Mormonism: The Most American Religion (feat. McKay Coppins & Kathleen Flake)

McKay Coppins (The Atlantic) joins me and Kathleen Flake to discuss his December 2020 longform essay "The Most American Religion" which pauses on the cusp of Mormonism's third century to meditate on questions of American religious belonging. 

Transcript

The Most American Religion

Stephen Betts: You're listening to Scholars and Saints. I'm Stephen Betts. Today on Scholars and Saints we're chatting with McKay Coppins, a Latter-day Saint journalist who's covered American politics for Newsweek, Buzzfeed, and The Atlantic for the past decade. In December 2020, Coppins wrote a long form essay for The Atlantic called “The Most American Religion,” in which he probes questions about Mormonism’s relationship with American culture and what Mormonism might look like in its third century.

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Stephen Betts: Kathleen Flake and I are pleased to welcome McKay Coppins, staff writer for The Atlantic and longtime writer about Latter-day Saint culture and the “Mormon moment” in American politics. Thanks for being here with us today, McKay. 

McKay Coppins: Thanks for having me on. 

Stephen Betts: So McKay, we're talking about your recent article in The Atlantic, “The Most American Religion” in which you talk about the evolution of Latter-day Saint involvement in American culture and about the tensions that exist between what it means to be a Latter-day Saint and what it means to be an American. And we'd like to talk today a little bit about one of the observations you make in this article, which is that Mormons taught ourselves to play the part over a century's long audition for full acceptance into American life that we finally succeed just as the country was on the brink of an identity crisis is one of the core ironies of modern Mormonism. So really you frame this question of what happens when a religious group discovers that it's spent you say, 200 years assimilating to an America that no longer exists and really you give us some personal meditations on what that may look like.

I think one of the ways that we can kind of get a little bit of purchase on something that you say in the article is to think about Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness.” And I think that that might be a useful way to think about this. Kathleen, tell us more about Du Bois and “double consciousness” and why this might give us an interesting view on being a Latter-day Saint.

Kathleen Flake: Thanks Stephen. I think what I'd like to talk about today a little bit is that both sides of this question of that America that is no longer, right, and Latter-day Saint anxiety, specific anxiety at this moment, but the fact that I think that the point you make that I think can be recognized as a fact that the Latter-day Saints have always been seeing themselves through the eyes of their host culture, in this case, in the American culture, right? Or this 200 year period, we have created a relationship with this culture, and at one point we became a problem. It happened pretty quickly, right? That the Latter-day Saints were viewed as a problem, and ultimately by the mid-20th century it was simply called “the Mormon problem.”

We tend to think of that generally, but we don't tend to attach that to the individual's experience. Of being seen as a problem. And I think that it's at that point that I remembered Du Bois's article in The Atlantic from the 1890s where he talks about the African American experience with being a problem. In fact, that's how he introduces the article. It's a wonderful piece. I recommend it to our listeners to look it up, but he, he talks about being greeted by others and his awareness that he's being viewed as a problem to be solved because of his racial identity in their eyes. And what struck me, but he speaks of this as having created in himself a “double consciousness.” And by no means am I making the equation to the content of that doubleness between African Americans and Latter-day Saints but this idea of the doubleness is what I'm learning from him. So, it's a very instructive statement about seeing yourself reflected in the eyes of others. It's the mirroring problem. Psychologists, we could go to psychology here, but what you describe in your article, this sense of what that was for you as an individual. And I'm wondering if we wanna talk about that as an institutional posture as well.

