Power and Corruption

Corruption is in the news almost constantly these days. Of course, we’re all aware of the old saw that power corrupts, but perhaps we are not aware of the context. Lord Acton was writing to Bishop Creighton in 1887 about the problem of writing history about the Inquisition: “I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”

As I’ve watched the impeachment proceedings unfold, I can’t help but think that Acton could very well have been writing about our day. Half of the country, it appears, is disposed to judge Donald Trump differently than they would just about anyone else and to presume that he does no wrong. And the heresy appears to be prevalent, especially among Evangelicals and many Mormons, that the office of president has sanctified the holder of it. But these people are playing with moral fire.

Science fiction writer David Brin made an astute observation in his novel The Postman (1985), which Frank Herbert echoed in Chapterhouse: Dune, published the same year: “It’s said that ‘power corrupts,’ but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable.” Brin also describes Donald Trump with eerie prescience. But I would modify his observation somewhat. Power doesn’t just attract the corruptible; it attracts the already corrupted. No one could claim that Donald Trump has been corrupted by the power of the presidency. He was fully corrupt long before he surprised himself by winning the electoral college vote.

And now another highly corrupt politician, “Moscow Mitch” McConnell, is prepared to do Trump’s bidding and hold a sham trial in the Senate. Where will it end? Hopefully at the ballot box next November.

I am tremendously saddened by another news story that broke just today. The Washington Post is reporting that a whistleblower who worked for the LDS Church’s investment corporation, Ensign Peak Advisors, filed a complaint with the IRS on November 21 that the Church has misused tithing funds and broken federal tax law by stockpiling surplus donations (to the tune of a reported $100 billion) instead of using them for charitable purposes, and also using donations to rescue a couple of floundering Church-owned businesses.

I am not going to rush to judgment. This is a very preliminary report, and the Church is making no statements yet. It may be that everything has been done according to the law. But the numbers alone raise significant questions. “According to the complaint,” the Post reports, “Ensign’s president, Roger Clarke, has told others that the amassed funds would be used in the event of the second coming of Christ.” If this is true, I have two questions. Why, at the Savior’s coming, would the Church need tens of billions of dollars in cash?  We generally understand that the Savior will come during a time of terrible upheaval. I suspect that this would involve a global economic collapse. In such an event, wouldn’t money be worthless? And I keep thinking how much good could be done in the present for the poor, the sick, and the elderly of the world with $100 billion or even some fraction of that amount.

The Post article closes with a quote from President Hinckley. Asked by a German reporter why the Church does not publish its financial records, President Hinckley answered, “We simply think that information belongs to those who made the contributions, and not the world.” I find this a rather bizarre statement. I don’t know of any ordinary member of the Church who faithfully pays tithing who has seen a financial report from the Church in the past 50 years. These reports used to be published annually. But that practice ended decades ago. I’ve been concerned about the secrecy regarding Church finances. Usually the reasons for keeping secrets (see Donald Trump’s tax returns) are not very compelling. Secrecy usually indicates that a person or an organization has something to hide. I hope this is not the case with the Church and this complaint.

Time will tell.

How Can a Latter-day Saint Vote Republican in Trump’s America?

I’ve taken a bit of a break from blogging. Life’s been busy, and I’ve been working on a long and rather involved article on cosmology, but I’ve also just needed a rest. However, after the events of the past few weeks, especially the impeachment proceedings and the Republican response to it, I simply cannot remain silent. Especially when so many of my coreligionists seem to be caught in a web of lies that they apparently can’t see (or perhaps refuse to see).

A serious question among Latter-day Saints used to be, can a good Mormon be a Democrat? And many Church members seriously doubted that the answer could be yes (despite the fact that President James E. Faust, Elder Marlin K. Jensen, Elder Steven E. Snow, and other General Authorities were indeed Democrats). But I would submit that this question has now been turned on its head. When you consider what the Republican Party has become in recent years, I seriously wonder how any informed and morally committed Latter-day Saint can justify supporting this party.

The Republican Party of Ronald Reagan or even of George W. Bush is long gone. It has been going for some time, but it is now fully gone. The GOP is now the Party of Trump, with all that this implies. The Republican Party is now:

1.  The Corruption Party. Donald Trump is without question the most corrupt president this country has ever seen. He has indeed drained the swamp, but he has turned it into a cesspool. Every week, sometimes every day, reveals a new outrage, new evidence of how he is using his office for personal gain, how he is undermining democratic institutions, how he is destabilizing not just our country but many of our allies. We have never seen a threat to the Constitution like what Trump presents. He truly believes that no law, no rule applies to him. If Obama had done one-tenth of what Trump has gotten away with, the Republican House would have impeached him in a hurry, and the Republican Senate would have tried to remove him from office. But now they bow to this two-bit huckster, cowed by his popularity among the Fox News–viewing base, frightened to stand up and speak the truth about him and oppose his abuses of power. I am disgusted with two of Utah’s congressional delegation, both of them Latter-day Saints. Mike Lee, formerly an outspoken critic of Trump, called him a “gift” in a recent speech and expressed regret that he was so slow in becoming a “fan” of Trump. And Christ Stewart, who once likened Trump to Mussolini, is now one of his staunchest defenders in the impeachment hearings. That these formerly clear-eyed critics are now willing to sell their souls to this horrible man says volumes about their devotion to party over country and conscience. And they are not alone.

2. The Party of the Wealthy. Trump ran as a populist, but in reality he is exactly what the GOP wanted in terms of economic policy. The only legislative victory the Republicans can boast of when they controlled both chambers of Congress and the White House is the tax cut for corporations and the wealthy. When the new law was passed and signed, I calculated my own taxes under both the old and the new tax codes. My taxes went up slightly under the new law. I work at BYU, and I am not the football coach, which means I am definitely middle class. Now, I will be the first to admit that I should pay more taxes. But so should the wealthy, far more. Instead, they now pay much less. In fact, recent statistics show that the ultrawealthy now enjoy a lower overall tax rate than any other income group.¹ In 1950, the wealthiest Americans paid 70 percent of their income in taxes. Now, after the Reagan, Bush, and especially the Trump tax cuts, this group pays just over 20 percent. And, despite what Republicans claim, tax cuts never pay for themselves, which leads to the next point.

3. The Party of Debt. When Obama was president and we were trying to recover from the Great Recession, the Republicans were deficit hawks, preaching austerity, which would have been disastrous. They blamed Obama for the increasing debt, which was actually a result of the recession and the Bush tax cuts, which lowered federal revenues. Deficit spending is necessary during a recession to prevent it from becoming something worse. But when the Republicans controlled the government, what did they do? They passed massive tax cuts during an expansion, which makes no good economic sense. It was just a gift to their donors. The increased investment they promised never materialized, and neither did any sort of serious trickle-down effect. What did happen is what we are seeing now: trillion-dollar annual deficits during an ongoing economic expansion. This is not just irresponsible. It is immoral. They are needlessly saddling our children and grandchildren with massive debt, which at some point will need to be paid off. Everyone likes tax cuts—especially, it seems, the wealthy—but at some point we need to get serious about living within our means.

Republicans like to claim that we need to cut entitlements to bring the budget back into balance. But with 10,000 Baby Boomers retiring every day, most of them without sufficient retirement savings (because of stagnant wages, lost pensions, and their economic responsibility to consume), it will be impossible to cut Social Security or Medicare for many years. With more people falling through the cracks in our top-heavy economy, we really shouldn’t cut Medicaid or other programs to help the poor either. So the only real solution to reducing our mounting debt is to increase taxes.

Contrary to Republican talking points, America is one of the most undertaxed among developed nations. If we were to tax, for instance, at the average rate of other OECD countries, we would have an additional $1.37 trillion dollars each year to help eliminate our deficit and contribute toward such pressing needs as infrastructure or health care. If we were to tax at the rate of the OECD countries with economies most similar to ours, we would have an additional $2.71 trillion each year. So next time you hear the Republican refrain that we are overtaxed, see it for the propaganda it is and ask who such rhetoric is benefitting. It is not you, and it is not your children.

4. The Party of Pollution. Trump brags about getting rid of regulations. But some of the most significant regulations he is rolling back are restrictions on water and air pollution. As of July 2019, Trump had racked up 83 environmental rollbacks. And contrary to his claims, air quality in the U.S. is worse than it was before he took office. “Across 35 major American cities, there were nearly 14 percent more of these [unhealthy air] days in 2018 (799) than in 2016 (702), according to the EPA. The record for the fewest-ever number of unhealthy-air days was set in 2014, during the Obama administration, when there were only 598.”² And water pollution is similarly on the rise. This is not surprising, given the environmental regulations Trump is reversing.

5. The Party of Gun Violence. I really don’t need to say anything here, but a political party that refuses to enact legislation favored even by a large majority of its own supporters, that offers empty thoughts and useless prayers after each mass killing, and that demonizes the mentally ill every time a massacre occurs, is simply in the pocket of the NRA.

6. The Party of Science Denial. A few Republican politicians, including Mitt Romney, are now seeing the light on global warming. But the party as a whole is still doing all in its power to reverse the gains we’ve made over the past decade or so. The unstable ignoramus in the White House, who thinks he knows more than scientists, is still the Denier in Chief and is set to pull us out of the Paris Agreement next November. Hopefully, his replacement in January 2021 will put us back on the right track, but in four years Trump may have done irreparable damage. This is not a political issue, although the Republicans have done their best to make it one. It is an existential issue, one that our children and grandchildren may never forgive us for. We need to take drastic action now, not in 2021, and certainly not in 2025. Now. Yes, we need a Green New Deal, one that can arrest the rapid change and perhaps reverse it. To do nothing is irresponsible. To do what the Republicans under Trump are doing is unforgivable and perhaps irreversible.

