Ed FirmageSeeking All Things Praiseworthy:RESTORING THE CHURCH
Seeking All Things Praiseworthy
RESTORING THE CHURCH: ZION IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES
By Edwin B. Firmage
EDWIN B. FIRMAGE, a professor at the University of Utah College of Law is author of Paul and the Expansion of the Church, editor of An Abundant Life: The Memoirs of Hugh B. Brown, and recently co-authored with Collin Mangrum Zion in the Courts.- A Legal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900. A version of this paper was presented at the 1988 annual meeting of the Mormon History Association in Logan, Utah. I
The American Puritans’ “City upon a Hill” prospered because it was a City on the Sea. How different the story of New England, or of America, might have been if they had built their Zion in a sequestered inland place–some American Switzerland, some mountain-encircled valley! The Sea helped New Englanders find resources, not in the land, but in themselves and in the whole world. The sea was the great opener of their markets and their minds.
THE MORMON PEOPLE AND THE MORMON PROPHETS sensed from the beginning that their religion would work only in community. Peculiar Mormon teachings did not simply demand their own institutions, radical social innovations like polygamy and the United Order required a unique lifestyle and community. We can say now in retrospect that a separate Mormon system of law and society was necessary to protect their vision against hostile government and inadequate law. Beyond that, however, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young understood that for religion to be effective it must be woven into every warp and woof of our lives. No laws of God are temporal; all are spiritual. If this is to be, the community must allow the introjection of spirituality into the law to enliven the community with God’s spirit.
For Joseph and Brigham, this vision, in its highest level of effectiveness at least, demanded a gathered church: Zion. This vision was absolutely central for both of them, so much that they led the Mormons into an unequal, nearly hopeless, struggle. And yet, long after Zion should have been obliterated by an industrial state and national markets, its institutions flourished. Mormon law and courts existed with vitality into the twentieth century until Church leadership decided that Mormon survival demanded accommodation with the national community, even if it meant abandoning the distinctive and controversial practices of communal economics, polygamy, and theocratic government.
WITH the powerful literalism of commoners, the Mormons, with lay leaders indistinguishable in education and social position from other Church members, set out to make Zion a reality. Brigham exhorted with characteristic pungency, “I have Zion in my view constantly. We are not going to wait for angels, or for Enoch and his company to come and build Zion, but we are going to build it.”[2] His counselor and friend, Jedediah M. Grant, exclaimed, “If you want a heaven, go to and make it.”[3]
Self-serving individualism, particularly when motivated by wealth, was severely sanctioned. The communal vision, like ancient Israel’s, was all-encompassing. Looking forward to a return to Jackson County, Missouri, as the center stake of Zion, Brigham warned in 1865, “If this people neglect their duty, turn away from the holy commandments which God has given us, seek for their own individual wealth, and neglect the interests of the Kingdom of God, we may expect to be here quite a while–perhaps a period that will be far longer than we anticipated.”[4]
The hallmark of Mormonism was, and is, this vital and powerful communal cohesion. The power undergirding Mormon communality is reinforced by factors in addition to the theological vision of Zion. The trek to the Great Basin and the colonial experience of settling a major or part of western America welded Mormons together with unbreakable bonds. There they built Zion in mountain-encircled valleys. They had consummated one of the great migrations of American history in a self-conscious pattern of the camp of Israel. This intensely authoritarian system might have been expected to continue as Mormons turned from the exodus to colonizing a hostile wilderness. Brigham Young, perhaps this country’s greatest colonizer, extended Zion’s tent with stakes implanted from San Bernardino to Old Mexico, throughout much of California, Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, and New Mexico–a rugged, at times brutal experience made possible by a shared vision of Zion. The authoritarian structure inherent in such an endeavor was helpful perhaps indispensable, and probably inevitable.
The uncoerced social affinity essential to the legitimacy of Mormon community was powerfully strengthened not shattered by persecution. The federal government began a half-hearted campaign against the Mormons with ineffective legislation against polygamy, then attempted to eradicate the practice by enforcing laws with heartless brutality. Simultaneously, the government attacked Mormon civil rights and liberties, including the rights to serve on juries, to emigrate, to vote, and to hold office. Finally the government waged a war on Mormon society and corporate personhood by seeking to disenfranchise the Church.
