Rome is captured. Not at the edges. At the center. The institution built to judge the age now speaks its language fluently. Synodality, accompaniment, listening, process. Every word but the ones that cost something. If your faith already runs on the rainbow, the state, and the sovereign self, Rome has made room for you. It will not ask you to change. That is the tell.
So what does a traditional Catholic actually hold right now? A demographic bet. Africa. The Global South. A generation of young priests who came up hungrier than the men who formed them. The bet may pay. It may also take forty years to pay. My children do not have forty years. They have now.
The SSPX kept the road. They also stand outside the wall, and the wall keeps getting higher. Set aside whether that is just. The question I cannot get past is smaller and worse: how do I explain to my son that he belongs to the fringe of a church that will not fully claim him?
Eastern Orthodoxy has held the line best. Not by heroism. By architecture. There is no single voice, so there is no single throat to seize. No one in Constantinople can hand over the whole East in an afternoon, because no one in Constantinople owns the whole East. That is the strength. It is the same weakness, read from the other side. A body that cannot be captured all at once cannot answer all at once either. And on the ground the problem is worse than any of that. Finding a parish that is a church and not an ethnic cultural society is hard. Also, the whole thing in this country would fit inside a stadium.
Then the Restoration.
What I saw in the nineties was not an argument. It was a people. Homes in order. Children wanted. Men who did not flinch and were not embarrassed to be good. I walk into a ward today and I still see it. It is still there. But I also see an institution that has learned to be careful. Soft in the places it used to be load bearing. Watching the world’s face for a reaction. Managing its reputation in the exact hour the world has decided the family is the enemy.
Strength is not a style. It is the requirement. Institutions do not lose it in one vote. They lose it one flinch at a time, each one reasonable, each one explained.
So one year.
I am giving the LDS path a year, with small children in the house, to find out whether it can still be a home and not just a place I remember being one.
And if postmodernity has taken the LDS church for good, then the East is the last small house standing. But that is the Alamo. Nobody wins the Alamo. You hold the walls, you die well, and you hope somebody who was not there writes it down.
_____
Wife: "Have you decided on a Church to raise the kids?"
Me: "EO, SSPX, or LDS"
Wife: "You're too hard on the mormons."
Me: "You're hard on someone you love."
SSPX is pre-Vatican II Catholicism
I am a life long latter-day Saint. I have lived in several different states and a mix of liberal and conservative wards. Your observation that the institutional church and the cultural church on LGBT issues is not sufficiently “load bearing” or at least won’t be for the next couple of decades.
On one hand, like you, I have seen permissiveness grow (culturally) in ways I never expected. In this sense, especially among the more liberal members, we are not following a dramatically different path than the rest of North American Christianity. And much of the well publicized defections from the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in recent years has been over this issue.
However, as much as some members would like there to be more permissiveness in the church for their LGBTQ friends and family, I have seen the institutional church basically hold the line against enormous cultural pressures. I know you point to some exceptions. But I think the temple rituals and exaltation theology combined with the still demanding nature of being a temple recommend holding latter-day Saint will provide a bulwark for a while to come.
Gay marriage is just to incompatible with not just the proclamation but the entire LDS cosmology. I have seen a growing emphasis on referring to heavenly parents as a way to emphasize the dimorphic nature of God. In order to concede more ground than we already have would require throwing out enormous foundational doctrines that Catholicism and eastern orthodoxy do not have to grapple with.
Ezra Taft Benson often said that the chapters in the book of Mormon leading up to the savior appearing in third Nephi is a template for our day and a lead up to the second coming of Jesus. If that is the case, we see the Nephites go into an almost total disintegration in those final years before the appearance of Jesus. The Lamanites followed a similar, but not exactly similar path. But it was very bleak at the end among all people.
In my circles in Southern California I find enormously impressive Christians of many kinds: Evangelicals who are not ashamed to be Christians or endure the crosses of the world. Catholics, who put my prayer life to shame. Eastern orthodox with fruits that look much like my community.
But if you’re concerned with your children, I don’t see any more impressive Christians than latter-day Saints in the high schools and middle schools, where my kids attend. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints provides the best cultural milieu on offer.
This response ignores the question of competing truth claims on purpose because that is a whole other conversation. Let me know if you want to talk more about any of these issues.
explain the philosophy of pragmatism applied to religion. Particularly William James. Apply William James philosophy to the LDS restoration versus Protestant Christianity
James' pragmatism holds truth is what works: beliefs true if practical consequences benefit life. In The Will to Believe, when options are live, forced and momentous and intellect undecided, will to believe is ok if fruits good. Judge by results not roots.
Applied to LDS restoration vs Protestant: Set aside historical disputes. Test which produces stronger community, moral growth, vitality, resilience. Whichever has higher cash value in experience is pragmatically truer. Experience decides for each.
