Mormons tend to phrase things differently. You’re either a member, or you’re not. There are inactives who fall into a gray area but this does not really diminish the either/or framework. Almost everybody buys into this. Even former-Mormons call themselves, well, former-Mormons. But are they really “former Mormons,” or are they Mormons who are no longer members of a particular church? I’ve heard of a creature called a Jack Mormon, but having never lived in a predominantly Mormon area I’ve never met one. I met a Jack Daniel’s Mormon once, but he promptly converted to AA and was never seen again.

We’re a lot more like the Jews than we realize. Active members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are the largest (but still a minority) segment of a religious community which encompasses much more: inactives/secularized Mormons, New Order Mormons, gay Mormons, members of the Community of Christ, polygamists like the FLDS, and many others. It strikes me as being quite similar to the Jewish community, minus a few millennia to mellow out.

All Mormons, including active members of the SLC-based Church, can embrace their broader faith community. Maybe new terms are needed. Some of the groups mentioned above don’t want to wear the label “Mormon” at all. Others like the FLDS and the gays claim it, but are fiercely resisted by the rest (“Oh no, you’re not!”).

I like to think we’re all just Mormons.

We have therefore decided to take submissions from interested parties. We will gladly consider posting pieces which fit LDSLF’s mission statement, or which fit in with other themes we’ve dealt with here. If you’d like to submit something but you’re shy about your writing skills, we’ll gladly work with you to produce a post. And of course, pseudonyms are par for the course here, though for internal purposes we’d prefer to know who you are.Please email me if you’re interested in contributing.

I’ve seen a lot of argument about the figures on human trafficking within the US over the past couple of years; Slate and The New York Times have come up with different figures for the number of slaves in the US, ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. But there’s no denying that even here, we have a problem. And there’s no denying that, in much of the rest of the world, slavery is alive and thriving.

What can we, as Mormons, do about it? We certainly have the obligation to do something - our scriptures enjoin us to strive for economic equality, and as long as we are part of a global economy which involves slavery, we will never achieve it. Is there some way for us to act as a church, either to make human trafficking more difficult, to free slaves, or at least to provide economic aid to slaves freed by others?

Societal attitudes toward homosexuals range across a continuum: On one side is complete prohibition: Same-sex relationships are forbidden under penalty of law, including the death penalty in some societies. Persons with a same-sex orientation are branded criminal or mentally ill and remain completely hidden in society. Even if they refrain from acting on their desires they are subject to psychiatric treatment and expulsion from jobs, churches, and other organizations. Homosexuality is strictly taboo.

At the other extreme, homosexuality is accepted as a normal human variation akin to left-handedness or skin color. Gays and lesbians are protected against discrimination by force of law. Their relationships are recognized as marriages by churches and the civil code. Opposition to homosexuality is deemed “homophobia” and, like racism, is strictly taboo.

Both extremes currently exist in the world. Certain Islamic countries under Sharia enforce strict probation. Others in the developed West are rapidly approaching the latter. The United States falls somewhere between these two poles, with wide variation between regions. In some places I could easily be fired from my job and shunned by the community because I am gay. Here in West Hollywood my partner and I are protected by law (albeit under the rubric of “domestic partnership” rather than marriage) and overt homophobes dare not raise their voice.

Since the 1950s American society has gradually shifted along the continuum, toward more acceptance of gays. Many believe we are heading toward the situation in Scandinavia and Canada. Others hope a compromise position will be reached, similar to what has developed in the United Kingdom. There, marriage remains a heterosexual institution but gay relationships are protected under a domestic partnership law. Churches do not have to acknowledge or perform same-sex marriages. This allows a wide range of opinion to peacefully co-exist. An armistice is reached in the so-called culture war.

Similarly, the Church has shifted. In the past, even homosexuals obeying the Law of Chastity were subject to exposure, excommunication, and de facto shunning. There were no wonderful, openly chaste gay members like the Bloggernacle’s own D. Fletcher. All homosexuals who managed to stay in the Church were well-hidden in heterosexual marriages. Today much has changed. In some wards one can be quietly, discretely gay and the Bishop will look the other way. The Church now discourages homosexual members from marrying the opposite sex. If you look carefully, you can see things are shifting further still. Buckley Jeppson’s excommunication appears to have been put on hold, despite his Canadian marriage to Michael Kessler (see this link). Are some of the Brethren asking themselves: “Would Christ really have us excommunicate all these people?”

