When a community possesses all the “qualities that should result in long-term failure,” but the community still thrives, John Sanphillippo writes that “local culture” frequently makes the difference.
It’s a phenomenon Sanphillippo christened “murbanism” or “Mormon urbanism.” Sanphillippo, who’s not a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (“I’m the opposite of a Mormon if such a thing exists”), uses “murbanism” as a way to describe the impact of a culture (in this case Mormon culture) on a local community’s resilience, adaptation and eventual success.
Matthew Schmitz of First Things recently remarked,
I, for one, would be happy to see Mike Lee, the Mormon senator, installed as a Caesar. I’d like to just turn our polity over to him and to a Mormon ruling class, because they have preserved WASP virtues without accepting the worst of the left-wing ideology. So I’d like to just see the Mormons run the country, and I think a lot of Americans feel the same way.
Hal Boyd in his opinion piece in the Deseret News stated in response to all of these outside commentaries about LDS culture
“While certainly flattering, I’ve been around enough Latter-day Saints (myself included) to know that both collectively and individually we still need fine-tuning.
And yet, as these comments suggest, even outsiders to the Mormon community sense how the faith fosters both profound community connections and alluring pro-social values.”
It is interesting to note the societal impact that the Mormon culture has on communities where we live. The most recent example can be found in the flooding that has occurred in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and the response of “Mormons Helping Hands” helping out flood victims and how such a response really is ingrained into Murbanism .
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