I don’t much care for basketball. I’m horrible at it myself and I’ve never really lost myself in the game watching others play it. I can respect what Michael Jordan accomplished, but it doesn’t interest me all that much. That said, I was moved by Lance Allred’s description of the early morning practices he would have with his coach in high school in his memoir, Longshot: The Adventures of a Deaf, Fundamentalist Mormon Kid and His Journey to the NBA.

Those mornings were the purest form of basketball I ever knew. Just me, [coach Kerry] Rupp, and a ball. No money, no boosters, no politics. It was the pure love and innocence of the game, when it was still a game for me. We both worked and sweated, our shoes squeaking and echoing out the gym and down the empty hallways. I’d pay to have those moments again, those moments of hard work and sacrifice when I knew not what to expect as far as what my future held, with no sense of entitlement, no reward or motive in sight other than just the pure love of the game. I had no idea if I was ever going to be good enough to play college ball. We were challengers of the unknown.

I wasn’t playing for the future on those mornings with Rupp; I was playing for the moment, for the present. I wanted to be good at something; I wanted to excel at something.

While I have never been a particularly dedicated athlete, Allred’s drive to excel, to find the limits of his physical ability and push himself beyond them, is inspiring, in spite of the likelihood that it is, at least partially motivated by his obsessive-compulsive disorder. The drive to be good can be, I think, found in all people: the polygamists amongst whom Allred was raised, the athletes with whom he competes in amateur, semi-pro, and professional basketball, and his own family, struggling to define themselves within and without the Apostolic United Brethren, the fundamentalist Mormon sect of Allred’s youth.

While the tales of Allred’s struggles and triumphs in basketball are interesting (particularly his harrowing accounts of life in European basketball), I was interested in this book primarily for its depiction of the Pinesdale group of the Apostolic United Brethren fundamentalist group. This group, currently led by J. LaMointe Jensen, was originally led by Rulon Allred, who was succeeded by his son Owen. He had another son, Louis. Louis Allred was my wife’s uncle, a fact that her family still doesn’t quite know what to do with.

Sharon* married Louis in an LDS temple. Louis had left his father’s church in his youth, rejecting its tenets and moving into the “mainstream” church. He met Sharon*, they fell in love, and got married, moving to California. Lewis never hid who his father was, but he was adamant that he would not return to the fold. His father, however, had other ideas and eventually called Lewis back. Louis loved his father. He returned and took a second wife, not informing Sharon* of his intentions. Sharon* was devastated initially, but was eventually convinced of Louis’s continuing love for her. She returned to him and joined the group.

Some time thereafter, Rulon was murdered by members of a different polygamous sect. As a son of the former prophet and the brother of the current prophet, Louis’s position in the sect became more prominent. But, depending on who you ask, his faith was not that of the other members of the Council which runs the Brethren. Louis eventually committed suicide. Sharon* remained with the group. She did get the pleasure, according to Lance Allred, of hearing Marvin Jessop state that Louis killed himself because he was weak and that Louis would go to hell. In my wife’s family, Louis is a kind of tragic figure, done in by his love for his father, which drug him into a religion and lifestyle he didn’t believe in. Lance Allred offers his father’s (Louis’s brother’s) assessment that the day of the funeral was the worst of his father’s life and moves on.

Lance Allred has a gift for anecdotes and his stories of growing up polygamous are vivid. They range from stabbings and out-of-wedlock pregnancies to his favorite uncle’s pastime of randomly shooting the neighbor kids with BBs. Every story is steeped in rural poverty, scored by Garth Brooks and featuring large breakfasts and hosts of screaming kids. Allred also describes the isolation of living polygamous in the suburbs, where your friends are primarily your family and you all live too close together.

Owen Allred is prominent in polygamous circles for advocating against underage marriage and sexual abuse. However, Lance Allred repeats accusations in this memoir that sexual abuse occurred in the Pinesdale community. While Lance wasn’t a witness or victim, he implies that he knows those who were and that, one day, his father will write a summary of his experiences in the AUB. It was accusations of sexual abuse within the group’s leading Council that led the elder Allred to renounce them. He and his wife (they had never taken another spouse) left with their family in the aftermath of those accusations. I won’t spoil the events of their escape, but they do parallel classic Mormon tropes regarding the presence of evil and divine intervention.

