Escaping Genesis
Four years ago I was given some advice by a seasoned, renowned, and beloved feminist Mormon heroine. I spent years trying to prove her wrong, but today I realized she was right.
In early 2012 I was struggling with my place as a woman in the Church (surprise!), and a friend email-introduced me to this paragon of Mormon feminism and scholarship. She was incredibly generous, and her emails were a lifeline of empathy and encouragement during a very difficult time. But one phrase surprised me: in response to my question “What can we do to move the Church forward?” she wrote, “do your work laterally with other women, but don’t waste your time trying to change the Church. There’s no escaping Genesis.”
Of course I respected her pragmatism and I know I must have sounded naive to her — she had been fighting this battle for decades before I was even born — but her comment felt to me like a resignation. The finality of the phrase roused me to righteous indignation, and my determination to prove her wrong fueled a personal quest. I read stacks of books and wrote research papers and took Institute classes and European History courses, all with the intent of proving that our Church absolutely can escape Genesis, perhaps even more easily than other Judeo-Christian denominations.
For reference, here is one of the problematic passages:
And (the LORD) said, “…Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. …Unto the woman (the LORD) said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree… cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. …And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.
Genesis 3:11–20
I agree with my scholar-mentor that the Church has been historically trapped by this passage of scripture. But it doesn’t have to be. Here are four reasons why the Church can move past its Old Testament legacy:
- It is likely that Genesis was not directly written by a prophet.
Despite its moniker as “the five books of Moses,” the Pentateuch was most likely authored by multiple groups of Hebrew scribes, anywhere from the tenth to the fifth centuries BCE. Moses is estimated to have lived in around 1200 BCE, and left no written record. His stories were passed down orally from generation to generation, with a gap of between two- to seven-hundred years before landing on papyrus. Even assuming the nearest date, this would be like me writing down an orally-transmitted family story from 1816 (and possibly as far back as 1316). It seems likely that during all that time, the story just might have picked up some of the biases of its tellers.
2. Even if the Old Testament was written by Moses himself, the New Testament trumps the Old Testament.
In Matthew 9:16–17, Jesus Christ Himself taught:
16 No man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and the rent is made worse.
17 Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.
Regarding women, the “old garment” or “old bottle” was a culture that was in many ways truly misogynistic, i.e., not just sexist, but woman-loathing. When Jesus Christ the social radical spoke to women as equals in public, when he educated them alongside men, when he entrusted them with the role of witnesses of his mission and his resurrection, I cannot imagine that He intended those new practices to be sewn onto the old cloth of chauvinistic doctrines or poured into the old bottles of demeaning behaviors. Christians, including Mormons, have had no problem eclipsing Old Testament practices like kosher laws, seventh-day sabbath observance and “an eye for an eye;” it’s time the Church applied the same update to the verses pertaining to women.
3. Modern revelation trumps ancient revelation.
Who are we, Martin Luther? Joseph Smith’s frustration with the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura was one of the driving forces behind his prayer leading to the first vision. He founded the entire religion on the concept of current, relevant revelation addressing the needs of the people at the time, even replacing teachings found in the New Testament (like using water instead of wine for the sacrament, for example). If there is a religion on earth that is not trapped by ancient writings, it is ours.
4. The Church has already “escaped” from other false doctrines perpetuated by past prophets.
One recent example is the essay on LDS.org, “Race and the Priesthood,” which states, “Those realities (of slavery and racial discrimination), though unfamiliar and disturbing today, influenced all aspects of people’s lives, including their religion.” This explanation acknowledges that even prophets and apostles (not just Joseph and Brigham, but Moses and Paul) are influenced by the biases of their culture. The essay goes on to make a full renunciation of past racism, proclaiming,
Today, the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects unrighteous actions in a premortal life; that mixed-race marriages are a sin; or that blacks or people of any other race or ethnicity are inferior in any way to anyone else. Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form.
Imagine a similar essay disavowing sexism. The Church is establishing a precedent for confronting difficult issues — it might be an opportune time to capitalize on the momentum.
In conclusion, I believe that it’s possible for the Church to escape from Genesis.
I really do believe that, but as I was getting ready to click “Publish,” I realized that my thesis was off. I had been refuting her statement “there’s no escaping Genesis,” but suddenly it struck me that she didn’t mean that the Church can’t escape, but simply that it won’t. I realized what she had already learned and was trying to tell me: that for a woman to beg a Patriarchal Church to renounce its scripture and publish an essay and change its procedures is, in the first place, playing into the very power structure I reject, and in the second place, probably futile.
Frederick Douglass wrote, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” In many cases, even with a demand (such as “Ordain Women,” which uses the command form of the verb), power does not make concessions. Now I don’t believe people like tender Elder Eyring or gregarious Elder Uchtdorf are power-hungry or that they’re consciously trying to keep women down. But I do think that institutional change is hard — it takes thought and humility and a ton of work, and so there has to be a massive amount of pressure to prioritize those changes. Sometimes power concedes nothing not because it is evil, but because, as Cheiko Okazaki famously observed, “Sometimes I think they get so busy that they forget that we are there.”
Put another way, in order to want to escape from something, you have to be in a significant amount of pain or fear… and Genesis does not hurt or scare men. It hurts and scares women. As long as the steering wheel is solely in the hands of men, this bus will never become a vehicle of escape for women. Women can say “this is hurting me” and “this is scaring me” and “this doesn’t feel right,” and “here are rational, logical reasons why this is wrong,” but the hard truth is that the men at the steering wheel are very busy and they are not the ones in pain. So in all likelihood they will keep replying “I’m so sorry” and “I love you” and “You’re important,” while they keep driving, on and on, in whatever direction they choose. And we will keep seeing women all around us throwing themselves out of the bus.
It seems to me now that my heroine was right on all three counts: I have spent a long time trying to change the Church, and it has been a huge waste of time. There’s no escaping Genesis for women because Genesis establishes Patriarchy, and Patriarchy is, by definition,
pa·tri·arch·y (ˈpātrēˌärkē/) noun: A system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it.
What remains, for us women who are still on the bus, is to work laterally with each other.
