Turning Our Moral Compass: the Environment and Mormonism's Theology of Means

Speaker 1

Our next speaker is Michael Ann Gardner. Michael Ann believes in building Zion through any means you can. This includes her professional work as a marketer and fundraiser for the nonprofit sector. It also includes her favorite hobby of learning about and implementing environmentally sustainable lifestyle choices. She serves as treasurer on the board of LDS Earth Stewardship.

Michaelann Gardner

Not seeing the mouse. Great, thank you.

Michaelann Gardner

So as stated, I have a little bit of a bias. So I am part of this group called LDS Earth Stewardship. It’s my other Mormon fringe group that I’m involved in. And what I really found fascinating is how I think actually these two fringe groups, so to speak. Actually, we have a lot to learn from each other. My presentation is primarily a theological one, and a question also of culture. of how the Mormon culture interacts with itself and how we can improve it. And I think that these two groups have a lot to offer in terms of making us more of the culture that we could be.

Michaelann Gardner

So first of all, the question I have is what do Mormons believe about the earth, right? So we believe that the earth was created by God, the earth is our inheritance. We even have this like sort of like Eastern mentality that the earth has a spirit or a personality.

Michaelann Gardner

But here’s the interesting thing. So my friend George, I know him through LDS Rose Stewardship. He’s one of the most prominent LDS researchers on LDS attitudes towards the environment. And he makes a statement where he says, many years ago, I began research on the relationship between Mormonism and the environment. I was struck by how many authors, all non-LDS, either assumed or directly asserted that the LDS Church was officially anti-ecological.

Michaelann Gardner

So this is interesting, right? For a theology and a culture that sees the earth as having even a personality, yet we’re seeing and sometimes even perceive ourselves as being anti ecological. Sorry, one second.

Michaelann Gardner

And the question I have to ask myself, of course, is why? Why is this the case? Why is it that we don’t see environmentalism as a valuable Aspect to incorporate into our lives. There are a lot of reasons for this. There is everything from political to not enough time. But I think actually has a lot to do with our orientation towards morality and what we consider to be Moral actions and what we consider to be morally valuable.

Michaelann Gardner

So here’s an example that I think is really amusing. This is a parody written by a Mormon blogger, and this is what he says. Glenn Beck, global warming debunker, morality savant, and one having the common sense to know that we humans cannot through consumption or pollutions affect the planet. Knew that there was a connection between the Japanese tsunami and what he called, quote, the stuff we’re doing. So the next time you hear some wild-eyed tree-hugging environmentalists tell you that our expanding wastelands and our nation’s ever-expanding consumption of the world’s resources Affect in any way nature. Tell them that such talk is patently absurd and that it is sins, bad thoughts, evil words, non-beliefs, drinking coffee, cheating on a test, gays wanting to get married, not attending any meetings. and or anything you could think of that at the time that is causing nature to become disruptive and even deadly. Now that is not crazy talk, but a sound understanding of how natural disasters are set in motion.

Michaelann Gardner

So this is a parody, right? But if you’ve ever talked to just a general conservative Mormon like Glenbeck, At church, they’re going to tell you that in the last days there’s going to be a lot of calamity coming, right? We’re going to have tempests and we’re going to have floods and there’s going to be all this destruction going on on the earth. And why are we going to have it? Because gay people want to get married, right? I mean, they may not out and out say that, but that’s the assumption that they’re making, right? That in the last days, wickedness will increase. And I’m not here necessarily to make a statement about sin or about God’s jud God’s judgment, but to me it’s interesting that we make this very clear connection between things that aren’t related at all and we say this is God’s judgment.

Michaelann Gardner

What’s fascinating about it, too, is that our theology in general is not a few different things. First of all, it’s not magical. An example Paul Cox gives is that a God who works through magical means could have easily and instantaneously restored the lost one hundred sixteen pages and erased the memories of evil men who have seen them. But instead the Lord foresaw the calamity twenty five hundred years before it occurred and inspired Nephi. Truly we worship a God who can work through small means. So we don’t believe in God coming and just making things happen out of nowhere, without any relation.

Michaelann Gardner

Our religion is not anti science either. Brigham Young said, Our religion will not clash with or contradict the facts of science in a particular. You may take geology, for instance, and it is true science. To assert that the Lord made this earth out of nothing is preposterous and impossible.

Michaelann Gardner

Our theology is not isolated. We believe that what one person does affects others. We talk about salvation, we talk about it in terms of families, in terms of nations, in terms of cultures. We know the whole city of Zion was saved.

Michaelann Gardner

We’re also not in denial of man’s ability to affect his world. On the contrary, men are agents unto themselves.

