How frequent is the converse, joining the community as an adult? And do these new members stick?
Do they miss an essential period of the molding process of becoming adult Mormons, or is it that more the “no believer like a convert” principle applies?
That’s likely a feature, not a bug. IOW, being so invested as an entire element of a person’s life is a component that makes questioning the religion a bigger hurdle.
I’ve seen some evangelical groups doing something similar, trying to integrate stores and childcare and other activities into their church to “create a community”, but sounds a bit like cult tactics of taking over a person’s whole life and cutting off outside activities.
Of course many Orthodox Jewish communities are similar, and it ties back to the original OP.
This sort of encompassing identity, the belonging to your unit within the tribe that included many overlapping aspects of your sense of self, that Mormons, Orthodox Jews, and per @TokyoBayer, Japanese raised in Japan, have, it was the standard for most of human history. Our modern Western world, especially America, in which many of us have Venn diagrams of intersectional identities and do not necessarily experience that encompassing sense of belonging with any of them, is fairly recent in the broad scope of our species. And some of us, I think, in some inarticulate way, experience that absence, with some responding with what I was talking about in the OP, trying to glom on to something, including diagnoses, to fill a prime identity role, in search of that sense of belonging.
Sorry wrong thread.
N/M
My mistake
Yeah, I’ve noticed this too with a couple of friends of mine. One of them is as far as I know still in that phase, about a decade later – they moved away and I mostly lost touch with them at that time, but their facebook still talks about it. I kinda wonder if they are okay.
Most members of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints I know do have it as the core of their personal identity – I’m one of the few people I know where I’m active in the church and (to a lesser extent) in the church community, but I don’t think of it that way. There are a lot of factors there: it has a lot to do with my spectrum-ish tendencies and identifying more with an intellectual community, and largely because of those things feeling like I had much at all in common with the church kids or community I grew up with (I was never friends with them or anything), and also being encouraged by my parents NOT to be socially part of the church community (my dad in particular, although he is an active member, thought the kids we grew up with were not intellectually suitable friends), and also with my complicated feelings about faith and the lack thereof. If I left the church, I’d miss a lot about it, I’d really miss the community, and I’d have a lot of guilt, etc., and i’m sure I have some identity involved in it, but just not to the degree I see with other people.
(As an aside, it’s interesting the difference for me between identity and community/group membership – I value my church group membership probably the highest of any community I’m in at present, but I don’t identify with it as much as with other groups for which my community is much more lacking.)
Joining the community as an adult is highly, highly encouraged (…that is an understatement 
). Some stick, some do not. I suspect the extreme sense of community is a lot of what gets people to stay (heck, that’s why I’m still there…)
You miss parts of the molding process, sure, but it’s not like @TokyoBayer described being Japanese. I would say this is a) the extreme welcoming and friendship that’s given to converts (see above) and b) because the kinds of lessons that are taught to kids are also taught to adults (we’re trying to be like Jesus, we fellowship each other, we follow the prophet, etc. ad infinitum), so as an adult you’re in essentially the same process of molding that the kids are, a recent convert may be just in a different place than the person next to them who has been a lifelong member. (Which is something else that we are taught at church.)
Yeah, that sort of sucks. A lot of industries are like that where the members feel like they are part of a strong community. Often because the work is interesting or challenging or it’s hard to get into or maybe it’s just designed to be cultlike. And professionally speaking, I think it’s important to be connected with a network and ecosystem of like-minded people and companies where you can share ideas and opportunities.
In my experience, transitioning out of that to a “this is just what I do for a paycheck” jobs suck because you feel disconnected and isolated and probably work with similar-minded people who don’t give a shit about anything besides punching a clock and leaving at the end of the day.
Like me in what fashion?
Like me in being non-practicing Jews? Like me in being farmers? Like me in liking cats? Like me in what and how much I read? Like me in liking dark and quiet at night? Like me in being an introvert? Like me politically? Like me financially? Like me in talking to trees?
Those things don’t line up well with each other. That is, some of them do, but some of them are nearly antithetical, and some of them are just plain not related.
And I realized many, many years ago that if I was only going to be friends with people “like me”, I wasn’t going to have many, and probably not any, friends.
Besides which, it’s more interesting. If I’m going to be social, I don’t want to be looking in a mirror all the time. I want to look out the window and see somebody different.
(that post wasn’t aimed at me specifically, I’m just taking off from it)
I am mostly not “normal” in any community I’ve ever run into.
I gave up wanting to be “normal” somewhere between age 13 and age 22; rather gradually, though there was a moment of sudden realization in (believe it or not) a thunderstorm.
The closest I’ve come is some small social groups in which it’s considered entirely normal to not be “normal”. Those people do matter a good deal to me. But those groups are made up of people who are all over the map on the list of criteria above.
You have now; at least, if encountering people on a message board counts.
I want to spend much of my leisure time on my own. (And a lot of my work time, for that matter.)
I want to spend my social time (and I do need some) with a variety of people. What they have in common is mostly that they’re willing to be social with me. (And, I suppose, that they don’t spend all their time complaining – some of the time is fine – and that they’re not overtly racist etc. And that they don’t hurt any creature for the fun of hurting something.) Yes, I expect we share something on a list of common interests – but I haven’t run into a whole lot of people who were interested in nothing at all that I’m interested in.
As important as what?