I believe the Church is moving toward a day when gays and even gay couples will be able to remain members. The Church’s teachings about marriage and sexual morality may not change, but increased light about the nature of homosexuality will lead to increased tolerance, compassion, and inclusion in the community. It can only be thus if the Church is truly led by the Lord, and we can see it happening already.

Instead of re-hashing old arguments, let’s ask new questions today. How does increasing knowledge of homosexuality in nature affect your feelings toward gays? Have your opinions shifted along the continuum? As society continues to move in a direction of more acceptance, what do you think the future holds for gays and lesbians in the Church?

Robert Smith: I am writing to ask you directly what your reasoning is for publishing articles that seem to challenge the current traditions and practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Many things you have said conflict with what the Prophets and Apostles of this Church have taught. Why do you post these positions? What do you hope to accomplish by doing so? I read your brief explanation of the purpose of the blog but found it very unsatisfactory. Would you please explain?

RoastedTomatoes: I disagree that much of what I have said contradicts the teaching of the church. As you know, the set of official teachings of the church is relatively narrow; the set of unofficial teachings, folk doctrines, speculations with more or less authority but no binding status, and so forth is much broader. Much of what the presidents and apostles of the LDS church have said contradicts what other presidents and apostles have said; for the most part, these contradictory teachings involve issues that fall outside the small core of binding teachings of the church. I’d suspect that most of what you’re uncomfortable with involves these kinds of disputed teachings. More generally, I have no idea how to respond to your questions without knowing what, in particular, you have in mind.

Please, let’s try to have this conversation with civility and charity. I’m sure you have good, honorable reasons for contacting me. Please understand that I have good, honorable reasons for my website. With respect to posts on issues other than economic theology, one of the primary reasons is always to promote dialogue and understanding among different kinds of Mormons. Apologetic work is always easier for us to accomplish when we’re able to understand and accept where other people are coming from.

Robert Smith: I am currently working on an article that explores blogs that in my opinion challenge some of the teachings and customs of the LDS Church. To completely understand the purpose behind these blogs I felt it would be a good idea to ask the authors directly what their mission and reasoning is, as opposed to me reading through the blog and trying to theorize it myself.

I see how my email would come across as accusatory and I apologize. I disagree with much of what is said on your blog and I do feel it is counter-productive to the goals and mission of the Church. However, I feel this gives me more reason to communicate with you and go to the source rather rely on my personal bias and opinions.

I thought a good place to start would be learning why you post your articles and what you hope to come from them. Also, what dictates the subjects you write about?

RoastedTomatoes: Thanks for the explanation of your goals. I’d still love to have you explain a little bit of what, in particular, you’ve found on my site that you disagree with. I don’t think there’s anything there that hinders the mission of the church, which as I understand it is to bring souls to Christ. Nonetheless, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that people’s opinions about what does and doesn’t work to bring souls to Christ varies wildly, both within the church and without it. So that, as they say, is that.

Like most bloggers, my wife and I write about whatever we want to write about. There’s no money in it, and no official sponsorship by anyone, so there’s really no reason for us to write about anything at all unless we really want to.

What do I hope to see come from the blog posts? I don’t really have any mission. Blogging makes it easier for me to remain engaged in the Mormon community between church activities — we live well outside of the Mormon corridor, so our general-purpose society is almost entirely non-Mormon and special efforts are indeed needed to keep ourselves connected between Monday and Saturday. Otherwise, it’s also been true that blogging has been a really useful tool for me in learning about the church’s history, theology, and scriptures. There have been happy side-effects, including the couple of dozen email messages I’ve gotten from various kinds of people explaining that our website or one of the handful of podcasts we did has helped people become reconciled to the church, but that stuff isn’t really our mission; I try to do most of my religious work face-to-face. Just in case you’re wondering, I’ve never received even a single email message to the effect that our site has damaged anyone’s faith.

