In 1546, Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg. Now it’s 2008, but theses—posted or unposted—are still a good thing to have. In my conversations about my religion, I have encountered certain platitudes several times. After hearing some of them for the last bearable time, I decided to write a couple of my own theses against ideas that threaten what I see as my religion.

Here is the first, posted (doorless) in way Luther could only have dreamed about.

Church is for the Simple:

By now, many who read my blog are familiar with my opinions on a host of religious topics, particularly the sanctity of conscience and the intellect. If you are like me, you have also probably heard the inevitable comebacks: that the Church is for the weak and simple and that intellectualizing endangers it. Most likely someone has countered your requests for an intellectually robust gospel (de-baggage the word, please) with the classic image of a penniless, illiterate widow in the slums of Manila. The conclusion is obvious: the gospel is for her. And how could we ask this poor, penniless woman for a sharp-toothed mind? How could we ask her to cut through conceptual meat when she doesn’t have meat to eat? She is barely surviving! She needs the milk of the gospel, and she needs it fast.

Maybe so. Maybe this woman’s life is so tragic and perverse that she needs to simply know that God lives and loves her. Before that, even, she needs a full stomach and something in her wallet. I believe these things. I believe them because I believe that bearers of good news should recognize the bearing capacity of their listeners; we do and should tailor the gospel message (and any other message) to the immediate needs and limitations of our audience.

But the way that people invoke the widow counter-argument frightens me because it privileges one narrative over another; it reduces the bearing capacity of one type of member to cater to the bearing capacity of another type. In essence, I believe that the way we invoke the ‘new members/penniless widow’ argument reveals more than we wish about how we value and conceive of our religion.Presumably, when we make the widow argument, we are emphasizing that each member of the Church is different and deserves unique treatment. We are also suggesting that there is a category of members—i.e. poorer, new, or less educated members—who require a different gospel message than other categories of members. Both these arguments suggest that the gospel works for everyone and that the different approaches to it will eventually merge into the same religious experience.

I disagree with both the assumptions and the likelihood of the expected outcome. I will start by explaining the latter opinion and end by explaining the former.

When we say that different kinds of religious strains will merge into a common experience, we are basically suggesting that—one fine day—a new convert will finish her glass of gospel milk and suddenly reach for the meat. Years of milk drinking, in other words, will have prepared her to stomach the heavy stuff. It also suggests that mature or experienced Church members will never eat their meat without their milk—that they will supplement their hard thinking and philosophical digestion with the basic principles of love and repentance. Sounds good in theory. The reality, however, is that we emphasize the milk so much that we effectively prohibit any movement toward the meat. To misuse an old standby, we create a milk ceiling between one level of the gospel and another—an opaque barrier that keeps us housed in horizontal rooms. Repeatedly invoking the penniless widow, we have given her no place to go when she overcomes her adjectives. We have made the gospel into a point rather than a vector with speed and direction, a dot to balance on in tiptoe rather than a moving line that takes us toward God.

The problem is that we have sacralized our limitations and made those limitations into a gospel, the good news of it being that we never have to struggle with big ideas. By doing so, we have not only insulted huge swaths of people—suggesting, condescendingly, that their poverty makes their minds impossible things—we have invented a gospel that will fail its basic principles. We have invented a gospel that is artificially self-limiting, a gospel that has come to prize self-limitation as one of its core virtues.

The obvious criticism is that this hurts the members who want more from the gospel, who are trying to live it to its fullest intellectual, ethical and theological extent. This is true; asserting an over-simplistic gospel not only decimates the argument that the gospel is for everyone (since it really caters to one type of convert); it also actively discourages thoughtful inquiry by making the thoughtful member’s virtues into vices. And so it is that it suddenly becomes proud to want more from the gospel, elitist to ask good questions, faithless to criticize, and extreme to interpret radical precepts radically. Compensating for the decline of these maligned virtues is a host of manufactured virtues geared toward survival and normalcy. And thus, bad reading becomes faith, convention becomes obedience, and preemptive certitude is humility

