Exponent II's Blog, page 78

I’ll go where you want me to go

I have a memory of a Young Women’s lesson when I was about 16 years old where the teacher asked us to write down where we saw ourselves in 5 years. I wrote down things like college and a mission and whatever else my little 16 year old self thought I might do/start before age 21. I was surprised when we shared our plans and I realized I was the only girl my age who did not write “marriage” and “kids.” Most of those girls aspired to being stay at home moms. Sure, I wanted to be a mom someday … but I was only 16 and that was not something I had any desire for in the next 5 years. 

That was 20 years ago. Since that time I’ve often wondered about those other girls (who mostly did do what they’d planned). Are they glad they got married so young? Are they glad they had kids so young? Was this really what they wanted in life? Or was it what they were told they wanted in life? 

I never wanted to get married that young. I never wanted to be a stay at home mom. But I was growing up going to Young Women’s lessons where it was the norm. In fact, getting married young and aspiring to be a stay at home mom was somewhat celebrated. I often felt tension between what I wanted and what I felt like I should do. This should was merely based on what everyone else around me was doing. It was confusing. When I got to college the confusion spiked and I struggled to choose a major and figure out how what I wanted could fit in with what I should do. 

Eventually I learned that what I should do was 100% entirely between me and God. It had nothing to do with what other people around me said was right. I believe God wants me to develop my talents and skills to serve his children. Sure, I do that at home. But I also do that in my career. And those things aren’t mutually exclusive. 

Recently a woman in my ward bore her testimony about how grateful she is to be a stay at home mom. She said something about how she really values being able to dedicate all of her time to helping develop the character of her children. She said that her mother, who “wasn’t able” to be a stay at home mom, often thanks her for giving this wonderful gift to her grandchildren. 

I don’t want to say anything negative about this woman in my ward. She’s entitled to her own personal revelation and if that’s what she feels is necessary for her and her family, that’s great! I’m glad she’s made decisions for her family that work for her.

However, though I respect her personal decision to make these choices for her life, I still got feeling a little out of sorts while hearing her speak. I worry the rhetoric she was speaking (which I hear a lot and is in no way specific to her!) kinda disenfranchises people or can make people feel othered.

First, I wondered about my own life. Do people that express this type of rhetoric not think that I’m spending all my time helping my children develop their character? I think about my kids all the time! I talk to my kids about my work and I hope that they understand how important to me it is to be doing the research I’m doing to make the world a little bit better. I hope when they see me in my career doing this research, their character is developed and they understand the importance of making the world a little bit better. 

I also worry about the young women hearing rhetoric like hers. Do they think they too will have to be a stay at home mom in order to truly care for their children? Will they think that their children are missing out on important character development if they happen to choose a different lifestyle?

What about the single women or the women who don’t happen to be married to a rich doctor (like she is)? Do they hear that rhetoric and feel guilty that they are working because their kids might be missing out on important character development?

I wish we just had a bit more space to recognize that not everyone wants the same lifestyle. 

Recently my ward sang the hymn, “I’ll Go Where You Want Me To Go.” While singing, it struck me that sometimes we like to pretend that there is one right place for us to go. We act like we have to live a specific cookie cutter life because God wants us to. But I don’t think that’s true. I think God, an all-powerful and fully-loving God, wants us to learn and grow and that should look different depending on who we are. But we need to allow ourselves (as the song says) to allow the “still, small voice” to call us “to paths that [we] do not know.” We don’t need to follow whatever cookie cutter recipe we hear.

Question: When have you felt like your personal revelation differed from specific rhetoric you heard at church? When have you allowed yourself to follow God down a path you did not know?

Picture of me going down a path in Oregon

What Was Your First Ward Like?

I recently had a conversation with a dear friend who is a lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints going through a faith journey. They asked me about my experiences as an adult convert to the church and what my first ward was like. I talked about getting baptized in the Washington, DC area and attending a dream ward for me.

Bright, aspiring, driven women made up the majority of my Young Single Adults ward. There was political and ideological diversity with plenty of vocal Republicans and Democrats and Independents. I wasn’t the only person who believed polygamy or the Priesthood and Temple ban against Black people didn’t come from God. I wasn’t the only supporter of LGBTQIA+ rights including same-sex marriage, and nobody questioned my worthiness to hold a Temple recommend despite my criticisms of the church. At the same time, the membership was not a monolith and I frequently interacted with people who disagreed with me, helped me refine my views, and inspired me to tailor my advocacy and activism.

Though we noticeably lacked racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity, there was an effort to reach out more to underrepresented groups and make our ward a more welcoming place for more of God’s children. My then-boyfriend and now-husband, who has never been a member, was embraced by the community. I had plenty of friends who were willing to talk to me about my doubts and challenges with church history, doctrine, and culture. Nobody ever told me I didn’t belong.

My friend on the faith journey described their home ward, which sounded nothing like my first ward. Their home ward was rigid, almost universally conservative, and quick to judge those who deviated from church tradition, culture, or leaders’ official positions on every issue. Sunday meetings weren’t a safe place to share doubts or criticisms unless you wanted to risk losing your Temple recommend, being eliminated from consideration for callings, and becoming a ward project.

I’ve often thought that I wouldn’t have gotten baptized if my introduction to the church had happened somewhere else. I’m so grateful that the vast majority of the members in my life are tolerant, compassionate, willing to engage on questions of faith intellectually as well as spiritually, and open to changing their minds over time. The longer I stay, the more I realize how precious that privilege is. I wish every ward was an open and welcoming place, but that’s clearly not the case.

How much of an impact does one’s first ward have? I would say it’s monumental. I’ve moved a lot since I joined the church, but even when I’ve lived in places where I struggled with the inflexibility and narrow-mindedness of a specific ward I could always remember and come home to a place where I felt more included.

