Do Latter-day Saints have an Assimilation Problem?
What we've gained and lost by fitting in
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Growing up as a Latter-day Saint, I always felt an affinity with Judaism. I still do. It may stem from similarities between the two religions, but mostly I think it’s borne of literature.
Latter-day Saints can’t claim much literary history, especially in fiction (unless you thought Tennis Shoes Among the Nephites was a thrilling read). Growing up, I turned instead to Chaim Potok. Novels like My Name is Asher Lev and The Chosen helped me navigate religious tradition, expectations, and faith. Both novels deal with young men drawn to art and literature which threaten to pull them away from their faith and family duties. I suppose I felt a little that way, or maybe even wanted to see that struggle in myself.
In adulthood, I’ve found Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel articulates religion better than any other author I’ve read.
In short, I’ve been able to understand my own faith-filled life better through Judaism.1
As both a nationality and a religion, Jews face a unique crisis broadly referred to as assimilation. Assimilation occurs through modernism, cultural/social integration, intermarriage, or simply someone leaving the faith. One can be Jewish by blood but lose their spiritual beliefs and practices over time. From one generation to the next, Judaism may become so faint in both practice and heritage that it’s irrelevant.
At first glance, Latter-day Saints don’t have this problem. As much as we talk about “Mormon” culture, especially around the American Mountain West, you’re either a practicing Latter-day Saint or you’re not. Heritage has little to do with it.
Yet being a Latter-day Saint includes a pressure that Jews don’t have—missionary work. Not serving a mission, per se, but living with the charge to bring others to Christ, to gather the lost sheep.
The assimilation framework is a useful one for Latter-day Saints to consider on the spiritual front. Are we at risk of assimilating? And what is the effect of assimilation on the ever-present responsibility to “be thou an example of the believers,” as Paul says?
Church Sponsored Assimilation
To ask today whether we’re at risk of assimilating is asking the question 200 years too late. In many ways, the story of the Latter-day Saints in the United States has been one of deliberate assimilation. This is documented so persuasively in McKay Coppins's 2020 Atlantic essay in which he argues:
“Mormons didn’t become avatars of a Norman Rockwellian ideal by accident. We taught ourselves to play the part over a centuries-long audition for full acceptance into American life.”
The purposeful assimilation Coppins describes saw Church members align with positive social trends in American society—nuclear families, hard work, patriotism—all good virtues that were naturally espoused because they suited us and made us better citizens in the eyes of the nation.
However, Coppins smartly asks, “What happens when a religious group discovers that it’s spent 200 years assimilating to an America that no longer exists?”
America may not exist in the same way that Coppins describes it, but that doesn’t mean assimilation has stopped. Until recently, assimilation has been the goal from the macro, Church-sponsored level. And, if you’re a Latter-day Saint like me, it’s been your modus operandi your whole life.
What do I mean by a macro, Church-sponsored assimilation? In part, that stories like this one below, as told by Elder James E. Faust, represent the Church’s position on being a Latter-day Saint in today’s society.
In the process of building BYU Jerusalem, an extension campus in the Holy Land, the Church agreed with local officials that BYU students and faculty would not proselytize while in Israel. Elder Faust states, “After the lease had been signed, one of [the Israeli government officials] insightfully remarked, ‘Oh, we know that you are not going to proselyte, but what are you going to do about the light that is in their eyes?’”
This story is equal parts fascinating and reassuring. By being a normal Church member, our disposition will bring others closer to truth, goodness, and even conversion. What’s not to like about this idea? It makes being a Latter-day Saint easy, or at least not any harder than it should be.
By macro, Church-sponsored assimilation, I’m also referring to the multi-million dollar “I’m a Mormon” ad campaign that started in 2010 and reached its pinnacle in 2015 with the global release of Meet the Mormons, a feature-length film highlighting the life of six Latter-day Saints.
2010 was a significant year, not just because of the campaign launch, but because for the first time, the Church of Jesus Christ had more members living outside the United States than within.
The “I’m a Mormon” campaign worked in any country. It was the perfect rallying cry to unite a global organization. We were all of different nationalities, backgrounds, and life situations, but at the end of the day, we were still Latter-day Saints.
A typical “I’m a Mormon” video featured someone exploring their hobbies and culture and then ending the video by stating, “…and I’m a Mormon.” There were even videos filmed with very famous Latter-day Saints, like Brandon Flowers, lead singer and frontman for The Killers.
The macro message was never officially to fit in, but at the micro-level, fitting in was the playbook for how to be a Latter-day Saint. Growing up as a young person in the 2010s, this culture gave me permission to be myself, with all my own interests, while also being a Church member.
“I’m a Mormon” vidoes remind me of the start of Pixars The Incredibles. The voice over, narrating the demise of the Supers in society, says, “Where are they now? They are living among us. Average citizens, average heroes. Quietly and anonymously continuing to make the world a better place.”
The Responsibility of a Latter-day Saint
It’s hard to say whether this “fitting in”/“light in our eyes” approach was a very effective missionary strategy. It was certainly a decent way to live, but as I alluded to earlier, one is not simply a Latter-day Saint. It’s not a nationality. To claim to be a Latter-day Saint is to at some level acknowledge that your purpose on earth is to help others find the joy of the gospel.
I wouldn’t claim that assimilating and fitting in has been a winning missionary strategy in my life.
As a child, surrounded by other Latter-day Saints in Utah, I assumed that anyone who wasn’t going to church was deeply unhappy or confused about life, and that merely by meeting a Latter-day Saint, they’d look beyond their mortal preoccupations to higher, holier things.
