Aristotle Smith wrote:Warning, long post ahead.
Full disclosure, I voted for Mitt Romney. Now having said that, I think there is something about his loss that has a real parallel with the problems the LDS church is facing with growth and evangelism. Here's the statistic I find the most interesting:
McCain Votes 2008: 59,934,814
Romney Votes 2012: 58,168,806
John McCain, one of the most lackluster Republican candidates in recent memory who was running with a VP candidate who had been crucified on the public stage (rightly or wrongly, I don't care about this for the sake of argument), convinced around 1.8 million MORE people to vote for him than Mitt could muster for his election. This is beyond pathetic for a candidate.
Now, take a look at some comments from
cumorah.com, the most honest place on the internet for learning about LDS church growth.
A closer examination of growth and retention data demonstrates that LDS growth trends have been widely overstated. Annual LDS growth has progressively declined from over 5 percent in the late 1980s to less than 3 percent from 2000 to 2005. Since 1990, LDS missionaries have been challenged to double the number of baptisms, but instead the number of baptisms per missionary has halved. During this same period, other international missionary-oriented faiths have reported accelerating growth, including the Seventh-Day Adventists, Southern Baptists, Assemblies of God, and Evangelical (5.6 percent annual growth) and Pentecostal churches (7.3 percent annual growth)....
The Seventh-Day Adventist Church was organized in 1849 and recently overtook the LDS Church with 13 million members, of whom virtually all are active. In 2004, the LDS Church added an average of 661 converts and 270 children of record each day. Seventh-Day Adventists were adding an average of 3,176 new members each day in 2000 and have experienced continued high growth since that time, adding between 900,000 and 1.2 million members each year. The Assemblies of God are growing at approximately 10 percent per year, or over three times the growth rate of the LDS Church, while the Seventh-Day Adventists report growth two to three times LDS rates at 5.6 to 8 percent per year. There are over 570,000 active Seventh-Day Adventists in Kenya alone. This is more than the official number of Latter-day Saints in all of continental Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, less than 200,000 of who are active....
Rodney Stark and Laurence Iannaccone noted: "Except for the years immediately following the prophetic disappointment of 1975, [Jehovah's] Witness growth has consistently outpaced Mormon growth. In 1954, there were 7.7 Mormons per Witness publisher. By 1994, this had been reduced to 1.9. Given that the Mormons are generally viewed as the world's most successful new religion and had about an 80-year start on the Witnesses, this is an astonishing achievement." It is even more astonishing when we consider that there are far more participating Jehovah's Witnesses than Latter-day Saints, since Jehovah's Witness statistical reports consistently cite attendance rates far above official membership
Some observations of parallels I see:
Overstating Statistics: The LDS church, like Mitt, consistently overstates its own following and growth. Furthermore, the LDS church, like Mitt, appears to truly believe its own statistics. Furthermore, both Mitt and the LDS church appear to try and use bad statistics to try and sell people on their brand, which would then lead to better statistics. In other words, if you can get people to believe that you are growing, people might jump on the bandwagon and actually make it a reality.
Well organized and persistent, but ineffective: Mitt put together a well oiled corporate machine for managing his campaign. He has spent more time trying to get elected than just about any other person in history. He spent 6 straight years of his life campaigning and setting up his support organization. But on election night, he couldn't even muster as many voters as John McCain had.
Likewise, on paper the LDS church has the best organized missionary force, but is far less effective than other groups. The most direct group for comparing Mormons are the JWs. They tend to compete in similar markets and use similar door-to-door proselyting strategies. Mormon missionaries have corporate sponsored preparation time, have a tremendous support team in the form of GA and mission offices, standardized materials, etc. Mormon missionaries are generally seen as clean cut and good kids. On paper the LDS missionary force should be outperforming the JWs, but the statistics show the exact opposite, the JW's are far more effective than are Mormons.
Lots of money, but unable to translated money into members/voters: Mitt is probably the wealthiest candidate in the history of the U.S., and he raised gobs of money. When you combine direct contributions with Super PAC money, Mitt had at least as much money as Obama, perhaps more. But whatever he did with that money, he didn't get much for it. In fact, he got at least 1.8 million less votes than did McCain, who ran an inept campaign.
Likewise the LDS church is probably the wealthiest church per capita in the U.S.. I am guessing at this because they don't release the numbers. But judging by how costly temples, church buildings, and malls are, I'm guessing they have plenty of cash on hand. Certainly much more than Seventh Day Adventists and JW's. But, both of those groups are vastly outperforming Mormons in evangelism.
Likeable on paper, but not well liked in reality: On paper Mitt should have been the a well-liked and admired guy. Great family values, hard working, honest, successful, etc. But as was obvious in the Republican primaries, no one liked the guy. I don't think he ever got over that problem.
Mormons also have this problem, but they don't like to admit it or think about it. Mormons are also hard working with good family values. Mormons generally think that everyone else likes them,
but they don't. For a great post on people not liking Mormons, from a Mormon writer,
try Rock Waterman's excellent blog post on the subject.
I think this point may be the hardest for Mormons to accept. Even people who have left the church will probably defend their LDS friends and relatives from what they perceive as anti-Mormon bigotry. Mormons try so hard and look so nice that any dislike or distrust of them will be perceived as bigotry. But, even if we stipulate that it's all bigotry (I don't think it is, but let's assume it is for the sake of argument), you still have the problem of people not liking you while trying to convert them to your beliefs at the same time. This doesn't mix well.
Flip-flopping as a way of life: It's axiomatic now that one of Romney's big problems was that he changes his positions to suit his audience. To some degree, everyone modulates their speech to get a better reaction from their audience. Politicians are masters at this. But, there is a limit to this and if you transgress that limit you lose credibility. I think Mitt went over the limit on this one.
I think the average Mormon does this regularly as well. Mormons try and have it both ways on polygamy, blacks and the priesthood, being the one true church, the importance of the Bible, the divinity of Jesus, etc. The discussion will be very different if there are non-LDS present than if it is an in group discussion. While in-group/out-group talk will always be different, I think Mormons cross the line from contextualizing their speech to dishonesty with regularity. And this is just the average TBM, Internet and Liberal Mormons have taken this practice to a whole new level. But the real kings of the flip flop are the GAs, who seem to care not a whit about changing practices and doctrines, with no explanation, which previous generations had seen as absolutely essential to the LDS faith.
In conclusion, I think there are some very real parallels between how Mitt ran his campaign and how the LDS church runs itself, and the results are the same. My guess is that Mitt has internalized his Mormonism and ran his campaign as a good Mormon would. Mormons truly believe that they are running the LDS church just as God would have them do this. And, Mitt was utterly convinced he ran a winning campaign...until it became brutally apparent he didn't. This is why the Romney ticket looked so shell shocked on election night, they really believed they had a winner. Contrast this with the McCain folks who were honest enough to know they had lost and conceded without looking surprised.
I don't think Mitt lost because he was a Mormon, but I do think that his devout Mormonism influenced him to run his campaign that had the same problems the LDS church has, and the results were the same.
Edited, changed "good statistics" to "bad statistics."
