How could the Church take unrighteous dominion seriously?

I was in a ward once where the Gospel Doctrine teacher loved to quote from the end of D&C 121. You’re probably familiar with it; it’s the piece that talks about how priesthood authority shouldn’t be used to control people. Here’s verse 39:

We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion.

This is a bit of Mormon scripture that I like quite a bit. I’m (working on being) a feminist and I don’t like hierarchies, so this reminder of how easy it is for people holding power to use it in bad ways to control people they have power over seems like a really important one to me.

In spite of that, I never liked how the Gospel Doctrine teacher used the scripture. He never used it as a starting point for us to consider how unrighteous dominion might be a problem that we had seen or experienced or participated in. Instead, he used it as an excuse for ignoring any issues or questions with the Church. For example, he once told us that people pushing for women’s ordination were wrong because we have D&C 121, so unrighteous dominion isn’t a problem in the Church. I’m wondering if his problem wasn’t that he had watched G.I. Joe as a kid, and the line “knowing is half the battle” from its little morals at the end of the episodes had morphed in his head to “knowing is all the battle.”

This teacher’s misguided belief that if a problem is brought up in our scriptures it’s pretty much solved already got me to wondering how the Church could change to take the inevitability of unrighteous dominion more seriously. Because as it stands, the organization of the Church clearly agrees with the Gospel Doctrine teacher and not with me. If you feel like a ward leader is exercising unrighteous dominion, you can go to the bishop. The bishop who most likely called the leader, and isn’t likely to be sympathetic to you. If you feel like your bishop is exercising unrighteous dominion, you can have the same problem with the stake president, who similarly probably called the bishop. (And even if he didn’t, he has the power to call and release bishops, so he’s likely to think the bishop is doing a good job.) If your stake president isn’t sympathetic, well, as I’ve seen many Bloggernacle commenters say over the years, you can go to God and pray that he’ll soften their hearts, or perhaps inspire the GAs to contact them about it. It’s not a very good system for getting any serious issues addressed, but it does seem like a great system to keep people compliant and quiet, and keep any real problems from reaching the GAs’ ears.

Photo by Drew Hays on Unsplash

So what might the Church do differently? A comparison that readily springs to mind is how the employers I’ve worked for have handled sexual harassment. Of course sexual harassment in the workplace isn’t a perfect analog of unrighteous dominion in a religious setting, but there’s clear overlap. Sexual harassment seems like it’s a subset of unrighteous dominion. Anyway, I’ve worked for both private companies and government entities, and I’ve sat through lots of training on sexual harassment. There are of course reasons to think it’s inadequate, but for sure it blows the Church response to unrighteous dominion out of the water. If I’m being sexually harassed at work, or I witness someone else being harassed, I can report it to my manager, which is like reporting unrighteous dominion to your bishop. Unlike at church, though, I don’t have to stick to the hierarchy that’s enabling the harassment in the first place. At a past job, we were encouraged to report through any manager we felt comfortable with in the whole organization. At my current job, reporting can also be handled through a hotline I can call that’s run by an organization that’s completely outside the company in order to keep it independent. I can’t testify to the effectiveness of these reporting methods, as I’ve never had to use them, but at least their existence, the fact that the organizations had thought about how to mitigate the problem rather than to pretend it didn’t exist, put it far ahead of the Church.

It seems like the Church could adapt some of these solutions to allow unrighteous dominion to be reported and (hopefully) dealt with. (I guess dealing with it is really a whole other question that maybe I’ll blog about another time, but we know for sure that if it’s not being reported, it’s not being dealt with.) Here are some possibilities I’ve come up with:

