Mormonism: A Sausage Makers Religion

A friend of mine, Christian Harrison--whom some bloggers may know as "Silus Grok"--first introduced me to the metaphor of the sausage maker in relation to Mormonism. Chew on this:

Do we prescribe bed rest and further enfeeble the weak minded? Or do we prescribe exercise and enjoin our siblings in faith to embrace a dynamic faith? Mormonism isn't an easy faith. It's the sausage maker's religion...Mormonism requires us to be active in making our own faith: an open canon, personal revelation, messy recent history, hard truths, prolific talks from leaders only a small number of which qualify as prophetic…you name it. We've signed up for a faith that is CONSTANTLY — RELIGIOUSLY, even — reinventing itself. And, like sausage making, it's not always a pretty picture. You have to get your hands dirty. And sometimes someone looses a finger. Mormonism, then, is a sausage makers' faith.

I was reminded of those astute words last week while reading Bryndis Robert's guest post at Flunking Sainthood. She's an attorney, an adult convert to the LDS Church from the Black Baptist faith, and she currently serves as a Relief Society President in Atlanta, Georgia. I find her voice perceptive and insightful. Below I only quote a portion of her words, but I endorse the entire post: 

I love sausage. However, I don’t like the sausage-making process. Through hands-on experience, I know that it’s ugly and messy. My family had a small farm where we raised chickens and hogs. Each fall, our rural community would get together for hog-killing day. Each person had a job. My job was to make the sausage. First, I had to choose which parts of the hog to use. Then, I had to wash the meat several times, chop it into chunks, and grind it (making sure not to lose any fingers in the process). Next, I had to mix and season the meat. I then had to stuff it into casings and form links or shape it into patties. So, what did I learn from that experience?

• Making sausage requires time and manual dexterity. 

• Not paying attention could cause me to injure myself. 

• I had lots of choices of ingredients when making sausage. 

• My choices determined the quality and taste of the sausage I made. 

The intersection of politics, social justice, and religion reminds me of making sausage. It’s an ugly and scary place to be. There’s the possibility of injury to the heart, mind, and soul. We have choices to make.  

As a member of the LDS Church, it has been difficult to watch the Church I love deal with this intersection—particularly on the issue of marriage equality and other rights for the LGBTQIA community. When the missionaries were teaching me, I was honest about my political and social views and the fact that I fall squarely in the Liberal or Progressive box. I was concerned about conflict between my political and social views and those of the Church. My missionaries pointed to the 12th Article of Faith and assured me that:

• members of the Church covered the entire political spectrum; 

• the Church encouraged members, as individuals, to be involved in the political process; and 

• the Church, as an organization, did not interfere in the political process.

Bryndis goes on to say:

I don’t know all of the answers, but there are a few things I do know:

• Navigating the intersection of politics, social justice, and religion requires a balance of courage, conviction, compassion, and compromise. 

• I cannot rely on anyone, including any Church leader, to choose my beliefs. I must choose. 

• I have to use my divinely given gifts of reasoning and intelligence to discern the correct course for me. 

• My choices will determine the kind of person that I am.

I share these convictions and I confess that being a Mormon like this can indeed feel like a "meat grinder" at times. It's not always pleasant, but I still love meat. Despite the "eat meat sparingly" rhetoric of the Word of Wisdom, I'm admittedly a Mormon meat lover--both literally and metaphorically.

Sometimes when I start talking about or craving the metaphorical meat people respond as though I should be content with milk. I understand milk for an infant, but children of God are meant to grow up into adults of God. Therefore, I find it a little insulting (and thus resent) when I'm treated like an infant and also by how often it feels like I'm being force-fed milk after having become an adult.

I hope to always retain the best of the Christ-endorsed child-like qualities, but this doesn't mean I continue to have a child-like relationship with the Church. Like Paul, I've grown up and "put away childish things" (1 Corinthians 13:11.) I've matured in my faith and as I've done so I've also come to have a more mature understanding of scripture. As Terryl Givens put it, "Scripture is a human manifestation of an impulse toward and from the divine. One can't expect textual flawlessness."

