Does the Mormon Church Empower Women? Answering a social media storm.

On Sunday evening, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints encouraged women around the world to come together to celebrate Relief Society, a women’s organization in the Church that is celebrating its 182nd anniversary.

In a video created for the event, J. Anette Dennis, a Relief Society leader, spoke passionately about the role of women in the Church. “There is no other religious organization in the world that I know of that has given such broad power and authority to women,” she said.

But when the church’s official Instagram page posted an excerpt from Ms. Dennis’ speech, including that quote, the response was immediate, overwhelming and largely negative. “What a joke!” wrote one commenter. “The sexism in this organization runs deep.” The post received more than 14,500 reactions as of Friday morning, with some critical responses receiving thousands of approving likes.

Anger flared a few days earlier when comments were deleted before being reinstated. In a response to the post and in emails to The Times, the church blamed the incident on an Instagram error. A spokesperson for Meta, which owns Instagram, said there was no issue that had affected the comments.

The conversation quickly erupted outside the church’s comments section and spiraled into a flurry of text messages among Mormon women, who shared stories of feeling marginalized and belittled in their interactions with church leaders.

The Instagram post addressed a longstanding outpouring of discontent among some women in the church, who chafe at the church’s restrictions and say the discussion about women’s empowerment is essentially hollow. Women are not eligible for the Church’s priesthood, a designation of God-given authority that applies only to men.

The Church distinguishes between “priesthood authority,” which is available only to men, and “priesthood power,” which is available to everyone. As in many other religious traditions, women are excluded from specific leadership roles and from some gatherings.

“We collect and read responses to all posts and appreciate hearing these genuine messages, concerns, thoughts and experiences,” Relief Society global president Camille N. Johnson said in an email from a spokesperson of the church. . The church provided Ms. Johnson’s comments in response to a request to interview Ms. Dennis.

Mrs. Johnson noted that hundreds of thousands of people watched a broadcast of the Relief Society celebration. “The intense interest we have experienced demonstrates the importance of these issues for women of faith,” she said.

The current groundswell began last fall, when a regional authority cracked down on a San Francisco Bay Area practice of inviting female leaders to sit in “the stands,” a raised seating area facing the congregation during Sunday services. The booth is a place of status, reserved for ‘presiding authorities’, roles for which only men are eligible, along with all others who participate in a specific service, including women and children. Local leaders had extended that invitation to some women leaders who did not participate in the services.

When the church took away this gesture of representation, Amy Watkins Jensen was outraged. She has three daughters and is a lifelong member of the Church, who could have been in the stands in her capacity as a volunteer leader. “We do this work and it should not be invisible,” she said.

She spoke to her bishop and continued down the chain of power, all of whom were men. Nothing has changed. She wrote one public letterwho signed nearly 3,000 Latter-day Saints, and started an Instagram account, Women on the Stand, asking for clarity and consistency on this issue for the global Church.

Mrs. Watkins Jensen’s immediate care was local, but quickly spread to other communities.

In Seattle, Kierstyn Kremer Howes, a therapist and lifelong member of the Church, woke up in the middle of the night with her newborn baby when she read about the removal of women from the stands in Mrs. Watkins Jenkins’ area.

“I was like, ‘I’m so tired of this,’” she recalls.

“You go to church and all you see are male leaders, and all the people we talk about in the scriptures are men,” Mrs. Kremer Howes said. “All that is good, glorious, and wonderful is in the man’s voice or looks manly.”

She stormed away from one fiery opinion piece (“I call it pissed off, my mom calls it sassy”) calling on LDS women to stay home from church on March 17, the anniversary of Relief Society.

“We do a lot of work, and when we ask for representation for that work, we are denied,” she said. “So let’s just get it over with.”

Mrs. Kremer Howes does not believe that many women actually stayed home from church on Sundays. (Several women said they supported the idea, but realized that if they stayed home, they would have to ask other women to cover their volunteer duties.) But the church’s Instagram post kept the discussion going.

“There is not a single decision a woman can make in this church that cannot be overruled by a man,” said Cynthia Winward, co-host of the podcast “At Last She Said It,” which focuses on women in the LDS -culture.

She said the discussion about women’s access to the booth is a notable milestone in the ongoing conversation about women in the church because it is driven by women who are, by definition, deeply involved in the church. The women who were given access to the booth had been there because of their volunteer work and leadership. “It no longer fits the narrative of ‘they’re just fringe feminists’,” Ms Winward said. “These are mainstream women.”

For some women, the response to the post does not reflect their own experiences. “I’ve never been in a situation where I was with a male leader or a male counterpart in church and felt like they didn’t hear me because I’m a woman,” said Hayley Clark, who lives in Utah. . She compared her experience in the church favorably to the condescension she occasionally faced as a female business owner, and said she was encouraged by the church’s quote.

For others, the opponents reminded them of deeper disagreements they had with the church. About a quarter of American Latter-day Saints say they have thought about leaving, compared to 16 percent of the overall population who have considered leaving their religion, according to a 2022 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute.

Sarah Schow is pregnant with her second child, a boy. As a young teen, her son will have “more authority in the Church than I will ever have,” she said, referring to a rule that allows boys to be consecrated to the all-male priesthood the year they turn twelve.

Mrs. Schow, who now lives in Canada, as a child belonged to chapters in Montana, California and Washington. She remembered learning as a child that she had a “divine nature,” of which femininity, reproduction, and nurturing were essential parts.

Now, though, she’s wondering about the church’s vision for her. Is her only role to be quiet and supportive? She quoted an emotional ballad from the movie “Barbie” to describe her disappointment with the institution she belonged to all her life: “What was I made for?”