(See more resources and links on our Pinterest board, Teaching Children about Sexuality and Pornography)

SecureMama recently did a booth at BYU Women’s Conference where she discussed a variety of ways we can be informed and help our children (and other children we care about) stay safe.

We should Care!

Online Rule of Agreement

Who is in the driver seat? User restrictions

Keep that baby gate up! Parental controls

Web filter – Keep the garbage out!

Does my computer have a cold? – Anti-Virus, Anti-spyware

Is your foundation Secure? – Operating System and Application Updates

iPhone iTouch Security for Teenagers

What are my kids talking about? – Cell phone Controls

Don’t talk to Strangers! – Safe Web Surfing

Where are my kids? – Social Networking

Keeping Kids Safe on YouTube

I’ve been thrilled to find some great resources for parents who are concerned about helping keep their kids safe online and with internet-enabled devices. Look for more posts this week on this topic.

(See more resources and links on our Pinterest board, Teaching Children about Sexuality and Pornography)

Today, we’re featuring Women for Decency, which has a lot of great resources on their website about how to keep children safe at home and at school. They also have community action ideas. Here are a few examples of their resources for helping keep children safe:

One-minute conversation starters

What to teach children (about pornography, how to share your values, etc.)

Having conversations with children about pornography, sex (and helping them separate the two!)

Family Media Guidelines

“It Only Takes a Minute” — simple things you can do to safeguard your home

Promoting decency and media literacy

Tips for dealing with cyberbullying

I’ve Got the Power – brochure for elementary-aged students (consider sharing this with your school officials for an official White Ribbon Against Pornography week, and use in your home as well)

Do you know of some good resources for promoting internet safety, talking to children about pornography and cyberbullying, etc.?

As with the previous posts in this series, this will be focused less on dissecting Romney than on discussing what it means to be a Mormon priesthood leader, and how this might bear on the kind of man Romney is and President he will be. I’ll bring in Mormon theology only to the extend necessary to illuminate some of the roots of Mormon culture. And, as in the previous posts, I’m dropping the Vader persona, though without revealing too much about myself, something my employer frowns upon.

One of the peculiarities of Mormonism is the heavy use of lay clergy. Almost every active member of your local Mormon congregation has a church calling, and none gets paid to carry it out. Even the routine cleaning and vacuuming of the chapel are done by the members as a rotating assignment. Only when you get above the local level do you start to see any paid professionals, and they’re mostly doing building maintenance or running the Church’s computer systems. And they’re typically assisted by an army of volunteer Church service missionaries.

This lay clergy seems to be something of a bragging point among Church members, and why not? It is impressive, and its contribution to the strength of the Church is priceless. I do understand that the great majority of non-Mormon churches rely on a fair amount of volunteerism as well, and that the majority of non-Mormon ministers are not exactly getting rich off their callings. My non-Mormon Christian friends seem as appalled by rich televangelists as I am. But the average Mormon doesn’t seem to view the reliance on lay clergy as merely one practical approach to Christian ministry; he seems to regard a paid clergy as a positive moral evil.

There are doctrinal roots to this attitude. Joseph Smith was told by the Angel Moroni that he must not seek the Gold Plates with any thought of getting rich. The Book of Mormon condemns priestcraft: “Priestcrafts are that men preach and set themselves up for a light unto the world, that they may get gain and praise of the world; but they seek not the Welfare of Zion…. But the laborer in Zion shall labor for Zion; for if they labor for money they shall perish.”  Mormonism also takes seriously the New Testament doctrine of a priesthood of all believers, though with the twist that the believing brother is actually ordained to an office in the priesthood.

Almost all faithful Mormon men are ordained elders shortly after they turn 18, and they then take their place in the elders’ quorum of their ward. Officially, the elders’ quorum exists to train the elders in their duties and to coordinate their home teaching visits. Unofficially, in most wards in which I’ve lived, the elders’ quorum also serves as a complimentary moving service and dues-free sports club, with an occasional barbecue thrown in.  In other words, in addition to its formal ecclesiastical duties, the elders’ quorum fills a number of ordinary human social needs.

