As the Mormon Moment continues, the articles I get sent seem, to me, more and more random (for lack of a better word). Until yesterday my favorite was an article in the NY Times about Mormon Hipsters that a friend sent because she very curious to know if I ever went to the kind of house parties the article describes where “the only vice on display was sugar, in the form of a large dessert spread” (I have been to a plethora of parties just like that and have also hosted more than a few). However unimportant I may think the topic of Mormon Hipsters is, my new favorite random article just came out this past week. It’s a Slate.com article about Mormons and Geek Chic, that details Mormon contributions to Geek Culture (among them Napoleon Dynamite and Battlestar Gallactica).
I find these articles amusing and mostly harmless, however they do make me wonder. As Abalyn pointed out in her last post, many Americans view Mormons as very different from themselves. Do these types of articles help make us seem more like everybody else since they show how individual Mormons participate in many different areas of society? Or, conversely, do these articles make us seem more “other” since they make a big deal out of the fact that these people are Mormon,? By pointing out the “Mormonness” of Orson Scott Card and Jared Hess, for example, are these articles claiming that Mormons are just like everybody else, or are they saying that we should recognize the distinct contributions of Mormons because they are so different from the rest of society? Thoughts?