Our tradition has developed a number of traditional religious titles, but they were never fixed. As John Hamer’s illustrations show, priesthood offices and their labels have shifted again and again, and some branches – Strangites, for instance – layered on still more.
I have already spoken about how I think Joseph Smith Jr. consolidated power into a hierarchy, designated certain titles along that hierarchy, and put himself at the top; I also explored why I think this was a bad decision for the Restoration. However, I have been reluctant to do away with spiritual titles in their entirety, because I feel like titles can serve as shorthand for what a person’s calling is. For example, I feel like I am meant to offer companionship, sanctuary, nurturing, encouragement, revival, and support to members of my communities. This is quite the mouthful, but I feel like this is all summed up with the title “matriarch”.
While drafting posts for the Reform Mormonism Facebook page – posts that spotlight quotes from our first General Conference – I asked friends how they’d like to be addressed. I wanted to do this because having my call recognized and affirmed by others feels good, and I want to give that feeling to others.
I asked a couple of my Reform Mormon friends what their preferred spiritual titles are, and I was met with a mix of responses.
One friend is a priestess. Her spirituality has always been very important to her, and as a teenager she was ordained as a priest by her grandfather. Now that she has transitioned genders and found Mormonism anew, being a priestess affirms her gender, harkens back to her spiritual origins, and also honors the connection she has with her grandfather.
Another friend didn’t want to use a traditional Mormon priesthood title, because noko (neo-pronoun) felt that would be narcissistic or egotistical of nokom (neo-pronoun) to take one on. Noko feels like nokom’s main connection to spirituality and the divine is through the processes of scholarship and intellectual work (reading biographies, writing about theology, studying scriptural translations), and a title that reflects that well is “Seeker”.
A third friend also didn’t want to use a traditional Mormon priesthood title, and preferred to be called “fellow traveler”. He likes this, because it implies his long journey of seeking truth and clarity, but now refusing to be tied down by dogmatic beliefs. He is filled with happiness whenever his path crosses with folks who share the same values and goals as him, and he doesn’t really care where their path started or where it’ll end.
I had two friends who declined to identify with a title altogether. Their perspective took the stance that a title boxes them into something, and they don’t want to be tied down by anything. They also implied that having titles could inadvertently support or create a hierarchy. I definitely understand this perspective, and respect people who decline to identify by a title, because they see the pain that titles have caused people.
I think our little eclectic group of Mormons have contributed something wonderful to our tradition: spiritual titles don’t need to be prescriptions, they can be descriptions. Additionally, the titles that we identify with don’t need to be restricted to the titles that Joseph Smith Jr. specified; they can be anything we feel called to.
That being said, as I argued in my post “My Relationship With The Term ‘Prophet’“, spiritual titles should not imply that someone has a more direct connection to the heavens. Everyone, without exception, has an equal right to revelation.