I just finished a discussion night where we were supposed to talk about the war in Iraq, but didn’t. That is probably because, as the first person got there, I was reading Election 2008, Reader’s Guide—in a fit of confusion. “Ah,” you say, “I know the rest of the mad lib (no pun intended): Iraq _____ (sucks), the government is ______ (corrupt).”

No, actually. Not this time.

This time I was reading about Hillary Clinton. The author of Hillary’s section of the Reader’s Guide was doing what any editorialist is supposed to do: flaying her for inconsistencies, snidely pointing out that she had been cozying up to the military since Kosovo. She had even, the author reported with sarcastic glee, convinced Bill to use military force in that conflict, happily ending Slobodan Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing rampage but unhappily fueling a whole decade of her anti-dictator, pro-America shtick. No wonder she voted for the war in Iraq! It showed, the author said, the she was prepared to use any military might to further her politics and the American agenda.

I said I was a fit of confusion. I was. I’ll tell you why.

Two nights earlier, I had decided to do something I had been both desiring and dreading for years: I talked to my mom about my politics and asked her about hers. Many of you who are reading this don’t know my mom, but it is important to the story that you do. A lot of people think their moms are nice, and they probably are. But please take me seriously when I say that my mom, for reasons other than giving birth to me, is actually the kindest person I have ever known. The idea of criticizing or harming anyone gives her the flu. We talked about George Bush, the war in Iraq, and the CIA. My mom looked at her hands and said, ever softly: “You might think I am naïve, but I don’t hate George Bush.” (Neither do I, for the record.) “I think he has done some bad things, yes, but I can also see why he might have done some of those things, too.”

The paragraph above is stuffed with a thousand ideas, each one meriting their own blog post. But I want to talk about a couple of them specifically. I will get to those couple by telling you my response, hoping you will keep reading long enough to see how tortured and varied it was.

First, I loved my mom so strongly it felt like a stomach punch. To know that she cared enough about George Bush to forgive him frankly for his actions would have been incredible itself, if she hadn’t outshone it with willingness to consider his context and her own hypocrisy: what might she have done in his position? I also commiserated. I had spent much of my life feeling torn between compassion and criticism (more on that later). But then I felt afraid. How had they hooked us like this? How long had they (campaign managers, PR firms, candidates) worked to exploit our kindness and our forgiveness for their own gain? And how much do personal virtues—kindness, forgiveness, understanding—decimate other personal values—not killing, not lying, not vying for power—when applied on a public level? Had my mom forgiven George Bush, or did she just not know what he had done? Had she sympathized, or had she been manipulated by people who knew she would want to? And finally, had she accepted certain sins at great cost—had she forgiven privately by indulging someone publicly?

I am not pawning my mom for a good blog post. I am sharing the conversation because it accentuated an already-glowing agony in my chest. The chest-agony is this: how to apply personal virtues on a political level. My fear is that I can’t, that it is impossible.

I said I was reading about Hillary Clinton, and I was weary and confused. I was weary and confused because the writer made it all sound so simple: Hillary was hoodwinking us all! The solution was to sneer and deride, vote Obama. A great part of me believes I’ve been hoodwinked. The part of me that has read dozens of history books and magazines and congressional minutes believes this. But the Christian part of me cries out that Clinton—anyone—must have a story, an explanation, that I could imagine myself in her position and see why it was sensible to choose the mistaken things she chose. There is something deep within me that suffers for her task of explaining herself every day to an unforgiving world with partial information. A part of me reviles the smug author of Elections 2008 for that smugness, his overly-precious delight at bagging another charlatan. Maybe he is party to the problem. Maybe he, to keep his job, has to write as drearily as his topics, afraid to say what is really in him for fear of satisfying himself and others and being done with the whole thing.

I felt the same when I met with my congressmen about Iraq. I was part of the Utah Progressive Caucus, and we were telling Rep. Matheson to vote to end the war immediately. We filed into his office for a nauseating meeting. Everyone said every unconvincing thing they could think of and no one was satisfied. It felt like a pony exercise, like the rich letting the poor get drunk at festival to let off the building awareness that they were being used. At the end, though, someone asked a question: Why did Matheson keep voting for the war? His aide (we weren’t allowed to see the man himself) leaned over and said, “I can tell you one thing. I can tell you that Matheson lies awake at night and agonizes over his vote. Truly. I can tell you that.” Everyone rolled their eyes and left. Everyone except me, who sat, glued and horrified, in my seat. The voting records were running through my head. History was running through my head. The sleazy maxims from campaign strategy class were also there and running. I should have dismissed it as a gimmick. But why couldn’t I? Why couldn’t I stop thinking about my congressman for weeks afterwards, wondering if it was true and he really did have an explanation for himself, wondering if he really was trying to end things the best he could?

