Keep two-deep leadership in Primary. Scrap rules that equate co-teaching with sex.

According to two-deep leadership rules, all Latter-day Saint (LDS) Primary classes must have two co-teachers, but a man and woman are allowed to co-teach together only if they are married to each other. It’s almost the same rule as the Law of Chastity: a Latter-day Saint man and woman are only allowed to have sex with each other if they are married to each other. But does it make sense to treat co-teaching like sex?

According to two-deep leadership rules in Primary, a Latter-day Saint man and woman are allowed to co-teach together only if they are married to each other.

My local bishopric recently extended a calling to me and my spouse to co-teach a Primary class at our local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) ward. I love teaching (and it’s a great motivation to share my lesson plans here at Exponent II) but I had to think twice about accepting this calling. I examined the rules around teaching Primary and could see why staffing Primary is such a nightmare for Primary presidencies and bishoprics.

In this article…Primary teachers never get a day off.Primary requires two-deep leadership.The two-deep rule in Primary is a reasonable precaution.The time commitment would be more reasonable if Primary teachers worked in teams of three.Primary co-teachers must be married to each other or of the same sex.But what if everybody has sex?Let’s keep two-deep leadership in Primary, but let’s scrap sex-phobic co-teaching restrictions.Primary teachers never get a day off.

Adult and teen Sunday School classes are held only twice a month, alternating with Relief Society/Priesthood and Young Women/Young Men. That means teachers of adult and youth classes get every other week off. 

Primary classes are the only church classes that meet every single week.  Each week, kids attend a shorter Primary class preceded or followed by Singing Time.

That’s great for kids, who tend to have short attention spans. It’s not so great for Primary teachers, who are required to be present every Sunday, with no days off. When a teacher of an adult or youth class needs to miss church for travel or illness, there’s a 50% chance they won’t have to worry about finding a substitute because it’s already their scheduled day off. A primary teacher needs to find a substitute every single time they miss church.

Primary requires two-deep leadership.In keeping with the principle of two-deep leadership, a Primary teacher is not allowed to teach without a co-teacher. Put a second teacher in that empty chair!

But wait, you might ask, since you and your husband are co-teaching this class, you wouldn’t need to find a substitute if just one of you gets sick, right? The healthy spouse could teach alone.

When we co-taught adult Gospel Doctrine, that’s how we covered whenever just one of us missed church. No need to find a substitute if one of the two co-teachers was still available to teach the class.

However, unlike adult classes, Primary classes require two-deep leadership. (Church Handbook 12.3.5) That means both co-teachers must be present every week. So even when it’s my husband’s turn to teach, I’ll still need to be there or find a substitute to sit in the classroom in my place.

The two-deep rule in Primary is a reasonable precaution.

Requiring two adults in every children’s class is based on a precaution developed by the Boy Scouts of America following a series of child sex abuse scandals within their organization. [i] Requiring the presence of an extra adult seems reasonable, given the importance of preventing sexual abuse of children. I mean, it’s literally the least we could do. (What about background checks? Security cameras? Glass doors on classrooms?)

The two-deep rule in Primary began in 2019, after a series of well-publicized activist efforts calling attention to child sexual abuse in church settings. Before that time, only male Primary teachers were required to have a co-teacher. Women could teach Primary alone. Church policymakers were apparently more concerned that men might abuse children than that women would, and the statistics bear that out. Most child sex abuse offenders are male. [ii] But I think there is a strong argument to be made for taking reasonable precautions to protect children from any demographic of abuser, even if the incidence is less common among women.

Another problem with the old policy was that it created an incentive for local wards to staff primary with women and not men. Under the old rule, some bishops and stake presidents even went so far as to ban men from Primary callings altogether. Why would a bishopric choose to use up two male volunteers to staff one classroom when they could staff the same classroom with only one woman? Women are already barred from many callings because of the female priesthood ban, and so the last thing we needed was another excuse for bishoprics to confine us to Primary all the time at the exclusion of other opportunities.

Overall, requiring two teachers in every Primary classroom, regardless of the sex of the teacher, is a win for child safety and gender parity. I think it’s the right way to go, although it certainly creates staffing difficulties for Primary presidencies, who need to recruit a much larger number of teachers for their organization than any other organization in the ward.

