Mormon Rhetoric

An "alpha girl" grows up; or why we still need feminism

2008-01-21T20:40:00.000-05:00

One year ago my husband and I went to the alter fully committed to nurturing a loving partnership in marriage, a partnership in which we envisioned supporting each other equally in our professional pursuits, sharing housework, and engaging together in social activities that we value. This vision, a wonderful ideal, seemed like the natural way to govern a relationship. I belong to what has recently been termed the generation of “alpha girls” – the highly educated and achieving women who only learn that they can be anything they want, but not everything, when they hit the workforce. And my husband, surely, is an equivalent alpha male. We were both products of an era largely committed to gender equality, whatever that means.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one year of marriage has schooled me in how difficult it is to achieve the kind of partnership we wanted – a partnership that involved mutual support for each other in all areas of life rather than dwelling in separate spheres. I was certainly unprepared for the change in how various people perceived me that came as a consequence of marriage and for how soon cultural assumptions about gender roles – assumptions I naively thought my generation was beyond – cropped up.

Like most upper-middle class young woman today, I was prepped and prime for educational success. Education was an investment in future earning power and citizenship whose importance was emphasized again and again. But marriage changes things. Soon after my marriage, many of the family and friends who had supported me so strongly in my education suddenly seemed to assume that having a career follow that education was simply not so important. My husband was the “primary” breadwinner; my career, if I chose to have one, was “secondary.” I needed to place my husband’s career first, because he would feel the burden of providing. My education, apparently, was not necessarily intended to lead to successful employment in my field; I could find fulfillment in volunteering or working part-time instead. People looked at me differently. Certainly, one day I (or my husband) might choose to stay home or work part-time, but some people seemed to place me on that track already. Despite all the talk of equality in marriage, no one outside of our marriage looked at my husband's future differently.

Unfortunately, under the immense pressure of this ideology, I, a life-long feminist, began to crack. I began to think about my professional goals (goals that really are important to me) as if they were secondary. I began to “support” my husband’s work at the expense of giving full justice to my own. The psychological costs, both to him and to me, were enormous. I felt depressed, resentful, and dependent. My husband felt all the weight of the assumption that he was the family’s primary resource. I did the all the housework, mostly because I was trained to care about it more, but also because I felt it was wrong to ask him to do more work. I sold myself short, and was socially applauded, and miserable, for it. (Okay, this paragraph exaggerates binaries and feelings, but to make a point.)

Of course, there were many people who supported my goals. The people I work with in my field have always been there to develop my talents. But, I also learned that the workplace simply doesn’t easily accommodate two working spouses. Certainly, I feel our church carries a significant amount of blame for these gender ideologies in my life, but it also seems to me a significant social problem that in the secular world we educate our girls to believe in their talents only to force them out of work when they start a family, because we are so slow to evolve workplace policies. This has enormous economic and psychological costs.

Most of the year I felt caught in a bind between those who expected me to put my husband first and between systems that are not designed to accommodate two spouses. The issue of work-life balance is more real than I knew; ideologies about gender roles are still pervasive; the need for feminism is very much alive. Regardless of how the future plays out, I have determined to return my goals to the center of my life and to continue striving for a marriage based on partnership.

The singles ward: one year out

2008-01-14T18:25:00.000-05:00

This January marks the first anniversary of my marriage and also my exit from a singles ward into a family ward. Looking back on my time in the singles ward from this vantage point, I find myself waxing nostalgic.

Certainly, there were a number of points about the singles ward that I didn’t like. When in college, I felt the dearth of anyone else my own age in my ward (there were occasionally no other undergraduates); similarly, I often missed having a calling, since there were often not enough to go around to the women in the ward when primary, nursery, and young women’s didn’t exist (that’s another topic). But, mostly, I disliked the humiliating imbalance of women to men that thrust the reality that many of us women would not marry a member of the church upon us every Sunday. My husband tells me that being an older, eligible male in a singles ward is no pleasant task either, since no one understands why they are not married. But people at least assume men have multiple chances.

In many ways, a family ward has eliminated those stresses. Most of the members in the ward are not worried about marriage, there are ample opportunities to serve, and there is a much wider age range of people to associate with. My current calling with the young women has been one of my most fulfilling.

And, yet, I find myself sorely missing the advantages of the singles ward. Mainly, I miss the people and the social events. I expected that married life would be more limited in its social scope than being single, but I have found that it can in no way replace my need for thriving friendships. But, such friendships are much harder to come by in a family ward than in a singles ward. Callings often separate you from other women in Relief Society and duties to spouses call, but the strongest barrier that I have felt has been the divide between those who have and/or stay home with children and those who don’t. Granted, I have made some amazing friends with children, but it is much harder to maintain those friendships than with single friends. Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t have a child just to fit in. (Don’t worry, I’m not, yet.)

The reasons for this barrier are pretty obvious: those who work during the day tend to be unavailable for many RS activities or informal get together’s, people are simply at different stages of life with different preoccupations, and children can’t be left unattended. But when I look at the amazing women I would like to know better, I can’t help wishing that some of those barriers were more permeable.

Life in a family ward has been lonely. It has made me wonder often what it means to be part of a community when we are so often, necessarily, wrapped up in our own families. Surely these families come with blessings, but a year into married life I have come to realize that families alone can never, for me, be enough. Never have I felt more the benefits that I derive from interacting with a whole range of people with different perspectives and interests– single, married, young, and old. When I was in a singles ward, I missed the benefits of the family ward; now, I miss my single friends. In both situations, I have found myself frequently wishing that there could only be one ward where both singles and married couples could mingle, wondering what my life would be like if we valued, like Jane Austen, our relationships with our literal and metaphorical brothers and sisters as being inextricably bound up with our relationship to our spouse.

Judgment: a dilemma for individualistic Mormons?

2008-01-09T11:00:00.000-05:00

For many years, I have been perplexed by the question of what I am required to do and believe as a latter-day saint. Confronted by a long and often contradictory history of commandments and culture attitudes within the church, the process of sorting out commandments from suggestions was nearly impossible. Finally, I settled on the belief that I am primarily accountable for acting upon only those precepts I have learned by my own experience to be important. While I respect those ideas that I do not now agree with, I have faith that God will hold me accountable only for acting with the best of my ability upon those concepts I personally know to be correct.

I find this position the only consist one I can take with respect to believing church doctrine. Moreover, I like placing myself as the central authority over my own life and beliefs, because I find that this heightens in my mind the significance of the commitments I make. And, yet, people can and do point out that a position that allows one to place on hold some church teachings undermines one’s membership in the church. Do I think there are any commandments that are binding on church members? What does it mean to be a member of the church once one says one’s own authority has more importance in determining one’s life than, say, the prophet’s?

