Spiritual Cartography

Idolatry & Restoration

A few months ago, my sister asked me to talk to a friend who had just learned that Joseph Smith’s practice of polygamy left in its wake broken hearts, painful feelings, and for many a sense of betrayal. Over and over, she asked questions like:

“Why have I never heard this at church? Is there any path for me to be a Mormon knowing what I know now? How can you, somebody who knows so much about the history of the Church, still go to church?”  

I have talked with people who have come to doubt the reality of Noah’s flood, people who are distressed by the Church’s firm adherence to mid-twentieth-century gender norms, people troubled by Joseph Smith’s marriages and use of a seer stone. Some have learned facts about early Church history that are disturbing. Others are bothered by the Church’s positions on current social issues. Perhaps, most of all, these people feel lied to or deceived. They have learned things about the Church’s past and present that don’t jibe with what they believed it was, or even what members and leaders of the Church taught them.

Often, these people say that reconciliation is impossible, and that their questions must simply be lived with as a thorn in the side (“put on the shelf,” as some say), or that the Church must be abandoned entirely. And sometimes, trying to solve these questions can only make the problem worse. For instance, if somebody comes to me with worries about Joseph Smith’s plural marriage, providing the facts I’ve learned can be useful, but attempting to extrapolate from those facts how this person should feel may not. 

There are many particular issues like these that trouble people about the Church. I’ve thought and read and written about many of them. But it’s fruitless to play whack-a-mole like this endlessly. There is much pain in the Church’s past, and of course there is, because there is pain and mistakes in anything humans do. There is a great deal of uncertainty embedded in being a religious person, and of course there is, because there is a great deal of uncertainty in being alive. The basic problem confronting many members of the Church is, I think, not that these things exist, but that many of us have convinced each other that mistakes and problems and uncertainty are dangerous to religion rather than inevitable. 

Another way of putting this idea is that behind many of the particular problems that trouble Church members is a single major problem. It’s an old problem, as old as the Bible itself. If the Israelites were God’s chosen people, why would the Babylonians be allowed to destroy Jerusalem?  If Joseph Smith were a prophet, why would he institute polygamy in a way that seemed guaranteed to inflict great emotional pain on his wife Emma?  If Brigham Young (or Joseph Fielding Smith or any number of other leaders of the Church) were a prophet, why would he repeat common racist clichés to justify denying Black people full participation in the gospel, clichés that the Church today rejects? 

One way of answering these problems is simply to say that God allows people to make mistakes, which is manifestly true. But that answer can seem unsatisfying. What’s the point of a prophet if that person makes mistakes with the magnitude of Brigham Young’s racism?  How do we know when a prophet is or is not making a mistake?  

Another way of answering the problems is to scramble to deny them, to defend the reputation of the Church and its leaders by shifting blame, downplaying error, insisting that when the Church’s history is correctly understood, then pain and mistakes, when not minimized entirely, can be rationalized as necessary, part of God’s plan.

Either way, the theory seems to be that mistakes and pain are a deviation from what the Church should be. The problem is that none of this is accurate. But the fact that it is not is, I think, its own sort of redemption. 

MORONI’S PROMISE

Here’s what I mean. When I entered graduate school, I had been inactive in the Church for nearly ten years. There were a lot of reasons for this, but most orbited around the fact that I didn’t have the spiritual experiences I was told I should have. A devoted seminary teacher promised me and the rest of my class that if we prayed about the Book of Mormon, God would grant us a burning in the bosom, which would be the Holy Spirit confirming to us the book was true.

I was an earnest and serious and anxious kid. I went home and read the Book of Mormon in a week. Then, with a distinct sense of nervousness and excitement, I knelt by my bed and prayed. And I stayed there on my knees for at least half an hour, hoping and waiting, and nothing happened, and nothing happened. And I was confused and a bit bereft. After a day or two I concluded that I must have done something wrong, so I decided to read the book again. I did, and I prayed about it again, and again nothing happened.

So I went to the seminary teacher, and he kindly asked me exactly the wrong question. Was I praying with a pure heart and real intent? I—a fairly naïve and earnest kid—was baffled. Six months or so later, I told my parents I didn’t want to go to church anymore. 

My confusion progressed to frustration and then to anger at that seminary teacher in particular and then at the Church in general. I was a particularly annoying sort of atheist for a while. (I think there’s real pain in a lot of ex-religious people, and I despair seeing that pain curdle into the sort of snarky, tired zingers about God that I embraced.) And of course, that teacher could have been more sensitive. 

