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(RNS) — Last month, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints shared a young man’s story about deciding to support the career of his wife, a pediatric neurologist — a career he says she was born for.

“Supporting her doesn’t shrink my purpose — it expands it,” he said, according to a post from the church’s official Instagram account.

Judging from some of the 2,100 comments across Instagram and X, you’d think the guy had just proclaimed motherhood was dead and the church had planned the funeral.

The dude-bros came out in force, with comments like, “How is she gonna have children if she’s busy being a doctor all day?” and accusations that the church’s public relations department had suffered from “estrogen poisoning.”

But then there was a backlash to the backlash — a string of social media posts from orthodox young Latter-day Saints who applauded the church’s new positive messaging about women’s careers.

Some are claiming that position isn’t new for the church, and that it has always been supportive of women achieving their dreams. Consider this Instagram reel from a young woman who says our doctrine supports women working, and that this is not a change:

 

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by Autumn Dickson Come Follow Me (@comefollowmeautumn)

“It’s not even a contradictory statement to the Family Proclamation,” she said. ” … It’s not pandering; it’s not the church changing its tune. It’s the church teaching the fullness of the Family Proclamation.”

Or there’s this one from a young LDS dad:

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Batchlor Wise Johnson IV (@batchloriv)

He says: “People analyze the Family Proclamation through the lens of something that is completely outdated. And like I said, your culture will affect how you view doctrine.” He then gives a quick history lesson, claiming that some members have been falsely influenced by outdated cultural ideas that women should stay home. Those ideas are based in privilege and an obsolete cultural “lens in which women had no rights.” He says, “When you do that in 2026, it just doesn’t apply.”

It’s fascinating that both influencers draw support for women working from the 1995 Family Proclamation, which is not official LDS scripture but might as well be. On the face of it, the document doesn’t provide bulletproof support for women working outside the home, especially if they’re moms. Here’s the relevant text:

“By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners. Disability, death, or other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation. Extended families should lend support when needed.”

But @comefollowmeautumn expands the phrase “individual adaptation” to include everyone. You don’t have to have a death in the family or a disability or any other rare circumstance to make adaptations that fit your family’s needs, as she says on Instagram. It’s like Oprah giving out cars to everyone in her audience: “You get an individual adaptation! And you get an individual adaptation! Everybody gets an individual adaptation!”

I love how she does this unapologetically, just as I love how @batchloriv faithfully and unapologetically deconstructs some of the church’s standard teachings about gender and parenting that LDS leaders have promulgated from the pulpit for generations.

For example, the idea that mothers are naturally better nurturers? No. Just, no. “That’s a skill issue,” he says. “Saying that men are not good with kids? Jesus Christ was great with kids. And I’m trying to be like Jesus Christ.” [Insert mic drop.]

But the idea that women are naturally and uniquely more nurturing than men isn’t just an outdated cultural idea — it’s been taught by top leaders of the church. As a recent example, at the church’s 2018 General Conference, President Henry B. Eyring spoke of the special “nurturing gifts of women,” their “innate and great capacity to sense the needs of others and to love” and their greater susceptibility to the “whisperings of the Spirit.” It was gender essentialism at its finest, packaged as the will of God for women. And it drew from decades of similar teachings by other church leaders.

This serves to gently remind the rising generation that the church has not always encouraged women to develop their gifts when such development takes them outside the home. That’s a highly selective reading of our history. These influencers are coming of age in a very different religion — one that has gone from demonizing working mothers to quietly tolerating them to giving them the highest and most publicly visible callings in the whole church.

In fact, @batchloriv chides people who he says quote former President Spencer W. Kimball on motherhood out of context. He claims that Kimball’s teaching did “not forbid women from going into education and pursuing their careers.”

But Kimball did exactly that. He led the charge against passing the Equal Rights Amendment because if women had equal rights under the law, they might abandon their God-ordained mandate to stay home and raise children.

