The Church has a Christmas present for you: additional guidance (posted Dec. 21) on how you should pray in church and, by extension, how you pray ever. The directive reinstates obligatory second-hour prayers and re-emphasizes using archaic pronouns in prayer. Quoting from the directive (which is in turn quoting the Handbook) “Members should pray using words that express love and respect for Heavenly Father. In English, this includes the pronouns Thee, Thy, Thine, and Thou when addressing Him.“
The first sentence is fine. But you can “express love and respect for Heavenly Father” in standard 21st-century English. You can do that in Australian or Irish or English or American variants of the English language. You can do it as a five-year-old or a ninety-year-old, you can do it if you have a PhD or if you didn’t finish high school. The idea that it is impossible or difficult or somehow unworkable to express love and respect for God in prayer using standard English is simply wrong. I know of no evidence suggesting using archaic pronouns makes prayer more loving or more respectful.
Now it does seem to be the case that senior LDS leaders somehow think using thou and thee and thine in prayer makes a prayer more acceptable to God. I don’t see any evidence for this. Jesus didn’t use thou and thee and thine. The best explanation (a true explanation, not a PR justification) is that LDS leaders have grown up hearing these pronouns in prayer and it feels right to them, reinforced by the archaic language used in the King James Version of the Bible.
What are the consequences of enforcing this policy? I can think of a few. LDS prayer-speak becomes (remains?) stilted as those praying stumble over the correct usage of these archaic pronouns. LDS prayer-makers become very self-conscious. Any visitor thinks our prayer language is a little weird. It makes younger Mormons uncomfortable praying and perhaps unwilling to pray. Anyone who actually believes God prefers these archaic pronouns probably also comes to think God is being a little too picky in how He is addressed. Here is one thing that is almost certainly NOT a consequence of requiring these pronouns: more loving and respectful prayers.
A rather more delicate response is given by Jana Riess at her Religion News Service column: “The thee and thou of Mormon prayer.” As usual, she makes some very good points and is fair to both sides of the argument.
So what’s a reasonable Mormon to do? How shalt thou pray in church? With thy family? In thy closet? Cast thy thoughts about and offerst up good counsel in the comments.
Wheat & Tares 
The “no opening prayer second hour” revelation had about as long a shelf-life as the POX. Glad I’m taking my vitamins to keep up with the breathtaking pace of earth-shattering revelations.
Maybe this minutia will be the ticket to getting people back to church after Covid.
It occurred to me this morning as I read this that maybe God really is just waiting for us to address him/her using the proper pronouns and the solutions to climate change, poverty, equality, war, etc, will naturally follow. Maybe this is what the Q15 have been trying to tell us all along! How have we not seen this? It’s the little things, right?
Honestly, these ridiculous pronouncements are just embarrassing.
(this is almost too easy)…Who knew that the Brethren care so much about pronoun usage. Leading from behind as usual.
I wholeheartedly agree that no one has the right to tell anyone else what kind of language they should use in a prayer. That places someone in between the person praying and God. That is not right.
With that being said, those who pray should consider whether they are treating God as someone they love and respect, or like an anonymous TikTok viewer. A real relationship can only come from respect and love. It can never come when one party in the conversation treats the other only as a silent, anonymous observer.
I just can’t even with this. It’s the combination of 1) reversing something they changed 4 years ago, 2) declaring how we should pray, 3) the time of year (seriously, 4 days before Christmas and THIS is what you have to offer the world?), and 4) the juxtaposition of this announcement against people dying of cold on the streets of Salt Lake. It makes us look and feel pharisaical, small, and petty.
I have a deep, personal relationship with God, whom I love and respect very much. I’m torn between continuing to pray how I usually pray in public OR politely declining if asked with “I’d love to, unfortunately, the church institution does not approve of how I show respect and love to my God in my prayers.” Both are snotty and small, but that’s where stuff like this sends me. To my worst self.
Thee, Thy, Thine, and Thou are to be used when praying in English. The King James version of the Bible is to be used by English speaking people. Let us all learn a second language and thumb our noses at these directives.
