Seventy-eight-year-old Canadian Rosalind Reid was worried about an upcoming church conference. Reid had been elected to be a delegate for the biennial World Conference of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS), and she wondered aloud to her fellow congregants in Wiarton, Ontario about a rumored change in her denomination. “If the vote comes up on the ordination of women, I’m going to vote against it,” she told others. “Oh Rosalind,” said an elderly ordained patriarch, “you better wait until you get down there. You might change your mind.” When Reid attended the RLDS conference a few months later in April 1984, the leader of her denomination, Wallace B. Smith, a great-grandson of denominational founders Joseph and Emma Smith, presented to the 2,000 gathered delegates a revelation he had received in the fall of 1983. It called for the ordination of women to the RLDS priesthood. “Oh no!” Reid silently exclaimed at the time, “How could he bring a message like that?” She later noted, “I was shocked, afraid, surprised.” Reid was faced with a decision. Would she vote to approve the new revelation or vote against it? Could she change her mind about women’s ordination? She was not alone in her soul searching. The vast majority of her fellow delegates were also thinking about these questions for several tense days in April 1984. Later that week, delegates voted by a margin of 5 to 1 to approve women’s ordination and the decision was canonized in the Doctrine and Covenants, a book of RLDS scripture.
Scholars have dutifully documented the partisan fights over women’s ordination in groups like the Episcopal Church and Conservative Judaism that authorized women’s ordination in the 1970s and 1980s (Huyck, 1983; Chaves, 1997; Naddell, 1999; Wessinger, 2020). Less is known about how people initially opposed to women’s ordination came to change their minds on it; that is, we know less about the process of change for individual people than we do about the formal processes that created policy changes on ordination (i.e. conference resolutions and judicial rulings) and the rationales for the change by people already convinced of it (i.e. activists for women’s ordination). 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 a change in denominational policy on 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 change their minds?
We draw upon three theoretical frameworks. First, we use sociological frameworks drawn from Mark Chaves, whose landmark 1997 study has had an outsized impact on scholarly understandings of women’s ordination (Chaves, 1997). To Chaves’ work, we add the work of historian Craig Harline (2010) and religious studies scholar Molly Farneth (2024).
Harline, for instance, discusses the process of changing one’s mind using the sociological concept of master status. As Harline notes, an individual may have many identities, but a master status trumps all other identities in a given relationship. “We don’t have to agree on everything to have a strong and equal relationship with someone,” writes Harline, “but we do have to agree on what matters most.” In the collected testimonies that we analyzed, 35 of the 66 individuals noted that they had no definite testimony about women’s ordination or were against it at the beginning of the conference. However, 13 of these 35 stated that they did have a testimony about the integrity and divine calling of their church president. To go against the counsel of their prophet president would have ruptured their relationship with the church they loved. Therefore, they came to have peace with the new change. In Harline’s terms, they prioritized their relationship as church members rather than as liberals or conservatives, and approved the new change.
Another complementary perspective emerges if we turn to thinking about the socio-political effects of rituals. In her recent book The Politics of Ritual (2023), religious studies scholar Molly Farneth theorizes how rituals can produce and create political effects in the world. Farneth writes “even as rituals prefigure a world that is not-yet, they are working on the people and politics of the world that is: shaping them and making claims on them.” For this to happen, Farneth explains, “the right people have to enact the right sequence of acts under the right conditions.” But the correctness and effectiveness of the ritual can only be judged after the fact, notes Farneth.
In dialogue with Farneth’s theory, our dataset serves as a kind of assessment on the effectiveness of legislative ritual in establishing the legitimacy of women’s ordination. Our paper details this highly ritualized legislative process – involving debates governed by Robert’s Rules of Order, but also traditional RLDS hymns about a prophet’s authority, ritualized readings, and even ritual processions. We found that 40 of the 66 respondents were present at the RLDS World Conference for part or all of the aforementioned ritualized legislative process. Twenty-four of those who were present referenced some part of the legislative ritual in their testimonies. Seventeen of these people arrived at the conference being against or unsure of women’s ordination but later changed their minds. For the majority of those who changed their minds, the power of the legislative ritual worked on them long after the vote, after they had witnessed its effects on the church. Their testimonies confirm Farneth’s idea that “successful performatives usher in new normative statuses,” sometimes long after a ritual is completed.
Thus, we argue that approval of women’s ordination in the RLDS Church was not only about how a denomination positioned itself in relation to ecumenical partners and the great project of “modernity,” as Chaves famously suggests, but that the experiences of ritual, as described by Farneth, and relationships with authority, as explained by Harline, were key to individual church members changing their minds about women’s ordination.
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.