No power or influence

“This Church has before it many close places through which it will have to pass before the work of God is crowned with victory. To meet the difficulties that are coming, it will be necessary for you to have a knowledge of the truth of this work for yourselves. The difficulties will be of such a character that the man or woman who does not possess this personal knowledge or witness will fall. If you have not got the testimony, live right and call upon the Lord and cease not till you obtain it. If you do not you will not stand…. Remember these sayings, for many of you will live to see them fulfilled. The time will come when no man nor woman will be able to endure on borrowed light. Each will have to be guided by the light within himself. If you do not have it, how can you stand?”⁸⁵⁷

In the midst of huge national animosity toward the Mormon church and a series of Congressional bills and US Supreme Court decisions ever more hostile to polygamy, Brigham Young said this:

“They [the true doctrines of Jesus] have been still more disfigured by the corruptions of schismatizing followers, who have found an interest in sophisticating and perverting the simple doctrines he taught….”⁸⁹²

The anthropologist Gregory Bateson cointed the term “schismogenesis” for these two phenomena—schismogensis meaning the genesis or creation of schism. He called them “symmetrical differentiation” and “complimentary differentiation,” and he noted that in either case, unless the schismogenesis is restrained, it leads to progressive rivalries and hostilities, with a “progressive unilateral distorition of the personalities of the members of both groups, which results in mutual hostility between them and must end in the breakdown of the [whole] system.”⁹⁰² Many scholars have applied Bateson’s idea to numerous areas of life, including religion. The Book of Mormon is in its broadest sense the story of two peoples or groups (the Nephites and the Jaredites) the arc of whose story is a perfect pattern of schismogensis. Both stories mirror each other almost exactly in their dramatic structure: the early divisions of family (i.e., warring brothers) that lead to warring peoples, not unlike the story of Isaac and Ishmael in the Bible. As the two sides pull farther and farther and farther apart, reconciliation becomes impossible, and in the end they disintegrate into total destruction. In the Nephite example, the opposing groups are named Nephites (after the brother Nephi) and Lamanites (after his brother Laman)—the Lamanites being the “wicked” side and the Nephites being the “righteous” side. But then an odd thing happens—the Lamanites repent while the Nephites grow in wickedness until finally in the process of time the Lamanites become more righteous than the Nephites.⁹⁰³ While it might seem that this switch-over would end the hostilities and heal the schismogenesis, it does not for into the gap that has grown between these two groups over the generations there has infiltrated another and far more insidious entity called the Gadianton Robbers. Both groups stirred up “hatred for their brethren,”⁹⁰⁴ but the Gadiantons were the keepers and purveyors of “secret combinations” and the devices of the devil which were the ultimate causes of the destruction of the people. Compared to the Gadiantons, the Lamanites were never more than outlaws. The Gadiantons were the conspirators and the terrorists.

Both narrations in the Book of Mormon end in a downward spiral that brings total destruction to all sides—no one survives. Again and again, the people degenerate into factional “tribes and leaders of tribes.”⁹⁰⁵ In the end, the scorched-earth society drove the people to the point where they would “curse God, and wish to die. Nevertheless they would struggle with the sword for their lives.”⁹⁰⁶ Whatever may have been the original mainsprings of division in the antiquity of the story, the ultimate cause of the ultimate demise was “divisions, evils, false churches, and persecutions” that arose among all the peoples.⁹⁰⁷

Schismogenesis marks an escalation of mutual hostilities (ending in mutually assured destruction”) that is a return to the old ethic of “a tooth for a tooth”⁹⁰⁸ that Christianity professes to have abandoned.⁹⁰⁹ It is the rule of the marketplace and the public square, particularly in the realm of politics—the agora. Speaking of the first generation political culture in Washington, D.C., Margaret Bayard Smith observed that the Senate chamber was an arena “like the amphitheatres of Rome,” filled with images of war. “It is a kind of moral gladiatorship in which characters are torn to pieces, and arrows, yes, poisoned arrows, which tho’ not seen are deeply felt, are hurled by the combatants against each other.”⁹¹⁰ This reality of the public square is known, expected, and accepted. It is its very nature and always has been. It reflects the character of the nation and its people, and in democracies it is generally considered to be not only a necessity but also a self-evident good. Nevertheless, its character is fundamentally that of rancor. A Biblical image apropos of this amphitheater is found in Matthew 12:43-45, a passage quoted by Mormon authorities as being instructive for homosexuals:

So the churches “join the fray,” as Mormon apostle Dallin Oaks urges,⁹¹⁷ and potentiate the schismogenesis. “Religion is attacked”⁹¹⁸ and so it must counterattack, tooth for tooth—or at least defend itself in kind. The church’s assimilation of itself to the schismogenesis of the public square reveals the true character of the church and the religion is professes—the church political and the church militant. But this is not the pattern set by Jesus, to return blow for blow. He taught that “ye shall not resist evil” but rather “turn the other cheek”⁹¹⁹ and be “peacemakers.”⁹²⁰ “Spiritual warfare” was the invention of Paul, not Jesus.⁹²¹ As we saw earlier, in his essay, “Beyond Politics,” Hugh Nibley explodes this myth.⁹²² “Politics, as practiced on earth,” he notes, “belongs to the ways of men; it is the essential activity of the city—the city of man, not the city of God.”⁹²³ There always comes a time—the “inevitable showdown”⁹²⁴—when men must choose between the two governments. In the image of the Book of Mormon, the Mormons, along with their “coalition of churches,” are tilting at the Lamanites, while all the while the Gadiantons are increasing in the world.

All this is the very definition and essence of the animus that official Mormondom has always directed at LGBT people, and at the families and marriages. The 2015 amicus brief struggles with finding a suitable definition of animus that would exclude all acts of “popular sovereignty,” even if such ballot measures “target a single group for disfavored treatment” (page 23). “If that is animus,” the 2015 brief argues, “the term has no useful meaning.” In this view, animus must be pure and unalloyed:
“Only proof of hostility toward the affected group, unmixed with any legitimate purpose for the challenged classification, justifies striking down a law for animus.”
The Mormons’ own definition of “animus” is instructive here because it does not square with this purist insistence. Probably the clearest official Mormon definition of animus that is relevant to the modern context of law, religious liberty, and the Constitution was given by church president John Taylor in 1884 in response to federal and state anti-polygamy laws:
“Thus a law [that day’s equivalent of DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act] was first passed by Congress, which has been perverted by the administration, by all its officers who have officiated in this Territory, and made to subserve the interests of a party who have placed in their political platform an Anti-Mormon plank; and have clearly proven that there is a combination in all the officers of State, officiating in this Territory, to back up this political intrigue in the interest of party, and at the sacrifice of law, equity, jurisprudence and all the safeguards that are provided by the Constitution for the protection of human rights. These…are some points that are of considerable importance. Similar things have been exhibited in former times—an animus, a united operation against justice, equity and law, and, in our case, against the Constitution of the United States, and the rights and privileges and immunities of the Latter-day Saints.”⁹²⁵
Today, the Mormons have turned this anti-Mormon animus around and redirected it, in the same fashion and with same intensity, toward same-sex marriage and LGBT people. Their animus is not unalloyed, but is a mixture of legitimate and illegitimate purposes expressing proof of hostility toward LGBT people—a “united operation” against them and their marriages. This Mormon animus is clearly on display in the 2010 documentary, 8: The Mormon Proposition,⁹²⁶ which is easily available in many formats.

Chapter 13: The Mormon Church: Sect Turned Political Faction

The defeat which the Mormon church suffered on the issue of polygamy, and the ensuring redefinition of itself as a more acceptable “religion” within the American social fabric, were the beginning of its assimilation to the state and its politics:

In his famous Federalist No. 10, James Madison warned that a “religious sect may degenerate into a political faction.” However, he felt that there would be sufficient protection from this pernicious influence if a wide variety of sects were widely dispersed over the entire face of the nation so as to protect the “national councils from any danger from that source.”⁹²⁸ Like all the Founders, Madison feared and detested factions for their pernicious tendency to undermine and ultimately destroy the republic. Suppressing the spirit of faction and increasing domestic tranquility was a major concern throughout the Federalist Papers. The problem with factions, as opposed to simple minorities and interest groups (of which there are many), is that each one tends to declare it own agenda as absolute and to claim for itself special rights to that end. A faction is usually unwilling to compromise. When religious sects degenerate into political factions, the conflict arises because religions—especially faith-based, “revealed” religions—hold their tenets to be absolute. Their argument becomes a zero-sum proposition such as this one on page 31 of the Mormon 2015 amicus brief noted above (emphasis added):

For all his prescience in the Federalist, Madison viewed factions as discrete entities. He did not entirely foresee the ability in modern times—with modern communications and transportation—for even widely dispersed sect-factions to coalesce around agreed-upon politically expedient issues for the sake of power, money, and competition. In effect, he did not foresee the modern resurgence of the anti-federalist mindset. The Anti-Federalists of Madison’s time were upset with the new Constitution’s totally secular language and particularly its ban on “religious tests.” They argued that religion was a necessary and crucial support of government and a guardian of public and private morals. For them, religion was the foundation of all civil institutions, and being the foundation, was entitled to absolute, or at least special, support and protection. They were parochial, provincial, homogenous, and localist—and their ideas and influence are present today.⁹³¹ The Mormon church and its coalition of “faith communities” made precisely these same arguments in their amicus brief in the earlier California marriage cases. Referring to same-sex marriages as “genderless” and thus rendering gay people neutered (castrated and spayed), the church essentialized men and women along purely gender lines⁹³², asserted that this was the “consensus” of “virtually all faith communities,” and then concluded with this argument:

“For Mormons, such arguments are specious at best, hypocritical at worst. Their 19^th-Century arguments in favor of polygamy were based on the needs of adults and adult society. Mormon apostle George Q. Cannon argued in 1879 that the primary purpose of polygamy was to take up the slack of surplus unmarried and unmarriageable women due to the reality that “Men go to war, they go to sea, they engage in commercial pursuits, they leave their homes, they engage in hazardous occupations.”⁹³⁸ It is also specious for them to argue that the “redefinition” of a word which describes an “institution” is somehow pernicious. Both Jesus Christ and Joseph Smith were redefiners par excellence. All readers of the Bible know the frequent formula in Jesus’s teachings that begins with the words, “Ye have heard it said by them of old time,” and ends with “but I say unto you.” He redefined love, anger, and adultery (among many other words) in this way.⁹³⁹ Similarly, Joseph Smith took many common English and ecclesiastical words (church, ward, stake, quorum, endowment, intelligence, scripture, priesthood, born again, grace, glory) and reified them with meanings peculiar to his new church.⁹⁴⁰ To both Jesus and Joseph, it did not matter that there was a “centuries-old consensus” on the meanings of such words. They pressed them into service with new meanings that fit the new realities of their respective visions. In Adrienne Rich’s words, they chose “to sieve up old, sunken words, heave them, dripping with silt, turn them over, and bring them into the air of the present.”⁹⁴¹ Both Jesus and Joseph singled out marriage as an object of special attention, redefinition, and change in both meaning and practice. Jesus was single⁹⁴²; Joseph was a polygamist. Jesus noted that “marrying and giving in marriage” were part of the wickedness that led up to the great flood of Noah.⁹⁴³ Joseph approved monogamous marriage until it became expedient for him to introduce polygamy.⁹⁴⁴ The fact is that marriage has always been, and still is, one of the most malleable concepts in human society—and one of the most co-opted by governments and religions. What is far more constant and intractable in patriarchal society is the insistence on “where It goes.” That is the real subtext of most of the marriage discussions. What is privileged is not so much any particular form of marriage so much as a particular form of genitalism.

Up to this point, we have talked rather loosely of diversity and conformity in several contexts both political and social. It is now time to bring them together in a closer look at how they are inflected in Mormon doctrine and practice. .There is a tension in Mormon doctrine between diversity and variety on the one hand, and conformity and uniformity on the other. This conflict echoes the larger conflict of the church itself versus the individual. Joseph Smith said: “I teach them correct principles, and they govern themselves.”⁹⁴⁵ But the church he founded produces ever-increasing lists of rules by which acceptable conduct is measured. This evolution from the church’s founding to the present day explains a lot in terms of modern Mormonism’s growing desire to assimilate itself to law and politics. It also reflects the American nation’s struggle to understand its own growing diversity and pluralism as against a remembered or reconstructed past of uniformity and “shared values.”

The Mormon temple “Endowment” ceremony, which includes an account of creation similar to Genesis, celebrates diversity. When God (or the Gods) command their agents to create the earth and its living things, the purpose stated for the creation is to “beautify and give variety to the face of the earth.”⁹⁴⁶ Beauty and variety are seen as intrinsic, self-evident goods, and indeed they potentiate one another. Early Mormon scripture, again from the hand of Joseph Smith, held that “it is not meet that I should command in all things, for he that is compelled in all things, the same is a slothful and not a wise servant.”⁹⁴⁷ “Verily, I say, men should be anxiously engaged in a good cause, and do many things of their own free will, and bring to pass much righteousness. For the power is in them, wherein they are agents unto themselves.”⁹⁴⁸ This seems to coalesce with the “govern themselves” paradigm.

