My own politics ocillate between liberalism (in the grand historical sense) and conservatism.<\/p>\n
I am constantly torn between Burke\u00a0or perhaps Wendell Berry\u00a0and Hayek or perhaps Schumpeter. \u00a0What does this mean in practical terms? \u00a0It means that I love commercial dynamism and tradition. \u00a0I love the vision of slow organic growth and chaotic, decentralized destruction and creativity. \u00a0I love the richness of authority and community and the possibility of liberty and individualism. \u00a0These are not, I am quite aware, entirely consistent loves. \u00a0(Love isn’t about consistency is it?)<\/p>\n
I dislike the shallow, talk-radio ideologues of the contemporary American Right who want to insist there is no real tension or contradiction between these loves. \u00a0I also dislike the administrative state, bureaucracy, central planning, the sanctimonious vacuousness of most contemporary constitutional law and the cant of rent-seeking trussed up in the garb of progressivism. \u00a0(I’m talking about you, UAW!) \u00a0I think that Woodrow Wilson was a prig. \u00a0I don’t think that Carter was a great president or<\/em> a great ex-President. \u00a0I don’t trust Jefferson or FDR.<\/p>\n I think that Calvin Coolidge was a courageous man of principle. \u00a0I love John Adams — although not necessarily the version of him served up by David McCullough and Joseph Ellis; spare me hagiography or (worse!) psychology. \u00a0I also love Abraham Lincoln, although of course, he was a protectionist, a great expander of the government, and, ultimately and to his lasting glory, a violent attacker of tradition and established hierarchy. \u00a0(Did I mention that my loves are not entirely consistent?) \u00a0I think that living in a politics dominated by the clash of Disraeli and Gladstone would have been glorious. \u00a0I find enduring a politics dominated by the kerfuffling of Obama and McCain (or worse Bush and Kerry) is demoralizing. \u00a0I fervently believe that Winston Churchill was the most heroic statesman of all time.<\/p>\n More than any of this, however, I am a Mormon. \u00a0I love the Restoration.<\/p>\n One of the persistent puzzles of my life is how I make sense of my political and religious sensibilities. \u00a0As a matter of biography, I can’t say that one emerged from the other. \u00a0Likewise, as a matter of logic, I don’t think that one forms a set of first principles for the other. \u00a0Rather, when I carefully examine my own thoughts, beliefs, and feelings what I find is a swirling chaos of affections and prejudices. \u00a0Reflection is not a matter of building an edifice on sure foundations. \u00a0Rather, it is the exertion of finding an orderly way of navigating the roil of my own reactions to the world.<\/p>\n It is possible, of course, to read Mormonism as a kind of liberalism. \u00a0For example, one could see in Joseph Smith the iconoclast and the liberator, the prophet who turned his back on the prejudices of the past, opened himself to the perfectibility of man, and thrived on the creative destruction of theological innovation upon innovation. \u00a0Imagine yourself as a Mormon in the 1830s and the 1840s, squint so as not to notice the apocalyptic expectation of judgment upon the nations, and one’s Mormonism looks liberal, progressive, and even revolutionary. \u00a0Likewise, one can read authors like Talmage, Widsoe, Bennion, or to a lesser extent B.H. Roberts and feel that Mormonism is a kind of reasonable and balanced expression of optimism on the human condition. \u00a0Education, an open mind, and belief in gold plates and anthropomorphic deity all combine in a vision of enlightened progress.<\/p>\n There are also, of course, ways of reading Mormonism as a kind of conservatism. \u00a0I went to college firmly decided against having anything to do with Mormon history or Mormon studies. \u00a0This was the early 1990s and the whole project seemed impossibly rancorous. \u00a0More even that that, however, my parents had lived at or near the center of so much of Mormon intellectual life in the 1980s that turning my back on Mormon studies was a way of both asserting my independence and avoiding the treacherous emotional politics of their divorce.<\/p>\n What changed this was B.H. Roberts. \u00a0During a hot, humid, p-day afternoon in the mission office in Pusan I started reading a battered copy of The Comprehensive History of the Church<\/em>. \u00a0I was enthralled by Roberts’s account of the Raid of the 1880s. \u00a0Beneath the veneer of objectivity, one could feel his boiling sense of outrage. \u00a0I am quite glad that Mormonism is monogamous. \u00a0I think that I have a pretty realistic sense of the difficulties and the heartaches of nineteenth-century plural marriage. \u00a0On the other hand, my reaction is detached. \u00a0I am not horrified or angst ridden about it. \u00a0I can understand, sympathize with, and even admire the nineteenth-century polygamists, while being utterly content that their marital world has passed out of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. \u00a0On the other hand, my emotional reaction to reading about The Raid was intense. \u00a0I found myself sharing Roberts’s sense of the wrong, the sense that there was something obscene about law and a distant government violently shredding\u00a0a community and way of life that had been so laboriously built. \u00a0This emotional reaction captures my conservatism. \u00a0Indeed, the power of the emotional reaction stays with me, even though on an intellectual level I think Mormonism’s forced abandonment of polygamy was fortunate, even providential.<\/p>\n The relative length of these musings says something about my own liberal and conservative impulses. \u00a0The liberal sentiment in my religious experience was captured neatly in a paragraph, one that ended with the rather trite summation of mid-century Mormonism’s faith in the ultimate absence of contradictions. \u00a0It was clean, reassuringly progressive, and a little shallow. \u00a0Capturing the conservative impulse took a detour of several paragraphs through personal and communal history. \u00a0The result was richer, but also conflicted, tragic, and possibly reactionary. \u00a0(I don’t care for polygamy. \u00a0How dare the nineteenth-century feds try to destroy polygamy! \u00a0Wait, do I want to go the barricades for polygamy?)<\/p>\n Try as I might, however, there is no sentiment for Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis in my Mormonism. \u00a0Their is some hope and relief in that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My own politics ocillate between liberalism (in the grand historical sense) and conservatism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,1,55,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-church-history","category-corn","category-news-politics","category-philosophy-and-theology"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8573"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8578,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8573\/revisions\/8578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}