Church Policy – Zelophehad's Daughters

When in doubt, leave women out.

Ziff30 November 20236 Comments

A few days ago, Peggy Fletcher Stack reported in a Salt Lake Tribune article that wards in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Relief Society presidents had been sitting on the stand during sacrament meeting, were told to stop this by the area president. She also reports that many women, both in the area, and in other places, are unhappy with the change. For example, over at the Exponent, Kelly Ann posted her letter to the area presidency, and pointed out that one of the people quoted in the Tribune article is also collecting letters to send.

I share the frustration of the women and girls quoted in the article. It’s sad that such a tiny step toward showing women in a position of authority was something that the area president felt the need to put an end to.

But I’m also utterly unsurprised at the area president’s response. It’s just another exhibit to add to the long list that shows that patriarchy is truly one of the core values of the Church. We might have documents like the Articles of Faith to tell us what our core values are, at least in theory. But what values does the organization of the Church exhibit? Statements like scriptures or proclamations tell, but our practices show much more clearly. And we have so, so many practices that show that the GAs have patriarchy as a default assumption. Men’s Church participation is assumed and requires no comment; women’s participation is unusual and requires consideration and explanation.

In Church Policy, Sin

Harm by Individuals, Harm by Systems

Ziff28 July 20238 Comments

What makes a particular action a sin? A simple definition might be that it violates one of the two great commandments to love God and love our neighbor. Violations of the first great commandment are harder to see (if my heart is full of hatred for God, how could you tell?), but violations of the second are typically easier. If I do something to harm another person, it’s interpersonal. It’s out there in the world.

Of course this doesn’t capture everything that gets labeled a sin. Why is it a sin for me to drink coffee? I’m not harming someone else. You might say that this must mean that it’s harming my relationship with God because he said not to. This interpretation makes the first great commandment a catchall for any sin where there isn’t harm to another person. They’re wrong because God said so, not because they actually cause harm (making them kind of like the legal idea of malum prohibitum, where an act is wrong because it’s prohibited, not because it’s immoral). Or you could also argue that things like drinking coffee are wrong because they’re doing harm to me, and the second great commandment says I need to love myself too. But I think this boils down to the same line of reasoning. We would call an action self-harming if it’s labeled a sin and it doesn’t clearly harm another person. The old euphemism of calling masturbation “self-abuse” used in some Church talks and publications springs to mind as an example.

In any case, in this post, I’m mostly just thinking about sins that violate the second great commandment, where one person causes harm to another. Our discussion of these sins in the Church typically focuses on the person committing the sin rather than the person harmed by it. I think it makes sense, because harming another person is an action that we can choose to do or not, so we’re at fault if we do it, while being the victim of someone else’s actions isn’t blameworthy. (Of course in some Church rhetoric, the question of who gets harmed gets turned backward, like for example in discussions of rhetoric, where male viewers feel like female clothing choosers are attacking them, rather than the way Jesus had it, where the blame falls on lustful viewers.)

But here’s the question: what if there are sins that have victim without any corresponding person doing the harming? For example, what if someone with diabetes dies because they can no longer afford insulin after the companies that produce it have suddenly and dramatically increased the price? There’s clear harm. But who’s to blame? A company’s salesperson who communicated the new price to the person? A company’s executives? Its shareholders? The head of the government agency that regulates drugs? Middle managers in the agency? The politician who appointed the head of the agency? The voters who elected the politician?

Or consider a less dramatic example. What if your ISP bill gets messed up and you’re double charged? What if you have to chat with an infuriating chatbot for 30 minutes before it agrees to pass you along to a human, and then you’re passed around a labyrinthine organization of call centers before you can get to someone who can fix it? It’s far less dramatic harm, but it’s still harm. Who sinned, that your interaction with the ISP is so painful, the front-line workers or the executives or the shareholders or the regulators or the voters?

In Church Policy, Tithing

Making Righteousness Easier

Ziff14 July 202315 Comments

In a devotional for young adults a couple of months ago, Dallin H. and Kristen M. Oaks urged them to, as a Salt Lake Tribune headline put it, “stop delaying marriage and start having kids.” They lamented that marriage is happening later, and that people are seeing having children as less crucial. They did bring up the problems of expensive housing and student debt that might be obstacles to early marriage and childbearing, but in response didn’t have much helpful other than to tell their listeners to have more faith: “Go forward with faith, and do the best you can in housing market circumstances less favorable than I and your grandparents encountered in our early years. And, especially, work to minimize student debt. In God’s plan we can have it all, but not in the sequence the world seems to dictate.”

