Why Do They Leave? III

Thus far, in my examination of the data from the NSYR I have looked at some of the scattered clues in the NSYR analysis. (The first post is here, the second post is here.) The NSYR actually devoted an entire book to the subject of youth losing their religion and their way, called Lost in Transition. I have already noted that intellectual reasons play a smaller role in youth losing their faith than behaviors or events. I am here interested in only those intellectual reasons that the NSYR found for people losing their faith. This post will look at reasons assembled in the first chapter of Lost in Transition for why youth of all religions become secular.

The first thing to notice is that

most of the problems in the lives of youth have their origins in the larger adult world into which the youth are being socialized. . . . One way or another, adults and the adult world are almost always complicit in the troubles, suffering, and misguided living of youth, if not the direct source of them. The more adults can recognize and admit that fact, we think, the sooner we will be able to address some of young people's problems more constructively. . . . The undeniable reality--indeed a key point of this entire book--is that emerging adult problems are ultimately problems of our entire culture and society.

(Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 11.)

If adults see problems among the youth it is our responsibility to do something about them.

"You Took No Thought"

The first chapter of Lost in Transition deals with the moral drift among young adults. (Moral here has to do with the larger issue of discerning right and wrong and not just the lesser issue of sexual morality.) This presents something of a challenge to researchers. "Emerging adult thinking about morality (as with most of the rest of adult Americans) is not particularly consistent, coherent, or articulate" (Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 20). It is not that young adults have been thinking about how to be degenerate or anything of the sort. "Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked" (Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 20). So an important part of the problem is that young adults have not given many of the issues much thought at all. One manifestation of this situation is that people who have doubts complain that they have never heard about a particular issue before. This often does not mean that those issues have not been discussed in public or even in Church. Often it means that the individual has never paid much attention, or sometimes any attention. I remember things like the failure of the Kirtland Safety Society, polygamy, and the Mountains Meadows Massacre all being taught in seminary. So when I hear accounts of those being surprised by something like that I wonder if their seminary teacher skipped those lessons or whether those individuals were absent that day or if they did not pay attention. I have taught enough to know that not all students pay attention and that not all that pay attention understand what is being taught even if it is taught plainly. The fact that most young adults (or adults for that matter) have not given much if any thought to moral issues is a disappointment but not a surprise. Nevertheless, the lack of giving thought beforehand to these issues can and does have disastrous consequences. Not only can it be a problem when young adults have given no thought to these issues, but it can also be a problem if parents or local church leaders have given no thought to such moral issues.

Problems with moral reasoning are prevalent among young adults and these problems were summarized under the following headings:

Moral Individualism

The NSYR noted that:

Six out of ten (60 percent) of the emerging adults we interviewed . . . said that morality is a personal choice, entirely a matter of individual decision. Moral rights and wrongs are essentially matters of individual opinion, in their view. Furthermore, the general approach associated with this outlook is not to judge anyone else on moral matters, since they are entitled to their own personal opinions."

(Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 21.)

Such young adults see "not 'immoral' people but people who make moral judgments of others as society's real problem" (Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 23). From this point of view, "to express one's own moral view is thus synonymous with dominating and controlling others, a kind of pathology that violates other people's dignity and rights" (Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 24). Such young adults

have not been taught well how to differentiate between strong moral and religious claims that should be tolerated, if not respected, and those that deserve to be refuted, rejected, and opposed. Very few have been given the reasoning tools and skills to discern such important differences. As a result, many emerging adults [I would include adults as well] simply end up trying to completely avoid making strong moral claims themselves, as well as avoiding criticizing the moral views of others. . . . But what few of them seem to realize is that such a position makes it impossible to rationally evaluate or criticize any moral wrong, including the horrific destruction and violence that helped drive them to this tolerant position in the first place. That is a problem.

(Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 26-27.)

The NSYR did not publish what percentage of Latter-day Saints reflect these positions but I have heard a number of Latter-day Saints advocating these viewpoints including some local leaders (though not my own).

Moral Relativism

The NSYR noted that "not all morally individualistic emerging adults subscribe to strong moral relativism. But many do. Moral individualism does seem to have strong intellectual affinities with moral relativism. And those who avoid moral individualism seem to have more to work with intellectually in order to resist relativism, if they in fact want to resist it" (Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 27). How does one spot a moral relativist? One manifestation is the repeated expression, "Who am I do judge?" (Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 27.) The NSYR provides a helpful quantification of how prevalent strong moral relativism is: "about three out of ten (30 percent) of the emerging adults we interviewed professed a belief in strong moral relativism. (In our nationally representative survey, 47 percent of American emerging adults agreed that 'morals are relative, there are not definite rights and wrongs for everybody.')" (Smith, et al,, Lost in Transition, 27.) What of the remaining 70%?

Two-thirds of emerging adults, however, were not strong moral relativists; they stopped short of that radical position. This remaining two-thirds of emerging adults wished to resist the radical implications of strong moral relativism. We might think of many of them as reluctant moral agnostics or skeptics. They were not, to be sure, firm moral realists or absolutists. Few of them, in fact, took clear moral stands that they could defend. The majority of emerging adults could not accept total moral relativism, but many of them also could not clearly explain or defend the moral claims that they wished to make or say why moral relativism is actually wrong. Some--more than one-quarter (27 percent) of the emerging adults we interviewed simply waffled on these questions.

(Smith, et al,, Lost in Transition, 29.)

This still leaves a large group unaccounted for:

those who took a "situationalist" approach to morality. All of the same things could be right or wrong, these emerging adults said, depending on the particular context or circumstances. About four in ten emerging adults we interviewed (41 percent) mentioned situations as complicating moral evaluations.

(Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 30.)

Another sizable group took a different approach:

Yet another way that some emerging adults--about one in three (27 percent) of those we interviewed--resolve their reservations about strong moral relativism is to say that, while most moral beliefs are relative, a small number of moral truths are not relative. . . . [So some of them] distinguished between universal moral truths and more relative beliefs that require more interpretation.

(Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 31-32.)

Because youth are not necessarily able to articulate their positions many fall into more than one category, which is why the percentages are well over one hundred percent.

The NSYR cautions that "it would be wrong to interpret these more or less morally relativistic voices as mere self-indulgent rationalizations for emerging adults to live as (im)morally as they please." That can be a consequence but apparently is not the dominating cause.

In fact, there are powerful institutional reasons why emerging adults think like this. And the moral reasoning of emerging adults has deep roots in American history and society. . . . These messages are well intentioned and, at least in certain ways, we think, important, valuable, and effective. . . . Unfortunately, at least some of this tolerance-promoting, multiculturalist educational project also seems to have been based upon some shoddy moral reasoning, which it reinforces in turn. Thus emerging adults in our interviews are simply parroting to us what they have been taught by the adults who have educated them. That does not make sloppy and indefensible moral reasoning acceptable, but it does help make it understandable.

(Smith, et al., Lost in Translation, 34-35.)

One does not expect the percentages in the general population necessarily to line up with Latter-day Saint percentages, but given the results I would be pleased but very surprised if moral relativism in some form was not alive and well among Latter-day Saint youth. I have heard some moral relativism from younger adults but simply do not know how many LDS youth subscribe to either strong or weak forms of moral relativism.

Moral Sources

Where do young adults think that morality comes from? The NSYR examined "how emerging adults think about morals sources--that is, the grounds or basis for moral truths" (Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 35). The NSYR made two important observations about those sources:

First, most of the accounts of morality's sources offered by emerging adults below are not reasonably defensible. They might make some sense to some at first glance. But when analyzed, much of what follows simply does not work; it cannot hold up to basic critical scrutiny. Second, despite claiming to be strong moral individualists, as noted above, most emerging adults' accounts of the sources of morality turn out to be not all that individualistic. Almost all of the accounts examined below, in fact, turn out to be highly oriented to the interests, needs, or desires of social relations. We are not simply representing different voices here. Rather, this is another instance of emerging adult thinking being not particularly internally consistent.

(Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 35.)

We begin with one of the more sobering statistics:

Fully one in three (34 percent) of the emerging adults we interviewed saith that they simply did not know what makes anything morally right or wrong. They had no idea about the basis of morality. Tellingly, some of these stumped interviewees could not even understand our questions on this point. No matter how many different ways we posed them or tried to explain or clarify them, our very questions about morality's sources did not or could not make sense to them.

(Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 36.)

On the other hand, "about four out of ten (40 percent) of the emerging adults we interviewed referred to how other people would think of them as (at least partly) defining what for them would be morally right and wrong" (Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 37-38). These young adults "professed to believe in moral right and wrong. Yet their morality does not itself have an objective reference or basis but was defined instead primarily by what other people would think about someone. If others would think the worse of a person for doing something, then that would be morally wrong for them to do. Positive and negative social perceptions, in other words, are morality's ultimate ground" (Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 37). In Book of Mormon terms, these are those for whom morality is whatever the great and spacious building approves of.

There are other perceived sources of morality. Six out of ten emerging adults interviewed (60 percent) "described the basis or grounds of morality as whether or not anything functionally improved people's situations. If a thought, attitude, or action created a better functional situation, then it was moral, they essentially said. If it made a situation worse, then it was morally bad" (Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 38). This type of thinking creates problems for these adults:

Because situational consequences can often turn out differently than expected, at least some of these emerging adults are not able to govern their lives with moral systems, maps, philosophies, or worldviews that can reliably tell them in advance what is right and wrong. Instead, right and wrong are only figured out after the fact, when one sees the actual consequences of living.

(Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 39.)

As a result the moral systems of over half of young adults are failing them:

The crucial distinction that these emerging adults are missing is the difference between the basis or reason for some moral truth and the effects of living according to that moral truth. Right moral living should normally have certain positive, patterened effects, at least over the long run. But that does not make those effects per se the reason why those things are morally right in the first place. If they are indeed morally right, they should remain so even if they sometimes fail to have those effects. Furthermore, sometimes right moral action does not improve people's situations. At times, in fact, it creates major problems. Sometimes right moral action involves real costs and sacrifices--which is exactly why it can be so hard to live morally. . . . So defining morality as that which functionally improves people's situations really does not work.

(Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 39.)

Just over half (53 percent) of those interviewed define morality as "whether it hurts other people." For them, "a moral violation per se is essentially defined as anything that hurts other people physically, emotionally, financially, or otherwise" (Smith, et al. Lost in Transition, 39). Those who understood morality this way "did not agree, however, on whether hurting oneself would also be morally bad or whether that was one's prerogative that had no moral implications" (Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 40).

For some emerging adults, not only is each individual entitled to define their own personal moral code, but it is also only the hurting of individual persons that could make anything morally wrong. For them it was only wrong to hurt individuals, and not particularly wrong to cheat or steal from an organization, such as a business.

(Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 41.)

The NSYR saw this approach as problematic:

Again, without going into much depth, we must observe that whether or not something harms people simply cannot serve as a defensible explanation for morality's source. One reasons is that acting morally sometimes involves hurting other people in some ways--think of certain situations that require telling a hard truth, for instance, or of enforcing certain kinds of justice concerning the fair distribution of goods in situations when some people will get less sot that others can have more. Another, more basic reason is that even being able to know or define in the first place what hurts or helps other people often itself requires reference to certain moral standards and understandings of what is good and bad. . . . In many such cases, it is only knowledge of the moral good that determines what is truly hurtful and helpful to other people. So morality itself cannot be dependent on perceptions of help and hurt as the basis of its very definition.

(Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 42.)

 About 12 percent of those interviewed held a view

that can best be described as a "social-contract theory" of morality. In essence, according to this view, moral truth does not really enjoy any objective existence--nothing that critique a belief or practice, such as slavery, that is embraced by the majority in a society. Rather, morality is simply the name of a collective social invention agreed to by people in a group or society to advance the hedonic and functional goods of those submitting to the social compact. Their mutually policing moral norms may come to be seen erroneously as objective, natural or universal. But in reality they are merely agreements by contact--pure social constructions.

(Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 42.)

The study's authors point to major problems with social contract theory, including its failure to explain human rights and that "if everyone in a society must agree to establish a social contract, then no morality will ever be defined, since never in human history has everyone in a society agreed to anything" (Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 44).

Almost one in four "of the contemporary emerging adults we interviewed (23 percent) referenced obedience to the laws of the land as one, if not the, key way to define morality. The essential idea expressed was that if something is in the law or regulations, then it is moral, and if it is not law, then it is outside the realm of morality" (Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 44). The authors also note the problems with such a view: "What such a view lacks, of course, is the capacity to successfully advance a moral critique of any existing laws, rules, or regulations" (Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 45).

The concept of karma was also put forward:

A surprising (to us) number of emerging adults we interviewed--nearly on in six (17 percent)--spontaneously referred to "karma" as a way to explain how morality works, why it's best to act morally, and why the universe is ultimately a morally just place. In invoking karma, they meant that good attitudes and behavior will be rewarded in this life and bad people will get what they deserve too.

(Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 45-46.)

Lastly, about 40 percent of those interviewed "claimed that their own moral views were somehow based in God's commands, the Bible, or other religious knowledge or sensibilities" (Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 46-47).

For those keeping track, these opinions account for 279 percent of emerging adults so they reflect an overlapping of approaches to morality not mutually exclusive categories. We can rank them in terms of popularity:

• 60 percent define their morals depending on the situational.
• 53 percent base morals on whether actions hurt other people.
• 40 percent base morals on what other people would think.
• 40 percent base morals on religious knowledge.
• 34 percent could not say whether anything was right or wrong.
• 23 percent base morals on laws or rules.
• 17 percent base morals on karma.
• 12 percent base morals on social contracts.

The wide spread of overlapping opinions seems indicative of a lack of thought on these matters.

Moral Compromises

While most young adults believe that people ought to obey the law and do what they think is morally right, a number did not. One in three of those interviewed "said that they might do certain things they considered morally wrong if they knew they could get away with it" (Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 47). One wonders how this one in three overlaps or not with the one in three who cannot tell what is right or wrong. If it does not at all, then it means that one in three do not know what is right or wrong and one in three will do the wrong thing if they think no one will notice.

Happiness and Instinct

When the NSYR asked what young adults would do in a situation where they were unsure of what was right, they got the following answers:

• 9 percent said they would do what would help them get ahead.
• 18 percent said they would do what God or the scriptures said was right.
• 34 percent said they would follow the advice of a parent or teacher.
• 39 percent said they would do what they thought would make them happy.

This makes it sound as though it were some deliberative process, but 72 percent of young adults say they would act on instinct (Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 51-52). They "speak about moral knowledge as being instinctive, automatic, prerational, embodied, common sense, and perhaps genetically rooted" (Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 55.)

Moral Dilemmas

The NSYR asked young adults to come up with some moral dilemmas that they had faced. "One-third of the emerging adults who we interviewed (33 percent) simply could not think of any moral dilemmas or difficult situations that they had personally confronted in recent years" (Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 56). "Nearly one in three (29 percent) of the emerging adults we interviewed offered what they thought were examples of moral dilemmas that they had faced. But these in fact turned out to be not moral dilemmas having to do with right and wrong, but rather some other kind of practical decision they had had to make. These situations or problems they described to us actually had little or nothing to do with moral conflicts" (Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 57). Only about a third could accurately bring up specific examples of moral dilemmas.

The NSYR's Conclusions

I will not go through all the conclusions of the NSYR on the moral reasoning of young adults. (I recommend reading the book.) I will highlight only a couple:

"It is not that merging adults are a morally corrupt lot (although some of them are). The problem is more that many of them are simply lost. They do not adequately know the moral landscape of the real world that they inhabit. And they do not adequately understand where they themselves stand in that real moral world. They need some better moral maps and better-equipped guides to show them the way around.

(Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 69.)

The families, schools, religious communities, sports teams, and other voluntary organizations of civil society are failing to provide many young people with the kind of moral education and training needed for them even to realize, for example, that moral individualism and relativism make no sense, that they cannot be reasonably defended or sustained, that some alternative views must be necessary if we are to be at all reasonable when it comes to moral concerns. Colleges and universities appear to be playing a part in this as well.

(Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 61.)

The NSYR has some particularly interesting conclusions about what can and should be done about the problems that they note in this book. They note the following basic causes"

Poor moral reasoning comes significantly from poor teaching of thinking skills in schools, families, religious communities, sports teams, and other youth-socializing settings. Damaging sexual experiences have connections to things like the way colleges and universities are run and the lifestyle scripts disseminated by advertising and the mass media. Mass consumer materialism is of course deeply rooted in the structure of the American capitalist economy and the advertising industry. Intoxicating habits have much to do with the financial motives of the alcohol industry ("Drink Responsibly" ads notwithstanding) and the structures of college life, among other things. And disconnection from civic, communal, and political life surely has something to do with the many real dysfunctions of American politics and the lure of private, mass consumerist, media-stimulated lifestyles.

(Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 233.)

College life, particularly, can create certain problems:

Structurally, most emerging adults live this crucial decade of life surrounded mostly by their peers--people of the same age and in the same boat--who have no more experience, insight, wisdom, perspective, or balance than they do. It is sociologicially a very odd way to help young people come of age, to learn how to be responsible, capable, mature adults.

(Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 234.)

After discussing (mostly infeasible) nationwide initiatives to address these problems, they come down to practices on the smaller scale that can help--indeed, one of the themes running through the books is that these things matter most:

Families, for example, can be intentional about their values, commitments, and lifestyles in ways that can have significant effects on their members. Not every American household, for instance, must watch television a great deal of the time. It is actually possible to find recreational activities besides going to the shopping mall. Often families can choose, for example, to eat more meals together than they typically do. Heads of families can in fact decide to practice and model for children generosity in the form of greater charitable and religious financial giving, volunteering, giving blood, and so on. Such choices are within the hands of families.

(Smith, et al., Lost in Transition, 241.)

The NSYR has consistently noted that the family has the biggest impact of any institution on shaping the lives and especially the religious lives of teenagers and emerging adults: Greater than teachers, greater than schools, greater than churches, greater than peers, greater than either the parents or the youth even realize. This effect still remains a significant pull even years after young adults have left home.

My Conclusions

I have looked in the first chapter of Lost in Transition for intellectual reasons why youth might be sliding into secularism. It provides a map of the terrain and points to some problems that the NSYR thought were serious enough that they ought to be addressed. It is important to put these intellectual concerns in larger context. One chapter of Lost in Transition covers the sex lives of emerging adults and another chapter looks at the role of alcohol and drugs. These play a larger role than intellectual issues. Another chapter looks at materialism, which also plays a role. We can see all of these issues (to a greater or lesser degree) among Latter-day Saints.

It is also important to realize that they NSYR gave percentages for categories of the young adults at large, not LDS young adults. LDS numbers sometimes mirror the national trends and sometimes are very skewed. Since LDS young adults were among those interviewed, they fit somewhere in the statistics. Probably the biggest problem is that many of the young adults (as is true for many adults in general) have given such matters little if any thought. They have not worked through the issues themselves and cannot necessarily deal with them in an intelligent or coherent fashion. With mortality having only a limited amount of time available, not everyone is going to have the time to think all matters through; some matters though are of sufficient importance that they deserve to be given some thought.

Some forms of moral individualism and relativism that I have seen among the Saints are (1) notions that agency allows us (not God) to determine what is right and wrong rather than allowing us to choose whether to do right or wrong, and (2) that we are not allowed to determine that the actions of others are good or evil, which directly contradicts Moroni 7:14-19. We need to be able to take moral stands on issues, both individually and as a Church. It is useful to be able to articulate why those stands are moral even if the line of reasoning is different when presented to those in the Church and those outside the Church.

The fact that these issues are a problem with emerging adults at large and that anecdotally they seem to show up among Latter-day Saints may make it worth paying attention to them. Since they are a larger problem for American young adults in general, if they are a problem for Latter-day Saint youth, they may be a bigger problem than any particular set of historical factoids.

Religious Studies Does It Again

Craig Blomberg buries some of his more interesting observations in footnotes:

One of the true scandals of the modern academy, apparently almost entirely unaddressed in the guild, involves the number of instructors in religious studies promoting, in their classes, Dan Brown's wholly fictitious claims about what took place at Nicaea as if they were actually based on historical fact. Yet in the past decade, one of the most recurring questions I have been asked by students on university campuses where I have spoken is how the Council of Nicaea determined the NT canon. When I explain that this wasn't what Nicaea was about, they state in disbelief or reply that one of their professors taught them that it was.

(Craig L. Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible [Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2014], 240 n. 79.)

I really have no reason to doubt the veracity of Blomberg's account. This would mean that some (or perhaps many) of those who teach religious studies do not actually know what they are talking about, at least on certain subjects. Now, it is one thing to make mistakes when one is dealing with a subject outside one's specialty, but what does one say about getting basic facts wrong in one's specialty?

Why Do They Leave? II

This is the second in a series of blog posts covering the sociological data scattered through the publications of the National Survey of Youth and Religion (NSYR) about why youth leave their religion for secularism. (For the first post, see here. For Latter-day Saint retention rates, see here. For where those LDS who leave go, see here.) We should remember that the NSYR initially came into being to test ideas circulating in Evangelical scare literature that U.S. teenagers were leaving in droves to become pagans and Wiccans. So as a study it was actually designed to detect if youth are leaving and what might be the reasons for doing so. What they found was that "U.S. youth are not flocking in droves to 'alternative' religions and spiritualities such as paganism and Wicca" (Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 32, 311-312 n. 1).

The last post focused on a list of factors for why youth become secular. I suspect that the list was not exhaustive, but all the factors were prominent. In this post I want to look at a specific set of intellectual ideas that were common among youth of all denominations. In the first wave, of the 3290 youth surveyed (Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 292), 267 had in-depth interviews lasting from 1.5 to 3 hours (Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 302); this included 21 Latter-day Saint youth (Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 303). One general observation the NSYR made was that "the majority of U.S. teens would badly fail a hypothetical short-answer or essay test of the basic beliefs of their religion" but Mormon teens "seem somewhat better able to explain the basic outlook and beliefs of their traditions" (Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 137). These in-depth interviews provided a window into the thinking of the youth studied and thus enable one to see some of the intellectual issues involved.

The NSYR found a common view of religion that cut across denominational lines (and I have heard it expressed by many Latter-day Saints).

We suggest that the de facto dominant religion among contemporary U.S. teenagers is what we might call "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism." The creed of this religion, as codified from what emerged from our interviews, sounds something like this:

1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and my most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

Such a de facto creed is particularly evident among mainline Protestant and Catholic youth, but is also visible among black and conservative Protestants, Jewish teens, other religious types of teenagers, and even many non-religious teenagers in the United States.

(Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 162-63.)

One of the interviews that the NSYR cited as an example of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism was a "17-year old white Mormon boy from Utah" (Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 163). So we know that this is a problem affecting Latter-day Saint youth.

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is about a few things.

1. First it "is about inculcating a moralistic approach to life. It teaches that central to living a good and happy life is being a good, moral person. That means being nice, kind, pleasant, respectful, responsible, at work on self-improvement, taking care of one's health, and doing one's best to be successful" (Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 163). 


2. Second it is "about providing therapeutic benefits to its adherents. This is not a religion of repentance from sin, of keeping the Sabbath, of living as a servant of a sovereign divine, of steadfastly saying one's prayers, . . . etcetera. Rather, what appears to be the actual dominant religion among U.S. teenagers is centrally about felling good, happy, secure, at peace. It is about attaining subjective well-being, being able to resolve problems, and getting along amiably with other people" (Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 163-64). 


3. Finally, it "is about belief in a particular kind of God: one who exists, created the world, and defines our general moral order, but not one who is particularly personally involved in one's affairs--especially affairs in which one would prefer not to have God involved. Most of the time, the God of this faith keeps a safe distance" (Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 164). "God is something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist: he is always on call, takes care of problems that arise, professionally helps his people to feel better about themselves, and does not become too personally involved in the process" (Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 165).

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism often hides among religious people:

We are not suggesting the Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is a religion that teenagers (and adults) either adopt and practice wholesale or not at all. Instead, the elements of its creed are normally assimilated by degrees, in parts, admixed with elements of more traditional religious faiths. Indeed, this religious creed appears to operate as a parasitic faith. It cannot sustain its own integral, independent life; rather it must attach itself like an incubus to established historical religious traditions, feeding on their doctrines and sensibilities, and expanding by mutating their theological substance to resemble its own distinctive image" (Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 166).

Various measures of Moralistic Therepeutic Deism appeared in 42%, 37%, and 34% of the teenage population (Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 168). By comparison, repentance was mentioned as a theme in only 4% of the teenage population, and obeying God in only 5% (Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 167).

The NSYR found that teenagers learn Moralistic Therapeutic Deism not only from their peers but also their parents.

