Women and the Church: Cooperation vs. Hierarchy

Women and the Church: Cooperation vs. Hierarchy

I think most Christian women have had difficulty reconciling what seems to be the church's position on the role of women with our 21st century notions of female equality and empowerment. This article relates specifically to the position of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints on women, but its principles can be applied to all Christians. (I have chosen sections of it to share here: the original post can be read by clicking here)

To Do the Business of the Church: A Cooperative Paradigm for Examining Gendered Participation Within Church Organizational Structure 

by Neylan McBaine

Part I: The Crisis

I will be talking today about how women fit into the functional structure of LDS church governance; but, unlike many of the others speaking today, I do not have advanced degrees in my subject nor consider myself an academic. My credentials as someone qualified to talk about this subject come from: first, a lifetime of personal experience as a woman in the Church and now the mother of three daughters; second, my role as founder, in 2010, of a non-profit organization, The Mormon Women Project, which publishes stories of faithful Latter-day Saint women from around the world; and third, a twelve-year career in marketing and brand strategy including my current role as associate creative director Church-owned Bonneville Communications, the agency partnered with the Church on Mormon.org and the “I’m A Mormon” campaign.

Today, I will be applying that professional lens to examine the way our women are involved in church ecclesiastical functions, and also how we talk about that female ecclesiastical involvement to an external, media-informed audience. As a marketer, I know how important it is for what we say we do in regards to our women, what we actually do, and what the Lord says we should do to be in triangulated harmony with each other. Today, I will explore how we can improve on our current practice of that triangulation.

As I started my research and was still seeking a solid thesis for my paper, there seemed to be a barrage of articles and blog posts that addressed the gendered division of labor in the Church. At first I was delighted by the breadth and volume of these articles on gendered church work, coming from a wide range of sources and philosophies, from ByCommonConsent to A Well-Behaved Mormon Woman to Feminist Mormon Housewives to Times and Seasons. As part of my research, I sent out my own survey, as well, asking friends for their own insight into what the gendered division of labor means for them personally.

What happened was that the more I read, the more I took notes, the more I prayed and studied, the more I realized that my thesis needed to reflect the deeply emotional and sensitive nature of these discussions. Every expression of opinion packs in it feelings rooted in personal experience, in relationships with male leaders and family members, and in one’s personal relationship with God. This was a reality which I’ve understood to be true for many years but which this initial research offered me unfiltered.

I came to rest on a prominent, consistent theme: There is a tremendous amount of pain among our women regarding how they can or cannot contribute to the governance of our ecclesiastical organization and we need to pay attention to that pain. Listen to these statements, recently gathered across a variety of forums: “My 12-year-old son gets the priesthood and all of a sudden he’s got more power and authority than me!”¹ Or another: “I truly wish you could feel the pain I feel as a woman in the Church. I know my potential and worth, and to have it limited to the role of ‘presidee’ in all areas discredits me as a daughter of God.”² Or this one: “I feel like if I had been a ‘good’ Mormon, I wouldn’t have gotten my Master’s degree. I wouldn’t be working now, and I wouldn’t WANT to work so much. I’d want to be a mother and have kids and stay home.”³ Lastly: “I have a PhD and am a full-time professor at a university. I am also married and have three children. The only place in my life where I am treated like a lesser human being is at church.”⁴ I could go on and on.

How is this possible? Why is this happening when you walk into Deseret Book and see shelves of books just for women? What is going wrong when we hear women praised and adored from the pulpit? We have wonderful men in this church who are good husbands, sons, and bishops. If we take off the table the possibility of structural changes and work from an assumption that gendered segregation is divinely mandated, the burden is on us as members to figure out what it is we are doing with our current tools that is not living up to our potential. The pain is real.

 ...

While some too flippantly dismiss or judge the pain, there are others for whom the pain seems to define their spiritual lives and, like my former Relief Society president, they measure every element of their church experience through the lens of that pain. “Women are the support staff to the real work of men. Period,” is one woman’s statement, as she describes how she understands the division of labor. “It’s a patriarchal tradition” is another response I noted in my own personal survey. “There is no such thing as ‘good’ patriarchy,” concludes yet another. Most of our women, however, are somewhere in the middle: not sweeping the issue under the carpet or judging those who struggle, but also not dismissing our ecclesiastical organization as entirely flawed or even abusive to women.