I was thinking about this spiritual good of marriage and childbearing in comparison with a secular good, recycling. (I don’t know that I completely agree that marriage and childbearing are always a good thing, but just taking it as a given for now.) We’d all (hopefully) like to do what we can to save the planet’s climate and ecosystem so future generations can continue to enjoy the Earth. Recycling allows us to do a little part by simultaneously reducing the amount of new resource extraction that needs to be done and reducing the amount of space devoted to trash. Even if we want to recycle, though, unless we’re very wealthy, none of us can do it alone. We need social systems in place involving collection and processing of recyclables to make it possible. Laws and policies that facilitate recycling are making this secular good easier (or even possible) to do.

The Church doesn’t have the power of a government to make laws, but it does have power. It has the ears of its members, not to mention tremendous wealth. In the same way that government laws and policies about recycling make it easier to do, the Church could use the power that it has to make a spiritual good the GAs want to see happen easier to achieve. President Oaks mentioned the problem of expensive housing and education. Child care is also expensive. For the substantial fraction of Mormons living in the US, health care is also expensive, especially the process of delivering a baby, even if there are no complications. I appreciate that he acknowledged that things can be more expensive than they were for his generation, but I still think that without living it, it’s hard to fully appreciate. Heck, I’m in middle age, and I can’t even grasp the full weight of how expensive life is looking to be for my kids. There are a lot of economic disincentives to marry and have children, especially when you’re young. Anyway, my point is that waving at these issues with “faith” is little better than when people who love their guns wave mass shootings away with “thoughts and prayers.” The Church has the power to do something here to make righteousness easier.

The Church doesn’t have the option of using tax policy to change people’s incentives, but it does have a similar option in tithing policy. With the tremendous value of all its investments, the Church really doesn’t need to collect much tithing from its members to keep operating. GAs could easily re-define tithing. With a little creativity, they could do so even without having to back off from the 10% figure in the scriptures. They could explicitly ask members to tithe only on after-tax income. More radically, they could tell members to go back to the old version of just paying on their actual increase (and in times where their increase was negative, they would owe nothing). Or they could be more targeted and say if you have children in your household, you should reduce your tithing owed using some formula. (I’m sure they don’t want to get down in the weeds on this, but the formula could be super simple, like subtract one percentage point per child.) Most radically, they could just stop requiring tithing at all, and just tell members to donate what they felt was right, but that no minimum amount needed to be met to get a temple recommend.

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 Policy, Liturgy

Why no Christmas-and-Easter Mormons?

Ziff14 April 20236 Comments

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.

In Church Policy, GA's

Which Issues Do GAs Consider Unimportant?

Ziff11 May 202215 Comments

Here’s a quote from Jeffrey R. Holland’s talk this last conference:

Of course, in our present day, tremendously difficult issues face any disciple of Jesus Christ. The leaders of this Church are giving their lives to seeking the Lord’s guidance in the resolution of these challenges. If some are not resolved to the satisfaction of everyone, perhaps they constitute part of the cross Jesus said we would have to take up in order to follow Him. [emphasis in original]

I appreciate that he (obliquely) admitted that the GAs maybe don’t have unlimited time or energy to solve all the questions of Church doctrine and policy that face them. I think it’s interesting, though, to consider what problems they do and don’t consider important enough to address. It seems quite clear that the further removed an issue is from the GAs’ personal experience, the less likely it is they’ll consider it important, and the more likely they’ll just wave it away as “well, that’s your cross to bear.”

Here are some questions that I think should obviously be pressing on GAs’ minds, but that they seem largely unconcerned about:

How could the Church more welcoming to single people? Two speakers in April 2021 conference mentioned how many single people there are in the Church. Tellingly, M. Russell Ballard brought this issue up only after he was widowed and it became more salient to him. But is there any doctrinal innovation, or even any Church program, or even any rhetorical shift to try to help single people feel more welcome? Not that I’ve seen. It was a brief mention of the issue that appeared quickly and was gone just as fast. The Church remains a place for married people, and single people are an afterthought at best.

