There’s a new exegetical school of thought that women do in fact have the priesthood. Most prominently Dr. Morgan Gardner in the BYU Religion Department wrote a book developing the idea, and there is some First Presidency commentary (specifically, President Oaks and President Nelson I believe) supporting the notion. 

First, as an aside, I adjuncted a religion class at BYU way back when I was a loud, opinionated, boisterous postgrad, where I was in several meetings with Dr. Morgan Gardner. I like her, appreciate her work (she produces good content, check out her site), and nothing in the below should be seen as reflecting negatively on her.

At the outset, I don’t have any kind of a problem with the actual substance of the argument. It sits well with me, and there’s some historical precedent and theological reasoning for something like “women do have the priesthood.” Rather, there are two related points I wanted to make about this new exegetical strand of thought.  

• It is, in fact, new. 

While “women actually do have the priesthood” has some precedent to draw from, on the whole it is an innovative theology, and that’s fine. I understand the skittishness of seeing this as an innovation. There are all sorts of theological ideas coming from lay members that fit in the category of people getting ahead of their skis and steadying the ark. While he could have phrased it better, I actually do sort of sympathize with aspects of the infamous McConkie letter to Eugene England on this point. Lay theologians can play with different possibilities, but their speculations have their limits that should be recognized. 

Of course what sets Dr. Morgan Gardner’s approach apart here is that this interpretation does in fact have explicit support from the authorities. I don’t know enough about the time sequence of Dr. Morgan Gardner’s work and the First Presidency talks to be able to suss out the provenance of the idea, but regardless of where it came from it is in fact a new interpretation, or at least new for something that has the support of the First Presidency.  

Now again, this is completely fine. However, if this interpretation becomes widely adopted I’m going to push back a little on any attempt to frame it as “this has always been there and it’s our fault that we didn’t interpret the texts and theology correctly.” There’s something a little “we’ve always been at war with Eastasia” to that, since this would have been considered an eclectic interpretation among both leaders and laity not that long ago. 

I think an analogy here could be drawn with the limited geography model of the Book of Mormon. The fact is that until population genetics research came along the predominant, quasi Church supported view (e.g. “primary ancestors of the Native Americans”) was different from the view today, and to be honest we should recognize that instead of trying to artificially force a continuity that simply is not there. One benefit of having living prophets is that policy and interpretations can change. 

• I doubt this will do much to resolve people’s concerns about women and the priesthood.

I realize I’m sort of mansplaining squared here. First, not a woman. And second, I’ve never had a problem with women and the priesthood. I’m not lowkey bragging, it’s just never really been a thing for me. If I ever leave the Church that particular item will be pretty far down on the list of why. 

However, I spend enough time around people for whom this is an issue that I doubt it will help retain people who would otherwise leave the Church over the issue. For people who have this concern priesthood is a stand-in for structural “power” (queue doom music, although I always thought the social and political “power” of Church leaders was overrated: President Nelson can’t even get Utahns to vaccinate). 

This kind of  liturgical-but-not-hierarchical priesthood doesn’t do anything to address that. Women still report to men and have to officially get approval for things from men. The gendered authority structures are still there even if we are more capacious in our understanding of priesthood power, so for people for whom who reports to who in ward council is very important, the operating characteristic remains the gender of the person where the institutional buck stops, and this doesn’t change that. Of course, the validity of any theological position is completely orthogonal to whether it retains people, so again this shouldn’t be seen as criticizing the idea itself.