Ordain Women, Women’s Ordination

A guest post from Jacob Baker, whose first guest post on ZD can be found here. This post is also on Jacob’s personal blog.

At the outset, I should say that at this point nothing is going to stop Ordain Women, whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s clear that no amount of criticism or shaming will fracture the movement. In fact, these have really only served (unsurprisingly) to strengthen it and add to its numbers. OW may have begun as an organized movement but has become something of an event, in the philosophical sense of that word–the eruption of something new that breaks with the prevailing order, something which marks a before and after. Those who are riveted by an event (like Paul’s encounter with the risen Christ, after which he was never the same again) can only understand certain truths in its wake. As Daniel Bensaid put it in his interpretation of Alain Badiou’s philosophy of the event:

Truth, following in the wake of ‘that which happens’, is a matter of ‘pure conviction’, it is ‘wholly subjective’, and is a ‘pure fidelity to the opening brought about by the event’. Apart from the event, there are only current affairs and the common run of opinion. The event is Christ’s resurrection, it is the storming of the Bastille, it is the October revolution, just as it is illegal immigrant workers taking to the streets in order to become agents in their own right, in order to break out of their status as clandestine victims; it is or the unemployed stepping out from the ranks of statistics to become subjects of resistance, or the sick refusing to resign themselves to being mere patients and attempting to think and act their own illnesses.

All of which is to say, that whether female ordination in Mormonism happens or not, Ordain Women has become an event that is producing subjects and brokering female subjectivity in a way that has only rarely happened in Mormon women’s history. And people are talking, at all levels. Groups are forming not only in opposition but in parallel opposition. This is what I mean when I say that nothing at this point will “stop” Ordain Women–not that they are on an inevitable track to absolutely secure Mormon priesthood for women, but that they have become something that is more than their stated intentions, something already historicized and important whatever the ultimate outcome, and something that will go on, in tributaries and rivulets, spreading and branching in unforeseen ways.

None of this is intended as marketing propaganda for Ordain Women. And it doesn’t mean that Ordain Women is going about its agenda in the right way (or the wrong away). It doesn’t even mean that Ordain Women fully understands what it’s become (though no one else could fully understand either). It’s simply descriptive, I think, of what is occurring. And it’s bigger than (merely) women’s ordination. (More on this “merely” in a moment). A lot is happening here, but drilling down from the more philosophical and abstract to to a more practical observation, one of the things I think is more or less getting lost in the chaos of words is how radically different this call for ordination is from struggles for ordination in traditional Christian contexts, and why this might not ultimately matter (though it makes for a different kind of uphill battle).

What is it about this movement-event? Like many (probably a majority) of my generation–mid 30s–(and especially in younger generations), I am in favor of equal rights for gays, women, minorities, etc, in pretty much every aspect of human society. I see the insidiousness of male white privilege and how it has shaped history and defined how history has been narrativized. As a grad student at a Methodist seminary I studied with men and women of many faiths on track for ordination, where male-only ordination had been a thing of the past for decades. I became friends with women who are now pastors and priests.

As a matter of course it was easy to see the radical inequalities between men and women in my own faith and that things needed to drastically change. And by this I mean institutional inequalities (I’ve already written about this elsewhere so I won’t repeat myself here) not natural differences between men and women. So why did the ordination of women in my own church feel so foreign and ill-fitted? At first I thought that it’s easy to see the need for change at a distance, when it costs you nothing–institutional inequalities in other institutions. When it’s on your own faith’s front doorstep, that’s another matter. And perhaps there was a little of that there. Nevertheless, however initially ill-fitting it looked, I thought that if women were to receive the priesthood, that could only be a good thing and we would just have to embrace it. Still, I thought a lot about the source of this seeming dissonance, which I think can be illustrated by comparing priesthood in Mormonism and other Christian denominations.

In the Catholic Church, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is an institution of the church whose objective is to “spread sound Catholic doctrine and defend those points of Christian tradition which seem in danger because of new and unacceptable doctrines.” Regarding the ordination of women to the Catholic priesthood, in 1976, the Congregation issued a declaration (since reaffirmed a couple times in the intervening years) declaring that the Church “does not consider herself authorized to admit women to priestly ordination.” The primary reasons given for this statement essentially add up to the prevailing notion that the Church’s authority is derived through scripture and tradition–Christ was free to establish his church in any way he saw fit, and in fact in many ways he went against prevailing societal and religious norms of his day in doing so–implying that it wouldn’t have been a stretch to make women priests, but because he didn’t do so when he could have, this makes the case for not ordaining women even stronger.

