This is going to meander a bit at first but bear with me. Each semester I have to grade something like 1,340,567 pages of student exams. It is horrible. To dull the pain, I pick a new music group each semester as my “grading discovery.” Last semester I picked Brandon Flowers and the Killers. I’d never paid much attention to them, but I got interested after I saw Brandon Flowers’s “I am a Mormon” video spot. It was a happy discovery. I like them. Much to my surprise a long-time friend of mine, an accomplished lawyer and former stake president, also recently discovered Flowers’s music through his daughter. After hearing that I was enjoying the Killers, he sent me a long and fascinating email with his theological interpretations of Brandon Flowers’s lyrics, which he finds filled with Mormon ideas. For example, in “Crossfire,” a song about a man rescued by his love he finds a reference to the Mormon interpretation of Eve and the fortunate fall. (That would make Chelize Theron in the video into the mother of the human race.) In “Only the Young” he finds embedded ideas from the plan of salvation and even coded references to the Hebrew terminology of redemption and atonement. My friend then turned his attention to Brandon Flowers’s song “Magdelena,” which he notes is Flowers’s most overtly religious song but also his least distinctly Mormon one. The song is sung by a man…
Author: Nate Oman
I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah (autobiographical blogging here), and attended Brigham Young University from 1993 to 1999. Between 1994 and 1996, I served in the Korea Pusan Mission. While at BYU, I mainly studied political science and philosophy. (I was lucky enough to take several classes from T&S's Jim Faulconer.) I also took just enough economics to get myself in trouble. After graduation, I married the fabulous and incredible Heather Bennett (now Oman) and worked on Capitol Hill for Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) while Heather finished graduate school at George Washington University. Beginning in 2000, I attended Harvard Law School, escaping with my JD in June, 2003. After practicing law for awhile, I became a law professor at William & Mary Law School. Somewhere along the line, Heather and I managed to have a son and a daughter.
Intellectual Disaffection and “The Biggest Tax Cut in History”
There are lots of stories on the Internet about people who have discovered things about Mormon history and left the Church. Indeed, these kinds of exit narratives have reached the point of cultural saliency that the New York Times and other media outlets have picked up on the story. I have repeatedly read or heard people claim that we are in the midst of an unprecedented wave of intellectual apostasy. I am skeptical. Before I explain why, I hasten to add that I have absolutely no doubt that many people learn things about Mormon history that they did not know and have a crisis of faith. I think that the Church as an institution and Mormon culture in general could do a much better job of talking and teaching about the Mormon past. I have great sympathy toward those that have such faith crises and to a certain extent I have been through something like them myself. That said, I am skeptical that we are actually seeing something unprecedented. To understand why, think of debates over taxes. Every time Congress considers tax increases or tax cuts critics and proponents will start insisting that “This is the largest tax increase in history!” or “This is the biggest tax cut in history!” Generally speaking, these guys will be right. The tax cut or increase is, in nominal terms, the largest of its kind in history. This fact, however, tells you almost nothing…
Men, Women, and Priesthood Session
In case you haven’t heard, members of the Ordain Women movement tried to attend the priesthood session of general conference and were turned away. I think that turning them away was a mistake, but I also think that it would be a bad idea for women to begin attending the priesthood session of conference. First, why I think excluding Ordain Women was a mistake. I can understand why Church authorities would turn away the Ordain Women activists. The rationale, it seems to me, would be something along the lines of, “This is an attempt to turn a sacred meeting into an organized media event designed to embarrass the Church into changing its doctrine. We don’t want to encourage this group or other groups to use Church meetings in this way.” I understand and appreciate that reasoning, but I think in this case it was mistaken. As a threshold matter, regardless the meeting was going to be used as a media event. Allowing the Ordain Women activists to attend the meeting would have largely defused interest in the story and in any case would have given journalists a less hard-edged narrative. More importantly, however, the number of women seeking entrance to the meeting was very small, there is no reason to suppose that their participation would have been anything other than decorous and respectful, and it would have signaled generosity and goodwill toward these sisters. I don’t think that there would…
Chastity and Virginity
