This week we’re bringing you a conversation on a subject that we’re always thinking about, but that has taken on a special urgency over the last two months—the role of women in the Church.

A large survey recently released showed a societal shift with regard to women and religion. In a reversal of trends from prior generations, young women are now leaving religion at significantly higher rates than men. Social issues and patriarchal structures are oft-cited reasons. Are there signs of trouble within our own faith?

To explore this question, we invited two brilliant women; Neylan McBaine and Bethany Brady Spalding. Neylan is the author of Women at Church, which turns ten years old this summer. Bethany is the co-author of the Girls who Chose God series, which highlights the powerful stories of women in scripture and Church history.

First, a little background on things we reference in this conversation.

In March, the Church’s Instagram account posted a quote from a talk by Anette Dennis, of the Relief Society general presidency. The post claimed, “There is no other religious organization in the world, that I know of, that has so broadly given power and authority to women.” This one post generated 18 thousand comments, mostly from Latter-day Saint women pushing back against this claim and expressing how their own experience feels quite different.

We also reference something that happened a few months prior when a church area authority in the San Francisco area instructed stakes and wards to discontinue their long-standing practice of having some women leaders sit on the stand during sacrament meetings. Over 3,000 women and men signed an open letter to the general women’s leaders of the church in protest.

We make brief reference in the conversation to a book by BYU Religion Professor Barbara Morgan Gardner, The Priesthood Power of Women published by Deseret Book. Gardner distinguishes between the temporal ecclesiastical priesthood to which now only men are ordained and the eternal familial priesthood, to which both men and women are ordained, and in which they act as full partners.

We tried to get honest about the tension, while approaching some potential paths forward. Is this just about the Priesthood, or is there something deeper going on? What practical things can both women and men can do to allow women and their spiritual gifts to shine? Does it require “change from the top” or is there an inner work that anyone could choose to do to change the experience just as profoundly? What might it look like for women to truly act as priestesses in their homes, whether as a single person or side-by-side with a spouse?

This is all tricky territory. Some will worry that we can’t consider how to improve women’s experience in the Church while sustaining Church leaders, while others believe that pushing until there is change is the only way forward. We hope this conversation honors all of those voices. We have deep love and empathy for our community and our leaders.

We’re grateful if you choose to spend your time with us on this topic. With that, we’ll jump right in.

Why Heavenly Mother is Essential for Women Understanding their Eternal Destiny by McArthur Krishna and Bethany Brady Spalding

“This Is a Woman’s Church”

This week, we're excited to have Bob Rees on the podcast. Bob is a true "long-haul hero" (to use Pete Davis's term) -- a Latter-day Saint who has been studying and writing on Latter-day Saint topics for more than fifty years. To us, Bob exhibits the best of what we have to offer theologically, and practically, to the world.

Bob believes that the deepest power of the Book of Mormon, even more than its remarkable origin story, is its ultimate message of love. After a lifetime of serious study and contemplation, he says, the goodness of the Book has simply changed his life. In addition to the profound effect it's had on him, he's also endlessly fascinated by it. We could feel Bob's enthusiasm as he shared ideas for making our reading of the Book of Mormon come alive–for example, by doing midrash—imagining elaborations and spin-offs that help us flesh out the stories we find in the text. In many ways, Bob models how to have fun with scriptures, even as we learn from or wrestle with them—and allow that work to transform us.

Bob has taught in humanities and Mormon Studies at UCLA, UC Berkeley, Graduate Theological Union, and other institutions. He's also the co-founder and Vice President of Bountiful Children, which fights child malnutrition worldwide.

If you'd like to hear more from Bob on the topic of The Book of Mormon, we'd really encourage you to check out his book of essays A New Witness to the World, which was published in 2020, or The Reader’s Book of Mormon, which Bob co-edited with Eugene England.

Thanks as always for listening, and we're excited to share this conversation with Bob Rees.

This week, we’re sharing a fascinating conversation we had with Josh Coates, a computer scientist, entrepreneur, and founder of the BH Roberts Foundation. The BH Roberts Foundation is the non-profit behind Mormonr, a producer of Latter-day Saint media that tackles hard questions about the faith, as well as "LDSBot," an AI-driven chatbot that is able to handle just about any question about Latter-day Saint culture and theology shockingly well.

In February of this year, Josh and his colleague, Steven Cranney, published the results of yet another project: a survey of a representative sample of active and former Latter-day Saints that the BH Roberts Foundation conducted. The survey found that among active Latter-day Saints, two "clusters" emerged: 80% of the sample had fairly orthodox beliefs around God, the Church, and the historicity of the Book of Mormon, while 20% expressed more uncertainty and held less traditional views. The survey also integrated questions from Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations theory, which attempts to suss out how different kinds of people build their ethical perspectives. This part of the survey found some really fascinating differences here between active Latter-day Saints and former Latter-day Saints that we think could help us understand each other better.

We spent some time with Josh talking about the different values and gifts these two clusters of practicing members can bring to the Church. In Josh's view, neither group alone can bring to bear the full gifts of the community on its own: cluster one could help our community grow deep, strong roots, while cluster two could help us branch out, expand, and explore.

We're super grateful to Josh, Steven, and the rest of their team for their work on this survey, and to Josh for sharing more about it with us. There's a lot to dig into here, and as always, we hope that discussing differences can actually help see each other with more empathy and love.