Anti-Creedal Religion, Anti-Ideological Politics
Anti-creedalism equips Latter-day Saints for liberal civic engagement. It also illuminates one of liberalism's core mechanisms, and why that mechanic is breaking down in America today.
I just finished Jonathan Rauch's book, Cross Purposes, which underscores the nature of liberalism as intrinsically and even intentionally incomplete. "From the beginning," he writes, "liberal theorists acknowledged that they did not attempt to prescribe an overarching concept of the good or of the purpose of life."1
This refusal to take a position on big questions like "the good" or "the purpose of life" enables pluralism within liberal societies. Scott Alexander's memorable depiction is always worth quoting:
Liberalism is a technology for preventing civil war. It was forged in the fires of Hell – the horrors of the endless seventeenth century religious wars. For a hundred years, Europe tore itself apart in some of the most brutal ways imaginable – until finally, from the burning wreckage, we drew forth this amazing piece of alien machinery. A machine that, when tuned just right, let people live together peacefully without doing the “kill people for being Protestant” thing.2
Restraining government from taking a position on “the good” or “the purpose of life” prevents the possibility that a particular view of “the good” could be enforced on people who disagree with the backing of the government’s coercive power. This makes it possible to deescalate disagreements between religious communities.
But the same mechanic that enables pluralism is also a key target of liberalism’s critics, especially on the post-liberal right. How far does the principle of neutrality extend? Must a religious person completely set aside their deeply held convictions to serve in office? Maybe we need to go even further and banish religion entirely from the public square so that no one can appeal to God in a policy debate. Sorry, Martin Luther King, Jr., but we’ll have none of that God-talk here.
Post-liberal critics are right to raise these questions, just as they are right to point out that a key tenet of liberalism—the equality and dignity of all individuals—is an import from Christianity. To the extent that liberalism’s neutrality is maximilized into a kind of anti-religious secularism, liberalism becomes self-destructive in practice.
Rauch has a particular take on these questions, one that I find generous and insightful. He even uses my church (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) as a prime example of the possibilities for positive cooperation between Christianity and liberalism. In doing so, Rauch focuses on our concept of "agency", and he was right to do so. I'll post a full review of his book as my next post in another two weeks.
But in this piece I will highlight a different point of correspondence between the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints and liberalism: incompleteness. This is expressed in my faith as anti-creedalism. It should be, but at the moment isn’t, expressed in liberalism as an opposition to what I call totalizing ideologies.
Ongoing Revelation and Pluralism
The philosopher (and Latter-day Saint) Jim Faulconer described the Church as "atheological" in a humorously but accurately titled paper: "Why a Mormon Won't Drink Coffee But Might Have a Coke." By "atheological" he meant that "Latter-day Saints…. are without an official or even semi-official philosophy that explains and gives rational support to their beliefs and teachings."
This puts us in stark contrast with contemporary mainstream Christian denominations which stand at the end of a 2,000 year history of intense and sometimes violent conflict to hash out the technicalities of Christian theology. For the heirs of this legacy of creeds, getting theolgoy precisely right is axiomatically part of what it means to do Christianity well.
Of course Latter-day Saints are interested in theology too, in the conventional sense of understanding the doctrines and principles of our own faith, but we are opposed to “official or even semi-official” expressions of theology. Dallin H. Oaks, the First Counselor in the First Presidency3 stated that "it's not the pattern of the Lord to give reasons." He went on to say that: "We can put reasons to revelations. We can put reasons to commandments. When we do, we're on our own."4 Official theology? We don't do that here.
The reason that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is able to function well, and in fact to attain very high degrees of religious cohesion, without a formal theology is our belief in ongoing revelation. The current leaders of the Church ("General Authorities") are considered "prophets, seers, and revelators" and our Articles of Faith explicitly refer to an open canon: "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…"5
In addition to ongoing revelation and an open canon, the Latter-day Saints see the Restoration of the Church of Jesus Christ not as a historical event but as an ongoing process. The implications of these commitments are profound and little understood, even by Latter-day Saints. The conventional wisdom is that these principles are basically placeholders that will be filled in the future with new revelation. They don’t matter much today, except perhaps as a kind of inidrect encouragement to look forward to future revelation. This is incorrect. The commitment to an open canon, etc. have direct consequences right now.