(These are difficult questions, and I’m not ready to give answers. There are some basic commandments like the Word of Wisdom that I believe church members are accountable to try their best to keep (granted, for some, this might not be possible), because these commandments identify us to the world at large and it reflects poorly on the entire community when some members break them. If we choose to be a member of a community, then we should try to respect its standards. But, in general, I think that the purpose of commandments is to help bring out our best selves and that activities that prevent us from developing are those that we need to amend or repent of.)

I raise this observation, because I feel that many of the posts and comments on By Common Consent, particularly Kevin’s excellent “You Make the Call Series,” keep raising again and again the tension between feeling that we are the chief authorities in our own relationships to God and the obedience we owe to church authorities. Because I think most of us on this blog share the belief that our relationship to God takes precedence over another authority’s views about our life, I occasionally sense in some comments and posts the feeling that when we are in positions of authority that we should not judge or interfere with the decisions our acquaintances make.

I want to suggest that our reluctance to interfere with others stems not only from a belief in our individual freedom but also from the way in which perceive judgment. When we speak of judging others, our language typically seems to imply legalistic standards, condemnation, and punishment. But, what if judgment meant not condemning others, but discerning what people stand in need of in order to become their best selves. Such a view of judgment is not punitive, nor does it co-opt individual authority and freedom to determine one’s idea of the good. Instead, it aims to give people the resources they need. We need to practice being discerning judges, resisting the impulse to impose our own ideas on others and developing the capacity to truly look at another.

When people are breaking commandments, it may well be wrong to condemn them or layer them with guilt. But their behavior does seem to suggest that they are struggling with questions in their own lives. Discerning their needs and providing them with resources might well be what they need. In my opinion, to not intervene positively and to offer desired support in people’s lives because of our own fears of condemning others is a service to no one. Allowing people to harm themselves, struggle with questions alone, or break commandments that reflect poorly on the entire community are not answers. Neither is condemnation. But, making a good faith effort to bring out the person our neighbor aspires to be might help.

Nostalgic protests

2007-11-15T17:50:00.000-05:00

A phenomenon is occurring at Columbia that interests me for the fact that it is happening at all. Columbia over the last semester as had a series of protests. The first occurred over Ahmadinejad’s visit to the campus. The next began after a noose was found on a African-American professor’s door at Teacher’s College. And, finally, a group of Columbia undergraduates has begun a hunger strike over several demands, including reforming the core curriculum to include more minority writers, creating an ethnic studies department, and expanding ethically into Manhattanville.

As an observer of these events, I perceive them as unified by the response they have received from the students I have spoken to on campus. If the response is not outright hostility towards the hunger strikers in particular – arguments that view the protesters as displacing the voices of the more moderate majority or as a privileged elite with the arrogance to assume that core reform is a significant enough issue to deserve a hunger strike – then it typically dismisses the protests that have occurred as forms of nostalgia. Similarly, when I asked the students in my class who they were protesting when they attended the Ahmadinejad rally, many said they did not know. Although parties formed to protest both the president and Columbia, these students attended because they wanted to experience a protest during their college careers. A friend of mine affiliated with the hunger strikes made their connections to the past more explicit. When searching for a way to express their discontent, they turned to forms that Columbia students used in past decades to successfully cause reforms. Perhaps surprisingly, very few people on campus disagree that the issues are important. They simply dispute the idea that protest is an appropriate form of response.

I don’t wish to judge any of these protests or protesters or comment of the particular issues at stake. However, I am deeply interested in asking what it means that many people now view protest as a nostalgic form whose moment is past. More explicitly, if our culture no longer values protest as a form of action, have we found new models? Or, do we feel that action is no longer worth taking? Do we view actions like protests more as modes of self-therapy for a privileged elite than as activities that can cause impact? Do we have faith that the systems we live within will promote good-enough forms of social justice? Or, is it simply too difficult to articulate a form of action worth pursuing?

I have no memory of the protests concerning gender and race that divided our church. As a younger member, the protests I have witnessed have only been private. The people engaged in these private protests probably feel no less deeply than those who were publicly ex-communicated for their cause, but yet I see no sign of public, member-lead protests against the church recurring in the near future. (Oh, yeah, they just occur in blogs!) Outside of our church, events occur daily that seem to demand our attention: the environment and Darfur to name a few. And, yet, the movement to save Darfur has essentially died. More and more people are now buying green, but we are still left with the glaring problem that the biggest threat to the environment is the global desire to define success as matching the US’s consumer lifestyle.

As I blog, I make sure to carefully guard my rhetoric to censor out any thoughts that might seem less than faithful or polite. When I fail at this task, feelings of shame follow. Despite the fact that I often feel thwarted by institutions, church-run or otherwise, that attempt to prescribe my gender role in society, I find that with every year I inure to the situation more. Content with the knowledge that 75% of my friends share the same liberal opinion on gender roles with me, I morbidly exercise faith that the church and workplace culture surrounding gender will change as this generation of leaders dies off. But, does this mean that I have given up action? And, if I have, does it ethically matter? Would any action I could have taken made a difference within a system?

If protest is no longer a form of action that we find effective, then what other models might we use (if we want to act at all)? And, perhaps more importantly, what are the contradictions in a liberal society and in a Christian church that make our relationship to taking action so difficult?

Why we cannot afford to stay out of political conversations: a response to Mark Brown's post on By Comon Consent

2007-10-16T19:39:00.001-04:00

Mark Brown’s latest post, as I read it, makes the argument that because our environment generally produces our political opinions, we should refrain from accusing people with different opinions of “bad thinking” and remove political conversations from church settings in order to prevent internal division. Many of Mark’s points are undeniably wise. Certainly, it behooves each of us to interrogate our own political beliefs, to consistently attempt to learn from those whose opinions differ, and to love those who disagree with us, recognizing that no party is God’s party. But although I can fully join Mark in believing that we would be well served by giving up negative models of political conversation, I must depart from what I read, perhaps wrongly, as Mark’s conclusion to renounce political conversation more generally within the Church.

I wish to offer the alternative argument that any contemporary organization that wishes to remain a significant moral force (and I’m assuming here that one function of an institutionalized church is to prescribe standards for moral action) cannot afford to give up politically oriented conversations, even for the aim of promoting peace amongst its membership. By politically oriented conversations, I’m referring to politics in the broadest sense of the term, incorporating all of the social and economic systems that order our lives, including, but not limited to, party politics.

My disagreement with Mark turns on the question of whether the moral practices a church should prescribe encompass merely localized, interpersonal interactions or extend to a far more global scale. Mark’s suggestion that we give up political discourse in order to promote harmony amongst the membership inherently prioritizes the local community as the body whose needs demand our attention. Local harmony takes precedence over our relationships with people who live far from us but inhabit the same systems we act within. Mark’s decision to prioritize interpersonal relationships seems to me characteristic of mainstream Mormon moral thinking in general. The vast majority of the principles we learn in church and the case studies we encounter there focus on how to properly interact with the people we encounter in our daily lives. This scale of interaction is undoubtedly significant, and perhaps indeed deserves our greatest loyalty, but it is also increasingly inadequate to not consider more global scales of interaction.

