Ring-Fencing Truth: The Tension Between Individual and Institutional Revelation in LDS Theology
Mormonism embraces personal revelation and individual responsibility for gaining a witness of the Divine and of truth, but this bottom-up, almost democratic process is fact-checked by a top-down hierarchy that limits the faith’s potential and funnels members’ personal spiritual discernment.
This is the first in a series of critical reflections on LDS theology as I navigate my shifting faith.
I offer my thoughts not as an act of retaliation, rebellion or disparagement, but as contributions to the growing community of Mormon thinkers who want the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be the best version of itself.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is sometimes criticized as an ultra-orthodox institution that demands compliance and blind faith of its members, whilst silencing dissent. There is a point to that view, but the reality is far more complex. I’ve found myself navigating and reflecting on that complexity, particularly since I wrote a Medium piece six months ago in which I publicly declared my gradual disengagement from the Church over the conflict between its doctrines and my sexuality. I voiced dissent and I got some pushback.
But this essay isn’t about my specific experience. It’s a reflection on voice, the expression of opinion.
Mormonism’s theology incorporates a fascinating dichotomy in its view of truth, revelation and voice.
On one hand, LDS Church leadership has an almost unquestioned voice: the Church’s president is considered a living oracle, God’s personal representative on earth. He can (effectively) unilaterally alter doctrine and his counsel is heeded and lifelong views instantly altered sometimes by millions of faithful with little vocal opposition.
However, the Church also preaches the extraordinary doctrine of personal revelation. Members are commanded (not merely counselled) to seek their own ‘testimony’ or witness of the Church’s veracity and of God’s existence. They are urged to discern actual revelation to direct their lives.
That is beautifully democratic. In a way, every member is a prophet. This is a prophetic movement; it is a church of prophets.
So, LDS theology recognizes two ‘voices’ of divine revelation. Let’s call them the institutional voice (the one articulated individually by the ecclesiastical Prophet or collectively by presiding councils) and the member voice (the one articulated by each member or collectively as the membership).
Each voice is, doctrinally, reliant on the same Source. They should, therefore, agree with each other. Of course, they don’t always and the Church has developed a maze of doctrines, policies and counsel to resolve the conflict.
In so doing, the Church tends to silence and critique the member voice until it coheres exactly with the institutional voice. In the process, the Church struggles to respond to changing culture and contemporary issues because a body of 15 million members outsources its revelatory capacity to the discernment of 15 mostly old men.
The Institutional Voice
Mormonism’s claim to a living prophetic is fairly unique and admittedly alluring. The doctrine is well established canonically. Joseph Smith’s prophetic mantle is canonized in Mormon scripture (this is Christ speaking):
… ye have received a commandment for a law unto my church, through him [Joseph Smith] whom I [God] have appointed unto you [the membership] to receive commandments and revelations from my hand.
And this ye shall know assuredly — that there is none other appointed unto you to receive commandments and revelations until he be taken, if he abide in me. (D&C 43:2–3)
That is reinforced by the LDS definition of what constitutes scripture:
…whatsoever they [church leaders] shall speak when moved upon by the Holy Ghost shall be scripture, shall be the will of the Lord, shall be the mind of the Lord, shall be the word of the Lord, shall be the voice of the Lord, and the power of God unto salvation.(D&C 68:4)
The current prophet’s words are therefore considered ‘scripture, … the will of the Lord, … the mind of the Lord, … the voice of the Lord’. Yes, the caveat is that this is only true when the prophet speaks ‘when moved upon by the Holy Ghost’, but Latter-day Saints are notoriously forgiving of the Prophet. Pretty much whatever he says, especially in a formal church setting such as a general conference, is taken, verbatim, as modern-day scripture. That is the institution’s voice: the actual word of God.
The Member Voice
Existing in tension with the institutional voice is the member voice. Latter-day Saints are counselled to seek inspiration for their personal lives through the Holy Ghost.
Theoretically, because normal members can also be ‘moved upon by the Holy Ghost’, they too can speak scripture. There is something ineffably magnificent in this. Every individual member of the Church (and even all humanity) has the responsibility to obtain direction directly from the divine Source.
One such available type of revelation is a divine witness of the veracity of doctrines or ‘truths’, as encouraged by the Book of Mormon:
I [Moroni, the speaker] would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truthof it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.
And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things. (Moroni 10:4–5)
This is what Mormons call a testimony. It is a personal conviction of ‘truth’ (whatever that is) which is supposed to be the product of revelation.
