“A New Future Requires a New Past”

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I had never heard of fundamentalist Mormons until seeing a 60 Minutes segment about them in the late 1980s. During a western vacation, I visited Colorado City, Arizona, on January 2, 1988, and talked my way into some friendships which continue to this day. FLDS Prophet Warren Jeffs, his father Rulon Jeffs, former Colorado City mayor Dan Barlow, the late Owen Allred, and his successor LeMoine Jenson of the Apostolic United Brethhren (AUB) were among my acquaintances. I later earned a graduate degree in legal history, and my thesis concerned an important event in their experience. I have continued to study, visit, and write about the fundamentalist Mormon universe since then.

Almost from my first discovery of fundamentalist Mormons I found myself comparing their version of LDS history and the doctrines entwined in our history, with that offered by the big church to which I belong. As I did my own reading of our history, I found neither had it right. In fact, there are multiple narratives, all with both truth and distortion in them. 

I now conclude there is no one historical truth. “The Truth” all depends on the needs of the teller, most especially institutional tellers. Things get left out, motivations get altered, people disappear or get enlarged. This is where “faith-promoting history” comes from. Generally, institutional history is part truth and part myth.

In a 2007 Mormon History Association session on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Gene Sessions, a professor of history at Weber State University, commented: “What happened in the past means nothing. What people think happened in the past means everything.” One recent historian has observed, “A new future requires a new past.” Beginning in 1890 and lasting for a generation or two, both the LDS leadership and the majority of the membership yearned for a new future. At that point in time, the LDS Church had been the object of what one non-Mormon historian called “one of the most sweeping episodes of religious persecution in American History,” made possible by a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions which, depending on your point of view, either emasculated the free exercise clause of the First Amendment or saved the nation from religious anarchy.

This new future required making peace with the larger American society. Long-held practices and beliefs were put away, defenses were lowered, some people were allowed to pass into obscurity, unique beliefs were modified, some episodes were denied, rituals were changed, and assimilation with limits not yet defined became the goal. It was a bumpy transition; but once it began, there never was much doubt that the Church was moving away from its isolated nineteenth-century identity. 

But toward what? 

Mormon teachings and practices that were modified during this process included: 

• Polygamy and the definition of celestial marriage
• Temple rituals and garments
• Adam-God teachings
• Economic cooperation or United Order living
• Millennial thinking and the kingdom of God
• The temporal gathering
• Adoption of the King James version of the Bible

LDS sociologist Armand L. Mauss wrote of this peacemaking process: “Mormons were required to give up polygamy, theocracy, collective economic experiments, and any other flagrantly un-American institutions, and thus to abandon the path of charismatic peculiarity, except at the relatively abstract level of theology.” Our whole relationship with the “Gentile” world was reworked. Religious communities draw a circle in the sand around themselves, establishing requirements for those who stand inside the circle with membership in the group, and those who stand outside the circle without membership. In short, what it meant to be Mormon inside the circle was redefined. 

While not the exclusive crafter of this change, Heber J. Grant came to be its most visible embodiment. He went from being a post-Manifesto polygamist as an apostle to being a Church president committed to monogamy and assimilation. In 1918 Grant succeeded Joseph F. Smith and presided for twenty-seven years until his death at age eighty-eight in 1945, longer than any other Church president. During Grant’s administration, the Church moved from toleration of polygamy hold-outs to actively driving them out of the circle.

One University of Utah graduate student in 1963 described Mormon fundamentalism as a “protest to adaptation.” While certainly a majority of Mormons had grown weary of the conflicts with the larger society, some dissenters sought to preserve the old ways, and some were in positions of religious authority. They grumbled and fought change from within until they died or were driven out by the striving for a new future that Grant represented. In a way, the Church insured that these fundamentalists would metastasize. By the 1930s they emerged as an annoying voice in opposition, challenging the big church’s version of whether, how, and why this change came about. 