As an example, consider the following statement from the relatively recent book, Mormonism for Dummies:

Although Mormon women may seem to be second-class citizens because they don’t hold the priesthood, most Mormon women don’t feel that way In the first place, the priesthood, like other spiritual gifts, is a vehicle for service. The role isn’t an opportunity for men to lord their position over women but to serve the Church and the world. (In fact, the first level of the Aaronic Priesthood is called deacon, which stems from the Greek word for servant.) Moreover, Mormon women can still receive all the blessings of the priesthood even though they aren’t ordained to it.

Do the statements in this paragraph really reflect what “most Mormon women” think? If they do, is that justification enough for the priesthood restriction? In particular, why should women not have as many opportunities “to serve the Church and the world” as men? Does any sizeable component of the group of Mormon women feel that being denied these opportunities imposes spiritual or other costs?

One problem in answering these questions is that they tend to confound two different attitudinal objects. If women are asked for their opinion of their current sex-based roles in the church, the question will natually evoke considerations linked to women’s feelings about their roles and also considerations linked to women’s feelings about the church. Imagine the situation of a woman who believes that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the unique path to exaltation, but who also feels profound dissatisfaction with her sex’s specified role within the church. Expressing that dissatisfaction raises concerns of disloyalty to the church; hence the two attitudes are in conflict, and the actual conclusion may be to disavow very real desires for a more gender-equitable institution.

I can see at least one way of thinking about the question that would circumvent this difficulty. Specifically, if Mormon women really do believe themselves to be better off without the priesthood than they would be with the priesthood, it follows that if the church were to change policy and offer priesthood ordinations to women, few or none would accept the offer. Such an experiment would remove the stigma of disloyalty to the church associated with desiring a more gender-equitable distribution of leadership and service within the church, allowing women’s attitudes toward their current roles to be revealed without contamination from considerations related to positive general attitudes toward the church and the gospel.

In practice, such an experiment is of course unlikely at best. However, it can usefully inform our conversation in two ways. First, as a thought experiment: does it seem genuinely plausible that, upon being offered the priesthood, most Mormon women would choose not to be ordained? If so, then the gender-restrictive policy is probably a meaningless constraint and certainly should not be the topic of any informed debate. If, on the other hand, we find it more credible to believe that a great many women would accept ordination, then we probably must conclude that the current policy imposes genuine costs on women. Whether those costs are justified by reference to some collateral gains is then the rational debate.

Second, this scenario is useful as a way of providing a more adequate measure of Mormon women’s attitudes toward current gender roles within the church. A survey question asking, “If the church made priesthood ordination available to all worthy women, would you accept ordination?” provides a measure of contentment with current church policy on this issue that is not affected by other church-related attitudes. The stigma of disloyalty is removed. (Some difficulties arise because of the hypothetical nature of the question, but these challenges only add uncertainty to the distribution of responses, rather than bias as in other formulations.)

RT: When you found yourself losing belief in the claims of the Mormon church, how did that affect your self-conception?

Anna: At first, it was liberating - meaning I felt that I’d discovered a secret no one else around me knew about. I felt, I guess, superior to people who were just plodding along subservient to the church when I really knew the truth. But this was mostly superficial. For the most part I felt frustrated and bitter because I wasn’t able to be happy doing the things everyone else seemed happy doing.

RT: How did you think about the seemingly faithful church members around you? Did you imagine that they might share some of your concerns or thoughts, or did you see them all as unaware of the things you suddenly saw?

Anna: Hmm. Good question. I was puzzled by them, actually. I remember asking subtle and some not so subtle questions to see if I was the only person who thought Mormonism was essentially a form of social control, but no one seemed to bite. So yeah, I felt pretty isolated. I think the only reason I didn’t question my sanity was that I was a voracious reader and realized that there was a world outside Utah and Mormonism that made sense to me.

RT: Most people who are Mormons by birth have lots of Mormon family members. How did you relate to them as you went through this transition? Did they puzzle you as much as the other Mormons around you?

Anna: Yes, my family was very orthodox. But I saw the church as an extension of my family. Well, my parents, really. My parents were very strict with us children in the same way that the church is - as far as laying down specific rules that don’t seem to make much sense (and without any real explanation) and then enforcing them. I broke with the church right around the time I was becoming more independent from my parents. My parents didn’t puzzle me, I thought I knew exactly what they were doing - that they were using the church to control their children, the way the church controls its members.

