Excavating Socialist Thought in Mormonism: Re-reading Hugh Nibley

 

[This is a slightly expanded version of a review essay cross-posted to the Religious Socialism blog here; it is the companion of another essay which reviews contemporary interest among liberation-minded Mormons here.]

Making a connection between American Mormonism as it presently exists and socialism is a serious stretch. Voting data have consistently shown that a large majority of the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the official name of the Mormon church) in America strongly identify with conservative causes and the Republican party. Mormon leaders–both political and ecclesiastical–have condemned all forms of socialism for many decades. The church is organized around an all-male priesthood--with homosexual behavior and gender fluidity officially denounced--and for most of the 20th-century that priesthood was explicitly forbidden to Black Mormons as well. While the globalization of the church, demographic shifts, and top-down policy changes have led to a moderation in the anti-radicalism which characterized the in the church second half of the 20th century, no one can look at, for example, former Republican presidential candidate Senator Mitt Romney, and conclude that his community will embrace socialism any time soon.

Still, times can change. The Mormon Church, like many other early 19th-century religious movements, rejected the capitalist forms which were then emerging alongside America’s expanding industrial footprint, and embraced Christian communalism instead. In both some of its earliest congregations in Ohio and Missouri, and then later even more robustly in Utah, following the church’s violent expulsion from its base in Illinois in 1846, many Mormons practiced, from the 1860s through the 1890s, what was called the “law of consecration,” “the united order,” or “the Order of Zion.” What this meant, in practice, were varying experiments, from one community to the next, with the collective ownership of property, unified decision making in economic matters, and the establishment of systems of stewardship and welfare; the goal was, in the words of an early revelation to Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, that all in Zion would be “of one heart and one mind,” and there would be “no poor among them.”

None of these experiments long endured the Americanization of Mormon society which followed after Utah’s admission to the United States. By the 1910s and 1920s, though socialist organizers saw much local success, among Utah’s miners and laborers, almost no connection was made between their party-building efforts and the communal orders which many Mormons had committed to only a few decades earlier.

Hugh Nibley, a long-time and famously contrarian professor of religion at the Mormon church’s flagship university, Brigham Young University, passed away in 2005. He never identified as a socialist, nor reconciled his church’s communalist history with its leadership’s subsequent denunciations of radical politics. But what he did do was interpret the scriptural and doctrinal teachings which motivated those early experiments, and used them to condemn the exploitative and environmentally destructive capitalist practices of most of the 20^th-century Mormon church’s American membership. His relentless criticism made Nibley popular with Utah’s small Mormon Democrat population--but aligning Nibley’s project with a possible Mormon contribution to Christian socialism is an unfinished project.

Last year, a group of young(er) Mormon scholars took up Nibley’s attacks on America’s capitalist ethos (many of which were collected in 1989 book titled Approaching Zion) in a small volume titled Reapproaching Zion. [Full disclosure: I am one of the contributors.] These writers are not necessarily sympathetic to socialism (some, in fact, are clearly opposed to it), but through their engagements, an outline of what a Mormon Christian socialism might involve can nonetheless be discerned.

While the authors examine Nibley’s ideas from distinct legal, economic, and philosophical perspectives, themes of pluralism, community, and limits are perhaps most important. By basing his condemnations of profiteering, careerism, and inequality on the various ways that early Mormon settlements constructed their distinct Zions--sometimes involving something as simple as storehouses of food which any member of the community had free access to, but sometimes involving collectivized working and living arrangements--Nibley’s writings underscore the perils involved in assuming any singular response to all economic evils. Building alternatives that truly empower people in their communities, but do not make those communities into exclusive localist tyrannies, is a tension-filled exercise.

Some of the authors speculate on the kind of arrangements that might enable diverse, yet still egalitarian, economic practices to extend beyond a single family, church congregation, or business, and how much localism, self-sufficiency, or even isolation might be necessary in order to preserve those arrangements. Others, grasping the hard nettle entailed by those possibilities, argue that Nibley showed how any committed Zion community--and, by extension, perhaps any committed socialist society--would have to accept a level of wealth that is lower that which profit-driven financial speculation and individual competition often generates. This idea is hardly new to anyone familiar with the intentional communities which Christian radicals have built over the centuries: a commitment to non-exploitative labor often means a commitment to work that is embedded in an equally shared common life, and such work is mostly incompatible with being outsourced, expanded, or specialized. Within Mormon circles, which has no tradition of monasticism or vows of poverty, the idea that economic limits are connected to the religious command to build a Zion community where there is no poor is a rare argument indeed.

Nibley himself notoriously lived out this rare ideal (Mormons tell the story of church president Gordon B. Hinckley speaking at Nibley’s funeral, and him observing that there wasn’t a single car in the church’s parking lot that day that wasn’t fancier than the 1976 Datsun Nibley drove for the last 30 years of his life). This gives rise to the accusation that Nibley idolized poverty, which some see as contrary to elements of both Mormon history and theology. Such claims introduce a connection to a longstanding socialist debate. For some, the promise of socialism is a more democratized distribution of the goods of wealth. But for others--and here the Christian socialist tradition speaks loudly--the socialist ideal is appealing exactly because it puts limits upon what the economist Joseph Schumpeter (borrowing from Marx) called the “creative destruction” of capitalist wealth-creation itself. In this sense, Zion--or any kind of Christian socialist community--is worth building in that it prioritizes social goods over distributable ones, meaning there will be more of the former and less of the latter. In attacking Nibley’s description of the Zion communities which Mormons ought to build as primarily small, agrarian, and static, and thus comparatively poor, some of his critics are misunderstanding exactly their point.

