Frequently you will get a response from members when you suggest that the government should have a program to do something, "Its wrong to think that the Government can implement something which is an "inspired program" which only the Lord can implement." This is generally followed by a call for inaction, or even an attack on a proposed program. Normally the programs that draw this type of criticism are welfare or entitlement programs. Its alright, and in fact commendable, for the Church to run its commodity based welfare program, but a food stamp program is likely to be condemned (not by the Church, but by the members.)
You see commendation for the United Order, or as it is sometimes referred to as the law of consecration or the Order of Enoch, but anything which remotely can get tagged "socialist or communist" is set up to be attacked vehemently. Of course the millenium syndrome comes charging to aid the predicament of those who really are not interested in making a change. The millenium syndrome is a label which I have applied to the tendency to defer anything which the Church believes in, but would result in a major shift of the socio/economic status quo, to be classified as something that will be put in place during the millenium. In other words, "Well Christ can do it when He comes, but as for me and my family we will oppose any other person or entity suggesting that it could be done before then." Perhaps the most famous example of the millenium syndrome was contained in the earlier editions of the misnamed Mormon Doctrine written by the late Bruce R. McConkie which categorically deferred the extension of the Priesthood to persons of African descent to the millennium.
So what are we really saying when we oppose any attempt to implement a government program which is clearly consistent with what we should already be doing? Most would say that we are simply saying that the government cannot get anything right. I once listen to a talk by Mitt Romney's father George Romney during the economic suffering of the Carter/Reagan recession in which he said not to expect the answer to come from Washington. He was of course absolutely correct, Reagan was just getting warmed up and he certainly was not destined to give us any correct economic answers. But, I doubt that was what he meant -- what he meant was that we should never expect government to get anything right.
So where is it written that we should not support community oriented collaborative efforts towards socio/economic fairness or dignity? Where is it written that although we reject strict Darwinian evolution as to parentage of Adam and Eve, we, nevertheless, fully accept the notions of Spencerian social evolution and extol capitalism and worship Adam Smith's "unseen hand." Where is it written that we are so feeble in our ability to do good and make sure that everyone has a fair chance at life with dignity and access to some basic things like health care, that we have to oppose those things as a group effort by any entity other than the Church? or worse yet any effort whatsoever until Christ comes again?
Is this an attitude which while palatable to the social conservative, nevertheless, drives the social liberal of conscience away from the Church? And exactly how do we square the common antipathy towards environmentalists? Do we approve, for example, the fact that the air pollution is now worse in Happy Valley than in LA? Or that the lack of development standards is so horrible in Salt Lake that the Church has had to resort to buying up land surrounding Temple Square to keep it from complete degradation? Exactly where does that fit in with our beliefs? Or.... more importantly... Christ's. We are a peculiar people, and we are proud of that...but we need to become a peculiarly good people.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Back to the Garden
Gardens are a place and they also are a metaphor, and many other things. They denote a place with boundaries and organization. I suspect few of us really understand what was meant when it was said that a garden had been created and man was placed in it to dress it. Not many of us talk about going out to the garden to dress it these days. We talk about weeding the garden -- but how do you weed a garden before it contains weeds? We talk about watering the garden -- but how do you water a place where it does not rain but the ground is moistened everyday by mist rising from the ground? We talk about cultivating a garden, but does that fit?
I suspect what was really intended was for the newly created man and wife simply to tend the garden and love it. Love the plants and help them grow and produce.
Somewhere along the way too many of us forgot about the love part of the equation and just focused on the tending, growing and producing
I suspect what was really intended was for the newly created man and wife simply to tend the garden and love it. Love the plants and help them grow and produce.
Somewhere along the way too many of us forgot about the love part of the equation and just focused on the tending, growing and producing
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Hillary Clinton: Does This Centrist Have the Stomach to Back Needed Change?
Hillary Rodham Clinton was, and a far as I can tell, still is a New Democrat. Being translated that means a Centrist who is a fiscal conservative, sympathetic to American civil liberties, and willing to implement moderate reforms. Despite the desperate attempts of the Republicans to paint her as a far left Democrat, the facts are she is a Centrist.
So the question is, does a Centrist have the willpower to effect the changes and reforms necessary to re-establish the middle-class, push through universal health coverage, and stop the drain of capital and jobs to overseas. Clearly, as her husband proved, a Centrist Democrat can shame the Republicans into balancing the budget. But Bill balanced the budget on the back of the middle-class, and when we were finally back in the black -- what happens? The neo-conservatives sweep into office and unload the surplus not on helpful domestic spending to assist the middle-class, but as a massive tax cut to the ultra-wealthy.
