ClobberBlog | Mormonism, Evangelical Christianity

Re #11- I know that in my experiences in the Provo Temple in the past 3-4 years, I have seen initiatory ordinances performed by women that appear to be much less than 40. I would assume that they are returned missionaries, childless young married women, or other single women that have successfully petitioned their bishops to attend the temple without a looming mission/marriage.

Fantastic list. Thank you!

I can confirm Kew’s comment on #11–I myself was an ordinance worker in the Provo Temple shortly after returning from my mission, ages 23-24, during which I performed washings and anointings on other women almost weekly. The only reason I had to resign was because life got busy (I got engaged, graduated and got a full-time job, etc) and I wanted to have more time to attend the temple as a patron with my future husband (weekly shifts of 5+ hours can wear you down). I was told I could return to working in the temple if I wanted to, that I’d just need to talk to my bishop and see if the temple needed more workers. However, once I had my son, I was told I couldn’t serve in the temple again until he (and any other children we have) turn(s) 18…or something like that. Just thought I’d give first-hand support.

Your list is intriguing, I must say. I have had a few issues of late with the “imbalance” and am still struggling to figure out what to do about it. I look forward to comments.

Jack, fabulous list. Great work.

Edje, I think your grasping at straws: “women aren’t marginalized because they’re women, they’re marginalized because they don’t have many leadership roles…because they don’t have the priesthood…because they’re women.”

But, even then, we’d have to make a case for “speaking time = value,” which is not obvious to me.

I’m also sort of surprised by this comment. I’d think the fact that speaking time = value is self-evident. Those who speak at General Conference are given an unprecedented forum to instruct and impart council and doctrine in an official, church-sponsored capacity. General conference addresses are often referred to as “modern scripture.” General conferences are hugely influential in the church. Perhaps you could explain why you DON’T feel the value is so obvious?

Katie:
The circularity is precisely the point. I’m not saying there is no marginalization, just that, as an argument, it’s redundant to bring up speaker sex ratios since under the current system priesthood is a prerequisite for most of the speaking roles at conference. On the list, instead of two items, it’s only one: women don’t hold the priesthood at present. My objection is to the logic, not the idea of marginalization.

As to “value”… Both the semantics and the argument logic are not clear to me. You use “unprecedented,” “modern scripture,” and “hugely influential,” all of which I freely grant go along with conference speaking. But, the issue from the OP is whether “women are really as valuable as men,” not whether they receive as much “prominence” or “prestige.” (These might be issues we want to talk about, but if they are, we should say so.) The uneven sex ratio is only half of what we’d need to argue (to convince me) that conference speaker time demonstrates that women are not as valuable as men to the church. The other half would be some justification for the idea that “valuing” _necessarily_ requires equal prestige in conference speaking time—and the justification would have to be distinct from the fact that women don’t hold the priesthood at present. With only the ratio disparity, we end up in either the no-priesthood or the sex-ratios-must-equal-one circularities.

To be clear, I’m not saying that increasing the number of women speakers and amount of time they occupy at conference wouldn’t be a good thing. I do, in fact, think it would and see no insuperable reasons why it couldn’t or shouldn’t. But, I don’t think adding more speakers would tell us anything about whether “women are really as valuable as men” to the church.

Jack:
Thanks for the response.

I have a hard time seeing how any case can be made that women play a “separate but equal” role.

I don’t claim “separate but equal” in the church. (I mean, really: only two or three women speak in GC. How is that equal?) I claim “distinct but equivalent” roles in the Plan of Salvation and different but all essential assignments in church. And I don’t care if they are equal or not. (And, since I don’t care about equality… whatever seems to be the best way to do business in accord with the scriptures, prophet, and Spirit is okay with me; that is “don’t care” ≠ “opposed.”)

