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Hacking at the Leaves while Stumbling over the Roots: Modernity, Assimilation, and RLDS Mimicry of Oldline Decline
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Alan Goff Humn. 417—The Emergence of the Modern Era Term Paper Hacking at the Leaves while Stumbling over the Roots: Modernity, Assimilation, and RLDS Mimicry of Oldline Decline Introduction As Western societies move from modern epistemologies to postmodern ones, it is worth reflecting what we are beyond if we live in a postmodern world. Modernity has endured pretty rough handling by postmodern thinkers, so we ought not to be naïve in acquiescing to modern assertions. The Enlightenment version of modernity has taken the heaviest casualties in recent thought. The Enlightenment asserted several consistent propositions: (a) human reason is supreme over religion and tradition and is up to the task of understanding nature and guiding society, (b) human nature isn’t fixed and depraved but is progressive and susceptible to education and improvement, (c) the most important unit in society isn’t the family or the community but the individual (society exists to expand individual possibilities and actualities), and (d) science and the scientific method are tools to be used to reveal a world and society built on law while scientific understanding uncovers a world independent of the knower’s intellectual horizon. Other features of the Enlightenment deserve treatment, but these seem a fair summary. Each of these assertions has been trenchantly criticized by postmodernism. One of the best modern insights to emerge from the sociology of religion is the sect/church dialectic. When a new religious belief emerges, its leadership acts like a sect: it requires separation and purification of its members who must engage in unusual rituals, endure the scorn of their neighbors, sacrifice by contributing time and resources to the organization; they insist they have an exclusive truth that other religions have neglected or perverted. The ministry is often unpaid and uneducated. Their membership is called apart to be peculiar and otherworldly. But over generations the membership often becomes more prosperous and educated. Its leaders, in particular, feel the pain of being odd, so they begin a concerted effort to raise the prestige of the sect. As it conforms to the society around it, the sect becomes a church or a denomination. Its ministry often becomes paid and professional, emphasizing educational degrees and professionalism as a sign of having finally arrived in society. The church no longer claims to have exclusive truth but is much more ecumenical. It demands less of it members, believing sacrifice of the self isn’t the purpose of religion but realizing the potential of the individual is; it would never dream of excommunicating members for engaging in sinful conduct and becomes much more likely to condone actions that it formerly condemned. It is less likely to dictate standards of conduct to its members and more likely to emphasize individualism. It becomes more and more this-worldly, valuing social and political activism rather than an other-worldly reward for its members. The most notable example of this dialectic is the rapid decline in church membership, contributions, numbers of congregations, and other measures of vitality in mainline American Protestant churches since the 1960s. As these churches (Presbyterian churches, American Baptist, Episcopal, Disciples of Christ, Evangelical Lutheran, United Church of Christ, and the Methodist churches) made their peace with modernity, they also swung from any remnant of sect-like behavior to perch on the far end of the sect-denomination continuum. Every historical example we examine of religions moving from sect to church also corresponds to a decline in standard measures of church vitality. Such discussion is not only relevant but essential to dozens of related issues within the Mormon community. Within the Mormon tradition the two main branches exemplify the sect and denominational approaches. The LDS church has maintained its boundaries and distinctiveness. The RLDS church has assimilated to the Protestant mainstream, becoming much more denominational. Roger Launius has, in a series of articles, been the main voice asking questions about the impact of modernity and the sect/denomination dialectic in the Mormon tradition. More thorough discussion of the issues and the ideological assumptions undergirding Launius’s position holds the possibility of illuminating the place of religious belief in the world today. Philosophical Liberalism vs. Political Liberalism My focus is here on the impact of modernity upon religious belief. I have already narrowed modernity to its most notable position—the Enlightenment. To narrow even further, the most influential version of Enlightenment thought today is liberalism. To avoid potential confusion between the philosophical liberalism I will discuss and a concept frequently used today called political liberalism, let me make some distinctions. The autonomy of the individual is the paramount concern of a philosophical liberal. When faced with a problematical political issue such as abortion, the philosophical liberal will come down on the side of freedom of choice for the woman rather than the potential life of the fetus. Besides individualism, equality is a shibboleth of liberalism. Hierarchy or inherited privilege is anathema to the liberal. Both contemporary political conservatism and political liberalism are deeply indebted to this philosophical liberalism. Political conservatives tend to favor the free-market-capitalism-with-minimal- governmental-interference aspect of philosophical liberalism. Political liberals tend to favor the autonomous individual who decides about sexuality, reproduction, career choice, or education without coercion from government or society; all choices become mere preferences subordinated to the reality that we freely choose our religions, our genders, our jobs, our homes, our families, and our friends. I am not going to discuss political liberalism. To avoid confusion, I will use the term liberal modernity to refer to the philosophical concept I intend to discuss. Liberal modernity is the dominant ideology in our educational, government, and media institutions (including the periodical called Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought). It is so dominant that its adherents take for granted that is ought to be dominant and often feel no need to articulate a defense of its hegemony, aren’t even aware of its hegemony