I don’t want to write about gay marriage. So let’s talk about linguistics first.
We acquire language in childhood through a long process of listening to and eventually reading the language output of competent speakers of English (or whatever languages prevail in the communities where we grow up). As we are exposed to countless examples of language, we start to build up an internal model of English. We hypothesize about the rules of English and use our hypotheses to generate English statements unlike any we have heard before in response to new situations. Over time, as our hypotheses are confirmed or falsified, we modify the internal set of rules by which we determine what is and is not a well-formed English utterance.
We can’t directly observe the mental structures of language. It’s entirely possible, even likely, that each of us has a somewhat different internal model of English. Even if we had the same set of grammar rules, we might prioritize them in a slightly different order. So there will be some statements that I think are grammatically correct according to my sense of English grammar, while you find them defective according to your internal model, and vice-versa.
I suspect that religious beliefs, including Mormonism, work in a similar way. Over years of listening, reading, and observing, we build up an internal representation of Mormonism by which we classify statements or behaviors as either well-formed or defective with respect to our beliefs, even in the face of novel circumstances. I may not ever have met my new neighbors, but my internal model of moral beliefs tells me that bringing them a pie would be a valid expression of Mormon teaching, while defacing their car would not, even though I have no direct experience with defacing cars or bringing people pie (brownies are my preferred way to say hello).
As with language, though, our internal representations of Mormonism are not exactly alike, and we prioritize its moral imperatives in somewhat different ways, leading to situations where what you think of as a true statement about Mormon belief is defective according to my internal moral grammar, and vice-versa.
Some variation is inevitable and, to a degree, even welcome. You say caramel with three syllables, I say it in two. You see neckties as a distraction at church, I see them as necessary. Vive la différence!
But other constraints are more significant, like the requirement that only transitive verbs can appear in the passive voice. The Book of Mormon was read is OK. But *In the gymnasium was danced just won’t do, at least in English. After too many differences accumulate in the basic rules of syntax and phonetics, we’re no longer speaking the same language.
The subject of gay marriage is one about which predictive statements of acceptable Mormon belief have been contradictory. Such as:
Love is holy and should be sanctified by the church.
Homosexual relations are sinful and must be rejected by the church.
Now that gay marriage is legal, married gay couples are keeping the law of chastity.
Sinful relations cannot be sanctified through marriage.
The church is moving towards accepting gay marriage.
The church has not budged an inch in its rejection of gay marriage.
In this case, the diversity of opinion is a problem for Mormonism, because family and marriage are at the heart of some core teachings and at the pinnacle of its salvific rituals. Fundamentally opposed views on central doctrines can’t co-exist forever.
Unlike human languages, Mormonism has a small set of highly privileged informants about what constitutes a well-formed statement of Mormon belief. I may have an imperfect command of Mormonism, but the prophets and apostles have a unique degree of authority. There is no structure within the church that rivals the apostles. When the apostles act with unanimity—as they have now done in classifying entering into gay marriage as apostasy—that is about as strong of evidence as we can get that gay marriage is not compatible with Mormonism (at least, not without generating a set of statements that break the whole system, like: *The prophets are incapable of guiding the church on important issues today). If I don’t understand why a policy was necessary, I assume it’s because my knowledge of the church’s needs beyond the boundaries of my own home is very limited.
So today a lot of people feel horrible. I’m sorry, and I sympathize. It’s a crummy feeling to think that you understand what your church teaches and to make predictions about the world based on your internal model of those beliefs, only to run into strong evidence that you were wrong, your church is not moving gradually towards what you see as the enlightened view on an issue you care deeply about, and your internal system of belief is not in conformity with church teachings after all.
While I don’t find the new policies as upsetting as other people have, they did surprise me in some ways. Now that I have evidence that some of my hypotheses based on my internal rule-set of Mormonism weren’t entirely correct, how do I need to update my internal model? We prefer parsimonious modifications—the fewest modifications to the existing system and the least amount of conspiracy-theorist thinking. I think all it takes is a few modest changes to how rules are prioritized in order to explain the changes to myself.
