Week-long hiatus

I know I have not been back that long, but this one cannot be avoided. On Saturday, my wife and I are taking off to Rome for Fall Break. I won't be back until the 13th so unfortunately, I will miss all the cool blogging about Conference and the new choice of Apostle and Counselor in the First Presidency. I would like to think that we will get the chance to use the computer there in Rome and if so, I'll try to give some travel updates. If not, see you around the 14th or 15th.

That Mormon guy on House

(OK, so yesterday I said I was taken a break from blogging about Mormon stuff, but this just came up and I can't resist)

For those who aren't "savvy", House is a Fox TV show about a really cranky, sarcastic, drug-addicted, but brilliant doctor. One of Dr. House's chief characteristics is that he is an (militant?) atheist and seeks at any opportunity to discredit any of his patients' or colleagues' notions about God, the afterlife, or the supernatural.

So it was very interesting when it was announced that one of his new assistants on the show would be Mormon. The show introducing this character aired on Tuesday. Interestingly enough, the Mormon guy is black, so there go the stereotypes. But it lead into the following initial joke:

House: So you a Mormon? I saw that Brigham Young ring on your hand. Or did your parents just clean the grounds?

OUCH! Right out of the gate, a subtle dig at Mormon history with African-Americans. The doctor responds with "The Church has a very progressive stance on racial equality." That's a questionable assertion; maybe presently true but not historically so. Also, when I think of the Church, the first things that spring to mind are not "progressive" and "racial equality."

There is another joke about the "magic underwear" that does not go much of anywhere, but the crux of this Mormon guy's involvement in the episode is also my most important point of this post. At one point, the doctor decides to do a liver function test by making a patient drink tequila and see how fast she gets drunk. For such an experiment, he needs a control group (someone with no tolerance for alcohol), so he picks the Mormon. I won't get into the back-and-forth, but the essence of the matter is that if this test is going to be conclusive and helpful in identifying the patient's ailment, the Mormon will have to drink. When the Mormon initially refuses, Dr. House asks, "Would you, or would you not, pull an ass out of a pit on the Sabbath?" A well-beloved scripture for every Mormon who ever went to college.

My real question is: if you had to break the Word of Wisdom in order to save another person's life, would you? I am not particularly thinking about a gun-to-the-head kind of scenario, but if in some alternate universe, partaking of alcohol or tobacco once would save the life of another human being, could you bring yourself to do it? If it was a loved one (wife, husband, mother, father, etc.), would that change your answer? My wife and I both agreed that we would partake. In my case, I like to think that it would make no difference if the person were a relative or someone particularly dear to me. In my own mind, the Word of Wisdom is NOT an eternal law. In the hierarchy of commandments, its actually pretty far down the list.

My only real complaint about the episode is that the guy is not convincingly Mormon. He says at one point "LDS does not try to control every aspect of our lives." LDS what? "LDS" doesn't do anything. The Church maybe, but LDS as a subject in this kind of statement. It just does not sound right and makes the whole thing sound less believable.

Best. Quote. Ever.

I'm going to take a couple-post break from all of the heavy Mormon-related blogging. I know that my disappoint the core readership at this blog, but it will be short-lived I promise. But I am going to have a couple of posts devoted to my alma mater, Duke. It's my blog and I'll do what I want.

The following appeared in the October 2007 Towerview, the campus student-run magazine:

"Everyone's got a hard-on about Harvard, Yale and Princeton that stems from a time when the country was smaller and you only needed three schools to educate the bastards...[Duke] hasn't been around long enough to turn out finely tuned assholes. Young egoists, but not ego-maniacs."

- Dana Vachon, Duke '02, author in New York City

Vachon, who earlier calls the education at Duke "flagrantly mediocre" has, for better or worse, hit the nail on the head. While I love my university, I have never been bowled over by the level of education offered at the school or the intellectual passion of my classmates. I never attended one of the HYPS (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford) schools, so I don't have much ground for comparison. However, I have consistently been surprised at how highly Duke is ranked. I understand that not all of the ranking is tied up in the quality of the undergraduate education, and it should not be. Universities are responsible for so much more than turning out 22-year olds with a better-than-high-school education.

Duke does not attract the hard-core intellectual and academic types. Based on my own perception, and not statistics, Duke undergrads do not generally go on to Ph.Ds in humanities and go on to lead other universities; they tend to go the pre-professional route and lead companies, law firms, and hospitals. Coming from my small-town background, I have wondered in the past if mine could have been that great "American Dream" story of going to HYPS. But you can't change history, and I remain very grateful that a school like Duke took a chance on a kid from a hick town in rural eastern NC.

My take on the "Inoculation" debate

To know what the debate is about, you'll want to read/listen to the following:
Sorting Out Inoculation at Mormon Mentality
and the podcasts #12 and #13-15 over at Mormon Matters.

For those not willing to invest a couple of hours to get into the whole debate, I'll try to give you the gist of the argument in a few short sentences.

- There are some weird, bad, potentially-faith-damaging things in Mormon history/doctrine, especially when they are introduced or explained by someone who is not a believer and/or is not sympathetic to the Church's history and/or truth claims.
- The Church currently and historically has done a poor job of explaining its own doctrine and history to members (and in some cases, may actively conceal it) in a way that prepares them for eventually finding it and being shaken by it.
- It would therefore be better for the Church to "inoculate" the Saints by giving warts-and-all history and explaining all the weird and difficult doctrines clearly, in order to reduce the shock and disillusionment that comes when one learns of this through an independent and unfriendly source.
(Incidentally, if you want a more general view of Social Inoculation Theory, see this page.