To get America back on track, there is going to have to be a certain amount of healthy class warfare in America. The question is, does a Centrist Democrat have the stomach for it?
Nifty("div.genericSCorner","top");
So the question is, does a Centrist have the willpower to effect the changes and reforms necessary to re-establish the middle-class, push through universal health coverage, and stop the drain of capital and jobs to overseas. Clearly, as her husband proved, a Centrist Democrat can shame the Republicans into balancing the budget. But Bill balanced the budget on the back of the middle-class, and when we were finally back in the black -- what happens? The neo-conservatives sweep into office and unload the surplus not on helpful domestic spending to assist the middle-class, but as a massive tax cut to the ultra-wealthy.
To get America back on track, there is going to have to be a certain amount of healthy class warfare in America. The question is, does a Centrist Democrat have the stomach for it?
Nifty("div.genericSCorner","top");
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Reagan's Most Damaging Impact
Ronald Reagan did a lot of damage to our nation, but perhaps his attack on labor unions resulted in the greatest harm to the average American. It set the stage for the massive chasm between the haves and the have nots and began the steady march of the American Middle Class into extinction.
Unions were very important to our having a stable and responsible government. For all their warts and corruption, they were a way for the blue collar working class to organize and create leaders capable of making the economic and social issues of the blue collar and middle classes of America known to Congress and the legislatures and making sure that the blue collar and middle class interests were respected.
After Reagan and the onset of globalization combined with urestrained laissez faire capitalism, they evaporated as an effective force and their leadership lost the clout it had previously wielded. In essence, Reagan created a power vacuum and the Republicans were ready, willing and able to fill that power vacuum with the religious right. The blue collar class disintegrated and descended into poverty, the middle class began to melt away.
The result was that the religious right organized the lesser educated into a significant political machine which blamed all of our economic and social woes upon our moral decadence and delivered their votes to the Republican party free of all strings pertaining to the economic interests of these economic classes. The result has been that the Republican party has been able to win elections by obtaining the campaign funding from the economic elite while purchasing votes from the lower economic classes by pushing social agenda issues which do nothing to improve the economic standard of living of these groups.
The consequence has been that we have seen a massive polarization of wealth, destruction of affordable access to some of the basic needs of our citizens such as health care and the ability to improve their economic standing by putting college education out of reach for their children. In other words, the loss of organized leadership on economic issues previously provided by labor unions has been disasterous for America. We may not have liked how they behaved. We may have thought they encouraged less than productive behavior to employers.
But it should be clear that without some way of organizing and providing economic leadership to the working class Americans, we all would suffer and we have. As the religious right has repeatedly stepped over the boundaries protecting individual liberty in America, and the average American has become weary of listening to debate after debate as to the morality or immorality of abortion and same sex marriage and unions, this economic strata has become available and is looking for something other than religion to rally to and provide leadership.
Political dominance in the coming decade is going to hang upon which party or group successfully manages to organize the working and middle-class economic strata. So far that has been a culture war that the Democrats have been losing to the Republicans since Reagan -- although before his Presidency was eclipsed by sex scandals, Clinton provided an alternative leadership which reached out to this group. The Republicans under Bush, however, consolidated their control of this economic stratum via the Christian Evangelicals. Now, the ball is once again in the air and the fate of America for the first half of the 21st Century lays in the balance.
Unions were very important to our having a stable and responsible government. For all their warts and corruption, they were a way for the blue collar working class to organize and create leaders capable of making the economic and social issues of the blue collar and middle classes of America known to Congress and the legislatures and making sure that the blue collar and middle class interests were respected.
After Reagan and the onset of globalization combined with urestrained laissez faire capitalism, they evaporated as an effective force and their leadership lost the clout it had previously wielded. In essence, Reagan created a power vacuum and the Republicans were ready, willing and able to fill that power vacuum with the religious right. The blue collar class disintegrated and descended into poverty, the middle class began to melt away.
The result was that the religious right organized the lesser educated into a significant political machine which blamed all of our economic and social woes upon our moral decadence and delivered their votes to the Republican party free of all strings pertaining to the economic interests of these economic classes. The result has been that the Republican party has been able to win elections by obtaining the campaign funding from the economic elite while purchasing votes from the lower economic classes by pushing social agenda issues which do nothing to improve the economic standard of living of these groups.
