Friends,

I’ve been increasingly worried about the religio-political radicalization of some Latter-day Saints. However, in a recent discussion with @radiowest I struggled with developing a solution. 1/ radiowest.kuer.org/show/radiowest…

I decided that I wanted to start a broader conversation about deradicalizaiton and develop some curricular resources for those looking to help themselves and help others. Derad is a weak solution to a complex problem, but it has some success rate. 2/

Statement on the US Congress Respect for Marriage Act (ht: ⁦@NeilJYoung17⁩)

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued a statement today affirming their support for a new federal law that will define marriage to include same-sex marriages
newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/respec… The proposed law codifies such marriages into law beyond the 2015 Supreme Court decision. “This approach is the way forward,” says the Newsroom.

This is of course a complete reversal of policies that the LDS church pursued in the public sphere for decades. 2/

Today Elder Holland explicitly called upon President Spencer W. Kimball's 1975 address to BYU called "The Second Century" in which Kimball declared 1/ that @BYU should become "last remaining bastion of resistance to the invading ideologies that seek control of curriculum as well as classroom." 2/

Elder Holland came up in an era when @BYU was largely respected as a place of higher learning. There were various classes on racial segregation in the 1960s/70s, and then on feminist issues in the 1980s/90s. The institution successfully navigated these issues by moderating 1/ and accommodating to social change. In the 21st c., LGBTQ issues have come to occupy center stage in the church's culture war. Over the past 15 years @BYU has made a number of accommodations on this issue as well. It is clear that there is a red line that it won't cross 2/

All is not well.

Today, my people remember that our literal and spiritual ancestors once had to flee their homes and their country to seek refuge for their families. They traveled in a large group for safety and support taking whatever they could carry. 1/ Hasty graves marked the wake of the caravan from the many who died along the way, including children; but the families who left felt the dangerous journey was their only way to be safe, free, and prosperous. They did not stop in the first place they could, 2/

A modest proposal for how to deal with #DezNat, the white supremacist movement in contemporary Latter-day Saint culture: rehabilitate or excommunicate. A thread... Background: The LDS church has a complicated relationship with racial teachings, but has spent much of the last decade working to improve. In 2017, with the rise of the alt-right, the LDS church issued a condemnation of LDS members affiliated with white supremacy movements.

Given the recent silly controversies about the supposed #Marxism of #BLM, I wanted to write a very brief essay on how I understand it. Many people seem to have an extremely simplistic view of what Marxism means through the lens of the Cold War or right-wing propaganda, but 1/ Marxist analysis or politics does not necessarily mean that you think the government should own all the means of production (though it certainly might for some). Rather, it is a theory about the roots of social problems and the roots of successful social change. Therefore, 2/