Exponent II's Blog, page 104

I Won’t Hate This Body…Even If You Think I Should

Dear Lord,

Whatever you do, please don’t make me flat chested

-a very selfish prayer from seven-year-old Ramona.

When I was a wee little thing, I asked Heavenly Father to bless me with big boobs. Greatly influenced by watching soap operas during the entire summer vacation, I discovered that the women on television who seemed to get the most attention seemed to be blessed with large chests and tiny waists.

During my childhood years (before age 10), I had already grown used to the jabs about my size. Although there was nothing wrong with my body as I nursed the same baby fat that others experienced before puberty, people around me seemed more interested in giving a child problems about her weight.

I thank my mom now as an adult for her constant guidance during these formative years of development. There was no topic too taboo that couldn’t be discussed as my body started to change. Patiently and lovingly, she listened to each silly question, slowly preparing me for a world that would throw a label at me in hopes that it would stick. In one such instance while in primary (elementary) school, I asked my mom if HIV was contracted by dancing on boys.

We recall this story fondly now. A year or so later, I would start puberty at age 9 1/2. Holding back her laughter, my mom dismissed the school ground rumor and set me straight.

Whether I ate a salad or something super unhealthy, I realized early on that it didn’t matter at all. I was big and I needed to do something about it.

With childish naivety, I returned to school with the new knowledge that unless I engaged in sexual activity with boys, there would be zero chance that I would contract a sexually transmitted disease. Looking back now, I recognize that this silly rumor was likely introduced by an older adult seeking to prevent their child from behaving *wuffless at the school dance*. Boldly and proudly, I shared what my mother had said with the rest of my class and danced the day away.

Still, criticism of my body and what I choose to do with it followed. At age 11, I had shapely hips and a well-developed bust. While many of the girls were yet to discover the joys and horrors of puberty, I began in elementary school and was somewhat in an expert in the changes occurring in my body.

As I got older, I recognized that society labeled my body differently. While my friends developed late in their teens, by age fourteen I was already an expert on my developing body. I handled each change in stride, never backing down from the rapid changes that seemed to be happening. I filled out with curves, a larger cup size each year and little to no height increase.

In high school, I fell under the radar of those who told me my body was all wrong. After each summer break, one teacher would tell me how big I had gotten over the break. I shrugged off the insults presented under the guise of concern at first. As far as teenage Ramona was concerned, my body and whatever changes happened to it were my business alone.

Things got bad when I joined the local Red Cross Youth Link. While a member, the instructor at every opportunity would remind me of my fatness, drilling it into my head that I needed to do something about myself and my ever-changing body.

At first, I responded with polite nods, then as time went on, I grew tired of his jeering even when I had graduated secondary (high) school. So, as disrespectfully as I could, I resorted to swearing at him whenever I could.

As a Christian, my outbursts betrayed the calm and collected person I aspired to be. Still, I resorted to angry insults as the years of passivity boiled over like an angry kettle shrilling its disdain.

I eventually phased away from my high school group of friends and the organization that bound us all together.  Still, the insults followed as I went through life and eventually joined the church. In my dating journey, I was seen as too curvy to be seen as beautiful. I was relegated to the girl who would take whatever was presented in hopes that a small glimmer of attention from the opposite sex. Still relatively new in a gospel that sometimes values the opinion of men more than women, I kept silent in fear that my outspokenness would rock the boat.

For years, I hated my body. I refused to take full-body photos and instead limited my social media photos to selfies and headshots. Since entering the thirties club, a part of me thinks that it’s about time that I stop being ashamed of the body that has kept me throughout these years on the earth.

In a church that values appearances over personality, I decided to be a cheerleader for myself as the Word of Wisdom was brandished each time I was rejected as a romantic interest. I’ve seen the ugly side of the Word of Wisdom, coming face to face with young women tearing their bodies apart for the sake of perfection which doesn’t exist. I’ve seen the damaging dysmorphic thoughts associated with being skinny.

Body dysmorphic thoughts seem to be second nature in LDS culture yet there is no scripture that screams for us to hate our bodies. Yet, its so hard to cut out the harmful narratives which have continued for far too long

In Utah this culture is especially prevalent which I saw firsthand as mothers and daughters shame their daughters into losing weight at the sight of one ounce of jiggle. I remember sitting next to a friend as she was berated for getting a little thicker post-mission. She was in no way fat but under the guise of the Word of Wisdom, a little jiggle deemed her unworthy to marry.

Eventually, when I got my own patriarchal blessing, I would hear mention of my weight as if it was my only defining feature. The mention of my body does little to soothe my mind since I’ve grown in nuance. Due to this, I have slowly begun reading it less.

In time, I found the voice to dismiss the revolving wheel of toxic positivity I had placed around myself as an act of self-preservation as a fledging member of the church.

My body which has seen disease, self-harm, and the stresses of mental and physical stress has been good to me…even if others deem it not to be.

I am a woman whose worth has been shaped by the ancestors, their curves and bodies mirroring mine long after their passing. In some ways, the thing people assume to be wrong and so horribly flawed, connects me to my ancestors in a way that no family history work has done.

And the lesson I take away from this ordeal is that if someone else has to define my worth that that worth is simply a projection of their own insecurity.

I love this body regardless. I love this body forevermore.

*Wuffless/Wutless (Bajan slang)- good-for-nothing, promiscuous, troublesome worthless, terrible, no good

*Wukking up/wuk up- a dance done by gyrating one’s waistline, with heavy emphasis on the forward and backward motions

*School dances in Barbados are usually where boys and girls dance together in extremely close contact by wukking up(usually on each other.

Classism and Sexism: Lingering Flaws of a “Perfect Man” in the Biblical Book of Job

In the very first verse of the Book of Job, the poet describes Job as “perfect,” but as this epoch poem progresses, this already perfect person manages to grow even more (Job 1:1). In the wake of tragedy, he learns to maintain faith while accepting ambiguity, cope with suffering, comfort the afflicted, and believe in himself even when others judge him as unworthy. He grapples with the question of evil and expands his perspective. 

And yet, modern readers can witness blindspots that stay with Job even after Job’s afflictions have helped him to grow in other ways. These issues are visible to us thanks to the work of generations of reformers who have opened our eyes to injustices which were so accepted and commonplace at the time of Job that neither he, nor his poet, nor the poem’s contemporary readers would have seen them as problems.

In chapter 30, without awareness of any problem with this attitude, Job reveals his disdain for the “vile” lower classes during a monologue about how unfair it is that he has joined their ranks.

1 But now they that are younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock. 

8 …They were children of fools, yea, children of base men: they were viler than the earth. 

9 And now am I their song, yea, I am their byword. 

Job 30:1;8-9

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Job’s scathing contempt for these lower-class people takes the form of mocking their poverty: “Through want and hard hunger they gnaw the dry and desolate ground. . . . They are driven out from society; people shout after them as after a thief. In the gullies of wadis they must live, in holes in the ground, and in the rocks” (30:3, 5–6). 

—Carol A. Newsom, Job, Women’s Bible Commentary by Carol A. Newsom, Sharon H. Ringe and Jacqueline E. Lapsley

Although Job has expressed indignation about the failure of his societal equals—his “friends”—to show “kindness” to him, it does not occur to him that such kindness should also be extended to those of lower rank in their society (Job 6:14; Job 30). Job has been exemplary in his charitable contributions to the lower classes (Job 29:12-16). No one from his time period would have expected anything more from him.

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If we want to read literature which better explores themes of classism, one example is Emma by Jane Austen, which was written more than 2,000 years after the Book of Job. Austen’s society was also heavily classist—ongoing reforms had not yet rooted out the sticky problem of classism, even more than two millennia after Job’s era—but society had progressed to the point that a philosopher like Austen could recognize classism as a sin.

Like Job, the character of Emma is a model upper-class person, dispensing gift baskets liberally to the poor. Until the end of the book, she also looks down on them and occasionally mocks them. But as the character evolves, she has an epiphany, “I have given them charity but not kindness.” (1996 film adaptation)

 

Returning to the Book of Job and turning the page to chapter 31, Job brags about his exemplary adherence to the law of chastity:

1 I made a covenant with mine eyes; why then should I think upon a maid?

9 …If mine heart have been deceived by a woman, or if I have laid wait at my neighbour’s door;

10 Then let my wife grind unto another, and let others bow down upon her.

Job 31:1, 9-10

Yikes! Job thinks the rape of his wife would be a just punishment to him for his infidelity, if he were to stray?

Job’s words are in keeping with the patriarchal perspective that saw a woman’s sexuality as the property of her husband and an abuse of it as an injury to the husband, rather than to the woman herself. Although modern readers are critical of the proprietary view of women in Job 29–31 and of the way concern for honor tends to translate into social resentment and contempt, there is little indication that an ancient audience would have so reacted. For them, chapters 29–31 would have presented Job in the noblest possible terms—a model patriarch. He is, as God has described him, a man who “fears God and turns away from evil” (1:8).

—Carol A. Newsom, Job, Women’s Bible Commentary by Carol A. Newsom, Sharon H. Ringe and Jacqueline E. Lapsley

Job and His Three Daughters by William Blake, 1805, Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

While women’s rights issues were off the radar of Job’s poet, there is a hint in some of the final verses of the poem that the attitude of Job toward women might have evolved, but this story was left unwritten in the background. When his time of adversity comes to a close, Job and his wife are blessed with children and the poet provides the names of Job’s three daughters: Jemima, Kezia and Keren-happuch; but not his sons, an unusual choice at a time when it was common to record the names of sons but not bother to record the names of daughters (Job 42:14). The poet reports that these daughters were included as Job’s heirs alongside their brothers, which means they were treated with unusual equity for women of their time (Job 42:15). 

The Book of Job is not the story of a perfect man, but rather, of a man who seemed perfect to the people of his time. We can learn from Job, both from the lessons he learned, and from those he didn’t. Even in the wake of life-altering disruption, Job found answers only to the questions he diligently sought to answer. The questions he never thought to ask remained a mystery to him. Suffering does not educate on its own. Simply experiencing adversity does not always yield enlightenment. Just as it is true that the most righteous people do not always have the most blessings—a major theme of the Book of Job—the most afflicted people do not always have the most wisdom. 

Does Our Patriarchal LDS Church Make Men the Absolute Best, or the Absolute Worst? (Or Some of Each?)

Young LDS men come of age in a system that teaches them to respect women by never telling dirty jokes about them…but also teaches them to preside over them, be their portal to God in the temple, know their secret name to call them up at the resurrection, have multiple women as spouses in the eternities, give blessings, extend callings and counsel them with their priesthood authority with no required reciprocity. Is that really the highest version of respect?

Years ago, I read a book about two American women who were kidnapped in Afghanistan. Despite struggling to escape, passerby just turned their heads and looked the other way. Nobody wanted to get involved because it wasn’t their problem.

I went out running the next morning and started thinking about how different my life was in America, and specifically, in LDS central Utah Country. I was wearing a tank top and yoga pants, my most comfortable running outfit, and I knew that it was highly unlikely for anyone to grab me and rape me because they thought I was wearing something too form fitting. And above that, I knew that even if I did ever choose to run in just a sports bra and short shorts, still no one was likely to harass me or say anything. And if someone did attack me, I believed completely that anyone driving by me on the road would stop and help me. The local men that I knew would fight to the death to stop a rapist or killer from hurting a woman that they didn’t know, even if she was dressed “immodestly”. That’s just the type of men I felt surrounded by in my town.

But within a few days of that book and that reflective run, I heard another story from a woman in a nearby stake. At their annual conference, the stake president had given a talk about modesty requirements for the women in their stake. He told everyone about driving home from work in the evenings and seeing women that he knew outside running for exercise on the sidewalks and roads, and that to his disappointment, they were often wearing clothing that was too tight, too short, or impossible to wear their sacred temple garments with. He said he loved and cared about these women and their safety, and he hated that he had to avert his eyes to avoid looking at them in their immodest attire. From that day forward, he offered a challenge to the women in his stake to never exercise in clothing that they couldn’t wear their garments with.

This is just a stock LDS photo from the internet – if you happen to know this man in real life, don’t blame him for this talk because it wasn’t him.

The woman who told me this story was angry with his talk. She thought he was placing the blame for his own perverted thoughts on the women he passed who were just out for an evening run in perfectly appropriate exercise clothing. I was also irritated by his decree, because I worked out and went running regularly enough to know how impractical his suggestion was. In a long race (like a marathon) skin chafing is a big concern and an extra layer of garments and loose material to cover them would make it so much worse. And while some people in some climates could comfortably do what he asked, I imagined I would personally pass out from heat stroke with the extra layers before stripping them off or giving up on exercise completely. His admonishment to wear only garment friendly running clothes seemed as silly and uninformed to me as asking competitive swimmers to wear them under their speedos. It wasn’t my stake, and I was glad.

A couple years later, I heard the story of his talk again, this time from two other women in his stake. At that point I was able to hear the aftermath of what it had caused in their ward. There had been a fairly successful running/walking group in their ward up until his talk (this was in the heyday of those smaller enrichment weekly activity groups). It included women who were active, inactive, and even non-members. They’d meet up for walks, pushing strollers and socializing, and those who were more ambitious would go running together and train for some local races.

After the stake president’s talk about wearing only garment friendly clothing to exercise in, the Relief Society president and bishop decided to make that a rule of this walking club. Because it was church sponsored, the women coming had to now wear sleeves and shorts that went to the knee, whether or not garments were underneath them. This felt silly and downright hostile to some of the women in the group (especially to those who hadn’t even gone through the temple or weren’t church members), while others felt that it was an important and necessary rule to follow. To them it was a test of their faithfulness to God, and anyone who chose to disregard the rule was judged harshly.

With no surprise, the group fell apart shortly after, with bad feelings all around. Some women felt like they were being treated as sex objects by the priesthood leadership – even on a walk around the park with other moms and babies on a weekday morning. Some women felt hurt and judged when they didn’t get the memo fast enough that sleeves were required when running 5ks now. Other women were annoyed or felt self-righteous when other members of their exercise group ignored the counsel they’d received from their leaders. Everyone felt a loss of their fun social group when it inevitably shut down amidst hurt feelings and broken friendships.

