The Church and Mormonism

by David Knowlton

Introduction

It seems so simple to join “church” and “mormonism,” as in my title, though both of these words are devastatingly complex and their joining never quite so clear as in this sentence, or in the name of an organization, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with it theological, ideological and political claims.  

In this paper, I shall not look at the difficulties of “mormonism” but shall focus on the notion of “church” and what some of its complexities mean for a sociology or social anthropology of Mormonism. 

Focus

As a beginning, let us take note that the root word of church is the Greek ecclesia which is an assembly, a gathering of people. It is not only a place where people have voice, as we think of when we describe a political gathering, it is also a place where a metaphysical notion becomes visible, that is the idea of a group that exists such that its people can meet. While the group may exist as an agglomeration of the bodies of its people as they go about their daily affairs, in their residence form, and in the way they feed and clothe themselves, still, when they come together as a group in time and space, a congregation, the image of their physical bodies becomes a metaphysic for understanding the assembly. Their being in the same place at the same time gives semiotic weight to the notion that they are somehow more than simply a bunch of people, but have a common and singular presence just like their bodies. 

Sometimes this metaphysic takes on new labels and justifications and sometimes it merely exists without more commentary or elaboration. 

This is the root notion of Church, though there is another important point to bring in here. Ecclesia refers to the assembly, at least as ecclesia in its modern forms église, iglesia, etc. is used in Romance languages as the match of the English “church”. Nevertheless, the Germanic “church” (kirche, etc) seems to draw on another Greek word kyriake referring to a place of devotion. Thus in the notion of church, from its origins, we join three things, assembly, place, and devotion. 

This suggests that the community is not enough in itself, or in its corporate manifestations, but must have an additional metaphysic in that it gathers in places of devotion, or worship. It draws on the rites and focus to the holy figure or God and comes to envision itself in relationship to the liturgy that both enlivens the divine and creates the assembly of the devout through proclamations and other ritual action.  

In the idea of the church the political, i.e. the gathering of the assembly to give voice to concerns, the cultic focus, and the place in which this happens conjoins in ways that enable much more social action, beyond the cult place, to have root and order in reference to the fairly complex metaphysic of the church. The place becomes an agglomerating symbol, not simply a physical space of cult and assembly. 

Weber

The sociology of religion by the master Max Weber picks this up, though Weber separates the term “church” for something more than what he calls “cult” and in this is an important aspect of social evolution. The latter word, “cult” emphasizes the social organization of devotion around a central holy figure, including the development of liturgy and religious specialists. The former word “church,” in his usage, refers to an ideal type that occupies the same territory as the state. In other words, the political and the devotional are partially separated, although also entangled and co-mingled. The main separation for Weber is in the nature of power, though this is arguable. For Weber, the church is limited to hierocratic power, control over salvation, while the state has a monopoly on violence. 

This is important. Weber’s ideal type of the church as category is territorially the same as the state but offers a different kind of power. In reality, states can and do offer salvation and use that as a basis of power while churches, as large organizations occupying the space of the state, are also drawn into coercive violence as means of control and domination. 

In other words, the cultic focus, of the Church, develops into something deeply entangled with the political order, even though Weber attempts a logical separation, at the same time the state and church are a kind of multi-headed cerberus, one territory with two (or more heads) guarding the gates to the metaphysical and physical bases of human existence no matter its valence or location. 

Armand Mauss

In the seminal study of Mormonism, The Angel and the Beehive; the Mormon Struggle with Assimilation, the sociologist Armand Mauss, blinded by the strange political system of religious pluralism unique to the US, loses the state from Weber’s definition—though that is key—and instead emphasizes that the church maintains little separation from society while the “sect”, a concept coming from Weber’s disciple, Troetsch, and developed in the American sociology of religion, is a religious body in tension with society. It is worth  noting that the concept of society, much used in sociology and anthropology, itself referring to a group of people, such as a guild, with the French Revolution became repurposed to describe the polity that no longer derived its existence from the Church or from a cultic focus on a singular holy figure or pantheon of such, but instead from “the people” who reciprocally derive self from it. From this political, expanded usage the term passed into sociology.  In its roots, nonetheless, it bears a curious similarity to the historical concept of “church”, although the cult figure is “the people”. 

