Last year my work took me to the Defense Advance Research Project Agency (DARPA). Back in the 1960s it was known as the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) when they funded research into packet switching, and then created the ARPANET to let high speed computers at DoD research facilities talk to each other. Today this network is known as the Internet.
There have been a few inventions that have stood out as changing the world, impacting large groups of people, and at times changing the course of history. We tend to think of the automobile, the steam engine, and airplanes as world changing. But most agree the two most revolutionary and important inventions of their times have been the printing press, and the internet. These two inventions, from two completely different time periods, have had a huge impact on the world in the areas of education, religion, history, and communication.
Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1450 was, without a doubt, a world changing discovery. Its impact to religion is vast. The first thing Gutenberg published was the bible. In the years that came, the bible went from a special book that only Catholic Clergy had (in Latin) to a book everybody could have in their own homes, written in the common language they spoke. The Reformation and Martin Luther have their roots in the printing press.
How has the internet affected religion, and more specifically the Mormon church? The biggest change the internet has brought to the church is the vast amount of information on history that is available in any household. You don’t need to subscribe to scholarly journals to have more information at your fingertips than is in the entire granite vaults of the church.
The church, like everything else, was behind on this revolutionary trend. In 2007 YouTube was banned at BYU, and was filtered out from their servers. Today you can actually watch General Conference on YouTube. You can pay tithing via the internet. With the pandemic, church in many parts of the world is conduced purely via the internet. What a blessing that the Lord influenced Al Gore to fund and promote the internet!
There is also a downside for the church. After the missionaries teach a first discussion, the investigators can google the Mormon church, and if they get past the first page of advertisements and SEO induced links, (paid for with tithing dollars) they will find out everything they every wanted to know about the church, and everything the church didn’t want them to know. Is it a coincidence that the places that the church is growing fastest (Africa) have the lowest internet connectivity rates?
If you want to learn about different versions of the First Vision, you don’t need to buy a book from the Tanners, but just goggle it. Did somebody (maybe Joseph Fielding Smith?) try to hide an early version (1832) of the first vision by cutting out the pages and putting them in a safe? You don’t need to take anybody’s word for it. With the internet, you can actually see the cut marks in the original document where the excised pages were glued back in thanks to the Joseph Smith Papers Project.
Do you think the internet is a net gain or loss for the Church? Do they gain more by being able to spread God’s word of the One True Church world wide, much like the printing of the Bible did in the 1500s? Or is it a loss for the church, with people leaving the church (or not getting baptized in the first place) when they read things on the internet that they never learned in church?
Wheat & Tares 
It depends on your goal. If you are part of the orthodox institution and your goals are for numbers and growing the institution then the internet has been another negative. However if your goal is to enlighten then the internet is a positive.
The LDS instuition was in its peak and heyday with controlling the information to the members via deserert news, deseret book, general conferences and the ensign. You had to look hard to find much else, or stray into prohibitive waters. I remember as a youth being told not to read the SLC tribune and our neighbors who read it were not following the prophet.
The contril of information is something the elite always does. If you control the information you control the people.
Overall today’s media has fast-forwarded the information process be it positive or negative for the Church. What may have in the past taken a great deal of research is now at one’s fingertips.
What concerns me is that the average person views a few links on the Church or any other topic and then trends to a position that in reality is superficial. And by superficial, I don’t mean it’s correct or not, rather it is a thin reliance factor.
I think the internet is a short term detriment to the church but a long term benefit. Once all of the people who were in the church during the pre-internet age, especially those who grew up in the 70s-80s-90s, have either made peace with the information that used to be hidden and anti-Mormon lies now being acknowledged as truth, the church will embrace the internet. Basically once the people up through Gen X and older millenials have all either gone inactive, left the church, or made a clear decision to stay regardless of the information then the church can embrace and leverage the internet going forward.
