I don’t know who wrote this, but I agree with ALL 95. She hit all my major irritants and issues with the LDS church Some of my favorites: 11.  Youth leaders should be trained in how to respond to and/or report issues of child abuse. Honestly, we all should, but especially youth leaders. 16.  Less meetings.  PEC and Ward Council should be merged and all leadership should attend the one meeting. 20.  Stop talking to minors about masturbating.  Also, adults.  Don’t talk to anybody about masturbating.  Why are we talking about masturbating at church?! 22.  Have the girls help pass the Sacrament.  There is nothing in the scriptures that prohibits this, and passing the Sacrament tray around isn’t required to be a priesthood function. 27.  Stop the worship/emphasis on The Family™.  If you’re going to talk about defending the family, you’d better be talking about all families, not just the ones with cis-gendered, heterosexual parents who are married and who have 3+ children born in the covenant.  Families, as a social unit of primary support and love, are worth defending.  “The Family™” is code for being homophobic and it’s antithetical to the teachings of Jesus. 31.  Change the temple language so that women are covenanting with God, not through their husbands. 35.  Let’s hear from more women in General Conference.  This would hopefully naturally happen should we ordain women (see Thesis 30) but black men have been ordained for almost 40 years and we still rarely hear from them. So, relatedly… 36.  … make a concerted effort to have more diversity in leadership, and in talks during General Conference.  We should value the experiences of all people in this church from all demographic groups. 57.  Have missionaries do more service.  Maybe make lasting partnerships with organizations in your area, and commit to having a certain number of missionaries available to them for a certain number of hours per week (so that organizations can depend on that continuity).  “By their fruits ye shall know them!”  Let’s make sure we’re bearing good fruit. 61.  Get rid of the one-year temple penalty on civil marriages within the US (and some other countries, I think).  Let people plan their marriage and/or sealing in a way that best works for them and their families. 65.  Relatedly, stop excommunicating married people in same-sex relationships.  Let them come to church, partake of the sacrament, and hold callings.  Hold them to the same standards that we hold heterosexual couples to, and encourage commitment, fidelity, and love. 76.  Create coming-of-age rituals for the girls in the church.  This could be corrected with ordaining women (see Thesis 30), but girls need to mark their maturation into adulthood and feel welcomed and needed by their congregation, too.  Give them responsibilities and ways to serve their ward community. 89.  Change youth standards to be more inward reflections than outward.  When talking about modesty, don’t just talk about what body parts need to covered, but talk about what it means to be modest in all of your thoughts and deeds.  When talking about the Word of Wisdom, talk less about what substances to eat/drink and more about what it means to treat your body with respect and have moderation in all things.  If we set less outward markers on what it means to be a righteous Latter-day Saint, we’re more likely to build an inner spiritual foundation that is based on principles instead of actions, and we’re also less likely to judge others who aren’t outwardly conforming.

How Utah Keeps the American Dream Alive

Megan McArdle, Bloomberg, March 28, 2017

There’s no getting around it: For a girl raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Salt Lake City is a very weird place.

I went to Utah precisely because it’s weird. More specifically, because economic data suggest that modest Salt Lake City, population 192,672, does something that the rest of us seem to be struggling with: It helps people move upward from poverty. I went to Utah in search of the American Dream.

Columnists don’t talk as much as they used to about the American Dream. They’re more likely to talk about things like income mobility, income inequality, the Gini coefficient--sanitary, clinical terms. These are easier to quantify than a dream, but also less satisfying. We want money, yes, but we hunger even more deeply for something else: for possibility. It matters to Americans that someone born poor can retire rich. That possibility increasingly seems slimmer and slimmer in most of the nation, but in Utah, it’s still achievable.

If you were born to parents who were doing well, you are likely to be doing well yourself. If you were born to parents who were not doing well, then you are likely to repeat their fate. To take just one metric of many: In a society in which a college degree is almost required for entry into the upper middle class, 77 percent of people whose families are in the top quarter of the earnings distribution secure a bachelor’s degree by the time they are 24. For people in the lowest income bracket, that figure is 9 percent.

But things look a lot better in Salt Lake City, which economists Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline and Emmanuel Saez identified as having the highest rates of absolute upward mobility in the nation. So I went to Utah to discover its secrets and assess whether they could be exported.

Once I got there, I found that it’s hard to even get a complete picture of how Utah combats poverty, because so much of the work is done by the Mormon Church, which does not compile neat stacks of government figures for the perusal of eager reporters.

The church did, however, give me a tour of its flagship social service operation, known as Welfare Square. It’s vast and inspiring and utterly foreign to anyone familiar with social services elsewhere in the country. This starts to offer some clue as to why Utah seems to be so good at generating mobility--and why that might be hard to replicate without the Latter-Day Saints.