(I don’t know what modifications are necessary for you, though, since your internal sense of Mormonism may differ from mine in key ways. I do know that non-parsimonious answers are very unlikely to be correct, and tend to quickly have noxious side effects, so I’m not entertaining any theories, pro or contra, about what the apostles really intended beyond what they say they intended, or about who is really responsible for the changes beyond the apostles and first presidency.)
So what I learn about Mormonism from the new policies is this:
- Gay marriage is a bigger problem for Mormonism as a system of beliefs than I had thought. Some smart people, including some of my esteemed co-bloggers, have suggested ways that Mormonism could be adapted to allow for gay marriage, but the new policies look like an authoritative answer that the two are in fact entirely incompatible. For a church that imagines salvation not as individual grace but as a family affair, but also maintains that same-sex intercourse is a serious sin, the legalization of gay marriages created family units that are beyond reach of the church’s salvific mechanisms. For a church with universal aspirations, that’s a difficult problem.
1a. A corollary to this is that the church sees its teachings on the family as highly disruptive to gay families. This is probably so; it’s hard to see how telling someone that their eternal exaltation requires the dissolution of their current domestic arrangement could be otherwise.
- The church places an even higher value than I had thought on not disrupting family units, no matter how these families are comprised. It was my understanding that the church never counsels divorce, even for polygamous families, either in the U.S. or abroad, who cannot otherwise be baptized, even as these families remain welcome to attend church meetings. The church will teach its doctrine, but it will not encourage the break-up of families of any kind.
So to bring my internal sense of Mormon belief into agreement with the policy changes, I need to raise the priority of two rules. On the one hand, same-sex intercourse ends up as an even more serious sin than before, and entirely incompatible with the sacrament of marriage; on the other, the imperative to strengthen families is also stronger, and encompasses families with gay parents.
Based on my internal sense of what Mormon beliefs permit or require, I will hazard a prediction that the policy on baptism and ordination of children of same-sex couples will sooner rather than later emerge not as a bright-line test but as something more like the Fair Use doctrine, where several different factors are weighed in deciding whether baptism is appropriate or not. That is, at least, what my internal sense of Mormonism predicts, although I’ve been wrong before. I’ll keep updating my internal model of Mormonism as needed.
* * *
Please do note that the comment section below is not a value-free space. It’s more like the front parlor of my home. Please keep your comments calm and avoid insulting anyone.
Interesting. I think this is a reasonable way of thinking about some of the conflicts people have over Mormonism.
I like this analogy. I also find it interesting the various “speech codes” and how they will adapt to the change in “correct speech”. Some people don’t speak mormon. Some speak mormon at home but not in public, others the reverse. Some enjoy slang and exclude those as odd that don’t adopt their speech codes.
Basically, mormonism as you describre it has the problem of being French. It has aspirations to being a world language of high regard and sees itself as having one correct form and needing tight control on language innovation. But it is declining as a share of world population speakers and has lost control over many loan words.
At a minimum many will speak with an accent or with poor grammar. The language community inevitably shrinks if people who speak incorrectly are excluded from discourse.
While I am very much on board with this post, I think more than a few people might be uncomfortable trading in all question of moral rightness for linguistic difference. This is especially the case for the PC crowd who have made a conscious effort to moralize so many linguistic differences.
“Unlike human languages, Mormonism has a small set of highly privileged informants about what constitutes a well-formed statement of Mormon belief.”
There are actually quite a few groups that claim to have this authority over a particular language, for example The French Academy. It’s unfortunate that you didn’t explore this part of the analogy more before concluding with such a limited list of possible reactions to the policy.
Very well reasoned.
I wish the last four words of 1 Kings 18:24 had been given their own verse, so I could respond to this blog post with a tidy citation.
As a former linguistics major (and recovering prescriptivist), I like it.
It is quite possible for a believing Mormon to disagree with the apostles in the matter of same-sex marriage without generating statements that break the whole system. This is because the prophets’ authority is only part of Mormonism’s foundation. The faith is equally grounded in the imperative that Mormons feel to receive a personal witness of the gospel’s truth and God’s will for them. Many Latter-day Saints have long since learned to cope with tension between their personal spiritual experiences and conflicting guidance of the prophets. It has ever been so.
“Some… have suggested ways that Mormonism could be adapted to allow for gay marriage, but the new policies look like an authoritative answer that the two are in fact entirely incompatible.”
I’m seeing so many explanations of what’s happening that are mutually incompatible. Some are saying it’s merely a policy, not a doctrine, so it’s fine for any faithful member to believe that it is not of God. Others are saying it’s an authoritative answer from the brethren to a doctrinal question, so believing that it is of God is a requirement of remaining faithful.
If the policy is later revoked or amended as some of the faithful are requesting and maybe expecting (see “Please Fix This” post at FMH for examples of what I mean), would such a later amendment look to you like an authoritative answer that Mormonism and gay marriage are slightly less incompatible than it now appears?
“It was my understanding that the church never counsels divorce … The church will teach its doctrine, but it will not encourage the break-up of families of any kind.”
Really. Not even in cases of abandonment, serial adultery, severe addiction, domestic abuse. Not even in the case of death threats by one spouse on the other spouse and children. That is something.
“…the church sees its teachings on the family as highly disruptive to gay families.”
and
“The church will teach its doctrine, but it will not encourage the break-up of families of any kind.”
Hard for me to see how you can read the new policy as a pastoral move to protect gay families. Indeed the church’s teachings are highly disruptive to gay families, but so is the new policy. I do not know how to read the requirement that a child of gay parents who wishes to serve a mission repudiate gay marriage and no longer live with her or his family as anything but a call to break up with your family.
Asking a child to distinguish between the marriage of the people who raised her and the people themselves is a rhetorical backflip that I think few of us can even imagine let alone could pull off (or would ever want to).
I just don’t buy the protectionist stuff. It rings utterly hollow to me. I think, if anything, the church is protecting itself from legal concerns suddenly emergent in the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges. The church certainly has a right to make those strategic choices. I have a right to believe they are not divinely inspired. And I’m left, then, as many are, with my own choices to make, all of which are painful.
“I don’t want to write about gay marriage.”
Cute.
OP: “It was my understanding that the church never counsels divorce, even for polygamous families, either in the U.S. or abroad”
Is that accurate? I’d heard the opposite. I clearly don’t know one way or the other.
It would be very odd if one’s purpose was to teach correct linguistic use to only describe the correct use to teachers of language and not also to students. The fact that what you learned was learned in a way that was not expected to be taught makes any conclusions about the usage more generally somewhat suspect.
I pretty much agree with everything in the OP, except this suggestion that we must change our thinking to be in rough accordance with that of the apostles in order to consider ourselves good members of the LDS church. At least that is what I am gathering that you are suggesting by asking “how do I need to update my internal model?.” The unwritten rules of who gets to consider him/herself a Mormon and to be in good standing are much looser and permit greater diversity than the unwritten rules of who gets to consider him/herself an English-speaker. To be considered an English-speaker, my rules for syntax and phonology must have a good degree of correspondence with those that are common in the greater the English-speaking community to the extent that I am clearly understood by them and can understand them.
As to considering oneself a good Mormon and to be considered a Mormon in good standing, there are limits. I wouldn’t be considered a Mormon in good standing if I drank, smoked, and openly doubted the existence of God. I would be fooling myself if I considered myself one doing/professing all of that. However, one can consider themselves and be considered a Mormon in good standing by the LDS leaders and disagree with the LDS leaders about their new policy in the handbook, support the legalization of gay marriage, and even think it would be a good idea for the leaders to allow temple sealings for same-gender couples. There are no formal situations in which I have to profess condemnation of gay marriage in order to be considered a member in good standing. This is not a question that I could imagine is regularly asked in baptismal interviews and it is not a temple recommend question. Now, if you support gay temple weddings, it may be a good idea to keep your opinions on the low down. And if you’re a temple sealer, to seal a same-gender couple would be a violation of policy that could result in the revocation of your sealing privileges. Of course, you would be misrepresenting Mormonism to say that leaders supported gay marriage, or that they supported the baptism of the kids of gay couples who were younger than 18. But defining Mormonism and being a Mormon are two different things that I think you are conflating.
