Church Life – Zelophehad's Daughters

Ideas I Accepted Uncritically

Ziff18 December 202418 December 20247 Comments

Janey’s recent post “Should We Make Life Easier or Harder? at W&T got me to thinking about a little story bordering on aphorism that I recall hearing a number of times as a kid and a teen in the 1980s. General Sunday School President Mark L. Pace recently told a version of it:

Photo by Muhammad Syafi Al – adam on Unsplash

President Pace particularly emphasized the importance of every member learning the gospel for themselves. He shared what he’s learned from watching baby chicks hatch during the years he’s spent raising chickens.

Hatching isn’t a simple process, he said. It sometimes takes 12 to 18 hours, with the baby chick resting between bouts of pecking the eggshell. And on a few occasions, out of concern for the bird’s life, he’s peeled away the eggshell for the baby chick.

“All I can tell you is that every time I have endeavored to do it for them, instead of them doing it for themselves, they die,” President Pace said. “They make it out, they may live for several hours. But there is something about the physical process of them coming out of the egg on their own that gives them the strength to stand up and walk and adjust to life outside the egg.”

Similarly, people must spiritually “hatch” for themselves, he said.

Even aside from his explicit analogy to spiritual development, I think the story gives a clear message that we need to worry more about being too soft than too hard. It’s better to err on the side of letting people suffer too much than on the side of coddling them too much. (Along similar lines, I remember a Seventy including the idea “Hard Is Good” in his Conference talk title a few years ago.)

What I find most striking about the story is that I hadn’t thought about it in decades probably before Janey’s post brought it back to mind, but it’s an idea that seemed so utterly logical when it was presented to me at the time that I just accepted it uncritically.

In Church Life, Communities

Connection or Control?

Ziff21 August 20242 Comments

In her book, You’re Wearing That?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation, the linguist Deborah Tannen points out a common issue in mother/daughter dialogue that becomes more prominent as the daughters age to adulthood: Mothers raise topics of conversation in order to maintain connection with their daughters, but daughters interpret them as trying to maintain control over them. The possible topics are many: who are you dating, where are you living, what are you driving, where are you going to school, where are you working, and on and on. Either party could be right. Mothers might in fact be trying to maintain some control in their daughters’ lives when daughters are perfectly capable of making their own decisions. Or daughters may be defensively pushing back when all mothers are hoping to accomplish is to know how their daughters’ lives are going. Or, most likely, something in between is true, with mothers being a little more controlling than they need to be (even unconsciously) and daughters being a little more defensive than they need to be. It makes sense that this connection or control question could be a fraught one especially for mothers and daughters (or any parents and offspring), given that parents are necessarily completely controlling of their kids’ entire lives when they’re younger, and in most cases, the kids’ entire lives are taking steps away from the parents.

In Church Life, Temple

Chapel vs. Temple

Ziff8 November 20235 Comments

The Church is unusual among Christian churches in having two different types of worship spaces, chapels and temples. Chapels are open to anyone, even if most people who participate are members. Temples are open only to members, and not even all members, but only those who have cleared hurdles of belief and commandment-following. Chapels are, at least potentially, at the center of community-building. We not only go to worship services there, but also to ward activities or activities run by organizations within the ward, like the Relief Society. There are even sometimes public-facing events in chapels, like blood drives or voting. In temples, by contrast, we largely do things “alone in one another’s presence,” to borrow a phrase from a BYU professor (who was advising us that movies didn’t make good settings for dates). Although there is a little more interaction in sealings and baptisms than endowments, for example, temples are far inferior to chapels as sites of building community.

As a heretic who’s on the outside of the temple, I still find a lot of value in the community-building possibilities of the Church. So I’m disappointed that since he’s taken office, President Nelson has shown himself to be far more interested in the church of the temple than the church of the chapel. For example, here’s something he said in Sheri Dew’s 2019 book about him: “The only buildings that are absolutely essential are temples. Stake centers and chapels are a luxury.” This was in the context of talking about making church more home-centered, so he might not have meant it to be quite as anti-chapel as it comes across here. But I’m still honestly struck in a bad way that he would refer to church buildings as a “luxury.”

