Category Archives: LDS Society

Bigotry and ignorance strike again

LDS Society, Main, News

Sandra and I lived in Washington DC — in the District itself — for nearly six years (1999-2005). During most of that time, a major issue was where the Church would build a stake center if and when one was built in the District itself. (The Washington DC Stake center is actually located in Kensington, MD, next door to the Washington DC Temple.) The sad part was that the Church had owned a rather large chapel right in DC many years earlier, but had sold it to another church.

Well, the Church has finally found property and wants to build on it — but they are facing opposition from both home owners and other churches:

It’s not just the traffic and parking congestion that they predict the Mormons will bring to 16th Street Heights, their lush residential neighborhood north of Mount Pleasant. And never mind that the area already has a dozen or so congregations, not to mention a host of other institutions such as schools and day-care centers.

But a tower that’s the equivalent of 10 stories high?

“What are they trying to prove?” said Stuart Peacock, a lawyer who resides around the corner, his narrowing eyes punctuating his disgust. “It’s too much.”

Gloria Eblan, a software engineer who lives across from the property, at 16th and Emerson streets NW, envisions the kind of raucousness associated with a throbbing nightclub, not a church. She insists that a jackhammer-thumping construction project, followed by a weekly parade of chattering congregants will disturb her ever-precious peace.

“I don’t want to come off as the anti-Christ, because I’m not. I just have my apprehensions,” said Eblan, a crucifix around her neck. “The noise is going to drive me crazy. We’re just trying to live our lives.”

Dozens of homeowners have expressed opposition to the new church with lawn signs that read, “Too Big, Too Much, Too Many.” And the Mormons are finding little support from the neighborhood’s clergy, including one pastor who said his objection is rooted not in architecture, but theology.

“They don’t accept Jesus as the Messiah; they accept him as the prophet,” said Edward Wilson, pastor at Church of Christ, a block from the Mormon site. “It’s wrong, I disagree with it, and I wouldn’t want them in the neighborhood.”

Mormon leaders have been surprised by the opposition, in part because so many churches are located there. But they said they’re confident that their reception will improve once they build their two-story brick church, which will host two Sunday services and seat 240. The church will offer underground and aboveground parking, which the Mormons promise will minimize the congregation’s affect on the neighborhood.

I’ve driven up and down 16th Avenue many times. As the article notes, there are many, many churches along that road. The building of an LDS stake center there is not going to change or spoil the look of the neighborhood along that road. This appears mostly to be religious NIMBY mixed with ignorance and some genuine religious bigotry.  ..bruce..

Some observations on polygamy

LDS Doctrine, LDS History, LDS Society, Main, Polygamy

[I belong to a private e-mail list for attendees of an invitation-only technology conference that has meeting annually for nearly 25 years. Early in May, as the news was breaking about the Texas raid of the FLDS YFZ compound, some comments were made by a few posters, drawing some rather uninformed and incorrect correlations between the FLDS Church and LDS Church culture in general, citing as sources (a) a former LDS Church member and (b) a non-LDS person who had lived for some time in Utah. I ended up making two posts to that list, which I reproduce here in slightly edited form.]

[First post — made 05/02/08]

I appreciate your efforts to shed light on the mess down in Texas. However, the next time you want to opine on and analyze LDS history, thought, and doctrine, you might try actually asking someone who has a thorough understanding of it and has studied it extensively in the context of both historical and mainstream Christianity.

Latter-day Saints (by which I mean members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 13+ million members worldwide, over 50% of those outside of the United States) are almost universally appalled by the various polygamous offshoots, most of which are quite tiny, insular and parochial in comparison. Note that support for such groups is grounds for denying a temple recommend (required to enter and participate in LDS temple ceremonies) and actual involvement is immediate grounds for excommunication. There is no sympathy, winking, or collusion between the LDS Church and these various tiny denominations; the relationship is frankly far more like that of the Roman Catholic Church and the various Protestant groups that arose during the Reformation, each side considering the other hopelessly apostate.

There is also very little similarity between the cultural and organizational behavior of the LDS Church vs. that found in these offshoots. Far from running around in suits and bonnets, and living in isolated communities, Latter-day Saints tend to be heavily integrated in their communities and cultures wherever they are found. There are over 27,000 LDS congregations worldwide, on every continent except Antarctica — and there may be one down there for all I know. Also note that the LDS Church has provided $750 million [correction: over $1 billion] in humanitarian assistance worldwide [PDF] in the last 22 years, the vast majority of which has gone to people who are not members of the LDS Church. All of this assistance has come either directly out of the pockets of the LDS members themselves or from the production of the LDS Church’s extensive welfare system, which itself is run largely from volunteer labor of LDS members.

