Two major court rulings have shaken shibboleths of Utah society and in the process revealed some major aspects of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as it acts in the world.
First, Utah’s law prohibiting polygamy fell. While the marriage of a man to multiple women had been a major symbol of ideological difference and spiritual legitimacy, under pressure from the Federal Government, the Church agreed to comply with Federal law and polygamy went underground until, by mid twentieth century, an ostensible split had developed which separated fundamentalist sectarians from the self-stated official LDS Church. The sectarians continued plural marriage and the mainstream banned it.
Part of the ban involved the delicate and problematic relationship between the Church and the State of Utah. The Church is the largest single social institution in Utah and the largest property owner, I believe. As a result, it carries weight in the State through the democratic process and through the power that elites have in any state in the US.
There is an open separation, and a muddle behind the scenes, despite frequent efforts to keep the two separate. However, for this analysis, another issue is important. Polygamists ran afoul of the Church not solely for practicing their beliefs in marriage between a man and women, but also because State law prohibited it. The Church became an enforcer of State law as manifested in religious obligations to follow the law, and the State an enforcer of Church rules as they were encoded in State law.
The great sociologist Max Weber separated the church from the State (a complex concept that includes national government and society as a whole) by recognizing that they both had a relationship to a territory but the one exercised power by controlling access to salvation and spiritual values, while the other claimed a monopoly on a kind of governmental power that has often been translated as violence.
In Utah, the Latter-day Saints are a church in Weber’s sense, despite the fact that Mauss when he writes about the Angel and the Beehive wishes to see them as a sect in an American sense, i.e. a minority group which has a tense relationship with dominant society. Despite the terrible conceptual confusion in Mauss’ work, he is right when we look at the US. But Mormonism, even as a global religious body, cannot be understood unless its church status in the US Mountain West, its homeland, is also understood.
When Mauss titled his book he used the Angel and the Beehive to speak to two different aspects of the Church, but the beehive is also a symbol of the State of Utah as I use it here.
Part of the relationship of the LDS Church with its homeland, then, is a tension with the State, at the same time the Church is also at times not only isomorphic with the state, it coexists in mutual support where the Church props up the State and the State the Church, whether consciously or unconsciously.
A part of that prop has now fallen and that will have an impact whose precise outcome is difficult to determine right now. The Church can no longer depend on State law to sanction polygamy. It will for the time being only be able to depend on the problematic process of Church courts.
Similarly, the State ban on Gay marriage has just fallen and Gay couples are marrying in the State of Utah.Here the key issue has been the right of the State, through the election of its people, to impose norms on marriage in its constitution.
Despite the State’s argument that natalism was an important concern of the State such that it justified limiting the rights of people to marry as they wished, the judge rejected that argument. In this way, he interposed Federal constitutional guarantees of individual citizens in the collective attempt of the Church and political parties to create an mainstream moral code on marriage in Utah enshrined in the State constitution and State law.
This has an impact on the informal relationship of the Church to the State of Utah and the Federal government. As a sect it can exist in dissonance, although Elder Dallin Oaks and others sound increasingly shrill in arguing for religious freedom to protect their right to speak agains homosexuality and on marriage as between a single man and a single woman.
The problem here is the isomorphy that should exist between a church and the State in Weberian terms whereby the Church provides a holy justification for society and its laws and where the State provides a legal framework and justification for the Church and its rites and ideas, its power.
As can be seen in the Federal intervention in Gay marriage, the Church and the State are not the same, completely. Active Latter-day Saints are a minority in Utah, although members in total (actives and inactives are a majority). Yet they are hegemonic. They claim the speak for State values and to claim State history, i.e. the founding myth of the pioneers.
In Utah, there is also a rather large population of non-Mormons who either belong to another faith or are secular. They and the inactive Mormons are a majority and an often not well represented majority in the State’s political Process.
To read Judge Robert J. Shelby’s ruling is to become aware of the part played by Latter-day Saints in the case before him. A bit more than half of the plaintiffs demonstrate in their biographies, as rendered by Judge Shelby a relationship with formal organizations of the LDS Church, 4 of the 6. Here we see the importance of a combination of Mormons and non-Mormons living in Utah appealing to the State for protection against the hegemony of the majority as manifested in the electoral process of creating an amendment to the State Constitution.
Though the State can claim complete relationship to the territory, Mormonism cannot, if its territorial organization is not recognized legally as binding on non-Members. They may feel it is every time they are asked which ward they belong to and as they realize that the LDS Church claims all or almost all of the settled territory of Utah in its ecclesiastical system. But when religion is counted as a matter of individual conscience and not as living within a territory, then there is a significant difference, as we see in this case where there is an argument, a fight, right in the heart of Latter-day Saint families and congregations. There are those who support Gay marriage and indeed are Gay, as well as those who do not. Although fewer in numbers, similar things can be said about polygamists. The sects do not stand for all Polygamists and even the sects claim to be Mormon.
The Leaders of the LDS Church foresaw this to one degree or another. Already after they won the battle on the ERA, they seem to have realized their weaknesses. About a decade later they declared the Proclamation to the world which defined the family in religious terms as an absolute, including divine sanction for gender. They also formulated organizations such as a massive structure to study the “family”, read nuclear family, without grasping the contradictions between such and Latter-day Saint ways, and provide a “social science” support for their arguments, as well as to take the fight to the broad society. It was another weapon in the struggle they had started when they moved against feminism.
They supported political groups, such as the National Organization for Marriage, many of whose directors have been prominent Latter-day Saints, to provide action as civic organizations without the religious taint of the LDS Church. They also joined in alliance with other bodies of the religious and secular right to stop what they saw as threats to the mid twentieth century hegemonic family.
They tried to redefine terms around feminism, gender, and sexuality, to provide replacement words that could function as bulwarks against the movement of society.
They also attempted to draw tight boundaries within the Church through sacralization of teaching and process around the Proclamation on the Family. And, they excommunicated or brought Church court charges against feminists and others who seemed to challenge authority and to disagree openly and publicly with Church teachings on the family.
Nevertheless, the process of social change, driven to a significant part by the very economy they support, has undercut their efforts. Marriage and the family, the understanding of gender, and the acceptability of homosexuality, not to mention individuality, have changed. Though this has provided fodder for decades of sermons, it has undercut the social base of acceptability of Mormon efforts.
As a side note, before concluding, I am amazed that the social science the church has supported and promoted --call it family studies--has had almost no presence in court findings, while mainstream social science and history have been very influential.
Increasingly, the historic and would-be Church in Weberian terms is being forced, itself, to be a sect, even in its own territory. It gambled and lost. The result is the shrillness of Dallin Oaks plea for a new definition of religious freedom and, perhaps, an increasing focus on the international Church where it feels safe, in part because of the rules under which it is able to create itself as a supra national religious body.
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