  • Call a church ombudsman, as Mike C. suggested in a post several years ago. Such a person (who Mike thought of as being called maybe at the stake level) could kind of stand outside the Church hierarchy to try to handle issues raised.
  • Make the whole church hierarchy more accessible. It’s easy for me to find out who my stake president is. But who’s my Area Authority? I’ve seen people ask this in Facebook groups when trying to resolve an issue that their stake president didn’t care about. It shouldn’t be difficult to find this out.
  • I know I suggest this in every other post, but make GAs accessible. Encourage people to write or email or call with their complaints. I wouldn’t expect GAs would answer individual members except in unusual circumstances, but at least this would allow their staff people to look over a bunch of member communications and find out if, for example, stake president X has turned his stake into a Snufferite church.
  • Do like my one job does and have an independent third party that complaints could be submitted to. I would expect that these would be aggregated in the same way that messages to GAs would.
  • More radically, set up a website where people can anonymously review their bishops. RateMyLDSBishop.com? I know it would be easy to get bad data, or random dogpiling on a bishop who did a totally legitimate thing (e.g., during COVID, I can imagine anti-mask/vaxxers complaining about a bishop who encouraged them to wear masks), but it would also open the door to finding out if a bishop was abusing people in his ward.
  • Retailers hire secret shoppers to get an outsider’s view on how their store treats people. The Church could hire secret ward shoppers to get a view on how wards are being run. On the downside, by being marked as new, they would probably get a different experience than most ward members do. They would probably have to stay a while for this to wear off. Even if they did, they would have to do things like attend ward council or other meetings to find out, for example, if the bishop had a habit of berating the auxiliary presidents in the ward. Maybe a secret shopper high councilman could pull this off. (I actually found precedent for this idea in a couple of Conference talks where speakers told stories of how people had done things wrong in wards they had attended. For example, Dallin H. Oaks once complained that people weren’t singing the hymns enough in a ward he had visited. And Russell M. Nelson recently said that a father didn’t bless his daughter correctly in a ward he had visited. And GAs are hardly secret ward shoppers. Everyone certainly knows who they are and that they’re there. Imagine what a truly secret ward shopper could discover!)

Really, these are all kind of halfway-done measures that could be grafted onto the existing Church structure. I’d prefer a more wholesale fix, where the Church was fundamentally restructured to make it less hierarchical on the whole. It seems like when you have a hierarchy to begin with, and an all-male hiearchy at that, you’re kind of baking unrighteous dominion into the structure. I’m not sure at the moment exactly what I’d suggest in place of the hierarchy, though, so for now I think I’ll stick with my halfway suggestions.

What do you think the Church would look like if it took unrighteous dominion seriously? Or how do you suggest it could change to get the problem more easily uncovered when it happens?

Note: I realized about halfway through writing this post that it’s mostly just a reworking of a post I wrote a few years ago when the Joseph Bishop scandal broke. If you’re so inclined, you can compare the two and see if I said anything new this time.

13 comments

  1. This is a serious problem in the church. This post has great suggestions, but let me add one more.

    In a large respect, this comes down to an egregious lack of training. Leaders are called, and given very little useful training on how to “lead.” They may get training on filing reports or on how many meetings they should hold, but not on how to lead.

    For instance, most leaders do not use the council system to obtain counsel. Instead, they treat the ward or stake council as a group that is simply there to be told what to do and then to execute the orders. If these bodies were used to actually discuss issues and provide counsel, mush of the unrighteous dominion would never get started in the first place. Especially if the contributions of the female members of the council was sought and respected.

  2. Great idea, Rudi! Better than any of mine, as it’s just changing how leaders interact with people they’re already talking to. Thanks for your comment!

  3. Area presidencies are easy to find on the Church website. Wikipedia provides a list of all area authority seventies by Quorum. (Random fact–there are now 10 quorums of area authority seventies numbered 3 through 12. #3 is Africa and #12 is Utah. The first shall be last….). Contact information, on the other hand, is nonexistent, so good luck with that.

