I was watching a TV show the other night (The Diplomat) and the following statement was made: “Loyalty is, by definition, an abdication of judgment”. The quote was made in respect to politics, pointing to the toxic pressures of political alignment, institutional corruption, and the consequences of blind allegiance.
We can see this in the current political parties in the US. Loyalty is the primary attribute for working with the current administration. Look at all the poor judgments being made by the “loyal” followers of the President.
Do you think the quote can be applied to other aspects of life? Lets look at family. We should be loyal to our family, but what does that mean? Does it mean standing up for a parent or sibling even if they are wrong? What about a spouse? Being loyal to a husband or wife means supporting them in good times and bad, being faithful.
Here are some definitions of loyalty in a relationship I found on a web site called PsychCentral
- Consistent Presence: Showing up for the person regularly, not just when things are easy or convenient.
- Trust and Honesty: Keeping their secrets safe, being transparent, and avoiding talking behind their back.
- Standing by Them: Supporting them through personal struggles, failures, or emotional highs and lows without immediately giving up when things get hard.
- Choosing Action over Words: Demonstrating dedication through reliable behavior rather than just declaring care
We see people that a loyal to a specific sports team, and attend their games even during losing seasons. After years a cheering for a losing team, one could say that fan has poor judgment!
What about being loyal with religion? We can be loyal to God, but what about organized religion? Is loyalty required towards a church, or its leaders? Or does professing loyalty to a church bring us to the problem of abdicating our judgement? There our obvious extreme examples of loyalty like the Peoples Temple in Jamestown or Heavens Gate in San Diego.
With the LDS Church, is loyalty expected? What does it mean in a religious sense to be loyal to the Church? Can you be loyal to the Church without giving up judgment? What happens if your judgment goes counter to what the Church is teaching, are you then disloyal? Is there a line that crosses from loyalty to blind allegiance?
Your thoughts?
In his 2018 remarks at the Be One Celebration, Pres. Oaks said:
“I studied the reasons then being given and could not feel confirmation of the truth of any of them. As part of my prayerful study, I learned that, in general, the Lord rarely gives reasons for the commandments and directions He gives to His servants. I determined to be loyal to our prophetic leaders and to pray — as promised from the beginning of these restrictions — that the day would come when all would enjoy the blessings of priesthood and temple.”
I immediately noticed his choice to be loyal and have reflected on his choice frequently. Since I cannot find any public statement of his from before ’78, I tend to assume that loyalty included a certain “silence” about his doubts and concerns. I often reflect on how our history around race could have been different if a person of Pres. Oaks’s influence (he was a Utah Supreme Court Justice and President of BYU-Provo) had been public about his doubts, would it change our history? How did his choice to be silently loyal impact the history? In many ways, it feels to me like Pres. Oaks is saying that — at least in that specific scenario — loyalty to the church and the brethren was more important than seeking for the truth around race and segregation and such.
I won’t claim to really know much here, but this question of where loyalty (to the church, specificially) fits into our list of virtues has been an important part of my deconstruction/reconstruction since 2018.
McShorty, That Oak’s example fits the given definition of loyalty in my first paragraph of loyalty exactly. Oak’s had judged the race question to be troubling, and could not get a confirmation that withholding the priesthood was right, so out of loyalty to the Church and its leaders, he withheld (or abdicated) his judgment. Good find!
This is an interesting topic. I think like many things, loyalty is good until it isn’t.
I liked to think there is loyalty in my immediate and extended family—the kind where we care for each other, even when things are hard. But, for me, this kind of loyalty is only built on the foundation to trust and honesty. And for me, trust has become an ever increasing requirement for the relationships I want to have. That basically means that I will not “lie for the Lord”, which is something the church institution has engaged in far too much.
It feels to me like loyalty has become far too often associated with covering another’s sins or gratifying pride and vain ambition. I guess if you’re a conqueror or a kingdom builder, this kind of loyalty would be useful. But as a divine principle, I just don’t see it because even in that context it is employed to take away the choices of another.
