I was lazily watching a football game on Sunday when an ad for your favorite suburban retailer appeared. One of the items that flashed across the screen was the book “How to Win at Chess.” Authored by the guy who does GothamChess online, if you’re into that sort of thing. I had a different “How to Win With Chess Openings” book as a kid, and the author explained that a better title might be principles of chess openings or something similar, but people don’t want principles or insight. They want to win. So if you want to sell that kind of book, you have to put “win” in the title.

So let’s talk about the theory and psychology of winning. We’ll start with chess. And you know where we’ll end up.

One thing about the game of chess: victory conditions are clearly spelled out. You put the other guy in checkmate or vice versa. If you trade down to two kings left, it’s a draw. You carelessly leave your opponent with nowhere left to move his lone king, it’s a stalemate, kind of like a frustrating draw. So when you win at chess, there is no uncertainty. Checkmate you win.

Another thing about chess: sometimes there is a game behind the game. If you are playing with a child, maybe a son or a niece, you aren’t just playing, you are teaching them how to play and how to play better. You might casually make some bad moves to give them a chance to get ahead and maybe even win. That’s partly pedagogical: checkmate is an elusive concept for a young player (“No, you can’t capture the king, you just have to surround him so he can’t move out of check”). You can’t really learn it until you can execute it on the board.

But it’s more than that. You might give up a rook or a queen at the start of the game to even up the odds and make if more fair. You want them to learn if that they think harder and more carefully, they can play better and even beat an adult. There are kids out there, more than a few, who can beat anyone reading this post, unless you happen to be a chess grandmaster. But behind the game of chess is the game of life. If you play every chess game with a child to dominate and destroy your opponent, you are missing something important about the game of life.

Now let’s talk about how to win at religion, and specifically I’ll talk about LDS religion, because that’s the one I know.

Are there clear victory conditions to win at LDS religion? It’s easy to say yes, particularly with the decade-long emphasis on “the covenant path,” a metaphor for checkbox religion. And you know the boxes: get baptized, go to church, go to seminary, serve a mission, married in the temple, pay your tithing, accept callings, hold an LDS temple recommend. Those are clear institutional victory conditions, and if you do them all you are a Hero of Institutional Righteousness. You and yours are one of the eight or ten families that do most of the work in church. It’s not all or nothing. You can be a slacker, then “get religion” a few years down the road and get on the checkbox path. You can be a convert and do the same.

Are there alternate victory conditions? Sort of. You can be a kind and charitable Mormon who shows up at every service project and sits next to lonely people at church. Call it the “practicing Christian virtues” victory condition, even if you for whatever reason skip some of the checkboxes like tithing or a temple recommend. Maybe you are kind of a fringe-y Mormon who pops into sacrament meeting on occasion, but once a year you stop by the bishop’s office and plunk down a $3000 check so every single kid can attend FSOY Conference. Call it the generosity condition, at least half a victory.

But LDS religion, all religions, are more complex than chess. Just talking about “winning at religion” probably strikes most readers as odd. If you’re not in it to win it, what exactly are you up to? I suppose I could have started off with “salvation” (or LDS “exaltation”) as the opening victory condition, ahead of the covenant path checkboxes. In the LDS context, have you ever met someone who felt — or yourself felt — that hey, the Terrestrial Kingdom sounds good enough for me, or even felt that fairly credible people have said even the Telestial Kingdom is a joyful place, so that’s okay for me? Is there a gentleman’s C version of salvation that makes sense? I’m not being sarcastic. Not every soldier wants to be a general. Not every employee wants to be a VP. It makes sense that not every Mormon wants to be a King or Queen in the Celestial Kingdom.

But let’s take one more step back and ask: Is there a game behind the game of LDS religion? In one sense, that might be to orient your church life away from the covenant path (you might check the boxes, you might not) and focus on Christian virtues or just following your moral conscience, whether Christian or not. But if you are doing so with the conviction that this is what Jesus in the New Testament is really advocating, I think you are still after salvation or winning, just with an alternate definition of winning (see earlier discussion). Maybe “I want Jesus to love me” is an alternate approach.

If you sense that there is a game behind the game of LDS religion and that’s the one you are playing, what is it? You might play along with the checkboxes or the service angle, but not because you are betting on salvation. I think if you’re playing the game behind the LDS religion game, you have moved away from the unique truth claims or salvation recipe of orthodox LDS teaching. Maybe you see almost any denomination or religion as useful or adequate for a good or moral life. Maybe you come to see religion as largely irrelevant to how you should lead a good life. If you have one hundred percent written off the LDS Church, I think you’re in an entirely different game. Bottom line: if you have come to sense you are really in the game behind the game of LDS religion, then LDS religion and the Church is still present in your world view and your life, just not in the same way as LDS leaders or orthodox teaching thinks it should be.

Okay, I’ve kind of laid some ideas out here. If it gets kind of fuzzy at the end, that’s because “the purpose of life” or “how should I live my life?” is such a broad inquiry once you step out of the narrow LDS covenant path formula. There are no definitive answers. In life, not all games have victory conditions.

Here are a few closing observations and prompts.

  • Do you feel you are winning at the game of LDS religion?
  • If you are not a Covenant Path Person, what’s your alternative victory condition?
  • Maybe winning is a completely wrong basis for discussion. You don’t go for a hike in the forest or tour an art gallery to “win.” Can you be a Mormon who just enjoys the journey and the scenery and the people along the path, with no particular concern for salvation or exaltation?
  • “I’m after enlightenment, not obedience” is maybe one version of the game behind the game of LDS religion. In early Christianity, this approach came to be called Gnosticism. Later Orthodox leaders labeled it a heresy, but contemporary Christian Gnostics were just doing Christianity differently. Leadership in every age generally wants to narrow acceptable practice and belief, and exercise control. Individuals, particularly in a free society, may see things rather differently and have broader views.
  • And then there is “Christian atheism,” starting with Bonhoeffer and gaining some notoriety in the Sixties. It stretches the term “Christian” pretty far, and I think the term “Mormon atheism” just snaps the entire connection. But who knows, there may be some Mormon atheists lurking out there.

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