On Being Spiritually Left-Handed

When I was young and sitting in a boring Chemistry class, I decided to write all my class notes with my left-hand, even though I am right-handed. I did it for quite a number of weeks. I had heard somewhere that writing with the non-dominant hand helps with retention of new information (which probably isn’t true, but Chemistry being what it was for me, I thought I would try anything at that point.)

I remember the focus I had to muster to make my hand translate what my brain was trying to put down. The letters came out squiggly. A task so simple for my other hand transformed the pen in my fingers into something completely foreign. Even my brain felt like it was cramping up. Not only was it awkward, but the results were sloppy, illegible at first. I did get better at it over time, but it took a lot of concentration.

I share this as an imperfect metaphor of my experience in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has been not too different from being left-handed in a spiritually right-handed church. The good part is, this has not been a bad thing! Let me explain what I mean.

There is plenty of tension in the world right now between what we have labelled “the political left” and “the political right.” Fortunately or unfortunately, this spills over into other aspects of life, including at church. I will call conservative members “spiritually right-handed” whenever they are focused on conserving aspects of church culture, tradition, and policy that they feel are important, and I will call progressive members “spiritually left-handed” whenever they want to improve or change aspects of church culture, tradition, and policy that they believe are detrimental to our progress.

I recognize this is reductive to the complexity of a wide range of political, social, and spiritual views, because a person could be “left” or “right” handed in any number of issues (a person can write with their right hand and pitch with their left, after all) but it is worth pointing out that whether someone is predominantly “right” or “left’ handed, bringing a diverse group of left and right-handed worshipers together in the same church does pose some challenges. It also provides remarkable opportunities for growth.

On Discovering That I Was Left-Handed

I was in my early twenties when I came to terms with the fact that I was spiritually left-handed. For context, I am a participating latter-day saint who also identifies as gay. In those developmental years spent trying to conform to heterosexual identity, I tried to fit in politically and socially as well, and that meant adapting to a really difficult situation. In other words, not unlike those midcentury left-handed pupils who, at least according to my mother, had their knuckles struck by their teacher if they were ever caught using the wrong hand, I grew up learning to take spiritual notes with my right hand.

Looking back, though many have had different experiences than me, I consider my formative years to be a blessing in the end. Not because I think my church culture did a great job supporting me as a gay member (to be honest it didn't; having to grow up terrified of strange feelings that were barely mentioned except in shameful whispers or ridiculed during quorum activities is not something I would wish on anyone) nevertheless the time spent writing with my right hand helped me gain skills I wouldn’t otherwise have learned.

I came to value what a conservative perspective of the gospel brings. I gained a personal testimony of covenants and religious traditions related to priesthood authority and prophetic voices. This includes commandments around same-sex relationships, as currently taught by church leaders. As I wrestled with the doctrines of Christ with my non-dominant hand, I learned to respect the capable right-handed leaders who were sincere in their efforts to follow Christ, and whose gifts and perspectives, though sometimes different from my own, helped me to see things I would not have otherwise seen. 

I confess that being in a battalion of right handed warriors, the sword of truth always felt a little clumsy to my grip. It wasn’t until much later that I learned that I was even allowed to use my other hand. It was a liberation! And the best part of it was that the gospel of Jesus Christ gave me insight into progressive ideals that fit more closely what I was experiencing as someone who struggled with belonging, especially in a church where conservatism was as dominant in the church culture as right-handedness.

The realization came for me during the church’s involvement in Proposition 8 in 2008, which was to maintain the definition of marriage to be between a man and a woman in California. Through the Proclamation to the World on the Family, church culture had by and large established itself as a bastion of Christian conservatism, at least when it came to questions of sexuality and family relationships. The mental notes we were taking in Sunday School back then emphasized over and over that marriage was only between a man and a woman, and that gay members and their allies should have no place among the saints. In fact, we were dangerous. I remember one member suggesting we should round up the gays and shoot them. It took me a few minutes to process that they were talking about me. I was the “them.” I was sitting in the same room with him on those same metal grey chairs.

