class: middle background-color: #272822
Canceling Taco Tuesday?
Reactionary Mormons' Struggle with the Scope of Religious Authority
Spencer P. Greenhalgh, PhD
School of Information Science, University of Kentucky
spencer.greenhalgh@uky.edu
@spgreenhalgh@scholar.social
Amy L. Chapman, PhD
Teachers College, Columbia University
alc2295@tc.columbia.edu
@chapmaab
slides:
https://spencergreenhalgh.com/work/_mssa_2022_deznat.html
??? Hi everyone, my name is... Today, I'm presenting with Spencer Greenhalgh from the School of Information Science at the University of Kentucky on some work we've done together investigating reactionary Mormons on Twitter and their trying to figure out how religious authority works online. We've titled this presentation "canceling taco Tuesday," which is a reference that will make a lot more sense in a few minutes. --- background-color: gray class: center, middle # background ??? In the meantime, let's start with some background... --- class: center, middle # #DezNat ??? The reactionary Mormons that we're studying are participants in the #DezNat hashtag on Twitter, which is purportedly a hashtag for Latter-day Saints... --- class: center, middle # "#DezNat means standing up and speaking up for Christ here on twitter." document 1249 ??? ... who are interested in defending the faith, as seen in this quote from our data, but in reality... --- class: center, middle # "it is disingenuous to describe the movement as merely about Latter-day Saint orthodoxy" Greenhalgh, S. P., & Chapman, A. L. (in press). "Come for the memes, stay for defending the faith": Far-right and anti-feminist red pill influences in the #DezNat Twitter hashtag. *Journal of the Mormon Social Science Association*. ??? ... this is a disingenous argument, given the clear influence of far-right and anti-feminist thinking on activity in the hashtag. --- class: center, middle
??? For example, on the surface, this meme from our data is a very online depiction of the 1844 Mormon succession crisis, but the depiction of Brigham Young as the white nationalist frog meme "Groyper," and the description of Joseph Smith III as a "momma's boy" demonstrate some clear preferences in terms of politics and gender performance. This is the sort of observation that popular and media coverage of DezNat has focused on, but while working with this data, we found that the DezNat movement also had things to say in response to two questions that scholar Heidi Campbell has posed about religious authority in the online sphere: --- class: center, middle
"What does religious authority look like in an age of digital media
, and, is it still held and defined by recognized religious leaders and the structures they work within?"
Campbell, H. (2021). *Digital creatives and the rethinking of religious authority*. Routledge --- class: center, middle
"What does religious authority look like in an age of digital media, and, is it still held and defined by recognized religious leaders and the structures they work within?"
Campbell, H. (2021). *Digital creatives and the rethinking of religious authority*. Routledge ??? ... these questions are particularly salient in the context of Mormonism. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a very hierarchical, top-down conception of religious authority, but phenomena like Mormon Twitter --- class: center, middle # "present Mormon identities and approach Mormon practice in ways other than those that are typically seen (or approved of)" Greenhalgh, S. P., Staudt Willet, B. K., & Koehler, M. J. (2019). Approaches to Mormon identity and practice in the #ldsconf Twitter hashtag. *Journal of Media and Religion*, *18*(4), 122-133. https://doi.org/10.1080/15348423.2019.1696121 ??? allow participants to skirt around that hierarchy, acting and identifying in ways that aren't encouraged or even allowed in formal Latter-day Saint spaces. In fact, --- class: center, middle # "Church members marginalized in the eighties and nineties—intellectuals, feminists, gays—gravitated to social media as a safe place to expres their ideas" McDannell, C. (2019). *Sister saints: Mormon women since the end of polygamy*. Oxford University Press. ??? ... historian Colleen McDannell has noted that those same voices that the institutional church intentionally shut out in previous decades can now easily speak to other Mormons through social media. In doing so, they implicitly assume a certain amount of religious authority, and we suggest that the DezNat movement is a reaction to the fact that more liberal voices are treated as authoritative on Mormon Twitter in ways that they do not appreciate. So, as we'll see throughout this presentation, DezNat pushes back against the more free-for-all approach to religious authority that exists online and offers a sort of grassroots, emic theory of how religious authority works on the internet. --- background-color: gray class: center, middle # methods and study context ??? To give a quick overview of our study... --- class: center, middle # 1,379 screenshots # tweets and context # April 3rd through 9th, 2019 ??? ... our findings today are based on nearly 1,400 screenshots of #DezNat-tagged tweets and relevant context; these tweets were composed between April 3rd and April 9th, 2019, and we selected this time period because