Ed Firmage Jr.An Open Letter to Paul Mero: You Asked for It
Paul,
I’ll tell you a bit about myself qua LDS person. I was born and raised in the church, served a mission to Germany, got married in the temple, paid my tithing, did all of the right things. Then one night as I was reading the Book of Mormon in preparation for teaching a Sunday school class, a realization hit me like a bolt out of the blue: “This is a modern book.” I described this experience years later (anyone interested can see the article at http://signaturebooks.com/apocrypha.htm) as a deconversion because it had all of the inscrutable suddenness of conversions TO Mormonism that I had seen on occasion in the mission field. That night my life changed forever. There was no arguing with this experience. It wasn’t the end of a years-long struggle with faith. I had no such struggle. The realization came unsought, and unwanted. But it happened, and it overwhelmed me. Sometime later, I was coming back from an evening in San Francisco (my wife and I were living in Berkeley at the time), and as I drove over the Bay Bridge and peered into the darkness, I felt like I was staring into the abyss. EVERYTHING about my life was up for grabs. My most cherished beliefs were shattered like Humpty Dumpty beyond any chance of repair. No sane person seeks such loneliness and emptiness, or such terror.
Now, if it makes this experience palatable to you, you can dismiss me as someone who simply gave into temptation. But I’ve had temptation, Paul, and sometimes I’ve yielded and sometimes I haven’t. This wasn’t temptation. This was being run over by a truck that you never saw coming.
Does this make me an apostate? Perhaps, in the sense that I’m no longer active in the church. But apostate to me means someone who CHOOSES to leave, who deliberately turns his back on the church, someone who therefore by way of self-justification seeks to harm the church. I never did that. In fact, it may surprise you to learn that I’m still on the books as a member. So is my dad. I have never and will never ask to have my name removed. The church may choose to excommunicate me, but that will be their act not mine. I make this choice out of respect for my past. I did not EVER repudiate my church or my past. My world changed and I found myself removed as if by transporter to another place from which I could never return to meaningful fellowship based on shared belief.
But I owe my past something. I owe Brigham Young, my great-great-great grandfather something. On any number of points of doctrine, Brigham and I would probably be at odds. There is, for example, the question of the existence of God, which he affirmed and which I doubt. But on any number of other issues, he and I would have a lot in common. Brigham, for example, devoted his entire life to the notion of building the kingdom of God here in Utah. Not a doctrinal kingdom but a real-life, down-to-earth, practical kingdom. Strange as it may sound, I share that vision. My kingdom isn’t a religious one in the conventional sense, unless for you as for me religion is ALL about how we relate to each other and to the earth. I don’t give a rat’s ass about whether heaven is one kingdom or three or whether the three Nephites walk the earth or not. What matters is what effect our belief has on how we live in the here and now. Belief, it seems to me now in retrospect, is more often than not a distraction from the real business of life, which is what we make of it.
It’s for this reason that I still care about what the LDS church does. I happen to be in love with Utah. I love this place passionately, and it hurts me to see the mess of it that we are now making, with the church’s connivance or unawareness. Some time ago, I saw a documentary entitled The Power of Community http://www.powerofcommunity.org/cm/index…), which tells the story of what happened to Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union. We here in the U.S. have heard and seen some of the bad things, but few of us have heard about Cuba’s amazing transformation in positive ways. One of these was the refashioning of Havana into one of the greenest cities on earth. Because they had no oil with which to make artificial fertilizers and pesticides and because they had no oil to power industrial farm equipment and processing plants, Havanans had to reinvent how they grow and process food. Today, half of the food consumed in Havana is raised inside the city limits, and 80% of that food is organic. No city in America can touch these figures. All around Havana, every square inch of available space, from rooftops to patios to yards to empty lots has been converted into garden. People raise, process, market, and buy their own food, neighborhood by neighborhood. Similar transformations have occurred in education and health care. Despite their many problems, Cubans have a life expectancy equal to our own and a child mortality rate better than ours. Cuba is in fact an exporter of well-trained physicians and other knowledge workers. It is a pioneer in the development of phage technology, an alternative approach to antibiotics. And Cubans are reexperiencing what real community is about.
As I watched this documentary, I thought, why is this happening in Havana and not Salt Lake? Must we too go through disaster before we are willing to change, or can we muster again the sort of energy that enabled the early Mormon saints to build a viable, self-sustaining community here in the unlikeliest of places? Can we build such a community anew here?
We face problems greater than any the pioneers did. What’s at stake, although it isn’t yet our immediate survival, is nothing less than the survival of our civilization. I see an opportunity for the LDS church to play an undreamed-of role in remaking our society on sustainable grounds. Salt Lake is uniquely positioned because of its built-in social matrix and its history, however dusty and forgotten, in communal living. I absolutely believe that the LDS church can in deed change the world, by working to change Salt Lake City, along the lines now being pioneered by our communist rivals in Cuba.
