I worry that the bloggernacle is a crucial cog within a cultural machine that takes prophetic religions and transforms them into secular and therefore apostate institutions.\u00a0 I worry that the same mechanisms by which modern intellectuals overthrew feudal society are also attempting to secularize the church today.\u00a0 (I have a strong suspicion that a very similar process characterized the transition from apostles and prophets to theologians and state authorities in the early church.) \u00a0I will follow Jurgen Habermas in calling this mechanism, \u201cthe public sphere.\u201d\u00a0 Let me first give a very brief description of the role that the public sphere played in the overthrow of feudal society before I articulate the rather obvious parallels which I see in the bloggernacle.\u00a0 (All references are from The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jurgen Habermas)<\/p>\n
The public sphere can roughly be characterized as any forum in which 1) participation is open to all, 2) all participant are considered equal, and 3) any issue can be raised for rational debate.\u00a0 A public sphere emerges and operates within and in opposition to some context in which some institutionalized authority has, or is perceived to have control over the media as it relates to itself.\u00a0 Critically, this institutionalized authority does not use the \u201cpress and broadcast media\u201d to provide \u201cpublic information and debate,\u201d but rather uses it \u201cas technologies for managing consensus and promoting [its own] culture\u201d \u2013 that culture which serves and forwards its own interests rather than those of the general public. (p. xii)\u00a0 Whereas the public sphere in the contemporary world is (ideally) meant to check and undermine both state as well as capitalist attempts at using the media in such ways, its rise in the 17th<\/sup> and 18th<\/sup> centuries was primarily an expression of capitalist attempts at checking and undermining such uses of the media by the absolutist state within feudal society:<\/p>\n \u201cIn its clash with the arcane and bureaucratic practices of the absolutist state, the emergent bourgeoisie gradually replaced a public sphere in which the ruler\u2019s power was merely represented before the people with a sphere in which state authority was publicly monitored through informed and critical discourse by the people.\u201d (p. xi)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Habermas sees the public sphere as the critical mechanism whereby democratic sovereignty came to replace monarchical sovereignty in the west.\u00a0 He also suggests that the compromise of the public sphere by contemporary capitalist influences is exactly what undermines the prospects for democratic societies today.\u00a0 In both cases, it is the creation and demise of uncensored, critical reason within the public sphere that is responsible for the respective creation and demise of democratic society:<\/p>\n \u201cWhile the historical structures of the liberal public sphere reflected the particular constellation of interests that gave rise to it, the idea it claimed to embody \u2013 that of rationalizing public authority under the institutionalized influence of informed discussion and reasoned argument \u2013 remains central to democratic theory.\u201d (p. xii)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Habermas gives the following account of struggle in which the early capitalists used reasoned publications within the public sphere to wrest authority away from, monitor and to some extent delegitimize state authority while the state authority tried to contain and censor such attacks \u2013 for attacks are exactly what these publications were:<\/p>\n \u201cIn the guise of the so-called learned article, critical reasoning made its way into the daily press.\u00a0 When, from 1729 on, the Hallenser Intelligenzblatt<\/em>\u2026 published learned articles, book reviews, and occasionally \u2018a historical report sketched by a professor and relevant to current events,\u2019 the Prussian King was moved to take the development into his own hands.\u00a0 Even the use of one\u2019s own reason as such was subjected to regulation\u2026 In general \u2018the scholars were to inform the public of useful truths.\u2019\u00a0 In this instance the bourgeois writers still made use of their reason at the behest of the territorial ruler; [but] soon they were to think their own thoughts, directed against the authorities.\u00a0 In a rescript of Fredrick II from 1784 one reads: \u2018A private person has no right to pass public and perhaps even disapproving judgment on the actions, procedures, laws, regulations, and ordinances of sovereigns and courts ,their officials, assemblies, and courts of law, or to promulgate or publish in print pertinent reports that he manages to obtain.\u00a0 For a private person is not at all capable of making such judgment, because he lacks complete knowledge of circumstances and motives.\u2019\u2026 The inhibited judgments were called \u2018public\u2019 in view of a public sphere that without question had counted as a sphere of public [stately] authority, but was now casting itself loose as a forum in which the private people, come together to form a public, readied themselves to compel public [stately] authority to legitimate itself before public opinion.\u201d (p. 25)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In this account we see criticism of the institutional authorities being published under the guise of academic research.