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Editor’s Note: This article has footnotes. To review them, please see the PDF below.

A Call for Compassion 

I was raised in Logan, Salt Lake City, and Ogden, Utah, as an active member of the LDS Church. I gained so much of great value from all the years in Primary, Mutual, and the priesthood quorums. From that association, as well as the great example of my parents and wonderful teachers along the way, I learned many positive lessons that have formed the foundation of my life. 

I learned that we should all love and care for each other— that we are all brothers and sisters and should treat each other accordingly. I learned that perhaps our highest calling is to help those who are in need and to be compassionate and kind toward those who are faced with difficult challenges. I learned, generally, that hatred, prejudice, and meanness toward others should be rejected in favor of love, inclusiveness, and kindness. Those seemed to be the fundamental moral messages from my church. 

However, I learned other, very different, lessons as a young Mormon boy. I learned that discrimination against African Americans, including their exclusion from the priesthood and their exclusion from worshipping in LDS temples, was compelled by God because their skin color was the mark of Cain as a result of their wrongdoing in an earlier life. I even learned that Brigham Young maintained that slavery was an institution ordained by God, that a white per son who “mixed his seed” with a “Negro” should be killed, and that African Americans were not to be treated as brute animals, but were to be treated as the servants of servants. 

I learned that we were not to question religious or civil authority. I recall once hearing someone say from the lectern in my ward that, according to the Twelfth Article of Faith, we are to unquestioningly follow the directives of leaders, including military commanders, and that if the directives are immoral, those giving them, not those who follow them, will be held re sponsible on judgment day. Even as a young boy, I recall being appalled at that call for individual moral abrogation. The idea that we are all to fall in line when ordered, even when doing so harms others, is abhorrent, dangerous, and contrary to the most fundamental lessons taught by Jesus and other major religious leaders. 

Until 1967, antimiscegenation laws in many states prohibited interracial marriages. An African American and a white, like Barack Obama’s parents, could not marry each other under those laws. Society advanced, and the laws caught up with those advances. In 1978, the president of the LDS Church said he had a revelation from God that the exclusion of black men from the LDS priesthood was to be lifted. 

I learned another thing as a young boy: I was taught that gays and lesbians—they were called “homosexuals” in those days were inferior people engaged in perverse wrongdoing. It was common for many people to use derogatory terms like “homo,” “queer,” or “faggot.” 

Since then, I have learned to liberate myself from those bigotries. I have learned that I can grow—and that, as I do, not only do I treat others better but I also become a better person myself. My life is enriched as I learn about others who are different from me and as I learn to value, not just tolerate, those differences. 

I know many gay and lesbian people who have married. In fact, I recently attended a wedding reception for two men, Idaho farmers, who were married in California. They have been together, committed to each other, loving each other, for thirty years. So many of the gay and lesbian couples I have known are loving and committed, and have demonstrated a remarkable stability in their relationships—a stability that has so far eluded me in my relationships. These good people, and those who love them, are hurt every day of their lives when they are treated under the law as second-class citizens and as they face the sort of prejudice, discrimination, and hatred generated by such measures as Utah’s Amendment 3 and California’s Proposition 8. 

The LDS Church is repeating a tragic and deplorable history through its vast involvement in the passage of Proposition 8— except that the bigotry and discrimination are now being directed not at African Americans but toward gays and lesbians. It is an outrage—and it is an occasion of great sadness for the LDS Church, for its members who are once again being, and allowing themselves to be, led astray, and for those who are victims of the hurtful judgments of those who think they are somehow superior to their gay brothers and lesbian sisters. 

Let us all call for greater love, better understanding, and dignity and respect toward all, regardless of race, regardless of faith or lack of faith, and regardless of sexual orientation. Let us all follow, rather than just talk about, the Golden Rule. Let us move beyond the false and hollow judgments that result in such pain, even to the point of suicide, for many LDS youth. And let us embrace each other as brothers and sisters and rid ourselves of the pernicious distinctions on the basis of sexual orientation that, with tragic consequences, have been drawn in the law and in so many hearts. 

