mormon causes that mormons ignore

So I’ve been reading The Lord’s University, an account of issues of academic freedom at BYU. I recommend it for anyone who attended or who is otherwise interested in BYU. Of course, the Honor Code devotees who most need to read the book would never open it or else summarily reject the meticulously detailed research somehow.

Anyway, it’s got me thinking again, for better or worse, on the clear conservative bias of the leaders of the Church, many of whom have been intimately concerned with the affairs of BYU.

What I don’t understand is why the Church decides to inject itself with a hard and fast position in messy debates like the Equal Rights Amendment and gay marriage. Members and leaders of the Church appear to subscribe to the opinion that the world is steadily devolving, and all our efforts should go towards stemming the tide, even though we know that eventually the world will become irreparably wicked. Ernest Wilkinson, the former BYU president who gave us the modern Honor Code and in whose student center BYU cool kids regularly gather to eat from the Word of Wisdom-flouting Cougareat, believed that the USA would soon be destroyed for wickedness and that requiring Cougars to dress modestly and keep their hair short would stave off the liberal agitation that was tempting the Apocalypse.

Anyway, if gay marriage will really ruin the fabric of society and call down the wrath of a vengeful god, it’s probably not the only thing about our society that will. So here’s my list of progressive causes that the Church has ignored in favor of more patriot-friendly ones.

“It is not given that one man should possess that which is above another, wherefore the world lieth in sin” (D&C 49:20).

Income inequity has proved historically to provoke more societal unrest than any other issue. If we’re concerned with the unraveling of society, why do we continue to shout down any support for a system that doesn’t promote a gulf between rich and poor? Putting aside the fact that we accept capitalism a priori as the best imaginable system, why are we so opposed to progressive taxation and business regulation, including actually enforcing the tax code on the 80% of US corporations who use offshore tax shelters?

The oft-cited defense is that even though income inequity has been steadily on the rise since the 60’s, we are all better off than we were then. Well, real wages have actually dipped since then, but beside that, there is absolutely no evidence that the Lord cares about our having a DVD player and two cars. Instead, “this is the way that I, the Lord, have decreed to provide for my saints, that the poor shall be exalted, in that the rich are made low” (D&C 104:16). If equality comes at the expense of ballooning wealth for the super-rich, so be it. Yet it’s a sacred cow, even in Mormonism, that those with means are entitled to an ever-expanding piece of the pie. This is a clear case of cultural bias taking precedence over LDS doctrine.

“Renounce war and proclaim peace… And again, this is the law that I gave unto mine ancients, that they should not go out unto battle against any nation, kindred, tongue, or people, save I, the Lord, commanded them. And if any nation, tongue, or people should proclaim war against them, they should first lift a standard of peace unto that people, nation, or tongue; and if that people did not accept the offering of peace, neither the second nor the third time, they should bring these testimonies before the Lord; then I, the Lord, would give unto them a commandment, and justify them in going out to battle against that nation, tongue, or people” (D&C 98:16, 33-36).

The Iraq war has cost a half million Iraqi lives, cost the US $2 trillion and thousands of soldiers’ lives, alienated many of our allies, galvanized terrorist opposition, set unsettling precedents in terms of torture and privatized warfare, and overall displayed a bumbling, naive effort full of selfish power struggles and unaccountable immorality.

With every day that passes since its miserable inception, it becomes clearer that Bush et al. engineered a case for the American people and Congress with the predetermined conclusion of invading Iraq. At our most generous, we could say that Pres. Bush truly believed that Saddam Hussein had WMD’s. But even then, according to the above passage of scripture, this is not justification for war.

Where were the Saints in pushing back against the rush to war?

“It is expedient that I, the Lord, should make every man accountable, as a steward over earthly blessings, which I have made and prepared for my creatures” (D&C 104:13).

There can be no doubting the importance of the earth’s Creation in LDS theology. What is less certain is our collective commitment to taking seriously our stewardship of it. Salt Lake City has the 6th worst air pollution in the country, and Utah County gets an F for air quality. We blithely watch industrial mining tear down the mountains around us, favoring industry in the imaginary economy/environment opposition. Utah Lake, thanks to the indiscriminate dumping of waste, is practically a dead swamp.

Furthermore, we fail to get involved on a broader scale, even as environmental decay threatens God’s greatest creation: humanity.

“I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose” (D&C 101:80).

Mormons’ cultural allegiance to the Republican Party left us blind to the realities of Pres. Bush’s power-seeking, filling us up instead with the veneer of patriot rhetoric and opposition-bashing. The Bush administration took executive privilege to a startling degree, bypassing the court’s checks on surveillance. He convinced Congress to grant him their Constitutional power of declaring war, and even was allowed to sign into law an act that strips habeas corpus from US citizens deemed (by the Executive Branch, of course) to be “enemy combatants.”



My purpose with this is not to argue for more political intervention from the Church, but for less. The mix of politics and religion, I’ve said before, make for bad politics and worse religion. Additionally, I would like us all to take a step back and try to distinguish our culture from the Lord’s culture and strive to more fully adapt the latter.