Author: Nathaniel Givens

Not Assimilation, But Alliance

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I found Jana Riess’s recent post about the President Nelson’s pivot away from “Mormon” interesting but I believe her thesis could be refined. Citing the familiar Armand Mauss retrenchment/assimilation axis, she sees the move from “Mormon” to “member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” as a swing of the pendulum back towards the assimilation end of the spectrum: We’re in an assimilation phase, a “we’re not weird” phase. Shedding the term “Mormon” helps us to assimilate ever more comfortably because the word, with its accompanying history, is one of the most distinctive things about us… the move makes sense as a piece of the larger assimilation puzzle. Emphasizing denominationalism may not win converts, but jettisoning “Mormon” makes us appear that much closer to mainstream. This analysis might have been sufficient were we still in the 20th century, but the intervening decades have complicated the picture. We are now living through a moment of historically high polarization and tribalism, and these factors call into question the existence of a mainstream “mainstream” into which we could assimilate. What’s more, we’re also in the midst of the Rise of the Nones. So when she says that the new emphasis on our formal name “just makes us sound like everyone else,” who is this “everyone”? There is no longer a simplistic American mainstream to serve as the basis for comparison. Something else is going on, and a couple of paragraphs from Elder…

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Moroni and Pahoran; Revelation and Humility

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The scriptures are replete with examples telling us to seek out personal revelation and use scriptural precedent and principles to guide our decisions. Anyone who has sincerely tried to do this over an extended period of time knows that it is easier said than done. How do we distinguish the guidance of the Spirit from a sea of conflicting emotions and ideas? How do we know which scriptural precedent applies to our lives? Even (near) perfect sources–revelation and scripture–suffer from our limitations as (very) imperfect recipients.  I thought of this when I was reading in Alma with my family last week and we got to the familiar story of Captain Moroni and Pahoran. Captain Moroni condemns Pahoran and threatens to kill him if he doesn’t send the necessary reinforcements and supplies, but it turns out Captain Moroni was mistaken and Pahoran was unable (not unwilling) to send the requisite support. Pahoran graciously doesn’t take offense, joins forces with Captain Moroni, and they win the war. So far so good, but on this reading two particular verses stood out to me for the first time: 19 And now, Moroni, I do joy in receiving your epistle, for I was somewhat worried concerning what we should do, whether it should be just in us to go against our brethren. 20 But ye have said, except they repent the Lord hath commanded you that ye should go against them. (Alma 61:19-20) The remarkable…

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The Abortion Status Quo is Untenable

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I appreciated the tone and intent of Michael Austin’s By Common Consent post responding to Terryl Givens’ post at Public Square. He correctly identifies the question of abortion as one of competing rights: the right of the unborn human being to life set against the right of the mother to preserve her bodily integrity, but he makes two crucial mistakes. First, he is too hasty in his application of the organ donation argument to abortion. According to that argument, since we do not require anyone to donate blood or organs to someone in need, surely we cannot require a pregnant mother to donate her body, either. Although this line of reasoning has strong intuitive appeal at first glance, the appeal vanishes if we probe a little deeper. Consider two scenarios (neither of which is an analogy for pregnancy or abortion; we’ll get to that later): Alice has a rare genetic condition. Because of this, Alice needs a kidney transplant. Bob is the only potential donor. If he refuses, then Alice dies. Bob steals Alice’s kidneys and sells them on the black market. Because of this, Alice needs a kidney transplant. Bob is the only potential donor. If he refuses, then Alice dies. Now, I agree with Michael that the state cannot compel Bob to donate his kidney. In either case, he has the inviolable right to refuse to donate his organs. That doesn’t change the reality that, in the second…

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Pro-Life: A Fiercely Held Moderate Position

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The Legal Status of Abortion, Revisited I’ve talked to Terryl Givens (my dad) a few times since his article on abortion for Public Square came out. Both of us are disappointed, but not at all surprised, by some of the reactions from fellow Latter-day Saints. I’ll dive into one such response–a post from Sam Brunson at By Common Consent–but only after taking a minute to underscore the difference between an extreme position and a fiercely-held moderate position. There’s a reason why the first section in Terryl’s piece is an explanation of the current legal status of abortion in the United States. Unlike many other developed nations, where abortion laws were gradually liberalized through democratic means, the democratic process in the United States was short-circuited by the Roe vs. Wade decision (along with Doe vs. Bolton). As Terryl explained, American abortion law since Roe is an extreme outlier: “America is one of very few countries in the world that permit abortion through the 9th month of pregnancy.” If the spectrum of possible abortion laws runs from “never and under no circumstances” to “always and under any circumstances,” our present situation is very close to the “any circumstances” extreme. In his rejoinder, Sam rightly points out that Roe is not the last word on the legality of abortion in the United States. Decades of laws and court cases–including return trips to the Supreme Court–have created an extremely complex legal landscape full of…

