Truth and "Point of View"

Why principles matter in "reading the world."

I have been doing some interesting reading over the past few days as part of my initial foray into a new research project that combines some of my personal life and beliefs with my academic work. In short, I’m looking at how LDS church doctrine and culture is congruent with work in the field of intelligence (espionage, counterintelligence, and other functions of the state intelligence apparatus). I am reading through some work in the popular and other press on connections between members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and connections to US intelligence.

During the week, while reading a piece by Terryl Givens¹, a member of the church, I found reference to an article that came out in 1971 in Ramparts Magazine, a radical left publication that came out in the 1960s and folded in the 1970s. The piece is as sensationalized as more recent depictions of the church and its culture like “Under the Banner of Heaven” and “Big Love” in its portrayal of things that I know and understand very differently.

I will first share a few examples from the article. Then I share an example from my own life. Then we’ll get to the part you’ve been waiting for - my explanation of the underlying principle!²

Rampart Examples with Notes

This is one of the first descriptions of the church from the article³:

What is less known, but more important, is that the Mormons have built up their own extraordinary international society with an intricate maze of economic institutions and political power leading back to the throne of the Church in Salt Lake City, Utah. There, within the tabernacles and temple building, aging Mormon Elders exercise the financial and spiritual wizardry that allows their powerful conglomerate to grow and prosper. With a daily income of better than $1 million, and extensive political and economic control, especially in the western United States. Mormonism has made the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply into a glamour stock.

This describes the church as a kingdom; a kingdom that seems to be exclusively predicated on building up ever more economic and political power. From an outsider who views the world through a lens of politics - a far left magazine that views economic relations and political relations as the basis of all human interaction - this might be a description of what you see. The view from inside the church is very different.

Here is a more sensational claim!

Every academic discipline at BYU is a field for Church control. A professor who formerly taught there told me he once expressed ignorance about God to a student and found himself under investigation by the FBI.

To read this and take it at face value is pretty laughable. A church that funds a school being concerned that academics are taught in a way that is in harmony with the faith is pretty reasonable - even if you don’t agree with the faith. There are plenty of other universities that have different values, so students and professors have other options. The part of this description that made me giggle is believing in all seriousness that the FBI is going to investigate a professor at a private religious university for expressing doubt in God. Two key pieces of this stand out - one is that it is a former professor. The second is that the church is made to seem so powerful, so power-hungry, and so petty that it would abuse its position and call in favors from the Federal Government to investigate someone’s faith is silly. This is a story that definitely has two sides. And if I was a betting man, I’d put all my money on the other side.

But that doesn’t fit the narrative of the article, so in that anecdote goes. Some spice to prove that the church is just another powerful and corrupt institution that needs to be reigned in by enlightened managers who know better.

One final gem from this piece comes in its description (muddled and wild in and of itself) of the “church” influence on Indian affairs.

Despite its racial views, the Mormon Church controls not only the education of its own people, but also that of numerous Navajo Indians in the Utah area. Mormons teach at a school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Brigham City, at some public schools, and on Indian reservations. Over 14,000 native Americans were enrolled in the LDS seminary program last year.

So this reading requires that the church controls every aspect of everyone’s lives. If you are a member of the church, your function is to do the bidding of the church (and remember that the lens that is being used to discuss the church is that of a political and economic cabal controlled by “aging Mormon elders”) in all things. So if we “unpack” this paragraph, which follows the BYU example, conflating college choice and all education, the fact that teachers at some schools controlled by the Federal government belong to the church, they control the education of the Navajo tribes.

Over 14000 native Americans were enrolled in seminary - religious education for high-school age students that is voluntary and non-credit bearing. No thought to ask whether or not these students were members of the church. Navajos in this scenario have no agency - they are simply controlled by the all-powerful institution.

A Brief Personal Example

Flying to Iskandariya from Mosul to find WMD. (May 2003)

During graduate school I had wonderful opportunities to learn and grow. Since I hadn’t studied political science in my undergraduate or Master’s program, I was the least prepared academically when I began my studies. I was older and married and inexperienced in the academic field I was beginning. I had other experiences. I had lived for two years in Ukraine as a missionary, and had spent 8 years in the Utah Army National Guard. I started graduate school after finishing my second tour in Iraq. I had been in Iraq for the initial invasion, the first 9 months of occupation, and then at the height of the surge in 2007-08.

Many of the students (most of the Americans) who were PhD students with me had come to do their PhD directly from undergraduate or MA (which followed directly from their BA). What this meant was that there were plenty of students who were at the dissertation stage who were 4-5 years younger than I was when I was starting school.

I don’t remember exactly what the function was, but during one informal discussion during my second year, the subject of war films came up. I had recently watched a movie about the Iraq War called “The Green Zone.” That film was about the early chaotic days of the invasion and focused on a team that was looking for WMD. Coincidentally, I was in Iraq during the early invasion and my team was tasked with intelligence about WMD and finding Saddam Hussein - those were the two big things that we were tasked to look for.

To give a bit more perspective, I was selected to fly from Mosul back to Iskandariya in southern Iraq to conduct an interview with someone who claimed to know where there were WMD. We had been in Mosul about 10 days. The 101st ABN still had a few elements in the south as they waited to hand off the area. In June 2003, I was also tasked with driving with an 0-5 (Lieutenant Colonel) from General Petraeus’s staff from Mosul to Zakho (on the Turkish border to the North of Mosul) to conduct an interview with some DIA assets who were on the ground. That interview was also about WMD.⁴

I had literally been all over Iraq interacting with Iraqis and asking about WMD during the period portrayed in the movie. So the film was of interest to me. At one point I joined the conversation about movies and said something to the effect of: “I really liked Green Zone. It captured the way that Iraq looked and felt at that time of the war.”

One of the “senior” students turned to me and said very confidently: “You can’t know that.” In that student’s worldview, the only way we can make definitive statements is through rigorous statistical studies - the type of work we were being taught to do in our graduate work.

What struck me then, and which still strikes me now 13 or 14 years later, is that the instinct wasn’t to ask me why I might say what I said. The instinct was that any knowledge that is definitive had to come through the processes that were learned and practiced in that particular brand of political science studies.

A Principle

Our perspectives are limited. We have ways of looking at the world that do not take into account everything. I am not advocating that we discard our lenses. In fact, one of the principles that I hold most dear is that I choose to look at the world through a lens of faith. What is important, is that we should be aware of our own lenses. We should also be sure that we are trying to understand the lenses through which others see the world.

In our church’s most recent General Conference, there was great emphasis placed on being a peacemaker. I think that one way we can be peacemakers is not to be quick to take offense, to understand that others view of us may take a different description than one we would take for ourselves. In order to communicate, we have to find ways to translate those views before reacting.

1. Givens, Terryl. 2012. “How Mormons Became American.” Religion and Politics. https://scholarship.richmond.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1103&context=english-faculty-publications (April 12, 2023).

2. This may be marginally true for a small subset of readers.

3. Lang, Frances. 1971. “The Mormon Empire.” Ramparts Magazine 10: 36–43.

4. Neither of these interviews were productive. “I know someone who knows someone who saw people burying things on their street 10 years ago. I know that it is chemical weapons!”