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There’s been a lot of talk in Mormon online spaces and the bloggernacle claiming that church participation has been way down since Covid. I’ve observed something similar, although I’m not 100% sure. For me, yes, it had a big impact. We run a recurring service cleaning business, and we always warn our teams that if one of their customers skips a clean, it can go one of two ways (like all relationships): either they realize how much they need you, or they realize how much they don’t. Skipped cleans just aren’t worth the risk (aside from the immediate loss of revenue). Now, obviously, during the pandemic, there was no reasonable choice but to skip church to save lives (despite what the toilet-seat licking Evangelical congregations may have believed). If I believed more in divine intervention, the fact that “God” made us all take a step back might have occurred to me as a more serious possibility. Anyway, I put out a poll on Wheat & Tares to find out if readers there had experienced a change in their participation or observance (for me, yes to both, although I am still teaching primary when I’m in town, but that’s it, and I don’t miss it at all. I would probably just not go back if not for that, although I also wonder / suspect I would lose something in the process, but we moved to a new ward in 2021, and I don’t know or really feel the need to know anyone.) Here’s the link to the survey if you want to take it:
https://wheatandtares.org/2022/08/03/covid-poll Current results:
HAVE YOU HAD COVID?
– 50% have never had it
– 36% have had it once
– 12% have had it twice
– 2% have had it more than twice (!)
VACCINATION STATUS:
– 7% Never vaxed
– 9% Vaxed, not boosted
– 57% vaxed & boosted
– 27% vaxed & boosted twice
APPROVAL OF CHURCH’S RESPONSE TO COVID?
– 35% Mostly approved
– 22% Said church wasn’t strict enough
– 17% Said church leadership was good, but their local leaders were not.
– 9% Said the church was too strict
– 8% Said the church leaders weren’t good, but their local leaders were great.
– 8% Said “other”
CHURCH COMMITMENT & COVID
– 36% Said they lowered their participation as a result of the Covid break (e.g. attendance, ministering, accepting callings)
– 30% Said their commitment didn’t change as a result
– 24% Said they lowered BOTH their participation and observance (e.g. word of wisdom, tithing, garments)
– 8% Said it changed, but not due to the pandemic break
– 2% Said they lowered their observance, but not their participation
– 1% Said it increased their observance
– 0 Said it increased their participation
I dunno about you, but that looks like a (mostly) one-way street to me. If I had to theorize about the lower commitment levels, I would still ascribe most of it to people realizing that life was easier without church, but I’d add a few other things:
– Unmarried women (and others) learned that the Church didn’t really care if they could take the sacrament, or learned that it didn’t make a difference to them.
– I had a friend from my home stake reach out to me. This is someone who still attends, but was alarmed at the number of people in the congregation who behaved in completely irresponsible ways, who were angry / defiant, who dove deeply into conspiratorial thinking, and some of whom literally died rather than take the pandemic seriously. This friend named names, and I was kind of shocked, too. These are people who taught us when we were children, ward leaders, teachers, caregivers. It is kind of a faith-shaking thing to put names and faces to this stuff.a
If you see a decrease, what do you think is behind it?
COVID was the perfect excuse not to go. People leave you alone, and you don’t come across as being inactive or maybe low-hanging fruit for activity. Overall, COVID has been good for me and my relationship with the church. You also learn how little you need the church and how much easier it is without it in your life. That sounds a bit harsh I guess, but I don’t mean it to be harsh. It just expresses the impact of COVID on me.
Purely anecdotal of course, but my ward is definitely not what it was before COVID. Some of that is because several families, including most of the young ones, have moved away. Three kids in Primary is about average these days, five is a big week and sometimes there’s only one. But I also agree with the premise that some of us recognized how little we need the church and how meaningless the Sunday routine can be. Is it any less meaningless not going to church? Probably not. But with driving time included it saves me 2.5 to 3 hours each week, time I have often been using of late to use my new smoker. (Sunday’s first attempt at smoking a brisket was a great success.) (As an aside, we just had COVID in May for the first time, we are vaccinated and boosted. I think the church response was good for the first 2/3 of COVID but after that I disapprove of the church’s handling.)
