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NOTE: If you're going to read this, please read it all. I don't want people arguing with me if they haven't actually read the whole thing :)
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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormon church) has grown at a rate of 52% on average each decade since 1984, bringing the current estimation to over 4.5 million in the U.S. Here are five reasons why this church has been able to thrive and grow in a religious climate where atheism and agnosticism is on the rise.
They Encourage Strong Belief
Let me start with a hypothetical analogy to get things going:
A man who has never seen a giraffe stumbles upon a black and white photo of the creature. Having heard of the concept of a Giraffe before, and seeing the caption on the picture say “Giraffe”, the man decides that giraffes must therefore be black and white. After pondering the picture and asking himself whether or not he believed this was true, he placed faith in the fact that giraffes are black and white and went to show this new discovery with his friends and family.
His peers, also having never seen a giraffe and seeing the strength of the man’s faith, ask themselves whether they too believe that giraffes are black and white, and some come to the conclusion that he must be right. Years pass, and by now the entire community has come to the strong belief that giraffes must be black and white. Each member now has their own faith supplemented by the faith of their community (I see the picture is black and white, and all of these hundreds of people believe it’s in black and white, therefore it must be true!). It becomes much easier to believe it under these circumstances.
A few more years pass. Now, the earlier members are at the point where they not only believe giraffes are black and white, they KNOW it to be true.
This is where most religions fail. The LDS church not only encourages knowing that their belief set is true, they actively instruct members to say the words out loud that their faith is so strong that their belief has passed the realm of “I think it is” and into “I know it is.”
The reason this is useful is because let’s say that a member of our hypothetical church of the black and white giraffes visited Africa, and let’s say they encounter a real giraffe. By encouraging such a strong faith in their beliefs, that member is more likely to come to the conclusion that “this creature is not a giraffe. Giraffes are black and white” and less likely to stop believing in the church.
This has worked equally well in the LDS church with modern geologists determining that the earth exceeds the few thousand years that is specified in The Bible. The picture of the giraffe differs from the hard facts, but we believe in the picture so the facts must be false.
They Adapt
For some believers in the church of the black and white giraffes whose faiths may not be as strong as others, this new knowledge of orange and white giraffes may be a deal breaker. Like with some religions whose average faith is lower or not as involved, some members of our hypothetical church may take the side of the facts and leave the church. If the church found a way to incorporate this new data into their belief system, they would lose fewer members.
Believers-turned-skeptics ask the church leadership “What of these orange giraffes? Are they not real?” The leadership responds with “We have received new revelation that giraffes are black and white, but may also come in white and orange.” The skeptics, driving partially on logic, now have fact as part of the foundation of their faith, which makes it much easier to believe the aspects that have not been proven (We believe in orange ones, which I can see with my own eyes, and they also all believe in black and white ones, which I have believed for awhile now and everyone I know also believes. This must be true!). In addition to strengthening the faith of existing members, this also helps to bring in new members. By having a belief set partially based on verifiable fact, you make it much easier for people to conclude that the non-verifiable aspects are also true. This is due to most people taking an “all or nothing” approach when it comes to whether or not they agree with something someone else is saying. Pad your arguments with enough loose facts in a debate, and it is much easier to tweak the logic and lead people to your conclusion.
This is where another winning aspect of the LDS church shines through. To take our previous example, while the LDS leadership has remained silent on the issue of the age of the Earth, many prominent Mormons have accepted its incorporation into their belief set, if only partially. The popular belief is that the Earth may indeed be a few million years old, but its use for “human” life and carrying out God’s plan dates back the six or seven thousand. While scientists actually estimate the Earth being in the Billions of years rather than the millions, this is “close enough” to satiate most would-be skeptics.