I have been reading a fabulous book by a Jesuit named James Martin called Jesus: A Pilgrimage. One of the things I like best is that he asks and explores challenging questions, gives a brief summary of each set of data and argument and then posits his view. He does this with questions like: “Did these things actually happen?” “Was Jesus celibate?” and “Was there really demonic possession or was it the ancient way of talking about mental illness?” I think these questions would generally make people very uncomfortable in Sunday School and would be off limits. With the information on the internet, people are getting their hands on the data, coming to their own conclusion and asking challenging questions. We have not been providing good answers. We either ignore the questions, make them off limits, or give superficial answers in hope that people will be satisfied and move on. We are starting to dip our toes in the water, but still seem generally afraid, as a church, to give space to ask and explore these questions. The fear is that if people have the information, they will not hold to the traditional narrative and will stop being obedient. I think our historical claims have been welded to our truth claims for so long we are scared to show or see that the data does not match up with the truth claim historical narrative. Adults in the church should be exploring and discussing difficult questions: “Was Joseph actually a translator?” ” Was polygamy of God?” “What special insights do prophets have?” These are uncomfortable for the institutional church because they challenge the narrative and the authority of the leaders. But, I agree that the sooner we allow ourselves to ask and explore these questions, the sooner we can move into a more mature understanding as a church. The internet will keep forcing us to do so, ready or not.
I believe the internet has forced the church to change quite a bit. It has helped give rise to “none”-ism. More and more people, particular millennials Gen Zers are self-identifying as part of no religion. And that trend has certainly affected the church as it has all churches. The internet certainly hasn’t been the death sentence that many ex-Mormons predicted it would be over the years. The church will long be around. But I believe it has forced the church to be considerably more guarded in how it presents itself.
I watch Music and the Spoken Word on YouTube every Sunday. General Conference (and even Stake Conference for shut-ins in my area) can be viewed online. Without question the Internet can be a great tool for the church.
On the other hand, my faith crisis was facilitated by the Internet. It may have happened anyways, but it was certainly accelerated because of ready access to information. I’ve not paid tithing since then, but I still go to church, so I’d argue the LDS church is marginally worse off because I’m not contributing financially.
My gut tells me that the church will stagnate if it relies on doctrine (vs community for example ) for growth. It’s simply too easy to find holes in our doctrine through online research.
It is easy to go on the internet to find information refuting nearly every claim that Donald Trump makes, yet 42% or so of Americans still are absolutely loyal to him including apparently most Utah Mormons. So I suspect that simply having access to information by itself may have a smaller effect than expected on how long-term members view the institutional CoJCoLDSs truth claims.
But for those whose life journey puts them in a position to begin to have some questions about those claims, the access to contradictory information has definitely had a strong negative impact on trust in the institutional CoJCoLDS. That probably includes a large proportion of young people.
Whether that is a bad or good thing for those who have been part of the Mormon movement is an open question. Since I tend to think the simplistic historical narratives of Joseph Fielding Smith and the reactionary approaches of the institutional CoJCoLDS to questions like race, feminism, and LGBTQ issues have been deadend paths for Mormon Christianity, I think that the broadening of the conversation on these topics within the Mormon movement provided by the internet will be a net positive. Mormonism still has a lot of richness beyond the fairly shallow version that currently comes from official publications of the CoJCoLDS, and the internet makes that available to pretty much anyone. So I think that many progressive Mormons have found CoJCoLDS adjacent spaces to practice a form of Mormon Christianity even while rejecting much of its failed ideas like polygamy, blood atonement, and the one and only true church. And that probably is a net gain.
Net loss, largely because a lot of historical information and a lot of criticism of LDS historical and doctrinal claims are immediately accessible via the Internet. The compensating positives are that LDS curriculum materials and magzines, PR videos, and General Conference are also immediately available pretty much all over the world. Remember when Conference was hard to access in real-time outside Utah? Remember when you had to wait a month to get the Ensign to actually read the Conference talks? So I’m not minimizing the positives, I just think that, on balance, the flood of information works against the Church.
The Church is adjusting. Slowly. The Gospel Topics Essays are probably the most direct response to the challenge. But they are provided online, not in print, and they are available only to those who know about them and go look for them. They are only barely mentioned in the LDS curriculum materials. They are almost never mentioned in General Conference talks. They are a band aid trying to cover an open wound. The Church has still not responded in fundamental ways to they tectonic shift the Internet has caused and is still causing.
I think the Internet definitely has benefits for the church but most likely outweighed by the negatives. My own questioning began in the 80s after reading Mormon Enigma and has been gradually percolating ever since. Now there is so much information out there that anyone with doubts or questions can easily investigate further. Four biggies that I have a hard time getting past are polygamy, gender equality, past and present racism , and LGBTQ issues. It just doesn’t add up to a loving God for me – but here I stay for the community. For now.
