President Nelson stirred up a lot of discussion with his Conference talk, “The Correct Name of the Church,” where he explained that the use of nicknames like “Mormon” for the Church or its members are a victory for Satan. As many people have pointed out (for example, Jana Riess), the arguments he made were similar to ones he made in an earlier Conference talk almost 30 years ago. As a relatively junior member of the Quorum of the Twelve, he found his arguments didn’t gain much traction, as President Hinckley gave a talk in the very next Conference where he embraced the use of the term “Mormon.” This time around, though, he’s in the top spot in Church leadership, so he’s getting things done. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir has been renamed the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square, for example.
One thing that really struck me about the comparison that shows that this issue has been on President Nelson’s mind for decades is what it reveals about the decision-making process in the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve. The D&C says that decisions made by these bodies must be unanimous. If this rule is followed, it means that then-Elder Nelson must have been on board with unanimous decisions made that followed President Hinckley’s approach of embracing and owning the term Mormon. It also means that all the Q15 members who were also on board with President Hinckley’s (and Monson’s) strategy have all changed their minds together, and are now on board with President Nelson’s view.
Of course there’s a more obvious explanation. The Q15 don’t actually require unanimity for their decisions. Or if they do, it’s on paper but not in practice. It seems likely to me that Elder Nelson was silently irritated with President Hinckley’s whole approach to the question of the name of the Church from 1990 to today. He was just biding his time, waiting until he could ascend to the Presidency and declare that his view was God’s will all along.
This view of Q15 decision making actually shouldn’t be all that surprising. After all, in the case of decision-making in the broader Church, the D&C says things should be done by common consent, but in practice, that has long ago changed from being a way for rank-and-file members to actually have any kind of input to simply being a loyalty test, where the only “correct” answer that can be given is to go along with whatever leaders have already decided. I think what President Nelson’s talk just shows is that this same process likely operates in the highest councils of the Church. What the top man says goes, and the only “correct” thing for more junior Q15 members to say is that they’re on board with whatever he wants.
What may also be going on is that different Church Presidents have different ideas about how much they want to actually try to build consensus before acting, or how much they just want to push their own agenda and force the rest of the Q15 to go along. It seems like President Nelson is signaling that he leans more toward the latter approach. Along similar lines, as Peggy Fletcher Stack notes, he’s more prone than previous Church leaders to refer to his decisions as being revelation. It’s possible that his approach just feels more jarring to me (or others) because he’s following a couple of men who leaned more toward consensus-building, although that’s just a general sense I have. I don’t really know how Presidents Hinckley or Monson actually handled decision-making.
One thing I can say is that people who are as certain that they speak for God as President Nelson is scare me. The fact that he seems uninterested in having the rest of the Q15 be anything but yes men makes him even more scary. I’m afraid he’s going to make it much harder to be Mormon, and not just in that he doesn’t like that name.
A thing I keep thinking about is how my dad often marveled at the amount of self-confidence a surgeon must have to be able to simply slice open another person with the belief that they can fix their patient. Surgeons are highly skilled, and often their confidence is often well-earned. I’m quite glad that there are people like that. But that ability to shrug off failures, and move forward with perfect confidence in one’s own rightness feels both superhuman, and terrifying to me.
I have not once forgotten that President Nelson was a world class thoracic surgeon. He wears a mantle just exactly how I imagine a surgeon would.
It’s interesting the way this “Mormon” thing undercuts the narrative we have that the mantle changes a new prophet’s priorities. I don’t entirely buy that narrative, although it’s certainly useful. In any case, I’m not seeing much evidence that Pres. Nelson’s priorities have shifted; his wife’s statements about his “being unleashed” or whatever sure don’t support that narrative.
I became concerned about 10 years ago after Pres. Nelson reorganized our stake presidency. A month or two later the new stake president talked to our ward about his interview with Pres. Nelson, and told us that Pres. Nelson had specifically asked him to “make a personal oath to support and follow President Monson in all of his decisions, and to commit to continue to do so in the future” At the time all I could think of was, “Holy crap, this sounds just like Akish in Ether 8.” Following up with Pres. Nelson’s Oct 2014 conference talk that “Our sustaining of prophets is a personal commitment that we will do our utmost to uphold their prophetic priorities” and that “Our sustaining is an oath-like indication that we recognize their calling as a prophet to be legitimate and binding upon us” tells me it is more about the prophet than it is about Christ.
Why the whining? This Church has needed changes for decades, the Restoration is not over. We finally get a guy willing to do the hard lifting and suddenly church members get nervous? The Church’s name was given by revelation long ago, and finally someone says “we’re going with it” then members balk?
