The Theology of a Mormon Christian Atheist

A reflection on my faith in God, past and present, and a response to missionaries who try to recruit me to their faith.

Investigating the history of early Christianity did much to reshape completely the way I think about religion (all religion). I began my research believing that the Great Apostasy was historical, that there was a primitive church of Christ identifiable in history whose form was somehow perverted between 30-33 AD and 1820. When I read people like Martin Luther calling for a return to primitive Christianity, I thought they were speaking historically (as I think they often meant to, though neither they nor Joseph Smith ever really separated history from theology as much as moderns do). But the more I learned about early Christianity and the branches of the faith that survived to the present (and those that died), the less my original narrative made any sense. Today, I think the Great Apostasy is just the Mormon version of a widespread early Protestant delusion (that there was a unitary primitive Christian church and that our denomination represents its only or at least its most legitimate successor).

Paradoxically, I find myself agreeing with G. K. Chesterton, who called the Reformation an atheist movement. I see where he was wrong (not all Protestants are atheists), but for me (and many people I know, Mormon and not) he was right. Taking faith away from God (a mystery outside time and space) and putting it in history (specific events that happened or didn’t) and historical things (e.g. the Bible) leads people like me inevitably to atheism (when we read the holy books and the history and discover incoherence and human vanity masquerading as divine certainty all over the place).

I am not against God. I rather think I am for him, insofar as he represents good things about humanity. But when he represents pieces of humanity that I find abhorrent, I cannot support that (e.g. most of the OT, and even many sentiments in the New: the only books that I consistently read with enjoyment are Ecclesiastes, the Gospels, and James). The repeated claim that someone understands God better than someone else I find historically extremely problematic, since it is traditionally advanced in order to make one person subject (in ways that I find immoral) to another. Also, I don’t see the hand of God in history. A Deist god (the Platonic demiurge who sets the world going and then steps back to let it unwind ad libitum) I might admit as a possibility, but the problem of evil appears in my mind too large and glaring to be undone by the reassurance that poor children dying in agony as a result of natural disasters (leaving aside manmade ones for the moment) will be rewarded in another life. Why would a personal, loving God send tsunamis or tse-tse flies to torture small children, too little and ignorant to have done anything to warrant that kind of punishment? I cannot answer, and try as I might I don’t see God providing one in history. (All history provides is theologians telling Job to quit whining and consider that he is an idiot to trust his eyes. I don’t dispute that I am an idiot, or that my eyes can play tricks, but that doesn’t actually make life better--for me or the kids dying out there. I have spent years asking God, “Where is the pavilion covering thy hiding place?” and the only answer I get is that it is everywhere, everywhere and nowhere.)

I will confess too that I prefer models of divinity which make it less powerful (and/or less good), since these seem more like reality to me. I actually like the Mormon god(s) more than some versions of the Abrahamic one (worshipped by Jews, Christians, and Muslims), precisely because he is not (at least not necessarily) all-powerful, all-knowing, and the rest of it.  He is just a being like us, only at some remove. (Maybe he doesn’t send the tsunamis and tse-tse flies. Maybe he would block them if he could.) I like “pagan” gods (who like the universe are sometimes just dicks: Apollo gets mad for no real reason and starts killing people because he can, just like the tse-tse flies). But I also like the idea of God as something ineffable and impossibly remote (the reality outside our limited ability to understand or express): I just don’t see this reality as necessarily kind or cruel. Like the world, it is simply there, giving some of us sunshine and others tsunamis (kind of like Zeus reaching into his two jars and tossing blessings and curses at random on everybody).

The more I have interacted with believers and non-believers in all kinds of different traditions, the less I believe in the utility of “missionary work” (at least as it exists in most traditions historically). There is a place for sharing with others. We can help each other, and we can talk about the thoughts and practices that give our individual lives meaning, but it is presumptive and wrong-headed to insist that others come around to our ways and leave their own (against their will). There is nothing inherently superior in any historical religion, nothing that makes it objectively better for all people everywhere than whatever other religion they happen to be practicing at the moment. There are superior people, people who practice their religion better than other people, but their superiority is not a matter of transferrable doctrine or ritual but something integral to themselves, an expression of their individually outstanding moral character. We can learn from these people. We can respect them. But real learning and respect is not about wearing the clothes they wear, saying the prayers they say, believing the doctrines they believe, etc. It is about cultivating our own moral excellence, looking into the depths of our own spirit and bringing out the best aspects of the humanity that we find there. That humanity is not all-knowing or all-powerful or anything similar. It is weak. It makes mistakes. But it can learn from those mistakes. It can be kind as well as cruel. It can repent. It can find and cultivate all kinds of beauty in the strangest places. I believe in it. I believe in people, even if I find our gods mostly fictions (some more infantile than others, but in the end we are all just children playing in the sand, building castles that the tide washes away the way it always has).

Modern Apocalypse

"Prophets of Doom."  History Channel, 2011.

As I prepare to hunt for a job puttering around like most academics, it is interesting to take a look at the big picture of what is going on in society.  The world as we know it is crashing, as it always has, only it is bigger now, so it falls harder.  I hope I can prepare myself to live in a world without all the things I depend on subconsciously.

I wish universities studied this stuff.  I feel like this is really what I am interested in.  What I really want to learn is how to live happily like the people in "less developed" economies, which are more sustainable than the cancerous, obese behemoth that is the imploding First World.  My research into antiquity is an attempt to get back to something better than modern civilization, without making the same mistakes that were made.  I want to return to the Bronze Age (or earlier), without being stupid the same way my ancestors were back then.