Lance and his family eventually turn to the church, which is interesting because Lance greatly dislikes organized religion. He cites the LDS faith as giving his sister the motivation to become a doctor and he frequently records prayers and thoughts devoted to God. Lance Allred appears as a somewhat idiosyncratic Mormon, one prone to cussing and stories of his friends’ pranks involving gay pron, but also as a clearly devout, believing Mormon. His story, for those not inclined to read about the perils of playing under Rick Majerus or on shady Turkish professional teams, will appeal most to people who want some insight into life on a polygamous compound and in Utah suburbia, along with an interesting escape narrative. For those who really enjoy basketball, there is a lot of that, too.

Elder Scott’s recent General Conference address, To Acquire Spiritual Guidance, begins on a somewhat ironic note. After noting that in times past if one sought guidance they would turn to mentors or advisors, the current technological information overload means turning to others for advice can be a very risky proposition. Rather than bemoaning the death of trust, we should welcome the excuse to turn our eyes upward for inspiration. Elder Scott seems to be saying that human interlocutors will always be inadequate and that we will be better served by seeking to commune with the Lord directly.

That task, Elder Scott admits, can be daunting. Learning to consistently recognize the promptings of the Holy Spirit, distinguish them from one’s own impulses and desires, and act courageously to fulfill them are accomplishments that we would be lucky to achieve in a lifetime. However, Elder Scott clearly believes that developing these skills is necessary.

Unwilling to commit to a given regimen of revelatory training, Elder Scott instead offers examples of and incentives for the development of spiritual acuity. He notes the Prophet Joseph Smith’s instruction to John Taylor to begin each day with prayer and then shares two lessons as examples. In the first, a humble Priesthood leader taught a lesson from his heart. The content of the lesson was less memorable than the impression the leader gave of sincere love, desire to serve, and humility. The spirit was present and powerful as this man struggled to express himself within the church. In the second, Elder Scott attended a Sunday School class where the teacher was using the fruits of his education and study to share insights into the lesson. Elder Scott interpreted this act as evidence of pride, of a desire to impress his fellow congregants.

To some degree, the contrast between these two lessons defines one of the more important elements of the church. By keeping his lesson simple and focusing on his testimony of his ministry, the priesthood leader impressed Elder Scott with his sincerity and emotional depth. Although the Sunday School teacher obviously put a lot of time and effort into the lesson, the intellectual approach left Elder Scott irritated and bored. The clash between the emotional and the intellectual is played out throughout the church on any given Sunday. There isn’t any particular resolution to it; I imagine that there were people bored in the priesthood leader’s lesson and enthralled by the Sunday School teacher. Certainly, our teaching would be improved if our teachers always took care to be both intellectually enlightening and emotionally fulfilling. The more important message here is that either course can invite the Spirit.

In the case of both lessons, Elder Scott felt the promptings of the Spirit. He stopped paying attention to his immediate surroundings and started listening to and interacting with the voice of God. While I wouldn’t say that content and comportment are irrelevant in teaching lessons, what is clear in this message is they are not as important for the individual as we may have thought. Lessons, prayers, rituals, and sermons, in this sense, are important only insomuch as they facilitate communion with God through the Spirit. Whether interested or biding his time, Elder Scott felt the Spirit and chose to listen to it instead of the lesson in front of him.

The manner in which Elder Scott recorded his personal inspiration is interesting, perhaps mostly because it follows the pattern that Joseph Smith seemed to follow with his revelations. Once written, the revelation was examined to see if it conformed to the mind and will of God and changes could be made. It speaks to the imperfection of human interlocutors and the willing humility of the Brethren (and any sincere seeker) to keep at revelation until they are certain they have gotten it right. And, much like Joseph Smith, Elder Scott teaches that:

A person may profit by noticing the first intimation of the spirit of revelation; for instance, when you feel pure intelligence flowing into you, it may give you sudden strokes of ideas, so that by noticing it, you may find it fulfilled the same day or soon; (i.e.) those things that were presented unto your minds by the Spirit of God, will come to pass; and thus by learning the Spirit of God and understanding it, you may grow into the principle of revelation, until you become perfect in Christ Jesus [TPJS, p. 151]

Paying attention to the first promptings is valuable not for the promptings per se, but because it indicates an openness to the process of revelation.

