Mormon beefcake

Very weird, given that you do not need to be LDS to be a student there (e.g., Jim MacMahon).

Given that (as Bill Gardner points out) you don’t have to be LDS to attend BYU, it’s hard to imagine that the outfits that accredit universities wouldn’t be concerned about this. Perhaps I’m naive, but it does seem like a violation, at least in spirit, of how something recognized as a “university” (and granted that status by secular society) can comport itself.

I have no desire to get into arguments about my church or my alma mater (especially since my fondness of the latter is only moderate, at best), but for what it’s worth:

1) We don’t know what he was excommunicated for, Matt. Church disciplinary courts very rarely make any kind of public statement. Maybe he was excommunicated for making the posters. Maybe he was excommunicated because he, like Teresa, had no faith in and thus no desire to sustain to a bunch of uptight, self-righteous lay leaders. Maybe he was excommunicated because he was sleeping around. We don’t know.

2) BYU has significantly tighted its religious and moral standards of admittance and graduation since Jim McMahon’s time, Bill and Patrick. You have to receive regular ecclesiastical endorsements to stay at the school, from semester to semester, year to year, contract to contract (yes, it covers faculty too). I have no idea what the Honor Code says these days, but I would be flabbergast if there wasn’t very explicit language in there stating that former Mormons who had left the church through excommunication wouldn’t receive their diplomas.

3) Henry, we generally don’t capitalize the “d” in “day.” It’s “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Thanks.

Can Patrick or someone who knows a lot about Mormons and Mormonism explain to me the seemingly paradoxical experience by me (and echoed by many others I’ve talked with) that, although the Mormon religion is exceptionally regressive and apparently intolerant, almost all of the Mormons I’ve known have been exceptionally nice people that gave me the strong impression of being truly good?

What I’m trying to get at is that this is interestingly in contrast to my experience of people of other faiths who have roughly the same very culturally conservative values; the typical culturally conservative evangelical, for example. They’re angry and alienated, mistrust everyone not like themselves; and, more to the point, aren’t nice to people who aren’t like themselves. The Mormons I’ve known, however, have almost been uniformly nice. They gave the impression of tolerance, though I know that can’t be true, essentially, given their beliefs. (And I’m including many people here whom I knew to be devout.)

Does it have something to do with being a minority and often mistrusted religion in American culture? Even though it’s not nearly so marginalized as it once was?

I’ve had better, more productive, more friendly, and more intellectually rigorous conversations with Mormons about matters of religious belief and related matters than I have ever had with the numerous Protestant cultural conservatives I’ve known. And yet, both the belief system itself and many of its very conservative values are the kinds of things that I tend to attribute to (what I perceive as) being the cause of the common vices of other kinds of religious conservatives—the things I already mentioned, which can be generalized as a sort of indiscriminate hatefulness.

Is there some imperative to be friendly to outsiders, perhaps for proselytizing reasons?

I’ve been puzzled about this for years and years.

that’s my experience too, keith.

relatedly: mormon missionaries in third world countries have sometimes been observed doing actual good, i.e. positively improving the lives of the people in those countries. this too is somewhat anomalous for the broader category.

hypothesis: part of what makes your typical mormon more tolerant than other religious conservatives is the fact that they have to learn–really learn–a foreign language. i have run into mormons (and ex-mormons) who were fluent in some languages that were pretty damned difficult and out-of-the-way.
(this hypothesis is a weird sort of meta-sapir-whorff: if you learn multiple languages, then you ipso facto imbibe multiple outlooks. i don’t believe it; i merely speculate).

