Blixa wrote:I think that is part of it and another part is the current institutional management of the church's history (which is itself part of its broader PR calculations and campaigns). And this is an interesting moment in the history of that history! There is a complex argument here that I can't do justice to in a few board posts, but I think that strands of this discourse ("the other as apostate white trash") that we see here and elsewhere in online mopologetics speak to something bigger than just individual snobbery.
Intriguing post there, Blixa. I wonder whether the patterns of conversion and inactivity as they are perceived to relate to prosperity and righteousness have anything to do with it. I would not be surprised if it were consistently the case that more lower-income people joined the Church, placing the burden on more longstanding and affluent members to attend to them administratively and perhaps financially, and then they drift away because the Church's demands make an already challenging life more burdensome. The result is that these folk are perceived as being less moral, more unreliable and unsteady, and then there is the "poor white trash" vision of apostasy.
Shumway's narrative, as perceived by the apologists, hits both sides of the apostasy coin. On the obverse we have Shumway the wannabe snob who claims that reading deep philosophy caused him to drift away from a childish faith. On the reverse we have the poor white trash family who failed in their obligations to Shumway because they lacked faith and perseverance. Lost in all of this is Shumway's very normal story of the young person who, in finding his own identity, drifts off in his own direction, away from his very normal and human LDS family. The subconscious agenda as dictated by apologetic anxieties rewrites the whole thing in order to make the whole story one of the failings of the Shumways.
The apologetic version is a very dark take on a fairly normal human story.