Just now I was reading through a defense of the church’s doctrines and
policies on gay marriage written by a believing member. As I read, it was
difficult for me to put myself in a frame of mind in which the arguments
presented made sense, and I began to contemplate why that was. Lately, it’s
seemed to me more and more that my reasons for disagreeing with the church have
changed. Originally, it was historical reasons. Joseph Smith and polyandry,
blacks and the priesthood, the teachings of Brigham Young, and more inspired me
to question the legitimacy of the church’s truth claims. Now the history matters less to me than the approach to living inherent in
orthodox Mormonism. The further I step away from it, the more harmful it seems.
Let’s take a step back and think of the human experience broadly.
Slowly over the course of the first years of life, a sense of self begins to
dawn within us. Toddlers begin to understand what it means for something to be
“mine.” They wake up to find themselves a living, breathing self in a human body. Freud
divides their newly developing psyche into three parts: the id, superego, and
ego. The poet Rumi often referred to the what Freud calls the id as the “animal-self” that lives in nafs, or body-driven compulsions. The
superego is the set of prohibitions and admonitions ingrained into the child by
parents and others as they grow up; it’s a socially constructed conscience. The
ego is the battleground of the id and the superego. It’s the consciously active
area of the mind that makes sense of and orders daily interaction with the
senses, the nafs, and the conscious.
We live and build our societies within the confines of a material
world. Our bodies, too, are material. And yet, we are also a symbolic self—we understand
ourselves in terms of the ego. This creates the primal dichotomy—the
self that is both material and symbolic, both subject and object, able to
choose, and yet subject to its environment. We do not have control over the
laws that govern the material world. We do not have ultimate control over the
conditions of our environment. But we do
have at least a degree of control over the system of symbols we construct to
create our worlds of understanding, social interaction, and personal
development.
That’s a large claim—that we have control over the meanings of words
and systems of morality we inherit. A large part of the history of western
philosophy has been an argument over this question—is moral law predetermined?
Or is it created? The traditional position of Christianity is that it is predetermined
by God. The answer to the question “what ought to be done?” has already been
decided, and it is our job to discover the answer that is ultimately true. This
position of moral essentialism, however, seems to me to be weakened significantly by examining different moral systems over time.
Different moral systems have different
prohibitions and admonitions—a completely different construction of the
superego. A man living in late imperial China would likely feel neither guilt
nor shame about having extra-marital sex with either a man or a woman, but if
he did not produce male offspring with a legal wife to continue the family name
and bring honor to his ancestors, he would feel deeply ashamed. A monk living
an ascetic life in medieval Europe would feel no shame at producing no
offspring, but would be deeply shamed at having sexual relations. The
difference is not in the nafs; though
varied, biology produces similar urges in the “animal-spirit” of all people.
The difference is in the cultural construction of symbols: the construction of
the superego, which in turn changes the experience of ego.
Many people receive inherited systems of morality without question.
They have very clear images of what is right and what is wrong. Questioning
these systems can be very psychologically taxing, because it involves
questioning a part of our own psyches. But doing so is deeply rewarding. When
we question the framework of the superego, we learn that it was inherited, but
also constructed. Because its nature is fundamentally that of a construction,
it can also be altered.
Because we have control over our systems of morality, we also bear
responsibility for them. If our superego and id interact in a way that creates
negative outcomes, we bear responsibility for them. If our
system of thinking marginalizes people, creates anxiety, stress, or fear, then
we bear the responsibility.
And this brings me to my ultimate qualm with the morality of Mormonism: the prohibitions and admonitions are is seen as determined and hence cannot be questioned. Any negative
outcomes are placed as the fault of the individual, only increasing the shame
and guilt that is already caused by the system of thought itself. And I don’t
just mean this for gay and lesbian Mormons. It works for everyone. It creates unrealistic expectations on the path to "perfection," and then makes you feel
guilty if you don't achieve them. The system views itself as the end-all -be-all
of truth, and therefore forces the individual to regard other systems as less
pure, less holy, and less true. It limits the span of human creativity, because
it does not allow for one of the most important types of creativity—moral and
theological creativity.
When presented with the question of how to best survive, life answered
in a million different ways. It answered with bushes, mosquitoes, elephants,
and sagebrush. It answered with cherry blossoms, humpbacked wales, elk, and
humans. When confronted with how to make sense of the world, the human mind answered
in a thousand ways, with Paganism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Sikhism,
Hare Krishna, Islam, Christianity, and Mormonism. Each environment demands a
different ecosystem, and each species adapts in unique, unprecedented ways.
Mormonism in its current form is like an animal that looks out at all of
creation and says “there is only one answer to the question. All living things were intended to be like me. I must change
all ecosystems to fit the demands of my own.”
The conclusion I have come to in my study of history and of the natural
world is that there is no way things ought to be. We are the creators of our
societies. We choose our systems of morality. We shape the superego.
And so reading explanations and justifications of the church’s stance
on one issue or another just don’t make sense to me anymore—they’re like birds
telling fish they should have wings or like trees telling chipmunks to
grow leaves. They just don't make sense.