With ever increasing frequency, a vast amount of our interactions occur within social, economic, environmental, and technological systems, ensuring that our actions have consequences that impact the lives of people far removed from our local spheres. Although these people are not immediate faces, I would be very reluctant to claim that these people should morally matter less in God’s eyes than my more immediate neighbors. While we do not yet have adequate moral or religious paradigms for helping us conceptualize what our agency might mean when it extends to a global scale, we most certainly have a moral obligation think about this deeply important issue.

While as church members we should make an effort to move beyond divisive political rhetoric, if we want to remain a relevant institution in society and to claim our full potential as moral agents, then we have to extend our discussion of morality to the institutions and systems that mediate our activity, a major one of which is indeed party politics. We cannot refrain from increased inquiry into the political process, because our actions within this system will have consequences that impact the lives of real people in drastic ways. If we refuse to discuss our agency in the context of these political systems, then we do not simply limit our moral influence to the local, but also wrongly deny our own responsibility for events that happen far, far away. While such discussions might promote division, the moral cost of hiding from these conversations strikes me as far too high.

I deeply value our church’s policy of not endorsing candidates, precisely because this policy enables members to continue a conversation about their beliefs and focus on their relationship to God. But if we extend our commitment to neutrality to refraining from all political discussion (a suggestion Mark does NOT make but that I wish to consider), I doubt that this policy would be either neutral or beneficial. Evoking neutrality of thought in a context in which the majority of members are both Republican and committed to conceptualizing morality in a local way would implicitly keep these interests in tact and shut down further conversation.

Ceasing to say "we:" recovering our own spiritual agency

2007-09-27T18:34:00.001-04:00

On a typical Sunday my Young Women are asked to imagine how they would act when a non-member encouraged them to participate in any one of the stock activities – drugs, underage dating, or parental disobedience – that we Mormons find outside our fold. These conversations are often surprisingly enjoyable, serving as moments when the Young Women solidify their bonds with each other as they contrast themselves to various others. But inevitably these conversations take a turn into the more disputed aspects of Mormon culture. From minor debates over a topic like the Mormon stance on Coke emerge spaces where a variety of Mormonisms emerge that disrupt the group solidarity our role-plays foster.

Out of these moments of rupture often comes the suspicion that our deepest threats to our “Mormon” identity come not from the world without but from within. What these stories of Mormons v. the world mask is that the deepest challenges to our faith, in other words, often spring from the members we wish to support us or assume censor the version of faith we practice.

It’s easy to repeat the standard complaints about how hegemonic Mormon culture discourages those who question and doubt. And perhaps there is strong reason to complain. Certainly Mormon culture does not discourage questioning; it does, however, often prescribe what types of questions are appropriate to ask. While practical questions that help us reach decisions or overcome obstacles are staples of the Mormon experience, questions that doubt the premise of Church authority rarely receive serious attention. And, yet, that said, it seems to me time to ask why we “dissenting” Mormons often take decided pleasure in playing up our perceived differences from normative Mormons and what our insistence on our difference means for our faith.

Which means it is time to stop using “we.”

I increasingly believe that I have allowed myself to limit my own spirituality and agency by allowing myself to believe that every Mormon I meet is a “representative” Mormon. Whereas I strongly cling to the idea that I practice a unique faith that is personally my own, I generally set my faith in opposition to the “representative” Mormon faith that I assume others practice. I have wondered whether I belong in the church and I have considered in the past leaving, because I felt that I could not conform to what everyone else believed.

These views, I now recognize, were deeply flawed. More importantly, clinging to these views curtails my potential to exercise agency, spiritually develop, and fellowship others. Through these views, I denied other people the same uniqueness I claimed for myself, refusing to look beyond the Mormon label I applied to them. And, more importantly, I outsourced my agency to other people by making decisions on the ground of what I thought other people believed, ceding responsibility for my choices to my flawed understanding of what others demanded of me.

The point I wish to make is that in order to take personal responsibility for our faith and to engage in real dialogue, friendship, and debate with other members, I believe we must stop considering other people as representative Mormons and begin treating them as people of unique experiences and evolving faiths. When people no longer feel the burden of being “representative” and instead claim personal responsibility for their faith, I suspect that a great deal of anxiety, confusion, and loneliness in church will be replaced with surprising friendships and plural beliefs. I believe that missionary work will flourish as people no longer face the anxiety of speaking for the church and can instead respond to a non-member friend (who, mind you, should be treat as a friend and not as representative non-member) with genuine thoughts that spring from one’s own beliefs and experience. I believe that we will no longer feel the immense stress to defend or dissent from church beliefs if we can cease to brand ourselves as Mormons first and individuals second.

But, in the meantime, I have a pointed question for the friend whose doubts have prompted me to write this series of posts: If you leave the church, are you doing it because it no longer speaks to what you personally believe or because of what you think other people think the doctrine is? Are you willing to let other people dictate the choices you make?

Dispersed authority: thoughts on the truth-making process in church culture

2007-09-17T09:06:00.000-04:00

Recently someone very dear to me let me know that although he has a strong testimony of God, he has been questioning his ability to participate in the Mormon church, because many of his beliefs in God and experiences have lead him to perspectives that contradict some of the cultural ideas in the church as well as what authorities have said. My purpose in the next few blog posts is not to blame him, but rather to hypothesize that many Mormons can deeply sympathize with his positions. I want to respond to him in these posts by looking at the various concerns that he raises and asking what we as church members can do both to make our church more open to questions and when we face our own doubts. Today, I want to begin to think about the process through which church truths emerge.

One of my friend's concerns is that he has difficulty sustaining church leaders, because these leaders often represent ideas that he finds problematic - particularly ideas about the role of women and minority cultures. However, what I want to ask is to what extent are these leaders actually responsible for promoting these ideas as truths and to what extent do we make leaders responsible for the very complex processes, often beyond their direct control, through which our church as a system raises some doctrines to the idea of truth.

Although leaders say many things, only parts of what they say actually become elevated within our church to principles that the majority of members take as doctrine. Whereas on rare occasions leaders might claim that what they say is revealed doctrine, the majority of the time it appears to be a much more arbitrary process by which their stories gather that type of weight. I want to hypothesize that much of the time, members themselves participate in deciding what messages become authoritative through practices as diverse as continuing to cite certain sayings in sacrament talks or cementing these sayings within the needle point crafts that adorn many Mormon homes.

If this hypothesis is correct, then it leads me to conclude that the process that makes doctrine carry weight is often not isolated to the relationship between an apostle and God, but rather the authority to elevate claims to truth is often dispersed amongst all church members. In that case, I believe that church members must turn not only a historical eye towards some of the "truths" conveyed in church, but also find themselves in a position of immense responsibility as they become agents in disseminating what counts as truth. For me, it is an exciting possibility, and one that makes me think more generously of church leaders, realizing that the claims they make take shape in the complex relationships they have with members of the church.