Kristen (#10): “Asking a child to distinguish between the marriage of the people who raised her and the people themselves is a rhetorical backflip that I think few of us can even imagine let alone could pull off (or would ever want to).”
Asking this of a child would indeed be asking too much. Even teenagers struggle with this. But adults do this all the time. (Please don’t think I’m putting these examples on the same level, but the principle is the same and some obvious examples should clarify.) Some BYU fans are good friends with UofU fans. Some Republicans have Democrat buddies. Neat-freaks can have disorganized pals. A 2nd-amendment die-hard can be close with a gun-control advocate. A Mormon who believes same-gender sex is a sin can be friends with a homosexual individual who thinks Mormons have some backward religious ideas. Etc.
Adults are all the time participating in positive relationships with people some whose closely-held beliefs and opinions, or some of whose actions, differ strongly. We can only do that by recognizing that the person is more than their, sometimes significant, difference(s) – by distinguishing between the person and their various bits and thoughts and words and actions.
Sorry, _Kirsten_ – typo! No offense.
Reread the post, and had some additional thoughts, especially concerning this paragraph:
I do recall reading some blog posts (James Olson’s recent one and Dave Banack’s a while back (which I can’t find)) that seemed to suggest that in the more distant future (25+ years down the road) the LDS church would come closer to accepting gay marriage (based on the belief that since general US society was becoming more accepting of gay marriage, much like they had become more accepting of racial equality and interracial marriage between the 1950s and 1970s, that the LDS church would eventually follow suit). However, I haven’t read anyone predicting the LDS church becoming more accepting of gay marriage in the short-run. Nor have I read any Mormon bloggers’ posts or heard from any believing Mormons who support gay marriage claiming that their acceptance of gay marriage was “in conformity with church teachings.” They all appear fully aware that their views aren’t. I get the sense that believing Mormons who support gay marriage tend to think that they don’t need to parrot or agree with everything the church leaders say in order to consider themselves and be considered LDS members in good standing. What Elder Christofferson said back in March 2015 (that members could back gay marriage on social media without fear of LDS church action against them) appears to confirm this.
Interesting comparison, Jonathan.
Daniel Smith (4) commented on your sentence “Unlike human languages, Mormonism has a small set of highly privileged informants about what constitutes a well-formed statement of Mormon belief” by stating:
Speaking of comparison… The French Academy, instituted by royal decree in 1634, lost its authority to regulate the French language in 1984. The French government had come to understand that this group of mostly octo- and nonagenarians was bound to lose feeling with the living language and the social forces that drive language development. The members of the Academy, called “the 40 immortals,” remained indeed member till their death, and thus the average age had been climbing and climbing.
Today, the authority for the French language rests with age-limited councils in various francophone countries, such as the French “Conseil supérieur de la langue française” (CSLF), a governmental entity. Their philosophy is not to impose norms but to follow and channel developments in order to maintain unity but also to respect the international diversity of French. For example, the French council proposed a “rectification” of orthographic anomalies, but choose to “let usage decide” over the next decades.
I think you have to be careful about the assertion that the Church never counsels divorce. We are not Catholic and divorce is allowed within our faith. While the Handbook does make a clear statement that no priesthood officer should ever involve themselves in counseling whom to marry nor counseling to divorce a spouse, it also states that those decisions must originate and remain with the individual. Essentially, the Church places a high value on family and marriage and it encourages priesthood officers to counsel couples in troubled marriages as well as encourages expert marriage counseling to help strengthen and heal relationships if possible. But if the member feels it would be in their best interest to divorce we would be supportive of them as far as providing care and concern for them. And as a Bishop I would feel very comfortable advising a woman in an abusive relationship to seek protective separation. We place a higher importance on the safety of the individual than we do on the sanctity of the marriage if you want to start classifying prioritization of important principles.