The thing is, it’s not just a question of throwing some thees and thous in there. To use these pronouns correctly (in terms of grammar) requires learning an entirely different set of conjugations for both regular and irregular verbs—dost, goest, hast, seest, couldst, etc—which church members, even general authorities, can’t be expected to get right all the time (not even Joseph Smith, apparently. One of the linguistic differences between the Bible and the Book of Mormon is that the KJV’s Elizabethan grammar is impeccable and the BoM is only making a backwoodsy attempt at emulating it). Avid scripture readers will pick up on a lot of these by osmosis, but honestly I don’t think the church leaders who instigated this realize what they’re asking.
I also don’t think they care. What they really want is for people to use Thee and Thou and to conjugate them in whatever way works for the teacher’s quorum president just before the muffins are devoured, grammar be damned.
And here’s Elder Oaks with the receipts: “In our day the English words thee, thou, thy, and thine are suitable for the language of prayer, not because of how they were used anciently but because they are currently obsolete in common English discourse. Being unused in everyday communications, they are now available as a distinctive form of address in English, appropriate to symbolize respect, closeness, and reverence for the one being addressed.”
So we use them precisely because they are incorrect. Got it.
Seriously??? It’s not like prayers sound like this:
“Yo dog, what up? Just wanted to give props for the awesome blessings your boy has. Fo shizzle, most righteous gratitude, pops. In my older bro’s name, amen.”
And even if they did, I think that an omnipotent God would get the point, especially if it was offered sincerely and with real intent.
It is this type of micromanaging that turns people (particularly younger generations) off. There are times and places for formality, but c’mon…can we focus on more pressing issues?
Here is a strange thought: a few younger friends have noted that the younger generations actually hunger for structure, formality and reverence in worship. Their world is less structured in many ways than my own was decades ago. Formality aggravated me. They find it comforting. I wonder… will this thing will crash or will it result in younger LDS happily murdering King James English in their prayers?
I’m torn here. On the one hand, is God really this picky? If so, shouldn’t he just reveal the pure Adamic language for us to pray in? On the other hand, now I’ll sound like a Sanderson sister when I pray so there’s that!
Otherwise Dot’s comment is spot on. The question shouldn’t be “How does God want me to pray?” the question should be “How can my prayers have a positive impact on the world?” Getting caught up in language seems like a distraction to me. But then, I view most of my faith tradition as a big distraction from what really matters, so this doesn’t surprise me to see such a statement issued during the Christmas season.
@old man, my observation in a ward that was 60% students and now working with the youth is that many people use “you / yours”. So I suspect this is a reaction to that.
It really is absurd once you learn another language (informal is used in Spanish and afaik many others) and the actual history of thee and thou. It’s like oaks was wrong about this and is digging in deeper. Immature.
NOW they worry about pronouns??!!
If the second-person singular pronouns of early modern English (thee, thou, thy, and thine) are reserved to show respect to deity, why are they also used with Satan? Here are just two examples from the KJV.
Job 1:7 And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou?
Matthew 4:10 Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan.
There is no linguistic or historic basis to this request. This is simply the preference/dictate of old men.
My mother took several semesters worth of classes in Middle English to learn all the conjugations and actually learn the grammar of Middle English. It is almost a foreign language. Middle English was king of transitional to Old English which is about like learning German or French for a speaker of modern English. Now, why would any loving father demand that his children speak a foreign language to him, and only him? It sounds awkward, not loving. In fact, it sounds like it is designed specifically to make communication with him unnatural and difficult.
So, I just can’t imagine the God that I worship being the one who wants his children to address him in an unfamiliar language. Now, I can imagine someone who thinks God is some distant, conditionally loving, judgmental, Pharisee thinking that God might care, or the leader of a church who actually wants to be between the members and God telling people things like this to keep them in line following the prophet and not knowing God for themselves. This is not something that will make people feel closer to God, but actually keep God feeling far away, uninterested, different and distant. Is that what the leaders actually want? For the member to feel like they can’t really pray to God because it feels so awkward? I know that will be the result, because having experienced trying to communicate properly in German, I just couldn’t really express my thoughts in my broken German. I can’t imaging trying to pray, really pray, in a language that is not one I am fluent in. Why would a loving father ever demand his children address him in a language they are not fluent in. Answer: this does not come from God but comes from men like Nelson and Oaks.
