The Rise of Mormonism

Rodney Stark, Reid Neilson

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780231509916
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Will Mormonism be the next world faith, one that will rival Catholicism, Islam, and other major religions in terms of numbers and global appeal? This was the question Rodney Stark addressed in his much-discussed and much-debated article, "The Rise of a New World Faith" (1984), one of several essays on Mormonism included in this new collection. Examining the religion's growing appeal, Rodney Stark concluded that Mormons could number 267 million members by 2080. In what would become known as "the Stark argument," Stark suggested that the Mormon Church offered contemporary sociologists and historians of religion an opportunity to observe a rare event: the birth of a new world religion.

In the years following that article, Stark has become one of the foremost scholars of Mormonism and the sociology of religion. This new work, the first to collect his influential writings on the Mormon Church, includes previously published essays, revised and rewritten for this volume. His work sheds light on both the growth of Mormonism and on how and why certain religions continue to grow while others fade away.

Stark examines the reasons behind the spread of Mormonism, exploring such factors as cultural continuity with the faiths from which it seeks converts, a volunteer missionary force, and birth rates. He explains why a demanding faith like Mormonism has such broad appeal in today's world and considers the importance of social networks in finding new converts. Stark's work also presents groundbreaking perspectives on larger issues in the study of religion, including the nature of revelation and the reasons for religious growth in an age of modernization and secularization.

1. EXTRACTING SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC MODELS FROM MORMON HISTORY

Historians have become accustomed to exhortations that they ought to apply social scientific models to their scholarship. Thus, when the Mormon History Association invited me to give the distinguished O. C. Tanner Lecture on Mormon History at their thirty-second annual conference in 1998, they likely assumed that any religious movement, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is both unique and constrained by general social scientific principles. And I imagine they presumed that I would devote my lecture to explaining how some of these principles apply to Mormon history.

However, I thought it would be far more useful to do the opposite. Through the years, by close study of the Mormons I have tried to discover the general within the particular—to extract general social scientific models from Mormon history. So I devoted my Tanner Lecture to summarizing several of these models in hopes that my Mormon audience would see some of the general implications of things they knew so very well in particular.

THE RISE OF A NEW WORLD FAITH

Twenty years ago I published my first LDS study with the flamboyant title “The Rise of a New World Faith” (Stark 1984a). In it I explained why Mormonism offered a “unique opportunity” to social scientists. I began by noting that it may be futile to try to understand the rise of new religions by studying the numerous small groups that constantly spring up, since none of these movements ever actually rises. Almost all are doomed to obscurity from the start. Hence, even if we should discover the underlying principles governing these new religious movements, chances are that what we will have discovered are the laws of religious failure.

Sociologists must study successful cases to understand how new religions rise. So I continued:

It is, of course, much too late to study how Islam arose in the 7th Century, as it is too late to study the rise of other great world faiths. Their formative periods are now forever shrouded in the fog of unrecorded history. Despite the many admirable efforts to deduce “histories” of these great movements by sociologizing upon shreds of texts, there are severe limits to what can be learned by these means. Sociologists of religion must await new developments to provide them with critical evidence.

And then came my punch line: “I suggest that we need wait no longer, that the time of deliverance is now at hand. I shall give my reasons for believing that it is possible today to study that incredibly rare event: the rise of a new world religion” (Stark 1984a:18).

I then presented two projections of LDS Church membership for the next century (1980–2080). The low estimate was based on a growth rate of 30 percent per decade, which is far below the actual average rate of growth of 61 percent maintained by the church during the three decades up to 1980. This low estimate would produce about 64 million Latter-day Saints in 2080. The high estimate was based on a growth rate of 50 percent per decade, still below the rate maintained during the preceding thirty years. Were it to be met, there would be about 267 million Latter-day Saints in 2080. Either total would qualify Mormonism as a world religion.

These projections have attracted much attention and have sent any number of my colleagues and various journalists into extreme denial. But it is possible to compare the projections for the first twenty-three years (1980–2003) with actual membership figures. In chapter 7 I show that membership of the Church of Jesus Christ is substantially higher than my most optimistic projections.

This little exercise in the arithmetic of the possible became of considerably more general interest when I wrote a book on the rise of Christianity (Stark 1996a). I hoped to establish whether the ordinary process of conversion explained how Christianity had grown as large as it must have been by the start of the fourth century or whether it was necessary to accept claims of mass conversions. That is, what rate of growth must we assume for Christianity to have grown from about 1,000 members in A.D. 40 to about 6 million in A.D. 300? Historians, from Eusebius to Ramsay MacMullen, have unanimously asserted that such large numbers necessitate extraordinary bursts of mass conversions.

