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.