The Next Mormons

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• Mormonism used to keep about three-quarters of its adherents. Among young adults it is now retaining less than half.
• It’s tempting to fixate on things the LDS Church is or is not doing as the primary explanation for those membership losses, arguing that the church is alienating young people with its antigay rhetoric, its treatment of women, and its superannuated leadership. While this book presents statistical evidence that some of those reasons do factor into why more Millennials are leaving the LDS Church, a major explanation for disaffiliation is the changing religious landscape in America. Mormonism is not an island.
• I would posit that the successful transmission of a religious identity is based on a combination of three indispensable elements: orthodox belief, an accepted code of behavior, and a fuzzier category I would describe as transformative religious experience.
• Research at Fuller Theological Seminary on evangelical young adults confirms that the most important factors in “sticky” religion continue to be the classic ones: being raised in homes where parents practiced their faith openly and with warmth, and where children were enmeshed in intergenerational networks that also supported the family’s religion.
• the best chances for successful transmission of a religious identity from one generation to the next remain within the family.22
• Overall, we can say that a college education is positively correlated with greater confidence in almost all Mormon doctrines, but not necessarily with stronger feelings of closeness to God.
• The level of doubting among Mormons is stubbornly identical from one generation to the next: 17 percent across all age groups.
• Among the current Mormon respondents, the top traits were responsibility, hard work, and religious faith. It is significant that responsibility and hard work edged out religious faith even in this steadfast pool of believers.
• However, several older Mormon interviewees told me that while the wider culture has in recent decades downplayed religious responsibility in favor of entertainment, the LDS youth experience has gone in the opposite direction, becoming more overtly religious and less lively over time.
• The decision to raise the bar came hand in hand with a new curriculum for missionaries called Preach My Gospel, which emphasized teaching by the Spirit rather than rote memorization, as had been the case previously. To accommodate that new curriculum, the church needed missionaries who were mature enough in the gospel to be able to go off script.
• We asked returned missionaries (RMs) to evaluate whether their missions had helped them strengthen their faith, prepare for a career, prepare for marriage and a family, gain converts for the LDS Church, and teach them to appreciate diversity. On nearly every measure, nine out of ten RMs who are still Mormon said the mission was “very helpful” or “somewhat helpful” in these areas. The only area to generate slightly less enthusiasm was “gaining converts for the LDS Church”: about 85 percent of RMs considered their mission to be “very” or “somewhat” helpful in that. Interestingly, there was very little generational difference in any of these categories; almost all RMs who still self-identify as Mormons had a positive mission experience, at least in hindsight.
• The mission, he says, schooled him on following through with things he didn’t necessarily want to do, which is an important value in any career; even jobs you love can be “filled with things that aren’t super-fun, like writing a dissertation, or doing experiments where it seems like you’re just banging your head against a wall. A mission is very much about self-motivation,
• Yet it was also Jamie’s openness to diversity that led to doubts about her faith. “I remember talking with a lady who was a Bahá’í at one point,” she explains. “And I remember walking away thinking that her belief system, and who she was, was actually very beautiful, and I could not find fault with it even though I was supposed to.”
  • Who taught her she needed to find fault with other people’s belief system? What happened to “bring all the good you have and let us see if we can add to it?”
• In his humorous and touching memoir Way Below the Angels, BYU professor Craig Harline observes, “Whether someone had the bad dream or not wasn’t so much a matter of where they’d been on a mission, or of how much faith they’d had, but of how well they managed to fit into mission-culture-as-currently-constituted.” The natural salespeople rarely had the dream, but it plagued “the born introverts and born introspectives and born sensitives who engaged in all sorts of personality-bending and will-breaking and metaphorical Chinese foot-binding trying to fit in.”
• Put another way, the LDS Church is losing almost half of previously active youth if they didn’t serve a mission and nearly a third of those who started a mission but returned early, but only one in ten of those who served the full term.
• Many Mormon singles feel judged or shamed, or express frustration that the church seems to be worshiping the nuclear family instead of Christ.
• Marriage has become something for the “haves” in America, and not so much for the “have nots.” And that’s unfortunate, because as many researchers have pointed out, marriage is itself associated with greater economic mobility, better health, and increased self-reported happiness. Marriage is declining most sharply among the very groups who could most benefit from it.
