Just asking for equal time

So i still don’t get the reflexive need that so many Mormons have to loudly and vociferously declare that the Law of Consecration* isn’t communism each and every time the Law of Consecration comes up in a church class—but i’ve come to terms with it as one of those things that will simply always be, whether or not there’s a good reason for it.

So fine, whatever, go ahead and remind everyone that the Law of Consecration isn'’t communism. Knock yourselves out over it.

But please, when you do that, could you also mention that whatever ism it might be, the Law of Consecration also most definitely isn’t capitalism, either?

* Or the United Order. They’re different things,** as i’ve noted before, but yeah, they’re closely enough related that either one fits here.

** Also, the comments on the post linked to there exhibit a most excellent example of what i’m talking about in the main body of today’s post.

Laws? What laws?

The position of the Mormon church is that one should obey the laws of the nation in which one resides. In fact, holding (at least most, maybe even any) callings generally requires that one is not currently in a state of breaking local laws. However, the church makes it a point to not inquire into immigration status—so if someone is a resident of a place but they are breaking the law by not holding a legally valid residency status (i.e., citizenship or some other sort of residency permit), they can still hold a calling. In fact, i have known people who did not hold legal residence status in their country of residence but still received callings as full-time missionaries.

I figure that a number of people find this either good or bad,* but i simply find it interesting that the church has effectively decided to ignore one statutory part of the nature of national borders.

* And note that if there are any comments that seem to me to be even remotely a rant about immigration policy and enforcement, no matter how cogent they might be, will be summarily deleted.

Politics and callings

One really interesting political thing i remember from my exile in Utah is the conventional wisdom that the quickest, most efficient way for an active Mormon male to be called as a mission president was become one’s party nominee for a high-profile Utah state office (e.g., the legislature, governor, congressional representative) and lose. Of course, Utah politics being what they wereare, that means running as a Democrat.* I don’t know if the conventional wisdom is (or ever was) true, but it seemed to be widely held: Run for office in Utah as a Democrat, end up called as a mission president.**

This leads me to wonder: Just idly accepting the conventional wisdom as correct (whether it is or not), we’ve now got Mitt Romney, who unsuccessfully ran as the nominee for national office (president) as a Republican. What’s the script on this one?

* I still remember the blurb in the newspaper one election day talking about the state party gatherings that night in Salt Lake City to watch the election returns come in: The Republicans will celebrate a lot of victories at XXX. The Democrats will celebrate a lot fewer victories, but have a better party, at YYY. The Libertarians will celebrate no victories, but have the best party of all, at ZZZ.

** I heard theories about why this might be the case, as well. The least charitable was that it was an attempt by the Mormon church to weaken the Utah Democratic Party by taking its experienced campaigners out of circulation. The more charitable was that if you’re looking for someone to run a church mission who knows how to deal with the frustrations of spreading a message you firmly believe in to an often-hostile population, you could do worse than use the experience of Democratic politicians from Utah.

Well, this was unexpected

In hopefully the last of my thoughts about the recent United States presidential election, a surprising result: Mitt Romney’s 2012 bid for president pulled in a smaller (only slightly smaller, but still smaller) percentage of the Mormon vote than George W. Bush’s 2004 bid.

Maybe affinity voting isn’t quite as much of a thing as i’d feared, after all.

Pulling rank

So now that Mitt Romney has lost the election for president of the United States, Senate Majority Leader (and Democrat!) Harry Reid continues to be the most highly-placed Mormon in the United States government.

I plan to find excuses to work that fact into conversations i have with other Mormons over the next week or two, just to see what sort of facial muscle twitches i can induce.

You or someone like you

As i write this, i have no idea who’s going to win the race for president of the United States.* I know a lot of people who are going to be voting one way or another, and i know some people are going to be voting for or against Mitt Romney because he’s a Mormon, and some who will be doing so in spite of that fact.

I would like to state, very bluntly and directly, that i find voting for or against someone based on their religious choices silly. It’s what we do, though, so whatever.

