The adage that change happens “one funeral at a time” actually has a bit of sociological research to back it up. To get technical for a brief moment, there is a question as to whether cultural change happens by “settled disposition” or “active updating.” In other words whether:
- After an initial period of young people figuring things out, our attitudes settle down and are relatively stable from adulthood on, which means that change happens as older people die off and are replaced by younger people.
- People significantly change across the lifecourse, so societal cultural shifts happen because people are convinced to change their opinions.
Of course both #1 and #2 happen, neither are mythological, but the question is which is the primary driving force for cultural change, and the literature has generally landed on #1 having more predictive power (fun fact, the guru of the cohort-driven cultural change literature is Stephen Vaisey, a BYU grad and [I believe] former member at Duke University. I’ve never met him, but when I interviewed for Duke U’s PhD program he was the latest hot young hire coming in the next year from Berkeley). A report I helped the Wheatley Institution with showed that secularization, for example, was driven by cohort replacement much more than by older people becoming less religious as they age. Of course, there are exceptions (Nate Silver estimated that about ½ to 2/3 of the change in gay marriage came from people changing their minds over the issue as opposed to older people dying off) but for most issues and in most contexts that’s not how it works. Sometimes the Overton Window solidifies so much that older people at least publicly don’t identify with a position that it was socially okay to identify with in the past (e.g. being a Klan member), but Overton Window shifts can be finicky, unpredictable things, and as an aside I suspect the latest election results at least in part stem from the left trying to use cultural power to strongarm an Overton Window shift on various issues that just didn’t have a lot of bottom-up, organic support.
So what are the implications for the Church? Simply put, given our rules for succession and increasing lifespans, there is a 60-year lag between youth attitudes and somebody influenced by those youth attitudes making it to the very top tier position (Church President), which is the only locus where major doctrinal revelations are received (although mid-level administrators sometimes do try to nip at the edges, there is a limit to how much they can do). Generally speaking I think people tend to exaggerate the influence of any single person in the hierarchy (e.g. if you think Elder Gilbert just woke up one day and decided to put more umph into CES mission fit you’re reading the situation wrong), but the one exception is the President of the Church.
I suspect the Catholic Church is going through a textbook case of this right now. As I and others have found in survey research, Catholic priests nowadays are much, much more conservative, and this is driven by younger cohorts coming up and replacing more liberal priests that were in seminaries in the immediate liberalizing glow of Vatican II. Conversely, as Pope Francis is the first Pope from the Vatican-II-is-exciting generation, it is not surprising that he has a more progressive perspective, but the point is that it took this long for a bright-eyed, newly ordained Catholic high school teacher in the afterglow of Vatican II to become Pope, so too will it take over a half century for whatever the kids these days are into to percolate up to the position of influencing Church policy and practice. If you do the math, assuming our personalities and perspectives are more or less settled by our mid-to-late 20s, it takes a loooong time. Not that Elder Bednar changing his mind and wearing a rainbow lapel pin is out of the realm of possibility, just highly unlikely (same for any of the 15, I suspect there’s less theological space among them than some people posit).
Of course, even a straight-line, survive-forward trajectory doesn’t take into account “selection effects,” or the fact that 1) the more orthodox will stay in the Church longer to be able to take the time to ascend those positions, and 2) leadership by and large selects for orthodoxy. So a more liberal leader wanting to, say, go full Community of Christ and back away from Book of Mormon historical truth claims would have to stay in the Church their entire life and be quiet enough about their heterodoxies to continue to be selected for increasingly higher tiers of leadership. Very occasionally you’ll get a non-historicist at, say, the bishop level or so (for example,Times and Seasons’ resident chaplain-bishop Stephen Fleming), but I suspect those sorts of beliefs, unless they were duplicitously and consciously trying to hide them, would eventually stymie one’s ascent into the highest echelons of the ranks. Whenever you see the very occasional Area 70 or mission president completely leave belief, they typically leave during or after their Church service, not long before.
Of course, these trends are general and there may be exceptions with later-life conversions. For example, I can think of two former GA 70s that would probably have pushed for same-sex sealings had they made it into the Quorum of the 12 and eventually the presidency. With Elder Snow’s Salt Lake Tribune interview it’s clear that is the direction he would lean…and I’m not going to name the other one because I’m just going by my gut based on things he’s said and might be wrong. Still, they are very much in the minority. Most retired 70s just retire without having a last word.
However, while the disposition of the President of the Church is important, so too is the culture of the Church writ large. Ironically, the fertility decline that typically accompanies liberalization leads to a narrower population base, which makes revolutionary agitation less likely. (As an aside, this is one reason why I doubt China will have a man-the-barricaded violent revolution. Old people don’t throw molotov cocktails, as has been well-established in the literature political turbulence often requires huge youth cohorts).
Now to address the normative question: is this a good thing? As the resident gadfly conservative you can probably guess my response.