In Church Policy, COVID, Temple

“Temple patrons and workers are ASKED to wear face masks”

Ziff24 September 202115 Comments

I was happy to see the First Presidency’s letter this week where they asked temple workers and patrons to wear masks. But I have to admit that I’m really puzzled by the wording. They’re asking patrons and workers to wear masks? Why not require it? I mean, the Church owns the temples, after all. They can set the rules there. It’s not like with vaccination, where the Church really has no control, but which the First Presidency urged us to do just last month (and reiterated in this letter). Couldn’t they at least urge mask-wearing in the temple? Saying that people are asked to wear masks just sounds far weaker than I would have expected.

I worked in a couple of public libraries for a number of years, and in one, people were limited to checking out no more than five DVDs at a time. A sign next to the DVD section said something like “Please take no more than five DVDs.” Someone once asked me why the sign said “please,” because it made it sound like a request. We had the rule, so why not just say what it was? Anyway, I feel like the First Presidency statement brings up the same question. If it’s announcing a rule that people have to wear masks to go in the temple, the letter’s soft language is failing to communicate, because I’ve already seen people arguing online that they can go to the temple unmasked because this is only a request.

I think it’s stating a rule, but they just got carried away in softening their language. Here’s the full paragraph from the letter I’m taking the quote from.

As cases of COVID-19 increase in many areas, we want to do everything possible to allow temples to remain open. Therefore, effective immediately, all temple patrons and workers are asked to wear face masks at all times while in the temple. These safety protocols are temporary, based on COVID-19 conditions, and will be rescinded as soon as circumstances permit.

Here are reasons why I think the letter is making a rule:

It says “effective immediately.” If they were only making a request, timing wouldn’t matter, as not everyone would be expected to comply anyway. When they’re making a new rule, though, they need to be explicit about when it starts, so saying when it becomes effective signals that it’s a rule.

In Church Policy, Unrighteous dominion

How could the Church take unrighteous dominion seriously?

Ziff10 September 202113 Comments

I was in a ward once where the Gospel Doctrine teacher loved to quote from the end of D&C 121. You’re probably familiar with it; it’s the piece that talks about how priesthood authority shouldn’t be used to control people. Here’s verse 39:

We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion.

This is a bit of Mormon scripture that I like quite a bit. I’m (working on being) a feminist and I don’t like hierarchies, so this reminder of how easy it is for people holding power to use it in bad ways to control people they have power over seems like a really important one to me.

In spite of that, I never liked how the Gospel Doctrine teacher used the scripture. He never used it as a starting point for us to consider how unrighteous dominion might be a problem that we had seen or experienced or participated in. Instead, he used it as an excuse for ignoring any issues or questions with the Church. For example, he once told us that people pushing for women’s ordination were wrong because we have D&C 121, so unrighteous dominion isn’t a problem in the Church. I’m wondering if his problem wasn’t that he had watched G.I. Joe as a kid, and the line “knowing is half the battle” from its little morals at the end of the episodes had morphed in his head to “knowing is all the battle.”

This teacher’s misguided belief that if a problem is brought up in our scriptures it’s pretty much solved already got me to wondering how the Church could change to take the inevitability of unrighteous dominion more seriously. Because as it stands, the organization of the Church clearly agrees with the Gospel Doctrine teacher and not with me. If you feel like a ward leader is exercising unrighteous dominion, you can go to the bishop. The bishop who most likely called the leader, and isn’t likely to be sympathetic to you. If you feel like your bishop is exercising unrighteous dominion, you can have the same problem with the stake president, who similarly probably called the bishop. (And even if he didn’t, he has the power to call and release bishops, so he’s likely to think the bishop is doing a good job.) If your stake president isn’t sympathetic, well, as I’ve seen many Bloggernacle commenters say over the years, you can go to God and pray that he’ll soften their hearts, or perhaps inspire the GAs to contact them about it. It’s not a very good system for getting any serious issues addressed, but it does seem like a great system to keep people compliant and quiet, and keep any real problems from reaching the GAs’ ears.

