Misrecognition is not subject to the critique of the anthropologist outsider decoding the insiders’ true motives because it is not based on knowledge available only to the outsider. Rather, it is a description of what the insider already knows and does in relationship to ritualized practices like gift-giving. Everyone knows that great offense can be taken if the receiver of the gift fails to respond properly, such as sending a thank you note or failing to reciprocate a dinner invitation.

So, outside of gift-giving, what rituals or ritualized practices are based on misrecognition in Mormonism? One example might be the discourses around “callings” and “service.” The discourses around asking people to serve in a calling are based around self-sacrifice, but they also are way of distributing social and symbolic capital. What others can you think of?

“…we need to appraise our own lives. How well are we listening to the Spirit? Are we living according to the eternal truths and doctrines of the restored Church of Jesus Christ? Can we effectively appraise the needs of others by the prompting of the Spirit? It impressed me that Muhammad Yunus must have been prompted by the Spirit when he organized a very unusual bank in Bangladesh, which some have said was the beginning of microfinance. When Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his efforts to help the poor, was asked what his initial strategy would be, he responded:

‘I didn’t really have one at the time. I simply began trying to help with my own funds, then went to the banks and asked them to get involved. They refused for several stated reasons, and thus my strategy began to evolve into: ‘Whatever the bankers did, I simply did the opposite.’ The bankers would only lend to the rich. I would only lend to the poor. The bankers would only make large loans. I would only make very small loans. The bankers would only lend to men. I would only lend to women. The bankers would only lend if there was collateral. I would only lend without collateral. The bankers required extensive paperwork. I only made loans that even an illiterate could understand. The bankers required their clients to come to the bank. I took my bank to the village.’

It should be noted that the banks expected a high rate of loan defaults. Yunus expected and experienced almost none. I understand that Mr. Yunus’s bank has provided more than $4 billion in loans and is entirely self-sustaining. Surely the Spirit of the Lord guided this noble effort.”

There is much written by and about Yunus. I think the his work gives us much to consider when it comes to the issue of self-reliance and poverty in the developing (and industrialized) world. The speech he delivers below give a nice sense of his thought and humility. Watch and learn.

For this reason, there is some irony with the Church’s statement that “gender is eternal” as a rebuttal of Millet’s theoretical revolution in feminist thought. Millet’s misappropriation of the way that the sex/gender distinction was being used in transsexuality reversed the assumption that gender was durable and sex was changeable, or at least more easily changeable than gender. In the Church’s rebuttal of Millet, it implicitly sides with and recovers the transsexual’s conception of “gender,” without explaining why mortal “sex” should also be imagined as eternally fixed.

Indeed, LDS theology can account for transsexuality and the self-description that one feels to be a “male soul trapped in a female body,” or vice versa. Given LDS theological anthropology which conceives of the soul as gendered in some essential way, the misalignment with a particular body is not outside of the realm of possibility (though some GA’s have sought to shore-up this loophole). In the same way that other birth “defects” may be seen as temporal and imperfect representation of the soul, for the transsexual, the biological sex itself is seen as in the very same class of accidental defects which would be restored and corrected in the resurrection. The durability of the soul despite the changeability of the body is a persistent theme in the LDS theological imagination.

The theoretical tension between transsexuality and feminism has been the subject of recent rethinking, most importantly in Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender. Such a tension remains unresolved in the political activism of both groups, despite the philosophical problematization of both versions of a fixed gender or a fixed sex over the last 15 years or so.

The church’s intervention into this debate, whether unwittingly or not, however, takes the side of (earlier) versions of transsexuality. The theological implications of this have been decried by feminists, but at the expense of transsexual (and queer) political and theological agendas. This unfortunate tension fails to see the political and theoretical/theological possibilities that the church’s statement contains.