7. The Party that Welcomes White Supremacists. Simple question: which political party do white supremacists flock to? I challenge you to name one white supremacist who is a Democrat. Ever wonder why? This past week, former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh, who has had a change of heart on white supremacy, released 900 emails sent by Stephen Miller to Breitbart, many of them showing “his immersion in an online ecosystem of virulent, unapologetic racism. The Miller of these emails isn’t just an immigration restrictionist, he’s an ideological white nationalist.”³ And who is Stephen Miller? He is the architect of Donald Trump’s immigration policies. Republicans own this, and they have not spoken out against hardly any of it. Like it or not, Republicans, you now belong to a party that leans strongly white supremacist, and this is actually part of Trump’s appeal with his base—the undercurrent of racism that has run largely unseen beneath the surface of party values has not been brought into plain view by Trump.

8. The Anti-Immigrant Party. Trump’s party isn’t completely anti-immigration. It welcomes immigrants, especially well-educated ones, from lily-white places such as Norway. But if you are from Mexico, you’re a rapist or murderer. If you’re from a “shithole” country, you’re not welcome. And if you’re Muslim, forget it. The LDS Church has taken a very different stand on immigration, even illegal immigration. If you’re interested in reading an excellent study that we published in BYU Studies Quarterly a couple of years ago about the economic and social effects of immigration and the LDS Church’s stance on the topic, see Walker Wright’s article.⁴

9. The Party that Undermines Health-Care. We have the most expensive health-care system on earth, and its results are not favorable when compared with any number of other countries that have embraced various systems that provide health-care for all their citizens. The ACA was imperfect. It allowed too much of the corrupt market to still play a major role. But it was succeeding. So the Republicans have tried again and again to destroy it and replace it with something worse. Right now, they have no plan, except to continue to undermine the ACA and to do specifically what they claimed they wouldn’t do: allow protections for pre-existing conditions to fail. The lawsuit filed by 20 Republican states, including Utah, and supported by the Trump administration would declare the ACA unconstitutional and would, in turn, allow insurance companies to once again deny coverage for pre-existing conditions. And with today’s unethically tilted Supreme Court (remember Merrick Garland?), there’s a good chance the lawsuit will succeed. And, as stated above, the Republicans have nothing to replace it with. Whatever they come up with is guaranteed to be far worse than even a crippled ACA. So, if you want a health-care system that works for every American, you simply cannot vote Republican. On this issue, as on so many others (such as Social Security, Medicare, and voting rights), the conservatives will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future.

Of course, there’s a lot more. But these nine points will suffice. I worry about my fellow Latter-day Saints. Many of them are simply uninformed, perhaps not interested enough to get the facts. Others of them are living in the Fox News bubble and are getting a distorted picture of the major issues of the day.

I served a mission in Germany in the mid-1970s. Many of the people I met and came to love were adults in the 1930s and 1940s. I wondered how such decent people could be deceived into supporting or least quietly accepting Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime. But after watching so many Latter-day Saints, including some in high positions, embrace the disinformation and propaganda coming from right-wing sources and fall in behind a completely amoral president whose autocratic instincts and lawless behavior are growing worse day by day, I no longer have to wonder.

________________

1. See David Leonhardt, “The Rich Really Do Pay Less Taxes than You Do,” New York Times, October 6, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/income-tax-rate-wealthy.html.

2. Robinson Meyer, “The Air Really Was Cleaner under Obama,” The Atlantic, July 9, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/trumps-us-doesnt-have-cleanest-air-record/593500/.

3. Jamelle Bouie, “Stephen Miller’s Sinister Syllabus,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 16, 2020, https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2019/11/16/jamelle-bouie-stephen/, published originally in the New York Times.

4. Walker A. Wright, “‘Ye Are No More Strangers and Foreigners’: Theological and Economic Perspectives on the LDS Church and Immigration,” BYU Studies Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2018), https://byustudies.byu.edu/content/ye-are-no-more-strangers-and-foreigners-theological-and-economic-perspectives-lds-church-and. If you download it now, it will cost $1.29. If you wait until January, it, along with all BYU Studies articles, will be free.

Statistics, Misconceptions, and the Imperatives of Millennialism

The Deseret News ran an article this week about the American Family Survey, an annual nationwide study conducted by the Deseret News, BYU, and YouGov. First, the statistics. The percentage of children born outside of marriage (34%) has stayed about the same or dropped slightly over the past ten years. The percentage of high school students who have had sex dropped from 48 percent in 2007 to 40 percent in 2017. In 2006, 40 of every 1,000 births were to teenage girls age 15 to 17; ten years later, that rate was 20. There were 3.6 divorces per 1,000 Americans in 2007; in 2017, that rate was 2.9 of 1,000. These statistics are relevant to the American Family Survey. One final statistic that wasn’t mentioned in the Deseret News article: the national abortion rate declined 26 percent between 2006 and 2015, hitting the lowest level that the government has on record.

The survey is enlightening because it shows that most Americans are wrong about the direction of the trends shown by the first four statistics. They would likely be wrong about abortion too, but that question was apparently not asked. Another enlightening result of the survey is that Republicans are more wrong than Democrats. In other words, conservatives have a more pessimistic view of American morals than liberals do. This, I believe, is not coincidental. I think this reflects two realities. First, conservatives tend to be backward-looking. America was somehow better in the past, so they have to bring back some lost America that they yearn for with nostalgia. The only problem with this perspective is that the statistics in so many ways don’t bear this out. Progressives, on the other hand, are forward-looking. They not only believe in progress, but that progress is the consistent long-term trend that humanity follows. This is an optimistic view. Still, more than half of Democrats were wrong about each of the trends mentioned above. Just not as wrong as Republicans.

The second reality is perhaps explanatory: a large percentage of the Republican base is composed of Evangelicals and Mormons and other religious groups who believe in some form of millennialism. The Deseret News article makes this point: “White evangelical Protestants also stand out for their poor performance on some of the trend-related questions. While members of most faith groups were wrong about as often as an average U.S. adult, white evangelicals were more likely to hold incorrect assumptions about rates of teen pregnancy, births outside of marriage and teen sex.” I think the reason for this is that millennial religions have a core belief that the world is going to hell. Everything is getting worse. It has to. Otherwise, there is no urgent need for the Second Coming.

And Latter-day Saints fall into this trap. Our whole religious outlook is colored by the belief that the end is coming, soon. The world is getting worse and worse, and when things get bad enough, then Jesus will come and create a paradise. We no longer have prophets who predict that the Second Coming will happen by a certain date or claim that people in the congregation will live to go back and build up Zion in Jackson County (see Lorenzo Snow in about 1899). But we are told that Satan is quadrupling his efforts and that the world is becoming increasingly evil. The only problem with this rhetoric is that many statistics suggest Satan is not very effective. Another statistic that contradicts this apocalyptic view is that violent crime has fallen sharply over the past quarter century. So, in terms of many behaviors Christians would consider immoral, America is actually becoming more righteous, not less.

Our leaders also use coded language sometimes that is understood to mean we are near the end. For example, when the age of missionaries was lowered to create a brief surge in the number of missionaries serving, it was labeled “hastening the work.” The unspoken implication here was that we have to hasten the work because the end is coming. But when the surge didn’t last, and when the results (say, baptisms per missionary) were disappointing, this slogan sort of went away.

My point here is both political and religious. I believe we should take the statistics seriously and adopt an optimistic view of human potential and societal progress. I also believe we do ourselves a disservice when we insist that our nation and the world are going to hell in a handbasket, just to support the idea that the end is nigh, regardless of societal trends. My own feeling is that if we can survive Donald Trump’s presidency, and I firmly believe we can, then our society will continue to move in positive directions, especially in addressing some of our most serious challenges—global warming, health care, gun violence, and income inequality. Oddly, on these fronts, it is the Republicans who are intentionally trying to make our world worse. But perhaps that is consistent with their millennial views. Maybe they are trying to make the Second Coming happen by torpedoing the world we live in—a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Antiquated Second Amendment

One of the most confusing, misunderstood, and misapplied pieces of the Constitution is the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” As an editor, I admit that this is a rather pathetic attempt at lucid English. Which is why it has been subject to so many tortured interpretations over the years and has in recent years been twisted by a conservative court to mean something that two hundred years of court precedent repudiate.

So, let’s talk about this troublesome sentence. Most conservatives simply take the second half out of context and make a blanket right out of it. But the first half provides the context. The right to bear arms is guaranteed within the confines of the need for a well-regulated militia and for the purpose of securing the freedom of the state. So, the right to bear arms, as a constitutional matter, has nothing to do with hunting or self-defense or, especially, enabling us to fight against the national government if we find ourselves at odds with it.

As constitutioncenter.org explains, however, two things have changed significantly since the eighteenth century: the militias mentioned in the amendment have been absorbed into the national military and the types of weapons used in military conflict have changed drastically. No longer are they the types of weapons individuals carry for lawful purposes such as hunting or self-defense. What this means, in plain English, is that the Second Amendment is completely outdated and antiquated. The circumstances under which it was created have changed and the concerns it was written to address no longer exist. So, we’re stuck with some obsolete verbiage that we twist in a partisan manner to suit our own points of view. What we really need is a common-sense revision of the Second Amendment that would enable us to pass sensible legislation that will prevent most of the mass shootings we experience on a continual basis.

