On your point about the Roman empire, Christians had differing views, and you can see that already in the New Testament: Paul was obviously only too happy to invoke his rights as a Roman citizen rather than be executed by Jews hostile to his program. And many Christian of the first centuries recognized that the Roman system was the practical means by which they could evangelize.
On the other hand, there is the book of Revelations, but its polemic against Rome was cryptic enough that you can interpret almost it to mean anything you want (I used to watch Jack Van Impe for fun...he saw it as Revelations as an attack on the European Union!). I am sure Kish can say much more about this with more authority than I, but suffice it to say, there was not a widespread antipathy against the Roman empire, and one can easily make too much of the sporadic persecutions that Christians (as well as Manicheans and Druids, for that matter) suffered at the hands of Roman imperial officials. Writer like Tertullian (significantly not "St." Tertullian) were less typical in their views than, say, the 2nd century apologists, who, in addressing their tracts to Roman emperors, obviously saw some value in the Roman system.
What is baked in to the Christian tradition as early as the New Testament, however, is anti-Semitism. It's an instructive example to me: one can walk away from something, de-emphasize something, ignore something, pretend it was never taught, and so on, but as long as its there in the text and in the tradition, it's going to resurface. You can't unwind it.
That is essentially all I'm saying here about gay marriage. The idea that a revelation can just change everything is to imply the reality of revelation, but most Mormons, no matter what they say, have to be primed to accept a revelation. That is why have been so few revelations since Joseph Smith. The fact that Brigham Young's ideas were abandoned almost as soon as he died is a clue about how Mormons have historically felt about revelation. Even the policy that got this thread started is telling; it doesn't do just to say "it's revelation," even if you believed. The Church had similar problems with 1890 (more on that below) but not with 1978 precisely because Spencer W. Kimball was not naïve enough to think that revelation was all that simple.
Kishkumen wrote:There is so much I could say about this. About Option 2: I would submit that the leadership of the LDS Church has already chosen to import the ideas and agenda of radical Christian extremists who wish to create a Christian Taliban. So much for not importing outside ideas....
I remain fascinated by the easy assumption that it is only the liberals who import outside ideas. Once again I marvel at how genius Augustus was. Call it conservative and old-timey, and you can convince just about anyone that the crap you are pulling is native to the tradition, regardless of what you do. Have Apollo and Diana be the focus of the ludi saeculares? No problem! The ludi saeculares are supposedly as ancient as the hills, but who would remember anyway, since the last time they were performed was long before anyone was born.
I don't know. I have a hard time persuading people of anything, so I tend to think that it requires a lot more than simply saying it is traditional and conservative; it may be totally innovative, but it has to be innovative in a way that feels familiar for the people who are the targets of the claim, which is another way of saying that it has to interact with tradition in some way. That was part of Augustus's genius. Of course, there are certain movements that are pure innovations masquerading as conservatism that don't even bother with tradition; we have daily proof of that. I just don't think Mormonism is one of those cases.
I don't argue that there are no external influences but there is an essential fact that I think is being missed by the liberals: the Church did not become socially conservative or even more theologically conservative; the society within which the Church was embedded became more liberal (to use the misleading shorthand) and the Church responded. It was put in a situation, not of its own devising, that continues to reveal a deep conservatism on certain issues. One could argue that it was innovative to enter the political sphere to fight for its position on those issues, but as you can tell, I think the Church's post-war political quietism was really just lack of serious threat from anything external to it, as well as lack of resources to combat threats. Both of those factors have changed—they perceive a threat and can draw on significant resources in attempting to address it—but I think it's still the same old LDS Church.
In any case, some members who were disposed to shift with a more liberalizing society suddenly found themselves confused in a Church that doesn't want to shift, and unfortunately they just don't have that much in the Mormon tradition that is on their side. At least that I can see. I read someone like Hendrix not arguing that there is something in Mormonism of the past that the leaders are ignoring but rather advocating a return to a time when these issues weren't part of Mormon discourse. The broader society is not going back to that, though, so I can also see that the Church is in a tough position on this because of potential legal consequences down road as the deference granted religion diminishes and as the more fluid conceptions of sexuality and gender gain wider acceptance. Internally, there could be a crisis of authority if the Church simply gives in and a crisis of identity if it changes its theology under political and social pressure.
When your standard is building community and emphasizing eternal progress for individuals within that community (as in Hendrix's case), then the Church looks liberal if you are a liberal because the fundamental issues aren't in question and there is nothing to challenge your assumption that people think like you. The Church today still emphasizes community and eternal progress for individuals, but because something as seemingly fundamental as gender is now up for negotiation, one's place in that argument can also define one's relationship to the community in a way that it didn't before. Little in the Church of 1950 would have offended a liberal democrat (the priesthood ban probably being the main issue) and much would have seemed familiar and congruous. But while a "liberal democrat" today is very different from one of the 1950s, I don't think the Church as an institution has changed all that much since the 1950s.
That is why I can't agree with you that the Church has imported any substantial ideas about gender and sexuality from outside of its own tradition. Which ideas did it not have in 1950 or 1890 about gay marriage or gender identity or sexuality outside of heterosexual and patriarchal marriage? I mean, Spencer W. Kimball, the grandson and cousin of the most polemical of polygamists, was born in 1895 and although he wrote Miracle of Forgiveness in the 1960s, I find it hard to believe he was innovating, since that reflected his decades of experience as a church leader at the Stake level and higher, in addition to whatever he imbibed from his Church and family culture (if those can be separated in his case). And this was someone who was appointed to the Quorum of the 12 by an ex-polygamist who had been a Church leader during the fiercest fights with the federal government in the 1880s. I focus on all this because you can draw a line: Grant appoints Kimball who appoints Oaks, and it's safe to assume they appoint people whose views are reliably consonant with their own and who can be counted on to affirm the tradition that each inherits. Anyone with a sense of responsibility to the institution would do that. It's not that people can't make up their own minds but that the probability that they will deviate much from the predecessors is not very high.
