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’s imminent coming in their materials. After several years of this kind of consistent, focused preparation the prophesied date comes….and nothing happens. At first there’s some fudge factor. Maybe it’s the next month or the next year? But soon it becomes clear that the entire prophecy is wrong.
Would that be the death knell to the Church? Something very similar to this actually happened to the Jehovah’s 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.
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’t know how to do footnotes in WordPress: Sturgis, Paul W. “Institutional versus Contextual Explanations for the Growth of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the United States, 1945-2002.” Review of Religious Research (2008): 290-300.)
What is intriguing here is that, while the run-up to the “Second Coming” in 1975 did indeed show an acceleration in growth with the added energy of Christ’s imminence, the slump after their own “Great Disappointment” 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.
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 “this is it, the Church won’t survive this,” whether it’s 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’m sure there will be many more before the final wrapping up. (How could it be any different with God’s chosen faith and people?)
Many, I am sure, would argue whether these things should 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’t 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’m referring to a one-off, religion-specific events, where people throw up their hands and leave all at once.
Another example: the Boston Globe “Spotlight” scandal of 2001/2002 was a code red for Catholicism in America, with just about the worst scandal possible, yet the percentage Catholic in the US didn’t really start to tank until nearly ten years later. Maybe that’s a delayed response, but I’m inclined to think it’s just generic secularization, as we’re seeing similar trends across the religious board.
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’s mailboxes or inboxes then there would be an irreparable exodus from the Church so great to threaten the Church’s existence, and some people were very upset when their YouTube videos didn’t lead to a widespread collapse in the faithful narrative.
(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’t 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.)
However, here I am going to caveat the “almost any” 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’s Witnesses? I don’t know) Still, at this point it’s clear that some General Authority scandal (of which we haven’t had a real juicy one for a long while) or this or that book or factoid becoming common knowledge isn’t enough to keep the stone that is cut of the mountain without hands from rolling forth.
Great post–and well timed.
Thank you.
I thought it was just last week that someone or other was predicting some major fraction of church membership leaving if someone’s concerns weren’t treated seriously…
In any case, would the list of fundamentals extend beyond “a faith that takes proselytizing seriously and has a devout core and devout leadership that holds to their doctrinal fundamentals”?
@Jonathan: I also wonder if there’s a certain critical mass necessary. New Religious Movements flash in and out of existence all the time, and those might be more sensitive to exogenous shocks, but if you have a large enough mass of people it’s unlikely there will be a one-off thing that will force everybody to throw up their hands and leave.
Once my husband and I were asked to teach a homebound couple who were recent converts. He had not been baptized because they had trouble figuring out a safe way with his disabilities, and he needed the gospel principles taught. We got to be really good friends and he really was quite the character. He told us about his childhood in a break off Southern Baptist congregation. About once every three of four years, their preacher would announce the Lord was coming on such and such date, and He would come to a nearby mountain top. So, the whole congregation got supper excited and it was all they could talk about for weeks. Then, on the appointed day they all packed a picnic lunch and hiked the several miles to the top of the mountain, (small hill by Utah standards, but for their location, it was a mountain.) They would spend about 24 hours on top of the mountain, praying and preaching, then gradually some would start announcing they needed to get to work, or get the kids back to school, and they would hike back down. They would gradually all return to real life, then a few years later, he would announce a new date and everyone would get all excited, and have another hike to the top of the mountain. And repeat a few years later. Nobody ever lost their faith over it, nor did they quit their jobs or sell their homes the next time the Lord’s return was announced.
I just don’t think there will be one big event that takes most of the church out at once. I think there are going to continue to be small events where a small number of members get upset and leave, but so far none of them have taken more than about 1%. I can’t imagine anything that will take out a bigger percentage. The Church of Christ lost about 50% when they made a bunch of major changes at once, the most problematic of which was no longer requiring belief in the BoM. But since they gave women the priesthood at the same time, we Brighamites tend to blame their member loss on that. But I just don’t think we are as at risk for member loss.
Anna: That’s really interesting. There’s a whole literature on “When Prophecies Fail” which started with a classic book by that name, basically when a religious groups prophesies the end of the world what happens when it doesn’t come to pass. (It’s the kind of really interesting research question that doesn’t get investigated anymore now that sociology is all race, gender, and inequality all the time, but for a while every time a group went through that process you could bet a researcher was embedded with the group to observe what was going to happen.)