As the rhetoric and urgency to “defend the family” reached its frenzy in the chapels and classrooms of Provo where I was attending BYU, Sunday after Sunday I heard about this army of gays coming to destroy the family. It was exhausting! I had personally felt the love of Jesus Christ many times in the church, and I was quite baffled by what I was hearing. How was I destroying Brother so-and-so’s marriage? Was I really the enemy within the gates, lurking in the pews? I knew I was hiding my sexuality to fit in, so maybe that made me the exception. They couldn’t really be talking about me, right? And yet I had close friends who had left the church to pursue same-sex relationships, and they didn't seem to want to destroy anyone's family, either. They were good, often abundantly compassionate people trying to do the best they could with a difficult situation. I watched them struggle with the decision to choose between their sexuality and their faith. It was heart wrenching.

And then there were those liberals. Those dang liberals. I remember one acquaintance during that same year walking ahead of me into the priesthood session of General Conference, pointing to a man and saying to his Aaronic priesthood aged sons, “See that man? He voted for Obama!” To which his son said in disgust, “Ugh, what is he even doing here?” As a Canadian, I found this strange conflation of religious and political identity nauseating, especially in a setting meant to foster brotherhood.

The culture wars divide us and blind us in ways I struggle to wrap my head around. At the time back then, I had never even considered myself a liberal. I barely even knew what it meant. I thought it meant you drank diet coke or got a tattoo. But now I was hearing that no threat to this church could compare to "the liberals." Or at least, that was how it was perceived in the late 2000s. And if I agreed with any political platform or policy designated liberal, I was deceived. Even when the church itself supported "liberal" policies, like supporting a non-discrimination bill against LGBTQ citizens in Utah, many members see this negatively as a "woke" church affected by a "woke" agenda, simply because it doesn't fit their political views.

Unfortunately, I am not sure if things have improved today. Much of our political discussions, including among sone members of the church, feels like it has flung itself headfirst into crazyland. No matter what degree of insanity exists on the right, "the liberals" will always remain the bigger threat. The disillusionment this has brought to many church members who find themselves on the left over any number of issues cannot be overstated.

As I came to understand firsthand how certain policies and cultural attitudes at church affected same-sex attracted members, I started to question whether taking the sword in hand to defend a traditional understanding of homosexuality was really the best way to help same-sex attracted members. We already know the doctrine. What we don't usually know is whether we are loved and accepted for who we are. I found myself wishing so much to see the sword of truth migrate to the left hand of my brothers and sisters at church, that they would fight for my place with them. In my dark moments, I needed to see them fight for me instead of against me!

Though the church will likely never change doctrine about chastity and marriage, I concluded years ago that the church, or the culture at least, needed to change certain policies and practices if I were going to survive. For so long I had learned to adapt to “right-handedness” when it came to understanding my sexuality and been blessed by their perspective. But now it was my brothers’ and sisters’ turn.

And luckily for me, I can say most have. The timing for me was a miracle. While simply being out and gay would easily have led to disciplinary action in previous years, I can breathe freely serving in my calling and attending the temple without too much worry. But I know that is not the case for everyone. Many, including personal friends, still live in closets because their church congregations are simply not safe. I am confident it is getting better, but it’s important to realize that these changes don’t happen by themselves.

What brings about this change? Well, here's the reality: it is those much maligned progressives, those dang libtards cutting through prejudice with their left hands both inside and outside of the church who have fought for my place in my church community. This includes gay rights activists who, no matter how much I might disagree with them on moral issues even now, have nevertheless fought for a greater understanding of gay identities and protected my right to exist. I owe them so much.

A Right Handed Church?

While the Church has always tried to maintain political neutrality, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, like most religions, has a robust legacy for preserving tradition with right-handed fervor. There is nothing wrong with being spiritually right handed. Right-handedness is vital. In this church, right-handed members remind us of covenants God made with His people anciently, and how holding onto these covenants can bring strength in new or challenging situations. Right-handedness gives stability in a world that is increasingly unmoored from moral safeguards. Right-handedness maintains a sense of familiarity in a world that feels uncertain. I admire how spiritually right-handed members take what is good in tradition, including ordinances, doctrines, policies, and preserve them, conserve them, and help keep Christ the center of our worship. We need our right hand to connect us to truths that have been the bedrock of our relationship with God for thousands of years. I love my spiritually right handed brothers and sisters! They have saved me from some of my more hasty and headlong left-handed impulses many, many times.

There is also much in our church history which could be considered enormously progressive, or “left-handed.” For example, I am enamored with teachings from Joseph Smith about an inclusive Zion where there are no poor among us, in a society where we are of one heart and one mind. Joseph Smith was a true left-handed progressive when he challenged institutional Christianity to restore a church based on revelation and lost truths about the inclusivity of God's love. But I am also discouraged when we fail to measure up to that ideal. 