1. Living men can be sealed to more than one woman due to death of spouse or temporal divorce. A living woman cannot be sealed to more than one man regardless of her circumstances. This was changed for a few years–I believe it was the late 1990′s. I know several sisters who were had been sealed to their husbands, were widowed, remarried, and were sealed to their second husband in the temple (because they were happier with their second husband than the first.)
2. Women only give two of the talks in General Conference; once in a blue moon they give three. True.
3. Women don’t have honorific titles apart from “Sister.” Not true. When I was a stake and ward RS president, the Bishop/ Stake President called me Pres. _______. I really didn’t like it. It felt too formal to me.
4. Priesthood sessions are longer and feature more speakers than Relief Society and Young Women sessions. Tradition, tradition, tradition.
5. A man always speaks last at the Relief Society and Young Women sessions, as the keynote speaker. It’s usually a member of the First Presidency and often the Prophet. I don’t have a problem with that at all. Women do not get to speak in the Priesthood sessions. That doesn’t bother me at all. Less meetings for women to attend. Yay!
6. Women leaders rarely get quoted in lesson manuals and church curricula. That is true in the Scriptures also.
7. Women have to have at least one male priesthood holder present in the vicinity in order to have a meeting. Men don’t have to have women nearby in order to have their meetings. You must be referring to Sacrament Meeting. Women can hold mid-week RS meetings without a man present.
8. All of the callings which usually go to women (Relief Society, Young Women, Primary) can technically be held by men. It doesn’t work the other way around. True.
9. All of the power to issue and revoke callings lies with men. Yup, except sometimes if they listen to their wives, they are more insightful in issuing callings.
10. Some wards bar women from giving the opening prayer at Sacrament meeting. That is changing. In many wards, women now give the opening prayers at meetings.
11. Almost all of the rituals are performed by and officially witnessed by men. Not in the temple initiatories.
12. Men are solely responsible for handling all financial business of a ward. Not in the early 1900′s. My mom was a ward clerk for years in her Nevada ward.
13. Church disciplinary councils are 100% male. True. I sometimes wish a stake and/or ward RS president could speak for a sister. Women who are rape victims, especially when they have been victimized by someone who is a Church leader, needs a female advocate!

Jack: First, nice coding!

Second, I appreciate your approach. Rather than simply sling mud, you take the time to carefully list your concerns and document them when possible. Where not possible, you are honest about your lack of documentation. One might actually accuse you of caring about truth!

One last note, fwiw, I could sort your list in four categories:

A) Points that may/may not be true but don’t concern me either way (which is not to say they should not concern you). #1,3,4,9(because I agree with Edje),11,12.

B) Points that are not true. #7, 8.

C) Points that are only true in rare wards; still worth discussing, but only in terms of “what is it about the Church that allows some people to think it’s okay to act this way?” #10.

D) Points that concern me. #2, 5, 6, 13.

Um, Carol.
Just for the record, women who are rape victims do not undergo church disciplinary councils. Your response was slightly ambiguous and I wanted to make sure that was said.

But I certainly agree that they need a female advocate to help guide them through their emotional process to feel safe again. I guess I always just considered that a given, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt to make it policy. Something along the lines of:

“If someone has been the victim of sexual abuse, they should be encouraged to seek professional counseling as well as seeking out leaders and advocates from their respective quorum or relief society.”
Suggestions?

Another anecdotal one which may not be true at all for most wards (and I would love to have confirmation that it is not widespread), but my girlfriend was in a ward where the young men got a YM budget and a Scouting budget in addition, so that they had twice the money for activities like trips to the mountains for snowboarding merit badges (she spoke up about that one and got some changes). Again, that might have just been her ward–it’s certainly not a church-wide policy–but I just thought I’d throw it out there along the lines of #10 as something that we should have a policy against.

Yeah, I’m really surprised by the poor apologetics in response to Jack’s well thought out post.

