Line upon Line

Deception doesn’t announce itself for what it is. It doesn’t say, “Here am I, a terrible choice that will lead you to heart ache and despair.” It doesn’t say, “Look at me, I’m bad news.” It certainly doesn’t say, “I’m evil.”

No, deceptive ideas would have no appeal to the good-hearted and well-intentioned if they didn’t dress up in camouflage.

Instead deceptive ideas claim the moral high ground. They say, “I am beauty, truth and love. I am intelligence. I am the only just way.” Here is the “Beware” sign we should post in our souls in some permanent place: some philosophies that claim the moral high ground are not the moral high ground. Some ideas that claim to be sophisticated and intellectual will bear out in the long run to have been stupid, limited and short-sighted.

Ideas may be passionately held, oft-repeated and become the mantra of the day, but that doesn’t make them right. They may claim that they are compassionate and not really be compassionate. They may claim righteousness and not be righteousness. They may wear the white hat as if they are heroic, and not be heroic.

The Adversary would lose much advantage if he were required to advertise exactly what he was selling with his philosophies or if his ideas had to have a nutrition label on them that exposed toxicity.

Evil or corrosive ideas don’t announce themselves as such or good people would run from them. They make their appeal by looking moral, compassionate, sophisticated or intellectually astute.

Because Mormon knew we would be wrestling with graduate level deception in the last days, the Book of Mormon gives us clear indication of what that looks like. It begins with Laman and Lemuel who, when they see Nephi about to build a ship, make a comment that history has born out as ridiculous.

They complain that they had suffered in the wilderness and that all this time they might have been happy with their possessions in Jerusalem when they say, “We know that the people who were in the land of Jerusalem were a righteous people; for they kept the statutes and judgments of the Lord, and all his commandments, according to the law of Moses” (1 Nephi 17:22). Then, as if to drive home the point, they repeat again, “We know that they are a righteous people.”

That rings with false certainty, especially when those righteous people tried to kill their father Lehi. What is fascinating, however, is getting a better picture of that “virtuous” Jerusalem they had left behind from the prophet Jeremiah, whose very name “jeremiad” comes to mean a list of woes.

Jeremiah tells us the people had forgotten the Lord “days without number” (Jer. 2:32), sought out Ba’al in groves (which would have included sexual orgy), “set their abominations in the house which is called by my name, to pollute it (desecrating the temple with false worship) (Jer. 7:30) and “built high places…to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire”(Jer. 7:31). The cries of children being sacrificed to false gods in the Hinnom Valley just outside Jerusalem’s walls may have carried up to the temple grounds. This is the people they call righteous?

Are we missing something here? Are Laman and Lemuel terribly sheltered as the sons of a prophet? I don’t think so. They surely must have known of all this and still claimed that the people of Jerusalem were good. How can they possibly be so deceived?

They claim the moral high ground in a most modern way. They are not led along by the foolish superstitions and visions of their father, Lehi. Their point of view? Commitment to religion and visionary experience equals delusion, or at very best naiveté. What’s worse it puts a cramp in their freedom. They might say today that they cannot be authentic.

Laman and Lemuel are propped up by what seems to them the most rational of reasons—what makes us happy. It’s what works for us now. It is utilitarian. What works in the short term while we enjoy all the distractions of material well-being. We easily can frolic and gratify ourselves without noticing that highly-charged storm clouds are gathering.

Of course, we know who the delusionary ones are here. Had they had their wish they would have been left behind in Jerusalem and either been murdered in some despicably grisly way typical of ancient Babylon or carried off to be lost in history.

What’s so dangerous about this is not just that deceptive ideas often pose as morally superior and more rational, they also claim that the truth is morally wrong or at least a sadly inferior point of view. They believe that those who cling to the rod are easily led, not quite bright, wildly bigoted and incapable of nuanced, sophisticated thinking. Often, those from the so-called morally superior (but deceptive) point of view persecute those who are following the truth. Nephi lived with constant threats from his brothers.

Consider this topsy, turvey world where evil is taken for good and good for evil, where deception poses as brilliance and moral rectitude. It’s a place where you can teach the most blatant sexuality to children in kindergarten, but not exchange Christmas cards at school because they are too religious. A place where abortion is a right because a woman owns her own body, but an infant does not have the right to life. A place where pornography is a huge business on the Internet putting millions of victims into modern day slavery, but standing against it is repressive.

And it’s a place where if you claim that you belong to the true Church of God, you may be ridiculed for not being willing to revise your claims or the doctrine to be more politically correct.

The suggestion: If you don’t take my point of view, it is because you are not as smart or brave or nuanced or courageous or as good as me.

Giddianhi, the Gadianton leader, sends a letter to the Nephite leader Lachoneus that is almost laughable in its claim of the moral high ground (3 Nephi 3). Here is Giddianhi, the chief of a bunch of terrorists bent on decimating the Nephites, and even he poses as if he is coming from the moral high ground.

The Gadiantons, he says, are “so many brave men who are at my command, who do now at this time stand in their arms, and do await with great anxiety for the word—Go down upon the Nephies and destroy them.”

Why do these “brave men” want to destroy the Nephites? Because they deserve it, of course—“because of the many wrongs which ye have done unto them.”

The Nephites, supposedly, have not only wronged the Gadiantons, they are “foolish and vain” to even consider standing against this terrorist band, crazy to defend themselves. The Nephites, suggests Giddianhi, are on the “wrong side of history,” as if there is a kind of inevitability to the Gadianton triumph.

(Oh, it is so embarrassing to suppose you might be on the wrong side of history, that people might look back at you as bigoted and enlightened fop, that somehow you couldn’t jump into the river of progress.)

That the Nephites and their foolish devotion to God are dead wrong is emphasized by Giddianhi in his sneering words about “that which ye suppose to be your right and your liberty; yea, ye do stand well, as if ye were supported by the hand of a god, in the defence of your liberty, and your property, and your country, or that which ye do call so.”

Giddianhi here is not only claiming the moral high ground, he mocks the Nephites as if they had been misled all along. He seeks to belittle the foundation of their beliefs. He does this to destroy their nerve, turn spine to spaghetti, and sap their strength.

It is also noteworthy that he uses false flattery, always referring to Lachoneus as “most noble” while all the time he intends to poison him as a leader. See it my way or we will destroy you dear friend—because, after all, we love everyone.

The Book of Mormon is giving us a warning in including these two examples of deception. We know that Laman and Lemuel and the silver-tongued leader of the Gadiantons had ill intent, all the while presenting themselves and their view as superior. With that, of course, is the view that if you aren’t with them you are the one who is backward and repressive and deserve what you get.

What is left for us in these difficult times is to be discerning about what actually is the moral and intellectual high ground as defined by God. We cannot be swayed by every one who calls out to us that they are here to enlighten us—lo here, lo there—or that we are not as advanced as they are morally. (They often can’t wait until the Church catches up with their opinion.)

Nor can we be dismayed if people degrade us or seek to humiliate us for our point of view grounded in scripture and testimony.

If current trends are the guide, those who cling to the restored gospel may have to be not only discerning but courageous. Lachoneus bought none of Giddianhi’s tripe, but gathered the people all into one place—and they won.

Our Church and our selves will no doubt face a great deal of hostility, persecution and pressure because we do not bow to the ideological winds. We may be scoffed at even by those close to us or those who used to share the pews with us. Yet, ultimately revealed truth will out. It always does.

The question for us is are we up to the task.