Mauss argued that to the degree that Mormonism becomes more like the society of which it is a part (notice how society replaces state) it weakens and loses internal coherence while to the degree it heightens tension with society, as a sect, in gains greater internal coherence. These are dynamics of a part whole, but Mauss’ sociology has lost us the chance to talk of the whole afforded in Weber’s sociology where the Church and the state share territory but have different means of power, even if such is debatable. 

Mormonism as Church 

The Latter-day Saints are part of a larger society, the United States, in which they are a small minority and do suffer the threat of assimilation.  However, that assimilation has not been solely a process of individual behavior, as is Mauss’ focus, rather it has also been a coerced process from the national state. Even today this coercion is an issue as we can see in Dallin Oaks cries for religious liberty, a freedom that is not about individual conscience, but about the right of a religious body, the LDS Church, to publicly hold and espouse stances contrary to the national legal and social order. 

In this we see a conflict  around the definition of religion and its place in the state, as well as between two ideas of church: religion defined as a matter of individual conscience which includes rights of assembly, and the far more problematic notion legally of a religious body with rights of social action and control over its members. We should note that envisioning religion as an individual phenomenon already depends on tensions inherent in Weber’s thought, and as developed from the French and American formations as Republic, i.e. wresting much public liturgical and holy space from the Church while marginalizing and reducing the power of the church, even if for Durkheim every society requires a church as a means of representing itself to itself. 

However, Mormonism has important aspects of a church in the Weberian sense. The US is a federal system, it is composed of states that carry out many of the functions of the classical “state”. In Utah, the state also has a church that occupies most of the same territory and which carries out para-state function. The two domains, the state of Utah and the church within it are, not surprised co-mingled. While the state is limited to those physical boundaries, the LDS Church is not, and indeed exists, both in membership and organization, in places where its members are a minority and it is one religious body among many.

In Utah Mormonism is a church in the Weberian sense while elsewhere it is potentially a church or sect in Mauss’ sense depending on its relationship to society where, in the US, religion is plural and is to an important degree separated from the state. All the while it is a social organization similar or different from others that occupy varied organizational space within the states.

Organization

As Weber would point out, these various instances of the church not only vary by their relationship to the state (society), they also have organization, that is to say a pattern of roles a differentiated hierarchy of power, reduced or very elaborate.

This notion is very important in Weber’s religious sociology as he observed the development of specialization, hierarchy, and power dependent on varying control over religious values or goods. Unfortunately, this variation has been little developed after Weber for various reasons, even though there is substantial variation from one group to another or one moment to another. 

To be very simple, we could compare, following Adams, a simple structure where assembly of equals is key and hierarchy and routinization of such are weak at best versus organizations where hierarchy and its routinization are strongly developed. In the first, the symbolic importance of the assembly for embodying the group and giving it presence before the cult focus (in distinction with the surrounding social matrix) are primary, while in a more hierarchical organization, which would also tend to be translocal in interesting ways, although for now  let us focus on the group of people assembled, the hierarchy exercises control to one degree or another over more than simply leadership.  It also tends to control place, liturgy, local leaders as brokers, and the assembly itself.  

In passing we can note that these have all been difficulties of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as its very hierarchical and bureaucratic organization (commonly called simply the “Church” or the “institutional church” as it has expanded and grown. They still are points of tension even where Mormonism is a Weberian Church, i.e. relatively isomorphic with the state such as in Utah. We can also note that despite the power of the bureaucrats, their lawyers, and local dependents, in places where the LDS are most sect-like, i.e. have the least relationship with local social organization and society, the congregations tend to strongly display the importance of assembly in a place as a means of making themselves visible and existent to self and others. While the individual dimension of belief and adherence does have importance, it seems dwarfed by the need for assembly, for being to each other and to others as a body.  In many cases the role of the local leadership as representatives of Church hierarchy seems reduced in the face of its role as invoking, enabling, and organizing an assembly. They seem more a symbol of being together, while also symbolizing a larger body the congregation is part of, than of carrying out administrative and control functions of the hierarchy beyond the congregation. 