The effect of all this, of course, was to cement the Mormon community into an impregnable whole. Mormons survived initial persecution and developed the bones and sinews of a people, as did Israel in exodus. Forging a community in the American West, they grew under intense and protracted persecution and matured in an isolation that ensured a distinctive, deeply rooted community.
But great costs were paid. The combined effect of overt federal persecution and the more thorough and irresistible subversion of Mormon society by widespread industrialization and encroaching national markets finally obliterated much that was unique. Nevertheless, a distinctive Mormon culture survived–part religious community, part ethnic group. Mormonism has powerful characteristics of both church and tribe.
THE nineteenth-century Mormon experience can only be described as heroic, whether one’s historiography is faithful or detached. Our challenge as we approach the twenty-first century is to continue with equal integrity. This cannot be done by attempting to repeat the past, nor by continuing traditions appropriate to continental migrations, colonization, and resistance to persecution. The courage of our founders can be approached only with the same robust vitality that empowered Mormons of the nineteenth century to break decisively with the culture of their time.
Like our individual strengths and dominant characteristics, our corporate strength of intense communality possesses a shadow that we deny at our peril. We have inherited the shadow of our fathers’ nineteenth-century traditions of great strength, not simply the traditions themselves. If we recognize this we have nothing to fear; if we do not, we will descend into a parody of the past, devoid of its integrity. We must examine the characteristics of our intense communal insularity and authoritarianism, particularly as they reinforce chauvinistic, ethnocentric tendencies that are no longer valuable in our dissent from the larger national culture. II
The apostles and elders and brethren send greeting unto the brethren which are of the gentiles…. For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things.
-Acts of the Apostles 15:23, 28
But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us; … Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God,
THE challenge for the Church in the twenty-first century must be to forge common bonds, not to accentuate differences. Our characteristics of both church and ethnic group must be acknowledged. The characteristics of church possess the regenerative power to change our lives toward God’s image-saving grace. Those of ethnic tribalism do not.
Military-like discipline may have been needed to colonize a hostile frontier, but it is an obstruction to conversion, not a helpful invitation to mature spirituality. Conversion occurs from the center outward; external coercion does not help the process. We need to move from authoritarian ethnocentricity to a church of Jesus and Paul. When worship of community displaces worship of God we accentuate our idiosyncrasy by self-love and self-worship. When we worship God we proceed inward to our center and outward in identification with all the human family and all life. We love as God loves. Nevertheless, the empowerment possible only with the Church in community must be preserved. The religious teachings and practices of the Church can only become real in community. Outside community, such teachings remain strangely disembodied ideas that have little effect on our lives. Church without community is impotent. Community without church places itself rather than God at the center, resulting in an unregeneraing tribal culture.
THE Church in the first century after Christ also faced this grave crisis and the Pauline solution points the way for every Christian community that followed.
The Christian idea took flesh in community–an intense, insular, Jewish community. For some time it seemed inconceivable that Christianity could exist outside the Jewish matrix in which it was born; but Paul, like Joseph Smith, had a vision. Paul came to see that the sociology of Judaism was not prerequisite to the Christian idea. Christianity could be embodied in other cultures, all cultures, and Jesus, not the Jewish law, was the gateway. This vision precipitated so great a crisis in the Church that the first conference in Christian history was called at Jerusalem. After much discussion the Pauline vision was accepted. The enormous struggle to realize that vision ultimately cost Paul his life, but henceforth the direction of the Church was outward–to the entire Roman world and beyond.
No greater burden than the necessary core of the Christian message should be required of the community as a condition for accepting and living the Christian idea. Any Christian community exporting the gospel cannot require the investigating group to accept the sociology of the community presenting the message. The grafting culture must be given the same freedom enjoyed by the exporting group: to nourish the Christian message within their own cultural tradition.
Of course, some social practices in any culture may be antithetical to the Christian message. Other customs may be more or less conducive to Christian flowering; but each culture must receive freedom sufficient to make these experiments and reach their own conclusions. The alternative is cultural imperialism in the guise of Christian evangelization.
