I recently listened to Mormon Stories podcast: Mormon Military Story w/ Ross “Marty” Martin (Edited Re-Release) | Ep. 1977. Fascinating episode. Marty is a good storyteller. He was an Army Ranger, which is one of the special forces units where the military sends 400 people into training and hopes at least 10 of them graduate. Marty is thoughtful, emotionally aware, and open about his experiences and feelings. I highly recommend spending a few hours listening to his story.
The rest of this post is not about Marty, it’s about the military in general and how Mormons fit into the military and some similarities I see between the military and the LDS Church. Everyone has heard the LDS Church compared to a corporation. That’s accurate. And the LDS Church has a lot in common with the military.
Authoritarian Structure. One does not question orders in the military. When the General has spoken, the thinking is done. Obey or get court-martialed. Sound familiar?
The Church’s push to ensure that BYU Professors toe the line on the Church’s doctrine about marriage, sex, gender, and family looks more like a military leader giving orders than it does a VP of marketing rolling out a new product. That link is behind a paywall at the Salt Lake Tribune, so I’ll quote a portion of it.
Then, in 2022, came a new employment contract, a sort of “loyalty oath,” in which faculty members (incoming and current) were expected to attest to their support of the church’s position on marriage, family and gender. To many, like [former BYU music professor Jason] Bergman, who felt pressured to agree, it went beyond the church’s own stance and seemed to carry an implicit threat: You can’t advance if you don’t sign off.
A convert and former bishop in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Bergman began to wrestle with his faith but feared discussing it with his local ecclesiastical leaders or fellow congregants. What if he said something in a Sunday school class that was seen as challenging on, say, polygamy, and it got back to his BYU superiors? He decided, “I can never speak up at church again.”
…
BYU is “not safe,” Bergman said, “for anyone who doesn’t fit the orthodox mold.”
That seems to be a sentiment shared by a sizable number of faculty members who feel demeaned, disrespected, powerless — and afraid.
…
“They targeted instructors they believed unorthodox, tightened the curriculum, and transformed the processes of hiring to favor teachers who shared their own ideas about orthodoxy,” Latter-day Saint historian Matthew Bowman writes in his latest book, “Joseph Fielding Smith: A Mormon Theologian.”
A pre-meme quip from the time mocked Wilkinson’s approach with the jab: “Free agency — and how to enforce it.”
Today, the threat of retribution apparently is so real that after dozens of interviews with present and former BYU faculty and administrators across many disciplines, not one current professor (including those with tenure, known as “continuing status”) would go on the record for this story.
When you join the military, you sign an enlistment contract that requires your obedience, even if you disagree with the orders you’re given. Disobedience brings severe penalties. After all, disobedience could endanger your fellow soldiers and foul up the mission. One person is in charge, and you agree to that or you don’t join the military.
One way in which the Church is getting to be even more militaristic than the military is the thought police. BYU professors have to say they agree with the Church’s teachings on sex and gender. They (apparently) can’t just agree to stay silent on any disagreement. Marty talks about how he had a faith/trust crisis in the government while in Afghanistan for his second time. He was able to successfully complete that tour of duty because the military doesn’t care what your private thoughts are. Marty still obeyed orders, and that’s what the military prioritized.
At BYU, “on top of the traditional “recommend” standards, which are required for entrance to any of the faith’s sacred temples, lay leaders must affirm that candidates: have a “testimony” of church doctrine, including its teachings on marriage, family and gender.” (from the SL Tribune article linked above).
Marty didn’t have to have a testimony that what the military was doing in Afghanistan was “true” as long as he followed orders. The LDS Church is requiring even more obedience than the military does, at least among BYU Professors.
Instant Community and Defined Roles. Military bases are little self-contained cities. The whole family lives there (usually) and so the military accommodates families and recreation and so forth. The size and complexity of military bases vary. Big bases would typically have a pediatrician and dentist on base, for example. Also a bowling alley and movie theater. There are clubs and activities. Military families buy groceries at the commissary. Your best friends are other military families. The housing is arranged in neighborhoods with parks for the kids. Since everyone is a transfer, there’s a lot of socializing and helping the new folks settle in and find friends and activities. After all, in a couple years, the new arrival will be the old-timer who helps the next wave of newbies find their footing.
