'Lightning in a Bottle': The Technology of Religious Organization

Speaker 1

I’m pleased to introduce the first of our keynote speakers of today’s conference. Melissa Wei-Tsing Inoue is a professor of Chinese history at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her first book, China and the True Jesus, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press and tells the story of the true Jesus Church and charismatic Christian modes in China in the 20th century. Her published research work includes work on global Mormonism, particularly in Greater China. She’s taught at a bunch of universities, but thinks it’s pretty boring to tell you about that. So instead, I’ll tell you that she has one and only one, Mormon husband. Four kids and a dog named Bertie. In addition to her academic work, Inoue has written numerous essays on Mormonism and her lived experience as a Mormon woman in the twenty-first century. We would ask also, please, that you not record this particular talk and enjoy our presentation from Dr. Inoue. Thank you.

Melissa Inouye

It’s nice it’s a normal podium so they don’t have to make the annoying button sound and have the whole podium slowly go down, down, down, down, down. So, thank you so much for your kind invitation to be here today. Mormons have a tradition of beginning their talks by complaining about the manner in which they were asked to give the talk. So when Carl contacted me and asked me to speak at the Mormon Transhumanist Association, I was sure he had gotten the wrong Melissa in a way. There’s another Melissa Inoue on Google who was also born in 1917, at 1979. It’s an important date. You’ll learn about that later. who is the head softball coach at Iona College in New York and who seemed vastly more qualified to speak about the use of technology to expand human abilities. I’ve been really slow to get on the digital technology train. So I just purchased my first smartphone three weeks ago. And I’ve been resisting smartphones for years, but I had no choice because we’ve been in Shanghai and there’s all these handy public bikes. on every corner, but if you want to use them, you have to use an app. I lost that smo smartphone yesterday morning in the Shanghai Pudong Airport. So it looks like that’s the end of my short-lived excursion into the world of apps. I also didn’t get much sleep last night because around 10 p. I learned that my aunties and great aunties would be coming, so I spent all night rewriting the whole talk to bring it up to their high standards. I’m very happy to be here, but I’m very jet lagged, so please forgive me and poke me if I fall asleep during the talk.

Melissa Inouye

So, 101 years ago, on May 26, 1917. As dusk was falling on the alleyways and thresholds of Beijing, the silk merchant Wei and Buo was praying in the quarters above his shop and heard a voice. Those who cling to the lusts of the flesh will die, but those who cling to the Holy Spirit will live in peace. You must receive the baptism of Jesus. Now at this point, Wade was already three days into what ended as a thirty nine day fast. so he was primed for divine guidance. And obediently he went out, and led by the Spirit, proceeded down the great avenue that led out of Yongding Gate, the southern gate of the city. Although reduced in number to facilitate increased traffic flows and to accommodate new stations at the ever-expanding railway lines, Beijing’s remaining city gates were still centers of bustling activity. The Beijing resident and novelist Laoshe described the medley of ear-piercing noises and the stench of the dry dust in the road as a variety of people and vehicles pushed through this gate. No one dared to push too fast, he wrote, but everyone was in a hurry to get through. The cries, the cracking of whips, the cursing, the honking of horns, the tinkling of bells, the laughter, all mingled together to form a single melody of sound. Now here’s a picture of Yeongting Gate from this time, and notice the river flowing by just outside of it. Wei threaded through the clouds at the gate and walked further to a place with flowing water away from the noise and traffic. He climbed down the banks and waded out into the water where he knelt. Then he heard a voice from heaven, You must be baptized face down.

Melissa Inouye

Here, I’ll quote directly from his account. And for simplicity’s sake, throughout the talk, when someone makes a charismatic claim, I won’t say, you know, Way alleged or Joseph Smith claimed, I’ll just relate the claim. He said, I plunged into the water, raised my head, and clearly saw the glorious Saviour Jesus appearing to me. Hallelujah. Coming up from the water I knew that my body and spirit were both holy. I felt very powerful and knew that I had received great authority. From heaven a voice said, I give you full armor. Use the girdle of truth. I felt in the darkness as if God were forcefully fastening it. The voice told me that I must be an honest person and that I could never again speak untruth. Then the voice said, I give you the breastplate of righteousness and the helmet of the grace of salvation. In the dark the Lord’s messenger fastened them on securely. Then the voice said, I give you the shoes of the gospel for your feet. I felt in the dark that there was God putting them on for me. Then the voice said, I give the shield of faith and virtue into your hand. And again the voice said, Take it Then the voice said, I give the precious sword of the spirit into your hands, and the loud voice commanded me to do battle with the devil. I saw that suddenly there came a devil with a face shaped like a plough. I fought with him and used the precious sword of the spirit to defeat him. Then came another devil, more vicious than the first, and battled with me. I fought several bouts, and used the precious sword of the Spirit to drive him away. After a while there came again another devil of great power, even more awful to behold. but with the glorious army armor that the true God had given me, the full soldier’s armor. I felt powerful. After several bouts, one after another, I defeated the great devil.