In short, even though there is a great deal of flexibility in certain aspects of Mormon theology, I have never seen any evidence produced whatsoever that Mormonism ever entertained the possibility that gender was fluid or that homosexual relationships were anything but sinful. I see it contradicting with doctrine going back to the 1830s and in open conflict with what Church leaders have been saying for 50 years. Even its seemingly radical sexuality was actually quite conservatively pre-modern within the institution of LDS polygamy. There are only three generations institutionally speaking between Oaks and Grant, and while clearly Oaks is different from Grant, he's not that different. What is significantly different are the external pressures the Church faces.
And I agree that there is a way to interpret fundamentalism as a modernist movement, as well, and tactically fundamentalists are obviously willing to exploit anything they can from whatever source, no matter how modern. That can be over-interpreted, however, so far so that it can obscure the nature of what we're dealing with by implying that one phenomenon is just as modern as any other, and therefore that this i ultimately just an extended language game ("look at this, I found an obscure reference that shows my position can work in this tradition after all, if I just interpret a certain way! History/philology/literary theory saves the day again!"). That is I think where liberals generally go wrong, and particularly Mormon liberals. Fundamentalism is a response to certain categories and experiences that modern life has given rise to—or rejected. But the traditions that fundamentalists appeal to are also real things because they carry real authority with real people who have real memories, and they weren't obviously invented yesterday, whereas something like same-sex marriage was. Tradition isn't a rhetorical invention, or at least not only a rhetorical invention.
It's an obviously uphill battle, if it is even a hill worth fighting for in the first place. You've certainly won me over to the idea that liberals should keep doing their thing. If there is to be any fundamental change, it will have to come from the leadership—people need to admit this—but it is certainly going to help some future Uchtdorf if the hard intellectual work has already been done and packaged so that the leadership can market it as a revelation in a believable way. Maybe they are just in the early stages of it (although I hate to say it but so much of it seems like posturing and careerism, especially the MI stuff).
This had been done on the priesthood ban by 1978. 1890 is an interesting contrast here: there was little intellectual shift in the leadership or the membership (although there were many members who were already hostile to polygamy); there was simply a revelatory gesture pushed through under the shadow of political necessity. The result was four decades of confusion and schism. It all seemed to work out in the end but there was no guarantee that the Mormonism of the Woolleys wasn't going to topple or unravel the Mormonism of the Kimballs. I return again to that pivotal figure of 20th century Mormonism, nephew of Joseph Smith himself and patron of Dallin Oaks. The Quorum that Spencer Woolley Kimball joined in the summer of 1943 was itself still riven over the issue of polygamy; apostle Richard Lyman was excommunicated over the issue in the fall of that year, and in that fracas Kimball was witness to the consequences in the mainstream church (never mind the fundamentalists, who were his own cousins) to the strong-arm tactics and politicking of Wilford Woodruff five decades earlier.
The lesson of 1978 is not a happy one that all you need is love and hope and the Church will change because the arc of history has progressive bent. Spencer Kimball had the auctoritas to induce a change in the Church only because he was a master, in every sense of that word, of its tradition. The record is clear that 1890 was not far from his mind in this, and it's likely not far from Oaks's mind either.
Kishkumen wrote:Excellent points, Dean Robbers. Yes, the understanding of gender and procreation could continue to evolve, nay, must evolve, to keep up with the times. Manufacturing humans by splicing together DNA on a Petri dish? No problem, that’s how Elohim’s God Squad did it millennia ago. There is always a way. But the Corporation is like any other such entity. You want to keep your profits up and your customer defections low. You want to find new customers, in fact. So you just can’t go there until the peeps are ready. It’s not so much a question of what is true as it is one of shepherding a brand to a grand future. Roger Hendrix understands this, but he is, at the same time, just a little too ahead of the curve for the Three Stooges (Nelson, Oaks, and Ballard), who understand the prevalence of homophobia among Boomers and even many Gen Xers.
Once Boomers are gone, there will be too few Gen Xers to worry about. (They are the new Silent Generation.) The Church will be forced to embrace gay marriage if it wants to continue to exist as anything more than a curiosity like the odd Swedenborg Chapel or Christian Science Reading Room.
It is telling to me that the Church is so involved in real estate. I learned recently that many corporations, no matter what their originating business function, connect themselves heavily to real estate and finance so that they don't have to worry to much about the future of their particular industry, to insulate themselves from the business cycle at the micro-level. I think the Church is doing that, as well, and they don't really care about expansion in the global north anymore. The more I read of about Oaks and his stuff, the more I impressed that he has a very subtle and discerning mind. I think he knows all of this too well, even if some of his fellows don't, although Gerrit Gong is another one that could run circles around just about anyone (I've met him when he was a Stake President). What we read as cluelessness could just be a different strategy: let the Church membership contract to a devoted and traditionalist core that will inevitably go through cycles of increase and decrease, while creating a Kingdom of God that doesn't depend much on tithing for its maintenance and will thus be somewhat insulated from the conversion and activity cycles.