TO ANY (BODY) WHO WILL LISTEN:
THE EVOLVING ROLE OF MEDIA TECHNOLOGY IN THE CHURCH OF JESUS
CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS’ MISSIONARY COMMUNICATION
STRATEGY
by
Gavin Feller
A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of
The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Arts
Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, Florida
August 2013
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
While all graduate faculty in the Communication Studies program contributed to
this thesis indirectly, I would like to acknowledge a few specific individuals whose
support and guidance made a particular impact. I thank Bill Trapani for his willingness to
step in and help out with this project last minute when he could have just as easily
declined. I thank Melanie Loewing for her priceless counsel in the ongoing
conceptualization of this project, for her insightful feedback and her sharp editorial eye.
As my thesis advisor, Fred Fejes has been an incredibly supportive guide throughout this
project, giving me the confidence and freedom I needed from inception to completion. I
thank my brother Jared Feller and friend Brad Kime for the many long Mormon studies
conversations and resources shared. I thank my mother and father-in-law for hosting and
“just checking” on this disheveled and unkempt hermit during the final weeks of the
project. Above all, I thank my wife Barbara and son Milo. Barbara’s unwavering faith
and confidence in me and her love and support were never questioned or unappreciated.
Milo’s 10-month-old smile and laugh while playing catch on the floor during writing
breaks kept me sane down the home stretch iii
ABSTRACT
Author:
Gavin Feller
Title:
To Any (Body) Who Will Listen: The Evolving Role of Media
Technology in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’
Missionary Communication Strategy
Institution:
Florida Atlantic University
Thesis Advisor:
Dr. Fred Fejes
Degree:
Master of Arts
Year:
2013
This thesis explores how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS)
has used media technology as part of its missionary communication strategy. Particular
attention is paid to the Internet as a space for religious practice and how the LDS Church
has sought to extend its media practices and missionary efforts online. By utilizing new
media technology to find individuals interested in hearing its message, the LDS Church
faces new challenges to its traditional face-to-face missionary program, its centralized
hierarchy of control and its ongoing struggle for identity within American Christian
culture. Throughout its history, the LDS Church’s missionary communication strategy
has used several different methods for finding people to teach but has consistently
focused on ensuring that such methods ultimately lead to face-to-face lessons with
missionaries, viewed as the most transformative communication exchange for both the
missionary and the potential convert.
iv
TO ANY (BODY) WHO WILL LISTEN:
THE EVOLVING ROLE OF MEDIA TECHNOLOGY IN THE CHURCH OF JESUS
CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS’ MISSIONARY COMMUNICATION
STRATEGY
Chapter 1: The Missionary Age Requirement Policy Change .............................................1
Thesis Chapter Outline ..................................................................................................4
Chapter 2: Theology and Media ..............................................................................5
Chapter 3: Uses and Gratifications and Religious Practices on the Internet ...........7
Chapter 4: Religious Identity Construction and Conversion Narratives ...............10
Chapter 5: Sociological Approaches to LDS Missionary Service .........................11
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................13
Notes ............................................................................................................................15
Chapter 2: Theology and Mass Media ...............................................................................23
Introduction ..................................................................................................................23
Christianity and Catholicism........................................................................................24
The Body and Physical Presence in Catholicism ...................................................25
Catholic Mass Media .............................................................................................27
Protestantism ................................................................................................................30
The Body and Physical Presence in Protestantism ................................................32
Protestant Mass Media ..........................................................................................33
v
Mormonism ..................................................................................................................35
The Body and Physical Presence in Mormonism .................................................37
Mormon Mass Media ...................................................................................................40
Print .......................................................................................................................40
Telegraph ..............................................................................................................42
Film .......................................................................................................................42
Television..............................................................................................................45
Centralization ........................................................................................................46
Missionaries and/as Media...........................................................................................47
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................48
Notes ............................................................................................................................50
Chapter 3: Uses and Gratifications and Religious Practices on the Internet .....................64
Introduction ..................................................................................................................64
Uses and Gratifications ................................................................................................65
Religion and the Internet ..............................................................................................70
Religious Internet Uses and Gratifications ..................................................................72
Theoretical Approaches ...............................................................................................75
LDS Internet.................................................................................................................78
SEO .....................................................................................................................81
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................84
Notes ............................................................................................................................86
Chapter 4: Religious Identity Construction and Conversion Narratives ...........................99
Introduction ..................................................................................................................99
vi
Religious Identity Construction .................................................................................100
Liza Morong’s Story ..................................................................................................102
LDS Online Proselytizing Experimentation ..............................................................112
The Body and a Hybrid Proselytizing Future ............................................................116
Conclusion .................................................................................................................117
Notes ..........................................................................................................................120
Chapter 5: Sociological Approaches LDS Missionary Service .......................................131
Introduction ................................................................................................................131
LDS Hierarchy ...........................................................................................................133
The Bloggernacle .......................................................................................................135
Assimilation and Retrenchment .................................................................................139
I’m a Mormon Campaign...........................................................................................140
A Rite of Passage and Instrument of Socialization ....................................................145
Embodied Dialogue ...................................................................................................153
Conclusion .................................................................................................................156
Future Research .........................................................................................................159
Notes ..........................................................................................................................163
Bibliography ....................................................................................................................177
vii
CHAPTER 1
THE MISSIONARY AGE REQUIREMENT POLICY CHANGE
Introduction
Two weekends a year throughout the world, members (Mormons) of The Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) gather around the family computer, television
and radio, in local meeting houses, and for the lucky minority to a granite shelled
conference center in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City, Utah. Those far away from
Salt Lake City will watch and listen throughout the weekend’s broadcasts, some with
reverence equal to conservative Christian Sabbath worship and others with casual
attention divided between Saturday chores and religious devotion. Those gathered in their
local meetinghouse will sit in a dark room gazing toward a large TV or white screen on
which a succession of men and women in their finest dress appear.
Those seated in the Utah conference center are likewise suited in Sunday best;
nestled among some 21,000 others from various corners of the globe, united in their
desire to be instructed from on high. Some sit patiently, quietly, often praying or simply
starring at the majestic walnut pulpit at the front of the room. Parents wrestle to settle
children, passing Cheerio-filled Ziploc baggies, coloring books and iPads down the
family line. Suddenly all chatter ceases in an instant. Like a well-trained choir, audience
members rise quickly to their feet with a reverberating whoosh that fills the Center then
dissipates into utter, momentary silence. From the back of the balcony to the front row of
1
seats, all eyes are fixed on a trail of men and women entering the front of the conference
room. The man in front: a modern prophet of God.
Ordained the prophet and president of the LDS Church in 2008, Thomas S.
Monson waves to the enormous crowd, with his head reaching to from side to side,
painting the surrounding walls with a bright smile.1 He signals for all to sit as he takes his
seat among a row of 15 men, the apostleship, presiding LDS Church authority and
“special witnesses” of Jesus Christ to the world.2
From 1830, the year the LDS Church was established, to today, LDS General
Conference has brought together leaders and members, the former to instruct the latter on
God’s living word.3 Messages of gospel principles such as faith, repentance and
forgiveness are coupled with contemporary rhetorical defenses of family and Christian
values.4 In addition to spiritually uplifting talks, announcements are made of new
callings5, new temples and on rare occasion, Church-wide policy changes. In the October,
2012 General Conference, President Monson made such an announcement, as surprising
and curious as any. He announced a change in age policy for volunteer missionary
service.6 Typically, young American Latter-day Saint men are eligible to serve between
ages 19 to 26 and young women from ages 21 onward (no limit), while in 48 other
countries the Church has traditionally been more flexible with age restrictions.7 The new
change, however, lowered American missionary age eligibility (where the majority of
LDS missionaries come from) to 18 for men and 19 for women, allowing both sexes to
volunteer earlier, especially women.8
The response to the announced change has been monumental. In just two months,
missionary applications increased by 471 percent.9 The Church also reports that more
2
than 50 percent of missionary applications are now from women, previous to the recent
policy change, young women accounted for only 15 to 20 percent of the missionary
force.10 The number of missionaries serving throughout the world, a body larger at any
one time than all Protestant denominations’ missionary forces combined, has reached the
highest number in the Church’s history: 70,274.11 These missionaries are divided up
geographically into areas called missions, which numbered 340 until the change
demanded the addition of 58.12
The missionary age policy change is resulting in an incredible increase in
missionary service, but more importantly, it reflects the LDS Church’s broader
proselytizing communication strategy. The LDS Church has long encouraged its young
people to voluntarily serve as missionaries but why did it decide to increase the number
of face-to-face missionaries now when it is already actively engaged in online
proselytizing, search engine optimization (SEO) and a number of social media outlets?13
At a time when many modern Christian churches are migrating to digital proselytizing
platforms and others focusing entirely on digital worship, why the push for increased
embodied communication?14 The LDS Church has readily adopted mass communication
technology from print to social media and shows no signs of reversing course.15 What,
then does this new policy reveal about the way the LDS Church views communication
media and the role of the human body in proselytizing? Why is face-to-face missionary
communication so treasured within Mormonism and how will it continue to be integrated
with new media technology? These questions make up the primary research questions
this thesis seeks to address.
3
Thesis Chapter Outline
In order to explore these primary research questions, this thesis offers a study of
the role of media technology in the evolution of the LDS Church’s missionary
communication strategy. Situated at the intersection between the institutional Church and
the American public, LDS missionaries act as authorized representatives—channels
through which the evangelical goals of the organization are accomplished.16 As such, the
Church’s missionary program is a reflection of the organization’s relationship with media
technology, its theology, social structure and cultural identity.17 LDS missionary work is
part of the Church’s genetic makeup; it cannot be separated from organization’s historical
media use.18
Thus, studying the missionary communication strategy of the LDS Church
requires a unique research approach that cannot be accomplished through a single study
or with a single theoretical framework. Rather, the study of the evolution of the Church’s
missionary communication strategy demands an interdisciplinary approach bridging
scholarship from media and communication studies, sociology, religious studies and
Mormon studies. Through this interdisciplinary approach, this thesis works to connect
important historical changes in the LDS Church’s institutional media use to its evolving
missionary communication strategy. Particular attention is paid to the causes and
consequences of the Church’s recent online proselytizing experimentation and the role of
the body in LDS missionary communication.
Throughout this thesis I argue that the ultimate goal in LDS missionary
communication is embodied dialogue. Internet technologies and social media platforms
are providing the Church nuanced techniques for locating and introducing individuals
4
interested in learning more about Mormonism to the LDS Church. The LDS Church’s
missionary communication strategy has throughout its history used several different
methods for finding people to teach but has consistently focused on ensuring that such
methods ultimately lead to face-to-face lessons with missionaries as the most
transformative communication exchange for both the missionary and the potential
convert.
Chapter 2: Theology and Media
In chapter two of this thesis I aim to situate Mormon media practices within a
larger historical and theological Christian framework to illustrate the uniqueness of both
LDS embodiment theology and institutional media practices and how the two are
interconnected. Before we can understand how LDS media practices have influenced and
been influenced by the Church’s missionary communication strategy, some basic
theological differences in mainstream Christian thought are worth considering. By
comparing theological conceptions of the body and physical presence across Catholicism,
Protestantism and Mormonism, the uniqueness of Mormon embodiment theology and
materialism becomes apparent.
To better understand Mormon theology of the body it is necessary to review
Joseph Smith’s early teachings on the subject as well as recent Mormon studies
scholarship. Joseph Smith’s teachings celebrating the physical body mark a radical
departure from mainstream Christianity at that time.19 Contrary to the traditional
Christian oppression of the body, Smith taught that God has a body like man’s and that
man may one day become as God is through a glorified, perfected physical body.20 Smith
also rejected infant baptism and the notion of original sin, teaching instead that the
5
receipt of physical body is evidence of pre-mortal obedience to God.21 Mormon theology
teaches, “The body is not to be overcome in order to reach spiritual fulfillment, but
perfected.”22
Religious scholars Benjamin Park and Jordan Watkins trace the importance
Smith’s theology of the body within Mormonism and its connection to the concept of
Mormon materialism.23 Mormons believe, “There is no such thing as immaterial matter.
All spirit is matter, but it is more fine and pure, and can only be discerned by purer
eyes.”24 Thus, one not only honors his/her physical body in avoiding alcohol, coffee, tea
and harmful drugs, he/she also receives spiritual rewards.25
While a comparative study of media practices of world religions would be a
valuable contribution to the field of media and religion, such a task beyond the reach and
purposes of this thesis. Rather, a brief history of Catholic, Protestant and Mormon
institutional media practices bridges theology and media. Because of their unique
doctrinal importance within Mormonism, embodiment theology and materialism are
central to our understanding of the LDS Church’s relationship with media technology and
its missionary communication strategy. Rather than seeing technology as a way to free
the spirit from the prison of the body, Mormons are taught to resist virtual reality as a
substitute for embodied reality.26 The belief that the body is a necessary part of spiritual
development is a primary reason why the LDS Church strongly encourages its members
to serve as face-to-face missionaries and hence why the Church prizes embodied
missionary communication.27 But the opportunities and challenges of media technology
problematize the Church’s communication goals considerably.
6
In providing a basic outline of each Christian tradition’s theological approach to
materiality and the human body as well as its institutional media use, the need for the
study of the relationship between Mormon missionary communication and new media
technology becomes clear. The LDS Church’s unique tradition of face-to-face
proselytizing coupled with its theology of materialism makes its emerging engagement
with new media technology an important topic of study.
Chapter 3: Uses and Gratifications and Religious Practices on the Internet
Chapter three of this thesis focuses specifically on the Internet as a space for
religious practices. I use an audience centered media studies approach called uses and
gratifications (U&G) to shed light on the how individuals’ perceptions of the Internet are
changing as religion online becomes more acceptable.28 Far from viewing audiences as
inactive media users, the U&G perspective helps identity the individual motivations
behind Internet use.29 The U&G approach sees audiences’ decisions to use media as
conscious and rational.30 People use media to fulfill important psychosocial needs such as
escape, relaxation, and pleasure and as alternatives and compliments to areas of their
lives they are not satisfied with.31
In connection to U&G scholarship, researchers have also used expectancy value
theory to better under how individual perceptions influence media choices.32 People’s
decisions about which media to use to fulfill various personal needs are in large part
determined by their belief in the possibility of a medium to fulfill a need and the potential
outcome of their decision to use the medium.33 From this perspective, people’s
perceptions of the Internet as a space for religious purposes are important determinants of
how and if they use it.
7
Early U&G research saw the Internet as a functional alternative to face-to-face
communication: those who feel valued in their interpersonal environment utilize the
Internet primarily as an information tool while those who feel less valued in interpersonal
communication environments turn to the Internet as an alternative, interactive tool.34 This
first wave of U&G Internet research found information seeking as the most common
reason for Internet use, yet with the advent of social media and Web. 2.0 technologies,
more recent studies find passive and ritualistic uses of the Internet as increasingly
important motives.35
The Internet has increasingly become a place for religious practice.36 Important
research on religious uses of the Internet illustrates why and how Americans use the
medium for religious purposes.37 Use of the Internet for religious purposes is common
among the majority of American adults and rising in popularity.38 Clark, Hoover and
Rainie also found those that attend church services frequently use the Internet more than
the average American and are more likely to research their own religion as well as the
religious traditions of others online.39
As the popularity of the Internet as a religious space increases, scholars of media
and religion have sought various theoretical frames for studying the phenomenon. Heidi
Campbell’s recent book, Digital Religion, offers an excellent guide for understanding
how scholars have approached study of the Internet and religion.40 Campbell and others
have traced three waves of Internet and media research.41 In the first wave, scholars used
terms like cyberspace and cyber religion to describe the utopian and dystopian
possibilities of religion on the Internet.42 In the second wave, scholars began focusing
8
more on how individuals and religious institutions were actually utilizing Internet
technology.43
As part of this second wave, Christopher Helland’s theoretical frame
distinguishing religion online from online religion is a helpful tool for understanding how
religious institutions have viewed and used the Internet.44 Helland sees religion online as
the use of the Internet by hierarchical religions to extend their power and control to
online spaces.45 Online religion, on the other hand, is the “doing of religion online,”
through virtual rituals and worship as substitutes for real world religious practices.46
While useful in understanding established religions initial approach to the Internet,
Campbell argues that Helland’s distinction is becoming increasingly blurred as off- and
online religious practices continue to merge.47
This convergence of digital and physical religious practice has given rise to the
term digital religion. Campbell uses digital religion to describe “the technological and
cultural space that is evoked when we talk about how online and offline religious spheres
have become blended or integrated.”48 Hoover and Eschaibi describe it as a “third space,”
emerging from the confluence of digital culture and lived religious practice.49 Digital
religion takes into account not just the “digitalization of religion” but the “contribution[s]
the digital is making to the religious” as well.50 Thus, digital religion functions as both an
interpretive framework as well as a useful research term.
Research on the uses and gratifications of religious Internet use is valuable for
understanding how the LDS Church has approached the medium for evangelical purposes
and how effective its approach is. Scholars of Mormonism have found that the LDS
Church has approached the Internet primarily as an extension of its hierarchal control
9
rather than a space for virtual worship; according to Helland, religion online.51 Chen’s
research on the Church’s SEO efforts offers valuable insight into the success of LDS
SEO in overpowering anti-Mormon content with official Church websites.52 Chen argues
that various informal efforts by members of the Church to assist SEO specifically and to
share their beliefs online generally greatly contribute to the success of LDS SEO.53
Chapter 4: Religious Identity Construction and Conversion Narratives
Chapter four of this thesis explores the role of Internet technology in the
construction of Mormon religious identity. More than ever, the Internet and social media
operate as important spaces for “building, negotiating, presenting and communicating
religious identity constructions.”54 Rather than separating traditional religious worship
from online religious experiences, the intersection of on and off-line worlds represents an
important confluence in the process of religious identity construction.55 Lovheim argues
that the Internet “provides a discursive and social infrastructure—that is, sacred texts, a
shared set of ideas and forum for discussion, rituals and transmission—which sustains as
well as forms these religious identities.56
As part of the construction and communication of religious identity, scholars have
found that the conversion narrative plays a significant role in reaffirming the commitment
and devotion of the converted.57 Blogs offer particularly useful sources for research on
the role of online conversion narratives in the construction of religious identity.58 The
study of Mormon conversion narratives presented offline in the form of a traditional
Mormon testimony, has shed light on the cultural, social and spiritual implications of
such narratives within Mormon communities.59 However, scholars have yet to study the
implications of enacting religious identity through the sharing of Mormon conversion
10
narratives online and how the LDS Church’s evangelical media practices influence the
process of religious identity construction online.
To fill this void, I offer an analysis of Mormon convert Liza Morong’s
autobiographical conversion narrative.60 Morong’s conversion narrative works as
contemporary example of Mormon religious identity construction online. Morong’s
conversion narrative sheds new light on the implications of the LDS Church’s current
online proselytizing efforts. Finally, her narrative also functions as an archetype for
future LDS missionary communication across off- and online spaces.
Chapter 5: Sociological Approaches to LDS Missionary Service
The final chapter of this thesis uses a sociological lens to examine broader social
and structural elements of LDS missionary service and how the use of Internet
technology poses challenges to LDS tradition and culture tied to missionary
communication. These challenges including the following: maintaining hierarchical
control, balancing assimilation and retrenchment and missionary service as an instrument
of socialization.
Recent research has shown that blogging offers “the freedom to express personal
views on public religious issues, and the capacity to create global networks to share
information and resources,” and an alternative space for previously excluded and silenced
voices to be heard. 61 While most social media use encouraged by the LDS Church falls
within the reigns of its official websites and social media pages, unofficial Mormon
blogging within the Bloggernacle62, creates an online space removed from traditional
structures of control and power where orthodox, heterodox and anti-Mormon beliefs are
commonly exchanged.63 Avance argues that the Bloggernacle, rife with anti-Mormon
11
voices, facilitates Mormon deconversion and thus poses a challenge to the LDS Church’s
missionary efforts.64
The LDS Church’s challenge to maintain hierarchical control can also be viewed
as part of the organization’s historical struggle to balance its American identity through
periodic assimilation and retrenchment.65 Sociologist Armand Mauss has theorized this
pattern of assimilation and retrenchment arguing that the Church spent much of the first
half of the 20th century “Americanizing” itself only to reverse course through a
subsequent retrenchment lasting until only very recently.66 Mauss maintains that
retrenchment is primarily an internal process working to build exceptionalism and
exclusivity among members of the Church.67 Thus, the LDS Church’s “growth and
prosperity depend upon finding and maintaining an optimum level of tension on a
continuum between disrepute and respectability.”68 This larger pattern of assimilation and
retrenchment is a helpful framework for understanding the LDS Church’s contemporary
relationship with proselytizing and technology.
Mauss’s argument that the Church has recently begun shifting towards reassimilation is most evident in Church’s “I’m a Mormon” campaign.69 The campaign’s
portrayal of unconventional Mormon womanhood marks a possible softening of the
Church’s traditionally strict patriarchal control while presenting the Church significant
challenges in balancing tradition and culture in its desire to assimilate with American
Christianity.70
The LDS Church’s missionary communication strategy cannot be separated from
the larger social and cultural history of the Church. Chapter five also explores
sociological research arguing that the internal impact missionary service has on those that
12
serve and their future in the Church is intricately connected to the leadership structure
and vitality of the religion.71 Shepherd and Shepherd have written detailed accounts of
LDS missionary service as an instrument of socialization and as a rite of passage.72
Wilson argues those who serve successful missions are initiated into an exclusive social
group with lifelong rewards while those who fail to complete the rite of passage often
endure social stigmatization or disassociate themselves from Mormonism completely.73
The LDS Church has historically depended on its missionary program to socialize future
leaders of the Church.74 While serving, missionaries become grounded in LDS doctrine,
learn the hierarchical structure of the Church, and obtain valuable communication and
leadership skills to utilize as future lay leaders.
Conclusion
Taken together, the chapters of this thesis bring various research perspectives,
periods of history and media technologies together to demonstrate that the ultimate goal
in LDS missionary communication is embodied dialogue. Internet technologies and
social media platforms are providing unique opportunities for the development of
nuanced techniques to locate and introduce individuals interested in learning more about
Mormonism to the LDS Church. By utilizing such technologies the Church is faced with
new challenges to its centralized hierarchy of control and its ongoing struggle for identity
within American Christian culture. The LDS Church’s recent online proselytizing
initiatives also challenge the Church’s traditional use of missionary service as an
instrument of socialization. Throughout its history, the LDS Church’s missionary
communication strategy has used several different methods for finding people to teach
but has consistently focused on ensuring that such methods ultimately lead to face-to-face
13
lessons with missionaries as the most transformative communication exchange for both
the missionary and the potential convert.
This thesis discusses connections between important historical changes in the
LDS Church’s institutional media use and its missionary communication strategy. As
such, each chapter presents various theories and research useful for further exploration of
LDS missionary communication and its relationship with media technology. The
intention of this thesis is to provide a platform for future doctoral research encompassing
each of the chapter areas. It also aims to serve as a valuable starting point and reference
guide for the growing field of Mormon media studies. Finally, understanding how the
LDS Church has used media technology in its efforts to influence the religious beliefs
and behaviors of others contributes to our understanding of the process of
communication. 14
CHAPTER 1 NOTES
1
“President Thomas S. Monson,” Mormon News Room, last accessed June 10, 2013,
http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/leader-biographies/president-thomas-s-monson.
2
“Special Witnesses of Christ,” LDS.org, last accessed June 10, 2013,
https://www.lds.org/prophets-and-apostles/what-are-prophets-testimonies
3
“General Conference, its Historic Path,” Mormon News Room, last modified April 1,
2011, http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/general-conference-history
4
For the database of General Conference addresses, see http://www.lds.org/general-
conference?lang=eng.
5
The term “calling” refers to lay appointments Latter-day Saints take upon themselves.
6
Thomas S. Monson, “Welcome to Conference,” LDS.org, last modified October 6,
2012, http://www.lds.org/general-conference/2012/10/welcome-to-conference?lang=eng;
An LDS mission is a time young Latter-day Saint males leave home for 24 months,
females for 18 months, to proselytize full-time in a location chosen by the leaders of the
Church. The term will be more fully described in chapter five of this thesis.
7
David Newlin, and Jennifer Stagg, “LDS Church Members Respond to New Mission
Age Rules,” KSL, October 8, 2012, http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=22472472;
Heather Whittle Wrigley, “Church Leaders Share More Information on Missionary Age
Requirement Change,” LDS.org, October 6, 2012,
15
https://www.lds.org/church/news/church-leaders-share-more-information-on-missionaryage-requirement-change?lang=eng.
8
“Response to Mormon Missionary Age Announcement Remains Enthusiastic and
Unprecedented,” Mormon News Room, January 7, 2013,
http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/mormon-missionary-age-announcementresponse.
9
Peggy Fletcher-Stack and Lisa Shencker, “News of Lower Mission Age Excites
Mormons,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 8 2012,
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/55035591-78/lds-age-church-women.html.csp.
10
Ibid.
11
R. Scott Lloyd, “Members and Missionaries to Partner in Work of Salvation,”
LDS.org, last modified June 23, 2013, http://www.lds.org/church/news/members-andmissionaries-to-partner-in-work-of-salvation?lang=eng;” Terryl Givens, People of
Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture (New York: Oxford Press, 2007), 153.
12
“Missions to Be Created to Accommodate
Influx of New Missionaries,” Mormon News Room, February 22, 2013,
http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/missions-created-accommodate-influx-newmissionaries; Despite an increase in the number of missions throughout the world, the
Church has not moved missionaries into new areas but has further divided existing
missions increasing their concentration rather than their geographical reach.
13
Peggy Fletcher-Stack, “LDS Church sees Potential in Proselytizing Online,” Salt Lake
Tribune, last modified July 16, 2010,
16
http://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=10212967&itype=storyID; Chiung Hwang Chen,
“Marketing Religion: The LDS Church’s SEO Efforts,” Journal of Media and Religion
10, no. 4 (2011): 195.
14
Heidi A. Campbell, Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media
Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2013), 1.
15
Sherry Baker, and Daniel Stout, “Mormons and the Media, 1898-2003,” BYU Studies
42, no. 3 & 4 (2003): 124.
16
Preach My Gospel, (Salt Lake City: Intellectual Reserve Inc., 2004).
17
Gordon Shepherd and Gary Shepherd, “Membership Growth, Church Activity, and
Missionary Recruitment,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29, no. 1 (1996): 3357.
18
Gary Shepherd and Gordon Shepherd, Mormon Passage: a Missionary Chronicle,
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 21; “Mormon Missionary Work: A Brief
History and Introduction,” BYU Harold B. Lee Library, last accessed June 18, 2013,
http://lib.byu.edu/digital/mmd/missionary.php.
19
Benjamin E. Park, “Salvation Through a Tabernacle: Joseph Smith, Parley P. Pratt, and
Early Mormon Theologies of Embodiment,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought
43, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 5-6; Doctrine and Covenants 93: 33-34.
20
Ibid; Doctrine and Covenants 131: 7-8.
21
Doctrine and Covenants 138; Mormon 8: 10-21, Book of Mormon; John Durham
Peters, “Reflections on Mormon Materialism,” Sunstone, March 1993, 48.
22
Park, “Salvation Through a Tabernacle,” 122-123.
17
23
Benjamin E. Park and Jordan T. Watkins, “The Riches of Mormon Materialism: Parley
P. Pratt’s “Materiality” and Early Mormon Theology,” Mormon Historical Studies 11,
no. 2 (Fall 2010): 122-123.
24
Doctrine and Covenants 131: 7-8.
25
Park, “Salvation through Tabernacle,” 7; Doctrine and Covenants 89.
26
David A. Bednar, “Things as they really are,” LDS.org, last modified June 2010,
http://www.lds.org/ensign/2010/06/things-as-they-really-are?lang=eng.
27
Bednar, “Things as they are.”
28
Daniel A. Stout, Media and Religion (New York: Routledge, 2012), 73; Campbell,
Digital Religion, 3-4.
29
Elihu Katz and Jay G. Blumler, eds. The Uses of Mass Communications: Current
Perspectives in Gratifications Research (Beverly Hills: SAGE, 1974); Zizzi Papacharissi,
“Uses and Gratifications,” in An Integrated Approach to Communication Theory and
Research, eds. Michael Salwen and Don Stacks (New York: Routledge, 2008), 137.
30
Katz and Blumler, Uses of Mass Communication.
31
Papacharissi, “Uses and Gratifications,” 137.
32
Philip Palmgreen and J.D. Rayburn, “Gratifications Sought and Media Exposure: An
Expectancy Value Model,” Communication Research, 9 (1982): 561. DOI:
10.1177/009365082009004004.
33
Ibid.
34
Zizi Papacharissi and Alan Rubin, “Predictors of Internet Use,” Journal of
Broadcasting and Electronic
18
Media 44, no. 2 (2000): 191-192.
