What Motivates a Mormon to "Do Good"?

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was the last of the "Five Good Emperors" of Rome, and he died precisely sixteen and half centuries before Joseph Smith founded the Mormon Church. He was affectionately known as "Marcus The Wise", and he wrote of one of the inherent flaws that plague the LDS Church in modern times. He spoke of three kinds of men:

"One kind of man, when he does a good turn to someone, is forward also to set down the favour to his account. Another is not forward to do this, but still within himself he thinks as though he were a creditor and is conscious of what he has done. A third is in a sense not even conscious of what he has done, but he is like a vine which has borne grapes, and asks nothing more when once it has borne its appropriate fruit. A horse runs, a hound tracks, bees make honey, and [the third] man does good, but doesn't know that he has done it and passes on to a second act, like a vine to bear once more its grapes in due season. You ought then to be one of these who in a way are not aware of what they do."

I was raised "keeping score" for myself, and by training me to do this, the LDS Church also taught me to subconsciously "keep score" for every member of the church around me. As an Elder's Quorum President I was keenly aware of who showed up to help people move and assist others in the quorum in doing tasks that could not be done on their own. The needs of others are front and center in the Mormon Church, but so is the "score keeping".

I think at the root of this trend is the notion that Mormon have to "earn their way" into the Celestial Kingdom. Just getting into "heaven" is not enough for a true-blue Mormon (TBM) because families are only eternal if you make it to the top-third of the Celestial Kingdom, so the self-evaluation is critical. If you sin (a minus), you have to counteract that with a good deed (a plus).

Just doing good because it is a part of human nature is very rare in a Mormon congregation. The Ward PEC (priesthood executive committee) is always keeping score. I know because for fully half of my adult life I was a member of a ward or branch PEC in more than six congregations from Edmonton (AB) to Yellowknife (NT) to Greater Vancouver (BC). I know there a "good Mormons" (like my son), but they are the exception rather than the rule.

A Preventable Mess! How Families Become Divided.

Well, as I knew it would, an email that I sent out last night to my immediate family members has hit some raw nerves. That email was a personalized version of my post from earlier today that is entitled, "Religion - the root of MY Evil".

This is an email that I got back from one of my most favorite nieces. She is married and in her early 30's and has a brand new baby.

Quoting: "I have never before responded to any of Lester's letters. I likely never will again. I love him and respect his opinions and the decisions he has chosen for his life. However, in return I expect that same respect. My beliefs are mine, and they tend to follow the doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, not the culture and not what other people in my church believe, but I follow the doctrine and that includes the First Presidency and anything they sign in accordance with their callings as Prophets of God! I will never walk out of a church meeting because of something they ask to be read over the pulpit, and I am offended that anyone would ask of me to do so! I have never asked you [Lester] to go against your beliefs, I expect the same respect!! My religion has stated its beliefs. How individuals choose to portray those beliefs is something that they will have to discuss with God, whom I believe is a loving, just and merciful Being! I have never been cruel, mean or judgemental to any homosexual, however, I also do not condone that lifestyle. This is my belief. This is a personal opinion! YOU have yours and I have NEVER judged you for it! Do not judge me for mine! You can still love and care for someone and disagree with their beliefs and their lifestyle!! I enjoy receiving emails and news from you, I do not enjoy being lectured or being told I am wrong in my opinions or beliefs. And I definitely do not appreciate being grouped into a category of Mormons who are cruel! My judgement is reserved for a session between me and my Lord and Savior. Do not presume to tell me how He is going to judge me!!" (End)

This is my reply:

"Thanks for taking the time to respond. FYI, you and [your older sister] were the only ones to do so, but at least [she] sees the church leaders for who they really are. In your email you wrote: "I have never asked you to go against your beliefs, I expect the same respect!!" Well, one of us has to be wrong, because if your prophet gets his way, I lose my right to equality, not only as an American, but a human being. I am an atheist now (well, maybe a hopeful agnostic at best), so by demanding that I afford you the privilege of blindly following your prophet, you are asking me to forfeit my belief that I was born gay and am entitled to a full, happy, authentic life as a gay man. A life, which I might add, will have no impact on how happy your marriage to [your husband] is and how you will raise your child. Please try to break away from the mentality that, "When the Prophet speaks, the thinking has been done." You are more intelligent than that. Take a step back and take a serious look at what the prophet is really asking you to do. He is telling you that your fellow human beings, (your gay "brothers" that you claim your God created,) really are not "equal" and that their homosexuality is a weakness in the flesh (a mental illness?) that must be endured alone and in sorrow. The problem here is your Bible...there is really nothing in the Bible that states that women or slaves were ever equal. It took the founding of a New World and some creative writing by the American Founding Fathers (several of whom were atheists) before modern liberals determined that they could ignore the writings of the Bible and free the slaves and let women own property and vote. These photos to the right are taken from above the doorways in the Capitol. Don't give any church the credit for doing that. Christian fundamentalists fought those changes every step of the way because they claimed then (and your prophet still wants to claim now) that the Bible had to be interpreted literally. Only in the New World, with an effective separation of church state, could this degree of equality have been accomplished. Your prophet is now asking California to once again merge church and state and take us backward toward the a selective interpretation of the Bible, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Holy Wars.

