Doctor Scratch wrote:The comparison I have been seeing the most is with the Priesthood Ban. For outside observers, didn't this sort of seem to "come out of the blue"? I mean, sure: there was a lot of social pressure, and ugly incidents, but if you are just looking at it from the perspective of the secular media, or ex-Mormons, or even the typical rank-and-file person, doesn't that also wind up seeming like a "fast" policy change? Decades and decades of racist policy, and then *POOF!*, one day it all just goes away?
Yes, I acknowledged that my distinction was somewhat arbitrary. These kinds of changes are always going to seem fast--one moment you are living under one set of rules, the next you aren't. My main point was the fact that you have major policy decisions which are at odds with each other happening very close together.
Doctor Scratch wrote:I do think you raise an interesting question, though, which is: How--if at all--is it possible to quantify policy-making decisions? I think that part of the difficulty in doing this lies in the fact that none of us has been privy to the Brethren's deliberations. That is always the case: whatever you get is just rumors and hearsay. But I would be willing to be that there was (and perhaps still *is*) some very serious, and very interesting, haggling going on behind the scenes. There is another difficulty here in that, unlike the "Witnesses" movie, it's not as if the Brethren can do a "roll-out" of a new, more tolerant policy on LGBTQ+ issues.
The quantification of policy making decisions is VERY interesting here. I think these decisions are evidence that there are now at least two factions operating someone independently at high levels of church leadership. Contradictory decisions and policies from a single organization that happen nearly simultaneously (50 days may as well be simultaneous for a large bureaucracy) are evidence that there seems to be at least two groups making decisions without regards to each other. My guess is there is a conservative faction that organized and lead the LDS withdrawal from the BSA while another more liberal group is focusing on BYU issues.
I think you can also conclude that the groups are operating across traditional divisions inside the LDS church. By that I mean the LDS church has organized itself based on gender (YM/YW presidencies), age (Primary/Sunday School/Priesthood/Relief Society presidencies) and geography (Area Authority Seventies). These decisions all affect the same group of people: primarily US male youth. US female youth are also affected, though not as directly since they never participated in Boy Scouts.
If I had to guess, I think it was Russell M. Nelson who inadvertently caused the factionalization over the November exclusion policy. There's lots of evidence that nobody was consulted on the matter before the up and down vote. Then he went off and declared the policy revelation by himself. In the aftermath of that, no other apostle also declared the policy as revelation. He didn't have the presidency at that point, it was a pure power play on Rusty's part. Once you do that, you open up the possibility that another group will form and use similar tactics.
I think another contributing factor to this was Monson's dementia. He wasn't running the show for a long time; this gave space for factions to form. I think this also shows that Rusty is no Gordon Hinckley. The church faced a similar situation in the early 80's with Kimball and the early 90's with Benson. Both were out of it and factions could have formed. But, Hinckley kept the factions at bay and the church unified, with Hinckley holding all the power of course.