Also note that many Evangelical Christians consider us too liberal in our lifestyle and behavior (we’re great fans of music and dancing, and our view towards abortion and related issues, while still conservative, is more liberal than that found in Evangelical — or for that matter, Catholic — circles). Anyone who seriously contends that Latter-day Saints are conformist sheep controlled by the Church hierarchy would be laughed out of the room by anyone who (like me) has actually served in an LDS bishopric. (Here’s Joseph Smith’s own observation: “There has been a great difficulty in getting anything into the heads of this generation. It has been like splitting hemlock knots with a corn-dodger [corn muffin] for a wedge and a pumpkin for a beetle [mallet].”)

As for education and intellect, I’ll cheerfully put up the LDS Church’s record against any other religion . For every Sonia Johnson (and there really have been only a few dozen such excommunications over the past 20 years), there have been scores of excommunications for extreme right-wing behavior and hundreds, if not thousands, of excommunications for involvement and participation in polygamous groups.

In short, trying to make statements or draw conclusions about the LDS Church based on the behavior of the FLDS group down in Texas is about like trying to make statements about Methodist and Baptists churches by the behavior of Jim Jones and the People’s Temple.

Finally, I will cheerfully admit — as will most Latter-day Saints — that the LDS-heavy culture in Utah does get a bit, ah, strange at times. A close friend of mine — who served as an LDS bishop over a mostly-Latino congregation down in El Paso, Texas — put it best, paraphrasing from “Hello, Dolly”: “Mormons are like horse manure. Spread them around, and they make things grow; pile them up in a heap, and they tend to stink.”

[Second post – made 05/05/08]

Most (though not all) modern LDS-derived polygamous churches descended from a group of seven Latter-day Saints (Mormons) who were excommunicated in the 1923-1941 time frame for practicing polygamy (the “Council of Friends”).The diagram at the bottom of this website gives you something of an idea of how most (though not all) of these churches are related. The FLDS Church is the largest of the surviving polygamous churches, most of which are either very tiny or defunct.

Still, the FLDS Chruch has only about 10,000 members total, most of whom were born into the FLDS Church and were never members of the LDS Church. The same is true of most of the other polygamous churches; they occasionally recruit outside people (Latter-day Saints or not), but tend to be largely descended from the original recruits (who were mostly Latter-day Saints) in the early to mid 20th Century. (Note that by contrast, the relatively small city of Parker, CO, where I live, has about 4000 Latter-day Saints in and around it, and there are about 130,000 Latter-day Saints in the entire state of Colorado.)

There are also stark contrasts between how the FLDS Church (and some of the other polygamous churches) practice polygamy vs. how it was practiced among Latter-day Saints up through 1904. For example:

The FLDS practice the “Law of placing,” or assignment of marriages, combined with a high level of control of the membership. This contrasts greatly with the LDS. We have no arranged marriages and the average age for LDS marriages is 23. Throughout LDS history, free agency has been a ruling principle. In 19th century LDS plural marriages women were freely allowed to marry, divorce, and leave the community. My own great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Clark Crouch, was in a plural marriage, and she divorced her husband and left the community with no ramifications. There was no danger of having her children reassigned to anyone else. It was more difficult for men to obtain a divorce, as it was believed that the men should provide economic and social support since there was no state welfare program and women had limited employment opportunities. Kathryn M. Daynes discusses the economic underpinnings of plural marriage in her book titled “More Wives Than One: Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System, 1840-1910.” . . .

Another difference with the FLDS church is their idea that more wives equals a greater chance of exaltation. While our critics like to claim we believed that, Brigham Young stated quite clearly that not everyone would, or should, practice plural marriage. Several members of church leadership–including apostles–were not polygamists. Some of Brigham’s more controversial statements, when read in context, seem to use plural marriage as an example to focus on the idea of being willing to follow God rather than whether or not you actually practiced plural marriage. If plural marriage were required for heaven, why did some members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, our top leadership group, not practice it?

If you would like to read more about fundamentalist Mormonism, I recommend the book “Modern Polygamy and Mormon Fundamentalism: The Generations after the Manifesto” by Brian C. Hales.

— Scott Gordon, fairlds.org (The FAIR Journal — email sent 5/4/2008)

There are some other stark contrasts as well. In the Utah Territory in the second half of the 19th century, when the practice of polygamy was at its peak, Brigham Young emphasized the need for advanced education for LDS girls and women. On one occasion he stated:

“We wish, in our Sunday and day schools, that they who are inclined to any particular branch of study may have the privilege to study it. As I have often told my sisters in the Female Relief societies, we have sisters here who, if they had the privilege of studying, would make just as good mathematicians or accountants as any man; and we think they ought to have the privilege to study these branches of knowledge that they may develop the powers with which they are endowed. We believe that women are useful, not only to sweep houses, wash dishes, make beds, and raise babies, but that they should stand behind the counter, study law or physic [medicine], or become good book-keepers and be able to do the business in any counting house, and all this to enlarge their sphere of usefulness for the benefit of society at large. In following these things they but answer the design of their creation. These, and many more things of equal utility are incorporated in our religion, and we believe in and try to practice them.” (Journal of Discourses 13:61; address given July 18, 1869)

LDS women (mostly plural wives!) were heavily involved in national and international women’s rights movements and traveled to the Eastern US to participate in and speak at women’s conferences. Only the first page of the just-linked article is available, but it does set forth the basic situation; also see An Advocate for Women: The Public Life of Emmeline B. Wells, 1870-1920 by Carol Cornwall Madsen (BYU Press/Deseret Book, 2006), as well as this transcript from the PBS Special, “The Mormons”. In 1872, LDS women (again, mostly plural wives) started their own intellectual journal, The Women’s Exponent, which was published for over 40 years.