It can be a bit frightening to realize that all of God's most objective truths are always evaluated subjectively. It's initially jarring to realize that there is no such thing as unmediated revelation--that it always comes through a human filter. So while I continue to choose faith and to trust God, I no longer equate "LDS priesthood authorities" with God. I trust mortal leaders to do their best to seek inspiration, but I'm not trusting them to give us unfiltered or unmediated revelation. Everything that comes to us comes through our human experience, our human language, and human culture. And we "see through a glass darkly".

Once upon a time I took comfort in believing there was an infallible standard I could rely on. Similar to how Armand Mauss shifted his faith paradigms as he came to understand the social construct of reality, my paradigm now places emphasis on choice--choosing to believe--relying on my own conscience as the final authority for how to live my life. Terryl Givens has explained it this way:

“We want a standard that is infallible because it relieves us of the burden of continually exerting ourselves to use discernment. The way that Dostoyevsky put it so beautifully is that 'We want some person to be a keeper of our conscience'. The hard lesson is that there is never a moment when you can delegate your own volition to another individual.”

Unfortunately I continue to meet many self-proclaimed "orthodox" Saints who take issue with this approach because in their paradigm it lowers the importance of apostles and prophets. By pointing out the need to use individual discernment and rely on our own conscience (our individual best effort to understand the will of God) some have even implied that I'm "attacking" the apostles and prophets, regardless of whether or not they're even "acting as such."

When I refuse to put church leaders up on a pedestal, no one needs to pin evil motives on me or assume I think the apostles are "evil" or "sinister"(words I've seen used.) That would just be crazy talk. I've never in my life even implied such a thing as this. My theory is that this crazy talk is born out of a misunderstanding of what it really means to "sustain" our leaders--but thankfully Christian Harrison has more insight to share on that important topic as well.  In reality the only really crazy thing I can see is how many Mormons want to be "relieved of the burden of individual discernment."

I can understand why people could be initially uncomfortable with individual discernment--the process can involve doubt and uncertainty, and doubt and uncertainty make a lot of people nervous. There are some folks who get nervous when they realize they have to think for themselves and follow their conscience rather than just "follow the leader." I think these folks have yet to learn the "the hard lesson", as Terryl Givens said, that there is never a moment when you can delegate your own volition to another individual leader. This is why Bryndis' words resonate as though they were my personal manifesto:

• I cannot rely on anyone, including any Church leader, to choose my beliefs. I must choose. 

• I have to use my divinely given gifts of reasoning and intelligence to discern the correct course for me. 

• My choices will determine the kind of person that I am.

The sausage making process can make people uncomfortable. It can be messy. But we must embrace the messiness if we're to be faithful to reality. We belong to a sausage makers religion. Can we please stop pretending that things are always clean and tidy as though we're still infants who can't handle the meat? Let's just get comfortable with the idea that we're not always going to be comfortable in a world of ambiguity and uncertainty and get on with the good news of embracing faith and grace.

“Religion is belief in someone else's experience. Spirituality is having your own experience."

Spotlighting a post from my friend, Lon Young: Put Away Our Telescopes? Not a Chance! The Heavens are Calling


From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth,
From the laziness that is content with half-truths,
From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth,
Oh God of Truth, deliver us.
~ Ancient Prayer

IN 1633, THE ROMAN INQUISITION CHARGED Galileo Galilei with heresy. His crime? Entertaining the notion that the sun “does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world,” and for espousing a theory deemed “false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scripture.”

While Galileo didn’t invent the heliocentric model of the universe, he discovered plenty of evidence for it. His own powerful telescopes were showing him things never before encountered, and mathematical reasoning confirmed what others, like Copernicus, had been saying. To a rational mind, there was no denying the soundness of the astronomer’s conclusion, but it was an inconvenient truth, to say the least, in an age where burning heretics, not fossil fuels, contributed most to global warming.

