Why has the LDS Church hewed such a socially conservative line in the half century or so of my life and what does it meant? These questions have been bothering me for a long time and here I want to explore them.
The questions are difficult because they seem to pose a theological question and because they raise an issue that, though evident in my experience, will be denied by others as soon as the going gets rough. Leaders of the Church, and other Latter-day Saints, in my experience, often change the ground of argument when it suits them.
There are some good anthropological arguments for why this may be, including a Mormon understanding and use of language, as Daymon Smith observes, as well as a need to keep an unencumbered religious space open for God and his Spirit to be seen in movement, as I have noted. However that is not where I am going here.
During my years on this earth, I have seen leaders of the Church resist the cultural movements of the sixties, attack civil rights, support the denial of the priesthood to Blacks, insist on the inferiority of African Americans, warn people on the dangers of miscegenation, argue against labor unions, attack social progressives as Communists, warn of the Red threat, support the rights of businesses to exploit workers, attack feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment, negate the value of homosexuals and equal rights for Gay people, etc.
It seems that in this half century of struggles, dare I say “culture wars”, the Brethren as a body, and the bulk of the membership in the US, have been almost entirely on the conservative side. (I realize one can find examples that will run counter, but without having done the data gathering to support what I am about to say, I nonetheless suspect that if one were to track the editorial page of the Church News one would see a statistical support for what I am arguing. In my youth Apostle Mark E. Peterson certainly did a good job of laying out these culturally conservative arguments and giving them religious sanction by his very presence).
I think that perhaps Armand Mauss is partially right. Latter-day Saint leaders required retrenchment, whether consciously or unconsciously, in the late twentieth century to keep the boundaries between Latter-day Saints and the world high enough to keep Mormons attached.
I disagree with Mauss, because this conservative/liberal divide split American religion across the board and created the left as an increasingly irreligious and secular space, though it had not been before.
In other words, it seems there are broad forces in American life, far beyond the Brethren, that have created this divide. But those are beyond the scope of this essay, other than to note that the LDS leaders have embraced this social division and made it their’s.
Like others of the religious right, they have moralized it and theologized it. However, the LDS have also made it a particular sectarian space within the broader right wing.
A Mormonism has been built where reaction against social change that has challenged the privilege of authority, of socio economic inequality, of race, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, among others, can be rejected in alliance with all the others on the right who reject them. At the same time this reaction becomes a primary space for living and displaying one’s loyalty to God and religion.
Within that moralized space of reaction, leaders now face the problem of reworking their position in a new time and place. The ideas of racism have become a burden. The question was how to disavow them, without negating the rights of religious leaders to claim to speak for God and be seen as serious. It is also probable that most of the other issues where they have drawn a line will also become a problem.
In fact, one contemporary issue of the Brethren, the arguments for religious freedom, can be seen as an attempt to retain the claim to speak for God and have it be taken as legitimate, when the reactionary issues they claim--a stance against Gay marriage--are increasingly untenable in the broader society. The issue is not religious freedom so much as it is the freedom to claim that the space of the prophet is the one of calling the public to repentance in terms of a remembered golden age when God was with the people.
This is a strange prophetic and apostolic space. It is one driven by reaction to a larger society, rather than one driven in any obvious way by a religious vision other than reaction.
Though this is an easy and very common way in which religious leaders build difference to separate themselves from the world, in this case it is also an acceptance of the world and its ways. That is what drives the space allowed for prophetic work in these terms.
Mauss is wrong, as a result. While building a sectarian boundary with a part of American society, they are swallowing the camel of the rest along with many others in the religious right, although each comes up with their own religious justification. The retrenchment was also an accommodation with society, a lowering of barriers.
The anthropologist in me sees this sanctification of reaction as fascinating, and a major dynamic of contemporary Mormonism.
I will leave it to others, including my religious self, to parse the religious implications. In closing, I will only note that closing the ranks and drawing lines in reaction forces others from the field. While there are gains, there are also losses.
it must be noted that though this political reaction has been very important. There are positive aspects of LDS religious society far beyond reaction, as Douglas Davies argues. However, sometimes the political reaction can tend to overwhelm the positive.
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