RT: Did your parents know about your changing relationship with the church?

Anna: They did when I stopped going! We fought about my going to church for years - probably until I had my first job. They respected the fact that I need to save money for college, and let me work on sunday. My father sometimes had to work on sunday as well, so they at least were reasonable about that. But the tragic thing was that they never really asked me what I believed about the church, or if they did, I certainly don’t remember it. But I do remember them fighting with me to go to church meetings and to follow all the rules. They really didn’t seem interested in what I believed, but they were very interested in my maintaining the appearance of believing - attending my meetings, etc. Tragic meaning that I have only recently been able to separate religious belief or spiritual belief from religious authority and structure.

RT: Did these conflicts change the way you felt about your parents? How did their lack of interest in your beliefs affect you?

Anna: Up until I was about 16 years old, my parents and I were in continual conflict. They didn’t seem to approve of any decisions I made - my friends weren’t good enough, my grades weren’t good enough, and my lack of interest in the church was certainly a source of chronic and very contentious conflict. So needless to say, I didn’t have a positive nurturing relationship with my parents. If you look back objectively, though - I was a good kid. I went to school, did my homework, didn’t get caught for shoplifting, etc. I felt that they didn’t even want to get to know the real person I was becoming (as much as any teenager knows who she or he is anyway) - and their lack of interest in my beliefs just bolstered this estrangement from them. They wanted me to be a good mormon girl, and- by their estimation - I wasn’t. Anyway, when I was about 16 some other things came up that changed my parents’ focus away from me.

RT: You lived in Utah; presumably many of your friends were Mormon. Did you discuss your changing relationship with the church with them?

Anna: Oh, no! Not at all. I didn’t have too many friends as a teenager - and the ones I had I didn’t think were interested in the church. I was still under the impression that I’d discovered a secret no one knew - that the church wasn’t true. I didn’t want to out myself so to speak, because I didn’t know how people would react to me. Well, and the times I had asked questions, or tried to start conversations about beliefs, I’d been shot down or ignored.

RT: You’d been shot down or ignored; was this by your peers or by adults?

Anna: Hmm. Probably just by the adults. It’s funny as I’m remembering this, because I don’t think it ever crossed my mind to ask my friends what they believed.

RT: It seemed off limits? Or simply unimportant?

Anna: Oh, it was very important to me. I guess I’d have to say that it was off limits because I was worried that I’d be more of a social outcast (not that I was, really - I was just shy) if they knew that I thought the Mormon church wasn’t the only true church.

RT: How would the process of moving away from belief in the church have differed for you if you felt more free to talk about it?

Anna: You know, it makes me sad to think about this. I’m sort of tearing up remembering how isolated and afraid I was as a teenager/young adult. I truly believed I was alone and that I’d lost something very important that everyone else had (even if it was a false belief in a false church). If I had someone who loved me, whom I could have trusted, someone with my best interests at heart instead of pushing an agenda (find a returned missionary, get married in the temple, have lots of children, etc.), my life would have been immeasurably happier. I think I would have made better decisions, and I know that I wouldn’t still be struggling to overcome crushing self doubt and a negative self image.

RT: We’ve already talked about this a little bit, but I want to ask directly. How did you feel about God as you moved away from belief in Mormonism?

Anna: It terrified me, but I stopped believing in God. I couldn’t reconcile my earthly experiences, particularly that of my sister and parents - who had lived a very orthodox life, but were not immune to tragedy - with the Primary - level understanding that I had of God. That he loved me, especially. So I jettisoned my belief in God along with Mormonism. It took me awhile - Mormonism was the first to go, but God just didn’t make sense to me. And I certainly didn’t feel Him as a presence in my life.

RT: You had spent your life as a Mormon, a commitment that–as we all know–requires a lot of time and effort. What were your feelings about the time and effort that you had put into Mormon things before your belief status changed?

Anna: Well, since it was mostly a power struggle between my parents and me, I think I felt mostly happy that I’d won the battle rather than resentful that I’d been forced to go to Church. It wasn’t until a few years later that I felt extreme anger towards my parents for foisting a world view upon me that caused a lot of damage.

RT: So the costs that you subsequently saw in your having been Mormon were more psychological than material?

