What a Mormon Musical Taught Me About Democracy
The Company of The Book of Mormon in action (Image: Paul Coltas)
No, sorry, this isn’t about the Book of Mormon musical. (And yes I have seen it, yes it is great, and yes being Mormon is really like that.) It’s actually another Mormon musical I have in mind.
“I Have A Plan”
When I was around 8 years old, I used to sit on the ground in our living room, in front of my family’s record player (damn I’m old!), listening to the soundtrack of My Turn on Earth, while looking at the picture book that came with it. My Turn on Earth (1971) is a Mormon musical written by Carol Lynn Pearson.[FN1] It tells the story of “Barbara” and her journey through this life in which she learns many of the lessons that Mormon children are supposed to learn, like the Golden Rule (“Do unto others …”) and “Opposition is necessary in all things”. It’s cheesy AF, but it had a profound impact on me at a young age, and I carried its messages with me into adulthood, even after I became pagan.
One of the songs from the musical, called “I Have a Plan”, dramatizes one of the foundational myths in the Mormon cosmology called “the War in Heaven”. According to this myth, before the earth was created, we all lived with God as spirits. God held a great council to decide how to best fulfill the destiny of his children. Two plans were put forward: Jesus’ plan and Lucifer’s plan. Jesus’ plan was to send us to earth and let us make decisions for ourselves, with the understanding that this would result in great suffering, and many spirits would not make it back to God, but in the process we would grow and become wiser. Lucifer’s plan was to make all the choices for us, and thereby secure the safe return of all of God’s children to his presence. A “war” of ideas ensued and, according to Mormons, the plan of Jesus prevailed.[FN2]
Having lived on this earth for almost 50 years, I’m not convinced. I think that war of ideas is still going on. And I don’t think the plan involving human agency is winning.
I remember listening to (the actor playing) “Lucifer” singing “I have a plan; it will save every man. I will force them to live righteously. They won’t have to choose, not one we will lose!” And then Jesus would sing: “I have a plan; it is better for man. Each will have to decide what to be. In choosing, I know, you’ll learn and you’ll grow.” In the musical, Satan argued that Jesus’s plan would result in bloodshed and starvation, and he promised peace and happiness for all. Jesus responded:
“The most precious gift we have been given, next to life itself, is the power to direct that life. We must have the opportunity to choose. And there must be the possibility of wrong choices. To discover the powers that are within us, and not look continually to someone else. To use our own free agency. This is growth, and growth must be.”
— My Turn on Earth (1971)
I still think this is beautiful. Taken out of the Christian context, I actually can see it being part of an alternative charge of the Neo-Pagan Goddess.
Later in life, I realized the irony of the Mormon church teaching this lesson to children, given that the whole program of the church is much more aligned with Lucifer’s plan than it is with Jesus’. The Mormon church infantilizes its members—including the adult members—and promises to keep them safe from all the dangers in the world (for Mormons, that means premarital sex, masturbation, rated-R movies, alcohol, caffeine, tobacco), so they can all return to live with God one day.[FN3]
But in spite of two decades of church indoctrination, the message from My Turn on Earth stayed with me, and I think it played a big role in why I eventually left the Mormon church in my 20s. Even after that, even after I stopped believing in God, I still believed that real moral growth requires personal experience and freedom of choice. It’s perhaps not surprising then that I would later come to embrace Paganism, Unitarian Universalism, and anarchism.
What Unitarians Taught Me …
A few years ago I wrote a 4-part series about my unorthodox introduction to anarchist ideas. Long before I knew the names Bakunin, Bookchin, or Chomsky, I was introduced to anarchist ideas by pirates, midwives, bonobos, and Unitarians. As I explained in the series, the history of pirates, those violent criminals from our bedtime stories, taught me about the violence of civilization itself. My experience of my wife’s home birth taught me about the availability of alternatives to the state and capitalist order. Primatologists who study bonobos, cousins to chimpanzees, taught me about the naturalness of cooperation and mutual aid. And Unitarians taught me about small-scale democracy.
I joined my local Unitarian congregation about eight years ago, and I have been attending for about thirteen years.[FN4] Over that time, I have served on various committees and ministries and, until recently, the Board of Trustees. In Unitarian Universalist churches, the Board is elected by the congregation. Unitarian Universalism is a form of congregationalism, which means local churches are governed, not by a hierarchical umbrella institution, but by the members of the congregation. This is enshrined in the Fifth Principle of UUism, which expresses a commitment to “the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large”.
