My tween daughter recently asked me about people who attend church only at Christmas and Easter. She said that she likes going to church, but that if she ever quit, she couldn’t imagine still attending on these major holidays. At least in my experience, this is a common feeling among Mormons. I mean that I haven’t noticed ward members attending on or around Christmas and Easter who don’t also attend pretty regularly the rest of the year. Part of the reason, I think, is that the LDS Church is such a high-demand church. It’s definitely designed for, and expects members to be, either all in or all out. There’s not much room for people who are kinda sorta in, for whatever reason or at whatever level of activity.
But maybe a bigger reason is that we don’t as a church really do anything special for Christmas or Easter. I was thinking about this recently because there was extra discussion of even Palm Sunday and Holy Week at General Conference. And there was the First Presidency letter that canceled the second hour of church on Easter. At least in my area, there was also supposed to be some effort to invite non-Mormons to come, and to make sacrament meeting nicer than usual. This might have been passed down from the Area Presidency or someone; I couldn’t find a church-wide reference to it.
My ward did have a nice Easter sacrament meeting, with several musical numbers and some good talks focused on Jesus. But it struck me that it was still just a sacrament meeting, built out of the same usual building blocks of talks and singing and prayers and sacrament. Making a special effort at Easter (or Christmas) to make those building blocks better doesn’t change the fact that it’s still the same type of meeting. Other than the sacrament, which is of course the same every week, there isn’t any ceremony or ritual. Other than sacrament and singing (and the odd sustaining vote), there isn’t congregation participation. I think it’s telling even that we call it a meeting rather than a worship service or something like that that lots of other Christians would expect. It makes it sound very businesslike, which I think fits because we’re a pretty businesslike church.
As a lifelong Mormon, I really know hardly anything about liturgy and religious ritual in Christianity more broadly, but I do feel like I know enough to say that we don’t have it in our sacrament meetings. Unlike some people I know, like my sister Lynnette, it’s not something I particularly long for. I do think it’s clear, though, that without some kind of liturgy or ritual or ceremony or whatever you want to call it, we’ll never make Easter or Christmas services any better than a nice sacrament meeting. We’ll never have holiday services that are a strong enough draw that even inactive members want to come back for them.
I feel like with some acknowledgement of Holy Week, the LDS Church is just taking the tiniest baby step toward acknowledging something like a liturgical calendar. As my co-blogger Galdralag once observed, it seems there’s no doctrinal reason that we couldn’t move toward being more liturgical. Honestly, I don’t expect it to happen, though. I suspect the GAs feel like they’re taking quite a step toward mainstream Christianity in even mentioning Palm Sunday and Holy Week a few times, and explicitly stating that no stake conferences are to be held on Easter. But when push comes to shove, I doubt they’ll want to make any serious changes in our meetings. At most, maybe we’ll get an annual pre-Easter devotional from the First Presidency like we do with Christmas or something at that level.
The really telling question will be whether General Conference will be moved when it conflicts with Easter. This next happens in 2026. I feel like there’s some chance it could be moved, since the 1977 decision to stop deliberately holding it on April 6th makes Conference seem less necessarily tied to the first Sunday in April. But I think it’s more likely that Conference will hold firm and Easter will give way, and the GAs’ dalliance with Holy Week and the liturgical calendar will peter out.
One aspect of the Christian liturgical calendar that we should totally adopt regardless, though, is fasting for Lent. We Mormons are great at fasting! It would of course be an adjustment to imagine fasting from things other than food. It would probably be a bigger adjustment for Church leaders to consider the possibility of having individual members decide on their own fasts. I feel like a good Mormon version of a Lenten fast would be something dictated from the top. Like one year, we would all be encouraged to go on a fast from TikTok, and the next year Instagram, and so forth. Maybe given enough time, we could even move beyond social media to other fast ideas!
Ironically, I’m a Christmas-and-Easter Catholic and I’m Mormon the rest of the year!
There are a few Xmas only Mormons. Young adult kids who come home from college for Xmas. They sometimes still come to church with their family.
