When I was a kid, my family had a big, beautiful dog of indeterminate breed named Feathers. She was a fun family dog but not really an example of a well-trained animal. We kids thought it was hilarious to have “obedience lessons” in which we would tell our dog, who was already lying down, to “Lie down!” “Stay!” “Don’t do anything!” “Look happy!” Then we would praise her for being such a good girl. Or we would give commands we knew she wanted to follow: “Feathers, come get a treat!” or “Git that squirrel, git it!” She would follow those commands immediately. What an obedient dog! If we told her to do what she was already doing, or to do something she wanted to do, she was perfectly obedient! We thought we were really funny (we were).
But was Feathers really obedient? Or was it just that her natural inclinations had never been challenged?
Let’s talk about obedience to the commandments of the Church. What’s the overlap between your natural inclinations and the Church’s commandments? Here’s a handy Venn diagram with some behaviors filled in.
What changes would you make to this diagram to match your natural inclinations? I don’t need a commandment to avoid smoking, for example. Would you go to Church even without a commandment because you like seeing your friends and feel good at Church? Is it easier/harder for you to obey some of these commandments than others?
Now let’s fill in that middle section for the majority of the population.
About 7% to 10% of the population identifies as queer, meaning 90% to 93% of the population is heterosexual. It’s hard to find accurate survey numbers, but lots and lots of people want to get married and have kids. If a straight person marries someone of the opposite sex and they have children, do they get righteousness points for that?
We could command Feathers: “don’t have puppies!” and she could comply with that commandment because we got her spayed. On the other hand, if we commanded Feathers to have puppies, she couldn’t do it.
Andrew S. made an insightful comment not long ago on Bishop Bill’s post “Moral Agency” and asked about the impact our inclinations have on our agency and choices. If we want to do something regardless of the commandment, Andrew S. asked if that was really free will. That’s a fascinating question and I hope he does an entire post on it.
Rather than entirely swipe Andrew S.’s question, I’m going to change the question a bit. If we want to do something regardless of the commandment, does it count as obedience? Like, the sort of obedience that gets you to the Celestial Kingdom? Church leaders have taught that obedience is the first law of heaven.
If a straight person presents himself at the Pearly Gates and says, “I married a woman and had kids!” does that help him get into heaven? Or will Saint Peter reply, “You wanted to do that anyway, so heaven doesn’t care about that. You never went to Church because you wanted to go play golf with your friends: go to hell.”
Or let’s talk about another Christlike behavior that is super easy for me because it turns out I have some natural inclinations towards it. I left the Republican party in my 20s because I was sick of the Utah legislature passing laws that made life harder for poor people. Christ commands us to be compassionate towards poor people! Even back when I agreed with the Church’s teachings about sexual behavior, I despised the way the Republicans treated poor people enough to leave the party over it. I won’t sound a trumpet about my alms-giving, but I help. As much as I can, I help. Even though I’ve left the Church and have serious doubts about Christ’s atonement, I help the poor because something inside me wants to help the poor.
So picture me at the Pearly Gates. I tell Saint Peter, “I gave to the poor and helped feed the hungry!” What happens? Does Saint Peter say, “Great job, Janey! Welcome to heaven!” Or does he say, “You wanted to do that anyway, so heaven doesn’t care about that. You divorced your husband because you never wanted to have sex with a man again: go to hell.”
For this discussion, assume that neither the golfer nor myself wants to repent and rely on the atonement for our sin. The golfer has no interest in going to Church. I have no interest in being married to a man.
It’s easier for a naturally social person to fulfill their ministering assignment; introverts with social anxiety are going to struggle. It’s easier for someone who finds it restful to sit quietly to attend Church and the temple; someone with ADHD is going to struggle. It’s easier for someone with upper-middle-class parents to stay out of debt and pay tithing; someone breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty is going to struggle.
And so forth.
Questions:
- Which commandments are easy and natural for you to follow?
- Which commandments are hardest for you to follow?
- Do you get brownie points in heaven for doing something you have no inclination to do?
- Say you hate public speaking but you accept an invitation to speak in sacrament meeting.
- Say you have Tourette’s and can’t sit quietly in a group but you go to the temple anyway (based on a true story) (the person with Tourette’s ended up hitting a couple people and shouting during the session).
- Say you’re not sexually attracted to your spouse but you have sex anyway, even though you aren’t trying to conceive.
- And the other way around — do you get brownie points in heaven for doing something you want to do anyway?
- The time I went to the bishop and asked if I could teach Gospel Doctrine and he said yes.
- Someone who has always wanted children gets married, has children, and does their best to be a good parent.
- You’ve got young children and would give anything to spend a quiet evening just sitting down. So you leave your kids with your mom and go to the temple.
Wheat & Tares 
This is a wonderful post which raises important questions. Is blind obedience worthy of blessings? Does it even deserve praise? The answer is an emphatic “No” to both questions.