The first consequence is an explicit acceptance that our understanding is provisional and incomplete. It is incomplete in the sense that we don’t know the answers to all the important questions. Latter-day Saints envision a series of “kingdoms” in the next life (as opposed to a heaven/hell dichotomy) and also that this life is critical to determining which kingdom we end up in. But, in the long eons of eternity, is there the possibility to alter the fate dictated by our mortal life? There is no official answer to this question, and different Latter-day Saint leaders have held contradictory opinions. Because of our embrace of ongoing revelation, this is seen not as a crisis or occasion for potential schism but as just a fact of life. You can’t embrace ongoing revelation without the corrollary: some things haven’t been revealed yet. As a result, there is space for pluralism on this question.
Our understanding is also provisional in the sense that many of the core doctrines we embrace are not fully defined, and we don’t expect they will be. Nothing is more central to Latter-day Saints than the atonement of Jesus Christ. But which of the many competing atonement theories is correct? The Church has not adopted one, and there is no expectation that it ever will. This falls into the realm of Oaks explanation. It is essenial to believe in the atonement, that it happened and is necessary, but the why and the how are not essential to know.6
Of course Latter-day Saints are not unique among Christians in not having all the answers, or in having a diversity of beliefs among their adherents. But the commitment to an open canon, etc. is a unique feature that makes Latter-day Saints particularly well suited to acknowledge and tolerate those differences. There’s an implicit epistemic humility at play: we know that we don’t know. The expectation is not to have all the answers (yet). The Latter-day Saint commitment to an open canon constrains our religious belief in a way that is similar to the kind of constraint within liberalism, and to the very same end: enabling pluralism.
Totalizing Ideologies
The Latter-day Saint tradition sheds light on what we should expect from the limitedness of liberalism, but first let me be absolutely clear: I am not suggesting that Latter-day Saint beliefs could or should be transplanted directly into liberalism. The Church, with its formal hierarchy and reliance on authority, is not a libreral institution in the same sense that the United States as a whole should be, nor is it trying to be. The approach to pluralism within the Church and the approach to pluralism within liberal societies are not the same and cannot be exchanged.
So here are the two claims I am making. The first, almost just as an aside, is that the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are particularly effective at training its adherents to participate as members of a pluralistic liberal society.
The second is that the Latter-day Saint version of pluralism shows that, to be successful, the limitedness of librealism is essential but must be bounded.
The open canon is only useful to Latter-day Saints insofar as there is actually a canon. If anything goes, then you don’t have a pluralistic community, you have no community at all. Liberalism cannot be purely neutral or objective. It cannot be value-less. Liberalism must positively embody certain principles and values. It does not follow that the government should monitor or enforce those, but liberalism is not exclusively about government. It is also about society. The concept of freedom of speech, for example, is basically worthless if it is reduced to only its legalistic embodiment. For a flourishing liberal society we need legal protections and social conventions that support free expression.
I cannot tackle all of the positive tenets that liberalism should embody, but one tenet of liberalism that desperately needs an update is the concept of limitedness itself. We need to expand the firewall around pluralism from one expressed in religious terms (e.g. “separation of church and state”) to one expressed in more general terms, such as a separation of “totalizing ideology” and state.
Because liberalism arose from the religious wars of Christian Europe, the phrase "totalizing ideology" would not have made a lot of sense. There was no need for that kind of generality. Everyone knew what a totalizing ideology looked like; it looked like a religion. There were no non-religious totalizing ideologies to be concerned with. So naturally the propounders of liberalism expressed the intentional limitedness in explicitly and exclusively religious terms.