What was your first ward like? How has that affected your membership throughout your life? Do you think it matters as much as I think it does?

In Matthew 18:20, God promises “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” In my experience, this is true. But how those other people (even if it’s just one or two) treat us can either invite the spirit or chase it away. Would you agree?

The Trouble With Empty Seat Theology

When I was a baby, I travelled with my parents to a temple in a far-away place where were sealed as a family. I sat on the altar where my parents knelt, and someone put my tiny, chubby hand over their clasped hands for the ceremony.

In the order of heaven, promises matter. When God makes a promise, that promise is binding. If God lies, God ceases to be God. 

In some traditions, babies are baptized. In ours, that notion is utterly rejected. A covenant must be entered into with eyes wide open for it to mean anything. Accountability is a prerequisite for covenant-making, not only in our faith but across human history.

So when I sat there in a little white dress, I didn’t make any promises that day. Our sealing was my parents’ gift, assuring me eternal parentage. I did nothing to receive it. Which means that this blessing is not contingent upon me. We are bound together. If my parents fulfill their part of the covenant, I am covered by the terms of the covenant. If we are not together in the eternities, it will not be God’s doing.

“Night of Fire” PC: chezshai on Flickr

When a child leaves the church, or makes life decisions that are not consistent with our ideas about celestial destiny, it can be hard to reconcile how they will be together with their eternal family. This time of year, our loved ones look around the dinner table and take a silent headcount, wondering how many seats will be empty hereafter.

It seems like a paradox; I grant that. But as human beings and as people of faith, we are accustomed to paradox. Believing in God has always required us to stretch our imaginations– to acknowledge the edges of our understanding. When faced with logical inconsistency, we return to our roots. The entirety of our theology must be built upon a correct understanding of the nature and character of God — A god who is very much in the business of making broken things whole. A god who is very, very good at making sad things beautiful again. A god who is creative and kind. Anything less is useless.

God makes covenants, and God does not lie. 

Children are sealed to their parents.

The only empty seats in heaven will be of our own making.

Why Aren’t Women Consulted When Ward Boundaries Change?

My stake realigned its ward boundaries on Sunday. After a hymn and prayer, the stake president announced the changes at a special meeting that was broadcast via Zoom on Sunday afternoon. “If you’re unhappy, blame your bishops,” the stake president said. “They got a lot of input.” It felt like a strange attempt at both levity and deferring responsibility. 

After his remarks, two or three other men who have stake callings gave brief talks about how the process was inspired and how change was hard, but the members would adjust and get through it if they had faith. 

It was not a secret that ward boundaries were changing, and some of the changes had been openly discussed prior to the meeting–I’m not sure how widely, but the couple of guys I know who serve on the high council or as stake clerks were pretty open about the likely changes when asked. This was refreshing to me. The church gets so weird about secrecy, even when it’s unnecessary at best and harmful at worst, and women are disproportionately the ones affected by the secrecy culture because they are excluded from priesthood-only spaces.

“Priesthood only space” pretty well defined the parts of the meeting I saw last weekend; despite the fact that the announced changes equally affected women, only men spoke, only men sat on the stand in the Zoom frame, and only men were involved in the redistricting process. And it seemed that quite a lot of them had been involved, from what I gathered: all the bishops and the stake presidency and clerks, so about 12 men. As far as we were told, and as far as I could tell, the stake and ward Relief Society presidencies were not consulted or involved in the process at all. My friend on the high council told me that the boundary changes, once they were finalized, were presented to the stake council, which includes the female stake auxiliary presidencies, but they were not asked for input.

Interestingly, the church’s General Handbook only specifies that the stake president is the one to propose ward/branch boundary changes. It uses the singular “he” in describing the process for determining the criteria for revising boundaries. It does not mention any other people to involve or suggest forming a committee, but neither does it forbid involving others. 

Surely the people who came up with the procedural guidelines in the handbook did not intend for the stake president to crunch the numbers and figure out boundary changes all on his own. Even though it is not specified, surely they expected him to ask others to assist with this task. So why not include women?

Presumably, my stake president read the procedures laid out in the handbook [1] and determined that seeking counsel and insight from stake priesthood leaders and bishops was the best way to figure out which boundaries to adjust.

I think it’s great that he interpreted the handbook’s guidelines in a way that fit his situation, but just as the handbook did not specify whether or not to consult with male leaders, it also did not specify whether or not to consult with female leaders. The stake president, with the exact same rationale, could have just as easily consulted with female leadership about the proposed changes as he did with the male leadership.

But he did not.

One of the main reasons they chose to adjust ward boundaries was to help balance the number youth and Primary children in each ward. Since the stake president is only required to consider total number of members and active, tithe-paying, leadership-quality Melchizedek Priesthood-holding men in each ward boundary [1], I was relieved to hear that other demographics were also considered. I found it disappointing, though, that the female leaders who might have had the greatest insight into the names and circumstances of the families represented by those numbers were not consulted.

Speaking about women’s exclusion from policy-making in the highest levels of the church, Chieko Okazaki, former counselor in the general Relief Society presidency, said, “Sometimes I think they [male leaders] get so busy that they forget that we are there.” If this happens at the highest levels, is it any surprise that it also happens on the local level?

A friend in my ward, knowing about my views that women are underrepresented and underutilized in the church, told me about a funny interaction she had with some of the other women in our ward. She smiled as she said, “I told my friends, “They need to have the Relief Society in there to help with those boundary changes! You know those guys are going to mess a bunch of stuff up. The women would get the job done right!”” She said her joke was a hit and her friends all laughingly agreed. “I thought you would appreciate that,” she said to me.

