General Conference Odyssey

The General Conference Project: The End of the World, the End of Death, and the End of Shame

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nopeFor some reason, I allowed Nathaniel to drag me into this 14-year scheme of reading a new General Conference session every week (you can check his post for the details). My first reaction was a big nope. Quite honestly, General Conference bores me. I don’t find it particularly edifying and frankly find the style and content of most General Authority talks to be lacking (to put it kindly). So the idea of reading multiple talks a week and then writing about them couldn’t have been less appealing.

And yet…

As I thought about it, the project seemed more and more worthwhile. I would become truly familiar with the teachings and trends of modern Mormonism. I would understand more fully what my parents’ generation grew up with. Furthermore, I would be taking seriously the words of leaders I sustain as prophets, seers, and revelators.

The April 1971 morning session was a good place to start. It combined the things that I both love and hate about General Conference. The first two talks were less than stellar. Joseph Fielding Smith’s talk was (what would now be) a typical, unremarkable rundown of basic Mormon beliefs. His outline could be straight out of a manual. The talk has virtually no scriptural references or historical sources. While this probably shouldn’t bother me, it does. Mormon theology has evolved and I don’t think many members or leaders are aware of its evolution, despite the claim of “continuing revelation.” Granted, this was 1971. The New Mormon History was just starting to gain momentum (The Mormon Experience hadn’t even been published). Despite these misgivings, I did like this line: “…The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints [is] the custodian and dispenser of [the gospel’s] saving truths…” Reminded me of Terryl & Fiona Givens’ claim in The Crucible of Doubt that members of the LDS Church are custodians of the temple.

Spencer W. Kimball’s talk was annoyingly alarmist, though intriguing from a historical view. Kimball engages in some inflammatory anti-gay rhetoric, being two years after the Stonewall riots. But considering the 1970s was a transformative decade for the LGBT community, it is interesting to see how some Church leaders were responding to the trends around them. Nonetheless, the “perversion” of homosexuality is not the main topic, but fits snuggly into Kimball’s apocalyptic rhetoric and worldview: “We are living in the last days, and they are precarious and frightening. The shadows are deepening, and the night creeps in to envelop us.” According to Kimball, the “world is now much the same as it was in the days of the Nephite prophet who said: “… if it were not for the prayers of the righteous … ye would even now be visited with utter destruction. …” (Alma 10:22.)” Our world is “sinking into depths of corruption. Every sin mentioned by Paul is now rampant in our society.” The “eccentricities and disobedience” of the youth are “laid at the feet of those parents who gave them an example of disobeying both government and God’s laws.” Among these sweeping statements, Kimball makes the following claim without a hint of irony: “Many voices, loud and harsh, come from among educators, business and professional men, sociologists, psychologists, authors, movie actors, legislators, judges, and others, even some of the clergy, who, because they have learned a little about something, seem to think they know all about everything.” Since I think the evidence is in favor of the world getting better overall, I found little to be salvaged from this talk.

However, Marvin J. Ashton’s talk struck home for me. With President Nixon declaring a “war on drugs” in June of that year, it is noteworthy that drug addiction plays a prominent role in Ashton’s talk. Yet, it isn’t the addiction or drug use that is Ashton target, but the reasons for it:

If we as parents and friends advise our youth that drugs are bad, evil, and immoral, and yet we do not try to understand why our youth turn to this evil substitute for reality, then the drugs themselves become the issue and not the symptom of the greater issue of unhappiness. We need to know why our loved ones want to run from their present life to the unknown yet dangerous life of addiction. What causes a strong, lovely, vibrant young person to allow a chemical to control his or her behavior? What is there at home, school, work, or church that is so uncomfortable that an escape seems necessary? If we were not faced with the evils of marijuana, LSD, speed, and heroin, we would be faced with some other type of escape mechanism, because some of us as brothers, sisters, parents, friends, and teachers have not yet been able to reach our youth in such a way as to give them the confidence and love they seek. Some of us are not providing the stability in the home, the respect, and the care that every person needs. They need more than Church upbringing—they need a loving home life.

"That's why I'm a drunk. When I'm drunk, I can stand myself."
“That’s why I’m a drunk. When I’m drunk, I can stand myself.”

Ashton’s approach recognizes the lack of human connection behind addiction. Without using the term, his description acknowledges drug use as a shame-based behavior: “May I reiterate that while drugs are a most serious problem, and while the Church is a flexible instrument in the Lord’s hands, we must not be diverted from our eternal and most effective course by problems that, though serious, are only symptoms of greater ills” (italics mine). The way to address these “greater ills” is to “strengthen their homes and personal lives through warm, loving reeducation around basic gospel principles.” Instead of responding undesirable behaviors with shame, anger, and fear, “it is imperative that there be love, understanding, and acceptance in the home so our youth can learn that only steadfast pursuit of God’s ways will bring a rich, happy life.” And though many “who are part of the drug scene tend to adopt unusual dress, hair styles, and other mannerisms which set them apart…we do only harm by rejecting them from our meetings and general fellowship.”[ref]Only if they “become offensive or unacceptable by reason of extreme behavior” should we exclude them.[/ref] He offers credible advice to parents:

Parents, let’s make certain our youth are not continually exposed to the idea that the stresses of daily life require chemical relief. Factual information about drugs should be constantly stressed rather than attempts to frighten or shame. We must try to rear our children so that they are neither deprived of affection nor spoiled. We must give our children responsibilities according to their capabilities and never overprotect them from the difficulties they will encounter. As sure as some adults—mothers and fathers—continue to sow the wind, they will reap the tornado. Let us more firmly entrench ourselves in the true purposes of family life and sow oneness and reap joy.