Back to Blogging

2007-09-17T09:05:00.000-04:00

Dear Readers,

I'm back. Although I will still contribute to By Common Consent, I am now returning to blogging on Mormon Rhetoric. Thanks for all of the support you have given me!

Natalie

By Common Consent

2007-08-17T14:38:00.000-04:00

Dear Readers,

As many of you know, I was invited to blog on By Common Consent. Rather than reproduce my posts on this site, until further notice I invite you to check them out on By Common Consent.

Thanks for your support,

Natalie

Ward boundaries: thinking beyond geography

2007-07-29T21:30:00.001-04:00

Recently the Manhattan stake where I live has undergone a surge of growth. In response to the influx of new members, new wards have been created, buildings have been erected, and there is every appearance that the stake will soon divide.

The surge of members in New York City is undoubtedly exciting. But these members are also shaping a Mormon community that looks scarcely like the one I grew up in. The majority of these members are, like me, young singles, newly weds, or parents of young children who come to the city to pursue school or professional goals. They are also unlikely to settle in NYC permanently. Even those who do stay in the city for several years often switch apartments frequently and thus migrate from one ward to another. If NYC wards are anything, they are resoundingly transitory phenomenons, with congregations whose faces change almost monthly as huge intern populations come and go.

It is a truly remarkable experience to be part of such a vital community that is home to so many intelligent, motivated members. But until I became a Young Women’s leader in one of the newly created wards, I did not notice that this growth has some decided downsides when in comes to nurturing today’s young adults.

Because the majority of the growth comes from a young, transitory population, the new wards that spring up have very few long-term residents in them. As wards divide, those few permanent families with young adults become spread through the wards so that each ward has extremely few young men and women. Consequently, it is very difficult to actually maintain functioning youth programs or even to fellowship the youth with other members. It is not uncommon for there to be just a single young women every Sunday, and it is also not uncommon for the youth leaders to constantly change.

Reflecting upon the fact that NYC’s wonderful growth is also inadvertently causing large problems for permanent residents and the youth, I wonder if it is not time to consider dividing wards with some attention to needs in addition to geography. Already, the church has singles wards - and people might certainly debate their usefulness - and perhaps we should also consider assigning families to wards in part based on their family’s status in places that face such rapid development. Perhaps, for example, families with youth could go to designated wards so that there are enough youth to run a steady program. In NYC, paying attention to facts other than geography when creating wards makes additional sense if the goal is to foster wards stable enough to function, because renters tend to move apartments, and hence wards, so frequently.

Although making geography only one consideration when assigning wards would undoubtedly have issues, perhaps it is time to consider some more innovative ways to draw our boundaries so as to promote communities where change rapidly occurs. Until then, however, we will just have to find ways to thrive within the current system.

Speaking from experience: a technique that often limits me

2007-07-15T22:21:00.000-04:00

For a long time I have struggled to figure out how to frame the comments I make within and about the church so that they seem supportive but might also lead to what I would deem as positive changes in our church culture. For a while now, I have operated on the model that couching my comments in terms of personal experience works best using the logic that while it is easy to argue with a person’s philosophical stance, it is hard to argue with how they feel about an issue or perceive an event they experience. For example, when I wished to explain to someone why I felt that the church could use more revelation on gender, I would explain to him/her how I felt great pain when I realized that I would not receive the priesthood, when I watched the young men receive much more attention than the young women, or when I could not learn about what the General Authorities told my Stake President about the state of the stake, since only the priesthood was invited to hear the news.

In general, I still believe that speaking about specific experiences rather than in terms of “truths” or philosophies leads to more effective communication between people and better testimonies, especially when we bear them to non-members (or, as a friend of mine deems them “friends of other faiths.”) I would direct you to my blog for a fuller discussion of my rationales. However, I have also found that speaking from experience can isolate and dis-empower me as a speaker when the occasion requires me to draw upon experiences when I felt hurt.

Although it is likely that many people share one’s experiences and views, to argue a point by citing how one experienced pain in a situation makes me bring up how I formerly felt powerless. This moves risks recasting me in a powerless position once again. It is very difficult to make an argument that draws pity to one’s self without sketching one’s self as in need of help and thus not a proper leader. In the particular case of when I have tried to mention to people how certain stances that the church has on gender make me feel excluded from leadership opportunities, I find this move especially problematic because it makes me feel more dependent on others than ever.

Speaking from experience can also make me feel extremely isolated, because when I speak from experience I choose not to speak about the systems that make me feel disempowered or the other people who might share my feelings. Speaking from experience demands that I put my life and consciousness on the line, and sometimes it causes me to feel battered down when I cannot draw on others for support or speak about systemic structures that contribute to my pain. To constantly use my (less positive) experiences as an example for why we should reform a policy emotionally wears me down. Admittedly, it is much easier to speak from personal experience when I am drawing on past successes.

Perhaps most significantly, I find that speaking from experiences sometimes introduces a situation in which only those who have had the experience feel authorized to speak. When the listener has not shared the experience, I suspect s/he is often overwhelmed by the speaker’s emotions and does not know how to proceed. For example, far too often, I find that men will not speak up in support of needed reforms on how we view gender, because gender has been improperly conceived as a category that only bears upon women and that only women can speak about. I feel that this situation is deeply unfortunate, because until gender becomes an issue that people of all sexes feel able to ask critical questions about, I cannot foresee our leaders seeking more revelation about such basic concepts as a heavenly mother and places for women within church leadership.

So, yes, there is a place for speaking for experience, but I wish sometimes that others would speak for and in support of me a bit more. I do not wish to be defined by and limited to my experiences when I interact with the world and shape my life within the gospel.

If I can only take my knowledge with me, then can I take Google?

2007-07-13T18:06:00.001-04:00

Normally, I'm not one for speculating about the afterlife. Clearly, how we think about it informs the decisions we make here - in fact, what we think about the afterlife most likely reflects what principles we most value - but I often find discussions about it a little futile. However, I find one phrase frequently repeated and agreed upon: "You can't take your property with you, only your knowledge and talents."

On the face of things, this statement seems straightforward. But, I feel that we increasingly live in an age in which the line between my knowledge, not to mention my very human identity, and the objects I own or the systems I function within is blurry. For example, I outsource a lot of my memory to my computer, just as my husband does to his Palm Pilot. Rather than teaching my students to memorize facts, I teach them the process through which they can research information. Or, interestingly, conversations with friends about my last blog post revealed that while many of us expect our pets in heaven, we are not so sure about wild, un-charismatic animals (despite the fact that 90% of the cells in our bodies are bacteria). In other words, we expect in heaven those things we have made extensions of ourselves and thus part human.