In my opinion it seems that the Church (and LDSs) are continuing to move toward a refinement of the notion of authority which places the leadership of the Church in the former category rather than the latter. In other words, leaders of the Church are representatives of the Church, but are not necessarily reliable sources of information on particular topics (although they may of course be reliable sources of information on policy). An interesting question would be which topics  are they still considered to be reliable sources of information on; and is this body of topics narrowing? But perhaps that can be addressed in a future post. Rather in this post I would like to focus on the question of whether or not this refinement is something others are noticing as well; and if so, who is filling the space of the “expert”?

While this is somewhat of an over simplification, I think it does present enough of a picture to raise the issue of whether or not this shift in the notion of authority, opens space for those not representing the Church in a leadership capacity, yet are “experts” in particular bodies of knowledge, to have some “authority” within Mormondom.

To illustrate this with a concrete example (and of course no quantifiable data), if one has an interpretational question about the scriptures, who does one turn to? My sense is that less and less people are turning to leaders in the Church, and more and more people are turning to “authorities” in the “expert” sense.

This space, which has probably existed for some time, has traditionally been filled by Deseret Book and CES, both of course operating within the structure of the Church. My question, however, is whether or not we can sense either a broadening of this space to include more non-Church affiliated “experts”, many of which bringing more “academic” approaches, or at least a shift within this space where these approaches of those doing work on Mormonism have a stronger hold than those traditionally occupying this space.

Based primarily on personal (and mostly random) observation, it seems that Church leaders are becoming increasingly comfortable with this division of authority (although perhaps not in word), thereby increasing the space for authorities in the “expert” sense. At the same time, academic approaches (some from those employed by Church institutions such as BYU) have begun to fill this space and now compete with Deseret Book and company. I might even go so far as to speculate that this approach seems to be making up ground, or taking marketing share away from other “authorities”.

While I don’t think that personal authority is completely irrelevant to making an argument, it is certainly no substitute. Having spent enough time around people with fancy degrees, it doesn’t take long to figure out hat they are just people with highly fallible opinions. However, sometimes these people are blinded by their own credentials and seek to establish the authority of their view without having to defend it. If all arguments could be offered anonymously, they could be forces to stand on their own merits. Keirkegaard and other modern philosophers often published pseudonymously for the same reasons.

In antiquity, pseudonymity was a common practice. The vast majority of our canonical works are pseudonymous in that they are not written by the person to whom they are attributed. In some cases, as in the Torah, the attribution was made at a much later date. In others, the author was taking the name of the figure to say what they though they would (or should) have said. In our modern era, this violation of the integrity of “authorship” as it has developed is often taken as a shocking case of dishonesty at the heart of our sacred texts. The only possible motives for such a move, it is thought, would be to lie about the authorship in order to increase the authority of one’s own views by putting them in the mouth of someone more famous. Even if this is a pious fraud, it is thought to be irreverent. Such a view fails to consider the fact that the near universality of this ancient practice meant that few would have taken on face the authenticity of any work’s stated author, and in fact we know that the authenticity of many texts were disputed. Most of the time, no one was fooling anyone.

I’d like to propose that we see pseudonymity not as seeking authority, or pious fraud, but as setting aside the self, sacrificing personal glory. In a way, the motives are exactly the opposite of modern notions of authorship where the author is praised as original and unique. Instead, the author occludes himself or herself for the sake of a higher, holier purpose. His or her own place in history is lost intentionally as the “original” contributions are properly situated as dependent on others. For many, this was a pious, virtuous act of subsuming oneself into the persona of another, while raising the content of the argument as more important that the status of its author. I think that pseudonymous or even anonymous blogging has the potential for such great virtues.

“Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

When God proposes here in the plural to create man in his image, with whom is he talking? And with whom is God discussing when he says in later Genesis 3.22 (NRSV),”Then the Lord God said, ‘See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever’”?