I’m not equipped to discuss the nuances of Catholic authority, doctrine, and interpretations of Christian history, but I point this out because, while the concept of being bound to tradition is at work in defending the status quo of male-only priests in the LDS church (though the LDS version is at least as ostensibly tethered to absence of new corporate revelation on the matter–a subject for another time), the comparison starts to break down when we see how priesthood functions in the LDS world and how it functions in Catholicism (and more or less in Protestantism). And this, in my opinion, is where the heart of any discomfort on the part of most LDS people in ordaining LDS women to priesthood lies. Of course, there are still plenty of people uncomfortable with female priests in the Christian churches, but I don’t believe the reasons for discomfort are precisely the same. Yes, for some, their views are mainly derivative of a sexist worldview generally, while for some others not having LDS leadership on board with the idea is the primary deal breaker.

But I don’t think these reasons address the central plane of tension with regard to priesthood in Mormonism. Priesthood in most Christian denominations is a class apart. Only a few hold the office of priest (or pastor or bishop, etc) and only a few aspire to it. Most (men and women) would absolutely say that they felt called by God to enter the priesthood or become clergy in their respective denominations. In Mormonism (at least in LDS Mormonism) to be a man is to be a “priest.” The rite of passage from boyhood to manhood is priesthood, so “priest” is more accurately an anthropological category than an ecclesiastical office, a marker of gendered identity that can’t even be approximated in traditional Christianity. It’s why “priesthood” for a Mormon man can paradoxically feel simultaneously both meaningless (it’s simply part of the circle of Mormon male life for virtually every maturing male–body hair appears, get the priesthood, start dating, get a job, graduate from school, serve a mission) and the most meaningful thing in the world (it’s the primary framework for your identity as a male in the religious community). You do almost nothing to receive it, but it becomes the interpretive lens of your masculinity and the governing principle of your participation in the community. Feeling “called” couldn’t be further from the experience of receiving it. And performing ordinances and blessings, in the end, is not what really constitutes it.

All of this serves to explain, at least to my mind, the somewhat frequent hesitancy of even a theologically liberal mind with regard to Ordain Women. On the one hand, that there’s a crucial problem in retaining and appropriately valuing women in the Church and that “understanding divine worth as daughters of God” is simply insufficient to convince many to remain, is indisputable. That women can all too easily be conceived as unnecessary for the Church to function is also difficult to argue against. (I’ve posted my thoughts on this here and here). But on the other hand, ordaining Mormon women to the priesthood might feel strange and otherworldly, not primarily because of antiquated sexist notions of priests as male-only, but because men can only be men as priests in Mormon culture. A man who is not a priest (who does not have the priesthood) is not merely someone who has not felt called to the ministry and is simply an attending member of his congregation, as in traditional Christianity; a man who is not a priest in Mormon culture is quite literally not fully a man.

This is why the word “ordination” is so fraught in Mormondom. From the viewpoint of many Mormons, women seeking the priesthood is not simply a battle for sameness through equality (though typically this is ignorantly framed by detractors as the heart of the struggle); it is the attempt on the part of some women to become, in a sense, men–because “priest” and “man” are virtually synonymous in the Mormon world. Uncoupling “male” from “priest” is much more complex than in other traditions. So it may feel to some not just like a power struggle, but a wildly impossible grasp for an incoherent ideal.

None of which is to say that Ordain Women is fundamentally misguided. The movement that has become an event has zeroed in on the the precise thing that brokers inequality between men and women in the Church and a primary source of female alienation, and it’s not that women get to have babies. What I am trying to articulate is why female ordination to Mormon priesthood is of a different genus than the struggle for women’s ordination to priesthood in other denominations. And also why its chances for success on the level of ordination is in my view probably less likely than in other Christianities (where congregations are often widely condemned for not allowing women to be ordained, to respond to the call of ordination) and possibly not ultimately even desirable in the long term, particularly if priesthood itself and our understanding of it is in need of reform. And this is where Ordain Women has become more than “merely” a call for women’s ordination. It’s become an event that is creating new subjects of new truths, trying to be faithful to the event that created them, and mired even more deeply, committed even more strongly to remaining with the Saints and the Church, not bent on destroying it or being fundamentally unfaithful to it. What subjects are capable of in the aftermath of an event can expose cracks in the system, highlight and bring to the forefront dire needs and insufficiencies that were hidden or ignored, whether their intended actions come to fruition or not.