To be fair, I can see why he might see less value in chapels. If his goal is to get people on the covenant path, only their baptism and confirmation take place in a chapel. After that, it’s all temple ordinances. Attending church in a supportive ward might be a nice to have, but it’s not going to make the difference in exaltation. President Nelson, like many of his fellow GAs, is also clearly deeply concerned with people’s loyalty to the Church. Chapel worship is all well and good in this area, as you’ll hear lots of rhetoric about how the Church is God’s one true organization, but the chapel doesn’t provide the opportunity like the temple endowment does for members to promise all that they have or ever will have to the Church. I can see how this makes the temple far better in President Nelson’s eyes.

And of course President Nelson isn’t just talk when it comes to valuing the temple over the chapel. He’s announced a huge number of temples, many of which have been started, and a few of which have even been completed. And on the chapel side, I was intrigued to see an analysis linked on the Mormon subreddit a few months ago, done by u/xanimyle, that shows the distribution of years the Church’s chapels were built. I’ve reproduced their graph below, and here’s a link to the original post.

In Church Life, Friendship

Friends at Church

Ziff28 September 20235 Comments

I was sitting in sacrament meeting recently and had a realization that while I’ve lived in my ward for a decade, and I feel like I know a fair number of people, if I stopped coming, there are only a tiny number who would notice. I don’t mean this in a woe is me way. More just I was thinking about making friends at church in general, and whether my experience is typical or not. Here are a few aspects of friendship at church I was thinking of, along with my brief thoughts. I’d love to hear your experiences, either related to these points, or related to points or issues I hadn’t even considered.

Separation — Church seems like a great candidate for being what sociologists call a third place, separate from the typical first two places where we spend most of our time, which are home and work. This aspect of church has definitely been a plus for me in making new friends beyond the people I already know in the first two places. Even though there has occasionally been a bit of overlap between people I know at work and those I know at church, it has always been small. And in some situations, I’ve even been fortunate to have church function as more than one place, in the sense that I’ve known non-overlapping groups of people in different church contexts. This has happened when I’ve known one group of (potential) friends through my ward and another group that I’ve played volleyball or basketball with. Also, I haven’t personally experienced this, but I know my wife has gotten to know people beyond our ward through book clubs and Relief Society enrichment groups (Is that what they were called, back in the 2000s?) that included women from multiple wards.

Breadth — One aspect of geographically assigned wards that I’ve seen discussed as a positive (I think originally brought up by Eugene England) is that it brings together people who might not otherwise choose to associate. A geographic area can include people of different ages, races, and income levels. In practice, though, I’ve pretty much stuck to getting to know people who are most like me. As a fairly educated middle-aged white man, I have mostly gotten to know other fairly educated middle-aged white men, even when my ward has included a greater variety of people. The people I’ve made friends with have been similar not only in age and race, but also in more peripheral characteristics, like the ages of our kids and our general income bracket. Of course, this pattern of who I’ve made friends with is clearly on me, as I’m hanging out with people I’m most comfortable with rather than pushing myself at all to know different people better, even when church at least opens the opportunity to me.

Depth — Of the people I’ve become friends with at church, I’ve only known a very few at any level of depth. I feel like in all the wards I’ve lived in, I’ve become friendly with quite a few people, at an acquaintance level, but like I was saying at the beginning, I’ve really only gotten to know a small number. I doubt that this is something specific to church, though. It’s probably more attributable to my general style of making friends, or perhaps even to people’s general experience of making friends. I feel like making new friends as an adult is hard, and this is something I’ve seen a lot of people comment on, in and out of the Church. One other point I think it’s worth making, though, is that I have enjoyed many of the acquaintance-level relationships I’ve had quite a bit. At least for me, it’s not a case of someone being a close friend or a waste of time. Acquaintances have made my life better.