But it’s a mistake, I think, to see him as personally at fault. He was simply enacting broader patterns he was taught. He was struggling to reconcile the effortless and simple universe he had been taught to believe in with the grimy and limping reality we actually live in.

It’s those patterns, more so than the particular issues that they generate, that I want to examine. These are patterns of certainty, of overconfidence, patterns that envision the religious life as a great mechanism that works like an assembly line, piecing together a predictable series of parts—good actions here, right belief there—to produce expected results.  

Or to take another metaphor, that seminary teacher had been taught that religion is a map to salvation. God has given us a set of instructions on how to get there and has designated certain people or texts to pass them on. Set aside precisely what those instructions might be—accepting Jesus, obeying his commandments, achieving karmic balance, participating in sacraments and ordinances like baptism—for our purposes this matters less than the fact that there are instructions. There is a map. Under this definition, religion is the word we use to name the process of following the map God gives you.

That is what that seminary teacher was trying to accomplish. Learn about the map, follow the map. If the road he pointed me down led to a dead end, the problem was with the one who followed the map, not the map itself.  He and I had both forgotten that the map is not the territory. 

MAPS

The scholar of religion Jonathan Z. Smith popularized the phrase “map is not territory” to warn us about confusing our descriptions of a thing for the thing itself. Believing that the map is the territory can fool us into mistaking that we know the land far better than we do. We might confuse the clear, straight lines and dots on the paper for what the land before us actually is: roads, cities, hills, trees, rivers, valleys.

That is what I had done. I had studied the map we had been given, a map produced by a late-twentieth-century curriculum committee directed and inspired by late-twentieth-century general authorities, and concluded that it contained the entirety of what my religion could be. In the particular approach that particular seminary teacher offered me, the entire thing was useless.

Now, of course I did this. I was a teenager. 

I used to teach a course called “Introduction to the Study of Religion.” It was not a World Religions course—a march through Judaism and Islam and Buddhism and so on. Instead, we asked what made some things religion and other things not. When I asked my students what religion was, they tended to generalize from Christianity. Religions believe in God, are about going to heaven, have moral codes, and so on. But then I would bring up Zen Buddhism and ask them if it was a religion. Because they’d heard it called a religion, they usually said yes, whereupon I’d point out that Zen Buddhism does not have a deity and does not describe a heaven. This tended to confuse everybody. 

They did the same thing I had. For them, “religion” could be measured by the Protestant Christianity most of them were raised with.

Jonathan Z. Smith used the comparison of the map and the territory to illustrate the problem of defining “religion.” He argued that humans tend to overgeneralize about religion, to try to reduce what religion is to something familiar that matches our expectations. But always, as we study the past or the present of human religious experience, we’ll find something that scrambles our definitions.  

Maps are our definitions of religion. They’re always marked by the culture that we live in. The territory is that vast swath of country that overflows any given moment. The territory of Christianity includes both Russell M. Nelson and St. Peter; both Joan of Arc and Eliza R. Snow. What sort of sacrament meeting would satisfy all of them?  

As for that seminary teacher—I broke his map. He didn’t know what to do, so he struggled to locate me on the map, rather than considering that the territory underneath the map, where I was wandering, might be something different than he imagined it to be. His map of Mormonism was a version where the part of the Book of Mormon the Church’s missionary program started calling “Moroni’s promise” in the twentieth century would always work the same way. 

But, as Jonathan Z. Smith or any other historian of religion might point out, the Church has not always used that passage in that way, and it may stop doing so in the future. Or, to extrapolate even more, the Church has embraced dozens of ways throughout its history to talk about how somebody might have a spiritual experience, and it has inevitably discarded some and will inevitably embrace many more. That that particular map did not work for me did not mean that there are not other maps available. 

The point here is not that maps are bad and we should pay attention to the territory instead. Nor is the point that each individual has their own map and we shouldn’t try to impose them on each other. Neither of those things are true.

The point is this: maps are inevitable. We need them. We borrow them from those we trust, either consciously or implicitly—teachers, leaders, friends, our social media feed—and cobble them together from Sunday School lessons and what our parents teach us. Your map shares a lot with those of your friends and family. You share maps on social media and over the kitchen table and start to build them together, naming the various landmarks so you can all recognize them: “feeling the Spirit,” “shelf breaking.” The landmarks point you to various endpoints, of having a testimony or building a relationship with God. The map helps you make sense of what your life looks like.

