The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a large, centralized institution. Since large, centralized institutions tend to be biased towards legibility, it is worth asking if this exists in Mormonism. I try to avoid value judgements here and allow you to decide if less legible institutions are better or worse for the Church.
Prerequisites: I reference Seeing Like A State. This post should be self-contained, but if you want more context, see my book review. I do not assume that you are familiar with Mormonism.
Originally Written: August 2021.
Confidence Level: My thoughts on the overlap of two topics that I know well.
A note on terminology: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is an institution. The Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ is a collection of beliefs. Mormonism refers to all parts of the movement that began with Joseph Smith. The streets of Salt Lake City are not part of the Gospel or the Church, but they are part of Mormonism.
Streets in a Grid
The easiest way to recognize legibilism is to look for grids. Grids make it easy for a centralized institution to find things. The aesthetic of legibilism involve straight lines and right angles.
The cities of Utah are all arranged on grids. The streets don’t even have names: they are numbered. A typical address in Utah is 456 E 700 N. This is located 7 blocks north of the center of town and between 4 and 5 blocks east of the center of town. This is an extremely legible system, repeated everywhere Mormons settled.
The center of the grid for Salt Lake City is the Temple. A Protestant minister who lives in Utah once asked my mom: “What is the address of the Salt Lake Temple?” This is a ridiculous question. The Salt Lake Temple is what all addresses in the valley are measured with respect to.
The tendency towards existed in Mormonism well before Brigham Young led the Church to Utah. The first city plan was drawn by Joseph Smith only 3 years after the Church was organized. It was also drawn as a grid.
Ironically, this system of legibility does not work well with other, later attempts at legibility. Navigation systems (Google Maps, Apple Maps, etc) believe that addresses are numbers. The address is read as 456 instead of 456 East and the road name is read as East 700 North instead of 7th North. This is especially problematic when neighboring towns grow into each other. For example, 3rd North of American Fork is the same road as 18th North of Pleasant Grove. Navigation systems think that the name of the road is East 300 North West 1800 North. Similarly, the road names for interstate exits are supposed to be legible, but they are not if they only say the road number and not what town it belongs to.
Home & Visiting Teaching
The Legibilism in the Church significantly increased in the mid-1900s with the Priesthood Correlation Program. Correlation changed many of the institutions of the Church. I will focus on one: Home & Visiting Teaching.
Home & Visiting Teaching were introduced in 1963. I will first describe how Home Teaching worked. Visiting Teaching worked in almost the same way, but in the women’s organization instead of in the men’s organization.
The purpose of Home Teaching is to develop relationships among members of the Church and to provide for the spiritual and temporal needs of every member of your congregation. Every man in the congregation is assigned another man as their home teaching companion. These two men are given a list of people in the congregation who they are responsible to home teach. You and your companion are obligated to visit every person on the list once a month, together, in their home, and share a spiritual message with them. If you don’t want to come up with your spiritual message, you can share something from the Church-wide magazine. At the end of every month, you are obligated to report to your local leadership which of the people on your list you were able to visit. This is then put into a Church-wide database.
Home & Visiting Teaching were an attempt to make friendship legible.
How effective Home & Visiting Teaching were is … debatable. I was critical of it, but that was uncommon. A significant amount of good was accomplished through the Home & Visiting Teaching programs. There are lots of anecdotes of how they improved people’s lives. Home & Visiting Teaching did not succeed at their own goal: to have everyone in the Church, throughout the world, be visited in their home once a month. Outside of Mormon-majority areas where the congregation all lives within walking distance, the real percentage rarely went above 20%.[1]This is a reflection of my own personal experience. I do not have sufficient evidence to establish this claim for the entire Church. Of course, the reported percentage was often significantly higher. Managing the Home & Visiting Teaching programs took a lot of effort from the local leadership. I think that this effort could have been more productively spent elsewhere in the Church.
In 2018, Home & Visiting Teaching were replaced by Ministering. This was a centrally-planned reduction in Legibility. Reporting changed from saying “Yes” or “No” for each person you were assigned every month to having a discussion with your local leadership every three months. Ministering is also more flexible. Anything that builds the relationship counts as ministering, not just sharing a spiritual message in their home with your companion. There are certainly further reforms that could make ministering even less legible,[2]For example, people could have more influence on who their ministerers and ministerees are, instead of having it assigned by local leaders. but the direction of these reforms are clear.
Less legible institutions can be more effective at serving local needs than highly legible institutions. They cannot operate primarily through obedience to a central plan. Instead, they require local creativity and initiative.
References