it included... --- background-image: url(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Crowd_after_General_Conference_%2827726233068%29.jpg/1280px-Crowd_after_General_Conference_%2827726233068%29.jpg) ??? ... the weekend that the April 2019 General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints took place. In short, lots of official Latter-day Saint sermons and business happening, and lots of Mormon activity on Twitter. --- class: center, middle # open, collaborative qualitative coding ??? We did open coding of these screenshots and worked closely together, which was especially important because... --- class: center, middle # "degrees of insiderness and belonging in the religious realm can be quite varied" Decoo, E. (2022). Research in the religious realm: Intersectional diversification and dynamic variances of insider/outsider perspectives. *International Journal of Qualitative Methods*, *21*, 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069211063706 ??? ... the two of us have different personal histories with Mormonism, and bringing insider and outsider perspectives together resulted in a richer analysis. --- class: center, middle # "enhanced scrutiny and questions of power relations" Suomela, T., Chee, F., Berendt, B., & Rockwell, G. (2019). Applying an ethics of care to internet research: Gamergate and digital humanities. *Digital Studies/Le champ numérique*, *9*(1), article 4. https://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.302 ??? We were also very attentive to the unique ethical considerations that arise in internet research and would be happy to elaborate on those later. --- background-color: gray class: center, middle # findings and discussion ??? Today, we'd like to go over what our analysis has told us so far, and we'll divide our findings into three parts. --- class: center, middle
The World (Wide Web) According to DezNat
DezNat's Claim to Religious Authority
Threats to Authority (and Tacos)
??? First, we'll talk about how DezNat sees their co-religionists as chipping away at Latter-day Saint authority structures. --- class: center, middle
The World (Wide Web) According to DezNat
DezNat's Claim to Religious Authority
Threats to Authority (and Tacos?)
??? Second, we'll discuss how DezNat itself claims religious authority in responding to these perceived threats. --- class: center, middle
The World (Wide Web) According to DezNat
DezNat's Claim to Religious Authority
Threats to Authority (and Tacos)
??? Finally, though, we'll discuss the threats that DezNat participants themselves pose to their own understanding of religious authority, including those related to tacos; we've made this section title a bit bigger because this we're planning to zoom through the first two and spend some extra time on this last point. --- class: center, middle background-color: #272822
The World (Wide Web) According to DezNat
??? Again, we're going to start by discussing how DezNat sees their co-religionists as threats to religious authority and how they see themselves as responding to those threats. --- class: center, middle background-color: #33ccff ## how DezNat situates itself ??? Helpful here is one of the many tweets in our data where a DezNat partisan is trying to describe the movement. DezNat had existed for nearly a year at this point and had already attracted attention and controversy, so many of the accounts that we studied were eager to set the record straight. So, in one tweet, a DezNat participant described the movement as --- class: center, middle
"a group of folks interested in following the prophet
, and tired of seeing tweeted apostasy from members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints without any clarification, which is intended to lead away other members"
document 1082 ??? "a group of folks interested in following the prophet"—that is, they're interested in shoring up Latter-day Saint authority structures --- class: center, middle
"a group of folks interested in following the prophet, and tired of seeing tweeted apostasy from members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints without any clarification
, which is intended to lead away other members"
document 1082 ??? they see themselves as a response to other Latter-day Saints "tweeting apostasy," or diverging from established authority --- class: center, middle
"a group of folks interested in following the prophet, and tired of seeing tweeted apostasy from members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints without any clarification, which is intended to lead away other members"
document 1082 ??? and they see those other Latter-day Saints as "leading away" other people on Twitter—actively working against religious authority. --- class: center, middle
??? However, DezNat sees itself as a united force on the side of religious authority—a sort of roadblock warning against sin. --- class: center, middle
??? Or a flag to rally around. --- class: center, middle background-color: #33ccff ## how DezNat relates to others ??? now, DezNat sees itself as on the side of religious authority, and its relationship with other populations on Mormon Twitter follows from that self-perception --- class: center, middle
