May 23, 2012

A Kiwi-Mormon comment on the US-Mormon election

So its election year in the US.  It’s the year that we get to trust the American public to select the ‘leader of the free world’ (whatever that rather presumptuous aphorism means?).    It’s the year that our news programmes at the ends of the earths are clogged with the latest from the US hustings which will dump endless medium shots of Romney with his immaculate pompadour, and Obama with his smug smile on us.  We New Zealanders get to look on as who knows how many millions and millions of US dollars are stuffed down the proverbial drain to support two campaigns to elect yet another impotent American President.  A President whose most aggressive opponents in bringing about reform and transformation to America will not be sitting on the opposite side of the house from him, but will consist of a voracious commercial sector, a rapacious industrial military complex, and the intransigent mythologies of America’s halcyon days long since past that will buzz incessantly in his ears from the pulpits of thousands of congregations across the continent.

For us New Zealand Mormons the contest leading up to November is even more interesting because of Romney.  In the last six months I’ve actually been asked for whom I would cast my vote in the American Presidentials more times than I was asked about my political preferences in my own country’s recent elections.  It seems very difficult for people outside our faith tradition to disaggregate our religious identity from the country from whence that faith tradition was born.  Just as Catholics are a bit from Rome, and Jews are a bit from Jerusalem, Mormons all over the world are just a little bit from Utah and are therefore a bit American whether we like it or not.

I don’t particularly like it all.  Don’t get me wrong, I love visiting the US and adore my American friends.   I love ‘In and Out Burgers’, and the cute way Americans say ‘swap out’ instead of ‘change over’.  I adore the way they are nostalgic about the Imperial System of measurement while  the rest of the world has gone metric.  I love that most Americans would be largely unaware of the fact that the rest of the world has gone metric.  I love the way the Americans can talk with a pitch, pace and volume that I can’t possibly replicate.  I love their good teeth and the way they whoop and holler when they go to the bowling alley as if all future joys in life depend on the ‘strike’.  I think its sweet that they blush when they hear ‘hell’ and ‘damn’ and of course I’m an ardent consumer of many of their books and media which have provided hours of pleasant distraction for me over the years!  To borrow a maxim from the many American visitors to our New Zealand podiums;

I love the people of America so much.  What a beautiful country you have!!

But as one helluva proud Kiwi sometimes it’s difficult to feel wholly like a New Zealander while being a Mormon at the same time, and I feel ever so slightly peeved about it.   This, I think, is largely because our religion calls upon us to perform our faith like Americans;  to sing American songs;  to use daft American titles like ‘President’; to be required to understand a cultural logic that doesn’t quite fit in over my own;  to always feel like we are waiting for permission for something from America;  to frequently tell or listen to American stories about Americans in America; and now to get caught up with an election that should be but a passing interest but feels rather like the future of the Mormon church.

But then again I am resigned to the fact that it wouldn’t be possible to grow a church anywhere in the world without the attendant cultural inscriptions borrowed from its host nation.   I just think we could be a bit smarter about it and a bit more conscious of it.  If the way we made sense of our religion was (as much as possible) mindful and cognizant of the way in which our national cultural habits shape our faith experiences, Romney and his republicans wouldn’t be positioned as a religious option or a spiritual possibility, they would be understood as politicians – pure and simple.

Yet when I was in the Utah a couple of months ago that’s not the impression I got from the punters. There was a startling conversation rumbling around the wards that has positioned Romney as ‘the one’ (because he is Mormon); to pray America out of its woes; who would prepare America for the second-coming; whose extraordinary wealth was a blessing from God for this moment!  My sense was that there is a strain of American Mormon who seems to have glommed on to the notion that because Romney is wealthy he possesses the requisite skills to set America on its financial feet again and restore the fat to the land – which is apparently a precursor to the second-coming of Jesus to the Midwest?

