Some critics of religion like to point out that religion is mostly focused on the afterlife rather than the concerns of this world. Some would say that Christians make lousy stewards because they don’t care enough for temporal matters. This is a criticism about too much airy fairy transcendence and not enough human, domestic practicality.
Mormonism is particularly secular in its immanent frame focus when compared to many other Christian sects. God has a body of flesh & bone, and becoming a God means an embodied (and one assumes immanent) Person. This focus on the immanent is one thing that sets us apart. Immanence is a secular approach, one that is assumed more and more as time goes by as simply the way the world works. We seek meaning and transcendence from within, not from without. In the words of E.M. Forster’s character Mr. Emerson (who personified the Romantic movement) in A Room with a View:
(pointing at his chest with his fork) “Here is where the birds sing! Here is where the sky is blue!”
We value human flourishing and individuality, not just an eternal reward that feels imaginary and too far removed from our daily experience to be believed. Even the Book of Mormon promotes a uniquely immanent doctrine of human flourishing:
Men are that they might have joy. 2 Ne 2:27
Elizabeth Drescher wrote about the shifting search for meaning in our secular age in her book Choosing Our Religion. She noted that many Millenials found spiritual meaning in simple activities like meals with friends or taking a yoga class. Finding moments for reflection or connection have become a spiritual touchstone for many. To them, these activities filled–at least partially–the longing for transcendence, the space religion once occupied. In a secular age, meaning comes from within, from our current lives. This is often called being spiritual but not religious.
“it is the sense of an absence; it is the sense that all order, all meaning comes from us. We encounter no echo outside. In the world read this way, as so many of our contemporaries live it, the natural/supernatural distinction is no mere intellectual abstraction. A race of humans has arisen which has managed to experience its world entirely as immanent. In some respects, we may judge this achievement as a victory for darkness, but it is a remarkable achievement nonetheless.” Charles Taylor
Mormonism straddles the individual-focused secular world with our focus on personal revelation. While revelation assumes the origin is external (messages from God), the experience of personal revelation often has more in common with internal inspiration. It feels right to the individual. It clicks. Bosoms burn. It doesn’t necessarily feel like intervention; in a sense, it is similar to a divine spark from within that takes voice.
“Religious belief makes its claim somewhere between revelation and projection, between holiness and human frailty; but the burden of proof, indeed the burden of belief, for so long upheld by society, is now back on the believer, where it belongs.” Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own
Even when we are given church-wide revelation, a nod is given toward seeking personal revelation as a confirmation; although it is not generally accepted to question the authority of church-wide revelation, we can quietly acknowledge that it is not binding to us as an individual due to personal circumstances. This respects the primacy of immanence or internal experience and promotes the ability for individuals to have fulfilling lives when the the broader narrative fails to promote their happiness.
What’s the difference between the source of one’s transcendence? Well, an imminent framework is about human flourishing, not just celestial reward. One unique aspect of Mormonism that has always struck me is that we don’t hate the body; there’s no Mormon Opus Dei.[1] We view the soul as the combination of a spirit and a body, and we view God as embodied. This means that we value both the divine and the human. But integrating the two is not always easy.
On my post that gave an overview of Charles Taylor, Andrew S made the following astute comment:
To me, the biggest thing that strikes me is the difference between an immanent frame and a transcendent frame, with the immanent frame being about flourishing, and the transcendent frame being about transformation. The immanent frame is about perfecting or realizing our human material (things like sexual fulfillment, success, health and prosperity, and so on), whereas the transcendent frame is about going beyond human categories. And I totally recognize that I have a definite immanent focus — I want to be the best person I can be, which means improving things in this life. I am not concerned so much about the eternities, especially to the extent that I am asked to suppress or repress or abstain from core human life elements on the hope or faith of a transformation in eternity.
This is also a good place to point out how Mormonism developed as the systems were changing — because we can point out that Mormonism doesn’t have quite as transcendent a frame as other older religions do. It has a lot of immanent focus to it.