Rather than filling myself with facts and memories, I tend to function more like a search engine that knows how to retrieve facts that I have stored in other places. This point might seem a bit simplistic, but the technologies that we live with fundamentally change how we process and conceive of knowledge. Consequently, it seems to me worth speculating about what conception of knowledge the idea of an afterlife might demand. Could it be that one reason we place so much emphasis on redeeming everyone is that we would need the entire network of people on the earth to really be able to transport our knowledge to a hereafter? And, would our "knowledge" equip us to function in whatever world we expect?

Animals among us: including animals in our narratives of eternal progression

2007-07-11T14:59:00.000-04:00

Last month my dog, Blitzen, passed away. To lose a beloved pet – and to recognize in its absence how deeply its life was intertwined with one’s daily routine – is to realize that it is possible to have a more intimate relationship with an animal than I will ever have with the majority of people I meet.

Given the central position that animals occupy within our lives in an age when articles about pets routinely make it to the top of The New York Times most emailed articles (to be beaten out only by articles like “what a whale taught me about marriage” that combine animals and families into one article), I find myself wondering why the animal’s place remains so under-theorized within LDS theology. In an effort to begin to think about the animal’s place within the gospel, I want to look at what just a few of the fragments our scriptures say about the beasts. Although I will only look here at two moments in Genesis, I hope that other people might bring to light more passages that might help us understand the roles animals might play within our theology.

In the Middle Ages, animals had a far more central place in Christian theology than we currently recognize. Medieval bestiaries, books that compiled the histories of animals and fantastical beasts alike, allowing for a slippage between the real and the imaginary, flourished within monastic, civic, and religious life. These books often painted particular beasts with symbolic and instructional value. Dogs, for example, were often a symbol of Christian virtues, since they tended sheep, and their licks purportedly carried healing power. But by far the most central scene that these books depicted is the moment in Genesis where Adam names the animals.

“And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would name them: whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof” (Genesis 2:19).

Medieval bestiaries always depicted this short passage, and scholars used this moment in part to generate a complex theological understanding about man’s relationship to God. Although certainly the passage positioned man as a steward over God’s creations, many interpreted the passage to mean that man approximated God in his capacity to reason, because he demonstrated an ability to properly use language that elevated him above other life forms.

However, it seems to me that we should not overlook the fact that in this passage Adam’s birth into language and reason also establishes a hierarchal world in which his ability to use language justifies his dominion over animal life. More troublingly, in the next passage Adam names Eve, thus establishing his power of her. I question the ability of the mentality authorized here – one that empowers the human over the animal, the man over the woman, and those who speak over those who listen – to promote humble stewardship over God’s creations. The prevalence of hunting stories within LDS lore makes it seem all too likely that we have often grafted the (sometimes necessary, but often not) slaughtering of animals unto our stories about maturation and independence.

But Genesis also drops some hints that paint the Garden of Eden as a space of far more harmonious relationships between man and beast than my previous comment might suggest. Not only does the above passage allow for the alternative interpretation that Adam’s ability to be like God is founded on his ability to recognize, connect with, and care for animals, but other passages seem to suggest that Eden had a taboo on eating meat. After the flood, God tells Noah, “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things” (Genesis 9:3). If we overlook how distasteful it must have been for Noah to receive authority to eat the creatures he tended on his ark, does this passage that equates animals with herbs suggest a new dietary law for a more fallen age?

I’m not entirely sure what to make of these fragmentary and contradictory glimpses of animal life within the Bible. And, certainly, I haven’t begun to cover all of the passages. The violence that I see sometimes within them undoubtedly stems from the fact that I relate to animals as pets rather than as food for survival – a luxury that surely few people have. But, I do find that these passages raise some questions.

Why do we continue to privilege the ability to speak so much over other abilities, such as the ability to listen and to hear the word, which, after all, is the quality of humbleness that saints must cultivate? Why do we not take more seriously – as seriously as we take taboos on tobacco and alcohol – the injunction in the Word of Wisdom to eat meat sparingly and to eat locally? In a moment of environmental awareness in which we increasingly understand the importance of eating local products and are witnessing the most rapid depletion of the world’s animal species to date such neglect seems inexcusable. I find myself wishing that we as church members would begin to take far more seriously our duties to be stewards over the earth and its animals and to recognize the centrality of preserving this earth to our narratives of eternal progression.

Modern scripture: exploring our relationships to holy works

2007-07-06T22:41:00.000-04:00

Although I believe that the single most powerful concept in the LDS faith is the principle of continuing revelation, I have lately begun to wonder why we have ceased to be a scripture creating people. Certainly, I have heard the argument that we should treat the apostles’ words as scripture, but these words do not appear to me to be granted the same weight within our church as our canonical texts – The Bible, The Book of Mormon, The Doctrine and Covenants, and The Pearl of Great Price.

Yet I feel that before we can explore this question in depth, we need to develop a much richer historical understanding of how Mormons (and other religious groups) have understood their relationships to their holy works. To ask a question about why we do not write scripture now means to first understand both what type of documents the scriptures are and how people have historically written and read them. In other words, we need to ask under what conditions people write and have written scripture in order to better understand whether it is possible to write scripture today.

It appears to me that it would be extremely fruitful to begin an exploration of how the early saints understood their relationship to the evolving canon of scripture and, consequently their own positions in history and to God. Not only did these saints live in a time of immense volumes of revelation, but, because of their historical situation, they also faced the tasks of refining and defining the systems and mechanisms that would authorize some texts and other bits of revelation as truth. Hopefully, if we were to understand the systems through which texts became evidence of truth (rather than taking the text’s content as our starting point), we would understand more clearly what beliefs and principles motivate our faith and govern its daily practices.

Of course, this question presumes a stance that sees our relationship to texts and to scripture as historically evolving and multifaceted. This assumption leads me to wonder if we are not, in fact, writing scriptures in new form today. Although we no longer appear to make canonical books of scriptures, are our own scribbling in our journals, blogs, and magazines that distinct from the histories found in our older scriptures, even if most of those who write are not prophets?

Perhaps there is so much writing today as compared to the church’s origins that it would be impossible and limiting to include all writing within a single volume of scripture – much like it was impossible to include all work within The Bible. Then again, perhaps the point of canonical scriptures is to regulate the sheer volume of writing in order to create uniform and authoritative teachings that give the church a common foundation. Be that as it may, as a blogger, I find the idea that we are writing new scripture today quite appealing. But even if we are not writing scripture, I would appeal to my fellow bloggers to help me identify sources that discuss how Mormons relate to the scriptures so that I can shape this question into a larger project.

Fashion statements: dress as communication

2007-07-05T12:43:00.001-04:00

Quite recently, Levi Peterson wrote a post entitled “Don’t Come to my House in a Shirt and Tie.” This provocative post and the fascinating comments about it clearly signaled how standards for dress remain one of the most contested spaces as we attempt to negotiate our identities as church members. Struggles over what constitutes respectful and modest clothing, and the related struggles over whether the paradigm of “modesty” dis-empowers more than empowers women and is culturally relative or not, continually surface as sites for everything from adolescent rebelliousness, to deep explorations of our spirituality, to humanitarian causes. What each person who cares about dress and considers the choices they make (or evaluates those others make) about where they shop and what they wear seems to clearly understand is that dress constitutes one of our simultaneously most visible and understated ways of communicating our identities, our values, and our affiliations. I suspect it is this fact that makes the rigid rules for dress that Peterson diagnosis often so frustrating. Or, in an alternative situation, what made the schoolgirl in me rejoice that I had a uniform that freed me from having to make fashion statements.

