Biggest changes in the church in your lifetime

[Hagoth]

Here are some things I was actually taught in church when I was young, vs. what the church says about them today. Hmm.

Temples:
Then: The endowment was an immutable revelation from God. Denial of origins in Masonry. Masonry was actually a degenerate imitation of the true endowment of the Temple of Solomon that was perfectly restored in these the latter days.

Now: Oops, even the Masons now reject the antiquity of the temple ordinance. Let's rip out as much as we can. Problem: you can't get rid of all of it without completely reimagining the temple. Result: a nasty, clunky hybrid.

Lamanites:
Then: Native Americans are the direct descendants and "principle ancestors" of the BoM Lamanites. The righteous ones are already beginning to turn white, like us good Mormons, as predicted by the BoM, and they will now become a huge and powerful part of the church and save the constitution.

Now: We don't know how or where to look for Lamanites. We assume they were "among the ancestors" of Native Americans. Let's just say they were here but every trace of them got stamped out, unlike all of the other people who were here.

Americas:
Then: A chosen land kept separate from all people, consecrated for the arrival of the BoM people. Originally the Eden of the Bible, it was separated during the Noahic flood to isolate it.

Now: The Americas have been densely populated by Siberian descended people since millennia before BoM times, to the degree that the DNA of the BoM people was entirely swallowed up. And still, somehow, Adam and Eve were the the first people, living in an America that was already long inhabited by others.

Book of Abraham:
Then: An actual first-person account written by the hand of Abraham almost 4000 years ago.

Now: An Egyptian religious document written 2,000 years after Abraham, but it inspired Joseph Smith to write down what it should have said if it really were written by Abraham.

Seerstones:
Then: Joseph translated with the ancient Urim and Thummim spectacles. People who used "peep stones" were charlatans and tools of Satan. As proof of this, Joseph Smith had Hyrum Page's seerstone crushed into dust. Rumors of Joseph using a rock in this way are anti-Mormon lies.

Now: Yup, Joseph used a rock in a hat alright, but it was a good and holy thing; just like an iPhone. Shame on you if you thought it was an occult practice (unless it was done by anyone besides JS).

[wtfluff]

Then:

G-S-Then-.jpg (82.95 KiB) Viewed 1687 times

Now:

G-S-Now-.jpg (102.16 KiB) Viewed 1687 times

[deacon blues]

Priesthood Ban. Then: God has spoken: Book of Moses, Book of Abraham, 1852, 1947, 1971.
Now: Might have been Joseph, Brigham, George Albert Smith, Harold B. Lee, and others following society and its traditions.

I could spend hours discussing this.

[Hagoth]

Priesthood Ban. Then: God has spoken: Book of Moses, Book of Abraham, 1852, 1947, 1971.
Now: Might have been Joseph, Brigham, George Albert Smith, Harold B. Lee, and others following society and its traditions.

I could spend hours discussing this.

Oh man, how did I overlook that one?

[nibbler]

The thread title put me in the mindset of coming up with the biggest change to the overall church experience on any given Sunday or activity night.

I'd say the move from peppering church meetings throughout the day such that it consumed an entire Sunday to moving to block schedules and eventually the 2 hour block.

So many of the "big" changes in the last 10 years have all been rebrands, downsizing, and genericizing.

Changing the name of something but that something is nearly identical to what it was before. Home teaching/ministering, tithing settlement/tithing declaration, MOTAB/a choir made up of members of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that sings at temple square. Dead prophet's conference talks (Teachings of the Presidents)/current conference talks. The list goes on. The names changed but it's the same experience.

Then there's the downsizing. Take a program, reduce it's footprint by 20-30%, but again it's the exact same experience as it was before the downsize, just less of it. Sunday meetings, rules for missions, garment sleeves, priesthood quorums. Again, the same experience, just less of it or shorter. Not significant enough to change the overall experience.

Then there's the genericizing. Gotta fit in with the Evangelicals, no more planets, see we know how to Palm Sunday, we'll name drop Jesus a few more times, we're not weird promise, please don't come after us when you're finished with your other purges. There's the line what's unique about Mormonism isn't good and what's good about Mormonism isn't unique. Well they're trying to get rid of what makes us unique. Why haven't the bad parts gone too? Coffee and tea bans? A joke. Hyper-fixation on measuring member's worth by gating access to the temple? Toxic.

