Trust, Trump, and the Future of the Latter-day Saint Ethos

Greetings,

This week I have some longish thoughts on what is wrong with American Mormonism and how it relates to American politics and the decline of trust. 

In many ways, Mormonism has been defined in terms of very high levels of trust.  Traditionally, Latter-day Saints have trusted their Church, its leaders, and their fellow Latter-day Saints.  The formidable cooperative ethic that has so-often made the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a socially effective institution is built on this trust.  I’ve often seen this in action in my life, as when for example I went with other volunteers from our stake to assist with hurricane clean up in North Carolina.  It was an impressive feat of organization, which included community outreach to identify homeowners in need of help, effective triage of their needs to ensure that people with the right tools arrived, and the marshalling of thousands of manhours of volunteer labor.  All of this happened because Latter-day Saints were willing to throw themselves into this collective project based on their trust in the good will and basic competence of the ecclesiastical leaders who organized the efforts.

Trust is also key to the understated sweetness of Mormon congregational life.  What can make participation in a ward (local LDS congregation) such a deeply good way of life are the bonds of mutual trust among ward members.  This can come in deeply practical ways.  We trust local leaders to administer fast offerings to the needy with honesty and good will.  We trust in the good will of primary and youth leaders who provide activities and social support for our children.  We also trust in the basic decency of one another’s faith, so that when Brother Smith begins spouting theological nonsense in Sunday School our response is tempered by an appreciation for Brother Smith’s love for God and love for his neighbors.

The importance of trust can also be seen in the standard list of accusations made against Latter-day Saints.  They have traditionally appeared naïve to outsiders, too trusting.  There is some truth to this critique.  The affinity fraud to which Latter-day Saint communities are prone is simply the flip side of the trust that defines those communities.  High-trust contexts are a fertile hunting ground for fraudsters.  For much of the 20th century one of the stereotypes of Latter-day Saints was that, in an era of declining trust for institutions, they continued to believe “the Man.”  Hence, the legions of Latter-day Saints in the CIA and the FBI.  Habituated to trust they tended to be comfortable with institutions and institutional hierarchy.  In moral narratives that identified ethical behavior with personal authenticity and pitted it against institutional evil and conformity, the Latter-day Saints emerged as that quintessential bad guy, “the organization man.”  This critique, however, testified to the centrality of trust to Latter-day Saint identity.

If I had to identify one thing that has changed dramatically over the last 5-10 years among American Latter-day Saints, I think it would be the waning of this trust.  It is very difficult to quantify or verify such impressions, but it seems to me that Latter-day Saints today are less trusting on a variety of fronts.  They are less trusting of social institutions like government, business, the media, and education.  They are less trusting of Church leaders.  They are less trusting of one another.  In this they are simply following the trajectory of American society, albeit a generation or two behind the trend.  There is a huge academic literature on trust, and the consensus among social scientists is that social trust in the United States reached a peak in the early 1960s (probably a historically anomalous peak) and has been in decline since then. 

Some of this decline in trust also probably has to do with dynamics internal to Mormonism.  In the early 2000s, the Church positioned itself as a strident foe of same-sex marriage.  The political triumph of same-sex marriage and the rising social acceptance of homosexuality has changed the relationship of many members of the Church to their leaders.  A very large minority of Latter-day Saints support same-sex marriage, and a larger group is generally uncomfortable with the Church’s approach to homosexuality.  Likewise, as the Church’s all-male priesthood seems increasingly anachronistic and reactionary in a world defined by a widespread commitment to sexual equality, many members have redefined their emotional relationship with that authority.  The interesting dynamic that I have seen is not so much among Latter-day Saints that choose to leave the Church as a result of these issues, but rather among Latter-day Saints that for whatever reason choose to stay.  One way that they handle this is by affording less trust and authority to their leaders than was once the norm among Latter-day Saints.  This is especially true among the young.

Finally, there is the political dynamic within the United States that can be summarized by the word “Trump.”  I don’t mean simply the narcissistic ex-president living in Florida, but the shift in politics that he both took advantage of and fostered.  Beginning in the 1970s the Latter-day Saints became increasingly aligned with conservative politics in the United States.  It’s worth remembering, however, that this was not always the case.  Prior to the 1970s Latter-day Saints were more politically diverse than they became thereafter.  It’s worth remembering that when Barry Goldwater launched the first modern conservative run for the presidency in 1964 that Utah voted for Lyndon Johnson.  Initially, Latter-day Saints were attracted to American conservatism precisely because it played on themes that found echoes in their trust-based ethos.  Ronald Reagan was suspicious of government regulation, but in large part his cultural message was a repudiation of the distrust of the previous two decades and a reaffirmation of the basic goodness of American institutions after the battering that they took in Vietnam and Watergate.  This wasn’t a wholly coherent message, particularly as the very high levels of trust that characterized American society prior to the early 1960s most definitely extended to the large New Deal bureaucracies that Reagan criticized.  This is the conservatism to which Latter-day Saints largely hitched themselves about the time that I was born.

