I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, but I’m not a very good one. The first and most pressing issue is whether I can consider myself a Christian. The Church goes to great lengths to insist that it is a Christian one. Jesus Christ is, we are always reminded, in its official name. But there is something about Mormonism that seems like it deserves a clean break from Christianity (or at least from traditional Christianity). We have new revelation. The Church sadly downplays this by insisting that The Book of Mormon is a complement to the Bible. I tend to think it should be seen the other way around. The Bible is a beautiful book, but has never moved me as much as The Book of Mormon.
Adding to my feelings that I can’t honestly call myself a Christian is that the dynamic between the Bible and the Book of Mormon always leads me through the Quran. I fell in love with the Quran in my twenties and seriously considered converting to Islam. Before I made that leap, I was introduced to the Book of Mormon. I believed the Quran was a progression in revelation from the Bible and that had set in fairly solidly in my mind before I became convinced that The Book of Mormon was progress from that. The latter conviction has kept me in the LDS church for over 25 years. But my testimony is irregular.
For instance, I am fairly certain that worthiness interviews and the concept of worthiness itself is a man-made thing. As such I have never had a temple recommend. I’m not particularly interested in secret ceremonies and covenants. I am becoming more and more convinced that I need to sanctify my daily life and action. I believe that God will honor those mundane choices. If I am not sanctifying my days, then a temple ordinance doesn’t seem like it would make up for that. If I am sanctifying my days then a temple ordinance doesn’t seem like it would add much.
I am not much for intermediaries between God and myself. I still have some small hope that Jesus Christ will act as my advocate when I am judged, but mostly I am coming to the conviction that we are judged on an individual basis and that no one will stand between me and God in the final hour of my mortal life. If there is a heaven (and I’m relatively sure there is) your church by itself will not save you and mine will not damn me. Those who are given much will have more expected of them and I have been given much.
As I’ve said my testimony is irregular, but I have a testimony none the less. I believe that we each have a spark of divinity which is a principle of intelligence. When we gain knowledge in this life, we can carry it into the eternities. When our truth and love and power increase here it stays with us. We are not mere flesh. We have something more to us. And that spark and intelligence is something that lasts beyond our mortal lives. Perhaps heaven is not what I imagine it to be, and perhaps rather than an eternal personal existence our egos are burned away and all that is right with us returns into God. But I think something of our uniqueness does survive a final judgement. Our spark will go to God without being drown in His glory or it will go away from Him to be free from it.
Another primary complaint I have about the LDS church is that our prophets have become idols. It is very difficult for some members to see the real faults of Joseph Smith Jr. and Brigham Young for instance. I am convinced that both, from time to time, exercised unrighteous dominion. For Smith my prime example is The Nauvoo Expositor. It was a newspaper that printed the scandalously unflattering portrayal of the church as being both polytheist and polygamist. I think the accusations were largely true. For the “crime” of printing it every copy of the newspaper was collected and destroyed. But the early Saints vengeance was not satisfied. The printing press where the copies were made was burned. Smith gave that order, when he should have stopped it. He had just given a sermon (The King Follet Discourse) praising, among other things, the principle of free speech. I am convinced that the burning of that printing press was unrighteous dominion, that Smith should have been held responsible, and that his final days in the Carthage Jail were a legitimate enforcement of justice. I also believe that because of this, the hedge of protection that followed Smith throughout his life was removed. To make matters worse, when the mob came for him, he had a gun and shot back. If burning a printing press hadn’t already sealed his fate, then firing a gun into an angry mob certainly did. I still believe Smith was a martyr, but he was not always innocent in general and in this specific instance contributed his own faults to his death.
Brigham Young was a great man, but he exercised unrighteous dominion as well. They say that power corrupts. At the height of his power, he was both prophet of The Church and governor of the territory that would become Utah. I have never lived in a theocracy and wonder how I would do in one. If I had been there when Salt Lake City was founded would I have been able to obey Young? I suspect I would not have. But I also doubt I could have pulled a handcart to Deseret in the first place. I may have stayed with Joseph Smith III and never started dreaming of polygamy. That is the principal unrighteous dominion of Young. If I understand his history even vaguely well, he had 50 wives, 50 children, and 1000 grandchildren. Sometimes I want that. Sometimes I wish I could get the world to excuse such dominion in me. And sometimes I think the Book of Mormon condemned him in his final hours for having more than one wife and concubines. Polytheism and polygamy are either sins against the Divine or they are not. As I just said, sometimes I hope they are not.
Perhaps my interest in the Divine Feminine is what makes me want to draw more women into my life. The Church gives a tiny bit of lip service to the idea that we are children of Heavenly Parents, plural. I want to know Heavenly Mother, but I realize my best access to Her will be through the women in my life who seek Her rather than from me receiving direct revelation. That makes at least four gods in my head. Heavenly Father, Heavenly Mother, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost. If four, why not eight or twenty or three hundred thousand. Gods that is. I would die a hideous though happy death if I tried to seek three hundred thousand women. And Heavenly Mother would be none too happy. Perhaps because I want more gods, I also want more wives. The first runs directly at odds with my love of the Quran but the second oddly does not. I tend to rationalize that there is one impersonal unmanifest God to which all the other “gods” are mere facets. It is the sparks of divinity that pervade everything to greater and lesser degrees that turn into individual gods in my mind. As a principle of intelligence this does not translate very well. It’s hard for me to think of the divinity in plants and rocks as intelligent. But perhaps it works to think of them as bearers of information at least. This is the information age and touching those states of divinity and intelligence is crucial to recovering the humanity that we have lost to some degree to our technology. In some very real ways, the “god” of technology is a very masculine one. The softer and the more subtle gods need a place in this world too. And they are all just facets of a divinity that are within my reach.
I believe that objective truth exists, but that human beings are incredibly bad at finding it, even worse at holding onto it, and worse than that about expressing it after they have done the former two. I don’t think the human race has lost its connection to the divine so much as it is the case that we as a species have never found it. I get flashes of brilliance, rudiments of prophecy, insight into my own divine spark, and a little more intelligence every day. But I want so much more so much faster. Still, I get caught up in games and socializing. I sit at this computer unproductive except for brief moments like the one I am in now. I want the truth, but I am bad at finding it, worse at holding it when I get it, and worse than that at telling you what I know to be true. Thank you for reading.
Latter Day Sinner 