Mormonism talks about becoming gods, casting off the natural man, etc., but godliness is not definited as wholly different from humanity. “As man is, God once was” after all.
So, in Mormonism, human flourishing is identified with transcendent transformation. Paul in the New Testament takes a rather cynical look at marriage and sexuality, conceding that maybe it is better to marry than to burn, but his ideal is clearly celibacy. This is usually not so with Mormonism — the fulfillment of the law of chastity isn’t celibacy, but a fruitful, heterosexual marriage with children. So, there is that extent that sexual fulfillment is defined as transformative — at least for some people.
Mormonism obviously isn’t completely about immanence, though. While the law of chastity absolutely views celibacy as a lesser goal for straight people (to the extent that the leaders chastise straight members for not doing everything they can to marry and have children), we can still see the rhetoric of transcendence when looking at the LDS church’s position on LGBT members. Here, sexual fulfillment is anathema. These members are supposed to set aside their sexuality in hopes that the Atonement can transform them into something else in the afterlife.
I think this also can explain why we see faith crises more and more. People don’t natively live in the religious mindset. They live in a secular mindset, with an immanent frame, and when religion is at odds with that, that builds tension. So, LDS policies to LGBT folks often seem unfair precisely because we live in a society that has an immanent frame, and we cannot help but have that immanent frame ourselves.
Because Mormonism came about when this shift from transcendent to immanent was underway, we strive for a balanced perspective between happiness now and in the eternities. Older versions of Christianity had a much bleaker outlook on the human condition. In the words of Alexander Pope, life’s a bitch and then you die. But we don’t have such a negative view of mortality. Our celestial reward is viewed as an extension of the good life we are building here: positive relationships, sexual love, and so forth.
That puts a lot of pressure on this life. Why would we want something to continue if it’s not good to start with? When we try to pivot from human flourishing toward celestial transcendence, that’s where the cracks in the veneer become visible. The stresses between the two create a tension that can’t be borne. For those displeased with the idea of bad things from this life carrying into the eternities, we often say “It will all work out in the end,” like there is some sort of celestial lobotomy that will magically convert an earthly hell (like polygamy or homosexual celibacy) into an eternal delight. Sometimes the dialogue sounds like this:
Party Line: X is so, so important. It’s the most important thing.
Individual: But I don’t have X and can’t have X.
Party Line: X doesn’t work for you? Well, it will all be worked out in the eternities then. X isn’t that important. Trust me, X or you will be different then. X will apply . . . later.
In a sense, the celestial becomes a Plan B when human flourishing fails, or rather when our system to promote human flourishing fails. But if we can’t get it right in the temporal mortal sphere, why do we assume we’ll get it right in the celestial one? The rationale falls back on the human deficiency argument again; either the individual is deficient or the temporal plans for happiness are limited by human reasoning and human imperfections. Human flourishing is so, so important. Except when it doesn’t work. Then, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Maybe this is why older religions don’t focus so much on human flourishing. Perhaps they’ve been burned too many times.
Discuss.
[1] Although garments are kind of the Mormon hair shirt.
Wheat & Tares 
Wow! Well done. I’ve been struck by many of these thoughts. You did a great job of pulling them into a single, coherent frame of reference.
This is where I am right now: “The rationale falls back on the human deficiency argument again; either the individual is deficient or the temporal plans for happiness are limited by human reasoning and human imperfections.”
It seems like in the church’s framing (even if we don’t like to say it allowed) the human is always deficient. The plan if perfect. Marriage, partnership, wealth, children (I could go on and on) are all considered blessings. So if you aren’t blessed with one of the items mandatory for Celestialhood then you are deficient. And while in more recent times Authority has tried to make it clear that this isn’t true, the subtext to me has always been that this is exactly true in the Mormon paradigm. Why do we need to be told it is not true, if everything other than the voice of Authority points to it being true?