Anna: Oh, absolutely! Absolutely. I’ve been financially independent most of my life, so I understand the value of money, but I would gladly have given away all of my money to the Church or to anyone else rather than be haunted by it. That was probably a bit too negative – sorry.

RT: No, really, if you felt that way, then that’s the way it is.

Anna: Yes. Although I thought I cast off my beliefs fairly easily as a teenager, you really don’t have much of an idea how deeply your childhood experiences and parental example affect you. I thought because I wasn’t able to believe in God that I would be cursed to live a miserable life. How that works logically, I can’t tell you. But I certainly felt that way. I felt that I was a lost soul.

RT: Did anyone other than your parents try to bring you back into the Mormon fold?

Anna: Well, my parents didn’t really try that hard. As I said, they were pretty distracted by more pressing situations, and since I seemed to be doing okay, they left me alone. That’s how our relationship is today, although I have grown to love them and appreciate them. as far as other people, no one really did try to bring me back to the fold. I had devout mormon roommates in college who knew I was Mormon, but I obviously didn’t go to church, but they never broached the subject with me. No one tried to reactivate me - I think one reason was that I came across as very confident in my beliefs and extremely busy with work and school. They probably thought I wasn’t interested. But I thought about the church every single day. I was acutely conscious of how I didn’t fit in, how different I was.

RT: We’ve talked a lot about what you lost as you went through this process and became an unbeliever. Do you feel that you gained anything?

Anna: I think so. I think I was able to be more empathetic towards others who weren’t the approximation of the Mormon prototype. I’m not sure if this is a net gain, but feeling like an outsider and to some extent a pariah, I became very driven and ambitious because I felt that I had something to prove, I guess. I worked hard and excelled academically because of it, but looking back I didn’t really take much pride in my accomplishments - it was more a pursuit for external validation than real interest. On the whole, I wish I could have gained a testimony and never questioned. I envy people who never question

RT: You mention that you developed empathy for outsiders and people who don’t fit the mold. Could you say a bit more about that? Not the sharpest question–I mean, do you see that kind of empathy as a result of having gone through “outsiderhood,” or something else?

Anna: I think if anything it’s because of, as you say, “outsiderhood”. Unless you’ve felt it yourself, it’s hard to convey the intensity of the loneliness and despair you feel when you’re excluded from a group of people who, for all intents and purposes, are held up as the chosen people, and who seem on the outside to be perfectly happy. You feel like you’re living in a parallel universe, almost. A sad world where no one can understand you - and you can’t reach out to anyone for help. I think I’m starting to sound like a moody adolescent, but yes - I do think I can feel empathy for those who don’t fit the mold because of my experiences in and out of the Mormon church community. I identify more with the outsiders, I think. Even though now I definitely seem to fit the mold - at least superficially.

RT: Thanks so much for this interview–is there anything else you’d want to add?

Anna: You’re welcome. Well, one thing. I wish that I could have the opportunity to help people who were in my situation. Not sure how I’d do that. But I wish I could find them and hug them and tell them that it’s okay. That we don’t have answers for everything. And that it’s fine if you don’t believe everything you’re taught in the church. It’s complicated.

I can imagine three fundamental ideas about why Sunday School might be important. First, Sunday School might be an occasion for spiritual experiences that lead to a strengthened witness of Christ and to character change. Second, Sunday School may serve the purpose of providing class members with the intellectual tools necessary to appreciate the scriptures. Third, the classes might provide guidance, or at least an opportunity for serious conversation, about how to approach problem texts and theological difficulties. However, it seems to me that Gospel Doctrine classes are typically not structured — due to institutional and cultural constraints — in such a way as to consistently meet any of these goals. Hence, the question that serves as the title for this post is far from rhetorical.

Does Sunday School provide an environment in which class members routinely have powerful spiritual experiences that strengthen their testimonies of Christ, or that help them transform themselves personally? There is some evidence that the church leadership sees this as the intended purpose of Sunday School. Each of the Gospel Doctrine manuals begins with a section providing helps for the teacher. These sections heavily emphasize the need to bring the Spirit into class discussions. In some cases, the teacher-guidance materials explicitly state that providing spiritual experiences that develop testimony is the goal of Sunday School. Thus, in the Old Testament manual, we find:

Studying the Old Testament should strengthen class members’ testimonies of the Savior and their commitment to live his gospel. Guided by the Spirit in their study, class members should be able to testify with Job, “I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth” (Job 19:25).

