Dear Mormon Woman, What Do We Do Now?
About a month ago, I found myself having an irrationally huge emotional reaction about a relatively minor hurt at church. It felt like the last straw, the feather-light flax that snapped my back, and so I looked backward to try to identify the mountain of straws as they had accumulated. Writing the chronology was therapeutic; flipping the genders to create a negative-image thought experiment was illuminating and honestly pretty shocking, even for me as I wrote it. I opened and closed the article with an impassioned vow that I wasn’t going to do it anymore, and that’s really how I felt.
But what is “it?” What am I not going to do anymore?
What I have come up with so far are three things I am not done with, and three things I am.
Three things I personally am not done with:
1. I am not done with God. This week, a friend who left the church and became an Atheist told me that while she was Mormon, she believed in God, but she hated him. I can understand that — the panic I felt when I confronted my festering fears that God was a polygamous misogynist made me physically sick and brought on a massive depression. Furthermore, I want nothing to do with a Heavenly Mother who abandoned me on earth’s doorstep with a note to talk to Dad or my brothers if I needed help. But with all that said, I keep looking into my heart and I find that I still believe. I have sisters and friends who have helped me salvage my connection to the Divine from the ashes of the temple, and I trust my Maker again like I did when I was little. My prayers have become really honest — if you live in the Bay Area and you see a mom in a minivan crying and talking intensely to herself after school drop-off, it might be me having it out with God. (I address the Divine source of all Goodness who made the Universe and created my spirit as “God,” because it’s ambiguous and doesn’t make me choose which parent I’m talking to.)
2. I am not done with Jesus. It is hard for me that the godhead is represented as all male, and it can feel confusing and marginalizing that Jesus embodies all good traits even though he is a man with a beard… but I love Jesus and I love his message. It’s also important to me that the Christ of the New Testament was a social radical — the way he talked to and about women was revolutionary at the time, respecting them not by patronizing them with praise, but by talking and listening to them as human beings.
3. I am not done going to Church. One of the many factors in my decision to stay is that despite my frustrations, my ward feels like a family. My bishop is as close to an embodiment of the Good Shepherd as I have ever seen. My son’s Primary teacher created games and made cookies and took him to lunch and took him on walks when he was so bored during Sharing Time, he was pushing on the Primary room walls to try to bring the building down like Samson. My Relief Society sisters have been there for me through babies’ births and my crisis during Prop 8 and even reading Dear Mormon Man, which I never thought they would see. Through thick and thin, I have loved them and they have loved me. I feel so much pain and internal conflict when I walk into the church building, but I still have so much to give and so much to learn from being tied to a community… and those people are my community.
And now, three things I personally am done with:
1. I am done violating my integrity by saying “yes” to something that I believe is morally wrong. I believe that I will answer to God alone when this crazy life is over, and I can’t risk the devastation of telling God that I had gone along with something I felt was wrong because someone else — anyone else! — told me to.
2. I am done tolerating “unrighteous” dominion. Thankfully this hasn’t been an issue for me personally in many years. But I’m still writing it because I currently know girls who are being raised by abusive fathers, and many women who are in abusive marriages, and they tolerate it because they love their dads and their husbands and they fear that they will lose everything (most terrifyingly, lose love) if they stand up and say no.
3. I am done tolerating “righteous” dominion. This is much harder to define, so I will use an extreme example to illustrate the point.
Solomon Northrup, the 19th Century African American whose memoir inspired the movie Twelve Years a Slave, described one of his masters this way:
“In my opinion, there never was a more kind, noble, candid, Christian man than William Ford. The influences and associations that had always surrounded him blinded him to the inherent wrong at the bottom of the system of Slavery.”
Of course nothing I have experienced or witnessed in my privileged life even approaches the atrocity of slavery. But Northrup’s astute and compassionate observation that it’s hard for people to see their own culture clearly can be applied broadly. If even a “kind, noble, candid Christian man” didn’t see the evil in one of the most morally reprehensible institutions ever devised, it seems likely that a decent person in a less horrific social system might be similarly unaware of injustices that might exist. Especially if this person grows up seeing his parents and families and teachers and church congregations observing these practices. And certainly, like Slavery was, if these practices seem to be justified by scripture and condoned by God.
There are many noble and good-hearted men whose benevolence soothes the women over whom they preside, and it is only when there is a conflict or crisis that these women realize they are not in an equal power relationship. One of the countless tragedies of institutionalized slavery is that some slaves absorbed and believed the message that God created them to be inferior, and that slavery was their divinely-appointed lot in life. I know women whose view of themselves has been similarly demeaned, women who might revolt against a dramatically abusive patriarch, but who often live with anxiety, depression and resentment without even recognizing its source.
When I proclaim “I’m not doing it anymore,” I mean that I am done subordinating myself to Patriarchy, no matter how generous or warm or affably self-deprecating the patriarch. I mean that I am the peer of all adult human beings, and while I’m happy to take a subordinate role in grad school because I’m new in my program or at work because I’m learning a new skill or at home because my husband really really wants to be the president of vacuuming, I will not take a subordinate role on the basis of my being a woman.
And now the tricky stuff. These concepts are nebulous: what they look like in practice? So far, I am full of more questions than answers. For example, being a full-time mom and depending on my husband’s income has worked out well because he is so great; if he ever ceased being wonderful I would be screwed. I am totally dependent upon his benevolence, and I will certainly not be teaching my daughters to take that risk. Or how do I engage with stake and ward leadership, knowing that I am completely at their mercy? Do I accept callings? Do I participate in programs when their message is “my way or the highway?” Do I accept the offer of a priesthood blessing, knowing that this man’s tender intention to help is bundled with the implication that my access to God is insufficient? I don’t know.
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I am at a cross-roads and I feel exhausted. But as I struggle to honor my integrity while still maintaining my faith, I think of Sue Monk Kidd’s words of encouragement to women re-shaping their spiritual journeys:
There is no place so awake and alive as the edge of becoming. But more than that, birthing the kind of woman (herself) who can authentically say, “My soul is my own” and then embody it in her life, her spirituality, and her community is worth the risk and hardship.
