I will begin this post the way I have begun almost every other: I am sorry for not writing in so long. I have been in an unusually cryogenic deep freeze.

Here is the first thaw.

I told my friend Matt today that I have a deconstructionist testimony of Mormonism. For starters, I believe in it because I don’t believe it, because the process of believing that took me toward unbelief brought me more truth than starting with the ‘right’ conclusions ever would have.

But that is not yet deconstruction, and it is also more than that. So let’s get on with it. I am given the Book of Mormon. I am told it is a sacred book, true, the only truth. I start to read it. I find a passage that irks me, but because I think the book is sacred — because I am told to read it again and again and again, and because it is supposed to be “true” and therefore must possess a secret that would satisfy my ire — I do exactly that: I read it again and again, and my reading deepens, and I search out all possible answers. Perhaps I find that my original assumption — this initial feeling that the Book of Mormon is racist, maybe — bends toward a reading that shows that this is simultaneously true and untrue. There are racist ideas in the Book of Mormon, and there have certainly been racist outcomes: people have found verses that were ripe for bad use and used them badly (both the book’s fault and the people’s fault). But because I am reading down, deeper and deeper, I must look at everything, and I discover, too, that for Joseph Smith’s time period it is actually quite progressive: a book about the American continent belonging rightly to the Indians, a book about white people needing brown people to save them. And then I must think the next logical thought — namely, how much was this book influenced by Joseph’s personal history and the larger histories unfolding around him — and I am off to the races again, asking questions about the nature of revelation and its dependability, about the possibility of a non-Platonic truth where there is nothing ‘out there’ and only the tension of all the ‘in here’s’.

It is the exact feeling of ire, of disbelief, of noticing contradiction, that saves. It saves by making you aware of the passage of time.

That sounds strange at first: the knowledge of time saves you? What could that possibly mean? What I mean by it is this: reading centuries’ worth of sacred texts requires you to admit that truth is very different at different times. It also requires you to admit that some things that were formerly ‘true’ to whole cultures are repugnant and grotesque to whole cultures now. Once you have noticed this, you will have to ask yourself a hard question: “What was ‘true’ about the scriptural ideas you now find repugnant and what was cultural? What parts of these grotesque idea actually came from God and what parts are merely the infinitized preferences of people still in the grip of societal- or self-deception? Did God, for example, really want the Israelites to kill men, women, babies and animals to purify the land from wickedness, or was that a great and odious self-deception that the Israelites attributed to their God to give it sanction?”

You will be forced to ask these questions, but then, as every good book requires, you will be forced to turn the question on yourself, ask, “What ideas in my own time are merely zeitgeist playing God and what ideas are true in spite of the culture?” Or, in other words, “If I took my most intense spiritual feelings and froze them into words that persisted in a book for dozens of centuries, and if a person thousands of years from now opened that book and read my frozen thoughts, what would they find to be true and what would they find to be backward and repugnant?”

This, in turn, will lead to a thousand more questions. You will necessarily wonder if there is any truth at all beyond culture, and if God actually tailors his/her messages to a culture or if cultures, being locked in time, simply perennially misunderstand God’s untailored words. And if there is no truth beyond culture, you will have to reassemble your entire concept of right and wrong, of responsibility, and of the function of God and, if you are in earnest, you will have to decide what thing or being or object — in a culture where truth is flush with culture — can counterweigh your tendency toward self-deception. But if you believe that there is some truth beyond culture, you will likely spend the rest of your life deciding your method for extracting truth from culture, of knowing when there is a difference and what it is when there is.

At this point you might start to realize that it doesn’t as much matter if the book is ‘true’ in the historical or correspondent sense, but, rather, if it makes you true by confronting you with the precariousness of your own truth notions and your devastating capacity for self-deception, which is itself a function of both personal and historical time. You will come to perform the most spiritual act, which is to doubt yourself in earnest, to doubt the self-evidence of any of your thoughts and to suspect preferences in the ideas you claim as truths. And this just might save you: It might save you from the rotten self-evidences of your culture; it will certainly save you from flatness of mind. It will require you to radically consider the possibility of truth in everything. But more even than that, it will make you Christian reader of history, both the sweeping histories of cultures and the intricate histories of individual people. To learn to read the world in this way (and you are no longer reading a book, but the world) is perhaps the saving act, making you both generous and wise, mimicking godliness by making you radically Other than Others (even Other than yourself) — a ballast against self-deceptions — and radically synonymous with Others-an empathetic human who can suffer with others in their search for truth. When you read the Old Testament, for example, instead of merely closing it defiantly and persisting in the truths of your time, you will let your anger or outrage guide you through the hard questions: Why did this person think this way, why do I think in my way, and what would God (or any other being who could look on me with the perspective of the future) think about what I think?

