The topic labels are posted with each Conference page. For example, here’s the list for the April 2013 Conference. There are a couple of issues that make these data less than ideal. First, some of the terms used, such as “family history” rather than “genealogy,” suggest that the topic labels weren’t assigned at the same time the Conferences occurred, but were rather assigned years later. Second, the labeling appears to have been done in at least three phases, given dramatic shifts at two points in time in the average number of topic labels per talk. This means at least three different people assigning labels, and it’s unlikely they would agree entirely with one another’s choices. But for purposes of this post, which isn’t all that serious anyway, I’m just going to ignore any issues with the data, throw it all in a big pile, and make a few graphs.

Most popular topics

Here are the top ten topics in order of popularity. The vertical axis in this graph, and in all graphs below, shows how many talks were assigned the topic label since 1971. I think there are no real surprises here. I’m disappointed that obedience comes in at #3, but not surprised.

Seven deadly sins

It looks like lust is the favorite of the seven deadly sins. Of course, there aren’t actually any talks labeled with “lust,” so I chose “morality” as maybe referring to the same thing. In this graph and all others below, when I substituted an alternative term to try to find labels that matched a topic, I’ve put the actual topic word used on lds.org in parentheses.

Books of scripture

Not surprisingly, the Book of Mormon beats the pants off other books of scripture.

Godhead

I guess it’s clear who the favorite member of the Godhead is.

Missions of the Church

It’s tough to pick labels for perfecting the saints. Just about anything could be fit under that heading. So you could certainly argue with my choices there. But it does appear that Conference talks far more frequently address proclaiming the gospel than redeeming the dead.

Necking and petting

So of course we could never have a subject label as blatant as “sex.” That would be gauche! It appears that we also can’t have one as obvious as “chastity.” Here’s my list of vaguely sex-related words that might or might not be euphemisms for sex.

Young women’s values

I wouldn’t have guessed it, but “divine nature” and “individual worth” actually do show up a few times as topic labels for talks. This was actually what prompted me to look at how frequently all the values show up.

Groups of people

I found topic labels that refer to groups by age, groups by marital status, and groups by gender. I’ve added some groups that were never referred in the graph to just to emphasize what is clearly the imagined default person in the Church: married, male, and middle-aged. The unmarked groups don’t get subject labels applied to them. I realize that the topic labels are probably the opinions of just a small number of people, but I think it would signal that women have arrived as being taken seriously as fully members of the Church when they no longer qualify as being a special topic requiring a separate label. The message of this type of label is that there are talks for people in general, who are of course men, and then talks for women, which are a separate class of talks.

After all we can do

Nephi says we are saved by grace “after all we can do.” It looks like Conference talks emphasize all we’re supposed to do a lot more than the grace.

Heavenly Mother always liked you best!

Other Christians give us a hard time for believing Jesus and Satan are brothers. If they are, it’s pretty clear which brother is the favorite. Maybe that’s why Satan rebelled. Older siblings are typically more compliant with their parents’ wishes and younger siblings are the rebels.

Ten Commandments

“Thou shalt not commit adultery” is the Conference favorite, but only if you believe my attempt to connect the euphemism “morality” to adultery. There’s much less discussion of not killing or stealing.

Obedience vs. sacrifice

Samuel famously told Saul that “to obey is better than sacrifice.” It looks like this difference holds up in Conference talk popularity too. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any mention of Samuel’s next comparison point, hearkening versus the fat of rams, in topic labels. In fact, there weren’t any topic labels referring to animal fats of any kind.

Seven heavenly virtues

We looked at the seven deadly sins, so how about the seven heavenly virtues? Chastity is the favorite, but only because I stuck “morality” in for it again.

And the greatest of these is . . .

Faith? Paul claimed it was charity. What does he know?

Seven habits of highly effective Mormons

While we’re on the lists of seven, let’s throw in Stephen Covey’s famous seven habits. You can see I had to stretch quite a bit to make any of the topic labels match the seven habits. I must admit that I didn’t try all that hard to match “synergize,” a word that I can’t hear without spontaneously rolling my eyes. I’ll just be happy thinking that Conference talks aren’t telling me about synergizing. I do enough eye-rolling while watching it as it is.