• Then too, since World War II the LDS Church has created its distinctive religious identity in the crowded American religious landscape by emphasizing marriage and the nuclear family. Marriage is hammered home as not just a cultural goal but a deeply religious mandate for Latter-day Saints. In the postwar period, Mormonism’s familial ideals coincided perfectly with certain trends in American society that favored earlier marriage and larger families. As the church navigates the twenty-first century, however, it must do so knowing that the society that supported Mormonism’s emphases on marriage and “traditional” gender roles in the 1950s has turned in another direction, either expanding marriage to include same-sex couples (see chapter 7) or questioning its value altogether. The church must find a way to speak to the growing percentage of never-married Mormons, who often feel great strain in a church that has taught them that marriage is fundamental not only to their happiness in this life but also to celestial exaltation in the world to come.
• She notes there’s no shortage of rhetoric about how wonderful and important women are, but church leaders also continue stating that the only divinely appointed job women have is to bear and nurture children.16 That, she says, can be confusing: My biggest issue is that I think I’m foreordained to not only be a mother but to do a lot of other things. As a single woman, I don’t know what my role is, or what other ways in which I’m important to the gospel or the building of the community… . With most of the single women, it feels like the church is saying that we’re just biding our time until we get married, and that’s when our “real” lives will begin.
• Says Troy, a thirty-seven-year-old economic researcher: Part of it is that in Mormon culture, it’s men’s responsibility to initiate. I’ve had priesthood leaders call me to task for not dating enough. But women are not considered at fault for not getting married, because they’re not supposed to initiate. A lot of the single Mormon women I know are suffering from depression. They’re in a position where they want to achieve something, and the culture is telling them they have no power to achieve that, so it’s very debilitating in terms of self-actualization.
• The loneliness and bewilderment often felt by older Mormon singles, he says, is gender neutral. As a result his ward has actively sought to be a gentle, healing place for these Latter-day Saints. They don’t have lessons on marriage, having been instructed by their stake president “not to pound that drum.” They don’t pile on the guilt by asking singles why they aren’t dating more. Instead, they offer community and solidarity, creating a safe space for singles to worship. “There’s something special that the Lord is trying to tell them, not to give up on the church, not to give up on all the things they can enjoy,” says the bishop.
• Overall, we see a much higher percentage of premarital or nonmarital sexual experience in the former Mormon sample—approximately twice as much. These findings complicate the victorious narrative about Mormons’ remarkable rates of abstinence from premarital sex, and should prompt us to ask: Are Mormons’ astonishing rates of resistance to premarital sex artificially inflated in surveys because those who did have sex have left the church?
• Mormons are second only to Hindus in marrying within the fold, which in turn significantly increases the likelihood that any children born to that family will also elect to stay in the religion.
• Marriages in which both partners are committed to the same faith tradition have a greater chance of retaining children in that tradition than ones in which the partners are members of different religions or one is not affiliated at all.
• Coming off a bad breakup of a relationship she had expected to culminate at the altar, Emily had no “plan B” for how to live life as a single person. Not one woman in her life had paved the way to show that a Mormon woman could be happy to be single and working: no aunts, older cousins, or Young Women leaders had forged that path.
• Having single people as leaders is rare outside of singles wards. In conventional or “family” wards, single adults are too often passed over for leadership opportunities.
• Clayton Christensen, an author and professor at Harvard Business School, is a Mormon who has held many leadership positions in the LDS Church, especially in the New England area.
• He was concerned about the abysmal activity rates for singles in his area: only 17 percent of the single women on the church rolls attended church regularly or even occasionally, versus 68 percent of the married women. Among single men, attendance was even lower: just 8 percent. When he dug deeper, he discovered one district of the church in Upstate New York that did not have that problem. In that district’s six branches, married and single members attended at roughly equal rates. What was the difference, he wondered? The answer was callings. Those small branches were “so desperate for anybody who could walk” that single men and women were given heavy responsibilities—and they responded with faithful dedication. Christensen believes that every conventional ward needs to take a hard look at the membership of its “ward council,” which consists of leaders from all the various auxiliaries like the Relief Society, the Young Men, and the Primary. If there are no single members serving in important callings that require their presence at ward council, those wards have missed an opportunity to not only diversify the ranks of leadership but also extend to single members the knowledge that they are valuable contributors.