because they regard it not as an ideology but as fundamental reality; this uncritical dogma needs to be demystified. Liberal modernity’s concept of the free-floating subject has been devastatingly attacked by postmodern thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida. Its notion of individual prerogatives always trumping communal ones has been taken on by communitarian thinkers. As James Madison recognized, the liberal order requires a specific notion of human nature, a notion that is almost always asserted without any need to defend the conception of human nature or society. Even that concept of human nature found in liberalism is largely derivative, pilfered from the biblical tradition. “At that point we become aware of the extent to which our liberal order had depended on a larger worldview whose demise it could not easily survive. We begin to understand that the crisis is not so much a crisis of liberal politics as it is a crisis of the philosophical assumptions that had made it principles appear so self-evident. The liberal superstructure has fallen because the moral and spiritual convictions on which it rested have been shaken. “It is no longer possible to regard the liberal way as the invincibly right one for all mankind. Perhaps it is no longer even valid for us? Without the sense of an order beyond itself in terms of which its rightness can be seen, liberal democracy loses the landmarks that hold it fast. If it rests on nothing but itself, liberal order rests on nothing" (Walsh 81). So we face this odd situation: liberal modernity dominates our intellectual culture, but it is an increasingly incoherent and indefensible concept. What is left for defenders of liberalism is a recognition that its theoretical foundations are not only confused but also impossible to defend. With the collapse of the philosophy, liberalism is left as a pragmatic social orientation, a series of practices that can survive quite well without theoretical justification (Walsh 46). The theoretical bankruptcy of liberalism does not entail abandonment of liberalism as a practice (Walsh 50), for many aspects of liberal modernity are worth resuscitating. That we no longer kill each other over religious or political differences is a beneficial consequence partially the result of liberalism’s hegemony. Strict Churches and Denominational Strength It is illiberal to insist on strict standards of conduct for church members; it violates the notion that the individual is supreme. The LDS church and the RLDS church have taken two different paths when faced with modernity. They have also migrated two different directions on the sect/church continuum. Worldwide, empirical examples demonstrate that religions conforming to modernity have lost their vitality, while “religious communities have survived and even flourished to the degree that they have not tried to adapt themselves to the alleged requirements of a secularized world. To put it simply, experiments with secularized religion have generally failed; religious movements with beliefs and practices dripping with reactionary supernaturalism (the kind utterly beyond the pale at self-respecting faculty parties) have widely succeeded” (Berger, “Desecularization” 4). On the other hand, “religious movements and institutions that have made great efforts to conform to a perceived modernity are almost everywhere on the decline” (Berger, “Desecularization” 6). I assert that these two issues are closely related and that they also explain why the RLDS church is in steep slide toward oblivion and the LDS church is vital and growing. Every church that has remade its foundations upon modern thought has declined; hence the RLDS church is similar to the mainline Protestantism it models itself upon. But modernity is too fragile and unstable to build a church upon. Liberal modernity emphasizes individualism, which undermines the sacrifice of the self needed to make a church. The individualism of modernity saps the strength from the community and self-sacrifice necessary for religious belief; you can base Kiwanis clubs upon modernity, but churches need more substantial nutrition than modernity can provide. Dean Kelley’s landmark study in 1972 should have provided a warning to RLDS church leaders. These leaders invested heavily in making their church into a denomination. But accepting modernity as your first religion and the restored gospel as a secondary commitment which must be adapted to the first makes for a fractious set of contradictions within a church: “At our civilized best, we rightly pride ourselves on being tolerant, open-minded, equalitarian, and respectful of individual differences, rights, convictions, and sensitivities. But there may be a basic and irreconcilable conflict between these valued qualities of civic life and imperious dynamics that create and sustain meaning” (Kelley, Why 154). Recent work on the issue from within sociology of religion reaffirms the case Kelley made nearly three decades ago: “Religious organizations are stronger to the degree that they impose significant costs in terms of sacrifice and even stigma upon their members. Herein lies the key to the trends noted throughout this book. People tend to value religion on the basis of how costly it is to belong—the more one must sacrifice in order to be in good standing, the more valuable the religion” (Finke and Stark 238); modern churches make for weak ones. This insight reminds us of Joseph Smith’s claim that that religion which doesn’t require the sacrifice of all things doesn’t have the power to lead to salvation. In this case, the self must be sacrificed in order to bring the person in tune with eternity, but liberal modernity’s self is the centerpiece of its political project and sacrificing that would entail denying modernity. “Humans want their religion to be sufficiently potent, vivid, and compelling so that it can offer them rewards of great magnitude. People seek a religion that is capable of miracles and that imparts order and sanity to the human condition. The religious organizations that maximize these aspects of religion, however, also demand the highest price in terms of what the individual must do to qualify for these rewards” (Finke and Stark 275). Those who work in the academic study of religion often come with presuppositions that hinder rather than help them understand the phenomenon. Reasons for the success or failure of religious ventures particularly are misunderstood. Kelley lists four areas in which religions are expected to conform to the expectations of modernity if they are to be considered safe and respectable. But “these expectations are a recipe for the failure of the religious enterprise” (Kelley, Why viii) and misunderstand what religion does: 1. “It is generally assumed that religious enterprises, if they want to succeed, will be reasonable, rational, courteous, responsible, restrained, and receptive to outside criticism; that is, they will want to preserve a good image in the world (as the world defines all these terms). 