Nobody Likes Us

Stephen C

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I ran across this post from the incomparable Ryan Burge the other day that confirmed something I’ve suspected: neither the left nor the right like us. 

 

Occasionally Latter-day Saint liberals love to point out that, despite our political alliance of convenience with the right, we’re not their favorite. They’ll hold their noses and take our votes, but they don’t like us. 

And all of that is true, but the problem is…the left is no different. They’ll occasionally make nice and make a play for our votes, and there are people on both the left and the right that do sincerely like us, but also on both the left and right there is a cadre that absolutely hates us, sometimes for different reasons, but sometimes they’re just both intolerant towards what they see as our cooky beliefs. Some suggest that the left don’t like us because we have a heteronormative theology, but so does nearly every other religion, so that doesn’t go very far explaining why they’d hate us more than the Catholics or Baptists.

And some of the more educated on the left might be aware of our pre-1978 priesthood ban in the sense that some of the more educated Latter-day Saints might be aware that the Southern Baptists split from the Northern Baptists over slavery, but ultimately I suspect that from the left it’s stemming from a more nebulous sense that we’re cooky right-wingers who believe the kind of things that Christopher Hitchens makes fun of, and from the right that we’re cooky heretics. Liberal pundit Lawrence O’Donnell’s Statement that Mormonism was founded because Joseph Smith had to come up with an excuse after he was caught with the maid could have just as easily come out of the mouth some Milo Yianapolis type right-wing provocateur.

And yes yes, the left could absolutely love us if we went full Episcopalian or Coc in terms of social issues theology and donated our 100 billion fund to worldwide anti-racist and anti-homophobia training seminars as a sort of indulgence for past racial and sexual sins. Unlike the right they couldn’t care less about us being non-trinitarians. And the right might like us more if we severely enervated our more exotic theologies, but being cool with either the left or the right isn’t worth much to me frankly in terms of messing with our teachings or operations. For the foreseeable future the Church of Jesus Christ will probably not really fit with both the left and the right, and I sometimes wonder if that is a feature and not a bug. 

Comments

6 responses to “Nobody Likes Us”

  1. Jonathan Green

    Interesting chart. For Democrats, we’re liked as much as Evangelicals (and might be perceived as roughly equivalent as well). For Republicans, we’re not in the ‘mortal enemy’ category (with Muslims and atheists), but we seem to be in the ‘alien’ category (with Hindus and Buddhists).

    It would be interesting to know which part of each party coalition is the primary driver – I can see the Main Street ‘Romney Republicans’ having warmer feelings for us than the Religious Right, but that’s just a guess. And the mainline Protestants are probably more positive towards us than the Progressive Left, but again, who knows. Potentially we’re viewed more favorably closer to the center than at the extremes. It’s always fun to see someone you’ve been casually following (in this case, on the Progressive Left) deciding to do a bit of crude anti-Mormon agitation, then proudly call their followers’ attention to it, as if expecting their applause.

    In any case, I also see it as a feature rather than a bug.

  2. JTB

    The way I view it, the Left thinks we’re weird and stupid. The Right, on the other hand, thinks we’re heretical and demonic. I don’t have to look further than the perpetrator of the recent shooting at my old stake center to see which side I view as a more tangible threat to Latter-day Saints.

  3. Hoosier

    I suspect it’s probably because Baptists and Catholics have been part of both parties’ major coalitions at times and so both parties can identify them among their allies. Baptists are big for both right and left because you’ve got the Southern Baptist institution on the right and African-American Baptists on the left. As for Catholics, you’ve got the traditionalist wing on the right and the Kennedy/Biden/Boston Irish Catholic legacy on the left. Meanwhile we’re politically silo’ed and are an “other” within that silo anyway.

    Hopefully the large web of CIA/FBI infiltrators I keep being told we have comes in handy when it all hits the fan.

  4. RLD

    For the left, it’s mostly politics (everything is mostly politics these days). I saw a distinct shift with Prop 8 and related efforts: while our theology has always been heteronormative, from the left’s perspective we were trying to force it on everyone else. Of course Catholics were right there with us, but the left knows more about Catholics so Prop 8 isn’t their whole impression, and since then there’s been Pope Francis and now Leo. Which does suggest we could change the left’s perceptions if we wanted to, at least to get to a level more like Catholics. It wouldn’t take a full-blown transformation like Stephen describes, but it probably would take more than we’re interested in doing. Things like, say, an official statement about how and why our position has changed from Prop 8 to the Respect for Marriage Act, or an apology for the priesthood ban.

    Given that everything is mostly politics these days, the fact that the right still doesn’t like us is remarkable. I suspect the mean masks that there’s a group that is just fine with us (Jonathan’s Main Street Republicans) and a substantial group that does consider us mortal enemies comparable to Muslims and atheists. That perception is based on our theology and not something we can ever change. (They also put a lot more time and resources into attacking us than the left does. If the Grand Blanc shooting had really been an “Anti-Christian” attack like the Trump administration talked about initially, I imagine they’d have wanted to “go after” those who radicalized the shooter. That faded pretty fast once it became clear where his inspiration really came from.)

    But I agree with Stephen: not fitting in with either tribe is a feature, not a bug, and not something we need to worry about fixing.

  5. Bert

    Since when have we ever been popular with anyone?

  6. bbell

    Its a feature. We are getting disliked for what I see as good reasons that I am fine with by both sides. I reject secular and theological leftism and I reject the theology of the Christian and secular right. I am LDS and that is a unique way of approaching politics and theology

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