London BYU Fan

But in general, a lot of our church's culture was developed from English Methodist and Anglican traditions (at one point, something like 2/3 of our church membership was English), so even in hymns that are unique to us, you'll see those influences.

But we also kind of have our own approach that's developed. For example, we have an entire genre of what we call "Sacrament hymns" intended to be sung with our equivalent of communion, and they really don't have a direct analogue in any other tradition--they were pretty much all written internally.

I LOVE this question, and the answer is kind of open to debate. If you were to just flip through our hymnal, you'd see a lot of stuff that looks very Anglican, and indeed we've directly borrowed a lot of Anglican pieces like "The Lord My Pasture Will Prepare" and "For All the Saints".

Unfortunately, I can't speak to this at all because the only Sanderson I've read is the Alcatraz series (which I love, but I haven't gone on to any of his better-known stuff).

So Paul definitely gets his due when we do our year's study on the New Testament. Also, there are some chapters in Romans and Ephesians that are pretty key to our whole belief set on divine authority--Ephesians 4 in particular--so we use those all the time.

This is an interesting question. I can tell you that there's one book we deprioritize, the Song of Solomon, which we consider apocryphal. But beyond that, we have a four-year rotation where we emphasize each of the Old and New Testaments, the Book of Mormon, and the Doctrine and Covenants.

Well, I'm probably not nearly as enjoyable to talk to as a sister missionary would be, but I'm an open book as far as my understanding of our teachings on Paul, and my grandmother wrote one of the hymns in our new hymnal so I can try my best there too lol.

That is definitely part of it. The Prop 8 mess in California permanently hardened a lot of church members. Hearing accounts of 12-year-olds having beer bottles thrown at them at Prop 8 rallies had an impact.

You...don't know much about Mormons, do you?

It is worth noting that GOP support among church members is down--Trump underperformed Romney, McCain, and Bush by large margins in Utah, and his endorsed candidates have done poorly in the last couple rounds of primaries. A lot of church members dislike MAGA, but they hate and fear Democrats.

They don't especially care that the Book of Mormon spends chapters on chapters warning about the precise equivalent of the Trump GOP--they're conditioned not to trust Democrats, so those that vote tend to just default to Republicans.

That makes them really persuadable by any Republican who does enough Planned Parenthood scaremongering.

Unfortunately, those two factors have been powerful enough to make a lot of church members essentially completely stop evaluating Republican candidates against their own beliefs.

2. Factor 1 has been dramatically exacerbated by the legalization of abortion and same-sex marriage (but ESPECIALLY abortion). A lot of church members are absolute, unequivocal, hardline single-issue voters with the issue being abortion.

That's been true even as the church is institutionally nonpartisan and individual Democrats like Hugh B. Brown and James E. Faust have risen to great prominence in church leadership. A lot of church members have grown up their entire lives being told that Democrats are the bad guys.

As you might expect, I've done plenty of pondering on this. I think there are two interrelated factors that have led to MAGA having success in the LDS community.

1. Partisanship is a heck of a drug. LDS culture took a very hard political right turn in the 1960s and has never really wavered from it.

DezNats are especially funny to me because they're very much just evangelical Christian nationalists with an LDS label, which means that they're advocating for a system of government under which they would almost certainly end up in camps.

Oh yeah, absolutely. "Swinging" is a one-way ticket to excommunication. Most of them were either ex'd or voluntarily resigned their membership very quickly.

I mean, "original recipe Mormons" were basically just very traditional northeastern US protestants for the most part (and later, a LOT of Methodist-leaning Brits). Culturally, that's a lot of what the church still is tbh.

Many of the really prominent MomTok influencers aren't even members anymore--certainly not practicing members. A lot of them ironically have significantly bigger followings outside of the church than they do in it.

To be clear, these people are flatly insane and nothing in Mormon doctrine, theology, or practice could reasonably be construed to suggest that this is a good idea.

The more I think about this, the more I think that the only way forward this country has is a heavy crackdown on alt-right social media. We have to eliminate the incentives that fuel political edgelords and feed their content to impressionable young people.

Right, but even if they're the latter, they clearly derive enough clout from it to be worthwhile, and all of that clout is coming from Gen Z and Gen Alpha. So where is the incentive to stop?

Really, I guess the answer is for cooler heads to reassert control over social media and ban them all.

It sounds crazy to say, but the GOP being a Trump personality cult is actually probably a *moderating* influence in the sense that Trump is mostly interested in enriching and protecting himself as opposed to establishing a Thousand Year Reich. Without him, these people won't have such inhibitions.

Even if we get out of this mess and back to some semblance of normalcy in a few years, we're going to face the same dumb situation a few more years after that as the psychopaths the GOP has been breeding take charge and push the party back to being as extreme as it is now--or more so.

There is a moderate layer to the GOP that has been cowed by Trump but could (relatively) easily be shuffled back to the forefront as the party collapses under the weight of its own stupidity. But that's not sustainable when the people coming up after them are unreconstructed white nationalists!

I really do believe that the GOP as it currently stands can essentially be denazified by pure financial pressure (it has no money or viable donor base).

What I can't figure out is how the two-party system possibly has a future when the entire youngest generation of Republicans are flat-out Nazis.

A High Church Anglican who wants to abolish the family is...something

They gallantly ran away (complimentary)

Bottle of Red, Bottle of White

Critics say uptown girl Jeannine Pirro drinks more than Billy Joel—and they may be right—but she's good with her stiletto, and Captain Don has her movin' out from Fox to the US Attorney's office. Don't ask me why.

by Maureen Dowd

It's where I served my LDS mission! The area we covered was about a 4-5 hour radius around St. Louis, but I spent a fair amount of time in the city and metro area. Where did you go to grad school?