How can we help more in our community find peace in a middle ground, where the pain is acknowledged and we provide doctrinally sound tools and behavioral guidelines for addressing that pain? The first step must be to extract exactly what it is about our current rhetoric and practices that is at the source of this crisis among our women.

Part III: Identifying the Sources of Pain

As we start that exercise, allow yourself for a moment to step into the shoes of someone who struggles with finding her place. Consider, for instance, the narratives that define the rights of passage of our youth and the source of this bitterness may become illuminated.

So many of our narratives about our youth involve those moments when a dad ordains his son to the Aaronic priesthood, and then the first Sunday the son gets to pass the sacrament, or bless the sacrament, or go home teaching or collect fast offerings or become an Eagle Scout or get a mission call…. These are times of spiritual outpourings and parental pride, the joy of eternal progression made tangible through the bodily actions taken on by that worthy son. It’s not often a mother describes a similarly gripping scene when her daughter graduates from Mia Maids to Laurels.

Imagine the disappointment (my six-year old granddaughter discovers that) passing the sacrament is a job only for boys. Crestfallen, and with that childish sense of entitlement, my daughter asked, “But what do I get when I turn twelve?”

…It made me very sad. My question is not what my daughter “gets” when she turns twelve, but what will be asked of her? What messages will she get about her role in the church?

On the one hand we want to impress upon young men what a privilege and honor it is to [act in these sacred responsibilities], while on the other hand we insist to our young women (and women of all ages) that it’s really no big deal. Seriously, ladies, you don’t want [to have to do this stuff]. You shouldn’t want [to have to]. Nothing but trouble, that priesthood! And yet, very important. Without it our church would be nothing. Worse than nothing, a fraud. But at the same time, you aren’t missing out on anything. Trust us!⁹

...

 

The sadness expressed in these narratives and in many others that I’ve heard over the years does not necessarily come from the fact that our daughters won’t get to do the same things as our sons. It is rarely driven by the “pride” the bishopric member I quoted earlier describes as power grubbing or seeking beyond the mark. Rather, the pain simply comes from the disconnect between our identities as women in our day-to-day lives in the external world and our identities as women in the institutional church. We are not a hermetic religion, and so we function in a world where individuality and opportunity are celebrated as the hallmarks of civilized societies. Valuing the individual’s right to aspire to any circumstance or opportunity is practically the mantra of the 21st century. And yet, as women functioning within the ecclesiastical church structure, we are asked to put aside our understanding of how contemporary societies and workplaces ideally should function and instead grasp hold of a very different model. We require that our women suspend their understanding of social equality as it is currently represented in our modern society. This is consistent with our belief that we should be “in the world” but not “of” it, but we members should not flippantly dismiss how difficult this can be in actual practice for a woman whose role in worldly society has changed so swiftly and dramatically over the past hundred years.

Desiring to be used, engaged, recognized and appreciated for our public contributions is not, for most women, about the glory of public praise or being in the spotlight. It’s not about wanting to eradicate the divine differences between women and men. It is simply about a basic human need in every person – man or woman – to be told, “You are needed. You matter. You have a purpose. Your opinions matter. Not just at home behind closed doors, not just with our children, as essential as those influences are, but also in the broadest context of the Lord’s kingdom.” I was speaking last week with a woman who runs an NGO in Uganda, offering reading and computer literacy classes to men and women who are coming out of the bush after ten plus years of being child soldiers or sex slaves in Joseph Kony’s guerilla regime. She told me that most of her students desperately want to create Facebook accounts. When I expressed surprise, she quoted one of her students as saying, “I want people to know that I am. That I have an identity of my own. That I have a personality and can make choices. That I survived the bush, that I am strong.” In the face of life’s greatest suffering, one need that arises above many others is the need to be recognized as a unique and valued contributor

Part IV: The Cooperative Paradigm

Having established the magnitude of this crisis and having struck at some of the roots of the pain, I’d like to turn now to what we can do to alleviate this pain. There is a premier rule in public relations that you cannot tell a story that is not true and still have it resonate or feel authentic to the audience you are trying to convince. PR strategy must reflect how an organization is actually behaving or it can never ring true, and that is true with external audiences as well as internal audiences. The internal audience must be behaving in the way that they say they are behaving, or else they will ultimately be exposed or criticized. Right now in regards to our women, there are gaps between what we say we are doing, what the Lord has told us we ideally should be doing and what we actually are doing. If we bring these three points of triangulation into harmony, we will have greater integrity, stronger convictions and happier women...