I think the original source of this observation might be this tweet.

In Church Life, Church Policy

Disavowing old teachings could reduce leader roulette

Ziff14 June 202315 Comments

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.

In Church Life

Dual Relationships at Church

Ziff23 February 20235 Comments

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.

In Christmas, Church Life

Attending Church on Christmas

Ziff22 December 20227 Comments

The Church announced back in November that as Christmas falls on a Sunday this year, church will be a sacrament meeting-only affair. (The wording of the announcement actually makes me chuckle—it says “the only meeting Church members need to attend that day is sacrament meeting”—which kind of sounds to me like a suggestion that wards should still hold the second hour, it’s just that nobody should feel obligated to attend it.) Although my memory isn’t great, it appears from this Church Tech Forum discussion that they made similar announcements in 2011 and 2016 when Christmas fell on a Sunday, as well as in 2017, when Christmas Eve did. But church wasn’t consistently shortened for Christmas on a Sunday in previous years. I definitely remember attending all three hours of church as a kid in the 1980s when Christmas fell on a Sunday in 1983 and 1988, and I recall being desperate to get the boring church stuff out of the way so I could get home and enjoy my presents! I’m not sure what I was up to in 1994, but in 2005, again I remember attending all three hours of church, as my wife and I were visiting her parents. In 2010, I even blogged about the question, suggesting that maybe church should be shortened around the holidays. Maybe I should take credit for the Church deciding to listen and start doing so!

I saw Peggy Fletcher Stack share this New York Times article (This is a gifted link to the article, so you can read it even if you don’t subscribe.) about different ways Christian churches are handling Christmas on a Sunday this year. According to results of one church’s survey, the percentage canceling church entirely is up five percentage points (from 11% to 16%) since this was last an issue in 2016. I really liked this summary point from Timothy Beal, a religious studies professor who was quoted in the article:

Christmas morning and Sunday morning are sort of in tension with each other. Most people who are churchgoers think of Christmas morning not as a religious time but as a family time: stockings and brunches and staying in your pajamas until midday or later.

Anyway, considering the question again, I had a few thoughts. They don’t really hang together, so I’m just going to make a bulleted list.

Christmas church isn’t a big deal for us because we Mormons don’t follow a liturgical calendar. We don’t have particular different services for any holiday. Not Christmas, not even Easter, the centerpiece of Christian celebration. (Well, maybe Mother’s Day.) Sure, individual wards and branches can decide on their own to have a more music-and-scripture focused sacrament meeting on or around Christmas, and in my experience, many do, but that’s up to them. There’s nothing stopping a bishop from assigning speakers to talk on the City of Enoch or the Word of Wisdom this Sunday.

In Church Life

What types of questions might differentiate types of Mormons?

Ziff31 October 202231 October 20224 Comments

I was intrigued by a guest post at W&T a couple of weeks ago where an anonymous poster shared a question from a survey the Church was doing that invited respondents to categorize themselves as one of five types of Church members. (These appear to be unrelated to Robert Kirby’s five types of Mormons.) Here are the five types. Note that I’m dropping the edits between the February and October versions shown in the W&T post and just going with the October version.

I am committed to the gospel, but personal spirituality is more important to me than being institutionally religious. I may attend worship services regularly, but I don’t feel obligated to attend every meeting. As a Christian, I value being open-minded, fair, and tolerant.
I am committed to the gospel, and the Church plays a central role in my life. I believe all of its teachings. I usually read my scriptures daily. I think members should be strictly obedient to the counsel they receive from their priesthood leaders.
I primarily belong to the Church because of family, tradition, culture, or community. I usually enjoy participating in the Church socially, and feel that God rules more by love than by fear.
I am generally less interested in religion and/or spirituality. Even though I may believe some Church teachings, they don’t play a large role in my life. I don’t attend church as often as other people do. Sometimes I have been frustrated by the impact of religion on society.
I am committed to the gospel, and the Church is important to me I try to follow its teachings and do the things I’m supposed to, balancing with life’s other priorities. I tend to focus on practical applications of the gospel that are most relevant to my current life and family situation.