At some point in his life, a faithful Mormon man is likely to be ordained a high priest. This typically takes place so that he can fill certain callings requiring the High Priesthood, such as serving in a bishopric, a stake presidency, or on a stake high council. A bishopric leads a ward (local congregation) and consists of a bishop and two counselors. The bishop must be a high priest, and his counselors are almost always ordained high priests as well. A stake presidency supervises several wards and consists of a stake president and two counselors, who must all be high priests. They are assisted by a high council of twelve high priests. The name “stake” is shorthand for “stake of Zion”, from a metaphor of the Church as a big tent with stakes holding down its corners.

Thus, a typical Mormon ward has an elders’ quorum and a high priests’ group, with the elders’ quorum typically consisting of the unmarried and younger married men from the ward and the high priests’ group consisting of the older married men from the ward. Aside from its ecclesiastical purposes, this division serves some important social purposes: The elders’ quorum tends to specialize in the needs of young fathers, while the high priests’ group provides a good place for older men to doze during the final hour of church, uninterrupted by crying babies. –Did I mention that Mormons love to laugh at themselves?

I’m going to have to explain the humor. Sunday services for Mormons last a full three hours. When I was a kid, these were broken up into three separate meetings each Sunday. That made for a lot of travel, especially in wards covering a large geographical area, and the Church switched to a solid block of meetings when I was a teenager. Typically the sacrament service comes first, followed by Sunday School, followed by priesthood meeting (for men) and Relief Society (for women.) Children have their own Primary meeting the last two hours, but sacrament meeting is an occasion for entire families to sit together. The breaks between the three meetings are occasions for much coming and going in the hallways, particularly on the part of the Primary children, much like X.J. Kennedy’s picture of Heaven: “Gangs of the slaughtered innocents keep huffing/The nimbus off the Venerable Bede…”

Hence, during the final hour of the meeting block, with the younger children safely ensconced in their Primary classrooms, the wives and daughters off to Relief Society, and the elders meeting in their own quorum, the high priests’ group meeting is a time for the older men to sit and pontificate back and forth on whatever the lesson topic is that day. If they can stay awake. I am reminded of the story of the high priest who suffered a heart attack in his group meeting. When the paramedics arrived, they resuscitated three high priests before they got to the right one …

Okay, enough old guy jokes. If you did not already guess, I was ordained a high priest many years ago.

A less obvious but very important purpose of the division of the younger men into the elders’ quorum and the older men into the high priests’ group is the opportunity for the elders to gain experience in Church leadership. The elders’ quorum has its own presidency, consisting of the president, two counselors, and a secretary. The elders’ quorum president is generally a promising future leader, often a young man who has returned from a mission, has married, and is now raising a family (though none of these are strict requirements.) The same is likely true of his counselors and secretary. They meet regularly with other ward leaders, with visiting Church authorities, and with their quorum members. They practice leadership skills that will be put to use later in other positions of leadership. An awful lot of bishops got their first training in adult Church leadership as elders’ quorum presidents.

Church leaders aren’t chosen by those they lead. They are chosen by authorities higher up the hierarchy. Thus, when a new elders’ quorum president is needed, a candidate is typically nominated by his bishop. The nomination is considered by the stake presidency, who present the name of the candidate to the high council for further discussion. All of these leaders are expected to prayerfully seek the guidance and confirmation of God in this process. The chosen candidate is then sustained by his quorum: The stake president tells the quorum that they believe the Lord has called Brother Smith to serve as the elders’ quorum president, and the quorum members are asked to raise their hand to show that they sustain the call. The quorum is also given the opportunity to dissent from the call, but this is so rare an occurrence that I haven’t seen it happen in decades. It’s a matter of faith in inspired leadership: as the joke goes, Brother Smith must have been called by God, because no one else would ever have thought of him … Once sustained, the candidate is set apart as the elders’ quorum president by laying on of hands of the stake president.

