Good, Good, Good

When I started school at BYU, back in the 1990s, the school used to celebrate the day before Thanksgiving by bringing a bunch of wrecked cars onto campus and leaving them in various quads to remind us all to drive safely if we were traveling for the holiday. This wasn’t an issue for me, because my family lived nearby, but I recall thinking that if the university had really been serious about students’ safety when traveling over the long weekend, they would just close the day before Thanksgiving to make it easier for people to travel without having to make dangerous overnight drives.

I was reminded of this when reading President Oaks’s talk in the Women’s Session of this last General Conference, where he lamented that Church members are marrying later and having fewer children. He said that people are delaying marriage “until temporal needs are satisfied.” I think he’s making the same error that the BYU administration of the 1990s was making: he’s oversimplifying complicated situations where people face competing goods. BYU students of the 1990s, wanted to attend their classes and do well in school, but they also wanted to go home and see their families for Thanksgiving. Young people in the Church today likely do want to get married and have children, but they also face (in the US, anyway) runaway education costs that mean they’ll be paying for their own schooling for decades, high medical costs that make it ever more difficult to bear and raise children, and high child care costs that make it more difficult for both spouses to get all the education they can. It has often been observed on the Bloggernacle that the Church’s admonitions to marry young, have lots of kids, get all the education you can, and stay out of debt are impossible to satisfy all at once unless you have the good fortune to have been born into wealth.

Of course, you probably remember that then-Elder Oaks also gave a talk back in 2007 on prioritizing between competing goods. The problem with this talk as far as the issue I’m discussing is concerned is that in it, Oaks only discussed situations where there’s an obvious ranking of what’s good, what’s better, and what’s best. The on-the-ground dilemmas that people actually face are not always this clear. What’s the greater good between doing well in college and visiting your family? Or what’s the greatest good among marrying, saving money, having kids, and getting more education? These can be very complicated questions that I’m only skimming the surface of. There are entire layers of other considerations like, for example, the fact that people who marry when they’re younger are also more likely to divorce, or that following Church counsel of having only one wage earner in the family makes the family vulnerable (again, in the US) to losing not only income, but also health insurance, at a moment’s notice when an employer does a round of layoffs.

President Oaks shows no appreciation for the complicated situations that young Church members face. He was a young adult in the post-World War II United States, when the economy was ever expanding and standards of living ever rising, so perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. In his mind, though, it appears that there aren’t actually difficult decisions people make between good alternatives, but only wicked people and righteous people, worldly people, and godly people. Just as the BYU administration in the 1990s didn’t acknowledge the difficult decision between goods that students had to make, but rather tried to scare and shame them as though it would magically make the dilemma go away, President Oaks doesn’t acknowledge the difficulty of satisfying all good ends at once, and instead simply resorts to shaming young Church members for not being able to do the impossible. He’s like the stereotypical boss who, when you ask how you should prioritize your tasks, tells you to make every task a top priority.

If you’ve been at BYU in the past two decades, you know how that story ends. In 1998, the administration announced that the day before Thanksgiving start being treated as a holiday, with no classes scheduled, in order to make it easier for students to travel home to visit family safely. To me, this seems like a clear acknowledgement that students were being put in an extremely difficult situation, and trying to scare and shame them with threats of car accidents wasn’t doing anything to solve the very real dilemma they faced. I wish that President Oaks would come to a similar realization about the competing goods that Church members are faced with, and quit telling people they’re bad for not being able to do everything at once. Perhaps he could even spearhead a Church policy change that, like BYU’s, reduced the issue of competing goods for young people (although I’m not sure what that might look like).