Dual Relationships at Church

I really enjoy Alison Green’s workplace issues advice blog Ask a Manager. One type of question I’ve seen her field many times asks about having more than one relationship with someone at work. By that I mean that they’re in a situation (or considering going into one) where they’re not only in a co-worker relationship, or supervisor and supervisee relationship, but also a family or friend or other business relationship. For example, I’ve seen letter writers ask about hiring a friend or family member (or the other way around, about accepting an offer to work for a friend or family member), or about accepting an offer to work a side job for the boss at their first job, but as a babysitter for their kids, or about agreeing to rent an apartment they own to their boss at work.

From what I’ve read, Green universally recommends against these types of dual relationships. (She doesn’t use this term, but I’m borrowing it from mental health, where it’s used to describe a situation where a therapist and client also have another relationship in another context.) She typically points out that there are all kinds of difficult ways that events in one relationship can then leak into the other relationship. For example, if you hire your friend and then you have to give them a bad performance review, will they remain friends? If you rent an apartment to your boss and they’re unhappy with a rent increase you propose as their landlord, will they fire you?

I got to thinking about this kind of dual relationship in a church context when I read Dave B.’s recent post “Is There a Deep Church?” at W&T. His post raises the question of how much influence Church employees have even though GAs are ostensibly in charge, in a kind of parallel way to the question of how much influence government employees have, even though elected officials are ostensibly in charge. This is a tangent to Dave’s post, but it occurred to me that Church employees have a dual relationship with the Church, as both employees and members. I was also reminded of Scott B.’s 2011 post at BCC, “Seeking Pastoral Care at BYU,” where he points out that people affiliated with BYU have dual relationships with their bishops: while bishops are in theory people BYU students or employees could go to for pastoral care in times of crisis, bishops are also the ones who can get them fired or kicked out of school if the bishops decide their crisis is somehow sinful.

In this post, I’ll list all the dual relationships that happen in a Church context that I can think of. Also, in Alison Green style, for each one I’ll outline at least one way that an event in one part of the dual relationship could leak into the other part. Finally, I’ll see if I can come up with a suggestion for a different way the Church could handle the situation to avoid the problem of the dual relationship.

Church employees in general

• Description: The Church is both their religion and their employer.
• How it could go wrong: If a Church employee gets a bad evaluation, will their bishop also be notified to give them Church discipline? Or if a Church employee gets a big calling (stake president?), will they expect a promotion at work? It seems like this relationship is also easy for the Church to exploit by reminding employees of their temple covenants to give everything to the Church. If employees are unhappy with the size of their salary or their raise, say, their supervisors can just call them faithless and threaten them with Church discipline.
• Possible solution: For many Church employees, it seems likely that there’s no particular reason they need to be Mormon. The Church could have a policy of hiring only non-Mormons unless there’s a particular reason they need a Church member for a position. Alternatively, they could probably just outsource some functions to third parties entirely, cutting the Church out of the equation. I think they already hire marketing and legal firms in some situations. This process could just be expanded.

Internal Church auditors

• Description: Like any Church employee, the Church is both their religion and their employer.
• How it could go wrong: The yearly audit report in General Conference isn’t credible (at least to me) because there’s no way the result could be any different. If a Church employee turned up evidence of major wrongdoing with the Church’s money, would the Conference audit report say this? Of course not! It would say the same thing it always does, and the employee would be hushed up, fired, and/or excommunicated.
• Possible solution: There is zero reason to require internal auditors to be Mormons. The Church should hire outside firms to perform these audits, and should require that no Mormons be part of the teams assigned to do them so there’s no possibility of ecclesiastical pressure affecting the results.

BYU students

• Description: The Church is both their religion and the owner of the university they attend. Their bishops are both possible pastoral counselors and also in effect enforcers of orthodoxy, as students are required to get an ecclesiastical endorsement from their bishops each year to continue in school.
• How it could go wrong: I’ve read a number of stories of BYU students who lost their faith and either had to go through the motions of faith for the remainder of their time in school, transfer to another university, or get kicked out of school for being apostates.
• Possible solution: The Church could sell the BYUs. Or if that’s too extreme, they could take a less heavy-handed approach when running them and allow students to complete their degree program if they lose their faith. Or they could drop ongoing ecclesiastical endorsements entirely, and perhaps only require them as the students enter school.

BYU professors

• Description: BYU professors are a subset of Church employees, but one with a particularly complicated relationship with the Church because they’re supposed to uphold and teach Church doctrine and perspectives while also teaching their academic area.
• How it could go wrong: Like students, professors can be booted from school for losing their faith. They can also be threatened by students who consider them to be insufficiently orthodox, and who complain about them to the university (or directly to GAs if they have access through family connections or the like).
• Possible solution: Hire only non-Mormons to teach at BYU. Maybe an exception could be made for religion professors, since they’re supposed to be devotional teachers who bear testimony more than academic teachers. (Although it might also not hurt to reconsider just breaking this function off from the university function.)

CES teachers (paid)

• Description: CES teachers are a subset of Church employees, but their dual relationship issue is particularly acute in comparison with employees in general because their job of teaching doctrine is so core to the Church and so similar to what GAs are doing.
• How it could go wrong: The same way any Church employee’s relationship with the Church could go wrong, but on steroids. If you get a bad evaluation as a CES teacher, does this make you a bad Church member? Or, turning it around, if you’re a CES teacher, do you get to call students’ testimonies into question if they don’t like your teaching? Additionally, as paid CES teachers are almost inevitably the most orthodox in their own eyes (as they’re willing to devote both their religious lives and careers to the Church), do they warp the whole Church with their hyper-zeal?
• Possible solution: This seems like a really tough one, because the Church really doesn’t want to have non-Mormons teaching seminaries and institutes. One possibility would be to require them to be volunteers, so that only people who are wealthy enough (or perhaps retired) could do the job, although of course this could raise other possible problems.

Members in general

• Description: All members have a potential dual relationship with their bishop or branch president (or possibly other local leaders too). A bishop is supposed to be a pastoral resource who you might turn to in a time of crisis. A bishop is also the one who initiates Church discipline against you if he thinks it’s warranted.
• How it could go wrong: A member goes to a bishop with a pastoral need, for example, a woman is being abused by her husband. The bishop perceives a Church disciplinary need instead and initiates discipline against the wife for being insufficiently submissive to priesthood authority.
• Possible solution: Split the pastoral and administrative roles up. Call a separate person to handle pastoral needs and have them sit outside the local Church administrative hierarchy.

In thinking through possible ways to avoid these dual relationships, it occurs to me that the Church isn’t likely to implement them not only because some of them would be really difficult, but because in the end, I suspect that Church leaders like the dual relationships. I’m guessing they find it valuable to be able to have the threat of Church discipline (even if only implicit) hanging over BYU students and Church employees and internal auditors. Especially now in the Nelson era, where loyalty to the Church is the highest virtue, then this extra pressure through a separate relationship isn’t bad; it’s just another tool to help keep people from straying from the covenant path.

I’m sure there are other dual relationships in the Church, and aspects of the ones I did list, that I’ve missed. I’d love to hear in the comments what you’d add to or take away from my list, or if you think this way of thinking about these relationships is even helpful in the first place.