On women leaving church

I agree that this Brother seems to be doing his best with the position and authority that he has.

“Hello everyone, Jared here. I have been reading your comments and I am devastated that my lesson on D&C 25:10 caused pain to so many of you.

Thank you for helping me see where I went wrong in explaining things. I am sorry and I hope you will allow me to learn, with your help, to teach with greater clarity and charity in the future.


In my video, I failed to see that by speaking of the recent increase in women leaving organized religion, and then quoting a scripture about “seeking after the things of this world,” this implied that women who leave our Church do so largely because of worldliness. Then, by speaking of sacrificing “this world” in favor of “a better world,” my words suggested that women are not making sufficient sacrifices in the here and now.


I want to state clearly that these are NOT my beliefs, and that I am deeply sorry that this was the message that came across to so many. As I have tried to make clear in other lessons, women already sacrifice so much, and people leave religion for many reasons, and we should listen to and learn from them with a “Lord, is it I?” attitude.


To be clear, I believe that the Church will continue to improve as women are valued not only for their sacrifices, but for their gifts of leadership and spiritual authority.

The Restoration will remain incomplete, and the Gathering cannot occur, without the powerful voices of the daughters of God. These voices need to be heard. President Nelson has made that abundantly clear, and we should do all we can to reflect that prophetic priority.


I still have much to learn in so many areas, and am deeply grateful to those who shared their feelings, perspectives, and experiences with me.

I think that he is genuine in wanting to listen to and learn from the feelings, perspectives, and experiences of those that are hurting and leaving and he may even have some access to relay this information to actual decision makers. However, he is not a decision maker himself. He does talk about taking these understandings to improve his teaching in the classroom. That is good and is about the limit of his decision making ability (even there he will need to be careful lest he overstep and find himself out of a job).

To be clear, I believe that the Church will continue to improve as women are valued not only for their sacrifices, but for their gifts of leadership and spiritual authority.

The Restoration will remain incomplete, and the Gathering cannot occur, without the powerful voices of the daughters of God. These voices need to be heard. President Nelson has made that abundantly clear, and we should do all we can to reflect that prophetic priority.

This is a wonderful sentiment. I am not clear on what it is that President Nelson has made “abundantly clear.” That the church will change and improve to give women more “leadership and spiritual authority?” That the restoration and gathering require women to use their “powerful voices?” I love the idea, I just don’t know that this description fits with the teachings that I am hearing from church. I would be very happy to be proven wrong if anyone can direct me to such teachings from our church leaders or President Nelson specifically.

Her main deal is that “human-ing is hard enough” – it doesn’t need to be complicated by gender performance expectations and limitations [snip]

That’s a pretty powerful observation.

What you said was part of it.

“CHURCH” MEANING AND COMMUNITY AFFILATION

But when we say “church” anytime from around the dawn of history to probably the 1950’s ish, we are saying “doctrinal center” for moral teaching, “tribal affiliation” (why protect and feed the individual), “local economy” (to buy and sell in), “recreational association”, “department of health” for public safety, etc. That is what the pioneer families experienced as their survival was interlaced with families taking on all these community roles (and still is to a degree).

But now we can choose other then the church – if you want to go to a Easter party, you can go to the branch one, the church down the street, an online discord party, a local library party, etc. with minimal social penalties. You can afford to move to a different city more easily enough to go to school, to get a different job, to claim a potentially different future for yourself. Your identity isn’t as closely tied to your religious affiliation and religious performances.

INSIDE VS OUTSIDE THE CHURCH

I think the difference is that for women inside the church, there is encouragement to “stay in one’s (nurturing) lane”. I was having a conversation with my husband about “how women like his mom preside over the household ALL THE TIME and that women need to be respected for their decision-making abilities and treated as the household subject matter experts rather then overly-tidy, tending-to-hysteria females”.

