Rules are lazy and create conformity, but they are practical for large groups of people; the higher the percentage of people for whom the rules create a societal benefit, the more useful the rule is. 
Different leaders have different standards for what percent of a group “needs” the rule before they will apply a rule; the 80/20 principle is often applied (80% of the people need to be kept in line), but it may feel childish and condescending to those who don’t “need” that rule. There’s an expression that “the exception proves the rule,” but the more exceptions are warranted the less effective the rule is. We also have behavioral rule codes (called standards). And where there are rules or standards, there are individuals in a group that don the police cap and watch for law breakers.
Conversely, individual agreements are often more powerful and more personal but take longer and are harder to track and measure. In the church we also use agreements (called covenants), although we essentially make them one-size-fits-all which makes them more like rules. We claim to be a covenant-making people, but maybe we are really just a rule-making people. Let’s compare:
Standards
- promote an ideal
- shotgun approach, one size fits all
- creates a law and then hedges about it
- compel compliance – consequences are not natural, but are enforced by society
- rely on conformity
Covenants
- they reflect diverse needs; personal circumstances apply
- based on principles, not checklists
- they align with values
- they are more subjective and based on personal choice
- the only consequences that apply are between the covenant-makers and any natural consequences that exist
So, which is better? Can you create a church based solely on individual covenants rather than standardized requirements? I’m reminded of people who write their own wedding vows, something I’ve seen a few times in real life but mostly in the movies where pretty much nobody uses standard wedding vows anymore, and they all sound like they were written by Erma Bombeck. They are funny, off-beat, and heart-warming all at once.
It can also be observed that some of the “standards” we have as LDS are actually subjective in terms of how they are applied (e.g. tithing). However, there’s not much subjectivity, and there are a lot of rules that don’t have a lot of subjectivity (e.g. chastity, Word of Wisdom, temple recommend questions); additionally, local leaders often like to apply their own personal definitions of standards to their congregations. We also seem to be more focused on clearcut rules and standards for the youth (the White Bible for missionaries and For the Strength of the Youth pamphlet).
Perhaps this is a personal preference thing. For many, traditional uniform standards may seem more legitimate for their familiarity and ability to build a shared community. For others, making a more personal covenant will feel more relevant and binding.
- Do you prefer standards and knowing where the lines are or do you prefer personal covenants and subjectivity ?
- Do you think there should be more personal leeway with standards or do you think orthopraxy is key to Mormonism?
- Do you think the 80/20 rule applies to the church standards or some other percentage? For example, a statistic I’ve read states that 1 in 7 people who drink become an alcoholic (actually much higher than I would have thought). That’s obviously much lower than 80%, but perhaps the perils of drinking (broken families, drunk driving accidents, beer bellies) make the lower percentage an acceptable threshold.
- Are personal covenants more thoughtful and personal and therefore more binding to those that make them?
- Is it right to apply societal consequences to create conformity when consequences don’t follow naturally?
- Are standards necessary to create a uniform culture of believers and to make it clear what to expect from our community of saints?
- Should we emphasize personal covenant making more than we do as a church? Does the focus on high standards reduce the likelihood that members want to make incremental personal covenants?
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
Which is teaching correct principles?
Both?
Interesting questions, Hawkgrrrl. Forgive my failure of understanding, but I’m not sure I get what you’re talking about with personal agreements / covenants. To help me, would you give an example of a personal agreement that hasn’t been subverted into a one-size-fits-all rule?
If I understand the distinction right, I would guess that we lean more toward one-size-fits-all standards and less toward individual agreements in the Church out of a sense of fairness. That is, if we feel like others are getting off easy in not having to live all the painful standards we do, we get mad. If you look at those who most closely police the rules, it seems like more often than not, they’re policing rules that they have suffered to try to stick to. It seems like this comes up with any type of rule where there’s disagreement around the edges, or where the Church has shifted position over time, e.g., Word of Wisdom, birth control, Sabbath Day.
I believe agreements went the way of the dodo bird thanks to correlation.
Ziff – I think you are spot on. The scriptures have examples of personal covenants all over the place, some good some bad. I am thinking of Jacob and the angel, and him putting his hand under the angel’s thigh. I am also thinking of the rash oath of Jepthah. A modern day version might be doing a personal fast or making a commitment to do something to obtain a specific blessing or answer to a prayer. But I don’t hear much of that any more. Also, as I thought about Lent, that is a pretty individual commitment, and I realized that since we’ve already given up so much, I’m not keen to give up more. In this example, the rules are so onerous they trump my personal commitment to sacrifice.