Got is not just another Bon Jovi who seeks hordes of croc-wearing followers to mindlessly purchase tickets and scream at concerts. God has a higher purpose.
Followers who can not or do not think for themselves are useless to God. For those mindless followers will be in a real bind when a slight alteration of the common scenario occurs and they have to figure something out.
What is actually beneficial are followers who have been taught, who have given reasoned thought to the teaching, and have decided that following the teaching is the right thing to do. These people will be able to figure things out and do good in any scenario.
Are there blessings for those who reluctantly accept sacrament meeting speaking assignments and put no effort into preparation? Absolutely not! And there is actual harm inflicted on those who have to listen to a talk that is about as energetic as a Soviet-era farm tractor rusting in a field.
And what about the endless ward council, bishopric, and similar meetings in which nothing is accomplished? Do participants get blessings simply for being there? They absolutely do not. And their families are worse off for it because while the parents are in these meetings, the unsupervised children are home playing violent video games while Dua Lipa songs blare in the background.
So many thoughts. It’s a great topic, and one worthy of reflection. I’m not inclined to think that we have a point system of good deeds and bad deeds. In fact, I think the Good Place skewered that notion so perfectly that there isn’t much more to say to that. But I do think being a moral person matters, and that we all have areas where we are naturally more inclined to be moral and other areas where we are less inclined to be moral.
How did we get that way? I suspect a lot of it is through our life experiences–we create neural pathways the more we behave a certain way, and those become easier for us over time. But maybe there’s something related to temperament as well, which could totally be hormones or dopamines. Some people go to the casino and it just lights up their brain in a way that it doesn’t for me. I find it boring, repetitive, noisy and shallow. Some people love the sensation of cliff jumping. I’ve done it, and while it’s not terrifying, the number of seconds I can count falling in the air before I hit the water is not time I actually enjoy. I’d have more fun just swimming and normal diving than doing the more arduous cliff jumping that is so fun to other people. I don’t think those examples are particularly moral, but I suspect that my preferences are related to things like dopamine and hormone levels that differ from person to person and that cause us to engage in risky or more cautious behaviors. Mormons typically associate “goodness” with caution, not with risk-taking. But it’s risk-taking to protect Anne Frank in your attic during the Nazi occupation. It’s cautious to comply with the Gestapo. It’s cautious to tattle on your roommate at BYU, and you get rewarded by the institution. Alex Pretti followed his natural instincts, the same ones that he used as a VA nurse, and helped a woman who was pushed down. Many conservatives said he deserved to be executed for “interfering” with an ICE operation. Was that risk-taking? If so, it appeared to be his natural instinct. Does that mean he also liked cliff jumping and gambling? Not necessarily. There are different types of risks we take.
When I was in high school there was a new girl who had a funny name. I made a terrible joke about her name that stuck, and I felt so bad about it that I went out of my way to befriend her. At the end of senior year we ran into each other and she thanked me profusely for my friendship and for making her life easier at a new school, but she didn’t know that I did both things: made it worse, and then felt bad and made it better.
I was listening to Ezra Klein’s podcast this week about the Epstein files, and the elites who didn’t consider the connection to him to be a deal-breaker, even when they knew what he was up to. There were other elites like Tina Brown who immediately saw him for who he was and refused to associate with him. So was she more moral than they were, or were they just less skilled at judging people? Or were they more transactional (which feels like it is less moral)?
I kind of went off on a tangent here, but in general I do think being a moral person means we work to avoid the social pressures that often lead us to make morally compromised choices, and we learn from it when we fail and do better. We try to remedy the harms we’ve done. Unlike in the point system in the Good Place (where your point totals always ended up in the negative), I tend to think we just have to keep trying to do better.
What is moral has very little to do with the church’s rules, though. Among the ones you listed, most of them don’t make humanity better–they just benefit the church as an institution. Most of those I know who were raised LDS and no longer attend mostly live like Mormons anyway. There are exceptions, meaning some people only behaved as they did because the church prevented them from doing what they wanted. There is often a short-term second adolescence that ex-Mos go through that’s a little embarrassing to watch I guess, but on the whole, I think it’s necessary as you grow up to own your own choices, and if you never have before, well, you have to work that out.
This is the first thing that came to mind reading this thought-provoking post. From Holland’s infamous “musket fire” talk ([link](https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/jeffrey-r-holland/the-second-half-second-century-brigham-young-university/)):
“We have spent hours with them, and we have wept and prayed and wept again in an effort to offer love and hope while keeping the gospel strong and the obedience to commandments evident in every individual life.”
So if obeying commandments you don’t like racks up brownie points in heaven, the Q15 must be racking them up in spades. All that endless weeping and praying as they’re compelled to excommunicate LGBTQ members they’d personally love to keep in the Church — if only Christ would let them! Notice how neatly this frames their obedience as the costly kind — the kind that actually counts.