Different generations have different ways of disagreeing and expressing dissent. Often those are affected by the models that leaders provide their followers.
For example, Orson Pratt disagreed publicly and at length with Brigham Young. Brigham Young disagreed with Brigham Young too.
My favorite times Brigham Young disagreed with himself are:
- When he stated Adam was not a proper name or individual but a title that applied to literally hundreds of thousands and that all references were figurative.
- When he stated Polygamy was temporary and would last only until women were more equal with men.
- That women were not equal to men because men had denied them the opportunity, training, education and experience they needed.
- QED: polygamy existed only because men wronged women.
Dissent in Brigham Young’s time was wild and wooly.
Compare that type of disagreement to Bruce R McConkie who was pretty forceful but whose dissent to disagreement with leaders was: “I, was wrong.”
That makes for an entirely different culture of dissent.
In the modern, more hierarchical and correlated church, the current pattern of dissent is typified by the way some leaders dissented from the “I’m a Mormon” campaign.
The dissenters waited out those they disagree with and after they died, they called them badly misguided. Patience has replaced what had been public dissent. Even true conference votes have disappeared.
You can see that same approach in responses to calls to be vaccinated, LGBT policies and numerous other points. So many members quietly state to close friends that the leaders they disagree with are misguided. Instead of a public acknowledgment of a difference of opinion, members simply wait for those leaders to die and for the narrative and policies to change.
Instead of “quiet quitting” we have “quiet dissenting.”
I would never have predicted that twist.
What do you see in how dissent in the Church is expressed or is likely to be expressed?
Wheat & Tares 
In my opinion, the most common and effective form of dissent in the church is a person voting with their feet. People who participate at all in the church do this to one degree or another.
Don’t agree with the church’s reliance on unpaid volunteers (or more realistically on guilted/shamed members) for building cleaning? Easy, just don’t show up to clean it.
Not a fan of ward temple nights? Don’t go.
Too many activities or activities that don’t appeal to you at church? Don’t go.
Disagree with the church’s lack of financial transparency? Don’t give them any money.
And the biggest one – you don’t feel that the local dentist/business owner has actual moral and spiritual authority in your life? Don’t go consult with him about your inner concerns. Don’t let your kids meet with him alone. Don’t accept callings simply because he extends them. Ultimately, don’t cede your personal authority to him.
Too often we think of dissent as active opposition, when in reality it can be very subtle yet extremely effective. All the while, avoiding being “that guy” (or gal).by vocally dissenting in meetings and public settings. Just set your own boundaries and be comfortable saying no and it’s a more powerful form of dissent, one that the church really can’t combat.
I think “agency” rather than “dissent” for all the ways an individual private member can vote with their feet. And the small ways that an individual private member can dissent—raising your hand in opposition, disagreeing with some authoritative sounding in Sunday School—are small and less and less meaningful.
Rather, in talking about dissent I look to all the leader roulette examples we bandy about. In my opinion (and experience) most meaningful dissent happens at the level of bishops and stake presidents saying “no, I’m not doing it that way” or authorizing or permitting actions contrary to instruction or tradition. Every time a bishop makes a decision according to the dictates of his conscience that may be seen as different than the General Handbook, that is dissent. I think it happens a lot.
That kind of dissent might well be considered “quiet” from a General Conference or COB point of view, but it’s not really quiet when it’s your own ward or stake.
I believe that there’s a ton of quiet dissent within the Church membership. I often wonder what members really believe deep down inside. Do they really believe in a sad heaven scenario as outlined by RMN in recent years? Do they really believe the official JS story (there were actual gold plates?)? Do they really believe the Lord talks to RMN?
it seems like it’s pretty acceptable among US Catholics to express doubt in the Pope and the Cardinals. But we know it’s pretty unacceptable to express doubt in RMN and the Q15. But were it more acceptable, would we discover that even most active members have significant doubts about LDS basics? I think so (although I also acknowledge the hard core faithful too).
The most evident place that I’ve seen effective disagreement within the Church revolves around historical preservation and temple construction:
* The Bountiful and Wasatch Stake Tabernacles were planned to be torn down and replaced with more standardized meetinghouses. Public outcry led to them being preserved instead.
* The Church withdrew its high-density housing proposal that would surround the temple near Tooele because concerns were raised that the proposal was out of place for a rural community.
* One of Brigham Young’s homes (Lion House) was going to be torn down and turned into a parking deck. Sister Florence Jacobsen (YW General President and historical preservationist) regularly bumped heads with President Henry Moyle (McKay’s counselor) regarding its fate. Thankfully, President McKay liked Sister Jacobsen’s plan of turning the Lion House into a restaurant, and the parking deck plan was scrapped.
