Exorcising McConkie

Speaker 1

Our next speaker at the Conference of the Humanists Who Do Stuff is Ben Blair. Ben holds a PhD in philosophy and education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and is a co-founder of teacherur. co. a platform to deinstitutionalize education. He and his wife, Gabrielle Blair, are the parents of six children and live in Oakland, California. He currently serves as Chief of Special Projects Officer of the Mormon Transhumanist Association. Ben.

Ben Blair

So I’ll be reading a handful of meditations, so they’re kind of breaking points in between. My presentation. It’s not one fluid. And I’ll start with one called blood.

Ben Blair

Let’s think the questions together then. Is that a blood? Okay, yeah.

Ben Blair

The approach of a testing, Jesus understands you. Jesus will heal, comfort, lift, unburden you. can work to deceive the attesters that the burdens of others are Jesus’s to carry. This approach can, ironically, separate us rather than bind us together. because we would be healers and healed, throw our hands up, even if in prayer, rather than extend them to another. This approach can work to soothe and trick the evildoer into thinking he’s not responsible for the evil he carries out or facilitates, even through inaction. And if he is somehow to blame, it will be fixed by Jesus anyway. But these interpretations are misreadings that deceive us away from the work of Christ.

Ben Blair

We all have blood on our hands. Christ’s true followers are doing something about it.

Ben Blair

Two facts exist. Unless there is a drastic change, death is the inevitable end for all of us. 2. Our technological power is increasing at a rate yet unheard of.

Ben Blair

So which is the faithful position? That death has been conquered? Or that we may yet be able to conquer death, the Antichrist.

Ben Blair

I see your God who’s done everything already, and I see the Antichrist. Its message is that the work is done, or the work is permanently reserved for him. Jesus accomplished his part, which, as it happens, was all that needed to be done. In an ironic twist, Jesus is turned and used as the pacifier to keep us from doing the work of Christ. Jesus, the model of taking on all burdens, is invoked as a reason to not take on burdens, because he already took them all on. Jesus has twisted and used as the pacifier to convince us that reading sacred texts, performing rituals, and obeying leaders and rules is the whole of the work.

Ben Blair

But no one believes it. We can sustain it only for a time. The texts, rituals, leaders, and rules themselves point to something more. and betray the attempt to lull us. Moreover, the suspicion that we are responsible only grows with time, even as the harsh prospect that the burdens are ours is frightening.

Ben Blair

Here is where Jesus, the Savior, the model, offers not so much comfort as hope and faith and encouragement. The burden is great. The work is real and daunting. And that cliche phrase that isn’t even scriptural suddenly resounds as if from Christ. It won’t be easy, but humanity and what it may become is worth it.

Ben Blair

This next one is called Exercising McConkie. I’ve heard that Bruce R. McConkey was as charitable as he was scholarly and dogmatic. To be clear, I’m not talking about the actual McConkie, and no doubt one could find passages in his work to contradict this caricature I’m portraying. Rather, I’m critiquing the mythical McConkie that Mormonism has let fester for too long. I’ll differentiate this mythical macaki from the actual macaki by way of an asterisk and goatee.

Ben Blair

If you’re not familiar with the show Big Little Lies, this may be a bit of a spoiler, but I hope not. Big Little Lies is a series set on the coast of California that meditates on the fallout from the actions of a rapist and abuser on a community. It casts a light on undiagnosed, unreported, unpunished, unrecognized violence that underpins the community and affects everyone in ways they aren’t even conscious of, even though it all finds its source in a single perpetrator. It is a heavy, murky weight and burden they can’t escape because they have no frame of reference for a life without it, or perhaps they’ve abandoned their memory of that alternate world. They breathe and replenish its poisonous air, even if unwittingly. It is physically, emotionally, psychologically, and sexually violent. But as the hopeful setting next to the vast renewing Pacific Ocean attests, the air wasn’t always toxic like this, and it can’t remain toxic like this and survive. Sometimes the reasons for seemingly complicated cultural decline aren’t complicated at all.

Ben Blair

McConkie wasn’t the first church leader to shift Mormon culture away from its roots and toward dogma. but he may be the most influential in a strand that formed in defense and festered into a mutant. He turned the church increasingly insular separating the Church from the world to such a degree that his works feel like an act of masturbation. His influence is showing real signs of waning.

Ben Blair

but it still reverberates in four emphases that abuse and will eventually kill our faith an emphasis on escapism, or worshipping the abstract or permanently mysterious. An emphasis on framing faith as assenting to propositions communicable only to fellow Mormons while neglecting behavior that extends beyond the Mormon community to touch and heal the world in practical ways. An emphasis on a special Jesus who stands apart not as a model to follow, but as a mystery of which to merely testify. And an emphasis on centralized prophecy, authority, and inspiration.

