My family and I just got back from an extended road trip. And one of our first stops on that road trip was Homestead National Historic Park in Nebraska. It was actually our second time visiting and, seriously, if you get the chance to visit, you absolutely should. (It’s only about an hour and a half from Winter Quarters.)

The Homestead Act was fascinating. Signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, it allowed heads of household or anyone over 21 to claim a 160-acre parcel of land, provided they were, or intended to become, a citizen.[fn1] To get the land, a homesteader had to live on the land for five years, built a home, make improvements to the land, and farm it. At the end of five years, for only the cost of a filing fee, a successful homesteader would own the land.

The Homestead Act encouraged the settlement of a significant portion of the Midwest and the West. Roughly 10% of the land of the U.S. was claimed under these provisions. Of course, it’s not like the land was uninhabited before homesteaders staked their claims, and the Park doesn’t gloss over the harm it did to Native Americans or, for that matter, to the environment, as farmers tore up prairie and cut down forests.

Still, it’s a fascinating and important part of U.S. history (happy Fourth of July to our U.S. readers!), one that is, at least in my educational experience, largely overlooked.

And it’s a not-insignificant part of Mormon history.

See, Utah had almost 17,000 homesteaders that proved-up their claims. I assume not all of them were Mormon, but some were. At our visit, the Ranger pointed us to some computers with access to a Bureau of Land Management website that allows people to search for homestead records. I did a quick search and discovered that Charles A. Brunson, my great-great-grandfather, successfully got 160 acres in Millard County, Utah, in 1915 after (I presume) homesteading it for 5 years.

I may well have other ancestors who also homesteaded in Utah (and I’ll probably look at some point), but the point of a vacation where I didn’t bring my computer was not to spend a ton of time sitting on computers at an NPS site, so I then did a quick search and discovered that at least one of my wife’s (non-Mormon) ancestors also successfully homesteaded in Wisconsin.

At that point, we enjoyed the rest of the displays and farming tools and cabins and other things the site had to offer. (Seriously, you should go!)

The Homestead Act did significant work in creating the United States we have today. And that work did not exclude the Mormons.

If you discover you had ancestors who homesteaded, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

—

[fn1] Which included women, immigrants, and formerly-enslaved persons.

Image from Shelly. CC BY 2.0.

M. David Huston lives and works in the Washington DC metro area. He is a husband and father of four who has previously written for poetry, international affairs, and LDS-related publications.

Christianity, at its core, comes down to one word, love.  The radical egalitarianism implicit in Jesus’s use of Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18 to explain his gospel message is what draws me in:

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:37-39). 

Indeed, as Jeffrey R. Holland recently explained, the “first great truth in the universe” is that “God loves… wholeheartedly, without reservation or compromise, with all of His heart, might, mind, and strength” (emphasis original).  Love crosses all boundaries and traverses all borders.  Love is the beginning and the end. 

In the world of Biblical scholarship oceans of ink have been used exploring the nuances and implications of the various Hebrew and Greek words used to express this idea (ahab, hesed, dod and eros, phileo, agape, storge, for example).  And in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) tradition, many General Conference addresses and print publications have been similarly focuses on discussing and exploring love and more specifically the idea of charity, Christlike love.  But at this point in my life, I am becoming more interested in the “practice of love”—by this phrase I mean “how love plays out in the real world.”  And when it comes to the practice of love, my experience has taught me, and the scriptures seem to suggest, that the practice of love almost always starts with hearing and listening to the beloved.[1]

The scriptures are replete with examples of God modeling the practice of love though hearing and listening.  A few representative texts from the Hebrew Bible would include (here they are linked):  Genesis 16:11, Genesis 21: 17, Exodus 3:9, Exodus 22:23, 27, Deuteronomy 26:7: 7, 2 Kings 20:5, Psalms 6: 9, Psalms 10: 17, Psalms 18: 6, Isaiah 65:24.  But this is a short, short list.  If you take the time to read through these verses you will, no doubt, be reminded of others in the LDS standard works that carry the same message. 

The link between love and listening/hearing has also been reinforced over and over in General Conference .  Consider these talks (also linked, and also a short list) by Dieter F. Uchtdorf, Russell M. Nelson, M. Russel Ballard, Chieko Okazaki.  Overwhelmingly, it’s clear that practice of loving includes, and I believe in many respects begins by, hearing and listening. Anyone who has truly felt “heard and listened to” knows that it is among the most powerful ways someone can show their love. 

Alma (the Elder) seems to suggest that hearing and listening is at the very core of what it means to be “in the fold of God, and to be called his people.”  In Mosiah 18, as Alma is discussing baptism, Alma explains that being God’s people is directly connected to the commitment to bear each other’s burdens, mourn with those who mourn, and comfort those in need of comfort (Mosiah 18:8-10). Though it is unstated, it is nonetheless foundationally true—and I believe Alma would agree—that in order to know who among us is burdened, who is mourning, and who needs comfort we must first be able to hear and listen to the voices of individuals in those situations.  Said another way (and applying this directly to myself): I will never know who is burdened, mourning, and in need of comfort if I never hear and listen to what those around me are saying.  I cannot fill my Christian vocation without hearing and listening.   

And this brings me to my point.  Some LDS practices, policies, and leaders’ statements have resulted in real pain for some individuals who are LGBTQ+ and their loved ones.  I present that as a fact not an editorial comment. 

So how does the practice of love (specifically hearing and listening) play out when comes to LGBTQ+ issues and the LDS church? 

It has been my experience that those who express sorrow and lament in regards to particular LGBTQ+ related statements or policies—particularly if those expressing these feelings are LGBTQ+ themselves—are too often dismissed as anti-LDS (and thus effectively silenced).  If we are to keep our baptismal covenants in the way Alma describes, we need slow…way…down… and patiently hear and listen to what those who are affected by these statements and policies are actually saying.  We may be as surprised by the depth of their sorrow as we are by the ferocity of their faith. 

I realize it can be hard for some faithful LDS members to hear and listen to the lived experiences of those who have been hurt by the LDS church’s LGBTQ+ related statements or policies.  Especially when those experiences rub against the religious tradition that we hold dear and in which we have deeply seeded belief.   Nonetheless, I humbly suggest that we cannot bear the burdens of, mourn with, or comfort our LGBTQ+ neighbors unless we first hear and listen to them.  Listening to the lived experiences of our LGBTQ+ neighbors who have burdens, who are mourning, and who need comfort is precisely what we have been called to do as Christians generally and as baptized members of the LDS church specifically.

Bringing the prior two points together, we need to create the conditions that encourage honesty and openness (which allows for true hearing and listening). If hearing and listening to those who have burdens, who are mourning, and who need comfort is indeed central to our Christian vocation then we as an LDS community need to make our worship services, social gatherings, and instructional settings honest-to-goodness safe spaces for LGBTQ+ individuals and their families.  We need spaces where open, frank dialogue is welcomed and rewarded with trust and respect. 

What does this look like in real life?  That is really impossible to answer categorically, but it could be include: read about the lived experiences those who are LGBTQ+ (for instance Brian Andersen’s commentary in Advocate); hold a fifth Sunday or Sunday School lesson focused on LGBTQ+ issues taught by someone who is LGBTQ+; have young women/men groups volunteer with a local Pride group; and/or encourage Ward members to celebrate those in their Ward or extended family who are LGBTQ+ in Ward newsletters, Facebook pages, etc.  The point is that the practice of love—hearing and listening—requires continuous and intentional effort.  But only after we’ve put forth this effort (to riff on D&C 50:22) will “they that speaketh and they that heareth and listeneth understand one another, and then both will be edified and rejoice together.”

[1] Kristen Fuller “The Difference Between Hearing and Listening,” Psychology Today,  July 8, 2021. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/happiness-is-state-mind/202107/the-difference-between-hearing-and-listening

David Aubril is a French teacher, fond of didactics, literature, UNIX systems and free diving (with no order of preference). He follows with great interest contemporary debates on Gospel and Church matters, from across the Atlantic Ocean.

On the French version of the Church website, there is a video called “religious freedom brings balance”, with many excerpts of Elder’s Rasband last talk. As far as I can tell, there is no English version. I supposed it was especially made for French-speaking people, to make us aware of the dangers of secularism. How kind. Indeed, we have gone quite a long way with the principle of secularism in France. Maybe our experience can shed some useful light on the topic?

It might not seem so today, but France was once a very religious country. It used to be called the Roman Church’s ‘eldest daughter’. Because of those close ties between religion, society and politics, freedom was limited. There were many contentions, struggles, and even wars. Between 1562 and 1598, eight civil wars between Catholics and Protestants tore the Kingdom of France apart and led to many massacres. It is one of the darkest pages of our history. The Edict of Nantes put an end to the conflict, but only for a short period: contentions rose again between 1620 and 1629; a few decades later, Louis XIV initiated a policy of persecutions against the Protestants that lasted for about another hundred years.

Over two centuries, many Protestants fled the country because of these conflicts. Some of them found refuge in America or other places. But there were also many who stayed. They had to learn to live peacefully with their Catholic neighbors. They all had to find neutral ground on which they could build a community. That neutral ground is the whole point of the concept of secularism.

That concept appeared during the Enlightenment but became a constitutional principle after decades of violent struggles in France during the nineteenth century. The Roman Church was strongly opposed to democracy, science and socialism, and it used every means to weigh in on political issues in France and nearby countries. After years of tension and conflicts, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a law was enacted in 1905 separating the State and the Churches, ensuring that the State would remain neutral towards all Churches and all religions, and that everyone would be equal before the law, whatever their beliefs.

At that time, there were in fact different kinds of secularism: some were hostile to religion, because they wanted to get free of the Roman Church’s influence in public affairs, others, like Aristide Briand, the drafter of the law, were more in favor of a neutral position. He explained: “The law must protect the faith, as long as the faith does not claim to speak the law”. That 1905 law was a peacemaker in a divided county, embraced by the population, politicians and many of the French clergy, who felt that their first duty was to public harmony.

The religious wars and the power of the Roman Church during the nineteenth century left a very deep mark in our Nation. For many people here, religion has become a synonym of oppression. That is, in fact, still the case in many countries. For those people, secularism is a protection, and, because of our history, we are very sensitive to that. One can not understand the Laicité law without this historical background. Since 2004, in France, “the wearing of signs or outfits by which students ostensibly manifest a religious affiliation is prohibited [in] public schools.” The principle upon which that law relies comes directly from the Enlightenment era: school should be a neutral zone, free from all religious influences.

I understand that such laws, considered outside of their historical and cultural background, can lead foreigners to think that secularism is a threat to religious freedom. I’ve read Church materials explaining that people won’t be free to express their feelings and thoughts anymore. But religion is no ordinary topic that you can throw in a conversation like your last trip or your children’s accomplishments. It shapes people’s lives. And as diversity grows in our societies (think, for example, of sexual orientation), people are less and less inclined to let one’s religion enter into their lives if they don’t choose to. Secularism doesn’t prevent people from talking about religion. It prevents a religion from talking to people who don’t want to participate. 

Fighting against secularism isn’t fighting against atheism. Like in Aristide Briand’s time, there are many forms of secularism today. And most of them are not hostile to religion. In fact, I think secularism is a way to protect faith, by preventing politics from using it. You have witnessed in the United States the damage done: a recent survey, among many others, explains that “it could be that the increase in the number of atheists is a direct result of Christian nationalism” (Yonat Shimron, Salt lake Tribune, June 21, 2022).

Church leaders may also fear that secularism could hinder missionary work. But, as the Book of Mormon shows us, there is more than one way to do missionary work. Ammon never publicly preached; yet he was the most successful of all the missionaries.

France is often perceived as a country of atheists. There’s a cultural misunderstanding here. A recent survey (Observatoire de la laïcité, 2019) shows that 37% of French people are believers. If you add agnostics (15%), that’s 52%. One out of two French people is either a believer or a person in doubt. It’s way less than in the States, but way more than zero. But, in France, it’s rare and considered rude to talk about religion in public. With our historical background, you can easily guess why. That doesn’t mean that religion is not important, and that people don’t have a spiritual life. I am often surprised, when talking to colleagues and neighbors, to discover that they have very strong beliefs. But it is a very private, a very intimate thing. Does it make it less valuable?

Today, secularism is the principle that allows us, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in France, i.e. a religious minority, to live our faith. It is the principle that ensures that we do not suffer oppression or discrimination. It is not the enemy of religious freedom, quite the opposite. It is the very ground on which freedom and religion can coexist. And I think it is necessary to protect religion from conscienceless politicians. Fighting against secularism, for me, would be sawing off the very branch we’re sitting on.

