One of my sisters who has taught freshperson writing classes for years says that over that time, she’s come to write her syllabus more strictly and then soften it as the need arises rather than trying to go the other way. She says it’s clearly just easier for the students if any shifts are toward more leniency rather than more severity, even if her policies start out more lenient in the latter situation. Along similar lines, I was thinking about how maybe Church policy changes might be easier in one direction than another. In other words, they’re more resistant to change, or stickier, when moving in one direction than another. Or more generally, some particular policies might be stickier than others, regardless of the direction of movement, or maybe policies in a particular area (e.g., Word of Wisdom) might be more or less sticky. (Note that I’m borrowing the language of policy stickiness from the idea of wage and price stickiness in economics, where either can stay at a nominal level more than you’d expect even as its real value changes. The reasons for wage and price stickiness seem pretty different from the reasons for Church policy stickiness, so I don’t think it’s a good analogy, but I like the term.)
We just saw an example of this kind of stickiness and non-stickiness (slipperiness?) this last Sunday, when the Church’s Sunday meetings moved back to having three periods, but rather than going back to the old three-hour block that we had from 1980 to 2018, now shortens them to fit into the two-hour block we’ve had since 2019. I think this was an interesting test case because one aspect of the Nelson-era policy—the number of meetings—was changed, while another—the meeting block length—was retained. I find the stickiness of the meeting block length particularly intriguing, because I wonder if President Oaks would have preferred to go back to a three-meeting/three-hour block like we had before, but decided that shortening the block was easier than lengthening it, that is, the meeting block length was stickier in one direction than the other.
You can anticipate my question, then: Which policy changes that past Church presidents have implemented or future Church presidents might implement might be sticky? And which might be slippery? I’m especially interested in this question because the Church might have a mix of gentler and harsher presidents in the next few decades. I’m hoping that maybe some of the gentler ones might implement some kinder policies that later presidents, regardless of how harsh they might want to be, would find it difficult to undo.
Word of Wisdom: A substantial fraction of Mormons are drinking coffee, it seems like far more than when I was young. What if a future Church president said he’d had a revelation, and coffee was now okay by the Word of Wisdom? I suspect, with some momentum already in that direction, that such a change would be pretty sticky and hard for a later president to undo without alienating a large fraction of Church members.
Tithing: I’ve written multiple times about how I think it’s an embarrassment that the Church has amassed such vast wealth with no apparent plan for using its money to do good or for backing off at all on requiring Church members to continue to tithe at what for many members is a ruinous rate. What if a future Church president decided that we could still have the blessings of tithing without requiring ten percent of members’ income? What if he kept the ten percent rule, but said explicitly that families, like businesses, have revenue and costs, and they should only tithe on the difference between these? Or what if he followed the often-discussed 1907 Joseph F. Smith statement that
we expect to see the day when we will not have to ask you for one dollar of donation for any purpose, except that which you volunteer to give of your own accord, because we will have tithes sufficient in the storehouse of the Lord to pay everything that is needful for the advancement of the kingdom of God
and just said the Church had reached this point and it would no longer require tithing? Maybe they could still allow people to give donations if they wanted, but tithing would no longer be required for a temple recommend, and there would no longer be tithing settlement. Like with my sister finding it easier to loosen rules than tighten them, I’d guess that later Church presidents would find it very difficult to tighten back up, and say no, actually, God still needs ten percent of your wages.
Scriptures: What if a future Church president took President Oaks’s openness to different Bible translations and said we’re going to have modern versions of all our scriptures? I feel like if we had a 21st-century Book of Mormon that dropped all the “it came to pass” phrases, among lots of other changes, it would be a very difficult sell for a future more fundamentalist Church president to say that we’re going back to the KJV and the original Book of Mormon. Members of today already often find the KJV a verbal thicket. What might people say after a few decades of reading something much clearer, if prodded to go back?
Sabbath Day observance: This is just my anecdotal experience, but I feel like Mormons in my circle are far more lax about Sunday activities than we were back in the 1980s and 1990s. For example, watching sports on Sunday was definitely seen as bad when I was young, even if some people did it. But now, I feel like everyone at Church expect the most extreme more-pious-than-thou openly talks about watching the Super Bowl at least. This is in spite of the Church’s push back in 2015 for stricter Sabbath observance. I wonder if this is another situation where it’s easier to loosen rules than to tighten them.