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A Brief Note on Alma and Corianton

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Alma the Younger strikes me as one of the sterner of the prophets, which makes sense if you consider his background. I know a few people in my life who have had similar, if less spectacular trajectories. It’s not an ironclad rule that those who wander tend to be more intense about obedience on their return, but it’s at least a correlation. And that has colored how I read his words, especially in the letters / commands to his sons and especially in the chapters addressed to Corianton.  Something changed for me as I read these chapters in preparation for my Gospel Doctrine lesson last week, however. I noticed for the first time that although chapter 39 is the one I always remember and although it is full of memorable lines (“I would to God that ye had not been guilty of so great a crime,” vs. 7) it’s a relatively short portion of the total addressed to Corianton. After dealing directly with Corianton’s screwups in chapter 39, Alma never mentions them again in chapters 40 – 42. That ratio seems important. We, as parents and leaders, may tend to get stuck on the “you done wrong” portion and kind of hammer that home. Alma the Younger very plainly states what Corianton did wrong but then doesn’t belabor it. He sustains the conversation for a long time, but never returns to that topic.  This called to mind another famous verse,…

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It Matters Why the Church is Pro-Life

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Edited with author’s note on the comments at end of post. Abortion is a hot-button issue. Maybe the hot-button issue. That’s why–after finishing a draft of this post in November of 2019–I sat on it for almost a year. I’ve rewritten it and am posting it because I’ve realized it’s important to understand not only the what of the Church’s position, but also the why.  This is tough, since the Church has a publicly available policy on abortion but no single, authoritative theological rationale for the policy. This provides a certain amount of leeway in interpreting and applying the Church’s policy, although not nearly as much as some Latter-day Saints would like to believe.   Let’s begin with the Church’s official position on abortion: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believes in the sanctity of human life. Therefore, the Church opposes elective abortion for personal or social convenience, and counsels its members not to submit to, perform, encourage, pay for, or arrange for such abortions. The Church allows for possible exceptions for its members when: Pregnancy results from rape or incest, or A competent physician determines that the life or health of the mother is in serious jeopardy, or A competent physician determines that the fetus has severe defects that will not allow the baby to survive beyond birth. The Church teaches its members that even these rare exceptions do not justify abortion automatically. Abortion is a most serious…

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Church Without Churches

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When my bishop announced that we would not be holding usual church services last Sunday, my main feeling was one of short-term relief: I absolutely love my calling as Gospel Doctrine teacher (I never want any other!), but I simply didn’t know where I was going to find time to prepare a lesson that weekend with all the other commitments that I had going on. My second feeling was one of excitement. I’ve long believed that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints exists to serve families (rather than the other way around) and so the recent moves towards home-centered church have been very exciting for me. However–big caveat here–I haven’t actually been that great at following through in my own family. So I looked at this as an opportunity to really redouble my efforts to make our home one where we talk, study, and practice the Gospel. My impression is that these feelings–short-term, half-joking relief at getting one freebie combined with a determination to rise to the occasion in our homes–was pretty common among fellow Latter-day Saints. So I was surprised when I realized the optimistic attitude was not shared by many of our fellow Christians. My first clue was Lyman Stone, whom I follow on Twitter, and who is really not a fan of closing churches. This is surprising because, in all other respects, he takes the Covid-19 pandemic very, very seriously. (In on small part because…

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General Counsel and Outliers

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Todd Rose starts his book The End of Average off with some really arresting stories that all make the same point: there’s no such thing as an average person.  His most in-depth example is based on how the Air Force designed their cockpits in World War II and the years immediately following. They took the dimensions of hundreds of pilots (arm reach, chest circumference, leg length, you name it) and then used the average of those measurements as the template for their cockpit design. The idea was that an average-shaped pilot would fit perfectly. And, since most of the pilots would be average on most measurements, the cockpits would be a decent fit for everyone. That was the theory, anyway. In practice, the Air Force was plagued with accidents that appeared to be related to pilots having a hard time using the controls. A twenty-something scientist named Lieutenant Gilbert S. Daniels had his doubts about the whole underlying theory, so he tested it out: Using the size data he had gathered from 4,063 pilots, Daniels calculated the average of the ten physical dimensions believed to be most relevant for design, including height, chest circumference, and sleeve length. These formed the dimensions of the “average pilot,” which Daniels generously defined as someone whose measurements were within the middle 30 percent of the range of values for each dimension. So, for example, even though the precise average height from the data was…