Can mercy rob justice?

Alma says no, but it appears that discussion of mercy can at least crowd out discussion of justice.

Is it the attitude or the gratitude?

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard about an attitude of gratitude in Conference several times. Which is more important, though? Clearly it’s the gratitude. Which makes sense if you think about it, I guess. Gratitude with no attitude is still a virtue, but attitude with no gratitude sounds like trouble, as the implication is that the attitude is bad.

Boyd K. Packer’s hit list

President Packer famously labeled feminists, gays, and intellectuals as the three great enemies of the Church. None of them appear to get much discussion in Conference. Of course, this fact really shines a light on the weaknesses of this type of analysis: President Packer routinely condemns gay marriage without saying any explicit words that might lead a label assigner to assign the label “homosexuality” to the talk. Getting back to the graph, tolerance is included because of President Packer’s recent talk in which he mentioned the “tolerance trap.” Finally, President Packer also warned that “Some things that are true are not very useful.” Because he isn’t opposed to truth in general–only the non-useful kind–I added a caveat to the last bar.

In the future I hope to do something a little more substantive with these data, but for now, I hope you enjoyed these mostly frivolous comparisons.

Once, shortly after the Second Temple was destroyed, a famous Rabbi told his students that he would be making the long journey from Yavne to Alexandria, Egypt, to meet with an important Gentile woman. His students loved him and could not bear to part with him, so they insisted upon accompanying him on the journey.

They embarked, and after a month of arduous travel, they arrived in Alexandria. They found the home of the Gentile woman, and it was grand and palatial. She came out to meet them, and she was beautiful and powerful, exceeding anything they could have imagined. The Rabbi turned to his students who had accompanied him and told them that he would be entering the home of the Gentile woman alone, and they were not to follow him. He then removed his tallit katan [sacred clothing, literally "small tallit," a kind of prayer shawl], handed it to one of his followers, and entered the house with the beautiful foreign woman. His students stood outside in wonder as the curtains within the house were pulled so tightly shut that they could not see inside.

Nearly an hour later, the Rabbi emerged from the house. He accepted the tallit katan and once again donned it.

“Now my friends,” he said. “Why did you think that I went into the house of the Gentile woman alone?”

“We thought that you were discussing great affairs of state, too sensitive even for our ears,” they replied.

“Ah,” said the Rabbi. “And why did you think that I took off my sacred clothing?”

“We thought you feared that the holy fabric might be soiled from some of the spittle from the Gentile woman’s mouth as she spoke, so you removed it instead.” [The spit of Gentiles is one of the many things that causes ritual impurity according to Jewish law.]

“Why did you think that I pulled the curtains closed?”

“We thought that your meeting was too secret to be seen by passersby in the street.”

“Ah,” said the Rabbi.

He then smiled. “My friends, and so it was, every whit. As you have judged me in these matters, so may the Lord God judge you.”

 
______________
I have loved this story since I heard it. Sometimes I fear that the common Mormon maxim to “avoid the appearance of evil” (from 1 Thessalonians 5:22) tacitly leaves the impression that it is permissible to judge those who “appear evil.” I prefer the lesson of this old tale: we should bend over backwards in giving others the benefit of the doubt.

But that 10th commandment is a pesky one. Because for a long time I’ve been especially covetous. Now it’s not what you might expect. I’m not really covetous of my neighbor. His house is nice, but it’s about like ours. Besides, he’s unmarried and has no manservant, maidservant or ox. He’s quite fit, but I’m not interested in his ass. So there’s not much for me to covet, except perhaps his riding lawnmower, but I would consider that more of a transgression than a sin. No, my problem is much more serious.

I am like the people of Babel, who built a tower because they coveted God’s power. Or Simon, who tried to pay Peter for the priesthood authority he coveted. You see, I have long sought for that which I could not obtain–a particular calling in the Church. I’ve wanted to be important, to be looked up to by dozens of adoring faces each week, to play a crucial role in the life of the ward each Sunday. Yes, I confess, I have coveted the position of Primary pianist.

