{"id":47637,"date":"2024-07-28T04:00:28","date_gmt":"2024-07-28T10:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=47637"},"modified":"2025-05-28T20:37:32","modified_gmt":"2025-05-29T02:37:32","slug":"churches-with-sound-fundamentals-are-very-robust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2024\/07\/churches-with-sound-fundamentals-are-very-robust\/","title":{"rendered":"Churches with Sound Fundamentals Are Very Robust"},"content":{"rendered":"

Imagine President Nelson and the First Presidency came out with a revelation prophesying that the Second Coming would happen on a specific year (yes, that would never happen in the Church for a great number of reasons, but suspend disbelief for a second). This message was trumpeted from the General Conference pulpit on multiple occasions and carried across multiple issues of the Ensign. Missionaries are told to incorporate the message of God\u2019s imminent coming in their materials. After several years of this kind of consistent, focused preparation the prophesied date comes\u2026.and nothing happens. At first there\u2019s some fudge factor. Maybe it\u2019s the next month or the next year? But soon it becomes clear that the entire prophecy is wrong.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Would that be the death knell to the Church? Something very similar to this actually happened to the Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses in 1975. My understanding was that there was always some level of plausible deniability, but you had to be a more nuanced believer to read between the lines of official material to parse out such a space. The Witnesses by and large were gearing up for the Second Coming.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And what happened to them when Christ failed to arrive? I ran across this graph of Witness growth during the 20th century (citation, since I don\u2019t know how to do footnotes in WordPress: <\/span>Sturgis, Paul W. “Institutional versus Contextual Explanations for the Growth of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the United States, 1945-2002.” <\/span>Review of Religious Research<\/span><\/i> (2008): 290-300.)<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

What is intriguing here is that, while the run-up to the \u201cSecond Coming\u201d in 1975 did indeed show an acceleration in growth with the added energy of Christ\u2019s imminence, the slump after their own \u201cGreat Disappointment\u201d lasted for only a few years, and then growth kept continuing right up with where it was before. Matter of fact, if you remove the hump and simply extrapolate a single line from before and after, it looks like they basically ended up where they would have been without the sharp increase and dropoff. It was as if their failed prophecy didn’t matter at all for their bottom line.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One of my take-aways from this is that mature, institutionally developed religions with sound fundamentals are quite robust. In our own history, we perennially go through waves of people saying \u201c<\/span>this<\/span><\/i> is it, the Church won\u2019t survive this,\u201d whether it\u2019s Kirtland Safety Society, the Missouri expulsions, the death of Joseph Smith, the coming of the railroad, the death of Brigham Young, the polygamy raids, the Manifesto, the finding of the Book of Abraham papyrus, the Internet making people more aware of the complexities, etc. And I\u2019m sure there will be many more before the final wrapping up. (How could it be any different with God’s chosen faith and people?) \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Many, I am sure, would argue whether these things <\/span>should<\/span><\/i> have been the death knell, but I would dispute their prophecies of our imminent demise on a more general, sociological level. As shown in the Witness case, as long as you have a faith that takes proselytizing seriously and has a devout core and devout leadership that holds to their doctrinal fundamentals, faiths are relatively robust to “exogenous” shocks (although some of this is stemming from inside the Church, so somewhat endogenous). Of course, if the leadership doesn\u2019t quite believe it, that causes its own problems and all bets are off, and general secular trends are hard for any faith, but here I\u2019m referring to a one-off, religion-specific events, where people throw up their hands and leave all at once. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Another example: the Boston Globe \u201cSpotlight\u201d scandal of 2001\/2002 was a code red for Catholicism in America, with just about the worst scandal possible, <\/span>yet the percentage Catholic in the US <\/span><\/a>didn\u2019t really start to tank until nearly ten years later. Maybe that\u2019s a delayed response, but I\u2019m inclined to think it\u2019s just generic secularization, as we\u2019re seeing similar trends across the religious board.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I think this fantasy has petered out somewhat, but I remember the old Very Online dreams that one just needed to get information about Joseph Smith polygamy or this or that into everybody\u2019s mailboxes or inboxes then there would be an irreparable exodus from the Church so great to threaten the Church\u2019s existence, and some people were very upset when their YouTube videos didn’t lead to a widespread collapse in the faithful narrative.<\/span><\/p>\n

(Fun sidebar, years ago when I was involved in Wikipedia editing I noticed the Wikipedia entries on the facsimiles made it sound like the Latter-day Saint Egyptologist translation of the papyrus materials was in a different universe than the mainstream interpretation. I adjusted the article accordingly to better show that in terms of the character-by-character translation there wasn\u2019t much disagreement. Later, when he was on the Joe Rogan podcast Richard Dawkins talked about the Book of Abraham and how Mormon Egyptologists agree with the consensus. His specific verbiage was such that I suspect that he got that tidbit from Wikipedia, specifically the section that I edited, so perhaps the most publicized point I have ever made was made from the mouth of Richard Dawkins on the Joe Rogan podcast.)\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

However, here I am going to caveat the \u201calmost any\u201d exogenous shock. Wilford Woodruff was literally shown in a vision what would happen if the Church did not back off of polygamy, and if OD II hadn’t been received that would have been quite the stress test. (Even then, would either situation have been as bad as the 1975 Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses? I don\u2019t know) Still, at this point it\u2019s clear that some General Authority scandal (of which we haven\u2019t had a real juicy one for a long while) or this or that book or factoid becoming common knowledge isn\u2019t enough to keep the stone that is cut of the mountain without hands from rolling forth.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Imagine President Nelson and the First Presidency came out with a revelation prophesying that the Second Coming would happen on a specific year (yes, that would never happen in the Church for a great number of reasons, but suspend disbelief for a second). This message was trumpeted from the General Conference pulpit on multiple occasions and carried across multiple issues of the Ensign. Missionaries are told to incorporate the message of God\u2019s imminent coming in their materials. After several years of this kind of consistent, focused preparation the prophesied date comes\u2026.and nothing happens. At first there\u2019s some fudge factor. Maybe it\u2019s the next month or the next year? But soon it becomes clear that the entire prophecy is wrong.\u00a0 Would that be the death knell to the Church? Something very similar to this actually happened to the Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses in 1975. My understanding was that there was always some level of plausible deniability, but you had to be a more nuanced believer to read between the lines of official material to parse out such a space. The Witnesses by and large were gearing up for the Second Coming.\u00a0 And what happened to them when Christ failed to arrive? I ran […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":47638,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-sciences-and-economics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/unnamed.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47637","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=47637"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50266,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47637\/revisions\/50266"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}