With that as background, though, the rest of this is written with the Mormons who are voting for Romney because he’s a Mormon in mind.

Many of the people i know who are voting for Romney are planning on voting for him at least in large part because he’s a Mormon. This makes sense, because a lot of the people in my social circles are Mormon, and affinity voting is a real thing.

Have they really thought this through, though? I still remember someone telling me during the presidential primary season back in 2008 that he was planning on voting for Romney, even though he (my friend) differed with him (Romney) on a lot of issues, “because Romney has the priesthood, and you’ve got to trust the priesthood.” Really?!? I mean, when did someone receiving the priesthood immediately make him trustworthy enough to be offered one of the two or three most powerful jobs on the planet based on that qualification alone?

Seriously, i don’t get it. I mean, i’ve known some priesthood holders who were jerks, and i’ve known some folks who don’t hold the priesthood who are role models at a level i merely hope to one day get somewhere close to.

So what’s with the Mormon affinity thing? Just because he’s one of ours, we suddenly get less critical? Not healthy, folks, not healthy at all.

* I tend to believe that statistically valid samples work, and so i have expectations, but that’s a whole different discussion right there.

What if?

Given my conversations with people, i’m starting to think that there are a number of US Mormons at all points among the political spectrum who are starting to worry that Mitt Romney will end up winning the US presidency…and fall flat on his face, as a bit of an embarrassment to us all.

I mean, here we were all comfortable thinking he was our edition of Al Smith, a sacrificial lamb to pave the way for later Mormons who might want to seek the presidency, but no, here he has to go and start creeping up in the polls—so let the stressing out begin.

Unintended consequences

Not original to me, but courtesy of a Facebook friend: Even if you want Romney to win the upcoming presidential election, don’t you worry just a bit that he will and that that will cause certain Mormons amongst us to become just a little more insufferable?

A questionable fast

So over the weekend i became the latest proud(?) recipient of the email going around asking all the Mormons in the country to spend Sunday, 30 September fasting and praying for the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney.

Can i just say how utterly wrong that is? Or even if it’s not wrong, it’s at least icky. And it’s icky and wrong—or at least it should be—no matter what side of the recent political debates you’re on. (That is, if you even care—and with that, a big Hello! to what the Blogger dashboard tells me is the occasional reader from Germany.)

I mean, c’mon, folks. Get real. Especially when the email contains lines like God loves the United States of America and he wants us to be successful as a nation, followed immediately by If we do all that we can through our hard work and prayers in behalf of Mitt Romney miracles will happen. (I have to admit that when i read that, my first thought was “What, we’ll suddenly be presented with a candidate who’s better than either of our choices? That’d be cool.” But then again, i’m pretty much an unreformed cynic, so you might not have thought the same thing.)

I mean, sure God loves the United States of America. I’m pretty certain about that—just as i’m certain that God loves Canada, and Mexico, and Germany, and Russia, and Kenya, and Djibouti, and Fiji, and India, and Pakistan, and Iran, and Israel, and Syria, and Uzbekistan, and [continue the list for nearly 200 more names of countries]. So why is our presidential election suddenly such a big deal to God? I’m pretty sure it isn’t, at least no more than elections in, say, Rwanda are. God loves all of us equally, after all.

And besides, we’ve already got Mormons in positions of power in the United States, anyway—isn’t Harry Reid, senator from Nevada, the Senate Majority Leader?

Oh, wait—that’s right, i think we can guess from the tenor of this email that since Harry Reid’s politics are (very slightly) left of center, he quite simply doesn’t count. Nope, we apparently need Mitt Romney.

Well, maybe we do—it’d be fun to see a pair of Mormons at utter and complete loggerheads, using every parliamentary trick in the book to stymie each other’s political plans. Maybe then we’d finally get people (and by “people” i’m including a lot of Mormons, too) to realize that we’re not as socially and politically monolithic a group as they think we are.