Recently my years of lobbying finally paid off. The counselor called me in and blew out his cheeks in exasperation: “You win, we’re finally calling you as the Primary pianist.” I doubt he had ever seen an endzone dance after extending a calling, but what mine lacked in coordination was made up for in enthusiasm. Now, I attribute this success to righteous living, although my “accidentally” closing the keyboard cover on the former pianist’s hands may have had something to do with it. The Lord works in mysterious ways, you know. Who I am to question?

Anyway, it’s a great calling. You get to play fun songs, you’re protected from all those rambunctious kids by a big, solid piano, and, unlike the chorister, you don’t have to prepare much. And it’s safer than being the organist, since there are no organ pedals. I have a vivid memory of one sacrament meeting where my dad nodded off during the talks and stomped on the organ pedals. (I still treasure the look on his face.) No need to worry about that as Primary pianist. You also get to hear stuff like, “As many of the Genitals as repent…”, or “We believe in the same organization that existed in the Primitive Church, namely impossibles, prophets, imposters,…”, or “The Holy Ghost?! I’m scared of ghosts!” And that was just in my first two weeks!

But the best thing about the Primary relates to what I call the golden ratio of Church teachings. Let me digress a moment to provide a brief math lesson on the golden ratio. Two quantities are said to be in the golden ratio if the ratio of the sum of the quantities to the larger quantity is equal to the ratio of the larger quantity to the smaller one. Clear as mud? Thought so. Let me try to illustrate:

Now that we’ve got that straight, according to Wikipedia, many artists and architects have proportioned their works to approximate the golden ratio, believing this proportion to be aesthetically pleasing. It turns out the golden ratio equals approximately 1.6.

Now, unless you are well-versed in Church history and theology, you may be unaware that as an institution we have striven to follow the aesthetically pleasing golden ratio of acceptable to unacceptable teachings. So for every 1.6 acceptable teachings, we try to present 1 unacceptable teaching. When we are unable to achieve this as a worldwide Church, individual adaptation is practiced at the local level. As a rule of thumb, this means that for every 16 or so teachings on love, patience, compassion, and empathy, we try to include approximately 10 teachings on blind obedience, modesty policing, 1950′s gender roles, and exclusion of gays.

It turns out that churches that exceed this ratio of acceptable to unacceptable teachings either get translated (see Zion, City of) or else cause their congregants to lose interest (see Universalist, Unitarian). Churches with ratios less than 1.6 can be quite popular, with their us-versus-them tribalism and violent stirring of emotions. Remarkably, the Westboro Baptist Church is postulated to have a negative ratio, although how that would be possible I leave to the mathematicians and religious philosophers. (There is an urban legend that Fermat claimed a simple proof in the margin of his church newsletter, but no one has been able to complete the proof.) For obvious reasons we don’t want our ratio to slip too low, so the Church strives for the aesthetically pleasing 1.6 ratio.

But I digress. What’s great about Primary is that the ratio of acceptable to unacceptable teachings is through the roof. If “Follow the Prophet” were dropped from the Songbook and the hand gestures were dropped from “Book of Mormon Stories”, the ratio would probably exceed 10. Primary children are taught to love other people, be kind, tell the truth, accept differences, and listen to their parents. Great stuff!

The problem is, to reach the golden ratio for the Church as a whole, this means that other organizations must have a much lower ratio, you know, to balance it all out. Relief Society isn’t too bad, but Sunday school often approaches a ratio of 1. Now in High Priests’ group, according to my personal experience and understanding of calculus, the ratio of acceptable to unacceptable teachings approaches 0 as time approaches 60 minutes. But just as the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee, so we must respect the role of each organization in achieving the golden ratio.