The dialogue within Christianity as to what constitutes the necessary core message continues in every generation and in every community where the message is introduced. The process compels openness and outwardness, even in fiercely insular communities that resist every step–unless, of course, they give idolatrous, ethnocentric self-worship. God is then displaced with the communal self which grows in its own image, accentuating every group characteristic in perfect caricature.
THIS dialogue on core essentials exists not only between contemporaneous communities but also between generations within the same community. The gradual change within a believing community obscures the evidence of the evolutionary process; but, the process can be seen starkly by separating the centuries.
Accordingly, we examine here the Mormon experience in the nineteenth century and contrast it with our situation now as we approach the twenty-first century. What follows are examples of persistent nineteenth century practices which I believe Mormonism will have to confront as it embraces a different time and other cultures. By no means is this a challenge to the spiritual core of either Christianity or Mormonism. Rather, it is an invitation to discover and distinguish our core spiritual principles from the sociological matrix in which we happen to live at a particular time and place. The former we hold and revere; the latter we change as circumstance reveals to us the wisdom of doing so.
The inherited gift of intense community has a tendency to enthrone any peculiar communal characteristic as if it were a divine absolute. This is particularly true for Mormons because of a peculiar insight that, paradoxically, should produce openness but if unexamined results in the opposite–the open canon. Joseph Smith believed that God could and would give revelatory messages to the world, revealing himself in every age and among many peoples. With a liberality of spirit that even now seems starkly modern he taught that the Jewish and early Christian scripture was holy but not perfect or inerrant, and surely not complete. God had spoken and would yet speak to many groups. The records of that dialogue could be considered to be as authoritative–authentic–as our Bible. The result of this insight should have been, and to some extent has been, that we avoid the presumptuousness of creeds that tightly define and confine God and our relationship to him. Every generation and people wants to be left with grat freedom to explore that awesome mystery. Such a people, one would think, would never presume formally or informally to excommunicate each other–to pronounce anathema–because someone saw another way.
Over time, however, Mormons developed an idea of a de facto infallibility concerning prophetic pronouncements. The authoritarian tendencies developed in our early community building were inappropriately transferred to doctrinal areas and ecclesiastical government. Although Joseph denied any notion of infallibility or inerrancy, even for the biblical canon, we have come perilously close to believing in the infallibility of the comments of religious leaders, however casual and unexamined.
Similarly, like any other religious community, we can all too easily see God’s benediction upon, perhaps even his hand in creating, our every social more. Our group customs–for example, our predilection for conservative politics and classical, marketplace economics–become hallowed, divine.
If this process continues unchallenged and unexamined, we begin to worship ourselves, not God. We enthrone every social peculiarity as being revelatory. We defend and accentuate every custom and cling to them through time. Customs of a particular time and place, perhaps defensible or at least understandable near the time of origin, become increasingly grotesque as we carry them into another age.
A painful example illustrates this phenomenon. Early Mormons originally came in large numbers from New England and the East. These displaced Puritans carried with them healthy notions of abolitionist sentiment. In Missouri, some blacks were evangelized, baptized, and ordained to priesthood office, like other converts. Understandably, slave-owning Missourians were frightened. As a self-defensive measure of preservation in an increasingly violent environment, the Mormons agreed to desist from evangelization among slaves. Over time, and probably unevenly at first, the ordination of blacks to priesthood office ceased.
In time the origin of this policy was forgotten. Given the Mormon belief in continuing public revelation, we increasingly bestowed upon this expedient practice a revelatory status. Later, Brigham Young and subsequent Church leaders made perfectly indefensible statements to justify the practice long after its evolutionary origins were lost. A wretched theology of sorts grew up around a practice that, at any point and surely beyond the early Missouri community, was antithetical to Christian teaching. Paradoxically, an early Mormon insight was lost–that abolitionism and Christian equality were consistent with God’s universal fatherhood and our universal brotherhood and sisterhood–and a belief in continuing revelation was turned on its head.
Although that practice has now thankfully been reversed, its history is a good study in the potential dysfunctions of the community. Our notion of revealed truth must be moderated, indeed bounded, by the realization that we perceive God’s will through the filter of our own subjectivity, our imperfection, our humanity. Without this insight that which should liberate, imprisons, outworn practice becomes new dogma, more rigid, not adaptable to changing circumstance. When the concept of revelation is joined by a notion of prophetic infallibility, a dogmatic system is born that eventually becomes excessively authoritarian, ironically imprisoning a people in the past when the revelatory notion was meant to free them from the past.