That provincialism hurts the non-provincial is, like I said, the obvious criticism. But this criticism itself is too narrow. To criticize naivety by invoking the rights of the sophisticated not only builds a false hierarchy of religious classism, it also assumes that intellectualism is a hobby like any other. It suggests, in others words, that some Church members like soccer, jigsaw puzzles and petty truths while other members prefer crossword puzzles, golf and thinking. The great success of any religious crusade against intellectualism is to make intellectualism into a hobby or a consequence of wealth. This crusade is especially ironic, since it is most frequently waged by people whose middle class interests require them to antagonize intellectuals to defend their hobbies and wealth. The success of this crusade is very important to vested interests, for it only after the crusade succeeds that the vested can argue away the intellectuals. Only after intellectualism is turned into an elitist hobby can people lecture intellectuals against imposing their thinking on others, as if the intellectual were asking that every new member play croquet or win at Scrabble. When thinking is seen as a hobby, a thinking gospel will seem a dangerous pastime.

But because thinking is not a hobby—because real religious life requires a tremendous amount of thought and thoughtfulness—the milk ceiling hurts more than thinkers: it hurts the whole Church and religion itself. To pretend that religion is simply a lifestyle or a regimen—to say that the signs of conversion would be a white shirt or an edited movie or the simple absence of alcohol—is to grossly misunderstand the agony, conflict and trepidation of a real religious quest. Religion as a regime won’t save anyone, and only thoughtfulness can save religion from regimen. The heart is important, yes, but the heart without the mind is a dangerous thing.

You might disagree, say: the heart is the instrument of religion! I will not argue using facile invectives against irrationality. I will say, instead, that the heart is often only as big as the ideas that house it, and it can easily keep the wrong things alive. The heart can do profound work, it’s true—it can grow straight out of a rotten ideology—but it is more often confined by the interpretive frameworks that tell it when and where and how to do its job. In the Church, we often speak as if charity were the same as love or long-suffering when it is routinely separated from those words in scriptural lists. Charity does not mean having thoughts as wide as love; charity means expanding our thoughts until they require everything from our hearts. Love is not the antidote to regimen. Only charity, seeking for truth in all places, can avoid the dangers of a preferential heart. Seeking real truth, rather than seeking allegiance, requires the mind and a most brutal consciousness.

Our missionary program tells us more about what kind of religion we value than almost any of our other institutions. And it is clear that the missionary program overwhelmingly prefers regime over mind. If the discussions are coins in the most valuable currency we have to exchange, then we are suffering from the worst kind of inflation; we can buy almost nothing with our ideas. We have decided, arbitrarily, to trade mainly in platitudes and behavior change. Dealing in sales, we produce converts that look like market products: remarkable similar, unambiguous icons of a certain belief set. There is no room in this process for the unfinished—for what cannot readily appear—and so we constrict our discussions to regimens and exclude the kind charity that overflows regimens and bounds. It is in this way that we can tell the Manila widow that we need her abstinence but not her mind, presumably because we include abstinence in what we call the core of the gospel while relegating intelligence to a waiting room. But there is a question here that is begging to get out: why is thinking not included in the core of our religion? Why is it less important than a regimen marker? Why is it something that can wait, as if it is a final embellishment or a curtsy rather than the point itself?

I believe that religion needs our minds: all of all of our minds. Without this, the religion becomes a lifestyle rather than a probing question, and charity falls to allegiance. The meat–never a side dish in the first place–will be perpetually deferred to make way for a new milk religion that, by deferring meat, becomes as small as the cup holding it. My next post will contine this theme, getting more specific about the consequences of deferring the mind. In the meantime, I will end this, the first of several Lutheran theses.

I said I would be talking about the relationship between conscience and self-deception, which is really a discussion about criticism and deception, since people with sharp consciences feel compelled to criticize in the name of truth. This is particularly true in religion—for our purposes, Mormonism—in which the subject of truth is paramount and people must criticize in order to preserve it. These critics are often hounded. They are told: lay off, be positive, drown critique in kindness. This poor kind of guidance led me to write posts on the importance of conscience, since it is clear that these directives ignore the very real task of judgment and belittle agency in favor of allegiance. But many advocates of conscience are similarly amiss. This crowd often equates integrity with questioning and conscience with critique, as if those things were secure and enough by themselves. They are right in the motives for critique, but they are often wrong in their method—more particularly, because of their confidence in their method.

Midsummer’s play-within-a-play takes both crowds to task, showing the exposure to deception in both. Interestingly, Shakespeare does not seem to suggest that the courtiers shouldn’t criticize the play; indeed, it seems they should. The tradesman’s play is an insult on every front: over-obvious, simplistic, and devoid of subtlety. The tradesmen, afraid that their audience will not understand their metaphors (that a man, for instance, will be dressed as a wall) or be disturbed by the frightening parts (a man dressed up as a lion) decide to write a prologue for every metaphor, ensuring that the audience will not miss any of the lessons they are designed to communicate.Any Mormon who has attended church, Institute, or General Conference will find the tradesmen’s pedagogy too familiar: a criminal lack of subtlety, an abundant fear of ambiguity, a penchant for overwrought metaphors, and a generally low estimation of the audience’s capacity for discretion. In these instances, the play’s illusion is not real enough to outdo reality; by poorly mimicking life, it has nothing beyond it to offer. It is not moral: the illusion does not expand what we consider to be ‘real.’ Shakespeare’s courtiers sense the same things, and so they critique the play and call it poor.If plays teach us anything, then, it is this: that obviousness is immoral. By trying to name everything, the tradesmen have defied the morality of fiction and also crossed the formidable Alan Badiou, who warns us that “Evil is the will to name at any price . . . the desire for Everything-to-be-said.” The desire of fiction, on the other hand, is to highlight “the unnamable,” which Badiou claims “frees the destructive capacity in all truth.” For a Mormon, these seem to be strange definitions of evil; after all, evil is stealing or lying or doing drugs! But it is precisely Mormons who most need this definition. We are a people whose sinfully easy notions of evil have motivated the crime of provincialism. Oddly, in desiring to name everything, our moral speeches and talks have propelled rather than prevented the destructive capacity of truth.

Shakespeare surely recognized this, and seems to defend his courtiers in their critique; after all, the play really is bad! And thank goodness for his permission, since criticism is both a responsibility and a right. But Shakespeare is obviously criticizing the courtiers just as much as, if not more than, the tradesmen. At least the tradesmen are sincere—bumbling, yes, but also earnest. Perhaps their uneducated earnestness is dangerous, but Shakespeare seems to consider it less dangerous than the courtier’s hypocrisy. After all, almost everyone watching the play has just finished acting like fools in the name of love; Puck’s spells had changed their reality, and their resulting limited perspective made them mad mis-interpreters, fawners, idiots. They should have learned something from love—perhaps their ability to be deceived?—but they didn’t. We are left appropriately wondering what kind of love they are in. Probably not much, if they can’t admit their own hypocrisy.

And so: If audiences teach us anything, it is that we are always part of one and always being watched by one. Criticizing the one we are watching is fine if we accept being criticized by the one watching us. If the tradesmen’s sin was naming at any price, the courtiers have their own version: they will to criticize at any price and the desire for Everything-to-be-scanned. Everything, that is, except themselves. And so the courtiers, too, commit a crime against the morality of fiction. They forget that they are characters rather than narrators, and that their perspective is always being out-perspectived somewhere else by someone else. Their attempts to narrate from the limits of their perspective constricts their criticism and makes it suspect. They avoid simplistic and overwrought truth, but they also suppress the unnamable until it no longer names them. They cannot be convicted—not by others, and certainly not by themselves—and so they have lost their moral power to judge. Even Bottom, the tradesmen’s swaggering anti-savant, knows two things the courtiers don’t. First, he knows he is an actor and he tries (albeit too hard!) to convince people he is something he is not. Second, he knows he can’t name everything: he tried to explain his experience as a donkey and failed. The courtiers, on the other hand, don’t even know they’re something they think they aren’t, and they cannot even remember their visions (delusions) long enough to think twice about the supremacy of their opinions. The courtiers have no memory and no sense of audience: they do not remember making the mistakes they criticize and they do not feel exposed to a wider perspective. In other words, they are deceived. They are unreliable critics.

But how does love help us to avoid deception? Specifically, how is religion’s commandment of love the physic for a quarantined perspective? Surely it isn’t just a flowers-and-bunny’s setup; there must be something in the nature of love that confronts the problem of knowledge.