There must be some alarmingly unhinged folk in certain Mormon circles for these kinds of notions to be so apparent to someone just passing through the Valley.  Sure there is a vague possibility that Romney might be able to cook the books but its highly unlikely that Romney has any notion of how, or any will to deliver or even restore wealth to the entire country.  He didn’t do it for Massachusetts (where I think  the gulf between the rich and poor increased exponentially  under Romney’s governorship) so one wonders why the faith in his disposition to do so nationally?

I do believe that our awareness, consciousness and attention as to the texture of  our respective national cultures might offer us some spiritual liberty and the impetus to have a conversation with each other about what our special Mormon brand of Christianity means in practical terms. Perhaps we would be actively working to construct the ideal faith community, our Zion,  instead of conflating things like the material benefits of upper middle-class incomes with the blessings of personal religious observance.

Perhaps we could freely answer the question as to why Mormons in the US are largely Republican, and be at liberty to have a decent chat about it in a Pleasant Grove Sunday School without folks getting white knuckled and watery eyed.

We might be able to wonder out loud in our sacrament talks about the efficacy of supporting what looks to be a tendency for the US to get involved in illicit and wasteful military campaigns across the world, and we’d allow the words of Mormon to inform our thinking as we pondered what it meant to:

…delight no more in the shedding of blood.

We might be able to openly consider the state of health care and social services in our respective countries and in discussion with each other we might speculate as to whether or not Alma was talking to our generation when he asks:

…will you persist in turning your backs upon the poor and the needy, and in withholding your substance from them?

Perhaps Mormons might be able to deeply and seriously take to heart the injunction to have (as did an ancient faith community Mormons should be aware of):

…all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor, bond and free, but they were all made free, and partakers of the heavenly gift.

 

If we were a bit more awake to the tendency for our mortal political institutions to go spectacularly pear-shaped we’d bring a healthy skepticism to national leadership because we are aware that:

…we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

 

Perhaps we would be able to have a healthy retort for any politician who gauged the prosperity of a nation by  the NASDAQ  or the Trade Weighted Index by asking them them if:

…ye do love money, and your substance, and your fine apparel, and the adorning of your churches, more than ye love the poor and the needy, the sick and the afflicted?

 

I’m sure there will be the predictable Rush Limbaugh fans who will try to poke holes in my ‘oh so obviously socialist’ ideology.  But inasmuch as the Book of Mormon belt looks set to go Red in November and while there are small pockets of Mormons across the American continent and large pockets across the world  saying ‘hang on a cotton picking minute!  What’s that it says in my beloved scriptures??’  it would seem that we clearly have an ideological contest within our own ranks that some robust conversation could help us map.  But sadly this won’t happen – at least not in Utah – where it should happen.  Unfortunately we Mormons will be bullied along in a certain ‘cultural-political’ direction because there isn’t enough ‘raho’ (a Maori word –look it up) in the upper echelons to confront the possibility that treading the sacred territory of the right might upset donor revenue in the Basin.  And here in New Zealand that will matter in terms of our religious/churched experience as these dominant ideological trajectories reach out to us in Othered places and work to shape our spiritual identities.  America has been made to matter in non-American LDS places but it feels like an unwieldy beast, intransigent, bullish and utterly entitled.  So from my soap-box at the bottom of the world I have a hope beyond hope that one day we’ll get to a place where our spaces, regardless of our geography,  freely admits the kind of debate  that seeks to work out our discipleship in a world full of ‘isms’.  Where Mormons in the US are honored for being a people who manage the aggregation of their theology with the political terrain and are honest about the ripples it creates among their own across the world.

EPILOGUE

Just for fun and because few Mormon’s in New Zealand will never be vilified for not loving Mitt Romney and his straight teeth, I’m daring to play the lone down-under off-shore pundit.

