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Roy wrote:
Maybe it is kinder to grant Roy jr. the freedom to set his own course – not forgetting the legacy that came before but also not feeling bound to retread the same paths.
Roy Jr. will do his level best to set his own course as he transitions into adulthood at different points. And if he is anything like my teenager, it will be part rebellion at parental common sense, part “oh shiny”, and heavily under the influence of hormones and social conditioning.
Our job as good-to-decent ancestors and stewards is to make accessible to them the legacies that were passed onto us – the good and the bad.I have told my daughters since they were around 6 years old or so about how our families have a biological legacy towards substance abuse as it comes up. 3 of my 4 grandparents were alcoholics, 2 of my grandparents who were raising my parents as single parents got drunk enough long enough that my parents in essence self-raised themselves and eventually joined the church. My husband’s side of the family fared a little better with substance abuse – but not enough to fully counter my biological legacy.
After about 10 years of hearing the family legacy, it came up last week. My teenager rolled her eyes in the exasperated way that teens do and was like, “Moo-oom, we don’t need to hear again how our family gets addicted to alcohol or drugs – stop being annoying”. But the coolest part was that she was annoyed at being bored by being told it again – she has internalized the cautionary warning about our family legacy and alcohol. She no interest in alcohol or street drugs [but is interested in the “forbidden coffee”].
There cannot be gender equality while our marriage and sealing practices are intertwined. – This arrangement requires that a woman be sealed to only 1 man throughout her lifetime (and completely “Cancel” any other spousal sealings), while a man can be sealed to multiple women throughout his and gains “Clearance” to do so.
I think that the LDS standards of members regarding clean living (fidelity to spouse, WoW), acknowledgement of obligations to family and community do the heavy lifting to bless women and children and creating some of that family-friendly “equality” stuff that actually has nothing to do with equality. I think that at long as Patriarchy is prized as the organizational structure for church administration that there will be a “separate but equal” divide among men and women at church and in church culture with the priesthood authority being the bludgeon/flashpoint between men and women because the priesthood authority is the fundamental way in our church culture that boys are not girls and treated very differently.
FUN LINKS:
The marriage advice every couple needs, but no one getshttps://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/the-marriage-advice-every-couple The men who like women and the men who don’t. Yes we can tell.https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/men-who-like-women I’m a feminist and I think it’s harder to be a man than a woman.Roy wrote:
Anyway, I think that I’m coming to a place where I can support Roy jr. in what he wants. If he wants to be ordained then that’s ok. If he doesn’t want to be ordained then that’s ok too.
I have seen your posts throughout the years talking about how it was important to you to create space so you could bless your son with the priesthood authority and repeat the tradition of the father passing the priesthood authority to the son. This has been a goal/aspiration that meant a lot to you and had motivating value to you. NOTE: Statement of observed facts, no guilt-tripping or shade being thrown here.
One of my favorite quotes by Adam Grant is this:
Quote:It’s more important to be good ancestors than dutiful descendants. Too many people spend their lives being custodians of the past instead of stewards of the future. We worry about making our parents proud when we should be focused on making our children proud. The responsibility of each generation is not to please our predecessors—it’s to improve conditions for our successors.
– Your comment about your father conveys to me that your father may be ambivalent about any expectation of passing on the priesthood line to the next generation.
– Your comment about being aware of the added responsibilities/expectations attached to priesthood ordination for your son is in line with what “good stewards” do.
– The remaining point is more about what ritual do you and your son need that would have a similar emotional vibe of passing on a legacy that would make you a “good ancestor” here?
I like it as well. It goes with how Father Tim (from Jan Karon’s “Mitford” series) defines forgiveness as “giving up my right to hurt you because you hurt me”.
– Basically taking vengeance/revenge/retaliation off the proverbial table.
I understand that part of the “Proclamation” was an to attempt to write out why gender (and man-women marriage family structure) was doctrinally important during the start of the governmental/legal de-coupling of gender and marriage (pun quasi-intended, you’re welcome). I also mourn that women were not included in writing the document at the time – I think some paragraphs and sentences were clunkily written to highlight aspects of family structures and omit other aspects of family structures because it was a fairly homogenous male panel of writers trying to define policy & doctrine.