I am sure most of you have stopped reading long ago, dismissing me as a preposterous naïf. But I am not naïve. I have read all the books. I have written a thousand laments on the horrors of government and the crimes of America. I recognize the power of PR and the consequence of complacency. I have even wanted to secede from my own country, and still the question hounds! I believe it is wrong to equate forgiveness with permission; I can love my enemy and not allow for his actions. But it is more complicated than that. It is about suspicion and humility and responsibility and everything else. It is obvious that religious values can convince people to allow leaders to commit heinous crimes in the name of compassion—to allow torture and squalor and murder and hypocrisy in the name of sympathy, a sympathy that is itself usually just a gilded ideology. But it is also obvious that politics is miserable by itself. Don’t believe me? Just ask the youtube debates, in which a disputation of politicians stood and flapped their mouths about the most serious problems in America. The problem is, they all said the same things. Republicans, Democrats, veterans, upstarts—they all gave us what we wanted, and what we wanted was, apparently, conversations about everything but the point. As I watched, a Heidegger quote found me, and not in the way he probably intended it: “Only a god can save us,” I think I said out loud. I said this because at first, like always, I had been furious that no one could talk about the tragedy. The policy, yes, but the tragedy, no. I vacillated between compassion and outrage. I wanted someone to stand up, shrug off the charlatan suit, and say: “Look, I am a human being. Let me tell you why I did what I did. Let me tell you why I say what I say.” Then I could know what to do. But then I realized even that was impossible—first, because I would think it was another gimmick and second, because no one else would have listened. I felt like I was in a room with a traveling salesman, wanting to believe King Benjamin but suspecting I was being had. The real reason I said that Heidegger line, though, was because I began to see the tragedy. I began to see that none of these people, no matter how good or bad they were, could ever talk about the point. They couldn’t talk about it because all they had were facts and strategies, and the point was deeper and infinitely more mysterious than that. The point was the horror of war itself, the tragedy of killing, the dread of destroying anything. But to talk about those things in that way is precisely what religion is. I don’t mean church religion. I mean to say that religion is always an agony about agonies, a real investigation, a sonorous plea, a great turning. I mean to say that a person who speaks reverently is always a preacher, and that politics, for all its pretend preaching, is no gospel—can’t save anyone.

Politics might try, might say, “Let’s forgive this nation who bombed us,” but it must always go back into the muck—must always admit that the real fact is that forgiveness is never secure and the real maxim, that politics is always security. Politics cannot tell people what they don’t want to hear unless the people are ready to hear good things. Politics will never ask for the stories or the reasons or the tragedies because it can’t rationalize them, can’t logic them into justice or law. More than all that even, politics cannot give us the great barbaric yawp, cannot cry gutturally over the pain that is thick on the earth. It can mention it yes, but with no gut, and so it becomes strategy, solutions, stamps on envelopes containing everything but the letter.

I still don’t have my answer. (Not that I’ve even stayed with the question.) I know politics are necessary, but I do not know how politics ought to be. I do know, however, that they need each and all of our religion: the fire in our bellies and the fury in our heads. To speak like a pedant, it might be that politics is Classically limited to allow us to be Romantically unlimited—that it rationalizes itself so that we are free to hope. That is just another way of saying that only a god can save us, both God with a capital G and the small gods within us. If that is true, we must never be convinced to stop fighting, and we can never confuse rhetoric with prophecy, the talk of ‘leaders’ with the gospel within us, turn how we will, come what may.

With the height of Christmas shopping upon us, I got to thinking today about my favorite anguished dilemma: how to create a good relationship between art and simplicity, keeping and giving. I was about to write something on it when I found the following–an old scripture journal entry on, among other things, 1 Nephi 13 and the great and abominable church. I keep a scripture journal, oh, once every five months, and it shows; the entry is as rambly and inconclusive as any proper exploration should be. You might wonder what something as wintry and wanton as the abominable church has to do with something so lovely as aesthetics. So did I, and this is what I found. The dilemma takes place in San Cristobal, Mexico, while I was living with friends at an archeological compound with a truck called Dios es Amor parked in front. (Don’t ask.) (Ask.) Names are included to celebrate the innocent. (I know it’s long, but give it a shot. I really want people’s feedback on this!)