Or our belief system is too simplistic and too defined. We endlessly speak of ‘God’s Plan’ as if we have a clear understanding even ownership of this plan. It seems very likely to me that we don’t. We correctly understand very little. The little we do understand has been used/expanded by Authority to create a concrete (somewhat confusing) whole.
When “it will all work out in the end” is used for others, it’s an empty platitude. When it is used for yourself, if can be a source of hope.
One thing that seems to be ignored consistently when discussing “it will all work out in the end”, in favor of things that invoke more passion like polygamy and homosexuality, is physical and mental disability. For some of us, without “it will all work out in the end”, there is no hope. Sure, we try to mitigate things in the present, if the sciences are advanced enough to do so, but for most there is no cure or alleviation in sight.
I think what hurts us the most in having a list of “items mandatory for Celestialhood” is the idea that we have to check all the boxes ASAP, or we risk never accomplishing them.
ack, in my quote (and my original comment too, oops), I have a word used incorrectly. It should be:
But I did want to respond to a few things from a few of the comments:
For example, from ReTx:
The thing that strikes me is that this sort of thing takes a perverse twist in Mormonism. In traditional Christianity, it is to be expected that the human is always deficient. Mormonism tries to “fix” a too negative outlook by making the fall a good thing, by bringing God closer to our level, etc.,
So, when we hit situations where the human is deficient, it’s not really something that’s accounted for into the system. If you aren’t blessed with one of the items mandatory for Celestialhood, you are more than just deficient — in fact, you are not really accounted for at all. Like, Mormonism relies on a framework of agency and self-efficacy — that you have choices and that your choices determine your results. So, the idea that some people cannot make certain choices or would never be happy with those choices is simply not considered. We cannot just say, “Well, some people are built differently” in the Mormon framework.
Good post and so many great ideas. My take on just one of the excellent points here: I might disagree with Mormons not hating the body. Yes, I believe we do have a much more physical sense of God and our own selves when it comes to the afterlife, but I still find a deep mistrust of the body that runs through a lot of Mormon teachings. We are still, like most of our Christian brethren, deeply afraid of/uncomfortable with sexuality. And to second the brilliant post from Andrew S, we only ever talk about it to define the privileged group (straight married people) that have access to it and to condemn all sexual feelings/thoughts in everyone else. We are still deeply suspicious of both the sexual and the sensual body. Mormonism, for all its unique teachings about the body, still thinks of it as a contested site between the forces of good (bodily denial) and the forces of evil (reveling in the sensual), and we usually see it as more likely to be under the sway of the devil than of God. The mandates involving modesty, clothing, even hair styles, tattoos, piercings, etc., demonstrate to me a deep and pervasive suspicion of the bodily, even though many TBMs would claim that such prohibitions are about respecting and honoring the body’s divine purposes.
But if we are supposed to be about immanence, I’d suggest that we are still lacking even in areas other than sexuality. The body is the instrument of empathy: We feel and experience emotions in a decidedly bodily way. It is by being completely in touch and in tune with our bodies that we understand feelings like sadness, despair, hunger, etc. And if we are truly to mourn with those who mourn, etc., we must first understand, through bodily memory, what such emotions feel like. The body, in other words, is not only the instrument of empathy, it’s the spur to action as we ourselves remember, in a bodily way, what people in extremis are feeling and are then moved to help them because we recall through bodily memory what it felt like to be in despair, to be lonely, to be hungry and thirsty. We are then moved to eliminate (or mitigate) these feelings in others. This is really, IMHO, what I’d call the ethic of the body. And Mormons simply don’t talk about the body this way, which to me means that we really have yet to plumb the depths of its significance.
Great post Hawkgrrrl. Personally, I’ve always sought for transcendence as the only really worthwhile spiritual quest. I know that most people are busy asking God to help them with the minutia of their daily lives, but most of my prayers have been about trying to enter a state of peace and transcendence beyond those minutia. Death always seemed something to look forward to. Maybe this is one of the reasons Mormonism always bothered me, because I was out of sync with the immanent attitudes of the culture around me.