The consequence has been that we have seen a massive polarization of wealth, destruction of affordable access to some of the basic needs of our citizens such as health care and the ability to improve their economic standing by putting college education out of reach for their children. In other words, the loss of organized leadership on economic issues previously provided by labor unions has been disasterous for America. We may not have liked how they behaved. We may have thought they encouraged less than productive behavior to employers.
But it should be clear that without some way of organizing and providing economic leadership to the working class Americans, we all would suffer and we have. As the religious right has repeatedly stepped over the boundaries protecting individual liberty in America, and the average American has become weary of listening to debate after debate as to the morality or immorality of abortion and same sex marriage and unions, this economic strata has become available and is looking for something other than religion to rally to and provide leadership.
Political dominance in the coming decade is going to hang upon which party or group successfully manages to organize the working and middle-class economic strata. So far that has been a culture war that the Democrats have been losing to the Republicans since Reagan -- although before his Presidency was eclipsed by sex scandals, Clinton provided an alternative leadership which reached out to this group. The Republicans under Bush, however, consolidated their control of this economic stratum via the Christian Evangelicals. Now, the ball is once again in the air and the fate of America for the first half of the 21st Century lays in the balance.
ITS THE SYSTEM, NOT THE INDIVIDUAL: CAPITALISM IN AMERICA
When you wish to really avoid analyzing whether a certain system inherently leans towards evil, you quite frequently run into the rebuff that its the people not the system which creates the problem. This frequently is not an argument that can withstand the light of day. It is nowhere more obvious than with respect to laisez faire capitalism
I disagree with the argument that it is not capitalism, but selfish people who are the problem. This argument is like the one made by the NRA, its not guns that kill people, but people. To quote Eddie Izzard, "...umh, I think guns might just have a little bit to do with it." The problem with the people not system position is that capitalism is an amoral system which has two tendencies one is to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few, and the second is to require selfishness in order to work efficiently. Even the moderate free-market capitalists indicate greed is a virtue in such a system because of the so-called constructive destruction theory. Capitalism requires us to measure things and money and materialism provides the medium of measurement. I would also state that Soviet style communism suffered from the same problem. The social system needs to be community based and the economic system needs to be designed to support the social system, rather than the social system being designed to fit the economic system. This clearly differs from the neo-conservatives. Once when I was getting career advice from my great Uncle, he pointed out the window to his shiny new T-Bird and Lincoln Continental (this is late 60' mind you) and said "See those." I said "yes." He said, "That is how America keep score." I think that pretty much sums it all up -- capitalism is the game, materialism denotes the winner.
This concept of a game is interesting, since Kemp said on the floor of Congress in relation to the World Cup, "Football is an American capitalist game, soccer is a European socialist game." I would agree, since football is considerably more violent than soccer -- both as a sport and as a symbol. Football has also been referred to as the modern form of gladiator fights, which is also appropriate since that was a favorite pastime of the first major Western empire.
I disagree with the argument that it is not capitalism, but selfish people who are the problem. This argument is like the one made by the NRA, its not guns that kill people, but people. To quote Eddie Izzard, "...umh, I think guns might just have a little bit to do with it." The problem with the people not system position is that capitalism is an amoral system which has two tendencies one is to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few, and the second is to require selfishness in order to work efficiently. Even the moderate free-market capitalists indicate greed is a virtue in such a system because of the so-called constructive destruction theory. Capitalism requires us to measure things and money and materialism provides the medium of measurement. I would also state that Soviet style communism suffered from the same problem. The social system needs to be community based and the economic system needs to be designed to support the social system, rather than the social system being designed to fit the economic system. This clearly differs from the neo-conservatives. Once when I was getting career advice from my great Uncle, he pointed out the window to his shiny new T-Bird and Lincoln Continental (this is late 60' mind you) and said "See those." I said "yes." He said, "That is how America keep score." I think that pretty much sums it all up -- capitalism is the game, materialism denotes the winner.
This concept of a game is interesting, since Kemp said on the floor of Congress in relation to the World Cup, "Football is an American capitalist game, soccer is a European socialist game." I would agree, since football is considerably more violent than soccer -- both as a sport and as a symbol. Football has also been referred to as the modern form of gladiator fights, which is also appropriate since that was a favorite pastime of the first major Western empire.
