Part 1 of 3: Imaginary conversations with a conservative Mormon woman about feminism and the Church.

Mary Cassatt, Five O'Clock Tea

                        
I am not a member of Ordain Women. Though I am open to the possibility of women someday receiving the priesthood, I don't see female ordination as the obvious answer to the inequalities  women face in the Church. Moreover, I have serious reservations about some of the tactics used by the Ordain Women organization. Nevertheless, I count myself among those who believe that the roles of women in the Church must continue to evolve in a way that promotes equality. I see real, solvable problems in the institutional church regarding women's authority, autonomy, and leadership.

Over the past several days, I have read many comments from women and men adamantly defending the status quo and criticizing those who advocate change. As I struggle to maintain a sense of unity with members of my church whose views are different than mine, I hear in my mind Christ's admonition, "If ye are not one, ye are not mine." I imagine myself having a conversation over a cup of herbal tea with a conservative Mormon woman, a fictional character representing many of the wonderful women I know. I imagine myself speaking honestly and without fear. Here is what I would say.

I have known you for a long time. You teach my son primary songs, you sing with me in the choir, and you sit next to me in Sunday School. You have reached out with genuine love to my non-member husband. You have been patient with my unanswerable questions. You have mourned with me during the terrible days after my father died.  You have helped sustain my faith with your love and testimony. I have seen your great capacity for empathy and understanding.

The sacrament meetings, visiting teaching appointments, Relief Society lessons, and acts of service that we have participated in side-by-side have bound us together with hundreds of ties. We have sung the same songs, read the same scriptures, and felt the same Spirit telling us that this is where we belong. I hope that we will not let our differences divide us. 

You have told me how happy and fulfilled you are as a woman in the Church. You feel respected, loved, and listened to. Those feelings are real, and I know that you're capable of deciding for yourself what makes you happy. I have heard you express frustration that church members whose views on women and the church are radically different from yours get so much press. That's a fair point, and I hope that your voice is heard. Above all, you have a strong conviction that we have living prophets on the earth today, and you sustain them without reservation. You cherish the belief that they speak for God, and that faith has blessed your life. I honor that.

As I talk about points of disagreement, my purpose is not to persuade you to adopt my paradigm, but rather to explain it clearly. I want you to see my advocacy for women's equality as coming from a place of thoughtfulness, faithfulness, and hope.

Fallibility of Leaders and Changing Doctrine

Much of our disagreement can be traced to differences in how we see prophets, leaders, and church organization. I believe that leaders of the Church, even members of the first presidency and quorum of the twelve, sometimes make mistakes. I believe that the Church is a work in progress, an imperfect approximation of God's will for His kingdom. Inspired leaders receive revelation and process it through a human filter of cultural baggage, prejudices, and preconceptions. Certain ideas that were once taught as doctrine are now de-emphasized, abandoned, and in some cases refuted.

I want you to make room for members who think like me. No, I need you to do more than that. I plead with you to understand that accepting the reality of prophetic fallibility is the only way I can make peace with church history. Acknowledging that prophets make mistakes is uncomfortable, and it is not something I do carelessly or lightly. But it is the only way that I can see past the mountain of discarded and sometimes disturbing prophetic teachings in our not-so-distant history. Please don't push people like me out of the church or marginalize our voices.

You can imagine how this belief in prophetic fallibility might influence my views on church organization and doctrine. I listen to General Conference, and it nourishes me spiritually. I strive to help and sustain my leaders. I am grateful for their service. But in my worldview, it is possible that a teaching or practice that is in conflict with my own conscience might someday change, because it might not reflect the mind of God.

This belief influences my willingness to speak out about my views, even when I sometimes disagree with church leaders. In a recent response to Ordain Women's request to attend the general priesthood meeting, church spokeswoman Jessica Moody referenced the "wonderful conversations . . . relative to women in the Church," and stated that "recent changes . . . were facilitated by the input of many extraordinary LDS women around the world." If the Church really is sincere about seeking input and encouraging productive conversation, then I want to be a part of that. And I don't see how we can have a conversation that facilitates change without actually talking about the positive changes that we would like to see.

This does not mean that I think all criticism is fair game or that all methods of protest are appropriate. I believe that any discussion of thorny issues must be thoughtful, respectful, and mediated by the Spirit. I hope that every member would follow the dictates of their own conscience in how they advocate for change.

This post is the first of three parts. Parts 2 and 3 will discuss specific issues regarding women in the Church. 

I welcome you to turn this imaginary conversation into a real one by sharing your thoughts in the comments sections.

Fellow citizens of the household of God.

