Below is a entry to the old “Mormon-L” listserv. It is from the mid 1990s. Mormon-L was a mailing list, as this was before the world-wide-web. You signed up, and then got e-mail from anybody on the list that “posted” something. It was the grandfather to the “Bloggernacle” that we have now, and was known to be somewhat progressive.
Now for the fun part. The below was from my father, a ward clerk at the time. As some background, in the early 1990s the Church changed from paper membership records to the online MIS system we have today. In doing so the new online system did not keep all the same information the paper copy did. It was missing the names of who performed each ordnance. For women it was Baptism and confirmation. For men is was also each priesthood office, with a name and date.
Boy, did I just have an experience. Most of you, at least the clerks, are aware that we have new membership forms. These forms lack much valuable information available on the old forms. We had instructions to destroy the old forms when we received the new ones.
In bishopric on Sunday, we decided it would be a good idea to give the old forms to the members so they could have a copy of the information regarding those who performed various ordinances. The bishop asked me to clear it with the stake. I spoke with the stake clerk and he thought it was a good idea, but he would clear it with the Stake President. He came back later and said that the Stake Pres. didn’t like the idea of giving the forms to the members but we could keep them in another file for future reference. But he said maybe I should check with SL about this.
I called the MIS department and the answer I got from the sister who answered was that the instructions were to destroy all forms. I started questioning her on the reason for this and she immediately referred me to the ‘policy’ division of MIS. This brother immediately asked me why I was questioning a policy of the church. I told him I felt they were taking away a valuable tool in keeping track of members. He said “you better talk to the first presidency.” I thought I had misunderstood him, so I said “you mean the first presidency decided that the records should be destroyed?” His answer was “of course, where do you think policies like these come from? They all come from the First Presidency.
He then said “just a minute.” After a couple of minutes of elevator music, a sweet sister said “Office of the first presidency, how can I help you?” I was totally blown away, but explained my question again. She said this decision to change the records and destroy the old records was an inspired decision of the first presidency. She wouldn’t discuss any reasons behind it, only that it was an inspired decision and that was that.
So, I spoke to the “first presidency” in the form of a secretary and was very firmly put in my place every step of the way. The mere fact of my asking questions seemed to ring an alarm with each of the 3 people I spoke with.
I guess I am upset because this is a very mundane type of policy which someone somewhere should have been able to explain to me in simple terms. Instead, it suddenly took on a ‘questioning the doctrine’ context and I had no recourse but to immediately and quickly back down when I spoke with the “first presidency.”
Well, I guess the apple didn’t fall far from the tree!
So, do you think anything has changed in 30 years? Does the FP really come up with mundane policies like this? Or do you think it was just Church broke employees defending a decision, even if they didn’t really think it was inspiration?
Wheat & Tares 
I am not surprised. If a stake president called, he might Have gotten meaningful engagement — but a low-level member has no status and will not be given meaningful engagement. The key factor for meaningful engagement is one’s status, not one’s question. The handbook has always made it clear that the stake president handles all matters upwards, not and members are supposed to talk to their stake presidents.
When I send (I am sure unread) letters to the FP, I always start by saying I am sending a copy to my stake president to save them the trouble.
We open ourselves to problems when we call everything revelation. If I remember correctly, and I might not, a few years after this they realized that they couldn’t track priesthood lineages, so now they changed course, and now our system captures and keeps the name of the person performing the ordinance, at least for MP ordinations. Calling everything revelation or an inspired decision means that we cannot admit mistakes, which is a great pressure relief valve. It also keeps us thinking infallibility, which we say isn’t our doctrine, but really it is.
It is all about leadership roulette.
Sometimes a local Napoleonesque authoritarian rule supersedes the established rules/policy. On my mission; white bible states awake at 6:30 AM, but MP states 5:30 AM, “Obey!”. Church has online seminary available for students, but out SP says “NO”, not in our stake. The church publishes the Gospel topic essays, buried 10 clicks away, and SS teacher is released by Bishop for not teaching with authorized materials. We can all add to this list, but we the surfs have zero say, power to push back, or even give appropriate feedback.
This authoritarian rule was good in a few instances, as reflected in some of Matt Harris recent podcasts. It is refreshing to learn that the occasionally the President of the church will push back on the Junior members of the Q15, but only in private. When McKay and then Kimball pushed back on Benson to stop being so extremist and disallowing him to run in the 1968 Presidential race with Wallace. Or when McConkie had “a new flood of intelligence” at the prompting of Kimball. However, the church could have avoided the whole Mormon Doctrine problem, if they publicly rebuked it in 1960.
