In the psychology of perception, there’s the idea of a just-noticeable difference (JND) in some stimulus. For example, if a person is looking at a light, a JND is the smallest change in light that they’ll notice.

Some of the discussion around the changes that were just made in the temple ceremonies has made me think that we could define a parallel idea for how meaningful a change is: a just-meaningful difference (JMD). A JMD would be a change in something that’s just small enough to be meaningful.

To me, the changes the Church just made are far, far beyond the JMD threshold. The fact that women’s and men’s covenants are now parallel to each other rather than having women covenant to hearken to their husbands and men covenant to obey God is, I think, huge. The hearken covenant (and its even harsher predecessor, the obey covenant) have been the source of so much pain to so many Mormon women over the years. Similarly, the changes that have Eve no longer be silenced for the latter part of the endowment, and dropping the requirement that women be veiled are also very big. All these changes signal a fundamental reorganization of how women and men are though of being in relation to God. Instead of a hierarchical view where God presides over men, and men preside over women–one that Paul and Brigham Young would have preferred–we’ve taken some steps toward one where God is over all, regardless of their gender.

I’m flabbergasted, then, to learn that some men (friends of friends) are waving these changes away as just minor adjustments to the endowment. To use my term, they’re saying that these changes are below the JMD threshold. They’re not big enough to be meaningful.

I know it’s the height of arrogance to tell someone what they really believe, but I’m going to go there anyway. I don’t think these people actually believe this. Here’s a thought experiment that I think will make my point. What if instead of moving to an arrangement where everyone just covenants with God directly, we just flipped the script from the old version and had women covenant directly with God, and men covenant only to hearken to their wives? Also, how about if we have Adam be silenced after this covenant, and require men to veil their faces for the end part of the ceremony?

I’m guessing that people who wave these changes away as minor and not really meaningful would recoil at my proposed alternatives. Because it’s obvious that these would be meaningful changes, isn’t it? It would be totally out of line with all the patriarchal preferences that the LDS Church is so fundamentally built on. But if it were truly the case that moving from the hierarchy of God-man-woman to God-people isn’t enough to cross the JMD threshold, it must also be the case that moving from God-people to God-woman-man also isn’t enough to cross the threshold.

Here’s what I think is going on when people assert that these changes are minor. Being Mormon involves picking up many skills, and one of the most important is to learn to pointedly ignore many blatant inequalities, particularly those that fall along gender lines. Kids learn early that their parents or teachers or other Church members do not respond well to being asked straightforward questions like why it’s always the boys blessing and passing the sacrament, or why it’s always the men running sacrament meeting or why General Conference speakers are overwhelmingly male. To borrow a bit from President Oaks, we Mormons learn that it is good to claim that inequality doesn’t matter, it is better to claim that you’ve never actually noticed inequality, and it is best to pretend that the inequality doesn’t exist at all. What I think is happening when people assert that the changes to the temple ordinances are minor is that they’re figuring (correctly, I think) that to acknowledge that the changes are meaningful would be to implicitly acknowledge that the gender inequality existed in the first place, and of course as good Mormons, they’ve learned that only wicked people notice things like gender inequality in the Church, so they conclude that to show that they’re still righteous Church members, they must argue that the changes are minor.