In Church Policy, COVID

Did the First Presidency letter increase masking at church?

Ziff16 August 202118 Comments

Like many other people, I was very happy to see the First Presidency’s message last week where they urged members to get vaccinated against COVID and to wear masks. Sure, I can quibble with the timing (it would have been nice if they had said this months ago) or the wording (the caveat that masks are only urged “whenever social distancing is not possible” seems a little silly given that social distancing is pretty much impossible at church, when entering and exiting at the very least), but overall it’s excellent. It’s a welcome sign that the First Presidency actually does see themselves as running the Church, and they don’t intend to cede control of the American part of the Church entirely to the Fox News crowd.

I was really curious to see what effect the letter would have in my ward. First, some background: I live in a suburban ward in the American Midwest. It’s almost entirely white people. Politically, it strikes me as pretty middle of the road for wards I’ve lived in. As you’d guess, there are definitely more people on the conservative side, but there are also a smattering of Democrats. Among the conservatives, there are at least some old-school conservatives who really don’t like Trump, but there are also some who love him and his populist message of exclusion and hatred.

In Church Policy, Fun

Ten More Changes the Church Could Make and Un-make before Next Conference

Ziff4 August 20218 Comments

The Church has announced that the Saturday night session of General Conference will be held after all, although it’s not going to be a priesthood or women’s session, but another general session. I think it’s unfortunate that the net effect of the change will most likely be fewer women speakers. I am happy, though, to see Church leaders being willing to reconsider changes they’ve made, even after those changes have been made public, like they also did with the Manti Temple renovation. Of course I still have lots of things to complain about, like that I wish GAs would seriously consider larger changes, like how to spend the Church’s money or how to give the Church a more robust and representative leadership structure by extending the priesthood to women. And the constant tinkering really isn’t compatible with the obedience-demanding stance of the Church. I’m fine with the reality that Church leaders are feeling their way in the dark just like the rest of us, but I think it’s manifestly absurd when they demand absolute loyalty and zero questions or dissent while they clearly don’t know exactly what they’re doing much of the time either.

Mostly, though, rather than seriously considering what this change might mean, I wanted to go my more typical silly route and come up with a list of changes the Church might make and un-make before October Conference. If you have more suggestions, please don’t hesitate to add them in the comments!

In Church Policy, General Conference

General Conference, Now 20% Shorter!

Ziff8 June 202122 Comments

The Church announced yesterday that, starting with October Conference this year, the Saturday evening session (priesthood in April, women’s in October) will be discontinued. I have a few thoughts on this change, but they don’t really hang together at all, so I’m just going to list them.

I’m all for fewer meetings, particularly in General Conference. Ten hours of meetings over a weekend is a lot! I appreciate President Nelson’s willingness to tinker with Church practices and not just assume that the way things have been must be the way things will be.
As I read former Ordain Women board member Heather Olson Beal pointing out elsewhere online, it seems like this change can be traced to OW’s actions several years ago where women asked to be admitted in person to the priesthood session. In response, clearly in an attempt to take the wind out of OW’s sails, the next year the Church started broadcasting and streaming the priesthood session like it did other sessions. But now that this session is available to anyone, the Church’s announcement reasons, what’s the point of having it at all?
This change is being made because all sessions of general conference are now available to anyone who desires to watch or listen.
This argument seems odd to me. It says that the crucial characteristic that made priesthood session priesthood session was that it was closed, and no random people (especially not women, apparently) could listen in. I had always thought that what made priesthood session different was the content: there are talks there directed to priesthood holder that don’t really apply to non-priesthood holders.
It’s not at all surprising that with the ending of priesthood session, women’s session is also ended. It does seem like the “if it’s not closed, what’s the point” argument does not apply to women’s session, so that’s not a reason to end it. But of course, in a patriarchal church, it would be surprising if women got to do an extra thing that men weren’t doing. So the end of priesthood session also means the end of women’s session.
It seems inevitable to me that the ending of the gender-specific sessions won’t end speakers in Conference wanting to talk to only men or only women. This will just mean that these talks will now occur in the remaining general sessions. I’m guessing that there will be more talks aimed specifically at men than specifically at women, although perhaps this will be a good thing, considering how often talks aimed at women are about enforcing gender roles.
As Peggy Fletcher Stack and Scott D. Pierce’s article points out, this change will almost certainly lead to fewer women speaking in Conference, as the women’s session was typically a chance to hear from three women, even if few spoke in the general sessions. This graph shows the number of women (including one YW who spoke last year) speaking each Conference since 2010. Up until the women’s session and priesthood session started alternating in April and October, there were typically two women speaking in the general sessions, plus three more in the women’s session. (The graph includes the RS and YW meetings before they were official Conference sessions.) It seems likely that two women speaking per conference is the norm we’ll go back to. This change will flow through to the rest of the curriculum too, which is so much all Conference all the time now, and we’ll hear from hardly any women at all. I’d like to hope that this was an unintended side effect of the change, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if it was a very much intended effect.