First, some general education on feminism. Except for hard-core 2nd Wave feminists from the 60s and 70s, VERY FEW feminists argue that equality = the same anymore. It’s a very outdated idea. These days, feminists are primarily concerned with equality of opportunity and imbalanced power dynamics that put women at a disadvantage.

So Rob, for you to argue that men and women are the same, and therefore it doesn’t matter who speaks in General Conference, misses the point entirely. The point isn’t that men and women are the same. The point is that women have nowhere near the same level of access as men.

This goes back to the discussion with Edje. Edje, you said (and Brian agreed): “I’m not saying there is no marginalization, just that, as an argument, it’s redundant to bring up speaker sex ratios since under the current system priesthood is a prerequisite for most of the speaking roles at conference. On the list, instead of two items, it’s only one: women don’t hold the priesthood at present.”

But whether or not women hold the priesthood is NOT on Jack’s list so there’s no duplicate complaint here. This isn’t a discussion on giving women the priesthood. It’s a discussion on how we can improve the power, status, and opportunity imbalances that exist in the church WITHOUT a major doctrinal shift. And giving them more visibility and a stronger voice in GC would be one of the fastest, most poignant ways of doing it, IMHO–no special revelation required.

Finally, as to the argument of “it’s just tradition” (which I hear a lot, BTW): I spent 18 months of my life in a foreign country asking people to give up unrighteous traditions and forsake all for the gospel. So we better step up and do the same. If you think the traditions are founded in truth and solid principles, then let’s hear it. But standing by traditions that marginalize women just because that’s the way those other guys did it is a poor rationale indeed.

I never have a problem appealing to the Bible, especially when it suites my pre-conceived notions. Maybe I’m really just a Christian fundamentalist at <3. 

Katie and Jack,
FTR, I don’t consider when people ask you to refine your arguments truly apologetic. I think I wrote something a couple of days ago on 
apologetics.

An excellent list of very concrete and real ways that the Church gives real signals about the subordination of women. I’m positive that most–if not all–of those signals are unintentional, and that none of the hierarchy of the Church consciously believes women are inferior. But that does not change the reality of those signals or the messages they send.

And… I think I forgot to mention: interesting post. Thanks for the analysis.

Tomchik (#24)

I did pull out my copy of the CHI. Page 85, as Jack said:

Someone please tell me Kari’s wrong (34). Otherwise, I have a cancellation to get with no sealing to replace it… (As some of you know, my rockstar of a DH is not LDS.) I don’t have a CHI to reference. Does anyone know if women’s cancellations require replacements?

CF, at least half of those who post on this blog have never come near the Mormon view of the iron rod, so telling them they aren’t faithful Mormons isn’t really much of an argument. In fact, they’ll make fun of you for it. I’m all for calling apostates apostates, but many who post here aren’t Mormon. It makes your comment a non-sequitur.

CF and Psychochemiker,
I’m active in the LDS church and yet as a woman I have some difficulties about where I stand in the Church. I think my difficulties and questions have merit. I’m glad that you are confident in where you stand, but can’t you leave room for others to get there without calling them apostate or on the road to apostasy? Just because people in the Church have questions doesn’t mean they are necessarily walking to the paths of darkness! So please keep your judgements to yourself, thanks.

I can’t tell which version of feminism I’m being exposed to until someone clarifies.

I prefer the feminism satirized by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her book, Herland which was a fascinating read, mostly because she depicts women who are nonplussed by the idea of a superior man, and her sharply critical assessments of both women’s and men’s fashions, which have served to exacerbate dimorphism, and gotten worse, since she wrote.

Regarding the sealing covenants, I suppose it’s worth reiterating that a sealing has efficacy only through the faithfulness of the people in the sealing. One is not “sealed to a deadbeat”, the deadbeat has abrogated his place by his behavior and isn’t part of the covenant. I think the Church routinely cancels sealings-to-deadbeats, as I have anecdotal examples from my own family to that end, but this is only done if another sealing can take place at the same time.