I told her I absolutely agreed with her, and that what she said was funny but also really not funny because it was just the truth. Women’s inclusion shouldn’t be a joke. Of course Relief Society presidencies would have a different perspective and should have been involved in this process. Of course women should have been in the room. 

And there was no reason they couldn’t have been.

[1] Here are the only two criteria given for what must constitute a ward in the US and Canada: they must have at least 300 members (including less active members), and they must also have one “active, full-tithe-paying Melchizedek Priesthood holder capable of serving in leadership positions” for every 20 members (active and less active), with a minimum of 20.

Sex, Porn, Men and General Authorities

As a woman raised in the LDS church, I was taught that pornography was one of the very worst evils of our modern times. I’ve been thinking about this for years though, and despite the many problematic elements of pornography use, I believe we’ve been dealing with this topic all wrong. The church’s teachings on pornography are at best misguided and unhelpful, and at worst a purposeful misdirection to keep members from noticing far more problematic behavior at the highest levels of male leadership. 

I know this topic is difficult and controversial, and that a lot of women reading this will have been harmed by the pornography use of men in their lives. I see the frequent discussions online in LDS women’s forums about the betrayal wives feel when they discover their husband’s hidden behavior, and I know how painful it is for the men who desperately want to stop viewing pornography but can’t. I do not want to invalidate any of those feelings or experiences. They are very real.

I also know that many women regularly view pornography themselves, but in this specific post I want to talk about men’s use of pornography from a woman’s perspective. I’m posting anonymously because I talk openly about my family members. This is just my opinion, from my own life perspective. It’s okay if you disagree with me.

PART ONE: MY DAD AND PORNOGRAPHY

When I got married in the temple over twenty years ago, my dad didn’t come. He wanted to. He was an active and devoted member of the church. He had a stake calling working closely with the stake presidency, paid a faithful tithing, sang in the ward and stake choirs, literally never missed his home teaching, showed up early and stayed late to help run ward events, held family scripture study, and never missed a chance to share his testimony and publicly declare his belief and dedication to the church he’d converted to in his thirties. My dad (still to this day, now almost eighty) has been the one of most faithful and dedicated members of the church you can find anywhere.

Why didn’t he come to my temple wedding, though? It was because he was caught viewing pornography a few months before my sealing date and declared unworthy to see me get married.

At the time I didn’t really question it. He was the sinner, after all, and I learned this wasn’t the first time he’d been caught with porn. My sister asked me, “Do you even feel comfortable letting Dad around our future kids anymore?” I wasn’t sure what I thought, but his banishment from the temple that day cast a dark cloud over the entire experience, and I still struggle to have happy memories of my wedding day all these years later. 

My mom is now currently dying. She’s been in hospice care for a very long time and has surpassed her life expectancy many times over. She’s in poor health and can be difficult to be around, which isn’t that unusual for someone at the end of their life with dementia. My dad has spent every waking moment caring for her under incredible stress for well over a year now. He hasn’t complained, and hasn’t shown a single sign of stopping no matter how exhausted he is. Any of us should hope and pray for someone as good of a human as my dad to be their companion in life – even if his consistent weakness was viewing pornography. 

I visited my parents recently and by complete coincidence our old stake president and his wife came to visit them at the same time. I felt rising emotions in my chest when it occurred to me that the man coming (who I hadn’t seen since I was a teenager in his ward) might be the same man who wouldn’t allow me to invite my dad to my own wedding after he told him he’d been viewing pornography. As we made casual small talk at the beginning of their visit, I tried to keep my voice calm and said, “I forgot…what years were you the stake president again?” I felt a flood of relief when he told me the years he served and that he was released two years before my wedding. It hadn’t been this stake president, it was the next one. If it had been the other man in front of me, I think I would’ve had an unplanned emotional meltdown with absolutely no idea of how to explain it to the four elderly people I was visiting with.

Luckily for all of us, I didn’t have to confront that particular trauma in person that day – but I did realize how angry I am at the stake president who made that decision. There is such a variety of responses from church leaders over porn use, including some leaders who do nothing at all when men confess to them. Why was there no ability to extend grace to my broken and repentant dad for one single day, or to consider my feelings? Most girls are walked down the aisle by their fathers when they get married, and the only reason they wouldn’t be is because their dad is dead (or not in their life). I didn’t have that issue. My dad was alive and very present, but another man I barely knew decided I couldn’t have him at my wedding because of porn. My mom and dad are both converts, so I already had almost no family there and he took away one of my parents. Sometimes as a woman I’ve felt completely overlooked by men in authority dealing with other men, and this is probably the biggest example of that. Men deal with other men over porn use, and too often the women in their lives tend to be forgotten in the background.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, I was taught my entire life that pornography was evil, and that viewing it would lead men to become sexual deviants and occasionally, you know, serial killers. I can’t believe that anymore, considering two things:

Research shows that the vast majority of men (and plenty of women) view pornography regularly, and our society hasn’t broken down into mass murder and rape in the streets. It may not always be the greatest part of human nature, but it’s a pretty normal part of human nature regardless.My dad struggled with pornography use his entire life, and at the end of his life it turns out he’s one of the greatest men I’ve ever known.
 

Today I’m angry and sad that the church made my dad feel like a bad person for wanting to look at naked women and sex. (I’m actually glad he liked that stuff, because if he didn’t – I wouldn’t exist!) I’m angry that the church gave my mom (who was a difficult person to be married to due to multiple lifelong undiagnosed mental illnesses) a reason to treat my dad poorly and feel so superior to him. My mom was often mean and her moods were unpredictable, while my dad was unfailingly kind – yet his normal draw to view sexual images made him feel inferior his entire life, and my mom kept a temple recommend while his worthiness came and went. Despite everything, my dad never cheated on my mom. He never visited a prostitute. He never walked out on our family to find an easier companion. Now he’s helping change my mom’s diapers, patiently feeding her with a spoon as she sits in a wheelchair, and has dedicated his entire life to her care despite being healthy enough himself to do more fulfilling activities with his remaining years. Realizing that my dad spent his life believing he was broken because of pornography breaks my heart – and frustrates me at the institution of the church for its unending obsession with men and pornography.

