The Next Generation
I hang out with a group of liberal Mormon grad students. In this group, many of us have parents who were charter members of intellectual Mormon publications like Sunstone, Dialogue and Exponent II. The other day we were discussing how our parents react to our participation in Sunstone Symposiums. In most cases, our parents have become much more conservative through the years and are quite uncomfortable with our affiliations with such ‘heretical’ organizations.
I would really like to hear from those of you who were early participants in Sunstone—how has your involvement affected your children? Do they accompany you to Symposiums? Are they committed magazine subscribers? Or are they embarrassed by your liberal views?
And for those of you in the younger generation: How does your parents’ intellectual/liberal Mormon legacy affect you?
My story: My parents were avid subscribers to Dialogue and Exponent II in their early years. As University of Utah students in the late ’60s-early ’70s, they fraternized with many liberal, intellectual Mormons. However, they let their subscriptions to these publications lapse in the mid ’80s. Mom said it was because the writers were re-hashing the same old issues over and over again; they just wasn’t interesting to her anymore. I didn’t get to ask my Dad much about these issues before he died. However, I did have one conversation with him in ’93 about the September Six (I had read a lot about it over the Internet). He was quite curious to know who had been ex’d and why. As we discussed the issues I felt that his intellectual fervor was still important to him, but he just didn’t have anyone to discuss such things with. We had a few interesting conversations before he passed away. Though my Mom is pleased about my work with the Exponent and with Irreantum, she acts ambivalent or even uncomfortable when I discuss Sunstone. Me, I’m glad to have inherited my parents’ vintage copies of Dialogue and ExII even if I don’t have parents who are overtly supportive of my involvement (though I do like to imagine that Dad is one of the ‘Spirit World’ attendees). My pre-teen kids have attended many Symposium sessions and also have to endure our weekly ‘Outhouse’ meetings (Outhouse is what we call our local group of intellectual Mormons). I suspect/fear that my kids will grow up to be uber-conservative BYU alumni-types in rebellion against their parents’ liberal ways…
May 3rd, 2006 at 3:30 pm
Gee, I come at this from the opposite end of the spectrum. My parents are plenty smart (dad has like 60 patents to his name), but they were never impressed the intellectual church set.
We had a few of them in the extended family: my great Uncle Paul, my Great Aunts Mike and May - they were referred to as “Sunstoners” and usually occupied a small, but energetic corner of every family reunion. I think the rest of the family felt about them the same way I did: simultaneously frightened that they would suck me into their conversation (which they enjoyed doing), and wanting to jump in just to brave the unknown.
However, the Sunstonness seemed to skip a generation of the family. My grandparents’ brothers and sisters were a part of it, but their children weren’t. So when I started to come of age, I had to make my way pretty much alone, though once I had made it and published something in Dialogue, my Uncle Paul did his best to fellowship me. However, I think that I’m really the only Sunstoner in my current generation - the only one out of the closet, anyway.
Interestingly, most of my family is completely unaware that I run in these crowds because my family stays so far away from them. I don’t think my parents have any idea that I publish my work in the more “liberal” venues (I stopped telling them about it after I got one too many emailed calls to repentance over The Sugar Beet). I figured I’d just leave this part of my life out of our relationship so that things could sail smoothly.
As for my kids, I don’t have many feelings either way about how they want to interact with the Mormons. I think life is too complicated and people too precious to waste time telling each other what we should think. The only thing that I think would really hurt me is if my kids decided to get uber-orthodox and consign me to hell as a heretic. I’d be afraid that they’d always see me as an object of pity, or scorn, or as a missionary project. I’m fine with church stuff as long as it strengthens families, but once people use it to break families apart, that ain’t cool.
May 4th, 2006 at 9:55 am
My mother was an editor of Sunstone with Peggy Fletcher back in the 1980s, and my dad — a Church historical department employee since 1975 — has always taken a lively interest in Mormon studies. They are now divorced. My mother is fairly liberal and my father is fairly conservative. My father is active in the Church. My mother is totally inactive in the Church.
Some of my earliest memories of are Sunstone and its old offices in SLC on West Temple. As for the magazine itself, I don’t consider myself a “Sunstoner,” although I have subscribed in the past and been to one or two symposia, which were quite a bit of fun. A lot of this, however, comes from the fact that while I consider myself an intellectual, I don’t consider myself a “liberal,” except perhaps in the technical sense that term is used in political philosophy. For this reason while I have enjoyed Sunstone, I have also found it alienating in that it too-often seems to make an equation between “thinking” or “scholarlly” or “intellectual” and “liberal” or “on the left.” Hence to me Sunstone has often felt like it was mainly about a sort of liberal Mormon community building rather than intellectual discussion per se. There is nothing wrong with this. I certainly don’t want to begrudge any Mormon — liberal or otherwise — their community. It has just not been something that I have been eager to put much energy into. That said, I have perused just about every back issue of Sunstone in the BYU and Harvard libraries and have read a lot of great stuff in Sunstone.
