“Handling” Cultural Change

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I’ll admit it, going on vacation put me seriously behind on my reading, especially of all the columnists out there (I will be very sorry when my NY Times archive/TimesSelect access goes away — it’s enough to make a girl enroll in grad school, just to retain the free access for a few more years.) Anyway, I’m a bit late in noticing the following quote:

Still, when the United States was seriously inconvenienced by our commitment to freedom of religion, we found means to handle Mormon polygamy.

That was William F. Buckley, Jr., in his August 25th column. His general point was that British society needs to find a way of responding to the increasingly vocal (and growing) immigrant Muslim population in the UK — that’s the only Mormon mention in the piece (the Queen gets far more attention.)

My take? Okay, yeah, figuring out how to cope with change is important for any society, and when lots of changes are happening, it’s obviously a more urgent matter. Duh.

But, umm, are we really that great of an example of how to deal with change? Excluding pre-1847 persecution for the moment: is disenfranchisement, wholesale asset seizure, and widespread imprisonment really the greatest model for adaptation to cultural challenge? Is the general historical lesson of pre-1890 Mormon polygamy really “phew, we got those Mormons to cooperate, eventually”? And, because maybe this isn’t an interesting enough question yet, how about “should Mormons look to the Utah Territory period as a positive example of how to treat newcomers in our own societies?” Or maybe we’re just on every commentator’s lips right now, even when they’re not thinking about hit-piece films or presidential candidates, and this was a really bad example to use?

Anyway, my little sister hates it when I try to start this kind of conversation with her, so: what do you all think?

9 thoughts on ““Handling” Cultural Change”

  1. I’m guessing that it’s a really bad example, and Buckley just isn’t familiar with Mormon History. Though, I guess it’s possible he believes that the best answer to the problem with Muslims in Britain is to drive them out of the country and not allow them back until they agree to abandon certain religious practices.

  2. I think you’re spot on. And I also think that you should send your penultimate paragraph to UPI.

  3. It’s the whole “freedom of religion, as long as we’re not uncomfortable with it” litmus test.

    A fascinating question, at least for me, is “Should we care if the Muslims take over Britain?” If Britons themselves don’t care to preserve their own society and have handed it over to the Muslim immigrants, shouldn’t Muslims be able to remake the nation in their image? Assuming one could properly address the international security concerns, why should anyone care what happens to Britain? Old buildings and paintings?

  4. This is obviously a difficult issue given our history and sensitivity to the persecutions of the 1850-1910 time period. However, it is a legitimate question to ask: how much can a group of people within a society decide to “secede” and set up their own rules?

    In Utah, the situation was complex because at the start the area was not part of the United States. So, the federal government was dealing with a seemingly separatist group that was outside of federal boundaries for a time. And then the whole Civil War situation complicated things a lot. But at the end of the day, Mormons considered themselves Americans and were willing, over time, to integrate mostly peaceably.

    The big difference is that Muslims in Europe do not consider themselves Europeans. They are Muslims first, Arabs or Pakistanis, etc second and then they are Europeans, perhaps. So, integrating them will have to involve a big change in attitude on their part. (And, yes, I would agree that part of the reason they have not integrated is the attitude of the native Europeans in many cases).

    I personally care whether Europeans integrate their Muslims for two reasons: 1)the 9/11 attackers all spent some time in Europe and did not integrate into that society and 2)Western Europe has always been a traditional U.S. ally for the most part and I’m not willing to abandon that alliance yet. The last thing we need is a new caliphate in Europe. But yes I agree it’s the Europeans who need to deal with that first.

  5. Are we so sure that Mormons collectively thought of themselves as Americans? The population balance of Utah around 1860 was leaning pretty heavily towards English and Swedish immigrants, no? I don’t think it’s necessarily reasonable to expect first-generation immigrants to think of themselves as citizens of their new place of residence first. If I moved to Israel or Ireland tomorrow (the only two countries I have any real shot of getting citizenship from easily and interest in actually living in,) I’d probably think of myself as “American” for the rest of my life. And, Mormons weren’t well treated by the US government at all — if you weren’t raised in Ohio or New York or somewhere else in the settled parts of the US, there was no reason to think of yourself as American.

    queno — I personally care about major changes to the UK because, a) I have lots of ancestors there, b) Buckley’s point about Britain being the birthplace of modern representative democracy holds, and c) they’re our strongest natural allies in the region. But I’m also deeply uncomfortable with change — I wonder if a lot of other people are, too?