[The publication Current asked me to write up my thoughts about abortion; I ended up writing nearly 3000 words. A much, much shortened version of the essay below is available on their website this morning, but if you want to read the full thing, go for it. Cross-posted to In Medias Res.]

That sign is in our front yard, signalling our support for defeating the “Value Them Both” amendment on the ballot here in Kansas this August. If the amendment referendum succeeds, it would overturn a state supreme court decision which determined that the Kansas state constitution guarantees at least minimal abortion rights to Kansas women, thus allowing Kansans opposed to abortion rights to follow our neighboring states of Oklahoma and Missouri and push for a total abortion ban. The sign thus betokens a “pro-choice” position, even though I’ve never called myself that and think the language of individual “choice” when it comes to abortion is part of the whole problem. So why am I, some who was raised in a politically conservative (but not, as I later came to see, particularly ideological) Mormon home and thoroughly absorbed the repugnance of abortion which was communicated to me, taking this position all these years later? Well, that’s a story, mostly having to do with what my wife and four daughters have taught me along the way.

When I say “repugnance,” I really mean it. While my parents were never activists and anti-abortion literature didn’t litter our home, the moral and even visual revulsion to the practice of abortion was invoked anytime the topic came up (which, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during the death-rattle years of the Equal Rights Amendment–my church having played a major role in sealing its fate–was not infrequently). I can still call up in my memory a feverish image that somehow made its way into my brain when I was still a child: that of an abortion doctor plunging a huge butcher knife into a woman’s vagina, murdering the child in her womb. (I should note that the fact that some zealous opponents of abortion rights might point to procedures used in incredibly rare late-term abortions to insist upon the basic accuracy of that nightmarish image from decades ago has no effect on my thinking today; what I find most repugnant in 2022 is very different than it once was.)

Was it all just moral revulsion and distaste? No, there was some actual doctrine taught as well (emphasis on “some”). Mormon leaders over the decades have made multiple, if not numerous, statements regarding abortion, with some stipulating that “life begins when two germ cells unite to become one cell, bringing together twenty-three chromosomes from both the father and from the mother”–which would seem to suggest that Mormon doctrine teaches that life begins at the creation of human zygote–and others stipulating that a woman’s “right to choose what will or will not happen to her body” is fundamentally limited if “she behaves in such a way that a human fetus is conceived”–which would seem to suggest, in light of the previous declaration, that any sexual activity which results in the creation of a cell-multiplying zygote entails a mother’s complete responsibility to preserve that cell-multiplying life. In practice, however, none of these teachings were ever politically deployed throughout Mormonism in a theologically rigorous or ecclesiastically consistent way (which is not to say there haven’t been attempts to do so). In general though, the unarticulated presumption seems to have been (and still seems to be) that stating officially that “elective abortion for personal or social convenience is contrary to the will and the commandments of God” is sufficient, with no further elaboration or explanation regarding public matters being necessary. Repugnance at the idea of extinguishing “a cherished newborn baby,” complete with “beautiful eyes” and “little fingers” was perhaps assumed to do the rest.

It certainly did for me, for many years. The change in my opinions didn’t come at once, my movement away from being “pro-life” (a phrase I don’t remember particularly liking even in my most ardent phases) was a long process. Well into my 30s and 40s, articulating a set of reasons that could make sense of my youthful revulsion–even as I grew into a fuller understanding of the deep complexities of human sexuality, science, and sociality—remained hugely important to me, thus leading me blog about abortion and related topics repeatedly, in perhaps some increasingly strained ways.

During these years, for reasons that are probably similar to those of nearly every person who comes to think differently about the faith of their youth as they grow older, I became more and more doubtful that the statements of Mormon leaders, when not explicitly grounded in the scriptural canon, were necessarily the word of God and thus normative. For related reasons over the same time span, I came to recognize the scriptures as exceptionally complicated and thus not well-served by the proof-texts, just-so-stories, and tidy logical conclusions so unfortunately common in Mormondom (and pretty much every other Christian domination as well, to be fair). And finally, officially non-Mormon (though unofficially, many conservative Mormon leaders and thinkers had been borrowing them for years) anti-abortion arguments, such as those dependent upon a religious invocation of natural law, became increasingly implausible to me; for example, I found the teleological demand to view a human zygote which may or may not implant itself in a woman’s uterine wall as equal in every way to a newborn baby simply unpersuasive, philosophically speaking. So what coherent articulation of anti-abortion belief did that leave me with, if I wasn’t to simply dismiss my original revulsions and intuitions as bankrupt, but neither found them well served by the simplistic affirmations of my leaders or many other anti-abortion thinkers? Well, one grounded in my long-standing contempt for philosophical individualism and capitalist commodification. Abortion, I came to believe, was a moral evil not primarily because of its harm to human lives (since 99% of abortions in the United States take place months before the life of the fetus in question stops being a matter of mere scientific principle and instead becomes an actionable reality), but rather because it was rooted in a socially harmful, choice-centric sense of disposability: a disconnect from both the anthropological fact and the civic ideal that our social relationships form a connection (as Edmund Burke said) between the living and the dead and the not yet born. Stanley Hauerwas’s essay “Abortion, Theologically Understood,” though I do not agree with all of it, made this point better than I ever could:

If you want to know who is destroying the babies of this country through abortion, look at privatization, which is learned in the economic arena. Under the veil of American privatization, we are encouraging people to believe in the same way that Andrew Carnegie believed. He thought that he had a right to his steel mills. In the same sense, people think that they have a right to their bodies. The body is then a piece of property in a capitalist sense. Unfortunately, that is antithetical to the way we Christians think that we have to share as members of the same body of Christ. So, you cannot separate these issues. If you think that you can be very concerned about abortion and not concerned about the privatization of American life generally, you are making a mistake.

I look today at the 15-year-old essay where I quoted Hauerwas, and I think the perspective it articulated (a perspective I tend to call “left conservative”) remains mostly sound. And yet I want to take much of it back nonetheless, because the animating force behind it—the admittedly simplistic yet still meaningful repugnance I felt when I first learned what abortion meant—has become deeply entwined other, more complicated and, I think, more mature intuitions. I’m particularly bothered by the way, in 2007, when our oldest daughter wasn’t yet 10 years old, I could write that those who defend abortion rights as necessary to the sexual freedom essential to individual personhood, who think it a matter of right to “enjoy sex without their futures or thoughts or relationships being messed up by any communitarian crap in any way, clearly have only ever had sex on the starship Enterprise‘s Holodeck.” I see the point I was trying to make in those passages, but still, that’s a sentence that could have only been written by a man woefully uninformed about the complications of sexual identity and expression, especially as experienced by women, one of whom he was married to and four of whom he was raising to adulthood. I hope I’ve repented of that presumption.

To be very plain: I now realize that to accept, even just implicitly, the notion that insofar as abortion is concerned there are only two types of pregnancies–those which result from violence, in which case abortion ought to be guaranteed to the violated woman, and those which didn’t result from violence, in which case abortion ought to be treated a perilous choice that needs to be weighed against principles of social responsibility and connection and regulated by the state accordingly–is really stupid, even if a coherent point can be found within it. Why is it really stupid? Because it’s a binary, and binaries practically always fail. Maybe that 16-year-old teen-ager’s, or that divorced woman’s, or that 42-year-old mother’s, sexual decisions were made entirely without violence. But were they made entirely without social pressure? Without religious expectations? Without bad information? Without forced compromises? Without conflicting socio-economic and cultural demands? As I’ve grown older, and watched my daughters grow and move into adulthood, and watched as my wife and I have moved into middle-age, the pressing and often painful complexities of marriage, sex, love, risk, desire, and children, the confusions and justifications and fears which attend all of them (as well as, of course, the many joys and surprises they bring), have simply become enormous to me. Add to that concerns about money, concerns about extended family, concerns about health (both mental and physical), and maybe most importantly, concerns about all the innumerable little assumptions and (mis)understandings amidst the ones we love which we navigate day after day after day. The result of all this is a heaviness—the same sort of heaviness I can remember feeling when I held our firstborn daughter, and felt the enormity which my wife and I had taken responsibility for.

Does that responsibility carry any kind of moral obligation to it? Of course it does! But that obligation cannot be extricated from all the other obligations that come with the complex existences we are all heirs to. Eventually, there came a point when I realized that the repugnance I feel at abortion is more than matched by my repugnance at the prospect that someone with the power of the state (and here I remember Elizabeth Bruenig’s sharp observation from several years ago: “penalty seems to be the only way those operating under the ‘pro-life’ banner feel comfortable expressing their commitment to life”) could approach any woman who has come to a moment of heavy decision-making regarding abortion in the midst of all of the above, looked her in the eye, and say: sorry, but we’ve decided that this choice should not be available to you.

So my intuitive sense of the wrongness of abortion hasn’t changed; that repugnance is still there, and it still guides my thinking. But it is no longer a solitary or supreme guide; there are too many other potential harms, manifest in too many other ways, for me to accept any longer that a pregnancy, insofar as the responsibility to the potential life which it may result in is concerned, is always of only two possible sorts. Between violent rape at one end, and mere (though is it ever actually “mere”?) convenience at the other, there is an immense amount of very murky road. Do my critical views about that individualistic, privatized, choice-centric mentality which treat all the connections in our lives as disposable still matter? Absolutely they do. But mostly today, they lead to me focus ever more on the response that millions of women have screamed, and continue to scream, at anti-abortion politicians who insist upon inserting their concerns into an enormously difficult and private decision, but whose concerns lead them to do exactly nothing in terms of compassionately responding to the enormous weight that women as human beings who can become pregnant and give birth experience every single day of their lives. What about supporting those connections? What about health care? What about maternal leave? What about reproductive assistance generally? What about educational and social and care-giving support? (Carolyn Homer’s list of what the “pro-life” label ought to include is an excellent rundown.) Again, while I do not agree with every implication of her language, the Catholic writer Leah Libresco Sargeant’s comments in The New York Times last week speak truthfully, I think:

Ruth Bader Ginsburg….made the case that abortion is really the price of admission to society we demand of women. And I think she’s factually right. That’s what we ask of women. We don’t support women when they’re pregnant, even with wanted pregnancies. We don’t support parents nationwide. We place heavy burdens on parents who are most vulnerable. TANF, which is support for needy families, has been hollowed out. The child allowance didn’t make it to parents who were the poorest. So it’s true, you can look around and say, our culture has no room for the vulnerable. It doesn’t have room for babies who are vulnerable, and it doesn’t have room for women who are vulnerable. So abortion is a crutch that lets us navigate that hatred of dependence that’s pervasive in our culture.

And now, millions of people who have worked very hard for decades on behalf of a simplistic defense of the unborn have kicked away that crutch. Bad decision, I say; very bad, all the way down.

Which is why, here at the end (for now, anyway) of this ongoing argument I’ve been with myself (and others) for years, we have the aforementioned sign in our front yard. The argument over abortion in the U.S., thanks to Roe v. Wade, Casey v. Planned Parenthood, and other Supreme Court cases, has for a half-century been utterly entwined with—and often served as a proxy for—debates over judicial power and the meaning of democracy. I have strong opinions about both of those debates, both nationally and in the context of our state constitution, and given that I have a profound distaste for undemocratically allowing unelected judges to make policy for the people, one might wonder why, all arguments over abortion aside, I don’t see Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health as a good decision, or Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt (which articulated a very broad—much too broad, I think, especially given how many Republican politicians hypocritically misused it to justify opposition to vaccination policies during the pandemic—right to “bodily integrity” and thus abortion here in Kansas) as a bad one. The answer, of course, in line with everything I’ve written thus far, is that nothing happens without a surrounding context which weighs upon one’s choices.

