Thomas O’Dea

Thomas O’Dea recurs across Kyle’s notes as the Catholic sociologist who, in his 1957 study The Mormons, predicted that higher education would erode Latter-day Saint faithfulness — a forecast both of Kyle’s source books treat as a thesis worth testing against the evidence. Faith is Not Blind quotes the Hafens recounting how they and their classmates lived out what O’Dea called “Mormonism’s most significant problem”: the Church’s “great emphasis on [higher] education” set up “a serious and unavoidable conflict” because its “literalistic and authoritarian approach to religion collided with the skepticism and independence fostered by university-level studies” — O’Dea’s “ideal” confronting the “real.” For O’Dea, the stakes were the religion’s survival: “Upon [the outcome of this strain] will depend the future of Mormonism.”

The Next Mormons then reports that the prediction failed: O’Dea “argued… 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” — often “it is the best-educated individuals who have the strongest ties to Mormon orthodoxy.” The book casts O’Dea’s “pessimism” as the foil to sociologist Rodney Stark’s “unbridled optimism,” drawing the lesson that “present conditions are no guarantee of future results,” and pointing instead to Armand Mauss’s accommodation-vs.-peculiarity tension as the more durable frame.

Context: Thomas F. O’Dea (1915–1974) was an American sociologist of religion, best known for The Mormons (1957), an early and influential outside sociological study of the Latter-day Saint movement.

Where this appears

• The Next Mormons — his 1957 prediction that higher education would secularize Mormonism, reported as falsified and framed as the pessimist foil to Stark.
• Faith is Not Blind — quoted on “Mormonism’s most significant problem,” the collision of education and authoritative religion (the “ideal vs. real”).