Growing up, I think I basically imagined God as being somewhat akin to a General Authority. In my mind, he (male, of course) was a generally benevolent older man. He wasn’t mean, necessarily, but he did have very clear expectations of how people should act, and would be disappointed if you didn’t meet those expectations. He would lecture when necessary, if he felt like you needed it. He would be patient, sure, but he also had a clearly defined plan for you, and wasn’t very interested in your opinions or ideas about how things were going, because you needed to get on board and follow the plan. God didn’t particularly care about your feelings, for heaven’s sake; he cared about accomplishing his grand purposes. I mean, he might listen politely and maybe even acknowledge what you said, but ultimately he wanted you to get with the program and get over yourself.
GA God was incredibly invested in authority. After all, like a GA, God had more authority than everyone around him—in fact, I would say that’s most fundamentally what made him God. His most central attribute was that he was the one who was ultimately in charge of everything. I don’t think I realized until I had a bit of distance just how central authority is to an LDS worldview. It’s the most basic reason why the church exists: saving ordinances have to be done with the correct divine authority, or they won’t count. Authority is what the early church lost when the Great Apostasy hit, and the key reason there needed to be a Restoration. Proper authority is in fact so crucial that religious rituals like baptism need to be re-done if you didn’t have an authorized person doing them, and no matter what you did in your life, you will be in some sort of limbo in the next one until you get those ordinances performed by someone who has the right authority to do them. I realize I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but I think I didn’t realize just how much this view of how the universe worked was shaping my understanding of God. It seemed clear to me that authority was something that God the GA really, really cared about, possibly even more than the well-being of humans at any particular moment (thus the people in afterlife limbo, waiting for their work to be done).
Hierarchy was also extremely important to this God, who was at the very top of a long authority chain. Even within the Godhead, there is hierarchy; it is very clear in LDS teachings that the Son is subordinate to the Father. I was never quite sure what to make of Abraham 3, which seems oddly concerned about how some things are above others, but I did feel like it made sense in that it fit into a generally hierarchical view of the universe. And it felt to me like God was very protective of his position at the top. That was why, for example, that we needed to use the correct, formal prayer language of thee and thou—after all, you address a superior differently than you would address a friend. Again, while this God was generally benevolent and patient, he expected respect and deference. There were plenty of things that bothered him—obviously he couldn’t look upon any sin at all with the least degree of allowance—but somehow I absorbed the idea that failure to respect him, and to respect the hierarchy, was maybe the worst thing you could do. It was disloyalty. And it was disloyalty to question the church authorities whom he had called. That was almost unforgivable. Communication was top-down—while you could certainly bring concerns to God (or attempt to somehow send them up the church hierarchy), information and instructions from God came down through the proper line of authority. This is not to downplay that there was also an entirely different communications channel, one which went from God directly to humans and in a sense therefore subverted the hierarchy, but not only was this less definitive than communication through authorized channels, it was also still fundamentally authoritarian in nature. God the GA was there to give instructions, to give the final word. Your role was to listen and obey, without question. This God was graciously willing to listen to you, but the important thing was that you listened to him.
Honestly, while it may sound like I’m slipping into caricature here and there, overall I think you can make a case that a lot of this is pretty reasonable. I mean, God is the Supreme Being, the Ruler of the Universe, the final authority, right? Why wouldn’t your job be to listen to him as closely as possible, to submit to him, to obey as well as you can? Doesn’t he, by definition, know what’s best for you? Isn’t he the arbiter of right and wrong? Why would anyone object to all of this, unless it was because they had an unrighteous spirit of rebellion?
There’s another crucial point about God the GA. He was loving, for sure. He truly, genuinely, loved his children. But love was only one of his many attributes, and he had to keep it in balance with other things. In particular, love and law had to be given equal weight. This was why God couldn’t waive the ordinance requirement, and also why he required that an atonement be made to in some way counteract sin. He couldn’t simply forgive. God’s love was part of a carefully calibrated system with checks and balances. It was a big piece, and you might even argue that it was central to the whole thing, but it was still just one of many elements.
