Epistemic status: Low-effort post about something I am very familiar with.

Preamble

Scott Alexander recently wrote about making strong communities within a liberal society. He has nice things to say about Mormons:

Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Mormons: Get lots of people of the same religion together in one place - a timeless classic. Some of the ultra-est of the ultra-Orthodox are still more fluent in Yiddish than English, giving them near-invincibility from the mainstream. 9/10.

And again in the highlights from the comments:

Maybe the Mormons are the entrepreneurs we’re looking for?

As the resident Mormon, I have opinions.

Scott's Thesis

I found myself very unconvinced by the thesis of Scott's argument. As always, read the whole thing and don’t trust my summary, but the key point is:

But even defining these exceptions broadly, probably fewer than 10% of Americans belong to one of them [tight-knit communities of strong values].

Are the rest not interested? Happy with mainstream culture? They don’t seem happy. 90% of articles on social media are people talking about how much they hate mainstream culture, sometimes with strong specific opinions about what improvements to make. But it never seems to occur to these people to join together with like-minded friends and secede from it. Why not? Why don’t conservatives live in trad whites-only farming villages on the Great Plains? Why don’t YIMBYs live in dense walkable towns sprung up from the forests of Vermont? Why don’t people who hate smartphones/social media/AI live somewhere that bans all of those things?

My best guess is money.

If you’re sufficiently committed, you don’t need money. You can go out in the forest with your like-minded friends and probably starve (or, like the libertarians, get eaten by bears). But if you’re insufficiently committed, money is pretty helpful! Or at least this is what I gather from my own experience. 

One of the exceptions is "Serious Christianity". I expect that substantially more than 10% of Americans belong to this "exception". According to the PEW survey of religions, 25% of Americans attend religious services weekly or more often (p. 61), 22% read scripture weekly or more often (p. 186), and 13% participate in prayer groups, scripture-study groups or religious education programs on a weekly basis (p. 190). I also would rate serious Christianity higher than Scott did for its level of community, although not as high as Mormonism.^[1] I expect that a larger fraction of Mormons have primarily non-Mormon coworkers and neighbors than serious Christians have primarily non-Christian coworkers and neighbors - and that this is not a good metric for measuring the strength of the community.

I don't think that the key difference is money. Medieval villages might have had close-knit communities out of necessity. But there are also plenty of historical examples of groups forming intentional communities, despite being much poorer than the median American today. For example, early Mormonism, or the Amish, or the Puritans. I don't think that Joseph Smith had a positive net worth at any point of his life - but he still managed to build a city of more than 10,000 people.^[2] The Mormon pioneers were, on average, much poorer than the people who settled Oregon or California. They used handcarts^[3] because they couldn't afford wagons, and they knew that there were people on the other end who would help them when they arrived.

What's missing is not money. I would guess that the answer is something like gumption or being more agentic. Are people actively trying to build better communities? Do people feel like they can just go and make new meaningful institutions and traditions?

This kind of effort feels a lot more missing in modern America than money.

As our children's song says:

You don’t have to push a handcart,
Leave your fam'ly dear,
Or walk a thousand miles or more
To be a pioneer!

You do need to have great courage,
Faith to conquer fear,
And work with might for a cause that's right
To be a pioneer!

Institutions of LDS Communities

The rest of this post goes through ways that I think that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has built a strong community within a liberal society.

Standardization

One thing that contributes to community that was mentioned in the comments is standardization. This is much more of a thing in our church than in other Christian churches.

... the real innovation of modern Mormonism is exporting the same community-building model to all four corners of the earth. A common experience for Latter-day Saints traveling abroad is to be struck by how nearly identical the Sunday experience is whether in Africa, America, or Asia. The upshot of the Church’s system of social organization is that it is effortless for a Latter-day Saint person to slot into a new community wherever they go, and it is likewise easy for the community to sustain itself as individuals naturally come and go while they pursue their secular lives and careers. That kind of physical location independence goes a long way towards solving the practical problems highlighted in the post. - Justin

There are a ton of things which have been centralized, including building designs,^[4] org charts, patterns for how meetings are run, and even curricula. The central Church puts out suggested scripture reading schedules and lesson manuals. In principle, the entire Church has a lesson on the same passage of scripture each Sunday.^[5]

Missionary work also contributes to a standardized culture. It takes young members from around the world and thoroughly mixes them by sending them to serve on different places. Missionaries do not even choose which continent they serve on.

Standardization is good for community if you are traveling or moving somewhere new. There is somewhere that feels familiar regardless of where go (except most of the Middle East or China). There is also criticism of it as bland corporatism, or that the Church operates as a franchise.

I don't think that standardization is the main source of community. It seems helpful when you're traveling or the first few months of moving somewhere new, but most of your life is not in those situations. I don't think that a standardized, familiar setting would actually be all that valuable if it didn't point towards a longer term community.

Ward Boundaries

Another relevant institution is ward boundaries. Congregations, called wards,^[6] are defined geographically. I think that this is also done in Catholicism, but that there aren't really norms encouraging people to go to the right parish. It is not a thing in Protestantism, where people shop around for which congregation they like the most.

