This episode we bring on guest scholars Taunalyn Rutherford and Armand Mauss to discuss important news from the first half of 2018:
- the Church separating itself from the Boy Scouts,
- changes to home and visiting teaching and the priesthood quorums,
- the release of Church policy changes for interviews and abuse,
- Pew survey highlighting Mormon attitudes toward LGBT and same-sex marriage issues, and
- the selection of two new Apostles
Hosted by Patrick Mason and Morgan McKeown
MORGAN: Thank you for joining us on our first episode of Mormonism Magnified. My name is Morgan McKeown, and with me is my co-host Patrick Mason, who is the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University where he is also the Dean of Arts and Humanities.
PATRICK: Well it’s great to be with you Morgan, and I’m excited for the launch of this podcast. I think this is going to be a great opportunity to talk about some really important issues.
MORGAN: This episode we are going to be talking about some of the important Mormon news in the first half of 2018, the topics that have grabbed news headlines pertaining to Mormons and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We’ll be discussing:
- the Church separating itself from the Boy Scouts
- the recent changes to home and visiting teaching and the priesthood quorums
- the release of Church policy changes for interviews and abuse
- the recent Pew survey highlighting Mormon attitudes toward LGBT and same-sex marriage issues, and
- the selection of two new Apostles.
MORGAN: We’re joined today by two guest scholars, first Taunalyn Rutherford…
TAUNALYN: Hi! Thank you for including me in the conversation.
MORGAN: Taunalyn is currently an adjunct faculty member in Religion at BYU. She was also a student in the Claremont Mormon studies program, graduating in 2017 from Claremont Graduate University with a PhD in History of Christianity and Religions of North America, but with a dissertation on Mormonism in India…
TAUNALYN: …I also became enamored with the religions of India, so approaching the topic of religion in India, and specifically Mormonism in India, was very interesting to me as I started my PhD.
MORGAN: And our second guest, we have renowned Mormon scholar, Armand Mauss,
PATRICK: Armand is one of the senior statesmen and senior scholars within the field of Mormon Studies. He was a longtime Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Washington State University, he was Chairman of the Dialogue Board of Directors, the author of many important books, some of the most important books in the field of Mormon Studies. And he was absolutely integral in the formation of the Mormon Studies Program at Claremont Graduate University. So it’s my pleasure and honor to be friends with Armand and to have him on the program.
ARMAND: Always nice for an old professor to get to talk again.
MORGAN: So welcome to our guest scholars, let’s jump into the first topic.
CHURCH SEPARATING FROM BOY SCOUTS
MORGAN: The LDS Church recently announced that it was separating its Young Men’s program from the Boy Scouts. This made national news in the United States, for example the New York Times ran the headline, “Mormon Church Ends Century Old Partnership With Boy Scouts of America.”
PATRICK: Armand, you are one of the top scholars of 20th century Mormonism, just how important was that relationship between the LDS Church and Boy Scouts during the 20th century? What did it mean for the Church?
ARMAND: It was a really important program up until last the last 20 years or so of the 20th century. In my own life, for example, it was very formative. I got leadership experience I would not otherwise have gotten. And it provided opportunities for great camaraderie among the boys. More to the point, in those earlier days, all the boys seemed to enjoy it. There was a lot of anticipation to going into Scouts. So it was really unusual to find a boy that was not interested in scouting. That began to change during the time that my own sons were in Scouting. Most of my sons became Eagles but with a lot of kicking and screaming and pushing and shoving.
PATRICK: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point Armand. I think about my own experience growing up. I grew up in a family of four boys, and we always joke that my mom got four Eagle Scouts. We had a family rule that you had to get your Eagle Scout before you got your driver’s license. And so there was a lot of family pressure, and a lot of it became part of this “machine” that Mormon Boy Scout troops were in order to produce Eagle Scouts.
TAUNALYN: We joke that one of my sons “accidentally” got his Eagle. But sometimes there was a conflict of interest, I felt, between the Scouts and the Church. And which “religion” so to speak was going to win out. I think you could see that divergence in terms of what was important.
ARMAND: The program just came to seem less relevant for boys, and for a long time it’s been kind of a strain in the church to make the scouting program work for all boys, because a number of boys in the Church, while otherwise faithful to the Church, have not been interested in what the scouting has to offer.