I have been trying to think through Elizabeth Smart’s remarks about chewed up gum and the way that we teach chastity to our youth. I have never heard the chewed up gum analogy, but I remember stories about cupcakes passed around and similar visual aids. I always thought there was something ugly about these lessons. It seems to me that the fundamental problem with all of these analogies is that they equate chastity with virginity. Virginity by definition is something that once lost is never regained. Historically, it has also been associated with a whole bunch of disturbing male attitudes towards women. In some contexts female virginity is literally a piece of property that can be sold to men titillated by the prospect of deflowering a virgin. There has never been a comparable treatment of male virginity. For example, historically a lot of legal systems have allowed parties to a marriage contract to back out of the deal if the bride was not a virgin. I know of no legal system that created a similar escape clause for men. Not surprisingly, feminists have long pointed out that reducing sexual morality to the idea of female virginity has a host of troubling implications, from a sexual double standard for men and women, to the commodification of female bodies, to the treatment of rape victims as irredeemably fallen. The feminist criticisms on this front all strike me as correct. The argument is…
Why Gay Marriages are a Good Idea but Marriage Equality Worries Me
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the constitutional challenge to Proposition 8. I sat down to write a blog post about my thoughts on gay marriage and kept writing and writing and writing. You can read the results here. Like a lot of Latter-day Saints, I have spent a fair amount of time during the last two decades thinking about gay marriage. For better or for worse, it has been one of the main conundrums of Mormon intellectual discussions for my entire adult life. This essay is an attempt to distill my thinking and conclusions. (At least thus far.) Ultimately, I think that gay marriage is a good idea. I think that recognizing gay marriage has the potential to create stronger gay families and a better environment to grow up in for the children of homosexuals. It also carries within itself the possibility for an ethic of gay chastity, which ultimately strikes me as superior to either gay celibacy or gay promiscuity. I understand that in its fullest religious sense, gay chastity for Latter-day Saints (as opposed to gay celibacy) requires revelation to those with greater religious authority than I, and I am comfortable sustaining that authority. Nevertheless, in my all-things-considered independent judgment, gay chastity is a good idea. That said, much of the public discussion around gay marriage strikes me as deeply troubling. Gay marriage has emerged as a civil rights issue, for…
The Case Against Scouting
I think that the Church should end its relationship with the Scouting program, but not for the reasons you might think. No, this isn’t a post about homosexuality or even about gender equity, or at least about gender equity as it usually gets discussed on this issue. Indeed, in many ways, I think that girls are served better by the Church than are boys. This is because I think that in many ways that YW program is superior to the YM program. It is true that in some units more gets spent per young men than per young women. This issue is actually extremely complicated and varies from unit to unit. The complexity comes from the fact that youth spending comes from a variety of budgets at both the ward and the stake level and you need to include all sources of funding to get a clear sense of per capita budgeting. (Yes, I have got many headaches tying to figure out exactly how much got budgeted per young man or young woman in my ward and then trying to insure that the budgets are pretty much equal.) Still, in many – perhaps most – units Scouting causes more money to be spent per young man than per young woman. However, I am not convinced that this means that young men are getting a better deal than young women. In fact, I think the opposite is true. I think it…
A Letter to a Friend
Below is the text of a letter that I wrote about a year ago to a close friend who was in the midst of a crisis of faith. I have edited it to remove any identifying information: Dear Friend, It was a pleasure to talk with you earlier. I am sorry to hear about the spiritual and intellectual difficulties that you have been struggling with. You are — quite literally — in my prayers. I have thought a great deal about what you told me of your struggles with faith and the Restoration. I hesitate to offer any advice or “solutions” to your difficulties, both because I don’t know precisely what troubles you and because I realize that when one opens up the hurting parts of one’s soul often a sympathetic listener rather than a fix-it guy is what is of most value. With that apology, let me offer a couple of thoughts. I don’t think that a faithful life is something that flows out of a full theological reconciliation. That is, I don’t think that we are tasked with answering all of our theological questions and doubts and only once that reconciliation has been effected commit ourselves to living a faithful life. I realize that this runs counter to much of the rhetoric in the church, rhetoric that is borrowed in large part from our proselytizing efforts. According to this model, one is given a revelation of the truthfulness…
Another Surreply
