It’s been a while since I gave a talk in church (8 months, to be specific). I don’t have one coming up, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about religion. On a drive the other day, I actually started trying to think through the relationship between prejudice and true religion. (Yes, apparently this is what happens when I’m alone in the car for long stretches at a time.) Specifically, I was thinking about the relationship between prejudice and my religion.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints definitely doesn’t have a spotless reputation when it comes to prejudice. The church’s policy against allowing people of African descent to hold the priesthood up until the late 1970s is well established, and is often brought up as a critique against the church. Yes, the church has since stated that “Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form,” but for over a hundred years, it was far less clean cut about that stance. (That article I just linked to does a great job going into detail about the specifics of the ban and how it was lifted. Check it out, if you want to know more.)
While the stance on racism has clearly come around, the church still has policies that specifically target some groups, including women and the LGBTQ+ community. We can debate the grounds of those policies, but the fact that most outside the church cite them as evidence that the church still discriminates isn’t really up for discussion.
This is all further complicated by the fact that we believe Christ is at the head of this church. That He literally is guiding it through modern-day prophets, who essentially do as He directs, through revelation. And so my thought of the drive was this: in a church that’s divinely led, how in the world could there still be prejudice? Why wouldn’t Christ just smack us all upside the head and tell us to get in line? You could argue that He doesn’t because the current church policies are divinely mandated, and that it’s modern society that’s out of joint, but people argued that back when there was the priesthood ban, and we’ve seen how that played out. Even setting aside the current minefield of prejudicial issues, there’s no getting around the fact that for over a hundred years, the church had prejudicial policies that it now recognizes were wrong. So why didn’t Christ at the bare minimum smack people upside the head back then?
Of course, you can take the argument that the church is all phony, and it was all done for purely political reasons, and that’s your right to argue. It is not, however, an argument that works for me. Why not? Because I’ve had too many experiences with this church to dismiss it as phony. I have a deep-seated belief in its truth. I believe the prophets are led by divine revelation. If I want to continue to have that belief, I must somehow come to grips with the actions and policies of the church.
Some of the issue comes from people assuming that any church led by God would be a perfect church with perfect policies. However, it only takes a brief scratch at the surface of that argument to see it’s flawed. We believe people are imperfect, and the church is made up of imperfect people. We don’t believe our prophets are perfect, either. There’s no doctrine of infallibility there, despite what some church members would like to believe. (I think this is actually really important to remember. As soon as you begin to believe all church leaders are perfect, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment, especially since as I said, even the church speaks out against that belief.)
In other words, a church made of imperfect people cannot, by definition, be perfect itself. The Gospel might be perfect, but we believe the church’s understanding of that Gospel is a work in progress. That like its individual members, the church grows line upon line, bit by bit. The ninth article of faith clearly states: “We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God.”
Great and important things. When I hear that, I don’t think it’s talking about church meetings going from three hours every Sunday to two. (Though I gotta admit, that was pretty great.) I think it’s more along the lines of the church ending the priesthood ban. I am not the head of the church, and I am often wrong, but I can’t help wondering what church policies we have today that we think are immutable and everlasting that will turn out to be as temporary and flawed as that ban, and I don’t think I’m out of line to wonder that. (Please note that I continue to support church policies, even if they might turn out to be flawed. Why? Because I’m not God, folks. And I recognize that just because something doesn’t make sense to me doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s wrong and I’m right. Having faith is a choice, and if it were always an easy one, it wouldn’t be much of a choice. But that’s a topic for a different essay.)
Ultimately, the thought that best brought everything into focus for me was this: even when Christ was literally on the earth, leading His fledgling church, He still allowed that church to be restricted based on race and religion. It wasn’t until He was gone that things opened up for Gentiles and Samaritans and the like. And even the Apostles who lived with Him and learned from Him in person, day after day, wrote some things (or at the least, didn’t correct some things other leaders were writing, since many of the more egregious ones come from Paul) that come across as pretty darn sexist and prejudiced. We also believe Christ is the God of the Old Testament, as well, meaning all those rules and laws in the Old Testament were done under His watch and direction as well.
Seen through this light, we don’t really have any evidence of a time when the church wasn’t prejudiced in some way. (Except I’m assuming in the City of Enoch, but let’s not split hairs.)
It’s easy to dismiss these earlier prejudices, assuming that since people back then were “less enlightened,” it was more acceptable for those prejudices to exist. CS Lewis termed this sort of thinking “chronological snobbery:” “The uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.” In other words, it’s short sighted to view people in a different time period as being cretins. I think there’s a tendency of everyone in every time period to look at themselves as enlightened and anyone who disagrees with them as not. It’s better to try to think of those people as essentially like yourself, and see how they were handling things.
In the end, my ultimate conclusion is that God and Christ do the best They can with the situation and the people of each time. They do not force people to make certain choices. In fact, smacking people upside the head to get them to do what They want them to do is pretty antithetical to how I believe this is all set up. From a Latter-day Saint perspective, that was Satan’s plan: to force everyone to make the right decisions all the time. It’s a fundamental underpinning of our faith, then, that even the church will get things wrong from time to time. Does this make it any less hurtful to the people who are ultimately wronged? Sadly no, but it does at least give an explanation for why it’s allowed to happen.
I realize that what makes sense to me might not make sense to others, but for me this is where my inner debate ultimately led on that drive the other day. I wanted to get it down in writing to take it out, look at it from different angles, and make sure I understood it. Having done that now, I’m even more settled with my conclusions. Will this make a big difference in how I live my life? Not really. I still think I’m ultimately responsible for being as nice as I can be, regardless of the circumstances. For trying to accept people for who they are, even if I disagree with them. For treating them as they would like to be treated. For trying to be as Christlike as I’m capable of being, and doing my best to become more capable each day.
But it certainly helps me to think these things through for when people ask me why I believe what I believe or how I can continue to believe it. Maybe it’ll help you as well.
In any case, have a lovely weekend, and I’ll see you next week.