Religion Dispatches
…ey lost, Mormon media observers felt that his campaign must have yielded a net positive for public understanding of the Mormon faith. But new data released by the Pew Forum suggests otherwise. 82% of Americans surveyed by Pew say they learned little to nothing about Mormonism during the 2012 campaign. Nearly 50% said they still know “little to nothing” about Mormonism, a proportion unchanged from 2011. And only about 40% could answer two basic…
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…a lengthy hash that made no reference to tax fairness, cuts to the safety net, and corruption in the financial sector. The statement did, however, refer repeatedly to the Church’s opposition to gay marriage and abortion and its support for school vouchers. The statement, called “The Hope of the Gospel in Difficult Times,” thereupon failed to muster the required 2/3 vote for adoption. Older social justice bishops carped openly about the document’s…
Read More…om U.S. policy on Israel to, of course, the gays. The conspiratorial World Net Daily says Sandy is a sign that God is angry with the U.S. for defying his will on Israel: In fact, in his book Eye to Eye: Facing the Consequences of Dividing Israel, [William] Koenig points out that nine of the 10 costliest insurance events in U.S. history followed dramatic calls by U.S. officials for Israel to make land concessions in bids for peace with its neighbor…
Read More…mental storytelling is an American tradition dating back at least to the nineteenth century. It encourages us to zero-in on the anecdote—to identify with and shed tears for the helplessness of the victim—and lose complete sight of the big picture. Is there anything in Romney’s foreign policy that will ensure that more Navy SEALS, sailors, and soldiers will come home quickly? Does the Romney-Ryan budget maintain the social safety net on which disa…
Read More…ficient. So too with deregulation, and with the removal of a social safety net. These things create wealth, incentivize work, and preserve individual freedom from government interference. Liberals and humanists mistakenly think human beings can be improved, and that’s why they want to use government to make things better. But government equals unfreedom, so liberals are anti-freedom. However, imposing God’s laws about who needs to obey whom—which…
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…r.” “Follow the Prophet” is the theme of children’s songs, refrigerator magnets, breakfast mugs, and board games. The then-Apostle Harold B. Lee added politics: “You may not like what comes from the authority of the Church,” he cautioned. “It may contradict your political views… But if you listen to these things, as if from the mouth of the Lord himself… the promise is that ‘the gates of hell shall not prevail against you.’” No leader was consider…
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…ave come to be represented by a man who has no interest in a social safety net and blames those in need for being in poverty or without work. Mormons don’t believe that. He is not us. I get requests from Mormons around the country to do service projects in Gulu and work side by side with Ugandans. We are very clear about not imposing our ideas on the Ugandans. We have a local staff from the community who have worked all their lives with child sol…
Read More…, that argument goes, we wouldn’t need a government-provided social safety net. That claim lies at the heart of the most crucial economic argument of the election, the role of government in the economy, and it’s not going to be resolved through a theological discussion. It’s going to be resolved with facts and figures: that in spite of the kindness and generosity of millions of Americans, who, like Romney, have helped someone in need, millions of…
Read More…dy responsible for generic top level domains (gTLD) like .com, .org., and .net, asked for proposals for new gTLD, I watched with some fascination. One of the earliest discussions was around allowing “.xxx” to indicate pornography-related sites. However, I am interested in a new round of names that may potentially define who is in and who is out of religious communities. In particular, I am looking at the applications for “.islam” and “.shia”. Owne…
Read More…ournal recently described as the exceptional “insular[ity]” of his campaign and Romney’s own refusal to accept unscripted questions from the press corps. Add to it the ever-louder Obama campaign drumbeat over Romney’s offshore bank accounts, and the net effect is a characterization of Romney (and with him, Mormonism) that draws on old-time Mormon stereotypes of insularity, secrecy, and top-down authoritarianism. It would be wonderful if these ster…
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