"Apparently there are two types of us Mormons -- literal and liberal."
All dichotomies are useful up to a point, but they're also arbitrary. Any time somebody says, "The world is made up of two things,"get ready for a game of "compare and contrast," one of the most frequently tested skill, from elementary to grad school. The catch is in the categories compared. "Literal and liberal" is a useful point of comparison, but it's also misleading.
Take the Word of Wisdom. It literally denies that it's a commandment. It literally says that it's just a "word of wisdom." It also literally advises against the consumption of "hot drinks."
If read literally, this prohibition would include hot water, warm milk, hot lemonade, hot chocolate, maybe even soup. One has to wonder how God - in a Church that places so much weight on restoring on all those "plain and precious parts" omitted or distorted by the "intepretations of men" - wouldn't just say what was on his mind. It took an utterance, by a completely different prophet some decades later, to decide that "hot drinks" means "coffee and tea."
Now, we've got another problem. What if the coffee and tea are "iced"? Can there be a cold "hot drink"? There is a literal contradiction, at least between the "hot drink" language and the "coffee and tea" replacement.
Let's say "coffee and tea" supercedes "hot drinks." Taken literally, that would include anything that qualifies as "coffee" or "tea." It would ban every espresso, every cappuccino, and every herbal tea. It would also include decaf. Would it include the beans, prior to their processing as a "hot drink"? Who knows? If so, it's a prohibition that extends to coffee candy, coffee ice cream, et cetera.
But I've known active and faithful Latter-day Saints who drank decaf. I've also met my share who had no problem drinking "herbal teas." Does this make them "liberal"? My wife, while on her mission in South America, was actually told by the mission president to drink coffee - as a cultural thing. She's pretty "literal" and she followed him "literally." So, for a year-and-a-half, my wife was a coffee drinker, though if you're going to do so, South America is the place to be.
Even then, there are those who pride themselves on their strictness so much that they don't stop at coffee and tea. They go on to ban colas and chocolate because of the caffeine, which is an ingredient in coffee and tea. What should we call such zeal? "Literal" isn't the first thing that comes to mind. The Word of Wisdom doesn't "literally" say anything about colas. To get there, you'd have to widen the prohibition, based on an interpretation that says it really means "caffeinated products." As far as I can tell, that's not an obsession with "literalism." On the other hand, I wouldn't call it something invented by a "liberal" either.
To be fair, there are tensions between strict and loose constructions, but - as the Word of Wisdom illustrates - it's not a simple tug-of-war between what is "literal" and what is "liberal." For one thing, the line from "literal" to "liberal" extends in more than one direction. It isn't a tension between purity and compromise. Every principle can be overshot and undershot. Neither extreme deserves to be labeled as superior to the other. As in anything else in life, the idea should be to strike the proper balance. For some in the Church, it's a competition to see who is higher and holier, even where winning the game produces results that are neither healthy nor complimentary.
If there are those in the Church who would rationalize their own mediocrity, there are also those who go a little nutty, attempting to create their own standards of perfection that seem designed to create an elite club for themselves. Is it enough to serve a mission? I've met some who came from families where you had to make AP or you weren't much of a missionary. I've met people whose idea of the Word of Wisdom included a ban on sugar and refined flour. I've met Latter-day Saints who think you have to have a certain number of kids. I've met Latter-day Saints who wanted to rewrite the Law of Tithing, or who size one another up by which callings they've served. Before I got my mission call, I was told - by one woman in my ward - that the Lord calls his best missionaries to foreign missions. She didn't have much to say when I got called to Utah.
People are nuts. Mormon people are simple nuts in their own way (and usually to the tune of "Come, Come, ye saints").
If we're going to play the dichotomy game ("there are two kinds of people in the Church") we could do just as well with comparing the actives and the inactives, or the valiant and the lazy. We could probably compare the proud and the humble. My favorite dichotomy of late (and I'm just saying this as a personal preference) is between the traditionalists and the revisionists.
The traditionalists are composed of Utah Mormons, people outside of Utah who ought to be Utah Mormons and new converts. These are the people who take their Postum black - with no cream or sugar added. Their "year's supply" has a lot of cracked wheat. These are people who think God's chosen people are in Utah, born within a kind of royal line, or called out of Babylon to be grafted in. The Gospel is a simple, unbroken, seamless message - reducible to the contents of Gospel Principles (or some other Church manual). Their closets are stocked with smiles, and they always have a fresh one for every get-together. They tend to be Type A. They tend to be the ESTJs of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. They are destined to sit in the councils of the Church, which is why they're majoring in Finance or going for an MBA. They're corporate people. When Romney says that "Corporations are people," he's - of course - speaking of himself.
The revisionists are also Utah Mormons, though you'll find them clustered in the cities, and people outside of Utah who ought to be this type of Mormon. They're not new converts so much as people who've been in the Church long enough to see the "cognitive dissonance" between the narrative and the way things really work. Many of them are faithful and active, though just as many are inactive. Some are outside the Church, though the traditionalists are easier to flip. You see, the strict construction of a traditionalist - with its tidy lines and neat corners - doesn't bend so very well. That's the point. It's an inflexible model. So, when the inflexible model comes face to face with an inflexible fact, something has to give. I've seen Latter-day Saints bend reality with their minds (sheer denial at its finest). I've also seen them break, go Manchurian Candidate and join hands with Ed Decker and the gang. It's an ugly sight.