Here’s two thoughts on the “nice” issue. First, despite its roots in New York State and some time in the mid-west, Mormonism is really a western phenomena. And, people in the west are “nice”. If you spend much time in the east or in some parts of Europe or the like, it can freak you out how nice people in the west are- very friendly and helpful. It gets down-right oppressive after a while. So, some of it is that. More speculatively- Mormons don’t really believe in hell. As I recall it, the worst place most people could end up (the telestial kingdom) is very nice. So nice, you’d kill yourself to get to go there if you saw it. Or at least late 19th century Americans would. Maybe now days people wouldn’t. But, believing in endless lakes of fire, people being stabbed by demons and eaten and shat out over and over, and that you’ll take joy in it and that God likes that sort of thing, well, it doesn’t help your niceness level very much. But if you don’t think God is taking pleasure in torturing most people for all eternity, maybe you’ll be nicer, too. It helps one’s outlook, anyway, and makes the who religion less dismal and unpleasant. There’s a sort of culture of service, an idea of being good neighbors, and trying to love others, too, that’s taken fairly seriously. It’s most actively directed at fellow members, but not only. Those things add up.

There are probably any number of naturalistic or sociological explanations for that question, Keith, and then there are devotional explanations. The naturalistic or sociological explanations would be things like: yes, as a proselytizing church, with a great many of us have served missions for the church, there is a great emphasis on and presumbly some skill at presenting oneself as tolerant and open-minded and developing “relationships of trust,” as the old missionary manuals used to say, even if the culture or language or customs seem bizarre or evil to you. Or maybe: the particular theological and ecclesiastical structure of the church–post-polygamy, anyway–has encouraged members of the church (though that may be changing as the church leadership finds itself more and more often committed to stereotypically conservative “culture war” positions) to be active and optimistic participants in the better elements of modern life, to accept science and capitalism and education and the pluralism they inevitably produce. Or maybe: the history of church, filled as it is with story after story of the years of persecution and hostility, ending with the church being driven pretty much to extinction before it caved to government pressure, has engrained into Mormon practice a sensitivity to exclusion, as well a belief that the best practical response to hostility is to get along by emphasizing commonalities, and not pick fights where unnecessary. Or also: as a church built around a lay leadership, with the overwhelming majority of the work that must be done to keep the whole operation running being provided by volunteers, there’s an intense community spirit which develops, a constant awareness of the need to pitch in and help out others when they’re overworked or ill or in trouble, and that communitarian sensibility results in a general desire to try to do the same in our neighborhoods, workplaces, etc.

The devotional explanation, of course, would be that, well, we’ve got the Holy Ghost, and the gifts of the spirit, and they bless us so as not to be assholes quite as often as we might be otherwise.

Or also: as a church built around a lay leadership, with the overwhelming majority of the work that must be done to keep the whole operation running being provided by volunteers, there’s an intense community spirit which develops

Whatever it is, it’s not that. My grandparents on one side were Plymouth Brethren, and they were as closed-minded, self-righteous and ungenerous as you like. “We’ve got the Holy Ghost and you can’t have any!”

Actually I think the devotional explanation, or at least a sociological version of it, is probably the strongest. I’ve only met a few LDS people, but yes, they were all genuinely nice people – they reminded me in that respect of some of the better Anglicans and Catholics and Marxists I’ve known. Faith does have that effect, sometimes. Perhaps the question is why it so often doesn’t.

Put me down as someone else who shares previous posters’ lifelong experience of Mormon personal decency toward those who don’t share their faith. I too think that this makes (most) Mormons I’ve met* rather unlike (most) theologically conservative Catholics and Protestants I’ve known.** I’ll also admit to having a lifelong sociological/historical fascination with Mormonism, though I’ve never really been able to put my finger on why I find them so much more interesting than other religious movements with which I have no personal connection. Thanks, too, to Russell Arben Fox for acting as an excellent native informant throughout this thread.

______________________

* It might be worth noting that I’ve never met Mitt Romney.

** In this regard Latter-day Saints also compare rather favorably with analytic philosophers.

I’ll echo the other commenters in that most Mormons I have met have been very decent people.

Possibly it’s because of a recent memory of persecution of their faith.

