We just returned from our yearly-ish pilgrimage to Utah. Trips to Utah are always an opportunity \u00a0to stick my finger in the air to get a more subjective, qualitative sense of things are going in the Church. Of course, Utah does not equal the Church in so many ways, but it does act as a sort of financial and membership ballast, and the amount of Mormon-ness in Utah is big enough that one can notice trends and patterns that would be harder to discern from random noise with a smaller sample size. However, here I\u2019m not backing up any of these conjectures with quantitative data, it\u2019s just my own anecdotal sense that may or may not be right, for what it\u2019s worth.<\/p>\n
Back in my day Utahns could basically be separated out into three groups: members, whether active or not, ex-members, and never members. Typically but not always there were tensions between the first two groups, and ex-members either moved to Salt Lake Valley or left Utah altogether. The ex-Mormon identity was a very reified, concrete thing. It could hardly be otherwise with a relatively high-tension, high demand religion like the Church.<\/p>\n
Now I\u2019m noticing another group, the second-generation ex-members. Some are what immigration scholars would call \u201cgeneration 1.5,\u201d or people who are born in one country as children but moved to another country young enough that for all intentions and purposes the UK\/the US\/whatever is the only country that they\u2019ve known. The religious counterpart here would be people attending primary\/YW\/YM, then their parents leave along with their kids. The singer Jewel or Actress Amy Adams fit into this category. With the Great Internet Exodus I suspect there are a lot of these \u201cgeneration 1.5\u201d ex-members in Utah. A lot of time has passed and I get the sense that, if you were going to leave with your whole family over Book of Abraham or LGBTQ issues, you would have done so by now, plus people are just having fewer children now, so this \u201cgeneration 1.5\u201d group of five kid families all leaving is a one-off phenomenon.<\/p>\n
However, enough time has passed since The Great Internet Exodus that I am noticing another religious demographic in Utah: 2nd<\/sup> or 3rd<\/sup>-generation ex-members. This group does not have \u201cex-Mormon\u201d in their social media bios, they fold their arms and bow their heads out of politeness for the family reunion prayers, and if their kids or family members returned to the Church they wouldn\u2019t particularly mind. They might even have a sort of respect for the structure and stability provided by the Church even if they themselves have no desire. They still swim in member water occasionally, and might even show up to a church meeting if a friend\u2019s friend is leaving on their mission. There is a particular kind of 8th kid of a ten-kid super orthodox family that is overrepresented in online ex-Mormon discourse–these are not one of those.<\/p>\n On a related note, like others I have been surprised at the number of new missions in Utah. These missions do not make a lot of sense when viewed from the former paradigm of members, ex-members for whom missionaries would not help, and a small number of never-members. However, the increase in never-members in Utah, combined with this new religious sociodemographic, actually means that there is a critical mass of people for whom missionary work might be effective, especially when taking into account the ample resources of local wards (we have a hard time fellowshipping RCs in my local ward, I suspect Utah wards don\u2019t have the same problems), and Utah missions presumably benefit from the Starkian dynamics where somebody\u2019s probability of conversion is proportional to the number of network ties somebody has to a faith.<\/p>\n In a sense this new Utah paradigm could an ideal. There are enough members that people are likely to at least consider the possibility, to open up the door to faith and not to dismiss it out of hand. But there isn\u2019t so much of a monopoly that membership is a genetic inheritance, with the few that break out of their genetic inheritance shunned enough that they become a whole other thing\u2014the Ex-Mormon. It is providing the opportunity to embrace the gospel without sociocultural coercion to do so, making agency more operative in religious decision-making.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We just returned from our yearly-ish pilgrimage to Utah. Trips to Utah are always an opportunity \u00a0to stick my finger in the air to get a more subjective, qualitative sense of things are going in the Church. Of course, Utah does not equal the Church in so many ways, but it does act as a sort of financial and membership ballast, and the amount of Mormon-ness in Utah is big enough that one can notice trends and patterns that would be harder to discern from random noise with a smaller sample size. However, here I\u2019m not backing up any of these conjectures with quantitative data, it\u2019s just my own anecdotal sense that may or may not be right, for what it\u2019s worth. Back in my day Utahns could basically be separated out into three groups: members, whether active or not, ex-members, and never members. Typically but not always there were tensions between the first two groups, and ex-members either moved to Salt Lake Valley or left Utah altogether. The ex-Mormon identity was a very reified, concrete thing. It could hardly be otherwise with a relatively high-tension, high demand religion like the Church. Now I\u2019m noticing another group, the second-generation ex-members. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latter-day-saint-thought"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47614","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\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47614"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47619,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47614\/revisions\/47619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}