PART TWO: NONE OF THE DISCUSSION ABOUT PORN MAKES SENSE TO ME:

So much of what we teach about the law of chastity (specifically regarding viewing erotic materials) doesn’t make any sense to me. For example:

1. Sex is always taught as the “sin next to murder”. So technically, we’re saying that murder is worse than premarital sex, right? Despite this, I have been told so many times that a movie or show is okay to watch specifically because its rating is for violence, not sex.

If murder is a worse sin than sex, shouldn’t it be better for me to watch a scene of consensual love making than a non-consensual stabbing? Shouldn’t I be able to say, “I’m watching an NC17-rated movie, but don’t worry…it’s only because of some very explicit sex scenes. There’s no murder!”?

Saturday night I went to see the newly released Hunger Games prequel movie in a very packed theater in Utah county, filled with LDS people eager to pay money to watch three hours of violence and murder. I looked at the crowd and wondered how many of them would be in Sacrament Meeting the next morning, totally fine with the people they’d watched get stabbed with a pitchfork the night before.

2. It hasn’t escaped my notice that a lot of LDS women love shows like Bridgerton and Outlander, both of which contain a lot of love scenes. The explanation I’ve heard for why these shows are okay to watch is because they’re showing committed, married sex. “Finally, Hollywood is portraying married sex as a good thing!”, I’ve heard women say.

This breaks down for me immediately because these are not shows teaching morality and LDS chastity standards by any stretch of the imagination. In reality I think these women are saying, “Finally, Hollywood is portraying sex in a way that I don’t feel guilty about watching!”

And the “it’s married sex so it’s fine” thing everyone does has a huge plot hole for me. The people in these hot sex scenes are actors – they aren’t actually married to each other. Using that logic, if a married couple took videos of themselves having sex and uploaded them to a porn site – why would that not be okay to watch, then too? I mean, it’s married sex!

3. We talk about pornography as if it is one single entity, but there are so, so many different types of pornography out there. (Even in Utah, where we declared it a public health crisis, no one has ever defined what pornography actually is. We are just weirdly legislating around a totally undefined term. Is porn a swimsuit issue of a magazine? Is it naked sex? Is it partially clothed sex? Is it a Game of Thrones scene? Is it a Bridgerton scene? Is it the hot lumberjack guy on TikTok who splits logs in a tight shirt with 10 million followers?)

It’s as vague as someone with a severe food allergy asking, “What will we be eating for dinner?”, and their host just answering, “food”. There are a lot of different types of food, some of which would be very damaging to the person, but also plenty that aren’t a big deal. You have to be more specific!

Like food, there’s a very wide range of pornography and why a man might look it up. A sexually inexperienced newly married man might be looking online for help giving his even less experienced new wife her first orgasm. I have such a hard time seeing that as anything but a totally noble pursuit. On the other hand, a fifty year old pedophile might look up child pornography to view a four year old child being raped. Those two actions by two different men are motivated by wildly different intentions, but in general conference they are both simply called “pornography”.

I had a BYU professor who’d once completed a graduate level research project on pornography at a different university. He told us that for most men, watching people have sex simply made them want to have sex too. No Ted Bundy style killing sprees, and no soul stealing deals with Satan – they just wanted to have sex. Few women I know would be angry with men in their lives for simply wanting to have sex, but when the word “pornography” is used over the pulpit to describe both straightforward depictions of sex as well as illegal, sexually abusive porn – how are deliberately uninformed women supposed to do anything but jump to the very worst conclusion? (And how are teenage boys supposed to understand that looking up pictures of boobs is very different from what a rapist going to prison has done because we call all of it “the sin next to murder”? We tell stories about serial killers blaming their crimes on pornography, while not honestly pointing out to kids that billions of other people have also consumed pornographic materials and literally never killed a single person because of them.)

Just like my sister and I wondered at first if my dad should ever be alone with our future children, I’ve heard many women panic about child molestation when they discover their husband’s pornography use. It is highly unlikely that an otherwise decent man who likes watching pretty people have sex is also a pedophile, but when women are given the implied message that those things are somehow connected to each other, marriages and family relationships face completely unnecessary challenges. 

4. If the church really does hate pornography so very much, why do they take the scientifically least effective route possible to limit and end its use? I know a mental health professional who specializes in addiction, and since learning that about him I’ve occasionally picked his brain for advice on overcoming my own compulsive behaviors (for example, what should I do when I find myself eating cookies in the pantry at 10 pm when I’m not hungry and really, really don’t want to be doing it?). 

He’s given me a three part solution: 1. Avoid fear. 2. Avoid shame. 3. “What you resist, persists.” He’s told me to accept my normal human weaknesses with compassion, and avoid aiming for perfection through hypervigilance. I want to break his professional advice down for how we treat unwanted pornography use in the church.

Fear: We make men terrified of porn from childhood on with stories of Ted Bundy. We make them terrified that no woman will marry them if they admit they’ve looked at it, and that their spouse will leave them if they’re caught. 

Shame: We make men feel intense shame for viewing pornography, leading to secrecy and more shame. 

Resisting: Instead of just letting men move on and try to do better the next time, we take porn use (even just once) and turn it into a huge issue – releasing men from callings, taking away their temple recommends, making them publicly not take the sacrament, and sending them to church sponsored Addiction Recovery Programs. This white knuckle approach that makes it central to everything in their life does the exact opposite of everything my addiction specialist friend suggested to me. 

