Individuation: agency between retrenchment and accommodation accommodation

Like any individual person, also believers, even the most steadfast, pass through life stages. Moreover, within a religion, personalities differ and shape types of believers. This subchapter examines both factors, life trajectories (4.6.1) and types of Mormons (4.6.2).

Overlaying both factors is the question which basic directions individuals take:

retrenchment in strictness, faithfulness, and compliance “in all things,” or accommodation to circumstances, shifting beliefs, and more lenient attitudes. The

1 Marion D. Hanks, ‘Without Prejudice, without Bigotry’, BYU Devotional, 30 March 1965.

https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/marion-d-hanks/without-prejudice-without-bigotry/ Accessed July 17, 2019.

2 Hartman Rector Jr., ‘Our Witness to the World’, Ensign (July 1972), 64.

3 Chieko N. Okazaki, Disciples (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Company, 1998), pp. 147–149.

151 choices can result in tensions between agency and structure, which is characteristic for organizations where the acceptance of membership requires the acceptance of constraints.

4.6.1. Life trajectories

This section draws the attention to the diachronic aspect in Mormon women’s lives. The many personal narratives that cover life stories attest to various phases and passages in which agency plays a decisive role. Individuation makes the principles of obedience and faith much more tempered than a uniform theoretical presentation. Nearly all believers transition in their life course over uneven and sometimes jarring religious trajectories (Ingersoll-Dayton, Krause, and Morgan 2002). Mormon historian Claudia Bushman, professor of American Studies at Columbia University, mentioned that agency is one of the three great Mormon feminist principles, next to revelation and the belief in a Heavenly Mother (2016, 263). However, her essay on agency in the lives of contemporary Mormon women painted a dynamic picture of the application of agency. She compared her childhood comprehension of agency with her later insights.

When I was young, I thought that agency was a managed, not a free, choice. While the principle of choosing was clear, I thought that I could only choose between good and bad. My choice was to follow along, do what I was taught was right, and to obey orders as they were given, or to make a stupid, rash, thoughtless choice and be zapped for eternity.

Later in life she realized how many choices Mormon women make all the time in living their religion. Mormonism indeed has “a daunting long list of beliefs and practices that assume more or less importance as times change.” Over the years, and also according to personal preferences, church leaders vary the emphases on items such as prayer, fasting, scripture study, food storage, temple attendance, service, family home evening, genealogy, Sabbath observance, and more. Each time the individual member decides to what extent a certain emphasis needs to be conformed to. Bushman took as an example the temple worthiness questionnaire, which each member who desires to go to the temple is submitted to every two years in order to obtain a “temple recommend”. The necessary yes-answers to the yes-no questions on faith and compliance actually hide the complex choices each person has made. For example, the question on observance of the Word of Wisdom (abstaining from alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and tea), answered by “yes,” will hide that a person has made personal choices about decaffeinated coffee or green tea, or, as Bushman wittily mentioned, the observance as “the same way that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young did.” Those familiar with Mormon history know that these early church presidents drank wine. Bushman concluded:

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Using our agency we choose the type of Mormon we wish to be: We can choose to be oppressed or liberated by the demands that are offered to us. We are free to determine our relative virtue or vice. We can choose to try to do everything, or to pick and choose from among all the injunctions we receive. As a practical matter, we already choose our level of obedience to the commandments and teachings. We can't obey them all with equal intensity. We all have our favorites.

Bushman’s remarks bring us directly to the topic of types of Mormons.

4.6.2. Types of Mormons

Bushman’s remarks open up the wide discussion on types of Mormons and the various ways they use their agency in “doing religion.” A classical dual repartition is between

“Iron-rod Mormons” and “Liahona Mormons” (Poll 2001). Iron-rod Mormons form what one would call elsewhere the (very) conservative group. The term refers to an image from the Book of Mormon: the iron rod is a handrail that leads along a narrow path to the tree of life and thus offers security and guidance.¹ Even in “the mist of darkness,” as the Book of Mormon recounts, by clinging to the railing one can reach the ultimate heavenly goal along the path. Applied to current church members, the image suggests a strict religious attitude by never deviating from the path. The maintenance of the commandments is therefore a central concern or self-evident second nature for these members. “The mist of darkness” is the threatening outside world with its temptations. “Iron-rods” usually see Mormon experience as an all-or-nothing choice. They use their agency to retrench.