PATRICK: My sense is also that the century-long relationship between Boy Scouts and the LDS Church was great for Mormonism in part because of the respectability that Boy Scouts brought to the Church. I mean, you don’t get much more mainstream America, Norman Rockwell, than Boy Scouts. And that’s what Mormonism was striving for in the 20th century to gain that kind of respectability. By the turn of the 20th century, and now in 2018, I don’t think Boy Scouts carries that same cultural cachet. Whereas on the other hand, Mormonism has grown and matured. I don’t think it needs Boy Scouts in quite the same way that it did in the mid-20th century to prove its American-ness. And if anything, I think the church wants to prove its global identity, and that it’s not just an American church.
MORGAN: Some of the news organizations have highlighted that there were various issues upon which the Church and the Boy Scouts were diverging. For instance, the Boy Scouts had recently allowed openly homosexual Scout leaders. They had also allowed girls to be part of the program, and then implemented policies such as handing out contraception at their National Jamboree. But it sounds like there were a lot of other reasons, perhaps in addition to some conflicting moral perspectives, why the timing would be right for the Church to look for a separation.
TAUNALYN: The news media has made this a lot more about the LGBT issues and some other things surrounding this. But I think something to highlight here is the context of the global Church, and the Church has said that its desire is to instigate programs for youth that are translatable across countries and cultures. Also, the resources that go towards Boy Scouts can be reprogrammed and given to the global Church rather than just those in North America. And, then of course equalizing the resources of the programs between boys and girls. Although it keeps them separate, they can focus more on the mission of the Church rather than the mission of Boy Scouts. So I think it’s a very welcome program change.
PATRICK: I think in the last generation too that there’s been a realization that the level of recognition given to boys and girls was very different between the young women’s program and the Boy Scouts. The Boy Scouts had all these elaborate ceremonies and award ceremonies especially for the Eagle Scout, the Court of Honor. Whereas young women, when they achieved their medallions, which arguably requires even more work than the Eagle Scout, they got 10 seconds of recognition in Sacrament meeting. And so I think this is going to be an effort by the Church to create greater parity between not only resources, but between achievement and recognition that teenage boys and girls get within the Church.
TAUNALYN: That’s a great point.
ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGES: MINISTERING AND ELDERS QUORUM
MORGAN: Let’s jump to the next topic here: the organizational changes that were announced at General Conference. And specifically, the two changes: first is the Ministering program to replace Home and Visiting Teaching. And second, the reorganization of Priesthood Quorums from two quorums, an Elders Quorum and a High Priest’s Quorum, into a single Elders Quorum. This didn’t grab too many national or international headlines, but certainly has a big impact for many Mormons.
PATRICK: This idea of people visiting each other was not unique to the Home Teaching program when it got introduced in the early 20th century. The 19th century church had Block Teachers and Ward Teachers and during the Mormon reformation in the 1850s they went around and basically did a Catechism and did the equivalent of a temple recommend interview with people. So this idea of home visits is a very old one, and the Church leadership has just changed and refreshed the way that it looks and is talked about from time to time. Which I think is a good thing.
ARMAND: Yeah, the Home Teaching Program has long been a mainstay in Church organization and Church lore. There’s always been a lot of jokes around Home Teaching, and in some ways the levity surrounding it has pointed to some of the drawbacks in the way that it was carried out. I think that the problem for us so far in the change from Home Teaching to a Ministering program is that we haven’t yet been given any details on what that’s going to mean.
ARMAND: I like the general concept that we shouldn’t have to tie ourselves to one visit per family per month, but I’m a little worried that if we don’t at least get that, then Ministering will become whatever kind of slapdash social interaction that we can come up with when our leaders ask us for reports.
PATRICK: I’ve been struck by how quickly the membership of the Church has adopted a new vocabulary. It does speak to something of the centralization of the Church, and Church culture. Nobody talked about Ministering, and then all of a sudden it was as if Mormons had been talking that way all along in their entire lives. It does reveal the continued power of a top-down, central, prophetic leadership. But I think in terms of the way that most wards are going to function, part of me believes that it might be much ado about nothing. It’s still going to be individuals, or companionships, or couples assigned to other families, and there will still be “more or less” visits and “more or less” reporting. So I agree with the spirit and intentions of it. I’m not sure how it’s going to change practice very much.
MORGAN: What do you think are some of the more meaningful implications of these changes?
PATRICK: Including the young women in it the same way the young men have been included I think is a positive step forward. That will be important. And I also hope for more interaction between the Relief Society and the Elders Quorum. So this again, is another step in a series of small steps by the Church to either elevate the role and the voice of women or to create greater parity between men and women’s experiences in the Church. I think we’ll continue to see small steps in this direction as well.