Romney will be creamed in the Presidentials not because he’s a neo-liberal Mormon brat but because he can’t do Al Green, or slow jam the news, AND because he ain’t half as hot as Obama. And note this too, all you good ole boys who thought your wives to be the ideal sweet conservatives that you had married when she was 17, when you are out at work she’s on the internet getting all squiffy on that fine black man with his liquid eyes and his smart behind.

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May 12, 2012

Mormon Excommunication – Why it needs an Ecumenical Council

The three words, “Write a blog” have appeared in my diary consistently over the last few weeks bereft of a satisfying red line through it indicating its completion.  My life has taken a turn to the extraordinarily busy of late, but here I am on a Friday evening, finally with just enough time to contemplate the thorny question of excommunication!

I haven’t been excommunicated or even formally disciplined (thus far)  but I have a bee in my bonnet about it.   I have to admit that I was pleased when my adulterous ex was axed.  It seems churlish now but at the time, having him spiritually disbarred was a relief.  It’s not nice to have your husband blatantly banging his squeeze and then passing you the sacrament – but that was a long time ago and involved some seriously silly decisions on the part of local leaders.  While I do accept it as an important show of protection for those who have been left miserable by the impenitent, after some reflection I’ve decided that it bothers me intensely in the case of the heretic, and in a previous post I noted how it hangs over the aberrant like a meat cleaver. It intrudes by stealth, leeching away at ones heretical, radical and questioning inclinations like a tick.  Excommunication isn’t simply plank walking for thieves and the sexually aberrant, it’s a constant and noiseless threat to those who question, wonder and dream. 

Incidentally, I have yet to meet anyone who has been through a Church Disciplinary Council who has reported it to be the much touted ‘Court of Love’.  It’s a strange oxymoron that speaks more to a rhetorical device aimed at constituting formal religious discipline as an ecstasy rather than a correction.  In my conversations with those who have been through the process it’s not an ecstasy at all.  It can be brutal, capricious and sometimes downright mean.  I’m sure there are those who have emerged from these inquisitions humbled, reflective and at peace, but the notion of fronting up to a quorum of men with the expectation of full divulgence of ones moral or ideologically deviant transgressions seems somehow strangely absurd and antithetical to joyous transcendence.  Even the New Zealand Family Court (where only those utterly necessary to the case are present)  honours the delicate nature of ones most personal and tender of experiences with more aplomb than Church Disciplinary Councils  (which might include an assortment of suited blokes who have variously sailed in from their desks at the insurance office, or their tool boxes at the building site to pass an eternal judgment upon one’s soul).

Excommunication in the LDS church is a strange American frontier bricolage, partly constituted as a 19th century legacy from Joseph Smith’s habit of excommunicating and re-baptizing all in the same week; partly an institutional form appropriated from the threads of other religious traditions; and partly a way of working out and responding to spontaneously occurring challenges to local authority.   It has far too many of all kinds of religious discourses embedded into both its rationale and its execution and not enough care or thought into its management or its scope.  It is all axe to the tree and not enough law and governance.  There is too much judgment and not enough mercy, too many spiritual generalists and not enough religious specialists.

Mormon moral arbitration is a strange esoteric business involving more than the presentation and weighing of evidence.  A supernatural, metaphysical and discarnate subjectivity is deployed in church disciplines in order to reach the final determination of either guilt or innocence – with a heavy emphasis placed on the ‘damage to the church’ incurred upon one’s transgression.  Excommunication is a discursive practice in Mormonism that seems to make up its rules and declares its judgments as a matter of ‘intuition’, ‘revelation’ and ‘spiritual promptings’ which can be as subjective, variable, and as flawed as deciding what to have for dinner.  There is simply too little in the way of regulation, study, context and intellectual work around the practice of excommunication from the LDS church to render me satisfied with its efficacy.

So for good measure, and in case a Bishop or Stake President is reading this – here is a wee beginners glossary to help navigate some of the more thorny designations for the intellectual sinner:

Apostasy:  Formal disaffiliation or renunciation of a religion (we excommunicate for this)

Heresy: Opinion or doctrine at variance with the orthodox or accepted doctrine, especially of a church or religious system (there are no formal ‘instructions’ to excommunicate for this).