The time commitment would be more reasonable if Primary teachers worked in teams of three.

For a time, my local ward experimented with calling three teachers to each Primary classroom. I co-taught a Primary class then with two other women. Each Sunday, one of us taught the lesson, one of us sat in the classroom to provide the mandatory two-deep leadership, and the third person had the day off. If one of us was sick or traveling, we had a built-in substitute available to us; we could trade with the co-teacher who was supposed to be off that week. It was a great way to bring Primary callings closer to the more flexible time commitment of other teaching callings.

Eventually, however, my ward had to abandon the experiment. Not only did it require more people, but assigning three rotating teachers per classroom was complicated by the gendered rules around who is allowed to co-teach with whom. It would have been easier for me to accept this new Primary calling if we could have added a third teacher to our team to lighten the load, but that would be impossible because half of the adults in our ward are forbidden by church policy from co-teaching with me, and the other half are forbidden from co-teaching with my husband.

Primary co-teachers must be married to each other or of the same sex.According to Primary two-deep leadership rules, two people of the same sex may co-teach Primary together.

The LDS Church has a longstanding ban on people of the opposite sex serving together as co-teachers unless they are married to each other. The Handbook states that co-teachers “could be two women, two men, or a married couple.” (Church Handbook 12.3.5)

When I need to miss church, I must find a male substitute because I am the only woman in the ward allowed to co-teach alongside my male spouse. If both of us will be gone, we can’t just group-text the substitute list and take the first two substitutes who say yes; we might end up with a man and a woman teaching together who are not married to each other, and that is not allowed.

This rule has nothing to do with preventing child abuse. In fact, the two-deep leadership policy of the Girl Scouts program requires the two adult leaders to be unmarried, or they need to add a third, unrelated co-teacher to the mix.

But what if everybody has sex?

Since requiring co-teachers of the opposite sex to be married doesn’t improve child safety, and may even make children less safe, why do we have such a rule?

If you thought, “But what if everybody has sex?” you’re thinking like a church policymaker.

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I can’t trace exactly when these gendered co-teaching restrictions began, but it appears that some version of this rule has been in place since before the feminist revolution of the 1970s brought American women back into the workplace in droves. General Authorities who retired from secular work before the ‘70s may have never worked with women, and then they went on to serve full-time in priesthood quorums where women were banned. These men had no practical experience having professional relationships with people of the opposite sex, and invoked policies and teachings based on assumptions that if men and women worked together, adultery would be rampant.

Ironically, while there should be nothing sexy about a man and a woman spending half an hour co-teaching a group of children, the ban on co-teachers of the opposite sex makes the innocent sight of a man and woman teaching a Primary class together seem tantalizing and suspicious and lurid.  

Let’s keep two-deep leadership in Primary, but let’s scrap sex-phobic co-teaching restrictions.Latter-day Saint men and women who are not married to each other are not allowed to co-teach a Primary class, just like they’re not allowed to have sex. But why does the same rule apply?

Before the two-deep leadership policy, following gendered co-teaching restrictions was easy. Put only one teacher in each classroom and no one will have a co-teacher of the opposite sex! But today, these outdated, gendered co-teaching rules interact with the two-deep leadership policy and make staffing Primary even more complicated. What’s the solution?

Implementing two-deep leadership in Primary requires a larger number of staff than ever before, but the safety of our children is worth it. On the other hand, when staffing Primary is already so challenging, why are we clinging to outdated rules that do nothing to protect children and make staffing even harder? It’s time to end gendered rules about who can co-teach with whom so we have maximum flexibility to fully staff our Primary programs.

[i] Here’s my interview with Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), an advocacy organization that helped expose these child sex abuse cases.

[ii] Ironically, although the rule in Primary suggested an awareness among church leaders of the higher risk of sexual abuse by male perpetrators, church policy also required one-on-one interviews of children by bishopric members who were required to be male due to the female priesthood ban. In 2018, this policy improved by allowing a child or youth to have a second adult in the room when the minor requests it, but this policy only allows for the minor being interviewed to request that a guardian be present, not vice versa. The guardian may not even be aware that an interview is taking place. (Church Handbook 31.1.4)