There is little sense within LDS canon that this member voice has restricted access to certain information (‘all things’ sounds pretty unfettered to me).
The Tension and the Dissonance
What happens when the two voices do not agree with each other? Both, doctrinally, are channels to the same Source of revelation, they are even both theoretically sources of scripture, so there should be no conflict. But obviously there is. Everyone experiences it at some point. I myself came to a very powerful revelatory understanding that my sexuality was not sinful, yet the institutional voice tells me very forcefully that it is.
That dissonance has existed since the faith’s first days. Everyone was a prophet for a while. It was Joseph Smith who first had to deal with it. Less than a year after the Church was officially organized, some members began claiming to have received sweeping revelations and visions, sometimes contradicting Smith’s own teachings. His response was Doctrine and Covenants Section 43 (quoted in the previous segment), which formally elevated the prophetic, institutional voice of the President of the Church above the prophetic voices of members.
That section, billed as a revelation direct from the Lord Himself, used the language of ‘commandment’ and ‘law’ to strictly enjoin the membership to adhere to the institutional voice as ‘there is none other appointed unto you to receive commandments and revelations until he be taken’. That ‘law’ remains the relatively unchallenged precedent today.
Things didn’t end with Section 43. Over time, church leaders added nuances to codify the institutional voice’s prominence and the limited role of the member voice. This doctrinal resolution was explicated recently by Dallin H Oaks, then a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and now First Counsellor in the First Presidency. Oaks describes two ‘lines of communication’, which he terms ‘personal’ (what I’ve called the member voice) and ‘priesthood’ (the institutional voice). His use of the term ‘priesthood’ to identify the institutional voice clearly shapes his rhetoric: the institutional voice derives its power from the priesthood, so it is by definition more powerful, authoritative and ecclesiastical. The member voice has no such weight.
Below I discuss six of the doctrinal ‘resolutions’ with which most Latter-day Saints agree and which current church curriculum teaches.
(I rely primarily on Oaks’s talk because of its clarity and his reputation as one of the Quorum of the Twelve’s doctrinal heavyweights.)
1: The Member Voice is Primarily Confirmatory
While Oaks admits that the member voice occurs ‘without mortal intermediary’, he sets clear boundaries to the data this voice can carry:
This personal line of communication with our Heavenly Father through His Holy Spirit is the source of [1] our testimony of truth, [2] of our knowledge, and [3] of our personal guidance from a loving Heavenly Father. It is an essential feature of His marvelous gospel plan, which allows each one of His children to receive a [1 again] personal witness of its truth.
So the member voice is designed primarily, Oaks argues, as a means to obtain confirmation of truth. He nudges ‘knowledge’ into the mix (labelled ‘2’ above), but does not explain it, leaving the reader in little doubt that confirmation is the primary idea.
This is key. Oaks subsumes the member’s revelatory rights underneath the institutional voice. In other words, the prophet speaks and you get to confirm what he says. Not the other way round. It is top-down. There is no such thing as a grassroots member declaring some new doctrine and asking leaders to confirm that. The idea is ludicrous enough to make members balk at internal protest movements such as Ordain Women, even when the protestors affirm that their goal is only to ask church leaders to pray about their proposals.
The confirmation-focused view of revelation is by far the most prominent in church teachings and culture. In their very first lessons, missionaries encourage their students to gain a testimony of the Book of Mormon and the teachings they have presented. Monthly fast and testimony meetings in church worship services feature streams of members affirming their testimonies. Most sermons and lessons in formal church settings and even in the home end in a testimony of the subject matter.
In all of these reiterations, the institution has its voice repeated, confirmed and reinforced by the membership. Members who might disagree with what they are hearing cannot realistically oppose; they must remain silent or get on the bandwagon.
2: The Member Voice is Limited to Personal and Family Issues
As referenced earlier, Oaks identifies that ‘personal guidance’ is a legitimate arena for the member voice.
The member voice does have the right to declare itself fairly strongly within these parameters. A Church doctrinal manual confirms that members can only receive inspiration from God ‘to help you with your specific needs, responsibilities, and questions and to help you strengthen your testimony.’ Notice the jurisdiction there. The institutional voice is all-encompassing but a member can only discern issues for his or her private affairs. The institutional voice’s hegemony is thus perpetuated over the member voice.
In another address, Oaks reinforced this in describing a sort of jurisdictional revelatory verification process:
When one person purports to receive revelation for another person outside his or her own area of responsibility — such as a Church member who claims to have revelation to guide the entire Church or a person who claims to have a revelation to guide another person over whom he or she has no presiding authority according to the order of the Church — you can be sure that such revelations are not from the Lord.