Melissa Inouye

Now, after his vision, Wei proceeded southward to the town of Huang ten, on the east bank of the Yangding River, south of Beijing. There he stayed with fellow merchant friends and continued to fast, eventually abstaining from food for thirty-nine days. Over the course of his fast, Wei attracted people from near and far and sparked an instant revival, accompanied by dramatic accounts of healings, speaking in tongues, and other divine manifestations. People, mostly people who were already Christians, converted to the true Jesus Church in droves. Rival churches grumbled about sheep stealing. Over the next couple of decades, the True Jesus Church grew into one of the major independent Protestant denominations in China, with a membership that multiplied overseas and with friends in the halls of political power.

Melissa Inouye

Now, religious movements from the True Jesus Church to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints often we begin with a charismatic spark. And I use the word charismatic in a way that it’s broadly used in religious studies to describe an experience animated by divine, superhuman, or extraordinary power. After this initial charismatic spark, two eventual possibilities follow. More often than not, the new religious movement fizzles when its founder dies or when it grows larger and loses its focus. Sometimes, however, this spark grows into a steady burning flame. People manage to create institutions, such as formal institutions like ecclesiastical hierarchies And informal institutions, like shared cultural practices, that managed to preserve this charismatic spark without either smothering it or letting it get out of control. Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, and all the world’s great long-standing religious traditions began like this. As a sociologist James Matheson once remarked, the challenge most religious movements face is figuring out how to capture lightning in a bottle. And as I’m sure a room full of transhumanists will point out, the bottle is a form of technology.

Melissa Inouye

Today, I will discuss the relationship between the lightning and the bottle by comparing examples from the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the Mormon tradition, with the history of the True Jesus Church. Now, I’m primarily, here’s some shameless self-promotion, a historian of religion and moral culture in China, so most of my material today is taken from my forthcoming book to be published by Oxford University Press. Titled China and the True Jesus. The True Jesus Church, in some ways, is the Mormonism of China. It’s this upstart Restorationist church that believes its country of origin is God’s chosen land. And that scripture that Lincoln cannon quoted earlier is very important to them. Lightning comes from the East and it shines on the West. That’s the origin of the restored gospel for them. Now, by examining these two Christian movements in a comparative context, we can develop a broad perspective of how charismatic religious movements form and hold together generally. The True Jesus Church is a great point of comparison for Mormonism because of many historical similarities. So for example, the True Jesus Church was also founded by a country bumpkin with no formal education. who saw Jesus in a vision, who warned that other churches were corrupt, who heard God say, They draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Who was divinely called to establish the one true church. And the true Jesus Church’s early teachings are also based on Wei’s multiple revelations.

Melissa Inouye

So let’s get back to lightning in the bottle. Some people are lucky, or I guess unlucky, enough, to have a direct personal experience with lightning. Is there actually anyone who’s had a direct personal experience with lightning? Has anyone been Struck by lightning. Oh, see, see, not that many people, but very cool.

Speaker 3

It wasn’t struck, but the Boy Scout I was with was struck and killed by lightning.

Melissa Inouye

Oh, interesting. That sounds like the story told by the Institute director, the UCLA Institute, who had that same experience. He’s the only person I’ve ever known who’s Who’s had that experience? So, most of us don’t have that experience.

Melissa Inouye

In real life, we do access Lightning’s power, but in a mediated fashion through wires, plugs, and USB ports. Now, in religious life, religious people access divine power through traditions, rituals, and institutions. In religious life, people don’t regularly see heavenly beings or fall to the ground senseless for three days and nights. But they do regularly seek to channel divine power through rituals of communion, through offerings of incense, through the invocation of the name of Jesus Christ or the Buddha Amitabha, through fasting and prayer. And these rituals. Liturgies, traditions, forms and practices create the intermediary vessel, the bottle, between human beings and the divine, the lightning. They are religious technology.

Melissa Inouye

Now the Oxford English Dictionary defines technology as the branch of knowledge dealing with the mechanical arts and applied sciences, the application of such knowledge for practical purposes, and a particular practical art. So today I’ll speak of religious technology as a practical art of channeling and containing the experience of the divine in ways that maximize accessibility and reliability. And some might say, well, religion is not a practical art at all. Religion is an illusion, it’s this idea, it’s a state of mind. It’s the exact opposite of the mechanical arts and applied sciences. However, the practice of religion does indeed involve particular practical arts. So these practical arts or religious technologies can be include actual physical objects such as a seer stone or consecrated oil in a vial. ritual forms such as the blessing and distribution of bread and water in the Lord’s Supper rite, and organizational structures such as ecclesiast ecclesiastical offices and hierarchies, or informal conventions of congregational participation.

Melissa Inouye

This is a form of organization which I’m sure you recognize. I’m just using the most likely people to be there since most people in the world are Chinese and half of everyone’s actually women. So from a strictly rationalistic point of view, the efficacy of the first two examples cannot be proven through hard evidence. But the third example, modes of organizing and engaging people in collective action and identity, has a concrete function from both atheistic and theistic points of view. So in contrast to the technology of say a wireless router which sends electromagnetic, I can’t say it because I’m not a technology person. Which sends electromagnetic waves through the air. Religious technology used for organization deploys resources of human imagination, concentration, and action. It creates vessels for the sacred, structures for community, and platforms for collective action. Some might say, that’s not real technology. Technology is things you can see and touch, buttons you push to make things do stuff. So, I’m going to push your buttons. If you know this song, please sing along. Ready? I should stand up. If you’re happy and you know it, if you’re happy and you know it, double your hands If you’re happy and you know it, then your face will surely show it if you’re happy and you know

