Internet & Social Media – By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

Guess I’ll Go Eat Worms

January 20, 2023 by Sam Brunson

About a month ago, YouGov released the results of a poll asking how Americans feel about various religions. Respondents were asked a simple question: “Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the following groups, organizations, or belief systems in the United States?” They were given a random sample of 17 out iof a list of 35 religions and could choose one answer to the question:

Very favorable
Somewhat favorable
Neither favorable nor unfavorable
Somewhat unfavorable
Very unfavorable
Not sure

Among the religions in the poll was “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon Church).” And how did we fare?

Rethinking Plagiarism

October 10, 2022 by Sam Brunson

Last week, in the wake of General Conference, there was a mini-scandal: it appears that in Elder Bednar’s talk “Put on Thy Strength, O Zion,” he borrowed his interpretation of a parable from a 2016 article, sometimes even using that author’s precise words. He didn’t flag his intellectual debt in the oral version of his talk, though, and the original published version also failed to use quotation marks or footnotes for many of the ideas.

Now, I realize I’m idiosyncratic, but the first person who comes to mind when I hear about a plagiarism scandal is my friend and colleague Brian Frye, ~~Dogecoin Professor of Law & Grifting~~ Spears-Gilbert Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky Rosenberg College of Law.

Professor Frye is the preeminent plagiarism apologist in the legal academy. And his apologia pro plagiarism forces us to confront the question, why is plagiarism wrong? While the answer seems self-evident, he makes it clear that the question of the wrong of plagiarism is a lot murkier and harder to pin down.

Faith, Reason, and CES

September 18, 2022 by Sam Brunson

Last week, the Deseret News published an essay by Elder Clark Gilbert, the commissioner of CES. (Remember, CES is over the church’s secondary education system, including the BYUs and Pathways.) In it, he argues for the distinctive—and critical—role religiously-affiliated colleges and universities play in our broad network of secondary education.

And honestly, I found the essay deeply troubling.

Not, let me point out, because I disagree with Elder Gilbert’s premise. I’ve spent my entire academic career teaching at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law. We’re a Jesuit school, and our sense of Jesuit identity is central to our mission and to the way we educate our students. This mission encourages us to center justice, as well as the well-being of our students, faculty, and staff. It motivates and permeates the education we provide.

On Faking It

May 19, 2022 by Sam Brunson

Earlier this week, the Salt Lake Tribune published a column entitled “If You’re Faking Your Latter-day Saint Faith … Why?” The basic gist is, the columnist is puzzled why people who don’t believe in the church still participate, rather than living authentically. He writes about these fakers (and, if he were a Salinger fan, I supposed he would have used “phonies“):

They go to church, they fulfill congregational callings, they pay tithing, they socialize with believers and participate with family members in every aspect of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, except for one.
They do not actually believe it to be the truth.
Call me naive, but this whole concept is tough to fit into my brain.
Why the heck would anyone pretend to believe in a religion that is as demanding, and often outright inconvenient, as the LDS Church is?

The column really got under my skin. In the first instance, it’s because I have no patience for people (inside and outside the church) who insist that, if you don’t buy into their conception of religion, you should leave. (I similarly have no patience for people who insist you have no choice but to stay—I’m equal opportunity impatient!)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Internet & Social Media, Media, Mormon, Rants Tagged With: belief, big tent, binary, fakers, phonies, spectrum

Lafferty, Posse Comitatus and Mormon Remix Culture

April 29, 2022 by Sam Brunson

Yesterday, Hulu released the first two episodes of Under the Banner of Heaven, an Andrew Garfield-led adaptation of Krakauer’s book by the same name.

And honestly, I don’t have anything to say about it. I haven’t had time to watch it and, in any event, I’m not a television critic. (If you want a set of insightful and sophisticated responses, Juvenile Instructor has you covered!)

But its renewed salience brings up something that I think Krakauer gets wrong about Mormonism. But the thing is, it’s also something most Mormons get wrong about Mormonism: there’s a sense that Mormonism exceptionalism. For critics of the church, that can mean that the bad things about Mormonism are unique to Mormon beliefs and culture. For members, it can mean that the good things are revelatory and unique to us, the result of direct revelation.

