What You Missed at Sunstone West

This Saturday I took a trip down to Sunstone West in Cupertino California with a couple friends from a Mormon-themed message board I frequent.

Mike Reed, playing with my camera.

One of these friends, Steven, is a gentle giant. The strong, quiet type. Into anime, dungeons and dragons, and techno music. Mike Reed is a wiry, loquacious, earringed-and-goateed academic. Needless to say, they are extremely interesting people, and I very much enjoyed our excursion. Other people I enjoyed meeting and chatting with at some length included Maxine Hanks (with whom I share an interest in the overlap of Mormonism with gnosis), Mel Tungate (who shares my dismay at how LDS apologists have handled the Book of Abraham issue), and Seth Bryant (an up-and-coming Community of Christ scholar with an interest in sexuality and gender issues). As I remarked to Mike, it was great to get to hang out with people who laugh at my FARMS jokes.

My session (with Ben Clarke) was well-attended and well-received. I'll post an MP3 link when it's available.

That's me up at the front. The back of Steven's head is at the far right. (Yes, ponytail guy.)

The only presentation I took notes on was Todd Compton's talk, "Teen Marriage Age in Mormon Polygamy and in American Culture: What Was the Norm?".

Todd observed that ten of Joseph Smith's wives were in their teens at the time he married them. Todd asks, was this typical of the New England culture from which Smith and most of the Mormons came? He found that it was not. In Massachusetts, for example, the mean marriage age was 24, and only about 3-4% of women married in their teens. Only about .04% married at ages 14 or 15.

Todd also looked into marriage ages in Utah after the Mormons moved West. Most frontier states had more men than women, which increased competition for wives and drove female marriage ages down. Utah had no such imbalance, yet its marriage ages were much lower than the rest of the US, including the frontier. This is because polygamy causes a gender imbalance almost by definition: competition for wives resulted in women marrying at younger and younger ages.

Todd feels that a better apologetic for Joseph's marriage to Helen Mar Kimball than the appeal to cultural context is that the marriage was a dynastic alliance between two church leaders. It was initiated by Orson Hyde rather than Joseph himself, and Todd thinks it probable that the marriage was not consummated (though there's no evidence one way or the other for this particular marriage).

Another very interesting talk whose MP3 recording you'll want to purchase when they become available was Connell O'Donovan's "'I Would Confine Them to Their Own Species': LDS Historical Rhetoric and Praxis Regarding Marriage Between Blacks and Whites". Connell had found a very interesting record of the minutes of an 1847 meeting. Earlier the same year Brigham Young had endorsed interracial marriage, saying that we are all one blood. In this meeting, however, he decried it, suggested that it would lead to the destruction of society and humanity, and indicated that it required blood atonement. This just goes to show how very abruptly his position (and the church's position) reversed on this subject. Connell thinks part of this may be a cathartic expression of Brigham's personal frustration about the way his own marital relations were being handled by the courts: crap runs downhill, so to speak. Brigham repeated these themes on several other occasions, as well, and so did other church leaders. Despite their vehemence, the ban was enforced somewhat inconsistently. One interracial couple had something like eleven children, half of whom were initiated into the priesthood and half of whom were denied it. Connell closed by basically saying that the prophets of doom who felt sure that interracial marriage would be the end of us all have been proven mistaken. The same argument is used against same-sex marriage, and that will be proven mistaken, too. It's only a matter of time.

I also got to see the first half of Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons. It is truly moving and well-put-together.

I'm already looking forward to next year!

The Journey Is Over, but the Cycle Begins Again

Tonight's series finale of Battlestar Galactica was a fantastic ending to a fantastic series. I loved the fact that it brought real closure to the show. There are too many shows where the creators just don't bother to tie up all the loose ends. They demand that we invest time and emotion into the show, but then cop out on the payoff. BSG did not succumb to that temptation.

The finale, by the way, was loaded with spiritual themes. Here are just a few:

1) Prophecy is fulfilled in sometimes unexpected ways. It was only after everyone's expectations had been dashed and all hope of the fulfillment of Pythia's prophecy was lost that the prophecy could finally be fulfilled. Even then, most did not recognize its fulfillment for what it was. It's almost as though prophecy is God's private joke; his way of saying that he has a plan, but it's beyond our comprehension and in any case he doesn't have to explain or prove anything to the likes of us.

2) The wheel of history turns in cycles with frustrating inevitability. Humans always make the same mistakes. We die and are reborn. And yet even the inevitable may not really be inevitable. Maybe, just maybe, in one of these cycles something unexpected will happen and the pattern will be broken. (Escape from the endless futility of death and rebirth, by the way, is the Buddhist model of salvation.)

3) When the brain outpaces the soul, the consequences are destructive on a massive scale. Sometimes we need to just set our technology aside and start over with a clean slate. Unfortunately, nothing could motivate us to actually do this-- nothing, that is, short of the near-complete extermination of the human race by its technology.

4) "God" and "gods" are just two different ways of naming the same reality. We learn near the end of the episode, in fact, that "God" doesn't really like that name.

5) "Miracles" and "angels" really do exist. I suppose that some will feel that making Starbuck's resurrection an act of God is a cop-out, but I frankly think it made the ending more powerful and meaningful. It means that even amidst the inevitability of the cycles of history, events and actions have meaning and purpose, and are orchestrated by a higher power. It gave the narrative a cosmic scope and a mystical aura that it would have lacked if the creators had explained everything scientifically.

I have to say, I loved this series. It was one of the best TV offerings in a long time. Maybe ever.