First of all, let me say that while I totally understand the idea of the term inoculation to describe what the result should be, I agree with the poster over at Mormon Mentality that the inoculation metaphor is incorrectly applied. Inoculation in the biological/medical sense means deliberate "infection" (hard to avoid such polemical terms) with a weaker version of a disease, in order to prevent infection with a truly virulent form of a pathogen. What some folks are advocating is hitting members will the full dose of the Truth, which should prevent them from being infected with other, more virulent mutations, of the "Truth". I'm a lawyer, not a doctor, so I don't know what this is called. But hitting members with a weaker/tidier/incomplete version of the Truth is what the Church is already doing. And it is not having the effect to prevent members from becoming disillusioned when difficult matters of faith and history arise. It may abate curiosity for a time, but many come to possess the uncomfortable information not due to curiosity, but because of contact with other people.

One school of thought among the GAs regarding the "inoculation" of Church members is that of Boyd K. Packer that "all truths are not necessarily useful." As a matter of theory, I agree. Knowing about the Mountain Meadows Massacre or about Joseph Smith's plural wives does not inspire faith in or allegiance to the Church.

But as a premise for how instruction in doctrinal and historical matters should be done, I cannot. for me, it boils down to a single question: Does the Spirit testify of Truth or of Utility? If the Spirit does indeed testify of Truth, "things as they really are", (which I believe that it does) then it will not testify of a convenient untruth. If we insist and focus upon members obtaining a witness of the Spirit, the only reasonable and viable choice ought to be to teach the Truth and not the Convenient, warts and all.

Does BYU create doctrine?

This post comes from an idea I have had floating around for some time now. In fact, I wish I had posted on it sooner, when the ideas were fresher. In part, it comes out of the experience of my wife teaching in the Department of Religious Studies at BYU.

The argument that I intend to lay out is that, contrary to the prerogatives of latter-day scripture, the true doctrine-making institution of the Church is not the First Presidency or the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, it is the faculty of the BYU religion department, and more broadly of the Church Educational System. Disclaimer #1- I am not stating that this as being my ideal situation (it is emphatically NOT), simply that it is empirically true.
Disclaimer #2- I realize that I am overstating my case a little here, and it is intended to be somewhat hyperbolic. However, I would not waste my time on such a long post if I did not think there was some truth to it.

Key assumption (which underlies this entire argument)- the doctrine that really counts is the doctrine "on the ground" (what gets talked about in Church on Sunday and lived out daily in the lives of members) and not some Platonic ideal of doctrine that appears in official Church manuals.

First premise: The great doctrinal era of the Church is OVER.
Perhaps I should state that it a more tentative fashion...based on recent experience, the great doctrinal era of the Church appears to be over (I leave open the possibility that a new revelatory period could break open at any moment). Now I say this as someone who fully believes that the General Authorities of the Church are divinely inspired to guide the LDS Church. Nevertheless, the dramatic world-shaking revelations of Joseph Smith, etc. are not part of our contemporary spiritual experience as members of the Church. Whatever doctrine is being made in the Church today are merely tweaks of existing principles or assertions of principles that are generally uncontroversial among LDS or in the world. Joseph Smith built the house, we are merely moving the furniture around.

Second premise: No one has a greater amount, degree, and depth of access to the repositories of doctrinal knowledge within Latter-day Saints at a time when doctrinal ideas are being formulated and stored than professors at BYU or the faculty of CES.
For the most part, the average Church member's engagement with General Authorities consists of the following: 16 hours a year (General Conference) and a couple of articles from the Ensign. But looking back at the first premise, many of these articles and GC talks are not doctrinal in nature, or at least only weakly so. Also, at a time when members are truly paying attention in GC or reading the Ensign regularly, many notions of doctrine have already been solidified.
BYU professors and CES faculty have far greater access to LDS youth in the high school and college age. Doctrine and interpretations of scripture are, in fact, taught in Seminary, Institute, and throughout the BYU Religion Department (classes in which are required for one to graduate from BYU). Students emerging from these classes will take from them knowledge about the scriptures and the doctrine of the Church that they will reproduce in official settings throughout the rest of their lives (this is really the evidence of the premise, rather than a part of it). In addition, these individuals write a great deal of the doctrinal material on-sale at stores like Deseret Book. While one might claim that most LDS get their doctrinal ideas in Sunday School or Priesthood, chances are that your teacher went to BYU, has attended CES, or got some of the ideas that you are being taught from materials produced by one of those sources.

Example- How many people do you know who claim to have gained a fuller understanding of the Atonement because of Stephen Robinson's "Believing Christ"?

I lump CES and the BYU Religion Department together for a reason. As a purely org chart matter, I do not believe that they are the same thing. Presumably, the head of BYU Religion Dept. reports to the President of BYU, or something like that, who reports to someone on the Church Education Committee, another member of which is the head of CES. This would indicate parallel lines of communication and authority. However, Terry Ball, the current Dean of Religious Education, is a CES trainee. His elevation to the Deanship was orchestrated by another CES alum, Boyd K. Packer. I don't actually believe that CES is some Gadianton-robber-like conspiracy, a secret combination bent on controlling the whole Church through false doctrine. Rather, I merely point out that CES represents and perpetuates a certain conservative brand of Mormon doctrine, one with which not all LDS resonate or feel comfortable.

So my argument basically boils down to the following: there is currently a doctrine-making void in the Church (due to a lack of official doctrinal exposition), and CES and BYU have been both willing and able to step in to fill it. They have the resources and access to perpetuate their particular view of the doctrine of the Church, and have and continue to do so.

Related to this matter, but too large a topic for me to address, is the age-old question of "What is Mormon doctrine? Where do I find it?" The fact that the answers to these questions are uncertain gives CES and BYU even greater latitude to step to the fore and proclaim that they have the answers we seek.