“It’s better to marry young because you can marry a girl straight out of high school, before she gets set in her ways and too comfortable by herself.” –Clem “Golden Boy” Hartford

“You have to get to them when they’re young before they get set to certain ways of thinking.” –Jonas, probably.

Unsurprisingly, Gannon finds it interesting that the honchos behind the FLDS, unconstrained by feminism and social convention, chose to mate with very young ladies. I find it interesting, too, though for different reasons. I actually agree with Gannon that men frequently can be sexually attracted to younger women and even people that we call children (but aren’t in any biological sense). Where Gannon and I differ is that he finds this to be determinative that to struggle against it is counterproductive and unnatural and that’s not how I see it at all. From my perspective, to the extent that it is a natural instinct it is sometimes natural in some men in the same sense that a propensity for violence is natural and the desire for men to have sex with as many women as he can is natural. In other words, it’s an aspect of our nature that we set up societies to moderate.

One of the more disturbing aspects of a lot of Gannon’s comments here and elsewhere and the comments of those like him are their talks about how unsullied young women are. They haven’t been embittered by feminism or a perpetually broken heart or whatever. He talks of how… fresh… they are. Not just in the physical sense, but in the mental and emotional senses as well. This disturbs me the same way that it would disturb me to hear a land developer talk about how natural and pristine a particular place is. He likes it natural and pristine so that he can himself develop it.

Between the ages of 15 and 25, a young lady will do her growing and by the end of that will become the core of the woman that she’ll be for the rest of her life. What Gannon, Golden Boy, and Probably Jonas are essentially saying is that it’s better to get in on the ground floor of this elevator and that the woman that appears at the top is inferior to the one at the bottom. She hasn’t been properly trained. The 25 year old has all sorts of inconvenient ideas and desires.

And I’ll be honest and say that I understand what they’re talking about. It’s nice to able to influence someone into being interested in what you’re interested in and doing the things that you like to do. My ex-girlfriend Julie (who was in the 15-25 bracket) was wonderfully malleable. She came around to agree with me politically, religiously, and we’d watch anime together, play video games, and listen to the same sorts of music and watch the same sorts of shows despite not having a whole lot of similar interests when we first met. It was something of a big deal when she wanted to watch Will & Grace and I wanted to watch SportsNight, which came on against one another.

My wife, I’ve learned, is not nearly so malleable. Getting her interested in a number of the things I am interested in is a longshot. Comic books and anime are out. Playing video games against one another is also not going to happen. Alternative rock? Not so much. Politics? We disagree a lot. Religion? Woooooo boy. Some of it is because I married a much more hard-headed woman than I dated a decade ago, but at the same time I’m less malleable when I was then. Ten years ago I acquired an interest in country music from Julie but I haven’t really made a similar effort with Clancy’s preferences of chick rock and classic rock, to pick an example.

To me there is an inherent problem when it comes to someone that has grown out of their malleable years dating someone that hasn’t. I can agree with Golden Boy’s comment so long as he says that men should get married young, too (which, since the LDS advocates it, I suspect that he does). But people with the wisdom of 25 years experience extolling the virtues of the inexperience of a 15 year old troubles me. It makes me believe that there is an element of control involved. A desire to be Pygmalion and create a statue to fall in love with.

While Gannon sees the FLDS situation and the apparent preference for teens on the part of the old men as supportive of his belief that such relationships should be more commonplace (or at least not illegal), I look at the same and see exactly what I fear about such relationships. The FLDS is built upon the manipulation and control of the young. So it’s not at all surprising to me that they would bite the bullet and take control of their sexuality as soon as they possibly can. Marry them off at 14 and they’ll never have anything to compare their sexual experience as a member of an old man’s collection.

I’ve thought about what I would do if my fifteen year old daughter came home with a twenty-five year old boyfriend and whether or not I could bring myself to approve. In the end, I couldn’t, and more than anything I think that the reason would be that she hasn’t fully discovered who she is yet and he probably has. Further, it is not necessarily in his interest for her to become all that she is capable of becoming. Unspoken would be the corollary that he is in a better position to prevent her from becoming all that she is capable of becoming than some numbnut that she’s going to school with.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been discussing the CPS raids on the FLDS and the subsequent court battles with various people over the last week and I’ve noticed an interesting trend. There is a near even split. The dividing line is not between liberals and conservatives or big government folks versus libertarians. Rather, it’s men against women. Probably about two thirds of the men I’ve talked to believe that the CPS was way out of line and that this is an egregious example of government over-reach. About the same portion of women take the opposite view. Republican voter or Democrat, it doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot. Men seem to look at the situation abstractly as a legal or philosophical issue. Women seem to look at the situation more personally as young women are stripped of their autonomy to become tools of procreation and the playthings of much (and sometimes much, much) older men.

For my part, from what I know about the case and the laws surrounding it, I think that the judges came to the correct legal conclusion. The CPS did a very poor job of getting its evidenciary ducks in a row. Even setting aside the faulty tip that triggered the raid, it seems likely that they could have done a better job of seeking out the women that escaped and the men that were kicked out of the compound. Or maybe even with all those ducks in a row the situation is cloudy enough that they can’t realistically legally intervene. Not sure. It’s frustrating when the prosecution (or in this case a government agency) botches a case that really could have been worthwhile, but when that happens the system needs to do what the system needs to do in order to prevent those botches from happening in the future.