As a now-retired editor for religious publications, I can confirm that language has always and will continue to evolve. Sometimes this old grammarian gets a bit grumpy about “modern usage,” but then I don’t make the rules (which as we all know, are made to be broken anyway). When the Community of Christ went to enormous lengths about a decade ago to produce a new hymnal (“Community of Christ Sings,” 2013), a concerted effort was made to include “words and music relevant to disciple and Christiancommunity formation in today’s world, with inclusive references to humanity, relationships, and the Divine. At the same time, consideration was given to words and music that represent with integrity the period of history and cultural context from which they come” (from the CCS Foreword). There’s the occasional Thee and Thou in the 664 hymns in the book for that reason, and sometimes simply because of copyright restrictions.
Many English hymn texts were rewritten and non-English translations provided for quite a few hymns. (And as a sometimes pianist for worship services, I admit to great difficulty getting the rhythms right on hymns included from outside North America. ) Of course, all that wordsmithing was done not simply for grammatical reasons, but frequently for theological ones, too. One of my favorites is the familiar Latter-day Saint hymn whose first stanza in CCS now reads: “We thank you, O God, for our prophets who guide us in witness today. We thank you for sending the gospel enlightening our minds with its rays. We thank you for every blessing bestowed by your generous hand. We lift up our promise to serve you, to bring healing and peace to all lands.”
Funny thing is that Joseph Smith basically used this same mindset of mimicking the archaic KJV language in the BOM. It’s one reason that it sounds scriptural specifically. We haven’t really learned anything since then. We are still using the same psychological tricks on ourselves.
I’m of an older generation so these archaic terms are pretty much ingrained in my brain for prayer, but some of the loveliest prayers I’ve heard in our congregation have come from new members who have used more modern wording. You could feel their earnestness and faith rather than it being some pattern of prayer that I might trot out.
It didn’t matter to me that they brought back praying at the start of second period but it did bother me that they felt the need to specify the language used. I hope that individual units don’t make a big deal of pointing this out to their membership. It could backfire and make some people lose confidence in praying publicly.
Some believe those archaic second-person pronouns denote respect and honor. But through history they were also used to express contempt, for addressing strangers, superiors OR inferiors. Current insistence on using the terms as a sign of respect, if one is speaking English, seems to be based more on someone’s familiarity and preference . Once I switched to using you/your in prayers, my prayers and relationship with God immediately and greatly improved. Now I can talk about anything and without hiding behind a wall of formality. And it hasn’t resulted in loss of respect for deity.
Personally, I’m relieved. With this clarified, I feel like I can finally return to Sunday School, and finally reconnect with God. This should fix everything. (Sarcasm intended.)
Our leaders must live in a perpetual state of fear: Members will stop paying tithing, stop attending the temple, stop serving missions, start loving LGBTQ+ members as much as they love God, start demanding financial transparency, start demanding sexual abuse be reported to law enforcement before calling the church’s hotline…the list has no end. Members might even demand the Q15 be accountable for what they say and do. It must cause our senior leaders to have so many anxiety nightmares.
It makes sense senior leadership would have a policy announcement calendar to keep members distracted from the really important stuff. I bet they call it something like, “The bright-shiny-new-stuff-to-distract-members calendar.” I can hear the discussion in the COB. “Humm, end of December. The calendar says it’s time to pull attention to compulsory Middle English pronoun usage in prayers. But to remember new words you have to use it in a sentence. Looks like we better bring back prayer before Sunday School in order to practice the policy. Brilliant!” Meanwhile across the world, LDS temples operate two days a week on average yet we spend money to build more…nothing to look at here.
