Sunday School: D&C 129-132
The Sunday School teacher we had yesterday did a phenomenal job with the weird and wacky tail end of the Doctrine and Covenants. I want to document it in case I want to steal any of this at a later date.
Very early on, she dropped a bombshell on me personally by mentioning that Joseph Smith saw Paul in vision. I'd never heard that before. I spent the entire time she was talking about baptisms for the dead Googling that. Here's what I found.
Then we got to Section 129, which is the handshake section. She challenged us to think of practical application behind it, and I jumped in to assist. The section really has a funny, almost meme-like quality to it at this point. She wanted to ground it in something demystified, which is cute to how I think about Scripture in a lot of ways.
I brought up that in this time period, the Church was dealing with, and had been dealing with, individuals in the community going head to head with Joseph Smith, trying to be equally charismatic and revelatory in ways that challenged his leadership. We have everything from alternative practices with seer stones, internal fighting over money, and John C. Bennett especially introducing "spiritual wifery" as a counterfeit to the practice of polygamy. When you have a revealed religious movement with lay ministry, it opens the Church to a lot of what happened in the 1830s and early 1840s. There are people who try to challenge and usurp order by claiming power and influence for themselves for ideas and beliefs they champion.
At the heart of Section 129 is the principle of discernment. Don't believe everything that someone says to you without testing and proving it, or the person delivering it, in some way. Joseph Smith is talking about angels and spirits there, but the principle applies broadly to ideas and principles, too. Trust shouldn't be unconditional based on association in the Church because like any other vehicle for human relationships, people in the Church can and will still hurt you. That's an important part of the psychological landscape in the Church during the 1840s when these sections were written, which is essential to the context of how we should read them.
Later on, I connected this thought to generative AI. It is being lifted up as an essential service to our lives, while being completely divorced from truth and accountability. It can present information that is inaccurate and unsourced without connection to any individual person we can challenge or question. AI is being attributed personhood and "intelligence" when it has no brain, no ability to understand the information it presents. It has no relationship to the truth, no ability to discern truth in any of the information it handles. It's incapable of sound judgement and can only reflect the judgment of its human creators in its programming, which often are corporations whose only purpose is to abuse their creation for the purposes of making money. More so than any evil spirit that may or may not exist, AI has no hand I can shake. It's an algorithm for hire, not a person that we shouldn't be treating as capable of reason.
She loved that, and so did I. I never thought about it quite on that level before. I mostly resort to being glib and saying AI has no place anywhere near religion because machines are incapable of, and are no replacement for, worshiping God. But given that I'm surrounded by a conservative and aging population who don't understand this technology, explaining it to them this way helps them to grasp the stakes here in a way they can accept.
Because if I said, "this is the solution of billionaires to automate us out of the workforce so they can replace us with mindless drones with no morals, specifically so they can enslave us," they would balk and say I was crazy. I left that part unsaid.
And ultimately for me, that ended up being much more interesting than anything about Section 132 and polygamy. I was mostly watching to see how she handled it. And by bringing up John C. Bennett, I made it so running out the clock was a valid out of she wanted to take it. Never let it be said that I'm not a team player in a Sunday School class.
For Section 132, we went into the Book of Mormon and talked about Jacob 2, where the polygamy they were practicing was expressly forbidden. How do we square that circle with Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, David and Solomon, and the Old Testament patriarchs who practiced polygamy? Does the Book of Mormon condemn them?
She landed in the place I think is just about the only tenable ground there is, while maintaining any kind of integrity: polygamy is the exception, not the rule. It happened. Joseph Smith practiced it. Brigham Young practiced it. Hyrum Smith, Heber C. Kimball, and many others practiced it—secretly, then openly. She even contextualized the practice of being sealed to prophets, rather than one's own family, which was a widespread practice in the Church until Wilford Woodruff put a stop to it. He was the one who shifted the ideology in the Church to being sealed to family in all our generations back to Adam. That was what replaced polygamy with the 1890 Manifesto.
There were many aspects of the practice of polygamy that were not inspired. Abusing and neglecting wives is never inspired. Turning children who cannot reasonably consent into wives and arranging marriages for them is never inspired. Forcing women to remain in polygamy when they don't want to be, never wanted to be, and doing so at the threat of taking their children away, is never inspired. All abuse, whether it takes place inside or outside of polygamy, is never inspired. And we should never abuse the historical record by pointing to the outcomes of the practice, of women making the most of the situation, and saying "the ends justify the means." So much of polygamy apologetics is just that sentiment, wearing different hats and trench coats. I think a lot goes unsaid in the reality that much of what happens to us is man's doing instead of God's. That doesn't mean we are abandoned and forgotten in those circumstances. Heaven will help us through all the unfair and unjust things that happen to us. But that help is not indicative of God's endorsement of the suffering that brought us to that place.
One criticism I will offer is the case the teacher tried to make that "polygamy was about religion, not romance." Eliza R Snow, plural wife to Joseph Smith, would fight you if she heard you say that. She was in love with Joseph Smith. She stated that openly and without apology to anyone. You don't maintain polygamy on anything but love. No one suffers what the Saints went through in defense of polygamy without it being inexorably connected to profound religious AND romantic love. This isn't the place we can build accurate historical understanding from. And the only reason anyone would try is because they don't know enough about the general presidents of the Relief Society and women's history in the Church, something that deserves extensive correction from the Church itself.
Overall, it was a great lesson. It kept Mormonism weird, which is exactly what the Doctrine and Covenants should be about. It got weirder for me because of the lesson, which is exactly what I always want.