You never have to agree with this or that event or fact. That is the great mistake of moralist, rather than process, Christianity, a kind of Christianity all too often perpetuated by Mormonism itself. Faith and goodness are rarely found in agreeing with some proposition or other, but in the freedom to radically decide whether you agree or not. This is no revelation: many liberals have gotten this far, after all. But many liberals have also forgotten that this freedom is dangerous and prone to self-deceived selfishness of all kinds and they easily flatten their world to house their preferences only, calling it freedom. Too often, though, this freedom is often paltry, a desire to do whatever they already want. This is why you must also be generous in your reading. You must be generous in your reading in order to decide wisely what to reject and what to keep.

You will and should ultimately decide what you think of the Old Testament, or this or that commandment, but only after a process (excruciating) of setting yourself at odds with your self-evidences. No one but you — and sometimes least of all you — will be able to tell if you have done this fully, hence the pharisaic tendency: to reduce people to what can be seen and deduce righteousness from that, to make agreement and outward comportment the signs of faith. A testimony induced by a growing awareness of time has nothing immovable to measure itself against, no ultimate confidence in either outside or inside standards. It does not have this luxury because it realizes that everything moves — people, truths, ideas, gods, time. The only spiritual process that truly saves simultaneously uses time to other a person out of self-evidence while allowing a person to conclude something different than has been concluded before.

This is my testimony of scripture. Scriptures are houses of time that freeze old ideas and ask new generations to read them. Their sacredness does not imply that they are true, whatever that would mean, but that they must be taken seriously enough to be read and re-read. Re-reading is the pedagogy of salvation: it requires revision, revisiting, reevaluating everything, every day.

But I am concerned because these thoughts produce uncomfortable consequences. They seem to suggest that authenticity is most likely to occur within an authoritative and often oppressive institution, ideology, or system that appears intent on denying that authenticity. And yet it seems that the strange outcome of rigid authoritarian truth (this is the truth and the only truth) is a complex of truths that vex and vie and verb their way to prominence. Authoritarianism might actually (and quite accidentally) suggest that there is never an original interpretation, both in the sense of God possessing the ‘pure’ revelation or in the sense that one verse is truer than another verse 400 years later, and also in the sense that authoritative revelation — public revelation — can never fully trounce personal, or private, revelation. And this produces a great tension: that authoritarian structures, precisely by emphasizing totality and rigidity and the Truth of certain ideas — by insisting on the high seriousness and high stakes of it all — set the stage for profound subversions performed by people who are becoming truer than the Truth in their testimonies of resistance.

To be fair, Mormonism fails itself in its anemic self-definitions. There are many, including top leaders, who do not see Mormonism in the way I have described and who would in fact like to wipe out all possibility of the interpretation I am giving. But the fact still remains that Mormonism’s authoritarianism, in a strange move, is the precise thing that ensures an explosion of anti-authoritarian interpretations. After all, the very process of canonization is a deeply authoritarian process that begets deeply anti-authoritarian consequences. To canonize is to draw a line, to gather an armful of truth and say, “The world inside my arms is true and the world outside my arms is not.” Many people will accept this notion thoughtlessly and push forward in a happy dogmatism. But anyone listening or reading carefully will see the questions that it begs, will ask: How did you decide that these things were true and these weren’t (off the to the historicity and criterion races), or: These things that are true say different things (off to the nature of revelation and the influence of culture races).

The very margins of canonization, like deconstruction’s obedient child, will ultimately prove more important, house more important texts, than the actual text ever will. The authoritarian move of drawing a line is actually a most fertile subversive act, containing in it all the questions the line was supposed to stop people from asking.

Add to this Mormonism’s most subversive central premise — that of restoration — and you complicate things even more. As in any established religion, the subversiveness of Mormonism’s central tenet has been turned into an event rather than an ever-present gerund: the Restoration (definite article and capitalized word) rather than the restoration-ing (the uncapitalized doing of daily seekers). Mormonism, in its move away from a verb and toward the noun of institution, has swapped the idea of restoration for the event. So it is Joseph Smith who ushered in and accomplished the task of Restoration rather than seeing restoration as the process of finding and gathering in truth from wherever it is found.