Over at FMH, rah has a post responding to my “How Mormonism Changes” post. As I read it, she has basically three objections to my post. First, she insists that I misunderstand the motivations of liberal Mormons, which are grounded in genuine love and concern for others rather than ideological embarrassment. Second, she suggests that historically the priesthood ban’s elimination had more to do with evolution within the hierarchy than it did with progression of the membership of the church. Third, she claims that the model of prophecy I propose is mistaken or the like because it does not appear in the scriptures. Here are some thoughts in responses. First, on the historical issue I actually agree with her. I think that creating unanimity among the highest leadership made it very difficult to abandon the priesthood ban. There was certainly a lot of racist theology taught in justification of the ban that ought to be examined and rejected. What is interesting to me is that despite the deep divisions among the leadership, the abandonment of the ban met with essentially zero opposition from the membership of the church. This historically was not always been the case with major ecclesiastical changes in Mormonism. I think that the lack of opposition among the membership was really quite striking and worth thinking about. I certainly do not think that the priesthood ban was without enormous costs for individuals and the church. Second, the liberal Mormons that…
A Surreply to TT’s Critique of “How Mormonism Changes”
At Faith Promoting Rumor TT has a legthy response to my last post on how Mormonism changes. It’s worth a read and you should go over a take a look. I actually agree with a lot of what he says, but I’d like to push back on a couple of things. First, he writes: “Unity” of the church is selective, not a neutral category, one that excludes some in order to manufacture unity. That is, even the choice to “preserve” unity comes with costs measured in exclusion. There are a couple of ways of understanding this. It could just be saying that maintaining unity has costs, it is not an absolute good, and that those costs are not evenly borne. Delaying the abandonment of the priesthood ban had costs for Black Latter-day Saints and for potential converts and members pushed away by the ban. If this is what he is saying, then I completely agree. Maintaining unity has costs. (More on this anon.) He might be saying something else, however, something a little more radical. He might be suggesting that the idea of communal or institutional unity is itself an illusion, an epiphenomenon created through a discourse of exclusion, a mere nothing that gratuitously harms the Other upon whom its construction depends. This, I think, is mistaken. I think that it makes sense to talk about the cohesion of communities. I think it makes sense to talk about institutions being…
How Mormonism Changes and Managing Liberal Expectations
One of the things that the Mormon interwebs do is imagine change within the Church, lament the lack of change within the Church, and (at times) agitate for change within the Church. Certainly there is historical precedent for change within the Church, the most dramatic recent example being the 1978 abandonment of the Church’s racial priesthood ban. This is an example worth thinking about. First, the shift came relatively late if you super-impose the Mormon timeline on the civil rights timeline in the United States. The Supreme Court declared segregation unconstitutional in the 1950s, although it didn’t do much to actually end it. During the same period, Martin Luther King’s mass movement was getting under way. By the 1960s you had rioting and – not coincidentally – congressional action. By the early to mid-1970s segregation was thoroughly discredited and almost all of its formal structures had been dismantled. Hence, for many a Mormon – especially those of a liberal variety – the timing of the 1978 revelation is an embarrassment. The prophets, rather than moving in the vanguard of history seem to be trailing in its wake. Second, the shift exacted virtually no ecclesiastical costs for the Church. There were no mass apostasies in 1978. There were no splinter groups that formed as a result. Indeed, the overwhelming response to the revelation among conservative rank and file Mormons was relief and joy. There was no serious challenge within the Church…
Gender and Priesthood
I think that women should receive the priesthood. I don’t find the reasons that have been given as to why the priesthood is limited to males very compelling. I don’t think that motherhood is a good analog to priesthood, or rather I think that motherhood is a kind of priesthood (an exercise of godly power by human beings) but its analog is fatherhood, not the Melchizedek priesthood. I think that the feminization of religion is an important issue, one that feminist critics dismiss rather too breezily. I suspect that the all-male priesthood probably mitigates this problem somewhat in Mormonism, but I suspect that we could come up with other ways of dealing with it. At the end of the day, I simply don’t have any objection to women performing ordinances or holding positions of ecclesiastical leadership. Indeed, I think that there are a lot administrative and pastoral issues that could be handled more effectively were women ordained. I do, however, think that giving women the priesthood would create enormous problems for Mormonism. This is because male identity within the church is structured around the idea of priesthood. If the priesthood were extended to women, it would no longer be a nexus of male identity. This would force on us a choice. We could either look elsewhere for some basis of male identity, perhaps in ideas of fatherhood or non-priesthood brotherhood on the model of the Relief Society. It’s not clear exactly what this male identity would look like. To take a banal issue but one that would have huge cultural implications,…
Seeing the Future of Mormonism