Michaelann Gardner

So if the proceeding if the main viewpoint in our culture is that things are going to be happening in the earth unrelated to anything realistic or probable, and yet we’re not magical, we’re not anti science, we’re not isolated, we don’t deny our ability to affect the world. Why is it that we don’t see environmentalism as valuable, that we don’t see environmentalism as valid. I think it has a lot to do with where we’re orienting our moral compass.

Michaelann Gardner

In the book of Nephi, they talk about the Lehona, which was a compass or a ball that led Nephi and his family to know which way to go. And it it worked, it functioned primarily by well, it was a spiritual means, right? But it functioned by the things that Nephi chose to give his focus to. I think that as a culture, we have given our focus to perhaps, I might say, the wrong kind of morality or the wrong aspects of morality.

Michaelann Gardner

I think that, in contrast, a morality that focuses on the environment acknowledges that What we do, what we do affects other people. It’s a theology that acknowledges that we have not only a right, but a requirement to care for the earth. I think a Mormonism that would turn its morality from this focus on sexual sins and its morality from the individual and what the individual can do and accomplish, but instead of focus on the broader perspective, would actually have the power to be one of the strongest environmental movements that there is.

Michaelann Gardner

If we change our morality from a sense of what I can build for myself, but instead have our goals set on what we’re going to be accomplishing in the long term An example here is changing our moral value to wanting to grow in wisdom and knowledge as practice for the millennium. Brigham Young dismissed the notion that man’s degradation and pollution of the earth is something that would be swept away as if by the wave of a magic wand upon Christ’s return. Not many generations will pass away before the days of man will again return, but it will take generations to entirely eradicate the influences of deleterious substances. This must be done before we can attain our paradisyal state.

Michaelann Gardner

Secondly, if we can acknowledge that our morality, that what we do affects other people, that it’s not just about going and trying to maintain a kind of personal morality, but seeing the widespread effects that we have in a more concrete way. When we turn to morality as simply about sexuality or simply about the actions of individuals we fail to realize that our unsustainable living practices are preventing us from being able to build Zion. They’re preventing us from being able to care for the poor and for the needy.

Michaelann Gardner

And another point too is fascinating that if you go and you do a search for morality on lds. org, you pull up talks, for example, from Tad Callister, where he Says that to be moral is to be sexually clean. Or you might pull up a definition of how the world is falling to pieces. because our internal character is not being controlled to make sexually pure choices. Constantly throughout Mormonism, these two are are equivalent, I think there is room for a different definition of morality, but it’s not explicitly talked about.

Michaelann Gardner

That’s kind of my basis, I think. For saying that we need to change a moral orientation, it’s the fact that over and over in these talks we’re not focusing on the ways that our actions can help us prepare for the future, and we’re not prepare we’re not focusing on how our actions and our moral actions can help us care for other people more effectively.

Michaelann Gardner

So the last thing that I wanted to touch on was transhumanism’s ability to sanctify Mormon progress. This is kind of a play on Don Bradley’s his talks title, which he titled The Ability of Mormonism to Sanctify Human Progress. But I think that transhumanism has the ability to really transform Mormon morality and Mormon progress, and not just with environmentalism. I think that transhumanism in its acknowledgement that our actions matter, and in the acknowledgement that human beings can contribute to a greater human accomplishment and a greater goal that we want to achieve. Those two things that transhumanism brings to the Mormon conversation, I think, have the power to really help us be more environmentally moral and otherwise moral. Um forward

Michaelann Gardner

The thing that is interesting to me as well is the number of times in our theology that we do talk about the need to focus on cause and effect and our ability to influence the world around us. One of the best examples that we have actually is The brother of Jared. If you may remember from the Book of Mormon, the brother of Jared goes and he takes sixteen small stones. He’s trying to cross a great deep in boats without any light. He takes 16 small stones, he refines them with his own power, his own tools, takes them before the Lord, the Lord touches them, it makes them glow, and then they’re able to transport themselves across the great deep in light. What I love about this story, though, is, as many philosophers and theologians have pointed out, is that it was his own means that he brought to the table that enabled him to achieve godliness.

Michaelann Gardner

Now, when we think about Mormonism and our desire to To have an effect on our environment. So many times we talk about environmentalism, we don’t think that we can have any effect. We don’t think that our actions even matter because God’s going to come and just wipe it all away. He’s going to come and make things clear. For us. But as we observed with the Brigham Young quote, we know that that’s not going to be the case. We know that It’ll take our actions, they’ll take many generations of our effort to entirely eradicate the influences of what we have done to the earth already.

Michaelann Gardner

So as we, like the Brother of Jared, learn to be moral participants with God, as we learn to turn our morality from a narrow set of definitions to a broader focus on other people and on the actions that we can have in the world, when we, like the brother of Jared, are able to do these things The Brotherhood of Jared was able to see the face of God. And I believe as well that as we bring these aspects of transhumanism to our theology, our own morality will be transformed, our own ability to be godlike will be transformed, and that we will also be able to see the face of God.