Professionally, the military takes steps to keep people from ossifying in a role. That’s why the military transfers people around every few years. You’re learning the role so you can do the role anywhere in the world with people you met yesterday. If you leave a person in place for thirty years, they adapt the role to their individual style and if you throw them into a new environment, there’s going to be some friction. All those military transfers are designed to train people to join a team and immediately the team can work together because everyone knows exactly what their task is, and how to work with the other team members.
Mormons are pretty similar. Being the Young Women’s President in one ward is a lot like being YWP in another ward. If you move 1500 miles, your new ward is going to look a lot like the ward you just left. If you get called into the Elder’s Quorum Presidency a week after you move in, and you had the same calling in the ward you moved out of two weeks ago, chances are you’re going to hit the ground running and not need much training.
Same thing goes for building a community. Bouncing the pioneers all over the U.S., founding numerous cities, was great training for sending them across the plains and yanking a civilization out of the dirt of the Salt Lake Valley. Put enough Mormons in one place and we’ll organize ourselves into a functioning community. That’s very military. Or maybe the military is very Mormon. Whatever. They are both closed societies with their own distinctive communities.
Family Legacy. The strongest predictor of whether someone will join the military is if they have a family member in the military. That’s all well and good until we acknowledge how that is separating the military from the general population of the USA.
Who serves when not all serve? This is a fundamental question for a nation that relies on volunteers to staff its military. In the United States, perhaps the strongest predictor of military service is having a family member who served—allowing for extended family members, it averages to about 80 percent of new recruits across the services. Going a step further, between 22 and 35 percent (depending on the service) are the child of a service member. The West Point Class of 2017 includes three brothers who will all commission into the Army, and whose father and mother both served in the Coast Guard.
While at first glance this makes sense—children are likely to follow in their siblings’ and parents’ footsteps—it’s a remarkable gut check when you look at the past 15 years of war. The military draws many recruits from the same communities and the same families, isolating those in uniform from society and vice versa. In essence, the self-selection dynamics have created a “warrior caste.” [Article from Slate, 2017]
Similarly, the biggest predictor of being an active, practicing LDS Church member is being raised LDS. Multi-generational families carry the Church. Converts are awesome, and in fact, Church leaders say things like, “New converts have blessed and been the lifeblood of the Church throughout its history.” Teaching, baptizing, and training a new convert is a resource intensive undertaking. Yes, absolutely expend those resources. However, it’s a lot easier for the Church when a new Young Women’s President says her mother was the YWP when she was a teenager. Being raised by faithful LDS parents is free training for the Church. Not only does the ideal multi-generational family train their children to fill Church roles and strengthen the community, but they also pass on the ‘unwritten order of things’ (for better or worse).
The point is that being raised in a military family, or an LDS family, jump-starts children into a distinctive culture that takes a lot of training.
And that comes together with some isolation from the general society. Say you’re LDS, married, and military. You raise your kids on half a dozen military bases across the world while homeschooling them and attending Church every week. The kids will have some great experiences, and … well … maybe that unique background will make life a little bit tricker if they choose to leave either one of those communities? That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it should be acknowledged as something that some people have to deal with.
Questions:
- Do you have family/friends in the military?
- Were you in the military? Do you see validity in the comparisons I’ve drawn? What other comparisons do you see?
- Are there advantages to being in a closed, high-demand community like the military or the LDS Church? Are there disadvantages?
- Do you think the LDS Church can be validly compared to the military? And to a corporation?
Wheat & Tares 
One DOES question orders in the military. Soldiers are not required to obey any and all military orders. The orders must be lawful and constitutional. In fact, solders can be convicted for crimes committed when obeying unlawful and unconstitutional orders.