Ward boundaries impact the community very differently in Utah than everywhere else.

In Utah, the main consequence is that your neighbors are also your church friends. Modernity^[7] often separates out different types of relationship - your family, your neighbors, the people you work with, the people you go to church with, etc., are often fairly disjoint groups of people. Having multiple types of these relationships overlapping strengthens the community.^[8]

Outside of Utah, this means that congregations have a wide variety of social, economic, age, etc. backgrounds.^[9] If it were not for church, I would not be friends with any sailors or janitors. This seems like the sort of thing that would weaken a sense of community, but I'm not convinced it actually does. It is also better for development social ties across society as a whole. I prefer the outside of Utah version.

The only Church approved exceptions for ward boundaries are (1) different languages in the same area, and (2) young single adult (YSA) wards, which exist to make it easier for us to get married.

Callings

The most important institutional contribution towards the community is (according to me) callings.

The Church is organized differently from most (all?) other churches. We do not have a professional clergy. Instead, all of the things that the clergy does are divided up among the congregation. 

Things like prayers and sermons rotate through the congregation each week, as assigned by the bishop. Other roles, e.g. Sunday school teacher, activities planner, or person who helps the full-time missionaries, have members 'called' to them for a few years.  The bishop also extends (most of) these callings, and members are encouraged to neither seek or refuse callings. The bishop himself, who presides over the ward, is also a lay person. He is called (by the next higher layer of Church organization) for 3-5 years, and serves with 2 counselors. After that, he is released, and the new bishop could extend any calling to him.^[10] Over the course of your life, if you stay active in the Church, you are likely to serve in maybe 1/3 - 1/2 of all callings.

The system of callings also fixes the size of wards: Too many people and economies of scale means that there's not enough callings for everyone. Too few people, and it's hard to get all of the callings filled.^[11] Most wards have ~100 adults attending on a typical Sunday. If they get larger, the Church will split them into 2 wards.

Having a calling is very important for feeling like you're fully part of the community. It's the difference between 'the church I go to' and 'my church'. You feel more ownership of and oneness with a community to which you are meaningfully contributing.^[12] Most active members of the Church would be less unhappy if they went an extended period of time without a calling than if they were expected to serve.

This is extremely weird from outside of the church. Once upon a time, I was reading a newspaper article written by a non-Mormon about internal criticism within the Church. It was (unsurprisingly) bad, but one thing stuck out to me. They reported that someone who had been publicly critical had been released from their calling. It was clear that the reporter had no clue what this meant, or why that would even be a bad thing.

Sometimes, the fact that everyone is an amateur is apparent in a bad way - a Sunday school teacher who clearly doesn't like teaching & knows less about the material than the median person in the class, or a sermon that is not a message that the Church would want to promote, or poorly planned activities. But often, things work pretty well. People who have been in the system for a long time become highly capable generalists. The amount of latent knowledge about how to do church in a typical ward is incredible.

Niceness & Ministering

There are also norms around niceness, and some institutions to support it. I think that we're towards the upper end of Protestantism in this regard, but not an outlier.

People in the Church act friendly, and there are strong norms about being nice.

Sometimes online, you see criticism for Mormon niceness being fake.^[13] I think this criticism is pretty wrong:

1. Something that I want out of norms is for them to encourage good behavior that would not otherwise exist. The norm isn't for the intrinsically nice people, it's for the jerks to stop being mean to people (and hopefully to train them to stop being jerks).
2. I don't think most of it is fake. There certainly are people who are disappointed in the amount of service they have received in the Church. And people who (accurately) believe that they have given much more service than they have received. But there is a lot of service. Lower effort things that I call 'normal acts of service within a community' (e.g. in Mormonism: helping people move) are definitely common. Much higher effort acts of service are not that unusual either. There are multiple examples of things done for or by my immediate family that I feel would be substantially too large of asks elsewhere.^[14]

Serious Christians also do similar things, but maybe at a lower rate? I don't know. 

One thing that we don't do that I've heard of from a Mennonite guy: Apparently, in their community, if you travel with a letter of recommendation from your bishop, people will let you stay in their house instead of staying at a hotel.

The main niceness-adjacent institution of the Church is called ministering. Everyone in the ward is assigned someone to be their friend and to whom they should have a low bar to reach out to if they need help. These relationships are horizontal, in that they aren't determined by your calling or age or other distinguishing factor, but they are not symmetric: the people who minister to you are not the same as the people you are assigned to minister to. This creates ministerer-ministeree networks throughout the ward. I have lots of opinions about this (and its predecessor, Home Teaching). I don't know if this system works better than the Protestant system of small groups, and would like to see more experimentation here.

I think that norms are more important to establish niceness than institutions. Also important is that we believe that we are under divine commandment to care about each other. Institutions can be helpful in narrowing the set of people we feel responsible for caring for to a manageable size, but do not themselves create the impetus to be nice or care for others.

Conclusion

So what would I recommend for other communities that want to become strong in a liberal society?

