Senator Barack Obama, in his opposition to the war in Iraq, is clearly opposed to numerous authorities within the Bush administration (from the office of the President on down), who call for a continuation of the war. Where does this leave Latter-day Saints? After all, as we are taught in the Twelfth Article of Faith, “We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.” The incumbent President and Vice President have stated that those who take issue with their positions are not just wrong, but unpatriotic. Given that the President, the Vice President, and many of the Cabinet want to continue the war, how can Latter-day Saints take a contrary position and be true to our faith? How can we support a candidate who opposes the war in Iraq, thereby opposing the highest officials of our country?
Yes, we Latter-day Saints are certainly (and very appropriately) taught to uphold the law. However, we often confuse obedience to lawful authority with unquestioning obedience to authority, period. (Why do we do this? The reasons are rooted in LDS history; briefly, we reacted to the 19th century persecution of the Latter-day Saints by the Federal government, by becoming ultra-Americans in the 20th century.)
Obedience to lawful and moral authority is quite appropriate and 'saintly' (in the sense of being something that a Latter-day Saint should do). Unquestioning obedience to authority or authority figures—including the authority figures in the current Presidential administration who are pushing to pursue the war in Iraq—is not the least bit saintly; rather, unquestioning obedience to human authority is arguably un-saintly, unMormon, and unscriptural (beyond being just plain stupid).
In Ms. Peach’s comment to my first post, she brings up several incidents in which the U.S. government engaged in activities that were illegal (the bombing of Laos, for example) and/or immoral (training the officials of other countries how to use torture to stifle political dissent, for example). In my response to her comment, I bring up other such incidents (for example, the nuclear bombing of southern Utah [!] in the 1950s, as well as the COINTELPRO operation that attempted to disrupt the civil rights movement, and the MKULTRA mind control experiments on unwitting American civilians). Examples could be multiplied, well into the current day. My point is not to be anti-government, which I am not; rather, my point is to show that the U.S. government has conducted operations—some of them lasting for a decade or longer—that have been manifestly immoral and highly illegal. As the Lord himself declared, in connection with a discussion of governance under constitutional law: “Nevertheless, when the wicked rule the people mourn” (D&C 98:9).
The Latter-day Saints, of course, believe that the United States Constitution is divinely inspired (D&C 101:80). We need to remember that, under that Constitution, it is perfectly legal to engage in certain forms of protest against the government or its agencies (see the First Amendment to the Constitution, which specifically prohibits Congress from “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”). This protest includes everything up to and including large, loud, and insistent but nonviolent demonstrations with a million people on the Mall in Washington, DC. Just because something is governmental policy does not make it sacred. The same sacred Constitution that gives our government its form also gives us, as citizens, the right to protest.
Put bluntly: Opposing the government is not a sin, nor is it a crime. In fact, one could argue from the scriptures that opposing the government is a moral responsibility, when the government is engaged in actions that are clearly immoral, and/or illegal. The fact that Senator Obama opposes the government regarding support for the war is not a problem from either a gospel perspective or a legal one. Rather, it is a matter of moral courage.
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How can Latter-day Saints be Republicans? Most especially I'm amazed after the way Romney (arguably the best R candidate for President) was outed by his "fellow" Republicans for being Mormon!
About 9 months ago I went to a conference at Princeton University on Mormonism and Politics and all of the historians there agreed (or at least those who spoke up) that Smith and early mormons would be Democrats today.
How can an LDS person ignore the part of the BOM indicating (roughly) "when you are in defense I am with you, when you go on the offense I am not?"
Eric's first sentence--"How can Latter-day Saints be Republican?"--is an interesting twist, intentional or not, on a famous saying by a now-deceased LDS General Authority, who once stated, many years ago, that a believing Latter-day Saint could not, in good conscience, be a Democrat. (I intend to focus on this at length in another post to this blog.)
It would be a worthy essay (say, in the Atlantic, Harper's, Sunstone, or Dialogue), to consider how it is that the Latter-day Saints, at least in Utah, came to identify with the Republican Party, as so long ago they did. (It was an old joke, half a century ago, that "Utah is the only place where the Irish are Republican and the Jews are Gentile.")
My sense of the situation is that the circumstances of LDS history converged to make it easy for the Latter-day Saints to choose the Republican Party on the basis of superficial characteristics. This is not a pretty story.