Finally there is the question of universalism. Socialist movements have long had their globalist as well as localist instantiations, from Marx’s “working people of all countries” to the Paris Commune. Nibley’s critique of commercialism involved a critique of the dependencies which extensive commercial transactions create, and how those connections can draw people away from the covenants that keep the faithful committed to the Zion ideal. But obviously, as a Christian faith shaped by the evangelical impulse, the drive to make expansive connections is essential to Mormonism, as their own missionary culture makes clear. The negotiation of those rival impulses suggest the need to reflect upon the proper political space for socialist development, whether national or local, and the variety of communal and egalitarian forms that may best reflect the level of economic democratization possible in on different spatial levels. Despite many arguments which lean heavily in the direction of the small, self-sufficient, egalitarian village, the ideal of Zion as Nibley sketched it out nonetheless integrated urban and rural environments. The socialist cause has a similar need to attend to the same diverse demands.

Religious socialism is by its nature an aggregation of insights, drawn from every tradition which recognizes that the integrity of individuals depend upon constructing communities which grant them equal economic and democratic power. Mormonism’s history has many such insights, though learning from them involves digging past close to 150 years of official disregard.

Hugh Nibley’s own intellectual excavations were in the name of a Zion ideal, which many might see--because of its religious foundation, sense of limits, and pluralist structure--as opposed to their preferred socialist one. I find this unfortunate. As Charles Marsh wrote regarding Christian influence on the civil rights movement, the drive to build “beloved communities” takes place “in, through, and outside the church.” To whatever extent scholarly reflections upon one Mormon troublemaker’s attempt to describe and urge upon his fellow Mormons a mostly lost communalist ideal can become part of such a collective building project, it is worth exploring--even if the church tradition out of which these reflections emerge may seem a most unlikely source.

Should Mormons (or Anyone) Hope to Change the World?

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

For many decades at least--and maybe, depending on whose history you most trust, maybe ever since our beginning--the dominant American Mormon mode for thinking about this thing which the scriptures and those who claim to be able to authoritatively comment upon them tend to call "the world" has been to, if not completely flee it, then at least stand at a remove from it: to be "in the world, but not of the world." There's a deep scriptural truth to this formulation, reflecting as it does one of the final statements attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John. But just as many Christians--and, of late, more and more Mormons--have been equally inspired by the tradition of the Great Commission: that we are called to go about into the world, and change it for the better. This means evangelization and missionary work, of course, something which the Mormon church has embraced from the start. But it also means many other kinds of service and charitable works as well--something which, to our credit, we've done our best to get caught up on in recent years.

Jesus taught the eternal value of changing lives through loving service, and that is more than enough for most Christians. Mormons, though, might imagine that there is an additional endpoint to all that going out into and changing of the world, one which which distinguishes us from many (not all, for certain, but nonetheless many) other Christian groups: the ultimate aim of building up the kingdom of God upon the earth and establishing Zion--which for Mormons like me means a community and/or state of being where all are of one heart and one mind, dwell in righteousness, and no one is poor.

There is much which can be said about the theological, ecclesiastical, political, and cultural aspects of this argument--or is it a dialectic?--between Christian resistance to "the world" and the (utopian?) Mormon hope for a real, actual Zion of unity, equality, and love, and no Latter-day Saint in the past century has written about the topic more provocatively and powerfully--if not always persuasively--than Hugh Nibley. (I've written and spoken some about Nibley's ideas here, here, and here.) Last year, though, another voice was added to this ongoing argument: Joseph Spencer's For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope. In his smart and short book, Spencer explores a very specific philosophical matter which pertains to how worldly Mormons like myself think about Zion: how can we hope for something which is, by all apparently and historical experience, impossible to achieve? That is actually a truly vital question, and Spencer's wrestling with it is genuinely challenging, something I didn't notice at first. My belated realization of how good a book it is should be of no surprise to those who read Mormon blogs--just see here or here if you've missed out, somehow--but I'm happy to say it here: if you've ever thought about the why of the Christian call to change the world, or of the Mormon call to consecrate one's time and talents on behalf of such an ideal goal, Spencer's book is one to be read.

Note I said why, though: not how. Spencer's book is directed towards shifting our philosophical appreciation of what it means to hope for something that lies utterly outside our experience, relying heavily upon a reading of the apostle Paul's letter to the Romans, and the entwined concepts of faith, love, and God's gifts. "[H]ope gives up on the world in joyful affirmation that it can--and will--be otherwise," writes Spencer; we must understand, he argues, that Jesus's life and death ushers in the possibility of a hope that "refus[es] to trust in the supposedly self-sufficient, in the supposedly inert and fixed, and in the supposedly total and unchangeable [character of the world]" (pgs. 22, 51). Moreover, Spencer argues that such a "hope against hope" is essential to understand Joseph Smith's fullest teachings about Zion. A "genuinely Christian hope" is that which frees us from (Spencer quotes the philosopher Gabriel Marcel here) "the 'radical insecurity of Having,' from the self-liquidation of every economy of property," and since Smith's law of consecration--which Spencer insists is still fully in force for every member of the Mormon church--obliges us to own our property "as though" we don't, we need to be able to grasp such an unworldly hope if the motivation to act as other-directed, charitable stewards, rather than accumulators and profit-maximizers, is going to have any kind of chance (pgs. 63, 128, 141). I'll say it again: that's a vital shift, and writing a thoughtful book about it is thus a worthy and important thing.