An elders’ quorum president typically serves from a few months to several years. Sometimes he is released in order to be called to another important position. Very often he is released simply because his leaders feels it is someone else’s turn. The latter is rarely perceived as any reflection on the former president. It’s simply how things work in the Church.

I do not know exactly what callings Romney has held in the church. He may well have been called as an elders’ quorum president shortly after marrying Ann, and as a promising young leader, he may then have been called to the stake high council and ordained a high priest. As a high councilor, his most visible duty would be speaking at different wards around his stake as a representative of the the stake president. Less visible but more vital duties include extending certain callings from the stake president, setting apart some of those so called, and participating in stake disciplinary councils. The latter is perhaps the weightiest duty of a high councilor. Members who violate church standards in sufficiently serious ways (committing a serious crime, abusing family members, committing adultery, or repeatedly preaching against settled Church doctrine, for example) can be put on probation, disfellowshipped or excommunicated. Since the lesser penalties are usually administered by a bishop, a high council disciplinary meeting is usually to consider excommunication, the most serious form of discipline in the Church.

Whether or not Romney first served on a high council, he was called at the tender age of 30 as a counselor to a stake president. This is not the usual progression; a counselor in a stake president has usually served as a bishop first. But it’s not a strict requirement and Romney had doubtless already distinguished himself as a Church leader.

After serving in a stake presidency, Romney was called as a bishop. This is A Big Deal. A candidate for a bishopric is nominated by his stake president to the First Presidency of the Church. If they approve the candidate, the stake president is authorized to ordain the new bishop after he is presented to his ward for a sustaining vote. In my father’s day, a new bishop had to travel to Salt Lake City to be ordained by the First Presidency themselves, but that’s no longer practical, and I think Romney was called after that change was made. The new bishop soon finds himself in a world of hurt schedule-wise; his list of duties is lengthy and many cannot be delegated to his counselors. Only the bishop himself is authorized to perform marriages, hear confessions of sins, interview members to receive their temple endowments, interview young men to be ordained to or advanced in the Aaronic Priesthood, interview children of record for baptism (converts are interviewed by the local mission), authorize formal welfare assistance to members in need, etc., etc., ad weary etc. It’s easily a 20-hours-per-week job, for which the bishop receives no pay, on top of his regular day job. (Though, as they say, the retirement is out of this world.) Bishops are accordingly held in extraordinarily high regard and affection by most of their ward members; unfortunately, every bishop discovers there are a few disgruntled exceptions. You can’t please everyone, so you remind yourself that God is part of the audience.

By all accounts, Romney was as extraordinary a bishop as he was a missionary. However, bishops have to do hard things. There is the story, widely enough told that it is likely true, that Bishop Romney had to give some hard counsel to a woman considering an abortion. The Church shrinks from labeling elective abortion as flat-out murder, but forbids it as “like unto murder” and considers it grounds for the most severe Church discipline. There are exceptions for rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother, but these are not automatic; the woman is expected to counsel with her bishop and receive confirmation by the Holy Spirit that the decision to abort is justified. In the case involving Bishop Romney, the mother apparently was inclined to end a dangerous pregnancy and Romney felt strongly that she should not do so. This is worth consideration by social conservatives who fear Romney is not sincere enough in opposing abortion.

Romney was apparently called as a stake president while still serving as a bishop. At the time, these calls were made by a visiting Apostle, who would interview likely candidates and make a selection, with the candidate being presented for a sustaining vote at a stake conference. When a bishop is called as a stake president, there is usually a slight delay before a replacement can be called to take over his bishopric, and for a short time the new stake president is holding down both callings. Just thinking about the burden involved makes my head hurt.

Stake presidents have considerable authority to lay down policy within their stakes, but they are still local leaders and they do not determine doctrine or deviate from the general policies of the Church. Romney was a stake president in an unusually liberal corner of the Church, and his members included an unusual number who considered a lot of settled doctrine and policy to be up for debate. Romney’s approach to these members suggests to me a man who was willing to listen to the other point of view, but who at his core was quite conservative.