* The Manti Temple in 2021. Originally, some of the oldest muraled instruction rooms in the Church would have been tossed and replaced with stale stationary instruction rooms. Outcry prompted President Nelson to go back to the drawing board and find a more innovative solution, which was to build a newer temple in the nearby town of Ephraim to address capacitiy concerns while keeping the Manti Temple preserved.
Like I said in yesterday’s post, disagreement can be a form of revelation. In some of my callings, I’ve had people approach me with concerns and I would respond “You know what? That’s…… actually a good point! I’ll confirm that with the Lord”. And sure enough, I received confirmation that their concerns were completely justified. I was able to perform my callings more effectively when I invited people to give their input. Of course, there were times when I disagreed with somebody’s input, but I would never shun somebody for providing it.
Recently I’ve been having these coffee-shop style chats with a few others in my YSA. It usually involves us staying after one of our weekly activities and we sit in the institute and chat deep into the night. It’s really nice and I’m the most liberal of the bunch and the rest are in between orthodox, moderate, and liberal. It’s really quite nice because we get to have these really deep, nuanced conversations either about Church doctrine, culture, and politics. It’s refreshing, even. We most always lament (me, especially) that there’s no forum in the Church to actual discuss issues. Ideally, since we are in college after all, we’d think Institute would be the place to talk and learn super deeply about these issues. But it’s really just another Sunday school.
I think younger members of the Church are finding a comfortable in-between of interpreting “sustaining” to mean more than just “agree all of the time.” I had some missionaries, after giving one of my hot take opinions about disagreement with prophetic leadership, ask if I sustained the Church leaders. It didn’t take much to convince them that “sustain” can mean be critical.
Dissent is something the Church is going to have to be okay with, or else it will continually alienate those who know how to make the Church a more welcoming place for God’s children.
Dissent in the face of the Correlation Department and “following the prophet” can feel tricky.
(1) Because it’s uncomfortable to stand out as a dissenter in any organization.
(2) Because we get an easy out with the doctrine that we’re blessed for following the “law of obedience” (even if the leader we’re obeying is wrong or misguided).
I think the concept of “correlation” in the LDS church has been a two-edged sword. On one hand, it has definitely helped maintain consistency in practice and doctrine as the church has grown and become more international. I’ve seen firsthand how this can be the glue that keeps many international wards and branches intact and allows them to function as part of the larger church – not every part of the world has multi-generational membership that intrinsically knows/understands the practices and concepts.
On the other hand, the correlation department has a tendency to flatten the nuanced and personal aspects of faith and religion into something of a standardized product for the masses. It’s almost impossible to have both, especially across 17 million members.
At its core, I think it comes down to scalability. You just can’t maintain centralized control over any organization without a standardized, documented set of rules and guiding principles.
IMO, the LDS church had to either standardize its doctrine/practices or let the church fracture into offshoots as it grew. The creation of the Correlation Department was a logical path for the LDS church to take given its authoritarian leadership style as an organization.
Correlation is honestly not all that different in concept than Mcdonald’s – by and large a burger from Mcdonald’s is basically the same anywhere in the world. Sure there are some regional one-offs, but overall it’s very consistent and carefully controlled. This can be great if you love seeing those golden arches and/or need something familiar in a new place…but it can also really suck when your local MCD crew somehow manages to turn that standardized burger into something lukewarm and grotesque.
I’m a quiet dissenter and have been for considerable time. At some point, I was called in by the bishopric for a new calling, and I declined to accept the calling saying that I simply no longer believe the core tenets. I still attend sacrament meeting with my wife. My wife, although by outside estimations is a full believer, is also a dissenter in a sense. She supports LGBTQ rights, and has dissented by essentially not listening or paying mind to homophobic remarks. She picks and chooses the aspects of conference talks that she likes and sticks with the ones that she likes and ignores the stuff she doesn’t. She dissented from white Utah Mormon culture many years back when she felt judgment and pressure from them for not being able to have children. When we adopted our first we decided to move to a new house and attend a Spanish ward, instead of the typical English-speaking ward. We’ve been attending the Spanish ward for almost 9 years and have no intention of going back to an English ward. The Spanish ward is more transient, less organized, less rigid, and more laid back. Since people speak in church in Spanish, with only an occasional English speaker from the stake, my wife doesn’t regularly hear church talks in a language that she understands well. She has learned Spanish to some degree, but doesn’t understand every speaker. That way she has sort of insulated herself from the occasional crazy speaker. Furthermore, the leaders don’t rely on her to fill callings of import because her Spanish is not great. Consequently, church has become a sort of minimal going-through-the-motions activity where we meet friends and enjoy each other’s company. And we get to practice our Spanish and learn about different cultures.
