Thankfully, Zion Is Quirky People

A Review of Dispatches from Mormon Zion

In his book Dispatches from Mormon Zion, Ryan Davis tells personal stories from a decade living in Utah Valley. For him, this has meant fishing up the canyon, connecting with fellow Taylor Swift fans, interacting with students at Brigham Young University (where he’s a professor of political science), and chatting about practical philosophy with his friends in the area. 

The book’s opening stories are a delight, including a comical interaction with a random kid who tries to get Davis to take her to 7-Eleven to buy her snacks, a pie-making contest that Davis mistakenly wins for a moment, and a sighting of minivan near BYU with a license plate MIL-FLCN (Millenium Falcon), and so many more. Provo is weird, and Davis captures the weirdness perfectly.

But it’s the final chapters that most deeply moved me. There, among other things, Davis explores some of the most vexing questions I’ve wrestled with as an adult, namely: How can I make sense of the fact that my childhood beliefs about God were largely the result of the culture I was raised in? Wouldn’t I have had very different beliefs (and felt just as certain about those beliefs) if I had been raised elsewhere? Perhaps more importantly, how can we ever hope to find true peace—to build Zion—when the world is full of quirky differences and contradictory views about God? 

As he does throughout the book, Davis explores these questions with a spirit of humor and curiosity. He says that what might initially appear to be irreconcilably different views of God might only seem that way because we’re each embedded in different cultural contexts. To illustrate this point, Davis suggests that we imagine what it would be like to meet an alien who experiences colors as sound. Whereas you see the color green, this alien would hear it as a particular kind of buzzing. “You are responding to the same thing,” Davis writes, “but with different experiences and concepts.” 

A similar thing is happening, Davis suggests, with the varieties of religious experiences around the world. We’re each responding to the same thing, but we experience that same thing through the concepts that are familiar to us because of our unique cultural context. “Our spiritual experiences might really be traceable to God, but this phenomenal appearance (the God we perceive) is a kind of intermediate figure between us and God. Call it an angel, or a vision, or a heavenly Buddha. But whatever you want to call it, God must enter our mind through our own sensory experience, as shaped with our own concepts.” (148)

This is a wonderful, hopeful, and loving worldview. It means that we must learn to hold each “phenomenal appearance” lightly, knowing that any phenomenal appearance cannot fully capture the infinite capacity of God. It means that God is at work throughout the entire world in a variety of cultural contexts. It also means that each tradition has a unique purpose to play in building Zion, and that Zion is bigger than any single tradition. As LDS apostle Orson Whitney once wrote, “God is using more than one people for the accomplishment of his great and marvelous work. The Latter-day Saints cannot do it all. It is too vast, too arduous, for any one people.” 

Of course, all of this is quite abstract. In practice, I’m not trying to figure out how to get along with every person in the entire world. I’m just trying to figure out how to get along with the people I interact with on a daily basis—my family and friends, quirks and all. 

Davis understands this and writes about how to translate these ideas into our lived experience. Citing the work of historian Don Bradley, he points out that Joseph Smith claimed that the grand fundamental principle of Mormonism is to “embrace all truth, let it come from where it may” but that Smith later also proclaimed that friendship is the grand fundamental principle of Mormonism. 

Proclaiming that two distinct things are the grand fundamental principle of Mormonism might seem contradictory, but Davis sees another way to think about it. “My own preferred reading,” Davis writes, “is that embracing the truths one finds in another is just what friendship is about.” (153) It’s a lovely interpretation of Smith’s words, suggesting that a) Mormonism is fundamentally about friendship and that b) friendship is fundamentally about embracing the truth in each other. 

Put another way, the grand fundamental principle of Mormonism is the portal into Zion. It’s a way into peacemaking, which Davis also explores in these chapters. He notes that there are two ways of finding peace: either through conquering another person via argument or through finding “peace through friendship.” For Davis, finding peace through friendship happens when we stop “trying to win an argument” and instead take on a posture of curiosity, allowing ourselves to be open to their differences—their views, their flaws, and their quirks.

This is the practice of Zion—flawed people learning to understand other flawed people and create something completely new together in the process. 

Where will this practice lead us? It’s impossible to know. When we practice this way we can’t help but transform into a new way of being. As the scholar Wayne Booth puts it, when we open ourselves up to love, we are “committed to the possibility of conversion” away from our current position. Love, in this way, always retains a sense of openness and malleability, without ever completely letting go of one’s inner integrity.

“In a deeply divided world,” reads the back of the Dispatches from Mormon Zion, “how can people find common ground?” On every page, Davis shows how it’s possible—through a determined spirit of curiosity and humor that not only tolerates but also delights in our quirks.

Jon Ogden is the cofounder of Uplift Kids, which helps families explore wisdom and timeless values together. To subscribe to his column, first subscribe to Wayfare, then click here to manage your subscription and turn on notifications for One Step Enough.

Art from the ‘Marrow’ series by Daniel George.