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In “The Problem of Pain,” CS Lewis famously says that many people mistake the Father in Heaven for the Grandfather in Heaven—”a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see young people enjoying themselves’ and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all.”

The Grandfather in Heaven is a perversion of the Christian doctrine of God because he does not ask anything of his followers. He doesn’t care if they eat ice cream for breakfast, or if they do their homework, or if they progress in any way into adulthood. He doesn’t have to deal with them when they are the spiritual equivalent of 30 years old and failing to launch. He just wants to make sure that everybody has a good time on his watch.

There is another common perversion of God the Father that rears its head from time to time in both Christian and Latter-day Saint circles. Let’s call him “The Godfather.” Unlike God the Father, the Godfather works through fear and intimidation. He gives us presents and helps us find our car keys, of course. And we may, from time, discreetly ask him to whack an enemy or two and make it looks like an accident. But, in exchange he demands our absolute loyalty. And if we fail him, we may end up sleeping with the fishes.

Like all masters of manipulation, The Godfather knows how to use a person’s family as a lever. This is how trials get tampered with: the star witness will get a picture of their children playing at school, along with a subtle hint that playgrounds can be dangerous, and all of a sudden they can’t remember ever seeing the defendant carrying a body-sized gunny sack down eighty flights of stairs.

There is a spiritual equivalent to this kind of manipulation. When a religious figure or ecclesiastical institution claims to control somebody’s access to their family in the afterlife, they often end up–often not intending to–creating an eternal hostage situation in an effort to compel some sort of earthly behavior–invoking a God who says to us, in effect, “Nice family you got there. Sure be a shame if you was never to see them again when you died because you couldn’t find it in your heart to buy me an airplane.”

Latter-day Saints, I think, are more likely to talk this way than other religions because eternal families are such a key part of our religious understanding. Mormons have a long tradition of replacing “‘till death us do part” with “for time and all eternity” in the wedding ceremony. We have deep doctrines to support this change. And we sometime imagine that we are the only ones who believe this.



We are not. I have found this to be a nearly universal belief among people who believe in an afterlife at all. People of other faiths don’t come to this through a set of ordinance, however, but through their understanding that a God who is all good things would not create a heaven that separated them from the people they loved. People often hold this belief deeply and intuitively, regardless of what may be said by the theologians of the institutions that they are affiliated with–most of which are also not as hostile to the idea of eternal families as Mormons sometimes imagine them to be.

I believe that we should all have enough epistemic humility to grant that we don’t understand the afterlife well enough to say whose families will and will not be there together. There is a whole lot about Mormon Heaven that doesn’t make much sense if you think about it for very long. In our minds, we imagine spending eternity with our children and, perhaps, our parents. But if everybody does this, there is going to have to be a really big house–since the “family” will necessarily include everybody who ever lived. And if “our eternal family” means “everybody,” then it isn’t going to matter much who got picked by the right team in the great gym class of life.

When I was a missionary, I always felt a little bit icky teaching about the Plan of Salvation in a way that, I can see now, often had the effect of telling people “join our church or you won’t see your family again when you die.” And I have always had a really big problem with LDS funerals, where speakers are directly instructed to tell non-members in the audience that they can see their departed loved one again, but only if they join the Church and go to the Temple.

I understand that, when Latter-day Saints talk like this, they are doing so in a spirit of hope. They want to share the good news that families can be forever. But most people already think that families can be forever–and that the love and devotion that they feel for their family will survive into whatever kind of existence comes after this life. So statements like, “you can see your family again if you get baptized and married in the temple” mean exactly the same thing as, “you will never see your family again if you don’t get baptized and married in the temple.” The threat is simply the flip side of the promise–and the promise is a subtle way to deliver the threat.

I am convinced that God doesn’t talk that way. But I know that Marlon Brando does. And when people hear things like this from a pulpit, they need to be very clear who is being quoted.