The Traditions of Our Fathers

How the context in which we're raised affects our access to light and truth

You can listen to the audio version of this essay here.

I recently dressed up like a fool and spoke to a bunch of people I’d never met before. No, I’m not talking about my bespoke on-site clown services for people in hospice, where I cheer the dying by showing up and offering a living reminder that there are in fact people more disappointing than their own children. I’m actually talking about going to a college graduation.

The actual graduation part itself isn’t that bad. The valedictorian speaks, which I always love, and a special commencement speaker does too, and they’re usually good. They announce the names of the graduates and I get to think about how many of them I taught back in the day, and how they’ve grown and how happy I am for them. I get excited for their futures, I get to meet their families. Love all that stuff.

All of that is fine. What I hate about graduation is all the traditions. There’s the funny clothes, like I mentioned, with the robe and the hat and the weird hood for those who have a PhD. (The ceremony when you finish that degree, by the way, is called a “hooding,” which sounds like you’re getting jumped into a gang or something. And you kind of are: the gang of the MIND.) Then we “process”—and it’s not PRO-cess, like the noun, nor PRO-cess the verb, but pro-CESS, the other verb, which means to march in a procession. We process, listening to the same music every year, and the degrees are handed out in the same way, following the same methods that have been followed for as long as anyone can remember.

I recognize, of course, that despite my dislike for them—I didn’t go to my college graduation or my masters degree graduation, and my PhD graduation got canceled because of COVID, so win, win, and win—the traditions are actually what make graduation special. Without the traditions, we’re just a random group of people assembled on the lawn of a tall building. With the traditions, the random assembly turns into a graduation. Traditions play a role in making the event meaningful, and really they make the event what it is. Without them, it’s nothing.

So traditions can turn the normal into the special by giving meaning to something. They can play other roles too, like setting norms for what is acceptable behavior in a particular city or region; traditions often tell us how we do things around here, whoever “we” are and wherever “around here” is. Different traditions can make a place and a people what they are.

All of these functions for traditions are interesting, but today I’d like to focus on an additional one. As well as doing all the things we just said, traditional beliefs form a background against which we judge many other things. Traditional views of the universe, the earth, people, and relationships all impact and even determine our opinions about lots of other things. By “traditional views,” I don’t mean folk beliefs or Native American ideas, I just mean the views that are traditional to you—the ones that were around and active in the places you grew up and had your formative years. This is part of the reason that your parents’ political views are such a powerful predictor of your own political views: those are the traditions that are passed on to you. And level of education is another powerful predictor of politics, exactly because different levels of education in different places inculcate an alternative set of traditions, which tend to lead to certain political views. The traditions are doing a lot of work.

In this essay I’d like to think about the role of traditions in this sense, in their capacity as influencers and even determiners of what we end up believing. These traditions are an essential part of the context in which we receive revelation and interpret the scriptures and other aspects of the gospel, so the play the contextual shaping role we’ve been talking about for a long time now. But the scriptures pay special attention to an idea called the “traditions of our fathers,” and to what those traditions end up doing with our ability to believe. We’ll see that they can be both good and bad as they inevitably affect the way our knowledge grows (or doesn’t grow) in the restored gospel. At least according to the scriptures, they’re one of the most important sources for contextual factors that constrain revelation—and in this respect, they can hold us back or move us forward, perhaps even without our realizing that they’re having an effect at all.

The “traditions of the fathers”

Let’s start with the idea of “traditions,” or as we’ll see it frequently, “traditions of the fathers.” I’d like to explore what the scriptures say about this idea in order to establish a base, and then we’ll view what we’ve come up with through the lens of the principle of context.