Mormons and Voluntary Organization

Much more than you wanted to know

Originally published on reddit here; mirrored here in an effort to consolidate my writing.

By my estimate, throughout my life before leaving Mormonism, I spent somewhere around 15,000 hours on activities directly related to the religion. That translates to something around two hours of time daily on religious activity. Granted, this includes a two-year mission, but the estimate still only includes the time directly spent working during that time, not eating or sleeping. Take that out of the equation, and you're still left with around an hour a day through the rest of my life.

For something around 3% of that time, 500 hours of religious courses I got the dubious honor of attending in lieu of a regular elective high school course, I was around someone who was being paid for their work. Every other moment, it was volunteers all the way down.

That's my normal, the water I swam in. It occurs to me, though, that the intricacies of Mormon organizational structure might not be quite so legible to people who didn't swim through them for their entire life.

It's fascinating stuff, though, or at least it's been clattering around my mind enough that I need to inflict it on someone else. Either way, it's yours to enjoy now.

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I.

Think of a famous Mormon.

Yeah, Mitt Romney will do just fine. Well done if you picked out some random like Clayton Christensen or Stephen Covey instead, though. I'll get to them too as I roll through a list of Mormon leadership roles. No women, I'm afraid: Mormon women, as a song an army of six-year-olds sang to me once reminds us, are to care and nurture, not to preside1, except over women and children. Explaining their role will have to wait.

1 (This isn't the time and place for this discussion, but some Mormon children's songs are something else. Take this one. Instructed young, indeed. Brainwashed, my fellow exmos would grumble, not really inaccurately. Catchy tune, though.)

The fascinating thing about being a visible, high-achieving, capable Mormon man is that you're really just playing Russian Roulette with your free time. No matter what you're doing or how busy you are, there's always a good chance that one day you'll pick up the phone and be saddled with an extra twenty to thirty hours of unpaid labor a week for half a decade or so. Going back to Romney, his experience is about typical for a successful Mormon businessman. Most notably, he spent five years as a bishop and another eight as a stake president.

A bishop is something akin to a pastor: leader of a local church group (ward) of some 100-500 people. He doesn't preach directly much more than anyone else, but he organizes weekly church meetings, assigns local members to a dizzying array of positions and responsibilities, and regularly counsels members who are struggling or interviews the ones who are due for their intermittent checkups. Still paying your 10%? Still not smoking, drinking, or sexing? Still believe in all this? That sort of thing.

Stake presidents are the middle managers of Mormonism, keeping tabs on a dozen or so wards, assigning new bishops and similar positions, making a bunch of sometimes-inspirational speeches, and handling problems that escalate beyond the level of bishops.

Neither position requires advance training. Well, a correction: Almost no unpaid positions in Mormonism require or provide advance training. They're just loaded up onto busy professionals with full-time work and usually a squad of kids2, who can sink or swim at their leisure from there. In Romney's case, it meant managing Bain Capital during worktime and a bunch of Mormons during his personal time. And so, you know, he just shrugged and did it. Why not, right?

2 (Think you can get out of marrying by snagging a leadership position like in Catholicism? Not a chance. Pretty much every position at the level of bishop or above is only open to married men.)

Clayton Christensen, while teaching at Harvard and presenting his case for disruptive innovation, got thrown into more-or-less the next level of Mormon leadership as an 'Area Seventy', in charge of administrative work and preaching over a large region, like Asia or Utah. In his case, it was northeast North America. He also spent a few years as a bishop, of course.

That's still a bit less demanding than one of Stephen Covey's roles, though. Before sliding into the public eye as a self-help writer, he was assigned as a mission president. In other words, he was asked to move to Ireland to spend three years babysitting some 150 young missionaries, inspiring, instructing, directing them around, and generally keeping the whole project from falling apart. I'm not sure the standard at the time he went, but at least recently, mission presidents do get a four-day seminar before being sent out to keep things running.

Finally, we get to global leadership, the general authorities of the church, and the first full-time, compensated positions. With a few exceptions, these have historically been too wrapped up in their Mormon-specific roles to be particularly visible to the world at large. You've got the seventies, who do the same thing as the area seventies discussed above but on a global scale. There are currently around 105 of them, as you'd expect from the name. At the very top, you've got the quorum of the twelve apostles, a group comprised of fifteen men if you include the first presidency and the president (or prophet) of the church.

Probably the most historically relevant apostle from a non-Mormon angle was Ezra Taft Benson, who served as Eisenhower's secretary of agriculture while leading the church. If you're looking for some light reading on obscure Mormon political drama (and who isn't!), I recommend this treatise describing the quiet wrestling match over the apostolic narrative throughout his tenure thanks to his increasingly extreme right-wing views and eagerness to use his platform to raise political topics in church meetings. He even almost made it onto a presidential ticket, first with Strom Thurmond and then with George Wallace, but the prophet at the time nixed it.

