LMIKT=15

LMIK10A=8

15-8=7

LGA=9

9*7=63

AIGCA=12

63-12=51

5,000,000/51= 98,039

The resulting number is the number of new active liberal Mormons which we can expect to be created each year for the next five years. NAH, I don’t buy it either. But I know some of you had fun doing this “scientific” calculation.

Bottom line, there is no way to tell for sure what the future holds for liberal Mormonism. But here are some indicators that liberal Mormonism has a bright future:

1. The Bloggernacle itself. With the explosion in the number of blogs, more spaces have been created for liberal Mormons to discuss Mormon theology and history. This will have an impact on the Church as a whole, although it is difficult to say what it will be. My bet will be that information will be more freely shared than in the past, and that more Mormons will begin to consider the liberal method of theological interpretation as the best way to deal with the information they are slowly assimilating.
2. The Church. The Historical Department has been recently given an independent existence from the Family History Department. This new emphasis on the distinct task of church history, accompanied by construction of the Church History Library, official participation in the Joseph Smith Papers Project, and recent work on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, indicates a real willingness to engage with reason and evidence.
3. Blake Ostler. As the only Mormon theologian working systematically with our theology as a whole, his three volumes of Exploring Mormon Thought gives liberal Mormonism something solid to sympathize with and react against. Using the terms of the latest philosophical theology, Ostler uses reason and evidence in his search through the Mormon scriptures to come to sometimes orthodox, sometimes heterodox conclusions. Ostler is a figure who will provide grist for discussion for liberal Mormons for years to come.
4. Mitt Romney’s candidacy. Public interest and scrutiny of Mormonism will likely now not ever return to pre-Romney levels, forcing Mormons to use reason and evidence to rationally justify our traditions and beliefs to secular society.

Discuss, my friends:

I was raised in a household of faith. My parents are believers who encouraged discussion of religion in their home. I’ve asked around and found that this isn’t the case in many LDS homes. My parents asked what we children learned in Primary and Sunday School and then what we thought about it!

We also had books on the shelves, dangerous books. I often think of this when I hear well-meaning LDS friends say they put an historical or theological concern “on the shelf,” so to speak. I pull mine off the shelf! The shelf is where most of these issues come from in the first place! Reading H.G. Wells’s Outline of History, Joseph Fielding Smith’s Essentials of Church History, Leonard Arrington’s and Davis Bitton’s The Mormon Experience, Obert Tanner’s Christ’s Ideals for Living, and Bruce R. McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine was enough to get some internal debates going. It was apparent these folks were not all on the same page about very fundamental things.

How to make sense of the contradictory voices? Only later in seminary did I hear that prayer followed by expected good feelings was the surest way to truth. This never fully took with me, and certainly didn’t help me decide if evolution driven by natural selection was the means by which human life developed, or if the Documentary Hypothesis of the Pentateuch was true. As a child and teenager, I had occasional intuitive flashes which I sometimes interpreted as inspiration, but these felt less certain to me than objective evidence, especially when my intuitions took me in wrong directions.

Lowell Bennion’s Understanding the Scriptures was one tool I found to use reason to sift through religion and extract the truth. I mean, have you ever tried to sit down and read through the book of Genesis, let alone the entire Old Testament, from beginning to end, and not have some serious questions about the mass of weirdness you encounter? Bennion used his faith in the loving character of God as the most important criterion to judge the divinity of particular scriptural passages. Therefore, if you read in the Good Book that a certain prophet called down she-bears to devour little children for making fun of his bald spot, you can be sure God was not involved in the transaction, and presumably that the author of this particular piece of scripture was making it up or mistaken. I continue to be amused at those who will jump to the defense of the divine origin of every verse of scripture, and use their knowledge of ancient languages to show that the little children were really Babylonian teenage gangsters, Assyrians undergoing mid-life crises or Canaanite senior citizens, missing the point that God doesn’t do this kind of thing at all if other scriptures we read about Him being loving are to be held as true.

Bennion’s basic approach of focusing on the character of God revealed to us in Mormon scripture and experience, modified slightly as I have lived more fully and read more widely, has served me well in doing two things: staying Mormon and staying sane. I have kept my faith in a loving God through crises that were trying, and have kept my self-respect as I have shifted my theological paradigm occasionally to adjust to new information and life experiences.

In part III, I will present a prognosis for Mormons like me. What are some of the challenges this approach to Mormonism will likely face, from within and without the Church?

Discuss, my friends:

I am talking about liberal Mormon theology. For me, this cannot be divorced from liberal Christian theology, just as conservative Mormon theology is influenced by conservative Christian theology.

Liberal Christian theology started with Friedrich Schleiermacher, a German who attempted to reconcile Protestantism with the Enlightenment. He emphasized the importance of the subjective human response to religion, rather than the objective truth claim of religion. An example of this would be the assertion that the freedom from anxiety that awareness of Christ’s sacrifice brings us as Christians is more existentially significant than which model of the Atonement is the most accurate or whether the Atonement occurred in exactly the way the Gospels attest.

This became one current in liberal theology, while the biblical critics of the 19^th and 20^th centuries would make objective investigation of the scriptures a central concern of liberal theology by investigating the authorship of the books of the Bible and by interpreting the texts within the circumstances in which they were written. An example of this would be scholarly findings that some of the raw material of the Pentateuch (serpents as powerful malevolent beings guarding trees of wisdom, a catastrophic flood, giants, ribs taken from men to form women, etc.) was adapted from Sumerian stories known to the Israelites from their captivity in Assyria (and later Babylon).

Given the subjective and objective premises of liberal Christian theology, what are the assumptions of liberal Mormon theology? Here are some of my suggestions:

1. Reason and evidence must have an appropriate influence on the formation and periodic revaluation of our religious beliefs.
2. Therefore, the well-established findings of the natural and social sciences, historical methodology, etc., all have things to tell us about Mormonism.
3. Questions of historicity are thus best decided by historians, anthropology by anthropologists, biology by biologists, and so forth.
4. Only a few narrowly defined truth claims can be considered binding on a Mormon in good standing. All others may be individually decided, since the subjective response to religion is more important than it’s objective truth, where it is more difficult to obtain clear information. Example: I am very certain that being a Mormon makes me a better and happier person, somewhat less certain that God exists, and least certain that God has a physical body with two hands and two feet.

Given the above:

Are liberal Mormons real Mormons?

Do you know any liberal Mormons?

Are liberal Mormons those with more questions than answers?

Discuss, my friends: