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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Nail on the head Dave! Thanks – Bullets 2, 3 and 4 are how I look at this whole thing at this later stage of my life.
Cheers
I feel perfectly comfortable taking communion (sacrament) at whatever non-LDS church I may be attending. My husband refuses because those churches do not have the proper ‘authority’, which I think is ridiculous. I have always been a cherry picking Mormon, and the longer I live the fewer cherries there are that appeal to me. I have always been cynical about the checkbox aspects of Mormonism because there are too many who check all the boxes and are still uncharitable and unkind and xenophobic and misogynistic.
ChatGPT helped condense my thoughts re: winning at Mormonism:
1. Don’t fake belief.
It creates long-term complications.
2. Don’t attack belief unnecessarily.
You can reject an institution without humiliating people who love it.
3. Decide boundaries before pressure arrives.
Especially around money, sex, marriage, children, and Church participation.
4. Keep relationships that don’t require intellectual surrender.
Belief and friendship don’t have to be all-or-nothing.
5. Make your own decisions—but accept that other adults get to make theirs.
That’s the strongest form of independence.
In that sense, the “win” isn’t beating the Mormon system. It’s reaching the point where neither the Church nor opposition to the Church gets to run your life.
Where I am now in life I am focused on being a good human being. An area of special focus is recognizing the advantages I experience as a white, lower-middle-class male and trying to help those who aren’t so lucky. I say please and thank you, especially when interacting with food service employees, but also on the rare occasions I use AI like ChatGPT.
As far as winning at religion goes? As stated in WarGames, “The only winning move is not to play.” Trying to check all the boxes of Mormonism for most of my life didn’t bring me happiness. If anything, it just brought me more stress and heartache.
I’m more comfortable being myself than I have ever been before and, for me, that is a huge win.
I think most mainstream religions have the base goal of making people better. Some do it better than others. Some are grifting while they do it. Some have beliefs that aren’t helpful. But in some way or other, this is what they impart to their congregants–become a better person by following these beliefs. People being people, they don’t always use those teachings in the best way. Like that Utah Rep who was caught embezzling …
I recently described myself as someone who believes in God but likes the New Testament gospels part of Jesus. I use those tenets to live my life.
In some way, I do believe people pick where they want to to … if you think of heaven in the LDS sense. People like to hang out with other people who are like themselves. Lots of people don’t like to hang around uptight religious people. Not everyone is cut out to serve endlessly. Not everyone wants to be “good.”
And yet, whenever the stories of dying come around, people talk about the immense feeling of being loved. How wonderful it was. And so I think everyone can relate to wanting that feeling. Being loved. Especially if you haven’t been particularly loved in this life. If anything could get everyone to heaven, it’s probably wanting that. Being loved.
You see how so many of the problems of our society are because people don’t feel loved or accepted, so they turn to groups with negative or hateful views, not because they admire the teachings, but because they finally felt accepted. I also think there is a huge epidemic of a lack of self-esteem. How wonderful would it be to know you are valuable no matter what you look like, how much money you have, or what circumstance you are in in the world. With this I think people are suffering from bad values, putting their time, efforts, money, and life for things that are fool’s gold. The only thing you take from this life is who you are.
So I’m in favor of loving and accepting people. Of leaving the world a better place as much as I can even though it is just a small drop here and there. That’s my religion behind the religion.
Interesting thought. I “learned” chess from my big brother, which was an extremely unfair competition. He didn’t play in the way you describe teaching a child, no he played to slaughter me. So, all I ever learned was how to stay in the game longer. I considered it a “successful” game if I lost in 20 moves instead of 10. The deck was so stacked in his favor that all I could do was attempt to defend myself. And he liked it that way. Because of course he always won. And he had ways of manipulating me into playing, even though I didn’t like playing defensively until I lost.
My husband discovered that I had no concept of the moves to actually win. Even when he purposely made big mistakes, I didn’t know even what to do to win. He couldn’t even hand me the game because I didn’t know what to do. He tried to teach me, but really it was too late.
