Chapter 3: Disavowment Part 1

| Part 1: My Analogy | Part 2: My Reality |

Interwoven

“What does it really mean to disavow a practice?”

~~~~~~~~~~

If you watch the trailer for the movie “Loving,” the true story behind the landmark Supreme Court case on interracial marriage, the couple’s right to marry seems utterly obvious today.

But back in 1964 when Mildred Loving pled with Robert Kennedy to consider the unconstitutionality of the charges against her, she had very few other allies. The situation in Utah wasn’t much different than in Mildred’s Virginia. With a 99% Caucasian student body, Brigham Young University lacked any substantial opportunity for integration, even if laws and doctrinal teachings hadn’t forbidden interracial marriage at the time.

BYU student Tony Morgan felt the pressure to get married as his graduation day approached in 1964. As an active Mormon and returned missionary, he had taken his mission release interviews seriously. In those interviews, both his mission president in France and his stake president back home in Utah had encouraged him to put his primary efforts into his next mission in life: fulfilling his familial, patriarchal obligations.

But even though he had spent the next four years surrounded by what should have been perfect matches for him, the connection never happened the way he had imagined it would. Tony had done quite well in school, but as the commencement speaker foretold workplace successes that were surely ahead for the top-ranked students, he had the distinct sense that he had failed at the most important mission of his collegiate years.

After graduation, he found himself working in a prominent research role for a life insurance company. Although disappointedly still looking for a soul mate, he was quickly moving up in his firm and making a good name for himself.

He was incredibly good with numbers; as an actuary, he also managed to put his stochastic skills to further use by producing extraordinary charts that considered all possible outcomes along with their relative chance of occurrence. He quickly embraced an emerging, computer-based science that consisted of tweaking every conceivable variable and combining the full range of possible outcomes into a single set of probable scenarios. The procedure he was mastering had actually been developed during the Manhattan Project and further research at Los Alamos; it had been given the code name Monte Carlo, which was the casino where the developer’s uncle used to gamble away his money, hoping to beat the highly improbably odds.

While presenting some of his work at a trade conference, Tony caught the eye of the Defense Department’s computer code developers themselves, who offered him an interview on the spot. Tony had always wondered whether his Mormonism might be a detriment to his career, but Ezra Taft Benson’s time in the Presidential cabinet showed him that anti-Communist sentiments could trump any difference in religious leanings. During the interview, he freely repeated sentiments he had learned from Benson, Skousen, and other prominent speakers during his time at BYU. Tony had been raised as an all-American patriot; his father had been a war hero, and he knew that losing the Cold War would undo everything his own father fought for. He was willing to pledge his life for his country, and his passion came across clearly in the interview.

The interviewers decided that he would be a great asset to Uncle Sam, and it wasn’t long before Tony was poached by the feds to help further refine their Monte Carlo techniques. He was extremely proud that his research would aid the CIA, NASA, and a number of other agencies that could help the U.S. win the Cold War. As his reputation and influence grew, Tony couldn’t believe that a boy from Farmington, Utah could walk the halls of the Pentagon and report to five-star generals.

He began to receive exciting overseas assignments, and he was thrilled to be able to use his programming skills to help other governments fight the threat of Communism that seemed to be spreading like a plague around the world.

On one particularly fateful trip, he boarded a flight to Cairo and found himself sitting next to an attractive young woman with whom he struck up a conversation. With her olive skin and long, black hair, she didn’t look much like the BYU co-eds he had dated in Provo. Just a few minutes into their conversation, the life experience she described made his previous dates seem a bit naïve about the world. Tony knew he should have been sleeping or preparing for his upcoming meetings, but he stayed wide awake over the next twelve hours while they both bared their souls to each other.

It all seemed so natural, and at least to Tony, the chance meeting felt like destiny. The plane landed all too quickly, and he had to admit to himself that in that brief period, he had already started to fall in love. They didn’t plan it; it just happened.

As soon as they stepped off the plane, they had to part ways to catch their connecting flights. If they wanted to see each other again, they both knew full well that it would take a concerted, mutual effort. Tony’s sleep-deprived mind was spinning. Should he take the gamble?

Aided by a swarm of butterflies, he decided on a leap of faith.

“Can I give you my num-” he began to ask, pulling out a piece of paper. But before he had even finished the question, she had already interrupted him by pressing a scrap of paper into his shirt pocket.

“I need to run if I’m going to make my connection,” she said.

He awkwardly thanked her for her number and promised he would call. Without a kiss or even a handshake, she backed away and gave him a wave and a smile. He stood in silence and watched her fade into the crowd, his soul full of indescribable feelings of peace and harmony and universal destiny that temporarily trumped every analytical path in his head. Everything mattered, but nothing else mattered, because absolutely everything in the Universe seemed to have joined forces to bring them to their chance meeting.

Tony eventually made his way to his own gate and sat down to wait for his flight to board. The 12-hour dialogue was playing back in his mind, with the tape in his head rewinding and fast-forwarding to each of the topics they had discussed. He had learned a great deal about her travels and her insights into politics and world events, but he quickly realized how much he didn’t know about her. She had told him her name was Gina, for instance, but he didn’t know a thing about her hometown.

He frantically dug the paper out of his pocket, hoping to get a clue from the spelling. Disappointingly, it was only a number. He wondered if Gina might be short for Regina, a German name. Or maybe it was an Italian nickname like for the actress Luigina? Or maybe her name was Jina, with a Korean origin. He had seen her pull out a reddish-colored passport when they went through the airport immigration lines; other than noticing that she didn’t have a blue passport like his, though, he had no idea of her actual nationality.

For the next hour, he sat there at the gate unable to think of anything else. Little as he knew about her, he had to concede that he was already smitten. Eventually he looked at his watch, wondering if he had time to run to her gate and ask her a few more questions.

