"The Gathering of My People"

I was a little surprised to see how thoroughly the student's guide equated the gathering of Israel with membership in the LDS Church. The "literal gathering of Israel and . . . the restoration of the Ten Tribes" proclaimed in the Tenth Article of Faith, i.e., the restoration of the descendents of the chosen people to their promised homelands in Palestine and (for Lamanites) the Americas, isn't just downplayed in this lesson's rhetoric—it's entirely absent. Well, except it does get smuggled in—entirely without comment, though—by way of the scripture chain attached to the end of the lesson.

This kind of thing is both encouraging and frustrating for someone with a liberal religious outlook. It's encouraging because it shows official Church teaching moving away from a literal reading of scripture which has served, over the course of LDS history, to sacralize forms of racism. I'm all for getting away from the literal, premillennialist conception of the gathering proclaimed in the Tenth Article of Faith, and I'm happy to see correlation moving in that direction, too. What's frustrating, though, is how it's being done. Instead of openly critiquing the teaching now viewed as problematic, the Church is, as usual, opting for the more Orwellian tack of simply replacing the old rhetoric with a new one, without announcement or explanation, and expecting the membership to climb obediently aboard. That approach is necessary to preserve the operating fiction that at any given moment, Church teaching provides an unchanging, unfailing, irreproachable guide. (The above claims need to be unpacked and nuanced, but to borrow a line of Joseph Smith's, they suit my purpose as they stand.)

And I'm frustrated because even the new church-centered conception of the gathering retains unhealthy aspects of the gathering concept that have persisted throughout the movement's history. For Mormon orthodoxy, the gathering equates with flight. The Saints gather because they perceive they need places of refuge where they can be protected from the world's wickedness and from the destruction God plans to pour out on the world because of its wickedness (D&C 29:8; 38:41-42). Fear is thus a motive in the gathering: these early revelations claim that the Saints need to gather to Ohio because of a conspiracy against them (37:1; 38: 28-32). Operating within this understanding of the gathering is a notion that the Saints are, or should be, a pure, righteous community—indeed, the only righteous community in a world that has become altogether wicked (33:4; 38:31). Preserving the community's purity requires that the inadequately faithful be "cast out" or "cut off." (In D&C 42, the "Law of the Lord," we'll get a whole litany of who needs to be "cast out" of the community; we see the concept at work in this lesson's readings in 52:4-5.)

A few years back, I was reading 2 Nephi 5 at a time when I'd recently been reading Mircea Eliade, so I was thinking about the organization of sacred space. 2 Nephi 5 describes the founding of the first Nephite society after their exodus into the wilderness to escape Laman and Lemuel and their followers (an early template for LDS gatherings). As I was reading it with Eliade on the brain, I realized that this chapter was presenting what would become a classically LDS understanding of the ideal society, the kind of society they kept trying to build every place they gathered. At the sacred center of this society is the temple, the axis mundi that links earth to heaven. But at the margins of this society is constant violence, or the constant threat of violence, as the community wards off its perceived enemies. For this society, Laban's sword (which Nephi says he used as the model for making other swords with which to arm his people) is as crucial a symbol as the temple.

I think the same is true for Mormon orthodoxy today. You see it at work in rhetoric about the stakes of Zion being "a refuge and a defense against evil." The gathered community is a community huddled together for protection, except when they send emissaries out into the world, endowed with power from on high to protect them, to try to convince others to come be gathered with them and thus escape the wrath that is to come. The gathered community lives with a constant sense of being under attack, which in turn requires a constant, vigilant patrolling of boundaries and the use of various forms of violence to keep the community safe and pure: the rhetorical violence of aggressive apologetics parrying "attacks" on the faith from outsiders; the psychological and emotional violence of "casting out" and "cutting off" insiders deemed to be insufficiently faithful or loyal; and at times the physical violence of a Mountain Meadows Massacre.

That's what I see as unhealthy or dangerous in the concept of the gathering. But I also sense the Spirit moving around inside this concept, trying to break through and communicate something of worth.

• I sense that in the idea of coming together to be endowed with power from on high and then going out into the world to serve. That concept is integral to how the Episcopal services Hugo and I attend are structured: the community gathers, is nourished by word and sacrament, and then goes forth in the power of the Spirit to love and to serve. That same concept is at work in the LDS gathering.
  
  
• I feel the Spirit when I read about Christ being like a hen who gathers her chicks under her wings (29:1-2), or when Christ says, "Lift up your hearts and be glad, for I am in your midst" (29:5). The gathered community is the community that naturally forms as individuals come to Christ and in so doing find themselves one with everyone else who has come to Christ. The gathered community is called to live out that oneness more conscientiously and fully: to be united in prayer (29:6), to esteem our brothers and sisters as ourselves (38:24-25), to be one in the sense of being equal in privileges, including economic privilege (38:26-27).
  
  
• I hear the Spirit in the injunction to go out from the world, or from Babylon; to be clean, you who bear the vessels of the Lord (38:42). There's a danger of spiritual elitism there, but it's also a call to be a priestly people, a counterculture committed to gospel principles in a world reigned by anti-Christian principles like consumerism or militarism or laissez-faire economics.
  
  
• I feel the Spirit when the revelations promise that "I, the Lord, will hasten the city in its time" (52:43). The city is Zion, of course. Some years back, I read an interview with Christian essayist Kathleen Norris in which she said she was currently reflecting on what it means that the Christian vision of the ideal community is a city. Latter-day Saints take that vision very literally, of course. The gathered people build cities. This isn't a rural Western fantasy of everyone living out on self-sufficient homesteads, a good drive away from their neighbors and far away from the long resented arm of the feds. A city requires organization, government, coordination, regulations, safety nets, administration, social services, systems for distributing goods. The question before us—the challenge of the gathering—is to build all that in a way that will be just and equitable and merciful and compassionate and generous and consecrated and respectful of the dignity of every person.

But the image of people fleeing from the world to gather in places of refuge doesn't really help us do that in the long run. That vision lends itself very well to building walls and fortifying boundaries and launching counterattacks and ferreting out traitors. It doesn't lend itself well to working to transform the society in which you live in the direction of peace and union and love. For that you need to start emphasizing different metaphors: the salt of the earth, the lump that leavens the loaf. I'd like to live long enough to see the Saints start privileging those metaphors instead of the current rhetoric about gathering to places of defense and refuge.