On October 2, the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints informed members through email that they have changed the policy regarding those who may act as witnesses for baptisms and temple sealings. In the recent past, only men holding priesthood office were allowed to act as the two persons who oversaw that these ordinances were performed and recorded correctly. Now the opportunity to do so has been extended to women and youth as well. The “Bloggernacle” (i.e., the Mormon blogging world) has been active after the announcement, and bloggers are invariably expressing hope that this change bodes well for improving the position of women in the LDS Church.
 
For many years now, particularly since Ordain Women organized in 2013, the lack of parity and status for women within the Church’s structure of an exclusively male priesthood has been subject to much criticism and debate, including among members themselves. The topic of female ordination has been fraught with tension as many local congregations have grappled with the fact that some of their members support and/or advocate for it while the “prophets, seers, and revelators,” who make up the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve (the highest-ranking leadership councils of the Church), have officially rejected the idea. This tension has resulted in local leaders censuring or excommunicating several prominent advocates because of their activism on this matter. 
 
Some LDS women have tried to find a middle ground. While still reserving for men the right to priesthood office, they acknowledge the problems associated with lack of status and respect that women routinely have faced in Church interactions, and consequently have proposed certain shifts in policy meant to address such problems. Neylan McBain’s 2014 book Women at Church: Magnifying LDS Women’s Local Impact is the best known of such efforts. McBain proposes many ideas for how LDS women could have greater involvement and visibility, ideas designed on one hand to leave alone the official doctrine regarding male priesthood but on the other to suggest possibilities in line with the Church’s policies as found in its Handbook. In principle, these possibilities would move the Church toward greater gender parity within these limits. Allowing women to serve as witnesses for baptisms and sealings could be seen as an innovation in keeping with the spirit of McBain’s proposals. 
 
However, women serving as witnesses for ordinances is not entirely an innovation, since, according to LDS historian Jonathan Stapley, historical records indicate that women served as witnesses for temple ordinances and baptisms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Still, the Church underwent a “Priesthood Correlation” renovation in the last century, which resulted in certain functions that had once been open to women—such as witnessing or giving healing blessings—being increasingly restricted by the end of the twentieth century. In that respect, this change in policy regarding witnesses can be read, at least partially, as an increased willingness of current Church leaders, as opposed to their immediate predecessors, to construct practices more in line with inclusive historical precedents regarding women.
 
The willingness of leaders to restore some practices to women has undoubtedly stemmed from the absorption within the Church’s culture of some basic feminist ideals regarding women’s voice, presence, and equality, despite the recent doubling down on patriarchy as the doctrinal underpinning of its priesthood structure. Equality in particular has been picked up as an ideal, but only within a complementarian paradigm. The Church’s current teaching offers rhetorical validation and even celebration of the work women do in the Church and in their families. Such work is regarded as every bit as important, valid, and meaningful as the work men do. Still, leaders’ general image of “men’s work” (e.g., priesthood office) and “women’s work” (e.g., motherhood) falls along traditional lines. Each type of work is equally important, valued, even critical to salvation, the teaching goes, but they do not look or function in the same way—they are presumably equal if not the same. 
 
The move to allow women and men to fulfill a role in exactly the same way within the scope of witnessing could very well act as a potential step toward bridging a traditional division of labor within the Church. After all, a woman who serves as a witness, as Jana Reiss points out, has the ability to correct a priesthood holder in the same way as a male witness does. The function of the role of witness within a gender-inclusive model is not “equal but not the same”—it is equal and the same, period. This kind of shift in ecclesiastical role indeed has the potential to initiate a positive shift in doctrinal understanding regarding the kind of work open to women within the Church.
 
However, a crucial piece of context is often missing whenever Mormons celebrate these incremental shifts in better policies for women. The Church’s move away from a strong form of patriarchy toward a gentler patriarchy based on complementarianism has at least partially been the result of leaders’ reactions against growing pressure on the Church to be more inclusive to LGBTQ members. Two parallel paths have been developed in recent years, each informing the other in LDS doctrine and practice. The first is the growing clarification of a complementarian model with implications of expanded roles for women in the church; the other is a hardening refusal to expand the Church’s belief system to accept non-heterosexual orientations and non-binary gender identities. 
 
In the same week that the email announced complementarian-style changes to witnesses for baptisms and sealings, Dallin H. Oaks of the First Presidency declared, in a meeting for high-ranking leaders, that “binary creation is essential to the plan of salvation.” Oaks also explained that when the church teaches that “gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose,” “gender” is to be understood as “biological sex at birth.” Such teaching results in characterizing, as Oaks does in his talk, non-binary identity as “confusion,” a characterization that does little to validate any identity outside of a female/male model of reality. Thus, in the same week that Mormons hail greater inclusivity for women, LGBTQ persons and advocates experienced a “dark day” for reconciling their place within the Church. While any move to genuinely equalize the roles, influence, and status of women in the LDS Church is indeed cause for celebration, Mormons must recognize that for now the strengthening of a complementarian paradigm seems to be done at a moral cost to those within the community who fall outside the traditional heterosexual binary system. 

Sightings is edited by Joel Brown, a PhD Candidate in Religions in the Americas at the Divinity School, with assistance from Nathan Hardy, a PhD Candidate in the History of Christianity at the Divinity School. Sign up here to receive Sightings via email. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.