Unfortunately, I think Mormonism is also a stacked deck against women. You stay in defensively, as in “how can I be hurt the least?” Because if you pay attention, there is a lot that is very insulting to women. Women are not full humans, but appendages to their husbands, just like their organization is an appendage to the priesthood. Single women don’t even get to be appendages, they are just worthless nobodies. Even children at least have potential, single women are more worthless than even children. And a man needs several appendages, two arms, two legs, one priesthood antenna, and several wives.
Now, I have noticed that the most effective style of surviving is denial. Women go through their church life purposely ignoring or rewriting the things that say they are less than priesthood holding men. They go heavily into the pedestal stuff. Motherhood makes them equal, thus insulting their sisters who never marry or cannot carry a child. And ignoring that “priesthood” is not the correlation to “motherhood”. Which insults fatherhood as nothing. These women are deep into the Evangelical idea that men and women compliment each other, but men rule. So, they fight their husband for total control of home and children, because that is their God given role and he has no business playing with HER children. He isn’t allowed to even help at home because home is her castle and he may be king, but he better not touch anything but his chair in the living room. They are proud as punch that their husband can’t boil water or find the vacuum. Means they are taking good care of the biggest baby in the family. They respect priesthood *at church* but do not give him any real role as father except priesthood.
Trying to fight the system eventually gets old, so feminist Mormons burn out.
I have even seen women trying to cope by inventing a separate but equal system. One is some woman I think teaches at BYU. In her version of Mormonism women have a separate priesthood and don’t need the male priesthood. She sees birthing and nursing a baby as religious sacraments and has this whole new belief system that gives her meaning to the temple ceremony. And she has followers. It is called “Two Trees.” Look it up. I think it is stupid, but she and her followers find that it makes Mormonism less painful. Just like my “chess game” was seeing how long I could play without losing, she is playing her own game within the male game and not even pretending she wants to win at the real game.
As absurd as the idea of “winning” at religion sounds to me, I’ll note that on the Mormon Stories podcast, guests have sometimes used the phrase “in it to win it” to describe their level of devotion to the church in their first half of life. I haven’t paid attention closely enough to catch whether this is a phrase that John has introduced to the conversation, one that people have picked up on over time from previous guests, or possibly even a phrase that some members of the church actually use to describe their devotion to the church. I certainly have never used it even at my most orthodox.
With that introduction, as I try to imagine what people mean by “winning it”, I would say it usually involves some version of feeling assured that a person has secured their status in the afterlife via some combination of:
1. checking off all the usual boxes culminating in a temple marriage
2. raising one’s children to achieve all of the same objectives
3. holding callings of responsibility in the church that give a person a sense of divine favor for a well-lived life
4. getting that second anointing if you’re enough of an insider
I’ll note that while evangelical Christians (rightly) criticize our obsession with earning our way into heaven, they have constructed themselves a fairly simplistic theology that, while giving greater emphasis to grace, also is based around a desire for a “guarantee” of having the right status in the afterlife. That is the common theme, rooted in a deeply human desire for certainty, a quest for “the sure thing”. Which doesn’t exist, of course. I think some personality types crave it more than others.
For me personally, at this point I could get behind some notion of enlightenment as being a victory. For me, it’s not so much that I feel I’ve reached enlightenment, but it was a turning point, perhaps one might say “a win”, to reach the point where I felt free to believe what I want independent of what the institution tells me. I participate on my own terms, and I don’t claim to have all the answers to anything, but I find much greater joy in the freedom to ask all questions and consider all possible answers, and be at peace with the uncertainty of not knowing a lot of things.
Pre-my own endowment, I would never have considered winning at religion, because each day was a new chance to succeed or fail at emulating the life of Jesus Christ. Post-my own endowment, well if I have all the secrets to getting into heaven, I guess I won. What keeps people in after they win, I suppose it’s getting their kids and grandkids to get the secrets to unlock the pearly gates as well. I never could fit the temple into my first 18 years of Mormonism, and thankfully, I don’t have to anymore.
Also, what Anna said.
If you have to win at religion, I don’t want to play.
