{"id":20035,"date":"2012-04-09T12:24:07","date_gmt":"2012-04-09T17:24:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=20035"},"modified":"2012-04-09T12:24:07","modified_gmt":"2012-04-09T17:24:07","slug":"seeing-the-future-of-mormonism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2012\/04\/seeing-the-future-of-mormonism\/","title":{"rendered":"Seeing the Future of Mormonism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you want to know where Mormonism going, look at Mormon missionary work.\u00a0 Mormonism is nothing if not a missionary church.\u00a0 Indeed, the evangelical imperative of the religion has consistently defined its teachings, theology, and culture.\u00a0 For example, if one is looking to read Mormon theology in the nineteenth century, you would find little in the way of theological treatises.\u00a0 Rather, you would find missionary tracts like Pratt\u2019s <em>Key to the Science of Theology<\/em>, or you could read sermons, sermons whose doctrinal content is almost always embedded in an explicit or implicit theological polemic against American Protestantism.\u00a0 This is because in large part Mormon missionary work proceeded by polemic.\u00a0 As a missionary, I envied the bygone days when missionary work consisted of public theological brawling with an apostate and hireling clergy, but that is clearly the missionary experience that produced much of early Mormon thought.<\/p>\n<p>Likewise, the massive emphasis on families, especially the sanctified nuclear family, that one sees in post-WWII Mormonism in large part comes from the way in which the church placed an appeal to family at the heart of its incredibly successful proselytizing work in the twentieth century.\u00a0 To be sure, the theological material was ready at hand to create a cosmic narrative about eternal families, but the theology of the family implicit in the Home Front ads was not the same thing as the theology of the family implicit in the sealing practices of Joseph Smith or Brigham Young.\u00a0 The sharp turn toward a massive emphasis on the family came at the time when in some sense the identification of Mormonism with happy monogamy was embryonic and aspirational rather than established.\u00a0 Heber J. Grant, it is worth remembering, was a polygamist and it was only a few years after his death that David O. McKay was preaching the gospel of the sanctified nuclear family.<\/p>\n<p>This brings us to the \u201cI am a Mormon\u201d ad campaign.\u00a0 It gives an image of Mormons as multicultural, hip, interesting.\u00a0 It palpably and aggressively labors against the stereotype of Mormons as white Republicans locked into traditional family roles and uninteresting corporate jobs.\u00a0 I know a lot of young Mormons who love the ads.\u00a0 They identify \u2013 or want to identify \u2013 with the cool and interesting people in the ads.\u00a0 They like the way in which they are relieved of the need to conform to a stereotype locked someplace between Spanish Fork, Utah and Alpine, Utah.\u00a0 At the same time, a lot of the sophisticated wanna-be sophisticates who identify with the ads have cried foul.\u00a0 \u201cMost of the people I go to church with aren\u2019t nearly that interesting,\u201d they point out.\u00a0 \u201cThey are a lot whiter, more Republican, and less creative than the \u2018I am a Mormon\u2019 ad people.\u201d\u00a0 Lies, lies, lies, they insist in their darker moments.<\/p>\n<p>This misses the point.\u00a0 There is clearly a sense in which the \u201cI am a Mormon\u201d ads are a PR shtick.\u00a0 Like all PR shticks they do not describe reality in any kind of complete or accurate way.\u00a0 Rather, they pick at reality to create an appealing vision.\u00a0 The difference is that this PR shtick is embedded within the missionary program of the Mormon Church.\u00a0 That missionary program will do two things.\u00a0 First, it will relentless grind its way forward, searching for converts and institutional growth. \u00a0The growth will comes from people who find its message appealing. \u00a0Second, it will transform the church that it serves.\u00a0 Many Mormons, especially Mormon leaders, have their sense of what it means to be a Mormon forged through missionary work.\u00a0 For them Mormonism is and in some sense always will be the message that they preach as missionaries, a message that includes not simply \u2013 or even primarily \u2013 the theological content of the lessons they teach but the rhetorical tropes and emotional images in which those lessons are embedded.\u00a0 Over time Mormons will push their own lives to conform to the images presented by the Church of what it means to be a good Mormon. \u00a0Those images of good Mormons, however, are always made with at least one eye on missionary work.<\/p>\n<p>This means that the \u201cI am a Mormon\u201d ads ought to make hipster, young sophisticates hopeful.\u00a0 If I am right, over the course of their life times Mormonism in its teachings and cultural practices will transform itself to look more and more like the cool Mormons in the \u201cI am a Mormon\u201d ads. \u00a0That will be pretty cool to watch.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you want to know where Mormonism going, look at Mormon missionary work.\u00a0 Mormonism is nothing if not a missionary church.\u00a0 Indeed, the evangelical imperative of the religion has consistently defined its teachings, theology, and culture.\u00a0 For example, if one is looking to read Mormon theology in the nineteenth century, you would find little in the way of theological treatises.\u00a0 Rather, you would find missionary tracts like Pratt\u2019s Key to the Science of Theology, or you could read sermons, sermons whose doctrinal content is almost always embedded in an explicit or implicit theological polemic against American Protestantism.\u00a0 This is because in large part Mormon missionary work proceeded by polemic.\u00a0 As a missionary, I envied the bygone days when missionary work consisted of public theological brawling with an apostate and hireling clergy, but that is clearly the missionary experience that produced much of early Mormon thought. Likewise, the massive emphasis on families, especially the sanctified nuclear family, that one sees in post-WWII Mormonism in large part comes from the way in which the church placed an appeal to family at the heart of its incredibly successful proselytizing work in the twentieth century.\u00a0 To be sure, the theological material was ready at [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20035"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20036,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20035\/revisions\/20036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}