It’s a new year at church! And, among other things, that means that a new crop of kids has graduated from Primary! Boys and girls who turn 12 in 2024 are now attending Young Men and Young Women. The boys are going to start passing the sacrament! And the girls are going to … um … start attending Young Women.
And why are boys passing the sacrament and girls are not? Because of policy choices that church leaders made decades ago, and that current church leaders keep in place, either because they don’t realize it’s a policy choice that they could reverse or because they support the policy that treats girls as second-class and inferior in the church.
I’ve blogged about this several times (here and here and here; also, my co-blogger David Huston has written about it here), but let me reiterate: nothing in scripture requires priesthood or maleness to pass the sacrament. In fact, D&C 20:58 says expressly that deacons and teachers don’t have authority to administer the sacrament, so passing the sacrament is not administration. It’s purely a policy choice church leaders made, and one they continue to make every day that they don’t change it. I personally think it’s bad policy: it sends a message to girls and women that they aren’t as valued in the church as boys and men and/or that the church doesn’t value their service and participation as much as it values the service of boys and men.
Look, I get the inertial quality of this: it’s been this way for a long time. Church leaders likely feel like they’re not actually making a policy choice here—they’re just maintaining the status quo. But they’re not: to paraphrase Rush, even choosing not to make a choice is, well, a choice, at least if you occupy a position that would let you make a meaningful choice here.
And it’s not the only deliberate policy choice that the church makes devaluing women and girls and/or their service. There are a string of callings that we only let men hold, notwithstanding there being no priesthood requirement and no gendered reason.
What callings? I’m going to leave out callings that specifically require priesthood (bishop, stake president). I’m also going to leave out ones that are arguably gendered (YM and YW leaders, RS president; EQ president probably fits in both buckets).
So what are we looking at? This isn’t an exhaustive list, but here are a couple callings that are limited to men, in spite of the fact that priesthood is unnecessary and there’s no implicit gender.
Sunday School presidency
From the Handbook:
“The bishop calls and sets apart a Melchizedek Priesthood holder to be the ward Sunday School president. They discuss whether counselors should be called. If counselors are needed, and if there are enough men to serve in these positions, the Sunday School president may recommend one or two counselors. If the bishopric approves, a member of the bishopric calls them.”
Why does it need to be a Melchizedek Priesthood holder? Honestly, no idea. Teachers can be men or women, priesthood holders or not. The Sunday School presidency doesn’t administer any ordinances. Largely, as far as I can tell, they ensure that there’s someone to teach every Sunday School week and, if they really want to go the extra mile, provide some teacher training.
Ward Clerks
From the Handbook:
“Every ward should have a qualified, functioning ward clerk. He is recommended by the bishopric and called and set apart by a member of the stake presidency or an assigned high councilor. He should hold the Melchizedek Priesthood and have a current temple recommend. He is a member of the ward council.”
Ward clerks are important! They serve critical administrative capacities, ensuring, among other things, that necessary records and reports are done! And that doesn’t require priesthood! (I’ll ignore the whole temple recommend creep that’s become so big in the last decade or two, but it’s also worth noting that (a) that’s not necessary, but (b) women also hold temple recommends.)
(And before someone tries to bring it up: yes, bishoprics work closely with ward clerks. But also, if you’re going to have an affair with someone you’re working closely with, (a) you probably shouldn’t be in the bishopric, and (b) you’re almost definitely working closely with women at your work, and you should also not be having an affair with those women.)
Women Only
As far as I can tell, there’s only one women-only calling that’s not RS or YW: Primary presidencies. From the Handbook:
“The bishop calls and sets apart an adult woman to serve as the ward Primary president. If the unit is large enough, she recommends one or two adult women to be called as her counselors ….”
Again, there’s no reason that a primary presidency needs to be a particular gender (though honestly, as long as other callings are unnecessarily gender-segregated, at least this provides a formal leadership role for a couple women).
It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way!
The church is perfectly capable of getting rid of these unnecessary gender restrictions, and even doing it without a ton of fanfare. Think stake auditors. The 2010 Handbook, section 14.9.2, reads:
“The stake president or his counselor who is chairman of the stake audit committee calls at least two stake auditors. These auditors should be trustworthy brethren who hold current temple recommends. If possible, they should be experienced in accounting or auditing” (emphasis added).
The current Handbook is different. Today we read:
“The stake president or his counselor who is chairman of the stake audit committee calls at least two stake auditors. These brothers and sisters should have current temple recommends. If possible, they should be experienced in accounting or auditing.”
Sometime in the previous 13 years, church leadership realized that it’s dumb to have a gender requirement for stake auditors. So it got rid of the gender limitation! Now men and women can both be church auditors.
So church leaders can change policies, even where those policies were, at one point, enshrined in the church handbook. They can’t pass off these limitations to tradition, because tradition only carries the amount of weight we decide we want it to carry. If the church endorses and maintains policies that treat women worse than men, girls worse than boys, it’s the policy church leaders have explicitly decided to adopt and maintain.
Church leadership needs to do the same thing with respect to other unnecessarily gendered callings. And frankly (and I’ll keep beating this drum), it’s even more important that it eliminate the unnecessary, unscriptural, prejudiced, and frankly stupid[fn1] policy that only priesthood holders can pass the sacrament. It sends a message to our girls, loud and clear, that they’re not necessary, their service isn’t valued, and frankly, that they’re second-class citizens in the church at best.
I don’t think that’s true. Church leaders say it’s not true. But their nice words are drowned out by the volume of their actions in keeping in place these discriminatory policies.
[fn1] I’ve seen the argument made that there are so many boys that if we let girls pass the sacrament too, the boys wouldn’t get to. Which is dumb on its face—so what if the boys pass half as many times?—but also reflective of a very narrow part of the church. Yesterday, only adult men were passing the sacrament. Why? Because we have four or five young men. And at least half of them are priests who could actually administer the sacrament (though most of them were out of town). But we had at least two young women who could have—and should have—passed the sacrament today.