The perils of revival

My Book of Mormon reading for this week was Alma 5-7. I was looking forward to this reading, because it contains Alma 7:11-12, which encapsulates much of what the Incarnation and the Atonement mean to me. But I ended up finding the reading quite unpleasant—something like sitting through a sacrament meeting talk on, let’s say, the evils of evolution, or women working outside the home, or why we all need to support President Bush at a time when most of the country has turned against him. I realized that Alma’s sermons in Zarahemla and Gideon are an indictment of religious liberalization—an indictment, in other words, of religiosities like mine. So even though I kept reminding myself to stay teachable so I could hear what the Spirit might have to say to me in these chapters, a lot of my energy went into self-defense—and into psychologically defending my impulse to self-defense against the critical, orthodox voices in my head who tell me I’m rationalizing.

Let’s back up a little. We learn why Alma has embarked on this preaching tour—which is really a kind of revival—in Alma 4. As the church have become prosperous, many become proud. They set their hearts on the vain things of the world. They become scornful toward one another. They turn their backs on the poor and needy. And they begin to persecute “the humble followers of God” who still impart of their substance, who retain a remission of their sins, and who look forward to the resurrection of the dead. Later, Alma describes this humble remnant as those who still “walk after the holy order of God, wherewith they have been brought into this church, having been sanctified by the Holy Spirit, and they do bring forth works which are meet for repentance” (5:54). In his sermon at Gideon, Alma accuses the proud members of the church of “unbelief” and worshipping idols (7:6).

If Alma’s preaching were a general condemnation of pride and scorn and persecuting other church members and ignoring the poor, I wouldn’t be nearly so defensive about this. If anything, in fact, my challenge would be not allowing myself to be complacent—not patting myself on the back because as a good liberal, I believe in redistributing wealth for the benefit of the poor, and as an excommunicated gay intellectual, I’m certainly not the one who's guilty of persecuting fellow church members . . . which, of course, would make me guilty of the pride and scorn and presumptions of superiority over others that Alma condemns.

But there’s something more specific going on in these sermons—something more political. The scenario described in these chapters—the church become rich, they become lifted up, they look down on a humble remnant who keep the old faith—is a recurring pattern in the history of religions. Sociologist of religion Rodney Stark (who’s made rather flattering predictions about Mormonism’s future growth) has a model which predicts that in order to grow to the point where they claim a significant “market share” of their society, religious movements need to reduce the tension that their distinctive beliefs and practices create between themselves and the larger society. This means, basically, moderately liberalizing their beliefs and becoming less demanding. This reduction in tension is often associated with an increase in social status, including socioeconomic status. As the movement moderates, however, members of a more sectarian temperament—that is, members who desire a greater degree of tension between themselves and the rest of the society—will accuse the movement of having sold out. If they’re unable to regain control of the movement, they’ll break away and form a more conservative movement trying to get back to fundamentals.

A good example of this dynamic in nineteenth-century America is Methodism, the movement that Joseph Smith once considered joining. In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, Methodists grew very rapidly, becoming the largest Protestant group in the United States. The movement appealed to working people and people settling the frontier. It offered an intense, emotional, revival-oriented religion, with dramatic crisis-like conversions not unlike those described in the Book of Mormon, and close-knit communities in which members supported one another, exhorted one another, and monitored one another’s behavior. Over time, however, as more and more Methodists became middle class, there was a move to make the movement more respectable. This meant a move away from highly expressive conversions, a cooling of emotional ardor, professionalization of the clergy, and greater social stratification. Methodists who resisted these developments formed associations devoted to preserving the old-style revivals, with their dramatic spiritual manifestations, and they began to place particular emphasis on Wesley’s teachings about sanctification, or holiness, which were being downplayed by the more respectable, or we could say “liberal,” Methodists. Eventually, these Holiness groups were expelled from the Methodist denominations. Some decades later, the Holiness movement gave rise to Pentecostalism.

This is the kind of internal shift and conflict that prompts Alma’s revival tour. Alma is a sectarian—the Nephite equivalent of a Holiness preacher. He believes that the upwardly mobile, “respectable” members of the church have sold out. They don’t believe the right things any more. They’re not leading sufficiently pious lives (not producing works meet for repentance, in his words). They either haven’t had the right kind of born-again conversion experience, or they’re no longer living up to that experience. And they’re no longer making the sacrifices that typified the church in its earliest days, especially the expectation of imparting of their substance to aid the poor (Mosiah 18:27-28). Alma’s response is to launch a good old-fashioned Holiness revival tour—as the Book of Mormon puts it, “bearing down in pure testimony against them” (Alma 4:19). To be more precise, he’s bearing down against liberalizing trends in the church. The result is a new wave of conversions (6:2). That, and a purge. Alma ordains new priests and elders who will preserve the sectarian vision for the church (6:1). And members who won’t submit to this sectarian housecleaning—as our text puts it, who won’t “repent of their wickedness and humble themselves before God”—are “rejected” and their names “blotted out” (6:3).