35
Ibid; Zizi Papacharissi and Andrew Mendelson, “Toward a New(er) Sociability: Uses,
Gratifications and Social Capital on Facebook,” in Media Perspectives for the 21st
Century, ed. Stelios Papathanassopoulos (New York: Routledge, 2011), 214
36
Stout, Media and Religion, 73; Campbell, Digital Religion, 1-3; Lynn Clark, Stewart
Hoover and Lee Rainie, “Faith Online,” Pew Internet, last modified April 7, 2004,
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2004/Faith-Online.aspx.
37
Clark, Hoover and Rainie, “Faith Online;” Stout, Media and Religion, 73.
38
Ibid.
39
Ibid.
40
Campbell, Digital Religion.
41
Ibid.
42
Ibid, 8-9.
43
Ibid.
44
Christopher Helland, “Surfing for Salvation,” Religion 32, no. 4 (2002): 299.
45
Ibid.
46
Ibid, 299-303.
47
Campbell, Digital Religion, 2-3; Christopher Helland, “Diaspora on the Electronic
Frontier: Developing Virtual Connections within Sacred Homelands,” Journal of
Computer-Mediated Communication 12, no. 3 (2007).
48
Ibid, 3-4.
19
49
Stewart Hoover and Nabil Eschaibi, “The ‘Third Spaces’ of Digital Religion,” Center
for Media, Religion, and Culture, University of Colorado Boulder, last accessed June 13,
2013, http://cmrc.colorado.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Third-Sapces-Essay-DraftFinal.pdf.
50
Ibid.
51
Helland, “Surfing for Salvation;” Stout, Media and Religion, 77.
52
Chen, “Marketing Religion.”
53
Ibid.
54
Nadja Miczek, “‘Go Online!’ said my Guardian Angel,” in Digital Religion:
Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds, ed. Heidi Campbell (New
York: Routledge, 2013), 221.
55
Campbell, Digital Religion, 3.
56
Mia Lovheim, “Identity,” in Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in
New Media Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2013), 41.
57
John Lynch, “’Prepare to Believe’: The Creation Museum as Embodied Conversion
Narrative,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 16, no. 1 (2013), 3.
58
Miczek, “Go Online!,” 221.
59
Ibid, 19-20; Rosemary Avance, “Seeing the Light: Mormon Conversion and
Deconversion Narratives in Off- and Online Worlds,” Journal of Media and Religion 12,
no. 1 (2013): 18; Eric A. Eliason, “Toward the Folkloristic Study of
Latter-day Saint Conversion Narratives,” BYU Studies 38, no. 1 (1999): 142.
20
60
See Liza Morong, “The Book of Mormon Musical, and the Conversion that Took Place
Because of It,” Liza: Happy, Theatrical and Mormon (blog), April 11, 2013,
http://lizamorong.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-book-of-mormon-musical-and.html
61
Paul Teusner, “Formation of a Religious Technorati,” in Digital Religion:
Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds, ed. Heidi Campbell. (New
York: Routledge, 2013),183.
62
The term “Bloggernacle” refers to the unofficial Mormon blogosphere. See page seven
of chapter five for more information.
63
Ardis E. Parshall, “Blazing a New Trail: Doing History in the Age of the Internet,”
Utah Valley University conference: “Mormonism and the Internet: Negotiating Religious
Community and Identity in the Virtual World,” Orem, UT, March 30, 2012.
64
Avance, “Seeing the Light,” 18.
65
Armand L. Mauss, The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with
Assimilation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
66
Ibid; Armand L. Mauss, “Rethinking Retrenchment: Course Corrections in the
Ongoing Campaign for Respectability,” Dialogue: A Journal Of Mormon Thought, 44,
No. 4 (2011): 1.
67
Mauss, “Rethinking Retrenchment,” 1.
68
Ibid, 3.
69
Ibid, 20.
70
Ibid.
21
71
Shepherd and Shepherd, Mormon Passage, 21; David J. Whittaker, “Mormon
Missiology: an Introduction and Guide to the Sources,” in The Disciple as Witness:
Essays on Latter-day Saint History and Doctrine in Honor of Richard Lloyd Anderson,
eds. Stephen D. Ricks, Donald W. Parry, Andrew H. Hedges (Provo: Foundation for
Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 2000); Shepherd and Shepherd, “Membership,
Growth.”
72
Shepherd and Shepherd, Mormon Passage, 19-32.
73
William A. Wilson, “Powers of Heaven and Hell: Mormon Missionary Narratives as
Instruments of Social Control,” in Contemporary Mormonism: Social Science
Perspectives, eds. Marie Cornwall, Tim B. Heaton and Lawrence Alfred Young,
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 209.
74
Ibid.
22
CHAPTER 2
THEOLOGY AND MASS MEDIA
Introduction
My exploration of role of media technology in the evolution of LDS missionary
communication necessitates that I distinguish Mormonism, its unique theology of the
body and its relationship with mass media from other forms of Christianity.
Understanding the basic tenets of LDS theology in relation to those of Catholicism and
mainstream Protestantism is the first step in answering my initial research questions
about the LDS Church’s missionary age requirement policy change as evidence of its
emphasis on embodied communication. Theology is only relevant to this study as much
as it pertains to the institutional media uses of the religious organization to which it
belongs.
In this chapter, I aim primarily to lay a cursory foundation of mainstream
denominational Christian theology and institutional media use via Catholicism,
Protestantism and Mormonism. In providing a basic outline of each Christian tradition’s
theological approach to materiality and the human body as well as its institutional media
practices, the need for the study of the relationship between Mormon missionary
communication and new media technology becomes clear. The LDS Church’s unique
tradition of face-to-face proselytizing coupled with its theology of materialism makes its
emerging engagement with new media technology an important topic of study.
23
Christianity and Catholicism
Among world religions, scholars have traditionally separated Christianity,
Judaism and Islam from Buddhism and Hinduism as “religions of the book” due to their
historical dependence upon a single sacred book of scripture such as the Holy Bible,
Torah and Koran, respectively.1 Thus, text as a communication medium is of central
importance to the establishment, spread and endurance of Christianity. Religious scholar
Huston Smith argues that the recorded resurrection of Christ is the primary reason for the
proliferation of Christianity, for without it all of Christ’s works and words would have
been in vain.2 It is the holy mission of Jesus Christ, his teachings, miracles, death on the
cross and subsequent rise from the tomb that unifies Christianity as the world’s largest
religion.3
Before written records were widely accessible, oral Christian missionary efforts
were a consistent evangelical force in the quest to fulfill Christ’s original commission to
“teach all nations.”4 Initial apostolic efforts, including the transformative proselytizing of
St. Paul, resulted in the rapid and impressive spread of Christianity from Jerusalem to
Africa and Europe.5 This proselytizing had little aid from communication technology,
relying instead upon eyewitness accounts, physical gatherings and word of mouth; only a
tiny minority was able to read sacred texts written primarily in Hebrew and Greek that
would later come together as the Bible.
During the next few centuries of Christianity, important events include the
Constantinian shift and subsequent codification of beliefs in the 4th and 5th century; the
great schism of Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism in 1054 A.D.; and the
24
Protestant Reformation.6 Through it all, the Roman Catholic Church has remained. Today
over one billion people call themselves Catholic.7
The Body and Physical Presence in Catholicism
The role of the human body and the idea of presence have a somewhat troubled
history in Catholicism. While many have simply written off Catholic views of the body
as oppressive disdain for physicality and sex, the story is much more complex.8
According to historian Peter Brown, Christian sexual renunciation developed out of
Pagan and Jewish conceptions of dualism: the idea that one’s being is divided between a
body and soul, and further, that one’s soul was divided by evil and divine tendencies in
need of purified unification in order to face God.9 Because the flesh was often seen as
weak and the soul its superior10 the flesh must then be subdued and conquered.11
Likewise, women, who were often seen as the cause of “double-heartedness,” were
temptations to men otherwise wholly committed to God.12 The Jewish tradition of fasting
along with many of Christ’s words, including his praise for those who had left family to
follow him, and his example as a celibate male prophet contributed to bodily repression
and sexual renunciation in early Christianity.13 Perhaps most compelling is the Christian
doctrine of resurrection, a belief that soul and body will be reunited in perfect form, all
making the suppression of physical appetites an anticipation of such an event.14
Theologian Rosemary Ruether argues that by the end of the third century the
evolution of early Christianity, influenced by Marcionism, Montanism and
Valentinianism, resulted in a “complex synthesis of patriarchy and celibacy.”15 Celibacy
became superior to marriage just as married Catholics were subject to the power of
celibate clergy.16 Celibacy was not, however, required of all but of the few designated to
25
lead God’s people; those whose sole attention and effort could not be divided by desires
outside of the Church.17 Clerical celibacy has continued through the centuries and is still
practiced today. Sexual renunciation and celibacy, however, are only a small part of a
Catholic theology of the body.
Despite the complicated history of bodily suppression and sexual renunciation,
physical presence is central to Catholic worship and rituals. Catholicism’s seven
sacraments—baptism, confirmation, reconciliation, Holy Communion, marriage,
ordination of priest and anointing of the sick—are all physical events done in person.18
Pope John Paul II defines the body itself as the “primordial sacrament” through which
God is revealed; because God himself does not have a body he incarnated a body in the
form of Christ on earth as a way to reveal himself to humankind.19 The body, according
to Catholic theology, is thus the medium and the message.20
The necessity of physical presence in Catholic worship is closely connected to the
belief that the institutional church is vital to salvation; it is through the Pope that the
Bible is interpreted and the seven sacraments of salvation administered.21 It is perhaps the
mediation that the papacy offers that is most central to Catholic institutionalism. As
Christ mediated the cause of God the Father to humankind, so too do ordained bishops,
priest and popes mediate in the name of grace.22 Papal infallibility gives the Pope
ultimate power of mediation.23 Mediation and physical presence then go hand-in-hand:
God is mediated and thereby revealed through physical clergy directing a physical
congregation.24 The concepts of mediation, presence and hierarchy translate into how the
organization has engaged with media.25
26
Catholic Mass Media
The paradoxical relationship between Christianity and mass media generally
stems from the notion that while “the world should be embraced for its beauty,
knowledge, and opportunities for experience, it must also be simultaneously rejected in
terms of its evil and deleterious aspects.”26 Catholicism has a rich history of embracing
media, which Sally Vance-Trembath attributes to three points of theology:
sacramentality, mediation and communion.27 Sacramentality in Catholicism is closely
tied to physical presence; it means that God is available through all reality and thus
through various media.28 Architecture, statuary, painting and other forms of fine art have
strong roots in Catholicism.29 For Catholics, God’s essence is everywhere and is not
limited by human laws or understanding; the doctrine of transubstantiation maintains that
laity literally take part of God into their bodies through the Eucharist and likewise receive
part of God when engaged in appropriate communication, regardless of the medium.30 If
God can be in all things then media are not without the reach of his all-encompassing
essence.
Mediation and communion are less abstract, more closely associated with
materiality then sacramentality. According to Vance-Trembath, the Catholic doctrine of
mediation insists that God is not directly approachable but mediated by secondary causes
and persons.31 Mediation has most commonly been associated with the power of the
papacy and its central role in bridging the gap between the sacred and the profane but
also applies to electronic communication media.32
The concept of Catholic communion is rather egalitarian: if humans need a
mediator to access God, it makes utilitarian sense that a large body of people can be
27
served by a very small group of ordained mediators such as clergy. The word
catholic is derived from the greek katholikos, meaning universal and has been used
intentionally as a unifying term.33 Vance-Trembath notes, “the divine-human encounter is
fundamentally communal,” demanding that Catholics physically gather together for
worship.34 Thus, the theology of communion extends beyond the Holy Communion
sacrament and should be viewed as a central building block in the construction of a
strong sense of community among believers. In essence, one cannot get to God without a
priest and a congregation; and further, one can and should access God with others
through every available means, including media.35
With this in mind, the Roman Catholic Church has utilized various media for both
secular and religious purposes. From newspapers to the Internet, it has sought to use mass
media for spiritual communication and unification.36 For example, Roman Catholic
priest, Charles E. Coughlin and his politically charged radio show, was, as Jeffrey
Hadden argues, the first religious radio broadcaster to build a mass audience; in 1932,
just six years after starting, Coughlin’s weekly audience reached 45 million.37 Sharing the
Good News to the entire world through all media is a right of the Catholic Church and the
Catholic press has been given the responsibility of “bringing a knowledge of the Church
to the world and a knowledge of the world to the Church.”38 Catholicism has also
affirmed the influential power of film, radio, television and the Internet and has pushed
laity to take part in the production of media content.39
Though God can be accessed through various media, not all media content has
been considered appropriate for Catholics. Members have relied upon the papacy to
define proper media use and the Catholic Church has not shied away from determining
28
what media content members shouldn’t use.40 Catholic censorship formally began when
5th-century Roman censors, originally appointed to collect census information for the
empire, often exercised censorship over art.41 Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, for
example, was later censored by covering the nudity with leaves.42 The Index Librorum
Prohibitorum, from 1559 to 1966, listed books banned by the papacy for Catholic
readers.43 Likewise, in 1933, the Legion of Decency was established to determine
Hollywood films Catholics should avoid.44
Scholars and laity alike have noted Vatican II as a historic turning point for the
Roman Catholic Church on doctrinal, hierarchical, social and technological issues.45 Led
by Pope John XXIII, Vatican II essentially modernized Roman Catholicism. Among the
many changes, the council replaced Latin with modern languages, launched a more
friendly approach to inter-faith dialogues, increased laity involvement in liturgy, gave
more power to local bishops and redefined the Church’s stance toward communication
technology.46 Rather than relying solely upon the papacy to define proper media use, the
Church spoke clearly about embracing technology for holy purposes while giving
authority to local bishops and parishioners to decipher gray areas.47
The Catholic Church’s empowerment of laity to make moral judgments regarding
media has been most evident with the Internet.48 As Catholicism’s most outspoken
advocate of communication technology, John Paul II saw new technology, including the
Internet, as an appropriate way to accomplish the Church’s “ever pressing task of
evangelization.”49 In 1995, under John Paul II’s leadership, the Catholic Church launched
the official Vatican website; in 2008 it created its own YouTube channel; and in 2009 the
29
Facebook page “Pope2You” was launched.50 A Google search for “official Catholic
websites” in 2013 produced over six million results.
Though its Internet presence is strong, the Catholic Church still places priority on
physical worship and embodied proselytizing. At the onset of the Internet age, John Paul
II spoke clearly about the limitations of disembodied communication: “electronically
mediated relationships can never take the place of the direct human contact required for
genuine evangelization.”51 Pontifical councils in 2002 emphasized that while the Internet
is useful in sustaining communities, it cannot replace or transmit the physical sacraments
necessary for salvation.52 This is reflected in the Catholic Church’s use of the Internet
primarily as an extension of hierarchy; creating websites for the purpose of information
dissemination rather than digital worship.53 The doctrinal importance of priestly
mediation, communion and physical presence for sacraments demand that Catholics meet
regularly for formal worship. In the face of increasing digital worship taking place online,
the Catholic Church remains leery of the potential loss of hierarchical control on the
Internet.54
Protestantism
Religious Scholar Euan Cameron argues “no other movement of religious protest
or reform since antiquity has been so widespread or lasting in its effects…so destructive
in what it abolished or so fertile in what it created” as the Protestant Reformation.55
Despite ample evidence to support theological and political dissension brewing from
within Catholicism before Martin Luther’s famous 95 Theses, most scholars refer to
Luther as the starting point for the Reformation.56 Luther’s predecessors include Hussites,
Waldensians and other heretics that publicly dissented from the strict hierarchical power
30
of the Roman Catholic Church throughout 15th century Europe.57 Contesting Catholic
indulgences, among other practices, Luther questioned papal authority and the doctrines
of mediation, communion and sacramentality.58
As a Catholic priest himself, Luther’s access to laity via sermon, clergy via letter
and the public via the printing press are key factors in the spread of his protestation. The
Reformation was not the result of a single action, pinning complaints on the Wittenberg
Cathedral, but a complicated process involving heated literary exchanges among clergy
and the publishing and dissemination of ideas.59 Yet, as Elizabeth Eisenstein notes, it was
a mystery to Luther and his contemporaries how his Thesis written in Latin and other
writings had garnered such enthusiastic support.60 What started, as Euan Cameron points
out, as a protest by privileged classes (scholars and churchmen) against their own
superiors, resulted in a movement that spread rapidly across Western Europe.61
Though other social and political forces were certainly at work, there is consensus
among scholars that the printing press was a necessary and fundamental part of the
Protestant Reformation.62 Many Christians have shared Luther’s assertion that printing
was “God’s highest and extremest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is
driven forward.”63 Before printing, a select minority of elite scribes (priests and monks)
was solely responsible for documentation and production of manuscripts including the
Holy Bible and other sacred texts.64 After Gutenberg’s press, which first printed the
Bible, accessibility to religious texts reached levels only previously dreamed of. Printing
allowed dissemination of the Bible--which was eventually translated from Latin to
German, English, French and other vernacular languages--and other religious pamphlets
used as weapons against Catholic religious and political dominance.65
31
Aided by printing technology, leading reformers such as Martin Luther
(Germany), John Calvin (Switzerland) and John Knox (Scotland) helped bring about
revolutionary social and religious change throughout Europe. The social and political
power of the Catholic Church was severely weakened and its exclusive hold on religious
doctrine quickly dissolved.66 The Reformation, however, was as much a move toward
religious individualism as it was a move away from papal Catholicism. As Stephen
Prothero puts it, the Protestant Reformation was a shift from “sacraments to scripture,
from the idolatry of images to the veracity of words.”67 The emphasis was no longer upon
papal mediation but upon personal revelation. Protestantism was born out of the notion
that God can be accessed universally and personally through his revealed words;
displacing papal mediation power with the power of written text.68
Protestantism, although originally a European movement, is firmly entrenched
today in American religious, social and political life. Today over 50 percent of
Americans consider themselves Protestant.69 The term Protestantism includes a large
body of diverse religious traditions, often categorized by media and religion scholars into
three main groups: Conservative, Mainline and Anabaptist.70
The Body and Physical Presence in Protestantism
Early Protestant reformers protested the dogma of papal mediation and the
necessity of physical worship and rituals, though their conception of the role and nature
of the body changed little.71 The reliance on the word of God and his word alone (Sola
Sciptura) meant that one not only didn’t need the pope to gain salvation, he/she didn’t
necessarily need a congregation either.72 Protestants see Jesus Christ, not the Pope, as
their mediator to God; only through his grace, not rituals, can individuals obtain
32
salvation.73 The actions of individuals rather than communion take precedence. Reading
is glorified and becomes the priority medium for accessing God and salvation, an idea
that led early America to become for a time “the most literate place on earth.”74
Most Protestants gather not to partake of physical sacraments or to participate in
traditional/medieval Christian rites and rituals, but to hear the living word of God.75
Rather than theological or institutional, as is the case with Catholicism, the need for
physical presence in Protestantism is generally a social concern.
Protestant theological and institutional departures from Catholicism were radical
by nearly all means excepting the movement’s primarily consistent adherence to the
doctrine of the Trinity.76 While a priest or pope need not mediate humankind’s
relationship with God, the Nicean Creed still generally defines him.77 While most
Christians believe in the Trinity, its opacity convolutes the relationship of human
physicality with God, the relationship of the soul and the body and the doctrines of
resurrection and life after death.78
Protestant Mass Media
Like Catholics, Protestants see the principle function of media as evangelism.79
Protestants’ enduring relationship with media is evidenced in the early American colonial
presses, most of which were created by Evangelicals.80 Early American religious tracts
and pamphleteering can also be traced back to a Protestant Evangelical tradition.81
Beyond the emphasis on the power of the written word, Protestants have warmly
embraced the use of mass media from film to the Internet for gospel purposes.82
Perhaps the most well known example of Protestant institutional media use is
televangelism and its incredible popularity in America. In 1934, the Federal
33
Communications Commission (FCC) mandated that network radio stations devote a
block of time for public service broadcasting, which included free religious
programming.83 This system of radio broadcasting, Hadden argues, favored mainline
religious traditions and resulted in a loss of airtime for Evangelicals.84 The 1960 FCC
policy change allowing networks to include paid religious programming as public service
broadcasting opened up airtime for Evangelical purchase.85 The free-market friendly
Evangelical theology, coupled with the gradual move by many Mainline Protestants away
from public broadcasting, resulted in a new age of Evangelical broadcasting dominance.86
In the late 1970s, Pat Robertson, Paul Crouch and Jim Bakker paved the way for a
powerful new wave of religious broadcasting through satellite and cable television.87
From the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, the average number of Americans viewing a
religious television program skyrocketed from five million to 25 million.88 Though
nowhere near as pervasive as during its height in the early 1980s, televangelism continues
today as a method for evangelization and worship for millions of American Protestants.
Televangelism should be seen as a religious tradition uniquely dependent upon a specific
technology for survival.
In general, Protestant Christian denominations have used virtually all forms of
media for religious purposes, including newspapers, magazines, books, radio, television,
music and the Internet.89 As zealous as many Protestants have been towards religious
media, however, many have also operated under the fear that secular media unceasingly
threaten to undermine one’s faith; a relationship Shultze calls “an uneasy alliance.”90
Beyond general adoption mixed with periodic rejection of “worldly” media, the
differences between Mainline, Conversative and Anabaptist Protestant communities’
34
media uses are beyond the purposes of this project. Such diversity resulting from the lack
of an institutional hierarchy across Protestant denominations is perhaps the most
distinguishing aspect of Protestantism’s relationship with media. Protestants have no
Vatican, Inter Mirifica or World Communications Day to prescribe how media should be
used but instead rely more generally upon individual conscience and local leadership for
direction.91
Mormonism
In many ways, Mormonism represents a middle road between the rigid reliance
upon Catholic authority, ritual and tradition and the autonomous and individualized
nature of Protestantism. As a Christian denomination Mormonism is similar on a number
of levels to both Catholicism and Protestantism theologically, but it is also profoundly
unique because of its American roots, embodiment theology, lay clergy, institutionalized
missionary program and historical struggle with public perception and identity; all of
which are related to its institutional use of mass media.92 It is the youngest and smallest
of the three religious traditions compared here but growing steadily and spreading rapidly
throughout the world to the point some have projected Mormonism to become the next
world religion.93
Two hundred and ninety-seven years after Martin Luther’s 95 Theses was first
penned, Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, began his own journey of protestation.
Like Luther, Smith’s search for the “right” form of Christianity in upstate New York was
by no means unusual. The urgent anticipation of Christ’s promised Second Coming and
subsequent Millennial reign prompted renewed Christian zeal resulting in thousands of
new converts, heated theological debates and a vibrant and contentious religious
35
marketplace referred to in history as the Great Awakening.94 Due to the enthusiastic
flames for developing Christian sects and the peculiar growth of various spiritual
traditions in the area, the rural western region of New York State has been called more
specifically the “Burned-over District.”95 Mormons view the discovery of America, it’s
establishment and constitutional religious freedom as the work of God’s hand in
preparing a place for the promised restoration of Christ’s true gospel to thrive; the fact
that Joseph Smith happened to live in arguably the most religiously friendly region in the
world at that time further removes coincidence from the LDS Church’s view of its
ancestry.96
The events leading up the establishment of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints are best understood in the words of Smith himself. Smith recalls his youth as a
time of “great excitement” in which he many preachers were crying “‘Lo here! And
others, Lo, there!’”97 A curious and contemplative boy, Smith attended various church
meetings “as often as occasion would permit.”98 Searching for personal salvation, Smith
tells of his decision to pray to God about exactly which church to join, something he saw
necessary due to the problematic nature of biblical interpretation and the impossibility of
“a person young as I was, and so unacquainted with men and things, to come to any
certain conclusion who was right and who was wrong.”99
It was Smith’s initial prayer and his self-proclaimed heavenly vision that followed
that started the teenage boy’s journey toward establishing a new Christian religion. Smith
tells of seeing God the Father and his son Jesus Christ in physical form, as separate
beings who spoke to him, commanding that he join none of the existing churches for
“they were all wrong,” and that through him in the near future the true church of Jesus
36
Christ would be restored to the earth.100 Ten years before the LDS Church was
established and already Smith’s radical claims sought to challenge the centuries-old
doctrine of the Trinity by asserting that God and Jesus Christ are two separate, distinct
beings with bodies “of flesh and bone as tangible as man’s.”101
From this first visitation in 1820 to the official establishment of the LDS Church
in 1830, Smith insists he was visited by other heavenly beings and directed to a record of
ancient scripture engraved upon gold plates he would later translate into the Book of
Mormon.102 Published in 1830, Cross notes that the Book of Mormon addresses every
error and truth discussed in the Second Great Awakening and "decided every
[theological] argument” including infant baptism, ordination, the atonement, the Trinity
and church government.103 Smith’s assertion that he’d seen God and Christ personally,
his self-proclaimed prophetic mantle and his said translation of the Book of Mormon
from an ancient Egyptian language were heretical enough to outrage Protestants and
Catholics alike, let alone the later Mormon period of temple building, polygamy and
westward migration. Twenty-four years after declaring that he’d “seen a vision,” Joseph
Smith was murdered by a mob while imprisoned in Carthage, Illinois at age 38.104 But
Mormonism had only just begun. Established by an obscure, uneducated American farm
boy in 1830, today, the LDS Church reports over 14.7 million members worldwide.105
The Body and Physical Presence in Mormonism
The LDS Church’s missionary communication strategy and the consistent
importance it has placed on face-to-face proselytizing are closely tied to its theology of
the body and materialism. In addition to the idea of a physically separate and embodied
Godhead, Joseph Smith taught disembodied spirits on earth are previously disobedient
37
spirits from a pre-earth life, punished for not following Christ by never receiving a
physical body.106 Smith challenged Christianity’s traditional prioritization of spirit over
body reflected in the words of the famous American theologian Jonathon Edwards: “a
heavy moulded body, a lump of flesh and blood which is not fitted to be an organ for a
soul inflamed with high exercises of divine love. . . . Fain would they fly, but they are
held down, as with a dead weight at their feet.”107
Contrary to a rhetorically suppressed theology of the body within much of
Christianity, Mormonism centers its cosmology on the receipt and glorification of a
physical body.108 Mormons see baptism as both an essential ordinance of salvation and a
ritual requiring a physical body; Smith began the practice of baptisms for the dead as way
to offer salvation to diseased individuals believed to be disembodied spirits occupying
another world, capable of accepting or rejecting earthly ordinances performed
vicariously.109 Mormons reject the doctrine of original sin, the practice of infant baptism
and the notion of the body as the source of sin and thus wait until children are at least
eight years old before permitting baptism.110 “The body,” Benjamin Park argues, is “not
to be overcome in order to reach spiritual fulfillment, but perfected.”111 The zenith of
Mormon embodiment theology is the extremely controversial doctrine of theosis taught
by Smith—that humankind is capable of and should diligently aspire to future, embodied
godhood.112
This supreme theological importance placed upon the human body is the
foundation of other Mormon teachings including the “Word of Wisdom” (health code
prohibiting alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea and illegal drugs); a conservative dress code,
particularly for young women; the prohibition of tattoos; and the limiting of body
38
piercings to one set of earrings for females.113 Mormon theology, however, insists that the
physical and spiritual cannot be separated; those who keep the “Word of Wisdom” for
example, are promised “wisdom and great treasures of knowledge.”114
Mormon materialism comes from Smith’s original teaching: “There is no such
thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine and pure, and can only
be discerned by purer eyes. We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall
see that it is all matter.”115 By nature, materialism is not only at the heart of the Mormon
doctrine but an important foundation for understanding the LDS Church’s theocratic,
economic and cultural history.116
Because of their unique doctrinal importance within Mormonism, embodiment
theology and materialism are central to our understanding of the LDS Church’s
relationship with media technology and its missionary communication strategy. On one
end, without its embodiment theology the most basic tenets of Mormonism are
unthinkable. On the other end, extreme materialism and unchecked bodily passion
fruitlessly invert Cartesian dualism to the neglect of the spirit.117 Rather than seeing
technology as a way to free the bound spirit from the prison of the body, Mormons are
taught to resist virtual reality as a substitute for embodied reality.118 Yet, the LDS
Church presses forward in its rapid adoption of new media, seeing infinite spiritual
possibilities through communication in digital worlds.119 The belief that the body is a
necessary part of spiritual development is a primary reason why the LDS Church strongly
encourages its members to serve as face-to-face missionaries and hence why the Church
prizes embodied missionary communication.120 But the opportunities and challenges of
media technology problematize the Church’s communication goals considerably.
