This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
In a recent interview with Utah State University professor Philip Barlow, retiring LDS Church leader Marlin K. Jensen spoke candidly about problems facing his church. Chief among these is a level of apostasy not seen since Joseph Smith's 1837 banking fiasco in Kirtland, Ohio.
Responding to the exodus of existing members and the failure of new members to become established, church leadership has launched an effort called The Rescue to reclaim its flock. Among other things, this effort aims at providing better information through the Internet.
It's not my concern to tell The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints how to retain members. But the church is not alone in this crisis. The problems it faces are mirrored everywhere in our society. It is the solution to these problems that is my concern, and the solution in each case is the same.
The church's real problem isn't that members find misinformation, or truth, as the case may be, on the Internet. The problem is that life in the church revolves around what is found in the Internet, and in books and sermons. The problem of the church is that it lives increasingly in the head, and only in the head.
This is likewise the problem of our political parties and our universities. It is that we live in a world that revolves around ideology, around belief, around the things we think about, rather than around how we live.
As institutions defined by abstractions, they are empty of soul. They are disconnected from the concerns of ordinary life. They are, in a word, irrelevant.
Back in the 1960s, our universities suffered from a similar malaise. They were slow to respond to the human reality unfolding around them in the protests against war, injustice and racism. The battle cry of students was that education, as embodied by the universities, was irrelevant. It was worse than irrelevant.
For years, universities, which should have been in the forefront of the battle against militarism and injustice, were fellow travelers with military and industry. Hence, Eisenhower's prescient warning against the collusion of the academy and the military-industrial complex.
Forty years on, we are in the same mess. Institutions that should be leading the way in real, as opposed to talked-about, transformation are even more deeply enmeshed in a mindset divorced from reality that is driving the planet toward destruction.
In the face of environmental challenges and social inequities that dwarf what we saw in the 60s, the LDS Church should be, and could be, an example of a different way. But what we see in the lives of everyday Mormons is the same ideological paralysis, the same inability and even refusal to act.
The church can say all it wants to about history and belief, it can proclaim its Christian credentials 'til the cows come home, but Mormon reality says something different, and members understand this.
The remedy for malaise is action. What Mormons need, what everyone needs, is bold, unprecedented action that addresses real problems rather than figments of the mind.
What Mormons in particular need is a call to build Zion, not in the form of a bigger church, but in the ordinary brick and mortar of people's lives, in things like how we power our homes and cars, how we raise our food and how we treat the poor.
In this, and only in this, will the church find the relevance its members crave. Focusing on providing better versions of the present message of disconnected ideology is a recipe for disaster from which there will be no rescue.
Ed Firmage, Jr. photographs and writes about life in the West from his home in Salt Lake City.