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Fan Culture and General Conference

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Elder Holland’s talk at the conclusion of the Saturday Afternoon session of the April 2019 General Conference, Behold the Lamb of God, is one of the most powerful talks I’ve ever heard or read. I challenge anyone to read or listen or watch the talk and think that Elder Holland was anything other than deadly serious in his chastisement of the Saints for our failure to fully appreciate and honor the solemn significance of the sacrament.  We are to remember in as personal a way as possible that Christ died from a heart broken by shouldering entirely alone the sins and sorrows of the whole human family. Inasmuch as we contributed to that fatal burden, such a moment demands our respect. These are loving words, but also stern and passionate. This is a sacred topic–the most sacred of topics–and Elder Holland was plainly telling us that we’re not doing as well as we could be.  This makes the laughter the follows all the more jarring. (Start watching around 9:00 into this video to see what I mean.) Elder Holland is talking about arriving for this sacred event on time, and he expresses gentle accommodation for mothers of young children who have a lot to struggle with in terms of getting their families to church at all. He also says that it’s understandable for any of us to be late from time to time, but he insists that ongoing tardiness is…

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On Not Understanding the Atonement

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There are some pretty major aspects of our Latter-day Saint faith–and of Christianity in general–that I don’t really understand. Specifically: the necessity and efficacy of the Atonement. Repentance and forgiveness make sense to me. The Atonement is a mystery, and none of the explanations or theories resonate with me on a deep, personal level. I am convinced that the scriptural accounts–especially in the Book of Mormon and New Testament–are true. I believe what they tell me. I just don’t understand them. What I do feel, and feel viscerally, is the fundamental brokenness of the human condition generally and my own shortcomings in particular. The world is broken, and I am broken in it. I am just as utterly convinced of the splendid beauty which we may all glimpse from time to time within this broken world and among its broken inhabitants. We are broken, but we we dream of wholeness. That dream came from somewhere. Wholeness–perfection–is also real. What I don’t understand is how Christ and the Atonement comes into play in helping us get from the Point A of Brokenness to the Point B of Wholeness. There’s only one thing I’ve ever read that helped me start to build a scaffold across the chasm of my ignorance. That’s Sister Neill F. Marriott’s talk from the General Women’s Session of the October 2017 General Conference: Abiding in God and Repairing the Breach. I read the talk about a year ago,…

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Disputations in Zion

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A couple of weeks ago, we reached the end of 3 Nephi 26 in our family scripture reading. It’s the culmination of Jesus Christ’s ministry to the New World and the founding of Zion. I’ve always been fascinated by Zion, and especially by the practical side of it. The concept sounds so utopian, but we’re supposed to be building a real Zion down here. How? I wish I knew, but the scriptures seem so tantalizingly silent on the details. In 3 Nephi 26, we get one of the hallmarks of Zion in verse 19: And they taught, and did minister one to another; and they had all things common among them, every man dealing justly, one with another. But of course around that we are explicitly told that we’re getting a redacted version of Christ’s teachings, as in vs. 16, “the things which they did utter were forbidden that there should not any man write them” and again in vs. 18, “many of them saw and heard unspeakable things, which are not lawful to be written.” Then, the night after reading chapter 26, we started in with chapter 27: And it came to pass that as the disciples of Jesus were journeying and were preaching the things which they had both heard and seen, and were baptizing in the name of Jesus, it came to pass that the disciples were gathered together and were united in mighty prayer and fasting.…

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To Be Childlike or Childish

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Innumerable blog posts and not a few books have been written in the last few years about faith crises and doubt as the Church and our Secular Age collide. The Church understands that facts on the ground are changing and that–in order to accomplish eternal objectives–tactics need to shift to accommodate the new reality. The clearest example of this is Elder Ballard’s address: The Opportunities and Responsibilities of CES Teachers in the 21st Century. In the piece, Elder Ballard extols use of the Church’s new Gospel Topics essays–which cover sensitive and difficult topics like race and the priesthood and Heavenly Mother–and makes crystal clear that things have changed. As Church education moves forward in the 21st century, each of you needs to consider any changes you should make in the way you prepare to teach, how you teach, and what you teach if you are to build unwavering faith in the lives of our precious youth. Gone are the days when a student asked an honest question and a teacher responded, “Don’t worry about it!” Gone are the days when a student raised a sincere concern and a teacher bore his or her testimony as a response intended to avoid the issue. Gone are the days when students were protected from people who attacked the Church. Elder Ballard could not be more clear that some of our old tactics are no longer serving current needs. It is important for us…

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Some Moral Considerations of Wealth and Growth

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Graph displaying sharp increase in world GDP over last couple centuries after two thousand years of no change.

