Are progressive Mormons doomed to disappointment?

In an opinion piece for the Salt Lake Tribune, Julienna Viegas-Haws outlined ten steps that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints could take to become the kind of big-tent organization that at least some of its leaders want it to be.

(It’s too bad that Richard Poll’s terms Liahona and iron rod didn’t gain more traction instead of progressive and conservative, because many members assume that being theologically progressive necessarily implies being politically progressive, or vice versa. This is not the case.)

Unfortunately, most of these steps are fundamentally incompatible with core practices of the Mormon hierarchy. Here’s how I see the possibility of change for each of these:

Increase gender equality

Gender inequality operates on two levels in the Church. Superficially, the culture of benevolent patriarchy resulted in many minor slights towards women. Several of these have been addressed in recent years: women are now allowed to pray in general conference. The General Relief Society Meeting was promoted to the General Women’s Session of Conference. More substantially, women are now invited to participate in planning weekly sacrament meeting services. Perhaps some of the suggestions from Neylan McBaine’s recent book will also gain traction.

But the church has taken a hard line against any hint that women become the theological equals of men. More than just participation in priesthood authority and Church leadership, this is reflected in the Mormon view of the afterlife. Men are to become gods; women are to become priestesses to their husband-gods. We no longer teach that women are to obey their husbands in General Conference, but we continue to mandate it in the temple — in this life, and the next.

Like so many parts of Mormonism, this was a theological outgrowth of polygamy: why would God want men to have multiple wives? Clearly (to the 19th century mind) because women are the weaker sex and need a man to lead them in righteousness.

Polygamy is also why Mormonism does so little with its doctrine of a Mother in Heaven: if a man must participate in polygamy to be exalted, and if God is an exalted man, then God must be a polygamist and we have not one but multiple heavenly mothers. This understandably makes modern Mormons uncomfortable.

More on polygamy below.

Apologize for its racist past and mistreatment of LGBT members and accept married gay couples at all levels

Apostle Dallin H. Oaks famously declared this year that the Church does not give apologies, explaining that the word “apology” is not found in the scriptures. While this assertion is translation-dependent, clearly the concept of apologizing is scriptural. The real problem for the Church is that apologizing inherently involves admitting you were wrong, and it is canonical scripture for Mormons that their prophet cannot be wrong.

(To be fair, the LDS Church makes the same kind of distinction as the Catholics do with papal infallibility: Mormon leaders are infallible only when speaking officially. The difference is that Mormon prophets speak officially a lot more often than the Pope speaks ex cathedra.)

Thus, while the official Church explanation for why black members were denied temple ordinances and priesthood ordination until 1978 “disavows the theories advanced in the past” for the ban and “unequivocally condemns all racism, past and present, in any form,” a careful reading shows that it stops short of disavowing the ban itself, because that would imply that Brigham Young had led the Church astray when he imposed it. The Church will not cross that line by issuing a full apology.

As ambivalent as this is, it is more than the church has done to distance itself from its former teachings on homosexuality, which include that homosexuality is a choice, that masturbation can make you gay, and that homosexuality can be cured by heterosexual marriage. Today, the church acknowledges that “individuals do not choose to have such attractions,” and that “we have some unfinished business in teaching on [transgender issues],” but it is too busy retrenching in its now-lost (in the United States) campaign against gay marriage to even consider apologizing.

Despite this, “Melyngoch” makes a case that the Church is closer to accepting gay marriage than it seems, based on the acknowledgement that homosexuality is in fact not a choice. But progressive members need to be careful not to read more into such statements than is intended; the dominant interpretation among Church leaders remains that homosexuality will be cured in the next life even if it cannot be cured in mortality. It will take a new generation of leadership at the least before this perspective changes.

Provide financial transparency in the use of tithes and use tithes and offerings more to help the poor and needy and less on capital projects (temples, churches, commercial buildings, etc.)

The church used to disclose financial statements that, if not fully transparent, were at least far more detailed than what we see now. This changed in 1959, when an ill-conceived building program created embarrassing deficits for the Church. Rather than disclose the extent of the problems, it limited public information to the Auditing Department reports that we see today.

Reducing transparency was thus done out of expedience and not out of deeply held principle. Not by prophetic utterance, but by bureaucratic decision. Should the Church wish to do so, it could cite former president Gordon B. Hinckley among others in support of transparency. (“We think that [financial] information belongs to those who made the contribution.”)

