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My brother-in-law married into a very wealthy Mormon family. They have made a lot of donations to BYU; perhaps coincidentally, no member of this family has been denied admission to BYU. My husband is unemployed. We are expected to pay ten percent of his unemployment checks in tithing. Some small part of that donation is going subsidize the college education of my incredibly wealthy nieces and nephew.
Yeah, that sticks in my craw a little.
At some point, I will be willing to pray again, specifically to ask God how to appease Him. I feel like there has got to be some sacrifice large and horrible enough that I can get on His good side again. Does he want me to tithe 20 percent? Attend the temple once a week even though I’m deeply troubled by the sexism? Give up sewing (which is both a hobby and a business for me)? Have another baby? I think, after another few months of unemployment, I’ll be ready to give God whatever He wants. But I’m not quite there yet.
Around here, non-LDS churches either sponsor Girl AND Boy Scouts, or neither. (Not just scouts, either. My daughter participates in a basketball ‘sports ministry’ in another church that has a roughly equal number of boys and girls. In every ward I’ve ever been in, church basketball is only for boys/men.) In comparison, our failure/refusal to provide equal opportunities to kids of both genders probably looks really weird. Some of our strangeness is good, but a lot of it is neutral or bad. Such as endorsing scouting only for boys but never (in 100+ years) for girls. In 2017, is there a good way to explain that to a never-Mo that won’t cause them to give major side eye to the church? And would they really be wrong? If God doesn’t see fit to correct the sexist assumptions of His prophets, with whom He presumably communicates on a regular basis, then doesn’t He share some of the blame? He has never, in 180+ years of direct revelation, insisted that His wife get Her fair share of praise and gratitude for Her role in the creation. Imagine how different the church would be if Heavenly Mother had been a participant in the First Vision! We wouldn’t have to keep Her in the shadows since She would have been a vital part of our doctrine from day one.
So here are the possible conclusions I’ve come to: 1) It’s possible that God did not allow his wife to participate in the Creation. In this case, God is a sexist jerk.
2) It’s possible that God DID allow his wife to participate in the Creation, but He does not have a problem with taking the credit for Her work. He demands that we
never stopgiving praise and gratitude to Him for the awesome world we live in, but He is not troubled when His wife is given neither. In this case, God is a sexist jerk. 3) It’s possible that Heavenly Mother did not participate in the Creation because She was busy doing a different, equally important thing. However, God does not want us to know what this was, instead preferring that all our praise and gratitude be directed towards Him and Him alone. In this case, God is a sexist jerk.
I think about this in the context of my own marriage. If my husband was required to create something big, say an earth, he would want my participation even if nobody was requiring it. (I am way more creative than him, and even if I wasn’t, my husband tends to be very humble about his own skills and seeks out the input of others.) Later, if people praised him for creating this awesome thing, my husband would insist that I received my fair share of the praise – probably
morethan my fair share, knowing him. A man who takes credit and accepts praise for his wife’s work isn’t really any more enlightened than a man who doesn’t let his wife participate in the first place. I can accept that the creation story in the endowment is wrong (I struggle to understand why God hasn’t seen fit to correct the sexism, but okay). I can accept that a lot of the more troubling aspects of the endowment are wrong. But where does that leave us? Doesn’t the majority of our exclusive truth claim hang on the temple?
Orson wrote:All scripture and revelation is subject to the understanding and interpretation of men, who see through a glass darkly. God cannot reveal to man more than he is able to accept or comprehend.
In 2017, shouldn’t we be able to accept and comprehend the idea that a woman (or some number of women) participated in the creation? If our current depiction is incorrect, God can correct it any time He chooses. Then again, if God had been more forthright about Her participation
in the first place, maybe mortal man wouldn’t have ever developed the idea that the really important work of creation can’t be done by women. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Sheldon wrote:
Anything by Daniel Ariely, but I especial liked “Predictably Irrational”Gladwell’s book are fine, but a little too “pop Culture” for me.
Ooooooh I loved ‘Predictably Irrational.’
I went on a bender of reading social-science books right before/during my faith transition. I never made the connection before – wonder if the two are related.
