American Consulate - Hermosillo March 19, 1989 Editor Dialogue Magazine Dear Sir: While I was grateful for Eugene Kovalenko's interest in my dilemma (letter column, Dialogue , Spring 1989, p. 13), I found his comments less than helpful. I want to assure Dialogue readers that I wasn't "putting anyone on". I'm afraid Kovalenko hasn't really come to terms with the problem England and Newell posed for me, and others.* Most would agree that our internal compass, conscience, is formed by the culture in which we live and most importantly by parental upbringing. That's why history has given the world cannibalism as an acceptable more in certain South American and Oceana cultures, infant exposure in ancient Rome (and several contemporary tribal societies), the habitual and accepted use of narcotics in any number of contemporary Latin American and Asiatic societies, footbinding in pre-revolutionary China, the drinking of urine as a medical specific in some African tribes, the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, and Islamic jihad in present day Iran. Left to itself, I'm afraid that the "inner light" just isn't good enough despite citations from Pasternak, Littet, or Baillie. That's why nations need great "law givers" who see beyond the contemporary culture (the "Legislator" of Political Theory) if a people is to emerge as a Civilization in the Toynbeen sense. The question is, at what point does following the Legislator (Hammurabi, Solon, Christ, The Founding Fathers, Joseph Smith) merge into the excesses of Hitler/Mussolini/the Ayatollah Jomeini; and when does insistence on following the imperative of one's own conscience lead to apostasy (Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, James Strang, Lyman Wight, the Godbeyites -- and more recently John Singer and Adam Swapp)? I refer reader Kovalenko to Ogden Kraut's informative (and troubling) treatment of the Singer/Swapp tragedy in the November, 1988 Sunstone . According to Kraut, who knew Swapp and participated in the negotiations preceding the shootout, both Singer and Swapp were absolutely convinced that they were following righteous conscience in opposing the State's attempt to remove their children for "child abuse" when, as they saw it, they were only insisting on their Constitutional right to educate their children in the home. As a further example of where unrestrained conscience can lead one, Mr. Kovalenko, please read Levi Peterson's article in the current Dialogue (Spring 1989, p. 24) informing us that the Mountain Meadows Massacre followed a prayerful High Council Meeting (I've sat in not a few High Council Meetings where prayer-guided conscience has led to excommunication, meaning separation of a soul from the presence of God, the spiritual death most Mormons fear more than death itself ("Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both body and soul in hell." [Matt. 10:28]). * See also paper On Priesthood and Personal Revelation in this series. Had the advice of the institutional head of the church Brigham Young only arrived in time, the Mountain Meadows catastrophe would have been avoided, giving us at least one instance where "guidance by the brethren" would have been preferable to acting according to personal conscience. Of course this isn't the kind of conscience-directed guidance either Newell or Kovalenko, or other well-intentioned people, have in mind. But pray tell me how I am to know when following my conscience when in conflict with my spiritual leaders will spare me the tragedy of a Singer or a Swapp (or a John D. Lee). Or, on the other hand, how loyally following my leader in preference to my own conscience -- for all the reasons given by England, and amplified in my previous letter -- is guaranteed to avoid the tragedies of the Holocaust, the Iran/Iraq Holy War, or the Waco, Texas shoot-out? That is precisely the dilemma. There seem to be no clear guidelines. God is fighting a cosmic war against evil. Much of His guidance to Church leaders must necessarily be tactical and contingent on the use of the initiative of Free Agency by Man and the Devil. I've always supposed that is why "of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only." (Matt. 24:36). In war there can only be one commander, and he must be ready to use every ruse and tactical advantage available on a moment's notice. Unlike many other theologies, Mormonism is sufficiently Existential that it doesn't understand God to dictate our innermost thinking and utmost acts. We are not marionettes, unlike DeCartes' notion of God's creations. That is why Works are essential as well as Grace. I further suppose that is why Joseph Smith taught that what God commands at one time as right (or wrong) may be the polar opposite under different circumstances (which is another reason, as explained in my earlier letter, why I won't write off leadership by the Brethren even when my own conscience, formed nearly sixty years ago in a quite different world climate, might