Just days after thinking about how incredible LDS men are, I was quickly brought back to the reality that actually, sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes their culture, positions of power, and perceived superior connection to God can make them the absolute worst. They sometimes treat Latter-day Saint women like children, and it’s simply infuriating because they are the ones in ultimate authority over everything. No woman could make an arbitrary rule that subsequently breaks up the Elder’s Quorum basketball night because half of them follow it and half of them don’t, because a woman is never in a position of authority over men to do something like that. Even if a woman thinks she knows better than her male peers about how they should dress themselves, she will never have an opportunity to declare her own opinion as the will of the Lord for them over a pulpit.

I’ve been told often (generally by faithful men in my life) about all the times in Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthood lessons they were taught to respect women. I believe that’s true, in that they were told to treat us well by their actions and thoughts, and many times I have felt that from them. However, as long as we are all chained to a system that places men perpetually in positions of authority over women, and as long as men write the doctrine, receive the revelation, interpret the scripture, take up the vast majority of general conference talks, preside and speak prominently at our women’s meetings, and are taught leadership skills as youth that girls never get – it doesn’t matter how many times boys are told to respect women. We are bound to a system that inherently disrespects our intellect and ability to lead ourselves and others. 

When the stake president saw women in his stake exercising, rather than just looking away at something that made him feel uncomfortable, he interpreted those feelings as God prompting him to give instruction to all of the women in his stake that would make his discomfort go away. That’s not because he wasn’t told repeatedly throughout his life to respect us, it’s because the system he was completely enmeshed in from childhood led him to believe that his thoughts as a high-ranking priesthood leader were God’s commandments to these women. 

I don’t want that kind of relationship with men, where they’ll respect me by not telling off color jokes in my presence, but simultaneously believe God has called them to direct my life and guide decisions for me through the words they choose to say to me in a priesthood blessing. I want to be met as a true equal, where I could place my hands on their heads and counsel them right back. The older I get, the more anything less than a true respect created from equality in authority and decision-making feels patronizing and condescending. We treat little children well by sheltering them from crude or scary circumstances and making decisions for them about their lives. That should not be the same way we treat adult women. Sisters in the church deserve personal authority, leadership opportunities over all members of the church (male and female), equal time at the pulpit in every meeting of conference, and a direct relationship with God (which includes Heavenly Mother as an equally visible partner to Heavenly Father), free of any middleman they covenant through.

In short, they should be treated like the men. Then it’ll feel like respect.

Ripe Fruit, Poverty, and the Corruption of Religion

This past week I was at a Community of Christ family camp in the mountains of Northern Utah. It was a hot and dry week and the campground was green with trees. At any time of day I could hear birdsong and kids playing. My voice was hoarse with talking and catching up with old friends and making new ones. I listened to many stories of our camp participants, often about the difficult struggles they are experiencing now or have experienced during the pandemic. That kind of sharing and listening is sacred and essential to making meaningful connections and developing authentic relationships. It was a beautiful week of relationship building.

At a big event like this one, there are so many jobs and responsibilities to make camp run smoothly. Everyone contributed through washing dishes, cleaning bathrooms, teaching children, running campfires, and preparing food. We were fortunate to have a week of great food. One of the roles that I played at camp was kitchen assistant. I arrived at the kitchen bright and early to help with breakfast. I washed my hands, put on my apron, and started cutting up bags of apples for breakfast. Though most of the fruit was ripe and ready to be eaten, a few of the apples were rotten and past their prime. I had to throw them away. 

Ripe summer fruits are delicious, but fragile. The sweetness of fruit is fleeting and quickly turns to decay, making what was once desirable into something disgusting. The ripeness of fruit is not enduring, but part of the life cycle that returns seeds to the earth to begin the growing cycle again.

This theme of the transience of ripeness and beauty is an important one in the history of art. After the Protestant Reformation, Dutch artists were forbidden by church leaders to paint traditional biblical scenes. Instead, artists painted ordinary objects that often included fruit and flowers––the still life paintings that we know today. These common objects took on moral meanings in art. Paintings of flowers in full bloom and ripe fruit––sometimes beginning to decay––were important reminders of death and mortality. These paintings reminded viewers that the ripeness of fruit, like the beauty of youth or the ease of prosperous times, did not last forever.

The lectionary text for today begins with the prophet Amos’ vision of a bowl of summer fruits presented to him by God. In my mind, this vision recalls the rotten apples at camp and the fruit painted by Dutch artists. It is a signal that something desirable is coming to an end or a threatened end.

Amos lived during the eighth century BCE, which was notable for being a time of relative peace for Israel. Scholars agree that the Book of Amos is the earliest of the prophetic books, but disagree about who he was. Scholar Donald Gowan, in The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary, discusses the “Amos tradition” instead of Amos as a single historical person and identifies the Amos tradition’s contribution to scripture as “the beginning of a unique tradition in the history of religion: prophecies of the approaching end of the existence of God’s people based upon God’s judgment of them for failing to live according to the divine standards.” Many more prophets followed in the tradition of Amos.

When I was a Mormon, I used to understand scriptural prophecy in a literal way. This meant that texts like this one in the Book of Amos were foretelling a future that was filled with sorrow and destruction as a failure to keep God’s commandments. 

Today, I understand these texts in a different way. Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann warned against the kinds of readings I used to embrace. In his classic book The Prophetic Imagination, Brueggemann wrote that “The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.” In other words, the job of the prophet is to challenge cultural norms and open us up to new ways of thinking. He noted that prophets were not fortune tellers and that their writings were more than books of righteous indignation.

After the vision of the fruit, this metaphor for the fleeting nature of prosperity, God gets angry and the text tells the author that God is angry because of the ways in which the Israelites treat the poor in their communities. The author tells us that God is ready to destroy God’s people because of how angry God is with the ways in which they have cheated and dismissed the poor and cared for money and their own self-interest more than the care and thriving of all of God’s people. And then God goes on and on about the terrible things God will do in consequence in an effort to get the author to understand the seriousness of the community’s sin.

How should we understand this text? What is the Amos tradition really getting at? Jewish theologian and Civil Rights activist Abraham Heschel wrote extensively on the role of Hebrew prophets in his book titled The Prophets. In the first chapter, he made a number of observations about prophets and prophetic texts that can help inform our understanding of Amos today. Heschel’s work has also really helped me personally to reframe the meaning of prophets and prophetic texts away from Mormon bureaucrats holding tight to white Evangelical norms and toward prophets holding communities accountable for the systems of oppression that they hold in place.

At the risk of being overly academic, I want to share some of Heschel’s insights that are helpful in understanding Amos’ vision of fruit and the conversation he has with God. Heschel wrote that prophets are extremely sensitive to injustice and call out the corruption of religion. Prophets make predictions of disaster, which are really calls to repentance. When they speak, they begin with doom and then emphasize hope. Most importantly for our text today, prophets experience the feelings of God and prophets teach that few are guilty but all are responsible.

The Amos tradition communicated God’s anger at the injustice experienced by the poor at the hands of a community that was in prosperous times. The author told his readers that God felt this injustice acutely and threatened to destroy all prior agreements with Israel because some Israelites were exploiting the poor in their own self interest. 

The text isn’t telling us what God would do so much as how God felt as God witnessed the sin of oppressing the poor. God was saying that regardless of who started this situation, everyone in the community was responsible for ending it. Here, God was siding with the poor, which is a constant theme in scripture and a central tenet of liberation theology, which has influenced Community of Christ since the 1960s.

