I had the privilege of being part of a Fordham University event last night on the future of religion, responding (along with a rather more distinguished fellow panelist) to remarks by the religion journalist and academic Molly Worthen on the roots of institutional faith’s present-day developed-world decline. There was, I think, some basic agreement among all of the panelists about some of the patterns and shifts we’re experiencing right now (the decline of institutional authority, the working out of the sexual revolution, the rise of the so-called “nones”), and then a number of interesting things were said about the possible unknowns that might either accelerate or redirect current trends: There was discussion of how institutional-cum-orthodox forms of faith might experience some sort of revival, of how spiritual-but-not-religious forms of faith might represent the vanguard of an entirely new era of religious understanding, and of how religious forces outside the developed world (Islam, Pentecostalism, Chinese Christianity) might matter more to the West itself than a Western-centric vision allows.
All of us were trying, I think, to escape a little bit from the tyranny of extrapolation — the tendency to assume that today’s trends will necessarily be tomorrow’s, and that history happens in a relatively linear and Whiggish fashion. But reflecting on the discussion afterward, it seems worth dwelling a little more the importance of the unexpected in religious history, the ways in which various forms of rupture and reversal can make punditry look foolish.
This issue has come up a bit in my recent discussions of Roman Catholicism, where the word “schism,” which I’ve dropped a few times, has often been greeted with a touch of shock or outrage from people on different sides of internal R.C. debates. As it should be, of course — I’m obviously using it to shock a bit, to emphasize what I see as the high stakes in current debates — but only if that shock is happening for the right reasons, only if it reflects a legitimate horror of schism, rather than a disbelief that such a thing could ever happen. Because no such disbelief is justified, any more than it would have been before any previous schism or division (ancient, medieval or Reformation-era ) put an end to a previously longstanding unity. Schism happens; indeed, it happens pretty often in its minor forms (and has been happening apace in Protestantism), and while its major forms are rare enough that you shouldn’t expect them around every corner, when they do happen they can dramatically redirect existing trajectories, and completely rewrite what seem like basic religious scripts.
As, of course, can all sorts of unlooked-for developments. Whatever ultimately comes of the Francis era in Catholicism, nobody making predictions about the future of Catholicism circa 2010 expected Benedict’s resignation and Francis’s accession, let alone anything that’s followed. Similarly, nobody making projections about the future of Catholicism circa 1940 would have expected something exactly like the Second Vatican Council. And nobody looking at the religious landscape in 1950 would have imagined that by 2040 Africa could dominate Catholic demographics and that China might have the largest Christian population in the world. And all of these happenings aren’t merely unexpected; they’re weird, exotic, strange (two popes at once? the mass in English? Africans and Asians evangelizing the West?) by the standard of what earlier trends would have led one to expect.
Let me give you another, much more hypothetical example of what I mean. In recent months the Mormon church has formally acknowledged that Joseph Smith was rather more polygamous than many Latter Day Saints had been led to believe. This acknowledgment prompted Slate’s Will Saletan to write an interesting piece predicting that the same process of ongoing revelation that led Mormons to put away their founder’s view of marriage (and, later, to remove the bar on the priesthood for Mormons of African descent) will eventually lead the church to embrace same-sex unions:
When you look back at these stories—not just the reported facts, but the way the church has recast them—you can see how a reversal on homosexuality might unfold. First there’s a shift in the surrounding culture. Then there’s political and legal pressure. Meanwhile, LDS leaders have to grapple with the pain of gay Mormons—now acknowledged by the church as “same-sex attracted”—who sacrifice for an institution that forbids them to love and marry. Within the church hierarchy, less conservative voices gradually replace leaders who have died or stepped down. Eventually, the time is right for a revelation. When you pray hard enough, and you know what you want to hear, you’ll hear it.
