Love the People, Hate the Policy

Thoughts from an apostate on the Mormon Church’s same-sex marriage rules

As I reached my row on the crowded airplane on Saturday, I sighed when I saw my seatmate, an older woman with a pleasant face and a bright, welcoming smile. At that exact moment, my Facebook feed was filled with stories of pain and heartache, reactions to the harsh news from the Mormon Brethren in Salt Lake that defined same-sex marriage as apostasy, and worse, denied children of gay married couples any access to saving ordinances until they turned 18 and renounced their parents.

And now I would have to spend two hours sitting next to a Mormon grandmother. I steeled myself for the worst.

I am a Mormon apostate. In 2008, when my marriage ended, I was going through an even more painful faith transition that tore apart everything I had ever believed about life. With the help of a kind LDS therapist, I learned about cognitive dissonance, and I was slowly able to accept that I was not broken, even though my progressive values did not align with the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I later joined the Catholic Church, an act defined in the Mormon Church’s Handbook as grounds for excommunication, though I was never summoned to a church disciplinary court.

I formally resigned from the LDS Church in 2014, and now I attend a Unitarian Universalist congregation, though I still identify theologically, for the most part, as Catholic (like many Catholics, I’ve embraced the cafeteria approach to religious teachings). The Unitarians have long provided a haven of humanistic grace for those seeking to escape the harmful effects of soul-damaging dogma. I expect many righteous Mormon saints who were personally affected by the same-sex marriage policy may find a home there, a place where they can cherish their heritage while distancing themselves from this most recent painful enforcement of The Proclamation on the (White, Heterosexual, Affluent) Family.

I’m not going to write about why the Church Handbook changes are viewed by so many as divisive, hateful, and contrary to Christ’s teachings. That subject has been thoroughly covered in numerous blog posts that exploded onto the Internet after the changes were leaked.  Nor am I going to expound on the disturbing fact that so many faithful LDS members flinched when they learned about this policy (we call that reaction “the still small voice” in Mormon-speak), then turned away from their initial response and worked very hard to justify the church’s hateful words as something born of “love.”

Instead, I want to share what my faithful Mormon American Airlines seatmate reminded me of during the course of our flight.

Though this policy is hateful, many (if not most) Mormons are in fact filled with love.

As an acknowledged apostate, I have felt that love over and over again since I left the church. Two of my children are being raised LDS because I agreed to it after my divorce. Their leaders have always included me (an apostate) in their activities. Relief Society sisters have frequently brought me (an apostate) meals; one former visiting teacher even cleaned my kitchen while I was at work and left me freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.

When I lost my job, my sons’ bishop took me (an apostate) aside and said, “I know you’re not a member anymore, but we still love you. If you need anything at all, come to us. We will help.” And I knew he meant it. Another Relief Society President stopped by with flowers and a card, “just because.” Some of my children’s ward members came to celebrate Midnight Mass with me (an apostate) one Christmas, and I am still regularly invited by Mormon directors to participate in interfaith choirs each holiday season.

These loving Mormons understand and respect that I no longer share their faith. And they love me anyway, not in a “love the sinner, hate the sin,” way, but in a genuine, Christ-like “love one another” way.

A song I learned as a child in Primary (Mormon Sunday School) has helped me to understand (though I cannot support) where the new Handbook policy is coming from. Here are some of the lyrics: “Keep the commandments, keep the commandments. In this, there is safety. In this, there is peace.” The Proclamation on the Family, supported now by the new church policies on apostasy and same-sex marriage, helps conservative, traditional LDS families to feel safe and at peace. Many identify this very issue as their “freedom of religion,” and they see that “freedom” attacked on all sides by the “world.”

But I prefer Mormons—and I know plenty of them, including the woman who so serendipitously sat beside me on my flight—who sing a different Primary tune: “Jesus said love everyone, treat them kindly too. When your heart is filled with love, others will love you.”

Policies may set the rules, however harsh and unforgiving.  But people determine how those rules are interpreted and applied. If my LDS friends are any indication, creative leaders and ward members will continue to find ways to embrace people who don’t fit the narrow standard defined by the Proclamation on the Family. I hate this Mormon policy. But I still love my Mormon people.