Friday, July 13, 2007
Kennedy was Wrong
Every President whose words are remembered, are normally remembered for only a few words said in the course of their career. (Lincoln our only presidential poet being the exception that proves the rule.) But Kennedy said something that was taken as a massive display of patriotic rhetoric. The phrase for which he is most remembered is, "Think not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."
It sounded good. It was, however, wrong. It is the epitome of nationalistic rhetoric run amok. People do not exist to serve their country, countries exist to serve their people. When governments cease to serve their people, then they should be removed and replaced.
There is no legitimate purpose for government than to serve its citizens. There is no other purpose, and citizens need to be demanding of their government -- we may disagree on how or what services should be delivered, but we should never support a government which exists to self-perpetuate itself.
In America when we think of what it means to be an American, it means subscription to a package of ideals which were the ideals of the deist enlightenment thinkers who conceived it. Those ideals are developing and are evolving towards the more romantic and higher ideals which are embodied in the Declaration of Independence. That ongoing development and evolution is highly dependent upon the citizens making demands upon that government.
While it is appropriate to call upon citizens to help each other, and to do things for each other, and to build strong communities, it is not appropriate to ask the citizenry to abjectly submit to a concept of a nationhood that is to be defended at all costs and against all odds. That kind of devotion is sacredly restricted to defending our brothers and sisters -- our fellow citizens, not some abstract notion of a fatherland or homeland.
This is not an easy concept to understand and many beloved Americans are hard to understand. Probably the hardest to understand is Robert E. Lee. Offered command of the Union forces, he chose Virginia over America. He did not seem to be terribly devoted to the preservation of slavery as an institution, but he led a fight on the side of the slaveholders. What did Lee think Virginia was and why was he more loyal to it, than the nation he had previously taken an oath to defend? Was it an abstract notion of a certain government, a geographical location, a culture? These are imponderables which historians and social thinkers will debate and mull over so long as American history is taught.
I find Lee the ultimate enigma. But I have thought, and continue to think, that Lee rendered his greatest service to his fellow Americans after he surrendered and after he lay down his sword. He did so by sternly admonishing his generals and leaders not to convert their struggle into a partisan guerrilla war, and afterwards downplayed militaristic ideals, going so far as to intentionally walk out of step in parades at his college.
It sounded good. It was, however, wrong. It is the epitome of nationalistic rhetoric run amok. People do not exist to serve their country, countries exist to serve their people. When governments cease to serve their people, then they should be removed and replaced.
There is no legitimate purpose for government than to serve its citizens. There is no other purpose, and citizens need to be demanding of their government -- we may disagree on how or what services should be delivered, but we should never support a government which exists to self-perpetuate itself.
In America when we think of what it means to be an American, it means subscription to a package of ideals which were the ideals of the deist enlightenment thinkers who conceived it. Those ideals are developing and are evolving towards the more romantic and higher ideals which are embodied in the Declaration of Independence. That ongoing development and evolution is highly dependent upon the citizens making demands upon that government.
While it is appropriate to call upon citizens to help each other, and to do things for each other, and to build strong communities, it is not appropriate to ask the citizenry to abjectly submit to a concept of a nationhood that is to be defended at all costs and against all odds. That kind of devotion is sacredly restricted to defending our brothers and sisters -- our fellow citizens, not some abstract notion of a fatherland or homeland.
This is not an easy concept to understand and many beloved Americans are hard to understand. Probably the hardest to understand is Robert E. Lee. Offered command of the Union forces, he chose Virginia over America. He did not seem to be terribly devoted to the preservation of slavery as an institution, but he led a fight on the side of the slaveholders. What did Lee think Virginia was and why was he more loyal to it, than the nation he had previously taken an oath to defend? Was it an abstract notion of a certain government, a geographical location, a culture? These are imponderables which historians and social thinkers will debate and mull over so long as American history is taught.
I find Lee the ultimate enigma. But I have thought, and continue to think, that Lee rendered his greatest service to his fellow Americans after he surrendered and after he lay down his sword. He did so by sternly admonishing his generals and leaders not to convert their struggle into a partisan guerrilla war, and afterwards downplayed militaristic ideals, going so far as to intentionally walk out of step in parades at his college.
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
The Patriarchal Role: Fathers and Community
Having been asked to prepare a Sacrament Talk on "Fathers" for a Father's Day Sacrament Meeting, I found myself in something of a stupor of thought. All that swirled through my mind were the gushy, sentimental observations, and very tired cliche's and supposed Biblical connections that everyone assumes are somewhere in the Bible about family values. Such thoughts just did not resonate for me. The more I meditated on the subject, the more I realized that was not where I was supposed to go with the talk.