The difficulty of applying the meaning of the text to our own time is that there are so many applicable situations in our cultures and communities that routinely afflict the poor, grow the ranks of the poor, and criminalize the poor so that they can better be exploited and manipulated by others. This happens in so many ways in our communities and countries that we may not always be able to see it. Christian culture in my community justifies this by spreading the following three myths: 1) that those who are poor deserve to be poor, 2) that hard work can easily pull people out of poverty, and 3) that the trauma of poverty is not a barrier to escaping poverty. Contemporary Christianity has been complicit in perpetuating these myths about poverty and the reading for today makes it clear that our contemporary judgements are not in alignment with God’s will.

When a society marginalizes a group of people, we make that group more likely to experience poverty.

When laws that criminalize LGBT identities and seek to exclude LGBT people from schools, workplaces, housing, healthcare, sports teams, public bathrooms, or even public discussion, we create poverty where none need exist. These kinds of exclusion from public spaces creates additional difficulties for LGBT folks in securing jobs, housing, and other necessities of life. By politicizing LGBT identities, we rob people of opportunity. When cultural practices encourage and maintain racial segregation in schools, neighborhoods, jobs, we create poverty where none need exist. 

When police treat Black, Indigenous, and other people of color as criminals in a society that associates these identities with criminality, we create poverty where none need exist. Incarceration ensures poverty and formerly incarcerated individuals will have difficulty getting a job for the rest of their lives.

When minimum wage is not a livable wage, we ensure that people will be trapped in poverty with no way to work their way out. Corporations created this cycle of poverty, but all of us allow it to continue.

Laws that criminalize safe abortion impact many people in society and they grow the ranks of the poor in ways that disproportionately impact women and gender minorities. 

When a society marginalizes a group of people, we make that group more likely to experience poverty. In doing so, we create injustice and God is sensitive to the violence that these injustices inflict on the lives of God’s people. 

And if we are telling ourselves right now that we didn’t create these systems, that we are not responsible for creating transphobia, homophobia, racism, the prison system, minimum wage laws, or the overthrow of established abortion rights, the Amos tradition is telling us that we are still responsible for reducing the oppression that people experience. And if we are using our religion to justify inaction and as inspiration dole out blame, exclusion, and shame on those who we have created as poor, the Amos tradition is telling us that our religion is corrupt and we are still responsible.

This visionary experience in the Book of Amos speaks to our Enduring Principle of pursuing peace, which we engage when we resist and work to change unjust systems. The work of repentance that the Amos tradition calls us into aligns with contemporary scripture in Community of Christ.

“When your willingness to live in sacred community as Christ’s new creation exceeds your natural fear of spiritual and relational transformation, you will become who you are called to be. The rise of Zion the beautiful, the peaceful reign of Christ, awaits your wholehearted response to the call to make and steadfastly hold to God’s covenant of peace in Jesus Christ.

Doctrine and Covenants 164:9b

Our experience of living in prosperous times, like bowls of fruit and ripe apples, will not last forever. If our prosperity and privilege causes us to ignore the poor, grow the ranks of the poor, and exploit the poor, we sin against God’s people. May we turn away from these sins, open our eyes, and feel the anger at injustice that God feels, understanding that we may not be guilty, but we are responsible for pursuing peace and undoing the corrupt systems that are growing around us.

Pray with me:

God of the Poor, 
Remind us that your love is not limited to the prosperous
That ripe fruit is not enduring
But your love for your people
And especially those who we have made poor
Lasts forever.
Help us to hear this call to repentance
To see and resist systems of injustice
That create disadvantage and harm all around us.
Plant in us a vision for a more just and gentle future
That nags at us continually.
In the name of Jesus, the peaceful one,
Amen.

This sermon was given at the Beyond the Walls online gathering on July 17, 2022.

Called to Serve?

A recent mission-centered talk by a high councilman keeps percolating in my thoughts. The speaker hoped to inspire young men to serve LDS missions. He made it very clear that boys are called to serve missions. For boys, a mission is expected and required by God. Girls, on the other hand, can be called to serve. Missions are nice for girls, but optional.

This is fairly common rhetoric, but this speaker emphasized the extraordinary spiritual experiences offered to male on missions by giving examples from letters by a current female missionary. He spent his talk urging young men to prepare for missions by sharing experiences from an enthusiastic young female missionary. Yet, this spiritual awakening and life-changing mission is just suggested for her and it can not prepare her for the authority and responsibility that male missionaries will receive from serving a mission. And it hurt to be once again reminded of how many spiritual experiences are reserved for men, but bolstered by women.

In a 2018 youth devotional, the oft-quoted Russell M Nelson asked youth, “Would you like to be a big part of the greatest challenge, the greatest cause, and the greatest work on the earth today?” One could argue that he is more generally discussing missionary-work, rather than missions. However, missions are often lauded as the greatest experience of a man’s life and an essential one. Why, then, isn’t this the case for women?

I’m laughing at myself a bit as I write this because I have a conundrum. I actually dislike the incessant push for all young men to go on a mission. There is far too much pressure in the LDS church to conform and follow one path to spirituality and righteousness. I don’t actually want the circle of expectations to broaden and pressure more people to serve missions. But I do want to explore why the LDS church doesn’t see how problematic it is to describe a mission as a “pivotal role in [an] unprecedented event” for men, but a “powerful, but optional, opportunity for women (Russell M Nelson, General Conference, April, 2022).” This only serves to emphasize how so many exceptional spiritual experiences are reserved for men. It also lays bear the point that men are essential to leading, teaching, and speaking for the Lord; women are nice to bring along.

In the April 2022 General Conference, M. Russell Ballard said the following about his mission experience:

“My full-time missionary service as a young man in England blessed my life and shaped my spiritual destiny.”“My missionary service prepared me to be a better husband and father and to be successful in business. It also prepared me for a lifetime of service to the Lord in His Church.”“Of all the training I have received in my Church assignments, none has been more important to me than the training I received as a nineteen-year-old elder serving a full-time mission.”

This sounds incredible, doesn’t it? According to Ballard, his mission became the stepping-stone for both spiritual and temporal successes. Like many men, he describes his mission as transformative and life-altering. Simply being born biologically male qualifies a man to have all of these unique priesthood experiences if he chooses them; including baptizing and confirming new members, mission leadership, and continuous, and institutionalized spiritual authority and responsibility throughout his life.

For women, on the other hand, “a mission is also a powerful, but optional, opportunity. We love sister missionaries and welcome them wholeheartedly,” according to Russell M. Nelson. A sister missionary is neat and helpful, but she will not baptize, confirm, act as mission leader, or gain institutionalized spiritual authority and responsibility throughout her life. This is why I didn’t serve a mission. It wasn’t necessary for me and I honestly didn’t believe the full spiritual experiences of being a missionary were open to me as a woman. Now, I listen to these talks directed at my children and my heart breaks for young girls hearing this same message.