My picture of GA God was obviously deeply intertwined with various LDS teachings, but I do want to say that I highly doubt everyone who was raised in the church ended up with the same picture, or even anything remotely like it. I’m very aware that individuals have often wildly different experiences of Mormonism, so I’m not trying to set this out as “the Mormon version of God.” I’m simply saying that as someone who was raised in the church, this was the image of God I absorbed, and the church was of course a big part of that.
Regardless, I’ve come to think that while there might be aspects of this image of God that capture something important, it is fundamentally just wrong, at the very core. God isn’t a kindly older man who alternately lectures and encourages you and puts up with you expressing your concerns while hoping that you’ll eventually listen. Yes, I do think that God would like you to listen—but not in an authoritarian way, in which the point of your listening is to know how best to obey. And God doesn’t just patiently listen to what you have to say before telling you what to do. God genuinely wants to hear it, for as long as you want to share it. I believe that God wants a real relationship in which both parties care deeply about and take seriously what the other has to say, in which both parties are affected by one another. It’s a relationship grounded in love, rather than in obedience. God might nudge you in certain directions or suggest things, but the point of communication isn’t for God to give you orders to follow. I’ve also honestly never felt any sense of God being concerned about proper respect and deference and your always remembering that you are addressing the Supreme Ruler of the Universe and need to tread carefully. Instead, I’ve encountered a God who wants to hear what you are actually thinking, in whatever language you want to use to convey that. God seems strikingly uninterested in human hierarchies. And above all, love isn’t one of the many characteristics of God; love is what God is. God’s love is absolutely ridiculous. It’s absurd. It isn’t carefully balanced with other things; it overthrows everything. Extravagant doesn’t even begin to describe it.
I have to admit that for much of my life, I would have been extremely wary of someone talking about God’s love the way that I do now—I would have been on the lookout for cheap grace, for people trying to get out of the consequences of their actions. But here I am, saying it, mostly because of experiences that have shaken me to the core and made me re-think a lot of my assumptions. And this is all deeply personal; I realize that other people may have very different experiences of the divine (and in fact, I think those differences are important). At this point, I actually feel less confident in a lot of what I’ve believed about God over the years, and I’ve struggled to find language for where I am now. But encountering a radically different God from the kindly yet fundamentally distant GA whom I imagined for so long has honestly been one of the most surprising and amazing experiences of my life.
Thank you for this thoughtful post.
I love how you explain the idea of God as the ultimate GA, Lynnette, because that’s exactly how I learned to think of God too. I guess this isn’t terribly surprising since we’re from the same family. And I think you’re clearly right too that this isn’t some universal Mormon view of God. I do think, though, that every time a GA reinforces the importance of deference to those higher in the hierarchy, even when it’s in something as trivial as what you do with a plastic water bottle, they reinforce this view of God as also deeply invested in and concerned with hierarchy. And, as you allude to, every time they take a moment to remind us that it’s deeply important that we use the right language when addressing God, they again reinforce this idea. Every time junior GAs feel like they have to sprinkle their talks with quotes of the Church president, it reinforces the idea that God also maybe has a giant ego that needs to be carefully massaged.
I really like your new view of God. I find it really difficult to believe in a God who is so invested not only in hierarchies, but in maintaining existing human hierarchies. I only know the barest bit about liberation theology (and only because you told me about it), but it seems to make way more sense to me than the hierarchy-reinforcing, prosperity-gospel-loving approach we have in the LDS Church. Oh, straight white men have outsized influence in the world? Let’s have them (us, since that’s me too) have outsized influence in the Church too! What nonsense! Why wouldn’t God be more interested in subverting and overthrowing such hierarchies?
This post really resonates with me and represents a similar picture of the God I was raised to believe in. This concept of a stern GA, or older man with white hair and a finely pressed suit with brown elbow patches, was one of the reasons why it took me 40 years to finally find a true connection with the divine. I was not a rebellious person for the most part. In fact I was actually so scared of this GA God that I probably towed the line to a fault – alienating friends and acquaintances along the way who were unafraid to live their life fully and to play around with pushing boundaries now and again.