That totally makes sense Pontius Python! I think it was at a Sunstone session about Easter several years ago that I first remember hearing someone suggest that given that other high church folks are already having lovely services around Easter, they just go to those. I still think it’s too bad that we Mormons can’t fill that need, but I guess we are what we are, and high church stuff isn’t in our wheelhouse.
Jks, good point. I hadn’t thought of that.
It’s a bit telling that when it comes to Easter and Christmas, the Church is giving members less Church rather than more. Many members I know seem to be treating it more as a holiday away from the normal Church responsibilities than a special event to commemorate
I keep hearing the push for high church ritual and calendar observances from the shining stars on the bloggernacle and blabbernacle (Jana Reiss, Dan Wotherspoon and many gusts, W&T, BCC, ZD, etc.) And I’m listening extremely carefully, because those who are calling for it have valid and compelling arguments. They are communicating a deep spiritual need supported by science. The most recent sunstone podcast illuminated the importance (from a cultural anthropological perspective) of not just ritual, but (gulp) high risk ritual in founding and gluing communities together. Life without sacrifice-laden ritual as a way to align community member’s hearts (quite literally) and focus, is far less cohesive.
Still, I can’t call for more ritual, especially high church rituals. As much as I love Jesus, as much as I appreciate the historical significance of the machinations of the high holy days, as much as I love playing masses and oratorios, as much as I understand such rituals to be instructive and participatory theater, I just can’t go there. Why? Well, I’ve observed that this push comes after years of complaints that our church is boring (total snooze-fest) and often off-point (e.g. tithing talks on Christmas). Correlation has given us too much milk, no meat and we have all been assigning each other “F’s” in public speaking. Our rameumptum-esque re-hashing of conference talks in every local meeting (in an odd GA fixation) causes most to scream deafeningly in our heads- while our faces display a serene smile. And maybe we just don’t have the fire and passion that kept our pioneer ancestors riveted on not just less padded pews, but on logs, stones, or their feet for hours and hours on end– to hear the orations of Joseph, Brigham, Parley, Orson, or Heber. And yes, in light of that it’s nauseous to hear decades of obedience drivel while we doff our millennial zeal and mission.
I can’t help but think that adding more mechanized ritual is the answer. It seems like we’re treating a symptom, not the disease.
Also, I’m not a fan of LDS ritual. It’s clumsy, and superfluous to our transcendental and early spirit-infused low church roots. I would have loved to have participated in the ritual and sacrifice of temple building, but alas- my hands (gifted with my pioneer ancestor’s gifts) are not needed. Temples fall from the skies these and land anywhere you can throw a stone- all pre-fabricated. I’ll refrain from discussing temple worship, but just say that I agree with High Nibley in perceiving temple ritual as an epitome of all art forms that is meant to evolve with intense participation and intellectual creation. Alas, our participation is minimal.
I worry that we have already become the Pharisees of our day- the way we prioritize the church’s health above that of the saints and our neighbors, that our increasing scrupulosity and idolatry of church standards and our prodigal brother syndrome, etc. is a bad context to be adding MORE high church observances. It’s like adding gasoline to the fire. I’d say the answer lies instead within.
Also, as a newer church, can we not benefit from the historical examples of the high churches who went through this exact phase in their development? Not just in western Christianity, but in the old and new testaments, as well as the BoM? It seems like we know how the story ends…and how the high/low cycle continues to spin.
Yeah- I don’t know where we go from here. As much as others cheer at the recognition of Holy Week and advent, I’m wincing. What about the virtues of
Low-church? Is there anything in the reformation and low-church that could address this need for ritual? And dang-it, is “keep mormonism weird” a lost cause at this point and should we just continue marching into Mainstream Christianity?
That’s totally fair, Mortimer, that we’re not likely to do liturgy well if we did it. It may not have been clear from the post, but I wasn’t calling for more liturgy or for us to move toward being high church. I was just thinking through what it might look like to do that, since it seems to be an issue on GAs’ minds.