Let me make three other points. First, an editorial I read not long ago explained that the phrase “bear arms” is a term we use only in reference to military situations. As the writer put it, you don’t bear arms against a rabbit. Bearing arms is, as the Second Amendment suggests, a military matter. In other words, keeping and bearing arms is not synonymous with just owning a gun for nonmilitary purposes. Therefore, the Second Amendment does not strictly prohibit the government from regulating the ownership of weapons that are not used for military service. At the time of its writing, it prevented the government from restricting citizens from owning “arms” that could be used in well-regulated militias at need. These militias were essential because the National Army was small and inadequate for a full-scale war. This is why regular citizens such as Martin Harris were conscripted for short-term skirmishes during the War of 1812. And members of these local militias used their own weapons.

But times have changed dramatically. We no longer rely on local militias. We have a massive, well-armed standing military, and so, as I suggested above, the Second Amendment, as written, is irrelevant to our current society. We do not need citizens to own military-style weapons so that they can fight our enemies at a moment’s notice. Indeed, the unrestricted ownership of these killing machines is one reason why we are seeing such carnage in our public places by a few unhinged and deluded lunatics.

And this leads to my second point. Most people simply assume that the rights enshrined in the Constitution are inviolable. But rights are always attached to responsibilities. We only enjoy rights as long as we do not abuse them. Freedom of speech is not an unbounded right, even though it too is protected by the Constitution. I do not, for instance, have the right to say certain things in certain places. I also do not have the right to board a commercial airplane without going through a thorough and invasive search of my person and belongings. If I try to carry my little Swiss Army knife onto a plane, I will be searched, and the knife will be seized. Why? Because of the act of one or two demented terrorists. Therefore, such searches and seizures are no longer considered “unreasonable” (see the Fourth Amendment).

The right to bear arms should be subjected to similar interpretation. As a society, we have long passed the point at which we, collectively, have proved ourselves capable of using guns responsibly. On average, over 36,000 people are killed by guns in America each year and another 100,000 are injured. Yes, I know, you would never shoot anyone indiscriminately. But an increasing number of Americans do not exhibit such perfect discretion. I maintain that we have forfeited the right to own any sort of gun we want to own because of our irresponsible behavior. Just as I cannot simply walk onto an airplane with my pen knife, I should not be able to just go buy a gun. I have to obtain a driver’s license and prove that I know how to drive before I can operate a car. At a minimum, we should require the same level of regulation for using a gun.

Final point. As so many have insisted in the past week, the right-wing rhetoric about mental illness and violent video games is bunk. Other countries have equal levels of mental illness and play violent video games. Only in America do we have semi-weekly mass shootings. Gun homicides in America are 25 times higher than any other high-income country. The difference? Lax gun laws. Similarly, the argument that more guns will create more safety is more than flimsy. We already have 393 million guns in America, spread among only 326 million citizens. If this talking point is right, we should be the safest country on earth. Obviously, this is nonsense.

I have an ultra-conservative neighbor who has claimed on social media that gun ownership is a God-given right. I don’t believe her family even owns a gun. But such is the power of tribal persuasion. We are both LDS, but I have to wonder if her God is the same as mine.

Some Thoughts on the Mueller Report

It took me a while, but as of Friday I can say—unlike most Americans and unlike 99 percent of Republicans in Congress—that I have read the entire Mueller report. I figured it was my civic duty. So now, since I invested that much time in getting informed, I figure it’s also my civic duty to offer a few observations.

1. This is not easy reading. There’s a lot of legalese in it. And a lot of the detail was reported accurately by the “fake” news, so there were few surprises. But it was well worth reading.

2. Trump and his campaign perhaps did not conspire or coordinate with the Russians, but they were aware of their interference and welcomed it, rather than reporting it. Which says something about how they view the law (something to ignore).

3. While no Americans “knowingly” or “intentionally” supported the IRA’s efforts (IRA is Internet Research Agency, a Russian entity), many unwittingly furthered the IRA’s objectives. They got duped. This is important for all sides, because next time around, it could be the Democrats who get used by the Russians.

4. The election was close. A few thousand votes in three states made the difference. A Russian Facebook campaign that reached as many as 126 million persons and a twitter campaign that reached as many as 1.4 million certainly had an effect.

5. The Russian objective was to sow discord in American politics, which furthered Putin’s larger objective of undermining democracy here and around the world. He obviously felt that Trump would help fulfill this objective. He also sought to defeat Clinton, so he also supported Sanders in the primary. Which brings up an interesting question: In a face-off between Sanders and Trump, who would the Russians support? Probably Trump. See next point.

6. The chaos that Trump brings furthers Russian objectives. When he is gone, either in 2020 or in 2024, which candidate will the Russians support in order to bring down democracy? Or will China also get into the game? What if they support opposite sides? I think we’re in for a rough ride, because the Trump administration has done nothing to combat foreign interference in our elections. He can’t bring himself to admit there was Russian interference because it casts doubt over the legitimacy of his election, which it should. But his inaction opens the door for more interference in the future. Hold your hat.

7. The evidence of obstruction was sufficient, I thought, but after reading the complete accounting of it, I’m leaning toward Nancy Pelosi’s position. Trump probably isn’t worth it. And it would be symbolic anyway, since the Republican Senate will never convict Trump. The president was obviously trying to both derail the investigation and encourage his indicted chums to lie under oath, but he was probably saved from the worst attempted obstruction by disloyal staffers, primarily but not exclusively McGahn and Sessions. If they had followed orders, Trump would be facing certain impeachment. At this point, though, I think an impeachment process would get bogged down by Trump’s stonewalling, which would result in lengthy legal battles that might consume the rest of his presidency.

8. I suspect, though, that Trump might be in greater danger of eventual conviction for either campaign finance violations (the porn-star payments) or any number of corrupt business practices. That will certainly play out in the courts after his presidency, when he is no longer immune from indictment.

9. In some ways, Trump seemed to dance all around obstruction without quite stepping on it, but you get the impression that this was more dumb luck than skill. He seemed to be stumbling and bumbling in his efforts to kill the investigation. Part of the reason he probably got away with what he did is that he did so much of it in public. It simply got lost in the daily chaos of the Trump presidency. There is so much objectionable in Trump’s act that obstruction of justice seems rather inconsequential. Next to his racism, his perpetual lying, his undermining of democratic institutions, his kowtowing to brutal dictators, and his personal attacks, obstruction of justice just isn’t all that eye-catching. It is, however, illegal.

10. And this was apparently very important to Robert Mueller. The most surprising portion of the report, for me, was a lengthy section near the end where Mueller’s team put together a thorough legal analysis of the relevant obstruction laws to shoot every objection raised by Trump’s legal team completely out of the water. Even though Mueller refused to come to a conclusion on obstruction, for reasons he explained, he did indeed lay out a very clear legal pathway for Congress to follow. Which makes his testimony this week all the more crucial. I wonder what the questioners will be able to drag out of him.

A couple of quotes from the Mueller report are particularly significant, I thought. “In sum, in light of the breadth of Section 1512( c )(2) and the other obstruction statutes, an argument that the conduct at issue in this investigation falls outside the scope of the obstruction laws lacks merit” (section 2, p. 168). Also this: “Accordingly, based on the analysis above, we were not persuaded by the argument that the President has blanket constitutional immunity to engage in acts that would corruptly obstruct justice through the exercise of otherwise-valid Article II powers” (section 2, p. 178). If you understand what Mueller is saying, AG Barr completely and dishonestly misinterpreted the report. After reading it and listening to Barr, I have to wonder if he actually read it.

A final thought. I’m really tired of the Donald Trump show. I hope most Americans are similarly exhausted. We recently celebrated Independence Day in America. Trump, of course, tried to co-opt the holiday and make himself the center of attention. But I had a personal hope on July 4 this year. All I wanted was independence from Donald Trump. May that day come soon.

The Book of Mormon Critical Text Project

One of the interesting aspects of my job is that I am the primary proofreader for Royal Skousen’s Book of Mormon Critical Text Project. If you haven’t heard of the Critical Text Project, you really need to look into it. A good place to start would be here. Royal is a linguistics professor at BYU and has been working on the Critical Text for about thirty years. It is, and I am not exaggerating, the most important research on the Book of Mormon that has ever been conducted. It is amazing.

Royal is methodically coming to the end of the project, but so far it has produced fourteen rather large books, with three or four still to come, two of which I’ve been proofreading in the past several months. Volume 1 is a typographical facsimile of the extant portion of the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon (about 28 percent survived water damage from 40 years in a leaky cornerstone in the Nauvoo House). Volume 2 is a typographical facsimile of the printer’s manuscript (in two parts). Volume 4 (which, for some reason, preceded volume 3) is titled Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon (in six parts). These books “analyze 5,280 cases of variations (or potential variation) in the text.” What Royal means by “the text” includes the original manuscript, the printed manuscript, and some 20 printed editions of the Book of Mormon by both the LDS and RLDS churches. Because Royal found more variants as he was publishing the six books, he decided to publish a second, more complete edition a few years ago.

In 2009, when he finished volume 4, Royal then published with Yale University Press a version of the Book of Mormon that is, as far as he can determine, the text that Joseph Smith actually dictated. There are 354 conjectured readings in The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text, which means that these are Royal’s best estimates, based on the textual evidence, of the words that Joseph Smith dictated but that somehow ended up different in the manuscripts or 1830 printing. And Royal has also restored the original text where it has been edited or otherwise altered over the years.

Since 2009, Royal has been working on volume 3, titled The History of the Text of the Book of Mormon (in maybe seven parts). The first four parts have been published, two titled Grammatical Variation and two titled The Nature of the Original Language. Grammatical Variation, as you might surmise, examines in detail the grammar of the Book of Mormon. I am one of a handful of people who have read all 1,281 pages of Grammatical Variation. Believe me, it’s not a page turner. It is a detailed examination of the sometimes strange grammar of the Book of Mormon, which turns out to be quite fascinating, if you like that sort of thing. But it is absolutely crucial for understanding what the Book of Mormon is. The Nature of the Original Language looks, primarily, at fascinating and sometimes perplexing parallels between the Book of Mormon text and Early Modern English constructions, some of which were camouflaged when Joseph edited the text in 1837 (and again, to a lesser degree, in 1840).