Thus we got the separation of church and state not because there's something exclusively dangerous about religion, but because the combination of government and any totalizing ideology is the existential threat to pluralist societies. It just so happened that religions were the only totalizing ideologies in town back in the 17th century, so liberalism's limitedness was framed in religious terms.
But that's no longer the case. Subsequent centuries saw the rise of secular totalizing ideologies like Marxism and fascism. Although it's clear to any observer that such ideologies are illiberal, it's not necessarily obvious that the threat they pose is effectively identical to that from comingling religion and state. As a result, liberalism lacks the capacity to recognize and respond to these threats.
This is why the first internal threat of illiberalism came not from the American right (Christian nationalism) but from the American left (social justice ideology, the successor ideology, or whatever we're supposed to call it). The American left, which has become highly secularized, is finely attuned to religious threats to liberalism but has not yet developed antibodies to basically the identical threat from secular totalizing ideologies.
It's time to update our understanding of this facet of liberalism. Pluralism is possible when the government is restrained in such a way that it cannot be co-opted by a totalizing ideology. When the only totalizing ideologies on the block were religious, separation of church and state got most of the job done. Now that we have secular ideologies that are every bit as totalizing as any religion ever was, we need to reorient our understanding of how liberalism enables pluralism in more general terms.
Against Creeds and Ideologies
There is a mistaken belief that all political ideologies are basically the same thing. This is not so. Some -isms are, effectively, discoveries of institutions that worked even before we realized what was going on. Consider language. It’s a sophisticated, complex social technology that evolved without anybody directing it. Only very recently—many thousands of years into our use of human language—did we get around to investigating how and why it works. We had language long before we had linguistics.
Markets are another example of an evolved social technology. Humans have been trading—and creating conventions (social, legal, and technical) to regulate trade—since long before recorded human history. But it was only in the 20th century that Friederich Hayek made the discovery of how prices worked as a way of rapidly and accurately diffusing information within markets.7 There, again, the function proceeded the invention.
Liberalism is to a large extent based on recognizing, aggregating, and protecting social institutions that nobody invented (like markets). Even its most prominent attributes—like formal, written constitutions—are just the repurposing of accidental inventions no one fully appreciated at the time. If you doubt that, contrast the self-aware phrasing of the documents of the American founding with historical antecedents like the Magna Carta. Liberalism was discovered more than it was invented.
Marxism is a perfect example from the opposite end of the spectrum: a fully worked-out theory that preceeded practice or implementation. Discovered ideologies are bottom-up and by nature incomplete. A proponent of liberalism need not believe that it is the last and best approach to government that humans will ever enact, but only that it’s the best we’ve come up with so far. Invented ideologies are top-down and by nature complete (at least aspirationally). Karl Marx did not set out to contribute to an ongoing process of innovation in human governance, but to present a final explanation.
In my discussion of the atheological nature of Latter-day Saint religion, I relied mostly on the concept of an open canon. But there is an important corollary: a deep-seated mistrust of creeds per se.
The ongoing Restoration began in the midst of the Second Great Awakening when Joseph Smith (then 14 years old) went into a forest near his home to ask God which church he should join. In the resulting First Vision, God appeared and told him he should “join none of them” and “all their creeds were an abomination in his [God’s] sight”.8
This is strong language, especially from a Church that emphasizes constructive dialogue with other Christian denominations, and has since the very beginning. Joseph Smith said “If I esteem mankind to be in error shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too”.9
Wilford Woodruff, the fourth leader of the Church from 1889 to 1898, taught the same approach:
When you go into a neighborhood to preach the Gospel, never attempt to tear down a man’s house, so to speak, before you build him a better one; never, in fact, attack any one’s religion, wherever you go. Be willing to let every man enjoy his own religion. It is his right to do that.10
So did George Albert Smith, the eighth leader of the Church from 1945 to 1951:
We have not come to take away from you the truth and virtue you possess. We have come not to find fault with you nor to criticize you. We have not come here to berate you because of things you have not done; but we have come here as your brethren . . . and to say to you: “Keep all the good that you have, and let us bring to you more good, in order that you may be happier and in order that you may be prepared to enter into the presence of our Heavenly Father.11
While some Christian creeds contain teachings that might rise to the level of “abominable” from a Latter-day Saint perspective,12 the vast majority and especially the most well-known, are largely unobjectionable if for no other reason than that creeds tend to specify beliefs at a level of precision that is simply too great to generate any strong conflict with Latter-day Saint beliefs. Because we have no formal theology of our own, it's awfully hard to pick fights with the technicalities of anyone else's theology (although plenty of misguided Latter-day Saints have tried).
