My Facebook has been a tour de force of twisted logic, leaping to conclusions, extreme aversion to context and rigor in comparison, and ignorance over the last few days. Sin is still sin, the definition of nothing changed, but in response to the legalization of same-sex marriage in the US, the LDS Church was now in the position of having to clarify a policy on how to deal with "families" and individuals from those families in a new edit to their leadership handbook. The edits drew skewed headlines ranging from insinuations of homophobia (NYT: "Mormons Sharpen Stand Against Same-Sex Marriage" - no, they didn't--the stand is the same: it's sinful, and the LGBT is still welcome and invited to join and participate fully as long as they repent, just like with every other sin) to open accusations of homophobia, with a dash of xenophobia and even a little pedophobia thrown in just for good measure (WaPo: "Mormon Church to exclude children of same-sex couples from getting blessed and baptized until they are 18" - total distortion of context), to gleeful flogging of church leadership as backward, insensitive, mean-spirited, oh, and did I mention homophobic? (Salt Lake Trib: "New Mormon policy makes apostates of married same-sexcouples, bars children from rites") The sensationalized coverage is as fallacious as it is predictable: first of all, the Trib makes no money unless they convert a local interest story into a national one by framing it into an attack on the LDS church; but the other thing these headlines all have in common is a facile context-free depiction of religious belief as inherently divisive, judgmental, and blindly exclusionary to the point of unabashed victimization of the categorically innocent. The emotional thrust of the mainstream media outlets is obvious: How dare they attack innocent kids! It's not their fault if their parents happen to choose an SSM relationship! Isn't it already bigoted enough of you to hate gays, now you have to hate their kids too?! If only we did away with this silly religious freedom thing and everyone was made to be open and tolerant...
Twisted logic, hasty conclusions, aversion to context and rigor in comparing apples to apples, and ignorance.
What is the purpose of a baby blessing in LDS doctrine? It's not a saving ordinance. It's a chance for a father to experience the spirit of prophecy as he channels the Spirit's ideas into his own words in a reflection on what blessings the child may obtain through obedience and faith in Christ at later points in its life. It's even permissible to record such a father's blessing, although few exercise that option, and it would be a huge missed opportunity for the father if the blessing didn't take place, but there's no call to romanticize the function into some grandiose christening akin to a Catholic infant baptism. The cost of missing a baby blessing is social and emotional, not eternal.
What is the purpose of an 8-year-old baptism in LDS doctrine? It is a saving ordinance, and because a child has developed sufficiently to understand basic moral distinctions on her/his own by age 8, s/he begins to become responsible for his/her own moral agency and continues to grow in that responsibility until some age of full moral autonomy that I'll call adulthood. As a father of several children beyond the age of 8, I can assure you that they don't have a full mastery of the skill of anticipating enough of the consequences of their choices on themselves or others to be considered truly responsible. They still need plenty of guidance to ensure that they can predict how a choice will affect their spirit negatively or positively, and also how their choice will affect others. But they do have the beginnings of a sense of right and wrong, and can therefore be expected to choose the right according to that sense. When children at this age are part of a faithful, active LDS family, the Church is right to expect that they will continue to grow in faith and in the ability to exercise that moral agency for good. However, the Church has never dogmatically insisted that non-members, part-member families, or less active LDS families baptize their children at age 8 or at any age thereafter. Even with active member families, the encouragement exists, but it's always a matter of individual choice, even for the child. Why? Because that would be logically inconsistent with the more basic and primary responsibility of parents to their children. It would be imposing itself as the party responsible for the spiritual and moral growth of the child from age 8 on, necessarily replacing the parent--this it cannot do. Not only are the Primary (Sunday school for ages 3-12), and Young Men's, Young Women's auxiliaries only ever structured as support for the family, the Church as a whole is only ever conceived of as a social institution supporting the eternal units of society (the family) in their responsibilities to raise Christian sons and daughters. In other words, it's romanticization, again, to suggest that missionaries and other members of the church should target any 8 year olds that aren't in stable, active member families for baptism. Everyone will have an equal opportunity to receive all of the saving ordinances. It's better for each individual if it can be done closer to the ideal--at 8 in an active family--because there are advantages to being able to begin strong and continue firmly supported, especially through the adolescent years. But in the end, a baptism at age 18 is no less spiritually and eternally valuable than a baptism at age 8. In fact, the opposite worry is more likely: that baptizing an 8 year old no matter the activity-level or testimony/sin status of the parents is morally confusing. God alone is able to sort out who is responsible, but as far as his earthly instruments are concerned, asking an agent with only the very beginnings of responsibility for moral behavior to go it alone throughout late childhood and adolescence, knowing the support of their parents is questionable, would be an irresponsible act in and of itself that the Church would be guilty of were it to be common practice. The Church can't, in good conscience, usurp a family's role, condemn a child to a life of breaking a sacred covenant s/he wasn't in a good position to keep, and therefore should not be in the business of baptizing children of apostate parents.