For that matter, women in the Utah Territory were the second (after those in the Wyoming Territory) in the United States to receive the right to vote, in 1870. That right was stripped by Congress in 1887 in the effort to end polygamy and reduce the political influence of the LDS Church, but it was restored — 25 years ahead of the 19th Amendment — when Utah gained statehood in 1895. In fact, the actual language put into the Utah State Constitution was, “The rights of citizens of the State of Utah to vote and hold office shall not be denied or abridged on account of sex. Both male and female citizens of this state shall enjoy equally all civil, political and religious rights and privileges.” (1896 Utah State Constitution, Article IV, Section 1, “Equal political rights”).

In short, it’s hard to imagine a more dramatic contrast between the TV images and news accounts of the (apparently) highly-sheltered, controlled and under-educated girls/women at the FLDS compound in Texas and the broad, active, literate, and — for its era (we are talking about the 1800s) — quite liberated roles and activities of Latter-day Saint women in the Rocky Mountains during the last half of the 19th Century. ..bruce..

Obama and Mormons — an update

Current events, LDS Society, Politics

I wrote several posts a few months back about the opportunity that Barack Obama had to gain support among American Latter-day Saints, particularly in the western US. In brief, I felt that Mormons were so upset about the anti-Mormon slurs being used against Mitt Romney that I felt there was a real opportunity for Obama to pick up significant LDS support in the general election.

Well, I now believe that such an opportunity is dwindling away, due to three main developments.

First, Mike Huckabee now appears to have lost his influence in the GOP campaign. Since his campaign and he himself were the worst offenders in anti-LDS slurs, that will go a long ways towards letting the anger that many Mormons felt towards such appalling tactics die down.

Second, John McCain appears to have buried the hatchet with Mitt Romney — they’ve done fund-raising events together, something McCain desperately needs help with — and there is serious talk about Romney as VP. (Personally, I’d rather see Condi Rice as VP, but I think she may carry too much baggage from the Bush Administration to be seriously considered.) Anyway, the McCain-Romney reconciliation likewise goes a long ways towards smoothing over some of the anti-Mormon jabs that came out of the McCain campaign in the primaries. Note, however, that there are still “social conservatives” (read: Evangelicals) who are apoplectic at the thought of Romney as VP. If this is seen as having torpedoed Romney’s selection as VP, McCain support could dwindle again.

I love the government and the Constitution of this land, but I do not love the damned rascals that administer the government. — Brigham Young

Third, and the real kicker, the whole flap over various sermons by Rev. Jeremiah Wright — and Obama’s only half-hearted attempts to distance himself from Wright’s more inflammatory remarks — has likely diminished most of the support that Obama might have gained among Latter-day Saints. In particular, the clip of Rev. Wright saying, “G** d*** America!” — which was repeatedly shown on the various news channels — would likely be very offensive and disturbing to most Americans Mormons. In spite of our own history of religious persecution and having to flee the United States for what was then Mexico (and is now Utah — which gives me a great idea for a new Absolut Vodka ad showing the kingdom of Deseret), American Mormons are profoundly patriotic and believe very much in American exceptionalism, even as we decry some of the idiocies of the past and present. And while we still wince over comments made by a few past Church leaders, in most such cases said leaders have been dead for decades or over a century, rather than being alive and now building a $1.6 million home in a mostly-white, affluent neighborhood (which raises questions about many of Rev. Wright’s comments and sermons).

Things could change again. McCain could do something profoundly stupid, such as choosing Mike Huckabee as VP, though I consider that highly unlikely. On the other hand, Obama’s most recent comments — about small-town people in Pennsylvania being “bitter” and “clinging to guns or religion” — aren’t going to play very well with Mormons living in the intermountain West.

In short, I just don’t think any significant shift to Obama is going to happen. ..bruce..

General Conference BBQ update

LDS Society, Main

[UPDATED 04/05/08 – 1455 MDT] Ooooooookay,  it looks as though this approach to one of our BBQs isn’t quite a popular as our regular approach. 🙂 We had maybe 8 adults (including 3 missionaries) and 3 kids for the morning session. Several families showed up during the lunch break — we probably had 30 people here at the high point — and now we’re back down to 7 adults (plus me) and 3 or 4 kids for the afternoon session. Of course, this means I now have more food than I know what to do with, even though I only cooked up half of the hamburger and the hot dogs. Heck, I have three briskets that I haven’t even carved up yet (and most of the first two left as well). I definitely overshot. Sigh.