    I’ve been trying to think through the ombudsman idea through the lens of my experiences as a stake auditor. I live in a well-run stake, so my experiences may not be particularly relevant to the situations you have in mind. Nevertheless, I was an outlier as an auditor–I issued more exceptions than the rest of the auditors combined. None of those exceptions constituted true corruption–they were just warnings to fix irregularities that could grow into corruption if not addressed. But the other auditors were not issuing them. I never watched them in action, but I can think of four possible reasons:

    1. They recognized the exceptions but let them slide,
    2. They found the exceptions, but didn’t recognize them as such,
    3. They never found the exceptions because they consciously avoided them (e.g., never pulling the expenses for scout camp), or
    4. They never found the exceptions because they didn’t now where to look.

    The same thing could happen with a stake ombudsman. They would have to know where to look for problems, be willing to do the looking, recognize problems when they see them, and be willing to address them. That may not seem like a big ask. But if a majority of auditors in a well-run stake can’t manage to do that, I’m skeptical that an ombudsman, even one appointed in good faith, would be very successful at what you have in mind.

  4. Thanks for sharing your experience, Last Lemming. And thanks for being hard-nosed enough to push for things to be fixed that need to be fixed!

    I can definitely see what you’re saying about an ombudsman being ineffective if they don’t have the proactive approach that you took as a stake auditor. I don’t know how much difference this would make (and I’m not entirely clear on the idea in my head anyway), but what I’m imagining is that members could take the initiative to bring unrighteous dominion issues to the attention of the ombudsman, rather than the ombudsman having to seek them out. There still would be a question of how effectively they would deal with them, but I was thinking at least they wouldn’t have to seek the problems out like you did as an auditor. In any case, that’s a really thought-provoking comparison.

  5. I think the church makes it too hard to change bishops. I understand calling a bishop requires approval from church headquarters, and there’s the expected 5 year term. So even if a stake president realizes he has a problem bishop on his hands, he knows that replacing him before 5 years will require a fair bit of work and will possibly stigmatize the bishop who didn’t serve a full “term”, thus making him possibly reluctant and willing to wait out the term. Fundamentally we ask too much of bishops anyway. Maybe if more of the job of bishop were distributed among multiple people it would not be as big of a deal to make changes when needed, and with power less concentrated the effect of a bad actor is reduced.

  6. A well-trained independent ombudsman staff in each area of the Church would be needed to field and review complaints. They would need the authority to remove bishops who are abusing others–either psychologically, sexually, or spiritually. This will never happen because the Church defers abuse to Kirton and McConkie that silences victims through NDA’s.

  7. I’ve heard, but do not know, that there is now a system in place for missionaries who are being mistreated by mission presidents to get help, a system that was needed but certainly not available when I was a missionary (we never even had the chance then to meet with visiting general authorities, who a few years earlier would routinely interview all missionaries).

    Do you know if in fact there is such a system, and how it works? If it does exist, it seems like that could be a model for seeking help with other leaders who have extraordinary power over our lives.

  8. Quentin, that’s an excellent point. If it were easier to move people in and out of positions of authority, that would definitely make it easier to take unrighteous dominion concerns seriously. It would be interesting to know how often bishops are released before five years as it is, for example because they move or maybe just burn out.

    Chris, you may be right. I was hoping for the best with my suggestions, but I realize they’re mostly unlikely to ever happen.

    Interested, that sounds like a hugely positive development! I’ve never heard of it before you mentioned it. I hope that such a system is real and that it works out well enough that it gets tried for other areas!

  9. We should talk about the penalty for unrighteous dominion a lot more often: “behold, the heavens withdraw themselves: the Spirit of the Lord is grieved; and when it is withdrawn, Amen to the priesthood or the authority of that man.” D&C 121:37. Those are words of eternal damnation. Without the priesthood, men don’t go to the temple or the celestial kingdom. He loses his standing in the Church and before God.

    I was reading thru the Church resources for abuse survivors (as one does), and noticed that the penalty for unrighteous dominion got left out from the quote on the page titled “Can I heal from abuse?” https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/get-help/abuse/can-i-heal-from-this?lang=eng The quote ends with the Lord being grieved:
    “Regardless of when or how the offender is held accountable, you can be assured that when anyone “exercise[s] control or dominion or compulsion upon the souls of the children of men, in any degree of unrighteousness, behold, the heavens withdraw themselves; the Spirit of the Lord is grieved” (Doctrine and Covenants 121:37; italics added).”

