A systems theory on LDS leadership and how personal psychology scales into doctrine
I’ve been trying to understand why the LDS Church feels so different from the one older generations grew up in. Not just doctrinally, but in how it relates to people and how authority is exercised. This is a systems explanation that started making sense to me once I stopped looking at individual decisions and started looking at patterns.
At a certain point, the same dynamics keep repeating.
What I keep coming back to is how personal psychology, delayed authority, and centralized power interact in a church that treats leadership decisions as revelation.
Spencer W. Kimball was not far removed from polygamy. He was the grandson of Heber C. Kimball, lived in Arizona near post Manifesto polygamist communities, and came into leadership surrounded by men who still believed Doctrine and Covenants 132 meant plural marriage, not symbolic eternal sealing.
He also lived through the Richard R. Lyman excommunication from inside the Quorum. That mattered. Sexual theology wasn’t abstract for him. It had already destroyed an apostle.
When Kimball talked about sexuality, especially within marriage, it was almost always framed as duty rather than desire. There was no real attempt to integrate eros into holiness. Instead, sex became something dangerous that had to be tightly controlled. That mindset shows up clearly in The Miracle of Forgiveness and in the 1982 First Presidency letter that intruded directly into marital intimacy.
What stands out to me is that not all of his peers agreed with this approach. Hugh B. Brown explicitly said the Church does not involve itself in the bedrooms of its members. That tells us Kimball’s views weren’t inevitable or universal.
The Church later walked back the 1982 letter, quietly stopped promoting The Miracle of Forgiveness, and abandoned some of the most damaging purity based rhetoric Kimball had normalized. That’s the point where it stopped feeling like “just the era” to me. When an institution quietly retreats from a framework it once enforced, it’s usually because harm became impossible to ignore.
Russell M. Nelson shows a different version of the same structural problem.
As a junior apostle, he gave a General Conference talk criticizing the use of the word Mormon. In the very next session, Gordon B. Hinckley publicly corrected him. That kind of correction is rare in LDS leadership culture, especially in that setting.
The disagreement was public, unresolved, and then simply shut down. There was no space for it to be worked through. It just sat there.
Decades later, once Nelson became president, the exact same position returned, unchanged, but now framed as revelation. Mormon was suddenly a victory for Satan. Along with that came a presidency marked by sharp reversals, heavy personal branding, unprecedented temple announcements, and a tendency to moralize past member obedience without acknowledging institutional responsibility.
I don’t think this requires assuming revenge or pettiness. It makes sense if you understand how a delayed power hierarchy works. In a system where disagreement cannot be resolved and authority eventually becomes unilateral, suppressed preferences don’t disappear. They wait.
Dallin H. Oaks is the most troubling example for me.
As BYU president, he presided over an institution that engaged in aversive conditioning and electroshock therapy on gay students. That this happened is not really disputed. What is disputed is administrative knowledge and moral accountability.
Oaks has consistently denied awareness or responsibility, even as documentation and scholarship suggest the issue was known at an institutional level. What makes this worse is that denial has been paired with continued opposition to LGBTQ inclusion and with the disciplining or excommunication of those who publicly refuse to support him.
This is where the idea of consent falls apart for me. The Church claims moral authority while withholding transparency, denying harm, and punishing dissent. That isn’t informed consent. It’s coercive authority.
These are three very different men, but the same mechanism keeps showing up.
In a centralized, gerontocratic system where authority is delayed for decades, personal psychology doesn’t get checked. It gets sanctified.
Kimball’s sexual alienation became shame based doctrine.
Nelson’s unresolved disagreement became revelation framed reversal.
Oaks’s institutional denial became loyalty enforced over moral repair.
Each time, God’s will is claimed, members absorb the cost, corrections happen quietly if they happen at all, and accountability never flows upward.
The Church today still asks for enormous levels of time, loyalty, obedience, and money. But it provides less local community, less transparency, and less return on that investment than it once did. At the same time, it centralizes authority, dilutes the distinctiveness that once gave people identity, and reframes late social adaptation as revelation.
Millennials and Gen Z aren’t leaving because they’re offended. They’re leaving because the numbers don’t add up anymore.
I can’t believe an institution that repeatedly sanctifies personal and institutional failure, suppresses dissent rather than addressing harm, retroactively moralizes obedience, and demands loyalty without accountability is being led by God.
That conclusion didn’t come from anger. It came from watching the same pattern repeat and finally admitting to myself that it isn’t accidental.
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