Mormon Academicus: Mormon Intelligentsia and the Crises of Orthodoxy

I’ve been a nerd since long before Bill Gates made nerdiness kind of cool. When I played
basketball, the other team would call out: “Don’t be ball hogs; give Russ the ball! *he he*” The rest of the time, I was roaming the halls, in almost pedantic fashion, as people would ask me to name for them the Presidents of the United States aka my willingness to be a freak show so that I could win friends...I really needed a life...

So as one utterly lacking a life, I did what most good, quality no-lifers do...go to graduate school. Traumatic. The structures that I had known all my life crumbled beneath my feet. Assumptions, core values, and folk beliefs were attacked at every turn by friend and foe alike. Before too long, I just didn’t know what to believe anymore...the earth was shaking underneath my feet...

*Quivering lips* *slight sobbing* I had come to the disturbing realization that the ivory tower was a cult...

Surprised? Whatever one wants to say about the Molly Mormons, Peter Priesthoods, or Dark Princes of Mormon anti-intellectualism, I quickly learned that if academism was the purest form of freedom, then academism was an odd form of freedom indeed. After more than a seminars where the conclusion seemed to be (ad nauseum) that we should blame *groan* dead white men for (name your favorite social problem), that goodness and evil were basically constructs, at least when uttered by a Christian’s mouth. So I come to you as an “academic-in-exile”–to borrow from Lavina Anderson’s fitting phrase...an academic apostate of sorts. I see my relationship to academics as D. Michael Quinn sees his relationship to modern Mormonism (though I do lack that nice bonus called a Yale degree).

Full transperancy: I am a touch bitter. And I am going through an academic crisis of faith. But hey, I’m in good company. Nietzsche went through it (except that the brain tumor didn’t exactly help the situation either). I do not suppose myself able to cover all of the intersections between traditional academism and Mormonism in so small a post. Rather, I point to the distorting influence academism can have when it is divorced from their attendant, checking-and-balancing, gospel principles. Lest anyone think that I bear ill-feelings against any particular Mormon intellectual, please know that much of my disillusionment comes from personal experience...and alas, I have never had the chance to meet any of the famous Mormon dissidents.

In 1990, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote his wildly entertaining (though obnoxiously esoteric) book, Homo Academicus–a sociological study of academics as a social class. He calls his study a “comic scenario, that of Don Juan deceived or the miser robbed.” The analyzers of man become the analyzed. Bourdieu notes early that “no groups love an ‘informer,’ especially perhaps when the transgressor or traitor can claim to share in their own highest values.” So I come to you also as a fellow-believer in the life of the mind...as a believer that the “best books” (see D&C 93) are not *eyeroll* just the scriptures (as my hardline friends have once suggested). I visit your happy e-home as first a seeker of truth (my Latter Day Saint faith), second, a Mormon (that being defined as a cultural association), and third, a nominal informant.

As I spent the summer in Utah, I felt like the stock figure of the Mafia member who goes straight and tells the cops about the Mafia’s dirty secrets. I was the anthropologist returning with his ethnographic study on that most fascinating class of natives called “graduate students.” What was their manner of dress? What kinds of foods do they eat? Did they have “noble savages”?

If the traditional Gentile scholar might be called Homo Academicus, what then might be the makeup of the Mormonus Academicus? In particular, what does that native called “the dissenter” think, feel? What are his/her mating habits? Eating habits? How does it relate with other native peoples? Do they live in a “limited geography” or are they spread across the continent? Thus, in my travels as ethnographer/former Mafia man of the mind, I have observed four tendencies amongst the Mormon intelleligensia. I do not suggest that the “dissenter pathology” is any worse or better than that borne of other ideological systems. Indeed, in 1971, Elder Maxwell himself noted that without the attendant virtues of love, absolute truth is prone to create behavioral abnormalities

1) Sticking it to the Man a.k.a post-structuralism unplugged

Dissent is really just deconstruction with a political agenda. While I am aware about the ideological tussles between post-structuralism, feminism, and the whole litany of other -isms, one element they share is the foundation that Michel Foucault established. To Foucault (and others such as Derrida, Sarte), we owe credit for realigning how we view intellectual politics. To grossly oversimply, Foucault essentially redefined ideas as “structures of power” that were created to ensure racial and sexual superiority–not exactly something that makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside. Furthermore, Foucault (and others) emphasized the corrupted nature of language...so corrupt that to pretend there was any essential meaning to it was to only delude oneself.

Yet what happens when the tools of this analysis are turned on itself? What happens when post-structuralism itself becomes the so-feared watchword of Foucault: le structure de pouvoir (“the structures of power”)? What happens when the language of postmodern thought realizes its hypocritical state? The words revolt against us...and society shuts down. Post-structuralism unleashed eventually turns on itself, for what happens after one deconstructs an idea? S/he is left with remnants of ideas...which also must be dismantled and subverted. Before long, all that remains is the idea of the post-modern itself. The truest form of postmodernism, it seems, is simply a desire to watch the ideological world...not sparing one’s own house. Therefore, breaking down a hierarchy of any kind.–especially that old bugaboo of religious hierarchy–becomes a prime target.