Kimball also said the following things, and they were reiterated multiple times by other church leaders and local leaders: 

• “It was never intended by the Lord that married women should compete with men in employment. They have a far greater and more important service to render.”
• “The husband is expected to support his family and only in an emergency should a wife secure outside employment.”
• “I beg of you, you who could and should be bearing and rearing a family: wives, come home from the typewriter, the laundry, the nursing, come home from the factory, the café. No career approaches in importance that of wife, homemaker, mother — cooking meals, washing dishes, making beds for one’s precious husband and children.”

Much of Kimball’s rhetoric was later picked up and expanded on by President Ezra Taft Benson, who as an apostle told members in a 1981 General Conference that women were divinely ordained to support men in their careers by staying home with the children.

“In the beginning, Adam was instructed to earn the bread by the sweat of his brow — not Eve,” Benson insisted. “Contrary to conventional wisdom, a mother’s place is in the home!”

He warned that mothers who shirked their stay-at-home responsibilities would reap the consequences. “The seeds of divorce are often sown and the problems of children begin when mother works outside the home,” he taught. “You mothers should carefully count the cost before you decide to share breadwinning responsibilities with your husbands.”

This was preached repeatedly as God’s holiest doctrine and deeply influenced several postwar generations.

While I’m sympathetic when today’s young LDS members rightly point out that such teachings are basically nonsense, I’m also sympathetic to their elders who took such counsel to heart back in the day and are now bewildered by the church’s seeming about-face.

I remember a young woman I knew who stood up in sacrament meeting in the late 1990s to announce she was quitting the career she had trained so hard for because she’d just had a baby and the prophets had taught that mothers needed to stay home. My heart ached for her. I wonder how she feels about that decision now. Probably, like many LDS women of our generation and before, she has experienced both joy and regret.

I never agreed with the late 20th-century “gospel” that there was no substitute for a mother’s arms, or that men would be somehow lessened — emasculated, even — if their wives worked outside the home. But those really were church teachings — official doctrines, not just cultural add-ons.

So, this Mother’s Day, I’m celebrating that many younger members are able to slough off the teachings of the past. But let’s not forget that these were actual church teachings. And now, it seems, God’s will is something else.

(RNS) — This week marks two years since the United Methodist Church voted to remove the last barriers to full equality of LGBTQ+ members. The removal of those punitive measures came in the wake of a schism that saw the departure of more than 7,600 congregations, or about a quarter of U.S.-based Methodist churches.

Now comes the postmortem.

Lovett Weems Jr., retired director of the Lewis Center for Church Leadership at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., has penned an analysis of the forces that led to the schism and how the denomination might recover. A lifelong United Methodist who has studied available data, Weems suggests a practical way forward for its 4 million U.S. members.

He begins the book — released by Abingdon Press in March — on a note of mourning. He will be buried next to his parents in the church cemetery of the Mississippi congregation where he grew up. But that church has disaffiliated and is no longer United Methodist.

Weems is convinced most United Methodists might have been able to tolerate their differences on sexuality, but the growing political polarization around the country left little room for disagreement or compromise — until recently, a cherished Methodist ethic. Practically, though, what allowed churches to leave, Weems writes, was the temporary lifting of a legal provision that ensures church properties belong to the denomination. When churches realized they could leave the denomination and take their property with them, they did.

The second half of Weems’ book deals with the future. The United Methodist Church had been shrinking even before the schism. In 2024, the median attendance at its churches was 29 people, and many of those people are older.

If Francis Asbury, the pioneering Methodist bishop, found the key to church growth in sending pastors on horseback out to the frontier, today’s growth strategy might be reversed. If the church wants to reach younger, more ethnically diverse people, it must focus on densely populated urban areas, Weems writes.

RNS spoke with Weems about his book, “An Aura of Hope,” and new realities facing the United Methodist Church. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

RELATED: With a final flourish, United Methodist conference eliminates all anti-LGBTQ policies

You point out that when you die, you’re going to be buried in a church that has disaffiliated from the United Methodist Church. I wonder if that’s true of a lot of other United Methodists as well.