Anyway, most of the seventies and all the apostles hold their positions full-time until the day they die, traveling around the world, holding mandatory biannual ten-hour meetings (General Conference) for all church members, speaking for God, and so forth. When one president dies, the longest-serving apostle takes his place. For their trouble, they get an annual stipend of around $120000 each and the reverent awe of Mormons everywhere.

The great majority of the global leaders are men, with the exception of the Relief Society presidency (leaders of the women's organization) and the Primary presidency (in charge of kids 0-12). In 2013, a woman prayed in General Conference for the first time, so that's something.

To summarize: The prophet and apostles appoint new apostles and seventies, the general seventies and apostles appoint area seventies and mission presidents, the area seventies appoint stake presidents, the stake presidents appoint bishops, and the bishops appoint every local member to all the roles needed to keep everything running. Nobody can volunteer for any position, and while technically they can say no if asked, it's considered bad form. Nobody gets paid except the mostly very old men who are in charge of the whole affair.

Aside from restrictions like being a man and having a wife, there aren't many limits on who can be appointed to which position when. Often someone will spend a while as a bishop or something, then be placed into a quietly useful minor role somewhere in the ward. In practice, getting noticed tends to breed more getting noticed, and someone successful at one level will drift upwards for a while and then rotate through assorted high-level administrative roles.

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II.

Most of all that is quite distant from your everyday member, of course. You see your bishop weekly, your stake president a couple times a year, and watch the general authorities on TV while forlornly playing bingo and trying not to fall asleep too obviously. What does life look like if you're not a member of Mormon royalty?

Much the same, really. There's always stuff to do. You're assigned to a ward strictly geographically. No choice in the matter. You're with whoever you're around. Sometimes, the boundaries will be redrawn, and people you saw every week for years disappear from your life without ever physically moving. Growing up, I knew almost everyone in my ward, and almost nobody outside of it. During my time in the church, I spent time as a councillor in the various Mormon youth groups, a pianist and organist, (briefly) a teacher, an assistant clerk (in charge of the ever-thrilling task of keeping membership records up to date and processing some payments), and of course a full-time missionary. Missionairies do a little of almost everything in the church and have their own involved internal leadership structure, with more experienced missionairies getting put in as 'district leaders', 'zone leaders', and the universally adored Assistants to the President.

Back in my day, church meetings were three hours long, which have since been shortened to two hours for active members and zero hours for me. The first hour or so involves a few group songs, a bunch of the youth passing sacrament (communion) around, and speeches (always 'talks' in Mormon parlance) prepared by whichever lay members were unlucky enough to get a call from the bishop that week, usually starting with the dictionary definition of whatever they were supposed to talk about and an anecdote about how they hardly had time to prepare after getting a call from the bishop that week. The second hour (and third, he mutters) sees everyone divide up into small groups and alternates between a lesson on whichever of the Old Testament, New Testament, Mormon Testament Book of Mormon, and modern scripture is being covered that year and sex-divided meetings where they talk about whatever.

Oh, and it's the exact same format everywhere in the world, but sometimes meetings get out of sync by a week or so. It was always funny to go on vacation and sit there slowly realizing you'd studiously avoided hearing the same lesson a week before.

Don't think Mormons get out of it with just the Sunday meetings, either. Teenage boys and girls meet in sex-segregated groups one evening a week for whatever activities or instruction their leadership has come up with. Sometimes you get lucky and go on cool campouts or run around in the woods throwing flour bombs at each other. Other times, you get what's basically a fourth hour of church. Every Monday night, meanwhile, families are expected to meet together and have a church-focused activity night. Again, hit or miss depending on how much initiative everyone's feeling. Daily family scripture study and prayer is standard, and feeling guilty because you can never quite get in the habit of individual scripture study or prayer is its accompanying long-time tradition.

Nope, still not the end. I already mentioned religion classes for high school students. Utah students (that is, me) get them carved into their school days, and typically have a 'seminary building' just off school property so they can go study while maintaining official separation of church and state. Every other poor sap gets to wake up early every day to yawn through a bunch of church instruction before school. Thankfully, it's since been changed, but back in my day Mormons also had "home (or visiting, if you're a woman) teaching", where they were assigned a few local families to visit, chat with, and share a short spiritual message with. Much of the time, this just meant feeling guilty because you didn't actually get it done.

Members are also in charge of building upkeep and cleaning on a rotating schedule. They get very, very good at setting up chairs and coming up with excuses to avoid Saturday morning church cleaning. Finally, on no set schedule beyond "as often as possible", they're encouraged to go to the temple to perform tasks like the much-maligned baptism for the dead, or watching the same video again and again on behalf of those same dead people. ...It's complicated.

