Sharing Some Articles

To My Dear Blog Readers (the few of you there are),

When I am not directly involved in selling wiping rags or doing psychotherapy (my "split personality"), I am usually either listening to music or listening or reading about issues that interest me, and these days those issues are often centered on Mitt Romney and the historic so-called Mormon Moment (LDS people  and beliefs in the national spotlight), the upcoming presidential election, the debate on gay marriage, BYU, sports, and addiction.

I read the following articles/posts and found them interesting. The first two are about the Mormon Moment, and the last is a blog post by Mitch Mayne in which he talks about his relationship with God.  They are worth the time to peruse--I hope you do. 

An Acceptable Prejudice?

May 29, 2012 

By

Thomas C. Terry - Associate Professor of Mass Communications at Idaho State University

It was a fairly typical lunch at an academic conference in the East after the New Hampshire primary in 2008. There was a smattering of endowed professorships and international reputations at the table, perhaps eight academics in all.
Along with the sweet tea and penne pasta came the inevitable skewering of George W. Bush.

"Never has a president experienced such horrible poll approval numbers in the midst of a war," one professor quipped.

"That is, if you overlook Harry Truman," I interjected into an uncomfortable silence.

It was going to be that kind of meal.

Dessert made its appearance and talk turned to the relative merits of the developing college basketball season and presidential candidates. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were hotly debated – the state’s primary promised to be a pivotal one. Then it was onto the Republicans, and Mitt Romney’s name popped up.

"I couldn’t vote for a Mormon," one professor said. There was some polite (or perhaps impolite) head-bobbing. "It’s a cult. Very intolerant, and their opinions about women, and, well ... ” and his voice trailed off.

I mentioned I had just been hired at a college in the West with a sizeable student and local population of Mormons -- Idaho State University, in Pocatello. I wondered rhetorically whether anyone said the same thing in 1960 about voting for John F. Kennedy because he was Roman Catholic. Or for then-Senator Obama because he is African-American. There was that same uncomfortable silence again. I think they felt sorry for me.

I’ve attended numerous scholarly conferences since that lunch where Mormonism has been discussed, and it is amazing to confront snide and disdainful comments and even overt prejudice from intellectually and sophisticated academics. And it seems perfectly acceptable to express this bias. Mormons are abnormal, outside the mainstream; everybody knows that. They don’t drink alcohol and coffee. Their women are suppressed. They don’t like the cross, and their most holy book seems made up. And there’s that multiple-wives thing. At one session involving a discussion of Utah’s history, several dismissive comments were spoken, rather blithely and without any sense of embarrassment. Belittling comments were made about Mormons' abstemiousness, and there was a general negative undercurrent. The LDS Church was referred to as the Mormon Church, something many members object to. They don’t mind being called Mormons, but their church is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or LDS Church. At least some of the professors who were making these remarks knew that.

Yes, Mormons do not embrace the cross as a symbol of Christianity, but it is because they consider it representing state-sanctioned execution and intense suffering. I regard it as a sacrifice on my behalf. Who’s right? Various Christian denominations think that during communion the wine and wafers actually are transformed into the body and blood of Christ – and over the centuries Christians have been derided as cannibals. I was raised to believe that the Eucharist represents the sacrifice of Jesus. Nothing more than different perspectives and beliefs.

Mormons are excoriated in popular culture (see: "The Simpsons") for the way their church was created by someone who was kind of a con man. And the translation of the Book of Mormon was accomplished with a hat. And the Golden Tablets have been lost. Hmmm. The stone tablets of the Ten Commandments were misplaced, too. And a burning bush talking? Really? It comes down to faith, as it should. Not some sort of ignorant bigotry.

Many of the academics consider themselves liberal, socially responsible, and broad-minded individuals, the repository of the best in America. They’re proud of themselves for voting for Barack Obama (a bit too smug maybe?). They would splutter and bluster and be generally outraged to be considered prejudiced. None would consider saying anything similar about African-Americans, Muslims, Jews, Native Americans . . . well, you get the idea. But anti-Mormonism is part of the same continuum that contains discrimination against any group. Why, then, is it allowable publicly express bias against Mormons?

In 2009, The Daily Beast compiled a listing of the top 25 safest and 25 most dangerous college campuses in America, based on two-year per capita data from 9,000 campuses with at least 6,000 students. The two states with the highest proportion of Mormons did pretty well in the safest category: #5 was Idaho State University, Pocatello, where I work;  #13 was Utah State University, Logan, and #17 was Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. No Utah or Idaho schools were on the most dangerous list.

