[DevilsAdvocate]

DarkJedi wrote:

I read the article a couple days ago, and it is mildly interesting. I think your last paragraph nailed it – the church has no reason to change it so it’s doubtful it will change any time soon.

That’s the thing, I think there actually are some good reasons to at least consider changing the WoW interpretation such as the glaring inconsistency between what D&C 89 actually says and Jesus and Joseph Smith drinking wine as if there was nothing wrong with it versus it now being treated as an unacceptable sin that supposedly makes members that disobey these strict expectations “unworthy.” And from a practical standpoint it unnecessarily limits the pool of potential faithful followers which can have a compounded effect because the Church currently depends so much on members being married to another active member and successfully passing LDS traditions on to their children to retain followers and doesn’t do a very good job of attracting and retaining individual followers without family ties to the Church.

So, for example, if there are women in the Church that don’t get married because there aren’t enough “worthy” LDS men or if an LDS family only has 2-3 children and they all fall away then it’s basically the end of the line for the LDS tradition in these cases which means many potential future grandchildren are lost. Sure some people are going to fall away regardless of what the Church does but the WoW is definitely a major sticking point that makes many feel like the Church is just not for them, they don’t belong, etc. Of course, recognizing some of these points would probably require Church leaders to “think outside the box” more than what looks like their typical caretaker approach to leadership. And while there isn’t necessarily much vocal activism to change the WoW the way we see with feminist concerns, LGBT rights, etc. (possibly because most members that drink and/or smoke have already voted with their feet) where I think the leaders already do feel constant pressure is simply the number of members falling away.

Basically it looks like the status quo is simply not going to produce the results they were used to seeing in past decades due to the more recent trends of the internet causing many long time active members to lose faith and leave as well as smaller family sizes on average. And to some extent I think Church leaders realize this and that’s one of the main reasons they took action to lower the mission age limits and we hear them pleading for members to “stay in the boat”, “doubt your doubts”, and “give brother Joseph a break.” Well what happens if the significant losses continue and the mission age change, the push to keep the Sabbath day holy, etc. are not enough to sustain a healthy number of followers? What would be the next steps? Treating the WoW like some kind of sacred cow already doesn’t make much sense from a purely doctrinal stadpoint and it makes even less sense if the Church’s overall health and relevence is threatened to the point that it needs all the followers it can get instead of being happy to exclude potential converts and so many members raised in the Church over somthing like this.

[DevilsAdvocate]

SilentDawning wrote:

I hope I’m not giving you too much here about happiness. I’ve been fascinated by the topic, the fact there are entire scholarly journals on happiness studies. This TED talk presents a Harvard Professor presenting the impact of Money, Children and Marriage on happiness…The results are interesting.

1. Money does produce happiness, but the happiness per dollar gets less and less the more money you get.

2. Good marriages produce more happiness than being single after the honeymoon period happiness falls to a level that is higher than being single.

3. Divorce increases happiness if the marriage is bad.

4. Children do not produce happiness. There is a joy spike, particularly for women after birth, but happiness falls to a level that is below their happiness as single people.

…I found it interesting to run typical Mormon philosophy through these filters to see what they say about certain Mormon attitudes toward marriage, tithing, divorce, and having boatloads of children.

To be honest, I’m not sure happiness was ever a primary specific goal that Church leaders were really aiming for with some of their most heavily emphasized teachings and policies. Instead it seems like much of this is more about doing your perceived duty and conforming to established LDS expectations. Sure Church leaders will give some lip service to happiness but as far as I can tell that is largely based on magical thinking (I.E. God will supposedly bless you if you do what you are supposed to) and assumptions such as that God supposedly designed us to fulfill these expected roles (so in theory they should lead to more happiness than going against our supposed purpose in life). So it’s no surprise that Church leaders are apparently happy to let many Church members believe they should pay a full 10% of their income as tithing even if they have to go increasingly into debt and can’t afford to pay their bills, they should go ahead and get married and have many children as soon as possible and not wait to finish college or have a decent career first, and that women should be stay-at-home moms as much as possible.