There's more. There's always more. I didn't even cover things like helping out the missionaries, ward activities, or reaching out to your less-active brothers and sisters to bring them back into the fold. But that's the overview of what you can expect the structure of life for an average Mormon to look like. Everyone has an assignment (sorry, 'calling'), or is supposed to have one. Everyone has a bunch of extra-assignment tasks. There is always, always something more a good, obedient Mormon can do in the church.

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III.

Right, so now I've dragged you through more detail on the bureaucracy of Mormonism than you were ever planning to know. Congratulations. But why am I bothering to lay it all out like this? What am I hoping to prove?

Well, I'm not aiming specifically either to praise or condemn it in broad strokes. A lot of it is weird from an outside view, and a lot feels dated, to say the least. Plenty of important and true criticisms can be levied. What I'll say is that this was my childhood. It had a lot of good, a lot of bad, and a lot that was simply mundane. It felt perfectly normal at the time, for better or worse, and now that I'm out I'm mostly just fascinated that the whole thing exists and functions just about as well as any other organization. And I think other people should be, too.

There are a few things to highlight here:

1. The active, training-oriented structure.

A great deal of time in Mormonism is spent listening to untrained and often unskilled volunteers deliver messages straight from a manual. That's the downside. The upside is that, even though there's only a limited formal training structure, members are constantly put in positions to practice and perhaps even improve at various group-focused skills. I miss opportunities to give speeches, honestly. It was a lot of fun to practice public speaking in a low-threat venue of a few hundred people. Everything, more or less, is like that. It all ends up building on itself one way or another. Kids get sent out on missions, maybe convert a few people, maybe stay converted themselves, and return with solid doctrinal understanding, leadership experience, and exposure to thousands of randoms to train their social skills and persuasion on. Leaders get a chance to demonstrate their efficacy and get siphoned wherever they're needed. At every level, Mormons have a startlingly extensive pool of reasonably experienced talent ready to handle whatever the religion needs.

2. The sheer absurdity of it all.

I'm not talking about the origin story or anything like that here. I'm talking about the extent to which people are willing to spend their spare time and energy on all this stuff. I met a professional athlete during my mission. Know what he was doing at church? Helping out with the youth program he'd been assigned to. Another time, my bishop was a construction worker. Since the whole thing exists as a parallel structure only loosely connected to the rest of life, you just get tossed in with a group of randoms and make do with whatever you have. Sometimes it works great, other times it feels like it's constantly being held together by shoestrings and if you blink the whole thing will fly apart, but everywhere you go, it all comes together into something functional.

3. Some uses and limitations.

One of the features of a structure like this is that, when something needs to get done in the community, disaster response or helping a member in rough times, you know exactly who can get things done, how to organize, where to find a bunch of sometimes-eager, sometimes-grudging voluntolds to take care of things. When you already have a group used to coming together all the time for any reason or no reason at all, things that actively require that sort of community become a lot smoother. The extensive repetition of the same messages and constant contact with the same people is the structure culture is built of. Everyone gets enmeshed in it, everyone finds a role and a responsibility,

Of course, the church also has a tendency to be inward-focused, getting members to spend so much time working on church-related things that their time for outward-directed, non-church activities is sharply reduced. Not only that, by nature of its religious mission and origins, a lot of the activities tend to be a bit quixotic, where even as members feel or convince themselves of benefits and positive impacts, from a secular perspective they're mostly just spinning their wheels. Temple activities like baptism for the dead are an obvious example here. So much time and energy, spent on basically nothing from a secular standpoint.

That it works is remarkable. That it even excels in some areas, more remarkable still. But I'm convinced it's far from optimal. There's so much more that could be done.

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IV.

Can another organization emulate this sort of structure exactly? Should it? In particular, is it possible to encourage that sheer level of commitment without the infinite carrot and stick of commands from an omnipotent deity? Should that level of commitment be encouraged?

I don't know that I can really answer yes to all, or any, of those questions. Stepping out of Mormonism into the rest of US culture, though, it feels like two different but quietly parallel worlds. I think people underestimate just how different things are for Mormons. It's night and day. And right now, while we avoid many of the problems that creep into the structure of Mormonism, my own feeling is that we develop an opposite and parallel set of problems: too little organization, too little structure, too few people willing to call for involved activities outside of settings where we're buying and selling our time. In a world full of Mormons, I'd say—hey, might be worth loosening up a little. In the world we have? There are worse things to notice than the Mormons.

The structure of Mormonism isn't a panacea for the world's problems, but I'm convinced that there are lessons to draw from it nonetheless.

Thanks for reading.

Until next time.