At best, mainstream Mormonism uses restoration as a verb only to talk about all the people it will gather into its truth: a move that solidifies the boundaries of Mormonism and privileges the truth inside it. In reality, however, it is clear that a true understanding of restoration is a daily verb and requires porous boundaries between ‘the truth as we know it’ and ‘the truth as we could know it’. If we honestly believe that there is truth everywhere, and it is our job to find it, then we must also believe that we can never use the criterion of the inside to decide the truthfulness of something from outside. In other words, there is no way to use the authoritarian truths given to us by our institutions to perform the most sacred task of our religion: deciding what is true. As I said before, to do that we have to consider the fallibility — or the vulnerability, or arbitrariness, or historicity, or wrongheadedness — of our own beliefs right along with everything else. We have to be constantly alert, considering the radical possibility that each new thing might not only be true, but possibly even truer than what we claim as true.

I don’t blame Mormonism for seeing, and then trying to avoid, the dangerous implications of a restorative religion, particularly one that allows for personal revelation alongside official pronouncements. As Richard Bushman reminds us, the beginnings of institutional Mormonism can be dated to the time when Joseph returned to New York to tell the Saints who were getting their own extreme revelations that he was the authority and that his revelations counted more. This was an authoritarian move, to be sure, but also a necessary one, which is precisely why it interests me. It is precisely because Mormonism is so authoritarian — precisely because its story is so totalizing, its truth claims so sweeping, the stakes so high, the push for conformity so intense — that the profoundest kind of deconstruction can occur. In a sense, Joseph had to trade the central tenets of Mormonism for its health and survival; if he hadn’t severely restricted or devalued personal revelation and radical restoration, Mormonism would never have been anything but a perpetually splintering sect that lacked the gravitas to produce resistance. Deconstruction shares a similar birthright; its great subversions could only occur within an authoritarian language of hierarchy, static differentiation, and an insistence on the totalizing meaning of terms.

So again: What on earth am I saying? Am I justifying the presence of bad things in order to produce the good? Or, worse, am I saying that oppression and repression and the essentializing pronouncements of elites — along with the immeasurable amount of suffering and alienation they cause — are somehow necessary to a system that capable of producing truth? Or am I saying that Mormonism is uniquely equipped to create the highest form of anti-Mormon, a person who uses the deliberate falsehoods of Mormonism to become its antithesis, which is somehow a truer Mormonism than canonical Mormonism itself?

I don’t know. I do know that the Mormons who have learned to read well — instead of ideologically — are inevitably some of the most earnest, complex, and expansive-minded people I meet, often much more so than so-called free thinkers who were born thinking the ‘right’ (for our time) kind of things. These people often strike me as flat, their thinking inherited and lacking history in any of its incarnations — without a sense of time and how they operate in it. They often denigrate ‘religious people’ as being conservative and small-minded, when they are actually performing the most dangerous hypocrisy: believing that the virtue of their conclusions necessarily implies the virtue of their process, or believing that the right conclusions preclude the wrongness of their assumptions. In short, too many liberals condemn themselves in their criticisms of others; their liberalism is simply a puffed-up belief that they have escaped the mistakes common to all humans.

Getting redundant now, but I believe that the central problem of existence is the tendency toward self-deception. This tendency is a human problem, not a religious or a political or ideological one. The difference is not that religions increase self-deception while, say, democracy limits it. The difference is that every institution increases self-deception in uniquely dangerous ways. The converse of this is hopeful, however: If institutions can foster self-deception, they must also have unique ways of diminishing it. I accept that religion fosters self-deception in uniquely dangerous ways. But I must also insist that religion challenges self-deception in uniquely marvelous ways. Right now I am in the strange position of realizing that in my experience of Mormonism, the former sponsored the latter.

I don’t think this needs to mean that only authoritarian structures can produce proper resistance-proper resisters. I do think, however, that it is immeasurably valuable to have ideas with high stakes, to have ideas that cannot simply be rejected but must be understood, and to cultivate in people a sense of the sacred. This would cure people by introducing an Other that can fight against their false notions, their impatience, their wrong-headed ideas. And it creates this Otherness precisely by demanding communion: true understanding between humans that erases all Otherness. I suppose I believe that religion is the house where the radically Other not only meets the radically familiar, but becomes the same thing. The love taught by good religion, good reading, good democracy, whatever, divides people untidily between doubt and self-doubt, between the boundaries of their skin and the beginning of someone else’s, and between the critical distance of judgment and the immanence of intimacy.

This is my deconstructionist testimony. Everything unravels itself in the attempt not to, and that’s the point. There is always unraveling somewhere on a smooth string, unraveling faster the tighter the smooth string squeezes. The truth is the unraveling: the unraveling of self-deception, of authority, perspective. The need is for something to unravel against.