So what happens to teenagers who subscribe to Moralistic Therapeutic Deism? Later waves of the NSYR study looked into the issue:

What has become of the MTD five years later, now that those teens have become emerging adults?

The latest wave of research reveals that MTD is still alive and well among 18- to 23-year-old American youth. . . . The concentration of MTD talk among emerging adults has been somewhat diluted, but that is not to say that MTD has disintegrated as a de facto believed and practiced faith. It has not. . . . 

Emerging adults have a lot more personal, real-life experience than teenagers do. And as the teenage faith of MTD has had to confront and address life's realities during the transition to emerging adulthood--the five years studied here--MTD itself has been put to the test. For some, MTD seems to have sufficed for managing life. For others, it seems MTD has simply proved too thin or weak to deal with life's challenges. Confronted with real existential or material difficulties, some emerging adults appear to have backed away from the simple verities of MTD or perhaps have moved forward into somewhat more complex, grounded, or traditional versions of religious faith. In short, there seem to be certain tests in life through which some youth find that MTD proves an unrealistic account or an unhelpful way to respond.

(Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 154-155.)

One of the first points to notice is the time lag between what is taught (and practiced) and the challenge to the faith. What the youth learned as children and teenagers was put to the test when they were emerging adults. What was reaped as a young adult was sown much earlier. I will illustrate this with an unscientific anecdote. A number of years ago I lived in a ward with a huge primary but not a single active teenager. The bishop studied the problem and found that all of the teenagers had gone inactive between the ages of 8 and 12. While there were a number of different causes for the inactivity, there was also a gap of a number of years between the cause and the effect. Longitudinal studies like the NSYR can help us see that relationship.

Youth who as children and teenagers learn Moralistic Therapeutic Deism as the content of their religious faith will not find it sufficient to sustain them through the challenges of life. Some of them, as noted by the NSYR leave their faith. So when it comes to the intellectual content of what we are teaching youth, we should be teaching the gospel rather than Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Of the five points of the de facto creed, the first two points and the last point would have to be nuanced and the other two rejected. The restored gospel of Jesus Christ is simply not compatible with Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.

If we want to help the youth keep their faith, equipping them with the tools to combat Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is one place to start.

While We Are At It

For those of you who do not know the books that have come out of the NSYR, they are:

• Smith and Denton, Soul Searching (2005)
• Regnerus, Forbidden Fruit (2007)
• Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition (2009)
• Dean, Almost Christian (2010)
• Smith, et al. Lost in Transition (2011)
• Regnerus and Uecker, Premarital Sex in America (2011)
• Smith, et al., Young Catholic America (2014)

All were published by Oxford University Press. They really are worth the read.

Why Do They Leave?

I have previously used statistics from the National Survey of Youth and Religion (NSYR) to highlight that: (1) we do a better job at keeping our youth than other religions, though we still lose just over a third; (2) we lose about three-quarters of the youth we lose to secularism though there are also some losses to various sects. A third key ingredient in understanding the situation is to know why youth are leaving. In this case raw statistics do not help answer the question. Simple surveys rarely help elucidate those sorts of issues.

Fortunately, not only did the NSYR track thousands of youth for a decade but they also engaged in in-depth interviews with a significant number of the youth at various stages. These interviews let the youth explain themselves and their reasoning behind the decisions they make and why they answered some of the questions the way they did. This provides richer data than otherwise might have been the case.

Unfortunately, the data published by the NSYR does not directly address the issue of why some Latter-day Saint youth become atheist, agnostic, or apathetic. It does, however, delve into the reasons why youth in general choose that path. For the sake of discussion, we here assume that reasons why Latter-day Saint youth choose that path are similar to reasons that youth in general choose that path. The NSYR cataloged a number of different reasons why youth lose their religion. These are worth listing:

1. Disruptions to routine

"Many life transitions and disturbances of diverse sorts--divorce, death of a family member, leaving home, job loss" make people "less likely to attend religious services" (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 75.)

2. Distractions

Emerging adults engage in a number of other issues and activities that often distract them from possible religious and spiritual interests and involvements. To begin with, the central task of emerging adult life itself--learning to stand on one's own two feet--is in some sense one big, macro distraction from religious devotion. . . . Outside of work and possibly school, emerging adults spend a good amount of time attending to various errands associated with living on their own. . . . Fun-related distractions in many emerging adults' lives include . . . any other number of recreational and social activities that take time, energy, and sometimes money and planning. On top of all that is time spent on gadgets. . . . Social life can be distracting and draining in other ways as well. . . . More generally, there is simply too much else going on at the time to go to church, synagogue, temple, or mosque. (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 76-77.)

3. Differentiation

Part of emerging adults' central life task of standing on their own is establishing identity differentiation. . . . Religion, particularly public religious practice, is one arena that effectively offers emerging adults an opportunity to achieve clear identity differentiation. . . . Religion also seems to many to be of less consequence than matters of education, finances, love interests, childbearing, and other more pressing areas, as a possible place to slack off, drop out, or otherwise become quite different from one's parents (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 78.)

4. Postponed Family Formation and Childbearing

The postponement of "settling down" that is associated with emerging adulthood unintentionally produces, as a causal mechanism, the tendency for Americans to reduce religious involvements during this phase of life. (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 79.)

5. Keeping Options Open

Emerging adults are generally loath to close doors or burn bridges. Instead, they want to keep as many options open as possible. . . . If religion means being sober, settled, and steadfast, and if emerging adulthood means postponing those things, then it means not being particularly concerned about religion. (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 80.)

Some youth (about 30%) want to have more of a cafeteria approach to religion, picking and choosing the beliefs that they want. They are picky


about what they are willing to adopt of their religious tradition's beliefs and practices, some of which they think are "outdated." They often hold certain "different opinions" and desires from what their religion allows, so they pick and choose what they want to accept. [They] disagree, neglect, or ignore the official teachings of their faiths most often on the following religious issues: sex before marriage, the need for regular religious service attendance, belief in the existence of hell, drinking alcohol, taking drugs, and use of birth control. (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 167.)

6. Honoring Diversity

For most of their lives, from preschool on, most emerging adults have been taught by multiple institutions to celebrate diversity, to be inclusive of difference, to overcome racial divides, to embrace multiculturalism, to avoid being narrowly judgmental towards others who are out of the ordinary. . . . Despite the value of such inclusiveness and acceptance generally . . . this general orientation when brought to questions of religious life tends to undermine the effectiveness of particularities of faith traditions and practices. . . . As a result, most emerging adults are happy with religion so long as it is general and accepting of diversity but are uncomfortable if it is anything else. (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 80-81.)

7. Self-confident Self-Sufficiency

They were authorized as individuals to know and choose what is right, at least for themselves. It was difficult for them to imagine an objective reference point beyond their own individual selves by which to evaluate themselves, their lives, and those of others. They could decide what to believe about ultimate reality based on what feels right to them, whatever fits their personal experience. . . . Why would an emerging adult want or need religious faith? (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 82.)

8. Self-evident Morality

"They believe . . . religion plays an optional role in morally good living. The single thing in which it specializes--helping people to be good--is actually not needed in order for people to achieve that outcome. Religion thus serves a nonobligatory, noncrucial function in life. It does not have a corner on anything unique. Nobody has to believe in or practice it to live morally. As a result, its status becomes that of a lifestyle accessory. (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition 83.)

9. Partying

One of the other reasons why many, though not all, emerging adults may want to distance themselves from religion is that religion in their minds conflicts with certain other lifestyle options that are higher priorities. Most of them want to party, to hook up, to have sex in relationships, and to cohabit; or if they do not do these things now, many at least want to keep them as options for the future. . . . Many want to have sex with a boyfriend or girlfriend, or to at least be free to do so if the occasion arises, and many want to be able to hook up with someone they meet to whom they may feel attracted. Many also want to cohabit with current or future serious partners or fiancés before getting married. And all of this, emerging adults are aware, contradicts the teachings of most religions. So they simply avoid religion and thereby resolve the conflict. . . . Framed as a social-psychological causal mechanism: most emerging adults reduce a certain cognitive dissonance they feel—arising from the conflict of religious teachings against partying and sex before marriage versus their wanting to engage in those behaviors—by mentally discounting the religious teachings and socially distancing themselves from the source of those teachings. In this simple way, the role of sex, drinking, and sometimes drugs is often important in forming emerging adults’ frequent lack of interest in religious faith and practice. (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 83-84.)