I feel guilty, though, because I find Mormonism as a religion (rather than as a social grouping) somewhat hard to take seriously, givne the account of how Joe Smith found the scriptures and that that archeology and genetic analysis make its scriptures scientifically falsifible. It seems too forced, too strained, probably because (like the Koran), its scriptures are the work of one man rather than (like the Bible and Torah) the work of multiple authors edited over time to remove the more blatant inconsistencies. It still needs to find its Aquinas. But it has shown itself to be very flexible, and goddamn they are nice people.

While I had many very good LDS friends when I lived in Utah, I also knew quite a few people who would become friendly, then never want to talk again after they were convinced that I would not convert.

Yeah, I try not to overlook that. But I grew up in Eastern New Mexico where Mormons are visible, but a minority. And so a portion of those I’ve known (probably half I’ve known in other environments than my childhood and where the above might apply) live around people who are mostly not Mormon and they don’t expect to convert them. Yet, they still were noticeably nicer people than, say, the Baptists I knew.

Probably like others who have commented here, I’m an atheist since early adulthood and so I generally feel like a stranger in a strange land. Every believer I meet, which is basically everyone, is someone to whom I’m an outsider. And I was an open-minded, intellectually rigorous “seeker” from childhood through adolescence, so I’ve been accumulating interactions with other people concerning their beliefs my entire life. Thus, it’s not a trivial number of interactions and therefore I don’t think that my general comparative observation about Mormons is unreliable.

I’ve only met a few LDS people, but yes, they were all genuinely nice people

In my youth in the West, I met a fair number of Mormons who were arrogant and hostile, although of course by no means all Mormons fit that description.

As an outsider to this site, I have to say I’m struck by how *nice* and *civil* the commenters on Crooked Timber all seem to be. Not like those snarky, nasty ones on Matt and Kevin’s blogs. Oh, and I agree about Mormons being nice.

well, exactly, kmack. no one here is saying that the church itself is an enlightened institution. personally, i think it’s an abomination.

but that, i take it, is exactly the background fact which makes the personal decency of the individuals worthy of note.

What’s the relevance of personal “niceness” here, and how did that diversion get preposterously parlayed into a claim about Mormon toleration? Many evangelical Christians—if not many Republican activist ones—seem “nice” enough.

What kid blitzer wrote. Except that I’d reiterate my claim—coming from someone who has almost always been surrounded by a majority of evangelical Christians and Republicans—that, no, comparatively to Mormons, not that many have seemed that unusually “nice”.

Believe me, I’m furious about the LDS’s backing of Prop 8. As well as their many official unusually regressive policies. That’s exactly why I find it remarkable that most Mormons I’ve known I would easily classify as good people, while this certainly is not true of other groups with comparable values. That’s what’s so strange. I think they’re good in spite of their regressive, intolerant values and I’m extremely curious about why this is the case.

It goes right to the heart of an aphorism I made up and repeated often when I was young, but don’t mention much anymore: most people don’t believe what they believe. My point is that I’m not sure that peoples’ beliefs reliably correlate with their goodness. Goodness has everything to do with you relate to people on a one-to-one basis. It should have everything to do with your politics in a democracy, too; but, unfortunately, I don’t think it does.

It seems to me that, for example, the same homophobic and misogynist values one sees in the LDS and in conservative cultural evangelicals are actually quite disimmilar on how the relate to how they relate to the individual member of LDS and conservative evangelical churches. For many of the evangelicals, these antagonist and intolerant values are the chief attraction of the faith; I don’t think that’s the case with Mormons. I think Mormons are Mormons in spite of the fact that these values are antagonist and intolerant…I suspect they wish they could convert everyone so that they could avoid the conflict. Most of the outspoken cultural conservatives, however, particularly evangelicals of the Roberston/Falwell ilk, I strongly suspect would always find enemies and people to be intolerant of. So even if the values vis a vis belief and faith are the same, I don’t think they’re the same as the personal values and temperaments, if you see what I’m getting at.

