I want you to do a brief thought exercise. It consists of three questions. The purpose of a thought exercise is to help you see something that may be familiar from a different perspective.
The three questions are about your beliefs – your personal convictions. For the purposes of this exercise, let’s include ALL types of beliefs whether religious, political, economic, or moral. Let’s exclude opinions that are simply matters of personal taste.
- Do you care if your beliefs are true? (Almost everyone would say “Yes” to this question.)
- What if one of your beliefs wasn’t true? (How would you know? Would you admit it?)
- How likely is it that ALL of your beliefs are true?
Of course, question #3 is the point of the exercise. It is to help you realize that it is nearly impossible that 100% of your beliefs happen to be true.
Waking up to this simple fact means that if we seriously want to align our beliefs with the truth, to the best of our ability as humans to know the truth, we need to regularly re-examine all of our beliefs. This can be personally scary. But the fact is that, by definition, beliefs that are actually true can withstand the scrutiny.
Even more difficult than scrutinizing our beliefs is that we need to be willing to change our beliefs when we are in error. The problem is that most people are not inclined to even examine their beliefs, let alone change them. Change requires work. It requires humility. It may even require repentance.
Be WE, as members of the Church of Jesus Christ, MUST do these things. Our integrity depends upon living our lives as honestly and consistently as we possibly can. We claim to really care about truth and our understanding of the gospel requires us to live our lives according to the truth.
Stubborn pride
Rather than undertake honest, regular, self-examination and repentance, most people deny and rationalize their mistaken beliefs and behaviors. Rather than putting the pursuit of truth first in their lives, people put their own traditions, opinions, and self-image first and then CLAIM they are living the truth – they usually even believe their own deception.
Nothing is easier than to identify one’s own favorite political, economic, historical, and moral convictions with the gospel. That gives one a neat, convenient, but altogether too easy advantage over one’s fellows. If my ideas are the true ones — and I certainly will not entertain them if I suspect for a moment that they are false! — then, all truth being one, they are also the gospel, and to oppose them is to play the role of Satan. This is simply insisting that our way is God’s way and therefore, the only way. It is the height of impertinence.
Hugh Nibley
Instead of seeking to learn and live God’s way, it is much easier to just say that your way IS God’s way. This tactic has been used for decades by groups as dissimilar as Jihadi Muslims and Utah Republicans. They don’t need to change, they don’t need to repent, they don’t even need to listen, because “God” agrees with them. And, to them, any other point of view is evil by definition.
The necessity of change
The humility to self-examine and change your mind is essential in the academic and scientific worlds. You cannot discover new things if you believe you already know everything. Clinging to the past is a barrier to growth. Moving forward requires letting go of the past.
Stubborn, self-reinforcing, blind belief is particularly damaging right now in the political arena. We somehow actually find members of the Church of Jesus Christ enthusiastically supporting an arrogant, ignorant, criminal, racist, rapist, bully for President of the United States — and they don’t even see the irony.
It is so easy to become comfortable with the status quo — to believe what you have always believed and vote how you have always voted. But when the once-familiar ground underneath you is shifting rapidly, standing still is dangerous.
MAGA is not your father’s Republican Party. It has become a dangerous, fascist, cult. It is time for the Saints to get out. People who cheer for Mike Lee and boo Mitt Romney have lost something essential. They have lost their sense of righteous discernment. Without that, can they really still call themselves “Saints?”
And others will he pacify, and lull them away into carnal security, that they will say: All is well in Zion; yea, Zion prospereth, all is well—and thus the devil cheateth their souls, and leadeth them away carefully down to hell.
2 Nephi 28:21
Source:
Hugh Nibley, “Beyond Politics,” Nibley on the Timely and the Timeless, Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1978.
Well said, and timely.
I notice a connection between the thesis of this essay and the call for the sacrifice of a broken heart and a contrite spirit in 3 Nephi, which is essentially, his asking us to be willing to offer up our current desires and our current beliefs in order to be, like Abraham, greater followers of righteousness. Nibley also points out that when Abraham enters into a dialogue with God, “Will you destroy the righteous with the wicked?” God approves and does indeed dialogue with Abraham, to Abraham’s benefit and increased understanding of the realities of the situation in Sodom. There is a differently instructive dialogue later when Jesus tries to explain his forthcoming sacrificial death to Peter, when Peter, on that occasion, protests, “This will not happen to thee!” That is when Jesus rebukes Peter, “Get thee behind me Satan, thou savorest not the things of God but of men.” To his credit, Peter accepted the rebuke, and grew to understand that things he did not think or want in light of limited understanding were in error. He repented. He made the sacrifice of those attitudes and desires, and entered the Real. I once studied all of the arguments offered by Biblical peoples to justify rejection of Biblical prophets, and found that they all boiled down to people saying, “It’s not what I want” and/or “It’s not what I think.” That is, people end the conversation with God by asserting that if God were God, he would not ask them to give up anything they desire, nor change what they think. That puts us in the role of God. As Nibley says in your quote, “This is simply insisting that our way is God’s way and therefore, the only way. It is the height of impertinence.”