That way, the covenant is in force for all the people in the covenant who are still faithful *to* the covenant.

End apologetic.

Regarding meeting lengths and quotations in manuals, I don’t consider those metrics important at all: I think the Church could profitably move to a 2.5 hour block, 90 minute conference meeting lengths, and may find a way to profitably cancel both Activity Days and Cub Scouts, if doing so is a plus.

I maintain that #7 is nonsense, and wouldn’t dream of imposing such a requirement on a trip to the mall; your lay leaders misapplied a policy directed at certain overnighters, and created nonsense. It’s certainly present in the culture, but many things are present in the culture which are not present in the policy.

My experience has taught me just the opposite: I can’t count the number of times that my wife or daughters have met without a man supervising the meeting because it’s a regular occurrence. As in “weekly” or “more often than that”.

Regarding #8; I’ve read the CHI, which is not refuted by an an anecdote of a unit somewhere in the world misapplying the policy.

As to your laying responsibility on the Church for things its members do wrong, what do you expect them to do? The CHI is a very clearly written document, General leaders hold out training opportunities to local leaders on a regular basis.

Then, some local leaders ignore the policy. I had one Bishop who called a disciplinary council for a matter, and didn’t hear me say that a disciplinary council wasn’t required, even after I said it five times. He hadn’t read the CHI until the day of the council, where he read it aloud to all of us in the room and then realized his mistake.

You know (because I’ve said so elsewhere) that I think the Church is on a trajectory away from complementarianism and toward outward egalitarianism. Even so, I think the culture around the Church (you know, that thing which creates dimorphism in dress and grooming styles, and severely accentuates sexual differences between men and women) will have to actually become more egalitarian before the people in the Church will be able to move that way en “critical” masse.

And for what it’s worth, it all seems unfair to my 12 year old daughter, which leads me to wonder how, or if, she’ll make her peace with it.

Chelsea,

Imagine yourself as a child of such a second marriage as we are discussing. How would you feel if you were told that you are sealed to your mother and her former husband (who you have likely never met)? What blessings would that provide to you? What would that teach you about how the LDS view the value of your biological father?

“By contrast, men are allowed to start performing rituals at age 12.”

WHAT?? Young men AND young women can be proxy for the deceased in baptisms & confirmations, but both sexes can not perform any other Temple ordinances for the dead until they are endowed, which is rare before the age of 18.

I am a child of a couple who is now divorced. I was born in the covenant, and my birth father is no longer a member of the Church (as far as I know, haven’t checked officially, but he’s done some baaaad stuff).

A Seventy once explained “born in the covenant” in a meeting I was in. He said being born in the covenant is to be sealed to a right to celestial parentage. So we’re not really sealed “to” our parents in the sense of belonging or possession, but just guaranteed the blessing of a celestial family (obviously pending our own faithfulness)

Honestly, I have no problem that on paper I’m sealed to my Mom and birth father. I am content knowing that the same blessings are available to me as to anyone else born in the covenant.

Re: #11.

Women also officiate in the endowment (you only mentioned washings and anointings)

This was fairly progressive thinking toward women in the 1800′s, according to Richard Holzapfel. They could participate in the same ceremonies as all the men AND were able to officiate in some of the most sacred ordinances we offer.

You know what I would do if I were the adversary?

I would find a way to convince men that since they’re taller and stronger and their bodies don’t go through inconvenient cycles of weakness such as menstruation and pregnancy and childbirth and they’re the ones who do the penetrating during coitus, they are in fact superior to women and are meant to rule over women even in areas which have absolutely nothing to do with these physical, biological factors—like church leadership.

Then I would convince them that not only is that the way things should be, but God is the one who wants things that way and these things are all by God’s design. You know, instead of following Jesus’s example of loving those who were weaker than Him and willingly empowering them as co-heirs. We can’t have men doing that—heavens no.

Then I would have myself a good laugh and head back over to Nancy Pelosi’s office where I usually hang out.

