My first thought is of women, their role in the family and their role in the church. I think women are getting into medical school and law school and other types of graduate programs more often than ever before. My mother’s generation was often content to get married and start having children pretty quickly. For example, my mother was a credit or two away from getting a master’s degree but stopped abruptly when she got married to my father. Only years later did she go back and re-do the whole process to get her masters.

I think today there is a reality that women are seeking advanced degrees and professional credentials and are either finding a way to have children during that process or are delaying the conception of children until they feel they are at a stage of their studies where they can handle twin responsibilities.

I don’t necessarily see this as a problem at all. It’s just a change I’m noticing. This is a little bit challenging because not all women in Relief Society are in agreement that this is ok… but I think it’s become more and more an accepted option.

So how does this answer the first question? Well, I think women are thinking about their personal needs as well as their personal responsibilities. My wife is a medical student and her reaction to critics or perceived criticisms was that most women have to work at some point, why not work in a field she chose — a field that challenged and excited her? She didn’t feel she should have to be relegated to a more traditinally acceptable job (nurse, elementary school teacher, etc.) that didn’t particularly interest her.

I know that critics of this approach would say that this is the “cafeteria” approach to Mormonism … where a devout LDS person picks and chooses a bit according to what they want or need. But others (myself included) do not see it that way. After all, the prophet today is encouraging men and women to get all the education they can. At least that’s the way I’m understanding what he’s saying.

On your given definitions, neither. This is a false dichotomy, although admittedly it appears to me that many members of the Church have been sucked into it, taking one wrong position or the other.

Perhaps this depends on how stable or unstable US society is. The idea of “unchanging and uncompromising truths” seems to be more popular in a violently changing, compromising world, while the laid-back “whatever works for you” approach works better in a laid-back, working world.

As to LDS Churchmembers, I think that we are generally far more fundamentalist than other (at least Christian) religions. Even my most liberal friends accept the scriptures and most of what the prophet says “wholesale.” They may take a more “a la carte” approach to things that their bishops, stake presidents, even other apostles say, but they have testimonies of the scriptures.

What are the timelines on these trends? I have been a member for 23 years, and I can’t claim to have noticed anything like this. This seems like something that would happen over multiple generations.

Are the trends you describe global or Western or national? Phillip Jenkins argues that attempts to accomodate Christianity to the wealth and pride and spiritualism and nuance of the first world ruins the message for the third world.

Your set-up suggests that “scriptural literalism and unchanging, uncompromising doctrines that reveal truth and reality” necessarily take a Cartesian form (that is, they are “transcendent” in the sense of being separate from ourselves; they are static postulates which we can only observe and conform to, not principles which partake of our own nature). I agree that this describes fairly well the sort of modernism so many fundamentalist Christians perhaps unintentionally subscribe to (at least on a theological level), and I guess that to the extent you’re talking about Christianity in America, then that presumption works. But I’m reluctant to see those terms used in the way you seem to nonetheless, because I think it has the unfortunate consequence of assuming that immanent revelations cannot involve fundamentals, and transcendent revelations must be objective. Neither is, I think, once you look outside the particular narrow history of American Christianity, necessarily true.

But “fundamentalism” is entirely the wrong way to describe the LDS Church. It is true that the Church “do[es] not (at least admittedly) adjust [its] principles to comport with the changing morays of society” (thanks Blaine). (Although undoubtedly many in the Sunstone croud would dispute this particular observation about the Church and its course.) But that does not imply fundamentalism; rather, it implies moral certainty, righteousness, and a desire to serve God over the world. It doesn’t have to be turned into some kind of sociological aberration.

If the LDS Church or its members were “fundamentalist,” they would be bigamous, isolationist, and drinking coffee and tea and using tobacco (Brigham Young had little success in getting the members of his day to give them up and it only became such a strict prohibition around the turn of the century). But that is not the case, except for in some small “fundamentalist” communities, because the Church does change as the times change. That is the beauty of having continuing revelation, etc. The moral imperatives do not change but if some of the trappings change, so what? What is the point of having a living prophet and apostles–i.e. an inspired Church leadership–if the Church is “fundamentalist” in nature?

But having rejected that the Church is fundamentalist in nature does not require accepting the “spiritualist” categories, either the shopping cart or cafeteria varieties. I’m not sure that the Church falls into those categories either. Perhaps, as in so many other respects, the Church is here again “peculiar” and we must create a new, separate category into which only it can fall (because it is true and truly lead by God’s prophet).