What is interesting about this list is that for the most part, intellectual reasons play a secondary role in conversion to secularism. This is not to say that intellectual reasons play no role, or that certain actions have no intellectual ramifications. The list is mainly behavioral or event driven rather than philosophically driven. Doubts in religiously held beliefs do not show up on the list.

Unfortunately, the NSYR gave no approximate weight to the frequency of the various reasons. One can hunt around the data and get some indications (and I provided one of these in point number 5 above). Among emerging adults (18- to 23-year-olds) in America, 84% have engaged in sexual relations and 66% have done so with more than one partner (Regnerus and Uecker, Premarital Sex in America, 25). Thus about five-sixths of emerging adults may potentially fall under those whose sex lives conflicts with their religion and, if they give it much thought, will fall under the temptation to make their beliefs conform to their practice. For teenagers we have better separated data published. Among Americans 37.2% or teenagers have been sexually active and another 24.5% wish they were. Among Latter-day Saints 12.6% of teenagers have been sexually active and another 14.9% wish they were. (Regnerus, Forbidden Fruit, 132-33.)

So the desire to sin in ways that fundamentally conflicts with their religion affects about 30% of LDS teenagers. We lose 13% of our teenagers to secularism. So the desire to sin does not automatically lead to an abandonment of religion, but the NSYR found a statistical correlation on keeping religion and obeying the law of chastity (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 218, 271-75). On the other hand, having doubts about religious beliefs was only weakly correlated with retaining or losing faith to the point that the NSYR deemed it not significant (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 216). Doubts play a role in loss of belief and commitment but only in combination with other factors.  (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 229-31). For instance doubts play a role in the loss of faith of emerging adults only when faith did not play a big role in the teen's parents' lives, and the parents were lax in their church attendance, and faith already played less of a role in the teen's life, and is usually accompanied by the youth's less frequent religious devotion, i.e. prayer, church attendance and scripture reading (Smith and Snell, Souls in Transition, 229-30). In other words, doubt usually needs to be combined with other factors to come into play.

The list of issues should not be thought of as necessarily mutually exclusive reasons for abandoning faith. If 84% of youth have potential issues with sex lives incompatible with their faith and 30% want to pick and choose their beliefs, there has to be some overlap. We are looking at a list of prominent factors not a list of separate causes.

Only three of the nine reasons deal with intellectual issues (6, 7, and 8). One of these (number 6) is an uncritical commitment to diversity. Diversity can be a good thing. Society needs a variety of occupations to function well: it needs farmers and pharmacists, engineers and educators. But that occupational diversity does not mean that criminals are either necessary or desirable. Diversity, in and of itself, is not an unalloyed good. A simplistic example is that diversity of answers to 2 + 2 is not a good thing. Answers of 3, 5, -87, and 2,000,003 are not equally valid answers to the question 2+2 (they are all invalid answers). Diversity can be a good thing or a bad thing and thus one needs to exercise discernment about whether diversity is desirable in any given instance. Diversity can be a cover term for disguising that "they seek not the Lord to establish his righteousness, but every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god, whose image is in the likeness of the world, and whose substance is that of an idol" (Doctrine and Covenants 1:16).

Discernment requires some external criteria for deciding right and wrong. Latter-day Saints can become susceptible to point 7 if they confuse two points of view. The Latter-day Saint point of view is that each individual can know for him- or herself what is right; he or she is then a moral agent who can choose whether or not to do what is right; he or she is then accountable for his or her actions and must accept the consequences for choices made. This should not be confused (although it sometimes is) with the position that each individual can choose for him- or herself what is right and that God will automatically ratify that choice without accountability or consequences because God loves us or Jesus's atonement somehow nullifies all the adverse consequences of our actions.

The best data available to me indicates that we are not primarily losing youth to doubts that spring up in their minds as a result of something that they read on the internet (which is not to say that such a thing does not ever occur). The losses seem to be the result of a combination of factors (in which doubt sometimes might play a role). Loss of faith seems to be a complex play of factors rather than some simplistic story. Other factors weigh more heavily including sin or the desire to sin. Far more detrimental to loss of faith than doubts are notions of relativism, or the uncritical commitment to politically correct notions of diversity, and misunderstandings of moral agency and accountability.

Instead of indiscriminately accepting diversity or declaring that all points of view are equally valid, we ought to be discussing when diversity is good and when is it bad, what sorts of diversity are beneficial and which types are not, and what are the long-term consequences of various points of view. We ought to be clarifying the consequences of moral agency and stressing accountability. We ought to be paying attention to the consequences of choices and teaching those consequences.

Now, I am willing to consider that there might exist better data for Latter-day Saints than the NSYR data. The NSYR has the advantage of being publicly available and addresses the issue being discussed. I am also open to the possibility that the NSYR data is focusing on the general picture of youth in the United States and that a different story might be playing out among Latter-day Saints (which is demonstrably the case on a number of issues that the NSYR looked at but not all of them). A better analysis of the data focusing on the particular problem could help but if such an analysis has been done it is not publicly available. Those interested in the problem really owe it to themselves to work through the seven books comprising nearly two-thousand pages of analysis that the NSYR has generated. The narrative that Latter-day Saint youth are leaving the Church in droves because of something they learned from the internet that raises doubts in their minds is not supported by the available data.

Haven't I Heard This Somewhere Before?

Last night, I ran across the following autobiographical note in a recent book by Craig Blomberg:

In college, from 1973 to 1977, I majored in religion at a private liberal arts college that in many respects was running from its Christian heritage as fast as it could.

(Craig L. Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible? [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press, 2014], 5.)

In an endnote Blomberg helpfully supplies some details:

Augustana College, Rock Island, IL., 1973-1977. Until 1962 the college had housed a Lutheran seminary. A long-tenured and highly-beloved president, Conrad Bergendorff, had been a masterful champion of the highest levels of academic achievement within a framework of informed but devout Christian faith. Under Thomas Tredway, the president inaugurated during my student days, attention was given almost exclusively to the academic goals. The religion department (no longer the department of Christianity as under Bergendorff) was most eager to expose students to virtually every perspective except the historic, pietistic Lutheranism (or its equivalent in other denominations) that had characterized the school before the mid-1960s.

(Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible? 229 n. 23.)

I sense a pattern here.

An Unintended Consequence

Christian Smith, no stranger to astute observations, has yet another one:

Many Catholic educational institutions have found that efforts to become more mainstream, to open up to the larger world of higher education, and to increase the quality of their instruction have had the unintended consequence of sidelining or diluting their Catholic character and identity.

(Christian Smith and John C. Cavadini, Building Catholic Higher Education: Unofficial Reflections from the University of Notre Dame [Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2014], ix.) 

Smith is merely observing in Catholic terms the experience of Congregationalist Harvard, Congregationalist Yale, Baptist Brown, Presbyterian Princeton and many other originally sectarian institutions of higher education. Though the specifics may differ, this general experiment has been conducted many times with the same general result. Insanity, it has been said, is to repeat the same experiment over and over and expect different results.

Where Are They Going?

In a previous post, I addressed the issue of how many youth the Church is losing using data from the National Survey of Youth and Religion (NSYR). The NSYR provides data on how many we keep but also what happens to those we lose.

I will present the data in chart form. The first column (A) is the percentage of LDS who change to that religion in their high school years (from Christian Smith et al., Soul Searching, 36). The second column (B) is the percentage of those who were LDS in high school who changed religion as young adults (from Christian Smith et al., Souls in Transition, 109). The third column (C) is the calculated percentage of those who were raised LDS and then changed by the time that they finished being college aged.

                                            A       B      C
LDS                                    86%  72%  62%
No Religion                       13    17      28
Conservative Protestant  1       3        4
Mainline Protestant          0       4        3
Black Protestant               0        3       3
Indeterminate                    0       1        1
Roman Catholic                0       0        0
Jewish                                0       0        0
Other Religions                 0       0        0

(Note that because of rounding errors the percentages in the last column add to 101%.)

One way of visualizing this data is to think of the deacon's quorum and Beehive class in a ward that comprises 25 youth. By the time that they have graduated from college we would expect that 15 would still be LDS, 1 would be, say, a Southern Baptist, 1 would be an Episcopalian, 1 would be a United Baptist, and 7 will have no religion.