As I said before, the content and context are less important in the reception of revelation, but not unimportant. In launching into a critique of pornography, Elder Scott acknowledges the potentially corrosive effects of pornography on family relations, but he is also at pains to discuss its effect on the soul. He notes that the adversary is at pains to induce “individuals, through temptation, to violate the laws upon which spiritual communication is founded.” The notion is that Satan achieves his goal if “he is able to convince them that they are not able to receive such guidance from the Lord.” The presence or absence of revelation in the life of the individual is presented, in this talk, as the surest means of judging one’s current standing with the Lord.

Returning to those two lessons, the point appears to be that whether or not you are someone who prefers the intellectual or the emotional, putting yourself in the right place at the right time indicates a willingness to receive revelation. The ongoing church-wide debate regarding the superiority of one or the other approach to scripture is shown in this, I think, to be entirely beside the point. Whether you are interested or bored, your involvement in the process seems to be considered sufficient sacrifice for God to honor it with those first intimations of revelation, if such is appropriate. What you do with that appears to be far more important than learning the signs of the times or the facts behind a piece of historical myth. Not that either of those is bad, but they seem to be goals secondary to our involvement in the church.

Finally, it is worth noting that, for those ensnared in pornography or other damaging, compulsive behaviors, Elder Scott’s first advice is to re-establish communication with God. Certainly, other steps are necessary, but it appears that without this, they may be empty or ineffectual. In our church, it seems that revelation is all.

I heard this in the hallway as I walked to class today.

“They’re not coming to church, but not for any legitimate reason. They’re just too lazy.”

Discuss.

This past week in Sunday School there was a discussion of Joseph Smith’s martyrdom and Doctrine and Covenants 135. My Sunday School teacher, whom I love and believe to have been sincerely sharing her thoughts on the martyrdom, went a little crazy. I don’t want to go into too much detail, but the line “Joseph Smith died for us” was uttered.

Now, I understand that different people get their testimony of the Gospel from different sources and in different ways. I myself have always been a Book of Mormon first guy; it’s how I got my testimony and it is how I maintain it. My testimony of Joseph Smith comes from his translation work on the Book of Mormon, not so much his other stuff (which isn’t to say I don’t appreciate it, don’t worship using it, or disbelieve it, just that my testimony came from the Book of Mormon and that it where it mostly resides). I don’t feel that my testimony is superior to anyone’s and I’m happy to have people get to the Gospel from all angles. So please read what follows as an inquiry, not a rant.

I don’t get our need for martyrs in the Catholic/Orthodox-saint sense. I admit that Christ’s blood needed to be shed in order for the Atonement to take place, but aside from that I don’t see the appeal. The message of Abraham and Isaac is, very explicitly, that God doesn’t require our blood. I doubt that the early Christians would have had that different an experience if Peter and James had died natural deaths. The Church would not be any less true for me (I think) if Joseph had lived until he was eighty. While it is nice to assume that Joseph’s death was all part of God’s plan, set up from the beginning, what do we lose if we see it as another 119 pages lost, evidence of Satan’s short-sighted plans rather than God’s need for spilt blood.

I tend to think that when John Taylor wrote that Joseph had “sealed his mission and his works with his own blood,” he didn’t view it as a necessary thing. It is a statement that Joseph was faithful to the end; that’s all. I’m no historian; was the immediate period prior to his incarceration the only time Joseph feared for his own life and spoke portentiously about it? Couldn’t a lamb going to the slaughter refer to another stint in a fetid prison, instead of a foretold death?

In any case, since we know that Joseph wasn’t particularly inclined to face the justice of Carthage and that his decision to go was some mixture of love of his people and a desire to save face, I wonder at my Sunday School teachers conviction. That Joseph reluctantly crossed back over the river to submit to arrest does not indicate to me a great desire to shed his own blood for the cause (nor, I suppose, does the fact that he shot back at his attackers while in Carthage Jail). I had a mission companion once who had a goal of getting arrested by Russian police for teaching the Gospel. It happened while he was my companion. Goal achieved, but he had to behave rather obnoxiously to do it (ignoring mission guidelines, I might add). There may be salvific power in suffering, but I’m skeptical it comes to those who seek it out.

The Catholics and Orthodox celebrate their saints for their stalwart devotion to God in the face of torture. The deaths of the saints are gruesome and often miraculous. I was recently reminded of the martyrdom of St. Christina, who was drowned and ripped apart. Those who venerate saints take God’s choice to put her back together again as a sign of divine love, but reviving someone just so that they can undergo another tortuous death doesn’t strike me as love. However, we are also frequently assured that saints felt no pain, so what do I know?