Chris O,
Can’t the mantle also include a mantle of preparation? Would an apostle not see and experience things that influence his future leadership decisions? Must revelation occur out of a vacuum to be legit? It seems like many members want Revelation ex nihilo!
I’ve been trying to reconcile how I feel about all of this. On the one hand, I am all for revelation and being a church of revelation–like, enthusiastically so. We should be a church of continuing revelation, it’s literally written into our theological DNA. But on the other hand I’m like a character in Star Wars because I’ve got a bad feeling about this. I feel like this is retrenchment more than anything else but that we’re also pivoting away from the cultural and communal things that make us weird but wonderful and more toward things that make us a little more homogeneous. Anyway, I’m just not sure. I guess this Mormon will just have to wait and see.
Old Man-
I suppose it’s possible, but it seems so silly and petty and laughable to me that God cares so much about a name (especially after all the work his predecessors put in that’s he’s undoing). There are, I think, lots of reasons to think he’s wrong about this. My priors on Pres. Nelson aren’t “Hey, he’s clearly doing the Lord’s work”, so how whether you come down on preparation or long-simmering beefs will probably come down to those.
And I’m not arguing that revelation is ex nihilo, but it clearly depends, at a minimum, on what questions we ask. Pres. Nelson is clearly concerned about the church’s name, which I think says more about his concerns than it necessarily does about God’s. Lots of Mormons are prepared for a prophet to be right, but we don’t want to wrestle with the human part of revelation and the possibility that they may be wrong.
The true reality that “Church”members refuse to acknowledge is that “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints” is not a Church, it is simply a federally registered trademark and, as of 19 Oct 2018 a Utah DBA (doing business as) owned by the Corporation of the Presiding Bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
At the web address https://www.mormonnewsroom.org/rights-and-use, it discusses:
“Trademarks – The following is a non-exhaustive list of Church trademarks and service marks: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Liahona, Book of Mormon, Mormon, LDS, CTR, FamilySearch.
These marks are identifiers of Corporation of the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or Intellectual Reserve, Inc. and are registered in the United States and other countries. For additional information regarding Church trademarks and service marks and their proper use, please see Guidelines for Use of Church Trademarks.”
From Wikipedia: “In 1887, the LDS Church was legally dissolved in the United States by the Edmunds–Tucker Act because of the church’s practice of polygamy. (The Edmunds–Tucker Act was repealed in 1978.) In the United States, the church continues to operate as an unincorporated entity.
Tax-exempt corporations of the LDS Church include the Corporation of the Presiding Bishop of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which was organized in 1916 under the laws of the state of Utah to acquire, hold, and dispose of real property; the Corporation of the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which was established in 1923 in Utah to receive and manage money and church donations; and Intellectual Reserve, Inc., which was incorporated in 1997 to hold the church’s copyrights, trademarks, and other intellectual property.”
The “Church” is an entity with similar status as a neighborhood club, but your tithing dollars go to the Corporation of the President, individuals employed by the “Church” actually work for the Corp of the President, and the only member of the Corporation Sole is Russell M. Nelson.
Section 115:3 identifies a distinction between members of the church in living in Missouri (the members located in Missouri were members of the church in Zion), and “all the elders and people of my TCOJCOLDS scattered abroad in all the world” are members of the TCOJCOLDS. Usually we only quote verse 4, “even The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints”.
While Pres. Nelson wants to focus on the full name, the TCOJCOLDS entity doesn’t exist as an incorporated entity. If he is really serious, the entity should actually be organized, the assets should be transferred from the Corp of the President and the Corp of the Presiding Bishop.
After all, didn’t Jesus say: “Ye shall call the church in my name…for if a church…be called in the name of a man (Corp of the President) then it be the church of a man?” I am in total agreement with that statement.
I served as a counselor in two stakes presidencies for fourteen years. We had different points of view but always achieved unity. An important element of that unity was deference to the president as the one who held the keys, a deference that was not imposed by the president but freely and cheerfully given by the counselors as ones who had covenanted to receive the Lord’s servants. To suggest that President Nelson chafed at President Hinckley’s comfort with the use of the name Mormon shows a misunderstanding of the joy of receiving Christ by receiving his servants. That is the oath and covenant of the priesthood, that we will receive the Father by receiving the Son by receiving the Lord’s servants. President Nelson understands that covenant. He would not have chafed under it.
There seems also to be a misperception that we sustain Church leaders because they are always right. There is a range of what is right and good within which good people may disagree and within which I believe the Lord allows his servants some discretion. We sustain the decisions of our leaders not because they have made the only decision acceptable to the Lord but because the Lord has appointed them as his agents to make such decisions and because our unity is more important than the minor differences that may exist within the range of what is acceptable to the Lord. It is deference to our leaders that makes us one. When we understand that, we defer intelligently and as an expression of our desire and fitness to live someday in the kingdom of Heaven in which leaders will be those whose dominions flow into them without compulsory means and we will be such as can flow into our leaders without being compelled. And we will be both leaders and followers. Google Orson Hyde diagram of the kingdom of heaven.At every juncture will stand a king and a priest, a queen and a priestess, unto God.