I’ll freely admit that if Dobbs really does turn out, in the years to come, to have been just the first step in the expression of the Supreme Court’s determination to no longer involve itself in not just abortion legislation, but voter rights legislation, gerrymandering legislation, health care legislation, gun control legislation, etc., the time may come when I’ll eat crow and call this a good decision, at least constitutionally speaking, because the ending of undemocratic judicial rule over the people’s elected representatives will turn out to have been a very, very good thing. However, given that the Supreme Court involved itself in New York’s century-old and widely supported gun laws literally just the day before Dobbs was handed down, I see no reason to believe the Court is suddenly turning away from screwing with democratically determined legislation. Rather, I conclude—as I think any remotely well-informed observer also must—that the Republican majority on the Court has, with Dobbs, achieved a long-standing and carefully developed (and financially well-supported) political aim, nothing more. That is an aim that will hurt women whose lives I want to make easier; preserving Hodes here in Kansas is, I think, not nearly as much a perhaps unavoidable concession to the individualistic, choice-centric assumptions of our current social order as it is an embrace of showing mutualist support to women who, in the absence of a radical change in the direction of solidarity and equality our economy and culture, are now facing potentially grave harms in their navigation of the heavy choices of family and health and life. (Also, please note that, despite claims to the contrary, Hodes has not “radically changed and expanded the landscape of abortion in Kansas,” unless you think that “landscape” is defined entirely by the ability to the state to be able to ban one particular rare second-trimester abortion procedure or impose prohibitively burdensome abortion clinic requirements; moreover, keep in mind that does the “Value Them Both” amendment really doesn’t appear to do anything of specific value for women’s choices at all anyway). Thus I say, to any Kansan who reads this: vote on no on August 2, please!

Abortion is, I believe, often (if not always and in every way) an evil. I also believe there are lots of evils in this world, some actual and some potential. Telling a pregnant person who might have to tragically confront–in all their diverse physical and economic and familial and occupational and religious and mental situations–a hideously difficult route through all these diverse evils (both real and potential) that they no longer have, and never should have had, a political or legal promise that one particular route will be available to them, no matter what their circumstances or what the science of what’s going on (or not yet going on, or no longer going on) inside their bodies at any point along their pregnancy, is simply repugnant to me. So yes, I changed my mind since I was a boy. If I was able to do so regarding same-sex marriage, I can do it regarding the necessity of abortion rights too.

Self-Reliance is not a gospel principle. It is found nowhere in the scriptures. The closest we come to it are various verses requesting that one not be idle. But we appear to have made an idol out of the “self-made” man that is antithetical to the gospel and really needs to stop.

I blame the Protestants. One of the issues behind the Reformation was the absolute dependence on the sacraments of the Catholic church for salvation. Having a good relationship with God was important, but without the sacraments, you could hope for Purgatory at best (note: this is a gross simplification; feel free to nitpick if you like). Luther resolved the issue by saying we are all saved, but Calvin took a different approach. God, he preached, has chosen a select few to save, everyone else is fuel for hell’s fires. Grace is all that matters, what you do is unimportant. However, those chosen by God will most likely naturally produce evidence of their election in how they live their lives. They will be more holy, more pious, and, perhaps, God will prosper them (see note above about simplification).

Well, the pilgrims were Calvinists and they brought that set of beliefs across the pond with them. We tend to think of the “Protestant work ethic” that we situate in their colonization as rooted in the need to work hard to survive those first cold winters. But that doesn’t reflect reality. The first generations of colonizers were often so sick that they couldn’t work at all; their survival was initially wholly dependent on the Indigenous peoples who took pity on them. Protestant work ethic worked (and still works) instead as a racial and class division. The pilgrims worked while the Indigenous peoples idled, it was assumed.  Protestant work ethic was a signifier that the Protestant way of being was superior to the heathens they encountered in America; it only recognized the kind of work that the Protestants were already good at. And the Protestants prospered, while the Indigenous people did not, driven away by the guns and plagues brought by the people they saved. God’s ways are mysterious indeed.

The current-era version of the Protestant work ethic is the Prosperity gospel, which teaches that if you are righteous, God will give you stuff. Conversely, it teaches that if you have lots of stuff, God must like you, what you do, how you think, who you vote for, and so forth. American culture has bought into this myth entirely; it is the reason anyone cares what celebrities think about anything. This, specifically, is the reason the Zion society fails in the 4^th Nephi, dividing up based on the accoutrements of wealth. This is why Donald Trump (or, I guess, Jim Bakker) appeals to Evangelicals and conservative Mormons (see Malachi 3:13-15).

So, in America, being poor is worse than unfortunate; to be poor is to be in a state of sin. You must have done something to displease God, otherwise you would not be poor. The whole country, state and society, stands around pointing at the poor, like Job’s accusers, trying to get them to admit what they did wrong. They didn’t go to college, they got the wrong degree, they don’t speak English, they came here illegally, they don’t maintain their yards like they should, they never got married, they got married too young, they shouldn’t have had a child, they have a culture problem, they listen to the wrong music, they like the wrong shows, and a thousand other subtle and unsubtle racist, ableist, sexist, and classist justifications for why they are poor and, more importantly, why we don’t have to give of our substance to help them. Each is a means to demonstrate that they are not our neighbor.

This is antithetical to the Gospel. Not just because we are specifically commanded to not engage in this sort of victim-blaming (see: Mosiah 4:16-26), but because, as King Benjamin points out, we are all beggars. There is not a person on earth who is not entirely reliant on the atonement to achieve any sort of salvation. I don’t care if you are Ghandi, Mandela, Mother Theresa, and Abraham Lincoln rolled into one, you are just as reliant on God’s grace as that Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, and Warren G. Harding amalgam over there. Nobody earns their way into heaven. Nobody is better suited for heaven. We all fall short and the amount by which we fall short is always infinite. That’s what the atonement is for.

Sure, we are not to be idle. But engagement in work or a cause is no protection against poverty (see, for example, Joseph Smith’s early life). Itinerant carpenters and fishermen in 1^st century Palestine would definitely know this. And Christ had little time for those who engaged in righteousness for righteousness’s sake. To be a disciple is demonstrated by your  love of your neighbor and that means helping your neighbor (however you define that help).  Do you want to be like Christ? Then be like Christ! Go to the poor, the imprisoned, the sex workers, the homeless, the beggars, those despised by society (I’m guessing IRS workers don’t count, but probably just barely) and help them. Don’t worry about  whether they are “worthy” of help or interested in or capable of change. Help them. Because they are often in situations where they cannot be self-reliant. When we cannot be self-reliant, Christ intervenes. Be his angel.

So, to reiterate, self-reliance is not a principle founded in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This doesn’t make it inherently bad, but when it is used to excuse not helping or listening to those around us, it is very bad. One of the more important messages of the Gospel is that we are wholly reliant on Christ for our salvation and, should we desire to be saviors on Mt. Zion, we should be as free with our grace as Christ is with his. After all, Christ repeatedly said he was only doing the things his Father would have him do. How self-reliant is that? 

Texts are tricky things, whether they are scriptural, historical, literary, or constitutional. People who claim to be “textualists,” or even (in constitutional circles) “originalists” often hide behind the rhetorical value of being such a thing without acknowledging the actual difficulty of doing it. Texts are not self-interpreting units of meaning that will yield their secrets with no effort, but only to the pure in heart. 

Textual interpretation is a process of asking certain, well-defined questions and then trying to answer them from the words on a page. It has always been more art than science, and the value of the answers ultimately depends on the quality of the questions. The process of asking questions of a text is sometimes called “framing.” The way we frame a textual question controls the kind of answer we get, because it determines the kinds of things we look for. 

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson is, I believe, an example of really bad textual interpretation. I am not talking about the result here of denying the women of around half the states in the union the opportunity to make their own heath-care decisions, which I also believe is a bad result. I am talking about the questions that the majority was asking to begin with, which were really bad questions. As a result, the Court has empowered state legislatures (and possibly the national Congress as well) to ask another series of bad questions that will produce even worse answers.

What follows are five arguments about framing that, if I ran the world, would be taken into account in both the judicial and the legislative debates about the abortion issue. These are not policy claims, but interpretive arguments about the kinds of questions that should lie beneath our policies. The first two arguments deal with the way that the Supreme Court framed the issue. The last two deal with the ways that various state legislatures have framed, or will frame, the abortion question in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson. Here they are:

1. The historical right in question is not abortion per se, but bodily autonomy. Justice Alito’s argument in Dobbs v. Jackson goes something like this: “Constitutional rights are either specifically enumerated in the Constitution (the right to free speech) or deeply rooted in the nation’s history and traditions. The right to an abortion is not enumerated in the Constitution, nor is the right to an abortion deeply rooted in the nation’s history and traditions; therefore, there is no Constitutional right to abortion.”

The first framing problem here is that the question is framed far too specifically for the kind of interpretation being proposed. The right to have an abortion is a specific instance of something else, namely, the right to decide what is best for one’s own body, and this right is very deeply rooted in the nation’s tradition. People have, and have always had, a right to bodily autonomy. It would be unthinkable for the Supreme Court to permit a state legislature to forbid people to remove a wart because some religion saw wart-cells as sacred, or to prevent the treatment of cancer because legislators saw cancer as God’s judgment on sinners. People have a right to believe these things; they do not have a right to use those beliefs to determine how other people use their body.

If we simply substitute the term “bodily integrity” for the term “abortion” in Dobbs v. Jackson, it barely even achieves semantic sense, much less ideological coherence. And there are very few rights that can’t be abrogated by looking to the Constitution, or American tradition, for evidence of overly specific application of those rights. We do not limit the right to bear arms to muzzle-loading muskets, nor do we limit the freedom of the press to things actually printed on a hand press. It is no different to argue that bodily integrity is not protected in the Constitution because it nowhere mentions a surgical procedure that did not exist when the Constitution was created.

2. The correct Constitutional question is not “where is the right granted,” but “where is the government power enumerated.” From the originalist perspective, Alito’s reasoning is not merely wrong; it is exactly wrong. The framers of the Constitution did not believe that it only protected the rights that it enumerated. In fact, they argued against including a Bill of Rights in the initial document because they did not want to create an enumerated list of rights that would suggest that other rights are not protected. Hamilton says this clearly and directly in Federalist 84:

I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power.

Hamilton’s argument (and Madison’s too) was that the question Alito asks is precisely the question we should not ask about rights in the Constitution. The correct question is not, “where does the Constitution grant a person the right to do something?”; rather, it is, “where does the Constitution grant the state the power to prevent a person from doing something?” Where, in other words, does the Constitution permit the state to use its coercive apparatus to control an individual’s medical decisions? By the logic of the framers themselves, codified in the Ninth Amendment, such a state power cannot exist unless it is specifically enumerated.

3. The view that life begins at conception is an inherently religious view that should not be used as the basis for law. Not only do the laws currently being passed in state legislatures across the country enshrine a specifically religious view that has never been used as the basis of law in the United States before—the idea that life begins at conception and that a two-celled zygote is entitled to the full protection of state. This is a very recent, poorly formed religious principle that very few actual religions believe.

The Bible is actually just as silent on abortion as the Constitution is, though the one reference to unborn children in the biblical text does not support the current Evangelical doctrine. This reference occurs in Exodus 21:22-23:

If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life.

When we compare the punishment in biblical law for causing a miscarriage (a fine) to the punishment for committing a murder (death) we cannot avoid the conclusion that, for the Ancient Jews at least, a fetus was not considered to be, or protected as, a person. There is not much else we can claim from this. I do not suggest that this means that the Bible permits abortion in all circumstances, but we cannot get to fetal personhood from any other text in the Bible.

No Christian denomination that I am aware of actually treats an unborn child as a human life. Churches that baptize infants do not baptize stillborn children. Churches that preach the need to accept Christ do not preach that two-celled organisms that are spontaneously aborted go to hell. The full theological equation of a zygote and a human being is really not a thing when the question is something other than abortion.

And the American legal and common-law traditions have never accorded personhood, or Constitutional rights, to unborn fetuses. We have never required that missed periods be reported to the authorities or that spontaneous miscarriages during the first few weeks of pregnancy be investigated as possible homicides. We don’t count every fertilized egg in the census or use it to decide congressional representation. And we do not grant jus soli citizenship to every child conceived in the United States. In a hundred ways, membership in the political community begins at birth, and this fact is as deeply rooted in the nation’s history and culture as any fact could be.

There are no simple religious answers to the question, “when does life begin?” This involves complicated questions about souls and afterlives and the intentions of deity that even religious people do not agree about. There is, though, a very clear political answer to the question, which is the only one that we can use as public policy in the absence of established religion: life begins at birth.

4. Women are better able to make difficult moral choices around their own bodies than legislatures are. The terms “pro-life” and “pro-choice” are both bad framings of the abortion debate. Everybody involved in the debate is pro-life; the arguments surround the definition of human life and the relative valuing of different kinds of life. Everybody is also pro-choice. The debates are about who gets to decide.