          

          
             Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with 
             the saints, and of the household of God.    Ephesians 2:19

Years ago, when I was still teaching high school, one of the boys on the quiz bowl team that I coached lost his father to cancer. I went to the funeral, and I brought with me several members of the team, all of them teenagers, all of them somewhere on the social fringe of their high school peers¹. I felt a kinship with these young men and women. I enjoyed their enthusiasm for obscure trivia, their out-of-the-mainstream interests, and their quirky brand of academic achievement.

Our best player was a kid I'll call Steven. He had a vast expanse of knowledge, and his buzzer finger was like lightning. But he was difficult to manage: Smarter than most people he knew, he was socially awkward and sometimes abrasive or even obnoxious. On more than one occasion, I had to apologize on his behalf to the other coaches at competitions.

Steven came from an evangelical Christian family who attended a mega-church just down the road from the high school. When we walked into the Presbyterian church where the funeral was held, he commented on how much he liked hearing the organ that was playing. In his church, he told me, they were accompanied by a worship band instead.

The funeral service was lovely, filled with sorrow, hope, and with the joy of Christ. I was pleased to be there with these teenagers, who were respectful and uncharacteristically solemn as they showed support for their friend.

Then came the moment when something barely perceptible happened, something that was almost nothing and yet left an indelible imprint on my mind. The congregation stood to sing "Amazing Grace," a song I love and usually sing with as much gusto as is appropriate for the given situation. The other members of the team sang inaudibly or not at all, but Steven knew the words, and he sang the melody in a clear, thin voice. This was my song, and this was his song too. We stood shoulder to shoulder, an Evangelical teenager and his Mormon quiz bowl coach, singing a song about Jesus, singing about sin, redemption, hope, grace. There was no trace of abrasiveness in the boy standing next to me. In that fleeting moment, I felt that we were spiritually linked as brother and sister.

Certainly, I have sung hymns of praise with non-Mormons many times before and since, and I don't quite know why this particular moment seemed so significant. But years later, the memory is still something of a reference point for me. In the intervening years, I made a conscious decision to interpret the Biblical phrase "body of Christ" as including all of Christ's followers, not just members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I have tried to be open to further divine glimpses of spiritual unity. My efforts are modest. Once, when I had moved to a new neighborhood, my Baptist neighbor invited me to join a non-denominational prayer group held in her home. I was too shy to try it; Mormons don't really do that kind of thing. Only much later did I fully appreciate the kindness of that inclusive gesture, coming from someone who probably found my beliefs strange, at the very least.

But there have been small successes. Reading personal stories of faith from those outside my church  have helped me appreciate the varied realities of lived religion. Reading Bible commentary from non-LDS sources has deepened my understanding of the scriptures. The last time I prepared a sacrament meeting talk, I sent a facebook message to an old college friend of my husband's, now an Episcopal priest, asking him if he had any thoughts that I might use in my Easter Sunday sermon. I was enriched by his insights, and I was touched by his readiness to help me contribute to my Mormon meeting. Another time, also around Easter, I made a silent and heartfelt effort to invite the Holy Spirit as the Jehovah's Witnesses testified on my doorstep of Jesus Christ and His resurrection. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I thought that as we shook hands before they left, I sensed an extra measure of warmth in their hands and faces.

As I discover my Christian brothers and sisters, I feel almost as though I am being being reunited with family members separated from me at birth, family members I didn't know I had. We have different traditions, different vocabularies, and different ideas. Yet looking at their faces, I see that we are of the same family, the same parents.

I am occasionally taken aback by the barrage of criticism — sometimes false, sometimes devastatingly accurate — directed at my faith by other Christians. I am well-versed in the various theories on whether Mormons are saved², and I have heard all the arguments for why we are not Christians. But they still sting. In fairness, I have also heard plenty of cringe-inducing remarks made by Mormons about other Christian churches. I hope that my church will continue to soften its rhetoric about other religious traditions.

A recent criticism of Mormonism from one segment of the Christian community has prompted me to reexamine that longing for unity that I recognized in myself years ago. Given the criticism from other Christians that will probably never go away and our substantive theological differences, what kind of unity am I really seeking? What sort of oneness can I hope to achieve?

I have come to see that I am not interested in solidarity for political causes. Nor do I want to smooth over doctrinal differences. And though it would be gratifying, what I want most is not validation from the religious community of my credentials as a genuine Christian. What do I want? I want to learn from followers of Christ of all denominations, from their devotion, their charity, and their scholarship. And I want to stand with them, mutually rejoicing in something that we share in the deepest recesses of our souls.

Surely, the household of God has room enough for that.



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¹In later years, things changed. At one point, we had the homecoming king on our team, along with a soccer player and an aspiring fashionista. Go figure.

²Once, I stumbled upon an internet treatise on whether Glenn Beck was "saved." The basic argument went as follows: Glenn Beck had a wonderful understanding of the atonement. Therefore, he is probably not a true-believing Mormon. Therefore, he might be saved. (Salvation is not possible for fully believing Mormons.)