By the time he checked his watch, though, her flight had already departed, and Tony realized that it was all in his court now. He hadn’t given Gina his own number, so she was never going to be able to call him. He stared at the handwritten characters on the scrap of paper, which started with the number 2.

“Of course!” he thought, “The country code!”

A new set of country codes had just been implemented around the world earlier that year, with the first digit indicating the continent. Running to a pay phone, he looked for the first digit of its own number: it was also a 2.

“Africa!” Tony said to himself, feeling a bit like a detective.

The next two numbers were a 1 and a 3. He flipped up the massive phone book, but the Arabic characters were of no use to him. Next to the phone, though, he saw a placard with a list of the new country codes for international travelers. Scrolling through the index he discovered that 213 placed the phone number in Algeria. Was that Gina’s home? Was she just visiting there? Was it the number to her own apartment? To her parents’ place? A hotel?

Should he just dial the number and leave his details with anyone who answers? If so, his American accent would certainly give away his identity, and on arrival Gina would know that he had called, potentially marking the beginning of a long-distance relationship with all of its entailing implications.

At this point in his life, only a relationship with a viable chance of progressing toward marriage would warrant the investment of a phone call that was sure to throw his world into a huge spin. Who was this girl anyway, and did they even stand any chance of ending up together? If not, he knew that scrap of paper belonged in the trash can!

He went back to his seat to piece things together logically, staring at a large world map on the wall while he gathered his thoughts.

Fidgety and restless, he decided to start writing down his thoughts and – as he was apt to do – charting out the risks and consequences associated with his options. He opened his briefcase and reached for his journal, but instead his eyes rested on the scriptures that he always carried with him. Faced with such a potentially consequential decision, he thought it might be prudent to first seek some advice from the prophets themselves. Hoping to underscore any prospective intercession, he first held the books using both hands and uttered a silent prayer for discernment. Then, with his thumb flipping through the gold-leafed pages like a ball in a roulette wheel, he hoped he might land on a winning number that would tell him what to do and absolve him of having to make his own decision.

In this case, he had to acknowledge the same “lack of wisdom” that his hero prophet had faced a century and a half before. Shouldn’t this be one decision in which he, like Joseph, was entitled to some sort of divine guidance? Over and over again, he would arrive at a random verse and read it through repeatedly. But none of the passages he pointed to seemed to have the slightest relevance to his pointed question. Was this the dreaded “stupor of thought” that his scriptures equated to a negative response from God?

Tony’s next inclination was to drop to his knees, but he realized that kneeling on the floor might look a bit odd to his fellow travellers, particularly if a beam of light appeared over his head – an image that made him laugh at the absurdity of his own expectations. As a more practical alternative, he thought of joining the Muslims in the nearest airport prayer room, but he didn’t want to miss any flight announcements, so he stayed put.

What was he thinking anyway? Did he really have to make any consequential decisions right then and there? He did not want to risk falling in love with someone God wouldn’t approve of, but perhaps it was already too late for that. If he knew in advance that she wouldn’t be a candidate due to her background or beliefs, there would be no sense in taking things any further at all; he considered his time to be much too valuable to play games with a short-term fling. Without divine affirmation, he knew he would just have to drop it altogether and hope that God would bless him with a worthy partner down the road of this life or the next.

He conceded that silent prayers were his only hope for deliverance from this predicament. Armed since childhood with Moroni’s promise as his spiritual divining rod, he hoped to receive a simple yes or no answer from God Himself to guide his next step. He wished he had access to a Liahona like his scriptural heroes had, where the directions for his next step would just magically appear in plain letters – as long as he was really, really righteous. Had he been living righteously enough to deserve an answer? He didn’t need a big string of text here, just a single letter would suffice: Y or N.

As he swayed back and forth with his decision, he momentarily envied the arranged marriages of the Old Testament where personal choice wasn’t even a factor. He knew that wouldn’t bring true happiness either, but at least he could blame someone else for the decision rather than running the risk of making his own blunder! Stuck in the latter days, he felt the burden of his own agency. Staring at the Bible in his hands, he realized that he would be unlikely to find any relevant advice written in the days of concubines and dowries. Perhaps the modern-day prophets would have something more applicable to say than their ancient counterparts. He put his scriptures away, dug back through his briefcase and pulled out the latest Improvement Era magazine that he had brought along to read on the plane.

On the inside cover was an advertisement for BYU, including a photograph of Y Mountain. The elusive “Y” that he was hoping to spot was covered by snow in the photograph, but his eyes focused on the text of the advertisement, which called the school by its nickname, the “Y”. Was that his answer? Yes?

He felt silly looking for answers in this way, so he put down the magazine, leaned back and stared at the wall again. The large compass drawn in the middle of the ocean caught his eye, in particular the letter “N” right at the top. The opposite answer? No?

He was driving himself crazy with this ambiguity. He always made very calculated decisions for himself and wasn’t superstitious in any other aspect of his life; in fact, he tended to mock horoscopes and those who adhered to the arbitrary advice of columnists and psychics. Surely he could find something more substantive than seeking signs in random letters!

He turned back to the Improvement Era which was, after all, the official “Voice of the Church” as its subtitle attested. He scanned each page, hoping to find an appropriate article that might match his predicament. In between advertisements for Standard Oil and ZCMI, a girl in a wedding dress caught his eye. The bride and groom were pictured at the top of a Bookcraft ad highlighting fourteen “must-have” books for Latter-Day Saints. The book was entitled “Time and Eternity” by the apostle Mark E. Petersen. The caption said it laid out a case for the “necessity of temple marriage.” Now Tony didn’t know anything about Gina’s religious background, but surely this criterion would exclude her from consideration. Tony feared what he might run across in the words of a hard-liner like Elder Petersen, who had ruffled feathers during Tony’s years at BYU by pushing for segregated chapels and preaching that exaltation was not possible for those of African descent. His attitudes on courting were likely to be similarly exclusive, so Tony decided to keep moving.

