In my last post, I think I made it sound like I had never read Mormon history before, stumbled on a few facts about polygamy or blood atonement, had a cliché breakdown, and threw my cyber-hands in the air. I guess I should elaborate.

I have read Mormon history before—not thoroughly, by any means, but I knew the names of the monsters. It is not as if I have spent my life floating down some bright blue river called A-OK. The thoughts that are with me now have been with me from the beginning. The things I will say are from a bloody, bitten-back tongue.

My state is anything but straightforward. It might be easy to point me to different things I have written or said in the past and say, “Remember that? Remember when you believed that?” And that is a fair thing to say, except that I have never been able to decide what it was I truly believed—never felt like the good things in Mormonism overwhelmingly outweighed the bad, never had a confirmation that could quiet my conscience. As for the things I have said, they are as varied as I am. They come from the song of my contradictory self. I have contradicted myself from hour to hour, but that is not because I have found new truths that replace old truths; it is because I am trying to be true to the flux I am living.

I need to explain something about myself. I am a reverent person. I believe this came from my parents, who are tender to the last hour of a day. Being reverent means that the world, for me, shows up as a holy place. This doesn’t mean I’m naïve; the reverence actually makes evil more palpable. The reverence means that I want to help in every place I find myself, and it means that I sorrow like a knife when I see people who are casual and apathetic. Casualness, apathy, hipness: they are all expletives against the self, a way of taking our own names in vain. Because I see real problems and because apathy and casualness are unbearable to me, I dig in. I try to see the possibilities in what I am part of, and then I try to become them. I try to instill reverence in other people and to encourage them to escape apathy and offer the mighty things they have to give. I am not saying this condescendingly, as if I am better than other people—dragging them like some cross behind me. It is, rather, that I see how much our institutions need all of us, and so it wounds to see people withholding what they have. Withholding also breeds more casualness and criticism, which itself breeds triviality and is an insult to truth. I long to see a world where people take ideas seriously, and their reverence—not their laziness or languid self-righteousness—causes them to criticize with great intent.

All these opinions make me somewhat of a masochist, since I am always staying in and fighting for places that some disdain or abandon. That’s why I went to BYU, it’s why I live in Salt Lake, and—in some ways—it is why I have dedicated myself to being Mormon. Don’t mistake me; I am not Mormon because I like the exercise. I am Mormon because I was born reverent into a religion of beautiful ideas. Even when I was young, I felt a yearning to make the religion the best I could make it. I couldn’t understand the people who appeared to come and sit and go home like automatons. Why would you be religious for the routine, the lifestyle, the mere comfort? It baffled me. When I learned about eternity, I went home and vomited in the bathroom. The idea was too big. Religion is a house for too-big ideas, and thus Unamuno’s idea of Christianity as an agony always made more sense to me than religion as an activity or a smug certitude. Charity, as my friend George told me, is the capacity to bear all things—all the contradictions and conflicting sacred obligations that have been, are, and ever will be in us. I believe this.

Then there is the other side of myself, which is not another side at all, but rather a refining contradiction growing out of the reverence—a Siamese twin that will never let the reverence alone. I believe that contradictions are necessary educational states, and I believe that most honest principles or practices will produce their goodly opposites if we are true to them. For me, reverence produces reform, which religious people—especially Mormons—often believe is antithetical to worship. Not so. Contradictions have a lot to teach each other; they finesse and chastise and challenge each other—they are the third party between you and yourself that keeps you from lapsing into centrism.

So then: I reform because I am reverent, and I criticize because I care. I am not looking to get out of a job. I want to work. I want a noble sweat. I criticize, first, because of the casualness I see in the people (often including myself). This kind of criticism is meant to inspire. It is this kind of criticism that produced the Move the Gift and the Counterpoint Conference blog entries. In these posts, I was begging: see what we could be? See what our religion makes possible if we bring our abundance to it? People have often referred to these entries as my “belief” entries, implying that I wrote them in a moment when I did not doubt, that I could revisit if I would just remember. I can see why people would say that. But I need you to know that I wrote these posts in times of great tenderness and great doubt—that it was not as if I knew the Church was true and then slumped back into skepticism. These posts were written in the spirit of First Criticism, which seeks to inspire people to perform their own greatness within wide-walled institutions. The Second Criticism takes two forms: First, it is a personal doubt. It is a healthy (and sometimes woebegone) skepticism. It knows that truth is a crucial and mystifying word, and that it would take a lot for me to equate it with something. It is conscience—a strong sense that I do not and cannot (yet?) agree with something that I have been taught because it is wrong, unethical, trivial, misplaced, or hollow to me. Second Criticism is also a stern critique of institutions and structures, an attempt to articulate the way in which they might be damaging or dangerous to people. This Second Criticism produced many of my “unbelieving” blogs, in which I seem to depart from the truth I knew to become “critical.” These entries were no less believing or unbelieving than the other entries; they are simply me articulating what I see.