I would hope the FP is aware of many of the policies, but then backs the local Napoleon, even when the local leader is wrong, to not usurp the whole church power structure. For your MIS example, if the FP was not aware of the policy, it became policy, set in stone.
Those of us whose ordinations occurred during the paper era can still see (most of) our Melchizedek Priesthood lines of authority on the Tools app. So somebody was disregarding the First Presidency’s “inspired decision”.
Interestingly, I can see the lines of authority for my ordinations as both an elder and as a high priest, but I cannot see the line of authority for my ordination as a seventy. The ordination to seventy itself still shows up in my record–it’s only the line of authority that is missing. I don’t know whether that is because it has been lost or because it has been deemed irrelevant. Maybe there is some ambiguity about which of the other two is the one that matters. Traditionally, you were supposed to follow the line of your most recent ordination (high priest). But because I am no longer a member of a high priests quorum, perhaps I am supposed to follow the line for the office corresponding to the quorum of which I am a member (elders). My ordination as a seventy is neither the most recent nor does it correspond to my current quorum membership, so maybe that’s why I cant see that line. But I’m just guessing.
I agree with lastlemming that someone obviously disagreed and disobeyed since this information is available today.
This perfectly sums up why my kids no longer bother. Being told in youth classes to stop asking questions and get in line didn’t compute. It computed for their grandparents and parents but they aren’t interested in the “because I said so” line. And I couldn’t be prouder.
Chadwick, no, the “shut up, get in line, and no questions” attitude is relatively new in the church. Back when I was in Seminary, before the flood, question might be answered with “I don’t know” but questions were good. Proved a student was listening and actually processing. There were real discussions in Sunday school about doctrine and doubts could be discussed because they were not so threatening. It was a different church back then, so no, baby boomer did not settle for shut up, get in line, and don’t ask questions. I don’t know about gen X, milenials, or gen Z, because I didn’t experience growing up when they did.
But freedom to think was before there was a huge lack of archeological evidence, before coffee, tea, and especially green tea were deemed healthy, before the internet where faith destroying answers could be found in minutes, before the church switched from community to covenant, before the church switched from love to obedience, before the church refused to apologize, before Oaks with his emphasis on law, before the church proved to be on the wrong side of history on civil rights, women’s rights, LGTB rights, before you had to ignore evidence to the contrary, before the church was fooled publicly by Mark Hoffman, before they had to change doctrine and give blacks priesthood, back when it was being proven that cigarettes killed people and back when the church was really growing, back when we still believed there would really be a second coming and we would all go back to Missouri.
And most importantly all the freedom of thought was before the church doubted itself and got a huge insecurity complex.
I really don’t have a comment about “line of authority” or the change that might have list that info, because being female it is totally non applicable, so sorry about the off topic post, but the topic is as irrelevant to me as a woman as who ordained the Pope.
Thanks Anna for that context. Very helpful.
I’m a gen X/rising millennial who had just graduated BYU and left the Mormon bubble for a job in CA when prop 8 was a thing. I was asked and declined several times by church leaders to donate time and money to the cause and was definitely tsk tsked for not getting in line. Also on my mission a few years earlier we couldn’t question our MP who told us to hold his root beer while he exponentially increased the rules in the white handbook. We were repeatedly taught that obedience was the first law of heaven. My mission was early stage internet days. I brought my personal lens to the discussion and appreciate your addition.
Gee, I wonder where all the folk doctrines to explain unjustified church policies originate. Perhaps when things aren’t explained (and/or there really is no justification other than “do what you’re told and shut up or we’ll call you apostate”) then those who believe and who want to be “good” in the eyes of the organization, who want to make it work, will invent reasons that sound pseudo-logical (like tannins to explain coffee & tea) to resolve their own cognitive dissonance. Why do these people think God gave us brains? To make our necks stronger?
I’m pretty-sure the church kept the original paper records archived. I think it was the local wards and branches that were supposed to destroy their copies. And so–yeah–there may have been a few bugs in the system at first–but who can argue with its efficiency now?
I wwent through Seminary in the 90’s, and BYU in the early 2000’s, I have never experienced a teacher telling anyone to stop asking questions.
Jack, nobody is arguing it is not more efficient today. All my father was asking is if he could give the old (and last) paper copy of the records to the members. He was told no, it was inspiration to have them destroyed. BTW, I have mine!