McKay Coppins: I think that it is both an institutional posture, but as experienced by individuals in the institution, right? And I think what you're describing, it's important to note up front, like you said, that you can't equate the Latter-day Saint experience with the African American experience, the black experience in this country at any time in history and of course we're not doing that, but I think it's actually something that a lot of distinct identity groups feel, right? Minority identity groups, whether they're religious minorities or racial minorities or sexual minorities. This feeling of both looking at yourself and looking at your community as it is, as you perceive it, and as it's being perceived from the outside and almost there there's a danger, and I think in Mormonism it happens a lot where we become almost obsessive about how we're being perceived from the outside. And I write in the piece about how I grew up in the suburbs of Boston and Massachusetts. There were not very many members of the Church in my high school, and I, you know, kind of embraced the classic minority religion neurosis of worrying about how I would reflect on Mormonism everywhere. And so I of course, like any teenager, worried about fitting in and worried about the ways I was different from my friends and classmates. I also loved the Church and I loved, you know, my faith and I wasn't ready to jettison it. So instead, I tried to kind of walk this line where I wanted to be “the cool Mormon,” right? You know, I never drank beer or alcohol or anything, but I was happy to be the guy who drove you home from the party if you got drunk, right? And I would never smoke pot or do drugs. But I would also never narc on you. I wasn't gonna tell on you to the, you know, grownups and I had this idea that, because there were so few Mormons in my world If I convinced the kids around me that I was cool, that I was, you know, a good guy, then that was a win for Mormonism everywhere, right? And so I felt like I was kind of like a foot soldier in the broader Mormon quest for likability and respectability. And I think that that's something a lot of members of the Church feel.

Kathleen Flake: Is it enhanced, aggravated—choose your word—by the sense of religious mission? You mix that actually in your, in your recent comment, you needed to both represent yourself as pleasing to your peers, so they would, as only is necessary in high school, accept you and include you. 

McKay Coppins: Yeah. 

Kathleen Flake: But also representing your church well. And again, I think this, as you say, is true of all marginalized peoples to varying degrees of marginalization, but with the religious dimension in Mormonism, it's “ensign to the nation” 

McKay Coppins: that exactly, yeah. 

Kathleen Flake: That, that's another layer to this, does it not? 

McKay Coppins: The evangelical element, right. The idea, the proselytizing element.

Kathleen Flake: Yeah, the proselytizing element. And that also participates in the way Latter-day Saints are negatively viewed in a liberal democracy, this exclusive truth claim. Sorry. You're in the clutches of religious studies here and 

McKay Coppins: No, I love it. 

Kathleen Flake: But the very thing, that extra layer to wanting to be pleasing is the desire to have your religion respected and then hopefully received as well and that becomes a religious duty.

McKay Coppins: That's right. And I think that that's a huge part of the Mormon experience that you both are worried about how you fit in. You're worried about how your church is viewed, but it's tangled up in this idea that it's really important for the religious mission overall, that the Church be viewed in a certain way, that it be respected and liked because otherwise we won't be able to do the proselytizing work that we want to.

You know, it's funny you mentioned the truth claims. After the piece came out in The Atlantic. There is, you know, a lot of response I got, we got letters and emails and a lot of response on social media. But there is this kind of funny sub-genre of responses which were, from kind of, you know, militantly secular readers who would respond by saying things like, “Oh yeah, he makes Mormons sound so nice and great, but do you know that they think they're the only true church? They're the only true religion.” As though that was kind of an indictment. And it's funny because, you know, A) that's not exclusive to Mormonism, right. And I think it represents a, a general lack of understanding of religion writ large. But I also think that it's increasingly unpopular the theological posture that the Church takes, you know, saying that this is Christ's restored church saying that these are true doctrines, that there are, you know, unique and exclusive truths housed in the Church, and it makes you know that that was not really all that uncommon maybe a hundred years ago or. Even 50, 60, 70 years ago. But now it's so out of step with kind of the way that we talk about not just religion, but everything in America, especially the, you know, we're very uncomfortable with anything that can scan as exclusionary. And that's part of the complication of this whole project. And part of why there's this pull that I write about toward kind of abandoning various aspects of the religious tradition in the Church just so that we can feel more comfortable in kind of the society where we are. This gets at kind of what you refer to in the piece and, and very graciously, let me quote, “strip poker,” right?

Kathleen Flake: Yeah. That's the question of how much accommodation is required. And the interesting part, one of the interesting parts of your piece is you say, this game, to use my metaphor, but this game has been going on for two centuries now, but the rules are changing on what needs to be stripped. 

McKay Coppins: Yep. 

