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Did Mormon Morality Teachings Really Make it Harder for Elizabeth Smart to Run?

By Joanna Brooks

…ssons are nowhere in the official sex education curriculum of the state of Utah. Nor are they to be found in the current handbooks or youth instructional manuals of the LDS Church. The most current LDS youth manuals (released in January 2013) reflect a steady effort on the part of LDS Church leaders to revise out especially punitive messages about sexuality, especially those that might compound feelings of guilt or shame in abuse or violence surv…

Mormon Church Finally Notes Black Elders, Still Offers No Apology

By Darron T. Smith

…tion against black people (beginning with Brigham Young’s statement to the Utah Territorial Legislation in 1852) was enough to silence their critics. With a revelation and the stroke of a pen, white racist traditions ostensibly ceased to exist. Mitt Romney claimed he was overcome with emotion at the announcement of the declaration, which paved the way for R&B legend Gladys Knight, a black Mormon, to join the faith. Racist one day, non-racist the n…

Romney, Tisha B’Av, and LDS Temples

By Sarah Posner

…les of the restored Church were built in Ohio, Illinois, and eventually in Utah. Today, the Church has 138 operating temples around the world. Regardless of the place or time period, temples are the most sacred place on earth-a place where earth and heaven meet and where we feel close to our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. For Mormons, their temples are “as sacred as Solomon’s temple.” This video has more: As Gorenberg explains in his seminal bo…

Orrin Hatch: Health Care Dollars for Prayer Cures, But Not Abortion

By Peter Laarman

…dical expenses. Hamburger and Geiger write that the measure, introduced by Utah Republican Orrin Hatch, would put prayer treatments “on the same footing” as clinical medicine and would prohibit discrimination against “religious and spiritual health care.” Oh, my. It doesn’t matter to me—and I hope it won’t matter to you—that the sums of money that might be paid to spiritual healers are relatively small. It matters hugely to me—and I hope it will m…

New Report Mapping Christian Nationalism by State Suggests Election Need Not be Played Out on Christian Nationalist Terms

By Daniel Schultz

…olina, and Wisconsin? They’re all right around the national average. Those numbers are not destiny, however. Conservative Utah has low levels of agreement with Christian nationalism, at just 28%. Meanwhile its solidly Democratic neighbor New Mexico is a bit higher, at 32%. Still, the results are significant for understanding the political scene today. Christian nationalism should not be ignored or downplayed, but at the same time the segment of th…

Dispatches from the Workplace: Bishops Lead the Cry to Stop Workplace Raids

By Kim Bobo

…ly descending upon six different small towns in Colorado, Nebraska, Texas, Utah, Iowa, and Minnesota, detaining 1,217 workers from Swift & Co. meatpacking plants. The churches and social services in these communities responded quickly and humanely by providing support for abandoned children and families and seeking legal assistance for workers. The religious community bore the brunt of the humanitarian response to the government’s commando-style f…

Romney Betrays Harold Bloom’s Fantasy Mormonism

By Joanna Brooks

…the order ending the this-worldly practice of Mormon polygamy that secured Utah’s statehood and set Mormonism on a path towards national integration. Or David O. McKay, the twentieth-century LDS Church president, who dramatically expanded the Church’s worldwide missionary program and reduced Mormonism’s eccentric theological energies into a single correlated program of instruction. Indeed, what makes contemporary Mormonism powerful is not the imag…

LGBT Mormons Ask in Historic Temple: “If they could just see us, don’t you think they would change their minds?”

By Joanna Brooks

…epted polygamy, and they never followed Brigham Young across the plains to Utah. Today, the Independence, Missouri-headquartered Community welcomes women into the priesthood and openly gay people (including non-celibate and partnered LGBT people) into membership. The Community of Christ offered Affirmation an institutional welcome of a kind LGBT Mormons rarely experience, providing tour guides, meeting spaces, and the opportunity to worship within…

Creationism and Global Warming Denial: Anti-Science’s Kissing Cousins?

By Lauri Lebo

…ithout any mention of evolution, though other states could soon follow. In Utah earlier this month, the House approved legislation that urges the Environmental Protection Agency to put any plans for regulating carbon dioxide emissions on hold, “until climate data and global warming science are substantiated.” “I think there may be a tangential connection in terms of methods to creationism and intelligent design, but perhaps not a direct linkage or…

The Mormon Moment?

By Joanna Brooks

…to support a suite of moderate immigration reform measures in the state of Utah evidence the growing influence of Latino Mormons in the Church. And they point to a future of more contests and compromises. 3. New tensions about how to manage controversial elements of the Mormon past are emerging, thanks to the digital era. The LDS Church would like to quietly leave behind issues like polygamy; current lesson manuals, for example, do not reference…