It seems that black and white thinking is the engine that drives Mormonism. There may be open minded conservatives, but a church (or thought control cult) that relies on black and white thinking would lean heavily conservative.

Not that I’m qualified to write on conservatism, having fallen into heresy, but I once had a JBS card in my wallet.

They keep driving away any who might be even a little it tolerant, or tentative, or wanting more of a voice in what happens in the church. So it becomes ever more stilted and rigid. It can't help but become ever more conservative.

Hasn't it always been that way?

It appeals to fiscal & religious conservatives. That's the archetype TSCC wants to attract.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/04/2019 08:41AM by Amyjo.

ChurchCo and its followers believe in a single source of truth and authority. They believe Capital-T Truth is not subjective, relative or flexible. (That's what they believe, anyway, whether they actually practice it.) They believe in uniformity and conformity. These are conservative, authoritarian principles. However, they're not big fans of some other conservative principles, like freedom from institutional control, fewer regulations and personal privacy. Because Mormonism is a communitarian system. It's about the group, the Kingdom, the common goal. Since Mormonism is about perfection and where you are on the ladder to the VIP Room in the Sky, it's a haven for judgmental jerks. All of this, like slskipper said, drives out the less fanatical, or at least silences them.

You are right. My dad stopped just short of the JBS card though he did think ETB was the Bee's Knees.

Mormonism was always conservative--or constipated as I like to say--but there has been a slow steady move to extremism conservativism. Is that even correct English? haha.

Back in the day we were the family that was even too Mormon for most other Mormon families, but we rode our horses on Sundays, Mom gave us green tea when we were sick. Dad gave TR's to the older generation who drank coffee. And most wards had a big slice of fun activities to go along with the snoozy meetings. I learned to cha cha in Mutual.

About a year ago, my elderly Mother asked where she could get green tea tablets cuz she heard they would be really good for her health. Stupid me says, why not juts have a cup of tea like when we were sick as kids?

"I Could Never Do THAT."

With Mormonism desperate times call for desperate measures. It is not the same church as when I was a kid and and Google wasn't chasing it around the room.

It does seem to be growing more one-sided, moving from cult-like to actual cult. That seems to be the public perception these days. A kooky, stuffy cult. It’s definitely not cool like it was under David O McKay. The differences between McKay and Oaks-Nelson couldn’t be more stark. In Nelson’s defense, he makes a pretty good cult leader.

I suspect they know it’s a sham. They’re not too happy with their task of keeping up appearances. Which I think exacerbates the ultra conservativism. It takes a certain mindset to make that work.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/04/2019 01:23PM by babyloncansuckit.

I can speak from experience that my relatives that have stayed TBM inside the cult (talking immediate family members,) are more rigid and inflexible than the relatives who've left TSCC.

Their children who stay in TSCC are as rigid and inflexible as their parents are. Especially those who have gone on missions.

Lord have mercy on their souls!

babyloncansuckit Wrote:
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> There may be open
> minded conservatives

Open minded conservative is an oxymoron.

How about openly conservatively minded? (mindedly?)

An argument could be made that unlike Michael Valentine Smith (Stranger in a Strange Land), all of us have a point of view, all of which points are distributed along whatever you wish to call the continuum. Absent a final arbiter, there'd be no way to judge which point was "True," other than a dB meter.

It’s interesting that Joseph would promote a final judgment, given his attitude toward the law.

Going on a mission wasn't a Bright Light for me, it always seemed that people / 'investigators' who didn't join were just as sincere & honest in their beliefs as Mormons, maybe more.

OTOH, Mormonism NEVER had a patent / copyright on Kindness, Honesty, those are the basis of faith, aren't they?

Certainly it's not becoming more conservative than it was 50 years ago. Relative to itself, it's much less conservative in most respects than it was for much of its history. The surrounding society, however, has rejected traditional thinking at a much faster pace. So relative to the surrounding society, the traditionalism ("conservatism") that remains in Mormonism may seem more pronounced on some issues.

In other areas, I'm not sure where you put some historical practices and beliefs of Mormonism on the "conservative - liberal" spectrum. For example, how do you categorize polygamy? In its day (and even today), it was a radical, alternative-lifestyle departure from what was accepted by conservative/traditionalist members of the larger society. Assuming fully consensual arrangements, if Mormons were to reintroduce polygamy in 2021 would it be regarded as a fantastically "progressive" movement or a horrifically "regressive" movement? Would liberal legislators get behind a "Marriage Freedom Act" that would allow polyandrous and polygynous marriages? (Progressives seem to be fine with polygyny among Muslims. Would Mormons get the same polite acceptance/non-condemnation if they decided to bring it back?)