In 1967, Richard Poll published an essay, What the Church Means to People Like Me, that introduced a metaphor that a fair number of my fellow Saints utterly despise but which seems to have resonated with many others. Poll divided the church into Iron Rod members, who looked to the Church to define a clear and well-defined path to salvation, and Liahona members, who saw the Church as a compass to help them find their own path to salvation. (The terms Iron Rod and Liahona are drawn from Book of Mormon imagery.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, the breakdown roughly corresponded to conservative and liberal members of the church, and my own reading of Pope’s essay is that Pope was a Liahona member who was ever so slightly contemptuous of his intellectual inferiors among the Iron Rod members. It’s an old story and it’s still with us today, although the gap seems to have widened and the preferred labels seem to have mutated to True Believing Mormon and New Order Mormon.

Romney seems to have been an Iron Rod Mormon who nonetheless tried, as stake president, to be as accommodating as possible of Liahona Mormons. These Liahona Mormons included a number of feminists who questioned the all-male priesthood leadership of the Church and the traditional roles of women as wives and mothers. Romney looked for creative ways to give these women more of a leadership role in his stake without departing from Church orthodoxy in the matter, which doesn’t seem to have really satisfied anyone.

I do not know enough about the specifics in Romney’s case to draw very many conclusions, but I do know something about orthodoxy and heterodoxy in the Church generally. I am quite confident that critics of the Church who characterize it as the “Morg Collective”, whose members give robotic obedience to their leaders, don’t know much about how the Church actually works. I am even more confident that critics of the Church who depict its women as Stepford wives have had very little actual contact with real live Mormon women. The truth is that Mormons love to talk about doctrine, love to speculate about doctrine, and love to argue about doctrine. Every Mormon ward I’ve lived in has had a member or two who furiously galloped through life on his gospel hobby horse, to the bemusement of his fellow Saints, some of whom probably hurt themselves struggling to keep a straight face. Get a group of randomly selected faithful Mormons together and ask them whether evolution was part of the creative process, whether the Flood was a literal universal flood, whether the original Hill Cumorah was in upstate New York or in central America, or whether a murderer is forever barred from exaltation, and you’ll get about as many opinions as there are Mormons in the room.

In theory, a Jewish man is master of his home. Yeah, right. Tell that to his wife. Mormons are more like that than you would guess. If Mormon women do not occupy highly visible ward leadership callings, their callings are nonetheless vital in less visible ways. A ward Relief Society president is the closest female counterpart in the ward to the bishop, and she works closely with him in the administration of welfare relief: A bishop may have no clue what groceries a young family with an unemployed father needs, so it’s the Relief Society president who fills out the bishop’s storehouse order form. A fair number of bishops, including my current bishop, invite their Relief Society president to attend the regular priesthood executive committee meeting, where she sits as the equal of the elders’ quorum president, high priests group leader, and other ward leaders. And any Mormon can tell you that the Relief Society president is wired into an intelligence network that would put Mossad to shame: If a ward member goes into the hospital, the Relief Society will have a sister at the family’s door with a hot casserole and freshly baked bread before the hospital admissions have finished verifying insurance.

Some folks find this smothering. They shouldn’t.

Notwithstanding their fondness for theological debates, there are some things almost all faithful Mormons are agreed on. All look to Christ as Son of God and Redeemer. All believe God has answered their prayers and that the Holy Spirit has touched their lives. All believe that they have seen the hand of God moving in the Church. If you can get close enough to a Mormon to get him to really open up, almost any Mormon will have a story or two about a Church leader who really screwed up. But those stories are not tossed lightly about at the elders’ quorum barbeque, because faithful Mormons fear to lift up their heels against the Lord’s anointed. Not because they fear the wrath of their leaders or the vengeance of the mythical Morg Collective, but because they really believe they will have to answer to that God whose hand moves those leaders.

