Part VIII of the Sunstone Classics Series
Wayne C. Booth was a distinguished literary critic, the author of The Rhetoric of Fiction, and a professor of English and literature at the University of Chicago. This excerpt is from a Sunstone article published in 1998. It starts on page 25 of issue 109.
Where am I now? Well, I’m still a “Mormon,” but one who puts quotation marks around most of my religious commitments—the marks always translated not as “disbelief” but as “Allow me my own definitions.” The pious young believer [I once was] and I have engaged in a variety of dialogues for going on seven decades. As my beliefs and unbeliefs have shifted about, the debates have, of course, changed ground. At times I’ve treated the boy as a stupid oaf, and he’s treated me as a lost soul. Sometimes he has been so shocked by my ideas, and even more by how low I rank coffee or wine drinking on the scale of sins, that he has simply and angrily cast me off, even as I have lamented his naive commitment to silly superstitions and destructive prejudices. Now, though, as he and I face the many conflicting religious and anti-religious conflicts flooding our world, the distance between us seems to me far less, and the need to get together, in spite of his remaining conviction that that is impossible, seems ever greater.
Scene: The northwest corner of the Brigham Young University farmland, where the head sluice gates lie—sluice gates that I manipulate as I irrigate the farm through the long summer hours, reading my pocket Plato as I wait at the end of the furrows for the water to arrive. This evening, Professor M. Wilford Poulson has happened by, seen me pulling up a headgate, and stopped his car nearby. After finishing my simple task, I go to his car; place one rubber-booted foot on his fender; and we start talking. We talk and talk—talk on through the beautiful sunset, on into the twilight, slapping mosquitoes, talking, talking mainly about the Church and my doubts.
POULSON: Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. You keep leaping ahead into areas you know nothing about. The fact that some Church leaders are dishonest or unjust doesn’t mean that the Church is valueless. Every institution, including every church, has some immoral leaders. Surely, you’re not going to relapse into the position that because the Church claims to be divinely led, and its leaders are clearly not divine, it must be valueless, when judged in human terms.
WAYNE: No, but I don’t see any reason to . . .
POULSON: You shouldn’t be looking for reasons to. You should be looking only for reasons not to. Here you are, raised in a marvelously vital tradition, surrounded by an astonishing number of good, intelligent people who have found a way to organize their lives effectively. You come along and ask them for reasons to do what they are doing! What you should ask for, before giving up anything they offer you, is reasons not to go along.
WAYNE: But I just can’t stand even sitting in Church without speaking up when somebody talks nonsense. Last Sunday they were talking about personal devils, and some of them really believed that stuff.
POULSON: Well, you know what I’ve always said when some authority grills me on that one: “Of course I believe in personal devils. All my devils are personal.” It’s so unimportant whether you call it devils, or personal quests, or temptation, or schizophrenia.
The fifty-five-year-old widower; hated by many students for his nagging discipline in the classroom, mistrusted by the Church and university authorities, owner of “the best collection of books on Mormon history” (he has previously invited me into his basement to have a look at his collection of “forbidden” sources) talks on into the dark, feeling lucky (I have no doubt) to have with him one of those rare students who really loves discussing deep questions for hours on end. Of course I cannot see the boy; I only feel myself standing there, chilling a bit in my wet socks, tired after twenty hours of irrigating (not hard labor; admittedly, but still—), changing from one foot to the other—and exhilarated beyond description: this is what life can be, this is one of the great times—I’ll stay here forever if he’ll only go on talking.
POULSON: What you should be doing, instead of trying to undermine other people’s belief, is discovering beliefs that you yourself can live by. And you’ll find most of them being taught right in the Church, by the people you’re attacking. That’s why I keep saying, “Show me a better church.” I’m not determined to stay with this one, if you’ll find me another one that does as much good and that has fewer corrupt leaders, a better attitude on race, or what not.
WAYNE: But that’s not good enough. Don’t we have the right to hope for an institution that is at least honest with itself? I long for a cause that I can give myself to as fully as the believers—my father and mother, my grandparents—could give in earlier times.
POULSON: Well, I’m sure you can find it, if you want to badly enough. Because all you have to do is just put your mind to rest and let your emotions take over. Almost any church can easily become that to you, if you want it to badly enough. The Mormons have plenty of members like that; all causes do. What they lack is devoted men [I’m pretty sure he did not add women] who still are willing to think, not just be carried away with sentimentality. What they really need is a corps of missionaries who know everything that’s wrong about the Church—and who don’t care, because they know that it can be an instrument for good in their hands.
In the dark, now, the moon not quite ready to rise, the stars bright as they never seem to be in 1969, the old man’s gray hair is faintly visible inside the car; the deep thoughtful voice pours out into the night. His dirty fingernails are now invisible, and there is nothing but prophetic voice and silver glow.
WAYNE: Do you mean to suggest that I should go on a mission?
POULSON: Why not? If you could work not to get the people under the water in the greatest possible number but to take them where you find them and help them to grow—why not? Can you think of a better way to spend two years than setting out to help other people—with no concern about your own welfare or future? That’s what the missionary system is, at its best. Oh, yes, I admit that it seldom works at its best. Most of the boys are so badly prepared, at nineteen or twenty, that they couldn’t even do a good job in the narrow definition of making converts. But you might, if you worked hard, if you thought hard, and if you could keep from worrying too much about your own reputation—you might make a real difference for a lot of people. Just take for example the whole question of charity toward backsliders—who has that in charge in our present set-up? None of the other missionaries will be working on that, and you might. Why not?
So, at ten o’clock they break up—and Wayne Clayson Booth accepts [a mission] call. Now, here in the late nineties, it’s clear that young Booth thus landed himself in rhetorical waters far more turbulent than he could ever have predicted: even Poulson, who had served as a missionary before doing the historical research that for him dissolved the gold plates, could not have predicted what this “second-generation Mormon liberal” would encounter.