Case closed. The member voice has its lane and it better stick to it.
3: The Institution Alone can Expand One’s Revelatory Jurisdiction
Of course, jurisdictions can expand in certain church callings (see Oaks’s reference to ‘another person over whom he or she has no presiding authority according to the order of the church’). The idea here is that members may receive the additional right to revelation to guide their calling, which they would otherwise not be entitled to.
But members cannot unilaterally access those callings; they are given by the institution. Thus, the institution safeguards the expansion of voice and can therefore dictate the terms on which the expansion is awarded. One such term, naturally, is that church leaders in certain callings must agree with the institutional voice. Their callings do not give them leeway to preach whatever they wish—or even to claim doctrinal revelation.
4: The Voices Function Only with Worthiness
And if any of the restraints mentioned above weren’t enough, Oaks provides a caveat:
…we cannot communicate reliably through the direct, personal line if we are disobedient to or out of harmony with the priesthood line. The Lord has declared that “the powers of heaven cannot be controlled nor handled only upon the principles of righteousness” (D&C 121:36). Unfortunately, it is common for persons who are violating God’s commandments or disobedient to the counsel of their priesthood leaders to declare that God has revealed to them that they are excused from obeying some commandment or from following some counsel. Such persons may be receiving revelation or inspiration, but it is not from the source they suppose. The devil is the father of lies, and he is ever anxious to frustrate the work of God by his clever imitations.
Oaks’s language here borders on inflammatory. The member’s access to personal revelation is muddied (one ‘cannot communicate reliably’) if he or she is ‘disobedient to or out of harmony’ with the institutional voice. That is an extraordinary statement. ‘out of harmony’ can mean anything from full-on apostasy to one tiny disagreement. The channel is also cut off entirely for those ‘who are violating God’s commandments’. Oaks characterizes these two groups as people keen to find excuses to sin. And, of course, doctrinal arguments are always best intensified through the invocation of the devil: people who speak contrary to the institutional voice are getting their revelation ‘not from the source they suppose [but from] the father of lies’. That sounds awfully close to the institutional shaming of people into agreement and submission. Troublemakers clearly can’t be trusted, especially if they’re devil-deluded.
Granted, Oaks’s language is certainly not characteristic of most church leaders (he has a knack for fieriness), but the implications of what he is saying are remarkable. The member voice is null and void, the result of a frenzied, sinful mind, if does not agree with the institutional.
One must bear in mind that what ultimately constitutes ‘worthiness’ in the LDS tradition is determined by priesthood leaders through worthiness interviews for temple recommends, etc. Here again, the member voice is controlled and channelled through the institution. While top Church leaders are also under the requirement to live worthily so they are attuned to the Spirit when they divine the institutional voice, there is no ecclesiastical determiner of their worthiness. The imbalance further empowers the institutional voice over the member’s.
5: The Member Voice is Welcome to Add to Discussion, But It Has No Final Say
To give the Church credit, there has been a softening in recent years towards accommodating some role of the member voice in the ecclesiastical structures. That role is as an advisor or discussion participant. But its presence is carefully ring-fenced.
The tightrope the church walks is illustrated in section 4.6.1 of Handbook 2 (the authoritative policy guide for church leaders), where the church outlines the roles of the member and institutional voice in a local congregation’s ward council. The language characterizing the roles of the bishop (who is the chair of the council) and the councillors is telling:
During the meeting, the bishop explains each matter being considered, but he does not normally decide how to resolve the matter until he has heard the discussion. He encourages discussion without dominating it. He asks questions and may ask particular council members for their suggestions. He listens carefully before making a decision. These discussions should foster a spirit of inspiration.
Council members are encouraged to speak honestly, both from their personal experience [i.e. member voice] and from their positions [i.e. ‘institutional’ voice] as organization leaders. … After open discussion, the bishop may make a decision, or he may wait to discuss the matter further with his counsel[l]ors. After he makes a decision, council members should support it in a spirit of unity and harmony.
Council members are given the platform to articulate their member voices, but there are clea institutional safeguards against ideas contravening the institutional voice:
- The bishop may unilaterally rule without discussion (‘he [only] does not normally decide’).
- While the bishop should not be ‘dominating’ discussion, he still participates, allowing him to comment in real-time.
- He decides who speaks and when, giving him the power to steer the conversation.
