A week or so ago, an intrepid critic of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced to a tough audience of similarly hostile critics that members of that Church hate and condemn the Beatles or, anyway, should hate and condemn them. Inspired by his research, I expressed my own disdain for the Beatles, and my righteous indignation against them, in a post that was rather cryptically titled “On my apparently deep dislike of the Beatles.” I’ve decided, though, that I need to examine the matter a bit more fully.
The first exhibit in this particular critic’s case that Latter-day Saints abhor, or should abhor, the Beatles comes from a passage in a General Conference address from President Thomas S. Monson — who was, yes, the President of the Church at the time — in which President Monson “criticized” their song “All You Need Is Love.”
You may or may not have the lyrics to that song at the tip of your tongue, so I’ll post them here:
Love, love, loveLove, love, loveLove, love, loveThere’s nothing you can do that can’t be doneNothing you can sing that can’t be sungNothing you can say, but you can learnHow to play the gameIt’s easyNothing you can make that can’t be madeNo one you can save that can’t be savedNothing you can do, but you can learnHow to be you in timeIt’s easyAll you need is loveAll you need is loveAll you need is love, loveLove is all you needLove, love, loveLove, love, loveLove, love, loveAll you need is loveAll you need is loveAll you need is love, loveLove is all you needNothing you can know that isn’t knownNothing you can see that isn’t shownThere’s nowhere you can be that isn’t whereYou’re meant to beIt’s easyAll you need is loveAll you need is loveAll you need is love, loveLove is all you needAll you need is love (all together now!)All you need is love (everybody!)All you need is love, loveLove is all you needLove is all you need (love is all you need)Love is all you need (love is all you need)Love is all you need (love is all you need)Love is all you need (love is all you need)Love is all you need (love is all you need)Love is all you need (love is all you need)Love is all you need (love is all you need)Love is all you need (love is all you need)Love is all you need (love is all you need)Love is all you need (love is all you need)Love is all you need (love is all you need)(Love is all you need)Love is all you need (love is all you need)Yesterday (love is all you need)Oh (love is all you need)(Love is all you need)(Love is all you need)
And you may or may not recall President Monson’s fierce denunciation of both “All You Need is Love” and the Beatles. So I’ll provide it for you:
I recently read in the Wall Street Journal an article by Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s chief rabbi. Among other things, he writes: “In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint. All you need, sang the Beatles, is love. The Judeo-Christian moral code was jettisoned. In its place came [the adage]: [Do] whatever works for you. The Ten Commandments were rewritten as the Ten Creative Suggestions.”
Rabbi Sacks goes on to lament:
“We have been spending our moral capital with the same reckless abandon that we have been spending our financial capital. …
“There are large parts of [the world] where religion is a thing of the past and there is no counter-voice to the culture of buy it, spend it, wear it, flaunt it, because you’re worth it. The message is that morality is passé, conscience is for wimps, and the single overriding command is ‘Thou shalt not be found out.’”
You will, I think, notice immediately that President Monson’s denunciation of the Beatles isn’t really very fierce at all, that it isn’t really much of a denunciation, that it isn’t exactly a blanket condemnation of the Beatles (but is only a criticism of an idea contained in a single song of theirs), and, perhaps most saliently, that it isn’t even in President Monson’s own words: Instead, it’s a quotation from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, and specifically from an article of his entitled “Reversing the Decay of London Undone” that was published in the Wall Street Journal for 20 August 2011.
So exactly who was Jonathan Sacks? Now, I realize that, for some secularist critics like the fellow who raised this issue and like those who received it with agreement and even, in at least one or two cases, with enthusiasm, it’s a settled assumption that the leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are closed-minded frontier yokels, fanatics, and rubes who would be expected to dislike the Beatles and, for that matter, anything else that’s even slightly inconsistent with their Ozzie-and-Harriet and Smallville-style provincialism. But Jonathan Sacks doesn’t seem to have been that sort of a person.
Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020) had earned a bachelor’s degree and a a first-class honours master’s degree in philosophy at the University of Cambridge and then, following postgraduate work at New College, Oxford, and King’s College, London, earned a Ph.D. from the University of London. Additionally, after studies at the London School of Jewish Studies and London’s Etz Chaim Yeshiva he qualified for rabbinic ordination. He also received a doctorate that was bestowed by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
At the time of his article in the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Sacks was the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth. After retiring as chief rabbi, he served as Ingeborg and Ira Rennert Global Distinguished Professor of Judaic Thought at New York University, as Kressel and Ephrat Family University Professor of Jewish Thought at Yeshiva University, and as Professor of Law, Ethics, and the Bible at King’s College London. The author of more than forty books, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005 and, in 2009, having been made a life peer, he took a seat in the British House of Lords as Baron Sacks of Aldgate.