When, therefore, I see the church squandering its real and political capital chasing gays when it should be building solar power installations, replanting ward gardens and farms, and urging the saints with all possible urgency to embrace conservation, I DO get angry. It’s not because I can’t leave the church alone. For twenty years after my deconversion, I wrote nothing and essentially did nothing in connection with the church. As far as I was concerned, the church was a non-issue. I have never attacked the church on doctrinal grounds, and I discussed my own story strictly as a personal memoir, not an agenda for apostates to gang-bang the church.
My isolation came to a self-imposed end when I began to realize how much my own life had to change in order to become sustainable. And I realized that however much I did on my own, it would probably come to nothing without a similar transformation throughout Utah, and indeed the world. Change must START with me, but it can’t end with me. That’s where Who Watches the Watchers and I part company. He’s a survivalist, I’m not.
So, I began my own underground, but now increasingly public, campaign to get the church off its ass and into the frontline, where it should be as an institution that claims prophetic leadership. If the church does not act now and we end up where climate scientists predict we’ll be, the membership of the church and the world at large will have reason to point the finger at the men downtown and say, “You frauds! How dare you talk to us about prophecy when you failed to act ten or twenty years ago on problems evident to anyone!”
So, Paul, that’s my story. If it helps you to sleep at night, call me an apostate. But our dialog is more than a debating contest. We face life and death problems to whose scope and nature the church has yet to awaken. Forget about me. Consider what YOUR role could be toward the church. If you, as a faithful member, think that things here in SLC are just fine, that the air we breathe is OK, that the fate of our snowpack and of our rivers is in good hands, fine. If not, what are YOU doing about it? Why aren’t YOU demanding action from the church? For let’s not kid ourselves, you and I and Who Watches the Watchers can build as nice a little survivalist kingdom as we want behind our domestic barricades but without the church’s cooperation Salt Lake City as a whole will remain untransformed. And untransformed, it is a bomb waiting to go off.
July 22nd, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Those are some pretty tough questions there Paul! Willing to give up a little cash and time to the cause of sustaining the lives and reputations of your fellow Utahn’s?
My great, great, great grandfather, Lewis Barney, came into the valley with Brigham Young and helped colonize the west. I don’t follow much history, even that of my ancestors because I think the problems we face are very different, but I think Lewis would be very ashamed of the fact that the church won’t defend the constitution or the laws today and instead seems to be more interested in it’s perceived benefit of Hannity’s radio show, and Utah’s local Hannity, Doug Wright. Radio has a HUGE influence on people’s opinions and actions.
July 22nd, 2008 at 4:21 pm
There are no so blind, as those that will not see.
Noah took his ridiculing and made plans.
If the effort to get participation in some way to avoid what are deemed coming catastrophes is accomplished, great Ed, if not it will come down to individuals.
Survival is the effect of living well. There is no grand transformation. Cubans only adapted when the rug was pulled out from under them, and as sad as it is, it takes that to move societies to a place of survival, and with that comes the improvements. Or not, there is some luck involved.
Given the option of growing your own food, or having someone else grow it, the bulk of the modern world wants someone else to do it, while they do something else.
Do it yourself Ed, people will adopt it when they see the benefits. It is the best way, as you enter the mainstream through infiltration, not by overtly demanding the power around you to change. It won’t you know, not in a timely fashion.
Structurally, our current system is resistant to change because so many livelihoods are tied up in the current economic paradigm. Keep feeding the beast and it continues to grow and dig in. Change yourself, and you rob the status quo of the power of your sweat and money.
Idea: You proclaim yourself the new Prophet, have this revelation of a better way, and force the church to adapt. Hell, you are related to the Prophet Brigham himself, you have the right, no the duty, to have a revelation and lead the People of Zion to the promised land.
Or you could buy some of your own solar panels and move forward, leave the herd to its own ends. They could well be bleating for your guidance before all is said and done.
It’s a no lose proposition.
July 22nd, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Larry the “church” wanted to create its own kingdom, and while it may have shared some values of the US Constitution, it certainly did not wish to be ruled by it. It took a little forceful persuasion to get the church to respect the dominance of the US Federal government.
There is a history of not wanting the government to control them.
Do they support Federal immigration law?
Radio only has impact if you listen, and then believe what you hear, and then try to apply it to your life, and others. NPR has the same goal. It all comes down to what appeals to you, and what you believe in.
July 22nd, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Larry,
Yep, the contrast between church teaching and institutional practice is glaring. I have LDS friends who see it and wonder aloud to me whether the leadership is just fraud. Irony of ironies, I’m the one telling THEM that it’s probably a matter of people being thoughtless. I do wonder, though, how one can be SO thoughtless and still put a suit and tie on without assistance. Charitably, I say the same thing of Doug Wright, who strikes me not as a bad man but a goodnatured fool. I guess that’s why he’s a radio host. Smart, well-informed men wouldn’t last long. They never do in hierarchies.
