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.”
This is a fantastic opinion piece. It raises the important question: Can a member of the Mormon Community be expelled from that community? The irrefutable answer is: No.
Abraham Lincoln famously told members of the Church: “You go back and tell Brigham Young that if he will let me alone I will let him alone”.
Lincoln was correct in realizing that one cannot use force or coercion to make another reject their sense of culture. Leaders of the Church should realize that they cannot simple tell people that they are no longer Mormons and expect it to be so.
I remember a guy in our ward who was excommunicated because he asked another woman in the ward to marry him (he was already married). Afterwards, he told people they could kick me out of the church, but the priesthood is eternal, and they can never take that away from me. A few years later, his daughter was killed in an accident while she was drinking (the family had many problems trying to force her to be righteous; it was such a waste because she was a really good girl, and they just compounded her issues). When she was buried, they had the funeral in the local LDS Church, and he took part as the father. Then we went to the cemetery, and he dedicated her grave with a version of a prayer that was part of the temple ceremony, raising and lowering his arms while he spoke. No one said anything. People just went back to the church and had a luncheon. So I guess some of us are really thick and others like me are a bit thin because I thought he was crazy.
I think most members see Mormonism as a set of religious doctrines plus some pragmatic stuff, but it seems that in practice the pragmatic stuff is the substance of the Church and the truth claims are a macguffin. I can imagine an alternate universe in which Mormonism arises and evolves just as it has done in this universe, but with a completely different set of doctrines.
A fascinating question is whether Mormonism could have succeeded with NO doctrines. Britt Hartley promotes the idea of “tools without the woo”, suggesting that we can build community, structures, traditions, rituals, ethics, culture, meaning, and even spirituality without tying any of it to religious orthodoxy. But John Dehlin often remarks on the difficulty of building a strong, organized community sans religion. For many of us, the thickness is worth the woo.
I have a friend who is part of the Washington Ethical Society. They are trying to build exactly what Robert describes. They have their own form of orthodoxy, but it is not religious.
So, to address lastlemming and Robert,
This post was actually me trying to take a much more pessimistic Facebook post and try to make it into something less pessimistic. I am actually quite happy that I don’t think any of the doomerism leaked through, haha.
I will not repost that entire FB post, but the gist was that I thought that secularists and leftists are “hamstrung” politically because they don’t leverage the motivations and power of religious dogma. These technologies are dangerous because they are powerful, but not using them is like bringing a knife to a gun fight simply because guns are “too deadly”.
My concern is that although religions are not just about beliefs, I worry that strongly held beliefs (in the religious sense) are a prerequisite to get the benefit of everything else. As I mentioned, I am feeling very pessimistic about this.
While Britt Hartley admirably discusses building a no-nonsense spirituality, she *also* acknowledges how difficult the task is, and recognizes how “ahead” religions are by packaging a lot of these things together in a ready-made package so that people don’t have to DIY from scratch.
Anyway, I would love to be proven wrong!
Sorry, Andrew, but I don’t think you are wrong. I read your post yesterday and it got me thinking. But my thoughts were still evolving and attempting to write thoughts as you think them just gets too long. I am still mostly there today, so this is going to be long as I write and figure things out as I go.
So, I got thinking about when the Catholic Church was so powerful that the pope was telling kings who to marry and that they needed to gather armies to go free Jerusalem from the evil Moslems. People obeyed even when it was quite ridiculous.
And it led me to my mother and how she didn’t believe Joseph Smith was anything but a con man. If she believed in God, then she hated God. But she couldn’t really bring herself to even ask such questions. She *hated* temple garments, yet wore them till we buried her in them. She never could quite think through from “Joseph Smith is just like Jim Jones” which she told me when the koolaid went down, to “maybe I don’t have to do what the church tells me.” She just was not capable of thinking such thoughts.
Many of her generation and before were the same. My father was. Some uncles They didn’t really believe, but could not bring themselves to make the break from the powerful hold the community/world/church had over them. The could not even really ask the questions it would take to really leave the church.
But it wasn’t just the community as in people they personally knew. It wasn’t just the Utah culture, or pioneer heritage. It wasn’t just the church. It wasn’t the belief system. It was like the whole known world. It was this world view that the church was a part of and they just could not break out of that. To even question it was too much. Stepping out of the church would be stepping off planet earth.
It wasn’t that they only knew Utah culture, because my dad was out of Utah culture almost 10 years of WWII and occupation army life. He stayed in Germany after WWII for several years of the occupation. He KNEW German culture, spoke fluent German, loved a German girl, but couldn’t marry her because she wasn’t Mormon. And my dad was an atheist. But the church still told him who he could marry.