Jonathan: “It was my understanding that the church never counsels divorce … The church will teach its doctrine, but it will not encourage the break-up of families of any kind.”
Eve: “Really. Not even in cases of abandonment, serial adultery, severe addiction, domestic abuse. Not even in the case of death threats by one spouse on the other spouse and children. That is something.”
Eponymous: (to summarize) The Church never supports divorce of a functional, or salvageable, family, but also supports an individual to protect themself and their family from abuse.
Lyle: Universal statements often contain exceptions. Its hard to describe a 100% accurate theory of anything. Let’s not nit pick. :) [As an example, in many Catholic Countries, LDS Missionaries would help a potential convert obtain a divorce from a legal spouse with whom they had longs since separated from, so that they could marry their current not-yet-legal spouse. So, in this instance the Church did counsel divorce, and encouraged the breakup of a de facto non existent family unit in favor of a potentially functional one. This was seen as helping individuals comply with the Chastity Commandment while also helping to form a stable family unit. Sometimes this involved donations to local judges who were willing to grant a quick divorce which would otherwise take months or years to obtain.]
Zil —
The church is not asking an 18 year-old prospective missionary child of gay parents to simply “participat[e] in positive relationships with people, some whose closely-held beliefs and opinions, or some of whose actions, differ strongly.” In fact, they are asking them to be willing to sever those relationships, if necessary. And these aren’t just any people. They are their parents, whose beliefs the church is asking them to disavow in order to serve a mission. And then they are asking them to move out of the home in which they were raised. I don’t live with my friends whose politics or sports-team devotions are different from mine. And even if I did, I wouldn’t have to disavow their choices in order to serve a mission. Or move out.
The stakes in this new policy and the potential that the “positive relationship” will be damaged are immeasurably higher than in any of the situations you raise, and, as far as I know, the church asks nothing similar of missionaries whose parents might be involved in any number of non-church-approved practices.
Perhaps the prospective missionary child herself can pull off the disavowal and moving out because she believes strongly enough in the church. But what of the parent who is left deeply wounded? Or what of the parent who asks the child to choose between them and the church? It seems utterly unnecessary to me to ever put a child or parents in such a position, not to mention utterly unnecessary to be willing to accept the potential for so much injury. I find the disavowal and moving out requirements stunning in their callousness.
I just cannot accept that we can do this in the name of Christ.
Jonathan,
I’m only seeing this now, and as usual, I find it a sharp, incisive presentation of the sort of thinking which describes how we see the problems before us. Excellent work! However, as one who thinks the policy is foolish and wrong, and yet feels little need to re-evaluate my “internal model of [Mormon] beliefs” solely on the basis of this disagreement, I would plead, in my defense, your own principle of parsimony. Specifically, you write:
When the apostles act with unanimity—as they have now done in classifying entering into gay marriage as apostasy—that is about as strong of evidence as we can get that gay marriage is not compatible with Mormonism (at least, not without generating a set of statements that break the whole system, like: *The prophets are incapable of guiding the church on important issues today).
Yet that is hardly a parsimonious conclusion. It is, on the contrary, a rather expansive one. More correct, I think, would be to say:
When the apostles act with unanimity—as they have now done in classifying entering into gay marriage as apostasy—that is about as strong of evidence as we can get that gay marriage is not compatible with Mormonism (at least, not without generating a set of statements that require a modification of the whole system, like: *The prophets can make mistakes when it comes to developing policies pertaining to sexual identity and family structure when it comes to guiding the church on important issues today).
