The Sanctity of Dissent

by
Paul James Toscano

Signature Books, Salt Lake City,
1994.

Table of Contents:

Prologue

The essays collected in this book—originally written as speeches—are personal milestones in a journey into exile—a journey that formally began on 16 March 1963 when, as a seventeen-year-old convert from Catholicism, I was baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the California Baldwin Park II Ward. That journey lasted thirty years and six months, culminating on 19 September 1993, with my excommunication by the stake presidency and high council of the Salt Lake City Big Cottonwood Stake.

Growing up I was never a rebel. I was all obedience and responsibility. And in my early years in the church, my views seemed thoroughly orthodox, and my loyalty to leaders seemed unshakable. But, from the beginning, there was something at the root of my religious life that made my ultimate excommunication highly likely, if not inevitable. This something was not—as some have conjectured—anger, nor ambition, nor amorality, nor arrogance. It was a fundamentally different understanding of the meaning of the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The essays collected here serve as a chronicle of my progressive development and articulation of this perception of Mormonism that so radically differs from that currently advanced by the mainstream and corporate church.

Modern Mormonism asserts that the purpose of the restoration is to eliminate religious uncertainty by establishing a church and priesthood structure that provides a sure-fire, fool-proof, and fail-safe conduit to God. What modern Mormonism claims to offer the world is not principally a body of teachings or ordinances or spiritual experiences, but a body of divinely called and appointed church leaders ("the Brethren") who are authorized by God to deliver to us inspired counsel on how to live happy, productive, and respectable lives in this world and how to perfect ourselves in preparation for the celestial world to come. Modern Mormonism, therefore, promises to eliminate the risk of personal error in religious matters. In the church we hear this promise again and again in the form of such catchphrases as:

To be learned is good, if we first harken to counsel.
There is safety in following the Brethren.
Obedience is the first law of heaven.
When a prophet speaks, the thinking has been done.

Over the fourteen-year period spanned by these essays I became painfully aware that the modern LDS church has become crushingly legalistic. It emphasizes strict adherence to rules. It sees righteousness and spirituality in terms of church membership. It teaches that one's standing before God depends on one's loyalty and obedience to the men in charge. In practice, it contradicts Jesus' teachings that we should have no masters. Its policies are at odds with New Testament and Book of Mormon teachings that our relationship with God is not determined by status—be it race, gender, family, tribe, nation, wealth, office, or circumstance. It stresses incessantly the importance of church and priesthood [p.xiii] authority over personal spiritual gifts and experiences. Its members tend to testify of the truth of the church rather than of the gospel, to emphasize the family over the individual soul.

I have never agreed with this form of Mormonism. For me, the restoration was meant to re-establish the truth that our relationship to God is individual, personal, direct, and passionate. Our apostles, prophets, and leaders were meant not to give us rules of conduct, but to call us to Christ. The Brethren were not chosen primarily to receive revelation for us, but to teach us how to obtain revelation for ourselves. For it is not our leaders, but the spirit alone that can confirm in us all truth. The church was not created to save us. The church is what needs to be saved. Its purpose is not to dispense rewards and punishments, but ordinances and teachings by which we may be spiritually transformed. The church was never intended to serve as a shuttle to heaven, but to encourage us on our own spiritual journeys, to teach us that mistakes are inevitable, but that forgiveness is at hand, that God's love for us is personal and unconditional, and that each of us is equally sacred.

This is not to deny or disparage the need for church, family, government, or other social structures. Scripture teaches that each Christian is a living stone in the spiritual temple of God. Structures are important. But they are not primary. They are necessary. But they are not sufficient. The basic building block of any community, religious or otherwise, must be the individual soul, whose worth, the scripture declares, is "great in the sight of God." The ninety and nine must be left for the sake of the one because the individual is always more important than the organization. The congregation is never holier than the humblest of its members. The good news is not that Christ loves the church, but that Christ [p.xiv] loves each individual. He died not to spiritually empower the collective, but each child, each woman, each man. Had there been but one sinner, Christ would have died for that one alone. Chief among the radical teachings of Jesus Christ is that God is not a tribal deity at all. God is the God of each person, no matter what her tribe, his nation, her family, his class—no matter what his or her religious understanding.

The modern church is uncomfortable with this view because, down deep, it does not fully trust its members to respond to the spirit of God or to apply the principles of the gospel. It does not fully trust God to do his/her own work. The ecclesiastical bureaucracy doubts the power of God to spiritually transform the rank and file members of the worldwide church. It sees itself as a spiritual elite whose primary duty is to reinforce true worship. So, it makes additions to the gospel message. It makes up rules. It promises those who obey them that they will become citadels of rectitude safe from the vicissitudes of life. For this reason, in the modern church to avoid sin is a more certain course than to repent, to judge rightly more serviceable than to forgive, and to follow the Brethren more reliable than to follow the spirit.

The good news has always terrified the legalistic and controlling, those who demand closure. To them the gospel seems too unpredictable, too risky, too open-ended. Such people find it difficult to trust an invisible God, to shoulder a cross of personal sacrifice, and to assume and allow others to assume the risks of personal accountability to God. Jesus says to us: "Take up your cross and follow me." But we do not want this. We want to lay it down and follow someone else. We want leaders who will make us lists of dos and don'ts, tell us how to dress, when to laugh or cry, what to speak, where to go, whom to trust, what to believe, and why. We want someone to outline our life's plan, a plan of happiness,

where everything is pre-scheduled. We want a celestial itinerary worked out by God-appointed travel guides who can give us a map that charts for us a spiritual journey without mistakes, losses, weaknesses, sins, or unpleasantness. In short, we want all the benefits of life and none of its burdens. We want to go back to Eden, away from the lone and dreary world. We want a clean, well-lighted place, perfect, changeless, safe. We want freedom from freedom.

But this is the one freedom God will not allow us. Salvation frees us from bondage not from liberty. Each person is responsible for his or her own spiritual journey, for his or her own failings. No competent person can escape this responsibility. Each individual must choose to make her or his own mistakes or to make the mistakes of someone else. If we make our own, we can grow through repentance. If we do not, we will stagnate in blindness or self-righteousness. No one can dodge this responsibility by transferring it to a spiritual leader. To attempt this is idolatry.

In the course of my journey into exile, I came to accept that the modern church's view of the restoration was irreconcilably opposed to my own. With ever-increasing clarity I saw that the church, in its misguided attempt to create for its members a safe place, instead, was creating for them a prison and abetting abuse. I came to believe that God will not bless such an effort, nor acquiesce in the abdication of our personal responsibility for the spiritual welfare of our own souls, nor smile benignly upon us as we sell ourselves into slavery no matter how well-meaning, or inspired, or authorized our masters may be.

I was excommunicated from the church for publicly expressing these criticisms, which have been collected in this book. These essays trace my spiritual journey away from legalism to redemptive Mormonism. They memorialize the [p.xvi] development and articulation of my view that the true purpose of the restoration was not to create yet another "one and only true" group, but to re-establish Christ's "true and living church"—not a closed ecclesiastical corporation, but an open and genuine religious community whose members believe, not merely in the sanctity of the collective, but mainly in the sanctity of personal experience, personal salvation, personal revelation, personal freedom, personal empowerment, and personal accountability to a personal God—a community whose members believe in the sanctity of the individual and in the sanctity of dissent.

Easter 1994