And so I would agree with the men, for the most part. Except that a lot of them take it a few steps further. In their view, the CPS folks are the bad guys and the FLDS – or at least the majority contingent of the FLDS that is not actively sleeping with minors – their victims. More than one person has suggested that the FLDS is being picked on because it’s different, that the belief that all of these bad things are going on is largely the product of prejudice, and that we’re punishing an entire group for the actions of comparatively few.

That’s where they lose me.

From my perspective, the CPS folks are the inept and overzealous good guys in this case. The FLDS members are the victims only insofar as criminals are sometimes the victim of illegal searches. Well that’s the extent to which they are victims of the state, anyway. A majority of them are victims of the system they grew up in, but then they’re also the perpetrators. The moral perpetrators here are not simply the men that are having sex with people that they shouldn’t be having sex with. The perpetrators are the families giving up their young women to this system and raising their sons to be future perpetrators or else allowing them to be kicked out of the compound. While some people wonder why they don’t just take the men out of the picture and let everyone else be are in my mind insufficiently weighing that by participating in the system, their hands are bloody to. The women are victims, but they’re not just victims.

Don’t get me wrong. They have my sympathy. I don’t pretend that if I were raised in that environment that I wouldn’t believe exactly as they believe and support the system exactly as they support it. Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn’t. But while I have sympathy, that doesn’t entitle them to the moral right to perpetuate the system that warped them. Though I don’t have as much of it since they were profiting from the system in a sense, I even have sympathy for the men that are collecting the young brides. As the saying goes, they know not what they do. They believe that they are doing God’s work. That doesn’t mean that letting them do what they were doing is right, either.

I’ve no doubt that the FLDS parents love their children. The problem is that either they love their church more or are stuck so far under the thumb of their church that they are powerless. So in a sense, Warren Jeffs is their parent. Their argument that nothing should be allowed to come between their family loses its resonance when they quite frequently allow their church to do just that:

To reduce competition for wives, the church systematically expels adolescent boys, thus trimming the eligible male population. It’s estimated that the FLDS has thrown out between 400 and 1,400 male members in the last decade.

Church elders excommunicate boys as young as 14 ostensibly for bad behavior—like flirting with girls, watching a movie, listening to rock music, drinking, playing basketball, or wearing short-sleeve shirts. Sometimes called the “Lost Boys,” they’re considered apostates and cut off entirely from their relatives. Parents or siblings who protest are sometimes asked to pack their bags as well. Girls have also been cast out of the church, but this happens much less often. Usually this punishment is reserved for women who don’t wish to be part of a polygamous marriage.

Excommunication doesn’t just mean that they lose Temple privileges or can’t take Holy Communion anymore. The church is the community. They’re not only kicked out of Mass (or whatever the FLDS equivalent is) but kicked out of their homes and their physical communities. Complaints from FLDS members about how wrong it is for them to send these kids into the world at large ring hollow. The church does it and the parents allow it to happen. Either they agree with what’s happening or they’re powerless to do anything about it. The end result is the same either way.

So how well do these young men fare in the world of iniquity that they are thrust into? It’s not a pretty sight:

They aren’t used to remembering when job interviews are or how to pay bills. They don’t know how to mingle with people, and some struggle to talk to girls.

“You’re taught that everyone out here is corrupt and evil,” Steed said. “You have no idea how life works, no idea how to survive in modern society.” They are, after all, only teens, but now they are on their own.

A therapist meets with some boys; some attend self-improvement classes. They are learning to manage money and signing up to take the GED. Fischer evaluates them, asking about future plans and if they want to go to college. He is working to match each boy with a mentor and find them places to live. For now, they live in hotels and in houses that the Fischer brothers own.

Many are highly skilled in construction, a main job in the creek. But all this support from outsiders is confusing. The boys say FLDS members and even their own families often turned on them, so it was easier to distrust everyone.

“In a way, it scares us,” said Raymond Hardy, 19. “I’m not used to it.” Ream wants to know what the catch is. “There’s always a catch. Why are they doing this?”

Of course, one could read this and say that the CPS is just condemning more kids to this fate. This is true, but I am unpersuaded that this is the worst fate. As difficult-going as this was for the Lost Boys, their situation is not unsalvageable. Many of them will grow up and have children and those children will be born free. Their sisters, on the other hand, will have children that will be born into the same machine that they were, believing that free thought and action are stops on the road to Hell. Regarding the kids in Eldorado, as substandard as our Foster Care system is, I’m not convinced that it’s worse than the alternative. I’m further not convinced of the notion that because the FLDS screwed them up so royally that the only responsible thing to do is to return them to that oppressive environment.

The tricky part, though, is the question of “What next?” This is a question where the CPS has fallen woefully short and the question to which I am not sure there is a good answer. Even if they do take the kids and more of them eventually adjust, the women in the compound will simply have more kids. The machine will likely live on. Perhaps the result will be an insurrection among the rank-and-file towards normalizing the church’s relationship with its surroundings. It seems unlikely that such an insurrection can be cultivated where free thought is grounds for explusion and besides, they’ve lost their children before in service of The Cause and no such movement has occurred.

