In honor of Anthropic’s collaboration with the Vatican, a ChatGPT-generated image of Dario Amodei eating a Filet-O-Fish, IYKYK. 

As a group Latter-day Saints have this psychological drive for the ever-elusive mainstream acceptance. We’re generally known for being nice and orderly, if a little weird and on the wrong side of the sociocultural elites. We have a form of hippness but deny the power thereof, and with a few tweaks we could be really cool.

Honestly, I’m ambivalent about this seemingly interminable quest. Taking a step back, in principle if God had a chosen people, I would imagine they would basically look like us: a small, somewhat quirky group that never gets popular enough for people to join en masse, or even in any significant numbers. “An holy nation; A peculiar people” who draw in those with spiritual discernment to recognize it for what it is, His sheep who hear His voice whose numbers are few (how’s that for mixing scriptural phrases). This group would be paradoxically looked down on despite being known for their kindness and wholesomeness, as if God is constantly refining them anew every generation. 

My ambivalence also stems in part from seeing what has happened to other groups that have gone through the same drive for acceptance. For example, US Catholicism went through something similar in the early 20th century (for an excellent account of this process see The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture), climaxing with the election of John F. Kennedy. While not being weird had its benefits, they traded their status as a “peculiar people” for the mess of pottage of respectability and assimilation. 

Like the German Reform, Christmas Tree Jews once they were let out of the ghettos, post-Kennedy Catholics largely divested themselves of the little behavioral markers of Catholicism. For example, the McDonald’s “Filet-O-Fish” was originally designed to appeal to the Catholic market that abstained from non-fish meat on Fridays. Although the institutional Church has since backed off the meat on Friday thing, even if they hadn’t I have a hard time seeing Catholics caring enough for it to move the needle for Friday hamburger sales in Catholic-heavy areas. (Maybe dirty sodas are our Filet-O-Fish. We can’t have a margarita so we’ll become the most skilled soda artists in the world). 

And sure, if you work in a Catholic heavy environment you see the little ash crosses on their forehead for Ash Wednesday, but even that seems rare. More to the point for growth and vibrancy, Catholic family sizes collapsed and now are no different than Protestant family sizes. So congratulations, there is very little anti-Catholic stigma as measured by feeling thermometers and the like, and they are completely mainstream. But at what cost? Ultimately, there is this tug-of-war between complete acceptance and uniqueness, and, hot take incoming, I sometimes wonder if we Latter-day Saints are actually a little too assimilated. I think we should “Keep Mormonism weird,” to crib from Austin’s unofficial slogan. In the sociology of religion there is a theory that faiths need to maintain an ideal tension with the environment: too much and they become a cult in the desert (which has definitely described our situation at points in our history), and too little and they become like everybody else and lose the purpose for even engaging in the most token of religious behaviors.

Of course, there are benefits to assimilation. The Catholics had finally arrived, and could leave the “Little Italys” and Boston tenement houses. The Jews as well could leave their own garment district tenements and settle in the suburbs. That is all great (although we are missing out on the unique food, art, and literature that ethnic and religious enclaves can produce), and biting the bullet and isolating ourselves from society completely like some religious groups (e.g. the Amish) also shuts off the benefits that the outside world can give us. 

Still, I think we’re constantly fighting against forces of assimilation, both inside and outside the Church, that want us to go the way of post-Kennedy US Catholicism. People recognize the influence and potential power of a phalanx of hard-working wholesome people in a centralized ecclesial structure that they can try to lobby or influence (and sometimes try to coopt for their own social or political purposes), but don’t recognize that the power itself comes from its uniqueness and distinctiveness, and if we too trade that for respectability and finally “make it,” then so too go our superpowers and “peculiar people” status that the scriptures have prophesied about.