So I tried to think about my father's generation -- which Tom Brokaw labeled "the greatest generation," a statement of praise that is probably overstated. They were blessed, or cursed, whatever way you want to view it with America's last morally unambiguous war. In fact, the more I thought about it, the less enthused I became about that generation. But, fortunately for our family, Dad did not behave like a lot of the Dad's of that generation. He showed up for all of our activities even though we sat the bench in all the team sports. My mother, my dad and my dog tended to be the only adults other than the coaches who showed up for cross-country meets and track meets. My generation on the other hand flocked to our kids meets both home and away. Same for music competitions.
My father shared most of the racial prejudices of white males in post WWII Indiana. Indiana was the hotbed for the Twentieth Century KKK. But that did not include my father -- who attempted to shelter the Catholics who drew the harassment of the KKK, because there were no readily available African-Americans to persecute. And, he annonymously decorated the grave of an African-American who had led him, as a small child, around on a pony in the churchyard when services droned on too long. His attitude with the gypsies who periodically travelled through the area was to get to know and befriend their King, rather than close up shop when they came to town. So he was the kind of guy who would bluster one thing, but behave completely inconsistent with his bluster.
While unconsciously I believe he was indeed my role model, I never really thought of him that way, nor do I remember him ever behaving in a manner intentionally to serve as such. Well, I take that back -- Dad drank socially, but he never drank in front of me until I was of legal age. An intentional deception which backfired on him because I located and raided all of his liquor stashes -- its kind of hard to discipline a kid for consuming something that you are trying to pretend does not exist. Less hypocritical was his position on smoking. But what I mean is that he never seemed to be behaving in a "preachy manner" calculated to impress me with the notion that I was to behave as he did. The role modeling must have been too subtle for my older brothers because I cannot see that they ever used him as a role model.
The question, however, which haunts my mind is whether a father plays any other function in society other than a role model for his children and a source of financial support for his family. If he does, then what might such a function be and what might its level of importance be to the family and society. In a society where the social conservatives keep chirping about the importance of "family values" or "traditional value" there needs to be some in depth thought and investigation lavished upon such an inquiry.
I believe a father (and sometimes the mother) play an important role in anchoring or connecting the family to a community. The father is, especially in traditional white anglo-saxon Christian families, the person who establishes the family within the community and in many spheres also establishes the role the entire family plays in the community. Because of Victorian notions regarding gender roles, the exception to the father being the anchor in the community, is in the area of education. The Victorians specifically reserved this role to the mother and hence the mother frequently is the person anchoring the family within the public school system.
If what I have just said has even a modicum of truth, and I believe it has much more truth than that, when we start lamenting the decline in "family values" -- we may be looking at the wrong culprit. What I mean is that "family values" are associated by the vocal right as being under attack by gays, abortionists, pornographers, and the media. Somehow, I have always doubted that -- not that I necessarily condone homosexuality, abortion, pornography -- but because these are not new activities.
What I believe is happening is that the fathers have no community with which to connect. Certain religious groups do supply at least a partial community to which the fathers can connect. For example the Mormons, the Amish, Jehovah Witnesses, and the Islamists all recognize the inherent need for community.
For the Mormons it goes beyond that, and I fear that many Mormons do not understand the full extent of what is happening in society and its impact on Mormon standards and belief. Shortly after Joseph Smith, Jr. established the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Lord directed him to start up colonies of members who would be a part of what is called the United Order or the Order of Enoch. These were something like the Israeli kibbutz -- in other words they were very communitarian in nature. Because of persecution, the Mormons after the assasination of Joseph Smith, Jr., by an anti-Mormon mob in Illinois, migrated to Utah under the leadership of Brigham Young and established successful United Order communities in the west. These communities continued to function until the Federal Government in the guise of clamping down on polygamy caused the communities to dissolve for fear of seizure of their land.
Obviously, United Order villages are what might be considere hyper-communitarian. But, America still had communities in the rural small towns and in the ethnic neighborhoods in the urban area which were still true communities until in the late 1980's. What we are seeing now, however, is the complete destruction of the communities encompassing small towns. During my father's generation, there was still a community to which he could connect his family. Persons born to families in such towns tended to either stay in the community after they graduated from high school, or returned to them after college or graduate school. That is much less likely now.