"The homosexually [sic] community seems to cause so many problems everywhere they go. ... Look how they view conference and the gospel, it ALWAYS has to be about their issues" document 1345 ??? Here, for example, we see a DezNat partisan describing queer Mormons as a threat to the religion writ large, --- class: center, middle
# "this is what apostasy looks like" document 495 ??? And here, we see a DezNat participant encouraging Latter-day Saints to steer clear of the Mormon feminist blog *The Exponent*, because it represents what apostasy looks like. --- class: center, middle background-color: #33ccff ## how DezNat sees itself ??? This belligerence corresponds with responsibilities that DezNat has assigned itself to bring back respect for religious authority on Mormon Twitter. One interesting example of this is in response to a writer of a progressive Mormon blog, who expressed concern that online Mormonism was splintering into different echo chambers. --- class: center, middle # "splintering" vs. "sifting" document 1379 ??? However, one prominent DezNat account argued that what was actually happening was "sifting"—the wicked on Twitter were being separated from the righteous, and DezNat belligerence was playing a role in this. --- class: center, middle # "This is where the Church is going. Either you course correct or you don't." document 1080 [modified] ??? Similarly we often saw a kind of "in or out" attitude among DezNat tweets, such as this one, which warned other people on Mormon Twitter that they either needed to change to conform to Church teachings or they were going to be left behind—there is no middle ground for DezNat --- class: center, middle background-color: #272822
DezNat's Claim to Religious Authority
??? None of this content is surprising coming from a conservative religious group on Twitter, but what's more interesting is the implicit and even explicit ways that DezNat claims religious authority to tweet the way that they do. --- class: center, middle background-color: #33ccff ## the Church needs DezNat ??? For example, DezNat often argued that the Church needed DezNat to do what it was doing. This was most visible in conversations this weekend about "social media fasts." In April 2019, Russell Nelson had been president of the church for just over a year, and during his tenure, he had twice issued challenges for church members to abstain from social media for ten days. One challenge had been to the youth of the church, and the other one had been directed specifically at adult women, so there was a lot of curiosity going into this General Conference about whether a similar invitation would be issued to adult men. However, some male DezNat participants were confident that there wouldn't be such an invitation, because, they argued: --- class: center, middle # "The brethren know, the world needs #DezNat now, more than ever." document 773 ??? Church leaders ("the brethren") knew that their work was needed. There are some interesting gender dynamics here, in that church leaders are almost exclusively men and DezNat participants are assumed to be men. Here, though, we're focusing on the implication that Latter-day Saint leaders approve of DezNat's presence and work. We also see this expressed in a meme using similar language: --- class: center, middle
document 749 ??? And then once it became clear that Nelson would not be asking men to try out a social media fast, this kind of reasoning came out again, with arguments like: --- class: center, middle # "#DezNat is needed to cry repentance to twitter dot com" document 1073 --- class: center, middle # "the brethren need #DezNat to continue supporting the gospel of Jesus Christ with exactness" document 1291 --- class: center, middle background-color: #33ccff ## the Church *is* DezNat ??? Perhaps even more interesting, though, is the argument that the Church *is* DezNat—that is, not just that leaders approve of DezNat but that Church leadership are somehow ex officio members of the movement. They might not use the hashtag, but they're on the same wavelength. This is perhaps most evident in a Twitter thread that happened right after the General Conference had concluded. In a kind of evaluative summary, one prominent account suggested that... --- class: center, middle # "the Brethren are well versed in #DezNat" document 1278 ??? "the Brethren are well versed in #DezNat." in a reply, another participant took things a step further, arguing that --- class: center, middle # "the Brethern [sic] and Sisters are #DezNat 😎" document 1278 ??? The Church leadership was, for all intents and purposes, part of the #DezNat movement. The first account seems to have taken a liking to this argument, because about an hour later, he came across a tweet from a more progressive Mormon, who raised concerns that some of the sermons during the General Conference would encourage DezNat in its belligerent actions. His response to this tweet was to say "if you think they're encouraging #DezNat, well..." --- class: center, middle # "That's because they are #DezNat 😉" document 1292 ??? "... that's because they are #DezNat." That is, in practical terms, there is no distinction between Latter-day Saint leadership and the #DezNat hashtag on Twitter. This is a **remarkable** claim. --- class: center, middle background-color: #33ccff ## authority and unity ??? However, it's not