This study evaluated whether Latter-day Saints have more favorable perceptions and practices of food and water emergency preparedness than other households. Individuals across 46 states in the USA ...completed an online survey in 2014 (n = 572). Results indicated that Latter-day Saints, compared to Non-Latter-day Saints, were more likely to have a disaster supplies kit, to have long-term food storage, to have preserved food by canning/bottling, and to perceive neighborhood/community connectedness. Latter-day Saints had significantly lower odds of having less than one month of food storage available compared to Non-Latter-day Saints. Our findings suggest Latter-day Saints may be better prepared to handle a disaster than Non-Latter-day Saints.
In October 2018, the Prophet Russell M. Nelson informed members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that the Church teaching curriculum would shift focus away from lessons taught on ...Sunday. Instead, members were now asked to engage with ‘home-centred, church-supported’ religious instruction using the Church materials ‘Come, Follow Me’. In a religion where Church leaders still defend the idealised family structure of a stay-at-home mother and a father as the provider, the renewed emphasis on the domestic sphere as the site for Church teaching could also reinforce traditional Mormon gender roles. This article draws upon the lived religion of Latter-day Saint women in Sweden, Greece and England to understand how they negotiate gender in their homes. Looking at the implementation of ‘Come, Follow Me’ of sacralising of the home as a gendered practice, there appears to be a reinforcing of the primacy of the domestic space in the reproduction of religious practices and doctrinal instruction. Simultaneously, in conceptualising a gender role, the guardian of the family, I show the ways that European Latter-day Saint women are providing, protecting and nurturing their families. The domestic space then becomes instrumental in providing space for more nuanced, complex gender constructs that accommodate Mormon beliefs, cultural context and secular notions of gender without destabilising the institutional structure.
For centuries, people have traveled to sacred sites for multiple reasons, ranging from the performance of religious rituals to curiosity. As the numbers of visitors to religious heritage sites have ...increased, so has the integration of religious heritage into tourism supply offerings. There is a growing research agenda focusing on the growth and management of this tourism niche market. However, little research has focused on the role that religious institutions and leadership play in the development of religious heritage tourism. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of religious leaders and the impacts their decisions have on the development of religious heritage tourism through a consideration of three case studies related to recent decisions made by the leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
This article will consider missionary work performed in Manitoba and Eastern Canada, and how The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints progressed toward integration into Canadian society as ...another established minority religion searching for potential new members. By navigating through their Canadian settings, Latter-day Saint missionaries adjusted themselves and their Church to local expectations and environments, and constructed a new home for Mormonism in Canada. Three ways that Latter-day Saint missionaries negotiated their place in Canada include evolving relationships with the Canadian public through missionary encounters, renting meeting spaces from fraternal organizations and then constructing their own meetinghouses, and organizing local, auxiliary organizations that aided non-members. The Canadian context, the Latter-day Saint missionary experience, and the growth of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Canada, reveals a process of negotiation. There exists a tension between integration and otherness. Latter-day Saints balanced this tension by on some levels maintaining their distinctiveness, while at the same time blending into Canadian expectations. How the Latter-day Saint missionaries responded to these barriers, the challenges related to communicating with the Canadian public, finding spaces to congregate, local leadership roles, and participating in different aspects of Canadian society, tells a story of a new religion integrating into a new environment.
Researchers have thoroughly documented the experiences of sexual abuse survivors; however, many complications may arise for adult survivors who are religious. To our knowledge, there have been no ...previous studies regarding childhood sexual abuse survivors who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This qualitative research project sought to explore the questions, "What are the gendered messages of femininity that Latter-day Saint childhood sexual abuse survivors have received, and how have these messages impacted their healing from sexual abuse?" Fourteen participants were interviewed as part of a qualitative investigation in a semi-structured format with open-ended questions from an emergent grounded theory design. The researchers analyzed the interviews to reveal results that are grounded in participants' reported experiences. Six themes arose under the category of Harmful Cultural Lesson and Social Norms. An additional theme, Healing through Advocating for Change, presented alongside a theoretical framework of healing, explores the relationship between the harmful cultural messages that Latter-day Saint sexual abuse survivors internalize, the subsequent impact on a survivor's sense of self, and alternative trauma-informed lessons that lead to healing. The author(s) present these results along with the implications for therapists working with Latter-day Saint sexual abuse survivors, recommendations for church policy changes, and future research directions.
