The Untrained Bishop

The Untrained Bishop

Even when I had started to speak and write about the problems of Mormon women, I still found myself believing the idea that the Mormon way of training bishops was a good idea. After all, it was really great for the bishops. I’d seen plenty of men (my father among them) who were called to bishop and who seemed to have a “mantle” placed upon them. They became larger than life. They grew into the role and became more empathetic. They understood things they hadn’t understood before. They seemed somehow more humble and also wiser, more soft-spoken, broader in their perspective.

Now, looking at the Mormon system of calling men into authority and then insisting to them and to everyone else in their ward that the “Lord” will enhance their knowledge and understanding while they are given virtually no training and are thrust into a role that they have watched done from the outside but have to figure out their own way to do entirely on their own — all without pay and while still trying to manage their own full-time jobs and family responsibilities — well, it looks crazy now. And dangerous, as well.

When you consider how often bishop’s wives are doing all of the work of keeping things together at home, well, it looks less like a miracle and more like the same thing the Mormon church does all the time — put a man out front and then make sure most of the work is done by women behind the scenes who get no credit for it other than a few words of thanks on the last day the bishop serves and thanks his wife for her help. Help? It’s more than that. It’s the same old-same old, where everyone watches the man in front of the curtain while the woman behind the curtain is completely ignored and people think it’s the man who is doing everything. Hint: he is not.

I have real sympathy for bishops. Truly. I don’t think they are the “best men” the church has to offer. I think the method by which the Mormon church chooses bishops is ridiculously flawed. I think it’s mostly based on who is a good extrovert and who has connections to other people in leadership, with a dose of who pays the most tithing so that businessmen and other people who society in general values, become the church’s leadership. In a church that claims that its members are “not of this world,” the leadership looks an awful lot like the world’s leadership.

I also sympathize with the time crunch on bishops and what must feel like the weight of the world on their shoulders. Bishops do most of the boots on the ground ministering in the church. Stake presidents and other authorities higher up the chain are mostly big-picture managers. Bishops are the ones who deal with the real people problems, the disputes inside a ward, the whispers between various members, the refusal to take certain callings because they’re boring or not visible enough, the people who run off the rails and go teach their own doctrine.

These days, I don’t see bishops with the shine that I used to see them. I suspect that shine is at least partly by design. It works well to make sure that you see a man in a suit who is the one you talk to for solutions, even if they don’t have any solutions. Is it better or worse if they believe their own shit and think that they will, for example, be able to tell if you’re about to self-harm and will come in the middle of the night to stop you? I think maybe the one bishop I knew who stepped down after a year because it was simply too much might be the best of them all.

Sadly, bishops have no idea how to spot signs of sexual abuse. How could they know that abuse victims often act out in ways that look like what Mormons call “sin,” ie early sexual interactions where they can finally use their bodies for themselves, or trying to drown out the trauma with alcohol and drugs, or running away from home (where their abusers have access to them). Bishops are only trained with the same tools that regular members are trained in: read scriptures, go to church, say your prayers and do Family Home Evening. So why should we expect them to suddenly know evidence-based practices of therapists? The Mormon church offers them a hotline to a law firm in case the abuse is impossible to ignore, but that still doesn’t give the bishops training in what to do next.

I wish there was some consciousness within Mormonism of the limits of whatever it is that people are calling “discernment” these days. Blessings don’t come directly from God, even if you believe in a God, which I don’t anymore after too many blessings gone wrong. The other strategy of the Mormon church seems to be to do a Jedi-mind-trick of “don’t speak ill of the Lord’s anointed.” Just look away from and do not ever speak about the problems with the bishop. Only notice and talk about the good stuff they do. Don’t bring up the mistakes, however tragic. Or the bishops who are actively driving your youth out of activity with their dogmatic insistence that God is speaking to them about every tiny little thing.

Untrained bishops aren’t the best thing about the church. They are just the thing that turns out to do some heavy lifting in making men a little better because for a short time, they are forced to deal with a bunch of the emotional load that women are dealing with all the time. Yes, I think that the system of throwing bishops into the fire helps individual men become better people. I’m not sure how long it lasts, however. And my real complaint here is that the focus on how much better the bishop becomes neglects all of the other people in the ward who are being used as his training ground. Their harm becomes his lesson. This looks a lot like one of the early novels I wrote where a young man watches a woman being abused and becomes a stronger, better person. Great for him. Less great for her.