But even though maps are inevitable, we have to adopt them with awareness that they are not territory, which is another way of saying that in another time, or another place, that teacher and I might have thought somewhat differently about what feeling the Spirit is. Our maps are born of a collision between absolute eternity and our particular time and culture and place. And eventually we’ll come to the edge of one map and need to find another to continue. That’s normal.

This is to say that it’s common and easy to assume that the way of understanding what it means to be religious that we were raised with is the only way, and that if that way doesn’t work, we have to give it up. Or it’s easy to assume that this way is a map and that giving it up is abandoning all maps for the territory itself. But that’s not true. It’s maps, in a sense, all the way down. 

That the Church has changed its maps in the past and will change in the future does not actually mean that it is not “true”—instead, it means that it is what the Doctrine and Covenants calls “true and living.” The problem is not that the Church changes its maps, because the Church has a lot of maps. The problem is when we freeze a single map and pretend that it is the same map that Moses, Peter, and Joseph Smith used. Or the problem is believing that we can somehow get away from maps entirely. We can’t. When we do that, we’re committing idolatry.

IDOLATRY

What’s idolatry? Simply put, idolatry is worshiping things that aren’t God, like the idols—golden calves and statues of Zeus and so on—that people in the Bible are always going on about. 

But idolatry is more than that. Martin Luther said that “whatever your heart clings to and relies upon, that is your God.” Idolatry tempts you to invest a fallible and limited human idea or institution or practice with absolute faith and confidence. Idolatry is the child of certainty. It leads you to reject the possibility that you might be wrong. It happens whenever you come to believe so fully in your convictions that you come to assume, even unconsciously, that your beliefs are immune to the flaws and limitations that history and culture places upon all of us. It’s believing your map has no edges.

Everything in this world will at some point break under the pressure of your faith and trust. Everything—every ideology, every institution, every person—will reach questions it cannot answer and problems it cannot solve. For some people, a political party becomes an idol; for other people, a particular writer; for others, it’s being cool or Bernie Sanders or Taylor Swift or the Constitution. All of these have their own cliff’s edge. 

Because we worry about our own flaws, we invest power in things that we hope will protect us from failure. We project confidence, we feign certainty, we embrace righteous anger. We believe in simple answers. And then we grow vehement about defending the things we have invested in, since deep down the anxiety remains, because money or ideology or doing this thing or that won’t help you fix all the ways this world is broken. It can’t. 

Idolatry destroys because it is a product of anxiety that only feeds that anxiety in turn. Idolatry is like scratching a mosquito bite; it is satisfying in the moment, but in the long run the underlying problem only grows more inflamed.

Idolatry is refusing to admit the possibility that your map is not the territory.

I think our religious lives are a contest between restoration and idolatry; between pretending that our maps are the territory and coming to understand that religion is actually the process of swapping out, redrawing, adding detail to—restoring, in a word—the maps we have had in the past.

Doing these things is not an embarrassing error or an inevitable mistake. Rather, the beating heart of the religious life is the consciousness that all maps are finite. They resonate with the reality of territory, but full perception of that place lies inevitably, as we live, beyond us. The purpose of religion is to help us understand that we will travel from map to map throughout our lives, with our eye upon a perfect territory we may never fully inhabit in this life, but nonetheless can imagine and aspire to.

The answer to idolatry, then, is not cynicism or doubt. It’s charity. Charity is the willingness to place your faith in things even with the knowledge that they’ll at some point fail. We can develop the capacity to forgive and help to mend what will eventually break, because these things contain goodness and truth, and your expectations were not unrealistic in the first place.

The light of human history shows us that religion changes over time. Recognizing that the map is not the territory brings the wisdom to see that change is what religion is for. Religion is less about belief than it is about action. It is about abandoning the false certainty of idolatry for the act of restoration.

RESTORATION

One way of imagining restoration is to think of it like a light switch. It is on or it is off. When it is on, the Church exists in essentially the same way, whether it be 38 AD or 2023 AD. When it is off, history happens. Roman Catholicism and Protestantism and Eastern Orthodoxy—all of these religions run by human beings—are the products of historical development and change over time, human beings making decisions in the context of their culture. But all of those things are suspended at the moment of restoration. The Church does not exist in history; the Church exists only in truth.

But I think this is a bad way to imagine what restoration is. Instead of an accomplishment, I think that restoration is an effort. It is a way of acting, not something that happens to you. 