Roy wrote:
What I like about scouting is that earning an eagle scout rank or serving as a scout leader is something that is recognized and respected outside of the church. I feel that any replacement program would lose that benefit.That’s actually one of my criticisms of the “but the YW can get a Young Womanhood award!” explanation for why girls don’t need Scouts. My husband has been putting his Eagle Scout on his resume for years. I don’t list my YW award because outside the MorCor, it’s utterly meaningless.
I’m really curious to see how the LDS Scouts will handle this. They can’t exclude a boy from scouting because he was born with female parts. But they CAN exclude a boy from YM and MUST exclude a boy from holding the Priesthood if he was born with female parts. Problem is, we’ve got the PH, the YM, and Scouts so intertwined that you can’t really have one without the other.
I remember reading (no idea where) that there were some problems pre-1978 with the Church’s involvement with scouting because they had decided that some positions within a troop could only be held by the Deacon’s quorum president or whatever, which meant that boys of color were automatically excluded from that position.
Last week we had Stake Conference. We just got un-gerrymandered (is that a word?) so I literally had two stake conferences, in two different stakes, in back-to-back months. But the new stake we’re in actually puts together a stake choir for conferences, and since I don’t have to drive an hour each way, I was able to participate along with my 14 year old daughter. (She is ambivalent about the church, but loves to sing.) And the week before that, we had a great SM talk about inclusiveness… given by a brother in our ward whose wife happens to be a board member here.
😆 I already made the hearkening covenant for myself – I was twenty years old, madly in love, naive, and also a little self-righteous. I wish I could undo THAT covenant and keep the rest. But I also don’t feel comfortable making that covenant on behalf of other women, especially my own female ancestors. I just don’t go to the temple at all. But that is probably a cowardly way out – someone else will do their endowment instead, someone who has no issues with the sexism and will gladly bow her head and say ‘yes’ and consign my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother to an eternity of hearkening. If you think about it, dead women who are having their temple work done in 2017 are lucky. Dead women who had their temple work done in 1989 have to OBEY their husbands forever. Nibbler brings up a good point regarding different meanings of “as.” I’m pretty sure that this exact point came up during FMH’s ‘When The Temple Hurts’ series. It can either mean “hearken to your husband at the same timethat he hearkens to God,” or it can mean “hearken to your husband in the same mannerthat he hearkens to God.” (Of course, that doesn’t answer the question of why I can hearken to my husband but he can’t hearken to me, but… baby steps.) We have a similar problem with the very definition of the word ‘hearken.’ There’s kind of a Schrodinger’s cat situation happening where “hearken” means “obey” when my husband is doing it to God, but “hearken” means “not obey, but something else, but we don’t know what” when I do it to my husband. What would it take to receive further light and knowledge? If my eternal salvation rests on keeping this covenant, shouldn’t I have a better understanding of what it all means? It wouldn’t take much – a General Conference talk here, a 5th Sunday lesson there. If we don’t like talking about it in public, because it seems cultish/outdated/sexist/downright weird, shouldn’t that be some kind of sign?
GBSmith wrote:The covenant about hearkening has an out for the wife as it specifies that the husband has to hearken to God for her to hearken/obey him. Since I’m a slacker at heart, I always figured my wife would get a pass on that one.
I think a lot of people take the same ‘escape clause’ that you do. It’s a moderate perspective that still allows you to take the covenant literally. If this loophole works for you and your wife, I wouldn’t want to take that away. For me, it still doesn’t answer the question of
why I can’t hearken directly to God. Does He think I have cooties? I don’t; I already had my shot 😆 Imagine if, in a hypothetical talk in Women’s Session, President Nelson said the following: “Sisters, you covenanted to hearken to your husbands, so let’s talk about how you do that. It does/does not [pick one] mean obey. However, if your husband doesn’t hearken to God, you don’t have to hearken to him. However, it’s your responsibility to be able to tell if your husband is hearkening to God or not. Also, if you are not married, you don’t have to hearken to anyone. I mean, I guess you can hearken directly to God if you really
wantto, but if you don’t, you aren’t breaking any covenants.” All of which would be totally truthful and reflect the way a lot of LDS people think. Also, it sounds completely absurd. 😆