Blasphemy: Irreverance toward God or sacred symbols of a religion (we seem fine with this).

Inasmuch as we have borrowed this practice from the Catholics it might also be instructive to point out that at the Council of Trent, ending in 1563, decided jointly that excommunication carries with it its own social and spiritual evils  on account of the excessive and punitive use of the practice 500 years ago.  In this case it was agreed that:

“Although the sword of excommunication is the very sinews of ecclesiastical discipline, and very salutary for keeping the people to the observance of their duty, yet it is to be used with sobriety and great circumspection; seeing that experience teaches that if it be wielded rashly or for slight causes, it is more despised than feared, and works more evil than good.”

While there does appear to be a diminution in instances of excommunication  these days I still feel there is a mandate to review it and to reign it in as a practice with a huge question mark sitting over it – particularly with respect to who is entitled to censure, how this takes place, and upon what guidelines and edicts that censure occurs.  Without it, it remains something to be ‘despised’, a flea in the ear and in the case of some healthy heresy – it is an aggravating encumbrance!

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April 22, 2012

The Secret Life of Mormon Polygamy

Although controversial, in LDS circles there have been a few Mormon women I know who were utterly captivated by Big Love.  While it told us an outlandish story about a  clandestine fundamentalist polygamous underground playing happy families somewhere in The Valley it also outed polygamy as a modern possibility.  It was an intriguing narrative of how the domestic rhythms of this truly Mormon of Mormon stories might play out in contemporary Utah society.  Regardless of intrigues and politics, I was fascinated with the concept of a community of women raising children together in their modern 3 up and one downs, transporting them in their communal minivans to school, and planning sexual rotations with their husband/patriarchs.

For all of Big Love‘s ‘production’ and polygamy’s Utah locatedness, ‘the principle’  is actually alive and well in New Zealand.  Though somewhat distanced from us through both time and space, this eccentric, esoteric and idiosyncratic practice continues to be present in the conversations and anxieties  of some Mormon women down under.  Church pronouncements aside personal internal battles with polygamy are still a reality as we come of age.    While our patriarchs have sought to dismiss it as firmly situated in a bygone era, without an emphatic repudiation of polygamy as anything more than an aberrant theological innovation, Mormon women must still wrestle with its historical significance, its future possibilities, and its present substance.

Even though it has been removed as an official doctrine of the church, polygamy plays out as a continuing legacy of my religion’s past.  In the Red Tent, polygamy flirts around the periphery of our imagination, our conversations, and our fears.  Polygamy reveals herself to us in its disavowals and silences. It secludes itself in the hushed spaces of the ‘not said’ and in its muted way speaks to Mormon women more violently than it did in those autocratic pulpit utterances of the 19th century.  In those days there was a theology, a doctrine and an orthodoxy that vindicated the practice and made ‘the principle’ as salutary and saving as the call to gather to Zion.  Today she plays butterfly games with our imaginations, darting in and out of consciousness like a capricious acquaintance leaving some of us bereft of answers and weary of the eternal unknown.

There isn’t a Mormon woman I know well who hasn’t pondered deeply upon the subject of polygamy.  Polygamy presents herself to Mormon women as a theoretical decision with interminable practical consequences.

‘Would I live the practice if required as a symbol of my faith today?’

Clearly there are women who would.  My adopted mother traumatized my sister and I with her regular accounting of the potential of certain single women in the ward to be her future sisterwives, at least in the next life.  For her, polygamy was an opportunity to deepen her bonds of friendship with her close friends.

My mother-in-law is polygamous.  She is the second sealed wife of my husband’s step-father and while there has been little in the way of familial conversation as to functional exigencies incumbent upon my in-laws as to how they will manage their marital affairs heavenward, there is still a tacit acceptance of its efficacy as a blessed course to ensure an eternal attachment to a good man.

