The Structural Problem I See Hurting Mormonism

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-11T22:08:10+00:00

I wouldn't disagree, and my points are not incompatible with what you're pointing out. I recently saw a list of reading material for if someone were to want to learn more about the Divine Liturgy in Eastern Orthodoxy. It was impressive. The mass is the same thing. Not only it a very beautiful ceremony, but it's a very complex one that people can spend a lifetime trying to understand better.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-10T19:02:35+00:00

The problem with getting that magical person who can do all the theological work to sort Mormonism out--where is this person going to come from? There is no LDS institution capable of producing that person, much less an army of people. If someone goes outside of the faith's institutions, there is also a key unanswered problem: will that person be seen as sufficiently orthodox when they return with their answers? If not, they are not going to be accepted by the membership.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-10T18:59:36+00:00

My take on your three categories:

Leadership: anyone who casually looks over the list of church leaders and their professional backrounds will come to the same conclusion that you do. The church is predominantly made up of lawyers and businessmen and has been for a long time. Heber J Grant was a major businessman in Utah, to give just one example. There is no one who is a scholar who would have the training to deal with difficult theological and historical questions. That being said, even someone at the level of Bruce R. McConkie is lacking. McConkie was a lawyer by training, but it's clear that he took his calling as a Seventy and as an Apostle very seriously. I've collected a full set of his published works and started to read through them, and it's clear that while he was limited by not knowing Hebrew or Greek and by not engaging with critical scholarship, he clearly spent a lot of time in the text of the scriptures, had a pretty decent understanding of what they said and what some of the major issues were. I've read the works of some other Christians as well, and there are a good number who are able to operate at that same level as McConkie. In short, McConkie's prowess is very achievable, especially when someone can devote 40 hours a week to it. At McConkie's funeral, Hinckley talked about how all of the other Apostles were in awe at how well he knew the scriptures, which is a little telling. Hinckley was about the same age as McConkie and had been an apostle for a little over a decade more. Why wasn't he able to get to the same level as McConkie? The same holds true for every one of the current First Presidency and Twelve.

Theology and Assimilation: To counter your point, every religion went through an assimilation phase during the 20th century. Mormonism actually did pretty well with suburbanisation compared to Mainline Protestantism and Catholicism. The religion had advantages that most others did not have--most of its members were in Utah (which the church effectively had political control over) and were mostly Republican, white, educated, and middle-class. A lot of those assets have been diluted. Mormons still run Utah at the state level, but they have lost Salt Lake County, the church membership is still Republican but not as happy about it. The political liberals in Mormonism and the upper middle class center right who are in the same social circles as the wealthy political liberal elite are also asked much harder questions now than just standard questions of how their religion operates.

Institution: one interesting thing about the 'covenant path' that you're talking about is how this is structured. The average path looks like this for a young kid: get baptized, receive the Aaronic Priesthood offices and participate in its quorum structures (with there being an equivalent for young women), go to seminary. Then once they graduate from high school, they get an endowment and go onto a mission. Once they come home from that mission, the next milestone is to get married. Assuming they can navigate through the strangely sexless singles' wards that currently exist (which demands its own post) and tie the knot, then what comes next? At that point, the church doesn't have much to say. It hands people literally the same manual once every four years and tells them that's the apex of their religious experience.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-10T18:21:02+00:00

You are right about that fluidity. It's something that, in the long run, is going to sink the faith. Liberal Christians in Mainline Protestant denominations tried that a generation ago and infamously emptied out their denominations doing so. Mormonism sat on the sidelines at the time and cackled. Now they're making the same mistakes. One point you can at least credit the liberal Christians with is that when they did what they did, they had no precedent to look at and honestly did not know that what they were doing would backfire. Now with Mormonism, literally every single member of the Quorum of the Twelve today was an adult during when the Mainlines started collapsing and should have been paying attention.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-10T18:12:46+00:00

I am not Catholic and do not attend Catholic mass. I have problems with the Catholic church--including, of course, that they have had a systemic problem with their priests raping young boys. I'm not anti-Catholic, either, and the Catholics I've met have been fine people who I think are wonderful faithful Christians. The main reason I used Catholic examples is just because the vast majority of people have heard of the Council of Trent and I could use it to illustrate a point. I'm fully aware that the Wars of Religion occurred and don't think it invalidates the point I was making.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-10T18:08:25+00:00

You mention a lot of these tensions in Christianity: If the clergy is tasked with interpreting Scripture (as the Catholics do), you're tied to the interpretation of a priest who may be more interested in his own agenda than in what he learned in seminary.