Goodness has everything to do with [how] you relate to people on a one-to-one basis.

You make an interesting observation, Keith, but everything in it boils down this this assumption. Good people, you assume, can’t really believe in something that would result in less than good things (as you define them) happening to people a one-to-one basis, even if they say they do believe those things, because their personal goodness–their one-to-one niceness–puts a lie to those beliefs. Yet I think your basic assumption is highly contestable. I, for one, think it is entirely possible and reasonable for goodness to reside in, for example, a state of approval before God, that will not necessarily always result in one-to-one niceness. You can disagree, of course, but your disagreement would have to involve contesting the premises of that belief and defending your own, rather than just shaking your head in disbelief.

“Can Patrick or someone who knows a lot about Mormons and Mormonism explain to me the seemingly paradoxical experience by me (and echoed by many others I’ve talked with) that, although the Mormon religion is exceptionally regressive and apparently intolerant, almost all of the Mormons I’ve known have been exceptionally nice people that gave me the strong impression of being truly good?

What I’m trying to get at is that this is interestingly in contrast to my experience of people of other faiths who have roughly the same very culturally conservative values; the typical culturally conservative evangelical, for example. They’re angry and alienated, mistrust everyone not like themselves; and, more to the point, aren’t nice to people who aren’t like themselves.”

I wonder if the following claims are really all that surprising:

First, it may seem strange but it is possible to belong to a religion with some doctrines that are intolerant (e.g., all people who don’t believe as we do or act as we say are all going to hell) and even believe the doctrines of that religion and be extremely kind to all those heathens/heretics/hell-bound people. I agree with you that this isn’t what a person would expect unless they have regular contact with these people, who are unlike ourselves. The whole story is a little bit more complex. First, they are supposed to be kind and loving toward others if they are Christians–there are other ethical requirements for Muslims. I don’t know the specifics there. But ‘fundamentalist’ Muslims I’ve met seem both like good people and nice to infidels (or at least me). Many religions have strains of tolerance and intolerance, both ethical condemnation and ethical reverence for human beings as such. Their standards for personal behavior toward others usually require treating others well, whatever their ultimate destination after death. In pathological cases, religion functions like nationalism or similar things and yes, then you could be in trouble if you aren’t a believer. But in daily life, not so much.

Do you actually know a bunch of culturally conservative evangelicals? Were they really all like this? In my experience, they are not all like this, particularly when dealing with actual humans rather than abstractions. Abstractly, they may think certain people are committing horrifying sins but when they deal with those people, they are not necessarily inclined to be cruel or openly condemning. There are even some reasons internal to the religion not to be such but also, I don’t think they are quite so morally ‘other’ as some people seem to think.

I think that the anger, etc. is often caused by particular subcultures, rather than an artifact of a particular religion one belongs to. There is a subculture of angry right wing paranoid that overlaps with some of the evangelical subculture. But then there are many other subcultural groups with those traits. In my experience, certain academics can be bitter, rage-filled, intolerant people who can’t stand anyone unlike themselves, e.g., Muslims and Christians. Or various others they don’t like–chaos theorists or libertarians or whatever. My hypothesis is that the thing that makes people angry and intolerant is some kind of perceived wound to themselves, rather than their beliefs per se. The problem is that there are a lot of right wing people who take up Christianity as a kind of perceived victim status and have all kinds of crazy views. But this is not a necessary feature of belonging to the religion. I think it really oversimplifies to say that the antagonism is the main attraction to the faith. For some people it is. For other people it isn’t. Maybe go to L.A. and visit a Guatemalan evangelical church sometime and see why they joined ? Or even a suburban megachurch? The reasons are very diffuse and complex.

This is not to say that the potential is not there for a scary us/them kind of Christian nationalism. Or that fundamentalists don’t attempt an unjustified dominance over others in politics–as occurred in Prop 8. Or that there are not many problems associated with religious fundamentalism in society and politics. I think James Ellis is right that people’s beliefs don’t always correlate with their goodness. Sometimes you can even explain why, although I don’t think I managed to do that.

