As Evangelicalism grows increasingly unhinged, where is Mormonism going? cover art

As Evangelicalism grows increasingly unhinged, where is Mormonism going?

As Evangelicalism grows increasingly unhinged, where is Mormonism going?

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 Episode Summary  Over the years on this program, I’ve often said that the political differences dividing Americans are really just artifacts of much deeper epistemic divides. In the episode before this one, we explored how those differences manifest psychologically—but psychology alone cannot explain why so many people feel so alienated that they willingly support political leaders like Donald Trump whom they acknowledge to be deceptive and chaotic.The truth is that most of Donald Trump’s supporters back him because they feel like their religious viewpoints are being shunted aside by scientific and educational progress that they cannot refute or even understand. The tension between recalcitrant belief and modernity has always been the core conflict motive of Christian fundamentalism, but how this works specifically in terms of doctrines varies widely across epistemic communities. That’s why in this episode, we’re going to focus on just one faith tradition, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormons. Our guide to Mormon epistemology is going to be Luna Corbden, the author of a book called “Recovering Agency: Lifting the Veil of Mormon Mind Control,” which discussed various cultural and linguistic methods that the church used on its members to keep them coming back for more. In a lot of ways, not much has changed within LDS Mormonism since Corbden published in 2014, but some things have—and they’re revealing some deeper divisions between the institutions of the Latter-Day Saint Movement and its longtime rival of Evangelical Protestantism.The transcript of this audio-only conversation is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full page.Theory of Change and Flux are entirely community-supported. We need your help to keep going. Please subscribe on Substack or Patreon and get unlimited access.Related Content—The long and tangled history of Mormonism and Evangelical Protestantism—Religious authoritarians have always been at war with democracy, regardless of whether anyone else realized it—The Christian right was a theological rebellion against modernity before it became a political movement—How Mormons, evangelicals, Native Americans, and tourists mix in the state of Idaho—Salt Lake Tribune cartoonist Pat Bagley on politics, Utah, and being an ‘emeritus Mormon’—Luna Corbden on the Mormon Stories PodcastAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction04:06 — Challenges of free will and information control14:08 — Mormonism created new doctrinal controversies while solving for classical Christian dilemmas20:12 — Centralization and doctrinal evolution in Mormonism26:47 — Intellectual Mormonism’s conflicted epistemology35:42 — Sweeping embarrassing doctrines under the rug doesn’t make them disappear40:01 — Scientific claims and the Book of Mormon44:40 — Spiritual polygamy remains an actual practice in today’s Mormonism53:49 — Former Mormons and active progressive Mormons are reconciling58:42 — Reclaiming self-worth and autonomyAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So we're going to have a discussion here about Mormonism and Epistemology and all that. But before we get into it, I did want to talk a bit about your book specifically and what you meant by agency, because for people who are not familiar with Mormonism, the term of agency is a core doctrine and something that is very important.So what does Mormonism mean by the concept of agency?LUNA CORBDEN: Yeah, It is a core doctrine to, or what they call the plan of salvation or in recent, the, recent thing they call it is the plan of happiness. When I was still in it was the plan of salvation. And the idea is that in the war of heaven, Jesus and Satan both stood up and had a different plans for the, future progress of their brothers and sisters, spiritual humanity at that point.And Jesus wanted to send everybody down. We can make our own choices, and if we made the wrong choices, we'd have to be punished for them for some reason. And then Satan was like, we're Lucifer. we'll actually just force everyone to make the right choices and then that way we can save everyone and no one has to be punished.And there was a huge war in heaven over that. And Lucifer's obviously the bad guy, and he got cast out and we ended up in this. That's the. How Mormonism solves the problem of evil, which is not something they talk about in Mormonism, but you get out of it and you're like, oh, that's how they're solving the problem of evil is basically free will. It's basically free.Will we have the ability to choose good versus evil? We need evil in order to be able to choose good, because if our only choice was good, then it's not really a choice, and that's really central. So the idea is we ...
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