It’s Not Taxes

April 2, 2022 by Sam Brunson

A popular legal Twitter personality has an evergreen tweet: “It’s not RICO.” See, RICO (the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) has become a super-popular rhetorical crime. Trump violated RICO; antifa violated RICO; I’m probably violating RICO just by posting this!

The thing is, RICO is a very narrowly-tailored law. There are specific criteria a crime has to meet to violate RICO and basically, if you hear someone say that somebody else violated RICO, you can be about 99% sure not only that they’re wrong, but that they have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.

I thought about that the other day when a friend pointed me to a clip from a popular Mormon-themed podcast.[fn1] In the clip, the podcaster makes a blockbuster announcement: the podcaster has just discovered why the church builds so many temples. Specifically, the podcaster was told by an “inside source”:

It turns out that for the church to maintain its tax-exempt status, for the Mormon church to maintain its tax-exempt status as a charity or as a church, it has to do something with its money. And so building temples is one of the major ways the church can spend a boatload of money with all this cash that it keeps collecting and stay in business and be perceived as a charitable institution.

“Lead Out in Abandoning Attitudes and Actions of Prejudice”

February 8, 2022 by Sam Brunson

Note: between when I drafted this post and when I scheduled it to go live, Bro. Wilcox apologized for his statement. And it’s a real-deal kind of apology, not a squishy avoiding-blame one; in fact, it’s a model for one step of precisely what I hoped for. I’m still going to posting for two reasons. First, while apology is a critical part of repenting, it is not the only step. And second, I don’t think this was primarily an individual problem–there is an underlying institutional problem that his comments highlighted and his apology didn’t and couldn’t change. But I’m making some changes to what I previously wrote in light of his apology.

Last weekend, Bradley Wilcox, second counselor in the Young Men’s general presidency and associate teaching professor of ancient scripture at BYU-Provo, gave a youth fireside in Alpine, UT. Somewhere in the fireside he asked, rhetorically, why Black church members didn’t get the priesthood until 1978. (To be clear, his framing of the question is wrong: in the first decades of the church, a number of Black men received the priesthood; it wasn’t until 1852 that Brigham Young imposed the priesthood-and-temple ban on Black members.)

Mark Hofmann and Taxes

March 8, 2021 by Sam Brunson

In anticipation of watching Netflix’s Murder Among the Mormons,[fn1] I started rereading Victims: The LDS Church and the Mark Hofmann Case.[fn2]

And right at the end of chapter two something leapt out at me: in addition to searching for (and forging) rare documents, Hofmann engaged in tax planning! Chapter two discusses Hofmann’s attempts to sell the Anthon Transcript to the church. Initially he asked for a set of six Mormon gold pieces in exchange. Why the gold pieces rather than cash? In part, he said, because he wanted a “tax-free exchange” (Turley, 38). (Note that, after negotiation, the church gave him one five-dollar gold coin plus some historic Mormon notes and a first edition of the Book of Mormon missing its title page.)

Now if you’ve read much of my blogging, you know these three words leapt out at me, a virtual technicolor attention grabber. So what was Hofmann trying to do?

The Evils of the Dole: What Is This “Dole” Thing, Anyway?

December 4, 2019 by Sam Brunson

Last week, Kristine A wrote an excellent post from last week, highlighting the BYU-I Medicaid omnishambles. In the post, she mentioned that one rumored reason for the policy was to get students “off the dole.”

