Revelation, Scripture, and Politics

Church leaders these days are a gutless bunch, says my plain-spoken friend Brother Jones, as I’ll call him. Although he insists that his testimony of the Church is as rock solid as ever, Brother Jones doesn’t participate much in the ward lately, in part because he is deeply unhappy with the Church’s leaders. They lack the courage of their convictions, he thinks—the courage to stand up for (or against) political positions and figures as the scriptures and Church doctrine prescribe. Other churches are out there in the public square boldly proclaiming what they believe. They stand for something. Meanwhile, our Church leaders sit mutely on the sidelines.

I haven’t said what political positions Brother Jones favors, nor will I. Though I’m thinking of a particular individual with whom I happen to talk regularly, I have friends who make similar criticisms from both the left and the right (and perhaps also the center, if there still is one). The issues vary. Some critics are alarmed by Donald Trump. Some are concerned about creeping socialism, or “wokeism,” or increasing governmental encroachments on freedom, or persecution of religion. The common element is that they are disappointed with Church leaders, whether local or general, for limiting themselves to bland pieties in the realm of politics instead of being more aggressive in supporting good and opposing evil.

I’m not entirely unsympathetic. I have some of the same concerns.

But an implicit assumption made by the critics—and sometimes by myself—is that the Church’s revelations and scriptures support specific positions on these controversial political issues. Is that assumption justified?

Usually, I believe, the assumption rests on a mistake. On two kinds of mistakes, actually. One kind of mistake is about the nature of politics. The other is about the nature of revelation and scripture.

First, politics. In our idealistic moods, we may suppose that politics should be the application of true principles to governance. At some level of abstraction this may be so, but at a more basic level this isn’t what politics ever has been, or could be, or should be. Politics, as the saying goes, is the art of the possible, and what is possible is constrained by numerous factors. By resources, which are scarce. By entrenched practices and traditions that we happen to have inherited. And by what “the people” in all of our earthy orneriness are disposed to support, oppose, or put up ...