The specific argument of state legislatures, and the implicit argument of the Supreme Court, is that legislators are better able to decide when abortions are appropriate, and when they are not, then women themselves are. Anyone listening to the statements of state and federal representatives about pregnancy and abortion should know just how dangerous this idea is.

Most of the new state laws make some exceptions to outright abortion bans, such as (in the case of Utah for example) exceptions for rape, incest, and the life or health of the mother. But they try to enforce those exceptions through laws and courts that simply aren’t capable of the kind of moral reasoning that these decisions require. What constitutes rape, for example? Is a woman’s testimony enough, or does there have to be a conviction? What constitutes consent? Must we conduct a full hearing to tease out the extent to which women have been coerced by their partners to have sex? Do we even believe that women can be coerced by their partners? What is a legitimate health issue? What does the chance of the death of a woman have to be before the state considers it a “life of the mother: issue?

These are difficult questions that require nuanced analyses of a lot of different factors. Neither courts nor state legislatures have historically proven to be good at this kind of reasoning. Laws are blunt instruments, and judges, in many cases, are even blunter. And legal processes take more time than women normally have when making decisions about their own reproductive health.

There are a lot of proven ways to reduce the number of abortions in a nation. These include making contraception available, making health care affordable, and making education universal. Criminalizing abortion and punishing women does not generally reduce the number of abortions, but it does endanger the lives of women and prevent them from participating in society as full-fledged citizens trusted to understand their own bodies and make important decisions about their own lives. This rampant mistrust of women and contempt for their choices unfortunately IS deeply rooted in the history and traditions of the nation. But it never should have been, and it never should be again.

The U.S. Supreme Court this morning overturned Roe v. Wade. The effect of the ruling will be to eliminate access to abortion in about half of the states. This “victory” reflects decades of work by the “pro-life” movement. Pundits, legal scholars, and activists will no doubt dominate the airwaves today, dissecting the consequences of the opinion and plotting political action. I leave that exegesis to them. Instead, I’d like to turn the discussion to what a fullsome “pro-life” society would actually look like.

This post assumes that proponents of the “pro-life” movement with respect to abortion are sincere in wanting to protect infant life.[*] It also assumes that being “pro-life” generally is one of the most important goals of human society. Whether grounded in faith, ethics, or post-enlightenment philosophy, we all should recognize the dignity of every person and support a social contract that promotes life.

As Latter-day Saints in particular, we proclaim that every one is a beloved child of God, that the worth of every soul is great in the sight of God, and that our great Christian duty is to love one another. If we are to build a culture that celebrates life, we cannot stop at protecting the unborn. We must make sure every new baby, and continuing to every adult, receives societal support to stay alive and thrive. After all, the vast majority of abortions are sought by impoverished individuals who lack access to health care or child care. To address this, we must advocate for a whole host of policies and practices by all our social institutions — governments, corporations, churches, etc. — to promote measures designed to maintain and strengthen human life.

I have long pondered what a reimagined society would look like if supporting every life was its actual central goal. There is much hypocrisy in our politics today, from all directions. Building a truly “pro-life” society would require mass investments in caregiving work and healthcare — alongside mass reductions in military spending and violence. It would require eradication of discriminatory practices against minorities and persons with disabilities. And it would limit preferential financial benefits for the already wealthy and powerful, in order to ensure that the least of these are supported.

I’ve brainstormed the beginnings of such a “pro-life” policy list below. Feel free to add more in the comments. If we are serious about supporting life, let us reallocate the energy spent trying to eliminate abortion to promoting these social goals.

Preventing Needless Death

• Provide universal healthcare
• Mandate and supply vaccines
• Abolish the death penalty
• Ban assault rifles and other high-capacity, lethal weapons
• Provide quicker access to stronger restraining orders for victims of domestic violence
• Ensure accountability for state-sponsored violence (e.g. impose employment consequences, criminal prosecution, and financial damages for police brutality)

Supporting Children’s Lives

• Provide universal children’s healthcare
• Pass Medicaid expansion in every state
• Supply universal nutritious free meals in schools
• Expand food stamp, SNAP, WIC, and related benefits
• Dramatically increase salaries and funding for childcare, daycare, early education, and school teachers
• Offer generous paid family leave
• Provide lactation rooms, flexible work schedules, breastmilk shipping programs, and other practical support for nursing mothers

Supporting All Lives Around the World

• Provide quality assisted living facilities and elder care
• Guarantee a minimum basic income and/or access to food, clothing, and shelter
• Invest in and maintain global clean water infrastructure
• Supply abundant famine, plague, and natural disaster relief to any and all affected areas
• Abolish all forms of slavery, indentured servitude, and mass incarceration (including private, profit-seeking prisons)
• Welcome refugees and work to reunite immigrant families

Supporting Policies with Empirically Known Mass Aggregate Effects on Health and Life

• Invest in leading scientific and medical research to fight cancer and disease
• Invest in robust mental health and crisis support programs
• Subsidize or reduce pharmaceutical drug costs
• Ban cigarettes and smoking
• Adopt progressive taxation schemes to reduce gross income disparities and severe poverty
• Combat climate change through reducing pollution, carbon emissions, plastic waste, and deforestation while promoting clean energy
• Build walkable, breathable cities with abundant and affordable housing
• Eliminate dangerous farm, factory, and other working conditions (while not depriving the workers of food, shelter, and income)
• Require robust safety measures in transportation (e.g. seatbelts, accident prevention sensors, helmets)
• Increase accessibility for persons with disabilities
• Ensure access to high-quality education for all children, women, impoverished, minorities, or other underprivileged
• Promote democracy and combat corruption

– – – – – – –

[*] There are reasons to doubt the sincerity of some, particularly those who have oversimplified “pro-life” rhetoric in order to back positions which lack medical nuance, inflict greater harm on women experiencing natural pregnancy loss or sexual violence, pursue their stated goals through cruelty, or are empirically counterproductive.

Last year, Elder Kopischke’s talk on mental health finally spoke of missionaries’ discomfort. But as things go back to normal after the pandemic, and Church leaders repeatedly ask young men to prepare to serve missions, I feel that there are some more things that need to be said.

I remember attending a youth meeting a few years ago in Western Europe. One of the highlights of this meeting was the broadcast of several videos of missionaries performing wonders: a team of sisters taught dozens of investigators by video conference, a team of Elders had made a video that had been viewed 180,000 times.  Instead of inspiring me, however, these perfect stories made me worried that any missionary who is not as successful will doubt their faith or self-worth.  Missionary work should not be measured by clicks or other quantified goals.

This matter concerns me deeply. Metrics are not only irrelevant; they are also harmful. When my son was on a mission, he was not well.  Thankfully missionaries had just been given permission to call their families weekly.  We watched as our son withered over the course of his mission.  After six months, we received an email from the wife of the mission president telling us that he was suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorders and depression, and needed medical treatment.

Those were terrible months for us. Our son, an adventurous young man who liked to drive and joke, no longer dared to drive and was continually struggling with a devouring anxiety. As we spoke with other missionaries’ parents, we found out that anxiety, sleep or eating disorders, and depression accompany a significant proportion of the young people who serve missions. 

At the time, we read an article which explained that “how well children respond to setbacks depends largely on how well their parents helped them develop the attitudes and the skills of resilience.”  We blamed ourselves.  But then we learned in our son’s mission there was a program called “Standards of Perfection.”  Perfection was becoming the norm, and all those who could not achieve it could only be terribly disappointed in themselves. 

I think that in most missions there are those “Standards of Perfection” in one form or another. Combined with the stress of uprooting their lives, learning new languages, and confronting other cultures, the pressure can be terrible.  Especially for young people like my son who grew up in communities with few other Church members, the demands of a mission are discordant.  He learned for years to fight against peer pressure, but then suddenly had to follow and participate in the same sort of group pressure, but now from within the Church.

Once our son came home, he got a job, started driving his car, and resumed his studies. No doubt his anxiety is still there, but without the pressures of the mission it’s not nearly as acute; it’s something he can work around.  

His experience makes me want to revamp the entire mission experience, to do away with the obsession for numbers and success stories.  For too many of our young people, that pressure makes missions a terrible experience, not a faith-affirming one. 

Apple TV’s series Severance is brilliant. Its topology in multiple dimensions is novel, strange, and thought-provoking. I want to talk about it because it problematizes Mormon theology in interesting ways. It is bursting at the seams with possible discussion topics, lesson plans, and late-night talks with family members among members of the Church. If you haven’t seen the show, there is really no point in reading on because this post is full of spoilers that will ruin the surprise in the unexpected directions the show takes. The series is just too beautiful to let my blog post ruin it with untimely reveals. So, back away if you haven’t watched it. Some future version of yourself will thank you.

The plan of Salvation, getting a body, and veil of forgetfulness

Recall the show’s central conceit is that a mysterious company called Lumon has created technology that can be implanted in your brain that allows your consciousness to be split into your work-self and your everyday self (presumably the true self). People have signed up for various reasons, but while at work, you have no memory of who you are, what your circumstances in life are, or anything about your previous life. You keep your set of knowledge skills, a working memory of how the world works (for example, you might remember details about the city of Baltimore, but you cannot remember anything about your place in the world or your relationship with Baltimore). Your true self enters into a Lumon contract freely, but your work self is thereby bound by that contract.

The trouble begins when your Lumon self has had enough and wants out of the contract. This is what happens to Britt Lower’s character Helly. She is miserable. She hates being a Lumon employee. She tries to escape multiple times. Finally, she sends a message to her outside self in a video asking her to release Helly from this work. Her outside self sends her a message back that she is not going to help her and to knock off trying to escape. She cannot leave. Helly feeling the injustice of her condition in this place starts to try harder to get out, even things like trying to injure herself to send a message to outside self that she can do damage to her outside self from right there in Lumonland.

So to LDS theology. Clearly, there are resonances with the plan of Salvation. There is no memory for the Lumon employees of their preexistence. They left that world freely, but are held to the conditions of LumonEarth based on a contract for which they apparently signed but have no memory of making this contract. And this sets up an ethical dilemma.

The body plays a vital role in our theology. Presumably, we all argue that the body teaches us things that cannot be learned in any other way. Theologian Deidre Green puts this nicely in her book on Jacob in the Maxwell Institute’s Theological Introduction to the Book of Mormon series,

The inestimable value of each human being attested by the death of Christ includes the body and the eternal relationship between an individual and Christ that is formed through their shared em-bodied experiences. Also valuable is the knowledge attained through the body that cannot be gained in any other way…Jacob is at pains to communicate that intelligence is located within the body and that a resurrection is required to retain that intelligence post mortally. In other words, neither minds nor spirits are the sole location of knowledge; there is knowledge about how to be in the world that is received through the body and necessarily re-mains in the body. This teaching implies that some truths can never be extrapolated from our embodied experience into rational thought; rather, this knowledge is forever only available through the body (Green 2020:26-27).

If this is true, then promises made in a preexistent state would have to be conditioned on knowledge we could not possibly know then but might find out in our bodily sojourn here on Earth. The terms of the agreement become untenable, just like in Helly’s case (in the show, we are led, rightly, to sympathize with her rather than the person who has landed her in Lumon). In coming to Earth under these conditions, has something manipulative and unsettling occurred?

There are some other things I want to explore with this show, but we’ll come back to those in another post. Let’s start with this. In coming to Earth, what if we learn things that make the conditions of our being here no longer possible to embrace? While it might hold legally, is it ethical for the company to keep Helly to her agreement if she is still an autonomous free agent while in the company. What of us? Are the conditions of the test inherently ethically unstable?

Discuss.

I’ve experienced depression and generalized anxiety for as long as I can remember. It comes and goes and sometimes I’m not really aware I’m experiencing it until the clouds start to lift and I suddenly realize the sun feels good on my skin again, surprised at the revelation that I hadn’t been feeling it for a while.

When I started elementary school I was also diagnosed with ADD (now more commonly called ADHD, although the diagnostic labels overall could use some improvement). With all good intentions my parents decided to hold off on getting me medication for those conditions. Until my thirteenth year or thereabouts when I started junior high school and the increased organizational load became unbearable.

My mom relates a story that I’ve long forgotten. I’m arriving home from school. I’m frazzled. I’m being asked about homework—again, and I take a multiple-subject folder out of my backpack. I accidentally dropping it on the floor as papers from 7 classes (was it 7?) scattering to the four winds. I break down in tears. And that was the moment she decided it was time to see if medication could help.

