By Divine Design

In one of the most often-discussed passages of almost-scripture on the Bloggernacle, the Family Proclamation reads:

By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners.

I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that this isn’t one of my favorite parts. I don’t like the attempt to box women and men into prescribed gender roles. I especially don’t like it when these gender roles are attributed to God’s design, when it seems pretty obvious to me that they’re actually attributable to what the 1995 crop of GAs got comfortable with growing up. I think the opening phrase “by divine design” actually kind of signals this, as to me it suggests that the writers knew they didn’t have a scriptural leg to stand on when arguing for gender roles, so they figured they’d better just go big and claim that they (gender roles) came straight from God.

Thinking about this phrase more, it got me to wondering where else in Church rhetoric it had been used, because I swear I had heard it in contexts other than FamProc quotes. I thought these contexts might be interesting to look at. Because if I’m right that use of this phrase signals a speaker who’s grasping for authority but has nothing to cite, then it’s interesting to see where else Church leaders might want to assert things but realize they have no authoritative backing. (I realize that this is a big if, because even I realize this interpretation might be a bit of a leap. I’ll understand if you stop reading here.)

I searched the Church website and the LDS General Conference corpus for the phrase “by divine design.” I found about 40 matches (ignoring redundant ones and documents that were just quotes of earlier ones) that I categorized into a few groups.

Divine Gender Roles

The majority of uses of the phrase are just quotes of the FamProc. No surprise there. I didn’t even note or count these, as they were just quotes of an earlier source, but I suspect there were more documents of this type than all other types put together.

There are also a bunch of uses that, while not direct FamProc quotes, are definitely FamProc-adjacent. Here are a few examples. The added comments in italics are mine.

• “How can we, as women, receive the full blessings and power of the priesthood in our lives? We can sustain and support those who bear it righteously. This is by divine design, not by plan of man.” (Joanne B. Doxey) This is actually from 1987, several years before the FamProc.
• “I believe it is by divine design that the role of motherhood emphasizes the nurturing and teaching of the next generation.” (L. Tom Perry) It does seem like the gender role rhetoric is more often aimed at women than at men, perhaps because there are so many reasons for and examples of women going against it.
• “The honored role of mother is increasingly out of fashion. Let me make it clear: we must not allow the world to compromise what we know is given to us by divine design.” (Bonnie D. Parkin)
• “By divine design, we have unique gifts and talents that will help us fulfill our destiny as daughters of God.” (Come Follow Me–For Young Women) The first part of the sentence doesn’t sound like it’s about gender roles–oh, unique gifts and talents!–but the last part brings it back there.
• “By divine design, both a man and a woman are essential for bringing children into mortality and providing the best setting for the rearing and nurturing of children.” (Church Handbook, quoted by Dallin H. Oaks) Note that I couldn’t find this statement in the current Handbook, but this talk is from 2013, so perhaps the wording has been changed. I do think it’s interesting that this extends the gender role rhetoric into reproduction, where it’s probably less controversial that it takes an egg and a sperm to make a baby.
• “[Latter-day Saint women] believe that by divine design, women and men experience the most growth, joy and fulfillment together, not in isolation.” (Newsroom article “Women in the Church“) I think it’s interesting that although this is kind of FamProc-adjacent, it’s extremely vague, dropping all mention of different gender roles in favor of just saying that women and men should be “together, not in isolation.” The vagueness makes sense maybe given that Newsroom articles are directed at non-Mormons, and perhaps Church leaders realize that hitting gender roles too hard doesn’t make us look good.

God orchestrates history

• “America has no place as a belligerent in such a conflict. We do have a place in the world by Divine design and destiny as the makers of a lasting peace, but we must come to this task not as joint conquerors but with clean hands and a contrite spirit, bearing in our hands the olive branch of peace, spiritual hope, and righteousness.” (J. Reuben Clark, Jr.) This is from a Conference talk given in April, 1941 where he argued that the US shouldn’t enter World War II. It’s the only pre-Correlation usage I found. From a little searching, it appears that Clark was generally an isolationist, and this statement definitely seems in line with that.
• “Stories about Joseph and the gold plates were ‘noised abroad’ quickly in the Palmyra area. . . . By divine design, more than by coincidence, many truth seekers passed through Palmyra to become religiously disturbed by the gold plates stories they heard.” (William G. Hartley, Church History Department) This, from a 1978 Ensign article, is the first use of the phrase I found in the era of Correlation.
• “It was by divine design that the marvelous Mary became the mother of Jesus. Further, Lucy Mack Smith, who played such a crucial role in the rearing of Joseph Smith, did not come to that assignment by chance.” (Neal A. Maxwell) This is a 1979 Ensign article, taken from a 1978 talk given just a month after Hartley’s article (above) appeared. Even if he didn’t originate it, I can see why Elder Maxwell liked this phrase.
• “May I express my appreciation for and confidence in the young adults of the Church? As a special generation, placed here by Divine design at a special time, special chores await you.” (Neal A. Maxwell)
• “God had prepared this country [The Philippines] by divine design to become a powerhouse in the Church in the latter days.” (Ronald A. Rasband)