Melissa Inouye

So, I used a common form of religious technology, a simple musical device. And this device, like a chip, is installed in the brains of Mormons from a very early age. I push the button and you sprang into action. Perhaps your heart rate went up. Your state of mind may have shifted a bit. Electrical signals in your brain fired so that you envisioned yellow smiley faces. You all waggled your hands around and produced sounds within your throat. You all acted together in synchronization. It was pretty impressive. So I’m choosing to emphasize the term religious technology, even if it sounds a bit stretchy to you hardcore material technology people, and even if it’s a rather glib way of renaming already familiar terms such as practices, rituals, and institutions. I’m using this term religious technology to highlight the way in which innovative religious organizations like new digital technology can achieve things and make things happen that were not previously possible. Religious organization creates processes, not necessarily mechanical or chemical, but processes with tangible consequential outcomes, through which mundane individual existence is transformed into a sacred collective existence. Through which the divine other becomes an intimate part of everyday life. So let’s talk about these bottles, these religious technologies. What forms do they take?

Melissa Inouye

Now, in the story of Wei Yin Boa, the founder of the True Jesus Church, there are examples of religious technologies that exist in the form of actual physical objects. For instance, Wei claimed to receive literal armor. He said he could feel a divine messenger, or perhaps even God, fastening a breastplate onto his chest and shoes onto his feet. Using his sword of the spirit, Wei did battle with the forces of evil and overcame them. In Joseph Smith’s first vision, of course, the pillar of light delivers Joseph Smith from the power of the devil. But in the case of Wei and Boa, God just gave him the lightsaber. Joseph Smith did receive a breastplate, but later.

Melissa Inouye

So, Mormonism, as you well know, is launched by new hardware. Contemporary Mormon believers are accustomed to viewing Joseph Smith’s first vision. As the beginning of this distinctive new religion. But for early converts and missionaries, the focus was on Joseph Smith’s Golden Book of Scripture: Word of God 2. 0. In the middle of the Second Great Awakening, many people, Methodists and Baptists and so on, recorded accounts in which they saw Christ, or were attended by angels, or heard God’s voice, or had a cathartic experience of forgiveness from sins. So that experience, the first vision itself, wasn’t completely unusual for people at that time in that place. What helped Joseph Smith’s relatively run-of-the-mill visions grow into a full-blown religious movement Was it he also had an exciting new technology, the gold plates containing the text of the Book of Mormon, and the Steer Stone, and other things So, like the epic image of Wei and Buo brandishing his shield of faith and the sword of the spirit, Joseph Smith’s early distinctiveness and appeal as a religious leader is that he claimed to have literal heavenly hardware given to him by the hands of a divine being.

Melissa Inouye

In addition to the sacred objects they wielded as part of their divine mission, Wei and Bo and Joseph Smith both deployed other non-material religious technologies to catch the lightning in the bottle, including rituals and organizational structures. So, for example, the story of Way’s first vision introduces a religious technology in the form of a ritual, face-down baptism in a natural body of water. And the precise details of this technology are very important for the exclusivist claims of the True Jesus Church immersion. symbolizes death and rebirth. The natural body of water evokes the river Jordan. The face down posture follows the manner of Jesus’ death when he bowed his head And gave up the ghost. So, this kind of baptism is a true technology in the sense that if the commands are not executed correctly, the technology will not work. Just like when you’re logging in and you forget that your password was case-sensitive. Or just as contemporary Mormons plunge the person being baptized down and swish her around and do not allow any part of the body to pop up or else, you know. The whole rite is inefficacious, right? So, in that same manner, members of the True Jesus Church believe that any baptismal posture not involving kneeling in a natural body of water and then plunging the face into the water. Is inefficacious. And if you have not been baptized in this fashion, they weren’t, you are not going to the good place.

Melissa Inouye

So, the reason why I’ve asked you not to record is because it’s very I have a responsibility as a researcher to not To not allow my subjects to come to any harm because of their religious activities. So I’m going to play a video clip of But true Jesus Church baptism is really fast, actually. But throughout this presentation, please don’t record the video clips that I play, just for the sensitivity of the material. So here is a person kneeling in the water. This is the beach actually. That was super fast. So that’s the proper way to be baptized.

Melissa Inouye

So as Jonathan Staveley has noted in his recent book The power of godliness, Joseph Smith drew on both the New Testament and the Book of Mormon to teach members of his new church that miracles came by faith. And here I’ll quote directly. He says, But miracles were elusive. And Smith consistently sought a means for his people to manifest the power of God. In principle, every believer could see angels be miraculously healed and receive revelations. In practice, Joseph Smith created ecclesiastical and liturgical structures to mediate the open heaven. Joseph Smith drew on a variety of existing liturgical resources, including a section at the end of the Book of Mormon giving instructions for church structure and ritual texts. To create new rituals, new technologies for accessing and unleashing the power of the heavens, Joseph Smith encouraged the development of rituals of healing through the laying on of hands by both women and men. He created a suite of temple rituals, including washing, anointing, clothing and priestly vestments, as well as an interactive dramatic ritual through which believers received an endowment of power. Now, Wayne and Joseph Smith were not only recipients of divinely given technologies in the form of actual objects, like the Sword of the Spirit or the Book of Mormon.