He looked at the other book titles and didn’t see much of interest until he got to the last one. Number 14 was a book by Hugh B. Brown, the first counselor to the prophet, entitled “You and Your Marriage.” He wanted advice on dating and courting, not necessarily marriage, but perhaps it would include some relevant, pre-matrimonial material. Besides, given Elder Brown’s contrastingly public support for integration among his fellow apostles, Tony thought his views on marriage might be equally liberal – perhaps even allowing an exception for someone like Gina. The ad included a clip-out order form, and Tony contemplated filling it out with the number 14 circled. The book would likely take weeks to arrive, though, and who could guess where in the world Gina might be by then – and whether another suitor might have entered her life in the meantime. That thought made Tony cringe. Might there be someone sitting next to her on her flight, perhaps striking her interest right at that very moment? The book wasn’t going to help him at all; he needed some more immediate advice.

As he flipped past the ads and through the pages of further articles, he couldn’t believe his luck when he ran across a column on marriage by Hugh B. Brown – it was an excerpt straight from Book #14; he wouldn’t have to wait after all!

He read through the article with gradually diminishing excitement, however; each paragraph seemed to add insurmountable distance and obstacles to the path between him and Gina. While Elder Brown was generally quite liberal in his views on racism and other social issues, it became apparent that he held a very conservative notion of marriage.

The article began with a biblical quote: “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers.”

The imagery made Tony think of his own pioneer ancestors trekking along frozen rivers and narrow cliffside trails with their oxcarts. He imagined the disastrous consequences of an imbalanced team; who in their right mind would want to take that sort of risk? He also wondered if the passage was meant to imply that unbelievers were unequal to believers, where one could pull the weight and the other couldn’t? Or did it mean that they would merely try to pull the cart in different directions with equal strength? Whatever the case, would Gina be considered a non-believer in this analogy? Tony wondered what sort of beliefs and believers the reference might extend to. Believers in Christ? Believers in Paul? Believers in Joseph Smith? Believers in Hugh B. Brown and his position as a prophet, seer, and revelator?

As for himself, Tony believed firmly in all of these sources of truth; he had also been taught that the most recent prophet’s advice trumps any outdated prophetic words because of its latter-day relevance. And right in plain words, the first paragraph of Elder Brown’s modern-day revelation included the church’s “insistence” that members marry within the Church.

The rest of the article laid out a clear case against inter-faith marriage, focusing on the reasons to avoid straying outside your own faith even in dating. Tony’s initial euphoria began to fade with each page, replaced by a growing fear of pursuing a relationship with Gina.

Among other advice, in direct words quoted from God’s appointed mouthpiece on earth, the article stated, “Let Catholics marry Catholics, and let Latter-Day Saints do the same.”

“It is unwise to start out with fundamental differences; and differences in religion are fundamental.”

The article went on to deride not just differences in religion, but in “cultural patterns” as well. In the case of an interfaith marriage, “a satisfactory union is unattainable,” and Elder Brown added that a difference in faith was like “a flaw in a building that extends from the foundation to the roof.”

Although the title of the book made it sound like it would be geared toward advice for married couples, most of what Tony read seemed like the pre-marital advice he had been seeking – only he hadn’t counted on it being so blunt.

“Date only those who are in your own faith.”

He had been hoping instead to find some advice that might help him to recognize the signs of true love. Love? Had there even been any mention of love? Tony scoured through the article once more from beginning to end looking for a single reference to the word; it was nowhere to be found! Did love even exist as a variable in this equation? Or was a testimony of the restored gospel more important than love itself?

Perhaps she could take the missionary discussions and eventually become converted to Mormonism, Tony thought. But what if they both fell for each other and she decided that Mormonism wasn’t for her?

Anyone contemplating such a union should “consider whether they will be willing to lose their children here or hereafter or both, rather than reject a juvenile infatuation.”

Juvenile? Tony was a college graduate, well past any puppy love stage. Was this nothing more than an infatuation in the eyes of the Brethren, he wondered. Was there no possibility of genuine love here? If he pursued a relationship with a non-Mormon, would it really be destined to end with an eternal separation from his own children?

The article included advice for anyone foolish enough to get involved in an interfaith engagement: “A broken engagement is better than a broken home.”

The article didn’t leave room for any flexibility at all, claiming that “there can be no warm family fellowship” in the permanently broken home of an interfaith household.

Love had no power after all.

“Be satisfied with nothing less than celestial marriage,” Tony read in closing, “a prerequisite to admittance to the highest degree of the celestial kingdom.”

Well, he had his answer; this particular requirement was non-negotiable. The only variable that mattered in Gina’s case was her eventual willingness to become Mormon.

Now if Gina wasn’t even a Christian at this point, Tony knew he would have a far greater challenge on his hands in getting her to accept not just the Book of Mormon, but the Virgin Birth, a universal atonement, and the exclusive insistence that Jesus is the only gateway to heaven, leaving everyone else – including potentially her own friends and family members – to wallow in eternal, post-mortal sorrow. Mormonism aside, that would take quite a leap. He could only hope she had some sort of Christian background or would at least be open-minded enough to accept its fundamental tenets.

Dejected, he put the magazine back into his briefcase and waited for the next flight announcement. Eventually an update came, but unfortunately in the form of flight delays. He was going to be stuck in this indecisive state of limbo for at least another few hours.

Tony pulled out his journal to record his thoughts. Not sure where to start, he looked around at the people coming and going in the international terminal. He started thinking about the odds of plucking two random people from the crowd and testing their mutual compatibility.

