Oh No Ross and Carrie

By way of Mr. Deity (one of my secret vices), I recently learned about a podcast series called "Oh No Ross and Carrie," whose co-hosts took the missionary discussions and were baptized into the LDS Church for the purposes of investigating Mormon claims from their position as rationalist skeptics. The podcast describes itself as "the show where we don’t just report on spirituality, fringe science and the paranormal (from a scientific, evidence-based standpoint), but dive right in by joining religions, attending spiritual events, undergoing 'alternative' treatments, partaking in paranormal investigations, and more."

There are two Mormon-themed podcasts, each about an hour long, which you can access here: Part 1, Part 2. Listening to Ross and Carrie's account from the vantage point of a returned missionary, I ached for the missionaries, who sound as if they were thrilled to find people who engaged with their message so seriously, who were happy to show up to church, and--joy of joys!--accepted a baptismal commitment with very little pushing. (Podcaster Carrie records her end of the phone conversation in which she calls the elders to say that she and Ross would like to set a baptismal date. What she and Ross don't know is how much elated hugging and grateful praying occurred in the missionaries' apartment as soon as they got off the phone.)

Ross and Carrie maintain that they were mostly honest with the missionaries and other LDS authorities they engaged with, short of announcing that they were investigating the church for the purpose of doing a skeptical podcast about the experience. (They maintain, though, that they would have come clean about that if asked.) Not unexpectedly, the skeptics aren't very impressed with the evidence the missionaries offer them to support LDS claims. On this matter, my liberalism makes me ambivalent. On the one hand, I too am not moved by orthodox LDS apologetics (of which the missionaries offer an unsophisticated version anyway). On the other hand, as a religious liberal I would find it very tiring to engage with Ross and Carrie's hard-core Enlightenment rationalism: I'd end up rubbing my temples a lot and saying, "You guys are missing the point here." They lack the poetic sensibilities that would allow them to appreciate myth and ritual as sources of meaning-making. And they're not as self-critical as they think they are when it comes to recognizing their own unfounded beliefs: they could benefit from a healthy dose of postmodern antifoundationalism. (Example: They refer in the podcast to evolution as a proven truth. Ehhhh... I'm prepared, for political reasons, to take my stand with evolutionists over against creationists, but I'm too much a historicist by training to elevate evolutionary theory to the status of an article of faith.)

Ross and Carrie's ability to pass a baptismal interview while acknowledging that they have only a "mustard seed's" amount of faith in Mormonism and are, in fact, still waiting for spiritual confirmation is a sign of what's wrong with the LDS Church's missionary system. Someone should have intervened at some point in that process and said: "You know, you're rushing into a commitment that you really shouldn't make until you feel greater certainty that this is what God wants you to do. Let's hold off on baptism until you've spent more time studying, and praying, and attending church, and engaging with the members, and seeing how you still feel several months from now about becoming members of this faith community." The reason no one intervened that way is that the system craves conversions for the sake of impressive statistics. And yet the people at the helm can't seem to get it into their MBA-trained heads that rushing people into baptism is a big reason why the church's retention rates are such a joke.

The most painful moment in the podcast for me was an exchange Carrie described having with one of the missionaries at a meeting a week or so after their baptism (if I recall the time frame correctly). At the meeting, Ross and Carrie fessed up about the podcast and announced that they hadn't experienced the empirical evidence--i.e., the spiritual confirmation--they'd been waiting for. "Elder Johnson" (not his real name, apparently), a greenie who had been so nervous at their first meetings that he had been physically trembling, gave an impassioned speech in which he said that he too had shared many of the doubts Ross and Carrie had expressed, but that he was staking his faith on the church because (this is my paraphrase of Carrie's paraphrase) the doctrine of the Atonement allowed him to confront the existence of evil and suffering in the world. According to Carrie, he gave as an example the fact that in Los Angeles, even the air you breathe is terrible for you. Belief in the Atonement is how he goes on having faith in the possibility of something better.

Carrie and Ross understood this speech as an example of how religions teach you to see the world as more problematic than it really is in order to sell you their solution. They explained to podcast listeners that back when they had been involved in religion (they both seem to have had evangelical backgrounds, judging from what they said), they too had seen the world as a terrible place--but once they were liberated from religion, they realized the world wasn't so bad. Yes, well, perhaps it doesn't look so bad from your social location, my dear pampered fellow middle-class probably college-educated white Americans. I'm with Elder Johnson on this one, and I'm impressed that at age 19 (I'm assuming) he's developed a faith that has that much of an existential core to it. I'm impressed, too, that he found his voice and was able to bear witness to that testimony.  I hope he felt edified and strengthened by this encounter, because he should have been.

I find myself feeling more hostile to the podcasters at the end of writing this post then I did when I started out.