From the CPS’s perspective, this will quite likely result in a retreat from Texas and that may be all the CPS and the State of Texas want. The Creek compounds in Utah and Arizona will continue on, though. Willard has expressed great concern that any attempts to pierce the armor surrounding that will result in rivers of blood. Maybe he’s right. I don’t know. After Waco, it seems unlikely that the federal government is going to take that chance and the governments in Utah and Arizona seem to have moved on from their investigations.

This is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of all of this. It’s also why I have become so frustrated with those that are celebrating the reunion of parents and child. Even though I believe the courts likely ruled correctly given what they had to work with, I am more inclined to feel sad and angry that moral justice was not done even if legal justice was. This represents not the greatness of our system, but the inherent weakness of it. It is apparent that either our governments are too inept to handle the investigation or otherwise that cults can escape justice so long as their circle their wagons tightly enough. No thorough investigation can occur without ripping the community apart from one end to the other… and we can’t rip the community apart without being able to thoroughly investigate it first.

Further, they’ve managed to win people over people by virtue of the very insularity that keeps them beyond the government’s reach. The fact that they’re so different becomes a reason in itself that they should not be released into the general system. The kids are so brainwashed that they can’t handle the outside world without the guidance of their brainwashed parents. Except that arguments of coercion are shrugged off because you can’t call it coercion when the conditioning begins at birth. The fact that members of the church are so stripped of their autonomy that coercion becomes redundant simply doesn’t make me feel better.

A number of posts both here and at Bobvis seem to hit on topics of the behavior of men towards women, and whether it’s cultural or not. As with any case study, there are a number of “exceptions that prove the rule”, but by and large I’ve found that men from middle-eastern or (perhaps more to the point) islam-influenced cultures have a pretty paleolithic attitude towards women. Many times, this is dressed up as insisting that the barbaric, humiliating and isolating behavior towards women constitutes some bizarre form of “freedom” for them. In reality, however, the prevailing attitude seems to be that women are (a) unable to take care of themselves, (b) unworthy of being allowed to, (c) inferior to men, and (d) largely to be neither seen nor heard (“barefoot and pregnant” at home).

This seems to have some startling parallels in the FLDS, given more by the latest round of news in which zombie-like women obviously parroting rote-memorized lines (with a very “yes. we. love. our. mother. russia” scared-of-something vibe) trot around and the FLDS, obviously wiser to the PR game, trots out dog-and-pony-show “visits” with their youngest men (who only have one wife… so far) to show how “normal” their insular society is. In reality, of course, FLDS women have no choice of husbands, no control in their own lives, and have even been referred to as “breeding stock” by the FLDS’s “prophet” Warren Jeffs.

On the Islamic side, the source seems pretty obvious – Muslims are expected to revere the “example” of the “prophet” Mohammed. The problem is, Muslim men try to follow Mohammed’s example with women. Mohammed’s track record shows up with some pretty raw abuses, including a couple of rapes he retroactively called “marriages”, plenty of sex-slave concubines, and draconian laws on divorce, proving rape, and sanctioning violence towards women that would probably even make the FLDS think twice.

Unfortunately, the FLDS parallels this pretty well. In the Islamic world, women are “theoretically” allowed veto power on whether to enter into marriage (though the reality in almost all Muslim nations is otherwise). In the FLDS, you either marry who the FLDS “prophet” says, or you’re kicked out of the group – with wives being reassigned at a whim of the “prophet” should a man happen to fall out of favor. Both groups seem to see women as primarily baby factories; both have standards of “modesty” designed around preventing a significant amount of self-expression in women as well as making it hard for them to differentiate their appearances. Salman Rushdie has famously said that “Muslim society is afraid of women’s sexuality; numerous other scholars concur, noting the incredibly pornographic verses and male-oriented idealization of “heaven” (72 beautiful ‘virgins’ that magically re-virginize and a never-softening erection to match). The FLDS ideas towards women seem similar; multiple wives in heaven with few males, women who must be “submissive” towards men at all times, etc.

In Mohammed’s time, he got plenty of men killed fighting his wars, as did most of the other tribes in the region, and so there was a pretty good abundance of “extra” women; a polygamous society necessitates behavior designed to (a) keep women “in their place” and (b) ensure that enough young men die to keep the desired (at least by the rulers) female/male ratio. Today, many young Muslim males are “encouraged” to “fight jihad against the kafir” by the older males of Muslim society, conveniently getting them out of the way for the older Muslim males to take multiple wives – even in countries where it’s against the law (the FLDS seems to have the same idea). The FLDS answer to the “young men problem” has been by simply kicking a lot of young men out into the world, not caring what happens to them after that.

In both cases, the term “submission” pops up too commonly. So common, in fact, that much of the discussion seems more like propaganda to create a “stockholm syndrome” situation; women are told that being veiled, submissive, second-class and utterly subservient is “true freedom” or “holy”, and even pitted against each other to tattle (and thus gain favor with the male of the house) if one of them shows a bit too much self-respect. Even for monogamous Muslims, the threat of taking a second wife – and relegating the current to second-class status – is all too common in Muslim society.

At root, I submit that what both groups (at least the males thereof) are really afraid of is, in fact, women being comfortable in their own self and sexuality. Too many women being confident in themselves, or realizing “I don’t have to be treated this way”, might just mean that they would stop putting up with the abusive behavior altogether.