He was nodding along – up until I said “preside” – his mother could not be a “presider” (priesthood function) but she was an amazing and respected “conductor” who conducted all household matters. His mother was a highly respected assistant manager who functioned as a full-fledged manager for a credit union branch. She ran the operational show there on 1 failing kidney with a house set up classily enough that Mary Poppins would approve, and had more executive functioning in her pinky then I manage to acquire in 1 arm and 1 shoulder. But all of her decision-making and precision had to be classified as “conducting” to get stuff done.

I think that women can define their identity and their role more outside the church then in the church. I could describe myself as “a concerned parent-type mom” and inside the church, the attention shifted to “mom” while outside the church, it seemed that people weighed “concerned parent” and “mom” about the same.

Women today have more diverse community options, specialized access to supports (as opposed to fighting for accommodations at church that provides some generalized access to supports but wants a “covenant path one-size-fits-all” approach), and the cost calculation is allowed to be run with minimal social stigma.

CHURCH VS FEMALE RESPONSIBLITY TUG-OF-WAR

I see it as a tug-of-war between the necessity of both parents working (so the women can’t take on the elder care, child care, and community care that traditional stay-at-home mothers can take on that is the implicit patriarchal expectation) and the elderly male leadership explicitly and implicitly expecting women to take on all the care as part of the “nurturing” responsibility with men counseled to “help” women with the kin-work of daily living and “support” families financially. And part of the problem is that church affiliation is coming into competition with employment, with education, with family maintenance work, with socialization/community, with medical care – with all the “good things” and that this competition is not even acknowledged aside from “choose church”.

I think part of the conversation that isn’t happening is what abuse in the family structure looks like. We use “unrighteous dominion” in a very sterile, generic way, but supporting families to prevent abuse requires more listening and less prescribing, and more supporting grass-roots autonomy and less top-down leadership. We need to equalize cancelling temple marriages so that they are “fair” and only 1 sealing can be active at a time or “all” sealings can be active at a time for both genders. As far as I know, for the lifetime – men can be sealed to multiple women but a woman cannot be sealed to multiple men. I gather that sealings for the dead seal everyone with the caveat that “God will sort it out” without regard to gender (as long as a male name and a female name are sealed together).

I think that part of the concern about 54% of Gen Z leaving the church organization is that the type of “care” required to maintain extended families and the church community falling more on men who stay – and our culture doesn’t have much experience of that. Worse case scenario, what does a full-on purified male-only affiliation look like? A variation on Mason Associations? Male Scouts of America without quite as many campouts?

NOTE: Part of what is interesting about more girls and women leaving is that boys and men are coming to the church, and coming back to the church, and staying in the church. Our culture is not used to that narrative being a functional reality.

It’s hard for me to extrapolate much from the reported numbers. I don’t know the starting point and I don’t know the number of people leaving.

So there are still more women in church than men. The starting numbers and the number of people leaving are important. Maybe the study gets into that but the bar graph certainly masks those important details.

Under that exaggerated scenario, the percentage of women leaving the church being higher than the percentage of men leaving the church might indicate that women are starting to catch up to a trend the men experienced in the past. It’s hard to say.

It’s hard to fully extrapolate what the meaning behind the numbers is, and what is motivating the leadership (aside from fear – the question in my mind is “what are the leadership most afraid of?”).

The “number of women at church” determines the number of women socializing at church (church potlucks and RS activities specifically). The “number of women at church” also is a primary driver for Primary activities (including Cub Scouts replacement activities) from what I tell.

The “number of women at church” also determines the dating pool for active men.

The “number of men at church” is actually less important then the “number of qualified to be counted men” to staff leadership positions to run the organization. I think this requires a temple recommend (which has its own barriers to access), but I am not sure.

I also think that because “women and children” are grouped so closely in our LDS culture, that there is an implied “plus X” variable for every woman that leaves. So that “108” women leaving for every “96” men really is treated like “108+X” women leaving, because for every woman who leaves – she is taking 1-2+ kids with her, and maybe a sister leaves out of solidarity, etc.

