McKay Coppins

But you know, part of this was, a big part of this wasn't that the very end of the 19th century, the church disavowed polygamy, discontinued the practice.

And that was kind of the beginning of the mainstreaming of Mormonism.

Utah became an official state.

And from that point on,

the church was kind of on this march of assimilation, trying to be accepted as a respectable and positive force in American religious life.

I know.

No, it's a real – it's an ongoing conversation in the church.

I mean –

We got the same rhetoric, you know, that we should be in the world but not of the world, right?

I remember one of the big defining talks given by a Latter-day Saint prophet early in the 21st century was by Gordon B. Hinckley.

He was the president of the church.

He said that we are a peculiar people and that we should be a peculiar people.

We should be apart from the culture in some ways, even as we try to participate in American life.

And I do think that there is a question now about, you know, whether that assimilation has gone too far, right?

Mm-hmm.

I remember five years ago when I wrote this story about the church entering its third century.

And the thing that I worried about, and I wrote about this in the piece, was that –

Not that Mormonism would, you know, drift into kind of radical right-wing politics like much of the religious right.

I'm actually more concerned about it becoming so obsessed with assimilation, so obsessed with approval from mainstream American society that it kind of loses sight of what it actually is, right?

Mm-hmm.