Russell M. Nelson, who has been president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since 2018, turned 100 last week. Amid the great display of affection and fanfare that church members showered on him during the celebration, some people wondered aloud which of his many accomplishments he will be remembered for.
After all, he has introduced a great many changes. (The church has published a helpful and comprehensive list of them.) And not just to culture and policy but also to some of the most sacred doctrinal aspects of the faith, including four separate revisions to the temple endowment ceremony. (It’s now considerably shorter than it used to be and has greater equality between men and women.)
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) President Russell M. Nelson and his wife, Wendy, before his 100th birthday festivities at the Conference Center Theater on Temple Square in Salt Lake City on Sept. 9, 2024.
In the Next Mormons Survey 2, fielded in 2022 and 2023, we asked 1,420 Americans who identified as Latter-day Saints which of Nelson’s changes were their favorite. Since we didn’t want the survey question to be unwieldy, we narrowed that list of changes to 15 and asked whether respondents viewed them as very favorable, somewhat favorable, neither favorable nor unfavorable, somewhat unfavorable or very unfavorable.
Any respondent who judged at least one item as “very favorable” then received a follow-up question asking which of the changes they were most enthusiastic about. Here, the 1,268 people who qualified for the follow-up question could only choose one of the items they had felt “very favorable” toward.
My research partner Benjamin Knoll and I devised this follow-up question because we felt there would likely be an “all-in” segment of the church population that reported feeling very positive about every single change, making the results of the opening question less useful as an overall measurement. But a “where the rubber meets the road” question that forced respondents to choose just one thing could give us a better gauge of which changes were most beloved by members.
The upshot? Church members are very, very happy about having Sunday church services be two hours instead of three. That shortened schedule ranked first of 15 possible options in the follow-up question. Here were the top 10 vote-getters, in order:
1. Moving to a two-hour church meeting schedule.
2. Emphasizing home-based “Come Follow Me” gospel study.
3. Using the full name of the church and avoiding “Mormon.”
4. Allowing missionaries to call home weekly.
5. Allowing parents to accompany youth into bishops’ interviews.
6. Removing the one-year waiting period between civil weddings and temple sealings.
7. Allowing women and youth to serve as witnesses for
baptisms.
8. Ending the relationship with the Boy Scouts of America.
9. Changing temple rituals to expand the role of Eve and give greater equality to women.
10. Calling the first Asian American and the first Brazilian as apostles.
Taken as a whole, the list is striking in its various appreciative nods to modernity. Nelson’s tenure in leading the church has been noteworthy for tilting toward the “beehive” rather than the “angel,” to use the late sociologist Armand Mauss’ terminology. Mauss famously wrote that Mormonism has to navigate a careful tightrope of assimilation (represented by the beehive) and retrenchment (represented by the angel) to attract and retain members. Shift too far toward assimilation, and the church will lose its necessary distinctiveness and look like everybody else. Shift too far in the other direction by doubling down in retrenchment, and members will balk at being too different from the rest of the world.
Most of these top 10 options represent the church’s forms of assimilating to a changing world.
Two-hour church and home-based gospel curriculum accommodate the reality that people have less time than in the past (or at least perceive that to be the case) and are sometimes less willing to spend that free time in church. And emphasizing the full name of the church rather than “Mormon,” one of Nelson’s decadeslong pet peeves, is assimilationist in that it attempts to stress that Latter-day Saints are followers of Jesus Christ rather than part of a strange sect.
Allowing parents to go with their kids into bishops’ interviews, and to talk to their missionary children once a week instead of just twice a year, accommodates a kind of hands-on parenting that is more common today than in the past. It also reflects a contemporary focus on the mental health of young people.
Removing the one-year waiting period that used to be required for U.S. couples wanting to get sealed in the temple after a civil ceremony means more couples will choose to have that civil ceremony. This means non-Latter-day Saint friends and family members can attend their civil weddings, unlike the temple sealings that are closed to the public. This, too, is assimilation.
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) A sealing room in the Pittsburgh Pennsylvania Temple, where husbands and wives kneel at an altar like this and promise to be faithful to each other and God. Their marriage is sealed for eternity. Children can also be sealed to their parents.
Giving women an expanded ritual role in witnessing baptisms — and even rescripting the sacred temple endowment ceremony so women now promise to obey God directly rather than harken to their husbands — demonstrates that the church is coming on board, however glacially, with the idea of greater responsibilities for women.
Finally, calling two apostles who are not white Euro-Americans showcases the church’s greater commitment to racial diversity and to being a global religion rather than merely an American one. Again, this change was long overdue, but kudos to the then-90-something Nelson for being the prophet who began diversifying the church’s highest ranks. Recall that just a few years before, then-President Thomas Monson had the opportunity to do so when suddenly there were three open spots among the apostles — and he filled all three spots with white men from Utah.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) New Latter-day Saint apostles Ulisses Soares and Gerrit W. Gong speak to reporters in Salt Lake City in June 2018. Soares is the first Latin American to be called as an apostle and Gong is the first Asian American to receive that assignment.
In fact, apart from the severing of ties with the Boy Scouts, all of the top 10 changes reflect U.S. Latter-day Saints’ desire to assimilate to the broader culture. But what’s at the bottom of the list is also interesting, because the least popular items may reflect that church members don’t want too much assimilation. They’re not wild about renaming the Mormon Tabernacle Choir as “The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square,” even though they seem to love the general idea of emphasizing the name of the church rather than “Mormon.” And they’re not fans of Nelson’s decision to discontinue most church-sponsored pageants such as the one at the Hill Cumorah.
Moreover, they’re not apparently wild about the church’s “ministering” program that introduced greater flexibility and reduced the amount of reporting from the home and visiting teaching programs it replaced. If cultural assimilation were the overarching goal of U.S. members, the new ministering program would seem to fit that need. But they appear to be ambivalent about it, which means we should be careful in assuming members are fully invested in assimilation.
One thing they’re not ambivalent about is Nelson himself. In a separate question that went to 849 respondents who were asked to identify their favorite church leaders, he carried the day at No. 1, the most popular of all current leaders. Happy birthday, President Nelson.
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) President Russell M. Nelson and his wife, Wendy, and President Henry B. Eyring during a balloon drop at his 100th birthday festivities at the Conference Center Theater on Temple Square in Salt Lake City on Sept. 9, 2024.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Religion News Service columnist Jana Riess.
(The views expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