If we accept that Joseph Smith did more save Christ only for the salvation of men, then it seems to me that we need to be realistic regarding his death. I don’t know the value of seeing it as foreordained but I think that if we take Joseph and Jesus as exemplars then we should respect their real attitudes as they approached death. Christ asked that the cup be taken from him. Joseph made plans to flee to Iowa. Christ cried from the cross, “My God, My God, Why hast thou forsaken me?” Joseph looked at his friends and said, “If my life is of no value to my friends it is of none to myself.” There is despair and fear in these words and moments. We should respect that, rather than glossing it over.

So, if I am wrong to object to direct comparisons between Joseph and Jesus, it isn’t because I don’t value what they have done. It’s to some degree because I find Christ incomparable. But, more than that, it is because I worry that we can, in becoming overly fascinated with the interesting deaths of our loyal dead, we may seek out troubles and flaws that God wouldn’t want to see in us. We are, after all, often as short-sighted as the Devil.

Advice comes in two forms: rules to live by and personal narratives. As a recovering academic, I still see the appeal of rules. The acquisition, digestion, and reformation of the world around us grants power. Rules are created as a result of this process, rules derived from the manner in which we have broken down and rebuilt our worldview. Every rule is a law of gravity for our existence, created in our head but no less binding on us than thermodynamics or quantum mechanics. In point of fact, it seems our world is created in our head, a construct of the physical and the other that we bump into and our internal struggles to make sense of it all. So rule-making tends to be an act of control, a map of the known, a guide for traversing a world half obscured in darkness.

Halakhah is a Jewish notion. It names the great collection of legal material in and derived from the Bible. Rules of behavior offered as a means of salvation, a solace, an explanation for the good and bad in the world. Clarity and concision are the most important elements of the halakhic. If each rule can have only one application or one meaning, then the rule is well written. Ambiguity is the devil of little minds and rulemakers (no overlap necessarily implied).

For Halakhah, the tool of choice is a scalpel. Things that can be taken apart should be so that we can seek their beating heart and thereby gain understanding. We break down everything to its atoms; we make it as small as we can, perhaps so that we won’t be intimidated. Breaking something down to its one-word causes (patriarchy, racism, grace, compassion) gives the illusion of comprehension. Small ideas, though powerful, are manageable.

I am being too hard on the academic. The alternative is Aggadah, described by wikipedia (as good a source as any) as all non-legal material of Jewish or Biblical influence. It is a bit more than just that. Aggadah is intended to be just as binding on the average Jew as Halakhah, it just doesn’t consist of rules. It consists of stories. Aggadah is a vast collection of tales regarding Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, Akiva, Judah Ha-Levi, and a thousand other rabbis, scholars, peasants, prophets, and fools. It is a great grab bag of stuff; unruly, unruled, and uninterested in linear meaning.

The Halakhic impulse is to approach the Aggadah and derive rules from it. Certainly, that is what the rabbis often do. However, if the purpose of the Halakhah is to explain the world around us, it seems to me that the purpose of the Aggadah is to approximate it. Both approaches build worlds inside your head: Halakhah gives you schematics; Aggadah gives you impressionist vistas. Halakhah tells you why you love the painting, but Aggadah is the feeling that you get when you look at it and understand.

The academic impulse is to look at the Aggadah with disdain. Either it is incomplete (without a clear meaing) or it is incompetent (unable to explain itself). Nonetheless, I am deeply jealous of those with skill in Aggadah. President’s Monson’s Octopus trap did more to explain addiction to me than the thousands of morality talks I’ve heard before and since. Elder Holland’s Father in White, looking for his son, taught me more of the Father’s love for me, for us all, than any intense study of 1 Corinthians 13 has thus far. Christ taught in parables, why do I fail to give them the respect they are due?

I cannot speak for others, but I live in stories. I have stories about my childhood, my schooling, my family, my wife. Each story is actually about me, my understanding, my worldview. Every story takes place in my head, much more than it ever took place in the world. And each story is a guess, an attempt to approximate what actually happened, to offer the world through my eyes. I envy Margaret, Tracy M, and Rebecca J their ability to recreate their world for others. I seek to cultivate it in myself. In the meantime, I struggle in my Halakhah, using it to make up for my lack of Aggadah, until such time as I, like my Father in Heaven before me, am capable of creating worlds without end.

We all know that the two great commandments are to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself. I find the differences between the two refreshing and apt.