When I ponder what it will take to maintain Brother Joseph’s progressive vision of the Kingdom of God, I am convinced it will require a lot of innovative, and revelatory change. We will need to spend at least as much time repenting of wicked cultural practices and traditions as we do retrenching ourselves in the traditions and doctrines worth holding onto. It will require discernment to know the difference, as well as both prophetic and personal revelation working together.

But make no mistake, building Zion will require both hands.

Jesus is Ambidextrous, And We Can Learn to Be Ambidextrous, Too

I find a lot of peace reading about the moments in Jesus’ ministry when he used his “left hand” over his right one to challenge the religious institutions of his day. It seems He was most fierce when putting down pharisaical wickedness that used established law and traditional interpretations of doctrine to oppress those suffering at the margins. I think this resonates with me so much because that person has often been me. For years, I was labeled and treated as unclean because of who I am. LGBT members, even faithful covenant keeping men and women, have long been misunderstood and pushed out by well-meaning churchmen for centuries. I love the left-handedness of Jesus that reaches after me when I feel misjudged or forgotten, and He helps me feel his unconditional love.

I also appreciate Jesus operating with His right hand to establish a church that functions to maintain doctrinal authority based on scriptural truths and commandments. Those laws and commandments have protected me and brought me rich blessings. I see Him holding out His right hand to me to honor His covenant to save his people, even promising to reach me in great affliction. He does it through ancient rituals and ordinances that He invites me (me!) to be a part of. I love the right-handedness of Jesus, that through obedience to His commandments I can be gathered into his arms, both his arms, like a hen that is gathering her chicks.

As disciples of Christ, we are His hands and we are His eyes. Because we are a predominantly right-handed church, for too long we have misinterpreted Jesus’ teachings to cut off our left hand and pluck out our left eyes whenever they offend us. (Matthew 5:29-30) Whether on the right or the left, it is our own sins that we should pluck and cut out, never each other!

Of course, left-handed members must learn to value and rely on right-handed brothers and sisters. But if we are currently living in a right-handed church, our focus should be on seeking out those who have been turned away because they do not fit the right-handed mold. They are desperately seeking Christ’s healing, too. By discernment, we can do this and still maintain doctrinal purity and prophetic authority. If we do not, all of us, both those who leave and those who stay, will find ourselves all the more blind and hobbled with missing limbs and missing eyes, having lost the full spectrum of gifts we need to fulfill our sacred mission to prepare the world for Jesus Christ. It is that age old Book of Mormon fragmentation into tribes. It is the disease we are facing now. It is spiritual leprosy in the body of Christ to lose members of our community whose gifts we so desperately need.

Luckily for us, the road to Zion is paved with repentance. The atonement brings wholeness, including wholeness in our congregations. Change is good. It will be alright. And perhaps in some church meetings, like I did in my Chemistry class, we can each try writing testimony with our non-dominant hand. It might feel awkward and your writing will be messy. But keep on trying! See where leaning into your weakness gets you. See the people you once considered enemies, and how they can help you with your wobbly hand.

You will learn to appreciate and love them in ways you never thought you could.

No One Should Be On the Menu

"Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” Isaiah 55:1

Christ Healing the Paralytic
at the Pool of Bethesda
Bartolome Esteban Murillo, 1667

Almost twenty years ago now, I read a book called “Modernity and the Holocaust” by Zygmunt Bauman. It rearranged my brain. 

I was a university student getting the liberal education I always dreamed of, filling my mind with good ideas that I still believe are immensely important. But the nagging idea this book left me with, the one that unsettles me to this day, is that no knowledge or college degree is enough to settle questions of morality.

The book points out at length that the institutions that cure disease and foster great art and music can be the same institutions that commit atrocities with similar zeal and sleek efficiency. Nuclear technology can power millions of homes or wipe out humanity. Chemists can make food more abundant or use that same research in a gas chamber. A degree makes no moral guarantee about how a person uses their knowledge. 

Institutions alone, even ones with expertly crafted safeguards through bureaucratic process, are not enough to maintain morality. It cannot be outsourced to them.

Morality only exists within people.

It is generally frowned upon to talk about the Holocaust, in part because it is not pleasant, but also because, as most critics point out, we shouldn’t overdo the argument that so-and-so we don’t like is a Nazi, or that this civil rights violation or that is equivalent to genocide.

