After Elder Uchtdorf introduced the new, more principle-based For the Strength of Youth pamphlet last October, my YW-age daughter came home from a church meeting where she said her leaders told her that actually, all the old rules from the previous version still apply. So all the micromanaging, harsh, and unrealistic rules are still in force. Sexual feelings are still categorically wicked, and tattoos are still bad. Really, I thought the idea of the new version was to get rid of these overly detailed rules that don’t apply to everyone (or for some of them, anyone) and just teach general principles and have the kids learn to make moral decisions themselves.
What this incident illustrates is at least part of where leader roulette comes from in the Church. As has been discussed on the Bloggernacle at great length over the years, the GAs’ general refusal to disavow old teachings, coupled with all their effort put into maintaining the idea that their teachings never change in the first place, leaves all the old teachings out there just waiting for Church members to glom onto them and teach them as the Church’s current position. My daughter’s experience just shows this happening in real time. The old teachings about the wickedness of multiple piercings per ear, for example, are all still out there. Nobody’s going to go back and add an asterisk to say, this Gordon B. Hinckley Conference talk from 2000 where he preaches against them (as well as tattoos) to explain oh by the way, we no longer teach this. So any teacher or leader who’s looking for the Church’s position on tattoos can still easily stumble on such teachings.
As an aside, I suspect there are at least two groups of people who run afoul of these old teachings. One group is simply ignorant of changes in the Church. Maybe they converted recently, or they were young (or not born yet) when the change happened, and they take seriously all the Church’s teachings about how its constant amid a changing world, and assume that they can bring up any old past teaching and have it still be the Church’s current position. The other group is the fundamentalist-leaning people who are yearning for a higher law that they can use to distinguish themselves from the great unwashed even among Church members. They enjoy the thought that even if the Church is watering down its doctrine for the weak-willed 21st century members, they’re holding onto the real hard truth. I’m guessing this type of thinking originally got going with all the denials and double-talk and secrecy around polygamy, which were so thick that the ending of it in what is now the LDS Church took decades, and the breaking off of multiple churches who were probably sure all along that the Manifesto was just a PR move and they were supposed to keep polygamy going on the down low. Today’s more fundamentalist Church members might still believe in polygamy as a higher law, or in the idea that black people were less valiant in the pre-existence, or a variety of anti-LGBTQ ideas that the Church is only gradually edging away from. They might believe that any use of birth control is pretty much the same as abortion or murder, or that all other Christians are actually servants of Satan, and anything ecumenical the Church does is sullying it. Or, as my daughter’s experience shows, they might believe that tattoos are still wicked.
So part of the problem is that there’s little to no acknowledgement of change, but another part, I think, is that when something like getting tattoos exits the Church’s list of discouraged practices, it typically moves to something that the Church is neutral on rather than encouraged. And when the Church is neutral on something, GAs really don’t have reason to talk about it. This means that not only are the older teachings about the wickedness of tattoos still out there, but they aren’t even mixed with newer softer teachings that say they’re okay. Here’s a little graph to illustrate. The vertical axis is for the Church’s approval or disapproval of a practice, from encouraging or commanding it at the top to discouraging or commanding against it at the bottom. The horizontal axis shows how much time Church leaders spend preaching about the practice, with lots of time to the left and little time to the right.
I’ve put a few example practices in the graph to illustrate. Ordinances like baptism and marriage are in the upper left corner. The Church encourages these practices and spends a lot of time talking about them. In the lower left corner are things like gay marriage and tobacco consumption, which the Church discourages and spends a lot of time talking about. Toward the upper right are things the Church encourages but doesn’t spend much time talking about. An example here is vaccination, which as a generally pro-health organization the Church of course encourages. But as vaccination isn’t generally thought of as an issue related to religion, GAs spend little time talking about it. Of course they were still supportive of it, though, as many Trumpists were appalled to discover during the pandemic when their true savior often pooh-poohed vaccines. In the lower right corner are some things like murder that the Church very much opposes, but GAs don’t spend much time talking about, presumably because they think they’re rare or so obviously wrong that their wrongness hardly needs mentioning. (Also near this corner is rape, which is hardly ever brought up, and which I hope the Church opposes, but I feel like GAs don’t discuss because they’re wary of any framing of sex that uses consent as the decider of whether it’s okay rather than marital status.)
Going back to tattoos as my example, with the removal of the anti-tattoo rhetoric in the new For the Strength of Youth, in terms of the graph, tattoos move not from the lower left corner (discouraged and talked about) to the upper left (encouraged and talked about), or even to the center left (neutral and talked about), but rather to the center right (neutral and not talked about). It will definitely be a welcome thing if we don’t hear any new discussion of tattoos from Church leaders, but like I said, this means we’ll have no new rhetoric to dilute the old stuff if anyone goes searching on the Church website.