Kathleen Flake: Right, because America itself has stripped itself of certain things. Right? And with respect to your last comment, I'm struck by the thought that I'm not sure there aren't exclusive claims being made in this society that extraordinary pressure is being put on people to adopt. And that's one of the reasons why you're seeing the great division and the lack of a middle on certain cultural issues. We've lost a center in a particular way. And it used to be that those claims were about religion, 19th century Mormonism, of course, being that the object for that split in many ways as Catholics have always been right. And Jews in a very different sense. But certainly Catholics and Mormons with their exclusive truth claims have violated the unwritten democratic rule of disestablishment of what fairness constitutes culturally and socially. But now we have a whole different set of claims in late 20th, especially in early 21st century, that, that are requiring accommodation that it seems to me are held in that sense of religiously uncompromisable devotion. Right. So it's not sure you can say that generally as a society, we don't have the kind of value claims to which we owe a do-or-die allegiance, right? Those are not religious necessarily.

McKay Coppins: That's fair. It's outside. It's migrated outside of the religious realm. Although I would say that because of the polarization of America, it's very easy to generally abide within a segment of America where you know, there there's an understanding that everybody is generally on the same page. And especially if you're in, I don't wanna say “Blue America” or liberal America, because that's, you know, overly simplistic. But let's say you're in liberal America, there is kind of general utopian idea of “We all get along because we all broadly share the same values.” And “You can be different in certain ways, but not in other ways,” right? And that's true in conservative America too. So you, you're right. It's just, it's migrated outside of religion and now it's more about politics and culture.

Kathleen Flake: Yeah. The the other irony is it's migrated out of religion, but religion is then drawn in to legitimize the claim, right? But also the strength of that issue is, I think, communicated in that phrase, “cancel culture.” The lament from certain people that it's a “cancel culture” captures this notion of there are certain things that are illicit in a way that we used to think of religious terms. But I'd like to ask you, what is the America that now exists?  I like that phrase that Stephen quoted, “200 years of assimilating to an America that no longer exists.” We can define that most easily on what no longer exists. But what does exist that would require Mormon accommodation, right? So the list of things that no longer exists would include the nuclear family as the ideal. But what now exists that Latter-day Saints have to accommodate to in your mind? Where does the irony lie presently?

McKay Coppins: So this was actually a version of the question that animated the piece at the in the beginning, which was that Mormonism feels like, and a lot of Mormons feel like they are out of step with modern America, and that's because the country has changed and moved on, evolved from the kind of mid-20th century America that the contemporary Church kind of modeled itself on. But, and this is gonna seem like a punt, but I promise it's not. I don't know what the America now is because I don't think there is any one America anymore. And there was a line in the piece originally, and I think we cut it, but in one of the drafts I had something about how the very idea of a mainstream America feels like an anachronism now, and that's because America. American culture, American life has fractured into a bunch of different siloes, right? And there is not anything like a monoculture that existed in the 1950s, sixties, seventies, eighties. You know, there isn't one way to be “American.” In fact, that idea is one of the central debates going on in our country right now, and it's what drives so much of our political aggravation, and it's what drives so much of the culture war. What does it mean to be American? Is it a multicultural, pluralistic democracy founded on meritocratic ideas? Is it rooted in patriotism and loyalty to a country and in, you know, white identity politics? You could parse it a bunch of different ways and in a lot of ways that's been kind of the central dialogue over the past four years.

But I would say that part of the reason there's so much angst in Mormondom right now is that there is no one clear path to become, you know, good mainstream citizens. And so 

Kathleen Flake: There's no way to play the game of strip poker. 

McKay Coppins: Exactly. The game got a lot harder. You can decide, and this is what 

Kathleen Flake: Too many people playing.