Further, there is still a resilient and prescient discourse suggesting the over abundance of righteous women in the next life, who – out of practical necessity, will be required to share husbands.  The idea of one woman with one man in the heavenly realm has been touted by some in the OMC (ordinary Mormon conversation) as the simple manifestation of a devilish egocentrism.

But then there are women like myself for whom the proposition of living polygamously will be met, in any event, with a resounding ‘NO’.  Furthermore, I resent deeply the infernal ambiguity that has been constituted in the failure of the AMC (apostolic Mormon conversation) to deal with the question of polygamy with clarity and lucidity.  On the one hand it is a prerequisite for salvation, on the other hand it’s an officially declared liability to the life of the church.  On the one hand it continues to be practiced upon the dead in temple ordinances, on the other hand it is an excommunicatable offense among the living.   

But more than the contemporaneous abstraction of polygamy I resent it’s liminal presence in my spiritual, emotional and domestic life.

  • I resent that it has given my husband permission to wonder.
  • I resent that though my husband says polygamy has no appeal and he doesn’t wish for it, I know that as a good Mormon boy he would be duty bound to consider it if a Mormon prophet told him it was a necessary sign of his religious commitment.
  • I resent that polygamy lingers in the bed with us as I imagine what it would be like to have his familiar body next to mine, warm with the smells, and excited by the moans of another woman (or more).
  • I resent that my desire for an exclusive intimacy could be theoretically compromised by the presence of another.
  • I resent that the desires and needs of my sex have historically been rendered subordinate to a domestic order dictated by the masculine priesthood.
  • I resent that the story of Mormon polygamy has been cut short by the voice of authority and that we women have been given little opportunity to heal from the vicissitudes of a practice that for many was egregiously difficult and heart-breaking.
  • I resent that even my afterlife, one that I am conditioned to look forward to as a place of rest, peace and healing, has been intruded upon by the scepter of polygamy which whispers to me, ‘perhaps not now, but certainly in the hereafter – if you are very good’.

When Big Love piloted we received an email from some friends to petition HBO to take it down as an offence to the LDS church, as if polygamy is something from which Mormons are innocent.   Of course we didn’t sign the petition.  It seemed a rather peculiar request.  In terms of modern Christian practice Mormonism is polygamy, and polygamy is Mormonism.  Until we women are finally given the decree nisi, polygamy will continue to shadow us, an unsolicited bedfellow nibbling surreptitiously away at us  and compromising our rise to full feminine spiritual stature.

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April 11, 2012

On coming home to my Mormon husband

In recent times I’ve usually been able to head overseas for work/research at least twice a year (its tough but someone has to do it).  It seems to have developed into a rhythm where I have a two week visit to the US and one shorter trip to Australia.  There’s enough of a pattern in my work trips that Nathan can predict my mood when I get home.  That super-maternal gene must have missed a beat with me because instead of heading down the ramp ahead of the pack in anticipation of reuniting with the whanau (family) I really struggle to fit back into domesticity with the kind of aplomb that seems to be a prerequisite for my gender.  Truth be told my family and I suffer for at least two days post-return as I cower from the noise, the demands, the aggravation and the relentless work of motherhood.

As the van pulls up to collect me from the airport, filled with eager and expectant faces, I have to rustle up any enthusiasm for the coming onslaught.  I suppose I’d rather be missed than not but its very difficult to feel excited about my reintroduction to children and domesticity, particularly after enjoying the quiet satisfaction of my recent independence and solitude.  For two weeks I’ve been able to concentrate on my work, my intellectual interests and hold adult conversations without the competing demands of a busy household.  In these two days following my return home I usually find myself in a fug that has me reassessing everything about my life, my priorities and my marriage, children, God, religion.  Even rugby doesn’t feel ‘true’.

