{"id":90,"date":"2010-10-14T18:53:18","date_gmt":"2010-10-14T18:53:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/among-the-mormons.html"},"modified":"2010-10-14T18:53:18","modified_gmt":"2010-10-14T18:53:18","slug":"among-the-mormons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/among-the-mormons.html","title":{"rendered":"Among the Mormons"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"UtahI’m
\nback from my little sojourn at Utah State University–the former
\nagricultural college that is now a splendid city on a hill at the Cache
\nValley end of beautiful Logan Canyon. They reckon that of its 15,000
\nundergraduates, 85 percent are LDS. The Mormon equivalent of a Catholic
\nNewman Club and a Jewish Hillel House is an Institute of Religion, and
\nat USU the Institute,<\/a> adjacent to the student center, counts between six and seven thousand regulars. <\/p>\n

In
\nshort, you can say (as I did in my lecture), “If the Constitution is
\ndivinely inspired, then it’s because God wanted the United States of
\nAmerica to be a secular state,” and you’ll get a laugh because the
\naudience is well aware that Mormon doctrine does, indeed, consider the
\nConstitution to be divinely inspired. No doubt because of Mormonism’s
\nmonopolistic dominance, non-LDS students have to hang on to their own
\nspiritual convictions for dear life. Last year saw the establishment of USU SHAFT<\/a>–Utah State University Secular Humanists, Atheists, and Free Thinkers. They’ve got a couple of hundred members too, I was told.<\/p>\n

Everyone was talking about Boyd K. Packer’s remarks on homosexuality<\/a> and their aftermath–and that included a vigorous exchange of views in the letters column<\/a> of the local daily, the Herald Journal News<\/i>.
\nOn campus, I didn’t find a lot of support for the Packer position, but
\nrather a sense that the 86-year-old apostle was a declining
\nrepresentative of an era that is passing. Evidence that that could be
\nthe case came along with Church public affairs managing director Michael
\nOtterson’s strong denunciation<\/a> of anti-gay bullying, which Religion Dispatches’ Joanna Brooks sees<\/a> as a significant piece of aggiornamento<\/i> for the Church.<\/p>\n

It’s
\nimportant to recognize, though, how big a deal homosexuality is in the
\nMormon belief system. In the Christian tradition, gender is not central
\nto the main message, though some seem to pretend that’s so today.
\nCelibacy was the preferred option: Better not to burn, was the best Paul
\nhad to say about the institution of marriage. In Roman Catholicism,
\nmarriage was the johnny-come-lately sacrament.<\/p>\n

But as my friend
\nand host Phil Barlow, USU’s new Arrington Professor of Mormon History
\nand Culture, emphasized to me, in Mormonism, ontology and
\nsoteriology–the theories of being and salvation–are heterosexually
\ngendered. Where Catholic and Eastern Orthodox bishops have to be
\nunmarried, Mormon bishops have to be married. Families exist for time
\nand eternity. One might call Mormonism the apotheosis of 19th-century
\nfamilialism. <\/p>\n

It’s likely, then, that accepting the naturalness
\nof homosexuality would be a bigger theological deal for the LDS Church
\nthan putting plural marriage on hold or accepting people of color as
\nfull-fledged members. Fortunately, however, this is a tradition designed
\nfor the reception of new revelations. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m back from my little sojourn at Utah State University–the former agricultural college that is now a splendid city on a hill at the Cache Valley end of beautiful Logan Canyon. They reckon that of its 15,000 undergraduates, 85 percent are LDS. The Mormon equivalent of a Catholic Newman Club and a Jewish Hillel House…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nAmong the Mormons - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/among-the-mormons.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Among the Mormons - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I’m back from my little sojourn at Utah State University–the former agricultural college that is now a splendid city on a hill at the Cache Valley end of beautiful Logan Canyon. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}