One of the things the Covid-19 pandemic took from me was the chance to see the concerts and performances that my daughters would have had at the end of their freshman and senior years. One of the things I was given in their place was a chance to argue with vaccine skeptics online.
Some of the people who rejected the Covid-19 vaccines were always vaccine denialists, while others slid from hesitancy to skepticism to outright rejection. They all tried to sound coolly rational about it, but surprisingly few of them actually said something like: “Sorry, not for me. The science is real and I’m grateful for the vaccines and other medical treatments, but I’m young and healthy, and the risks from Covid are low enough that I’ll sit this one out.” I could almost understand that perspective – no one likes needles, and I react badly enough to vaccinations that a full course of injections and boosters collectively laid me out about as long and as badly as my actual Covid infection. (After a few people my age or younger in my extended circle of family and friends died from Covid, I’ll keep taking my shots when recommended, thank you very much.)
But if you pushed back on the skepticism, you would start to hear things like: The vaccine trials were rushed. I’m avoiding the risk of myocarditis. I’m waiting for a traditional, better-understood vaccine. There are cheaper treatments that work just as well, like Vitamin D, Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine.
So you pushed back a little more and talked about statistics and study design, and how the studies caught signals for even rare side-effects like myocarditis; and that none of the alternative treatments were ever found to work better than placebo in large, randomized controlled trials; and that it’s very clear that excess deaths rose with Covid and fell with vaccination.
But the human thirst for confirmation being what it is, the rejoinder soon came: You can’t trust Big Pharma to report honestly on the vaccine trials. You can’t trust the FDA, NIH, or other government agencies. They suppressed cheap interventions that could have saved millions (or didn’t test for the proper dosage of zinc). Ultimately, you arrived at a place of nihilistic skepticism where no government official, Republican or Democrat or other, of any nation in the world, could be trusted; and all pharmaceutical companies and medical personnel (except for a brave few on YouTube) and scientific journals were part of a global, coordinated effort to suppress the truth. After the demolition of all ways of discovering or having confidence in medical knowledge, “It’s the lizard people who control everything” is one of the less noxious explanations people are left with.
As I watched this play out, it felt familiar. It was like watching discussions of sexual morality on Mormon blogs over the last few decades.
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Why do we as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe what we do about sexual morality (the “Law of Chastity”), which limits the expression of sexual intimacy to married men and women?
We might describe the sources of our knowledge as ancient scripture, modern scripture, and prophetic counsel. Yet after an apostle says in General Conference that sex outside marriage is wrong or cites the Proclamation on the Family, online discussion follows a familiar pattern.
There are disgruntled protests that General Conference talks or the Proclamation aren’t canonized scripture. Faced with the modern revelation that undergirds the apostolic statements, people appeal to the New Testament. Confronted with Paul’s unambiguous statements in Romans or Corinthians or Ephesians, they respond that Paul was not Jesus. But I ask you: Does the man who said, “For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders… All these evil things come from within, and defile the man” sound like someone who approved of extramarital sex? As Latter-day Saints, we are not left to do our own research about what the scriptures teach. To the extent that we are members of the Latter-day Saint community, we accept the prophets and apostles as authoritative commentators.
Why should you trust what Dallin H. Oaks or your bishop says about sexual morality? You might just as well ask why you should trust Anthony Fauci’s opinion about vaccination. All these people are only figureheads for whole edifices of knowledge. Once you start dismissing church teachings based on prophetic statements and modern revelation and ancient scripture, there’s soon nothing left. The real problem with supposing that the prophet has simply never asked the right question, or is too blinded by cultural presumptions to recognize the true answer, is that it is the epistemologically most destructive path. If you reject the teachings of Paul and Jesus and Joseph Smith and Dallin H. Oaks about human sexuality, why accept any of their other teachings?
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But what if you can’t live with, or within, the Law of Chastity? Are exit or an implosion of religious knowledge your only choices? There are better options.
You can accept and take responsibility for your imperfection instead of demanding that the Church affirm it in the face of centuries of its teachings. The great thing about the Law of Chastity is that it embeds human sexuality in a thick web of ritual, doctrine and narrative about family relationships and life and death and what comes before and after. If you are looking for meaning, the whole structure offers you many points of attachment, no matter your personal situation.
I don’t know if a widow’s mite worth of chastity will be sufficient after this life, but it is certainly better to approach the judgment bar hoping for mercy rather than demanding vindication. I don’t know if your widow’s mite of chastity will be enough to maintain unrestricted church membership or formal membership at all, but it respects the Church for what it is instead of asking it to be something else, and you can continue to love the things you love about it and maintain the relationships you’ve built up within it, both human and divine. You can just show up. If you keep coming on Sundays, people will find a place for you, no matter if or how your name appears on the rolls.
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