39
Mormon Mass Media
Rather than viewing media as a peripheral contribution to the development of
Mormonism, we must first acknowledge its central role in establishing, defending and
proclaiming the faith. Mormons see it as no coincidence that God spoke to Joseph Smith
on the eve of the communication revolution; Samuel F. B. Morse’s famous first telegraph
took place only weeks before Joseph Smith was killed in 1844. Though citing God’s hand
in the creation of new technologies for evangelical purposes, or “spiritualising (sic)
technology” as Heidi Campbell calls it, is not unusual within Christianity, the parallel
development of the LDS Church and the communication revolution is fuel for Mormon
exceptionalism.121 Just as Mormons see the Reformation, Revolutionary War and
founding of America as having plowed the soil fertile for the restoration of Christ’s
church, they see mass communication technologies as paving the way for the continued
spread of his kingdom.122 As John Durham Peters has noted, without certain media
(oratory, word of mouth, horseback, boat and the printing press) “early Mormonism
would be entirely unthinkable;” Peters therefore calls Mormonism a “media religion”
because of its historical dependence upon and theological embrace of media.123 Mormons
have not only used media to send and shape their message but they’ve also used them as
things to think with.124
Print
The use of media to establish, defend and proclaim Mormonism began with the
printing of the Book of Mormon. The “New Bible” marks a turning point in which Joseph
Smith moved from a spiritual world of folklore, dreams and visions to establishing an
organized following of faithful believers.125 Regarded within Mormonism as the product
40
of seven years of angelic visitations and counsel, prophetic proclamations, intense
skepticism and divine translation, the Book of Mormon enabled the official establishment
of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints less than a month after its publication;
thus Mormonism didn’t officially begin until its primary medium was in place.126 The
Book of Mormon has since been used as the LDS Church’s primary missionary tool and
is regarded as the keystone of the religion; said Joseph Smith, “Take away the Book of
Mormon and the revelations, and where is our religion? We have none.”127
Like the Reformation, Puritan Revolt and the Great Awakenings, early
Mormonism took full advantage of the printing press for spiritual and administrative
purposes.128 Early Mormon newspapers including the Evening and Morning Star,
Millennial Star, and Times and Seasons were used outwardly to proclaim the gospel
while internally keeping early congregations coordinated and unified; the papers and
others like them, disseminated a number of Joseph’s revelations as well as community
news.129 Likewise today, the LDS Church has correlated its administrative hierarchal,
doctrinal and social activity around standard publications distributed throughout the
world.130
Print is also a crucial medium for personal spiritual experiences within
Mormonism. Spiritual conversion to the LDS Church hinges on personal revelation, or a
personal witness, often acquired through reading the Book of Mormon and praying about
its truth and divinity.131 Often referred to as “the fruits” of Joseph Smith’s prophetic
mantle132, LDS Missionaries have used the Book of Mormon as a corroborator of their
teachings in a “don’t take my word for it” fashion. It is as if the physicality of the Book
of Mormon makes Smith’s presence once again tangible, serving as incarnation of its
41
both its prophetic authors and translator.133 The book’s mere existence serves as evidence
of the missionaries’ unrecorded, and ever-evanescing words with those they teach.
Speaking about the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith taught that, “a man can get nearer to
God by abiding by its precepts than by another book.”134 Print is thus the establishing
Mormon medium for things secular and spiritual.
Telegraph
As powerful a medium as print was for the establishment of early Mormonism,
like all media up to that point it was limited by time and space. During the mid 19th
century, however, telegraphy carried electronic messages across space seemingly
disconnected from time; a welcomed solution to the challenges the LDS Church faced in
growing geographical dispersion.135 Mormonism was born global, as John Durham Peters
notes, it has always had a network character; people converted to the LDS Church in
Hawaii and California before Salt Lake City even existed and the Church’s longest
continuous congregation is found in England not Utah.136 Joseph Smith’s successor,
Brigham Young, used the telegraph to connect frontier Mormon communities after the
Church’s westward migration; at the time of Young’s death in 1877, roughly 1,200 miles
and 68 stations of the Church-owned Desert Telegraph were in operation.137 While the
telegraph served as a brilliant administrative medium for establishing the Church in Utah,
maintaining control and disseminating secular information, it lacked the potential
spiritual depth subsequent media would bring.
Film
The turn of the 19th century brought film to America, and the LDS Church saw
promise in the new medium. Regarded by some as the sixth feature length film in the
42
U.S., One Hundred Years of Mormonism, a silent, black-and-white picture released in
1913, was created primarily in response to anti-Mormon films circulating at the time.138
Indeed, early anti-Mormon films portraying the Church’s history as fanatical and
unfounded triggered efforts by LDS leaders to respond with films telling the Church’s
story in a positive light.139 In 1921, the greater Salt Lake City area is estimated to have
had 30,000 people attending movie theaters daily.140 Around the same time, the Church
began sponsoring Church-wide “motion picture evenings.”141 The Church also produced
film slides as early as 1924 for missionaries to use as part of their international
proselytizing efforts.142 These early slides, along with various print publications of the
same time period, were more peculiar and daring than the conservative missionary media
used today. Filmstrips, created by the young future prophet Gordon B. Hinckley, for
example, depicted archeological artifacts from ancient American ruins as a starting point
for conversation about the Book of Mormon.143 The Church has since backed away from
controversial historical and doctrinal points, focusing instead on assimilating with
Christianity more broadly.144
Mormon film, used initially to proclaim and defend the faith, during the middle of
the 20th century, began focusing almost exclusively on wholesome entertainment for
Church members.145 The 1930s and 1940s mark a second wave of Mormon film, referred
to as “Home Cinema” in which Mormon film shifted to a more institutional production
system that laid the structural foundation for an internal film industry for many years to
follow.146 The strict censorship of anti-religious sentiment and amoral activity under the
Hays Production Code (1930-1968) relieved the LDS Church from pressure to “disabuse
the public,” allowing attention instead for the rise of an internal Mormon film culture.147
43
Encouraged by LDS leaders, Mormon filmmakers created and distributed a number of
unofficial LDS films weaving Church history with entertainment for Mormon audiences
seeking wholesome media content.148
The use of film as an internal LDS medium is nowhere more evident than in the
most sacred of LDS rituals: the temple endowment ceremony.149 In a place where not
even all Latter-day Saints are permitted to enter (let alone non-members), where those
that do are sworn to secrecy, the Church began using film as a central part of the temple
endowment ceremony in 1955 in order to make the ceremony adaptable to various
temples worldwide.150 The film, shot with an exclusively LDS cast and crew inside the
Salt Lake City temple and later developed by all LDS personnel, was personally
delivered for its first showing in a temple outside of Salt Lake City by producer and
future Church President Gordon B. Hinckely, who also incidentally acted as the
projectionist for the initial screening.151 That a film could play such a vital role in the
highest of LDS rites speaks volumes to the confidence the Church has continually placed
in communication technology for spiritual edification.
Radio
Starting in 1922, the LDS Church began using short wave radio for
communication with its members.152 Two years later, the Church’s semi-annual General
Conference was radio broadcast for the first time.153 In 1929, Music and the Spoken
Word, a program combing gospel messages with music and singing from the Mormon
Tabernacle choir, began broadcasting.154 The program has since become part of
programming for over 2,000 radio and television stations and continues today as the
oldest continuous broadcast in both American radio and television.155 Astle and Burton
44
argue Music and the Spoken Word, because of its longevity and broadcast range is the
most important broadcast program in the Church and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir the
Church’s “most recognizable symbol.” With the aid of national and international
broadcast partnerships and technological innovation, Mormon radio continued to broaden
its geographic reach and content development making the medium a central element in
the globalization of Mormonism.156
Television
Compared to print, radio, and film, television has played a relatively minor role in
Mormon history. LDS institutional use of television began in 1948 when signals from
General Conference were broadcast to thousands around Salt Lake City’s Temple
Square.157 The Church has since invested heavily in an internal satellite system (over
6,000 satellites in 83 countries) in order to broadcast General Conferences and other
communication from its Utah headquarters to local congregations throughout the
world.158 LDS Church’s broadcasts of General Conference and “Music and the Spoken
Word” have used television for its broadcasting reach while underutilizing its visual
potential. Far from cinematic, such productions resemble a three-camera newscast
without the cutaways; primarily static cameras remain focused almost entirely on
stationary Church speakers for a two-hour duration. The Church has primarily used its
internal satellite television system didactically as an extension of face-to-face worship
rather than an entertainment medium.
The most public oriented Church use of television is the award-winning
“Homefront” public service announcement.159 The campaign, which started in 1970, has
produced thousands of television spots centered on the importance of family with the
45
well-known tagline, “family…isn’t it about time?”160 The campaign is evidence of the
LDS Church’s shift toward a less aggressive approach to sharing its message with the
world. While the Church has continued to produce its own television programs, most are
done through BYU-TV and its NBC affiliate KSL-TV, broadcasting primarily in Utah.161
The cultural stigmatization of American TV is likely behind the Church’s failure to fully
engage with the medium; seen as an incessant, mind-numbing presence in LDS homes
and an enemy to family time, many Church leaders have shared the fear that television
viewers are “amusing themselves to death.”162
Centralization
In 1967, through the creation of the Bonneville International Corporation (with
subsidiary Bonneville Communications), the LDS Church consolidated its film, radio,
television and public relations efforts, separating commercial broadcasting from spiritual
and ecclesiastical functions.163 As evidenced in “Homefront” campaign, the creation of
Bonneville marks the LDS Church’s move toward infusing commercial programming
with LDS values and themes.164 Today Bonneville owns one television station and 17
radio stations, 15 of which are located in the nation’s top largest broadcasting markets.165
This way, the LDS Church sees itself as making the world a better place without
explicitly promulgating Mormonism, but instead, steadily working to slowly change
public perceptions of the religion.166
The LDS Church’s use of the Internet and its “I’m a Mormon” campaign will be
covered in subsequent chapters because of their direct connection to recent LDS
missionary communication changes. The former will be discussed in relation to the uses
and gratifications audiences obtain from using the Internet for religious purposes and will
46
be connected to the LDS Church’s recent search engine optimization efforts. The “I’m a
Mormon” campaign is best understood in the context of the LDS Church’s larger
sociological struggle to maintain a unique identity while it seeks to gain public
acceptance through assimilating with American culture.167
Missionaries and/as Media
As channels for spreading and sustaining the LDS Church throughout the world,
missionaries are themselves a unique medium inextricably bound to the social, historical
and institutional structures of the Church’s mass media. Indeed, missionaries stand
between the LDS Church as an institution and the outside public as appointed mediators
of its dogma to the world. Missionaries are “set-apart” for missionary service by their
local leaders and become the Church’s authorized representatives.168 Where the LDS
Church’s traditional mass media fail to reach for whatever financial, logistical or political
reasons, its missionaries fill the void. The face of the LDS Church is in many parts of the
world its missionary program; for some, all they know of Mormonism are the young men
in white shirts, ties and black name badges they see and encounter. Missionaries are also
often on the front lines of new media initiatives, piloting new content and platforms for
sharing the gospel before Church-wide implementation.169 Finally, the interconnectedness
of LDS media and missionaries is evident in the historically close relationship between
the Church’s media and missionary departments, which frequently work together on
outreach projects.170 The missionary program then should be considered one of the LDS
Church’s most valuable communication mediums.
Conclusion
47
Contextualizing Mormonism within broader strands of Christianity as I have done
here by outlining important historical, doctrinal and institutional media uses within
Catholicism and Protestantism highlights the unique nature of both Mormon theology and
missionary work and how each relates to the LDS Church’s institutional media use. This
chapter serves as a useful foundation for understanding some basic differences between
Catholic, Protestant and Mormon doctrine that lead to differences in each religious
tradition’s institutional media use. It also works to connect previously disparate areas of
research between theology and media studies.
In many ways but most particularly with respect to the body, Mormon theology
differs greatly from Catholic and Protestant theology. Contrary to traditional Christian
notions of original sin and bodily oppression, the physical body is a central doctrine
within Mormon cosmology and the primary medium for cultivating desired spiritual
character.171 Mormonism’s materialism justifies the adoption of new media technology
but its embodiment theology hasn’t allowed for the displacement of face-to-face
missionary work.
The LDS Church has a long history of using media for both spiritual and
administrative purposes, to establish, defend and proclaim itself to the world. Print is the
establishing medium of Mormonism and still a central part of missionary service,
conversion and member worship.172 Broadcast technology including radio and satellite
television has been important for both outward and internal communication, extending
the reach of notable programs such as Music and the Spoken Word, General Conference
and the Church’s “Homefront” public service campaign.173
48
Mormon missionary work should also be viewed as critical part of the LDS
Church’s institutional media efforts. Missionaries act as important mediators, standing
between the idiosyncratic and at times secretive doctrine, culture and history of the LDS
Church and the world. But in order to understand the Church’s missionary age policy
change and its focus on face-to-face proselytizing, we must consider Internet technology
and the Church’s recent online proselytizing initiatives.
The next chapter of this thesis will present an audience-centered approach to
media studies as a framework for viewing the religious uses and gratifications people
seek through Internet technology. I will also discuss how the LDS Church uses search
engine optimization to change public perceptions of Mormonism
49
CHAPTER 2 NOTES
1
Huston Smith, The World Religions (New York: HarperOne, 2009).
2
Ibid, 330.
3
Ibid.
4
Matthew 28:18, KJV
5
Thomas Bokenkotter, A Concise History of the Catholic Church (New York:
Doubleday, 2004), 21-24.
6
Smith, World Religions, 317-364.
7
“Global Christianity,” The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. accessed June 10,
2013, http://www.pewforum.org/Christian/Global-Christianity-exec.aspx.
8
Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Sex and the Body in the Catholic Tradition,” Conscience
20, no. 4 (2000): 2.
9
Peter Robert Lamont Brown, The Body and
Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1988), 34-36.
10
Jesus Christ taught, “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” Matthew 26:41, KJV.
11
Brown, Body and Society, 34-36.
12
Ibid, 36.
13
Ibid, 42; Mark 10:29 KJV.
14
Ruether, “Sex and the Body,” 5.
50
15
Ibid, 4.
16
Ibid
17
Brown, Body and Society.
18
Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and
Doesn’t (New York: HarperOne, 2007), 167.
19
Paula Jean Miller, “The Theology of the Body: A New Look at the Humanae Vitae,”
Theology Today 57, no. 4 (2001): 502.
20
Ibid, 504; Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1964); the connections between McLuhan’s seminal media
scholarship and his Catholic faith are well documented: see Thomas W. Cooper, “The
Medium is the Mass: Marshall McLuhan’s Catholicism and Catholicism,” Journal of
Media and Religion 5, no. 2 (2006): 161-173.
21
George M. Marsden, Religion and American Culture (Fort Worth: Harcourt College,
2001), 17.
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid.
24
Miller, “Theology of the Body,” 502-503.
25
Daniel A. Stout, Media and Religion: Foundations of an Emerging Field (New York:
Routledge, 2012), 35.
26
Stout, Media and Religion, 34; J. Hitchcock, “We Speak that we do know,” in ed. R.W.
Budd and B.D. Ruben, Beyond Media: New Approaches to Mass Communication (New
Jersey: Hayden, 1979), 178-193.
51
27
Sally Vance-Trembath, “Catholicism,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, Communication
and Media, ed. Daniel A. Stout (New York: Routledge, 2006), 64.
28
Ibid, 63.
29
Stout, Media and Religion, 35.
30
Chad E. Seales, “Congregations,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, Communication and
Media, ed. Daniel A. Stout (New York: Routledge, 2006), 94; Stout, Media and Religion,
36.
31
Vance-Trembath, “Catholicism,” 64.
32
Ibid; Stout, Media and Religion, 78.
33
Vance-Trembath, “Catholicism,” 63.
34
Ibid, 64.
35
Pope Paul VI, “Decree on the Media of Social Communications:
Inter Mirifica,” Vatican, last modified December 4, 1963,
http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vatii_decree_19631204_inter-mirifica_en.html
36
Ibid.
37
Jeffrey K. Hadden, “The Rise and Fall of American Televangelism,” Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 527, (1993): 115.
38
Paul VI, Inter Mirifica; “Communio Et Progressio: On the Means of Social
Communication Written by Order of the Second Vatican Council,” last modified May 3,
1971,
52
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/pccs/documents/rc_pc_pccs_doc
_23051971_communio_en.html.
39
Paul VI, Inter Mirifica.
40
Stout, Media and Religion, 35.
41
Ibid, 36.
42
Ibid.
43
Ibid.
44
Ibid.
45
Ibid; Ted G. Jelen, “Catholicism, Conscience, and Censorship,” in Religion and Mass
Media: Audiences and Adaptations, eds. Daniel A. Stout and Judith M. Buddenbaum
(Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 1996); Jay P. Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism: A
History of Religion and Culture in Tension (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
46
Dolan, American Catholicism, 193.
47
Stout, Media and Religion, 36.
48
Jim McDonnell, “Catholic Approaches to the Internet,” Communication Research
Trends 31, no. 1 (2012): 14.
49
Ibid, 15.
50
Ibid.
51
Ibid.
52
“The Church and the Internet: Pontifical Council for Social Communications,”
Vatican, last modified February 28, 2002,
53
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/pccs/documents/rc_pc_pccs_doc
_20020228_church-internet_en.html
53
Christopher Helland, “Surfing for Salvation,” Religion 32, no. 4 (2002): 298.
54
Ibid.
55
Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (New York: Oxford University Press,
1991), 1.
56
Ibid, 2-10; Mark Greengrass, The Longman Companion to the European Reformation
(New York: Longman, 1998), 30-40.
57
Greengrass, Longman Companion, 39-40.
58
Ibid, 43-58
59
Ibid.
60
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 152.
61
Cameron, European Reformation, 1.
62
Eisenstein, Printing Revolution.
63
Ibid, 150.
64
Richard Campbell, Christopher R. Martin and Bettina Fabos, Media and Culture: An
Introduction to Mass Communication (Boston: Bedford Books, 2012), 292.
65
Eisenstein, Printing Revolution, 150.
66
Ibid, 154-155.
67
Prothero, Religious Literacy, 59.
68
Eisenstein, Printing Revolution, 152-160; Stout, Media and Religion, 37.
54
69
Pew Forum 2013.
70
Stout, Media and Religion, 37.
71
Cameron, European Reformation, 90.
72
Prothero, Religious Literacy, 60.
73
Cameron, European Reformation, 112.
74
Prothero, Religious Literacy, 60.
75
Smith, World’s Religions, 361.
76
Cameron, European Reformation, 312.
77
Ibid.
78
Smith, World’s Religions,
79
Quentin Shultze, “Evangelicals’ Uneasy Alliance with the Media,” in Religion and
Mass Media: Audiences and Adaptations, ed. Daniel A. Stout and Judith M. Buddenbaum
(Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 1996), 63.
80
Ibid, 63.
81
Ibid.
82
Ibid, 61.
83
Hadden, “American Televangelism,” 115; Stewart M. Hoover and Douglas K. Wagner,
“History and Policy in American Broadcast Treatment of Religion,” Media, Culture and
Society 19, no. 7 (1997): 10.
84
Hadden, “American Televangelism,” 115.
85
Ibid, 116.
86
Ibid, 117-120.
55
87
Ibid, 120.
88
Ibid.
89
Stout, Media and Religion, 37.
90
Shultze, “Evangelicals Uneasy Alliance,” 61.
91
Stout, Media and Religion, 37.
92
The lay clergy, missionary program and cultural struggle for identity of the LDS
Church will be covered in subsequent chapters.
93
In 1984, sociologist of religion Rodney Stark famously projected future LDS Church
membership growth to continue steadily, reaching up to 265 million by 2080 and thus
becoming the next world religion; Rodney Stark, “The Rise of a New World Faith,”
Review of Religious Research 26, no. 1 (1984): 23-24.
94
Whitney R. Cross, “Mormonism in the Burned-Over District,” New York History 25,
no. 3, (1944).
95
Ibid, 326.
96
2 Nephi 13, Book of Mormon; Quentin L. Cook, “Restoring Morality and Religious
Freedom,” LDS.org, last modified September 2012,
http://www.lds.org/ensign/2012/09/restoring-morality-and-religious-freedom?lang=eng;
Cross, “Burned-Over-District.”
97
Joseph Smith, “Joseph Smith History,” in History of the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints vol. 1, ed. Brigham Henry Roberts (Salt Lake City: Desert News,
1902), 1.
98
Ibid, 2.
56
99
Ibid.
100
Ibid, 1-3.
101
Doctrine and Covenants 130: 22.
102
Smith, “Joseph Smith History,” 6.
103
Cross, “Burned-Over-District,” 334.
104
“Joseph Smith Jr. Significant Events,” LDS.org. accessed June 11, 2013,
http://www.lds.org/churchhistory/presidents/controllers/potcController.jsp?leader=1&top
ic=events.
105
“Facts and Statistics,” MormonNewsRoom.org, last modified June 11, 2013
http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/facts-and-statistics/;
106
Abraham 3: 26, Pearl of Great Price.
107
Jonathan Edwards, “Heaven Is a World of Love,” quoted in George M. Marsden,
Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 191.
108
Benjamin E. Park, “Salvation Through a Tabernacle: Joseph Smith, Parley P. Pratt,
and Early Mormon Theologies of Embodiment,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon
Thought 43, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 5-6; Doctrine and Covenants 93: 33-34.
109
1 Peter 4:6, KJV; Doctrine and Covenants 138.
110
Mormon 8: 10-21, Book of Mormon; John Durham Peters, “Reflections on Mormon
Materialism,” Sunstone, March 1993, 48.
111
Park, “Salvation Through,” 7.
57
112
Benjamin E. Park and Jordan T. Watkins, “The Riches of Mormon Materialism:
Parley P. Pratt’s “Materiality” and Early Mormon Theology,” Mormon Historical Studies
11, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 122-123.
113
Doctrine and Covenant 89; Park, “Salvation Through Tabernacle,” 7; “Modesty,”
LDS.org. accessed June 11, 2013, http://www.lds.org/topics/modesty?lang=eng.
114
Park, “Salvation through Tabernacle,” 7; Doctrine and Covenants 89; See also,
Doctrine and Covenants 93:33-34, "spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a
fullness of joy; and when separated, man cannot receive a fullness of joy.”
115
Doctrine and Covenants 131: 7-8.
116
Joseph Smith received numerous revelations directing the financial and political
affairs of early Latter-day Saints, the justification of which is found in Doctrine and
Covenants 29:34, “Wherefore, verily I say unto you that all things unto me are spiritual,
and not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal.”
117
Max Nolan, “Materialism and the Mormon Faith,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon
Thought 22, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 64; Peters, “Mormon Materialism,” 49.
118
David A. Bednar, “Things as They Really are,” LDS.org, last modified June 2010,
http://www.lds.org/ensign/2010/06/things-as-they-really-are?lang=eng.
119
Toone, “Panel Discusses.”
120
Bednar, “Things as they are.”
121
Heidi Campbell, “Spiritualising the Internet. Uncovering Discourses and Narratives of
Religious Internet Usage,” Journal of Religions on the Internet 1, no.1 (2005): 8.
58
122
Cook, “Restoring Morality;” Jared Farmer, Mormons in the Media, 2012, e-book, last
accessed May 1, 2013: http://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/mormon/.
123
John Durham Peters, “Media and Mormonism,” in Oxford Handbook of Mormonism,
eds. Philip Barlow and Terryl Givens (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming),
2.
124
Ibid.
125
Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith Rough Stone Rolling: A Cultural Biography
of Mormonism’s Founder (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 57.
126
Ibid; Peters, “Media and Mormonism,” 3; Givens, People of Paradox, 86.
127
History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints vol. 2, ed. Brigham Henry
Roberts (Salt Lake City: Desert News, 1902), 52.
128
Givens, People of Paradox, 86.
129
Peters, Media and Mormonism, 5-7.
130
Armand Mauss, The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
131
Moroni 10:3-5, Book of Mormon.
132
“By their fruits ye shall know them,” Matthew 7:20, KJV.
133
A number of Book of Mormon prophets point to the future publication of the record as
a time when the voices of deceased saints and prophets will “speak from the dust” to the
reader. See 2 Nephi 33:13, 2 Nephi 26:16 and Moroni 10:27.
134
Title Page, Book of Mormon.
59
135
Sherry Baker, “Mormon Media History Timeline: 1830-2007,” Brigham Young
University Library, last modified 2006, last accessed June 12, 2013,
http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/IR/id/157.
136
Peters, “Media and Mormonism,” 8.
137
Baker, “Mormon Media,” 27.
138
Randy Astle, “One Hundred Years of Mormonism,” Mormon Literature and Creative
Arts. accessed June 12, 2013, http://mormonlit.byu.edu/lit_work.php?w_id=19717.
139
Randy Astle and Gideon Burton, “The First Wave: The Clawson Brothers and the
New Frontier,” BYU Studies 46, no. 2 (2007), 35.
140
Ibid, 27.
141
Ibid, 28.
142
“Media Timeline,” MormonChannel.org, accessed June 12, 2013,
http://www.mormonchannel.org/about/media-timeline.
143
Ron Taber, “The Church Enters the Media Age: Joseph F. Merrill and Gordon B.
Hinckley,” Journal of Mormon History 35 no. 4 (Fall 2009): 223.
144
Armand Mauss, “Rethinking Retrenchment: Course Corrections in the Ongoing Quest
for Respectability,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 44, no. 4 (Winter 2011).
145
Randy Astle and Gideon Burton, “The Second Wave: Home Cinema (1929-1953),”
BYU Studies 46, no. 2 (2007): 45.
146
Ibid, 47.
147
Ibid; Smith, “Joseph Smith History,” 1.
148
Astle and Burton, “Second Wave,” 45-47.
60
149
Ibid, 72.
150
Ibid.
151
Ibid, 72-73.
152
Baker, “Mormon Media,” 40-41.
153
Ibid.
154
“Media Timeline;”
155
Astle and Burton, “Second Wave,” 60; “History of the Choir,”
MormonTabernacleChoir.org, accessed June 12, 2013,
http://mormontabernaclechoir.org/about/choir/history?lang=eng. The award-winning and
world-renowned Mormon Tabernacle Choir started in 1847 and is made up of 360
volunteer Latter-day Saints, see “Mormon Tabernacle Choir,” Mormon News Room,
http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/topic/mormon-tabernacle-choir.
156
Baker, “Mormon Media,” 41-52.
157
Astle and Burton, “Second Wave,” 60.
158
Baker, “Mormon Media;” “Technology Used by the Church from Early Years,”
Mormon News Room, last modified January 1, 2007,
http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/technology-used-by-church-from-early-years.
159
“Media Timeline.”
160
“New Homefront Spot Released,” LDS.org, last modified December 1993,
https://www.lds.org/ensign/1993/12/news-of-the-church/new-homefront-spotreleased?lang=eng.
161
Baker, “Mormon Media,” 51-57.
61
162
M. Russell Ballard, “The Effects of Television,” Ensign, May 1989, 78-79; Neil
Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
(New York: Penguin, 1985).
163
Ibid, 55; The centralization of LDS media is part of a bigger, Church-wide correlation
movement that will be discussed in more detail in chapter five of this thesis.
164
Ibid; 40.
165
Fred C. Esplin, “The Church as Broadcaster,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon
Thought 10, no. 1 (1977): 25; Lynn Arave, “Bonneville International Aims to Buy Three
Radio Stations,” Deseret News, April 15, 1997,
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/555046/Bonneville-International-aims-to-buy-3radio-stations.html?pg=all.
166
“Homefront Spot.”
167
Armand Mauss, The Angel and the Beehive (Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
1994).
168
Preach My Gospel (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
2004), 2.
169
Taber, “Church Enters Media Age,” 223-228.
170
Trent Toone, “Panel Discusses ‘I’m a Mormon’ Campaign at BYU Symposium,”
Deseret News, last modified November 9, 2012,
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865566404/Panel-discusses-Im-a-Mormoncampaign-at-BYU-symposium.html?pg=all.
171
Bednar, “Things as They Really are;” Peters, “Mormon Materialism,” 48.
62
172
Peters, “Media and Mormonism.”
173
Baker, “Mormon Media;” Astle and Burton, “Mormon Cinema.”
63
CHAPTER 3
USES AND GRATIFICATIONS AND
RELIGIOUS PRACTICES ON THE INTERNET
Introduction
Now that I have contextualized LDS theology and the history of the Church’s
institutional use mass media within Christianity, it is time to begin shifting our attention
to new media, in this chapter more specifically, the Internet. The LDS Church’s
prioritization of media platforms carries with it important assumptions, however implicit,
about the costs and benefits of various technologies. These assumptions and conclusions
are drawn from a complex of doctrine, tradition, culture and research but they may or
may not reflect the attitudes and perceptions of the media users the Church is seeking to
influence. By focusing entirely on the LDS Church’s objectives as an institution, the
valuable perspectives of its media audience are neglected. Thus, the first section of this
chapter pays attention to audience’s perceptions and uses of the Internet as a space for
religious and spiritual purposes by first using the Uses and Gratifications (U&G)
approach to media generally and then exploring the relationship between religion and the
Internet more specifically.