Now, I’ve been meaning to write about church (and government) welfare for a while, and that comment got me thinking: variously in lesson manuals and other church contexts growing up, I’ve heard about the evils of the dole. But outside of church contexts, I can’t say I’ve heard the word “dole” very often.[fn1]

Originally, I had a long, comprehensive post vaguely mapped out in my head. But it turns out this is the holiday season, and also the writing-and-grading-finals season, so in place of the comprehensive exegesis of church welfare, I’m going to look at use of the word dole. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Current Events, Internet & Social Media, Mormon, Politics, Society & Culture Tagged With: church welfare, conference, dole, language, ngram, omnishambles, the dole, Welfare, words

On Satan’s Plan, Tax Edition

August 9, 2019 by Sam Brunson

A couple days ago, I got a message from a friend, asking how I respond to people who claim that taxes are Satan’s plan. Honestly, my instinct would be to respond, “That’s stupid,” block the person on Twitter, and get on with my life.

But that doesn’t work in every circumstance. I mean, if your interlocutor is standing in the checkout line next to you, blocking isn’t really an issue. And if your interlocutor is, I don’t know, your father-in-law, calling him stupid may not be the optimal approach. (And honestly, if the person is speaking in good faith, dismissing them like that is rude and unfair.[fn1])

So how would I address a good faith assertion that taxation is Satan’s plan? Depending on the person, I’d probably take one of a couple routes: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Current Events, Economics, Internet & Social Media, Mormon, Politics, Society & Culture, Theology Tagged With: agency, compulsion, consequences, free agency, satan's plan, taxes

Mourn, Comfort, Stand: How Mormons Can Respond to New Zealand

March 16, 2019 by Carolyn

The baptismal covenant in Mosiah 18 is why I call myself a “Mormon.” There, by the Waters of Mormon, a beggarded group of refugees promised to “preach nothing save it were repentance and faith on the Lord” and to “knit their hearts together in unity and in love one towards another.”

These original members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Prior-day Saints expressed their desires to “bear one another’s burdens, that they may be light;” to “mourn with those that mourn;” to “comfort those that stand in need of comfort;” and “to stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things.”

I’ve spent the last day reflecting on how I, and my Mormon community, can live up to those same covenants in order to demonstrate love and unity towards our Muslim brothers and sisters in the wake of the white nationalist terrorist attack on Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Comparative/Ecumenical, Current Events, Doctrine & Policy, Featured Posts, Internet & Social Media, Mormon, Religion Tagged With: baptism, cair, christchurch, hate crime, Islam, jacinda arden, muslim, new zealand, Politics, white nationalism

Jung at Heart: Social Media and Self Knowledge

January 30, 2019 by Guest

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”

–Carl Gustav Jung

Keira Shae is the author of How the Light Gets In, a BCC Press memoir.

I’m that Millennial. The one who took hundreds of thousands of pictures of my kids (pictures that all look the same), hundreds of my meals. The teen who grew up experiencing the Internet the way that other generations experienced oxygen. The original one who sincerely thought I should express political opinions on Facebook and had the debating capacity to change other’s minds. At nineteen.

The one who spent much of her adult life wondering how she could waste so much valuable time playing on social media. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Guest Post, Internet & Social Media, Media, Mormon, Society & Culture Tagged With: attention, Facebook, instagram, journals, Jung, Social media

What I Learned in the Silence

October 17, 2018 by Guest

Natalie Brown is a former By Common Consent blogger. She is currently writing a memoir on the stories we tell about houses. You can follow her on Twitter @BtwnHouseHome.

The prophet invited Mormon women to take a break from social media, and they listened. My networks went silent with friends gone ghost. I know this, because I logged on occasionally to check announcements. What I discovered was a wasteland of quiet. I began logging on deliberately to process the silence, sharing my thoughts about the fast into the void it left behind. Wondering occasionally what other Mormons might think when they saw the dates and timestamps of my posts.

I learned in the silence that it is primarily Mormon women who amplify my voice. With Mormon women mostly absent, fewer people engaged with me. Although my networks include men and women, Mormons and non-Mormons, it is disproportionately Mormon women who comment, retweet or like what I have to say. I can’t fully explain why this is so, but my voice is diminished in their absence.

Mormon Whisper Networks and #MeToo

June 4, 2018 by Carolyn

In every singles ward I’ve ever attended, there have been predators.