Rather than prescribing rules for dress or bemoaning those we do not like, perhaps we should begin focusing more on what people communicate through their fashion statements and how people perceive our own. In other words, we need to focus more on the principles and consequences of our fashion choices so that we can better understand which messages we wish to send.

For example, in the specific case of whether or not to home teach in a white shirt and tie, we need to pay attention to the consequences that follow from wearing a suit. On the one hand, the suit does show respect, but it also creates a distance between people that blocks intimacy from developing. In another example, the fact that missionaries always wear suits most likely contributes to one New York Times writer’s recent claim that people perceive the LDS church as having the soul of a corporation. Or, finally, when we consider what constitutes appropriate dress for Sunday worship, we probably should consider whether our goals include creating a uniform for expressing reverence or encouraging people to attend church. Recently, I asked the mother of one of my young women what we could do to help her come to church, and I learned that this young women would not attend, despite the fact that she enjoyed church, because she was anxious about her body and did not feel comfortable in a dress.

The decisions we make about how to dress will inevitably impact what type of conversations we can have, to whom we can speak, and the power dynamics of any given situation. If we better understood the messages people communicate through their dress we would undoubtedly learn quite a bit more about the needs and hopes of members within the church. And, if we began focusing on what we wish to communicate through dress – a task that would require defining precisely what we hoped to accomplish in situations like home teaching – we would be better able to decide what specifically would constitute being well-dressed for a given situation. I would love to hear more about precisely what principles, commitments, and goals underwrite the fashion statements that we make as church members.

Beyond peace and calm: daring to experience the spirit in novel ways

2007-07-05T11:17:00.001-04:00

A remarkable thing occurred in my Sunday school class this week: we reached consensus. While we all acknowledge that there is no right way to feel the spirit, we all concurred that the spirit was accompanied by peace, calmness, and quiet.

Peace, calm, and quiet are the characteristics by which I most frequently recognize the spirit in my life, but perhaps there is a decided danger in my propensity to think that peace, calm, and quiet must accompany the spirit. Our Western world tends to value undemonstrative interiority, quiet rationality, and pleasure within bounds, and our church with its construction of temples and meeting houses as quiet spaces certainly partakes of these values.

However, we need only perform a passing study of the scriptures to see that the spirit has not always been so reserved. The scriptures feature converts collapsing in fits under the influence of the spirit, great festivals full of rejoicing, burning bushes, tablets cracking, and angles appearing. The spirit in these instances is colorful, lively, and anything but quiet and peaceful. Similarly, in the cities where I have attended church not a few recent converts have brought parts of their own religious traditions with them that include more demonstrative spiritual observation. One of my friends, a former Southern Baptist, bemoaned the fact that our singing and worship was not as warm as in the church she grew up within, saying that the rituals within the Southern Baptist church increased her appreciation of the spirit.

Although I value the calm and peace that I feel the spirit brings to me, I worry that my insistence on feeling the spirit as calm has made me less than receptive to those who experience the spirit in other terms. I am ashamed to admit that I sometimes dismiss more spiritually demonstrative members or accounts in the scriptures as a type of spiritual hysteria or mental unbalance, failing to consider how these members interact with the spirit and their community in legitimate, intelligent ways. And, as a consequence, I have significantly limited my capacity to experience the spirit in all areas of my life and to extend fellowship to people from other backgrounds.

But there is an aspect of my insistence on the spirit filling me with peace and calm that concerns me even more. Namely, do I insist on the spirit being peaceful and calming, because deep down I don’t have enough faith that God is capable of the huge spiritual outpourings that we read about in the scriptures? Surely, even in my style of writing about religion I equivocate and try to acknowledge multiple points of view, in part because I cannot yet bring myself to risk fully committing to any one belief. Do I not wish to risk the faith I do have by allowing myself to believe that God could really perform a miracle that no one could deny was one?

I’m comfortable with allowing God to fill me with peace, but by insisting that peace is all the spirit can bring, perhaps I have excluded myself from truly allowing God to work miracles within my life. I think it is time for me to consider the possibility that God can bring us much, much more than peace and take seriously the proposition that he really can bring us eternal life in the world to come and marvelous blessings here on earth. Because if I truly believed in his power, then I know that the choices I make everyday would be more daring and more directed towards bringing the world more peace.

Guest blogger on By Common Consent

2007-07-05T11:14:00.000-04:00

Note: For the next two weeks I will be a guest blogger on By Common Consent. During these weeks, I will copy my posts here, but I encourage readers to check out the lively Mormon community of By Common Consent.

Agency after college: some thoughts on the choices I don't make

2007-06-28T22:17:00.000-04:00

Growing up, everyone told me that I could be anything I wanted, an idea that still seems supremely attractive to me. The only problem was that they didn't tell me that I couldn't be everything I wanted. At some point, I would need to choose which of my many potentials I wanted to pursue. I couldn't become a college professor and lawyer and a movie star all at once. I'd have to make a choice.

This post is not directly about Mormon rhetoric; rather, it's a personal confession about why I find it so very difficult to exercise my agency now that I have left college. At some point I realized that I found the possibility of being able to choose to be so many people more exciting than any one choice I could possibly make. Regardless of how good that choice was, it couldn't match in excitement the vision of having so many choices to make. I was in love with agency itself. Paralyzingly in love with it.

But there was another reason that I found agency difficult to exercise after college: I suddenly needed to be responsible for my own choices. I loved school, because I loved the fact that I made choices that were rewarded by my teaches with approval or disapproval. In fact, growing up most of the choices I made were either affirmed or not by the people I interacted with, meaning that my choices were, alas, probably as much their choices as mine. I exercised agency, of course, but I exercised that agency within a system that others largely determined for me. And I loved the comfort that system gave.

I think my inability to commit to one choice is profoundly linked to the fact that I am accustomed to relying on other people's approval. Because I sometime value so much what awards other people assigned to my various career options, I am also at times unable to recognize what I actually want. Far too often, I let others tell me what I want.

Life after college is less clear. There are no more grades and no more clear life paths. For the first time in my life I find that I must fully take responsibility for deciding what I want and what I will pursue with my limited resources and time. I find this situation rather frightening, because in the absence of people to reward my behavior I must also take responsibility for determining the worth of my own decisions. And, yet, terrifying though this state of affairs is, it is also exciting. It has made me realize that agency is not something that I was born with or that I simply have, but its a skill that I am just learning to practice. Agency is not a gift, but rather a psychological achievement and something that we must allow ourselves to take. It is nothing short of claiming my life as mine to make - and that task I find as daunting as it is exciting.