UTAH-STYLE GOVERNMENT. There’s bad news and good news.

Bad news: The wide gulf between Utah and, say, North Carolina implies that we do, in fact, have a real problem on our hands. A child born in the bottom quintile of incomes in Charlotte has only a 4 percent chance of making it into the top quintile. A child in Salt Lake City, on the other hand, has more than a 10.8 percent chance--achingly close to the 11.7 percent found in Denmark and well on the way to the 20 percent chance you would expect in a perfectly just world.

“Big government” does not appear to have been key to Utah’s income mobility. From 1977 to 2005, when the kids in Chetty et al’s data were growing up, the Rockefeller Institute ranks it near the bottom in state “fiscal capacity.” The state has not invested a lot in fighting poverty, nor on schools; Utah is dead last in per-pupil education spending.

But “laissez faire” isn’t the answer either. Utah is a deep red state, but its conservatism is notably compassionate, thanks in part to the Mormon Church. Its politicians, like Senator Mike Lee, led the way in rejecting Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency. And the state is currently engaged in a major initiative on intergenerational poverty. The bill that kicked it off passed the state’s Republican legislature unanimously, and the lieutenant governor has been its public face.

This follows what you might call the state’s “war on homelessness”--a war that has been largely victorious, with most of the state’s homeless resettled in permanent housing through a focus on “Housing First.” That means getting people into permanent shelter before trying to diagnose and address the problems that contributed to their homelessness, like mental illness and substance abuse.

This approach can be cheaper than the previous regime, in which too many individuals ended up in emergency rooms or temporary shelter seeking expensive help for urgent crises. But Housing First runs into fierce emotional resistance in many quarters, because it smacks too much of rewarding people for self-destructive behaviors. Utah’s brand of conservatism overcame that, in part because the Mormon Church supported it.

People in Utah’s government casually talk about getting the community involved in their efforts, not as a rote genuflection to a political ideal, but as an actual expectation. “Government’s not going to solve all this, and that’s why you’re in the room,” Lieutenant Governor Spencer Cox said to attendees of a community meeting about the Intergenerational Poverty Initiative, and it wasn’t just an idle hope. Utah really does have an immense parallel structure that can be counted on to bolster anything the government does on poverty. Its front door is Welfare Square.

THE MORMON WELFARE NETWORK. Like most social service agencies, Welfare Square is in one of the less pretty parts of town, tucked just off the highway between industrial buildings and modest tract homes. The complex itself, incorporating public spaces where help is offered, and private spaces where the church manufactures many of the goods it gives away, is built of modest materials and is kept scrupulously clean. And it is vast.

Many charity operations offer a food pantry or a thrift shop. Few of them can boast, in addition, their own bakery, dairy operation and canning facilities, all staffed by volunteers. The food pantry itself looks like a well-run grocery store, except that it runs not on money, but on “Bishop’s Orders” spelling out an individualized list of food items authorized by the bishop handling each case. This grows out of two features of Mormon life: the practice of storing large amounts of food against emergencies (as well as giving food away, the church sells it to people for their home storage caches), and an unrivaled system of highly organized community volunteer work.

The volunteering starts in the church wards, where bishops keep a close eye on what’s going on in the congregation, and tap members as needed to help each other. If you’re out of work, they may reach out to small business people to find out who’s hiring. If your marriage is in trouble, they’ll find a couple who went through a hard time themselves to offer advice.

But it does not stop with informal networks. Mormon youth are encouraged to go on missions. Many of them evangelize, of course, but others end up doing work for the church, including at Welfare Square. Every Mormon is expected to skip two meals a month, and to donate at least the value of the food they would have bought (and preferably more) to help the needy. They’re also encouraged to volunteer for the church. A job center at Welfare Square harnesses the still-prodigious energies of retirees; when I was there, an immigration center, also staffed with volunteers, was just starting up. The assistance offered is not unique, but the sheer scale of it is; few other churches could muster a similar army of willing, helpful people, or deploy them so efficiently.

The Mormon Church has a particular philosophy of help. Don Johnson, division director for the Welfare Department of the Church, spoke of the Pharisees quizzing Jesus in the gospels: “They asked the savior what is the greatest commandment--love God, and love your neighbor.” For the Mormon Church, that means making sure that no one goes hungry.

But the church is quite clear that the help is a temporary waypoint on the road to self-sufficiency, not a way of life. People are asked to work in exchange for the help they get, and, as the bishop said, “We make a list of what will sustain human life, not lifestyle.” I sampled various of the food items, and all were perfectly tasty, but nothing was what you would call fancy. It’s a utilitarian stopgap, not a substitute for an income, and not meant to be; the help comes with a healthy push to get yourself back on your feet as quickly as possible. The two phrases I heard over and over were “individual” and “self-reliant.”