The idea that the young people and intellectuals are always correct is like people who claim that all old movies are great. We only remember the Sound of Musics, we don’t remember all the schlop whose only legacy is a spot on Mystery Science Theater 3000. By the same token, we remember the Civil Rights marches, but not, say, seances and spiritualism, blankslatism, Freudian psychoanalysis, the fact that birth control rights were originally motivated by the desire to have fewer Black people, getting rid of age of consent laws, and a lot of other faddish things the intellectual, self-consciously progressive class was into that haven’t exactly survived the test of time, and for which it was good that the Church did not grab onto it as the latest cool thing, or, as President Hinckley put it, to have “a man of maturity at the head, a man of judgment, who isn’t blown about by every wind of doctrine.”
Comments
19 responses to “The Church, Cohort Turnover, and “Change Happening One Funeral at a Time””
Is the Overton window even relevant anymore? I mean yesterday, annexing Gaza was outside of that window and today it seem to have moved into the window. Not because older generations died off overnight, but because one man single-handedly moved it there. Within the Church, you have the example of Wilford Woodruff doing something just as dramatic. If this is the new normal and the Church continues with the cohort-driven model, it risks becoming nothing more than a safe place to stick one’s head in the sand.
I’m a prime example of a conservative youth becoming a very liberal with more knowledge and experience. At any rate, it’s morally very difficult to be a “conservative” in today’s America. Maybe you’ll eventually come around, Stephen. (-:
An example of change that happened one funeral at a time in the Church might be the weakening of the anti-evolution, anti-science, anti-scholarship, and sometimes even anti-curiosity strain of thought that had so much influence for so long. As a concrete example, I remember being told that Joseph Smith–History was canon and the other accounts of the First Vision should be ignored (with a hint that studying them might be downright dangerous). But the 2020 Restoration Proclamation from the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve draws specifically on those other accounts. I can’t imagine Saints or the Joseph Smith Papers happening in my youth.
A possible example of active updating is my pet theory that the current emphasis on Christ, his atonement, and being saved by his grace, as opposed to legalistic approaches to the Gospel, is a direct result of President Benson’s counsel to make the Book of Mormon the center of our gospel study. After all, President Nelson was already an apostle by the time that counsel was given. But he’s talked repeatedly about the impact studying the Book of Mormon has had on him, and specifically on his testimony of Christ. So maybe the Book of Mormon is just that powerful, or maybe we’ll see even more impact of that counsel as my generation, the ones who got it in their youth, have an increasing role in top-level Church leadership.
(That seems like a much more plausible explanation for the emphasis on Christ than a desire to assimilate into mainstream Christianity, given that it’s been accompanied by a continuing emphasis on the Book of Mormon and greater emphasis on the temple and temple building.)
Looking ahead, the next big one-funeral-at-a-time change I see is a generation taking over for whom it was always normal to have women as peers or superiors in the workplace. We’ll see what impact that has.
Given the age of the current First Presidency, and Holland’s health, we may have change coming at the rate of four funerals soon…
And I’d just add a couple more wrinkles: the “youth of today” always included a conservative segment, and the idea that younger generations are becoming more progressive has take a couple big hits lately. To our detriment, we’re coming up on a decade of young people seeing that abusers, racists and sexists can do just fine in public life, while the idea of trying to treat everyone with dignity and respect is for squares and losers.
Remember Wendy Nelson’s statements in the Church News shortly after her husband’s elevation to the First Presidency? She said now that her husband is president of the church, he is able to do things that were previously were not possible. Or how President Hinckley couldn’t abolish stake seventies quorums until after Elder Peterson died? Or how President Kimball couldn’t change the priesthood ban until a day when, conveniently, the same Elder Peterson was out of town on assignment and Elder Stapley was in his hospital deathbed?
Stephen, nice post. Two things:
1. I’ve always heard that folks tend to come back to belief and orthodoxy as they age. Do you know the data on this?
2. I don’t want to hijack your thread, but you’ve greatly overstated the influence of racism on the availability of contraception. Belief in social Darwinism, with its racial component, was widespread in the U.S. and Europe when Margaret Sanger created Planned Parenthood; certainly it influenced her and others. To say it was *the* original motivation, let alone a principal one, is a bridge too far.
Last Lemming: Occasionally there are people who rupture sharply with the past, and they are either visionaries when it pans out or idiots when everything explodes, but they’re the exception and not the rule.
Thomas: So youth becoming more liberal is definitely within the “cohort replacement” model, but it’s the adults significantly shifting after they’ve reached adulthood that is more rare. At the risk of being too trendy, I mean conservative in the Burkean sense more than allegiance to whatever the thing-of-the-minute that the Orange Man is into.
RLD: That’s a good point. I believe President Nelson is an anti-evolutionist, but his first counselor is the son of the evolution gadfly of the mid-20th century Church, so battles versus wars won and all that, and the issue isn’t nearly as salient even if there are some people who privately hold a particular view.
I should be more familiar with our soteriological history in regards to legalism versus grace, but that sounds like a plausible theory.
Acw: That’s true, but surprises do happen.
Jonathan Green: Especially among the young men.
Ji: I wasn’t aware of the stake seventies quorum dynamic.
Freddo: It’s really hard to get solid data on this because there are issues of 1) age, 2) period, and 3) cohort, and it’s hard to disentangle those effects empirically, but there is some research that suggests that as people have children and marry there is a return to faith, but people are neither marrying nor having children anymore (and if they have children they’re not marrying), so I don’t know how much that dynamic is going to effect secularization in general.