Similarly, we have adopted a means of succession to the presidency of the Church based on length of apostolic tenure which insures that this vital office once held by the youthful Joseph will almost always be held by someone of extreme old age. Yet no authoritative doctrinal precept mandates this. Over time custom hardened into rule and now Church government is enfeebled at senior levels in the Council of the Twelve and the First Presidency. Nothing in Church doctrine forbids an emeritus status for members of the Quorum of the Twelve. This would insure younger leadership in the Council of the Twelve and in the person of the president of the Church. Apostolic succession to the presidency, still based on tenure, could continue only with individuals at least a decade younger assuming the presidency. Or, better yet, perhaps members of the Council of the Twelve might select the president from among themselves.
AT this point another early Mormon characteristic with its accompanying twentieth-century shadow appears: We accept a greater degree of authoritarian leadership than would most people living in a modern industrial and democratic state. Undoubtedly this authority is legitimate: it is uncoerced, flowing naturally from a group as homogeneous and communal as ours.
But a religious community must also respect individuals even as it preserves the core beliefs of the community. Mormons believe in uncreated intelligence: A soul sovereign and co-eternal with God.
I was in the beginning with the Father, and am the
First-born…. Ye were also in the beginning with the
Father…. Man was also in the beginning with God.
Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made,
neither indeed can be…. Behold, here is the agency of man… (D&C 93-21, 23, 29, 31).
This should allow–demand–an enormous respect for each other’s beliefs, our individual vision, even in community. Prophetic leadership should consciously decry any notion of infallibility of leader or scripture.
If we believe this, then egalitarian dialogue should be encouraged with full heart. This would include searching, open, and honest examination of our history and our scripture. “Honest” and “faithful” history would be the same. Mormon teachings and practices would be discussed and opinions sought at all levels.
The profoundly energizing Mormon practice of lay priesthood would be lived more fully than it is currently, with even less distinction between clergy and laity. Theological notions or Church practice would be discussed with great openness in every class and quorum. Any creed-like attempt to confine God to something as tiny as our minds would be greeted with good humor. Authoritarian pronouncement would be made infrequently and with caution. All women would be invited into full priesthood participation, with every quorum and office in the Church open to them. No Mormon Christian doctrine, of which I am aware, forbids this. The absence of feminine spirituality in the councils of church government is a loss of such enormity in Christian history as to be impossible to overstate. With other Christian traditions Mormons must no longer ignore this open wound.
By not decreasing authoritarian tendencies within Mormonism, we risk spiritual and moral infantilism or, at best, adolescence–a dependence on others for inner spiritual and moral structure that prevents our own robust maturity. Notions of lay priesthood assume that for most purposes we need no intermediary between ourselves and God, save Christ himself. One may be our spokesperson, to be sure, at the pulpit or before the altar. But he or she acts for us all. On another occasion, we might be the voice. No difference in kind exists. This is the mature form of Christian belief that can take us into the next century, growing in likeness of God, not ourselves.
How do we get there? Perhaps the Pauline example contains the key. A burgeoning church, spilling beyond our mountain enclave - our “sequestered inland place”– will face challenges in crossing each frontier. With each barrier we cross, we will become more a church and less an ethnic group. If simultaneously we maintain our core beliefs, our communalism will remain intact but more refined.
This growth will bring with it paradox. As we attempt to save our brothers and sisters in the Third World, perhaps they will save us. As Mormon missionaries evangelize people in South and Central America, Asia, and Africa, we constantly will be forced to decide what portion of our message is social custom from Kanosh, Kanab, and Kanaraville, or the essence of Christianity.
Our lay priesthood is an enormous advantage. We cannot impose foreign clergy on native communities for long. At most, we will train native lay leaders and ordain them within months. We simply cannot impose full religious and cultural imperialism on a community in which the entire congregation at every level of leadership is governed from among themselves. If we listen, they will teach us.