When I was in law school I had a group of friends with whom I met weekly. We called ourselves the Metaphysical Elders. We would read some article on religion or Mormonism beforehand and have a discussion over lunch. It was a great deal of fun. Of that group, I think that one or two might identify themselves as “Sunstoners” — or at least as being involved via spouses with ExII — but the other two or three of us did not. Yet in part I think it was precisely because we did not view ourselves as being part of some underground liberal Mormon community that our intellectual discussions were so much fun. It was just about friends and ideas.
May 7th, 2006 at 10:47 pm
I am part of the “Irvine Intellectuals” with Jana (which I hope is how our group is known eventually–”Outhouse”, which we decided to use because it seemed like the perfect witty opposite to “in-house”, carries some negative connotations, obviously…although, I guess it’s better than calling ourselves the “Kybo Group”). My experience with this group has been enormously faith-affirming. A couple of years ago I went through an excruciating religious crisis, from which I emerged very happy and confident (even more so than I had been when the cosmos made perfect Mormon sense), but relatively alone in my heretical views. Luckily, the “Irvine Intellectuals” group was just starting, and there I found a community of similarly troubled-yet-committed Mormons who were eager to talk through their experiences. This was especially crucial for me because my family was very much opposed to my new views. My mother has always been a conservative/orthodox Mormon, and although my father had at one time subscribed to both Dialogue and Sunstone, he is equally conservative and orthodox these days. He left behind the symposia and critical inquiry of Sunstone in the early 1990s, just after Oaks gave his (in)famous “alternate voices” talk in General Conference. Last year, after a few months of painful email and phone exchanges, I decided that it just wasn’t worth it to discuss these issues anymore with my parents (and, as Stephen says, it’s been “smooth sailing” once we agreed never to bring it up). Oh, and we don’t talk about Bush either.
When I published in “Dialogue” recently, I know it was the cause of some consternation for my parents—whereas if I had published it in the late 1980s, I think it might have been a source of pride for my father, although I think that has more to do with the way my parents have changed, not the journal (Nate may disagree here). In any case, I suspect that at least my dad read the article because when I was home in Utah for my brother’s wedding a few weeks ago, I found a brand new copy of that issue in the basement, but we have never discussed it, and we probably shouldn’t. The article had to do with the Book of Mormon, and in it I hinted at what are my very naturalist/historicist feelings toward the book, although I didn’t say that exactly in the article (mainly because I don’t feel compelled to “correct” the faith of those who do find the historical idea of Nephi, etc., to be important or necessary).
With my kids, I’m actually very curious to see what happens. My wife and I teach them the basic gospel program, we have regular Family Home Evening, but we have every intention of being frank and open when they get old enough to ask the harder questions. We have no desire to raise fundamentalist kids who maintain that Noah’s ark really had two of every animal, that the earth is only six thousand years old, or even that you have to believe that Nephi was a real person, that Christ’s death necessarily means one thing or the other, or that people who do believe those things are crazy. If I raise them right, they will have the *choice* to believe or not, to go on a mission or not, to stay in the church or not. When it comes to dogma, I want none of this “as for me and my house” business. I want my kids to be bright, honest, smart, kind people, and I know too many non-Mormons that are like that to believe that my church is the only way to become that kind of person. My kids will be at Sunstone growing up, and they’ll have parents with complicated questions, but our goal is to make sure they feel free to decide what they want to believe and do, to make well-informed decisions about these things. My sons might grow up just like their dad, who gets more excited about the delicious ironies of history or philosophy (“..it tastes good…like honey…”) than I do the straightforward fervor of the religious believer. But they might also end up trying to “save” their ol’ dad from hellfire and damnation (that would make the grandparents happy). Or, maybe somewhere in between, which would be fine with me.
–John Williams
May 31st, 2006 at 1:36 pm
It may be an unjustified generalization, but it seems to me that most of the Sunstoners are now aging baby boomers or even older. Why is that? When I grew up, there was more of a spectrum of what was an acceptable range of thought a Mormon could have and still be considered faithful. Many of us wanted to keep our intellectual integrity and also be faithful LDS. With correlation and retrenchment, the Church became much more conservative and conformist. Many of us stayed perhaps in part because of the Sunstone community. Nowadays it seems to be that young intellectuals who aren’t comfortable with the conservative mold seem to be more likely to opt out of the church entirely. Fewer of them are interested in staying in as a “Sunstoner” and feeling marginalized.