I think it is fine to be loyal if the cost is something you are willing to pay. For example, being loyal to a losing team for your whole life if you want, because just cheering for a team can be fun and valuable even if they are really lousy. I would, for instance be loyal to the team my kid plays on, even when they lose every game. It cost me very little to be loyal, UNLESS I bet the rent money. Then my loyalty reaches the point of stupid. But as long as I just pay for tickets and wear a team shirt and cheer for my team, the cost may well be worth staying loyal for whatever reason.
In non sports metaphor that might translate to, I might stay loyal to a church I disagree with on some points if the church has most of its doctrine as good, Christlike beliefs, that church does a lot of good in the world and in individual lives. For example, back to Oaks. He stayed loyal even though he disagreed with the blacks and priesthood issue. He kind of put that issue on his shelf as “I don’t agree with this, but maybe I am missing something or do not understand something? And so he stayed faithful and loyal and pretended to agree. Obviously he thought his loyalty was worth the cost.
Another real life example. I know an alcoholic who disagrees with the “higher power” kind of idea. Very atheist. But the value of AA in his life made it worth it to find something to work as “higher power” to make it so he could relate to others and make the program work. So, he picked nature, represented by a beautiful 300 year old tree in a city park. He would go to the park and sit under his tree when he was wanting a drink. Good thing he had a morbid sense of humor, because the city decided the tree was diseased and the danger of limbs falling was too great, so the city cut down his higher power. They killed God. It put that glitch back in his loyalty to AA, because how could he make it work when the city was more powerful than his higher power. He REALLY had to remind himself that the tree was just *symbolic* of the higher power.
So, yes, blind loyalty can be harmful. People have to be willing to step back and look at what they get out of the thing they are loyal to, and compare that to how much it costs them. Is my loyalty to “my team” making me do stupid things like spend $300 on tickets when I do not have that kind of money? Is my loyalty to my spouse causing me to put up with abuse? Is my loyalty to my religion costing me my self esteem, or am I letting my children go hungry to pay tithing to a greedy organization that does not need my money when my children really do?
The church actually looks for people who are “church broke” because they want people to be so invested in the church that they never step back and do the cost analysis of really looking at what they get out of the thing they are loyal to. Callings can often take too much time away from family. Tithing can cause people to go into debt when living expenses are high and income barely covers necessities. But the church teaches that it is lacking faith to do that analysis. We are all just supposed to happily sacrifice, when the church really doesn’t even need us to. Because faith. Then when people do go into debt paying tithing, it must be their fault somehow, and the church turns its back on the member because they MUST lack faith or somehow God would have saved them from their own stupidity.
Now, I am not going to judge Oaks on his loyalty to the church. Speaking out about it would have made him ineligible to be a general authority and his values, goals, and just who he is wouldn’t have allowed that. But for me, my values , goals, and the “just who I am” made me speak up. But I never had the kind of platform he had. But yes, being vocal cost me something I didn’t much care about anyway.
Loyalty is great for the most part. What do you do, though, when loyalty to one thing, like the church, is really loyalty to one part of that thing, like Ezra Taft Benson? Pondering and praying about the truth of anything is not a one-and-done proposition. It’s something you should constantly apply to determine the worth of what you’re loyal to. When you get stuck in your loyalty after the ship has left the harbor, that’s when you’re missing the boat.
In the Church, “loyalty” is seen as a synonym for “being true to” or “being faithful to,” and of course senior leaders want you to be loyal to, true to, and faithful to the Church.
But then listeners (the membership) and even the leaders themselves invert the relation, and equate “true” and “truth” with “being loyal to.” Then by definition, agreeing with and supporting the Church and its senior leaders is being true and truthful (even if the Church is wrong or you are saying something false) and speaking an unwelcome piece of truth is being “untruthful” (as in disloyal).
So loyalty is something of a trick virtue. It sounds virtuous but is often misguided. I wish it were banished from LDS discourse and clearer terms were used.
