I Have a Problem and I Need Your Advice and It Is Absolutely Urgent

Okay folks. I have need for some good advice on a dire situation that I'm facing. If I'm reading things correctly -- and I know that I am because I went to college for 12 years to ensure that I know how to read things correctly -- the decision I make in the face of this situation might not merely affect my own life, but it has the potential to hold sway over the hopes and dreams of literally, and I am using that word very conscientiously, hundreds of thousands of people every fall.

To get a sense of the gravity of the situation, I'd like you to consider for a moment this cabin:

It's lovely, right? The setting is nice. The trees are beautiful. You can almost smell the mountain pines and fresh, natural air. But let's take a closer look:

The cabin is old. Decrepit. Empty. There's a broken bed in the dark, dank interior. The screen door hangs limply. The windows are crusted over. The family that once inhabited is long since gone. Probably dead. No one knows who this R.D. Skidmore was, just as no one will likely know you once you are 50 years past your shuffling off this mortal coil. Life is short. Life is not fair. Life, in a word, is pain.

Now that you're in the mood and you have a sense of the gravity of the situation, allow me to describe the context of the decision that I'm facing before asking for the much-needed advice:

Let's say you are an incredibly superstitious sports fan, and today your team played one of the more storied programs in all of college football (top 15 all time according to the worldwide leader). Let's say that the game was pretty rocky to start and frankly not looking great, so at halftime you decided to go do other things like read scriptures with your wife to get your mind off it. And then you came back into the room only to realize that the game had already begun again, and that while you were gone, your team intercepted the opposing team's quarterback and subsequently had scored a touchdown. Encouraged with the newfound momentum, you sat down and settled in to watch. And immediately the other team started to play really well. And your team started to not look so great. A kernel of an idea started to form, so you decide, tentatively, that maybe you need to leave again. Just to see what happens. And so you leave fore a while, but the game is a siren song that can't be ignored so you come back. And the minute you came back, you watched the opposing team's running back run for like 30 yards. So you leave again.

And you yo-yo like this for the rest of the game. And every time you were out of the room your team did great things. And also every time you came back into the room you saw the opponent's team do things that were, for their purposes, great, but that for your purposes were decidedly not great. And so you decide to leave for good. But you're still following the stats on your phone because somehow that doesn't seem to affect anything. And then as the game was coming to an end and when the opposing team had a 99.9% chance of winning and when you were out of the room, you started to feel pretty good about things. Because the team was going to lose, but you weren't there to see it happen, so it clearly wasn't your fault but rather some other cosmic force was at play here. And you start to relax.

BUT THEN, with just seconds to play, your team did some borderline miraculous thing and they scored, and by doing so forced overtime.

So you stayed out of the room. And while you were out of the room, your team scored a touchdown in overtime to take the lead in the game for the first time. At this point you had been doing some pretty heavy reasoning with yourself, and you had concluded with much adamance that you know with every logical fiber of your being that your presence before the television set can have no impact on individuals' -- strangers, really -- abilities to play a game 2500 miles away. So you came back in to watch the end of the game and to see your team win and relish in the accompanying joy. And then nearly immediately after you came back in, the opposing team scored a touchdown to force a second overtime.

Mildly shellshocked, you became aware that you had to go to the bathroom, so you went away again. And you lingered away because you still had your phone and the live stats. And as you lingered, your team won the game in the 2nd overtime.

Naturally you were overjoyed at your team winning, but there frankly wasn't as much overjoy as there would have been had you watched it.

Now, any being with any ounce of reasonability would attest to the fact that your actions, specifically with regard to your viewing habits and your general presence in front of the television set, directly affected the outcome of this game.

D.I.R.E.C.T.L.Y.

Thinking ahead to next week, and the weeks beyond, you are left with a very large concern. There seems to be a new rule coming into effect after some 33 years of fandom. You watch; your team loses. You avoid watching; your team wins. Simple.

The world would have you think that winning=happiness and losing=misery. So, logically, under this new rule, not watching=happiness.