As far as rigid ideological correctness goes, there was a period in the 1960s through to the mid-1980s where more questioning was allowed and more honest research and historical inquiry was allowed. Packer and some of his ilk cracked down on that and many vocal dissenters and critics were excommunicated. (This smacked as much of the type of purges and crackdowns you'd see in communist regimes as anything else. Were the communist purges the actions of "conservative communists"? I don't know. It's sometimes hard to keep up with the weird ways that political labels are constantly morphing and being redefined without being expressly redefined.)

But more recently the LSD Church came out with the essays that spill the beans on many of the historical naughtiness and embarrassments that they previously worked so hard to hide. "Mormon Spring?"

It's a nutty cult to be sure. But it can be a fascinating subject of anthropological examination.

Even if it hasn't become more conservative per se, it has become more rigid, more intolerant, and self-serving it seems. Considering the mess it made of the LGBT policy and reversal in the past several years snafu, etc.

Bigotry has always been in supply at LDS Inc.

They've just changed the focus from first, racial, to then feminism, then onto LGBT (of course it has been unspoken throughout.) Also it targets people Christianity sought to protect ie, the poor, elderly, widows, orphans, the sick, and those in prison. They get no special favors in Mormondom. They are treated as peripheral, or extraneous members in cult membership hierarchy.

Are they more conservative or are they simply becoming small minded?

And 'rigid & inflexible', can't that be attached to liberals or progressives or moderates?

Who is Maude?

What does conservative even mean anymore? I used to think it meant spending less, but modern day "conservatives" spend more than liberals. At least when they control our government.

I've become more conservative since leaving Mormonism, having studied and discovered nearly all gov't programs and wars are scams, with unintended consequences making things worse. But government is now the new religion - like the gods of old, it can solve all our problems, if you just throw enough money around.

Don't see that many church members have a problem with the programs or wars. Most my TBM relatives are benefitting from some useless government program or job. The most recent of which is a bishop brother making money building government housing for migrant laborers, which benefits the Mormon farmers in the area also, so they can build their huge houses. Must not be big Trump supporters.

And of course, most members I know love war, and all that big spending.

The Constitution the church once promoted, was designed to put limits on government, but is largely ignored. Most Mormons I know have little understanding of the concept of limits.
https://www.hoover.org/research/unconstitutional-congress


Also seems the church likes spending money, also - malls, conference center, temples, etc.

As for social issues, the church shares many views with liberal feminists who consider men to be disgusting in their sexual interests. Lusting, objectifying women, rape culture, etc.

I recently read a thread on an LDS site where someone asked if it was a sin for a man to lust after his wife.

https://www.ldsfreedomforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=51387&sid=df0b3b08777b8daa93c0e9664bfa73d4

Then you have the guys publicly shamed in the ward for porn.

Church generally supports socialism, as in our public school system. I often wondered about church families with 8 kids using public schools. Then someone with few or no kids forced to pay for them. Doesn't seem to be very responsible, which should be a conservative principle.

So I guess it depends on the issue, and how you define conservative.

I just recalled in 2012, I was a Ron Paul delegate to our Republican county convention. I saw a lot of LDS people there to support liberal Mitt Romney. They considered Ron Paul to be an extremist nut, because he didn't want to spend enough money on welfare and warfare.

They supported the move to make us all pledge to support the eventual nominee, regardless of principles.

Heil Romney!

Did you just cite Stephen Moore as an authority on . . . anything?

Living in a democracy means that as a nation, we are condemned to living out the consequences of our tastes.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/05/2019 05:45PM by babyloncansuckit.

This depends, surely, on the definition of the word "conservative." Like the word "liberal," it has many meanings.

The American experiment in republican democracy was radically liberal. The hope that its liberties and checks and balances could thereafter be preserved eventually became a conservative creed, as people wanted to "conserve" what had been achieved. That desire gradually came to mean social values as well, so there were two different definitions: preserve the political constitution and/or guarantee the old social structure.

But that inclination to sustain old values can be pursued passively or actively. In the latter case conservatives seek not just to prevent change but to reverse it, often going beyond the past institutions they supposedly support and trying to conjure into existence values and institutions that never previously existed. These might be called "radical conservatives."

