#and can we bottle this and disperse it via airplane over the rest of utah

[tanadrin]

went back and listened to the episodes on david bokovoy's personal experience with religion, and man, it's funny just how different the stuff that people twig on in their experience of faith is--for bokovoy, even as a scholar of biblical criticism, it really isn't the truth claims of the LDS church that were ever a problem for him. like his academic career definitely primed him to move from a more orthodox, small-c conservative theology to a more expansive one (and he remains a pretty spiritual guy in general from the sound of it), but the thing that really started to fuck him up was the church's insistence on beating the anti-gay-marriage drum, starting with proposition 8, and culminating in the 2015 declaration about the children of gay parents not being welcome in the church unless they denounced them.

and it's a little infuriating to listen to him talk about how he feels about the LDS church after all of that--this whole "the leadership are good people deep down, i just disagree with them on this." like, come on, dude. i get that you're a straight guy whose experiences with mormonism have been generally very positive, but you are also self-aware enough to talk with compassion about LGBT people, about the experience of having a gay daughter, about the way in which people raised in Mormonism who are gay or even just a little bit nonconformist in some aspect of their life can have a really brutal time of it, and yet you cling to this idea of the organization as having some noble core, some inherently good quality that is only failing in its ultimate expression. he even talks about the experience of watching a movie that dramatizes the way different faith leaders came together during the civil rights movement, and having a moment of acute discomfort remembering that at the same time the leadership of the LDS church was still racist as hell in its teachings and policy

like, you should not be afraid to admit that the LDS church fucking sucks! it's always fucking sucked! most organized religion fucking sucks, and the organized religion that doesn't fucking suck has mostly gotten there by virtue of progressives splintering off and forming organizations that retain only a general flavor of the awful bullshit they grew up with and none of the core dogmas. i don't know of a human organization from the beginning of time that rigidly patrols boundaries of identity politics and creates structures of authority based on spirituality that didn't rapidly collapse into tyranny, a grift, or both, except the ones that were already that from the beginning.

and this, i suppose, is my disappointment with even the very open-minded progressives that John Dehlin interviews, which is that they want to redeem an organization that i think is fundamentally unredeemable. no particular shade to mormonism here--I think the Catholic church is also fundamentally unredeemable. hell, if i knew more about tibetan buddhism, i'd probably think that whole hierarchy was fundamentally unredeemable as well. the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints cannot become progressive on LGBT issues and honestly pursue truth and cease to misrepresent its history and spend its money on helping the poor and needy instead of conservative political campaigns and exploiting eighteen year olds to do morally questionable missionary work in third world countries without ceasing to be the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and its leadership knows this. for the exact same reason the Roman Catholic church can't go "lol you know what, our bad, this Pope guy isn't all that he's cracked up to be" and remain the Roman Catholic church.

i mean ultimately bokovoy doesn't go to church anymore; he says that the 2015 declaration was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back, and even if it was revoked tomorrow, it's not like he'd start going back. i assume he's not tithing anymore either. and he seems like a generally very gentle soul who wants to see the best in people, and i don't want to get on his case too much about that, because i admire that. but man, i think it's kind of disappointing to watch someone as apparently smart and compassionate as he is work himself into knots to excuse the behavior of the leadership of an organization like that when the simplest explanation is just that these people are assholes on a fundamental level and always have been.