Roy wrote:
I am big on the “individual adaptation” clause in the family proclamation. Why wouldn’t we want members to adapt general principles to their individual circumstances? In Sunday School a few years ago, I brought up the “individual adaptation” and how wonderful it was that we can essentially be taught correct principles and then govern ourselves.
In theory, “individual adaptation” of church doctrine or culture isn’t problematic. In practice, a respectable amount of members take comfort from abiding by the rules rather then refining the rules to create a life worth living.
The real problem with “individual adaptation” is that when it is properly wielded, it gives members autonomy to decide for themselves how to live the rules rather then bolstering the church organization’s autonomy to dictate the rules to the members.
EXAMPLE: Tithing.
Assuming “individual adaptation” allows the member to determine where they are going to pay tithing and how much. The church that allows for “individual adaptation” allows for the “Gross vs Net” determination and in theory would allow “tithing” to be paid to other organizations to count for the community credit of being law-abiding. For a lot of members (especially in leadership), donating to a food bank (following Malachi to provide a social net) is not the purpose of tithing (and they think that the LDS version does it better).
Roy wrote:
The teacher, a former stake leader, pushed back stating that we should be careful thinking that our circumstances excuse us from following the gospel path as strictly and earnestly as we otherwise might.I understood his message to be that for a small subset of people, the traditional nuclear family is impossible and if you belong to these groups then your bishop can be merciful and release you from the expectation – but be very careful of deciding for yourself that you qualify to “individually adapt” lest you enter into apostacy.
It’s pretty maddening. Let people live their lives and form their families and provide financially and parental nurture the best way that they can.
One of the things I have found interesting is how “family oriented” our church is to make and create linear connections between individuals and pass on a legacy. It matters who the parents are, who got married, ages, etc. But while the majority of us have blood relations and legal relations that we hang out with, there is a whole lot of “found family” and friends that aren’t defined as “family” in LDS terms.
The “traditional nuclear family” as talked about in the Proclamation says nothing about the handicapped extended family who live with you (except in the “death or disability” clause), the friends who are closer to you than your siblings, and other family formulations such as at dorms, etc.
Something is fishy in his response. 1. He could have not authorized your going to a doctor rather then setting up the bureaucracy to provide the medical care.
2. How is it on you that he felt bound by your seeking out an initial medical opinion informally for your situation before contacting him and following the procedures to get the care?
NOTE: If anything, he should feel good feelings towards you because you worked out on your own a way to get some preliminary information before requesting his attention (and resources) to resolve the injury.
3. If he is anything like the mission president I have, he took your medical concern to his wife who actually did the executive functioning to match up the church insurance to a medical professional in your area (and maybe even the scheduling and related logistics). So, his in-interview time and attention and the 5-10 minutes to delegate the actual responsibility to someone else is worth chastising you for?
Yes, he would have probably preferred that you not have a medical situation on his watch that required any of his attention:) BUT that is what is he was paid the generous stipend to administer:)
Quote:They [the church leaders who are administering the unit] are focused on what is good for the ward or the church generally and not primarily focused on what is good for me individually.
– These are the same leaders that benevolently insist that “they know best” about what should happen equally on the unit and individual levels – up until they don’t. It doesn’t take much to find a topic outside their league of “knowing best” – which is pretty much taking the abstract doctrinal framework (as understood by the leader) and applying it to the pastoral side of living – disability, divorce, abuse, trauma, identity dynamics, conflict resolution, lifestyle priorities (non-church based – the church will tell member lifestyle priorities at the drop of a hat).