Part 5 of volume 3 explores the appearance of King James Bible text in the Book of Mormon, and we’re not talking here about just the large swaths of Isaiah or Matthew that are copied almost verbatim into the Book of Mormon. King James text (both Old and New Testament) appears all throughout the book, and it is often skillfully woven into the text in intricate and surprising ways. This fact leads to some conclusions about the Book of Mormon text that create some interesting dilemmas for scriptural purists.

Part 6, which I’m proofreading right now, is a careful examination of the spelling in the original and printer’s manuscripts. Two big takeaways here. First, Joseph’s scribes couldn’t spell worth a lick. Even Oliver Cowdery, who was passing himself off as a school teacher, was a horrible speller, although not as bad as Hyrum Smith. But he did sometimes learn how to spell words through the scribing and proofing process. To give you some idea of how bad the spelling was (and English spelling was indeed standardized by 1829), this book has over 400 pages of spelling blunders, some of them pretty awful. The second takeaway is that my appreciation for John Gilbert has skyrocketed. John Gilbert was the compositor (typesetter) who worked for E. B. Grandin. When you realize that he received a completely unpunctuated text with misspellings everywhere, it is frankly amazing that he was able to make sense of the manuscript. He made a few errors, but we can understand the Book of Mormon today largely because of the work of Gilbert.

The Critical Text Project started with FARMS in about 1988. FARMS, of course, became the Maxwell Institute, but Royal and the Maxwell Institute had a falling out after the publication of volume 4 and the Yale edition, so BYU Studies picked up the project. We published the first four parts of volume 3 and will publish the remainder. We also published the second edition of volume 4. When Royal is finally finished with this monumental work, he is planning to issue volume 5, A Complete Electronic Collation of the Book of Mormon. In his words, “This electronic, searchable collation is a lined-up comparison of the important textual sources and specifies every textual variant in the history of the Book of Mormon text.” It is, in other words, the raw data that Royal has used to conduct his research on the Book of Mormon. And he is going to make it available to other researchers so that they can continue the work he has started.

Let me say a word, in general, about the Critical Text. It is a staggering work of research. And I believe that nobody other than Royal Skousen could have pulled this off. It is so detailed, so thorough, and so professional that it will still be relevant in 50 years, maybe far longer. Already any serious Book of Mormon scholar has to use Royal’s Yale edition of the book if he or she wants to get the textual scholarship right. Using the latest LDS publication simply won’t suffice. For me, it has been both fun and informative to get a full preview of Royal’s most recent work. For most researchers, these are reference works. But I get to read them cover to cover. It’s not easy reading, but it is extremely educational. Royal has told me he needs my “jaundiced eye” to give the typeset pages one last look before they go to print. I take that as a compliment. I let most of his unique style quirks slide, but I do question him now and then on an assumption or a conclusion. And I find an occasional typo or misplaced word. Royal is stubborn about some things, but reasonable and generous about others. If one of his students or another researcher finds something that he uses in the Critical Text, he always gives credit. He is also not generating a defensive product. This is a work of careful scholarship. If he finds something that either goes against convention or is hard to explain, he simply presents it. Most important to him is to get the data out there so that we can all look at it and draw our own conclusions.

I’m looking forward to seeing the project finished. I’m sure Royal is too. He will retire when the final volume is published. And at that point, he will have completed one of the most impressive and useful research projects in LDS history.

Romanticized Notions

One morning in the spring of 2005, when I was a senior editor at the Ensign, the new managing director of the Church’s Curriculum Department called an emergency meeting for the editorial staffs of the magazines. He had learned, he said, that in August President Hinckley was going to challenge the members of the Church to read the Book of Mormon before the end of the year. This was a big deal, he said, and we needed to discuss a strategy for supporting this initiative. What could we do with the magazines’ content to complement President Hinckley’s challenge? This initiated a brainstorming session, with all sorts of ideas being put forward. After maybe fifteen minutes, Don, the managing editor of the Ensign, spoke up. “David,” he said, “we probably ought to slow down for a minute. President Hinckley doesn’t know about this yet.”

David was new to the department, so he can be forgiven for not understanding how First Presidency Messages were created. At that time—and it had been this way since the Ensign was first published in 1971—the managing editor of the Ensign created First Presidency Messages, usually by recycling old material from talks and articles by members of the First Presidency. He would then submit these for approval or alteration. Sometimes with President Hinckley, because he was so vigorous and was speaking frequently in various locations around the world, some of his messages were simply compilations of quotes from his various speeches. But for this particular message, the Book of Mormon challenge, the text was recycled from a talk President Hinckley had given in October 1979 as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

In that talk, Elder Hinckley challenged members of the Church to read the entire Book of Mormon in the 183 days between the date of his talk and April 6, 1980, the sesquicentennial of the organization of the Church. But because he was merely a member of the Quorum of the Twelve and not the prophet, I don’t think this challenge gained much traction among Church members. I was a recently returned missionary in 1979 and paid close attention to general conference, but I don’t recall any sort of widespread excitement to follow Elder Hinckley’s proposal. In 2005, however, he was the prophet, so this challenge became a BIG DEAL.

I never asked Don how he came up with the idea. I suppose he was just looking through old Hinckley talks and came across this one. He probably thought it would fly, and so he changed the dates (read the book between August and the end of the year rather than between October and April) and also changed the number of chapters that members would have to read each day (one and a half chapters instead of just over one per day). Don then submitted this proposed message to the First Presidency, and obviously President Hinckley thought it was a grand idea. After all, it had been his own idea some twenty-six years earlier. But this time, people would pay attention. And the rest is history.

My point here, though, is that most members of the Church are like our new managing director. They don’t understand things like this. They don’t understand how the Church works in so many ways, and so they have some very unrealistic notions about things like revelation and inspiration. Sometimes it’s a lot more prosaic than we imagine it to be.

In our next issue of BYU Studies Quarterly, we will be publishing an article about the history of name changes for the Church over its relatively short lifespan. There are some surprises here for most Latter-day Saints. One is that the name we now use (more than ever since President Nelson’s renewed emphasis), the one “revealed” in D&C 115, was actually in use before the revelation was given. In other words, it didn’t come out of the blue as a new and novel name. There’s a significant backstory here that I don’t want to give away, so I’d invite you to read the article when it is published in late August or early September.

But a good deal of our history is like this. When you know the details, you realize how romanticized the version is that most members of the Church believe. I guess there’s no getting around this. But so it goes. Whenever I run into these romanticized notions, I can’t help but hear the echo of Don’s voice in my head: “President Hinckley doesn’t know about this yet.”

Mitt and Me

Last week we were in San Diego for a little vacation. On Sunday (June 2), we attended church in the ward on Fanuel Street in Pacific Beach. We got there a few minutes early, and just before the meeting started, I looked to my left, and who should be walking down the aisle but Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann. We were mildly surprised, but we knew Mitt had built a house in the area, so we assumed this was his “home” ward when he is at his home away from home away from home. During the meeting, I Googled “Mitt Romney’s California home” and was sent to a couple of local newspaper articles about the small uproar Mitt’s construction project caused among the neighbors. I guess he was knocking down a 4,000-square-foot beachfront house in La Jolla and replacing it with an 11,000-square-foot beachfront mansion, complete with a four-car garage and the infamous car elevator. The neighbors were none too excited. More on this later. Interestingly, one article gave the address, so we plugged it into the Church’s meetinghouse locator, and sure enough, we were attending Mitt and Ann’s ward.

I posted a picture to Instagram of the ocean view from the balcony of the timeshare where we were staying along with a sentence about seeing Mitt at church. My daughter posted a comment: “Did you go shake his hand and give him a bit of voting advice?” Of course that would have been fun, but not at church. When we left, Mitt was busy talking to one of the ward members, so we just slipped out quietly and drove back to the condo. He should be glad.

Now, here’s where things start to get a little odd. The next day I received an email from the office of Senator Mitt Romney. The odd thing is the timing. Sometime between when Mitt was elected and when he took office, I wrote him a three-page letter telling him that while I hadn’t voted for him, he was still my representative in the Senate, and I expected a few things from him (advice he hasn’t taken, I should add), much of it related to our boorish Tweeter-in-Chief. Anyway, it took that long for his office to reply to my letter, but I found it an odd coincidence that it would come the day after I had seen him at church in San Diego. The email was just a form letter thanking me for contacting Senator Romney and telling me that he would speak out now and then when the president said or did something outrageous. Definitely not the approach I advised.

Well, the same day I got the email, since we had the address and were heading out to La Jolla anyway to play on the rocks at Cuvier Park and see the seals at La Jolla Cove, we decided to drive by and see the 11,000-square-foot Romney beach mansion. We found it, but we couldn’t get closer than a hundred feet or so, because he “lives” on a very narrow dead-end street that has a no-access sign posted at its entrance. Only residents and their visitors are allowed, I suppose, for both the Romneys and the two houses across the street. All the streets in this neighborhood are very narrow. With cars parked on either side, there’s only room for one vehicle to drive down the center. So I can imagine what a nightmare it was for the neighbors to have backhoes and cement trucks and lumber trucks trying to access the property.

