Children of the cult

I have hesitated to blog anything about the awful situation at the fundamentalist LDS compound in West Texas, simply because I keep thinking that I'll learn information that makes things more clear -- that is to say, makes the Right Thing To Do more clear. But it doesn't, at least not for me. Here's the latest on the hearing underway in Texas today to determine whether or not the state did the right thing in raiding the compound and taking hundreds of children into custody as part of an abuse investigation.

Regular readers know that very little upsets me as much as child abuse. My default position is that the authorities must not hesitate to go in to protect children who may be being abused. But I also have strong beliefs about the sanctity of the family, and believe that the state should interpose itself between family members only as a last resort -- which, obviously, an abusive situation requires.

But what is abuse? Is it always clear? Under the law, there's no doubt at all that having sex with underage teenage girls is by definition a crime, whether or not you call her your "wife." In the state of Texas, a person under the age of 16 cannot consent to marriage. And obviously, polygamous marriages are not recognized as marriages. If teenage girls are being forced into polygamous marriages and into sexual relationships, the state has a responsibility to get in there and stop it. If no one will protect those minors, the state must.

But. I've been trying to think about this situation in light of the fact that the fundamentalist LDS cult (Tom Wolfe says the difference between a "cult" and a religion is political power) is unpopular, and I certainly find their beliefs and lifestyle repulsive. But this is a free country, and as such, I have to tolerate a certain amount of repulsiveness; my own religious freedom depends on it, and so do yours. But tolerance can only go so far. Where do we draw the line? How, in a pluralist culture that respects freedom of religion, do we know how and when to say that this or that religious sect's behavior is not only wrong, but is criminally intolerable?

A few thoughts:

We should consider the fact that through most of human history, it has been the case that females marry young (males too). A postpubescent girl is capable of childbearing. Our modern, postindustrial culture's attitude toward marriage and age is actually an outlier in human experience, as Frederica Mathewes-Green once observed. Excerpt:

Over the course of history, the age of marriage has generally been bounded by puberty on the one hand, and the ability to support a family on the other. In good times, folks marry young; when prospects are poor, couples struggle and save toward their wedding day. A culture where men don’t marry until 27 would normally feature elements like repeated crop failures or economic depression.

That’s not the case in America today. Instead we have an *artificial* situation which causes marriage to be delayed. The age that a man, or woman, can earn a reasonable income has been steadily increasing as education has been dumbed down. The condition of basic employability that used to be demonstrated by a high school diploma now requires a Bachelor’s degree, and professional careers that used to be accessible with a Bachelor’s now require a Master’s degree or more. Years keep passing while kids keep trying to attain the credentials that adult earning requires.

Financial ability isn’t our only concern, however; we’re convinced that young people are simply incapable of adult responsibility. We expect that they will have poor control of their impulses, be self-centered and emotional, and be incapable of visualizing consequences. (It’s odd that kids thought to be too irresponsible for marriage are expected instead to practice heroic abstinence or diligent contraception.) The assumption of teen irresponsibility has broader roots that just our estimation of the nature of adolescence; it involves our very idea of the purpose of childhood.

Until a century or so ago, it was presumed that children were in training to be adults. From early years children helped keep the house or tend the family business or farm, assuming more responsibility each day. By late teens, children were ready to graduate to full adulthood, a status they received as an honor. How early this transition might begin is indicated by the number of traditional religious and social coming-of-age ceremonies that are administered at ages as young as 12 or 13.

In our culture, it is abnormal for 14 year olds to marry. The fundamentalist LDSers have a communal structure built to accomodate married 14 year olds (well, "married"). I happen to think it's terrible to force a 14 year old to "marry" a 50 year old man who has five other "wives." I would put a stop to it. But shouldn't we at least ask ourselves on what ground we stand to criminalize the practice, when many of us are perfectly willing to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples. If there is no fixed definition of marriage, and if marriage is merely a contract establishing a legal relationship between consenting people, why is it wrong for the members of this community to establish their own rules governing marriage? It's weak to say, "Because 14 year olds can't meaningfully consent." That's not a moral argument, it's a legalistic way of avoiding the argument. There has to be a reason why 14 year olds can't meaningfully consent to sex and marriage, despite the fact that their bodies are capable of reproduction, and they live in a society -- e.g., the FLDS compound -- that supports early marriage. We should think about this.

