here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nA while ago I was speaking to my stake president and made some humorous quip about him excommunicating people, and he had responded that he had actually never excommunicated anybody before. I was kind of surprised at this, as my father who has served in bishoprics in the 1990s and 2000s referred to disciplinary councils and excommunications during his time. (And yes, I know it’s not technically called “excommunication” anymore, but here I’m using the term to be more pithy). \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI have no hard data on this, but I would not be surprised if excommunications are less of a thing nowadays for several reasons.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nTo some extent the excommunication process requires the consent of the person being disciplined. They could just not show up and\/or request their records be removed. Whereas before the Church may have had enough sociocultural heft in some geographic areas to get people to show up, even if there was a call to a disciplinary council I suspect many people just wouldn\u2019t bother (unless, of course, they want to invite a bunch of media and make some point of it).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nOf course, they can have one without the person, but generally speaking completely inactive, members-on-records-only are considered off-limits (except, possibly, in some egregious circumstances). Unless they start serially killing people I doubt Rocky Anderson or Marco Rubio will ever face a disciplinary council, despite whatever they may be doing in their personal lives.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nMoving one degree further, I don\u2019t get the vibe that somewhat-inactives are typically facing a lot disciplinary councils either. If somebody shows up to Church every couple of months with their live-in girlfriend, I doubt many bishops will call them up for living in sin, although there may (or may not) be some sacramental restrictions.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI\u2019m not super informed about this, but word on the street is that same-sex couples are holding callings, taking the sacrament, and everything, depending on how liberal the SP or bishop are, so gay couples are another category that people are skittish about calling up for a disciplinary council for. (To briefly preempt a concern here, you can\u2019t complain about bishop roulette and one-size-fits all at the same time, they are the mirror images of one another).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSo really that ironically leaves relatively active people who are opting into the Church\u2019s disciplinary structures voluntarily who are at risk for discipline and maybe excommunication. While in the past there may have been people who really did not care for living the Church lifestyle, but for whom there was enough social scaffolding around the Church as an institution that they still felt obligated to go through the process, my vibes, again for what they\u2019re worth, is that, like the non-believing missionary going on a mission due to social pressure, that is less of a thing now, so I suspect that excommunication is more or less reserved for 1) leaders who committed a sexual sin, 2) super active types who are nonetheless serial adulterers, 3)\u00a0 super active types who did something that would put them in prison, or 4) embezzling from the Church. Since 2 and 3 are less likely to happen among people who are actually showing up to Church, or who would want to keep showing up to Church after being exposed, the Venn Diagram overlap of people who are actually at risk of being excommunicated is quite small.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I assume they aren’t actually this dour, but what some people envision a disciplinary council looks like. Here I’m not addressing the normative question of whether we should excommunicate, I have already said my piece about that here.\u00a0 A while ago I was speaking to my stake president and made some humorous quip about him excommunicating people, and he had responded that he had actually never excommunicated anybody before. I was kind of surprised at this, as my father who has served in bishoprics in the 1990s and 2000s referred to disciplinary councils and excommunications during his time. (And yes, I know it’s not technically called “excommunication” anymore, but here I’m using the term to be more pithy). \u00a0 \u00a0 I have no hard data on this, but I would not be surprised if excommunications are less of a thing nowadays for several reasons.\u00a0 To some extent the excommunication process requires the consent of the person being disciplined. They could just not show up and\/or request their records be removed. Whereas before the Church may have had enough sociocultural heft in some geographic areas to get people to show up, even if there was a call to a disciplinary council […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":47741,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2970],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-church-leadership-and-policies"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/ab904635-9eeb-4e5d-99ed-62b98af36884.webp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47740"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50270,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47740\/revisions\/50270"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/p>\n