However, in the intervening lifetime the political right in the United States has changed dramatically, and much of that change can be seen in terms of a contraction in the circle of conservative trust.  Where Reagan conservatism distrusted government’s economic regulation while affirming trust in most other large American institutions, modern conservatives trust far less.  They distrust government but they distrust much else as well.  A certain skepticism towards academia and the media has hardened into reflexive disbelief.  Likewise, Reagan’s trust of market processes has given way to a suspicion of trade and big business.  The conservatism of the 1980s and 1990s believed in the melting pot and the American Dream.  Accordingly, it tended to celebrate immigration as evidence of American exceptionalism.  In contrast, Trump’s conservatism has been deeply suspicious of immigration and often viciously xenophobic.  This contraction of trust has also changed political discourse.  Trump wore his cynicism as a badge of authenticity and exalted what for lack of a better word I’d call “assholery” to the level of a political stance.  He has perfected a stance of conflict, contempt, and unapologetic offensiveness in his interactions with others. In this he is, I think, merely following a trend that was in place before he arrived on the scene, and which extends across the political spectrum from the sneer-industrial-complex of late night television pioneered by the Daily Show to the campus warriors that count “triggering the libs” as a political victory.  Trump accelerated and exacerbated all of these trends. The success of his assholery came from the fact that he was able to repackage social viciousness as personal authenticity. He thus turned what Latter-day Saints have traditionally regarded as unacceptable behavior into a political virtue among his supporters. 

In the United States we tend to think of politics as a fight about what government should do, but politics is also simply an ongoing discussion of how we ought to live together in community.  In this broader sense, Mormonism has always had a political message because the Church provides both a model of what a community should be – Zion – and concrete communities of wards and stakes in which people learn to live and work together.  American Latter-day Saints, however, are both Latter-day Saints and Americans.  They thus take their political lessons from both the Church and from the American politics to which they give their allegiance, and because as a demographic matter Latter-day Saints have leaned toward the political right since 1970, that means that many Latter-day Saints take their lessons on politics from American conservatism.  Over the last ten years, however, American conservatism has been increasingly hostile to the traditional Latter-day Saint ethos of trust.  Trump and Trumpism are the epitome of low-trust politics.  Too often over the last four years I have seen Latter-day Saints imbibe this ethos of coarse suspicion toward both society and those within their own wards and stakes.

I have been writing about the effect of conservatism on American Mormonism because as a matter of demographic fact, American conservatism is simply far more influential among Latter-day Saints than is American progressivism. To be sure, there are Mormon progressives and always have been.  But they lack the cultural footprint of Mormon conservatives. However, it would be a mistake to imagine that the waning of a Latter-day Saint ethos of trust would somehow be reversed if American Mormonism simply became a progressive movement.  Indeed, since 9/11 it seems to me that American progressives have increasingly defined American conservatism as a fundamentally illegitimate movement.  George W. Bush’s ill-conceived foreign adventures are seen within the left as unforgivable war crimes, Obama’s presidency was initially hailed in messianic terms as a redemption of a perhaps irredeemable America, and Trump and his followers have come to be seen as an existential threat to freedom and democracy.  One does not trust existential threats.  Existential threats are enemies.

I don’t think that it is possible to go back to the kind of Mormonism that existed when I was growing up.  I am not sure it is desirable to do so.  That Mormonism had its share of pathologies.  However, I don’t think that Latter-day Saints can carry on the work of building Zion in the face of deep distrust toward one another and toward their neighbors.  Carl Schmitt, a German political theorist in the first half of the 20th century, argued that politics was fundamentally based on enmity, it was a matter of living in the face of others who were fundamentally other, the “bad guys” against whom one has to struggle.  This is a vision of how communities work.  Joseph Smith, on the other hand, taught that “the grand fundamental principle of Mormonism is friendship.”  Enemies distrust one another.  Friends trust one another.

American Latter-day Saints need to decide if they are going to follow Schmitt or Smith.  If the latter, then they are going to have to learn how to trust and love their fellow Saints and their neighbors again.

See you next week,

Nate

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