Academic Affiliation: Utah Tech University
Title: “You might change your mind!”: Early Responses to Women’s Ordination in the 1980s RLDS Church
Abstract:
Scholars have documented reasons given by Christians and Jews for supporting women’s ordination, noting that very little changed in terms of formal rationales between the 19th and 21st century (Chaves, 1997; Naddell, 1999; Speight, 2020). Less is known about how people came to change their minds on women’s ordination; that is, how people who opposed women’s ordination came to support it. Our study draws upon 63 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, reflected on how they came to support women’s ordination. To explain their change of mind, we use sociological frameworks drawn from Sullins (2000), Campbell and Putnam (2010), Hairline (2011), Cragun, et. al. (2016). We argue that women and men changed their minds when they prioritized strong, close relationships with people who already supported women’s ordination (or girls and women they assumed would be positively impacted by it) over the pressures of cultural social signaling in which women’s ordination served as a proxy for larger social issues (Chaves, 1997). In other words, changing one’s mind about women’s ordination performed more than just symbolic work; it reinforced pre-existing relational work.