Melissa Inouye

and not only creators of new religious technologies, such as the rituals of face-down baptism or temple ordinances, they were also early adopters. They adapted existing religious technologies in particular organizational forms for new purposes. They didn’t always try to reinvent the bottle, as it were, but they improved on existing designs, materials, and manufacturing processes. And religion is one of humanity’s oldest forms of organizational technology, and one of our methods for facilitating collective worship of sacred things and stories has been constantly in process and constantly evolving. We’ve been making and improving bottles for a really long time.

Melissa Inouye

One of the key religious technologies that powered the True Jesus Church’s runaway success in China in the 1910s and 20s was glossolalia, the practice of speaking in tongues. This practice first came to China by way of American Pentecostal missionaries beginning in 1906. In 1915, Wei Yin Bo, already a Christian at that time, took, met a Pentecostal missionary and began to speak in tongues. Two years later, he took this new technology of tongues and redeployed it within his own religious movement. Now, we have some accounts from missionaries in China in the early 1920s who kind of describe what it was like. Evan E. Bryant described in detail the congregation’s newly acquired method of corporate prayer. He was a London Missionary Society missionary, and he was really annoyed because his little flock of Christians in Sangzhou, a a city in northern China, converted en masse to the Shu Jesus Church. So he’s writing this with a little bit of bitterness. He says prayer involved repeating ad-lib the phrases, hallelujah, praise be to Jesus, each person saying it faster and faster until the rapid, united praying becomes a wild, ecstatic babble, accompanied in the case of some with physical tremors and shakings.

Melissa Inouye

Another missionary, Edith Murray, expressed her frustration at the value the congregants were now ascribing to charismatic expressions instead of to the authority of the missionaries. Everybody talked about dreams and visions. We did not experience any because we had not received the Spirit, she wrote. Oh, how hard we strove to teach them about the Holy Spirit as revealed in Scripture, and as proved in our own experience, but they would not believe us. every meeting became a pandemonium, and as soon as any attempt at prayer was made, all kneeling, bodies swaying about and trembling all over, they would start repeating Hallelujah, Praise Jesus, but almost immediately lose themselves in inarticulate sounds. One night after an address on Isaiah 53, they went on like that for 40 minutes until I really thought they were mad. So I’ll play a video of contemporary True Jesus Church congregants. Praying in tongues after foot washing, right. And it seems quite similar to what’s being described here. So again, please don’t take any videos of this. In the conference footage will blur the people’s faces.

Melissa Inouye

So, Glossolalia and the True Jesus Church is distinctive compared to Glossolalia and other Pentecostal churches in North America and Africa because of its routinized, regularized character. They announce the prayer. A few seconds later, nearly every member of the congregation begins to shake, clasped hands back and forth while making A sound like lolo lolo, or a syllable repeated over and over again, or hallelujah, hallelujah. And after a few minutes, when a church worker rings a bell, the prayer instantly ceases.

Melissa Inouye

Now believers view prayer as a technology in the sense that the proper procedure is found to deliver results. Once I was conducting an interview And a young woman in in the city in central China tried to teach me how to pray, like the True Jesus Church. She said, it’s very simple. You kneel. You say, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, then you say, hallelujah. It’s like calling God on the phone, and hallelujah is God’s telephone number. You’ll get the Holy Spirit if you ask. So for her, receiving the Holy Spirit and the accompanying gift of tongues wasn’t something that might happen or wouldn’t happen. It was a technological process that could be reliably expected after a little persistence, maybe some tuning. To connect to the Holy Spirit, to capture lightning.

Melissa Inouye

Now, in the present day, At the True Jesus Church’s semi-annual spiritual convocation meetings, I’m going to check on this slide. Oh, yeah, I think I’m going to stay here. New converts who had accepted baptism, foot washing, and the Lord’s Supper rites at this meeting were brought forward in a final meeting in which they were expected to ask for the Spirit. And during this time, they came to the front of the congregation and they knelt in prayer. So it’d be kind of like this room, but then there’d be a bunch of people sitting in the front kneeling. And elders and deacons and deaconesses and preachers moved among them. laying hands on their heads to help facilitate their receiving the Holy Spirit and also observing them closely to verify that their reception of the Holy Spirit was genuine. And according to Ms. He, a preacher in southern China, she says um speaking in tongues can take at least twenty to thirty minutes. Their tongue has to be moving. They can’t just be making sounds. Then we put a sticker on their clothing, and at the end the names of all those who have a sticker are recorded on a list of those who have received the Holy Spirit. So there’s so many interesting things about True Jesus Church glossolalia, but let’s just focus on this last bit.

Melissa Inouye

In at least some regional cultures of the contemporary True Jesus Church the status of someone whose soul has been saved through the baptism of water and the Spirit is so clear to highly trained experts they can label you with a sticker on your sleeve. True Jesus’ church tongue speaking is so distinctive, so extraordinary, it presents an opportunity to know with absolute certainty that one has been saved and sanctified. A technology to give evidence of things you can’t see is incredibly powerful. Yes, the Wi-Fi signal is getting to your phone. Yes, there is salmonella in that chicken. Yes, you’ve been saved. Knowledge is power.

