This weekend I enjoyed watching Heretic. As a Mormon feminist, interfaith worker, and fan of thoughtful horror plots, this film touched on many things I think about regularly. It kind of felt like it was made just for me.

I won’t be spoiling any outcomes of the film, but I will share and discuss some dialogue near the beginning of it.

Mr. Reed, played by Hugh Grant, raises Joseph Smith’s polygamy as the first line of attack to antagonize the beliefs of two young adult missionaries. He is dissatisfied with the justifications they offer; he says polygamy has no spiritual value, and that Joseph Smith used it to legitimize extramarital affairs with women. Joseph’s actions, he suggests, are a prime example of the problem of mystical experience becoming dogma. He points out that it is hard to trust others’ revelations when people are so liable to abuse power, and how when you see human frailty like Joseph’s, it’s easy to give up trying to believe anything religious.

Mr. Reed is a horrible person and a psychopath. It’s cruel how he antagonizes the missionaries about their faith. Most of what he shares in the film is not challenging to me at all as a Latter-day Saint or a religious person. He’s a puffed-up, self-aggrandizing man with an intellectual air he uses to try to mask his underdeveloped dualistic thinking and shoddy arguments. There is just one topic he covers that genuinely does and should sting regarding the Church: his concerns about polygamy. Watching this scene at this point in my life, I honestly resonated with Mr. Reed’s take of what happened with polygamy and the dilemma it poses to believers. It makes sense to me that this is the very first thing he uses to try to break apart Latter-day Saint faith. I personally have experienced polygamy as the weakest link in Mormonism’s armor and its biggest ongoing problem.

Latter-day Saint plural marriage doctrines have a much bigger impact on women today than any outsiders would be able to pick up on from the film. The teachings did not really end near the turn of the 20th century. They are alive and well, harming marriages and girls’ well-being to this day. In the 90’s and early 2000’s, I was regularly taught at church that polygamy is God’s lifestyle and a more sacred order of marriage I must someday conform to if I wanted to fully return to God’s presence. Polygamy is still upheld as divinely sanctioned in Latter-day Saint temple rituals and scriptures. For example, if I die before my husband does, he could get married for eternity to another woman, making me a post-humous polygamous wife without him or the Church having any obligation to obtain my consent. D&C 132, written in 1843 by Joseph Smith as a message to his wife Emma and canonized as scripture, contains spiritually abusive passages in which women are treated as objects to possess, it is made clear women’s lack of consent has no power to set boundaries for men, and women are threatened with God’s destruction if they don’t approve of men practicing polygamy.

Mr. Reed raises the question how can we know if others’ religious claims are true? One of the sisters says that we can know by the way we feel. This dialogue made me think of my personal history of strong feelings about polygamy and resistance to accepting it as revelation. During the 27-year-long period of my life when I felt compelled to accept polygamy as divine, I experienced many miserable thoughts and emotions. I felt lesser than men, deprived of true sexual and marital agency, terrified of death and heaven, and unhappy about womanhood. 

I agree with Mr. Reed that polygamy is a strong example of the obstacles to trusting religious leaders that arise. When my belief in polygamy crumbled a few years ago, this jeopardized my faith and I had to grow and become more independent and nuanced in my thinking.

Joseph Smith’s polygamy continues to harm many people’s spiritual lives and emotional well-being. The problem is perpetuated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ refusal to do virtually anything–besides adding a brief note in the official handbook that God won’t force anyone to stay in an unwanted sealing in the afterlife–about the spiritual and psychological abuse it causes. People at church don’t teach it as much today as they once did, and rhetoric has softened, but the Church clings to unwavering trust in polygamy as a legitimate revelation, a legacy passed down through generations of Joseph’s (overly) loyal male successors (several of whom were polygamous themselves).

Unlike Mr. Reed, I’m not an all-or-nothing thinker about religion. I don’t jump to assuming the worst of Joseph Smith. I know from study and from life that some people are complicated psychologically and spiritually, and that we humans are not all good or evil or all gifted or flawed. When I consider his history as a whole, I don’t think abuse and broken trust are what Joseph Smith consciously intended. It looks more likely he suffered from disordered intimacy due to emotional wounds that he didn’t understand or know how to deal with, and that this led to self-deception about his behavior difficulties.  One reason among many others for believing this is that there is evidence he had rock bottom type experience when he regretted his plural marriage teachings and practices and felt he had been wrong about it the whole time, the kind of thing that can happen when someone has been caught up in addictive thinking and starts breaking out of the delusions they used to justify acting out.