What is the great and abominable church? I hear it talked about a lot in the scriptures, but Nephi doesn’t explicitly define it. In most of the passages that mention it, it seems to come in tandem with economic materialism—people who wear fine-twined linens and whatnot. It is frequently a disturbing metaphor (if it is a metaphor) because it sets up what seems to be a very facile distinction between good and evil. Nephi says that the devil is the founder of the great and abominable church, and that this church fights against the church of God for the praise of the world. It seems like most people make the great and abominable church what they want it to be, and what they do not see it being is more telling than what they do. It seems, in other words, that most people have a very easy view of evil in the past tense, and this categorical and vague notion of evil makes it difficult for them to evaluate the evil presently around them. Thus, patriots will believe that the great and abominable church is Islamic fundamentalism, or terrorism, while an activist is likely to suggest that the United States government—with its secret interventions into other countries, its lies and business ties and corruption—is its founder. If the phrase does usually come with descriptions of a materialistic people, however, along with frequent references to harlots and the praise of men, I guess I can start with that.

Kate Kelly, Neil Ransom and I have spent not a few hours on this vacation talking about the law of consecration, and my own materialism has been on my mind almost daily. And why shouldn’t it be? I see the consequences of it everywhere I go. In San Cristobal, I cannot avoid knowing that my wealth has caused other’s poverty, and I am forced to justify my private property, clothing, vacations, and gelato every time a five-year-old beggar comes up to me and asks me to buy a deformed Zapatista doll. I have dozens of shoes, a hundred or so shirts and no end to pants and skirts. I do not need all these to live. I have stopped buying clothes almost entirely in the past two years, but I struggle with that decision for obvious reasons: First, because it is hard for my pride, but second, because I don’t know if removing myself from the market economy is helping at all.

It seems to me that there are two aspects of every political problem: the circumstantial and the spiritual. Not buying clothing because it is vain might solve my spiritual problem of pride but would not solve others’ circumstantial problem of poverty; removing myself from the buying and selling of the world might actually damage a street vendor’s chance to move up one measly rung on the comfort ladder. But then again, I am leery of any solution that requires spiritual evils or mediocrities in order to improve circumstances. It is very difficult to know how to act as an individual without the guarantee that others will cooperate, too, not just because I am afraid that I will get screwed but also because noble acts—if done randomly and without coordination—might do more damage than good. If I, for example, stopped buying clothes and cars altogether, I might (with enough other random individuals doing the same) drive down the demand for cars and clothes and get an indigenous woman laid off in a factory in Ciudad Juarez. I can argue that the woman shouldn’t have to work in the factory anyway, which I believe, but the woman will only ever know that she lost a factory job that was better than living on the streets.

This is just skim from the top of my dilemma; I could talk for pages about this. Nevertheless, I want to talk about the abominable church, what it might be, and how I might be a part of it. Then I want to talk about what I would need to change spiritually to not being a part of it. I have frequently wondered about the man who refused to give up his riches for Jesus after devoting the entire rest of his life to him. Why was this so hard? I cannot condemn this man because I barely know of anyone—including myself—who would be able to do forcibly what he was asked to do willingly. I cannot be a dogmatist about this man’s sin (being a dogmatist, after all, just means being certain that we would not commit a certain sin without ever attempting to see if we really wouldn’t or remembering that we already have.) It seems to me that the sin of materialism and Nephi’s comment about the “praise of the world” might have more to do with each other than being commonly-associated vices; it seems that materialism is painful to give up precisely because it requires giving up the praise of the world–the things that count automatically, the things that stand in for us so that the people who will never desire to really know us will be forced to respect us on their own terms. As I have been thinking and talking about why it is so difficult to live the law of consecration, I have realized this brute fact: that I am, despite what I say, connected woefully to the identity and clout that my possessions give me.

This is obviously a sin, but the words “great” and “abominable” or not tossed around lightly; this sin, therefore, must have something to do with the foundation of the gospel itself. It must keep us fundamentally from accomplishing the most saving commandments. It is interesting to me that the law of consecration has to occur in a community (Zion) to help save people. The act of economic consecration requires an individual to us her agency—the thing that truly makes her an individual—to give up her possessions—the things that artificially make her an individual—for another person’s sake. Consecration requires the ultimate act of individuality in behalf of the ultimate expression of community. Consecration requires that we sharpen and then dissolve the line between ourselves and other people in order to save each other.

A community is a group of people who make each other honest—about themselves, their responsibilities, and their thresholds—and who influence each other to see the artificiality in mere populations—of classes, of differences, of possessions.   If we cannot use ourselves to give ourselves to others—to stand in for them—than our possessions will stand in for us. We will not be able to practice the fundamental virtues of the gospel—agency and empathy—or achieve the fundamental purpose of the gospel—salvation (not just Christ’s ability to save us, but our ability to be saviors to each other.)