In Church Policy, Feminism

Invisible (Mormon) Women

Ziff11 March 202119 Comments

In her book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Caroline Criado Perez documents and discusses what she calls gender data gaps. These are places where data that’s gathered from only (or mostly) men are used to make design or policy decisions that have bad effects on women because, on average they differ from men in consistent ways. Although she doesn’t ever gather them in a list like this, I think there are at least three different points at which data from women can be lost.

Sometimes data isn’t gathered from women at all. For example, a medical researcher might decide that women are too complicated what with menstrual cycles and possible pregnancy, so they study only men and then just assume that the results generalize. Or decision-making bodies that consist of all or mostly men use their personal experience to make policy decisions, without even considering that their experience might not be representative because of their gender. For example, Criado Perez discusses governments making decisions about snow removal and public transportation and even city design with an eye toward trip patterns of commuting to work and back home that is more common among men. In so doing, they ignore or downplay the importance of a pattern more common among women where they go to multiple destinations in one trip. This is especially common among people who care for children or the elderly, which are tasks that women do far more often than men do.
Sometimes data is gathered for both women and men, but isn’t reported in disaggregated form, so it’s not clear whether there are gender differences or not.
Sometimes data is gathered for both women and men and is reported disaggregated, but decision-makers are still ultimately unconcerned with the differences. This is generally the case for data on harassment of political office holders that Criado Perez reports, where women holding office are harassed more often and more seriously by their colleagues and even their constituents than men holding office are, but the response of heads of legislative bodies seems to be to tell women to toughen up rather than to do anything themselves to make harassment more difficult.
Photo credit: Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Reading this book got me to thinking about how gender data gaps might affect Church policies. Of course it’s obvious that many Church policies discriminate against women by design, for example the priesthood ban for women. But what the book made me think about is all the ways in which the Church maybe unintentionally makes policies that differentially affect women, and the decision-makers just aren’t very aware of it because they include no women (or if they do, the women know that their place is to not talk too much).

Another thing too is that in terms of the three points at which data on women might be lost that I’ve listed, the Church seems like it’s often stuck at what might be called step zero. That is, Church leaders are loath to admit that they need any data from anyone, men or women, because surely God will put into their minds everything they need to know, and they really don’t want to be troubled by input from rank-and-file members.

But that’s beside the point. What I’m going to do in the rest of this post is just list some Church policies and practices I came up with that are maybe not explicitly designed to give women a worse church experience than men, but end up doing so anyway. These are the types of things that, even without making major changes like ordaining women, could be improved if GAs (and in some cases even local leaders) closed their gender data gaps by getting more input from women.

The requirement for endowed members to wear temple garments is much more burdensome to women than it is to men. Although they’re roughly the same shape as men’s, women’s garments are less compatible with typical clothing options available to women than men’s are with typical clothing options available to men. And that’s to say nothing of issues like yeast infections, which the cisgender men among the ranks of the GAs aren’t going to be personally familiar with. (For much more on this issue, see Angela C.’s excellent post from several years ago at BCC.) Even if getting more women’s input only meant a softening of language around how consistently garments are to be worn, it seems like this would be an improvement.
Mothers’ lounges (or whatever the rooms are called in church buildings where women can retreat to breastfeed their children) are consistently too small, too poorly ventilated, too poorly furnished, and too frequently attached to bathrooms. Sometimes they’re non-existent. All this is anecdotal, but it seems like the pattern is so consistent that it clearly reveals a problem. If more women were asked to give input on building design, perhaps this could be fixed.

