Nephi’s Alleged “Courage”
I would like to start by suggesting that if a voice in your head tells you to kill somebody, you ought to ignore that voice. If that voice tells that you ought to chop the head off of a person that is so drunk as to be unconscious, even if the unconscious drunk has property that you would like to steal, you still ought to ignore that voice.
But what if that voice in your head asserts that it is the voice of the Spirit of God? If The Almighty deigns to speak to such as you or I, surely we ought not ignore His voice…
I cannot speak for everyone, but if I had a voice in my head telling me to kill someone, even if (especially if?) that voice claimed to be the Spirit of God Himself, my most likely course of action would be to seek immediate treatment for mental illness.
However, in the LDS church, children are taught to sing a song that celebrates the very event described above. And even though it is in reference a story about following a voice in your head telling you to behead an unconscious drunk in order to facilitate stealing his property, it is sung for the purposes of teaching those children to always listen to God, to trust Him, and to be obedient to His will.
The song in question is #120 in the Children’s Songbook, “Nephi’s Courage.” The first verse tells us
The
Lord commanded Nephi to go and get the plates
From
the wicked Laban inside the city gates.
Laman
and Lemuel were both afraid to try.
Nephi
was courageous. This was his reply:
The chorus teaches the lesson that is to be instilled by singing the song:
I
will go; I will do the thing the Lord commands.
I
know the Lord provides a way; he wants me to obey.
I
will go; I will do the thing the Lord commands.
I
know the Lord provides a way; he wants me to obey.
The chorus and first verse of “Nephi’s Courage” are referencing a story contained in Chapters 3 and 4 of 1st Nephi in the Book of Mormon (BoM):
3: 7 And it came to pass
that I, Nephi, said unto my father: I will go and do the things which the Lord
hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the
children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish
the thing which he commandeth them.
Chapter 4 provides the details of how the Lord “prepared” the way (italics and underlining added for emphasis) for Nephi:
6 And I was led by the
Spirit, not knowing beforehand the things which I should do.
7 Nevertheless I went
forth, and as I came near unto the house of Laban I beheld a man, and he had
fallen to the earth before me, for he was drunken with wine.
8 And when I came to him
I found that it was Laban.
9 And I beheld his sword,
and I drew it forth from the sheath thereof; and the hilt thereof was of pure
gold, and the workmanship thereof was exceedingly fine, and I saw that the
blade thereof was of the most precious steel.
10 And it came to pass
that I was constrained by the Spirit that I should kill Laban;
but I said in my heart: Never at any time have I shed
the blood of man. And I shrunk and would that I might not slay him.
11 And the Spirit said
unto me again: Behold the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands. Yea, and
I also knew that he had sought to take away mine own life; yea, and he would
not hearken unto the commandments of the Lord; and he also had taken away our
property.
12 And it came to pass
that the Spirit said unto me again: Slay him, for the Lord
hath delivered him into thy hands;
18 Therefore I did
obey the voice of the Spirit, and took Laban by the hair of the
head, and I smote off his head with his own sword.
19 And after I had
smitten off his head with his own sword, I took the garments of Laban and put
them upon mine own body; yea, even every whit; and I did gird on his armor
about my loins.
20 And after I had done
this, I went forth unto the treasury of Laban. And as I went forth towards the
treasury of Laban, behold, I saw the servant of Laban who had the keys of the
treasury. And I commanded him in the voice of Laban, that he should go with me
into the treasury.
24 And I also spake unto
him that I should carry the engravings, which were upon the plates of brass, to
my elder brethren, who were without the walls.
Leaving aside the amateurish implausibility of the story[i], when innocent and impressionable LDS children are singing this song intended to instill the lesson that it is brave to be obedient to the will of God, they are actually singing about a BoM story in which Nephi listens to a voice in his head that tells him to behead an unconscious drunk so that he can steal his property.
I don’t know if I can sufficiently convey how profoundly disturbing I find this.
I’m confident that the majority of us know family and friends who experience voices in their heads. Depending on the research methodology and operational definitions,10 -70% of individuals without diagnosed mental illness have experienced hallucinatory voices (one of the studies referenced in the endnote reports that 11% of otherwise healthy university students reported hearing the voice of God) [ii] And certainly many of us live with, or have lived with, mental illness; at minimum we all know people who have. In some forms of mental illness, the prevalence of hallucinatory voices can be as high as 80%.[iii]
Imagine the harm that the lesson of “Nephi’s Courage” could do to a young person with a tendency to mental illness. After having the lesson of this song instilled through the repetition of a decade of Primary or Sunday School, and after being repeatedly taught that the BoM is “the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book…” (italics added for emphasis), a young person reads the BoM, recognizes the passage from the chorus of Nephi’s Courage, and reads on to discover that that alleged courage alluded to in the title of the song is the courage to murder someone when a voice in one’s instructs it. What lesson does a young person with mental illness take away from this?
Even without taking mental illness into consideration, I recall being taught that I needed to listen to the “still small voice.”[iv] I was told that the still small voice would never guide me wrong, and that I must always be obedient to it.
If the Church is going to teach children that we must always be obedient to the voice of the spirit, and that it is courageous to commit an act that, like Nephi, they find morally objectionable[v], perhaps that lesson needs to be accompanied with certain provisos.