But behind my cynicism and frivolity, I care deeply about the Church and find considerable value in what I experience within it. So the next time the Sunday school teacher or priesthood leader says something particularly cringe-worthy, I realize that I need to do the math and cut them some slack. As Mormons we have some pretty awesome teachings rounding out each group of 16. Maybe the job of moving some of the remaining 10 teachings into the acceptable column is not just for our leaders, but for me as well. No doubt my influence will be small, but I say (borrowing from my favorite children’s song not in the Primary Songbook), “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine! Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine!” Perhaps my little light can help the golden ratio begin to be replaced by the golden rule.

For the rabbis, then, part of righteousness comes from dialogue with God. Noah was righteous, yes. But the better part of valor – the proof of the truly great – is in challenging God; in wrestling like Jacob and the angel until we may claim our blessing (Genesis 32:24-32). Although we are to be obedient, we are not to be unquestioning. On the contrary, God wishes us to respond. No human question could upset the Divine; it is questions that bring us closer to Him.

The inherent rightness in questioning God is further illustrated in the life of Moses. When he becomes tired and overburdened by the demands of shepherding an entire people from Egypt to Canaan, he turns to God and complains at some length, even begging God to kill him. God suggests that he call counselors, leading to the first Council of the Seventy:

And Moses said unto the Lord, Wherefore hast thou afflicted thy servant? And wherefore have I not found favour in thy sight, that thou layest the burden of all this people upon me?  Have I conceived all this people? Have I begotten them, that thou shouldest say unto me, Carry them in thy bosom, as a nursing father beareth the sucking child, unto the land which thou swarest unto their fathers? … I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too heavy for me. And if thou deal thus with me, kill me, I pray thee, out of hand, if I have found favour in thy sight; and let me not see my wretchedness. And the Lord said unto Moses, Gather unto me seventy men of the elders of Israel, whom thou knowest to be the elders of the people, and officers over them; and bring them unto the tabernacle of the congregation, that they may stand there with thee. And I will come down and talk with thee there: and I will take of the spirit which is upon thee, and will put it upon them,; and they shall bear the burden of the people with thee, that thou bear it not thyself alone. (Numbers 11:9-17, KJV, emphasis added.)

Asking questions is not an exclusively male prerogative either. When the children of Israel settled in the land of Canaan and began apportioning the land, they determined that it would be inherited patrilineally (from father to son) according to each tribe. This way the geographical tribal borders would stay intact throughout generations. Yet a man named Zelophehad had only daughters, and they became concerned about their ability to claim their family land given the lack of a male heir. They asked Moses, and Moses asked God. It was determined that the daughers of Zelophehad had an inheritance of their own in the land of Israel:

Then came the daughters of Zelophehad … of the families of Manasseh the son of Joseph: and these are the names of his daughters; Mahlah, Noah, and Hoglah, and Milcah, and Tirzah. And they stood before Moses, and before Eleazar the priest, and before the princes and all the congregation, by the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, saying, Our father died in the wilderness…. and had no sons. Why should the name of our father be done away from among his family, because he hath no son? Give unto us therefore a possession among the brethren of our father. And Moses brought their cause before the LORD. And the LORD spoke unto Moses, saying, The daughters of Zelophehad speak right: thou shalt surely give them a possession of an inheritance among their father’s brethren; and thou shalt cause the inheritance of their father to pass unto them. And thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel, saying, If a man die, and have no son, then ye shall cause his inheritance to pass unto his daughter. (Numbers 27:1 – 9, KJV)

This, then, is a God who demands obedience, yes – but also a persuadable God, a God who seeks relationality. It is not merely that we are allowed to ask, and it shall be given; knock, and it shall be opened (Matt 7:7) – it is that God wishes us to ask. It is the asking, as we Mormons teach, that led Joseph Smith to his role in the restoration of the modern Church.

It is for this reason that I am consistently surprised by the backlash against questioning and debating within Mormon subculture. Especially, it seems, when addressing issues relating to the role of women, gender roles generally, and the nature of the priesthood, there is a rather consistent overtone of orthodoxy that implies both that questions should not be asked, and that the righteous are those who are content with the status quo. I would argue, on the contrary, that within our tradition – within our very oldest traditions and up through the restoration – there is a constant, even urgent, demand to question, and to question consistently; to wrestle with our own angels until the morning (that is my favorite Genesis tale). I would argue further that it is not clear that because one person is all right with the status quo that means that everyone should be. On the contrary, the notion that questioning itself, or the feeling that some change is needed, is somehow apostate seems counter to nearly every one of our stories of origin.