So what am I suggesting? I think it would be great if GAs could acknowledge changes in the Church. Russell M. Nelson has certainly embraced his role as someone who changes things, like home and visiting teaching to ministering, shortening church, and multiple tinkerings with the endowment ceremony. But it’s my impression that he’s no more willing than his predecessors to acknowledge an actual change in the Church’s position on any issue. I’d like to see some acknowledgement that we don’t just change policies, but also teachings, and I’d love it if outdated teachings were marked as outdated on the Church website. Or if the Church would come out and say we know thousands of you still own and refer to Mormon Doctrine, but if you’re going to do so, please ignore the following articles. Or even better, just ask people to discard it.
I think if the Church did this, it could put a real dent in leader roulette. Of course there will always be differences in interpretation by different local (and even general) leaders, no matter how carefully the Church Handbook or Conference talks are worded. But I think it could at least be reduced if the Church would make it harder for local leaders to stumble on out-of-date teachings and assume they’re current.
I have little to comment, because you’ve hit the nail right on the head in my opinion. Told teachings never die, they just (hopefully) fade away, and we’re left without any real method for knowing what we are supposed to believe. Do we believe anything that anyone has ever said in GC? Or maybe all our doctrine gets wiped clean every six months unless they mention it in conference again? Or we have to go with whatever the last speaker in GC said on that topic?
Nearly completely off topic, not too long ago, left handedness (for the sacrament) made a reappearance in the handbook, so it is once again wrong to pick up a piece of bread with your left hand. It was wrong for a long time, but then it was fine for a while, but now its wrong again. That left hand just can’t be trusted. So I’d argue that left-handedness should be a little bit below the neutral line. I haven’t heard anyone bring it up in church though, so the only people that know about this are the uber-zealots and the handedness hobbyists. (I’m in that latter category!) I guess anyone reading this knows about it now, too, so you have to pick to join one of those two groups, or maybe form a third group for people who don’t really care.
Okay, so, like, here are the Basic Absolutes:
1. Lord/God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent…or something to that effect.
2. Lord/God is the same yesterday, today and forever. He never changes.
3. Lord/God has all things before Him; past, present and future. He sees it all, end from the beginning.
4. God’s works are endless, He created the universe, including worlds whose inhabitants are His begotten sons and daughters & His overriding purpose in all He does is to bring about their immortality and Eternal Life.
Okay, so far – so good. When compared to the gods on Mount Olympus, it’s pretty sweet worshipping a Being who is the very definition of “having it all together” and who’s work and glory is to make you The Best You Ever. Yet, right from the beginning things seem to fall apart. He can’t even find two boys from the great preparatory premortal existence who can live together in The First Family without one killing the other. He allows His earth kids to be able to choose good from evil and – even after getting rid of the 1/3 bad apples in premortality – He ends up with nobody making the right decisions so He has to drown the whole bunch of ’em (basically).
And so it goes down to the latter daze, when things finally come together. He establishes The Only True and Living Church, with prophets whom He will personally guide and revealeth His secrets, and grants to them the use of His very own priesthood power. Cool. Except, again, things aren’t working. There is a disconnect somewhere. Maybe several disconnects. Messages sent from an all-knowing, unchanging god to earth apparently are scrambled and misunderstood, and have to be corrected, sometimes as quickly as 3 years following the initial pronouncement. Or, maybe the messages are transmitted okay, but we’re just too stupid, carnal, and devilish to understand what we are being told. Don’t know for sure, but here we are.
I suppose my hopes were too high. I somehow thought that the best church ever, led by the smartest, loving Eternal being ever, would keep us way ahead of the curve on “how to do earth”. Guess not.
I like the premise and agree with the article in the most part. Thank you for thinking and posting this. I do wonder though, if this is more based on your lived experience rather than hard evidence, data, and what may be happening outside of the USA (considering more members are outside).
The vaccination thing was huge in America, I read various articles about members issue with this and the fallout from the church’s encouragemnt of the vaccine. Also, I can’t recall a single talk on tobacco at any stake or general conference (yes, in the broader talk as a reference), yet we have this as “high preaching”?
My lived experience here in the UK is the whole tattoo and piercing thing went out long ago with an emphasis on acceptance and tolerance in the main part. Elder Uchtdorf’s talk was confirmation of a good number of leaders thoughts and practices. I have spent a great deal of time in Utah and in Europe and especially as a leader in the UK, the difference in approach, teaching, thought processing and counsel is very different. It’s frustrating when I hear “the church says…” no! Your local leader and your lived experience or perhaps your mother “says” this, albeit borne out of historic, folklore or past practices and thinking within the church. I look it and feel and think “are you attending church in the 1960’s?!
I agree that there should be a much heavier disavowal of errors like the priesthood ban and past teaching relating to LGBTQ+. I think the brethren see this as a precedence setting scenario that members will say “You disavow that now but it was taught as doctrine to all of us not long ago, how can we trust what we are being taught now won’t be disavowed 20 years from now?!” – This is valid in it’s point and concerning in it’s possible future reality.
Brilliant article and again thanks for raising.