My journey into the past is also a journey into the future.  It is not a "restoration" (in the Mormon sense) really; it is more of a cautious reformation.  There is no Eden to return to.  But there is a purgatory before the modern hell, and right now that purgatory is looking like the place to build if you want to last.

Living on the Dole

Neil Postman.  Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.  New York: Vintage, 1992.  ISBN: 0679745408.

Berndt Heinrich.  A Year in the Maine Woods.  Da Capo, 1995.  ISBN: 0201489392.

Postman writes about the demise of old human culture (the art of living well), and the rise of a new one (the art of manipulating hyper-specialized tools in exchange for increasingly complex goods and services from other tool-users, goods and services so complex that no individual can provide them for himself).  Heinrich offers an interesting paradox: a new man (the hyper-specialized professor of biology) who nevertheless manages to live well in the old style, largely because he lives simply.

In his book, Heinrich tells how he went out into the Maine woods, built a log cabin, and managed to thrive without regular access to many of the amenities of Postman's technopoly (amenities like running water, the indoor toilet, and the refrigerator).  The modern Thoreau did not cut himself off entirely from society: he installed a phone in a friend's outhouse, and he made regular visits to less technologically unburdened people around him, but his experiment is still impressive.  He made his own food, keeping an eternal stew on the stove: as long as he boiled it once each day, bacteria never ruined it, and thus he required no refrigerator.  He gathered water each day from a spring nearby.  (In modern communities suffering from water shortage, e.g. Western cities like Las Vegas, he recommends cutting off easy individual access to water, requiring people to travel and get their own: the farther they travel, the less extra, unnecessary water they will be willing to bring back.)  His daily entertainment came from cutting wood (for the stove), running, visiting neighbors (or receiving visits from family members and students), and (especially) watching native wildlife (which he describes in great detail throughout the book, as you expect a good biologist to do).  He did not have a television or Internet.  He conducted numerous experiments, some personal (like his attempt to calculate the moon's orbit, a quantity known to science but unknown to him personally) and some professional (his original excuse for this excursion was a desire to see how ravens behave in the wild: he published his findings for scientists).  He was never afraid to get dirty--trapping rodents (which he then fed to ravens or cooked and consumed himself), tasting insects (which were always invading his little home: the strangest invaders were so-called "cluster flies," giant black flies that gathered in the crevices of the cabin over winter and came out in hordes every time it got warm), and mucking around in the outdoors (where he regularly collected roadkill and dead farm animals to feed his ravens).

Reading Heinrich's experience reminded me of Postman, largely because Heinrich strikes me as one of those happy moderns least affected by the diseases of modern civilization that Postman talks about.  At the end of the day, Heinrich knows how to take care of himself better than most people.  He has practical know-how that is increasingly rare in modern life, which is supposed to work better the less each individual knows about doing for himself, and the more he knows about serving society (with increasingly hyper-specialized skills).  Heinrich also has remarkable psychological contentment--though he alludes offhand to his ex-wife (who presumably wasn't down with moving off into the wilderness), and wood-madness (what happens when you live too long as a forest hermit away from other people).  Unlike many people, he is not worried about business or politics: Wall Street and Washington are far from his consciousness, whether as sources of goodies to harvest or sins to protest (chief among these the withholding of goodies).  If the economy tanks, his woodland home will still be there, and he will still be able to live in it.  He is not "on the dole" with the rest of modern civilization, sucking the teat of the giant behemoth that is Society (supply-and-demand, proletariat and bourgeois, presided over by the divine Hand of Adam Smith or the corporate Consciousness of Karl Marx).

It strikes me that much of modern society lives "on the dole."  Employed or not, all of us depend on others to do for us in really basic ways (e.g. providing access to food, shelter, and clean clothing).  Increasingly, this dependence is not a luxury (the way it often has been throughout history), but an expectation: we even get some people talking about it as a "right" (which seems idiotic to me).  Confronted with problems, we demand that specialists come in and save us from life (whether unpredictable forces of nature, our own incompetence, or the incompetence of someone else near us).  We throw tantrums (occupying Wall Street, joining the Tea Party) instead of fixing the root of the problem (our individual attitude and aptitude).  Our established organizations of social control (government, schools, churches, businesses) play to our infantilism, cultivating citizens who vote for suck-ups (who in turn promise them the world on a silver platter), students who care more about getting ahead temporarily than actually learning anything about real life (that might be hard, not to mention pay small short-term dividends), worshipers who think that piety is doing whatever some guru (or book written by gurus) says, and customers who are supposed to sit back and be "needy" (since Keynesians value consumption over production).  The result is that we are always feeling helpless, frustrated, and worried.  No one likes living on the dole, whether that means being a wage-slave (some of whom make millions) or a homeless bum.  Better to live in a wilderness with no amenities.

A final thought.  Heinrich is just like us modern civilized folk in many respects: he uses a lot of the same technology, and relies on other people to help him with things he cannot provide.  The difference, as I see it, is that he engages his own life much more continuously and thoughtfully than we do.  He asks for help with problems that he has already attempted to solve on his own, problems that many of us would never recognize because we have already called specialists in to take care of everything without doing our own diagnosis.  We sit around passively, waiting for life to happen to us (and complaining when it happens badly).  Heinrich goes out to meet it.  We never know what we are capable of, and we feel frustrated, alienated from ourselves (and one another), and helpless.  Heinrich sees what he can do every day, and is empowered even by failure (which for someone like him is a kind of learning).  We are helpless in the hands of our tools, which have created a culture that controls us.  Heinrich is the master of his tools, which he uses to make culture.