But back to the email, and another bit of ickiness: We are so excited to be a part of this time in history, to have this special opportunity to stand for liberty. Liberty? Huh? It seems to me that folks on both sides (most all sides, for that matter—let’s not forget the minor candidates) are fans of liberty. It’s not like we’ve got the Archangel Gabriel running against Benito Mussolini here, after all.

The absolute worst part, though, was the bit urging recipients to Please contact all your friends and family everywhere and ask them to join with us in this special day of fast. Ask them to contact all of their friends. Take this message to the churches.

Nuh-uh. No. Absolutely not. The Mormon church is, after all, very fond of its tax-exempt status in the United States, and (at least partly) as a result, this advice is simply against current church policy.

You can take such a message to other members of the church, but to take it to your entire congregation (which is what i get from to the churches)? Not in a Mormon church—if the bishop has been reading his leadership Handbook at all lately, you’ll get smacked down hard and quickly.

And so, on second thought, maybe i actually do wish people had done that—that would have been fun to see.

Falling in love with Uncle Sam

So the recently concluded Fourth of July celebrations led me to wonder why in the world Mormons* have become such a hyperpatriotic people. I mean, this is the country that tried to litigate us out of existence less than a century and a half ago, and that we had to leave to survive less than two centuries ago.

Anybody got any explanations?

* In the United States, at least. I don’t know what the situation is like in other countries.

Workers, unite!

You know, the first verse of “Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel” wouldn’t be out of place at a meeting of a cell of your local Communist Party, right after the singing of “The Internationale”.

More lockstep claims

So in my last post, i wondered aloud where the idea that Mormons are a lockstep people comes from. Wherever it comes from, though, it’s become a part of the narrative, and as evidence for that i give a line from one of Aaron Blake’s recent columns in the Washington Post,* this one about how the Mormon vote has helped Mitt Romney in the past, and how it was expected to help him in today’s caucuses. Here’s the line:

Because Mormons vote in unison and because they turn out in large numbers, a state like Nevada is virtually impossible for any of Romney’s opponents to win.

Did you catch that? “Because Mormons vote in unison…” Interesting phrasing there—it presupposes that Mormons vote in unison, rather than trying to establish whether that’s actually the case. It certainly is the case that Mormons have tended to vote for Romney at rather amazingly high rates in the past, but how would one know that Mormons voting for Romney at such high rates isn’t simply a case of identity politics, rather than the group voting as a (near-)monolithic bloc?

* I grew up near Washington DC, and a lot of the Mormons i grew up around were convinced that the Post was an ardently anti-Mormon newspaper. I never really got that, myself—rather, the newspaper, like very many newspapers, was intensely after the merest whiff of scandal coming from any large organization, and that occasionally meant they reported on negative stuff about the Mormon church. There is a difference between that practice and being anti-Mormon, though—if you’re an equal-opportunity muckracker, i don’t think the charge of being anti-anything-specific can actually stick, you know?

In lockstep

In a comment on my last post, Heather the Mama Duk raised the point that the sociopolitical term conservative is locally defined, really—so polls saying that most Mormons in the United States self-identify as conservative might well not be parsable. Of course, this won’t kill the narrative that Mormons are a lockstep-type people. So:

Why is the idea that Mormons are a monolithic block (socially, politically, religiously, and so on) so pervasive? I mean, anybody who’s talked about caffeine (or Mitt Romney, or traveling on Sunday, or cooking with a wine reduction, or…) with a cross-section of Mormons has disproved that claim by their own experience, so what’s up with the continued vector of this particular pop-culture meme?

Whence conservatism?

So Mormons are of great interest to political reporters here in the United States right now, what with a Mormon locked in a tight race for a major-party presidential nomination and all. One thing that’s frequently been reported is the result of an opinion poll that (supported the conventional wisdom and) found that a majority of Mormons self-describe* as conservative, and only a tiny sliver as liberal.** This leads to a bunch of assumptions about Mormons and their political leanings—but i’m wondering if this isn’t getting the causality precisely backwards.