• “The original jurisdiction until they’re married is in the parental home, in the family.” Elder Packer’s comments suggest a possible disconnect between the demographic reality of most LDS singles being mature and financially independent and the view that some leaders may harbor, that they are embracing a perpetual adolescence.
• “If it were 1970, I’d expect this kind of treatment,” Elysse says. But this happened in 2008. She never did major in neuroscience at BYU, but the story has a happy ending: now twenty-six, she’s getting a doctorate in neuroscience at Harvard University, where her talents are appreciated and she works around a hundred hours a week. Nobody today would ever accuse her of not being serious about science. Elysse’s experience of sexism in Mormon culture is dramatic, but it differs from other women’s more in degree than in kind. Dedicated to a particular version of family values in which women are seen as primarily responsible for bearing and nurturing children, Mormonism is sometimes at odds with recent shifts that have taken place in American culture, a divide that is more keenly felt in the younger generation.
• Adolescence, then, is a time when gender expectations begin to be clearly defined in Mormonism. This can be painful at times, especially for girls who don’t submit easily to being groomed for marriage and motherhood. In interviews, I asked what respondents thought about the different roles Mormon boys and girls played while they were in high school. Most men said it was simply not on their radar at that time (and some were surprised enough by the question that I suspect it is not much on their minds even now). But many women had clearly thought a good deal about the question, and not just in hindsight.
• Many Mormons will take exception to this portrayal of the “separate spheres” in the LDS Church. Women and men are equal, they say, but they have different and clearly defined roles; men have priesthood and women have motherhood.10 This focus on the strictly gendered division of duties in the church became a hallmark of Mormonism after World War II, so it is the religious and cultural expectation most living Mormons have always known. Men have gone out to work, and women have stayed home with the children; men run the church, and women do not.
• The church’s evolving tug of war over women’s roles is encapsulated by “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” a 1995 First Presidency statement that upholds a gendered division of labor as divinely ordained. Although the Proclamation is not included as scripture in the LDS canon, it is often quoted in General Conference and has been framed and displayed in thousands of Mormon homes. “By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families,” it reads. “Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners.” Herein lies a tension, because in Mormonism to “preside” means to have charge over. In the home, then, the task of presiding is given to the husband “by divine design,” which would seem to be a clear approval of patriarchy. However, the Proclamation also insists that husbands and wives are “equal partners,” which makes the old-fashioned idea of a man presiding significantly more complicated. If a disagreement arises, does the husband have the right to overrule his wife? Do they take turns deciding? How are terms like “equality” and “partnership” to coexist next to ones like “preside”? These are the kinds of questions that define Mormonism’s ongoing negotiation of women’s roles.
• What do smaller families mean for Mormon women? Many studies have shown that having fewer children correlates with additional years of completed education for women, which leads to the second point: many Mormon women are taking advantage of higher education. Education in Mormonism has long been put forward as a positive good, with church leaders encouraging young people to get all the education they can and emphasizing an LDS scripture that “the glory of God is intelligence.”32 Mormons believe that education is not merely a stepping stone to a better career in this life but also a valuable refining fire for the soul, since any knowledge gained here on Earth can be taken into the world to come. However, church leaders have not always given the same advice about education to men and women. They have instructed men to magnify their skills so they can become successful at work and provide for a family. For women, by contrast, education is portrayed as a means to become better mothers who are able to teach and guide their children, and as a practical stopgap measure should a husband’s death or disability ever force a woman into the workplace.
• The NMS confirmed that Mormons with college degrees are 15 percent less likely to leave the church, but also discovered something else: this is not always the case for women. Having a college degree decreases women’s likelihood of disaffiliating, yes, but women who follow college with certain kinds of postgraduate education like an MA or a PhD are actually more likely to leave. Women’s retention does not appear to be adversely affected when they receive professional degrees in law, medicine, or business; the correlation between postgraduate education and leaving the church exists solely for women with academic degrees. Among men, additional education correlates with greater retention no matter what kind of advanced degree is pursued. If further research bears this out (and we should keep in mind that the number of Mormon women with advanced degrees is small enough to encourage caution about generalizing these results), it is worth asking why some very highly educated women are more likely to leave the fold.