2. It is expected, moreover, that they will be democratic and gentle in their internal affairs (again, as the outside world defines these qualities). 3. They will be responsive to the needs of men (as currently conceived), and will want to work cooperatively with other groups to meet those needs. 4. They will not let dogmatism, judgmental moralism, or obsessions with cultic purity stand in the way of such cooperation and service.” (Kelley, Why vii-viii) But note that each of these expectations is a modern standard. These are external demands placed on religion to subordinate it to a modern regime. These are ideological demands placed upon a competitor by a modernity that insists its subjects serve mammon, not God. The RLDS church has adopted all four of these criteria; it has mixed and baked its “recipe for failure of the religious enterprise.” When churches liberalize to become more participatory and pluralistic, they lose their vitality. “The quality that enables religious meanings to take hold is not their rationality, their logic, their surface credibility, but rather the demand they make upon their adherents and the degree to which that demand is met by commitment” (Kelley, Why 53). Kelley looked for two decades to find examples of leniency and strength coexisting in a church but found none (Kelley, Why 86-87). Not only are strict churches stronger than lax churches, but strictness is hard to maintain. It is easier to lapse into leniency and very hard to move from leniency back to strictness (Kelley, Why 96). The RLDS decline is not only rapid but also probably irreversible; to roll it back would require a drastic change in policy and leadership. The current RLDS leadership adheres to a modern ideology that valorizes individualism and abhors the type of obedience and self-sacrifice that would be required to regain vitality: "'Strictness is usually caricatured as invariably authoritarian, harsh, punitive, irrational, etc. We are all captives of our historical experience, and it is a pity that almost the only experiences of strictness in Western culture have been marked by heresy-trials, inquisitions, excommunications, auto-da-fe's, persecutions, crusades, and pogroms; and that the only content about which it is thought possible to be strict is some kind of fundamentalism," but Kelley notes, "That need not be the case" (Kelley, "Why" 171). The extent to which a church adapts to the modern notion that the individual is the measure of reality and truth is the extent to which the church declines. It is popular in liberal Christianity to emphasize religion as a personal quest for discovery rather than an expectation of truth and obedience of the adherent. Individualism and social strength in churches do not go together. The more one is willing to adhere to discipline and sacrifice for the whole, the greater the social strength (Kelley, Why 85). Kelley notes that he didn't mean to so closely identify health of a church with increase in members, a simple matter of numbers. The publisher chose the title of the book, a title Kelley is at pains to distance himself from (Kelley, "Why" 167). Statistics don't necessarily measure the vitality of congregations: "Membership trends are seen as a crude but informative index of the vitality of a church (or other institution), particularly in a free-market competition among exclusivist rival faith-groups. . . . church growth is not the point. It is a by-product of a church that is vigorously meeting people's religious needs" (Kelley, "Why" 168). David Kelley's thesis has stood up well over the past few decades. Statistical and historical research finds continued declines in mainline churches (Episcopal and United Church of Christ are given as examples) and growth in "small sects" such as Mormons and Pentacostal groups. Even with this evidence, "many researchers question the causal role of strictness" (Iannaccone 1181). Strictness is so anti-modern that those under its thrall must find other excuses for declines or deny the empirical evidence. Perhaps a third alternative is to accept the lapse in vitality and valorize feebleness. Evidence of Church Decline It isn’t easy to sort through the numbers demonstrating the decline of the RLDS church. Different commentators give different statistics. Launius cites a figure between 25,000and 50,000 lost members (Launius, “Reorganized” 53). Launius notes that RLDS membership reached a high point at 173,000 in 1982. Every year since then has seen a decline. World membership stays steady at about 250,000. But the numbers don’t convey the magnitude of the problem because many members’ names are on the rolls although they have left the church over the changes wrought by church leadership. Church Historian Richard P. Howard estimates that 25,000 people have left the church because of their objections to the modern adaptations. Other church leaders say the number is closer to 50,000 (Launius, “Reorganized” 51-53). Other measures of vitality also show dramatic decline. Reductions in contributions “have been dramatic . . . signaling a near collapse of the RLDS church during this period and portending catastrophe for the future” (Launius, “Reorganized” 53-54). Congregations have been closed (Launius, “Reorganized” 55). Christian Century figures claim that the RLDS church went from a high of 350,000 members in 1980 to less than 250,000 in 1996 (“Nonprophet” 786). Midgley notes the schism that has resulted from the commitment to a modern ideology by the RLDS leadership. Between 15,000 and 30,000 disaffected RLDS members meet in separate congregations that have withdrawn from the church. Some 200 groups have formed their own branches in the U.S., Canada, and Australia (Midgley, “Radical” 134 n. 4). Stack claims that RLDS membership has dramatically decreased: "In the last decade, membership has declined from 350,000 to 250,000 and operating expenses have outstretched income" (Stack). Compared to the oldline decline, the RLDS decline is much more dramatic and alarming. The oldline churches have seen the following declines in numbers and percentage between 1965 and 1985 (Coalter, Mulder and Weeks 19 and 226 n.
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