The issues will be many: African or Tongan drums in religious ceremonies; forms of dress and food; appropriateness of practices or teachings in a radically new environment; marriage customs. Poverty in the Third and Fourth Worlds will be our great teacher: our cultural notions of the government’s role in a nation’s economy will be called into question and appropriately discarded by many nations. Our wealth blinds us; their poverty may remove the scales from our eyes. A core Christian gospel will emerge, “these necessary things,” uncluttered with our own sociological baggage.
Similarly, as Mormonism enters Communist countries in Eastern Europe and eventually China, we will find that our own ethnocentric notions, however dear to us, are not essential to the gospel’s core.
Within our own country the growth of Mormonism in large urban areas among diverse racial and ethnic groups will force a dialogue upon us and within us. The result, I hope, will be a different sort of community: richer in texture, more diverse, less authoritarian.
Perhaps we can enter into interfaith dialogue with our Christian and non-Christian brothers and sisters, not seeing them primarily as potential converts but as disciples like ourselves.
We might give more attention to converting ourselves to the truths they possess. Mormonism’s influence for good in the world will be much greater, I suspect, among the many who remain firmly attached to their own religious tradition, rather than within the relative handful of people who join our faith.
We trivialize God when we see all history pointing toward New York in the 1820s. Our own community becomes too short, too narrow, too thin. Robert Bellah’s “community of memory”[5] must extend for us before the nineteenth century. In the next century, as our Mormon community moves outward into Africa, South and Central America, and Asia we will likely expand in time as well. Mormons who think that God ceased to speak sometime after the first century of the Christian era and resumed dialogue with us in the nineteenth century ignore centuries rich in the continuing story of God’s relationship with us all. That bleak picture of utter apostasy is hardly brightened by seeing a few preparatory acts as God’s prologue, as it were, to the Restoration.
Alternatively, we can choose to see God’s message in the writings of Christian fathers and mothers through the centuries as wonderful messages complete in themselves. A vital sense of continuity is lost for Mormons, who generally are closed to such literature and history. The Latin and Greek fathers; the writings and meditations of Christian mystics from the first century to the present; reformers within and without the dominant church of a time and place–all reveal the mystery of God’s relationship with us.
Beyond Christianity the Jewish tradition, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and the Islamic tradition have a richness to offer us, particularly within the contemplative traditions of East and West. We may gain invaluable richness from an inward journey, not into cultural ethnocentncity but to the center of our own soul. We Mormons have excelled in the outward journey as colonizers and organizers, making deserts blossom, but too many of our hearts may remain an arid desert. Christian and non-Christian mystical traditions have much to share with us, more in corrective ways than as replacements for our traditions. Taken alone, the mystical tradition could result in an other-worldliness divorced from human need and social action. Equally true, social activism shorn of direction from our spiritual center could produce even greater injustice. A dynamic balance between spiritual meditation and action for social justice is the ideal.
Our view and use of scripture could expand as well.
Overwhelmingly we now see the Bible as a proof text, using isolated passages to prove a particular teaching, and pass this off as pastoral instruction in scripture. What loss. This is strange, too, because formally we do not accept the fundamentalist belief in scriptural inerrancy, nor do we see the scriptures as a source of priesthood empowerment, as in the Protestant tradition. As we sense our own need for real nourishment, we may move toward non-dogmatic, non-apologetic study of the Bible simply to gain the richness of its real message.
We would aid this process greatly by diminishing our monopolistic use of the King James version of the Bible. This most beautiful of all English translations is a treasure beyond price. But thousands of documents are now available, and have been for decades, that the King James translators did not have. And our language has changed dramatically. If we want the scriptures to come alive for us and for our children, we should embrace new translations. (The New English, the New Jerusalem, and the Anchor Bibles are three of my favorites.) Again, it is strange that a people who rejected Protestant fundamentalism toward scripture in the nineteenth century should seek so avidly to board a ship in this century that is so clearly sinking as is this form of scriptural fundamentalism, relegating scripture to the status of an icon: something to be venerated but not understood. Our choice of Bible translation, too, must turn outward. If not, we remain cut off from much dialogue in biblical research and from greater maning and sensitivity in biblical education. Of course Joseph Smith used the King James translation, what other translation would he use? After one wades through all the rationalizations for our current practice. This is the fundamental reason, and it is not sufficient.