Everyday niceness, from people whose needs are being solidly met, and promise to be met for some time to come not to mention for eternity, should be an expected attribute.
The biology of it’s right there. Dressed up in dogma but it’s there.
Mormon success at meeting the biological needs of its fellowship is unquestionable.
You’d expect it especially when that niceness is produced within a non-threatening interchange.
I’ve met Scientologists who were nice. Proselytizing but genuinely nice, to me.
And racists who were nice, to me.
Thugs, cops, priests, drug-addicts, rabbis, whores, Baptists, famous musicians, even politicians, in my experience can be genuine and nice, in the right circumstances, to the right people.
I had lunch with an LDS elder of some repute who was more than superficially polite, and a very pleasant conversationalist. And he picked up the tab.
I like it when people are nice to me.
Possibly the Mormon tolerance of sexual deviance and gender heterogeneity has broadened significantly in the 21st century. Possibly it has not.
I didn’t notice much, in the Prop 8 campaign here in California, of a message of “Tolerance yes, but marriage no”. It was just “No, we’re saving marriage, and too bad for you”.
Some recognition of the long ugly history of Judeo-Christian bigotry and injustice suffered by gays and lesbians and other sexual outliers would have gone a long way toward improving things, and given credence to the LDS p.r. of being warm and loving folks.
The 19th c. Mormons were not only not “nice” to the Native American populations of the lands they coveted, and took, they were as violently, murderously intolerant as it’s possible to be. There’s blood all over Utah from that.
But once it was over, and the stink from the carnage had evaporated, and the history had been erased or covered up, nice folks. Genuinely nice. Prosperous, content, confident, nice.
That dark foundational part of their presence as a successful community hasn’t been seriously and officially addressed, not with the contrition and remorse and humility it requires. Mostly because there’s no one outside powerful enough to force them to do so, and because doing so from within would threaten the core of their existence as a community.
The source of that benevolent confidence is a conviction of their rightness, demonstrated and confirmed by their prosperity.
It’s not unique to the LDS by any means, that fundamental hypocrisy. It mirrors the larger society’s inability to confront its own dark path to what it saw as God-given dominance and prosperity. There’s a lesson in that mirror.

Chuk wrote:

“On another note, as a sociologist (in training), the LDS church is a masterpiece of organizational efficiency”

Organized it is, but I would hardly describe it as efficient, with two near-universal male priesthoods, parallel sacred and temporal management, and countless gremiums at local, regional, and church-wide levels. The function of this huge apparatus is not efficiency but the ever-tighter binding of individuals into the heirarchy by means of distributing offices with onlt the appearance of a distribution of decision-making. The Roman Catholic Church, which makes no pretense of distributed authority, gets by with only three levels of management (local priest, diocene bishop, universal pope) and leaves temporal and sacred control entirely in the hands of the priesthood. (The fulltime staffing of the Vatican (population 900), controlling a church of roughly a billion believers, is roughly on par with that of the LDS church, with only a fraction of the membership. Despite this efficient structure, the RCC has recognized the value of allowing decision-making to often appear slower and more cumbersome than it actually is; a deliberate tempo is often particularly useful in maintaining control and silencing debate or dissent among lay members of the church.

Religious types are often “nice” if by “nice” you mean “conventionally polite and solicitous as long as they get their own way”. That’s why everyone gets so surprised when they turn “nasty” upon no longer getting their own way. Salesmen (which I suppose is what missionaries are, of a sort) are also really nice people, as long as you realise that you have to deal with them within a certain set of boundaries, and with a realistic attitude toward their likely honesty (William Burroughs was sooooo right about that one).

“Is there somebody one can write to, who will perform the ceremony on request?”

There probably isn’t in most circumstances. Catholic excommunication runs along the lines of criminal law, and requires proof of action and intention.