At my lowest point on one of these returns, I’ve told Nathan that my mood was entirely his fault.  If he hadn’t felt compelled to proposition me with his very Mormon, ‘you’re the one God wants me to be with for eternity’ proposal I wouldn’t be in this state of emotional funk.

‘What you don’t understand is’, I explain to him, ‘I’m not actually like this in real life.  I’m not a bear with a sore head.  I’m happy and pleasant when I’m alone.  I actually feel joy, personal peace, and bliss.  That’s the authentic me.  Being a mother and inheriting the ‘homemaker’ designation is what makes me pissy and wound up – it doesn’t feel authentic.’

‘You’re such a pain in the arse’, he retorts.

‘Well you could have married someone less complicated.  Someone like the mother on Cheaper By the Dozen who suffers egregiously in familial absence.  Someone who looks up with contentment from her ‘Love is Spoken Here’ embroidery to check on the bubbling casserole that she has timed to finish when you walk in the door.  You could have married someone who anticipates the Mormon milestones with the same enthusiasm that you do – baptisms, confirmations, ordinations, missions, temple sealings.  (My latest contribution to a son’s baptism was to ask him why he doesn’t want to join the Anglicans – their services are shorter, the music is better, and the Priest’s sermons are usually fine scriptural expositions on a social justice theme).  She might have been a Mormon Mommy Blogger who share’s frosted cup cake recipes for FHE with her extensive online community.  (I find FHE tedious and have recently led a coup where all of the children voted me in as the preferred parent to conduct because ‘Dad takes too long and his lessons are boring’).  Your ideal wife could have been milder, more even tempered, and gentler with you, and the children.  She might have loved this Mormon life without question and lived it with absolute commitment.  In BKP’s estimation I fail on all fronts.  I’m a straight gay ally, I’m a working mother, I’m a scholar, and I’m a feminist.  I’m simply don’t feel suitable!  What the hell am I doing being a Mormon?’

And here’s the thing about this Mormon life of mine!  It’s filled with paradox and incongruity.  Because out of my greatest frustration also comes my greatest joy.  As one foot rushes for the door, one gentle hand holds me back. As one frowning and disapproving face beats me down from the podiums on high, another looks at me with infinite admiration and respect on the pillow next to mine. As yet another correlated lesson on sustaining the priesthood is slammed shut by me in frustration, tender hands are placed on my head and a blessing that offers genuine comfort is administered.  And as I consider my latest theoretical plan to do a bunk and forsake the shackles of domesticity, revelation comes to my flawed and imperfect Mormon husband and bursts through on his beloved words.  Words I’ve been familiar with for almost 20 years now.  Words that only one who has been touched by a divine presence has the power to utter.  Words that break through my self pity, self interest, and self involvement.  Words that drip with empathy, understanding, goodness and kindness.   Words that call me home.

Once again I steel myself against the barrage of short embodied testosterone and with confidence I am able to proclaim;  I’m a straight gay ally, I’m a scholar, I’m a working mother, I’m a feminist, I’m a Mormon mother AND I’m the wife of a good faithful Mormon man who loves me for those very things that seem to set me at odds with my religion.  And until I go away again, home, husband and children is where I’ll find my bliss.

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April 1, 2012

Why Jesus wants Mormon women to play rugby

I’m just a New Zealander.  I’m a South Seas outlier looking on at my big brother, the  US  and the way he figures out the game of life  and tries to take the winners proceedings.  And with my tiny voice at the bottom of the globe  I’d like to say something by way of observation about the way the big boys play.

I managed to catch a couple of sessions of the ‘Mormonism and the Internet’ conference held at UVU this week.   It was a very good conference including some excellent keynotes and panels.  One particular panel was intriguing.  It included John Dehlin who shared his findings from the ‘Why Mormon’s Leave’ survey, Scott Gordon from  Fair who talked about ‘The Role of Apologetics’, and a non-LDS emerging scholar, Rosemary Avance who discussed her research on ‘Mormon conversion and deconversion narratives’.  I love discourse analysis, so Rosemary’s work was fabulous.  However it was the interaction between John and Scott that had me riveted.