One of the things I stumbled across in studying this subject was that in 1930 the LDS Church published Latter-Day Revelations: Selections from the Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As its title states, it was an abridged version of the Doctrine and Covenants, one of the four Mormon canonized texts. It contained forty-one sections, some of them abridged, and did not include Section 132 on celestial marriage. Prepared by James E. Talmage, an educator, scientist, and apostle, the book was published in English, Spanish, and Norwegian. Fundamentalist Mormons leaped on the book as an example of the Church’s continuing efforts to jettison unique Mormon doctrines. The Church quickly retreated, withdrawing the book from sale.

In 1941 an essay in the fundamentalist Mormon monthly magazine TRUTH pointed out that, in addition to omitting Section 132, Section 85, which predicted a time when one “mighty and strong” would have to set the Church “in order,” had also been omitted. “These two revelations apparently constituted a thorn in the side of the leaders of the Church who had repudiated and surrendered the principles involved.” TRUTH then noted sarcastically that omitted revelations “were considered obsolete and of no ‘enduring value’, and hence were omitted from Dr. Talmage’s book.”

To some extent, change in the LDS Church was possible because it came through the Prophet, often given emphasis by “Thus saith the Lord.” That kind of institutional authority makes it easier to effect change, although LDS Church presidents have never had the power to act without seeking consensus. And the pronouncements of past prophets are often brought out by dissenters to challenge those of modern prophets. 

In George Orwell’s futuristic novel 1984, one of Big Brother’s aphorisms is: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” The Prophet controls the past for the great majority of believing Mormons, not by destroying or altering historical records, but by articulating an institutional past that most casual listeners are prepared to believe. “Plural marriage ended in 1890” is an obvious example. 

LDS sociologist Armand Mauss has described the Mormon experience as alternating periods of “assimilation” and “retrenchment.” He suggests that the Church was anxious to emerge from cultural “disrepute” and emphasized assimilation until the 1960s when the pendulum began to swing back. “Faced with assimilation, Mormons have felt the need since the sixties to reach ever more deeply into their bag of cultural peculiarities to find either symbolic or actual traits that will help them mark their subcultural boundaries and thus their very identity as a special peo ple.” He calls this a “predicament of respectability.”

Writing in 1994, Mauss examined how the mindset of Church leaders influences Mormon doctrine and culture, but he did not consider the dilution effects of a flood of converts on the LDS community, even while noting: “New converts between 1986 and 1990 accounted for more than three-fourths of all baptisms.”

When I was born in 1948 there were just over a million Mormons on the whole planet. They were overwhelmingly a Rocky Mountain West community. That changed in my lifetime, ignited by David O. McKay, driven harder by Spencer W. Kimball, and greatly accelerated by Gordon B. Hinkley. Hundreds of thousands became millions. The LDS Church recently sent out the one-millionth missionary and claimed a membership of thirteen million. We changed from a denomination where the great majority of members were born, raised, and indoctrinated in the Church to a world where they are just a fraction. The great majority of members I encounter today are relatively recent Baptists, Presbyterians, Church of Christ, and Catholics. They bring their past religious experience and beliefs into the Church and do not have a lifetime of Mormon religious education. 

I was born in North Carolina and have lived most of my life in the Deep South. When I was a boy and young man, the people in my branches and missions were, like my father, largely part of the post World War II Mormon diaspora, raised and instructed in the Church. What I heard at church seemed to reflect that religious indoctrination. 

Now in mid-life, I attend growing wards and stakes in the Deep South. The members are largely former Baptists. Fewer than half the adults sitting around me grew up in the Church. What I am taught in sacrament meeting and Sunday School now is very different from what I heard as a boy and a teenager. It is more protestant and less “Mormon” than what I knew growing up.

For a long time, I taught the Gospel Principles class in my ward. One Sunday we sang a hymn in sacrament meeting that referred to our Mother in Heaven, Eliza R. Snow’s O My Father. “In heav’n are parents single? / No, the thought makes reason stare! / Truth is reason; truth eternal / tells me I’ve a mother there.” The manual touched on family that Sunday, and I mentioned the Heavenly Mother in my lesson. I did not see that belief as heretical. Rather, it was something I had been taught all my life. After class a furious missionary scolded me for bringing this up, for “not teaching from the manual.” Apparently an investigator had been in class and freaked out at the reference. I was annoyed at the time but let it pass. Now, I wonder if I am a product of an older brand of Mormonism while the young missionary—and probably the great majority of the missionaries—are the product of the new, more protestant Mormonism. 