Part of the problem is the isolation of LDS leaders and their extreme workloads. Some months ago, I had dinner with an emeritus LDS general authority friend, who confessed to me, a little hesitantly, that, and I use his exact words, the leaders don’t have time to think. They’re too busy. Combine that with the fact that they are surrounded by yes-men who must accept their superiors’ thinking as divinely inspired, and you get a culture of profound intellectual inbreeding. They don’t act on global warming, not just because they don’t regard it as a moral issue but because they’re just plain ignorant about it. And so are most of the folks in their downline, who suffer from the same set of problems. It’s only when you get out to the edges of the LDS hierarchy that light penetrates the cloud of busy ignorance.
This surely is one of the great ironies and tragedies of the LDS church. It’s an organization that espouses the potentially radical and earthshaking idea of continuing revelation, and because of that waits for revelation to occur before acting. Not surprisingly, the revelation doesn’t, and desperately needed guidance never happens. The full truth of this paradox struck me not too long ago as I considered the fact, and it is a fact not my opinion, that the church hasn’t had a significant addition to its scripture since Joseph Smith. Brigham Young pointedly denied being Joseph’s successor as far as scriptural revelations were concerned. None of their successors have added to scripture either. Only two major additions to LDS scripture since Brigham Young, the 1890 Manifesto banning polygamy and the 1978 revelation to Spencer Kimball allowing blacks to hold the priesthood. Both of these are negative revelations. The first revoked one of Joseph Smith’s most important revelations. Hardly an expansion of doctrine there. The other simply undid a century or so of ingrained behavior. In point of fact, there is no revelation in Mormon scripture prohibiting blacks from holding the priesthood. So, again, at best Spencer Kimball’s revelation is a revocation of scripture, at worst a revocation of bigoted habit, pure and simple. Other than this, not ONE significant expansion of Mormon scriptural thinking. It is said, of course, that the sermons and writings of LDS leaders can be revelations. Fine. And that would make them different from non-LDS religious folk exactly how? Somehow, one expects more from men who call themselves not pastors not rectors not priests not clergy but PROPHETS. Of prophets one expects a little higher standard on all counts. More vision. More passion. More principle. Isaiah was a prophet–I speak here anthropologically without validating whether or not he saw and heard what he said he did. He spoke and acted like a man who had been energized by contact with the creator of the world. Joseph Smith was a prophet–again I make no statement about the ultimate truth of his story. Brigham, in a different way, was a prophet, a practical prophet, who called down the blessings and wrath of the almighty without hesitation. What we’ve seen since is pretty paltry stuff. I would love to see a prophet at work in Salt Lake again, kafir though I am.
July 22nd, 2008 at 4:49 pm
Who Watches,
Actually I am. This year my wife and I tore out our back yard and planted a garden. We anticipate that it will be a big part of our life going forward.
July 22nd, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Good thing, in the Utah climate, drying things is very doable, and well kept they will last all year. Other than that there is canning.
Growing a garden is a fundamental use of solar power, and if it is in the backyard, it needs no refrigeration until picked, and no fuel to get to “market”. No doubt it is good. Next step, set asides in urban areas where people can grow vegetables and recharge. In Europe this is everywhere, and people even have tiny cabins to sleep free afternoons away, after tending their gardens and drinking wine.
As a residence in a city it is always good to know if your soil is pure. I was back East drilling environmental monitor wells this spring, and you would be very surprised where contamination is found. Very surprised.
Check this, if you plant kales and lettuce in those big(2 ft. in diameter) black planters, 2/3rds full of good soil, they grow lettuce well into fall, and protect the plants from cold. A cover is enough on cold nights. I have seen entire gardens in these tubs, and have used them myself.
For lettuce you can keep planting seed all summer, and get results into fall.
July 22nd, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Excellent points, as always, Ed.
July 22nd, 2008 at 8:09 pm
WoW! Thank You Ed
July 22nd, 2008 at 9:37 pm
Who is Watching
For perhaps the first time, we can agree completely on something. Thanks. I’ll pass this on to my wife, the master gardener.
July 22nd, 2008 at 9:56 pm
At some point it could become clear, that what I have done here, despite the resistance, forces the progressive movement out of its comfort zones..
..and into the arena, where the goal should be intellectual combat, equipped with the means of vanquishing opponents. You can expect no less from the best of your opponents that are zealots. They mean to win, not compromise, or rule from consensus.
Consensus is not possible, it is a culture war, and to be sure, opponents are not going to quit. Ever. It is a permanent condition of the human race in my view. History keeps pointing it out when reviewed.
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Thanks for sharing, Ed.