Problems with Presumptions about Premortality

My patriarchal blessing says I was born into the Church to good parents because of my valiance in the premortal life. This line has always troubled me. I remember thinking at the time, “I was given every chance in the world to succeed and blossom based on my fortunate birth circumstances. If anything, God thought that I was weak and needed extra help to ensure I didn’t fail.” Don’t get me wrong, because I absolutely love the idea of a premortal life of some sort—an era reaching infinitely into the past where I have always existed as some sort of primitive essence. But it seems like this particular idea—that entitlements in this life are predicated upon premortal actions—can be and has been misapplied to the detriment of others.

The idea that we might be able to link premortal righteousness to conditions under which people are born into this life can morph into a sick, twisted excuse to judge others as well as to withhold sympathy for those who are born into tragic circumstances. “After all,” we might smugly reason, “they may have brought this upon themselves in some way.” We might also be tempted to pat ourselves on the back if we are enjoying a lion’s share of blessings, as if we were more deserving of them than others are.

This teaching has been used to make awful justifications for withholding temple blessings and Priesthood ordinations from black people. Bruce McConkie, for instance, wrote in his book Mormon Doctrine, “The race and nation in which men are born in this world is a direct result of their pre-existent life.”¹ He later recanted these racist missteps by saying, “Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whomsoever [sic] has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation. We spoke with a limited understanding and without the light and knowledge that now has come into the world.”² Recently I have been heartened by the stark and official repudiation the Church has cast upon these idle and caustic speculations from the past. Yet these old notions still persist.

Racial implications aside, I think we need to seriously question the utility of linking privileges in this life with prior lives altogether. Even if our birth conditions were indeed affected to some degree by what happened before, this concept is so fraught with potential problems that it needs to be abandoned completely.

I ran into some words of wisdom on this topic from a beloved LDS instructor and essayist named Eugene England:

It is time to reaffirm what seems to me the only scriptural and logical doctrine of the relation of the pre-existence to this life, that our actions and decisions there helped form the internal quality of what we became there and continue to be here, not our color or other external “advantages” of birth. Of course, there is a connection between the pre-existence and what we are here, and it is the obvious one: We are the same people, continuing with the same general kind of character and qualities we had there, but that doesn’t mean that God grades us accordingly by color or condition of birth. In fact, since we are constantly changing and growing, sinning and repenting, we can’t really judge anything about anyone’s pre-existent life. The only thing we need to know and have any right to act upon is that we are all children of God, “alike unto God,” and of infinite potential. As Joseph Smith stated in the King Follett Discourse: “All the minds and spirits that God ever sent into the world are susceptible of enlargement and improvement.” This means that we do not have moral identity, fixed and determined by past actions and signalled by skin color or condition of birth, but rather a moral history and infinite moral potential; we should not be looking for signs by which to judge each other’s moral identity but rejoicing in and doing all we can to help develop every person’s infinite moral potential.

…

If there are any connections, for the rest of us, between our pre-existent character and the external conditions of our birth here—race, family, wealth, position, etc. — we do not have any clue as to what those connections are. We can only be certain, on scriptural warrant, that those connections are not a punishment nor a denial of the Atonement. In fact the most logical connection, given the assumption and scriptural evidence that our heavenly Parents are better than the best earthly ones, is quite different from the usual one in popular Mormon thought. If good earthly parents had a chance to send one child to a badly-run summer camp and one to an excellent one—and one child was sinful and troubled and the other righteous and a good influence—where would they send the troubled child? To the place the child could get the most help, I think the gospel would suggest and most of us would believe. But that means, assuming God is such a good parent, that we who are born into privileged white Mormon families were likely those least valiant in the preexistence and in need of help! I’m very serious about this; such a relationship to the pre-existence, if we insist on any at all, squares much better with what we know of God’s nature than the other notion, which makes God partial, racist, and vindictive.

-Eugene England: Are All Alike Unto God?

Footnotes

¹ Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, 1993 printing, pg. 616
² Bruce R. McConkie, All Are Alike unto God, CES Religious Educators Symposium, August 18, 1978