You can confess to something serious enough to get excommunicated, but even if it’s a real rather than fake confession (i.e., you can prove that you really did something worthy of excommunication), that’s not enough, because the act of the confession undoes the “crime” to a large extent.

You would need to add something else, e.g. an intention to repeat the offence (which so far only gets you up to a voluntary renunciation of the faith), plus an intention to do something afterward that’s prohibited to those who have renounced, e.g. continue to act in a capacity as a Priest, or continue to receive Communion.

That might elicit a warning that if you persist in this course, you might be sanctioned. Then if you can show that you have, in fact, persisted in this course, that might get you all the way to excommunication.

EJH: I think the easiest way is to find an excommunicated archbishop and get him to consecrate you as a bishop. Hurry though as they’re beginning to get a bit thin on the ground.

Lisa said:

Do you actually know a bunch of culturally conservative evangelicals? Were they really all like this? In my experience, they are not all like this, particularly when dealing with actual humans rather than abstractions….I think that the anger, etc. is often caused by particular subcultures, rather than an artifact of a particular religion one belongs to. There is a subculture of angry right wing paranoid that overlaps with some of the evangelical subculture. But then there are many other subcultural groups with those traits. In my experience, certain academics can be bitter, rage-filled, intolerant people who can’t stand anyone unlike themselves, e.g., Muslims and Christians. Or various others they don’t like—chaos theorists or libertarians or whatever. My hypothesis is that the thing that makes people angry and intolerant is some kind of perceived wound to themselves, rather than their beliefs per se….I think it really oversimplifies to say that the antagonism is the main attraction to the faith. For some people it is. For other people it isn’t. Maybe go to L.A. and visit a Guatemalan evangelical church sometime and see why they joined ? Or even a suburban megachurch? The reasons are very diffuse and complex.

Very well said, and thank you for saying it. People familiar with modern American religion might be easily led to believe that Mormons and evangelical Protestants treat each other with mutual loathing and suspicion, for example, and certainly there is some evidence of that (the big kerfluffle between the supporters of Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee back during the Republican primary, for example). But it simply isn’t the whole story. As a longtime resident of the American South (Virginia, Mississippi, and Arkansas), and had many associations, formal and informal, with evangelical Protestants, particularly Southern Baptists. They knew I was an active, believing member of the local Mormon congregation. Yet, to my knowledge, none of them ever expressed any kind of contempt or exclusions towards me; to a person, they were kind, open-minded, and generous. Selection bias in the sort of people I met, given that I’m an academic? Possibly. Nonetheless, it’s evidence to me that the often common assumptions about hate or antagonism which frame how we think about groups we don’t agree with, even groups espousing political or moral or theological doctrines we think are wicked and false and hateful, are often simply wrong, or at the very least fail to recognize a complex reality.

There are a lot of different Mormons, who joined or who stay with the LDS faith for a lot of different reasons. The same for other conservative evangelicals. These differences lead to many different subgroups within the whole. Some of those subgroups, no doubt, truly are hostile and aggressive and mean. But not all of them are, and none of them, I think, are uncomplicatedly so. It’s an important point to keep in mind.

I think the easiest way is to find an excommunicated archbishop and get him to consecrate you as a bishop

Don’t deny the Holocaust, though, or you might get reinstated . . .

Religious types are often “nice” if by “nice” you mean “conventionally polite and solicitous as long as they get their own way”

Also someone asked if I really have known many evangelicals. I’m from the Bible Belt; the answer is “yes”. Not to (re)mention, my sister is one.

I think that I should be more clear that the basis for my “niceness” estimation isn’t very limited contact such as talking to a missionary whom I don’t know. It’s based upon people I know moderately to quite well.