I mean, a whole bunch of Mormons are from the central Rocky Mountain region, and that’s a pretty conservative region—even states there where Mormons don’t hold a majority (as they do in Utah) are pretty intensely conservative.† So is it that Mormons are generally conservative, or is it that people from the central Rocky Mountain region are generally conservative, and the Mormons from there†† are just along for the ride?

I’m thinking the latter, myself.

* It’s rarely clear whether these surveys mean to measure political, social, economic, or whatever attitudes, and that bugs me.

** That is, “liberal” in the United States sense, not the rest-of-the-English-speaking-world sense.

† In fact, i’d argue that Utah has only the third-most conservative electorate in the region, following Idaho and Wyoming.

†† And very specifically from there, not just living there—i’d expect Mormons from, say, Pocatello, Idaho to be likely to lean right, even if they happened to be living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Are Mormons weird?

So as many of you know, a Mormon, Mitt Romney, currently has the inside track for his party’s nomination for president of the United States. Some months ago there was a bit of a flare-up when some people close to Barack Obama, the incumbent president and his party’s presumptive nominee, called Mitt Romney “weird”. A number of people—including a lot of Mormons—objected to this characterization, saying that weird was being used as a code word for Mormon, and that calling Mitt Romney such things was merely a case of religious bigotry.

Folks? Mitt Romney has done things like taking his family on holiday with his dog strapped to the top of the car. Now, this sort of thing doesn’t really have much direct bearing on someone’s ability to act as president of a country, but it certainly is weird.

Really, Mormons, let’s not be quite that paranoid. It is quite possible for a Mormon to be weird without that weirdness being the result of being Mormon, after all.

Getting it right

True story: My oldest is twelve years old, and so attends young women classes at church. One recent Sunday, the topic of abortion came up, and there was a bit of a pile-on about how it was a horrible, sinful thing, no exceptions. My daughter eventually pointed out that the church’s official position on abortion is actually a bit more nuanced than that (and she then got backed up on that by one of the adults present).

It led me to wonder how often that happens—that is, how often discussions of hot-button issues that start going beyond the church’s actual teachings get reoriented to what the church’s position actually is, and how often things go completely off the rails (which, of course, would lay the foundation for further off-rail-going in the future).

So this is an interesting turn

There’s a presidential election coming up next year here in the United States, and as part of our (insanely) long election process, a few interesting things have come out. First of all, for the first time as far as i can tell, there are two serious candidates who are Mormon, both of them running for the Republican Party’s nomination. Now, the Republican Party is the United States’ mainstream conservative party, but as an example of how socially conservative that party has drifted, consider the following intriguing factoid:

Out of all the candidates for that party’s nomination (and there are quite a few right now), the only two who agree with the scientific consensus that Darwinian evolution is a real thing and with the scientific consensus that global warming is happening and is the result of human activity are…the two Mormons.

Mormonism: The religion of modern science. Who’da thunk it?

David B gingerly touches the third rail, again

Same-sex marriage is a big issue for a lot of people, both within and without the Mormon church.* (In fact, it’s become a big issue for a lot of non-Mormons with regard to how they view the Mormon church itself. But that’s a side issue for today’s topic.)

In pretty much every opinion poll of the US population that i’ve seen on the topic of whether same-sex couples should be allowed to get legally married, there’s been a consistent age breakdown: Those younger than me generally think there’s no problem with the idea, while those older than me think that it should never be allowed—my age seems to be the swing point for this effect.**

I haven’t seen any such polls of Mormons, though. That is, there are plenty of opinion polls that show that Mormons† are generally not in favor of allowing legal same-sex marriages, but there don’t appear to be any easily allowable breakdowns that show whether there’s an age effect among Mormons that parallels that of the general population.††

Anyway, i’m curious whether younger Mormons have different views on the subject of legal recognition of same-sex marriage than older Mormons do. Anyone know if there are any reliable poll numbers on this issue?‡

* And, as i’ve written before, i really don’t get why it’s such a big deal to so many Mormons, but I recognize that it is.

