![\"\"](\"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/00.159.178_PS2.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
“God, I thank you that I am not like other people: even like this jock. I watch my language, am always worthy to pass the sacrament, am on the honor roll, and I give a tenth of all my income.”<\/em><\/p>\n As a note, I put this post in the queue for the 5th a long time ago, not realizing that it was General Conference weekend, I’ll keep it up, but in posting on General Conference Saturday I’m in no way trying to draw attention from what should be drawing your attention today.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n With high school almost 20 years in the rearview mirror for me now it’s interesting to see individual trajectories and how they surprise or do not surprise me.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n There are myriad topics that could stem from this theme (for example, who would have thought the X-Box junkie became the most objectively accomplished person in our graduating class?) <\/span>However, given the subject of this blog, and the fact that my high school\u00a0 was nearly all Latter-day Saint, an obvious variable of interest here is later-life relationship to the Church.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n And on this I noticed a seemingly paradoxical theme that I’ve also picked up elsewhere. Many (though not all) of the \u201cgoodie good\u201d kids have left. These were the ones who were into seminary council (when that was a thing), drama, and The Beatles (in kind of a faux rebelliousness borrowed from their parents), and who actually read the book in English Lit.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n However, in sort of a \u201cfirst shall be last\u201d situation, many (thought not all) of the (male) jocks who were into Eminem, four-wheeling, girls and more girls, are by all appearances now family men and many are active (and the ones that aren’t don’t have any particular beef with the Church), even though of the two groups the former was much more churchy and checked off many more of the boxes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I don’t know why it turned out this way in my particular context, and I don’t want to extrapolate too much from the idiosyncrasies of my one experience (for my wife it was the opposite at her school). I’m not arguing that drama kids leave more than jocks do, or that drama kids are necessarily always the “goodie goods” like they were in my high school, but just to speculate for a moment\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n For some of the kids in that very LDS environment being a kid who went to firesides and such was one of the things you did to be a Good Kid according to what the overarching subculture deemed to be good.<\/span> Later in their lives when they are exposed to alternative frameworks they are just as likely to get into saving the whales, Palestine, or what have you. I\u2019m not saying that these aren’t noble causes or that this explains all activism in these areas, just that it\u2019s another moral target for a certain personality type that is drawn to causes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In some cases their new paradigm places themselves within an Overton Window for which the Church\u2019s position is outside of it, so they leave. In some cases the obnoxious companion on the mission interrogating you about why you were there is being obnoxious about another issue. The consistent theme is moral preening, stridency and righteous indignation.\u00a0<\/span>Of course that’s one extreme. I\u2019m not saying all or even a large portion of the seminary council\/ drama kids (or people who leave the Church) were that extreme, but it was a common theme, and many fell somewhere on that continuum.<\/span><\/p>\n On the other hand, the high-testosterone jock lifestyle with its often accompanying toxicities and issues was such that the stability offered by the gospel was clearer. Even if they’re not active themselves they often respect it (one calls to mind a statement by the greatest Mormon athlete of all time, Jack Dempsey, that he was “proud to be a Mormon. And ashamed to be the Jack Mormon that I am.”)<\/span><\/p>\n For them the gospel wasn’t another thing to excel at for an honors student that tried to excel at everything, but was a balm and anchor as they grew into adulthood after high school (especially for those who didn’t have a super stable family life), and as the Mormon \u201cSacred Canopy\u201d is punctured, there will (hopefully) be fewer people who are disciples because that it what good straight-A honor kids do, and more people who are disciples because they have learned that without it they smart from the God-shaped hole in their life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n As a high schooler, I thought that the goodie-goods were my moral superiors, but as I see them age I realize that in many cases their churchy behavior wasn’t from any inherent advantage in spiritual sensitivity, but instead from a personality disposed towards moralizing, which can be turned towards good ends, but isn\u2019t necessarily a virtue in and of itself.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: even like this jock. I watch my language, am always worthy to pass the sacrament, am on the honor roll, and I give a tenth of all my income.” As a note, I put this post in the queue for the 5th a long time ago, not realizing that it was General Conference weekend, I’ll keep it up, but in posting on General Conference Saturday I’m in no way trying to draw attention from what should be drawing your attention today.\u00a0 With high school almost 20 years in the rearview mirror for me now it’s interesting to see individual trajectories and how they surprise or do not surprise me.\u00a0\u00a0 There are myriad topics that could stem from this theme (for example, who would have thought the X-Box junkie became the most objectively accomplished person in our graduating class?) However, given the subject of this blog, and the fact that my high school\u00a0 was nearly all Latter-day Saint, an obvious variable of interest here is later-life relationship to the Church.\u00a0 And on this I noticed a seemingly paradoxical theme that I’ve also picked up elsewhere. Many (though not all) of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":47966,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latter-day-saint-thought"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/00.159.178_PS2.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47965"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48025,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47965\/revisions\/48025"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}