Here’s a quote from Jeffrey R. Holland’s talk this last conference:
Of course, in our present day, tremendously difficult issues face any disciple of Jesus Christ. The leaders of this Church are giving their lives to seeking the Lord’s guidance in the resolution of these challenges. If some are not resolved to the satisfaction of everyone, perhaps they constitute part of the cross Jesus said we would have to take up in order to follow Him. [emphasis in original]
I appreciate that he (obliquely) admitted that the GAs maybe don’t have unlimited time or energy to solve all the questions of Church doctrine and policy that face them. I think it’s interesting, though, to consider what problems they do and don’t consider important enough to address. It seems quite clear that the further removed an issue is from the GAs’ personal experience, the less likely it is they’ll consider it important, and the more likely they’ll just wave it away as “well, that’s your cross to bear.”
Here are some questions that I think should obviously be pressing on GAs’ minds, but that they seem largely unconcerned about:
- How could the Church more welcoming to single people? Two speakers in April 2021 conference mentioned how many single people there are in the Church. Tellingly, M. Russell Ballard brought this issue up only after he was widowed and it became more salient to him. But is there any doctrinal innovation, or even any Church program, or even any rhetorical shift to try to help single people feel more welcome? Not that I’ve seen. It was a brief mention of the issue that appeared quickly and was gone just as fast. The Church remains a place for married people, and single people are an afterthought at best.
- How could the Church more welcoming to LGBT people? The GAs spend a lot of energy talking about the threat of LGBT people, with little to no clear awareness that these folks are actually part of the Church. Could we do any better than suggest that LGBT people are just fundamentally wrong, and they’ll be “fixed” to be straight and cisgender in the next life? Could we imagine anything other than telling them that to stay on God’s good side, they need to stick with their assigned birth gender and stay celibate? The GAs are clearly unconcerned with these questions. Heck, they pretty much seem unaware of even the existence of anyone other than maybe gay men. Acknowledging that lesbians exist would require them to first accept that women can have sexual interest, and that their sexual orientation can matter, and they seem to not know these things.
- How could women have a voice in how the Church is run? The GAs never wanted to formally acknowledge, and certainly not meet with, Ordain Women. They did some tinkering around the edges in response to them, though, broadcasting the priesthood session of conference, adding women to general Church councils, and adding women leaders to the
EnsignLiahona centerfold of Church leaders. They’ve also changed some rhetoric to tell women that everything they do in the Church is under priesthood authority, so it’s kinda sorta priesthood-adjacent, and therefore Very Important. But this has been almost entirely hand-waving and not related to any change of substance. The top leadership of wards and branches, stakes, areas, and the entire Church remains male-only. In families, men are still ordained and women are not, and we still have the self-contradictory lines in the FamProc about husbands presiding, but husbands and wives being “equal partners.” - How could women’s value in the afterlife be made clear? Dale G. Renlund made clear in his talk this last conference that the status of Heavenly Mother is not on the GAs’ list of priorities. Saying something concrete about Heavenly Mother would be an easy way for GAs to make clear that women won’t be eternally subservient to men. But this question clearly isn’t one that weighs on them. (Or perhaps they worry about the backlash should they decide to reveal that in fact they think women will be eternally subservient.) Along similar lines to Elder Renlund, Gordon B. Hinckley in his 1991 talk where he answered a letter from a teen girl who saw clearly her second-class status in the Church, he repeatedly said he was “confident” or “satisfied” that scriptural passages that refer to “men” really included women as well, so everything was fine. Clearly, this wasn’t an issue that concerned him too greatly, or he might have actually considered the inequalities in both Church rhetoric and practice. Instead, he just waved the letter-writer’s concerns away with some pats on the head. Also, on the closely related topic of eternal polygamy, Dallin H. Oaks made a joke a few conferences ago, showing that he thinks it’s laughable that a woman should be concerned about her status in the afterlife. This is worse than a topic that the GAs don’t even address; they obviously know it concerns people, and they think that’s trivial or stupid.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf wrote a First Presidency message in 2011 that someone in my ward quoted recently. He told a story about a Church member who eagerly told his non-Mormon neighbor about latter-day prophets, but then was chagrined when he realized that he couldn’t recall what the prophets had said recently.
The point of the story was to encourage readers to follow what the Q15 says more closely. But I think a more obvious point (that Uchtdorf actually acknowledged in the article) is that conference is almost entirely the same, over and over. Oh, President Oaks is quoting the FamProc and telling us about the wicked world again? Neil L. Andersen is telling people to have more kids and that abortion and birth control are bad? Henry B. Eyring is regaling us with another tale of his childhood in New Jersey? What if instead of telling us the same thing for the thousandth time, they actually considered pressing questions and gave us more answers than “everything will be fixed in the next life”?
I really do think it boils down to the GAs’ failure of empathy. Being single, or gay, or trans, or childless, or female, isn’t in their experience, so they think these are fringe concerns. I’m imagining an alternative timeline where the new Church president decided that the random snippet of scripture we really needed to abide by was 3 Nephi 28:1-3. In these verses, Jesus tells the nine Nephite disciples who aren’t going to be the Three Nephites that they’ll die “after that ye are seventy and two years old.” Therefore, a new Church president could say, any man living to an age of greater than 72 was clearly trusting in the arm of flesh, and an insult to God. You can bet that the Q15, virtually all of whom would be discovering overnight that they were an insult to God, would meditate and meet and fast and pray night and day until they found a resolution that made it okay that they had lived too long. This would not be a fringe concern at all; it would be one that affected them, the most important people!
I know I’m like a broken record, but I think the GAs’ refusal to address any of these pressing issues, while they still find plenty of time for their favorite gospel hobbies, just shows yet again that Church leadership needs to be far more like Church membership. It needs to include women, and people who have had different life experiences (no more business executives for a while, please), and a greater racial diversity, and greater age diversity (maybe 72 would be a good retirement age) and people from different economic circumstances. Otherwise, the Church risks being a comfortable place only for straight, white, cisgender, well-off men. I mean, to some degree, maybe it has been this for a long time, but the contrast with the rest of the world is only growing more stark.
