This is the third part in an ongoing series about the Book of Mormon and its application to our day. In the first two parts, I explored the identity of Mormon as a prophet-historian, and discussed how the book is intentionally placed in the context of our times. Then, in an unplanned add-on, I explained my reasons for doing this series. In this part, I will discuss the inseparability of religion and politics, and suggest that the Book of Mormon is meant to guide us in navigating sociopolitical matters, as well as matters of faith.
The early Latter-day Saints, once they began gathering and settling together, sometimes suffered at the hands of their neighbors. Growing up, I got the sense this was because of infernal opposition and the acts of wicked people whose hearts were closed to the message of the restoration. When it was taught, it was frequently framed as sheer religious persecution of those who gave no offense, by people of evil intent.
Of course, I can hardly blame those who taught it this way for making our people the heroes of their own story. We all do that. But the truth is rarely so black and white. While their beliefs and practices must have seemed strange and surely caused consternation and alarm among their neighbors, and while the persecution they suffered was indeed wicked, the Saints weren’t just sitting there, hoping to hold their beliefs in peace. They were trying to build a new spiritual and social order. They voted as a bloc, which could disrupt the political dynamics of the places they settled in. They actively sought converts, which tends to earn both friends and enemies. They ran for public office, sometimes while accused of criminal behavior. They sometimes suppressed unfavorable speech, while maintaining their right to it. Yes, they were treated badly, but they could also act badly. Yes, they were sometimes abused or even killed, but they also sometimes killed others. It’s fair to say the persecution of the early saints was religious in nature, but it must also be said that many complex factors were bound up with what their persecutors considered their religion to be.
I’m not saying the persecutions were justified, of course, just that they were more complicated than I was sometimes taught, and I’d like to add that the time for forgiveness and charity towards those persecutors is long past. If Jesus, hanging on the cross, could plead for his murderers, saying that they “know not what they do” (Luke 23:7), how can we not extend similar grace to those who persecuted our people in the early days, especially given that our people, unlike Jesus, were not guiltless.
Nowadays, Latter-day Saints in Utah are sometimes accused of having attitudes that mirror those early days in disturbing ways. For instance, how many of us blame immigrants and refugees—labels that once described us—for Utah’s housing crisis? How many of us consider them disproportionately likely to be criminals, though the data says the opposite? How many of us resent them as a socioeconomic burden (again, despite the facts showing their immense benefit)? How many of us have a particular group in mind whose politics or way of life we consider to have changed our state for the worse? Is this the case even though we’ve made little to no effort to understand or get to know members of that group? How many of us have indulged in that “you’re welcome here, but don’t try to make here like the places you came from” mentality?*
I think a lot of us would say these issues are at least primarily political, but they’re the very attitudes involved in what we describe as the religious persecution of our ancestors.† Here's the point of convergence: we consider our religion, and the actions taken by leaders who were guided by it, to be the primary reason Utah is, in our view, such a great place to live. This is reasonable. We settled here to escape religious persecution and the communities we built were explicitly religious in nature. It was our shared religion that held us together, and our ideas about how to run our cities and towns came straight from our church leaders, if not directly from scripture.‡ There’s no getting around this, and there’s no denying that our church is still a major force in shaping this state. There is more to the state’s greatness than our religious history, and our religion and politics are not interchangeable, but they are inseparable, and that’s the point.
Here are a few more examples:
Remember when President Oaks told us from the General Conference pulpit not to participate in the threatened violence surrounding the 2020 election, and then on January 6th there was a guy at the capitol wearing costume armor and waving the Title of Liberty?§ Was that religious or political?
Remember when the prophet told us to “lead out” in ending racism? Was it religious or political?||
What about the divisive policy excluding children of same-sex couples from blessing and baptism, and its relatively quick reversal? Or the increase of suicide and depression in recent years that we regularly hear about in conference? What about the various refugee crises we’ve seen, that both our church and our state have had some pretty great positions on? Remember when President Hickley called for the perpetrators of 9/11 to be “ferreted out and brought down?” Was that religious or political?