** And it’s not that people tend to be less likely to approve of it as they get older—i’ve been watching the polls on this issue for some years, and it really is my birth year that seems to be the most reliable inflection point.

† Important caveat: I’m talking only about Mormons in the United States here. While i’d be interested to learn the attitudes of Mormons outside of the United States (particularly in jurisdictions where same-sex marriages are legally recognized) on this subject, it’s beyond the bounds of what i can deal with in a single blog post.

†† I did find a report of a poll that reports on the breakdown of recent opinion polling on the subject among Utahns, and it found sharp differences by both religion and age, but it didn’t provide any sort of cross-tabulation ability to figure out what the effect of religion and age was.

‡ And yeah, Gallup may have it, but i’m not going to shell out cash to get past their paywall just to look into this. Maybe i should clarify: Anyone know if there are any reliable poll numbers available for free on this issue?

Who teaches those who teach the teachers?

So (since i brought up church lesson manuals a couple posts ago) i was looking through the church’s Preach My Gospel manual.* This is an important manual—it’s the sourcebook for teaching the teachers of those entering the faith (i.e., the full-time missionaries).

Unfortunately, the teachers apparently aren’t always being taught things that are consonant with current church policy. For the specific case i noticed, a quote from p. 77 [emphasis added]:

Chastity requires faithfulness in thought and action. We must keep our thoughts clean and be modest in our dress, speech, and actions. We must avoid pornography in any form. We should treat the God-given procreative power and our bodies as sacred. Baptismal candidates are to live the law of chastity, which prohibits any sexual relations outside of a legal marriage between a man and a woman. They are not to participate in abortions or homosexual or lesbian relations. Those who have committed sexual sin can repent and be forgiven.

This paragraph summarizes church dogma nicely, except for the bit i bolded—the church’s policy on abortion is actually a bit more nuanced than that, holding that abortion (while always regrettable) is justifiable to the point of not being sinful in cases where the life or health of the mother is seriously jeopardized by the pregnancy, where the fetus will not survive birth, or where the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.**

However, these exceptions†† aren’t mentioned anywhere in Preach My Gospel—and that’s important information for our missionaries to know! If someone asks a missionary what the Mormon church’s position on abortion is, and they base their understanding on the contents of the manual explaining what they’re to teach, our missionaries will be teaching something that doesn’t actually match our church’s policies.‡ This can’t be a good thing, can it?

* I can’t find an online version of it aside from a PDF file containing the whole thing, which seems a bit unwieldy to link to here.

** Such exceptions are one reason some of the more ardent† anti-abortion activist groups consider the Mormon church a pro-abortion group.

† Well, extreme would be a better word than ardent. Even most anti-abortion groups that think the Mormon church carves out too many exceptions generally find the church a worthwhile ally in their cause all in all, i think.

†† For one more exception, as far as i can tell (read: i may well be wrong in this, and would appreciate finding out—but i know of nothing about it either way in the church’s handbooks), a medical professional who is required to perform abortion procedures as a condition of employment has their church standing under no threat (assuming they don’t actively seek out opportunities to do so, presumably).

‡ Rather, the missionary would teach them how to be a good Roman Catholic. I’m happy that we’ve got Catholicism in our world—absolutely beautiful rites, especially if you can find a nice high mass, just nothing but beautiful—but it’s not us.

Politicians as leaders

So my stake was reorganized Sunday before last, and the new stake president is Sheldon Fisher. Interestingly, he has a political past—he unsuccessfully challenged Congressman Don Young in the most recent Republican primary here, running to Young’s right (which, really, is pretty hard to do).

In my memory, political figures in ward and stake leadership tend to be better at keeping politics, even to the level of code words, out of the pulpit than those who aren’t political figures.* (Maybe they know the game, so they know how to avoid it.) I’ll be interested to see if this observation continues to hold true.

* I use the phrase “in my memory” on purpose—i do realize that this hasn’t always been the case (see Benson, Ezra Taft and Roberts, B.H., among many others). My personal memories of these sorts of things, though, only go back to the early 80s or so.