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This is a really good, smart piece connecting home affordability with congregational struggles in the LDS church.
I have some additional thoughts. https://twitter.com/nataliebrownist/status/1361680399764774917
I have some additional thoughts. https://twitter.com/nataliebrownist/status/1361680399764774917
As @WmHenryMorris pointed out last year, the church's congregational model depends on a US cultural economic model that is clearly no longer viable. That puts us on the lip of a crisis in the church but we don't realize it.
And instead of rising to meet this crisis in a genuinely prophetic way, church leadership doubles down on the failing economic model of [MBA husband + SAHM wife + 3 kids in the suburbs] as a moral issue. We have built our house on sand, unfortunately.
None of this is inherent to our faith tradition; it's a result of Mormon assimilation in the post-WW2 era.
But it is now in the process of becoming a genuine threat to our organizational model as well as a threat to our life in community.
But it is now in the process of becoming a genuine threat to our organizational model as well as a threat to our life in community.
There was a good conversation about this back in December, but we have been piggybacking Zion on the postwar idea of suburban family life for like three generations and it isn't working.
Most of the ways we envision community are resource intensive (in terms of time, talent and treasure) in a way that Mormons no longer have the bandwidth to support. And that is just going to get worse.
Right now the church organization appears to be trying to meet this crisis by pushing responsibility down to the individual family level, switching over to a modular program that you are meant to implement at home on your own. But that deeply misunderstands the problem.
Families and individuals who don't have the bandwidth to support a resource-intensive organization don't have to bandwidth to go it alone, either.
The answer is to turn our ecclesiastical imaginations towards models of community that produce, rather than consume, our bandwidth. Spiritual and temporal resource pooling and mutual aid.
This stuff is really hard to build from the ground up (it takes bandwidth, & bandwidth is the problem) and the tragedy is that we have this extensive church organization that *could* be reimagined at the congregational level as a scaffold for deep, thick and authentic community.
But that requires a nimbleness and an adaptability that conservative gerontocracies are not historically great at.
And just to be crystal clear about it, the resource-intensive demands of LDS community has historically taken those resources in the form of unpaid labor from women.
So when I am talking about reimagining community in a way that creates spiritual and temporal bandwidth for families via resource pooling and mutual aid, I am very specifically ruling out versions of this that primarily demand extensive unpaid labor from women.
In other words, I am saying that we have to carefully examine and reject models that have invisible costs, because those costs are almost always borne by women.
I am suggesting that we build something that accounts for the economic reality of two working spouses with limited bandwidth and imagine ways to bring families into community with each other to support each other in an egalitarian, communitarian way.
Anyway please read @nataliebrownist's fascinating piece on the central role that housing costs and residential patterns play in the roots of all of this.