Just as racial discrimination is now forbidden in the United States, and just as antimiscegenation laws are now nothing more than a shameful part of our nation’s history, we will celebrate full marriage equality someday. We have come so far in just a few years, particularly because most young people do not carry with them the burden of bigotry as I did, and as did so many of my generation. There will be obstacles, but reason, fairness, and a higher morality will prevail—if we join together in demanding it. 

Let us all keep up the proud fight—the fight for fundamental fairness, the fight for compassion, the fight for love. 

Ross C. “Rocky ” Anderson
Salt Lake City, Utah 

***

Clarifying My Own Stance

I deeply regret that Thomas Alexander understood my recent article (“Can Deconstruction Save the Day? ‘Faithful Scholarship’ and the Uses of Postmodernism,” 41, no. 1 [Spring 2008]: 1-33) as attacking him and Leonard Arrington. This was not my intention. I’m sorry that I may have given that impression by not clarifying my stance on the issues raised in the article. 

My aim in that piece was to offer historical perspective on orthodox LDS scholars’ uses of postmodernism and to assess the likelihood that those appeals could win greater status for orthodox scholarship within the larger academy. Apart from that assessment, however, I was not trying to weigh in on the debates that have played out around orthodox scholarship. While I have strong opinions regarding those debates, I wanted to be as impartial as I could manage in my discussion of them for the purposes of this article. 

As it happens, my sympathies lie with those, like Alexander and Arrington, who argued for alternatives to the more restrictive, militant conceptions of orthodox scholarship advocated by antipositivist critics like Louis Midgley and David Bohn. In fact, Midgley has complained that my essay casts him as the villain in a “morality play” that pits a “heroic New Mormon History” against a “deplorable Faithful History” (comment posted in response to Kaimi Wenger, “Moderation in All Things,” By Common Consent, August 2, 2008, http://www.bycommonconsentcom/2008/07/moderation-in-all-things, comment 34). While I hope I managed to give a more balanced and nuanced account in the article than Midgley’s complaint implies, his perception of my commitments around these issues is not so far off. 

One source of confusion, perhaps, was my use of the term “antipositivist” to describe Alexander’s and Arrington’s critics. I used that term merely to reflect the language of the debates. I myself do not believe Alexander and Arrington were positivists; indeed, I find the accusation of positivism absurd. That accusation made sense to critics only because they (the critics) held a stark, fundamentalistic world view that dismissed everything to the left of their own brand of orthodoxy as irreligion. 

Given my lack of sympathy for the agendas that were pursued under the rubric of “faithful history,” I feel little enthusiasm about the efforts some LDS scholars are now making to enhance orthodox scholarship’s status within academia. Having watched “faithful scholarship” achieve its current position of privilege within Church institutions as a result of campaigns to enforce orthodoxy, I find it hard to be moved when orthodox scholars now bid for the academy’s sympathy by invoking postmodern appeals on behalf of marginalized and deprivileged voices. 

Again, I regret that my article may have given a mistaken impression of my intentions to Professor Alexander, whom I regard as someone who tried to fight the good fight. 

John-Charles Duffy 
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 

***

Asherah Alert 

For some time I have been hearing about and greatly anticipating the appearance of Kevin L. Barney’s scholarly comparison of the Mormon Mother in Heaven with the female deity Asherah. I have long admired Kevin Barney’s research, writing, and opinions. So it is with some regret that I feel compelled to point out some dangers and flaws in his “How to Worship Our Mother in Heaven (Without Getting Excommunicated)” (41, no. 4 [Winter 2008]: 121-47). 

I agree with Barney’s assessment (and the starting point for my examination of this topic) that Daniel C. Peterson’s article “Nephi and His Asherah” is “surely one of the most remarkable articles ever published in Mormon studies.” Here Peter son introduces Mormon readers to Asherah, chief goddess of the early Canaanites, who was also worshipped by at least some of the ancient Hebrews. Although the Old Testament is rife with condemnation of this idolatrous practice, Peterson, for the first time in Mormon writings, gives credence to the position that worship of the Asherah may have been legitimate. 