Melissa Inouye

Now Mormonism has similar religious technologies that take the form of rituals, including technologies for guaranteeing a couple’s admission into heaven. Let’s discuss the most popular of Mormonism’s security solutions, the ritual for sealing family members together eternally. Rooted in Joseph Smith’s early temple practices and the practice of polygamy and Nauvu. Latter-day Saints believe the sealing ritual binds family members together for eternity. I’ve never met a religious person who didn’t believe they would be reunited with loved ones after death, from any religion. But while most people hope for such happy family reunions, Mormonism guarantees it and has formal rights or technologies to accomplish it. Jonathan Stapley’s study of Mormon liturgy and ritual shows that Mormons who originally conceived sorry, shows that Mormons originally conceived of priesthood as a material network of human beings, women and men, who had been sealed together in the temple. They were the priesthood. Only in the twentieth century did we start to define priesthood as a power of God and begin to tie priesthood authority tightly to ecclesiastical office. Stapley argues that the early Mormon practices of plural marriage and adoption grew naturally from the need to expand and connect this material network of heaven through horizontal as well as vertical ties.

Melissa Inouye

Now in modern times this practice of concentrated connection continues. In the absence of plural marriage, formerly regarded by church members as the core of the restored gospel In the 20th and 21st centuries, Latter-day Saints have come to define themselves through their faith that families can be together forever. Through special buildings, temples, equipment like altars, texts, and human presence, we seek to immunize ourselves against the degradations and separations of death.

Melissa Inouye

Now, some solutions to the problem of human separation come not through esoteric rites and sacred pronouncements, but through institutional structures and bureaucracies. Joseph Smith’s religious innovations often took the form of new organizational structures, the societies, quorums, and councils of the church. Subsequent Mormon leaders had taken up this mantle Organizational revelations such as Brigham Young’s 19th-century organization of companies of saints on their flight from the United States, or Linda K. Burton’s 21st-century leadership at the Relief Society, and eventually church-wide initiative, I Was a Stranger. Technologies of organization are perhaps the most bottle-like of all technologies because they really do hold things in or create space for a sacred project. At a certain point, often very early on, religious movements become too large to hold together through followers’ interpersonal access to the Founders’ insights and gifts. They require rules and regulations to keep people together even when they’re physically removed from each other. to order potentially destabilizing charisma. As my father-in-law, a former stake and mission president, once put it, the church may or may not be true, but it is organized. This is probably one of the reasons why the Mormon Transhumanist Association has lasted longer than any other Transhumanist organization. Mormons are good at getting together and staying together.

Melissa Inouye

Thus far, I’ve discussed the significance of religious technologies such as sacred objects, new rituals, and organizational forms, which played a key role in the founding of both the True Jesus Church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You’ve graciously accommodated my stretchy metaphorical definition of technology. But let’s not also forget the role of mechanical applications, i. e. , actual technology, in the spread of both of these religious movements. Now, Wei’s use of both religious and mechanical technologies to promote his new religious insights and experiences in China was very innovative. For instance, in the signature combination of religious evangelization and commercial marketing, Wei used recently introduced mass mechanized printing technology to produce mass runs of a large coupon. that announced a massive clearance sale at his silk shop in Ensign Yong, and also told the story of his visions and miracle working. The coupon was titled, Special Discounted Prices at the Silk and Imported Cloth Shop Due to Miraculous Occurrences and promised that the bearer of this coupon is entitled to an extremely deep discount. And the book of the printed text on the coupon detailed his 390 fast, his visions of Jesus, and various locally performed healing miracles. All of these messages were distributed in person or sent through the mail to other Chinese churches, taking advantage of the new modern postal network, which used railway lines. Once made permanent through paper and ink, Way’s visions and healing miracles traveled easily in mail bags and by hand with bargain shoppers and Christian seekers alike.

Melissa Inouye

Now, nearly a century earlier, as you know, Joseph Smith and his followers also made good use of the existing resources in information and transportation technology. They used the printing press and they converted the massive, clunky, golden server into a more portable version. Through printing and bookbinding technology, which allowed long and complex religious texts to circulate in a cheap, lightweight form, in the 1830s, Samuel Smith, brother to the prophet, was able to leave a copy of the book of Mormons with Phineas Young and Menden New York. And this book circulated slowly within the Young family until it came to Brigham Young, becoming a major instrument in his conversion. Another way in which Mormons benefited from actual material technology is from missionaries and converts’ use of ocean-going transportation. The Apostle Paul went across the Mediterranean, but by the 1830s, shipbuilding technologies had allowed the early Mormon missionaries to cross the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. In 1837, missionaries including Wilfrid Woodruff and Heber C. Kimball went to England. In 1843, missionaries such as Addison Pratt went to Tubuai and other islands in the South Pacific. Many religious traditions in history have had universal aspirations and inspired transnational journeys, but the speed with which 19th century Mormonism was able to go global is striking.

Melissa Inouye

Now, of course, Mormonism is global on an entirely new scale, with temple building projects announced all over the world, 70,000 missionaries running around, and hooray, and increasingly international leadership. In the contemporary church, the tools of the digital age allowed to hold a solemn assembly today, all over the world, or actually yesterday, because of the time zones. They’ll hold a solemn assembly for affirming support of the new prophet in a truly worldwide fashion. All over the world, members of the church can see themselves raising hands in unison with thousands of others to sustain the new prophet. even though they are miles, time zones, languages and days removed from the proceedings in the conference center. This is a feat of coordinated and concentrated multilateral imaginative community that combines both religious technologies and material applied technologies.