I remember feeling a vague thrill at the promise of feeling better, being better, but also a sense that this proved there was something wrong with me. Something that needed fixing that other kids didn’t need. I was broken, in a sense. I kept it a secret from my friends and pretty much everyone but my immediate family. And if I could have kept it secret from my siblings I would have.

At several points in my life I wanted to know if I had “aged out” of my ADHD symptoms. The brain undergoes significant development through our mid-twenties and some people don’t take medication in perpetuity. I wanted that. For one, the cost was a growing burden. It was also a pain to get prescriptions filled each month when I already had some issues with planning and focus. Side-effects include irritability, and “grooming” my hands, nail-biting, restlessness, and a possibly increased risk for heart issues. But each time I experimented to see how things went it became so quickly apparent how big a difference my comparatively low dose made for me. The same went for my antidepressant meds.

Medicine alone doesn’t cut it. I’ve done therapy off and on, I’ve worked hard to become tuned in and reliable and organized and good at what I do. Not everyone around me knows what’s up, or remembers all the time, or sees what things look like from my perspective, but I accept that. I choose to take medication because it helps me be the person I like to be. My master’s thesis research focused on intellectual disability in Latter-day Saint history and thought in part because I wanted to know more about myself.

This backstory explains why I took a recent article in the Church’s Liahona magazine personally. Author Jacob Hess identifies himself as a doctor of community psychology, a mindfulness teacher, and a writer. He has a PhD but I don’t know if he’s certified to practice. I recognize some good advice in the piece—Pay attention to what we do with our bodies, what we put in our bodies, how we care for our bodies. Pay attention to our thoughts, be more present with them. Don’t bury trauma. Seek connection with God and others. Try small, incremental changes and pay attention to what’s working.

Things go off track for me in a section called “Decrease dependence”:

“It’s natural for anyone facing depression or anxiety to rely on a variety of outside supports: from professional therapists and family or friends to medication and food. Some unfortunately turn to illegal substances and alcohol while trying to navigate painful emotions. While many sources of help can provide short-term benefits, people who find longer-term healing consistently speak of a decreasing dependence on external resources. The Church’s emotional resilience class is one resource that helps people develop that kind of growing freedom.“

I can’t help but read this article through the lens of the stigmas I’ve dealt with for most of my life. I’ve chosen to pursue the “natural” course of seeking outside supports like professional therapists and medication. These things are included alongside illegal substances and alcohol not necessarily because he thinks they’re morally wrong, but because they only provide “short-term benefits.” The word “natural” itself has a certain weight for Mormon readers: the natural person is an enemy to God, they are out of step, natural does not have to mean good. It can even mean bad.

We can tell someone is reaching a state of “freedom” the less they need to depend on external things like medication, therapy, or less socially acceptable methods like drug and alcohol use. Otherwise, one is “dependent,” which is framed as a negative, they cannot discover “more lasting emotional healing.” Not relief. Not equilibrium. Not seasons of good. An endpoint of healing.

Hess directly objects to the idea that mental illness can be permanent. (What he defines as mental illness isn’t clear here, but can we include the huge array of psychologically and physiologically atypical conditions that cause friction with broader society as well as a sense of suffering by individuals?) He uses important new advances about brain plasticity to argue that “we know better” now. Citing a scripture invoked in a recent General Conference address he invites us to “Do whatever lies in your power and then ‘stand still … to see the salvation of God, and for his arm to be revealed’ [Doctrine and Covenants 123:17].” The implication is that the salvation of God is the cessation of mental illness in this life, the arm of God will be revealed in a miracle of healing. What if that’s not what God is promising everybody?

Elsewhere Hess has expressed vaccination skepticism regarding COVID-19. Like others who encourage mindfulness as therapy (homeopathic therapists, alternative medicine practitioners, wellness services, and life coaches), he calls attention to failures by mainstream medicine and offers alternatives. I see some good reason for people to feel alienated by mainstream medicine. Impersonal and negative experiences, problems with how medical research is conducted, ongoing gaps in knowledge. It’s worth noting that Hess doesn’t go as far as some alternative voices—he at least extends some regard to medicinal and therapeutic approaches. But he shares the same underlying posture of skepticism, and positions such approaches as temporary modes of assistance at best (and possibly even hindrances to real healing at worst).

Which leaves me with the conclusion: If a person takes medication or utilizes therapy over a long period of time they are doing things wrong. Their ongoing “dependence” is evidence of the system’s failures and their own gullibility at best, or their own culpability at worst. For Hess, true freedom is achieved when I move beyond those limited modes of assistance. But what about people experiencing chronic illness or long-term emotional/mental instability? He doesn’t bring them up here, which is an an ableist decision. (Showing prejudice or preference for neurotypical people while excluding marginalized people.)

Bringing people into his framework who utilize more long-term assistance (those with cyclical patterns of depression, mood disorders, various chronic psychiatric conditions) would complicate his outlined path toward lasting healing. His otherwise good advice becomes partial truth at best because he avoids talking about the real messiness and variety of human experience. The details.

I believe stigmas around mental health assistance currently outweigh any cultural over-reliance on particular interventions like therapy or medication.

I believe it’s a moral and ethical imperative for people working in mental health to be direct and open about the fact that we can do our best but there are no assurances, and the path will look different for different people, and healing will look different for different people. I’m open to a variety of approaches, even some outside the mainstream, with a humble recognition that it might not “fix” everything but that it’s worth trying to.

I believe sometimes mourning with those who mourn and comforting those in need of comfort doesn’t always require fixing the thing that makes them mourn or removing all the causes of their need for comfort. I believe sometimes it’s impossible to fully fix or remove such things. I feel called to mourn and comfort in spite of that.

I believe that identifying such a clear path anyone can take out of anxiety and depression is a lot like asserting that people dealing with anxiety and depression are largely to blame for their condition, either because we live in a way that causes those conditions or we reject a foolproof way out of them. They exhibit laziness, guilt, ignorance, stubbornness, or some combination of each. I want to be clear: Hess doesn’t explicitly assert that position. I think he might even reject that position. But I want him to understand that so many people who read his words already hold those beliefs and will feel newly justified in them or convicted by them because of a credible researcher’s short and otherwise well-meaning article.

I don’t speak for everyone dealing with anxiety and depression. I don’t deny that I can make choices that impact my anxiety and depression. I’m not a trained mental health specialist. But I also believe based on my own experience and the witness of many others that healing is a multitude of experiences. I want people to be very clear and honest about that. If you use medication, if you benefit from therapy, I stand with you and I’m grateful we have the opportunity, for as long as it helps, whether temporary or more long-term.

And when Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water, to go to Jesus. But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me. And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him, and said unto him, O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt? (Matthew 14:29-31)

There are two ways to look at Peter’s nautical adventures in the fourteenth chapter of Matthew.

We can look at the failure. Peter is given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to walk on water, and he blows it. Christ stretches out His hand and assures Peter that it is going to be OK, and, after a few hesitant steps, Peter stops believing and starts thinking. He trusts his own reason and concludes that walking on water is impossible, so he begins to doubt Christ’s ability to sustain him. When he loses his faith, he sinks, fully earning the rebuke, “O thou of little faith” (33).

But we can read the same scene as a triumph and a miracle. While all of the other apostles huddle in the safety of the boat (a dubious safety because of the storm they are experiencing), Peter asks Christ to call him forth. And then Peter actually walks on water, becoming only the second person in the history of humanity to overcome the straightforward laws of physics.

Peter walks on water for an unspecified amount of time and does not sink until he sees the “wind boisterous.” The storm on the water overcomes his resolve, and he responds as any human being—and indeed any physical object of a certain weight and density—must respond. But he does not perish because Christ immediately “stretched forth his hand and caught him.”   

Which of these readings a person adopts tells us a lot about how one sees human nature. In the first reading, Peter is inherently not enough. His own efforts are futile and doomed to failure, and he is saved by Christ’s grace and mercy through no efforts of his own. Peter, as Everyman, is insufficient and can do nothing to effect his own salvation. He must rely wholly on Jesus Christ.

In the second reading, though, Peter is more than enough. He does incredible things on his own, and he experiences something that nobody else ever has. He goes beyond his limitations and expands his spiritual potential. And when those limitations reassert themselves, Christ steps in and saves him, giving him the opportunity to learn and grow without having to die in the process. Christ does not create his success; Christ allows him to create his own ultimate success by mitigating the consequences of failure.

I think that many of us judge our own efforts—as parents, partners, employees, or spiritual seekers—by the fact that we end up sinking and having to be saved rather than by the fact that we do amazing things in the process. We focus on the end result of our efforts rather than on the growth that we experience by making them. This is how business works, and it is how most employees are evaluated. But it does not appear to be how God works or how our spiritual journeys become meaningful. We are supposed to try hard things and fail. We are supposed to sink and have to be saved. That is the whole point of Atonement.

The Greek world gives us a close comparison to Peter in the story of Icarus, who, along with his father, Daedalus, King Minos’s labyrinth by fashioning wings out of wax and flying out of the labyrinth where they were. Icarus flies for a while, but he gets too close to the sun, and the wax melts, causing him to plummet into the sea and die.

Many hold that Icarus was wrong and should have taken a more balanced approach to flight, but a long tradition holds that Icarus did it right. While death is inevitable, we can choose to soar and go down in flames rather than slip away gently. Anne Sexton captures this element of the Icarus myth in her poem, “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph”:

Consider Icarus, pasting those sticky wings on,
testing that strange little tug at his shoulder blade,
and think of that first flawless moment over the lawn
of the labyrinth. Think of the difference it made!
There below are the trees, as awkward as camels;
and here are the shocked starlings pumping past
and think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well.
Larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast
of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings!
Feel the fire at his neck and see how casually
he glances up and is caught, wondrously tunneling
into that hot eye. Who cares that he fell back to the sea?
See him acclaiming the sun and come plunging down
while his sensible daddy goes straight into town.

The heroes of these stories—Peter and Icarus—each do something remarkable that nobody has ever done before. In both cases, they succeed for a while; and, in both cases, they eventually fail and sink into the sea. But there is a crucial difference between the Greek myth and the New Testament narrative: Icarus has to choose between staying safe and soaring to the sun. When he fails, he dies.

Peter, though, had a safety net. He was able to try, learn, and eventually fail without dying. This is the difference that Christ makes. The Atonement does not make success inevitable; it just makes failure—especially spiritual failure—something other than fatal. And we can rejoice in our limited successes—walking a few steps on the water, moving only a part of a mountain, flapping around a few inches off the ground with our wax wings—without the overwhelming sense of failure that comes when we don’t get everything right the first time.  

The recent global pandemic has had an enormous and negative effect on many people’s mental health because it dramatically discounted the definition of “walking on water” and “soaring to the sun.” For several years, things that used to be normal—going to the store, getting an education, keeping our families safe—required such an enormous effort that many of us didn’t have time or energy for anything else. And we reinterpreted the overwhelming success of simply surviving as a disappointing failure to do anything else.  

By seeing Peter’s first steps on the water as the amazing miracle that they are, we can, I think, recognize the value of our own efforts—even when we don’t end up with the results we want or even need. Ultimate failure does not invalidate amazing efforts because there is no such thing as ultimate failure. We always get another chance. That is the “good news” that we call the gospel.

David Aubril is a By Common Consent reader from France.

When I was in high school, my reading of Pascal’s Thoughts and my friendship with a Latter-day Saint classmate made me wonder about the existence of God. The answers I found in the Bible and the Book of Mormon gave me a deep desire to obey His commandments.

Despite the incomprehension of many relatives, I was baptized and went on a mission. When I got home, I went back to the studies I had left for a while and got married.

My wife and I firmly believed in the promises repeated in the Book of Mormon: “Inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments ye shall prosper in the land” (2 Nephi 4:4). We were confident that our obedience would enable us to obtain the blessing of an eternal family.

It is difficult to express how affected we were when a series of trials shook our home. Not only was our dream collapsing, but our certainties were shattered.

Of course, I knew obedience didn’t protect us from trials. But, somehow, I thought, in a very superstitious way, that I would be preserved. I say ‘superstitious’, because I think that’s what brings, for many of us, the emphasis on obedience. We think that we have acquired some kind of magical protection. We reverse things: instead of doing God’s will, we obey so that God will do our will. By our obedience, we hope we can bind God, justifying and cheating ourselves with the promises laid in the Scriptures. “Why is this happening to me, when I follow the commandments?” actually means “I do what God asks me, He can’t do that to me, He is bound.”