The big threat to the youth in the Church is not Evangelicals but secularists. They account for more than twice as many losses as those to all other religions combined. We lose more youth to secularism during the college years (and the statistics include those who do not go to college) than we do in the high school years. Signs of secularization during the time when youth are attending the university should be of particular concern to church leaders.

Latter-day Saints are not the only religion losing youth to the secularists and so it is worth putting our statistics in context. Here are the calculated statistics (column C) for the Church compared to other religions:

Percentage of youth lost to secularism:

Indeterminate 53%
Other Religions 52%
Jewish 46%
Mainline Protestant 33%
Roman Catholic 29%
LDS 28%
Black Protestant 26%
Conservative Protestant 23%

So various denominations tend to lose a quarter, a third, or half of their youth to secularism. We are closer to losing a quarter but are on the high end of that.

These statistics need to be considered with those of my previous discussion about the comparative loss of youth generally. We lose more than twice as many to secularism as to all other religions combined. Sectarian losses are a lesser concern. While we do not want to be in the position of saying "not one soul will be lost" because we remember who made that boast, any individual loss will be keenly felt especially by those closest to the individual lost. Still, we need to realize whence the greater threat is coming. We also need to arm our youth against that threat.

Udo Jürgens (1934-2014)

I just saw the news that Udo Jürgens died today of a heart attack while out for a walk.

I am very sorry to hear about it.

He was a very talented and witty man, though not especially moral.

I am reminded of one of some lines from one of his more famous works:

Und das Ende vom Lied hat wohl jeder geahnt
Der Tod hat reium sie dort abgesahnt.

(For those of you who don't know: No, that is not a typo; it's a pun.)

Archaeological Silliness in the News

'Tis the season to be silly, at least when it comes to reporting about archaeology. No, I am not talking about the wildly inaccurate reporting of the BYU archaeological excavations in Egypt (such as is found here and here). The prize for the silliest archaeological headline comes from the Independent:

Archaeologists find vast medieval palace buried under prehistoric fortress at Old Sarum

Now, just think about what is being claimed here. Archaeology proceeds from the assumption that material is deposited chronologically. The further down you go, the earlier the material. Whenever find a building below another building, the earlier one is under the later one.

If the building at Old Sarum was really built by Henry I in the twelfth century then it is certainly medieval. It is not prehistoric. Prehistoric England is earlier than medieval England. By the time of Henry I, England had definitely entered its historical period.

If archaeologists actually had found a medieval palace under a prehistoric fortress, then we might seriously think about space aliens being involved. If you read the story, you will find that such is not the case.

To his credit, David Keys, who wrote the story, did not make the mistake; whoever wrote the headline did. By writing "under" instead of "inside" the editor wins the prize for the silliest archaeological story of the season.

A Quote from Elder Oaks

This quotation from Elder Dallin H. Oaks is worth pondering:

Sadly, some Latter-day Saints ridicule others for their reliance on revelation. Such ridicule tends to come from those whose scholarly credentials are high and whose spiritual credentials are low.

The Book of Mormon's major significance is its witness of Jesus Christ as the only begotten Son of God the Eternal Father who redeems and saves us from death and sin. If an account stands as a preeminent witness of Jesus Christ, how can it possibly make no difference whether the account is fact or fable—whether the persons really lived who prophesied of Christ and gave eye witnesses of his appearances to them?

This is part of a response to the following position:

Some who term themselves believing Latter-day Saints are advocating that Latter-day Saints should "abandon claims that [the Book of Mormon] is a historical record of the ancient peoples of the Americas." They are promoting the feasibility of reading and using the Book of Mormon as nothing more than a pious fiction with some valuable contents. These practitioners of so-called higher criticism raise the question of whether the Book of Mormon, which our prophets have put forward as the preeminent scripture of this dispensation, is fact or fable—history or just a story.

Among his conclusions, Elder Oaks lists the following:

5.  Those scholars who rely on faith and revelation as well as scholarship, and who assume the authenticity of the Book of Mormon, must endure ridicule from those who disdain these things of God.

How Many Youth are We Losing?

I have heard for some time reports about the Church losing young people in droves. None of these reports have any sort of statistics attached to them. What percentage of the young people is a drove? There is actually a literature on this subject. The National Survey of Youth and Religion actually has statistical data on the subject. (This data was discussed in the Mormon Studies Review before it took its change in direction.)

Here are the statistics from the National Survey of Youth and Religion on retention for various types of religion in the United States (From Christian Smith, et al., Soul Searching, 36; and Christian Smith, et al,, Souls in Transition, 109, 304). These numbers are basically the percentage of the youth whose parents are a religion that have their parent's religion in high school. The second number seems to be those who were a particular religion in high school that are still that religion in their college years. The third number is a multiplication of those two percentages that should give the number of young adults who were raised in that religion that are still that religion in college years. The fourth number is the number of those belonging to a particular religion that are in the devoted category in their college years. The fifth number is those in their college years that are either  attenders or devoted. The first, second and fourth numbers are from the NYSR and the third and fifth numbers are calculated from NYSR data.

                                          HS       college     total     devoted     + regular
Latter-day Saint                86%     72%         62%     56%           71%
Conservative Protestant    86        64             55        15              34
Roman Catholic                83        66             53        2                21
Jewish                               75        61             46        7                11
Black Protestant                81        55             43        6                19
Non-Religious                   63        68            43         0                1
Other Religion                   57        72            41         15              25
Mainline Protestant           68         50            34        7                 25
Indeterminate                    45         10            5          5                 21

The bad news is that Latter-day Saints lose one of seven of their youth in high school and about twice as many in college. So all told, we lose just over one third of the youth by the time they are through with college. Almost half of those who are left are potentially in trouble.

The good news is that of those that stay, over half are in the devoted category and almost three quarters are regular attenders. We have almost four times as many devoted young adults as the next closest religious category, and over twice as many regular attenders. We keep more of our young people than any other religion. Fewer of our college age youth are vulnerable than those in other religions.

One of the interesting things is that the NSYR defines the devoted category as those who are consistently engaged in the only behaviors that the NSYR has found to be statistically significant to retaining faith. The regular category is those who are engaged in those behaviors, but not as consistently.

The behaviors that the NSYR found statistically significant for retention of faith are (1) regular prayer (defined as at least a few times a week), (2) weekly church attendance, and (3) regular scripture reading (defined as at least once a month(!)). The NSYR also found a link between keeping the law of chastity and retaining faith.

Any assessment of how the Church is doing on retaining our young people needs to acknowledge the fact that we have been doing some things right; perhaps many things. It is not a matter of things not working--they clearly are; our retention statistics are the envy of all the other religions--but of things not working as well as they might.

Mormon Studies at the 2014 AAR

The 2014 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion convenes in San Diego. What are the Mormon Studies topics that will be covered in this meeting?

Kristen Tobey of the University of Pittsburgh will discuss "Not Non-Mormons": Belonging without Believing in the LDS Church:

This paper will treat three groups that simultaneously affiliate and disaffiliate from the LDS church: New Order Mormon, StayLDS, and the Society for Humanistic Mormonism. These groups offer resources for individuals who identify culturally but (to varying degrees) not doctrinally with Mormonism; they complicate the binary model of religious affiliation versus non-affiliation, offerings options for hybrid religious identities that include elements of both. This paper will explore the dynamics of these hybrid religious identities, and the variety of discourses and practices that go into their construction and communication. Each group proclaims a slightly different position with respect to matters of belief and unbelief, but I will argue that participants, many of whom sample more than one of these groups, find them useful for the concrete practices they advise and teach as participants construct, inhabit, and communicate new, hybrid religious identities, which are more nuanced than static conceptions of the religiously unaffiliated allow.

Courtney Wilder of Midland University will discuss The Mormon Mommy Blogger: Analyzing the Writing of Contemporary LDS Women:

This paper examines the presentation of gendered activity, including mothering and depictions of women’s bodies in both image and narrative, in a wide array of Mormon mommy blogs, and argues that this genre of writing is religiously and socially significant. The blogs range from the lucrative and widely-known to the small and more private; all are written by Mormon or formerly Mormon women with children, who are depicting themselves publicly as religious women engaging in their roles as wives and mothers. The women’s depiction of and commentary about their own lives is analogous to the public and private writing of earlier eras, and it is more religiously and socially diverse than the stereotypes about Mormon mommy bloggers suggest. These bloggers offers valuable insight into the religious lives of contemporary Mormon women.