I’ve read many online discussions about pornography use in the church, and to summarize them all, I’d say this: there are so, so many men in the LDS church viewing pornography in secret. I think it’s much more likely that a man is than isn’t. 

In an environment where so many men are exhibiting similar behavior, is it really fair to place the blame on the individuals rather than critically examining the system that so many of them are reacting nearly identically to? We were all raised in a culture that valued total purity before marriage, yet offered almost no sexual education before or after marriage, and provides no professional premarital or marital counseling. We rarely talk about sex, and right up to your wedding night your sexuality is treated as a terrible sin. Curiosity combined with a genuine need to learn about something that will be a huge part of most people’s adult lives leads members of the church to the internet to explore. It’s very easy to see how anyone would be repeatedly pulled back to what they’re viewing there. Internet pornography is often the only available outlet to explore this important part of our lives that’s a taboo discussion everywhere else.

Once stuck compulsively in this behavior we tell men to just try harder to be righteous, but make no attempt to address the root causes of their behavior (loneliness, stress, anxiety, boredom, depression, exhaustion) or to provide a replacement activity to self soothe (exercise, music, companionship, Netflix, sports).

Instead, attempts to change frequently involve punishment (like my dad missing my wedding), shame, repentance, more shame, guilt, secrecy, fear, paranoia, hopelessness, loneliness, self hatred, and more shame. It’s not surprising at all that men turn to pornography even more the harder they try to stop, as the way they are treated (like alcoholics or drug addicts in the church’s pornography addiction programs) is the worst possible way to treat an unwanted behavior. It turns normal human weaknesses into compulsive addictions. 

Unlike the treatment of a drug addict (where there is no healthy level of daily interaction with say, cocaine or heroin), there has to be daily interaction with your sexuality. Similar to compulsive eating, you need to find healthier ways to eat and manage your appetite, not just avoid food for the rest of your life. The church doesn’t allow for that flexibility when it comes to sex, which leads to failure after failure in curing men’s unwanted behavior. 

5. Literally everywhere else in society, the people who are most critical of something are usually the same ones who consume it regularly. For example, film critics, art critics, and television critics all live and breathe the medium they are critiquing. The biggest critics of pornography in the church however, are the ones who claim they’ve never watched it. Elderly men who aged out of their testosterone and sex drive many years before pornography became easily accessible on the internet are the ones passing out the fear and shame to the younger ones. The church treats pornography as the biggest issue facing men today, yet will only let men who have never seen it make the rules and write the general conference talks about it. This reminds me of when heterosexual people give advice on how to be gay in the church, or men give conference talks on how to be better women and mothers. 

For example, the church teaches that “Much of pornography shows violence, domination, and aggression toward others.” On the other hand, Psychology Today talks about 2% of porn videos depicting violence against women, making it less violent than many TV shows and movies.

For the record, I want zero percent of the media we consume to include violence against women – but this demonstrates to me that the person writing for the church manuals might not be very personally experienced in the world of pornography.

6. As a young woman, I wasn’t allowed to wear sleeveless dresses to church dances because it would be immodest. When I was a Mia Maid, two priests came into my young women’s class and one told us about going to a dance with a girl who showed up in a strapless dress and how he had to keep offering her his jacket and hoping she’d cover up with it.  As a nursing mom I had to go to the mother’s room to feed my babies, lest I turn the men and boys in my ward into porn addicts. Elder Dallin H. Oaks told me that I’d “become pornography” for men if I dressed immodestly, and Elder Tad Callister warned me that I should dress modestly to “contribute to the moral purity of men”. There is so much concern about women and girls covering our entire bodies to avoid tempting men.

But then we all go to the temple for the first time and there’s a completely naked lady in the movie and everybody’s like, sure that’s fine.

If the teenage boys in my ward were supposedly struggling to avoid porn addictions because they’d seen a mom with a nursing cover over their baby but still *knew* there were boobs underneath it, how is a totally naked, beautiful Eve projected on a large movie screen not going to cause porn addictions for all the new missionaries? Explain this to me.

PART THREE: WHY I’M MAD AT CHURCH LEADERS FOR MAKING PORN SUCH A BIG DEAL

Like all of us, church leaders make mistakes – including how they’ve dealt with the relatively new issue of modern internet pornography use. I would be okay with those mistakes if they would simply acknowledge what’s happened and apologize. 

Women, unfortunately, are systematically excluded from all decision-making power and positions of authority in the church. (This included the decision to keep my dad out of the temple on my wedding day.) We wait for men to decide that change is needed, so all I can do is watch helplessly as the next generation of teenagers grows up with the same issues I struggled with. Change is painfully slow, and waiting for it is excruciating when you have no ability to contribute to it. 

I feel like top church leaders could have a much bigger moral impact on the world by fixing their own issues than lecturing other men about looking at illicit images online (including hoarding wealth in a suffering world, harm to LGBTQ youth up to the point of suicides, refusing to acknowledge past mistakes of leaders for fear it will open them up to modern day criticism, and breaking and bending federal and state laws for their own benefit).

I want a better church for my friends, family, neighbors and children. I want a church healthy enough that men like my dad aren’t compulsively viewing pornography as an escape. I want a world where women’s ideas and leadership are treated equally to men’s, and I want our leaders to be and do much better with our money and their words. Within our church is child sex abuse, rape, assault, homophobia, racism, and a total lack of representation for women in upper church leadership. But instead of addressing these issues they have the power to fix, our leaders stand at the pulpit and tell us the most pressing issue of the day is that all the younger men in Elder’s Quorum keep looking at boobs on their laptops.

