Posted by:
Tal Bachman
(
)
Date: November 23, 2014 08:43PM
As a Mormon, I observed with particular interest the phenomenon of the Mormon liberal.
Here we were in what was obviously an authoritarian, dogmatic, sexist, anti-intellectual, racist (or formerly racist) religion, and yet, a bunch of members still claimed both to be supporters of this religion, AND good liberals. I didn't get it.
I still don't, actually. When Ezra Taft Benson famously said that it didn't seem possible for a devout Mormon who understood its doctrine to be a liberal democrat, he seemed only to be stating the bleeding obvious. How can an atheist also be a believing Catholic? He can't. How can a feminist also be a pro-male chauvinist pig? She can't. How can a true "liberal" also be a supporter of a baldly patriarchal, authoritarian institution, which denies, or has denied, full membership rights to believers based on their race, sex, and sexual orientation, and has a long history of fraud? He can't.
This is why, as a Mormon, I always sided with the Benson-Packer wing - logical consistency was cognitively important to me, and they were the only ones with logical consistency on their side. They just openly admitted their sexism, racism, etc.
By contrast, Mormon liberals were confused. They were walking contradictions-in-terms: on the one hand, they would complain about the church's sexism and racism and "hostility to intellectualism" or what have you, while on the other, they would renew their pledges of allegiance to their cult fuhrers every stake conference, and continue to allow the church to turn their kids into cult zombies. But for me, as for Packer and Benson and all those other bad guys, the syllogism was simple, the logic inescapable:
Premise One: Mormonism was true
Premise Two: Mormonism was sexist, authoritarian, racist (or formerly racist), homophobic, and anti-intellectual;
Conclusion: Therefore, Mormon sexism, authoritarianism, racism, homophobia, and anti-intellectualism were true.
There was no way around this. To accept that Mormonism was true logically required accepting all those other things as true; and if you did, you could not be a liberal. If you didn't, you could not be a Mormon. At least, you could not be these things in any logically coherent (that is, non-nonsensical) sort of way.
At least, that's how it all looked in my head. It still does. That might be why I'd rather live in a community of conservative Mormons than of liberal Mormons: at least the conservative Mormons are logically consistent. The liberal Mormons are just confused, and don't make any sense at all. It's the difference between saying:
A.) A is X (where this is wrong);
and
B.) A is X, but also NOT X, at the same time (as with string theory, this statement does not even qualify as wrong, because it is incoherent);
I can handle people believing that A is X, when it's not...but I just can't handle being around people who believe that A is X, but also NOT X, at the same time, and then talking about their "struggle" to reconcile "X and not X at the same time", posting on their weird blogs about it, or writing long, boring articles in Sunstone about it. I'd rather read The Ensign.
Just one man's two cents.
Is anyone else like this?
Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 11/23/2014 09:54PM by Tal Bachman.