It bugs the crap out of me that there's no big push by really faithful members to reinstate The Everlasting Covenant. Obviously los grande 15 don't want to piss off the rest of the (non-muslim) world, but the faithful should be agitating like crazy.
The language is clear! How else can "Everlasting" be interpreted? And now that the legal hurtles are either removed or are toothless, why isn't ghawd badgering the big 15?
Of course I'm assuming that the Big 15 think that reinstating The Everlasting Covenant would be a bad PR (no, not Puerto Rican) move, but who knows? Maybe it would revitalize priesthood meeting?
It's a cult that thrives on persecution. It's not going anywhere. Distasteful doctrines will go down the memory hole: "The BoM was never taught as literal history".
Eventually, a long time from now, probably long after I'm dead, there will be a bunch of people sitting in the board room of a major real estate company, laughing about how it all began with a narcissistic con man who fooled people into believing he had a pile of gold plates...
I think TSCC will merge with Islam for the sake of polygamy, discrimination against gays, and to bulk their numbers up to show world dominance like JS wanted.
Ones who don't like that will start their own little independent branches here and there.
Probably change and maybe get smaller. Members will move onto a different scam.
Despite all the information that is readily available, there seems to be no shortage of people falling for BS in one form or another.
Government controls our education, and government is in bed with religion and an assortment of other scams, including wars and its own programs. So it is unlikely that people generally will be less involved in frauds.
Most people base their beliefs on emotion, and just want someone to pretend they love them and will provide security and benefits.
The "promised land" might move to the only place TSCC has significant growth, sub-Saharan Africa. The limited geographical theory of the BoM seems to be headed in that direction.
In 100 years time TSCC might have a majority of African membership, with a few token blacks in leadership positions, but still run by white conservative Utahns. Official membership numbers will max out by then at about 50 million, with zero growth in active membership, ie about 5 million active members.
Gen X'ers and Millenials are not participating like the baby-boomers. Historians will look back and call it pre-Internet and post-Internet mormonism. It can't survive it's own history. It will take on all the machinations that Catholocism and Judaism and Protestantism have been through since the 1960's. The population of the faithful will dwindle. There will be many disappointed parents and hard discussions. 40 and 100 years from now there will still be serious pockets of believers - those who see in the Church's dwindling numbers the culmination of prophetic warnings of the Last Days. But mormonism has a different problem than the other religions. It's staffed entirely by volunteers wheras the other major US religions have professional pastors and rabbis for whom their spiritual service is a small business. As the volunteers dwindle in numbers, the 20% of the faithful who do 80% of the work will find the whole deal to be much more taxing - causing an epidemic of passive/aggressiveness within the church. If certain 'manchurian GA's' penetrate the top leadership, then there is a chance for potential moderation. But I think the more likely result based on the doctrine is that leadership will double down on dogma and overwhelm the faithful and ultimately become more cult-like - a slow and painful contraction for all involved. There are some moderating steps that will be taken. The block will be shortened and hopefully the leadership retreats to limited-proselytizing mostly service missions.
There's no doubt that the leadership is already reacting. Births in the covenant has already become a point of emphasis. RM's are encouraged to get married and start having kids. Now an increasing number of sisters are RM's and get this same advice. They are the church's best hope. A key metric will be churn on this group. What % of BIC's stay active LDS after age 30.
We have only to look at the successful formerly draconian religions that have survived their own history. They survive by attrition of hardliners and the modification of punishments.
There is always a distance between the orthodoxy and what is actually practiced by the people on the street. Also, you can tell what is orthodoxy in a religion by what is punished. Anything that is ignored rather than punished is morphing into a voluntary status. That is, the congregation is allowed to follow their conscience (and is not punished for their choices).
For example, for centuries the Catholic Church has not believed that sexual predation is a sin. It may be listed as a mortal sin, but it was never punished. This created a great outcry by the congregations because their children were the victims.
A religion is supposedly not allowed to permit sexual predation by authority figures and yet....
Everything Mormonism now demands will end up being voluntary. I submit that the church will stop excommunicating people, punishing "heretics" etc, etc. Tithing settlement will be eliminated and people's donations will be truly voluntary.
People don't have to put up with being treated like children. They might not mind if the orthodoxy believes in fairies or the Book of Mormon, but they don't want to be dragged into a Court of Love or have their children interviewed about touching their best-feeling place.
The Mormon Church has to improve it's product and it's brand, just like any other corporation.
Change, failure or contract? – Yes all of those. Sometimes failure is sudden and catastrophic sometimes muted and slow. But everything fails eventually and there are innumerable ways tssc will essentially cease to exist in any meaningful way.
I like to imagine a leadership crisis and split at Q15 level, with a charismatic challenger taking away most of the LDS faithful but not getting their hands on the money. Further down the line the Corp of the President gives up on pretending it has a prophet and concentrates solely on being a property company. Then the remaining side becomes bankrupt and collapses in disgrace and prison sentences.
If there was a book of short stories describing possible failure scenarios of the church I’d buy it straight away. Please tell me one exists.
If the trends of the past 20 years continue (they might, they might not...), then the future would be "contract." In the US, the church growth rate is lower than the population growth rate, so the % of people in the US that are mormons shrinks every single day. That's not the case worldwide, but it is the case in every "developed" country.
So while they might still grow in absolute numbers (though at slower rates than in the past), the % of the people in the world that are mormons will (if current trends continue) get smaller and smaller -- and it's already tiny.
Then again, they could announce some major change that keeps people from leaving and results in new converts. It would have to be something big, big enough to counteract the internet...but even then the church's history will bog it down.