Pioneer Day

Celebrating my roots by letting go

My Pioneer Day outfit, circa 1978

On July 24, 1847 (as every young Mormon child knows), Brigham Young and an advance party of brave pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley in what would someday (once the Mormons officially renounced polygamy) become the state of Utah. “This is the right place,” the prophet declared, evidently unaware that the California coast was just a few mountain ranges away. The Mormons, my people, exiled from their homes in Nauvoo, would build a new Zion in the shadow of the Wasatch Mountains and celebrate every Pioneer Day with picnics and parades.

This year on Pioneer Day, I sent a two-page letter by certified mail, return receipt requested, to my Mormon bishop, a man I have never met, requesting that he remove my name from the church records. Elaborating on a template I found here, I wrote:

I am taking this formal step as a direct result of your (not my) church’s decision to excommunicate Kate Kelly. A church that cannot allow good women to ask legitimate questions without fear is not the place for me. I am aware that according to church doctrine this cancels all blessings, baptisms, ordinations, promises, covenants, and my hope of exaltation in the Mormon celestial kingdom, and I have made my decision with that consideration well in mind. The Mormon version of heaven is not something I could ever look forward to as a woman. Please do not have anyone from the church contact me to try to change my mind.

Why now? For years, I lived comfortably in the ambiguous space of inactivity, accepting welcome plates of brownies, joking that I am now in a polygamous marriage to my remarried Mormon ex-husband while I have never been married in the eyes of my new Catholic faith (I had my Mormon marriage annulled). I never took the formal step of resigning from the church because I told myself it just didn’t matter that much to me.

The truth is that I left the church a long time ago, first mentally, as I had to face the growing cognitive dissonance that left me feeling broken and inadequate, then physically, as I drifted away to things that were more spiritually meaningful to me. As a practicing Mormon, I found that no matter how hard I worked or prayed, I simply did not feel a reassurance of a loving God. I did not have a testimony that Joseph Smith was a prophet. And I really didn’t think being Mormon was much fun. “If this life is all we have,” I thought to myself in 2007, realizing that I really did believe that, “then I’m wasting it.”

Kate Kelly’s excommunication was the catalyst for me to finish what I started so many years ago, when I found myself sifting through the ashes of a refiner’s fire I had never expected—my longed-for temple marriage broken, my faith destroyed. The reason I stayed active for so many years before my divorce, judging people who drank coffee, telling myself that a testimony would be the reward for obedience to rules that made no sense to me, was because of fear, not love. That fear kept me in the church for several years.

In 1993, I was a junior at Brigham Young University. One of my favorite professors, Cecilia Konchar Farr, was fired that summer, in part for supporting a woman’s right to choose. In September of that same year, six prominent Mormon intellectuals were called before church disciplinary courts and excommunicated for speaking their minds, for talking about the possibility of a Heavenly Mother, or for telling the truth about Mormon history. Joanna Brooks has written in excruciating detail about this experience and how it affected young Mormon feminists in her must-read memoir, The Book of Mormon Girl 

I heard the message the LDS Church sent then to women with doubts like mine. Get with the program, or get out. I stopped writing anything other than ward newsletters. And I got with the program—marriage, babies, ward callings, temple service, staying home to raise the children—for 13 long years.

I don’t regret the babies (now growing into lovely, independent people). I do regret all the rest. Like many who have left the Church, formally or informally, I feel betrayed by my former religion. That sense of betrayal is likely something that I will struggle with for the rest of my life.

Still, it’s no easy thing to leave the faith of my fathers. Like most people born into the Mormon church, I will never really be able to leave everything about that faith: so much of who I am was shaped by its culture and customs. And there are some things—the focus on family, the self-reliance, the way Mormons take care of their own in times of need, and of course, the music—that I continue to admire.

I am also tremendously grateful for the few church members who have remained my friends through my faith transition, and for the Kate Kellys of the world who continue to fight from within for what they believe is right. “Do what is right, let the consequence follow” was one of my favorite hymns when I was a child. I tried then—and I try now—to follow that advice. It’s just that I no longer believe that there is one right path for everyone, or that the bright-line path of Mormonism was right for me. The easy answers the church provides are no substitute for the hard questions I now ask myself about meaning and happiness. 