Ben Blair

To exorcise McConkie, we must snuff out escapism and recognize that what is worthy of worship is worthy of practice or aspiring to practice and emulation. And frame faith as trust in, change toward, and fully immerse our bodies and minds in the role of Christ as exemplified by Jesus, as our affirmation reads. Resist a special and removed Jesus. The value of Jesus is, as far as we need to be concerned, is as an inspiration and model to follow. And embrace a radically egalitarian view of prophecy and revelation, as Carl Youngblood has described Joseph Smith’s view. The command is for all to take on the name and works of Christ.

Ben Blair

Sorry. Exercising McConkie will take time. First to rid ourselves of the evil spirit and then to come to ourselves again. But fresh, clean, rejuvenating air awaits us.

Ben Blair

And the last one, the moral genius of Christ. Over the past few years, the hearts of my brother and my mother both failed. My mother’s here today. A monitor displayed a flat line. Had their hearts stopped seventy years earlier like my grandfathers, or had they stopped while they were not in the company of able and responsible people like many others, they too would be dead. But years and people can make all the difference. My mom and brother were dead, but not irreversibly so.

Ben Blair

There was yet hope. And thanks to able and responsible humans, their practices, notably CPR and their machines, pacemakers, defibrillators, etcetera. , the products of intense, decades-long research and development, and made possible through improved technological capabilities, my brother and mother were revived and healed.

Ben Blair

But examples like my mom and brother are not the only place we can witness the lost revived. We can likewise look at evils such as human trafficking, extreme poverty, and other instances of lost souls, and discover that Here too, because of concentrated efforts and improved technology, we can see hope for revival and healing where we couldn’t before, even while far too many people are still dying or are otherwise lost. Again, time and people can make the difference.

Ben Blair

In all of this, I see Christ and the progressive expansion of the work begun as mere potential in swaddling clothes lying in a manger. Though it can be misguided, it is a comforting mindset to claim with certainty that wounds will be healed, that disorders will be ordered, that death itself will be overcome because of the incomprehensible goodness of someone else. I don’t have to carry the burden of humanity’s evils, or even my own, and my loved ones. Someone already made away. All I have to do is pledge my full allegiance to that one. All I have to do is take on his name, his work.

Ben Blair

Where individuals before had taken on the burdens of their family and community, Jesus was the first to take on the burdens of all. It was perhaps too heavy a load for anyone else, or more likely, too audacious an idea to even consider. Ah, but here’s the moral genius in conditioning the burden taking on others taking on his work He opened the human mindset to a way that all burdens could be carried by an ever-growing set of people with ever-improving capabilities to carry burdens who relentlessly take on the work of Christ until the work is done.

Ben Blair

Jesus was the indispensable model and provided the central orientation and posture toward the world. And because of this, Jesus is in all the work of Christ, to one degree or another. But the work of Christ extends beyond the person Jesus. The work is ours now, too. And it will only get done if people actually do and improve the work of healing the sick, mending the broken, and raising the dead.

Ben Blair

The comfort of our certainty thus transforms to the horror and awe of our responsibility to take the torch and proclaim the gospel. Our failure to date is not reason to abandon hope. Nor is it reason to assume that God will take care of everything after all, nor is it reason to doubt our faith in yet broadened physical, moral, and technological capacities on the horizon.

Ben Blair

The Gospel of Jesus Christ tells us that the work is not already done, far from it. Salvation, like peace on earth and CPR, will be worked out by those true disciples who actually join with Christ and deliver. O come, all ye faithful. Thanks.

Speaker 1

Ben and our next speaker, Carl, kindly agreed to split one speaking slot, so they will take questions together at the end of Carl’s presentation. Carl has been an avid technology enthusiast since early childhood and has been earning a living as a software engineer since 1997. He was a Mormon missionary for two years in Brazil, where his newfound aptitude for language led him eventually to get a degree in Portuguese from Brigham Young University and later a master’s in computer science from the University of Washington. Carl’s struggle to apply his faith meaningfully in today’s rapidly changing world led him to co-found the Mormon Transhumanist Association in 2006. Carl is passionate about science, technology, religion, philosophy, and the performing arts. And Carl is Vice President, Director, and Co-Founder of the MTA. Welcome, Carl.

Carl Youngblood

Thanks. It’s good to be with you guys today. So as I was trying to fill the schedule with speakers, We were going for bigger, heavier hitters. Well, at least heavier hitters than myself. I don’t know. Ben did a really knock that one out of the park, but. We tried to get a BYU professor, he declined, and so Ben and I agreed that if that had happened, that we would sort of split this time. So I’m really happy and honored to be tag teaming it with Ben here. And what I have for you today is more of just a smattering of thoughts. It’s not a fully developed idea. But the other day I read an article that was actually in the Jesuit Review that focused on the Catholic Church, but kind of really got my juices, my mantle juices flowing. And the question was, the church used to be like Silicon Valley, can it be again?