I’m with Dave B. It’s a net loss, but as 10ac notes, facts and history don’t matter to zealots, so my theory is that the church membership will shrink overall, but the people left will be hard line true believers who pass the church’s various loyalty tests with flying colors. And as felilxfabulous notes, since the church is uncomfortable with any questions that threaten to topple its truth claims, sincere, questioning members will leave (they already are, actually) because this church makes questioners unwelcome.
To me, the biggest thing about the internet is, as I remind my students, that it’s forever. That has huge consequences for the church, not, I think, chiefly because one can research the historical facts surrounding the church’s narrative, etc., but rather because the internet both prevents and illuminates the church’s attempts at gaslighting. In other words, the biggest threat the internet poses to the church is that it “remembers” all of what previous church leaders have said, which means that when the church denies it ever said, taught or condoned things, but then you can look up past leaders teaching, saying and condoning such things, the church immediately loses most (if not all) of its credibility. The internet also puts a lot of pressure on the church’s definition of “truth”. When members/leaders testify of verifiably false or nonexistent things or events during conference, lessons, testimony meetings, etc., whatever the “truth” they think they are testifying of is not true at all. So believers can say stuff like, “well, it’s a kind of spiritual truth”, but even subjective, spiritual truths are, the church teaches, ought to be based on actual, metaphysical truths. And it’s often the case that someone’s “feelings” about the truth of things are merely feelings and can be contradicted with documentary evidence and research. I think this is why so many younger people are leaving. Despite American culture’s tendency to denigrate young people as lazy, latte-sipping slackers, young people are far from that; they’re internet and tech savvy, they’re smart, and unlike many so-called true believes, they know both gaslighting and bullsh*t when they see it.
I think the internet is a net positive for the Church, though the historical part has been a very rocky road through the 2000s and 2010s. The Church was at the forefront of internet technology with its genealogy programs (FamilySearch website went live in 1999), and it didn’t take too long for it to ramp up online resources for members (like streaming of general conference) and missionary work (mormon.org in 2001). Church leaders were blindsided by the Church history/scholarship side of things in large part because they’d severely hobbled the Church History Department in the 1980s and 1990s (in contrast, they’d fully supported the technological evolution in the family history side of things during those same decades).
The decision to invest in the Joseph Smith Papers Project (due in large part to millions in financial backing by Larry and Gail Miller) was really the kick in the pants to improve the Church’s production of its own history, though members didn’t really begin to see fruits of that work till 2008 and later. By that point, many people had already become disenchanted with the dissonance between the Church’s traditional portrayal of its history versus the very different picture displayed by resources online. Church historians honestly didn’t even know the extent of the Church’s holdings until the whole archive was moved to the new library in 2009. The history side just wasn’t a priority for a couple decades.
The Church has utilized the internet in fabulous ways, but there was a significant hit by keeping their head in the sand too long on the historical stuff. With their increasing online resources, though, Gen Z won’t experience nearly the whiplash that Gen X and Millennials faced on the historical side. I suspect history will become a lesser factor in the disaffection of younger members.
I think the Internet will represent a net loss for the Church but that loss will not be immediately apparent. I break it down into two groups: current members and prospective members.
Current members: It will take time but when today’s Primary kids are tomorrow’s Church leadership, the Church will have changed significantly, and it won’t be for the better if you define “better” as “stronger.” More and more members are exposing themselves to information that certainly chips away at historical and truth claims. They might still be showing up for meetings but there’s a lot of doubt in the air that is hard to measure. The lack of trust in previous and current Church leadership will only weaken over time. And if you don’t trust the leaders or believe the truth claims, are you going to serve a mission, pay tithing, etc. ? Older members like me are often just kind of hanging on. It’s hard to walk away from 50 years of habit.
Prospective members: How would any educated person join the Church if they Google the Church’s truth claims, discover information that contradicts the missionary presentations, and then can’t get answers from current members? Because that’s where we are. That’s one reason why convert baptisms are so low in the West (US and Europe). Like someone posted above, there’s less Internet coverage in Africa and that’s where the growth is. If you strip away 8-year-olds’ baptisms from the equation, the Church is hardly growing. We like to blame the lack of membership growth on evil: Satan, materialism, secularism, etc. But maybe it’s simply cold hard information brought to us by the Internet. That’s what I think.