What most surprised me about this is that the survey apparently just straight up asked people to categorize themselves. This seems way out of the norm to me for how social science questionnaires work. I mean, I understand that companies, and I guess churches, might make profiles of common types of their customers or members. But it seems much more conventional to me that instead of asking people to directly categorize themselves, a researcher would ask them a bunch of far simpler questions, and then aggregate the responses by looking at which ones correlate with each other and come up with the types without showing them to the people taking the survey. If you’re familiar with the problem of double-barreled questions, which ask more than one thing at a time, these are like ten-barreled questions.

I strongly suspect that that’s what the Church researchers originally did. And that got me to wondering what questions they might have asked to try to get at types of Church members. In this post, I’ve come up with a list of questions that I hope or wish they asked, and that of course I’d love to see data on for a large number of Church members to see if types of Mormons fall out like I’d expect.

Beliefs

How strongly to you believe in each of the following Latter-day Saint doctrines?
Response options: Don’t believe at all to believe completely

God lives.
God loves us.
God cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance.
Jesus lived a perfect life.
Jesus Christ atoned for our sins.
The early church established by Jesus fell into apostasy.
Joseph Smith restored the Church.
Prophetic authority to lead the Church has been passed in an unbroken line from Joseph Smith to Russell M. Nelson.
The Book of Mormon is a translation of an ancient record of a people who lived in the Americas.
The Book of Abraham is a translation of an ancient record written by Abraham.
We lived in the pre-mortal existence before our life on earth.
There is life after death.
Our place in the life after death will depend on the kind of life we have lived.
Our place in the life after death will depend on whether we have performed the required ordinances (or someone else has performed them on our behalf).

In Church Life

Well done, good and faithful youth leaders

Ziff9 March 20226 Comments

All the discussion about Brad Wilcox’s awful talk recently led me to thinking, because he was addressing teens, about some of the teachers and leaders I had when I was that age. Unlike my sisters Lynnette and Kislilili, who attended Education Week religiously, and who as a result had the good fortune to hear all kinds of space doctrine from CES people like Brother Wilcox, I didn’t participate in any church activities outside our ward. In fact, I didn’t participate in many activities in our ward, for that matter. I did attend church every week, along with the rest of my family, and as a boy, I participated in passing and preparing and blessing the sacrament. But I skipped nearly all weekday activities, as they were too wrapped up in Boy Scouts, which I didn’t enjoy. All that being said, though, I’m remembering quite a few good experiences I had with leaders and teachers.

I was a difficult teenager. I was fairly bright, but I was constantly hyper-aware of my many shortcomings, and I figured that everyone else was too. As a result, I was very prickly and defensive and I’m sure not easy for my teachers and leaders to relate to. In spite of my general crabbiness at the time, I have several leaders who I remember fondly who said or did helpful things. Not all of my leaders and teachers were good, but really the majority of them were. I appreciate, especially in retrospect, thinking about what a hard kid I was, the effort they put in to making my church experience better.

A seminary teacher once speculated in class that half of the Church would make it to the celestial kingdom. This completely blew my mind. From a young age, I had absorbed the idea that the celestial kingdom was only for people who were perfect, who kept 100% track of all their sins and repented of all of them perfectly. It was quite clear to me that the celestial kingdom was an unobtainable goal for me, probably only open to GAs and their families, so I was just hoping for the terrestrial rather than the telestial kingdom. In other ways, this teacher wasn’t particularly focused on grace or hope or anything, but this one offhand line made me think maybe I could hope for something good in the afterlife.