I've seen this work in a number of ways, especially from my contact with African cultures where polygamy was part of the traditions. Polygamous parents are also living in a sinful condition, but even if they were to renounce polygamy, they're in the double bind of not being able to divorce their partners without running afoul of another deadly sin: dereliction of family duties. Their children are as innocent as the children of SSM couples, but must also wait until the age of legal majority before their candidacy to baptism can be considered. It's not an indictment of the children, but a recognition that the parents' sinful condition is preventing a closer association with the Church.
Look, no one is excluding any moral agent from any blessing the church offers, they're just asking some of them to wait until their moral agency has matured to a state of autonomy sufficient not to require the permission of parents. In fact, the LDS happen to be the only church I know of that actually stays consistent on this point feeling so strongly that the blessing of baptism is eternally important that no length of patiently waiting for the chance to be baptized is considered too long. They do baptisms by proxy for the dead!
What is the purpose of excommunication? Is it for LDS faithful who make a mistake? No, it's for the unrepentant whose sins are so public that the body of the Church must distance itself , for fear of having its good name--the name of the deity they revere, that they've taken upon themselves by covenant--altered and to keep clear off accusations of "you let those kind of people join you?". No one is ever barred from attending regular meetings, and no one is ever barred from repenting and then participating in all of the blessings of membership. Paul makes clear that Church leadership must make clear distinctions between who is and who isn't within membership, and that certain offenses against God must be grounds for disassociation in 1 Corinthians 5 (v. 9-13 is the most salient passage, but the whole chapter is instructive). But this exact same injunction to disassociate from certain kinds of sinners also affirms the institutional right of self-discipline as the only method of discipline for the people involved--once outside the Church, God only is allowed to judge them, such that if they repent and restore themselves to the conditions of membership, they will be welcomed again with open arms. The sinner is loved. Similarly, Alma the Elder, in a time when there was no precedent for the excommunication-worthy cases that were coming before him as an authority, received a revelation affirming that repentance is always a trump card, that church members who condemn the repentant are guilty of their own condemnation, and that secular and spiritual authority are separate matters, the latter being limited to the Church and unsuitable to application beyond the sphere of the Church itself.
So let's ask the simple and relevant questions then: who is that agent responsible when two adults commit the sin of living in a homosexual relationship, then unrepentantly commit to their partner in a legal marital relationship? The adults, right? OK, now who is responsible if a child is adopted into such a relationship or is included into that relationship from a prior marriage of one of the conjoints? The adults right? Therefore the policy of not allowing children of SSM arrangements to be baptized quite properly holds the adults accountable for their apostate decision and condition. Once a child in such a union can be held accountable for his/her own, the choice can be theirs, and no sooner.