In his article, Barney follows up on the link that Peterson proposed between Asherah, the tree goddess, with Nephi’s vision of the mother of the Son of God and the Tree of Life. As much as I admire such an exegesis, I must point out that a more conservative reading of 1 Nephi 11 suggests that Nephi is shown Mary and her child to connect Jesus with the tree, not Mary with the tree. Among Mormon scripturalists who accept this reading is Elder Jeffrey R. Holland: “The images of Christ and the tree [are] inextricably linked. . . . At the very outset of the Book of Mormon, Christ is portrayed as the source of eternal life and joy, the living evidence of divine love, and the means whereby God will fulfill his covenant with the house of Israel and indeed the entire family of man, returning them all to their eternal promises.” 

This view fits better with the chapter as a whole, the condescension of God being the demonstration by the Father of His love for the world by sending His “only begotten Son,” Jesus Christ (John 3:16). 

Those who have some experience in women’s studies of the Old Testament will readily recognize Barney’s recapitulation of the “Sophia as Heavenly Mother” theme. I agree with his assessment that Sophia (Latin for Wisdom) “was present at the creation and assisted in its work” (134) as a divine female force. It is quite possible that the Wisdom figure can tell us a great deal about the Goddess Asherah and even our Heavenly Mother herself. 

But when it comes to pegging Asherah as our Heavenly Mother, there are many problems which must be overcome, and Kevin Barney falls short of doing so. Barney’s proposition is that the early worship form of venerating Asherah is more valid than the later, more evolved form of monotheism. If we accept this view, then we must acknowledge the entire pantheon of gods worshipped by the early Canaanites and He brews, which entails rejecting the prophetic authority of the reform period. I am willing to consider that worship of a Holy Mother figure may have been a part of the primordial religion. But by the time we come to know the Asherah figure in the Old Testament, she has been perverted into a licentious, dissipated, corrupt figure whom God’s prophets denounced. Barney mentions, but downplays, the very severe rejection of Asherah by the prophets and by Josiah, a king whom the Deuteronomicist considers to be a divinely inspired national hero. The frequent association between Asherah and the Canaanite fertility cults shows that, at least by the time of the major prophets, she had become a sign of idolatry and was henceforth rejected. In fact, Asherah may bear little or no resemblance to the Mormon Heavenly Mother. How do we know, I wonder, which of her attributes are divine and which are not? Can we accept her association with trees, groves, or poles while rejecting, for example, the cult of prostitution accompanying her worship? 

Kevin Barney concludes his article by suggesting some of the ways this conception of Heavenly Mother might be worshiped that are consistent with an orthodox LDS position. The best of these, which quite captured my imagination, was that we “reconceptualize” our Christmas tree traditions as symbols of the Christchild’s mother. Says Barney, “Since the practice of putting up Christmas trees originated from a pagan fertility symbol that had to be reconceptualized in the first place to give it a Christian meaning, giving the tree our own reconceptualization would not be treading on inviolable ground. And, of course, putting a Christmas tree up each December is entirely unobjectionable in our culture, a practice at which no one would bat an eye. But seeing the tree as a symbol of our Mother may be a source of satisfaction to those who long to acknowledge Her in some way” (136). 

This description in Barney’s article had my head spinning as I immediately began to imagine many different ways of decorating a Christmas tree. But Latter-day Saints might be better served by imagining ways to exclude paganism than from reconceptualizing it. After all, 

Thus saith the Lord, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them. 

For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe.

They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not. . . .

Every man is brutish in his knowledge: every founder is confounded by the graven image: for his molten image is falsehood, and there is no breath in them. 

They are vanity, and the work of errors: in the time of their visitation they shall perish. (Jer. 10:2-4, 14-15; emphasis mine) 

After spending many words advising his reader that the current policy of the Church is not to pray publicly to Heavenly Mother, Barney “suggest[s] a partial, small exception” (133). Apparently Barney finds it acceptable for infertile women to pray to Asherah. I believe that Barney is treading on thin ice with this suggestion. Although I will admit to praying to a Heavenly Mother in private under certain circumstances, it is nonetheless a practice which might lead to the wrong side of the stake president’s desk. Church President Gordon B. Hinckley, in issuing his instructions, first to the Regional Representatives and then to the women’s general meeting, did not limit the restriction on prayer to a Mother in Heaven: “Logic and reason would certainly suggest that if we have a Father in Heaven, we have a Mother in Heaven. That doctrine rests well with me. However, in light of the instruction we have received from the Lord Himself, I regard it as inappropriate for anyone in the Church to pray to our Mother in Heaven.” I read Barney’s paragraph on prayer to the Mother as a dance of fancy footwork where he trips in and out of recommending these types of supplications but simultaneously absolves himself of responsibility for counseling that anyone actually do so. 

