Yes, I know there’s no big hill on the back-side of the Community of Christ Temple, but Gemini has decided that there is and I can’t convince it otherwise.
It is no secret that the Community of Christ is not doing so well growth-wise. Of course, no religious groups except for Assemblies of God, Amish, Haredi Jews, and Mennonites are doing great growth-wise right now (let that be a lesson, if you’re not wearing floor-to-head clothing, you’re not conservative enough to grow ;), but there are some groups for which the decline is particularly pointed and the CoC is one of them.
To get the throat clearing out of the way, I’m not doing the Brighamite spiking-the-football thing. Relations are exponentially warmer than they were when Joseph Smith III had a super awkward dinner with cousin Joseph F. Smith and his wives in Salt Lake City. While there may have been some subtle tension for some people as they held the Kirtland Temple and other sites and artifacts, now that the vast majority of their historical crown jewels have been transferred there’s virtually no zero-sum dynamic going on from any angle, and I wish them the best with their mission and future.
But yes, they are in fact in decline, with a very top-heavy, aging membership base. I’m not interested in making a particular prediction for the magnitude of their decline or for when the lights will turn off (although here are some interesting thoughts on that), I just want to game out some possibilities for what it might like if the faith dies off. The flipside of exponential growth is exponential decay, where losses become smaller the smaller you become. If your population halves every 10 years then eventually everything but the absolute core remains, even if it takes a while, and then the question is what will happen to that institutional/cultural/social core.
Possibility #1: Disbandment
There is precedent in the restoration tradition for different splinter groups just simply closing up shop and everybody going back to their farms. However, this typically happens with really small groups that never achieved any kind of critical mass or takeoff, so the institutional inertia keeping them together never really developed. This might happen with the Community of Christ, but I doubt it, I suspect there won’t ever be a CoC meeting where the leadership meets, says they had a good run, and tells everybody to turn in their keys. Or at least by the time they get to that point the institution won’t look anything like the Community of Christ does now.
Possibility #2: Limp Along
There are still Strangite churches, the Temple Lot Church is still going. Heck, there are still followers of Sabbatai Zevi, the 17th century Jewish Messiah pretender who converted to Islam when his life was threatened. And Shakers recently exhibited the fastest religious growth in the world when they went from 2 to 3 members. A church rooted in a clear truth claim can limp along for quite some time, but it’s not clear that the CoC has that kind of stake in the ground like, say, their more conservative splinter group cousins (the Restorationist branches) do.
Possibility #3: Absorption or Transformation
In the Nation of Islam Elijah Mohammad’s son and successor kind of pulled a Wallace Smith, discarding their more eccentric doctrines that largely defined them and moved towards mainstream Sunni Islam. Eventually they lost even this smidgen of distinctiveness, and eventually just told adherents to join their local mosque and closed up shop. (The “Nation of Islam” today led by Louis Farrakhan is actually technically a splinter group.)
In much the same way I wouldn’t be surprised if the Restorationist branches, essentially the RLDS splinter groups, actually outlive the CoC and continue the reorganized tradition. However, Elijah Mohammad’s son was able to use his authority as the duly-appointed successor to officially close up shop. If the CoC President just wanted to do the same there would probably be subordinates that would probably splinter off to keep it going in some form or another as long as there were institutional incentives to do so.
Of course, “some form or another” does a lot of work. For example, the world’s largest no-kill animal shelter in Kanab, Utah is the institutional successor to the New Religious Movement of The Process Church of the Final Judgment, a sort of Scientology-type group that was founded in the 1960s. After a series of internal divisions and splinters, they gradually divested themselves of their religious aspect by degrees and became an animal shelter. (Fun fact, I actually interviewed a couple former Process members when I was at Baylor, and got some of the old members in contact with each other for the first time in decades). Likewise, at some point in the process, after many more congregations have shut down and there is simply no demographic future for the CoC as a religion qua religion, I could see the CoC becoming a non-religious NGO with a mission or promoting peace (a big part of their contemporary mission), or an independent generic liberal Protestant Church, and then it might eventually close doors, but it wouldn’t be because of a grand “we are officially dissolving the institution Joseph Smith III reorganized” moment, more of a “this church is closing and hey, didn’t it have its roots in the Community of Christ?” It will sort of end in a whimper because the institution will be so different by then.
Possibility #4: De-Centralization
Some movements can continue as a more diffuse theology and ideology even if particular institutions die off and evolve. However, this has already sort of happened with the restorationist branches splitting off from the then-RLDS. I might be wrong here, but at this point if the Community of Christ stopped existing it wouldn’t have any leftover attendant theology particular to them that couldn’t just be picked up by either an already existing restorationist branch or mainstream protestant church. The CoC is, above all else, an institution at this point (not saying that’s a bad thing!) more than a cultivator of a particular, distinct theology or ideology that could outlive it.
Possibility #5: Stasis and Equilibrium
One function in the religion market that the CoC serves is as a more liberal counterpart of the Latter-day Saint tradition for progressively-disposed ex-members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (indeed, I get the vibe that’s one of their selling points). With inflows and outflows you can have a dynamic where you can lose a significant percentage of your membership every year, but once you get small enough a sort of equilibrium takes hold, where your outflows are numerically small because you are small, but the inflows, even though they are very small as a percentage of the whole, replace the outflows. For example, is .000005% of Latter-day Saint liberals convert to the CoC every year, then the CoC can maintain stasis even if, say, they lose half their membership every ten years once they get small enough.
However, there is a history of liberal splinter groups from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that haven’t panned out, I just don’t think the market for liberal but still institutional competitors for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is that big. People might like the idea in theory, I just don’t see enough people doing the hard work of paying the tithing and showing up to a New Liberal Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Plus, the CoC is evolutionarily distinct enough from the COJCLDS that it’s not a simple equivalency of CoC= liberal COJCLDS. They’re their own unique thing.
Possibility #6: Become a Quasi-Ethnic Group
There are still Samaritans. There are still ancient Gnostics, there are still Zoroastrians (the faith of the king of Daniel-in-the-Lion’s Den fame). Some religious groups start to blur the line between ethnicity and religion, so you don’t have to sign on to theological particulars to belong. The CoC has a small aspect of this, with some multi-generational families traditionally belonging in the CoC category, but it never achieved the level of demographic distinctiveness to reach ethnicity level.
Conclusion
If the Community of Christ doesn’t reach some sort of inflow-outflow stasis with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I suspect at some point it will rebrand again as a more generic NGO, or essentially become an independent mainstream Protestant church that will eventually close its doors. We’ll see.
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