Symmachus wrote: ↑Sat Mar 13, 2021 7:07 pm
You are too kind, as ever, and I think I disagree myself, noble Reverend, with myself, particularly in my airy speculations as to the reason why certain Mormons see some link between their experience and that of Jews in any country and such ethnic groups as endured socially and legally sanctioned brutality that is scarcely imaginable. Or at least I have not really articulated my skepticism well, and "no place in Mormon thought" is going too far, when perhaps "little recognition in Mormon practice" is what I mean, especially when you compare it to any of the liturgies of traditional Christianity. And maybe there is no connection. I have to think more about that.
As far as my being learned, I apologize if I have given that impression. My lapse into sarcastic
Ostalgie was the symptom of having discovered and devoured the treasure trove of East German TV now available on Youtube. It was not due to knowing anything.
The fact that what you view as very humble "noodling about" invariably inspires us to broaden our horizons tells us all, at the very least, that our discourse is elevated by your participation. I think it is the mark of a noble mind to be able to disagree with one's self publicly, and I strive to do so myself, although I am sure others will disagree about my success in that endeavor. Your views challenge me, and they make me wrestle with myself. Without exception, they cause me to think harder about what I think, and so mine is the joy of your bracing responses to my lazy sermonizing.
Not necessarily in attempt to push back on your disagreement (which I'm sure is well founded), but merely to explain my own view a bit more fully and more generally, since I think it is relevant to this thread:
I don't question that there has been and remains a low-level prejudice, but it seems to me on the one hand to be the typical cultural prejudice that urban elites have for religious people in general, particularly against fundamentalist Christians—which is how, in their ignorance of religion, Mormons appear to them—and on the other hand it appears as the sectarian prejudice that, in turn, those fundamentalist Christians have for practically everyone else. Most other people don't know or care about Mormons, but even for those who do, the prejudice does not translate into violence or abuse. Has there been a wave of anti-Mormon violence akin to the attacks on orthodox Jews these past few years? I could have missed that story. But the attempt to envelop whatever low grade prejudice exists against Mormons in the rhetoric of race and thus render it a species of the same system that first enslaved and then oppressed Black people in the United States seems not merely historically inaccurate but morally dubious, given Mormonism's own role in that system. I am open to being wrong about that, but I would like to see concrete examples. All I see in the first 30 pages of Reeve's book that are available for public view are an overemphasis on vague rhetorical flourishes culled from the opinion pages and political cartoons of east coast newspapers in the 19th century. What seems to be missing is that, unlike any of the other groups which some progressive cartoonists attempted to lump Mormons in with, Mormons had a significant amount of power. It was that power, not their racial backsliding, that was the point of contention. An overemphasis on rhetoric has the potential to obscure that essential fact in a way that it often happens with Mormon self-understanding of persecution: a joke about Mitt Romney's "magic underwear" is not persecution, nor is a political cartoon lampooning Mormons as non-white an indication that Mormons are oppressed by a white power structure, and what Mormon history is really about is winning whiteness.
The federal government and American society more generally were not going to allow the emergence of a para-government on its frontiers when they had just defeated one at the cost of much blood and treasure in the Civil War—particularly one that could interfere with rail and water and mineral resources. It attacked the Church as an institution and undermined its power but not Mormons per se, except incidentally. Yet within six years of the Church's capitulation, Mormons were given a state and could be found at the highest levels of the power structure of the country. A
former Mormon and devoted student of inveterate circle-drawer Karl G. Maeser who remained on very friendly terms with the Church was on the Supreme Court by the 1920s and a
Mormon born in polygamy was running the economy of the United States not long after that (some of his policies were, of course, sabotaged by that formerly Mormon Supreme Court justice). At the same time, a Black person couldn't eat in the same restaurant as a white person in most of the country (probably including Utah). How can those be part of the same framework of oppression and dominance?
Pace Reeve's subtitle, Mormons have not had to "struggle" for whiteness in any meaningful sense. The struggle was not for Mormons to achieve "whiteness" but for a few anti-religious progressives to deny it to them—it's from that small group that Reeve appears draw his big conclusions from. But that was a doomed and apparently short-lived project because their rhetoric couldn't overcome the reality. Racialized rhetoric may have been weaponized in the publicity war against the Mormons controlling the intermountain west, but it was a secondary or tertiary effect of the primary point of contention.
As to my speculation, perhaps wrong, as to why this kind of over-reading is gaining currency is that contemporary Mormon progressives have a similar attraction to that rhetoric of racial otherness in their own case because it makes their pose of radical politics a little less ridiculous in their own minds, if not others' eyes: "I'm a white professor with health and insurance and a pension who gets paid to write about a ten-year span of a tiny town in Illinois called Nauvoo, but I'm actually from an oppressed group, too! Solidarity brethrxn!" For such progressive Mormons, it is useful in their struggle to achieve the sanctity of Otherness. As you know, I find them kind of silly overall, even if they are sincere, so I could be wrong. But conservatives too want some of that sanctity, because it is a form of social capital in United States culture, so that is why, in my view, you see the Daniel Peterson variety attempt to link up with their favorite oppressed group. Meanwhile, most people only know that BYU has a football team, Mormons have two moms (but who doesn't these days?), believe that Jesus spent some time in Cancún, and that they get a planet when they die. I would say that Mormons, in terms of the wider American society, are otherized in the way that people who are really into cosplaying are otherized: it's fine if they do it on the weekend, but you'd rather they not talk about it with you at work.
The old fight with governments over ecclesiastical power is reemerging, though (I think Oaks has been very perceptive on this). I wouldn't be surprised if this rhetoric gets re-weaponized by even the traditionalist Mormons: "this is racism against Mormons!" is probably coming to a Deznatsi Twitter feed at some point. If it does, I doubt anyone will take it seriously, so why we should take seriously earlier versions when hurled by the other side?