The last area where I strongly feel that Kevin Barney has stepped out of bounds is his assumption that he knows the personal name of our Heavenly Mother. Says he: “I personally regard it as very significant that we actually know the name of our Mother in Heaven: Asherah” (133). This possibility cannot, given the lack of other information, be discarded, but Barney would certainly have to give more evidence to convince me of this than that a few ancient Hebrews once adopted the appellation of a Canaanite Goddess as the object of their devotion. I feel no more comfortable using “Asher ah” as Heavenly Mother’s personal name than I do using as her title “Elat,” which he identifies as an ancient word for “Goddess.” (I do love the word studies, though. Kevin Barney excels at them, and his expertise is in evidence throughout his article.) 

Other suggestions lose their potency as we realize that the Asherah of the Old Testament just may not be She whom we seek. Naming children Asher or Sophia, planting saplings to honor a tree goddess, seeing consecrated olive oil as a symbol of a feminine presence in ordinances, and even serving in the temple in the way described by Barney seem weak proposals compared with the active, vital worship of a feminine deity in Goddess based religions. 

In writing this response, I do not wish to discourage those who are searching for greater light and revealed knowledge upon the important subject of the Divine Feminine. I commend Kevin Barney for his efforts in this matter and hope students of Mormonism will continue to probe in this direction. 

Cheryl L. Bruno 
Summerville, S.C. 

***

Kevin Barney Responds 

Thank you so much for taking the time and making the effort to comment on my “How to Worship Our Mother in Heaven (Without Getting Excommunicated)” (41, no. 4 [Winter 2008]: 121-46). Let me assure you that I am in no measure offended or upset that you disagreed with me; on the contrary, I am flattered that you thought the piece was worthy of this substantive attention. So I thank you. 

It should come as no surprise, however, that I disagree with your comments. I will try to outline the nature of my disagreements as follows: 

1. Peterson’s article. I was a bit stumped by your comments on Daniel Peterson’s article, “Nephi and His Asherah.” You seemed at first to be an enthusiastic fan of the piece. But Peterson basically does two things: (1) In general, the article is a survey of recent Asherah scholarship from an LDS perspective, and (2) In particular, it is an exegesis of 1 Nephi 11. Yet you reject both the general relevance of non-LDS Asherah scholarship to the topic of the Mormon Mother in Heaven and the specific exegesis Peterson offers, so it was unclear to me what, exactly, you found to like in the article at all. 

I freely acknowledge that I stand on Peterson’s shoulders in writing my article. I probably would not have had the confidence to attempt it if he had not plowed this ground ahead of me. I remember for a long time being familiar with the foundational work of Raphael Patai in The Hebrew Goddess (3rd ed. [Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1990]); and as the scholarship on this point began to accelerate, I considered writing about it. But in the end, I threw up my hands, just overwhelmed by how much there had come to be out there—which is why I was thrilled when Peter son made the effort and did it better than I could have. I did not know Peterson at the time (our times at BYU did not overlap), but I recall finding his email address and sending him congratulations on the achievement. We later crossed paths at a conference and have become friends. 

On the exegesis you reject, you are no doubt correct that the more “conservative” approach to the chapter is to see the tree as a symbol of Christ. You quote El der Holland as saying “The images of Christ and the tree are inextricably linked.” It is unfortunate that Elder Holland does not present evidence or argumentation for this claim, and many questions go unanswered by his unelaborated assertion. Why is there a connection between the tree and Jesus? What I found so powerful about Peterson’s reading is that it resulted in the passage’s finally making sense to me. The angel does not explain the tree; but when he shows Nephi the virgin and then the virgin with the child in her arms, the meaning becomes clear to Nephi without further explication. 