FYI: I am most likely one of the “Questioner” category most of the time because I am more likely to follow the expectations I set myself and twist external expectations into my internal expectation. However, I come across very much as also being an “Upholder” because I do generally meet external expectations and I like “rules”. These tendencies are just that – a weighing of options so that more often a specific type of option shows up. These are general habits of an individual over time, or more like, “more often then not” statements. There is an interesting theory/observation made by Gretchin Rubin about people is that they tend to fall into 4 general patterns of behavior (labeled as “tendencies”) observed in responding to expectations. External Expectations– Standards of others about one’s behavior (Fidelity and WoW are examples) Internal Expectations– Personal Standards (New Year’s Day Goals for example) Broad Strokes Classification: Upholders– This group was born to meet external and internal expectations consistently. Questioners– This group is great at meeting internal expectations, but not necessarily external expectations. Obligers– This group tends to meet external expectations, but not necessarily internal expectations. Rebels– This group tends to reject expectations in all forms (both the external expectations of others and setting and meeting internal expectations). EXPLICIT EXAMPLE: Ministering (Quasi-Controversial:) )
Upholders– Run the system as implemented (gaining comfort form the external validation) and have less patience for innovation or non-participation (internally validating their expectation and judging others). Questioners– Tend to define the system rules to work for them and have more of a “good enough” approach. Obligers– May or may not meet an external expectation, but don’t necessarily have or need an internal expectation. Rebels– Across the board will not participate unless it is meaningful to them. May or may not reject participating at at theoretical level even. The church community goal is to deal with as many “Upholders” and “Obligers” as possible to ensure the work gets done, manage the “Questioners” to ask the right questions for innovation without loss of labor, and to shame the “Rebels” out of the group (because they are so hard to motivate).
The leadership tries to balance encouraging “strict obedience” because it benefits the Upholders and Obligers with periodic “spiritual inspiration” comments to give power back to the members. Plus, not all leaders have the same tendencies or perspectives.
skipper wrote:
The first is that although there were groups of women being abused by a subset of man, I also think men with high sex drive (biologically higher testosterone) that did get over their heads. That may have been too many wives and children – not the rewards of more sex (although I am sure most of these men might see it this way) but the lack of anything more, a sex drive where they are always emotionally and existentially lonely. And Roy, although you believe in free will and personal choice I wonder if some of these men become trapped in their own sex drive. It is just a wonder, as I am unsure.
Polygamy isn’t just about sex. Polygamy is about male authority (1 man and many women), about control (of the situation if nothing else), about men selling/bestowing admission to an upgraded afterlife in exchange for promises. Polygamy is about seeing whether a man was worthy of leadership in a way that tied women and children directly and explicitly to him (and that is why our sealing practice for living women have to choose which man to be sealed to in this life while a man can be sealed to as many women as he has legally married in this life rankles so much – the inequality of choice).
Our religious culture grounds the conversation in how BY practiced polygamy and how it was used by the upper leadership in general to consolidate social power and authority with sex used to biological children and a biological legacy converted into a jumble of spiritual legacy parts.
skipper wrote:
My second point in this broader conversation is that as humans we tend to want to put history into neat and simply boxes. All men were this way, or all women experienced this. I believe polygamy has a subset of many different experiences. Clearly some women were abused and some men enjoyed sex with different women through the week or month. But I believe there is another subset of men who tried to be good to many wives and some wives that enjoyed the closeness of other women. And then there is everything in between these two polarities – multiple subsets.Besides me, does anyone believe polygamy was inspired for a 50 year duration to build up a LDS community, but in the process, and within subsets, our not so divine human nature complicated things?
I don’t think that God had anything to say about the way that humans arrange relational frameworks at this level, even though people like JS and BY said that God did. I do believe that polygamy was used to weld leading families into a community that colonized the west (and the Native American Indian tribes in the area as well) in an empire-building spree that was halted by the railroad and the land absorbed into the state of Utah and the US government.
I think that our biology innately encourages sex with multiple partners over a lifetime and that men are both biologically wired to seek more sex and that their brains are more strongly rewarded when it happens for them. I think that more women have been more thoroughly conditioned to deny a sex drive and that the cost of sex (producing pregnancy) is wired into a women’s DNA so that she is more sex risk-adverse. There are also studies out there that from a biological perspective, women’s bodies produce more negative effects such as nausea when encountering risk that men’s bodies do not (which is one reason why teenage boys are risk-seeking).
Roy wrote:
For me it is helpful to compartmentalize early Mormon theology and modern Mormon theology. I am a fan of using the Marvel and DC comic book universes as examples. They are similar and borrow ideas from each other but they are clearly separate worlds that work under separate rules. We can speculate on who would win in a fight, superman or captain marvel but ultimately we are comparing apples and oranges. This is how I see early Mormon theology and modern Mormon theology. They cannot be aligned because they come from different worlds.
This works as long as it is understood that there are 3 “worlds” at play here:
a) The joint world of JS and BY (which is a stretch actually)
b) The 1950’s “Modern Era” that upper leadership still lives in divided by gender roles.
c) The world from the 1970’s and beyond that includes a lot about civil rights, autonomy, and consent that wasn’t given air time in either of the other generations.