The church is well along this path. Two years ago, it acknowledged homosexuality as a deeply ingrained condition and said it “should not be viewed as a disease.” Today, in its essay on polygamy, the church affirms its defense of traditional marriage, but with a caveat. “Marriage between one man and one woman is God’s standard for marriage,” the essay concludes—“unless He declares otherwise, which He did through His prophet, Joseph Smith.” It happened once. In fact, it happened twice. When the time is right, it’ll happen again.
This is a good example of plausible religious punditry, looking at past and current patterns to predict future developments. A number of Christian churches have made a shift on homosexuality like the one Saletan describes; the Mormons have a history of making shifts on issues where the church is out-of-step with American culture; and their church would have a clear doctrinal basis, in continuous revelation, to justify making such a move. Project current trends forward, and it seems like, well, a normal thing to expect.
Now I could put my own pundit’s hat on and come up with some plausible reasons why, instead, Mormon doctrine might remain exactly as it is. (There is, for instance, a significant difference between re-adapting to a longstanding religiously-based sexual-moral consensus, one that originates in shared scriptures and beliefs, and adapting to an emerging sexual-moral consensus whose origin is much more secular. There is also a difference between a revelation that makes you more like every other existing Christian church and a revelation that puts you on the liberal side of an ongoing intra-Christian conflict, etc.) But that, too, would be a somewhat normal-seeming thing: Just continuity as opposed to change. What’s more important is that I could also imagine something much more abnormal — given current expectations, that is — happening around these issues than what Saletan predicts.
One such something would be a real rebirth of Mormon polygamy — its escape from or expansion out of the fundamentalist ghetto where it has survived (and, to some extent, thrived) ever since revelation ruled it out. Most devout Mormons, or at least the ones I’ve talked to about the issue, already have an understandably complicated relationship with their polygamous forebears. There isn’t a sense that, oh, that was a terrible mistake and we don’t know why it happened, because given basic Mormon premises that idea doesn’t make any theological sense; rather, there’s a sense that polygamy has some kind of important place in God’s plan, that in some circumstances it must be not only sanctioned but laudable, and that the change in revelation reflected a change in those circumstances, but one that didn’t make Joseph Smith and Brigham Young any less obedient to God in their own situations.
So context matters — and while I don’t know how many Mormons would frame it exactly this way, I think one way to read that context is to look at the revelation suspending polygamy and see God basically blessing a political-cultural bargain between the Latter Day Saints and the United States, in which Mormons would be granted the liberty required to thrive in return for adapting themselves to American familial norms … as adapt they did, becoming the archetype of 1950s bourgeois normality and then remaining archetypal long after that norm had ceased to meaningfully exist.
But if that bargain was real, and not only real but divinely-sanctioned, then what should pious Mormons today make of the fact that the United States now seems to be going back on the deal? How should they respond to the possibility that their faith is becoming effectively alien again, developing another “marriage problem,” because it still hews to the terms of the original deal even as American culture demands assent to a very different, effectively post-biblical, understanding of what marriage is supposed to be? Saletan sketches one possible response, in which Mormons simply accept the new bargain, the new terms, and adapt once again. But that’s the Whig’s view of history, in which everyone responds to new incentives by rushing in the same direction. If you take the example of Mormonism’s founding fathers seriously, you might just as easily say, the bargain has been broken, therefore the revelation that helped seal it no longer applies, therefore we can go our own divinely-sanctioned way again even as the wider culture rushes in another direction. And the end result might not a L.D.S. church that evolves toward, say, the current Congregationalist or Unitarian view of marriage; it might be an L.D.S. church that has much more trouble sweeping polygamy to its margins (especially if civil laws against the practice fall), and that suddenly has to deal with powerful fundamentalist currents, a powerful fundamentalist wing, in ways that would have been hard to imagine before the same-sex marriage debate began.
This is all the purest speculation, of course. Like a Catholic schism, a springtime for Mormon polygamy is not something that can be gleaned from current sociological data, church attendance figures, polling and the like. And it would be, well, a very strange development. But this is my point: We can’t know exactly what it would look like, but where religion’s future is concerned, the strange in some form is always part of what we should confidently expect.