Often they are charming, talented, witty men. Often they are proactive about quoting prophets and volunteering for service projects and asking women on dates. To their fellow Elders Quorumites, the predators are often indistinguishable from ordinary Priesthood holders.

But women suspect trouble. Stories of terrible dates, of over-aggressive advances, of nasty breakups and refusing to respect boundaries, quietly percolate among Relief Societies. When these women see a creepy or known threat approaching a friend, they quietly pull her aside and whisper a word of warning. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Current Events, EQ/HP, Family, Gender & Sexuality, Internet & Social Media, Rants, Relief Society Tagged With: abuse, sexual assault, sexual harassment, Singles, Young Single Adults

What Tax Folks (and Kyle) Talk About When They Talk About Tithing

December 30, 2016 by Sam Brunson

Yesterday, I saw this tweet from Jana Riess:

Study says young adult #Mormons most likely generation to tithe (but there’s a catch) https://t.co/V7jqAfkBfl via @janariess

— Jana Riess/Twible (@janariess) December 26, 2016

The catch: younger members are more likely than their elders to say they’re paying tithing on net, rather than gross, income.

The question of why younger generations are more willing to cop to paying 10% of their net income is an interesting one, and I have no idea if it reflects changes in religious rhetoric or in their financial situations. For that matter, I have no idea if it actually reflects a shift: maybe Mormons have always moved from net to gross as they’ve aged.

What’s clear, though, is that few people, if any, are actually paying tithing on their gross income. I tweeted to that effect, and got into a fun rabbit hole of a Twitter conversation. So, for your reading pleasure: What Tax Folks (and Kyle) Talk About When They Talk About Tithing:
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Economics, Internet & Social Media, Mormon, Society & Culture Tagged With: #taxnerds, gross, jana riess, net, tithing, twitter

Are You Listening to the Maxwell Institute Podcast?

October 12, 2016 by Sam Brunson

There’s no delicate way to put this: if you’re not listening, you should be. Blair Hodges is an excellent, thoughtful interviewer who invites really smart, thoughtful people on the show. He talks with his smart, thoughtful guests about really interesting religious topics, which sometimes touch on Mormonism, but more often, introduce listeners to religious thought that isn’t Mormon-specific. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Internet & Social Media, Mormon, Mormon Studies, Religion, Scriptures Tagged With: american universities and the birth of modern mormonism, maxwell institute podcast, thomas w simpson

Does Open Stories Foundation Qualify As Tax-Exempt?

February 9, 2015 by Sam Brunson

Last week, Peggy Fletcher Stack wrote an article about John Delhin’s finances. A couple things leaped out at me, particularly salient, perhaps, because of research I’ve been doing recently, and because they raise difficult-to-see red flags, both for the Open Stories Foundation (“OSF”) and for other Mormons (or, more generally, Americans) who want to start a tax-exempt organization.[fn1]

Tl;dr: OSF looks like it is violating the prohibition against private inurement, which would compromise its tax-exempt status; it should at the very least get a tax practitioner with experience in the tax-exempt area to look closely. Also, anybody who wants to operate a tax-exempt entity needs to get competent legal advice upfront: the tax-exempt area is a minefield of compliance traps. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Current Events, Internet & Social Media, Media, Mormon, Society & Culture Tagged With: 501(c)(3), open stories foundation, private inurement, reasonable compensation, tax-exempt

Role Models

February 2, 2015 by Sam Brunson

In my mission farewell talk,[fn1] I spent a little time talking about one of my teenage heroes. Charlie “Bird” Parker was an alto saxophone player who revolutionized jazz. With Dizzy Gillespie, he broke with swing and invented bebop, a faster, more cerebral, more harmonically complex style of music.

