Sheri Dew and the Unimagined Unknown

A few weeks ago, the Church News ran a story about Russell M. Nelson being interviewed by an Argentine journalist. The real headline is captured better by this LDS Living story with a great clickbaity title: President Nelson’s Incredible Response When a Journalist Asked If the Church Excludes Women.

“Many churches are ruled by men, at the exclusion of women,” said Mr. Rubin. “Is this the case for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?”

“Well,” said President Nelson, “you should talk to a woman about that.”

President Nelson then turned and looked at Sheri Dew, executive vice president of Deseret Management Corporation, the CEO of Deseret Book Company and former Relief Society general presidency member.

“Can you help with this answer about the role of women in the Church?” he asked her. He motioned her into camera range.

Sister Dew told Mr. Rubin that he would have a hard time finding a church where more women have more authority than in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“There are hundreds of thousands of women, right now, who have legitimate leadership opportunities and expectations. As women in the Church we teach and preach, we expound doctrine, we serve missions as full-time proselyting missionaries, and we have leadership responsibilities,” she said.

She thinks he would have a hard time? Seriously?

Just in case, I can lend him a hand with a couple of examples. Here’s how The Episcopal Church (TEC) is governed:

The Episcopal Church is governed by a bicameral General Convention, which meets every three years, and by an Executive Council during interim years. The General Convention consists of the House of Bishops and the House of Deputies.

How do women fit into these governing bodies? Well, here’s a photo of half of the Executive Council. It’s from a decade ago, but I think it still makes the point: there are lots of women on the Executive Council.
Just to be sure, I checked the list of members of the Executive Council and House of Bishops from the most recent convention, held in July of this year. Based on the names of the members, I estimate that the former is 51% women, and the latter 8% women. (The House of Bishops includes all retired bishops, so I guess it’s not surprising that it has so many more men given that TEC only started consecrating women as bishops a few decades ago.) I didn’t check the House of Deputies; it’s too big. (If you’d like to, have at it.)

The actual numbers aren’t that important for my purposes. I just want to point out they’re not zero. Every position in the government of TEC is open to women. The current Presiding Bishop is a man, but the previous one was a woman.

Here’s another example that we Brighamites should be well aware of: The Community of Christ. They have a First Presidency and a Council of the Twelve Apostles just like the LDS Church does. The First Presidency is currently 33% women (1/3), and the Council of the Twelve is 42% women (5/12). Again, the important point here is that these numbers aren’t zero. All church leadership positions are open to women as well as men.

How about the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA)? They’re governed by the Church Council:

The Church Council serves as the board of directors for the church. Its members include the churchwide officers, bishops representing a cross-section of synods and up to 45 other people elected by the Churchwide Assembly.

Here’s a photo of the Church Council from the ELCA website.

I checked the list of voting members from the minutes of their April 2018 meeting, and it looks like the Church Council is about 35% women. This includes the Presiding Bishop of the Church.

These three examples, of course, contrast markedly with the organization of the LDS Church. Every First Presidency member, both now and historically, has been male. Every member of the Quorum of the Twelve. Every Seventy. Every Area Authority or Regional Representative. Every stake or district president. Every bishop and every branch president. Every person who conducted a baptismal interview, temple recommend interview, or disciplinary council. Every person who presided over or a General Conference session, stake conference, ward conference, branch conference, or sacrament meeting. Every person who blessed the sacrament. Every person who baptized or confirmed a new member or ordained someone to a priesthood office or set someone apart in a calling. Every patriarch who gave a patriarchal blessing. Every sealer who performed a marriage. All men.

The idea that a person would have a hard time finding another church where women have more opportunity than they do in the LDS Church is, to be blunt, laughable. So what could Sheri Dew possibly have been thinking when she made such an outrageous statement? And also, what are GAs like President Nelson thinking when they endorse such statements by continuing to trot her out as an authority on women’s experience in the Church? I have a few ideas, but of course they’re speculation, and I’d love to hear yours as well.

• She is engaging in the strategy of “if you’re going to tell a lie, might as well make it a whopper” that’s so popular among politicians. She figures that many or most people won’t actually check what she’s said, so if she’s going to tell a lie, she might as well make it a big lie.
• Her point of comparison is the more conservative churches and religions. She’s thinking of the Catholics, the Southern Baptists, the Muslims. None of them ordain women, so she reasons that LDS women’s church participation, by virtue of getting to do things like head auxiliaries, give sacrament meeting talks, and serve missions, must be broader than that of women in those other churches. Her statement about how much LDS women get to do does remind me of Church PR statements that I wrote a post about several years ago. My point was generally that the PR statements were clearly taking an idealized church where women don’t participate at all as a reference point, and were enumerating the many ways LDS women’s participation is greater than zero.
• She can’t imagine that a church could actually be a real church if it’s not patriarchal. The ELCA and TEC aren’t even on her radar as real churches because of course a real church would have an all-male hierarchy.
• Although she’s aware of other churches where women’s participation is broader than it is in the LDS Church, she figures that in such churches, where they don’t have the full gospel, it’s only a shadow, and not real church participation in a fully true church.

My second explanation seems the most reasonable to me. I think she (and other Church leaders who talk about this issue) gets in a groove with comparing women’s participation in church to zero, and then she slips up and accidentally makes a point about where the LDS Church falls, not in comparison to zero female participation, but to actual other churches where women might participate a whole lot more. As an aside, it would be interesting to actually do a comparison like this and see where the LDS Church falls relative to others, particularly given their size. But it seems clear to me that Dew hasn’t done anything of the kind: she’s just speaking off the cuff.

And as you might have guessed from the title of this post, I also kind of like my third explanation. I sometimes wonder when I hear GAs and their associates like Sheri Dew talk about the LDS Church and about other churches and about the role of women, whether it might not be the case that they can’t even imagine the possibility of a non-patriarchal church. Like they can conceive of churches that maybe use different books of scripture or meet on different days of the week or have different dietary restrictions. But the idea of patriarchy is so tied up in their minds with the idea of church that the possibility of a church where women participate as fully as men do just doesn’t compute for them. This is why I think it’s an unimagined unknown. It’s not that they don’t know about such churches; it’s that they can’t even imagine them as existing (in spite, of course, of their actual existence).