However, elsewhere the same volume condemns that which “seeketh to become a law unto itself, and willeth to abide in sin, and altogether abideth in sin.”⁹⁴⁹ The three elements of that formula, separated as they are by commas, might reasonably be read as cumulative—in other words, as saying that to “become a law unto itself” is only wrong if and when there is a concomitant “abiding in sin.” But it is not read that way. It is read as if the three elements are synonymous: to become a law unto itself is tantamount to abiding in sin. Hence, Mormon apostle Amasa Lyman said, “You are not independent, you never was [sic], and you never will be. That being does not exist within the range of man's history. The very principles upon which we exist make us the objects of dependence.⁹⁵⁰ Similarly, Mormon scripture holds that everyone must “deny himself” in order to follow Jesus.⁹⁵¹

It is therefore not difficult to see why this ever-growing religious conservatism of the individual and the individual’s will and identity conflicts directly with a growingly diverse and libertarian America—and why there is a consequent felt need to invade and influence the very law that facilitates that diversity. Chai Feldblum elucidates the legal issues in a discussion of the liberty interests claimed by gay and lesbian people, among others, in modern America.⁹⁵² Feldblum assembles the case law and treatises that have noted an increasing diversity of personal and moral liberty in a pluralistic society. For example, in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the Supreme Court stated: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”⁹⁵³ But this “right,” if it exists, must strike fear and loathing into the heart of any true patriarch who claims the right, like Adam in Genesis, to name everything and everyone, and to insist that all of them be called only by the name he has given it, her, and them. As noted earlier, this has been the God-given right claimed by all patriarchs since God brought all the creatures, including the woman, to Adam to see what he (Adam) would name them.⁹⁵⁴ They were not allowed to name themselves. Thus, any right or “liberty” that claims the contrary authority “to define one’s own concept of existence,” to affirm oneself, strikes at the very root of this patriarchal privilege and the requirement to “deny yourself.”

The conflict in Mormon doctrine might perhaps best be expressed in the Mormon scripture that says: “[H]e that keepeth the laws of God hath no need to break the laws of the land.”⁹⁵⁵ This can be read two ways. It can mean that the church ought to try every means to minimize church-state conflicts by remaining neutral and distant from the state. On the other hand, it can mean that the church ought to do all it can to control the state so that the state does what the church wants. The first paradigm is one of distance, the second one of intimacy. Intimacy might seem at first to be the path toward uniformity and identity of ideology and purpose, but it is the foundation for conflict. The law, particularly the common law, is an evolving process. It changes as society evolves. But most religions, including Mormonism, see their principles as eternal and immutable—hence their conservatism in the face of societal change.

If the church and the kingdom have the power of faith which they claim, they are, or ought to be, above earthly power—above trusting in the “arm of flesh.”⁹⁵⁶ They ought to say to earthly power what Gawain says to Dagonet: “What, good Dagonet, dost thou lie at my door? Foolish boy, what need have I of thee? From what wouldst thou defend me?”⁹⁵⁷ “All victory and glory is [sic] brought to pass unto you through your diligence, faithfulness, and prayers of faith.”⁹⁵⁸ If you really have “faith in your prayers,”⁹⁵⁹ if in exercising them you “cannot go amiss,”⁹⁶⁰ why do you need or want school prayer? If you believe in the inherent power of the word of God⁹⁶¹, why would you want or need to post it in a courtroom? Or wear it on your sleeve to be “seen of men”? If the power to “bring to pass much righteousness” is in human beings⁹⁶², why do they need the power of the state? If the churches are open and the freedoms of religion, speech, and assembly are secure under the Constitution, why try to tag on to the government and law as a backup church? The answer, of course, is that “Persuasion is clumsy and its results uncertain.”⁹⁶³ When religion goes to law, the rules of religion no longer apply; the rules of law apply. It requires of all a “religious test.” Religiosity becomes the touchstone. It operates by “compulsory means.” When this happens, the cause of religion and its two-edged sword of faith becomes a jidad, and the church has the power of government behind it to issue and execute the fatwah. The faith that causes people to see eye to eye is denied, and it is required of Shylock by the law that “He presently become a Christian,”⁹⁶⁴ and must do so lest the Duke make good his threat to “recant / The pardon that I late pronouncéd here.”⁹⁶⁵ None of this expresses the power of faith (not mere belief) as understood by the Latter-day Saints but the edifice of the law. So long as the church clings to it, the church cannot stand “independent above all other creatures beneath the celestial world,”⁹⁶⁶ cannot have faith in its prayers⁹⁶⁷, and cannot claim to possess the power of God unto salvation,⁹⁶⁸ All that is relegated to the state. This is hell, where the devil is prince⁹⁶⁹, where Babylon commingles with apostate Christendom (which tries to rule Babylon), and where there is nothing but law with its mandatory heterosexuality, where there is faith no more, neither free agency, and due process is meticulously observed. It is, in short, as the old Mormon joke about “free agency and how to enforce it.”