I’ve complained in many other threads already 😈 but I can do it again.😈 APPROVAL OF CHURCH’S RESPONSE TO COVID?
The church’s response to covid was a mixed bag. There are two types of responses to talk about, the churchwide response and the local response.
Churchwide. The global church gets credit for shutting down in-person meetings at the beginning of the pandemic. I don’t know how much credit to give because I think the timing of it was reactionary to government mandates that were already ramping up.
March 12, 2020 – The state of Utah recommends that gatherings of more than 100 people be cancelled for the next two weeks.
Laterthat same day, while everyone was discussing what that would mean for church, the church suspends all meetings. They did suspend all meetings worldwide, so there’s that. Regardless, I’m sure the church would have suspended church meetings given the growing realization of the dangers of covid. Outside a few small murmurings from Bednar about religious freedom and pumping gas, I didn’t see our global church leaders fighting gathering restrictions.
The covid response kind of fell apart after a while. Covid precautions became a local matter. I get it, you don’t want to restrict meetings in location A because covid is bad at location B, regional outbreaks are too hard to manage at the global level, so leave it up to the locals to call the shots. A few problems with that approach.
1) It was a worldwide pandemic, there weren’t a whole lot of safe regions and dangerous regions, it was bad all over with no way to contain things by region.
2) On average I’d say that there are more “caution to the wind” types in our church than “play it safe” types. That reflected in decisions local leaders were making to go back to normal.
Covid was and is a divisive issue, it’s impossible to please everyone. Accommodating one group comes at the expense of the other group, no matter which group you try to accommodate.
Ultimately it all comes down to the local level. Here we could have done a much better job. My local experience:
1) The decision by global church leaders to let locals decide was a mistake. There should have been better guidelines and metrics for local leaders to relax restrictions.
2) The people that wanted safety precautions were regularly read the riot act. There was no riot act reading for the people that were against safety precautions. The accommodations mostly went in one direction.
3) After the first wave of covid waned, we let down our guard. Once the second wave and more especially the omicron wave showed up there was zero appetite to go back to restrictions or precautions. I’ve mentioned this before but after we started doing in-person meetings again we even ignored local government restrictions on gatherings.
4) Dropping online offerings. In my opinion there’s no reason to drop online offerings. A few wards still offer online, some dropped them entirely. Our ward moved to a system where you have to get permission from the bishop each week to get the link to online meetings. They’re probably more concerned with counting everyone that attends than anything else but that plan always felt way too controlly and icky to me.
CHURCH COMMITMENT & COVID
All we can do is look at anecdotal evidences. The first Sunday I went back I was shocked at how many people were in attendance. There were lots, just as many as were attending pre-pandemic. Interestingly, attendance has slowly dropped off since I’ve gone back to in-person. Maybe people showed up for a while and decided they preferred not attending church.
I think people enjoyed their break from the proverbial hamster wheel, working very hard but in ways that don’t produce actual benefits to self or community.
I hear other anecdotes where people have seen a significant drop-off in attendance due to covid. I’ve also seen leaders react in a way that reveals that they’ve seen a drop-off. It’s going to be a concern going forward.
Human nature and all but I’d rather we explore ways to make church more relevant than the classic approach of maligning people that aren’t at church in an effort to scare the people that are there into staying (so they won’t be similarly maligned).
Speaking only of my ward, it’s definitely gotten smaller, but covid probably isn’t the only cause. Our ward boundaries have changed three times since the start of 2020. So there’s a lot of different faces. I also milked the covid excuse to stay home for all it was worth, so I wasn’t there to watch the comings and goings. But I’m sure some of those faces were lost because of covid. Missing church gave a lot of people the chance to see where it fit in their lives. For me, because I tend to be a recluse, I like to venture out and go to community events to spice up life. Not going to church for so long and finally returning gave me a good chance to see how church scratched that itch and how it didn’t. It also provided a good contrast to realize how little spiritual enrichment I receive at church compared to my home activities.
Since sifting has been talked about recently in another thread, you could say covid was a natural sifting event. Those who found they missed church were all the happier to return. Those who didn’t got the chance to ask themselves whether they wanted to go back or not.