The second section of the chapter offers a brief history of how the LDS Church
has used the Internet, paying special attention to the organization’s recent search engine
optimization (SEO) efforts. By connecting media audiences’ perceptions and uses of the
64
Internet for religious purposes to how the LDS Church has used the medium I aim to
highlight both the successes of the Church’s SEO operation and the challenges digital
religion presents.1 The increasing presence of digital religion2 and the Church’s SEO
efforts are both closely tied to how the Church chooses to use its physical missionary
force to communicate with world.3
Uses and Gratifications
In light of the terrible calamities from the World Wars, increasing mass media
presence at home in America and the devastating effects of Nazi propaganda lingering in
the minds of social scientists, scholarly efforts were for a time focused on understanding
the influence of media on an otherwise unaware public.4 The perceived one-way power
of media on audiences was a dominant research approach and took the form of a number
of metaphors in which media were compared to magic bullets and hypodermic needles
whose impact was nearly universal and all but uncontrollable5 Other researchers moved
in nearly the opposite direction, going so far as to claim that the impact of media was
severely limited by audience’s selective exposure and retention.6 Research on how people
use specific media worked to further develop business marketing strategies and public
polling techniques via media.7 Other scholars were at the time commissioned by
governments to make connections between media violence and a violent American
society.8 Yet, the question of why people use certain media was largely underexplored.9
U&G research should be understood not as a single theory but as an alternative
approach to previous media effects research: an important theoretical shift.10 Though the
beginnings of U&G can be traced to the work of media studies pioneers (Herzog,
Lasswell, Lazarsfield) as early as 1940, it was in the early 1960s when media scholars
65
began a concentrated effort to understand, as Elihu Katz puts it, not what media do to
people but “what people do with media.”11 The approach assumes an intentional and
active audience rather than simply viewing media as tools of mass persuasion.12 The
U&G perspective emerged, Papacharissi argues, as a way to understand media effects as
the result of more complex processes than had been explored in the past.13 In 1974,
Blumer and Katz edited a seminal text on the state of U&G research, collating previously
disparate research and formalizing the approach.14
The U&G approach relies upon a number of assumptions. First, all humans have
social and psychological needs that can be fulfilled in part through media use; the term
gratifications describes the fulfilling of these perceived needs and wants.15 Thus, the
audience is assumed to be active and consciously choosing specific media.16 Because
U&G research has traditionally been conducted through quantitative surveys, it also
assumes audience members’ ability to be self-aware of their media use and to be able to
express media use and the interests and motives behind it.17
What then are the perceived needs and subsequent gratifications associated with
media use? Using U&G as a framework for analysis consists of the examination of
motives, relevant social and psychological antecedents and the consequences of medium
consumption.18 Communication scholars have identified inclusion, affection and control
as the three primary needs interpersonal communication fulfills while escape, relaxation
and pleasure are more often found through electronically mediated communication.19
However, the most effective media research combines interpersonal and mediated needs
to best understand use of a specific medium.20
66
Social and psychological characteristics have also been linked to specific medium
uses.21 Such characteristics include physical health, interpersonal interaction, mobility,
life satisfaction, social activity and economic security; the combination of these
dimensions forms the Contextual Age Scale.22 This scale has been used to show, for
example, that those with less economic security and less mobility invest more heavily in
affordable media for entertainment and social communication otherwise unavailable to
them.23 The level of internal and external control one feels over his/her life (locus of
control), affinity with certain media and unwillingness to communicate are other
important social and psychological factors researchers have connected to media use.24
Other factors connected to media use include loneliness, parasocial activity, creativity,
anxiety, mood and content preference.25
Papacharissi argues that years of research across dozens of media studies
concludes that people typically use mass media as functional alternatives, or, in other
words, “to compliment or substitute for aspects of their environment they are not satisfied
with.”26 This finding is extremely important in consideration of the relationship between
the Internet and religion.
Like all theoretical paradigms, U&G research has led to important schisms and
augmentations, three of which are particularly relevant for understanding religious uses
of the Internet: functional alternatives, dependency theory and expectancy value theory,
or gratifications sought and obtained. The U&G approach views media as a key source of
social and psychological fulfillment but it also acknowledges that media meet certain
human needs better than others and often act as functional alternatives to interpersonal
and more conventional methods for satisfying human needs.27
67
Alternatives to media exist as the inevitable result of competition for human
attention, time and energy.28 Rosengren and Windahl further argue that different people
use the same media for different gratifications.29 Perhaps commonsensical to media
scholars today, the notion of alternative functions shifted thinking away from previous
notions that people use one media in one way for one reason.30 As new media are
continually developed, such as the Internet, questions about which medium audience
members use for which gratifications become increasingly complex.31
Further theorizing of the relationship between audiences and media led to a
branch of U&G research called dependency theory.32 Arguing that U&G research gives
too much power to media users, Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur theorized a model to explain
how media use can lead to media dependency.33 Dependency theory grew out of the
social theories of Marx, Durkheim and Mead, acknowledging that media audiences are
parts of a larger social structure, in living conditions often outside of the direct control of
the individual.34 Dependency theory thus includes individual’s motives and needs
coupled with life attributes and external social conditions as factors contributing to levels
of individual media use and dependency.35
At its core, dependency theory assumes that “dependency on media information
resources is an (sic) ubiquitous condition in modern society.”36 Societal change and
conflict further increase one’s dependency upon media as means of restructuring social
arrangements when previously established social arrangements become inadequate.37
Dependency upon specific media is further increased when functional alternatives for
fulfillment of audience needs are absent or inaccessible, thus narrowing the worldview of
the media user to specific medium he/she has become dependent upon.38 Dependency
68
theory is useful in helping explain the patterns, habits and dependency upon media for
secular and religious purposes.
While a useful and important part of ongoing media research, dependency
theory’s broad social perspective neglects individuals’ perceptions of media as sources
for need fulfillment. Enter expectancy value theory. Social psychologists Martin Fishbein
and Icek Ajzen’s work on attitude change led to the development of expectancy value
theory.39 Communication scholars Palmgreen and Rayburn applied expectancy value
theory to U&G research making a case for increased attention to audience beliefs
(expectancy) and evaluations of media as way for understanding media use; their work
has also been called the gratifications sought and obtained (GS&O) approach.40
Palmgreen and Rayburn’s adaptation of expectancy value theory assumes that humans
are rational creatures that use available information to arrive at decisions and
evaluations.41 The theory maintains that people make choices about media according to
their belief in the possibility of a medium to fulfill a need (gratifications sought) and the
potential outcome of their decision to use the medium (gratifications obtained).42 This
makes people’s perceptions of the Internet as a space for religious purposes a determining
factor in how and if they use it.
Most importantly, the U&G approach sheds light on why people use certain
media. The difficulty of summarizing decades of research loosely organized under the
U&G banner gives rise to limitations of the approach for those viewing it as a theory
rather than a framework. Seeing U&G as a turning point in media studies and a useful
framework for audience-centered media research is perhaps most fruitful. This U&G
69
framework thus serves as a fitting starting point for the area of research to which I now
turn: religion and the Internet.
Religion and the Internet
What does the LDS Church’s decision to increase face-to-face missionary
numbers tell us about how it views the Internet as space for religious practices? The
Church’s decision reflects its view that the need for face-to-face proselytizing is still
prevalent throughout the world in spite of the increasing presence of religion online and
spiritual uses of the Internet.43 What then are the perceived limitations of the Internet as a
channel for proselytizing and how does it continue to fall short of face-to-face
communication? Research on religion and the Internet has exploded in the last 20 years
offering valuable insights into these questions. Such research increases our understanding
of how individuals and religious institutions perceive the Internet and how such
perceptions shape their decisions to engage in online worlds.
To begin, it is useful to provide a background of Internet access and use generally.
According to Gallup, in 2011, only 32 percent of adults worldwide report having home
Internet access.44 At the top of the country list are Sweden and Singapore with over 93%
home Internet access while countries such as Burundi, Madagascar and Mali report that
less than one percent of adults have such privilege.45 While the majority of industrialized
countries have high home Internet access rates, countries with large populations including
China (34 percent) and India (3 percent) bring the world average down considerably.46 In
the United States today, about 80 percent of adults report having home Internet access.47
It is important to note, however, that those with the highest Internet access are white,
educated and wealthy.48 Numerous studies show that age, race and socioeconomic status
70
are directly related to Internet access and should in turn affect how scholars view the
Internet as a space for religion.49
U&G research has been helpful in understanding why people use the Internet.
Papacharissi and Rubin argue that the Internet works as a functional alternative to faceto-face communication: those who feel valued in their interpersonal environment utilize
the Internet primarily as an information tool while those who feel less valued in
interpersonal communication environments turn to the Internet as an alternative,
interactive tool.50 Therefore, when individuals have a secure relationship with face-toface communication they won’t need the Internet as a substitute for offline relationships
but will instead use it to compliment other areas of life that are perhaps not as fulfilling as
they would like.51
Early U&G research on the Internet found information seeking as the most
common reason for Internet use, yet with the advent of social media and Web. 2.0
technologies, more recent studies find passive and ritualistic uses of the Internet as
increasingly important motives.52 Such passive and ritualistic uses include, for example,
entering social networking websites and surfing online news when first arriving at work
as part of one’s daily routine. It is important to note that, like all media use, not all
Internet consumption is the result of deliberate behavior.53 The difference between
instrumental uses and ritualized uses is an important distinction. What may begin as a
rational, conscious media selection (instrumental use), over time, becomes an
unconscious routine behavior, or ritual use.54 Such ritualized media use, Leung argues, is
more about the medium than the content, producing stronger medium affinity in the user
through high exposure while his/her motives are often diffused: it is less intentional and
71
less purposive media consumption.55 While the U&G frame assumes an active, conscious
audience, habitual use of the Internet has also been identified as addictive and dependent
behavior.56 Instrumental uses of the Internet should not, however, be entirely separated
from ritual uses. U&G research has shown that one medium can be used for various
reasons both instrumental and ritual.57
Religious Internet Uses and Gratifications
The maturation of the Internet with its ongoing diversification and expansion of
content demands that scholars move past searching for overarching motives for using the
medium and focus instead on specific perceptions, uses and gratifications—in this case,
religious uses by religious seekers, or questers. Before understanding religious Internet
gratifications obtained, perception of the medium as a space and place for religion is
crucial.58 In other words, how do individuals’ views of the potential religiosity of the
Internet affect their religious uses of it?
Within religious communities, both parishes and parishioners alike must evaluate
benefits and costs of Internet use, costs often in the form of dangerously unlimited access
to perceived spiritually harmful content and relationships.59 Much like religious groups’
worries over violent movies and sexualized television programs throughout the 20th
century, simply entering the World Wide Web presents perceived dangers freely and
readily available like never before. Media literacy efforts by religions groups hope to
instill a cautious and protective mentality within congregants before the medium is even
used to ensure the user is constantly on-guard for offensive material.60 Fear of
pornography and anti-religious content are made companions to any and all Internet
use.61 The dualistic nature of religious teachings that simply label content as all together
72
good or bad, however, lacks the depth necessary for media users to navigate the
complexities of the Internet.62
Contrary to secularization theory, religion continues to flourish in America and
the Internet has clearly become another space for religious practice.63 Research supports
the idea that religious groups’ attitudes (religious gratifications sought) toward the
Internet as a space and place of religious potential have moved from early fear,
skepticism and uncertainty to more general acceptance.64
In 2004, three million individuals in the United States were already accessing
religious material online daily and 64 percent of Americans with home Internet access
had used the Internet for spiritual and religious purposes.65 In 2006, nearly half of U.S.
churches had their own websites.66 But who is using the Internet for religious purposes
and what exactly are they doing online? The vast majority (74 percent) of people
affiliated with a religious group use the Internet.67 The most common religious purposes
the Internet facilitates are reading religious news, exchanging emails with religious
content and sending greeting cards for religious holidays.68
Many religious individuals have used the Internet not as a substitute but a
complement and extension to traditional worship.69 For example, rather than replacing
traditional worship with cyber worship, 17 percent of respondents reported using the
Internet to search for places in their community where they could attend religious
services in person.70 Hoover, Clark and Rainie further found that the online faithful use
the Internet as an additional venue for expression of personal faith and spirituality, rather
than a space for seeking out the new and different.71
73
What about those seeking information about religion online? Only a third of the
online faithful use the Internet to seek and exchange information about their own
religious tradition and the religious traditions of others.72 The biggest motivation for such
exploration is a curiosity about others’ beliefs.73 Those who attend offline religious
services most frequently are more likely to seek information about their own religion
online rather than the religion of others, while those who attend less frequently are more
likely to seek out information about religions other than their own.74 The relationship
between religiosity and searching out religious information online is significant. The
motives in seeking out other religions of those that attend Church less frequently are
centered around mere wanting to know, “just to find about them,” rather than for personal
growth as more frequent attendees report.75 However, frequent attendees are the most
likely to seek information about other religions, making them more interested in all
religions online.76 These findings support a trend in U.S. religion wherein those within
established religious traditions are evolving toward a “seeker-orientation” while those
outside institutional traditions are moving further away from religion altogether.77 Thus,
people who are not involved in religious organizations are more likely to be as
uninterested in religion online as offline.78
Is the Internet then, as some have argued, facilitating the movement of American
religion away from traditional institutions toward individualization? Some 55 percent of
Americans online use the Internet for activities related to personal religiosity and
spirituality such as prayer requests, downloading and listening to music and exchanging
emails with spiritual content.79 While 36 percent go online for activities related to
traditional institutional religion such as looking for places to attend church services,
74
planning church meetings and making donations to religious organizations and
charities.80
Search engine optimization (SEO) companies rely on the statistically proven
notion that most people find the websites they’re looking for through links to other sites
and search engines.81 Studies of religious participation on the Internet, however, have
shown that word-of-mouth and offline marketing are the major ways in which people
have found a favorite religious-oriented website.82 An in-depth study of 500 highly active
religious web surfers revealed that just 18 percent found their favorite site through an
online search or by happen stance (linked sites), whereas half found out about it through a
family, friend or church publication.83 Thus, SEO efforts specifically targeting those
searching religion online will most likely reach either 1) individuals already committed to
a religious faith seeking to share their faith and learn about others’ or 2) individuals not
associated with established religious traditions superficially searching for info about
others’ religions—and such efforts will likely be less effective than more traditional, offline advertising efforts.84
Theoretical Approaches
Heidi Campbell has traced the emergence of scholarship on religion and the
Internet, identifying three waves of research and the possible emergence of a fourth.85 It
is important to note that while some approaches are more useful than others, each wave
of scholarship has worked to contribute to an emerging field of interdisciplinary study
making important contributions to media and communication studies, religious studies,
sociology, anthropology and Internet studies.86
75
During the first wave, scholars often used the term cyberspace to weigh utopian
and dystopian views concerning what were often seen as the limitless possibilities of
religion online.87 Early research in this area began in the mid to late 90s and tended to
offer general overviews of the positive and negative implications of the Internet for
religious practice.88 The term “cyber-religion” provided a beginning framework for
studying traditional religious practices moving to the Internet but like the relationship it
sought to describe, it was difficult to define and eventually gave way to more
sophisticated and specific research frames.89
According to Hojsgaard and Warburg, the second wave of religion and Internet
scholarship focused on a “more realistic perspective” by studying how people and
religions, not just technology, were “generating new forms of religious expression
online.”90 During this time a number of useful edited collections surfaced, offering more
diverse and sophisticated insights into the cultural implications of religious practice
online.91 It was during this time that sociologist Christopher Helland offered a theoretical
framework to distinguish religion online from online religion.92
Helland’s distinction is useful in understanding major differences in how religious
organizations have adopted the Internet. Helland classifies religion online and online
religion on the basis of how the website creators’ view the site and users’ levels of
interactivity.93 Religion online, Helland argues, is an online continuation of hierarchical
structures that exist offline, wherein websites are highly controlled spaces that leave
nothing to chance but instead channel viewers to see what particular religious leaders
want them to see.94 The religion online paradigm views the Internet as another tool for
the dissemination of official information about traditional institutional religion.95 Helland
76
argues that most churches based on hierarchical control first utilized the Internet in these
ways, creating official websites but putting forth little effort toward interactivity,
including online worship.96
Online religion, on the other hand, is not merely learning from authorized
religious sources or supplementing offline worship through information but the actual
“doing of religion” online.97 Online religion takes advantage of the unique many-to-many
communicative capacity of the Internet, seeing it as a place of interactivity and an
environment rather than a tool for dissemination.98 Online religion takes shape through
informal religious discussions, prayers, rituals and other forms of non-denominational
worship.99
Helland has since reformulated his theory to account for the increasingly blurred
line between religion online and online religion.100 Yet Helland’s distinction is useful
today particularly for understanding how established religions such as the LDS Church
have used the Internet as an extension of hierarchical control and for exploring why such
institutions haven’t taken advantage of the interactive potential of the Internet.101
Helland’s theoretical approach led to what Campbell sees as a third wave of
religion and Internet research wherein a “bricolage of scholarship” began coming
together from various backgrounds.102 This wave is characterized by increased attention
toward the development of theoretical and interpretive frameworks and research
methodologies for better understanding questions related to ritual, community and
identity.103 Campbell argues that a possible fourth wave of religion and Internet research
is emerging as scholars begin more longitudinal studies of religious practice in online
worlds and their wider social and institutional implications.104
77
The blurring and blending of online and off-line religious practices, coupled with
the development of Web 2.0 technology, has led scholars to develop the term “digital
religion.”105 Campbell defines digital religion as “the technological and cultural space
that is evoked when we talk about how online and offline religious spheres have become
blended or integrated.”106 Hoover and Eschaibi describe it as a “third space,” emerging
from the confluence of digital culture and lived religious practice.107 Digital religion
takes into account not just the “digitalization of religion” but the “contribution[s] the
digital is making to the religious” as well.108 Thus, digital religion functions as both an
interpretive framework as well as a useful research term.
Before I discuss how the LDS Church has used the Internet a summary of this
section’s key points is helpful. First, use of the Internet for religious purposes is common
among the majority of American adults and rising in popularity.109 Second, those that
attend church services frequently use the Internet more than the average American and
are more likely to research their own religion as well as the religious traditions of others
online.110 Third, the majority of religious Internet use currently resembles more closely
religion online rather than online religion though this distinction is becoming increasingly
blurry.111 Fourth, individuals find their favorite religious-oriented websites most often
through offline sources such as family, friends and religious publications and
advertising.112
LDS Internet
Given the LDS Church’s history of institutional media use its online presence
should be no surprise. However, using Helland’s classification, the official websites of
the LDS Church more clearly offer religion online rather than online religion.113 A brief
78
history of the Church’s institutional Internet use will demonstrate how it has viewed the
Internet as an extension or compliment to traditional physical worship and religious
practices rather than a substitute. The LDS Church has also successfully used
contemporary SEO strategies to help change public perception of Mormonism and further
spread its message.114
The early years of LDS Internet were focused almost entirely on experimentation
and internal communication.115 The LDS Church took to the Internet in 1995 by
launching a news website called ldschurchnews.com.116 For the next few years the
Church experimented with several websites including a Brigham Young Universityoperated site and a site commemorating the sesquicentennial of the Mormons arriving in
Salt Lake City.117 A year later, it launched LDS.org which has become the central and
most robust Church website.118 The site serves primarily for members of the Church and
has developed considerably; today it offers access to scriptures, modern teachings
including General Conference addresses (video, text and audio), authorized
administrative manuals, teaching aids and leadership resources and news.
Continuing its long history of genealogical research and vicarious temple work,
the Church launched what has become one of the world’s largest and most popular
genealogical websites, familysearch.org.119 In 2007, the site was receiving approximately
8.5 million hits per day.120 Family Search’s interactivity allows users to do everything
from uploading family photos and creating family trees to searching the Church’s
incredible database and indexing records for future research.121 However, the site is
almost entirely secular in its design and approach; no mention of the Church is made
79
outside of a small link to official LDS Church websites and the Church’s near hidden
name at the bottom of the page.122
In preparation for the 2002 Winter Olympics, the Church launched Mormon.org,
designed specifically to help answer outsiders’ questions about the religion.123 Unlike
LDS.org, Mormon.org has served primarily as a website for those outside of the Church
seeking information about the religion. The site features a live chat room for users to talk
to missionaries, thousands of short Church member profiles, and several video clips of
everyday Mormons sharing their story as part of the “I’m a Mormon” campaign.124 Even
so, Mormon.org clearly directs viewers to its Worship with Us and Meet the Missionaries
sections featured on the site’s home page.125 Indeed, the Church sees the web as a
supplementary tool for offline worship rather than a substitute. In line with Helland’s
description of religion online, users of Mormon.org are led through highly controlled
channels limited to official information about the Church.126
The LDS Church also sees the Internet as a valuable instrument for internal
communication. From 2008 to 2010, LDS meetinghouses began connecting to the
Internet but the decision to connect was left to local leaders as the costs were paid for by
local budgets rather than general Church funds.127 By the end of 2010, 50 percent of LDS
meetinghouses had an Internet connection.128 However, in 2011 the Church announced
plans to centralize its worldwide costs and its goal to install Internet access in 85 percent
of all meetinghouses by the end of 2011.129
The move to standardize Internet access across meetinghouses demonstrates the
value the Church places in using the technology internally to disseminate information as
a substitute for physical, face-to-face communication. The material nature of LDS rituals,
80
and in particular the weekly ordinance of the sacrament as part of Sunday worship,
demands that members physically meet for weekly worship.130 Indeed, an LDS apostle
recently reemphasized this weekly meeting as “the most sacred and important meeting in
the Church.”131 However, efforts to replace a number of leadership and training meetings
done in person with video, satellite and Internet technology is welcomed and perhaps
necessary when considering the logistics of instructing a worldwide lay clergy.132 Thus,
the tension between embodiment theology and technology surfaces once again.133
SEO
In October of 2010 the LDS Church became the talk of the SEO world after a
Google analytics expert pointed out the effectiveness of the Church’s SEO operation.134
Various experts applauded the organization’s efforts, seeking to break down the
successful strategies in order to replicate them.135 A primary goal of SEO is to create a
network of links to a site in order to increase its relevance and importance to web
crawlers such as Google. Put briefly, search engines deem the most popular content (most
linked to) to be the most relevant and important.136
Chen notes that the groundwork for LDS SEO was laid as early as 1996 but began
more earnestly in 2007.137 The Church’s SEO includes efforts to make more attractive
content, diversify keywords, and build links.138 In 2008, the LDS Church was
consistently creating up to 400,000 links per month, a number that doubled at its peak in
2010.139 In late 2010, it is estimated the Church had built close to 3.5 million external
links from nearly 10,000 different domains to LDS.org, placing it next to MTV.com on
the list of the Top 500 Most Important Internet sites.140
81
While some question the use of SEO in attracting religious followers, the LDS
Church has remained quiet but persistent in increasing the Web ranking of Church-related
terms.141 LDS SEO has worked to connect keywords from both outsider and insider
vocabulary, maximizing one’s chances of finding authorized information about the
Church as opposed to anti-Mormon and ex-Mormon sites.142 Linking words such as
“church,” “Jesus,” and “Christian,” to official LDS sites increases the likelihood of
someone finding them while searching a variety of religious content.143 More general
terms like “debt management,” “food storage,” and “employment” that connect to an
official Church site about provident living demonstrate just how wide the Mormon
keyword umbrella stretches.144
Others outside of official LDS efforts also carry out SEO as a way to combat
negative and anti-Mormon content online.145 In addition to the Church’s Information
Systems department, a number of savvy, informal grassroots organizations offer
significant assistance to LDS SEO.146 One such organization, the More Good
Foundation, believes the only way to overcome negativity about Mormonism online is to
“overpower it with content.”147 This flood of pro-Mormon content by the Church and
various unofficial organizations has in fact been extremely effective in displacing antiMormon content online. In 2005, anti-Mormon sites constituted over 50 percent of
Google search results for basic Mormon key words, while pro-Mormon sites made up just
28 percent of the results.148 However, by 2008 the numbers almost completely reversed
with pro-Mormon content appearing in over 50 percent of search results and antiMormon sites just 30.149 With help from the More Good Foundation, and efforts to crack
down on copyright infringing videos, anti-Mormon content on YouTube has similarly
82
been dwarfed by pro-Mormon videos; Chen found that videos portraying Mormonism in
a positive light make up about 75 percent of search results using key Mormon words on
YouTube.150
Chen argues that the Church has chosen to informally allow Mormon-led
unofficial organizations such as the More Good Foundation and LDS Media Talk to take
the lead in areas of online marketing that are particularly sensitive or potentially
controversial.151 By doing this, the Church avoids the political backlash that has long
plagued the religion.152 These organizations also lead the way in providing technical SEO
training and resources for everyday Mormons voluntarily seeking to share their faith in
online worlds.153 By encouraging local Mormons throughout the world to subscribe to
official LDS media outlets and create Church-related social media content members
themselves also become powerful catalyst for ongoing SEO.154
SEO offers a valuable supplement to broad face-to-face proselytizing. Rather than
moving from house to house unaware of who missionaries might encounter behind each
door, creating digital pathways online for those interested in family, religion, Christianity
and even Mormonism puts the ball in the media user’s court. Indeed, the Church and
unofficial SEO-oriented groups have stated the goal to meet Internet users at their level,
in their own terms, offering information and resources for those already seeking it.155 At
best, SEO can prepare interested individuals for future contact with Church missionaries;
at worst, the Church is improving its public image online.156
The use of SEO to defend and proclaim Mormonism is no surprise considering
the faith’s tenuous relationship with public perception and news media from its
beginning.157 Through SEO the Church can vie for control over information the public
83
finds when searching online—a receding horizon of control the Church has chased since
its founder Joseph Smith began wrestling with the press about his visions and
revelations—control the Church is far from realizing.158 Despite all the Church’s past
efforts, Mitt Romney’s unsuccessful presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012 illustrate
the persistence of the Mormon in America; between 2011 and 2012, Gallup noted that
one fifth of Americans polled stated, “they would not vote for a well-qualified
presidential candidate who happens to be Mormon.”159 Despite abandoning the practice
over 120 years ago, a 2007 Pew Research survey showed that the term polygamy is
nearly synonymous with Mormonism.160 While the fight for a positive public image
continues to prove difficult for the LDS Church, SEO gives the Church an unprecedented
level control over its image online.161
The Church’s SEO efforts are part of its broader involvement in social media
outlets. Today the LDS Church has a Mormon YouTube channel with over 30 million
video views, a Facebook page that reaches 115 million people, a Twitter account with
over 21,000 followers and even a GooglePlus account as part of what one Church media
specialist is calling a “new age of Mormon media.”162 While technologically exciting, the
new age of Mormon media will also prove a significant challenge to Mormon culture,
embodiment theology, traditional worship, and face-to-face missionary work.
Conclusion
The U&G approach provides a valuable basis for my research on the relationship
between face-to-face and Internet proselyting of the LDS Church by incorporating an
audience-centered media use perspective for approaching religious uses of the Internet. I
have demonstrated that the Internet has grown in American perception as a space for
84
religious and spiritual purposes.163 Currently, the majority of religious individuals are
seeking information about religion online as compliments to traditional worship, a
finding that works well to support the LDS Church’s current aims in targeting public
perceptions of Mormonism while ultimately encouraging traditional worship.
While “doing” Mormonism in the sense of participating in traditional worship
services such as the sacrament is not done online, proclaiming the gospel—part of the
LDS Church’s three-fold mission—is done online through SEO, the “I’m a Mormon
Campaign” and use of social media by the Church and everyday Mormons.164 The LDS
Church sees the Internet as a powerful medium for accomplishing a task central to the
faith. Helland’s distinction between religion online and online religion is helpful in
showing how the LDS Church’s institutional use of the Internet is more an extension of
traditional, hierarchical control than other forms of digital religion. However, the rising
popularity online religion and more specifically, digital religion, poses cultural,
theological and proselytizing challenges the LDS Church must face as it enters a new age
of media.
The next chapter in this thesis will continue the discussion of the LDS Church’s
use of the Internet by addressing current online missionary efforts more specifically. I
will use the conversion narrative of Liza Morong as a case study to explore the
confluence of traditional face-to-face proselytizing and online initiatives. Morong’s
conversion serves as an ideal prototype for future LDS proselytizing beginning with the
Internet and social media and ending with embodied missionary lessons.
85
CHAPTER 3 NOTES
1
Chiung Hwang Chen, “Marketing Religion Online: The LDS Church's SEO Efforts,”
Journal of Media and Religion 10, no. 4, (2011): 85-205.
2
Throughout this chapter I use Heidi Campbell’s definition of digital religion as “the
technological and cultural space that is evoked when we talk about how online and
offline worlds have become blended or integrated.” In short, digital religion is the
merging of religious practices in on and off-line worlds. Heidi Campbell ed. Digital
Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds (New York:
Routledge, 2013), 3-4.
3
Chen, “Marketing Religion,” 191.
4
CarrieLynn D. Reinhard, and Brenda Dervin, "Media Uses and Gratifications," In 21st
Century Communication: A Reference Handbook, edited by William F. Eadie, 506-16.
Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2009, 506. doi:
10.4135/9781412964005.n56.