20-year military veteran here. Lots to unpack with this analogy. I don’t fully agree with the validity of the comparison Janey, but I see what you are trying to get across here, and I appreciate that, and take no offense. Just off the top of my head for now (I will probably think of more later):
– Membership in either the Church or the military can be frustrating and nonsensical at times, but at least the military pays you to put up with it, while the Church demands members tithe themselves into poverty.
-The military is not a lifetime commitment for anyone. You serve your minimum obligation (a typical enlistment is 4 years), then you are free to leave honorably and go on with civilian life, or you can stay in for longer if you like it enough. Some manage to make a career of it, but even they must retire at some point. The Church has no honorable path for discontinuing one’s membership, voluntarily or otherwise.
-The U.S. military has 6 distinct service branches, and within each, hundreds of possible career paths to choose from, in every kind of trade and skilled job imaginable. Not everyone ends up happy with their choice, but at least they had some say in the matter, and they can leave as soon as their obligation is met. By contrast, the LDS Church offers a one-size-fits-all “covenant path” for everyone, and members are not permitted to express dissatisfaction. You can’t even choose which congregation you attend. And don’t even think about leaving.
-Advancement and promotion in the military is largely merit-based and requires proving one’s leadership potential, while climbing the Church’s leadership ladder is a function of personal/family connections, net worth, and demonstrated “yes-man” potential.
-There have been women serving in the highest levels of military leadership for decades (the current Chief of Naval Operations, a 4-star admiral, is a woman) but Church leadership is still exclusively male.
And, as Old Man stated, military members are obligated to obey only lawful orders. There are many documented occurrences of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young giving orders that were unlawful. And in the modern era, the Church’s SEC violation and cover-up definitely involved unlawful orders being carried out that should have been questioned instead of followed blindly.
20-year military veteran here. Lots to unpack with this analogy. I don’t fully agree with the validity of the comparison Janey, but I see what you are trying to get across here, and I appreciate that, and take no offense. Just off the top of my head for now (I will probably think of more later):
– Membership in either the Church or the military can be frustrating and nonsensical at times, but at least the military pays you to put up with it, while the Church demands members tithe themselves into poverty.
-The military is not a lifetime commitment for anyone. You serve your minimum obligation (a typical enlistment is 4 years), then you are free to leave honorably and go on with civilian life, or you can stay in for longer if you like it enough. Some manage to make a career of it, but even they must retire at some point. The Church has no honorable path for discontinuing one’s membership, voluntarily or otherwise.
-The U.S. military has 6 distinct service branches, and within each, hundreds of possible career paths to choose from, in every kind of trade and skilled job imaginable. Not everyone ends up happy with their choice, but at least they had some say in the matter, and they can leave as soon as their obligation is met. By contrast, the LDS Church offers a one-size-fits-all “covenant path” for everyone, and members are not permitted to express dissatisfaction. You can’t even choose which congregation you attend. And don’t even think about leaving.
-Advancement and promotion in the military is largely merit-based and requires proving one’s leadership potential, while climbing the Church’s leadership ladder is a function of personal/family connections, net worth, and demonstrated “yes-man” potential.
-There have been women serving in the highest levels of military leadership for decades (the current Chief of Naval Operations, a 4-star admiral, is a woman) but Church leadership is still exclusively male.
And, as Old Man stated, military members are obligated to obey only lawful orders. There are many documented occurrences of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young giving orders that were unlawful. And in the modern era, the Church’s SEC violation and cover-up definitely involved unlawful orders being carried out that should have been questioned instead of followed blindly.