Are we supposed to be so distracted by that sin that we don’t notice any of the problems the leaders need to work on? Many men (like my dad) throughout the church show real humility and a desire to repent and make use of the atonement when it comes to their pornography use. I wish the men at the top would show the same willingness to fix their own shortcomings, and that the rest of us could have more compassion and less judgement for the humanity of everyone in the church dealing with unwanted pornography use.

Men Don’t Always Need the Last Word

The annual Primary Program finishes. The congregation smiles contentedly, overcome with the warm fuzzies of children singing and speaking of Jesus. This Sunday, the Holy Ghost showed up in full force and, after the final Primary song ends, it’s the perfect time to simply conclude with a closing prayer. No matter the time, even if the meeting has gone over, the Bishop must stand up and give an impromptu talk and share the last word.

It’s a Women’s Meeting. The intended audience is female and the messages are created especially for them. Female leaders with the full capacity to invite in the spirit, offer God’s guidance, and preside at the meeting are present. After the women speak, a man with more authority concludes the meeting, usually taking more time to speak than any individual female speaker. He must have the last word.

You’re at Girl’s Camp. Friday is the final night of an emotional, spiritual bonding experience that finishes with a testimony meeting. Young women stand up, overcome and overflowing with burgeoning testimonies. Dry eyes are forbidden. It’s an incredible, lovely, unique experience that many women treasure. A final testimony from one last brave teen is finished. It’s the perfect time to sit with the spirit and end with a prayer. Instead, the visiting Stake President stands up at the end to give the last word and conclude the meeting.

Up until recently, Latter-day Saint conventions held that meetings always ended with a male speaker. Interestingly, the final speaker usually is granted the most amount of time. Switch this up, and you’ll often find that men, no matter where they’re placed on the program, plan the longest talk. Women, finally granted the opportunity to speak last, must edit and abbreviate to accommodate men going over time.

When a High Councilman visits to remind us that the Stake President really loves us (and he’s not just saying that), he always speaks last. His talk is always expected to be long and he is generally allowed to talk until he’s finished (even if it cuts into the next meeting). He is expected to have the last and final word.

Bishopric members visit Relief Society meetings and, when the lesson if finished and women are done talking, like to get up and share their final thoughts as the only man in the room.

This is benevolent patriarchy at its finest; all done in a spirit of love and leadership. In fact, many will read this and think, “Of course they do. It’s only right. They’re leaders and they love the people they’re leading.”

But imagine these scenarios playing out in any other arena of our lives and it’s jarring. Whether it’s meant to or not, it sends the message that men have the most important thing to say and the last word. Maybe it’s supposed to mean, Men hold the priesthood and are stand-ins for God’s authority and just vessels for Him to work through. But the way we revere priesthood leaders as people, defer to them as individuals, and passively accept their intrusion into all spaces indicates that, in practice, things are otherwise.

If we want all members to embrace their own testimonies, spiritual authority, and relationship with the spirit, we need to re-think this practice. If we want women to be fully respected as spiritual leaders by everyone in the congregation, we need to end this practice. If we want to break the molds of unnecessary sexism in Mormon culture, then men don’t always need the last word.

Which book of scripture did Latter-day Saint leaders of the 2010’s love most?

If I had to guess, I would have guessed the Book of Mormon. After all, when I was a youth, it was drummed into my head that “the Book of Mormon is the keystone of our religion,” and that we would “get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book.”

I’m showing my age here. I guessed the Book of Mormon because I was a youth of the 1990s, ushered into the youth program under the reign of Ezra Taft Benson, who served as president of the LDS church from 1985-1994.

Joseph Smith was the first president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) to call the Book of Mormon our keystone, but I’m pretty certain that Ezra Taft Benson said it more often. Centering church curricula around the Book of Mormon was one of the key initiatives of Benson’s presidency.

Things have changed since the ’90s. A different book in our canon was used far more often in youth lessons during the 2010s.

In 1833, Caroline and Mary Elizabeth Rollins saved the first printed pages of Doctrine and Covenants from vandals who destroyed the printing press. Youth curriculum writers of the 2010s owe them a debt of gratitude.

I found out which book church leaders really liked while prepping the Exponent website for a big change in the youth curriculum coming in 2024. The LDS church will discontinue the Young Men and Young Women curriculum format that has been in place since 2013 in favor of using the same Come Follow Me format currently used for Sunday School. (Primary will use that same manual, too. Yes, you heard me right. Grown-ups in Gospel Doctrine and wee babes in Primary will study the same curriculum.)

Young Men and Young Women classes will join Sunday School classes to undertake a chapter-by-chapter study of the Book of Mormon that lasts for a full year, followed by a year of studying Doctrine and Covenants, then a year of the Old Testament of the Bible, and finally a year of the New Testament. (Or should I say, during that third year we’ll study Genesis and Exodus for half the year and then whip through the rest of the Old Testament? Good grief, curriculum writers, the Old Testament curriculum has a pacing problem!)

The 2013-2023 Young Men/Young Women curriculum that is going away was centered on gospel topics. Each lesson was titled with a gospel question answered by a variety of scriptural and contemporary sources relevant to the question. Within that topic-based format, we were studying the scriptures, but that format did not rigidly require that we devote exactly 1/4 of our lesson time to each book of scripture, like the new 4-year rotation does.

At the Exponent, we had created over 100 Young Women lesson plans based on the old curriculum. It would be a shame to let such a treasure trove go to waste, so in preparation for 2024, I combed through every Young Women lesson plan in our archive. If a lesson plan centered primarily on just one book of scripture, it would fit with the new curriculum, so I recategorized it as a lesson plan for Book of Mormon year, Doctrine and Covenants year, New Testament year, or Old Testament year.

