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| 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.
