I was assuming that building strong community is a good thing, because of the post this is responding to. If Scott (or other people) are looking at Mormonism to see what they can learn about building strong communities in a liberal society, it is better if they have an accurate understanding of how the community works.
I think that the things that seem most likely to be worth exporting are ministering and callings. Callings seem harder to export. but have been very important for me feeling part of the community. Ministering seems easier to export, and I wouldn’t be that surprised if rationalists end up doing it better than we do.
Some of the things you’re talking about do not feel like the Church as I have experienced it. I only have my limited view, and for example have never lived in Utah, so maybe we’ve just experienced different things.
I don’t think that any of the leaders I have known could reasonably be described as “covertly power-seeking and who can succeed at this by veneer of niceness”. Including the leaders who I have had significant disagreements with. All of the ones I’ve dealt with are sincerely trying, and would be relieved to have a less effortful calling. I don’t think that most of the niceness you see in the Church is actually a veneer. (N here is maybe 20, if you include bishops, counselors, and elders’ quorum presidents.)
Mechanistically, the Church is a really ineffective route for power seeking. ‘Advancing’ in callings is a slow, highly uncertain process, during which time you are expected to do a ton of service. Maybe there’s some inflection point above stake president where this stops being true (I wouldn’t know), but at least at the levels I’ve been able to see, the incentives point strongly against trying to get more power.[1] If this is a bigger problem in Utah than elsewhere, then I would guess that it would be because having a leadership calling helps you get promotions at work (or something else), and so there are more incentives coming from outside the Church itself.
I agree that there is too much deference without review. I would prefer deference with review. For example, the first time I was called to be ward mission leader, I told my bishop why I thought I was not a particularly good choice for the role, and suggested that we both go and think & pray about it and talk again next week. We did, and I ended up accepting the calling. The leaders I’ve had have reacted well to this—at least some of them seem to prefer it to either deference without review or outright refusal. This is a direction I am trying to push Church culture in.
The set of lessons is not fixed. The lesson topics are suggested by the Church. This only results in the same lesson if the teacher is putting in a minimal amount of effort. Even in this case, someone in the class can dramatically improve it by asking an interesting[2] question, at least if there are some other people who are willing to engage. If no one there is willing to put in anything more than a minimal amount of effort, then the lessons will be repetitive and boring—and no amount of institutional design will fix it.
I endorse proselytizing. If you think that your believes are true and good, then it is good to offer them to the rest of the world. Even if it is through Harry Potter fanfiction instead of only rigorous argument.
I don’t know what treatment you’ve received when leaving the Church. My impression is that people’s friendships in the Church gradually fade away because it’s much harder to maintain a friendship when you don’t have a built in plan to see each other at least once a week, and as people move away and you don’t meet the new people. This can mean that you feel isolated if you come back to visit, but this doesn’t seem like an avoidable problem. If you’ve been treated worse than this, then I’m sorry.
Then why do people do it? Because of a sense of duty—there are norms against refusing callings. My guess is that if the norms around not refusing callings significantly weaken, bishop would be one of the harder callings to get anyone to agree to do.
‘Interesting’ here does not mean ‘controversial’. ‘Interesting’ means ‘something that other people will have nontrivial responses to’. Flagrantly controversial questions are often not interesting, if they result in predictable responses. Crafting interesting questions for Sunday school is an art that I’ve practiced, and I think it’s worthwhile for other people in the Church to practice too.
I’m a big fan of strong communities and I don’t mean to say not to do them. The place that utah mormonism caused severe chafing in my life was related to rules and social structures that are reasonably core to mormonism. That’s not to say the things I found to cause problem don’t serve a purpose, but I don’t think they’re worth the significant cost. I only wanted to bring up the warning that it’s not just the case that all is well in mormonland, even though there are some things which do seem to be kinda nice there that are somewhat missing elsewhere. Covertly powerseeking is something I’ve heard about and had suspicions about locally, but I’d put much higher probability on it in the core priesthood.
I agree that refusable assignments might be a pretty good idea for an intentionally organized community, though I would propose that some sort of unusual local democracy might be a better option for how to choose people. zany idea, derived from straightforwardly turning mormon callings into local democracy: something where everyone is electable as [ranked choice/probabilistic vote/liquid democracy/star voting/etc] by default, and then refusal happens after the election, and the first non-refused option is the one who takes it? that might still have the problems with having a single person assigning. and I don’t like how expensive it ends up being to do elections. (...what if you had a cryptographic pseudoRNG seeded once per person from something unchangeable about them generate the subset of people who will vote this year...)
Ministering—home teaching/visiting teaching, when I knew it—seems sus to me. I don’t trust it to not cause toxic groupthink. If I saw a group doing that from a distance my first impulse would be to avoid them, and it would take a lot of transparency and epistemological soundness on the part of everyone involved for me to take that guard down much at all.
I think you’d be interested in Tocqueville’s description of how New England towns worked in the early 1800s. My guess is that the system of callings descends from it, and it was substantially more democratic.
Search: “Limits of the township” to find the relevant section.