5
Richard Campbell, Christopher R. Martin and Bettina Fabos, Media and Culture: An
Introduction to Mass Communication (Boston: Bedford Books, 2012), 292; Reinhard and
Dervin, “Uses and Gratifications,” 506.
6
Wilbur Schramm, Jack Lyle, and Edwin Parker, Television in the Lives of our Children.
(Stanford: Stanford University press, 1961),1.
7
Reinhard and Dervin, “Uses and Gratifications,” 507.
86
8
Eihu Katz, Jay G. Blumler and Michael Gurevitch, “The Uses of Mass Communication
by the Individual,” in The Uses of Mass Communication: Current Perspectives on
Gratifications Research (Beverly Hills: SAGE, 1974), 20.
9
Elihu Katz, “Mass Communication Research and the Study of Popular Culture,” Studies
in Public Communication vol. 2 (1959), 1.
10
Zizzi Papacharissi, “Uses and Gratifications,” in An Integrated Approach to
Communication Theory and Research, eds. Michael Salwen and Don Stacks (New York:
Routledge, 2008), 137.
11
Katz, “Mass Communication,” 2; Reinhard and Dervin, “Uses and Gratifications,” 508.
12
Katz, “Mass Communication,” 2.
13
Papacharissi, “Uses and Gratifications,” 138.
14
Elihu Katz and Jay G. Blumler, eds. The Uses of Mass Communications: Current
Perspectives in Gratifications Research (Beverly Hills: SAGE, 1974).
15
Papacharissi, “Uses and Gratifications,” 137.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid, 139.
19
Ibid, 140.
20
Ibid.
21
Reinhard and Dervin, “Uses and Gratifications,” 511; William J. McGuire,
“Psychological Motives and Communication Gratification,” in The Uses of Mass
87
Communication: Current Perspectives on Gratifications Research (Beverly Hills: SAGE,
1974), 174-178.
22
Rebecca B. Rubin and Alan M. Rubin, “Contextual Age and Television Use,” Human
Communication Research 8, no. 3 (1982): 228-244.
23
Papacharissi, “Uses and Gratifications,” 140.
24
Ibid, 141.
25
Ibid.
26
Ibid.
27
Katz, Blumler and Gurevitch, “Uses of Mass Communication,” 22.
28
Ibid.
29
Karl Erik Rosengren and Sven Windahl, “Mass Media Consumption as a Functional
Alternative,” in D. McQuail (Ed.), Sociology of Mass Communication: Selected Readings
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), 166–194.
30
Reinhard and Dervin, “Uses and Gratifications,” 509.
31
Ibid.
32
Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach and Michael L. DeFleur, “A Dependency Model of Mass-
Media Effects,” Communication Research 3, no. 3 (1976) DOI:
10.1177/009365027600300101
33
Ibid; Kevin Pearce, “Uses, Gratifications and Dependency,” in Encyclopedia of
Communication Theory, eds. Stephen W. Littlejohn and Karen A. Foss (Thousand Oaks:
SAGE, 2009), 989.
34
Ball-Rockeach and DeFleur, “Dependency Model,” 4.
88
35
Pearce, “Gratifications and Dependency,” 989.
36
Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur, “Dependency Model,” 6.
37
Ibid, 7.
38
Ibid.
39
Reinhard and Dervin, “Uses and Gratifications,” 512; Philip Palmgreen and J.D.
Rayburn, “Gratifications Sought and Media Exposure: An Expectancy Value
Model,” Communication Research, 9 (1982): 561. DOI: 10.1177/009365082009004004
40
Reinhard and Dervin, “Uses and Gratifications,” 512; Palmgreen and Rayburn,”
Gratifications Sought,” 562-563.
41
Palmgreen and Rayburn, “Gratifications Sought,” 563.
42
Ibid.
43
Campbell, Digital Religion, 1.
44
Lymari Morales, “Home Internet Access Still Out of Reach for Many
Worldwide,”Gallup.com, last modified January 14, 2013,
http://www.gallup.com/poll/159815/home-Internet-access-remains-reachworldwide.aspx.
45
Ibid.
46
Ibid.
47
Ibid.
48
Aaron Smith, “Home Broadband 2010,” Pew Internet, last modified August 11, 2010,
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Home-Broadband-2010/Part-1.aspx?view=all;
Thom File, “Computer and Internet Use in the United States,” U.S. Census, last modified
89
May 2013, http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p20-569.pdf. Those with higher
incomes and education levels have significantly higher Internet access. For example, in
the United States, 87 percent of adults with a college degree have home Internet access
while only 34 percent of adults without a high school diploma have access; of those with
income under $30,000 per year only 46 percent have access while those with over
$75,000 and over have a 87 percent access rate.
49
Kathryn Zickurh and Aaron Smith, “Digital Differences,” last modified April 13, 2012,
http://pewInternet.org/Reports/2012/Digital-differences/Overview.aspx?cnn=yes; File,
“Computer and Internet Use;” Smith, “Home Broadband 2010;”
50
Zizi Papacharissi and Alan Rubin, “Predictors of Internet Use,” Journal of
Broadcasting and Electronic
Media 44, no. 2 (2000): 191-192.
51
Ibid, 193; Zizi Papacharissi and Andrew Mendelson, “Toward a New(er) Sociability:
Uses, Gratifications and Social Capital on Facebook,” in Media Perspectives for the 21st
Century, ed. Stelios Papathanassopoulos (New York: Routledge, 2011), 214.
52
Ibid; Papacharissi and Rubin, “Predictors of Internet Use.”
53
Arvind Diddi and Robert LaRose, “Getting Hooked on News: Uses and Gratifications
and the Formation of News Habits Among College Students in an Internet Environment,”
Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 50 no. 2 (2006), 198; Rokeach and
DeFleur, “Dependency Model,”6.
54
Diddi and LaRose, “Getting Hooked,” 198.
90
55
Louis Leung, “Gratifications, Chronic Loneliness and Internet Use,” Asian Journal of
Communication 11, no. 1 (2001), 99.
56
Diddi and LaRose, “Getting Hooked,” 195.
57
Leung, “Chronic Loneliness,” 99; Reinhard and Dervin, “Uses and Gratifications,”
509.
58
Palmgreen and Rayburn, “Gratifications Sought,” 563.
59
Heidi Campbell, When Religion Meets New Media (New York: Routledge, 2010), 5.
60
Daniel A. Stout, Media and Religion (New York: Routledge, 2012), 62.
61
See “Keeping Safe and Balanced in a Google-YouTube-Twitter-Facebook-iEverything
World,” OverComingPornography.org, accessed June 12, 2013,
http://overcomingpornography.org/individuals/keeping-safe-and-balanced-in-a-googleyoutube-twitter-facebook-ieverything-world?lang=eng; Overcomingpornography.org is
the LDS Church’s newest website dedicated to pornography addiction.
62
Stout, Media and Religion, 62.
63
Campbell, Digital Religion, 5-10; Stout, Media and Religion, 73; For secularization
theory see Peter L. Berger’s seminal text The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological
Theory of Religion (Garden City: Anchor, 1967).
64
Campbell, Digital Religion, 5-10.
65
Stout, Media and Religion, 73; Lynn Clark, Stewart Hoover and Lee Rainie, “Faith
Online,” Pew Internet, last modified April 7, 2004,
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2004/Faith-Online.aspx.
91
66
“National Congregations Study,” National Opinion Research Center, accessed June 12,
2013, http://www.soc.duke.edu/natcong/Docs/NCSII_report_final.pdf.
67
Stout, Media and Religion, 74.
68
Clark, Hoover and Rainie, “Faith Online,” 4.
69
Ibid.
70
Ibid.
71
Ibid, 6.
72
Ibid, 7.
73
Ibid, 4.
74
Ibid, 15.
75
Ibid, 16.
76
Ibid, 15.
77
Ibid, 16; Penny L. Marler and C. Kirk Hadaway, “Being Religious or Being Spiritual in
America: A Zero-Sum Proposition?” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41, no.
2, (2002): 289-300.
78
Clark, Hoover and Rainie, “Faith Online,” 16.
79
Ibid, 8.
80
Ibid.
81
Christopher Helland, “Surfing for Salvation,” Religion 32, no. 4 (2002): 299.
82
Ibid.
83
Ibid.
84
Ibid; Clark, Hoover and Rainie, “Faith Online.”
92
85
Ibid.
86
Campbell, Digital Religion, 9-10; Stout, Media and Religion, 1.
87
Ibid; Morten T. Hojsgaard and Margit Warburg, eds. Religion and Cyberspace
(London: Routledge, 2005), 9.
88
Ibid, 8; Jeff Zaleski, The Soul of Cyberspace (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).
89
Ibid, 2.
90
Ibid, 8; Hojsgaard and Warburg, Religion and Cyberspace, 1-10.
91
Ibid, 9. See Hadden and Cowan’s Religion on the Internet: Research Prospects and
Promises and Religion Online by Dawson and Cowan.
92
Helland, “Surfing for Salvation.”
93
Ibid, 294.
94
Ibid, 295.
95
Ibid.
96
Ibid, 298.
97
Ibid.
98
Ibid, 298-299.
99
Ibid.
100
See Christopher Helland, “Diaspora on the Electronic Frontier: Developing Virtual
Connections within Sacred Homelands,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
12, no. 3 (2007).
101
Campbell, Digital Religion, 2-3.
102
Ibid, 9.
93
103
Ibid.
104
Ibid, 10.
105
Ibid, 3.
106
Ibid, 3-4.
107
Stewart Hoover and Nabil Eschaibi, “The ‘Third Spaces’ of Digital Religion,” Center
for Media, Religion, and Culture, University of Colorado Boulder, last accessed June 13,
2013, http://cmrc.colorado.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Third-Sapces-Essay-DraftFinal.pdf.
108
Ibid.
109
Clark, Hoover and Rainie, “Faith Online;” Stout, Media and Religion, 73.
110
Ibid.
111
Ibid; Campbell, Digital Religion, 3.
112
Clark, Hoover and Rainie, “Faith Online;” Helland, “Surfing for Salvation;”
Campbell, Digital Religion.
113
Helland, “Surfing for Salvation.”
114
Chen, “Marketing Religion.”
115
Sherry Baker, “Mormon Media History Timeline: 1830-2007,” Brigham Young
University Library, last modified 2006, last accessed June 12, 2013,
http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/IR/id/157.
116
Baker, “Mormon Media.”
117
Baker, “Mormon Media.”
118
Ibid.
94
119
Jared Farmer, Mormons in the Media, 2012, e-book, last accessed May 1, 2013:
http://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/mormon/; “Familysearch.org,” Alexa, last
accessed June 14, 2013, http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/familysearch.org.
120
Baker, “Mormon Media.”
121
FamilySearch.org
122
Ibid.
123
“Media Timeline,” Mormon Channel, last accessed June 14, 2013,
http://www.mormonchannel.org/about/media-timeline.
124
Chapter four of this thesis discusses Mormon.org’s chat function in more detail and
chapter five offers a closer look at the “I’m a Mormon” campaign.
125
Mormon.org
126
Helland, “Surfing for Salvation.”
127
Jacob Stark, “Wireless Internet Access in Meeting Houses,” LDS Tech, last accessed
June 13, 2013, https://tech.lds.org/index.php/ldstech/1-miscellanous/393-wirelessInternet-access-in-meetinghouses.
128
Ibid.
129
Ibid.
130
Dallin H. Oaks, “Sacrament Meeting and the Sacrament,” LDS.org, last modified
October 2008, https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2008/10/sacrament-meeting-andthe-sacrament?lang=eng.
131
Oaks, “Sacrament Meeting.” The LDS sacrament ordinance is similar to Catholic
Mass and other symbolic rituals in remembrance of Jesus Christ, but unlike the Eucharist,
95
Mormons see the bread and water (not wine) as purely symbolic. See Doctrine and
Covenants 59:9-10.
132
See http://www.lds.org/broadcasts/worldwide-leadership-training for examples of
internal LDS broadcasts.
133
See chapter two of this thesis, pages 19-20.
134
Chen, “Marketing Religion,” 185.
135
Ibid.
136
Ibid.
137
Ibid, 190.
138
Ibid, 189.
139
Ibid, 190-191.
140
Ibid; Justin Briggs, “Breaking Down the Mormon SEO Strategy.” Distilled, last
accessed June 13, 2013, http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/breaking-down-the-mormonseo-strategy/.
141
Chen, “Marketing Religion,” 182.
142
Ibid; Briggs, “Mormon SEO Strategy.”
143
Briggs, “Mormon SEO Strategy.”
144
Ibid.
145
Chen, “Marketing Religion,” 191.
146
Ibid.
147
Ibid, 194.
148
Ibid.
96
149
Ibid.
150
Ibid, 196.
151
Ibid, 192.
152
Ibid; John Durham Peters, “Media and Mormonism,” in Oxford Handbook of
Mormonism, eds. Philip Barlow and Terryl Givens (New York: Oxford University Press,
forthcoming), 2.
153
Ibid, 191.
154
Ibid; Russell M. Ballard, “Sharing the Gospel using the Internet,” Ensign, July 2008.
155
Ibid.
156
Ibid.
157
Peters, “Media and Mormonism,” 2.
158
Ibid; Chen, “Marketing Religion,”198-199; Joseph Smith, “Joseph Smith History,” in
History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints vol. 1, ed. Brigham Henry
Roberts (Salt Lake City: Desert News, 1902), 1.
159
Lydia Saad, “In U.S., 22% are Hesitant to Support a Mormon in 2012,” Gallup, last
modified June 20, 2011; Frank Newport, “Bias Against a Mormon Presidential Candidate
Same as in 1967,” Gallup, last modified June 21, 2012,
http://www.gallup.com/poll/155273/bias-against-mormon-presidential-candidate1967.aspx.
97
160
“How the Public Perceives Romney, Mormons.” The Pew Forum on Religion &
Public Life, last modified December 4, 2007, http://pewforum.org/Politics-andElections/How-the-Public-Perceives-Romney-Mormons.aspx.
161
Chen, “Marketing Religion.”
162
Toone, “Panel Discusses.”
163
Campbell, Digital Religion; Stout, Media and Religion; Clark, Hoover and Rainie,
“Faith Online.”
164 Proclaiming
the gospel, redeeming the dead and perfecting the Saints make up what is
traditionally referred to within Mormonism as the three-fold mission of the LDS Church.
See Spencer W. Kimball, “Remember the Mission of the Church.” Ensign, May 1982.
98
CHAPTER 4
RELIGIOUS IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION AND
CONVERSION NARRATIVES
Introduction
Building upon the historical analysis of the LDS Church’s institutional media use
in former chapters, this chapter extends such analysis specifically to the Church’s use of
online technologies for evangelization. In addition to the religious uses and gratifications
of Internet users, my initial research question about the LDS Church’s recent decision to
increase its face-to-face missionary force demands an exploration of the LDS Church’s
current online proselytizing efforts and how such efforts relate to individuals’
negotiations of religiosity across on and off-line spaces.
More than ever, the Internet and social media operate as important spaces for
“building, negotiating, presenting and communicating religious identity constructions.”1
Rather than separating traditional religious worship from online religious experiences, the
intersection of on and off-line worlds represents an important confluence in the process
of religious identity construction.2 This chapter seeks to explore precisely this confluence
in relation to the LDS Church’s current Internet and social media proselytizing practices.
In order to understand the role of LDS Internet and social media efforts in the
process of religious identity construction, I will examine the conversion narrative of a 21year-old, American woman named Liza Morong. As told through her own social media
99
accounts, Morong’s conversion narrative offers a unique look into the relationship
between building, negotiating and communicating Mormon identity online. While
Morong’s individual experience does not speak for the hundreds of people throughout the
world that join the LDS Church daily3, from the perspective of the Church, her
conversion narrative follows an archetype of religious identity construction across on and
off-line spaces.
Morong’s conversion narrative also demonstrates the LDS Church’s normative
missionary communication strategy in action; after finding the Church online Morong
transitioned to face-to-face communication with LDS missionaries, joined the Church
through baptism, and began presenting her conversion narrative online through various
social media accounts.4 Thus, Morong’s experience offers insight into the various stages
of Mormon identity construction as mediated by the Internet and social media.
Religious Identity Construction
The formation and presentation of identity has been an important area of research
for scholars concerned with the social and cultural impact of new media.5 Likewise,
religion has long been considered an essential part of individual and community identity
construction.6 Far from separating online religious practices from other arenas of
everyday life, the ever-increasing closeness of the relationship between traditional
religious practice and digital technology continues to blur the line between on and offline religious experiences.7 The “third space,” as it has been called, that emerges through
the convergence of digital culture and lived religious practice is a unique and relatively
new phenomenon that has only recently gained scholarly attention.8
100
Digital media increasingly take on important roles in the creation and negotiation
of religious identity by offering new platforms and social settings for religious practice.9
Stout argues, “we have arrived at a point where virtually any religious phenomenon can
be experienced through technology.”10 Lovheim argues that the Internet “provides a
discursive and social infrastructure—that is, sacred texts, a shared set of ideas and forum
for discussion, rituals and transmission—which sustains as well as forms these religious
identities.”11
In addition to playing an integral in the building and sustaining of religious
identity, through the creation of personal blogs, videos, websites and social media
profiles, more and more individuals can now present and perform their religious identity
online.12 These new digital media platforms allow for greater self-expression, selfreflection and social interaction as part of the individual expression of religious
identity.13
As part of the construction and communication of religious identity, the
conversion narrative plays a significant role in reaffirming the commitment and devotion
of the converted.14 In Mormonism, the custom of sharing conversion narratives
(“testimonies”) with both insiders and outsiders is a cultural expectation and, as
Rosemary Avance argues, a ritual performance reflecting Joseph Smith’s experience,
allowing members to “ritually embody the founding myth of their faith.”15 The study of
Mormon conversion narratives presented offline in the form of a traditional Mormon
testimony, has shed light on the cultural, social and spiritual implications of such
narratives within Mormon communities.16 However, scholars have yet to study the
implications of enacting religious identity through the sharing of Mormon conversion
101
narratives online and how the LDS Church’s evangelical media practices influence the
process of religious identity construction online. I aim to begin filling that void through
the case study offered below.
Liza Morong’s Story
Liza Morong has recently made national news for her ostensibly unconventional
conversion to Mormonism.17 Morong’s conversion narrative has gathered media attention
primarily because her “journey” to Mormonism began when she attended The Book of
Mormon Broadway musical.18 The fact that the controversial Broadway musical initially
sparked Morong’s conversion process is not the focus of this chapter. However, the
spread of her conversion narrative through national news outlets highlights an important
part of Morong’s identity expression that will be considered later on.
In order to better understand Morong’s online conversion to Mormonism, I have
chosen to conduct a qualitative analysis of all publicly available information about her
story, particularly as she tells it herself through her personal blog, social media accounts
(Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter), and Mormon.org profile. It is important to note that all
analyzed text was posted online by Morong after she joined the LDS Church, making the
sharing of her conversion narrative an integral part of the construction her religious
identity.19 The autobiographical nature of Morong’s narrative illustrates how “past and
present experiences relating to ‘religious narratives’ are interconnected.”20
Morong is currently an active participating member of the LDS Church, a fact that
clearly influences her retrospective rhetorical choices in the construction of her
conversion narrative.21 It should also be noted that Morong was raised in a Christian
Congregational church, making her conversion a move from one Christian faith to
102
another rather than from atheism to an established religion.22 Morong’s high involvement
with social media, as evidenced by her many and frequently updated social media
accounts can also be used to shed light on the religious uses and gratifications of young
media users who seem to increasingly and consciously immerse themselves in a digital
environment.
Morong’s “journey” to Mormonism began when she first attended The Book of
Mormon Broadway musical.23 As a theater major, Morong relates the Broadway musical
experience as an “exciting opportunity” in which she was “dancing and laughing” in her
seat throughout the production.24 Morong told a Desert News25 reporter that she “laughed
hysterically the entire show,” thinking, “Wow, these people are crazy. They must be
brainwashed.”26 Shortly thereafter, Morong decided to check out Mormon.org to “see
just how insane [Mormon missionaries] were.”27
It is important to note that rather than finding anti-Mormon material online,
Morong implies she found Mormon.org quickly, either as a direct result of LDS offline
advertising or search engine optimization efforts. Having just seen a satirical, theatrical
production, rather than seeking further negative portrayals of Mormonism online,
Morong indicates she was searching for an authentic source of information; Buchanan
notes, “When she found a link for a live chat with missionaries, Morong felt like she had
hit the jackpot.”28 Seeing the musical as a valuable opportunity to redirect public
attention to authentic Church materials, missionaries have distributed copies of the Book
of Mormon outside of theaters showing the musical and the Church has even advertised
inside the musical’s playbill itself.29
103
In hopes that she would get the chance to “destroy” everything the missionaries
were “‘told’ to believe,” Morong began chatting with an official LDS missionary
stationed in Provo, Utah’s Missionary Training Center. 30 That Morong felt she could
“destroy,” let alone alter another’s beliefs through online communication demonstrates
her perception of the Internet as a space where attitudes, beliefs and identities change.
The number of chats taking place on Mormon.org has rapidly increased in recent years;
in 2010, missionaries on Mormon.org were taking between 2,000 to 3,000 chats daily.31
While Morong’s conversion narrative points to an initial mischievous motivation in
chatting online, far more research is needed to understand the uses and gratifications of
online religious chat rooms.32
For Morong, the online chat is where her “real adventure began.”33 Though she
claims she “wanted to make fun of him,” the chat missionary was apparently too polite
and kind for Morong’s intended rhetorical ambush and she surprised herself when she
agreed to chat again at the missionary’s invitation.34 Soon after this first “chat” with the
LDS missionary, Morong began more formal online lessons toward conversion.35 The
transition from an informal online chat to scheduled missionary lessons is not, however,
detailed in any of Morong’s accounts. From the LDS Church’s perspective, this transition
is a key first step separating mere conversation from labeling the individual interested in
meeting again a “potential investigator.”36 While it more than likely has research
documenting the effectiveness of online chats, unfortunately, the LDS Church withholds
valuable internal information from researchers.
Yet, curiously, after first chatting on Church-owned Mormon.org the online
missionaries began teaching Morong through Facebook chat.37 Why Facebook? For the
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LDS Church, the move to Facebook relinquishes its power and control by allowing a
private company to profit from the relationship between Morong and the missionaries.
However, one possible reason for such a decision could be for technological and social
convenience, making it easier for Morong to chat with the same pair of missionaries
repeatedly rather than reentering Mormon.org’s chat room unaware of who she would
find on the other end. Traditionally, Mormon missionary companionships are limited to
specific geographic areas and thus repeatedly teach the same individuals to maintain
consistency in the relationship.38 Naturally, when missionaries move on to other areas
during their mission, which happens regularly, some of those investigating the Church
stop progressing toward baptism due to the severed personal relationship with a specific
missionary.39
In addition to interpersonal relationship maintenance and convenience, moving
the lessons to Facebook can be seen as meeting Morong in at her level, within her digital
home, with all the trappings of online culture readily seen; a first step toward the face-toface lessons that would later take place in Morong’s physical home.40 Traditional
Mormon missionary communication has intentionally taken place in the learner’s home, a
concept in need of further study as the idea of home continues to change with ongoing
convergence between on and off-line worlds.41
Unfortunately, the nature of Morong’s Facebook chats is not explained (but will
be considered later) as her personal blog account jumps to the day when the missionaries
sent her a physical copy of the Book of Mormon.42 Curiously, in spite of the wide range
of scriptures and LDS literature available online through LDS.org43 the missionaries
chose to send a physical copy of the LDS Church’s foundational text.44 This decision
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marks a second step in the transition to face-to-face communication and an important
linkage of authenticity and credibility between a digital experience and an established
religious tradition.
In early new media research, scholars readily distinguished the “virtual” from the
“real.”45 However, the increasing mediatization of daily life has made this dichotomy
more problematic.46 It seems the level of authenticity granted to online religious practice
is in large part a construct of individual experience and negotiation.47 The
decentralization of knowledge production online demands new methods for evaluating
authenticity and for now the LDS Church is sticking to traditional methods of
authentication.48 There is no doubt that Morong saw her online chats as authentic and
meaningful experiences but granting credibility and trust to the missionaries and the
Church as a religious institution was perhaps made easier through more traditional
methods of authenticity such as print publication.49
In addition to increasing the authenticity and credibility of the message, the
physical book can also be seen as a personal gift. John Durham Peters argues, “Giving
can be a form of power, a way to impose obligations.”50 As such, gifts suggest
reciprocity from the receiver, opening an exchange, further forging the budding
relationship between Morong and her physically distant LDS missionary teachers; in fact,
Morong’s blog account tells of the missionary’s hand-written promise written in the back
of the book directing her to pray to know the truth of the book’s contents.51 Such
personal notes containing promises and testimony narratives are common practice and
encouraged in Mormon gospel sharing, seen as adding significance and a personal
“witness” of the book’s truth.52
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Morong’s account becomes more spiritual after receiving the Book of Mormon,
praying about its truth and participating in a lesson with the missionaries through
Skype.53 Seeing she had nothing to “lose in saying one prayer,” Morong began asking
God about the Book of Mormon.54 At this point Morong’s conversion narrative shifts
from mischievous curiosity to spiritual seeking. Shortly thereafter, she recalls feeling the
presence of the Holy Spirit for the first time, in her own words:
I was riding my bike to class one morning through some side streets in an older
neighborhood in Boston. I remember the light was just passing through the
branches of the trees. I felt this peace that I have never felt before. I thought to
myself, ‘That just came from God.’55
The turning point in Morong’s conversion was a spiritual feeling understood as
answer from God, something extremely common in Mormon conversion narratives.56
Eliason points to this spiritual epiphany as a common building block in Mormon
conversion narratives.57 Like Joseph Smith, many Mormon converts experience a
spiritual confirmation that they are on the right track.58 More important than Morong’s
spiritual epiphany itself, however, is the mediatization of her conversion process.
Clearly, Morong placed some amount of trust in the hand-written promise from
the missionary that God would answer her query. But how much of that trust was the
result of a digitally mediated relationship? Did the tangible copy of the Book of Mormon
increase the credibility of the missionaries’ message or would she have received the same
spiritual confirmation had she searched the Book through the Church’s website? Perhaps
coincidental, the correlation between Morong receiving a physical copy of the Book of
Mormon and her subsequent spiritual experience suggest that the later was predicated
upon the former and may not have happened through exclusive online communication.59
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Having received her personal “answer” about the truth of the Book of Mormon,
attended local Church meetings and met in person with local missionaries, Morong
decided to be baptized a member of the LDS Church.60 Morong’s decision to be baptized
was made while in her home during a face-to-face lesson with sister missionaries where
she “felt the Spirit strongly and knew that what she had learned was true.”61 At the
missionaries’ baptismal invitation Morong recalls looking at the sisters, “they told me the
next step was baptism, and I realized I wanted to do that” and, “suddenly all three of us
were crying hysterically at my dining room table;" indeed, the shedding of tears, an
integral part of both male and female LDS culture, would be difficult to share through
online chat.62 Mormon embodiment theology,63 asserting the need for a physical body to
participate in ordinances such as the baptism and the sacrament, demands that all digital
communication must eventually lead to embodied worship.64 Thus, the conversion
process as it takes place across off- and online spaces is becoming increasingly complex
for the LDS Church.
The timeline of Morong’s conversion indicates that she joined the LDS Church a
little more than three months after first seeing the Broadway musical.65 That Morong
traveled to Utah where the missionary she first met on Mormon.org performed her
baptismal ordinance, rather than choosing to be baptized by the local Boston sister
missionaries, illustrates the importance of interpersonal relationships in Mormon
proselytizing and how a close personal relationship can develop through digital
communication online.66 In a blog post reflecting on her conversion to the Church,
Morong expresses deep appreciation for the missionary she first met online: “I wish I
could put into words how much you mean to me. Thank you so much for being the first
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person to inspire me on Mormon.org. You have honestly changed my life forever. You’re
truly amazing.”67
Interestingly, Morong’s full conversion story with details about the Broadway
musical and Mormon.org chat wasn’t blogged until April 11, 2013, more than a year after
she joined the Church.68 It was less than a month after this April blog that her story was
published in the Deseret News and subsequently nearly half a dozen other national news
outlets.69 What prompted Morong to present her new religious identity and express her
conversion narrative online? And why didn’t she do so earlier? How does her selfexpression through blogging and other social media contribute to the ongoing negotiation
of her religious identity?