But do Church leaders even want to know about any cases where these expectations don’t work out so well for Church members much less acknowledge the possible role of these expectations in actual real life results? Not as far as I can tell. And for all their talk about the importance of families and “traditional” marriage between one man and one woman my guess is that the Church itself is already more of a threat to “traditional” marriage than some of their favorite boogeymen/scapegoats of choice like same-sex marriage and porn/nudity due to A) the threat of divorce when one marriage partner loses faith in the Church and some members never getting married in the first place because they think they can only date and seriously consider marrying a “worthy” Church member in the temple. Church leaders could easily come out and make a strong statement that loss of belief in the Church by itself is not a good reason to seriously consider divorce (1 Corinthians 7:12-14) but instead we typically hear about how bad, wrong, unacceptable, and scary the outside world supposedly is which tends to have the opposite effect.

[DevilsAdvocate]

Reuben wrote:

We toss around a lot of terms like “relevant” and “Christ-centered” and “inclusive” as if, if the Church were more those things, more people would stay. If I may be allowed to be the person who points out the elephant in the room, I’d like to add “true” to the list. If the Church were as obviously true as I grew up thinking it must be, I think hardly anybody would leave…Or were we taking that as an axiom? Or not talking about it because it’s not something the Church can change? Both?

I see this as something they can’t really do much to change other than maybe stop making quite so many truth claims that don’t hold up to scrutiny very well and stop depending so much on so many different doctrines needing to be true at the same time. Why is it that typical practicing Catholics can know about some of their church’s less than flattering history, not believe in official doctrines like transubstantiation, etc. without automatically feeling like they need to leave their church permanently over this the way we see so often in the LDS Church? To me it looks like it is the Church itself that has set the expectation that truth is supposed to trump practically every other consideration and now that approach is starting to backfire in a big way.

In reality even belief in God and life-after-death is mostly a matter of speculation and most people have no reliable way of knowing for sure if they exist in the first place. So relying on any assumptions about these when making important decisions involves a leap of faith and people should be aware of that and comfortable with it if that’s what they want to do. And for the LDS Church it is not just uncertainty for members to have to live with once they face the facts but many inconsistencies in the history, scriptures, etc. that make it increasingly difficult for many of them to believe in the Church’s claims about revelation, prophets, etc. once they know about some of these details. That’s why I think Church leaders’ primary goal should not be about numbers or anything like that but simply to try to make Church membership more of a positive experience for more people than it currently is so that even if many members will inevitably lose faith at least they would have less to legitimately complain about in that case.

[DevilsAdvocate]

nibbler wrote:

DevilsAdvocate wrote:

There are people raised in the Church that go through a temporary rebellious phase that eventually settle down but it seems like very few of them ever return to full activity in the Church compared to the ones that followed the typical LDS life script from cradle-to-grave. In the leaked video about single adults they were saying only 30% of LDS single adults are active in North America and 20% internationally and that most of these became inactive by age 20. And I think that’s precisely why Church leaders lowered the mission age limits and want young adults to hurry and get married. And now we are hearing reports that about 50% of returned missionaries are falling away shortly after their missions. What Church leaders should be asking in my opinion is why don’t more of these single adults want to stay in the Church? What do they really get out of the Church? In my case, after I returned from my mission the main thing I got at that point was guilt-trips, stress, less free-time, etc. And I still believed in the Church and didn’t hate the Church at all but there just wasn’t enough there to make me want to go back so I remained completely inactive for several years and ended up marrying another inactive Mormon as a direct result.

Yes. I think sometimes leadership mistakes the symptoms as the cause.

Not only that, but even if they actually do recognize some legitimate causes of inactivity such as the dramatic difference between being married and single in the Church it looks like they typically don’t drill down and analyze this data further; instead we generally hear things like Ballard, Hales, etc. telling single men to just get to work seriously dating and get married already. Well if “the gospel” according to the LDS Church was really as great and wonderful as they claim then it seems like the Church shouldn’t have to depend so much on people being married to another active member and a general sense of obligation due to believing in the claims about exclusive truth, authority, etc. in the fist place; in theory single members should already want to stick around because they should be able to tell the positive difference the Church is supposed to make and get undeniable happiness and satisfaction from supposedly doing the right thing (John 7:17; 1 Thess. 5:21). Instead the current reality for many single members is that if they take the Church’s teachings seriously it is basically a monk-like life of sexual deprivation or condemnation and guilt-trips of being repeatedly told they are unworthy simply for being human; or perhaps worst of all an emotional roller-coaster ride back and forth between these literally painful states which was my own personal experience as a single adult until I finally gave up on the idea of “repenting” until after I was married at minimum.