Let’s look at one common narrative we share when confronted about our system of gender segregation in this contemporary world. Last year, the Washington Post asked Michael Otterson and representatives from 19 other religious congregations to comment in 500 words on the following prompt: “Former president Jimmy Carter has said, ‘The discrimination against women on a global basis is very often attributable to the declaration by religious leaders in Christianity, Islam and other religions that women are inferior in the eyes of God.’ Many traditions teach that while both men and women are equal in value, God has ordained specific roles for men and women. Those distinct duties often keep women out of leadership positions in their religious communities. What is religion’s role in gender discrimination?”¹¹

The title of the response from Otterson was “What Mormon Equality Looks Like,” implying that there is a system of equality in our leadership that simply needs to be revealed to an external audience. Otterson wrote:

"I put this question to three women in my church and asked them for their own insights on how they see their role and life in the Church….

"Here are their points about life as a Mormon woman.

"Women in the Mormon faith regularly preach from the pulpit to the congregation and lead prayers during Sunday services. As a result, today’s Latter-day Saint women tend to be well educated and confident. Most have experience in speaking in public, directing or presiding over organizations, teaching and leading by example. Brigham Young University turns out more female than male graduates."

The negative response to Otterson’s piece among the Church commentary in the bloggernacle was intense and personally painful to Otterson, who is usually so in tune with the membership. One thing that was misunderstood was that he did not write the title of the piece, which so cavalierly used the big “E” word: Equality. The laudable fact that he reached externally to women to guide his response was overshadowed by one significant disconnect and the disconnect was this: the fact that our women preach from the pulpit and say prayers in Sacrament meeting does not make them “equal” to our men, according to any publically accepted definition of that word.

Why do we do this? Why, when confronted with an intentionally inflammatory accusation like “gender discrimination,” do we instinctively default to defensive claims that our women are actually just the same as our men because they speak in church, go to school, and get to feel the Spirit the same way? We so often instinctually fall back on earthly paradigms to describe our structure. In an effort to bridge our own experience with the experience of our external audience, we rely on comparisons to hierarchical power structures of fallen world institutions: governments, corporations, and universities in which men and women ideally work side by side to advance to opportunities available to both genders. We talk in terms of opportunity, advancement, visibility, of hierarchical power, which are hallmarks of advanced worldly institutions, in America at least. We highlight statistical equalities like how many women graduate from college. If you’d like further proof of this tendency, go read through some of the answers members have given on Mormon.org to the question, “Why don’t women hold the Priesthood?” and note how many times those answers cite the fact that our women speak in Sacrament meeting or run the Primary.

But I call this the Apples-To-Snapples comparison: leading an auxiliary organization that has influence over a subset of the population is not the same as leading the entire organization. According to the world’s definition of equality, women’s leadership opportunities in the Church organization are a watered down version of the real thing, with lots of sugar added.

Continuing to rely on the Apples-to-Snapples comparison is not good enough because, in the outside world, when you say men and women have equal leadership opportunities, you mean — at least ideally — that men and women have the same cleared path to advance to the same positions of influence and authority. When the outside world looks at our structure and sees men ecclesiastically responsible for even the highest ranked women in our organization, the media perceives our claims as being false advertising and we lose our credibility to tell our own story. It then becomes someone else’s job to “uncover” the truth for us, leading down a path of exposes and betrayals.

Is there gender discrimination in the Church? If discrimination means separation according to gender, yes. If it means delineation of opportunities based solely on gender, yes. Many argue that different opportunities based on gender is unfair, adverse, and/or abusive by definition. The Church does not satisfy secular gender-related egalitarian ideals, period; and our institutional behavior fits that definition of gender discrimination in several inescapable ways. We shrink away from accurately representing how we work, thinking it condemns us as a church. And in the eyes of the world it might. But the Church does not, and should not, operate according to secular concepts of power, status, etc.; and if we attempt to justify ourselves in this paradigm we will not only fail, but betray our own ideals.