Imagine my surprise that most of the people I meet are very well-adjusted, happy, fulfilled, and not searching for anything more out of life. I suppose my non-Latter-day Saint friends, coworkers, and acquaintances think I’m a nice guy, but I won’t kid myself that they’re looking at me, saying, “I wonder what Miles has that I don’t?”
If the goal was that by assimilating, by fitting in, we’d bring more people to the Church, maybe we got it wrong.
Furthermore, what if as a consequence, this assimilation focus has actually done the opposite, not by keeping converts from the Church2, but by making it easier for Latter-day Saints to leave?
Perhaps we’ve gotten too comfortable in the world, blurred the lines, and made concessions between how we should and shouldn’t engage with all the varieties of life. In short, I wonder if it’s too easy to wake up one day and say, “I’m done with the whole religion thing.” By cozying up with the world, is it too natural to slip out of our faith as if it were any other hobby or identity that can be shed like any other 21st-century fad?
Is this just a circumstance of contemporary religiosity? It’s easier now to give up on religion because there are so many natural alternatives, be they other “gods” to serve (work, wealth, and prestige), distractions to follow (entertainment and recreation), or other identities to put on (politics, gender, and culture).
I am not suggesting that these alternatives like wealth and recreation and politics cause people to leave the Church (though on occasion, they are). Rather, when life gets rocky and our faith wavers, there’s plenty in the world to fall back on that leaving the Church feels like no big deal.3
A Change in Course
There have been several statements made by Church leaders that seem to be pushing members to act in a different way. One occurred in 2018 when President Nelson, in one of his first acts as Prophet, said that we should no longer refer to ourselves as Mormons.
I found this instruction very difficult. In no way did I think it was wrong4, but giving up the moniker of Mormon has been hard. I’ll readily admit there was a casualness about referring to myself as a Mormon that made me feel less peculiar, not more peculiar. At least people knew what a Mormon was. Nobody knows what a Latter-day Saint is.
More recently, at the latest General Conference in April 2023, I heard another statement that seems to reverse course on the old method. Elder Quinten L. Cook said, “An essential part of this missionary effort is for individual members to become beacon-light examples wherever we live. We cannot be in camouflage” (emphasis added).
Let’s say these and other statements like them represent a new direction for Church culture and what it means to be a Latter-day Saint.
How should we stand out? I don’t know. I don’t have a grasp on what it means to drop my “camouflage”.
Additionally, as my brother Cole wisely acknowledged as I discussed this idea with him, the aspects of our faith that did make us stand out are no longer as stressed, at least officially. Consider the new For the Strength of Youth pamphlet. For the uninformed, when I was in high school, in the course of a few dozen pages, this booklet laid down very specific guidelines around dating, dress and appearance, music, language, and sexuality that dictated how you were supposed to live as a young Latter-day Saint. The new pamphlet is a self-guided program that pretty much says “Pray and figure it out”.
So, in the true spirit of religious paradox, the current direction seems to be, “Stand out, but we’re not going to tell you how.” To be fair, the surface-level behaviors of Latter-day Saints, eg. the avoidance of alcohol and coffee, the Sunday observance, the clean language and conservative values were probably never the things to actually attract people to our Church. Yet it was easy to fall back on that stuff. Conversion runs much deeper, and knowing how to effectively make that a part of day-to-day life is difficult and uncomfortable.
I believe we’ll figure it out and hope that more direction comes, but at least in the meantime, I wonder, like Coppins, what happens when a religious group is told it’s no longer enough to simply be a Latter-day Saint?
Since moving to the East Coast and actually interacting with real Jews, most of them are shocked to hear this. I don’t think they feel as close an affinity with Mormons.
As I wrote in 2021, conversions are slowing down.
I’m not trying to be critical of those who leave the Church. This is one of my own existential fears, that it’s a little too easy to imagine what life would be like without my faith, at least on a temporal level. In other words, I have my own list of ways I’ve assimilated into the world.
Though it was odd timing considering the money they’d spent on the advertising campaign)
A thought-provoking read. I haven't followed a lot of your writing and am not on Facebook often, but I noticed your post and this is a topic I've thought about frequently. A scriptural reference I heard often while growing up was to “be in the world but not of the world”. I’ve always considered that to be a misunderstood phrase — that we are to be separate, to exist here without participating in the world. On the contrary, I’ve always interpreted this to mean that if we believe ourselves to hold something so precious as the truth of the restored gospel that we have a commission to share that BY being active participants in the world WHILE remaining true to our covenants. In general, I think this sentiment has been reflected in the messages promoted by Church leadership to seek the good and be unified with those surrounding us. Unification and assimilation are two different outcomes.
I agree that the “blurring of the lines” you discuss has led to confusion and many leaving. I continue to wrestle with what it means myself. I think the “blurring of the lines” can be misinterpreted as a softening of the principles and that some use it as justification to lessen their commitment to certain standards. In reality, I think it introduces the expectation to live a higher law - one according to our individual ability to communicate with the Spirit rather than rely on Church leaders to do so for us.
Thanks for this reflection, Miles. Good to read your stuff here!
From my perspective, Russell M. Nelson has continued or even doubled down on the steady, decades-long approach toward assimilation. Taking the angel Moroni off of temples, trimming church to two hours, talking about Jesus more than Joseph Smith, discontinuing many of the Mormon pageants, reducing the strangeness of the endowment, removing the original artwork in the SLC temple, allowing missionaries to wear blue dress shirts without ties, and so on — it all feels like assimilation to me. Even the pivot from "Mormon" to "members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" feels like an effort to assimilate (i.e., "look, we're Christian — it says so in our name!").
As I see it, the Church is sort of in a bind. Members feel increasingly uncomfortable with our past, particularly as it relates to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and want the focus to be on Jesus. But if the focus is solely on Jesus, what makes the Church distinct? Why join? It's a tough situation for the organization.