[DevilsAdvocate]

SilentDawning wrote:

I wish people still remembered John Dehlin’s study about why Mormons leave. I think he had a really big sample size, and it highlighted faith issues as the major reason people leave — not reasons that make the person leaving out to be an apostate sinner...Here is an overview of what he found: Key takeaway:

Quote:

Respondents of the study cited 15 “major factors” and 13 “minor factors” as reason for losing belief in the church. Among the major issues were a loss of faith in the Book of Mormon, problems with church history, loss of faith in Joseph Smith and conflicting theological issues…Factors more significant to men who were surveyed included losing faith in God/Jesus, science, anachronisms in the Book of Mormon and problems with the Book of Abraham. Issues more significant to women were the church’s stance on women, women and the priesthood, the church’s stance on homosexuals, polygamy/polyandry and abuse.

Overall “minor factors” that scored low in the study included the desire to sin or having been offended by a fellow church member.

One reason I wouldn’t read too much into the results of John Dehlin’s survey is that this depends entirely on who even knew about the survey and also cared enough about it to respond. Because of that it almost certainly over-represents a specific group that are by and large disaffected members and ex-Mormons that were once heavily invested in the Church, often married to another active member, that studied their way out of a traditional LDS testimony by reading uncorrelated information on the internet and that like to talk about it on DAMU and ex-Mormon websites. That is all fine and good for that specific segment but Church leaders are apparently concerned about all members that fall away or lose commitment regardless of the primary reasons why.

My guess is that the single largest group of inactive members (literally millions) are like SamBee described, basically people raised in the Church or converts that never really got into the Church that much to begin with and often didn’t go on missions or marry another active member. For this group I think pre-marital sex, the WoW, porn, and even simply feeling like they have better things to do on Sunday are major reasons why they fell away but I think this is not so much because they were sinners that “lost the spirit” the way Church leaders like to assume as much as simply that their non-LDS lifestyle only made it that much less likely for them to go on missions or marry an active Mormon. Basically at this stage, before getting married, for many young adults it is simply easier and much less painful to “sin” by the Church’s standards than it is to avoid “sin.” But after getting married to an active member in many cases it would actually be harder to “sin” than just forget about the idea of it if it is something their spouse will notice and disapprove of. So it looks like marriage to another active member is one of the single biggest factors at play here, with full-time missions being another major factor.

There are people raised in the Church that go through a temporary rebellious phase that eventually settle down but it seems like very few of them ever return to full activity in the Church compared to the ones that followed the typical LDS life script from cradle-to-grave. In the leaked video about single adults they were saying only 30% of LDS single adults are active in North America and 20% internationally and that most of these became inactive by age 20. And I think that’s precisely why Church leaders lowered the mission age limits and want young adults to hurry and get married. And now we are hearing reports that about 50% of returned missionaries are falling away shortly after their missions. What Church leaders should be asking in my opinion is why don’t more of these single adults want to stay in the Church? What do they really get out of the Church? In my case, after I returned from my mission the main thing I got at that point was guilt-trips, stress, less free-time, etc. And I still believed in the Church and didn’t hate the Church at all but there just wasn’t enough there to make me want to go back so I remained completely inactive for several years and ended up marrying another inactive Mormon as a direct result.

[DevilsAdvocate]

mom3 wrote:

Quote:

not wanting to strictly observe the Sabbath day

I’d laugh at this one if it wasn’t so true.

A few years ago my daughter dated an LDS young man who told my daughter that the reason her father had left the church was that we had taken our kids on family bike rides on Sundays. This was the seed that started it all.

So for any of you wondering what happened to me, it all began with bike riding. Case closed.

Maybe it sounds silly but I think there really is something to this. I would summarize it as, “knowing the difference.” Basically if you generally go along with what the Church asks for and expects to the point that you get used to it and it becomes a familiar routine then in many cases it seems normal and not all that difficult to tolerate. But then if you deviate from this for very long and find out that it is actually much easier and more enjoyable to not do all this then it only makes it that much harder to try to live up to the Church’s expectations even if you are open to the possibility than if you are just doing what you always have.