We often hear leaders say that “obedience is the first law of heaven.”  But obedience is, in fact, neither the first principle of the Gospel, nor the first commandment. Yet, probably because of our frequent use of the concept of covenant, obedience seems to have become for many Church members a basic principle of the gospel. You only have to see the number of speeches and lessons on this subject.

We talk a lot about it, but we don’t question it, and we probably don’t understand it. What does it really mean to obey?

The account of the Fall teaches a great lesson about that. After she partook of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, Eve came to Adam, and tried to have him partake of it. In their dialogue, we see two very different understandings of obedience. Adam says that he firmly intends to follow all of our father’s commandments. Eve explains that he can’t. He has to choose. Either he stays in the Garden of Eden, or he goes with her to replenish the earth. But he can’t do both.

In a complex world, obeying is not following a directive, it is prioritizing and choosing which directives we will follow, and which directives we will leave aside. Obeying has always been choosing between several commandments. When Christ rebukes the Pharisees it is because they are poorly prioritizing the commandments: giving priority to donations to the Temple rather than helping one’s parents, exercising the law while forgetting mercy.

Obedience explains why it was necessary to eat of that fruit.  After all, Adam seemed to clearly know it was wrong to partake of it: God had forbidden it.  But the “knowledge of good and evil” is not just knowing something is forbidden: it is about making the best choice at a time, in given circumstances, and taking responsibility for it. It is experiencing the dilemmas of life. In other words, it is about developing a moral sense, a consciousness.

So, Eve is not only a great example of faith, but also of obedience, because she understood what obedience really was, even through that may sound very contrary to the Christian tradition.

In obeying, one does not give up his free will, but exercises it. I think this is where lies one major misunderstanding between church leaders and many of our young people and less active members. Most of the time, they do not stop following gospel standards. But they prioritize them differently. And many times with a relevance that we could actually learn from. It strikes me to see that, while Church Authorities lament in their speeches about the decline of moral values ​​in society, huge crowds are rising up to denounce injustice as never before.

Without a better understanding of the concept of obedience, and better teachings about it, we will certainly miss many of the dilemmas of our younger generations.

M. David Huston lives and works in the Washington DC metro area. He is a husband and father of four who has previously written for poetry, international affairs, and LDS-related publications.

Christian historian Justo Gonzalez notes that in the ancient Christian church Communion (what we in the LDS faith tradition call “the Sacrament,” a shortened version of “the Sacrament of the Lords Supper”) was a time when believers, the Body of Christ, came together to share in the joy that Jesus’s resurrection offered.  By celebrating the resurrection as a community, the burgeoning church embodied what Communion represented: believers were expressing their faith in, and physically enacting the belief that, a community of disciples from different walks of life, through Jesus’ atoning work, can (1) be bound together, (2) be collectively bound to Jesus and (3) become a community that takes part in the divine destiny of creation.[1]  It was bold, and theologically powerful, statement of unification.  In fact, at times, this celebration was held at the tombs of faithful Christians, thereby joining “the living and the dead into a single body.”[2]

This notion of community was so important that as the early church began to spread to other locations, “in order to preserve and symbolize the bond of unity, the custom arose in some places to send a piece of bread from the Communion service in the bishop’s church… to be added to the bread used in the other churches in the same city” so that, symbolically, all Christians were still eating from the same loaf of bread.[3]

Though the language used in the modern LDS church to talk about Sacrament is somewhat different than the sentiments above (regrettably in my view), the practice of the Sacrament ordinance still delivers the same ancient message.  In the Sacrament prayer, the language is expressly plural.  The pronouns are “we” and “they,” not “I” and “me.”  The Sacrament prayers bless the bread and water for “all those”—again, expressly plural—who participate in the ordinance.  The bread and water are shared among the congregation and passed from one member to the next; resulting in children administering it to their parents, daughters administering it to their fathers, and mothers administering it to their sons.  It is the only ordinance in the church administered in this way. 

However, the reality is that many do not participate in this Communion.  The reasons vary and are as unique as the individuals themselves, but include: individuals, especially women, with health restrictions (e.g. COVID) and who do not have a priesthood holder in the home, or families who are no longer authorized to perform this ordinance at home in the push to get people back into pews; those who are traveling; those who are working; and those who, for whatever reason, are just late to the service.  This group also includes those who are struggling with their faith; individuals who feel unwelcome in the LDS culture (LGBTQIA+ for instance); those who have suffered from ecclesiastical/spiritual abuse and who will not worship alongside their abuser; those who feel ‘unworthy;’ those who feel they have been ‘pushed out’ because of social and/or political beliefs; those who have voluntarily departed because they no longer believe or who cannot continue to support LDS teachings, doctrines, policies, or practices; and individuals who are under some form of church discipline.[4] 

At this point, it is worth pausing to acknowledge that the debate surrounding whether the Communion table is “open” (for all people regardless of the status within an institution) or “closed” (only for those who meet certain institutional requirements) has been around as long as there has been Communion.  I am not exploring that issue here—though it is an issue ripe for further discussion.  In the LDS tradition the Communion table is often culturally closed.  There is a strong sense that LDS members should police themselves and not consume the bread and water if something in their life is amiss (however one interprets that).  As a matter of policy, LDS ecclesiastical authorities have the ability to tell individuals that they cannot participate the Sacrament ordinance.

Yet, when one considers all of the people who fall into my admittedly incomplete list of individuals who are unable to, chose not to, or are told they cannot participate in Communion on any given Sunday, the numbers become overwhelming.  I think it is likely that, each week, there are many more people who are (or were) part of the LDS community who do not participate in Communion than those who do.  It causes me to ask the questions: What kind of unity results from having only the healthy, available, self-assured, institutionally-approved members at the Lord’s Table? What does Communion really mean if a large portion of our community is not there? 

I understand that there are myriad ways (maybe even better ways) to find unity with God, humankind, and creation outside of this specific ordinance.  But it does not change the fact that, when I look at the empty seats next to me at church and I consider all the people who are not there, I am reminded of inability celebrate Communion with them and of the missed opportunity to build bonds of unity across categories that often serve to separate us like age, gender, sexual orientation, race, and socioeconomic status.  Maybe our table needs to be a little more open than it currently is?  Or maybe we each need to find ways to build community with those who are not at the table?

[1] These three ideas are based on Daniel L. Migliore’s discussion of the Lord’s Supper in Faith Seeking Understanding, An Introduction to Christian Theology (3^rd Ed), 1991 (William B. Eardmans Publishing Co.: Grand Rapids, MI): 307.

[2] Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity, Vol 1: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation, 2010 (Harper One: NY), 110.

[3] Ibid. 111.

[4] As many have observed, the act of excommunication (or, really, any act of church discipline), no matter the euphemisms used or the justifications offered, is a spiritually violent act.  It is the intentional extraction and removal of one who had been part of our community, figuratively cutting off member (finger, toe, arm…) of the Body of Christ.  And while it is probably the case that an action like this may indeed be justified in some cases, too often such surgeries seem more elective than required.  Church discipline carries with it a variety of consequences, but I have come to believe that one of most severe actions taken against those who subject to church discipline is denial of the Sacrament.  By being denied the Sacrament, individuals under church discipline are also denied one way (admittedly not the only way, but a powerful way) in which they could commune with others, with Jesus, and with creation.  This is more than just a denial of an ordinance; it is the denial of community.

My freshman year at BYU, my Book of Mormon professor took a couple classes to warn us of the dangers of self-esteem. It’s been long enough that I don’t remember precisely how she got to self-esteem being a dangerous concept (except something something less than the dust of the earth). It was dumb, though, and harmful, though, and I objected to it in class, though as an 18-year-old I didn’t have the language to articulate why it was stupid and harmful.[fn1]

While I’m not clear how she derived the idea that self-esteem was harmful, I wouldn’t be shocked if it found its roots in Pres. Benson’s infamous talk “Beware of Pride.”

In his talk, President Benson says that “[i]n the scriptures there is no such thing as righteous pride—it is always considered a sin.” He goes on to explain why pride is a literal “damning sin” and how to counteract its evil effects. And I can see a line from self-esteem to pride.

So are self-esteem, and pride, and Pride, and being Proud to Be an American inherently sinful?

Well, no. And I think Pres. Benson would agree with me on that. (I mean, I’d have to explain myself, but then I think he’d agree.) See, when you look for “pride” in the OED, you get twelve definitions. Some of them are obsolete, and some are irrelevant, but a large handful are relevant. And each has different meaning and connotation. So is something sinful just because it fits within one of a dozen definitions?

That would be absurd. Love them or hate them, but a pride of lions (definition 10) isn’t sinful just because the English language attaches the word “pride” to them.[fn2] Pride may be a sin, but it’s not a sin as a result of its nomenclature.

And the cool thing is, we don’t have to guess what Pres. Benson meant by “pride.” He defines his term within the talk itself! He mentions “self-centeredness, conceit, boastfulness, arrogance, or haughtiness” (roughly definitions 1(a) and 2), but, he says, those miss the core of sinful pride. Pride—the type of pride that is the universal sin and the great vice—is, at its center,

enmity—enmity toward God and enmity toward our fellowmen. Enmity means “hatred toward, hostility to, or a state of opposition.” It is the power by which Satan wishes to reign over us.

For much of the rest of the talk, Pres. Benson explains and gives examples of this enmity, of how it hurts us and our neighbors spiritually, and what we can do about it. And I agree! Enmity is bad. It’s sinful. It’s a universal sin that we need to actively rid ourselves of.

But enmity is not implicated in every definition of pride; in fact, it’s in opposition to several. Definition 3(a), for instance, is virtually the opposite of enmity:

A consciousness of what befits, is due to, or is worthy of oneself or one’s position; self-respect; self-esteem, esp. of a legitimate or healthy kind or degree.

This type of pride—self-esteem, if you will—is basically recognition of our inherent and eternal worth. Among other things, it embraces recognizing ourselves as children of a loving God.

Similarly, 6(a) defines “pride” as

A sense of confidence, self-respect, and solidarity as felt or publicly expressed by members of a group (typically one that has been socially marginalized) on the basis of their shared identity, history, and experience.

Again, this type of pride is the opposite of enmity—it’s solidarity with one’s neighbors.

Pres. Benson’s “Beware of Pride” was an important—and evergreen—talk. The enmity of pride is damaging and dangerous. But we do his warnings a disservice when we don’t actually look at what he means by pride and instead attach it to any English language usage of the word.

[fn1] It wasn’t limited to the religion department at BYU. At a stake conference after my mission, a stake president’s wife spoke about how her daughter had come home from school one day and mentioned self-esteem, and the stake president and his wife had explained how harmful the idea of self-esteem was.

[fn2] Though to be fair, you should probably also beware of a pride of lions, albeit for different reasons!

Photo by Leonard von Bibra on Unsplash

There is an ironic, even impish innocence to earth, an endless provocation to the human impulse towards wonder that provides no recourse for satisfying that impulse. Humans, then, live at odds with nature, forever, seeking to graft meaning, purpose onto a branch that cannot support the weight of our need. To live is to want to understand, but to seek understanding is to look past the wordless bounties of living.

—Matthew Wickman, Life to the Whole Being, p. 101

To the extent that we can believe Aristotle about such things, the Ancient Greeks had a single word to represent the entire purpose of philosophy and all other human endeavors. This word, eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία), describes the highest good of human life. The word literally means good (eû ) spirit or minor deity (daímōn). In English texts, this word has been translated as “happiness,” “virtue,” “welfare,” “thriving,” and, my personal favorite, “human flourishing.”

For Aristotle, a eudemonic life is one that has all of the elements of flourishing—intellectual fulfillment, physical health, satisfying relationships, material prosperity, and spiritual understanding—in exactly the right proportions needed for a person to thrive. Though Matthew Wickman does not use the word in his remarkable new memoir Life to the Whole Being—a phrase that Parley P. Pratt used to explain the gift of the Holy Ghost—a key objective of the book is to describe a spiritual ideal of eudaimonia. In fact, “life to the whole being” would be a reasonably good translation of eudemonia, should the author ever want to take up his hand at translating, or even paraphrasing, the Nicomachean Ethics.

The subtitle of the book, The Spiritual Memoir of a Literature Professor, was all that I needed to know before buying the book, as I too was once a literature professor looking for a spiritual vocabulary—and a large part of me hopes that I will be so again someday. The author tells us in the introduction that the book grew from two highly interconnected seeds: a course that he taught at BYU on spirituality and literature and a devotional talk titled Thriving Spiritually that he gave, also at BYU, in December of 2020.