These kinds of inane LDS papal bulls remind me of June, 2019. Starbucks announced it would open a coffee shop across the street from BYU, Provo, the church’s flagship university in the spring of 2020. I’m sure the church’s initial thought was, “The horror!” (I think I actually read that book when I was a student at BYU.) So, in grand fear-driven fashion, the church released a policy statement. It came out in August and read (I had to look this up to get it right):
“The word coffee isn’t always in the name of coffee drinks. So, before you try what you think is just some new milkshake flavor, here are a couple of rules of thumb: (1) If you’re in a coffee shop (or any other shop that’s well-known for its coffee), the drink you’re ordering probably has coffee in it, so either never buy drinks at coffee shops or always ask if there’s coffee in it. (2) Drinks with names that include café or caffé, mocha, latte, espresso, or anything ending in -ccino are coffee and are against the Word of Wisdom.”
But wait, there is more fear bubbling to the surface, and the policy announcement continues:
“Green tea and black tea are both made from the leaves of the exact same tea plant. The only difference is that the leaves in black tea are fermented and in green tea they’re not. They’re both tea and against the Word of Wisdom. Some drinks have tea in them but don’t advertise that fact, so always check the ingredients. Also, iced tea is still tea.”
Aside from this announcement making Mormons look like total dopes (maybe we are but I don’t think so), I thought the statements were the single most hilarious things I’ve ever read coming from the church. I have always wanted to print a t-shit with “Also, Iced Tea is still Tea,” and wear it to a ward function. I’m sure I have an odd sense of humor, but I still laugh hard when I read these paragraphs.
To be a more serious, I agree with many commenters who suggest it is better to pray, simply to pray, to find God through this expression, than worry about pronoun usage. Because I have siblings who will get so wrapped around this axle they will be far more worried about ‘getting it right’ than what they are feeling and how they should find a way to say it. Why put a governor on praying? It seems to me there is no need to bring attention to this, and it has the potential for negative unintended consequences. Mormons have a distinctive way of praying, both in pattern and English usage, which is a learned behavior and most get it 80% right (according to the church’s policy) anyway. For some (maybe many?) praying in public, praying in church is so very difficult and intimidating. What uplifts me is when someone who is afraid to pray, prays anyway and all I hear are the raw expressions of their heart–this moves me, even changes me. The policy announcement focuses on a kind of stricture that doesn’t need to be emphasized. Just like “so always check the ingredients” for that trace amount of green tea doesn’t need to be said. Or “Also, iced tea is still tea.”
And one last bit of humor on latte’s and the adolescent state of black tea. After I read the release on coffee and tea in response to Satanbucks planned attack on BYU, I laughed and discarded it. A few weeks later in Ward Council a member shared the assigned spiritual thought. They read the coffee and tea announcement, and in all seriousness the member said to the effect, “This makes sense (growing very, very serious and solemn–you know the voice), because when you think about it, Satan is trying everything he can do to occupy and take over our bodies and minds so it makes sense he would try to get into our bodies through the green tea they put in energy drinks…and we all know how popular those are.” And then he bore solemn testimony that our leaders are inspired, Satan is real, and this announcement probably saved thousands of members from the darkness of Lucifer. I sat with my jaw on the floor thinking someone has to start giggling because for a moment I thought it was a parody, what he was saying and how he said it were so totally absurd. Nope. He was dead serious. Others were like whoa, I’ve never thought of it that way. Very inspired indeed.
I’m sure there are those who will view the prayer policy to be the kind of thing that will save souls from Lucifer’s influence. I don’t. I know I’ve been irreverent and maybe even a little condescending in my remarks here, but I wish we could have more weighty announcements, giving us more impactful and difference-making things to talk about and thoughtfully consider.
As a missionary in Flemish-speaking Belgium 30 years ago, we learned that we were essentially speaking “Elizabethan” Dutch, that is, Flemish is Dutch from the 1600s. I understand this is also the relationship between Norse and Icelandic. Anyway, prayers did not use the familiar form of “you”, nor did people use the old conjugations of verbs. And isn’t Portugese “old” Spanish? I don’t think this direction is well thought out for an international Church. Maybe it was a slow news day in the COB.