And yet, nestled in the midst of all the good publicity, was this comment about BYU: "Joseph Smith’s golden plates would have been safe at Brigham Young." Would the Daily Beast have said this: “The tablets of the Ten Commandments would have been safe at Brandeis University" or "at Notre Dame University?” Not very likely. But this sort of flippant and biased comment about Mormons is somehow socially acceptable. Responsible people don’t use "Indian giver" anymore (and we shouldn't). But we Welch on deals and get away Scot-free. I have a sprinkling of Welsh and Scottish blood in me, and I don't appreciate those comments.

So what, exactly, is so awful about being Mormon?

Utah is about 72 percent Mormon, so it's a pretty good representation of Mormonism. Among the 50 states, Utah has the lowest child poverty rate, the lowest teen pregnancy rate, the third-lowest abortion rate, the third-highest high school graduate rate at 94 percent, the highest scores on Advanced Placement exams, fewest births to unwed mothers (also the highest overall birthrate), lowest cancer rate, lowest smoking rate, lowest per capita rate of alcohol use, and, arguably, the most comprehensive and universal state health insurance system in the U.S.

Furthermore, Mormons as a group have the lowest rates of violence and depression among religious groups, are seven times less likely to commit suicide (if active church members), and have the lowest divorce rates of any social-religious group. Sixty-five percent of Utah residents have personal computers, the highest penetration rate in the country. Crime has decreased in the state of Utah by anywhere from 15-18 percent over the past 10 years.

Mormon women are more likely to be employed in professional occupations than Catholic or Protestant women (similar to Jewish women) and more likely to graduate from college than Catholic or Protestant women (but less than Jewish women). One survey indicated Mormon women experience more orgasms and are more satisfied with their married lives than non-Mormons.

Plenty of religious groups – from Orthodox Jews to Orthodox Muslims to various mainstream Christian denominations – do not allow women full participation in the life of their church and communities. But disparaging Roman Catholics, for instance, because their church does not allow female clergy, isn’t a knee-jerk reaction to that faith. Yes, Mormon women wear less revealing clothing – no plunging necklines and short-shorts. But is modesty a bad thing?

Glenn Beck is a Mormon, but so is Harry Reid. Other famous Mormons are or were: Harmon Killebrew, Jack Dempsey, J. W. Marriott, Gladys Knight, the Osmonds, Butch Cassidy, and Eldridge Cleaver. What does that tell you about Mormonism? Absolutely nothing.

Sure, many people find it annoying to have Mormon missionaries knock on their doors. But what kind of moral and religious conviction must it take to devote up to two years of your life in service to a higher calling, whether it be community service or religious proselytizing? Isn’t this the sort of commitment we want to encourage in young people, who are too often accused of being selfish and jaded? Having students who have been to Mongolia, Paraguay, and Finland enrich my classes, not diminish them.

At about 13 million members, Mormons are a pretty large cult. So what is so bad about this “cult?” And a cult growing at almost exactly the same rate, decade by decade, as the original Christian church in the 1st and 2nd centuries. It makes no sense, but then bigotry doesn’t. Who wouldn’t want to be on those lists? Seems like good things to be, even if you can’t drink coffee and beer, wear more than one earring per ear, grow a beard (frowned upon only if you want to move up the church hierarchy), and show lots of cleavage. You can have as much hot chocolate and ice cream as you want, though, and I have embraced this provision enthusiastically.

When I first moved to Pocatello, I lived in a cul de sac and seven of my nine neighbors belonged to the LDS Church. Nobody tried to convert me. They invited me to church picnics – no pressure. My next-door neighbor spent nearly two hours one weekday morning (he was late to work) helping me restore my snow blower to life after five years in the humid South. Another helped flush and fix my sprinkler system. A third returned my dogs after they’d escaped. Several just showed up with family members to help me move in. A fourth one tossed me the keys to his Cadillac after the transmission in my Suburban disassembled on my driveway. "Bring it back when you don’t need it anymore," he said.

These are not the faces of intolerance and prejudice.

No. Those faces are in the academic mirror.

I was raised as a member of the United Church of Christ – the same denomination as President Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright – and my sister is an ordained minister in the denomination. I am now Episcopalian. An uncle and aunt and several of my first cousins are Mormons; the first was converted while stationed with the Marine Corps in Hawaii.

Just why is it socially acceptable to denigrate and trivialize and insult a class of people as a class of people? They had a name for that sort of behavior and system in the South a few decades back. You may remember it. It was called Jim Crow.

