REVIEW: Mason, Restoration, Pt. 3 [EDITED]

[The first version of this stopped after two points because I planned my day poorly.]

So Patrick Mason wants Latter-day Saints to sally outside the fortress church and pursue goal he calls re-enchantment, human identity, religious freedom, refugees and immigrants, social justice, and community, as covered in the previous parts of this review. But before outlining those six goals, Mason identifies six areas where our historical baggage hinders this:

1. racism
2. patriarchy
3. nationalism
4. cultural colonialism
5. inequality of wealth
6. fundamentalism

Now this is where things get even shakier, in terms of keeping everyone on board. The six goals Mason proposes are close to running foul of some members' cherished political views, but these baggage items run foul of some members' cherished doctrinal views. That's because these members have doctrinal understandings that are not doctrine itself, but that's a lot bigger of an argument to undertake. And one foul step in the attempt can wreck the whole enterprise.

Nevertheless, I think Mason is right in all six of these items. But being right isn't enough when you're trying to change someone's mind about what they think are the principles of their religion. You have to have flawless arguments, because if there is any error in your logic, the target audience will latch onto that error as proof that the entire premise is flawed. And this is where I start to find the little particulars that I think are bad.

RACISM (pp. 59-60): Early Church leaders were wrong to be so accommodating to the racism of their day. Later theologians were wrong to gin up "doctrinal" rationalizations for that racism. The Book of Mormon itself seems to indicate the same types of racist pseudo-doctrines were held by some ancient Nephites. The overwhelming whiteness of many US wards and branches can lead to behaviors and cultural practices that would make many of our neighbors uncomfortable to worship with us. My ward has about 100,000 people within its boundary. Probably half of those are non-white. But we have a very small number of non-white attenders, and they often have to deal with obtuse comments and behaviors. We had two Congolese brothers move in about a year ago and many older ward members still cannot tell them apart, and aren't particularly ashamed of that. That's not a great look. The defensiveness of some white members when the discussion turns to racism is keeping us from honestly accessing what we could be doing better. It can be true that you aren't racist and that people from a different background aren't comfortable around a group of people who are all like you. Nobody is calling you racist when they point out that we could all do better welcoming others.

PATRIARCHY (pp. 61-2): Just as Church members of the past were sure their racist cultural heritage was doctrinally based, today we have a lot of sexist views that we calmly accept because we think they have a doctrinal basis. Personally, I am convinced that the true role of women in the Church is far from clearly understood today, but until we have a desire to learn the truth we won't receive it. But can we at least start with the simple things? Stop assuming women are for childcare and food preparation, stop referring to men as "the priesthood," stop creating any explanations for the absence of female ordination beyond "that's our current understanding of the Lord's direction," and stop trying to "even things up" through the creation of a cult of motherhood.

NATIONALISM (pp. 62-3): Someday I might relate the stir I created in my ward when I didn't stand during the national anthem. Let me just say here that a calm explanation of the difference between patriotism and nationalism fell on deaf ears. Since the 1950s Church membership in the United States has identified more with the Republican Party, and since the nomination of Donald Trump in 2016 the Republican Party has been more nationalist than perhaps ever before. There are good signs regarding our rejection of nationalism, such as Trump underperforming for a Republican in LDS-heavy states like Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, and Utah. There are bad signs regarding our embrace of nationalism, such as Trump still winning LDS-heavy areas easily. Jesus isn't coming again to be an American.

CULTURAL COLONIALISM (pp. 64-5): Many years ago I had the realization that a lot of the Church's culture can be explained by Joseph Smith growing up in Protestant 19th-century America. God told Joseph to start a church and Joseph said, "I know what church is supposed to look like," and God said, "Sure." But if the Restoration had begun in Africa or Asia our meetings would be drastically different today.

INEQUALITY OF WEALTH (pp. 65-7): This is the only one of these six projects that lines up with my area of interest, millennial social thought (MST). As such, I will write a separate post dealing just with this.

FUNDAMENTALISM (pp. 67-9): I think we've come a long way in a short time with rooting out personal opinions masquerading as dogma. We have men in bishoprics and stake presidencies with facial hair. We have boys in plaid shirts passing the sacrament. You can buy caffeinated drinks at BYU. But like the old saying about science advancing one funeral at a time, this process seems to be moving at the speed of generational replacement. Which is ironic considering that at the forefront of this change is a prophet who must be among a very small group of oldest Church members. We still have work to do, though. The Church contains a large number of members who view science and religion as foes. I had a Seminary teacher who taught against evolution and radiocarbon dating.

