Understanding Consecration and the Poor

Christ Healing the Sick at Bethesda, Carl Bloch

It is brave to be vulnerable about weaknesses and ignorance at church. 

That's what I have to tell myself when the person who is teaching the Sunday School lesson admits to thinking that Consecration as it was practiced in the LDS Church, Socialism, and Communism are all the same thing, and all of them bad. It is brave to be that wrong and to admit it openly in public.

I want to share the observation the teacher made and my response to it, in case it helps anyone else who has to explain this to someone in or adjacent to our community. These are corrections that aren't made often enough, or this directly, and it's time to start acknowledging why. It's time to recognize who created the harmful circumstances in which we now live and worship and to do the hard work of undoing them.

The History and Rejection of Consecration

To provide some context for those who need it: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a Christian community that throughout its history practiced a form of socialism called the Law of Consecration. It has a long and complex history, marred with mixed success, failure, and corruption.

The Law of Consecration was originally exercised through the United Order, referred to in scripture as the United Firm—not to be confused with the United Orders in the frontier territories the Church occupied throughout the 19th century. And in the post-WWII, anti-Communist, deeply entrenched right wing swing because those like J. Reuben Clark, Ezra Taft Benson, Cleon Skousen and others in the overlap between church leadership and the John Birch Society, consecration is now a politically charged subject.

Most members of the Church cannot talk intelligently about the actual practices of the Law of Consecration or the United Orders. They don't know enough about them to understand the massive wealth transfers they created for certain families in the Church when the United Orders were sold off to private ownership. Current members whose inherited wealth exist because of consecrated properties born out of the Saint's poverty and desperation, purchased rather than earned through work by their ancestors, are often unaware this is the source of their prosperity. Those who are aware of the fact have a vested interest in not drawing attention to it. As a result, there isn't really a space at church to challenge this historical illiteracy that wouldn't cause serious conflicts within congregations, which is why the Church has never tried to do it. It would involve a certain amount of pedantry that is a socially and politically loaded gun.

But people in our faith take the ignorance they have inherited about the Law of Consecration and the United Order and try to use their incomplete knowledge to make sense of American capitalism and our current form of government. As someone with this understanding who also grew up poor, I don't know which aspect of my experience makes lessons like these more painful to listen to.

The Painful Ignorance of Poverty

Returning to the lesson that inspired this post, here is the observation from the teacher I referenced before. He admitted that he has only ever looked at consecration, socialism, and communism through the lens of what everyone allegedly "gets." To him, it's a transactional relationship based in receiving material objects. Whereas some (see post and comments) within the Church create a distinction between Consecration and Socialism as one where "Socialism takes" and "Consecration gives," this messaging hasn't reached many younger conservatives within the Church. The understanding, as reflected by our current instructor, is that Socialism and Consecration give until they become insolvent because there will always be more undeserving poor abusing the system than those who contribute. It categorizes those in need as lazy, unintelligent, and unwilling to contribute. That there was first a necessary sharing of unearned materials and a pooling of unpaid labor has completely gotten lost.

He's an adult and is just now realizing that there were "work requirements," as they're now called, for the Law of Consecration, and that's as far as he can actually understand the exchange at work. This is the only way he was prepared to reconcile the existence of socialism within the Church in his own mind. It's his first exposure to one of the oldest ideas in socialism, that everyone gives according to their ability and receives according to their needs.

In case you also don't know, that last sentence is practically a direct quote from The Communist Manifesto. Karl Marx didn't come up with it either. It was a saying that had already been shared around in labor rights circles for many years before Marx wrote it down. It's a vision of society that is decidedly 19th century, a kind of utopian vision of class solidarity and survival in which the Church shared.

If that sounds like D&C 51:3, where Edward Partridge is instructed to "appoint unto this people their portions, every man equal according to his family, according to his circumstances and his wants and needs," and you want a different way to interpret it... I could tell you I'm sorry, but I'm not.

Consecration is not a contemporary Republican value. It's not going to gel with current Republican sensibilities. The idea that your labor should bless more people than just you, since it depends on more than just you to accumulate it, isn't going to go down well for Republicans these day. They're going to choke on it.

Everything about Christianity is hostile to the selfishness and greed that have plagued and defined American society since the beginning. God does not honor exploitation, greed, and the dehumanization of the poor. That's not how Heaven operates. If you need a market of labor to exploit to avoid working with your hands, you're not interested in heaven. If you need wealth to situate yourself above others, you're not interested in what Heaven is. Heaven is not a market. There is no buying, selling, or trade there. There is no capitalism in heaven. 

