Why Only One?

Thoughts on the Disposition of Mormonism

May 01, 2025

Nathan B. Oman offers a welcome probe into the “deep intellectual tendencies” of LDS thought. There’s a lot to like here: we are indebted to the past, to our communities, to our ancestors and descendants; forms of authority can be legitimate and not necessarily oppressive; sociality is eternal; religious belief—like almost everything else—is a gift; and all of our relationships are fragile and worthy of our most intense care and cultivation.

In his own terms Oman is right. I like what he is doing but not what his doing does. Anyone who’s ever been married or had a missionary companion knows that being right is often the lesser virtue. Intellectual inquiry is at its best when it is disclosing possibilities rather than affirming existing powers. Do we really need a defense of conservatism? Since the very beginnings, our intellectual tradition has had conflicting strains constitutive of a vibrant warp and weft, even though the liberal-progressive strains have consistently lost out to conservative ones, as Benjamin Park shows in American Zion. I think these defeats are due less to lack of theological authenticity than bad field position in the war of ideas. Liberal openness to dialogue—an attitude Oman models admirably—has been getting eaten alive by conservative ruthlessness. (Twenty years ago I published a book showing liberalism’s vulnerability to anti-liberal viruses.) Oman lends his considerable talents to an already stacked team.

Let’s root for the underdog. I think Oman treats liberalism less than generously. If his liberalism at its worst is a deracinated individualism paralyzed before the multiplicity of options, conservatism at its worst is parochial, stagnant, and smug. Gratitude can tip into gloating; the Zoramites of Alma 31 were very grateful! (Indeed, they showed “a certain insouciance to injustice.”) Liberalism’s core value is rather humility—in the face of the ultimate irreconcilability of values (as Isaiah Berlin argued) or before the difficulty of being sure about anything, including our own opinion (as John Stuart Mill argued). And liberals are not stuck with the Hobbes-Locke-Rawls tradition, thank goodness. There are much more robust and richer variants on offer (but that’s for another day: let me just name-check John Dewey and Charles Taylor).

Much in LDS thought tilts liberal. The idea of conversion—becoming a new creature—allows for radical novelty in one’s mode of being. Doctrine and Covenants 93 makes choice fundamental: unless intelligence is able to act for itself there is no existence! Our very being turns on agency. We make covenants of “our own free will and choice.” Our belief that the human spirit is both an uncreated intelligence and a child of God makes the tension between autonomy and relation permanent. The lack of theological resolution here is productive: conflict can be creative (a quintessentially liberal idea). By proving contraries truth is made manifest.

Progressivism is handled even less generously. I get the feeling that Oman’s progressives are less a disposition than a class of people who tend to populate universities and social service institutions. At its worst, progressivism is a quixotic war against our situatedness in the name of permanent revolution. (Some would assert that is when progressivism is at its best!) And progressives can be just as annoying as liberals or conservatives; the off-putting effects of social-justice warriors have been a prominent feature in pundit post-mortems of the 2024 US presidential election, fair or not, to say nothing of the battering progressive achievements have been taking from MAGA’s hostile takeovers or guttings. Should we pile on?

If we are to be conservatives and prize the best the past can offer, there are at least two senses in the intellectual history of the term progressive worth protecting. One is the reforms of the Progressive Era, 1890-1920, which gave us meat inspection, the direct election of senators, universal public education, labor laws, and the weekend (among other things). The other is the theological work done in the same period by Roberts, Talmage, and Widtsoe, foundational LDS thinkers all excited by potential for renewal. Perhaps their clearest legacy is the concept of “eternal progression.” This idea has been embattled in LDS theology for the past half century, but I don’t know of a more radical and glorious picture of the human project. And the divine project—that addition is kind of the point. Progress is a troubled term, yes, but could there be a more fundamental LDS idea than the potential for ongoing growth as selves and peoples?

That Oman allows three dispositions shows that his working assumption is a liberal one. What he says argues for a single disposition, but what he does shows the answer has to be plural. As always, we should pay more attention to what one does than says, and even more to what that doing does.

This essay, part of the forum How Mormonism Sees the World, was written in response to Nate Oman’s The Disposition of Mormonism, published May 1, 2025.

John Durham Peters is Maria Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film and Media Studies at Yale University whose writings can be found here.

Art by Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011).