The politics of the last decade largely represent the conflict between traditional conservatives who want to preserve the constitution and its liberties on the one hand and, on the other, radical conservatives who want to tear up parts of the constitution they don't like and enshrine values and practices that they think should have enjoyed priority. The radicals are in the ascendant now, with many older GOP leaders leaving the movement and lamenting the party's demise.

The LDS church is sort of torn between those two camps. On the one hand a lot of Mormons sympathize with the radicals who would recreate the country; on the other the church leadership has always hedged its bets by advocating family values, liberal immigration policies, etc. Romney is the embodiment of this traditional conservatism. The hierarchy has never denounced the radicals in full throat lest it offend a large chunk of the church membership but its sotte voce discomfort is evident in a lot of its public statements.

An interesting question is whether the membership is choosing sides in the struggle. Clearly a lot support the radicals at the polls, but sometimes it seems like there is a riptide in public opinion as evinced in support for Romney.

So I don't know if the body of the church is getting more conservative in a political sense. The members are clearly becoming more conservative in their religious views: they have given up the notion of personal revelation, doctrines that the church must always respect, etc., as the church narrows its legitimacy from history and doctrine to mere "obedience." But politically? The elections show a tremendous body of support for whoever the conservative leader is, regardless of whether traditional or radical, but my sense is that a lot of Mormons would jettison the present GOP leadership in a second if Romney ran again.

So religiously, yes they are growing more conservative. Politically, I suspect a change in the sort of conservatism although nothing approaching actual liberalism.

I can see religious conservatives questioning their political views in the age of Trump. Or not, given that he’s a cult figure himself. My mom loves the guy.

Mitt fits perfectly into the Mormon groove. Money is a sign of virtue in a prosperity religion. He looks good in a suit, another sign.

I’m more interested in Mormon culture though. They seem to be circling the wagons. For such a conservative organization, they sure are making a lot of changes. It smells of desperation. But why not? They are desperate.

Yes, Mormons are circling the wagons. And that is a conservative tendency. The changes and reforms we see may appear inconsistent with that view, but those adjustments are all marginal.

"Take your vitamins?" That might be something you would say at a nursing home when getting the residents excited for a shuffleboard contest.

Modern Mormonism has all the excitement of a nursing home.

A nursing home where they make you clean the toilets. . . and the floors.

Interestingly if you study early mormonism. Many of Josephs ideas were liberal and progressive. He was quite open about sex and some of his friends were gay and did abortions (Dr. Bennet his 1st counselor). They were also into alternative living arrangements practicing communism. He petitioned the federal government and even met with Van Buren to try to get remittances for the loss of their property. He failed because the government at the time was conservative and felt that giving away money to it's citizens was breaking the constitution. In H.O.T.C. he even declares that he is a democrat.

But at the end of his life he saw that many of his progressive ideas (sharing wives, sharing property) weren't working very well and he began to see the world as conservatives do, which is that people need strict laws and personal property. Brigham led the church into more and more conservative ideas. But the one who really set the foundation for modernism and made the church go Republican was Heber J. Grant with J. Reuban Clark.

I have no way to compare since I've been out for the last six years. I have no clue and furthermore I don't care.

I'd say no, compared to ETB's John Birch obsessions.

I think that from the responses, one can see that this is complicated.

In some respects, it has liberalized. People with black African ancestors can now have the priesthood. They got that right before population genetics showed we all have such ancestry--oops!

As others have noted, the social control and diminution of fun seem to have grown as the organization became more centralized and focused on temple worthiness. It's harder to be culturally Mormon in the regimented sphere. It also seems that there's less social space to be politically liberal, because there's such an emphasis on homogenizing everyone. If someone is outside of the typical LDS cookie cutter image, then they just don't fit in and that field seems to be getting narrower.

Now that I've been officially out of the LDS Corp. for about 12 years now, I sometimes reflect on that. In some ways, I'm not that far outside the norm for a stereotypical Mormon now. I'm a suburban dad, who works in an office job. Our house is even about 2 miles from the Temple--as the crow flies (fortunately getting there on the roads is a bit trickier). I'm a BYU graduate with pioneer ancestors, many of whom were leading lights of early Mormonism. And yet, I started to have the feeling that I didn't fit into this group.

So I guess my bottom line is that the LDS Church has become more conformist than in the past. And part of social conforming in MOrmonism (or restored mumbo jumbo whatever) today is political conservatism.