This story seems primed to make the rounds on Facebook and Twitter, where thousands or millions of people will no doubt express mindless approval, before passing it along to other people who will also express mindless approval. Which is a shame, because this is actually a really shitty story, featuring a really shitty person. Here is the gist:
A Mormon bishop who wanted to teach his flock a lesson about charity went to the extreme and enlisted a Hollywood-style makeup artist to transform him into a scruffy vagrant who then panhandled outside his church.
David Musselman, 45, said he knew some of his congregants would be kind and some might be mean, "but what surprised me the most was the reaction of indifference."
"The majority of the people just ignored me and went to great lengths not to make eye contact," Musselman, the bishop of Taylorsville Fourth Ward in a suburb of Salt Lake City, told NBC News on Friday.
Let's get a few things straight here.
The LDS Church has tens of billions of dollars in assets. A 2012
analysis of the church's finances found that it earns
$7 billion annually from tithing. Where does it all go?
Concerned or disgruntled current and former Mormons complain that the church spends too much on real estate and for-profit ventures, neglecting charity work.
The Mormon church has no hospitals and only a handful of primary schools. Its university system is limited to widely respected Brigham Young, which has campuses in Utah, Idaho and Hawaii, and LDS Business College.
Along with "real estate and for-profit ventures," this money also (still) goes to lobbying against gay people. It had
appeared that the church was trying to rein in its rabid hatred of gays after suffering some bad PR, but the prospect of Those People enjoying equal rights was evidently too much to bear, and now the lobbying is right back in
full force.
So, if you're David Musselman, a local leader of this morally bankrupt institution, and you're apparently concerned about the homeless, what do you do? You could go rogue, aim up, question your church's leaders, rally your congregation around the idea that LDS funds should be redirected from real estate and anti-gay lobbying to helping the homeless. This would be quite admirable.
That's not what he did, though. No, this condescending prick thought the best way to approach the problem of indifference to the plight of the homeless was to deceive and humiliate his "flock" by wearing a costume and exposing the commoners' alleged lack of empathy. One obvious reason this is problematic is because it's dishonest. The people of that congregation trust Musselman, probably as much as anyone else in their lives, and he just showed that this trust is meaningless to him. (Granted, a bishop lies for a living, but still.)
Musselman lamented that some members of the congregation "felt horrible," but thought it was worth it, because shaming them "had the effect [he] hoped it would have." The flock should have told Musselman to go fuck himself. These people, who supposedly needed to be taught a lesson in empathy, gave the liar who they thought was a homeless person $20 and some food. "Dozens" of people interacted with him. This is what they're supposed to feel ashamed about?
Moral of the story is don't lie to people in an attempt to shame them. And don't think you have any right to lecture working people about their alleged indifference to the homeless when your fantastically wealthy church doesn't even make a pretense of giving a shit about the homeless. Please don't Like or share or tweet this story (like you did last time even though
that story was a hoax).