The central idea of Christianity and of our Restoration is this: Jesus comes to us in history. Jesus left eternity to join a particular moment in a particular place. He told parables based upon the lives of rural Mediterranean peasants that would be meaningful to those who heard them—and many of them, quite frankly, mean far less to us than they did to those people who eventually wrote them down, just as the parable of the bicycle means a great deal to modern Americans but would mean little to them. Jesus had no dental care. He wore the clothes and ate the food that those around him did. He died in a bloody and authoritarian punishment. His life was unimaginable to virtually any member of the Church living in the United States today. 

But then, we believe, he came here too. He spoke to a common farm boy. He told that boy to make Jesus comprehensible to people in that time and that place. Restoration, like Jesus himself, is incarnation. It is a translation of the absolute and the divine into the particulars of a specific time and place and people. And in so doing, the divine casts what seems normal to us in a new light, forcing us to reconsider our beliefs and assumptions.

Jesus comes to us as much as we go to him. And that means that seeking restoration does not mean simply endlessly replicating a particular sort of Christianity because we imagine it is the one correct way to be a Christian.  

But this gestures to a paradox. If religion is always changing, is there in fact something called “religion” in the first place?  What does “restoration” mean if it looks different in any time and situation? There are a number of ways to answer this, but for our purposes we will go with one. 

The theologian Paul Tillich said that religion might be best defined as the human attempt to venerate and gesture to things of “ultimate concern.” Religion derives from our belief in, sense of, and hunger for the certainty and perfection that doesn’t exist in our lives, but which we can imagine and which we hope for. Tillich says that this perfection is what God is. And we can sense and imagine perfection, Tillich teaches, because of the spark of divinity in us. 

That spark helps us to imagine what the world and ourselves might be like. What we would be like having fully overcome the “natural man”—our seemingly inborn instincts toward selfishness and self-preservation and anger and revenge. It can also help us imagine what the world that Jesus calls us to live in might be like: a world of charity and justice, a place where God wipes away all tears.  

And yet, because our lives are constantly incomplete, our attempts to touch that perfection are always incomplete. Being religious means trying to touch it again and again, in different times, places, and situations. And that means we have to do it in different ways. We have to dig into the resources that we have and try to define anew what we want to be in every generation.

This idea, of course, poses a danger. As the epistle to the Ephesians puts it, we may risk being blown about by every wind of doctrine; of adapting religion to the culture around it and stripping it of its capacity to imagine different worlds. Nobody ever thinks they’re being blown about by a wind of doctrine. Instead, we take things for granted. We assume that the world our friends or parents or the people we follow on social media show us is true. 

That is what the idea of restoration should help us avoid. Just as, on the one hand, we should see in Jesus how religion’s vitality, energy, and capacity to change human lives comes from its adaptability, we can also see in Jesus its persistence. 

The most vital religious traditions in human history are those that give expression and meaning to the reality of change, defying idolatry. But at the same time, they need to be deeply connected to the accumulated lessons of a tradition.

They bind change to their identity. They accord respect to their past and that identity. 

Roman Catholics call this process “ressourcement,” a French word meaning, literally, a “return to the sources.” What Catholics mean by that is that as the world develops and human cultures change, their faith constantly returns to itself, explores its own resources, and finds in them new answers for problems that earlier Catholics had not considered because those problems did not yet exist.

In so doing, they avoid idolatry and embrace restoration.

THE CHURCH AND HISTORY

The certainty that idolatry offers is tempting. It’s often reproduced in the teaching institutions of the Church, as it builds the maps its members seek. Certainty fosters commitment. It makes them strong, but it also leaves them brittle. When people who have been raised on certainty experience their first dose of uncertainty, it can leave them dazed and wobbling. This is the set of experiences we have come to call the “faith crisis.”

And all too often, people struggling with the fragility of certainty simply reproduce the absolutist logic of idolatry. It is perfect and good or it is wrong and bad. Each proposition implies the truth of the next. If your seminary teacher failed you, the Church is corrupt. If you think the Book of Mormon has truth in it, you must accept that conference talks are revelation. And so on. 

This is fundamentalism. It’s important to define the word. “Fundamentalism” is often used today to mean virtually any religious belief or activity that seems extreme to the person who uses the word. But we should not use the term as a slur. Instead it’s worth examining precisely what those people who proudly embraced the term meant by it. The word was coined by Protestants who explicitly opposed the idea that religion might change over time. 

Threatened by modernity, they produced a modernity of their own: their belief system, fundamentalism, attempted to reduce religion to a science. Water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and always has. Similarly, fundamentalists argued that their interpretations of scripture were clear and verifiable. They denied that religion is affected by history. Fundamentalism is the opposite of restoration. 