And what of those who feel they are “failing in the home” because of their wayward children?: “I believe we start to fail in the home when we give up on each other. We have not failed until we have quit trying. As long as we are working diligently with love, patience, and long-suffering, despite the odds or the apparent lack of progress, we are not classified as failures in the home. We only start to fail when we give up on a son, daughter, mother, or father.”

The contrast between Ashton and Kimball demonstrates that if apostles can see and address the world differently, so can local members.

risenFinally, Ezra Taft Benson offers a healthy, edifying testimony of our eternal nature, the Resurrection, and the need for an eternal perspective. It was an excellent follow-up to Ashton’s talk, reminding us of our inner divinity and potential: “As eternal beings, we each have in us a spark of divinity. And, as one who has traveled over much of this world, on both sides of the iron curtain, I am convinced that our Father’s children are essentially good. They want to live in peace, they want to be good neighbors, they love their homes and their families, they want to improve their standards of living, they want to do what is right, they are essentially good. And I know that God loves them.” But all these virtuous desires do not end here because of the Savior’s resurrection: “Yes, there is the ever expectancy of death, but in reality there is no death—no permanent parting. The resurrection is a reality.” Peace between peoples, good neighbors, loving homes and families will not end. They will continue because death has been conquered. I wholeheartedly agree with Benson’s declaration: “There is nothing in history to equal that dramatic announcement. “He is not here, but is risen.””

I take the good with the bad of General Conference. I’m excited to do so each week.

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Here are the other folks participating in this grand scheme who have also written blog posts responding to the Saturday Morning session of the April 1971 General Conference. (If any of the links don’t work, try back later. They are all coming online during the day.)

Beginnings and Endings

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764 - Beginnings and Endings

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post for Times and Seasons[ref]The Assurance of Love[/ref] responding to a 1981 General Conference talk by President Hinckley[ref]Faith: The Essence of True Religion[/ref] that I found challenging. In the post, I worked through some thoughts about President Hinckley’s talk, and I included this sentiment about reading the word of modern prophets:

President Hinckley’s talk was given 34 years ago. I was a baby then, so of course I have no memory of this talk. I did not know that it existed until last week… And I must confess a sense of shame as I read it for the first time and realized that this past year was the first year (since my mission) that I even tried to listen to all the sessions of General Conference. How many more talks have been given over my lifetime that I have never heard? Never read? Never considered? I say that I sustain the apostles as prophets, seers, and revelators, and yet I have nearly two centuries of their official talks given in General Conference and I have never even considered that I might want to go back and systematically read them to see what they had to say. I think it’s time I change that.

Max Wilson, who runs the blog Sixteen Small Stones, pointed out that there was nothing preventing me from converting that sentiment into action. Together with a few others, we hatched a scheme. We decided to start with the April 1971 General Conference (the earliest readily available online) and read them all at a rate of one session per week.

I plotted this out in a Google Spreadsheet and found that, assuming General Conferences continue to include 6 sessions per year as they currently do[ref]That’s two general sessions each on Saturday and Sunday in addition to a General Women’s Session and a General Priesthood Session.[/ref], it would take us until 2029. Late in the summer of that year we will revisit the April 2029 General Conference and finish it up before the October 2029 General Conference begins.

Naturally, because we’re all bloggers and writers of some stripe or another, we also decided to do a post every week in response to one or more of the talks that we’d read the week before. So this post—in which I decided to write about President Ezra Taft Benson’s talk Life is Eternal—is the first in a weekly series that is going to go on for the next 14 years.[ref]My elementary school kids could be back from their missions before I’ve completed this survey. The duration of this project is longer than the present duration of my marriage. Just some examples of what a 14-year project looks like to me.[/ref]

My motivation is pretty simple: I seek to take modern prophets seriously. As members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we believe that our leaders are fallible and make mistakes, but we also believe that they are inspired and serve as watchmen on the tower. I want to know what the watchmen have been telling us. I especially want to look across a really large volume of contemporary writings to see what trends, patterns, and themes stand out most prominently.

So, without further ado, let’s get started.

The first thing that struck me about President Benson’s talk was his optimism. “I am convinced that our Father’s children are essentially good,” he wrote, and then, “Again I say, our Father’s children, my brothers and sisters, are essentially good.”

And then I was struck by the simple beauty and simplicity of President Benson’s talk: “Yes, life is eternal. We live on and on after earth-life, even though we ofttimes lose sight of that great basic truth.”