And now the story gets even a bit more strange. Several days later, after we were home, I had a dream. Now, usually I don’t remember my dreams, and when I do, they are generally the bizarre, frustrating kind where you’re trying to get somewhere but you can’t get your legs to move, or where you’re trying to find something and can’t locate it. But this particular dream was crystal clear and not frustrating at all. As with all dreams, it just sort of started in the middle of the story. I was on my way to drop in on Mitt (I’m sure my daughter’s comment triggered something in my subconscious). I arrived at his house, but it wasn’t the one in La Jolla. It was in a different type of neighborhood. So I parked my truck and walked up to the door and rang the bell. Mitt answered and invited me in. I sat down on the couch. Ann was on the opposite end, and several grandkids were in the room. A couple of them came and snuggled up next to me like I was a family member. It was a very comfortable setting and I didn’t feel at all out of place. Mitt was seated across the room in a chair, and he and I chatted for a while about this and that. Then I informed him that he and I didn’t see eye to eye politically, but I hoped he could do something about the disaster in the White House. He agreed noncommittally that the situation was indeed unfortunate, but he didn’t make any promises.

At that point, I guess I ran out of things to say, so I excused myself and walked out to my truck and drove off. And got lost in the neighborhood. I guess there had to be a frustrating element or it wouldn’t have been one of my dreams. So I drove back to Mitt’s house, where he gave me instructions. I drove off again, and as far as I can remember that’s where the dream ended. But it was all extremely vivid and left me with a rather warm feeling toward the Romneys. Now, I’m pretty sure this dream doesn’t mean anything. I doubt that I’ll ever meet Mitt Romney. I doubt that I’ll ever get anything more than that form email from his office. But these events have created some sort of connection that I feel to Utah’s junior Senator. I still disagree with his politics. I’m still not happy with his response to Trump’s incessant assault on our republic. And I will certainly never vote for Mitt. But, hey, I’ve visited him at his house and had a nice chat—even if it’s only in my dreams.

De Facto Infallibility and the Difficulty of Deciphering Spiritual Manifestations

The reversal of the POX has highlighted a growing problem for the Church. Church leaders have never claimed to be infallible—in fact, in recent years we have had at least one straightforward admission by a member of the First Presidency that Church leaders sometimes make mistakes¹—but they never actually admit to specific mistakes. In fact, even when a “revealed” policy is reversed, somehow we are expected to believe that both the policy and its removal are inspired. This results in what I call de facto infallibility. The leaders admit to being fallible, but in practice they want us to believe that everything they do or say is inspired. Then, when something like the recent policy reversal comes along, the way they announce it damages their credibility. And this damaged credibility spreads to everything else they do or say.

This is a tricky problem for a Church that claims to be led by revelation. It would actually be refreshing for one of the Apostles or a member of the First Presidency to announce that even though they thought they were doing what was right, they missed this one, so they are reversing the policy. Such honesty would be welcome among most members, I believe, since the opposite creates so many problems. But admitting to mistakes creates other problems. If the General Authorities are capable of getting significant policies wrong now and then, how can we trust other things they say? And if we can’t trust what they say, where does that leave us? I’m sure this reasoning lies somewhere behind the de facto infallibility we see. But this is really a fallacy. Just because the leadership can’t admit to making a mistake when things turn out wrong doesn’t mean the membership isn’t aware that they were wrong, or at least a significant portion of Church members. So, in essence, they really aren’t fooling most members. This being the case, it would be better to just be honest and admit it when they make mistakes, because the result is essentially the same, except for the unnecessary pretense of infallibility, which any member with eyes to see will see through.

The real problem, the one they ought to be talking about, is the fact that revelation is not easy. Interpreting spiritual manifestations correctly is difficult. If the General Authorities acknowledged this, it would not only create more realistic expectations among members, but it would help members in dealing with local leaders, who—surprise!—also sometimes get things wrong. Let me illustrate with a couple of stories.

Many years ago, when we had two small children, my wife received a calling to be Primary president in our ward. She accepted the call, but in the hours after accepting, she felt awful about it. And it wasn’t just the fact that she was the busy mother of two small children. Something else was wrong. She felt the calling was a mistake. She talked with me about it, and I suggested she call the bishop and tell him how she felt. She did, and this humble man said he’d pray about it. The next day he called her, and he said, “Sister Terry, you’re right. This calling is not for you right now.” We didn’t understand why until a few weeks later when she started experiencing problems with a pregnancy that resulted in our third child being born twelve weeks early. This would have prevented her from serving in that calling.

I’m sure the bishopric had felt inspired to extend the call to serve, but sometimes inspiration is just hard to decipher. Sometimes we just get it wrong. In my own life, I’ve had a few major spiritual manifestations that I was sure about. But about half the time, I’ve been wrong. Now, the other story.

This one comes from Gerald Lund. He told about a bishop who had been called to the hospital in the middle of the night to give a young mother a blessing. She had collapsed and was in a coma. Her vital signs were dropping. When the bishop laid his hands on her head, he was overcome with a wonderful feeling of peace and light. He assumed the Spirit was telling him that the woman would be healed, so he blessed her that she would rise from her sickbed and would be able to raise her children to adulthood. A few hours later, she was dead. Lund points out that experiences like this are common.² So, why does this happen? Because spiritual experiences often come as feelings, and feelings are devilishly difficult to decipher. Even for prophets and apostles. The bishop in the second story may have been sent the message by the Lord, “I’m in charge. Everything will be fine.” But the message he received (his interpretation) was that the young mother would be healed. Revelation is actually a very complicated thing, much more complicated than we are led to believe.

It’s fairly easy to look back over Church history and see instances when leaders got it wrong. The priesthood ban and all the awful doctrinal explanations to justify it is merely the most obvious example (and yet the Church even struggles to admit this mistake). But it’s harder in the present to talk openly about mistakes by leaders. We are taught that they will never “lead the Church astray,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. And we are taught to sustain them and to never speak evil of them. But where does simply acknowledging that our leaders have made a mistake have a place in the Church? I would suggest that, culturally, we have made such an acknowledgment practically impossible. Therefore, we have de facto infallibility. And any way you slice it, it causes problems.

________________

1. “To be perfectly frank, there have been times when members or leaders in the Church have simply made mistakes.” Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “Come, Join with Us,” Ensign 43, no. 11 (November 2013): 22.

2. Gerald N. Lund, Hearing the Voice of the Lord (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2007), 8.

A Parable

A distinguished professor has a son who gets accepted to a prestigious university on the far side of the country. The son moves away from home and gets settled in a new apartment in a new city. School is hard, but he does well in his classes. He calls home every week to talk to his father, but his father never says anything. There’s just silence on the other end of the line. The young man would like to talk to his mother, but his father is a very patriarchal man and doesn’t allow his wife to talk on the phone. The son doesn’t know quite what to do when confronted with this silence, so he just talks. He tells his father about his new life, his new friends, and his studies. He has decided to major in the same subject his father has specialized in. In fact, his father once wrote a popular textbook, which is required for one of the son’s classes, so the son asks his father questions about various points he doesn’t understand. The father doesn’t answer, doesn’t explain the concepts he has written about, some of which are rather confusing. Every now and then, the son imagines he hears something on the phone, very faint, but he can’t be sure, and he can’t understand the sound he thinks he hears.

Eventually, the son runs a little short on money, as students tend to do. He feels awkward about his predicament, but he asks if his father might send him some money. Silence. Since there is no response, he takes out a student loan to stay afloat. Every now and then, however, at seemingly random intervals, a small deposit appears in his bank account. He assumes these deposits come from his father, so he calls to say thanks, but there’s no response on the other end. Once in a while, however, the father sends the son an unexpected text, but these brief messages are cryptic, almost like crossword puzzle clues, and the son doesn’t know quite what to make of them. He tries to interpret what his father is trying to say, but he usually ends up scratching his head, not really understanding these enigmatic missives. A couple of times he takes these text messages to a linguistics professor whose class he has taken. The professor comes up with an ingenious interpretation, but the son isn’t convinced the professor knows what he’s doing. As time goes on, the son feels more and more estranged from his father. He wonders whether he should just give up on the relationship, but instead he keeps making perfunctory calls, hoping that someday his father will answer him.

A friend of his father’s from his hometown comes to visit. He assures the son that his father loves him and would do anything to help him succeed at school. He claims that the father is actually answering his calls, but that the son just isn’t listening hard enough. The son doesn’t know what to make of this. He’d like to believe it, but it just doesn’t make sense to him. It seems to him that his father has just lost interest in him.

Eventually, the son nears graduation. He has done well, but he has not lined up a job, so he knows he must return home. His student debt has accumulated, so he has that to worry about. But his bigger worry is about his father. What will it be like to return home? Will his father be pleased? Will he allow him back in the house? The son isn’t sure, but he is resigned to the fact that whatever will be will be. So he dresses in his cap and gown and gets ready for the big ceremony.

Dwelling in Righteousness with No Poor among Us

So, I led a discussion on Sunday using the questions I listed in the last post as a general outline. Lots of discussion. Many insightful ideas on what’s preventing us from establishing Zion and what we can do to overcome these obstacles. I’ll share a few thoughts here on the third through sixth questions, about dwelling in righteousness and eliminating poverty.

First, though, another thought about what prevents us from being of one heart and one mind. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to unity is incomplete information (or just plain bad information). If we had all knowledge, we would see things clearly and would likely agree on everything. But the nature of mortality is ignorance about most things. We also have lots of information that is simply inaccurate. And then there’s the problem of people who want poor information, who only want to confirm their prejudices and preconceptions. So, better information is one key to creating greater unity.