In Church Life, Church Meetings

Back to Church Wishlist

Ziff22 May 202022 May 202011 Comments

The Church released guidelines a couple of days ago for how returning to church meetings will look. Given how quickly the Church acted in closing temples and suspending church meetings as the COVID-19 pandemic started, I’m disappointed that these guidelines don’t seem to take it all that seriously. This post is a laundry list of comments on the Church’s guidelines and a wishlist of guidelines I would like to see before I’d be really comfortable attending church in person again.

Greetings

Mormons are a handshaking people. Sometimes we’re even huggers. These types of greetings aren’t safe with the coronavirus on the loose. The Church’s guidelines do mention this, but only in the context of people known to be sick: “Avoid close contact with people who are sick (this may include avoiding shaking hands or other customary greetings).” This seems to overlook the entire problem we’re facing, which is that people who appear well may be carrying the virus! I wish they would have said more generally something about not engaging in greetings that involve touching other people, and suggesting touchless greetings like waves or bows in their place.

Sacrament

The guidelines suggest that people sit only in every other row in the chapel so that the sacrament can be passed to everyone directly. This is a good step, but I don’t think it goes far enough. A single symptom-free carrier priest could still infect an entire ward in a heartbeat. I like the idea I’ve seen several people suggest of having people bring their own bread and water. The priest would say the sacrament prayer like usual, but it would be blessing the bread and water people already have with them. This would be in keeping with the Church’s statement about the prayer-giver and the emblems having to be in the same location.

I suspect, though, that Church leaders wouldn’t go for such a solution, because it would require possibly non-priesthood-holders to prepare the sacrament, in whatever sense of the word prepare. So I have a more radical solution that is completely in keeping with the guidelines. How about if we have someone stand at the pulpit and say the sacrament prayer, but not to bless any emblems, but rather just to remind us of the sacrament and help us look forward to a time when we can take it again and recommit to live our covenants? This is precisely what the April document “Directions for Essential Ordinances, Blessings, and Other Church Functions” already recommends for people in “unusual circumstances” who don’t have access to the sacrament. Well, now we’re in the unusual circumstance of not being able to take the sacrament together safely, so how about if we put it on hold until we can?

This would take a forward-thinking bishop, but a side advantage of this setup would be that women could be the sacrament prayer readers some weeks. Remember that there’s nothing actually being blessed. It’s just like when individual people read and ponder the sacrament prayers at home, only now we’re in the same room, so we’re having one person read aloud for efficiency. As a believer in the need for women’s ordination, I love the idea of normalizing our hearing the sacrament prayers spoken in women’s voices.

In Church Life

Pregnancy Prophets!

Guest10 January 20204 Comments

This guest post comes to us from Josiah of the blog Josiah Reckons.

We love babies at our church! Our community is excited when someone in the ward is going to have a baby. People are quick to congratulate and offer support.

My wife and I had three children while in our 20’s. People gave encouragement, clothes, toys, food, and support in many other ways. Our church can be very supportive of couples with children.

Specious Signs

In our excitement, we love to talk about pregnancy and babies with expecting parents, but we can get carried away in our enthusiasm. Sometimes we start to think we are pregnancy prophets. We think we are seers seeing the signs of the times. And sometimes we say things that lead to awkward revelations like “Not Pregnant!”.

Being sick last week, and bloated this week is not the same as being pregnant. Gaining a little weight is not the same as being pregnant. Not bouncing back to pre-pregnancy weight ‘fast enough’ is not the same as being pregnant again. Working a couple of weekends and then showing up to church looking tired is not the same as being pregnant. Use your imagination, there are lots of possible reasons a person might look similar to someone in the early stages of pregnancy.

