Michael Paulson offers some conclusions from “Far from Zion: Meeting Mormonism on the Religion Beat,” a talk he recently gave at Utah Valley University:
Fourth, it seems to me that there is, at this point, at least a cultural uncertainty within Mormonism about how far an individual Latter-day Saint can go in publicly disputing, or even questioning, a position of church officials. That uncertainty, at least in my experience, can have a chilling effect on openness, although my impression is that the conformity of political speech by Mormons is slowly lessening, either intentionally or unintentionally, in the wake of the Romney campaign and Proposition 8. But there’s clearly a tension within Mormonism about what kinds of opinions are OK to voice publicly. I have a few theories about what’s happening. It seems to me, as an outsider, that Mormonism places a fairly high premium on conformity, as well as on community. There can be religious consequences for stepping out of bounds—I’m thinking about people who have been excommunicated, or disfellowshipped, or denied that diploma at BYU—but there can also be social consequences for non-conformity, which, in a culture that places such a high premium on community, can be chilling as well. I think the lack of an ordained clergy is a complicating factor, because it seems to make it harder to define who is speaking officially for the church and who is speaking as an individual—if everyone really has a calling, and those callings constantly change, which people are speaking for themselves and which for their church? Another way of thinking about that is that there seems to be less distance between the institutional church and its members in Mormonism than in other religions, so it is harder for insiders and outsiders to distinguish the significance of actions and opinions of individual Mormons, and that’s a prickly issue at a time when there’s a sensitivity about the political involvement of churches.
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