Carl Youngblood

Now some people have this caricature of Silicon Valley as this place where people invent really useless apps that like help them find bars more easily and don’t do any really meaningful things. I’m not trying to evoke that image of Silicon Valley more More the sort of audacious historical view of Silicon Valley as a place of tremendous innovation, right? So I think that this question could be applied to more than just the Catholic Church, like the article that I read. So, Christianity, as well as Mormonism, so this is the article, by the way, Christianity, as well as Mormonism. were revolutionary when they began. They overturned paradigms and instilled newfound zeal in millions of followers. This zeal was channeled into numerous world-changing initiatives

Carl Youngblood

To name a few, the early Christians had a revolutionary welfare system, caring for the poor and needy among them and providing superior health care services, giving rise to what would later come to be called hospitals. their life expectancy was significantly higher than their non-Christian peers. Contrary to outmoded claims that the Middle Ages were a dark era this period after the decline of the Roman Empire was one of unprecedented innovation, spurred on entirely by the tech powerhouses of the day. monasteries. Numerous advances in agriculture helped Europeans to emerge from the Malthusian trap that plagued the Romans. including the wheeled plow, the horse harness, the nailed horseshoe, and three-field crop rotation. This agricultural revolution caused a population boom which also led to economic, cultural, artistic, and technological dominance, including the invention of the university. All this has been described by some historians as a type of Industrial Revolution. Economists have argued that the increased productivity resulting from these innovations was also the cause of the general disappearance of slavery throughout Western Europe from the 9th through the 13th centuries. higher labor costs cause resources to be diverted away from growing the labor force towards the development of productivity enhancing technologies.

Carl Youngblood

And if we look more recently towards Mormon contributions, we can see that Mormons Founded Nauvoo from Mississippi Swampland to become one of the largest cities in Illinois at the time. They made profound contributions to the settlement of the West, spreading out from their home base in Salt Lake City. At a frantic pace to build townships throughout the intermountain west, each within a day’s journey from the next. They played a critical role in the construction of the Intercontinental Railroad. Samuel Bowles, editor and publisher of the Springfield, Massachusetts Republican. observed that but for the pioneership of the Mormons, discovering the pathway and feeding those who came out upon it all this central region of our Great West would now be many years behind its present development, and the railroad, instead of being finished, would hardly be begun. The Mormons also built a robust welfare system in the midst of the Great Depression that in many cases functioned more effectively than many federal initiatives. Individually, Mormons have contributed to numerous innovations in the arts and sciences, including the invention of the television, hearing aids, headphones, word processors traffic lights and artificial organs. But as an organization, we used to be more willing to solve big problems, like in the days of Brigham Young.

Carl Youngblood

Historically speaking, the Christian and Mormon churches have produced countless innovations, both social and technological. They did so prolifically, unabashedly, naturally, relentlessly. More than any particular invention, social welfare, the hospital, the university, the post slavery economy, the railroads, a social safety net What stands out is the mindset that made all of it possible, a mindset whose closest contemporary equivalent is much more to be found in the Bay Area of California than in the Vatican or the vast majority of Catholic dioceses, parishes, ministries, or LDS World buildings, I might add. Moreover, that Silicon Valley mindset was crucial, central, to performing the Church’s work of feeding the hungry, instructing the ignorant, and effecting broad-based social change. Mormon theologian Jacob Baker, I wish he had a picture on somewhere on social media that was a little more like, you know,

Carl Youngblood

Professional or whatever, but this is what this is what I found. Anyway, he’s really smart. I I admire him. Um he he kind of in a very bitter, ironic mode, so this is a little bit Harsh and satirical, but I think he highlights some significant contributors to this malaise. He says one of them is our hyper-assimilation into American life. Rather than stand apart from or in the way of the surrounding culture, we have decided to beat Americans at their own game. Be more patriotic than anyone else, he says. The will of the people with regard to government is the will of God. Always go along to get along. Obama, Trump, doesn’t matter. Personally moral versus personally corrupt, irrelevant. Always be the religion that is most friendly to whichever administration is in power by being the one religion that is the most harmless to that power. Second, he continues, our theology has become aggressively nihilistic in a social sense.