In simplest terms, I am a contradiction. My desire to do good wherever I am often seems like belief, while my desire to criticize and admit what seems wrong seems like doubt. This is incorrect. The truth is that, for a long time, my desire to help kept me from even asking whether Mormonism (or the Church, or the gospel) were true. I realized when I was about 21 that helping is not the same thing as believing, and that I probably would have helped and believed in the same way no matter what I had been born into. That is a good thing to know, but it is also dangerous: I can’t say something is true simply because I want to be and do good within it.

This post will be perpetually continued. For today, I’ll stop here. I wanted to give you an idea of the forces that pull me so you can interpret the contradictions I will certainly throw down. As for now, I hope you understand me a bit better. I also want you to know that I think what I am experiencing is a good thing—a good thing that, quite frankly, I have been experiencing my whole life anyway. I am not scared of it, although it is scary. It is not the first I have said about it, although I will try to say it as best I can. I do not believe in belief that does not take you to the abyss, a belief that does not require a person to consider that there really might not be a God and to ask what that would mean. It is true that last month my story fell apart, but it is also true that I never trusted its togetherness in the first place. Stories are the most powerful things on earth, and I am partly honored to lose mine and get to find it again.

“Politics is not what politicians do” –Alan Badiou

I just finished listening to NPR’s rundown on the Iowa caucus. Neil Conan had invited all sorts of political pundits to field calls and discuss the primary results. The pundits were ecstatic. They had never seen anything like it. A surging victory for Obama and Huckabee? Truly, they said, a reason to hope!

Then they took calls. A politico called in and talked maps: “…Isn’t it fascinating that Romney took western Iowa but Huckabee took central?” After that, it was a woman. She thought Huckabee was a great guy, but too extreme. But it wasn’t Huckabee’s religious extremism that bothered her. It was his extreme idealism. There was, she said, no place for that in politics. She said we needed to heal as a nation. What America needs is a real centrist! She was pleased, therefore, with Obama’s win. What a hopeful candidate he was!

Conan and Co. agreed. Obama and Huckabee had shot up in the polls because of their dashing personalities, their charm, their downright positivity.

More calls. More congratulations. I almost threw the radio out my window, except I was on the phone—trying to get through to the radio station that I wanted to throw out the window.

Neil Conan never took my call, which is probably for the best.  It is probably for the best because, as far as I can tell, my ideas have no place in politics. My ideas have no place in politics precisely because they are political, precisely because politicians don’t do politics. People do. Or should.

We say that Obama is the hope candidate. He is not. He is the centrist candidate–maybe not because he wants to be, but definitely because he has to be.  If you haven’t noticed, Obama favors building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico to solve the immigration problem. Sure, he softens it with naturalization plans and rhetoric, but in the end he is pro-wall. Obama never mentions the possible causes for the immigration problem, which on a practical level include NAFTA and on a philosophical level include our decision to believe that an artificial boundary is more important than ethics. Obama also takes money from corporate interests. He has to. Otherwise he wouldn’t get the attention he needs to win—to win enough that everybody loses.

Then you have Kucinich and Gravel. Both have dared to emphatically address the possible causes of the immigration problem, placing the blame squarely on NAFTA and unfair trade policies. They adamantly deride the notion of a wall and use an ethics of equality (unobscured by geographical boundaries) to insist that immigrants are sane humans who should be treated as such. Gravel single-handedly waged a five-month filibuster to end the draft and published the controversial Pentagon Papers to inform Americans about the administration’s real reasons for invading Vietnam. He also advocates tirelessly to amend the constitution to allow for participatory democracy—taking power from leaders and investing it (more than just rhetorically) in the people. Kucinich pierces through the war-mongering madness to offer us a Department of Peace. Neither candidate takes money from corporate interests. More philosophically, neither is willing to tell Americans the gross lies they are accustomed to hearing: that by virtue of a certain boundary or history they are better than other people, that they deserve to consume regardless of consequences, and that they need a pragmatist in Washington. As a consequence, neither gets any votes and both are kicked out of debates.

This post is not rally-against or rally-for. Yes, I will vote Kucinich or Gravel. Emphatically. But that is not the point. Nor is it the question. The question is is why we accept things politically that we would never accept personally, and why we accept this happily as the case. 