There is another, perhaps more serious problem. Walls of separation—any walls—create two sides, and when one of those sides escalates, the other must also escalate. The Berlin Wall of the Cold War is a suitable image. It is arguable that when the coalitions of churches in the United States began to escalate the anti-homosexual contest in the 1960s and 1970s, they actually exacerbated the situation which they deplored in ways that would not have occurred without their stimulus. Mormon apostle Boyd Packer understood this when he spoke in 1976 “To the One” and promised he would use the word “homosexuality” only once lest he inflame the thoughts of all present.⁹⁷⁰ He actually addressed thousands in a congregational assembly. He also noted, without comment or elaboration, that there might be a message for “the one” in the text of Matthew 12:43-45, which reads (emphasis added):
“When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth [it] empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last [state] of that man is worse than the first. Even so shall it be also unto this wicked generation.”
In terms of the ways in which walls operate and both sides escalate, it would appear that the lesson in the Matthew text is rather for Packer and the church. In their efforts to exorcise the “unclean spirits” they perceive in the world, and to do so by going to law and politics, they have merely emboldened those they oppose on the other side of the wall. Indeed, as each of the two sides breaches the wall in ever more aggressive ways, they succeed in pulling the other wide over the wall and onto their side in ever-escalating cycles. In the process, many people both young and old feel pushed into early premarital sexual relations in order to “prove” or “guarantee” to themselves and others that they are “not gay.” In practical terms, as the “coalition of churches” escalates its anti-same-sex-marriage efforts in California, that will spark and equal and opposite reaction by the pro-same-sex-marriage forces—and thus further embroil everyone in more disputatious politics. The process demonstrates how easy it has become to breach the wall of separation, crossing back and forth effortlessly, assimilating one side to the other seamlessly, without apparent thought or problematization. Those who come into the public square submit themselves to the rules and consequences, the rough-and-tumble, of the public square. For the church, this has meant the opening of many old wounds and controversies that it would rather leave alone. The church must expect this. Any sense of surprise or discomfiture when this happens is misplaced:

“False prophets and false teachers are also those who attempt to change the God-given and scripturally based doctrines that protect the sanctity of marriage, the divine nature of the family, and the essential doctrine of personal morality. They advocate a redefinition of morality to justify fornication, adultery, and homosexual relationships. Some openly champion the legalization of so-called same-gender marriages. To justify their rejection of God’s immutable laws that protect the family, these false prophets and false teachers even attack the inspired proclamation on the family [the Proclamation herein] issued to the world in 1995 by the First Presidency and the Twelve Apostles.”⁹⁷¹

The public square responds: Of course all these things happen; it is the very nature of the marketplace, where freedom of speech and thought prevail. That is as it should be, for “[i]f there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”⁹⁷² Honest debate and disagreement are not an “attack,” and those who participate on different sides of such questions in the exercise of their free speech are not “false prophets” and “false teachers”—merely interlocutors. If Joseph Smith was right, that “truth will cut its own way,"⁹⁷³ and if Justice Holmes was right that "the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,"⁹⁷⁴ then that is the best justification of the need for the wall of separation. It is also a pretty good definition of faith.

And as for the orthodoxy you announce today, the exact same charges—attacking the “sanctity of marriage, the divine nature of the family, and the essential doctrine of personal morality”—were leveled by others against the Mormons in the 19^th Century for their practice of polygamy. Their enemies viewed polygamy as the quintessential example of “fornication and adultery.” As Nibley correctly noted, both then and now the “whole blame is on sex.”⁹⁷⁵ Yet, perhaps oddly, the sexual metaphor of the “little factory,” adduced by apostle Packer in “To Young Men Only,” is apt as well in the political context—if the “little factory” is thought of as the fountain of contention that brews with constantly going to law and politics as a substitute for faith. We can thus liken it to that context:

“There are ways to conquer such a habit. First of all, you must leave that factory alone long enough for it to slow down. Resisting is not easy. It will take weeks, even months. But you can get the little factory slowed back to where it should be.”⁹⁷⁶

Even as the same-sex marriage wars seems to be reaching the end-stage, new battles emerge in the LGBT context, particularly with regard to the “T” portion of that acronym, transgenderism. As Michelangelo Signorile has recently put it, “It’s Not Over.”⁹⁹⁸ Inequality remains, and as the Book of Mormon teaches, “And thus we see how great the inequality of man is because of sin and transgression, and the power of the devil, which comes by the cunning plans which he hath devised to ensnare the hearts of men.”⁹⁹⁹ Quite literally, we are bedeviled by inequality. The abolition by the Mormon church of polygamy and The Negro Priesthood Doctrine (by Official Declaration-I, and Official Declaration-II) already give the lie to the church’s argument at page 34 of the 2015 amicus brief: