Back when I was about twenty, my companion and I tracted out every cottage — there weren’t many — in this isolated little village on the Brienzersee. (Wikimedia Commons public domain)
David French’s article is, I think, both insightful and important:
“We’re Not in a Civil War, but We Are Drifting Toward Divorce”
I’ll go further, and apply it a bit closer to home:
One significant factor in current apostasy from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the ability of those who’ve become doubtful or fully alienated to form alternative or ersatz “communities” online, where they can “meet” together to spur one another on to greater and greater heights of disdain for their still-believing relatives and neighbors and to ever more frenzied contempt for their former leaders and onetime beliefs. No more is departure from the Church necessarily a massive social setback. No longer does it mean at least temporary isolation. There are large support groups and considerable numbers of “friends” — albeit overwhelmingly of the “virtual” kind — who are there to encourage and sustain the newly-minted apostate, and to proselytize for more converts.
Having left one community, these folks join another. And there is little serious communication across the gulf between the two.
I genuinely believe that this is socially/psychologically vital to understand.
Posted from Grindelwald, Switzerland
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