Is Mormonism Ridiculous

May 23, 2012 By Taylor Petrey -- Assistant Professor of Religion at Kalamazoo College

In The Book of Mormon Broadway musical, the central character Elder Price sings, “I Believe…” followed by a mixed series of benign and ridiculous claims. The genius of the song is that it so perfectly performs widespread American perceptions about Mormonism in the early 21st century.  Elder Price, and Mormons in general, are presented as harboring some naive and strange ideas, but in the end being good people with good intentions who might actually be able to help people.

Mitt Romney’s upcoming nomination as the Republican candidate for President seems to confirm how Mormons generally have come to be understood.  Even Evangelical Republican voters have largely overcome some hesitancy about Mormonism, perhaps accepting it the way viewers of The Book of Mormon musical come to accept Mormons. Romney may hold some wacky religious ideas, but he is a good person who may actually help some people.

Like Elder Price and Mitt Romney, Mormons are praised for certain characteristics: being nice, having good families, valuing industry, thrift, or for being good citizens in the community. These are indeed genuine compliments that any community should be proud of.  What is missing from this list of positive attributes is praise for Mormonism as having any important religious ideas.  In fact, praises of Mormons as people often include the caveat that Mormon ideas and beliefs about angels, golden plates, and Kolob are strange, weird, ridiculous, and sometimes even dangerous.

The common response to the idea of Mormonism’s weirdness is to insist that all religions are weird to some extent.  Mormons and non-Mormons alike utilize this response.  Stephen Colbert said it best when he quipped, “Mormons believe Joseph Smith received golden plates from an angel on a hill, when everybody knows that Moses got stone tablets from a burning bush on a mountain!”  Jon Stewart similarly evaluated the angst about Mormonism as a kind of arbitrary stigmatizing that can apply to any religion. There is something compelling about familiarizing Mormonism by way of defamiliarizing accepted religious stories, yet this also remains unsatisfying to explain why anyone would believe incredulous things.

The trotting out of apparently ridiculous Mormon ideas is evidence of just how little Americans really understand religion.  Religious people of all stripes should be concerned with the way Mormonism is portrayed because it reveals the inability of people to ask the right kind of questions about religion and to discern how religious people construct their worlds.  Discussion of Mormonism in the media tends to reveal the fundamentally unethical way that Americans think about religion, engaging in reductionism, decontextualization, and stereotyping.  It is not enough to suggest that all religious are equally silly (a point Bill Maher’s Religulous makes not in defense of religion, but against it).  This perspective represents a failure to understand religion at all.

Such shallow explanations of Mormonism tend to decontextualize certain details that are embedded within larger narratives in a way that renders them humorous or bizarre, but unintelligible as meaningful religious ideas. It would be like saying that Christianity is about the belief that three Zoroastrian magi followed a star to a house in Bethlehem or Islam is about the idea that Mohammed flew on a horse to Jerusalem.  These may be accurate details, but shorn from the broader context they reveal essentially nothing about Christianity or Islam.  Bullet lists of strange ideas hardly explain what people find compelling about the Christian or Islamic narratives and does little to illuminate the meaning of these religions to billions of adherents.

How then should we think about religions that avoids reducing them to a few salacious ideas?  Iconic scholar of religion J.Z. Smith has suggested that in the way we speak about religion, there is “a tension between religion imagined as an exotic category of human experience and expression, and religion imagined as an ordinary category of human expression and activity.” (Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982], xii.)  In other words, we are often tempted to treat religion as something strange and exotic rather than as a normal way of engaging with the world.  When we engage with the religious ideas of others, we owe them the respect of an explanation of what may be intellectually compelling about them.  What kinds of problems are they seeking to solve?  How do they make sense of the situation around them?

Like most religious traditions, Mormonism emerged to resolve some kind of spiritual or intellectual problems its early adherents saw in the competing options available to them.  In order for Mormonism to survive, it has had to continue to be relevant, to address something that people find compelling.  As the discussion of Mormonism continues in the public sphere, it may be useful to understand what people find compelling about Mormonism, and even why so many apparently smart and capable thinkers remain committed to its teachings.