But that’s the thing about authentic events. They happen to you or they don’t. You have no control over their siren’s call. Those that are born anew because of events spend the rest of their lives figuring out this new fidelity, trying on these new truths that look so dazzling to them but not necessarily to others, trying to persuade others of their rightness; they’re different than they were before the event. This was St. Paul, who spent the rest of this life trying to parse out a Christianity that he never came to through rational discussion or logical argument, but that shattered him from the outside in. And it also means that not everyone will feel called to the cause. But the ripples of the event and the words of those called to be faithful to it have far-reaching, even unintended consequences. Many feel to support OW, for example, even though they aren’t interested in or are even opposed (for many different reasons) to women receiving the priesthood. Because the need not just for change but radical change is so apparent to so many.

Try as I might, (and I have truly tried) for the reasons I’ve outlined above, I cannot be an uncompromising undoubting defender of Mormon women receiving priesthood. But then, this is partly because I’m not even completely sold on the ways priesthood is identified, granted, and enacted in the first place. I am a firm advocate for Mormon institutional female equality, and if priesthood becomes the the only way to do this, then those of us who haven’t been called by the Ordain Women event will simply have to accept the initial dissonance and feel to thank the Lord that progress has been made. In any case, that’s another thing about events–no amount of “this just doesn’t add up” repels them. They endure to the extent that the subjects created by them endure. These subjects may try to use logic and reason and history to persuade the unbelieving, but logic and reason were not the impetus for the event in the first place. This is often how change breaks into the world and creates something new. Despite my reservations about what it would mean to ordain women in the Mormon context, the possibility of a new creation is why Ordain Women has my support.

22 comments

  1. Very interesting thoughts, Jacob. So let’s think about mission calls: for LDS young men, it is an institutional expectation to go serve. You don’t need to feel “called,” you just go, and if you don’t go, you need to explain why you don’t go. But for young women, they go if they feel “called.” There is not institutional expectation. It is one of the few examples where one has to feel “called” and then volunteer to serve in the Church. (Senior missions being another.)

    If this transition occurred for young women serving missions (they were not set apart to serve missions in the 19th century, then in the 20th they were) that provides an example, perhaps, for how it could occur for the priesthood.

  2. Can you say more? It seems like precisely because they don’t have priesthood that it’s possible for them to feel called.

  3. I loved this post. Thank you. I look forward to an interesting and enlightening comments section, too, but mostly it’s nice to be able to acknowledge that something about my world view has shattered from the outside in, that this is dazzling to me. It’s kind of exhilarating.

  4. “And people are talking, at all levels.”

    I am interested that this is your impression.

    Personally I don’t know how to evaluate the impact of this group. The number of facebook “likes” is comparatively tiny relative to the active membership of the church, the number of profiles on the still even tinier. Of course its influence could be much wider than that, but I still wonder how many people have any awareness of this movement at all, or how many are paying any attention. It’s huge in the blogs, but how about in the pews? How can we tell?

  5. I am not really involved in the ongoing debate over the ordination of women, but here’s my story.
    In the late 70’s, when every worthy male was given the priesthood–D&C 1 was quoted as being fulfilled. “That every man might speak in the name of God”. I remember thinking, Is this like Genesis chapter 1, where God creates man in His own image? Man meant male and female. Would every worthy man (male and female) speak in the name of God by the power of His Holy Priesthood was my question?

    I went to the temple last month, and while in the endowment session, a powerful impression rested upon me. I’m an over 50 High Priest who is sensitive to the Spirit, but have no reason to push for the ordination of women. This was the impression, “The day has arrived when women should no longer veil their faces in any location, but should come boldly before their God.”

    I loved it! I burned and rejoiced within. What a glorious day!