I’m a Mormon atheist in the sense that I was raised Mormon and did all the things well into middle age and now I’m atheist and had my name removed. I still do many Mormon things and probably always will without realizing it, especially since my wife is ABM. I don’t think that’s what the OP means by Mormon atheist though.
Put me in the camp of an LDS flavor of WarGames from the 80’s – a version of mutually assured destruction where the only way to win is to not play. I think humans are worse off because of religion. To throw in one more cultural reference, I think the Mormon church is the Kobayashi Maru, an un-winnable game featured frequently in Star Trek. You can kind-of win by feigning indifference. Apparently.
Do you feel you are winning at the game of LDS religion?–I think my religious outlook became more positive when I started viewing it more as a game than a test. Growing up I associated tests with anxiety and the feeling that the adults in my life had high expectations for me while simultaneously expecting me to fail. (That does not mean this feeling was accurate to reality, but it’s what I felt.) Religion was like that for me; God held me to high standards that I could never reach and I was, at best, Telestial Material. Everything changed when I came to the realization that God is not out to get me, and They want me to succeed. That’s when religion became a game, something to explore and have fun with. If my religion is a game of chess, it’s the kind where God and I are playing while we laugh, swap stories, and eat cookies, but we get interrupted by kids or cats so there’s no ending, and therefore no winners (and no losers). I may not be winning the orthodox LDS game, but I’m having a much better time than I did as a teen.
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 mean, I am, or try to be. I do think about the afterlife sometimes, but I think we as a church spend too much time worrying about what’s on the other side of the veil when we’ve got to live in the world we have now. I think focusing on the small and simple things are the most important–being kind, mourning with those who mourn, standing up against injustice, etc. You can’t really quantify those things, and there’s no way to measure a victory that doesn’t really exist.
To “win” is, I suppose, to endure to the end–that is, if there really is such a thing as “winning.” Because we know that even after enduring to the end we are saved by grace.
Quentin mentioned the phrase “in it to win it”, often heard on Mormon Stories in the context of (former) Church members who were once highly devout and committed. It’s always interesting to hear that expression, because when I was growing up in the Church (1980s-1990s) I never, ever felt like I was “winning” at it, or even on a path toward winning. At my peak TBM-ness as a younger adult, my religion had instilled into me so much anxiety, inadequacy and self-doubt that I felt like I was in a constant state of failure. Back then, there was little to no emphasis on grace in Church teachings (at least that I understood). I internalized the caveat of salvation “…after all we can do” and reasoned that despite doing all the things, I wasn’t doing enough, and could always do more, therefore Christ’s atonement wouldn’t be sufficient to bridge the gap for me. Each new milestone was just another hamster wheel, especially receiving my own endowment and the associated covenants.
It took me years of deconstruction, pain and nuanced reframing to get to a healthier relationship with the Church, which now includes much greater emotional distance between me and the institution, as well as living and interpreting the Gospel by my own terms, which I have come to view as a kind of “winning”. Divine grace is more frequently mentioned in Church discourse these days, which is good for my kids to hear, but also frustrating for me because I didn’t get to have those teachings growing up when I really needed it, as “grace” was considered anathema to the preferences of the Church leaders at the time…but that’s a topic for another post.
Trevor mentioned the Kobayashi Maru from the Star Trek universe, which is very applicable to my journey. In the Star Trek canon, James Kirk as a young Starfleet cadet surreptitiously reprogrammed the simulation in order to remove the guarantee of failure, and then when tested, he won it decisively. He didn’t consider it cheating, but rather a philosophical rejection of the premise of a self-contained, unwinnable situation. There’s no point to a test in which the ultimate outcome is effectively predetermined failure. These days, with my current relationship with Mormonism, I’m feeling a little like Kirk, quietly carrying the smug satisfaction of having beaten a rigged game by re-rigging it in my favor.
My longer comment got lost when I mistyped my password, so I’ll just say that I really really don’t like games. At all. Often life, as described by the church, can feel like a game, and I really don’t want to play.
One RS lesson our long suffering president asked how the phrase Think Celestial helps us.. my response was that it wasn’t remotely helpful, that church rhetoric about the celestial kingdom was not an attractive proposition for women..