Well, I’m sure that is the case, at least for folks of my generation that often came from churches that had cemeteries connected with them. When I went into ministry, clergy often came from small churches and from rural churches. That’s not necessarily the same today, where clergy are more likely to come from suburban or urban churches and churches that tend to be somewhat larger.

You write that the schism in the church was avoidable. How so?

(In 2019), the delegates to the General Conference from the United States supported what was called the One Church Plan that would have permitted the church to omit negative language regarding homosexuality, and at the same time, not require anyone to violate their own convictions. The One Church Plan would have passed with two-thirds of the U.S. votes, but with the votes of all the delegates, including the international delegates, that was not possible, and so it failed by a relatively small number of votes.

A major part of (the schism) was permitting churches to leave with their property. The United Methodist Church has a trust clause, where the property of a church is held in trust. When someone leaves a church, they leave just as they came, one by one; they don’t take property with them. The provision for leaving said that the only reason for leaving had to deal with conscience related to human sexuality. However, we know that once that door was opened, many churches took this as an opportunity to leave over a variety of issues. Compromise of any kind was just something that people were not open to talking about.

You talk a lot about how the way forward now is actually opposite the way that the United Methodists initially grew, which was to go west and reach rural areas. Explain that.

What I’m proposing is simply going back to what in essence, was the original question: Who and where are the people God has given us today? And so, when Bishop Francis Asbury was looking at things in the late 1700s, early 1800s, he concluded that the preachers were going to stay around New York and Philadelphia, where life was a little easier, but the people were moving westward. So, he sent ministers to where the people (were) going. It worked for over 100 years, but by the early decades of the 20th century, some of that movement had begun to shift. 

We are out of sync with four key areas that emerge. One is geographic. We are more represented in the counties where one-third of the population live than we are in the counties where two-thirds of the population live. One is age. The age makeup of United Methodists is significantly older. Another is racial. The percentage of people of color tends to be about 10% across mainline churches, and vastly greater — in the 40s or higher — in the population as a whole. And then economic. United Methodism has always thought of itself as a middle-class church, and some of the writing of the 1950s named Methodism as the kind of prototypical middle-class church. But in the ’70s and ’80s, that movement stopped, and so what’s happened is the middle class has shrunk in size. The people that are poor represent a somewhat larger portion, but the people above the middle class, that percentage, has grown larger as well.

We’ve lost connection with (poorer) people in our communities. There was a time when the makeup of a Methodist church was very similar to the makeup of the population of the community. That’s no longer the case. People who are regular church attenders tend to be older, more educated, more well to do, more likely to be married — all those things that set them apart from the general population in their community.

If you were a bishop now, would you focus on the larger, more urban churches?

I would ask, where do two-thirds of the people live? Then, I would look at churches with 250 or more in worship attendance. Then I would see what’s happened to them in the last 10 years. And I’d be looking at two things in particular. One is the number of deaths, and the other is the number of new adherents. And in a sense, that matches what demographers talk about as natural increase and natural decrease. I would see which of these churches have more new believers than deaths.

Next, I’d want to begin learning from those churches. Where are they located? What have they done? What’s different there? I would bring them together, and I would say, “To whom much is given, much is expected. We want to encourage you. We want to learn from you, and we invite you to share what you’re learning with other churches.”

The Rev. Adam Hamilton, the pastor of the largest United Methodist church in Kansas, is running now for the U.S. Senate, if he wins the Democratic primary. What are the chances nowadays of a United Methodist pastor winning?

