Wishful Thinking

 

Deseret News posted an Opinion piece under the title of Perspective: Let's get real about the loss of faith. There is so much to unpack here. Especially as someone who aggressively left the faith and returned. I love unpacking, so let's do it.

The article itself makes an attempt that is more nuanced and sophisticated than what I expected from Deseret News. The baked-in conclusion of "Church good" is still there. Of course it is. But it honors the efforts of atheism and religious detachment more than I expected. But even as it does so, it maintains a careful balance by controlling for one of the most important variables in the equation: Gender. 

The primary focus on Chris Hanna as a man is deeply significant to how this balanced perspective is achieved. The Church reforms after WWII and into the 1970s remodeled the institution into a place where men would thrive at the expense of everyone else. That's why his memories are rose tinted, his reckoning after decades away is easier. It clearly isn't tainted by exhausting labor. He can envision a return with a cheeky half smile and a joke because his relationship to the institution was filtered through several layers of removal from the core failures of modern Mormonism.

It's improved a lot in the past twenty years, don't get me wrong. But the Church he experienced doesn't exist anymore. And what parts still exist that are negative, he won't experience the same way because he's a man. No one expects him to feed missionaries and attend activities and make food and do child care and do sign up sheets and all the labor that goes into building the community he praises. The Church still runs on an ungodly, unholy amount of unpaid, unrecognized labor from women. And I say this as someone who works more than full time, until almost midnight 5-6 days a week, who has an unanswered text in my phone from my ministering sister who still expects me to go on visits with her. This is culture I'm trying to change and I'm not sorry about it.

Because Hanna has been gone for two decades, he missed Prop 8. He's missed several witch hunts at BYU. He missed Ordain Women. He missed the November 5th policy initiation and removal. He missed lighting the Y. He missed so much of the cultural reckoning that is transforming the institution (slowly) into a place that demands more from him. He missed the point where the Church got political back in 2008, and the decades of reckoning and hell we've had to pay ever since.

Would he feel the same way about the Church he remembers if he knew that? 

Would this reckoning with moral philosophy and attempts to replace Mormonism with outside counterfeits look differently if he knew that the Church is full of exhausted women who aren't interested in prioritizing him and his comfort anymore? 

I have been sacrificed on the altars of men's incompetence so many times over the past 20 years. I spent a season away from the Church and returned, and here's what I know. Women leave the Church not over conflicts in belief, but because of profound injuries to body, mind, and spirit from being aggressively wrung out like sponges until there is nothing of ourselves left. What we have all experienced as women in the Church is infinitely harder to come back from. And the subject of an article like this, that humanizes former members and why they leave, and cajoles members to consider what they want, is primarily addressed through the desires of a man?

Of course it is! 

And the praise for Dallin H. Oaks, the Church authority who has single-handedly chased more people out of the Church over the past twenty years than any other? Hilarious. Something only a man who has been missing for the past 20 years could say.

Hanna sometimes daydreams “about a way I could participate if there could be respectful acceptance of my pace and place,” hastening to add that “I’m not there to twist the tradition to my politics, and think the church needs to be wary of those who come back to reshape it.”

This statement could only be written by a man who has no knowledge, no care, for what women have fought for, won, and lost in the history of this institution. Not before he was born. Not in the time he was present for. And not in the time since he left. 

If I don't assume it comes from a place of profound ignorance, it can only come from a place of malignant and willful neglect of the truth. There is no other way to interpret such an attitude that the Church has nothing to gain from the political transformation taking place in the lives of Mormons, active and inactive.

If this same article focused on women, there is only one thing it could say: "How Saying 'No' to My Community is Keeping My Faith Alive."

No, I can't do visits. No, I can't go to the cannery. No, I can't make food for that funeral. No, I can't serve labor intensive callings with the Primary or the youth. And no, I'm not enabling the learned helplessness and outsourced labor from men in the Church anymore. If they want something done, the men in this Church can do it themselves.

Why? 

Because every second of my life is dedicated to the survival of my family through economic turmoil, and I'm not alone in that. In this season of my life, I have to focus on being a provider. Working class women in this Church are providers too, and I don't care how anyone feels about that. My contribution is to cut a check every two weeks, and to show up to church when I'm not too exhausted to rise from my bed. That is my contribution. And if that is good enough for the men in this Church when they do it, then it's good enough for me. That is a statement deeply informed by my politics, which have been here every time I have been over the past twenty years. The idea that the Church can ever be politically neutral is also a decidedly male perspective. They're the ones who benefit from no one else being able to advocate for change without their efforts being dismissed as dissent and being categorized as political.

If we're getting real about acknowledging and reconciling with those who leave, I'm not interested in prioritizing or pursuing men whose views on their place in the community haven't evolved or changed in the time they've been away. They'd be returning to a community they don't recognize, and I refuse to acknowledge that as anything less than a good thing. And if they choose to come back, they had better do so older, wiser, and more flexible to social change than they've ever been. 

Otherwise, they'll find themselves yearning for a Church that hasn't existed since the moment they fossilized it in their minds, and will never exist again.