It is interesting to note that Shakespeare respects fiction’s moral ambiguity and leaves things nice and complicated. Though he might be advocating for love as deception’s anecdote, his play’s curtain falls on still-deceived lovers—the same lovers who criticize the tradesmen’s play. These lovers—Helena and Demetrius, Hermia and Lysander—still suffer from love’s delusions but don’t even see themselves as deluded. This doesn’t mean, however, that we should discard love. In fact, a careful viewing of the play (say, for the second time in two nights?) should show us precisely what kind of love to discard. I said earlier that the courtiers loved each other, and were thereby deluded. It is more correct to say, however, the courtiers loved themselves first and were therefore deluded again in romance. Similarly, in the paragraph about religion, I said that God-love led to dangers; I think it is more true that self-love used God to commit a sin against knowledge. Shakespeare’s lovers are deluded before Puck ever hexes them; they are deluded because their love for each other is really a runaway love of self. After Puck hexes them, their love get criss-crossed, and its purposeless seems absurd; it is easy to compare it to irrational faith and God-worship: groundless, reasonless, and persisting despite all reasons to the contrary. In truth, though, it is no more absurd then self-love masquerading as romance (falling-into-self confused for falling-in-love) or hypocrisy posing as worship.

In the end, everyone gets the dreamboat and they all float away on happily-ever-after. But the predicament is unsolved and the lovers—as made obvious when they mock the tradesmen’s play—are still deceived hypocrites. What the lovers never accomplish is a religious kind of love, which is precisely the kind of love that cures self-deception. And religious love does not only cure the deception of romance, but also of criticism.

Loving religiously requires loving a third party as much or much more than one loves oneself, to see God as an audience who knows more and to see ourselves as actors pursuing an illusion to become, oddly, more authentic. It is surprising how much this love resembles the lessons of theatre and fiction:

First, any religious person must reckon with the problem of illusion and metaphor; one must ask what is real and if one has been convinced enough by words to learn a new perspective. Have the words been true and subtle enough that they outdo the perspective of immediacy? Is the fiction of scripture both impassioned and restrained enough to offer the truth without naming the unnamable? Is the illusion real enough to make one true? If the answer is yes, one agrees to love. If it isn’t, one must determine how to supplement love with criticism and criticism with love.

Second, a religious person is always acutely aware of audience. Prayer, for instance, is nothing less than a monologue to the invisible, a plea to be narrated by a poet who knows more perspectives than one’s own. To pray is, quite metaphorically, to break down the famed fourth wall and admit once and perpetually that knowing is always part of a more-knowing, a God-audience with great perspective. To speak a monologue, in prayer or in play, is to realize that there is something out there to speak to—something that needs our explanation. That is religion and theatre’s great starting place.

Third, a religious person recognizes that there is someone—some God, some fairy, some magic—behind the rationality and knowledge she supposes to have earned. When Demetrius falls for Helena, for instance, he probably believes he is deciding to do so for good reason. He probably even believes he is rational. He isn’t; his experiences are simply flush with his knowledge. The audience knows his rationality is actually Puck’s mischief. But the real lesson, and the one known by the devout, is that truth and reality are functions of mood, and that mood—while possible to regulate—is not possible to choose. Mood is a room with small truths inside it, walls and hallways to other rooms.

But more than anything, religious love cures deception by requiring us to love God more than we love ourselves and others, or more precisely, to love ourselves and others by loving God. I said love would cure deception, but I don’t mean it will get rid of it. Love cures us of deception by making us notice it, by insisting that it will never go away. The commandment to love God, then (or, theatrically, to love our audience), is a clue to solving the problem of knowledge. It is trying to tell us that we will never escape perspective. Consequently, it is trying to teach us that conscience will never be enough. Conscience is only reliable when its sense of duty matches actual obligations. If conscience relies only on itself, we might think that we are true (that our sense of duty matches with our real obligations) when we are actually solipsistic—when our experiences are merely flush with what we count as real. The commandment to love is the great commandment of non-alignment: it requires us to love something that isn’t ourselves so that we cannot be deceived by the solipsism of conscience.

 We must love a God that is different enough than we are—who loves people we don’t love, who asks for things we cannot give, who stays when we wish he’d go—in order to reckon with perspective. In the process (and in the attendant process of loving other people) we learn our power to deceive ourselves. We learn that our perspective must be constantly amended by the perspective of others, and that our consciences must be the result of that loving confusion.