Some more examples of how the Church is like the military:
1. I’m not exactly sure how far the members of the military can go in criticizing their superiors, but I suspect there are some pretty serious limits. Dallin Oaks says members shouldn’t openly criticize their superiors at all, even if the criticism is true:
2. Authoritarianism was mentioned in the OP, but I’ll add to that Boyd Packer’s insistence that members/leaders are not to look horizontally or downwards when making decisions. They are always to look upwards in the hierarchy for direction:
3. There are many military metaphors in hymns and scriptures:
a. “Dare to Do Right” (“Stand like a hero and battle to death”)
b. “Hope of Israel” (“Vanquish every foe today”)
c. “Behold a Royal Army”
d. “We are all Enlisted”
e. “Onward, Christian Soldiers”
f. “Let Us All Press On” (“In the fight for right let us wield a sword. The mighty sword of truth.”)
g. “We Thank Thee, O God, for a Prophet” (“The wicked who fight against Zion will surely be smitten at last”)
h. “Armor of God” (Ephesians 6:10-18 and perhaps plagiarized(?) in D&C 27:15-18
i,. Captain Moroni’s raising the “title of liberty” and going to battle often used as a metaphor for how Church members should stand up for their beliefs (and, unfortunately, Captain Moroni is also idolized by Mormon, extreme right-wing nut jobs as a model by which they ought to force their views on everyone else)
j. “Good soldier of Jesus Christ” (2 Timothy 2:3-4)
I personally can see some value in the military metaphor, but I feel like the Church uses these metaphors far too frequently, and many members seem to forget that it’s a metaphor. You know, we’re supposed to think and apply the useful meanings from the metaphor, but not take it too far. We aren’t literally at war with everyone outside of Mormondom. Right? Right?? When we take these metaphors too literally we end up with…
4. BYU-Idaho compared porn/masturbation to the horrors of war in a very memorable (in a bad way) video: https://religionnews.com/2014/02/03/mormon-war-masturbation-video/.
5. We are preparing for a literal “battle of all battles” between good and evil that is supposedly going to happen any day now just before the Second Coming of Christ. Our generation was saved for this day because we are the valiant ones who actually have “The Right Stuff” to fight this battle (forget that my parent’s generation and my kid’s generation are also the “Valiant Generation” saved to fight evil and usher in the Millenium).
20 year military spouse here. Another point where the military is less authoritarian than the church is that if your commander gives an order and you have information to suggest that it is a bad idea, you are supposed to object. Say, you are a scout and know there is an ambush ahead, you actually have a duty to object to the order until your commander knows what you know. Then maybe you are stuck obeying anyway, but you do have a right and duty to raise objections to stupid orders if you have information your officer does not. But in the church once the order is made, your job is to shut up and support what you know is a bad decision. Just try having scientific information that says the church has taken a wrong turn on gender issues or say you know information on where they are thinking of building a new chapel or how the ward will be split. Your job isn’t to bring this information forward as it would be in the military. Your job in the church is to shut your mouth and support your leaders. And if you are the female version of a church leader, you are never in a position to share information you know, where if you are a female military person, your duty is exactly what a male person’s is.
Also, it is not the isolated community you talked about with everybody forming a tight on base community. Most do not live on base and often it is not even possible because there are 10 times more families than houses to put them in. So, many times there is no chance to even live on base, because of rank and housing availability. So, you can take money for the cost of living on base and you can live off base by renting or buying a home just like nonmilitary people do. Hill AFB in Utah has very limited on base housing and we chose to live off base. We were the only military in our ward. In Florida we lived on base, then bought a house off base. In Texas we lived off base and once again were the only military in our ward. In Germany we lived in military housing, with Army folk even though we were Air Force. So, it is never the cozy picture of an insulated community like you painted. You always are mixing with nonmilitary families, and often don’t even have any military people in your life except at work. You also do not have to shop at the commissary and many do not because Walmart is cheaper. I still have commissary privileges yet haven’t been inside one for 5 or so years. And unless you are overseas you don’t use the military dentists and often not the military doctors.
It is no where close to the Mormon ward community, and you never have people who won’t let their children play with nonmilitary kids like some Mormons won’t let their kids play with nonmembers.
Yes, it some ways military have their own language and culture. But, Mormons have a member language too and we have a culture. I would say the military culture has much more in common with civilian culture than Mormons do with nonmembers. It is not an isolated culture, but really just a sub culture.
So, once again the church culture is more of what you are saying the military is like, even than the military.
Sorry we are kind of blowing your analogy apart, but I find the church emphasized obedience to leaders far more than the military did.