-{Note from trumwill: I have a(nother) post coming up early next week on the FLDS raid in Texas. When that post comes up it will be an opportunity to discuss the legal angle of those raids, so lets save that discussion until then. Oh, and believe it or not, I have a post in mind for the AOC angle of religious communities and the FLDS raid, so let’s hold off on that for now, too}-

The Deseret Morning News, a newspaper owned by the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-day Saints (LDS), has a couple of interesting articles pertaining to the Yearning For Zion (YFZ) compound in Texas, and the effect that it has had on Mormons.

The first article is about Mormons in the cities of the area of the YFZ compound and some of the hardships that mainstream Mormons face by being lumped together with the Fundamentalist Latter-day Saints (FLDS):

“There are some people here that believe anything bad about Mormons and that’s what they’re going to do,” said Charles L. Webb, who serves as president of the Abilene, Texas, stake.

The LDS Church’s presence in this part of Texas is small. The Abilene stake covers an area 25,000 square miles in size with about 3,000 members. There are only two LDS chapels in San Angelo, but a number of Baptist and other evangelical Christian churches. It’s the polar opposite of Utah, where the LDS Church is the dominant faith.

In repeated statements, leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have differentiated between the two faiths and expressed disappointment that some news media outlets have lumped the two together.

I must confess that prior to moving out west I never thought much about Mormons, but to the extent that I thought about them and their history of polygamy it probably would have boiled down to “Mormons stopped practicing polygamy so that Utah could become a state, but some Mormons still practice it.” In a sense that’s true because people that think of themselves as Mormon do practice it, but it wildly understates the fissure between the two groups. It can be likened to the fact that most Christians don’t speak in tongues but some do.

The problem is that the protestant comparison doesn’t apply because protestants are not generally institutional in nature. You have denominations like mine that are hierarchial but not uniform or dogmatic and churches like the Southern Baptists that are dogmatic and somewhat uniform but not very hierarchial. The LDS Church, on the other hand, is more like the Catholic Church in nature, which is hierarchial both in organization and theological substance. The Catholics have their Pope, the Mormons their President. You are either a member in good standing with Salt Lake City or The Vatican or you are not. Protestants can shift this way or that or attend one church or another depending on their personal beliefs, but the Catholic and Mormon churches don’t really operate that way.

So from the outside looking in, we can see the LDS and FLDS as two different kinds of Mormons, perhaps “good Mormons” and “bad Mormons”, from their perspective there are Mormons and non-Mormons, each believing that the other is the non. Unfortunately, this is one of the areas where we don’t have good terminology to differentiate the two without simply adding an adjective in front to point to which group we mean. The adjective suggests that they are two parts of the same thing, which from a structural and theological perspective they just aren’t. Where’s a good term like Davidians when you need one? For purposes of this post, I will refer to the SLC-based Mormons simply as Mormons and the FLDS Mormons as Creeps.

In addition to terminology, one thing that a lot of people (including some that should know better) seem to believe is that Mormons take a nudge-nudge-wink-wink approach to polygamy. That they simply banned it out of political expedience but support it in spirit. I don’t know what goes on in LDS Temples, but far and away the most anti-polygamy people I have ever met were members of the LDS Church. Perhaps they were putting on a show for me or they’re double-secretly instructed to act that way or something, but that’s a pretty big stretch. I never brought it up and the conversations that come to mind are conversations that occurred between Mormons and not speeches directed at me.

I’ve heard them defend their history with it. I’ve heard something about something akin to polygamy exists in the afterlife (Abel or Willard can clear this up if they’d like). But as an institution in the modern-day United States, I haven’t heard a word in support of it even in the context of a theoretical discussion. I know far more non-Mormons that think that it should be legal. We’re all angry about what happened in Eldorado, but well before this dust-up or even the arrest of Warren Jeffs, the disdain for the FLDS when it came up was palpable and primarily on grounds of the polygamy rather than the incest/rape that they could easily hang their hat on if they simply wanted to distance themselves from the Creeps.

I am as skeptical as anyone else about the divine revelation that suddenly overturned their polygamist traditions at precisely the point where it was most politically necessary to do so, but I am convinced that they believe that God has declared it wrong and thus it is about as wrong as wrong can be.

Of course, the real scandal in Eldorado is not the polygamy. We try to be accommodating to religious sects so long as they mostly keep to themselves and don’t present a clear danger to its own members (think Amish). The real issues are the plural marriages involving minors, the scent of incest, and the expulsion of young men into a world that they are unprepared for. I don’t personally think polygamy should be legal, but without these things I would be inclined to let the FLDS be the same way we leave the Amish be.

That brings me to the second article in the Deseret Morning News, which concerns a judge’s inquiry as to whether or not the LDS Church might come in and monitor the FLDS prayer services:

SAN ANGELO, Texas — A judge wants to see if local LDS Church members would be willing to help supervise prayer services at the makeshift shelter where Fundamentalist LDS women and children are being housed.

In response, a local official of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said he was baffled by the judge’s suggestion. {…}

The president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ stake in Abilene, Texas, which oversees San Angelo, was surprised by the judge’s request.

“They think we’re the same ones because we use the Book of Mormon,” Charles L. Webb told the Deseret News. “I’m dumbfounded they would suggest that.”

