The Liberal Shall Be Blessed
(If We Know What Liberal Means)

by Davis Bitton

Some of my best friends call themselves liberals.  They like to think the political left in current American politics represents the ideals of the gospel.  Karl Marx must be chortling in his grave.

I grant them the right to use this honorable word and to make their case.  While not buying their argument in general, I can see some merit to it.  But we can be vastly confused by words, their associated meanings, and their changes across time.  Sometimes we think we are communicating when we are not.  We smile and nod our heads while assigning very different meanings to the key words in our conversation.

Words have a history.  They are not set in concrete.  They pass out of usage, and new terms enter our workaday vocabulary.  New meanings become attached to old terms.

Are you neat?  Are you cool?   Knowing that these words have meanings beyond orderliness and a temperature that is less than warm, you smile knowingly and agree to accept the compliment.  But how easily we date ourselves.  In rap usage, as I understand, what you want to be known as is bad.  Jim Croce anticipated the current crop of rapsters when he sang of “bad, bad LeRoy Brown, baddest man in the whole damn town, badder than old King Kong, meaner than a junkyard dog.”

Historians, if they would avoid serious misunderstanding, must pay close attention to the history of words.

I remember hearing a debate between Joseph E. Williams and the Democrat candidate for office in Idaho.  “Resolved, that the United States is a republic and not a democracy.”  It is a stock argument that may never go away.  Contained in these terms are differing conceptions of American government and the meaning of the Constitution.

Our good Brother Williams, our stake president and a prominent state senator, gained a huge head start in his opening remarks.  Then his opponent came along and began quoting statement after statement by prominent Americans from the Civil War onward who described their country as a democracy.  The author of the American Creed, you may remember, has it both ways–“a democracy in a republic.”

Quite a few years later, in graduate school, I studied with Robert R. Palmer, an eminent historian of the French Revolution.  His interests were much broader than the cataclysmic event, or series of events, in France.  He put us graduate students to work on specific research projects that later helped him write his great two-volume work The Age of Democratic Revolutions.

One of Palmer’s published articles examined the usage of democrat, democratic, and democracy in colonial and revolutionary America.  Nobody admired this idea then, and to call yourself a democrat was a sure ticket to political oblivion.  To judge from the context and associated expressions, the term meant rabble-rouser, someone who stirs up the masses, someone who thinks, heaven forfend, that ordinary people, the great unwashed, should rule.

It seemed obvious then that political power should be in the hands of people with a stake in the stability of the country (hence a property requirement for voting), people with at least a certain level of education and understanding (hence literacy requirements before paying your poll tax).

These negative meanings continued to be attached to democrat for a long time, and perhaps still linger.  In the meantime, of course, as American political history developed and with the rise of new party labels to replace the old, some people were using the term proudly and with a much more positive intended meaning.  Democrat Woodrow Wilson wanted to “make the world safe for democracy.”  It wouldn’t be quite fair to accuse Democrats now of advocating mob rule.

What, then, does it mean to be liberal?  When Joseph Smith was leading the Latter-day Saints, he praised those who were liberal.  In September 1843, when he opened the Nauvoo Mansion as a hotel, he explained: “My house has been a home and resting-place for thousands, and my family many times obliged to do without food, after having fed all they had to visitors; and I could have continued the same liberal course, had it not been for the cruel and untiring persecution of my relentless enemies.”  (HC 6:33).  “Woe to ye rich men, who refuse to give to the poor, and then come and ask me for bread,” he said on another occasion.  “Away with all your meanness, and be liberal.”  (HC 6:56-59).

So Joseph Smith urged people to be liberal.  Therefore we today should find the most “liberal” candidate and vote for him or her.  Is that the intended meaning?  Hardly!   Only someone lacking historical awareness would ignore the historical shifts in the meaning of words.

An indispensable resource when engaged in this kind of analysis is the Oxford English Dictionary (often known as the OED).  As we all know, many words have more than one definition.  The numerous examples provided of how the terms were used, arranged chronologically, illustrate shades and shifts of meaning.  The OED is an inexhaustible resource for students of the history of ideas.

We discover that the adjective liberal, going back to its Latin root meaning, was assigned to those subjects “worthy of a free man.”  These are the liberal arts.  The idea is that one is not satisfied with merely learning skills but enlarges understanding through the study of literature, history, and other subjects.  This question is still with us.  In today’s job market one appreciates the importance of specific skills.  At the same time, to be truly educated, should not a person be literate and aware of the wider world, past and present?

After other meanings we come to the political.  Thinking back into the early and middle nineteenth century, your liberal was in favor of reform–economic reform, social reform, political reform.  In England this included extending the suffrage by means of the great reform bills.  By the turn of the century there was in England a Liberal Party.

Neither of these two definitions, educational or political, although they may express admirable goals, helps us much in understanding Joseph Smith’s statements.

Another definition of liberal is “bountiful, generous, open-hearted.”  Aha!  I think we clearly see what the Prophet had in mind.

It takes little time with the Topical Guide to discover the terms liberal in the Bible.  Proverbs 11:25 tells us “the liberal soul shall be made fat.”  I’m not sure that inspires me very much, but I had better follow my own advice and discover what the writer, actually the King James translator, meant by fat.  “Well supplied with what is needful or desirable”–okay, that is a blessing worth pursuing.

My good friend Jill Mulvay Derr, a fine historian, wrote an article about Sarah Grainger Kimball entitled “The Liberal Shall Be Blessed.”   Too little remembered and appreciated during her lifetime and down to the present, Sarah was a great Latter-day Saint woman, a liberal woman.  But her qualities will be seriously misunderstood if the term evokes the values of the Sixties generation or the perverse applications of the term by Noam Chomsky and his followers.  No.  Generosity, compassion, giving and helping others–these are the qualities praised by the scriptures, exemplified, by Sister Kimball, and still worthy of our earnest endeavor.

As we allocate our time and resources, we can do worse than think upon, and perhaps frame for our wall or refrigerator, the following words from the Book of Mormon.  Describing righteous Nephites who were “exceedingly rich,” the author says:

 “And thus, in their prosperous circumstances, they did not send away any who were naked, or that were hungry, or that were athirst, or that were sick, or that had not been nourished; and they did not set their hearts upon riches; therefore they were liberal to all, both old and young, both bond and free, both male and female, whether out of the church or in the church, having no respect to persons as to those who stood in need” (Alma 1:30).

If we pay an honest tithing, a generous fast offering, and a significant amount to the Humanitarian, Missionary, and Perpetual Education Funds, we are being liberal in the grand old sense of the word.  If we donate to private charities and participate in community service, we are liberal.  Who is more liberal than God, who “giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not” (James 1:5)?

Ah, the history of words.  With some attention to the history of words, their shifts and shades of meaning, we can at least understand each other better.