America during the last forty years put the saying, "home is where the heart is" to the test. It appears to me, that the saying has been found wanting. Home may be where the heart is and certainly no home can long endure if the family's heart is not in it, but home needs to be an actual community and an actual geographical location as well. It requires a father to stake his claim in that community and to connect his family to that stake. The creation of a home involves more than simply a home or an apartment in which blood relations reside, just as a community involves more than a group of housing units with a shopping center.
The sense of being at home cannot be franchised whether by a Church or a business. After WWII, servicemen who had suffered homesickness abroad came back with the notion if you had a business set up to look exactly like the same business elsewhere then it would make people feel at home. The concept being if you went into a franchised restaurant or store that was just like the one in your hometown then you would immediately feel comfortable and at home. In other words, businessmen went out with the conscious intent of creating a homogenized hometown so that wherever you went it was home. Religions such as Mormonism and the Jehovah Witnesses understood the concept as well and so every chapel and every Kingdom Hall tends to resemble every other chapel and every other Kingdom Hall. If you attend a Sunday service in one Mormon ward, you can expect that a similar service with the exact same Sunday School lesson is occurring in similar chapels all over the United States. Mormons often point out that no matter where you go you are at home at Church.
The problem with this economic concept is that if home tends to be everywhere, then instead of home being everywhere -- it is nowhere. Families moving in and out of LDS Wards every couple years or so, can only develop a superficial connection to the community at large and a somewhat tenuous connection to the Ward family. In other words, the father has no community to connect his family with, (not to mention the mother being unable to connect with the educational community) and as a result he is denied the opportunity to connect his family to any community.
The phrase "army brats" meaning children of military personnel who bounce around the country and the planet following their parents' postings has come to potentially include a huge segment of American society. As a consequence, father's are failing to fulfill their complete role and families are falling apart at a prodigious rate. But what the social conservatives are complaining about are merely symptoms of a much more systemic problem. That problem is that fathers no longer play the role they have to play in the community because there is no community in which he can play the role.
My father connected his family to his community. We knew we had certain standards which we were charged to uphold in order to protect or improve our family's reputation in the community. Our father provided the family leadership in this respect, and if his family upheld the reputation then it reflected well not only upon the father, but the whole family -- deservingly or not. This had a tremendously positive impact on the entire community and tended to keep families together. If the community is only a homogenized replication of some other community -- or a tract of hundreds of houses looking more or less the same as all of their neighbors, this community never comes into being. With the loss of the community, the obligation to protect the family reputation or even to keep the family together tends to erode -- you can just move on to another community which is exactly like the community where the family fell apart, or a different Ward which looks exactly like the Ward your family crashed and burned in.
The demise of this patriarchal role is of very significant religious importance and nowhere of such importance than Mormonism. Although one may search somewhat in vain for praise of family connections in the Bible, one finds such praise much more evident in the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants which along with the Bible and the Pearl of Great Price constitute the canonized Latter-Day Saint scriptures. In Mormon theology there are three Priesthoods: the Aaronic Priesthood which is an appendent to the Melchizdek Priesthood, the Melchizedek Priesthood, and the Patriarchal Priesthood. Currently the only ordinances of the Patriarchal Priesthood currently restored are the sealing ordinances conducted in the Sealing Rooms of the Temple. This Patriarchal Priesthood is bestowed as part of the marriage ceremony and cannot be held by persons who have not wed. While the Melchizedek Priesthood is the authorization to act in God's name with respect to mortals, the Patriarchal Priesthood is the authority by which the Celestial Kingdoms are governed. In other words, the Patriarchal Priesthood governs the community of the gods.
If we believe that everything on Earth resembles that of the Heavenly Realms. Earthly Fatherhood then involves training to connect families to the community of the gods. For that reason, it is more than merely the assumption of duties of support and maintenance, and it is more than the duty to be a role model. It is to prepare for the enternities in God's Creation. As a result, it is not just a building block of society, it is that which when accompanied by God's grace secures and binds the eternal relationships of the Kingdom of God.
I suspect as a result, that if we want families to continue to be the bedrock unit of our country, we should spend less time battling pornography, abortion and bad media, and more time rethinking our economy and society so that families make a difference. Our goal should be the literal creation of Heaven on Earth, or rather the Kingdom of God. That goal involves much more than the preaching of sexual morality, it requires the creation and nurturing of a society to which a father can connect -- in other words a community in which every family has a place and every father a role. Not only a place and a role, but a cherished place and a dignified role.
