Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter at the peak of its powers. There are almost 24,000 of you enjoying this mail-out, which will be landing twice a week for the rest of the year, and each iteration will be a blockbuster. Well, maybe not the one after Christmas. Let’s see.
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We’re now very much ensconced on Bluesky, and we had 4,000 new followers over the weekend. Join us: we’re having a good time, and long may that continue.
Issue 21 continues to be snapped around and about the place. Enjoying the eponymous drink in Madeira; comparing menus at Andrew Edmunds; presiding over a non-existent debate and on Brighton beach.
Quite a genteel quartet, yes. We do welcome photos of Issue 21 anywhere, really. If you send a particularly good one to us on social media or editorial@the-fence.com then you could win a bottle of Bollinger Champagne, which is a genteel prize, no doubt about it.
To business. This week, we’ve got bits and pieces on George Michael, gang war in Hackney, but first, let’s talk about our crazy cousins in Utah. Francis Martin has come through with a dispatch.
The Last Laugh
To most people, Mormons are a bit of a joke. If you’re on TikTok, you might have heard of ‘soaking’, an apparent loophole in the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints’ (LDS) strict prohibition of pre-marital sex. During ‘soaking’, the man gets his penis inside, but then neither he nor his chaste partner move of their own volition. Instead, friction can be achieved by way of a ‘shaker’ moving the mattress beneath the pious couple. There is little evidence that the practice of soaking is anything more than apocryphal, but it adds another reference point to the general perception that Mormonism is risible.
The LDS, though, doesn’t care whether you laugh at Mormons, perhaps because they’ll get the last laugh. The LDS is almost unique in soliciting postmortem conversions, and routinely performs baptisms on behalf of the deceased. The ceremony takes place in a large sculpted font resting on the back of a dozen golden oxen. A teenage proxy for the dead person enters the water dressed in a white garment, and the process is very quick. So quick that it’s possible to whip through dozens of ceremonies a day. Taking part is a right of passage for Mormon teens, but it requires a steady supply of names ripe for baptism. And this is where the Church of England has, unwittingly, lent a helping hand.
In 2021, the C of E engaged a company called Atlantic Geomatics to undertake a national survey of England’s graveyards, with the ambition of photographing every tombstone and memorial, accompanied by a schematic of the burial grounds, to create a searchable database. But it transpired that Atlantic Geomatic, now renamed AG International Ltd, had contracted a company called FamilySearch to scan the records, and FamilySearch is owned and operated by the LDS. Concerns were raised, and earlier this year the scheme was relaunched, without any role for FamilySearch. Various figures in the church, though, remain ‘disquieted’, and in July the C of E’s General Synod voted almost unanimously to ask parishes not to sign up to the scheme until further work had been done.
The idea behind the practice is that the dead person is being offered the opportunity to be baptised as a Mormon, having not had that chance in life. There is one verse in the Bible that the LDS uses to justify postmortem baptisms: St Paul asks (in a modern language translation) ‘If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptised on their behalf?’ The exact context of the remark is disputed, but Mormons have latched on to it as evidence that the earlier-day saints approved of the practice.
The LDS’ enthusiasm to get involved in cataloguing genealogical records is explained by its need to provide a steady stream of names for postmortem baptisms. According to Don Casias, who worked for the Church for 13 years and was responsible for FamilySearch, at one point they were down to the last two months of girl’s names, and had to introduce rules to suppress the number of postmortem baptisms taking place. The LDS’ efforts to harvest more names have been facilitated by the burst of interest in amateur genealogy. The church has been gathering copies of records for well over a century, collecting reams of microfiche containing birth, marriage and death records, military lists and wills, and anything else their volunteers could get their hands on. It is now estimated that they have some eight billion records.
The long and laborious task of indexing these records into a searchable database fell almost solely to Mormon volunteers, until a surge of interest in genealogy, and the internet, brought commercial entities such as Ancestry.com, and MyHeritage.com into the picture. A mutually enriching relationship between these companies and the LDS has developed, in which the Mormons provide the raw data, and the private companies contribute their resources to its indexing, which they then pass back to the LDS.
FamilySearch is the beneficiary of all this, and offers free access to a colossal repository of records. It only takes me a few clicks to make a profile, and in seconds I’ve found the document recording the birth of my great-grandfather in Antwerp in 1902. A few more clicks and I’m into some proselytising material, but the LDS’ involvement isn’t pushed to the fore and it’s quite possible that the majority of users never realise the connection to Mormonism. To access information about who has been registered as baptised you need to be a certified member of the LDS: a decision which has much to do with PR as privacy, after previous outrage about the baptisms of non-Mormons.
It is because of one such controversy that there is now a source of records of the dead which Mormons aren’t allowed to touch: lists of those who were killed in the Holocaust. When it was discovered that they were being systematically baptised, Jewish communities and Holocaust memorial groups condemned it as desecration, and Mormon elders issued stern instructions that no Jewish victims of the Holocaust should be baptised.