PazamaManX wrote:
Our ward boundaries have changed three times since the start of 2020.I’m sure each stake is different but it’s pretty rare for boundaries to change in my stake, even when sorely needed. Three times in less than two years seems like a lot.
Could those boundary changes be related to a drop-off in activity? Do you think it was to accommodate growth or adjust for shrinkage?
nibbler wrote:Could those boundary changes be related to a drop-off in activity? Do you think it was to accommodate growth or adjust for shrinkage?
I believe it’s a mixture of growth and loss. There are some who have gone their own way. But, I also live in one of the fastest growing areas in the country right now. So the changes are reactions to the constantly changing membership geography.
We’ve all heard the saying “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” My dad used to riff on this by saying, “Absence makes the heart go wander.” I think that both of those things are true. Another way to put it is “If you love someone, set them free. If they don’t return, they never were yours. If they do, they will love you for life.” Or something like that. Maybe it’s like a marriage that goes through a forced (rather than a wanted) separation for a period of time. In some marriages, this will result in a permanent split because they realize it wasn’t that great a relationship after all. In other cases, they will be relieved to be back together because they really felt the loss.
At least in the WT survey, that appeared to be mostly a “relief” to be out of the relationship rather than a “longing” to return. I think it’s also exacerbated by how many people moved during the pandemic. We did, and I know many others did, too. Joining a new ward is difficult at the best of times, but nearly impossible in a pandemic. You don’t know anyone, and you can’t really get to know them. You are also in “first date” mindset and not really interested in indulging people’s worst impulses because you have no stake in the relationship. In our case, the new ward parking lot is full of “blue lives matter” license plates, every talk and lesson was about obedience and hating on doubters, and there was plenty of dog-whistle conservative political viewpoints. I heard a few things like that in my last ward, and frankly I wasn’t a big fan of that one either, although I did have friends there, and I was more indulgent of their conservative (and even conspiratorial) views–willing to engage in discussions with them anyway. The one before that, a ward I loved, was fragmented in five ways during a radical ward realignment, and I basically haven’t had a ward that didn’t suck on some level since then.
I really did try in this new one, up to a point. I engaged with people in the FB group, donated items to people who asked for them (not even a response or thanks or anything from most of these efforts, and in fact it was more like “leave it on the porch–we’re too busy to come to the door”). Just really not great community. When the RS presidency changed, the most virulent right-wingnut got called in, changed the group name to something I thought was an Evangelical group, and posted her GOP stuff there. I left that group. I just don’t have any interest in participating with these people, but honestly, I can’t say my old ward would currently be any better. There are far more church members like her than there are like me. I just think the Church left me, not the other way around.
You’re touching on something I really struggle with. More than one virus has spread in many wards. I’ll do my best to keep this politically neutral. How do you comfortably attend church when you see the toxic bile, vitriol, and ill will that many bishops, stake presidents, relief society presidents, nursery leaders, etc. post on social media? Take the ignorance is bliss approach, just don’t look at what they’re saying and pretend everything is okay?
The line between politics and religion is very blurred in the USA. In fact I’d say people put their politics first and use their political views to interpret their religion, even though they believe they’ve ordered them the other way around. Some of their more disturbing views aren’t confined to social media posts, they’re integrated into talks, lessons, counsel, interviews, and policies.
It’s easy to look past imperfections when people have very lofty ideals and fall short of attaining them. It’s quite another matter when people have ideals that are the dead opposite of yours. They may fall short, but even if they were perfect in what they’re doing, they’re still headed in a direction you don’t want to go.
When that’s the majority of people at church and when that voice is the only one with the backing of “authority” it makes it that much harder to attend.
nibbler wrote:You can not look, take the ignorance is bliss approach, things will be okay if I simply don’t know what they’re broadcasting to the world. The line between politics and religion is very blurred in the USA. In fact I’d say people put their politics first and use their political views to interpret their religion, even though they believe they’ve ordered them the other way around. Some of their more disturbing views aren’t confined to social media posts, they’re integrated into talks, lessons, counsel, interviews, and policies.
It’s easy to look past imperfections when people have very lofty ideals and fall short of attaining them. It’s quite another matter when people have ideals that are the dead opposite of yours. They may fall short, but even if they were perfect in what they’re doing, they’re still headed in a direction you don’t want to go.
