Sociologists revisit O'Dea's 'The Mormons'

Sociologists' most recent take on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was edited by faculty at church-owned Brigham Young University, but published by the University of Utah Press — a fact that, for longtime Utahns, may illustrate just how much has or hasn't changed in the past half-century for a faith that continues to draw both curiosity and scrutiny.

Written by a stable of scientists, most not part of the LDS Church, "Revisiting Thomas F. O'Dea's 'The Mormons,"' already has spurred a daylong university symposium and is likely to provide fodder for those who study the church — and more directly, its members — for some time to come.

Released earlier this year, the book includes reflection on O'Dea's original question of "how the LDS Church could retain its own uniqueness as it confronted the larger society," according to editors. His seminal study on Latter-day Saints, published in 1957 after the Harvard graduate student was assigned to do a detailed survey of rural LDS communities, was the basis for much of the sociological study of Mormonism that followed.

Cardell Jacobson, one of the new book's editors, told an audience at a Utah Valley State College symposium on Wednesday that, at the time of its publication, O'Dea's study focused on a faith that was Utah-focused and mostly isolated within the Intermountain West. "He didn't anticipate the kind of growth the church has experienced."

Other things he didn't foresee in his look at Latter-day Saints include:

• The women's movement and its impact on members.

• Changes in the sexual mores of the nation, including increasing tolerance for homosexuality.

• How race and the civil rights movement would impact society and the church.

Those topics all are addressed at length in the new book.

Race plays heavily into the faith's current missionary effort in Africa and South Africa, he said, which before a 1978 announcement rescinding a ban on priesthood ordination for black males was not even a possibility. Even so, the church "has never recorded race as part of its membership record," he said, "so we simply don't know how many ethnic groups (and in what proportions) belong to the church."

Sociologist Armand Mauss addresses the topic in the book's chapter on "O'Dea and the Race Issue," writing that, "Some white Mormons have continued to hold the old conceptions about race, but at a clearly diminishing rate. Black populations in most of the world are joining the church in large numbers.