Church leaders like to portray this kind of thing as something supposedly wrong with the members that fall away but personally I think a better explanation is simply that it shows the limitations of who the Church is typically going to appeal to or not. In fact, I think a lot of these points could be summarized as a single point, namely that the Church currently doesn’t compete with the alternatives all that well for the average person because in so many different cases once people seriously consider or actually try out the alternatives instead of dismissing them, being afraid of them, etc. then going back is not very likely in practice.

[DevilsAdvocate]

hawkgrrrl wrote:

– Why is “pornography” not lumped in with “chastity”? Is that evidence of poor social skills among the pornography set (pornography doesn’t require you to hold a conversation)?

– The utter obsession with pornography is just not good. I’m not a fan of it either, but sheesh, are we even talking about the same thing? I’ve heard folks in Utah County refer to a billboard for Victoria’s Secret as “pornography.” Is the pornography-meter so heightened that there are hyper-sensitive people out there trashing their marriages over minor human weakness?

I suspect it’s because they view pornography as a bigger and completely different type of threat and that’s why they showed it in a bigger bubble than most of the other issues including chastity. If you think about it chastity is largely only a serious threat to typical Church members as far as leading to falling away from the Church before they go on missions and/or are married after which sex is magically changed to completely acceptable overnight as long as they don’t commit adultery; but even after members have already safely cleared these hurdles porn/nudity continues to be a threat (in Church leaders’ eyes) in that many active Church members will continue to view it occasionally which means they are already technically not living “the gospel” by LDS standards even if they continue to attend church and go through the motions otherwise. On top of that, there is this whole highly questionable theory about supposedly “losing the spirit” and it’s not even just about members leaving permanently as much as the idea that anyone not completely on board with the program supposedly needs to repent and are on a dangerous slippery slope similar to the following description from the talk, “Can ye feel so now?”

Quentin L. Cook wrote:

While anything that lessens commitment is of consequence, two relevant challenges are both prevalent and significant. The first is unkindness, violence, and domestic abuse. The second is sexual immorality and impure thoughts. These often precede and are at the root of the choice to be less committed…Sexual immorality and impure thoughts violate the standard established by the Savior…We were warned at the beginning of this dispensation that sexual immorality would be perhaps the greatest challenge. Such conduct will, without repentance, cause a spiritual drought and loss of commitment. Movies, TV, and the Internet often convey degrading messages and images…there is virtually no place on earth that cannot be impacted by salacious, immoral, and titillating images. This is one reason why pornography has become such a plague in our day.

[DevilsAdvocate]

SamBee wrote:

P*rn is an addiction, M isn’t in my view.

Why? What exactly are the differences between porn and masturbation that make porn an automatic addiction that don’t apply equally as well to masturbation or reading romance novels for that matter? Also, what exactly is the difference between a genuine addiction and something that people just happen to naturally like? For example, sugar is easily more harmful to more people on average than occasionally viewing porn/nudity ever was due to the real negative physical health effects of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc. so why don’t we ever hear about how everyone supposedly needs to be cured of their sugar “addiction” to the point of expecting complete abstinence for everyone the way we repeatedly hear about porn in the Church? As far as I can tell the main difference is simply the presumption that people shouldn’t be doing this, which is questionable to begin with in the case of porn/nudity whereas it makes more sense in the case of smoking, drugs, etc.

I can certainly see why some people that already think masturbation is alright and perfectly healthy would still think porn is bad, distasteful, etc. but at the same time I think it’s misleading and unfair to call every man that hasn’t completely stopped viewing porn/nudity permanently an “addict” especially if it basically amounts to a few minutes here and there and doesn’t negatively impact their everyday life in any noticeable way. Personally, I see most of the hype about porn “addiction” as pseudoscience that many Church members and other moral crusaders have been spreading largely as yet another form of shaming and scare-tactics to try to browbeat men into submission in this case. As far as the Church sponsored addiction recovery program for porn, I think it will be hard to even get past the first step of traditional 12-step programs in many cases:

Quote:

We admitted we were powerless over __—that our lives had become unmanageable.

The problem with this is that for many of these supposed porn “addicts” their lives are not unmanageable at all; they basically continue to go about their business more or less the same way they would if they never looked at porn/nudity and my guess is that the only reason many of them are at these meetings at all is simply because their wife found out about their porn habit and freaked out and/or they made the mistake of confessing this to priesthood leaders. If some of them feel like these support groups are helpful then good for them, but personally I wouldn’t expect to see a very high level of “success” if expecting men to never look at porn/nudity again is the goal (which it currently is for the Church).