Local motion: making local voices count in a global age

2007-06-24T18:38:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago our stake had stake conference. This conference took the form of a one-way broadcast from Salt Lake in which several General Authorities and a General Young Woman's Leader addressed us via satellite from Salt Lake. I genuinely appreciate this attempt by the leadership in Salt Lake to connect with LDS members in other regions, but I also felt that this conference illustrated the pressing need for our church to access local voices.

Stake conference plays an important role in developing local church communities. It presents one time in which local leadership can help members understand the particular challenges that their unique outpost of LDS faith faces. The introduction of these new broadcasts dismantles that opportunity, replacing it instead with a chance to listen to leaders who, in our case, repeated general conference addresses and are often painfully out of touch with local concerns.

This broadcast demonstrated that we now have the technology in place to effectively bring the voices of leaders to people who do not generally connect with them. However, it also demonstrated how inadequately we have developed a social system that enables leaders to hear local voices in exchange.

In part, we might attribute the fact that we have not successfully found a way to bring local concerns to the attention of Salt Lake to the very models of priesthood organization that we rely upon. Namely, we utilize a hierarchical chain of command - not unlike certain business structures - in which each local leader reports to his supervisor. Although this system functions well to ensure that information moves from the top down, it also presents numerous opportunities for information NOT to move from the bottom up, because information can stop with any one member of the chain.

This heirarchical method for communicating information becomes particularly problematic when we note that organizations tend to appoint leaders who thrive within the current system. In other words, organizations tend to appoint as new leaders those who most successfully model the leaders already in place, thus creating a governing body that lacks diversity. In the wards I have lived in, people who thrive within business or the law while attending church regularly tend to epitmize leadership and Mormon success.

While this practice might be useful in some situations, it also makes it likely that the voices of those whose concerns do not match the leaderships' will not be heard. Within the church, the fact that our chain of command works through the priesthood organization makes the problem of women's voices being lost especially acute.

For many years this hierarchical system has helped to give us the comforting reassurance that the church "is the same" wherever we go. But while we ought to maintain consistently throughout the world in our core beliefs, we also need to appreciate how the church culture can and should be different as local needs dictate. If we are to have a church that can continue to respond to its members' needs, and a church whose leaders can know what questions to bring to the Lord, then we need to develop more dynamic channels through which to communicate information. It seems quite telling that the most successful companies today have made improved communication their business.

Spirituality in the city

2007-06-17T08:07:00.000-04:00

After several weeks of being out of town, I am back again. In fact, my own friends visited me last week from North Carolina. At dinner, we began discussing the differences between how, unlike in Elders Quorum, assertive and controversial comments are widely discouraged by the culture of Relief Society.

Normally, I am inclined to attribute these facts to my feeling that the reigning prescriptive cultural norm of Mormon womanhood has little place for the assertive manners of speaking that women who are, for example, CEO's or other professionsals use to speak with authority in the work place. When these professional, educated women transfer the style of speaking that they use in their daily lives to Relief Society, I feel that they often meet resistance from a setting that values the "emotional" well-being of its members far more than their intellectual health.

However, my friends from North Carolina made me wonder if perhaps there are not other factors that contribute to the fact that in Relief Society we find people speaking in a confessional, nurturing manner rather than in patterns of speech guided more by inquiry. Namely, I was struck by the fact that my wonderful friends from North Carolina lived life at a much, much slower pace than it is possible to in the heart of New York City where I reside. As I was speaking effeciently and watching the clock so that I could make it to my work on time, they chatted with everyone, took in the world around them, and disclosed large aspects of their personal histories to those they met.

Perhaps these qualities were peculiar to my friends, but I began to think about how the models that we have for spiritual conversations and sacred places generally derive from people who lived in the countryside. One would look in vain for a Sacred Grove in the middle of Manhattan, not to mention neighbors that would welcome a long chat. And, I began to wonder whether people in the country and the city experience their spirituality in different terms as a consequence of the environment they live within. Surely, many of the ways that we are expected to speak in church settings reflect gender norms, but I would be interested in hearing from readers about whether they have found that where they live influences the type of conversations that they consider spiritual.

Missionary Strategies

2007-05-27T14:05:00.000-04:00

This Sunday, a group of my friends sat down and discussed the familiar topic of why missionary work is so hard. Two points emerged that I wish to share here.

Perhaps one of the reasons we find missionary work difficult is that the typical person who questions us about what Mormons believe expects us to answer as "the representative Mormon." When this occurs, we find ourselves searching our minds to pull out official church documents or passages of scripture that we might quote so that we can speak for the organization as a whole. Unfortunately, these statements typically fall flat when told to non-members,not only because they are frequently written in language that only a Mormon would understand, but also because they do not reflect our own voices and the nuances of our personal beliefs.

The trouble is that none of us are representative Mormons. Rather, we are each individuals with slightly different beliefs who speak in different words. I want to suggest that we cannot be effective missionaries who can speak with spirit and conviction unless we respond as individuals rather than as representative Mormons. Unless we can use our own language to share with others why being a member of the church changes our lives in specific terms that the other person can relate to, then others will not be able to have an intimate, spiritual conversation with us.

Of course, we must also realize that the non-member we speak with is not a "representative non-member." Unless we attempt to learn about the specific details of the other person's life and beliefs, then we will not be able to have an effective exchange of ideas that will foster the spirit and community.

Once, however, we decide to be missionaries who respond as individuals rather than as representative members to inquiries about Mormon beliefs, we might feel that we do not want to always immediately answer a personal question. Sometimes we feel anxiety to respond to every question instantly, which is why we often fall back on general church statements, but not every question is appropriate for a non-member to ask. For example, one of my friends noted that she does not feel it is appropriate to respond to a question about what Mormons believe about chastity at work. So, she tells the person asking that the Mormon church says x, but she would prefer to go for a walk and discuss her personal believes on the matter in a more intimate, friendly setting. Missionary work does not mean that we need to respond to everything immediately; we should respond to questions when the time and place is right, and create a better time, place, and conversational terms when needed.

Promoting rather than defining "family values"

2007-05-20T15:46:00.000-04:00

Many church members and official publications frequently speak about family values, motherhood, and fatherhood, but rarely go on to define what they mean by these terms and to illustrate the various roles that they attach to them. Although I think most people would acknowledge that, for example, motherhood is not simply an identity but a bundle of many different roles that one performs, these roles rarely enter into discussions about family values. We rely on family values as a rallying cry that all too frequently pits us against non-Mormons, but beyond agreeing that family values are good we rarely discuss what actions encompass them. What is the consequence of the fact that we speak a lot about our gender and family identities, but rarely about the different activities that these identities entail?