By connecting Morong’s narrative to recent Mormon.org initiatives, it is highly
likely Morong’s seemingly sudden conversion narrative blog post is not unusual but
encouraged by the LDS Church. In tandem with the Church’s September 2012
announcement that Mormon.org would be available in 20 languages reaching “90 percent
of the Internet-using world,” the Church distributed new pass-along cards for members to
give to their non-member associates directing them to view personal profiles on
Mormon.org.70 Sent to a large number of Latter-day Saints, the cards came with
admonition for all members of the Church to create a personal Mormon.org profile.71
Though a creation date is not available for Morong’s Mormon.org profile, it is likely the
inspiration for her very-similar blog narrative. This is significant because it means that
Morong is far from alone in sharing her conversion story online through social media
profiles and personal blog posts; in fact, there are currently over 100,000 personal
profiles on Mormon.org, many in the form of a conversion narrative.72 By encouraging
109
its members to engage in such online media creation, the LDS Church not only increases
its informal online presence and evangelical reach, it produces tremendous indirect
support for its ongoing SEO efforts as keywords and external links are continually
connected to official LDS websites.73
The role of digital media in Morong’s conversion is more clearly understood
through a brief comparison to another Mormon convert’s experience joining the LDS
Church after watching the Book of Mormon Broadway musical. Like Morong, former
Culver City, California mayor Richard Marcus’s conversion to Mormonism was recently
in the news.74 While Morong was introduced to Mormonism through the Broadway
musical, Marcus saw the musical as part of a personal exploration of the Church initiated
by a conversation with a close Mormon friend. The musical made Marcus want to learn
even more about the LDS Church.
Rather than chatting with the missionaries online as Morong did, Marcus used
Mormon.org to initially find about more about the Church and eventually to find a local
meetinghouse and arrange for an in-person visit with local missionaries. Marcus recalls,
“three days later, two angels showed up on my doorstep,” referring to the sister
missionaries.75 Like Morong, Marcus choked up while meeting with the missionaries, as
he was thrilled to receive a copy of the Book of Mormon; Marcus told them, “You don’t
know how much I’ve been waiting for this.”76 After praying to know the truth of the
Book of Mormon, Marcus quickly received his answer:
I don’t know from where, but this intensity came into me. I couldn’t even finish
my prayer. I was so overwhelmed. I thought that maybe my head was going to
explode or my heart was going to burst right out of my chest.77
110
Shortly after his spiritual experience Marcus was baptized a member of the LDS Church
where he remains an active participating member today.78
The similarities between Morong and Marcus’s conversion narratives raise a
number of questions surrounding the different roles digital media played in the process of
each person’s religious identity creation as a convert to Mormonism. Morong and Marcus
both watched the Book of Mormon musical and accessed information about the LDS
Church on Mormon.org.79 Both point to spiritual confirmations along their investigative
path and a distinct answer to their prayers about the Book of Mormon.80 Both shed tears
and shared an emotional moment in the presence of physical missionaries and developed
close relationships with the missionaries that taught them.81 Both joined the Church
rather quickly and have stayed active participating members.82
But why did Morong choose to chat online while Marcus requested a physical
visit from the missionaries? Why was Marcus so anxious to receive a physical copy of
the Book when he had digital access to the exact same text all along? Or was Marcus
simply unaware of LDS.org and the large database of Mormon scripture and literature
there?
The age difference between Marcus and Morong helps demonstrate how
perceptions of the Internet and social media as spaces for religious practice have changed
in recent years.83 Perhaps Marcus perceives a greater dichotomy between the virtual and
the real and was thus seeking an embodied religious experience to authenticate his
research online; while as a digital native, Morong sees little separation between off- and
online spaces as part of her everyday life.84
111
Morong has shared her narrative on her personal blog, Tumblr and Twitter
accounts and Mormon.org profile online but I could only find that Marcus has a
Facebook page. According to Clark, Hoover and Rainie, Americans will progressively
use the Internet for religious purposes more like Morong and less like Marcus.85 In line
with uses and gratifications research, Morong would be more prone to share her
conversion narrative online than in person as part of traditional Mormon worship.86 Thus,
the role of conversion narratives in Mormonism as creating “an inspirational and faith
promoting popular historical consciousness” will increasingly involve the Internet and
social media as platforms for religious expression and the construction of religious
identity for individuals and Mormon communities.87
Morong’s conversion narrative serves a case-in-point example of what the future
of Mormon missionary work and conversion might look like as the LDS Church adopts
new technology for new purposes and young people continue to seek religion online. The
lay nature of the Church means that converts like Morong and Marcus, as long as they
stay a part of the Church, will serve in volunteer positions, spreading their influence
throughout the Mormon community and the next generation of converts.88 In order to
more fully understand why Morong was affected the way she was and how the LDS
Church sees her conversion narrative, we must shift our attention from a convert
perspective back to the perspective of the LDS Church and its missionary efforts.
LDS Online Proselytizing Experimentation
While Morong seemingly spends a significant amount of time online, there is no
physical disability preventing her from doing otherwise. On the other hand, the
missionary that first chatted with and later baptized Morong, Trevor Boardman, has
112
musclular dystrophy.89 Though his Facebook profile picture and other photos online with
him and Morong together show no signs of a physical disability, Boardman’s muscular
dystrophy posed a challenge for Morong’s baptism; because of Boardman’s condition
and full immersion in water required in LDS baptism, another missionary was necessary
to assist Boardman in the ordinance.90
Currently, online LDS missionaries either have physical disabilities limiting fulltime face-to-face proselytizing or are stationed online only temporarily while waiting for
an international visa.91 Full-time proselytizing is extremely physically demanding as
missionaries typically work 11-13 hour days, six days a week, often outside walking,
riding bicycles and for the fortunate, occasionally driving.92 The LDS Church performs
extensive physical health screenings requiring applicants to resolve potential
complications before submitting an application, including removing wisdom teeth in
addition to physical examinations, vaccinations and all other necessary preventative
measures.93 Traditionally, those that don’t measure up to physical and psychological
standards are given a variety of other opportunities for Church-service specific to
individual needs and capabilities.94
LDS online proselytizing efforts began as an experiment, and while deemed a
useful and effective alternative for the physically disabled, the Church has no intentions
of replacing face-to-face missionaries.95 The Mormon.org chat feature began in 2006 and
Church employees began training missionaries to take online chats during their brief
three to nine week stay at the Missionary Training Center (MTC) before leaving for fulltime face-to-face proselytizing.96 Taking chats online naturally grew out of missionaries
taking in-bound phone calls from people interested in obtaining Church publications as
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part of rotational MTC training for full-time face-to-face service.97 In 2008, Tyson
Boardman, older brother to Trevor Boardman who also has muscular dystrophy, served
as the first missionary assigned to full-time online proselytizing as a pilot program for
what became an official missionary assignment in 2009.98
The primary center for online missionaries is in in the Provo, Utah MTC where
roughly 10-14 missionaries are stationed while small groups of other missionaries in
Mexico City, the Philippines and sister missionaries in Salt Lake City, Utah take chats to
keep the chat room operating 24/7.99 Online from 10 am to 9pm daily, in 2010 these
digital missionaries were taking 2,000 to 3,000 per day, an increase from 500 daily chats
the year before.100 The Church’s internal studies show that the majority of Mormon.og
users are 15-20 year olds.101
Online efforts from 2009 to 2010 led to 264 baptisms; an impressive statistic
considering the current average number of annual convert baptisms per face-to-face
missionary is only 4.5.102 In its first two to three years, Mormon.org chat helped convert
people across 42 states and 20 countries.103
The nature of Mormon.org’s chat room is far more informal than the traditional
approach to LDS proselytizing. The option to “chat with us” is made clear to users on
Mormon.org’s home page and each subsequent page visited on the website. The chat
begins as a separate window and users are welcomed to Mormon.org chat. Another
caption thanks the user for his/her interest in “talking with a missionary” and makes the
purpose of the chat clear, to “answer basic questions about the church and its beliefs and
to provide opportunities to learn more.” Next, users are informed, “a missionary will be
114
with you shortly”(my emphasis). Users are then told an individual, who is identified by
first name only, is ready to assist them.
The use of missionaries’ first names only is a departure from traditional practice
on taking on the title “Elder” to replace one’s first name to both honor and distinguish
missionaries.104 The use of a first name only and the absence of a profile picture
immediately make the chat more anonymous and informal than an in-person meeting; a
strategy used “to not scare off those starting the chat.”105 Physical missionaries, however,
are nearly unmistakable and their black identifying name badge has become a part of the
Church’s public image.106 By removing the traditional missionary title in chat rooms the
authenticity of the missionary is challenged.
After the established missionary is ready to assist the user, another individual
enters the chat but is identified only as “joining the chat,” giving the appearance of one
missionary assisting the user while another unknown individual has “joined the chat.”
This potentially confusing start to the chat may make users more comfortable in their
online interaction, feeling as if another inquirer has joined forming a group discussion.
However, both respondents are in fact a missionary companionship in the same room
communicating with each over the direction and goal of each chat.107
Mormon.org chat balances a thin line between informality and authenticity. While
missionaries seek to remain casual and informal, before chatting with anyone, the
purpose of the chat is made clear with the disclosure statement: “Thank you for your
interest in talking to a missionary from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The purpose of Mormon.org chat is to answer basic questions about the church and its
beliefs and to provide opportunities to learn more.”108Thus, the LDS Church faces
115
significant challenges in managing tension between casual online conversation and rigid
hierarchical control. Such challenges and others will be considered in the following
chapter.
The Physical Body and a Hybrid Proselytizing Future
Rather than a replacement to traditional missionary work, online proselytizing
remains a starting point for future face-to-face interaction. An LDS Church employee
overseeing MTC operations makes the necessity for face-to-face interaction clear,
referring to online proselytizing he states, “In every case local missionaries have to get
involved,” noting there is a much-needed physical experience that can’t happen online.109
An online missionary echoes the goal for future in-person meetings, referring to
individuals engaging in Mormon.org chat he says, “we try to get them to the local
missionaries and make sure the local missionaries are the primary teachers.”110 Indeed,
both Morong and Marcus’s conversion experiences demonstrate the goal for eventual
embodied LDS missionary communication.
Experimentation with online proselytizing, however, could be leading to a hybrid
version of Mormon proselytizing. Out of approximately 70,000, only a handful of
missionaries serve completely online but a number of LDS missions have been
experimenting with online communication and social media as methods for finding
people interested in the LDS Church to later visit in person.111
Beginning in May of 2010, a group of missionaries in Rochester, New York were
advised to spend their mornings and downtime interacting on Facebook, blogging and
commenting on websites that mention Mormonism.112 The focus of these efforts is aimed
at generating local contacts for missionaries to later visit and teach face-to-face.113 This
116
“e-contacting” is still in experimental stages but offers missionaries an alternative route
to meeting potential Mormons.114 A manager at the Provo MTC notes that, “many people
would love to investigate the church but are not ready to have missionaries come to their
house,” arguing that an online connection may serve as a more effective starting point for
later face-to-face interaction.115 Another Church missionary official tells of a couple first
connecting with LDS missionaries online and later meeting for in-person instruction; yet,
when too embarrassed to ask the physical missionaries a particular question the couple
went online again to find their answer in what they felt was a less intimidating
environment.116
Rather than viewing the virtual and the real as separate spheres, the LDS Church’s
current online proselytizing efforts demonstrate its desire to bridge off- and online worlds
as seamlessly as possible. New media technology is being pursued and developed the
Church to assist primarily in improving the Church’s public image and attract interested
individuals to authorized channels such as Mormon.org where the path toward embodied
communication with local missionaries can begin.117
Conclusion
The Internet has become a critical space for the creation, negotiation and
presentation of religious identity.118 As off- and online worlds continue to coalesce, the
role of technology takes on increasing importance in mediating this process of religious
identity construction.119 Conversion narratives within Mormonism function spiritually
and socially in the construction of a “popular historical consciousness” that is
foundational to individual and religious Mormon identity.120 Social media platforms
online, including blogging, facilitate social environments for self-expression of religious
117
identity.121 Thus, blogging one’s conversion narrative is an integral part of the changing
face of Mormonism.
I have therefore analyzed the autobiographical conversion narrative of Liza
Morong as told through her social media accounts, personal blog and newspaper articles
to shed further light on the role of Internet technology in the construction of Mormon
religious identity. My analysis of Morong’s conversion narrative reveals important steps
taken by the LDS missionaries to ensure that Morong transitioned from her initial online
chats to meeting with local missionaries in person. My comparison of Morong and
Marcus’s separate conversion narratives reveals common experiential events including an
initial curiosity; a spiritual confirmation along their investigative path connected to a
physical copy of the Book of Mormon; an emotional experience with local missionaries;
an answer to personal prayers; and an epiphany leading to baptism into the LDS
Church.122 While both conversions progress along a similar path toward embodied
communication, Morong’s conversion began on Mormon.org chat, making it a possible
archetype for future LDS missionary work incorporating online chatting and other
technological methods for finding individuals interested in the Church.123 Morong’s
conversion serves as an illustration of a conversion process that began online and
successfully transitioned to physical meetings, baptism and sustained Church loyalty.124
However, digital technology and online chatting in particular, poses new
challenges to the LDS Church’s authenticity. The casual chat environment online
missionaries engage in is a stark deviation from traditional face-to-face missionary work,
showing early promise in finding people for future teaching while creating a unique
challenge in balancing informality with professionalism and authenticity.125 Despite the
118
increased use of such technology the eventual goal for all missionary interactions is for
local missionaries to meet with investigators in person, in their homes.126
While the move toward initially connecting with individuals interested in
Mormonism online makes sense in the developed world, the digital divide plaguing
developing nations poses internal, cultural problems for the LDS Church in managing
face-to-face missionaries assigned to serve in the third world and those assigned to use
Facebook, Wordpress and Mormon.org on a daily basis.
The final chapter of this thesis will utilize a sociological framework to explore a
number of hierarchical and cultural challenges the LDS Church faces incorporating new
media into traditional missionary work. I will discuss challenges decentralized
communication environments pose to the centralized hierarchy of the Church. I will also
look at the Church’s broader struggle for identity within American culture. Finally, I will
explore how online proselytizing initiatives challenge the mission as an instrument of
socialization.
119
CHAPTER 4 NOTES
1
Nadja Miczek, “‘Go Online!’ said my Guardian Angel,” in Digital Religion:
Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds, ed. Heidi Campbell (New
York: Routledge, 2013), 221.
2
Heidi Campbell, ed. Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media
Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2013), 3.
3
Taking the LDS Church’s most recent convert baptism statistics, throughout the world
an average of 746 people join the Church through baptism daily. The Church reported a
total of 272,330 baptisms during 2012; I arrived at 764 by dividing that number by 365.
See Brook P. Hales, “Statistical Report, 2012,” LDS.org, last modified April 2013,
http://www.lds.org/general-conference/2013/04/statistical-report-2012?lang=eng.
4
Emmilie Buchanan, “From ‘Book of Mormon’ Musical to Mormon convert,”
Deseret News, May 3, 2013, http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865579364/FromBook-of-Mormon-musical-to-Mormon-convert.html?pg=all;
Liza Morong, “The Book of Mormon Musical, and the Conversion that Took Place
Because of it,” Liza: Happy, Theatrical and Mormon (blog), April 11, 2013,
http://lizamorong.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-book-of-mormon-musical-and.html.
5
Mia Lovheim, “Identity,” in Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New
Media Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2013), 41.
6
Emil Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1995).
120
7
Campbell, Digital Religion, 3-4; Lovheim, “Identity,” 49.
8
Ibid; Stewart Hoover and Nabil Eschaibi, “The ‘Third Spaces’ of Digital Religion,”
Center For Media, Religion, and Culture, University of Colorado Boulder. Last accessed
June 13, 2013, http://cmrc.colorado.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Third-SapcesEssay-Draft-Final.pdf;
9
Lovheim, “Identity,” 41-43.
10
Daniel Stout, Media and Religion (New York: Routledge, 2012), 19.
11
Lovheim, “Identity,” 47.
12
Miczek, “Go Online!,” 215.
13
Lovheim, “Identity,” 51.
14
John Lynch, “’Prepare to Believe’: The Creation Museum as Embodied Conversion
Narrative,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 16, no. 1 (2013), 3.
15
Rosemary Avance, “Seeing the Light: Mormon Conversion and Deconversion
Narratives in Off- and Online Worlds,” Journal of Media and Religion 12, no. 1 (2013),
18.
16
Ibid, 19-20; Eric A. Eliason, “Toward the Folkloristic Study of
Latter-day Saint Conversion Narratives,” BYU Studies 38, no. 1 (1999): 142.
17
Buchanan, “Musical to Mormon Convert;” Natalie O’Neil, “Theatergoer Converts to
Mormon Faith after Seeing 'The Book of Mormon,’” New York Post, May 16, 2013,
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/way_of_the_lord_ClnuOmNhyVzpsBJWTwvBPM;
Eric Randall, “Months After Seeing ‘Book of Mormon,’ Suffolk Student Converts to
Mormonism,” Boston Magazine, May 15, 2013,
121
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2013/05/15/months-after-seeing-book-ofmormon-suffolk-student-converts-to-mormonism/; Hunter Stuart, “Liza Morong, College
Student, Converts To Mormonism After Seeing 'Book Of Mormon,’” Huffington Post,
May 10, 2013.
18
Buchanan, “‘Musical to Mormon Convert.”
19
Lynch, “Prepare to Believe,” 3-4.
20
Nancy T. Ammerman, “Religious Identities and Religious Institutions,” in Handbook
of the Sociology of Religion, ed. Dillon, M. (UK: Cambridge University Press), 213.
21
Morong, “Book of Mormon Musical.”
22
Buchanan, “Musical to Mormon Convert;” Stan L. Albrecht and Howard M. Bahr
found that less than one percent of Mormon converts residing in Utah came from faiths
outside of Christianity. See Stan L. Albrecht and Howard M. Bahr, “Patterns of Religious
Disaffiliation: A Study of Lifelong Mormons, Mormon Converts, and Former Mormons,”
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 22, no. 4 (1983), 373.
23
Morong, “Book of Mormon Musical.”
24
Ibid.
25
The Deseret News, where Morong’s story was first reported, is an LDS Church-owned
newspaper based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Further research should investigate exactly how
Morong’s story was initially found by the Deseret News.
26
Buchanan, “Musical to Mormon Convert.”
27
Morong, “Book of Mormon Musical.”
28
Buchanan, “Musical to Mormon Convert.”
122
29
Joseph Walker, “LDS Church is Smart to Reach Out to 'Book of Mormon' Musical
Audiences, Priest Says,” Deseret News, May 16, 2013,
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865580156/LDS-Church-is-smart-to-reach-out-toBook-of-Mormon-musical-audiences-priest-says.html?pg=all.
30
Ibid.
31
Angela Lankford, “A New Full-time Mission Call: Online Missionary,” LDS Living,
December 15, 2010, http://www.ldsliving.com/story/63052-a-new-full-time-mission-callonline-missionary.
32
Buchanan, “Musical to Mormon Convert.”
33
Liza Morong, “Hi I’m Liza,” Mormon.Org (personal profile), last accessed June 13,
2013, http://mormon.org/me/b9fv.
34
Morong, “Book of Mormon Musical;” Buchanan, “Musical to Mormon Convert.”
35
Ibid.
36
Preach my Gospel: A Guide to Missionary Service (Salt Lake City: The Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2004), 39, 49.
37
Buchanan, “Musical to Mormon Convert.”
38
Gary Shepherd and Gordon Shepherd, Mormon Passage: A Missionary Chronicle
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 99-106.
39
M. Russell Ballard, “The Hand of Fellowship,” LDS.org, last modified October 1988,
last accessed June 15, 2013, https://www.lds.org/general-conference/1988/10/the-handof-fellowship?lang=eng.
123
40
LDS Apostle M. Russell Ballard encouraged Church members to share the gospel
through social media and in particular to “use stories and words that [outsiders] will
understand.” See M. Russell Ballard, “Sharing the Gospel using the Internet,” Ensign,
July 2008.
41
Shanna Butler, Adam Olson, and Roger Terry, “Preaching His Gospel,” Ensign,
September 2005.
42
Morong, “Book of Mormon Musical.”
43
LDS.org hosts a searchable database of official Church publications including the Holy
Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price, General
Conference addresses and all other official Church magazines, handbooks, manuals and
gospel literature dating back to 1830.
44
Ibid.
45
Kerstin Radde-Antweiler, “Authenticity,” in Digital Religion: Understanding Religious
Practice in New Media Worlds, ed. Heidi Campbell (New York: Routledge, 2013), 97.
46
Ibid.
47
Ibid, 96-97.
48
Ibid, 98.
49
Ibid, 97.
50
John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 58.
51
Ibid; Morong, “Book of Mormon Musical.”
52
Nina Lewis, “Peace my Brother,” Liahona, August 1988.
124
53
Morong, “Book of Mormon Musical;” Buchanan, “Musical to Mormon Convert.”
54
Ibid.
55
Ibid.
56
Eliason, “Conversion Narratives,” 143.
57
Ibid.
58
Ibid.
59
Buchanan, “Musical to Mormon Convert.”
60
Morong, “Book of Mormon Musical.”
61
Ibid.
62
Buchanan, “Musical to Mormon Convert;” Joanna Brooks argues, “Crying and choking
up are understood by Mormons as manifestations of the Holy Spirit. For men at every
rank of Mormon culture and visibility, appropriately-timed displays of tender emotion are
displays of power.” See Joanna Brooks, “Mormonism and Glenn Beck’s Tears,” New
York Times, October 26, 2009, http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/mormonismand-glenn-becks-tears/. While shedding tears is an integral part of Mormon culture, I
personally do not equate acceptance of this practice as an inherent manifestation of
power.
63
See chapter two of this thesis, p. 19-22.
64
Benjamin E. Park, “Salvation Through a Tabernacle: Joseph Smith, Parley P. Pratt, and
Early Mormon Theologies of Embodiment,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought
43, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 5-6; John Durham Peters, “Reflections on Mormon
Materialism,” Sunstone, March 1993, 48.
125
65
Buchanan, “Musical to Mormon Convert.”
66
Ibid.
67
Liza Morong, “Baptism,” Liza: Happy, Theatrical and Mormon (blog), January 1,
2012, http://lizamorong.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-0101T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2013-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=4.
68
Morong, “Book of Mormon Musical.”
69
As of May 22, 2013, Morong’s conversion narrative has been told in Deseret News,
New York Post, Huffington Post, Boston Magazine, Mail Online, and Gawker.
70
Heather Whittle Wrigely, “Mormon.org Now Available in 20 Languages,” LDS
Church News and Events, September 12, 2012,
https://www.lds.org/church/news/mormonorg-now-available-in-20-languages.
71
Ibid.
72
Trent Toone, “Panel Discusses ‘I’m a Mormon’ Campaign at BYU Symposium,”
Deseret News, last modified November 9, 2012,
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865566404/Panel-discusses-Im-a-Mormoncampaign-at-BYU-symposium.html?pg=all.
73
Chiung Hwang Chen, “Marketing Religion Online: The LDS Church's SEO Efforts,”
Journal of Media and Religion 10, no. 4, (2011): 85-205.
74
Emmilie Buchanan, “Inspired Question, 'Book of Mormon' Musical Leads to Former
California Mayor's Conversion,” Deseret News, May 13, 2013,
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865579813/Inspired-question-Book-of-Mormonmusical-leads-to-former-California-mayors-conversion.html.
126
75
Ibid.
76
Ibid.
77
Ibid.
78
Ibid.
79
Ibid.
80
Morong, “Book of Mormon Musical;” Buchanan, “Inspired Question.”
81
Ibid.
82
Ibid.
83
Campbell, Digital Religion, 1-3.
84
Ibid.
85
Lynn Clark, Stewart Hoover and Lee Rainie, “Faith Online,” Pew Internet, last
modified April 7, 2004, http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2004/Faith-Online.aspx.
86
Radde-Antweiler, “Authenticity,” 98.
87
Eliason, “Conversion Narratives,” 143.
88
According to Buchanan, Marcus has already been given an assignment as a priesthood
quorum secretary and actively participates in missionary work. See Buchanan, “Inspired
Question.”
89
Buchanan, “Musical to Mormon Convert.”
90
Ibid.
91
Lankford, “Online Missionary.”
92
Missionary Handbook (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, 2006), 13-15.
127
93
Thomas J. Boud, “Physical Prep Tips for Missionaries,” LDS Living, September 27,
2011, http://www.ldsliving.com/story/65995-physical-prep-tips-for-missionaries.
94
Peggy Fletcher-Stack, “Online LDS Missionaries Seek Converts in the Virtual World,”
Salt Lake Tribune, April 2, 2009, last accessed http://www.sltrib.com/faith/ci_12055813.
95
Ibid.
96
Ibid; Chen, “Marketing Religion.”
97
Ibid.
98
Lankford, “Online Missionary;” Fletcher-Stack, “Online LDS Missionaries;” Dallas
Knox, “Tyson Boardman Documentary,” YouTube video, 4:10, October 29, 2010,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQIQzB7wMwE.
99
Scott Taylor, “Select Group of Missionaries Serving Online,” Deseret News, March 23,
2011, http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700120917/Select-group-of-missionariesserving-online.html?pg=all.
100
Ibid; Ibid.
101
Ibid. The Church obtains parental permission before chatting with anyone under the
age of 18.
102
Ibid; Hales, “Statistical Report.” The average number of baptisms per missionary from
1940 to 1994 was 5.8. See Gordon Shepherd and Gary Shepherd, “Membership Growth,
Church Activity, and Missionary Recruitment,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought
29, no. 1 (1996): 35.
103
Taylor, “Select Group.”
128
104
“Missionary Program,” Mormon News Room, last accessed June 14, 2013,
http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/topic/missionary-program.
105
Taylor, “Select Group.”
106
Ibid.
107
Ibid.
108
Mormon.org/chat.
109
Fletcher-Stack, “Online LDS Missionaries.”
110
Ibid.
111
Peggy Fletcher-Stack, “LDS Church Sees Potential in Proselytizing Online,” Salt Lake
Tribune, July 16, 2010,
http://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=10212967&itype=storyID.
112
Ibid.
113
Scott Taylor, “Mormon Missionary Work Moving Online,” Deseret News, July 14,
2010, http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700048228/Mormon-missionary-workmoving-online.html?pg=all.
114
Ibid.
115
Fletcher-Stack, “LDS Church Sees.”
116
Taylor, “Mormon Missionary Work.”
117
Ibid; Fletcher-Stack, “LDS Church Sees;” Buchanan, “Musical to Mormon Convert;”
Morong, “Book of Mormon Musical;” Chen, “Marketing Religion.”
118
Lovheim, “Identity,” 41; Mizcek, “Go Online!.”
119
Ibid.
129
120
Eliason, “Conversion Narratives,” 143; Avance, “Seeing the Light,” 18.
121
Ibid; Radde-Antweiler, “Authenticity,” 98.
122
Morong, “Book of Mormon Musical;” Buchanan, “Musical to Mormon Convert;”
Buchanan, “Inspired Question.”
123
Ibid.
124
Buchanan, “Musical to Mormon Convert.”
125
Taylor, “Mormon Missionary Work.”
126
Fletcher-Stack, “LDS Church Sees.”
130
CHAPTER 5
SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO
LDS MISSIONARY SERVICE Introduction
I have explored the potential changes in LDS proselytization communication in
relation to new media technologies thus far, but there are other important challenges
engagement with such technology poses for the LDS Church on a bigger scale including
the following: maintaining hierarchical control, balancing assimilation and retrenchment
and missionary service as an instrument of socialization. These challenges are central to
the structure, cultural identity and vitality of the LDS Church particularly because of its
unique face-to-face proselyting tradition and its seemingly never-ending struggle to
combat a negative public perception. In many ways, the missionary program represents
the face of the LDS Church to the public and is thus intricately connected to broader
social and cultural issues the Church grapples with. In addition to the external nature of
LDS proselytizing, the internal impact missionary service has on those that serve and
their future in the Church is intricately connected to the leadership structure and vitality
of the religion.1 Thus, the LDS Church’s missionary communication strategy cannot be
separated from the larger social and cultural history of the Church. Indeed, to study LDS
missionary work is to study the history of the LDS Church itself.2
131
This chapter first explores general challenges to traditional Church hierarchy the
utilization of new technologies such as blogging pose. The next section presents the
sociological frame of Church-wide retrenchment and assimilation as useful way to
understand how the use of new technologies is connected to broader historical patterns of
the Church’s political and cultural identity. Part of this section gives special attention to
the “I’m a Mormon” advertising campaign and what it entails for Church public
perception and internal communication. The next section looks at LDS missionary
service as an instrument of socialization and a rite of passage for Mormon men and how
new online proselytizing initiatives might threaten the effectiveness of the mission ritual
within Church. Finally and most importantly, I address the significance of the dialogic
nature of missionary teaching and testifying at the heart of the LDS missionary program,
explaining why the LDS Church’s proselytizing strategy continues to prize face-to-face
communication as the supreme form of missionary communication.
Using a sociological frame to view the LDS Church’s missionary communication
strategy sheds light on how this strategy is historically, culturally and sociologically
embedded in the Church as a whole. The changes in the Church’s missionary
communication strategy I have explored through out this thesis inevitably impact the
structure and vitality of the religion. The changing role of new media technology not only
influences how the Church communicates its message to the world; it also directly affects
communication within the Church, amongst members and leaders. Because Mormon
missionary service operates as an instrument of socialization, the relationship
missionaries have with media technology during their service will influence their future
role as lay leaders in the Church.3 Eventually every part of the Church will be affected by
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the decisions now being made regarding the use new media technology in missionary
communication.