Just like in his Monte Carlo work, it would require charting out every possible scenario. Before writing any words at all in his journal, he decided to instead pull out some graph paper and start sketching out a chart much like he had always done in preparing presentations as an actuary.

It was obvious from the prophetic words that religious unity was the key consideration in marital compatibility. So backing up a step, he made a list of all the major religions he could think of, then laid it out into a matrix. Placing a check-mark in boxes with approved unions and an “X” to symbolize forbidden unions, the slim chance of compatibility between strangers started to take on a graphical form.

He knew his little chart was incomplete in terms of world religions, but he could already see the emerging pattern in his limited array: membership-based weighting aside, any two random people from a mixed crowd would only stand about a one in ten chance of potential compatibility.

So what if the two people happened to be lucky enough to both be Christian? If a Christian wished to marry another follower of Christ, could the manner in which their priests or pastors interpret the teachings of Christ differ so greatly that they should break off their relationship with each other? If they happen to rely on differing interpretations of what Christ actually meant with the things he said, are they really eternally incompatible? Tony knew full well that even those who claim to follow Christ and read the same Bible can’t agree on how to actually practice Christianity; with this acknowledgment, he felt the potential prospects in his matrix shrinking down even further.

He put a question mark in the Christian-Christian nexus box and decided to expand it with its own matrix, listing the some of the Christian denominations that came to mind along each axis.

Tony knew he was leaving off a whole lot of denominations, but he had to cut it off somewhere. He could see that if a chart of sub-sects was embedded into each of the major religions, he would be looking at even slimmer chances, with only one in a hundred or so unions acceptable to God. He stared at the LDS-LDS box, which according to his own exclusive, internal doctrines was the only box that should really get a check mark at all – every other union being equally invalid and unauthorized.

So what if two random people who meet each other just happen to strike the minutely improbable jackpot with their mutual Mormonism? A green light? Well, according to the words of Elder Brown and each of his predecessors, Mormons still have at least one more question to answer:

“Are you a front-row or a back-row Mormon?”

If you don’t happen to come from the same set of pews in church, you’d better be warned that you might be in for quite a struggle. In fact, if your potential Mormon mate isn’t the card-carrying temple-type, not only will they be shut out of the gates – you will be too! And you’ll lose your kids for all eternity to boot!

So if you happen to pick two people who both happen to hold a temple recommend, then you’d be in luck, right? Could he and Gina become those two lucky people?

Tony’s obsession with numbers and statistics carried back well past his mission encounters, which he had tracked methodically. He thought of the ten thousand doors he had knocked as a missionary. And the one in a ten that opened. And of those, the one in ten that allowed him to enter. And of those, the one in five that led to viable discussions. And of those, the half who actually came to church. Of those the one in five that resulted in baptism. And finally, the one in two – literally, one of two real people – that ended up in the temple. After two years of hard labor, in his case, his efforts had culminated in the endowment of a single soul! One in 10,000 sure seemed like a miniscule probability – a 0.01% chance! But ever since his primary days, in reference to bringing a single soul to Christ, Tony had been armed with the question, “How great shall be your joy?”

Since his return, whenever someone put him on the spot with the awkward question, “How many people did you convert?” he often claimed that he would do it all over again for another single soul if the call came. Was Gina’s conversion destined to be his next call? Did she stand a better chance of accepting the Mormon message than whoever sat behind a random door in one of the French villages he had roamed on his bicycle?

Minute as the probability seemed from his vantage on an airport bench, at least it represented a plausible prospect. In Gina’s case, he knew that policy dictated a minimum one-year wait even under the most optimistic scenario; but if the stars aligned, she might just have the chance of holding a temple recommend someday – potentially checking the requisite box with a divine blessing.

Staring at his charts, however, Tony realized he had only been considering a single variable and that there was much, much more to contemplate.

In addition to her religion, he realized that he knew nothing of her race or her nationality. They had talked about a lot of topics during the flight, but he had embarrassingly missed all three of these critical pieces of information. How might these additional parameters affect his equation? A person’s religion might change, he figured, so that variable in his equation was truly variable; but now Tony was faced with the sinking realization that her race and nation of origin were fixed – as were the prophetic warnings against stirring the pot.

Gina seemed to have a darker complexion. Had it just been the lighting on the plane, or did her skin tone reflect an ethnic background? The phone number she had given Tony was from Algeria, a mixing pot of ethnicities if there ever was one. Tony knew from his mission days that there were plenty of European Algerians – with French, Spanish, or Italian roots – living alongside those with Arabic or sub-Saharan origins. Where did Gina fit in? Was there African blood in her? The cursed seed of Cain? Could he imagine being yoked together through future battles with someone who had proved to be less valiant in pre-mortal wars?

Although interracial marriage had been legalized in Utah the previous year, it still was not considered moral by church leaders, who had actively opposed repealing miscegenation laws. From a wide range of pulpits and podiums throughout his Mormon upbringing and university education, Tony had repeatedly heard dire threats about racial mixing. A mixed marriage, after all, wouldn’t just exclude the “loathsome”, dark-skinned spouse from salvation; the “white and delightsome” spouse would have their own temple blessings rescinded, excavating an equally wide chasm in the road back to God and His Son.

While interracial unions were viewed by church leaders as being offensive to God, the far greater threat lay with the generations to come. A mixed couple was likely to produce offspring, thereby forcing otherwise innocent, mixed-race babies to enter the world with no chance for redemption. Giving up your own salvation was one thing, but robbing someone else of theirs was quite another. According to the namesake of Tony’s own alma mater, the crime of interracial propagation was downright Satanic!

