Are we suffering a mass apostasy from the Church?

Are we suffering a mass apostasy from the Church? April 4, 2015

 

Gloria Steinem, 1972
Feminist icon Gloria Steinem in 1972
You may be wondering what she has to do with my topic. Read on, and you’ll see.

 

I was pleased this afternoon to hear Elder Quentin L. Cook directly address — and flatly deny — the assertion that the Church is hemorrhaging members at a record rate.

 

I see and hear this claim quite often, particularly from militant apostates.

 

Heck, I heard something like it from the feminist Gloria Steinem, when she came to Cairo, Egypt, while I was living there many years ago.  (It was 1980, or thereabouts.)  She had spoken in Ewart Hall, at the American University in Cairo, on the topic of patriarchal religions and the oppression of women.  I found her speech quite amusing because, there in Cairo, in one of the world’s largest Muslim cities, she had specifically singled out three religious traditions for particular criticism over their treatment of women:  Roman Catholicism, Orthodox Judaism, and Mormonism.

 

Quel courage!, I thought.  It surely required nerves of steel to come to Egypt and denounce those three.  (Especially Judaism.)

 

Anyway, afterwards, Bill Hamblin and I chatted with her at a reception given in her honor.  (This was the academic year that Bill and I met, when we and our wives were all living in Egypt.)

 

Ms. Steinem had indicated that Mormonism, in particular, was losing large numbers of women every week over its repressively patriarchal attitudes and policies.  We asked her for a ballpark estimate of how large the losses were, and she couldn’t supply it.  But the numbers, she assured us, were very, very large.

 

Did she have a source for her claim? we asked.

 

Of course she did.  She would send it to us when she returned to New York.

 

It’s been thirty-five years now, and . . .  well, maybe she’s recently sent it to Bill and he’s simply forgotten to mention it to me.  We wrote to her two or three times, expressing continued interest in her documentation for the assertion she had made, but we never received a reply.  (Egyptian mail service in those days was, I admit, sometimes unreliable.)

 

Obviously, I think we’re losing too many members.  Losing even one, of course, is too many, and we’re losing more than that.  But, so far as I’ve been able to determine, there’s no wholesale exodus, and Mormonism, much to the consternation of many of its critics, is nowhere near collapse.

 

I sometimes think that the problem emerges from a self-selected environment.  That is to say that the most militant and vocal and even obsessive critics and apostates tend to inhabit a world of message boards in which everybody is more or less like them.  It’s a severely skewed sample, but it becomes their point of reference and, so, they come to imagine, because virtually everybody they interact with is leaving or has left Mormonism, that everybody everywhere is doing the same thing.

 

The late film critic Pauline Kael was much more self-aware, when she (in)famously said, in a speech delivered on 28 December 1972 at the Modern Language Association — i.e., not long after Mr. Nixon’s reelection to the presidency — “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”

 

She didn’t really mingle with the Great Unwashed, in other words, but she at least dimly sensed that they existed somewhere out there.

 

The apostates and critics who discern an imminent implosion of the Church seem to be living in “a rather special world” of their own.

 

That said, though, every soul is precious and there’s no excuse for complacency.

 

 


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