This play between assembly and hierarchy is significant and makes for an important part of Mormon dynamics, whether in Utah where the hierarchy is stronger and more visible, versus areas where it is occasional at best. 

Translocal, Supra-national

The nature of religious organization and hierarchy varies, as groups grow, hive off, and become translocal, in some cases even to the degree we can call them supra-national, that is beyond the nation state and its controls. Mormonism is a congeries of many local organizations that have similarities, in part because of the development of central control over real estate, religious materials, acceptable internal social activities, and effort to strengthen command/control over local brokers. The organization has attempted to emphasize the power of the whole, symbolized and realized in command activities of the bureaucracy and in control over local variables. Increasingly local people ventriloquate, or perform entextualizations of speech and ideas that stem from the hierarchy, at the same time they are also concerned with local issues and dynamics. The first gains more centrality of place in formal spaces and worship, while the second is pushed more and more to unofficial or marginal spaces. Nonetheless, the combination and its organization is an important and often under noticed aspect of Mormon life. 

Part of what enables this strength, semiotically and organizationally, of the center is its existence above many localities, including countries, and its ability to coordinate and unify many different organizational forms through its power and administration.  The Latter-day Saints are much more translocal than the vast majority of religious bodies and count as one of the few that I would identify as potentially supranational.  

In this, it is not the presence of the organization sharing co-territoriality with a state that is key to its existence, but rather the development of an order and organization above any given locality. We have seen in Utah and greater Deseret that this is not without tensions. Deseret is key even today for reproducing Mormon leadership and ways, i.e. highly active members more attuned to the translocal Church than to needs and realities of the local congregation(s), as well as the bureaucracy. Yet its cultural control has been challenged in the face of a so called gospel-culture. In other words we are living at the moment the tensions between dependency on a Weberian church, and the reality of a highly hierarchical translocal organization. The latter is still dependent on the former though it seems to be separating itself and other areas of the Church sometimes question Utah hegemony, although not necessarily the Church. 

In this we find an axis of hierarchy, although there can be, and often are, many more relationships connecting people across localities and hierarchical levels. Within the hierarchy, these develop from common work or ecclesiastical experience that builds ties that can survive transfers and changes. Some also stem from common experience as members in localities that then are left as individuals move or rise in hierarchical level. Others stem from relationships to missionaries or temporary hierarchs in localities while even more come from family and kinship. Other ties arise as a result of common missionary experience. And, we also get ties from common interests, such as intellectuals, feminists, gay members, politics, theological interest or disinterest, business, and a whole host of ties that develop in the blogosphere or simply on line. 

Together, these create a translocal and varied set of ties that cross cut hierarchical divisions and the simple experience of locality. They intersect with the hierarchy and also operate parallel or sometimes even perpendicularly to it. In any case, they can be classified according to density of ties, degree of translocality, and degrees of distance from key organizational hierarchs. These relationships are important spaces in which Mormonism is lived and experienced, at the same time they complement, or create tensions with simple social and religious life in congregations. These all provide different social spaces, localities, cult focus, and moments for assembly whether virtual or physical. As a result, they complicate and diversify the experience of the LDS Church as something that enables people to be and see themselves as more than individuals, i.e. part of larger body and being. 

Conclusion 

I shall leave the analysis here for now. We began with the observation that the notion of the “church” is extraordinarily complex, which it is whether we look at the historical usage of the term, its definition as a sociological or social / legal category, or its nature within the large organization that is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  The LDS Church is a congeries of different kinds of church under the guise of a singular symbol and an organization of church. An understanding and classification of that diversity enables us to grasp more thoroughly the complex dynamics of Mormon life in a sociological or anthropological fashion and how the different instances relate to one another.  It is key to grasping Mormonism. 

____________________________________

This paper was written and presented at a conference on the Social Science of Mormonism held at Utah Valley University in March 2017.