5) The Elders

I have no younger brothers. On my mission I came to feel a sense of siblingdom with a lot of the Elders in my different zones and districts – a feeling of occasional exasperation mixed with tenderness and deep affection, what I imagine I would feel toward my younger brothers if I had them. I loved those guys.

I served in the Provo MTC alongside an Elder from California. He and I were in each other’s district there and again after we moved to a smaller MTC in Latin America for our Spanish language training. Then, after we arrived at our mission country, we happened to be placed in the same district again. I will try to be careful in how much detail I give in this story because it is his and not mine.

He was a very thoughtful person. One day I discovered that every transfer period (every six weeks) he wrote a personal, individual letter – in Spanish – to each of the (around 15) Latin American missionaries, Elders and Sisters, in our mission. He had learned that their own families could not afford to send them letters, so he wrote short notes to them, offering words of encouragement and support. (This was technically against the rules – *missionaries are not allowed to write to other missionaries in the same mission. I think, though, that had the MP known he would have been proud of this Elder who wanted the Latin American missionaries to have something tangible to open alongside their North American companions.)

When I learned he was doing this, I felt both a sense of admiration for him and a sense of deep shame at my own inadequacy – it hadn’t crossed my mind even once to reach out in that way. And this Elder struggled more than most with Spanish, making it doubly impressive to me that he quietly, unobtrusively, sought out ways to buoy people up without letting the fear of making mistakes get in the way.

One day in our small district meeting – we had only two companionships in our district – he felt the need to tell us his story: He came from a large family, one of the youngest children of nearly ten and the only child to serve a mission. He was an athlete, a strong, big guy, as were his brothers, and he had turned down a sports scholarship to serve.

And, he told us in that small, intimate meeting, he came from a gang family.

A couple of years before his mission, one of his older brothers was killed in a gang feud. He explained that normally in those situations, gang families seek retribution by plotting revenge. But his family “remembered the church” – that phrase stuck in my mind – and chose another path. His father and mother and older brothers and sisters decided instead to pray for help to forgive his brother’s murderer. And he decided to be the first in his family to serve a mission.

He struggled with the language and with the culture of the country we served in. And, he said, on a more profoundly personal level, he struggled privately to expurgate himself of the gang norms of his past and to fit in to LDS mission culture. His biggest fear was that he wasn’t strong enough to see it through – that all the friends and family back home who had doubted his ability to be a good Mormon missionary would be proven right.

They weren’t. He completed his mission, and recently we got in touch again.

*Update* – I realized after I wrote this up that I was remembering this rule incorrectly – missionaries were not allowed to write to missionaries of the opposite sex who were serving in the same mission. For me as a sister missionary that pretty much meant that I couldn’t write to other missionaries. (Sisters made up just over 10% of my mission, and there was rarely more than one set of sisters in any district or zone, with the upshot that sisters rarely got to know other sister missionaries who weren’t their own companions.)

The fact that this Elder didn’t exclude the Latina sisters in his letters spoke volumes to me. They weren’t love letters (my one Latina companion showed me a couple of the notes he had written her, and they were 100% mission-appropriate in terms of content). I was glad that he looked at us as his sisters in the gospel and fellow missionaries first, and as women (off-limits!) second.

My daughter suffers from depression. Her first major episode, at least as far as I could perceive, began in middle school when her mom and I were divorced. Since then she has had significant ups, and many good times and good friends, but the dark cloud that is the absence of purpose and meaning, hopes and dreams, seems to follow her like an unruly, unwelcome companion. Meds have helped, therapy has brought some relief, but deep down, the terrifying emptiness that I imagine never seems to leave her alone.