Carl Youngblood

We are never and will never be the vanguard for addressing and fighting poverty, domestic violence, religious violence, economic injustice. This is partly because church leaders are almost always very conservative and purposefully selected as such, and more concerned with conservative moral issues, but even there we aren’t leading the charge on anything except being against gay marriage, an exceptional asterisk issue for the Church. But the larger reason is that since the mid twentieth century we have moved more and more inward. front loading all our value into the family and material into the temple. Everything is about families and temples, everything more specifically, everything is about selling the ideology or idolatry of families and temples. Not necessarily helping all families to prosper. Consequently, the above moral issues are not seen as moral issues, They are more like the unfortunate consequences of living in a fallen world. Our purview isn’t to try and solve these problems. It’s to help everyone prepare to depart in family arcs for the undying lands, never to return. What really matters is where we’re going, not where we are at. Whatever can further that cause is moral, whatever can’t is irrelevant. As I said, it’s fairly harsh, but I do think that he identifies some important attitudes that, if taken to their extreme, can really be detrimental to our culture.

Carl Youngblood

We must abandon this spirit of escapism and retreat that has infected our theology in favor of wholehearted engagement with the present world. Early Christians spoke of a new Jerusalem, a utopia that would be built in this world, not in the world to come. Mormons reignited this zeal, laying the foundations of what they thought of as the actual city of God. We have the theological underpinnings necessary to make it happen. Can the Church, speaking both to various creeds collectively and to Mormons in particular, become the instigator of innovation that it once was? Whether existing churches do or not, I’m confident that some religion will emerge to supplant the lack of ambition and concern for human welfare that characterizes too many churches today. It may not be currently recognized as religion, but it will serve the function of religion, and the rigor it provokes will overpower the half-hearted attempts of outmoded orthodoxies.

Carl Youngblood

In closing, I just want to share two quotes that I feel really highlight some of these symptoms that I’m talking about. The first one is from Abraham J. Heschel, and it’s about how we got here. And the second one is from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and it’s more about how we or where to go from here.

Carl Youngblood

Religion declined. Let me back up. It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. when faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, loved by habit, when the crisis of to day is ignored because of the splendor of the past when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain, when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless. Finally, where we could go with trying to inspire the kinds of things that would make religion become the powerhouse that it once was.

Carl Youngblood

I really like this quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. Thank you.

Carl Youngblood

So we just have time for maybe a couple of questions. Maybe one for each. Yeah. How much of that? Who’s it for?

Speaker 4

I think ball was but how how much of the rut you feel we’re in? Is due to the church just growing to be a really big organization versus early days, you had to innovate all the time. Because you, I mean, just, you know, I’ve been in a entrepreneur and you get a lot more creative when you’re starting than when all of a sudden you have several hundred employees.

Carl Youngblood

Yeah when the chips are down you kind of find a way right? So taking that briefly, I feel that we’ve gone into a mode of more preservation of a legacy than of creation of a new Zion and New Jerusalem, right? We’ve lost a little bit of that zeal, and I think for good reason, like if you study the historical precedence. I think that there’s you can find all the reasons why the imperatives are changing for our organization, but I still this part of me doesn’t want to let die the idea that we could somehow rekindle that zeal.

Speaker 4

What would have to happen for a big organization like our church to get that created the way you’re talking about early church members?

Ben Blair

Do you want to take that one? Yeah, well, I think there are some. Really encouraging signs. Like, I think the response to the Syrian refugees, where the church basically said, if you see a way to, if If you see a problem, address it. Don’t expect top-down orders of here’s how we’re going to solve it all. It’s grassroots, you figure out a problem. And so that’s one example. Another example is in I live in Oakland and our stake, our stake president, it was after he was released, but there was a community center that would give food out to homeless people. And he said, Oh, we should take this on, and then started working on it. And then realized, oh, they need a big fridge, wrote to the church and said, Hey, would you sponsor a fridge for these people? We’re going to help. Execute this thing, but we could really use this help. And the church was super excited. The $30,000 refrigerator or whatever. So I think there are encouraging signs, and I think there it’s easy to say.

Ben Blair

Get mad at the church and say, How come the church isn’t solving all these problems? But I think we first can look at and I don’t want to say the church couldn’t do more. I would love to see more of the proportion of their budget going to Humanitarian things. But I think if the message is more, we are an army of people who are seeking to heal the world, and they’re out actively trying to engage the world, and we’re doing whatever we can to support that. And I think there are encouraging signals that way, and those signals could be incredible Yeah, and I think that’s probably going to have to end it, but I just want to piggyback on that just a little bit and say, in addition to that, I think that.

Carl Youngblood

There’s a natural winnowing process that’s happening right now where, because frankly, I think the church is suffering a lot of hard knocks right now in various areas. I think that as people are questioning and struggling more, I think that or I hope at least that this will cause us to go through a process of repentance and to get more desperate, so to speak, so that people are willing to maybe consider some oddball ideas from that vocal guy in the corner like myself, who has been out in the wilderness for so long. So, anyway, I’m hoping they get more desperate, basically.