• Only 67 percent of Millennial former Mormons had mothers who worked outside the home, compared to 75 percent of those who remain self-identified as Mormons.
• This does not necessarily mean there is a causal factor at work here. There is no evidence that merely having a stay-at-home mother makes a person more inclined to leave the church later.
• Mormonism’s Millennial generation is not diversifying at a rate that matches the rapidly changing general population, which is expected to be majority nonwhite by 2042.5 While the nation changes, Mormonism has remained much the same racially.
• System justification theory suggests that individuals do not always act in their own self-interest if forfeiting that interest might help bolster a system or institution they care about and benefit from—in this case, the LDS Church and its belief in prophetic authority. System justification theory acknowledges that groups that appear to be oppressed have their own opinions on the matter—whether, for our purposes, that is black Mormons who have found ways to justify the priesthood/temple ban that used to be in place or Mormon women who are often the strongest defenders of gender-based priesthood restrictions.
• About two-thirds of Mormons overall think blacks are responsible for their own condition, with 36 percent pointing to systemic discrimination. LDS Republicans are slightly more likely than US Republicans to cite discrimination (25 vs. 14 percent), but the national patterns basically hold true among Mormons: Democrats, nonwhites, and younger people point to racism more than Republicans, whites, and older people do.
• In general, individuals’ views on race seem most shaped by education, age, and proximity to other races, and less by religion.
• One area where Mormon views are considerably more positive than other predominately white groups is immigration, and in this religion does seem to play a role. In recent years, the LDS Church has taken public stands that can be viewed as proimmigration, from urging the federal government to allow young Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) designees to remain in the United States legally to forcefully stating, after then-candidate Donald Trump called for a ban on all Muslims entering the country, that the LDS Church supported religious freedom for everyone.
• Previous research indicates that there may also be a “missionary effect” at work here, meaning that Mormons’ views on immigration may be more positive than other conservative Americans’ because many Mormons have been immersed in missionary service abroad. The NMS confirmed that too: returned missionaries demonstrate a higher regard for the contributions of immigrants than Mormons who did not serve a mission, 64 percent to 58 percent. The appreciation for immigrants is highest of all among those missionaries who had to learn a foreign language for their mission (68 percent).
• Moreover, greater racial diversity in church leadership could go a long way toward helping nonwhite Mormons feel more represented in the LDS community.
• Lillian, as an Asian American, has wonderful memories of Chieko Okazaki, one of the most recognizable nonwhite world leaders the LDS Church has had; Okazaki served in the general Relief Society presidency in the 1990s. “She didn’t speak with the painful Utah ‘Primary teacher’ voice, she had had a career, she had experienced racism and sexism and other-ism and she had overcome so many things that women loved her because we could feel her love and truth,” Lillian says.
• in Mormonism, earlier statements from apostles and prophets can stay “on the books” and even in the teaching curriculum long after they have disappeared from the pulpit in General Conference.
• As PRRI CEO Robert P. Jones has put it, “Young adults are generally uncomfortable with politicized religion, and for them, same-sex marriage is not a moral battleground but simply a feature of everyday life.”
• In Elaine’s case, a loss of her testimony (belief) led to sexual experimentation (a behavior), which led to a sense that she was unworthy in God’s eyes (a belief) and therefore should not even attend church (a behavior). Belief and behavior tend to reinforce one another, which is something the Mormon religion has understood very well: it has consistently emphasized high behavioral standards, as well as doctrinal instruction, and Mormon youth have outpaced their non-Mormon peers on many behavioral measures.
• Research from the Barna Group about Protestant young adults suggests that Millennials’ most positive experiences and feelings about church are focused on relationships and opportunities to serve.
• Some Protestants who are concerned about retaining Millennials have written about the need for churches to become more relational and authentic, moving “away from the church-as-business model and into the church-as-relational-community model.”
• Millennials are the closest in age to the time they would have served an LDS mission, and we’ve already seen that they are the generation most likely to have served a mission. So for them, sharing their faith may simply feel more natural because doing so all day, every day was a recent experience. Another cause might be the sensibility that in this generation, every topic is on the table for discussion: whereas previous generations of Americans were taught that religion was one of the two topics not to be broached in polite company (the other being politics), Millennials have grown up with the notion that nothing is taboo.
