What are our Church’s IMPLICIT values?

As hard as I’m trying not to be, I’m probably pretty cynical right now, but based on our behaviour our values seem to be based on appearance more than what we really are as children of God or anything that might help us develop faith in him or draw closer to him. In a nutshell, it seems we concentrate more on ensuring others think we are what we preach than about actually becoming what we preach we should become.

Frankly, I think it depends greatly on how “church” is defined by each person who answers that question – but I don’t have time right now to go further into my own answers that change with varying definitions.

Well, in answering the question, you have try to go beyond personal themes and look at the generalities and repeated messages that seem to be pretty consistent across the various Wards you’ve attended.

Unquestioning loyalty to the organization and its highest leaders seems to me to be an occasionally explicit, but mostly just very strongly implicit value of the church.

Well, in answering the question, you have try to go beyond personal themes and look at the generalities and repeated messages that seem to be pretty consistent across the various Wards you’ve attended.

That’s just it:

The biggest variance and hardest “implicit” values to codify are related to having such widely divergent experiences in different wards and branches. Someone who has lived in my current ward all his life (or the one immediately prior to this one) and someone who has lived in cwald’s branch, for example, would describe very, very different “implicit values” – since implicit values are the most subject to interpretation and, therefore, local variations in “value”.

In general, I think the “explicit values” at the world-wide level tend to be the “positive” ones (with obvious exceptions, especially to certain members and groups), while the “implicit values” tend to be the more “negative” ones. However, that also will vary radically depending on the outlook of the person making the valuation judgment. At the local level, the explicit and implicit values tend to follow the same generally opposing pattern – with the positive and negative sides being a direct reflection of the personalities of the most prominent and/or vocal leaders.

In short, I don’t think “Our Church” has any objective, universal, objective, explicit or implicit values – since even the idea / value that Jesus of Nazareth was and is the Redeemer of the World and the Individual Savior is seen as either an implicit OR explicit value by so many people. Another example would be the value of “love” or “love God and neighbor / everyone”. Conservative and liberal members generally will agree that it is an explicit or implicit value (that it is a value in the Church) – but gay members might disagree totally, based on their own experiences as among the “unloved” (those excluded from the value in too many instances). To them, “love” might not be a value at all in the Church. Iow, individuals define “value”, generally, and “explicit” and “implicit”, specifically – highly subjective words that rely almost totally on the glasses through which value is seen.

I think my perception of implicit value is a direct reflection of my perception of explicit value (obvious, I know, but . . .) – and I think my perception of both is a direct reflection of my standing within the Church and how I am treated in action by those with whom I actually associate and in word by those with whom I don’t.

While it would be difficult for me to distill the implicit values from my church experience, I would support the Five values (presumably not listed according to importance) that SD has brought up as being consistent with overarching themes.

1. We value MATERIAL WEALTH. This is not explicitly valued, but it is unmistakeably implicitly valued. There are, I believe, and I have stated before, hard coded reasons for this (Jacob 2:19), but they are not explicitly acknowledged.

2. We value POSITION. This is explicitly devalued (D&C 121). But in all our bios, we are sure to mention that “he served as a bishop at age 28” or some such positional reference.

3. We value STATUS. Do you hold a temple recommend? Are you serving in a calling? Are you married? How many children do you have?

4. We value SAFETY. We are averse to risks of any kind. We like to program our lives and live the program.

As you might gather, I’ve been doing a lot of study of organizations, culture and change lately. One term I’ve run across is IMPLICIT values. Some organizations have a statement of values that is explicit, and they try to make sure they live those values…However, for many, those values are implicit. The aren’t written down anywhere, however, they speak loud and clear because of the systems and the “little things all the time” that communicate certain values as being more important than others…what do you see as the implicit values of our Church?

It seems like most of the basic values the Church wants to promote are explicitly emphasized. For example, we often hear about obedience, sacrifice, worthiness, and testimony (exaggerated conviction about the Church’s relative importance). I think these traits the Church wants to cultivate in members are directly related to the “implicit” values of loyalty and commitment to serve the Church. The Church’s emphasis of these ideas is certainly understandable because they associate lack of obedience, sacrifice, or testimony with members “falling away” from the Church which is one of the worst possible end results from their perspective.

It looks like one of the main things individual members actually value the most is approval from other members. The fear of man is such a strong motivator that sometimes it leads people to sacrifice almost anything else they value like truth, freedom, personal happiness/contentment, etc. and I think this is what has happened with the Church to end up with all the groupthink and detailed rules we see now. The problem is that these primary Church values have become severely imbalanced to favor what is convenient for the institution over what is important to many individuals and the Church currently doesn’t show much respect or tolerance for some of the most common values people have that are likely to conflict with the extreme level of commitment the Church demands and expects out of members.