Black and White and Authority, a Breaking Mormon Mood

More than two decades ago, now, I spent some time with my Stake President, Kerry Heinz, discussing the articles I had published in Mormon scholarly venues and the transcripts of talks I had given. President Heinz was very concerned that my work would damage people’s testimonies.  

I felt the opposite. We argued strongly, because I felt that Heinz’ approach built people’s testimonies on sand.  

Of course Heinz, who had been a CES man, if I recall right, though he lived in a wannabe palatial home near Holladay, was a friend and associate of then President Boyd K. Packer and represented a fundamentalist line of Mormon thought that included Bruce R. McConkie, and Joseph Fielding Smith. 

These are the leaders who manifested the black-and-white “we are right, damn the evidence”, model of maintaining fundamentals. By using this term, I know I am making this current of Mormon thought -- perhaps the most powerful one in my lifetime -- akin to polygamists, but that is not why I use the term. 

We need to rescue the term fundamentalist from a single fundamentalism, and relate it to the broad current of rigid American essentialism called fundamentalism. We also need to see it in its social cradle. 

Smith, Benson, McConkie, Packer, Heinz, and a wide host of others, were reformers and people who relied on an absolutist thought whose heritage is now showing more clearly its contradictions and senescence. 

They came into power at a time of the decline (or death) of the old Mormon social form tied to the Mormon village and were part of designing a suburban and socially mobile form of the faith that tied people to the Church through providing “answers” and demanding service to the Church, tithing, and statements of testimony built on increasingly weak bases. 

At the same time, they were part of cutting away the social props that sustained the strong social commitment to the faith, as Mormonism became less a society / faith and more a part time commitment sustained by “testimony” and authority. 

They played games with epistemology, the doctrine of knowledge, by defining truth as solely that which comes through faith, is confirmed by the spirit, and conforms to what the brethren teach.They hoped the empiricist issues with the word could be held at bay by arguing devotion and discipline.

Then they went about actively trying to silence or mark with identities of heresy voices that noticed the empirical issues and actively tried to grapple with them, especially while maintaining commitment, membership, and faith. These were not heretics, per se, though there were a few of those. They were people actively working to come to terms with the complexity of the Mormon heritage while maintaining commitment and faith. 

This hegemonic fundamentalism is an important factor that must be taken into account if people wish to comprehend the public rise in doubt and exit today. 

It was, and still is, a kind of mood and motivation, to paraphrase Geertz, Davis, and (of course) Weber, that received official sanction and that colored people’s approaches to their faith and information about it. 

The voices gathered by the Salt Lake Tribune in their survey on doubt and disaffection are filled with narratives in which this mood is present. Its collapse for many led to a concomitant loss of commitment to the Church. 

Now, the anthropologist in me recoils at this elitist vision of leaders determining everything, that I have just painted. 

One must also look at the creation of Mormon middle and upper middle classes, a suburban society of managers and employees, who, like so many other White Americans, found solace in religious fundamentals at a time of massive social change and made in their congregations a home in an increasingly alienating society. 

This fundamentalism, it seems to me, fit well in a religion and society in which leaders were ever more media images surrounded by a kind of effervescence, connected with rigid norms and conservative values, and one in which the former props of middle-class life, such as the nuclear family, were challenged by an economy demanding women work outside the home, the reduced need for family in the first place in the face of growing individualism, and a focus on love, sex, and romance as human needs.  

New beings were being formed and the Church was slowly losing its competitive edge to control them with its dominant fundamentalist mood.

We are in a time of change. A new mood may be aborning in Mormonism, though it is hard to tell with the challenges and shaking of these days. It is probably something we will only see in hind sight. 

It may be that this new mood is being created in the heritage of Eugene England and his more open faith, as well as those who follow it both within the leadership and in scholarship. Scholars, such as Patrick Mason, appear to be playing an important role in creating this new way forward. Of course, we could end up in a restated and smaller fundamentalist Church with tighter boundaries to the outside.  

All I can say is “who knows”. The testimony built on sand failed as something adequate for a faith the size of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It broke at the seams with changing times. Even in Utah we live in a different society from the one that propped up the Fundamentalist mood. 

I personally hope a more modest and informed faith will develop as normative and mainstream, though at this point in my life I am an observer of Mormonism far more than the committed participant I was when Heinz and I wrestled. 

The anti-intellectual pressures from Heinz and his mentor, Elder Packer, as well as the political putsch on sexuality, and the normative right-wing, taken for granted faith is what made me cease to wish to participate in the wards I lived in. Attending Church became too grueling. 

It was not, however, the stuff that  today is haunting so many that was a problem: all the data that seem to challenge truth claims. Those have seldom bothered me.