So your average Mormon is a perplexing mixture of heterodoxy and orthodoxy, in which respect he is probably not so different from other Christians or Jews. The difference is that the average Mormon believes that, ultimately, the Church is led by a group of living prophets who anchor the Church to Christ Himself. Destroy that belief, and at some fundamental level the man ceases to be one of the Saints. But the Lord warned Joseph Smith that we would not always be able to discern the hypocrites, and that poses a bit of a problem for a Church leader. Are the dissenters Saints through whom the Lord is also working in His own manner? Or are they hypocrites in whom the core Mormonism has been extinguished, who wish to transform the Church into something that would be alienated from God?

I’m not sure how much this tells us about how a President Romney would approach his office. Romney would doubtless listen carefully to the opposition. I believe he also has a hard core of basic principles he will not compromise. Just how the balance between the two plays out in office will be interesting to watch. I suppose it should be obvious by now that I consider it a better gamble than the alternatives.

I do not know Mitt Romney. The most that I can claim is that a close friend knew Romney at first hand many years back. My friend thinks very highly of Romney and plans to vote for him, though he wishes Romney was a bit more conservative politically, but that’s been the extent of our discussion. So what follows is mostly not an attempt to dissect the specifics of Romney; rather, it is a more general discussion of what it means to be a Mormon man, written from a largely cultural Mormon perspective, and how this might bear on the kind of man Romney is and President he will be. I’ll bring in Mormon theology only to the extend necessary to illuminate some of the roots of Mormon culture.

I’m also going to have to drop the Vader persona for this series of posts. By their nature, these posts are going to include a lot of material distilled from my own experience as a lifelong Mormon, and the topic is too serious to risk any forced Vader humor. (Well, except that one.) I’m going to remain coy about my own precise identity; my employer insists on it.

Roughly half the membership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was born in the Church. Both Romney and I are part of this group, and we both have several generations of Mormon ancestry, going back to the pioneers that crossed the Great Plains from Nauvoo to the Salt Lake Valley from 1847 on. Both of us have ancestors who practiced polygamy during the latter half of the 19th century. My last polygamist ancestor was a great-great-grandfather, while Romney is one generation closer to his polygamist forebears.

The Mormon settlements in the Old West developed a distinctive character that reflected both the new Mormon theology and the established culture of the immigrant who were attracted to that theology. Most of these immigrants came from New England, the British Isles, and Scandinavia, with just a leavening of southern Americans and other northern Europeans. These immigrants were relatively literate and well steeped in both the Old and New Testament, though, unsurprisingly, they tended to be unusually dissatisfied with the dominant Christian denominations in their communities. Often they felt that what they saw and were taught in their original churches was at odds with what they read in the Bible, and the flood of new revelation through Joseph Smith, the Mormon founding prophet, was to them a floodlight illuminating the meaning of their traditional scriptures.

The Mormonism they converted to, though thoroughly unorthodox, was nonetheless a thoroughly Christ-centered religion, which viewed Jesus of Nazareth as God the Son, quite literally the spiritual and physical Son of God the Father, and as the Redeemer of all mankind. It was a religion that heavily emphasized spiritual gifts, including revelation, prophecy, healing, and the gift of tongues. The Church’s claim to continuing revelation, beginning with the Book of Mormon, was a rejection of the completeness of the existing scriptural canon and suggested the possibility that the canon was not even infallible, yet the early Saints took the Bible very seriously. It would be fair to say that the Bible long remained at the heart of the Mormon scriptural canon, undisplaced by the Book of Mormon, which was treated largely as a second witness to and commentary on the Bible. This may surprise some readers, but it is consonant with my own experience. I grew up on Bible stories and did not really begin to be introduced to Book of Mormon stories until well after my baptism at age 8. The modern emphasis on the Book of Mormon within the Church began within my lifetime.

The first pioneers entered into the Nauvoo Covenant, a sacred pledge to support each other in the journey west. Part of the concrete realization of this covenant was the Perpetual Emigration Fund, a rotating fund that provided loans to help the poorer Saints make the journey to Utah and get settled into their new homes. The fund was later seized by the U.S. Government during the polygamy prosecutions, which hindered further Mormon immigration, as was doubtless intended; however, the modern Perpetual Education Fund, which provides educational loans to Saints in Third World countries, was deliberately styled after the Perpetual Immigration Fund. Thus the pioneers had a strong sense of community.

