On the Big Sort

One of the purposes of this blog is to find a way to express my views on issues political and religious in a forum that I am comfortable with. Around the time we moved to this ward--a few months before and a few months after May 2003--I had a bit of a personal crisis. The impending and then actual start of the Iraq War was for me the last straw in many ways. I had just finished 6 years at conservative BYU, broken up with 2 years of a mission. I had endured the 2000 election and its attendant frustrations. We had moved to a rather wealthy and very conservative area of town where a large portion of the ward was involved in the military--either at the Air Force base or Sandia Labs. I was 27 and had spent my entire adult life surrounded by people whose political ideologies were, in many ways, repugnant to me.

This was embodied by the sense of isolation I would often feel, both at church and at UNM. In the former, I was the only left-leaning PhD student in the humanities I knew, while in the latter I was the only LDS returned missionary father of (at the time) two children that I knew. I did not really fit in anywhere.

That got better in this ward, in part because it is more diverse than the previous ward, and in part because I was more involved. I served in the Elders Quorum presidency, and service makes you more caring toward others. (In our previous ward I had "calling immunity" because Ryan was just a baby and Summer had a big calling. Plus, I simply wasn't needed as much.) It was still hard at times, but I found myself getting less and less upset at some of the irrational actions and words of others; when a counselor to the bishop based his spiritual thought in PEC on something W did, I winced, but it was less painful than some testimony meetings in April 2003.

Anyhow, I share this (admittedly too soul-baring) experience to make a larger point about how we segregate ourselves according to our beliefs and ideologies. A book on my wish list these days is The Big Sort, by Bill Bishop, who also writes a blog based on his sociological theory at Slate. The basic idea is that over the past 30 years, Americans have formed new group identities based on their politics, both partisan and issue-based, and often both. This results in the sort of homogeneous communities we see in places like Eagle Mountain (on the right) and Albuquerque's North Valley (on the left). We decide to live near and associate with those who share our politics. And the result, according to Bishop, is the extreme polarization we see today.

My intention here is not to discuss the validity of Bishop's ideas here, but rather to apply this idea to my experience and LDS culture more generally. In the Church we often speak of the importance of supporting and sustaining each other's faith--the idea that the coals stay warmer closer together. But we often struggle to differentiate between building up faith and reifying conformity of thought. This is a common critique of the Church, and one that I find weak, but there is a very real risk. It would have been very easy for me to dismiss the importance of my membership in the Church in March of 2003, and it would have been very easy to not go to Church every week. In fact, we lose a lot of people simply because they don't fit the cultural mold and feel unwelcome.

The key, I believe, is to realize that a testimony of the restored gospel does not equal or require political or ideological orthodoxy. In the lead-up to the 2004 election, a priesthood lesson focused on the importance of being involved and informed in the political system; this quickly deteriorated into a discussion of what political issues Latter-day Saints "ought" to hold. Someone (who has since moved from the ward) referred to a commonly-seen bumper sticker that reads, "You can't be Catholic and pro-choice." He then said the same applies to being LDS. I was carrying baby Isaac at the time, so I was able to conveniently slip out and not say what I was thinking, which was certainly for the best, because I wouldn't have said it with much charity.

But here's what I could have (and should have) been able to say. It's entirely possible to be LDS and pro-choice (or anti-war or pro-drug legalization, though that last one is less likely). There is no temple recommend question about any of these issues. We are asked if we are honest and live the commandments, none of which include voting a certain way. (I recognize the fine line related to California's Proposition 8.) And to expect everyone with whom we worship to share our political beliefs--or worse yet, to demand it--is to participate in both the exclusionary group definition of the hypocrite and the religion-as-commodity mindset of the contemporary megachurch, both of which are antithetical to the gospel of Christ.