There is a connection with Joseph Campbell’s observation that the entrances of ancient temples had guardian figures representing Fear and Desire, what we think is so, and what we want to be so. To enter the Real, we have offer up what they think and what we want. Otherwise, we cannot enter the Real, nor become, with Abraham, a greater follower of righteousness.
There is a connection with the Perry Scheme for Cognitive and Ethical Growth. Perry studied the patterns of incoming students to Yale, and found a Nine Stage pattern, as students adapted well or poorly in moving from parochial local environments to the challenging ideas at the University Level. Position 2 of the Perry Scheme as this:
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POSITION 2 – Multiplicity Pre-legitimate. (Resisting snake)
Now the person moves to accept that there is diversity, but they still think there are TRUE authorities who are right, that the others are confused by complexities or are just frauds. They think they are with the true authorities and are right while all others are wrong. They accept that their good authorities present problems so they can learn to reach right answers independently.
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That Position corresponds to Nibley’s phrase “”This is simply insisting that our way is God’s way and therefore, the only way. It is the height of impertinence.”
Perry saw the potential for Progress through to his Position 9. For instance, a part of his Position 6 is this: “He starts to see how he must be embracing and transcending of: certainty/doubt, focus/breadth, idealism/realism, tolerance/contempt, stability/flexibility. He senses need for affirmation and incorporation of existential or logical polarities. He senses need to hold polarities in tension in the interest of Truth.”
That is much like Lehi on the need to recognize “opposition in all things” and Joseph Smith on how “by proving contrarieties, truth is made manifest.”
Eventually a person can progress to Perry’s position 9.
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POSITION 9. Commitments in Relativism further developed.
The person now has a developed sense of irony and can more easily embrace other’s viewpoints. He can accept life as just that “life”, just the way IT is! Now he holds the commitments he makes in a condition of “PROVISIONAL ULTIMACY”, meaning that for him what he chooses to be truth IS his truth, and he acts as if it is ultimate truth, but there is still a “provision” for change. He has no illusions about having “arrived” permanently on top of some heap, he is ready and knows he will have to retrace his journey over and over, but he has hope that he will do it each time more wisely. He is aware that he is developing his IDENTITY through Commitment. He can affirm the inseparable nature of the knower and the known–meaning he knows he as knower contributes to what he calls known. He helps weld a community by sharing realization of aloneness and gains strength and intimacy through this shared vulnerability. He has discarded obedience in favor of his own agency, and he continues to select, judge, and build.
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I’ve elsewhere made a case that Joseph Smith by example and precept tries to lead us to Position 9. But Perry observed another possible response to the uncertainties of life.
“If the person RETREATS, rage takes over and he loses agency to make sense. He survives by avoiding complexity and ambivalence and regresses to Dualism, position 2, (multiplicity pre-legitimate). He becomes moralistic righteous and has “righteous” hatred for otherness. He complains childlike and demands of authority figures to just tell him what they want.”
And that, alas, describes MAGA thinking, and embodies Nibley’s incisive description, “If my ideas are the true ones — and I certainly will not entertain them if I suspect for a moment that they are false! — then, all truth being one, they are also the gospel, and to oppose them is to play the role of Satan.”
That attitude places its adherents beyond repentance, incapable of making the offering of a broken heart and a contrite spirit, something that a Living God, as a opposed to a mortal wannabe, warns us against.
This is such an important subject. You’ve given me much to think about and it was well thought out. Thank you.
This issue has always bothered me. Lots of very devout LDS people are voting for tRumpf again. From the very first time I heard of him (in an interview with Barbara Walters) I had a very negative feeling come over me…I was 20 at the time. I was put off by his arrogance, his attitude that he knew everything and that he was somehow better than most of the people he knew. Throughout the years, everytime I saw him on the news or in a magazine article, etc., the negative feeling about him intensified. When I heard that he was running for President again in 2016, I got a copy of the book, The Making of Donald Trump, written by David Cay Johnston. He had two storage lockers full of the information he had collected on trumpf including his failing casinos, the law suits against him brought by contractors who had built buildings for him who were never paid, etc. Then the women thing….he was trying to bed every woman he met and bragged about it. All the businesses he started failed. Then when he was facing bankruptcy in the late 80’s or early 90’s the government said he was too big to fail and they rescued him at taxpayer expense. He was involved with the Mobs in New York at one time and also a well known drug kingpin. And let’s not forget the notorious Roy Cohn who mentored him and taught him how to use media to his advantage and was told by Cohn to hit back harder when anyone came against him. The Book of Mormon scriptures talk about this kind of man as a leader and it is not good. I don’t ever hear of any church leaders warning us about him…but they sure warn us about gays, abortion, etc. I am starting to wonder if I am missing something? Many people think he is a “savior” type person, come to turn around the evil government that they claim the Democrats have made for us. I pray about this often…I just cannot get behind him…the negative feeling I got when I was 20 has enlarged since he was voted in as President in 2016. Help!!!
Laurel, I share your concerns. I don’t understand why the Church has not given us stronger guidance about this. But I am glad to hear that you are listening to your inner voice of spiritual discernment. I fear that many Republican “Saints” have accepted lies for so long they can no longer recognize the truth.