While I know that Sanger was openly influenced and motivated by eugenics ideas, I’ll concede that I couldn’t defend a staked-out position on exactly how much of the motivation was eugenicist, whether explicitly or not. However, I could modify the statement to make it much more precise by saying that the religious support for birth control among the Mainline Protestant faiths was largely motivated by eugenics (as discussed in Wilde’s linked book on the subject).
RLD: Correction: *Second* counselor.
The First Vision film we used to show everybody on my 1978-1980 mission included elements of three different first vision accounts. An article in the New Era about the film made quite a point about the fact that other accounts were represented.
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/new-era/1977/10/lovely-was-the-morning?lang=eng
Yes, President Nelson has on occasion made comments indicating he does not believe in evolution–which makes it all the more remarkable that he hasn’t sought to promote that point of view as president of the Church. He’s not exactly shy.
I’m not aware of any comments by President Eyring on the topic, but I also assume he probably agrees with his father and wonder about his influence behind the scenes.
Good point Left Field! I’ve seen that film enough times that I really should have recognized elements from it when I finally did read the other accounts, even if there were a couple of decades in between. It just goes to show that the Church was never and still isn’t monolithic on such things.
If we believe that individual repentance is necessary to approach oneness with the Heavenly Father, then this post seems to side with the teaching that the path to eternal life is narrow and few are on that path. Most are on a broad path that leads elsewhere.
You’ve repeatedly speculated in public about individuals’ membership or belief status. That bad habit mars otherwise thoughtful and interesting posts.
Gwendolyn: I’m not sure about what you’re referring to, but if it’s the bit about Stephen Fleming that was meant as a friendly aside; his views on source material for the BoM et al. have been the open topic of discussion on this blog for the past couple of weeks or so, so I’m not “outing” him or saying anything new.
As far as other posts; I don’t make a habit of doing so and am fuzzy on what you’re referencing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I have, as I’ve explicitly noted that when people use their Mormonism to leverage their argument, (“as a faithful Mormon…”) then it is fair to question what exactly is meant by that descriptor.
“Vaisey, a BYU grad and [I believe] former member” from the post above is one of several recent examples.
Ah, that one. I was pointing that out in the same way that I’d point out that Marco Rubio or Ryan Gosling had Mormon backgrounds as a fun little bit of trivia; from the context it’s clear it wasn’t meant to impugn him or his conclusions.
You reference the rebalancing in the church “doctrine “ of the importance of faith in Christ and grace, vs SWK Miracle of Forgiveness -not” approach , which ETB’s emphasis on the BofM [inadvertently?] brought into the Church. I often wondered after closely studying the BofM on my mission to mixed blood northern South America in very early 70’s if the 12 had ever even read the Book of Mormon. It seemed to me if they had that its basic teachings about the atonement and about equality amongst all peoples had completely escaped their blinded eyes. No one who “got” the BofM would ever have produced Miracle of Forgiveness. I tossed every copy I ever encountered during my 12 years combined service as s Bishop and Branch President.
The BofM undercut the whole blsck nonsense as well for anyone with two brains to rub together. And obviously it provides the underpinnings for the political course correction Trump/MAGA is trying to effect, (last chapter of Mosiah with constitution for government by Judges)and the fact that leaders may do unrighteously towards themselves but righteousnessly towards their people. Most notable is the necessity for a a painfully direct emphasis on true equality amongst people, including individual accountability for consequences of individual choices. True equality is a terribly demanding taskmaster …a common thread across the BofM. nowadays we’ve become accustomed to treating people on the curve, with unending # of categories demanding special inequality in treatment vs others….
Old Grandpa, could you provide specifics concerning the last sentence of your comment?
I can give you an old funny example from
Church admin that illustrates the point well. I was the agent bishop for a multi ward chapel in Latin America that we, the local majority Spanish speaking ward, shared with a gringo English speaking ward. In those days budget costs were split down the middle between the 2 units, each treated equally. No big deal, no confusion… though every problem or damage to the building we instinctively blamed in those wild out of control spoiled gringo kids.
Not long after that we were transferred to the Northeast US. I was the President of the Spanish branch and we shared a building with a gringo ward. The stake and the gringos had developed the custom over the years, no matter the relative size of the branch, of not making the Latins pay their full ride, their full 50%. That would in essence pat their little Spanish brothers on their heads condescendingly, and in the process remind them they were less. And the Latins would go along, but then complain because they never had equal calendaring access to the use of the building, and the gringos obviously looked down their noses at them. As soon as I was called I insisted on equality – we paid our 50% and we had equal calendaring access.. plus we expected the gringos to quit walking in, out, and through our meetings as if we weren’t there, and we expected a clerk and s bishop’s office just like them. Full equality… tough discipline… the gringos preferred the condescending treatment even though it cost them more $, and the Latins while spending less have something to continually bellyache about. Once the principle of equality was laid down, a tough taskmaster that chafed both sides, things began to improve on each side and in our interactions as they became more frank, honest, and Christian