Here I had an immense advantage because I knew from LDS statistics that the early growth of Christianity was in no way astonishing. All that was required for Christians to number 6 million within the time that history allows was a growth rate of 40 percent per decade, which is significantly lower than the recent LDS rate (Stark 1996a:7, 14). I must confess that I have enjoyed all the praise I received for generating this growth curve for early Christianity, but I also must admit that it was a very small achievement. I have made rather more important discoveries from close study of the Latter-day Saints. For example, in my first essay on the rise of Mormonism, I promised that I would soon publish a theoretical model of how new religions succeed, generalized from the LDS example. I made good on that promise in 1987 and produced a more sophisticated version in 1996 (Stark 1987, 1996b). In chapter 6 I examine whether (and to what extent) the Latter-day Saints satisfy each element of my theory. And satisfy and succeed they do.

NETWORKS OF FAITH

One of my earliest theoretical contributions to the social scientific study of religion concerned the central role of social relations in conversion to religious groups. This work did not begin with study of the Latter-day Saints but with the first dozen American members of the Unification Church, often referred to in the media as the Moonies. John Lofland, a fellow graduate student, and I wanted to understand how people converted. We decided that no real progress could be made in explaining conversion if we were barricaded behind the library stacks, so we went out to see it happen.

Our observations reduced doctrinal appeals to a very minor initial role. Yes, after people have joined a new religious movement and have fully learned its doctrines and forms of worship, they emphasize the centrality of belief in their conversion. But having observed these same people before and during their conversions, Lofland and I knew better. It was the social connection that led to their conversions, or, as we put it, “conversion was coming to accept the opinions of one’s friends [or relatives]” (Lofland and Stark 1965:871).

Subsequent studies have shown that, in fact, interpersonal ties, or social capital, are the primary factor in conversion; my more recent work on this phenomenon is based on the proposition that when an individual’s attachments to a member or members of another religion outweigh his or her attachments to nonmembers, conversion will occur.

In the case of most new religious movements, conversion is based on the formation of attachments to outsiders, and the typical convert is a person deficient in ties to others because of situational or psychological factors. However, when movements depend on befriending isolates, their growth will be very slow. Why? Because when new members are selected for lack of ties to nonmembers, they rarely connect the group to other potential converts. Thus, growth requires that these religious movements constantly form new ties to nonmembers despite being increasingly composed of members deficient in the social skills needed to play the active role in forming such relationships (Stark and Roberts 1982). Any movement growing as rapidly as Mormonism or early Christianity cannot be based on recruiting isolates. Rather, most new converts must open the way to new social networks—to the conversion of their friends and relatives.

While seeking to document this proposition I first benefited from a close examination of Mormonism. My LDS friend and fellow sociologist Armand Mauss provided me with data on the outcomes of a large number of contacts between Mormon missionaries and nonmembers. When the contact occurred through a door-to-door cold call, the results were dismal. However, when the contact was arranged and hosted by a Mormon friend or relative of the potential recruit, conversion took place quite often. It thus became obvious that LDS conversion is most efficiently produced by rank-and-file Latter-day Saints who spread their faith to relatives and friends (Stark and Bainbridge 1980b).

My interests in conversion and the growth of religious movements have taken me back to the Church of Jesus Christ data again and again. I have devoted a good deal of effort to reconstructing the earliest Mormon social networks, starting with the Joseph Smith family. Most Mormon historians are aware that many early Mormon conversions were very much a kinship affair. Nevertheless, I doubt that many fully appreciate the extent by which the Church of Jesus Christ began as one big family or how long this remained true and at what extraordinary distances. I have detailed these social networks in chapter 3.

RELIGIOUS CAPITAL AND CONVERSION

Having stressed the network character of LDS conversion, I now must admit that doctrine does matter. Even if people do not pursue a new faith because they find its doctrines irresistible, doctrine does tend to impede or facilitate religious choices. It does this in two primary ways. One way involves the principle of the conservation of religious capital. The other way occurs as doctrine shapes the social norms within religious groups.

As I became more familiar with LDS statistics I noticed that the LDS church was much more successful in some places than others. Eventually, I recognized a pattern: Mormon growth is usually more rapid in Christian than in non-Christian societies. This encouraged me to examine other recent religious movements and to notice that groups retaining substantial Christian cultural elements (such as Christian Science or the Children of God) have grown more in the United States than have various non-Christian faiths based in Hinduism or other Eastern religions (such as Theosophy or the Hare Krishnas).

We already have examined the role of social capital in conversion. Likewise, people will attempt to conserve their religious capital—the degree of mastery of any particular religious culture—when making religious choices. What this means is that, generally speaking, the greater their store of religious capital (the more they have invested in a faith), the more costly it is for people to change faiths. This fact helps us recognize why converts overwhelmingly are recruited from the ranks of those lacking a prior religious commitment or having only a nominal connection to a religious group. When people change religions, they tend to select the option that maximizes their conservation of religious capital by switching to a religious body very similar to the one in which they were raised (Bibby and Brinkerhoff 1973).