To be fair, scientists and philosophers, not just the Church, opposed him. But it was the Church with the power to coerce and intimidate. As the sole mediator of rites essential to salvation, God’s priestly representatives could strip Galileo of his eternal salvation. What could man do more?

I can imagine Galileo’s family and friends pleading with him to stop studying the heavens. It’s dangerous, they must have said. Put away your telescope.

Inquisitive Latter-day Saints hear that, too. Why study the night sky when its constellations have already been named, catalogued, and described in our Church-approved manuals? Why look at the heavens when Deseret Book publishes thousands of titles on Astronomy? There’s no need to look for yourself. And it could be dangerous: You could lose faith in the truthfulness of the Star Map. Put away your telescope.

And yet, like Galileo, the urge to know the truth by our own experience, to understand what’s really out there, compels us to look for ourselves. So we look. And then we begin to understand why there was so much institutional hand-wringing over what we might find.

We’re discovering some stars in the night sky that don’t correspond to the official Star Maps we’ve been issued at Church. Certain constellations have been left off the official charts, and it appears that some stars have even been redrawn to suggest patterns that aren’t present in a clear reading of the starry sky. Not only that, but those who’ve traveled far and wide report that what we see printed on our Star Maps constitutes only one perspective, from a Northern line of latitude, and that skywatchers in the Southern Hemisphere see an entirely different set of stars. The discrepancies are not easily dismissed.

We are confused.

We hear leaders telling us not to trust our own eyesight, to doubt our faculties of reason. We hear apologists pat us on the head and explain that there’s really no contradiction between what we’re seeing in our telescopes and what’s on our official Star Maps. Then we go to Church and hear people bearing testimony of the Star Map. And we sing, Praise to the Cartographer. And what we hear most of all is that we shouldn’t be looking through our own telescopes in the first place, but instead should exercise faith that the Star Map is True.

That last point prompts me to ask: Should we have testimonies of the Star Map and its Cartographers? Or should we have direct encounters with the Heavens they attempt to describe? Isn’t it rather like going to a restaurant and worshipping the menu instead of savoring the food?

I’VE BEEN AIMING MY OWN TELESCOPE at the spectacular cosmos that is Mormonism, collapsing its distance, but until recently I’ve been reluctant to share an honest account of what I’ve seen. For one thing, I realize my view is filtered through a particular lens, shaped by my personal and cultural biases, faulty reasoning powers, and limited perception. For another, I haven’t wanted to force anyone to look through the telescope with me, believing it’s the prerogative of each person to decide if and when they look for themselves. But mostly, it’s fear that has kept me–and so many like me–from giving an honest report of our experience. We stand much to lose by admitting that we see things differently. We are branded as arrogant, faithless, deluded, disloyal, and dangerous.

I get it. I’ve been there myself. By discrediting a person, we don’t have to grapple with the questions he or she raises. And when our most crucial claim as an institution is that we’re right about everything, it’s simply not permissible to allow someone to suggest we may be wrong about anything. The community protects itself from the vulnerability of uncertainty by marginalizing anyone who doesn’t reinforce their sense of certainty. And if there’s one thing out of which we Mormons fashion a Golden Calf, it’s our personal and collective certainty.

Fortunately, astronomical charts can be redrawn to more closely reflect reality. At the institutional level, curriculum and resources are being re-written to acknowledge some of the more egregious discrepancies between our traditional narratives and more honest tellings. No doubt, this change comes as the Church is hoping to earn back the trust of those who have been far more more troubled by the lack of openness than they are by a clear reading of the stars. I applaud this forthrightness for its own sake, and am persuaded that whenever institutions resist transparency they will lose credibility with Millennials for whom unrestricted access to information is seen as a birthright.

Call me crazy, but I still find value in those Star Maps. They fire my spiritual imagination. They bestow a mythic power on our collective narrative. And the awe they’ve instilled in me over so many years has become the prime motivator for me to seek my own direct, unmediated experience with the Universe.

Put away our telescopes? Not a chance. The Heavens are calling!

 ~