I don’t know, is the fact that most people don’t change their minds even when presented with incontrovertible proof—not just in religion, but in politics too—really all that much cause for reassurance? Seriously, you’re giving me flashbacks to my mission, when we would argue with JWs until we were blue in the face that, say, there can indeed be more scripture than the Bible, or that Christ did not in fact return invisibly in 1918, or that it’s ok to donate blood, and we had all our prooftexts and historical facts elegantly lined up, and still never made a lick of headway. In those moments, the stubbornness of the JWs did not strike me as “sound fundamentals,” but a self-defeating spiritual blindness that cut themselves off from even the possibility of feeling the Holy Ghost (not to mention from life-saving medical care).
For that matter, there’s tens of millions of my fellow Americans today (including of my fellow saints) who stubbornly insist against all contrary evidence that global warming isn’t real or life-threatening, that COVID-19 was no big deal and that vaccines are dangerous, that Trump won the 2020 election and didn’t try to violently overthrow US democracy on January 6th, ‘21, that Iraq was responsible for 9/11, and numerous other massively destructive ideas. The Flat Earth Society continues to grow, as do innumerable other conspiracy theories. In those moments, my first thought isn’t how all these various movements have “sound fundamentals,” but that something is terribly wrong with all of us and will only lead to our destruction.
Note that I’m not here discussing the truth claims of the Church itself (I have my own testimony by the Holy Spirit, for what it’s worth), only that saying “Our Church will be fine because we are as stubborn and impervious to new evidence and logic as the JWs” is not exactly the ringing endorsement that you seem to think it is.
Two fun stories about the Witnesses on my mission. I rarely ever fought with them (more out of lack of energy than wisdom), but I had a companion that had memorized a verse in their bible that they simply had a red line through (maybe they had a good reason for excluding it, maybe not, I don’t know). It probably wasn’t the most mature thing, but whenever they brought up some gotcha point he said that the Bible had a perfect response to that, and asked for their bible to show them. Of course he flipped to that scripture, pretended to be stunned when he saw that they removed it, and said that the answer was there if they ever had access to a full bible.
Also, once we were tracting in one directing and ran into them tracking in another direction. After exchanging pleasantries we thought about how funny but awkward it would be for the Mormons to show up on people’s doorsteps right after Witnesses, so we left that neighborhood.
Anyway. Yes, I”m not implying in any way that our issues are logically analogous to theirs, I’m just making a broader point that what we often think of as a Defcon 1, fatal situation isn’t as big of a deal big picture as we think.
Stephen C., I only ever had one experience with us missionaries following behind Witnesses, and what happened was a man answering the door, kind of excited, with a Bible in hand, ready to bash the Witnesses with some scripture, and a visible look of disappointment when they saw it was us. I don’t remember too many details, but the homeowner figured to give us whatever scripture they had prepared (with whatever gotcha question), my companion mentioned that there was a verse that answered the situation, looked to me, and I replied that it was the next verse. I don’t remember what the scripture was, but it was in John. The homeowner thanked us for the gospel conversation, and we went on our way.
I have to agree with JB that Stephen C has made an excellent point in a depressing way.
Let me push back on the Catholic example though. My sense of how this went down is that the Boston Globe story prompted a few other newspapers to ask “Has that happened here?” and do similar investigations. But that kind of work is time-consuming and expensive, so it wasn’t all that many and it took a while. When they found the answer was “Yes, it has” that prompted more newspapers to launch more investigations, and that found more problems. Which prompted more investigations. Government officials got involved. The whole thing snowballed.
For some Catholics, learning the the problem of abuse and cover-up was local, not necessarily in their parish or even diocese, but somewhere they could drive to, convinced them that it was universal. That it was systemic, not a few bad apples. They started to think, with some justification, “As far as I know my bishop has never covered up for an abusive priest, but if it had come up he probably would have.” It destroyed the moral authority of the Catholic Church in their minds. (It didn’t help that the politics of some Catholic leaders was shifting well to the right of their congregations at the same time.) But ten years from the Boston Globe report sounds like about the right timeline for that to become widespread.
A cautionary tale.
@RLD: Good point about the delayed reaction, but I still wonder if the slope is any different from the Protestant decline around that same time once you take into account region (since the Catholic parts of the countries are the ones that have been secularizing fastest).