“Think about something you need. What would make your life better right now? What are the eternal laws that govern that blessing? What eternal law would you need to live so that you could receive that blessing?"
-Wendy Watson Nelson, wife of Mormon President and Prophet Russell M. Nelson, speaking in Kenya, April, 2018
Heavenly Father, are you really there?
And do you hear and answer ev’ry child’s prayer?
Some say that heaven is far away,
But I feel it close around me as I pray.
The most fervent prayers of my childhood were always on the toilet. A fiendish combination of celiac disease and irritable bowel syndrome frequently resulted in everything from mild indigestion to acute stomach cramping. The latter would often leave me doubled over, pleading with God to make the pain subside, promising greater obedience, improved character, or just about anything else I could think of in exchange.
One of my earliest concerns about Mormon theology concerned the role of God in people’s lives. The Mormon Church provides abundant opportunity for individuals to share their personal experiences and philosophies with each other. At the local level, the Mormon Church has no paid clergy, so the rank-and-file members are responsible for filling the 3-hour service every Sunday. Each member is periodically assigned to speak to the whole congregation, pray, or lead small group discussions, and is encouraged to share their testimony of what their religion means to them.
In my early teens, I began noticing a pattern in the experiences people shared. From help finding lost keys, to good parking spots, or new jobs, all sorts of things were credited to God that I could not believe were attributable to divinity. I frequently saw people observe something improbable occur and conclude that because it was unexpected, it should be credited to God. I felt that people claimed divine providence in situations that seemed much too unimportant to warrant the attention of a just God.
Identifying cases of divine intervention should beg the question of why God chose one situation over another. Someone may have survived a health scare against low odds, but the very existence of the odds speaks to others being less fortunate. What makes any individual person more deserving than another?
This is a world where thousands of people die of hunger every hour, babies are born with HIV and all manner of birth defects, children can succumb to cancer and other sickness, and entire regions of the globe are stricken with violence. If there is some sort of benevolent God, why are these things allowed to continue? Perhaps because God was too busy solving so many first world problems of people in my congregation.
Especially as a beneficiary of disproportionate wealth and opportunity, how could I square the vast inequality and injustice on Earth with a benevolent, omnipotent God who cares about all people?
Grace is the concept of love, mercy, and blessings given to people by God despite human unworthiness. Grace and its relationship to individual salvation is one of the primary differentiators between various sects of Christianity. On one end of the range of beliefs is the idea that God preordained a chosen group, often called the elect, who he will save. Some denominations think that grace is irresistible, meaning God changes the souls of those chosen as recipients to guarantee acceptance of the saving grace. Others feel God will only extend saving grace to those he knows will accept it. Life isn’t fair, and it isn’t supposed to be.
Others believe once grace is offered the recipient can choose if they will accept it. Still others teach that to be presented with grace, a person must be working to be worthy of it, even though the human condition of depravity renders the efforts futile. Others teach that salvation is the result of a mix of the grace of God, and the merits of a person’s actions.
An emphasis on grace undermines human agency. If nothing you do can make you worthy, why try? On the other hand, an emphasis on works claims human actions can result in blessings from God, which is contradicted by the immense injustice of the world.
For some, the answer is to insist that the world is fair. Prosperity gospel teaches that faith and good behavior can lead not only to salvation, but to worldly enrichment as well. Favored by televangelists, this doctrine suggests that poverty, illness, and economic difficulty are a result of being unfaithful, and those afflicted by these circumstances must be less worthy. Wealth is an indicator of virtue, of favor with God. Followers should aspire to wealth and even expect it to result from their faith.
The administration of this gospel is usually a super wealthy leader (whose wealth is not only justified, but a source of credibility!) suggesting that parishioners can buy blessings by giving money to the religious organization. Many pastors are shameless. For example, while appealing to his congregation to donate for his new private jet, pastor Creflo Dollar said, “If I want to believe [sic] God for a 65-million-dollar plane, you cannot stop me!” He then suggested that subsequent negative publicity was the Devil trying to stop his message from spreading. While not all views of prosperity gospel are as extreme as Mr. Dollar’s, the tenets are not fringe views either, with reach extending all the way to the White House.
While subtler, and without the direct transfer of large sums to Church leadership, Mormonism contains strong undertones of prosperity gospel. I was never explicitly taught to seek and desire material wealth, but worldly success was idolized. With local leadership consisting of unpaid volunteers, global Church leadership is selected from lay people toward the middle or end of secular careers. Successful professionals are usually the people chosen. For Mormon leaders, worldly success is one of their sources of authority. The current Prophet was a surgeon before entering full time religious leadership. Other leaders have come from successful careers in business or academia. (The global leadership is paid well, but not outrageously.)
The Mormon Church observes a biblical law of tithing. All members are asked to give 10% of their income to the Church. The rhetoric surrounding tithing ranges from dubious to downright alarming. During an April 2018 trip to Kenya, Prophet Russell M. Nelson said "We preach tithing to the poor people of the world because the poor people of the world have had cycles of poverty, generation after generation. That same poverty continues from one generation to another, until people pay their tithing."