The isolation of the Mormon communities and the prior history of persecution within the United States, combined with the searing experiences of the Utah War and the polygamy prosecutions, might be expected to have destroyed any loyalty of the Saints to the United States. Certainly the Congressmen who refused to seat B.H. Roberts and nearly denied Reed Smooth his Senate seat thought so. Yet this was not the case. Among Joseph Smith’s revelations were statements, taken as coming from the lips of Christ Himself, that the authors of the Constitution had been raised up by God for that very purpose, and that the Constitution was an expression of principles for establishing a just secular government in preparation for the divine government of Christ at His Second Coming. Even more central to Mormon theology is the concept of agency: Mormons resoundingly reject any Calvinistic doctrine of predestination, viewing the suffering of Christ as the price paid for men to be given genuine moral choice. Thus the philosophy of natural rights became, to the Saints, an article of religion. The Saints could not easily forget that they had been denied their rights by other Americans, but they came to view the American polity as a divinely inspired system that sometimes fell into the hands of evil men.

With the end of polygamy and the granting of statehood to Utah, the Saints worked to integrate themselves into the larger nation while preserving the distinctive character of their communities. By 1940 it was possible for Hollywood to produce Brigham Young, with its sympathetic portrayal of the Mormon pioneers (and, incidentally, a slightly eccentric portrayal of Joseph Smith by Vincent Price.) Among the fatalities at Pearl Harbor was Mervyn Bennion, captain of battleship West Virginia and an active Latter-day Saint. The Eisenhower administration included Ezra Taft Benson, a sitting Mormon Apostle, as Secretary of Agriculture.

The mid-20th Century also saw the gradual transformation of the Church from a community comfortable with the most liberal and progressive elements of American culture (Emmeline Wells, president of the Women’s Relief Society, was a friend of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony) to a community that increasingly identified itself with the more conservative elements of American culture. Utah voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964; it has not given its electoral votes to a Democratic nominee for President since. I believe it would be fair to say that much of this shift was in the American ideological map rather than in the Church; what it meant to be a liberal underwent a sea change in 1960s, and conservatism as a knee-jerk reaction became conservatism as an articulated political philosophy at about the same time. Church members, disturbed by the spread of Communism, by the radicalism of the 1960s, and by the growing secularization of American culture, found that the new political conservatism of the Republican Party resonated with them. Early Church members had practiced a form of voluntary community socialism called the “United Order”; many saw Communism, with its explicit atheism and state coercion, as Satan’s counterfeit, and most of the Church membership became strongly anti-Communist and anti-Socialist. A Church membership that had been fairly evenly split between Democrats and Republicans became increasingly Republican.

George Romney, Mitt’s father, found a measure of political success as a liberal Republican in the 1960s. However, his campaign for President seems to have foundered largely on a single ill-advised remark: He described the military’s careful orchestration of his visit to Vietnam as a brainwashing. I would not be the first to suggest that this explains Mitt’s own circumspection. Mitt has approached his political career with a not-entirely-irrational fear of stepping on a political land mine and suffering the fate of his father.

Mitt the Mormon Elder

Another thing Mitt Romney and I share is an upbringing in a family having pioneer Mormon roots but living outside the traditional “Mormon Corridor.” My grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all lived in predominantly Mormon communities; I was raised in a community that was mostly not LDS. The same is true of Romney. For me, this meant having a foot in each of two worlds: the tight-knit Mormon congregation, and the wider non-Mormon community. Both my parents and I had good friends in both communities, but the bulk of our social activities revolved around the Mormon congregation. This was partly because ours was a small community and most people did a lot of socializing within their respective churches, for lack of other diversions.