“It’s a failure on the part of many,” he said, “if this is going on for six months or a year and their condition hasn’t changed.”

This combination of financial help and the occasional verbal kick in the pants is something close to what the ideal of government help used to be. Social workers used to make individual judgments about what sort of help their clients needed or deserved. But such judgments always have an inherently subjective and arbitrary quality, which courts began to frown on in the middle of the 20th century, in part because they offered considerable discretion for racial discrimination.

THE RACE FACTOR. One astonishing feature of Utah is how little people talk about race. The state population is now about 13 percent Hispanic, but only 1 percent black. Part of the explanation is probably the Mormon Church’s century of institutional racism.

During the era of founder Joseph Smith, the church actually seems to have been relatively egalitarian for its time. But his successor, Brigham Young, who led the Latter-Day Saints to Utah, excluded black followers from the priesthood (which is generally open to every Mormon man), keeping them out of the center of ecclesiastical life. The doctrine did not change until 1978, and the church’s racist past still lingers.

Unsurprisingly, the Mormons did not attract many black converts during the century that the ban was in place. Given that Utah is primarily peopled by Mormons, its population skews white.

This near-absence of racial diversity means that racism is largely left out of Utah’s conversations about economic inequality. That leads to some conversations around inequality that would be unbearably fraught elsewhere. When the poor people are, by and large, the same race as the richer ones, people find it easier to talk about them the way they might talk about, well, family members--as folks who may have made some mistakes and started with some disadvantages, but also as folks who could be self-sufficient after a little help from an uncle or a sister. It’s a very different conversation from “victim”/”oppressor” and “us”/”them”: a conversation that recognizes that poor people often make choices that keep them in poverty, but also that the constraints of poverty, including the social environment of poor neighborhoods, make it very difficult to make another choice.

Utah’s willingness to help, and its ability to help, may arise from its homogeneity--a trait that won’t be exported to the diverse nation at large.

THE SOURCE OF STABILITY. Utah is an aberration in many other ways. Look at alcohol and marriage.

The Mormon Church forbids drinking, and alcohol sales are far lower here than in other states. The incidence of problems associated with alcohol--like poverty, unemployment and crime--is also lower than in most other states.

On the other hand, the Mormon Church strongly encourages marriage, and the state is #1 in both married adults and in the percentage of children being raised by married parents.

Chetty et al suggest that having two married parents is a bedrock foundation of economic mobility--one that is rapidly eroding in modern America.

By encouraging members to marry, the Mormon Church is encouraging them to reduce their own likelihood of ending up poor. But it may also be creating spillover effects even for non-Mormons, because Chetty et al didn’t just find that married parents helped their own children to rise; they also influenced the lives of the children around them.

If you live in a neighborhood full of single mothers who had a hard time finishing school, that’s probably the future you’ll expect for yourself and your own kids. If you live in a neighborhood full of thriving two-parent families, that’s probably the future you’ll envision, even if your own father disappeared when you were 2. Marriage matters at the individual level, but it also matters at the community level, because the community can strongly shape individual behavior.

CAN UTAH’S MOBILITY BE REPLICATED? Utah’s incredible levels of integration, of community solidarity and support, of trust in government and in each other, enable it to build something unique in America, something a bit like Sweden might be, if it were run by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Where the best ideas of conservatives and liberals came together in one delicious package: business friendly, opportunity friendly, but also highly committed to caring for the needy and helping them get back on their feet.

No place is perfect. But with mobility seemingly stalled elsewhere, and our politics quickly becoming as bitter as a double Campari with no ice, I really, really wanted to find pieces of Utah’s model that could somehow be exported.

Price gave me some hope. The Mormon Church, he says, has created “scripts” for life, and you don’t need religious faith for those; you just need cultural agreement that they’re important. He said: “Imagine the American Medical Association said that if the mother is married when she’s pregnant, the child is likely to do better.” We have lots of secular authorities who could be encouraging marriage, and volunteering, and higher levels of community involvement of all kinds. Looking at the remarkable speed with which norms about gay marriage changed, thanks in part to an aggressive push on the topic from Hollywood icons, I have to believe that our norms about everyone else’s marriages could change too, if those same elites were courageous enough to recognize the evidence, and take a stand.

President George W. Bush talked a lot about compassionate conservatism 15 years ago, but Utah has made it a reality. Utahans seem strongly committed to charitable works, by government, alongside government or outside government. Whatever tools used are infused with an ethic of self-reliance that helps prevent dependency. And yet, when there’s a conflict between that ethic and mercy, Utah institutions err on the side of mercy.

America could use a politics more like that. And the values that make it work are not unique to Mormonism.