"You might change your mind!": Authority, Ritual, and Approving Women’s Ordination in the 1980s RLDS Church

Our study draws upon 66 first-person accounts of women and men in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS) who, only months after the denomination approved women’s ordination in 1984, reflected on how they came to support women’s ordination. The majority of these individuals were either neutral or opposed to women’s ordination before the 1984 conference. How then did they come to support women’s ordination? Ultimately, we argue that support for women’s ordination in the RLDS Church did not simply reflect how individuals wanted to position themselves in relation to ecumenical partners and the great project of “modernity,” as Mark Chaves might suggest, but that the experiences of ritual and its power to shape people after the fact, as described by Molly Farneth, and relationships with authority, as explained by Craig Harline, were key to individual church members changing their minds about women’s ordination.