But it's more complicated than that: While you acknowledge that sports and such have no real eternal significance, you also know that the action of *watching* your team play, win or lose, brings very real enjoyment to your life. The watching itself makes you feel kinda like this:

Certainly winning is better. And when you win really big ones, and you get to watch, you might feel a little something like this:

But when you don't watch, even though winning is nice and helps a fair bit, when the dust settles, win or lose, you feel more like this:

That said, you know that the world doesn't center around you. You know firsthand that other people also are brought very real enjoyment by watching your team play and very realer enjoyment by watching them win.

And so we arrive to the part where I ask your advice and you give it to me. If you were in such a situation, what would you do? Would you sacrifice your own pleasure for the greater good? I mean, if you could guarantee -- GUARANTEE -- that your team would win by the mere act of not watching them actually do it, would you? There is still joy in the win. Sure. But because you know the sheer and utter enjoyment of both watching AND winning, the joy of watchless winning is quite and considerably less. And isn't the fact that you know that you are not actually experiencing the full allotment of joy available it's own class of misery? Would you willingly increase the misery of your own life, knowing you've created greater joy for others?

It might be easy for you, dear reader, sitting outside and above the situation to say, "Well, my dear Sam, certainly it is incumbent upon you to do all you can to provide for the well-being of your neighbor." I get that that's the right answer. Logically. But, as the paterfamilias has taught us, it's a fool that looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart. Put yourself in my shoes here. What would you do?

On America and Patriotism and If/Where They Fit at Church

I was recently asked to be the organist at church, and because the chorister was out of town camping the week of July 4th, I got to pick the hymns for that Sunday. Traditionally (at least according to the 33 years’ worth of Independence Days I’ve experienced) we sing the patriotic hymns in the back of the hymnbook on the Sunday closest to Independence Day. This makes sense according to the calendar, but in recent years it has made me somewhat uncomfortable. To be clear, I consider myself a patriotic sort, but with the Church being global, I've wondered about how appropriate it is to sing region-based songs during worship service. So as I set about deciding what hymns to sing, I did a lot of  "studying it out in my mind," pondering about the relationship between America and patriotism and God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ, some of which I have now written out and present to you.

*Quick note: This is kinda long. My thinking and writing here strayed at times away from the direct question of “what is appropriate to sing at church?” into larger questions of patriotism and American greatness. So if you don’t want to read the whole thing, I get it. That said, if you’re not going to read the whole thing I would encourage you to skip down and read the last dew paragraphs, starting with the one that begins “While these hymns rhapsodize about American greatness…”*

Before I explain what I decided regarding the hymns, I want to show you a picture of some fireworks to get us in the mood and then outline some of my ponderings on the subject.



The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a worldwide church that makes a special effort to emphasize that everyone in this world belongs to a universal family regardless of nationality. In a similar vein, Joseph Smith once claimed that, “We ought to have the building up of Zion as our greatest object” (160) with “Zion” being defined elsewhere in the scriptures as a group of people that are “of heart and one mind, and [dwell] in righteousness; and there [are] no poor among them.” Similarly, Christ himself taught (as interpreted by King James’ translators), “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.”

Unity, community, and love. And not just for those we like, or get along with, or who happen to live within our same a relatively arbitrary set of lines drawn in the dirt. Love that extends across the entire family of humankind.

So, if part of our purpose in congregating on Sunday to worship is to increase in unity, community, and love, where do patriotic hymns fit in?

This isn’t an easy question for me to answer. I love patriotic songs, and I love this country. But there’s no denying that these songs are often used to prop up ideas of American exceptionalism with which I heartily disagree. And because of these exceptionalist undertones, I’ve seen where some have compared singing such hymns in Sacrament Meeting to that part of the Book of Mormon where the wicked and apostate Zoramites build a big tower upon which they stand and thank God for making them better than everyone else.

We, meaning Americans, are not necessarily better than everyone else. But by saying that Americans are not better than anyone else, I’m not also saying that we are worse than anyone else. Comparisons of this sort are unhelpful. 