McKay Coppins: Well, right. And so when I interviewed members of the church, I, you know, I spent a good chunk of last year talking to all sorts of different members of the Church from, you know, esteemed academics to President Russell M. Nelson to rank and file members and converts and people of all political stripes. And they all had completely different visions for what the Church should be in its third century. And a lot of it was motivated by what they saw as the ideal America. And there was a lot of angst about the Church going in the wrong direction. So when you would talk to kind of conservative members of the church in America, they would say that they're afraid that the Church is gonna become, you know, diluted and liberal and abandon its values under pressure from societal elites or whatever. And then you would talk to more progressive members and they would say, “Oh, the Church is gonna follow the path of the white evangelical crowd and become a vehicle for culture war.” And both of those concerns kind of reflected the reality that they had such different ideas of what it would mean to be a mainstream America that were rooted in where they lived and where they went to school, and how they voted and what kind of TV and movies and podcasts they consumed. And so all of this just speaks to the fact that because we're in a country that is fractured and fracturing and atomizing and polarizing, it's much harder for the Church to kind of follow a playbook, to be seen as kind of a respectable mainstream. 

Stephen Betts: Well, and I think, McKay, you touch on this really well in the piece. One of the ways that I feel like the Church is adapting to this new situation is they've started doubling down or creating a different space that they call, increasingly, “gospel culture.” They're trying to, rather than a adapt to an American ideal, they're increasingly, as the Church becomes more global, but also with respect to stuff that's going on in the United States increasingly using this concept of a culture that we define, a culture that, you know, we're not trying to adapt to anymore. Have you seen any of that in, in the interviews that you've done?

McKay Coppins: In some ways, I actually think that would be ideal, right? I think that a Church that doesn't obsess over external validation and doesn't try to conform to the mainstream mores of it's native country. That's kind of the argument that I'm making in the piece that, you know, I don't actually have a fully fleshed out vision of what that would look like. But my hope and kind of plea at the end is that we simply become more confident as a people, more confident as an institution, more secure in ourselves and in our peculiarities, and kind of focus on nourishing and improving our own culture. And I think that there has been some movement in that direction. I think actually, in some ways, President Nelson's tenure has been focused on that. You know, I think that he as a fairly orthodox member, you know, but who has spent a lot of time in various circles that are outside of orthodox conservative Mormonism. I think that he sees the value and the goodness in the Church and in Mormonism, and he's trying to enhance it. But I think that there's still such a reflex both at the institutional level and at the individual level to try to find how we fit in various, you know, how we fit in, how we fit into the bigger American picture and especially the American picture as opposed to the global picture that it still is kind of a tick for us, but I'm interested to hear what you both think about that because what would a distinct gospel culture look like? A fully kind of independent gospel culture that's not shaped by Americanism or liberalism or conservatism, or, or, or these other isms or ideolog.

Stephen Betts: Yeah, I mean I recently heard, to your point, Richard Bushman comment that he feels that Mormon culture is beginning to mature, beginning to reach a place where, and when he talks about culture, I don't think he's talking so much about the institutional church, although it may, his comment may not preclude that. But he's talking about things like art. He's talking about things like cultural achievement and I think that's an interesting way of phrasing that question is to a certain degree, like, does the Latter-day Saint self-evaluation, the self-image have something to do with having some, you know, having some sort of cultural capital and you get to this in your piece, right? Where you talk. This theater critic who says, you know, this is when the Book of Mormon Musical first came out and this theater critic who says, you guys, you know, Mormons have no cultural cache. So, you know, to what extent do you think that, that the arts and other sorts of extra-institutional or extra-theological factors play into this?

McKay Coppins: Oh, it's, I mean, yeah, it's, it's kind of where the whole thing plays out, right?  I think, you know, I talk about the Book of Mormon musical in the piece and how we as a people chose to react to that in our kind of characteristically good-natured way. And the institution did. And also, you know, we as individuals did, and probably a lot of people felt that way. I lived in New York at the time and I know I had a lot of people in my Brooklyn branch who thought the musical was funny and they enjoyed it. And I know that there were a lot of people like me who felt obligated to play along and pretend like we were cool with it when in fact we weren't. And I think that that's what that theater critic’s was speaking to when he made that comment that the reason there aren't any protests and the reason there's no backlash to this is because your people have no cultural cache. And for me, that was a moment where I realized that our, our eagerness to play along and to laugh along to kind of popular culture, skewering. And, you know, mocking us, was actually kind of humiliating. It wasn't like a testament to our niceness. It was a testament to how little power we had in the arts and in popular culture.