that hard to reconstruct how DezNat comes to this conclusion, and while time constraints are going to keep us focused on DezNat thinking in our data, those familiar with Mormonism will note the ways that this thinking overlaps with official church teachings. In short, DezNat sees religious authority as being transferred through unity. --- class: center, middle # "I literally sat yards away from the Lord's chosen mouthpieces as they spoke the Lord's words" document 765 ??? This begins with the 15 men at the top of the church hierarchy, who are assumed to united with God to the extent that they are extensions of the divine body: To hear Latter-day Saint presidents or apostles speak is to hear God speak—a pretty clear argument for authority through unity. --- class: center, middle # "the brethren are united when it comes to truth and doctrine" document 561 [modified] ??? This authority is further emphasized by the unity that exists between these men, and it's kind of surprising how insistent DezNat is on this point. For example... --- class: center, middle # "It's not just Oaks and Andersen. They all support the Family Proclamation." document 663 [modified] ??? ... DezNat participants saw it as inappropriate to suggest that individual apostles might be behind conservative church teachings... --- class: center, middle # "How can you hear such a beautiful message like Gongs and think it's some petty attack on a fellow apostle." document 1166 ??? ... or to point out the ways in which one apostle's sermon could be read as pushing back against another apostle. For what it's worth, it's it very clear that apostles have aggressively disagreed with each other throughout Latter-day Saint history, so DezNat's view of this is wildly oversimplified. However, emphasizing the existence of unity and the authority that it confers is important for DezNat to set up the next part of the argument, which follows the kind of syllogism you might see in a logic class: --- class: center, middle
"The Brethren are united and make every decision unanimously with the confirmation of the Spirit.
#DezNat sustains the Brethren completely and is united behind them.
So who is dividing?
document 1359 ??? Church leaders are united with each other and with God. --- class: center, middle
"The Brethren are united and make every decision unanimously with the confirmation of the Spirit.
"#DezNat sustains the Brethren completely and is united behind them.
So who is dividing?
document 1359 ??? DezNat, in turn, is united with Church leaders, and therefore... --- class: center, middle
"The Brethren are united and make every decision unanimously with the confirmation of the Spirit.
"#DezNat sustains the Brethren completely and is united behind them.
"So who is dividing?"
document 1359 ??? it's inappropriate to describe DezNat as divisive—they are acting with ecclesiastical and even divine authority, transferred through unity. --- class: center, middle background-color: #272822
Threats to Authority (and Tacos)
??? And now, it's finally time to talk about tacos! DezNat rallies around the authority of Latter-day Saint leaders and argues that this authority extends to their movement, so it's interesting to see how DezNat participants themselves inadvertently called into question their own theory of authority and unity. Earier today, Jared Hickman used rhe phrase auto-deconstruction to describe the way that the Book of Mormon spoils its own narrative almost from the beginning, and I want to echo that language here. --- class: center, middle background-color: #33ccff ## hypothetical limits of prophetic authority ??? Let's start with the ways that DezNat participants were forced to wrestle with whether prophetic authority has limits—that is, are church leaders always united with the will of God? In April of 2019, Church leaders rolled back a policy restricting the baptism of children of parents in same-sex relationships, and this presented a couple of challenges for DezNat. First, as one DezNat critic in our data argued... --- class: center, middle # "if it was walked back in 2019, it wasn't divine revelation in 2015" document 118 [modified] ??? ... was this really revelation if the policy didn't even last four years? Is it possible for church leaders to make mistakes, and what does that say about their unity with God? Our data show DezNat wrestling with this question, but even more interesting for our purposes is a response to this same tweet by another DezNat critic, who asked in mock concern: --- class: center, middle # "#DezNat must be in rough shape right now, is anyone checking on them?" document 118 [modified] ??? "Is anyone checking on DezNat? Are they okay?" At this point, nearly a year into its existence, DezNat had developed a deserved reputation for homophobia and harassment. So, this policy change was seen as a test case for #DezNat—would they defer to ecclesiastical authority if it issued a decision that took baby steps away from homophobia? Or was their support for religious authority conditional on their own views and, therefore, simply a convenient justification for homophobia and harassment. In response, DezNat really went on the defensive. --- class: center, middle
"If you worry that #DezNat folks are concerned or upset... today, you truly don't get it."