As for the point, it’s this: The point is that the very organizations that are designed to protect us are destroying us, and that somehow, through an elaborate rhetoric campaign, they have convinced us that this is the best we can hope for. For instance, I respect Obama. I think that on a personal level he is articulate, intelligent, and fair. But it doesn’t matter, because he has entered the political machine and, by doing so, has had to make himself part cog—fitting himself to the preservation of the machine itself. I have watched as his ideas (and ideals) have become more and more vapid, all to match the vapidity of his political strategists and his constituency. This vapidity is the result of believing that the thing we call politics—the disputation of politicians, lobbyists, and Congress—is actually doing politics.

I have heard theory after theory about the source of the Iraq war. Say what you will; you are probably halfway right. But the other half of the explanation is politics itself. I have read the books, and believe the explanation is simply this: bureaucracy and pragmatism. It does not matter how smart Condoleeza Rice is or how evil Cheney might be. No one can walk into the political lions’ den praying. You may believe that war is an atrocity, an abdication of human spirit. Fine. But when you walk into that world you can no longer say it like that. You will talk policy. You will decide how many bombs to use or how to impose appropriate sanctions; you will be forced by your position and your environment to wall your ethics around the landscape of the accepted. You may not accept this. You may be a Kucinich or a Gravel. Okay, but you will still be stopped by three things. One: Precisely because you are speaking like a human—precisely because you offer humans what they talk about in their living rooms and kitchens—you will not be taken seriously. Two: Whatever momentum you gain will be limited to your assigned treadmill. You will run faster in place than a hamster, constrained to your puny cage and its bureaucratic wheel. Three: Happening to triumph over the first two, you will be defeated by the very people who claim to want you. You will be defeated by people who have the convictions of real politics but the imagination of the political machine, who believe, despite all dignity and sense, that politicians do politics and that politics requires the compromise of the point itself. But of course! Imaginary politics (the institution) always limits real politics (individual concern and action). Politics as an institution is bounded on every side by the moral possibilities asserted by real politics, by what the people—free to speak as they believe and indebted to no one—have insisted upon. And if the people believe that politics is no longer what they do—if they believe that the conversation is exhausted by the debate, that the “leaders” are creators rather than fulfillers—then the debate will be bounded on all sides by a sickening pragmatism, a yawning vacuity.

If you don’t believe me I will give you one more try. I am currently fighting a Wal-Mart that is going in down my street. I am preparing, of all laughable things, a Power Point to convince people that Wal-Mart is a bad idea. What I want to do is put down the damn clicker, drag people to a sweatshop and say “Look! Look at these children! Are your clothes and your cheap shoes worth the degradation of real human beings?” But what I do is drone on about car trips and the cost of a new traffic light. That is not what it is about! It is about beauty, care, reverence. But the conversation is bound by the language of economy. The conversation is bound by money, pragmatism, bureaucracy. And that is the people’s fault—for believing in it! For agreeing to it. The lady in charge of the Wal-Mart group says I have to stay on message. Traffic lights win battles, she tells me, so I’ve got to talk traffic lights. And so I do. I am not a bad person. I am a good person who cannot say what is good in me. Perhaps Condoleeza Rice is not a bad person. Perhaps there is no way to go into a traffic-light world and talk morals. That, in essence, is institutional politics and that, for some reason I will never understand, is what we are all so excited about.

Most likely you will disagree with me. Politicians speak that way because they embody the spirit of compromise! No. And be careful with that word. Compromise is when real people say what is most true to them and then make real sacrifices for the good of the whole. PR is when people restrain what is true for them to anticipate others’ truths for personal gain. What we have in politics is PR masquerading as compromise.

Politics is what people do before they believe in artificial boundaries and necessities. Politics happens every time someone grows an organic onion. Politics happens whenever someone chooses to bike instead of drive. Politics is the thundering sermon of personal conviction that arises out of a prayer between anyone and herself. Maybe someday, if we listen to the politician in our hearts, we will grow enough organic onions to hear a man in a suit talk vapidly into a microphone about the growing importance of the environmental industry. But we will not have to cheer. Not for him. Our lives will have already been that cheer, a great hurrah for beauty and the last pure idea.

My BYU American Heritage teacher asked us if a moral person could ever become president. No, we were supposed to answer, presumably because that president would be quashed for defending traditional marriage. My answer is still no, but for a very different reason. A moral person will never be president, not just because she wouldn’t win, but because she will lose her right to speak morally as she gains her right to run. The real moral heroes—the people who have made a real difference—have almost always been people who rose to the top on the power of their own uncompromised beliefs. These people–the Susan B. Anthony’s, the Wilberforce’s, the Gandhi’s—came to the top from the grass, from the place where you can say the real things without censure. Once in charge, they had set the boundaries for the conversation, and nobody could ask them to speak otherwise. The other direction is harder. Coming to the top by anticipating other’s reactions will always lead to anticappointment. Having nothing to say—nothing real you’ve insisted upon—you will be forced, by the institution itself, to play PR with truth.