Just so you know, if the government were to implement a policy tomorrow restricting the Mormons from "sealing" their own dead ancestors, I would protest in the streets on your behalf so that you have your freedom of religion.

What the Mormons are doing in California (and what they did in 2006 with me), is telling me that now that I am an out gay man I am worth less in this country than I was 4 years ago while a hypocrite and lying about my authentic self. By obeying your prophet you are trying to tell me that I am expected to take a demotion in my status as a human being after accepting my birth as a gay man.

All I'm asking is that you (as a family member) leave religion out of this. It is a question of civil rights. I didn't ask to be born a gay man just like Mickey did not ask to be born a negro and you did not ask to be born a woman. You enjoy freedoms that were earned on the backs of women before you. Your children will see your prophet and other Christian fundamentalists as people who saw others as undeserving of equality under the law; exactly the same way as you yourself now see those who kept slaves and treated women as chattel only a few generations ago. As the Republican chief judge in California wrote when he struck down the ban against gay marriage; "I did not want to be seen as on the wrong side of history with this issue." Take a closer look at the stand your prophet is taking and re-evaluate your thinking.
I hope you can now see where this letter from the prophet has led us in our own family. Because I cannot stand down and ignore this (because it affects everything that I am and my right to the same happiness that you take for granted), and because you cannot opt to disagree with your prophet (because you will be labelled "apostate"), we will now have a very deep divide in our family; a divide that will likely be insurmountable for the rest of our lives, but what choice did I have? To remain silent? I tried that for over 35 years, it didn't work, so I will not allow you all to fool yourselves into thinking that this isn't important to me. It is important enough to me that I will risk alienating myself from my family because to do anything less than defend myself on this issue would be to go back into the closet and deny my authenticity!

Don't blame me for having an opinion. Blame your prophet for putting you into a "no win" situation. Because of what your prophet did, there are only losers on all sides of this whole, preventable, mess.

Sincerely,
Uncle Lester (End)

I'm going to end this post with the quote I posted earlier today from Stuart Matis. It was written to a friend a few short days before he commited suicide after the letter from the Prophet was ordered read early in the year 2000 during the California Proposition 22 debate: "The Knight Initiative [Prop 22] will certainly save no family. It is codified hatred. It is anti-family, anti-love and it is wrong."

Religion - the root of MY evil!

I was motivated to start my blog while reading Richard Dawkins' controversial book, "The God Delusion". In the preface, he tells of working with Channel Four (British television) on their two-part documentary "Root of All Evil". While promoting the documentary in the local papers, they bought a full-page ad and published a photo of the New York skyline that showed the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The caption read, "Imagine a World Without Religion".

The book is a brilliant thesis in defense of atheism, and as you read this post, I would invite you to think in broad terms beyond Christianity. The most difficult challenges in my life were generated by my membership in the Mormon Church (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), but in every reference to my own experience, you could substitute "Catholic", "Islam", or simply "fundamentalism" or "extremism" for the word "Mormon".

Any religion can claim to be the only path to God, rather than just another path to God, but when that religion strives to influence government to legislate their interpretation of scripture into the laws of a country, then they have crossed the line into bigotry. Let me remind you of the definition of bigotry: "the stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one's own."

The catalyst to begin my blog today was inspired by an email from an on-line group that on June 20th the Mormon Church formalized their support of a very political campaign to entrench bigotry into the California constitution. They have ordered that a letter from the prophet be read from the pulpit in every California congregation on June 29th, and this letter is instructing members to take a single polarizing position in a political campaign. With words like "Local Church leaders will provide information about how you may become involved...", "...do all you can...", and "...donating of your means and time....", the church has made it very clear that there will be no middle ground for the faithful members of the church during the November election this year.