If you want to know where Mormonism going, look at Mormon missionary work. Mormonism is nothing if not a missionary church. Indeed, the evangelical imperative of the religion has consistently defined its teachings, theology, and culture. For example, if one is looking to read Mormon theology in the nineteenth century, you would find little in the way of theological treatises. Rather, you would find missionary tracts like Pratt’s Key to the Science of Theology, or you could read sermons, sermons whose doctrinal content is almost always embedded in an explicit or implicit theological polemic against American Protestantism. This is because in large part Mormon missionary work proceeded by polemic. As a missionary, I envied the bygone days when missionary work consisted of public theological brawling with an apostate and hireling clergy, but that is clearly the missionary experience that produced much of early Mormon thought. Likewise, the massive emphasis on families, especially the sanctified nuclear family, that one sees in post-WWII Mormonism in large part comes from the way in which the church placed an appeal to family at the heart of its incredibly successful proselytizing work in the twentieth century. To be sure, the theological material was ready at hand to create a cosmic narrative about eternal families, but the theology of the family implicit in the Home Front ads was not the same thing as the theology of the family implicit in the sealing practices of Joseph Smith…
King Benjamin and the Moral Irrelevance of Panhandlers
For many people, being confronted by a panhandler presents a moment of profound moral choice. I think that these people are confused. As I understand it, the panhandler presents a moment of profound moral choice because he forces us to confront the reality of poverty and our willingness to do something about it. To give money to the panhandler is to act as Christ’s disciple, ministering to the poor. To walk by the panhandler is to ignore the poor and the downtrodden. The text I have most often seen in church for framing this crisis comes from King Benjamin’s address: And also, ye yourselves will succor those that stand in need of your succor; ye will administer of your substance unto him that standeth in need; and ye will not suffer that the beggar putteth up his petition to you in vain, and turn him out to perish. Perhaps thou shalt say: The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand, and will not give unto him of my food, nor impart unto him of my substance that he may not suffer, for his punishments are just — But I say unto you, O man, whosever doeth this the same hath great cause to repent. (Mos. 4:16-18) I don’t buy it. First, to be clear, I believe that poverty is a great moral evil. I believe that God has commanded us that we are to…
City Creek and the Choices of Thrift
Jana Riess, a person for whose intelligence and good will I have a great deal of respect, has an article up criticizing the new City Creek mall that that Church has financed in Salt Lake City. You ought to go read Jana’s article. To massively over simplify her point, the mall represents a basic moral failure because the church invested $1.5 billion in the project. This money could have been spent on the poor and rather than a glitzy palace to consumerism. There is a simple and powerful logic to Jana’s claim, but I think that by failing to work through the actual economic trade offs involved in the project, her argument misses the points of moral and practical judgment, thereby obscuring the nature of the choice that Church leaders made with this project. The most fundamental question is whether the Church should save a portion of its revenue. Despite the price tag, from the Church’s point of view the Mall is less a piece of flashing spending, than consequence of the choices that the Church’s commitment to institutional thrift impose upon it. The Church does not spend the totality of its revenues each year. Rather, it always takes a portion of revenues and sets them aside. My understanding is that this policy was put in place in the 1970s by President N. Eldon Tanner, who was tasked with solving the financial mess that was created by the rapid expansion…
How I should like to live my life…
I post here something I recently wrote in my journal: I basically think that Aristotle had it right on how to live a good life: find a proper mean between extremes, be balanced, and live virtuously. So here is what I would like my life to look like: I start with work, the labor I must do to live. I should like to be good at my job. I don’t have any particular desire to be at the very top of my profession. Academic stardom looks like rather too brass a ring to devote all of one’s energy on the greasy pole to achieve. I would like, however, to teach my students well. I would like to write things that help people to think better, to say a few somethings that will still be worth saying and reading a generation or two hence. To the extent that I have other intellectual ambitions, I would like to be remembered as one of the people who helped to push along Mormonism intellectually, a person who treated the Restoration with charity and respect and learned something from it, perhaps something that had not been learned before. I would like to be a good husband and father. I want to teach my children how to be good and productive people. I want them to be kind, virtuous, intelligent, and hard working. I want to give them the foundations of a faith that will carry…
Huntsman, Mormonism, and the Presidency
For those who may be interested, I am going to be on KUER’s (the NPR affiliate in Salt Lake) Radio West program this afternoon discussing Mormonism and a possible presidential run by former Utah governor Jon Huntsman.
