This post is for anyone who feels tension with the LDS Church: believing, disbelieving, half-believing, culturally Mormon, post-Mormon, or something harder to name.
I want to suggest something that may sound strange: the LDS Church is not just a church.
Mormonism is strange to many modern Americans because it is still trying to be religion in an older, thicker sense. By “thin” religion, I mean religion imagined mostly as something one individually has, chooses, believes, or practices: private belief, voluntary attendance, personal spirituality, and moral opinion. By “thick” religion, I mean religion as world-building: ritual, kinship, authority, calendar, community, sacred geography, moral formation, money, sexuality, death, memory, and belonging.
This thickness is both what makes Mormonism powerful and what makes it dangerous.
Many critiques of Mormonism assume religion is primarily about whether certain truth claims are correct. But Mormonism’s power has never come only from belief. Mormonism forms a people. That makes it a useful lens for understanding religion in the past and in other cultures, and it also explains why opposing the harms of thick religion is harder than simply debunking its doctrines.
When religion was not just religion
Renaissance historian Ada Palmer helped this click for me in her 2013 essay “Why We Keep Asking ‘Was Machiavelli an Atheist’?” She wrote that in the modern West, atheism is a socially available position, meaning that people know it exists as a possible identity or intellectual stance. It may be a minority position, but everyone knows it exists. It is part of the discourse.
Atheism was not socially available in the same way in premodern Europe. Palmer notes that atheists were often imagined as “elusive and invisible enemies (rather like vampires)”, and that atheism was seen “as a moral perversion.”
Why was atheism so rare in earlier time periods? Palmer’s explanation is that nonbelief was logistically and intellectually harder when religion supplied much of the inherited structure of science and social theory. To be an atheist in the Middle Ages meant throwing away much of that inherited structure — and a new foundation hadn’t been developed yet. If God explained nature, politics, law, social order, and the movement of the heavens, then rejecting God was not like deleting one belief from a list. It was more like rejecting the framework that made the world intelligible.
That helps illustrate why atheism could be seen not merely as disbelief, but as a moral perversion. Declaring oneself apart from religion could sound like declaring oneself an anarchist, enemy of the state, and enemy of social order all at once.
It might seem strange to you to think that declaring nonbelief would be associated with so many other things, because in our contemporary world, well, we are just thinking about belief. But as I started thinking about this more, it made other things I read fall into place.
I learned a long time ago that when scholars were trying to develop definitions of religion for comparative purposes, they struggled to do so. The clean, tidy neat definitions of religions in western, secularized societies didn’t fit in other societies, and they also didn’t work for past eras. For example, it could be difficult to separate what was “Hindu religion” from what was “the rest of culture” when considering temple practice, household ritual, caste and community structures, philosophy, festival calendars, regional identities, family obligation, social belonging, and political identity. (Even the category “Hinduism” reflects boundary-making that does not always map neatly onto lived practice.)
The same difficulty appears when we look backward in time. The past, too, is a foreign country. What we can say is that religions in contemporary western societies have been “thinned” down. A lot of the things that used to be part of the bucket “religion” have been disaggregated to the state, markets, schooling systems, science and universities, political movements, and so forth. In many contemporary Western contexts, religion is often reduced to a series of private, personally held beliefs about supernatural phenomena and how those intervene on the natural, scientifically ordered world.
Mormonism as Thick Religion
This is an area where even contemporary Mormonism can help us get a glimpse into a thicker version of religion. Most Mormon-adjacent people already know this at some level: Mormonism is not just about belief, and it is certainly not just about private, personally held beliefs. We can talk about the role of orthopraxy in Mormonism — adhering to the right practices. We can talk about the role of ritual in Mormonism. We can talk about the role of community in Mormonism. Mormonism still asks more than “what do you believe?” It asks where you attend, what calling you hold, whether you have a recommend, whether you minister, whether you tithe, whether you participate in ordinances, and how your family is sealed across generations.
This also helps explain why debates about “cultural Mormonism” become so charged.
About a month ago, Bishop Bill wrote a blog post that discussed the argument that people who no longer believe or practice should not claim Mormon identity. The institutional argument is easy to understand: the Church has doctrines, commandments, ordinances, priesthood keys, covenants, admission requirements, and boundaries. In that sense, Mormonism is not simply an aesthetic, a regional brand, or a collection of nostalgic memories.
But if the LDS Church is not just a church, then belief and practice cannot be the only measures of one’s relationship to it.
The institution can define formal membership, temple worthiness, callings, priesthood office, and ecclesiastical standing. But Mormonism is bigger than those institutional categories. It is also a formation system: a culture, language, moral imagination, family structure, ritual memory, and way of seeing the world.