But what about my son and my daughter who have yet to abandon their faith in the Mormon Church? I'm the youngest child in a family of six, and all five of my siblings are still TBM's (True Blue Mormons). I have 37 nieces and nephews, the majority of whom are still attending weekly church meetings. Where does this type of action by church leadership leave them?

It is well documented in history what action like this by the church does to families. At best, it polarizes congregations and divides families. At its worst, it has caused suicides and initiated disruptive church-court action against open-minded individuals and vulnerable church members like myself.

In early 2000 there was a fierce battle on in California over the passage of Proposition 22. The battle was so fierce that when one family took a vocal position against the church and refused to place a supportive lawn sign on their property, the head of the family was disfellowshipped (released from his position in the ward and had the use of priesthood authority suspended). Their main opposition was against the church's involvement in politics. Most tragically, the tension became so severe that on February 25th Stuart Matis shot himself in the head on the sidewalk of a regional California meeting house in Los Altos. A short time before his suicide he wrote this to a friend: "On the night of March 7th, many California couples will retire to their beds thrilled that they helped pass the Knight Initiative (Proposition 22). What they don't realize is that in the next room, their son or daughter is lying in bed crying and could very well one day be the victim of society's homophobia. The Knight Initiative will certainly save no family. It is codified hatred. It is anti-family, anti-love and it is wrong."

Asked to comment on the suicide, a spokesman for the "Yes on 22" campaign declined comment other than to say, "It's a personal family matter." No kidding! So why did the church and other campaigners get involved in "personal family matters" in the first place?

I think it was Stuart's mother who recounted that in a Sunday School class that she attended, and with full knowledge that she had a gay son (who was living a celibate life and still worthy of his temple recommend), a man stood up and said, "They should take every homosexual and round them up, put them on a boat, and sink it in the Mindanao Trench!"

How can you fail to see that statement as anything but bigotry?

During the campaign for Proposition 22, letters from the prophet were ordered to be read from the pulpit. The significance of this is that there is a saying in the Mormon Church that is not at all an exaggeration. The saying is, "When the Prophet speaks, the thinking has been done!"

Fast forward to May 29th, 2006 when the church once again saw fit to have a letter like this read from the pulpit, virtually commanding every Mormon to write a letter to their political leaders in support of the Federal Marriage Amendment. At 7PM that night I was personally served a letter from my bishop and my Elders Quorum president. I had been summoned to a disciplinary council at 7AM the morning of June 4th. These types of meetings are traditionally referred to as a "Court of Love", because they like to convince themselves that they are acting in my best interest out of their love for me by working out my salvation with God for me. They feel qualified to do this by virtue of their "calling" to preside over me. I asked to have my friend (and a member of my bishopric) attend with me, and was denied. I asked the stake president (the Mormon equivalent of a Cardinal) to distribute a two page letter to each man on the council that clarified my position as a gay man who was going to remain married and faithful to my wife of 25 years, and was denied.

The "court of love" was over in 35 minutes. Only two questions were asked of me (one was, "Have you been actively trying to get other members of the church to adopt your views?", to which I replied, "I have only written my personal views in my memoirs.") They debated my fate for 5 minutes and then invited me back in to pronounce my excommunication.

That same Sunday, (June 4th), a letter to the editor by Jeffrey Nielsen was published in the Salt Lake Tribune. Mr. Nielsen was a philosophy professor at BYU and was happily married to a woman and had a family. All he stated was that by reading a letter from the pulpit, essentially ordering all members of the church to adopt the church's stand on the FMA issue, that church leaders had crossed a line. He was fired the next day.

So here we are again. In the two years since my excommunication the church has made amazing strides toward reconciliation with the gay Mormons. Carol Lynn Pearson's book, "No More Goodbyes" has paved the way for this to happen. Her play, "Facing East" provides a riveting backdrop to the consequences of adopting a "no middle ground" position when it comes to homosexuals and the Bible. Pressure from SoulForce has forced BYU to stop expelling gay students, and pressure from ex-gay groups (including a demonstration by my former wife and I on the steps of Evergreen Int'l in July 2007) has forced the church to admit that they do not know what causes homosexuality and that they will never counsel a gay man to marry a woman as a "cure". They seem to have repealed all of their former printed matter on homosexuality and its causes in favor of a single brochure entitled "God Loveth His Children". All of the recent writings advocate their love for their gay brothers and sisters. It seemed that we had emerged from the dark ages and entered an age of enlightenment.

And now this. The wording of the current letter is essentially identical to those that were read in 2000 and in 2006.

Unfortunately, the consequences will therefore be almost identical as well.