Our possessions are a metaphor, then, for our inability to practice empathy; they are steel walls that demarcate identity, preventing us from getting out and others from getting in. If we cannot give them up, we do not merely reveal our vanity. We reveal that we fear the process of becoming one. The praise of God is honesty; it is knowing that we are who we say we are, who we say we have been, and who He says we are and have been. The praise of the world is artificiality, a vernacular of outsides. If we do not believe in God enough to believe in our insides—good and bad—then we will never believe in him enough to do anything. The wealth commandments turn out to be faith commandments. Our unwillingness to give up our riches is an unwillingness to love and be loved for the right and real things. We are scared of giving up our whole soul to God, in faith. We are scared to believe that what He thinks of it is more important than what the world thinks of it (because the world will inevitably think incorrectly) and so we hold a little back as collateral, something that the world can understand on what we think is their way to understanding us better. This is the worst kind of economy–extravagant, saving nothing.

It looks like there are two economies, then, just as there are two churches. And maybe that is what Nephi meant. There is the economy in which we spend what isn’t ours and save nothing (financially, morally), and then there is the economy in which we spend the only thing that is ours and save everything (ourselves, each other). I am scared to know what people would think of me if I were only a composite of my acts of agency, the love that God had for me, and the love I humbly expected to receive from others. I hold back the right kind of spending and continue with the wrong kind. The great and abominable church is many things, probably, but I am convinced that it is, at least partly, a metaphor for misdirected identities, a metaphor of artificial individuality preventing the real individuality that comes from changing places with—atoning, saving, understanding—people in a group.

Right now, money is one of the best (if not most impoverished) metaphors we have for exchange between two people. It is a barren exchange that should highlight the need for a spiritual exchange, that should cause us to ask all the questions about inequality, individuality, blessings, and sacrifice that would lead us to a spiritual exchange of places—empathy, salvation. I don’t know where to go from here, and the conversation certainly is not over.

I have told Chris Nielsen several times this vacation that my morality is fastened to my notion of aesthetics; in the best world, I believe that beauty would be a sign that people had lived justly and mercifully. If the natural world is beautiful, for instance, it would mean that someone had shouldered a burden of spiritual virtues—sacrifice, respect, patience, persistence, reverence—to keep it that way. That is an aesthetic of preservation, though. In the human sense, its equivalent would be reverencing (preserving through respect) what is already beautiful in people.

What about an aesthetic of creativity, though? Is the creative aesthetic always artificial in an (im)moral sense? If I reverence the natural world but want to build a cabin—if I want to construct a thing of beauty out of a natural fact of beauty—am I always extravagant? And then, of course: where is the line between survival and extravagance? My whole point is, as I have said, there should be no line between survival and beauty, and my question is whether or not this makes me morally just or morally extravagant, if it is a sign that I am acting harmoniously or dissonantly. This is not merely theoretical. If I see the beauty in people but want them to be more than they are—to work together to create beautiful societies—is that act of combining and collaborating necessarily going to produce hierarchies, inequities, corruption? And what of the materialist notion of beauty? Because I have said that living the law of consecration or any of its degrees is difficult for me because I love beauty: I love beautiful homes, bright art, striking clothes. I do not want an equality of blandness, a Soviet robbery of expression by a lackluster Robin Hood. But if I continue to link my notions of beauty and morality, I run always into the question of extravagance and artificiality. A beautiful home, I believe, is a gift—to eyes, spirits, and everyone who is invited into it. But a beautiful home is also a sign of injustice, because it means that I have something and somebody doesn’t.  In creating more and more instead of respecting what is, I create inequities, and right alongside them, the question: what is necessary? And what does necessary mean? Necessary for survival? (Because that can be ugly, spiritually and circumstantially.) Necessary for human expression? (Because that can be extravagant and unfair.)

The difficult thing in trying to live the law of consecration is the question of what is necessary, and the question of what is necessary is a question of what is beautiful and what is dispensable. It is, deeply, a question of individuality and what makes us individuals, a questions of gifts—of how to keep enough of them to be able to give them away. Do I have a right, in Zion, to make my gift a beautiful house that everyone can enter and enjoy? Do I have a right to write, or is that dispensable? What can I keep, and what should I give, and might there be an infinity of ways to keep and give? Can morality be founded on aesthetics, and is aesthetics an ambivalent term? I need to sort all this out.