| The full history has a very interesting periodicity around pursuits that are typically associated with academia. One could argue that the Mormon church has an "academia complex" of many interesting dimensions. Or an extreme love/hate tendency with learning and academic progress that is never quite reconciled. One of the most fascinating dimensions to me is the sheer number of active-Mormon academics who make a quiet decision to become covert agents working against the leadership of the church. (The September Six were a prominent example of this and other issues in the academic space too) When my wife and I were considering whether to remain active (both of us born into the religion) and after I had left the local stake leadership at my own will, my wife corresponded with a prominent Mormon academic. Feeling some natural hesitation at the very least due to the tremendous cost to our family and friend relationships, and more (the impact here has been awful). This academic, well-known to church members, eventually admitted rather bluntly that they saw themselves as one who helped Mormons see through the false stories told by church leaders. We couldn't believe what we were reading in these messages, after the initial formalities were over and after my wife continued pushing back from the "but you, personally, genuinely don't see a problem with..." angle. But over time I've come to realize that academia kind of has a unique upper hand in the sense that it is a separate, objective social structure with its own support and language system. So, as long as one doesn't torpedo one's own job directly, church academics can have arguably-deep access to changing minds over time. (It was clearly a bit of an intoxicating concept to the person in question, I think also given their popularity) It does require listeners to pay a lot of attention to nuance however, so the filtering effect is unfortunately strong compared to people on the more orthodox or fundamentalist side who speak passion-first, as direct as possible, from a position of stubborn belief despite others' positions and experiences. My observation of academics-oriented personalities within the local church (whether actually academic by profession or not) was that they tended to be almost randomly punished for simply existing. In my mind this was pretty clearly related to the question of whether an individual tended to contribute to the day-to-day order of things with consistent structural adherence & adjustment, or whether they rather did this at a theoretical level, more clearly removed from the little picture. The former being more in line with the preferred personality of the church organization. Ergo, punishment for being who they were. There's much more I could say about it, but it's really quite a fascinating topic in its way. And it's not uncommon as an active member to come across artifacts similar to the alphabet in question, which seem really cool, then you find they were in effect abandoned by very intellectual people who are no longer Mormon. That was always a bit awkward as an active Mormon...but, you know how it is with these intellectuals! "When they are learned they think they are wise"... |