A New Age? or "How Mitt Romney & Proposition 8 Changed the Mormon World"?

When you set a match to your heart

Fueling with bitterness and doubt.

That's the place that once it starts

No amount of tears can put it out.

I know you're scared,

but no one's spared when you play with matches.

You've got me walking through the fire...

(Walking Through the Fire, by Mary Chapin Carpenter)

I presented a paper in November, 2008-- in Chicago, just before election day, in the Mormon Studies section at the American Academy of Religion annual conference. A heuristic exercise in looking at agency in Mormonism, the title was "Vocal Mormons Meet Mitt Romney: The Impact of a Mormon Presidential Candidate on Mormon Self-Expression." My argument was that the combination of Romney and the LDS Church's strategic rhetoric in responding to criticism and fear of Mormonism opened up a space for dissenting Mormons to debate controversial issues on the Internet and in other public forums.

In a nutshell, Romney's candidacy resulted in a multitude of news articles and blog essays about the question of individual agency in the LDS Church. As a result, Romney repeatedly insisted that he would not be sanctioned by the LDS Church for publicly supporting social issues the Church is against. Similarly, the LDS Church reaffirmed its usual assertion of Church political neutrality and extended it by stating its awareness of political diversity among church members and its intention to respect that. Soon after, California Proposition 8 became the litmus test for this implied tolerance.

I have not personally heard that anyone has been excommunicated for public resistance and criticism of Prop 8, though I have heard of a few being threatened privately with church discipline. Even so, I still believe that, without the attention drawn to Romney and the questions he generated about individual agency inside of the LDS Church, Mormons would not have assumed their church's tolerance on this very public and divisive issue and many would not have been public with their critique.

Of course I'm always interested in the insights of others into this and other aspects of the Mormon world.

P.S. Many of these ideas appear in an article I wrote for Religion in the News, at http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/csrpl/RINVol11No3/Mormon%20Proposition.htm

"Shaking the Tree"

This has been an interesting week. Looking back it would be easy to say that I didn't get much of anything done. And yet I did several interviews for my dissertation and worked on Sunstone Salt Lake City. I spent extended time with a friend who is suffering, and with my grandchildren who are finally getting used to the idea that I'm actually their grandma (and not just a specter of some sort). And though I usually eat most of my meals out (Haji Baba's and Pita Jungle are my local favorites), I bought three months of food storage because CNN and MSNBC have been keeping me informed on the international food situation. I've also done a lot of research, continuing to find participants who fit into the categories in which I'm interested--whether they're blogging or on email lists or "meetup" (http://www.meetup.com) groups. And I spent an entire day with one of my daughters, who is chronically ill and needs help with her diet. I've been cooking more too, doing dishes, cleaning closets, and basically being a real human being. So I can't say that I've been unproductive--though I also watched a lot of TV (vampire movies rock!) and had to recover from a nasty migraine earlier in the week.

But I've been avoiding actually writing, beyond continuing to work on the introduction to my dissertation. I am surely an undiagnosed obsessive compulsive, because I work and rework....and rework again so that sometimes one or two paragraphs monopolizes several hours. Words have power. One of my main concerns, then, is "getting it right." Not that there's a "right" way to write a dissertation, but analyzing what these women are doing and how they are doing it is a great responsibility.