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Jonathan Ellis
Austin, Texas

A Look Back at Mormonism in 2015

High-profile Excommunications

The Church excommunicated more members for apostasy than it has since the September Six twenty years ago. Of the most prominent, John Dehlin was excommunicated for believing too little; Rock Waterman for believing too much. Corbin Volluz wrote about what these have in common.

Church Growth and Demographics

As the year ended, the Church reached the milestone of 30,000 wards and branches. Separately, The Church announced in August that women would be joining top church executive councils for the first time, continuing a trend towards increasing acceptance of women’s participation in the Restoration.

October’s General Conference saw the calling of the 98th, 99th, and 100th apostles, making the Church 100 for 100 in all-white leadership. Emily Ellsworth explained why some members were disappointed with an analogy to the Romney candidacy.

Time published an excerpt from Dateonomics, originally subtitled “the rise in Mormon breast implants and $100,000 Jewish dowries can explain why you’re alone on Friday night.” Briefly, the twin forces of men leaving these faiths (and religion in general) at a higher rate than women, and an emphasis on marrying within the faith, leaves many Mormon and Orthodox Jewish women permanently single and drives dysfunctional behavior in both men and women.

LGBT Issues

At the beginning of the year, several events seemed to signal that the Church was beginning to moderate its stance towards LGBT individuals:

  1. When the Boy Scouts of America dropped its policy prohibiting gay adults from serving as leaders, some speculated that the Church would drop Scouting. But the Church ultimately decided to move forward with the BSA.
  2. Apostle D. Todd Christofferson affirmed that members were free to back marriage equality on social media without fear of Church discipline.
  3. Apostle Dallin H. Oaks acknowledged that “we have some unfinished business” in understanding transgender situations.
  4. The Church’s emphatically endorsed Utah’s antidiscrimination bill, which drew praise from both sides of the aisle for protecting both gay rights and religious freedom.

But in November, the Church introduced a new policy prohibiting children with gay parents from participating in fundamental Church ordinances including baptism. Grant Hardy’s summary of the situation is essential reading. I also recommend my own piece looking at the stated and potential motivations for the change.

The End of the World

Church member Julie Rowe drew mainstream attention in September for her predictions of dire calamities to befall the world and especially the United States, and I took a look at Mormonism’s history of eschatological prophecies.

With no calamities forthcoming, Rowe withdrew from public life for a time, but she is now reported to be planning another book.

Gospel Topics Essays

The Church published two new essays, on Joseph Smith’s Teachings about Priesthood, Temple and Women and Mother in Heaven. Quoting my original report,

In 1993 Maxine Hanks was excommunicated for editing a collection of essays on Women and Authority, which is now freely available online. The first and second chapters are The Mormon Concept of a Mother in Heaven and The Historical Relationship of Mormon Women and Priesthood. It is surely progress that Hanks was reinstated to the Church three years ago without repudiating her work, and that the new essays reflect it to a large degree. We might next ask with Margaret Toscano from 1994: if as the new essay claims, “women exercise priesthood authority,” why aren’t they using it?
The Mother in Heaven essay is short. “Our present knowledge about a Mother in Heaven is limited.” Notably, it does not address the possibility of polygamous Heavenly Mothers as taught by early Church leaders. (Apostle Orson Pratt: “God the Father had a plurality of wives… [Jesus] followed the example of his father, and became the great Bridegroom to whom kings’ daughters and many honorable wives were to be married.”)

I highly recommend Michael Barker’s article reflecting on the priesthood essay in the context of Arman Mauss’s framework of optimal religious tension.

Other Scholarship

The Joseph Smith Papers Project released Journals Volume 3 and the printer’s manuscript of the Book of Mormon. In conjunction with the latter, Assistant Church Historian Richard Turley published Joseph the Seer, which explains how Joseph Smith used a seer stone to translate the Book of Mormon and includes the first pictures ever of the stone itself. I responded with an analysis of what Turley got right and what he left out.

Historians Philip Jenkins and William Hamblin produced a truly epic debate on Book of Mormon historicity spanning almost a hundred posts, prompted by Jenkin’s question:

Can anyone cite any single credible fact, object, site, or inscription from the New World that supports any one story found in the Book of Mormon? One sherd of pottery? One tool of bronze or iron? One carved stone? One piece of genetic data? And by credible, I mean drawn from a reputable scholarly study, an academic book or refereed journal, not some cranky piece of pseudo-science.

Unfortunately, after a few posts the discussion settled into a routine of Jenkins complaining that nobody would give him a straight answer and Hamblin responding that no such evidence should be expected, with neither willing to let the other have the final word. The only specific piece of evidence that is brought up as a candidate is Nahom, but I learned a lot more about Nahom from Ryan Thomas’s research than from the Jenkins/Hamblin debate.

The Black, White, and Mormon conference saw some excellent presentations, including Lester Bush’s retrospective on the priesthood and temple ban. And the Sunstone Symposium got its groove back, tripling attendance year-over-year.

Richard Bushman started an interesting discussion on 19th century phrases in the Book of Mormon.

Books of Note