The Revenge Of The Post-Mormons: It is time to completely renovate the public presentation of the LDS Church
The Revenge Of The Post-Mormons:
It is time to completely renovate the public presentation of the LDS Church
>Abstract
>The LDS church is shrinking at a furious pace. At least 40% of the members in the last 25 years have left the church, and more than half the still-active members think the church is not properly focused. Those who have left have "Judged the church and found it wanting." About 45% of the post-Mormons say that they might return to the church if it made some changes. I am suggesting just how radical those changes would have to be to get the church back so that it matched the original church of Christ or the restored church of Joseph Smith.
Introduction
We have an old saying that "the best revenge is living well." I would like to modify that statement to read "the best revenge is living [the Gospel] well," at least for many post-Mormons.
In other articles and books, I have described in great detail the many doctrinal and behavioral problems with today's LDS Church. That church has the correct name and the correct leadership titles, but the content of that bureaucratic structure is only 5% correct. In other words, 95% of the restored gospel has been seriously distorted or even reversed. This path to a "backwards church" or even "anti-church" began in 1896, when the top church leaders secretly decided that they were going to completely change direction from the Zion-building heroics of the previous 66 years. The year 1896 was when Wilford Woodruff was church president. We should note that if the church leaders no longer wanted to continue with the same methods and attitudes of the past, they could have stepped aside and let others serve who would accept and continue those earlier standards. Instead, they began to treat the gospel as their own personal property, even charging rent for it. We have another saying concerning a "dog in the manger" where a dog cannot or will not eat the hay, meaning he is not using it for its intended purpose, but he keeps the cows from eating it as well, causing a big problem.
It was originally intended that the top church leaders be wise, idealistic, and selfless men who would always act as Christ did in being a servant to improve the lives of his fellow humans to the greatest possible extent. However, instead of continuing to follow that pattern, the top leaders decided that it was time to exploit the church members for the benefit of the leaders, making the leaders into a new elite or master class. Since that time, every idealistic aspiration of the church has been replaced with self-centered humanism. That transformation has naturally been very depressing to idealistic church members, and many of them have left in disgust and confusion. Most of them have not developed the understanding and rhetoric to clearly express their feelings, and the reasons for those feelings. Most of them have merely relied on instinct, conscience, and the promptings of the Holy Ghost. It has been my task of the last sixty years to try to put all of that gospel complexity into words.
Member response to church changes
In recent decades, the leadership pattern has been quietly and unobtrusively reversed, like so much else. Instead of the church leaders showing the way by good example, the ordinary reasonably-informed member has become the locus of gospel wisdom. Even though these local members are far from being experts in church history and doctrine or theology, they have sensed in droves that there is something seriously wrong with how the church is being administered. I think many of them see themselves as following the dictates of the Holy Ghost. Large numbers of them have been so troubled that they have left the church to find a way to live the gospel on their own. Many of those who remain active in the church have serious doubts about whether the church leadership are following the right path.
Many people sense these things intuitively, but a recent book entitled Torn: Why People We Love Are Leaving The Church And What We Can Learn From Them, by Jeff Strong, has done the hard math to put into numbers what so many people sense already. The two big conclusions of that book are that at least 40% of the active church members have left the church in the last 25 years, and that about 56% of those who remain in the church have many questions about whether the church is doing what it should be doing. This leaves a relatively small and shrinking group, really a tiny minority of the members of record, who fully accept the church as it is. As a non-statistical observation of mine, it appears that a disproportionately large number of these people who still fully support the church are also the same ones who derive their living incomes directly or indirectly from the central church bureaucracy. If so many need to be paid to remain true believers, one might wonder just how accurate, appropriate, and convincing the current version of the Gospel might be.