The revisionists are less neat and tidy. They're less about decisions and judgments. They're more about details and possibilities. They can be annoying in their inability to clean up their room, or get moving. They can also seem passive-aggressive in their Buddhist inaction. When anthropologists wonder how the world of the Book of Mormon - which was based on the technology and culture of Bronze Age Palestine - could span one continent, let alone two, the revisionists wonder about it, too. But instead of snapping like a twig in a heavy wind, they speculate. Maybe the Book of Mormon didn't happen all over North America. Maybe most of it happened in Guatemala.
The traditional approach doesn't always get you very far, when the facts are against you. Traditionally, this wasn't a problem. Mormons simply ignored the facts. With the internet, and so much visibility, this is not so easy to do. This is where the revisionists keep the game going. So what if mitochondrial DNA shows that Native Americans don't have Hebrew markers? That sound of glass shattering isn't the revisionists, who argue that the people of the Book of Mormon must have been more local than previously thought.
The sky is the limit when it comes to revisionist thinking. It doesn't matter if the Book of Mormon speaks of horses and there were none in America prior to the Spanish. Revisionists will simply tell you that "horse" was the only word Joseph Smith - with his limited vocabulary - could think of when he "saw" these scenes play out during the process of translation. In fact, revisionist arguments are the reason many Mormons remain unconcerned about anachronistic language and outright plagiarism within the text of the Book of Mormon.
Revisionists, sometimes called "apologists," think outside the box. When the Book of Mormon says the Lamanites were cursed with dark and loathsome skins, it's the traditonalists who steer straight into the iceberg while the revisionists look for better answers. I've always found it hilarious to listen to a simple traditionalist explain to non-Mormons how Mormons aren't racists but God is. Revisionists range from the Hugh Nibley types - who say that the "dark and loathsome" moniker is misunderstood - to heretics like myself. Short of calling the Book of Mormon allegorical, the easiest reply is to suggest that the Nephites, themselves, were racists. Why not argue that they attributed the darkness of the Lamanites to a curse? If the people of the Bible weren't perfect, why should the people of the Book of Mormon be any better?
Of course, revisionism is only appreciated when it's needed. When keen observation points out flaws in the assumptions, practices or occasional leadership decisions in the Church of Rock Ridge of Latter-day Saints, the revisionists are hauled out and stoned. That's what happened to the September Six, back in '93. Elder Packer's threat to Church historians - that digging up embarrassing moments that get in the way of the narrative would have membership-status consequences - sent chills throughout the scholarly community. Not that all Mormon studies papers were of equal merit. I think I could have done without a treatise on Mormon masturbation. Still, there's something tremendously stupid about an ecclesiastic authority telling historians that one of them is about to have a Galileo moment.
Revisionism isn't always valued but "you need me on that wall," they would say - while mumbling something about Cubans trained to kill them. As the membership finds itself caught in the pincers of a dilemma - between faith and facts - the revisionists may be the ones pointing the way out.
When I joined the Church, some 30 years ago, I was led to believe that the science was getting better and better all the time. Coffee and tea were turning out to be really bad for you, because of all those horrible ingredients, including caffeine and tannic acid. Today, the literature is full of articles touting the antioxidant qualities of these beverages and their beneficial impact on health. In the same way we were told that the opening of China would let us sell the Chinese our stuff (rather than the other way around), science was proving the Book of Mormon right. Today, such claims are a little sketchier, particularly in light of mitochondrial DNA.
If I told my non-member friends that I believe a group of desert rats, in pre-Captivity Israel, marched across the Arabian Peninsula, built a sailing ship and sailed East - without spotting any land prior to hitting the West Coast of the Americas - I'd be laughed out of the room. Science has found skulls of Polynesians in America, but those skulls are from prehistoric times.
To date, nobody has found the first knuckle of a dead Ephraimite.
But I don't have to worry about whether science will ever come through. I'm no longer worried about the Book of Mormon. All my questions have been answered with the Book of Abraham. I think that book's origins, copied symbols and proffered translations speak volumes.
Given the infancy in which Egyptology found itself, when Joseph Smith attempted to write a translation of what he saw on the Chandler papyra, it's not surprising that he would stick his neck out so far and offer up his own translation of the text. Unlike the Golden Plates, which came and went with hardly an opportunity to write down the original text and a Joseph-Smith translation, the papyra Joseph worked on - which turned out to be a copy of the standard Book of Breathings - gives the world a definitive and objective standard to work from. Here, Joseph Smith wrote down the characters and wrote down his translation. Any competent Egyptologist could evaluate Joseph's translation skills by simply checking his translation.
We now know that what Joseph Smith wrote had nothing to do with what he was attempting to translate. I don't want to be the one to utter an ugly word like "fraud," but it's a word the Book of Abraham easily provokes. The one time our guy put his translational skills to the test, in a manner that could be objectively evaluated, he failed miserably. It's as if somebody handed me a DVD of a movie in Chinese and I wrote a bunch of subtitles for it - unaware or unconcerned that somebody would eventually hire a Chinese translator to check my "translation."
Then again, so what?
The Book of Abraham is a gift, not because it is translated so well, but because it frees us from having to defend the literality - or historicity - of any of this. There's not one practice, in the LDS faith, that would have to be jettisoned. The greatness of the LDS Church - including its scripture - lies not in historicity but in its ability to inspire. The only truths that really matter are those which lead to better lives.