In most or all of those cases, I think it’s easy to see that there may not be a bright line of separation, because they all involve an intersection of social, political, moral, and religious issues and perspectives. And yet, when we talk, we sometimes give the impression that politics and religion are, and should remain, completely different worlds.
I suspect that for some this is due to an aversion to confronting uncomfortable questions. They go to church to be comforted and affirmed in their beliefs (which is a good and important function of our church meetings), but because we can have differing practical interpretations of the same beliefs, political conversations might seem to threaten that purpose.
Some of us conflate being outside our comfort zone with the uncomfortable feeling of losing the spirit, which is incorrect, and an unfortunate obstacle to growth. If the spirit of God can’t be with us unless we’re comfortable, then it’s not much of a guide. If feeling conflicted is the standard by which we judge good from bad, then we stand condemned to forever be spiritual and emotional children.
It’s true that losing the spirit can be uncomfortable—when we recognize that we have lost it, that is (D&C 121:37-38)—but that feeling is the anxiety that comes from intentionally going contrary to what we know to be right (Alma 40:14). It’s not the discomfort of confronting an unfamiliar idea, being exposed to new and challenging people or perspectives, or suspecting you might have to change your thinking. Helping us to repent and change is an important role of the spirit. It’s in that area of stable, guided uncertainty, just beyond the totally familiar and comfortable, but not so far beyond it that we’re completely unmoored, that true growth happens.¶
For some people, I think the prohibition on politics at church is based on a genuine desire to avoid a spirit of contention, which is a good desire. Not stirring up contentious debates, but putting them away is one of Christ’s most important doctrines (3 Nephi 11:30). We’re often not very skilled at discussing hard things without becoming defensive, dismissive, or combative. All three of those responses are negative, and do in fact cause us to resist the spirit. But those problems tend to arise from an over-reliance on certainty, which can be counteracted with faith. When we’re closed to the possibility that we have more to learn on a topic, we preemptively reject others’ ideas, making communication impossible. On the other hand, when we can discuss hard things openly and without judgment, we can meet each other's needs in powerful ways, and we become more secure in our own, now better-refined and better-grounded beliefs.
Much has been said about the numbers in which members of my generation and younger are leaving the church. It may be that at least part of the reason for that lies in our unwillingness to bring “politics” into our practice of religion. If our members can’t bring the issues they confront in daily life to church with them, to talk them through and hear ideas from others about what guidance the word of God can provide, then we’re not meeting their vital spiritual needs. If we deflect the questions, or condemn them, or forbid them, it’s no wonder the questioners are looking elsewhere for answers.
Perhaps the best reason to avoid politics at church is to avoid violating the necessary political neutrality of the church itself. Those in teaching or leadership positions should avoid giving the impression that they speak for the church on political issues, or that their political ideas are endorsed by the church. This isn’t the same thing as discussing how the scriptures apply to the relevant issues of life, but it can be a tricky line to walk at times, so some may prefer just to avoid it. However, as I demonstrated above, while the church as an organization doesn’t formally endorse candidates, it does take a stance on sociopolitical issues regularly, when it sees the issue as crossing into an area governed by morality. So even this line isn’t clear cut.
Finally, for some people, it’s a matter of rendering to Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God that which is God’s (Matthew 22:21). “My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus said (John 18:36), “so leave worldly things like politics right out of church,” we add. The problem with that is, as I showed in the beginning, it’s not that simple. I’m not suggesting Jesus was wrong about this, of course, but I think that line about Caesar is instructive. In context, it functions as a rhetorical trap, which is a technique Jesus often employs to foil his enemies. It sets up an impossible situation for his interrogators.
Jesus knows that God is the owner and maintainer of all things. He knows the tribute money isn’t ultimately Caesar’s, any more than it belongs to any mortal. So do the Pharisees. But they’re not going to try to make that point where the Romans might hear about it, and so they walk away, amazed.
