In trying to clarify the LDS Church’s position on Blacks and the Priesthood, and acknowledge its problematic past exclusion of Blacks from the LDS priesthood, the church throws itself into a swamp of messy and troublesome words.
It makes you wish for a conceptual rail to lead you through the fog. But there is none, although the statement does attempt to distinguish one. The solid, the constant, the firm path seems what the document calls “theology” and pairs with “practice”.
In the statement, “theology”, seems a summary of what Latter-day Saints think is key to their Church, divine guidance and revelation.
Of course, the word is much more complex. It generally refers to study of of God’s word and the relationship of God to the world, to paraphrase Webster’s dictionary.
The secondary definition of theology picks up something else important to Mormons, ”a system of religious beliefs or ideas.” This seems to speak the Mormon idea of “doctrine”, an ill defined term that seems to simply refer to what is divinely given and perhaps official.
The LDS document relies on this phrase, official doctrine, to contrast with explanations besides the one it prefers of LDS theology and practice.Theology and official doctrine are the core of their argument. Note, though, that the word doctrine does not seem to be able to exist on its own. It has to be official, since there can also be unofficial doctrines it seems to imply. While many Latter-day Saints see doctrine as far more absolute, the Statement implies it is only acceptable if it has official sanction from officialdom.
The Statement contrasts theology and related practice with “culture” and with “theories”. That which is now excluded, unofficial, can be defined safely as “culture”. And, the gist of the ideas now in disfavor can be designated “theories”.
In the background, my background as a Latter-day Saint, I hear the expression “the ideas of men”.
A quick search on this phrase on www.lds.org, shows its relevance.The first hit says that the Church’s leaders, its twelve apostles, keep its members from being exposed to corruption, a rust and rots specifically defined as coming from “mixing the ideas of men with the eternal truths of God.”
Theories and culture, then represent the ideas of men, which should be avoided, while theology and practice stand for “eternal truths of God.”
The word culture has been used for some thirty years now among Mormons as a term which contrasts that which is human with the divine truth that is supposed to be found in the heart of Mormonism.
Yet there is a confusion here, because at the same time culture is negative, there can be a gospel culture, at least according to Elder Oaks. He defines it as “a distinctive way of life, a set of values and expectations and practices common to all members”.
The idea that anything is common to all members in a religious community where the vast majority of the members do not participate is problematic at best. As a result, Oaks claim seems more like a statement of hegemony than one of observation.
Oaks continues to show himself preoccupied with questions of origins (logical or phenomenal). He writes “This gospel culture comes from the plan of salvation, the commandments of God, and the teachings of the living prophets”.
As a result, he sees culture as resulting from theology, which may make sense since Oaks is a lawyer and there is always the question of how laws relate to people, are they a reflection of people’s actions or are they the determinate of them.
Oaks shows this theological bent when he continues to write about “false cultures”, i,e. those which are “contrary to the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ and to this gospel culture”. He contrasts true and false cultures as if they were a dichotomy, and borrowing from the notion that true is a characteristic of that which characterizes the Church while false is that which does not.
This idea of characterization may also be expressed as typify. Something that typifies something else stands for its ideal nature, its essence. This may also involve a notion that the type, the essence may remain the same over time while the representations vary.
I think this idea of a type that is constant while representations vary is at the root of the statement on race and priesthood. Nevertheless, there is still mud and mess.
The word theology presents a challenge, because these things from cultures stick around, whether official or not. They may once have been true cultures that now are pressured to become false.
Despite this assimilation of culture to theology in notions of true or false, there is also a separation. Are cultures wholes, are they practices? Do they include ideas?
We are back at the problem in the definition of theology. Is it simply a system of religious beliefs and ideas or is it the ideas and practices that connect the Church with God? We could also ask whether it is a system or some kind of congeries.
Oaks characterizes culture as practices and, following not just his lawyerly practice, but a common LDS idea sees them as depending on what drives them. He sees ideas as guiding or leading to practices, the stuff of culture. In much Mormon parlance the “ideas of men” are motivated by “concupiscence,” i.e. lust and passions, while theology and the Church are supposed to be driven by God if they are to be true.
In other words, without saying so, the Statement builds on a world divided into the ideas of God and the ideas of man, the one driven by the intervention of the divine while the other is driven by humanly passion. This latter includes the passion of arrogance, which is word often applied to “theories” that are not divine. They are not Truth, in the godly sense, no matter their scientific or empirical merit or validity.
Here is where the statement gets very soft. It labels this latter as culture while the former is simply theology and practice.
Of course to an anthropologist, this is all culture.The Church is claiming a field of divine action in the world that it does not want to be seen as cultural, even though to an anthropologist it of necessity is.
While the Church’s statement, along with Elder Oaks, seems to insist on a clear line separating the fields, this might not be the case. Instead, if we are right in seeing Mormon thought as relying on a notion of type then we have a moving scale maintained by the clarity of a typological duality, while underneath things shift.
This is the kind of stuff brought together in Catholic ideas of popular religiosity, or in many notions of folklore. Popular religiosity is often argued to be the religion of ordinary people that often contains doctrines, practices that though once were acceptable have now been rejected by the elites. To some, folklore similarly pulls together the contrast for the typological clarity of the elites, such that the elite world is proper, while the folklore is backward.
in sum, we have a very messy set of words, as can be seen in the many and varied reactions to the LDS statement on Race and Priesthood. For me, as a student of Mormon society and culture, including the Church, what I find interesting is the attempt to create a space of privilege for Mormonism, especially in its contemporary elite forms, and then the dependency of that attempt on a strict dualism of legitimacy versus illegitimacy on top of a sliding scale where the one becomes the other as times change.
The final intriguing piece, which I have not dealt with much here, is the recognition of the context in which the Church operates. That issue of context seems to be the main motivator, along with the notion of concupiscence, for the dualism on top of a sliding scale. A fascinating relativism has appeared in the midst of absolute truth.
In other words “the rot and rust” that comes from “the mixing of the ideas of men with the eternal truths of God” cannot be avoided. In fact, this mixing may be a major role of the Brethren in their divine callings, as may the periodic rejection of older mixings. At the same time they claim and make real the pre-emptive dualism of truth and the divine, in contrast with the false and the domain of men.
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