Redford’s hostility to Mormons in general is a little off-putting. After all, he has had historically some good relations with Mormon Democrats like former Salt Lake City mayor Ted Wilson, who became director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah. He surely has Mormon employees at Sundance Resort and in his catalogue operation. And Mormons have participated in the Sundance Film Festival and various workshops sponsored by the Sundance Institute from its beginnings (e.g. Napolean Dynamite).

The criticism of the single-minded thrust of Mormon missionaries is also a criticism that might be made about soldiers, who do not get distracted from their assigned objective. I have a feeling that Mr. Redford would feel differently if the single-mindedness was being put into service on behalf of one of his liberal political causes. After all, that’s what his movie “All the President’s Men” glorified in Woodward and Bernstein. Redford’s statement that missionaries are “plastic” is a value judgment that denies their sincerity, that they believe in what they are saying. Coming from a person who is a professional actor, whose job is to write, produce, direct and perform fiction (AKA lies), a certain hypocrisy is showing.

The reason that Redford and many other people involved in the entertainment industry find a natural home in the Democratic Party, despite their incredible wealth, has, I suspect, something to do with the fact that Democratic Party policies are based on making grand gestures to demonstrate sincere concern and sympathy, not to actually solve problems. When the programs do not produce results, the Democratic Party response is “You can;t cut the program, don’t you care about the problem?” So failure of the program means that more money must be spent on the gesture, and any success means that more money must be spent on the gesture.

One of the grand gestures that Redford has been deeply involved with is environmentalist issues, including of course global warming, having hosted a conference of mayors on that issue with left wing Salt Lake mayor Rocky Anderson. Global warming is the ideal Democratic grand gesture, because by definition it is almost impossible to tell whether any program will make any difference in the problem, because the already accumulated greenhouse gases are enough, allegedly, to ensure continued global warming even if we all stopped breathing, driving, eating, and lighting and warming our homes. We won’t know if any Democratic Party program is helping for another 50 years. The Democrats have no idea what the input needs to be for any particular output of results. They are not counting on science, but on sincerity to prove to Nature that they are worthy of being saved from disaster. It has all the logic of the pre-Christian Hawaiians throwing virgins into the volcanoes to appease Pele, the fire goddess.