I admired the Bird’s virtuosity on the saxophone. I admired his improvisational genius. And I admired his work ethic: he may have had a natural genius, but, as a teenager, he also practiced 11-15 hours a day. And it was this work ethic, as much as anything, that appealed to me, and it was this work ethic that made me think of him as a prepared to leave on my mission.[fn2] [Read more…]

Filed Under: Internet & Social Media, Mormon, Music, Navel-Gazing & Poetic Observation, Pop Culture, Society & Culture Tagged With: addiction, bebop, bird, charlie parker, flawed, mission farewell, role model, saxophone, work ethic

Choices, Choices

October 11, 2014 by Angela C

I’ve been reflecting a lot on E. Quentin Cook’s talk called “Choose Wisely.” This was the opening talk of the Priesthood session, so I suppose that makes me not the target audience, and yet it’s clearly a talk with universal application. [1] I won’t let that stop me.

E. Cook begins by talking about the problems when we rationalize our failures to act heroically. He uses the example of Lucy not catching the ball in the Peanuts comic strips.

While always humorous, Lucy’s excuses were rationalizations; they were untrue reasons for her failure to catch the ball.

He then goes on to talk about the eternal ramifications when we rationalize our failure to prepare for our eternal goals. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Current Events, Economics, Education, Family, General Conference, Internet & Social Media, Media, Missionary, Mormon, Navel-Gazing & Poetic Observation, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion, Society & Culture Tagged With: choices, E. Cook

The Anosognosic’s Dilemma, Blogging, and the Body of Christ

June 4, 2014 by Jason K.

One need not spend much time on the internet before coming face-to-face with what looks like raw, unfiltered stupidity. We’ve all seen memes mocking such ignorance. “How could you not see that?” we say, indignantly congratulating ourselves on our own superiority. As an advocate of the Oxford comma, here’s one of my favorites:

Still, as pleasurable as dumping on such instances of idiocy may be, most of us do recognize that this sort of thing isn’t very Christlike (as some huffy commenter, devoid of any irony, will inevitably point out). Such recognitions notwithstanding, we feel guilty for a few minutes and then jump back into another Facebook battle with one of the utter morons who seem to populate the place. [fn1] [Read more…]

Filed Under: Internet & Social Media, Mormon, Navel-Gazing & Poetic Observation, Theology, Doctrine & Policy Tagged With: Anosognosic's Dilemma, body of Christ, Facebook, Milton, trolls

Merging Religious and Secular News(papers)

April 4, 2014 by Sam Brunson

The Church News is moving. It has just announced that stories from the Church News will be posted on DeseretNews.com, that LDSChurchNews.com will redirect to the DN site, and that eventually the archives will be moved as well.

Which is fine and good, I suppose. Apparently, the Church News was hosted on a platform that couldn’t be supported or upgraded.[fn1] So the consolidation seems to make sense from a technical point of view. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Current Events, Internet & Social Media, Media, Mormon Tagged With: 501(c)(3), campaigning, church news, deseret news, irs, tax-exempt

Joseph Smith on Wall Street

February 21, 2014 by Sam Brunson

No, I don’t mean Joseph Smith’s 1832 visit to Manhattan, though he stayed at 88 Pearl Street, which is mere blocks from Wall Street,[fn1] and he may well have walked on Wall Street. I also don’t mean the bronze statute of Joseph Smith that stood in the Financial District.

No, I mean the name-checking of Joseph in 2012’s induction ceremony for Kappa Beta Phi, a secret Wall Street fraternity. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Current Events, Internet & Social Media, Modern Era, Mormon, Mormons!, Politics Tagged With: 1 percent, drunk, jokes, Joseph Smith, roast, unfunny, wall street

Killing Narfi: Skyrim and the problem of evil

February 4, 2014 by John C.

As Mormons, we have a pervasive, if not terribly well-attributed, belief that, in the next life, if we turned out to be good enough, we’ll get to make our own planets. Folks, why wait? There are a wealth of world-building strategy and role-playing games available right now. One has me in its web right now and it is causing me to consider the creation of a moral universe. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Current Events, Internet & Social Media, Media, Mormon, mormon.org video of the month, Pop Culture, Religion, Society & Culture

Featured Post

BCC Press Has a Birthday Present for You

Recent Comments

BCC FB

Get BCC via Email

Archives

LDS Headlines