So I tried to think about my father's generation -- which Tom Brokaw labeled "the greatest generation," a statement of praise that is probably overstated. They were blessed, or cursed, whatever way you want to view it with America's last morally unambiguous war. In fact, the more I thought about it, the less enthused I became about that generation. But, fortunately for our family, Dad did not behave like a lot of the Dad's of that generation. He showed up for all of our activities even though we sat the bench in all the team sports. My mother, my dad and my dog tended to be the only adults other than the coaches who showed up for cross-country meets and track meets. My generation on the other hand flocked to our kids meets both home and away. Same for music competitions.
My father shared most of the racial prejudices of white males in post WWII Indiana. Indiana was the hotbed for the Twentieth Century KKK. But that did not include my father -- who attempted to shelter the Catholics who drew the harassment of the KKK, because there were no readily available African-Americans to persecute. And, he annonymously decorated the grave of an African-American who had led him, as a small child, around on a pony in the churchyard when services droned on too long. His attitude with the gypsies who periodically travelled through the area was to get to know and befriend their King, rather than close up shop when they came to town. So he was the kind of guy who would bluster one thing, but behave completely inconsistent with his bluster.
While unconsciously I believe he was indeed my role model, I never really thought of him that way, nor do I remember him ever behaving in a manner intentionally to serve as such. Well, I take that back -- Dad drank socially, but he never drank in front of me until I was of legal age. An intentional deception which backfired on him because I located and raided all of his liquor stashes -- its kind of hard to discipline a kid for consuming something that you are trying to pretend does not exist. Less hypocritical was his position on smoking. But what I mean is that he never seemed to be behaving in a "preachy manner" calculated to impress me with the notion that I was to behave as he did. The role modeling must have been too subtle for my older brothers because I cannot see that they ever used him as a role model.
The question, however, which haunts my mind is whether a father plays any other function in society other than a role model for his children and a source of financial support for his family. If he does, then what might such a function be and what might its level of importance be to the family and society. In a society where the social conservatives keep chirping about the importance of "family values" or "traditional value" there needs to be some in depth thought and investigation lavished upon such an inquiry.
I believe a father (and sometimes the mother) play an important role in anchoring or connecting the family to a community. The father is, especially in traditional white anglo-saxon Christian families, the person who establishes the family within the community and in many spheres also establishes the role the entire family plays in the community. Because of Victorian notions regarding gender roles, the exception to the father being the anchor in the community, is in the area of education. The Victorians specifically reserved this role to the mother and hence the mother frequently is the person anchoring the family within the public school system.
If what I have just said has even a modicum of truth, and I believe it has much more truth than that, when we start lamenting the decline in "family values" -- we may be looking at the wrong culprit. What I mean is that "family values" are associated by the vocal right as being under attack by gays, abortionists, pornographers, and the media. Somehow, I have always doubted that -- not that I necessarily condone homosexuality, abortion, pornography -- but because these are not new activities.
What I believe is happening is that the fathers have no community with which to connect. Certain religious groups do supply at least a partial community to which the fathers can connect. For example the Mormons, the Amish, Jehovah Witnesses, and the Islamists all recognize the inherent need for community.
For the Mormons it goes beyond that, and I fear that many Mormons do not understand the full extent of what is happening in society and its impact on Mormon standards and belief. Shortly after Joseph Smith, Jr. established the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Lord directed him to start up colonies of members who would be a part of what is called the United Order or the Order of Enoch. These were something like the Israeli kibbutz -- in other words they were very communitarian in nature. Because of persecution, the Mormons after the assasination of Joseph Smith, Jr., by an anti-Mormon mob in Illinois, migrated to Utah under the leadership of Brigham Young and established successful United Order communities in the west. These communities continued to function until the Federal Government in the guise of clamping down on polygamy caused the communities to dissolve for fear of seizure of their land.
Obviously, United Order villages are what might be considere hyper-communitarian. But, America still had communities in the rural small towns and in the ethnic neighborhoods in the urban area which were still true communities until in the late 1980's. What we are seeing now, however, is the complete destruction of the communities encompassing small towns. During my father's generation, there was still a community to which he could connect his family. Persons born to families in such towns tended to either stay in the community after they graduated from high school, or returned to them after college or graduate school. That is much less likely now.