"If you sustain the prophet, you sustain him, period."
document 155 ??? For example, this participant argued that critics of the movement had it wrong. --- class: center, middle
"If you worry that #DezNat folks are concerned or upset... today, you truly don't get it."
"If you sustain the prophet, you sustain him, period."
document 155 ??? DezNat **would** defer to authority no matter what. In fact, this user continued... --- class: center, middle # "If this weekend it is announced that tacos are against the [Word of Wisdom], for example, some of us would be sad, yea even sad unto tears, but those who sustain the prophet as the mouthpiece of the Lord would simply give up tacos." document 155 ??? If church leaders announced that Latter-day Saints were no longer allowed to eat tacos, they might be "sad, yea even sad unto tears," but they'd comply. This user used a kind of silly hypothetical scenario to demonstrate DezNat's unwavering commitment to leaders' authority. However, let's contrast it with another tweet from this same DezNat account about two hours earlier in the day, where this user described hypothetical scenarios as --- class: center, middle # they are "ask[ing] hypothetical questions in the hope that they can find a crack in the beliefs of a believer" document 142 ??? ... a bad faith effort to destroy others' beliefs. Why the difference here? Well, it's pretty simple. As DezNat began to argue that they had no issue with the policy change and that their only concern was deferring to prophetic authority, critics of the movement began to push them on that commitment. For example, if the Church had announced that Latter-day Saint temples would solemnize same-sex marriages, would DezNat be on board with that? That's the exact question that was posed in this thread, and our DezNat friend, who two hours later is ready to propose the hypothetical situation of giving up tacos, is now arguing that someone else's hypothetical situation is inappropriate. In short, this user believes that religious authority safely extends to forbidding Mexican food, but seems less confident on whether it would extend to affirming same-sex relationships. --- class: center, middle # "if a change that fundamental happened, my testimony would be destroyed" # "I know the Church will never change its stance on marriage" document 150 [modified] ??? Another DezNat account also participating in this conversation responded more straightforwardly. If church leaders allowed for same-sex marriages, their belief would be destroyed. Why? Because they know that there are limits to prophetic authority (including heteronormativity), and those limits suggest the possibility that Latter-day Saint leaders could, in fact, not be united with God and thereby make a mistake. This, of course, stands in contrast with the theory of authority and unity that DezNat argues in our data. To a certain extent, this argument gives DezNat authority to review and approve the teachings of church authorities, which upends the argument that they had been making elsewhere. --- class: center, middle background-color: #33ccff ## internal disagreements on authority ??? Another interesting site of tension around DezNat and authority also happend in the leadup to the April 2019 General Conference. In the days before the conference began, a disagreement arose between members of the movement that were equally committed to respecting religious authority but disagreed on what that meant in practice Most of this happened before the timeframe that we're studying, so we don't have access to all the details, but one DezNat participant (whom we'll call Charles) had recently gotten engaged. This had somehow led to a conversation about the acceptable level of intimacy between an engaged-but-not-married Latter-day Saint couple, and the conversation got tense, leading Charles to distance himself from the movement. As we established earlier, it is DezNat's unity with church leadership that purportedly grants the movement authority to do what they do on Twitter, so disunity within DezNat posed another threat that also put DezNat on the defensive. For example, one account who seemed at least somewhat sympathetic to the movement bemoaned --- class: center, middle
"Who knew the great #deznat fracture would be about making out."