I can easily argue with efficiency/inefficiencies of lds church leadership all day Jack. I was a leader in multiple wards and a district President when I was a missionary and it is so full of silly beaurocracy. You haven’t given one reason not to argue and please don’t waste time by saying the church investment money is proof of its efficiency. It isn’t because none of that money or its management has anything to do with wards or stakes or missions. It has only been used to prop up church businesses and as a place to invest unspent tithing and budget.
On asking questions. The unwritten way of managing this is to dismiss hard questions by saying it’s inspired and we just need to trust or only worry about the big questions like Jesus, Joseph Smith, and our testimonies. The standard protocol is to give blow-off answers that almost sound kind of like primary answers. So yeah, you can ask the first round of questions, and get the passive-aggressive treatment and non-answers and told to just focus on the Savior or the gospel or some nonsense like that. The problem is when you call out the non-answers and ask the second round of questions. Then they turn the questioning on you. “How long have you been looking at porn?” Can you ask questions? Yes. Can you subject ideas and policies to questioning? No. Even on the question of questions we get gaslit. “Of course you can ask questions.” Ask too many you get treated like a pariah. We all know that. The church is not a place of open discussion and deep thinking. It is a place where leaders tell the congregations to jump and they respond with how high.
Brad D is correct. You never get told “don’t ask questions.” You just get a “Sunday school answer” to the question and or you get the answer to the question you *should* have asked, to paraphrase some GA’s advice. He actually told people not to say that we don’t know the answer to that, but instead give them the answer to the question they SHOULD have asked. Then if you dare to point out how that really does not answer the question you did ask, they turn things around on you and imply you must be sinning or you would get the answer yourself. Or, like I had a temple president tell me when I didn’t accept his non answer, my attitude is taking me straight to hell. Yup, ask too many hard questions they tell you that you are under Satan’s influence or that you must be sinning. So, it is kind of like the unwritten order of things. There is no rule against asking questions, but you better not ask really hard questions that the authority doesn’t know a good answer to.
The church didn’t used to be that way. People didn’t feel insulted if you asked a question they didn’t have an answer to but admitted it was a hard question. People didn’t act terrified that the church might not be what it claims. They were more secure in their testimony.
I don’t know why it feels important to me to say that the church was different in back 1950s-1960s in that people didn’t react like a short man with a Napoleon complex. It is like now people fear they are wrong to believe. Not that they will be persecuted for it, but like they are insecure about it all. But they say they are persecuted for it, when it is all in their own head. But I first really noticed this insecurity when Boyd K Packer literally pounded the pulpit and yelled that the Holy Ghost was male, male, male, male. And I thought to myself he is scared silly that a god could be a “she”.
jader3rd, I haven’t been discouraged directly either but there are lots of official (or semi official) examples of leaders discouraging questions by characterizing them directly or indirectly as being the wrong questions.
Brad Wilcox infamously said people concerned about the priesthood name were asking the wrong questions: “Maybe instead of asking why the Blacks had to wait until 1978 to get the priesthood, we should be asking why did the whites and other races have to wait until 1829.”
In 2019, Dallin Oaks poked fun at a concerned woman who had written him to ask whether she’d be forced to cohabitate in heaven with her husband’s first wife. “Just trust in the Lord” he answered after waiting for the audience’s laughter to die down.
Rmn urged people not to rehearse doubts with doubters and characterized those with weak faith as lazy learners and lax disciples.
Lawrence Corbridge dismissed common testimony-shaking questions as “secondary.”
And most recently, Jacob Hess has worked hard to recast questions posed in the CES letter by Jeremy Runnels as dishonest. https://www.deseret.com/opinion/2024/11/18/pretended-curiosity-attacking-faith/
I’ve been in the church for four decades and I can’t recall the last time anyone posed a tough question in any church context. It doesn’t happen and seems obvious, at least to me, why.
Jesse, I was just thinking of the Corbridge talk. And it ties right in to the Oaks’ 2019 talk. The leaders have successfully created a caricature of ex-Mormons as people who obsess about peripheral issues and lose sight of the central matters at hand. Ex-Mormons are easily offended people with bees in their bonnets who get hung-up on minutiae. My mom sent me and my siblings the Corbridge talk, singing its praises. I wrote back and said that based on my understandings of the ex-Mormon community, many aren’t simply hung-up on side issues, they question Joseph Smith’s claim to prophethood and the idea that the church is the kingdom of God on earth. In fact, many ex-Mormons question Jesus’ divinity and the existence of God. That being the case, I think Corbridge got it wrong. What Corbridge is seizing upon is what led people to question the larger framework of the church. And yeah, many times it is anomalies. But these anomalies add up. It may start with, “something doesn’t seem right with the idea that the Book of Mormon is historical.” OK, then once you’ve arrived at a position that the BOM couldn’t possibly be historical, then the prophethood of Joseph Smith tends to come into question. And once you recognize that Joseph Smith’s behavior with women was rather bizarre and questionable, then his prophethood becomes even more of an issue. Without a prophetic Joseph Smith, then on what grounds is the church the kingdom of God on earth?