Ironically, as I’ve left the church and embraced hedonism, I find myself having a more nietzschean longing for material life, and for the continuation of that life in eternal return.
“We cannot just say, “Well, some people are built differently” in the Mormon framework.”
I’ve found this to be so true as well. I had a bishop interview a while ago where I tried to explain how spirituality works for me. I told him the avenues I’ve explored, my success and failures and how I’d come to a place of great peace in life. I was specific and positive about the changes I’d made (none of which break any commandments). I was also clear that my family/ artistic background gives me a radically different perspective and that I don’t expect anyone else to have the same experience, but that it is working great for me.
His response… “Yes, but are you reading your scriptures every day.”
It seemed like he couldn’t even fathom what I was saying. So he ignored it as if it didn’t exist. I was floored.
“And Mormons simply don’t talk about the body this way”
I really, really want to disagree with this, because what you described with respect to empathy and the body is exactly what I’ve always thought the Mormon physicality is all about. I grew up Mormon, and one of the specific things I took from my childhood was that the body was good (the soul of man was spirit AND body); that Christ himself condescended to take upon himself the body in order to fully succor his people (Alma 7); that receiving a body was a tremendous gift that allowed us to experience good and bad in ways we couldn’t without it. I was taught that the spirits in the spirit world were looking forward to the resurrection, when they could get their bodies back again. I was taught that we usually feel the Spirit with our bodies, and that one of the reasons we kept our bodies free from artificial stimulants was to allow it to be more receptive to the Spirit. I was taught that sex was good, and that I was to keep chaste so that it would be part of a powerful bonding with my one-day wife. Church leaders today are trying to emphasize the physicality of human relationships specifically to stop people from living their lives online through social media (and blogs). One can find fault with any of the things I was taught, but I think it’s just wrong to suggest that Mormons, or rather Mormonism, teaches people to dismiss or de-emphasize the body. Sure, there’s always more depth-plumbing to suggest, but I think it’s clear there must be a lot of Mormons trying to do just that.
“The mandates involving modesty, clothing, even hair styles, tattoos, piercings, etc., demonstrate to me a deep and pervasive suspicion of the bodily, even though many TBMs would claim that such prohibitions are about respecting and honoring the body’s divine purposes.”
I guess I’m one of those TBMs. I don’t think we’re suspicious of the body. I’d say we’re suspicious of other people’s attitudes toward the body.
Hi Martin,
I actually agree that empathy IS what Mormon physicality is all about; it’s there in the scriptures, it’s in what you term the condescension of Christ and it’s also in the general Christian framework. My point is that I don’t hear it talked about very much at church and I think one reason for that is an underlying fear/suspicion of the bodily. What I hear is (IMHO) an unhealthy obsession with chastity (see any modesty/chastity lesson taught to our young people) meaning that the body and its desires are often associated with shame (chewed gum, licked cupcakes, etc.), an emphasis on avoiding putting certain things into it (coffee, alcohol, narcotics) but no mention of healthy eating, physical fitness, etc (can an obese body feel the spirit as well as a fit one? I wouldn’t think so, but you never hear that discussed). The impression these examples gave me as a teenage investigator and later as an adult was that the body COULD be an amazing, miraculous thing, but I’d say about ninety percent of talk about the body was comprised of the negative consequences of having one, not the benefits. Perhaps that’s out of an abundance of caution, I don’t know, but I think that’s been the general trend. And I can tell you that at the church school I attended, we regularly got talks in our religion classes not only about chastity per se, but also about the dangers of the body being seduced by any number of things having to do with the senses: art,music, esp. rock and roll (the devil’s music, as it was often called), drugs, etc. We did not get lessons about the wonderfully abundant sensations the body is capable of and how such sensations can lead us to knowledge, wisdom and empathy.
