Mormonism among World Religions

I teach world religions at BYU and I hold off from discussing Mormonism until the last day of class. This allows us a new context for looking at the religious tradition of (usually) all but one or two students. Not only do we consider the university’s sponsoring church within a world religions framework, we also include other church-cousins within the larger religion-family we identify as Mormon Christianity or Mormonism. Most students are surprised by the list of Mormon traditions I mention, like Rigdonite, Strangite, Cutlerite, Bickertonite, Morrisite, and Reorganized/RLDS groups. The category opens up, and we begin to wonder about broader Mormonism like we did with the world movements we covered all semester, like Judaism, Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Bahá’í, Daoism, Confucianism, Shinto, Mazdayasna/Zoroastrianism, and Indigenous religiosities. The question we ask of all these movements involves what does each offer the world?

I especially like Stephen Prothero’s framework for understanding religion. In his books God Is Not One and Religion Matters, Prothero recognizes the semantic problem of the word religion and offers a way for distinguishing this term/concept. At the heart of the matter is whether religion really stands apart from, say, culture, or other social orders. A friend of mine who loves baseball more than almost anything else went to a Dodgers game (despite being a fan of a rival team) and when I asked him about the experience, he said he “worshipped at this sacred shrine to baseball.” Is baseball a religion? Prothero would say no, and this is why. If we take religion to mean how a person orients one’s view of reality in the context of resolving one or more cosmic-order or existential problems, then a passion for baseball isn’t religious. My friend isn’t defining his reality or a cosmic-order problem or his existence by baseball. Take, however, another person I know who is deeply offended by me not singing along to the national anthem when it plays during a sporting event. This person has, in fact, built her sense of reality around a cosmic-order/existential problem. The biggest trouble facing humanity is tyranny; tyranny is responsible for all ills in the world. And she regards the constitution of the United States as a divinely inspired solution to this problem of tyranny—it offers freedom, and the symbols of its fight for freedom are sacred and supremely meaningful to her, including and especially the national anthem. Her patriotism is her religion; when her church runs against her understanding of the political moment and of freedom, she sides with her actual religiosity, her patriotic belief and fervor.

So as we study world religions, we ask this question of how each represents an orientation toward reality within the context of resolving cosmic-order, existential, or human-condition problems. We learn how Islam articulates a cosmic-order concern (pridefulness is the destructive force in human societies) and a solution (turning to God eliminates pride), for example. By asking this question, we can start to notice ways this religiosity offers something to the world. Continuing with Islam, we might see how Muslims collectively encourage almsgiving and relief to the orphan, how they maintain routines of humility that beckon us all to surrender our pride to a good and virtuous God.

On the last day of class, we entertain the question of what Mormonism—not simply the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but the broader religious movement—offers the world as a religiosity. I believe the whole religious complex, its traditions and routines, its philosophy and rhetoric, converge around trying to overcome death.

Death as Separation

Joseph Smith articulated a religious philosophy that, despite theological and ritual evolution across and within the various Mormon churches, maintains some important coherence. One key and innovative concept was how death of any kind amounted to separation: mortal death = separation of body and spirit; spiritual death = separation from the presence of God; relational death = separation of family members by mortal or spiritual deaths; temporal death = separation of something from its original, ordered condition. “All mankind,” Samuel the Lamanite teaches in the Book of Mormon, “being cut off from the presence of the Lord, are considered as dead, both as to things temporal and to things spiritual.” He goes on to describe the resurrection as a reunion from the temporal and spiritual separation: “the resurrection of Christ redeemeth mankind, yea, even all mankind, and bringeth them back into the presence of the Lord” (Helaman 14:16–17).

An eternal separation would be the ultimate cosmic-order problem. “More painful to me the thoughts of annihilation than death,” Joseph Smith said in 1843. “If I had no expectation of seeing my mother Broth[ers] & Sisters & friends again my heart would burst in a moment. & I should go down to my grave.”1 We humans face deaths of all kinds all around us: fracturing of the divine family of God, strife, separations of body, mind, spirit, from each other. Left to itself, death in the Mormon concept is the existential problem demanding a solution.