Mitt’s congregation was tiny compared with my own. I grew up in a ward, which is a congregation of about 200-600 members led by a bishop. This bishop is a layman (in fact, at one point, my bishop was my own father) and his position is not permanent, though his tenure tended to be a bit longer back then. Nowadays a bishop serves for about five years, and it is quite uncommon for one to serve a second “term” any time thereafter. The other congregational leaders are also laymen. In fact, the only paid employee of my ward was the janitor. Mitt’s congregation in his earliest years was a branch consisting of a few members meeting in his father’s home; later the Church in his area grew to the point where a small ward could be organized. His father was the branch president and then (I believe) bishop of his ward. Later the elder Romney became a stake president, supervising several wards and branches, a position I’ll discuss more in a future post.

Boys in the Church are ordained to the Aaronic Priesthood sometime at or after age twelve. Their role in this “lesser priesthood” is rather like that of an altar boy in a more traditional Christian faith. The 12- and 13-year-olds serve as deacons, whose primary visible duty is distributing the bread and water of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. (Which is almost always spoken of among Mormons simply as “the sacrament”, since it is a weekly ritual in a Church that has almost no other weekly rituals or liturgy.) The 14- to 15-year-olds serve as Teachers (a formal priesthood title) who make the preparations for sacrament meetings. They also begin their formal teaching ministry, by joining in home teaching, a program of monthly visits to every family in the ward. The home teachers present a short religious message, see how the family is doing, and (generally) socialize a bit. Home teachers can sometimes be assigned to visit the same family for many years, and they often develop strong bonds of friendship with their assigned families. Indeed, it is not unheard of for a home teaching relationship to end after decades with the home teacher as an honorary pallbearer at the member’s funeral. As Adam Greenwood would say, it’s all part of the sweetness of Mormon life. Boys who participate in home teaching invariably are partnered with a mature man chosen to be a mentor to them, often their own father.

At age 16 to 17 the young man is ordained a priest. At this point, he is qualified to perform baptisms, administer the sacrament, and ordain other deacons, teachers, and priests. He is beginning to accept adult responsibilities and is working towards becoming a full-fledged adult member of the Mormon community. However, he is not yet qualified to confirm those who have been baptized or to give inspired blessings, duties that are reserved for full-fledged adult males who have been ordained elders. More about that in a moment.

Girls are not ordained to the priesthood, which is strongly identified with the ideals of fatherhood. (They have their own organizations, which are beyond the scope of this post.) Furthermore, the modern Church has enthusiastically adopted Scouting as the activities program for its young men. The entire young men’s program in the Church is a thus a program of intense male bonding that would put Robert Bly to shame.

It is a healthy form of male bonding, though. Young Saints of both sexes, who are generally baptized and confirmed at age eight, are taught the usual Christian virtues, plus abstinence from alcohol. tobacco, coffee, tea, illicit drugs, and any kind of sexual activity outside of marriage. In the case of the young men, the ban on sexual activity is accompanied by a considerable amount of placing the fair sex on a pedestal, with carefully chaperoned coeducational activities intended to teach basic courtship skills. The result is that an astonishing fraction of Mormon first marriages are marriages between two virgins.

One does not really expect an eight-year-old to fully understand his or her commitment to Christ. My own deeper conversion to Mormonism took place in my mid-teens. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that it was helped along by a certain amount of Mormon cultural kitsch, including the notorious Saturday’s Warrior. In any case, a real commitment took hold before I reached adulthood, was ordained to the Melchizedek Priesthood, and was called on a mission.

Young men are ordained to the higher or Melchizedek Priesthood sometime after their 18th birthday. If the Aaronic Priesthood is a kind of apprenticeship, the Melchizeked Priesthood is “the real thing.” Like the Aaronic Priesthood, it has several offices, but the two ordinary offices are elder and high priest. It is to the office of elder these new adult men in the Mormon congregation are ordained. I cannot really fault members of traditional Christian denominations who snicker at our 19-year-old elders, but we are using the word in a perfectly respectable sense, denoting someone who has reached full adulthood in the Mormon community. Elders can confirm those who are baptized, can give inspired blessings, can ordain other elders, and can (in time) participate in the full range of temple ordinances.