We, a few of thine children, approach thee in prayer to express our gratitude that thou hast givenst us prophets to lead us in these, the latter days, in these most important matters. We art grateful, O Father, for prophetic guidance about which pronouns that we shouldst use in prayer. We further prayst that thy chosen prophet will givest us guidance about thy preferences for howmst we express ourst love among ourst family members. Shouldst we say, “I lovest thee, dear parents” or is it more archaic and respectful to say, “I lovest y’all, dear parents.” As thy prophet hath instructed us regarding the name of thy Church, the banishment of the word ‘excommunication’ and now these instructions about prayerful pronouns [bonus points for the alliteration there guys, just want to make sure you saw that], we have faith that soon more word-commands shalt be forthcoming from thy prophet. Indeed, making the members of thy Church four times more self-conscious to prayst in public wilt surely be a sanctifying experience. Wilt thou extend this guidance even unto the bearing of testimony? For surely that wilt increase the fervency and sincerity of the testimony, to use archaic and unfamiliar grammar, even unto speakingst in tongues.
@Chadwick “On the other hand, now I’ll sound like a Sanderson sister when I pray so there’s that!”. Now that’s all I’m going to think about with the influx of thees and thines that are forthcoming. Thanks for the giggle.
My take on this, as a young person (23 years old) who yearns for more ritual and formality at church, and also happens to have a degree in English and Medieval & Renaissance Studies: it’s garbage.
I have a deep love for Early Modern English, which is what the KJV was written in. But there’s no reason to continue using it. It’s old, it’s hard for most people to understand, and it’s REALLY tricky to remember how to conjugate the verbs when English doesn’t have standard conjugations anymore. Using thee/thou is a losing battle. English has changed! Let’s move on and let people speak to God in the language they know instead of trying to learn a variation that hasn’t been regularly used for centuries.
However, if this is the hill we’re going to die on, I’ll have to work some Middle English poetry into my next talk. Doesn’t matter that nobody in the congregation can understand me—we’re properly addressing God over here! Surely more archaic phrasing, with the most thees and thous, is best!
Beginning as early as the 1300s reformers believed the Bible and church services should be available in the vernacular. Wycliffe, Luther, Hus, and others many challenged Rome to make religion and God accessible even to uneducated people. The KJV and ultimately Mormonism are some of the products of this brave movement. Yet today Salt Lake is Rome. Mormon leaders insist on using archaic language traditions that make connection to God inaccessible to many. The nonsense about the correct way to pray makes this clear. (Honestly the KJV is not easily understood even by college educated people. Most of my understanding comes from the familiarity from a life of exposure.)
This is a related tangent that I have to mention: While they don’t sell indulgences, ordinances and ultimately salvation come with a pretty hefty price tag.
Don’t you dare use modern pronouns when addressing God, but knock yourself out repeating the same worn out phrases heard week after week in church (because God never gets tired of hearing them).
Some of His favorites:.
“Thank you for this day”
“Bless those who were unable to attend today so they can be here next week”
“Take these things and apply them into our lives”
“Guide and direct us”
“Help us to travel home in safety “
DHO reminds me of the Muppet Sam the Bald Eagle because to him there is only one way to think and be-his way. Sam is pathetically pompous and self righteous. This tangent about prayer language has been a special concern of Oaks’ for nearly 50 years. I was a student at BYU at the end of his reign and remember too many devotionals and firesides where he hammered the topic to death. He even wrote a chapter about this subject in a Deseret Book book about prayer that came out in the late 1970’s.
What I find most upsetting is that DHO and the rest of the Q15 are so worried about us members using the wrong words in Early Modern English to pray in while poverty, disease, violence, homelessness, mental health crises along with conflict and war are everywhere. It seems to me that their priorities as leaders of a Christian church that professes to follow Christ’s teachings are seriously skewed. This doesn’t bode well for the members of the church. If they read and carefully study the four gospels they will sooner or later realize that what Jesus says about prayer and what is taught at church and other church related meetings and in church publications are two very different matters. The religious scholars and leaders of His day were also hung up on using the “correct words” in their prayers and in their worship services even while the widows and orphans; the poor, sick, and disabled people; the least, the last and the lost were treated with contempt and taken advantage of by these same men. It continues on today. Jesus’s phrase “straining at gnats” and His admonition to his hearers and followers to be engaged in the “weightier matters” of the gospel which are always based in loving relationships comes to mind every time the Q15 comes up with some new pronouncement that has nothing to do with what Jesus taught.
