Your fellow Church-members are really ticking you off. Sister So-and-So is making the same tired comments in Sunday School that you’ve heard a thousand times before. Brother Whats-his-Name is advocating the same silly understanding of Doctrine X, Policy Y or Scriptural Interpretation Z that more enlightened Mormons (like you) discarded years ago. Your co-religionists, as a group, are pre-occupied with some silly notions that they’d quickly jettison, if only they understood the Gospel better.
But what should you do? You could take them all to task of course, but that would make you look uppity, judgmental, self-righteous. It also wouldn’t win you many friends at Church. And to think that so many of your brothers and sisters are confused only serves to raise troubling questions: What does it mean that so many fellow Mormons don’t understand the Gospel? Is there something wrong with the Gospel? Is there something wrong with the way it’s being taught? Or is it something else?
Then it hits you. Why, there’s a simple explanation for all the false notions circulating in the Church! The answer is that Mormonism has a “culture” that exists independent of the “doctrine.” And to the extent that you see manifestations of belief, arguments or actions that don’t fit with your (correct) perception of Mormon teachings, you can rest assured that you are just seeing Mormon “culture” at work. Ah, that silly “culture”! It’s safe to disparage it, of course, because it isn’t the “real deal.” It’s not like you’re actually criticizing something important like “the Church,” or “the Gospel.”
I want to submit that, when we Church members draw distinctions between “doctrine” and “culture,” we often aren’t really saying anything of substance. We fool ourselves into thinking we’re drawing an important distinction, when in fact we’re just assigning a word to a category of belief, activity or dogma we find distasteful. We also often avoid the unpleasant task of confronting the source(s) of the particular beliefs of actions in question. Perhaps many of the things that are bothering us aren’t “doctrinal,” per se (whatever that means), but perhaps they flow logically from our “doctrines.” If something is ingrained in Mormon “culture,” what are the chances that it stems from historical LDS teachings that have currency precisely because they have had (past or present) authoritative support? The chances are pretty good, in my estimation.
I’ve never been fond of invoking the “doctrine/culture” distinction, because at bottom, I don’t think its analytically helpful in sorting out the nature of Mormon beliefs and practices. Thoughts?