I think pretty much everybody thinks their beliefs, preferences, and needs ought to be important; though a lot of people have learned not to expect them to be seen as important by others.
But the minimum needs to include “at least pretends to be a Christian”, no?
I can’t join a church.
That’s probably true. And an interesting thought to bring to the thread.
As established legal concepts such as ownership, rights, duties, controlling laws… Or established facts.
So, you live in a community where the majority of folk don’t speak your language? Have vastly different education than you? Have vastly different income/wealth? Maintain their property/homes vastly differently than you? Have much different expectations WRT such things as noise? Use different transportation than you?
Sure, each of us could identify any number of ways in which we are different than our communities. And - yeah - every community, no matter how homogenous, likely contains at least a few iconoclasts. But IME, truly heterogenous communities are the exception far more than the rule.
Well, it helps, I suppose. But just in my eight-person church choir we have a stated agnostic, a practicing jew, and someone else whom I’m not really sure but is certainly not coming up for communion. Episcopalian. We all like to sing.
I used to need people to be weird and dark before I could be friends with them. That’s long over. What I realized is that my basic criterion for friendship is kindness (this does let out a lot of people though). The rest is extra. Because I’m introverted and kinda autistic, I really prefer my friends to speak English well.
I live in a community where it’s distinctly odd to be either Jewish or atheist; moderately unusual to have moved in from outside the area, at least as other than a retiree; definitely unusual to be faceblind to the degree that I am; fairly unusual to have my particular combination of education; fairly unusual to have my politics; pretty unusual to not have any guns; and in the immediate neighborhood rapidly becoming somewhat unusual to not speak Pennsylvania Deutsch as well as English, though in the wider area that’s still the minority. Buggy and bicycle transportation is also still in the minority, but there’s a whole lot of it. It’s rural America, everybody else drives some sort of motor vehicle, but how old and what style also varies widely.
Income levels vary drastically in this area, as does property maintenance, as does overall amount of education. Nearly everybody does speak English. But I didn’t claim to be not normal along every possible dimension – only that I’m significantly different enough to stand out in any particular group; though not always for the same reason(s) as I stand out in some other particular group.
Come to think of it, that’s a whole lot of mine as well. I have at least one friend who doesn’t exude a lot of it on the surface; but it’s there.
You sound like you are very special.
[Bolding mine]
Yes. I was a bit of an iconoclast in college. I wanted no part of fledging a fraternity, for example. But now, way later in life, I can see benefits to having such a built-in network of “brothers”. The idea of being in a fraternity still bugs me though.
Also late to the discussion, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot.
I have also noticed this:
And I think there’s a few things going on. People are looking for an identity and a place in a world where many traditional ones are fading, they are looking for a group to belong to, where they might find congenial company and moral support, they are looking for understanding, both of themselves and by others. And sometimes they are looking for better treatment, and even in some subcultures higher status. Because we live in a society that’s just enlightened enough (sometimes) not to mock or attack people for disabilities, but not enlightened enough not to mock or attack people for struggles that don’t have a label pinned on them.
Is this good or bad? I think it can be good if it leads to greater understanding and learning better coping strategies, it’s good if it leads to people making social connections and friends if they had struggled with that. Like @BigT, I think most of the rise in people saying they have X is people who genuinely have X, or at least share some of the features, and could potentially be helped by realising it.
But I do think it can be unhealthy, both by fostering ‘us against the world’ attitudes and blaming ‘normal’ people for all their problems, as @raspberry_hunter said above, and getting in the way of improvement and personal growth. Things like depression, anxiety and PTSD can be treated and even cured; internalising them as part of your identity and using them as a means to community can get in the way of that. And with disorders like autism and ADHD, there are coping techniques that can be learned, and skills can be improved with practice. It’s not helpful to ignore it, but nor should it be an excuse for not trying to improve your life.
It’s surprising the gender ratio was so off! When I went to university to study physics they had the opposite problem, and solved it by putting either 2 girls or none in each of the tutor groups of 5 or 6 students. I thought that was a decent way to handle it.
Yeah, I agree with everything you’ve said. It’s interesting (and validating for me!) that you’ve observed this as well (the good as well as the bad).
I came across the below article, where it says 3% of the kids had symptoms of both autism and ADHD, but only .5% could be diagnosed with both disorders. This is what I meant by ‘share some of the features’: that almost all the people adopting these labels have genuine symptoms, which may or may not meet the diagnostic threshold. And since they do have symptoms, they can potentially be helped in the same way, and potentially need similar accommodations (in more limited areas).
I know there’s a lot of sneering at people self-diagnosing, since it’s assumed to be for attention or to excuse bad behaviour. This would be much less of an issue if diagnoses were generally treated as a means to understanding rather than as excuses or as setting people apart.
Not that I’ve ever noticed. Maybe Italians living with other Italians or Irish living with other Irish, but as someone who grew up Catholic there were no Catholic neighborhoods anywhere near where I grew up. And I grew up in a large city. Yeah, there were some clusters of ethnic groupings, but not because they were specifically Catholic. My street had only one other Christian family, and they were Lutherans. All the other families were Jewish, and all the kids played together in one big gang.
Slightly off-topic, I just discovered a documentary on Netflix about Robert Putnam’s research, called “Join or Die”. It’s very good, and hits on a lot of more recent causes and effects we’re seeing now about membership.