How Exponent lesson plans based on the topic-centered 2013-2023 Young Women curriculum matched up with the new Come Follow Me curriculum

When I finished up, there was a clear winner: Doctrine and Covenants by a landslide. I was able to reuse 22 old youth lessons for the Doctrine and Covenants curriculum. New Testament claimed 14 lesson plans, Old Testament got 12, and Book of Mormon came in dead last with only 11. (President Benson would roll over in his grave.) There were 43 lesson plans that either centered on contemporary sources or were too evenly mixed in scriptural sources to fit within the one-book-at-a-time format of the new curriculum.

In the new curriculum, the hodgepodge of books in the Pearl of Great Price are divided among other curricula: Joseph Smith-History and the Articles of Faith join the Doctrine and Covenants curriculum, Moses and Abraham join the Old Testament curriculum, and Joseph Smith-Matthew joins the New Testament curriculum. The Family: A Proclamation to the World also gets a space in the Doctrine and Covenants curriculum, making it the only uncanonized source text.

These additions partially explain why the Doctrine and Covenants curriculum beat out the others so handily. For the first several years of the 2013-2023 curriculum, youth lessons were organized around 12 monthly themes. One monthly theme was the Apostasy and Restoration, a historical period documented in Joseph Smith-History as well as Doctrine and Covenants. Another full month was devoted to Marriage and Family. Our modern concept of marriage and family as a gospel principle is largely absent from the standard works, so these lessons largely relied on the Family Proclamation for source text.

But even if we exclude these additions, Doctrine and Covenants still comes out on top. That’s because three of those monthly themes from the 2010s centered on priesthood; Prophets and Revelation, Priesthood and Priesthood Keys, and Ordinances and Covenants; and as much as we like to say that our modern church is patterned after Christ’s ancient Biblical church (especially when we’re defending archaic practices like the female priesthood ban), the truth is, the only scriptural source for most of our modern priesthood doctrines and policies is Doctrine and Covenants.*

* And actually, our current policies and doctrines around priesthood don’t even follow Doctrine and Covenants very closely. Much of the work defined as priesthood duty in Doctrine and Covenants is assigned to unordained women in our modern church, while other tasks are restricted to male priesthood holders without any scriptural basis for banning women and other non-priesthood holders. For several examples, see this analysis:

Shouldn’t it be obvious? How Mormon Women Hold and Exercise the Priesthood Today

My One Cool Trick for Surviving the Holidays (and my Dutch Apple Pie recipe!)

Several years ago, I began dreading the holiday season. It was part general overwhelm from having four children, part overscheduling with the mix of school/church/community/family events, and part something else. The holidays lost their magic when I was drained by working so hard to create magic for everyone else.

It turns out I am happier when I work from a place of joy rather than obligation. Wild, I know.

Bit by bit, some of my holiday joy has started to come back. No small part is because my children are a little older and are all sleeping through the night. More intentionally dividing holiday responsibilities with my husband has helped a lot, too. And I know that even being able to worry about my joy level is wrapped in layers of privilege and safety.

But here’s my one cool trick for surviving (and maybe even liking) the holidays: I build in annual traditions that are just for my own enjoyment. Preferably, these things are easy, inexpensive, and repeatable, but most importantly, they are for me.

That sounds obvious in retrospect, but it took work to figure out and build upon. It can’t always be about what the kids or extended family or external expectations demand. Sometimes, it can be just about me.

I may pair my tradition with something my family will do anyway. We carve pumpkins every year for Halloween, but I’ve added a bowl of candy corn (which I love but only want once a year) and watching the movie Hocus Pocus. No one else in the family needs to like the candy corn, but it’s great if they do. And now, when I think of carving pumpkins, it’s not just the work of helping several children with pumpkin guts and designs for which my carving skills are not up to par; it’s having the treat and movie that help it feel like Halloween for me.

At Christmas, I don’t love wrapping presents. I especially don’t love feeling rushed or staying up late on Christmas Eve. By starting earlier in the month and pairing the wrapping with holiday movies that I want to watch—While You Were Sleeping or Family Stone or Little Women—it suddenly isn’t so bad.

I have several of these small, simple traditions I’ve built in for myself around Halloween and Christmas, but Thanksgiving is trickier. It may be because our plans can vary wildly by year. Some years we travel, others we host, and some are by ourselves. Making my favorite Dutch apple pie recipe is perhaps the closest I have as a Thanksgiving tradition just for me. My kids (and husband) prefer chocolate pies or other desserts, so I continue making the Dutch apple pie because I want it. And that’s fine with me.

Do you have traditions you’ve built into the holidays that are just for you? What do you do?

****

Dutch Apple Pie Recipe

INGREDIENTS

1 of your favorite homemade pie crust or 1 ready-made pie crust (Pillsbury refrigerated dough)

Pie filling:

5 medium honeycrisp apples; peeled, cored, and thinly sliced.1 tablespoon lemon juice¼ cup granulated sugar¼ cup brown sugar¼ cup flour1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Topping:

1 stick butter, softened1 cup brown sugar1 cup flour

DIRECTIONS

Preheat oven to 375°F. Place a baking sheet in the oven as it preheats (the warm baking sheet will help keep the crust from getting soggy as it bakes and act as a drip sheet).Fit pie crust into pie plate and trim excess.In a large bowl, mix sliced apples, lemon juice, white and brown sugar, flour, and cinnamon. Gently transfer the mixture into pie plate.Put the softened butter into a medium bowl. Using a fork, blend the brown sugar with the butter until well mixed. Add the flour ½ cup at a time and blend well.Take small amounts of topping (golf ball sized) and flatten each piece until about ¼ inch thick, and place over the pie filling until completely covered.

Bake at 375°F for 30 minutes; tent pie with tin foil (to keep the top from burning) and bake for another 20 minutes. Remove from oven and allow to cool for at least one hour before serving to allow juices to set.