So, I have been asked to be a guest blogger for a couple weeks at By Common Consent and Main Street Plaza.

For the Main Street Plaza blog, I will probably be posting (cyber-recycling!) some of my old posts for the first bit, since they said I could/should do that. For By Common Consent, I will be posting new stuff that I will also post on my blog (with a link for all those whose favorite hobby is looking at things twice).

In the meantime, if you send me $1,000 I will mail you a napkin I have used or a burrito I didn’t feel like finishing. That is how famous I am now, and I am quite sure you will pay.

I have promised for a month to explain where I am in my religious travels and how I arrived here. The problem is that I am a mood writer* who most haughtily eschews plot** (*would not recommend this; ** am destined to write a book in which nothing at all happens) and feel like I can’t explain something unless I am in the same mood that infused the moment I am writing about. Clearly something to overcome. As in, right now.

So I will give you a brief snippet explaining a few of the precursors to the crisis. This will by no means be extensive, so please take it in all its narrow circumscription. I will expand on recurring themes in separate and subsequent posts. Right now I am just trying to give you some context and get better at putting down the dreaded chronology. There are two parts; read both.

Two months ago, Sunstone asked me to write an article on the political history of Mormonism c/o Mitt Romney. I had read some Mormon history, but had been meaning for a decade to read it thoroughly. As I will expand on in future posts, I think that history–rather than being a dangerous hobby–is more widely a meta-study of truth and ethics. Reading history is crucial to understanding deception, specifically how it occurs and the similar ways in which it is defended or entrenched (and at whose expense) in each instance. It helps us to understand that truth and ethics are contextual, and it helps us to be careful about the context in which our truths and ethics occur. I believe reading Mormon history is vital to being a Mormon (more on this perhaps controversial assertion later); consequently, I was very ashamed to have read so little of it myself*. (* To put things in proper perspective, I should say that I was familiar with quite a bit of Mormon history and had spent inordinate amounts of time thinking about the patterns and tensions of concpetual relgious history; however, I had never read detailed, factual and primary accounts of different events. I mention this because I don’t want to suggest that I encountered shocking or difficult history one time and then rejected the Church entirely.) 

So I went to the library and checked out a monster’s share of books. I divided my book selections into four categories: insider apologist, insider historian, outsider historian and outsider antagonist. I thought it was very important to get all these perspectives, since history obliterates our erroneous notions of objectivity and each perspective gives us new deception and new clarity. As a reader with specific values and experiences, I also knew that I would bring deception and clarity to the books–or, if not deception (that sounds maybe too active and gleeful), at least a perspective that would make the books show up differently.

Some people worried when they saw the stack: Why D. Michael Quinn? Why the cult anthropologist? These comments alone reinforced my sad understanding that Mormon history is viewed by Mormons themselves as treachery or anathema. Or, in the inverse, as loyalty and advertising. I was disturbed by either side of the fraction: Since when was history about proving loyalty? Most of the people who commented did not begrudge the book by the Ensign editor or the Church manual. That was, after all, history, and it was history precisely because it made the Church true. Any other kind of history was rooted in bitterness and bias.

I would ask some of the critics why they opposed including Quinn and Co. Was it their methodology? Did they say something false? I sincerely wanted to know; I did not think of any of the books as sacrosanct. They would give me vague answers about bias and grudges. We would disagree. Discuss. In the end, it seemed that most of them considered writing Mormon history as an act of devotion or a religious test for proving loyalty. I was no stranger to this kind of attitude. I had heard it repeated almost constantly in church, at college, during family parties. Ever since I was very young, it had disturbed me. Didn’t we want the truth? What were we afraid of? If our institution had committed great wrongs and great rights, wouldn’t knowing about them teach us about institutions? The proper kind of obedience? The nature (and danger) of faith?