Tony looked around at the complexion of his fellow travellers and decided to make another chart based on race or ethnicity. In his insurance work, he had frequently been asked to break down probabilities and propensities by race. His employer had relied on the disputed U.S. census categories for these tasks; given the many shades he saw around him, Tony wasn’t quite sure how to define the dividing lines, but he decided to start with those seven groups.

Once again, his chances began to take a graphical form. If he accepted the notion that God frowned on mixed-race relationships, only those unions that fell along the straight, diagonal line through the middle of his chart would be marked acceptable. The narrow band of check marks stood out to Tony like the perfect squares in a multiplication table. Could he bring himself to believe that the rest of the products were unlawful and offensive in God’s eyes? Did Gina’s ethnicity doom their relationship from the beginning with a big, fat “X”?

Tony’s only comforting glimmer of light came from his current ignorance about Gina’s background. So what if he ended up winning this improbable lottery, discovering that she was not just willing to join the LDS Church, but that she was just Caucasian enough to be deemed temple-worthy as well? Would they then be in the clear with the boxes of matching religions and ethnic backgrounds ticked?

Well, unfortunately for Mormons there are further tests that limit God’s favor to even slimmer pickings. You see, LDS apostle Boyd K. Packer said, “Mexicans should marry Mexicans, Japanese should marry Japanese,” and so on. So we’re not only talking about race and religion, we’re also talking about nationality, which requires an even narrower filter. Tony had received this same message from his mission president every time a local French girl turned the head of one of his fellow elders.

“Leave the French girls for the French boys,” they were repeatedly told; after all, “the gathering place for the French is in France.”

Like every other mission rule, ten-fold blessings were predicated on the obedience to this standard, and Tony had obediently avoided any social contact with single women in his mission zone.

Tony looked up at the world map on the wall. France was just one little country in a big world; thanks in part to the warped projection of the map, even the United States looked tiny next to countries like the USSR. Were his prospects really limited to that small, parochial territory? If God really didn’t want his children falling in love with anyone outside their own borders, maybe Tony should just stay put from now on and stop traveling internationally. The thought filled him with a sense of claustrophobia; under those constraints, you might as well commend instead of condemn the Russians for the walls they were building to keep people inside of their own occupation zones.

Tony looked at the indecipherable, Arabic names of the countries on the map; to pass the time, he tried to name as many as he could think of. He pulled out a new sheet of graph paper and started listing some of the countries along both axes of a new matrix.

He quickly jotted down about forty country names, which was about all he had room for on his graph paper anyway. He could see that even this limited-scale graph would require hundreds of crosses, so he just got out his red scripture-marking pencil and started coloring in the “unapproved” unions. He marked the slim band of approvals in green, which barely showed up against the distinct sea of red.

He always like to be comprehensive in his work, but to show the true proportions by accounting for all of the world’s two hundred or so nations, he knew that this particular matrix would have to be over twenty times larger, displaying an even more consuming coat of red. In addition, he also realized that in order to comply with every level of his creed, this larger chart would need to be progressively embedded inside the other charts of religious and racial compatibility that he had made, further shrinking the sliver of acceptable scenarios with any probability of success.

Nonetheless, this final chart did a fine job of showing his chances graphically. It forced him to acknowledge that his immediate options were very, very limited:

Tony’s career had been built around making calculated choices, and he tried to apply the same principles to this new, personal predicament. In this case, when he weighed it all out, he concluded that his chance of success with Gina was effectively nil. Whatever her religion, whatever her racial background, he knew she lacked the prized, blue passport: Strike three!

So what should he do with this insight? What was his duty to God now?

The final boarding call was finally announced, and Tony stood up to board the plane, pulling the scrap of paper out of his shirt pocket.

Love? Armed with glorious rewards of “principalities and powers and thrones and dominions” that were tied to his earthly servitude, love itself really seemed like a juvenile concept as Elder Brown had alluded. These promises and more – including planets and eternal posterity – would be the just compensation for those who “endure valiantly” according to the restored gospel. True Mormons, including his own ancestors, had been asked to sacrifice so much more. Some of them had valiantly endured a frigid trek and lost loved ones in the process; others had entered into polygamous relationships that went against every inclination of propriety they possessed; a few had even offered both of these sacrifices to their Lord. Giving up on this hint of true love felt as painful to Tony as any previous sacrifice he had made during his long mission days, but at the end of this very long day, he was able to treat his offering in the same way: it was a trial to be “valiantly endured”. In Tony’s case, the trivial notion of love was temporarily going to need to take a back seat in order to clear the way for far greater things to come. If this was a test, he determined not just to pass it but to ace it. Surely his ancestors had received their eternal reward for their sacrifices, and surely he would receive his.

Wouldn’t a loving God who is testing his faith eventually send him a viable prospect if he passed this test? So if he just happened to feel some attraction for someone who just happened to sit next to him on this next flight or on any future journey, he made the determination that he would first check the all-important boxes of common nationality, race, and religion before letting his pesky feelings go any further. Serendipity be damned! If she just happened to fall in the red zone, and if he somehow deluded himself into thinking that true love might be brewing, denying that love was part of his perceived priesthood duty; like a future with Gina, it was just one of those sacrifices that life demanded of him. “Turn it off,” as they say!

He took one last glance at the payphone as the queue progressed, knowing that if he ever had any regrets about the decision, this moment of true clarity and courage would have the final word.

He tossed the note into the trash can near the gate, handed over his ticket, and boarded the plane.