As one should expect from a book by a literature professor about spiritual thriving, both literature and religion take center stage. But the connections that he draws between these two things is slippery. Wickman rejects that popular enlightenment idea that poetry has replaced religion as the source of human spirituality, but he also rejects the common religious conceit that imaginative literature is a meagre substitute for the scriptures and that fiction and poetry can only divert our attention from the revealed word of God.

For Wickman (and for me), religion and literature are responses to the same fundamental human problem: that our desire for meaning far outstrips the universes ability to provide it. Hence, we must thrust ourselves into the breach to fill the gaps in our understanding with something more than ordinary experience. Both religion and literature fall into the category of “something more than ordinary experience,” and both give us strategies to set the chaos of the external world into orderly frames that we can use to generate the narratives we need to turn the world’s often-random messiness into things like meaning and purpose.

Wickman’s literary palette is broad, and he explores the work of Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Levertov, Hardy Woolf, Blake, Elliot, Wordsworth, Sartre—and many more—to crystalize the kinds of spiritual meaning that comes from literature. But this is not really a work of literary criticism, nor is it a study of ideas. “Ultimately,” he writes in the introduction, “this is a book less about ideas than experience—spiritual experience. . . . I focus on spiritual experience, rather than spirituality because I wish to emphasize the experiential aspect of a spiritual life” (29).

Wickman is true to his word. Life to the Whole Being is built around experiences that one might classify as spiritual: his mission to France, where he found very few people interested in the religious ideas he cherished, his marriage and the letters he has written to his wife, the deaths of his brother and his good friend, conversations he has had with LGBTQ friends who tried, but failed, to stay in the Church. These experiences, he suggests, are raw encounters with God—often as experienced through other human beings—and these experience matter. They are the basis of a spiritual life. They are, one might say, the primary texts.

Both institutional religion, as represented by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and imaginative literature, as represented in the text by the poems and novels that he discusses, are ultimately secondary to the spiritual experiences themselves. But they both play important roles. They structure the narratives that turn experience into meaning, they help us interpret the silences and gaps that come with all spiritual experiences, and they teach us the right questions to ask of the answers we receive.

Life to the Whole Being is a complex work in that it does a lot of things at once while navigating an often torturous path. But Matthew Wickman is an excellent guide to the landscape of faith. His prose is clear and moving, his experiences are relevant and illuminating, and his taste in literature is (from where I sit at least) impeccable. I loved this book, and I think you will too. It is not a book of easy answers, nor does it need to be. It is a book that identifies some of the most important questions that we must ask as we journey towards spiritual understanding. Finding the answers to these questions is the work of a lifetime, and it is the journey, as much as any destination, that helps us to thrive.

Robert George is in a difficult spot. As co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage, opposing same-sex relationships has been a major focus of his public intellectual work even while the tide has been shifting in the United States—polls show more and more people approve of gay marriage. A record high 70% support it today according to the latest Gallup poll. Even Latter-day Saints follow this trajectory, with support doubling in the past decade.

I’m not optimistic enough to think the battle is over. America’s political makeup ensures that for the foreseeable future an increasing minority will have outsized influence on all kinds of things, from abortion rights to the contents of elementary school libraries. George seeks allies among conservative religious groups to keep his hope alive, that the state can be used to discourage and even prevent queer relationships from flourishing. George seeks allies to further his cause, including among Latter-day Saints. One recent think piece of his can be found at the unofficial LDS publication Public Square.

In a nutshell, George believes queer folks wrongly place their gender or sexuality at the core of who they are. He (dismissively) calls this “LGBT+ identitarianism.” Considering how much time and effort George has given questions of sexual orientation, it’s weird to see him accuse others of making sex and gender too central to their identities!

One of the biggest problems facing conservatives like George is how to be kind and loving to queer people while also insisting on the moral inferiority and even danger of their sex or gender identity. If being gay is damaging to self and society (and also threatening to one’s salvation) as George believes it is, it would be “unloving” to affirm that identity in others. Which is why George says we should “treat each other decently and compassionately” and seek loving friendships with people even where “deep disagreement” exists. He has gay friends, apparently. I wish he spent more time saying how a person can be loving towards someone while also condemning an important part of their identity (I suspect queerness would be less “central” to a person’s identity the less social pressure and regulation they’d face about it).

George is in a minority of conservative thinkers who actually acknowledge the existence and power of social constructs. In his view, sexual orientation “is an artifact of 19^th-century psychology.” By invoking history he invites an obvious parallel. Once could exchange “race” for “sexuality” in his article and make the exact same arguments. He could have written the same essay about “The Philosophical Basis of Biblical Segregation,” pointing out how we (white folks) should love and be kind to BIPOC folks, but that racial identities are not truly central to our eternal identities as children of God, that the whole idea of “race” is a human construct, and therefore, there is no problem with asserting the importance of traditional conjugal relations within racially homogenous marriages—as can easily be interpreted as binding from the biblical record (Acts 17.26 for example, as well as the frequent commandments that Jews not marry Gentiles).

In fact, Latter-day Saints used to believe such a sexual/racial hierarchy was God’s will. Taylor Petrey is one among many scholars who have discussed this history. This isn’t a simple after-the-fact equation of race issues and sexuality issues. Within Mormondom, “the doctrines about race and the doctrines about gender [were] joint ideologies that were emerging in the middle of the twentieth century. They dominated the way the Church structured its teachings, its public policy, and the practices they were engaging in.” (Check out Petrey’s interview with me about it here.)

George’s initial assessment seems entirely correct:

If one believes that ‘sexual orientation’ or “gender identity” truly is central to one’s identity or being, then The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ teaching about marriage and family, including but not limited to the Proclamation on the Family, will always be highly problematic and, indeed, mysterious. It will be defensible, if at all, sheerly by appeal to authority.

Instead of gender identity/sexual identity being “central,” I might say “important to.” Because things are more complicated than George accounts for. Some queer folks feel tension with broader culture precisely because sexual attraction isn’t really their thing, for example. But since the church has acknowledged the value of sex being not just for procreation but also “to express love and strengthen the emotional, spiritual, and physical connections,” it’s even trickier to claim there’s something inherently sinful about same-sex intimacy.

George (and Public Square by extension) worries Mormons are falling back on little more than an appeal to authority (General Authorities particularly) to shore up their anti-LGBT+ positions, and he offers some resources that might help steady the intellectual ark a bit. He invites us to listen to a chorus of philosophers, historians, theologians, and others who’ve been raising objections to a sort of hyper-individualism—bordering on narcissism—of the modern age, believing that being gay is somehow an extreme and especially dangerous way to be too individualistic (as though queer people are incapable of forming meaningful relationships?)

I actually share a lot of those concerns about hyper-individualism—it’s one of the reasons I became more politically progressive. But I don’t share George’s belief that God inherently disapproves of queerness or that it’s against the laws of nature. To me, basic gospel principles like faith, hope, and charity—as well as more generalized values like respect, commitment, and service—can just as easily (or with as much difficulty) play out in relationships beyond the heterosexual binary. I believe there is beauty all around when there’s love at home, including queer homes, because I’ve witnessed it for myself.

Happy Pride Month!

I was reading the WBEZ website yesterday, and came across a story about Cardinal Cupich, the Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Chicago. Cardinal Cupich called on legislators to pass legislation to curb gun violence.

“The Second Amendment, unlike the second commandment, did not come down from Sinai,” Cupich told NPR. “There is an understanding that we all have in our hearts, engraved in our hearts, a natural law about the value of human life. And there is no amendment that can trump that.”

So can he do that? Can he speak out about political issues? Is he, the leader of the 3rd largest archdiocese in the United States, with more than 2 million Catholics, risking the Catholic Church’s tax exemption?

The answers, in order: yes, yes, and no.

Likewise, our church faces no legal impediment to talking about gun safety legislation, asking members to support it, or even lobbying on behalf of such legislation at the state or federal level.

The church does face certain limitations: lobbying can only make up an “insubstantial” part of the church’s activities. But, while there’s no bright line definition of what counts as “substantial,” given all of the time and money the church puts into its religious mission, as a practical matter it probably couldn’t reach lobbying substantiality even if it tried.

In fact, the only real impediment to the church engaging on this issue is its own internal policies. And even those really don’t impede its actions. While the church generally refrains from engaging in politics, it says that:

In exceptional cases, when moral issues or the Church’s practices are involved, the Church may take a position on political matters. In such cases, the Church may engage in political discourse to represent its views.

Does promoting gun safety legislation represent a moral issue? Cardinal Cupich argues that it does. It’s a moral duty, he says, because “it’s about saving lives.”

Now I’m not making a normative case for church involvement here. What I am saying is, if the church doesn’t engage with this politically, that’s its decision. It isn’t boxed into a place of inaction by law. Nothing that prevents them from engaging substantively on the question. In the end, the choice is entirely theirs.

Also, whether or not the church acts, there is nothing to prevent members from engaging and trying to shape law and policy in a way that will protect lives. The church, after all, encourages us to “participate in worthy causes to make their communities wholesome places to live and raise families.” If we fail to participate civilly, that’s our choice.

We live at a time when conspiracy theory is spreading. This is my fourth post on its particularly Mormon manifestations. See the first here, the most recent here, and part I of this post here.

Current news is this: According to David Leavitt, Utah County attorney, Utah County sheriff Mike Smith has accused Leavitt of participation in what Smith calls “ritualistic child sexual abuse,” involving cannibalism and child sex trafficking.

According to Sargent Spencer Cannon, the case involves conspiracy – not, as is typical in such situations, simply a family member or friend, but rather “a group of people . . . an organized effort.“

The sheriff’s department claims that the conspiracy goes back thirty years, to 1990. It also has claimed that a “portion” of the reports are confirmed. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, the only public information linking Leavitt to such a thing is a website apparently created by a man Leavitt prosecuted for rape who has since fled the country. It accuses Leavitt of not simply participating in, but running, a “widespread ritual sex abuse ring in Utah.”

Also notable is that Leavitt has been an outspoken advocate for criminal justice reform; in his words, “decluttering” the county legal docket from smaller cases that he seeks to settle or send to rehabilitation or drug courts in order to focus on prosecuting violent crimes and felonies. He has stopped pursuing the death penalty. Smith has endorsed Leavitt’s opponent, Jeff Gray, accusing Leavitt of being “progressive,” and equating that position with being “anti-law enforcement.”

Now, I, of course, do not have definitive knowledge about what might be going on in Utah County, though Leavitt himself calls the accusations “ludicrous” and “a pack of lies.”

But, as I observed in Part I of this post, the links between conspiracy theory and fear of child abuse are strong, having been welded together for centuries. They go back at least to the medieval “blood libel” accusations of Jewish abuse of Christian children. In only the past forty years, accusations of “ritual sex abuse” have rocked the United States more generally and Utah in particular. In my earlier post, I document the accusations against the leadership of the Lehi Eighth Ward, none of which were proven, all of which emerged from the sketchy evidence of coached testimony and spurious “recovered memory” induced under hypnosis. And across the country, and even in the Lehi Eighth Ward, people went to prison on charges that later seemed self-evidently false.

I also observed how easily Church members fell for such accusations. The Cold War was a conspiratorial time in American history more broadly, and Church leaders like Ezra Taft Benson were primed to read the Book of Mormon through conspiratorial lenses, transforming the evil Gadianton robbers from Communists one decade to the Democratic Party the next to Satanic child abusers the third.

And of course, in the past five years the slow mainstreaming of this long-standing, fridge conspiratorial style has entered mainstream American politics. We have seen example after example of the language of conspiracy and child abuse being wielded in political campaigns. And now we have an example in Utah County itself.

Maybe this particular incident is not simply one more instance of conspiratorial moral panic, built of tired tropes, fear, and shreds of unrelated evidence. But maybe it is.

BCC Press is proud to announce the publication of The Burning Book: A Jewish-Mormon Memoir, by Jason Olson and James Goldberg—the true story of Jason Olson’s conversion from Judaism to Mormonism and his life spent reconciling the two cultures and religions into something beautiful, coherent, and whole. Along with the amazing James Goldberg, one of the Mormon world’s premier novelists and poets, Olson weaves a remarkable story of faith and change that makes room for everybody.