But it is also, I think, a limited thing. It is an argument which insists that we ought to look at ourselves in the mirror and recognize "not only that things can change despite the fact that they present me with an objective impossibility, but also that...I can be an agent of such change" (pg. 27)--a great message! It repeatedly underlines Adam Miller's insistence (including at the very beginning and the very end of the book) that the responsibility faithful Mormons have to work out the means by which they will put that economic, communitarian, charitable hope into practice is finally and ultimately a personal one: "[i]f you do not work things out for yourself, they will never get done" (pgs. ix, 153)--again, a great message! But they both sound to me like individualistic ones, inward ones--which is why I've suggested (both in the review I linked to above and in a too-long, rambling philosophical post here) that Spencer's book strikes a quietist tone to me.

Jim Faulconer--an old teacher of mine, my respect for whom is pretty immense--takes issue with this judgment. "I’ve seen Joe accused of a kind of quietism of thought, but this book proves that charge untrue," he writes. "For he shows that the law of consecration has remained, from beginning to now, a matter of providing an inheritance for the poor of the Church, and he argues quite firmly that the law has not been rescinded, not even temporarily." He quotes Spencer's summary of the law (as he presents it as presently existing) in its all hopeful fullness:

To obey the law is to remain the technical or legal owner of one’s property while (1) deeding away all excess (everything more than is “sufficient” for an appropriate stewardship) in order to outfit the poor Saints, (2) maintaining what remains in one’s possession as a stewardship for which one is responsible to God and for God’s stated purposes, and (3) giving whatever excess accrues subsequently through wise use of one’s stewardship either (a) to benefit the poor directly or (b) to ensure that the institutional Church has the resources to do other work necessary for furthering God’s purposes (pg. 142).

Once again, this is a great--a challenging, sobering, inspiring--message. I do not--not when I truly think seriously about my and my family's needs and wants, and the needs and wants of those I see all around me in my ward and city and world--consecrate all that I could. I don't act like the steward I probably ought to be; we don't have many excesses in our family, but we have a few, and we treasure them, and the prospect of giving them all away to the poor or donating them all to the church to use as it sees best rests hard upon my heart. To the degree to which Spencer's arguments must be understood as a plea for ordinary (and comparatively speaking, quite wealthy) American Mormons like him and me and everyone who reads his book or this blog to gird up their loins, be hopeful, and work towards that demanding--though perhaps also liberating--personal end, then surely Jim's response is correct: this isn't a retreat from action, but rather a charge directly to the heart.

But that doesn't resolve every concern I have, because "quietism" doesn't simply mean "inaction." Rather, quietism suggests a non-antagonist, non-confrontational, accepting attitude towards the world; it suggests a posture of acceptance, rather than engagement. Spencer's book, insofar as we think of one's personal understanding of what it means and what it involves to hope for and work towards a better, more equal, more loving world, is hardly lacking in hows. On the contrary, it is filled with them. But those hows never extend beyond his heart, or my heart, or yours. It is the how of Mother Teresa entering the slums of Calcutta, of Zacchaeus coming down from the sycamore tree and giving half his wealth to the poor, of Ebeneezer Scrooge's reformation. It is a call for everyone, on their own, to figure out how better to love and serve their neighbor. For the fourth time--that's a powerful and needed call! But not a comprehensive one--in fact, it's the opposite of comprehensive: it's piecemeal, it's particular. I like the particular; I think it's vitally important to involve oneself and to prioritize over other allegiances the local. But note what's happening there: involvement and allegiance. Which means other people, all of whom are organized one way or another in reference to the world they (and we) are part of. To engage with any of those organizations, however hopefully, may well obligate us to make choices and experience alignments and disagreements with others--in other words, to say something to or about or sometimes even against the world.

I would never label Spencer's book a call to some kind of spiritual individualism or atomism; that completely misunderstands his many, strong arguments pointing out our absolute dependency upon God's gifts. Yet I fear his analysis at least allows for such a conclusion. He carefully and forcefully argues against the Mormon tendency to put the utopian demands of consecration in our distant 19th-century Utah past or our unknowable, millennial future, and I couldn't agree with him more. But he does this in part by attacking the idea of any kind of "systemization" of consecration, insisting instead that seeking Zion is simply something that each of us, on our own, need to be doing right now, since, after all, there's no "divinely orchestrated communism on the horizon" (pg. 145).

Of course, that's not entirely true, as we still have the model of Joseph Smith's communism, not to mention the model of dozens of experiments with communal economics under Brigham Young, to say nothing of hundreds of other Christian examples of Zion-type arrangements the whole world over. But Spencer's arguments give me the impression, at least, that he feels that if, in our hopeful workings, we decided to critically engage in a changing the worldly systems and organizations we and our loved ones are part of, in the hopes of moving them in the direction of something more Zion-like, we'll actually be getting hope wrong. Invoking the--one more time!--powerful and thought-provoking idea that conditions in Zion ought to be understood as similar to those economic and social relations which obtained among medieval monasteries, he deepens his commitment to an abiding, waiting, "as though not" framing of hope, suggesting that the truest and wisest realization of Smith's efforts to build a Zion community was that "the law of God and the laws of the land" should be "neither directly opposed to each other nor regarded as potentially working in perfect concert" with each other (pg. 140). In other words, the hope for Zion should involve that which does not challenge worldly laws, nor that which makes use of worldly laws. Truly, monastic models of community have much to teach us...but as regards the whole debate over Christians not being "of this world" as opposed to Christians "changing the world" I mentioned earlier, and what a better grasp of hope may tell us about that matter--well, this sort of presentation does seem to stack the deck in favor of the former, don't you think?

Thinking through these issues puts me in mind of another excellent book, James Davison Hunter's To Change the World, which is a fascinating survey of--and a thorough criticism of--the many ways in which Christians throughout history (though mostly American history) have articulated their challenges to the world. There is--just like is the case with Spencer's book!--a great deal to learn from Davison; his unsparing analysis of the presumptions he sees operating in favor progressive change on the part of the "Christian Left," and in favor of cultural preservation on the part of "Christian Right," and even in favor of the "neo-Anabaptist" rejection of both of the above, is both trenchant and mostly persuasive. But only mostly...because, after all, if the power of God's call is to be experienced in this world as not one which makes peace with the world, but also not one which seeks to change the world this way or that, that how can it be anything except, well, a private, personal mystical experience? Hunter's call for Christians to exercise "faithful presence" is wise one (and one whose parallels to the patient world of Christian monasteries supplements Spencer's arguments), and I certain wouldn't say that I've fully internalized all the good things I can learn from it. But I also can't help but agree with Andy Crouch in this review of Hunter's book, which observes that one cannot build a "presence" alone: "movement[s]...require partners."

Partnership, friendship, community, collective sacrifice, building and eating and reaping and sharing in ways that tied and supported and protected the saints all together: all of that was central to Smith's original social, economic, and ecclesiastical vision. Spencer's book takes nothing away from any of that. But it also constructs a notion of hope that I think may, however insightful it is, lead some of us to believe we have good theological reasons to hesitate to orient our hope towards the collective possibilities and gifts always around us, and that it would be truer to God's revelations to focus on the--admittedly!--great and needed and loving work we can do, on our own, in our own way, as we hope to get our hearts right. I would never judge another's vocation. But I have to end my simply saying that my preference (without concurring every postmodern claim he makes) is to see we faithful, we hopeful saints, as Scott Abbot did: "we will own up to our stewardship as creators, and not just stewards." A proper hope for Zion may begin with my shifting my heart to a willingness to embrace those gifts from God which enliven the objectively impossible, but it doesn't end with a refining of that self-embrace; it looks for tools and partners and, yes, even systems and programs and suggestions and criticisms by which the whole community, perhaps even the whole world, can be embraced as well. If not that, well, then, what was the Commission for?

Getting Everything Wrong (Even What He Gets Right)

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

The October 2011 issue of Harper's Magazine features as its cover article a lengthy, provocative, at times insightful, but mostly wholly tendentious anti-Mormon screed by Chris Lehmann, entitled "Pennies from Heaven." Lehmann's thesis basically boils down to 1) Mormon doctrine conveys a particularly pure version of the "prosperity gospel," in which the tightly organized collective acquisition of non-speculative wealth (mostly gold or land) is held up as the ideal characteristic of God's chosen people, and 2) this ideological mix of piety and material plenty has spread through the Tea Party movement and into the mainstream of the Republican party, with Mormon presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman being exemplary contributors to this continuing economic conversion. This thesis--both parts of it--is, to put it plainly, complete balderdash. At one point Lehmann, in criticizing the Tea Party, speaks of their "tortured and largely confabulated vision of the Founding Fathers" (p. 36); the exact same sentence could be used to describe how he treats what he calls "Mormon economics," or indeed how he treats Mormonism itself. Even when he touches on an important point or two that could contribute to a thoughtful story about the unfortunate alliance between much of contemporary American Mormonism and the G.O.P.'s free-market fetishization, he still manages to get the actual argument wrong.

In short, Lehmann's piece is the very model of the modern, high-brow anti-Mormon essay: one which purports to wrestle with a heavy and challenging thesis, of the sort which the much-discussed "Mormon moment" makes relevant to public discourse, and while so doing does manage to generate a fair amount of insight...but then shines that illumination in overwhelmingly false directions, ones that the author apparently has neither sufficient awareness nor ability to be able to double-check. Alan Wolfe's "White Magic in America", a fascinatingly wrong-headed excursion through Mormon history from more than a decade ago, in which Stephen R. Covey's organizational mantras presented the theological key to understanding the faith, is another example of such intellectual confusion; Lehmann unintentionally aspires to that level of baseless, high-powered thesis-mongering, and he very nearly reaches it. Rebutting Lehmann, therefore, requires more than just pointing out all the ways which many of his claims are wrong; you have to talk about how he misunderstands, or just plain misses out on, all the claims that he actually gets right.