Webb said he plans to contact LDS Church headquarters in Salt Lake City for guidance before responding to the court’s request. The judge did say in court that if that fails, she would consider other options.

I imagine that the bafflement and whiff of frustration is akin to asking a Vietnamese-American if he can translate for someone that speaks Chinese. “We all look alike to you?”

Be that as it may, I would think that there would be a tremendous opportunity here for the LDS to be a great help for this terrible situation. Though the doctrinal differences between the LDS and FLDS are no doubt legion, the LDS is the closest thing that we have to their faith in the community of reputable religions in the United States. The children of the FLDS are in for some serious theological detoxification that isn’t going to be easy (or likely successful) no matter how we go about it. I can’t help but think that it would be a lot more successful if it started with representatives of a religion whose doctrine that might be at least a little bit familiar.

I may not be theologically in sync with the Mormons, but if teaching these young people that God is good, Jesus saved mankind, and Joseph Smith resurrected the one true church of God will help acclimate these young people to the broader world around them, I think that could be a very, very good thing. Bringing back the lost sheep, as it were.

Of course, that’s easy for me to say because I’m not a Mormon and it’s not my job (or my interest) to protect the church’s interests. And reaching out to the FLDS is quite likely not in the church’s best interest. It could be a PR nightmare that would do their reputation a lot more harm than good. They’re already fighting to differentiate themselves from the Creeps. By inserting themselves into the situation (even at a judge’s request), they’d be sabotaging that differentiation. They’d be further melding into the minds the connection between the two churches that too many people believe anyway.

It sounds crass and cynical to say it, but it’s the church’s leadership that has the responsibility of protecting its image. Whatever church you may belong to, don’t pretend that your church leaders are any different. For a church to be able to reach out and do good work, it must be positively received by the community. Reaching out to lost children of the FLDS would not help in that regard.

So as such, I guess I can understand this passage from the first article:

Webb said he has discouraged members from helping out in the name of the LDS Church to avoid confusion between the two faiths, but said they should offer their services as individuals. The local Baptist congregations have contracts to provide relief services in disaster situations.

San Angelo 2nd Ward Bishop Jeffrey Bushman was contacted by a chaplain helping the FLDS women when they were being housed at Fort Concho. The women had requested copies of the Book of Mormon.

He sent them some copies.

“They didn’t have anything or bring anything with them, I guess, and they wanted some scriptures and they asked for the Book of Mormon,” Bushman said. “I didn’t mind. We don’t ever mind giving out (copies of the) Book of Mormon to people.”

God: It was good to see you last Sunday.

trumwill: Was it?

God: Sure. Like any father I love it when my children come to visit. Even if they do mess up the confessional.

trumwill: Yeah. They didn’t do the usual one. I didn’t know the words to the one that they were doing and by the time I realized that I was lost, I knew that it was more than half way through and that there wasn’t any point to finding the prayer book.

God: If you didn’t know the words, how did you know that it was almost finished?

trumwill: The words change, but the spirit is usually the same. There’s sort of a rhyme and rhythm to the way it works. That’s one of the things that I love about being an Episcopalian. It’s all rhythmic and sure. Even if I get lost, I sort of know where I am. Maybe You prefer the services where people are jumping up and down yelling their devotion to You. I like the rhythm. It took me so long to find it. Remember when I was a kid and I thought that we should say the words more forcefully? For thine is the KINGDOM, the POWER, and the GLORY…

God: You were young and impatient.

trumwill: I’m old and impatient. Back then I was just young and bored. I didn’t know how to join the rhythm of the service. Say the participatory prayers, listen to the Gospels, contemplate the Gospel. I spent so much time thinking that there ought to be ways that it could be done quicker and more interesting. If I could have just taken a step back and go with the flow that was given, slow my mind down and contemplate the reason for the moment, it would have probably given me the speed and interest I could have used.

God: That’s true of a lot of things in your life.

trumwill: It’s the story of my life. I can be so insistent on finding my own way that I overlook the path placed in front of me. I’m so worried about finding that optimal place between effort and result that I ignore the experiences of those around me. I keep thinking that maybe I can get by with doing less or that I will do more and have no more to show for it. That I’ll do my job, to go church, diet, exercise, quit smoking… and it won’t do any good. Wasted effort. I ignore that people that do certain things turn out better than people that do other things. No matter how much life proves otherwise, I never stop thinking that the rules of cause and effect and social rewards and punishments just won’t work for me.

God: That’s quite the dilemma. Moreso because you can see it right in front of you and feel that there isn’t anything that you can do about it.

trumwill: If I do something about it, that might just be wasted effort. In case I am right and what I see all around me is wrong, I mean.

God: I’m not sure what to say to that.

trumwill: Score one for the Willmeister. I just stumped God!

God: People stump me all the time. By not doing what they oughtn’t be doing. By giving you free will, I’ve sacrificed the power to be unstumpable. Stumping me is a dubious achievement. It’s one that comes with something opposite of a reward.

trumwill: So… yeah… what were we talking about?

God: Church. I’m pleased that you chose to sing today.

trumwill: Well yeah. My father… I mean, you know… my other father… and I used to always say that our gift to You in Your house was not singing. If You’d intended me to sing, I figured that you’d have given me a pleasant voice.