"One guy getting angry is a fracture?"
document 48 ??? "Who knew the great #deznat fracture would be about making out." One of the most prominent DezNat accounts took real issue with these kinds of comments, replying to them to suggest that nothing was wrong with DezNat, and that everything was fine. For example, in response to this tweet, he... --- class: center, middle
"Who knew the great #deznat fracture would be about making out."
"One guy getting angry is a fracture?"
document 48 ??? asked whether one person getting upset was really a threat to the health of the movement. Once again, though, what's more interesting is the way that these conversations implicitly called into question the theory of authority and unity that DezNat is typically so confident about. For example, a number of those who believed that Charles had overstepped in his relationship with his fiancée quoted former Church president Spencer Kimball, whose 1969 book *The Miracle of Forgiveness* was long infamous in Mormon circles for its definition and condemnation of sexual sin. For these participants, this book was authoritative, and Charles was expected to defer to its teachings. --- class: center, middle # Charles: "I am following the prophet. The miracle of forgiveness was a book written by president kimball but is in no way official church literature." document 34 ??? However, Charles's response was to say that one could disagree with the book but still respect church leaders' authority—in short, not everything a church leader says is authoritative. This already starts to raise questions about the clear link between God, church leaders, and DezNat that members of the movement typically profess. However, things also get more interesting as the Twitter thread continues. --- class: center, middle
Zach: "I think Deseret Book stopped selling [the book]"
Kevin: "It hasn't."
Charles: "Michelle Obama book is at deseret. Deseret doesn't mean much anymore."
document 34 ??? First, we get Zach, who seems to support Charles's argument by saying that Deseret Book, the church's official bookstore, doesn't carry the book anymore. The book went out of print in 2015, so Zach is probably onto something here. However... --- class: center, middle
Zach: "I think Deseret Book stopped selling [the book]"
Kevin: "It hasn't."
Charles: "Michelle Obama book is at deseret. Deseret doesn't mean much anymore."
document 34 ??? Kevin chimes in to say that Deseret Book is still selling the book, arguing that it is still authoritative. However, Charles isn't done yet—he jumps in to say: --- class: center, middle
Zach: "I think Deseret Book stopped selling [the book]"
Kevin: "It hasn't."
Charles: "Michelle Obama book is at deseret. Deseret doesn't mean much anymore."
document 34 ??? Well, Deseret Book can't be an authoritative source considering that they carry Michelle Obama's book. Checkmate. This conversation illustrates that while DezNat might agree that it's important to defer to religious authority, they aren't always clear on what counts as religious authority. Is a 50 year old book authoritative? Is a church-owned business authoritative? However, we're not even at the end of the thread yet: --- class: center, middle
Kevin: "We should just stick to 'official doctrine' (which actually means that the Proclamation could be argued that it isn't 'official doctrine') which is a progmo POV"
Charles: "Prophets and apostles have literally said it IS doctrine"
Kevin: "right, but it isn't canonized. So what exactly is official doctrine?"
document 34 ??? Kevin seems to see Charles's argument as a slipperly slope and asks about the status of a 1995 document popularly referred to as "the Family Proclamation," which lays out official Latter-day Saint teachings on sexuality and gender and is treated as authoritative although it's never been voted into the Latter-day Saint canon. Kevin suggests that Charles's nitpicking would lead to making the Family Proclamation non-authoritative, since it isn't canonized. His criticism of Charles is also evident by equating his thinking with "a progmo perspective"—Charles is thinking the same way that apostate progressive Mormons think. Indeed, we see in our data that DezNat perceives itself as defenders of the Family Proclamation, so Kevin's argument is touching on particularly important points for an internal DezNat debate. --- class: center, middle
Kevin: "We should just stick to 'official doctrine' (which actually means that the Proclamation could be argued that it isn't 'official doctrine') which is a progmo POV"
Charles: "Prophets and apostles have literally said it IS doctrine"
Kevin: "right, but it isn't canonized. So what exactly is official doctrine?"
