Decades ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court first ruled against prayer in the public schools, President David O. McKay publicly criticized the ruling; he considered it to be leading the country “down the road to atheism.” Dallin Oaks, on the other hand, who was a law professor in Chicago at the time, saw good reason for the Court’s decision in the case before it and worried that criticism might be based on incomplete information about the full rationale and intent of the ruling. So, as he considered the Court’s decision, Brother Oaks began organizing his thoughts on paper. He dispassionately reviewed the Court’s action and discussed its effects in a broad context—how it would apply to secular influences in the public schools as well as to religious ones.
Later, upon meeting Henry D. Moyle of the First Presidency, President Moyle took an interest in Dallin Oaks’ legal work, including what he had written on this topic. Upon returning to Salt Lake City, President Moyle shared with President McKay what Dallin Oaks had written. After reading Brother Oaks’ broad treatment (which, again, simply outlined various implications and meanings of the Court’s decision, including in non-religious schools), President McKay directed that it be published in the Improvement Era, the Church’s official magazine at the time.
Part of what is interesting in this episode (so far) is that although Brother Oaks noticed dissonance between his own judgment and the public expressions of the prophet (who, he thought, might have been incompletely informed), he did not publish a critical article or give a disapproving speech (or, as would happen today, write a critical blog). He conducted himself with complete respect toward the prophet. In fact, it was not even he but President McKay who had his write-up published.
What Happened Next
But that was not the end of the matter. Some thirty years later, and now one of the Twelve himself, Elder Oaks wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal on the subject of school prayer. He said:
When the Supreme Court decided the original school prayer case in 1962 … I thought the case was correctly decided. What I did not foresee, but what was sensed by people whose vision was far greater than mine, was that this decision would set in motion a chain of legal and public and educational actions that would bring us to the current circumstances in which we must reaffirm and even contend for religious liberty.[1]
The reality seemed to be this: While the Court’s decision was probably the correct one on the specific matter before it at the time, the way the majority opinion was written set in motion the chain of events that President McKay had originally feared. In recognition of the prophetic nature of President McKay’s warning, Elder Oaks later wrote:
My worldly wisdom in writing approvingly of the school prayer case on the facts of the decision was just a small footnote to history compared with the vision of a prophet who saw and described the pernicious effects of that decision in the years to come.
He added: “For me, that was a powerful learning experience on the folly of trying to understand prophetic vision in terms of worldly wisdom.”[2]
In other words, while attending to the technical issues of the case, Brother Oaks overlooked the large consequences that would stem from it—consequences that would not come from the technical issues themselves but from the attitude of the written opinion that attended the decision. And they were consequences that would not fully manifest themselves until much later.
In the years before these consequences became evident to him, however—and when he thought President McKay might be missing something—Brother Oaks still conducted himself with complete respect and honor toward the prophet. And in the end—as he himself reported—it turned out that he, not President McKay, was the one who was missing something.
The Mortal Peephole
Brother Oaks never became a critic of the Church or the prophet, but his experience teaches us something important about those who do find fault with the kingdom. This is useful, because detractors have always been a feature of God’s work. The children of Israel murmured constantly about Moses, for example, and the Pharisees did the same toward the Savior throughout His earthly ministry. And those are only two examples.
Such murmuring happens, and is guaranteed to continue happening, due to an inescapable feature of mortality—namely, that we mortals are doomed to see everything through a straw. We never see all there is to see—we don’t even come close—and this includes things that will happen in the future. But the Lord does see everything, including future events and consequences, and it is from this divine and infinite perspective that He inspires His prophets. That is what the experience of Dallin Oaks taught him . . . and it is what it teaches us.
Unfortunately, if the Spirit has never testified to us of the Lord’s kingdom and of His prophetic leaders (or if we have forgotten or lost it), we are left with nothing but our straw perspective to guide us—and it will always give us reasons to complain. Never seeing the full panorama, but only this element or that through our mortal peephole, we are guaranteed to misunderstand what is really happening and what the Lord is really doing.
The good news, of course, is that we can receive His Spirit and we can know that the Lord is in charge. We then have more than just our mortal peephole to guide us; we have the Lord, Whom we trust.
*****
Duane Boyce and Kimberly White are father and daughter. Learn more about modern prophets in their new book, The Last Safe Place: Seven Principles for Standing with the Prophets in Troubled Times.
[1] Dallin H. Oaks, “When ‘Freedom’ Becomes Religious Censorship,” from The Wall Street Journal, 23 May 1990, Congressional Record, 1989–1990, http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r101:S23MY0–271.
[2] Elder Oaks confirmed this story to me (Duane) in personal conversation in 1995. He has recently written of it in his Life’s Lessons Learned (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book, 2011), Kindle location, 606–635. This quotation is found at Kindle location 635.