America during the last forty years put the saying, "home is where the heart is" to the test. It appears to me, that the saying has been found wanting. Home may be where the heart is and certainly no home can long endure if the family's heart is not in it, but home needs to be an actual community and an actual geographical location as well. It requires a father to stake his claim in that community and to connect his family to that stake. The creation of a home involves more than simply a home or an apartment in which blood relations reside, just as a community involves more than a group of housing units with a shopping center.
The sense of being at home cannot be franchised whether by a Church or a business. After WWII, servicemen who had suffered homesickness abroad came back with the notion if you had a business set up to look exactly like the same business elsewhere then it would make people feel at home. The concept being if you went into a franchised restaurant or store that was just like the one in your hometown then you would immediately feel comfortable and at home. In other words, businessmen went out with the conscious intent of creating a homogenized hometown so that wherever you went it was home. Religions such as Mormonism and the Jehovah Witnesses understood the concept as well and so every chapel and every Kingdom Hall tends to resemble every other chapel and every other Kingdom Hall. If you attend a Sunday service in one Mormon ward, you can expect that a similar service with the exact same Sunday School lesson is occurring in similar chapels all over the United States. Mormons often point out that no matter where you go you are at home at Church.
The problem with this economic concept is that if home tends to be everywhere, then instead of home being everywhere -- it is nowhere. Families moving in and out of LDS Wards every couple years or so, can only develop a superficial connection to the community at large and a somewhat tenuous connection to the Ward family. In other words, the father has no community to connect his family with, (not to mention the mother being unable to connect with the educational community) and as a result he is denied the opportunity to connect his family to any community.
The phrase "army brats" meaning children of military personnel who bounce around the country and the planet following their parents' postings has come to potentially include a huge segment of American society. As a consequence, father's are failing to fulfill their complete role and families are falling apart at a prodigious rate. But what the social conservatives are complaining about are merely symptoms of a much more systemic problem. That problem is that fathers no longer play the role they have to play in the community because there is no community in which he can play the role.
My father connected his family to his community. We knew we had certain standards which we were charged to uphold in order to protect or improve our family's reputation in the community. Our father provided the family leadership in this respect, and if his family upheld the reputation then it reflected well not only upon the father, but the whole family -- deservingly or not. This had a tremendously positive impact on the entire community and tended to keep families together. If the community is only a homogenized replication of some other community -- or a tract of hundreds of houses looking more or less the same as all of their neighbors, this community never comes into being. With the loss of the community, the obligation to protect the family reputation or even to keep the family together tends to erode -- you can just move on to another community which is exactly like the community where the family fell apart, or a different Ward which looks exactly like the Ward your family crashed and burned in.
The demise of this patriarchal role is of very significant religious importance and nowhere of such importance than Mormonism. Although one may search somewhat in vain for praise of family connections in the Bible, one finds such praise much more evident in the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants which along with the Bible and the Pearl of Great Price constitute the canonized Latter-Day Saint scriptures. In Mormon theology there are three Priesthoods: the Aaronic Priesthood which is an appendent to the Melchizdek Priesthood, the Melchizedek Priesthood, and the Patriarchal Priesthood. Currently the only ordinances of the Patriarchal Priesthood currently restored are the sealing ordinances conducted in the Sealing Rooms of the Temple. This Patriarchal Priesthood is bestowed as part of the marriage ceremony and cannot be held by persons who have not wed. While the Melchizedek Priesthood is the authorization to act in God's name with respect to mortals, the Patriarchal Priesthood is the authority by which the Celestial Kingdoms are governed. In other words, the Patriarchal Priesthood governs the community of the gods.
If we believe that everything on Earth resembles that of the Heavenly Realms. Earthly Fatherhood then involves training to connect families to the community of the gods. For that reason, it is more than merely the assumption of duties of support and maintenance, and it is more than the duty to be a role model. It is to prepare for the enternities in God's Creation. As a result, it is not just a building block of society, it is that which when accompanied by God's grace secures and binds the eternal relationships of the Kingdom of God.
I suspect as a result, that if we want families to continue to be the bedrock unit of our country, we should spend less time battling pornography, abortion and bad media, and more time rethinking our economy and society so that families make a difference. Our goal should be the literal creation of Heaven on Earth, or rather the Kingdom of God. That goal involves much more than the preaching of sexual morality, it requires the creation and nurturing of a society to which a father can connect -- in other words a community in which every family has a place and every father a role. Not only a place and a role, but a cherished place and a dignified role.
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