Melissa Inouye

So I’ll briefly discuss a different question, which is what is the proper balance between the lightning and the bottle? Sometimes you have too much lightning, and sometimes you have too much bottles. So, for example, in early Mormonism, numerous people besides Joseph Smith claimed to see visions and receive revelations for the church. James Strang, who attracted numerous followers, including two apostles, John Page and William Smith. These offshoot movements sapped Mormonism’s numerical strength and sense of shared purpose. In the true early True Jesus Church, too, numerous offshoots sprang up. Especially in the first decade following its establishment, a steady stream of heresies since 1917 is recounted in a 1947 Trudesus Church publication. The historical account includes a neat statistical chart that summarizes details like name, location of heresy, reason of heresy, and so on. So for example, Ye Fu Sheng, Tang Jia village, male, 50 years old, in the True Jesus Church for one year, 30 followers, dead, church dissolved, said he was Christ. Dai Tsang Ju, Sichuan, female, forty years old, in the Chu Jesus Church for one year, ten followers, lost her way, fasted for a long time, became prideful, and was deceived. Even new religions with all their innovations must eventually stabilize or else cease to exist. Here, there was too much lightning. Charismatic power could not be effectively contained.

Melissa Inouye

Sometimes you have too much bottle. For example, in the True Jesus Church in the 1950s, institutional and individual self-preservation won out over the church’s claims to divine power. Under intense political pressure to abandon neutral religion and align with the popular politics promoted by the Chinese Communist Party, the church’s leaders allowed popular political rhetoric and concerns to penetrate their internal discussions. And external pronouncements. So, for example, um this is a statement by Wei Isaac, who is Wei and Boa’s son, The undisputed leader of the church at this time. And he eventually ended up saying, We should not lay so much stress on miracles nor tell people that taking medicine and consulting a doctor are sins, but rather should train our preachers in the elements of public hygiene and midwifery. He taught that the true Jesus Church had actually that the emphasis on unconditional love was imperialist poisonous thinking, and that the church had a feudalistic and counterrevolutionary leadership structure. The quorum of leaders directly below Wei at this time likewise abandoned their universalistic moral and soteriological claims. They began to speak in jargon. Actually, I just used jargon. Sorry. So soteriological means having to do with salvation. They began to speak in political jargon that reflected prevailing political beliefs. So for example, in April 1953 meeting of the Uhan True Jesus Church, local leaders discussed whether Stalin’s soul was saved. he had died a month earlier and they’d had a big funeral for him um in that Joe and Lyh had attended in Moscow. So according to the record One person said, Those who believe and are baptized will be saved, but whether or not Stalin’s soul will be saved is not clear. To this, another leader responded, Stalin can be saved because of the righteousness that he did. Yet another said, Comrade Stalin has saved many towns, tens of thousands of people, more than Jesus. Also, Chairman Mao has turned China into a powerful country, and all China has been liberated. The devil is imperialist America. In this case, church leaders were more motivated by institutional self-preservation than by the desire to find Christ through the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Their concern was for the bottle itself, the church practices and institutions. Their work was to make the bottle impervious to threats from within as well as without, with thick, opaque walls. The lightning inside is obscured and stopped up. If it was inside, it was of no use to anyone.

Melissa Inouye

The lightning, in Mormonism, is Mormonism’s divine charismatic element, things which cannot be controlled normally. The visions, healings, tongues, angels, work of the Holy Spirit. The bottle is Mormonism’s human technological element, things which leaders and members have tinkered with over time liturgical texts, hierarchical structures, policies, lesson manuals, chapel and temple buildings, the work of bureaucracy and construction.

Melissa Inouye

Now, Armin Maas’s work addresses this theme of balance within 20th and 21st century Mormonism. In his book, The Angel in the Beehive, Maas argues Religious movements which survive and prosper are those which maintain an optimum tension between two opposing strains. The first strain, which he symbolizes with a beehive, is a strain toward greater assimilation and respectability. The second strain, which he represents with the image of an angel, pulls toward greater separateness, peculiarity, and militance. Religious movements, that don’t maintain this balance over time, don’t survive. He says, if in its quest for acceptance and respectability a movement allows itself to be pulled too far toward assimilation, it will lose its unique identity together. If, on the other hand, in the quest for uniqueness of identity and mission, it allows itself to move too far towards an extreme rejection of the host society, it will lose its very life. Its viability and its separate identity both depend upon a successful and perpetual oscillation within a very fairly narrow range along a continuum between two alternative modes of oblivion. Now Maas cogently observes that within any given point in time, a movement is grappling with either of two predicaments, disrepute or respectability. This is a particularly big challenge for a global church in which this balance must be correctly executed in many different host societies at the same time. The balance between charisma and religious organization, the lightning and the bottle, and the middle ground between peculiarity and respectability, the angel and the beehive, are not exactly the same thing, but they’re related. Both describe the constant effort, feedback, and adjustments required to maintain Mormonism as a viable body of Christ as it grows across time and space.