I do not understand it. I seek for empathy but I’m sure that I just don’t comprehend what she experiences. Even as I tell this story I know that I’m getting it wrong. As much as I don’t want to experience depression myself, I truly wish I had empathy. I wish I could say to her that I understand what she is feeling. I wish I could provide her that shelter and support.

At other times I wish that I could take her suffering away and suffer in her place. But the cruel reality is that that is not an option. This little girl, who I blessed as a baby to be a happy child, who sang and scrubbed the floor in imitation of Cinderella as a 2-year old, who always, always laughed at my jokes (the true sign of a blessed spirit), has a disease that neither I nor the doctors can take away. She now enters adulthood and I wave my arms ineffectually and look on in despair. I have an inkling of what David must have felt when he cried, “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”

And I rage, rage against the cruelty of fate and the human condition that causes her to suffer so (I don’t believe God has anything to do with it). I hate mental illness. I just hate it. Perhaps I don’t have the standing to feel so violently about mental illness since I have not experienced it first hand, but I loath it.

To my further dismay, my daughter’s suffering has shone a harsh light on my deepest flaws. Because sometimes while she is suffering I feel not empathy, but frustration and annoyance. Why can’t she do more? Why won’t she do more? She is so sweet, intelligent, and fun, but as I fret about her lost potential, I sometimes allow my delight in her personality, her being, to be forgotten. I have hope that she will be able to function throughout her life, that she will find joy in learning, work, family, and faith, but I let that hope eat away at my compassion. Under the guise of worrying about her future success, I lack patience for her current difficulty.

I wish I had answers, both for her suffering and for my dysfunctional way of coping. I truly believe that she will learn to manage, that it will get better, that she will grow strong as she faces this adversity. But as a father I sometimes let my fears engulf me. At these times, however, what often brings me solace is the Atonement; I feel that the Atonement has something to say to me. And yet I don’t quite know what it is. I don’t understand the Atonement, its theories all seem inadequate, but the story of a parent afflicted by the suffering of a child speaks to me, and somehow I am comforted. The sky brightens, the sun comes up, and I dream that my daughter is standing on the beach, waving at me through the mist. And she is smiling.

I didn’t go on a mission, so my knowledge of the MTC comes entirely from what people have told me. But I’ve had some fun conversations with several of my co-bloggers who are RMs, and we’ve come up with a list of similarities:

1) You live in a bubble that’s cut off from the rest of the world.

2) You’re never alone. People are watching you all the time.

3) Your time is heavily scheduled. You have activities all day, which you’re expected to attend.

4) You have limited contact with friends and family.

5) You get so used to being in that environment that it can be disorienting to leave.

6) Because you’re sharing a common experience, you can make really good friends. On the flip side, people can drive you crazy precisely because you can’t get away from them.

7) There’s an expectation of obedience or compliance.

8) There are, to some degree, cookie cutter expectations: a standardized approach that’s used for everyone there, without taking into account the varying needs of individuals.

9) You have to ask permission before you can do a lot of basic things.

10) You have to have regular meetings with an authority figure to evaluate how you are doing. These can be quite loaded, because these authorities have the power to decide what happens to you.

11) Going on a walk is a prized luxury.

12) It’s a delight to get stuff from the outside world (but there are restrictions on what people can give you).

13) You’re expected to participate in group sharing exercises (whether group therapy or testimony meetings.)

14) Both environments are shaped by ideologies that come from leaders higher up, meaning that the people directly working with individuals usually have little ability to change the protocol.

15) Cafeteria food.

We made this list just for fun, so I don’t have many deep thoughts about it, but I am curious, for those who’ve been in either setting, whether you’d agree or disagree with these characterizations, and how being in that kind of environment affected you.

On this evening, behind closed doors in his office at the ward building, the mild-mannered, middle-aged, soon-to-be excommunciated-for-adultery bishop, asked innocent little Lilian if she practiced bestiality.

Bestiality?! She didn’t even completely understand sex, let alone carnal knowledge of a non-human mammal. She did not live on a farm, she did not own a dog, and she was a girl (which, to this naive blogger, seems to present further challenges to the practice). Lilian, sitting in her little gingham dress, barely out of Primary, had to ask the bishop what bestiality was. And he obligingly explained it to her, alone, the two of them, in that office.