J. Spencer Fluhman of Brigham Young University will lead a panel of Ann Taves of the University of California, Santa Barbara and Steven C. Harper of the LDS Church History Library in a discussion of Joseph Smith’s First Vision: New Methods for the Analysis of Experience-Related Texts:

In a fresh approach to the founding story of Mormonism, two scholars (one LDS and one not) who are currently writing on early Mormonism will present the results of their collaborative analysis of each of the known sources of Joseph Smith’s first vision, including newly discovered sources, using a method that teases apart events (what ostensibly happened) and explanations (the subject’s understanding of why it happened). When aligned chronologically by event and explanation, the method provides a more rigorous basis for examining the historical development of the narrative over time, including changes in structure and content, in the context of social interactions and the role of experience narratives in the emergence of new social movements. Using this highly debated event as a case study, the presenters will demonstrate the way in which a clear distinction between the subject’s explanation of events and scholarly meta-explanations allows scholars to work toward agreement on the former and more carefully account for their differences with respect to the latter. Two respondents will then address both the case study and the broader implications of the method for the field of religious studies.

Respondents will be Kathleen Flake of the University of Virginia and Gustavo Benavides of Villanova University.

Daniel Wyche of the University of Chicago will discuss Ender as Parrhesiastes: Truth-telling as Spiritual Exercise in Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead:

In Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead, we see the development of the fictional practice of ritualized mourning called “speaking for the dead,” created by the titular protagonist in the final chapter of Ender’s Game. This practice bears a certain resemblance to those ancient practices of parrhesia analyzed by Foucault in his late work. The crucial distinction being that we have a practice not of what Foucault calls “speaking the truth of oneself,” but rather of speaking the truth of the Other. This paper approaches “speaking for the dead” through the lens of Foucault’s analyses of parrhesiastic practice—and vice versa. Special attention will be paid to the relationship of the speaker to the other in both the fictional and historical cases, in order to draw out a richer analysis of the place of the necessary concepts of inter-subjectivity, empathy and difference in “practices of truth-telling” in general.

Meredith Ross of Florida State University will discuss House of Card: Ender’s Game and Speculative Fiction as Vehicle for Religio-Political Values:

Speculative fiction, through its explicit engagement with possible futures of the present world, represents a unique opportunity for writers and readers to connect present-day cultural concerns to possible futures. Speculative fiction allows authors to set characters in worlds created by misguided values present in the world of the reader, providing a platform to “break” and remake that world through critique. By examining not just the world that an author has created, but the trajectory of its creation, we can gain insight into the author’s understanding of how religion and politics interact and impact history. Using works from Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game canon as a case study, this paper illustrates the capacity of speculative fiction as a vehicle for cultural values, and argues for speculative fiction's usefulness to historians of American religion.

Speculative fiction is useful to historians. Who knew?

Christopher Ashley of Union Theological Seminary will discuss The Hand of God: Secularism and Mormonism in Battlestar Galactica (2003 and 1978):

Prestige serialized television drama can depict religious characters, but its presumptive secularism usually frames their faith. One exception is the 2003 reboot of Battlestar Galactica. Glen Larson’s incorporation of elements from Mormon Scripture and practice into the mythology of the 1978 original is fairly well-known and generally understood as a matter of the creator’s expression of his own faith. The 2003 series is not usually read as a personal religious statement by its creators. Its story, however, develops not only in-universe theologies and atheologies, but at least one in-universe god—considerably more religion than did Larson’s original. Moreover, that material, centered on the tropes of angelic revelation and theocratic violence, displays considerable resonance with American perceptions of Mormonism. I speculate that in the predominantly secular form of prestige television drama, religious themes will tend to emerge as revelation and genre disruption, often from NRM or other “outsider” sources.

I remember Battlestar Galactica as cheesy. I have never thought of it as "prestige television drama."

The University of Utah's Margaret Toscano will respond to Wyche, Ross, and Ashley.

Stanley Thayne of the University of North Carolina will discuss The Blood of Father Lehi: Indigeneity and the Book of Mormon:

The Book of Mormon, published in New York in 1830, purports to narrate the history and origins of Indigenous Americans. It identifies the ancestors of Indigenous American peoples as “Lamanites,” a group whom God cursed with a “skin of blackness” because of their unbelief. But it also prophesies that they will become a mighty people in the last days. This paper explores intersections between American Indian tribal-national identities and this racialized religious identity. My driving research questions include: How do American Indian individuals who convert to or affiliate with Mormonism read and interpret this text and these passages? How do they negotiate this ambiguous identity? How does it gel or conflict with Indigenous narratives? To answer these questions this paper, drawn from my dissertation, will develop contextualized ethnographic portraits focused on the textual interpretations of individuals from American Indian Mormon communities.

Will this paper discuss the understandings of Latter-day Saints who reside in Mexico, Central America or South America? Or has the author assumed a Nineteenth Century background for the Book of Mormon and assumed that the Lamanites must be the American Indians in the areas where Joseph Smith lived?

Aaron Ghiloni of Trinity College Queensland will discuss Towards a Comparative Missiology:

Given the historical influence of mission on the development of religious studies coupled with the pervasiveness religious diversity in the West, one might expect to find a plethora of comparative scholarship on missionizing tendencies. However, such research is rare. Skreslet’s 2012 textbook on the methodology of mission studies notes that “relatively few missiologists have applied themselves to the problem of comparative missiology…”(1). Furthermore, “comparative investigations of mission have not been particularly numerous and, when they appear, tend not to make reference to each other. The result…is a scattered, uncoordinated discourse related to comparative missiology, begun from multiple starting points” (2).
To fill this research gap, the author has initiated a research project on the mission concepts of atheism, the Baha’i Faith, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Mormonism. Drawing on forthcoming systematic research into the particular concepts of each of these seven traditions, the author will speak to his research program in “comparative missiology.” Moving beyond Müller’s either/or concept of Missionary and Non-Missionary religions, the research has located four themes common to mission movements: duty and leadership, movement across borders, communication of a progressive but universalistic logic, and the adaption of truth to create communal identity.

David Golding of Claremont Graduate University will discuss From Dusting Feet to Saving Souls: Mormon Missions in Thought and Practice:

Mormon mission preceded Mormonism itself. Months before Joseph Smith made headway on the Book of Mormon translation and over a year before he organized the Church, he composed a revelation commissioning supporters to “embark in the service of God.” This paper examines the theological imperative of mission within Mormonism.
Mormon mission history reveals an ambitious and highly systematized mission enterprise often passed over in the larger Christian literature. At the heart of this mission resides an enthusiasm for historical and scriptural literalism, a uniquely Mormon riposte to the classic questions of Western religion. Its missionaries once audaciously imagined from their agrarian cabins that their missionary force would one day reach the whole world and they fashioned a complex organizational hierarchy worthy of such an aspiration. Perhaps the greatest irony of their missiology is how, in all their religious creativity and openness to rustic theology, they actually succeeded in setting themselves up for impossible ambitions. A cursory glance at the mission history of their Euro-American neighbors would certainly uncover some of these same tendencies. In zealously striving to evangelize the world “in a generation,” neighboring Protestant missionaries couldn’t help but be deprovincialized by the encounter. It remains to be seen how the recent surge in Mormon mission activity will similarly come back to shape the future Mormon worldview, but if the trends of the larger Christian context are any indication, Mormons have probably passed a point of no return. They once celebrated the isolation of their mountain home in the American West only to see it give way to their expanding vision of colonizing in the name of Zion; today’s exuberance for a more global mission effort portends another reflexive turn, this time toward humanitarian service and greater interreligious awareness.

Elisa Pulido of Claremont Graduate University will discuss Integrating Utopia: A Mormon Attempt at Nahua Assimilation in the Mexican Borderlands (1887):

This paper argues that despite the existence of sacred narratives detailing the success of an ancient, racially integrated utopia in the Book of Mormon, Latter-day Saints in the nineteenth century were culturally blind to any application of their own sacred texts might have had in their bi-racial Mexican colonies in Juárez. White Mormons privileged establishing a haven for polygamists over improving race relations. Indigenous (Nahua) converts, who had relocated to the colony, grew discouraged by the rigors of settlement building in an alien geography among an alien culture, and trekked 1,000 miles back to Central Mexico.