The chart above estimates the per-capita GDP of the entire world over the last 2,000 years. There are all kinds of problems with estimating GDP over such a long time-horizon, but the only thing that matters for the purposes of this post is the general shape of the graph. At the time of Christ, there was essentially no growth in per-capita GDP. At our present moment in history—and going back to before the Industrial Revolution—there is very, very steep growth in per-capita GDP. If you live at a time when there is essentially no growth (on a per-capita basis) then you live in a zero-sum world. Generally speaking, the only way to become wealthy in a world like that is to expropriate wealth from someone else. This is true based purely on the abstract math. If there are 100 people and $100 dollars, then for every person who has $2, there is at least one person who has less than $1. Speaking concretely, the way to get wealthy in the Iron Age was to own more physical stuff, especially land. If you owned land, then you had control over the production from that land, either for crops or for grazing for herds. Since there is only a finite amount of land to go around, you get wealthy by owning more land than your neighbors. If you live at a time where growth dominates, then you do no longer live in…

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On the Half-Life of Admonitions

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Latter-day Saints don’t watch R-rated movies. This is one of those specific, concrete directions that has an amazingly long half-life. It’s such an embedded aspect of LDS culture that I have no memory of being told it for the first time. The upside of specific, concrete admonitions like this is that they are easy to understand, easy to remember, and easy to apply. This means they can have a great and lasting impact on the behavior of the Saints. The downside of specific, concrete admonitions is that their clarity and simplicity can enable dereliction of duty. Practical admonitions are intended to provide practical guidance, but practical guidance is always funded on spiritual principle. It’s up to us unpack the admonition to access the spiritual payload within. Because specific, concrete admonitions are sticky (to use a marketing term), they can easily outlast their original context, however, and as they become divorced from their original context they are easier to treat as intrinsically valid rather than contingent upon some underlying principle. The contextual drift happens on at least two levels. First, the admonition was almost certainly initially part of a longer address that provided immediate context. Second, the admonition was given at some point in the past and therefore relates to a historical context. The longer an admonition persists in the group consciousness, the further it drifts from its textual and historical context. It gets harder and harder to reverse engineer the…

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Until We See Eye to Eye

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I adapted this post from a talk that I gave in my ward on June 24, 2018.  We See the Same Things Differently I do not know what it is like to live without glasses. That’s because I have been wearing glasses for longer than I have memories. There’s a photo of me—it might be hanging up in my parents’ house—when I’m less than two years old. I’m straddling a toy horse with wheels on it, standing up, looking back at the camera, and I have prescription goggles strapped to my little baby head. The reason that the doctors knew I needed glasses when I was that young was that I had a serious infection that damaged my eyes. I had surgery at the time, back when I was a baby, but it wasn’t really successful. As a kid I needed really powerful prescriptions and even with coke-bottle glasses and bifocals it was still impossible to get my eyes to point in the same direction. I had surgery again when I was a teenager and the results were better. I’m not nearly as cross-eyed as I used to be, and my glasses aren’t as thick as they once were. But my eyes still don’t cooperate with each other. For the most part, I don’t notice or care about this, but it still bugs me when I see myself in photos and only one eye is looking at the camera or…

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Stick With It

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A couple of years ago I started a group project called the General Conference Odyssey. Along with some friends, I’m reading every General Conference that’s easily accessible on LDS.org (that means we’re starting with October 1971) and writing up my thoughts. At a rate of one session per week, it will take us about 14-15 years to get through the entire inventory. You can read more about the project, and find a mostly-complete index of every blog post to date, here. After posting my entries at Difficult Run for the first couple of years, I moved over to Meridian a few months ago. This is a better fit for the posts (since Difficult Run tends to be more about economics and politics) and I’m really happy to have them there, but a few weeks ago they opted not to publish one of my submissions. I’m perfectly fine with their decision–and I’ve continued to submit all my subsequent posts as before–but I liked the post and so I decided I’d publish it here at Times & Seasons. So, without further ado, here are my thoughts in response to the priesthood session of the October 1980 General Conference. Sometimes I read a session that I don’t love right away, but when I dig a little deeper I find something in it to keep with me. Sometimes I read a session that I don’t love right away, and digging deeper doesn’t help either.…

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Reasons for Following Imperfect Prophets

