The Mormon Culture of Community and Recruitment
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Mormon Culture of Community and Recruitment Source:http://www.allaboutmormons.com/IMG/MormonImages/mormon-scriptures/book-of-mormon-many-languages.jpg Thesis by Tofani Grava Wheaton College, Department of Anthropology Spring, 2011 1 Table of Contents Page Chapter I: Introduction 4 Chapter II: Methodology 8 1. Research Phases 8 2. My Informants and Fieldsites 11 3. Ethical Considerations 12 4. Challenges Encountered 13 Chapter III: Literature Review 15 I. Historical Framework 15 II. Theoretical Framework 17 A. Metatheoretical Framework 17 1. Theories of religion and community 17 2. Religious rituals and rites of passage 19 3. Millenarian movements 21 4. Fundamentalism 22 5. Charisma 24 B. The logic of Faith in Christianity in 21st Century America 25 1. The function of American Churches in contemporary 25 American society 28 2. Modern Techniques of membership recruitment 29 3. Religious conversion III. Analyses of Mormonism 31 A. Processes of socialization and the Mormon subculture 31 1. A Family-oriented theology 31 2. Official Mormon religious rhetoric 32 3. The prophetic figure 34 B. Mormon Conversion 35 1. Missionary work and volunteer labor force 35 2. Mormonism as millenarian 37 IV. Online Communities: Theoretical Overview 38 A. Virtual Culture 38 1. The Interaction logic of virtual communities 38 2. The Virtual Self 40 3. The Interpenetration of public and private spheres 42 4. Virtual Communities as instruments for change 43 43 2 Page B. Religion and Technology in Modern America 46 1. A New Religious Landscape 46 2. Religious representation online 49 3. Praising Technology 51 IV. Twenty-First Century Mormonism and the Internet 54 A. Mormon Culture in the Virtual Age 55 1. Change and Accommodation: The Public Faces of Mormonism 55 2. Building the Church online 57 B. Proselytizing through electronic media 61 1. Official LDS Websites 61 2. The Mormon Blogosphere 62 Chapter IV: Data Analysis 65 I. Encountering the LDS Church for the first time 65 1. Personal preconceptions regarding the Mormon Church 65 2. Trip to the Oakland Temple and subsequent first face-to-face 68 with missionaries 3. Trip to Salt Lake City, Utah in August 2010 73 II. Mormon missionaries and becoming a potential member of the faith 77 1. Missionary lessons 77 2. My experience of personal involvement 79 3. Baptism ceremony projection date 81 III. The LDS Community 83 1. Sunday meetings 83 2. The Temple 86 3. General Conference 87 IV. Church authorities on the Web 89 1. Official Sites 89 2. Instructing the lay ministry and Church Internet Policy 94 3. LDS Missionary work online 97 V. Members online investment 99 1. The “Bloggernacle” 99 2. Mormons on “Second Life” 104 Chapter V: Conclusion 107 Bibliography 113 Glossary 119 Annex Documents 121 3 Chapter I: Introduction This thesis is a study of the culture of community and recruitment in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as LDS Church or Mormonism. The statistical report published by the Church in December 2009 recorded that there were 13,824,854 Mormons worldwide. This compares to one million members in 1947, and two million members as of the end of 1963 1. I believe that Mormonism appeals to members by providing a safe harbor from what believers commonly describe as a “sin- driven”, and competitive American society. At the same time, the general public often perceives the Mormon faith negatively. There is even a certain apprehension toward the LDS Church. As a critical thinker, I wondered why and how the Church experienced such exponential growth, and so undertook to study the Mormon culture of community and recruitment. I examined the Church‟s organizational structure offline and online, as well as its beliefs and practices. The socialization of Mormons involves an emphasis on living the gospel, together with a mission to volunteer and spread its message. All of the members I interacted with demonstrated a desire to share the benefits of their beliefs and experience of faith. As one Mormon informant said, “Mormonism is more than a religion, it is a lifestyle”. On many occasions, I was encouraged by Mormons to convert and become a blessed member of 1 http://lds.org/church/statistics?lang=eng 4 the “true Church of God on Earth”2. The unanimity of the Mormon‟s beliefs is striking, as is the tight-knit community it creates. The basic unit of LDS community is the family, considered “the most important social unit on earth”, as well as “the basic and most important unit in heaven”3. Claudia Bushman, a non-Mormon historian in the history of the LDS Church, writes of the “Mormon belief in the family, not the individual, as the basic unit of society” (Bushman 2006:41). The centrality of the family within the Church, followed by its strong support network, constitutes the greater benefits of being Mormon. Members cooperate and unite in a mission to build the kingdom of God on