They Are Relatively New
Adaptation becomes harder the longer a church is around. With churches that have been around thousands of years, new scientific data becomes harder and harder to dismiss. This may account for why many religious people take a much more passive view on God, thinking of him as a personal guide to inner truth rather than a guiding force in everyday life. The idea that the rain coming down is God’s hand blessing our crops is much harder to swallow when you understand the principles of Meteorology. For this reason, many stances taken by previous religions have had to be quietly omitted from frequent use, or their meanings altered. “Maybe God didn’t physically wave his hand and drop water to the ground, but he was the one who caused it to happen in some way. No, I don’t know how or why, God works in mysterious ways.”
Because the Mormon religion is less than 200 years old, not enough life-changing and widespread new data has been discovered that the church has been forced to omit or incorporate, allowing them to be more irrefutable than churches whose scripture suggests that they sacrifice a cow every few weeks.
In contrast to the belief of ignorant people, the Mormons DO follow the Bible. However, they also put heavy focus on their new scripture, The Book of Mormon. This effectively serves as a way to antecede the parts of the Bible that no longer mesh with modern society, in the same way that the New Testament does this for the Old Testament. When it comes to doctrine, conflicting statements are usually justified by essentially noting that the previous instructions were for earlier society, and that the new revelation is more essential for the modern day. Therefore, The Book of Mormon solves the problem of any uneasy or hard to swallow aspects of the New Testament.
The Church Was Built Using The Gaps In Other Churches
When Joseph Smith developed the beginnings of the church, he first went to every other Christian religion available. Armed with the knowledge of where those churches don’t quite live up to their own doctrine or follow their own rules, he was able to build his Church in such a way as to seem “more correct” than the others. This allowed him to draw upon a very large group of people as members: other Christians. By appealing to where their churches didn’t measure up, he was creating a better alternative for those who were dissatisfied.
Examples of this are the reinstatement of many of the rules outlined by Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians which many of the churches were not following, such as the organization of church leadership and the correct way to hold church gatherings. Even though this is clearly written in the Bible, most Christian religions in one way or another do not follow these rules. By utilizing this fact, The LDS church can draw on that in order to find members who are the most likely to join them (those who are already religious).
They Have Strong Community Values
For this section, I will be drawing mostly from my own experience rather than easily verifiable information, so feel free to take this one at face value and study it further.
The LDS church is a very tight-knit community. Growing up in it, I found that most of the children grew up together, would hang out together at school, and generally associated themselves mostly with other Mormons. This is because in addition to the three hour Sunday sessions, there are multiple groups that children are expected to be involved in throughout adolescence. This includes after-school youth events, a class taken by high school students Monday through Friday (usually before school starts), and The Boy Scouts of America, for which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is the primary sponsor.
These groups help to shape children into better followers of the community. They also assign “home teaching” to adult members and missionaries who come visit families, with an emphasis on families who seem to be slipping away from the church. This helps them to assess and correct any possible members going from “active” to “inactive” status. For a majority of members who leave the LDS church, the church itself still qualifies them as “inactive”.
Once a youth turns 19, they are expected to go on a two-year Mission, during which they will be shipped off to another state or country and spend their entire time focusing on the church and teaching others their ways. These are the missionaries that you may see riding their bikes around town. After they get home, most get married shortly after starting college.
You may have noticed that this means that by the time an LDS member starts college, they are already around 21 years old and have 3-4 years left of college. Some try to get a semester or two in before leaving on their Mission, but they are still two years behind when they get back. That, coupled with getting married shortly thereafter, has the propensity to cause financial stress for the newlyweds right off the bat. This is where the strong community of the LDS church comes to the rescue.
Different programs exist which serve to help members in need. These programs provide members with food, money, and other provisions needed to survive living on your on your own at 21, married, and without a college degree. This means that by the time you do get on your own two feet, you have the LDS church to thank for it, and now you are basically a member for life. You will follow their teachings, incorporate your children into the process, and pay the church ten per cent of your salary as “tithing”. This tithing will in turn be used to buy food and provisions for other families in need, perpetuating the process.
Genius.
