I could have sworn that David A. Bednar used this anecdote in Conference since his call to the Apostleship, but a cursory google search only turns up an old Ricks College devotional from 2001 where he said it, so either I’m massively misremembering, or this is a multiversal Mandela effect, or my Google-fu is weak or whatevs; but in any case, I at least know for sure that Bednar cited Mark Twain at least once in a talk at Ricks, declaring:

“In Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck wrestles with issues of conscience and who he really is. The following statement from Huckleberry teaches all of us an important lesson about real intent and being honest with ourselves and with the Lord, even though in the story Huck himself has not yet truly learned the lesson. 

And I about made up my mind to pray and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It weren’t no use to try and hide it from Him . . . . I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I weren’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, . . . but deep down in me, I knowed it was a lie—and He knowed it. YOU CAN’T PRAY A LIE—I found that out. “

Now, on the one hand, ShipsofHagoth’s entire raison d’être is to read things through our own idiosyncratic lens, so I certainly don’t begrudge Elder Bednar doing the same himself with Huck Finn. And indeed, he is teaching a true principle here–you can’t pray a lie! Certainly, you can’t sincerely pray while being dishonest with yourself and your fellow man; recall how in 1877 at the dedication of the St. George Temple, Brigham Young condemned those “Elders in this Church who would take the widow’s last cow for five dollars, and then kneel down and thank God for the fine bargain they had made”–which sanctimonious self-righteousness was on par with the Pharisees and hypocrites.^[1]If only Bednar had been this direct in condemning Summer Sales as he was of wearing shorts when he was president at Rexburg–or at any other time since. Huck Finn’s “YOU CAN’T PRAY A LIE” is as quotable a line to use for that idea as any.

Yet on the other hand, the English major part of myself just can’t let this flagrant misreading of the text slide–because, when Twain has Huck Finn confess to himself “You can’t pray a lie”, he’s not teaching an important principle, but subverting it.

The context in the novel is that Huck Finn has been sailing down the Missouri river with Jim, an escaped slave who used to belong to his aunt, from whom Huck has also run away. Over the course of their many river adventures together, Jim and Huck have bonded as best friends, with Jim even becoming a sort of surrogate father to Huck^[2]in place of his actual deadbeat, abusive father. However, in chapter 31, slave trackers have captured Jim, and Huck is at a lost of what to do. In the section that Bednar has just quoted, Huck has just tried to kneel down and pray to the Lord for help in rescuing poor Jim, only to realize that he was sinning.

With acerbic venom, Twain portrays good-hearted Huck Finn as feeling that he has sinned, because he has been helping a slave escape from his “rightful” owner. As a born-and-bred Missourian in antebellum America, Huck has been taught his whole life that slaves are property, and that it therefore is a sin to steal someone else’s property, which is what he has been doing by helping Jim escape to freedom. Jim’s capture, he naturally concludes, is his just punishment for having broken the laws of both God and man.

Shortly after he realizes “YOU CAN’T PRAY A LIE,” Huck Finn determines to at last straighten-up and flight right, and he sits down that very moment to write a letter to his aunt, informing her both where she can find him, as well as her runaway slave. Huck Finn feels a weight lift off his shoulders, as he prepares to finally do the “right thing.”

No sooner does he write the letter, however, then does he remember all the times Jim had helped and saved him over the course of their adventures together. He begins to feel how unjust it would be to return Jim to slavery, and his conscience is piqued; yet he also recalls once again how it is a sin to help a slave escape, as he has been taught his whole life–that indeed, if he were to free Jim from slavery, he would be condemning his soul to hell.

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell” he decides, and tears up the letter, and heads off to save Jim.

As a retired BYU lit professor once told me, this is the moment when Huckleberry Finn becomes a Christ figure. Why? Because he is willing to suffer the pains of hell, in order to save his friend–for “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”^[3]John 15:13. And boy, would that have made a more interesting talk.

Don’t get me wrong: “You can’t pray a lie” is true doctrine, and I don’t mind that Bednar taught it.^[4]Although his surface-level reading also single-handedly demonstrates why we need English professors so badly in the first place.. But if we are truly the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, then I nevertheless wish he had also given equal shrift to what this all-important passage has to say about what it actually means to become like Christ–to mourn with those that mourn, to suffer with those that suffer, to “do what is right and let the consequence follow,” and to descend below all things in order to save our friends^[5]Not to mention the importance of following our God-given conscience even when authority figures tell us what we’re doing is a sin, though I also get why an ex-president of BYU-Idaho would be … Continue reading