Dear Bishop Bill,
I should like to know more about how Mormons perform the ordnance.
Sincerely,
Brother Maynard
Did the first presidency make the decision about destroying the records? Maybe. It’s equally plausible that mid-level bureaucrats, possibly under the supervision of a minor GA, made a decision and the first presidency rubber stamped it in a meeting with minimal thought or discussion. Given that we’re talking about the Hinckley first presidency, run by a man noted for taking himself a lot less seriously than the current guy in charge seems to, I doubt Hinckley himself would have labeled such an administrative decision as “inspired revelation”. I’m also not surprised that the COB is full of yes-men and women who take first presidency decisions more seriously than the first presidency does.
Having said all that, things seem different under Nelson. He strikes me as willing to attribute every administrative decision to God. And call any questioners to repentance. It’s not helpful. I hope that thinking goes away one day when someone else is in charge.
@Five is right out
I got the joke. For those who downvoted his comment, he was calling attention to a typo: “ordinance” was spelled “ordnance”, which changes the meaning quite a lot. I too would love to know more about “Mormons performing ordnance”. The curiosity is nearly enough to make my head explode, as it were.
The response that Bishop Bill’s father received is amusing because it generates more troubling questions than it resolves. If the First Presidency really does have a conduit to heaven (as members are taught), why is any of that precious bandwidth spent on deciding what to do with redundant paper membership records? Or to put it differently, if you could get direction from God on absolutely anything, what does it say about you if this question was on your agenda?
There’s a wonderful phrase used more by British speakers that’s applicable here. Bishop Bill’s father was “fobbed-off” by that secretary (and perhaps the First Presidency).
On asking questions, here are a few of my experiences:
-I don’t remember being explicitly told not to ask questions, but have been told multiple times by multiple people that I’d be happier at church or with the church if I just didn’t think so much.
-When the SEC stuff happened, our bishop asked in ward council if we knew anyone who was troubled by it. When I said I did, he proceeded to explain it wrong and bear his testimony that the prophet wouldn’t lead the church astray, etc. I corrected him on a few of the details but did not respond to the testimony. Two other men in the room (one during the meeting and one after) bore their testimonies to me that, when they have questions about something the leaders of the church do, they just trust that the leaders have done the right thing and they don’t worry about it anymore. (And for a fun additional detail, one of them is about twenty years younger than me. I think I managed to keep my face neutral.)
-I shared, with a close friend in private, about the problems that I was having with the temple. She told me I just needed to go as often as I could until it didn’t bother me any more. It worked for her!
-Multiple comments in different classes and conversations that included the “when the prophet speaks, the thinking is done” mess.
-A Sunday school teacher for one of my children pulled me aside after class and asked me to explain to Child that they discuss the ideal at church and questions or exceptions should be discussed at home.
It all adds up, you know?
Just tired, 100% get this. One thing that frustrated me so much about the “don’t rehearse your doubts with doubters” edict is that there really is no one else in the church to rehearse them with. I’m not saying I have easy answers, but ours is a uniquely “bow your head and say ‘yes'” faith as reflected in your experiences. In EQ last week, our instructor shared a handful of the mind-bending modern quotes about how women more or less hold the priesthood (do they really?). It could have made for a good discussion, but everyone more or less shrugged and moved on. In my experience, church is largely performative. We get together and come up with creative ways to say the same damn thing over and over again. Rereading talks that quote other talks that quote other talks. Again, I don’t have an easy solution except to say that I’m glad Jack shows up here so we have some semblance of discussion and don’t end up in the same trap.
I think we used the same talk last Sunday! And nobody wanted to explore that any further.
And nobody seems to like it when I take the “you have the priesthood necessary for your calling” thing to what I think is the logical end: that there is no reason why women should be excluded from callings that require the priesthood, then. Just give them the calling, and we’re good to go! You could even call the young women to be sacrament passers. As long as it’ a calling…