As biblical scholars such as Marc Brettler, Michael Coogan, and John Day have persuasively argued, this is yet another reference to the divine council in the Hebrew Bible. As Harvard’s Jon Levenson states:

“It is true—and quite significant–that the God of Israel has no myth of origin. Not a trace of theogony can be found in the Hebrew bible. God has no nativity. But there do seem to be other divine beings in Genesis 1, to whom God proposes the creation of humanity, male and female together: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (v. 26). When were these other divine beings created? They too seem to have been primordial. Whether their existence should be interpreted as a qualification upon God’s mastery in Genesis is impossible to determine. Because they do not dissent from his proposal to create humanity in his and their image, we cannot say whether God’s authority, like Marduk’s, involved some element of collegiality. From other biblical accounts of the divine assembly in session, it would appear that these “sons of God/gods” played an active roles and made fresh proposals to God, who nonetheless retained the final say.”[1]

A typical traditional interpretation of these passages is that God is using the “royal we.”  However, this is quite unlikely, as such usage is seemingly unattested with verbs elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible; moreover, the plural style here fits perfectly with other explicit references to the divine council in session, such as Isaiah 6, Job 1-2, and 1 Kings 22.19-23.[2]  For instance, 1 Kings 22.19-20a (NRSV) states, “Then Micaiah said, ‘Therefore hear the word of the Lord: I saw the Lord sitting on his throne, with all the host of heaven standing beside him to the right and to the left of him. And the Lord said, “Who will entice Ahab, so that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?”.  Additionally, other biblical texts explicitly mention the divine council’s presence during the creation of the earth.  For example, Job 38.4-7 (NRSV) declares:

“‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together
and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

Thus, it should be noted that the divine council’s presence during the creation narrative of Genesis 1.1-2.4a additionally strengthens the argument that creation ex nihilo is not being described in Genesis 1, since the existence of the deities who comprise the council, like that of the God of Israel himself, precedes any act of creation in the narrative.

[1] Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 5.

[2] Marc Zvi Brettler, How to Read the Jewish Bible (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 42-43.

King Benjamin saw the impossible tension between these two contradictory commandments and attempted to resolve it by collapsing them into one single ethical imperative. He said: “when ye are the in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God” (Mos 2:17). The attempt to equate the love of God and the love of neighbor as simply one ethical imperative elides the problem of having two competing duties. The problem (or promise, depending on your perspective) with such a position is that the duty to love God cannot possibly come into conflict with the duty to love one’s neighbor.

Setting aside epistemological issues raised by Kant that result in Neitzsche’s proclamation that God is dead, there is another element here, namely, the teleological ethical imperative of modernity. For Kant, Hegel, and others, there was no possible justification for the suspension of the ethical. In this view, one’s God is one’s neighbor, and the ethical is the divine.

This is the problem that Kierkegaard tackles in Fear and Trembling. He suggests that Abraham discloses the tension between love of God and love of neighbor when God asks him to kill his son. Kant is very clear here that this is a violation of ethics and that Abraham was not justified in his obedience to God’s “supposed” command. Kierkegaard, in contrast, asserts that the duty to God is higher than the ethical duty, and if not, then God is simply an abstraction of ethics. (In a way, this remains the theoretical problem of the Social Gospel to articulate a basis for ethics that is not identical to a secular basis). He suggests that either Abraham is really the father of faith, or he is a murderer. If one holds the point of view that God is ethics, then the latter is the only option.

King Benjamin is not willing to concede this tension. Along with Kant and Hegel, he sees the ethical as the divine and categorically prohibits God’s command to contravene the commandment to love one’s neighbor. He must, therefore, reject Abraham’s faith, for if Abraham’s faith is correct, then so is that of the suicide bomber and the Laugherty brothers, both of who see God’s intervention in the world in such a way that supersedes the ethical. If by “God” one means something other than the commandment to love one’s neighbor, then this God can only ask that if you follow him, you must hate your father, mother, brothers, and sisters. King Benjamin killed this God before Kant did.