Next I will review in-depth the section on wealth inequality, and finally I will address the small bits that undermine the valid arguments.

REVIEW: Mason, Restoration, Pt. 2

In my previous post, I began a review of Restoration: God's Call to the 21st-Century World by Patrick Q. Mason. I ended with Mason's six areas of focus for the future. They are

1. re-enchantment
2. human identity
3. religious freedom
4. refugees and immigrants
5. social justice
6. community

Here's what he means by each of these.

RE-ENCHANTMENT (pp.79-80): Mason means returning a sense of the supernatural to a secular world that rejects all aspects of it. "Anytime we increase faith in the world, or encourage others to do the same, we are doing the work of restoring enchantment in a disenchanted age." Personally, I think the "I believe in science" crowd is ill-informed and thinks they are signaling advanced learning when they are really marking themselves as middling intellectuals. I'm no great scientific mind, but even in my limited reading in this area I have come across enough to know that there is more that surpasses our understanding than is commonly understood. Just in the past year I've read Stephen Hawking calmly claiming that there are around 11 or 12 dimensions and Govert Schilling's book summarizing the latest thinking in dark matter. "I only believe what I see" takes a major hit when science says we can't see most matter. The calm reversal of conventional wisdom on UFOs since early 2020 should help loosen up the disenchantment that held most "learned" people for the past 100 years.

HUMAN IDENTITY (pp. 80-1): In a world more willing to believe in unseen things, we can increase society's understanding of our origin as spirit children of Heavenly Parents. Mason claims that our theology is radical (it is) and that it deeply resonates with people (it does). Assuming when he writes "one remarkable gift the Latter-day Saints could give would be to more fully reveal our Mother to her children around the world" that he means just making this teaching more broadly known, I agree. However, there is not much we know TO reveal than that. Given our Church's cultural tendency to embrace speculation as doctrine, I worry that too much exposure of this doctrine will result in more confusion than clarity. But could it be appropriate for the general members of the Church to humbly but persistently ask for more information to be revealed? What's the worst that could happen? Get told "trouble me no more concerning this matter" (Doct. and Cov. 59:22)?

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM (pp.81-3): This has been an area of increasing focus for Church leadership. If we view this from the perspective of "whatever Church leaders spend a lot of time on is what will be society's main problem in 20 years" it is pretty disconcerting. But let's leave that alone for now. Mason writes our actions on religious freedom are "a model of how Latter-day Saints can ... mobilize in the service of others."

REFUGEES AND IMMIGRANTS (pp. 83-5): Mason begins from Elder Patrick Kearon's fantastic General Conference talk from April, 2016. I fear that many members of the Church whose politics leave them inclined to xenophobia decided to reduce their cognitive dissonance by just ignoring Elder Kearon. That is a terrible shame. This is an area where agreement should be easy.

SOCIAL JUSTICE (pp. 85-6): Here is another area where the political ideas of most members might cause some problems. (As an aside: do these people think Jesus is going to join their political party when He returns? They DO know He plans to come as King, right? That is a role currently absent from the American Constitution.) I was recently at a meeting where our stake's one Black member of the High Council suggested our stake create a community event to commemorate next year's Juneteenth. I think it's an excellent idea, but I'm afraid I don't know how a majority-white church can pull off something like that without seeming pandering or condescending. On the other hand, I've had family respond disparagingly when I've told them my work will be closed for Juneteenth. I said, "Slavery is wrong, so I can get behind a holiday that celebrates its end." There might not be room for the leadership of the Church to do much with a "political" issue, but there's plenty of room for each of us to do so as individuals.

COMMUNITY (pp. 86-7): Mason thinks our Church's "you get what you get and you don't get upset" approach to ward membership and leadership is a good model for building community with anyone around. I would caution that many Latter-day Saints have discovered how to game that system by aiming to live in wards they like. My ward shares a building with the "good" ward of the stake, and our stake as a whole is the poor relation of the next stake to the north of us. In his April 2013 General Conference talk, Elder Stanley G. Ellis shared this tale of "community building":

For 16 years I served in the presidency of the Houston Texas North Stake. Many moved to our area during those years. We would often receive a phone call announcing someone moving in and asking which was the best ward. Only once in 16 years did I receive a call asking, “Which ward needs a good family? Where can we help?”