Issues of identity and power are incredibly complex, and sometimes I think we do ourselves a real disservice when we think we have it all figured out. This is why you and others are more than justified in arguing with DCP, Mormon progressives, and each other about this. Just when we think we know what we are about, someone will overturn our comfortable assumptions about things. The questions to me are: what is comparable, in what way, and to what extent. Personally, I would stay away from publicly blogging about comparisons of Mormons to Jews or Black people for most of the reasons you raise. At the same time, I do believe in the existence of a cultural hierarchy in this country, and in my view it is the case that the most privileged position to occupy is still WASP. Pointing to one set of factors or another in order to claim Mormons are, in fact, mainstream is fundamentally wrongheaded, in my opinion. They simply are not WASPs because they do not, to this day, function with the goal of perpetuating White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideals and group privilege.
Yes, as you note: Mormons were not enslaved. There was no Mormon Shoah. And yet, the Republican platform identified one of the central hallmarks of late-19th-century Mormon life as one of the "Twin Relics of Barbarism." The other was slavery, and, as you are no doubt better aware than I am, opposition to slavery did not always come from a place of inclusiveness; it often came out of a desire to banish Black people from North America altogether. The other tricky thing about identity is that much of it boils down to self-perception. To whatever degree one thinks of it as factually unjustified or justified, the Mormon narrative of persecution, extermination, and exile was very powerful in forging an identity outside of the mainstream of American society. We are not just talking about a few ugly cartoons someone else drew here; we are talking about the narratives Mormons imbibed from their mothers' wombs, so to speak. It is a narrative of difference, and it reinforces the internal Mormon sense that Mormons are different, do not belong, and can expect others to harass them.
And, lo and behold, they do. OK, not slavery, not Jim Crow, not the Holocaust. But is it just plain goofy or precious to notice how easily mainstream Christians, atheists, and liberals pounce on Mormons? Personally, I can't say it has made my life intolerable or anything, but I recall clearly being mocked and having my beliefs mocked from a pretty young age. I grew up in "the mission field," and people could be pretty nasty about Mormonism, in my experience. That continued on into my experience in graduate school, and on the job as well. The funny thing was that often the people who were belittling Mormonism to my face were my supposed friends and colleagues. When I quit attending the LDS Church, one of my colleagues told me he was relieved that I got out of "that cult." And he would regularly refer, in front of others, to my escape from a cult. The fact that this colleague was particularly powerful in the profession did not help a whole lot.
And "woke" folk actually don't have much love for Mormons, which makes the position of "woke" Mormons pretty interesting. As I reported here, when a woke posse decided it was going to make a political point about the backwardness of the Classics field, they chose to make that point by boycotting BYU first of all of the institutions they might have chosen. It was pretty galling to me to watch woke Catholics beat up on Mormon BYU when they can't do much to face down their own institutions. They pick the soft targets. Oh, and later the association met at Baylor, home of Phil Jenkins, and no one sent around a petition to boycott that institution either. Why? Their policies regarding homosexuality were equally public and regressive. I wonder why they were not boycotted.
So, I am afraid I have little sympathy right now for the argument that Mormons are this wonderfully mainstream and powerful group for which any claim to marginalization must be deemed risible. Oh, I suppose on this board it will seem funny, since many of us have been marginalized from our own tribe and therefore feel less inclined to be sympathetic to the alleged plight of our abusers, but in the larger picture, in my opinion, Mormons are not mainstream and not solidly privileged. I do think their "whiteness," or whatever you want to call the cultural construct of default privilege in our society, is provisional, and, having seen it denied on occasion to myself and my loved ones, I don't think it is particularly humorous or negligible. Still, I wouldn't spend a lot of time likening it to the plight of the Jews or Black people. That is just not a wise or productive thing to do, in my personal opinion. At the same time, I don't think it is stupid to keep in mind how these phenomena relate, and I think that it really is not impossible to find one's Mormon self on the wrong end of someone else's culture of privilege.
ETA: I think people underestimate the role religion plays in these identity wars. They forget the P in WASP and focus far too much on the W. W and P are mutually reinforcing aspects of the identity. There is a reason why Protestant congregations are divided very much along racial lines. Protestants engineered a lot of the disgusting racist doctrines that Mormons later clung to. They were the ones turning Native Americans into Hebrews and giving people of African descent the "curse of Cain." Just because these churches did not perpetuate or cling to those absurd positions up to the present does not mean that the underlying structures of identity and power within the group do not endure. The KKK was a predominantly Protestant organization for a reason.
We should also perhaps note that being a Constitutional "originalist" and an American conservative tend to be bundled with these things as well. I would not point to a particular person and say, wow you are a Republican, so that must mean that you are a racist. Rather, I think that, at this point, the Venn diagram wherein all of these categories are shown to converge and overlap has a lot of shared area in those circles: "conservative," "Constitutional originalist," "Protestant," "Evangelical," "Trumpist," "economic libertarian," "racist." It would be extremely lazy and inaccurate to assume that anyone who identifies with any of these things confesses them all. I can't say that an Evangelical is a Trumpist. On the other hand, without agreeing on everything, there is such a strong a convergence and synergy of ideas, structures, goals, initiatives, etc. among these groups, that, at the end of the day, one can make a pretty good argument for the end result being a perpetuation of a status quo that, to be fair, does end up preserving all of the worst from the past to the benefit of the traditionally configured clique of wealthy white people.
"He disturbs the laws of his country, he forces himself upon women, and he puts men to death without trial.” ~Otanes on the monarch, Herodotus Histories 3.80.