But at the same time, and this is the major point of the book, the Holocaust’s relevance will always be necessary so long as we have modern institutions that require moral guidance. As Bauman points out, “our anxiety can hardly abate in view of the fact that none of the societal conditions that made Auschwitz possible have truly disappeared, and no effective measures have been undertaken to prevent such possibilities” from happening again.

Today, this is even more alarmingly true.

Bauman, borrowing heavily from decades of Holocaust research, argues the Holocaust is not an aberrant blip in the steady triumphant march of progress that modernity pretends to offer. The Holocaust was a product of modernity.

He quotes Henry Feingold who made this chilling observation:

“[Auschwitz] was a mundane extension of the modern factory system. Rather than producing goods, the raw material was human beings and the end-product was death, so many units per day marked carefully on the manager’s production charts…Engineers designed the crematoria; managers designed the system of bureaucracy that worked with a zest and efficiency more backwards nations would envy. Even the overall plan itself was a reflection of the modern scientific spirit gone awry. What we witnessed was nothing less than a massive scheme of social engineering.”

And here’s a question for today: if moral safeguards in the 2030s were to fail like they did in the 1930s, what technology and institutional processes might we use this time to perpetuate atrocities against another undesirable group? 

Would there be an app for that? 

I don’t believe we are there yet, but I do think institutions meant to protect us from our more savage impulses are cracking at an alarming pace.

On the heels of a century of some of the greatest technological advances humans have ever known, we should be congratulating ourselves. We have a device that fits in a pocket containing the entire repository of human knowledge about art, philosophy, and scientific advances. From social networking to information sharing to hailing the arrival of artificial intelligence, we might think that at last we have done it. We have finally put to rest the animal within, smothered it with angry emojis and kicked it out of society via cancel culture until at last man’s evil nature is put in its place. We can now move into the technological utopia that billionaires like Elon Musk keep telling us about, where in twenty years we will become so enlightened that even work and money will be optional thanks to the shimmering new world they are ushering in. We might even colonize Mars.

Instead, what I see is the sliding morality of institutions that have degraded to a level of crisis. Not necessarily because deranged criminals and imbeciles exist in positions of power. They are not entirely new. What is turning this moment into a crisis is how woefully unprepared we, ordinary people, are in dealing with it. It is the unprecedented level of moral vacuum in not only the systems meant to protect us from these kinds of savage and lunatic tendencies, but in a significant portion of the population who are more than willing to put up with an immoral tyrant, even to the point of cheering him on. 

And, like the railroad that once transported raw materials for building a nation now used to carry undesirables to death camps, the technology we use to comment and read about the news is also assisting in the dismantle of public discourse and the erosion of basic facts. Anything you want to believe about whatever newest event, it's like a choose-your-own-reality. The loss of both morality and truth in our technology and media consumption is completely staggering.

But instead of blaming the technology for this sliding morality and truth, we need to start seeing the problem in ourselves.

We just don't have the strategies in place for when people no longer even care about right and wrong so long as their own team wins, or will lie to our face as the video plays and not even give it another thought. We know how to deal with law infractions and immigration issues and debates about infrastructure and health care. Not well, mind you, but at least there’s a manual. These issues and differences of opinion are expected, and escalating conflict is safeguarded against within that structure But when the moral foundation of an entire portion of people starts to evaporate before our very eyes, when neither facts nor morals no longer matter, it’s sheer panic from there on.

As we watch the buildings of government and scientific advancement become hollow and fill up like whited sepulchres with the institutional decay of washed up government officials, crackpot health officials, and flagrantly immoral elected officials, now might be a good time to pause and wonder if we, the people, have lost something along our way to find greatness.

What we are facing are glaring blindspots in our political and social discourse. We can see the obvious pathology that allows for atrocities and moral failures at home or abroad, but we still can’t see them as the product of the very systems we admire so much and expect to maintain and distribute moral authority and truth to us like pamphlets. We see the current breakdown as an aberration from an otherwise healthy system, and that if we'd just stick to the institutional script, everything would be fine. 

We think of secular institutions as guardians of morality, when in reality all they can do is package and distribute the morality of the people operating within them.