That's why I am joining other Strangers in Zion this Pioneer Day to declare that the Mormon church is not the right place for us. But that doesn't mean it's not the right place for you. One of my frustrations with the faith is the "us vs. them" mentality born in the persecution of the church's beginnings, the desire to be separate that drove the pioneers to seek safety in the mountain West. But this separateness does not always support the goal of building the Kingdom into a worldwide church.

The response of many faithful Mormons to Kate Kelly's personal tragedy was not Christlike by any measure. She was not a money changer in the temple. She is a faithful wife and mother in Zion. As a Mormon who chose to leave, I still remember the excuses I told myself when I watched others slip away. "It must be sin." Or "S(he) is too proud." Or "It's a pity s(he) would give up eternal salvation just because someone offended him/her." Or in the case of someone like Kelly, "What a tragedy that Satan has influenced him/her."

Maybe it's none of those things. Maybe people have genuine spiritual experiences that cause them to question their faith. I think most of us have these experiences. Some stay, ultimately finding peace and fulfillment in the Gospel. Others leave, finding peace and fulfillment in something else. But denying the validity of a person's experiences, or whitewashing the truth about your religion's doctrines, is not a good template for sustaining long-term membership in the club.

On this day, I celebrate my pioneer ancestors--their courage and faith in giving up one life to seek a better one in the Kingdom of God, "far away in the West." And I celebrate the heritage that gave me the strength to take my own spiritual journey. In the words of that still-dear Mormon pioneer hymn, "Happy day! All is well."

Dear Mormons: Count Me Out!

I'm a Mormon.

Views from the Diaspora on the LDS Ordain Women Movement 

On April 5, 2014, a group of brave, dedicated, faithful women, some of them personal friends, tried to attend a semi-annual conference that has traditionally had a large “No Girls Allowed” sign on its front door—and has no plans to change its exclusionary and hurtful practices any time soon. Of course, my friends were turned away. These women are part of the Ordain Women movement in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Today, the New York Times reported that Ordain Women founder and human rights attorney Kate Kelly had been summoned to a disciplinary hearing, where she may be excommunicated from the church she has fought so hard to change. Mormon Stories podcaster and gay rights advocate John Dehlin, a husband, father, and fifth-generation Latter-day Saint, was also summoned to a church disciplinary court in what Flunking Sainthood’s always insightful Jana Riess has predicted may signal the beginning of a new Mormon purge. 

I’m no longer a practicing member of the Church. But like many of my friends who have stopped attending Sunday meetings, I still consider myself culturally Mormon. When Facebook asks me for my religious views, the best thing I can say is, “It’s complicated.” So I’ve watched from the sidelines as my feminist friends who are still faithful Latter-day Saints agitate for change, cheering my girlfriends on, but believing that it’s not my fight. My suspicions, rooted in historical fact, are that no one ever got anywhere by walking up to the doors of the patriarchy, knocking politely, and asking to be let in.

I haven’t weighed in on Ordain Women until now because frankly, I felt like my voice didn’t count, that it wasn’t my fight. After all, I left on my own. I’m not like Kelly, who told Buzzfeed’s Laura Marostica “I never considered leaving the church. That was never on the table for me. I’m more of a person who’s like, ‘Well, I’m in an institution and I can see it needs to be improved. It needs to change; I don’t need to leave.’” Talk about the faith to move mountains!

In response to OW’s plans to attend the Priesthood Session in April, the church’s PR spokesperson Jessica Moody attempted to minimize and marginalize the efforts of my faithful friends: "Women in the church, by a very large majority, do not share your advocacy for priesthood ordination for women and consider that position to be extreme," she told Ordain Women, saying that 1,300 women who signed the OW petition were not significant in a worldwide church of 15 million members.

Well, if you’re going to count them, maybe it’s time to count me.

Because here’s the thing. When the Church says that it has 15,000,000 members, they are counting me, and lots of women like me. They’ve never formally kicked me out, at least not to my knowledge, though I’m WAY more apostate than Kate Kelley or John Dehlin. In fact, I’m so apostate that I actually went to the Dark Side, joining the Roman Catholic Church, which former Mormon General Authority called “the great and abominable church” in his first edition of Mormon Doctrine (a statement which, to be fair, was repudiated by other Mormon leaders).  Sorry, Mormons, but #OurPopeBeatsYourProphet.