From my point of view, when we frame life as a competition with winners and losers, better and worse, we are moving in the opposite direct of the ultimate goals of unity, community, and love. 

If we are exclusively focused on being better than others, then those others automatically become, if not enemies, then at least threats. Life, so-conceived, is a zero-sum game where there is a winner and the rest are losers. It’s like the old joke: when outrunning a bear you don’t have to be faster than the bear, just faster than whoever you’re with. While this is perhaps true in situations where you’re hanging out with hungry bears, and with people you don’t like, and also you’ve lost all capacity for human compassion, this is not true of life or “greatness” more generally.

I do believe that America is great, though certainly far from perfect. But just as my own self-worth does not depend on my neighbor’s self-worth, American greatness does not necessarily exist at the expense of or in relation to the greatness of other countries. The greatness that we find within this country is a greatness that is common and available to all nations, kindreds, tongues, and peoples across the world. Such greatness is achieved through a combination of hard work and divine support.

I recognize that talking about the Divine isn’t politic or cool when discussing international relations and geopolitical concerns, but I believe that any greatness we attain to in this life, in any sphere, is a shadow of an eternal Greatness (capital G), and that American greatness itself is such a shadow. To that end, I believe that divine inspiration accompanied the founding of this nation and the enumeration of its ideals.

While there are many “American” ideals that I might identify that lead to American and general greatness, allow me to mention just three:

• Individuals ought to be allowed the freedom to choose how they will spend their time and energy, though they are not immune from the consequences of those choices.
• All people have an inherent dignity. (This ideal was rather myopically applied in the early days of the nation, but we have made progress in broadening its application even if it seems we are still working towards full and true acceptance.)
• All people have the right and even duty to take active part in governing their own affairs. Such active engagement can take many forms, including voting, interpersonal discourse, personal improvement and growth, and, if necessary, perhaps a little bit of revolution.

Any greatness that we claim as Americans comes as we adhere to, work towards, and accept the responsibilities born from ideals such as these. And, by all rights, I find that America can be a pretty great place.

But any greatness comes with a warning from history. As Kenneth Burke explained in 1967:

“We know of many empires that rose and fell. We know of none that rose and didn't fall. Hitler, at the height of his arrogance, promised his followers, who obeyed him as automatically as conditioned cattle, that his dismal outfit would last a thousand years. That dream was soon over. I don't have the least idea how permanent our setup is likely to be, though it is a fact known to us all that a considerable number of our most characteristic contrivances have to be junked strikingly soon after we buy them.” (“Responsibilities of National Greatness,” The Nation, vol. 205, 17 July 1967)

We may think we’re pretty great and have things pretty well figured out for now, but that’s also what the Egyptians thought. And the Greeks. And the Assyrians. And the Romans. And the Huns. And the British. And so on. America is another empire, so to speak, in a long line that will eventually follow the others to a similar end, only to be replaced by another. In fact, as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we actively look forward to the establishment of a new government that will override all others.

Why, then, in our worship services should we celebrate momentary and ephemeral political power (divinely inspired though it may be) in the same space in which we teach what we claim to be eternal truths? 

Additionally, why should we celebrate this provincial political power when we claim worldwide familial relationships, including brothers, sisters, and siblings in our very midst who do not identify as “American?”

These concerns and misgivings were the starting point for me as I went about deciding if/which patriotic hymns to include in Sunday's worship service. And with that as my starting point, it might seem that I’m building up to the conclusion that patriotic hymns are inappropriate for Sacrament Meeting. But I’m not. In fact, I eventually concluded that they are entirely appropriate and I ended up selecting two. Allow me to explain how I got there.

I decided that to come to a sound decision I needed to carefully read through the words of the four patriotic hymns in the LDS hymnbook that I was considering to see specifically what kinds of messages were being communicated. I recognize that others far more inspired and qualified than me have already done the work of reading carefully and determining propriety, but I wanted to come to my own conclusions. These were the four hymns in question:

The Battle Hymn of the Republic
America the Beautiful
My Country, ‘Tis of Thee
The Star-Spangled Banner

(“God of Our Fathers, Whose Almighty Hand” would also have normally been under consideration but we had just sung it 3 weeks earlier.)