Yet the practice of Sunday School fits somewhat awkwardly with this described purpose. While each manual in the four-year course of study includes some lessons that have content focused on developing a testimony of Jesus Christ, each course of study also contains several lessons that are at best tangential to such a theme. The Old Testament manual’s lesson about Baalam is a particularly vivid example; the Old Testament itself is unable to adopt a coherent attitude toward Baalam, sometimes describing him as obedient to the Lord and other times cursing him for malfeasance. If the source text itself is inconsistent, it is perhaps difficult to expect a modern, amateur audience to construct too much meaning from a lesson themed around that text.

Lessons such as this, which are seemingly out of focus with respect to a goal of developing testimonies of Christ, are only part of the evidence against the interpretation of Sunday School as a site for spiritual experience. The remaining evidence involves opportunity costs: specifically, are there other activities that could be done during the Sunday School time which have a higher success rate in terms of providing transformative spiritual moments? The answer is almost certainly yes. In my collection of anecdotal experiences, testimony meetings are especially likely to result in experiences that people regard as memorable enough to serve as an impetus for changes in lifestyle. Firesides with carefully prepared sermons also rank high. By contrast, discussions themed around sometimes obscure scriptural passages seem relatively less productive of such spiritual witnesses.

This may result in part from how Sunday School is usually taught. In light of the classroom format, there is an emphasis on establishing discussion among class members. Such discussion often provides fuel for explicit or implicit conflict, as members’ personal theologies are expressed in ways that impinge on the theological commitments of others. Almost as problematic, for spiritual purposes, is the fact that an open-discussion format invites the occasional irrelevant and even boring remark. Neither irritation nor boredom seems to be an emotional state conducive to spiritual moments.

If Gospel Doctrine classes, as currently structured, relatively rarely meet the first purpose of providing transformative spiritual experiences for class members, how do they perform at the second possible goal of providing class members with the intellectual tools necessary for a real engagement with the scriptural texts? In short, not at all.

Really making an intellectual connection with sacred texts — especially such complex texts as the Old and New Testament — requires distinctive skills in critical reading, interpretation, and even languages. These skills are far from universal; I’d like to acquire them myself. But, when a Sunday School teacher lacks such skills, how can he or she manage to impart them to others? Clearly, substantial help from the lesson manual would be needed. Yet the Gospel Doctrine manuals provide no such help. The Old Testament manual is almost devoid of information on the history of Israel, which might help place Old Testament texts in an intelligible context. It lacks any engagement whatsoever with the ongoing academic debates over translation and over variations in ancient textual sources. It provides no guidance in the fine art of using narrative context to interpret passages, instead encouraging a process of focusing exclusively on three- to five-verse segments of text, as if they were entirely independent of the rest of the work.

In addition to these resource problems, the way Gospel Doctrine classes are usually taught is counterproductive in terms of encouraging intellectual development among adults. The existing research on how to achieve the best educational outcomes in teaching adults (which I intend to discuss in greater depth in a future post) suggests that successful adult educational environments are problem-focused. The teacher’s role is to introduce the problem, explain its importance, and sometimes to introduce specific tools that help the students work toward a solution. However, the solution itself must emerge from genuine creative work on the part of the students.

Sunday School as usually taught does not even approximate this model. A problem-focused learning environment requires that the motivating puzzle be one that the class members genuinely do not know how to solve at the beginning of the class period. Sunday School, by contrast, concentrates on the comfortable: examples and hypothetical scenarios are typically black-and-white stories that each participant can easily resolve, and teachers avoid difficult, ambiguous, and unresolved themes in scriptural texts or theology, perhaps out of a fear of eroding faith. As a result, the probability of genuine intellectual learning in a Sunday School classroom is approximately nil.

The probability that an individual who is troubled by a difficult text or a theological problem will find help within a Sunday School class seems to me to be similarly low. The reason, as just mentioned, is that such topics are shunned. Teachers avoid the controversial, and class members who raise difficult questions often find that the question is quickly dismissed — sometimes with an explicit warning that such topics are inappropriate.