In Church Policy

A Monopoly on Exaltation

Ziff24 August 20205 Comments

I read a discussion in a Facebook group recently that touched on the use of Elder Bednar’s infamous “don’t choose to be offended” talk (the actual title is “And Nothing Shall Offend Them”) as an excuse for people to say or do offensive things. Anecdotally, it sure seems like this is the major use that this talk is put to. I’ve seen the talk referred to many times, but it has been a long time since I actually read it, so this time I did.

What struck me in reading the talk this time is that I feel like Elder Bednar is making perhaps a narrower point than I had thought. He opens the talk with a story about how, as a stake president, he loved to go with bishops in his stake to visit inactive members. He would listen to their stories, and then gently berate them for letting offense that they had experienced at church interfere with all the blessings they can get only from church, like the sacrament and the Gift of the Holy Ghost. He doesn’t say anything about the success rate he got from confronting people–I’m guessing he would have told success stories here if he had any–but the important point is that he isn’t telling us that they shouldn’t allow themselves to be offended in general. He’s telling us that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be offended in a Church context, because we’ll be missing out on unique opportunities that we can get nowhere else.

I have always thought this talk fit with other talks on interpersonal relationships, on issues like anger or forgiveness. But now I think it actually fits better with talks like Elder Ballard’s “To Whom Shall We Go?,” where he asks people leaving the Church where they will go to get the support and ordinances the Church offers. Or with President Hinckley’s less confrontational but similar message where he quotes a young convert who was facing ostracism from his family as saying “It’s true, isn’t it?” and then “Then what else matters?” Or with President Nelson’s recent talk where he tried to close the temple work for the dead loophole so people wouldn’t think they could get away with living church-free lives now.

Especially in light of these other messages, the underlying assumption of Elder Bednar’s talk is that the Church has essential things–ordinances, but also teachings–that simply can’t be had anywhere else. It makes sense if this is true, then, that no amount of offensive behavior from local leaders, or indeed from general leaders, is a good reason to leave. The Church holds a monopoly on exaltation, so people who want to be exalted had better be willing to put up with anything so they don’t risk losing their access.

In the world of money and markets, monopolists are often guilty of (or perceived as being guilty of) leveraging their monopoly power to get more money out of their customers. The Church isn’t designed to be a money-making enterprise (although there may have been some mission creep). I appreciate that there are many things that General Authorities probably could do given the Church’s exaltation monopoly that they haven’t. They could increase tithing. “Where else will you go?” they could ask. They could inflict all kinds of more onerous burdens on members. They could require monthly or weekly temple attendance. They could require bishops to review members’ tax returns to be sure they’re paying enough tithing. They could re-start a United Order, and require members to deed all property to the Church. I think they don’t do things like this because they don’t see them as necessary, and again, unlike a business monopoly, they’re not trying to exploit the monopoly. They’re just pointing out that it exists.

In Church Policy, Ritual, Sacrament, Sexism

When Institutional Sexism Infects My Home

Pandora17 March 20204 Comments

I am an infectious disease epidemiologist for a global diagnostic company that makes the leading test for respiratory pathogens, including a family of viruses known as Coronaviruses. You may have heard of them. It has certainly been an extremely stressful few months at work. But also just a stressful time, in general, for us all. There is a lot of uncertainty. We’re all anxious.

Around the world, individuals, families, cities, states and nations are taking action to stop the spread of the disease. People are staying home with hopes that the virus will be stopped at the door.

I am an active member of the church. My spouse and I both have callings and temple recommends. However, for many years our activity in the church has been dependent on our ability to stop the harmful aspects of the church at the door of our home. We are vocal feminists. We have different last names (gasp!). We will never hang the Proclamation to the Family in our home. My husband does not preside over me. We take turns picking who prays (anyone else think the tradition where the man picks the prayer giver is just the silliest thing?). We sing of and pray to both of our Heavenly Parents.(Among many other beliefs that would be eyebrow raising at best, membership-council-inducing at worst, to 99% of our ward.) Read More

In Church Policy

Different Way the Handbook Says “Don’t”

Ziff26 February 202027 February 2020

I’ve noticed that there are a number of different wordings used in the Church Handbook to say not to do something. Of course, these differences long predate the new Handbook released this week. It was just the release of the new Handbook that got me to thinking about it now.