    Anyway, US discussions of Muslim growth in Europe are eternally shadowed by Mexico, China, and any other place that sends us immigrants. I’ve noticed more than a few blog comments over the years (not so much in the bloggernacle, but on political blogs) that forget that much of the immigration into Europe is legal, at least as far as getting over the border is concerned. And few seem to be aware of the racial tensions in Britain surrounding, say, perfectly legal immigration from Poland.

  6. The big difference is that Muslims in Europe do not consider themselves Europeans. They are Muslims first, Arabs or Pakistanis, etc second and then they are Europeans, perhaps. So, integrating them will have to involve a big change in attitude on their part. (And, yes, I would agree that part of the reason they have not integrated is the attitude of the native Europeans in many cases).

    Again, assuming that we address security issues, I’m not so sure I care about what happens to Old Europe.

    I personally care whether Europeans integrate their Muslims for two reasons: 1)the 9/11 attackers all spent some time in Europe and did not integrate into that society and 2)Western Europe has always been a traditional U.S. ally for the most part and I’m not willing to abandon that alliance yet. The last thing we need is a new caliphate in Europe. But yes I agree it’s the Europeans who need to deal with that first.

    As long as it is peaceful, I just don’t care what happens to France.

    Yes, I realize my stance is a bit theoretical, since I’m not sure a caliphate in Europe would be peaceful. But this speaks to the larger issue of what we expect out of any “tradition” — do we force it to be preserved beyond a reasonable life span? Civilizations die and are replaced with new civilzations. It’s the circle of life.

    This gets back to Sarah’s question as to how we perceive the Utah Territory days, or even how we perceive the Church and its migratory patterns today. In recent weeks, I have heard (usually visitors) comment on how the Church needs to encourage more members to move back into SLC and build the Church there. My comment is — if the membership in Utah isn’t willing to live there, why should I? Within my own stake there are wards slowly dying as people leave — why should we prop them up?

    Back to Europe and the Muslims — you have to have a core group of Europeans willing to set laws that force the Muslims into a codified set of behaviors to play nice with others. Do those people exist? If so, would we as Church members like the solution imposed on the Muslims? Might we find it restricts our own faith? I have a feeling that any “solution” imposed on the Muslims (in an effort to control them) would be violently opposed by religious activists in our country.

  7. I personally care about major changes to the UK because, a) I have lots of ancestors there, b) Buckley’s point about Britain being the birthplace of modern representative democracy holds, and c) they’re our strongest natural allies in the region. But I’m also deeply uncomfortable with change — I wonder if a lot of other people are, too?

    I’m not interested in propping up a society that doesn’t want to sustain itself, solely for the sake of history. And their being an ally is sort of contingent on their wanting to sustain themselves, don’t you think? Can you force a society to model itself in a certain way, without that society turning against you?

  8. “Can you force a society to model itself in a certain way, without that society turning against you?”

    No, but you also can’t leave a society alone without that society turning against you. I know I’m a Marxist, but the uninterrupted narrative between the oppressor and the oppressed marches on. Gentiles/Mormons; Christians/Muslims. Even through a less Marxist lens the same holds true. “Mormons followed a lesson, already by their time well established in American experience,” writes R. Laurence Moore in his Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans, “that one way of becoming American was to invent oneself out of the sense of opposition” (45). Sort of like Derrida’s theory of language–that words are defined by what they are not–identities are defined by what they are not.

    What to do then? No idea. But I don’t think Buckley knows either. I will say that the problem he outlines in England, and other European countries, was there long before 9/11 and the 1994 WTC bombings. It’s less a question of terrorism than one of cultural assimilation, which we haven’t figured out either.

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