I think though, to Bushman's point there, sure there is some maturation that's happening and I think that you see a greater number of writers and poets and various Latter-day Saints able to weave their experience into their work in a way that doesn't feel like it's, you know, pandering to the Deseret Book crowd necessarily, but that it's authentic and real. I still would like to see much more of that. I think we're very much at the early stages of that, even, you know, writing this piece for the Atlantic. It was funny because I spent, once it was assigned to me and I decided to do it, I spent a lot of time kind of looking at the various long form magazine treatments of the church over the past 20 years and then even before that and there were really only, you know, a couple different types of work being done. And, you know, a lot of it was from outside reporters because, frankly there are very few Latter-day Saints writing for national magazines. It's not an area where we tend to gravitate to. Then there was the genre of the lapsed Mormon writing about their journey out of Mormonism. And, you know, and that was kind of it. And when my editors kind of told me, you know, what'll make this essay unique is if you lean into your identity as a Mormon and also look at the hard parts. But, but lean into your personal experiences and don't apologize for them, right? Don't try to make excuses for them or, you know, make light of them or, or act like they were a starting point from which your journey toward enlightenment would go on, but actually just kind of write about them. That felt kind of novel to me, and I imagine a lot of Latter-day Saint writers in that position would feel like that was a novel, but it shouldn't be. And I imagine that even five, ten years from now, it won't feel as novel. So I do think that we are moving toward more of a confident and self-assured culture, but it's in fits and starts, and it's not kind of a steady march forward.

Kathleen Flake: There's several ways in which this culture can be used, can be talked about, right. So are, are we talking for example, about showing other people that Mormons do have culture and that if other people will look at it, they will like it too? Is that what we're talking about? Or are we saying that we have the kind of culture that illuminates the existing culture in a way that will draw people to that. Do we have something to contribute? 

McKay Coppins: Right. 

Kathleen Flake: Besides simply display. And I don't know that that distinction has been adequately made. And I wanna talk about something else. Stephen's use of the word culture, the gospel culture. On the one hand, that's a very strategic label. And, and I think it's worth considering how much of this is a desire to please. And how much of it's strategic. Powerless people have to be as strategic as powerful people. In fact, probably more so, right? So first of all, what are Latter-day Saints rank-and-file as we typically mean that and what are Latter-day Saint leaders saying in turn, when they use that label “gospel culture,” the Latter-day Saints have always said, and this is, it seems to me, a central part of their exclusive truth claim that whatever kind of culture you bring to being a Latter-day Saint, your primary culture are the covenants you make as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and once a year at the biannual conference, if not twice a year at the biannual conference, one of the leaders of the Church will stand up and say, you are not a French Latter-day Saint, you are not a Venezuelan Latter-day Saint. You are plain old a Latter-day Saint. So is that what they mean by a gospel culture, not a gospel that say evangelical Christians would agree to. Cause that's always, always been the crisis, right? Think of the Romney campaign about the Dallas ministers that, oh, they're not Christian because they don't think like we do. So that word gospel's highly contested. 

McKay Coppins:Sure. 

Kathleen Flake: And there's a Mormon culture that is highly boundaried by the way they dress, by the way they eat, their cosmology. And that's what is, I think, being spoken of across the pulpit as this is the base, this is the tie that binds. This constitutes us. It's not for however much beautiful art is being created elsewhere by Latter-day Saints who happen to be artists. That's not what's going on here. And that's, I think, goes to the question of confidence that you're talking about. Brigham Young was very confident.

McKay Coppins: Yes. 

Kathleen Flake: But that's not what you're talking about.