God, as I understand him, is Good and, therefore, incomprehensible to me. If I love my neighbor, it is done through (at minimum) extending him the same benefit of the doubt I grant myself (more on that later). God, on the other hand, is wholly trustworthy, reliable, and loving. As a result, I can devote myself fully to him without fear. Unfortunately, I don’t really understand him as a result. There is nothing in my experience (outside of God) that would hold up to that sort of standard. The goal in life is to know God, but there isn’t any way to do it outside of the experience of God himself. The world, the opportunity for learning that we have, is flawed, deliberately so. Our human experience, natural though it may be, obscures the divine and our connection to it. But it does provide some access to our fellow humans.

To love our neighbor as ourselves is as profound a command as I have ever encountered. I don’t know that I am sufficient to the task. It seems to me that the great problem of human existence is not the question of how to perfect one’s self, but rather the problem of how to love someone who is flawed. Loving the imperfect is what God and Christ excelled (and excel) at, but I often find it difficult. People with whom I disagree are idiots or deluded, manipulators of the worst sort. I, on the other hand, can justify away my moral compromises, my moments of poor form by pointing to the mitigating circumstances which required (or, at least, prompted) my bad behavior. If I have behaved poorly, please rest assured that I feel bad about it and that I didn’t intend harm or offense. I hate to overgeneralize, but I doubt I am the only person to have felt this way.

It strikes me that if knowing God is the goal of our existence, then loving our neighbors is the means. Certainly, God loves us and we are flawed, terribly so in most cases. Remember Elder Eyring’s counsel that if we assume that the people we are talking to is in some sort of trouble, we will usually be right. Finding it in our hearts to genuinely love those who have used us or, even harder, those who have used those we love is almost beyond human ability. Which is weird, because we mostly love ourselves and we have mostly used, abused, and hurt others. Loving your neighbor doesn’t just mean accepting your neighbors flaws; it means accepting (in a non-abstract manner) that you are possibly equally flawed. It means loving your self and your neighbor in the imperfection.

God doesn’t forgive us in sin, but rather from sin. No unclean thing may enter God’s presence. But we are all unclean; we are all in sin. Humans don’t have the option of loving, trusting, saving, embracing, or listening to the perfect (outside of God). Nor should we want it. God loves the killer, the thief, the jerk, the pervert, the meanie and the junkie, along with the little children and the saints. Why should we, in our striving to emulate and become like God, to know God, expect any other task?

Eons ago (in 2006), I wrote a blog post about Mormon popular art. In it I suggested that the Spirit has a tendency to testify of sincerity (rather than artistic quality) and that this explained why so much Mormon art is bad. In the comments to that section, D. Fletcher (whom I wish participated more around these parts nowadays) suggested that the reason so much Mormon art is tepid is because we are, generally, happy. Art comes from pain (much like comedy or addiction) and unless one is tormented in ways that most Mormons won’t admit great art cannot come. At the time, I thought that this was needlessly reductive; today I’m not so sure. But, that said, I have a suggestion for our artists out there (I myself not being much of one): feel the restraints of Mormon life as pain.

When I was in high school, I did not see the point of sonnets and haiku. It’s great that some poet can fulfill an arbitrary rhyme scheme, but I want to SPEAK (I was overly dramatic in high school). Constraints prevent our inner voice…except that they don’t. No-one would argue that Shakespeare or Petrarch’s inner voice was silenced by the sonnet and, further, no-one seriously argues that either wandered about speaking in iambic pentameter every day. Placing constraints made the work harder, more painful, but that was the point.

Another example might be Iranian cinema. In Iran, there are censors who judge films on their moral worth and their sense of Islam. This sets constraints on Iranian directors who wish to discuss sensitive subjects or question the authorities. Therefore, such directors have trained themselves to speak in metaphor, in disjointed narrative, in misdirection in order to get their point across. Even the most frank of Iranian movies has, it seems to me, a kind of magical realism, because the point is often found in what is missing onscreen but implied by events. One of my favorite Iranian films, Children of Heaven, is an inoffensive story of a poor boy and girl sharing a pair of shoes. It is also a critique of class in Iran, a call for the education of women,and a pious morality tale. The movies contain multitudes because they cannot be explicit or direct.