• And when respondents were asked to choose up to three ways sacrament meeting might be improved (e.g., planning more music, allowing different instruments, having occasional guest speakers from the community, sending children under age eight to their own class), the only item that garnered any real traction was limiting sacrament meetings to forty-five minutes. That proved a popular idea. However, every generation liked this possibility, not just Millennials.
• Troy, thirty-seven, decided to become a vegetarian when he was just nine years old, but found little support for a plant-based diet in Mormon Utah, where he did not know any other vegetarians.34 “Sometimes I was basically forced to fast on Scout trips or at other church events because everything had meat in it or was cooked together with meat. I would pretend to eat the potatoes covered in meat grease so as not to cause a scene but I would throw them in the bushes instead.” All this, he says, caused him to think seriously about religious authority: I felt that my being a vegetarian was inspired by God. So, I had to develop nuance very early in my understanding of God and the church, to separate out what my leaders and teachers were telling me versus what I believed. In the end, that really helped me, to be able to develop that skill when I was young. But as an adolescent, it was difficult to be so different, especially in a culture where difference is not valued.35
• The NMS asked respondents whether they agreed with the statement “I believe the United States of America is the greatest country in the world.” Since this particular point of view reflects more than basic patriotism (“I love my country”), we will refer to it as “American exceptionalism.” Current Mormons express a high degree of exceptionalism overall, but there is a deep generational divide on the subject, with older Mormons far more likely than younger ones to agree that America is “the greatest country in the world.” In interviews and other conversations, Millennials expressed a general sense of appreciation for the United States but also a greater willingness to criticize it. One Millennial, when asked whether America is the greatest nation, honestly wanted to know, “Greatest at what?” It’s a fair question considering that in various studies, the United States has ranked first in private wealth and wealth inequality, eighteenth for quality of life, twenty-seventh for life expectancy, thirty-seventh for health care, and fifty-fifth for infant mortality.
• It used to be a truism in American politics that when people’s political positions collided with those of their religious tradition, they would likely privilege belonging to the tradition. That cannot be taken for granted any longer, especially among younger Americans. There is a strong correlation among them between progressive views on sexuality and disaffiliation from organized religion.
• Churches have forced people to choose, so that young adults who disagree with their religions’ LGBT stance can either compromise their personal values or obey their consciences and leave the faith. Churches have sent the message that homosexuality is a make-or-break issue, and many young people are choosing to break with their churches.
• The problem with Millennials’ greater liberalism on these social issues is that the church has often staked its claim in the opposite direction, such as with repeated public opposition to same-sex marriage or the Equal Rights Amendment for women. Modern Mormonism has carved out an identity that capitalizes on conservative family values, so what happens when those values begin to be a liability for some of its youngest adherents? This boils down to a question of religious authority: If young Mormons’ social values come into conflict with those of their religious leaders, whose opinions will they privilege—their own or the institution’s?
• “I feel like it’s very important to follow the prophet even if you don’t know the answer,” he explains. He adds that as an academic, it’s not like he is anti-intellectual; he thinks “there’s plenty of room for discussion or disagreement” in the church. But he places a high value on listening to the prophet, even if he is inclined at first to disagree: I need to, at the very least, have spiritual insight on what the prophet has to say. A lot of times it’s that I disagree but I follow… . We are just a bunch of men and women who don’t know the full picture and are trying to do the best with the information we are given … and then we update our belief system when there is new information. Line upon line.