Why folks dislike Mormons
Flunking Sainthood has a nice post up on the recent finding in the book American Grace that Mormons are the third most disliked religious group in the United States. Jana makes some books points, and her call for a bit more Mormon humility is surely a good idea. Although the in-group identification that she cites is not really a proxy for smugness as much as social cohesion, there is no denying that Mormons can appear smug at times. One of the puzzles that Jana puzzles over is why Jews are so well regarded while Mormons are not. I suspect, however, that there isn’t much of a puzzle here. Let me offer a theory. Jews do well among conservative Christians and among liberal secularists. The reason for this is that while there is an anti-semitic strand in Christianity, there is also a philo-semitic strand that continues to see Jews as God’s chosen people in some sense and gives Jews a starring role in various eschatological dramas. Among conservative Evangelicals, for example, this shows up as Zionism from afar in the form of support for the State of Israel. Hence, conservative Christians — or some significant chunk of them — have theological reasons for happy thoughts about Jews. Secular liberals like Jews because there are a lot of liberal Jews. Hence, Jews are in the odd position of getting love for theological reasons from the right and love for political reasons from…
A Call For Papers: “Mormonism in Cultural Context”
The friends and former students of Professor Richard Lyman Bushman invite submissions for a conference, on the occasion of his 80th birthday, to be held June 18, 2011, at the Springville Art Museum in Springville, Utah. The summer seminars led by Professor Bushman beginning in 1997 pursued the theme of “Joseph Smith and His Times.” Participants were asked to connect the Mormon prophet to the religions, philosophies, and cultural formations of his period. More recently the seminars have posed the same question for Mormonism as a whole. How is Mormon thought to be situated in its broad cultural environment? For the conference, participants are invited to make comparisons to large cultural systems such as democracy, capitalism, evangelism, or science, or to specific thinkers and movements. The aim is to highlight aspects of Mormon thought or praxis that emerge more sharply when juxtaposed against other cultural formations or intellectual perspectives. Brief analytical reflections of about twenty minutes duration will be most suitable for the conference format. Friends and students of Professor Bushman are invited to submit. Send a short (1-2 pp) abstract of the proposed paper, along with a short (1 p) C.V., to Spencer Fluhman at [email protected] by November 1, 2010.
Thoughts on the Deseret News, Immigration, and a Mormon Voice
Consider this editorial in the Deseret News. (I mean it. Follow the link, read the article, and come back.) Intellectually there is quite a bit going on in these paragraphs. First, it is addressing the immigration debate arguing in effect that the rule of law is undermined by both widespread flouting of the laws and attempts to relentlessly enforce laws that are unfair. Both points are well taken in my opinion and in my mind they point toward a policy of better enforcement of considerably more liberal immigration laws, something I would certainly support. The interesting stuff, however, comes in the way that the editorial uses nineteenth-century Mormon experience. All the talk of pioneers, of course, is just a polite way of saying Mormons in public, and the point that it makes is correct: The Mormon pioneers in Utah were squatters. There is a certain amount of tetchiness on this point in the comments at the DN site, but there isn’t any serious debate about this. Granted, after the ceding of northern Mexico to the U.S. at the end of the Mexican-American war, Mormon immigration to Utah didn’t necessarily involve illegally crossing an international boarder (although there was some of that later in the 19th century), but the settlements up and down the Mormon corridor were settled by people who did not possess legal title to the land that they occupied. Indeed, the editorial understates this, implying that after 1869…
Conference Announcement: “Embracing the Law: A Scholarly Conference on Doctrine & Covenants 42”
Embracing the Law A scholarly conference on Doctrine and Covenants 42 September 10, 2010 • Free Admission Session 1 9:00 – 10:45 a.m., Stonemetz Conference Room Jeremiah John, Southern Virginia University Law and Church in Section 42 of the Doctrine and Covenants Nate Oman, William and Mary Law School “I Give Unto You My Law”: Section 42 as a Legal Text and the Paradoxes of Divine Law Discussant: President Rodney K. Smith, Southern Virginia University 1:30 – 3:00 p.m., Main Hall 337 Russell Fox, Friends University “Thou Wilt Remember the Poor”: Liberation Theology and a Radical Interpretation of “The Laws of the Church of Christ” Robert Couch, Willamette University Consecration and the End of the Poor Discussant: TBA 3:30 – 5:15 p.m., Main Hall Ballroom Karen Spencer, independent scholar “To Teach or Not to Teach”: Three Possible Interpretations of D&C 42:12-14 Kristine Haglund, editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought “The Beauty of the Work of Thine Own Hands”: On the Possibility of an Aesthetic for Zion Joe Spencer, University of New Mexico “Remnants of Revelation”: On the Canonical Reading of D&C 42 Discussant: Scott Dransfield, Southern Virginia UniversityFortFor those who For those who are going to be in Virginia next week, Southern Virginia University in Buena Vista, Virginia is going to be hosing a conference on September 10th entitled “Embracing the Law A scholarly conference on Doctrine and Covenants 42.” The conferences is being sponsored by the Richard…