Look Out, World!

At the recent FAIR conference in Utah, some interesting data were shared. Guess what? People don’t like us. No, let me rephrase that: people really don’t like us. According to the polling firm which gathered the data, LDS people have an unfavorable to favorable rating of 5 – 1. For every person who thinks well of us there are five who do not. To compare, notice that Jewish people have a favorable rating of 7 – 2 (seven likes for every two dislikes) and Catholics have a favorable rating of 2 – 1. Where are we going and how did we get in this handbasket?

There are likely to be many complex reasons for these discouraging results. The easy thing to do would be to blame others and fault them for failing to see our own special wonderfulness, and I actually do think that we are a bit under-appreciated. I like Mormons, and I wish others did, too. But since it is difficult to change others, the best thing to do is to look to ourselves to see if there is anything we can do to produce positive change. For the purpose of this blog post, I want to suggest only one thing.

There was a very interesting exchange recently at insiderhighered.com which discussed the question of whether Christian people are mistreated in colleges and universities. One professor argues that the answer is yes, a lot, while the other one thinks maybe, but not much, and maybe Christians themselves bear part of the responsibility for it.