Not to say that you can't write a long piece focusing just on what he gets wrong; Hal Boyd did just that for the Deseret News, and he did a thorough job of it too. Very simply, Lehmann's reading (assuming he actually did read it, which is doubtful) of the "prosperity cycle" in the Book of Mormon is patently ridiculous. Even if some libertarian economics professor with good Mormon connections says that the dramatic tale of the Nephite people developing themselves economically, and then suffering tragic reversals as they grow in pride and selfishness, and then ultimately ending their existence as a people in, as Boyd puts it, "utter destruction," is really just an example of the "business cycle" in operation (p. 34)...well, that doesn't make it true. It's just not true, on any reading of church history, that Joseph Smith's purported "awe of gold" (forgive me for not taking seriously such thoroughly discredited works as those of Fawn Brodie and John L. Brooke here) became part of "a theology of New World abundance" (p. 35). The Book of Mormon can, of course, be read in all sorts of diverse ways, as any scripture might be. But Lehmann is simply making stuff up when he draws connections from the Book of Mormon--building upon such misreadings as the notion that Jacob 2:17's reference to "your brethren...[becoming] rich like unto you" is comparable to some Kiwanis Club notion of corporate do-gooding, whereas it is actually a condemnation of wealthy Nephites who dressing in fine clothes, putting on airs, and failing " to clothe the naked, and to feed the hungry, and to liberate the captive, and administer relief to the sick and the afflicted" (Jacob 2:19)--to the idea of a whole religion that draws its adherents together through a promise of God's approval of material wealth. The fact that the American Mormon economic thinkers he cites "don't really experience any such tensions" over the idea of wealth accumulation (p. 37) is an indictment of those Mormon thinkers themselves and the American Mormon political culture in which they are doing their thinking (and not even an accurate one, at that; Lehmann makes no mention of influential Mormons like the liberal Democrat Harry Reid or the quasi-socialist Hugh Nibley), not an indictment of the religious texts at the heart of the faith. Lehmann's statement that "one scours the endless, incantatory pages of Joseph Smith's revelation in vain for any suggestion that wealth complicates the lives of believers" (p. 34) only demonstrates, as Boyd shows at length, not only Lehmann's utterly flawed grasp of what "Joseph Smith's revelation" includes, but also that the man probably never so much as cracked open one page of the Doctrine and Covenants (which is, you know, only part of the standard works for the church).

Well, I could go on, but the point is made: there is no solid foundation to Lehmann's allegations about "Mormon economics." What is more disappointing, though, and what makes a particularly frustrating example of high-brow anti-Mormon writing, is that he's not just making things up--there is something real to what he's observing. American Mormons do tend, by and large, to think about wealth in ways that are different from many other Christians, to say nothing of many other Americans. For reasons that have at least as much to do with our church culture's development through a history of political persecution and geographic isolation as with anything in our scripture, many American Mormons are infatuated with ideas of self-sufficiency, individual responsibility, and independence from government. Lehmann aligns this perspective with the prosperity gospel and the Tea Party (pp. 36, 41), and in making that alignment he's advancing an electorally plausible, if theologically flawed, argument. But it's the wrong argument to make. The right argument to ask--and which he would have asked, one suspects, if he hadn't been primarily interested in simply holding up Mormons as money-obsessed villains at a time of great economic distress and disagreement--is why that alignment has any plausibility at all, given the distinct groundings which separate Mormon economic thought and practice from most of modern-day capitalism. Asking that kind of question might have opened up important lines of inquiry about both Mormonism and capitalism itself--but of course, doing that wouldn't have given him much of a punch line.

What are the "distinct groundings" that I'm talking about? Lehmann asserts, repeatedly, that Mormons festishize tangile, material assets: Joseph Smith hunted for gold and set up a bank; Brigham Young set up vast business cooperatives; and Mormonism produced the flaky and bizarrely high-selling economics guru Howard Ruff, who has been urging people since the 1979 to fight socialism by investing in land and gold (pp. 35, 37, 39-40). There is something to that, of course: my father surely wasn't the only Mormon conservative who read Ruff and Cleon Skousen, picked up material from the John Birch Society (strongly promoted by former church president, Ezra Taft Benson), and as a result invested in a small canvas bag full of gold and silver bars which sat in our basement for who knows how many years. But he's missing the point, even when he all but states it clearly. The economic thinking which has emerged from the Mormon church in America has tended to be "deeply corporatist," full of joint-stock companies and cooperative welfare plans, and premised upon a kind of pioneer ethic: Lehmann quotes Kim Clark, former dean of the Harvard Business School, as saying that his whole outlook begins with being brought up in a home where the children were expected to "make our bed, do the dishes, do our chores, and go to Church" (p. 38). You do what you're supposed to do; you remain part of what you're supposed to remain a part of. What is all this? It is, in a word, non-speculative. It is a vision of an orderly and sustainable and faithful and economically sound life that doesn't admit much, if any, of the sort of risk, ambition, complex creativity, and appeals to profit upon which modern finance capitalism mostly operates.