Latter-day Saints were influenced by fundamentalist thought in the mid-twentieth century. And many still feel its touch. These are those Church members who fear that if, for instance, Joseph Smith believed something because he was influenced by his time and culture rather than because he knew it via revelation, his status as a prophet will be called into question. Or they assume that, for instance, because Nephi in the Book of Mormon refers to the “books of Moses,” a common ancient term for the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, those books must indeed be written by Moses. The idea that Nephi might simply be incorrect seems dangerous.

Fear is the right word. Fundamentalism promotes fear. Its ideas sow worry that God needs defense, and that leads to hyperbole. Fundamentalism turns religion into an idol, a plaster statue, a God who is terribly fragile, easily broken if knocked off of the shelf. 

Fundamentalism sacrifices what can be most useful and powerful about religion; its capacity to challenge every assumption and gesture constantly toward further possibility of change, rebirth, and renewal.

One primary fundamentalist strategy is to claim that only fundamentalism is “real” religion; that non-fundamentalist versions of faith are corrupt or worldly. And oddly enough, many who reject fundamentalist religion still assent to the premise of that dichotomy. They feel burned by fundamentalism but argue that non-fundamentalist religion is all compromise and “mental gymnastics”; that fundamentalism is genuine religion, and therefore religion in total is stultifying. That argument can feel compelling because some people who abandon faith retain fundamentalist ways of thinking about religion, even if they have abandoned particular fundamentalist beliefs. They continue to subscribe to the idol of fundamentalist religion even as they claim to reject it.

Restoration, on the other hand, can crack the window and let light in. There are resources in the Church’s history and theology, in its practice of restoration, that allow for our own ressourcement that can render our religion more meaningful and powerful.

Fundamentalism describes faith as knowledge. It pressures us to say that we “know” things are true and stakes a great deal on whether or not they are verifiably accurate. It creates binaries—but binaries do not reflect the reality of lived religion. A comprehensive and specific map can seem certain, but it remains simply a map. Our constant groping for a map that better fits our sense of the territory; our constant sense that we must progress and develop and adapt the restoration—that is what gives faith meaning and value. A binary cannot sustain that reality. 

In the logic of restoration, though, cognitive knowledge, or the things we know by thinking, is subordinate to the knowledge we gain through relationships. Richard Bushman has written that Joseph Smith hungered for family. The trauma he endured as son of parents downwardly mobile, whose economic catastrophes moved the family restlessly across early America, who lost young siblings to disease—all of this drove him to consider religion less as a source of cognitive knowledge than of experiential knowledge.

Joseph Smith was less concerned to know his lost brother was waiting in heaven than, simply, to know his lost brother again. And thus, the religious world he imagined was one in which the centrifugal economic and social forces tearing his family apart were stilled, and human beings were knit together again. His religion was a way of describing a deep truth about human nature: that we are not, fundamentally, individuals tasked with self-creation, but that we are social beings, shaped by those around us more than by ourselves.

In his lifetime he expressed this impulse through polygamy, the gathering of the Church, and sealing. In our lifetimes the Church expresses this impulse through celebration of the Western nuclear family. And understanding that religion is something deeply marked by history and culture allows us to see the fundamental hunger lying behind both of these expressions; to perceive them as different, but of a kind. Liberation, authenticity, finding who we are is not a project of disassociation and separation. Rather, liberation is recognizing our belonging; that we are shaped by others, by our communities, and by our families, and in that recognition finding reconciliation with ourselves and with others.

We, each of us, from Joseph Smith to Russell Nelson to my bishop to myself, are marked by our culture as much as the Church itself is. So is the cast that our families might take and how we interpret what they are. These are maps.

Of course, this is not the single right way to interpret the Church and its history. The point is that there is no single right way. The history of Mormonism gives us a vast set of ideas and inheritances, traditions and revelations for encountering God. Some may work best in some times and places; others will work best in others.

The point is this: God is not a concept, an idea, something frozen in time. God is a person, and thus encountering God is not about mastering a rigorous set of doctrines, but understanding and trusting in the bonds of a relationship that will inevitably change over time, just as your relationship with those you trust most will change over time. 

The heartbeat of that relationship is what religion is: something living, something that grows and evolves, something that flourishes in different ways in different times and places.

The fact that religion is living can give hope. Jesus is calling in every language, in every time. Having faith is having the hope to live in the world that being religious promises is possible and acting on that hope; to be willing to turn your back on the temptation of sterile idolatry and to plunge into the possibility and blessed reality of change. 

Matthew Bowman is Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University and the author of The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith and The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters and the Fragmentation of America.

Art by Emilia Wing