[DevilsAdvocate]

Quote:

The study of the doctrines of the gospel will improve behavior quicker than a study of behavior will improve behavior. Preoccupation with unworthy behavior can lead to unworthy behavior. That is why we stress so forcefully the study of the doctrines of the gospel.

There’s no doubt that if there’s one thing the Church is fairly good at it is controlling the behavior of its followers at least in terms of a few expectations like the WoW, no pre-marital sex, full-time missions, temple marriage, tithing, garments/modesty, etc. Maybe that’s what Packer was thinking about when he made this claim but if so I think he was giving way too much credit for this to the idea that the study of the doctrines will supposedly lead to a “mighty change of heart” and “no more disposition to do evil” on an individual and personal basis and not enough credit to simple family/social pressure where members often go along with these things in large part because other Mormons around them expect them to and will be very disappointed with them if they don’t. And as it turns out, most of these items on the checklist are typically externally visible to at least one or two other Church members most of the time for members that don’t ever deviate too far from the path for very long if at all.

All you have to do is look at the relative lack of success of the Church’s disapproval of porn and masturbation to see that it’s not nearly as simple as Church members being told, “do this, don’t do that” because God supposedly said so and then their behavior will follow suit when no one is looking. And it’s not like most active members were once chain-smokers, alcoholics, drug addicts, etc. and then gave up these habits; in many cases it’s more like the Church helped prevent them from ever getting caught up in these habits in the first place or alienated and excluded many Church members that already drink, smoke, and/or had sex before they were married which gives an illusion of a higher rate of success on this front than there really is. But maybe the biggest question of all about this claim is whether it’s really fair to call much of this behavior the Church has pushed a clear improvement over the alternatives in the first place. To me it looks like many of these points are more about perpetuating LDS Mormonism and its established traditions than anything that actually benefits the individual members, society as a whole, etc. that much if at all in this life which for all we really know could possibly be the only life we will ever have.

[DevilsAdvocate]

Jorsen wrote:

…I’ve had an interesting turn of events…So I’ve been settled into an agnostic almost atheistic role…I’ve tried a few atheist friendly churches…didnt find my groove there. I stumbled across a church in Orlando FL that claimed to be a ‘spiritualist’ church where the pastor is a psychic/medium…I went to a couple of services and took notes about whatever the psychic mentioned to me. Slowly building an extremely subjective and anecdotal evidence for there being “something” spiritual going on…Fast forward to last September on the 25th. The pastor asks if she can give me a quick reading which I gladly agree to. She says I’m about to have a drastic change in my job but things will be just fine. Just “go with the flow” she says. She says I will be in a much better place come Feb/Mar…I was fired over a fluke ‘nothing’ on September 26th from a job of over 10 years the very next day. I was just hired in my field and I start on Feb 20th. She said Feb and March. Everything is right on time…How on earth could this be coincidence? It cannot be. I worked in Tampa. Not in Orlando. She barely knew me..didnt even remember my name…So there’s something spiritual going on in this life. This much I feel confident in.

I am hardly orthodox…I don’t have a testimony of the church (other than how much I love it and how much light I think it has and good it does). I don’t have a testimony of joseph smith (even though I do consider him a prophet albeit with obvious shortcomings) I don’t even have a strong testimony of Jesus Christ (read too much about how he might be made up…historically speaking)…But I tell you in all honesty…I really strongly think that there is something spiritual in this world…Yet I still have a desire to go to the LDS church….You’d think I’d just want to stick with the spiritualist one…yet I am torn. I know I don’t believe everything in the bible is inspired….and I almost don’t care if the BoM is 100% historically true either…I just know everytime I’ve driven by and been on the temple grounds in Orlando that I’ve felt the spirit. I feel it at church. I feel it when I take the sacrament. That helps me. I’m still struggling to have it at my house and in my bedroom when I pray (I don’t pray enough)… I appreciate any advice or thoughts.

I’m glad you shared your story about the psychic, personally I really like to hear about unusual experiences like this. In fact, experiences like this of a few people I know personally where I don’t believe they were lying are one of the main reasons I’ll probably never be an atheist because I can’t explain them very well at all using atheist assumptions and it is simply easier for me to just take them at face value and admit that I don’t really know what they mean than try explain them away somehow.