Joseph Smith is not the first or last spiritual leader to abuse others, or to justify his abuses through theology. Martin Luther King Jr. struggled with sex addiction and created a self-deceptive personal theology to justify betraying his wife through repeated rounds of infidelity and preplanned penitence (I learned about this in How Can I Forgive You?). MLK’s life suggests that someone can have a serious intimacy disorder or be deeply self-deceived in one area and also be a genuinely gifted, inspired, and even prophetic leader who does good in the world that is hard to deny. I’ve sometimes have heard MLK referred to as America’s greatest prophet despite his issues. I see Joseph’s life as having a comparable pattern. Binary thinking about people and religion is inadequate to grapple with the real problems at hand. (For more about my perspective of Joseph Smith’s polygamy, see these recent posts in which I compare Joseph Smith and Jack Skellington: Part 1, Part 2).

Nuanced perspectives allowed me to weather my damaged trust in Joseph Smith. I continue to engage in Mormon spirituality because of positive personal experiences. Mormon community and practices have made my life joyful, fulfilling, and connected in many ways (minus polygamy). I have found many things about Mormon spirituality remarkably rich and emotionally and intellectually rewarding.

Some people like Mr. Reed think religion is about attaining correct, literal beliefs. This is the dominant approach to religion in the Western world. Since this is the water we swim in, we usually don’t recognize this kind of bias. In reality, what’s usually valuable about faith and spirituality is not having specific beliefs, but how it connects us to things that are greater than ourselves. I have valued Mormonism for decades because it offers me connection, belonging, and ways to create meaning. 

But the Church’s continued affirmation of polygamy as divine will, as well as other misogynistic structures, traditions, and policies threaten my prospects for belonging in the Church at this point more than ever before. Now that I’ve differentiated on polygamy, it feels like the Church is in direct opposition to some of the values and principles I now cherish the most, especially gender equality. During my childhood, when the Church offered a much richer and more enjoyable community life, staying involved felt like a no-brainer for me, even despite things like the polygamy crap. But the Church has now largely stripped its priorities down to temple worship, a solitary, silent, and solemn activity. It it currently letting go of most of its efforts to build rewarding local community life, making church less and less inclusive and compelling for women (and everyone) and less accommodating to women’s needs, values, desires, and strengths.

The Church has had a self-defensive, negative, and disapproving response to Heretic that I don’t resonate with. The official statement about the film says “Any narrative that promotes violence against women because of their faith.…runs counter to the safety and wellbeing of our communities.” This is a strange thing to say because the film doesn’t promote violence; it depicts it, which is different. Horror films are highly moral, and like most horror films, this one shows us the ugliness and evil of violence. The Church may claim to condemn violence against women, but this feels pretty hypocritical to me considering that the institution has chosen to perpetuate spiritual, psychological, and sexual violence against women for over 180 years through its plural marriage narratives and doctrines (I include sexual violence here because of the early days of women being manipulated into marrying polygamously, and all the instances in which the teachings have justified sexual exploitation since). For all these years, male authorities have failed to respond to thousands of women like me who have called out abuse and demanded change.

In another media-oriented statement in August, the Church said, “The true story of our faith is best seen in the countless lives of those who strive daily to follow our Savior Jesus Christ.” I agree with this, but the official, institutionally promoted historical and theological narratives nevertheless matter a great deal and play a major role in communicating the Church’s values and direction. The story of Joseph’s polygamy, which claims God demanded cruel and disempowering marital and sexual situations for both women and men, is a narrative the Church must become willing to adapt and reinterpret–with women’s contributions and leadership–if they are to move forward and become a truly ethical and accountable institution, one that condemns violence against women through and through.

Personally, I saw nothing that treats the Church unfairly in Heretic, and I think good will come out of it for both members and non-members, including a greater appreciation of Mormon women and missionaries and the challenges and vulnerabilities they face. I feel gratitude toward the makers of this film for bringing Mormon women’s issues, resourcefulness, and strengths into the public eye, and for how this film is a call for deeper thinking about faith and spirituality and also critical and compassionate thinking about violence against religious women. As a Mormon woman living in one of the most secular cities in the world, I felt very much seen by the writers. For me, the film affirmed the importance and the complexity of the difficult questions I grapple with regularly about spirituality, religion, and the meanings we need in our lives as I support Mormon women in my personal life and religious young adults at my work.