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Last week, the Church released an official statement from President Nelson regarding the Church’s name and an accompanying update to the style guide. The Bloggernacle was unimpressed.[ref]I’m going to use “Bloggernacle” to refer to the overall Mormon social media community until somebody shows me a better name.[/ref] This isn’t really a surprise, of course. Looking cool and looking impressed are usually mutually exclusive, and since social media’s primary function is personal brand management, looking impressed is decidedly rare. Still, it got me thinking. If prophets are imperfect, why should we follow them? Before I get to that–and it’s a question I don’t ask rhetorically–I may as well get a couple of thoughts about the announcement itself out of the way. First, I draw a distinction between President Nelson’s short statement, which (in it’s entirety) states: The Lord has impressed upon my mind the importance of the name He has revealed for His Church, even The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We have work before us to bring ourselves in harmony with His will. In recent weeks, various Church leaders and departments have initiated the necessary steps to do so. Additional information about this important matter will be made available in the coming months. and the new style guide which (in part) states that “the terms ‘members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ or ‘Latter-day Saints’ are preferred [to ‘Mormons’]” and that “the term ‘the restored gospel of…

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Rereading Rasband’s “By Divine Design”

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I did not have a positive reaction to Elder Rasband’s talk in the most recent General Conference, and I wasn’t happy when our Elder’s Quorum teacher announced we would be basing our lesson on it last week, either. But I decided to try re-reading the talk with an open mind, and I’m glad I did. The main reason the talk, By Divine Design, rubbed me the wrong way when I first heard it, is that I associate people who see God’s hand in numerous, small, every-day coincidences with the same class of superstitious belief that finds meaning horoscopes. This is, more than anything else, a cultural prejudice. The secondary reason is that I find the idea of a micro-managing God theologically vexing. Let’s start with the simplest question: how do the mechanics of divine intervention work out? When you pray to get the job you’re interviewing for, what exactly are you hoping that God will do for you? Send the hiring manager a vision, or contact HR directly on your behalf? And what happens when you’ve got multiple people praying for the same thing. Does the greatest faith win? But the most noxious question is this: if we have to give credit to God for the good coincidences, then why aren’t we giving Him credit for the bad ones? Sometimes a one-in-a-million convolution of circumstance saves a life. Sometimes it takes a life. If we’re giving God credit for the former but…

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Thoughts on Monson’s NYT Obituary

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The NYT’s framing of the life of President Monson was, to say the least, interesting. The obituary begins: Thomas S. Monson, who as president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since 2008 enlarged the ranks of female missionaries, but rebuffed demands to ordain women as priests and refused to alter church opposition to same-sex marriage, died on Tuesday at his home in Salt Lake City. He was 90. It’s just as illuminating to contrast the way the NYT approached President Monson’s death with that of other leaders. Here’s their tweet for President Monson. Thomas Monson, the president of the Mormon church who rebuffed demands to ordain women as priests and refused to alter church opposition to same-sex marriage, died Tuesday at 90 https://t.co/NKEHpAXzb1 — The New York Times (@nytimes) January 3, 2018 By contrast, here’s what they tweeted when Fidel Castro died. Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary who defied the U.S., died Friday. He was 90. https://t.co/2j6LKmaoz7 pic.twitter.com/fX8JlDCVCT — The New York Times (@nytimes) November 26, 2016 The comparison with Castro is particularly interesting because of Castro’s history with the Cuban LGBT community. As unwelcome and controversial as the Church’s continued position on sexual morality is, President Monson never presided over a repressive regime that literally rounded up homosexuals and sent them to forced-labor camps. (It is worth noting that although the Castro regime repressed the Cuban LGBT community for decades, Castro eventually had a change of…

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Early Christian Intellectuals Were Bored At Church Too

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So last week I read The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. It was definitely an interesting book, and one tangent stuck out to me in particular. Here’s author Stephen Greenblatt describing Saint Jerome’s travails with setting aside his addiction to pagan art to try and focus on scripture: But a prestigious cultural tradition that has shaped the inner lives of the elite does not disappear easily, even in those who welcome its burial. In a letter written in 384 CE, Jerome–the scholarly saint to whom we owe the story of Lucretius’ madness and suicide–described an inner struggle. Ten years earlier, he recalled, he was on his way from Rome to Jerusalem, where he planned to withdraw from all worldly entanglements, but still he took his prized classical library with him. He was committed to disciplining his body and savings his soul, but he could not forgo the addictive pleasures of his mind: “I would fast, only to read Cicero afterwards. I would spend many nights in vigil, I would shed bitter tears called from my inmost heart by the remembrance of my past sins; and then I would take up Plautus again.” Cicero, Jerome understood, was a pagan who argued for a thoroughgoing skepticism toward all dogmatic claims, including the claims of religion, but the elegance of his prose seemed irresistible. Plautus was, if anything, worse: his comedies were populated by pimps, whores, and hangers-on, but their zany wit…

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