I think the challenge with the Internet, more than the abundance of information it gives, is our ability to process said information. The reason anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers and so forth thrive has a lot to do with the abundance of information one can find. The truth is that for whatever subject, you won’t get the whole truth about it in just a single clicks. It takes a certain discipline to fact-check, evaluate the reliability of the source, cross-examine and so forth. More than “exposing” the Church (most of the arguments against it have been around for a certain time, though not easily accessible) the Internet forces us to balance the easily accessible information with patient and careful investigation. Not everyone does that work, because it isn’t necessarily self-evident, and we tend to prefer thinking we are right, then seeking to be correct.
I am confident the degree to which it is a curse or a blessing to the Church (among other parties affected by the internet), depends on how well each user can evaluate the information he receives.
Democracy of information, Mormon Panopticon, or Gathering Israel?
I’m surprised more hasn’t been said about the culture of Mormon surveillance. Probably because many of us can’t talk about it—too many Mormons work for the surveillance state (data gathering, intelligence collection, spying). Foreign intelligence organizations joke that to identify CIA abroad, one need only to find Mormons.
How do Utah’s data collection centers represent democracy?
How can the weaponization of information make speech free?
To what degree do you think LDS phone apps are spying on your internet browsing?
I am beginning to wonder: when President Nelson speaks of “gathering Israel,” maybe the context is “gathering information on Israel.”
There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts.
La Rochefoucauld
The future impact of the internet on the church is in its own hands. In an era of “no more secrets”, the church has to be committed to no longer hiding information that contradicts their current narratives, hoping they remain undiscovered. They have to offer narratives that align with the facts.
This will bring big initial public embarrassment. The alternative is continued private embarrassment thousands of times over as individuals discover the truth on their own devices and draw the conclusion that they are dealing with an institution that is fundamentally dishonest.
This will force allegiance to the truth as opposed to allegiance to those in authority.
Frankly, that is a seismic shift. It will rock the world of many members and some will leave. It will cause a massive transfer of authority from the leaders to truth-supported ideas. They will no longer be, as they like to refer to themselves, the oracles on which we must rely.
I think it would be liberating. There is so much in the church to recommend itself to current and future members. Now, they run into a wall when facts contradict narratives and people feel deceived.
Imagine how much time and money the church spends on crafting and promulgating stories that are designed to both attract and obscure? But the cost isn’t in money – it’s in the lives of the membership. They are torn when they discover the truth and that’s hard to live with for many. If they leave, they usually don’t find a new place to land: the church really does ruin you for other religions. Not because other religions pale in comparison, but because there is so much distrust in organized religion because of our Mormon experience.
Bushman, Turner, Prince et al are great detours while hiking the Covenant Path.
10ac makes a salient point that I don’t think is getting near enough attention: you can, for example, use the Internet to refute every last single one of Trump’s flagrant lies—as well as to refute the flat-earth society, the anti-vaxxer movement, anti-maskers, Qanon, 9/11 truthers, moon landing denialists, and so on and so forth. Most often however, we use the internet instead to reinforce our preconceived biases—including most of us. The same internet that disproves every conspiracy theory also expands, solidifies, and reinforces every echo chamber surrounding them. The internet behaves no differently for the church.
That’s my problem with all this pontificating about the Internet and the church: it has at best expedited the exit of members and investigators already looking for an excuse to bow out. As Jana Reiss’s “The Next Mormons” confirmed, the total percentage of members who leave over historical and/or doctrinal issues is actually rather small; most that leave are actually stereotypically conservative members who drift away either due to personal sin or sheer laziness.
Now in saying that, I certainly do not mean to invalidate the experiences of all you who have left (or at least questioned) the faith due to its very real and very messy historical issues; but it is also important to remember that the reason the Brethren have never paid more than token attention towards resolving historical problems is because such is really only a tiny portion of their total retention efforts. I cringe at rhetoric like “the covenant path” as much as the rest of you, but I also recognize that the reason Pres. Nelson has hammered on it so much lately is because he is specifically targeting those lackadaisical conservative members most likely to drift away in apathy, not to coerce liberal members into towing the line.
True believing members use the Internet to solidify their echo chambers as much as ex-Mormon and anti-Mormons do—that is, as much as almost the entire rest of the world does, and has for awhile now. This is not to draw a false equivalence between all these groups, only to point out that we’re all fixated on the wrong problems.
I love the comments that posts like this create. I was generally going to say something close to what David B wrote. I then read Brother Sky and Mary Ann’s comments and they were interesting. I do agree with Mary Ann that future generations will have less “whiplash” when learning history as they will know more of the details, there are other issues more troubling younger members. All of the family members that are close to me that have distanced/left the church have been over LGBTQ issues or just feeling that the teaching of the church were just not relevant or even hurtful. And all of them that I have talked to have said their Bishop and other leaders were kind, so no “it was just one bad Bishop that offended” going on.