Unlike many of my post-Mormon friends, I’ve never formally asked to leave. It wasn’t that big a deal to me. I still get monthly newsletters from my Relief Society visiting teachers and the occasional much appreciated plate of brownies or other home-made treat.

But if I count as a member, then I should count as a woman who left the church because I felt marginalized by policies that relegated me to the position of a second-class citizen. Motherhood does not equal priesthood, or even womanhood, for that matter. And nothing I know about Jesus leads me to believe that is God’s plan for me, or for any other woman I know.

Some of us who are still counted as members simply lacked the patience or just plain perseverance to continue to fight from within. So we drifted away, one by one, feeling, as I did, increasingly marginalized and irrelevant in a culture that emphasizes and celebrates two-parent, so-called traditional families as the pinnacle of righteous living (and hey, girls, as a carrot at the end of life’s stick, women can be “Heavenly Mothers” to millions of spirit children. No thanks—I didn’t like being pregnant in this life, so I’ll pass on that in the next one).

I can’t give you any hard and fast numbers. But everyone knows the Mormon Church is losing members fast, as both new converts and the long-time faithful grapple with cognitive dissonance, discovering less-sanitized views of their religion’s formerly white-washed (I chose that term deliberately) history.

After I expressed support for my OW friends on Facebook, one of my friends, a woman I deeply respect who is still an active member, messaged me to say that she just didn’t feel like she needed the Priesthood, since she always had access to its blessings. I remember feeling that exact same way when I was married. But after my divorce, I realized that in fact, I did not have access to those blessings in the same way married women did.  

Indeed, the issue of gender inequity affects both my former (cultural) faith and my new (spiritual) faith, as Chris Henrichsen noted in his article, “We Are Already Seeing an Exodus of the Faithful.” He quoted BYU Professor and Catholic Damon Linker’s oddly prescient observation: “in both Catholicism and Mormonism, there’s often nowhere else to go. It’s either love it or leave it.”

It seems a lot like the Pharisees’ approach to Jesus’s radical notion: “Love thy neighbor.” It's not “judge thy neighbor.” Not “expel thy neighbor.” But “Love thy neighbor.”

To John, Kate, and all my friends who are fighting for love within the religion they have chosen, I wish you every bit of luck on your spiritual quest. They would be silly and short-sighted to lose you. But to the people whose interpretation of love is to close doors and shut windows, to those “faithful” church members, I say #MormonsCountMeOut.

Fabric Scraps and Old Wounds

What Joni Hilton’s “Are You a Liberal Mormon?” meant to me

On Saturday, sequestered by November’s first snowfall, the kids and I decided to clean out the closets, donating bags of clothes that don’t fit, old toys we no longer play with, and my fabric stash.

Parting with the last of my fabric was harder than I thought it would be—much harder, in fact, than selling the few pieces of gold jewelry my ex-husband gave me during our 13 years of marriage. I’ve shed fabric a few pieces at a time in the six years since The Divorce (the children still refer to it in capital letters, acknowledging the post-apocalyptic wasteland that remained in the aftermath of our temple marriage’s sudden and unexpected dissolution).

These last three bins represented my most cherished finds—colorful satin brocades, plush, luxurious Minky, quirky calico prints, and finally, the pink chenille I once lined with toile flannel and made into a couture outfit for my much-wanted and much-loved baby girl.

How I loved to sew in those days of young Mormon motherhood! I made train quilts and book bags and matching pajamas for the boys, documenting everything in carefully planned scrapbooks. But having a daughter took my sewing to a whole new level. I dreamed up outfits for her in my sleep, bought a serger, and spent many happy afternoons creating my masterpieces.

After The Divorce, I had no time for sewing. But I kept the fabric because of what it represented, a life I had lost but still sometimes longed for.

Last summer, my little pink chenille-robed pixie turned eight, and I pulled out the sewing machine once more, to fulfill a promise I made to her and to myself. We went to the fabric store where she picked out a pattern, white satin, and gold-leafed chenille for her baptism dress.