- The bishop’s decision is final.
- Member voices ‘should’ resign themselves to the decision ‘in a spirit of unity’, which means putting on a united, institutional front.
And even with the teaching style encouraged by new church curricula now fostering more open discussion in lessons, there still is this constant feeling that the member voice is conditional, monitored, overlookable and fact-checked by presiding authorities.
6: The Institutional Voice is the Arbiter of ‘True Doctrine’
Section 17.1.3 of Handbook 2, specifies:
All leaders should ensure that true doctrine is taught in the Church. If a person teaches false or speculative doctrine, leaders should correct it promptly and sensitively. Errors can usually be corrected in private, but major or repeated errors may require public correction.
If local leaders are unsure what doctrines or teachings are correct on a given subject, they may seek guidance from their immediate presiding authority.
The member voice is specifically silenced in Church settings if it is out of sync with the institutional voice. The institution brings to bear its considerable leverage (through the leaders it calls who have authority and power over congregations) to enforce its voice. And, when a leader is in doubt if a member’s voice is contravening the institution’s, he must contact his ‘immediate presiding authority’, who is institutionally mandated.
Dissent, disagreement and even misgivings cannot find full expression, at least in formal Church meetings. This encourages a kind of self-censorship. I’ve certainly felt silenced (now more so than ever) and I know of members who avoid speaking up in lessons or worship services because they sense it is inappropriate or that will be corrected.
Revelatory Resignation
Mormons are left with little room to seek revelation. And if they do, they must verify the provenance of their inspiration by ensuring that:
- They are living ‘worthily’ (whatever that means);
- The inspiration falls clearly within personal jurisdiction or callings; and
- Their feelings don’t contradict anything claimed by the institutional voice.
When the Prophet introduces a new teaching or policy (or contradicts previous prophetic pronouncements, which happened most recently with the rescinding of the infamous November 5th policy), members are called to their knees to gain their own witness of the truth—but only to confirm, never to question. And if we do feel we have received some light, some revelation, it has to be fact-checked through the institutional lens before we can even trust it.
Many members resign their revelatory independence—their voice, their capacity to doubt, their scepticism—to the exclusive discernment of 15 men.
What If…
It is tempting to wonder how the Church or the broader Mormon community would be different if the institutional voice were to relax its censorship or if the Church were to honour the member voice as an individual and collective power. Even if it were only slightly to acknowledge that ordinary members at ground level have the spiritual capacity and right to receive light and knowledge on doctrinal matters—what would happen?
There are Christian traditions that do allow their adherents to come to their own understanding of God and of truth. Some denominations even celebrate the doctrinal debates within congregations (the churches of the Anglican Communion come to mind, but they certainly aren’t alone). People can, they claim, seek God in their own ways and find their own individual paths to God.
I have also noticed that some traditions (and I’m thinking particularly of Community of Christ here) see revelation as not necessarily channelled directly to a single man, but as the Spirit working and moving through a community. Revelation is true when it is felt by a critical mass. That is a radically different, bottom-up pattern of discernment to the LDS Church’s top-down tradition. If the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were to empower the member voice, I think it would be surprised at just how intact the doctrinal edifice would remain.
Would a more democratized church move towards women’s ordination to the priesthood or to same-sex sealings or to a deeper theology of gender? I suspect it just might in time. That wouldn’t destroy theological integrity. If anything, it would help members buy into the notion of continuing revelation, understanding that ‘continuing’ implies complexity and evolution.
I must add here that what I’m suggesting isn’t unprecedented within Mormonism. The Law of Common Consent hints at a sort of acknowledgement of the prophetic capacity of the membership body. And twice in the Church’s history, a major doctrinal volte-face has been pulled off: with the renunciation of polygamy and the rescinding of the priesthood and temple restrictions on black members. It is interesting to note that both of those changes occurred after the membership seemed to have moved against prevailing positions. It’s difficult to prove that, of course, but my sense from the literature is that it is the case. Mormons became increasingly uneasy with the policies, Church leaders sensed this and sought guidance. This happened much later than would have been most effective, but it did happen.
Leaders don’t like to admit that they change their minds. Changes happen after extensive deliberation, all designed (presumably) to assure everyone involved that what they’re doing is inspired. This clunky, achingly slow process could be quickened and enriched by discerning shifts in members’ understanding and giving us the platform to voice our heartfelt views.
The Church would need to create structures to accommodate the member voice, but I contend that such a move would be in its interest. We would evolve into what we are meant to be: a church of prophets.
