But I rather like the continuation of the assassination theme. It sure beats “Rape and Pillage Week” over at By Common Consent.

I agree completely with your point about sacred ordinances being a means of refocusing ourselves through ritual; the difference between something life- affirming, like baptism or the Endowment, and something odious, like Trek, is that the former uses the act to force us to make hard assessments about ourselves (am I truly worthy? Do I earnestly seek the Savior?) while the latter is designed to reinforce what wonderful,, superior beings we are.

A few years ago, the Houston Chronicle did a story on how area church kids were spending Spring Break. A Baptist group was going to build houses in a poor neighborhood. Another group was heading to New Orleans, for a week of Katrina cleanup. Another group was taking medical supplies to Central America. The Mormon kids were dressing in homespun and calico, and heading to East Texas for a week of playing pioneer.

It was, to paraphrase Jedidiah Grant, a stink in my nostrils.

I wouldn’t even especially mind the Stripling Warrior march so much, if it weren’t for the way every twitch of a Mormon eyebrow is being analyzed and interpreted by pundits around the world at the moment. I don’t like the visual this creates — it takes little imagination to foresee an out-of-context use of film clips as justification for classifying Mormonism a cult in certain parts of the world, as well as the ridicule it will engender: If footage of the “toga clad, stick stomping, unisonlike marching YM” doesn’t show up as B-roll behind Bill Maher and Lawrence O’Donnell and any number of Bible-thumpin’ Christian broadcasters, then such spokesmen are stupider than they look.

But it’s going to happen, apparently. I’ve expressed my unhappiness over that here, and there’s nothing more I can do but cringe and hope for the best. I’m certainly not going to go the route of condemning all Mormon-themed playacting.

All of it – Trek, The Hill Cumorah Pageant, stripling warrior fandangos — is dangerous, and destructive, because it replaces the difficult business of cultivating faith with pointless sacrifice and empty spectacle. It is a colossal waste of time.

I guess since I’m used to going places like Washington Crossing and watching the re-enactors fire cannons at New Jersey (a rather harmless pursuit), I can’t make myself get too bent out of shape about this, and I don’t imagine that media types, who are probably also used to events of this sort, would get too bent out of shape about it, either, unless they wanted to make some sort of political point. But I could be wrong. : )