We can do much better on this issue.

So those are Mason's six goals for the Church in its third hundred years. From my perspective of millennial social thought (MST), the last three seem directly related to my area of interest. Building Zion will definitely involve elevating our thinking and behavior on issues of refugees and immigrants, social justice, and community. What is standing between us and meeting these challenges in a "higher and holier" way? Mason identifies six items of cultural baggage the Church must address. They are

1. racism
2. patriarchy
3. nationalism
4. cultural colonialism
5. inequality
6. fundamentalism

In my next post, I will look into these stumbling blocks in more detail.

REVIEW: Restoration: God's Call to the 21st-Century World, by Patrick Q. Mason

I read this book six months ago and I have been literally carrying the physical book with me since then, figuring I would be more likely to blog my review if I always have the book available. (Don't feel bad for my back; it's a very light 100-page book--Amazon says it weighs 5.6 ounces, whereas my back is usually carrying around more than 4,000 ounces.) So if I've had the book with me night and day for six months why haven't I already blogged about it? Let me just say this: my church calling is hard. Like, really hard. I wouldn't recommend this calling to anyone.

So here's my review: There's one big idea to this book, and I think it's a good one. There are a few little particulars related to that idea, and I think they are bad. The book is bright yellow, and weighs 5.6 ounces. The end.

First, the good big idea. Mason sees a greatly expanded role for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the world, not in a proselyting sense, but in a humanitarian one. He starts by identifying the Church's historical withdrawal from society as a defensive response to persecution. He calls this idea the "fortress church" (p.2). He reviews early Church statements and teachings to find what the original generation of Church members thought the word "restoration" meant. Mason argues that what was being restored wasn't necessarily Christ's church or priesthood authority, but Israel (p. 13). "God's great restoration project seeks to unite all generations of the human family from the beginning to the present and onward all the way to the end of time" (pp. 16-7). God wants to restore people, not things.

This is my understanding of the idea of God having a covenant people. Not that some people are better in the sight of God--we're all His children and he is no respecter of persons (Romans 2:11). Rather, God's house is a house of order (Doct. and Cov. 132:8), and He only called Abraham His son for the purpose of using Abraham's seed to bless the rest of His children. This is what Jesus meant when he said God was able to make children of Abraham from stones (Matt. 3:9): being God's chosen people is an assignment, not an honor. From my reading, it seems Mason would agree with these points. He writes, "The purpose of the Restoration is to fulfill the ancient promises that all of God's children, regardless of the nation or clan they find themselves born into, can and will be 'heirs to the kingdom of God'" (p. 18).

This is where Mason's book crosses path with my interest in millennial social thought (MST), and my main reason for reviewing this book in this space. Mason calls Jesus "the Messiah of the marginalized" (p. 19), and writes, "any restoration we claim to participate in must therefore be primarily oriented toward those who have suffered on the margins of history and currently suffer on the margin of society." Here he's starting to get pretty bold--we tend to think of socioeconomic issues as political issues. "I think he ought to keep his mouth shut about old age assistance," right? But I agree with Mason. After all, if our task is to build Zion we aren't going to do that without some large socioeconomic changes among us. Some Church members who are most opposed to taxation plans they would call "socialist" are in for a shock when they realize what it means to "have all things common" (4 Ne. 1:3). I've had temple-endowed members tell me before, "We aren't being asked to live the Law of Consecration right now." Elder Dale G. Renlund has said, "In the endowment, we covenant ... to dedicate ourselves and everything the Lord blesses us with to build up His Church" (Renlund, Apr. 2023). We've not only been asked to live it, we have accepted the challenge.

Mason identifies six areas of focus where Latter-day Saints should focus on changing the world, and six items of baggage we must address to allow us to do so. I don't even think these 12 things are where Mason goes wrong, but it's in the presentation of some of them that he errs, and I fear that members of the "fortress church" who are already distrustful of calls to do anything except live like a 1950s white middle-class American will ignore the good when rightly identifying the bad here.

But first the focus items and the baggage we should acknowledge. His six areas of focus for the future are

1. re-enchantment
2. human identity
3. religious freedom
4. refugees and immigrants
5. social justice
6. community

My next post will detail what he means by each of these.