When I got rid of the archaic language and spoke to my Heavenly Parents and Jesus in the same language that I use for those people whom I love most of all my prayer life and my relationship with Deity changed 180 degrees for the better. For the first time ever I could open up myself to their deep and abiding love for me and for those people whom I love dearly without feeling perpetually “unworthy” and spiritually impoverished.
I don’t know about everyone else, but many times I haven’t prayed what was on my mind or in my heart because I didn’t know how formulate it.. I’ve actually made the switch to you and yours. But now it will be just another mark of rebellion to use those words, another petty little yard stick among many by which we feel free to judge each other.
Maybe what we all need in our local churches is someone like the guy in the Progressive Insurance commercials who works hard to keep young homeowners from turning into their parents. That would probably become an almost full-time calling, I suppose.
I was thinking about this while watching ‘Silent Night’ on BYU TV. Joseph Mohr was constantly butting heads with the Catholic leadership because he wanted church services to be given in German, not Latin. I see a big parallel here. Latin sounds very ‘churchy’ but it was actually separating people from God. Fancy pronouns are also ‘churchy’ but that’s really the only thing they have to recommend them.
Remember, these are the same people who insist that God really does expect everyone to take the sacrament with their right hand. Sorry, but I’m not buying it.
If you think the King James grammar is stilted and difficult, try learning to pray in Korean. “Please do _____” in standard Korean is “____ ha-seo”, or more politely “___ ha-sipsio”, but in prayer it gets even more formalized to “____ ha-siopsoso”. Thee and thou are child’s play when compared.
I think the guidance only applies to prayers in church meetings, so it may not be necessary to extend it to personal or family prayers.
I have been thinking about what the GAs motive n this might be, and Angela mentioned how Joseph used the archaic language of the KJV to make the Book of Mormon sound churchy, to make it sound like scripture. No one but maybe Quakers still used the archaic forms, so it was different and unique to religion. Everyone back then used the KJV because it was the only translation available back then, so the language sounded religious and churchy.
Now we have newer, better translations in modern English. But we are instructed to keep using the KJV. Why should we use an obsolete translation? Because if we switched to a modern translation, then the BOM would no longer sound like scripture and people might wonder why it was written in a language that was archaic at the time. Because that is a problem. Why was the BOM written in archaic language?
And using archaic language in our prayers backs up the impression of that kind of talk being churchy and it keeps it sounding familiar. This familiarity then keeps the BOM from sounding like it was written in a language that was already archaic. It keeps the BOM sounding churchy. It keeps people from wondering why God would use archaic language in translating a book and make it look like maybe Joseph Smith wrote it to sound churchy. And the General Authorities can’t have people wondering about stuff like that.
The one and only time I gifted a copy of the BoM to a friend, complete with testimony, was at university. She absolutely did not appreciate the archaic language and wanted to know why there wasn’t a more modern English version.
That’s my question too. A couple of decades or more ago now, Japan got complete retranslations of BoM, D&C as it was recognised they were pretty unintelligible to the modern Japanese..
On the OP, I cannot even.. yes the archaic prayer language is very much a barrier.. and the examples of its usage in the comments totally cringe inducing.. plurals…
Sorry I’m late to the party. The comment about matching the KJV language is spot on. Also, I don’t know if anyone has mentioned this, but the stupidity of this edict is intensified by the fact that the whole “thou/thee” thing was actually a familiar address in Elizabethan/Early Modern English. You’d use thou/thee to address a servant or an inferior and you’d use the more formal “you/your” to address an equal or superior (see this link for one perspective on this: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2010/08/a-word-in-thy-ear-an-thou-wilt/61411/). More evidence that our leaders really don’t know much about even the history of their own language, much less LGBTQ/class/women’s issues. SMFH. The god I worship doesn’t give a crap about whether I address him/her/they in stilted, archaic English or not. And if god really does care about this stuff, I’m not interested in spending the afterlife in the presence of a deity to whom trivialities like this matter.