LDS Hierarchy
Since its beginning, the LDS Church has been organized in a hierarchical
structure of patriarchal power and control. The power to make decisions begins with the
president and prophet, a single man who is supported by two counselors comprising the
First Presidency. Working closely with the First Presidency is a body of 12 apostles,
often referred to as the Quorum of the Twelve.4 These 15 men, along with the first of
eight Quorums of Seventy (70 men in each) referred to as the general authority of the
LDS Church, oversee all spiritual and material operations of the LDS Church throughout
the world.5 The remaining seven Quorums of Seventy are distributed as geographic area
authorities, working directly with local leaders.6 At the local level LDS Church clergy is
completely unpaid and is split into stakes and then wards or branches, overseen
respectively by a stake presidency and a bishopbric or branch presidency.7 Decisions and
appointments (referred to as “callings”) are made in a top-down fashion, always coming
from above.8 The governing body of the LDS Church is selected by direct
ordination/appointment by those in control rather than by vote.9 This rigid hierarchy
continues as the dominant model for LDS Church operations.
Sociologists of religion have recently argued that centralized, hierarchical
religious denominations are losing power to influence the religious lives of their
members.10 The term de facto congregationalism is used to describe the religious
movement supplanting hierarchical control with grassroots level autonomy over
congregational operations.11 The concept of a congregation within much of American
133
Christianity has slowly become more symbolic than geographic, offering greater
flexibility for individual members.12 This turn toward more individualistic worship in
American religious organizations has been seen as a sign of religious vitality and
progress.13 However, within the LDS Church, the 1970s and 80s mark a period of
worldwide “correlation” of Church operations coupled with a conservative political turn
and increased social peculiarity in reaction to the counterculture movement in America.14
The correlation movement centralized LDS operations worldwide by reigning in local
autonomy and flexibility, precisely the opposite of de facto congregationalism.15
While a number of Mormon feminists and sociologists see the correlation
movement as an effort to usurp power from local congregations and women, on the
contrary, some scholars see it as necessary for a rapidly expanding church organization
resulting in greater opportunities for women.16 Rick Philips, for example, argues that the
LDS Church’s correlation and increased centralization has led to significant Church
growth, unique unity among members worldwide and unusual religious vitality.17 While
correlation worked to increase the Church’s hierarchical control, there is evidence that
new forms of social media such as blogging are challenging such organizational control
in unique ways.
As the LDS Church enters what some scholars see as more decentralized
communication environments online, challenges to its geographically based hierarchy
must also be considered.18 The Internet and social media have been seen optimistically as
helping in the creation of an online participatory culture bridging previous socio-political,
gender and geographic hindrances.19 While most agree that the Internet has democratic
potential, the extent to which such potential has been realized is highly debated.20 By the
134
same token, scholars of media and religion have argued that the Internet challenges
traditional religious authority by expanding resource access and supporting new positions
of power.21 In expanding access to religious information previously reserved for elite
leaders, Internet technology can “undermine the plausibility structure of a religious
system,” and possibly displace traditional religious authoritarian control.22
Aware of such threats to its hierarchical structure, the LDS Church went online
cautiously by initially creating websites focused more on information than interactivity.23
Rather than using the Web as a space for interactive religious worship the LDS Church
limited its use to information dissemination. However, the recent move to online
proselytizing, use of social media and the “I’m a Mormon” campaign illustrate the
Church’s immersion in murkier waters. How can a church with a geographically based
hierarchy maintain control over its laity in a digital world where physical boundaries
increasingly evanesce?
The LDS Church has explicitly and actively encouraged its members to use social
media to share their beliefs but it hasn’t handed over control just yet.24 The LDS Church
exercises control online partly through censorship. The Church screens members’
Mormon.org personal profiles, uses Facebook’s friend function to supervise missionary
Facebook use and when needed, censors the content of missionaries’ chats online.25
Future monitoring and censorship efforts will likely take on increased importance among
top leaders as the LDS Church experiments with new media.
The Bloggernacle
An area outside of the authoritarian control of the LDS Church, however, is the
“Bloggernacle;” an emic term for the Mormon blogosphere.26 The term itself is a
135
declaration of Mormon attitudes towards the Internet and social media: Bloggernacle
comes from combing the word blogosphere with the word tabernacle, connecting an
ancient, sacred space for religious worship with narrative self-expression online. The
LDS Church’s rich history of personal record and journal keeping and its quick adoption
of new technology make it no surprise that members of the Church are actively blogging
about their beliefs. LDS Church leaders have even encouraged members to use blogging
to share their faith online.27 But blogging, in particular presents a problem for Church
hierarchy.
Recent research has shown that blogging offers “the freedom to express personal
views on public religious issues, and the capacity to create global networks to share
information and resources,” and an alternative space for previously excluded and silenced
voices to be heard. 28 While most social media use encouraged by the LDS Church falls
within the reigns of its official websites and social media pages, unofficial Mormon
blogging within the Bloggernacle, creates an online space removed from traditional
structures of control and power where orthodox, heterodox and anti-Mormon beliefs are
commonly exchanged.29 The Bloggernacle offers a platform for the previously
marginalized voices of female, heterodox and ex-Mormons.30
John Durham Peters argues, “when the [LDS] Church sees itself as in charge,
enlightenment beckons; when others are, then despair.”31 Stout points out how official
Church websites are highly controlled to protect hierarchical power, yet, by encouraging
its members to use blogging as a tool for sharing their beliefs the Church indirectly
exposes its laity to dissenting and resenting voices, giving away a portion of control to a
sea of unpredictability.32 Rosemary Avance argues that exposure to anti-Mormon
136
sentiment within the Bloggernacle can serve as a catalyst for deconversion.33 Avance’s
study of Mormon off- and online conversion narratives found that the Internet acts as a
“sanctuary” for heterodox and former Mormons as they explore and develop new
religious identities and subsequent communities of support.34 The Bloggernacle then
should be viewed as a community space reinforcing the beliefs of the faithful, uncertain
and opposed and thus a potential threat to the LDS Church’s hegemonic status quo.35
The LDS Church has long fought to shield its members from deleterious media
content but it seems it has no choice if it is to continue to garner the grassroots search
engine optimization (SEO) support it gets from members blogging their faith.36 LDS
SEO, while extremely successful in overpowering anti-Mormon websites with basic
promotional information about Mormonism, has produced only a narrow lead in search
result rankings on more complex and controversial historical Mormon issues.37 The
prevalence of heterodox and anti-Mormon blogs contributes to higher search rankings for
controversial issues, pitting such blogs directly against SEO efforts. Thus, for its SEO
efforts to effectively eclipse anti-Mormon content, the Church will need to continue
pushing members into potentially harmful territory online.
Perhaps the real challenge for the LDS Church in maintaining its cultural history
of record keeping and gospel sharing while continuing its SEO operation in an
unregulated blogosphere is, as Parshall argues, internal media literacy.38 The potential
dangers of the blogosphere can’t be avoided if the LDS Church wants to compete for a
dominant position in the battlefield of SEO. Further, its cultural traditions of missionary
work and journal and record keeping have been naturally extended to online worlds. As
the LDS Church continues to adopt new technology for proselytizing, media literacy
137
increases in importance. Didactic approaches to media use are a consistent part of
Mormon historical discourse and teachings but the pervasive nature of social media and
digital environments make distinguishing between appropriate and inappropriate media
content and use difficult. What was once a seemingly straightforward task encouraging
members to avoid harmful media such as daytime soap operas, R rated movies and
pornography has become increasingly complex on an unregulated Internet where danger
is “only a mouse click away.”39 Recently, a member of the LDS First Presidency
admonished members in a General Conference address to “blog and text message the
gospel to all the world,” then quickly added, “But please remember, all at the right time
and at the right place.”40 Determining when and where the “right” times and places begin
and end, however, will be a difficult task for the LDS Church.
The LDS Church’s media literacy challenges are further evident through LDS
apostle David A. Bednar’s recent address about the dangers of virtual reality.41 Speaking
to LDS young adults worldwide, Bednar notes the theological significance in having a
physical body as part of spiritual development and growth while preaching against online
anonymity and the dangers of cyber relationships.42 But what about missionaries
proselytizing online? Disembodied, separated by unknown distances and identified by
first name only—does Bednar’s counsel contradict the Mormon.org chat room and LDS
missionaries’ cyber relationships with potential converts?43 The Church views online
proselytizing not as a substitute for physical relationships, as Bednar warns against, but
as a starting point for future face-to-face visits from missionaries; the sooner the latter
happens the better.44 However, a dualistic approach to defining “cyber relationships” is
quickly antiquating as relationships increasingly cross off- and online spaces fluidly.45
138
Bednar refers specifically to the virtual reality platform Second Life but doesn’t
mention blogging or other social media Church members have been counseled to utilize
in sharing the gospel, leaving room for potential confusion among members.46 The LDS
Church is directing its members to use any and all social media to share their beliefs but
to avoid anonymity and the pursuit of cyber relationships as substitutes for physical ones;
certainly a difficult and potentially confusing task for members.47 To be effective in
maintaining hierarchical control and cultural tradition, the LDS Church must speak more
explicitly about the dangers of social media use, particularly blogging.
Assimilation and Retrenchment
The LDS Church’s challenge to maintain hierarchical control can also be viewed
as part of the organization’s historical struggle to balance its identity through periodic
assimilation and retrenchment.48 Sociologist Armand Mauss has theorized this pattern of
assimilation and retrenchment arguing that the Church spent much of the first half of the
20th century “Americanizing” itself only to reverse course through a subsequent
retrenchment lasting until only very recently.49 Mauss maintains that retrenchment is
primarily an internal process working to build exceptionalism and exclusivity among
members of the Church.50 Thus, the LDS Church’s “growth and prosperity depend upon
finding and maintaining an optimum level of tension on a continuum between disrepute
and respectability.”51 This larger pattern of assimilation and retrenchment is a helpful
framework for understanding the LDS Church’s contemporary relationship with
proselytizing and technology.
The LDS Church’s current use of online social media as missionary tools
contributes to a possible Church-wide re-assimilation movement. Mauss recently posited
139
that the LDS Church shows several signs of re-assimilation including the watering-down
of controversial doctrine; subtly retreating from claims of prophetic infallibility;
increasing flexibility in gender roles including softening attitudes towards homosexuality;
and the embracing of non-member Mormon scholarship.52 The Church’s “I’m a
Mormon” media campaign is perhaps the most convincing evidence of re-assimilation.53
I’m a Mormon Campaign
In 2008, the LDS Church began extensive research on American public
perception of its members. 54 After hiring two major advertising agencies to help conduct
large survey and focus group studies, the results alarmed Church leaders.55 The study
revealed that many Christians with similar beliefs and lifestyles as Mormons were
unaware of the LDS Church while those who were aware had already developed negative
perceptions of the Church; respondents used words such as “sexist,” “cultish,”
“secretive,” “pushy” and “anti-gay” to describe the LDS Church. 56 Shortly thereafter, the
Church launched the multi-million advertising campaign featuring the tagline “I’m a
Mormon” to challenge negative stereotypes by depicting Mormons as everyday people.57
The campaign consists of a diversity of Mormon profiles displayed across
Internet, television and billboard advertisements directing people to Mormon.org.58 Once
on Mormon.org, onlookers can search over 100,000 individually created Mormon
profiles by age, gender, ethnicity and key word to find short profile narratives explaining
how each Mormon lives his/her faith.59 The Church’s missionary department
spokesperson calls the campaign a “360 degree look at Mormonism” to “[help] people
understand better who Mormons are, how they live their lives.”60 In a national press
release, an LDS Church General Authority called the campaign an effort to focus “more
140
on who we are because of what we believe;” the campaign gives special attention to the
lives of individual Mormons rather than simply telling the world the Church’s beliefs as
in times past.61 The primary aim of the campaign is to portray Mormons as everyday
American Christians, in line with societal trends, in hopes of altering public attitudes
toward the LDS Church.62
The LDS Church has strategically introduced the campaign throughout major U.S.
cities, Australia and Europe. After testing the campaign in nine U.S. cities, the New York
City campaign launched, 40-foot Times Square billboard and all, just a few months after
the Broadway Musical The Book of Mormon premiere, timing the Church called an effort
to “be a part of the conversation.”63 In April 2013, the Church launched the campaign in
the United Kingdom and Ireland in expensive advertisement spaces including a 60-foot
digital billboard at one of London’s busiest train stations.64 The media blitz, according to
Church employees has proven successful in driving increased traffic to Mormon.org,
especially through mobile devices.65
Rather than sharing doctrine or enticing people to order official Church
publications as the Church had focused on in the past, the “I’m a Mormon” campaign
aims first to reverse existing stereotypes before bringing theology into the picture.66
Brandon Burton, president of the Church-owned advertising agency heading the
campaign notes that doctrine is only introduced when individuals seek it out through
Mormon.org.67 Burton believes that, “in order for people to have a desire to understand
doctrinally what the church stands for, it was necessary for us to overcome the stigmas
that existed.”68 The campaign broadly disseminates information aimed at overcoming
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pre-existing negative perceptions as an initial step toward the ultimate goal of future faceto-face missionary meetings.
Though the disseminative nature of the “I’m a Mormon” campaign follows
Mormonism’s traditional pattern of proselytizing communication, the overarching
cultural message presents significant challenges for the LDS Church’s recent move
toward re-assimilation. The campaign’s portrayal of Mormon womanhood is a
particularly important node of historical and political tension. The promotion of working
mothers is perhaps ahead of its Mormon cultural time and is not yet reflected in
established Mormon doctrine and teachings on family and gender roles.
In 1995, the LDS Church explicitly penned its conservative stance toward family
and gender in a document called “The Family: A Proclamation to the World”69
(abbreviated here on as Proclamation). In the Proclamation, marriage is defined as an
exclusively heterosexual relationship, gender is described as an “essential characteristic
of individual…identity and purpose,” and gender roles are outlined in the following
statement:
By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and
righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection
for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their
children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help
one another as equal partners.70
In contrast to the Proclamation’s unequivocally patriarchal language, a number of recent
“I’m a Mormon” campaign videos celebrate unconventional Mormon womanhood. While
the Proclamation emphasizes women’s roles as mothers first and foremost, several “I’m a
Mormon” campaign videos feature talented professional women, working full-time
without any mention of motherhood.71 I analyzed three such videos from Mormon.org’s
142
official YouTube channel to see how each subverts traditional Mormon conceptions of
womanhood.
The first video portrays a young, African-American urban schoolteacher.72 The
second, a former ballerina turned New York fashion design entrepreneur.73 The third, an
Aerial dancer and divorcee living in London.74 None of the women mention motherhood
and the only one to mention marriage reveals she is a divorcee. Instead of focusing on
their nurturing qualities, the women in the campaign videos are successful professionals;
happy with the careers their lives seemingly revolve around. Views of the three videos
each reach above 75,000, and the highest nearly 170,000.
Far from outliers, the three videos above are a representation of how womanhood
is portrayed in the “I’m a Mormon” campaign videos online. Of the 56 campaign videos
featuring women only 22 talk about their roles as mothers and of those, 13 are working
mothers.75 The majority of the videos, roughly 61 percent, resemble the three
professional women’s video profiles. Thus, videos portraying women as talented and
successful professionals are certainly not exceptions but an important part of the “I’m a
Mormon” campaign’s message about evolving Mormon womanhood.
Perhaps the “I’m a Mormon” campaign signals, as Mauss argues, a broader
Church-wide shift toward more flexible gender roles as part of the organization’s recent
re-assimilation effort.76 In addition to the videos I analyzed, Mauss points to several
instances where high Church leaders have defended working mothers in important
General Conference addresses.77 Tina Hatch also notes the expanding role of women in
the LDS Church.78 The recent missionary age policy change has most significantly
impacted Mormon women whose missionary service applications are currently
143
surpassing the number of men’s applications.79 Far from a complete cultural shift away
from patriarchy, however, the LDS Church’s hierarchy is still governed by the
exclusively male priesthood. Thus, the “I’m a Mormon” campaign makes clear the need
for the LDS Church to carefully manage the political and cultural tension between
traditional doctrinal patriarchy and its desire to assimilate with a more liberal American
public.
The chat feature on Mormon.org also illustrates the challenge for the LDS Church
in managing the tension between fitting in and remaining peculiar. Indeed, as covered in
the previous chapter, Mormon.org’s chat room functions intentionally as an informal
space nearly devoid of established Mormon tradition where missionaries are known by
first name only, use colloquial computer language and converse casually with interested
site users.80 By encouraging its missionaries to use Facebook and other social media to
find interested persons, the LDS Church seeks to break down negative stereotypes and
preconceived notions by meeting users in their digital territory. However, balancing
social media assimilation with the Church’s proselytizing goals is dangerous.
On one hand the LDS Church’s use of online proselytizing offers a new and less
formal avenue for initial contact when compared to traditional door-to-door approaches,
on the other hand, by coming across as too casual, informal and trendy the Church risks
respectability and peculiarity in its claim as the only true church of God on the earth.81
From the Church’s perspective, a number of critical questions present themselves. While
meeting a missionary online and exchanging superficial conversation about the Church
can be beneficial for the casual inquirer, if the conversation stops there has the LDS
Church lost its chance for persuasion and conversion? Likewise, has the inquirer gained
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any valuable insight into the Church or merely scratched a hip new public relations
surface leaving with little more than memory of a friendly chat online? When asked if she
hadn’t attended the Book of Mormon Broadway Musical would she still have found the
LDS Church, convert Liza Morong said, “I believe that if the Lord wanted me to find the
gospel, I would have found it eventually.”82 Morong’s perspective is shared by many
Mormon converts who’ve claimed “I didn’t find God; he found me.”83 While a convert
has every right to feel this way, such a belief does little to improve the Church’s
understanding of the role of advertising and media technology in the conversion process.
Still, questions about the effectiveness and cultural implications of the “I’m a
Mormon campaign” remain as the Church moves further toward re-assimilation. Is the
LDS Church giving up too much of its tradition in the bargain for banality? At what point
will Church leaders pull the plug on the push to alter public perception through social
media and advertising? If the past is any indication of the future, the Church’s struggle
for identity will likely continue along the pattern of assimilation and retrenchment. Thus,
rather than viewing the “I’m a Mormon” campaign as internally contradictory, it should
be viewed as an indication of growing pains.
A Rite of Passage and an Instrument of Socialization
In addition to hierarchical and cultural challenges, online proselytizing initiatives
could possibly disrupt the LDS Church’s use of missionary service as a rite of passage
and instrument of socialization. Doctrinally, socially and structurally the LDS Church
depends upon missionary work.84 Rather than viewing Mormon missionary work as
strictly outward evangelization, the cultural tradition works as a strong tool for internal
socialization. The transformative influence of missionary service on the missionary is
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well documented in various Christian faiths but is institutionalized on a much larger scale
within the LDS Church, making the cultural significance and socialization of LDS
missionaries unique.85
In order to understand how LDS missionary socialization works one must first
understand why it is such an important part of the LDS Church organization. Missionary
socialization is important because it is critical for the entire hierarchical structure of the
LDS Church.86 Top Church leaders are primarily former missionaries from family
pedigrees rich in LDS missionary service. The continuation of Mormonism in large part
depends on both the converts brought to the Church by missionaries and the socialization
of the same missionaries in the process, making missionary service “the single most
important cultural practice for maintaining the generational continuity of Mormon
society.”87 It is the lay clergy at the heart of the LDS Church that necessitates that young
men learn how lead, and leaving home to voluntarily represent the Church for two years
has proven an extremely successful tool for socializing future leaders.88 Historian Jan
Shipps notes, “The missionary program is as much about training Mormon youngsters to
be adult Latter-day Saints as in the search for converts to the faith.”89 Thus, expectations
are high and the pay off for the Church worth the investment.
When asked if every young Mormon male should serve a mission, former LDS
prophet Spencer W. Kimball replied emphatically, “‘Yes, every worthy young man90
should fill a mission.’ The Lord expects it of him.”91 Those inside the Church are well
familiar with the inescapable social pressure for missionary service males experience
from toddlerhood through adulthood.92 The Church’s structural dependence upon former
missionaries and concomitant expectation for missionary service necessitates the creation
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of what sociologist Peter Berger calls a plausibility structure wherein missionary work
becomes a normative part of Mormon life.93 Shepherd and Shepherd attribute the success
of Mormon missionary socialization to the Church’s ability to enlist its entire
membership in carrying out “a complex of church organizations, programs, campaigns,
publications and service opportunities, all of which are institutionally linked to Mormon
family life.”94 Indeed, Mormons believe it takes a Mormon village to raise a future
Mormon missionary.
The 18 to 24 months of missionary service usually take place between ages 18 to
30 but missionary socialization occurs throughout Mormon childhood. From an early age
Mormon children sing “I hope they call me on a mission.”95 While serving, missionaries
are often invited to visit children’s Sunday school classes of local congregations to share
missionary-oriented messages aimed at inspiring the children for missionary service some
10-15 years in the future.96 In addition to Church-sponsored efforts, the practice of home
religious observance has been attributed to the LDS Church’s success in mobilizing its
large volunteer missionary force.97 Formal rites and rituals within Mormonism also lead
to missionary service; age-related rituals see that children are baptized at age eight and
that boys obtain the priesthood at age 12 in order to prepare for missionary service at ages
18-19.98 Through a life of “anticipatory socialization,” the large majority of male
Mormon adolescents that have made the decision to serve a mission did so before
graduating high school; many recall, “that they could never remember when they had not
planned to go on a mission.”99
Rites of passage are traditionally identified as having three sequential stages:
separation, transition and incorporation.100 At a macro level, the physical separation,
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period of spiritual and physical testing, and subsequent return to congregational
incorporation of an LDS mission closely resembles the three-stage formula of traditional
rites of passage but can also be seen at a micro level as a developmental phase in the
“Mormon career sequence” with various rites of passages occurring along the way.101
Viewing missionary service itself as a rite of passage illustrates the make-or-break
nature of the ritual. Those raised in the Church that choose not to serve often use the
decision as an outward manifestation of cumulating alienation and subsequently leave the
Mormon community while others are severed through social stigmatization.102 On the
other hand, successful missionaries are honored for their service and gain membership
into an exclusive social group Wilson calls “one of the most cohesive and enduring in the
Mormon community.”103 They join the ranks of others with the title “returned
missionary” and become part a lifelong spiritual, cultural and even professional
network.104 Conversations among Latter-day Saints often revolve around missionary
service or “the mission,” as it is often referred to, as a defining event in the life of the
missionary.105
Successful missionary service is seen as setting LDS men toward a path of
commitment and devotion. McClendon and Chadwick note that within the LDS Church,
members “expect that returned missionaries are spiritually grounded, that they ought to
be leaders in the Church, that their homes and families should be stable, and that they
ought to be successful in their schooling and careers.”106 It is clear that the LDS Church
goes to great lengths to see that its young men serve full-time proselytizing missions, in
large part because missionary service changes the missionary and prepares him for a
lifetime of Church service and leadership.
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Understanding LDS missionary service as a rite of passage requires a closer
examination of actual missionary life. From the boot camp-like training at the missionary
training center (MTC) before entering one’s appointed field of labor to the strictly
prescheduled life of rules missionaries must keep while away from home, missionaries
first learn that “obedience is the first law of heaven.”107 Doctrinally, while Mormons see
missionary companionships as fulfilling a commandment of God to preach his word
“two-by-two,” by assigning each missionary a companion with whom he should remain
within sight and sound of at all times, the companionship system functions as the most
basic level of monitoring.108 Daily missionary tasks such as reporting proselytizing
statistics up the chain of command, teach missionaries to obey those above them in the
Church hierarchy of authority. The organizational supervision of LDS missions, under
which missionaries’ daily activities operate, closely mirrors the larger bureaucratic
Church structure. Through “goal-setting and outcome measurement by objective criteria,
standardized and programmatic training, systematic supervision of missionary
performance, and cost-benefit accountability” missionaries learn the American business
ethos imbued in Mormon leadership.109
In their initial “missionary call” (geographic assignment), missionaries are
informed that they are “expected to devote all [their] time and attention to serving the
Lord, leaving behind all other personal affairs.”110 Indeed, the Missionary Handbook and
companion manual, Preach My Gospel, prescribe an obedient missionary’s daily routine
of procedures from start to finish, emphasizing the importance of strict time management
and careful planning during the hours missionaries are responsible to decide.111 “Time is
one of the most precious resources,” they are taught.” 112 Ideally, missionaries plan the
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following day’s activities down to the hour and spend and additional two to three hours in
a weekly planning session.113 Such military-like schedules of time management and
extensive planning instill values of busyness, efficacy and diligence that characterize the
life of high LDS leaders and corporate America.
Much of what LDS missionaries do on a day-to-day basis is outlined for them, but
missionary service also provides young members a one-of-a-kind opportunity to learn
social and cultural norms not explicitly found in the Church handbooks and manuals;
storytelling is one example. William Wilson sees storytelling as integral part of
missionary service and an instrument of socialization, wherein “one becomes a
missionary by learning the canon of missionary stories and eventually by passing them on
to others.114 The stories missionaries share with one another, like all folklore, work to
reinforce specific community ideals, in this case, ideals of faith and obedience.115
Missionary storytelling, Wilson argues, teaches missionaries “the rules on which both
their individual success and the success of the missionary program will
depend…inculcate[ing] in them the attitudes toward the sacred that will guide their
conduct throughout their lives.”116
While traditional Mormon missionary service has been a male responsibility,
women are taking increasingly important roles in missionary work. Missionary service
was first fulfilled by men in the Church who often left wives and children to travel for
undetermined lengths of time preaching the gospel wherever they were assigned.117
Because only males hold the priesthood power necessary for lay Church leadership,
missions have been historically centered on young men rather than young women.118
Although welcomed to the mission field if they decided to serve, women were
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traditionally encouraged to prepare for marriage and motherhood.119 Up until the recent
age change requirement women were required to wait an additional two years (until age
21) before becoming eligible to serve.120 Though not publicly stated by the Church,
Shepherd and Shepherd suggest the age discrepancy was used to create a larger pool of
young women for male missionaries to marry upon returning home from service and as a
way to defray the development of romantic relationships among men and women
missionaries serving in geographic proximity to one another.121
Throughout the 20th century female missionaries have made up anywhere from
15-20 percent of the Mormon missionary force.122 The recent change in missionary age
requirements, however, lowered the minimum age for females from 21 to 19 resulting in
incredible increases in female missionary applications.123 Before the age change, male
missionaries held all leadership positions in the hierarchy led by a male mission
president. However, the Church has also recently created new leadership positions for
sister missionaries giving female missionaries unprecedented power.124 As illustrated
above, the socialization of LDS Church leaders takes place largely through missionary
service; the sudden flux of new sister missionaries taking on unprecedented leadership
opportunities could very well impact the role of women in the entire Church organization.
What I have outlined represents only a few examples of the multi-faceted
experience missionary service is for young members of the LDS Church in order to shed
light on how it works as an instrument of socialization, a rite of passage and a key phase
of development for individuals within the Mormon community. For the LDS Church,
important questions surrounding the relationship between established tradition and new
media technology are worth considering. How is the socialization process of missionary
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service being impacted by recent online proselytizing initiatives? Does online
proselytizing threaten to diminish the effects of missionary conversion and socialization?
Or, on the contrary, does the utilization of social media already familiar to young
members of the LDS Church for missionary work increase the Church’s effectiveness in
converting both outsiders and missionaries? Can missionary work done online qualify as
a cultural rite of passage? Can the Church continue to use missionary service as both an
outward proselytizing tool and an internal instrument of socialization or will it need to
find other methods for socialization to replace traditional face-to-face missionary service?
For finding people to teach in developed countries, chat rooms seem to be
working as more efficient tools. However, they are far from achieving the global access
that would allow for Church-wide implementation. The use of such technologies for
proselytizing does not provide missionaries using them the same physical experiences
that are a traditional and powerful component in explaining why LDS missionary service
is such a successful method of socialization and retention. Shepherd and Shepherd argue
that other traditional approaches for finding people, such as door-to-door contacting,
while less effective are “emphasized as essential to missionary labor, a way to
demonstrate…faith” and discharge the responsibility of preaching the gospel.125 LDS
Church leaders are certain there is something experientially spiritual in the physicality of
traditional face-to-face missionary work that contributes to its power to change the lives
of missionaries.126 The LDS Church’s pressing challenge is not to replace traditional
missionary service for more effective technologies but to find the appropriate balance
between social media use and face-to-face proselytizing in order to maximize the
transformative effect of missionary service in the socialization process.
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While it is clear that the LDS Church invests in the socialization of missionaries
and that such efforts are seen worthy of significant investment, how much of the
socialization and individual conversion that happens through missionary service requires
face-to-face proselytizing? What can and cannot be replaced with the use of new media
technologies? These questions can be answered in part through consideration of the
dialogic nature of missionary teaching and testifying and Mormonism’s theology of a
disembodied Holy Spirit.
