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I am catching up on my online reading after traveling all week with my job, so here is one more post from By Common Consent that I found incredibly profound. ( http://bycommonconsent.com/2010/09/24/what-i-said-at-sunstone/ Quote:But at the same time, Dulles reminds us that dissent always occurs within the context of a church, not merely as a rejection of it. This is important because, for both Catholics and Mormons, belonging to a church means membership in an ecclesiastical body that claims to be more than merely a gathering of Christians. Rather, God is in contact with the Church as well as with the individual. In other words, the church is a sacrament; it is a channel through which God extends grace and duty to human beings in ways not possible for individuals alone. In such a religion, authority and conscience exist in dialectic; they condition each other, strain at each other, but neither can exist fully before God without the other. The Church does not exist for its own sake, but neither do we gain salvation in isolation. So one can—and should—dissent as a member of a faith. The act of dissent should not be understood as a departure from that Church but rather as an act within it that draws upon its theology, history, and relation. A Mormon dissenter should dissent first as a Mormon.
Dissenting as a Mormon is tricky, of course, since there is both doctrinal discouragement and fierce social pressure to refrain from voicing any criticism. At the very least, a plausibly Mormon dissent requires abandoning the possibility of exit, and making it plain that one has done so. In his “Decalogue for Dissenters”, Armand Mauss has offered suggestions for how to do this:
1. Seek constantly to build a strong personal relationship with the Lord as the main source and basis for your own confidence in the alternate voice you are offering.
2. Do your homework before you speak up.
3. Relinquish any and all aspirations (or even expectations) for leadership callings in the Church.
4. Endure graciously the overt disapproval of “significant others,” including family members, but never respond in kind. [ed. note: If you can pull that off, beware of whirlwinds]
5. Pay your “dues” as a Church member. …Make clear your willingness to serve wherever called.
6. Be humble, generous, and good-natured in tolerating ideas that you find aversive in other Church members. …No one is won over by being put down, especially in public.
7. Show empathy and appreciation for Church leaders, male and female, from the general level to the local ward and branch. …Some of them sacrifice a great deal for no apparent benefit, and all are entitled to our support and our praise, whenever these can reasonably be given.
8. Do not say or do anything to undermine the influence or legitimacy of Church leaders at any level. …Let us by all means criticize policies, practices, or interpretations of doctrine; but let us not personalize our criticisms with ad hominem attacks. We should feel free to seek private interviews and/or correspondence with leaders, in which we can offer, in a spirit of love and humility, our constructive criticisms and suggestions.
9. Take advantage of legitimate opportunities to exercise your “alternate voices” and to exercise your free agency in “alternate” ways within the LDS Church and culture. We must never lapse into a posture where we just sit and gripe.
10. Endure to the end.
Great post. Dissenting while still wanting to hold a leadership position is even a trickier matter. Old-Timer wrote:Take advantage of legitimate opportunities to exercise your “alternate voices” and to exercise your free agency in “alternate” ways within the LDS Church and culture. We must never lapse into a posture where we just sit and gripe.
I love this one. There are a lot of opportunities to do this. One is in family home evening where I can teach whatever I want to my kids. For me FHE is a Church culture neutralizer where myself and my wife often counteract the unhealthy cultural norms in the Church by teaching our kids what WE believe.
I invite my home teachers to come over dressed in jeans, and don’t demand a lesson either.
When I was a YM president, I got permission to hold a Sacrament meeting at a campground where I was hosting a trip with the young men. No shirts or ties were required to participate in adminstering the sacrament that one time.
As a priesthood leader, I reported all home teaching on a “best efforts basis” and by judging whether we had met the family at the level of contact they wanted. So if someone said they wanted a once a year contact, and we visited them that year, then they were checked off as home taught all year. I regularly thanked brethren who did home teaching in a way that was respectful to the family, and appropriate given their commitment — even if that meant simply dropping banana bread off at their house with a note. And I didn’t preach the gold standard of a sit down visit with a prayer inside the home. So, for three years, the brethren in my quorum had a reasonable home teaching program — how I’d like to see the church approach it.
I never, not once, railed on my quorum about not doing home teaching. Not once. I never reminded them or brought it up in meetings either. So, I see the wisdom of changing what you can — and the impact can be reasonably far reaching in terms of people liberated if you’re in a leadership position.
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