    I am no novice in the things of the Spirit, nor am I the Prophet of The Lord who holds the keys on earth today. Those who do hold the keys will get this right and I pray that we always stand with them.

  6. Most of those in my acquaintance are familiar, at least to some extent, with the OW movement. And most would never out themselves by submitting a profile, or even “liking” something associated with OW on Facebook. The social risks are still too great, and the issue is too complex. Personally, I’m somewhere in the middle. LDS gender issues are very much on my mind, but I’m publicly very private about my opinions. I suspect that there are far more people in a similar state than might be immediately obvious.

    When the age for young women to serve missions was dropped to 19, did the COB expect the huge immediate response that occurred? I’m guessing not, since facilities were not in place to accommodate the influx. Apartments in Provo had to be hastily transformed into temporary living quarters. Yet previous to the announcement, female missionary opportunities weren’t a big topic of conversion, at least not in my heavily LDS Utah area, probably partly because no one ever expected them to change, but also because it would have been socially unacceptable to suggest that things weren’t fine as they were. Within 1 minute of the announcement, along with feminine cheers throughout the world, my niece was on Facebook saying, “I’m going on a mission!” I had no idea she even wanted to go.

    A lack of public chatter doesn’t equal a lack of private interest.

  7. In Mormonism … to be a man is to be a “priest.” The rite of passage from boyhood to manhood is priesthood, so “priest” is more accurately an anthropological category than an ecclesiastical office, a marker of gendered identity that can’t even be approximated in traditional Christianity. It’s why “priesthood” for a Mormon man can paradoxically feel simultaneously both meaningless (it’s simply part of the circle of Mormon male life for virtually every maturing male–body hair appears, get the priesthood, start dating, get a job, graduate from school, serve a mission) and the most meaningful thing in the world (it’s the primary framework for your identity as a male in the religious community). You do almost nothing to receive it, but it becomes the interpretive lens of your masculinity and the governing principle of your participation in the community. Feeling “called” couldn’t be further from the experience of receiving it. And performing ordinances and blessings, in the end, is not what really constitutes it.

    All of this serves to explain, at least to my mind, the somewhat frequent hesitancy of even a theologically liberal mind with regard to Ordain Women. … [O]rdaining Mormon women to the priesthood might feel strange and otherworldly, not primarily because of antiquated sexist notions of priests as male-only, but because men can only be men as priests in Mormon culture. A man who is not a priest (who does not have the priesthood) is not merely someone who has not felt called to the ministry and is simply an attending member of his congregation, as in traditional Christianity; a man who is not a priest in Mormon culture is quite literally not fully a man.

    Forgive me for quoting (and bolding) you so extensively, Jacob, but this!

    The way that “priesthood” has come to intersect with – and even be definitional of – Mormon constructions of masculinity is a crucial (and, I think, surprisingly under-discussed) factor influencing why many Mormons resist female ordination so strongly. To be a full, proper Mormon man is to be a priest. Female ordination has the potential to disintegrate – or force a full reevaluation and reconstruction of – the meaning of what it is to be a Mormon man, and that’s no small thing.

    As you say, the relationship between gender identity and religious service is much tighter in Mormonism than in many other religious denominations. (Our cultural narratives surrounding masculinity and embodiment further intertwine sexual orientation into that tight mix of overlapping identity markers – a reason, to my mind, that Mormons tend to worry so much about things like the Family Proclamation and LGBTQ sexualities. But that’s another conversation.)

  8. As I read your post, I also thought of missionary service as an interesting gray area. Missions blurs some of the boundaries by including women in an environment that is by in large a male space. I was incredibly grateful to serve a mission and am glad that I received a lot of support from my friends and family to do so. Overall, I had a very positive experience. However, I also had the experience of not quite fitting into the institution that I was a part of. As I read scriptures that discussed and made promises to missionaries I constantly wondered if those promises applied to me (many seemed to be tied to holding the priesthood). My mission president was very good at including and addressing sisters. However, it was fairly common in the MTC and during the mission to hear from speakers that mostly addressed the elders. Also, while I served sister missionaries were not officially included in mission counsels (even though my mission president unofficially included a coordinating sister in those meetings for a time). There were also elders who seemed to have a hard time having sisters in that male space (they wouldn’t even look at us if we said hi to them during zone meetings). I think significant changes will happen as many more sisters will now serve due to the age change. It will be harder to overlook sisters as they will make up a large bulk of the missionaries serving and a sister is now officially included in mission counsel meetings.

