site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

7
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I'm not sure if there's a specific term in the LDS community that separates it from more general missionary work, but sending 18-25ish young adults in suits on bicycles to knock on doors away from home, typically for sections of two years. TraceWoodgrains wrote about it from the perspective of someone then-inside the community who did the work in Australia, but I've seen it referenced from online and offline ex- and current-LDS.

Yes, ostensibly missionary work gets convert baptists, and the official statistics are in 4+ per missionary-year. Which is pretty respectable, even if it's an astounding amount of manhours to get there. But these numbers come about by merging the numbers from all jurisdictions, and by mixing explicit missionary work knocking on doors with, talking with organically-developed friendships while on mission, missionary service (such as volunteer work for the destitute).

Add in retention to baptism -- and from a non-LDS perspective, that's the LDS baptism requirements are a really low bar -- where knock-on-door numbers are awful and the entire program sells itself on members talking to or encouraging investigators that they found through personal efforts, and it turns into a wash pretty quickly for a lot of jurisdictions.

I don't think there are good public numbers for baptism-per-missionary by mission or country, but at least if your missionary work was recent, I'd really guess you were probably well above-average for your mission region.

The cynical view on Rumspringa is more that it shoves younger Amish to see how weird "the English" are and how little we like it (akin to forcing someone caught sneaking a puff of a cigarette to smoke several in a row, knowing that the nicotine would be unpleasant in that dosage), rather than a hazing: a person on Rumspringa can often run into trouble, but they're not interrupting Troubles' soap operas.

The cynical view on Rumspringa is more that it shoves younger Amish to see how weird "the English" are and how little we like it (akin to forcing someone caught sneaking a puff of a cigarette to smoke several in a row, knowing that the nicotine would be unpleasant in that dosage), rather than a hazing: a person on Rumspringa can often run into trouble, but they're not interrupting Troubles' soap operas.

IIRC, the rumspringa for most Amish is fairly tame and doesn’t involve that much contact with the English. It’s a time when Amish youth are allowed to disobey their parents a little bit and generally have a few exceptions to the strict Amish codes, not a general license to rebel.

I don't think there are good public numbers for baptism-per-missionary by mission or country, but at least if your missionary work was recent, I'd really guess you were probably well above-average for your mission region.

It was over a decade ago. I won't get into specifics because the country I served in already narrows down my identity far too much. But no, I was a little bit under the average for missionaries in the Czech Republic as far as baptisms go. That said, a significant source of baptisms (none of mine, but probably around 20% of the mission's) were Mongolia immigrants. In one of the cities with missionaries there was a member who had joined in Mongolia. She lived in an apartment building mostly full of other Mongolians and introduced the missionaries to a ton of them.

Regarding retention after baptism, the rule of thumb I've always heard (and have usually seen in regards to actual activity rates vs. membership on the rolls) is about 1/3 stay active. Not sure how this compares to, say, cultural Catholics that never go to mass.

Catholic RCIA has a ~50% retention rate. So making baptism harder has room for improvement, but not infinite room.