The Marines might be as bad as you say and as bad as the church, but the Air Force wasn’t. In fact my husband griped more about the lack of respect for the individual and the family’s needs from the church than from the Air Force. Once we had a rotten situation that was harming the family from the Air Force. Three times we found ourselves in such a situation from church in callings that gave no time for family.
But, OK, we got lucky and he never saw combat and was an officer in a needed occupation. The AF paid for him to go to 3 years of college and gave him a salary to do it. The church never did anything for us, only demanded we do for it.
I like the military better.
My military experiences were very different than the church, in a good way IMO. I’m still in frequent communication with some of my comrades from 30 years ago. Whenever we do talk or get together, we pick up right where we left off. I have rarely had that connection with people in the church. Once someone moves away, in modern times you stay connected on Facebook but otherwise aren’t likely to truly stay in touch. Church friendships are much more transactional, at least in my experience.
A stark difference is that while the military has high expectations and you work hard, there is also a time when it’s not just ok but strongly encouraged to play hard. Blow off steam and cut loose with your buddies after a long field exercise, deployment or other effort. In the church there is no element of play hard – it’s just more work. You did your calling well this week, reward yourself this weekend with a church cleaning assignment, helping someone move, and a full day of boring meetings on Sunday. And a healing serving of guilt if you haven’t gone to the temple lately.
To sum it up, military leaders who are tough on their subordinates usually do that because they care. The take responsibility for their people and their welfare, and give you opportunities to continue getting new skills and training. The church treats members like a resource to exploit until depletion.
Old Man – you’re right about a soldier’s right to question bad orders. Thanks for bringing that up. I was thinking of orders along the lines of: “dig a hole!” “now fill it in!”. I forgot about the important category of orders to do something wrong.
Jack Hughes – thanks for that thoughtful response. I learned a lot from your insights about the differences.
mountainclimber – I didn’t even think about all of our military music. And of course, the way we use military metaphors without even really seeing how militant they are is a thing. Holland’s “musket fire” is a military metaphor.
Anna – no need to apologize for blowing my analogy apart! If it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny by people who have been in the military (like you and Jack Hughes), then it should be blown apart. I didn’t know so many military families didn’t live on base. I appreciated your description of the differences and contrast.
Ethan – good addition. Work hard, play hard. I hadn’t thought of that either. I know someone who deployed to Afghanistan and talked about taking video gaming consoles with him as … I can’t remember what he called it, but it was something to do with morale and recreation. The military knows how important it is to let the soldiers and officers chill out once in a while. The Church doesn’t do that. Especially with missionaries. Like, P-day wasn’t even the full day. On my mission, we were supposed to do missionary work in the evening. A good missionary never ‘played hard’ the way the military encourages.
My post doesn’t hold up very well, but it sure is a good discussion!
You have reminded me of a doorstep conversation I had as a missionary in Maryland – but the reverse of what you would think! We were home after studying on P-Day – no name tags, casual clothes – and there was a knock at the apartment door. It was a handsome and charming young man about our age, going door to door to sell tickets to a charity concert in the neighboring town – which was just outside the mission boundaries. He was a very insistent and persuasive salesman and an interesting conversation ensued with him as I tried to nicely let him know that we were not potential customers. As he probed and prodded and tried to flirt his way into a ticket sale, I revealed that his argument could not change our minds – we could not attend pop music concerts, could not even go to the neighboring town, could not stay out past 9 pm. He was absolutely baffled and curious and kept engaging. In a last-ditch attempt to explain the situation, I said “we are basically nuns in the military” and that seemed to satisfy him and he took the sales pitch to the next door.
All that to say: the military comparison might be more accurate if comparing to a mission experience rather than “civilian” Mormon life.
Thanks for your quality posts Janey. I don’t read every post but I often come to W&T for what feels like friendship and community and even healing.
Janey – I think your post is great and illustrates some stark similarities. The biggest and saddest similarity IMO is that both organizations always have an enemy or “other” to push against. Makes sense for military service where you are training to potentially fight and kill. But it saddens me that the church feels the need to position itself against something else – Satan, the world, apostates, etc.