Bob, if you come back to this, and since you’re commenting on ZD — unless Ziff considers it too much of a tangent — could you share what, if anything, your stake presidencies did during those 14 years to hear and understand the voices and needs of women in the stake? Were women included in the councils? Did the presidents making decisions hear from anyone outside their usual chain of yes-men? Did the leaders whom the women are supposed to defer to actually seek their input?
@Bob: I think the thing that I see in your description of this process of “unanimity” is that it seems different from the process that I have internalized of how the highest councils in the Church come to unanimity. I don’t have an image of junior members simply deferring to higher ranking members, or of members of these councils merely withdrawing concerns or objections as a way to avoid gridlock. These councils have been described as councils where all are heard and all concerns are discussed until all concerns are resolved (not merely withdrawn out of deference to rank or to avoid gridlock). There are allegedly “no shrinking violets” in the group, so that they are characterized as strong and opinionated individuals who don’t readily withdraw concerns.
Perhaps my image of how these councils work is incorrect or incomplete. For me, if it is possible for concerns to be withdrawn without resolution, or if concerns are withdrawn (or worse, not brought forward) out of deference to seniority or rank, then that is going to change how I view “revelations” that come out of these councils. Unlike other bureaucratic committees, these councils are one of the ways that (big R) Revelation is supposed to be given to the Church, and one of the strengths of using councils is that unanimity is supposed to be a measure of the reliability of the revelations presented. What I see in Ziff’s post and your response is an apparent weakness in the unanimity of these decisions, where there may be some in the Q15 who may be harboring unresolved concerns or reservations about some of the “revelations” being presented to the Church. As many have conceded, whether or not to strike “Mormon” from our lexicon is a relatively minor issue, but there are some major issues out there for which such unresolved concerns could undermine the strength of the revelation being claimed by the Church.
whether or not to strike “Mormon” from our lexicon is a relatively minor issue
Not sure where you’re seeing this. Even most people I’ve heard from who default to supporting the Brethren 100% are having a hard time figuring this one out.
Judging from the blog name, the “random quote” in the header, and the question about including the sisters, I’ve stumbled out of my element. My daughters think I’m a feminist, but I don’t think anyone else does.
Let me respond to Mr. Shorty first. I can see how my earlier post may have left a misperception about deference. We had spirited discussions in our stake presidency. None of us hesitated to say what we thought and to do it as persuasively as we could. We had vigorous debates. I’m sure it is the same in the presiding quorums of the Church. But as a counselor I always understood, and the president trusted that I understood, that the decision was ultimately his. While I shared the responsibility, the very real burden of responsibility was ultimately on him. His knowing that I understood and had compassion for that, and my knowing that he gave my counsel due consideration, I was not afraid to be assertive, the president was not threatened by my assertiveness, and I was not offended when things did not go exactly as I had counseled. The fact is, we were never that far apart, and apart only rarely. I never experienced a difference so consequential as to warrant disrupting in any way the unity of the presidency. When the decision was made, we each supported the decision the same as if it had been the decision we had counseled. I get that that is a difficult thing to understand—it runs counter to individual pride and what many would consider their dignity. All I can say is that I was blessed with a change of heart. When I was first called into the stake presidency (as the first counselor), the spirit impressed upon me that my role was to lead the rest of us in sustaining the stake president. I found peace and joy in doing that.
As for “the usual chain of yes-men,” we had nothing like that in the stake. We wanted members of our councils to speak up and say what they thought, even if it was a minority view. Speaking up could help to refine or even change the decision made. If there was strong or serious disagreement, we would table the issue for further consideration, until we could come closer to agreement. But it is true that, once a decision was made, we expected, and the members of the councils themselves expected, that each member of the council would support the decision, not as a “yes man,” and not grudgingly, but wholeheartedly, as one who understands that if we are not one, we are not His.
I reiterate that we support Church leaders, not because they are always or perfectly right, not because every decision they make is dictated verbatim by the Lord, but because the Lord has appointed them as his agents. It’s none of our business whether they need correcting—that’s between them and the Lord. If they need correcting—which is not for us to judge—the correction will come from the Lord in time. As between us and the Lord, our duty is to sustain them and to support whatever the decision is today. There is nothing wrong with having private views and privately expressing those views to our leaders. But it is not our place to lobby them publicly, to create dissension in the Church, or to create embarrassment for the Church before the world.
