A few years ago when I was starting to step back from the church, I spoke to a friend who had chosen to leave before I did. “I’m grieving,” I told her. “I haven’t even left yet, and I already miss it.”
She sighed, half in sympathy and half in resignation. “I miss it every day,” she said. “Every single day.”
*
A couple months ago in the car, my older two daughters made a case to my husband and me why we should go back to Mormon church. [1] “Our friends are there,” they said. “We love Primary. We miss singing. Can we please go back?”
I told them that we would go back sometimes, that many of the people that we love the most go to Mormon church, and so sometimes we will go to be with them and to support them. I told them that I miss it, too.
And then I told them that no, we cannot go back.
*
We had a family discussion about how one of our core family values is equality: the equality of women, the equality of people of different races, and the equality of people with different sexual or gender orientations. I explained that even though there is much that is beautiful and commendable in the Mormon church, it blatantly violates our value of equality. We’ve talked about all this before, and my daughter said, “Yeah, like the church doesn’t allow girls to hold the priesthood or bless the sacrament.”
My six-year-old son, who had been quiet up until this point, piped up, “I think girls should be able to do whatever boys can do. That doesn’t make any sense that they won’t let girls do stuff.”
Obviously his views have been formed from hearing my own, just as my views at six were formed from those of my parents, but his words landed like on my heart like a testimony. I realized in that moment that I had never, in all my growing up, heard a Mormon boy say that girls should get the same power and opportunities that they got. Not in my Primary classes, not from my brothers or cousins, not from my best friends in high school. For that matter, none of my male peers at BYU, no one in my singles’ wards, no man in any of my wards until a few years ago expressed any concern about the lack of parity between males and females in the church. Boys and men accepted that they got stuff that girls didn’t. None of them seemed interested in questioning this system, if it ever even occurred to them, let alone voicing desire for girls and women to have the same opportunities they did.
My girls took their brother’s words for granted, took for granted that he saw them as equals or even superiors, took for granted that of course he would stand up for them, took for granted that it was right that the three of them should have the same opportunities, regardless of their genders.
I wondered how having that kind of vocal support from a male figure in my life, even a little brother, would have affected me as a child or teen. Perhaps I would have sooner reevaluated my belief that God, a man, clearly had preference for other men. Perhaps my faith in God would have been able to be salvaged more wholly than the ragged threads of hope I retain.
*
I reviewed with my children how the church teaches that people who are gay are not allowed to be in relationships with the people that they love, that they are not allowed to have a family like our family. We talked about how there is nothing wrong or weird about a woman falling in love with a woman or a man falling in love with a man and that the Mormon church causes oppression and harm to these people.
I told my children that I miss going to Mormon church, too. That I miss singing the songs. That I miss giving talks and seeing my friends and teaching lessons and talking about Jesus and serving others in callings. But I said that I cannot support an organization that knowingly and intentionally perpetuates such harm, that teaches that God wants men to have power and women to not have it, that teaches that God doesn’t want some people to have families with or marry who they love.
I told my children that if they ever went to a school or joined a club or did an activity where the girls were told they couldn’t do things just because they were girls and the boys were handed opportunities without even asking for them just because they were boys, I would take them out of those spaces without a second thought. I would never, ever tolerate a gendered disparity between my son and daughters like what they experience at Mormon church in any other context. So why should church be any different? How could I decry inequality in any other situation, but stay silent about this one while they were taught not just “this is the way it is,” but “this is the way God wants it to be”?
*
I’ve been making an effort for the first time since the pandemic to go to another church, a church that ordains women and that accepts LGBTQ people. My kids enjoy it, but they still sometimes wistfully say they miss Mormon church.
I do, too.
[1] We used to just call it “church,” but once our family started going to other churches, we had to add a qualifier, so now my kids call it “Mormon church.” No disrespect intended.
[2] This post reflects my own experience. I support those who stay active in the church even though I no longer can be.
Thank you for this post. I wound up leaving once COVID hit, but I had been struggling with it before then. I wound up losing my belief in God and in the Atonement a few years earlier – which made everything else kinda superfluous. It became harder for me to show up – even when I was trying to be a “hopeful fraud” as it were.
