ON NEGATIVE RESPONSES TO THE LDS CHURCH'S CONGRATULATORY MESSAGE TO PRESIDENT-ELECT BIDEN AND VICE PRESIDENT-ELECT HARRIS: A THREAD, WITH OVERWROUGHT ARCHITECTURAL METAPHORS https://twitter.com/Ch_JesusChrist/status/1338614923165749249

My church released a pretty typical statement congratulating Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on winning the election, and encouraging members to pray for the new President and Vice President. They do this after every presidential election—as do other churches and organizations.

The negative reaction from a wide swath of the church’s American membership is something to behold, and sets in stark relief how unusual the cultish sycophancy towards Trump by his supporters has become.

Members denouncing the statement, refusing to ever step inside an LDS chapel again, wondering how the Church could possibly jump the gun like this!

One commenter even suggested that Church leadership isn’t familiar enough with Constitutional law to understand the means by which Trump will still ultimately triumph. (Nevermind that one of the 3 men in the Church’s top leadership was on Reagan’s SCOTUS short list.)

This cognitive dissonance among far-right Mormons comes on the heels of another baffling development: the widespread popularity among LDS Republicans of anti-mask conspiracy theories—a movement that directly contradicts pleas from both Church and civic leaders.

IMO this highlights a challenge that the impulses toward religious hyperorthodoxy and conservative hyperpartisanship both pose: when battle-lines are drawn between “Us" and "Them,” the desire for one’s *team* to win can easily overtake the desire for one’s *principles* to win.

And it doesn’t take long for the principles to atrophy when partisanship casts a shadow over them. This also turns the desire for advancement inward, making it fuel for ego instead of ideals.

When you untether politics (or proselytizing) from core principles and values, it becomes east to think your convictions are *strong* when they’re actually just *brittle.* Your refusal to bend simply makes it more likely that you’ll break.

That’s the only explanation I can think of as to why so many members of the church who sailed without a care through the Church’s most turbulent recent waters—from 1978 to Prop 8—now find themselves in the midst of an existential spiritual and political crisis--

--a crisis over kinda silly things: a) having to wear a mask in Costco, and/or b) being asked to accept the reality of the results of a presidential election. These seem like such weird, dumb hills to die on for a people so prone to ardent testimony.

A few months before Covid 19 hit, the iconic Salt Lake Temple was closed in order to undergo extensive seismic upgrades in the next few years.

The architectural technology, which has previously been installed at the nearby historic Utah State Capitol building and Salt Lake City-County building, is known as a “base isolation system.” This is one of the isolation pads under the statehouse.

Essentially it involves excavating underneath the footings and foundation of an older building, bracing for temporary support, and then filling the gap underneath the foundation with giant rubber and steel pads.

In the event of an earthquake, the pads absorb and disperse the most jarring concussions, allowing the building above to literally ride out the quake with its structural integrity intact.

It’s not really a mystery where the inclination towards partisanship and ideological brittleness comes from. Many religious minorities whose histories include any significant amount of oppression, exclusion, or expulsion are likely have a strain of Us v. Them in their DNA.

And in the last 70 years, the LDS church’s move into the American mainstream coincided with the rise of prominent politically hyperconservative voices within the Church as well as a political landscape across America divided by) “bright line” culture war issues.

There are lots of hymns and songs and stories about building important things on “firm foundations,” on rocks instead of sand.

But what holds true for old buildings likewise holds true for old principles: you can brace and reinforce them to make them sturdy and keep the walls square and the roof on top, but--

--if, when that stack of stones gets hit by a big tectonic wave, it turns out to not be *strong* but merely *brittle,” and if it can’t absorb some of the force that hits it at its foundation, it doesn’t matter how many nails you used, It’s going to break, not bend. /end