Much is made of the fact that Catholic and Protestant leaders are all paid for their leadership, while the LDS leaders, at least at the local level, are all volunteers. The way things are going, one might wonder whether the LDS Church might soon join all the others in having to pay their currently-volunteer leaders in order to keep the organization going, since it appears that so many of the very volunteers the LDS Church relies on are no longer convinced of its accuracy. Some of the people who are leaving the church are the ward bishops. It was interesting to me to discover that in at least one case, an LDS bishop decided to stop paying tithing to the church, noting that his volunteer service to the church, if compensated at his professional rate, would be worth far more than the tithing he had previously paid. His stake president accepted his logic and he remains a bishop today, requiring tithing of every other member to receive a temple recommend, while he himself does not need to meet that standard.
One of the more interesting aspects of the statistics reported in the book is that the rate of people leaving the church is actually growing exponentially. By doing some mathematical curve-fitting and making some basic assumptions, I extended his exponential loss rate a few decades into the future. This showed that if the exponential rate of decline continued, there would be zero regular church members still active at the end of 2040, just 14 years from now. These kinds of projections rarely turn out to be true, but it does show the direction things are headed at the moment.
You can explore exactly what is wrong with the church today, doctrinally and historically.
The church today is only 5% true when measured against the correct original gospel as I have explained elsewhere. It should be noted that there are multiple data collections on the Internet of questions and problems concerning the LDS Church, but most of them deal with issues of only minor theological and sociological importance. I believe of much greater interest should be the 17 out of 18 groups of major doctrines which the church leaders have severely damaged or even reversed. Especially instructive should be articles that discuss a systematic theology, where graphs and charts are used to present fairly specific definitions, and point out central church deviations. See FutureMormonism.blogspot.com for many more details.
A church apology tour?
In my view, the historical church, from 1896 until today, has done numerous things which were unwise and unchristian. Perhaps some time could be spent in apologizing to various parts of the world for our past misbehavior. I'm thinking especially of our past poor treatment of the Jews in spite of the Book of Mormon directive to reach out to them.
We need everything new
What is needed is a new bureaucracy, a new system for charity, a new missionary program, a new youth program, a new genealogy and temple work program, etc. The basic Sunday meeting program – sacrament meeting – is not too far from what it should be, except for the fact that some of the assigned talks would be more appropriate if delivered in a mainline Protestant church meeting, and some of the hymns selected teach pure Protestant doctrine, having little or no doctrinal connection with the historical Joseph Smith church.
Many post-Mormon commentators have observed that the church is doing far too little about its charitable responsibilities, so that is probably the best place to begin. And of the problems which beset the church today, the largest one seems to be the fact that even more women than men are leaving the church. If that is true, and the largest number of people leaving the church are those who would ideally be bringing more souls to earth and adding to the membership of the church (and hopefully enjoying it), and those women are not happy with the church, then we are truly in what might be called an unrecoverable doom loop.
Any tribal leader will realize that if he cannot keep the women inside his tribe and reasonably happy, then his tribe will soon disappear. If one is reduced to stealing women from other tribes, this is a truly desperate situation. Some tribes reserve special places just for women, where the men are not welcome. Recognized as the source of all life for renewing the tribe, women are given special recognition and privileges. They certainly need to be carefully protected from danger and undue hardship.
Using modern technology for religious purposes
The LDS church today has successfully MISUSED modern technology to create a centralized command-and-control system, far more constraining than was ever intended to be part of the Church of Christ. One particularly troubling practice is having the central church impose the tight control logic of a business franchise on each and every group of people that meet in the name of Christ.
A better use of today's communications technology would be to extend the reach of an individua's desire to use his time and resources charitably to improve individuals and the world.
We find examples in the Scriptures of how societies lived the gospel, especially at the small village level. Today we should be able to reach the same highly desirable result for much larger groups of people.