And if you have a problem with that, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest it's because you've never been poor. You have no idea what it's like to be exploited, or you wouldn't be so eager and comfortable choosing it for others. You've never had your wages stolen, your livelihood threatened, the food taken from your children's mouths, everything of value you own taken, your health destroyed, your material wants ignored, and had people view you as less than human because you have nothing else they can take from you. You've never had to fight for opportunities on equal footing because everything in this world was built for you to receive it without question. You don't know what it means to have people say they treat you terribly because you don't work hard enough when they don't even know you.

There is a great evil in my country, in the society in which I've lived almost all of my life. It's an evil that also exists within the Church, in which there is an operative narrative in which people deserve poverty as a consequence of their own choices.

Nevermind that the Book of Mormon condemns that very thought with the strongest possible language in Mosiah 4:16-23. But I'm not going to quote that here for the sake of space. There's a different story I want to share instead that I think fits with the spirit of D&C 51 a little better.

In Acts 4-5, the apostles instituted a form of consecration then, too. People donated and sold property, donated them to the Church, "and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need."

There is a couple who agrees to consecrate some property to the Church under that system. Ananias and Sapphira kept back part of the sale price from the Church. They were caught in their lies and God destroyed them. They didn't want the blessings of consecration. They wanted to be seen doing good, not to actually do it. They wanted the honor that comes from being among those in their community who consecrate. There is a difference. One is real. The other is performative.

There is no future in heaven for those who care more about possession and positions than the commandments of God and the humanity of others. I don't know what it is in people of our faith that we make solemn covenants of consecration to God, without even understanding that this what they mean. We promise a generosity that is no longer enforced within the community because we each determine what that generosity looks like. But the consequences of holding back, even if they're postponed in modernity, have not be changed or rescinded.

You'll recall this is the first or the second time I'm bumping into these attitudes. I'm seeing a lot of people in my congregation bottoming out over the speed bump of giving poor people human dignity, and I gotta wonder what's getting lost in translation. I'm glad they're talking about it and beginning to address it within themselves. But the pace is glacial.

Restoring Dignity

So I'm going to say this in the simplest way I know how. My family was as poor as you could get in the United States without being homeless. I got free lunch at school. Both my parents worked. You can work yourself to the bone in this country and still be poor. The fact that my parents were being exploited by the companies they worked for was not a good enough reason for us not to be able to afford food. It wasn't a good enough reason for us not to have health care. It wasn't a good enough reason for me not to be able to afford an education. I didn't deserve to suffer because my parents were poor. I don't deserve to live with the lifelong consequences of that poverty still. I don't deserve it. No one does.

The members of my church were socialized to be mad at all the wrong people about the poverty in our country. They should be furious at the wealthy who don't pay living wages or contribute to society through their fair share of taxes, not the workers who demand living wages to uphold society. It's an extreme privilege for people in our church not to understand that.

And if I could ask one thing for my community to consecrate to me right now, at no financial cost to themselves, it would be to rehumanize the poor in their minds and hearts. Stop believing in the myths and preconceived notions they've absorbed about their friends, neighbors, and those in the pews beside them.

We're not monsters. We're not animals. We're not parasites. We're not vermin. We're human beings who are trying to survive. And that's how everyone should talk about us and our poverty when we're at Church. In sacrament meeting, in Sunday School lessons, at activities, and in leadership meetings—the poor are not failures. We're not unintelligent. We're not lazy. We're not object lessons for unprofitable servants. We are people worthy of the same respect that the Savior showed to us.

The Savior didn't ask to see our tax returns before giving us fish and bread. He didn't ask our nations of origin before teaching us his gospel. He didn't reserve his choices blessings for the rich and well-respected in society. He honored widows and their mites, sex workers and their loyalty, tax collectors and their service, and the poor in their humility with healing and wholeness. There was no minimum requirement of money to give before obtaining his favor. 

There were, however, dire consequences and anguish for those of means who went through life thinking that way. The rich young ruler. The camel and the eye of the needle. The whited sepulchres full of dead men's bones. The priests and temple leadership who had forgotten the purpose of their leadership. His condemnations were frequent enough that it's impossible to miss them or misunderstand them. They can only be ignored by those who've decided that covenants and commandments simply don't apply to them.