We need a narrative that doesn’t rely on justifications. It shouldn’t rely on comparisons to fallen world paradigms. It needs to stand on its own, while acknowledging that it may have little precedent and little comparison to worldly paradigms that describe gender-related egalitarian ideals.

What is this new narrative? I’d like to take the time to explore a possible option now that is specifically tailored to a marketing or public relations context and also has integrity for an internal audience.

In preparing his response to the Washington Post‘s prompt, Otterson asked three women to share their opinions with him. I was one of the three women that the public affairs team approached to ask for input, but out of respect to the fact that he didn’t incorporate any of my specific ideas, he left my name out. I’ve had the opportunity to speak with Otterson this since then, and he and the public affairs team have been exceptionally receptive and sensitive to my ideas. I have been thrilled with the seriousness Public Affairs has shown to the concerns and pain of our women. However, at the time he was writing this response for the Washington Post, 500 words in an online panel discussion was not the appropriate place in which to spell out a new paradigm for explaining our gendered structure. I understood these limitations of space and context myself as a marketing professional. I’m grateful to him for the unqualified support and interest he’s shown me since then.

To explore what this alternative rhetoric might be, allow me to share with you some of the thoughts I sent to the public affairs team when they first approached me about how I would respond to the Washington Post‘s prompt:

"I do not suggest presenting a blanket claim that women have leadership roles within the organization. While we can certainly point to the Relief Society, Young Women, and Primary, the ratio of global female leaders to male leaders is so small that pointing it out only serves to highlight the discrepancy. Also, bringing attention to the fact that our women only lead other women and children is playing into the logic of the prompt because it can then be inferred that women are not considered of high enough value to be more than special interest figureheads. I also think that taking the “look… women really do lead!” angle sounds inherently patronizing coming from a male author.

"The prompt suggests women do not hold leadership positions, therefore women are inferior. I suggest we argue it is true that Mormon women do not hold an equal number of global leadership positions as men, but that is not because they are of lesser value. It is because we believe we are working in an eternal paradigm in which roles and responsibilities are divided up cooperatively rather than hierarchically. Mormonism is a lay church so the members are the ministers, and this is a completely different organizational structure than traditional Christian priesthood or ministry, which is defined as an exclusive or trained clergy. Thus, when we talk about our ministerial structure to the outside world, we are starting from very different foundational understandings of what ecclesiastical ministry means.

"The prompt’s logic doesn’t adequately leave room for our organization’s cooperative structure of service, where no one person is paid for his or her ministry or deemed of greater value than another and where each brings unique resources to his or her responsibilities.

• Working towards a Zionistic cooperation within an earthly paradigm means that we often default to the human ordering with which we are most familiar: that of hierarchy and the currency of power. In an organization such as a church where no one is getting rich off of personal dedication to the cause, hierarchical power is sometimes weighed as the greatest currency because it is the human way of measuring success on the way to a goal. However, in a cooperative structure where people are rotating positions every few years and no one is materialistically rewarded over another person, that hierarchy is a flimsy currency on which to base one’s value.
• In the cooperative structure that is the LDS Church’s lay ministry, there is a division of roles for the benefit of the organizational order. This division of labor is, we believe, a reflection of divine mandates given to Joseph Smith. The division of labor — not just among men and women but among varying age groups, geographical groups and also among individuals — is a central theme of the Doctrine & Covenants. For example, in March of 1835, Joseph recorded a revelation from the Lord that specified the organizational structure of the church governance: Section 107. Close reading of this revelation shows how abundantly the Lord uses phrases such as, “of necessity” and “it must needs be” and “to do the business of the church” in describing how important an ordered approach was to church administration. Similar language is used in the Book of Mormon when congregations of believers are organized in ancient civilizations.¹²
• Nowhere does the Lord intimate that various callings and responsibilities are intended to give one person power over another. In fact, the words “lead” and “leader” appear nowhere in this section, and similarly, the word “leader” appears no where in the Book of Mormon. Even that book’s most admirable leaders, like Captain Moroni, are described as “servant[s]” and “righteous follower[s] of Christ.” This emphasis on organizational stability, on the specific roles and responsibilities of various parties to act as facilitators within the larger community, is, we believe, of divine origin and eternal value.

