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BRACE FOR MASS EXODUS ; .........But in both Catholicism and Mormonism, there's often nowhere else to go. It's either love it or leave it.
ReplyDeleteI think it's likely that over the coming years these churches are going to confront a stark choice: Reform themselves in light of equality or watch their parishioners opt for the exits. In droves.
Think about it: Men and women in the pews now live in a world in which nearly all obstacles to women's equality have been torn down. Where once women were relegated to submissive and subservient roles in the family, now domestic gender egalitarianism is the norm. Where once women were excluded from participating in politics — including denial of the vote — such strictures are now unimaginable. Colleges and universities that were once all-male have become coed. Just about every career that once excluded women is now open to them — including that most traditionally masculine occupation, military service. And so forth.
None of this is new. But this is: The churches are now largely populated by people who have no living memory of it ever having been otherwise. Living, studying, working, and voting in a world marked by ever-increasing recognition of the equal dignity of men and women, they go to church on Sunday and confront our culture's last significant institutional vestige of inequality — when that very institution worships the God who is the ultimate source of our egalitarianism.
The contradictions are unsustainable.
And they've already started to have a destabilizing impact.
Last year, several Mormons formed a group called Ordain Women and tried to gain admission to the all-male priesthood session of the church's semiannual General Conference at Temple Square in Salt Lake City. They were turned away. In an effort to avoid a repeat demonstration, the church has now banned the group from Temple Square during the upcoming General Conference on April 5. While a 2011 poll found that only 8 percent of Mormon women (and, oddly, 13 percent of Mormon men) support extending priestly ordination to women, this defensive move by the church is bound to raise the profile of the group and its cause. Combined with broader cultural trends in favor of equality, those numbers are bound to rise in the coming years.
If they do, the LDS church will face a crisis, since Mormon theology and folk beliefs are far more profoundly gendered than mainstream historic Christianity. The patriarchal nuclear family mirrors a divine familial arrangement led by an authoritative male God (Father in Heaven) who has his own obedient and deferential wife (Mother in Heaven). Opening the Mormon priesthood to women would challenge these doctrines in a way that could strike at the foundations of the church — far more so than the decision to permit the ordination of blacks in 1978. On the other hand, refusing to reform could eventually drive large numbers of younger, egalitarian-minded Mormons away from the church.
The Catholic situation is even more volatile. American Catholics have become accustomed to worshipping in a state of cognitive dissonance, with a majority rejecting the church's sexual teachings, and an overwhelming majority (something in the range of 98 percent) dismissing its strictures on artificial birth control. This is relatively easy to do, because these issues don't come up very often in Mass.