earth. Through an inclusive and collectivist socialization process, the lay ministry is trained to believe in its sacred responsibility to proselytize. This deeply rooted belief system, added to the Church‟s willingness to adapt to new conditions with new technology, affords Mormonism with the power to maintain and build membership with extraordinary success. I met Mormons of all ages, from a variety of socio-economic and educational backgrounds, some who were born into the faith, and some who had converted. All of the members I encountered were eager to prove their “willingness to serve in the Church and to study, pray and learn”. Through these practices, “members have the sacred opportunity and responsibility to obtain their own testimonies”4. Charles Didier, an official Church representative, defines testimony as “finding within ourselves a firm and true foundation 2 From the perspective of the LDS Church, “all other churches on earth are apostate and seekers of truth are commanded to come out from among them” (Nichols, Mather and Schmidt. 2006. Encyclopedic Dictionary of Cults, Sects and World Religions.) 3 LDS Church official website, lds.org: http://classic.lds.org/family/ 4 LDS Church official website lds.org: http://lds.org/study/topics/testimony?lang=eng 5 that will determine a firm and true behavior”5. Volunteerism, religious involvement and proselytizing are a means to prove worthy of God‟s work and gain testimony. In the hopes of painting as full a picture as I could of the LDS Church, I gathered field data in a variety of sites, including the Oakland Temple in California, Salt Lake City in Utah, and local Mormon wards in Marin County, California, as well as in Franklin and Weston, Massachusetts. The Church sent missionaries the day after my visit to the Oakland Temple, unannounced to my family‟s home. For the purposes of my research, I followed weekly lessons with missionaries from July to October 2010. In these meetings, missionaries preached the gospel and answered my questions. All along, they worked to put me in touch with different members of the Church, including, young adults, young married couples, families, and a former bishop. Together, my informants shed light on my understanding of LDS scriptures, practices and beliefs. I note that I have assured the anonymity of all the individuals I met, except where I have explicit agreement to the contrary. I also note that all informants were aware, and often reminded, that my interest was driven by my desire to investigate and write this thesis. As a participant-observer, I became familiar with the LDS community and witnessed its indispensability for Mormons. I attended church related activities such as “sacrament meeting”, “Sunday school” and “relief society”. My groundwork also entailed collecting primary data on the church, including The Book of Mormon, brochures, maps, DVDs and an LDS manual titled Preach my Gospel, designed for missionaries in training. Some of these documents were given to me because they served as a 5 LDS Church official website, lds.org: http://lds.org/general- conference/1991/10/testimony?lang=eng 6 complement to the missionaries‟ lessons. Others, because they are at hand in LDS places of worship, congregations and Temple visitors‟ centers. By recording data in my fieldwork journal almost daily for four months, I captured both facts and my own experiences and impressions of the Church, which proved an indispensable complement to my readings and academic research. Scholarly literature on the LDS Church has dealt primarily with historical and contemporary studies of social geography and practices among Mormons. In the mid-20th century, new foci of interest appeared in the literature, aiming to connect two major components of Modern American society: religion and mass media. Scholars have shown that from its earliest days, the Church has adopted increasingly sophisticated forms of print and electronic media, both in a mission to propagate the faith and protect it from outside scrutiny. In the last decade, they have also pointed to the possible “virtualization of the LDS Church”, emerging from Mormonism‟s significant investment in building its online counterpart. In their 2003 bibliography of academic scholarship on Mormons and the media, Baker and Stout remarked, The Internet and its relationship to Mormons, the Church, and Mormon/non- Mormon interaction is ripe for study from the perspectives of institutional uses, member uses, nonmember uses of official Mormon sites [and] impact/effect studies. (Baker and Stout 2003:133). Through the lens of media logic theories, I set out to investigate how the Church is adopting the Internet to fulfill its social and normative functions, and whether such adoption concurrently causes a fundamental change in organizational form. This aspect of my analysis represents the honors component of my study, and it required prior examination of the Church‟s culture of community and recruitment offline.