Sure, the church created that world, but it was so much more than the church. It was just not something all you “little kids” born into a world of TV and internet can even comprehend. I am just on the edge of that world being born the year TV was invented. But my parents both grew up in a world without even radio because small Utah town didn’t have radio.
It was more than beliefs, more than religion, more than community, and more like tribalism. Where people just cannot see beyond their little tribe.
So, today, in most places religion does not have that kind of hold over people. There is just too much of the outside world.
Except for places that do not trust the outside world. Like the South where they still don’t trust “them d*** Yankees.” And the Mormon corridor where the US army also marched against them. And much of the rural west where the government and the rest of the nation is viewed as a “bunch of stupid city folk.” So, where people are taught not to trust outsiders the local religion/culture has more power.
And there you find MAGA.
MAGA, where they bash the guards at the capital building with American flags, carry Confederate flags, dress up as Captain Moroni, or Vikings, and attack their own government while trying to defend their own government….or something like that.
They show the same inability to think through what the blank they even believe that my mother did. If they really believed in their supposed religion, they would not follow such a corrupt man as Trump. So, it REALLY is not about Christianity. But religion is part of it because this MAGA is using the people’s loyalty to religion.
But once your tribe claims that you must kill the enemy in the name of God, then religion gets used as motivation. And the tribe members cannot see beyond their little tribe because they have been taught that anyone outside the tribe is the enemy. So, they cannot think past what the tribe leader says. Because “God”.
But in our modern world, there are no real boundaries between “tribes.” Which of course is part of the problem because humans need to belong to a tribe.
So, how do we fix this? The only way I see is “French Revolution.” And my “tribe” is the ones who just will not ”go there.” And who do we behead? The MAGA followers or the supper rich?
Understanding a little better what you’re worrying at, Andrew, let me take a different tack (that might do no better as a response). As you know, I play in the world of non-believers who are interested in community. (“Non-believer” will be too strong for some people, but it works pretty well for a one-liner.) For what it’s worth, I find there is serious interest in that category or class of people within the various Catholic, Jewish, and Evangelical worlds as well as the Mormon world.
Using a combination of my framing and your framing:
>Can there be a thick version of a religion that welcomes the non-believer in (what Mormons would call) full-fellowship?
>>I would say NO. One can imagine and theorize about the possibility but (in my opinion) the barriers to entry are impossibly high.
>Can non-believers find ways of staying in and participating in community within a thick religion?
>>YES. That’s my book.
>Are efforts to raise the boundaries and define the inhabitants detrimental to non-believers who desire community?
>>YES, in any direction the enhanced boundaries and definitions take, including political.
>Are non-believers limited in the benefits of community they/we can enjoy?
>>I’d say YES, limited. But in the LDS/Mormon case in particular, I would propose a variant which is that if one were happy or satisfied with the benefits that adult Mormon women enjoy (acknowledging that most adult Mormon women I know are themselves not happy or satisfied) a non-believer can get pretty close. But with respect to the perceived benefits adult Mormon men enjoy (a big issue in its own right), that status or those benefits are not available to a non-believer.
Andrew S: Unfortunately, like Anna I share your skepticism. The closest thing to a successful shared culture that is non-religious would be a post-LDS one inside of Utah where there are enough people to make connections on the basis of a shared heritage. But it’s still very loose in that those ties are like trying to host a school reunion. It’s not the same as currently belonging to and building a thriving community. It’s much easier to belong just outside or on the fringe of an existing community, even one where the rejection is mutual.
Regarding your question about whether other religions include the same level of “thickness,” I suspect this is behind the losses in so many of the mainline churches. I also wonder where this puts Evangelicals and non-denominational churches in 20 years. Those are highly localized and the penalties for changing congregations are low, but you still have to stay within the broader coalition for family acceptance. Mormons would benefit from this except that they are never ever going to be accepted by them, no matter how hard they try. I was shocked to see many from these right-wing Evangelical or non-denominational strains responding to Hegseth’s demotion of Mormonism from Christianity by saying that Mormons are “trans Christians,” meaning they are putting on the clothes and social presentation of being Christian (specifically being like Evangelicals and other right-wing Christian denominations) but that they are not “passing,” and basically they are not “biologically/theologically authentic” to Christianity. I definitely heard echoes of Brad Wilcox’s claim that other churches were just “pretending” when they did the sacrament.
As I read your excellent OP I couldn’t help but think of the upheaval that occurred during the dissolution of the monasteries in England under Henry VIII. The monasteries, for centuries, had been the safety net for the poor (through the power of Rome). All this power and wealth went to the monarchy and nobility with no real requirement that they take care of the poor, including turning out the monks and nuns who lived there and hounding them as heretics. It was a huge social change for England, one that is still impactful today. Now, obviously the Mormon church was always a tiny minority in the US, but settling Utah made it unique and “thicker” than most other American churches.