Upon reading the words of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” I decided right off that it was a go. While it has distinct roots in American history and is a stirring patriotic anthem, nothing in it is overtly nationalistic or even mentions geo-politics at all. The Union army may have marched to its refrains during the Civil War, and they may have interpreted themselves to be representative of the truth that is marching on, but the words of the song itself (at least those included in the hymnbook which admittedly do leave out some of the more militaristic stanzas) can be read and sung as a rallying cry to the cause of Christ -- a battle with the worst impulses within each of us.

But the other three were a little bit trickier for me. At least at first blush.

I say they were trickier because these three, and perhaps most especially “The Star-Spangled Banner,” are much more overtly nationalistic and often used popularly as a kind of signboard for American exceptionalism. But upon reading through the words of the hymns themselves, a different picture began to emerge.

While these hymns rhapsodize about American greatness, the takeaway message in all three is that while America is great, its greatness is owed directly to God. Rather than self-aggrandizing assertions of our individual greatness in comparison to other non-Americans, there is a call to humility. There’s a recognition that our greatness has nothing to do with our own merits; instead it invites us to recognize with Ammon that we are, in fact, nothing. As to our own, individual (or even national) strength, we are weak. Therefore, we ought not to boast of ourselves, but rather we ought to boast of our God. For in his strength we can do all things.

Unfortunately, humility is not often seen as a precursor to greatness. And humility as a national ideal does not sit easily on the shelf next to the full-throated assertions of America’s superiority over all comers. 

But that kind of militaristic, hierarchical, zero-sum greatness is, in my view, a counterfeit, rather than a shadow of divine Greatness. 

The kind of national greatness described in these hymns, a greatness that owes its very existence to divine allowance, is a greatness available to all. It is a greatness that is found as we align our ideals with divine mandate. It is a greatness that, perhaps, America might do well to search out more diligently to, yes, make itself more great. But what does it mean and what would it look like to find and make America greater?

I've decided that finding and augmenting greatness is not about rooting out the unclean from our midst, as many on all sides of the political spectrum seem to keen on doing. Such attitudes and actions are not greatness, but rather mere vanity. It is the puffing up of our own selves with empty air and is soon and easily released and deflated. 

Finding and augmenting greatness, rather, is a matter of rooting out the unclean from within ourselves. 

It's about searching out our own hate, anger, disgust, and pride and laying it on the altar. 

It's about rededicating ourselves to loving our neighbors, even to the extent of showing compassion and mercy for national rivals. 

It's about rededicating ourselves to unity, community, and love. 

And as we go about doing this kind of work, we will hopefully come to realize that we have and do and will continue to fall short. 

We are imperfect. 

We require a little extra help that goes beyond our own human frailty. 

In short, if these are to aspire to greatness in any sphere, we need to recognize that to achieve greatness we may depend upon "God shedding his grace," his enabling and ennobling power, upon us.

The patriotic hymns, when read/sung while paying close attention to the words and message they relate, make this compelling claim that humility before God is a precursor to any and all greatness, even the national variety. And if these hymns celebrate and emphasize humility before God as a truly American ideal, what could be more appropriate in a worship setting?

Ultimately, I chose the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” to play and sing in church on Sunday. (My decision to go with “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” rather than the other two was made expressly as a commentary on my own comfort level playing it on the organ in front of 200+ people.)

As I played these hymns and heard my fellow congregants singing them, I felt that in doing so we were "[praising] the Pow’r that hath made and preserved us a nation" not thanking God for making us better than all other nations. 

As we did so, my hope was that we were all, as Americans specifically and humans more generally, remembering and rededicating ourselves to the notion that to attain or maintain any greatness at all, we need to continually acknowledge the true source of that greatness.