As far as whether or not the conservative Christians I’ve known, particularly evangelicals and fundamentalists, can be accurately described as being “not nice”…well, I think I’ve been less than clear on this. It’s not so much that they have been unsually unkind, it’s more that they’ve been pretty much like most people; whereas the Mormons have been unusually kind. Also, while the conservative Christians haven’t been particularly unkind to me (and, I should also say that almost everyone is kind and friendly to me because I generally am that way—except occasionally online—and, of course, people respond to kindness), but they tend to express anger and hostility against the vast number of people whom they think are the bad guys. Like, you know, casual hateful racism. I don’t doubt that many Mormons I’ve known are racist, but I don’t hear about it from them. I do from the culturally conservative Christians I’ve known in, primarily, (Eastern) New Mexico and Texas. (Eastern New Mexico is culturally Texan; often referred to in the rest of NM as “little Texas”.)

To put it another way, the culturally conservative Christians have of course been caring about their own, just as most people are, but I’ve noticed that the Mormons seem to be caring about everyone, not just people like themselves. That doesn’t mean they will compromise their values.

The reason this matters to me is that it gets right to the heart of something I feel and believe very strongly. I think that the conventional understanding of “tolerance” is flawed. It implies a “live and let live” attitude which doesn’t allow for proselytizing or strong and limited moral limits on behavior that implicitly condemn those who violate them. In my opinion, the much more productive idea of tolerance is simple that one, by default (but disprovable by evidence in individual, not general, cases) respects others to have as well-intentioned and earnest beliefs as oneself. It’s a view that doesn’t automatically assume that everyone who works contrary to one’s values is intentionally, actively “evil”. People—all people—tend to make this assumption. But those who hold culturally conservative, rigid, religiously defined values are more susceptible to this.

But I notice in my sister, most of her peers (young, not as political, conservative evangelicals), and most Mormons I’ve known that they don’t do this. They assume that most other people who believe differently than they do are well-intentioned but wrong.

I’m interested in this relative to Mormons because I’m extremely interested in it in general. I want to understand how communities and institutions can encourage strong values and activism while discourage vilification of those who have different and even opposing values. I see examples of communities that are able to inculcate this kind of tolerance, even religious communities with (relatively) very intolerant core beliefs.

To me, that people like Limbaugh exemplify the exact opposite of this is an example of why I care very deeply that we on the left avoid doing the same. I’ve been in conflict with the values of most of the people I’ve known my entire life (which perhaps might explain my point-of-view on this, along with my temperament being essentially optimistic and that I like other people), but I don’t think they’re bad people on the basis of having opposing values. With the exception of when they are intolerant in the Limbaugh-esque fashion.

Thanks, Keith – interesting stuff. The question it prompts for me is, what makes the rueful headshake fake?

I’ll unpack that.

If you’re a Christian (and hence care one way or the other), you can’t be certain that you’re saved and somebody else (who you don’t like) isn’t. You can hope God approves of your conduct (and not the other persons’s); you can even be fairly confident; but you can’t know. So the worst you can get to, on the level of moral condemnation, is (or should be) a rueful shake of the head – “well, I don’t know of course, but I think if you carry on like that you might just be heading down the primrose path… but it’s not for me to say, we’re all in His hands after all”.

We’re familiar with people who use that approach as a passive-aggressive tactic to conceal the hatred they’re actually feeling. But perhaps it can be genuine. “My values say your conduct is wrong, but I don’t know for certain that my values are binding on you” – that sounds like a pretty good attitude to have. Odd that, when we think about religion, the self-deceiving passive-aggressive version should be so predominant.

Yes, Gabor, maybe efficiency is the wrong word. But as Gardner points out–capturing exactly what I meant to refer to–they are astonishingly good at keeping things moving. They are a massive top down bureaucracy that gets things done (contrary to what many economists perceive as possible), and apparently, in a sustainable fashion.

I’m disappointed nobody picked up on my powder keg point. Fox? Alas, this post has slipped beneath the fold… it’s history already.

ajay, isn’t Mormonism simply Utahian power + rural tractorication?