The pronounced disgust for religious “historians” (known variously as anti-Mormons or faithless antagonists) and “history” had sponsored most of the pedagogy and beliefs I had learned in my Church career. I was confused: Wasn’t religion basically history? Our scriptural texts have always been historical texts, and while that explains the paranoia about “faithless” historians, it also condemns it. I have never been able to stomach the disconnect–or, more accurately, the partial connect that hails history when it is devotional and condemns it when it concludes the wrong things. Halfway through reading, I searched Quinn’s name on the Internet. A quote came up: Ira Fulton had mocked Quinn as a “nothing man.” This not only stung me for his sake; it stung me for my own. Why were people who were true to an academic method nothing people? What was it about the Church that made people consider “intellectuals” as useless at best and wholly other at worst? This was not the first time I had felt this way. In fact, I had felt this way my entire life. I had felt that almost everything I considered good and true in myself was considered treacherous or threatening to others. Fulton’s comment did not just represent an isolated and horrifying write-off of another human being. It was symptomatic of a larger trend, one that has persuaded many members and leaders of the Church that rigor and process and discourse are truly contrary to the larger aims of the Church.

I will write about all this in much more detail later.  For now, I am just trying to say how I felt. As I started to read those books and talk with people about them, and old and persistent pain started throbbing. It was a pain that told me that my Church thought PR was more important than truth; a pain that told me I would never be entrusted with my own story; a pain that saw apologists stop short of logical conclusions and get rewarded for it; a pain for a Church (yes, both in the leadership and in the “culture”) that perpetually alienated the very people who were trying most (despite flaws) to explore and understand and live their religion; a pain for the triviality that religion seems to care most about and despair for what it seems to care nothing about; a pain for my unraveling history; a pain all the silence and humiliation thinkers or dreamers must endure; a pain for the fact that every person who speaks what makes sense to me is revealed to be the villain; a pain, most of all, for the epithets, fallacies, and flattening accounts used against people who try to speak their truth.

I felt this loud congregation dirging before I had even finished one book. This does not mean I read with goggles from that point on. I tried as doggedly as I knew how to see stories from multiple perspectives and recognize the dilemmas (or polylemmas) that pulled a story to pieces. But the old feelings were clamoring with new strength; every line I read would end like lead–for the n+1 time, I would learn that people like me were undesirable or see a historian balk and give a favorable interpretation out of allegiance. I saw everywhere that allegiance was the truest religion, and that–despite what I heard about getting my own testimony–I was really only free to get a pre-emptive testimony that confirmed everything I was expected to believe. Anything outside of that, and there would be a thousand ways to discredit me: I would be faithless, bitter, proud, unkind, delusioned, lazy, on some vendetta mission, whatever. That is what I re-learned for the unbearable and too-much time: that the circle is always on the side of the insider. This circle will always condemn anyone who disagrees in the precise way that he cannot accept–that he no longer accepts–by using his unwillingness to accept the condemnation as proof that he’s lost his credibility.

One of the most painful examples of this that I read about was the story of William Law. In church and at BYU, I had always been taught a tidy and antiseptic version of Church history, a history in which Joseph Smith received perfect revelations in conduit from heaven and devilish detractors fought against him because they were afraid of the advancing truth. I never believed in this version of history. In fact, it always disturbed me and cemented my fear that we did not accept that dissenters could ever be acting out of conscience. I understood that I was being taught to read scriptures that had been stripped of their complexity, and the flat notion of good and evil that remained hid the contours of context and personality that they supposedly mapped.

With William Law, for instance: I had always heard of him as a traitor (at worst) or as a man who simply did not have the strength or faith required to endure to the end. When I read the details of his story, however, my original uneasiness cracked into a broken heart. William Law was not a traitor or a fallen angel. He was a man who was morally and religiously disturbed by polygamy (particularly the secretive and dishonest way Joseph went about “implementing” it), who worried that Joseph’s prophetic gift had been overpowered by lust, who suspected some of Joseph’s revelations as convenient manipulations designed to get people to follow and believe edicts they would otherwise abhor, and who legitimately resented the ways in which Joseph’s theocratic Zion suppressed freedom of conscience and loyal opposition for insider and outsider alike. Reading history from 180 years in the future, it is easy to employ retrograde disdain: obviously Joseph was right and the Church marched on. William Law was just a casualty along the way, a conscientous objector who would not fight the good fight. But we completley forget (we are taught to forget) that this is the way any normal, conscionable person would act when trying to do the right thing. We forget that–until we receive a personal witness of truth (and even sometimes after)–that we decide to believe in things for reasons. People believe in a prophet or religion partly because they think the prophet teaches correct principles or the religion is true and moral. If this is true, they have good reason to pause if the prophet asks for something they deem immoral in the name of religion. Even if one had received a vision of the truthfulness of Mormonism, one would still not be safguarded from the task of identifying “false prophets” or false teachings; the task of discernment would still be paramount.