(i)
Maybe children’s Primary lessons need to
include a section on how to distinguish between hallucinatory voices in one’s
head from the actual voice of the Spirit of God. Surely to teach children that
they ought to follow through on morally reprehensible actions when a voice in
the head tells them to, yet fail teach them how to judge between the actual
voice of the Spirit of God and hallucinations would be, to say the least,
irresponsible. Every person that I know who has heard voices as a symptom of
illness has described them as appearing absolutely real. Certainly the President
of the Church, his counsellors, and the Quorum of the 12, being Prophets, Seers,
and Revelators, must have a reliable method for adjudicating which
thoughts in his head are revelations and which are his own ideas (otherwise
they would have no business claiming to be prophets, seers, or revelators); how
easy would it be for the 15 to cobble together a guideline for the children to
help them avoid following any non-revelatory voices in their heads?
(ii)
Should my Sunday School lessons have
included a section that taught us to “always follow the still small voice,
except when it is telling you to do something wrong?”
That
would, presumably, be absurd, and would imply that listening to the still small
voice is not a reliable indicator of what is right. It would also
directly contradict the lesson intended by repeatedly singing “Nephi’s
Courage”—that listening to the spirit, even it seems to tell us to do something
prima facie morally incorrect, is courageous.
(iii)
Perhaps, as a variation on (ii), children
could be taught a comprehensive list of what is right and wrong, and then told
to follow the spirit only when it corresponds with column A. But again, this
would teach the children that the spirit is an unreliable guide to the good,
and would further reveal that the spirit is unnecessary for knowing the
good.
More generally, what lesson does any child take away from this?
For most right thinking people, killing an unconscious victim ought not be counted as morally acceptable. I would venture that most right thinking people would find such an act, not courageous, but morally abhorrent. Most need not be actually told that killing an unconscious victim is morally repugnant because most recognize it as intrinsically wrong. The wrongness of murder is not due to its illegality, rather its illegality is due to its intrinsic wrongness. The story of Nephi’s “courage” turns that order of operations on its head. It quite contradicts the intuition that murder is intrinsically wrong, because, in order for the story to make sense, the fact that God requires the murder of Laban makes it somehow morally praiseworthy. Consequently, a necessary condition for the story to work is that murder cannot be intrinsically wrong.
Even more generally, the lesson to be derived from Nephi’s courage is the lesson of Divine Command Theory[vi]--that morality is not derived from society, norms, rules, or laws, but from the will of God.
St. Augustine of Hippo defined sin as “a word, deed, or desire in opposition to the eternal law of God.”[vii] The LDS Bible Dictionary does not offer a definition of sin, however official LDS websites suggest that sin is “[w]illful disobedience to God’s commandments,”[viii] and explain that “[t]o commit sin is to willfully disobey God's commandments or to fail to act righteously despite a knowledge of the truth (see James 4:17).”[ix] Divine Command Theory is closely conceptually linked to the notion of sin. The various formulations of Divine Command Theory share a common core: that the only foundation for ethics is found in God’s command, that God’s will is the ultimate and only source/foundation of morality/virtue/the good. That being the case, morality/virtue/goodness is defined by whether an act is performed in obedience/conformity to divine will, while the bad/evil/sin is defined by being in a volitional defiance to divine will (1st John 3:4; Romans 7: 12-14).
To offer a sufficient critique of Divine Command Theory would be too time consuming, so I refer the reader to “Zeus’s Thunderbolt, Euthyphro’s Dilemma, and the Eliminative Reduction of Sin” or to a shorter version of the same (edited for Sunstone Magazine), “Sin Does Not Exist: And Believing That It Does Is Ruining Us.”
The lesson to be derived by impressionable Primary children by singing “Nephi’s Courage” and learning about the still small voice is that God is the source of morality. What lesson can be drawn from learning that even murder is not intrinsically wrong if God tells you to do it? That nothing can be intrinsically wrong if God tells you to do it? No matter how wrong an action may be seen by society, by norms, or even by law, if God tells you do it, it is a courageous act! And how does one know if God is telling you to do something? The spirit. The voices. The still small voice. Feelings.
I put it to you, gentle reader, that this amounts to the antithesis of morality, that it creates a moral vacuum in which anything and everything is permissible. If it is okay to do whatever your feelings tell you is okay, even if it would be otherwise morally impermissible, then NOTHING is actually morally impermissible, and the lesson of Nephi’s alleged “courage” risks contributing to a culture of amorality in Mormonism.
[i] The story is
amateurishly implausible. If one person holds up another person by the hair it
would be mechanically impossible to swing a sword with the other arm with the
force necessary to “smote” the victim’s head off. Mime the actions for yourself,
you will see what I mean. And after smoting off his head, the victim’s clothes
would be soaked in blood; when Nephi stole Laban’s clothes to impersonate him
and steal the brass plates, Zoram (Laban’s servant) would have been suspicious.
[iii] Hugdahl K. Auditory hallucinations: A review of the ERC
"VOICE" project.
World J Psychiatry. 2015;5(2):193-209.
doi:10.5498/wjp.v5.i2.193
[v] “I said in my
heart: Never at any time have I shed the blood of man. And I shrunk and would that
I might not slay him.” 1st Nephi 4:10.
[vi] There are plenty
of places to find definitions of Divine Command Theory. For example: https://www.iep.utm.edu/divine-c/,
http://www.philosophyofreligion.info/christian-ethics/divine-command-theory/,
and http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9781405106795_chunk_g97814051067955_ss1-129
Children, we will now sing, "Lafferty's Courage"
ReplyDeleteExactly.
DeleteBrilliant.
As one of the composers/lyricists of the song in question, I must agree with you wholeheartedly!
ReplyDelete