The Church can excommunicate a person, but it cannot make them unformed. It cannot erase the hymns, scripture stories, seminary answers, pioneer myths, temple silences, mission habits, modesty instincts, authority reflexes, family expectations, or the vocabulary of “the Church” itself.
This is why cultural Mormonism is not merely about Utah ancestry or green Jell-O. A person can be culturally Mormon without being from Utah, without having pioneer ancestors, and without believing the Church’s truth claims. Cultural Mormonism names the residue of formation. This is what follows if the LDS Church is not just a church.
In fact, the attempt to deny cultural Mormonism may reveal exactly how thick Mormonism is. If Mormonism were merely a church in the thin modern sense — a voluntary association of current believers — then leaving would be simple. You would stop attending, stop believing, and be done. But that is not how Mormonism works for many people. They continue to negotiate family relationships, language, moral instincts, grief, anger, nostalgia, embarrassment, humor, trauma, and belonging.
But even in talking about these in contemporary Mormonism, I think we have a thinned down version in contrast to the Mormonism of the past.
A Provocative Example from the Past
I do not bring up Brighamite Utah as a model to recover. For many of us, that era represents some of Mormonism’s most troubling features. But precisely because the example is uncomfortable, it helps us see something modern people often miss.
Religion has not always meant “private beliefs plus Sunday worship.”
In early Utah, Mormonism was not merely a denomination. It was a total social world people lived within. It organized migration, settlement, family structure, marriage, economics, politics, ritual life, geography, communal memory, and personal identity. The project was not merely to persuade individuals to accept propositions about God. It was to gather Israel, build Zion, establish a people, order a territory, bind families, redeem the dead, discipline bodies, organize labor, and prepare for the Kingdom of God.
That is what makes the example useful and disturbing. When religion organizes everything, dissent becomes costly. Difference becomes threatening. Community can care for people, but it can also control them. Ritual can form people, but it can also police them. Sacred order can create belonging, but it can also justify hierarchy and exclusion.
Modern Western people often imagine religion as one bounded sphere among others, but early Utah makes that framework hard to sustain. Analytically, it illustrates what scholars of religion often point out: “religion” is not a stable, universal category with the same boundaries everywhere. In some societies, religion is not easily separable from family, law, politics, ethnicity, geography, ritual, economy, and communal identity.
What does this mean for us now?
The question for us is what to do with that inheritance.
We may rightly reject the authoritarianism, coercion, hierarchy, and violence of earlier Mormon social forms. But if we reduce religion to private belief claims, we lose sight of what Mormonism has always known: religion is powerful because it is thicker than belief.
Many disaffected Mormons learn that the Church’s claims can be challenged, historicized, or debunked. That matters. Truth matters. But it can also lead to an incomplete lesson: that dismantling thick religion requires only better arguments, or that because institutions are dangerous, the answer is to abandon institutions altogether.
Cultural Mormonism is one sign that things are more complicated. If Mormonism were only belief or formal membership, unbelief or inactivity would end the relationship. But many people who leave Mormonism still have to renegotiate family, language, sexuality, authority, morality, memory, ritual, grief, anger, nostalgia, and belonging.
The Church can define ecclesiastical standing. It cannot monopolize Mormon memory.
If we want to oppose or ameliorate the harms of Mormonism — or of thick religion more generally — debunking belief claims is not enough. We also have to understand the structure of belonging that made those claims livable, plausible, painful, and powerful.
The lesson is not necessarily “institutions are dangerous, therefore abandon institutions.” The harder lesson may be: thick institutions are dangerous because they reach deep. If we want healthier forms of belonging, we have to take that depth seriously.
Questions To Consider:
- Do you think Mormonism is unusually “thick” compared with other contemporary American denominations?
- Do you think Mormonism is becoming “thinner” over time, as it responds to modern social pressures or tries to become more accepted by the wider world?
- What does “cultural Mormonism” mean to you: nostalgia, identity, injury, inheritance, formation, or something else?
- Is there something valuable in thick religion, or are its dangers too volatile to reform?
Wheat & Tares 
Thanks for this, Andrew. I find thick and thin useful metaphors even if not my own.
In a sense I wrote a whole book to answer a form of your questions so I won’t belabor it here. I will share that my understanding of the world and my self was helped along when a friend asked me whether I was still Mormon and her wise and well read never. Mormon husband replied “he can’t not be Mormon.” For me it isn’t a choice, a discussion, a debate. It just is. That’s what thick religion has done for me.
On a different tangent, my daughter who has actively participated with a different church for decades says about my book “you have drawn the circle so big that I’m in.”