I am a fan of niceness norms. I don't think that I have any particular insight into how to create them, other than to be nice yourself and to tell other people that being nice is good.

Institutionally, the best things to copy are probably callings and ministering.

To do ministering, assign people in the community (including new entrants!) someone, or a couple of people, for them to go to for help. This is directed at individuals, rather than callings,^[15] so it should not change if the person switches orgs, or gets a new job title, or moves group houses - although moving cities probably means getting new ministerers and ministerees. Ideally, these relationships have frequent contact and are long lasting (something that we could definitely do better at in the Church). Yes, having assigned friends can feel a bit weird, but it's a lot better than moving somewhere and having no friends at all.

Callings are probably harder to copy. It's not just performing service for each other. That's important, but insufficient. It's also a whole system where performing service for the community is expected, and happens by default instead of waiting for someone to request or offer service. People will not request or offer service anywhere near as much as is good for us. It's also a bias towards having people be generalists rather than specialists, and rotating what jobs people do. There are extra bonds between people because they are doing or have done similar callings.

I'm not sure what exactly that would look like for e.g. an ideologically-similar group office. Maybe, instead of having an ops team and office administrators, their jobs are divided into a bunch of small tasks.^[16] Each member of the group office is assigned one of those tasks to be responsible for about a year. One (or several) of these tasks is managing who is assigned to other tasks. As people move in or out, and when someone has being doing a task for a while, they get released from their task and assigned to something else. If this feels like it would be complicated and probably result in a worse office space, then that's probably true, at least for a few years until the skills get broadly distributed and the system starts feeling normal. If this feels like you would be unwilling to do some of the tasks or that the tasks are beneath you, then I claim that this attitude is a barrier to forming a close community. Being willing to do the things that other people are doing builds camaraderie, and having done lots of the particular tasks needed to support a community gives a real sense of oneness with the community.

1. ^{^}

   In my unbiased opinion.

2. ^{^}

   The demographics of Nauvoo, Illinois are hard to get solid numbers for, because the city was built and destroyed between censuses.

3. ^{^}

   Handcarts are famously associated with Mormon pioneers, in part because two handcraft companies left too late in the season, got stuck in snow in Wyoming, and then had to be heroically rescued by people from Utah.

   The Church would figure out a better low cost way to bring people across the plains a few years later. They would send wagons east in the spring, which would meet the pioneers in Iowa and stock up on food, before escorting the pioneers to Utah.

4. ^{^}

   We even have our own wall material: sisal.

5. ^{^}

   This Sunday is D&C 88, and I'm teaching !

6. ^{^}

   The name 'ward' comes from the days when we used to build cities. Cities are naturally divided into wards.

7. ^{^}

   I think that the main thing here is that most people live in cities which are too large for everyone to know everyone. I would expect something similar in the city of Rome or Chang'an in 100 AD.

8. ^{^}

   Rationalist group houses also cause overlapping relationships.

9. ^{^}

   This is not true in Utah because ward boundaries are small enough to typically have uniform socio-economic status.

10. ^{^}

    Leadership callings are not supposed to be higher status than other callings. This is not strictly true, but more true than most outsiders would expect. When someone I know is called to a leadership position, I ask them if they want congratulations or condolences. So far, they've always chosen condolences. That amount of service expected is wildly disproportional from any gain in status.

11. ^{^}

    In places where there aren't many members, congregations are called 'branches' and have a pared down version of the calling system.

12. ^{^}

    I sometimes joke (?) that the status hierarchy in the Church is built around the rights to perform particular acts of service.

13. ^{^}

    Note that I am talking about whether or not niceness within the Church is fake, not whether or not niceness towards outsiders is fake and intended to convert people. I also think that most niceness towards outsiders is genuine, but that discussion is less relevant for building a strong internal community.

14. ^{^}

    Some examples:

    1. Once upon a time, I moved to France for a postdoc during the middle of the pandemic. I did not have a French bank account, Frank banks are difficult to work with at the best of times, and the banks were just closed for the pandemic. I got an apartment from another postdoc who was leaving, but setting up electricity required a French bank account. Someone from church who I had talked to maybe 3 times on the phone agreed to set up my electric bill using his bank account. I promised to (and did) pay him back every month by sending money from my US bank account.
    2. When my sister first moved from the city where we grew up to the city where she now lives, she didn't know anyone there. One of her friends from church grew up there, and offered for my sister to stay at her parents house (who my sister had never met) while she was finding a place to stay. My sister stayed with them for maybe a month before finding a room to rent.
    3. While we were growing up, we had an exchange student who was going to college, then grad student, in the US live with us, without paying rent, for 6 years. Our only prior connection was that we were both members of the Church.

    I would guess that my immediate family is not very atypical for members of the Church in this regard.

15. ^{^}

    You would not minister to the bishop, you minister to Chris, who happens to be the bishop right now.

16. ^{^}

    How should the tasks be divided up? I don't know. In the Church, this is passed down to us through tradition. We mostly make small changes to an existing system to fit our circumstances, rather than designing something from scratch.