The biggest change is allowing black people to have the priesthood. All we get these days is the thinnest coat of paint over the top of what we're already doing. We're long overdue for another impactful change or two.

[Jeffret]

The biggest certainly has to be extending the priesthood to black men. They even trotted out a "revelation" to accomplish that one. How many other times has that happened in the last 100 years?

Here are a few others that have had significant impact.

Treatment of women. I'm lumping this one all together. The Church still discriminates against women and treats them as lesser, but the acceptable behavior for women has changed significantly. Two specific areas are working outside the home and birth control. The membership just weren't accepting of the heavy browbeating and restrictions in these areas, so leadership gradually loosened up about it. It's been a long time since I've paid attention to the current preaching in the Church, but even back in the 90's when I was starting to exit, there were papers documenting how much the Church had quietly changed about birth control.

Treatment of LGBT folks. Prior to Prop 8 in 2008, the Church was heavily invested in anti-gay legislation and campaigns. The quickest way to get kicked out of the Church was to publicly accept gays or criticize the Church's behavior against them. That changed dramatically in the blowback to Prop 8. I understand that these days it is possible to be publicly accepting of gays, including gay children, family members, and friends and still be a Mormon. (It may still be difficult to accomplish.) I know of a older gay couple who actively participate in their ward in the Los Angeles area.

Correlated budgeting. (Or whatever it's called.) Managing all of the Church's finances centrally instead of at the stake / ward level, was a big deal when it was announced, but the arrangement has had far-reaching impacts on the Mormon experience. It curtailed almost all big budget activities and dramatically reduced the social environment at Church. Most of the great memories I had in the Church as a kid are no longer possible.

The first two have not fully run their course yet. If our society manages to avoid fully collapsing into ignorant, bigoted, chaos, these two may well end up eclipsing the extension of the priesthood to blacks. Women are not likely to continue accepting diminished status at Church while having opportunities in the greater society. It's hard to even conceive of how the Church will fully accept women and LGBT people. The patriarchy is so deeply woven into the Church's doctrine, structure, and experience it's hard to see how they could even fully accept women and gays. But, the history of the Church demonstrates clearly, that it can change when society changes around it.

[alas]

Jeffrey mentioned correlation of finances, but a bigger part of correlation than just financial was making the relief society into nothing but a sham of a “women’s organization”. It is no longer a women’s organization but a men’s organization for their women folk. It is completely run by men now where back in the 1960s it was still run mostly independently by women. The women voted for their president. The women wrote the lesson manuals. The women had their own magazine written and edited by women. It had dues to collect money and it very own budget. It was even richer than the church at one time because the church was in debt and RS had money. It was actually a voice slightly independent of men. My grandmother even told me that in her early days of Relief Society, it was almost feminist. She was old enough to have lived through women being allowed to vote and the Relief Society actually advocated for women to be allowed to vote. But all that changed when Relief Society was smashed out of existence by the men deciding everything needed to be CONTROLLED by “priesthood”=men. Well, they had stopped pretending then that women who were endowed held a form of priesthood (although they are pretending that again to keep the women happy) so with no priesthood women could have no say in the organization for women. I guess it is safe now to go back to pretending women have some kind of priesthood given to them in the temple, because the men firmly control everything.

The same exact thing happened to primary. It went from being run by women pretty independently of the men to being totally run by men. It had it’s own magazine

So, women are now treated exactly like children, with all decisions about “their” organization being made by men. It is no longer “their” (as in women’s) organization but a men’s organization for women. This probably didn’t make any changes in the church that men might notice, but has made a huge difference in Relief Society in that our lessons are no longer specifically for women. Our lessons went from homemaking and child rearing and poetry and spiritual things to the same very boring lessons the men wrote and were taught in priesthood. HUGE change for the women.

[Jeffret]

Jeffret mentioned correlation of finances, but a bigger part of correlation than just financial was making the relief society into nothing but a sham of a “women’s organization”. It is no longer a women’s organization but a men’s organization for their women folk.

I thought about that one, but left it out because the title says, "changes in the church in your lifetime".

But, now that you mentioned it, it was within my lifetime. I thought it was a few years earlier.

That was certainly a huge change and few people are even aware of what happened.

The whole Correlation change was, I would say, the biggest change in my lifetime, even bigger than extending the priesthood to black men. It has had a very far-reaching effect and subsumes all of the other changes within it.