When I was in a sociology of work class, I read a lot of research contrasting the Japanese model of employment (and the culture behind that) to the western (e.g., US, but certainly not just US) model of employment, and the culture behind that. One of the articles I read had an interesting contrast that I think goes along well with the discussion of rules vs. agreements:
The paper goes on to explain the difference in systems: in the Japanese model, there is more of a social exchange model…such a model includes a lot of things, but basically it limits the number of participants as it works more on trust. This works in more homogeneous populations because one can assume a lot of shared values, meaning, etc.,
However, in more diverse societies, the same functions come off as playing favorites, crony capitalism, porkbarrelling, etc., because now, one in-group is being privileged above the other outgroups. As a result of increased diversity, organizations and communities seek to have more objective, neutral, and “fair” set rules, rather than renegotiated social agreements.
What strikes me when I read this stuff in light of the church is that it doesn’t seem the church doesn’t easily fit one way or another. I think Correlation plays a huge rule in this: we can have discussions trying to separate “the culture” from “the gospel” precisely because we recognize that some common understandings of what it is to be a “good Mormon” are not actually precise rules, but are actually shared understandings — socially determined agreements. Because members share a context (correlation), we can use buzzwords with each other and understand what people are really getting at.
Yet…there is great difficulty at separating what exactly is just “Mormon Culture” from what is essential to Mormonism…you’ll have people who take all sorts of positions on this issue, but not one can necessarily have an authoritative answer…precisely because our understanding of what is “authoritative” isn’t written explicitly.
Andrew S – interesting analogy with Japanese employment practices. I was also thinking along the lines of some contract practices I’ve experienced in my career. I’ve found that the more mature a market is, the more tolerance there is for standard contracts; companies will find the comparison to peer practices compelling. But that’s also a Western bias because we view our markets as mature, but they are also based on a completely different economic model (less government control), so there are other variants that change the stresses of the markets.
One thing I found in Hong Kong is that there is a strong belief that a written contract is less binding than the more recent verbal discussions that have taken place, even though they are not documented. Because of the value on “relationship,” companies are reluctant to contradict that thinking, even though as Westerners that sounds like utter chaos. We always want to know exactly when a lawsuit is justified.
This element of trust, individual needs vs. “best practice,” and what the standards are (on both sides of the contract) are all relevant to the idea of standards vs. covenants in church. We talk about an individual relationship with HF, but we practice conformity to standards. We talk about individual needs, but only as exceptional circumstances. We talk about standards as being an individual commitment, but they are really an imposed norm.
I think the biggest problem in the Church with regards to this is the “fuzzy” nature of the process. On the surface, the Church pays lip-service to individuality. There are teachings that we are to “keep the Sabbath holy”, or to “be modest”, or to “pay a full tithing”, or whatever. In the ideal world, these principles should be enough, and the implementation should be between that person and God.
However, many people in the Church can’t leave it like that. Just like the Pharisees who then started to make list after list of how these principles were to be lived, we do the same thing. And it is very EASY to ADD to the list but nigh well impossible to SUBTRACT from the list.
As examples, take the recent issue with blacks and the priesthood. Joseph Smith ordained a black man to the priesthood, so it obviously wasn’t a bit deal to him. But by Brigham Young’s time, we started to get these increasingly racist opinions (which were undoubtedly reflective of society at that time). These opinions start to gain more weight and gravity, until by the mid-1900’s, we have entire doctrinal reason and justifications for this. People who question the practice are called in for discipline for not “supporting their leaders”. It developed to the point where it took a concerted effort by the FP and Q12 with a revelation to fix the problem. And this is all over something that the Church now states that “It is not known precisely why, how or when this restriction began in the Church” and for which McConkie flat out said they were “wrong”.
And it continues at all levels. Modesty. Fairly simple concept on many levels. But some people keep adding layers and layers to it. We had a whole sacrament meeting listing minutae of what modesty SHOULD MEAN for us (mostly women). And just in case anyone is suggesting these are just personal opinions gone awry, a recent issue of the Friend had a story about a little girl who was essentially immodest because she was going to wear a sundress to the zoo, so she had to put a t-shirt underneath it.
Just like in race and the priesthood, people tend to “take your sundress and raise you” even further. More and more “rules” get added to what it means to be a Mormon. Yet because of the nebulous nature of what “doctrine” actually is, the Church can distance itself from it.