[UPDATED 04/05/08 – 0802 MDT] As my sweet wife Sandra is fond of telling me, the advantage of cleaning (and setting) up everything before you go to bed is that it’s all still cleaned (and set) up when you wake up in the morning. Woot! The coals in the smoker that I carefully banked last night were still hot, so it only took me a few minutes to get the firebox going. The three turkey breasts and the leg of lamb are all now being bathed in pecan smoke and actually cooking as well. The drinks (which I’ve divided into “Diet Soda/Water” and “The Good Stuff” in two different containers) are now all on ice, though they got pre-chilled last night with the overnight temperatures dropping into the 30s.

I have time to drive to the store for more ice before anyone shows up.

===== [Original post] =====

Well, all is readiness, I think. All five briskets (total pre-cooked weight: 35 lbs) have been smoked and are now in the oven for another 18 hours of cooking. I plan to get up at 6 am, rebuild the fire in the smoker, and smoke 3 bone-in turkey breasts and a leg of lamb (all of which have been marinading since yesterday). I called our next-door neighbors (Omar & Rose Rabat) and invited them to come over either Saturday or Sunday.

I have all the hamburger and hot dog buns purchased, though two of our MinPins — Wingnut (Winni) and Moonbat (Marti) — got hold of one pack of hot dog buns, ripped the package off, and dragged the buns into their ‘fort’ — the space under our bed — where they took quite a few bites out of the buns themselves. I discovered this when I called the dogs (we have four) to dinner, and Winnie and Marti just weren’t interested in their food. I also have all the ground beef, hot dogs, sausages, and portobello mushrooms purchased, as well as the chicken breasts (cut in half and marinating). Those will all get grilled between sessions tomorrow.

I got the satellite box and projector set up downstairs, then cannibalized one of my PCs to get a subwoofer and a pair of speakers for the audio; it works great. Moved furniture downstairs and set up folding chairs (we have about 20 folding chairs because Sandra is the ward music/choir director, and we hold choir practice at our house). Dragged chairs and counter stools around on the main floor as well.

Printed up 8″x5″ cards labeling bathrooms and nursing rooms and taped them to the appropriate doors. Typed up a half-sheet flyer for those attending (so I don’t have to keep explaining the same things over and over as people arrive) and put them — along with blank name tags — by the front door.

Moved all of the bottle water and diet soda out onto the deck, as well as half of the non-diet soda, so the night air can start the chilling process.

Cleaned the house so it’s spic and span.1

I guess that’s it. “To bed, to bed! Said Sleepyhead…” (one of our kids favorite bedtime rhymes). [Scroll back up and click on the “Night Theme” button at the top of the right sidebar to get the proper effect.] ..bruce..

=============

1 I added this in case my wife — who’s out of town — happens to get ‘net connection and read this post.

Open invitation to Colorado Bloggernacklites

LDS Society, Main

[Futher updates moved to the next post]

UPDATE (04/04/08; 1602 MDT): Three briskets down, two to go. I smoked the first three for about seven hours, wrapped them in foil, and put them in the oven; the other two just went into the smoker. The weather is gorgeous — sunny, mostly clear, and a bit cool. It’s supposed to be that way for the next few days, which will be just about perfect. I’m going to run out to buy some more soda — I’ve got a lot already, but then again, we’re going to have people here all day for two days.

UPDATE (04/04/08; 0910 MDT): The Conference cooking has commenced. I went out at about 7:30 am this morning, took the cover off of the smoker, dragged it into position on the deck, and started the coals a-burnin’. I’ve been marinating five (5) briskets — about 7 lbs each — since Wednesday, and I now have three of them in the smoker (all that I can fit). I will smoke them for several hours, then (as per this post) take them out, double-wrap them in heavy foil, and stick them in the oven at 180 deg F until tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ll stick the other two in the smoker and, once they’re smoked, I’ll do the same for them (but probably won’t serve them until Sunday).

I also have three bone-in turkey breasts marinating, as well as one leg of lamb. I’ll get up early tomorrow morning to start smoking them, with the goal of having them done around noon tomorrow. I’ve also got a number of boneless, skinless chicken breasts (cut in half lengthwise) marinating in Smoked Chipotle Tabasco Sauce; I’ll grill those tomorrow during lunch, along with hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken sausages, and portobello mushrooms.

Sure hope we have a large turnout, because we’ll have a ton of food. On the other hand, the last few times we’ve done this, we’ve had 70+ people show up. Should be fun. Now I’ve got to go hook up the video projector downstairs….