Mormonism is an authoritarian religion, in which authority is bestowed from on high—supposedly from God, but in reality from a group of 15 old men. In contrast, in Unitarian Universalism, authority flows from the bottom up, from the individual members. There is an umbrella organization, the UUA (Unitarian Universalist Association), but it’s a voluntary association of congregations which advises, but does not control, its member congregations—though in my congregation a lot of deference (I believe an unhealthy amount) is given to the UUA’s opinion.
After being raised in an authoritarian religion and then rejecting all organized religion (because I assumed it was all the same), UUism was a breath of fresh air to me. Over the last several years of being involved in church leadership, though, I have learned how hard democracy really is to realize in practice. And I feel acutely how far from it we are.
The truth is that my Unitarian congregation is about as democratic as the United States is—which is to say, barely. For most Americans, democracy means showing up to the polls once every four years and voting for one of two candidates to be their leader. At least from a historical and world perspective, most of these candidates would be relatively close to each other on the political spectrum. For example, their stances on capitalism, militarism, American exceptionalism, etc. would be almost indistinguishable.
At the level of the UUA, there have been competitive elections. In the last election for the UUA president, six years ago, the candidates were two White cis-women who, as far as I could tell, were interchangeable. Probably there were real differences between the two, but they were unexpressed and unapparent. This year, only one candidate has been nominated.
At the level of my local church, though, there’s not even competitive elections. Our Board selects a committee to nominate the next slate of candidates. And the congregation rubber stamps it. It’s uncomfortably like the single party elections in the former Soviet Union.
I learned a few years ago that there is a process for members to call a special congregational meeting to vote on any issue of special concern. And we did this once recently, at my own instigation and at considerable expense of personal social capital. But that level of democratic participation is the exception rather than the rule in my congregation. The reasons for this are two-fold. But before I get to that, let me tell you a story.
The Flag
There used to be a flag in our church. An American flag. And it wasn’t just in the church. It was in the chapel—right up front, a few feet away from the pulpit. It had been there for at least a decade. Maybe a lot longer, I’m not sure. A lot of people found it odd, not to mention inconsistent with the idea of separation of church and state. Even a lot of conservative churches don’t display the flag in the church, and our congregation is far from conservative.
If you asked around, most of the congregants would have told you they really didn’t know why the flag was there. It actually really bothered some people. And yet, there it stayed, year after year. A few people knew that the flag was there because of one couple (who not surprisingly were significantly farther right on the political spectrum than the rest of the congregation), who had been emphatic about its placement. And because of the conflict-avoidant nature of our congregational culture[FN5], the status quo prevailed.
Then we hired a part-time interim minister. He was only going to be with us for a year or two, and because of that, he probably felt a little more freedom to shake things up. He held a special meeting after church one Sunday to discuss the flag. I don’t think he cared so much about the flag itself, but he wanted to use the flag to illustrate how our congregation deals with (or doesn’t deal with) conflict.
About a dozen people attended the meeting, including the aforementioned couple. The opinions of the rest of those present ranged from ambivalence to outrage. As is typical of UUs, we talked the issue to death. There were lots of ideas, including leaving the flag where it was, removing the flag, turning the flag upside down (to signal a nation in distress), adding other flags (like a planet earth flag or a rainbow flag), and building a proper flagpole outside.
Not surprisingly, no resolution was reached in the meeting. But the next week, the flag was gone from the front of the chapel. It had been moved—by the minister, it turned out—to a corner in the social hall. And that was the end of that. The right-wing couple did stop coming to church, but our congregational life went on as before.
But that experience had a profound impact on some of the members, who came to believe that what our congregation desperately needed was permanent professional ministerial leadership—essentially, someone with the “authority” to make decisions, like moving the flag. And over the next several years, considerable (metaphorical) blood and (literal) treasure have been spent securing that leadership in the form of a full-time UU minister.
I believe, though, that we learned the wrong lesson from that experience. The story should not have ended with the minister unilaterally relocating the flag. I believe what he intended to do in moving the flag was to break up our collective mental stagnation by physically changing our environment. I don’t believe it was his intent to make the decision for us. But that’s what we let him do.
Don’t get me wrong. I think the kind of leadership our minister displayed—in calling the meeting, leading the discussion, and even provisionally relocating the flag—was valuable. But what should have happened next, after he moved the flag, was that we should have held a vote. The vote would undoubtedly have confirmed the minister’s action in moving the flag. But until the vote took place, he did not actually have the authority to move it. And the nagging question for me is this: Why did we let him?