Each year there’s a denominational breakdown of members of Congress. When I first started looking at those things, in the ’60s and ’70s, Methodists were at the top by far, and that’s no longer the case. I think now both James Talarico (the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Texas) and Adam Hamilton provide a mainline voice that we’ve really not had. They both are excellent spokespeople for mainline Christianity. And Adam, I think at this point, has a chance of winning if he can get enough exposure; people will vote for him. He is one of those people that could do anything, and just happens to be a preacher. He is clearly the most gifted United Methodist clergy of his generation. Adam knows how to handle himself. He can be clear about what he believes, but it is not done in a judgmental way. So I’m hoping that Adam can bring out the better angels of that Kansas spirit.

RELATED: Kansas last sent a Democrat to the Senate in 1932. A megachurch pastor aims to change that.

DJERBA, Tunisia (AP) — The annual Jewish pilgrimage to the 26-century-old El-Ghriba Synagogue in Tunisia drew a modest but notable return of international visitors this year, worshipping together under tight security after a deadly 2023 attack disrupted the festival.

Visitors came from France, China, Ivory Coast and Italy, including France’s ambassador to Tunisia, a symbolic gesture after two French citizens were among those killed in the 2023 attack. A national guardsman shot and killed five people at the El-Ghriba synagogue soon after the festival that year, spreading fear among the local Jewish population and international pilgrims.

Participants said about 500 people have attended this year’s pilgrimage, held on the Mediterranean island of Djerba from April 30 to May 6 to celebrate the Lag B’Omer Jewish holiday. Jews have lived in Tunisia since Roman times, and the pilgrimage remains central to the country’s small but long-standing Jewish community.

Inside the synagogue, the atmosphere was calm and devotional, while also buzzing with conversations and social exchanges. Worshippers lit candles, read sacred texts and wrote wishes on eggs later placed in a sacred cave within the complex, a tradition believed to bring blessings.

Among them was Redj Cahen, a Tunisian-Italian pilgrim who returned after missing last year’s gathering. “We are back, and we are proud to be Tunisian Jews,” he said. “It is a feeling you cannot explain. Only those who come here understand.”

The gathering draws both local worshippers and members of the diaspora returning to their ancestral roots and has long been seen as a symbol of coexistence, attracting Muslim visitors alongside Jewish pilgrims.

A visible but contained security presence surrounded the synagogue, while heavier measures were deployed at access points to the island, where police checkpoints and barricades controlled entry. Vehicles were searched and identification documents carefully inspected. Within Djerba, security was especially concentrated in Hara Seghira and Hara Kebira, the island’s main Jewish quarters.

Despite security worries, the traditional “Minara” procession took place for the first time since the 2023 attack, signaling a cautious easing of restrictions.

The Minara, a pyramid-shaped tower of gold and silver, is placed at the center of the synagogue. Women drape it with colorful scarves in a gesture associated with good fortune, fertility and marriage. A symbolic auction of paintings and Jewish religious items follows as part of a traditional fundraiser for the synagogue’s maintenance, after which the scarf-laden Minara is placed on a cart and paraded outside to the sounds of the traditional darbuka drum, singing and throwing of candy. It is later brought back into the synagogue, concluding one of the event’s pillar traditions.

The pilgrimage, one of the oldest in Africa, has historically drawn thousands from around the world. Attendance dropped sharply after the 2023 shooting outside the synagogue that killed two pilgrims and three security officers. The synagogue was also targeted by a 2002 truck bombing by al-Qaida that killed about 20 people.

“This year’s Ghriba pilgrimage marks a gradual return,” said former Tourism Minister René Trabelsi. “We are returning little by little.”

Trabelsi said Tunisian authorities had pushed to maintain the pilgrimage despite the challenges. The event plays an important role in supporting the local economy.

Khedir Hnaia, who has worked at the synagogue for more than three decades, welcomed the return of longtime visitors. “We would like to reflect a good image to the world, to bring back the glory of Ghriba and make it even better than how it used to be,” he said.

“We need to stand up for our country, we love Tunisia very much and in the same way our country stood up for us we will always stand up for it,” said Haim Haddad, a member of the pilgrimage organizing committee from Zarzis.

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Ben Mbarek reported from Tunis, Tunisia.