Some, like Dale G. Renlund, may argue that this messaging is because women are naturally more spiritual, so their divine nature doesn’t require a mission. He explained in the April 2022 Women’s Conference, “This [divine nature] is intrinsic to who we are. It is spiritually ‘genetic,’ inherited from our heavenly parents,16 and requires no effort on our part.” This matches much of what I’ve heard throughout my life about why only men hold priesthood responsibilities: women don’t need them because we are more spiritually mature. Spoiler alert: I don’t believe this is true, but instead a way to argue for continuing the patriarchal order that benefits men.

Renlund then goes on to compare missionary work to a soccer match, where all kinds of players are needed to protect and achieve a goal. This is meant to be inspiring for women, but I see missions as a feeder league in this scenario, where teams are required to include women, but they have limited ways to contribute. On this team, of course, women play a supporting role. It’s nice if they join the match and they can bolster the team’s success. The team loves women, but they don’t need the full feeder team experience because they are already so advanced in their unique soccer gifts. Their stories will be freely used to recruit more essential male players to the team, though.

This might be acceptable if women, who do not need the same feeder team experience, could also go on to join the major leagues as coaches, team captains, team owners, or on the board of directors. But they can’t. In fact, there’s a separate women’s team, but it is coached and led by men too. In reality, when the special co-ed season ends, it would be ideal if women could keep the uniforms clean, bring snacks, refill water bottles, boost morale, keep a team schedule (under the direction of a man), and watch the kids during games. And if no women show up to a Sunday game? It’s okay because all of the essential roles are filled without them.

Do I sound overly cynical? Perhaps. But listening to institutionalized exclusion and inequality couched in such kind words and accolades for women is painful and infuriating. What would I prefer? Well, in a dream world, women and men would have equal opportunities for leadership and authority in the LDS church and this disparity wouldn’t exist. If this is unrealistic, then missions should be encouraged as a spiritual calling that is optional, but equally important and life-changing for both women and men.

Come Follow Me: Psalms 1-2; 8; 19-33; 40; 46 “The Lord Is My Shepherd”

CW: Rape

Note: I didn’t limit myself to the specific verses suggested in the lesson, but tried (generally) to stay within the range of Psalms 1-46. I strayed a little outside that too, but hopefully it’ll still be useful for the other lessons on the Book of Psalms and will not interfere with anyone else’s lesson ideas. I just figured that many of the suggested Psalms are well-trodden territory and it is worth exploring more.

What I like about the Bible as compared to the Book of Mormon is that you get a more rounded understanding of the people – the heroes do things we see as villainous.  The villains act in ways we don’t understand to be wrong.  The people seem like real people, albeit living in a very different culture and society.  The book of Psalms encapsulates that – we don’t simply see Psalms of praise.  The Psalmists also rail against unfairness, question why God is gone, ask for their enemies to be punished, and lament the hardships in their lives.  In short, they remind me of my relationship with God – I want a relationship, but I am a hot mess.

One important pattern I see in the Psalms that women in the modern Church need to hear is that the Psalmists lift their voices.  In many ways the Church has taught us not to speak up or speak out.  In 2014 Elder Ballard infamously warned women “don’t talk too much.”   It isn’t hard to find quotes where women are encouraged to speak.  But the overall culture of our Church is one that devalues female voices.  There are few female speakers in General Conference.  Women are rarely the keynote speaker of any major conference directed at women, and are never the keynote speaker addressing men.  As a result the material for lessons tends to also be male-authored. The model for women is often one of sweetness, compliance and submissiveness. The Psalmists are not submissive and quiet.  They openly complain, ask hard questions, and demand things, just as they are vocal in praise, gratitude and assurance that the Lord is with them. Although the Psalms likely were not written by or for women, and are certainly not attributed to women, we can still use them as a lens to understand both the women of the Bible, and our modern experience as being women of God.

Authenticity Before God

The Psalms are examples of how we can and should be authentic in our communication with God.

Often God can feel very far away

“How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord? For ever? How long wilt thou hidden thy face from me?

Psalm 13:1

Have you ever felt like this? Forgotten by God? Or that God does not want to connect with you? Have you ever blamed God for something, or felt like God should have changed an outcome?

The Psalmists often demanded, rather than petitioning – they used the imperative. For instance, look at the verbs in Psalm 17. The author commanded God using the following words: hold, incline, hear, shew, keep, arise, disappoint, cast down, deliver.

When you pray, do you ever use the imperative? Why or why not? How do you think it changes patterns of prayer when you use commands rather than supplication?

Many Psalms refer to enemies, and a desire that God bring them down and lift up the speaker.

“Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.”

Psalms 23:5

While this seems fairly benign (I get to eat while my enemies, presumably hungry, watch me) others are much more aggressive, asking that God break the enemy’s teeth, or thrust the enemy to hell. The Psalmists are honest about anger, disappointment, and hatred.  They bring all the ugliness of humanity before God, not trying to pretend to be better than they are, or hide the darkness within from someone who sees it all any way. (e.g. Psalm 58:6,  Psalm 69:28, Psalm 137:8-9). There is no purpose in posturing and pretending not to have feelings of anger, jealousy, impatience, dislike or any other unflattering emotion. God knows we feel that way. The Psalmists did not hide their humanity behind a veneer of pious devotion, and we can follow their example in our prayers.

Have you ever talked to God in moments of anger at other people? If the Psalms are patterns for us to follow, does this mean God condones seeking vengeance? If not, what do you think we are supposed to get from vengeful psalms?

Using Psalms to Hear Biblical Women

For the most part the Psalms were probably written by men and used in male-centered worship.  This does not mean, however, that we cannot see women within the Psalms.  We can use the Psalms to illuminate the stories of women in the Old Testament, and come to a fuller understanding of what they felt in moments of great trauma or rejoicing. One example is the story of the rape of Tamar, found in (2 Sam 13:1-22).

Prior to her half-brother’s assault she pled for mercy.

I, wither shall I cause my shame to go? And as for thee, thou shalt be as one of the fools in Israel.  Now Therefore, I pray thee, speak unto the king; for he will not withhold me from thee.

2 Sam 13:13

After the assault, she the text says she went away weeping in distress, but the actions her brothers as one seeks retribution against the other for the violation. Where is Tamar in this? We can read Psalm 6 and Psalm 55 as if they were Tamar’s own words describing her pain.

O Lord, heal me; for my bones are vexed . . . Oh save me for thy mercie’s sake. . .I am weary with my groaning; all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with tears. Mine eye is consumed because of grief. . . Depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity; for the Lord hath heard the voice of my weeping. The Lord hath heard my supplication; The Lord will receive my prayer.

Psalm 6

My heart is sore pained within me: and the terrors of death are fallen upon me. Fearfelness and trembling are come upon me, and horror hath overwhelmed me. Oh that I had wings like a dove! For then I would fly away, and be at rest. . .For it was not an enemy that repraoched me; then I could have borne it: neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me; then I would have hid myself from him: But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and my acquaintance. We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company. . .He hath put forth his hands against such as be at peace with him: he hath broken his covenant. The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart: his words were softer than oil, yet were they drawn swords. Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and he shall sustain thee: he shall never suffer the righteous to be moved.”