I now trace my fearful obedience back to primarily one thing: I was a boy raised fatherless. And without a father in the home, I was truly terrified of masculinity in any form. I recall being at a friends house for an overnight stay during which he had an altercation with his father. My friend handled it like it was no big deal, engaging with this large and ominous figure who was clearly disappointed and angry. I had never been in such a terrifying place and I simply wanted to go home. I couldn’t handle the energy of the situation. It was too intense and too much unfamiliar territory. When I got home, I prayed for comfort. But because of this image of the GA God that had been instilled within me, I was terrified of him too! My prayer that night, much like for the next 40 years (with an exception here and there) felt empty and unheard.
I was never able to make a connection to this GA God, though not for a lack of trying. I absolutely tried. I tried so hard in fact that I created storylines in my own mind about how connected I was to him. But the honest truth was that I didn’t know this GA God. When I hit 40 there came a time when I finally had to stop pretending that I had a connection with this GA God and to let go of the concept of God entirely. Once I found the courage to let it all go, I began to discover, much to my surprise, that not only did the divine exist, but that it was much less frightening, intimidating, and demanding than I had ever possibly considered! My connection now with the divine is that of a friend, a confidant, and a coach. It’s a relationship built on trust and love, not fear. There is no elbow-patched suit. There is no folded arms and disappointed scowl. There is no gender (as far as I can tell). And there is no terror. Only peace. A far cry from the inaccessible GA that I had been expecting for so many years.
Great post. I love it.
Thank you, Raymond and aporeticone!
Ziff, I totally agree that this particular worldview gets reinforced a lot. I read about that plastic water bottle thing and seriously wanted to laugh; it sounds like a parody, like a caricature that critics of the church might claim to be true (those brainwashed Mormons are so obedience-obsessed that they have so smash their water bottles the same way as the prophet!) I totally agree that a God who subverts human hierarchies rather than reinforcing them makes much more sense, and also, I might add, is much more in line with the teachings of Jesus.
Phil, thank you so much for sharing your story. I found it deeply moving, and also very resonant. Like you, I found it so surprising, and also life-changing, to encounter a completely different God who brings peace rather than judgment.
When I was in my final year of college I was thrown part way through a windshield after the car I was riding in went off the road during a blizzard and hit a dead tree in a farmer’s field. (Yes, I was young and stupid enough to think that I didn’t need to wear a seatbelt.) The dead tree split in half and pinned me down. When the EMTs finally got to the crash site they pronounced me dead. Between that time and when I suddenly resurrected in the ER of a tiny hospital in the middle of nowhere I discovered who God and Jesus truly were/are. They were completely different than what I’d been taught in my home and mostly at church, except for a few inspired Primary teachers and a Laurel leader who’d emphasized God’s loving nature. When I hear the Q15 and other GAs talk about the Father and the Son they talk about beings that I simply can’t recognize or understand. I worship the beings I met that snowy night. They are my reality.
Thanks for such an interesting post! I grew up thinking of God in much the same way. I now believe the Divine is completely different than what I was taught, but it sure is tough to get those old images and expectations out of my psyche!
This post wonderfully encapsulates so much about what I used to think and feel, versus what I think and feel now. There was this pervasive dominating set of assumptions which guided my thinking for so long.
One thing I’ll add: when my shelf was breaking, one of the sources of dissonance for me was how aggressively I had been counseled to ONLY pray/speak to the Father. And the scriptures told me pretty much nothing about Him. There’s some rhetoric along the lines of well-he’s-just-like-the-Son-so-if-you-know-the-Son-etc… And I found myself thinking, “Well then, can I just talk to the Son?? Because he is the one I feel I have a relationship with?” Same with Heavenly Mother and/or the Holy Ghost.
Thank you for framing this topic the way you have. Very helpful.