And within academia and Mormon academic circles, this is certainly the case...yet the holders of that power carefully seek to retain their minority status. They must protect their own house. They do so by reminding their listeners that they deal with “anti-intellectualism in high places.” To retain their status, the mainstream membership of the church must be established as “the Other.” And thus the stock stereotypes are rolled out: denim jumpers, high-pitched primary voices, and wealthy businessmen. Accounts of side remarks made in the foyer about “those ‘intellectuals’” are stringed together. Common phrases within the Church are associated with intellectual laziness or even dishonesty (“‘Meat before meat,’ y’know, just means you keep the wool over their eyes until they like how wool feels...”). Given the plenitude of records in this church, there are enough bizarre remarks to provide more than enough fodder. As long as the structures of power cease to be in the hands of the hierarchy or even those Jell-O lovers from the other side of the family tree.

2) Martyrdom

The academic culture that associates itself with Mormonism seem to have made a particularly noisy show about joining in with the cult of the dissenter: generally with blaring bands and waving banners (Gileadi being one of the prime exceptions). It is hardly new...any academic who studies anything at all about the 20th century probably sees him/herself as some kind of activist. The current Church organization certainly helps some: whereas traditional Protestant culture had normalized dissent as a modus operandi, the hierarchical Church provides dissenters a full venue in which they can be the martyr to “the Corporation of the First Presidency”–like a lamb to the slaughter.

A powerful mythology about the Martyrs is developed, mythology that even seeps into mainstream LDS discourse (“Don’t learn too much; you’ll lose your testimony”). The book of martyrs (not unlike the Book of Life) is kept whereby future dissenters might find inspiration. Legends are circulated about the final days of the martyr: how he was ill or she faced a boardroom of twelve Stepford husbands. That the General Authorities all wear business suits certainly don’t help their cause in the minds of the dissent-cultists–robber barons and Enron executives wear business suits too.

Lucian Aurelius criticized the early Christians tendency toward suicide in this manner; suicide was honorable enough–if only they wouldn’t make such a theatrical show of it.

3) Reclaim the Heathen

As with academic culture, there is a real sense that the Mormon intelligentsia–being so misunderstood by the masses, friends, and family–need each other for emotional support in their endeavors. We have told ourselves: “They just don’t understand (actually, they often do, in my experience) about our need for the truth.”

But the battle goes on. The missionary work must be done subtly, the most astute suggest to themselves.

They make subversive comments in Sunday School...not too much (and they mustn’t bear their testimony about Christ or Joseph Smith’s prophetic role–that would turn the subversion into a faith-building exercise...can’t have that). They “ mention “members would be surprised to know that...” often. They seem to revel in Joseph’s (and others–except for fellow dissenter...don’t mess) flaws.

But they always remember their undergirding principle: milk before meat.

4) The Mormon Academy: Extensions of Power

To believe that Mormon academics don’t like the power that their research brings them is, I suspect, quite wrong. I, in my humble gospel doctrine classes, even began to soak in some the egotism borne of so many “such a good lesson” remarks. What happens when the deconstructers (or the dissenters) are questioned? The response is swift: retrenchment, “steps backward,” apologia. In such an environment, dissent has become its own idol with its own religion, rites, and sacrifices. Its priests who gather at academic symposia imply that mainstream members should kiss their rings (which oddly resemble newly-minted PhDs). As one professor mentioned to me, liberal arts take words even more seriously than students of scriptural studies...and frankly, he’s right. I can’t say I have ever studied a verse of scripture as in-depth as we have ever studied one particular paragraph of Derrida. And the reason we study it that much? Because, we’re told, Derrida was communicating some kind of truth that our minds had not fully grasped yet; we should just study our “scriptures” harder.

Those that do receive the privilege of becoming a member of their loyal following become folks who need deprogramming against the wiles of “the Correlation Committee.” If they do not, then the heathens must be cast aside as a mentally atrophied "conservative," at best a slave to the ideological state apparati (hat tip to Althusser) and at worst a knuckle-dragging neanderthal who really does like his Jell-O mold with carrots. If you defend the hierarchy, you must be merely a cog in the machine, a hack.

Since Joseph himself seriously sought to “revolutionize the whole world” with his theology, we thus have even no less than Ralph Nader appealing to the Latter Day Saint’s tradition of “revelation, resistance, and dissent” when speaking at the (in)famous alternative commencement (one which I attended). In The Mormons, it is interesting indeed that nearly all the academics whose research was highlighted per se were lukewarm or excommunicated Mormon scholars. Avraham Gilealdi, one of the September Six who later rejoined the Church, was not mentioned once. Prodigal sons apparently don’t always make for good press.

What kind of results does this cult of dissent bring about? After all, it is not the truth-seeking that gives academics the reputation they have in the church. q

As the Church has moved into the torrent of information publicized about it over the previous decade, it has been the conservatives who stare down the tanks and who face the lynch mob of “broad-minded” secular critics. Yet in the face of this attack led by the arson's torches, the conservative must demonstrate that he too can brandish fire of his own. And while the mob is bent on watching the world burn, the conservative can respond with a simple gesture: a firedance.

Something I can’t really do...but I am in desperate need of a hobby...