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Men like to barbecue. Men will cook if danger is involved.– Rita Rudner

I periodically do what my good friend Bruce Henderson refers to as VLSBs: Very Large Scale Barbecues. My wife and I started this tradition while living in Washington DC and have continued it here in Colorado. Here’s a photoblogging record of one from a few years ago. We typically get turnouts of 50-80 people at these events, and we eat food like this (note that these photos are from two years ago; see the link in the previous sentence):

Mmm...brisket...

Well, I’m doing one this weekend in connection with General Conference, and y’all are invited. I will probably smoke 30 lbs of beef brisket, as well as 2-3 turkey breasts, and at least one leg of lamb, as well as grilling several dozen hamburgers and hotdogs. And we’ll provide lots and lots of bottled soda:

Mmm...soda...

We run this as a pot-luck, so feel free to bring appetizers, side dishes, salads, or desserts.

We’ll have Conference on both in the living room (large screen TV) and down in the rec room (projector against one wall). Kids are welcome (Sandra has a permanent play area set up for our grandkids in one corner of the downstairs area). The schedule is pretty much GC schedule (9:30 am to 4:30 pm, both Saturday and Sunday); you can come for just one session, for all sessions, or even just for the break between sessions (12:00 noon to 2:00 pm each day).

Anyway, we’re at 9805 E Tom Tom Drive, Parker, Colorado — about 25 miles SSW of downtown Denver. Phone is 303.840.1511. Really ambitious (or crazy) Bloggernacklites from nearby states (Kansas, Wyoming, Utah, etc.) are also invited. ..bruce..

“All are alike unto God”

Book of Mormon, LDS Doctrine, LDS Society, Main

For none of these iniquities come of the Lord; for he doeth that which is good among the children of men; and he doeth nothing save it be plain unto the children of men; and he inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile. (2 Nephi 26:33)

Many, many years ago, on a visit to Utah, I attended church with an acquaintance of mine. This man was a professor at BYU and had a PhD from Harvard, of which he was quite proud. After the high priest group meeting was over, he turned to me and said, “You know, during the lesson I was looking around the room with interest. On the one hand, here were men with advanced degrees and significant accomplishments: scholars, professors, successful businessmen. On the other hand, you have men who are third- and fourth-generation farmers. I marvel that the same Gospel can encompass us all.” My response was simply, “Well, maybe from where the Lord sits, there isn’t any real difference.”

My acquaintance was not amused. As I said, he was quite proud of his Ivy League degree and did not care to be lumped in with farmers.

I have reflected on that exchange many times in the quarter-century since it happened. I think we all succumb to my acquaintance’s temptation from time to time and in different ways. The condescension of men is something quite different from the condescension of God; ours is made in self-justification, self-praise and self-satisfaction. Whether it is our intellect, our education, our orthodoxy (or heterodoxy), our skepticism (or our faithfulness), or even our sacrifice and suffering, we find reasons why we’re somehow better, wiser, more thoughtful or more authentic than those around us (or, at least, those of whom we don’t approve). And we are all of us wrong. From where God sits, there is no real difference between us; the gap between His attributes and ours, between His perfection and our sinfulness, is so vast so as to render our differences insignificant in the face of our need to simply repent and rely utterly upon Him.

And he spake this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others:

Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.

And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.

I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted. (Luke 18:9-14)

I believe we are not only guilty of chauvinism regarding our personal characteristics, our accomplishments, or our self-selected social/intellectual group, we are guilty of temporal and cultural chauvinism as well. We often assume, consciously or not, that God is more, well, nuanced with us in these ‘latter days’ than with, say, the Israelites in 7th century BC Judah because we are more sophisticated and educated. In fact, we often limit what we believe God could have told such people simply because of the historical setting; for example, God could not have really told Nephi details about the birth and life of Jesus Christ and so it must be a late addition to the Book of Mormon. (Unspoken but lurking beneath such assertions is the assumption, “Well, God hasn’t told me anything in such detail, so how could He have done so with Nephi or anyone else for that matter?”) Again, from where God sits, there is no measurable difference in our cultures, philosophies, and levels of education — the fact that we have iPhones, the internet, The Ensign and Dialogue, and that the Israelites did not, is meaningless in the context of the infinite gap between us and God.

Mormons – People who believe: … 3. That the only difference between them and God is a few years of training.
— Orson Scott Card, Saintspeak (1984).

God knows personally and watches over all His children on the “worlds without number” that He has created and continues to create; He perceives this entire universe in real time. We, on the other hand, struggle to balance our checkbooks and remember our own kids’ names or what we were doing 3 months ago. And yet we presume to judge and criticize one another, and to justify ourselves, over what are in an eternal and Godly perspective trivial differences. We are like toddlers arguing over who has more or larger freckles while a global war rages around us and threatens us all.