~~~~~~~~~~~

By the time Tony returned home to Utah, the scrap of paper was deteriorating in a landfill, sacrificed on an altar of analytical obedience. He never saw Gina again, but he thought of her often, still believing that he would be blessed in the future for denying the inclinations of the “natural man” and following the admonition of the prophets by letting her go. He continued to serve in the Church year after year, remaining strong in his convictions and trusting his leaders; every once in a while, in a moment of weakness, he thought of trying to research flight records or otherwise attempting to dig up a trace of Gina’s whereabouts. But he knew his destiny was to find someone who shared his race, his religion, and his nationality; after all, a temple marriage – which he assumed included all the prerequisite commonality – had been promised to him in his own patriarchal blessing.

Besides, he knew that his own leaders couldn’t possibly lead anyone astray. Even if he couldn’t explain their words sometimes, and even when they ended up reversing their position on racial exclusions and other matters over the years, Tony conceded that God knew the greater good. He clung to the notion that a loving father in heaven would reward him for his adherence to the direction he received at the time, even if the fulfilment of his patriarchal promises had to be postponed until the post-mortal realm.

Gina ended up running an Algerian restaurant in Paris with her French husband whom she met a few years after the Cairo flight. She had lived the rest of her life assuming Tony wasn’t interested in her, because he had never called.

Tony just recently passed away. He never felt the spark again like he had on that twelve-hour flight to Cairo, but he ended up having a rewarding career and led a fulfilling life of world travel. Those who knew him called him a true American hero; the Monte Carlo analyses that he helped to advance indeed contributed to the U.S. victory in the Cold War. His techniques had been applied from the Space Race to the Arms Race, and from the Energy Crisis to the Hostage Crisis. He had pioneered innovative methods of analysis which were highlighted in his obituary. Little did those who read about his accomplishments know, however, that he never came to grips with the most important analysis he had ever performed.

Toward the end of his life, he ultimately realized that he had based his compatibility charts on dodgy data and shoddy assumptions. Although the Church never officially gave mixed marriage their blessing, the reversals around other key issues helped convince Tony that he had been misinformed from the beginning and that he should have just followed his own conscience all along. He concluded that restrictions based on religion were only needed because of unfounded claims of exclusivity which ought to be done away with anyway – and that there was absolutely no sacred foundation at all for restrictions based on ethnicity or nationality.

When the appointed estate manager came to clear Tony’s belongings out of his house, he made a fascinating discovery. On the living room wall hung oversize charts just like the ones Tony had started sketching out in the Cairo Airport. The charts included hundreds of portraits that had been attached with push-pins and Scotch tape. Each portrait showed a different couple, some with each partner looking quite distinct from one another, others remarkably similar. Some of the portraits were photographs, some were photocopies, and some were clipped from magazines and newspapers. The estate manager wasn’t quite sure what to make of it all, so he snapped a photo for the estate sale and moved on.

An avid, lifetime member of the National Geographic Society, Tony had also compiled a massive bookshelf full of every National Geographic magazine ever published. Each issue was methodically catalogued in chronological order, and the estate manager thought he might be able to put the whole lot up for sale as a set, or perhaps donate it to a library. A few issues had been set aside, so he flipped through them to see if they were in good enough shape to sell. He soon realized that some of them were in pretty bad shape, having been sliced and diced beyond repair. One issue that had been completely decimated included an article that dealt with couples who had been cast out from their own families and societies for daring to cross religious boundaries. The photographs had been cut out, but the captions highlighted the subjects: a Buddhist and a Hindu, a Christian and a Muslim, a Sikh and a Baha’i. Some had apparently been photographed in hiding, fearing persecution for departing from their dogmas and customs.