    Overall, I was glad that I could be a part of that experience even though the environment didn’t always include me or address my needs. So, I wonder whether similar adaptations can be made in other male spaces in the church to allow women additional opportunities for service and if the system will be adapted to address both the needs of women and men in those spaces. Certainly including equal numbers of men and women in leadership roles is an important step towards helping the system address the needs of both sexes. However, there is always the possibility that those male spaces will continue to focus mostly on men and women will always feel a bit out of place in those spaces. To me, this may be a reason to consider developing parallel female spaces (such as a priestesshood) which would allow similar opportunities for service and growth for men and women.

  9. It’s become an event that is creating new subjects of new truths, trying to be faithful to the event that created them, and mired even more deeply, committed even more strongly to remaining with the Saints and the Church, not bent on destroying it or being fundamentally unfaithful to it.

    The thing is, no group pointing out a need for change has ever considered itself “bent on destroying it or being fundamentally unfaithful to it”. Even Martin Luther was committed to fixing the church he loved. The CofC wasn’t looking to be unfaithful, but trying to help the Church see what they had gotten wrong. Just because OW doesn’t yet see itself as possibly separating doesn’t mean it never will.

    As for these ideas being “new”, I seriously doubt that as well. Could you imagine women who worked so hard to be doctors and to have all women in the territory vote, women who came from churches where they were ordained and were leaders, not asking the same questions?

    I occasionally wonder if the public letter to the OW leaders was done not only to protect Temple Square from other groups who might decide to “not protest”, but to prompt in a wider audience the questions, ideas, and subjects brought up by OW. Could it be the Church wants more discussion about this? It would have been simpler to let OW retain its obscurity without comment.

  10. Frank, I think (as I understand the OP) the newness refers to the newness of these ideas for these people, not the absolute newness of these ideas in the world at large. Obviously women’s ordination is hardly a new phenomenon for the many churches that already ordain women (even if, as Jacob points out, it’s a different issue in Mormonism), but it is radically new for LDS women, who have widely been raised to construe themselves as uninvolved in the Priesthood and, beyond that, basically passive in matters of church governance. OW asks women (and men) to imagine LDS womanhood in a very different way from the messages about womanhood that I think most of us absorbed from the Church growing up.
    I’ve certainly considered, in an abstract, vague way, a future in which women would hold the Priesthood, but I think that taking publicly about that possibility, and especially taking action toward that end, has an impact. Myself, I’ve realized that I’ve been waiting for the Church to change and let me have a place in it for decades. This is pretty much the first time I’ve ever thought I could work toward that change myself.

  11. Quite love and appreciated this!

    You do almost nothing to receive it, but it becomes the interpretive lens of your masculinity and the governing principle of your participation in the community.

    So much yes to that. Many good points.

    And Gwyn, your comment was wonderful. If you see this, I’d love to talk to you privately! (If you click the link to my name, there is a contact form on my site.)

  12. I appreciate your more nuanced position on this topic, even if I don’t think it gets at the core issues very well. (My own attempt at doing so will have to wait until another time.)

    My opinion is that a strong majority of the conflict regarding Ordain Women and ordaining women have to with our assignment of subject and object. Those who feel inclined toward OW judge the church by the standards, values, rules and language of modern humanism. Those who are opposed toward OW judge it as a movement within modern humanism by the standards, values, rules and language of the church. This post is a clear example of the former and this is my main objection to it.

    You speak derisively of “shaming” “privilege”, terms which clearly do not originate within Mormonism. In this way, so many authors measure the church by worldly standards and (unsurprisingly) find the church lacking. This, however, is not exactly what you are doing…. and I like that.

    Of course the already quoted core is:

    “You do almost nothing to receive it, but it becomes the interpretive lens of your masculinity and the governing principle of your participation in the community.”

    This, as has been noted, is the core issue. Priesthood ordination has precious little to do with qualifications, competence, merit or worthiness. This is a large point which many people on both sides of the debate miss. Many feminists think that their exclusion from the priesthood implies a certain kind of incompetence or unworthiness on their part. Many reactionaries, on the other hand, think that women being equally or even more competent or worthy dissolves feminist concerns. Both of these groups are wrong.