Getting started
One fascinating portion of the Torn study was the finding that perhaps 45% of those who left the church would consider returning if corrections were made to church teachings and behavior. That could be in the range of about 1 million people. Of course, "once burned, twice learned" logic might make these people very wary of even investigating a claimed replacement or upgrade to the church. Nonetheless, a few brave and curious people might start a movement into the correct religion which could become as large as the movement that saw people leaving the INcorrect religion. In our business-oriented world, surely someone would notice this new movement and change in attitude, and try to profit from it. That is what got the church in trouble in the first place in 1896. Of course, for a gospel-oriented movement to be successful, it would have to function on gospel principles, which would preclude anyone trying to make a personal profit on this movement. However, if transparency is maintained, I believe most religionists would be happy to support good projects that had the right goals, and sought to minimize the administrative costs. In my observations, there are so many government programs and other social projects that charge at least three times the actual or necessary administrative costs, that it should not be difficult to be much more efficient. Even for the most self-centered active members, if they could put in 10% for necessary living expenses and get back 20% in value, they might decide that religion was useful and profitable after all.
Creating an exhaustive list of social insurance mechanisms
It is a problem of great importance and complexity to know just how much we can and should help each other as humans, whether through individual means, family means, religious means, government means, etc. I don't think this is much of a problem as long as individual freedom is maintained. The problem comes when someone chooses to use force at any level – individual, family, church, government, etc. One important religious goal should be to maintain individual freedom and freedom of religion. That should allow a complete menu of social insurance systems to be devised and operated so that only good and efficient results are seen.
Scale of operations
I think the goal of the LDS church, or at least its members, should be to see a Christian-guided budget of about $1 trillion operating within the United States to constantly encourage good things to happen in all the charitable areas. It should really take about $3 trillion of Christianity-guided programs to do all the good that is needed within the United States as a nation, to keep the nation moving upward ("building Zion") instead of downward (the natural man), but the remaining $2 trillion could come from other compatible and cooperating sources.
Just-in-time mechanisms
One of the most common ways of abusing a social system is when large amounts of money are collected in advance, through taxation or contribution, and then that money sits in a large and vulnerable pool for years or decades, open to the maraudings of any number of piracy-minded people. One of the characteristics of small-village charity is that everything can be spontaneous. If a need arises, a small and simple temporary organization is created to solve the problem, and then everyone goes back to normal. The main point for a larger charitable system would be to only collect and apply the money when needed, leaving nearly all resources under the management of the original owner in the meantime. In that way, the value of the resources can be maximized, and then drawn down when permitted and needed. That way, every transaction can be tracked, and money leaks and problems can be more quickly spotted by potentially thousands of observers – a sort of built-in instant audit system. Big, cumbersome, opaque government systems can allow trillions of dollars to be stolen, and no one even notices, as we are seeing on a daily basis in the news.
Organizational ideas – parachurch or separate religious order
One might consider the need to completely replace the current 95%-scrambled church organization with something else that is close to 100% correct. That would simplify many things, but it would complicate others. Another possibility is something that has been tried before, presumably in a similar situation, where the central church was carrying out only a small portion of its intended duties. The old Catholic religious orders were especially good at doing new missionary work and other activist social programs. They were able to operate within the framework of the original church, even though, surely, there were internal conflicts at times. For one thing, I believe they created their own source of funding so that they were not dependent on central church support. That was certainly true when they moved to foreign locations that had no practical or physical connection with the mother church.
If we could find a way to "thread the needle" to have two or three different groups of Mormons coexist, perhaps using the current church chapel infrastructure, and even some of the membership, in new and different ways, we might get some interesting results. If nothing else, it would certainly make people aware of important doctrinal and practical matters which might only come to light if there are some minor sources of competition or conflict to bring these issues into view.
People might attend a common "mass" or sacrament meeting, with all of the other church members, while simultaneously making plans to carry out charitable works that are not sponsored by the central church. If people mostly redirect their tithing to outside charitable projects instead of to the central church headquarters, that might be a small source of difficulty. Typically, people who don't "pay tithing" are not eligible for ordinances, leadership callings, temple attendance, etc., but they are still welcome to attend the general meetings. These people would technically be "self-disfellowshipped," but if it happens that half of the congregation is "disfellowshipped," and therefore unavailable to fulfill important callings, that might eventually spur a change in definitions.
