“Why Latter-day Saints Have Strong Communities” by Jeffrey Heninger

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].

[...]

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Outline:

(00:16) Preamble

(01:01) Scotts Thesis

(04:45) Institutions of LDS Communities

(04:58) Standardization

(07:07) Ward Boundaries

(08:37) Callings

(11:27) Niceness & Ministering

(14:04) Conclusion

The original text contained 16 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

August 17th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zTCtvXRATWdLoJ7p7/why-latter-day-saints-have-strong-communities

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.