The Impulse to Surrender
This brings be back to what I was saying about democracy. To be clear, when I talk about democracy, I’m not talking about people voting for leaders. I’m talking about the people who make decisions being the same people who are affected by those decisions. The more affected a person is, the more say they should have. It’s not a fancy definition, but it’s how I understand real democracy. And democracy is the core of anarchism, as I understand it.
And my experience with the UU has led me to conclude that there’s two things that get in the way of realizing that definition of democracy in practice. On the one hand, we human beings have in us an innate desire to be led, to submit to an authority. It’s not the only impulse we have. There are competing impulses. But I believe it’s there in all of us to some degree.
Aldous Huxley is well-known as the author of Brave New World. Perhaps his least-known work, though, is called The Devils of Loudon (1952). It is an account of a supposed demonic possession in a 17th century French town which led to the burning of a priest. (It was later turned into a play, an opera, and a very controversial film starring Vanessa Redgrave.) In the book, Huxley explores the psychology and politics of religious fanaticism, sexual repression, and mass hysteria.
One of Huxley’s insights from the book has stayed with me through the years. He wrote:
“Introspection, observation and the records of human behavior in the past and at the present time, make it very clear that an urge to self-transcendence is almost as widespread and, at times, quite as powerful as the urge to self-assertion. Men desire to intensify their consciousness of being what they have come to regard as ‘themselves,’ but they also desire—and desire, very often, with irresistible violence, the consciousness of being someone else. In a word, they long to get out of themselves, to pass beyond the limits of that tiny island universe, within which every individual finds himself confined.”
A few pages later, Huxley elaborates:
“Self-transcendence is by no means invariably upward. Indeed, in most cases, it is an escape either downward into a state below that of the personality, or else horizontally into something wider than the ego …”
— Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudon (1952)
It is this desire which Huxley theorizes explains the events in 17th century Loudon. We desire to lose ourselves. And one way of losing ourselves is into the herd and/or in submission to another person’s will.[FN6]
Now, my Unitarian congregation is not in danger of falling prey to mass hysteria like the residents of Loudon, but we are still prone to the same impulse to submit. This was illustrated for me at our last annual congregational meeting. At that meeting, our congregation—a group of some of the most conscientious and liberal people I know—voted to change the church bylaws to allow the Board to write its own rules that would govern how and when the church’s savings can be spent. In doing so, they removed one of the most important checks we had on the Board’s power and handed over the fiscal future of the church to just five people—five people who, as I have explained above, can only be said to have been democratically elected in the broadest sense of the term.
At the time of the meeting, I was actually still on the Board, and I pleaded with the congregants not to surrender their power. But no one seemed to share my concern. The response from one congregant was indicative of the general sentiment: “But John, we have you to look out for us.”
The Will to Power
In order for democracy to work, we have to fight the impulse to surrender our power. We have to fight the sense of relief that comes when a minister moves the flag for us, instead of us making the decision collectively for ourselves. We have to take responsibility for our own lives, individually and collectively. That means staying informed—sometimes demanding to be informed. And it means making a practice of taking back power from those who we have surrendered it to—even when we believe they are using it benevolently.
And there’s a flip side to the desire to submit, another impulse which I believe subverts democracy. It is what Huxley refers to in the quote above as the “urge to self-assertion” and what Nietzsche called the will to power. In its dominating form, it is the impulse to take power from another person. In its more benign (and, thus, more insidious) form, it is the impulse to step into a power vacuum and fill it with one’s own will. Either way, it is a form of self-assertion, the mirror of the desire to submit. And it must be resisted too for democracy to work.
In an organization like a UU congregation, there’s a lot of power vacuums. That’s because there’s always more to be done than there are people to do those things. And so, there is an ever-present temptation to step into the vacuum and fill it with one’s own will. This is especially tempting for Type A people, like me, who are impatient with process and like to see shit get done.
But I have come to believe the most important expression of a leader’s power in a democracy is actually the refusal to exercise their power. For democracy to work, leaders must make a practice of giving up power, or rather, of empowering others. This is a different vision of leadership than we are accustomed to, one in which being a leader doesn’t mean making decisions for others, but enabling others to make decisions for themselves.[FN7]
Don’t get me wrong. I’m shit at all of this. I recently resigned from the Board, after two years of struggling with my fellow board members over my concerns about the lack of democratic process, accountability, and transparency. I’m pretty sure I didn’t convert anyone to my vision of democracy. In my defense (and theirs), we don’t have a lot of good examples to draw from.