TAUNALYN: I appreciate that as well. As a former Relief Society President, I never worked with the Elders Quorum President or the High Priests, I was drawing on the help of the Bishop. And this new configuration allows for a parity between the Elders Quorum and the Relief Society and allows them to work together in ways that gives the Bishop greater freedom to work with the youth, which as they’ve mentioned is part of the goal here. And I’m excited about the inclusion of young women. One of the Millennials that I’m familiar with appreciated the change to Ministering… “Visiting Teaching,” she said, “felt like an old lady thing.” But Ministering maybe feels more natural, something that she can do with friends. So I think it opens up for Millennials, perhaps a space that is more comfortable.
ARMAND: The priesthood quorums now that have been combined so that we have just one Elders Quorum in every ward. I guess it’s one Elders Quorum per ward usually; it could take in more than one ward if some of the wards were small. But that’s again an interesting thing to watch.
ARMAND: But the one thing that it has really accomplished that I’ve seen so far in more than one ward is that it’s taken away the limbo status of middle-aged and older men who have never been ordained High Priests. And until this change was made, if a man got to be aged 45 and had not ever been in a Bishopric or a High Council, therefore having no reason that he needed to be ordained a High Priest, then he would be the age of many High Priests. And if he were expected to go into an Elders Quorum meeting on Sundays, he would stick out as the old guy among a bunch of youngsters. That’s no longer going to be the kind of drawback that we’ve had. So I see that as a really positive consequence of combining all age groups into one priesthood quorum.
TAUNALYN: I was just going to suggest that the change in the Priesthood Quorum is a nod to re-conceptualizing priesthood authority. A lot of the talks continued to reiterate that we’re not looking at rank – it’s not an upward movement or a downward movement. It’s the idea that you don’t advance in the priesthood. Additionally, the authority isn’t a status or a label, it’s a divine power. President Oaks talked about this. So I appreciate where they’re moving towards trying to see the power of the priesthood being something that is used to minister versus an authority that is used to create a hierarchy.
ABUSE / INTERVIEW POLICY CHANGES
MORGAN: Let’s go to the next topic. Recently, the First Presidency announced changes to the LDS handbook policies on sexual abuse and Bishop’s interviews. This came in the context of factors both specific to the Church, such as some protest movements among Church members against 1 on 1 interviews, along with a handful of sexual abuse accusations amid ranking Church officials. But also fits into a broader context that goes beyond Mormonism, represented by the #metoo movement and a growing awareness of sexual abuse. Let’s hear some thoughts about these policy changes and the drivers behind this.
TAUNALYN: The policy that came out in response to this, is that when a member of the Stake Presidency or Bishopric meets with a child, a youth, or a woman, he needs to ask a parent or an adult to be in an adjoining room, foyer or hall. And the person being interviewed can invite an additional adult into the interview. And they can make that call as to who comes. And that can avoid circumstances that can be misunderstood… a 55-year old coming out of a room with a young woman is problematic in this moment. These are great clarifications and opportunities, particularly for women and youth who have anxiety. This alleviates so much anxiety in terms of meeting with that person. It also invites other adults as helpers in a process of repentance for instance. Or in a difficult abusive situation, hopefully a child could feel that they could invite another person. If they’re being abused by a parent they could invite someone else ideally. So hopefully this creates a situation where youth and women are empowered to invite someone else into the interview.
PATRICK: I think clearly there are a number of external drivers. As Taunalyn said the #metoo movement. It’s now been several years since the stories broke about the sexual abuse crisis within the Roman Catholic Church, but that’s ongoing with continuing concerns and critiques about organized religion and the way that it either covers up or fosters a climate of sexual abuse. Of course, we haven’t seen any widespread scandal like that in the LDS Church, but some recent prominent individual cases. And so this is a pragmatic accommodation. Certainly I think it includes a kind of legalistic defense of the Church, and of liability. And a lot of internal voices have said that this took too long in coming. So there were external pressures but internal pressures as well, including from some former Bishops and other ecclesiastical leaders who felt like the time was right for these kinds of protections and policies. So the time was right for this to happen. I think it’s a very appropriate set of reforms. Some people still think it’s not enough, that they don’t go far enough in mandating a third person in the room for some of these interviews. But certainly, it’s a step forward.