– We leave modesty up the person, yet we publish articles about little girls and sun dresses.
– We leave tithing up to the person, yet we have talks about whether someone wants gross or net blessings, or even talks about paying even MORE than 10%
– We have the Word of Wisdom, which has been increasingly strictly interpreted since it was given, although nothing “official” has even been revealed.
– And so on.
So, really the biggest issue is that the Church pays lip-service to the “individual” nature of these things, yet subtly and overtly promotes the nit-picky nature of things
In law, the difference between a contract and a covenant is that if you break a contract, the other side is relieved of fulfilling their side of the bargain. In a covenant, even if the other sides breaches, the covenantee must still fulfill their end of the bargain.
I work in a company that had a few rules but mainly relied on the good people they hired to do the right thing and to be honest. That the overall thinking was that most people want to do a good job and will do the right thing to have that happen. Unfortunately, It’s so not true anymore.
In real life, many people cannot deal with a level of ambiguity that lets them operate as an individual who would chose the right thing. They are much more comfortable acting “as a little child” with tons of rules and boundaries which remove as much of the uncertainty as possible.
They, in fact, would rather give up their God-given agency in order to not have to think about how they apply that agency in real practice.
So I do not think the Church “pays lip service”, but that some members WANT the Church to tell them everything. And that some of us interpret what we hear over the pulpit from our leaders AS IF they were telling us everything to do, rather than offering suggestions as to how to conduct ourselves. We are free, almost required, to apply that which applies and reject that which does not. Obiviously, there may be consequences to rejecting some counsel, but I actually believe the consequences of giving up our agency are worse.
I realize that some object to this because they always want to paint the Church as overly authoritarian.
But the Church cannot take away or usurp our agency, period.
#8:dcp,
Even in Law, it’s never that clean. These things tend to stack upon each other. Contacts often have Covenants within them. Covenants can create Contacts, etc. And, as the OP states__ Agreements can or/become rules. If you add “policy”, you add a whole new mess.
Mike’s #7 comment captures the pharisaical nature of the church and it members very well. I also agree with Jeff that that some members WANT the Church to tell them everything. Both comments seem to agree that some members amplify the rules.
Obedience is important to learn because it teaches self discipline but God is much more than a sinless self disciplined being. At some point we must move beyond sin avoidance and home teaching on time to enlightenment of things more spiritual if we are to become like him.
I think you hit on something really important when you say that the more exceptions there are to the rule, the less the rule holds up. I think the church does this to itself constantly. For example, the church sometimes explicitly tells women that being a stay at home mother is ideal, despite the fact that the average American woman today spends over 20 years in the workforce. Women ignore this admonition all the time because they have to.
At what point is it sustainable to keep teaching a standard that many, many members cannot meet?
LovelyLauren – another aspect of that particular “rule” that doesn’t hold up, IMO, is that it’s not presented as a rule so much as a description (in the way it’s written). If that description is true (that women are naturally the most nurturing), then you don’t need to tell them what to do; they will do it naturally. If the description is inaccurate, then telling people what to do based on it won’t work anyway. You can’t change a tiger’s stripes.
I think I see a pattern here. If it is a good idea for Mother to stay home with their children for at least some of their early years, then it is a good idea. Whether a woman chooses to work outside of the home or is forced to, doesn’t negate the good idea.
It would only be natural that a woman who chooses to work outside the home would not agree with the idea.
So the pattern is that if we disagree with the idea it cannot be a good one.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say, Jeff, if you’d like to clarify, but I think that supporting your family is probably a better idea.
The problem with a rule/description is that a one-size-fits all pattern does not really seem to work well in many cases. Another one I see is the “rule” (or commonly quoted counsel) is that men and women who are not married should never be alone together. The problem is that many men and women have workplaces where such a rule is completely ludicrous. My husband is a paramedic. If he were to take that rule to the extent that some members apply it, he would have to find another career.
I think rules become a problem when non-commandment-based rules become a method of judgment, which seems to happen all too often.
Hawkgirl,
“We claim to be a covenant-making people, but maybe we are really just a rule-making people.”
You’ve about summed it up with that statement.
Lauren,
All I was saying is that a Mother who chooses to work outside the home would not agree that having a Mother home with her child is better idea than working outside the home. To a Mother who must work, it doesn’t matter what she believes.