Women, priesthood and Ordain Women

Women's standing has shifted repeatedly by policy, while ordination is called a 'divinely decreed pattern' leaders cannot alter; the founder of Ordain Women was excommunicated.

What the Church claims

The exclusion of women from priesthood office is God's unchangeable order, not a cultural policy.

Once the evidence is in, this claim: Contested. Women's standing has moved repeatedly by policy, in temple wording, in the language of authority, and in who may witness ordinances, which is hard to square with an unchangeable order. Ordination itself has not moved, and the claim is a doctrinal assertion rather than a factual one, so it is contested rather than weak.

The record

  • Dallin H. Oaks (April 2014) taught that women set apart to callings exercise 'priesthood authority' ('what other authority can it be?') but that presiding authorities 'are not free to alter the divinely decreed pattern that only men will hold offices in the priesthood'.
  • Ordain Women, founded by Kate Kelly in 2013, held its first public meeting on 2013-04-06 and sought entry to the priesthood session in October 2013 and April 2014; Kelly was excommunicated in June 2014.
  • Women's temple covenant to their husbands went from 'obey' (to 1990) to 'hearken' (1990-2019) to nothing (2019); the First Presidency said such adjustments will have 'no end'.
  • In October 2019 Russell M. Nelson announced that women may serve as witnesses to baptisms and temple sealings, and in 'Spiritual Treasures' told women the adversary does not want them to understand the 'endowment of knowledge and power' they receive in the temple.
  • The Nauvoo Relief Society was organized in 1842 'under the priesthood after the pattern of the priesthood' (Sarah Kimball's recollection, quoted in the Joseph Smith Papers introduction to the minute book).

The moving target

  • 1842: Society organized after the pattern of the priesthood, with keys turned to it.
  • 2014-04: Women have priesthood authority in callings; offices are for men by divine decree.
  • 2019-01: Temple covenants adjusted; women no longer covenant to hearken to husbands.
  • 2019-10: Women may witness ordinances; women have access to priesthood power through covenants.

The exchange

Oaks 2014; Nelson 2019

Priesthood office and priesthood power are different; women have always had the latter through the temple. Recent changes expand women's roles without touching the revealed pattern of male ordination, which prophets cannot change without revelation.

The answer: The same 'divinely decreed pattern' language was used for the racial ban until 1978, and the Church itself has changed women's covenants, witnessing and rhetoric in a decade. The pattern that cannot change and the pattern that keeps changing are distinguished only after the fact. Excommunicating Kelly for asking leaders to pray about ordination treats the question itself as apostasy.

What they get right: No revelation on women's ordination has been claimed, so the Church is consistent in declining to act without one.

Dallin H. Oaks (2014); Gordon B. Hinckley in interviews (1997)

The Church has never revealed that the pattern is permanent. It has said only that no revelation has come to change it, which is precisely the position it held on the racial restriction before 1978.

The answer: This is the strongest version of the defense and it is more modest than what members usually hear. It also cuts against the claim under test. If the honest answer is 'no revelation yet', then the arrangement is contingent, maintained by silence, and could end at any general conference — which is the skeptics' description, not the Church's. The Church cannot have both the permanence it preaches to its own members and the openness it offers when pressed from outside. The 1978 precedent it invokes is the precedent that a 'divinely decreed pattern' was neither.

What they get right: The distinction between priesthood office and priesthood authority is a real feature of Latter-day Saint theology rather than an ad hoc invention, and Joseph Smith's 1842 language to the Relief Society supports it.

Both cases at full strength

The skeptics' case

The record shows steady accommodation on everything short of ordination, driven by the same pressures Ordain Women articulated, while the organization's founder was expelled. The 1842 Relief Society was organized 'after the pattern of the priesthood', a starting point later narrowed. Whether ordination is eternal law or the last cultural holdover is exactly the question the 1978 precedent leaves open.

The apologetic case

Latter-day Saint theology assigns complementary roles; women receive every temple ordinance and blessing, preside over organizations, and, as Oaks explained, act with priesthood authority. Ordain Women demanded a specific revelation on its timetable and campaigned publicly against leaders, which is what discipline for apostasy addresses.

What would change this

An announced revelation either ordaining women (which would make the 2014 'divinely decreed pattern' another reversed teaching) or explicitly grounding male-only office in scripture the Church treats as binding.

Sources

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