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I was amused to see this article in the current issue of BYU Magazine that was delivered to my mailbox last week:

"Keeping The Faith: What Can You Do When A Child Expresses Doctrinal Doubts?"

Amused because we seem to be seeing more and more of this, indicating that it's an ever growing problem for the church.

But the article seems positively doubt affirming compared to the latest offering from LDS.org:

"What To Do When You Have Questions"

Addressed to the youth (rather than their parents) this one is chock full of the propaganda we expect from LDS, Inc. It places the blame squarely on the doubter, and discourages questioning while at the same time attempting to obscure what it is doing by parsing a non-existent distinction between "questioning" and "asking questions."

It's almost as if the author of the BYU Magazine article had the LDS.org piece in mind when she explained that if you try to address doubts that way, you'll only make things worse, because smart kids will smell what you're doing and assume that where there's smoke there's fire.

In a word, the BYU Magazine article appears to lean toward the inoculation approach of embracing open inquiry, whereas LDS.org sticks to its age old policy of quarantine (albeit masquerading as welcoming honest questioning). This got me thinking about the two approaches with regard to the church and its struggle with retention.

In the old Missionary Guide we learned that there were three groups of investigators: those that would join the church no matter what the missionary did, those that would not join the church no matter what the missionary did, and those whose decision depended largely on the effectiveness of the missionary. Everything that followed was geared toward making the missionary more effective, in order to maximize converts from that that last group—the only group our actions had any impact on.

I imagine this little concept from Marketing 101 must inform the church's retention efforts as well. Active, believing, BIC members fall into three groups. Those that will remain faithful believers regardless of what they learn about the church and how or when they learn it (Group A), those that will cease to believe the moment they learn about, say, the Book of Abraham problem (Group B), and those whose status as believing members—and thus, their eternal salvation—depends on the context and circumstances in which they learn about the troubling issues in Mormonism (Group C). If they learn about the Book of Abraham problem as youth, at church, in a controlled, faith-promoting environment, they will remain believers (inoculated). But if they learn about it later in life through independent research (failed quarantine) they will abandon belief and leave the church, feeling betrayed.

It's immediately obvious that if the church's ultimate goal were to save souls, then it would be teaching the Book of Abraham problem in Seminary. It would have adopted a policy of inoculation from the very beginning, as that's the only way to maximize retention of Group C.

That it has so long adopted a policy of quarantine, and is only now beginning to show signs of shifting to inoculation, indicates that the church's goal is not saving souls but making money. Quarantine, when effective, allows them to keep Groups B and C in the church and paying tithing as long as possible, before they eventually abandon belief and lose their salvation.

Whether quarantine is more profitable than inoculation depends on the average age at which people independently discover whatever it is that will destroy their belief (for Groups B and C). There is a point at which quarantine is less profitable than inoculation as that age decreases. I think that could be what we're seeing as the church is gradually shifting to a policy of greater (by comparison) transparency.

I was frankly stunned by the BYU Magazine article.

Cogent analysis as always, Sophocles.

Quarantine is a dead loss in a world with an internet. The only hope here is to tell all faithful members to cancel their internet subscriptions. I don't see that as a possibility.

Inoculation has similar problems. The Church needs to counter internet information that is detrimental to the Church with reliable pro-LDS information. I think that may be difficult (if not impossible).

Between a rock and a hard place?

Great OP. This concept would make for an interesting graph.

Information Explosion

Latter-day Saints have experienced crises of faith throughout the history of the Church, but the number of those asking hard questions or finding themselves in faith crisis has increased with the advent of the Internet, Fluhman says. “The information explosion has exposed Latter-day Saints to a wider range of information about their faith and about their past.”

Cope has found the same situation. “More students are coming across information on the Internet that they haven’t been exposed to before,” she says. “They do not know how to process these new details and in many cases feel a betrayal of trust. ‘Why hasn’t anyone ever told me this?’ they ask.”

The professors say the issues that most often come up include polygamy, women and the priesthood, race and the priesthood restriction before 1978, sexual orientation, and the translations of the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham.