This day, Easter, we celebrate the true condescension of God, that infinite and eternal atonement that bridges that infinite gap, resurrects us from the dead, and brings us back into the presence of God. It is a gift beyond all comprehension and deserving, and our reaction to it should be less like the Pharisee and more like the publican. We are all sinners and unprofitable servants — we are all truly “alike unto God” — and yet Christ atoned for us anyway. Today, of all days, we should remember and ponder upon that. ..bruce..

Imago Dei

Belief systems, LDS Society, Main

I wrote nearly a year ago about how US-based Latter-day Saints — unlike members of other major religious groups — tend to be more devout the higher their level of education. In other words, US Mormons with a college degree tend to be more active than those with just a high school degree, who in turn tend to be more active than those with no high school degree.

Now comes another interesting study out of BYU that says that US-based LDS women attending college tend to be more satisfied with their body image and less prone to eating disorders than non-LDS women attending college:

An associate professor of psychology at Brigham Young University, Spangler has spent a lot of time considering the relationship between religious doctrine and the body. In her talk last week at a University of Utah symposium on body image, she reported on research showing that Mormon college students have significantly better “body satisfaction” than students from other religions or from no religion.

Her thesis: Mormon theological doctrine about the body in general is what leads those LDS students to be happy with their own bodies in particular.

That’s not to say that most men and women who are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints like everything about their bodies. Spangler herself does research on eating disorders, and some of the women in treatment are from BYU. Like most Americans — 80 percent of women and 60 percent of men, according to one national study — many LDS women look in the mirror and are at least mildly unhappy. Still, Mormons are more satisfied than most, she says. . . .

Two of the studies, conducted by Jody Oomen-Early at Texas Women’s University, surveyed women age 18 to 30 about a related issue — eating disorders. Oomen-Early, who did her graduate work in health sciences at BYU, wondered if religious devoutness was correlated with increased eating disorder behaviors, a question that first occurred to her when an anorexic student at TWU told her that she felt she was “good” when she denied herself, and sinful when she ate.

Oomen-Early’s research found that the more devout a Baptist or Methodist woman, the more likely she was to have eating disorder behaviors. But — and this surprised her — more devout LDS women were less prone to eating disorder symptoms. “Religious devoutness seemed to be a protective factor in LDS women,” says Oomen-Early.

As one of the researches notes, correlation is not causation. Still, one could reasonably conclude that, for US-based Latter-day Saint women, the more educated you are, the happier you’ll be. Food (ahem) for thought; read the whole thing. ..bruce..

The Brotherhood of the Beard

LDS Society, Main

[UPDATED 3/12/08: Check out this corresponding post over at The Posts of My House: The Sisterhood of the Slacks. I must confess some real sympathy for the sisters who would rather wear dress slacks than skirts.]

We had stake conference the Sunday before last. I attended all sessions (except the youth session), including both of the Sunday main sessions, largely because I was in the Stake choir. And I was amused to find that my eyes were drawn to every other bearded male I saw during all those sessions — and I saw a few them eyeballing me as well. No, we’re all straight (well, at least I can vouch for myself) — but bearded Mormons tend to check each other out, not out of competition but out of a sense of “well, at least I’m not the only guy with a beard here.”

OK, there’s some mental competition as well (“Y’know, if he would just trim up his beard right there, it would look so much better…”), but it’s minor and secondary.

I’ve had a beard most of my adult life. I started growing my first beard during my very last week at BYU (1978) — not so much as an act of defiance than as an act of convenience, since I spent that last week sleeping in my office in the Talmage Building while trying to finish my CS 480 final project (a multi-tasking kernel running on a Nova minicomputer). I alternated between bearded and clean-shaven for several years (including a mustache for a while), was clean-shaven during my two years of teaching at BYU (1985-87) and remained clean-shaven until we had a “Days of ’47” beard-growing contest in our ward in Santa Cruz (no, seriously) in 1988. The bishopric was reorganized during that contest, and the two of us who were called as counselors both had grown beards, which really gave the ward that pioneer feeling. I kept mine after the contest, and have had it pretty much ever since.

Every few years since then I shave it off, usually out of boredom or curiosity, or from a desire to somehow motivate myself. What I usually get is people (including — nay, especially — members of the Church) finding polite or roundabout ways of telling me how much better I looked with the beard. When I shaved it off a few years back while we were living in DC, my dog Deacon barked at me when I walked out of the bathroom, not recognizing me. The same thing pretty much happened at church (though the members, for the most part, refrained from barking at me). The real clincher, though, was when the Washington DC North Mission President told me that I “just didn’t look the same” without the beard. When a mission president hints that you looked better with the beard — and this while I was serving as the branch mission leader, within his mission — then the beard isn’t going to stay away for long.

Besides, my sweet wife Sandra really loves the beard (she says I kiss better when I have one; I know, TMI, but there you go). She’s always very sweet and supportive and stiff-upper-lippish when I shave it off, but is always so relieved when I grow it back. As am I.

