Finding Oneself Among the Saints: Thomas F. O'Dea, Mormon Intellectuals, and the Future of Mormon Orthodoxy

摘要

Thomas F. O'Dea's classic The Mormons identified "Mormonism's encounter with modern secular thought"as perhaps the church's greatest problem. In line with secularization theory, O'Dea predicted an attenuationof traditional Mormonism, and an adaptation and gradual liberalization of Mormon theology as the literalinterpretation of Mormon origins "dissolved" in the solvent of modernity. O'Dea's views on the crisis facingMormonism were based, in part, on ethnographic field work in Salt Lake City in the summer of 1950, as interpretedby a modernist Catholic sociologist. A review of his field notes suggests that key informants who "hosted" muchof O'Dea's research activity were liberal Mormon academics who defined the church's traditional theology as aproblem. This viewpoint agreed with O'Dea's preconceptions about the "education and apostasy" dilemma. Acomparison of O'Dea's published "reading" of his field notes with the notes themselves suggests the plausibility ofalternative readings. One such alternative is offered here, an interpretation of the interplay of education, Mormontheology, and Mormon intellectualism drawn from O'Dea's field notes, but with a different emphasis from that ofhis essay. Finally, reverting to a modernist perspective, I offer some hints from survey research suggesting thatthe predicted liberalization of Mormon theology has yet to occur.