If Gospel Doctrine Sunday School classes, as currently structured, don’t really consistently meet any of the three purposes discussed above, why do we have them? Are they merely an institutional relic of an 18th-century attempt to fight the moral corruption of children in British slums? A place to warehouse those established adults who aren’t currently needed for some calling or other? Or a much-needed, but currently largely unrealized, opportunity for our members to become more intimately involved in our canonical texts?

Mormons, of course, do the same thing. We’ve built historical commemorations in New York, Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Wyoming, Utah, California, and other places. Monuments celebrate visions of Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, the birth- and death-places of leaders and sacred heroes, the locations of calamities and triumphs. The Sacred Grove, the Kirtland temple, the Independence temple lot, Nauvoo, Carthage, Temple Square. These places are occupied by thoroughly modern monuments and visitors’ centers, and yet they symbolize to us our sacred moments from the 19th century.

If these places anchor our modern geography in the Mormon past, the movements and migrations between landmarks serve as a symbol, maybe even a spatial reflection, of the flow of time. We imagine the Coalville Saints migrating first to Ohio and then to Missouri. We see lines of men, women, and children marching, barefoot and bloodied, through the Missouri winter and across into western Illinois. Our imaginations render wave after wave of pioneers crossing the high plains and then the Rockies into Zion, as well as the floods of immigrants crossing the Atlantic from England in preparation for the trek. We imagine with particular vividness the relative handful of handcart pioneers, and especially the Willie and Martin companies. This generally westward movement, in a series of sacred pilgrimages, structures the Mormon past.

In parallel with these collective memories and histories, structured by sacred places and epic journeys, we often tell our own lives with reference to place, space, and travel. Serenity and I have a kind of sacred journey that marks a major dividing point in both our lives: the time when we both travelled from Utah to the San Francisco area. That journey delimits the beginning of each of our adulthood, symbolizes the start of our relationship, and marks the moment when we began to live in the place that now feels like home to us. The journey was relatively short; a day and a half in a car. But the separation that the trip marked in our lives makes it seem larger, epic, sacred.

The problem with all of this geographic memory and myth is that space, however well it symbolizes time in some respects, is not history. In particular, Mormons can travel east, even though they cannot visit the 19th century.

Serenity and I just completed a move in which we undid two major migrations that define our family and community memory. First, we left the San Francisco area and drove across Nevada to Salt Lake City — symbolically undoing the beginning of our adulthood and of our relationship. The symbolic resonance of the second half of the move, in which we travelled across the Rocky Mountains and the plains to Illinois (ending, alas, in the Chicago area rather than in Nauvoo), is perhaps equally discomfiting. As we drove past Martin’s Cove in eastern Wyoming, a feeling of treason settled irrationally upon us. As we blithely undo the journey that our pioneer antecedents made in sweat and, all too often, blood, are we also betraying the cause that drove them on? As we become a part of what historian Jan Shipps has called “the scattering of the gathering,” are we throwing away the sacrifices of the past?

Space isn’t time, and moving to Chicago is not now an act of apostasy, like it would have been during Brigham Young’s day. But our spatial structuring of history makes the journey feel faintly disloyal. At least until we arrive in a resolutely 21st-century Chicago, where people drive cars instead of oxcarts and use cell phones instead of horseback messengers.

But then I can’t help wondering if I actually need that strength more. Is it really best for God to spend His time helping me get through a summer of difficult work? Aren’t there others in far, far greater need? Do my requests, perhaps, serve to distract God from the cries and prayers of parents in Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur? Parents of U.S. soldiers in the line of fire? Parents watching their children starve, die of parasites, suffer from AIDS?

Of course, I understand that God is omnipotent. If He helps me, He still has enough left over to deal with the rest of these tragedies. On the other hand, prayer is a finite resource. Aren’t my personal needs insignificant enough, in the scope of human need, that I ought to devote my efforts at prayer to the really serious problems?

God isn’t going to help all of the people I mentioned above; for reasons I don’t understand, He seems to leave most poor people in poverty, and He rarely moves bystanders out of the way of bombshells. In fact, I don’t even know if He will help me with my minor trials. Is it selfish that I’m going to ask Him to, anyway?