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The Social Construction of Mormonism

8/5/2013

5 Comments

 
PictureMormons are questioning if their religion was created by society.
Tags: culture, durkheim, religion, social construction, theory, integration, mormonism, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2013
Length: 4:41
Access: New York Times

Summary: In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Émile Durkheim (1912) explains the social significance of religious life. He argues—“the universal and eternal objective cause of … religious experience … is society”; and—“that which makes a man is the totality of the intellectual property which constitutes civilization, and civilization, is the work of society.” In other words, religion is created by society, and that its beliefs and what it constitutes as "sacred" are a product of human meaning and culture. In this video, we see Hans Mattsson, a former high-ranking leader within the Mormon Church in Europe, coming to terms with the notion that his religion may have been constructed by society (Mattsson is one of a growing group of disbelievers in the Mormon church). It notes that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (i.e. the Mormon Church) has always taught that The Book of Mormon is factually and historically true, but its claims have recently been contradicted by a variety of evidence. Evidence also shows the Church's founder (Joseph Smith) had intimate relationships with many wives, some of whom were very young, casting further doubt within its adherents. As noted in the accompanying NYT article. "The church was born in America only 183 years ago, and its founder and prophet, Joseph Smith, and his disciples left behind reams of papers that still exist, documenting their work, exposing their warts and sometimes contradicting one another." But the Roman Catholic Church, on the other hand, has had over 2,000 years to work through doubts raised by insiders and outsiders. This more recent example, therefore, might serve as a metaphor to think about how all religions (as argued by Durkheim) are constructed by society. Viewers are encouraged to consider how religions are constructed by people, and following Durkheim, what social conditions are necessary for the development of any religion? (Durkheim argues the necessary conditions are the separation of sacred from profane, beliefs, rites, and a church or single overarching moral community.) In addition, the video illustrates Durkheim's concept of integration, or the degree to which collective sentiments are shared and have social relations which bind individuals to a group. Durkheim argued that too much integration or too little integration is damaging to the individual and we see this when Mattsson's integration is lost. In the accompanying article, Mattsson is quoted as saying "Everything I’d been taught, everything I’d been proud to preach about and witness about just crumbled under my feet. It was such a terrible psychological and nearly physical disturbance.” When Mormons expressed such doubts, they were often cut off from friends,  family, and leadership within the church—thereby illustrating a social cause for their individual psychological predicament.

Submitted By: Paul Dean

5 Comments
Hanna
8/25/2013 02:08:25 am

I'd wager that many religious peopl like myself are perfectly aware that religion is a social construction, and that sacred texts are human attempts to aproach and understand the divine - and should be taken as such. Yet this doesn't mean that all attempts to approach the sacred or to approach God are meaningless. It just means that a faith can't be based on the idea that any teaching is infallible or directly from God. Quaker ideas about God, for example, take this into account (I'm not a Quaker, but admire their theology).

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Jenny Naidu
8/24/2018 09:19:11 pm

All of one's life a person believed in something, only to come to a new awakening that it was not so. I am a Methodist by birth, and I believe in Jesus Christ as LORD, and that the Bible Is God's Word to us all. I will never doubt that for as long as I live.

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Jacob
3/5/2019 05:07:17 pm

You are a sinner by birth. You aren't born with religion right as soon as you pop out. There is a way to salvation that must be followed by an individual's choice. No one else can save them for them.

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