Booker Alston of the University of Cape Town will discuss Gobo Fango: Latter-day Saint, South African Slave, or African American Hero?

Perspective and legend are two fundamental complications of writing biographies. This paper examines the legend of Gobo Fango from three different perspectives in an effort to highlight how these obstacles must be analysed by those producing definitive Mormon biographies. Jonathan Z. Smith’s theories of construction are combined with David Chidester’s practices of tracking the circulation of knowledge in order to methodologically justify the central argument that there is there is not one, but many Gobos in existence today and that only a study which investigates all of these Gobos can be considered a definitive biography of Gobo Fango.

Marie-Therese Maeder of the University of Zurich will discuss Unity in Diversity: Self-representation Strategies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Commercial Series "I Am a Mormon":

Drawn from the field of audiovisual media and religion, this paper interrogates strategies of self-representation in the series of commercials entitled "I am a Mormon". This series consist of 132 episodes between about two and four minutes in length produced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since 2010 down to the present day. The approach is threefold, asking (1) What discourse does the series generate about Mormons and Mormonism, and how? (2) For what communication space(s), constructed and shared by all participants, from makers to audience, is the series intended? (3) What values are linked to the statements made in and by the commercials? In analyzing audio-visual self-representation strategies of the Mormon Church, the paper considers how both social actors – their conversations, appearance, and behavior, for example – and stylistic forms communicate attitudes and values. The conclusion of the paper seeks to elaborate the Mormon worldview generated in this audio-visual discourse in light of the evident tension between unity and diversity.

Michael Hamilton of Principia College will discuss School Lunches, Fundamentalist Mormons, and Community Ecology:

This paper compares the contexts around the preparation and consumption of student lunches in two schools whose pupils are drawn from plural marriage communities. Community A and Community B make implicit statements about their ecological and political values and practices through the varied ways in which they provide nourishment to students during the school day.
Community A does not serve lunch at school, sending students home to eat. While portrayed as a cost-savings, the school administrator also explained the practice as consistent with community values. I explore the historical arguments that may have contributed to the policy.
Community B operates a large cafeteria with a menu including no added sugar and many organic ingredients. I argue that the cafeteria’s operations are, in part, a response to negative public perceptions of the sect, designed to reposition it as an accepted and positive presence in the larger community.

Ann Duncan of Goucher College will discuss Childbirth as Religious Performance: Quaker and Mormon Women and Paradigms of Faith and Motherhood:

Childbirth, one of the most corporeal of human experiences, has the potential to test a woman’s strength of body and character and to testify to the miraculous power of the body. Yet, motherhood is always socially constructed. In an era when advice about pregnancy and childbirth abound, religion can serve to mediate or even complicate this social maze by giving childbirth theological importance and by empowering and directing women to discern the of proper path through the maze. Engaging with past and contemporary scholarship on the complicated relationship between motherhood and feminism as well as personal interviews, this paper examines two Christian denominations on the margins of the mainstream -- the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) – and the ways in which childbirth within these traditions represents a performance of theology, motherhood and womanhood.

 So does motherhood have a biological basis or is it always only a social construct?

Matthew Bowman of Georgetown University will discuss A Vast Infiltration: Mormons, the FBI, Religion, and Politics in Late Twentieth Century America:

The close connection between Mormons and the Federal Bureau of Investigation became a pop culture trope in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. This paper will argue that this connection was most celebrated by an oddly dissonant collection of Americans. The first were Mormons themselves, who believed that the very real presence of FBI recruiters at Brigham Young University indicated that American culture had finally accepted them. The second group, however, were artists, conspiracy theorists, and evangelicals suspicious of Mormons who used the presence of Mormons in the FBI to validate broader narratives of government conspiracy, smooth, faceless bureaucracy, and lack of accountability that became popular in post-Vietnam America. The conflict between these two narratives has relevance for the cultural between left and right as the culture wars heated up, but also illustrates the ways in which Americans talked about legitimate and illegitimate religion in the late twentieth century.

 This slate of papers is illustrative of Mormon Studies.

BYU at ASOR/AAR/SBL 2014

One measure of a university's engagement in the larger scholarly world is its participation in scholarly conferences. The annual joint meetings of the American Schools of Oriental Research, American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature are a massive endeavor with hundreds of presenters and thousands of attendees. After looking through the program books, I am aware of the following individuals employed at BYU participating this year and have noted which section they are participating in:

BYU
Ancient Scripture
Lincoln H. Blumell, Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds
Richard D. Draper, Latter-day Saints and the Bible
Amy Easton-Flake, Recovering Female Interpreters of the Bible
Matthew Grey, Archaeology of the Byzantine Near East
Tyler Griffin, Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies
John Hilton III, Global Education and Research Technology
Shon D. Hopkin, Latter-day Saints and the Bible
Eric Huntsman, Latter-day Saints and the Bible
Frank F. Judd, Early Jewish Christian Relations
Jared W. Ludlow, Latter-day Saints and the Bible
George A. Pierce, Archaeology of the Southern Levant
Aaron Schade, Ugaritic Studies and Northwest Semitic Epigraphy
Catherine C. Taylor, Art and Religions of Antiquity

Archaeology
Cynthia Finlayson, Technology in Archaeology

Asian and Near Eastern Languages
Donald W. Parry, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible

Center for Teaching and Learning
Taylor Halverson, Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies

Church History and Doctrine
Jeffrey R. Chadwick, Archaeology of the Near East: Bronze and Iron Age, and Early Bronze Age III of the Southern Levant

Classics
Roger T. Macfarlane, Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds
Michael Pope, Greco-Roman Religions

History
Spencer J. Fluhman, Mormon Studies Group and Sociology of Religion Group
Edward Stratford, Archaeology of Anatolia
Grant Underwood, Latter-day Saints and the Bible

Law School
John Welch, Latter-day Saints and the Bible

Maxwell Institute
David Calabro, Egyptology and Ancient Israel
John Gee, Egyptology and Ancient Israel

Students
Jillian Mather, Archaeology of the Near East: Bronze and Iron Age
Christina Nelson, Archaeology of the Near East: Bronze and Iron Age
Michael R. Trotter, Papyrology and Early Christian Backgrounds

BYU-Hawaii
History
Richard D. McBride II, Buddhism Section, and Korean Religions Group
 
Religious Education
Daniel B. Sharp, New Testament Textual Criticism

Another Hoax?

The Washington Post is reporting that Barrie Wilson and Simcha Jacobovici are launching a new book that posits that Jesus was married and had two children.

I have not seen the book and so can only go off the reporter's summary which may or may not be accurate.

Apparently the two individuals claim to have discovered something in a neglected Syriac document by Zacharias the rhetor, who was bishop of Mitylene.

Scholars scrutinized the document and discarded it as insignificant.

The Sunday Times quoted Wilson describing it as an “ancient Syriac manuscript lurking in the British Museum…. Scholars have known about it for almost 200 years, but have not known what to make of it.”

There are two ways of looking at this. On the one hand a neglected Syriac document is something of a tautology. Syriac studies are largely neglected. (For those who do not know Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic that is used by Christians.) On the other hand, for Syriac scholars, Zacharias' Ecclesiastical History is comparatively well-known. There are at least three editions since 1800.

Reading the treatments of Wright, Brooks, and Baumstark it hardly seems as though scholars did not know what to make of this document.

They [Wilson and Jacobovici] claim the meaning of the text had been shrouded in code and “embedded meaning.” It speaks of a figure named Joseph, who apparently bore striking similarities to Jesus. He was depicted as “savior-figure,” the book said. “Joseph, like Jesus, was assumed dead and turned up alive; he too had humble beginnings and ended up a king of sorts.” So they contend Joseph was really Jesus in the text.

The sixth chapter of the first book of Zacharias is a translation of the pseudepigraphic work of Joseph and Asenath from Greek into Syriac. The copy or the translation is generally thought to be slightly garbled or corrupt. The general consensus is that the text refers to Joseph, not Jesus, and that this is a known work. Based on what I have read of the Syriac text, I would agree that it is about Joseph and not Jesus.

We will have to wait for the book, but the argument looks like typology run amok. In the meantime, I suspect that this is a bad argument sensationalized.