Suspense and Assurance

The condition of death-separation carries suspense, in that, we’re by default left without knowing the final fate of us all. Will we be reunited after death? Will we experience eternal life with God, forever overcoming death? “There is no pain so awful as the pain of suspense,” Joseph Smith remarked in another sermon in April 1843. “This is the condemnation of the wicked; Their doubt and anxiety and suspense causes weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth.” The antidote to the suspense of separation? Knowledge. “In knowledge there is power,” he went on. “Knowledge does away darkness, suspense and doubt, for where Knowledge is there is no doubt nor suspense nor darkness.”2 By knowledge, Joseph Smith was getting at an order of knowing something that you can’t unlearn. I look at English words and it’s rather impossible for me to unsee the English in them; the letters aren’t like characters or symbols of another language I don’t know, like, say, Chinese; I can’t help but immediately process the meaning of those letters and discern the word, even if I blur my vision and try to see them as only shapes. English is embedded in my knowledge and I can’t really unlearn it from my experience. Imagine having knowledge of eternal life, but on this order of knowledge. There couldn’t be any suspense, there couldn’t be any anxiety over death, at least the way Joseph Smith reasons through the problem. And so assurance of salvation and assurance of resurrection and assurance of exaltation are all solutions to the cosmic-order problem of death. You go and obtain an assurance from God, and you’re free from the pain of death, the preference for annihilation over being eternally separated from God or from family or from the body.

Sealing as Assurance

But how to be assured? What can actually communicate this order of knowledge such that one’s suspense, anxiety, or pain is obviated? For Joseph Smith, sealing brought assurance. But he didn’t mean “sealing” in the way we often speak of it, as though binding people together in an eternal covenant. His revelations describe sealing in the medieval sense: placing a sovereign seal upon something so as to certify or notarize it. In the Middle Ages, European sovereigns would devise royal seals to mark their pronouncements so that the masses could trust their authenticity. These seals were hard to replicate so as to work against counterfeiting. Sealing a document made it official and identical to the sovereigns themselves issuing the decree. In this sense, Joseph Smith spoke of using God’s own seal deliberately to claim people at the gates of heaven. He said in 1844:

Baptism for the dead was a “welding link,” he taught in 1842, because “the nature of this ordinance consists in the power of the priesthood by the Revelations of Jesus Christ wherein it is granted that whatsoever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven … or in other words, taking a different view of the translation; whatsoever you record on earth shall be recorded in Heaven.” The record of the ordinance constituted the binding agent—it would be binding on God in Heaven to recognize and honor the baptism. “This [baptism for the dead] therefore is the sealing and binding power, and in one sense of the word the keys of the kingdom which consists in the key of knowledge.”4 By being baptized in behalf of the dead, the mortal family members carry with them the knowledge that this deceased person would rise in the morning of the first resurrection because of the covenant associated with baptism and the power of the priesthood sealing it in the record books and making it so. When you see those names kept in the books, which is literally the Book of Life to be opened at the last judgment, you have that assurance that you will be together with your loved ones in the resurrection. This knowledge is supposed to overcome death.

Joseph Smith said he had seen the resurrection in vision. It consisted of people reaching out to one another by the hand. “So plain was the vision I actually saw men, before they had ascended from the tomb, as though they were getting up slowly, they tooke each other by the hand & it was my father & my Son. my mother & my daughter. my brother & my sister.”5 What a beautiful scene, each of us reaching out to our loved ones, being raised from death together.

A Gift to the World

What can we offer the world as a religiosity, a way of orienting ourselves to the real human condition and finding a pathway through our existential troubles? In a word, sealing. We get to be the crafty ones, the hardy folk who, finding ourselves entrusted with God’s own seal, go about sealing all we can. We bind up the separations we see. We bridge the chasms, we find the way out of hell and into heaven, we claim before God all we can. Yes, and we do this with the work ethic we’re known for—the resourcefulness and imagination of our forebears that raised up temples in the wilderness. Other religions certainly offer much to the world that we can receive, too. But while we’re thinking about contributions and being a gift to our fellow sisters and brothers and friends, I see so much potential in our collective effort to overcome death and bring life.