Irreligion on the Rise in the United States

USA Today recently released some survey results that show a pretty dramatic fall-off of religious adherence since 1990. Some groups are still slightly "in the black" since 1990, but Baptists, mainline Protestants, and non-immigrant Catholics are leaving their faith traditions in large numbers, whereas those identifying as non-religious make up a much larger segment of the population than ever before. Increasingly, the religion of Americans is irreligion.


Note that when I call irreligion a "religion", I don't mean it in the deprecatory or polemical way that Christians usually do. Ironically, some defenders of Christianity think that the best way to beat irreligion is to call it a religion; in this they concede to the view that religion is something to be despised! What I mean when I speak of irreligion (or perhaps more aptly, "secular humanism") as a religion is that it is often framed in such a way as to provide ethical norms (human rights, honesty, and tolerance), eschatological expectations (progress, color blindness, transhumanism, and world peace), and narratives about the meaning of life (love, self-realization, conquest of violence and ignorance). In this sense, secular humanism is actually filling a spiritual vacuum left by churches that have found themselves unable to adapt their message to the modern world. I see that as a good thing, at least in a sense. I do worry, though, that secular humanism's life-giving religious characteristics depend upon its opposition to a dominant, deeply conservative religious culture. As American religious adherence wanes and humanism finds itself without a foil, I can't help but wonder whether its quasi-religious ethic and sense of wonder will give way to a more nihilistic outlook. That, in my mind, would be a very negative development.

Sunstone West

Those of you who will be in the vicinity of Cupertino, CA on Saturday, March 27 may want to hop on over to Sunstone West for a few hours. The preliminary program contains some interesting abstracts, including the following:

• A presentation by Todd Compton investigating marriage ages in nineteenth century America in order to evaluate the propriety of Joseph Smith's marriages to young teenage girls.
• A paper by Connell O'Donovan that "traces public and private anti-miscegenation statements made by early church leaders--including Joseph Smith--from expressions of disgust and horror bolstered by scriptural prooftexting and prophetic language to shore up its theological foundations, to 20th Century political accusations of a joint 'Negro' and Communist conspiracy to bring societal and moral upheaval to the United States."
• A presentation by George D. Smith that appears to summarize the contents of his new book on Nauvoo Polygamy (with Todd Compton responding).
• Ben Clarke's discussion of the "increasingly marginal place for the Book of Moses in the LDS canon" and its possible implications for the way Mormons think about the historicity and canonicity of their other scriptures.
• Alongside Clarke's presentation in the 11:20 am - 12:40 pm time slot will be my discussion of the "missing papyrus theory" vis-a-vis the Book of Abraham. (Due to a clerical error, I'm not on the preliminary program yet.)
• Newell Bringhurst will present on Joseph Smith's "Revelation and Prophecy on War" and the so-called "White Horse Prophecy."

There will, of course, also be several sessions on Prop 8/gay marriage, as well as the usual "This I Believe"-type personal narrative sessions that tend to be so popular at Sunstone (click here to watch some from last year).

Full symposium registration is 35 dollars. Students can get in for 15. Head on over to the Sunstone website to pre-register. Hope to see you there!

Utah the Biggest Porn Subscriber

There's an interesting study by Harvard business professor Benajmin Edelman (read it in PDF here) making the rounds on the Interwebs this week. The study uses subscriber zip codes from a major porn provider to map state-by-state porn use, showing that red states tend to view more porn than blue ones.

New Scientist reports,

States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement "I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage," bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement "AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behaviour."

"One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you're told you can't have this, then you want it more," Edelman says.

One interesting feature of these data is that even after they are corrected for demographic differences, they show that Utah is far and away the biggest porn subscriber, whereas Idaho ranks at the bottom of the scale. The interesting thing about this is that Utah and Idaho both have large Mormon populations-- Utah is 58% LDS, and Idaho is about 23% LDS. Do Utah's depravity and Idaho's prudery have anything to do with their Mormonness?



Over at Mormon Matters, Orchard thinks the vast discrepancy in porn use between these two unusually Mormon states suggests that Mormonness may not have anything to do with it. I'd like to offer a somewhat different interpretation. One possible reason for the differential between Idaho and Utah is the difference between LDS as a religious subculture and LDS as a religious superculture. In Idaho, LDS are strong enough to have good support networks and a strong community identity, but weak enough to be something of a counterculture. Under such conditions, religiosity and rebellion against the status quo can actually be allies. In Utah, where LDS are a strongly dominant superculture, rebellion and iconoclasm take the form of porn use.

I think it is historically quite demonstrable that religion remains truer to its values when it remains an alienated minority standing in opposition to a dominant, even hostile superculture. It is when religion forfeits alienation for power and respectability that moral values degrade, religiosity erodes, and secularism gains strength.

So what can Mormons do to fight rampant porn use in Utah and improve activity rates? Simple: stop running for president, disband the "Gathering," and encourage Utah's Mormon residents to scatter themselves in a great Diaspora across the nations. (Well, okay, maybe not so simple.)

Non-communicative Editors

I don't mind getting rejection slips. I really don't. Some of the greatest writers out there were rejected by dozens or even hundreds of publications (and went through as many revisions) before publishing their first work. What does bother me, though, is when editors don't write anything back to me. If I have gone to the trouble to write something, conform it to a particular publication's (often complex) style guidelines, and submitted it with a cheery note to the editor, the least that he or she could do is let me know the submission was received and let me know if and when it has been rejected. There's nothing worse than the silent treatment, not only because the suspense is terrible, but also because a writer can't in good conscience submit his or her work anywhere else until that rejection slip arrives in the mail. Editors may think they're saving writers' feelings by pretending not to have received their submissions rather than sending out rejection letters, but in fact this is a failure of nerve and extremely frustrating for me as a writer.