POTENTIAL CONCERNS (LEADERSHIP SIDE) – STRICTLY SPECULATION:

– Women aren’t there to plan and primarily execute communal meals and activities for the church community.

– Women aren’t there to plan and primarily execute the maintaining of youth activities and related spiritual, cultural, communal, pastoral, emotional, and mental nourishment for those populations. Women aren’t there to staff Primary.

– Women aren’t there to nag/ask/organize family members’ butts into the pews.

– Women aren’t there at home running Come Follow Me (like they are supposed to per the 2018 Relief Society Broadcast). They may want to talk about other truths, do work at home, be creative at home, or be out in the community.

– Women aren’t there to foster emotional connections between individuals and groups.

– The dating pool isn’t robust enough to keep members dating and marrying other members.

– Men will exit the church rather then “settle” for marrying the remaining women.

– If women raised to embrace being the “spiritual center” of the home and church are leaving the church and not following or teaching church standards at home, there is a huge level of cognitive dissonance that gets generated.

TREND:

I think it’s more about girls and women being trusted with greater autonomy in the last 20-30 years outside of the church community, and the church culture not adapting to women have more autonomy in how women are led. Part of it is that we have elected record numbers of women to our government House of Representative seats over the last few years (currently 121 of them or 28%), but we see 3 women compared to 24 men assigned to speak at General Conference (12.5%). And honestly, I was surprised to hear that it was 3 women – my vague brain remembers 2 women more often then not.

Also, most communities have all kinds of resources that put their money where their mouth is when they “support women and families”. There are a lot of different potential instances where a woman could pick up that the church doesn’t support families to varying degrees that might drive a woman to leave. Heck, the whole shift to “home centered, church supported” programming (especially with the blatant “nurturing” explicitly includes “spiritual teaching” talk given by President Eyring at the same time in a talk given to women), this can feel like, “you are on your own” to women. The tradeoff to shifting to less church meant less Primary staffing requirements and less church-programming requirements that was liberating also has an isolating component.

I think it’s more about girls and women being trusted with greater autonomy in the last 20-30 years outside of the church community, and the church culture not adapting to women have more autonomy in how women are led.

I hear lots of women saying that the church is the only entity in their lives that’s still imposing limits on them because they’re women. The church is in stark contrast with the rest of their experiences and it’s highlighting a massive… I’ll call it opportunity… for the restoration.

In the past a church was the community. Now churches compete for time and attention in a marketplace of ideas. They’re not the only game in town. Society at large still has a way to go to make things fully equal but even a less than ideal offering found in the world is more than the church is doing. People will migrate to where they feel valued.

The “number of women at church” determines the number of women socializing at church (church potlucks and RS activities specifically). The “number of women at church” also is a primary driver for Primary activities (including Cub Scouts replacement activities) from what I tell.

The “number of women at church” also determines the dating pool for active men.

The “number of men at church” is actually less important then the “number of qualified to be counted men” to staff leadership positions to run the organization. I think this requires a temple recommend (which has its own barriers to access), but I am not sure.

I also think that because “women and children” are grouped so closely in our LDS culture, that there is an implied “plus X” variable for every woman that leaves. So that “108” women leaving for every “96” men really is treated like “108+X” women leaving, because for every woman who leaves – she is taking 1-2+ kids with her, and maybe a sister leaves out of solidarity, etc.

Halverson mentioned this in his initial video. Where go the women, so goes the church. I think you’re right.

My prior post was pure hypotheticals. Just a thought exercise to get me thinking about what the report is or isn’t saying.

The church largely relies on the number of TR holding, tithe paying men with the MP to determine when it’s time for a new ward or even determine the health of existing wards. The church has made recent changes to the policies for creating a new ward by setting a minimum number of “participating adults” but technically the policy could be satisfied by all of the adults being men. There’s still no requirement for a minimum number of women. I’d like to see a ward with no women try to get off the ground.