Do I even need to say how outraged this makes me feel, writing about Lilian’s experience? She felt extremely uncomfortable, but he was the bishop, and so she figured that that’s just the sort of thing they asked in temple recommend interviews. For that reason, it didn’t occur to her to tell her parents, and she would have felt way too embarrassed to do so anyway. So she got to take this warped sex education message home with her, to ponder in her heart and wonder about the depravity that was sexuality, to feel fear and disgust thinking about what it was that people did with each other (and with animals!) behind closed doors. All this from the spiritual leader of her ward. What a twisted narrative of sexuality to give a girl entering adolescence, trying to figure out her body, her emotions, and how to relate with others in adult ways.

Now, I realize that it could have been worse. Lilian was not sexually abused by her bishop. Fortunately, she did not undergo that trauma experienced by far too many girls and women. But her experience was traumatic enough. It caused her to develop negative beliefs and attitudes about sex. If sexual desire could make people do such disgusting things, she wanted no part of it. The interview played a role in turning her off to sexuality and making her suspicious of the motives of men in the sexual realm. What’s more, it caused her to feel deeply distrustful of church leaders and their supposed “inspiration”.

Did this need to happen? Of course, people can say that there’s always going to be a few bad apples. But why must we give bad apples the opportunity? Why do we continue to put our girls and boys in this potentially harmful position? And beyond protecting our children, shouldn’t we learn from the Catholic Church sex scandals and rethink the interview process if only for public relations and legal reasons?

But bad apples aren’t the only problem. Even when nothing goes wrong, having older men ask teenagers, especially girls, about their sexual behaviors is just plain creepy. In a highly unscientific poll about recollections of teenage interview experiences, my wife, daughter, and sister all responded identically: shaking head, shuddering, and saying, “Eww!” I don’t think they are alone in this sentiment. Is this the kind of church experience we intend for our girls? And why do we put our leaders in this awkward position? Personally, I would be reluctant to accept a calling to the bishopric because I don’t feel comfortable doing that part of the job.

So, there appears to be some tension between the institutional needs of the Church and the well-being of its members. As a Church we have decided that assessing members’ worthiness, including in the sexual realm, is important for entrance into temples. We perform recommend interviews because we believe the temple is the house of The Lord, a holy place, and we want to ensure that the members who go there respect this holiness by living righteously. So far, so good. However, it is obvious that the temple recommend interview is inadequate to this purpose. People can and do lie when interviewed, or they may deceive themselves, rationalizing their behaviors. Furthermore, the recommend questions can hardly be considered the final word on righteousness. For example, based on the recommend questions it is theoretically possible to exclude from the temple someone who affiliates with feminists, while allowing attendance to someone who subtly belittles his children and tells his wife that sex is her wifely duty. In other words, though recommend questions call out certain behaviors, they fail to adequately regulate other behaviors essential to a life of Christian discipleship.

As a result, I would conclude that the primary purpose of temple recommend interviews is not to keep unrighteous people out of the temple; the temple is chock full of unrighteous people–us! Rather, the primary purpose is to help us evaluate the righteousness of our lives on a regular basis, strengthening our resolve to live well and improve by being accountable to our spiritual leaders. The interview is for our benefit, not to protect the holiness of the temple or the other people who go there. This purpose needs to inform possible solutions to problems with the interview.

I see several solutions to the interview problem, both individual and institutional. The Church could have the Relief Society president or the Young Womens’ president do the interviewing of the girls. Was Deborah not a judge in Israel? Or a smaller step might be to require one of these leaders to be present when girls are interviewed. If personal accountability is paramount, perhaps we could think outside the box and have the youth sign a statement affirming the answers to the recommend questions. I am sure there are other ways the Church’s needs can be met while still protecting our children.