As always the experience varies by individual and there are many (in both the church and military) who take themselves way too seriously, and simultaneously others who are very real and balanced and just ordinary people who don’t make the church/military/whatever their whole identity.
Also MWR is the term you are thinking of – Morale, Welfare and Recreation:)
My best friend is stationed on a military base in Japan. One thing that he really talks about is how generous the housing allowance and situation is for their family.
One thing you touched on military housing. Whether military housing is good, bad, or neutral, one thing I can say is that in the US today, housing is more expensive than ever. This is especially true where Mormons predominantly live in the US. This statement rings true to me:
The reason I think the church will begin to decline in numbers is due to the cost of housing. You can see this in baptism numbers of children of record over the past 5 years.
The church, unlike the military, does not have a system in place for getting its members a housing allowance or stipend. While this is obvious, I think this is will be a challenge for a faith that results in primarily childbirth to grow its ranks. This is why I think it will have a difficult time keeping its numbers high. The social replication will not happen in the same way it did in the past (by having more children).
I made a housing-related post on a recent W&T article, but I think I am going to repost it below because is something that I think will play out in the next 10 years as large population of LDS active members are right now in their prime childbearing years and are not doing so (partly because of high housing costs). I would think someone in the Q15 or at the church headquarters would need to worry a lot more about the high cost of housing/rent in the US “Mormon Corridor” and less about visible pride flags at BYU.
The church could learn from the military by addressing housing and healthcare among its ranks (military has VA, even though it’s constantly at risk of beind privatized/defunded):
This is my thesis for what is happening in the US church right now:
I think if you look at the date of those hymns’ composition, you’ll find many of them having been written in the decades following America’s Civil War – a great time for military imagery in general. There are exceptions, but it’s a thing – in fact, some hymns borrow tunes from wartime popular songs (“School Thy Feelings,” “In Our Lovely Deseret,” “Hark All Ye Nations,” etc.).
There’s a lot of validity to the analogy you use, Janey, notwithstanding the valid exceptions noted by veteran commenters. Military commanders [rarely] claim to be moved by revelation and therefore de facto infallible, if not de jure. The success or failure of the mission is also usually quickly determinable – “we succeeded in capturing the objective, Colonel!” – as opposed to the mission of the Church. Ill effects are also much more obvious. The loss of a platoon or a position is immediately clear; the loss of a generation of young Mormons is not as clear until well underway. And our leaders still muddle about in denial and we still hear “they must just want to sin” in the class discussions. This tends to squelch the kind of feedback that is one’s duty in the military – to warn of potential disaster or adverse outcome, for the good of the unit and the mission. Leader “inspiration” and the lack of a quantifiable harm trumps the benefits of an actual open discussion.
I recall being asked in an interview for advancement at one point in the Corps, what I would do if given an order I fundamentally disagreed with. The answer, of course (as long as it was a legal order), was that I would obey it. While you wear the uniform, you obey. Once you get out, that’s the time to question. It’s worth noting that there have been relatively high-ranking officers who have criticized policy once they were free to do so. Marine MGen Smedley Butler is a good example; after his retirement he became a harsh critic of the interventionist foreign policies which he had executed effectively as a leader of Marines. Army General Douglas MacArthur, on the other hand, was a vocal critic of US policy in Korea while serving in command of Allied forces there, and was cashiered (rightfully so, IMHO) for his public statements.
In the church, there is very little room to question, even at the fundamental “General Custer, best not ride into that valley” level, any direction given by a superior especially at the regional or general level. I suspect that my failure to adhere to this unspoken norm was the reason I was removed from the leadership track consideration many years ago, which has been a benefit to me and my family. In the military, as someone commented above, it’s your duty to question an order if you have good reason to believe that its execution will be detrimental to the mission. Final decision still rests with the CO. But it’s a rare bishop and a still more rare stake president or Area President who allows or encourages that kind of feedback, even if they pay lip service to it. We simply aren’t wired that way in the church.
Sorry for the lengthy comment!