All of this is to say that it is not the content of particular creeds that is “abominable” but the very concept of creeds themselves. The problem with creeds, according to Joseph Smith, is that they lock a present level of understanding in place and preclude further learning:
…the most prominent difference in sentiment between the Latter Day Saints and sectarians was, that the latter were all circumscribed by some peculiar creed, which deprived it's members of the privilege, of believing anything not contained therein, whereas the Latter Day Saints have no creed, but are ready to believe all true principles that exist, as they are made manifest from time to time.13
Anti-creedalism is a liberal sentiment, not the kind that could or should be legally enforced, but the kind of supporting social convention upon which liberalism depends. In calling for a re-interpretation of libreralism’s neutrality from religious terms to secular terms, I’m not necessarily advocating for legal changes. Maybe some of those would be beneficial as well, but the primary change we need is social. It’s the attitude of sucpicion of creeds (in religious context) or of “totalizing ideologies” (in a secular context) that we could benefit from right now.
Conclusion
Here are my main points summarized:
A bounded limitedness is necessary for liberalism to achieve a pluralistic community. Without the limitedness (neutrality on certain questions) it cannot be pluralistic. But without bounds on that limitedness (i.e. consensus values) it cannot be a community.
Liberalism is a social technology, and laws and formal institutions are only a part of the package. Not every aspect of liberalism could or should be expressed through formal laws and incorporated into the government. Informal social conventions have a role to play as well.
We should reconsider the limitedness of liberalism to recognize that the real danger to pluralism is not comingingling of the coercive power of the state with religion per se, but with any type of totalizing ideology.
A deep-seated suspicion of totalizing ideologies should be a consensus value of liberalism. This may have consequences for our legal system (by recognizing a super-class of religion that includes totalizing ideologies), but it’s not clear to me that this is essential, and my focus is on a social awakening of the dangers of totalizing ideologies.
In another two weeks, I’ll post my review of Cross Purposes. After that, I’ll return to another theory-heavy post like this one. My general plan is to alternate book reviews and original pieces every two weeks throughout the rest of this year. I hope you’ll stick around.
Cross Purposes, page 55
He currently holds the #2 position in the Church’s hierarchy.
The quote is from his book, Life's Lessons Learned, which is quoted on the Church's website in a lesson about the history of race in the priesthood, which Oaks uses as exhibit A for why speculative theology is dangerous. Race and the priesthood is too complex for me to tackle in this essay, but for further reading I recommend starting with the Church's Race and the Priesthood essay.
This is (most of) the ninth Article of Faith with emphasis added.
This dynamic has also been summarized by saying that Latter-day Saints are more concerned with orthopraxy than with orthodoxy.
The quote comes from a Church document on interfaith relations: Reaching Out: A View of Interfaith Relations.
From Light and Truth: A Latter-day Saint Guide to World Religions available on the BYU Religious Studies Center website.
A leading contender in this regard would be the Westminster Confession of Faith which affirms a God “without body, parts, or passions” (text here). The reference to lack of “passions” is a statement of divine impassibility, which is the concept that nothing any human does, or that happens to any human, causes God any degree of pain or pleasure. This is antithetical to LDS scripture as exemplified in the vision of Enoch in Moses 7:28-29. For more on this, see my parents’ book The God Who Weeps.
The Journal of Joseph: The Personal Diary of a Modern Prophet, page 203