I think that perhaps the most significant consequence of this rhetoric is that it prevents us from shaping effective policies that could lend support to people trying to fulfill their various roles. We cannot shape policies that support an essential and abstract ideal like "motherhood," because motherhood is a fuzzy idea rather than a person. But we can pass legislation that could help people fulfill particular roles. We could, for example, promote further educational and employment opportunities for women who decide to stay home while their children are young. We could petition for quality child care or for a shorter work day. We could effectively support any number of causes that would help us fulfill the roles we value and enable us to have strong families.

Certainly, we might find that we agree and disagree about which of these roles we seek to promote, but if we began to speak in terms of the various roles we play and stopped trying to prescribe essential identities, we would be significantly farther along than where we are now in diagnosing and relieving the challenges that face the men and women trying to structure and support their families. We cannot successfully promote or defend abstract conceptions of identity. Our church could, however, become an immense force in promoting families if we stopped staking our claims on identity issues like gay marriage and began instead to diagnose and fight for what people need in order to successfully raise families and promote meaningful lives for men and women in 2007.

Citation and the conference talk

2007-05-10T08:51:00.000-04:00

When the conference issue of the Ensign arrived earlier this week, I eagerly turned to President Hinckley's address, "The Things of Which I Know." I looked forward to hearing how he acquired his faith and how I might share similar experiences. But then, I got to the following paragraph:

How deeply grateful I am that we of this Church do not rely on any man-made statement concerning the nature of Deity. Our knowledge comes directly from the personal experience of Joseph Smith, who, while yet a boy, spoke with God the Eternal Father and His Beloved Sone, the Risen Lord.

This passage surprised me. Whereas I had opened the pages to read about President Hinckley's personal experiences and witnesses, in this passage, and throughout the rest of his talk, he expressed his personal experiences by citing Joseph Smith's. Puzzled, and I admit a bit annoyed, I began to look through the other talks in the magazine, only to become fully aware that the vast majority of the apostles' talks relied heavily on citation and quotation.

Certainly citation has its purposes. Theoretically, it demonstrates how we share a web of knowledge and resources, it links our experiences to those shared by others in the past and others in different geographical regions today (creating "truths" that transcend context), and, as in the Book of Matthew, we can draw upon the past to show how God has fulfilled it. For busy apostles, it also must surely give them a body of works to draw upon when asked to speak to numerous members. As they face difficult decisions, it must be comforting to look towards other leaders for precedents to follow.

But, I find myself asking, "Why does a church that believes so much in continuing revelation and personal testimony rely upon citation so much?" As I raise the question, I find myself wishing that our authorities would address us a bit more in their own voices and look more towards the future than the past.

Neutrality in an era of inequity

2007-05-05T17:35:00.000-04:00

As graduation approaches once again at Columbia, I find myself thinking about the lessons I have learned through following the controversy about Cheney speaking at BYU. More specifically, I find myself asking what value the principle of neutrality serves within the church.

Like many others, I initially responded with concern to the news that BYU invited the Vice President to speak at graduation. As a New Yorker who must constantly disabuse my non-LDS friends of their perception that the LDS church aligns itself with the political right, I certainly did not feel that the invitation helped support my point.

But although I joined those who petitioned for the church to ensure that its future actions appeared more neutral, I now find myself deeply skeptical that the language of neutrality will be enough to actually allow the church to become an organization that embraces people of many political backgrounds. In an organization in which voices to the right have far more sway than voices on the left, to assert neutrality is to ensure a status quo that at times seems to marginalize current and potential members.

While the church should continue not to endorse or promote political agendas, to continually assert neutrality without addressing the real inequity that more liberal and international members feel might not be so neutral after all. Perhaps we must more actively welcome members from a variety of parties both in the US and abroad in order to ensure that people everywhere can better welcome the messages we have to offer.

"I know the church is true:" discovering vocabularies that work

2007-05-04T20:29:00.000-04:00

A couple of days ago, an LDS graduate student list that I belong to sent a link to a question and answer session in The Washington Post with Helen Whitney, producer and director of "The Mormons." One curious reader intent on listening to Ms. Whitney asked the producer what she learned from her time studying Mormon culture. She replied:

I was struck by the emphasis on certainty in your religion. I come from a tradition which encourages doubt and questioning. My own faith is inflected with doubt which I feel is intimately connected to my faith. However, I sense from many conversations with Mormon believers that doubt can be seen as undermining of the faith, even dangerous to it. When I went to my first testimonial meeting, and heard men, women and children describe their faith using the words "I know" I was truly surprised. They didn't use words like: I hope, I believe, I intuit, but the ubiquitous phrase I know. For some Mormons, this can be inspirational, and yet for others it can be intimidating and discourage them from voicing their own questions. Nonetheless, as I spent time in the Mormon culture I came to learn that their certainty is a complex many layered encounter with the divine.

The content of Ms. Whitney's respectful response did not surprise me. Having asked myself for many years what Mormons mean when they claim that they "know the church is true" and what it might mean for me to voice those words through which we self-identify as members of a church, I could fully sympathize with Ms. Whitney's remark that the phrase is complex. Sometimes the phrase "I know" expresses firm conviction; at other moments, it is the rote phrase we use to close a testimony; on occassion, it stands as a poor substitute for the other terms Ms. Whitney mentions - hope, belief, in short, faith.

But although the phrase "I know the church is true" can appear complex to individuals who, like Ms. Whitney, listen well enough to discern the multiple meanings it conveys, I suspect that the strident, certain, and imprecise note that this rhetoric strikes often leads to misunderstandings amongst those within and outside of the LDS church.

To claim that "x" is "y" is to trade in essentials, to shift the debate to what something IS rather than what something DOES. When we claim that the church is true, we speak of the essence of what the church means to us. But, in staking this claim - a claim that is too cliche to confer much meaning to people who don't share the culture associations it carries to us - we also invite resistance to it and fail to give other people a point of reference through which they can engage with our ideas. We define our position and invite others to define theirs, a dead-end move that shuts down conversations that might help us better understand each other's experiences.

Rather than professing the church is true, perhaps it would be more useful if we as church members used a more precise vocabulary and began to describe what the church does for us in our lives that lead us to be members. I suspect that if we were to shift our vocabulary away from essentials and towards what our faith does, then we would more actively understand and take responsibility for the deeds that motivate our belief.

Certainly, there have been moments in my experience of the LDS church when I have known both people who felt threatened by other members' desires to question and those who felt unwelcome in a culture that appeared rather too rigid and prescritive of conservative values. I, for one, have often both these people at once. But I suspect that if we as members were to pay more attention to the language through which we expressed our belief, focusing always on what belief does, that we would discover more intersections and exciting potentials in our faith with people both within and outside of the LDS church. So many times, I am astonished at how I talk past someone until a slight change of diction brings us onto the same page. If in our relationships to other people we cannot agree on what something is, then we need to search for a vocabulary that does work.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/04/27/DI2007042701597.html?hpid=sec-religion?hpid=sec-religion