Mormon Europeans or European Mormons?

In Dialogue, a Journal of Mormon Thought ( Volume 38 no.4 /Winter 2005), Wouter E. A. van Beek presented his essay:

Mormon Europeans or European Mormons?
An “Afro-European” View on Religious Colonization.

Hopefully the entire text of Wouter van Beek's esay will eventually become available in the online archive of Dialogue Magazine, but perhaps the MVG readers will be interested in some parts of it as it appeared on the Dialogue Weblog: By Common Consent.
On December 6, 2005, guest blogger Stirling Adams contributed a weblog titled:

Why the Church is more true in Argentina.

Some parts of the weblog:

If the Mormon wards you’ve attended in the U.S. are similar to mine, it’s likely you’ve heard periodic reports in sacrament meeting about a visit to another ward and the comfort in finding that “the church is the same wherever you go.”

In Argentina, I felt like I experienced a Mormonism stripped of a heavy overlay of U.S. politics; a Church less burdened by assumptions of cultural superiority and institutional pride that I feel can be associated too often with the U.S. Church; a Mormonism with members more attuned to how individual and institutional actions fare when judged by scriptural teachings (particularly the injunctions towards social justice in the N.T. and BoM).

Also, the just-released issue of Dialogue ( Vol 38:4, Winter ’05, dialoguejournal.com ), has an article called “Mormon Europeans or European Mormons? An ‘Afro-European’ View on Religious Colonization.” It is written by anthropologist and former stake president (and current bishopric member) Walter E. A. van Beek. It is part of a continuing series of articles on international Mormonism. At the end of the post I’ll briefly relate his analysis of the church in Europe to my experience in Argentina.

Now, how does Van Beek’s article relate to my experiences?

After describing 19th century Utah Mormons as a “tribe” using ethnographic terminology, and describing some ways in which our church/tribe was “domesticated” by American colonization, he suggests that once the Church gained power and started to grow in the latter half of the 20th century, we began to exhibit some “colonizing” behavior regarding the Church in non-US countries. This leads to his title question of whether Mormons who live in Europe are “Mormon Europeans” or “European Mormons.”

His analysis includes examples from various European countries, but since he knows the Netherlands best, he includes more data about the Dutch. Of them he writes:

The base culture for LDS membership is Dutch social culture, with compassion for the less fortunate, tolerance toward different opinions, and the notion that one not only has to cooperate but also to compromise to reach one’s goals…

Permissive Dutch society bears the stigma of drugs and other vices among some outsiders (especially for the French and Americans), but most Dutch do not experience any drug problems at all, and a permissive drug policy refines massive support in Dutch society, including among LDS members. The same attitude holds true for… the acceptance of homosexuality and same-sex marriages, the regulation of abortion, and the official regulation of careful practices for euthanasia…

As many Latter-day Saints subscribe to Dutch cultural norms and government policy on these issues, they tend to avoid discussion about them in church since their collective stance would stand out against an LDS Church policy they find awkward. (30)

One example: a few years ago, when the Domestic Church openly mobilize members in California against same-sex marriages, an apostle told European stake presidents to fight against legislation accepting same-sex marriages in European countries. All stake presidents listen to dutifully and then conveniently forgot the advice…. no LDS voice was heard when those laws were passed in Europe. But more important, the stake presidents felt no reason at all to be against those laws; in fact, acceptance of same-sex marriages take so much wind out of these fruitless debates that homosexuality becomes much less of an issue for Church members as for others…. (31)

…For Dutch Mormons this difference [here, the possibility of heterosexual marriage by contract instead of an official ceremony], as well as the others mentioned, is first and foremost a question of culture, not a question of doctrine. They have the impression that the Dutch views as expounded here, could in large measure be accommodated within the restored gospel without losing any essential teachings….

Thus, many members make some separation between doctrine and their evaluation of existing social practices, a cognitive compartment colonization that comes with the minority situation of being a non-European Orthodox Church in a secularized environment or, I might add, even a church on the road to fundamentalization. (32)

He suggests in his final section that in some countries in Europe, the Church’s strong U.S. identity has become/is becoming a liability, particularly as US credibility declines.

Van Beek’s more thorough, sophisticated, and knowledgeable analysis of some differences (or at least different trends) among the U.S. vs. outside-the-U.S. church and church members roughly parallels my experience in Argentina.

But, I hasten to acknowledge that while I chafe sometimes at the über-Americanness of the Church in the U.S., the preferred alternative is not that we be overly influenced by another country or culture (though if it were Argentina, instead of funeral potatoes, ham, and jello, we’d be having grilled beef, dulce de leche, and more grilled beef at our communal gatherings). Instead, it’s that we ought to try to focus our religious community and efforts on our core principles, taking care not to get bogged down too much by the shifting sands of fickle American politics and culture.