Exploring Mormon Thought, Culture, and Texts
My daily reading for all things Libertarian comes from LRC. I noticed today an interesting post referencing the Mo-Tab and a new CD/DVD collection based on the oft-quoted story of soldiers in WWII from opposing sides coming together to celebrate Christmas. (Could someone take the time to verify the historicity of this story? If it’s coming from the church, you can’t blame me for being a little bit skeptical…).
I haven’t heard it yet, but mine is on the way.
By now, pretty much everyone recognizes that church has begun to build up its sacred historical sites by dedicating temples, new visitor centers, and redesigning the experience visitors have. This has produced and encouraged increased pilgrimage by faithful members of the church who travel to these sites for special religious experiences. An industry has built up around these pilgrimage sites including hotels, bookstores, and replica relics. For an “aniconic” culture, we certainly have gone 180 degrees. Is the movement to materiality simply an inevitable development in the history of any particular religious movement? Is this particular development religiously neutral, an act of true piety, or a substitute for true spirituality?
While it is often assumed that Mormonism was aniconic (represented in its rejection of the cross), eschewing material spirituality because of its American Protestant background, the use of the Temple produces a certain tension in this theory. In the temple, a more sacred space is created. I think that it is the temple that has provided the impulse to sacralize Mormon historical sites. The birthplace of Joseph Smith, the Hill Cumorah, Kirtland, Independence, Nauvoo, Carthage, etc. all represent something of the sacred to Mormons. They are sacred history and sacred spaces. One can receive more firm answers to prayers in the temple, but also in these locations. Like invisible magnetic fields, they are places where the veil is thin, where this world and that world meet. As such, they will function in the same way as medieval pilgrimage sites. Will the pilgrimage sites begin to be specialized in particular ways? Will those seeking healing travel to the banks of the Mississippi near Nauvoo? Will those seeking advice about marriage travel to where Joseph and Emma were married? Will the Susquehanna river become a sacred place to be baptized?
The kitsch-industry that has developed around these sites and experiences focalizes the theological question in important ways. This is still in its infant stages, but can we imagine street vendors selling statues of Joseph Smith and the Christus, vials of dirt from the Hill Cumorah or Sacred Grove, bullet necklaces in Carthage, mosquito medallions from Nauvoo, etc? How will these objects contribute to Mormon spirituality? How will they shape the Mormon home or the Mormon body?
The questions of describing the effect of these present and future practices of course leads to reflection on their religious value. Currently, my experience with many LDS that see Catholic, Orthodox, and some Jewish and Islamic material religiosity is that they see it as strange, even a symptom of false religion. I wonder if as these practices develop in Mormonism, what the response will be as the leaders and people are more self-reflective on our own material religion.
Someone I know very well is prone to a religious form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, called “scrupulosity.” He worries obsessively over proper religious practice, especially the internal aspects such as prayer and thinking pure thoughts. He feels an unusual amount of anxiety over his thoughts and therefore engages in certain mental rituals to clear them of “sin.” Ironically, these rituals often compound the problem since they add to his anxiety, making it more difficult to control his thoughts instead of easier. Prayer is a very powerful healing technique, but as a compulsion it looses much of its transcendence. He is accustomed to spending hours praying and worrying.
Like many suffering from scrupulosity, he would never act on the odious thoughts that pop into his head. OCD is likely a biological disorder – it is certainly not a spiritual malfunction, even though it may seem that way to patients. This has me thinking: is there an unintentional bias against church members with mental illness?
We associate the Spirit with peaceful, happy, familiar feelings. As a result, we often focus our attention inwards to gauge our spiritual wellbeing, concluding that if our emotions do not match the “fruits of the Spirit,” something must be amiss in our behavior. This may be a normal and healthy part of religion, but for someone who is clinically depressed emotions are often poor indicators of God’s loving approval. Therefore, I think we should place less emphasis on “feeling” as part of our religious experience.
It seems to me that church members with all different forms of mental illness are seldom accommodated. For example, when speakers get up to give lessons on purity, happiness and other feel-good topics, they rarely consider the implications that their comments could have for members who are mentally ill. My friend is a convert to the church; and while he enjoyed the conversion process, it was extremely difficult for him to cope with all of the church teachings on thought control.
I have suggested that we focus less on feelings and thoughts in our discourse. What else could be done to help those who are struggling with mental illness feel at ease in church?
Mormons adopted the language of race and ethnicity to describe themselves from the very early days of the church. This post examines the rhetoric of race in Mormonism and compares it with that of early Christianity. It is inspired by Denise Buell’s amazing book, Why This New Race?, which looks at “ethnic reasoning” in early Christianity. In Mormonism, I see a similar dynamic, though different in some key respects, in the process of describing and creating a new people.
Up to this day, many people still see Christianity as a universalistic religion and Judaism as a particularistic religion. Christianity’s success is credited with its ability to apply to all peoples. Judaism “failed” because it was ethnically exclusivistic. What Buell did was to look at the rhetoric of race and ethnicity in early Christianity. The early Christians saw themselves as a new “race,” in the same category as Romans, Greeks, and Jews, only their citizenship was in heaven. As a claim to a “universal” race, it engaged in the same sorts of “particularistic” exclusionary practices as any other ethnicity. Her critique is that this new universal is simply another particular and that the claims to universalism always involve exclusion.
While this critique is certainly important for the study of early Christianity, in many ways it applies to Latter-day Saints( though we are more comfortable with being labeled “exclusionary”). However, Buell’s argument also tells us a lot more about Mormonism. Mormons claim lineage (literal, adoptive, symbolic, blah, blah, blah) with Israel which establishes them as a distinctive people. In some versions of this, the blood of the baptized member is said to change. In other cases, the blood of the investigator is activated and the ancient kinship bonds are rekindled when the spirit is felt, so that only those literal descendants are gathered again to the family. This diffuse blood was always seen as multi-racial biologically, but all members of the church belonged to the true family of Israel.
The rhetoric of racial unity in Mormonism has died down in recent decades, perhaps as the result of the power scientific discourses of race which may problematize Mormon theories of kinship (there is a lively critique of the biological view of race as well). The result, however, is that biological views of race become the discourse of race in the church, which means that the exclusionary language of that discourse can divide the membership. Yet, our own past exclusionary practice of denying those of African descent membership in the people of Israel reminds us that our rhetoric of universalism rings hollow. Nevertheless, as we have moved away from being a race, to being simply a religion like most others should cause us to reflect on this event. Is one model more effective than another? Should we continue to be a race of Mormons, or should we be just a religion?
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