Olson was born to a Jewish mother and a Christian father, both of whom agree to raise him in the Jewish faith. As a teenager, he makes friends with several Latter-day Saints, who give him a copy of the Book of Mormon, which he reads and believes to be scripture. But believing in the divinity of the Book of Mormon did not make Jason feel any less Jewish. “My religious conversion hadn’t changed who my mother was, hadn’t changed my ancestral connection to dream of a return to Israel,” he notes, when he describes his desire to take a trip to Israel sponsored by the Birthright Foundation. “Longing for a continued connection to my people and history, I decided to apply” (79). The Foundation, however, determines that he is not eligible for the trip.

He is, however, eligible to serve a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—a mission to Morristown, New Jersey, to serve in an area with “one of the highest concentrations of Jews in the US” (83). After his mission, he attended BYU, where he studied Hebrew, and to Brandeis, where he studied Judaism, and to Israel, where he received citizenship and continued to worship as a Latter-day Saint. At the end of the book, Jason describes his difficult decision to give up his Israeli citizenship in order to become a chaplain in the United States Navy, where he served people of all faiths and practices.

In the end, Jason Olson’s memoir is about faith in a large and loving God who makes room for Jews and Latter-day Saints, Protestants and Catholics, Muslims and Buddhists, and everybody else. His profound love for this God, and for all of the different ways that people seek and find divinity in their lives, will inspire readers across the religious spectrum.

As a special treat, BCC Press will host a virtual Zoom Launch event this Thursday, June 2, at 7:00 PM Mountain Daylight Time. Just click on this and enjoy: https://rb.gy/JQ2LSU. And, just in case the Kindle and paperback versions are not enough, the audiobook will be available late next week.

And, of course, here is the free sample, from Chapter Two of The Burning Book, when Jason first discovers the Book of Mormon—and almost burns it.

The Hulu series Under the Banner of Heaven has a lot of people asking “Does the Church create violent, abusive men? Does it foster the attitudes that lead to violence?” At the same time, many progressive Mormons have criticized the portrayal of supposedly mainstream Church members in the show, claiming that they are unfamiliar to us, that we don’t see ourselves and our experiences here.

A story broke this week revealing that the Southern Baptist Convention has been hiding clerical sex abuse that it said it couldn’t track (but was apparently tracking the whole time). This story is rocking that particular faith right now. Their abuse was unique because the SBC is a coalition of independently run churches, and the Convention had long dismissed victims by claiming that churches ran independently and they didn’t have the means to track abusive pastors. The scandal revealed this to be untrue; they were tracking them, and some board members were protecting the abusers through targeted intimidation of victims while allowing the pastors to just open a new church. There were roughly 700 pastors being tracked. You can hear more about it here.

We are all familiar with the Catholic priest sex abuse scandals, and the genocide against Native American children torn from their families and forced to attend religious schools in the US and Canada, suffering mistreatment, abuse and poor conditions. There have also been sex abuse scandals in the Boy Scouts of America organization, including victims from our own congregations. Each of these organizations has its own abuse narrative, the justifications abusers use, both to themselves and to others, the people in power who protect the abusers, the types of victims, the story of how the abuse unfolds and how it is then covered up or minimized. The stories may vary, but repeating themes emerge.

What does uniquely Mormon abuse look like? Lindsay Hansen Park has done some excellent work curating stories of abuse victims for whom the Hulu abuse narrative resonated. Several of these stories involve women whose partners tried to coerce them into practicing polygamy. Many stories also included men physically and verbally abusing women for not “submitting” to their priesthood authority. In the series, a father justifies incest using these same ideas. When women are reduced to gender roles, they are seen as interchangeable to some men, someone there to fill the various needs of that man: childcare, cooking, cleaning, running a household, and providing sex. A key difference in the Mormon narrative is that every man holds the priesthood. Clerical abuse isn’t confined to the Church; we’ve imported it into our living rooms and bedrooms. Obviously, the majority of men are not abusers, but those that are have a powerful narrative to intimidate their victims into silence. They can claim a power from God.

I’m not aware of any statistic that indicates that there is more abuse inside the LDS Church than outside; Krakauer’s post-9/11 thesis was that all religions lead to violence which strikes me as a reach, something that is unproven at least. I think we’d be hard pressed to find a violent streak in non-patriarchal, non-conservative Churches, for example. If so, is it religion that leads to violence or is it a patriarchal, conservative narrative? For example, there is a strong correlation between police officers and domestic violence (40% of officers are estimated). [1] In the discussion on this topic over at Wheat & Tares, a link to an article about religious-based child sex abuse was shared. From the abstract of that article (which included LDS case studies, among many others):

A number of uniquely religious characteristics facilitate this cultivation, which includes: theodicies of legitimation; power, patriarchy, obedience, protection, and reverence towards authority figures; victims’ fears about spiritual punishments; and scriptural uses to justify adult-child sex.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S135917891830315X?via%3Dihub

Families and Churches often contain unresolved, multi-generational trauma. This is another thesis of the Hulu series. Aside from the mantra that the abused often becomes the abuser, family trauma is even sometimes passed down through DNA in the form of epigenetic gene expression. Church trauma is passed down through rhetoric and dogma, and in our case particularly, fealty to the words of past and present leaders, even if we may sometimes hint that they were just “speaking as a man” or they are fallible humans who might make mistakes. We are careful not to name the mistakes, and to minimize any grave errors we might suspect. We sing “Praise to the Man” unironically, neatly excising the verses about violent vengeance (I do recall singing the violent parts growing up, though). We don’t talk about how problematic polygamy was, and we mostly avoid talking about it altogether if we can avoid it. If you want to know where the trauma lives, pay attention to what a family or organization avoids talking about and dealing with. Erasing and suppressing trauma isn’t the same as addressing and resolving it. [1]

Because we are in the business of “bringing the world His truth,” we also try very hard to avoid negative press that might turn converts off, which includes shows like this one, as well as news stories that bring abuse to light. It’s easier to consider abusers as mentally ill exceptions, impossible to predict, and difficult to rein in. In our quest to ensure the Church’s reputation, though, victims are often an afterthought, if they are heard and believed at all. Bishops are instructed to call for legal, not pastoral, advice when they encounter victims of abuse (this practice contains echos of the SBC’s approach that strictly focused on avoiding legal liability).

A much more common type of abuse within our congregations is domestic abuse of wives and children, not necessarily abuse by those in leadership roles. When every ecclesiastical leader involved in giving marital advice is a man, we foster an alignment with the male abuser’s perspective, not because bishops are abusive, but because they are not abusers (and don’t recognize it for what it is). While they can’t imagine being an abuser, they can imagine the horror of a false accusation more than they can imagine the horror of being a victim of abuse. Even abusers don’t admit to themselves that they are being abusive; they often cast themselves as the victim in their own mind. Everyone is the hero of their own story, even when they are really the villain. Asking abusers to self-identify in the temple recommend interview is no deterrent to abuse. A very common side effect of being abused is that victims can appear to lack credibility; the abuser has gaslit and manipulated them so consistently that even they question themselves. A victim who is crumbling under the pressure of their abuser often finds herself being interrogated and dismissed back into the arms of her abuser. So the cycle continues.

Every time we teach our young men that they have more authority than the young women, we set up a pre-written script for future abuses to be justified. We aren’t creating that abuse, and abuse is still the exception and not the rule, but we are providing the narrative. In other Churches, the abuse narrative is usually centered on the clergy. Our clergy reside in the home with us. By extending the priesthood to all males, we’ve also handed them a script that clergy in other faiths use to justify their abuses. By doubling down on gender roles, we’ve taught men that women are separate, a whole different species of being designed to support the home and family; any perceived failure on that front can be twisted by an abuser into a justification. A person living under the threat of violence is not going to be effective at any roles, much less the demands of motherhood and caregiving. The abuser creates additional justification through these intimidation tactics.

Obviously, the abuser bears the ultimate responsibility for their crimes. But if we want to help those who have been abused to survive their abuse, we need to understand their perspective and put victims first. As a missionary, I was approached by many women who were victims of domestic abuse. I had no training or personal experience with this, and the only tool in my kit was baptism. I suspect that as a sister, this was a more common occurence for me than the elders, although I’m sure they also were also sometimes sought out by abuse victims. One extremely distraught woman approached me because she was Catholic and had an abortion, and she was afraid she was going to hell. She had the abortion because she was sure her violent and abusive husband would kill her. My mission president told us to drop her because her abortion was a deal-breaker that in his view barred her from baptismal potential; her violent abuse was not even on his radar once he heard the word “abortion.” I didn’t know what I could personally do for her, and she haunts me still. Is she even still alive?

When we encourage women to be financially dependent on their husbands, to marry early, to have children often and early, we are creating vulnerabilities that make it nearly impossible for a woman to leave an abusive relationship and survive. Another commenter, PWS, shared a story that further illustrates the problem with anti-divorce attitudes in Church culture, even when abuse is happening. He shared the example of a BYU Alumni magazine article about “soft thoughts” about divorce, including the example of a woman whose husband was extremely controlling and abusive, with no regard for her mental or physical health.

Cora’s soft thoughts about divorce began early on, when Hugh decided unilaterally there would be no birth control and Cora subsequently bore four children in five years.

“I loved being a mother,” she says, “but I was overwhelmed and resentful because I felt I didn’t have a voice in my marriage.”

https://magazine.byu.edu/article/divide-or-conquer/

That saving this marriage without clearly identifying the abuse would be lauded in the Church-owned school’s publication is concerning, whatever the intentions. If one spouse makes decisions “unilaterally” that harm the other spouse and cause her to feel she “doesn’t have a voice,” folks, that’s abusive. If we are so incapable of recognizing the abuses in our midst when they are this obvious, how much harder must it be when the abusers are clever enough to hide what they are doing? Apparently there are enough members in our midst who see this story as normal, that nobody batted an eye. I wish I could say that this article was from the 1970s, but it was published in winter of 2018. Is there really anyone who would want their daughter or friend to remain in such a marriage, where her feelings and well-being are completely disregarded?

While I as a lifelong Church member have never personally been abused, I know many women in the Church who have been. I know many victims of incest, and I also know many whose husbands verbally or physically abused them, intimidating them into silence, turning Church members and leaders against them by claiming they were crazy or untrustworthy. When terrible things happen, it’s like stacking slices of Swiss cheese on top of each other. Each layer is a support network or systemic element that should be there to stop or prevent abuse, but sometimes the holes all line up, and unfortunately, the more holes, the more likely the abuse gets through and continues. Family members, Church leaders, and Church doctrines often provide more support and privilege to the abuser than the abused, whether intentionally (he’s a priesthood holder! a provider!) or unwittingly (he’s such a good guy!). When a victim is imperfect, often a byproduct of abuse, we tell her to do better, to forgive, to be better, to be humble (which is a huge pile-on since abusers are already adept at filling their victims with shame). We poke more holes in her Swiss cheese rather than seeking to help her. We reinforce her abuser’s justifications that place the blame on her and encourage her to downplay her abuse, even to herself.

I have some mixed feelings about the Hulu series, and a lot of it was foreign to my own experience (as someone not from Utah), but it is raising some questions about abuse that need to see the light of day. We have some work to do. We need to become more victim-centric, providing better advice, support and listening to women, which is nearly impossible in a Church run entirely by men that encourages (in word [3] if not deed) families to also be run by men. We need to teach leaders and members how to recognize abuse for what it is, rather than consulting lawyers to protect our reputation. Leaders need to be taught skepticism about the abuser’s version of events at bare minimum, something that is pretty rare in the stories I’ve heard. We need to quit believing that the preservation of an abusive marriage (or one in which children are being sexually abused!) is preferable to divorce; there are so many things worse than divorce, and we seem to be unwilling to acknowledge that.

And lastly, we need to quit handing abusers a pre-written script that justifies their actions. That last one is particularly tricky with our Church’s history of polygamy and patriarchy. While our contemporary versions of both of these things is less extreme than our fundamentalist cousins’, it’s still a ready-made script for abusers, particularly when combined with mandated gender roles, encouraged female financial dependence, and every man having the priesthood. These things don’t create abusers, but they do give them ammunition to use in their abuse, and more importantly, a way to justify it to themselves.

I have grave doubts that we will do any of these things, unfortunately. The more women I know, the more these very similar stories I hear continue to erode my hope. We don’t listen to women. We don’t train leaders well enough at all. We care more about modesty than rape. We blame victims. We fear breaking up bad marriages. We imagine abusers to be protectors and providers because that’s what they claim to be, and we need men to run our congregations more than we need women.

Discuss.

[1] Unfortunately, Google now thinks I’m being abused.

[2] Hello, CRT!

[3] That word being “preside”