Except for the bit about “yes-men,” Need-Screen-Name asks fair questions to which I may not be as sensitive as I would like to be: “What, if anything, did your stake presidencies do during those 14 years to hear and understand the voices and needs of women in the stake? Were women included in the councils? Did the presidents making decisions hear from anyone outside their usual chain of yes-men? Did the leaders whom the women are supposed to defer to actually seek their input?” I don’t know what hurt or disappointment may have prompted those questions—or this blog for that matter. I don’t want to defend the pride, insensitivity, or abuse with which a priesthood leader may have acted, which does sometimes happen.
I don’t know that we did anything special or extraordinary in our stake to address the needs of women, any more than we did anything special or extraordinary to address the needs of men. We didn’t view members of the stake as members or representatives of a gender. We viewed them as individuals with individual needs, and we cared about all of them. Much went on in private interviews—counseling, correcting, and giving support to sometimes struggling and hurting members—that the rest of the stake would have known nothing about.
We did have a stake Relief Society presidency, a stake Young Women’s presidency, and a stake Primary presidency, whose presidents participated in stake councils and in interviews with members of the stake presidency and who telephoned or emailed or cornered us in the halls at other times. None of them needed our invitation to be heard. They made sure they were heard, and they were heard. They pretty much ran their organizations as they saw fit. About the only time I can think of when the sisters needed to defer to the stake presidency was when we had to tell them we simply couldn’t, in fairness to stake members, fit another activity on the stake calendar (our outer units are 1.5 to 2.0 hours from the stake center). We were all just people dealing with people. Friends mostly. We liked each other. Many of the men were married to the women, and many of the women were married to the men, and we were just trying to make things work. Gender issues didn’t enter into it.
MrShorty, I think you expressed my concern in your response to Bob better and more succinctly than I did in the post:
“I think the thing that I see in your description of this process of “unanimity” is that it seems different from the process that I have internalized of how the highest councils in the Church come to unanimity. I don’t have an image of junior members simply deferring to higher ranking members, or of members of these councils merely withdrawing concerns or objections as a way to avoid gridlock. These councils have been described as councils where all are heard and all concerns are discussed until all concerns are resolved (not merely withdrawn out of deference to rank or to avoid gridlock). There are allegedly “no shrinking violets” in the group, so that they are characterized as strong and opinionated individuals who don’t readily withdraw concerns.”
The problem is that the way the Q15’s decision-making process is always discussed portrays it as though they all have input, where it appears the reality is that they don’t, and that they simply shut up and follow the top man.
Bob, I appreciate your comments, but I have a totally different view of the Church. I think it’s far more likely than you do–common, actually–for leaders to want to do things that are outside the range that Jesus would like. So I think it’s wrong for us to abdicate our decision-making authority to go along with leaders who make obviously bad decisions. I concede, though, that you’re far more in the Mormon mainstream than I am.
Also, regarding your very last point–“We were all just people dealing with people. Friends mostly. We liked each other. Many of the men were married to the women, and many of the women were married to the men, and we were just trying to make things work. Gender issues didn’t enter into it.”–my feminist friends have sensitized me to the point that when men perceive that gender doesn’t enter into something, what’s typically going on is that gender is entering into it, but the male point of view is being privileged, so we men don’t notice that there are other ways of thinking about things that we’re ignoring. The entire Church is, of course, shot through with this problem, as all-male councils at all levels, however well-meaning, can easily totally miss how their decisions affect women in ways they (we, the men) don’t anticipate.
Oh, and Need Screen Name, I’m totally on board with your tangent. Feminist issues are always relevant here!
Thanks, Ziff, and a quick comment.
“Many of the men were married to the women, and many of the women were married to the men…”
Turns out that women, particularly those who benefit from patriarchy, can be as strong of defenders of the status quo as any man, and can persecute unmarried or lower-caste women or men or gay members of the Church right along with the best of them.
Finding this thread late :), but here’s one thing I would point out. We are referencing that talk in 1990 and acting as if the Q15 is the same then and now. It’s not. Do you realize when Pres. Nelson was called, if was the first time we had no member of Q15 called in the 50’s or earlier? In fact, Pres. Nelson was called in the 80’s. Only 3 were called in the 80’s and only 5 in the last century. There’s been a lot of turnover and I think this explains the big push in changes, a guard has changed. If you believe the Lord is in charge, you believe he set this up for the exact right time. So I think it was a different consensus with a different group of leaders at a different time. Honestly set up for a different time, which is exciting.
Jonathan, I would exhort you to read Jana Riess’s post that I linked to in the second paragraph of the post. President Nelson clearly just copy-pasted a bunch of stuff from his 1990 talk.
But if you believe that everything that happens in the Q15, including when each of them dies, is God’s very will, then you really don’t need to explain anything. You can just use that magic wand to wave everything away.