I was out of practice, and the dress, with its slippery fabric, gave me fits. Unable to put the zipper in, I conceded partial defeat and modified the design for buttons. I cut myself more than once and bled spots of bright red blood onto the white fabric.

And I cried as I stitched the seams together. Because the truth is this: I did not want my daughter to get baptized in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While I still consider myself culturally Mormon, I no longer identify with the church’s teachings, and I fear that they can be especially toxic for bright young girls.

But baptism is what my daughter wanted (and no eight year-old should face the sort of social stigma she would endure if she didn’t).

Many brilliant Mormon and post-Mormon bloggers have done a better job than I could of articulating my own existential angst at the thought of my daughter’s baptismal covenants. Sitting behind her (I was not permitted to sit beside her) was one of the most agonizing moments of my entire life. Talk about NOT feeling the Spirit! Still, I smiled through the ceremony, shook hands, and got through the day. Because that’s just what you do, and it wasn’t about me anyway.

But I didn’t realize how truly bothered I was by the whole baptism pageant until I read Joni Hilton’s essay, “Are You a Liberal Mormon?” I know it’s so two weeks ago, but Ms. Hilton is still on my mind, because you know what? She is exactly like many of the Mormons I know—smug, self-righteous, and “perfect.”

If not staggering out of bars at 2:00 a.m. makes you perfect. Because that is apparently what “liberal Mormons” do (?????). Ms. Hilton’s essay was quickly taken down, probably because even the editors of Meridian Magazine had to realize how toxic it was. In case you somehow missed it, you can read Mormon Stories’ excellent coverage of the debacle here. 

This quote really stood out for me: “Liberal Mormons have forgotten that Christ runs this church, not mortals. God’s laws are uncheangeable [sic] and eternal, not somebody’s notions that sway in the breeze and adapt to each new social trend.”

Except they aren’t. Many Mormons I know manage the dizzying act of being both relativists and absolutists simultaneously. Blacks and women can’t hold the Priesthood, only now blacks can because in 1978, God changed his mind. Gay people can’t get married because God said they can’t, but God also used to say it was okay to have several wives, and now that’s just not okay.

These are not unique insights, by the way—these are glaringly evident examples of God changing his mind gleaned straight from sanitized LDS church history.  

One of the attractions of Mormonism has been the image and lifestyle that people like Ms. Hilton represent—clean-living, wholesome, nuclear families with hard-working, shirt-and-tie fathers, even harder working stay-at-home mothers, and a slew of bright, polite, successful children. I want to make it very clear that I am not criticizing that lifestyle. It works well for many people.

What I am criticizing is something I used to do myself as a temple going, faithful Mormon mother: Mormons have got to stop judging the latte drinkers.

You know what I mean. Jesus, if there is a Jesus, does not give a damn about whether somebody drinks coffee or not. He just doesn’t. This is a God whose first miracle was to change water to wine. When I was in Mormon Sunday School, the lesson focused obsessively on explaining that the “wine” in question was actually nonalcoholic grape juice. Now that I’ve enjoyed a glass or two of cabernet sauvignon for myself, I have to say that I very much doubt this. No one would be impressed by a god who changed water to grape juice.

Closet cleaning accomplished, my Saturday turned to a much anticipated interfaith choir concert hosted by my parish and organized by a local LDS stake music director. I had the opportunity to catch up with many of my LDS friends as we shared worship music. The concert featured several local church groups, with a finale sung by a 100-member chorus. My friends embraced me; we caught up on their children’s missions and college plans. I felt loved and included and best of all, not judged.

The LDS church is at a crossroads. Its branded lifestyle, the so-called traditional family as described in the Church’s document The Family: A Proclamation tothe World, is increasingly rare, for a variety of reasons. Yet people like Ms. Hilton cling to their own notions of righteousness, categories that exclude and hurt people both within (the “Liberal Mormons”) and outside of their faith.

I’m not sure about many things, but I am pretty sure that’s not what Jesus would do. Jesus would have an interfaith choir concert followed by a community potluck every single night of the week. And all—Mormons, Christians, Atheists, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and Pastafarians—would be welcome at the table.

P.S. If you live in the Boise area and want some pretty awesome fabric, I donated my stash to the Goodwill on State Street. I hope your daughter looks as fabulous in your creation as my daughter did in mine.

In Defense of Liturgy

Cogs in a Machine or Notes in God's Symphony?

If you’ve heard my ex call me an alcoholic party girl, he’s totally right. Case in point: I spent the majority of my weekend (Saturday evening and all morning Sunday) attending Mass at Holy Apostles, where I play keyboards in a Catholic band. Somehow, I think this behavior adds exponentially to my coolness factor, but that’s another essay.

This weekend, I dragged a talented young percussionist friend of mine along who has never been to Mass before, in the hopes of convincing her to join my 9:00 a.m. group, which has music, but no rhythm. She found the experience disconcerting, to say the least. “It’s scary,” she said afterwards, “Watching all those people do the same things and say the same things—it was like you were all brainwashed.” She has a hard time reconciling the fiercely independent—dare I say anarchist—friend she knows with the woman who stands up, sits down, kneels, and holds out her arms at all the appropriate times and can recite the Nicene Creed and the Lord’s Prayer from memory.  

In the interests of full disclosure, I am not a Catholic (yet). I was raised Mormon, and I am bringing up my own children in the faith of their fathers. And I’ve spent plenty of time without the inconvenient ties and binds of any religion (unless you count the Church of The Flying Spaghetti Monster, and when you take into account the fact that members’ tithes pay for a pirate ship, you definitely should not discount the Pastafarians!). So how did I end up at the Catholic church, taking RCIA classes and providing music at one and sometimes two Masses each week for almost a year now?

The answer is simple. I love liturgy.

The very thing that my friend couldn’t stomach—the repetitive phrases, the recited lines, the constant reinforcement of the same old dogma—is comfortable, soothing, and simultaneously intellectually stimulating to me.

I’m not saying you should love liturgy, or that your own beliefs (or lack thereof) are wrong. But I think there’s a strong case to be made for Catholicism. I can’t make an argument that has consumed 2,000 years of thought in one blog post—but I can share my response to my friend and provide a brief explanation of how liturgy functions in furthering my own search for spirituality.

I see the same things my friend saw at Mass—but I interpret what I see very differently. To my mind, all of us—and it’s a pretty diverse bunch (on Saturday evening, for example, the 1000+ Holy Apostles crowd included everyone from the State Governor and his wife to a group of African immigrants)—have made the same conscious choice to come together as one community, in a tradition that spans thousands of years and has its roots in the last supper a Jewish rabbi shared with his friends before he was murdered by Romans.

My friend saw cogs in a machine. I heard notes in God’s great symphony.

In his magnificent treatise, The Phenomenon of Man, that great scientist and devout Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin sought to explain his own paleontological discoveries that supported the secular theory of evolution by proposing a grand theory of cosmic theological evolution called Omega. For more than 20 years, I have thought about Teilhard’s work. But not until that conversation with my friend did I truly grasp its significance. What if every individual managed to attain the highest degree of individual excellence he or she was capable of? And what if all those individuals then joined in a community of believers, whose purpose was to unite their individual talents and skills to create a perfect world, to eliminate the problem of evil once and for all, to truly sing a new song to God?

Oddly enough, this week’s readings and homily dealt with theodicy, or the problem if evil in the world. My own life is consumed with the problem of evil—the disasters that befall us by chance, as well as the ones that befall us by choice. The liturgy—the comforting repetition of a Hail Mary, or the exhilarating proclamation of the mysteries (“Christ has died! Christ is risen! Christ will come again!)—serve a cognitive behavior therapy function for me. I don’t ask you to understand it. I only want to make you aware of the power of words, repeated, for weeks, for months, for years, for centuries—words which were spoken  by one who may have been the Word, in the beginning.

I will be the first to admit that I am faith-challenged and probably always will be. But by saying these words each week, I choose to place myself in a community that spans the centuries, that finds its roots in a stable, a manger, a star in the sky. “Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist,” Teilhard wrote. When we say these words at Mass each week together, we are not mindless cogs in a machine We are, as Teilhard defines us, “collaborators in creation.”