As parents, we can choose to attend these interviews and explain to our children why we are attending. As they get older and feel more self-assured, they can decide to go by themselves. We can also tell them (as I do) that they need not enter into details about sexual behaviors during the interviews (in fact, I tell them that I don’t think such details are the bishop’s business). The bishop can ask them if they live the law of chastity, but they need only answer yes or no; the details they should work out with the Lord. By helping our children have a more positive interview experience, we can help them see the temple as a spiritual resource rather than something they associate with discomfort and awkwardness.

Personally, I have drawn considerable strength from temple covenants and I appreciate how the temple rituals can draw me into a sacred time and space where I see myself more clearly and can reach out to a bigger, better, more beautiful reality. And so it makes me both furious and hurt that to go to the Lord’s house, some of our children must go through an animal house. There must be a better way.

A little bit about Mike: he majored in mathematics, and now works on the epidemiology of herpes viruses. (Just to clarify, he doesn’t have herpes but he’s working on it.) With this background he is very popular at parties. He has five children and a wonderful wife. He currently teaches early-morning seminary, probably as penance for some shenanigans in the pre-existence. He started blogging by accident and has continued because so far no one has managed to stop him.

Welcome, Mike! It’s great to have you on board.

And to some extent, I’ve been thinking about that question ever since. To put it in more theological language, how do divine action and human action work together in the process of  salvation? What, exactly, is grace, and what does it do? How does it relate to human freedom? In my theological work, I’ve been grappling with those questions for years, both in the context of the LDS church and in the wider world of Christian theology. I’ve written a variety of papers on the subject, and it played a significant role in my dissertation.

But on a personal level, I think I’ve learned the most about grace from a therapy group I was in a couple of years ago. It was a six-month, modified DBT group. (DBT stands for dialectical behavior therapy—you can google it for more info, but for purposes of this post, I’ll just say that it has you work on skills related to things like mindfulness and emotional regulation.) I really like DBT, which has helped me a lot. And the combination of DBT skills and the style of this particular group made me clue into things that I hadn’t really understood before, at least not on an experiential level.

For one thing, what mattered with the group was that you showed up and were honest. If you hadn’t done your homework, or you’d slipped into self-destructive behavior that week, that was simply something to talk about—not something to get you in trouble. The idea was that you looked at what had happened not with judgment, but with curiosity, with a compassionate attitude of wanting to understand what had happened, and the idea that you could  make different choices in the future.

In addition, you didn’t have to earn the privilege of being in the group through good behavior. It wasn’t as if you didn’t have to make any effort—because if you didn’t come, or you didn’t talk honestly about what was going on, the group couldn’t help you. If you weren’t ready for it, that was okay; you could try it again in the future. But if you came, people were there to help—not to judge.

I also appreciated the emphasis on a basic DBT skill called “radical acceptance,” which means accepting where you are right now, and going from there. It doesn’t mean you have to like the situation—the point is that you don’t waste your energy wishing it were different. Since I have a strong tendency to beat myself up when things go wrong, I’ve found this skill particularly challenging, but also surprisingly helpful when I’ve managed to put it into practice.

I’ve been in a couple of DBT groups since then, and while they’ve been useful, they’ve made me appreciate just how good my first group was. We had a group of people who came regularly, and as we got to know each other, we developed some pretty close friendships. There’s something powerful about an environment in which you can be honest, sometimes brutally so, about what’s really going on in your life.

All of this made me think a lot about my religious practice. I like the idea that you’re not at church to endlessly re-hash mistakes, but to focus on where you are going next—that church shouldn’t be a place to make you feel horrible about your imperfections, but to give you space to take account of where you are at the moment, and to encourage you to keep going.

And on a more personal note, I’ve thought a lot about this in the context of my relationship with God. I find it very easy to start avoiding things like prayer when I’m feeling guilty or angry. It’s hard to trust that this isn’t a relationship that I have to earn, or that’s contingent on my being on my best behavior. Rather, it’s something constant (though admittedly it doesn’t always feel that way). It’s not going to help, it’s not going to make any difference in my life, if I avoid it. But no matter how often I run, God stubbornly refuses to give up on me. And that, I believe, is grace.