Here are seven different wordings I’ve seen in the handbook for saying “don’t.” (I’m sure this list is not exhaustive. These are just the ones I found from a quick look at a few sections.)

Members don’t do X.
The Church/Church leaders does/do not encourage X.
The Church/Church leaders counsel against doing X.
The Church/Church leaders strongly discourage doing X.
Members should not do X.
Members must not do X.
Doing X is prohibited/not authorized.

In Church Policy, GA's

Discussion of the Name of the Church in Conference

Ziff13 September 20196 Comments

Last fall, after President Nelson made it a point of emphasis that he didn’t want the Church to be called the LDS Church or the Mormon Church, or for its members to be called Mormons, I wrote a post where I asked what this quick turnabout on the “Mormon” label meant for decision-making in the Q15. The theory is that they’re supposed to be unanimous, but this change, particularly so (relatively) soon after things like the Church’s “Meet the Mormons” movie and the “I’m a Mormon” campaign suggested to me that decisions are made by the Church President, and the others just serve as rubber stamps. I wasn’t alone in writing about this, of course. Many other people on the blogs brought up, for example, that Elder Nelson had given a talk on this issue in 1990, to which President Hinckley responded the very next Conference where he gently contradicted Elder Nelson and explained that he had come to peace with the common use of the nickname, and he simply hoped that Church members would strive to make it have positive associations.

After this 1990 back-and-forth, I thought the issue had pretty much lain dormant until President Nelson brought it up last fall, first in an announcement before Conference, and then in a Conference talk. But I’ve been reading through some Conference talks for an unrelated project, and I found that I missed a few related follow-ups.

First, then-Elder Nelson didn’t entirely drop his point after President Hinckley’s talk. In a 1993 talk given at the Parliament of the World’s Religions (that someone must have thought was pretty important, because it’s listed with the October 1993 General Conference talks), he said near the beginning,

I would like to speak of the organization I represent. I would like to speak of the institution and of the doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, sometimes known as the “Mormon” church. That is not its correct name, as many of you may know; it is only a nickname

And again, two years later in a Conference talk, he clearly wanted to bring the issue up again, but, unwilling to openly challenge President Hinckley, he instead slipped in this relatively large footnote to a pretty much wholly unrelated point in his talk. (The footnote is number 37, right after the phrase “for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”)

Speaking of correct names, we are reminded of a proclamation given by the Lord: “Thus shall my church be called in the last days, even The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” (D&C 115:4). He did not say, “Thus shall my church be named.” He said, “Thus shall my church be called.” Members have been cautioned by the Brethren, who wrote: “We feel that some may be misled by the too frequent use of the term ‘Mormon Church’” (Member-Missionary Class, Instructor’s Guide, Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1982, p. 2).

In Church Policy, Doctrine, Temple

(Tinkering Intensifies)

Ziff17 May 201911 Comments

When my sisters and friends started ZD way back during the Hinckley administration, I had an idea of how the Church worked that turned out to be false. I thought that the Church was clearly a slow-moving organization that would make a serious change only every generation or two. I figured that most of what they (we, as I joined only later) blogged about would be long-term issues on which the Church hadn’t changed its approach for decades.

My view turned out to be wrong because it turned out that Church leaders are tinkering with policies all the time. Just a few examples: They raised the bar on missionary service, making it harder to go on a mission, and then later they lowered the missionary ages. In response to Ordain Women, they started broadcasting the priesthood session of Conference. They added some of the women leaders to the Church-level committees. In response to (or in spite of?) Let Women Pray, they started having a few women pray in General Conference. In response to organized agitation from folks at BCC and fMh (and others, I’m sure), they clarified the policy on allowing young women to do baptisms for the dead while on their periods. In response to the Obergefell decision, they modified the Handbook to add the Exclusion Policy.

One thing I’m still unsure of is whether Church leaders were always tinkering with policies like this, or whether it was a new thing where they considered changes more quickly in the new sped-up internet-powered world. I’m kind of guessing the former, but I suspect people who know more Church history than I do will have a more informed answer.