Some time ago, the Latter-day Saints were subject to a series of crises that threatened their very survival. (Consider the mob persecutions in Missouri and Illinois in the 1830s and 1840s, and the U.S. federal political and military persecutions in the 1860s through the 1880s; political persecution continued in lesser intensity into the 1920s.) Under those circumstances, what was drilled into the people was the need to follow leadership without question, ignore subtleties, and hunker down. As necessary as this was at the time, it left LDS culture (which is not synonymous with 'gospel culture'!) with a preference for unthinking obedience to authority figures of any type, a tendency to want to appear hyper-patriotic, and a disdain for nuanced thought.
Enter the Republican Party of the 20th and early 21st century, which is designed to take advantage of characteristics like these:
--Over at least the last half-century, to a large extent, the Democrats have encouraged discussion and debate (civil rights, economic inequalities, issues of race and gender); the Republican Party, at least since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, has stifled debate and emphasized strict adherence to the party leadership. Latter-day Saints who were used to following leadership (originally to protect their very existence) played right into Republican hands.
--The Democratic Party has long been the party of the immigrant and the poor (which, of course, overlap to a large degree, especially in the first two-thirds of the 20th century). The Republican Party has long been the 'nativist' party--that is, keep the immigrants out, be they the potato famine Irish, the Eastern European Jews, the Polish Catholics, or whomever--and, as much as possible, preserve White Anglo-Saxon Protestant power in the name of 'patriotism.' The Latter-day Saints, who tried to emphasize their patriotism from the 1880s onward in order to gain statehood for Utah, and in order to gain acceptance in a hostile American political landscape, played right into Republican hands.
--The Democratic Party has a long tradition of relatively well-educated legislators, who emphasized thinking things over carefully. The Republican Party--never much for nuance--began at least as far back as the 1980s to embrace the power of emphasizing a few simple--one might even say simplistic--principles. Latter-day Saints, who dropped an appreciation for nuance in order to focus on the central tenets of their message as an exercise in cultural survival, played right into Republican hands.
What really sealed the deal was the McCarthy period of the late 1940s through the 1950's. Here we had a Republican senator pointing the finger to a clear enemy--Communism in the United States!--that threatened everything that the Latter-day Saints held dear: freedom of religion, the sanctity of the family, and so on. Hardly anyone among our people stopped to point out that, although Communist espionage was of course a threat, Communist social theory had never been popular among a substantial group of Americans after the depths of the Depression, a generation earlier. No one asked to see that paper that Senator McCarthy waved, with his supposed list of names of Communists in the State Department--no, that would have been disrespectful to authority. (He had no such list, of course.) No one pointed out that our LDS belief in the sanctity of the Constitution should inspire us--then and now--to defend the Bill of Rights, of which the First Amendment is the only Constitutional protection of our vaunted freedom of religion.
It doesn't help any that the Republicans took the moral high ground with their emphasis on 'family values' in the 1980s. The fact of the matter is that LDS values are at their heart a great deal more sophisticated than they appear on the surface. It's not just about holding Family Home Evening, folks (even though that is important). LDS values also promote care for the poor, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing the homeless. LDS values also promote civil discourse, not the demonizing of one's opponent (a favorite Republican tactic, not that the Democrats are immune from criticism on this front). LDS values are also about promoting peace and telling the truth; the contrast with the way that the war in Iraq began is almost too obvious to point out.
What we need is an LDS discussion on values, using as our models people like the late Elder Hugh B. Brown (who embraced the Democratic Party because it was 'the party of the poor'), and the late Lowell L. Bennion. (For example, see Bennion's book, Do Justly and Love Mercy: Moral Issues for Mormons (Centerville, UT: Canon Press, 1988.)
I am all for patriotism. However, I find it of interest that Jesus mentioned patriotism not one tiny bit in the Gospel narratives of the New Testament. However, Jesus says quite a bit in the New Testament and the Book of Mormon about caring for the poor. One of the major themes in the Book of Mormon itself concerns the dangers of societal divisions between rich and poor. (Take that into Sunday School this year.) In short, concerns about social justice are inherent in gospel values.
In sum, we need to realize as a people that civil rights are a very Mormon thing to defend. Compassionate social policy is a very strong LDS concern--from the perspective of the core of our religion, although we have a long way to go to make those values part of our external behavior, as a group. Neither civil rights nor compassionate social policy is a strong concern of the Republican Party in this era; both of these are strong concerns of the Democratic Party.
Incidentally, I can recommend highly Eric's blog (click on his name above to reach it). As always, I would ask readers of this, the Mormons for Obama Blog, to pass its URL on to your friends. Let's go viral.
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