Another issue that had been torn apart was a special printing called “The Race Issue”. A number of pages had been clipped out, most of which came from an article presenting a diverse portrait series of mixed couples who had tied the knot outside the New York City clerk’s office.

Both sets of portraits had ended up on Tony’s wall, aligned with the nationalities, races, and religions cited in the articles. As it turned out, the photographs had struck quite a chord with Tony and got him thinking: Had there ever been a Greek-Ugandan marriage? A Mexican-Hungarian marriage? An Icelandic-Laotian marriage? He wasn’t a very experienced internet user, but inspired by the article, he had gone online and started searching. Every time he looked for a missing square, he found a couple who fit the description. Sometimes he found photos online; if not, he had often tried contacting couples directly, asking them if they would be willing to help him with his project.

He hadn’t ever tweeted anything himself, but in the process of his research, Tony had also run across a Twitter campaign called #ThankyouLovings in which mixed couples had posted portraits of themselves. The campaign had been inspired by a movie about the Lovings, the real couple who had sued the state of Virginia to get their interracial marriage recognized. Related drives on Facebook and other social media outlets had likewise garnered a massive archive of mixed couples. Tony had collected as many images as he could find over the years, replacing each red square on his full-size charts with a real couple’s portrait.

Health issues had restricted Tony’s travels later in life, and post-retirement, single life had left him with a great deal of free time to tackle this ambitious project. It ended up taking him several years, but he finally completed his charts. Looking them over with the hindsight of the decades that had passed since his chance meeting with Gina, the fact that he had previously led himself to believe that God’s blessing rested only along a narrow, diagonal band of those charts seemed ludicrous.

Tony realized that many of the policies, statements, and advice that had previously been issued by the Church under false pretexts had never been rescinded. He could never understand why there was such a great hesitation to complete the reversal. The National Geographic Society had likewise banned black members from full fellowship. But their Race Issue included an admission of wrong-doing and an apology. Nobody was trying to change history or claim that it never happened, or worse, that it wasn’t their fault because someone else made them do it. They were sorry, they were trying to change, and thanks to that trajectory, Tony had no problem presenting himself as a modern-day member of their society. He couldn’t grasp his own church’s reluctance to do the same, and eventually felt a bit embarrassed to present himself as a member of a latter-day club that seemed stuck in a former era.

In any case, he hoped his charts might help instill in anyone who visited him the overall message that we’re all in this together. In light of his charts, skin tone seemed like such an arbitrary variable in a couple’s aim for happiness; the idea that metaphorical references equating dark and light to badness and goodness had anything whatsoever to do with skin pigment seemed juvenile to put it in Elder Brown’s words. The fact that a non-matching hue had been paraded around as an insurmountable obstacle by his own church leaders over the years seemed particularly disturbing.

One of the articles he had read in the Race Issue embarrassed and deeply upset him. The article was entitled, “There’s no Scientific Basis for Race – it’s a Made-Up Label.”

The subtitle stated, “It’s been used to define and separate people for millennia. But the concept of race is not grounded in genetics.”

With no scientific basis for racial classifications, the fact that his own charts even used those categories felt a bit sickening to Tony. The article included references to the unfounded ideas that had kept slavery alive for centuries along with the anti-Semitism that his own father had combatted overseas just a generation before. As he read the article, he realized how misguided his own prejudices had been, and that the race-based ideas that had been promoted from the pulpit had been completely off base. There was as little justification for the idea of putting up racial barriers during the civil rights movement in the United States as there had been for classifying Jews as sub-human during the Nazi heyday.

The more he read about genetics, the more infuriated he got. In the end he concluded that if the LDS Church held the keys of the priesthood in the latter days, the restoration that ended the Great Apostacy must have occurred in 1978. Nobody should have held the priesthood at all until that year, because – as Tony came to realize through his reading – we’re all of African descent! Those who claimed to hold the priesthood prior to that day must have been mere posers and counterfeit wannabes, because a supposedly divine ban on those of African descent would technically apply to every homo sapiens on this planet.

Tony wasn’t the only one who had been using supposedly inspired words about made-up labels to limit the choice of a life partner; he knew of many others who had denied true love based on the dose of UV rays that their ancestors had been exposed to. What a crock! It all seemed so obvious in hindsight. Of course it’s irrelevant! The regret Tony felt was channeled into his portrait projects, and as he kept pasting new portraits onto his charts, the word made up in the title of the National Geographic article kept haunting him. If a “made-up” label can be applied from the pulpit by a prophet claiming to speak for God, what else might be made up? Suddenly one day while he stood staring at his living room wall, it all made sense to him at once. That made-up card in the bottom row had never been there in the first place. It had been an illusion all along. As his imaginary house of cards toppled to the ground, he went through the sad realization that his stubborn, unquestioning zeal had limited his life’s perspective during his lifetime of church service.