We are literally shocked by this, so we assume we must not be going far enough. Maybe if we entrench ourselves even more into better technology, as some urge us to do. Or perhaps if we lean even heavier into fighting for constitutional rights, maybe flip over some tables in the sacred temples of due process, or protest the abuses bigger and harder. But as important as all that can be, none of that succeeds in instilling morality into what is now a vacuous space in a growing chunk of people. In the words of Elijah when the people tried to call to their idols to send fire from heaven to consume their offerings, “Perhaps if you pray louder! Your gods must be sleeping!” (1 Kings 18:27, very paraphrased.)

All this brings me to say something about Prime Minister Carney’s comments. He has been an important first among global leadership to say the gig is up and we need to face the facts. Bless him for that. And really, he is doing well what he was hired to do, which is to protect his nation’s interests, the same as any head of state. After all, he isn't there to preach a sermon and restore the moral conscience of the world. He's there to establish international policy.

After the gaslighting we have been hearing for the past year from institutional powers (or the last three hundred years, depending on your skin colour) it feels, at least at first, like a breath of fresh air. “The rules based international order” is over, he says, and since nostalgia is not a policy, let’s take the sign out of the window and refuse to live within the lie. Either fight for your place at the table, or take your place on the menu. (And presumably, if you're Canadian, just make sure you say “sorry” first before you politely eat your weaker neighbour.)

But this outlook, however pragmatic or realistic, is not the moral high ground we think it is. After all, we are still maintaining that someone must be on the menu. We just need to make sure it’s not us. 

After the full meaning of such an ideology settles in, we might start to feel even colder at the bone.

As Dr Stacey Patton smartly points out, “Black and colonized people should hear something even starker [in Carney's address]: our people have always been the damn menu. The only difference now is that more countries fear being served alongside us.” 

This is where we are. As the appetites of global powers become more insatiable, as the bulging pockets of billionaires become an even greater obsession, the institutional powers that serve the few are starting to turn not only on marginalized groups, but on their allies, on their citizens, on their very own who thought they had an in with the cool guys. It is not the injustice against them that wakes us up to the lie. It's when the injustice begins to reach us.

If a group of leaders are nodding their heads in agreement that it’s time to activate survival mode and disengage from the game of rules that was, at last we say it, always a farce, well just hold onto your butts. We might start to see even more pragmatic hold-your-nose-and-swallow-in-the-name-of national-security kind of deals, not less, because, so the argument goes, this is the new world order. When the big boys stop playing by the rules of the game, you take what you can get.

One has to wonder, as we scramble to rearrange our economic and political alliances to accommodate the unhingement and lawlessness in primary global powers, who will take up the torch now? Who will “preach good tidings unto the meek, bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to the captives, and open the prison to them that are bound?” Because it certainly isn’t the government or the technocrats. They aren't even pretending anymore. Perhaps a charity organization here and there, powered by the good will of an ever shrinking percentage of the population who can afford it, or even have the time?

But here is what I have come to believe, and I don't hear enough people saying it: morality cannot be adequately maintained by secular institutions. It is maintained by religious ones.

We should always work to improve and defend good secular institutions. We should protest, speak out, and fight to maintain the inspired institutions of liberal democracy. We absolutely should.

But when all this is over, don't expect the vacuum of moral authority to be filled by a simple restructuring or retrenchment into institutional law. As Carney acknowledges, we can't go back to living within the lie that global power structures are going to promise morality, or even basic security. Maybe they never even did.

Make no mistake. Fighting fascism is not enough. As Dr Stacey Patton explains, “the collapse of a lie does not automatically produce truth. It produces a vacuum. And vacuums are filled by power, not by conscience.”

So how do we resurrect our collective conscience for moral truth?

Like we learned in the Holocaust, the capacity for great evil is never neutralized within a modern institution. It remains baked into every single one of them. 

Unfortunately, this includes the decay of religion into an institutional bureaucracy, which we have watched over the past century. For Christians, many have witnessed a hollowed out form of our religion, totally divorced from the teachings of Jesus to become a mere extension of the institutional power structure. Alliance with institutional powers to create the rise of what we call Christian nationalism is absolutely not the savior we are looking for. History is explicit about where that leads.

The way out of this mess, the only way out in my opinion, is to rebuild our collective morality. This will include revitalizing religious community building. 

It can't look like a talent show for modern day Pharisees who have made an art out of straining at gnats to swallow camels by disregarding the suffering of the marginalized. It will include something much more potent—a return to radical Christian love.

To offset the rise of demoralized institutional power, religious people of every creed, Christians and non-Christian alike, will need to work together to rebuild a moral foundation where everyone is at the table and nobody is on the menu.