Russell Arben Fox's words have been very much on my mind in this case. Russell, as some of you know, is a (mainstream) Mormon, and a friend of this blog. He writes of the FLDS raid that he is glad the state moved in, but also glad that the authorities went about it deliberately, and with respect for the constitutional rights of the cultists:

[F]rankly, I can see myself in those people--I have ancestors who found themselves facing the same impossible situation: an unpopular and suspected faith on the one hand, the barrel of a gun on the other.

I don't want to overstate things: of course there are numerous differences between the situations and accusations that characterized the lives of Mormons in the 19th-century, and those which characterized the Branch Davidians fifteen years ago, or the FLDS today. And to lay my communitarian, occasionally-interventionary cards on the table, I'm by no means convinced that the hostile treatment which Mormons like me received back then was always and in every way an unjustifiable or without ultimate benefits, to the Mormon community or the American community or both. But all that being said, stick with the facts. A charismatic and authoritarian leader? Check. Antinomian rhetoric and actions, sometimes bordering on violence? Check and check. Unconventional (to say the least) marriage arrangements? Check again. The truth is that, as abused and misleading a word as it may be, my faith began as a cult--an avowedly and (I think, at least, in every way that matters to personal virtue and behavior) thoroughly Christian cult, one which actually absorbed and reflected much of what was typical in Protestant evangelicalism and revivalism at the time...but still, a small group, a "cult," nonetheless. And not just any cult, but a cult that faced hostility and repression. Seeing as how I'm glad that the great majority of our popularly so-called cult-like practices are no longer part of the Mormon package (though admittedly some of them I still miss...), thus no longer something I need to decide upon when affirming my particular kind of Christian faith, you might think that I could disassociate myself from splinter groups and other borderline Christian cults without difficulty. But that's not the case--as another Mormon blogger, one of my compatriots at Times and Seasons points out, the parallels in how we and they were treated and talked about are just too clear to deny.

(I don't have time to put all Russell's hyperlinks into that passage; please go read his entire post for them.)

Russell quotes at length, and to great effect, from a piece Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic wrote about the Branch Davidians at the time of that disaster. Read this, then read it again (the entire passage is there on Russell's blog entry):

The people who followed the deranged man who called himself David Koresh [the prophet-leader of the Branch Davidians] into the gray scrub of eastern Texas were, it is easy to say, losers: and of course they were losers. But they were not the kind of losers that liberals love. They, the Branch Davidians, described their position in the world too weirdly, in a way that put them beyond the reach of politics; and the Balm of Gilead is not a government program. They could not be engaged in their own terms, which were not, and must never be, the terms of a liberal order. Thus the saga of Waco was characterized, first and last, by an irreconcilability of meanings.

Is it really so difficult to see how easy it is to get lost and lonely in America, to feel sapped of significance by its scale and speed, and housed, and diminished by its indifference? Must it really be said again that many of its citizens do not experience this country as a land of opportunity? In a state this huge and frantic, in a society this byzantine and technological, the self is no longer secure, and longer the certain master of its situations; and it is inevitable that there will be individuals who will wish to withdraw.

And see, this is where I -- who belong to a religious communion (Eastern Orthodox Christian) that is on the fringes of the American mainstream -- begin to see myself in the FLDS people. As I saw myself in the story of the German Baptist homeschoolers attacked by the German government and basically driven out of their homeland because they wanted to educate their kids at home. I can see myself in the stories of the Canadian and Scandinavian Christians who have faced legal sanctions for standing up for their unpopular religious beliefs regarding homosexuality. A recurring theme on this blog is the possibility of taking the "Benedict Option" -- that is, dropping out of the mainstream, and retiring in some capacity to living in a countercultural community. How much counterculturalism, especially religious counterculturalism, is the state prepared to accept? How much counterculturalism should the state be prepared to accept?

Russell posted more, days later, about the FLDS situation, and watching mothers separated by the state from their children is wearing on him:

[A]t what point does our nervousness about arguably abusive marriage and sexual practices cross over into the sort of bigotry that assumes any kind of family relationship within such a community must be a false one, or at least one subject to casual state interference?

Maybe the state raid on the compound and the seizure of its children was just. I'm still inclined at this point to think it is just, based on what we know at this time (and subject to revision). But don't think for a minute that the only losers in this tragic affair are the FLDS cultists. All of us who are, or who can imagine ourselves as outsiders -- especially cultural and religious outsiders whose lives and beliefs run counter to the prevailing social order -- will have lost something.