My wife and I often reminisce on our experiences 9 years ago in the English-speaking ward. We don’t have fond memories of it. We retained a select couple of friends from that experience, but mostly found a lot of the community quite vapid. My wife and I had attended college and singles wards after we left home and then when we got married, we attended a regular English ward for six years and honestly we found it kind of a shock. We were 28 and 25 when we started attending and met some other couples our age we enjoyed. But when my wife started having infertility problems, things really got bad. A straw was broken when we heard a lady in our ward go off on a tirade about how women shouldn’t be going to grad school or law school to pursue a career, but should start their families instead. My wife had a graduate degree and was content in her job. Another ward member stood up and gave a talk shaming people who limited their family size. Another couple struggling to make ends meet with a husband still in school just started popping out babies left and right, because…God, and it was the right thing to do. The overarching culture in that ward really rubbed us wrong. So we left, and have no regrets. There is a Mormonism beyond white Utah, and a lot of people don’t seem to realize that.
For as long I as can remember I have defended the faith both personally, against “check-the-box” Saints, and professionally through 14 years leading Sutherland Institute (SI). In over 40 years, I never was in disagreement with them until 2014 when same-sex politics came between us…the same year SI fired me…a firing instigated by Church bureaucrats precisely over same-sex politics. I wanted to fight, the Church wanted to accommodate. I lost. In Utah, the Church is always your boss when it needs to be. Of course, there is a difference between dissent and disagreement, just as there is a difference between questioning and inquiry. I simply disagreed with the Church and, after many years, I left Utah (and now live in Vegas, close enough to our six children and 22 grandchildren…but out of Utah). Church leaders at every level are human beings. They have pride, passion, defensiveness, kindness, cruelty, etc., just like all of us. If dissent and questioning has become your pattern of Church life, I strongly recommend you leave the Church — and then leave it alone. If you simply disagree and inquire, stay — and keep searching for truth.
Well, in patterns of dissent, there is also talking about the church’s problems on blogs. And, there is pretty good proof that the church keeps track of what we discuss. And we can just use a handle or our first name but no last name and we don’t get excommunicated for criticizing the brethren.
I do both the talking about the church’s problems on line and voting with my feet. I also wait quietly for the church to change and know that it will rather than trying to drag my husband, children and grandchildren out of the church. And I know many cafeteria Mormons who do some voting with their feet by simply not showing up to clean buildings, or not accepting callings, or discussing feminist issues on line or on Facebook, or quietly waiting for the anti LGBT leaders to die. So, I think depending on what the issues is, most of us do some of each.
>I often wonder what members really believe deep down inside. … Do they really believe the official JS story (there were actual gold plates?)?
@Josh h:
When I was a missionary and fully TBM, I first had the thought that the story of the missing 116 pages did not make sense at all, specifically, the reasons given for not retranslating the plates. It felt too convenient to me.
Looking back over 20 years later, I wonder why I didn’t take those thoughts further than I did–that’s such a foundational part of our history! Instead, it was a long time coming–over 13 years until I started questioning other things that didn’t make sense.
I bet there are tons of people like me, who think “huh!” at some thing, but don’t take it further.
A hot cup of incredibly healthy freshly brewed delicious organic black coffee on my drive to work each morning through the lovely Kansas backcountry is dissent but also assent & thanks to God for inventing this wonderful bean! Meanwhile my orthodox brethren are drinking cold artificial-everything Diet Coke from an aluminum can. You do the math.
“Quiet dissent” — a useful concept. Nice discussion.
How about Sunday School? Quiet dissent is not attending — and a *significant* portion of adults who don’t have other responsibilities elsewhere do, in fact, skip it. That’s a good barometer for quiet dissent in any ward. (Same for Priesthood and Relief Society?) Attending and voicing contrary opinions from time to time is maybe the mildest form of noisy dissent, seeing you are speaking to the teacher or the class, not to a local leader. And “Sunday School dissent” can be phrased rather mildly. As in, “there’s another way to look at that question …” rather than “You’re all wrong …”
Paul Mero, this is not trolling. I’m completely sincere. Or maybe I just don’t understand the distinction you are making between dissent and questioning vs disagreeing and inquiring.
I truly don’t understand the invitations to leave that nonstandard members of the church so frequently get. I think I can have a strong testimony of the gospel, respect for church leaders, a commitment to staying and keeping the covenants I have made, and yet at the same time struggle with aspects of the church and our Mormon culture.
More than that, if I leave, I’m not likely to ever come back. On the other hand, if I stay and struggle, maybe someday either I’ll understand or our leaders will make a change that resolves my concern.
Bottom line, I disagree with what I understand to be your invitation that I should leave. I choose to stay and struggle.