Psalms 55

Another traumatic event of the Old Testament can be further illuminated through the Psalms. The unnamed concubine of the Levite in Judges 19 is silent in the story of her own destruction. To save himself her husband puts her outside the door to be raped by the men of the town in which they’re staying. All night long they assaulted her and in the morning the Levite found her on the doorstep, reaching toward the door, but she was dead. So he dismembered her and sent pieces all over Israel, and the story shifts to war. As with the story of Tamar, the rape is described mostly to give context to subsequent warfare between men. The woman herself and her experience is largely erased. However, we can read the text of Psalm 88 as if it were her cry to God:

I am overwhelmed with troubles.

My life draws near to death

I am like one without strength

You have put me in the lowest pit

I am confined and cannot escape

My eyes are dim with grief

I call to you, 

I spread out my hands to you

Why, Lord, do you reject me and hide your face from me

From my youth I have suffered

I have born your terrors

Darkness is my closest friend

Psalm 88

Thinking of these psalms as being the words of women in specific Biblical contexts: How does a feminized context change your reading of this psalm, or of the companion verses in Judges and Samuel? What do these psalms say about the position of women in Israel? How can these verses apply to specific modern circumstances that affect women?

These examples are of course exceedingly grim. However Biblical women are also known for uttering psalms of gratitude and praise. Miriam, Deborah, Hannah and Mary all speak or sing psalm-like poetry. For each of them this moment of beauty happens in the wake of a divine reversal. Miriam and Deborah both rejoice on behalf of a reversal for their people – they are brought out of captivity. Hannah and Mary both rejoice in personal reversals. Hannah was barren, and becomes a mother. Mary was born of humble circumstances but was chosen by God for an exalted role.

This pattern of movement from complaint to assurance, prompting psalms of reversal is present throughout the book of Psalms

You, Lord, brought me up from the realm of the dead; you spared me from going down to the pit…weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.

Psalm 30 (incidentally this verse always makes me think of Anne Shirley’s joy in finding out Gilbert didn’t die).

He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the much and mire, he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.  He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God.

Psalms 40

Have you seen this kind of reversal in your own life – a sorrow or hardship turned to joy or healing? Have you seen it in a more communal sense (your community, however you define it, going from suffering, to wellbeing)? Do you see the hand of God in this reversal, and if so, how?

Guest Post: My First Day in Relief Society

Guest Post by Alma Pellet. Alma Pellett is living the dream as a stay-at-home mother of 5, while also somehow continuing to do software development work from home in American Fork, Utah. She is relatively new to the world of womanhood, being transgender, and treasures each new aspect discovered.

Socially transitioning to present as female was a deliberate step for me to take after receiving direction, through prayer, to do so. It involved changing jobs (as I had been working for the Church History Library for 10 years), helping others work out what to call me, and the biggest difficulty, giving up my Temple Recommend. At the time I also informed my Bishop that I would refrain from joining the Relief Society until I was invited to come to the meetings.

Since then, I’ve been thoroughly enjoying wearing dresses to Church, blessedly welcomed by a number of people in my ward. Thus far, there have been no prejudicial actions or comments by anyone that I know of. But it’s difficult for others to read your mind, so it took several weeks before a wonderful sister invited me into the meeting with her.

It was a wonderful experience. The lesson was on the 2022 General Conference talk, “But We Heeded Them Not” by Elder David A. Bednar. I certainly did not have a good reaction when the talk was given as, being transgender, I tend to be included in “the world” whose ideas on gender should not be heeded, or listened to, and certainly not even be given a glimmer of the possibility of approval. There were even a couple of sisters who brought up how much “the world” is trying to make us change.

Sitting in that room with my sisters for the first time, I got a somewhat different perspective on the lesson. -I- needed to “heed not” those voices that kept saying how I was straying from the “covenant path”. I know that this transition, this fundamental change in my life is the right path for me. I know, through much prayer that I am not giving up on eternity by taking this path I’ve been directed to, finding joys that I never knew were possible.

A necklace I was given by a transgender friend

Added to this, I was able to speak up when the class was asked about experiences doing something that scared us. I was able to point out the welcome I got when first coming to Church in a dress.

Truly, it was a wonderful meeting, even if the lesson wasn’t quite meant to be read that way. Afterward, I even had a sister stop me to tell me about her transgender granddaughter.

I know continuing attending Church is where I need to be. I hope I can help shift opinions about transgender people, not to mention be a resource for anyone else in the Ward who may need someone to talk to or lean on. I look forward to when we meet again.

Where’s Huldah? Missing (Female) Prophet in Come Follow Me

If you are a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), you’ve heard this story often at Sunday School:

God’s chosen people fall into apostasy. The prophet warns them that wickedness leads to destruction. They counsel with the prophet and repent. They follow the prophet.

This is a favorite narrative of the authors of the Church’s Come Follow Me curriculum. But what if that same story could also be written this way?

God’s chosen people fall into apostasy. A woman warns them that wickedness leads to destruction. They counsel with a woman and repent. They follow a woman.

This week the Come Follow Me curriculum covers 2 Kings 17–25. The prophet in this Bible story happens to be a woman, Huldah. As I was preparing my lesson plan, I was disappointed to find that the Come Follow Me manual did not even mention Huldah, although it covered Josiah, the king who sought her counsel, in detail.

I gave the curriculum authors the benefit of the doubt. I understand that everything that is written in the scriptures will not fit into a two-page Sunday School lesson outline. The scriptures are just too long. In my version of this lesson plan, I found myself having to skip the story of Hezekiah, even though he was a great guy and a really swell king. I didn’t include him simply for lack of space.

But I was determined to include Huldah. She is after all, the prophet in this story, not to mention the only prominent female character. Because there are so few women heroes in the scriptures, I try to highlight the women who are there. I wish the Come Follow Me curriculum writers cared about representation like I do, but I understand that they may have other priorities. Just because they didn’t include Huldah doesn’t mean there was any malicious intent to the snub.

Screenshot of the all-male cast of the film, “Josiah and the Book of the Law” by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The lesson plan in Come Follow Me links to a 12-minute video produced in 2011 called Josiah and the Book of the Law, a pretty long film for a story that only covers two chapters of scripture. It’s a high-quality video. Great production values. Entertaining. But oddly, set in a fictional version of Palestine in which virtually every inhabitant is male. Male characters who only had one or two lines to say in the Biblical text feature prominently in the film. The narrator, a fictional character who could have been of either sex, is a man. Except for one brief scene near the end, every extra in the film is male. But Huldah, who gives a lengthy speech that fills a high proportion of the Biblical text, and—oh yeah—is the prophet in this story, is not in the film. No actress portrays her. The male characters do not even mention her. She has vanished without a trace.

The Come Follow Me manual suggests supplementing the scriptural text with a 1976 talk by Church President Spencer W. Kimball, How Rare a Possession—the Scriptures! It’s a nice talk. Motivational. In his sermon, President Kimball told King Josiah’s story in his own words. His rendition of the story was thorough, yet skipped the part about Huldah.

I had now studied three official sources from the LDS Church interpreting the the story of King Josiah and the prophet Huldah, created in three different media formats in three separate decades, and all managed to tell King Josiah’s story while skipping the climax where Josiah hearkens to the prophet. This does not seem like a simple case of editing for length. Huldah’s exclusion is intentional.

Why is the LDS Church afraid of Huldah? Are they afraid we will notice that a female prophet can lead just as well as a man? That we will wonder why women were prophets in the scriptures, but our modern church doesn’t allow them to be? That young girls in our Sunday school classes will look to Huldah as a role model and hope to be like her someday: a woman with authority in the church?