On the issue of Holocaust victims being baptised, which was broiling when he started working for FamilySearch, Casias confesses that he didn’t really understand the issue. Surely, he thought, it was a kind thing that the church was doing, by offering them a chance to be baptised into the LDS. In conversation with Casias, podcast host and psychologist Dr John Dehlin remembered what it was like to perform these baptisms: ‘We thought it was awesome. It was like returning the Jews to the true faith.’
I learned much of what I know about Mormon genealogy (and sexual practices) from podcasts hosted by former members of the church. Some speak with amused horror about what they did as teenagers; aghast at the outfits they had to wear, horrified by how ‘creepy’ they found the rituals, laughing at how ridiculous it all seems to them now. Casias, though, speaks much more soberly, and with clear affection for the LDS, it is only in the third hour of his interview on the Mormon Stories podcast that you find out that he left his job because of a crisis during which his marriage fell apart, and he realised that he was gay. Dehlin himself was excommunicated, though he disputed the decision and later released covert recordings of the disciplinary meetings he had with Mormon elders.
It was only after speaking with those who made complaints that Casias started to understand why it was so offensive to christen the descendants of people who had died for their Jewish identity. He is more sanguine about the fact that dead celebrities and famous historical figures have been baptised, some probably hundreds or thousands of times, and fictitious family trees continue to be added to the church’s open-source database, including the family lineage of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. What was it about Mormons being the butt of jokes?
You can follow Francis on Twitter here.
For the Love of Money
One of the most ambitious pieces we’ve ever published is now online. In the early noughties, Clapton Road was known as ‘Murder Mile’, but the story of the gang warfare behind the tabloid headlines has never been told. For the very first time, a number of villains and coppers have spoken – on the record and off the record – to Max Daly, who spent six months reporting the piece.
If you’re interested in London or longform journalism then do read this piece.
Back in the Arena
The less said about a balding YouTuber’s victory over Mike Tyson, the better. Two summers ago, John Saward wrote a brilliant essay for us about the bizarre afterlife of the lispy Brooklynite with the shark eyes. It’s an absolutely golden piece of prose, if you haven’t encountered it before, do make the time for it now.
An Exercise in Moral Probity
They say that first-time authors can’t make money in books (unless you’re a celebrity), but we keep hearing of mega deals that suggest otherwise. ‘Slutty Cheff’, an anonymous cook in her 20s with an Instagram account and an occasional Vogue column, was the subject of an 11-way auction for her debut, which is entitled Tart and will be published by Bloomsbury Lifestyle.
A number of sources have told us that Slutty’s advance fee was north of £150,000, which is pretty much the annual operating budget of this publication. We look forward to Schooner Scorer’s inevitable book deal with Faber and Faber.
Wheels of Steal
Some more vulgar information for you. Ever wondered how much a superstar DJ gets paid for a set at Fabric? We can tell you. £8,000 is the fee. While at Berlin’s Berghain you’ll get £3,000, which isn’t really a lot as these things go. Famous DJs who play ‘underground’ house music and score summer-long Ibiza residencies can bag £50,000 – and sometimes more – for a three-hour set in the Middle East.
We Want to Know All About You
Over the years, we’ve published some outstanding personal essays. Róisín Lanigan wrote about the phenomenon of the ‘chic young divorcée’. In Issue 12, we had Gareth Watkins worrying about how much time his son spends online. And in the current issue, there’s a beautiful piece by Ella Fox-Martens, who met her boyfriend for the very first time at Heathrow, having flown there from Australia.
We’re looking to publish some more personal essays in 2025 and beyond. If something spectacular – or spectacularly mundane – happened to you, and you want to write it about, then do get in touch with us at editorial@the-fence.com and we’ll make some magic happen.
In Case You Missed It
Has politics destroyed contemporary art? Dean Kissick daubs one of the pieces of the year.
Nate Jones asks how the Irish came to ‘rule’ pop culture, featuring interviews with the two Irish staff members at this very publication.
Joan Didion and Eve Babitz were two oustanding Californian writers of the same age who both wrote about style, film and the city of Los Angeles. They were even friends. But did they really have that much in common?
The triumph of illiberal democracy: a truly terrifying prognostication on the world’s immediate future from John Gray.
And Finally
From what we’ve observed, TV producers fantasise about bringing back two factual TV shows: After Dark and The Cook Report. We’re enormous fans of both shows, but neither could be executed with the relevant brio today – see this bracingly politically incorrect episode of The Cook Report from 1993, an investigation into the illegal peregrine falcon market.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4lqSs4xcCc
That show feels like something from another era entirely, but it came out only two-and-a-half years before George Michael’s seminal video for Fastlove, which could have landed yesterday:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHAQlFq6TFg
George Michael and peregrine falcons? It may not make sense to you. But it makes sense to us.
That’s not it for this week, we’ll be back on Friday with a comprehensive list of the worst pubs in London – as nominated by our readers. And we’ll give you a small list of the best pubs in London, courtesy of us.
Remember we’ve got our deal ongoing, in which you can score three free magazines (fun phrase, no?). If you’d like to speak to the editor about an order, then please email support@the-fence.com. Keep warm in this cold weather.
All the best,
TF