There are times in life where we must make choices in situations where our self-interest is challenged by moral obligations. They are difficult situations because no one likes to act against his own self-interests. Most people operate out of self-interest most of the time. When a conflict arises, self-interest is often the only consideration; however, for a morally-conscious Latter-day Saint, we are beset by conflicting demands.
Let’s look at a couple of common conflicts and how a morally-conscious member of the Church might deal with them. You’ve probably hear heard the stories that were taught in the Seminary courses regarding devotion to keeping the Sabbath holy. One of them was about a Latter-day Saint soccer player who decides he won’t play in the big game because he has suddenly gained a conviction regarding Sabbath-day observance. Because he was the league’s star player, the league changed the championship game from a Sunday because the fans wouldn’t want to watch the game if he was not playing in it. The lesson from the Seminary manual was that standing strong for the Sabbath could influence the world around you.
Meanwhile, here in the United States, Latter-day Saint football star Steve Young led the San Francisco Forty-Niners to championships, routinely playing Sunday games. Yet Steve Young was used by the Church in promotional spots to encourage people to investigate the Church. It’s not always clear or easy to figure out the moral high ground in such situations.
I faced a moral dilemma like this when I served as a branch president in a very rural area of a Southern state several years ago. About a third of the branch’s members were illegal aliens. As a law-abiding citizen and a Church leader, how do you deal with that. I spent a lot of time on my knees seeking guidance from the Lord over it. I eventually came to the determination that my obligations to serve these brothers and sisters as the Lord’s servant overrode the divine counsel to keep the laws of the land. These Mexican members freely offered service to the branch and worked hard to support their families. Occasionally they needed some welfare assistance, which I felt obligated to provide.
My conviction as a politically-conservative citizen was challenged by this situation. I had one member come to me privately, an older brother who was retired from the military, who said that he had learned that a certain family were not in the United States legally. He felt conflicted and wondered if he should follow the commandments to obey the law and turn them in to the authorities. I discouraged him from doing so and encouraged him him to focus on mercy and kindness toward the family in question.
I have since moved on from the area and on to other responsibilities in Church. I keep in touch with some of this particular family’s members on social media. One of them was but a young deacon when I was his branch president. He has grown up now and his life has taken him away from the Church. Here is where the topic of self-interest and morality comes to me anew.
Over the years, this young man has matured. He really didn’t know he was an illegal alien until he was around sixteen years old. The thought never entered his mind. He went to our public schools, and like many Mexican kids, he gave his white teachers a hard time. Although he was active in the Church as a boy and as teenager, as he grew older, worldly influences grew in his life. When he was sixteen, he went to get a driver’s license and found he couldn’t get one because he didn’t have a birth certificate from one of the United States.
At that point, the separation began with him. In his mind, he was now rejected by the dominant white society. Despite years of wonderful, caring, supportive relationships with white members of the Church who cared about him personally, he began to drift away. His parents’ decision to come to America illegally and violate our immigration laws affected him negatively at this point. He could not enjoy a future as an American due to no fault of his own. His parents discouraged him from serving a mission for the Church because the call might take him across a state line, where they could not protect him. So long as he lived in the remote, rural area in which we lived, they felt he would be safe. This began a process of diminishing the importance of the Church in the young man’s life.
Like most illegal aliens, he still needed to work to make a living. Like most of them do, he obtained a fake ID that uses the social security number of some deceased person. The illegal aliens in the area have a “work name” in addition to their real name. That ID allows him to work. Employers are supposed to use the government’s verification system, but there are many, especially in agribusiness, who just go through the motions and hire the illegals. That seeming necessity to break the law in order to survive, the justification of identity theft, and contact with a criminal underworld also has a way of compromising personal integrity.
I saw the problems this use of false identities could have firsthand where I worked. I was an IT technician for a system of rural health clinics. Before we had electronic medical records, the illegals and migrant workers would come in to be seen for illnesses and injuries. They would provide a fake name, fake social security number, etc. None of them had health insurance and they relied on government to pay for their care, even though they were not citizens and had no right to those benefits. When our clinic switched over to electronic medical records, we basically had to toss out the data on existing patients and re-enroll every patient because, at one of our clinics, the person’s identity might show a young 20-something Mexican man to be a 70 year-old, whereas, at another clinic, the same name and social security number might belong to an actual 70 year-old. Prior to the EMR implementation, patients could have records at several of our clinics. After the implementation, we shared a common database. It took some cajoling to persuade the illegals to provide their real information for the EMR and protect patient safety. None of them wanted their picture entered into the system.
I mention this complicated scenario because the young man in our consideration must, of necessity, enter into this system of deception. The Lord expects us to be honest in our dealings with our fellowman. In the lives of these illegal immigrants, everything they do becomes shrouded in deception.
Finally, I come to the most recent and disturbing interaction with this young man. This week, the same week he became a father (thus passing on the heritage of deception to his daughter), the young man was tweeting about the recent election. During the election, he encouraged friends and followers on social media to vote Democrat, even though he himself could not vote. He caustically jabbed at conservative Christian values that have isolated him from the greater world around him. He sarcastically commented that conservatives shouldn’t start rioting just because they appear to be losing. In this instance, I challenged his assumptions, showing him that the religious right is generally law-abiding and nonviolent. I also encouraged him to study history, showing him the historical connects of the Democrat Party to Indian Removal, slavery, Jim Crow, the Klan, opposition to desegregation and civil rights, etc. He replied that all he cared about was now, not about the past.
As a parent, I know it is a difficult thing to raise your children to be Latter-day Saints in this world. Illegal aliens who are members of the Church are not doing their children any favors by bringing them to the United States and forcing them into a web of deceit and evasion of the duty to obey the constitutional laws of the land. The young man I mentioned is now far from the Church, unmarried, and has a child born out of wedlock. He cares nothing for the teachings of the importance of eternal families, thus he won’t be sealed in the temple (unless he repents and returns).
When it comes to self-interest, the young man, his family, and other illegal immigrants are beholden only to what benefits them. They reject basic morality by living dishonestly on many levels at once. Their moral compromises cause the conflicts that tear American society apart in the debate over what to do with illegal immigrants. That conflict is further complicated because politicians want to exploit the immigrants for their own use. Democrats want to build up a permanent Latino voting bloc. The whole “caravan” thing of thousands of illegals marching to the border was fake. It was orchestrated by George Soros and his minions. Thousands of Guatemalans were paid, clothed, fed, given identifying wristbans, and bused to staged photos shoots along the way. It was a manufactured crisis to force political change and energize a particular narrative. Chamber-of-Commerce Republicans want cheap labor and therefore wink at the violation of immigration laws. Together, they operate to hinder the government’s effort to develop a sane policy. Meanwhile illegal immigrants drive on our roads without licenses or insurance, operate businesses without paying taxes, receive free schooling and health care without contributing to the system, and often, they bring corruption and crime from their home countries into our midst. Unable to fully assimilate, a sizable number of them become a scourge to their communities. In the large metropolitan area where I now live, the southern half of a great city is basically “Little Mexico,” replete with all the criminal problems that residents of their home country experience.
I don’t have a solution, or even a recommended solution to the problem. Like many of the students I teach, they have lived their lives in America without being American. They can’t go back to Mexico and fit in. They can’t fully participate in American life. They become angry, restive, disruptive, and resentful as they get older and experience the conflicts personally. The choice to be moral would be incredibly painful and probably expensive, as well. In that light, they choose self-interest, which is always ephemeral, and offers no lasting resolution.
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