by Kiskilili*
What Mormonism purports to offer is a unique relationship to deity (of a quality said to surpass what’s available in other denominations), the authorization to act on God’s behalf, and a personal self-understanding as inchoately and potentially divine.
I would argue these are some of the most breathtaking aspects of the faith. God values, validates, trusts, and acknowledges us, even in our weakness and inability, and he provides us the means for constructing a self-concept as a subject in relation to deity, both personally and existentially. This is what, for a Mormon, it means to be human.
Or, stated more precisely, this is what it means to be male and human.
For some of us the Church offers the stupefying prospect of becoming an eternal nothing, insignificant or nonexistent, cut off from the possiblity of relationships and from the raison d’être of the eternities: nurturing human progeny. Some of us are asked, as a religious act, not to accept the authority to act in God’s name but to defer it, to construe ourselves as objects rather than subjects and our value as contingent rather than inherent. We’re given scant institutional means for constructing a religious self-concept as beings in communion with the divine. Instead, our personal relation to deity is compromised by the presence of male intermediaries, and our existential relation to deity is nullified by Heavenly Mother’s profound absence.
Female Mormonism is a sort of negative space, an irreligion, not an opportunity for acknowledgment from God but a denial of it. If religion matters, and if women matter, this is a travesty.
[Some] raise the possibility that patriarchy (and correspondingly, I assume, androcentrism) may represent God’s will.
This could well be the case. It’s also why I left the Church. Not because of doubt, but because of faith: in God, temple, scripture, and priesthood. This is the searing irony: that my faith led me to give up on God. In the Church’s holiest spaces and most sacred texts I failed to find compelling evidence women are people in any meaningful sense. It’s the Church itself—not just disgruntled feminists—that insists gender matters. If the Church is right about what it fundamentally means to be female, I have no reason to stay; what I do hardly matters. If the Church is wrong, I have no reason not to leave.
Of course, the clear gendered implications of liturgy, scripture, and policy—that God endorses the blatant marginalization of females at every level and in every age—is simply unsayable in today’s political climate, and the Church has obligingly thrown us a barrage of palliative sops about women’s superlative value (often in reference to men), statements with painfully little reference to practice, rituals, or sacred texts and even less awareness of women’s experience.
I concede that many—maybe most—women are happy with the situation. I would argue it’s in spite of, not because of, these theological implications. Women are happy because they’ve trained themselves not to notice or they’ve found a way they’re comfortable rejecting it.
For those of us who can’t not notice and who can’t find an easy way out from under it, it matters because religion is about who and what we are and can be. And what some of us are is apparently appendages, afterthoughts, and auxiliaries.
And, quite likely, this will never really change in any way deeper than the cosmetic. Because the people with the power to change it—maybe human men, maybe a male Godhead—are, exactly because of that power, the very people who will never understand why it matters.
*This post is reproduced with the author’s permission. It originally appeared here.
This is powerful, Kiskilili,
I absolutely understand where you are coming from. And I think you’re right about that searing irony. I don’t have all that much faith that the way our leaders talk about gender, that our current temple rituals, that our scriptures, etc. accurately reflect God’s vision and hope and confidence in God’s daughters. And so, I’m able to live in that space of skepticism and still be active in the church, all the while hoping that there will be changes.
This article has stirred me. The melodrama is a useful construct for articulating the frustrating double-edged sword where women can find themselves against. I guess I do have hope that human men can extend themselves to understand where the women of the church are coming from. I speculated the other day that it might take another 50 years but I do believe that progress is being made and we’re on our way. I certainly believe in a God who does have the capacity to understand perfectly the hurts, sadness, frustration of women in this patriarchal system, and I also believe in Christ who is our advocate with the Father and our Voice to the leaders of the church.
Oh I know where you are comming from. Though yes I am sorry you left the Church. I don’t want to. I have no need to. I believe first and foremost, becoming immortal is a gift for keeping our first estate (or in other words, for not denying the plan in the pre-mortal word). Exaltation on the other hand. That is hard work, pure and simple. Yes I am somewhat mad at times (oh so many times) that it seems in the Church: “Women we adore you, and your work, but you don’t have the same commandment to teach and preach”….excuse me? I took upon Christs name at baptism, yes I was 8, but I clearly remember being taught that meant I must stand up as an example of my faith and teach. No I don’t think of myself as less, not holding the preisthood. But I do certainly think our leaders very often don’t take into account that what is said, and what is felt by the women of the Church might clash. I believe in Christ. I believe in this Church. I have invested to much, and have learned way to much.
Given that I can see your frustrations, I can see give the same exact circumstances how I might leave the Church too. I have not been through the Temple. I do not know of it yet, and please believe me. I will try my hardest to understand what is said there when I do go. I do call my self a feminist, but I reserve the right to change my mind all at the same time. I feel conflicted. But I feel that I am making slow progress in understanding myself as a woman.
Now here are my feminist tendencies: I wish that Women of the Church could feel more valued. I wish we would stop calling important programs like Primary, Young Women’s, Sunday School, and Relief Society as appendages. If they are under the cloak of the Priesthood, then they are not auxiliaries or appendages are they? How can equal be merely an appendage? These are some of the questions I have. And it seems like to me, just exercising Priesthood duties isn’t compassion, its following procedure. It seems to me at times the men are slighted even more so then the women…because its Priesthood this and Priesthood that…and half the men in the congregation who don’t hold callings are like “What in the heck do I do? I just sit here waiting for somebody to ask me to help.”
but its held in the highest esteem because it is the order of God. I believe that it is, but I think we are missing something. Correlation was a good thing because it correlated doctrine in the Church so you didn’t have this “My Bishop said”…”But oh my Bishop is better”…crap going on in the Church. Correlation FAILED in reminding women that they have power and strength…but its comming back. I so look forward to a history of the Relief Society, and a documenting of women, in ever season of their lives, who’s work truly is inspirational and healing and matters.
I have also often thought to myself but haven’t dare said out loud until finding this forum, that womanhood is more then just motherhood and wife-hood and that the women of the church truly don’t need the priesthood because as priestesses we already have power planted in us, a certain “priestess-hood” of our own. But it does seem unfair in certain aspects that we as women don’t really realize our divine potential, until after we have children. The men get the preisthood at age 12, Puberty for me started at 12, and I am thinking…I have to wait till I get married to have children and fulfill my divine potential? Okay, I don’t mind waiting, I am still very young, to young to have any children yet.
Maybe that idea of Motherhood = divine potential, that is forcing so many of our young girls into marriage and motherhood at a young age, because they believe truly “Well when I get 18 I will get a husband and marry because that is when I realize my true potential”…no wonder there is a large amount of depression pills being taken by Mormon women.