Those of us who know John’s work respect him as someone who has gathered people’s stories and has given them a remarkable forum for the voices of those people to be heard.  These include everyday Mormons’ stories of pain, anger and hurt in their relationship with the church, as well as their stories of faith, joy and conversion.  John’s rationale seems to be transparency.  ‘Let the stories be told and lets see what transpires in the telling, and let openness, frankness and honesty frame whatever might follow’.   John represents a growing cohort of Mormon post-structuralist, phenomenological existentialists who are bent on the deconstruction, critique, interrogation and testing of truth claims and the manner in which these truth claims ‘construct’ social identities.

Those of us who are familiar with the work of FairLDS and the  Maxwell Institute know their work in apologetics.   Mormon apologetics seems to have taken either a decidedly scientific evidentialist route, or have made historical and legal claims as to the efficacy of the Mormon theological position.  Mormon apologetics begins at the position of ‘truth’ and circles back around gathering ‘evidence’ on its way to its starting point.  ‘Let us accumulate evidence and use reason to confirm our hypothesis so that there will be no choice but to believe.’  Apologists are largely positivists, empiricists and rationalists who use reason to assert their metaphysical claims.

What we have in Mormonism presently is the classic discursive rupture captured so archetypically in the competing positions held by Scott and John.  These embattled religious subjectivities are reminiscent of the timeless philosophical debates between; The Cartesian man v the Lacanian Man;  The Enlightenment man v the Romantic man; The Modernist v. the Post-Modernist.

Yes, yes – I know this is all very big-headed and probably extraordinarily poor philosophy, but as I watched Lou Midgley characteristically attempt to beat down John Dehlin in the aftermath I was reminded of similar show downs between Stephen Colbert and Bill O’Reilly, or Michael Moore and Sean Hannity at UVU a couple of US elections ago.  I was also reminded of tangled buck antlers during rutting season in the deer park.  As Joanna Brookes and I mused detachedly on the scene as it played out before us, it all became very clear.  This was a boy’s game.  And although I am philosophically attached to John’s critical position I couldn’t help but feel an enormous surge of frustration that he has to play this game in an environment that is thick with insistence that someone has to win, that someone has to be ‘right’, or that a card needs to be trumped.  I’m not an essentialist, by any means; perhaps men have been constructed to be social as well as physical competitors?  Either way, this particular game was, and continues to be unremittingly, unreservedly, frustratingly and brutalizingly masculine.  And in the United States this binary is excessively amplified by the political and social context that draws unhelpful distinctions between villains and heroes, winners and losers, black and white, left and right, rights and wrongs, ins and outs, ups and downs, truths and errors.  Religion and politics in the US is Super Bowl Sunday on spiritual crack.

Speaking of sports, in New Zealand rugby is our national religion.  The first World Cup Rugby Competition was held in 1987 where the All Black’s won.  It would be 2011 before the All Blacks graced the winners podium again.  We have spent two decades in mourning having to watch defeat after defeat at the World Cup semi and grand finals.  Coaches have been fired, players criticized and dumped, and every rugby blooded New Zealander is the All Black’s unofficial team selector and strategist. However, in the background during a long period of this AB losing streak, the Black Ferns, New Zealand’s women’s rugby team, have been undefeated in back to back Women’s World Cup competitions and have, year in and year out, claimed 1st place in the IRB world rankings.