In Church Life, Conversion, Faith

A Faith for This Life

Lynnette14 April 20194 Comments

My decision to convert away from the LDS church was undeniably overdetermined. So many different factors; so many different threads. Some of them, I suspect, could have sparked the decision all on their own. And like so many life narratives of momentous events, already I note that I tell different versions of it at different times. The story is never quite the same. I imagine that I will continue to make sense of it all in new ways and with other perspectives as time goes by. So I can’t really say of any particular factor, this is the one thing that led to it all. However, when I look at major issues, one that I see being very deeply rooted is that I hit a point where I desperately wanted a religious tradition that had something to offer in this life, and not just the next one. Read More

In Authority, Church Life, Personal Narratives

Finally Leaving

Lynnette7 April 20197 April 201919 Comments

I still remember a Sunday when I was a young teenager, when the bishop felt impressed to get up at the end of sacrament meeting and share some counsel. I don’t remember any of the specifics of what he said. But I remember how he concluded his talk: in a voice of utter certainty, he said, “This is the will of the Lord for this ward.” And I loved that he said that. It made me feel so safe. God was aware of and interested in our ward, so tiny in comparison to the great vast world. God would send direction through priesthood leadership about even small decisions and issues. Weren’t we lucky to have that, while other people had to deal with uncertainty and doubt. We had a sure connection to God. Read More

In Church Life, Depression, Episcopalians, Liturgy, Mental Health

Evensong

Lynnette29 January 201929 January 20195 Comments

When I was in the hospital a few months ago, I missed church on Sunday. Obviously I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter; I have yet to see a psych ward that would let you out for a few hours to catch a church service. (They’d probably be especially nervous about Episcopal services, come to think of it, with all those candles.) But I was a little surprised at how sad I was to miss even one week. Since I’d walked into my local parish in February 2017, thinking at the time it was just for a temporary change of pace, I had not gone a single Sunday without attending Episcopal church somewhere. Even when I turned into a somewhat manic church-hopper later that year, and tried to visit at least one new church every Sunday, the possibility of skipping Episcopal services was simply never even on the table. It had become too much an essential part of the rhythm of my life.

That Sunday in the hospital, I tried to look on the bright side—I’d been wanting to see a religious service in the psych ward, and indeed I got to go to one. It was very low key. A chaplain came and had a small group of us read a few things, and then talk about them. The predictable result was that we spent a lot of time listening to the not always coherent thoughts of two patients who always had a lot to say. I was sorry I didn’t get a chance to talk to the chaplain more; she was warm and thoughtful, and seemed like an interesting person. I definitely appreciated her efforts. But I also thought about how only a mile away, my parish was holding its usual Sunday services. It was a blunt reminder of how much you’re cut off from the rest of the world in a place like that. The next Sunday, when I walked into church, being in the familiar building again actually made me emotional.

In Belief, Church Life, Statistics

Are Mormons More Homogeneous in Belief than Members of Other Churches?

Ziff6 March 201811 Comments

Since she started attending church with the Episcopalians, I’ve heard my sister Lynnette observe that members of her new church appear to have a much broader range of beliefs than Mormons do. I guess I had never really thought about this, but if it’s true, this seems like maybe it shouldn’t be too surprising. There is lots of pressure to conform in Mormonism, all the way from scriptures that have Jesus saying “I say unto you, be one; and if ye are not one ye are not mine” to talks that exhort members to set aside the cultures they grew up in to join “the gospel culture.” And of course, this doesn’t even touch on the pressure at the local level to conform. Consider, for example, the immense backlash faced by women who participated in the “wear pants to church” actions a few years ago. They were not even going against a rule of any kind, but rather violating a norm and standing out, and this made a lot of rank-and-file members appear to lose their minds. I don’t have a very good sense of the Episcopal Church in general, but I’m guessing that, like many American Protestants, they are simply less top-down in their structure than Mormons are, so there’s more room for differences of opinion or even belief.