The tithing issue
Today's central church version of mandatory tithing was never part of the Church of Christ and never part of the Joseph Smith church. In fact, it did not exist in its current form until 1964 when a handbook change was made that required everyone to pay all tithing to the central church organization, with no credit for sending charity to others, essentially unofficially canceling all outside charity by LDS members. That is also the approximate point at which the entire church started to shrink from about a 6% growth rate down to its approximately 0% or even negative growth rate today. A good manager might recognize that causing this critical inflection point turned out to be a very bad idea, and since it was done administratively, without any obvious formal revelation being involved, it might just as easily be changed back to where it was set for the preceding 134 years. Just making that one change would likely slow the member loss rate and might even bring some people back in, especially if they had the opportunity to do actual Christian charity work through a separate organization such as the "New Civilization" church or parachurch I am proposing.
Theological politics and war games
It is difficult to predict what would happen if we started some of the processes described here. However, it might be useful to set out three possible scenarios, simply to help keep the goals and possibilities in mind.
A friendly takeover
As I mentioned earlier, what the church leaders should have done 130 years ago was to retire themselves, if they wanted to, and turn the management of this Zion-building organization over to younger and more ambitious and idealistic men to continue on as the Scriptures intended, instead of having the top leaders act like pirates and take over the church as a going concern to loot it for their own purposes in a huge breach of member trust by executing a hostile takeover. For example, the two church leaders who objected to Wilford Woodruff's new plan, apostle Moses Thatcher, and BH Roberts, a member of the seven presidents of the 70, might have been included in that new group of people who intended to carry on the scripturally-assigned work of the church.
However infinitesimally small the chance of its happening, one might propose an "art of the deal" scenario where the current leaders who have worked themselves into a logical cul-de-sac could escape that self-made trap. They have been accumulating mountains of money through a corrupt non-gospel mechanism, but then have discovered that they cannot actually spend much of that money without having opprobrium heaped upon them and essentially being drummed out of office by the accumulated scorn of the members and past members who are paying attention to their behavior.
One way out of this cul-de-sac for the church leaders would be to have some new representatives of the members and past members offer the current church leaders a deal where they are each given $1 billion to go into their own retirement, and, in exchange, turn over the church to a completely new group to set the church back into the form it should have had all of this time. The church leaders might today secretly want to do something like that – simply take their winnings and leave, "take the money and run" – but they dare not do it for many social reasons, including the shame and embarrassment that would be heaped upon them if they did so. However, if that act of winning $1 billion was approved by the membership, just to "buy them out" and send them on their way, it would be well worth the money. That would leave the other nearly $300 billion in assets available for use in the way it was intended. It was never intended that it should be invested in physical or monetary assets that sit inert and appreciate over time. It was intended to be used actively to improve individuals and the society around us so that we could build Zion and avoid the destruction described in Fourth Nephi where the church became focused on getting gain and let the entire society crumble to dust, just as we see today.
A gospel insurgency strategy – gradual internal good influence versus a more sudden new startup
The parachurch or religious order idea, where we have one group of members and past members organizing to live the Gospel properly themselves, especially by starting large-scale charitable activities to overcome the "natural man" forces, while also maintaining an active role in attending local wards and stakes -- letting their light shine forth -- would be one way to show the determination of the real, well-informed members and past members to live the gospel correctly. If the mainline church is shrinking at a furious rate, and all of those good active people are switching sides right before the very eyes of the leaders, that would teach the top leaders something, and certainly would put pressures on them to readjust the program to make a proper place for the members who are returning physically, and for the members who are returning mentally, since they had serious doubts about the church in the past even as they went through the motions of active membership. In Brigham Young's day, the church had some "retrenchment" activities where they tried to get everyone recommitted to doing the right thing. There would be some parallels here.