I have a different perspective, but I think the same opinion. I’m on the other side of the political aisle that most people on this forum seem to be. I live in a red state, so I hear a lot of political statements made at church that I mostly agree with. But, I still hate hearing them.
I spend the other six days of the week in a conservative vacuum chamber. I don’t go to church to talk about politics. Sure, there’s some overlap in what they cover, but I feel those are not the most worthwhile subjects for discussions on Sunday.
Before moving where I currently live, I grew up and lived in a more conservative area of California. So politically, my ward was a mixed purple bag. Politics were never brought up (except during Prop
and I found it a far more welcoming ward with a stronger community. In my opinion, whether your political view meshes with your congregation or not, living in a monoculture detracts from the quality of the ward.For me, COVID could not have come at a better time. I was at struggling as a non-believer at BYU, going to church to avoid losing my endorsement. I had just met with my bishop who had signed my ecclesiastical endorsement for my final year of school. A few days later, campus was shut down for COVID. I never attended church for the remainder of my time at BYU, which is perhaps the single greatest thing I ever did for my mental health. Now, I was always worried about catching COVID (and I still haven’t). I would not have wanted to go back after hearing about people refusing to wear masks and grumbling about the most basic precautions. But to be honest, I just really needed a break from all things church.
As far as the church’s response, I would say one of the things that bothered me most was how they went ahead with that whole special Restoration General Conference rather than address the pandemic head-on. It felt super bizarre. It seemed like the whole world was worried about the pandemic, people were dying, there were lockdowns and masks and quarantines, it was a scary time. And the prophet who was supposed to be God’s chosen mouthpiece to lead the world through the difficulties of the latter-days………. read a proclamation about Joseph Smith and unveiled a new logo. What? Our attendance fell, but it has rebounded – and our convert baptism rate has surged post-COVID. We have a wonderful, loving Bishop who sets an incredibly accepting, no pressure tone. I am guessing only, but I think that might be a general distinction. People post-COVID are looking to connect again, so the more accepting wards might be rebounding, while the less accepting (or more “settled”) wards might not be replacing, numerically, those who stopped attending.
hawkgrrrl wrote:
We’ve all heard the saying “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” My dad used to riff on this by saying, “Absence makes the heart go wander.” I think that both of those things are true. Another way to put it is “If you love someone, set them free. If they don’t return, they never were yours. If they do, they will love you for life.” Or something like that.
I agree with this. Some people really missed the community and associations of church and couldn’t wait to start meeting again. Others saw church as at least a partial burden and were pleasantly surprised when they had a break from church and didn’t devolve into hedonists. We are in the camp of attending less and probably observing less. We used covid as an excuse for as long as we could but now we are getting to the point where we are past caring enough to make excuses. They don’t ask and we don’t tell.
I’m starting to think that it is rather unusual for a Christian church to have the sacrament/communion every week. It feels roughly analogous to renewing my wedding vows every week. It seems rather superfluous. I wonder, was it more common among churches in the time of JS? It feels designed to create a need for and dependence on the church – that offers me a weekly ceremony that I need to commune with my God.
Roy wrote:
I’m starting to think that it is rather unusual for a Christian church to have the sacrament/communion every week. It feels roughly analogous to renewing my wedding vows every week. It seems rather superfluous. I wonder, was it more common among churches in the time of JS? It feels designed to create a need for and dependence on the church – that offers me a weekly ceremony that I need to commune with my God.
I thought it was strange too. Jesus did it once with his apostles and it converted into a practice that they did every week. There are references to the ordinance in Acts:
Acts 2:42 wrote:And they continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.
Acts 20:7 wrote:And upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached unto them, ready to depart on the morrow; and continued his speech until midnight.
From the
DidacheDidache 14:1 wrote:But every Lord’s day gather yourselves together, and break bread, and give thanksgiving after having confessed your transgressions, that your sacrifice may be pure.
It appears that it became a weekly practice from very early on.
This article on the sacrament in the early LDS church might interest you.
https://rsc.byu.edu/you-shall-have-my-word/lords-supper-early-mormonism
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