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Notes on Mormonism in the Near Term

Notes on Mormonism in the Near Term

Last updated on: August 5, 2015 at 11:13 am by Dan Peterson

Notes on Mormonism in the Near Term 2015-08-05T11:13:19-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Editors’ Note: This article is part of the Patheos Public Square on the Future of Faith in America: Mormonism. Read other perspectives here.

Increasingly secular since the 1960s, Europe is also collapsing demographically, with fewer marriages, more divorces, and fewer children. Each European generation is smaller than its predecessor. The notion of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” is largely myth today; most young Greek children have neither brothers nor sisters, aunts nor uncles. Almost half of all Swedish households today have only one occupant.

The relationship between increasing secularism and decreasing marriage and birth rates was noticed long ago, and was understood as a causal one: Secular people tend to marry later, if at all, and to have smaller families. In other words, religious decline precedes demographic decline.

However, in her important book How the West Really Lost God, Mary Eberstadt argues that the undermining of the family undermines religion, too.

As she expresses it, “family and faith are the invisible double helix of society—two spirals that when linked to one another can effectively reproduce, but whose strength and momentum depend on one another.” Religious values are first taught in the home, and the home is where religious practice is modeled for the next generation.

And it works the other way, too: A married man with children is more than twice as likely to attend church as an unmarried man without children. Children, Eberstadt argues, “drive parents to church” as those parents seek help and support in child rearing. In other words, family fuels faith in this respect, rather than the other way around.

“Vibrant families and vibrant religions go hand in hand,” Eberstadt argues. “Conversely, not having a wedding ring or a nursery means that one is less likely to be found in church.”

But American marriage and birth rates have dropped, too; they simply lag a bit behind Europe’s.

Not coincidentally, I think, recently-released Pew Foundation survey data suggest that the Christian share of the American population declined sharply between 2007 and 2014, from 78.4 percent to 70.6 percent, while the unaffiliated—the “nones,” defined as atheistic, agnostic, or “nothing in particular”—grew dramatically during that same period, from 16.1 percent to 22.8 percent, and their surge was especially noticeable among younger adults.

Some seek to credit the “New Atheists” for this, but, though they’ve played a role, it’s probably not a central one: The description of the “nones” as either atheistic, agnostic, or “nothing in particular” obscures an important distinction. Many of the “nones” aren’t unbelievers so much as non-joiners or “droppers out,” religiously inclined to what’s been called “cafeteria Christianity” or (by Christian Smith) “moral therapeutic deism.”

In America as in Europe, they’re delaying or even foregoing marriage. Such books as Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart (1985) and Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000), have chronicled an increasing American predilection for autonomy, even rootlessness. And this affects more than churches and family formation. The PTA, for instance, has dropped to less than half of its 1960 membership. Rotary Clubs and the Knights Templar are substantially down, and aging. The Masons are at their lowest point in a century, and the Elks are down 50 percent since 1980.

This is the European and American environment in which Mormonism must operate today. And, though they lack behind their American peers and even further behind their European counterparts, Mormon youth, too, are delaying marriage. (I speak to two of the three cultural regions that I know best; Mormonism scarcely exists in the third one, the Arab/Islamic world.)

Growing up in the fifties and sixties, it was easy to assume that American society respected Latter-day Saints. They might be out on the theological fringe, but American civic religion was pretty much on their side. At least theoretically, Americans seemed to honor ideals of faithful heterosexual marriage, with fathers taking the lead and mothers caring for children. Society was, in other words, largely in sync with, and supportive of, fundamental practical Mormon values. In fact, Mormons seemed quintessentially American—which, in the postwar era of the Pax Americana, benefited their church not only in the United States but in Europe and Japan.

Today, though, Mormonism and Western society seem to be parting ways in crucial respects. The most powerful engines of popular attitude-formation and elite opinion in America and Europe are typically amused by, when not altogether contemptuous toward, conservative Christianity—which, in the sense relevant here, includes the Latter-day Saints. Mormonism seems socially retrograde and corporate in an era when such things aren’t appreciated. Mormonism’s patriarchal orientation, for example, is, putting it mildly, out of fashion in fashionable circles. Its emphasis on heterosexual marriage is seen as hateful, its insistence on fidelity within marriage as somewhat quaint, and its requirement of chastity outside of marriage as transparently ridiculous. (The tax-exempt status and accreditation of its flagship college, Brigham Young University, will almost certainly be challenged in the near term over its so-called “Honor Code”—on the analogy of what has happened, in the Canadian context, to Trinity Western University, which has a closely analogous “code.”)

Young minds are particularly sensitive to peer pressure and fashions, and, consequently, it’s unsurprising that the relatively sudden collapse of social support for core Mormon values seems disproportionately to affect the younger generation. That generation is also exceptionally “wired,” and has therefore been hit with an onslaught of attacks based on Mormon history for which traditional Church instruction has left them woefully unprepared. And, in a sense, because the details of its history aren’t safely lost in, say, the biblical past, Mormonism is more vulnerable to such attacks than most other, older, religious traditions.

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, of the Council of the Twelve Apostles, has repeatedly warned that the Church is never more than a generation from extinction, so everything hinges on how well and how widely the faith is transmitted.

The way in which the Church responds to this challenge will determine much about its future over the next five, twenty, and hundred years. I believe that Mormonism can prosper if it draws deeply from its own well, which brims with radical materials—radical in every sense—that Latter-day Saints haven’t even begun to adequately deploy. I agree, for example, with the Catholic theologian Stephen Webb, in his book Mormon Christianity: What Other Christians Can Learn from the Latter-day Saints:

By arguing that only the physical is real and that the divine is physical in ways that we can only glimpse in this world, Mormon metaphysics actually has some advantages over more traditional metaphysical schemes that emphasize the immateriality of the divine. Most significantly, Mormonism can address directly and sympathetically the question of materialism that lies at the heart of modern atheism.…

The case can be made that the most serious alternative to fundamentalism and Catholicism in terms of having the resources to turn back the tide of modernity is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

If the challenges of this new era awaken Mormons from the comfortable complacency of the fifties and sixties and return them to the native theological radicalism of their faith, that won’t be a bad thing.

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