Author: Nathaniel Givens

I found Jana Riess’s recent post about the President Nelson’s pivot away from “Mormon” interesting but I believe her thesis could be refined. Citing the familiar Armand Mauss retrenchment/assimilation axis, she sees the move from “Mormon” to “member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” as a swing of the pendulum back towards the assimilation end of the spectrum: We’re in an assimilation phase, a “we’re not weird” phase. Shedding the term “Mormon” helps us to assimilate ever more comfortably because the word, with its accompanying history, is one of the most distinctive things about us… the move makes sense as a piece of the larger assimilation puzzle. Emphasizing denominationalism may not win converts, but jettisoning “Mormon” makes us appear that much closer to mainstream. This analysis might have been sufficient were we still in the 20th century, but the intervening decades have complicated the picture. We are now living through a moment of historically high polarization and tribalism, and these factors call into question the existence of a mainstream “mainstream” into which we could assimilate. What’s more, we’re also in the midst of the Rise of the Nones. So when she says that the new emphasis on our formal name “just makes us sound like everyone else,” who is this “everyone”? There is no longer a simplistic American mainstream to serve as the basis for comparison. Something else is going on, and a couple of paragraphs from Elder…

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Alma the Younger strikes me as one of the sterner of the prophets, which makes sense if you consider his background. I know a few people in my life who have had similar, if less spectacular trajectories. It’s not an ironclad rule that those who wander tend to be more intense about obedience on their return, but it’s at least a correlation. And that has colored how I read his words, especially in the letters / commands to his sons and especially in the chapters addressed to Corianton.  Something changed for me as I read these chapters in preparation for my Gospel Doctrine lesson last week, however. I noticed for the first time that although chapter 39 is the one I always remember and although it is full of memorable lines (“I would to God that ye had not been guilty of so great a crime,” vs. 7) it’s a relatively short portion of the total addressed to Corianton. After dealing directly with Corianton’s screwups in chapter 39, Alma never mentions them again in chapters 40 – 42. That ratio seems important. We, as parents and leaders, may tend to get stuck on the “you done wrong” portion and kind of hammer that home. Alma the Younger very plainly states what Corianton did wrong but then doesn’t belabor it. He sustains the conversation for a long time, but never returns to that topic.  This called to mind another famous verse,…

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When my bishop announced that we would not be holding usual church services last Sunday, my main feeling was one of short-term relief: I absolutely love my calling as Gospel Doctrine teacher (I never want any other!), but I simply didn’t know where I was going to find time to prepare a lesson that weekend with all the other commitments that I had going on. My second feeling was one of excitement. I’ve long believed that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints exists to serve families (rather than the other way around) and so the recent moves towards home-centered church have been very exciting for me. However–big caveat here–I haven’t actually been that great at following through in my own family. So I looked at this as an opportunity to really redouble my efforts to make our home one where we talk, study, and practice the Gospel. My impression is that these feelings–short-term, half-joking relief at getting one freebie combined with a determination to rise to the occasion in our homes–was pretty common among fellow Latter-day Saints. So I was surprised when I realized the optimistic attitude was not shared by many of our fellow Christians. My first clue was Lyman Stone, whom I follow on Twitter, and who is really not a fan of closing churches. This is surprising because, in all other respects, he takes the Covid-19 pandemic very, very seriously. (In on small part because…

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Todd Rose starts his book The End of Average off with some really arresting stories that all make the same point: there’s no such thing as an average person.  His most in-depth example is based on how the Air Force designed their cockpits in World War II and the years immediately following. They took the dimensions of hundreds of pilots (arm reach, chest circumference, leg length, you name it) and then used the average of those measurements as the template for their cockpit design. The idea was that an average-shaped pilot would fit perfectly. And, since most of the pilots would be average on most measurements, the cockpits would be a decent fit for everyone. That was the theory, anyway. In practice, the Air Force was plagued with accidents that appeared to be related to pilots having a hard time using the controls. A twenty-something scientist named Lieutenant Gilbert S. Daniels had his doubts about the whole underlying theory, so he tested it out: Using the size data he had gathered from 4,063 pilots, Daniels calculated the average of the ten physical dimensions believed to be most relevant for design, including height, chest circumference, and sleeve length. These formed the dimensions of the “average pilot,” which Daniels generously defined as someone whose measurements were within the middle 30 percent of the range of values for each dimension. So, for example, even though the precise average height from the data was…