McKay Coppins: Well, yes. I mean, I don't think Brigham would be the model for what I'm talking about, but I will say that when I'm mentioning art and writing and music and all of that, I'm using them primarily as reflections of what you're talking about, I think, right? That if what you're saying, the quirks and peculiarities of Latter-day Saint culture, gospel culture, how we dress, the songs we sing, you know, traditions we have, the way we talk, the nomenclature. I think weaving that into art, that that's consumed by other Latter-day Saints, but also consumed by the broader culture is one way to measure our confidence as a people and not doing it in a kind of schticky way where you know, it's just meant to pander and not doing it in a way that it's just meant to please, but doing it in a way that is, comes from an authentic place where you're saying this is, you know, this is kind of who I am in my experience for good and bad.

But I'm curious ‘cause what you said brings up another question to me, which is that so much of that Mormon culture, that gospel culture is really hard to disentangle from a very specific place and group of people, which, you know, located in Utah primarily, and or maybe the Mountain West. And as the Church grows and expands globally and attracts more converts, and this has been the question kind of for the last several decades

Kathleen Flake: At least half century, I would say since 1970, if you can believe it. That's a half century ago, right? When they went into hyperdrive with international missions this has been in. One of the words for this is acculturation, right? When you export

McKay Coppins: And how much of that is healthy and necessary versus how much of the gospel culture, the Church culture should include a kind of melting pot aspect of bringing in the best of other cultures of the converts versus how much should there be room for, you know, multiculturalism in the Church.

Kathleen Flake: But the answer to that, McKay, has to be yes. Not an either or, right? 

McKay Coppins: Right. 

Kathleen Flake: And it is happening. You've seen it happen over the last 50 years. We don't have consolidated meetings, which means Latter-day Saints, believe it or not, used to go to church twice a day on Sunday for about five hours, four hours.

McKay Coppins: Right. 

Kathleen Flake: That was back in the sixties and seventies. You could say it was the energy crisis. Of the Carter years that cause of the consolidation, but they didn't go back. And that was acculturation to the situation in the international church, right? Because people didn't have, there was not the sufficient leisure class to run the temple ceremony. They used to run it. 

McKay Coppins: Yep. 

Kathleen Flake: Right. It requires considerable voluntary time. 

McKay Coppins: Yep. 

Kathleen Flake: So they've made a number of adaptations to, to temple worship practices. So we're seeing that all over. So to me, the question is why do we continue to pose this as either-or? What is the distinctive thing we're concerned that's not happening in adjusting Mormonism to its multicultural manifestations? What's not happening seems to be more the, the, the question, and, and a lot of that I hear coming from Americans. It really reflects more the crisis that, for example, the Anglicans have me going through for the last 30 years between the global South. And yet Latter Saints don't recognize it as that. It seems they're not quite sophisticated that all churches are going through this crisis, not just themselves. 

McKay Coppins: So what do you think? What do you think is not happening? 

Kathleen Flake: I'm not the one raising the complaint. I'm watching, I'm watching the game. I'm watching the poker game, right?

McKay Coppins: Yeah, yeah. 

Kathleen Flake: What do they, what do they consider essential and what do they consider non-essential 

McKay Coppins: Exactly 

Kathleen Flake: to what it is to be a Latter-day Saint? And they've made some extraordinary moves that have offended people on their own Right and their own Left. Forget the broader culture. They're in a mass struggle internally as they make those very adaptations that many people say they're not making. 

McKay Coppins: And this is the problem, right? This is the question. And this was also like, you know, every time, every conversation I had since this piece came out where we start to veer into this territory. The same question comes up over and over again, which is, “Well, what is the core?” What’s the thing that is non-negotiable? You know, is it just the most foundational truth claims and nothing else? Is it the way the general structure of the Church or what elements of the structure? I don't know, right? And that's what I think is both exciting and unnerving about the third century of Mormonism because that we are at a moment where, and you could probably argue that this has kind of always been the case in the Church, right? The ongoing Restoration is a constant process of trying to locate the core of the gospel and identify that. You can update and change and mold to what's necessary. But I do feel like especially because the Church is becoming more and more global, and also because in the United States there isn't even kind of a center anymore to hold onto, the question of what should the Church become, what should it stand for, what should it look like is more open than ever I think in, in my mind, but it's also unnerving because you can see the result of that debate tipping Mormonism one way or the other into irrelevance or into factionalism or into, you know, kind of its own self niche-ificiation, right? And so while I do worry about that I tend to, I'm naturally more optimistic and I tend to be, I tend to believe that we are capable. Locating the core in a healthy way, and I'm happy to say that it's not my job to locate what that core is, but I do think that's the, that's the central question that, that nobody can easily answer. 