ARMAND: Of course, before this became an issue in interviews with Bishops, it was an issue for teachers in the classrooms. So there was a long time, through most of the history of the church, where only one adult was in a classroom for Primary or Sunday School teaching with the kids. I haven’t kept track of the timing here, but it seems to me that it’s been a couple decades at least since the Church first of all put glass windows in the doors of the classrooms, and then required that for the children that there be two adults in the room at the time. I don’t know if that was focused only on having a second adult with a man, or whether it didn’t matter whether the teachers were men or women.
MORGAN: The new policy seems to indicate that it’s two adults of any gender now, but originally policy was focused on the men.
ARMAND: Yeah, I’m not surprised at that. So that’s been a long time installed there as Church policy. And I think the next logical step was what you just described, giving an opportunity for people to bring in outside “auditors” as it were. And that is going to be a help and a protection I think to Bishops as much as it’s going to be to the young people in their charge.
CHANGING ATTITUDES AROUND SAME-SEX MARRIAGE AND LGBT ISSUES
MORGAN: Our next topic is the release of a nation-wide survey data from the Pew Institute regarding the evolving attitudes towards LGBT issues including same-sex marriage. And while the survey covered the broader population and showed how public opinion had been changing towards these issues, it was interesting that a lot of headlines focused on the Mormons. For instance, we saw several national news articles with headlines such as “Support for Gay Marriage among Mormons gradually grows.”
PATRICK: Right, and so these attitudes have been changing rapidly within the general American culture, and certainly more rapidly in Europe as well. I think it’s one of the most rapid and thorough cultural changes in American history in terms of the acceptance of not only same-sex marriage, but LGBT rights and equality in general. Really within the space of a generation, where the civil rights for African Americans took much longer, rights and equality for women has taken much longer and arguably still has not been fully achieved. So this is a rapid shift, and obviously not all groups and not all people have been on board with such a rapid shift. And in every poll and in every survey, Mormons have lagged behind or at least reported a lower rate of acceptance for same-sex marriage and LGBT equality. I think one of the interesting things about this poll is that it does show a lot of movement there. And it shows movement generationally as well, that especially younger Mormons, Millennials and even younger, 18-year olds and people just graduating from high school and going into college, they look a lot more like the surrounding culture than their grandparents in terms of their attitudes to these issues. So I think it represents continuing generational change, it shows that church members are not exceptional. I think that sometimes we have this myth of Mormon exceptionalism, whether it be about abuse or something else, but in fact Mormons do sort of track with the general culture, sometimes just a few percentage points off or with a lag effect. And I think that’s what we’re seeing here.
PATRICK: So, I think it creates a really interesting challenge for the leadership, because the message about same-sex marriage has not changed. The message about acceptance and tolerance for LGBT individuals certainly has changed over the past generation, but not about marriage. But it seems that a lot of younger members of the Church are increasingly comfortable departing from the teachings of the Church, and that creates an interesting dynamic. It’s not the only time this has happened in Church history, and of course we see parallels with other cases. I mean, Roman Catholics haven’t followed church teaching on birth control for decades now. So this is not unique to Mormonism, but it is a unique moment on a very high profile issue that the Church leadership has really doubled down on. It just seems like younger people are not listening. Or they may be listening, but they don’t agree.
ARMAND: This has also raised a couple of issues that we’re going to hear a lot more of. I don’t think that the LDS Church is in a position to make any accommodating changes of doctrine or much in the way of policy as it did for example with the race issue. Unlike the race issue, the LGBT issue, at least where marriage is concerned, runs counter to a fundamental theological doctrine that originated in revelation. And that is to say the whole idea of eternal marriage as part of a long process of salvation and exaltation. I think that the culmination of all that in a marriage that is productive of offspring in the next world is going to make it very difficult ever to accommodate an acceptance of marriage between two people of the same sex. Now that doesn’t mean that we have a right to try to control what’s happening outside of the church of course. But it is going to make it difficult for the church to accommodate even legal marriages (legal in a civil sense). It’s going to be hard to accommodate those for Church members. So while as the polls say there’s much more acceptance now among Latter-day Saints than there used to be, especially among the younger, it’s going to be interesting to see how much more accommodation, if any, the Church can make to hold on to the participation of gay members. As long as the Church could never, as far as I could see, find a doctrinal or policy basis for approving their marriage and they still participate as active Church members.
ARMAND: The other thing this issue brings up – we’re going to hear a lot more of – is the constant ongoing redefinition of what constitutes religious freedom. That’s become a big issue.