\u00a0 There is a subtle transition in which the publishing and reasoning that are encouraged by the institutional authorities gradually become publishing and reasoning against these same authorities.\u00a0 The institutional authorities responded in turn with a degree of censorship, by encouraging scholars to focus on more \u201cuseful truths\u201d and insisting that the non-institutional public is in no position to pass negative judgment on its policies and dealings.\u00a0 The triumph of democracy was thus marked the demise of stately authority as the \u201cpeople\u2019s public use of their reason \u2026 claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves.\u201d (p. 27)<\/p>\n I hope this sounds at least somewhat familiar, since the \u201cpeople\u2019s use of reason\u201d against our church authorities has played out in almost the exact same manner, down to the verbiage.\u00a0 Early Mormon studies were originally pursued at the behest of the church authorities, the latter insisting that we seek all forms of learning from the best books.\u00a0 These learned articles soon brought to light information which fueled, if not functioned as a criticism of the contemporary church and its authorities.\u00a0 The church then pushes back by censoring and disciplining various scholars and disallowing easy access to revelant information while insisting that \u201csome things that are true are not very useful.\u201d \u00a0Soon after this, many of these scholars and intellectuals flee the public light to the privacy of various online and private mailing groups.\u00a0 These mailing groups eventually become the direct precursors to the public blogs that would later form the heart of the bloggernacle.\u00a0 This online forum soon becomes the very epitome of the public sphere \u2013 a forum in which all people have equal access and legitimacy to problematize any aspect of Mormonism such that gospel discussion comes to be no longer regulated from above by priesthood authority but is instead brought against the priesthood authorities themselves.\u00a0 This forum then becomes the primary recruiting pool for various social movements which unambiguously and directly call for church authorities to answer to the public use of reason.\u00a0 When the heads of such movements are brought before various church courts, the general and public membership is again reminded that they are in no position to pass judgment on the proceedings of these courts.\u00a0 The parallels in the conflicts between the bourgeoisie and the feudal state and the conflicts between the bloggernacle and the priesthood authorities couldn\u2019t be more striking.<\/p>\n Up until this point, many readers will construe my account as itself being an indictment of the church and its authorities, but such a thing is the exact opposite of what I intend.\u00a0 There are two points which serve to put my account in its intended perspective:<\/p>\n 1)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The public\u2019s use of reason is the very heart of democratic society and as such is used to check and undermine all authority: stately, corporate and ecclesiastical.<\/p>\n 2)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The church is not and was never meant to be a democracy whose heart is the public\u2019s use of reason.<\/p>\n These two points highlight the contradictions which exist between the church and the democratic world around it.\u00a0 It seems clear to me that we as faithful members of the church within a larger democratic society are under an obligation to bring the public use of reason against all forms of authority except<\/em> the authority of God that functions within the church.\u00a0 Accordingly, faithful bloggers are meant to bring their publishing and reasoning under priesthood authority rather than against it.\u00a0 It will be remembered that institutionalized authority is used to manage consensus and promote its own culture, a culture which serves and furthers its own interests.<\/p>\n The question, then, becomes this: Do we have a testimony of the authorities, culture and interests of the church? \u00a0\u00a0If so, then we too should object to the ways in which the public\u2019s use of reason is brought against the church and its authorities within the bloggernacle and will likely sustain the institution\u2019s efforts to protect itself against such attacks.\u00a0 If not, then we too should object to the institution\u2019s attacks upon the public sphere of which the bloggernacle is a part and will instead support the ways in which the public use of reason is brought against the church and its authorities.\u00a0 The contradictions between the church and the democratic world around it present a zero-sum battle in which support for one side constitutes an attack to the other.<\/p>\n Thus, I see the bloggernacle as a critical battle ground in the war of the church against the democratic world.\u00a0 It is the place where the seamless and unconscious transition is made in which public reason ceases to be a representation of church authority and becomes instead a constraint upon church authority. \u00a0In the exact same way that democratic values and practices functioned to undermine and replace feudal institutions and authorities, those same democratic values and practices function to undermine and replace the church and its priesthood authorities and the interests that they represent.\u00a0 No doubt, there are those within the bloggernacle who disagree with my diagnosis, but the onus is upon them to demonstrate how the relationship between the bloggernacle and the church is significantly different from that which existed between the bourgeoisie and the feudal state.