Then I was jolted to see a married Jesus thrown overboard with a press release in May 2006. The Church apparently succumbed to the hysteria in conservative Christianity over the popularity of The Da Vinci Code. As the Tom Hanks movie was about to be released, Church Public Communications issued a press release, resulting in the following news item: 

LDS doctrine does not endorse claims made in a popular book and movie that Jesus Christ was married. 

“The Da Vinci Code,” which opens today at the Cannes Film Festival in France, has evoked a lot of discussion from critics and Christians every where. The fictional story by author Dan Brown focuses on the premise that Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalene and fathered a child. Dale Bills, a spokesman for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said in a statement released Tuesday: “The belief that Christ was married has never been official church doctrine. It is neither sanctioned nor taught by the church. While it is true that a few church leaders in the mid-1800s expressed their opinions on the matter, it was not then, and is not now, church doctrine.” 

Professors of religion from around the state met earlier this week to discuss the storyline, finding very little evidence within the Bible to support the book’s storyline.

My fundamentalist Mormon friends, who emailed me the news item, were no doubt struck by the fact that plural marriage was also first cast overboard in a press release. 

Where and how was I taught that God and Jesus were married and that I had a Mother in Heaven? I rack my brain trying to identify just where I got this. Were the branch presidents, Sunday School teachers, seminary teachers, and home teachers who taught me that wrong? I was also taught that God and Jesus had plural wives. I was taught that a bit more on the sly; I could see this was not for public consumption so we didn’t talk about it too loudly. It seemed to fall under the heading of “the Mysteries” which we were discouraged from speculating on. 

I recognize I am not consistent in all this. I always believed the Church’s pre-1978 teachings on race were wrong and inconsistent with the gospel as I understood it. I just could not accept the old Mormonism on that point and welcomed President Kimball’s revelation allowing worthy black men to be ordained to the priesthood. The newer, more protestant Mormonism is one more to my liking on that issue.

I recognize that much of what was presented to me as belief and doctrine in the first half of my life has today been separated out as culture, folk belief, or the mere speculation of now-dead LDS leaders. I grew up being counseled that living prophets always trumped dead prophets, a teaching that left me somewhat uncomfortable as undermining consistency and stability. I also recognize that we cannot just pick and chose our dogma off a religious à la carte menu. 

I think this subject is made more difficult by the fact that the institutional Church presents the prophet as perfect, as without error. Follow the prophet, do not question the prophet, when the prophet speaks, the discussion is over. That deference is extended to all General Authorities and trickles down to your stake president and bishop. Obedience. Absolute obedience, which is justified by the promise that they will not lead us astray. And that same halo of deference gets enlarged to encompass just about anything they might have said in a past Church calling. 

I always saw this situation as a formula for a crisis of testimony. Prophets are mortal men; they are not divine beings; of course, they make mistakes. They are well intentioned and do the best they can, but they are not perfect. 

When the faithful are finally confronted with error, with the bad decision, the secret sin or dark corner that every human being has, the flash of anger, the error of judgment, or just the difference of opinion, it presents them with problems. Furthermore, social norms change over time, and consensus in a group—the “group think”—will be different over the decades. Much of what came out of Ezra Taft Benson’s mouth on race and civil rights now sounds just looney where it once was consistent with at least some corners of his time. Some of what was once said to justify the former prohibition against ordaining black men to the priesthood was a part of its time where now it stinks of racism. Those who find and quote the old stuff today sometimes get flogged for speaking nothing but the truth. 

I believe that there is an obvious spiritual answer for this dilemma, but institutional forces find this answer a threatening one. Testimony is personal. Faith is individual. We each must develop our own compass. We must believe because we believe, not because we are directed to believe without questions by rigid ecclesiastical superiors. We can come to that belief only by wrestling with the questions ourselves, not by being afraid of the questions. We must have confidence in our own testimonies; we can not delegate our testimony to some Church leader. We must answer for the content of our lives. “But he told me to believe that way; he said I would be safe if I just believed that way” is not an eternal answer. 