Yes, mine is more words–but it is doing less stuff with those more words, whereas your briefer words were claiming much more ground. There can, of course, be arguments to the effect that the language of prophetic authority as it has developed in Mormonism is more compatible with your original statement rather than my amended one. But note that those arguments, themselves, arise from an “internal model of [Mormon] beliefs” that we hold in our heads; they are not, to my knowledge, inherently dispositive, one way or another.
Lyle, seeking out the exception is not nitpicking. It’s what the original post advocates: you have to be open to revising your mental model when you encounter additional information. It’s also what Jesus taught: you’re familiar with the ninety-nine already, go get to know the one, and revise your mental model to include that one. When priesthood holders are in leadership positions with authority to counsel people in important life-changing decisions such as family formation or family dissolution, and those leaders think in sweeping abstractions and are only aware of whatever exceptions they may have already happened to run across in their own life and circle of acquaintance, real people’s lives are affected in devastating ways.
“Sometimes this involved donations to local judges who were willing to grant a quick divorce which would otherwise take months or years to obtain”
I’m tempted to ask whether bribery of government officials was against the law of the land in those areas. But I don’t need to. I already updated my mental model of what the church really thinks about “obeying the law of the land” years ago.
I love this analogy more and more. But as I’ve reflected on it the analogy is not to French, the analogy is to Babel. It is getting harder and harder to understand each other using the correct words. It is all imitation and less and less revising mental models. There are gaps between the models of men and women, between young and old, between Utah and non-Utah, between leaders and non-leaders, between lawyers and non-lawyers.
It is beautiful and it is awesome.
Thanks for the comments and clarifications. Wilfried, yes, the similarity to the Academy did occur to me.
Russell, rather than saying my solution or yours is the more parsimonious overall, the more likely explanation is that our internal models of Mormonism differ in a few ways so that we make somewhat different predictions about what constitutes a well-formed statement about Mormonism (and it probably depends as well on what part of the policy we’re talking about).
“So to bring my internal sense of Mormon belief into agreement with the policy changes, I need to…”
This particular comment (which seems to be one of the primary points of your post, here) seems indicative of an unstated principle on which the rest of your thinking hinges.
To hazard a guess, this principle is something to the effect of “if my sense of Mormon belief is out of alignment with that stated by the ‘small set of highly privileged informants,’ then I must alter my sense of Mormon belief.” More bluntly, your a priori assumption seems to be: they are right; if I disagree, I am wrong.
Do I read you correctly?
Ryan, think of it like trying to compose in Latin. We’ve read books and taken classes, so we have a pretty good idea of how the language works, and what’s correct and incorrect, but we’re not native speakers. If I think a particular phrase would be bad Latin, but then I come across Virgil using the same phrase, that would be strong evidence that my internal sense of Latin is incorrect, so I’d want to figure out what the rules really are. Now it may be that the phrase from Virgil just looks too weird to fit, so I’d spend some time looking for something that went wrong in transmission. But if something looks like good, well-transmitted Virgilian Latin, even if it’s surprising to my sense of how Latin should work, I’m more likely to be wrong than Virgil is. The more often I tell myself, “Well, sometimes Latin poets can be wrong,” the less likely I am to really have a good sense of Latin. Does that help?
I know this is way after the conversation has passed, but your last comment (#27) got me to thinking, and I would like to extend the analogy a little bit.
Say (for purposes of the analogy) I really like the metal band Symphony X. They really speak to me and I feel there’s a lot of truth in their art. The use Latin in some of their songs. And if I find Symphony X more moving and personally meaningful than Virgil. do I therefore decide their Latin is more correct, and declare “well, sometimes Virgil gets it wrong” (even though their Latin is actually terrible – the translations come out as complete nonsense like “a rich man of the feathers tragedy out of”). Should I keep insisting Symphony X has it right (even though they don’t), or is it better to admit that Latin poets are way more likely (by serious orders of magnitude) to have the Latin right than pretentious prog metal bands?
Does that work in extending the analogy?
Ivan, I think we can all agree that prog metal lyrics are not the best source for learning Latin.