“Maybe we should stop saying we’ve been lied to by the Church,” Brian Whitney recently argued here on WWE. Church leaders have been wrong, but maybe not intentionally dishonest on historical issues.
Konden Smith’s pointed rejoinder to Brian last Friday showed that in fact some modern leaders have explicitly pressured historians to misrepresent the Church’s past. Konden argued that Joseph Smith taught a doctrine of pious deception that still shapes the administrative culture of the Church.
I’d like to offer a third perspective that navigates a middle course between Brian and Konden: Modern Church leaders have indeed lied about Church history, but it may not be entirely their fault.
I don’t think it’s Joseph Smith’s fault, either. He did teach some of his followers to lie in service of the Gospel, including under oath. But that teaching mostly has not survived as part of the LDS tradition and does not explain modern leaders’ behavior.
No, the real causes are systemic. They’re rooted in the very structure of organizational dynamics and testimonial talk.
What I mean is something like what the late theologian William Stringfellow said in 1970: “Survival of the institution is the operative ethic of all institutions.” Stringfellow thought that all institutions, even churches, ultimately care nothing for moral principle. They are “principalities and powers” that demonically possess and enslave people to perpetuate the institution.[1]
John Steinbeck said it well in a classic passage about bankers: “They were men and slaves, while the banks were machines and masters all at the same time. . . . It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”[2] And if you think churches are any different, Stringfellow would say, you’re a fool.
Now, this is all a bit too bleak. Moral institutions do exist. The problem is just that the moral ones aren’t the really vigorous ones. The logic of the marketplace favors institutions that aggressively market themselves, and aggressive marketing is an amoral if not immoral practice.
The key to marketing, as any expert knows, is to tell compelling stories about a brand. The stories don’t have to be true, and they certainly can’t be the whole truth. They just have to generate positive feelings about the brand. They must appeal more to the irrational than to the rational parts of our human nature.
The classic forms of sales storytelling are the pitch and the testimonial. Pitches are more polished and practiced, while testimonials are more personal and spontaneous. Every institution must make some use of these narrative forms to grow or retain its constituency. The most vigorous institutions crowd-source both kinds of storytelling, converting constituents into salespeople. They cultivate a sales culture, enlist people into a lifestyle of manipulative storytelling.
Now consider the institutional culture of the LDS Church. The LDS community pressures every member to say they “know the Church is true” regardless of whether they really do. It also calls people to teach and proselytize regardless of their willingness or preparedness to. So when general authorities whitewash the Church’s history, they’re only doing what’s been asked of them at every level of Church participation on their way to apostolic office. They’re only doing what every member does. They are in some ways the consummate victims of Mormon sales culture, the most rugged cogs in its marketing machine. When we accuse them, perhaps we scapegoat them for our own self-loathing for letting institutions enslave us to do dishonest work.
I’ve never been a Mormon, but I was raised an evangelical. Like Mormons, evangelicals expect every member to bear testimony and do missionary work. Growing up, I felt acutely aware that I had no spectacular testimony, conversion, or miracle stories to tell. So when testimony time came, I sometimes stretched for things to talk about. I told a story of some spiritual experience or apparent answer to prayer, but left out important details that might cast doubt.
At one point my car developed a starter problem. I’d turn the key and it would just click. But I learned that if I waited a few minutes and tried again, it would always start. One day I took some friends to the liquor store. We piled in the car to head home, and the ignition just clicked. I waited a few minutes and tried again, but again it just clicked. I said aloud, “Lord, you created the universe; you can start my car.” This time when I turned the key, it started. My friends were amazed; they couldn’t stop talking about it. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that this was nothing new. So I lied by omission and let them believe they’d witnessed a miracle.
I’m a naturally skeptical person who considers all the angles, so when I used pious deception I knew that I was doing it. But many people can be excused from pious deception because they deceive themselves first. Uncritical storytelling is just the way testimonial discourse works. We craft personal narratives in order to instill faith, and we prune away details that don’t fulfill that purpose.
So when Benson, Packer, and Oaks admonished historians to keep damaging information “secret or confidential” and to write “as Mormons,” the real scandal was not that they advocated pious deception. It wasn’t even that they forced academic discourse into a devotional mode. Rather, it was that they laid bare the deceptive processes at work in testimonial discourse throughout the Church. It was that they exposed how our institutions have made liars of us all.
So the real culprit in the deception practiced by organized religion and politics may be organization itself. Should we then abandon all organization? Should we boycott institutions and groups? Perhaps not. Like it or not, institutions facilitate human cooperation. They enhance our productivity and order our lives. They appeal to our irrationality through salesmanship, but also to our rationality by creating real value. Perhaps the best we can do is to build immunity to deceptive advertising, to punish the institutions that do the most harm, and to affiliate with those that do the most good.
And meanwhile perhaps we should pity those in deepest bondage, who violate their basic moral principles in service of a hungry bank or church.
Notes
[1] William Stringfellow, “Traits of the Principalities,” in A Keeper of the Word: Selected Writings of William Stringfellow, edited by Bill Wylie Kellerman (Grand Rapids, Mi., 1994), 204–222.
[2] John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck Centennial ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 2002 [1939]), 32–33.