Lehmann essentially passes over the Mormon church's entire history of cooperative economics and attempts at local consecration practices; he reduces it all to a couple of sentences about how one early Mormon leader, before his conversion, had been an evangelical socialist. That's a huge flaw, one of many such flaws, in his article. However, consider what he does identity from out of those decades of Mormon economic history: the fact the the Mormon church has a tradition of binding its people together, and together they build things. Real things. Irrigation canals, food banks, welfare farms--indeed, hundreds of communities all throughout the American West. Well, now if you want to believe there is such a things as "Mormon economics," and that those Mormon economics fits right in with the paranoid, anti-government, economic-independence mindset of the present-day Republican party...doesn't that present something a little strange? Why all this joining up, and building up, of fairly staid corporate forms? How does that fit into a modern capitalist state when most of the wealth being created in the country is being done under the terms of (and, for that matter, most of it exists in the hands of) institutions of speculation and investment and rapid growth and turn-over? Since the financial meltdown of 2008, if you've been willing to listen to some of the confused voices of the left, or listen even more carefully to some of the most marginalized voices on the right, you'll will have heard this exact point made again and again: the real problem isn't so much (or isn't just) capitalism, but an unregulated, over-sized and over-grapsing, too-big-to-fail, government-entwined capitalism. This would seem to suggest that the Mormon economic argument, if there really is one (and some of us would desperately like it if our fellow church members recognized or remembered that there is such an argument out there), ought to be one that uses its supposed "obsession" with material, practical, personal and possessable and shareable wealth to critique the world of Wall Street bankers and corporate CEOs from the right (or even from the left, though that ship has, unfortunately, probably sailed). I mean, we are talking about a world where economics has become an abstract and elite game in which we all are, in essence, expected to embrace our dependency, and--whether we admit it to ourselves or not--pathetically beg for either big government to let loose with money to save the banks and hence our credit card interest rates (because I'm buying all my groceries on credit now anyway), or for big business to free itself from public obligations and redistributive taxation (because who needs libraries and school teachers and public parks anyway?) and start some of that wonderful "job creating," preferably right here where I live. No, neither of those attitudes seem particularly Mormon--at least, not the corporate, cooperative, tangible, practical, material, debt-avoiding, pioneer-oriented Mormonism that Lehmann unintentionally touches upon in his article. And that suggests an even greater paradox: the prime Mormon candidate for president, the focal point of so much of this attention, is Mitt Romney, who...made his millions in equity-fund management? Who pioneered a whole industry of leveraged buyouts, corporate take-overs, and economic restructuring? And who, of course, strongly supported the TARP bank relief bailouts in 2008? How odd. How...un-Mormon, perhaps?

Alan Wolfe did a slightly better job with a later, second high-brow essay on Mormonism, "Mormons and Money," which plowed somewhat similar ground to Lehmann's. But in that essay, Wolfe didn't dig into--and thus, like Lehmann, unintentionally (if wrongheadly) expose--any kind of purported Mormon economic ethic. He focused on the notion that Mormonism is a practical religion, a "this-worldly" religion, and hence that we tend to be organizational people, people who build, and thus like those who build well. Romney has certainly built well--and, if he becomes president, he'll no doubt be able to build even more grandly. Lehmann's clumsy attempt to show that the crackpot right-wing is, in some fashion, irreducibly Mormon, accomplishes really only one good thing: it presents the thought that maybe, just maybe, not all economic building fits into the corporate vision (a vision which, I would insist, even if Lehmann leaves it out, includes a healthy dose of equality and humility) of Mormonism. Which would imply, if you can believe it, that Romney's financial success, and his possible success in winning over Republican party primary voters, may be happening exactly to the degree he, and the people who are supporting, have forgotten an important lesson of this hypothetical "Mormon economics." Now that would have made a fascinating, provocative article. But Lehmann would have had to have actually done some reading first if he wanted to write that one.

The Scriptorian

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

[This is a pretty thoroughly Mormon-centric post, one which doesn't take the time to explain beliefs and language of my church which are well understood by members. You've been warned.]

My first encounter with Jim Faulconer came on my mission to South Korea. I'd been in the country about a year, and my companion at the time had an older brother who was studying philosophy back at BYU. He sent his younger brother a recent essay by Jim: "Self-Image, Self-Love, and Salvation", a masterpiece which has since been reprinted and celebrated and attacked many times. I don't know why this fellow thought his brother would like or need the essay: perhaps it just struck him as a great piece of writing, or perhaps he thought his brother would relate to Jim's own experiences as a missionary in South Korea more than 20 (now more than 40!) years before, or perhaps he thought his brother would value Jim's advice. If the last of these, he misjudged his brother greatly; my companion looked through the essay, turned to me and said (if my memory is accurate, which it probably isn't) "This guy just doesn't like people being successful and making money!", and threw it in the trash. I retrieved it, read through it, and realized several things, among them: 1) this man, James E. Faulconer, has put into better words than I ever could at least a portion of the many inchoate and confused thoughts I had about my situation as a missionary and a Christian, and 2) that I want to read everything he'd ever written, or every would write.

As it turned out, Jim's thoughts, profound as they were (and are) didn't do much to prevent me from being a pretty crappy missionary, but I have attempted diligently to read just about everything Jim has written in the years since, and I have been blessed by that determination. Let me take a few moments to attempt to explain why.

Earlier this year, the Neal A. Maxwell Institute released a collection of Jim's religious essays, Faith, Philosophy, and Scripture. I'm late to the party in talking about it; Blair Hodges reviewed it here, and Adam Miller has practically written his own book about the book here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. I won't review it myself, partly because there's too much to say about the profound ideas which Jim has packed into these essays on the nature of theology, the function of reasoning, the operation of memory, the meaning of idolatry, the historicity of scripture, and much more; partly because if I were to review it wouldn't be able to avoid some whiny complaining about it (why weren't some of Jim's very best and most important works--the aforementioned "Self-Love" essay, his essay on Walter Brueggemann's postmodern reading of the Bible, his essay on sexuality and community in the Adam and Eve story, his essay on the mystery of divine embodiment--included?); but mostly because reviewing the essays in the book--every single one of which is worth reading and pondering at length--would get in the way of reviewing the overall message of the book, and of the man.