Priesthood/temple ban: Even with the rise of Trump and the increase in unapologetic racism in the US, I feel like it would have to go quite a bit further before reinstituting the priesthood/temple ban would be at all imaginable for even the most racist of Church presidents. For just one reason, the Church’s growth in Africa, one place where it actually does seem to be growing, would come to an abrupt halt.
Ordaining women: I know it’s a long shot, but a guy can hope! If this happened, I think in a pretty short time, it would be unimaginable for even the most misogynistic Church president to roll it back.
I guess my examples all fit the same template: I suspect relaxing rules, expanding access, reducing fundamentalism, are easier than tightening rules, restricting access, and increasing fundamentalism. But reactionary shifts happen too. The Mormon Reformation happened. Correlation happened, and is happening. As a heretical Mormon, I’m sure I underestimate the possibility of a Church president saying “we’re going back to basics” and embracing sexism, racism, scriptural literalism, and anti-intellectualism like past fundamentalists have.
There are lots of other policy changes that I think might end up being slipperier. For example, Russell M. Nelson’s distaste for the term “Mormon” that he foisted on the whole Church will probably be deemphasized and finally ignored, and by the 2030s, young Mormons will happily say “It was always okay to call us Mormons. If you ever heard someone say it was a slur, that sounds like a you problem.”
I’d love to hear what possible policy changes the Church might make that you think could be more or less sticky.
I love this remark near the end: by the 2030s, young Mormons will happily say “It was always okay to call us Mormons. If you ever heard someone say it was a slur, that sounds like a you problem.” I’m 51 and really feeling this lately! Changes happening so fast and furiously that I’m either getting whiplash or feeling gaslit all the time!
I think using “Mormon” is already mostly back to okay. As far as the coffee and tea prohibitions, I wonder if it will just be something that stops being talked about, and bishops instructed not to withhold temple recommends over it, and eventually it becomes a practice that is not endorsed but tolerated, kind of like it was 100 years ago before it became a requirement for a temple recommend. I think that is more likely than an announcement of a revelation.
I love all the content on this website and check it multiple times a week, hoping for more goodness!
I do think that most large changes in the church happen slowly. I think of the slow suffocation of women being allowed to do ritual healing, washings, and anointings that came as a result of a thousand cuts (with the final stroke around 1946). Then people end up thinking “it was always this way” and we’re all gaslit about what we could have had.
I think a lot about the 1967 policy change where women were not allowed to pray in sacrament meeting. I’m sure people sincerely bore their testimonies that it was god’s will and was the Truth (with a capital T). But it did change in 1978 (and took until 2013 for the first woman to say a prayer in general conference).
I guess this post ties well with the recent “Hedges about the law” post. When the prophet cuts out an hour of the Sunday block it’s revelation. When I cut out an hour of the Sunday block, I’m “not attending all my meetings.” I suspect we’ll get a lot of changes, too little and too late, after the bulk of the population has already accepted it and with the leadership claiming revelation about it.
Wow, that’s such an interesting way to think about this! It got me thinking about other traditions, like have those that ordained women felt like they could go back? I don’t think so — but also, many churches that have moved in more progressive directions have experienced splits, as the conservatives eventually decide to just bail. I wonder if any of those shifts could be sticky, but also, so to speak, splitty? 😉
I think the church is in a position to do a U-turn on coffee and tea. They don’t even need a revelation because they already have one–“hot drinks are not for the body or belly”. All they have to do is reinterpret the existing revelation. And science will back them up. Coffee and tea are looking pretty favorable from a scientific standpoint right now. (Not so marijuana, so don’t get your hopes too high.) But the temperature at which they are consumed matters. So the Church could simply say that Joseph got it right the first time and that drinks in excess of 140F should not be consumed.
The paper in this link is a meta-analysis of studies testing the effects of both the amount and temperature of coffee and tea on rates of esophageal cancer. According to Table 5, most studies show a positive effect for amounts but a negative effect for temperature. (Mate’ was also analyzed and showed uniformly negative results.)
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2773211/
For the record, if this change were made, I might drink tea if it was served to me, but you couldn’t pay me enough to drink coffee.
I’m struggling a bit to really define ‘stickiness’ in church policy. In the economic sense, stickiness is when prices are slow to respond to supply and demand. Prices “should” change, but they don’t. But in the LDS context, what defines where policies “should” be?