But what about righteousness? What prevents us from dwelling in righteousness? Well, the usual suspects show up here. Temptation, sin, ignorance. I would also throw in bad laws. The more important question, I believe, is, what can we do to become more righteous? It’s pretty straightforward to make ourselves more righteous (not easy, but straightforward). But how do we get other people to be more righteous? How do parents get their children to be more righteous? Ah, that old problem. Well, even our Heavenly Father didn’t have great success on that count. We can list the usual ideas—teach correct principles, use love and compassion rather than criticism—but these methods have only limited effectiveness, because of that pesky thing called agency. This seems to be a rather large obstacle to creating a true Zion society. I suppose you could just kick everyone out who doesn’t fall in line, but in our modern society, where the Church is embedded in a variety of social and economic systems, we can’t create Zion isolated from the circumstances we find ourselves in. And as societies, we can’t simply exclude half the population. Where would we send them? Short of fleeing to some remote location where only the righteously inclined will gather, this appears to be an impossible requirement. And as I mentioned above, even Heavenly Father struggled with this. Which brings up the question of how God will maintain order and peace in his eternal kingdoms in the hereafter, particularly the telestial and terrestrial. Of course, that’s well beyond the scope of this post.

So let’s move on to the final characteristic of Zion: no poor. What are some of the causes of poverty? I was surprised and pleased that in two different wards where I asked this question, nobody mentioned laziness, which is a common explanation among some conservatives. Yes, there are a few people who are poor because they are lazy. But they are a minority, perhaps even a small minority. Other causes? Physical illness, disability, age, mental illness, lack of decent-paying jobs, lack of education or job-related skills, and even bad luck. Which reminds me of an experience I once had.

Back in 1999, Church magazines sent me to Quebec to write a story about the Montreal Homeless Choir. A young dental technician from France, Pierre Anthian, had moved to Montreal to get married. The engagement fell apart, but Pierre stayed. Because his mother had taught him to serve the less fortunate, he found a local homeless shelter/food kitchen and volunteered. But after a while he grew frustrated. Giving out meals was a short-term fix, he knew, but it wasn’t doing anything to create real change. So he cooked up an idea. He had been trained in the conservatories of Paris and Pau, and this background led him to the idea of forming a choir of homeless men. There was no requirement that the choir members had to be able to carry a tune. He advertised, and a few men showed up to practice. Then a few more. Eventually he had seventeen men who would follow his simple rules.

When they were ready, more or less, they went to the busiest Metro station in Montreal and started singing. Soon a crowd gathered, and people started dropping money into the hat Pierre had place in front of the choir. They became a news story. They sang regularly in the subway, but they also started getting invitations to sing at schools and businesses. They even performed at an NHL game. The money they earned from these appearances they donated to the food kitchen. The money they received in the subway station Pierre split among the seventeen singers. They earned enough to be able to afford apartments and food. Pierre’s idea got seventeen men off the street.

He told me one day that most of these men were criminals. Because of their circumstances, they had lived difficult lives. “Let’s just say thievery and attempted murder are not the worst offenses on the list,” Pierre once told a reporter. “And they are my friends.” He told me that the primary difference between himself and these men was just bad luck. Sometimes that’s all it takes. One bad break, and your life can spiral out of control. Pierre had given his life to serving these men. He gave up his business making dentures and devoted his time to the choir. The homeless shelter provided him a small living allowance so he could do this work.¹

But seventeen is a drop in the bucket of floundering humanity. There are millions in America who are living in poverty and who don’t have a Pierre Anthian to rescue them. So, how do we eliminate poverty? One homeless choir at a time?

I think we sometimes get the idea that if we just live the gospel, Zion will somehow magically happen. Voila! No more poor. But I think this is naïve in the extreme. In any society, there will always be people who are sick, disabled, mentally ill, or poorly qualified for decent-paying work. There will always be people who experience bad luck. And sometimes the economy will dip into recession, which will tip millions of people into unemployment. To assume that there is some sort of solution to these circumstances that does not involve government is simply absurd. Most Mormons don’t even consider the notion that the city of Enoch had a government. And it undoubtedly had laws prohibiting the hoarding of wealth. Joseph Smith and Brigham Young tried to establish Zion in a variety of ways. But they always implemented economic restrictions that attempted to equalize wealth.

One of the causes of poverty that is more systemic than individual is the concentration of wealth. Today we are experiencing historic levels of economic inequality, and despite what some conservatives like to claim, this is indeed a cause of poverty, and it is unsustainable. All you have to do is plot the current trends on a chart to see that where we are heading is socially destructive and economically disastrous. But this problem is not unique to twenty-first-century America.

In 1875, Brigham Young and thirteen members of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve issued a statement regarding the cooperative movement, particularly Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution, which the Church established to promote economic equality and stand against the inroads of American capitalism that had come with the railroad in 1869. It reads, in part:

The experience of mankind has shown that the people of communities and nations among whom wealth is the most equally distributed, enjoy the largest degree of liberty, are the least exposed to tyranny and oppression and suffer the least from luxurious habits which beget vice. . . . One of the great evils with which our own nation is menaced at the present time is the wonderful growth of wealth in the hands of a comparatively few individuals. The very liberties for which our fathers contended so steadfastly and courageously, and which they bequeathed to us as a priceless legacy, are endangered by the monstrous power which this accumulation of wealth gives to a few individuals and a few powerful corporations. . . . It threatens to give shape to the legislation, both state and national, of the entire country. If this evil should not be checked, and measures not taken to prevent the continued enormous growth of riches among the class already rich, and the painful increase of destitution and want among the poor, the nation is likely to be overtaken by disaster; for, according to history, such a tendency among nations once powerful was the sure precursor of ruin.²

A fitting warning for our day. There are a couple of ways to correct this imbalance. One is to tax massive wealth inequality out of existence to help lift up the lower levels of society. And progressive taxation will always be necessary as long as there are members of society who are sick, disabled, aged, mentally ill, or otherwise unable to provide for themselves. Charity is never sufficient to meet these needs. But there is another way we can equalize wealth in society that does not involve taxation. It is actually to create the sort of capitalism Adam Smith and other worldly philosophers envisioned. William Greider put it well: “The problem is not that capital is privately owned, as Marx supposed. The problem is that most people don’t own any.”³

In our current system, those who actually create the products and sell them, as well as those who fill support functions in businesses do not receive a proportionate share of the wealth they create. This is because they do not share in the ownership of the businesses where they work. Consequently, the profits all go to investors and executives. This creates a dual wage system. One group of people is paid as much as possible; the other group is paid as little as possible (a “competitive” wage, we call it). This system is designed to create increasing inequality. But consider Michael Ventura’s perspective on this system:

As a worker, I am not an “operating cost.” I am how the job gets done. I am the job. I am the company. . . . I’m willing to take my lumps in a world in which little is certain, but I deserve a say. Not just some cosmetic “input,” but significant power in good times or bad. A place at the table where decisions are made. Nothing less is fair. So nothing less is moral. . . . It takes more than investment and management to make a company live. It takes the labor, skill, and talent of the people who do the company’s work. Isn’t that an investment? Doesn’t it deserve a fair return, a voice, a share of the power? . . . If the people who do the work don’t own some part of the product, and don’t have any power over what happens to their enterprise—they are being robbed. You are being robbed. And don’t think for a minute that those who are robbing you don’t know they are robbing you. They know how much they get from you and how little they give back. They are thieves. They are stealing your life.⁴

Sharing ownership of businesses with workers would do more to equalize wealth in our modern society than any other method. This is not communism. It is capitalism as it was initially intended to be. How exactly the surviving Lehites achieved a society with not just no poor, but where “there were not rich and poor” (4 Ne. 1:3) is not explained in the Book of Mormon, but it certainly didn’t come about by allowing some people to own the time and labor of others or to treat them as “human resources” or “commodities.”

This last section was not part of my lesson on Sunday. Not nearly enough time. And it’s probably not appropriate for a priesthood meeting. But maybe it is. If we’re serious about establishing Zion, we need to consider the practical aspects of what we will need to do to accomplish this herculean task. It’s not going to happen by magic.

^{_______________________}

1. See Roger Terry, “The Least of These,” Liahona (December 2000), https://www.lds.org/study/liahona/2000/12/the-least-of-these?lang=eng.

2. James R. Clark, comp., Messages of the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 6 vols. (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1965–75), 2:267–72.

3. William Greider, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 416.

4. Michael Ventura, “Someone Is Stealing Your Life,” Utne Reader (July/August 1991); 78, 80, reprinted from the L.A. Weekly.

One Heart and One Mind

The ward I work with on the high council is having ward conference in a couple of weeks, and I am responsible to teach the priesthood lesson. The topic, in general, is Zion. As I have thought about this subject, it occurred to me that we often talk about Zion in vague generalities. I don’t find this very productive, so I want to get more specific. I am going to ask a few questions to get people thinking in more detail.

As described in Moses 7:18, referring to the city of Enoch, “the Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there were no poor among them.” Based on this definition, I plan to ask the following questions (with other embedded questions to steer the discussion a bit):

1. What prevents us from being of one heart and one mind?

2. What could we do to become more unified in our thoughts and desires?

3. What prevents us from dwelling in righteousness?

4. What could we do to become more righteous?

5. What are some of the causes of poverty?

6. What could we do to eliminate poverty among us?

I actually had a trial run with these questions in my own ward a few weeks ago, where I assisted our ward’s high councilor with his lesson. We ran out of time and didn’t go into much depth on the final two questions, but I can imagine they might lead to some very fascinating differences of opinion.

Today, though, I want to offer a few thoughts about the first two questions.

So, what does prevent us from being of one heart and one mind?

The first response I got in my own ward was “politics.” This is true, especially in today’s volatile political climate. But why do people disagree about politics (which often means social and economic issues)? Often, I believe, it is because people have different values and beliefs as well as different perceptions of life, and life is complicated.

Some Church members have the naïve assumption that all we have to do to achieve unity is to accept the gospel and live by its principles. But this is simplistic thinking, and it probably explains why most of our discussions of Zion are so general and unrealistic. Let me suggest something.

