The Emergent Church and Latter-day Saints: Thoughts on Reading Brian McLaren's New Book

Writing as a pastor, Brian McLaren explains his own disillusionment as a Christian living through the final two decades on the 20th Century.

A large number of both Catholic and Protestant leaders had aligned with a neoconservative political ideology, trumpeting what they called “conservative family values,” but minimizing biblical community values. They supported wars of choice, defended torture, opposed environmental protection, and seemed to care more about protecting the rich from higher taxes than liberating the poor from poverty or minorities from racism. They spoke against big government as if big was bad, yet they seemed to see big military and big business as inherently good. They wanted to protect unborn human life inside the womb, but they didn’t seem to care about born human life in slums or prisons or nations they considered enemies.

His list goes on, but already his point is made. Christianity was being high-jacked at the close of the century and the takeover and makeover of the faith made it difficult for many Christians to identify with a religion that had become a conservative political movement. Some principles were being pounded so hard that they became swollen and exaggerated. Other principles, often more basic and important, were being systematically ignored by those now at the wheel and had become dry and shriveled on a vine that seemed no longer connected to God.

Brother McLaren goes on in his book—and I take the liberty of calling him brother and see him as such—to describe his own day-to-day experience of waking up to “the brutal tension between something real and something wrong in the Christian faith.” His book is a documentary of how he worked through and is still working through those tensions. I think it is an account that quite a few Latter-day Saints would identify with.

I do not say all Latter-day Saints because critical thinking is not given an edge in Mormon culture. We do not even understand the word correctly in its context. Criticism is always seen something negative in our culture; we cannot begin to fathom the existence of something known as critical appreciation, for example. It seems to be an oxymoron. We’ve gone on and contracted the sickly habit of subserving thought to authority, conscience to office, and personal revelation to corporate dominion. We are not, however, a spiritually dead people. We know the difference between something that is real and something that has gone wrong, between the ideal once proclaimed from the pulpit, and the day-to-day betrayal of the archetype.

It seems to me that very worst thing spiritual people can to is to idealize the shortfall into a true substance, to speak for something wrong as if it were something real and thus betray the genius of their faith. This is almost always done by converting the spiritual gifts of God into an office that—in effect—bypasses the mantel. As in the saying, “The King is dead. Long live the king” without thought or prayer. In the secular world, few of us see George Bush as our Washington or Barak Obama as our Jefferson. Americans are far more likely to apply the skills of critical thinking and realize, along with Joseph Smith, that “every man lives for himself” and must, therefore, be his own person and make his own record.

But we contradict ourselves in spiritual realms and always see the President of the Church as “our Moses” or our Joseph Smith. We talk about mantels when the President of the Church passes away, but these mantels falling off their hooks are a dime-a-dozen in Church History and so many of us rise to proclaim supposed visions even before the signature is dry upon a death certificate. As is often the case, our eagerness to get behind a process invalidates our witness. When our own sacred experiences always seem to validate the status-quo, our own loyalty has perhaps slipped a little, like a mantel from off of our shoulders. We have switched the more public mantel, so-to-speak, from the right shoulder of God to the left holder of office—in the blinking of an eye.

I think it is safe to say that, while we’ve always had both liberal and conservative trends among us—as we’ve had liberal and conservative church leaders—we also did see, in the closing decades of the twentieth century, a conservative takeover and makeover of our faith. While the makeover is visible in various offices of the church-wide leadership, a more profound sea change is felt in the more subterranean offices the Mormon curia—the mid to lower management levels of church hierarchy. Here we see the same “conservative family values” have all but replaced “biblical community values”—those that Jesus referred to as the weightier matters of justice and mercy. In taking up the same old conservative platform as did the Evangelicals, we coveted “that which is but the drop” and neglected these more weighty matters.

The gospel that Jesus restored through Joseph Smith clearly put the weight back upon “biblical community values.” It does not leave the other undone, but with clear purpose it sets forth a liberal social agenda that far outstripped any Christian social enterprise envisioned in Smith’s century. One can debate ‘isms’ to a point. Is the Law of Consecration, for example, socialism or communism? But no fair reader of the Restoration’s scriptural texts or of the historical documents can mistake it for unbridled capitalism—indeed, as capitalism at all. Restoration scriptures damn and curse social inequality and call upon men to see themselves as stewards of God’s material blessings, not owners. All of us are commanded in the Book of Mormon to impart of these blessings freely. God made it clear through Joseph Smith that his intent was economic equality—a thing unheard of in capitalism. He did this by applying the imagery of Isaiah’s valleys and mountains to the present day poor and rich. “The poor shall be exalted,” he proclaimed, “in that the rich are made low.”

For too long, Christians who have felt in their heart a commitment to the weightier things of the Gospel, have sat on their hands in church classes and said not a thing. We have not raised our voices when we had the opportunity and we have allowed others to minimize these weightier values. We are in danger of letting Mormonism also become a conservative movement when it should have been the emergent church. I’ll tell you where I have seen the prophetic mantel fall. It has fallen upon us and we are shrugging it off.

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Brian McLaren's "A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith" is published by HarperOne, 2010, New York, New York.