There is no doubt that public discussions of Mormonism will remain interested in difficult issues from its past, including polygamy and its history of excluding people of African descent from priesthood leadership; and its present, including excluding women from priesthood ordination and its teachings about homosexuality. These discussions are important, and will hopefully be conducted responsibly and fairly. Rather than focus solely on these more problematic and controversial aspects, we might practice an attentiveness toward Mormonism as a paradigm for thinking about religion more broadly, to articulate Mormonism as offering a persuasive evaluation (for some) of human situations. The questions that we should be asking, and Mormons should be answering: How does Mormonism handle the big questions?  What is the meaning of life, of death, of the terrible and the good in the world?  How do Mormon notions about the cosmos affect ethical decisions toward others?  What do Mormon narratives about the past and the present offer their adherents?  These are not simple questions, and the answers are not simple either.  To discuss them at all is a serious endeavor.  While we may laugh (and I think we should) about religion, we can only do so ethically if we learn to think with religion as well.

My relationship with my Savior -- by Mitch Mayne on May 27, 2012

The other day I met with a friend of mine—a non-Mormon, very spiritual man who has committed much of his life to Christ-like service within the LGBTQ community. He is kind, wise, and it is remarkably easy to see my Savior very much alive in both the words and the actions of this man.

We ended up, as we usually do, talking about things of a spiritual nature—specifically, about our own understanding of the nature of God."How," he asked, "do remain so confident about who you are and what you're doing in the face of so many who criticize you?"

Somewhere along the journey of my life, I shared, I bought into a notion of God as a punishing, spiteful, vindictive and judgmental God—quick to smite me if I made a misstep, and slow to love me again, if ever. This concept was resinscribed, it seemed, when I heard others (including leaders within my own faith) interpret scripture to say that God demands perfection and has a zero tolerance policy for those who commit transgression, whether it be by choice or by happenstance.

That was a dark and terrifying way to live. With that kind of vision of God, I had to live a faultless life, and if it were true that God has no tolerance for sin, then it would be up to me to perfect myself first, before I presented myself to Him. Worsening things was the consistent counsel to develop my own, personal relationship with God. Well, quite frankly, when I held a vision of Him as such a terrifying figure not only did I fear building a relationship with Him, but quite honestly imagined myself to have a better life on my own. After all, who wants to have someone—anyone—looking over our shoulder who is just waiting for us to mess up so they can condemn us?

I decided that I had to completely toss out what I thought I knew about my Savior and learn for myself. I began simply, just sitting in a room quietly and beginning to talk to Him the same way I would talk to a trusted friend. By experimenting with a combination of prayer (speaking to my Savior) and meditation (listening for His response) I began, over the course of a few months, to feel more comfortable with this new relationship. This step, for me, was not about church. It wasn’t about any specific religion at all. It was simply about building my own personal understanding of a Savior who would be with me anywhere at anytime—not just one who was accessible for a few hours on Sunday.

And over time, I came to an incredibly simple conclusion—my Savior is my best friend. He shares my hopes, my dreams, my heartache, and my failures. I am free to bring my entire self to this relationship—things that would have been off limits with my previous understanding of God—including intimacy and shortcomings.

Today, I can say anything to my Savior—He knows me that well. Even when I am not at my most eloquent, I can still express my feelings and thoughts stumblingly, and I know He understands my intent. At times, I get angry, like a little child, and kick and yell and want my own way. Then I get to apologize to Him, and through that process, our relationship deepens.

He knows my fears, my defects and my mistakes. He also knows my capacity, my worth, my assets and successes. He knows what I need and provides it for me, even when my sight is not keen enough to ask for it. He gently, and often with a great sense of humor, pushes me in the direction of His will for me. When I have questions, I know it’s okay to ask. My Savior never makes me feel stupid or wrong. He gives me choices—and when I make a mistake, it’s okay. That process only makes us closer.

Developing this relationship with my Savior didn’t only change my understanding of Him, I explained to my friend, it changed my life. Today, I can say with complete certainty, that I am much less reliant on the opinions, needs, and demands of others. I need no longer look outside myself for validation. When I'm right with my Savior, I don't really need to be right with anyone else, regardless of their title or position in my life. All the other stuff falls into place easily and effortlessly, or it falls away completely.

What a much better life it is to have Him as my friend, and to have shrugged off the concept of a God who wants me to suffer because of my mistakes.

Sure, there are those who say my version of my Savior is inaccurate and how I approach Him is even disrespectful—and they are free to have their own understanding of Him, as well. But for me, I’ve genuinely grown to believe that when it comes to my relationship with my Savior the only truly disrespectful thing I can do is to lie to Him, and bring some pre-packaged version of myself to our relationship. After all, He can’t really help me become the person we both want me to be if I am not rigorously honest with Him.

How will you cultivate your relationship with your Savior today?