Temples play an important role in the Church. They are the places where we perform vicarious baptisms for the dead, as has been much (and mostly poorly) discussed in the news lately. The Mormon belief is that the strict law of God requires every soul that would be saved to receive baptism; while the justice and boundless mercy of God requires that no soul be denied the opportunity to receive salvation. This is a bit of a problem in a world where the vast majority of human beings have died without ever hearing about Jesus Christ or baptism. The solution is to perform such baptisms vicariously for every departed human soul we can identify. It is clearly understood that the departed retain their moral agency, and each can decide for himself whether to accept vicarious baptism, a point that seems to be lost in much of the popular discussion. Our youth regularly participate in such baptisms, which are the only temple ordinance in which they can normally participate.

But there is another significance to the temple. It is here that we receive the endowment, which is a series of ordinances meant to prepare the soul to return to God. We don’t talk a lot about it; indeed, we specifically covenant with God that we will not describe the core elements of it. It is most sacred, and the temple likewise becomes a sacred space, as fully apart from the world as any place on Earth can be. The endowment is also a preparation for marriage, which when performed in a temple is believed to last beyond the grave. Finally, departing missionaries are expected first to receive their endowment, as a kind of spiritual reinforcement against the challenges of their missions.

I do not know how closely my experience as a young Mormon matches Romney’s. His congregation was smaller than mine, and my impression is that its young mens program was not as fully organized. For example, there is no hint of any Scouting activity in his Wikipedia biography. Romney also attended a private high school where he was the only Mormon, in contrast with my experience growing up with a mixture of Mormon and non-Mormon friends. Finally, Romney seems to have not developed his deep commitment to the Church until he was already on his mission, though it is clear he was living by the Church’s standard of conduct as a teenager. I doubt he had much contact with Mormon kitsch, the lucky boy.

Missions are hugely transformative experiences for most young men who accept the call, even if (as in my case) they were already deeply committed to the Church. As a shy and awkward teenager, I was terrified of the thought of going out into the world to share some very personal beliefs, but I did it out of the conviction that God required it of me. My mission proved a very hard lesson in basic social skills, but I feel it was the second smartest decision I ever made. I may even have done some good here and there, though I was no standout. Romney seems to have quickly deepened his religious commitment on his mission, and by all accounts he was an extraordinary missionary.

Education has always been important to Mormons, who hired a Jewish professor to teach them Hebrew at Kirtland, tried to establish a university at Nauvoo, and did establish Deseret University soon after arriving in the Salt Lake Valley. Deseret University eventually became the University of Utah, which is no longer affiliated with the Church (and how), and the Church’s flagship university became Brigham Young University. I attended BYU for my entire undergraduate education (which, if you were wondering, is the first smartest decision I ever made.) Romney attended BYU only after his mission, and primarily to court the future Ann Romney. Neither of us continued our education at BYU past our bachelor’s degrees; both of us took our graduate degrees at prestigious universities of a decidedly non-Mormon character.

What does this background tell us about Romney? As I said in the first post of this series, I believe Byron York got it right when he surmised that church and family were at Romney’s core and were the two things he would give up all his worldly success for. Romney’s record as a missionary demonstrates his deep commitment to his religion. His record also demonstrates his enormous drive to be successful at everything he puts his hand to. His upbringing in a pioneer Mormon family in a non-Mormon community suggests he may have an unusual ability to work with people who do not share all his beliefs while still holding to his Mormon values. Romney’s subsequent record displays the tension between the strong social conservatism implied by the Mormon code of conduct and the strong Mormon belief in agency and natural rights: On issues like abortion, where his public position has shifted over time, I suspect his personal convictions have in fact been quite solid (and consistent with his present political positions), while his past political positions reflected the Mormon belief that God has given humans the right to make their own mistakes. I would also guess that a President Romney would look for creative ways to work within the system, playing hard but by the rules. I’ll take up that topic in greater depth in a later post.