Towards the end of what I think to be the most succinct and most insightful (but your mileage many very) essay in this collection, "The Writings of Zion", Jim writes:

Because we have continuing revelation, within mortality there can be no end to the work of interpretation that enacts the establishment of Zion. There can also be no end to work because we live together in an organic rather than a static whole. And there can be no end because we have not yet come to an end: as temporal, living beings, we are not always the same, unchanging from moment to moment; we live in that we continue to come to be, in that we continue to renew our life. We hopefully await the Apocalypse, the final revelation of the Son of God, his reign. Awaiting it, we must continue to renew our hope and expectation of that revelation, for ourselves and for others, by continuing to read, interpret, and reread. The medieval scriptorian's motto--lege, lege, lege, labore, ora, et relege; "read, read, read, work, pray, and reread"--must also be ours (p. 149)

There is a lot packed into those sentences. You see Jim's commitment to the Heideggerian and Levinasian concerns of continental philosophy, taking up our experience in the world as something best understood as something enacted, something coming-to-be, something which is always-already situating us in the presence of one another. You see his strongly Augustinian (or merely Pauline?) sense of our condition as one of abeyance, of waiting and attending upon that over which we can have no mastery or ownership. Most of all, you see his dedication to the texts before him, the revelations which we have received and accepted as canonical (which is a fascinating theoretical problem all its own). On the very first page of is short book, Scripture Study: Tools and Suggestions, Jim repeats that scriptorian's motto: read, read, read, work, pray, reread. That is what we have to do, in a sense all that we have to do--for once one has received a gift (for that his what Jim ultimately considers scripture to be), a gift that calls out to one, what else is there to do but continuing open it, and receive its call, and interpret its judgment, again and again and again? Anything else--anything that would aim to boil the scriptures down to a set of correlated bullet points and theological propositions--is misunderstanding our situation in this world, as children of God that have been called to Zion, to respond to Zion, to build Zion, and have the resources to do so within us and on our nightstands and library shelves, if we would only stop trying to be finished with them ("Well, I guess I've mastered the Book of Mormon now!"), and instead recognize that we have to always get on with interpreting them. Not willy-nilly; we are and should be guided the community we are part of, and the authority which that community entails. But those are, nonetheless, only guides to reading, not the reading, the gifting, itself; substituting the guides--the lesson manuals, the received wisdom that "everybody knows"--for the reading itself is to miss the point of the call entirely.

Jim learned this lesson early. In a story that he has shared several times, he describes how as a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University he learned, slowly but surely, how to read through the example of Stephen Goldman, a professor of philosophy and lay leader in his Jewish congregation:

I asked if he would allow me to study part of the Old Testament with him. He agreed and asked me to propose a course of study for the next quarter. "Well, since I don't want to go too fast, why don't we just read the book of Genesis?" I said. He was amazed. Though I thought studying one book of scripture in eight weeks was a snail's pace, he thought it impossible to do that much reading in so short a time. He suggested that we read only chapter 1. Since that was equally amazing to me, we compromised on "as much as we can get through." He warned me that we might not get very far, and we didn't. We barely made it through chapter 3, and he obviously felt pushed.

The first day we met, I had read all of chapter 1 and at his request brought several questions with me. One of them was, How do you reconcile the account of creation in this chapter with what is taught in science class? He refused to discuss that question. He did not think it interesting; it was not worth the time. There were, he said, much more important things to discuss, things pertinent to our lives and salvation. Professor Goldman allowed me to ask my other questions, and he had no trouble answering them. In fact, he answered each so completely that at the end of the hour I still had questions that needed to be answered.

At our next meeting, he finished answering my list of questions and asked if I had more. "No," I said, "I'm ready to move to chapter 2." "Before we do so," he asked, "do you mind if I ask a few questions?" That was a trick question, for he began talking about and asking questions about the details of the scriptures, questions that, by focusing on those details, went on and on. He asked about words and patterns of words, pointing out things I had never seen or had thought inconsequential. In almost every case I had no answers for him or felt that the answers I had were shallow and inadequate. But he was patient with me. As I fumbled for answers, he began to explain what he thought some answers to his questions might be and how the things he noticed were important....

For me, that was a turning point in my scripture study. Though I thought I knew the importance of the scriptures, and though I had found them comforting and delightful and enlightening before, I had never experienced them like this. In Doctrine and Covenants 18:34–36, the Lord says, "These words are not of men nor of man, but of me; wherefore, you shall testify they are of me and not of man; For it is my voice which speaketh them unto you; for they are given by my Spirit unto you, and by my power you can read them one to another; and save it were by my power you could not have them; Wherefore, you can testify that you have heard my voice, and know my words." For the first time, I felt that I really knew what this scripture meant. I had experienced the voice of the Lord in the scriptures. Though I knew intellectually that the scriptures reveal all things, especially when coupled with direction from a living prophet, I had never before known this truth in my heart....

