Managerialism is Apostasy
OK, maybe not, but also maybe. I’m going to vent.
I’ve got a teenager or two at EFY right now. Well, not EFY, the other one. FSY. One of my girls is a swimmer, pretty good at it despite the fact that her parents will not pay for camps or coaches or much travel or anything. She just had a swim coach from out of state who was in town for another reason hear about her and ask to meet with her for free. He gave her some extremely specific tips on her starts and her turns and some very specific practice routines to develop those tips. She was excited. That was last week. Now she’s at FSY. They have free time built into the schedule and are encouraged to use it for exercise among other things so no problem. They are staying at a small college and the college’s pool happens to be across the parking lot from the dorm she’s in. We looked up the lap pool hours and sent her with the cash and ID and everything else the pool wanted for general admission. Some of the pool hours coincided with free time. The first day she’s call us. They won’t let me, she says.
So we call them. Not permitted, they say. Liability. I roll my eyes. Fine, can I just sent you permission in writing or is there some kind of form. Nope, they say. The Legal Department has forbidden it. Your only choice is to withdraw her from FSY. Then the camp director had the blasphemous insolence to tell us that our daughter would be blessed by the Lord for complying with the dictates of the Legal Department, God rot his tongue.
There is no God but liability and the legal department is his prophet.
This morning we get a call from another teenager. She’s frustrated because they aren’t allowed to slow dance at the dances there. Why not? Well, the reason is simple, at least as it was explained to her.
- The Church does not approve of same-sex courtship behavior at FSY for obvious reasons.
- Slow dancing is courtship behavior.
- ???
- Therefore no one is allowed to slow dance.
IAW
June 19, 2024
I’m going to somewhat disagree here.
I would say it isn’t apostasy so much as a reaction against apostasy.
There are many, many parents who would sue the Church at the drop of a hat.
It’s like on my mission, where we had the stupid rule we couldn’t take our suit jackets off in members’ homes because some missionary got mad at a kid and started whipping him with his suit jacket.
Now, it seems the better approach would have been to realize you can’t make a rule for every crazy person, but my guess is the Church has already been sued for some swimming related issue in regards to FSY/EFY/YC/Trek/Whatever enough times they just decided to eliminate the problem.
(The counselor on the other hand, was dumb. The better way would have been “dude, I’m sorry. My hands are tied by the legal department” and leave it at that. Bringing in “blessings” was dumb).
Same with the slow dancing thing. The problem is, step 3 is a long messy, mess that the Church decided to just not deal with because it’s too messy. You can’t sum it up in a pithy sentence. Step 3 goes something like this:
3. So then same sex couples will start slow dancing, and when told to stop, they will protest and argue that if opposite sex couples can do it, as long as they aren’t kissing it should be fine and they will be told no, it’s not fine, and there are enough of the under 18 crowd that are “allies” within a few minutes the word will spread and there will be large groups of same-sex people slow dancing in order to protest the clearly bigoted FSY rules (not to mention all the counselors that are frankly “allies” as well and so will either ignore or even encourage the same-sex slow dancing) that it’s easier and clearer to just go to step 4.
Zen
June 19, 2024
My home ward in Idaho used to have a 24th of July rodeo. I am not a particular rodeo kind of person, but I fondly remember that – mutton busting for the kids, greased pig chase, my sister barrel racing, and even a bit of bull riding.
Alas, when the wicked rule, the people mourn. And the legal profession (as a whole) are worse than leaches.
This is what mourning is.
bobdaduck
June 19, 2024
Like IAW step 3 is messy, and requires you to take personal ownership to the level of telling the same sex couples off. The problem isn’t that its messy, the problem is the unwillingness to take responsibility for the doctrine and the enforcement thereof.
So you outsource it to rules, and nobody wins.
As for the swimming, I go military mental model here. You’ve got an idiot general, to the point that he is maybe antithetical to the whole point of FSY or whatever it is. The frustration comes from ruining what might have been- that the whole event is “living beneath its privileges”.
G.
June 19, 2024
IAW, that’s about the best face that can be put on it, which isn’t saying a great deal. It’s beneath the kingdom. It’s beneath our challenges and beneath our possibilities.
Sute
June 19, 2024
Incidentally, I was involved in a young men’s group teaching them how to waltz by a professional instructor a few years back. We need more boys confident to dance. We were short a few young women so without any giggles or innuendo a couple of the older boys learned one of dances with a couple younger ones. I remember thinking how mature they handled it as they took turns trading postions. No one teased, smiled, laughed, or went there. And they paired off with girls on other steps.
None were American, so that probably explains the difference.
IAW
June 19, 2024
well, I believe we are required by covenant to put the best face on what the Church does and charitably interpret what the leaders do. Declaring that lawyers are in charge instead of, y’know, the actual leaders, is a road to apostasy itself.
And “beneath our challenges and beneath our possibilities” basically defines the behavior of disciples in basically every era and dispensation.
G.
June 20, 2024
IAW,
fair enough
John Mansfield
June 20, 2024
Four concerns come to mind from the scenario above:
1. The need to be able to say “It isn’t my fault.” People and institutions feel this need assymetrically. They much more want to be held blameless that they didn’t do anything that led to a boy losing a fingertip than they care about having a responsibility for a thousand boys never learning to work with their hands.
2. Buck passing. One way to not be blamed for anything is to not be responsible for anything. We don’t even want to be responsible for identifying who is responsible, so we gesture at insurance and liability. There are predatory lawyers, but their influence is outsized by their convenience as scapegoats for why we can’t do things we don’t want to figure out how to do.
3. Unwillingness to hold anyone accountable. This is a complement to the previous point. I remember when the Local Unit Budget Allowance was rolled out in 1990, the end of local ward budget decisions as they previously existed. In the fireside broadcast with Hinckley, Monson, and Packer, this change was described as a correction to excesses of some wards carrying out extravagant, expensive activities. I wondered, “Couldn’t the church just excommunicate the leaders of those wards and leave everyone else alone?” Leaders don’t enjoy reining in individuals and feel more comfortable issuing general rules that they hope will place the individual actions that need to be reined in so far out of bounds that the leaders won’t have to correct any individuals about anything.
4. Managerialism. If the stake young womens president were the one Brother G.’s daughters had the disagreements with, then he and the girls could argue with her, and she could argue back why she is running something a way they don’t like. Instead they are dealing with an employee with no agency carrying out the policies of a faceless manager a thousand miles away.
[]
June 21, 2024
Finally the punishment for instructing the youth in the YMCA dance has caught up with us…