I am not a “soft” or “gentle” person. I don’t do “soft power/implicit” leadership in my home. Honestly, I have the highest level of executive functioning in my home, so what I say goes. I gather that this is true for a lot of LDS homes too (in terms of soft-power decision-making). One of my Catholic friends says the same thing goes on in his family culture too. The “the man has the final say” mentality explicitly goes against how my family functions and feels like a church-sanctioned form of dishonesty. NOTE: BECAUSE I have the highest level of executive functioning, it is part of my identity to coordinate and collaborate with family members to create win-win situations for everyone. It is not an ego-centric power trip.
The lessons I needed the most for my personal development were pretty much the opposite of what R.S. taught me. I loved R.S. – and I still felt that I was being humored and didn’t belong – because I don’t/won’t/can’t “perform” my gender role as female correctly. Sisters whom I have confided in state more or less that “I got the rubric wrong” and that “I did belong” – I tried to believe that too for a long time. Acknowledging that the gender stereotype didn’t fit me at all and was harmful to me was helpful in easing that pain. Leaving meant that I finally didn’t have to judge myself against a standard that was not verbally communicated in ways that made sense to me and wasn’t built for me.
Actually, I reject that gender is the reason to do things at all (aside from biologically-driven child-producing functions). I do things because “I am a concerned parent” not because “I am a mom”. People can be “complimentary” and work together as a team (in marriage and the like) – but I think it’s figuring out those traits and making it work against the racing timeline of death that matters more then people’s anatomy. I don’t have it all sorted out – I don’t have the right questions even.
I love what you’ve said here. It resonates with so much that I’ve noticed in my own home. And since gender doesn’t even determine biological functions, there is no reason to divide anything along some constructed notion of who should do what.
Discovering my husband and I have the opposite traits and characteristics of the assigned “gender roles” in the church has been the single most difficult thing in my life. Unfortunately it wasn’t until after we had our first child and I found myself floundering as a mom while he hated “missing out” going to work and pursuing graduate degrees that we realized how poorly this dynamic works for us. And now I can’t simply work more to allow him more time at home because “we” invested 15 years “putting him through school”. In my adolescence I never even considered pursuing a career that could actually financially support me or a family despite getting a “college education”. We all need to quit assuming anyone with ovaries loved kids and homemaking, anyone with testes loves work. We need instead, to raise mature adults able to function as individuals who can then “divide and conquer” in whatever way suits their personalities and strengths.
I can completely relate.
I think an unexpected harsh consequence is that you as person reel and grief over the opportunity cost of being expected to be someone you are not – and when you try to explain a) where you got the idea, b) that you are feeling emotions related to grief while processing the scenario and making decisions with those expectations suffocating you – they look at you with complete bewilderment before launching into defense mode rather then dealing with their cognitive dissonance on what is expected.
To me, It winds up feeling like “gaslighting” even though it’s just their perception being used to overwhelm your perception as a subconscious security measure – which gives you more work to do unraveling the revised situation and responding to it.
I hear you, ElleK. It is hard to have these conversations with our kids.
Thank you for sharing your heart and conversations with your children, ElleK. You are an amazing mother. I am so sorry you and your children miss the Mormon church and I am so sorry it is painfully pushing good, thoughtful people (like your family) out with its exclusions and hierarchies.
I am thankful that I read your article. I think you are right. If you don’t tolerate gender discrimination, then why would you tolerate it at church? Unfortunately, I don’t think many people think through how their acceptance of the status quo at church squares with their belief in other areas. Good for you and for your family.
So you are against the Church brainwashing your children, but you are happy to brainwash them yourself? Why not let them make the decision instead of deciding for them if they are going to go back to church, or be in a club etc. You are a hypocrite.
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I do not allow my young children to make decisions regarding their participation in systems or organizations I feel are harmful. As their parent, that is my job. All parents teach their values to their children and try to shield their children in various ways from people or organizations that blatantly violate those values.