Yup. That’s what I would do if I were the adversary.

I feel humans get so charged up with the way the system is set up that they overlook how the system is supposed to run. To many people want the roles to be switched or the system changed for their benefit. Could that be the reason why God destroyed mankind with a flood? Could that be the reason why he is going to destroy it by fire the next time?

I asked that same question myself after I joined over 11 years ago. I later realized that I was comparing the church to other faiths. I just found this article on understandingmormonism.org

Mormon Women and the Priesthood

There has always been a question in the world of how women fit into the Mormon Church. Worthy Mormon men are given the priesthood, but what are the women given? The world seems to look upon Mormon women as not equivalent to the men. Nothing is further from the truth, and there are countless examples and counsels given to the men and women of the church through the apostles and prophets.’ In the true Patriarchal Order man holds the priesthood and is the head of the household of faith, but he cannot attain a fullness of joy here or an eternal reward hereafter alone. Woman stands at his side as joint-inheritor with him in the fullness of all things. Exaltation and eternal increase is her lot as well as his. Godhood is not for men only; it is for men and women together.’1

‘The priesthood is…the power of God delegated to man by which man can act in the earth for the salvation of the human family’ (Joseph F. Smith, Mormon prophet).

‘The Lord has assigned to men the chief responsibility for the governing and presiding over the affairs of the Church and the family. They in turn are to use this sacred power to bless and benefit all members of the [Mormon] Church – men, women, and children’ (Brigham Young, Mormon prophet).
The priesthood is used to benefit the entire human family. Men have their work to do and their powers to exercise for the benefit of all the members of the [Mormon] Church…as it is with women. Women have their special gifts and are to be exercised for the benefit of the entire human family. Women in the Church have their own organization, the Relief Society, which blesses their lives, the Church, and all around them. It is the largest women’s group in the world with over five million members in 170 nations.

Men and women have different but equally important responsibilities in the home and the [Mormon] Church. Men have no greater claim than women upon the blessings that come from the priesthood. ‘The man holds the priesthood, performs the priestly duties of the Church, but his wife enjoys with him every other privilege derived from the possession of the priesthood. This is made clear, as an example, in the Temple service of the Church. The ordinances of the Mormon Temple are distinctly of priesthood character, yet women have access to all of them, and the highest blessings of the Temple are conferred only upon a man and his wife jointly.’ Also, in the temple, women have power conferred on them to perform certain ordinances for other women.

Everyone in the [Mormon] Church benefits from the priesthood, so each has a responsibility to honor and sustain the priesthood. In the Book of Mormon in Doctrine and Covenants 121:36 it reads: “…that the rights of the priesthood are inseparably connected with the powers of heaven, and that the powers of heaven cannot be controlled nor handled only upon the principles of righteousness.” Women are counseled to honor this priesthood, show respect to those that hold it and support it (meaning, to uphold, defend, to promote the interests or cause).

It is the husband’s responsibility to preside and provide leadership in the home. “In the perspective of the gospel, ‘leadership’ does not mean the right to dictate, command, and order. On the contrary, it means to guide, protect, point the way, set the example, make secure, inspire and create a desire to sustain and follow. Literally, the husband is to lead the way.”3

The father is the leader of the home and the wife is his companion and equal partner. They must work together to strengthen the family and teach their children righteous principles. As a woman fulfills her role as a companion/partner to her husband, she reinforces her husband’s position as head of the home and encourages family unity.4

The priesthood is from God to all His children. As each member honors that priesthood and develops Christlike attributes in their relationships with each other, the home and family strengthens.

1 “Mormon Doctrine”, by Bruce R. McConkie, pg 844;
2 “Priesthood and Church Government”, 1965, pg 83
3 “The Savior, the Priesthood and You”, Melchizedek Priesthood course of study, 1973-74, pg 172
4 “Family Guidebook” 1999, pg2