Also, I’ve yet to hear a discussion at church about how to tell the difference, from a bodily point of view, between powerful emotions and the Holy Ghost. Maybe more discussions/conference talks about things like that would help create a more body-positive vibe in the church. Right now, I just don’t see it, though I’m happy you’ve had more positive experiences regarding the body. You know, it’s funny; you’d think Mormons would be more comfortable with the body itself and its image. I’ve always assumed, since clothing has been associated with shame and sin (Adam and Eve in Genesis) that we’ll all be nude in the Celestial Kingdom since there’s no shame there. You’d think that would make us more body positive as well.
I kind of agree with Martin and Bro. Sky – our theology says we should see our bodies as good – even GREAT, but I would even discount that 90% of the rhetoric is body-shaming as I think it is higher. At least that is my experience.
And Bro’. Sky’s mentioning of the Celestial Nudist kingdom and his mentioning about obesity might almost push me to hurry up and get busy on my diet. Since I don’t see me going to the big C, I will start on my diet next week instead.
Happy Hubby: Celestial Nudist Kingdom is a fantastic name. You should trademark that.
Hawkgrrrl, what another great hit in the series. You’re doing real work here pulling these threads together into one discussion at a time.
I don’t think I fully understand the way that “immanence” and “transcendence” are being used here and in Taylor. My impression of reading about Taylor (I am really remiss at this point for not having read “A Secular Age,” I think it’s time I did so) is that transcendence, for him, is not a wholly negative thing. Of course, as a traditional Christian, that makes sense. To abandon the idea of justice and joy in heaven, delayed but not unreal, is to undermine a good deal of the Christian promise. (In the words of the (ironic) title of the Tolstoy short story — he is probably arguing for immanence himself in the story — “God sees everything, but waits.” If there is not justice in this life, and there is no justice in the life to come, then it seems there is no justice in God.
There are a variety of theological ways to approach this statement if true, but I actually wanted to highlight this question: does transcendence serve any beneficial purpose in Mormonism, or is it just a leftover from “old sectarian notions” forced upon us through the contingencies of the time and place of the Restoration’s happening? Does transcendence need to be eliminated, or does it need to be transformed in Mormonism?
An example might be the idea of eternal progress. Is this a transformation of transcendence into an eternal immanence, or is it a rejection of transcendence altogether?
Another question is the nature of humanity in Mormonism: is the fact that Mormonism proposes an eternal soul a transcendent principle transformed — “all spirit is matter”? Is the eternal supportable in immanence at all, or is the whole doctrine a leftover from traditional Christianity better left on the wayside as the Restoration rolls on?
Also, Hawk, I would love to bring in some of the observations of Adam Miller’s “Radical Mormon Materialsim” in Chapter 6 of “Future Mormon.” I’m sure I don’t fully understand everything going on there, but I believe his observations are apropos…
I just wanted to say that this was very thought-provoking. Like a lot of stakes, we try to nurture those who spend their Sundays teaching and meeting by offering a Know Your Religion or adult institute class. This year we are doing religions of the world. This will be an interesting lens to apply as we go through those different theological frameworks.
Of course I am biased about the ability of Mormonism to enhance our lives now because it was only through my conversion that I was finally able to stop drinking. And I had tried/failed so many times prior to that. But I appreciate that not everyone has that kind of experience.
jstricklan: Wow, tough, engaging questions. I’m not quite sure how to characterize Mormon celestial glory in terms of transcendence or immanence because our doctrine is generally very immanent, but with 15 apostles at any given time, you can find a quote to justify almost any perspective. It’s hard to compare our view of celestial glory to that of other sects except to say that ours does seem more immanent than most other Christian sects, and yet we talk about only being saved “with our dead” which implies the communal is vital to salvation (anti-immanent although not necessarily transcendent). Taylor, as a Catholic, no doubt sees Protestantism as more secular and more immanent than Catholicism (which it is, but it’s important to understand where he’s coming from).
I’d love to dig into Adam Miller’s chapter if you want to elaborate on that. I really enjoyed his book and reviewed it here: https://bycommonconsent.com/2016/05/13/book-review-adam-millers-future-mormon/