I suspect that even something as central and sacred in Mormon teaching as the role of the family will come under scrutiny as we move into the next century. It seems reasonable to believe that loving family associations formed in mortality may continue in the resurrection. But retaining the absolute centrality of the family in our beliefs can cause us to miss a much bigger picture. Millions of single and divorced people can be hurt, feeling that they are only marginally involved in Church participation. It is possible to make an icon of the family as easily as a particular version of the bible.
Jesus, in his own life and teachings, revealed a much grander vision. In almost every example of family association in his life and ministry, Jesus taught us to transcend the family. The family relationship was often used by him as a negative example–that is, he taught that if our sense of love and obligation did not move beyond family and blood relationships, we had not yet perceived his message. When his family found him in the temple he responded to Mary’s mild rebuke by saying that he was about his Father’s business–not theirs (Luke 2:41-50); when informed that his mother and brothers were outside, he told a crowded room that his disciples were his family (Matthew 12:46-50); in an intentionally harsh statement so we would not miss the point, he responded to a disciple’s request to bury his father, “Let the dead bury the dead” (Matthew 8:21-22); there is no evidence Jesus ever married; his disciples forsook all and followed him (I hope they did not desert their families, but the record does not clearl demonstrate that they did not). III
I am the way, the truth, and the life.
Ours is a society that requires people to be strong and independent. As believers, we must often operate alone in uncongenial circumstances, and we must have the inner spiritual strength and discipline to do so. Objecting to its authoritarianism and paternalism, religious individualists have often left the church or sect they were raised in. Yet such people often derive more of their personal strength than they know from their communities of origin. They have difficulty transmitting their own sense of moral integrity to their children in the absence of such a community and they have difficulty sustaining it themselves when their only support is from transient associations of the like-minded. It would seem that a vital and enduring religious individualism can only survive in a renewed relationship with established religious bodies. Such a renewed relationship would require changes on both sides. Churches and sects would have to learn that they can sustain more autonomy than they had thought, and reliious individualists would have to learn that solitude without community is merely loneliness.
THE journey outward is not so much toward individualism, though that is part of it. The individual must be free from coercive, demeaning authoritarianism if he or she is to mature spiritually into responsible autonomy. If the community is too insular, this process of individuation can take place only by breaking outside. The journey outward, however, is primarily a journey into larger community, larger in time and space. We will come to identify ourselves with Christians beyond the Mormon experience, those living now and those who have gone before; with believers in traditions other than Christianity we see similarities in the human quest that are more fundamental see than our differences. Part of this recognition may come as we travel inward on the meditative journey to our own center, or outward as we graft into our community of memory others from radically different cultures.
Jesus’ life and message transcended community, race, gender, nationality, tribe, even family. If we trivialize this message we violate the first commandment by some form of self-worship. Ethnocentricity indeed has power. Religion in community is the spiritual word embodied. But ethnocentricity alone is communal self-worship. The refining process of God’s grace is in the true religious experience, with God at the center.
Jesus broke traditional bonds. He recognized that his message would set children against parents, brothers and sisters against their kin. But that same message has the power to bind them up again, united across differences of race, gender, nationality, religious traditions even through time. His parable of the Good Samaritan; his teaching of having no place to lay his head or to lodge; his refusal to eat or converse only with the “good people”; the first great crisis of Christianity, that of resolving Jewish and Gentile Christianity through the Pauline paradigm all point the way.
Jesus preached and practiced a transcendent message of self-love, love of neighbor, and finally love of enemy. Neighbor and enemy combined such that no one was excluded from our love. On our inner journey of Christian meditation, on our outer journey that will transcend race, gender, and nationality, Mormonism must and will overleap the mountain redoubt that nurtured us in our infancy. With the Puritans across the continent in an earlier age, with Joseph and Brigham, Augustine and Paul, we continue our search for the City of God. NOTES
[1] Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience, (New York Vintage Books, Random House, 1965), p. 3.
[2] Journal of Discourses (JD), 9;284.
[5] R.N. Bellah, R. Madsen, William Sullivan, A Swidler and S. M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart (New York: Harper & Row, 1985).
[6] Bellah, pp. 247-48, note 8.