Image credit: This is a combination of two images from clipart-library.com.

But what I really want to talk about is the accelerated tinkering of the Nelson administration. To me, he seems obviously far more willing to change things that he doesn’t think are working than any of his predecessors in my lifetime. Just last week, the Church released news of the latest change: the end of the one-year waiting period between civil marriages and temple sealings in countries where temple sealers are authorized to perform marriages. Of course before that there was the ending of the Exclusion Policy, the temple ceremony changes at the beginning of the year, the deprecation of the use of “Mormon” as a name for the Church or its members, the relaxed rules on missionaries calling home, the combining of priesthood quorums, and the revision of visiting and home teaching into the ministering program. And I’m sure I’m missing others.

In Children, Church Policy

Good, Good, Good

Ziff21 November 20187 Comments

When I started school at BYU, back in the 1990s, the school used to celebrate the day before Thanksgiving by bringing a bunch of wrecked cars onto campus and leaving them in various quads to remind us all to drive safely if we were traveling for the holiday. This wasn’t an issue for me, because my family lived nearby, but I recall thinking that if the university had really been serious about students’ safety when traveling over the long weekend, they would just close the day before Thanksgiving to make it easier for people to travel without having to make dangerous overnight drives.

I was reminded of this when reading President Oaks’s talk in the Women’s Session of this last General Conference, where he lamented that Church members are marrying later and having fewer children. He said that people are delaying marriage “until temporal needs are satisfied.” I think he’s making the same error that the BYU administration of the 1990s was making: he’s oversimplifying complicated situations where people face competing goods. BYU students of the 1990s, wanted to attend their classes and do well in school, but they also wanted to go home and see their families for Thanksgiving. Young people in the Church today likely do want to get married and have children, but they also face (in the US, anyway) runaway education costs that mean they’ll be paying for their own schooling for decades, high medical costs that make it ever more difficult to bear and raise children, and high child care costs that make it more difficult for both spouses to get all the education they can. It has often been observed on the Bloggernacle that the Church’s admonitions to marry young, have lots of kids, get all the education you can, and stay out of debt are impossible to satisfy all at once unless you have the good fortune to have been born into wealth.

In Church Policy, GA's

What President Nelson’s Talk Tells Us about Decision-making in the Q15

Ziff2 November 201818 Comments

President Nelson stirred up a lot of discussion with his Conference talk, “The Correct Name of the Church,” where he explained that the use of nicknames like “Mormon” for the Church or its members are a victory for Satan. As many people have pointed out (for example, Jana Riess), the arguments he made were similar to ones he made in an earlier Conference talk almost 30 years ago. As a relatively junior member of the Quorum of the Twelve, he found his arguments didn’t gain much traction, as President Hinckley gave a talk in the very next Conference where he embraced the use of the term “Mormon.” This time around, though, he’s in the top spot in Church leadership, so he’s getting things done. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir has been renamed the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square, for example.

One thing that really struck me about the comparison that shows that this issue has been on President Nelson’s mind for decades is what it reveals about the decision-making process in the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve. The D&C says that decisions made by these bodies must be unanimous. If this rule is followed, it means that then-Elder Nelson must have been on board with unanimous decisions made that followed President Hinckley’s approach of embracing and owning the term Mormon. It also means that all the Q15 members who were also on board with President Hinckley’s (and Monson’s) strategy have all changed their minds together, and are now on board with President Nelson’s view.

In Children, Church Policy

Let’s Support Breastfeeding Mothers and Children

Ziff16 September 2018

The folks at the Exponent have launched an action to request that Church leaders make a policy that mothers are permitted to breastfeed their children publicly in LDS churches. I think it’s deeply unfortunate that so many women who want nothing more than to feed their children–something that you would think the Church should be deeply supportive of–are pushed to use terribly inadequate mothers’ rooms, shamed, told they need to cover up and that they’re contributing to the porn problem. Seriously, we’re a church that appears to not be able to get enough of the idea of divine gender roles. Let’s join this action to raise the issue with leaders, both general and local, to ask them to put their policies where their rhetoric is.

The action is called “Let Babies Eat,” and you can read more at the Exponent or at the website for the action.