Wendy Watson Nelson told a story at a young adult devotional in 2016 about a poor believer. “When his bishop commented on the large amount of tithing poor young George was paying, George said something like: 'Oh bishop, I’m not paying tithing on what I make. I’m paying tithing on what I want to make.' And the very next year George earned exactly the amount of money he had paid tithing on the year before!" This type of story is not unique, and repeated frequently, glorifying people who paid tithing before buying groceries or paying rent. These stories always end with needed food or money being provided in a subsequent miracle.
Perhaps to the Nelsons, tithing is a metaphor, an act of selflessness, a personal sacrifice for the good of the community. Still, their irresponsible confounding of spiritual and temporal benefits can be harmful if taken literally.
The Mormon Church is incredibly wealthy. Leadership has aggressively attempted to conceal financial information and denies the validity of all claims about its wealth. Despite this obstacle, researchers extrapolating from Canadian financial disclosure forms valued global Church real estate in temples and meetinghouses at $35 billion dollars. Another investigation found 13 investment companies with $32 billion in stock holdings registered to Church-owned web domains in 2017.
The Church also owns a huge portfolio of for-profit businesses, mainly accruing and developing real estate. They constructed a billion-dollar mall in downtown Salt Lake City and own nearly 2% of the state of Florida. It is estimated that the Church collects $7 billion in tithes each year, but Russell M. Nelson still goes to Kenya and preaches a crudely simplified model of poverty. As he tells it, poverty is not a complex problem caused by a legacy of imperialism, war, and corruption, but a problem of individual behavior.
I find rhetoric of this nature to be deeply unethical. It sounds like the shameless exploitation of the prosperity gospel. Leaders can tout 40 million dollars’ worth of charitable giving each year, but this is a pittance in the context of their wealth and rhetoric. Donating money to receive future blessings is for worshipers. Apparently, churches need real estate empires.
Mormonism differs from most of Christianity by being thoroughly unconcerned with grace. I don’t think I heard the word uttered once during a large majority of the 3-hour services I attended. The Mormon template for relating to God was much more transactional. I was taught that I entered in covenants with God, and if I kept my promises to obey commandments, I would receive blessings as a direct consequence. To quote Mormon scripture, “I, the Lord, am bound when ye do what I say; but when ye do not what I say, ye have no promise” D&C 82:10.
With such a clear relationship between behavior and blessings, it is unsurprising that Mormonism is very concerned with worthiness. There are worthiness interviews for adults hoping to gain admittance into Mormon temples. Temple admittance is required to perform the ordinances mandatory for salvation. There are semi-annual interviews for teenagers to make sure they aren’t being tempted by sex, drugs, or rock and roll, and yearly “Tithing Settlement” interviews for all members to give verbal confirmation to leaders that they are paying an appropriate amount of tithing. On a regular basis, Mormons are taught that they must act righteously to be accompanied by the Holy Ghost, whose companionship can provide comfort and clarity.
All this emphasis on worthiness leads many Mormons to have feelings of inadequacy, shifting blame for life’s hardships away from uncontrollable circumstances and onto the individual. To me, the burden of worthiness should not rest only on mankind. What reason do I have for believing God to be worthy of my worship? I have never encountered a compelling explanation for the suffering and injustice in the world. If God is omnipotent but fails to intervene in the face of so much suffering, I cannot believe he is benevolent. If God is truly benevolent, he is clearly quite impotent.
Unable to find an intersection between versions of God that I can believe exist, and versions of God who deserve my worship, I find no appeal in organized religion. It is, at best, ineffectual, and at worst, corrupt. It is easy to find leaders eager to usurp faith to accrue money, power, and influence, and impossible to find leaders who can articulate robust versions of God that I want to worship.
Some religious leaders do work to make their corner of the world brighter, but I’d prefer to support people who identify as community organizers, without the veneer of religious authority. Without a benevolent God, life is less scripted and more random. This uncertainty is uncomfortable, but it’s all I can believe. Paying someone to tell me otherwise doesn’t change this reality.
Over time I became better at managing my diet, learning what restrictions could prevent digestive trouble. While my pain seemed all important to me as a child, it objectively ranked quite low on the list of all the troubles of the world. It would be very unjust for God to spare me while neglecting so many others experiencing much greater suffering. As I came to see praying about digestive pain as a selfish and pathetic act, my prayers stopped. The symptoms would subside in about two hours whether I begged God for relief or not. Dietary changes reduced the frequency of severe stomach cramping, and a backpack bottle of Pepto-Bismol pills reduced the intensity of future episodes. This problem could not be solved by prayer but was mitigated by human action.
Inevitably I will encounter problems far more serious than digestive trouble. Problems that will make me feel powerless and inadequate, which no human action can abate. I’ll be reduced once more to a self-centered and desperate figure, appealing to anything for help. Then perhaps I’ll pray, not because I think anyone is listening, but because I hope that, against all evidence, I’ll find a sympathetic ear.
"Midnight," Tyler Glenn
