Oh. So that's why people don't like us.

This week I had the opportunity to check out the Mormon Media Studies Symposium which I thought was pretty good. The session I went to was called "Image and Authenticity: What We Think of Ourselves" by Sterling Van Wagenen. He started off by giving some statistics yielded by a study of 2,000 randomly sampled Americans about what they think of Latter-day Saints. 44% of those sampled thought of Latter-day Saints as family oriented, and another 27% described them as determined. Those adjectives, however, were among the only ones that were positive. The others included cultish, controlling, secretive, weird, pushy, and of course, anti-gay. These descriptions hurt my feelings a little bit, but the point of the entire lecture was not to focus to much on what people think about us, but what we think of ourselves.

Van Wagensen mentioned that most LDS people have a sort of inferiority complex because we tend to be looked at so negatively by outsiders. We almost yearn for a positive representation of Mormons in professional sports or in the entertainment world to try to "normalize" what people think about us. While there is nothing wrong with having pride in your religion and wanting to see people like you succeed, we should not do so as a result of feeling bad about who we are. We need not care so much that people see us in a negative light, if those people see us that way because of what we believe in. Our values are clearly not worth hiding or putting on the back burner for anyone else.

While I don't know why people think I'm pushy or controlling, I' okay with being looked at as weird or secretive since I know its for a reason. And its about me and no one else.