That is, defining religious freedom — well defining civil rights for gay people in general, but including in that definition what that means for religious freedom when you’re dealing with the subject of commercial services. So that’s going to be an ongoing issue.
PATRICK: And this poll showed that the general membership tracked very well with the teachings of the Church in terms that still a majority oppose same-sex marriage but are in favor of accommodations for LGBT individuals in other civil settings… so in employment, and housing, and other things like that. And that’s been the position of the Church in recent years. So the Church membership does follow what the leaders teach. But that’s decreasingly becoming the case, it seems, for younger members. Taunalyn, what are your thoughts on this?
TAUNALYN: I was just going to add the recent survey that came out actually found that Mormons and white Evangelicals, were by 53% supporting religious-based service refusals. So, there is a higher percentage of Mormons who are saying, we need to preserve that freedom of religion to refuse service.
PATRICK: Yeah, so they seem to side with the Wedding Cake folks, but at the same time they don’t think that gay and lesbian individuals should be discriminated against in employment or housing. So there’s a kind of parsing. There’s a nuance to the Mormon position, not just flat refusal.
ARMAND: That’s why I say we’re going to be hearing a lot more about that religious freedom issue.
NEW APOSTLES
MORGAN: Our final topic is the calling of the two new apostles, announced in the last General Conference: Elder Gerrit W. Gong, an Asian American, and Ulisses Soares, a native of Brazil. The New York Times ran the headline, “Mormon Church Selects Two Senior Apostles , and Neither is a White American.” Patrick was quoted in a SL Tribune article saying, “This is the church leadership’s most important nod to global diversity since the priesthood revelation in 1978” and a “step toward the church’s senior quorums looking more like its global membership.”
ARMAND: Yeah, that’s really a wonderful and incredible change. I had a strange experience of a church critic friend of mine, who’s a little on the right-wing side, when he heard about this, asked me what I thought about it. His comment was, “Well, the Mormons finally discovered Affirmative Action.” And of course, that is such an irrelevant comment in this case. Lest anybody have the suspicion that these two new Apostles were selected only because of their ethnicity, all you have to do is look at their resumes, and you will see two of the most well-educated, competent, and accomplished men in the whole history of the church. So that impressed me particularly, that is, to find out what resources these two brethren bring to the Quorum of the Twelve.
TAUNALYN: I just was going to say, both Elder Gong and Elder Suarez represent their ethnicity and their demographics, but they also can speak to and understand those areas of the world. Not only in the Church, but in the population of the world. And I think this is historic, but it also reflects a historic moment in the reception of members of the church in looking for these voices from outside the traditional Euro-American realm.
ARMAND: Church leaders are much more sensitive than some of the members think to the needs, not to balance up the Quorum ethnically, but to select new Apostles that help to strengthen the commitment and loyalty of members of different ethnic groups by showing that “people like them” are equally valued in leadership, whether at the general or the ward level. So in that sense, the selection of these two brethren was at least as important symbolically as it was substantively given their rich backgrounds of accomplishment.
TAUNALYN: Definitely.
ARMAND: And so, this has opened up an ongoing, public wonderment about when the first black Apostle going to be chosen. And that is more difficult because what our experience shows with all those that go into the Quorum of the Twelve is that lately they have always come from a background of literally decades of service in the lower echelons of the Church. And so it takes some time. As it happens, we have one black Seventy, Brother Sitati, who has been among the General Authority Seventy for a decade, so if there’s to be a black member chosen for the 12, he would seem to be the next most logical one.
TAUNALYN: I just witnessed a Stake conference where Elder Sitati from Kenya that Armand mentioned presided and reorganized the Stake. And I thought it was rather historic to see that happen, and to see the reception be very matter-of-fact, that this was the authority there. So, I think sometimes we look to the authorities to make the changes, where it’s the population of the Church in the reception of whatever changes are made that are more important to me.
ARMAND: Well Africa is a high-growth area of the Church right now, so it probably won’t be much longer before we have a black man in the Quorum of the Twelve, to do as Taunalyn says, to represent and speak to the people from that part of the world.
MORGAN: Alright, well that’s going to wrap it up for today. We want to thank you scholars for participating, and thank you for joining us today. You can find us on the web at MormonismMagnified.com, where we’ll be posting not only a full transcript of our podcast, but additional commentary and information. Just a reminder that this podcast is not an official production of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints nor the Claremont Graduate University. We’ll see you again on our next episode of Mormonism Magnified.