Clark,
I do think there's a legitimate critique of Momon culture in "Leaving the Saints." I really identified with what she was talking about to the point that it was quite painful to relive. The examples you give are the most spurious ones that people have picked up and run with ad nauseum--a strategy that was also used by LDS defenders against John Krakauer's "Under the Banner of Heaven." At BYU, and in Utah Valley, there was an atmosphere of fear and recrimination. At BYU, for example, people were being watched, reports were being written, spies were even used as far back as the Wilkinson administration at BYU. And for five years historian Michael Quinn was trailed by search committees who were dishonest about representing themselves so that they could locate him in a ward for the express purpose of excommunication. Fear of violence is almost as debilitatating as actual violence--witness international terrorism--and Beck talks about how it was crazy but she felt vulnerable to Danite-styled actions because she was challenging a system that was somehow considered sacred.
This is the primary complaint I've had of Boyd Peterson's otherwise legitimate critique of his sister-in-law's book: Beck never claimed that she had evidence of Danites peering around the corner, as I recall; she had a fear of such surfacing because of past evidence of fundamentalist wacko vigilantes. The Lafferty brothers during the 80s did in fact commit ritual executions--temple-styled--in the 80s. And, as with Elizabeth Smart's abductors, they were very near the center of mainstream church activity just prior to their criminal actions. To me, Beck's description of the atmosphere is very real, and very legitimate.
Futhermore, the explanations she was allegedly fed about bobbed and pubic hair is pretty consistent with my experience in the LDS culture: explanations--some often wild and quite funny--are often given from everything to why the blacks denied the priesthood to why hot drinks are disallowed. And as for the no-Sonja Johnson-found-in-the-campus library claim, I don't know if that's true, but I think the kind of silly efforts to regulate people's behavior as well as information that have occured in the past on campus suggest that it could have easily happened, even if it was rectified later.
More than anything though--and I tried to say this in an earlier post--the book is a brilliant expose of how the fusion between family and faith and faith and authority have created unique problems in the LDS Church and the Mormon culture--problems of identity, fear of punishment, self-censorship to the point of lunacy among other things. And, so that we don't forget, there were important concessions Beck made of individual kindness and Chrisitian living in the book that leavened the report. Overall, however, the most valuable part of the memoir was the critique of a system that the hierarchy and the majority of LDS seem to be unwilling to look long and hard at (or just too busy). I identified with her description of things and found it to be, arguably, the quintessential Mormon book of our time because of it. It is VERY Mormon. That's why we can't dismiss it in my view. I think we have largely dismissed the book and missed an opportunity to address serious problems among the people we claim as our own.
Sorry for the length of this email. I promise to be briefer in the future.
Dave
-----Original Message-----
From: clark@???
To: aml-list@???
Sent: Wed, 27 Dec 2006 1:37 PM
Subject: Re: [AML] Beck, Leaving the Saints
On Dec 26, 2006, at 10:30 PM, David Pace wrote:
Many people dismissed Beck's legitimate critique of Utah and Mormon culture because of the abuse claims.
Whoa. The problem was that Beck's critique of Utah and Mormon culture were anything *but* legitimate. I wish she had some legitimate critiques in there but everything was over the top. What, in her book, do you think was legitimate? The idea that the Church is bugging peoples homes who they feel are suspect and doing this from nearby chapels? The culture of violence with reborn danites? The whole deletion of all references to the ERA in the reference section of the BYU library or Sonja Johnson? The bit about short hair? How about the ban on shorts being because leg hair = pubic hair. Etc.
I'm all about having a legitimate critique of Utah culture. I think there's a lot to be said there. Too bad Beck didn't.
Clark
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