Thanks for your comments!
DaveW, that’s a great point about left-handedness. I was actually just trying to come up with a random characteristic that the Church would be neutral on, but you’re spot on that with Dallin H. Oaks pushing the right-hand-for-the-sacrament rule, then of course it isn’t neutral.
Seeker, yeah, I mean I guess of course I knew Church leaders were mortal. I just wish they were more open and humble about it in general. And truthfully, I’m not all that sure about God, myself.
Errol, you’re right I’m sure that my experience colors my view here. Not only am I an American, I was raised in Utah, which I’m sure makes things different. And to even go beyond that, I was raised in a family with some definite Bruce R. McConkie-type fundamentalist strains. So that’s a great caveat. And I’m honestly happy to hear that some of these more micromanagy commandments have been on the outs in the UK for a long time. I know the GAs hope for perfect worldwide Correlation, but when it fails in a good way, toward more acceptance and less fundamentalism, it warms my heart.
Ziff: Agreed. And I always enjoy your perspective.
But if we’ve changed things in the past, what’s next? More changes!? It’s a slippery slope.
If you ask LDS teens what the Church teaches and enforces, you get an immediate answer. And as Ziff noted, their list does not correlate with the lists of most adults. But honestly, their list is more accurate, more loving and more tolerant. Let’s turn the Church over to them ASAP. Zion could appear in the next 200 years then. It never will with my generation or older in charge.
Thanks, Seeker!
And spot on, Tygan! I suspect that’s a prime reason GAs don’t want to acknowledge past changes. They don’t want to hear pushback from the membership on their current positions.
Old Man, yes! If we could have a retirement age for the Q15, or even just some decades-younger advisors for them, I wonder if that might not solve a lot of issues the Church is facing.
Old Man, very perceptive and true! https://www.up.edu/garaventa/files/fildg%20files/the-four-americas.pdf
I have to say that the idea that teachings will (or should) never change is a weird expectation for a church founded on the principle of continuous revelation.
I’m curious where on the chart you’d put women working outside the home. In my experience, when doctrine changes (and it certainly does) the change shows up in behavior long before teachings. The silence in teachings is very real and only ceases as a significant number of members act contrary to the prior teaching and are still seen to be good members.
On the topic of tattoos and piercings, I think it will follow similar to beards. Beards were doctrinally not allowed for many years for “higher” positions such as bishop and temple worker. The prohibition stopped and very slowly some men started having beards. I was one of them. There was nervous laughter at first (my facial hair grows slowly so people thought I’d just forgotten to shave) but eventually everyone came round. When my BIL was called as a bishop in Utah last year the stake president made it a point to ask him not to drop his beard because he worried doing so would reinforce the old teaching.
FWIW, I have a good friend serving as bishop whose wife is active and amazing, and also just got a nose ring. I expect the ward will come around to accept that too. It can’t be harder than when they learned she was a democrat.
But when will male temple workers be able to grow beards? I haven’t seen a beard on one in decades.
My thoughts exactly. I grew up in California so I think have been more in tune with differences because I’d noticed the difference in converts’ and younger people’s version of the gospel versus life long/fundamentalist leanings. This past year I’ve kind of felt disoriented hearing the general authority here in Arizona, as well as in general conference, just kind of realizing that certain things I thought we left behind at church were still being preached. (I can’t think of an example right now. But we did also have the “old rules are still in force” thing for For the Strength of Youth.) I guess it’s kind of changed how I view the top leaders of the church, as being diverse in their opinions but deciding to support something different that they don’t necessarily believe or almost believe, and years later maybe due to aging some of those opinions sneak out like the left-handedness thing, or the David Archaleta incidence.
Anyhow, I was also wishing for more highlight of changes. One thing that really bugs me is the idea that priesthood members need to always be there at the church building if women and children are present (maybe not primary kids but definitely teens…). My ward growing up didn’t do that. They’d lock doors if a priesthood member wasn’t there because that was what the rules were at the time, though if you look at the wording you can definitely understand why people didn’t think that that rule changed. Recently I think they entirely dropped the sentence. Sometimes we’ve had issues with people not locking all the doors sand someone coming in our building. If everyone focused on locking doors (or being in charge of their own safety) instead of if a priesthood member is there or not, we wouldn’t have that issue. It’s hard for people to change that attitude though. I wonder if the male protector idea is intertwined with gun culture here.
Anyhow, having a policy vs doctrine view isn’t very helpful. Different people put teachings in different baskets. I think a lot of mainstream people will have certain things they perceive as doctrine that when it changes, then goes in the policy basket. Like a lot of the For Strength of Youth. And there’s a lot more changes that have happened historically than people make out. I think it would be very helpful to have that be in the open. I think the reason the church doesn’t is because they want to be respectful of people who have different beliefs in the church (to a point of course), just the issue of those people trying to force others to believe what they believe should NEVER happen, and it does too often. And all those books claiming that they’ve figured out what Mormon Doctrine really is would be null too.