The Church ™ (as they would like to be called) has announced (once again) that they’re taking back the last twenty years of embracing “I’m a Mormon” and “Mormon.org” and “Mormonsandgays” and a hundredish years of the “Choir Formerly Known as Mormon” and ask us to Please Stop calling us that!

To many this seems like a small silly nonsense thing for them to care about, but for me it’s a relief, if they don’t want “Mormon” then we, the irregulars, can have all the peculiar Mormoniness for us! Mormon is all ours now!! In this place I’ll call Peculiar Mormonish Internet Joy Fun Club, (or Mormon if you prefer) We will draw our circles wide, we are the cast outs, unwanted and embarrassing, ranting on the internets about small things like protecting children from sexual predators, and loving people more than checklists, and Jesus! We have tattoos and like Sunstones, and we share a (possibly at times self-defeating) knee jerk reaction against all things labeled “obedience”, including especially perhaps the the type of obedience measured in rigid adherence to labeling ourselves with awkwardly long titles not easily shortened to MotCoJCoLDS (it’s so easy!)

I’ll let you in on a secret, all the best things get thrown out here, in this pile of unwanted uncontrolled rebellious beautiful Mormon refuse. The beautiful gay Mormons, the beautiful children of the beautiful gay Mormons, the feminists, the intellectuals, the misfit toys, the singles, the mixed-faith marriagers, the uncomfortably opinionated, the wearers of tank tops and non-white shirt wearing beardsters.

Now that The Church™ has thrown out Mormon I feel like I can truly embrace with enthusiasm a title that I shied away from when “Mormon” implied a PR campaign that should have been titled “Mormons: Less Weird than You Thought! Join us!” or “Mormon Gays: You’re mostly okay so long as you don’t do it!”

In My Weird Mormonish Internet Joy Fun Club, I hope:

We will strive to apologize to those we’ve injured but never for being misfits.

We will acknowledge that we are planted on stolen land.

We will face the ways we oppressed and continue to oppress the less powerful among us.

We will find truth in the humanness of our pioneer ancestors, their strength, their sin, their gossipy back-biting, their goofy hymns, their tenacious drive to freely live their faith.

We will sit in uncomfortable paradox and lots of not knowing nothing.

We will embrace the radical divine nature of every human soul.

We will treat each other with dignity and kindness.

We will use our anger to energize our good works.

We will embrace radical acceptance of all the way we Mormon (and not Mormon).

I say these things in the name of Peculiar Mormonism

Amen