Zion is a society. Well, duh, you say. But sometimes we don’t understand what that means. All societies are extremely complex. Even when most members of a society share common goals, they often disagree with each other about how to achieve those goals. Why is this so? Because sometimes we have competing goals. Let me use a simple example. I think we would all agree that two desirable goals in our society are freedom and relief from suffering. The problem is that when we grant too much freedom, people inevitably suffer. For example, if we grant corporations freedom to pollute, people drink polluted water and breathe polluted air, and some, even many, will get sick or die. So, when trying to negotiate the tricky terrain between these two goals, we have to draw lines somewhere. Where do we draw those lines? In our current American society, Republicans shift the line toward corporations, allowing them more freedom to pollute. Democrats tend to shift the line closer to those who might suffer from pollution. This indicates two different sets of values.

These two competing goals—freedom and relief from suffering—have many other battlefields. Gun control is one. Health care is another. Global warming can be viewed through the lens of these two goals. So can taxation and so-called entitlement programs and hate-speech. And there are other pairs of competing goals. Prosperity and equality can compete with each other. So can ownership and fairness.

So far, all of the ideas I’ve mentioned assume that unity is a good thing. Last week, Angela C. over on BCC discussed a book that has a fascinating thesis: that consensus leads to sloppy thinking and suboptimal solutions. Sometimes dissent is healthy and produces better outcomes. So, what does this say about our Zion goal of being of one heart and one mind? Would Zion be a better society if we had a few nonconformists among its citizens? I suspect it might be.

What I hope to achieve with my lesson is to portray Zion as a real society that experiences the same challenges that every society faces, not some pie-in-the-sky perfect place where everything is hunky-dory. I just don’t think that’s realistic. For instance, most Church members don’t consider the fact that Zion will have a government. What sort of government should Zion have? And if we’re serious about creating a Zion society in the twenty-first century, Zion will have a health-care system. What sort of health-care system would Zion have? Now that’s something we ought to think about. But that’s a topic for another day. I’ll let you know how the priesthood lesson goes.

Misinformation and Fearmongering

Because the Democrats are proposing to actually do something about global warming, health care, runaway student debt, and rampant wealth inequality, the Republicans have trotted out the only response they can come up with: “Socialism!” We even hear cries of “Venezuela!” As if providing health care for all Americans would somehow turn us into a failed petrostate. On the right, there tends to be a lot of misinformation and fearmongering about what socialism even is. Perhaps a bit of personal history might shed some light on the question.

One sunny afternoon in August 1984, my wife and I passed through Checkpoint Charlie, where we were required to trade 50 Westmarks for 50 worthless Ostmarks. As we wandered the streets of East Berlin, we witnessed the somber, hopeless faces of the city’s few pedestrians. We marveled at the cheap-looking Trabants that motored loudly up and down the streets and belched foul fumes out of their tailpipes. We passed soldier after soldier, each fully armed, each exuding an almost tangible assurance that the Cold War was as real as any hot one. We watched people stand in lines a block long to buy produce. We tried to spend our allotted Ostmarks in the city’s most prestigious department store but couldn’t find even a souvenir we wouldn’t have thrown away. We finally bought a cheap noodle press and a metric measuring cup. We ate at a state cafeteria where the food tasted as unappetizing as it looked, then stopped at an ice cream parlor on Unter den Linden that was already out of practically everything on the menu by 4 p.m. By evening we were more than eager to return to the hustle and plenty of West Berlin. We left with most of our East German currency and absolutely no illusions about communism.

I can still remember later that evening visiting a little Slavic restaurant in a quiet corner of Neukölln and how ecstatic I was over a tossed salad with tomatoes and green peppers. “I could never get a salad like this in East Berlin!” I exulted. That one afternoon behind the Iron Curtain had made me see the world with new eyes. I marveled at how many stores and shops there were in the West, and at how fully stocked they were. In fact, because of that one afternoon, I can perhaps dimly imagine what the East Germans must have felt that November day five years later when the Wall came tumbling down. I can understand their desires for reunification and prosperity. I can understand their blind assumption that capitalism is right—because communism is definitely wrong. But there are many types of capitalism, and not all of them look like our top-heavy American form of corporate capitalism.

How many times have we heard from Republicans that socialism is evil, just one step, or perhaps even a half-step, away from communism? But is socialism really just a half-step away from communism? Remember the contrast I drew between the scarcity of goods in East Berlin and their abundance in West Berlin, between the oppression in the East and the freedom in West? Yes, this was a contrast between two opposing systems. But it was not a contrast between communist East Germany and capitalist America; it was a contrast between communist East Germany and socialist West Germany. West Germany in the 1980s was a solidly socialist country, with a universal multipayer health-care system, high marginal tax rates, a statutory guarantee of four weeks’ paid vacation every year (compared with none in America), and a substantial social safety net. Yes, West Germany was what Republicans would deride as a welfare state. It also had one of the strongest economies and highest standards of living in the world. It was strong enough to absorb the crumbling mess that was East Germany and still remain the strongest economy in Europe. Even today, Germany is solidly socialist, and in 2014 all German states also began offering free university tuition.

So, when you hear cries of “socialism” or “Venezuela,” please remember that this is simple partisan fearmongering by a party that has no solutions to the most pressing issues of our day.

Excerpts from Bruder: The Perplexingly Spiritual Life and Not Entirely Unexpected Death of a Mormon Missionary

As I mentioned in my last post, BCC Press has recently released a rather unusual mission memoir by yours truly, in both print and ebook formats (available on Amazon). Of course, they want me to promote it in any way possible, but since I’m really bad at self-promotion, I guess I’ll just let the book mostly speak for itself. I’ll trot out a few excerpts here, which should give you some idea of what sort of book this is, with minimal connective text from me. So, here goes.

From the Vorwort (foreword):

I need to confess up front that this story didn’t turn out quite the way I thought it would. About thirty years ago, when I first had the idea of writing an MMM (Mormon Missionary Memoir, a genre that has become as common as crabgrass in the LDS literary lawn), I pictured this narrative as a triumphant, majestic, remarkable retelling of the most glorious two years of my life. But that was thirty years ago. I was incredibly naïve. I hadn’t had enough time to let the mission experience percolate for a few decades. I hadn’t lived long enough to see it through the long lens of real life. Oh, I knew the plotline all right. And I could remember the cast of characters much better than I do now. But I was so close to the story that I couldn’t see it in any sort of context. I couldn’t comprehend the broader implications of the experience. It has now been forty years since that distant summer day when the Salt Lake Mission Home swallowed me whole. . . . I think those forty years have given me enough perspective to finally make a semiserious attempt at this admittedly atypical MMM. . . .

I can honestly say that my life is still being shaped by Bruder Terry and what he experienced all those years ago. Little did he know how complicated some of those innocuous experiences he had would turn out to be.

So this is his story. I will tell it as best I can, but you must realize that I am not the person who stepped onto that America-bound plane in Hamburg, Germany, thirty-eight years ago. And that is why I will refer to that person in the third person. He is gone. Has been for a long time now. But wisps of his memories still float by at times, like bubbles on the breeze. I can see them for a moment, but they are both distorted and impossible to grasp and to hold.

One thing you need to know is that in spite of the stultifying sameness of dress imposed upon male Mormon missionaries (females get cut a little slack in this department), no two missionaries are alike. Beyond this, there is another level of diversity: between missions—all 406 of them. My youngest son recently returned from serving in Ukraine. At the same time, his cousin was serving in Florida. Reading their weekly emails was an exercise in head scratching. You never would have known they were doing anything remotely similar. Their experiences were as different as a root canal and a birthday party. And when the cousin’s brother was sent to Uruguay, the sense of disconnect seemed to triple. So any mission memoir is going to be a very, very, very idiosyncratic narrative. Of course, any memoir is only as mesmerizing as the mind and writing facility of its author, but I am just arrogant enough to believe that I can turn virtually anything into a fascinating read. So, what better challenge than the rigors and tedium and conformity of a Mormon mission?. . .

Also, please forgive me if I don’t keep this story completely in the 1970s or in Germany. There were many things Bruder Terry didn’t understand then that I do now. He had no historical or cultural context for some of the things he experienced. He also had a very simple understanding of LDS theology and history. Some commentary is therefore inevitable. Actually, a lot of commentary is inevitable. But remember, I’m trying to understand him and his experiences just as you are. So please allow me to mind-wander. And if I were to write this story ten years from now, it might be far different than it is today. But this is how I remember it now.

And why, you ask, would you even want to understand a Mormon missionary in Germany in the 1970s? First, because what Bruder Terry experienced in Germany all those years ago has a lot to do with many of the issues facing Latter-day Saints today. And second, because it’s a pretty good story, disjointed and introspective as I present it, and everybody likes a good story.

From chapter 3, “Old World, New World”:

“Right now I think I’m more tired than scared,” Bruder Terry lied. “I’ll save scared for tomorrow.” He was tired. Jet lag was creeping up on him, but cold fingers of fear gripped him through the curtain of weariness that dulled his mind.

What would tomorrow bring, though, after he had slept the jet lag off? Today he had his fourteen traveling companions with him. He had spent two months with them and felt comfortable if not exactly confident in their company. But tomorrow, tomorrow would come too fast. Today had come fast. Flying toward morning out of Chicago, he had seen the sun rise over Ireland just four hours after nightfall. He had slept fitfully, crumpled up in a plane seat like a heap of new clothes. On waking he felt wrinkled, rumpled, and a bit stale. And now Ireland was far behind.

His mind wandered back briefly to an encounter they had had in Chicago. During their layover, a strikingly handsome man in a Lufthansa pilot’s uniform approached them.

“Where are you going?” he asked in a foreign accent.

“Germany,” they had answered.

