Mormons, Ex- and Still-

Ex-Mormons, the very word suggests an absence.  

That ostensible absence, the missing center in a world of apparently isolated, secular individuals bereft of religion’s anchor and community was the subject of a paper read by researcher E. Marshall Brooks at yesterday’s meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Washington DC.  

An hour or so before a die-in claimed all who were in the central lobby of the Woodley Park Marriott, where the conference is taking place, Marshall convoked his panel concerning secularity and personal meaning.  He, a non-Mormon Ph.D. student at Rutgers University, had come to Utah to carry out ethnographic research for his dissertation.  

While living in Utah County Marshall found networks of people like a secretive group of atheists including a bright and thoughtful young man who was a student at Brigham Young University and no-longer felt a draw to the religious structure of Mormonism.  

Marshall used this person to illustrate problems in the thought of Max Weber and of Charles Taylor concerning the secular individuals, caught in ostensibly rational, disenchanted worlds.  The person Marshall described, however, like most in his sample, found increased transcendent meaning when he let go of his religious superstructure. Physics, the fact that we all are composed of atoms that will continue long after we are gone, intrigued him and led him to develop great reverence and find strong meaning in the mountains of the Wasatch and the Red Rocks of Southern Utah.  

He talked to Marshall about how when he let go of his Mormonism he found added value in other people. He could appreciate them more when he no longer felt he had to enclose them in religious boxes.  

Marshall put an analytic finger on one of the great questions of religious studies today, the increase in religious disaffiliation—the nones of surveys, and the claims by increased numbers of people that they are spiritual and not religious, at the same time he challenged theorists of secularity. 

This un-named subject of Marshall’s research exemplified how people find transcendence (the old stuff of religion) in the world around them, including in science and rationality.  They find mystery and awe even in a God-less world.   

For me this work raises other questions especially at this time when so many people seem troubled by the facts of Mormonism’s past and the politics of its present as to whether that ex- of ex-Mormon means you can no longer define them as part of the experience of the Mormons as a people. 

By saying a people and not a Church, I am including them as part of it, that is as part of the important experience of life within Mormon communities and families, within social groups defined by the historical developments of the restoration and the historical forge of Mormonism.  

The ex-is not the beginning of a lack but an attempt to set personal boundaries within a community formed by Mormonism and only partially the Church. It is still part of the social life and personal experience of belonging to those communities and, as such, is worthy of study and discussion.  

The joining of ex- and Mormon forms a couplet whose relationships run both ways and both parts deserve comment in the context of the other.  

As a counterpart to Marshall’s talk, I had a long conversation with another BYU graduate who said she no longer participates in Mormonism.  We were discussing her intellectual journey as an anthropologist but she also hastened to say that even though she does not go to Church and does not see herself ever doing so, she is still considers herself very Mormon.  

The identity, even without the Church, has its own resonance and comes to ground in these two people, one defined as ex- and the other as still-, yet both part of the ongoing weight and power of this people who form the population majority of an important American region and have a diaspora like the arms of a giant squid reaching throughout the country and into the world.  

Mormonism is a rich and varied experience and subject for study.  Only part of it involves the Church.