Posted by:
Erick
(
)
Date: January 24, 2013 12:00PM
I was disbelieving, but "active", for nearly five years. Ultimately I was waiting for my wife to get on board. At the time, she was really the only person who knew about my situation, and I really wasn't aware of anyone else's. In the last two years she and I have both gone innactive, and in some circles have even been willing to share our disbelief in the Church. In doing that, we have bumped into a number or friends and acquaintances who have admitted to being at some stage of disbelief as well...yet most of them still attend Church. It would still be a small number of people overall that I know about, but it was much larger than I actually thought.
I'm also seeing the emergence of a looser more "liberal" demographic in the Church, which in my opinion is somewhere between "TBM" and "apostate". These people want to "reform" the Church and take a looser stance on certain theological propositions, including the historicity of The Book of Mormon??? Fundamentally, I see this as an ultimate rejection of Mormon authority and divinity, at least on some level, while still holding to some strange infatuation with the institution.
This move towards theological liberalism probably isn't that unusual though, I think, at least from a sociological standpoint. Here would be my hypothesis. If we assume that TBM and apostates are still the extreme ends of the population distribution of those connected to Mormonism, I would expect the numbers on either side to be rather small. Anecdotally, even growing up, there were "molly Mormons" who lived, breathed, ate, slept, Mormonism. Then there were those who were part of it, who were willing to attend Church and participate in the culture, but who were also a little less rigid in their adherence to Mormon commandments or principles. These people probably made of the base, or 68% of the mean (assuming a normal distribution for the sake of hypothetical). They served missions, went to Church, watched conference, held callings, etc....but they did it all to a mediocre standard, and more in a minimum requirements checklist kind of way. I see this group transitioning more towards a liberal demographic. I guess to expand upon this argument briefly, this is either because the distribution is actually shifting, or because it is widening (quite possibly the latter, now that I think about it), so that either way, the representative demographics of "average" Mormonism are changing.
In other words, look more to the base to see what is happening, rather than to the extremes. That is a better indicator of things..and might just mean that there are more of you than you realize.
For the sake of curiosity, and mabey this has been done, but it might be interesting to get a survey for the participants here on RFM, to find out how many are still "active" in the Church, or in other words, how many are "closeted apostates".