I have this recurring fantasy that at some point the Church leadership will look back at all the bearded and mustachioed General Authorities (including every President from Brigham Young through Heber J. Grant) who served faithfully up through the middle of the 20th Century and decide that maybe facial hair isn’t all that bad. But I suspect that won’t happen until we get far enough into the Last Days that the general destruction and upheaval disrupts the razors-and-shaving-cream supply chain. At that point, we’ll all have more important things to worry about.

Which I guess is the point. ..bruce..

D&D at BYU (1976)

BYU, Games, LDS Society, Main

With the passing this week of Dungeons & Dragons co-inventor Gary Gygax — and was there ever a more perfect name for the inventor of role-playing games? — I’ve reflected a bit on my own introduction to the game and the fact that I set up what I suspect was the first club ever at BYU that hosted D&D games.

For Christmas 1975, my (now-former) wife Marla had bought me the SPI science fiction wargame StarForce: Alpha Centauri, which I had been eying for some months in ads in the back of Analog. Of course, now that I had the game, I had to have someone to play it with. So I organized a club on campus — I was an BYU undergrad at the time, studying computer science — which I called, “The Strategy & Tactics Group”. I recruited a few people into it, most notably my friend Terry, a co-worker at the BYU Translation Sciences Institute, and also put up some signs around campus. The meetings, held every few weeks, were pretty casual — people (never a lot) showed up and paired off to play various map-and-chit wargames and the like.

At about the 3rd or 4th meeting, I noticed a group of four guys over at one table who were talking a lot and rolling dice. However, rather than having a preprinted map and cardboard chits in front of them, they had some little beige books and a few sheets of paper. I wandered over to see what was going on — and thus was introduced into the world of role-playing games in general, and Dungeons & Dragons in particular.

It was quite a revelation. I had been playing board games (Monopoly, Clue, Scrabble) and card games (Hearts mostly, though some War, Poker, and Blackjack) since childhood. In high school, my good friend Andrew Bos — who had previously introduced me to the Church — had subsequently introduced me to historical wargames, at which he always soundly thrashed me. And, of course, StarForce had intrigued me because of its science fiction setting, which was played out on a 3-D starmap of actual systems within 50 or so light years of Earth.

But D&D was like none of the above, nor like anything else I had ever played. Most of the game was played out in our heads, pitting us against the dice, the dungeon master (DM), and the various roll tables and stats in the D&D books. It was compelling, fun, and addictive, and for quite some time I ended up spending more time playing D&D at the club meetings than playing the various wargames that I had originally intended it for. That ended when the DM had to drop out of BYU for personal reasons, but I picked up the slack a bit sometime later and ran (as the DM) a few campaigns of my own. That continued until I finally graduated from BYU in 1978; I have no idea what happened with the club beyond that point.

Afterword

My most intense D&D playing would wait until a year or so after I graduated from BYU. After spending a year with General Dynamics down in San Diego, I took a job with Link Simulations in Houston (Clear Lake City, actually) in mid-1979, working on the Space Shuttle flight simulators at NASA/Johnson Space Center. I became friends almost immediately with Bob Trammel, who had started with Ford, another contractor on the SS flight simulators, within a week or two of my starting at Link. We happened to be staying in the same motel while waiting to bring our families out — and we both happened to be LDS (and, once we found apartments, in the same ward). Bob had heard of D&D and was interested in it; he had some co-workers who were likewise interested. So I set up a rather detailed campaign, and we played 2-3 times per week over lunch for probably 4 months. I then changed jobs in February 1980, moving over the Lunar & Planetary Institute, and so was too far away from the others for the lunchtime sessions.

However, several months later, we decided to try to finish the campaign and so set up a Saturday marathon session that lasted from about 9 or 10 in the morning until after midnight. The campaigners, bless their hearts, figured out the final clues (including a partially scorched index card I had made that held the code as to how to use magical teleport booths scattered around the dungeon) and actually finished the campaign successfully, though Bob was getting increasingly unhappy phone calls from his wife Carol as the night wore on. We all had an absolutely wonderful time. I still have that burnt index card in my files.

I don’t know if that was the last time I ever played D&D, but if not, it was close to it. Most of my game playing after that reverted back to SF/F wargames, since it was easier to find one person to play with than half a dozen. I had a golden age of wargaming while working at Monitor Labs in 1981-82; the head of computer systems for the accounting department, Steven Davies-Morris, was a gamer as well, and we’d play at least once a week or so in my office. But once I left Monitor Labs, I found it hard to come up with even a single opponent, though that didn’t stop me from collecting the occasional game, something I still do. Altogether, I own somewhere from 50 to 70 wargames, mostly science fiction/fantasy, and mostly dating from the mid-70s to the mid-80s.

And I still have my little beige D&D books. ..bruce..

Managing Mormon meetings

LDS Organization, LDS Society, Main

“Brethren, there is no meeting in the Church so unimportant that it cannot begin on time, and there is no meeting in the Church so important that it cannot end on time.”