I have been taught the majority of my life that a faithful person simply believes, regardless of the doctrines or ideas or behaviors in their religion. Real belief, it is argued, should be contentless and sourceless. Rather than weighing a system of belief against one’s own convictions (recognizing the possibility of deception and incorrectness on both sides), one believes pre-emptively simply because people who believe say it is true. After that, no amount of bad ideas or immoral actions or personal conscience can justify leaving. Conversion to another idea is rendered impossible by the institution’s definition of faith. I believe this is what happened to William Law. I am not saying that he was perfect or flawless. I am merely criticizing any attempt to suggest that he is full of flaws simply because he disagreed with and stopped believing in Joseph. I merely want fairness; I want evaluations to be made in the spirit of consistency rather allegiance.

As of now, I do not believe that William Law was required (ethically or religiously) to follow Joseph Smith, even if Joseph claimed (through God) that he was sinning or disobeying by doing so. I do not believe a person is ever required to go against his conscience to do the “right” thing, and I believe it is even ineffective (if doing the right things means being transformed rather than fulfilling a cultural obligation) to ask them to do so. In saying this, I emphatically recognize (and fear) the deception of conscience. Conscience is not supreme; it is full of faults and limited in innumerable ways. We should always be fighting to expand the limits of our consciences by learning, humbling ourselves, and listening to the Spirit. But if we have done so and we still find a commandment repugnant, or if we believe that we are being deceived, we should honor that. Indeed, I believe that this is what is required of us. So I do not believe William Law was a villain. I believe he was a good man. I believe his response more accurately represents what I deem to be moral and correct than other people the Church has deemed righteous. So why doesn’t he count? Why is he a nothing man simply because our prescribed methods did not lead him to our prescribed conclusions? Isn’t it the honest process–not the conclusion–that quite literally makes the man? If nothing else, why has this man’s history been flattened and discarded, fit only to package even flatter object lessons? Why has he been stripped of validity? Why have I not been allowed to learn from his life? For his life and actions contain lessons that are relevant to any thoughtful religious quest: questions of personal versus official revelation, conscience versus obedience, history as dilemma rather than history as the precision march of truth. Why are his doubts not canonized or considered as instructive as easy answers?

These are some of the things I felt as I read. As I will explain more later, I couldn’t simply relegate these things to the “culture” of the Church or even to “imperfections” in leaders and organizations. I am fine with imperfections and culture. But I also know they come from somewhere, and to insist dogmatically that a robust culture continues to spontaneously generate along the Wasatch Front (if not all sorts of other places)without any impetus is dishonest. We would not say this about any other phenomena. It is our loyalty (and the strict expectation of it) that makes us always stop here.

I can’t relegate my concerns to culture or imperfection for other reasons, as well. First, I cannot put it away because I see the leaders constantly reasserting it. As I read David O. Mckay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism, for instance, I confronted dozens of stories in which top Church leaders actively campaigned against Sterling McMurrin or Lowell Bennion or fill-in-the-blank. These leaders seemed to truly think that these people (who I have always respected and thought of as heroes) were dire threats to the Church–the leaders who I was supposed to consider as being closest to the wishes of God. Perhaps you are counseling me to be careful: I should not naively attribute false powers to these leaders simply because they are leaders. And I wouldn’t if I weren’t continually asked to, which brings me to my second point. I have a very high threshhold for ambiguity. I am perfectly content (and, in fact, this is the way things make most sense to me) if revelation is a deeply personal process filtered through the personality of an average person, and that most of “God’s word” is simply sincere advice from people who have tried to devote their lives to serving others. I accept contradictions and I accept their educational necessity. I believe in a loving God whose main job is to get us honest enough with ourselves that we can become answers to our own prayers; I don’t believe in the deus ex machina that makes every complicated thing all right, and I don’t believe in the objective “view from nowhere.” I believe we work out our salvation in a mighty conversation with history and each other, and I believe this is beautiful.