I had considered titling this essay, “What Anarchism Taught Me About Unitarianism”—a riposte to my earlier essay, “What Unitarians Taught Me About Anarchism”. But I think this is so much bigger than Unitarian Universalism. UUism has got to be one of the most democratic religious institutions on the planet. Yet, it is hardly democratic at all. And that says so much about the state of things. It wasn’t all for naught, though. My little “war of ideas” with the Board has helped me refine my understanding of democracy, and what it requires.
I’ve learned that elections aren’t a substitute for active participation in the decision-making by the people who are affected by the decisions being made. I’ve learned that accurate and reliable information and regular and frequent communication of that information are necessary conditions of democratic consent—uninformed consent isn’t really consent. I’ve learned that policy-making or rule-making can be used to subvert democratic process. We need to resist the urge to surrender our judgment to a book—whether that book is a Bible or a policy manual.
I’ve learned that, even in a liberal and critical-minded community like my Unitarian congregation, there is a strong temptation to defer to authority—whether it’s a minister, a Board president, or an umbrella organization like the UUA. I’ve learned that power without accountability invites and encourages neglect and/or abuse, even in well-meaning people. I’ve learned that “good intentions” can be used as a cover for a lot of neglect and/or abuse.
And I’ve learned that conflict is not only unavoidable, but is necessary for democracy. As another one of the songs from My Turn on Earth said:
It’s called opposition, my friend
Opposition, a necessary condition
In this world of ours.
But that is a topic for another day …
Notes
1. The Mormon church stopped promoting My Turn on Earth years ago. I suspect someone decided it didn’t align with the church’s program anymore. Pearson herself became an LGBT advocate and fierce critic of polygamy. Why the church has never excommunicated her remains a mystery. Many have theorized that she is too beloved by the membership, specifically because so many of us listened to My Turn on Earth as children.
2. The notion of a war in heaven is not uniquely Mormon, but is rooted in Christian scripture, both the Old and New Testaments. Mormons have added their own unique spin to the story, though. The focus on human agency is a Mormon development. There is a lot more about the Mormon version that is curious, but not germane to my thesis here, so I have left it out.
3. The war in heaven story has been used opportunistically by Mormon church leaders to argue both for “freedom”, in case of capitalism, and against freedom, in the case of progressive social reforms. See Boyd Petersen, “One Soul Shall Not Be Lost: A History of the War in Heaven in Mormon Thought” (2010).
4. Unitarian Universalists today are non-credal. You will find many Pagans in the pews of a UU church, as well as an assortment of New Agers, atheists, humanists, Buddhists, and even a few Christians.
5. It might seem strange to say that Unitarians are conflict avoidant, given that they are well-known for their predilection for debate. It's true that, if given the opportunity, Unitarians will endlessly debate just about any question. No question is too trivial to spend a whole committee meeting talking to death—so long as the discussion remains abstract and impersonal. As soon as the discussion becomes personal, though, Unitarians retreat. One effect of this is that the people who draw attention to problems come to be seen as the problem and are shunned. Another effect is that one or a few people can hold the entire congregation hostage. That's why one couple in my congregation was able to exert their will regarding the flag for so long. They made it personal, and no one wanted to offend them. Fortunately, my congregation recently created a “Right Relations” team to teach us Non-Violent Communication and develop communal structures for resolving conflicts in healthy ways.
6. It needs to be said that the desire for self-transcendence isn’t necessarily negative. There are positive forms of self-transcendence. The experience of the “ecological self” is an example of this, the awareness of self which is not isolated from the world around it, but enmeshed in the living world and entangled with other lives.
7. Another way to think about this is as a shift from power-over to power-with. Just as there are positive forms of self-transcendence, there are positive forms of self-assertion too.
JOHN HALSTEAD
John Halstead is the author of Another End of the World is Possible, in which he explores what it would really mean for our relationship with the natural world if we were to admit that we are doomed. John is a native of the southern Laurentian bioregion and lives in Northwest Indiana, near Chicago. He is a co-founder of 350 Indiana-Calumet, which worked to organize resistance to the fossil fuel industry in the Region. John was the principal facilitator of “A Pagan Community Statement on the Environment.” He strives to live up to the challenge posed by the Statement through his writing and activism. John has written for numerous online platforms, including Patheos, Huffington Post, and Gods & Radicals. He is Editor-at-Large of NaturalisticPaganism.com. John also edited the anthology, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans and authored Neo-Paganism: Historical Inspiration & Contemporary Creativity. He is also a Shaper of the Earthseed community, more about which can be found at GodisChange.org.