Really, though, what I thought would be even more interesting than reasoning out why or why not Mormons might be more homogeneous in belief than members of other churches, would be to see if there were any empirical evidence of this difference. It occurred to me that a great place to look would be the data gathered by the Pew Research Center in their Religious Landscape Study. It’s a US sample only, so it misses the larger fraction of Church membership that lives elsewhere, but it does represent the largest single concentration of Mormons in one country. I looked at Pew’s 2014 data. As these data are a few years old, they’ve already been discussed quite a bit on the Bloggernacle. I am coming at the results from a new angle, though. Rather than focusing on the particular answers respondents gave, I am interested in how similar the sets of answers are for members of the same church, regardless of what the particular answers are.

In Church Life, Lent, Suffering

Penitence: Some Reflection on Lent

Lynnette14 February 201814 February 20183 Comments

When they asked us about the meaning of “penitent” at a church group I was attending the other night, I have to admit that the first thing that came to mind was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, when near the end of the movie Indiana is going through various obstacles to get to the Holy Grail. The instruction is that “only the penitent man will pass,” and at the last minute, he realizes he has to kneel in order to avoid having his head chopped off. So when I hear “penitent,” I think, “be humble before God or be decapitated,” which seems like potentially useful information, especially if I ever go on a religious quest that involves elaborate traps.

In Change, Church Life, Discipleship

Calling You to Do Better Rather than Decimating You

Lynnette6 February 20186 February 201810 Comments

I was sitting in church a few weeks ago and noticing how several of the scriptural texts were about God calling people: Samuel hearing a voice and wondering what it was, Psalm 139 (“Lord, you have searched me out and known me”), and the encounter of Jesus with Nathanael. As I was listening to the sermon, which also touched on these themes, and emphasized God’s call to each one of us, and the need for our community to make space for everyone to become what God is calling her or him to be, a question came to mind which I’ve often pondered: how do you discern between a call or a challenge that pushes you in healthy ways, make you grow, and brings you closer to God—and one that simply beats you down and leaves you broken? Read More

In Baptism, Church Life, Conversion, Episcopalians

Getting Baptized

Lynnette31 January 201831 January 20183 Comments

I didn’t actually have to get baptized as part of my conversion. The Episcopal church doesn’t have a clear policy on what do with Mormons—while Catholics and some Protestants have ruled that Mormon baptism is invalid and converts from Mormonism must be baptized, Episcopalians have been rather less definitive. There are certainly LDS converts to Anglicanism who’ve made the religious transition without being baptized (perhaps most notably a former Episcopal bishop of Utah). When I first started playing with the idea of converting, I figured I’d do it via confirmation only; I liked the idea of holding on to my Mormon baptism as a way of maintaining continuity in my religious journey. Read More

In Church Life, GA's, Politics, Prophets

Whither Mormonism?

Lynnette17 January 20186 Comments

Two Mormon-related events in the past week have shaken me up a little. On one level, neither of them were particularly surprising—but on another, I found them both unsettling and at least a little unexpected. The first was the release of the Gallup poll which found that the Mormon approval of Trump was, at 61 percent, the highest of any religious group surveyed. The second was the decision of incoming church president Russell M. Nelson to move Dieter F. Uchtdorf out of the First Presidency and replace him with Dallin H. Oaks. I also found the comments made at the press conference about the leadership transition, especially the ones about women, to be quite jarring. And I’ve found myself asking: whatever has happened to my church? (Yes, I know that it’s not technically mine anymore, since I’ve found a new religious home. But it’s still the church I grew up in, the church that shaped me. I don’t feel all the way disconnected from it.) Read More

In Church Life, Faith

A Faith Less Angsty

Lynnette19 December 201719 December 201714 Comments

For most of my life, my religious beliefs have been both deeply meaningful to me, and a source of intense turbulence. I agonized over my relationship to Mormonism for decades, over what it meant to stick with a tradition that did things I so deeply disagreed with but which was such a profound part of my identity, and had played such a foundational role in shaping my spirituality. I don’t know how many hours I spent writing about those questions, talking endlessly to friends and family about them, even bringing them up in therapy. And because of all that, I think I developed the idea that genuine faith was meant to be difficult, and by “difficult” I meant, something that regularly drove you crazy.