War: I can’t write about anything else

Did you know that (aside from mosquitos) the most deadly animal to humans is ourselves? There are roughly 415,180 homicides each year in the world – this statistic is inaccurate due to countries with poor vital statistics (many people, particularly girls, are invisible and unrecorded). Also, this massive number does not include war or suicide. If it did, humans would be even more deadly than mosquitoes. 

I spend so much time reading, writing, and studying emotional maturity and life journeys. I’m enchanted by the goodness of humans, the way our voices unite in invisible waves when we sing together, and how a mother’s body transforms – stretching skin and increasing oxytocin – to nurse and adore her baby. The way families open space in their lives for adoption, and how people rise above harmful upbringings. The way my grandmother holds and tells stories and the way people laugh, paint, and kiss. My life is filled with wonder as I watch human magic sustain life and connection. But humans are the deadliest mammals, too. 

Humans are capable of producing incredible horror. Edgar Allan Poe wrote grotesque stories in the shadows of the Enlightenment to demonstrate this human horror. I see evidence of this human shadow in the videos from across the world too horrific to describe. Humans ripping bodies and buildings and families apart with weapons and others making excuses with borders and language. There is only one meaning for the word weapon, only one use for the noun: something used to injure, defeat, or destroy. Humans made this word for one purpose only. So while humans have an incredible capacity for tenderness and connection, we also have a harrowing capacity for destruction and hate. 

I want to turn my back on this grotesque demonstration of human capacity and only focus on the beauty but these humans in the videos and news articles are my species, they are my people: I see my face in their faces and my children in their children. None of us chose where we were born and I see enough of me in them that my mind and my body know that these are my people. The humans building weapons and destroying human lives are my species too. The ones protesting, the ones digging for bodies, the ones holding strangers, the ones wearing uniforms and pulling triggers – we are all the same species. We are all human. How can we massacre ourselves in this way?

In Andrew Solomon’s book Far From the Tree, he interviews Sue, the mother of one of the Columbine shooters. She surprised Solomon with her kindness and warmth and love for her son. She said, “After Columbine, I felt that Dylan killed God. No god could have had anything to do with this, so there must not be one. When everything in your world is gone, all your belief systems, and your self-concepts – your beliefs in yourself, your child, your family – there is a process of trying to establish, who am I? Is there a person there, at all?”

Amid war, I don’t know why I keep thinking about this chapter from Far From the Tree and this mother of a mass murderer who loves, misses, and remembers her son, who also cannot forget what he did. Maybe it is because all I want to do is worship and witness the goodness of humanity while telling stories about monsters to explain away the horror but there are no monsters, only humans. Sue’s story exposes humanity in its incredible horror and its incredible beauty. There is no excuse or explanation for all the suffering and destruction caused by people against people – she loves the boy she raised and is horrified by what he did. When God is killed and we are left to ourselves, what do we have? All Sue has is her questions: “Who am I? Is there a person there, at all?”

Statistics: https://ourworldindata.org/homicides

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

Kids These Days

I’m watching the Maze Runner series with my 14-year-old and for the life of me I can’t remember agreeing to it. I have a hard time believing I would ever willingly step into the hellscape that is this no-way-out, never-trust-anyone, there-is-no-end-to-the-maze movie. I have nightmares where I can’t escape; I don’t need to watch it on TV.

I have successfully avoided most of the children-killing-children movies: Hunger Games, Lord of the Flies, and Maze Runner. Until now. You would think that watching the entire Fast and Furious franchise (twice) over covid lockdown would have exempted me from movies I don’t choose, but here I sit, on my couch, watching Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials with my youngest and my husband, who is a more willing participant. They’re both on their phones because ADHD. Which is exactly why I’m writing my blog post now. Well, that and I’m not really interested in more dystopian “fiction” which, to be honest, looks increasingly like a prophesy.

I like YA fiction, just not the only-a-16-year-old-can-save-the-universe type of fiction. Ok, that isn’t quite true. If it takes place in, say, outer space or, perhaps, on another planet, or in a different time that looks nothing like my time, I like it. Nnedi Okorafor’s Bindi stole my heart and I think about the scene on the ship all the time. It isn’t that I think 16-year-olds couldn’t save us. I’m pretty sure they could. I just don’t think they should have to save us. Or, if they have to, maybe we don’t deserve saving. 

I hear a lot of old people exactly my age complaining about kids these days. “Kids just don’t know how to work,” and “kids don’t have any loyalty.” Psh. That’s just a get-off-my-lawn way of saying we taught our children to respect themselves, draw boundaries, recognize abuse, and now they’re looking at us like we’re the bad guys.

We are.

We are the bad guys. 

We created a world where a movie about children killing each other for entertainment hits a little too close to home. Where the sun scorching the earth is, well, actually happening.

But here’s the thing. For all our foot-stomping, we did a good job with those kids. They believed us when we told them they were valuable–too valuable to let abuse masquerade as fidelity. They see the mess and, instead of fighting each other to get to the top of the heap, they opt out of the scramble. They look at our fables and say, “Cute that you think a reluctant hero is coming to save you all. Why don’t we put that in a movie, where it belongs, and work on consent, community, and care in our real lives?”

Each generation criticizes the younger generation. They wave their hands in the air and scream about dying civility and the decline of the world as we know it. I don’t think our kids are proof that the world is in disarray; I think they’re proof that it’s trending up. 

Oof, so maybe we do need a group of rag-tag teenagers to rescue us all. Don’t let my teenager know I said that, though. He already thinks he’s smarter, faster, funnier, and more clever than his parents and I don’t need anyone feeding that ego. I mean, he’s not wrong, I just don’t want to live with him once he figures that out.

In case you want to join us, we’re watching Maze Runner: The Death Cure tomorrow. 

Photo by Aishwarya Gunde on Unsplash