So what are the critics upset about? There's no homophobic intent. There's no punishing children for their parents' sins (quite the opposite, in fact, it protects them). There's no hateful desire to exclude, to offend, to rigidly enforce boundaries (every single case is negotiable with a local ecclesiastical authority). In fact, there's not even any change, really--homosexual behavior is and always has been an excommunicable sin, and homosexual attraction orientations without the behavior never have been. There's no treating SSM couples as less or more guilty than hetero couples living in sin, no exclusion of anyone on anything other than purely temporary grounds (since anyone can repent for any sin) and there's most certainly no condemnation of any children.
Considered in a straightforward way, assuming good intentions, keeping categories rigorous, and with appropriate context, the critics of these policies have no legs to stand on. In fact, the fact that they have to conveniently elide critical context (my two favorites are the charge that the LDS have broken their own Article of Faith #2 on this, since it states that "We believe that men will be punished for their own sins and not for Adam's transgression"--it's not condemning kids, just their parents; and the charge that it homophobically singles out the LGBT community for whom SSM is salient, leaving out, by ignorance or malice, that children of other verboten family relationships, i.e polygamy, have been under the same consistent policies for decades), or twist logic (my favorite is that it makes innocent children into apostates by fiat--a completely nonsensical statement for anyone who understands what innocence is, and what apostasy is), or mix apples and oranges (my favorite is that it puts children in the same category with murderers, rapists, and polygamists--again, complete nonsense), or otherwise dishonestly conflate the unconflatable (my favorite is claiming the children have to denounce their parents--no, the grown up children who become adults will have to denounce the sin and practice of SSM, but never their parents, and never as minors).
Apostates have their own association of those oriented and aligned against the Church. They take comfort with like-minded fellows who can leave the Church, but can't seem to leave it alone. They look for reasons to project the same ill will and dishonesty with which they self-justify their sin, and look to their condemning body as an oppressor rather than as the anchor protecting them from a raging sea of worldly forces driving them away from the plan of happiness. They feel inwardly miserable, no matter how much they try to hide it, and like the master they (hopefully temporarily!) list to obey, are seeking that others may be miserable like unto themselves. It oozes out of them despite themselves, and the distortions they resort to as a means of counter-attack to make themselves feel justified in their dissociation from the Church is evidence of their inner rage, as well as of its unfoundedness. The problem is that, ultimately, their logic is circular. The hypothesis of ill-will seems to confirm itself at every turn, because when all you've got is a "The Church is judgmental and oppressive" hammer, every new policy or reason for doubt looks like a "they're the ones that should be excommunicated" nail. The hypocrisy is instructive: by taking every opportunity to twist the truth to attempt to condemn followers of Christ as un-Christian, apostates demonstrate a truly proud, holier-than-thou condescension. The irony, however, is that the true love and happiness they are missing out on is found among those who demonstrate, through a willingness to forgive and forget, that fellowship with those called to be "saints" is only an act of repentance away--which is the same condition Christ's salvation is predicated upon for us all.
p.s. My wife just read this over, and I'm inclined to make a final remark based on her astuteness, on which I place great confidence. Here's the remark: I've written all this from a pretty odd perspective. I've been writing as if my audience is both inside and outside, as if they understand that I'm looking at institutional policy issues as such, and leaving aside the elephant-in-the-room doctrinal issue that this is not a mere social club, and not a mere committee of leaders making choices. This is the Church of Jesus Christ. I believe the Lord leads it. His laws are eternal, and our rewards can be just as eternal when we live up to them and become more like Him. His Church is not only designed by Him, but led by Him through revelation to prophets. In other words, although society may shift underneath, and draw concerns to the surface that weren't there before, the concerns are not pressures that the Church responds to, but rather the impetus for asking more specific questions of the Lord. When policy like this comes down, it literally comes down--from an infallible heavenly communication link. He's not responding to pressure, he's answering a prayer for guidance. If it's unclear in the previous paragraphs, let me make it so here: I know God guides His Church by speaking through a prophet. He has spoken in this instance.
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