God: Your voice is as pleasant as it is sincere.

trumwill: Is it sincere? I mean half of the hymnals don’t mean a whole lot to me personally. They’re just what was chosen by some committee in New York or the Southfield Archdiocese. I never cared enough to even find out.

God: Regardless of the meaning the songs may have to you personally, perhaps it is that you are singing it together that gives it meaning to you. That allows it to become part of the rhythm that you appreciate.

trumwill: Perhaps.

God: Did you enjoy the service?

trumwill: Is the service something to be enjoyed?

God: I’d prefer it bring enjoyment than misery, though I suppose that there is more to consider than enjoyment.

trumwill: Then why do You ask the question?

God: Because you haven’t been to church since Christmas. You even missed Easter this year.

trumwill: Yeah, sorry about that. I was up too late the night before.

God: You intended to go the next week, though, didn’t you? Or the week after? The week before, the week before that…

trumwill: I intend to do a lot of things that I don’t get around to doing.

God: True enough. I just find it interesting that you would place more value on sleeping in than taking the simple steps it would take to visit my house on Sunday mornings.

trumwill: Sorry again. Boy, I’ve apologized twice now. Maybe I’m making up for goofing up the confessional.

God: Or maybe you’re gearing up to tell me why you haven’t stopped by.

trumwill: You know why. You’re omniscient.

God: I know what I know, but sometimes you need to tell somebody something to know it.

trumwill: It’s like Dad when I first moved to Deseret. How I avoided calling him and talking to him. I came up with all sorts of good reasons. Just like with church. I’ll do it later, tomorrow, the next day, next week. In reality, I guess, I didn’t want to talk to him because I didn’t want to face up to my failures.

God: Your failures?

trumwill: Yeah. I didn’t have a job yet. I didn’t have my Deseretian license plate or driver’s license. I didn’t know how long it would take for me to find a job and get settled in. I didn’t want to talk to him and tell him about all the things that I hadn’t yet done.

God: Would you have had nothing else to talk about?

trumwill: I’m sure I would have found things to talk about. But I would have feared that he would have been thinking the whole time of all the ways I’ve disappointed him. He’s rarely tried to make me feel that way, but his patience only makes me more impatient. His belief that I would make right made me feel all the worse for not doing so. My fear of his belief that I am a failure made me not want to call and validate his disappointment in me.

God: I am certain that he would have loved to hear from you. Regardless of what good news you may not have had to share with him.

trumwill: Wait… you know in the omniscient way that you know everything, or you know because you’re empathetic to my cutting him off and sympathetic to how I feel about it?

God: I know because I don’t ask that you have all good news before coming to visit me. Or to talk to me. Or to think about me. Some people come to me precisely because they are incomplete in some fashion or another. They come for help.

trumwill: Sort of like “Dear God, please find me a job?”

God: No. Sort of like the prayer you would sometimes say before taking an important test at school or before embarking on some other test of importance to you. You wouldn’t ask that I got you A’s. You asked that I give you the composure to stand up to the challenge.

trumwill: I left it deliberately vague, but I wanted that A. I just knew that I hadn’t worked enough to earn it.

God: You often got it.

trumwill: Yeah. Thanks for that. I don’t know. I just feel like maybe once I’ve got my crap together and had something to show You that maybe… I don’t know… I’d have something to show you rather than being all empty-handed and embarassed. Maybe once I’m already headed in the right direction, maybe then I can show you what I’ve got instead of standing before You as the sum of everything that I haven’t.

God: Do you remember what eventually happened when you cut your father off?

trumwill: Yeah. He got impatient and found my blog, where I’d written about my guilt about not talking to him. He started calling more often so that I couldn’t keep brushing him off.

God: And what happened?

trumwill: Things got better. My mind cleared from something that had been bothering me a great deal. I don’t know that it helped me find work any faster, but it made the meantime more bearable.

God: Right.

trumwill: Right.

God: Well?

trumwill: Well, right now I’ve fallen behind in so many ways and until I can get right on some of them it’s hard to get right on all of them. Sort of like it’s hard to stop smoking as long as I eat crappy food, but it’s hard to stop eating crappy food as long as I’m drinking crappy drinks because they go together. Crappy drinks go with cigarettes.

God: And once you’re a disgusting sinner, you can just stay there with the idle dream that you can suddenly give it all up at once and become a respectable citizen that can call your father and go to church and face the world.

trumwill: All or nothing, that’s me.

God: How’s that working out for you?

trumwill: One of these days, Lord. One of these days.

God: And nothing scares you more.

trumwill: Not that I can think of.

God: Except that maybe it won’t.

trumwill: Except that.

Recently the Wall Street Journal had an article about how more churches are culling their flocks:

Her story reflects a growing movement among some conservative Protestant pastors to bring back church discipline, an ancient practice in which suspected sinners are privately confronted and then publicly castigated and excommunicated if they refuse to repent. While many Christians find such practices outdated, pastors in large and small churches across the country are expelling members for offenses ranging from adultery and theft to gossiping, skipping service and criticizing church leaders.

The revival is part of a broader movement to restore churches to their traditional role as moral enforcers, Christian leaders say. Some say that contemporary churches have grown soft on sinners, citing the rise of suburban megachurches where pastors preach self-affirming messages rather than focusing on sin and redemption. Others point to a passage in the gospel of Matthew that says unrepentant sinners must be shunned.