So how do we navigate this issue? Part of the solution might be semantic. If we can agree on terms, perhaps we can agree on practice. What do we mean when we say “politics?” For some people, politics means partisanship. Being political at church means taking a religiously based position on the actions of a political party or telling people what their position, or their votes, should be.
But for others, and according to the etymology of the word, “politics” is merely the business of living together as a people. It includes the things we all agree on and the ones where we disagree. It encompasses the inevitable clashes and conflicts that arise from different people with different understandings working toward (hopefully) the same goal, namely, the building of a community. Any time people in the same community interact, whether it’s neighbors on the same street or nations in the same world, it’s political.
It’s politics in this second sense that I’m talking about when I say that there should be no prohibition on the blending of politics and religion. But that leads us to the question of how I’m using the word “religion.”
There are many ways to define that term, and maybe none of them are complete. When I talk about “religion” in this series, I’m talking mainly about our daily walk as guided by our faith. I mean the way our beliefs influence our actions, and also the fellowship of the saints: the way we interact within our community.
You might be thinking that's strikingly similar to one of the definitions I gave for politics, and that’s, again, the point.
“Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world” (James 1:27).
In other words, pure religion is about how we treat each other, especially the needy among us (the thing Jesus said we would be judged by), and how we think and behave in relation to the world around us. The gap between that and pure politics can be vanishingly small at times.
Of course I understand that divisive partisanship is out of place at church, and that our purpose there is to worship God. But we’re also there to strengthen each other in our trials and admonish each other in our duties. So surely—surely—it can’t be inappropriate in a church distinguished from so many others primarily by its additional books of scripture designed to help believers navigate the world they live in, to talk about the things going on in the world we live in? Especially when those things mirror the events in our scriptures so closely that it borders on parody, right? If the Book of Mormon is written for our day, surely we can use it at church to help interpret the things happening in our day.
Right?
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Phew! Made it through another one. In the rest of this series, I’ll approach some of the things happening in our day, and offer some thoughts about how the scriptures may apply. I’m not speaking definitively for the church here, or saying any of these are doctrines. They’re just my opinions, and in some cases ideas I just want to explore as I look for greater understanding myself. I don't claim to have all the best answers. I just hope to have a conversation that will help us to do the things that I kinda wish we could be doing more of at church.
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*This stance can seem so reasonable when you’re satisfied with the community you’ve helped build, but in a religiously focused community it ultimately boils down to a form of identity politics that you might call spiritual NIMBYism. I’m planning to address this more fully in a later post in this series.
†I’m not personally descended from any of the early saints, though my wife and kids are. I come from a rather farther-flug branch of Israel. But as a lifelong member of the church, I still claim this spiritual heritage.
‡The Doctrine and Covenants is full of sections about how the early Saints are to organize their social structure. If you look at any other book of scripture, you can see this is actually pretty normal. It happens for the Israelites in the Old Testament, for the early Christians in the New Testament, and for the Nephites in the Book of Mormon.
§I have to restrain myself from calling this guy names every time I think of him. Suffice to say I think his actions that day were just the worst, and reflect Jacob’s argument, “Believest thou the scriptures? Then ye do not understand them” (Jacob 7:10-11).
||By the way, I can’t speak for anyone else, but when I tried to follow that counsel by making it the topic of a lesson in my mostly white Davis County Elders Quorum (I was an instructor at the time), one of my leaders pulled me aside and asked rather skeptically whether the issue was really relevant here. I was accused of being “too political” in my lessons. For doing something the prophet himself explicitly told us to do. About a year later, a federal investigation revealed serious racial discrimination in my local school district (one of the most predominantly Latter-day Saint areas in the state), and that the district leadership wasn’t taking it seriously. So perhaps it was relevant after all. But was it religious or political?
¶This is known as Vygotzky’s Zone of Proximal Development. It’s a pretty foundational concept in educational psychology, and lines up well with the scriptural principle that we learn “line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little” (2 Nephi 28:30).
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