The Young Women motto is "stand for truth and righteousness." When I was in Young Women, my group had a tradition on Sundays that during opening exercises, we would have a period of time during which anyone could get up and share with the class how they had "stood for truth and righteousness" during the week. Usually the girls who got up would get a small piece of candy as a reward. At the time I thought nothing of this tradition, but looking back it disturbs me.
The things that girls would share as "standing for truth and righteousness" varied widely, but they most commonly involved being Mormon in a profane world. Many of the girls in my group were in choirs or plays at school, and it was common every few weeks for these girls to share that they had altered their performance dress with sleeves and a higher neckline or that they had refused to say a petty swear word such as "damn" as part of their lines in a play. I'm all for standing up for one's principles, but the part that bothers me is the getting up and telling everyone every Sunday. Most girls would try to share something every week, both because they wanted their Sunday chocolate and because of social pressure. During pauses, girls would elbow each other to get up. I was no different from anyone else. For me, as I suspect it was for most girls, sharing the ways I had been "righteous" in the past week was almost a kind of high. I got to show everyone else just how righteous I was, and enjoy their admiration. It was an ego booster, but it also served to bind me more closely to the group and to cause me to base a lot of my self-esteem on how I was perceived by the other girls. Everyone judged everyone else. If one of the girls didn't add sleeves to her choir dress or chose to perform on a Sunday, everyone else would look down on her--even though no one ever said anything.
The real difficulty with this kind of "standing for truth and righteousness" is that no one seemed to think very deeply about what they were standing for, or why. Sure, we swallowed all the rhetoric about standing up for "values" and being a "light to the world," but what did that really mean? It really boiled down to following rules--the church's rules--even if they seemed silly. There were no exceptions to the rules, ever. The world was black-and-white.
We were encouraged to be "steadfast and immovable" in the gospel. But where is the value in that? Where is the value in sticking by something even if it doesn't make any sense? Why is obedience a virtue? In the church, standing up for "values" ultimately boiled down to being obedient, to doing what the prophet has told you to, even if it seems silly. We were taught that "obedience is the first law of heaven." In other words, the ultimate virtue was not honesty--it was subordination of one's own reason, intuition, and moral compass to a dictatorship of "revelation." The ultimate result of this is that if obedience is the first law of heaven, the primary and most important virtue, then honesty is vilified. The person who says, "that doesn't make any sense; I don't think I'm going to follow it" is not a moral hero, but a weakling or a hedonist. The young woman who asks why, exactly, it's wrong to have two sets of earrings, and refuses to obey that command until reasonable justification has been given, is not to be praised, but chastised. She is not standing for truth and righteousness--an ironic phrase indeed when it implies moral dishonesty.
Perhaps I am going too far in calling obedience moral dishonesty. Perhaps it's unfair of me to apply my own standard of ethical epistemology to everyone else. But in my own view of the world, "good" and "bad" must be justified. They can't be arbitrarily assigned. They have to have reasoning behind them. If one rejects this, then the whole concept of morality, ethics--whatever you like to call it--is utterly meaningless. If "good" is solely determined by what an authority figure says, then there is no point in calling that authority figure "good." It becomes a circular argument to say that the prophet's counsel is good. How do we know that counsel is good? Because it came from the prophet. How do we know he is a prophet? Because his counsel is good. And round and round it goes.
If you're going to stand for something, you have to have something to stand on. You have to have some kind of epistemological rationale, some kind of logical footing, in order for you to even say that you are standing for something worthwhile. The kind of ethics I was taught in church was completely empty in this respect. The kind of ethics I now espouse are not based on obedience and faith, but on honesty, truth, and humility--the humility to admit that I was wrong.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Friday, April 15, 2011
It Gets Better
I remember how scared and devastated I was when I lost my testimony. Life was pretty difficult for me for a long time. Mormonism was all I knew, and I had no idea how I was going to live outside of it.
I don't know how likely it is that a Mormon who is doubting their faith will stumble across my blog, but if any ever should, this post is for you. And my promise is that it gets better, if I may borrow a phrase used by the LGBT movement.
I think that the best thing I did when I lost my testimony was reach out for help. I started posting on an exmormon recovery board, postmormon.org, and the people there were incredibly supportive. Another thing I did that was incredibly helpful was doing research on grieving and how it works. For many, perhaps most people who leave the church, there's a grieving process involved. It was incredibly helpful for me when I realized what was going on and why--and that it would eventually peter out and I'd be okay. A useful model for understanding this is the 5 stages of grief. The important thing to realize here is that this process is not like a game of Monopoly, where you land on each square, pay your dues, and move on. Everyone will experience these emotions differently, in a different order, and sometimes simultaneously. You will probably experience some of the different stages more than once. People are complex things, and leaving the Mormon church (whether you leave only mentally, or physically as well) is a long process for many people. The church entwines itself so entirely into the lives of its members. It permeates quite literally every aspect of life--from big things, like philosophical epistemology, to little things like what you can eat and drink, to intensely personal things like sexuality and relationships. There is no area of life that Mormonism doesn't touch. When you are freed from the church, it's a wonderful feeling. Your life and choices are completely your own and you don't have an organization trying to impose its one-size-fits-all dogma on you. But because the church is so completely a part of everything, the process of extricating yourself can be long and painful.
Everyone's experience will be different, but I am going to give a quick run-down of what the process was like for me in the hopes that others will be able to relate to parts of it, and recognize the differences in their own experience. The process started when I was exposed to information about the church that contradicted everything I had been taught. This information was online, and my initial reaction was to defend the church. I was convinced that the information being presented was false, and by Jove I was going to correct that misinformation! Obviously, this backfired badly. I was having references to the Journal of Discourses and LDS canon scripture thrown at me, and ultimately I realized that the discussion was going nowhere and gave up. The information I received perturbed me, but not so badly that it really affected me aside from irritating me.
Over a period of about a month, I repeatedly encountered things that chipped at my resolve. These things fell into two categories--reasoning and evidence. The reasoning was really the most powerful influence on me. I remember one day in particular when I couldn't get the conflict between D&C 132 and Jacob 2 off my mind. After my classes for the day were done, I remember sitting at the kitchen table in my dorm with my scriptures and laptop, poring over the relevant verses and trying to reconcile their differences. I spent the better part of the afternoon on this. And things like this kept happening, on average about once a week. Every time my attempt to reconcile the problem turned out to be futile and I gave up. One night it hit me that the church might not be true after all.
Doubt is a curious thing. It's like belief; you can't just make yourself doubt something. The philosopher Descartes tried to find truth by doubting everything, and then building his worldview back up starting with the self evident truth that "I think, therefore I am." But as the pragmatist philosopher William James pointed out, Descartes didn't actually change his behavior. He still kept his hand out of the fire, still ate and drank, still interacted with his world in the same way as always even though he was trying to doubt that any of it existed. I think that James has a more accurate conception of doubt than Descartes--namely, that doubt is uncertainty as to how one should act. And you can't make yourself doubt. Try it--try doubting whether you'll burn your hand if you stick it in the fire. Do you now have any hesitancy about how you should act with respect to the fire?
When I started doubting, I had no idea how to act. It was painful. When you don't know how to act, you can't really function. One term for describing this is "cognitive dissonance"--the painful phenomenon of having two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time. I believed that the church was true, yet I was aware of things like the contradiction between D&C 132 and Jacob 2, the heinous history of polygamy, Joseph Smith's false prophecy about the second coming of Christ being at the end of the nineteenth century, Brigham Young's Adam/God doctrine--and the list was growing. I didn't know what to think or how to act. The way we cope with cognitive dissonance is obvious--we suppress one of the conflicting ideas. So I suppressed my doubts. They were still there in a dark corner of my mind, but I ignored them so that I could function. I was in denial.
There came a point when I couldn't suppress the doubt anymore. I had shoved that "spiritual shelf" so full of different things that when I encountered one more problem--in my case, the Book of Abraham--it didn't fit on the shelf anymore and it came crashing down around my ears. I felt the full intensity of the doubt and uncertainty, and to this day I can think of only one other time when I was in more emotional pain (also connected to the church). It was then that I started posting on postmormon.org. Within twenty-four hours I was out. I had been resisting the notion that the church wasn't true, but by this time the only thing stopping me from admitting it to myself was intellectual honesty. I wanted to make sure that I had given the church a fair shake before I rejected it. But the pile of problems was just so enormous, the very honesty that made me initially hesitant pushed me to realize, it probably isn't true. The absolute relief that flowed over me when I made that realization was incredible. There was a long, hard road ahead of me out of the church still, but I entered into an acceptance phase for awhile. The last month of that semester at BYU was surprisingly pleasant. The month or so previously had been painful, and now I was free. I started exploring the boundaries of the new world that my mind was in, and found that it had none. I was as free as a bird, and it was exhilarating. In short order I accepted evolution as scientifically viable, gave myself proper sex ed with the aid of Wikipedia, and even started questioning the existence of God.
That last item was the one that drove me into another difficult stage of my deconversion. Atheism frightened me. I tentatively explored the idea with my mind, trying to get a feel for the world, and didn't find any God in this new, ex-Mormon world. It frightened me. About two weeks after I stopped believing Mormonism, I watched The Lion King with my roommates and ended up very distressed over the death of Mufasa. What happens when you die? I didn't want to lose my family forever. The problem of death kept me vacillating on the question of God for several months. At different points I was an atheist, an agnostic, a deist, and at one point almost a Christian. And then, after months of worrying that issue, I let it go. I realized that no easy answers were forthcoming, and almost imperceptibly, I began thinking of myself as an atheist.
That was the process of my intellectual change, but the emotional one was much, much more difficult. This is where the stages of grieving come in. Sometimes I would experience denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance all within a single day--sometimes a single hour. I knew it wasn't true, but sometimes I was still so emotionally attached to the church that I tried to make myself not know. Most often I was angry and resentful, which always seemed to throw me right into depression again when my anger proved utterly ineffectual. At one point I was so obsessed with the problem of death and whether or not life had any meaning that I was suicidal. The issue plagued my mind so much that it became like a vise on my brain that wouldn't let go. It was always there, looming in the background. I remember one dark night when my family was watching a movie, and I was so trapped inside my own mind that I locked myself in the bathroom, trying desperately to gain control of my mind, and the thoughts of death just wouldn't stop. Try as I might, I couldn't make them go away. There are few things that terrify me as much as not being able to control my own mind. I want to point out here that part of the problem in my case was that I have a history of problems with depression, especially in the winter months and as a side effect of PMS, and I have no doubt that this was an enormous part of the problem with my fixation on death. But it had never been this bad before.
My point in sharing this is that I want to show anyone who's in a similar situation that it gets better. You can move on, you can figure it out, and you can find meaning and purpose in life outside of God. It was really hard for me for awhile, and there's a chance that I might not have made it through. But I did, and I can promise that life on the other side is wonderful, and even better than life in Mormonism. It's going to be hard for awhile, and that's okay. Don't try to force yourself to be happy right away. It's okay to be sad. But don't give up, and if you find yourself seriously depressed like I was, please please please ask for help. Life is wonderful, and leaving Mormonism gives you so many wonderful options. Grieving is a part of letting go, but it doesn't last forever, and it WILL get better. :)
I don't know how likely it is that a Mormon who is doubting their faith will stumble across my blog, but if any ever should, this post is for you. And my promise is that it gets better, if I may borrow a phrase used by the LGBT movement.
I think that the best thing I did when I lost my testimony was reach out for help. I started posting on an exmormon recovery board, postmormon.org, and the people there were incredibly supportive. Another thing I did that was incredibly helpful was doing research on grieving and how it works. For many, perhaps most people who leave the church, there's a grieving process involved. It was incredibly helpful for me when I realized what was going on and why--and that it would eventually peter out and I'd be okay. A useful model for understanding this is the 5 stages of grief. The important thing to realize here is that this process is not like a game of Monopoly, where you land on each square, pay your dues, and move on. Everyone will experience these emotions differently, in a different order, and sometimes simultaneously. You will probably experience some of the different stages more than once. People are complex things, and leaving the Mormon church (whether you leave only mentally, or physically as well) is a long process for many people. The church entwines itself so entirely into the lives of its members. It permeates quite literally every aspect of life--from big things, like philosophical epistemology, to little things like what you can eat and drink, to intensely personal things like sexuality and relationships. There is no area of life that Mormonism doesn't touch. When you are freed from the church, it's a wonderful feeling. Your life and choices are completely your own and you don't have an organization trying to impose its one-size-fits-all dogma on you. But because the church is so completely a part of everything, the process of extricating yourself can be long and painful.
Everyone's experience will be different, but I am going to give a quick run-down of what the process was like for me in the hopes that others will be able to relate to parts of it, and recognize the differences in their own experience. The process started when I was exposed to information about the church that contradicted everything I had been taught. This information was online, and my initial reaction was to defend the church. I was convinced that the information being presented was false, and by Jove I was going to correct that misinformation! Obviously, this backfired badly. I was having references to the Journal of Discourses and LDS canon scripture thrown at me, and ultimately I realized that the discussion was going nowhere and gave up. The information I received perturbed me, but not so badly that it really affected me aside from irritating me.
Over a period of about a month, I repeatedly encountered things that chipped at my resolve. These things fell into two categories--reasoning and evidence. The reasoning was really the most powerful influence on me. I remember one day in particular when I couldn't get the conflict between D&C 132 and Jacob 2 off my mind. After my classes for the day were done, I remember sitting at the kitchen table in my dorm with my scriptures and laptop, poring over the relevant verses and trying to reconcile their differences. I spent the better part of the afternoon on this. And things like this kept happening, on average about once a week. Every time my attempt to reconcile the problem turned out to be futile and I gave up. One night it hit me that the church might not be true after all.
Doubt is a curious thing. It's like belief; you can't just make yourself doubt something. The philosopher Descartes tried to find truth by doubting everything, and then building his worldview back up starting with the self evident truth that "I think, therefore I am." But as the pragmatist philosopher William James pointed out, Descartes didn't actually change his behavior. He still kept his hand out of the fire, still ate and drank, still interacted with his world in the same way as always even though he was trying to doubt that any of it existed. I think that James has a more accurate conception of doubt than Descartes--namely, that doubt is uncertainty as to how one should act. And you can't make yourself doubt. Try it--try doubting whether you'll burn your hand if you stick it in the fire. Do you now have any hesitancy about how you should act with respect to the fire?
When I started doubting, I had no idea how to act. It was painful. When you don't know how to act, you can't really function. One term for describing this is "cognitive dissonance"--the painful phenomenon of having two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time. I believed that the church was true, yet I was aware of things like the contradiction between D&C 132 and Jacob 2, the heinous history of polygamy, Joseph Smith's false prophecy about the second coming of Christ being at the end of the nineteenth century, Brigham Young's Adam/God doctrine--and the list was growing. I didn't know what to think or how to act. The way we cope with cognitive dissonance is obvious--we suppress one of the conflicting ideas. So I suppressed my doubts. They were still there in a dark corner of my mind, but I ignored them so that I could function. I was in denial.
There came a point when I couldn't suppress the doubt anymore. I had shoved that "spiritual shelf" so full of different things that when I encountered one more problem--in my case, the Book of Abraham--it didn't fit on the shelf anymore and it came crashing down around my ears. I felt the full intensity of the doubt and uncertainty, and to this day I can think of only one other time when I was in more emotional pain (also connected to the church). It was then that I started posting on postmormon.org. Within twenty-four hours I was out. I had been resisting the notion that the church wasn't true, but by this time the only thing stopping me from admitting it to myself was intellectual honesty. I wanted to make sure that I had given the church a fair shake before I rejected it. But the pile of problems was just so enormous, the very honesty that made me initially hesitant pushed me to realize, it probably isn't true. The absolute relief that flowed over me when I made that realization was incredible. There was a long, hard road ahead of me out of the church still, but I entered into an acceptance phase for awhile. The last month of that semester at BYU was surprisingly pleasant. The month or so previously had been painful, and now I was free. I started exploring the boundaries of the new world that my mind was in, and found that it had none. I was as free as a bird, and it was exhilarating. In short order I accepted evolution as scientifically viable, gave myself proper sex ed with the aid of Wikipedia, and even started questioning the existence of God.
That last item was the one that drove me into another difficult stage of my deconversion. Atheism frightened me. I tentatively explored the idea with my mind, trying to get a feel for the world, and didn't find any God in this new, ex-Mormon world. It frightened me. About two weeks after I stopped believing Mormonism, I watched The Lion King with my roommates and ended up very distressed over the death of Mufasa. What happens when you die? I didn't want to lose my family forever. The problem of death kept me vacillating on the question of God for several months. At different points I was an atheist, an agnostic, a deist, and at one point almost a Christian. And then, after months of worrying that issue, I let it go. I realized that no easy answers were forthcoming, and almost imperceptibly, I began thinking of myself as an atheist.
That was the process of my intellectual change, but the emotional one was much, much more difficult. This is where the stages of grieving come in. Sometimes I would experience denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance all within a single day--sometimes a single hour. I knew it wasn't true, but sometimes I was still so emotionally attached to the church that I tried to make myself not know. Most often I was angry and resentful, which always seemed to throw me right into depression again when my anger proved utterly ineffectual. At one point I was so obsessed with the problem of death and whether or not life had any meaning that I was suicidal. The issue plagued my mind so much that it became like a vise on my brain that wouldn't let go. It was always there, looming in the background. I remember one dark night when my family was watching a movie, and I was so trapped inside my own mind that I locked myself in the bathroom, trying desperately to gain control of my mind, and the thoughts of death just wouldn't stop. Try as I might, I couldn't make them go away. There are few things that terrify me as much as not being able to control my own mind. I want to point out here that part of the problem in my case was that I have a history of problems with depression, especially in the winter months and as a side effect of PMS, and I have no doubt that this was an enormous part of the problem with my fixation on death. But it had never been this bad before.
My point in sharing this is that I want to show anyone who's in a similar situation that it gets better. You can move on, you can figure it out, and you can find meaning and purpose in life outside of God. It was really hard for me for awhile, and there's a chance that I might not have made it through. But I did, and I can promise that life on the other side is wonderful, and even better than life in Mormonism. It's going to be hard for awhile, and that's okay. Don't try to force yourself to be happy right away. It's okay to be sad. But don't give up, and if you find yourself seriously depressed like I was, please please please ask for help. Life is wonderful, and leaving Mormonism gives you so many wonderful options. Grieving is a part of letting go, but it doesn't last forever, and it WILL get better. :)
Monday, March 7, 2011
Music Theory
I think that in many ways, religion worships mystery. When I look at the history of religion, one of its main purposes seems to be to explain the unexplainable. Where did we come from? Well, Father Time slept with Mother Earth. Or Kukulkán and Tepeu made humans from maize. Or Yahweh made everything in six days. Where do we go when we die? Well, we go to the house of Hades. Or we spend eternity in some sort of paradise. Or... nothing happens. We're just dead.
So, when I say religion worships mystery, I mean that it derives its raison d'être from humans' inability to explain the world. In ancient mythopoeic religion, humans explained natural phenomena by anthropomorphizing them. Everything had a persona behind it. There were river gods, rain gods, mountain gods, fertility goddesses, plant gods-- everything had a god behind it. These gods served to explain the natural world, which otherwise seemed completely nonsensical.
In time, however, humans developed better ways of explaining things. For the Greeks, this was philosophia-- the love of wisdom. During the European Renaissance, "natural philosophy" was the study of the natural world. And this natural philosophy became what we now call science. I don't think I have to reiterate the story of how Christianity fought against science, how people like Galileo were persecuted for being so brazen as to undercut the church's monopoly on "truth." There's a reason that religion was so threatened by rational inquiry. If there were other ways of finding out knowledge, then religion was entirely unnecessary.
Religion stifles knowledge and inquiry. It worships the gaps in our knowledge by filling them with gods. It tries to get us to be satisfied with answers that aren't answers, to persuade us that we don't need to know, don't need to ask why and how and when, tries to convince us that the ultimate virtue is ignorance. But they don't call it ignorance. They call it faith.
And religion has been very successful in pulling this off. It has succeeded in convincing people that without ignorance, life is meaningless. Without faith, without mystery, without God, what meaning is there to existence? Without the promise of eternal reward and the threat of eternal damnation, why should one treat one's fellow human beings well? This is the great lie of religion. Ignorance and mystery add nothing to life except fear and misery.
I'm a musician. For a time, I thought that studying music theory would remove the sublimity of music. Oh, how mistaken I was! I'll admit, my knowledge of music theory is limited, but what I do know has not diminished my admiration for music one bit. On the contrary, my understanding of scales and intervals and overtones has enhanced my love of music.
Human beings love the experience called wonder. But there are two kinds of wonder. One comes from ignorance, and the other from understanding. Having experienced both, I can say that the wonder of understanding is much deeper, much more beautiful, and infinitely preferable to the wonder of ignorance. God is not necessary to explain the universe. We don't need religion to be good. These artificial, two-dimensional explanations only cheapen our experience of the beautiful universe that we are a part of.
So, when I say religion worships mystery, I mean that it derives its raison d'être from humans' inability to explain the world. In ancient mythopoeic religion, humans explained natural phenomena by anthropomorphizing them. Everything had a persona behind it. There were river gods, rain gods, mountain gods, fertility goddesses, plant gods-- everything had a god behind it. These gods served to explain the natural world, which otherwise seemed completely nonsensical.
In time, however, humans developed better ways of explaining things. For the Greeks, this was philosophia-- the love of wisdom. During the European Renaissance, "natural philosophy" was the study of the natural world. And this natural philosophy became what we now call science. I don't think I have to reiterate the story of how Christianity fought against science, how people like Galileo were persecuted for being so brazen as to undercut the church's monopoly on "truth." There's a reason that religion was so threatened by rational inquiry. If there were other ways of finding out knowledge, then religion was entirely unnecessary.
Religion stifles knowledge and inquiry. It worships the gaps in our knowledge by filling them with gods. It tries to get us to be satisfied with answers that aren't answers, to persuade us that we don't need to know, don't need to ask why and how and when, tries to convince us that the ultimate virtue is ignorance. But they don't call it ignorance. They call it faith.
And religion has been very successful in pulling this off. It has succeeded in convincing people that without ignorance, life is meaningless. Without faith, without mystery, without God, what meaning is there to existence? Without the promise of eternal reward and the threat of eternal damnation, why should one treat one's fellow human beings well? This is the great lie of religion. Ignorance and mystery add nothing to life except fear and misery.
I'm a musician. For a time, I thought that studying music theory would remove the sublimity of music. Oh, how mistaken I was! I'll admit, my knowledge of music theory is limited, but what I do know has not diminished my admiration for music one bit. On the contrary, my understanding of scales and intervals and overtones has enhanced my love of music.
Human beings love the experience called wonder. But there are two kinds of wonder. One comes from ignorance, and the other from understanding. Having experienced both, I can say that the wonder of understanding is much deeper, much more beautiful, and infinitely preferable to the wonder of ignorance. God is not necessary to explain the universe. We don't need religion to be good. These artificial, two-dimensional explanations only cheapen our experience of the beautiful universe that we are a part of.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
A letter I wrote as an angry ex-Mormon
This is a letter that I wrote some time ago to vent my frustration at the facade I was keeping. I had been an apostate for approximately six months, and would have described my religious status as "agnostic" (although, in retrospect, I really was an atheist, but wasn't ready to admit that to myself). For many people, leaving Mormonism has an anger stage, and this was mine. Many of the emotions that I express in this letter are no longer applicable to me, but at the time they were very real and nigh overwhelming. And, when I am feeling strong emotion, my typical coping mechanism is to write.
* * *
Dear roommates, visiting teachers, classmates, professors, FHE siblings and others: this letter is to inform you that I am not who you think I am. I may look like an innocuous Molly Mormon, but rest assured, more lies beneath the surface.
I am one of those who has never broken curfew. My conduct with respect to For The Strength of Youth is irreproachable. In other words, I seem like an ideal Mormon girl. Because of this, many of you seem to be quite fond of me. I appear very safe and docile and stereotypical. This is not the case.
If you asked, I could tell you things about Mormonism that would make your hair curl. From things you have heard about-- polygamy, blacks and the priesthood-- to things that would seem to you like they came from an alternate universe-- blood atonement, Masonic temple ordinances-- your life and perspective would never be the same.
I look to you like ideal temple marriage material. I can cook and sew and play the piano. I love children. I know the answer to all the questions in the Sunday School manual-- more detailed and sordid answers than you would be comfortable with, in fact. Mormonism is in my blood. It goes back six and seven generations in my family. In one sense, I will be a Mormon until the day I die. And yet, there is more. If you asked me what I really believe about religion, you would wish you hadn't.
If we should remain in contact, you will one day be shocked and surprised to learn that I have removed my name from the records of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I wonder what thoughts will go through your mind when you hear of this. If you should ask what happened, I will inform you that all those years you knew me, you never knew me. For the four years that I contributed to Sunday School, Relief Society, and religion classes, I did not believe a word of what was said by me or others. It was all a charade.
Perhaps you will ask why I pretended. Why did I deceive so many people as to my true self? The answer is complicated. Perhaps I do not really know the answer myself. Consider, though, what you now think of me. Is it positive, or negative? I would wager that the word "apostasy," along with all its negative connotations, has crossed your mind. Consider what it must be like to be branded an apostate by those you love. Consider-- if you were in my shoes, would you make yourself known at once? Would you be willing to take the consequences of coming out immediately? You have heard about how early Mormons were shunned and persecuted when they left the faith of their fathers-- be it Lutheranism, Catholicism, Presbyterianism or what-have-you. Do you pretend that Mormons do not do the same thing to those who apostatize? Do you think I wanted to make my mother cry and become a living example of the bitter fruits of apostasy?
Perhaps you are not aware of certain aspects of the CES Honor Code. You know that my education is one of the most important things to me in my life. I chose the school I did because I thought it would be an excellent beginning to my academic career, and because I still believed in the Mormon church at the time I enrolled. When I discovered what I did, I was already on the road to a degree. I still liked my school, in spite of all its trappings in which I no longer believed. I had no money to transfer. This is where the Honor Code comes in. Religious freedom does not exist for BYU students; if they are LDS at the time of enrollment, LDS they must remain for the duration of their education. To do otherwise would mean expulsion. Expulsion, you say? Yes. Students must be members in good standing of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. As I am sure you are aware, apostasy does not constitute good standing, and as you may or may not be aware, it is grounds for excommunication. Expulsion from an LDS school on grounds of apostasy entails educational credit revocation. I refused to allow this to happen. Therefore, I put on the act that you thought was my true identity. Perhaps my motives were not the best. Perhaps you think I should have made myself known to the world at once, and let the chips fall where they may. Perhaps you are right. However, I did not and do not ask for your approval. My actions are my own, and I do as seems good to me. I do not believe that I have any responsibility to an organization that deceived me. The time, place, and circumstances of my revelation are to be on my terms, not those of an organization that has manipulated and lied to me from the time I was a child.
You don't know me. You never knew me. Until you have walked through the valley of the shadow of doubt, you cannot know me. You cannot possibly understand the feelings of shock, betrayal, anger, depression, fear, and resentment attendant to the apostasy that you so vilify. Similarly, you cannot know the irony of the bitter fruits of apostasy. The fruits of apostasy are bitter, yes, more bitter than you can possibly imagine. Yet the knowledge of the truth is often bitter. I have learned not to fear the bitter fruit of knowledge.
Therefore, I ask that you judge not, lest ye be judged. You may need me one day. Should you one day find yourself in my shoes, you will know where to find understanding. When you have nowhere to turn, you will have a friend who has walked the road less traveled. When you grapple with the fear and uncertainty, someone who has already grappled with them will be there to shine light and hope in the darkness. Perhaps you will never find yourself in that situation. Perhaps you will believe until the day you die. One never knows where the road of life may take one. But, perhaps, you will one day find yourself on a road that you never expected yourself to walk. For that reason, I ask that you not censure the road I have taken until you have walked it yourself.
-BlissfulHeretic
* * *
Dear roommates, visiting teachers, classmates, professors, FHE siblings and others: this letter is to inform you that I am not who you think I am. I may look like an innocuous Molly Mormon, but rest assured, more lies beneath the surface.
I am one of those who has never broken curfew. My conduct with respect to For The Strength of Youth is irreproachable. In other words, I seem like an ideal Mormon girl. Because of this, many of you seem to be quite fond of me. I appear very safe and docile and stereotypical. This is not the case.
If you asked, I could tell you things about Mormonism that would make your hair curl. From things you have heard about-- polygamy, blacks and the priesthood-- to things that would seem to you like they came from an alternate universe-- blood atonement, Masonic temple ordinances-- your life and perspective would never be the same.
I look to you like ideal temple marriage material. I can cook and sew and play the piano. I love children. I know the answer to all the questions in the Sunday School manual-- more detailed and sordid answers than you would be comfortable with, in fact. Mormonism is in my blood. It goes back six and seven generations in my family. In one sense, I will be a Mormon until the day I die. And yet, there is more. If you asked me what I really believe about religion, you would wish you hadn't.
If we should remain in contact, you will one day be shocked and surprised to learn that I have removed my name from the records of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I wonder what thoughts will go through your mind when you hear of this. If you should ask what happened, I will inform you that all those years you knew me, you never knew me. For the four years that I contributed to Sunday School, Relief Society, and religion classes, I did not believe a word of what was said by me or others. It was all a charade.
Perhaps you will ask why I pretended. Why did I deceive so many people as to my true self? The answer is complicated. Perhaps I do not really know the answer myself. Consider, though, what you now think of me. Is it positive, or negative? I would wager that the word "apostasy," along with all its negative connotations, has crossed your mind. Consider what it must be like to be branded an apostate by those you love. Consider-- if you were in my shoes, would you make yourself known at once? Would you be willing to take the consequences of coming out immediately? You have heard about how early Mormons were shunned and persecuted when they left the faith of their fathers-- be it Lutheranism, Catholicism, Presbyterianism or what-have-you. Do you pretend that Mormons do not do the same thing to those who apostatize? Do you think I wanted to make my mother cry and become a living example of the bitter fruits of apostasy?
Perhaps you are not aware of certain aspects of the CES Honor Code. You know that my education is one of the most important things to me in my life. I chose the school I did because I thought it would be an excellent beginning to my academic career, and because I still believed in the Mormon church at the time I enrolled. When I discovered what I did, I was already on the road to a degree. I still liked my school, in spite of all its trappings in which I no longer believed. I had no money to transfer. This is where the Honor Code comes in. Religious freedom does not exist for BYU students; if they are LDS at the time of enrollment, LDS they must remain for the duration of their education. To do otherwise would mean expulsion. Expulsion, you say? Yes. Students must be members in good standing of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. As I am sure you are aware, apostasy does not constitute good standing, and as you may or may not be aware, it is grounds for excommunication. Expulsion from an LDS school on grounds of apostasy entails educational credit revocation. I refused to allow this to happen. Therefore, I put on the act that you thought was my true identity. Perhaps my motives were not the best. Perhaps you think I should have made myself known to the world at once, and let the chips fall where they may. Perhaps you are right. However, I did not and do not ask for your approval. My actions are my own, and I do as seems good to me. I do not believe that I have any responsibility to an organization that deceived me. The time, place, and circumstances of my revelation are to be on my terms, not those of an organization that has manipulated and lied to me from the time I was a child.
You don't know me. You never knew me. Until you have walked through the valley of the shadow of doubt, you cannot know me. You cannot possibly understand the feelings of shock, betrayal, anger, depression, fear, and resentment attendant to the apostasy that you so vilify. Similarly, you cannot know the irony of the bitter fruits of apostasy. The fruits of apostasy are bitter, yes, more bitter than you can possibly imagine. Yet the knowledge of the truth is often bitter. I have learned not to fear the bitter fruit of knowledge.
Therefore, I ask that you judge not, lest ye be judged. You may need me one day. Should you one day find yourself in my shoes, you will know where to find understanding. When you have nowhere to turn, you will have a friend who has walked the road less traveled. When you grapple with the fear and uncertainty, someone who has already grappled with them will be there to shine light and hope in the darkness. Perhaps you will never find yourself in that situation. Perhaps you will believe until the day you die. One never knows where the road of life may take one. But, perhaps, you will one day find yourself on a road that you never expected yourself to walk. For that reason, I ask that you not censure the road I have taken until you have walked it yourself.
-BlissfulHeretic
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Bluebeard
From childhoodreading.com:
Once upon a time, in the fair land of France, there lived a very powerful lord, the owner of estates, farms and a great splendid castle, and his name was Bluebeard. This wasn’t his real name, it was a nickname, due to the fact he had a long shaggy black beard with glints of blue in it. He was very handsome and charming, but, if the truth be told, there was something about him that made you feel respect, and a little uneasy…
Bluebeard often went away to war, and when he did, he left his wife in charge of the castle. He had had lots of wives, all young, pretty and noble. As bad luck would have it, one after the other, they had all died, and so the noble lord was forever getting married again.
“Sire,” someone would ask now and again, “what did your wives die of?”
“Hah, my friend,” Bluebeard would reply, “one died of smallpox, one of a hidden sickness, another of a high fever, another of a terrible infection… Ah, I’m very unlucky, and they’re unlucky too! They’re all buried in the castle chapel,” he added. Nobody found anything strange about that. Nor did the sweet and beautiful young girl that Bluebeard took as a wife think it strange either.
She went to the castle accompanied by her sister Anna, who said: “Oh, aren’t you lucky marrying a lord like Bluebeard?”
“He really is very nice, and when you’re close, his beard doesn’t look as blue as folk say!” said the bride, and the two sisters giggled delightedly. Poor souls! They had no idea what lay in store for them!
A month or so later, Bluebeard had the carriage brought round and said to his wife, “Darling, I must leave you for a few weeks. But keep cheerful during that time, invite whoever you like and look after the castle. Here,” he added, handing his bride a bunch of keys, “you’ll need these, the keys of the safe, the armoury and the library keys, and this one, which opens all the room doors.
"Now, this little key here,” and he pointed to a key that was much smaller than the others, “opens the little room at the end of the great ground floor corridor. Take your friends where you want, open any door you like, but not this one! Is that quite clear?” repeated Bluebeard. “Not this one! Nobody at all is allowed to enter that little room. And if you ever did go into it, I would go into such a terrible rage that it’s better that you don’t!”
“Don’t worry, husband,” said Bluebeard’s wife as she took the keys, “I’ll do as you say.” After giving her a hug, Bluebeard got into his carriage, whipped up the horses and off he went.
The days went by. The young girl invited her friends to the castle and showed them round all the rooms except the one at the end of the corridor.
“Why shouldn’t I see inside the little room? Why? Why is it forbidden?” Well, she thought about it so much that she ended up bursting with curiosity, until one day she opened the door and walked into the little room… Of all ghastly horrors! Inside, hanging on the walls were the bodies of Bluebeard’s wives: he had strangled them all with his own hands!
Terror stricken, the girl ran out of the room, but the bunch of keys slipped from her grasp. She picked them up without a glance and hurried to her own room, her heart thumping wildly in her chest. Horrors! She was living in a castle of the dead! So that is what had happened to Bluebeard’s other wives!
The girl summoned up her courage and she noticed that one of the keys – the very key to the little room – was stained with blood.
“I must wipe it clean, before my husband comes back!” she said to herself. But try as she would, the blood stain wouldn’t wash away. She washed, she scrubbed and she rinsed it; all in vain, for the key was still red. That very evening, Bluebeard came home. Just imagine the state his poor wife was in!
Bluebeard did not ask his wife for the keys that same evening, but he remarked, “You look a little upset, darling. Has anything nasty happened?”
“Oh, no! No!”
“Are you sorry I came back so soon?”
“Oh, no! I’m delighted!” But that night, the bride didn’t sleep a wink. Next day, Bluebeard said:
“Darling, give me back the keys,” and his wife hurriedly did so. Bluebeard remarked, “There’s one missing, the key to the little room!”
“Is there?” said the young girl shaking,
“I must have left it in my room!”
“All right, go and get it.” But when Bluebeard’s wife put the key into his hand, Bluebeard turned white and in a deep hoarse voice demanded:
“Why is this key stained with blood?”
“I don’t know…” stammered his wife.
“You know very well!” he retorted. “You went into the little room, didn’t you? Well, you’ll go back again, this time for good, along with the other ladies in there. You must die!”
“Oh no! I pray you!”
“You must die!” he repeated. Just then, there was a knock at the door and Anna, Bluebeard’s wife’s sister, entered the castle.
“Good morning,” she said, “you seem rather pale.”
“Not at all, we’re quite well,” replied Bluebeard.
His wife whispered in his ear, “Please, please give me ten minutes to live!”
Bluebeard replied, “Not more than ten!”
The girl ran to her sister Anna who had gone up to one of the towers and asked her, "Anna, do you see our brothers coming? They promised they would come and see me today!”
But Anna replied, “No, I don’t see anyone. What’s wrong? You look agitated.”
“Anna, please,” said the shaken girl, “look again! Are you sure you can’t see someone?”
“No,” said her sister, “only one or two peasants.”
Just then the voice of Bluebeard boomed up to them, “Wife, your time is up! Come here!”
“I’m coming!” she called, but then said to her sister: “Oh Anna, aren’t our brothers coming?…”
“No,” replied Anna. Again Bluebeard shouted up.
“Come down at once! Or I’ll come up!” Trembling like a leaf, his wife went downstairs. Bluebeard was clutching a big knife and he grabbed his bride by the hair…
“Sister, I can see two horsemen coming!” called out Anna from the tower that very moment.
Bluebeard made a horrible face, “They too will die!”
His wife knelt to implore, “Please, please don’t kill me. I’ll never tell anyone what I saw! I’ll never say a word!”
“Yes, you’ll never say a word for eternity!” snarled Bluebeard, raising his knife.
The poor girl screamed, “Have pity on me!”
But he fiercely replied, “No! You must die!” He was about to bring the knife down on the girl’s delicate neck, when two young men burst into the room: a dragon and a musketeer. They were his wife’s brothers.
Drawing their swords, they leapt towards Bluebeard, who tried to flee up some stairs, but was caught and killed. And that was the end of the sad story. Bluebeard’s poor wives were given a Christian burial, the castle was completely renovated and the young widow, some time later, married a good and honest young man, who helped her to forget the terrible adventure. And that young lady completely lost all her sense of curiosity.
Bluebeard often went away to war, and when he did, he left his wife in charge of the castle. He had had lots of wives, all young, pretty and noble. As bad luck would have it, one after the other, they had all died, and so the noble lord was forever getting married again.
“Sire,” someone would ask now and again, “what did your wives die of?”
“Hah, my friend,” Bluebeard would reply, “one died of smallpox, one of a hidden sickness, another of a high fever, another of a terrible infection… Ah, I’m very unlucky, and they’re unlucky too! They’re all buried in the castle chapel,” he added. Nobody found anything strange about that. Nor did the sweet and beautiful young girl that Bluebeard took as a wife think it strange either.She went to the castle accompanied by her sister Anna, who said: “Oh, aren’t you lucky marrying a lord like Bluebeard?”
“He really is very nice, and when you’re close, his beard doesn’t look as blue as folk say!” said the bride, and the two sisters giggled delightedly. Poor souls! They had no idea what lay in store for them!
A month or so later, Bluebeard had the carriage brought round and said to his wife, “Darling, I must leave you for a few weeks. But keep cheerful during that time, invite whoever you like and look after the castle. Here,” he added, handing his bride a bunch of keys, “you’ll need these, the keys of the safe, the armoury and the library keys, and this one, which opens all the room doors.
"Now, this little key here,” and he pointed to a key that was much smaller than the others, “opens the little room at the end of the great ground floor corridor. Take your friends where you want, open any door you like, but not this one! Is that quite clear?” repeated Bluebeard. “Not this one! Nobody at all is allowed to enter that little room. And if you ever did go into it, I would go into such a terrible rage that it’s better that you don’t!”
“Don’t worry, husband,” said Bluebeard’s wife as she took the keys, “I’ll do as you say.” After giving her a hug, Bluebeard got into his carriage, whipped up the horses and off he went.
The days went by. The young girl invited her friends to the castle and showed them round all the rooms except the one at the end of the corridor.
“Why shouldn’t I see inside the little room? Why? Why is it forbidden?” Well, she thought about it so much that she ended up bursting with curiosity, until one day she opened the door and walked into the little room… Of all ghastly horrors! Inside, hanging on the walls were the bodies of Bluebeard’s wives: he had strangled them all with his own hands!
Terror stricken, the girl ran out of the room, but the bunch of keys slipped from her grasp. She picked them up without a glance and hurried to her own room, her heart thumping wildly in her chest. Horrors! She was living in a castle of the dead! So that is what had happened to Bluebeard’s other wives!
The girl summoned up her courage and she noticed that one of the keys – the very key to the little room – was stained with blood.
“I must wipe it clean, before my husband comes back!” she said to herself. But try as she would, the blood stain wouldn’t wash away. She washed, she scrubbed and she rinsed it; all in vain, for the key was still red. That very evening, Bluebeard came home. Just imagine the state his poor wife was in!
Bluebeard did not ask his wife for the keys that same evening, but he remarked, “You look a little upset, darling. Has anything nasty happened?”
“Oh, no! No!”
“Are you sorry I came back so soon?”
“Oh, no! I’m delighted!” But that night, the bride didn’t sleep a wink. Next day, Bluebeard said:
“Darling, give me back the keys,” and his wife hurriedly did so. Bluebeard remarked, “There’s one missing, the key to the little room!”
“Is there?” said the young girl shaking,
“I must have left it in my room!”
“All right, go and get it.” But when Bluebeard’s wife put the key into his hand, Bluebeard turned white and in a deep hoarse voice demanded:
“Why is this key stained with blood?”
“I don’t know…” stammered his wife.
“You know very well!” he retorted. “You went into the little room, didn’t you? Well, you’ll go back again, this time for good, along with the other ladies in there. You must die!”
“Oh no! I pray you!”
“You must die!” he repeated. Just then, there was a knock at the door and Anna, Bluebeard’s wife’s sister, entered the castle.
“Good morning,” she said, “you seem rather pale.”
“Not at all, we’re quite well,” replied Bluebeard.
His wife whispered in his ear, “Please, please give me ten minutes to live!”
Bluebeard replied, “Not more than ten!”
The girl ran to her sister Anna who had gone up to one of the towers and asked her, "Anna, do you see our brothers coming? They promised they would come and see me today!”
But Anna replied, “No, I don’t see anyone. What’s wrong? You look agitated.”
“Anna, please,” said the shaken girl, “look again! Are you sure you can’t see someone?”
“No,” said her sister, “only one or two peasants.”
Just then the voice of Bluebeard boomed up to them, “Wife, your time is up! Come here!”
“I’m coming!” she called, but then said to her sister: “Oh Anna, aren’t our brothers coming?…”
“No,” replied Anna. Again Bluebeard shouted up.
“Come down at once! Or I’ll come up!” Trembling like a leaf, his wife went downstairs. Bluebeard was clutching a big knife and he grabbed his bride by the hair…
“Sister, I can see two horsemen coming!” called out Anna from the tower that very moment.
Bluebeard made a horrible face, “They too will die!”
His wife knelt to implore, “Please, please don’t kill me. I’ll never tell anyone what I saw! I’ll never say a word!”
“Yes, you’ll never say a word for eternity!” snarled Bluebeard, raising his knife.
The poor girl screamed, “Have pity on me!”
But he fiercely replied, “No! You must die!” He was about to bring the knife down on the girl’s delicate neck, when two young men burst into the room: a dragon and a musketeer. They were his wife’s brothers.
Drawing their swords, they leapt towards Bluebeard, who tried to flee up some stairs, but was caught and killed. And that was the end of the sad story. Bluebeard’s poor wives were given a Christian burial, the castle was completely renovated and the young widow, some time later, married a good and honest young man, who helped her to forget the terrible adventure. And that young lady completely lost all her sense of curiosity.
* * *
The lot of a Mormon apostate is similar to that of Bluebeard's wife. We are told our whole lives that everything is fine and dandy, that the church is true, that Mormonism is the only way to happiness, when in reality there is an ever-growing stash of mutilated bodies in the closet. We are told never to question, never to look at "anti-Mormon literature," because then the Spirit will leave us, and we will become apostates. Those who do open the closet door find themselves shamed, villainized, and ostracized. In other words, their stories are hidden in Bluebeard's closet along with all the rest of the unpleasant facts about the Mormon church.
When I first read the story of Bluebeard as a child, I thought that the wife was quite foolish for disobeying her husband and opening the forbidden room. She had a pleasant life in a fine castle full of treasures, with a husband who treated her well. If she had never opened the door, she likely would have gone on forever in happiness, never knowing about the morgue in her own house.
Later I realized that, even though the results of opening the forbidden room were unpleasant, it would have been awful for Bluebeard's wife to live forever oblivious to the horrors in her own house. She was not foolish for disobeying her husband. The moral of the story isn't "wives should obey their husbands and check their curiosity." It's "don't marry a serial killer." And how are you to know if you are married to a serial killer if you take everything he says at face value and ignore the fact that all his previous wives have mysteriously disappeared?
If you were married to a serial killer, wouldn't you rather know about it?
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Ennui
The fundamental problem of the human experience is that of satisfaction. It is in our nature to want things. But when our desires are satisfied, we always find ourselves desiring something else. It does not matter what the desire is; it could be a material object, or something more abstract like education or financial stability or a fulfilling relationship or political power. But each desire always seems to give way to a new one, and then we cannot be happy again until we have achieved our next desire.
It could be said that the ultimate human desire is to be freed from this seemingly inescapable cycle of desire, boredom, and desire. Religion, philosophy, and even consumerism are all attempts to find true happiness—to find release. But in every solution, the release is only temporary.
Perhaps what we call “spiritual experiences” are really only suspension of our desires and ennui. When we find ourselves in an altered state of mind, where we have no desires to be fulfilled or unfulfilled, no despair at the seeming futility of existence—this is our nirvana.
It is the lot of sentient beings to be aware of our own existence, and for the atheist, the inherent meaninglessness of existence. We’re born, we live, we die, and that’s all there is to it. This awareness causes us to reach for something more, because our unhappiness with the futility of existence is unsettling. It drives some to madness or suicide. So we lie to ourselves, tell ourselves that there is more to this life than there appears to be. That there is some part of us that does not depend upon the beating of our hearts and the breathing of our lungs. But this lie, although a comforting one, is still a lie. Our earnest desire for Something More does not mean that it exists.
Is it possible to find this release, fulfillment, nirvana, or whatever you’d like to call it—without relying on comforting lies and fairytales? I think so. I think that there’s something to meditation. I find release in music, in quiet evenings spent in reading and introspection, in conversation and laughter with friends. At these times, I find that although I am not pursuing any desire, I am happy. And, in the end, what more can I ask of life?
It could be said that the ultimate human desire is to be freed from this seemingly inescapable cycle of desire, boredom, and desire. Religion, philosophy, and even consumerism are all attempts to find true happiness—to find release. But in every solution, the release is only temporary.
Perhaps what we call “spiritual experiences” are really only suspension of our desires and ennui. When we find ourselves in an altered state of mind, where we have no desires to be fulfilled or unfulfilled, no despair at the seeming futility of existence—this is our nirvana.
It is the lot of sentient beings to be aware of our own existence, and for the atheist, the inherent meaninglessness of existence. We’re born, we live, we die, and that’s all there is to it. This awareness causes us to reach for something more, because our unhappiness with the futility of existence is unsettling. It drives some to madness or suicide. So we lie to ourselves, tell ourselves that there is more to this life than there appears to be. That there is some part of us that does not depend upon the beating of our hearts and the breathing of our lungs. But this lie, although a comforting one, is still a lie. Our earnest desire for Something More does not mean that it exists.
Is it possible to find this release, fulfillment, nirvana, or whatever you’d like to call it—without relying on comforting lies and fairytales? I think so. I think that there’s something to meditation. I find release in music, in quiet evenings spent in reading and introspection, in conversation and laughter with friends. At these times, I find that although I am not pursuing any desire, I am happy. And, in the end, what more can I ask of life?
Is this really what I want?
I think that I've always been a feminist. By feminist, I don't mean the man-hating, bra-burning, reverse-chauvinistic kind of feminist. I think that kind of thing goes against what feminism is supposed to be-- the belief that all people are born free and equal, regardless of gender, race, religion, nationality, or anything else beyond the control of the individual. But from the time I was small, I've always had big plans and big ideas. I want to do things, know things, be something. When I learned that, throughout history, other women have been kept from their dreams simply because they were women, that knowledge ignited a passion in me for women's rights. No one should be kept from their dreams. No one should be forced into a prefabricated mold.
As a child, I was convinced that I was as good as any boy at anything I wanted to try. No one told me otherwise, to be sure. No one ever told me that I was less smart, less strong, or less anything than a boy. I was frequently even told that I was better than the boys-- see my previous post, "Pedestals and Prisons." But, as I described in that post, my self was circumscribed into a very limited, idealized role. I might have goals and dreams, but they had to be compatible with my divine calling as wife and mother.
I was never told not to pursue dreams outside of being a wife and mother in Zion. But when I went to church on Sundays, the women who were held up to me as examples were not women like Susan B. Anthony, Mary Wollstonecraft, or Elizabeth I. Our role models were nurturers and helpmeets-- Florence Nightingale, Emma Smith, Ruth. (As a side note, I feel that the LDS church has committed an enormous travesty in its portrayal of Emma Smith. She is shown as a demure, compliant follower of her husband Joseph, when in fact she was a woman with intelligence and spunk. She threatened to leave Joseph multiple times because of his antics, and very nearly did on at least one occasion.)
My patriarchal blessing told me that I would marry a priesthood holder in the temple, that we would build a home that glorified God, and that I would be charged with bringing up our children unto the Lord. In seminary, we had an "education day," where we watched a BYU video about college education. There was a special section for the girls-- it showed a pretty young women with an embroidery hoop in hand, telling the young women that "even though you probably won't need a career to support your family, it is still good to have an education so you can teach your children, and so you can work to support your family if your husband is incapacitated." No mention of intellectual development for its own sake. No mention of women pursuing careers for their own sake. We were encouraged to go to college, but with our divine roles in mind.
I've always been a bit of a nerdy type. I would read nearly anything I could get my hands on, and my parents had a substantial collection of church books. I would spend hours poring over these. I developed a habit of looking up things like "women," "polygamy," and "plural marriage" in the index of nearly every historical book I read. I had become aware at an early age that most history books didn't say much about girls until modern times, and this bothered me. I felt left out. Surely the women deserved as much attention as the men when it came to telling the story of the human race. Slowly, I began to assemble a picture of what it meant to be a woman, and what it meant to be a woman in the LDS church.
One of the ways I rationalized polygamy was that women in polygamous marriages could leave their children with their "sister-wives" and pursue education and careers. This did happen in a few cases, like that of Martha Hughes Cannon. But these cases were the exception, not the rule. Even Martha lived towards the end of the polygamy era in Utah, and received her medical degree before she became a plural wife. A woman's lot as a plural wife was not generally so rosy, particularly in the early years. Ann Eliza Young, one of Brigham Young's plural wives, wrote about her experiences in her memoir Wife no. 19. It was not pretty.
In Mormonism, a woman's primary role is that of a wife and mother-- I hate to use such a blunt and perhaps clichéd term, but the ideal Mormon woman is a baby machine. I don't intend to belittle, marginalize, or otherwise disrespect women who choose to have children, perhaps even many children, and to stay at home to raise those children. Such women do, if they take their job seriously, contribute a great deal to society. But no woman should be forced, coerced, or pressured into motherhood. It must be her choice, a product of her genuine desire for motherhood. Motherhood isn't a "divine assignment." It is one of many equally valuable options available to women.
This role of woman as baby-maker does not end with this life. According to the LDS view of God's great "Plan of Salvation," men may become gods. This is summarized in a couplet by Lorenzo Snow: "As man is God once was, as God is now man may be." In this vision of the universe, a god (who was once a man) creates a world, and populates it with his own spirit children, who are in turn tested for their worthiness to become gods themselves.
And where do these spirit children come from?
Why, a woman has to bear them.
Think of how many people live, have lived, and will live on our earth alone. Think how many spirit children that is. Now, obviously one woman, no matter how perfect and eternal, couldn't bear that many children. The solution is simple: the gods practice polygamy. [Source: Discourses of Brigham Young, volume 11, page 313.]
This is the eternal destiny of the faithful LDS woman. An eternity spent sharing her husband with who-knows-how-many other women, perpetually producing spirit children to populate her husband's planets. Not planet. Planets. [Source: Moses 1:33] Women: know your place.
It didn't take long for me to put these pieces of the puzzle together. On this issue, I never read a single anti-Mormon source until after I stopped believing altogether. I learned all this doctrine while I was a teenager. I learned it in bits and pieces-- a comment from a seminary teacher here, a passage in a church publication there-- and when I opened the door to questioning my religion, the obvious picture of eternity that I had been hiding from was staring me in the face. A woman's divine calling was nothing more than sexual slavery.
I would sit in church on Sunday and watch the men pass the sacrament. I had never been treated badly by a man at church-- oh, sure, I had been harassed as a Beehive by immature deacons, but that hardly counted. All the Mormon men I knew were good, kind, caring men who treated their wives and daughters with love and respect. But, no matter how good of a man my future husband might be, did I really want to spend eternity as one of his many wives, eternally bearing his spirit children?
The pieces snapped together, and I realized what awaited me. And I wanted nothing to do with it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)