• Mormonism currently holds two different ideals in tension. At one extreme is the rulebook of following the prophet, encoded by the late church president Ezra Taft Benson as “fourteen fundamentals.” These included the ideas that the teachings of a living prophet always supersede those of a former one, that the living prophet “is more vital … than the standard works” of scripture, and that the Lord would never permit the prophet to lead the people of the church astray.2 Benson advised church members that if they ever experienced a conflict between “earthly knowledge” and the prophet’s teachings, they should “stand with the prophet.” Even the notion that Mormons would call the president of their church “the prophet” is a mid-twentieth-century innovation; the practice can be dated to 1955, during the presidency of the exceptionally popular David O. McKay. Before 1955 the term “prophet” was used in LDS periodicals to refer to founding leaders Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, or else to prophets from scripture.3 Recently, obedience and following the prophet have become regular topics in LDS curriculum. In 2016, for example, they were reinforced in the revised seminary Doctrinal Mastery program for high school students. For the church as a whole, words such as “authority” and “obedience” have increased in frequency in General Conference usage in the last two decades.4 On the other hand, there has also been a countervailing trend in which some LDS leaders have reiterated that the prophet is not infallible and general authorities can make mistakes, as when Elder Dieter Uchtdorf acknowledged in 2013 that “there may have been things said or done that were not in harmony with our values, principles, or doctrine.”5 These are difficult approaches to hold in balance, and the fact that Uchtdorf did not specify which mistakes may have been made and by which leaders is an indication of just how taboo it is to criticize or publicly disagree with an LDS prophet or apostle. It is remarkably rare for the church to disavow statements or actions from its leaders, even long-dead ones.6 Even doctrines that were taught in the distant past and have not been emphasized in decades are almost never publicly renounced. Instead, they quietly slip out of leaders’ teachings and disappear from church publications.
• That’s not to say that Millennials differ in every way on questions of institutional authority. For instance, the NMS asked respondents to select which characteristics made general authorities “more effective leaders” in their eyes, and offered two pairs of traits to choose from: strength and confidence or authenticity and vulnerability. Six in ten Mormons said they prefer LDS leaders to project strength and confidence, while four in ten chose authenticity and vulnerability. This did not vary by more than a couple of points from one generation to another, so age was not a factor.
• Mormons do not perceive themselves to be following the prophet at the expense of their own spiritual authority or the opinions of those closest to them.
• Mormon Millennials may be paying less attention to LDS general authorities, but they are not replacing that source with a reliance on their own ability to make moral choices. The NMS shows, instead, that Millennial Mormons are much less likely than Boomer/Silent Mormons and GenXers to regard their own conscience or spiritual promptings as authoritative
• Perhaps the ability to regard one’s own spiritual experiences and interpretations as authoritative is something people grow into with age. Millennials are likely to credit personal relationships with trusted adults such as local church leaders, family members, and professional therapists. I would suggest that as some people age, they drift from relying primarily on those trusted elders to relying on themselves.
• Lisa, thirty-two, grew up in a Mormon family that privileged spiritual experiences of God and often shared their dreams and impressions with each other at home: “I felt the Spirit when this happened” or “I had this revelation.” The miraculous was as normal in their home as the weather. Her dad would read to her from the journals of their pioneer ancestors, who seemed to regularly have extraordinary encounters with God. Then Lisa went on a mission to Canada and ran headlong into the church’s culture of obedience, which had never been her primary experience of Mormonism even though she grew up in a small Utah town that was more than 90 percent LDS. The mission was an eye-opener for Lisa, and not in a good way. “My own spiritual experiences had always been my own authority, and on my mission I was told that the Church’s authority was more important,” she says. “Somewhere I decided that this was the voice I should listen to.” Lisa stopped journaling, and her personal prayer life suffered as she emphasized keeping the mission rules but neglected the devotional habits that had long been her spiritual lifeline. About halfway through the mission she realized she was “very disconnected with myself and with God.” In the decade since her mission, she has remained somewhat active in the LDS Church but never with the conviction and peace she used to have. She would like to reclaim her sense of spiritual authority and the deep, automatic connection she once felt with God, but the LDS Church “has become so institutional, which is not at all the way I experienced Mormonism in my childhood,” and it no longer feels like home.
• In Mormonism, there has long been an institutional bias against ever saying “no” to a calling from a church leader. This was elevated to the status of an apostolic utterance in 1996 when Elder Boyd K. Packer instructed members that “we do not aspire to calls in the Church, nor do we ask to be released. We are called to positions in the Church by inspiration.”22 It would be unwise to refuse, he indicated, because callings come from the Lord.
• The fact that Mormons are discouraged from discussing their blessings openly with one another has a perhaps unintended side effect in that individuals are free to interpret and reinterpret those blessings any way they wish, probing the words at various stages of life and arriving at new understandings they come up with themselves. No one in authority ever sits a Mormon down and declares, “This is what your patriarchal blessing means.” Because the blessings are so private, church members claim authority for their own evolving perceptions. This places the tradition of patriarchal blessings at a unique crossroads in Mormonism today: they have enough of an institutional overlay to provide structure, but the lived experience of them is so localized—indeed, sometimes hyperpersonalized—that they hold a claim on a rising generation that appears to prefer a more grassroots and intimate experience of Mormonism.