Maybe they can’t bear the thought that after studying Huldah, our takeaway could be, “Follow a woman.”

If you would like a Sunday School lesson plan in which Huldah’s story is not redacted, you can check out mine: Come Follow Me: 2 Kings 17–25 “He Trusted in the Lord God of Israel” …and so did she.

Come Follow Me: 2 Kings 17–25 “He Trusted in the Lord God of Israel”

After watching the church video about Josiah, I found this excellent post about it, Female Voice and the Prophetess Huldah, written by Ryan Thomas at Patheos in 2014. Recommended reading:

Female Voice and the Prophetess Huldah

Trust Women

“Regardless of the cost even now, their eyes see, their ears hear, their tongues speak, and they are kind.”

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves, pg 193

Menstrual stories, pregnancy stories, birth stories, and post-partum stories are not in the narratives of our nation. They are not the foundations of history; they are not voiced in the constitution or at inaugural addresses. Pregnancy, birth, post-partum and everything in between stories are the silenced stories of humankind. These stories have existed since the beginning of time but are shoved into the hospital rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, and women’s corners where screams, grunts, breathing, and blood are the silenced stories of life. Each womb story is as diverse as the humans who originate from them and we don’t tell them.

But, sometimes, if you are lucky enough to witness and kind enough to listen, these stories are told in small rooms or parks or in support groups, grief groups, and therapy rooms. Sometimes, when a woman is being crushed by depression, sometimes when the horrors of her birth or loss or abortion are too much, sometimes when she has a friend or sister or mother who knows, sometimes when she feels safe, sometimes she tells her story.

I realize that we have done humanity, particularly women, a disservice by hiding these stories in safe rooms and not sharing them on loudspeakers for everyone to hear. I am realizing that some men and politicians don’t know that bleeding and making life (inside our wombs and outside) is long and miraculous and arduous. And that women do it without being asked or considered. Having a womb has absolutely nothing to do with politics – with the words and ideas that politicians create – women’s bodies do what they do without permission, without treatise, and without politics.

I didn’t know that my first birth was traumatic. It has been fifteen years and my pelvic floor physical therapist just told me that after the trauma of childbirth, after the ripping and bruising and damage of birthing my son, my brain disconnected from my pelvic floor muscles, leaving me with nerve damage in my pelvic floor muscles. And I had no idea.

Without womb stories, people can minimize pregnancy, through rhetoric, through the neglect of telling women’s stories, saying women’s words, and using women’s language for body parts and experiences, people can take wombs for granted. Politicians lessen the incredible, damaging sacrifice that childbirth is by reaching back in time and citing treatises written by men from a time when women were property and by failing to become educated about women now. Perhaps, by telling our stories, Americans can better appreciate the other side of the magical, incredible aspects of bringing life into the world. I have come to see that women’s stories make a difference.

So: I pee my pants constantly. I wear pads every day. I am a fit, 125-pound, 35-year-old runner (and mother of four) and I sit in my running partner’s car with urine-soaked pants. I always wear black leggings because sanitary pads are not enough to hold the urine that leaks from my post-partum damage. And I never say a thing.

I never tell my friends that I need to run home to change my pants, I don’t tell my kids that the smell is me, and I don’t let my husband see me cry on the toilet. Fortunately, my husband is able to forget that I have been peeing my pants for fifteen years due to nerve damage in my pelvic floor and prolapse of my urethra. I’m a woman so I don’t complain about my scars from childbirth. And my silence, compounded with billions of other women, matters.

When I was 20 years old, I went to a urologist, the best urologist in Utah with a car seat on my arm and a massive sanitary pad in my pants. I was horrified and humiliated but desperate. The urologist told me that he couldn’t do anything for me. Not feeling myself pee my pants was a “normal side-effect” of vaginal deliveries. He told me that urology was mostly for men anyway. I have been peeing my pants ever since.

For a long time, I thought that my body didn’t matter. That the destruction of my body through childbirth is normal. That I shouldn’t talk about my blood, my urine-soaked pants, my scars from being a woman. I allowed a national narrative to lessen my experience and weaponize other women’s experiences against me.

But I trust women. I trust women to learn that our bodies matter. I trust women to care for the unborn inside them that suck their blood and stretch their skin and shove aside their organs. I trust women to terminate their pregnancies with grief, tenderness, hope, and love. I trust women to educate younger women in the powers, sacrifices, stories, and pains of womanhood. I trust women.

Trusting women doesn’t ensure we will never make mistakes. It doesn’t ensure that we won’t crack and break, murder and steal. It doesn’t ensure that we won’t pee our pants, or choose to have abortions, or have more kids than we can handle. It doesn’t guarantee that there is one “right” way to woman, in fact, it guarantees the opposite: there is no “right” way to woman.

Trusting women gives us a chance to learn. Gives us a chance to be individuals with our own experiences that teach us about ourselves, and our concepts of life. It gives us a chance to be free as women (which looks different than being free as a man). It gives us a chance to create a world built with and by overwhelmed, underprivileged, overworked, queer, conservative, feminist, married, thriving, single, gay, straight, white, brown, working, successful, young, or old women.

I want to beg politicians to trust women. Please. Trust us enough to be human. To be good. Trust women to make difficult, bloody, real decisions. I used to think that women didn’t understand, but we do; we’re bleeding and learning to understand ourselves and our bodies without permission.

Trust women to learn and grow and change on our own. Trust women to think of the unborn. Trust women to terminate their pregnancies. Trust women to bleed and scar and suffer for the unborn. Because we do. Trust women to nurse and cherish and love the newly born. Because we do. Trust women not to when we can’t. Trust women’s experiences. Trust women to tell our own stories and make our own choices. Trust women.

“Yet if we live as we breathe, take in and let go, we cannot go wrong.”

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves, pg. 173

God Did’t Command Polygamy so Let’s Stop Saying That

Brigham Young and some of the women married to him

Growing up in the 80s my parents purchased a full set of dramatized scripture cassette tapes from the Living Scriptures which included all the LDS standard works plus stories from church history. (Suddenly feeling a bit ancient after typing ‘cassette tape.’) I often listened to these tapes while falling asleep at night which is how one night I learned about polygamy. There are many ways to inform youth about difficult topics; leaving them to find out about it on their own is definitely not an approach I suggest as helpful. At the time, I did not recognize or have the language to describe the horror and resulting trauma I experienced hearing Helen Mar Kimball’s story of being sealed to Joseph Smith as a reward for her father Heber Kimball’s willingness to offer his wife Vilate to Joseph when asked by Joseph. As a fourteen-year-old, was my fate the same as Helen’s? Would my parents sacrifice me as Helen’s father, relieved not to give his wife, sacrificed and abandoned Helen? 

In my 20s, I excelled at mental pretzel twists to justify polygamy. This Square Two post details the same thought process I had even as I found polygamy increasingly horrifying. Zina Hungtinton’s heartbreaking story in  Four Zinas: A Story of Mothers and Daughters on the Mormon Frontier particularly bothered me. I started questioning polygamy yet also still accepted the justifications that polygamy was necessary to ‘raise up seed’ for God (Jacob 2), that God had commanded Abraham to take Hagar as a wife so polygamy by early church members was acceptable (D&C 132), and that polygamy was a restortation of all things ancient (D&C 132).

