In The Angel and the Beehive, sociologist Armand Mauss chronicled how leaders and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS/Mormon) made changes to fit into White Evangelical American society in the twentieth century, a process that Mauss described as assimilation.1 In parallel to the LDS story but unanalyzed by Mauss, the leadership of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS Church/Community of Christ) invested in a similar “assimilative” process, but drew closer to mainline Protestant norms, including ideas about expanding women's roles in the church and in society. These competing trajectories pushed the two Restoration churches farther apart in belief and practice.2 By the end of the twentieth century, the most obvious marker of this distance was the passage of a resolution at the 1984 RLDS World Conference that permitted the ordination of women.
RLDS conversations about women's ordination...
