Oblique Discipleship

Lessons on Escaping Conformity from The Book of Helaman

“It takes a lot of courage not to enter into the division as it is constituted. . . . This diagonal obstinacy, this rejection of abrupt metaphysically derived divisions, is obviously not suited to the stormy times when everything comes under the law of decisiveness, here and now.”—Alain Badiou

Writing a book is never easy, but some compositional eras are more turbulent than others. I wrote my volume on Helaman in the middle of my doctoral program, as my marriage was falling apart, having delayed comprehensive exams so that I could throw the book together in a mad dash of six months’ research and two months’ writing. I took my exams five months later in the same week that my then-husband moved out, I filed for divorce, and the state of Illinois entered Covid lockdown, leaving me without childcare. By the time the book was published, the pandemic would be in full swing, wearing us down as we lived isolated from loved ones, homeschooled our children, and managed jobs that had become remote overnight. Covid stressed our health systems and our nervous systems and our supply chains, the Trump presidency raging all the while in the background and American political discourse straining to its breaking point. This book was born at a time when, personally and societally, we navigated untold pressures and learned to see ourselves newly.

Helaman: A Brief Theological Introduction is a book about another society trying to stand steady amidst the social currents swirling around their ankles. In the Nephites, I see a people who line up like iron filings behind the predictable magnets of fallen humanity: the rampant pursuit of wealth and power, the demonization of their political enemies, and a ruthless logic of “faster” and “more.” In these ways, Nephite society in the book of Helaman is like contemporary twenty-first-century culture. Most eerily similar of all is the unthinking blindness with which the Nephites are co-opted by these trends, how quickly they fall into numbing social consensus, how thoughtlessly they let themselves be corralled by the dominant values and categories of their culture. 

As a result, my volume reflects on learning to be self-critical as an expression of discipleship. 

But if Helaman speaks so powerfully to the canny invisibility of the snares that seize us, it also speaks to what discipleship looks like in the face of those pressures. If anything has changed for me in the four years since writing my volume, it is simply that I’ve found a more concise name for what I try to articulate within its pages. The call that I hear issuing from the book of Helaman is a call to oblique discipleship.

Helaman describes for me—in ways that no other book of scripture quite manages to do—the felt difficulty of finding my way as a believer. I feel as if I’m swimming upstream, forces around me roaring for my attention and trying to channel me into swifter currents. I feel constantly the push and pull of social pressures and political parties and online algorithms, all desperate to win me over to their habits and worldviews and (most egregious of all) their liturgies for how I use my time. Netflix wants to enlist my eyeballs and my pocketbook (but so, too, do Hulu and Disney+). Instagram never tires of seducing me with new shoes and ever-more radical politics (though Facebook would prefer that I try a new pair of pants and play seemingly benign puzzle games with my friends: it is curious that both platforms are owned by the same company). One of my brothers wants me to endorse his unfettered affluence, the other wants me to join him in radical leftism. Amazon wants my impulse buys, diet culture wants my self-loathing, the academy wants my skeptical detachment, administrators want my corporate loyalty and relentless efficiency. Helaman manages to conjure a similar feeling: discipleship faces a social Goliath whose pace is high-speed, whose volume is deafening, where I must pilot my way through a hundred different forces all clamoring for my attention and my obeisance. 

An oblique disciple is someone who cuts slantwise across those forces. It’s someone who can run diagonally against the gravity that advertising wants to exert on their wallet, the pressure that social capital wants to exert on their tastes, the coercion that the daily news cycle wants to exert on their attention. Oblique discipleship means holding your own covenant center regardless of what’s popular, reacting to hostility and defensiveness with uncompromising charity, and refusing to follow where the infinite scroll of social media feeds would lead you. Oblique disciples are like Max Lucado dolls who repel stickers, or Dr. Seuss’s Sneetches once they’ve learned the moral of the story. They are the Luna Lovegoods and the Saint Francises of the world: not susceptible to the pressures of the rat race because, all along, they’ve been playing a different game.

And the book of Helaman is full of them. We see disciples who eschew industrial and technological advancement in the name of investing in their domestic spaces instead (Hel 3:3–11, 20–21). We find fathers choosing scripture over party politics or financial success as the symbolic order for their lives (Hel 5:6–12). The prophets Nephi and Lehi are indifferent to the incentive structure of the Lamanite prison, able to stand in the midst of these tensions and not be burned (Hel 5:22–23). We see examples of behind-the-scenes discipleship, the choice of unassuming devotion over flashy ministries calibrated for public acclaim (Hel 11:19). We see disciples who content themselves with the invisibility that pertains from living a life oriented by values that others do not hold, in fidelity to a God that the secular world does not acknowledge. Over and over, for readers who are paying attention, Helaman showcases disciples who quietly sacrifice social capital in the pursuit of orthogonal priorities.

The danger, of course, is how easily this call can itself be co-opted. The twenty-first century already celebrates people who go against the grain or march to the beat of their own drum—but we celebrate them for having achieved that fantastical, self-aggrandizing, and ultimately marketable thing called “authentic individuality.” The risk, here, is that we might hear oblique discipleship as just one more imperative to be really cool but in a way that’s, you know, your own. As if it were punk rather than self-effacing, quirky rather than ascetic. The book of Helaman, however, is not calling for a form of achievement on the manic pixie dream-girl spectrum. It calls for something far less glamorous, something a bit more plainclothes, more parts thrift store and fewer parts self-styled indie fashion reclamation. The difference between the two is vast, and it has everything to do with the different gravitational field that orients the disciple.

Helaman is the story of a divinely favored people who fall entirely apart. They get swept up in the distractions of public and especially political life. They allow themselves to be polarized and oriented by the secular world, unable to hear God as a result. The book calls readers to pull themselves out of secular polarities—to not be caught up in hot-take reactionary antagonisms on social media, to not thoughtlessly absorb the demands of fashion, of income, of body shape/size, of humor, of tastes. Oblique discipleship means striving for different things, adjudicating successes along different metrics, hanging our motivations on different incentive structures. Living obliquely means showing up differently—on social media, in grocery store checkout lines, at parties, in traffic—because one is different.

What’s more, the book of Helaman leads me to believe that this slantwise discipleship is what the Lord needs most from his followers. He needs people who laugh at the false oppositions we construct among our sisters and brothers, whose arms open wider than the span of the millions of divides the world wants to box us into. He needs servants who are not susceptible to logics of instant gratification or constant entertainment, whose attention spans operate on a timescale other than two-day shipping, who are more literate in the quiet stillness of the Holy Ghost than they are in the shouty normativity of online identity curation. Here a little and there a little, by cutting diagonally across society’s implied lines, oblique disciples quietly chink open the cracks through which the Messiah can enter. They are ones whom the world does not know because they live in fidelity to one unknown by the world (John 17:16).

I want more tinkerers in more corners, more people who can slip nimbly in and around the world and its vectors rather than getting tangled in its polarities. When battle lines are drawn, the trick is to dance around them.

Kim Matheson is a research fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship.

Art by Brian Kershisnik.

These essays appear in Theological Insights from the Book of Mormon, a Wayfare series that pairs the 2024 Come, Follow Me curriculum with authors of the Maxwell Institute’s Brief Theological Introductions to the Book of Mormon series.

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