Justifications

Let’s take a look at those justifications. Do polygamous marriages ‘raise up seed’ by increasing a society’s fertility rate? A quick internet search produces a number of academic peer-reviewed studies that say no. Polygamous males do have more children than monogamous males while polygamous females have the same or fewer children as they would in monogamous marriages. Additionally, polygamous societies have more single males than monogamous societies. This higher rate of single males means more males do not have the opportunity to have the children they would have in a monogamous society. (Why are the men who are unable to marry because other men have multiple wives forgotten in the polygamy conversation?) The result is that polygamy does not increase a society’s birth rate which means polygamy does not ‘raise up seed.’  It’s tempting to say something snarky such as who would have thought that females are human beings with a limited reproductive capacity who can’t be programmed to efficiently pump out more product – the product being children. Snark aside, here are links to a few of the many articles I found:  Polygyny and the Rate of Population Growth, Fertility of Polygamous Marraiges, Polygamy in West Africa: Impacts on Fertility, Fertility Intentions and Family Planning. Bonus if you have access to JSTOR or other online journal access to conduct your own literature review. For those who want a quick summary specific to Mormon pioneer-era polygamy fertility, read this article: Mormon Polygamists Shared the Flaws of the Fruit Fly. 

The ‘raise up seed’ phrase in Jacob 2:30 is often interpreted as a reference to polygamy. However, it is important to actually read the verse because it doesn’t say that polygamy is what will be commanded. We, meaning, church culture, have inferred this interpretation. Reading verses 26-30 as a paragraph, I learn that people practicing chastity, which I understand as abstaining from pre-marital and extramaritial sex, is important to God while whoredoms, another word for adultery, is not acceptable behavior. Reading further, I learn that whoredoms/adultery/polygamy are not acceptable because of the pain it causes other people. Anyone familiar with stories of pioneer-era polygamy knows the horror many experienced. Many of us have felt the haunting pain of polygamy lingering in our scriptures, class discussions, and sealing polices and know that polygamy is definitely a ghost that needs exorcising. As for circumstances where behavior that would normally be considered a whoredom might be sanctioned because it actually does raise up seed, the only instance that comes to mind is the story of Tamar. Her husband died and, due to laws at the time, her only option to have children was through one of her husband’s brothers. Because her father-in-law Judah did not fulfill his responsibility to marry one of his other sons to her, she found a way to become pregnant by him. 

We are commanded to learn by study and by faith. Hooray for social scientists who study these issues and have provided us with information about the effects of polygamy on fertitily rates. We now know better than to justify polgamy with the excuse of increased fertility that does not actually happen.  Let’s recognize that with more knowledge, we can do better than to continue recycling this justification.

Moving on. Did God command Abraham to take Hagar as a wife? Here again is where it is important to actually read the scriptures. Genesis 16:2-3 tells us that Sarah requested that Abraham go into her maid and “gave her (Hagar) to her husband Abram to be his wife.” Under laws of the time, Hagar belonged to Sarah. Hagar was an enslaved person with no choices regarding what happened to her body or her life. While Sarah and Abraham’s actions regarding Hager were lawful, it was not moral of them to take away Hagar’s agency. My heart aches for Hagar. Let’s stop attributing Abraham and Sarah’s actions to God. Let’s also understand Sarah’s actions by learning how females in patriarchal societies are valued for what their bodies can produce so we can instead value females as whole human beings. Let’s stop justifying Abraham and Sarah’s abuse of Hagar’s body by saying the ends justifies the means because many people descended from Hagar. 

Pause. I must sit for a moment and hope for healing for all of those in this story, including those who inherited generational trauma. This is why I believe the gospel – the good news of Christ Jesus who lived, died, and was resurrected – is about the gift of healing. 

Finally, let’s consider the justification for polygamy as a restoration of all things ancient. There are many practices from the ancient world that nobody is clamoring to restore – enslavement of adults and children, stoning, human sacrifice, sexual slavery, and genocide to name a few. Just because people did something a long time ago does not mean it was God ordained then and needs to be practiced now. We also misunderstand restoration if we view it primarily as a restoration of things or practices. Patrick Mason in Restoration: God’s Call to the 21st-Century World explains how restoration refers to a restoration of people. In this book he shares the interesting history of how our understanding of restoration was influenced by restorationist religious movements in the United States in the early 1800s. His book is worth reading in order to examine our views regarding the meaning and purpose of restoration. 

What Next?

Now knowing that these common justifications for polygamy do not justify polygamy, where to go from here regarding this topic? We can look to Mormon pioneers for an example. During the 40+ years of building the Salt Lake Temple, there were several instances when construction did not meet the standard of “building not for today or tomorrow but for all eternity.” Construction that did not meet this standard was undone and rebuilt. Did people at the time worry about how redoing work might reflect on the previous work done, the veracity of the church’s truth claims, or leaders’ priesthood authority? I don’t know. I don’t know if everyone was in agreement about the need to re-do work, if some people were scared, if some people were enthusiastic, or if some people were annoyed. All I know is that they re-did work that did not meet the objective to construct a high quality building.

What is the work of the church today? Hopefully it is bringing people to Christ, building a community of disciples, and supporting people as we grow, develop, heal and become whole. The doctrine of polygamy still present in our beliefs and temple practices actively harms that work and it needs to be ripped out. 

There are many questions regarding marriage relationships after this life. Some may ask about people who have more than one spouse during their lifetime. There are people in my family of origin, extended family, and ward family who have endured deaths of beloved spouses. All the people I know have remarried. It is a sensitive topic because each person – females and males – love both their deceased spouses and their current living spouse. Do past practices of lived polygamy mean that polygamy as practiced by early church members is necessary in the next life to allow for the variety of situations surrounding death, divorce, and remarriage in the next life? I say no. We know so little of what the next life will be like, despite what Doctrine and Covenants 132 says. This section, as the kids say, is sus. One reason this section bothers me is that the language about wives treats women as objects to be obtained by men. I do not believe that my Heavenly Parents see me as an object. Ever since the first time I read this section as a teen, I feel nauseous when I read it. I trust my body because it doesn’t lie. It consistently tells me that not everything in this section is from God.

Even during Joseph Smith’s life, the practice and understanding of polygamy evolved. Why can’t we as the church evolve now? We can recognize that early church members hopefully did their best and we can honor their sacrifice and willingness to try to figure things out. We can also acknowledge that in the practice of polygmay things happened that were not ok with God. Church members do not need to justify the doctrine or practice of polygamy because the church will not crumble to pieces if it is admited that the collective understanding about this topic was incorrect. The church as an institution can do what the builders of the Salt Lake Temple did and rip out something that does not assist in the work of bringing people to Christ and offering healing. Whatever answers exist regarding marriage relationships in the next life cannot be built on the cracked foundation of polygamy.

Note: Because polygamy has been a challenging topic for me to digest, I had not read Ghost of Eternal Polygamy by Carol Lynn Pearson prior to writing this post. I have since started reading it and while it is painful to hear the stories of both people who lived this and people haunted by this practice, it provides what I consider essential information about this topic. I look forward to reading the second to last chapter which is titled “Toward a Partnership Tomorrow.”