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Sheluyang Peng's avatar

The MINO problem seems to exist with every single minority group in America. You have progressive Asian activists spending all their time talking about "not your model minority" and "antiblackness in the Asian community", while never caring about working-class Asians, just spouting buzzwords to collect on their NGO sinecures. Same with Jews as well. I wrote about it here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/double-crossed

And as for the collaboration between Christians and Muslims, it was a long time coming. If it hadn't been for 9/11, Muslims would be a solidly Republican bloc.

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TracingWoodgrains's avatar

You see something similar within Mormonism. Progressive Mormons, at least, have more of a leg to stand on: Mormonism was founded on the idea of continuing revelation and it’s slowly shifted over time, lending some credence to the idea that it may land in tidier accordance with progressivism in the future.

But it is unambiguous in the central importance of aligning your own approach with mandates from “living prophets” and the church as a whole, and people who object to what the faith’s prophets claim while still calling themselves believers are mostly fooling themselves. The faith is very deliberately near-immune to bottom-up influence.

In a lot of ways, I find fundamentalist believers more understandable than progressive ones. I get the impulse to reconcile heritage and culture with personal morality absorbed within a broader society opposed to one’s faith, but that combination leaves people a mess of unexamined contradictions, torn between fundamentally and irrevocably incompatible ideas.

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