So glad to see the church encouraging the use of preferred pronouns. Even God has feelings about it! Though I would note that God’s don’t seem to be gender specific
Corou (he/him)
My initial impression on the churchwide reinstatement of opening prayer in second hour was that it was an excuse to re-emphasize formal prayers directed to Heavenly Father as opposed to more familiar prayers which can easily switch to addressing Heavenly Parents. Like, the thees/thous essentially become a hedge, preventing the slide to what the Brethren consider heresy.
S, I agree with your statements, but I have a small footnote on your statement about the reformation:
“Beginning as early as the 1300s reformers believed the Bible and church services should be available in the vernacular. Wycliffe, Luther, Hus, and others many challenged Rome to make religion and God accessible even to uneducated people.”
Sort of, in the case of Luther at least, he hated and detested and the lower uneducated peasant classes, and he in no way, directed his writings towards them. His writings and push for vernacular translations of the bible were more for the benefit of the burgher social class (i.e. minor princes, wealthy merchants/landowners, or others of means who were unconnected to royalty or the church). They were literate, but couldn’t read Latin, hence the need for vernacular translations of the bible.
It was less (if at all) about making religion accessible to the masses, and more about giving the up and coming bourgeoisie class a piece of the sociopolitical pie that had been heretofore dominated by royalty and the church.
We, in the protestant tradition, especially mormon tradition, like to think of the Reformation as this heroic thing, and it sort of was, but only incidentally. It was an event that happened in which you could say there were independently positive and negative effects. The Reformation and the later 30 Years War was really more about breaking the monopoly on power held by royalty and the church, thus opening the door to capital as a political force. Religion was just the arena in which the competing ideologies fought it out. Eventually capital would win, and royalty and church would become vestigial appendages to power, and capital alone rules us now. And I’m hesitant to say whether we’re better off being ruled by capitalists than hereditary monarchs or churches.
So I don’t know if I’d call the Reformation heroic, I’d call it a thing that happened, and I’m not sure if we’re better or worse of because of it.
I joined a bible study with another church and discovered that we Mormons pray like babies – sunbeam level at best. They blew me away with their powerful prayers and I learned that we can and should ask for much more/ give much better thanks and praise than I had been so carefully taught in my mormon upbringing. No way am I going back to the mormon formulaic style that is so surface-level as to be practically meaningless.
I haven’t been in an English speaking ward for nearly a decade now, so it hasn’t really come up. But in the few dozen times I’ve been asked to give a prayer in a public setting in English over the last few years, I’ve made a deliberate effort to use “you” and “your” instead of the KJV pronouns. I had started it doing it even long before that in my personal prayers. I like the idea of God being an actual person that you would talk to like your actual father, like a human being. I feel like using archaic pronouns makes God more distant and alien. I’ve yet to be called out by someone by addressing God with “you”.
I served a foreign language mission stateside, so on occasion we would have lessons with young adults and teenagers who were more comfortable with English than with the language that their parents or extended families spoke. I noticed that they often had a hard time comprehending scripture, both the KJV bible and the BoM. I remember one person in particular that used her own bible that had a more modern English translation. As someone who grew up in the church, it had never yet occurred to me that KJV english would be more difficult. Thus it was the first time I considered the idea that we should make our scriptures more acceptable and ditch the KJV and have a version of the BoM in more modern English.
If we were really serious about sharing the gospel with the world or whatever, we’d prioritize making our scriptures accessible too.
On the other hand, it’s actually quite normal, among many cultures and religious traditions of the world, to have a different version of the language used for rituals and sacred texts. So I suppose it’s not unusual or unexpected that the Church leadership has this expectation that our prayers use archaic pronouns. But I think that in our specific context (having a personal relationship with deity), if that is the idea, then it would make more sense to communicate with deity like you would with other people with whom you have a relationship.
In other words, if you’re telling us that God is a human, and our father, then you should let people talk to him like he his a human.
I would need to find a source to back this up, but as I understand it, there’s official Church policy against modern English renderings of the BoM (for all the reasons mentioned above).