    I really like how to point out that priesthood authority within our church is very different from that in other churches, however, I don’t think you go far enough. My thoughts (which I will have to develop elsewhere) are that a priesthood which discriminates according to gender rather than competence or worthiness is meant to structure the family as an organization within the church as opposed to a group of people who are merely associated with the church. It serves to dissolve the barrier between church and home, more fully integrating the latter within the former. To be clear, I’m not necessarily saying that the family is modeled after the church, nor am I saying things are the other way around. Rather, I would suggest that both family and church are modeled on the kingdom of God model which Joseph Smith envisioned and which finds its clearest expression in the temple.

  13. Melyngoch, I believe I had the same understanding. I wasn’t taking about it not being new to the world at large, but it not being new to LDS women. We had many converts in the early church from religions that had women leaders, many women who found strength in being able to become doctors when only men had before, women who were treated as adults who could make good decisions in voting well before it was granted to the rest of the country.

    It seems a bit presumptuous to assume we’re doing something new here, especially when we’re using the organization of the Relief Society as an example.

  14. Whoops! I meant “this post *seems* like a clear case of that”…. Which I then meant to contrast with what is actually going on.

  15. Jenny Hatch, please get it straight. I understand this might be a bit confusing for you, but it’s the bloggers of ZD who are a cabal (see here), not OW.

  16. Jeff G., isn’t it just your own ideological lens that makes you so certain that Jacob’s ideological lens is a modern humanist one?

  17. Here are my thoughts on the ordination of women in the LDS church: http://naturalfamilyblog.wordpress.com/2013/10/06/my-thoughts-on-the-ordination-of-women-in-the-church-of-jesus-christ-of-latter-day-saints/

    “I believe this group of activist women are an organized cabal of professionally trained leftist agitators who have been tasked with doing a well publicized stunt in order to be excommunicated so they can then then whine to the media for the next twenty years about how evil and patriarchal the church is, having put their Feminist beliefs on the line and paid the seemingly ultimate sacrifice. I just wonder how much money they have been paid to do it…”

  18. Well, I really don’t want to go down that tangential path too much, but I would certainly acknowledge that my ideological lens certainly plays a role, but I would never say that it’s *just* that or that that’s all there is to it.

    I would say that any person who has had sufficient exposure to or training in modern humanism can potentially recognize its language… And lets face it, any person who has taken any social science or humanities classes at the university level has definitely been exposed to it.

    The problem is that such classes not only tend to not teach reflexivity with regards to these values (the sociology of intellectuals being a notable exception), but in many ways actively represses such. That’s why I tend to bring up the genealogy of people’s words and phrases since I believe that doing so highlights the contingent and historically situated nature of their critique. Humanistic critiques of the church are not things which are just there, nor are such things in any sense necessary or universally binding upon us. Rather, they are intellectual activities which we choose to engage in – activities which by no means tend to strengthen the church or sustain its leadership.

    To be sure, I think the account which I defend is itself deeply rooted in modern humanism. As such, I believe that to be an allegiance to modern humanism is good so long as it is constrained, qualified and conditioned by our unconstrained, unqualified and unconditional allegiance to the church. Sadly, I see many people in the ‘nacle that have that relationship exactly backward.

    But again, I don’t want this to lead to too much of a thread-jacking.

  19. Yeah, Jenny, I know. That’s what I was responding to. OW isn’t a cabal. ZD is. I know it can be hard to keep track of if you’re new to Mormon feminism, but I just wanted to straighten you out before you create a faux pas by mixing things up when you go to the Mormon feminist parties.

  20. “I still wonder how many people have any awareness of this movement at all, or how many are paying any attention. It’s huge in the blogs, but how about in the pews? How can we tell?”

    There are 19-20 stakes in North Texas (Dallas/Fort Worth), so I submit there is a pretty sizable core of members here. Plan protest during conference at one of the stake centers here. How much participation and attention will you get when you’re away from the lights of Temple Square? I submit that is a real test of how well OW is doing “in the pews”. (If not North Texas, how about LA or DC?)

Comments are closed.