Lastly, the world calculates in terms of top-down power; God’s calculations are exactly opposite. In the divine kingdom the servant holds the highest status, and in the Church every position is a service position. Given the obvious parallels between the Church’s administrative channels and a business organization, it’s easy to mistakenly assess the Church as a ladder-climbing corporation with God in a corner office at the top; but in this line of thinking we only reveal our shoddy human understanding of power.

In concluding my thoughts to the Public Affairs team, I finished by saying, “When we claim, as we regularly do, that the Church as an organization gives women and men equal leadership opportunities (which is simply not true) we’re using the same paradigm of power that President Carter is implying and the prompt assumes, which is an inadequate paradigm for evaluating power dynamics in an ecclesiastical institution such as ours. The paradigm is the problem, and must be addressed if we’re to offer anything beyond hollow excuses for women’s status in the Church. To argue, as Carter did, that women have inferior status and inadequate power because they lack hierarchical leadership opportunities is to superimpose a human construct onto a divine one. I – and many women I know — would love to see us moving away from this rhetoric.”

This idea of a cooperative paradigm is much harder to explain in our modern-day, fast-paced, soundbite-oriented news outlets than simply falling back on the Apples-to-Snapples comparison. My own explanation above was considerably more than Otterson’s allotted 500 words, and there are theologians and scholars who have produced thoughtful commentary of their own, such as Don Sorenson and Valerie Hudson’s Women in Eternity, Women in Zion, and Beverly Campbell’s Eve and the Choice Made In Eden. But whatever rhetoric we move to, it is essential that we rely on a doctrinally-rich explanation that challenges and even confounds fallen world paradigms rather than plays unfavorably right into them.

One of beauties of the cooperative paradigm over the hierarchical paradigm is that the cooperative paradigm more accurately incorporates both ecclesiastical and sacerdotal definitions of priesthood, which seems to be understood generally throughout the church as being much more gendered than a close reading of scripture suggests. For example, let us return to the organizational language of the Doctrine and Covenants. Section 84 states: “And again, the offices of elder and bishop are necessary appendages belonging unto the high priesthood. And again, the offices of teacher and deacon are necessary appendages belonging to the lesser priesthood.” (84: 29-30; see also 107: 5) Pay attention to that word “appendages.” An appendage is “a thing that is added or attached to something larger or more important.” Are not the offices of elder or bishop or teacher or deacon appendages to the priesthood, and not the priesthood itself? Are these so different from the female organizations, which we routinely call “auxiliaries”?

Pulitzer Prizing-winning Harvard professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has written about the vocabulary we use to describe our various congregants. She notes that our casual interchange of the words “men” and “priesthood” contributes to our misunderstanding that the men only have the power to do God’s work. Have you ever heard a member of the bishopric thank “the Priesthood” for passing the sacrament, instead of the “Young Men” or even the “men of the Priesthood”? The bishopric in my ward does an admirable job of thanking “the men of the Priesthood” rather than the “Priesthood” itself, but it’s likely that each of us, despite our best intentions, carelessly conflates the power to act in God’s name with the vehicle designed to administrate its use. Prof. Ulrich describes the conflation this way, “Because we use the word priesthood to refer to both the vehicle and the power, we get into some curious situations, almost like mistaking a utility pole for electricity or a sacrament cup for water.”¹³ Elder Dallin H. Oaks has spoken on the importance of this clarity of language as well: “We must never forget that the priesthood is not owned by or embodied by those who hold it.”¹⁴

In the survey I sent out to my own network of women, I asked what explanation the respondents would give for why only boys get to pass the sacrament. The number one answer I received was, “Because they have the priesthood.” Equating the priesthood with a gendered privilege, like passing the sacrament, reinforces over and over again the understanding that men “get” something the women don’t and the women are therefore lacking and lesser. Some in my survey included as part of their answer that if men “get” the Priesthood, then women get motherhood, which is an explanation that brings great peace to many. However, it also makes some women extremely uncomfortable. 

