Zelophehad's Daughters

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.

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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).

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