If race didn’t matter in the first place, surely the Creator of the human race knew that. And if that Creator was funnelling information through a Rocky-Mountain mouthpiece, shouldn’t that equality have been relayed as one of the key, fundamental principles to fight for, come what may? In the past, Mormons had been able to stand up against the adopted system; instead of being ostracized for ideas like polygamy, which after all was the Mormons’ attempt to get the rest of the world to relax their marital classification system, couldn’t those efforts have included dropping race-based restrictions as well as numerical limits on spouses?

Instead, the battle had been fought on the wrong side of the front, and Tony began to see the LDS position on the matter as geriatric stubbornness, driven not by inspiration, but by limited exposure and the fear of losing control over what had been comfortable up to that point. Truth itself had been entirely lost from the equation. The fundamental truth around the equality of the races hadn’t been channelled down to the foot soldiers through the chain of command; it took the masses to push the message up to the Commander-in-Chief. With this wider perspective, Tony’s new formula now had to account for the effects of indoctrination and subordination. No matter how he rearranged the terms, his re-written equation kept converging on the same two-word answer.

Now Tony had been raised not to swear, and there wasn’t anybody around to hear it when it all hit him, but this one time in his life he let it fly:

“Holy $&@%, it’s made up!” he shouted out loud, although nobody was around to hear him, “It’s %^$#&!@ made up!”

Tony died wondering whether anything he had been taught had actually been passed along from God, if there even was such a thing. But he also died grateful for the eye-opening perspective that had shattered his former beliefs and prejudices. He maintained a conviction that grass-roots efforts actually mattered and could spark a positive change. He could also walk down the street and see everyone as equal; regardless of nationality or color or creed, he could genuinely accept the validity of that person’s background and beliefs. And for that he was grateful to the end.

Tony had called his project Interwoven; and the finished product did, indeed, look like a tapestry. Many of the full-resolution photos can be viewed with the hashtag #ThankyouLovings. His estate manager posted his photo of the charts to the hashtag, which prompted a resurgence of interest and awareness. Tony’s chart of nationalities included forty random countries with almost 2,000 portraits; the complete matrix has over 40,000 cells which are gradually filling online as social media campaigns help spread the word. It may take years, but the finished tapestry will serve as a memorial to all of those affected by bigotry and intolerance and to all who joined Tony in his cause of undoing the damage of a defunct dogma.

~~~~~~~~~~

Taking it back to Nathan’s question: If you were Tony back in 1964, walking past that trash can in the Cairo Airport, what would you do? Given his beliefs and his support for the official church policies at the time, what should he have done?

Weren’t there exceptions to the rule? After all, there was at least one exception to the priesthood ban back in Joseph Smith’s day. Couldn’t Tony have considered his situation to be an exception and pursued a relationship driven by love and unrestricted by nationality, asking for customized guidance to his unique, personal plight? Elder Packer acknowledged that there are indeed exceptions to his rule against interracial and international unions, but conveniently added, “I don’t ask to be an exception.” A true follower like Tony would take that advice and fall in line.

Well, in hindsight we can now see that we are all exceptions, because the rule itself was phony. So how about today? Would a person’s religion figure into your decision or into your advice to your own children in choosing a partner? Would it make a difference whether a new love interest was Buddhist, or Hindu, or an atheist?

An unfortunate by-product of exclusive religions is the inability to conceive of the possible validity of alternative viewpoints. In reality, none of us really knows anything about what may or may not come next, and if we could truly appreciate our own ignorance on the matter, a cross-religion relationship could actually be viewed as a positive thing. Rather than the inevitable grief and sorrow that Elder Brown predicts in his teachings, children raised with that sort of tolerance and open-mindedness could learn to appreciate the beauty of both perspectives and be better armed to make decisions about what to adopt as their own life philosophy.

But in reality, I guess I would have to concede that if each partner in a relationship believes that their own dogma provides the only keys to heaven, and that their kids would be locked out for following their partner’s religion, well than yes, sadly, I would say they have no business having kids. Or even being a couple. If you’re Mormon, this is the point where you either send in the missionaries or call it quits right then and there at the airport. In my eyes, though, the problem with interfaith relationships is not the fact that the couple come from differing religious backgrounds; the problem is the exclusive claims of the religions themselves. Can we stop already with that nonsense!

My own grandfather fell for a Catholic girl and spent years of his life writing a book about the fallacy of Catholicism in an attempt to win her over. In the process he held regular meetings with the Catholic Archbishop, got entwined in Bruce R. McConkie’s press battles on the matter, and met with the Mormon prophet and a number of apostles to try to get his book published and distributed as a missionary tract. The title of his book was “Concerning God,” but a more accurately descriptive title would have been, “Why the Catholics are wrong and we Mormons are right.” The effort was doomed from the beginning; he was never going to leave his religion, and she was never going to leave hers. They ended up parting ways with this impasse.

Could they have had a happy relationship as a couple? I doubt it. Not with the prevalent claims of exclusivity at the time. But by the time my own grandkids consider their life partners, I would hope that the deconstruction of untenable truth claims will have dismantled the gated communities and private drives that religions have concocted for themselves. And hopefully future publicity and educational campaigns will continue to build on efforts like the Race Issue and the movie Loving, driving in the absurdity of using the color of your skin – or of your passports – to guide your next move. #ThisIsLoving!

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[Next: Chapter 3 Part 2: Selma]