"Off the Top Rope..." becomes a best-of-year book.
Brother Gee drops the elbow on bad arguments and reminds us what we already know.
For the last three months I’ve tweeted out excerpts from SAVING FAITH by John Gee, usually on Sunday mornings before church. There’s a bit of (recent) history to this book, as it received attention from the Usual Suspects when it launched in 2020.
Naturally, the fact that all the wrong people hated it served as great marketing for all the right people, and I pounced on getting a copy when it became available. After reading the whole thing, I understand why the enemies of the Church worked to sweep the leg on Gee and his findings.
The man regularly jumps off the top rope (hence the segment) with stats and scriptures to back up his findings at every turn.
The focus of the book is about the so-called “mass exodus” of young Church members, the “leaving in droves” that secularists crow about in their twenties online. Gee’s analysis of a massive survey not only proves that this isn’t happening in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it’s actually happening less than advertised among Christian churches generally.
(Interestingly enough, the faith with the highest rate of exodus is Judaism at roughly 44%, which I didn’t expect.)
While the body of the text can often slow down with long, dry analyses of the survey and what it reveals, this is actually a strength of the book: Gee is thorough and shows his work. Each chapter (there are 10) has an average of 200+ footnotes or references, and you see the little superscript numbers popping up at the end of every third sentence it seems.
Gee also gets into the number of influences that drive young people to abandon or switch their faith as they hit adolescence, and unsurprisingly, the status of their family (parents married or divorced, one or neither parents attends church, etc) has a huge impact on the faith of the children. Alcohol also plays a disproportionate role, second only to sexual activity of varying degrees.
My main interest in reading this book was to know what Gee had to say about staving off a faith crisis in young Church members. I’ve worried about setting the right example for my kids from the moment my oldest son was born. I still worry about it. Reading stuff like this helps me to figure out what to do different.
The main thing? Well, he gets to it in chapters 9 and 10, and it should be a shocker to nobody who watches Conference and listens to the prophets: pray regularly on your own, read scriptures regularly on your own, and participate in Church meetings regularly. (Daily, daily, weekly.) Those are the first three points. Point four is don’t engage in sex outside of marriage, and point five is to keep covenants.
That’s really what it comes down to. The facts of his findings are a death knell to the popular argument about why young people leave their faith, especially with regard to political beliefs and secular movements. There’s a huge contingency of sexual deviant activists at Brigham Young University who found out this book was due to release in 2020, and they played the usual tune (this is bigoted! it harms gay kids!) to get it removed from the campus bookstore.
Ultimately that resulted in the brou-haha that brought it to my attention in the first place, so I guess I’m actually grateful to the angersexuals for something.
Anyway, SAVING FAITH made the best-of-year list for me. You can get it on Amazon in hardcover, that’s the only available format. It’s pricey but I found it was worth it.