Increased donations to the poor and humanitarian projects is a likely outcome of increased transparency. Nobody knows for sure how much the Church’s City Creek Mall cost, but the estimated $5 billion dwarfs the approximately $50 million per year in humanitarian aid provided by the Church. The planned transformation of Deseret Ranches into a city of 500,000 inhabitants will cost still more. Of course, the Church should invest its resources responsibly — but financial transparency could help it to refocus on its mission to proclaim the gospel and care for the needy.

Permit members to openly question the authority of Church leadership without being excommunicated

The Mormon church began under the charismatic leadership of Joseph Smith. Officially, that leadership is transferred by virtue of the office of the presidency of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, but the charismatic gifts exercised by Smith have not continued with his successors.

Modern church leaders are thus vulnerable to accusations that the emperor has no clothes. They have reacted to this by repressing alternate voices of authority, primarily the “so-called scholars and intellectuals.” This reached a peak with the famous September Six in 1993 as well as the excommunications of noted scholars David Wright and Brent Metcalfe soon after. These acts successfully subdued scholarly discussion in the Church for a generation.

A new generation of discussion is now rising with the benefit of the Internet, but Church leadership can tolerate challenges to its authority no more today than it could thirty years ago. They will bend in some respects, such as explicitly allowing members to back gay marriage. And there will still be some degree of leadership roulette — thus, while Adrian and Tausha Larsen were excommunicated for noting that Mormon leaders can theoretically make mistakes, Kirk and Lindsay Van Allen’s church court for talking about polygamy as a specific example of such a mistake ended without disciplinary action.

But the core principle is unchanged: Church leadership (contra the Doctrine and Covenants) cannot allow those who conclude it is uninspired to say so too loudly.

That brings us, again, to polygamy.

Address the mistakes of polygamy and de-canonize Doctrine & Covenants 132

This is the big one. Polygamy is the giant skeleton in the closet of Mormonism. Despite former president Gordon B. Hinckley’s blithe dismissal (“I think it is not doctrinal”), polygamy, or Celestial marriage, remains canonized scripture. Here’s why this is so problematic.

To believe that God gave Joseph Smith a revelation to seal thirty-odd women to himself in Celestial marriage, you also have to accept that God commanded Joseph to:

• marry his servant girl years before he had the sealing power, and three more of his housemaids in Nauvoo
• marry Orson Hyde’s wife after sending him on a mission to Jerusalem, as well as marry ten other mens’ wives (some of whom continued in polyandrous relationships, but others lost their wives permanently)
• entice a 14 year old to marry him with the promise of earning salvation for her family by so doing
• marry three women after telling them that God sent an angel with a sword to kill him if they didn’t accept
• while hiding most of this from his legal wife Emma and from the church, and engaging in character assassination of the women and others who rejected his advances or denounced polygamy in public, including first presidency members Oliver Cowdery, Sidney Rigdon, and William Law

(No wonder the Church didn’t talk about Smith’s personal practice of polygamy for most of the 20th century.)

And then, you have to believe that God commanded three more Church presidents to issue repeated and categorical affirmations that polygamy was the true order of marriage and would never be taken from the earth, right up until He commanded Wilford Woodruff to repeal it — after which Woodruff and successors Lorenzo Snow and Joseph F. Smith alternately sanctioned and condemned further plural marriages for over a decade before the Smoot hearings convinced Smith that God really meant for them to stop practicing polygamy, and that the Manifesto was not just another facade to fool the Gentiles.

And that’s not even mentioning the internal problems in Section 132!

But the alternative, that Smith came up with Section 132 on his own, and that Brigham Young, John Taylor, and Wilford Woodruff (not to mention the Quorum of Twelve) were similarly speaking without inspiration when they officially endorsed the practice, is too horrible to contemplate. If Smith went rogue with Section 132, then everything else he did and claimed is open to question, including the priesthood restoration upon which the Church’s claim to exclusive salvific power rests.

That is why, even though there is some precedent for decanonization in the Church, Section 132 will remain on the books. The Church can throw Brigham Young’s Adam=God teaching under the bus. It can even step right up to the line of not quite admitting that the racial temple and priesthood ban was another mistake by Young. But it can’t admit that four presidents of the Church instituted and defended polygamy without divine sanction for fifty years.

In conclusion

The only area in which substantive change seems possible is in the financial sphere. Both increased transparency and reprioritization of Church funds could be done without a major course correction by the Brethren. Change in any of the other areas would require repudiating deeply-held doctrine, and would implicate earlier leaders in mistakes too big to acknowledge.

Instead, expect to see more talks about prophetic infallibility by that name or another. Russel M. Nelson — now himself likely to be the next Church president — gave a good example in his 2014 Conference talk. We should follow the prophet, he tells us without qualification, because “his counsel will be untainted, unvarnished, unmotivated by any personal aspiration, and utterly true!”