religious authority, Mormonism, and Instagram

22 March 2024 - 5 minutes read - 865 words - kudos:

As I hinted at in a recent linkpost, something really interesting happened this week that serves as a sort of microcosm of my research interests related to online Mormonism and religious authority. Here’s a rundown of what happened, as reported by the Salt Lake Tribune (and republished here via MSN).

First, a leader of the official Latter-day Saint women’s organization gave a sermon last Sunday, one quote from which was uploaded to the official Latter-day Saint Instagram account:

There is no other religious organization in the world, that I know of, that has so broadly given power and authority to women.

On the face of it, this statement doesn’t seem to hold up to the very patriarchal structure of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. However, I gather that the post was edited after the fact to include a fuller quote, which puts this statement in some context. I’ll spare readers the theological discussion, but suffice it to say that the fuller quote is in keeping with contemporary Latter-day Saint efforts to affirm women’s authority within the church without actually challenging the restriction of priesthood ordination to men and boys. In context, the assertion that this church is unique in “so broadly giv[ing] power and authority to women” makes a certain amount of sense, though there’s still clear room for pushback.

And pushback came! According to the Tribune:

They came fast — though not furious — nearly 8,000 comments, the majority from current and former Latter-day Saint women, pushing back against what was clearly intended to be a positive message of female empowerment.

I’d like to see some harder numbers on that breakdown of comments, but this already illustrates one of the fascinating things about religious authority in the context of online Mormonism. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a very structured, top-down organization. It would be a mistake to say that there has never been a bottom-up component to it, and it would be a mistake in particular to erase the pre-internet history of that component, but the difference between a one-way church broadcast (where the audience has no opportunity to push back against a comment by a high-ranking leader) and an Instagram post (where thousands of people did have the opportunity to push back against that same comment by the same high-ranking leader) is noteworthy. I sometimes say about Paris that it’s a truly amazing city and yet also overrated. I think the effect of the internet on authority in Mormon contexts can be understood as the opposite—it’s widely recognized and yet still needs more scholarly attention to fully understand.

However, I may never get any of those harder numbers because of what happened next. Here’s the Tribune again:

Sorrow and discouragement hardened into fury Wednesday morning when online responses began disappearing by the thousands.
Commenters revolted.
“How can you say thank-you for sharing our thoughts, feelings and experiences and then in the same breath silence them!” posted @kristina.mecham. “Deleting my message along with all the others is exactly what’s currently hurting women in the church. Once again being silenced and cast to the side.”
In a statement posted to Instagram Stories, however, the church blamed the vanishing act on a “platform-wide issue.”

While it is awfully convenient for the church that a platform-wide issue caused thousands of awkward comments to disappear, I’m inclined to believe thm. Not least, because it brings up a second aspect of how internet technologies mediate religious authority in the context of online Mormonism. While social media platforms like Instagram allow everyday Latter-day Saints to talk back to the church in ways that formal ecclesiastical contexts do not, these platforms also exercise authority over this church in ways that can have very interesting effects (last year, for example, I published an article on how Latter-day Saint leaders have been forced to work within the structures of the Domain Name System in order to create the presence they want on the internet). All things considered, an Instagram glitch making Latter-day Saint leaders look bad isn’t a huge issue—but it’s still noteworthy how this might have been different if there were, say, a Latter-day Saint instance of Pixelfed where these were being posted instead. It’s not that glitches can’t happen on a Pixelfed server, but the buck would stop with the Latter-day Saint leadership in a way that it doesn’t with Instagram.

It’s amazing to me how well this single instance illustrates two of the things I hope to further explore with my research on online Mormonism! I look forward to seeing what kinds of presentations and publications I’ll work this anecdote into.

EDIT [2 April 2024]: Thanks to this post from Wheat & Tares, I am belatedly learning that Meta made a statement in the context of this New York Times coverage asserting that there had been no glitches that affected comments on Instagram. As hawkgrrrl notes in her W&T post, it isn’t that “Meta’s word is unimpeachable, but neither is the church’s when it comes to their long, consistent history of squelching dissent.” I’m keeping this post up, but it’s much less clear now that the “second aspect” I mention is relevant here.

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