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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. \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n 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\u2019re not wearing floor-to-head clothing, you\u2019re not conservative enough to grow ;), but there are some groups for which the decline is particularly pointed and the CoC is one of them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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. <\/span>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\u2019s virtually no zero-sum dynamic going on from any angle, and I wish them the best with their mission and future.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But yes, they are in fact in decline, with a very top-heavy, aging membership base. I\u2019m not interested in making a particular prediction for the magnitude of their decline or for when the lights will turn off (although here <\/a><\/span>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 <\/span>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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Possibility #1: Disbandment<\/b><\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Possibility #2: Limp Along<\/b><\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Possibility #3: Absorption or Transformation<\/b><\/p>\n In the Nation of Islam Elijah Mohammad\u2019s 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. (<\/span>The \u201cNation of Islam\u201d today led by <\/span>Louis Farrakhan is<\/span> actually technically a splinter group.) <\/span><\/p>\n In much the same way I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if the Restorationist branches, essentially the RLDS splinter groups, actually outlive the CoC and continue the reorganized tradition.\u00a0<\/span>However, Elijah Mohammad\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n