• In some ways, it’s not that surprising to see someone like James leave the church, because he shares a few broad demographic characteristics with former Mormons. In case it needs to be said again, however, correlation is not causation; a person’s having one or more of these does not cause a person to leave Mormonism.
• The first such factor is that James is a man, and as I’ve noted elsewhere, there’s a large body of research suggesting that in this country, men are generally less religious than women. They are also more likely to disaffiliate from organized religion.
• Something else James shares with other former Mormons is that his parents were divorced. Overall, 37 percent of former Mormons’ parents divorced before they turned eighteen, with the highest numbers coming among Millennials.
• Divorce might make it more difficult to give children a religious upbringing. One parent might be more zealous than the other about taking children to church when it’s his or her weekend for custody, for example, or one or both parents might remarry someone of another religion.
• James is also in step with other former Mormons politically. They are noticeably less likely to be Republican, as we saw in chapter 9. Only 38 percent of former Mormons identify as or lean Republican, compared to 57 percent of current Mormons.
• In other areas, James is not typical. One of these is education. Generally speaking, less educated people are more likely to leave Mormonism, but James is pursuing his second master’s degree.
• Other major differences are that James is heterosexual and married. Nonheterosexual respondents were more likely to leave Mormonism than “straight” people, and married individuals are noticeably more likely to stay than those who have never married.
• Moreover, James was a little older than the norm: he left Mormonism in his early thirties, whereas two-thirds of former Mormons in the NMS left Mormonism before that age, with the median age being nineteen.
• Somewhat to my surprise, other factors that we might think would be significant—like racial identification (though there is greater racial diversity in the former Mormon sample) or living outside of Utah—do not seem to matter much in whether people leave the faith.
• In general, leaving Mormonism is often correlated with being male, politically liberal, less educated, never married, from a divorced family, and/or LGBT. In all my conversations I did not find a single former Mormon who personified all of those categories simultaneously, though many, like James, embodied two or more.
• We also asked former Mormons how they felt about these same theological and doctrinal questions when they were in high school. What emerges most clearly when we compare these beliefs side by side is that a majority of former Mormons, especially older ones, already had significant cracks in their testimony during adolescence. For example, 42 percent believed as teenagers that the leaders of the LDS Church were God’s prophets on the earth today, meaning that nearly six in ten did not; six in ten also did not believe that God’s priesthood authority was reserved only for men or that the Book of Mormon was factual history. What all this suggests is that many, though not all, former Mormons were already doubters as adolescents. It’s helpful to remember that this retrospective question is asking respondents to reach back years or even decades into the past, and sometimes in hindsight, we all have a tendency to remember things differently based on our circumstances and beliefs now. Thus, it’s possible that former Mormons remember themselves as being more critical in high school than they actually were. On the other hand, the median age for defection was nineteen in the NMS, so it’s reasonable that many of today’s former Mormons were doubters even back then.
• Two Utah-based studies in the early 1980s—when the church was growing numerically at a rate of 5 or 6 percent per year—show that even during that period of rapid growth, the rate of Mormons dropping out or switching to another religion actually exceeded the rate of people converting to the LDS Church in Utah.
• Generationally, then, we can see that social issues like the church’s treatment of women and the LGBT community appear to be galvanizing disaffection among younger former Mormons. Another major concern for them was feeling judged or misunderstood, which tied for first place among Millennials and ranked third among GenXers. This was a theme I heard many times in interviews, especially from women. One shared the humiliation of getting ready to speak in sacrament meeting and having an elderly lady cover her legs with a coat in front of the whole congregation, because the speaker’s skirt was deemed too short. Another told of a Primary president who booted two autistic boys out of Primary one day because they weren’t sitting quietly; she also told them that they would not be worthy to hold the priesthood when they turned twelve. I heard so many painful stories. Obviously, these were balanced by other stories of love and acceptance, but those who had experienced the sting of judgment did not forget. It was also interesting how many Millennials, in describing their own religious beliefs and values, used phrases like “I don’t want to judge them, but …” or “We all struggle with different things, so let’s not judge each other.” This is a generation that does not want to be judged harshly themselves, and seems careful about not judging others in turn.