Melissa Inouye

So I’d like to the balance between this balance Is something that strongly affects Mormonism’s life and vitality, not just within its top institutional tiers, but within its local wards, branches, and unofficial organizations, including this one. Around the world, this balance can be a little bit different. Now, here comes the question: why do we even try to put lightning in a bottle? Why not just roam about under the skies, standing in high places, waiting and receptive, waiting to be struck? Well, this is a great thing to do, metaphorically, not literally. But why work so hard on the bottle, the things, the ritual practices and the institutional, bureaucratic, political structures of organized religion? What’s so great about bottles? Well, this is where I think my metaphor starts to break down, but that’s okay because you come to the end of the talk.

Melissa Inouye

So in the metaphor, the bottle is a thing, something made of hard materials. In real life, the bottle is made of breathing bodies. Hearts and minds, mitochondria and melanin, living souls. All that I am I learn from people. All that I know about the goodness of God I learned from people, my family, my friends, my sisters and brothers in many places around the world. I value my sisters and brothers and the bonds that bind us together eternally.

Melissa Inouye

So, in conclusion, I would like to speak personally as a believer to say how much I treasure the lightning. The divine power available to all through the atonement of Christ, and the eternal work of our Heavenly Father and Mother. The glimpse of the divine spark that lights the universe as well as individual human beings is precious to me, though sometimes we see it as if through a glass, darkly. Here’s the lightning. And this is the point of our technological project, our collective bottle making, to keep God’s power close at hand, among us, within us. A world in which everyone can seek and experience this power is a world in which God lives and loves us, in which weaknesses can become strengths, in which lament can be holy. in which the heavens weep for the suffering and injustices and pollutions on the face of the earth. It is a world in which no suffering or hardship is for naught. in which the meaning of our lives and the relationships that anchor it continue long after this physical vessel has broken down and lies in elemental bits in the earth. It is a world enlivened by the joy of human love and the possibility of Zion. All God’s children, one heart and one mind, no poor among us. Thank you.

Melissa Inouye

Okay. So we have eight minutes for questions. Are there any questions? Yes. Was Apostle Tenho aware of the LDS in the Joseph Smith experience? Was Wei Enbo aware of the LDS and the Joseph Smith experience? I don’t think he was, but People in China have been aware of Joseph Smith for a long time. Actually, there was this major Christian rebellion that sparked the largest civil war in history and killed about 20 million people. And that was in 1853. And missionaries in China at the time said, Oh my gosh, it’s like Mormons, but in China because he also had a vision of God and Jesus Christ and was called to establish God’s kingdom on earth. Yeah. Yes.

Melissa Inouye

How large is the Trudeau Church? Um is maybe It’s hard to say because it’s hard to n count people in China because of the way in which religious belief is sanctioned or not sanctioned. But they say there’s about 1. 5 million people. I’m not really sure there’s more or less than that. There are many in Taiwan as well. And they seem really because they’re so distinctive, they kind of seem disproportionately around. People um who are in the Christian world have usually heard about a True Jesus Church person or been to a service or interacted with someone who’s a member of the True Jesus Church. Yeah.

Speaker 3

What was your first impression that Mormon transhumanism both from a bottle perspective and from a lightning perspective. How did you feel about it? And as an academic, what did you think about it? Okay, so what was my first impression of Mormon transhumanism from a bottle perspective and a lightning perspective?

Melissa Inouye

I’m still trying to kind of wrap my mind around. Oh yeah, this is the person who just bought a smartphone three weeks ago. The thing that I would say, again, this is where the bottle metaphor breaks down. So luckily the talk is over. You know, Joseph Smith says in DC that matter is spirit, or spirit is matter. It’s all the same thing. So, in that sense, you have to really recognize that they’re kind of the same thing. The bottle is the lightning, the lightning is the bottle. Which again is really interesting. I’m just going to sit here and kind of stammer about technology. Yeah, I think that I think you’ve really kind of taken that kind of provocative thought of the bottle being the line, the line being the bottle, it’s a kind of very interesting In very interesting directions. And I’ve just never gone that way before. So I’m just, again, sitting here stammering. Yes? Okay, okay. That’s good. Randy, and then over here.

Speaker 3

But um I could say that it’s uh it’s using your fantasy Historically, both Christianity and particularly Mormonism said, no, the bottle is the body. In other words, this is technology. God is technical. He does stuff. Right, he creates or organizes stuff, uses forms, right? And so we really reject the idea of a a non-tentionical divinity, a non-model divinity. Right, exactly. And I think that You could really riff on that, uh the Mormon art. When you put on those artifacts, it just seems so okay, but this is really cool. Right? And the more we we think about how I’d just like to know that a group or what of you think that five fingers, belly buttons, male nipples, whatever you want to think about, is that a permanent technology that God forever is? This thing continually morphing, and who knows what we will become in terms of future forms. That kind of thinking is transhumanist thinking. I don’t want to lay it on you and I have no idea. I’m fine.

Melissa Inouye

But yeah, I think Mormonism is less at war with the body than other Christian traditions. And I wouldn’t say the same thing for the True Jesus Church. So they’re more Pentecostal in that sense. You know, Flash is still pretty bad most of the time. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, wait, no, sorry. There was someone over here. Yes. Practices for technology?