Not, I would argue, your typical, run-of-the-mill backwoods bumpkin.
Now let’s look very cursorily at what Rabbi Dr. Sacks actually said, and what President Monson quoted from him. Is love really all you need? It’s enormously important, yes. No question about that. But might self-discipline, responsibility, fidelity, common sense, good judgment, altruism, honesty, self-sacrifice, and several other such values contribute at least a little smidgin to individual and societal flourishing and happiness?
President Monson’s quotation from Rabbi Sacks seems to me a pretty weak reed upon which to base a claim that Latter-day Saints condemn, or should condemn, the Beatles in toto.
Fortunately, though, our critic has a much more damning quote that he can deploy. It comes from remarks that Elder David B. Haight, then of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, delivered to the Annual Meeting of the Utah Association of Women on 24 April 1981. Although I expect that many of you have that particular talk committed to memory and that at least some of you may have actually had it bound with your copy of the scriptures, I’ll supply the relevant passage to you. In his speech to the assembled women, Elder Haight said that
Many of today’s problems can be traced to the music of the Beatles in the early 1960s. I witnessed the early developing of protests on college campuses, protests against the Vietnam War, with protestors using Beatle-type music to express their feelings against our government, against our military, and against authority in general.
I hope that it won’t shock you to learn that I don’t entirely share Elder Haight’s view. However, I take his point, and I take it seriously. The moral influence of the Beatles wasn’t entirely positive. Their prominent experimentation with psychedelic and other drugs, for example, had a decidedly negative impact. The “Youth Rebellion” of the 1960s, in which they were extraordinarily prominent participants and role models, wasn’t an unambiguous step forward for Western Civilization. And, to the extent that rock culture (along with the Pill and a host of other things) contributed to a loosening of standards of sexual morality, it’s scarcely surprising that Church leaders might occasionally have been unenthusiastic about it.
But Elder Haight’s nearly half-century old comment to a Utah women’s group does indeed represent a pretty strong (albeit rather brief and apparently not-often-repeated) negative judgment on the influence of the Beatles.
And here is how, as expressed by second critic at the same online site to which I’ve been referring, the Latter-day Saints are to be condemned on the basis of President Monson’s and Elder Haight’s remarks:
We Latter-day Saints, so the second critic contends, claim to have actual prophets like Isaiah and Paul walking the earth today. Their voices are literally the voice of God himself on this earth. And David B. Haight was one of them. Thus, if Elder Haight declares the Beatles to be at the root of many if not most of the ills of society, it’s no different than if God himself had come down in a cloud of glory and thundered that forth. And if we don’t accept it as the authoritative Word of God to us, essentially as scripture, that simply demonstrates that we really don’t believe our purported “prophets” to really be prophets. We don’t take them seriously.
I’m sometimes astonished, truthfully, by how many of our ex-LDS critics, including the secularizing ones, appear to be failed fundamentalists.
I don’t believe that I ever belonged to a church in which even our canonized scripture was held to be inerrant, let alone that modern apostles enjoy inerrancy in every comment they utter. (Such infallibility isn’t even ascribed to Catholic popes, who are thought to be infallible only when speaking ex cathedra on matters of faith or morals.) Nor do I believe that I ever belonged to a church in which it was taught that every isolated remark of every individual ordained apostle is to be received as binding scripture. Apparently, though, these critics did.
Do I take what individual apostles say very seriously? Indeed, I do. And I certainly agree that the products of popular culture are not without (sometimes troubling) moral implications. There are some television shows and films and songs and art works that are simply incompatible with a seriously Latter-day Saint moral framework. (And I’m not referring here only to sexual morality, although that’s a really obvious area of concern.) We need to be discerning and selective in our consumption of what our current society offers to us. In that sense, I have no problem at all with what Rabbi Sacks said, as quoted by President Monson. And I take Elder Haight’s reservation about the Beatles as worthy of serious consideration. Great though they were, John, Paul, George, and Ringo aren’t and never were beyond criticism.
Posted from Park City, Utah
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