As far as how to stay in the Church (if you want to) without a traditional LDS testimony, my main suggestion would be to not take the Church’s teachings and demands too seriously. Other Church members will definitely take some of this very seriously and expect you to do the same if you stick around for long but just because they say it that doesn’t mean you need to believe it. You could say no to things like callings, tithing, etc. on a case-by-case basis without having to leave the Church behind altogether if you don’t want to.

[DevilsAdvocate]

On Own Now wrote:

A thread from years ago that is a pretty apropos response to this program:

http://forum.staylds.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5057

Lot’s of great comments, including this one from DevilsAdvocate:

DevilsAdvocate wrote:

What they need to realize is that many if not the majority of disaffected members are never going to “repent” and regain a traditional LDS testimony and they often only put up with the Church as much as they still do mostly for the sake of their relationships with remaining faithful members. So in cases like this any hint of the idea that we are broken and need to be fixed mostly adds to the problem on both sides. It is aggravating to many disaffected members that already feel like they are doing fine with their current beliefs and/or they can’t really believe anything different than what they already do and it also encourages some of the remaining faithful members to have unrealistic expectations and judgmental and disrespectful attitudes toward members with different beliefs.

I had forgotten about that thread. To be honest, at this point I think Church leaders probably do realize that many disaffected Church members will never return but they typically see this as something wrong with these members more than anything wrong with the Church and the way it currently operates and they apparently think it is worth it to pester many Church members that will never return for the sake of any few that they hope will actually heed the call to “repentance.” That’s where I think they are wrong because this whole scorched earth style approach of nagging people to strictly conform to so many very specific beliefs, rules, and routines and acting like the ones that don’t are a lost cause unless they get their act together will end up leaving many people with a negative impression of the Church and make it harder for faithful and obedient members to get along with less faithful members and non-members very well.

It contributes to pointless and unnecessary family strife in many cases and even divorce in the worst cases. There are some disaffected members and ex-Mormons that basically don’t want their children indoctrinated in the Church the way they were because they see it as harmful overall. Results like this don’t reflect very well on a church that claims to be Christian, family oriented, a force for good, etc. And it doesn’t just impact the inactives and their families it could also contribute to to the burnout, loss of faith, etc. for some of the leaders and missionaries asked to carry out this order. My guess is that most of these inactive RMs already don’t really believe in the restoration story and/or don’t really like the Church very much at this point.

So reiterating the restoration story and challenging them to return is typically not going to be nearly enough to overcome the fundamental reasons why they left in the first place and even if some of them did go back if they still don’t really feel like it’s for them it will be a temporary effect of the outside pressure that will be hard if not impossible to sustain in sufficent levels to overcome the most common sources of dissatisfaction with the Church. That’s why I think a much better and more efficient solution would simply be to at least try to give members fewer reasons to want to leave and more reasons to want to stay in the first place. This would make the Church more of an environment that more wayward members could return to and feel comfortable about staying around and supporting, even if mostly for the sake of their families, community, etc. than what we see now.

[DevilsAdvocate]

DarkJedi wrote:

Our stake has been chosen to pilot a new reactivation program aimed at MP holders who are inactive and have served missions or are endowed. This was presented as “revelatory” to an apostle I won’t publicly name. Each ward is supposed to choose at least one of these individuals (preferably more than one) and send a priesthood leader (defined as bishopric, EQP, HPGL, or stake presidency) coupled with a full time missionary to visit. The missionary is supposed to give an abbreviated version of the restoration lesson and they are supposed to inquire about the person’s mission experiences (if he served one). They are then supposed to “challenge” (his word, I was surprised the word wasn’t “invite”) the person to come back to church. The missionary is involved to bring “bold enthusiasm” while the leader brings life experience. The apostle, through the AA, is expecting a report prior to GC. We are one of 10 stakes involved. The promise is “many” will return.

Why do they expect this to be any different from other programs they have made a big push for recently such as, “keeping the Sabbath Day holy” and, “hastening the work” where there was so much talk but little to point to in the way of noticeable results after the fact? To me it sounds like Church leaders are becoming increasingly desperate as if the losses are impossible to ignore anymore but they don’t really know what to do about it so they keep trying different possible solutions hoping to change major trends they don’t like to see. I almost feel sorry for them at this point (Matthew 15:14).