This would be one way to demonstrate the real power of the Gospel while also putting pressure on the church leaders to make some major changes. The most likely difficulty is that if the church leaders decided to be extremely stubborn, instead of taking the hint and going along peacefully with this "insurgency," they might try making small incremental adjustments and hope that these insurgents would just go away or will be absorbed back into the "Borg" and forget about their previous good intentions. If we experience the likely intransigence of the power-obsessed top leaders, who either are lawyers or think like greedy lawyers, using the law to profit themselves, then we would quickly find out that there is no point in negotiating with these anti-Gospel leaders.
Starting a new church from scratch
At startup time for a new church, it might be more difficult, simply because it may be more difficult to spread the necessary information and commitment among the target group of concerned past members and current lukewarm members, but both politically and doctrinally speaking, it would probably be much cleaner simply to begin a new church with all the right tenets and other parameters set at the beginning. That would get rid of most of the complex politics involved in such an activity. It is ironic that the church today claims to be trying to be nonpolitical, but the church leader behavior is as deep into politics as anyone could imagine. This is some pretty serious hypocrisy we are talking about here.
And we should remember that it was originally intended that the United States' constitutionally protected churches would be aggressively involved in politics, as the churches defended the freedom and prosperity of church members against an always-overreaching central government. In other words, in my frame of reference, a nonpolitical church is worse than useless. The church today is really a church which is trying to curry favor with the current political leaders worldwide as part of their effort to maximize their money incomes. That is the exact opposite of what a completely Gospel-driven church organization ought to be doing. They should be acting as defenders of the faith on every level, especially in pushing back the forces of the natural man, the Marxist centralization of everything, the continual attacks on religion, etc. In order to do their jobs as churches they have to maintain the same vigilance and militancy that made the nation's Christian churches one of the main pillars of support for the original American Revolutionary War.
Known church leader tendencies
It should be useful to consider the current church leader mindset. They quite obviously prefer a very small church with minimal duties for themselves, but more than adequate money for all their possible needs and wants. The new church bureaucracy was invented by Wilford Woodruff to simply supply the church leaders with a nice living, and that is the only real goal of the central church, even today. The constant talk about "gathering Israel" and the importance of church growth, is just an empty process of mouthing words to meet the emotional needs of the more serious members who actually want to see the gospel have a big influence on the world. The church leaders themselves see absolutely no personal benefit in an expanding church.
Even though it appears like it would be very beneficial to church growth to remove the current made-up requirement of mandatory tithing paid to the central offices, it seems extremely unlikely today that the church leaders would ever make such a policy change. They seem committed to appearing absolutely certain about everything they say, with no changes allowed. Nonetheless, the vision of about 1 million previously inactive people redirecting their tithing to some outside charitable causes might cause the leaders to reconsider the logical cul-de-sac they have placed themselves in.
I am quite confident that the church leaders are perfectly happy with a very small church, and even the small and shrinking church of today is still plenty big enough and lucrative enough to meet their financial and ego needs. They already have more money in the bank than they would ever dare openly spend (although laundering tithing money into their own pockets through excessive temple building is apparently not something they consider "open.") They have demonstrated that there are very firm social limits on how much they dare spend openly on themselves or on any "safe" outside charitable projects. But this represents the boundaries of the cul-de-sac they have created for themselves. Still, seeing a shrinking church would probably hurt their professional pride, even if it makes no difference to them financially.
In spite of all these reasons for the church leaders to do nothing about what many members see as our current crisis, the church leaders might decide, perhaps because of embarrassment, to make some changes to central church teachings and practices. They might try to "triangulate," as they say in the realms of politics, so that they could make the minimum changes and prevent any further gospel social progress by the post-Mormon "outsiders" or "insurgents." That is the biggest potential social problem, I presume. If one tries to influence an existing church to do the right thing, the most likely outcome is a very bad compromise where the newly adjusted church now only destroys 15 doctrinal groupings out of 18, instead of damaging 17 doctrinal groupings out of 18. In that case, someone would later have to start over again to exert a lot of effort for another small incremental gain.
