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.  

Reaction and Prophets in Mormonism: An Anthropological Meditation

Why has the LDS Church hewed such a socially conservative line in the half century or so  of my life and what does it meant? These questions have been bothering me for a long time and here I want to explore them.  

The questions are difficult because they seem to pose a theological question and because they raise an issue that, though evident in my experience, will be denied by others as soon as the going gets rough. Leaders of the Church, and other Latter-day Saints, in my experience, often change the ground of argument when it suits them.