Dealing with Social Change: The Mormon Church's Response to Change in Women's Roles

Abstract

This article develops a rational-choice model of the effects of social change on religious organizations, which we use to analyze the Mormon Church's response to change in women's roles. Content analysis and time-series techniques are used to estimate the Church's response to social change and the effect that this response has had upon member commitment and rates of conversionfrom 1950 to 1986. Wefind that despite initial resistance in the late 1960s and 1970s the Church has been moving to accommodate change in women's roles. Accommodation appears to increase participation among younger and less experienced members but decrease participation among older and more experienced members, suggesting that a successful church must strike a balance between accommodation and resistance to social change. How do churches respond to changes that threaten the social underp gs of their beliefs? Such changes are pervasive in the modem world: Catholicism confronts new contraceptive technologies and acceptability of divorce; Evangelical denominations must come to terms with evolutionary science; Mormonism must deal with changing family structures. As these examples suggest, the problems created by change are not easily resolved. Intransigence puts a church increasingly at odds with the prevailing culture and risks alienating both current members and potential converts; accommodation undermines its claim to transcendent truth and divine authority. In this article, we develop a rational-choice model of church behavior that identifies the trade-offs imposed by change and demonstrates its tendency to polarize church membership. We then test this model by measuring the Mormon Church's response to change in the roles of American women. Using time-series techniques, we estimate the Mormon Church's response to social change and, in turn, the effect this response has had upon member commitment and rates of growth from 1950 to 1986. Our results suggest that a successful church must strike a balance between accommodation and resistance to social change, We speculate that the ability to Portions of this research were supported by theArthur ViningDavis Junior Faculty Fellowship awarded by Santa Clara University. We are grateful to John Glidewell, Martin Marty, Harry Roberts,ArmandMauss,RogerFinke, and two anonymous refereesfor valuable comments and suggestions. An early version of this paper was presented at the 1987Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association. Direct correspondence to Laurence R. lannaccone, Department of Economics, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA 95093 X) The University of North Carolina Press Social Forces, June 1990, 68(4):1231-1250 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.177 on Wed, 16 Nov 2016 04:30:58 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 1232 Social Forces 68:4, June 1990 strike such a balance has contributed not only to the growth of Mormonism but also to that of conservative Protestant denominations. The Inevitable Dilemma When social or technological change reduces the perceived value of an organization's outputs, continued success requires a response. But whereas a business firm's response usually entails embracing the new environment, a church's optimal response is less clear-cut. Churches confront an inevitable (Yinger 1946). They must respond to the wishes of their members, lest they lose support (Brannon 1971), but they must also make distinctive demands, lest they lose credibility. Churches exist in part because they offer an alternative to societal norms (Hunter 1983; Lee 1960; Neal 1971). Hence, a church that loses its distinctiveness also loses its appeal. A Soviet Molokan sect studied by Lane (1975) illustrates this principle. Committed to a communitarian lifestyle, this sect approved of communist government before the Russian Revolution and was in tum tolerated after the Communists took power. Yet, as the sect gained government acceptance, it lost both members and commitment. In contrast, a radical Molokan splinter group that opposed the Communist govenmment grew. The development of American Protestant denominations likewise illustrates the need for continuing distinctiveness. For more than a generation American Protestantism has seen its culturally accommodated liberal wing decline as its sectarian, conservative wing has grown (Finke & Stark 1989). Noting the near-perfect correlation between cultural accommodation and membership decline, Roof and McKinney (1987:21) recently observed that almost all of the churches that retained distance from the culture by encouraging distinctive life-styles and beliefs grew; those most immersed in the culture and only vaguely identifiable in terms of their own features suffered declines (c.f., Hoge & Roozen 1979; Kelley 1972).1 The preceding examples show that churches often pay a price for accommodation. But it is also true that churches can be hurt by intransigence. When the Pope officially and decisively reiterated the Catholic Church's traditional ban on contraception in the Humanae Vitae encyclical, he shocked and disappointed the great majority of American Catholics and set into motion a backlash that is said to have dramatically reduced American Catholic church attendance, contributions, and confidence in papal authority (Greeley 1985; Greeley, McCready & McCourt 1976; Greeley & McManus 1987; Hout & Greeley 1987). The simultaneous losses of Catholicism on the one hand and liberal Protestantism on the other highlight the dilemma posed by social change. A Cost/ Benefit Model of Church Response to Social Change The problems identffied above can be analyzed with a cost-benefit model of religious organizations.2 In this model, the rewards a member obtains for adhering to her church's demands (and the sanctions she suffers for rejecting them) are summarized by a mathematical relation that economists call a production function. One such function, R, is depicted by the solid line in Figure 1. A person's conduct is represented as a point on the horizontal axis. The height of the hill lying atop this axis indexes the rewards associated with various manners of conduct. Conduct that the church advocates as ideal and rewards most strongly may be called the church's This content downloaded from 157.55.39.177 on Wed, 16 Nov 2016 04:30:58 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Mormon Church and Women's Roles / 1233 FIGURE 1: Society and Church, Similar Normsa