There are perfectly understandable reasons why many of these RMs are inactive and in most cases it’s absolutely not due to a lack of familiarity with the restoration story and high pressure sales tactics like the “commitment pattern.” But are Church leaders even trying to understand why so many members basically don’t want to have anything to do with the Church anymore? Not as far as I can tell; instead it is just more of the same old approach of telling the rank-and-file members to try harder to make the same old product work and sell better than it really does in practice for average people nowadays. They wouldn’t even need to make radical changes in core doctrines or anything like that to make the Church much more appealing to more people than it is now, just be a little more careful about what they focus on the most, try to improve the experience of being an active Mormon in terms of callings, meetings, home teaching expectations, etc.

[DevilsAdvocate]

One of the most interesting things to me about this book and how it applies to the LDS Church is the fact that the majority of American Church members are conservatives that typically vote Republican. For example, in a recent Pew survey 70% of self-identified Mormons either identify with or lean toward the Republican party which was higher than any other religious group in the poll including the Southern Baptists and various evangelicals. By contrast, 44% of American Catholics identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party versus 37% Republican and 19% independent which was about the same as all US adults on average.

Maybe this difference is mostly a product of more diversity among Catholics and more of them living in large cities where the Democratic Party is more popular on average whereas the highest concentration of Mormons are in traditionally red states like Utah, Idaho, and Arizona where the majority have voted Republican for decades. But looking at these research results where purity/degradation, in-group loyalty/betrayal, and authority/subversion were not nearly as important to American liberals as they were to conservatives in their surveys it certainly makes sense why LDS Mormonism would not appeal to liberals nearly as well as conservatives given the heavy emphasis on prophets speaking for God and strictly upholding traditions like the WoW, chastity, garments, etc.

And now we are seeing many ex-Mormons and disaffected Mormons that especially dislike the treatment of homosexuals and women in the Church because they see it as unequal, unfair, and oppressive. For example, hawkgrrrl mentioned the excommunication of Kate Kelly and John Dehlin in one of the articles on the wheat and tares site where it looks like the main reason they were excommunicated was liberal activism and pushing for change in a church that mostly wants to stay the same. Not too long ago there was an article about Harry Reid in the Salt Lake Tribune and he said something to the effect that the hardest part of being a Mormon Democrat was dealing with fellow Church members and some of them actually wrote letters to his local leaders saying he shouldn’t get a temple recommend.

Reid was a convert and I have a hard time believing that someone like that would be nearly as likely to join the Church nowadays as back when he joined the Church. Is there really much of a place for Democrats in the Church at this point? Haidt actually called the Republicans utilizing more of these “moral foundations” a “conservative advantage” and that Democrats could do a better job appealing to all these foundations than they have so far. But looking at the Pew results of 44% that already lean/identify Democrat versus 37% Republican and 18% independent, it doesn’t look good for the Church if it doesn’t appeal very well to about half the population at this point based on putting so much emphasis on things that don’t really resonate very well with American liberals/progressives and in some cases are actually viewed as a strike against the Church in their minds.

[DevilsAdvocate]

hawkgrrrl wrote:

Devils Advocate: I think reading Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age has an interesting twist on this idea. He talks about secularists being “haunted” by belief, and also that there is a worldview, an underlying set of assumptions, associated with secularism that goes unacknowledged. It’s part of what he calls a subtraction story (which he says is not accurate) – that the secular narrative we assume is that if we strip away the superstition and illogic and church abuses of religion, we’ll be left with “reality” (hence, the term “subtraction story”). But what he says is that there’s still something in the basement, even of an atheist, that they haven’t examined. There are these underlying beliefs and assumptions that haven’t really been examined.

To me, that is similar to the elephant and the rider. Like you, I wouldn’t specifically apply it to any one factual claim (or a set of them). Science, facts, research, all these things matter. The elephant and the rider is really about motives, unconscious assumptions, worldviews we take for granted, values–those types of beliefs (not factual ones). The elephant & the rider is about the post hoc justification process. The elephant goes where it goes, and the rider explains it. The rider isn’t guiding the elephant.

I don’t doubt that intuition, snap judgments, spontaneous emotions, un-provable assumptions, etc. play a significant role in the way people actually think and the real-life decisions they make and I definitely don’t think it would be a very worthwhile or realistic goal to try to eliminate this entirely in favor of supposedly purely “logical” thought. In fact, I think there are generally good reasons why people’s minds work this way and it has actually served them well more often than not. My main point is simply that I don’t believe this elephant and rider analogy is universally applicable to what we actually see in terms of human behavior and beliefs; basically it looks like it applies to some cases much better than others.