I spend a fair amount of time thinking about death. Not in a morbid way, but with the attitude of someone who has a finite budget and aims to make the most of it. I don’t know how many years I will have, of course, but I want to have achieved basically two things when my time does come.

First, I want to have felt that I gave everything I had. “We should waste and wear out our lives,” Joseph Smith told the Saints from Liberty Jail.[ref]D&C 123:13[/ref] Time and energy are resources. We can conserve them in the short-run, but in the long run the objective is to spend everything. My father taught me that when I was young, and I decided then to do my best to live up to it.

Second, I want to meet my death with confidence. I’m too keenly aware of my own capacity for rationalization. I can imagine—if I was careless—spending a lifetime as an active member of the Church only to learn at the very end that it was a combination of wishful thinking and agile mental gymnastics that had kept me going that whole time, and that in the end I didn’t know—not really—what was coming.

It’s rather fashionable to discount faith as blind belief, but what those critics do not understand is that no one is more sensitive and apprehensive about the capacity for self-deception than a believer. This is doubly true for believer with an intellectual bent. Anyone with an interest in philosophical can easily invent arguments that take the risk out of faith. The problem is that what that leaves you with is counterfeit faith. Then you really do have nothing but wishful thinking and blind belief.

I’m not sure this is what he intended, but consider Pascal’s famous wager. The logic goes something like this: if you act as though you believe in God then at worst you will die and lose nothing (because there is no God) but at best you stand to gain eternal live. If you act as though you do not believe in God then at best you will die and gain nothing (because there is no God), but at worst you stand to miss out on eternal life. The argument is famous for its contribution to probability theory and decision analysis, but it’s also clearly an attempt to arbitrage our way out of risky belief.

Well I don’t think that’s possible. There are lots of temporal benefits from membership in the LDS Church: longer life expectancy, a warm community wherever you move in the world, a great place to raise your kids. These are all real benefits, and anyone can enjoy them no matter what the truth about Joseph Smith and the Restoration might be, but I don’t believe that in the end these benefits alone—the self-evident, temporal ones—are worth the price of admission. I don’t think they are worth the time we spend in meetings, the effort we put into our callings, or the vulnerability we incur when we tie so much of our lives to a bureaucratic institution run by ordinary mortals.

The real danger is in fooling ourselves into thinking that we can participate in the Church without facing the tough questions. If we let ourselves be lulled into a kind of passive, consumerist version of faith we run the risk of waking up one day and realizing that we got the cost/benefit calculations wrong, but not having the individual spiritual reserves to sustain our membership because for so long our spiritual witness has atrophied while we relied on the obvious benefits to paper over a need to ask hard questions and subject our faith to intense scrutiny. If we do not interrogate our own faith, then eventually life will, and our testimonies will wilt under the inquisition.

Or, returning to my fear, we might not reach our own moment of truth until we are facing death’s final question. Then, for the very first time, we may realize that we can’t rationalize our way around the final question. That’s the motive behind my second goal. I want to be able to face death with confidence because only then will I avoid finding out, when it is too late to do any different, that my faith is made of paper. [ref]Our ward did lesson 41 in Gospel Doctrine today, and I was struck by a phrase I hadn’t noticed before in Paul’s first letter to Timothy: “faith unfeigned.”(1 Timothy 1:5) I wonder if this is what he meant.[/ref]

And this is why, returning to the talk, I found President Benson’s words so full of resonance.

Our affections are often too highly placed upon the paltry perishable objects. Material treasures of earth are merely to provide us, as it were, room and board while we are here at school. It is for us to place gold, silver, houses, stocks, lands, cattle, and other earthly possessions in their proper place.

Yes, this is but a place of temporary duration. We are here to learn the first lesson toward exaltation—obedience to the Lord’s gospel plan.

And also:

Yes, there is the ever expectancy of death, but in reality there is no death—no permanent parting. The resurrection is a reality.

Symbolism and allegory are nice, but they are not what I am searching for in this life. What I am searching for is reality. I want to live with the real sense that my time spent on earth is time spent at a waystation. I want to face death with the conviction in my heart, as sure as my conviction that a dropped object falls to the floor, that I will live again. That is something that wishful thinking and blind belief cannot produce. Only real, genuine, tested and tried faith can produce that.

That’s the kind of faith that I believe our Father wants us to have, and I think that is one major reason why we face a life so full of chaos, uncertainty, and tragedy. If things made sense, we could rely on rationalization and philosophy. We could escape the hard question until it was too late. But things do not make sense. The world is, as Camus noted, absurd. The hard questions dog us like the stubborn hounds they are. It is the very absurdity of the world that gives us the chance—time and time again—to cast aside the crutches of convention, of inertia, of rationalization, of tradition, of herd mentality, and of anything else that can provide a façade of faith to seek to try and find the real thing.

I won’t stop until I find it. I won’t be satisfied with anything less.

Here are the other folks participating in this grand scheme who have also written blog posts responding to the Saturday Morning session of the April 1971 General Conference. (If any of the links don’t work, try back later. They are all coming online during the day.)