There is the sticking point that the culture emphasis is on “eternal truths” and “restoring pure principles” that cross all generations and assuming that specific niche cases in the world views are truths that cross time and space. EXAMPLE: The farmers who lived on the edge of starvation and wrote the Word of Wisdom spoke vaguely at best about what easy access to sugar and the intense refinement of the food chain would do across the board to the saints’ diets.
Men especially are victims of the system that didn’t think the implications through about it. Our most explicit understanding of polygamy comes from the same D & C chapter where Emma is given a pretty strong “obey or else face destruction” non-consenting vibe. The stories about how polygamy came out always start with the consent of JS and BY being overwritten – that they didn’t want to participate but… And the degree of lying that Joseph did to Emma to make it all work is the stuff of legends and made the whole situation more distrustful from the start.
Also, most empires and cults in their highest levels of influence embrace polygamy (or something like it with the main leaders having multiple women closely connected to them) – so it looks less like a divine feature (or bug) and more like a standard man-made system (or maybe scheme).
“Consent” as a concept is a “Yes/No” onetime binary that overhangs hundreds of individual decisions made in married life about how to provide in a shared communal family life. Did the men really have the ability to “say no” if they were called by Joseph Smith or Brigham Young? I don’t know. I do know that some men were opposed to polygamy (originally Joseph Smith and Brigham Young actually) and then some of them changed their mind about it.
The thing is, polygamy “opened up” a lot of marriages in a very risky way that gave little room for true decision-making, equality, or consent – or the logistics of hosting the expanded family. The traumatic fallout from this opening brought the ire of the US government to Utah, impoverished countless family units (which may have been impoverished anyways). There is tension because the policy that a living man can be sealed to multiple women at the same time while a living women has to be “cancelled” from being sealed to more than 1 man at a time. This policy difference converts valued serial monogamy relationships into a form of polygamy which reinforces how polygamy has not worked out for women.
I see it as higher sex drive men would be more interested in being involved in a polygamous system AND more likely to have higher testosterone levels so that the ratio of testosterone and other hormones is different – which has a hormonal impact on behavior. Specifically, oxytocin and estrogen are tied to care & compassion – if you have a testosterone heavy ratio, you are biologically wired to “care less” for others and more likely to be interested in sex. It is one of the reasons why teenage boys to men in their mid 40’s (or so) make some of the decisions they make and they are “intoxicated” in a sense by testosterone (which does drift down slower as a man ages starting in the mid-30’s). And in American culture, a man whose wife just gave birth in the last 6 months is likely to be oxytocin-starved because our men aren’t big on long-term hugs (that do create oxytocin) outside of hugging their now-touched-out wives. In my mind, these higher sex drive men are the ones “getting the girl(s)”, getting the jobs, getting the power and authority in the system. And likely, getting in over their head in a lot of different scenarios because of their confidence and their previous successes and to cover insecurities.
Both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were in their 30’s when they incorporated polygamy in their lives. In my opinion, Joseph did so because he wanted more community ties, community adoration, and he wanted a legacy in the afterlife. Brigham Young did so because he was building an empire (in essence) and wanted sex, family ties, and control of people to make it happen.
Wilford Woodruff had over 200 women sealed to him, and had a thing about hosting birthday parties where an activity was mass sealing women to him (he was old at the time too, making it even creepier) – so it wasn’t about the sex. I’m guessing he wanted to ensure he had a female fan club / cheer squad for the afterlife, but I honestly don’t know.
Our culture has consolidated a lot of expectations onto a marriage and the marriage partner with a romanticized interest in “the one” being whom you marry. Marriage in the 1820’s was about love & caring, but it was also more pragmatic about being an arrangement to get men off the streets (by pulling them into families and with a wife to be faithful to), produce a viable business, to produce a bustling and well-fed household that expanded into being cared for in one’s old age, and a way to socially connect to powerful people in the community. I think it functioned more like a “get out of jail free (leave drudgery to someone else)” card then the high-stakes spiritual & emotional investment we treat it as now. I honestly think that our communal conversations about polygamy read our expectations of marriage onto the past and cause more harm then the original union itself might have in some instances because of what our culture expects of marriage now.