document 34 ??? However, here, Charles defends a more conservative view: The Proclamation doesn't need to be canonized to be authoritative—church leaders have said it's doctrine, and that's good enough. --- class: center, middle
Kevin: "We should just stick to 'official doctrine' (which actually means that the Proclamation could be argued that it isn't 'official doctrine') which is a progmo POV"
Charles: "Prophets and apostles have literally said it IS doctrine"
Kevin: "right, but it isn't canonized. So what exactly is official doctrine?"
document 34 ??? Kevin doubles down on his argument, though: You say that the proclamation is authoritative despite not being canonized, so what's the marker for doctrine? What makes something authoritative? This would be an interesting theological debate among any two Mormons on Twitter, but here, it's especially interesting because it's DezNat. We aren't seeing a liberal Mormon and a conservative Mormon disagree with each other on what counts as authoritative—we're seeing two arch-conservative Mormons wrestle with the basis of the religious authority that is purportedly the core of their movement. --- background-color: gray class: center, middle # conclusion and implications ??? And that, then, brings us to the end of our presentation, where we'd like to highlight some of the broader implications that we're starting to draw from our findings. --- class: center, middle background-color: #272822
is the DezNat movement self-contradicting?
??? First, is the DezNat movement cohesive? Or is it inconsistent with its own logic? On one hand, DezNat is a response to liberal Mormon Twitter accounts whom they perceive as having usurped authority thanks to the internet's flattening of authority structures. On the other hand, DezNat's own claims to religious authority are exercised through Twitter rather than through any formal process—they are, in a sense, what they are fighting against. In fact... --- class: middle, center # "Exactly how does one make sure a hashtag is regulated?" document 312 [modified] ??? ... even DezNat recognizes the absurdity of claiming that anyone who uses a Twitter hashtag is part of a cohesive, unified movement. This quote from our data is a response to a DezNat critic who argued that people were getting out of control and that the movement needed to do better about policing itself. However, the DezNat partisan's response is essentially "you can't control a hashtag." While that's true, it raises questions about DezNat's true unity, and disunity's implications for their claims to authority. --- class: middle, center # "DezNat is “not affiliated with or endorsed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” church spokesman Doug Andersen said Wednesday." Stack, P. F. (2021, January 31). Unholy war: Is #DezNat an online platform for defending the LDS Church or a launching pad for extremists? *The Salt Lake Tribune*. https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2021/01/31/unholy-war-deznat-troops/ ??? Of course, this is further emphasized by a Church statement in early 2021 that DezNat should not be seen as an officially-endorsed group. Generally speaking, liberal Mormons on Twitter don't claim ecclesiastical authority for their statements, so DezNat's suggestion in our data that it did have this authority might be more like overreaching than what the movement purports to be fighting against. --- class: center, middle background-color: #272822
how is religious authority defined in Latter-day Saint circles?
??? The other big question that we're coming away with is the question of how religious authority is actually defined in Latter-day Saint circles. DezNat participants are full-throated supporters of the Church and eager to prop up this authority, but our data suggest that they aren't entirely sure what the mechanics or the limits of that authority are. --- class: center, middle # "[LGBT] issues strike at the very heart of Mormon ideas of authority" Riess, J. (2019). *The next Mormons: How millennials are changing the LDS church*." Oxford University Press. ??? As Jana has written, questions about authority are associated with many of the other controversies that the church is facing. Now, Jana wrote this in the context of queer Latter-day Saints deciding to leave the faith—it's difficult to believe that 15 men are wrong about LGBT issues but still speak authoritatively for God in most other contexts. However, our findings also show another way in which this relationship is true: DezNat partisans are willing to accept baby steps away from homophobia in the name of deference to religious authority but uncomfortable with the prospect of Latter-day Saint leaders taking further steps toward affirmation. --- class: middle background-color: #272822
Spencer P. Greenhalgh, PhD
School of Information Science, University of Kentucky
spencer.greenhalgh@uky.edu
@spgreenhalgh@scholar.social
Amy L. Chapman, PhD
Teachers College, Columbia University
alc2295@tc.columbia.edu
@chapmaab
slides:
https://spencergreenhalgh.com/work/_mssa_2022_deznat.html