Before studying with Professor Goldman, I memorized doctrines and scanned scriptures for evidence that would support the doctrines I believed. After studying with him I realized that although that kind of scripture study is essential, our learning is vastly improved if it is done against the background of close reading I learned from Professor Goldman. The irony is that I learned this from someone outside the church, even though the prophets and the scriptures had already told me that it was possible. [Scripture Study, pp. 3-6]

A close reading of the scriptures, for Jim, takes away from us the kind of proposition arrogance which he associates with much of the epistemology of modern philosophy, and perhaps even the kind of theological thinking that has been with the Western world since the ancient Greeks. It's the sort of arrogance that my mission companion actually summarized very well in his intitial reaction to Jim's essay: the belief that, actually, when one really gets down to business, that there are answers out there, answers that will solve problems and put money in your pocket and result in success (baptisms, promotions, whatever: aren't they all the same?) But of course, that's not true. Properly, the call to Zion which is conveyed through the scriptures is one that "allows us to question ourselves and our world" (p. 63); it is something which should lead us to feel "mastered by something" besides ourselves (p. 100); it grants us a feelings of "foolishness and humility" (which is not the same, he immediately adds, as feeling "dumbstruck" or having "no confidence in what we say"; Jim is no relativist) (p. 124, 145); most importantly, it is something that is much larger and more important than its actual content: it is the context, the calling, the covenant, the saying, which is absolutely crucial (p. 139):

We often speak of and use scripture as if it were a set of propositions that are poorly expressed or, at best, "merely" poetic. We then try to discover the propositional content (doctrine) that we assume is lurking behind or implicit in those poorly expressed or poetic expressions and to disentangle the relations of those propositions. But that approach misunderstand scripture....

We usually read the scripture as if it were naive philosophy and ontology, looking for the principle of principles, for the theos that stands behind what we are reading, asking constantly the question, "What is it?"--even when we want to ask the question, "What must be done?" We are taught to read scripture that way from our births, both inside and outside the church. That way of reading scripture is something we share with many....Like the image of good traditional philosophers, those who read the scriptures in this way take the gospel to be a set of doctrinal propositions that one is to learn, and they take the scriptures to be a record of those principles and propositions behind which the "theological" gospel hides. When we read scripture this way, it is as if we assume that God is simply a poor writer--or that he chooses poor mouthpieces--and he finds himself unable to lay out clearly and distinctly, in an ordered fashion, the principles he wants to teach us. With amazing hubris, we assume it is our job to do the work he was unable to do, the work of making everything clear, distinct, and orderly. (pp. 63, 211)

Obviously, you can see why Jim, when he writes his wonderful guides to our weekly Sunday school curricula over at Times and Seasons and Feast Upon the Word, is always subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) bucking against the norms of the community he has committed himself to; he thinks we're mostly reading and teaching the scriptures all wrong, and we should be looking for questions, rather than answer. Jim doesn't much indulge in the role of a critic; he's not one to aspire to the classic prophet/truth-teller role, like Hugh Nibley. (I sometimes think that's unfortunate--but then again, someone who took the time to organize their insights and their questions into a strong challenge against their various church and civic communities might not always have the ability to do the kind of careful reading which Jim does, as a comparison of his footnotes with Nibley's will quickly make clear.) Mostly, and appropriately, if he criticizes anyone it is himself, which is perhaps what first made him so appealing to me: here is someone who knew he was a bad missionary, and who really didn't know which model of "missionary success" to follow, or even if such a thing is possible. 40 years later, Jim still isn't sparing himself; in a passage that I find beautiful in particular because of its lack of drama, he reflects upon a chance encounter with another couple, and how that encounter made it indisputably clear to him that "this man and woman loved their daughter more than I loved mine" (p. 24). That kind of judgment is important to Jim, as it should be important to us: he does not (or at least, so it appears on the basis of his writings, and more importantly so it appeared on the basis of the example he presented to me when I ended up studying philosophy in his classes at BYU as well) make these close readings a Pharisaical fetish: the constant interpretation that we are called into by the scriptures is not an invitation to Rortian relativism or elite, educated distance; it is about judgment and testimony. Not the kind of testimony which we should all hope for, and which he is grateful to possess (though he also recognizes that not everyone who seeks such spiritual blessings will receive them, and confesses ignorance as to why that may be--p. 13); but perhaps a "second-order testimony," one that through its encounter with the challenging and interpretation-demanding calls of scripture "testifies of the bedazzlement of the divine transcendence that reveals itself in religious life" (pp. 40, 85). That "second-order" is the best which Jim thinks his philosophy can offer; other than that, he just reminders his fans (of which I am one of many) to stop spending so much time thinking about such things, and get back to work, and most of all, get back to the scriptures.

There is more that I could say about Jim's overall intellectual contribution to Mormon thought and letters, and not all of it would be entirely positive. (There is in some of these essays, for example, as I think to be the case in a lot of contemporary Mormon intellectual writings, a vague pro-Catholicism and anti-Protestantism at work--see pp. 171-172.) But overall, I can't help but think that Jim is an absolute treasure to the Mormon community today. God, I suspect (and I suspect that Jim would agree with my suspicion--that is assuming he even ever reads this essay, which I suspect he won't; he's not that vain) doesn't really care if any of us end up being a "treasure" to anything besides the people we meet, the people we love, the people we serve, the people we can bring joy and solace and blessings to: that's God's community, right there, the one instantiated by the interpretive work, the waiting work, all Christians (and Mormons) are enjoined to by the revelations found in the scriptures. If it so happens that this community takes a particular ecclesiastical form, wonderful; and if it so happens someone's thinking can make that particular community a little bit better, a little bit more loving, a little more receptive to the call of Zion, all the better. But in the church or out of it, Jim's call--which was the scriptures call first--remains. Thank heavens for that.