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The chart above estimates the per-capita GDP of the entire world over the last 2,000 years. There are all kinds of problems with estimating GDP over such a long time-horizon, but the only thing that matters for the purposes of this post is the general shape of the graph. At the time of Christ, there was essentially no growth in per-capita GDP. At our present moment in history—and going back to before the Industrial Revolution—there is very, very steep growth in per-capita GDP. If you live at a time when there is essentially no growth (on a per-capita basis) then you live in a zero-sum world. Generally speaking, the only way to become wealthy in a world like that is to expropriate wealth from someone else. This is true based purely on the abstract math. If there are 100 people and $100 dollars, then for every person who has $2, there is at least one person who has less than $1. Speaking concretely, the way to get wealthy in the Iron Age was to own more physical stuff, especially land. If you owned land, then you had control over the production from that land, either for crops or for grazing for herds. Since there is only a finite amount of land to go around, you get wealthy by owning more land than your neighbors. If you live at a time where growth dominates, then you do no longer live in…

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So last week I read The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. It was definitely an interesting book, and one tangent stuck out to me in particular. Here’s author Stephen Greenblatt describing Saint Jerome’s travails with setting aside his addiction to pagan art to try and focus on scripture: But a prestigious cultural tradition that has shaped the inner lives of the elite does not disappear easily, even in those who welcome its burial. In a letter written in 384 CE, Jerome–the scholarly saint to whom we owe the story of Lucretius’ madness and suicide–described an inner struggle. Ten years earlier, he recalled, he was on his way from Rome to Jerusalem, where he planned to withdraw from all worldly entanglements, but still he took his prized classical library with him. He was committed to disciplining his body and savings his soul, but he could not forgo the addictive pleasures of his mind: “I would fast, only to read Cicero afterwards. I would spend many nights in vigil, I would shed bitter tears called from my inmost heart by the remembrance of my past sins; and then I would take up Plautus again.” Cicero, Jerome understood, was a pagan who argued for a thoroughgoing skepticism toward all dogmatic claims, including the claims of religion, but the elegance of his prose seemed irresistible. Plautus was, if anything, worse: his comedies were populated by pimps, whores, and hangers-on, but their zany wit…

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There’s something memorable about the phrase, “wars and rumors of wars.” It certainly occurs in the scriptures often enough. Two prominent examples are in Nephi’s vision of the future of his people (and his brothers’) on the American continents (1 Nephi 12:21, 1 Nephi 14:16) and the Savior’s own discussion of the end (Mark 13:7 and Mattew 24:6). The latter usage–echoed as well by Moroni (Mormon 8:30)–always struck me as anachronistic. These were opinions I formed as a kid, back when we all watched the First Gulf War on television. War was a different thing, then. The whole world was on our side, we were rescuing a small country from a larger one led by an evil dictator, and of course nobody could mount a credible resistance to the military might of the United States. Most importantly, however, we could watch the war on our televisions, as reported by correspondents on the ground who were connected almost in real time via satellite communications. In a world like this, how could there be rumors of war? Surely we’d know, wouldn’t we? As the years rolled by, this ability to know seemed more and more self-evident, to the point where the inability to hide seemed like the real issue. From spy satellites to computer viruses, lack of information seemed like a remnant of a past already fading into dim memories. This was, after all, the Information Age. Knowing is kind of what we do. Isn’t it? The…

