Isolation and Integration: Case Study of Latter-Day Saints in South-Western Nigeria
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Isolation and integration are two sides of the same coin, the former denoting negativity with the latter denoting positivity. The penetration of the LDS church into Nigeria in general and south-western Nigeria in particular has been faced with a considerable amount of opposition from the populace and the government. Nigeria is one of the most religious countries in Africa. Due to the vast demographic space, I am limiting our study to the south-western states, where it seems the church is growing more. The eastern region, to an extent, has also been experiencing considerable growth. Our queries are: what are the elements that depict isolation from other religious sects and society? What are the parameters for this phenomenon? Is there any evidence of integration? If so, how is this manifested? How are the male and female members of the LDS church trying to integrate into society and how has the response been? These among other questions are examined. Nigeria is originally a Catholic and Pentecostal religious environment, where open miracles, wonders and other phenomena are visible. These are hardly visible in LDS services, and this serves as motivation for non-members to oppose and isolate members of the LDS church from the fibers of society. The undetermined position of the LDS church and its non-registration with the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) has and continues to have relevant effects on the integration of the church and its members into the Christian circle of the country in general and the south-west in particular. I have discovered that, though the church’s growth in the south-west is visible, the possibility of integration has proven difficult. Due to the limited literature on this subject in the country, I have utilized semi-structured direct and indirect interviews of pioneers of the wards/units in the south-west, and also those who have investigated the church, many of whom still view the church as a cult. I also used an analytic approach that straddles critical discourse analysis and postcolonial theory. This paper proposes ways in which the members of the LDS church can better integrate themselves in a society that has a very different religious and cultural background to that of American society, where the church has more fully moved from isolation to integration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".