Which reminds me of questions that I have run over in my mind. That of – would I have been a believer if I had known what I now feel is the more unvarnished history? I would have to say that I might have. I would have to admit much of my beliefs did rest on getting that “tingling feeling” while watching Saturday’s Warriors and listening to Paul Dunn’s stories as a youth. I don’t consider myself lazy and just relying on those, but all the time of asking if the BOM is true never gave me any feelings of confirmation. Even serving my mission it was out of duty, not strong belief. But I do feel I did my best and worked hard.
As I think more about this I keep coming back that I am mainly upset over the cover-up by top church leaders. That level of continued cover up of history, even current history such as statements “Pres Benson is leading the church” while he was clearly mentally gone. I also grew up with clear and constant statement saying that anti-Mormon books were absolutely totally lies and of the Devil and if I even opened the cover of one, the Devil would have a grip on my soul and I very well could be lost. I look back on that now and think, “Man, that sure portrays God as weak and reminds me of SuperMan and kryptonite.
The Internet and rapidly expanding communication systems provide the Church with incredible opportunities to improve things globally. But I fear Church leadership has a narrow vision of how it can be used. How about telemedicine? How about a real global education system? If Kahn Academy can do wonders, surely a Church with almost limitless human and financial resources can make an incredible difference. Instead, the leadership seems narrowly focused on how to use it as a proselytizing tool. Where is the vision? I wonder if there is a need for much younger leadership. Individuals that understand the capabilities of technology.
If the Church could improve the global situation, it would do wonders for its proselytizing efforts. Instead of hard-core, in-your-face efforts to get new members, you could give investigators a reason to join: a universal effort to do good. Sorry about the rant, my formative years were in the 1960’s.
@JLB, disagree with this:
“ That’s my problem with all this pontificating about the Internet and the church: it has at best expedited the exit of members and investigators already looking for an excuse to bow out.”
You may be right that it’s only a tiny percentage of people who leave, but I think it’s really unfair to suggest that people who leave over history were looking for an excuse to bow out. I know many people for whom that was not the case at all, and finding the history (and cover ups) was soul-searing.
I am surprised in the present climate, the church has not just said fake news. But I guess that is what it has done for years.
If my family had not joined in the 50s, there is no way I would join an organization now, that discriminates against women, and gays. We believed the missionaries, and had no other source of information, until the internet.
We were the first family to join in our area. There are quite a number of historical british police shows we watch, and the sexism, homophobia, and racism really stand out. Then we think of church, where 2 of 3 remain.
There is a great potential for the internet and the future of the church — God’s work will go forward — all the information will be available, and all are invited to come and see, black and white, male and female, bond and free. Really, nothing has changed. Some will continue in faith, some will choose otherwise. As President Nelson said last week, “We all have our agency. We can choose to be of Israel, or not. We can choose to let God prevail in our lives, or not. We can choose to let God be the most powerful influence in our lives, or not.”
@JLB
“As Jana Reiss’s “The Next Mormons” confirmed, the total percentage of members who leave over historical and/or doctrinal issues is actually rather small; most that leave are actually stereotypically conservative members who drift away either due to personal sin or sheer laziness.”
The book confirms exactly the opposite of what you way. There isn’t a paragraph or table in the book that supports that. In fact desire to sin or laziness (two of the three correlated reasons) are in the bottom 3 or 4 reasons people leave.
Even the study that the church c0mmissioned for the Q15’s eyes (2013 – leaked a few years ago) shows those are at the bottom of the list.
I’ve read Jana’s book, heard her speak multiple times, and had a nearly two-hour phone conversation with her. You are not reporting the results accurately.
@JLB
I couldn’t disagree more on your suggestions of why people leave but I might have agreed with you many years ago. I’m not looking for any old excuse to leave or a have a desire to ‘sin’. And I think most people that do leave are more like me – though admit that I haven’t fully left because it would be painful for some of my family members. I will say that my testimony is gone though, and I don’t see it coming back. It’s actually very painful when it’s been a big part of my life for 2/3rds of a century. The internet wasn’t to blame – it was the policies and so called doctrine outlined in my previous comment that tipped the scales. And if a God doesn’t plainly tell his mouth pieces to stop being racist and homophobic I wonder about our God – like is he real?