Perfect Question about thr "True" church and its leadership. Why didn't anyone ever tell them about deceitful Mormon history? Mormoniciousness maybe?

When Tom Brown was a teenager, he became perplexed by arguments challenging his religious beliefs. He went to his dad. His father, a financial supporter of old-school Maxwell-Institute apologetics, said "So you're a quote unquote skeptic now, eh boy? We'll see how that goes for you," and he slapped his palm over his mouth to force back an outburst of laughter.

Tom recalls, "What on earth was wrong with this guy? Up until that day he was my dad, I mean, we had our issues but man, he lost it after I told him I'd just read somewhere on the internet they didn't have horses in the Americas during Book of Mormon times. I wasn't trying to question, I was curious because this real-time strategy game I played online didn't have horses or anything with wheels when you selected Aztecs or Mayans as your civilization."

Dad put an arm around Tom and helped him register an account on the Mormon Dialogue board. He insisted Tom use his in real life name as only "cowards" were anonymous. Tom logged in and started a thread asking his first question. He asked about horses in the Book of Mormon. But before anyone could answer the question, the topic was locked, and his account was suspended. "Asked and Answered," was the violation, he recalled.

"When I told my dad what happened, he asked me what I expected. He said something like, 'What, you think you're the first person to ever to discover that the standard line from our biased history books is that there weren't horses back then? You think John Sorenson doesn't know that? Do you have a Phd in anthropology like he has?'"

Tom was rattled, but eventually followed his father's advice to work things out with the mods. He shared a little more personal information with them and they tentatively lifted his restrictions. When his thread on horses got going, the first responder razed Tom for being a career anti-Mormon feigning to be naïve. The next responder accused him of being a "positivist," and Tom had no idea what that was. Then another responder chided him for not having studied enough. No one would answer the question.

"When I went to my dad, he told me that I have to admit they made some fair points. I was eighteen, I was taking AP history, I had a library card, and at least every month we strolled through Deseret Book as a family at the City Creek center. How was it that I hadn't known about these issues long ago? When I asked why they didn't talk about them in seminary or church, he laughed -- hysterically. His eyes were wide open and bloodshot. It was freaking weird. And then he said the scriptures command us to seek knowledge out of the best books, and if I hadn't figured this stuff out yet it was my fault."

Tom stayed with the board for a while until he was called in by his Stake President. A file had been put together on his posting activities and now he was facing disfellowshipment. There he was, with his God-given name plain as day making statements that could be interpreted as critical of the Brethren and the Church. How stupid was that? He discussed all this with his dad and his dad told him it was in the interest of the Church to root out "fifth-columnists".

"My dad revealed to me that he was one of the pseudonyms that had been harassing me on the board the entire time! I couldn't believe it! Well...actually I was starting to be able to believe something like this could happen. I asked him about the 'cowardice' of anonymous posting and he said, 'I'm just doing what you critics like to do -- if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen! Take it up with your apostate buddies if you don't like anonymous posting as they are the experts on it!"

Tom got an apartment on the west side of Salt Lake City and after a few months of not attending church he was ambivalent. Maybe he'd go back. Of course, if he did, that would be a problem for the stability of his fellow Latter-Day Saints, so fortunately his Dad had one of his friends get an undercover apostate to befriend Tom and to keep tabs on him in case he tried to come back to church. Sure, one day Tom might be welcome back, but until he had a blog defending the faith 100% and had a reputation for not entertaining the validity of any criticism whatsoever, it wasn't going to happen.

Gadianton wrote:When Tom Brown was a teenager... (snip)

Gadianton, is this a true story? Very interesting.

Selek,

Lest Kent accuse me of wrongdoing, no, this is not a true story. I took the BYU story and changed the last name of the person and wrote a similar story predicting the treatment of a teen with questions, who lives under the roof of a die-hard Mopologist. It would probably be a good idea in such a position to quietly go on one's way after high school is over, and not question the Church until then.