do a little bucking and kicking. What our parents taught us is not always an unfailing guide to contemporary right and wrong (revelation on Priesthood?). My own experience as Deputy Director of Research in the State Department in re birth control as part of U.S. Government foreign aid policy I was charged with helping form, as cited in my previous letter, is another case in point. More recently we've seen the case of a couple cited under the Civil Rights Act for refusing to rent an apartment to an unmarried pair, despite the landlord's own firmly held views that this was morally unacceptable behavior under their own roof. Some years ago I wrote an essay on the conflict between John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, two noted English political philosophers, the first holding that when the Sovereign exceeds the limits of the Social Contract the people must rise up in rebellion or run the risk of losing their liberties; the other maintaining that the Sovereign (Leviathon as Hobbes called him), is simply not subject to civil law, that there are always unpredictable contingencies for which the Sovereign, who is above the law, must be free to exercise raison d'etat in the interest of national survival (Festschrift in honor of Francis Wormuth, University Press, NY, 1965). The more I think about it, the more the elements of that paper return in the present debate. The matter is important because there are those in the present Congress who argue that the United States is losing the war against drugs and that the government should pay less attention to some hard-won defendant's rights in the interest of preserving the greater society. If matters continue to deteriorate, in a few years we may the concrete case of having to decide whether to follow new and unusual directions from the Brethren, or relay on our own archaically formed consciences, operating in the absence of what Kovalenko calls the "sophistry" of celestial guidance (what is the doctrine of continuous revelation about if it's not "celestial guidance"?) Perhaps the best insight I've received as a result of my truly seriously intended letter came from Kraut in his Sunstone article" "The Savior warned us that the path is strait and narrow . . . but he didn't explain that it was also strewn with banana peels and broken glass". (Ibid, p. 16). Perhaps that's the best resolution of the dilemma we're going to get. We've been given our Free Agency and have no alternative to using it. We have inspired leaders, but they're not infallible. We must study what they say, test it against doctrine, reason, and conscience, and seek prayerful resolution when these are not in harmony. Out of this prescription I take some comfort in being compelled to the conclusion that if we make honest mistakes, the Lord will take into account our intentions. Who knows where this leaves John Singer and Adam Swapp. We know what happened posthumously to John D. Lee. Regarding the critics of Melodie Moench Charles' article on women in heaven, I am constantly amazed by the confusion, if not ignorance of doctrine by otherwise well-informed LDS women. It has been well and clearly taught from the earliest days of the Restoration that women share priesthood. If they share it, they have it. But just as not all men are given the keys to preside, or otherwise exercise to the fullest extent their priesthood authority, it seems that in this time and in this generation women have been called primarily to put their keys to work in the home (with exceptions for Presidential callings in the Primary, Relief Society, and Young Women's Organization -- which comprise after all the preponderance of Church membership). In other times and circumstances it appears equally clear that women were indeed called as "prophetesses" and "deaconesses". What should put all these questions to rest is the acknowledged fact that priesthood sharing (holding) women participate as washers, anointers, blessing givers, and proxy actors, attendants, and veil workers in the highest and most sacred internal rites of the temple on the same basis as male priesthood bearers. Does it really make all that much difference if women don't sit on the stand in public as bishops or stake presidents? Anyone who's held such callings will wonder when women would find time to be mothers in Israel. One suspects the Lord explicitly exempted them from such admittedly high-profile and essential, but time-consuming secondary level priesthood callings, because in the existential nature of the universe, men are simply not as well equipped to conceive or bear children, nor as another of your contributors concedes, do many men have the same nurturing gifts as women. Perhaps this is an evolutionary trait not exclusively, but more genetically concentrated in the female gender, like right hemisphere thinking, originating in the long period when men were much more likely to be killed in the hunt -- or war -- leaving women to care for children alone, or