Demand could conceivably be gauged by surveying members. Here, it seems that demand is almost always in the less demanding/more personal choice direction. Coffee, tea, tithing, garment sleeves, church length, ear piercings, tattoos, fasting, church cleaning, mission length choice, church dress (pants, blue shirts, etc.), dating age limits, etc. I suspect that for every single one of these, letting members pick for themselves with no judgement would win on a popular vote. We don’t seem to like being told what to do, even by a prophet. (Even when we stand up in church and gush about how great it is to have a prophet.)
‘Demand’ for change isn’t sufficient though, as our church experience demonstrates. We’ve seen some recent changes that seem to have been very enthusiastically embraced (sleeveless garments and 2 hour church come to mind. I haven’t heard anyone demanding that we go back) so we can assert that there was demand, but in the LDS church demand really struggles cause change. Nearly all policies seem to be extremely sticky with regards to demand.
So what is the “supply”? All I can figure is that it is church leaders declaring what God wants, and we have no insight into what that is until church leaders make a new proclamation of Gods plans. In that regard, the church is extremely responsive to the supply side. The prophet says the Saturday evening session of conference is over and, poof, it happens. But we know that isn’t really the case — there is a supply side process, it just happens to be completely opaque to all but a few.
The ultimate case study is the temple/priesthood ban. That changes seems to have been very sticky. American society would have found the repeal to be at least a decade over due. LDS history provided no revelatory support for it. High ranking leaders advocated strongly in favor of a repeal. But the policy stuck around because all LDS policies are exactly as sticky as the president of the church says they are.
I’ve said many times that I think it is possible that the lasting legacy of the Nelson presidency may well be the idea that every church president is empowered to make whatever policy changes he deems right. Until Nelson I always felt that presidents generally acted as caretakers of an established order more than bold leaders into new paths. (At least since the start of the 20th century.) Nelson seemed unconcerned for tradition. It remains to be seen if Oaks and successive presidents will follow this pattern or revert to a more caretaker role.
Anyway, trying to get back on topic, I think members broadly want fewer restrictions across the board. Any large moves against this direction will be met by grumbling, and the larger the move, the more people it is likely to drive out of the church. A few big ticket items (ordaining women, accepting LGBTQ in full membership) would be such large reversals that if done all at once they would drive some traditionalists out.
I’m old enough to remember when white shirts were for missionaries. When I was in the Aaronic Priesthood back in the ’70s, I don’t recall anything about white shirts for us civilians. I do remember one ward where the deacons were asked to wear a necktie, and the priests were asked to wear a tie and jacket, but no white shirt rule for anyone as far as I remember. When I was a missionary back in the Carter Administration, the general authority over our mission suggested that we didn’t need to go right back to wearing colored shirts after we got home. He encouraged us to keep wearing white shirts to church. The suggestion seemed surprising to me at the time. I don’t recall how it happened, but somehow the(unwritten) expectation gradually took hold that men should wear white shirts to church, and especially that a white shirt was an (unwritten) requirement for blessing and passing the sacrament. That went on for decades.
But over the past several years, in my ward at least, that “rule” seems to have gone by the wayside. You still see a lot of white shirts of course, but a lot of men are wearing colored shirts now and nobody bats an eye if one of them blesses or passes the sacrament. I don’t know of any decree from Salt Lake that might have been the cause, but perhaps it was precipitated by the relaxed missionary dress standards that came out a few years ago. I don’t think anything was announced in the ward. We just stopped worrying about it. Did that happen churchwide?
None of that had the weight of doctrine of course, but over the course of 50 years, church practice on that matter just sort of came and went slowly on its own.
If they were willing to [sort of] reverse course on temporal polygamy and white supremacy, then nothing is a sticky as it seems. Polygamy remains a canon requirement to achieve exaltation. All of the internal deliberations on the topic available from the 15 confirm they remained emphatic on the necessity until they saw how misaligned they were from common Saints. Once that theology was an imminent threat to their continued power it became “a spirit of belief” requirement, then an optional nice-to-have, and now somehow mandated by canon AND anathema by Press Release and proclamation (in that order). In the case of institutionalized White Supremacy, it took several Apostles virtually self-immolating and a ton of peer pressure, which threatened the LDS University printing presses of procreation and lifetime tithepaying for the 15 to find yet another of Brigham’s theological innovations less inspired than it was during his life after the schism.