Examining the difficulties in the motherhood-to-priesthood comparison would be the subject of an entire other paper, but the arguments broadly fall into a few points: First of all, saying motherhood is the complementary gift to priesthood again solidifies the gendered assignment of the power to act under God’s direction as something only men can do. The complement to motherhood, the argument goes, is actually fatherhood. Secondly, a man’s ability to act in the name of the priesthood is something that is earned through worthiness and by personal triumph of character. The only way a man can exercise the power of God effectively is by being sufficiently righteous to represent God. By contrast, personal worthiness is not a prerequisite for a woman’s ability to bear children. There are many righteous, worthy women who are not mothers and some of them will never be mothers in this life. Becoming a mother is beyond the control of many women, despite their personal worthiness or triumph over character.¹⁵ In a church where more than half of our women are single, we need to tread carefully when claiming a parallel between motherhood and priesthood.

Returning to the cooperative paradigm, it might feel counterintuitive to some to be backing off bold claims of equality in an age when we are striving to be relevant to and more widely respected by the outside world. However, I feel that this alternate paradigm—explained and reiterated thoroughly over time and in the right contexts inside and outside of the Church—actually offers us a much wider platform on which to explore doctrine, bring others along in that exploration, and to value each other cooperatively rather than hierarchically. Most importantly, this alternate paradigm gives us the conviction we need to make sure that the currency of power does not dictate our behavior as servant leaders. For my purposes as a marketer, the cooperative paradigm provides an answer of integrity that opens the door for meaningful external dialogs, as well as internal dialogues, to which I now turn.

Part V: The Internal Shift

Next week on the Mormon Women Project, I will be posting an exclusive, historical interview with Maxine Hanks, one of the “September Six” who was excommunicated from the Church in September 1993. Last year, Maxine was personally invited by church leadership to be rebaptized as a member of the Church, an invitation she heartily accepted after a 20-year journey into feminist theology, including periods as a scholar of Gnosticism and a nondenominational chaplain. In her interview, Hanks reflects on why, after studies and experiences that took her as far away from Mormonism as theologically possible, she choose to again bear witness of the truthfulness of Mormonism.

Hanks says, “I don’t think gender tensions in Mormonism are due to inequality in the religion, but due to invisibility of that equality. The equality is embedded, inherent in Mormon theology, history, texts, structures. Gender equality is built into the blueprints of Mormonism, but obscured in the elaborations…. The inherent gender equality in Mormonism just needs to be seen by extracting it from other distracting elements and contexts.”

What kinds of initiatives could we take as church members to excavate this gender equality that we currently not doing? Harvard professor Clayton Christiansen, known for his work on disruptive innovation, often speaks to LDS Harvard students about how many of the standard Church programs—seminary, Family Home Evening, for example—started from the initiative of a small group of church members who saw a need and innovated ways to address that need that didn’t compromise doctrine or divinely mandated ecclesiastical practices in any way. How can we apply this same innovative spirit to the arena of women’s responsibilities at church? How can we put into practice our desires to see this cooperative community become more of our practiced reality? In essence, while we are reigning in our external claims, we need simultaneously to be broadening the practice of egalitarian ideals in our behavior so that with these opposite pulls we can have both internal and external meet harmoniously in the middle. I ask each man and woman in the audience today: What are you doing to excavate the power of the women in your ward and make their contributions more visible?

(back to Kindra, M.S.W.)
The second half of this article delineates a number of possibilities for making the power and influence of women more visible in families, wards, and stakes. These include considering who is invited to meetings, what order talks are assigned, using quotations by women, what type of activities are planned for young men and women, how auxiliary presidents are addressed, recognizing mothers after a baby's blessing, and having women help in planning and decision making when possible.


While it is difficult to navigate the fine line of changing actions without changing paradigms, I think the potential impact it will have on people's perceptions of the women around them will be powerful. Women have wisdom, and experience, and influence, and they should be recognized for this. We as women, on the other hand, have the responsibility to understand our own history in the church and recognize our influence and power for the impact it has had without filtering it through a worldly paradigm that puts everyone higher or lower than someone else.