Plan of Salvation

• “If so much of the world’s wisdom seems contrary to God’s, we should not be surprised. After all, by divine design, we live in a fallen world where we are cut off from the presence and mind of God.” (R. Val Johnson, Church Magazines)
• “[We] are agents unto ourselves, permitted by divine design to act and not be acted upon.” (Marcus B. Nash)
• “On those days when we feel a little out of tune, a little less than what we think we see or hear in others, I would ask us, especially the youth of the Church, to remember it is by divine design that not all the voices in God’s choir are the same.” (Jeffrey R. Holland)
• “By divine design, our physical body is a creation of God, a temple for our spirit, and should be treated with reverence.” (Ronald A. Rasband)

The God of Lost Keys

• “The Lord’s hand is guiding you. By ‘divine design,’ He is in the small details of your life as well as the major milestones.” (Ronald A. Rasband) This talk is titled “By Divine Design,” and Rasband’s point is that God is orchestrating things down to the smallest detail in our lives. Although he doesn’t use the phrase every time, he talks about scriptural examples like God delivering Laban into Nephi’s hands, as well as smaller things like his granddaughter running into her brother who was on his mission while she was touring Church history sites.
• “Elder Rasband Returns to His Missionary Roots in Harlem ‘by Divine Design'” (Title of a Church News article) This was published just a couple of weeks after Elder Rasband’s Conference talk. It has a similar message, attributing a chance meeting to divine design.
• “Like you, there have been times that I have wondered if I was on the right path. I know that if we act in faith, one step at a time, we will be guided by the Lord’s hand. By ‘divine design,’ He is in the small details of our lives as well as the major milestones.” (Ronald A. Rasband) This is also a follow-up to Elder Rasband’s Conference talk. In it, he shares some stories that people shared with him on Facebook of how God intervened in their lives.
• “Of course, such timing was anything but coincidence. As Elder Neal A. Maxwell (1926–2004) of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles once taught: ‘Coincidence is not an appropriate word to describe the workings of an omniscient God. He does not do things by ‘coincidence’ but … by ‘divine design.’'” (David Dickson, Church Magazines)

Other

Here are a couple that I didn’t feel like fit well into any of the other categories.

• “By divine design, when the President of the Church dies, the First Presidency is dissolved and the Quorum of the Twelve automatically becomes the presiding body of the Church.” (Summary of a video titled “Succession in the First Presidency“) The video is an excerpt from a 1986 talk by David B. Haight, and interestingly, the phrase “by divine design” does not appear in the talk. He calls the succession process a “divinely revealed procedure.”
• “At the direction of President Russell M. Nelson, today by divine design, with the authority of the priesthood which comes from Thee, and in the name of our Savior and Lord, Jesus Christ, we dedicate this temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Durban, South Africa.” (Ronald A. Rasband) I noted in a post several years ago that you know “so called” had really entered the Mormon lexicon when it made it into a temple dedication. Now we can say the same about “by divine design!”

Conclusion

I haven’t consistently noted the dates of the documents, so this might not be obvious, but I think there’s maybe a bit of a change over time in how “by divine design” has been used. The oldest uses are for God’s orchestration of history. Then after the FamProc, there was a flurry of uses about gender roles. Finally, since Elder Rasband’s 2017 Conference talk that used the phrase as its title, the Church’s machinery for creating a thousand derivatives of every Conference talk so it can be used in a million lessons has kicked into gear, and we’ve gotten a bunch of references to the God of lost keys.

I know “the God of lost keys” is a snide name for it, but as I’ve blogged about before, I think every faith-promoting story about God’s intervention is even more a faith-destroying story about all the other times God didn’t intervene. I feel like Elder Rasband has been incredibly thoughtless in how he’s promoted this prosperity gospel idea. Here’s a paragraph I find particularly egregious from his talk:

The Lord placed me in a home with loving parents. By the world’s standards, they were very ordinary people; my father, a devoted man, was a truck driver; my angel mother, a stay-at-home mom. The Lord helped me find my lovely wife, Melanie; He prompted a businessman, who became a dear friend, to give me an employment opportunity. The Lord called me to serve in the mission field, both as a young man and as a mission president; He called me to the Quorum of the Seventy; and now He has called me as an Apostle. Looking back, I realize I did not orchestrate any of those moves; the Lord did, just as He is orchestrating important moves for you and for those you love.

It seems like he’s just reveling here in how much God has blessed him, and then he adds this little throwaway line at the end that God must be doing the same for the rest of us. Really? Seriously? The people who’ve lost jobs and houses and lives during the pandemic? God is orchestrating the same good stuff for them?

Like I said before, I really don’t like the use of “by divine design” to attribute gender roles from a particular narrow time and place that GAs are comfortable with to God’s unchanging will. I also really uncomfortable with Elder Rasband using the phrase to talk about this prosperity gospel idea of God orchestrating the small details of our lives. I hope that his push falls flat and that, with apologies to Elder Maxwell who clearly loved it, the phrase just goes away.