There are two things about this that feel wrong to me. First, the moral high ground of sectarianism—the claim to be defending the original faith while other members are lapsing into the ways of the world—is relative. Recently, for a paper I’m writing, I’ve been reading or rereading a lot of articles by scholars at FARMS attacking other Mormon writers who say they accept the Book of Mormon as scripture but not as an ancient document. (That probably has a lot to do with why I’ve felt so defensive this week reading Alma’s sermons: I have these FARMS scholars’ accusations echoing in my head.) The FARMS scholars attack these other writers as apostates, sell-outs, people who are trying to accommodate the gospel to the world’s wisdom—liberal theology and naturalistic biblical scholarship—instead of the other way around. The FARMS scholars, in short, are claiming the sectarian moral high ground.

But FARMS scholars are themselves vulnerable to having even more die-hard LDS sectarians “pull rank” on them. Latter-day Saints who accept as prophetic teaching the idea that the Book of Mormon took place across both American continents and that indigenous peoples throughout those continents are blood descendents of the Lamanites could accuse FARMS scholars who promote a limited Book of Mormon geography of having accommodated to the wisdom of the world, as they’ve absorbed it through their fancy academic training, and presuming, as self-appointed intellectuals, to know better than the prophets. Shifting to a different example: Mormon fundamentalists claim the sectarian moral high ground when they accuse the LDS Church of having abandoned polygamy for the sake of accommodation and respectability. Any change in church teaching, or emphasis, or practice opens up the possibility of reactionary members accusing the Church of deviating from gospel truths or failing to live up to the gospel’s demands: the fact that missionaries no longer travel without purse or scrip; the Saints’ relatively recent embrace of a doctrine of grace; changes to the endowment; Gordon B. Hinckley downplaying the little couplet on Larry King, etc. What I’m saying is: it isn’t self-evident that God is on the side of sectarians, or that relaxing our commitment to earlier teachings and practices (even abandoning them) is necessarily apostasy.

The second thing that feels wrong to me about Alma’s revival is that I don’t believe purges and housecleanings are consistent with God’s parental nurture. Note that Alma 4:9 speaks of this period as a time of “great contentions among the people of the church.” It takes at least two parties to have a contention—and Alma and his fellow sectarians are one of those parties. And one of the lessons I take from the Book of Mormon is that contention is not God’s way (3 Nephi 11:28-30). Alma, no doubt, sees himself as “putting down” or “doing away with” contention; but in this kind of conflict, nobody’s hands are clean (though that’s not to say some may not be more blameworthy than others, especially where power is unequally distributed). Having said that, I will confess that when confronted with contentions between sectarian and liberalizing forces within the LDS Church—the intellectual controversies of the early 1990s, for example—I have not hesitated to conclude that the sectarians are out of step with God’s will, implying that God is on the side of the excommunicated liberals or the fired BYU professors. But if pushed, I would have to admit that in an ultimate sense, God isn’t really on either side. When all our hearts have been purified to the point that we are truly Zion, one in heart and mind, seeing as God sees, then sectarians and liberals alike will recognize that these conflicts we thought were so important simply dissolve in the mystery of the love of Christ. Because we’re not to that point yet, I continue to take sides based on my reason, intuition, and experience—that is, based on what I believe the Spirit is telling me—but I also feel guilty about it at some level in a way I think (or hope) is salutary.

The point is: I can’t believe that purges and housecleanings are the solution, even in cases where I would agree—with Alma or whoever—that the church really are guilty of laxity or straying from gospel teaching. My reasons for believing that have largely to do with my experience of the excommunications and BYU firings of the early 1990s. Or look at the “Mormon Reformation” of the 1850s—an effort to promote spiritual renewal and to bear down on laxity, not unlike Alma’s revival, but which ended up disseminating blood atonement doctrines and helping to produce the militancy that made possible the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Alma comes closer to the solution, I think, when he says that he is called to preach repentance to “everyone that dwelleth in the land” (5:49). That’s the gospel: preaching repentance to everyone, across the board, sectarians and liberals and everyone besides. Self-examination for all. Have you received God’s image in your countenance? Have you been stripped of pride? Have you been stripped of envy? Do you persecute your brother or sister? Do you impart of your substance to the poor and needy, and succor those in need of succor? In the context of these sermons, Alma uses those questions as a weapon, as an indictment of the party he believes is in error. But they’re questions that all the church—all the baptized—should be asking ourselves.

Alma 7:23-24 was where I felt the Spirit break through Alma’s sectarianism most strongly. These are the verses I should have written this post about, actually, as an exercise in self-examination. At the least, I can make them the focus of my sacramental reflection today:

And now I would that you should be humble, and be submissive and gentle; easy to be entreated; full of patience and long-suffering; being temperate in all things; being diligent in keeping the commandments of God at all times; asking for whatever things you stand in need of, both spiritual and temporal; always returning thanks to God for whatever things you do receive.

And see that you have faith, hope, and charity, and then you will always abound in good works.