THE WORD AS FLESH

Doctrine also plays a substantial role in shaping the social life of religious groups, aspects of which are of special importance to any outsider thinking of becoming a member. I was able to overcome my sociological training and to recognize that the Word can indeed become flesh.

Anyone who lives around Latter-day Saints and pays attention must be struck by the worldly rewards of membership. They benefit from the promise of immense rewards to come in the next world and shower one another with rewards in this one. By asking much of their members, the church gains the resources to give them much. Far more than members of most other American faiths, Latter-day Saints can feel secure against misfortune and hard times. This is not an accident, nor is it a holdover from frontier customs. Again and again when I have discussed these practices with Latter-day Saints, they quickly offer scriptural explanation. They maintain their own system of social services because they believe God commands them to do so. And here, too, my work on early Christianity profited greatly from my Mormon experiences.

It is not fashionable to argue that the early Christians took seriously such ideas as being their brothers’ keepers. Nor would most sociologists have suggested that Christians really would have acted on such notions to nurse the sick in times of plague, to sustain widows and orphans, to purchase the freedom of slaves, or to provide decent burial for the dead—this despite the fact that both early Christian and pagan sources agree that it was all true! Most sociologists know better than to believe such stuff. We have been taught that ideas are but epiphenomena flowing upward from underlying material conditions. But anyone who has watched their LDS friends make substantial sacrifices on behalf of others—open their home to an abandoned wife and children or regularly take a former neighbor now suffering from Alzheimer’s disease out for a picnic—knows enough to look for such forms of religious behavior elsewhere. I was able to understand the very attractive social and material rewards of early Christianity because I observed people become Latter-day Saints after having initially formed a favorable impression of the church on these grounds alone.

A THEORY OF REVELATIONS

Furthermore, my immersion in Mormon history led me to formulate and then to extend a theory of revelations. The most basic question confronting the social scientific study of religion concerns the sources of religious culture. Given that the major Western religions are all based on revelations, the question becomes: How do “revelations” occur? To the extent that we cannot answer this question, we remain ignorant of the origins of our entire subject matter.

When William Bainbridge and I first surveyed the literature on revelation, we found that the psychopathological interpretation was the overwhelming favorite, with conscious fraud treated as the only plausible alternative. We reworked the literature and systematized our own field observations to state three models of revelation, allowing for revelations involving neither craziness nor corruption (Bainbridge and Stark 1979). But I still was not satisfied. Eventually, I found the basis for a new theory in a close examination of how Spencer W. Kimball, then president of the LDS Church, received the revelation in 1978 that blacks could receive the Mormon priesthood. President Kimball reported no voices from beyond, no burning bushes, and no apparitions (Mauss 1981). The actual process by which he received his revelation would seem to involve nothing more (or less) than achieving a state of complete certainty about what God wanted him to do.

Couldn’t any sincere believer have revelations that way? Clearly, this episode demonstrated the possibility that many revelations can be understood in rational terms. I soon realized that this assumption could be extended even to the more dramatic episodes of revelations, including those that involve visions and voices. So I proceeded to construct a model of revelations based on the starting assumption that normal people can, through entirely normal means, have revelations, including revelations sufficiently profound to serve as the basis of new religions (Stark 1999b). In constructing it, I ended up giving considerable attention to famous founders of religions, and I was struck by some amazing similarities among Joseph Smith, Muhammad, Jesus, and Moses. I have unpacked my comparison of these holy men in chapter 2. This observation led me to the notion of “Holy Families” or the importance of family and social networks not only for producing converts but also for sustaining prophets. There seems to be compelling evidence that cultural and social supports are needed to make people receptive to revelations.

I was careful to acknowledge the possibility that revelations actually occur. It is beyond the capacity of science to demonstrate that the divine does not communicate directly with certain individuals; there is no possibility of constructing an appropriate detector. We must, therefore, admit the possibility of an active supernatural realm closed to scientific exploration. To confess these limits to scientific epistemology is not to suggest that we cease efforts to account for religious phenomena within a scientific framework. There is no necessary incompatibility between these efforts and faith.

RELIGION, FAITH, AND SKEPTICISM

While the similarities among Joseph Smith, Muhammad, Jesus, and Moses sustain my theoretical propositions, unfortunately they can also be twisted to support the view that religions are nothing more than human inventions and that all the faithful are misled or myopic. This fallacy has gone unchallenged i...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Extracting Social Scientific Models from Mormon History
• 2. Joseph Smith Among the Revelators
• 3. Mormon Networks of Faith
• 4. Rationality and Mormon Sacrifice
• 5. Modernization, Secularization, and Mormon Growth
• 6. The Basis of Mormon Success
• 7. The Rise of a New World Faith
• Bibliography
• Further Acknowledgments
• Index