How can the Church change? This is often a question on my mind, as there are so many things I’d like to see changed, such as ordaining women, for example. To say the Church is resistant to change would be an understatement. And even more so, it resists the public perception that it could be changed by outside pressure. But of course it does change all the time. These changes are always framed as just new ways of doing the same fundamental things, though. As Steve Taysom said so well in his biography of Joseph F. Smith,
Successful religions, meaning those that are historically persistent, find ways to make necessary changes to remain viable within a given cultural and historical context while simultaneously explaining away the changes as nonexistent, unimportant, or as epiphenomena that are changes in appearance only, and which are actually in service of a larger, unchanging phenomenon.
Reading articles for my last post on modesty rhetoric, I was pleasantly surprised that several of them waved away past teachings on modesty as being 100% about clothing. But I was also kind of amazed that they so obviously elided where those past teachings came from. Here’s an example from a 2019 New Era article:
When you hear the word modesty, what’s the first thing that pops into your head? Probably a list of clothing “do’s and don’ts” that you’ve been taught since you were little. But let’s try thinking of modesty in a different way.
I love the moving on to think of modesty in a different way, but I also think it’s absurd to not admit where the teachings “since you were little” came from, namely Church leaders and manuals and magazines and rhetoric in general.
So maybe this is how the Church can change: by pretending that its previous teachings that are now being discarded didn’t happen, or somehow came from some other source.
Here’s another example. A 2020 Church Newsroom article on updates to the Handbook contains this gaslighting whopper:
Many Latter-day Saint women and men were unfamiliar with the Church’s previous handbooks — especially Handbook 1.
You don’t say! How, I wonder, did Church members come to be so unfamiliar with the Handbook? It wasn’t that access was restricted only to a few male leaders was it? The Church never used copyright law explicitly to prevent its contents from getting out, did it? Naaaaah, that would never happen. It was those lazy members just not getting familiar with it.
Or you probably remember the classic Newsroom statement in 2012 after BYU professor Randy Bott favored the world with some racist ideas that were absolutely mainstream in the Church before 1978. The statement claimed,
Some have attempted to explain the reason for this [priesthood] restriction but these attempts should be viewed as speculation and opinion, not doctrine.
I love the hand-waviness of the word “some,” as though it were random people and not Q12 members.
Along similar lines, Dieter F. Uchtdorf, in introducing the new FTSoY pamphlet a few years ago, said,
It’s also important to know what For the Strength of Youth does not do. It doesn’t make decisions for you.
Of course, he carefully omitted the point that the whole reason he needed to say this was because the previous versions of FTSoY very much did try to make decisions for you.
You could even trace this waving away of previous ideas by obscuring who they came from to Jesus, who in the Sermon on the Mount attributed teachings he was replacing to “them of old time.” I know translation might have made this less clear, and I certainly have zero idea about how Jews of the time talked about their scriptures, but at least to my ear, this sure sounds like a way for him to downplay the importance of the prior teachings, which had come from the prophets, not just from some random people of old time.
If this is how the Church is going to handle change, I can already write the opening lines for some future talks or articles. For example:
Growing up, you likely learned that it was only men who were ordained to priesthood offices. Now we think about priesthood in a different way.
Note how you are the actor here, and precisely who taught you this is moved completely off stage. If you used to think this weird old way about some random female priesthood ban, then you are to blame for it. Honestly, though, if this is what it takes for Church leaders to save face when making changes, I would be frustrated that they couldn’t be more honest, but I’d still be happy about the result.
I think it’s helpful to look at those statements through the eyes of people who are fully invested in the old ways. Do we want them to come around to the new ways or do we want to just cut them loose and be done with them? We may get some emotional satisfaction from the Church admitting that it was responsible for the old (and presumably failed) ways, but when the Church does that, there is an implied “and you were all idiots for going along with it” attached. That’s going to encourage people to dig in their heels, not to embrace the change. If the Church wants to maximize the number of people who embrace change, it has little choice but to frame change the way they do.
The passage of time mitigates the problem to some extent and will likely lead to public acknowledgement of particularly egregious errors. By 2007, for example, enough time had passed that the Church felt safe apologizing for the Mountain Meadows massacre (both to the victims’ families and the Paiutes). There was virtually nobody left who had close enough ties to the perpetrators to take a stand against it.
Weirdly, the notion that the Church doesn’t/can’t/shouldn’t change is in direct contradiction to the fundamental doctrine that is supposed to distinguish us from everyone else, namely our teaching that the Church does/can/should change.
Sometimes (Temple/Priesthood ban) we get clear pronouncements that an old doctrine is gone and new rules apply. In that specific case we didn’t get any sort of reconning with *why* the ban existed, but at least we got an official declaration, canonized and in everyone’s triple combination.
Other times, we get a reasonably clear signal. The For the Strength of Youth update is a good example here. The tone clearly changed, the booklet is far less proscriptive and it was announced in general conference.
But so many times, leaders just stop talking about something with no clear indication that we’ve changed. Birth control was definitely bad, and at some point we quit emphasizing that, and at some point they slipped in some changes in the handbook that people mostly didn’t have access to. Somewhere along the way many (most?) members figured out that the policy had changed, but but how and when that happened was probably different for everyone. (This particular example is mostly before my time.)
It’s this last category of change in the church that leads to much confusion. Because the church almost never clearly repudiates a past teaching it is devilishly hard to know what we’ve moved on from and what we haven’t. As a result, it becomes difficult to even know if the church has changed.
I spent too many years of my life trying to figure out what the church’s position on things were, and wishing that the church would change. I’ve decided the better course is to do the work myself. In some cases I’m in good agreement with the church, in some cases I can’t figure out what they’re thinking, and in the cases where they are desperately in the need of change, I no longer have to wait for them to change, I’ll go ahead in front and hope they catch up at some point.