Embodied Dialogue
Throughout this thesis I have argued that the LDS missionary communication
strategy, regardless of technological advances, advances hierarchically from disembodied
dissemination to embodied dialogue, from mass communication in the form of
advertising to face-to-face conversation with full-time missionaries. The dialogic nature
of missionary teaching and testifying is in fact a fundamental part of Mormon missionary
service. Making sense of this dialogic exchange so crucial to the missionary experience
necessitates a departure from the sociological vantage point that has dominated this
chapter toward a more theological perspective. From the perspective of the Church,
missionary service is not merely a rite of passage or instrument of socialization but an
individual spiritual journey toward conversion resulting from fulfillment of a
commandment of God to preach.127 Thus, the spiritual implications of the actual meetings
and conversations missionaries have with investigators must be taken into account,
especially if we are to understand why such conversations are the culmination of LDS
missionary communication.
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The term dialogic is used here to describe the mutual spiritual conversion of both
missionary and investigator hoped for in the process of missionary teaching and
testifying rather than to describe the specific nature of individual conversations. It is these
momentary, symbiotic interactions wherein “he that preacheth and he that receiveth,
understand one another, and both are edified and rejoice together” to which all Mormon
missionary work and all LDS communication aspire.128 Mormonism is not alone in its
quest for communication that produces mutual change for the better, understanding and
unity; Peters argues that it was Socrates from which the longing for dialogic
communication as “souls intertwined in reciprocity” was born and has since endured as
the supreme form of both communication and love.129
Mormons believe that their faith and spiritual witness of the truth of their religion
(known as a “testimony”) develops in large part through sharing them with others; thus,
missionary service and more specifically, teaching is the summum bonum of true
conversion to the LDS Church.130 Much like Christ’s famous proverb, “he that loseth his
life for my sake shall find it,” LDS leaders encourage missionaries to share what they
don’t yet have in order to obtain it.131 Rosemary Avance argues that the bearing of
Mormon testimony functions to construct the conversion described; as “factive
performances,” testimonies affect the changes they state.132 The missionary pattern of
instruction is one of teaching and then testifying; missionaries are to teach basic
principles and then add a personal witness of their truth and divinity.133 They are
promised that in teaching the basic principles of LDS theology to investigators and
testifying of their truthfulness, the truth of the principles will be manifested to both
teacher and student by the Holy Ghost,134 giving both an individual spiritual witness, and
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each time further increasing a missionary’s testimony of LDS theology and thereby of the
LDS Church.135
Though missionaries are most often seen searching for interested people to teach,
LDS leaders have recently begun shifting the responsibility of finding to everyday
members of the Church in order to free up more missionary time strictly for teaching;
ideally, local members introduce friends, family and associates already interested in
learning to the missionaries and then accompany the missionaries in their teaching.136 By
repeating the pattern of teaching and testifying daily, thousands of times with any and all
who will listen for a period of 18 to 24 months, Church leaders hope missionaries return
home well grounded in LDS doctrine and culture; prepared for further teaching,
leadership and devotion. While it is only a small part of the larger socialization process,
the mutual missionary/investigator conversion through face-to-face missionary teaching
is the ultimate quest in LDS proselytizing.
The pivotal question is whether or not physical presence is necessary for mutual
conversion to take place. Can an online chat produce the same result? If so, why then is
online communication being used only in the beginning stages of investigator instruction
wherein investigators are ultimately required to meet with local missionaries face-to-face
before joining the LDS Church? Mormonism’s theology of the Holy Ghost assures that
physical presence is not a prerequisite for spiritual communication, for “the Holy Ghost
has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of Spirit. Were it not so, the Holy
Ghost could not dwell in us.”137 The very nature of reading scripture, an act Mormons
like many other Christians consider an opening of the door for heavenly communication,
is a form of disembodied, mass communication wherein author and reader are separated
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at the very least by physical distance and by death most commonly.138 The concept of a
third party, disembodied communicator of heavenly truths, unrestricted by the laws of the
universe as we know them, makes the question of needed physical presence seem
irrelevant and even trivial except for the fact that the geographically based, hierarchical
LDS Church demands that worship be done in person.
As long as the LDS Church continues in weekly in-person worship, for a convert
to become an active participating member of the Church he/she will at some point need to
become acquainted with a local congregation and meetinghouse. From the perspective of
the Church, the sooner the transition from a digital introduction to a face-to-face
exchange with missionaries takes place the better the chances are for a successful
conversion experience to take place for both the missionary and the investigator. While
chat rooms and other social media are changing the way Mormon missionaries find
people to teach, all missionary communication, regardless of how and where it begins,
will ultimately lead to face-to-face meetings.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have discussed the challenges the LDS Church faces by
incorporating digital technology into its evangelical communication with the world. The
decentralization of online communication has forced the Church to find new ways to
maintain hierarchical control while trying to stay technologically abreast. I have pointed
to the Bloggernacle as the foremost example of an emerging social space outside of
traditional Mormon hierarchy. The Bloggernacle is awash with competing voices from all
levels of Mormonism, from the most devout to the most opposed.139 By encouraging its
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members to enter such a contested space, the LDS Church hands interpretational control
of Church doctrinal, cultural and historical controversies over to the online community.
Using Armand Mauss’s theory of assimilation and retrenchment, I have argued
that the LDS Church’s “I’m a Mormon” campaign and recent public initiatives
demonstrate the Church’s efforts to re-assimilate into American culture after years of
social retrenchment.140 Such re-assimilation efforts, however, necessitate that the Church
walk a thin line between becoming too informal and maintaining its cultural heritage. Of
particular importance is the gradual softening of the Church’s conservative patriarchal
conception of womanhood as evidenced in many of the “I’m a Mormon” campaign
videos. The LDS Church missionary program stands at the juncture between a traditional
world of formal face-to-face missionary work and a more informal digital world where
the price of cultural acceptance is dangerously high. Sociologists Mauss and Young both
argue that the LDS Church will only become a world religion if it can “decentralize its
decision-making procedures, become less bureaucratic in local governance, less parochial
in its lifestyle prescriptions, and more tolerant of cultural heterodoxy.”141
I have also viewed LDS missionary service as an instrument of socialization and a
rite of passage. Such a perspective offers insight into the high cultural expectations for
missionary work young men especially face in the Church and what potential
socialization parallels females will face as their participation in missionary services
grows. Those who serve successful missions are initiated into an exclusive social group
with lifelong rewards while those who fail to complete the rite of passage often endure
social stigmatization or disassociate themselves from Mormonism completely.142 The
LDS Church places such emphasis on socializing members through missionary work
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because its lay clergy depends upon indoctrinated, skilled and committed members.143
Thus, missionary service socialization affects the Church’s entire organizational structure
and vitality.144
Lastly, I have shown how missionary teaching works as dialogic process of
mutual conversion for both the missionary and investigator. I have also raised important
questions as to the nature of embodied and disembodied communication with relation to
LDS theology of the Holy Ghost. The face-to-face missionary lessons are the prize of
LDS missionary communication because of the potential for both parties to gain a
spiritual witness of the Church’s teachings while growing together in unity and
understanding. As the line between on and offline worlds becomes more thin, and Latterday Saints continue to engage in social media, the LDS Church’s theological emphasis on
the need for a physical body for spiritual development will take on increasing
significance.
Journeying into digital worlds for proselytizing poses challenges for the LDS
Church to remain theologically and culturally consistent. While an LDS apostle preaches
that the virtual world of Second Life undermines the importance of a physical body
necessary for spiritual growth, at the same time growing numbers of Church missionaries
use Mormon.org to chat online with website visitors.145 On the one hand, LDS leaders
teach, “our relationships with other people, our capacity to recognize and act in
accordance with truth, and our ability to obey the principles and ordinances of the gospel
of Jesus Christ are amplified through our physical bodies.”146 But on the other, Latter-day
Saints are continuously encouraged to use social media such as Twitter, Facebook and
Wordpress to share their testimonies of the gospel with the world.147 Missionaries are
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increasingly using social media as tools for finding people to teach but depend upon
geographically established boundaries of authority to see that these people continue
progressing toward baptism and subsequent Church activity. Such tensions between
physical and digital worlds will only continue to challenge effectiveness of the LDS
Church’s established missionary communication strategy.
Future Research
This thesis is any many ways a starting point for numerous areas of research on
LDS missionary communication and its relationship with new media technology. While
much research on Mormonism has been done in the fields of sociology of religion and
religious studies, the field of Mormon studies stands to benefit greatly from scholars of
communication and media further entering the conversation. Likewise, the LDS Church
can benefit greatly from further investigation into the research areas I have explored in
this thesis.
This thesis has intentionally brought together research from the fields of
sociology; sociology of religion, religious studies, communication studies and media
studies in order to makes sense of a religious institution’s evangelical communication
strategies and the cultural implications of such strategies. Further research should
likewise approach the subject as interdisciplinary in nature. While the field of Mormon
media studies continues to burgeon, the need for comparative studies across religious
traditions is great. The field of Mormon media scholarship is yet in its infancy but has a
promising future ahead as scholars explore the cultural and historical connections
between the institutional media practices of the LDS Church and Mormon audience
media uses. Case studies of the American-born LDS Church as a historically hierarchical
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and patriarchal organization experimenting with new media will greatly benefit the field
of media and religion.
Mormon media studies will move forward as scholars throughout the world
contribute to the growing body of research. Due to the geographical concentration of
Mormonism in Utah, the field of Mormon media studies has likewise been centered in the
American West but has countless areas of potential research throughout the world.
Though founded in America, the LDS Church currently has more members outside than
inside the United States and thus calls for more nuanced research from those well
acquainted with the unique historical and cultural dimensions of Mormon media in other
parts of the world.148
Each chapter of this thesis represents a body of research in need of both
qualitative and quantitative study by scholars inside and outside of the LDS Church;
chapters three and four in particular serve as starting points for such studies. Chapters
three sets the stage for a quantitative study of Mormon social media uses and
gratifications. Such a study would shed light on how members of the LDS Church are
interpreting the messages leaders share with regard to their personal media use. The uses
and gratifications perspective would help clarify the reasons Mormons give for such
media uses and how spiritual and secular learning influence such reasons. Understanding
the uses and gratifications of Mormon media use would also benefit research on the
construction of religious identity in the field of media and religion.
Chapter four calls for a qualitative ethnographic study of Mormon converts’
relationship with media through out the conversion process. Interviews with converts
such as Liza Morong and Richard Marcus would contribute greatly to our understanding
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of how online proselytizing affects the individual spiritual conversion process. Interviews
with Church media and missionary department employees would help clarify how the
LDS Church sees online initiatives moving forward into the future.
Another area of research in need of more work is gender and LDS missionary
service. The recent missionary age requirement change is impacting females more than
their male counterparts and the rapidly growing body of female missionaries demands
further research into the historically patriarchal nature of LDS missionary work and how
the increased number of female missionaries might impact conceptions of leadership and
gender within the hierarchy of the LDS Church.149
Finally, further research is needed to understand how uses of new technology in
LDS proselytizing are impacting the missionaries themselves in the socialization process.
Interviews with former LDS missionaries and their mission presidents who have served
in both developed and developing countries will shed light on the differences in
missionary technology use across geographic, culture and socio-economic differences.
Both qualitative and quantitative studies can help document the impact these new online
initiatives are having on preparing Mormon missionaries for future leadership and service
in the Church and more particularly how cultural traditions within the missionary social
system are being altered.
Ultimately, this thesis works best as a platform for a future doctoral dissertation
project. The introductions to topics for further research presented here will indeed be
pursued through my doctoral research. Further time and resources are necessary for
deeper analysis of the relationship between LDS proselytizing and new technologies.
Funding will be necessary for primary research into the extensive archive of LDS media
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preserved in Salt Lake City, Utah. A considerable amount of time and travel are also
necessary to obtain qualitative interviews with LDS media and missionary department
personnel in Utah. Presenting such work at academic conferences within religious
studies, media and communication studies and Mormon studies will further help develop
this area of research.
I began this thesis with President Thomas S. Monson’s announcement of a
historical policy change in the age requirements of LDS missionary service. If the past is
any indication of the future, the LDS Church will continue to implement new
technologies into its missionary program and the Church itself will no doubt continue to
evolve as it grapples with important political and social issues. With a growing body of
over 64,000 young men and women throughout the world, further study of the
relationship between new media technology and the LDS Church’s missionary
communication strategy is greatly needed.
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CHAPTER 5 NOTES
1
Gary Shepherd and Gordon Shepherd, Mormon Passage: a Missionary Chronicle,
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 21.
2
David J. Whittaker, “Mormon Missiology: an Introduction and Guide to the Sources,”
in The Disciple as Witness: Essays on Latter-day Saint History and Doctrine in Honor of
Richard Lloyd Anderson, eds. Stephen D. Ricks, Donald W. Parry, Andrew H. Hedges
(Provo: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies).
3
Shepherd and Shepherd, Mormon Passage, 21-22.
4
“How the Church is Organized,” LDS.org, accessed June 18, 2013,
http://www.lds.org/topics/church-organization/how-the-church-is-organized?lang=eng.
5
Ibid; D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power (Salt Lake City:
Signature Books, 1994).
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid; “Why Don’t Mormons Have Paid Clergy?” Mormon.org, accessed May 30, 2013,
http://mormon.org/faq/no-paid-clergy; Stake presidencies, Bishoprics and Branch
Presidencies consists of groups of three men modeled after the First Presidency.
8
“Handbook 2: Administering the Church,” LDS.org. accessed May 30 2013,
https://www.lds.org/handbook/handbook-2-administering-the-church/callings-in-thechurch?lang=eng#.
9
Ibid.
163
10
Rick Philips, “‘De Facto Congregationalism’ and Mormon Missionary Outreach: An
Ethnographic Case Study,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 47 no.4 (2008):
628; R. S. Warner, “The Place of the Congregation in the Contemporary American
Religious Configuration,” in American Congregations: Volume 2: New perspectives in
the Study of Congregations, eds. J. P. Wind and J. W. Lewis (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1994), 54–99; R.S. Warner, “Work in Progress Toward a New Paradigm
for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States,” American Journal of
Sociology 98 no. 5, (1993): 1044-193.
11
Warner, “Work in Progress,” 1066-1067.
12
Philips, “De Facto Congregationalism,” 628.
13
Warner, “The Place of the Congregation,” 70.
14
Tina Hatch, “‘Changing Times Bring Changing Conditions’: Relief Society, 1960 to
the Present,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 17, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 66; Armand
L. Mauss, The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1994).
15
Hatch, “Changing Times,” 66; Philips, “De Facto Congregationalism,” 630.
16
Hatch, “Changing Times,” 97.
17
Philips, “De Fact Congregationalism,” 629-630.
18
Pauline Hope Cheong, “Authority,” in Digital Religion: Understanding Religious
Practice in New Media Worlds, ed. Heidi Campbell. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 7476.
164
19
Douglas Kellner and Gooyong Kim,“YouTube, Critical Pedagogy, and Media
Activism,” Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies 32, no. 1 (2010): 4; Henry
Jenkins, Katie Clinton, Ravi Purushotma, Alice J. Robison, Margaret Weigel,
“Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st
Century,” The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, October 19, 2006,
http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7B7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9CE807E1B0AE4E%7D/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF.
20
D. Piff and M. Warburg, “Seeking for Truth: Plausibility on a Baha’I Email List,” in
Religion and Cyberspace, eds. M. Hojsgaard and M. Warburg (New York: Routledge,
2005),135-150; Janet Wasko, “Political Economy of YouTube,” in The YouTube Reader,
eds. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden,
2010), 372-386; Mark Andrejevic, “Exploiting YouTube: Contradictions of UserGenerated Labor,” in The YouTube Reader, eds. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau
(Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2010), 406-423.
21
Cheong, “Authority,” 75-76.
22
Ibid.
23
Daniel Stout, Media and Religion: Foundations in an Emerging Field (New York:
Routledge, 2012), 78. See chapter three of this thesis for a more detailed history of LDS
Internet.
24
M. Russell Ballard, “Sharing the Gospel using the Internet,” Ensign, July 2008.
165
25
Peggy Fletcher-Stack, “LDS Church sees Potential in Proselytizing Online,” Salt Lake
Tribune, last modified July 16, 2010,
http://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=10212967&itype=storyID.
26
Rosemary Avance, “Seeing the Light: Mormon Conversion and Deconversion
Narratives in Off- and Online Worlds,” Journal of Media and Religion 12, no. 1. (2013):
16.
27
“Sharing via Social Media,” LDS.org, accessed June 2, 2013,
http://www.lds.org/church/share/sharing-the-gospel-via-social-media.
28
Paul Teusner, “Formation of a Religious Technorati,” in Digital Religion:
Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds, ed. Heidi Campbell. (New
York: Routledge, 2013), 183.
29
Ardis E. Parshall, “Blazing a New Trail: Doing History in the Age of the Internet,”
Utah Valley University conference: “Mormonism and the Internet: Negotiating Religious
Community and Identity in the Virtual World,” Orem, UT, March 30, 2012.
30
Ibid; Avance, “Seeing the Light,” 16.
31
John Durham Peters, “Media and Mormonism,” in Oxford Handbook of Mormonism,
eds. Philip Barlow and Terryl Givens (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming),
21.
32
Stout, Media and Religion, 76; Parshall, “Blazing a New Trail;” Avance, “Seeing the
Light,” 16-17.
33
Avance, “Seeing the Light,” 16.
34
Ibid, 17.
166
35
Ibid, 16.
36
Stout, Media and Religion, 39; Chiung Hwang Chen, “Marketing Religion: The LDS
Church’s SEO Efforts,” Journal of Media and Religion 10, no. 4 (2011): 195.
37
Chen, “Marketing Religion,” 195.
38
Parshall, “Blazing a New Trail.”
39
Daniel A. Stout, “Protecting the Family: Mormon Teachings about Mass Media,” in
Religion an Mass Media: Audiences and Adaptations, eds. Daniel A. Stout and Judith M.
Buddenbaum (Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 1996), 89-90; Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “A Matter of a
Few Degrees,” LDS.org, last modified April 2008, http://www.lds.org/generalconference/2008/04/a-matter-of-a-few-degrees?lang=eng.
40
Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “Waiting on the Road to Damascus,” LDS.org, last modified April,
2011, http://www.lds.org/general-conference/2011/04/waiting-on-the-road-todamascus?lang=eng.
41
David A. Bednar, “Things as They Really are,” LDS.org, last modified May 3, 2009,
http://www.lds.org/library/display/0,4945,538-1-4830-1,00.html.
42
Ibid.
43
Scott Taylor, “Select Group of Missionaries Serving Online,” Deseret News, March 23,
2011, http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700120917/Select-group-of-missionariesserving-online.html?pg=all.
44
Ibid.
45
Campbell, Digital Religion, 1-3.
46
Bednar, “Things as They Really Are.”
167
47
Ibid; Uchtdorf, “Road to Damascus;” Trent Toone, “Panel Discusses ‘I’m a Mormon’
Campaign at BYU Symposium,” Deseret News, last modified November 9, 2012,
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865566404/Panel-discusses-Im-a-Mormoncampaign-at-BYU-symposium.html?pg=all.
48
Mauss, The Angel and the Beehive.
49
Ibid; Armand L. Mauss, “Rethinking Retrenchment: Course Corrections in the
Ongoing Campaign for Respectability,” Dialogue: A Journal Of Mormon Thought, 44,
No. 4 (2011): 1.
50
Mauss, “Rethinking Retrenchment,” 1.
51
Ibid, 3.
52
Ibid.
53
Ibid, 23.
54
Toone, “Panel Discusses.”
55
Laurie Goodstein, “Mormons’ Ad Campaign May Play Out on the ’12 Campaign
Trail,” New York Times, last modified November 17, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/us/mormon-ad-campaign-seeks-to-improveperceptions.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
56
Ibid; Toone, “Panel Discusses.”
57
Toone, “Panel Discusses.”
58
Joseph Walker, “’I’m a Mormon’ Campaign Extending to 12 U.S. Cities,” Deseret
News, last modified September 29, 2011,
168
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700183551/Im-a-Mormon-campaign-extending-to12-US-cities.html?pg=all.
59
Toone, “Panel Discusses.”
60
Ibid.
61
“Mormon.org ‘I’m a Mormon’ Effort Launches in New York City,” Mormon News
Room, June 16, 2011, http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/mormon-ads-new-yorkcity.
62
Toone, “Panel Discusses.”
63
Ibid; “Mormon Ad Campaign Launches in New York City,” KSL.com, last modified
June 16, 2011, http://www.ksl.com/?nid=1016&sid=15994619.
64
Sarah Peterson, “Reactions to ‘I’m a Mormon’ Campaign in UK,” Deseret News, last
modified, April 29, 2013, http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865579169/Reactions-toIm-a-Mormon-campaign-in-UK-video.html?pg=all.
65
Walker, “‘I’m a Mormon.’”
66
Goodstein, “Mormons’ Ad Campaign.”
67
Ibid.
68
Ibid.
69
“The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” LDS.org, last modified September 23,
1995, http://www.lds.org/topics/family-proclamation.
70
Ibid.
71
See “I’m a Mormon, Urban School Teacher, and Rocking Partier,” Mormon.org,
YouTube video, 2:59, March 31, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S 169
DIbmgC5AE; “I’m a Mormon, Former Ballerina, and Fashion Executive,” Mormon.org,
YouTube video, 3:23, February 1, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-PK85LN18; “I’m a Mormon, Aerial Dancer, and London Aficionado,” Mormon.org, YouTube
video, 3:30, October 30, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-756LqB4-cM.
72
“Urban School Teacher.”
73
“Former Ballerina.”
74
“Aerial Dancer.”
75
See www.youtube.com/user/mormon/videos for the collection of Mormon.org
YouTube videos.
76
Mauss, “Rethinking Retrenchment,” 9-10.
77
Ibid.
78
Hatch, “Relief Society,” 96-97.
7979
“Response to Mormon Missionary Age Announcement Remains Enthusiastic and
Unprecedented,” Mormon News Room, January 7, 2013,
http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/mormon-missionary-age-announcementresponse.
80
Taylor, “Missionaries Serving Online.”
81
Mauss, “Rethinking Retrenchment,” 20.
82
Joseph Walker, “LDS Church is Smart to Reach Out to 'Book of Mormon' Musical
Audiences, Priest Says,” Deseret News, May 16, 2013,
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865580156/LDS-Church-is-smart-to-reach-out-toBook-of-Mormon-musical-audiences-priest-says.html?pg=all.
170
83
Jochen A. Beisert, “I Didn’t Find God—He Found Me,” Ensign, July 2003.
84
Whittaker, “Mormon Missiology;” Shepherd and Shepherd, Mormon Passage, 22.
85
Jenny Trinitapoli and Stephen Vaisey, “The Transformative Role of Religious
Experience: The Case of Short-Term Missions,” Social Forces 88, no. 1 (2009): 124.
86
Shepherd and Shepherd, Mormon Passage.
87
Ibid, 22.
88
Ibid.
89
Peggy Fletcher-Stack, “LDS Missions: Ultimate Rite Of Passage In LDS Mission Call,
Young Hear Adulthood Beckon 2-Year Sojourns Serve Two Functions: Church Grows,
But So Do Its Emissaries,” Salt Lake Tribune, last modified April 2, 1994.
90
See page 26 for a discussion of the changing role of females in Mormon missionary
work.
91
Spencer W. Kimball, “President Kimball Speaks Out on Being a Missionary,” New
Era, 1981.
92
Fletcher-Stack, “LDS Missions;” Whittaker, “Mormon Missiology.”
93
Shepherd and Shepherd, Mormon Passage, 23; Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy:
Elements of Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City: Doubleday 1967), 45-47.
94
Shepherd and Shepherd 1998, 23.
95
Fletcher-Stack, “LDS Missions.”
96
Though discouraged by Church leaders from doing so, it is not uncommon for teachers
to hand out pretend missionary tags to children at church. See
171
http://www.sugardoodle.net/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2
259.
97
Darwin L. Thomas, “Socialization,” in Encyclopedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel
Ludlow (New York: Macmillian, 1992).
98
Fletcher-Stack, “LDS Missions;” “Handbook 2.”
99
Darwin L. Thomas, Joseph A. Olsen, and Stan E. Weed, "Missionary Service of LDS
Young Men: A Longitudinal Analysis," Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific
Study of Religion in Conjunction with the Religious Research Association, Salt Lake
City, Utah, October 1989.
100
Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1960), 1-15.
101
Shepherd and Shepherd, Mormon Passage, 26.
102
Ibid, 27.
103
William A. Wilson, “Powers of Heaven and Hell: Mormon Missionary Narratives as
Instruments of Social Control,” in Contemporary Mormonism: Social Science
Perspectives, eds. Marie Cornwall, Tim B. Heaton and Lawrence Alfred Young,
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 209.
104
Ibid, 207.
105
Richard J. McClendon and Bruce A. Chadwick, “Latter-day Saint Returned
Missionaries in the United States: A Survey on Religious Activity and Postmission
Adjustment,” BYU Studies 43, no. 2 (2004): 131.
106
Ibid, 131-132.
172
107
Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft Publishing, 1958),
539. Emphasis mine.
108
Mark 6:7, KJV; Shepherd and Shepherd, Mormon Passage, 102.
109
Ibid, 48.
110
Missionary Handbook, (Salt Lake City: Intellectual Reserve Inc., 2006), 4.
111
Preach My Gospel, (Salt Lake City: Intellectual Reserve Inc., 2004); “Missionary
Handbook.”
112
Ibid, 13.
113
Preach My Gospel, 147.
114
Wilson, “Powers of Heaven,” 209.
115
Ibid, 216.
116
Ibid.
117
“Mormon Missionary Work: A Brief History and Introduction,” BYU Harold B. Lee
Library, last accessed June 18, 2013, http://lib.byu.edu/digital/mmd/missionary.php.
118
Shepherd and Shepherd, Mormon Passage, 23.
119
Ibid.
120
Ibid, 31.
121
Ibid.
122
Gordon Shepherd and Gary Shepherd, “Membership Growth, Church Activity, and
Missionary Recruitment,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29, no. 1 (1996): 35.
123
“Response to Mormon Missionary Age Announcement.”
173
124
Joseph Walker, “Sister LDS Missionaries Will Have Key Role in New Mission
Leadership Council,” Deseret News, April 5, 2013,
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865577611/Sister-LDS-missionaries-will-have-keyrole-in-new-Mission-Leadership-Council.html?pg=all.
125
Shepherd and Shepherd, Mormon Passage, 108.
126
Bednar, “Things as They Really Are.”
127
Shepherd and Shepherd, Mormon Passage. Speaking to new mission presidents,
former prophet Gordon B. Hinckley repudiated the idea that a mission is a “course in
personal development, a rite of passage, a finishing school for young men and women. A
missionary is called to serve,” Hinckley said, “to fulfill the divinely given mandate to
spread the word of God and build His kingdom on earth. Of course there will be personal
benefits. These will come in proportion to the degree of selflessness evidenced in
service.” See “New Mission Presidents Counseled to Love Their Missionaries and the
People,” Ensign, September, 1990, 74-80.
128
Doctrine and Covenants 50:22.
129
John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2006), 43.
130
Boyd K. Packer, “The Candle of the Lord, LDS.org, last modified January, 1983,
http://www.lds.org/ensign/1983/01/the-candle-of-the-lord?lang=eng.
131
Matthew 10:39, KJV; Packer, “Candle of the Lord.”
132
Avance, “Seeing the Light,” 19-20; Paul Rappaport, Religion in the Making of
Humanity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 114-126.
174
133
Preach my Gospel.
134
The term “Holy Ghost” is synonymous with “Holy Spirit” but used as the term of
choice within Mormonism.
135
True to the Faith (Salt Lake City: Intellectual Reserve Inc., 2004), 178-190; The
paradoxical nature of testimony and knowledge within Mormonism comes from what
Terryl Givens argues, “a theology of endless searching and a rhetoric of stolid certainty.”
See Terryl Givens, People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 35.
136
Preach my Gospel, 160.
137
Doctrine and Covenants 130:22.
138
Dallin H. Oaks, “Scripture Reading and Revelation,” LDS.org, last modified January,
1995, http://www.lds.org/ensign/1995/01/scripture-reading-and-revelation?lang=eng.
139
Avance, “Seeing the Light,” 16.
140
Mauss, “Rethinking Retrenchment,” 2011.
141
Shepherd and Shepherd, “Membership Growth.”
142
Shepherd and Shepherd, Mormon Passage.
143
Ibid.
144
Ibid.
145
Bednar 2009.
146
Ibid, emphasis mine.
147
Ballard, “Sharing the Gospel.”
175
148
“Facts and Statistics,” MormonNewsRoom.org, last accessed June 10, 2013,
http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/facts-and-statistics/.
149
“Response to Mormon Missionary Age Announcement.”
176
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