It’s odd to me that the article doesn’t seem to make any distinction between kicking someone out of the church for being a flagrant sinner and kicking someone out of the church for the sin of disagreeing with church leadership on procedural matters. What is really distressing is how some of these pastors don’t see a difference, either.

Some of you may remember the story of Walt. Walt was a friend of mine that had a relationship with a divorced mother. A long story short, though she was legally divorced she was not divorced in the eyes of the church. He was excommunicated and within months he took his own life. It’s difficult for me to read about these excommunications without thinking about Walt.

Churches are of course free to excommunicate those members that do not adhere to its beliefs. The Catholic Church can deny communion to pro-life politicians and it all makes a certain amount of sense to me. It’s one thing if someone sins and is repentant, but it’s another if they flagrantly sin or advocate views that are unholy in the eyes of the church. The existence of sin is one thing, but the embrace of it is another.

In that sense, it pains me to say that the church was within its rights to do what it did and on one level I can understand it.

It seems to me, though, that such a thing ought to be a last resort. Sin and redemption are par the course for Christianity. Walt was never given a chance to reflect and repent. Further, and this is where I see things very differently from a lot of more conservative churches, there are sins and there are sins. Walt’s only crime was sleeping with (not having sex with, only sleeping with) a woman whose divorce was not recognized by the church. In the greater scheme of things that has to count less than being a home-wrecker or supporting the legal sanction of 750k murders a year (which, if one believes that a fetus is a full-fledged human life as many churches do, a pro-choice politician is doing), isn’t it? Not in the eyes of a lot of churches, I’ve come to find out. A sin is a sin is a sin in the eyes of many.

It seems to me that if a church goes this route, there won’t be any perishoners left. That’s perhaps what disturbs me most of all. A lot of these are going to fall under “selective enforcement”. Is selective enforcement better than no enforcement? Maybe. The problem is that when certain types are targeted for enforcement. I remember reading a while back about a Catholic school that wouldn’t let a pregnant student walk for graduation… but they let the father. When it comes to sexual sins, we’re very frequently more harsh on the women than on the men. I’d imagine that rich and generous perishoners would be given the benefit of the doubt for their sins in a way that those that haven’t as much to give wouldn’t.

Some of the shunned people in the article had sins no worse than irritating the priest. There’s the woman that was shunned for “gossiping” and a lot of space devoted to a woman that disagreed with her pastor on a procedural matter. One wonders why the exiled wouldn’t say “good riddance”, but the nature of the separation is pretty unchristian in nature, to say the least.

Of course I come at this from an Episcopalian’s perspective, where church is more about brotherhood and community than it is righteous indignation.

Huckabee is running an add wherein some people say that there is a floating cross behind him.

Even before I heard Huckabee’s official explanation, it looked pretty plainly like a shelf of some sort to me. I will say this about Huckabee: it the bookshelf were intentionally placed behind him and lit to subliminally reinforce his religiosity, he is a much more shrewd and creative man than I’d given him credit for being*. Given that when it comes to the role his religious convictions play in his politics he is about as subtle as a sledgehammer**, I find that very unlikely.

It reminds me a little bit of a movie that Clancy and I saw in Deseret called Latter Days, wherein a closeted Mormon missionary falls in love with a West Hollywood gay highlifer. Mormons don’t do crosses, so I was surprised to see subtle, Huckabee-bookshelf-like crosses sprinkled throughout the film. I thought to myself that the movie must have been placed in the hands of someone that was fairly ignorant of Mormon ways. In the commentary I find out that no, the writer/director, Jay Cox, was in fact raised Mormon. He actually comments on the Huckabee crosses as completely unintended. He’d in fact gone to the trouble of having actual crosses removed from the church scenes that the set manager had mistakenly put there.

The cross is such a basic design, I guess, that it’s hard to entirely remove. Nonetheless, Cox said he’d gotten many compliments by non-Mormons on the subtle inclusion of crosses throughout the film as a testament to his directing skill.

* – I suppose it could have been done by one of his handlers, but as near as I can tell up until the last few days it’s been a more self-directed campaign.

** – Not to knock on the guy too hard. I don’t have any particular disdain for the man. He’s a mix of good and bad, just like the rest of’em.

Last week, Bob wrote a post on what might be a problem as encryption code and decryption code get better. Even if encryption can keep up, there’s nothing to stop someone from getting encrypted data and holding on to it until decryption gets better. In other words, if I say something now that nobody can read because it’s encrypted to the level of X and decryption is no better than X-1, and what I write a year from now nobody can read because it’s encrypted to X+1 and decryption is at level X… there’s nothing to stop them holding on to data they can’t now decrypt under the idea that they will be able to decrypt it in the future. It’s probably that Bob explains this better than I do, so check it out if I’m confusing you.

I don’t have a whole lot to say on encryption and decryption, but it reminded me of some plotting I did for a yet-unwritten novel. The basic premise is that there is Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. I needed them to exist in certain ways to advance the plot, but I also needed to form the internal logic dictating what each of these places is, who goes there, and what makes Heaven so perfect and Hell so bad.

