Fathers, Friendship, and Holding onto Your Platoon (or Not)

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

This old Cal Grondahl cartoon, from many years ago, has been on my mind for while:

It first came back to my mind as I was preparing for a sacrament meeting sermon on Father's Day, back in June, the first time I'd been at a church pulpit since before the pandemic. As I've explained before, the ward that my family and I had attended for years officially disappeared over a year ago--and its elimination by the stake, with consequent changes in boundaries which ended up dividing us from just about everyone we were close to in our former ward, has combined with the lock-downs and the many upheavals of 2020 (both personal and political), to make it hard for us to get back into the church-attending habit. The cartoon thus really struck me, because it was, predictably, the husband holding back his hysterical wife, patiently emphasizing the facts of the situation: "there's nothing you can do." 

That's the stereotype, right? When there is a difficult reality to face, when there are hard choices to make, when sacrifices must be accepted and leadership is required, who is supposed to provide it, in the church's official imagination? The husband, of course--the father, the patriarch. It's a stereotype that finds support in "The Family: A Proclamation to the World," after all: “By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families.” 

Sure, the Proclamation allows that "individual adaptation" may sometimes be necessary, and it's not hard to find statements from general authorities of the church implying how there may be all sorts of undefined exceptions to general principles like these out there as well, and that's even assuming you take the Proclamation seriously as a matter of doctrine (which I don't). But still, it's hard to be a member of such a culturally uniform body of believers as American Mormonism and not feel, as I do, at least slightly condemned for being, as I am, a weak father, someone reluctant to insist, in some commanding way, that my family has to attend a congregation that they mostly do not know, and a church that some of them--and, to a degree, I as well--have come to see over the past year and a half as, institutionally at least, partly irrelevant, morally as well as politically, to their lives. 

Maybe that weakness isn't such a bad thing; maybe American Mormon fathers can flip the cultural script, sometimes, and not necessarily play the stoic, authoritative, "there's nothing you can do"-types. (And considering the fact that our church's demographics skew heavily female as soon as you age out of childhood, that's probably an unavoidable flip, even if the cultural presumptions haven't caught up, and perhaps, given our all-male leadership, perhaps never will.) Still, as our family's participation in Mormonism, after decades of constancy, becomes doubtful and worried and inconsistent in the midst of the changes and covid-19 variants still out there, I can't help but feel somewhat at fault.

Lately though, as my family has continued to struggle along, I've stopped thinking about the husband in the cartoon, and started thinking about the wife, and her plea to hold on to her friends.

When Joseph Smith spoke of friendship as "one of the grand fundamental principles of Mormonism" he was speaking cosmologically; he may have given examples that were both personal and social, but his aim in introducing the idea, at least as I interpret the passage, is to emphasize how the friendship among members of the Mormon community will revolutionize the world, bringing us closer to the Millennial peace promised by the scriptures. Holding onto the Hendersons, as the cartoon satirizes, probably has no such theological weight. But...so what? Isn't it possible that insisting upon church activity in a particular place at a particular time, and thus upon supporting the leadership and the structures and the expectations culturally coded into the institutions of American Mormonism, all by way of a theological claim (the father in the cartoon might as well have said "Sharon, those with inspired priesthood authority have spoken; you can't challenge that"), is itself a stereotypically..."male" thing to do? Appealing to the cosmological principle of friendship, rather than real-world associations with one's actual neighbors and friends?

Of course, you will all say: dividing a ward hardly means you still can't spend time with the Hendersons! And that's correct. But we also all know that as fallen, embodied creatures, as creatures subject to human time and space, and subject to so many faults and limitations, we depend upon social structures to enable to us find and build upon the associations which bring virtue and purpose and joy into our lives. A Mormon congregation is, to twist slightly the famous Edmund Burke quote, "the subdivision...the little platoon we belong to in society." (Burke was talking at least as much about people embracing their place in the class hierarchy as he was about them loving their locality, but the general conservative principle holds.) 

We come into a subdivision, and we build, over time, memories, patterns of relationships, referents to people and events and experiences upon which we tell stories to ourselves about service, sacrifice, and simple pleasures. Can we do that anywhere, with any group of people, at any point of time? In theory, yes. But in practice, that kind of insistence (just start over again somewhere else!) valorizes exactly the kind of supposedly seamless, transactional modernity which, on a certain philosophical level at least, Mormonism ought to resist. In actual embodied life, becoming attached to a congregation takes time and costs effort--and as so many of us have experienced, the ward platoon we find ourselves may resist our best efforts at association (or, perversely, may bring out the associational worst in us). Thus to lose a subdivision that, over the years, came to mean seeing and catching up with and being comforted by the presence of genuine friends at Sunday meetings may well justify Sharon's desperate response.

Some will argue, not unreasonably, that the Mormon church is officially moving away from this kind of reliance upon congregational "platoons" anyway--that (perhaps inspired to prepare for the ward-and-activity-shuttering pandemic we have all experienced, and continue to experience) Mormonism is to become a "home-centered, church-supported" entity, and not just in the operations of Sunday School. To which I respond: well, maybe. If such decentralized hyper-localism--indeed, familialism--is to be the future of the faith, with our families (however we define them? or would only a clearly defined set of family associations count, perhaps those with the right sort of "Sharon, there's nothing you can do" patriarchs at their head?) serving as our "platoons," then some things needs to be seriously rethought, callings and boundaries and membership lists being just the start. In the meantime, though, we baptized members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we covenanted members of this particular interpretation of the body of Christ, are called to attend and support and receive the ordinances of salvation in our several subdivided places. And the difficulty of returning to such, for families like my own at least, remains.