I was assuming that building strong community is a good thing, because of the post this is responding to. If Scott (or other people) are looking at Mormonism to see what they can learn about building strong communities in a liberal society, it is better if they have an accurate understanding of how the community works.
I think that the things that seem most likely to be worth exporting are ministering and callings. Callings seem harder to export. but have been very important for me feeling part of the community. Ministering seems easier to export, and I wouldn’t be that surprised if rationalists end up doing it better than we do.
Some of the things you’re talking about do not feel like the Church as I have experienced it. I only have my limited view, and for example have never lived in Utah, so maybe we’ve just experienced different things.
I don’t think that any of the leaders I have known could reasonably be described as “covertly power-seeking and who can succeed at this by veneer of niceness”. Including the leaders who I have had significant disagreements with. All of the ones I’ve dealt with are sincerely trying, and would be relieved to have a less effortful calling. I don’t think that most of the niceness you see in the Church is actually a veneer. (N here is maybe 20, if you include bishops, counselors, and elders’ quorum presidents.)
Mechanistically, the Church is a really ineffective route for power seeking. ‘Advancing’ in callings is a slow, highly uncertain process, during which time you are expected to do a ton of service. Maybe there’s some inflection point above stake president where this stops being true (I wouldn’t know), but at least at the levels I’ve been able to see, the incentives point strongly against trying to get more power.[1] If this is a bigger problem in Utah than elsewhere, then I would guess that it would be because having a leadership calling helps you get promotions at work (or something else), and so there are more incentives coming from outside the Church itself.
I agree that there is too much deference without review. I would prefer deference with review. For example, the first time I was called to be ward mission leader, I told my bishop why I thought I was not a particularly good choice for the role, and suggested that we both go and think & pray about it and talk again next week. We did, and I ended up accepting the calling. The leaders I’ve had have reacted well to this—at least some of them seem to prefer it to either deference without review or outright refusal. This is a direction I am trying to push Church culture in.
The set of lessons is not fixed. The lesson topics are suggested by the Church. This only results in the same lesson if the teacher is putting in a minimal amount of effort. Even in this case, someone in the class can dramatically improve it by asking an interesting[2] question, at least if there are some other people who are willing to engage. If no one there is willing to put in anything more than a minimal amount of effort, then the lessons will be repetitive and boring—and no amount of institutional design will fix it.
I endorse proselytizing. If you think that your believes are true and good, then it is good to offer them to the rest of the world. Even if it is through Harry Potter fanfiction instead of only rigorous argument.
I don’t know what treatment you’ve received when leaving the Church. My impression is that people’s friendships in the Church gradually fade away because it’s much harder to maintain a friendship when you don’t have a built in plan to see each other at least once a week, and as people move away and you don’t meet the new people. This can mean that you feel isolated if you come back to visit, but this doesn’t seem like an avoidable problem. If you’ve been treated worse than this, then I’m sorry.
Then why do people do it? Because of a sense of duty—there are norms against refusing callings. My guess is that if the norms around not refusing callings significantly weaken, bishop would be one of the harder callings to get anyone to agree to do.
‘Interesting’ here does not mean ‘controversial’. ‘Interesting’ means ‘something that other people will have nontrivial responses to’. Flagrantly controversial questions are often not interesting, if they result in predictable responses. Crafting interesting questions for Sunday school is an art that I’ve practiced, and I think it’s worthwhile for other people in the Church to practice too.
I’m a big fan of strong communities and I don’t mean to say not to do them. The place that utah mormonism caused severe chafing in my life was related to rules and social structures that are reasonably core to mormonism. That’s not to say the things I found to cause problem don’t serve a purpose, but I don’t think they’re worth the significant cost. I only wanted to bring up the warning that it’s not just the case that all is well in mormonland, even though there are some things which do seem to be kinda nice there that are somewhat missing elsewhere. Covertly powerseeking is something I’ve heard about and had suspicions about locally, but I’d put much higher probability on it in the core priesthood.
I agree that refusable assignments might be a pretty good idea for an intentionally organized community, though I would propose that some sort of unusual local democracy might be a better option for how to choose people. zany idea, derived from straightforwardly turning mormon callings into local democracy: something where everyone is electable as [ranked choice/probabilistic vote/liquid democracy/star voting/etc] by default, and then refusal happens after the election, and the first non-refused option is the one who takes it? that might still have the problems with having a single person assigning. and I don’t like how expensive it ends up being to do elections. (...what if you had a cryptographic pseudoRNG seeded once per person from something unchangeable about them generate the subset of people who will vote this year...)
Ministering—home teaching/visiting teaching, when I knew it—seems sus to me. I don’t trust it to not cause toxic groupthink. If I saw a group doing that from a distance my first impulse would be to avoid them, and it would take a lot of transparency and epistemological soundness on the part of everyone involved for me to take that guard down much at all.
I think you’d be interested in Tocqueville’s description of how New England towns worked in the early 1800s. My guess is that the system of callings descends from it, and it was substantially more democratic.
Search: “Limits of the township” to find the relevant section.