Liberty Jail, certainty, and ambivalence

My D&C reading for this week was the Liberty Jail sections—two of them, anyway. (The assigned reading omitted D&C 123, which surprised me a little since church leaders have stated that they continue to regard that section as binding on the church; the First Presidency cited this section as the rationale for the Strengthening Church Members committee.)

Before I go any further, I want to say that I have prayed in the words of D&C 121 and 122 on many occasions. See this past post for one example. I feel I should say that because the tone of where I think I'm going to go with this week's post is in a critical vein, and so I want to make clear that these sections speak to me in addition to my speaking back against them.

I was asking myself this week: What do we learn from these sections about Joseph Smith's spirituality? We see his thirst for knowledge: a big part of the vision that evidently keeps him going in the midst of this miserable time is that someday he will know if there is one God or many gods; he will know the outer limits of heaven, earth, and sea, if they exist; he will know the revolutions, days, months, and years of the heavenly bodies (121:26-32). That's eternal life for him—to have his intellectual horizons expanded to the utmost; to know everything there is to know.

We see his hunger for ministerial authority, for followers who will turn to him for counsel and blessing (122:2). We see his hunger for faithful friends and for a people who will be unfailingly loyal to him (121: 9-10; 122:3).

We see his yearning to make his enemies fear and tremble (122:4), to see their hopes blasted (121:11). We see the intensity of his anger, an anger that makes it comforting to him to imagine his enemies—and the enemies of his people—stripped of their possessions and made to suffer everything that they have made him and his people suffer (121:13, 20). He feels that they deserve to be drowned with a millstone around their neck (121:22). They and their posterity, he feels, deserve to be wiped out from the face of the earth—and he derives a grim satisfaction from his conviction that someday this act of utter destruction will be accomplished (121:15).

I can't fault Joseph for his anger without implicating myself; anger looms large in my spiritual life, too. That's a big part of why these sections speak to me. But with the recognition that the judgment falls on me as well, I will voice my opinion that the anger we see being vented in these sections needs to be swallowed up in the pure love of Christ.

There's one more important thing we learn about Joseph's spirituality from these sections that I want to point to—and this is the main idea I wanted to get to today. We see in these sections Joseph's absolute certainty that he and his people are in the right and that God is going to give them the victory in the end. D&C 121 begins with a prayer of protest, perhaps even a prayer of despair: but it isn't the kind of despair that would prompt Joseph to doubt the existence of God. Joseph has grown weary of waiting to see God intervene; but he doesn't doubt that God is there to intervene, and intends to intervene, on his and the Saints' behalf.

I have very mixed feelings about a faith that intense. Part of me envies Joseph for his certainty. His faith and hope survive Liberty Jail intact because they rest on bedrock convictions. I don't know if I could survive similar circumstances. I suspect not. I sense too strongly the plausibility of the conclusions that there isn't really a God or at least that I've misapprehended God's will. I sense that faith comes a lot harder for me than it does for Joseph. I have to labor at it; for him, it seems more natural, like breathing. He's certain who God is and what God wills and where he (Joseph) stands in relation to that.

As I say, there's a part of me that envies that. But there's also a part of me that's repelled by it. I'm reminded of Michael, the man who served as my spiritual mentor for several years in Salt Lake after I stopped attending the LDS Church and came out of the closet. Michael had certainty, and that's what drew me to him. His certainty was based on mystical experiences that left him without any doubt that God is real and death is not; that God shines through each and every one of us if we can just stand out of the way. Michael had no doubt that God had nothing against my homosexuality. He had no doubt that my itching to go back to the Dominican Republic was a call from God. I did have doubts about those things. I desired to believe, as Alma 32 says. But I still felt the rhetorical and psychological force of the LDS Church's teachings against homosexuality; I suspected that my urge to go back to the Dominican Republic was just nostalgia or romantic idealism better ignored. I leaned on Michael's certainty while I developed my own leg muscles, so to speak. Without him, I probably wouldn't have had the experience of going back to the Dominican Republic in 1997, an experience that I now see as profoundly important in my spiritual journey.

I often wished for Michael's certainty. But then he would say or do something that would make me realize, "No. I don't want this." I was grateful that he had that gift, and that he was willing to make his gift available to me. But I could see how my propensity toward ambivalence and self-doubt and "problematizing" everything, as we say in academia—I could see how that was also a spiritual gift. Michael's certainty could be very frustrating at times. It blinded him to certain realities. It could make him very difficult to collaborate with, since he was not inclined to compromise. It eventually contributed to something of a falling out between us, which didn't get reconciled before he died, something I regret very much.

I have similar feelings about Joseph Smith's certainty. It's a gift, but it's also a liability. Joseph comes out of Liberty Jail as convinced as ever that he is God's uniquely appointed servant and that his people are threatened by enemies who want to destroy them (a fear he's harbored since back in New York). If anything, his "us versus them" siege mentality has become even more intense, and his theocratic vision gets ratched up a notch (or several). It's not just about communitarianism and a safe place to wait out the endtimes anymore, with "judges in Israel" and a "School of the Prophets." In Nauvoo, he builds up a virtually independent theocratic city-state, with an army at his command, and a Council of Fifty to administer the affairs of the as yet hidden but literal earthly kingdom of God, and eventually himself crowned king, with aspirations of actually running the United States as president. Eventually—I think it's safe to say, inevitably—that theocratic vision got him killed.

What if Joseph had had more ambivalence, or had been more willing to listen to those among his followers who had more ambivalence? What if the Liberty Jail experience had prompted him to reconsider his sectarian, theocratic millenarianism—to wonder if he had accurately apprehended God's will? What if he had been moved to see his initiatives and rhetoric as helping to contribute to the Missouri conflicts, rather than seeing the Saints as purely innocent victims? What if in Nauvoo he had implemented a policy of greater accommodation toward the rest of American society, like that which the Latter-day Saints were finally forced to adopt at the end of the 19th century as a result of the federal campaign against polygamy? It could have dramatically changed Mormon history. Possibly Joseph wouldn't have died at the hands of a mob in Carthage Jail. Possibly there would have been no trek west. Possibly the Saints could have kept Nauvoo and returned to Missouri, as the RLDS did. Possibly Mormonism's growth would have been more modest, more like the RLDS/Community of Christ than like the LDS. Possibly contemporary Mormonism would have shed many of its doctrinal and ritual distinctives (by no means an obviously good thing). Possibly there would have been no polygamy and therefore no polygamy crisis. Possibly there would never have been a Mountain Meadows Massacre (an unquestionably good thing).

Obviously I'm trafficking in hopelessly speculative hypotheticals. But I think the possibilities for historical alternatives are worth contemplating because I don't take it for granted that the way Mormon history actually unfolded—and is currently unfolding—represents God's ideal scenario. D&C 121:33 tells us that "as well might man stretch forth his puny arm to stop the Missouri river in its decreed course, or to turn it up stream, as to hinder the Almighty from pouring down knowledge from heaven upon the heads of the Latter-day Saints." Yes, but with a crucial caveat: receiving new knowledge requires being open to new knowledge, which means being open to rethinking, reconsidering, questioning, doubting what you already think you know. It requires a measure of ambivalence.