There is a symbiotic relationship between the Church and its fundamentalist fringe. The more the Church succeeds and grows, the stronger the fundamentalists become. As the Church strives to be more convert friendly, to require less of a leap for new converts to embrace, the more discomfort will be felt by more traditional Mormons, some of whom will leave. As the converts come in the front door, some of the traditionalists exit through the back door. For a minority of those who leave, Mormon fundamentalism represents a place to go. This does not mean they will become polygamous or join a United Order community, but they will hear beliefs with which they are familiar and which they were taught in their youth.

In September 2006 I attended the John Whitmer Historical Association meeting in Independence, Missouri. That is the historical society of what was once the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now the Community of Christ). Many Latter-day Saints are also members of JWHA. The theme of the conference was the various religious communities who traced their roots to Joseph Smith Jr. Anne Wilde and I conducted a session on fundamentalist Mormons. I learned how the RLDS world had undergone serious realignment as the result of doctrinal changes, dumping what many of its religious conservatives regarded as core values. The result has been the emergence of the now thoroughly protestant Community of Christ, the dissenting and more traditional Remnant Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and a number of independent congregations that refuse to declare themselves. The RLDS Church is no more. I was immediately struck by the parallels with the LDS experience. 

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is one of the few religious communities which has progressed from one-time marginal cult status to a robust and thriving religious community. Philip Jenkins, a historian of contemporary religious movements, has observed: 

The religious margin is the seedbed of new churches and mainstream organizations. Though the great majority of new religious groups do not succeed in growing to become major denominations, at least some do make the transition. Ultimately, all existing Protestant denominations began as new, radical sects, with the exception of a few groups like Episcopalians and Lutherans, who from their earliest days were accorded the status of an established church by a particular nation-state. Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, and Pentecostals all began their respective histories as suspicious and unpopular, yet each over time made the transition to respectability. 

He added: “The growth of the Latter-day Saints is very striking; the Mormon rate of growth in its first century-and-a-half has exceeded that of early Christianity itself.”

The LDS Church is still going through the natural evolutionary course from what others see as a cult to a church. Jenkins has some helpful definitions: 

Churches are . . . defined as “religious bodies in a relatively low state of tension with their environment,” sects are in a high state of tension, but remain within the conventional religious traditions of a society; cults, likewise, exist in a state of tension, but they “represent faiths that are new and unconventional in a society” or have no prior ties to any established body in the wider society. Cults “do not evolve or break away from other religions as do religious sects, but rather offer something new and different.”

There will be change. Nothing is fixed. But LDS institutions will likely try to paper over those changes. As Armand Mauss has commented: “One sometimes hears in Mormon sermons or lessons the reassuring testimony that the church has ‘always been the same’ since it was founded by Christ through the Prophet Joseph Smith (and even then, of course, it was presented to the world as a faithful replication of the primitive Christian church). Such a proposition is credible . . . only among those lacking institutional memory (as all Mormon converts do by definition) or among those untutored in any but mythological Mormon history (as are nearly all Mormons at the grassroots).”

Our individual comfort or discomfort with these changes probably has to do with when we were born and indoctrinated during this period of evolution. A generation from now, the changes that make me so uncomfortable will be nonissues for the vast majority of active members, just as plural marriage and United Order living are not issues for Mormons to day. They will have vanished from the official discourse, but likely will be preserved in some form among fundamentalist Mormons. Some of those who are made uncomfortable by these changes will find sanctuary in Mormon fundamentalism. 

My bottom line is my firm belief that my testimony and belief are personal convictions that I must arrive at for myself. The religious part of my life is not an empty glass into which my LDS superiors pour convictions. I must be persuaded myself. I also firmly believe that every prophet was a man, a good and benevolent man with the very best of intentions, but still a mortal who may make mistakes. 

And don’t try to tell me the Church is never changing.