I often hear people complain about church culture, with the implication that we ought to get rid of as much of it as possible and live the pure gospel. “Let’s get rid of Latter-day Saint lingo; it’s confusing to investigators.” “Trek is such a weird thing; can’t we stop doing it?” The simplifying of church programs. And then there are also those scary stories people tell about Utah culture.
Part of this is what I recently heard Christopher Blythe call the “self-loathing Mormon,” the need to distance ourselves from the culture we know so many of our more sophisticated friends distain. We worry that liking Saturday’s Warrior or admitting to having read all the volumes of The Work and the Glory will make us look like backward yokels. Additionally, the move towards fewer church activities seems like a good idea because it helps us focus exclusively on the gospel, on Jesus, rather than the church and its many traditions; and besides, we have so many other things to be busy with.
Eugene England tried to counter this exalting of the gospel at the expense of the church in his famous essay “Why the Church is as True as the Gospel.” He pointed out that only in interacting as a community can we truly practice the principles that we are learning through the gospel. Learning and intellectually assenting to gospel principles is irrelevant if we don’t practice them on those around us. Our wards are the ideal gym through which to practice love and charity by close association with those who we might otherwise avoid, practice leading and following without compulsion.
I love Brother England’s point, but I’d like to approach the necessity of the church from a different angle: the need for culture. Wherever humans are, this strange amorphous thing called culture develops. To misquote scripture, “where two or three are gathered,” there culture will be, that amalgamation of unique vocabulary, folklore, rituals, traditions, and activities, not to mention my favorite part, stories.
We can’t eliminate church culture any more than we can eliminate language. It’s something that’s going to happen either way. But what we can do is weaken it, starve it, actively suppress it. We can cancel traditional activities in favor of simplifying our ward’s social calendar. We can stop publishing fiction featuring contemporary LDS characters at our bookstores. We can take our distinctive Latter-day Saint music with its strange references to missions, pioneers, and the Book of Mormon, and water it down into something that would be unobjectionable to a nondenominational Christian. (Guess how I feel about the modern FSY albums…)
The key word here is unobjectionable, which I think is a synonym of undistinctive. All that has resulted from efforts to downplay LDS culture is culture that is almost not there because it is so bland. The issue is that the culture at large that we swim in is hardly likely to do us the same courtesy.
When forced to choose between a culture of thin translucence and a culture of vibrance and interest, we will tend to go with the stories in our hearts rather than the doctrines in our heads. Our beliefs have less to do with the arguments and theology than they do with the people we want to be around. As Arnold Kling puts it, we decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. If church movies are bland and basic, their messages are less likely to stick in our children’s minds when they have to compete with the interesting stuff being put out constantly from all sides. If our church activities are all solemnly focused on Jesus with no insertions of Pioneer Day fireworks or neighborhood roadshows, they simply can’t compete with the world’s celebrations or diversions. Not to mention that if we don’t create our own stories about what our culture means, the larger entertainment industry is sure to paint one instead. One solution to this is to shut the world out, but we all know that’s only a temporary one.
So I propose an alternative: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Let’s build up some Latter-day Saint treasure. Let’s stop trying to be like everyone else and instead be so interesting and compelling that people want to find out what’s going on over here. Of course, it would also be naive to equate Latter-day Saint culture with Utah culture. As the church grows more global, we need to have not less church culture but more church cultures. We can’t do that by playing it safe, by creating a gospel culture of lowest common denominator. We have to be not only true and good, but beautiful, interesting, fascinating, hilarious. Let’s stop apologizing and be our weird, peculiar selves.