As the old saying goes, “respect is earned, loyalty is returned”. True loyalty can only exist if the solidarity is reciprocated. For example, my current employer is a massive, faceless, publicly traded corporation that executed a hostile takeover of my beloved previous employer several years ago. I work hard, and the work I do for them is mostly satisfying, and they compensate me somewhat fairly, though not quite as fairly as I think they should, and the benefits package has been eroding in quality and generosity year after year. But I know this organization would not hesitate to terminate my employment if it became financially expedient for them to do so, without taking a moment to think of my livelihood, family and mortgage. Therefore, despite my professional dedication, I have no lasting loyalty toward my employer since they haven’t sufficiently earned my trust. Indeed, I would get a great deal of personal satisfaction from seeing my company’s senior executives being escorted out of their offices in handcuffs and slapped with SEC violations. Which is also why I don’t quite understand the whole “loyalty first” mindset of Trumpworld, because he has repeatedly shown a propensity to dump his closest allies at the first sign of trouble, then new ones rise to take their place. Treating your closest supporters (especially those who willingly sacrifice their own moral compass and personal integrity to stand by you) as expendible, disposable assets is hardly loyal.
I feel similarly about the LDS Church. If I were to apostitize publicly, this organization wouldn’t hesitate to kick me to the curb in order to protect their “good name” regardless of deep friendships or personal investment. Meanwhile, they demand from me a verbal pledge to God Himself to be willing to sacrifice everything I own for it, even my own life, while offering very little in return, seemingly less and less every year. So I simply adjusted my own input proportionally to match what I perceived the Church to be giving me. I’m nuanced/PIMO, recommend lapsed and pay no tithe, and the Church seems to meet my very low expectations now.
Fittingly, Gen Z and younger (my kids) have come to view loyalty as a liability, not a virture. They recognize that, in practice, “loyalty” is often highly conditional, lopsided, and ultimately hollow.
Your post immediately made me think of the one I wrote in the wake of the POX in 2015 called “Loyalty is a Tricky Virtue,” in which I delineate all the hateful things members said in defense of the indefensible policy to refuse baptism to the children of gay couples. It was such a bad policy that the church eventually reversed it, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t plenty of members turning on one another to demonstrate their fealty to any foolish idea church leaders could put forward as God’s will. In my post, I made this unfortunately prescient comment: ” If we show the most compassionate people the door, who will be left?” Now we know who’s left, and the church is FAR less compassionate than it was in the pre-Trump era. Here’s a link to that post: https://wheatandtares.org/2015/11/10/pull-your-heads-out-nutters/
Loyalty is always a tricky virtue. You can use loyalty to punch down on the marginalized and powerless while pretending to be a besieged victim yourself. Pres. Oaks has previously said that there is no such thing as a “loyal opposition,” which is only an opinion you can hold if you are a conservative in power. There’s a reason people claim the Democratic party is chaotic–because it’s a coallition of different priorities all arguing for their points, which is what democracy is. Of course we can all be loyal to something bigger (the country, a church, our family, our marriage) while also opposing some elements of that thing (colonialism, bigotry, past wrongs, poor skills or traits). Pres. Oaks’ views about this are consistent with his view that it’s always wrong to criticize church leaders. That’s great for him maybe, but not good for anyone else.
@Hawkgrrrl
It’s not even good for him, because ignoring flaws doesn’t make them go away.
Back to the basics…we understand that there are really only three commandments or instructions taught by Jesus: 1) we must “love God with all our heart, might, mind and strength”, 3) “love our neighbor as ourself”, and 4) “love one another as I have loved you”. What everyone that I look at seems to forget is that, in loving God and our neighbor we are supposed to love ourself as a child of God, and then, according to scripture, we can acknowledge that it may be possible to become a joint-heir with Christ.
To me, this means that we have to know what we are talking about when referencing God and His position on things, and not relying on someone’s opinions or their views about what is God’s opinion by abdicating our own responsibility to find out for ourselves.
Most of the time when I listen to those in charge I am very sure that they don’t have a clue about what scripture says, their focus is primarily on their power and expectation of loyalty from those lower in the hierarchy.
That said, I would rather stand alone than with a bunch of wannabes.