Guest Post: The Insidious Exchange of Community for Covenants
By Candice Wendt
My ward and stake keep hammering down on my 12-year-old son that boys serving missions is a mandate from God. But he’s not buying it. There are all kinds of problematic things going on I could unpack here, but for the moment, I’ll focus on just one obstacle. As we have attended our ward, which has eight proselyting missionaries assigned to it, my son has gotten the impression that missionaries’ efforts to build community are basically fruitless. He witnesses that church is a revolving door with people entering and exiting as they realize we’re not as communitarian as we seemed.
We attend church in the heart of Montreal. Our mission is one of the highest baptizing missions in the world, partly because our city welcomes a large portion of Canada’s refugees and immigrants. For many who are baptized, missionaries offer social respite. At testimony meetings, converts often thank missionaries for being their friends. But life as a member offers relatively little social time or enjoyment. Being in the ward is mostly about passive listening and being told to follow leaders and go to the temple. Social events are few, and often bomb, like when our ward Christmas party dinner was two hours late and all the food ran out before 50 people had eaten anything. You’re more likely to get asked to clean our very dirty building than be asked to dinner. Most converts stop coming after a few weeks or months.
LDS church community hasn’t always been this way. I remember the strong spirit of togetherness at homemaking meetings during my childhood in the western US. I recall the sound of sewing machines, the smell of bread baking, and the pleasure of watching women laughing together. I ran around the building during those gatherings, and later gained my first experiences babysitting so young moms could attend. I remember Halloween parties that were genuinely fun for all ages. At one, my bishopric performed a comedy skit that involved them wearing tutus. Wards worked like caring extended families. Some of this is childhood nostalgia, but some of it is cold hard reality. Community life is breaking down all over the world, and the church has been going along with this tide instead of resisting it.
The institutional church has long been taking an insidious turn away from community and toward covenants as its highest value. General leaders have cut ward budgets and removed, downsized, and deemphasized the programming that once fostered friendships, celebrated accomplishments, and created social fun.
Once as a teen, I displayed an appliqué quilt I made and a history of my great grandfather I transcribed at my ward’s new beginnings meeting. Other girls also shared. We felt admired and loved by the community. My daughter has no such opportunities for recognition.
When I got married and was required to leave my BYU singles’ ward, I was suddenly cut off from friends I loved and from fun social ward routines. I felt betrayed as I realized it seemed the church had made the singles’ ward so socially rewarding to get me married in the temple, then dumped me into an isolated life once their objective was fulfilled. The sudden loss of support contributed to my mental health plummeting as I had a baby and completed a master’s degree over the next two years.
Leaders are treating temple covenants as the sole thing we need to access faith and happiness. Some older members are on board with this. Maybe this is because older people are biased (including general authorities); they no longer have pressing developmental and social needs themselves, and their thoughts are turned toward death and comforting hopes of an afterlife.
One huge problem with the exchange of covenants for community is that temples do not tend to needs for connection. The temple is not better for me than scrolling on a cell phone in the sense that both are downloads of information while I’m essentially in isolation. The temple is not a place to talk or connect. In the celestial room, we may whisper awkwardly or feel we’re on display under bright lights. The ordinances have only become more devoid of interaction over time.
Covenants becoming the heart of religious life alienates members who have concerns about the temple. Some members hold the things Joseph Smith brought about toward the end of his life in suspicion due to his abusive, emotionally numb and compulsive behaviors during that period of time (i.e.. the nightmarish details of polygamy). There are many other fraught questions surrounding the temple, such as the ethics of worthiness interviews and entrance requirements. Many younger members are not confident ordinances should be at the center of living the gospel, or whether God actually needs them. For some, the focus on helping the dead feels irrelevant and misdirected when there are so many living people who need love and attention.
Social disconnection plus hope of a future life with God is not an equation for happiness. We need pleasurable community experiences to rejoice in the gospel and enact its meanings fully. Enjoyment is a blend of relationships, memories, and pleasure (e.g. eating, recreating, having fun; see this interview with Arthur Brooks about happiness from the Ten Percent Happier Podcast). Such experiences are a vital element of long-term happiness.To be happy in our church life, we need to eat with and play with people, make friends, and create memories together.
At a lecture at McGill University last October, philosopher Mark Wrathall discussed how from a phenomenological perspective, faith is not belief (such as in theology, afterlife structures, etc.), but loving and compassionate relations and community building. Faith itself works in a non-cognitive way, it is expressed and grown through community practices. I came away from this lecture with a strong recognition that what matters most to me about about my religious life is how it helps me live a better life now, not how it makes me think or feel differently about the possibility of an afterlife, something which is inaccessible, mysterious, and in many ways completely irrelevant to me now.
Jesus lived a community and relationship-centered life. He spent most of his time conversing, eating with people, connecting with groups, and initiating and nurturing friendships. Disagreement and stretching the limits of his friends’ thinking about themselves and their relationships was his continual mode and venture. Deep levels of emotional closeness seem to have been important to him. He did not live a temple-centered life; he lived a love and humanity-centered life. Following Jesus means subversively fostering community, friendship and love, even when the church itself has ceased to value these things.
I recently told my son after an uncomfortable discussion in Young Men’s that he’ll never receive pressure or guilt from me. I told him I know he is going to be a wonderful person whether he chooses to serve a mission or not, whether he marries in the temple or not, and whether he develops any kind of faith or not. He hugged me and said, “I’m so happy we can talk about these things.” The covenant-obsessed version of the church is not proving loving, relational or supportive enough for my caring children or their exceptional peers. They deserve so much better. Like so many millennial moms around me, you can plan on me resisting the tide and putting love and connection first.
Candice Wendt is a staff member of McGill University’s Office of Religious and Spiritual Life and a contributing editor at Wayfare. She is married to the psychology scholar Dennis Wendt and they are raising two strong-willed, artistic, French-speaking teens together.