Kathleen Flake: I think it is impossible not to feel that as you live in the moment, right? But think of that phrase from science about change: “punctuated equilibrium.” That we are at a point of punctuation right now that is driven by technology in large part, right? The technological changes in the late 20th and early 21st centuries are, are at the root of much of this tension, right? And those same circumstances, radical shifts in technology and we could, we can make the list existed at the end of the 19th in the early 20th century.

McKay Coppins: Yeah. 

Kathleen Flake: So the Reed Smoot hearings, for example, pose these very same questions. Right? There are moments where this game gets played with a higher sense of punctuation, and I think we happen to be in one. And it's going on before our very eyes, but I don't think people, if you look at the Reed Smoot hearings when a Mormon apostle was elected to the Senate and a trial was heard between 1903 to 1907 on every aspect of Mormonism, and it was a battle royale, these same tensions are going on now, but since we live in them, we think we're unique. This is a unique time of stress. This is a unique time. And it may be. It may be. If so, I would say it's because as you've said in this discussion that the nation itself does not allow a stable enough point around which the Latter-day Saints can position themselves. 

McKay Coppins: Right. 

Kathleen Flake: The country is in greater instability than it was during the Progressive era. And I haven't thought this through, but talking with you today, I think that I would make that distinction. So, there's greater destabilization of the power structures within Mormonism, between its rank-and-file and its leadership as a consequence of this moment. 

McKay Coppins: Right, and I mean, look, my day job is, I write about politics and you know, I'm not a historian, so it's hard for me to make comparisons to other areas in terms of national instability. But you have this culmination of so many different factors from technology to the crisis of authority in our democratic institutions to you know, polarization and radicalization and 

Kathleen Flake: the death of expertise…

McKay Coppins: Yes, the death of expertise, the death of trust that has made the country feel so unstable right at this moment. Now, where that goes and how that ends, I don't know. But you might be right that this feeling of precarity might be rooted just in the instability and maybe the instability is a kind of mirage. Maybe in a decade from now, the country will have stabilized and found some kind of new equilibrium and then the Church can position itself around that. But I don't know. And, and until then, I do think this can be a productive time for the Church and having these conversations and thinking about who we are and what we stand for and what we believe in independent—as much as that can be possible—of the country that we were founded in, it presents a lot of exciting possibilities. And so I think that these conversations are actually really good and positive, but they, they can also feel overwhelming when faith for a lot of people is what they're looking for as their anchor and foundation in a moment of tumult and and chaos. 

Kathleen Flake: I think that's very fitting ending comment because it, it rehearses something you said in your article about Latter-day Saints being a people who turn lemons into lemonade, right? They have a transcendental confidence in their capacity to work to a positive resolution of these crises.  

McKay Coppins: We are very optimistic people. And in my interview with President Nelson, which took place near the beginning of the pandemic as the economy was spiraling. The whole world felt like it was ending in biblical fashion. President Nelson was, you know, resolutely Mormon in every sense. You know, would not wallow, would not look on the, on the, you know, at the glass is half empty, you know, it was all about let's roll our sleeves up and, and figure it out. And that is, that's who we are for better and worse, and I think mostly for better, that's who we are. So, I fully expect, and this is probably the Mormon in me talking, that we will, we'll figure it out both as a country and as a religious people. 

Stephen Betts: That's McKay Coppins, staff writer at The Atlantic. Thanks for joining us today, McCabe. This has been great. 

McKay Coppins: Yeah, thank you. 

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Stephen Betts: You've been listening to Scholars and Saints. Support for Scholars and Saints comes the Mormon Studies program at the University of Virginia.

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