The restraints that Mormonism places on our behavior and our comportment should be viewed as the rhyme scheme in a sonnet or the censors in Iran. The pain is in using the limits to force yourself to look inward and work harder with the available material. If we accept the limits, and the necessity of the limits, that should inspire us to find ways to transcend them. So much Mormon literature is about the maintenance of the limits; so little seems to find the value that comes from the struggle with them (that’s what they are there for, after all).

In offering this suggestion, I am woefully arrogant. There may be Mormon art that meets my criteria (The Giant Joshua comes to mind as a possibility, but I haven’t finished it yet). Certainly, James Christenson’s work is popular and metaphorical (although I don’t like most of it). I just think that it is in the constraints, the ones in which D. Fletcher suggests we find our happiness, that we may find the pain necessary for great art.

Your Monday Morning Theological Poll:

Is Abraham’s astronomy real or metaphorical?

Look into your Urim and Thummin and give us the answers below.

Your Monday Mid-day Theological Poll:

Why is gender eternal?

Please give us the eternal perspective below.

Due to the recent poll, I was pointed to a diary post at the Daily Kos. In it, a pro-choice, pro-gay-marriage Mormon tries to explain why they won’t leave the church, even though they disagree with the church’s stance in Prop 8. The argument he chooses is that the church is within its rights to regulate behavior within the church; outside is another matter. The diarist alludes to reasons why they won’t leave the church, but isn’t very specific. Finally, the diarist asks the following question to another member of that community:

am I wrong to maintain my membership in my church? I love the Gospel, I think it is beautiful, and I don’t want to be outside it. I know you did what you had to do? Is my choice wrong? I don’t think so.

In the ensuing comments, many people (mostly militant atheists) helpfully suggest that the appropriate response is to stop going to church or to remove one’s name from the roles. This is because they aren’t listening to the diarist (who doesn’t want to leave the church) and because they have a fundamental misunderstanding of religious life. They think it is like shopping.

Many people believe that religion exists solely to make your life better. Many militant atheists, in particular, seem to believe this. Religion, in this thought, is there to soothe pain, to explain the mysterious, and to comfort the weak. “We, noble, brave, and strong, don’t need those consolations, but it is nice for those nincompoops out there to have something to cling to if they won’t be rational. At least, it is nice unless they decide to use religion to kill people…nevermind, let them suffer until they get it.” In this worldview, if a particular religion holds views or makes demands of you that you find potentially offensive or inconvenient, then you just go find a new religion. It is all about finding the religion that justifies the way you already live and causes you to have the most certainty regarding the meaning of your life and your place before God. In other words, choosing a religion and choosing an outfit are essentially the same act.

This is stupid.

It is stupid, primarily, because it denies the critical element that brings most people into religion, which is an experience with the ineffable. Most people who believe believe because they have felt, heard, seen, experienced some event that they feel is best explained by recourse to supernatural forces. Something happens in your life (you say a prayer, you cry out in pain, you wish for your mother’s love) and, a little unexpectedly, you get a response, an overwhelming response that doesn’t seem to come from within you. It tells you things; it opens your eyes and ears; it makes you want to be better; it makes you better. The initial faith experience is, I think, almost always like this. You don’t choose faith initially; it chooses you.

What you do with this, over time, changes according to the individual. Some people cling to it; others let it go. I personally think that, after that initial experience, faith is a choice; “will I continue to believe in the import of that event or will I let it fade?” In any case, this is where the consumer model of religion fails. I would imagine that the majority of the truly religious have joined a particular religion not because of its similarities with their already-held beliefs but rather in spite of the dissimilarities. Religious lifes means that we join groups because, to some degree, we believe God approves of the group. We join churches because we believe God told us that was the way to connect to the divine. We may well prefer another group that was more closely aligned with our personal beliefs, but we are where we are because we believe God told us to go there. Negotiating the difference between our understanding and a church’s is never as simple as “voting with your feet” because God found you in that church and, therefore, it can’t be all bad. To reject that church entirely isn’t to just walk away, it is to rewrite and revise your lived life. A church isn’t a political party, a social club, or a name brand. It isn’t something someone can or should easily discard.

So, o diarist, I agree with you. There is nothing wrong with remaining in the church, even if you disagree with some church policies. Tell your friends with their Dawkins and Hitchens (the Jack Chicks of the atheist movement) that suggesting otherwise fails to grasp what is important about religious life: the counsel of the divine. If they don’t get that or if they reject it, that’s their right; but it isn’t their right to regulate behavior outside of their little militant group.