The religious studies librarians at Brigham Young University (BYU) began a book display research project to examine the circulation rates of religious studies titles placed on display and to ...specifically evaluate the impact of religious fiction on that display in an academic library. Student employees were tasked with curating the displays over several years and maintaining a spreadsheet with the titles displayed and resulting checkout rates. Religious fiction (from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint tradition) circulated over 80% the first three years, higher than the religious nonfiction on display and the same genre in the stacks. In the final year of study when almost no fiction was displayed and a higher quantity of items were placed on the shelves, the display circulation rates fell sharply. All books on the display circulated better when there was a portion of both nonfiction and fiction and when the shelves held fewer items. The data clearly showed that religious fiction is an important genre to display in an academic library.
Augustine (354–430) is considered to be the first Christian scholar to refer to the Creation’s witness of God as the Book of Nature. For centuries, in conjunction with scripture, the Book of Nature ...was considered in Christianity to be a second witness of God. These two witnesses were also stressed in Judaism, beginning with the Torah’s account of the Creation. The Book of Nature was prominent in Islam as the faith emerged in the 7th century. However, by the 16th century reliance on the Book of Nature began to wane for all these traditions as allegorical interpretation of the natural world gave way to scriptural literalism, partially in response to emerging scientific advances. The appearance of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a self-identified restoration theology in the early nineteenth century should arguably reopen and clarify the Book of Nature in the faith. However, contemporary Latter-day Saint hermeneutics have limited the Creation’s status in the faith’s ontology. The Latter-day Saint theological ideal, supported by the scriptural canon of the faith, counters contemporary neglect, inviting greater attention to and respect for the Book of Nature among the Latter-day Saint community.
The forgotten story of the nineteenth-century freethinkers and twentieth- century humanists who tried to build their own secular religion In The Church of Saint Thomas Paine, Leigh Eric Schmidt tells ...the surprising story of how freethinking liberals in nineteenth-century America promoted a secular religion of humanity centered on the deistic revolutionary Thomas Paine (1737–1809) and how their descendants eventually became embroiled in the culture wars of the late twentieth century.After Paine's remains were stolen from his grave in New Rochelle, New York, and shipped to England in 1819, the reverence of his American disciples took a material turn in a long search for his relics. Paine's birthday was always a red-letter day for these believers in democratic cosmopolitanism and philanthropic benevolence, but they expanded their program to include a broader array of rites and ceremonies, particularly funerals free of Christian supervision. They also worked to establish their own churches and congregations in which to practice their religion of secularism.All of these activities raised serious questions about the very definition of religion and whether it included nontheistic fellowships and humanistic associations—a dispute that erupted again in the second half of the twentieth century. As right-wing Christians came to see secular humanism as the most dangerous religion imaginable, small communities of religious humanists, the heirs of Paine's followers, were swept up in new battles about religion's public contours and secularism's moral perils.An engrossing account of an important but little-known chapter in American history, The Church of Saint Thomas Paine reveals why the lines between religion and secularism are often much blurrier than we imagine.
This article analyzes the “conversion” of Anthony Uzodimma Obinna, an Igbo schoolteacher from the town of Aboh Mbaise in Imo State, and his extended family to Mormonism in southeastern Nigeria ...between the 1960s and the 1980s, from a historical perspective. I argue that the transition of Anthony Obinna and his family away from Catholicism to Mormonism can be explained by both the elective affinities that existed between Mormonism and indigenous Igbo culture, and socio-economic factors as well. This article bases its conclusions on a close reading of oral histories, personal papers, and correspondence housed at the LDS Church History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah and L. Tom Perry Special Collections at Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.
Mormon studies in China began in the early 1990s and can be divided into three phases between the years of 2004 and 2017. The first Master’s and Doctoral theses on Mormonism were both published in ...2004, and journal articles have also been increasing in frequency since then. The year of 2012 saw a peak, partly because Mormon Mitt Romney won the Republican nomination for the 2012 US presidential election. In 2017, a national-level project, Mormonism and its Bearings on Current Sino-US Relations, funded by the Chinese government, was launched. However, Mormon studies in China is thus far still in its infancy, with few institutions and a small number of scholars. Academic works are limited in number, and high-level achievements are very few. Among the published works, the study of the external factors of Mormonism is far more prevalent than research on its internal factors. Historical, sociological, and political approaches far exceed those of philosophy, theology, and history of thoughts. To Mormon studies, Chinese scholars can and should be making unique contributions, but the potential remains to be tapped.
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