The Junior Ganymede is proud to present a guest post from our friend at Gently Hew Stone.

I loved Aardvark’s recent post about gathering to Zion culturally. That essay made many important points that need to be considered deeply. My post is meant to stand on that one’s shoulders and go a little farther.

In the middle of what might be the essay’s most important paragraph, Aardvark said, “This is not a call to turn the next generation into a generation of artisans and scholars.”

Actually, it should be, and I’ll make the case that it is. Our need to save this and future rising generations is absolutely a call to produce more artists and educators—more people whose profession it is to build and transmit culture.

Consider first the current state of affairs. Twenty years ago, when I was a young man coming into church activity as a new husband and father, I spent some time looking around my ward and stake and studying the families, trying to get my bearings and copy some positive role models. I found easy patterns—the ones who were most faithful in the church tended to be large, financially comfortable, and politically conservative. I modeled my family on that pattern and have found it unsurprisingly efficient.

Except the financial part. I’m a teacher. Especially with a big family, our life is steady, but by no means as upper-middle-class as that of most comparable families. Yet my children’s faith and character thrives. Of course, this is true of many other families.

And yet, in my 16 years as a teacher in a heavily Mormon city, I’ve seen countless families with money and outward activity in the church, but whose children largely go astray. Conversely, the families with less money—enough for their needs, but not an excess—who are very strictly traditional and/or “artsy,” tend to have children who remain faithful into adulthood, regardless of other factors.

I think I and many others have confused correlation and causation. The faithfulness of the typical Mormon family is not because of its financial stability—though that helps—or its political conservatism—though that also helps—as much as it is their deep attachment to traditional culture.

(I think that the more the church grows globally, the less that faithful members will be recognized for worldly success, and more for cultural enrichment. That’s the deciding factor. Our materialism is largely an American construct, one of the weaker aspects of our Zeitgeist, and one that will be as irrelevant to the international church of the 21st century as Jello or the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers.)

The moral worthiness of our young men and young women is less due to their fathers making six figures a year and more due to their being homeschooled by a patient, literate mother. A young person’s mission service and temple sealing are better predicted by how much time they spent reading classics, watching old movies, and camping together, than by how much money their parents spent. Officially, the church has taught us this all along, but our culture has ignored it.

We conservatives often complain that academia is dominated by liberals, which is true. Have you heard the liberal response? They say that there are few conservatives working in higher education because few conservatives are even applying to work in higher education. They’re right, too. Why is this so? Because (John Q. Mormon says) the humanities only make you poor, that’s why! Such myopia is exactly what’s starving our children’s spirits to death.

There is a long-established and productive LDS Business College, but could you imagine an LDS Teacher College? It would be a ghost town.

Again, why? Because as a group we teach our young people to focus on preparing to provide for the family. Even adults who are no longer active in the church remember having that ingrained from their childhood; it’s as ubiquitous as “go on a mission” and “don’t date before you’re 16.”

And it has to stop. It’s doing untold long-term, generational damage.

The typical active Mormon family has a dad with an MBA or similar credentials. He’s an accountant or a dentist or a lawyer. I’m not denigrating these professions at all, but I am saying that the time has come to have fewer Mormons in these roles, and more of them in arts and education.

People go into the expected Mormon white-collar jobs because there’s safe money to be had, not because there’s anything essentially Mormon about them. Bottom line: anybody can do those jobs. Nobody needs us there.

But if we want the rich heritage of civilization that can nurture our children’s spirits through the challenges of this insane new century, we need Mormon teachers, at all levels, working true to their faith.

If we want an alternative culture now, so we can opt out of the filthy swamp of the mainstream, we can’t trust in our families helmed by accountants, dentists, and lawyers to lead the way. They won’t have the tools or the opportunity. We need writers, filmmakers, musicians, and every other corner of the humanities commonly represented by our children, and we need them today. We don’t just need a token few, or a novelty presence that caters to obvious notions of our identity. We need saturation. We need all degrees of art in every medium, dominated by our people.

Anything less, I firmly fear, will result in failure.

This won’t save the country or convert everybody or even change the mainstream much, but it will give our children a fighting chance to be immersed in a healthy culture that will enable activity in the gospel.

 


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