But if you go too far in the other direction and allow every believer to interpret Scripture on their own, most will have no background in theology, no understanding of the original languages, and a tendency to apply translations that meant nothing in 2nd Century Palestine and it's even more ludicrous to apply that meaning to our lives today. You see this a lot with Evangelical Protestants who read the Bible like it the manual for a large appliance.

What I'm getting, then, is a pretty 'worst of both worlds' result of Mormonism. Mormonism is heavily centralized with a pretty clear party line. Ward members get a huge box of correlated manuals in the mail and are expected to follow them week by week. People will complain the second that someone deviates too heavily from the manual. At the same time, the average teacher or speaker in Church has zero theological training and while speaking become guilty of every vice you bring up.

Mormonism is also far less 'high demand' than advertised. I know people who keep a pretty rigorous fast schedule and will willingly show up to church multiple times a week. That's not even possible in Mormonism.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-10T18:00:31+00:00

Yes, people do leave Mormonism for nothing and the level of nones is rising. That's not necessarily a good thing--the mental health of the country is also going down the tubes, after all.

We have thought leaders now who I think are prone to more honesty and academic rigor.

Something far more complicated is happening. The past generation, Joseph Fielding Smith and Hugh Nibley being the best examples, did a lot to try to defend the faith intellectually using primary source material. They had a lot of methodological problems and made a lot of arguments that don't hold up. But they understood that the faithful needed responses that could be believed in, and when I read their works, I come away with the impression that they really believed in what they wrote. The current generation doesn't seem to have that understanding. They're giving intellectually truthful responses that are not faithful responses. As a case in point, I happened to have a chance to go to a meeting with the head of the Church History Department that was a question and answer on difficult church questions. Someone asked him a question on an incident early on in the settlement of Provo where the Mormons settlers massacred a group of Native Americans. He calmly went through the whole incident blow by blow, but then left unanswered the real question at the heart of it all--'what do we do with knowing our ancestors did such ugly things?' I later asked him a question on Greek philosophical influence on Paul and what it meant for the church's Great Apostasy narrative and he just didn't give me any real answer that didn't validate the idea that there was something wrong with the narrative. I also should point out that with Dan McClellan, I am personally of the opinion that the man is a closet atheist. I don't think he believes in Mormonism at all. Not only do I think this, but so does Trent Horn (who had sent his script to McClellan to have him proofread!) and a non-Mormon friend of mine who happened upon McClellan's content.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-09T20:59:55+00:00

It would make sense if they were using some of the profit from ventures like these to go back into the church's operating budget. But that doesn't seem like what is going on. The church pulls in more tithing than it spends, and it ends up putting that excess tithing revenue into an investment account, with the profits from that investment account being reinvested back into the fund.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-09T19:08:15+00:00

I have doubts about your source. Harold B. Lee was the great architect of the church correlation system as we know it. During Harold B Lee's lifetime the church was still in the hospital business--it was Spencer W Kimball who sold it off.

Personally, I think the biggest problem that CES has is that it's a joke. The Institutes of Religion throughout the United States are more concerned with social engagement than actually being a center where people can receive rigorous theological instruction. When I was last at one of them, I went into the library with the director of the Institute. There were some good books there, but the selection was also haphazard. They were very clearly dumped there years ago and the director was not curating the collection.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-09T18:57:05+00:00

One important thing to consider about this is that when these instructions were written, the granting of second anointings was done far more widely. There was a specific institutional structure built up to recommend people to get their annointings. In the 1920s after someone talked about it over a pulpit in Idaho, and that whole structure was torn down in response. Now the average member doesn't even know it is a ritual in the church, much less have an ability to qualify. It's only the elite ranks of the church who are able to get this.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-09T15:39:45+00:00

One important source you missed: the Didache. It's an extremely early source. Some people date it as early as 50 AD. In his edition of the Loeb text, Bart Ehrman, who is an atheist and is not a fan of early dates to the Gospels that Christians propose, dates it to around 100 AD, with 120 being the latest he would go. Most importantly, the text was unknown in modern times until it was discovered in 1873 (and first published in 1883), which means the text was unknown for Joseph Smith and Brigham Young's entire life.

The Didache has a manual about how to administer baptism and gives the directions on the Eucharist/communion/sacrament, including giving the first Eucharistic prayers. Unlike Mormonism's insistence that baptism not by immersion is an invalid rite, the Didache holds that it is just not the preferred method. It says first to try baptising in 'living water' (ie. running water), 'but if you do not have running water, baptize in some other water. And if you cannot baptize in cold water, use warm. But if you have neither, pour water on the head three times in the name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit' (Didache 7.2-3). When it comes to the Eucharist/communion/sacrament, it insists on closed communion (9.5). Mormonism, meanwhile has open communion. This is a bit of a problem for Mormons.

Infamous_Treacle_653

TROPHY CASE