Seeing the tree as Asherah symbolism in this context makes tremendous sense to me. Trees were always associated with goddesses in the Old Testament. And I am fond of John Sorenson’s suggestion (in his classic Dialogue piece, “The Brass Plates and Biblical Scholarship”) to the effect that the brass plates were a northern recension of scripture, reflecting Lehi’s familial background as part of Manasseh in the north. We know that the people of Israel prior to the Assyrian conquest worshipped Asherah, so for that tree symbolism to immediately make sense to Lehi’s son really works for me. Of course, you are welcome to read the passage in your own, more traditional way, but I continue to favor Peterson’s insight here. 

2. Are we forced to acknowledge the Canaanite pantheon? Your letter seems to think my approach requires it. I disagree that if we accept any part of Asherah mythology, we are forced to accept the whole kit and kaboodle. Why? We know there was corruption involved, so we can certainly be selective about what we take and what we leave behind. I tried to follow a selection method of identifying positive allusions to Asherah in the scriptures, then used them as my base. Without stating it, obviously I was also looking at these things through the lens of modern Mormonism. And why not? I took pains to make it clear that my essay was engaged in religion-making. I do not see why we have to reject the tradition completely, simply because it contains corrupted elements when it also, in my view, at least, contains valid ones. 

To take your example of cultic prostitution, as I am sure you know recent studies have questioned whether such a thing ever really existed. But assuming arguendo that there was an Asherah-based prostitution cult, so what? We can leave that on the trash heap of history. I see no reason why we have to take all of it; it seems to me that we can pick and choose. 

3. Reform prophets. Your comment about my proposal’s potential for undermining the authority of reform prophets is where the rubber really hits the road, and I think it is your strongest point. I knew that this argument was going to be tough for rank-and-file Mormons to accept. We tend to want to read the scriptures as being univocal, without development. If one prophet re jected a certain practice, then it is unquestionably a bad practice and all prophets would agree. 

Just recently I had to counsel with a man in another state who used to be in my ward, because his BYU-attending son had learned about the nineteenth-century Adam-God beliefs held by Brigham Young and others. His son said, in effect, “Look, this isn’t a trifle. It’s a doctrine about the nature of God. It’s something as important as can be. And Brigham Young as prophet taught this. So it either has to be true and the Church is in apostasy for not teaching it, or the prophets are wrong altogether and they have no authority.” We have raised an entire generation of Saints with such linear thinking about prophetic infallibility that they cannot handle the nuances, and there really are a lot of them beyond the obvious Adam-God example. 

The truth is that the winners get to write the history, and it was those who rejected Asherah who largely redacted or wrote the Old Testament as we have it today. There is, quite frankly, a lot of political spin in the Old Testament. I recognize that we get really nervous when we start talking about spin in the scrip tures. So I do not blame anyone, including you, for not wanting to follow me there. 

4. Evict paganism. On my mission I ran into very conservative Christians and, of course, Jehovah’s Witnesses who saw clearly the pagan elements in such celebrations as Christmas and Easter and therefore advocated against celebrating them. I can understand and respect that position, all the while disagreeing with it profoundly. I love the holidays, and I love the fact that we Mormons are pragmatic enough to acknowledge the pagan elements in them and celebrate them anyway. I love that we do not feel threatened by Santa Claus or Easter bunnies or yule logs or mistletoe or anything else like that. I think that such tolerance shows a certain amount of religious maturity for our people. (Even those who are sure Jesus was born on April 6 are content to celebrate Christmas on December 25—and good for them!) 

5. Prayer. I referenced the same Gordon B. Hinckley statement you did, albeit quoted in two different places. I did not quite understand your criticism here. I made it clear that I personally do not pray to Mother in Heaven but that there is a scriptural precedent for such a prayer in limited circumstances. If people want to take the responsibility for themselves of following that precedent, then obviously the principle of agency is not suspended in their case and they are free to do so. You acknowledged that you sometimes pray to Mother in Heaven for unspecified reasons without scriptural precedent. Should we censure Leah for daring to offer a prayer to Asherah at the birth of her son Asher, named in honor of the Goddess? I do not think so. 