One of the things that caught me about Heaven was the notion that no sin can take place there. Lying is a sin. Thus, nobody can lie in Heaven. Then the thought occurred to me that if there is no lying in Heaven, there are plenty of people that are in for a rude awakening. Wives who thought that their husbands had always been faithful will learn that he did cheat. People will learn that their parents and children lied to them. Every bad thing that has ever been done to them by people that they believed loved them will suddenly be known.

That could make heaven a very, very awkward place, when you think about it.

Christianic religion has it that our sins count against us and when we die there will be some accounting for it between us and God. How God does the accounting varies, but what I had never particularly been taught in church and what might have actually been a much better tool for religious discipline was the notion that there will also be some sort of accounting not just with God, but also with all of the people that we know that we’ve deceived and hurt.

The connection between Bob’s encryption/decryption talk and my Heaven may or may not exist as strongly to anyone else as it does in my mind. In both cases I see a temporary reprieve followed by an airing of all things private.

The last thought that occurs to me is that if “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”… a cheating husband may prefer Hell over Heaven, if she’s there waiting for him.

-{This post is a reproduction of a comment I left at Half Sigma involving a misperception about Mormons and caffeine}-

When I was living in the Mormon west, I worked for the bishop (the LDS equivalent of a priest) of the local church. He had a free coke machine downstairs that served caffeinated drinks. Mormon and non-Mormon employees alike partook. I asked Mormon coworkers about the caffeine ban and found out that contrary to popular belief, there isn’t one. At least not as I understood it.

The Words of Wisdom in the Doctrine & Covenants bans “strong drinks” and “hot drinks”, which has been interpreted to mean alcohol, coffee, and tea. It is not universally interpreted to include all caffeinated products such as cokes. Some do anyway because addictive substances in general are discouraged, but there is no hard rule.

Will posits, in contrasting his churchgoing nature with that of his lovely wife, the idea that for some reason, Catholics have a “Catholic or nothing” approach to religion. As one of the Catholics of which he speaks, I think I can shed a bit more light on this phenomenon.

The first issue for a Catholic, as opposed to many other churches, is that the gulf in beliefs is much larger. I am fortunate in that my family is of mixed demoninations: my grandparents are a Catholic/Lutheran duo who have managed to stay together for 52 years, and their kids turned out to be 3 Catholics, 3 Lutherans, and a Methodist. This has allowed me to see the differences in what is taught.

For a Lutheran going to services at a Baptist or Methodist church, or even to Church of Christ, there is not an immense gulf in belief. There may be minor dogmatic differences, but there’s a certain “protestant unity.” For a Catholic, the structure of the service will be vastly different; there are also major hurdles to get past (differences in the belief on various sacraments, possible differences in prayer structure related to saints, etc) before someone raised Catholic might feel comfortable attending such a church. By the same token, a Catholic would likely be much more comfortable going to mass in an Orthodox church, whereas I get the feeling most “Protestants” would be much more uneasy in that regard.

This also will extend to how the sunday services are structured. Catholics, for the most part, grow up with a basic sunday mass that includes a definite sequence of events. There’s a lot of sitting/standing/kneeling involved (aka ‘Catholic Calisthenics’ by some). Ironically, the reforms of Vatican II allowed for some radical changes and regional variations, and yet most of the churches I have gone to have seemed to carry much the same music, much the same organization, and much the same character. When I visited Germany, I knew the melody to every single song at mass as well as the sequence of events, even if I was tempted to sing in English rather than in German. Had I not understood a word that was said, I still could have followed the mass just on gestures and timing alone.

The other issue – strongly prevalent in the southern regions but still present nationwide – is a decided animosity towards Catholicism and those who are raised Catholic on the part of many/most Protestant churches.

If a Lutheran wanders into a Methodist church, and speaks to people there about curiosity towards their church, there’s a certain level of acceptance about it. If a Catholic wanders into the same place, there’s much more a “oh dear we need to save you from that evil church” vibe to the response. From personal experience and the experience of other Catholic friends, Baptists are actually worse on this, with many Baptist churches actually teaching that Catholics are “not really Christian”, that their baptisms and sacraments are all 100% invalid (one particularly ugly implication being that Catholic marriages are invalid and they are “living in sin” and producing out-of-wedlock offspring), and other rather nasty things. The one Baptist roommate I had during my college years was 100% friendly, right up until he learned I was attending the Catholic mass on campus; after that point, he decided he hated me.

The more “born again” the particular Protestant branch is, the more likely they will have this sort of reaction to a Catholic. A few places I’ve been, admitting to being Catholic was somewhat akin to telling them to hang up the garlic wreaths and start sharpening the oaken stakes.

This is not to say that all Protestant churches are that way. Lutherans have a varying level of animosity depending on which Synod they belong to, and some have mellowed out in recent years (when my grandparents were married, they had to have a civil ceremony because neither church would take them; at their 50th anniversary, the pastor of my grandfather’s church had nothing but good to say about them, including regret that his church had taken so long to come around). I’ve found Methodists to be much more inviting than Lutherans or Baptists, though they are amazingly hardcore about their music; one imagines that someone tone-deaf might have a hard time there, or at least become very good at lip-syncing.

However, as for just picking up and going to a non-Catholic church? There are a lot of extra barriers to overcome, erected both by the Catholic beliefs and by the other churches.