There’s a great line in the fantastically named episode, The Committee on Human Rights, from “the Americans.” Some Soviet spys, during the Cold War, are fretting about how they’ll ever possibly gain access to some new immensely sensitive and classified spy installation to gain access to some crucially important information. Finally one comments reassuringly, “trust them to be Americans.” Cut to video of one of the spies, posing as a private-sector ‘defense’ contractor and walking directly into the installation. The lesson being capitalists will compromise anything to behave as good capitalists should.
All prior experience shows that our Doctrine is negotiable depending on economic and social pressures. However, adopting the evil acts from Luke 12 and the parable of the rich fool has led to some really huge ass barns of capital to protect the 15 ecclesiastical oligarchs from the opinions of commoners in and outside the church. Looking at the dual rise of MAGA and Nones also supports the stance of optimizing alienation of Saints from our neighbors. Faiths who have better turned their hearts to the two commandments of Christ rather than putting on the veils of Mosaic law idolatry and generalized animosity against anyone ‘outside’ have tended to become as disorganized and permeable as mortal Christ’s ancient church. In contrast, embracing dominion theology, penal substitutionary atonement theory, and the real “sins of Sodom” explained in Ezekiel 16 leads churches to flourish like weeds.
The impossible position of holding together a sprawling legacy institution borrowing the name and authority of the world’s most vehement anti-instutionalist is that you see what Emerson observed,
“Every thing looks permanent until its secret is known. A rich estate appears to women a firm and lasting fact; to a merchant, one easily created out of any materials, and easily lost. An orchard, good tillage, good grounds, seem a fixture, like a gold mine, or a river, to a citizen; but to a large farmer, not much more fixed than the state of the crop. Nature looks provokingly stable and secular, but it has a cause like all the rest; and when once I comprehend that, will these fields stretch so immovably wide, these leaves hang so individually considerable? Permanence is a word of degrees. Every thing is medial. Moons are no more bounds to spiritual power than bat-balls.”
As a result, we keep building bigger barns and shoving our best capitalist exploiters in the leadership pipeline for the octogenarian hunger games, so we can find out what pet frustrations they been stoking quietly for 40 years. Because if 17 million people tell you that you can literally speak for God, then priority one is very reasonably a rebranding campaign to better brand ourselves with the name too sacred for Priesthood and entirely unfamiliar to the historical figure you’re acting on behalf of, but what the Hell was Gordon thinking?!?
Solve hunger? Speak and act on behalf the foreigner? No! Brand!
About the name change thingy – we just got back from our semi-annual stake conference, in which the first speaker, a member of the Stake Presidency, spent time admonishing us to continue observing former LDS President Nelson’s commandment to refer to this church by its complete name – or at least by including ‘Jesus Christ’ each time you refer to the church. So, in our little valley at least, that non-Mormon directive is not dead yet.
Thanks everyone for your comments. Sorry to not reply sooner. I especially appreciate that so many of you all clearly put more thought even into my slapdash analogy than I did. I hadn’t really thought about what might make a commandment sticky, but I guess I was just thinking something like member reluctance to change.
Also, Lynnette, it’s especially great to see you here at your old stomping ground! And Foobar, thanks so much for your kind comment! I appreciate that you enjoy my posts so much! Hopefully I can get on the stick and write more frequently.
I really wish that very old rule about no facial hair wasn’t so sticky. There us literally nothing about beards in the handbook, yet temple presidents keep enforcing it and our stake president lectures men with beards in every temple recommend interview. He also tells EQ presidencies that they should “set a good example” and be “clean-shaven”.
I haven’t read this blog in years and this is the first thing I read when I come back. Love it. I completely agree that tithing needs to be changed to more of a collection plate idea. I also think WoW will soften, but I think green tea will spur that as they want to engage more Asian Saints. I agree with another commenter that the beard thing needs to go in the unofficial cultural arenas. (I just heard of a man called to be a service missionary who was told to shave the ears he’s had for more than a decade. Nonsense.)
My observation is that sometimes these changes come in subtle ways that start with a General conference talk that mentions an R-rated movie or a caffeinated soda or a change in FSoY pamphlet…then it filters quickly to BYU and then to the church culture.
I also want to see the garment question dropped from the recommend interview. In this day, there is no excuse for a man to ask a woman how she wears her underwear. Or rather, there never was an excuse but now we are (rightly) sensitive to that.
Anon, agreed. It seems like a silly thing for the Church to be concerned with.
And Sizzle Wits, I’m so glad I could welcome you back with a post you liked! I like your idea of change filtering out from unexpected places.