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It has often been noted that, in the United States, politics is our national religion. This is something my co-blogger Walker Wright covered at Difficult Run back in 2013, citing Eran Shalev: Through pseudo-biblicism the Bible became a living text, an ongoing scriptural venture which complemented and foritified notions of national chosenness and mission. This transformation occurred within a poisoned political culture which created “two parallel imagined communities,” namely the two political parties—the Federalists and the Republicans—that denied each other’s legitimacy. This disposition…created a political culture governed by a grammar of combat, which entailed a “politics of anxious extremes.” It fostered the intense employment and further construction of biblical politics, each side depicting the other as wrong-doing “Adamites” or “Jeffersonites.” …The pseudo-biblical language thus wove the Bible into American life and sanctified the young nation. American politics were transformed, in texts largely devoid of references to God, into the new religion of the republic. I came across another example of that sentiment this year, when reading Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order. (Which I loved.) In it, he writes: In building a modern state and overcoming clientelism, the United States had one big advantage over many contemporary developing countries: from the first days of the republic, it had a strong national identity that was rooted less in ethnicity or religion than in a set of political values centering around loyalty to its own democratic institutions. Americans in some sense…

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Believe me, no one wants to write about the Trump campaign (yet again) less than I do. However, events last week might have long-term consequences for the position of Mormonism in American society, and I thought it was worth a little bit of a look. The story starts with a major shake-up in the Trump campaign. As the NYT reported last week: Paul Manafort is out; Stephen K. Bannon is in. So, who are these two folks, and what do they have to do with Mormons? Paul Manafort is famous for, among other things, working to rehabilitate the image and career of Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych is the authoritarian, pro-Russian Ukrainian politician who was ousted in that country’s Orange Revolution. Manafort is the guy who was hired to get Yanukovych back in power. He overhauled Yanukovych’s image from clothes and haircut to people-skills, as this Slate article details. Surely, the idea went, if Manafort  could sell Yanukovych, he could also sell Trump. Well, apparently not. As for Stephen K. Bannon, he’s the guy who took over Breitbart after Andrew Breitbart died in 2012. Breitbart is a right-leaning Internet news/opinion site that—under Bannon’s leadership—has been heavily invested in Trump since the early days of his campaign. The most notorious example came from March, when a Breitbart reporter (Michelle Fields) claimed she’d been pushed and shoved by Trump’s then campaign manager. Bannon sided with the Trump campaign against his own reporter. As a…

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Jacob Baker began a long, public Facebook post this way: I’m willing to bet that there are many people out there right now feeling conflicted about the mass murder that happened yesterday. I’m not talking about the outspoken blatant homophobes and bigots, but essentially good people who find themselves somewhat confused by this tragic event. He went on to allege that such people have less empathy for the victims of the horrific mass shooting in Orlando because of a “feeling of disapproval or discomfort” that is “cultivated within your religion.” Thus, such people feel “both compassion and disgust.” An early commenter replied that this “mirrors some of my own experience” and explained that his views on the LGBT community changed as a result of “realizing that they are very honest, genuine people who want many of the same things I want and who struggle in life just as I do.” In a similar vein, Lindsay Hansen Park publicly shared her own conversion experience, which followed the same basic trajectory. She visited a gay bar “determined to witness the seediness, accept it, and love the LGBT community in spite of it” but what she saw were “people, regular people” and this was “so normal” that “[she] literally couldn’t process it.” As a result, she felt “deeply ashamed” and “betrayed by my culture.” These sentiments are examples of a larger narrative which holds at its core the proposition that the only reason…

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These three concepts exist, for most Mormons, in a tangled web. This has become especially evident in recent months as members have reacted to the Church’s new policies regarding same-sex married couples and their children that were announced in November. This discussion was stoked again following Elder Nelson’s recent remarks, leading to Dave’s post last week pondering: Policy or Revelation? The subtext to this question seems pretty clear: doctrine (often used synonymously with revelation in this discussions) doesn’t change. (For example, the Encyclopedia of Mormonism states that doctrine is “fixed and unchanging.”) And that’s the subtext that dominates all of these discussions: many members are deeply uncomfortable with the Church’s stance in relation to homosexuality in general and long for a change that would, in their view, follow the precedent of the Church’s 1978 Declaration (which followed after President Kimball “had received… revelation.”) by ending discriminatory policies that were never based in unchanging doctrine. Now, obviously the policy changes that came to light in November were just that: policies. But the question is whether they are policies that are rooted in doctrine or, expressed differently, policies that resulted from revelation (or “Revelation,” with a big-R, as Dave writes.) And this is just a proxy for the related questions: how likely are they to change? And: how sure are we that they are correct in the first place? I am not going to address those questions today. Instead, I’m just going…

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