“Liahona Mormons” are, in general, also faithful church members. But their guide is not a fixed railing along a path. The “Liahona”—also an image from the Book of Mormon—

is a kind of compass, “a round ball of ingenious making,” with unstable pointers and in which changing messages appear according to the situation.² Given by God to travel through a desert and across an ocean, the pointers in the compass work “according to the faith and diligence and heed which we did give unto them.” Faith implies uncertainty. A desert and an ocean also offer a completely different perspective than a narrow path in the mist, where one only has to hold the railing. Liahona Mormons see this vastness and acknowledge the many unanswered questions. They use their agency to assess their testimony and their involvement. They can become a Mormon “closet doubter” (Burton 1982). They may signal a lack of readiness to invest too much time and energy in church callings. They may lean to accommodation with outside norms, such as less strict observance of the Sabbath or the Word of Wisdom which prohibits tobacco, alcohol, coffee, and tea.

1 1 Nephi 8.

2 1 Nephi 16:10–12.

153 A type can overlap with a phase in one’s life trajectory. A Liahona Mormon will not change quickly in an Iron-rod Mormon, but conversely the phenomenon is frequent.

Growing life experiences, disappointments with leaders and other members, and additional knowledge of church history and doctrines can moderate the certainties someone had as an Iron-rod. Such members may take some mental distance though they may remain quite active members. The evolution from Iron-rod to Liahona is also typical of converts who start in the zeal of their conversion as an Iron-rod and lose the initial fervor over the years. In the field of gender, the difference between Liahona and Iron-rod Mormons may become acute in marriage. Quite frequent are the cases where couples have familial tensions and conflicts, as one partner leans to retrenchment and the other to moderation and accommodation (Burton 2017; Call and Heaton 1997; Marks 2005;

Vaaler, Ellison and Powers 2009).

Next levels are reached when a Mormon slips into less activity, inactivity, or explicit disaffiliation, either by choice of through excommunication. In such developments agency is often tested to the limits. A rather extensive literature studies this dynamics as it affects individual Mormons (Albrecht and Bahr 1983; Bahr and Albrecht 1989; Boyd 2013; Cheong and Fisk 2013; Hinderaker and O'Connor 2015; Scharp and Beck 2017; Singh 2014).

Finally, the relation between more or less compliant members fosters judgmentalism.

Anyone who has experienced life in the congregation of a conservative religion knows how much judgmentalism can govern relations. Judgmentalism refers to the social control members exert between each other and the moral judgments they make of others, usually based on limited observation (Beck and Miller 2000).¹

Relevance for my research

I meet my respondents at a certain moment in their Mormon life. My questions focus not only on their present feelings and insights, but, where appropriate, also on changes that have affected their experience within Mormonism.

- From the perspective of retrenchment some Mormon women in Flanders would fit the profile of fundamentalist adherence. It is therefore interesting, whenever possible, to probe their views on personal agency within the framework of “blind obedience,” but in particular the developments of such views over time.

- From the perspective of moderation, accommodation, and up to disaffiliation, these are developments I am familiar with, as I have seen and discussed them at length with many Mormon young adults in Utah. The aspect of agency, which becomes

1 In the Mormon-related media the topic receives much attention. See Jana Riess, “Undoing the Culture of Mormon judgmentalism—Or, I am not a ‘tare’.” Religion News Service (November 13, 2018).

https://religionnews.com/2018/11/13/undoing-the-culture-of-mormon-judgmentalism-or-i-am-not-a-tare/. Accessed November 29, 2018.

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paramount in difficult decisions over compliance or not, is therefore revealing to probe among members in Flanders. My potential respondents include less active, disaffiliated, and excommunicated members, or at least church-active respondents well familiar with such cases. How and why have they experienced these changes in the context of agency?