those<\/em> three. \u00a0(Especially Judaism.)<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Anyway, afterwards, Bill Hamblin and I chatted with her at a reception given in her honor. \u00a0(This was the academic year that Bill and I met, when we and our wives were all living in Egypt.)<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ms. Steinem had indicated that Mormonism, in particular, was losing large numbers of women every week over its repressively patriarchal attitudes and policies. \u00a0We asked her for a ballpark estimate of how large the losses were, and she couldn\u2019t supply it. \u00a0But the numbers, she assured us, were very, very large.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Did she have a source for her claim? we asked.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Of course she did. \u00a0She would send it to us when she returned to New York.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been thirty-five years now, and . . . \u00a0well, maybe she\u2019s recently sent it to Bill and he\u2019s simply forgotten to mention it to me. \u00a0We 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. \u00a0(Egyptian mail service in those days was, I admit, sometimes unreliable.)<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Obviously, I think we\u2019re losing too many members. \u00a0Losing even one<\/em>, of course, is too many, and we\u2019re losing more than that. \u00a0But, so far as I\u2019ve been able to determine, there\u2019s no wholesale exodus, and Mormonism, much to the consternation of many of its critics, is nowhere near collapse.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
I sometimes think that the problem\u00a0emerges from a\u00a0self-selected environment. \u00a0That 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. \u00a0It\u2019s a severely skewed sample, but it becomes their point of reference and, so, they come to imagine, because\u00a0virtually everybody they interact with is leaving or has left Mormonism, that everybody everywhere<\/em> is doing the same<\/em> thing.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 i.e., not long after Mr. Nixon\u2019s reelection to the presidency \u2014\u00a0\u201cI live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don\u2019t know. They\u2019re outside my ken. But sometimes when I\u2019m in a theater I can feel them.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
She didn\u2019t really mingle with the Great Unwashed, in other words, but she at least dimly sensed that they existed somewhere out there.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The apostates and critics who discern an imminent implosion of the Church seem to be living in \u201ca rather special world\u201d of their own.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
That said, though, every soul is precious and there\u2019s no excuse for complacency.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 I was pleased this afternoon to hear Elder Quentin L. Cook directly address \u2014 and flatly deny \u2014 the assertion\u00a0that the Church is hemorrhaging members at a record rate. \u00a0 I see and hear this claim quite often, particularly from\u00a0militant apostates. \u00a0 Heck, I heard something like it from the feminist Gloria Steinem, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"Gloria](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2015\/04\/402px-Gloria_Steinem_at_news_conference_Womens_Action_Alliance_January_12_1972.jpg\")
<\/a>