    That’s it. It just cuts off the quote before the penalty. Why wouldn’t the church include that?

    Even when talking about abuse, there’s no hint that unrighteous dominion has an actual penalty. It’s just that the Lord is grieved. Kind of a tangent – but that whole website made me angry with its inadequacy. It dumps the entire burden of healing on the victim (with much compassion) but doesn’t say a word about the abuser’s accountability or the enabler’s repentance for lying.

    And honestly – consequences for unrighteous dominion aren’t so much to reform the sinner. That’s a nice goal, but proud arrogant men who are willing to abuse authority don’t take suggestions very well. The consequences are to restore the victim’s trust in the institution. If the victim of the unrighteous dominion can see that the church removes an offender, then that restores trust. But if the church just shrugs it off and gently invites the victim to be more forgiving (as typically happens), the victim loses trust that the church knows right from wrong and is willing to act on that knowledge.

    I think the suggestions for an ombudsman are good, but first you’d have to have a system that actually imposes a penalty for unrighteous dominion, and the Church doesn’t even talk about the penalty anymore. Even a lesser penalty – like getting released from a calling – is considered too drastic.

    @Quentin – I was horrified in my mid-teens when my father was called as a bishop. After two years, he was released and put in as a counselor in a stake presidency. I was relieved they kicked him upstairs and away from working so much with individuals, and suspected they’d realized that my father should not be a bishop, and this was their way of removing him without humiliating him with an early release.

  10. Great points, Melinda. I guess I was just thinking here about ways to get unrighteous dominion reported to someone who could do something. I think you’re spot on that the “something” that gets done needs to be far stronger than just “the Lord is sad about you.” The parts you cite on the Church’s abuse site are massively disappointing.

  11. Ziff, I manage the ethics and compliance hotline at my company. (I am one of the in-house corporate attorneys.) While it is true that the hotline is operated by an independent third party, the third party receives the hotline reports and submits them to me for handling. The third party does not actually investigate the hotline reports. This is how ethics and compliance hotlines are normally handled in the corporate world. (The reason it is done this way is that employees are less likely to trust a hotline operated directly by the company.)

    The church could easily set up a “D&C 121 hotline” but it’s hard to say how well it would work. (Is 1-800-121-3946 available?) Church employees (or trained volunteers?) could receive or screen the reports and assign the reports to the local, stake or regional level for handling, but unless there’s a dedicated set of hotline investigators, the reports would probably go to the bishop or stake president and we have the problem already described. Perhaps knowing that church headquarters is receiving hotline reports might rein in a few unruly bishops or stake presidents. Church headquarters would receive unfiltered reports from wards and stakes, which is perhaps a good thing by itself.

  12. Thanks, Jim, for providing some color around how such a thing could actually work (or not work). Clearly I didn’t think at all through what would happen after you call the hotline. It sounds like there would need to be a more fundamental change in the Church to actually take the reports seriously, at whatever level they’re sent back. As you said, if the reports go back to the local leaders who are being complained about, the same problem just happens all over again, but now with more data.

  13. Life is hierarchical. Every relationship we have is based on hierarchy. It is the nature of being and a fact we cannot wiggle our way out of. There are protocols we must take, in both church life and worldly life, that require us to proceed thru various steps as we unlock higher and higher levels of attainment and justice. Whether it’s righting a wrong done to us via the criminal justice system or working thru the church hierarchy to heal from a spiritual transgression that we inflicted upon ourselves. It is prideful and highly cringworthy to think we can solve these issues by ourselves in a vacuum. We need hierarchies because we are not lone agents fending for ourselves but spiritual members of a religious community hungering for our Celestial Kingdom as well as citizens of a society here on earth hungering to co-exist and live in peace.

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