I see this elephant and rider metaphor as mostly just a simplified model Haidt found to be a useful and memorable way to try to explain the basic idea that not all thoughts are consciously controlled because some of them are automatic. For example, Haidt said that, “psychopaths reason but don’t feel” and “babies feel but don’t reason” to specifically make the point that these are two very different ways of thinking and that morality depends more on automatic feelings that are innate (not learned) than conscious reasoning because when the normal innate moral feelings are defective but the conscious reasoning ability is fine the moral results are ugly. So far the two main examples I have seen Haidt use this metaphor to explain are first automatic moral judgments and second a lack of willpower where people consciously think they should do one thing but end up doing another.

But even in these cases he doesn’t completely discount the rider (conscious reasoning) altogether but instead described it as something along the lines of the elephant (intuition, emotions, initial motivation) automatically leaning a certain way but that the rider can still sometimes manage to steer the elephant in a different direction. How else would you explain all the cases where people actually do demonstrate the willpower to go against what they feel like doing? In fact Mormonism itself at this point seems like it is often about strict discipline to not just do whatever you feel like whenever you feel like it. And these are cases where it actually makes sense why the elephant (automatic thought processes) would have an initial preference but not all beliefs, including many religious beliefs are automatic at all, some of them are clearly learned and/or arrived at in a conscious step-by-step thought process.

For example, why would the elephant care one way or another whether the rider believes the earth is round or flat other than perhaps providing a mild curiosity to know the truth? Things like that look like they are almost entirely a job for the rider (conscious thought) to figure out. So the explanation of the elephant already automatically wanting to do something and the rider making excuses for it after the fact like a lawyer certainly makes sense when the actual decision was not based on the rider’s stated reasons in the first place but this explanation doesn’t make nearly as much sense in cases where the consciously acknowledged reasons really do make all the difference between holding one belief over another because without these reasons the beliefs are completely different and typically stay that way until the underlying reasons to believe one thing over another change the whole equation.

[DevilsAdvocate]

hawkgrrrl wrote:

The Righteous Mind is one of my favorites. I also liked the Happiness Hypothesis. I’ve blogged about Haidt’s work many times:

https://wheatandtares.org/2015/02/03/explaining-belief-disbelief/

https://wheatandtares.org/2016/05/10/belief-vs-faith/

https://wheatandtares.org/2014/06/17/kate-john-liberalism-on-trial/

I read these articles on the wheat and tares site but to be honest I’m not sure Haidt was really trying to say that this “elephant and rider” metaphor applies to all or even most beliefs in general; to me it sounded like he was mostly talking about a subset of specific thoughts, intentions, etc. that are automatic such as typical moral judgments as opposed to conscious and deliberate thought. For example, these researchers asked people if it would be wrong for a man to have sex with a chicken from a supermarket before eating it to try to prove the point that most people will automatically feel that this would be wrong.

Then they followed this up by asking them to explain why it was wrong precisely because that is typically much harder for people to do in a very logical and convincing way in this particular case. In fact, Haidt claims that people will often come up with post-hoc justifications for snap judgments that were already made and did not depend on these stated reasons to arrive at in the first place. All that makes sense but if you look at something like the amount of scientific/technological progress that people have made in just a few thousand years then does that really look more like a product of the rider or elephant in this metaphor? Similarly, in an example like people losing faith over the Book of Abraham translation issues I don’t see why animal (non-verbal, subconscious) instincts would be needed to play much of a part in people drawing the conclusion that this doesn’t help the credibility of Joseph Smith’s claims about being a prophet.

If anything it seems like the low-level animal instinct would be for many Church members to give the Church’s story the benefit of the doubt because that is the pre-conceived bias and it is inconvenient or painful for many of them to seriously question their existing beliefs. But even some apologists that tried to defend the Church for years eventually changed their minds after thinking long and hard about some of these details and what they mean. To say this is like an elephant going where it wants to go seems like a real stretch. Where I think the elephant explanation would come into play would be something like Joseph Smith marrying women that were still married to other men because in theory why couldn’t God command people to do whatever he wants for whatever reasons? But to many people it just sounds wrong (intuitive moral judgment).

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