— J. Reuben Clark III, a counselor in my BYU Stake Presidency, to the priesthood leadership of my BYU ward, circa 1976

Pres. Clark (a BYU classics professor and the son of J. Reuben Clark Jr.) uttered those words in our BYU ward PEC meeting being held as part of our ward conference back when I was a BYU undergrad. The PEC meeting had been late in starting for reasons I don’t fully recall, but I certainly recall Pres. Clark’s rebuke once we did get started. I cited his remarks in the comments to this posting over at By Common Consent after seeing that the winner of the “Mormon happiness is…” poll was “…when church finishes 10 minutes early” (42%).

In the same comments, I talked about Lou Hampton, who became branch president of the District of Columbia Branch while Sandra and I were living there (and later bishop when the DC Branch became the Chevy Chase Ward). This was Lou’s third time as a bishop, and one of the changes he immediately instituted was that all meetings begin on time and ended on time, if not sooner. In fact, one of his first acts was to go through the entire chapel and ensure that the clocks were all synchronized and set to the correct time.

At the time that Lou became branch president, our schedule started with Priesthood and Relief Society meetings, and both meetings were well known for starting 10 to 20 minutes late. Lou worked diligently with both organizations to get them to start on time; as he did so, members started showing up on time as well.

Correspondingly, our meeting schedule ended with Sacrament meeting. Lou always took a minute with the speakers before the meeting started letting them know how much time they had and when he expected them to be done. He would do this with all the speakers in order to avoid the problem of an earlier speaker using up so much time that the later speakers had little left.

Lou always started Sacrament meeting on time, regardless of who might still be milling around in the pews; again, the members quickly learned to watch the clock and to sit down promptly. During the meeting itself, Lou would put a note on the pulpit or, should that fail to work, tap the current speaker on the back to indicate that it was time to wrap up. He would even do this with High Council speakers; as he rightly pointed out, he was still the presiding authority at the meeting, not the High Council representative. He did, however, forebear from interrupting any member of the District (and later Stake) Presidency.

Likewise, Lou would bring Fast & Testimony meeting to a close right on time, even if there were people still on the stand. That bothered me some at first, but I came to realize that Lou’s concern was for the congregation as a whole. It also gave us all an incentive to bear our testimonies sooner in the meeting, rather than later, and to keep our testimonies brief and to the point, so as to allow time for others. (One other thing: Lou always had a large printed sheet laying on the pulpit during Fast & Testimony meeting that said, “Please state your name.” This was a great help, particularly as the branch — and then ward — grew by leaps and bounds.)

On those occasions when the (regular) Sacrament meeting speakers ended early, Lou did not feel the need to fill up the remaining time, either by speaking himself or by calling upon others to speak. Instead, we simply ended Sacrament meeting (and thus our entire block) early. The members quickly caught on, and so again kept their remarks short and to the point. As a result, we regularly ended anywhere from 5 to 15 (and sometimes even 20) minutes early.

Lou kept the same discipline in the various leadership meetings (bishopric, PEC, ward council, etc.). We started on time, we moved quickly through the agenda, and we dismissed as soon as all pertinent issues had been covered. None of this indicated a lack of concern on Lou’s part for the branch/ward or its members; on the contrary, Lou did this precisely so that he could spend as much time as he could in personal ministry to the members. When I became one of his counselors, I quickly discovered that he delegated literally everything that he could to us for that same reason.

It is interesting to see the example set by the general Church leadership in General Conference, particularly under Pres. Hinckley. Of course, General Conference meetings always begin on time, but for the last several years, most sessions have ended several minutes early, particularly when Pres. Hinckley himself was the closing speaker.

I appreciated Lou’s example precisely because it reflected what I have tried to follow since hearing Pres. Clark’s rebuke some 30+ years ago. I’ve done my best to keep meetings on-time and brief both in my Church responsibilities as well as my professional life. I must confess that I have chafed some since moving to Colorado; our ward here is wonderful, but for most of the past 2.5 years that we’ve lived here, Sacrament has been both late starting and often late getting out (cutting into my time as Gospel Doctrine and now Gospel Essentials teacher), and my High Priest Group meetings are usually late ending as well.

I have recently been released as the Gospel Doctrine teacher and called as the ward mission leader. I’ve let the full-time and ward missionaries know that our missionary correlation meeting will be held right after the end of the block, and that I do not expect it to last more than 15 minutes. That was greeted with some joy and relief, as apparently the previous missionary correlation meetings were being held on a weeknight and regularly lasted a hour or more. I’ve been a ward mission leader several times before, and I’m pretty confident that we can cover what we need to in those 15 minutes; any follow-up discussions can be done one-on-one over the phone or in person. Our time is best spent in actual service to others, not hashing out details ad infinitum. I believe that’s true for all our meetings. ..bruce..