Speaker 5

So, in the technology for the religious perspective, how do you imagine different communities can talk to each other about improving their technologies? Because there are that technologies.

Melissa Inouye

Right, so the question is: how do religious communities talk to each other about improving their technologies? Even knowledge is organizational technologies. Well, that’s actually interesting. So, the first bit is with regard to religious Religions and technologies, is religions often steal each other’s religious technologies. There is a movement, this is actually, I won’t talk about that one. That’s a little too apocryphal. But what’s really interesting is the Chinese Communist Party borrowed a lot of it seems pretty clear the early Chinese Communist Party organizers had a lot of contact with Christian organizations like the YMCA. Zhang Thing was like a pianist or something in like a YMCA program. And people went to YMCA camps. This one famous anarchist went to a YMCA camp, not because he wanted to become Christian, but because he wanted to see how they worked and what they did. And he was so inspired. He’s like. It’s great. It’s like this combination of, you know, games and eating and songs and like all the stuff together, but all with this kind of higher purpose. In mind, and it’s so unifying. And they used that model when they were developing the Chinese Communist Party. And it’s important to notice that, like in 1921, let’s say, or even 1920. 1922, 23. The True Jesus Church was a far more successful organization than the Chinese Communist Party. They were both founded around the same time. Wei and Buo were and Mao Zedong were both in Beijing around the same time. But, you know, Wei at that time, you know Way’s operation was cooler. Yes, in the middle?

Speaker 6

I couldn’t figure out a way to pretend I’m asking a question. But an interesting thought, um this is something really interesting about Mormonism, is that a lot of our model is lightning to us. A lot of how we talk about the restoration is restoration of ancient structures, of ancient ways to lighten people. purifying uh masonry so that is so part of what we’re excited about is that the lightning is giving us better models to carry. Thank you for your comment.

Melissa Inouye

Um I also think that uh sometimes we mistakenly say, look how holy our bottle is. It can be holy in that sense, but sometimes we we mix the two up. in a way that’s not not beneficial for our spirits. Yes, me.

Speaker 4

So when you think of technology as bureaucracy or structure, right, in some ways it relegates the structure, it it it makes it secondary to the lightning. But as some people were talking here, you know, God is technology. Or the structure then is kind of cool, it becomes god-like. So, how can so I’m kind of jumping between like the lightning and the bottle, the lightning goes the bottoms. How can redefining technology in terms of organization and structure kind of free the model to shift and change and more? Does that make sense? I think the bottle stays rigid and fixed, but when you see it, conceive of it as that technology that is hooked, right? then the technology can shift and shape and shape. But the more construct bureaucracy we have now, often it can be very frigid and fixed. So how can redefining the structure as technology open kind of allowable Always, how could we defining our Mormon structures as technology allow Mormonism to change?

Melissa Inouye

Well, if you read Jonathan Stapley’s awesome book, you’ll be so happy I’m promoting it, but it’s really an awesome book. You see there’s so much change in our technologies, our ritual technologies over time. And I think just knowing about it can really open us up to new possibilities. I think you’re right. I think we have such a short memory. We think that everything now is the way it’s always been and always should be. And I was very heartened to hear in President Nelson’s talk and conference last week, he’s like, there’s awesome things coming. We’re not where we’re supposed to be yet. That’s what I heard, at least. Yes.

Speaker 7

The way that we end up describing it is as a word cloud in the shape of lightning. Word cloud in the shape of lightning. So so what I guess my question Is when you think of the bottle, how much of that bottle is linguistic in nature? And how do you view language as a technology? So how m what but how is the bottle linguistic in nature and how is language a technology?

Melissa Inouye

So much of culture within an organization. Linguistically derived whether that language is words, whether it’s body language, whether it’s smiling, whether it’s wearing a white shirt and tie, you know, behaviors. Okay, right. So, how do our How do we have a kind of specialized language for being Mormon or signaling orthodoxy or showing meaning? What component how big is the language component of that model? It’s aligning the model language. Oh, I think definitely. We have a lot of kind of linguistic technologies.

Melissa Inouye

For example, the use of the middle initial, Dallin H. Oakes, David O. McKay. That’s a very Mormon thing. It’s like kind of a way of saying, This is an important leader, listen to the leader. I feel like sometimes instead of naming their kids after Mormon apostles, I should just name them H or O. That was like. The truly Mormon thing to do. So in that sense, the language that we use signals identity and it signals kind of inclusion in the community. Also, Also, we believe that our certain language has to be completely correct, right? Like when we use it in writes. What’s really interesting is that most of the language in the temple was not written down for a really long time. It was only, I think, until sometime in the twentieth century when people started to actually write the temple texts down. So that’s interesting. You know, if language is so important Why didn’t we kind of transmit it in the most precise way possible? That’s interesting. Another thing about language is that the Always the story completely. Right, right.

Melissa Inouye

And I was just going to say, um, it’s a really big problem in the global church. when you’re trying to you know, there are some there are some hymns that don’t work, you know, in Chinese or i in all the different languages of the church, you know, and some hymns that are great in, you know, truth reflects upon our senses. I mean, how many times do people sing that in English? Sacrament meeting. It’s all the time. In China, it’s a really good song in Chinese. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Sorry. We’re out of time. I hate to stand between you and lunch. Thank you very much.