6. Personal name. I am also not sure why you object so strongly to acknowledging Asherah as the personal name of our Mother. As I showed in the article’s appendix, that name appears forty times in the Old Testament, even if it is always mistranslated in the King James Version. If we cannot accept Asherah as a name, how can we accept El/Elohim or Yahweh as personal names of deity? Mormon scholars have become comfortable with the interface of Canaanite precedents and the early Hebrew pantheon. See, for instance, my article, “Examining Six Key Concepts in Joseph Smith’s Understanding of Genesis 1:1,” BYU Studies 39, no. 3 (2000): 107-24. 

A good illustration of how Canaanite precedents influenced early Israelite belief is provided by Deuteronomy 32:8-9, which reads as follows in the Revised Standard Version: “When the Most High [elyon] gave to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of men, he fixed the bounds of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God [bene Elohim]. For the LORD’S [YHWH] portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage.” 

Here the High God El fixes the number of the nations at seventy to equal the number of His sons (also seventy), assigning one son to each nation. El assigns His son Yahweh to be the God of Israel. The confluence of Canaanite mythology with the early Hebrew pantheon in this passage is striking. 

In conclusion, I note that the bibliography I appended to the article had to be cut in half to meet space limitations. The amount of scholarship on Asherah as a Hebrew Goddess is absolutely huge. If one is unwilling to see that literature as relating in a meaningful way to the Mormon Mother in Heaven, then I would recommend following the position of my good friend Blake Ostler, who has stated that he is “open to the possibility that the entire belief in mother in heaven is a cultural overbelief.” You may as well, because there is not some vast body of evidence about some other Mother in Heaven figure in ancient Israel who would fit Joseph Smith’s statements. In my view, Asherah is our one shot at situating such a figure in the real world of the Old Testament, with actual Israelite worship directed to her. 

Once again, thank you so much for your careful attention to my article. I hope my response above gives a clearer idea of my perspective on specific points raised by your critique. 

Kevin L. Barney 
Hoffman Estates, Illinois 

***

Rest of the Story 

After my article on leadership in the Utah War was at press (“Who’s in Charge Here?: Utah War Command Ambiguity,” 24, no. 1 [Spring 2009]: 39-64) I be came aware through Ardis E. Parshall of additional information about how Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston was selected for this responsibility in late August 1857. As discussed on p. 39, Johnston believed at the time that his selection was solely the decision of Gen. Winfield Scott, the army’s general in chief, rather than that of President James Buchanan, whom Johns ton had never met. 

On April 7,1887, a very different version of the selection decision emerged in New Orleans at the dedication of an equestrian statue erected in Johnston’s honor posthumously. At this ceremony the principal speaker was Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederacy and Johnston’s commander in chief when he was mortally wounded at the 1862 Civil War battle of Shiloh. 

In reprising Johnston’s career, Davis recalled an 1857 conversation between him and Buchanan at a time when Davis was chairman of the U.S. Senate’s military affairs committee and the recently resigned secretary of war in President Franklin Pierce’s cabinet: “Buchanan, when President, sent to me to ask, ‘Who do you think ought to have command of the Utah expedition!?]’ I did not choose to select one only from my army acquaintances, and I gave three names. He said: ‘Do you and [Illinois Senator John A.] Logan ever agree about anything?’ I said: ‘I think so.’ He replied: ‘In this instance you have named the same three men.’ They were Persifor [R] Smith of Louisiana, Albert S. Johnston and R. E. Lee. Johnston was selected, and he was the best selection. He commanded the expedition to Utah, and was [later] made brigadier general by brevet. So he had gone to the highest grade next to commander in chief within a short period after the Mexican war.” 

Albert Sidney Johnston’s contemporary but incomplete understanding of the forces at work combined with Jefferson Davis’s more senior but probably fading recollection provide more light on how Johnston came to the Utah command than heretofore known. My very recent awareness of Davis’s version, even after a half-century of research, also illustrates how much more remains to be discovered about the Utah War’s origins, prosecution, and impact. 

William P. MacKinnon 
Santa Barbara, California