• “I see countless people in my generation who are spiritually orphaned, so to speak. People who don’t feel like they can bring their complexity or their authenticity to the religious experience.” He dreams of a Mormonism that is less tribal, less judgmental, less either/or than the faith of his parents’ generation. He wants people to be able to come to church and bring their whole selves.
• Moreover, we have enough information about the broad strokes of America’s changing religiosity to say that Mormonism would need to be extraordinary in its ability to resist its environment in order for a majority of leavers to return. Few young adults who leave other religions appear to be returning, judging from the fact that almost with every passing year, the percentage of Nones increases and the percentage of young adults who are affiliated with traditional religion continues to shrink.
• As well, many Millennials are having fewer children and having them later in life, so if having children has traditionally been the main catalyst prompting people to return to religious activity, that is not good news for organized religion.
• Testimony questions still abound, though many people welcomed the church’s recent efforts toward historical transparency and theological nuance in the Gospel Topics essays.
• In the 1950s, sociologist Thomas O’Dea published an insightful book called The Mormons, in which he argued, among other things, that higher education would introduce such a strain of theological relativism to the LDS Church that it would decrease faithfulness among the religion’s brightest and best. In fact, the opposite happened; as we saw in chapters 1 and 11, it is often the best-educated individuals who have the strongest ties to Mormon orthodoxy.
• Then in the 1980s, Rodney Stark famously predicted that Mormonism would be the “next world faith,” with as many as a quarter of a billion adherents by 2080.3 Stark chronicled Mormonism’s astonishing growth in its first century and a half, then predicted that because of Mormons’ vigorous missionary activity, high fertility, and seeming tendency to be an attractive alternative in nations beset by secularization, it would continue to grow at a rate of between 30 and 50 percent every decade. Mormonism’s postwar explosion showed no sign of slowing in the early 1980s; in the year that Stark published his article, membership grew by more than 5 percent. In fact, Mormonism obliged him for a decade—so much so that Stark gamely published a follow-up article called “So Far So Good”—but has slowed noticeably since, especially in the last few years.4 Stark’s work was a critical contribution in getting scholars and others to take Mormonism seriously as an emerging religion, but his membership projections now seem impossible.
• If there’s a lesson to be learned from O’Dea’s unrealized anxieties on the one hand and Stark’s unbridled optimism on the other, it’s that present conditions are no guarantee of future results.
• What should worry LDS leaders is not simply that the church will lose ground numerically—though for any institution of course that is a valid concern—but that it will become an echo chamber of its own making, a dogged remnant whose followers retreat to their own safe subculture. How the church chooses to finesse the social shifts we saw in Part Two of this book—specifically, those regarding marriage, gender, racial diversity, and LGBT issues—will signal which trajectory it is going to follow. Will it become an entrenched, embattled subculture, or will it accommodate its message to retain cultural relevancy?
• If there is a brilliant sociological theory that explains where Mormonism is now and how it might navigate these new challenges, it is not found in O’Dea’s pessimism about Mormon secularization or Stark’s buoyant assurances that all will be well; it’s in Armand Mauss’s 1994 book The Angel and the Beehive. Mauss argued that Mormons always exist in a state of tension between a desire to accommodate their host culture and a simultaneous need to stand apart as a peculiar people.
• The “angel,” according to Mauss, is the other-worldly spirit of Mormonism, the charismatic strain that embraces exclusive truth claims and distinctive theology. The “beehive” is the industry of Mormon culture in its quest to assimilate into American society. This ever-present pendulum between assimilation and retrenchment has ensured that Mormonism has successfully maintained a distinctive edge even while making theological changes that might have been unthinkable to previous generations: it eliminated polygamy in 1890, theocracy in the early twentieth century, and a racially determined priesthood/temple ban in 1978. At one time, those would have been considered unimaginable concessions—particularly polygamy, which is enshrined in LDS scriptures, not just policy or precedent. And yet the church changed. When those doctrines and policies were seen as standing in the way of its mission as LDS leaders understood it, those leaders jettisoned aspects of Mormonism that were impeding the religion’s progress.