“Wonderful,” he said. “I’m a German, and I’m a Mormon. Are you flying on my plane? It’s a Lufthansa 747 that’s only about half full.”

“No,” they had told him. “We’re on a Pan Am 707.” And, as it turned out, the plane was full. No elbow room in sight.

“Too bad,” he said. “Well, good luck, elders.”

Years later, I would realize this German Lufthansa pilot was none other than Dieter Uchtdorf, who would become a Mormon Apostle and would go on to serve as second counselor in the LDS First Presidency. He left a very positive impression, but remembering that encounter, Terry squirmed in his seat. He was tired of sitting. The Lufthansa pilot, he thought, would probably have invited them into the cockpit to show them around. This was, after all, 1975. But on the Pan Am plane, they were just ordinary pieces of human cargo. Uncomfortable cargo at that.

The crowded 707 circled now above Frankfurt, slowly passing through thick banks of clouds. Bruder Terry was fortunate to have a window seat and sat pensively, watching the passing shrouds of grey mist. What would Germany be like? He had wanted to see that enchanted land for years. Now he was directly above it, and clouds heavy with rain concealed the countryside from view. Would he be disappointed? Suddenly the wing dipped, the tattered edges of a rain cloud passed swiftly upward, and there it was—patch-work fields and dark green forests. “This is really Germany,” he thought, mentally pinching himself to see if it was real. An apprehensive thrill shot through him. “What will the people be like? Will I be able to convert anyone? Maybe myself?” It was more than an idle question.

From chapter 9, “Going to the Gynecologist”:

Like a painful zit, their troubles came to a head at zone conference on February 20. It was an eventful day in more ways than one. They took the U-bahn out to Pinneberg to meet with all the missionaries in the northern portion of Hamburg. At one point during the conference, one of President Scharneman’s assistants made a rather audacious promise. He even introduced this promise by saying that the Spirit had authorized it. Now, this was a promise that I’m sure no General Authority would sanction. In fact, there are all sorts of doctrinal and logical problems with this promise. It was completely out of order. But Bruder Bradford made it nonetheless. With his hand raised to the square, he declared, “I promise you in the name of Jesus Christ that if you will work fifty-five hours each week in the month of March, someone you are teaching will be baptized.”

“Now wait just a minute!” I still want to yell after all these years. “You can’t make a promise like that. It cuts against the grain of free will (or ‘agency,’ as Mormons call it) and a whole host of other gospel principles. You simply can’t make that promise. Can’t, can’t, can’t! Especially in Germany, where baptisms are about as common as palm trees.” But when Bradford spoke this promise, an odd thing happened: what Terry assumed was the Holy Ghost hit him like sucker punch and confirmed to him, in what he felt was an unmistakable way, that Bradford did indeed have authorization to make this promise. Terry knew it was true. KNEW. As improbable as it seemed, he knew that if he and Carlson worked fifty-five hours each week for the next month, one of their investigators would be baptized. How, he had no idea. They didn’t have any likely candidates. But he figured he could leave those little details up to the Lord. Apparently almost everyone else felt the same thing Terry did, because when Bradford asked them to raise their right hands to the square and promise to work those fifty-five-hour weeks, everyone in the zone quickly raised his or her hand. Everyone, that is, except Bruder Carlson.

Terry couldn’t believe it. The wind went out of his sails as quickly as if he had floated into the Doldrums. How could he? Terry thought. Terry hadn’t seen a baptism yet on his mission, but here was a guarantee, a 100-percent sure-as-sheep-dip guarantee. All they had to do was work fifty-five hours. Heavens, they were already doing that. This was like promising to brush your teeth before going to bed. But his companion wouldn’t promise. Terry was so angry he could have strangled Carlson.

To make a long story short, Carlson did eventually make the promise, and he and Terry did work those fifty-five hours each week. But nobody got baptized. Of course, no time limit was specified. That baptism might have happened twenty years later. But that’s not the way Terry understood the promise. It should have happened while he was there, or at least soon, which is a relative term. Just in case, though, I checked with the Church membership department when I worked at Church magazines. They didn’t have a record for any of Bruder Terry’s investigators. Bruder Terry also knew a young man from a different ward who later became stake president in that area. I contacted him, and he sent me a list of all the members in area where Terry was assigned. No names matched the ones in Bruder Terry’s appointment book. I guess it’s possible that someone he and Carlson taught once or twice moved away and joined the Church, but I’m quite sure that none of their real investigators were baptized. Certainly none joined during Bruder Terry’s mission. So what can I conclude? Well, . . .

Maybe something else was going on that day at zone conference. Maybe in the enthusiasm of the moment, Terry felt something powerful and interpreted it wrong. That’s certainly possible. My experience over the years is that spiritual feelings are devilishly hard to decipher. I’ve been certain about what I felt were spiritual communications from time to time, but time and experience have proved me wrong as often as right. So at this point, I have no idea what to make of Bruder Terry’s experience that day.

By the way, the rest of this chapter, which explains why two male missionaries would visit a gynecologist, is pretty good, just too long to include here.

From chapter 22, “Leaving the Mortuary”:

If life were more like an adolescent fantasy novel, Bruder Terry would have been scheduled to go home the day after the amazing evening at Ortmanns’. Unfortunately, life is more like, well, life. Serendipity is the huge exception, not the rule. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be serendipity. So instead of going out on a high note, Terry slipped back into the harsh reality of missionary work in Berlin. In spite of how difficult things were, though, he felt like he was on a greased slippery slide. The end was coming too fast, but he felt like he still had years of work to do.

The final month of Terry’s mission was filled with all sorts of conflicting emotions and experiences. Now, as I read through his journal, it strikes me that he was feeling pretty high levels of anxiety on several fronts. The Work was hard. Some days they had no success finding people to teach, and often their appointments fell through, but they did find several possibly promising investigators. Again and again after a Discussion Terry would write, “He could be good” or “She could be good”—even Frau Herschel, who answered the door one day without any pants on and another day was wearing a see-through blouse with no bra, which made it rather hard for the missionaries to concentrate on the Discussion. “She needs to repent a lot,” Terry observed, but he also wrote in a fit of complete irrationality that “she could be good.” Unfortunately, this hopeful assessment was seldom true. In some ways, he sounded like a Golden [the Hamburg mission’s term for Greenies], jumping to overly optimistic conclusions about people instead of seeing the long and more realistic view. Perhaps this was because he had no long view anymore. He was slated to leave on July 7, just over a month after the glorious Discussion with Ortmanns. So he viewed everyone as through a pair of near-sighted spectacles. This undoubtedly distorted his vision. . . .

Speaking of emotional states, Terry was apparently struggling more than I recall from this safe distance. Frankly, after the mission was over, I think I developed a good case of selective memory (which my wife claims never went into remission). I remember, of course, that the end of Bruder Terry’s mission was no triumphant exit that would make a fitting end to a Church-produced missionary video, but his journal sort of surprises me. It repeatedly recorded heartfelt laments about how hard it was to stay enthused, how much energy he expended trying to force a spiritual experience that never came, and how inadequate he felt. A follow-up Discussion with the Ortmanns was emblematic of his frustrations. He wanted so much to duplicate the magical experience he and Holmes had had—both for the Ortmanns and for his struggling companion—but the Discussion fell flat. He tried too hard, and when no Spirit came, he was exhausted and depressed for a couple of days.

Two factors probably came into play here regarding his frustration. First, over the past two years, he had actually had a handful of rather mind-boggling spiritual experiences. He probably assumed he should be having these sorts of happenings on a weekly or even daily basis. But he was young and had very little life experience. How could he know that the Spirit was capricious and came only occasionally and unannounced? Jesus even admitted as much to Nicodemus. Second, although he worshiped the ground President Randall walked on, I believe the standard this young president set was so high that when Terry understood he wasn’t even within the same zip code of that ideal, he felt he was a failure. Repeatedly, his journal bemoans the fact that he had so little faith. In his mind, the proof of faith was success. He remembered the baptism goal he had set the year before, the one encouraged by President Randall, who tied faith directly to results, baptisms. And what did Terry have to show for his faith? An elderly lady and a young Donny groupie. He supposed he could also count half of a lonely middle-aged man. Terry had found Alfred Kraft, but someone else had baptized him. And that was it. He had come nowhere near the thirty baptisms he had idealistically plucked from the air as a goal under the spell of President Randall’s magic. Unfortunately, the spell didn’t endure away from his presence. And since Bruder Terry had had so little measurable success, he translated that into the conclusion that he had no faith. The fact that he was still a mere district leader while several of his good friends in the mission were already zone leaders or assistants made him believe he had underachieved, an inevitable and sad conclusion in the palpable mission (and LDS) environment where leadership positions were seen as evidence of righteousness and faith. Rather than focusing on the few true high points, Bruder Terry wallowed in the troughs. And this pattern persisted right up to his last week. As the end drew nearer and he realized he would not see another baptism, he focused on leaving Bruder Williams with a pool of potential converts, hence the repeated naïve exclamations “He could be good” and “She could be good.” In the end, he left Williams nobody within a light-year of baptism.

Well, that’s a small taste of what Bruder is all about. There’s a lot more, of course, and the Nachwort (Afterword) delves pretty deeply into what I think now about both Bruder Terry and the Church he represented. But, as I asked earlier, why would you even want to understand a Mormon missionary in Germany in the 1970s? I’ll let Steve Walker, emeritus professor of English at BYU, give another answer: “Bruder may be the best missionary memoir ever. I’ve read every one I could find, and this compelling volume is the best I’ve found. I like the vividness with which Terry lays out the day-to-day realities of missionary experience like a smorgasbord for those who haven’t yet tasted it, and even more appetizingly for those of us who thought we already had.”