collectively, if another generation were to survive. For those insufficiently familiar with the doctrine of women's place in the priesthood and in Heaven, I was pleased to see Rebecca Reid Linford's citation of Linda Wilcox's confident and well-informed essay on the Mother in Heaven. Every anthropologist, sociologist, or historian is aware that the Mother Goddess was a universal attribute of ancient religions -- including Judaism. And where did this notion come from unless from the tradition of the First Eve who came with her husband the First Adam to the Garden of Eden where she bore the children Adam and Eve, (who took their parent's names), becoming our first parents. This tradition persisted in both Oriental and Western religions until a group of wandering Hebrew's who'd lost their tribal religious memories as slaves in Egypt were given the "strict schoolmaster" of the Ten Commandments, the essentials of good behavior, boiled down to ten basic rules all societies must observe if there is to be social harmony. Regrettably, this resulted (among other excesses which emerged) in an exclusive emphasis on the poorly understood male tribal deity Yaveh, whose almost forgotten attributes as the loving Father in whose image we were created (male and female) was almost lost until a fuller knowledge of God was restored during Yaveh's incarnation as Jesus Christ. Probers into antiquity nevertheless insist that inadequately buried traces of the female goddess remain evident in the ruins of the few structures of the early Hebrews that remain. Wilcox cites no less an authority than Erastus Snow (and she could have also cited Orson Pratt) taught that "God" is a name title describing the form of celestial family government which includes both the Heavenly Father and the Heavenly Mother (and indeed the Council of Gods of both sexes), which early Church leaders uniformly insisted is the only legitimate form of government in the universe and for which our earthly families are in training. In the Pratt formulation (see Last Seven Discourses ) "God" refers to the organized application of the infinite wisdom of all the greatest and most righteous minds of the past, under the presidency of one whom we know as Elohim. This collective "God" directs the affairs of the universe -- effectively reconciling the LDS concept of multiple deities of flesh and bone with the spiritually transcendent deity of traditional Christendom, but with more bottom to the doctrine. Bringing in the female participants of this collective "God" one can readily account for the evidently corrupted, but clearly derivative concept of male and female gods held by Greeks, Romans, Chinese, and Hindus. Indeed, if one accepts Heber C. Kimball's assertion that the President of the Church is "God" to the Mormon people (and why not? "Whether by My mouth or the mouths of My servants, it is the same") one can even account for the source of the overreaching egoism by which the Romans apotheosized their emperors. In this same vein Linford goes on to point out that the Church "equates motherhood with godhood, emphasizing that mothers perform the same holy creative [word added] calling as our Heavenly Father [parent] does" While speaking of callings, I know some who aspire -- sometimes surprisingly indiscreetly -- to the Apostolic calling (I suspect other readers may also know of such individuals). In my mind, this is a fundamental disqualification for the job. We are taught that we should not aspire to any calling in the Church. And I take it that this goes for women as well as men. A friend of mine who was the stake president whose unwelcome task it was to review the Bishop's Court citation in the Sonya Johnson case before the case preceded to trial, assured me that it wasn't, as generally reported by the press, her demand to hold the priesthood, which brought about her excommunication. Priesthood, she was informed, she shared with her husband. But being dissatisfied with being able to preside in a Womens Relief Society, Primary, or YWMIA, or serving as a temple worker in accord with the currently bestowed keys of her shared priesthood, Mrs. Johnson seemed insistent on being called to a conspicuous office -- to preside as a Bishop or sit on a High Council. Like any other person inappropriately seeking office in the Church, she had to remain unsatisfied. This being so, it is suggestive that her most conspicuous post-excommunication act was to chain herself to the gates of the Washington, D.C. Temple where she had only a short time previously been privileged to exercise the highest rites of the priesthood. It is curious that the only Church in the world (prior to the recent ordination of female Episcopal Priests, and with the further exception of a few minor Pentecostal sects) in which women hold and exercise priesthood authority as a matter of course, if in a particularly directed manner, neither the LDS Church nor the women of the Church have taken advantage of this for PR purposes.