This team is an absolute machine.  They are a full throttle assault on any opposition, and have the capacity to literally decimate their assailants with an intuitive and graceful style of rugby unequaled on any pitch or in any game I have seen.  They don’t try to play like the men, they are part of the same code, honour the same rules, but they play like girls.  They are canny,  clever, resourceful,  confident, quick, insightful and instinctive.  They play as a team, not show ponies trying to impress the selectors and fans.  They aren’t playing for the attention of the boys, they are playing for the love of the game.  They aren’t entrenched in the mentality of the rugby club room or the who’s who in the organizational hierarchy.  They aren’t all over-salaried wanna-be All Black captains and coaches in waiting.  They are winners, who, in the age of corporatized, franchised, fat cat, big boys rugby, have played on, out of the shade of the grand stadium, and they have bested the boys.

Mormonism needs feminine and feminist players in order to keep the game at grass-roots. That I as a woman have found Christ’s message as other than the Anglo-normative,  Ameri-centric, post-Fordist, neo-liberal, chauvinistic, misogynistic, conservative, hyper-patriarchal,  hierarchical, aristocratic, religious market-driven, adversarial, colonial enterprise that seems to characterize this behemoth  as presently constituted, is not my fault and its not a characteristic of someone who is  spiritually truant– I just read the rule book closely as a good Mormon girl is supposed to.  If my sisters would pull their eyes away from the stallions for a moment and join the girls’ game in the back paddock, those blokes might one day look up and see the stadium emptied of fillies.  And they might even wander over to see the game as Jesus (a first five himself) intended it to be played?!

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March 29, 2012

The Widows on Temple Square

My friend Rachel and I spent a very pleasant couple of hours on Temple Square yesterday afternoon.  I took my promised trip to the COB, and despite trying to convince my quite delicious elder guides to let me through the  unmarked closed doors,  I was unable to break in and thrust myself upon the unsuspecting COBBERS with a demand to know their deepest secrets.  This was in part because of the excessive security that exists at the COB,  but also because it simply doesn’t seem like the decent thing to do to knock over sweet retirees in a bid to get to the inner sanctum.  However the  disappointment at my failure to infiltrate was muted by the discovery of a  most extraordinary feminine sub-culture who daily escort COB guests up and down the elevators and out onto the balconies  in their sturdy pantyhose, shoes and conservative Sunday best.  These are the widows on Temple Square.

Many of the volunteer ‘guest services’ Temple Square jobs are filled by retired men and women living in the Valley.  In the COB, the volunteer jobs seem to be largely taken up by widows who happily take  tourists up  to the balconies of the COB to get a birds eye of Salt Lake City and beyond.  However, more than the wonderful 25th floor views,  I was simply struck by stories of these women.  To many it  might seem wholly mundane, but I for one was enthralled as they told me about the antics of ancestors long dead,  husbands since passed, children long gone, and grandchildren and great-grandchildren  who at last count total well into 10s.   I asked one woman – a widow of 13 years:

Did you ever doubt this Mormon life of yours?  Did you ever want to run away from it?

She smilingly and knowingly replied:

Yes of course, over the years I’ve had that thought once or twice, but not seriously.  I’ve had a good life with a wonderful husband and beautiful children, that’s what I’d be giving up.

When I suggested she might like a toy boy or another masculine diversion she laughed out loud:

One husband was enough for me!  I’ve never had a desire for someone else.  Although it can be very lonely.  But I have purpose and I have hope and that’s all one can ask for at this stage in life  I suppose.

It might seem like an innocuous and facile  conversation but it came on the heals of stories of polygamous wives, poverty, dances beside the lake to the swing and tap of big bands, weekly children of record baptisms in the tabernacle, angry great aunts who left the church and became staunch Catholics, the burning of effigies by be-robed KKK Mormons on the front lawn of a newly married ‘mixed race’ couple, and laughter over the small burial plot for Brigham Young that simply wouldn’t have been able to accommodate his numerous marriage partners.  Her pantyhose and Sunday best belied a rich and interesting life and heritage which seemed worth paying attention to. And with that,  like my many Mormon mothers and sisters back in New Zealand, there was no affront in my obvious lack of orthodoxy, there was no question I couldn’t ask, there was no story that wasn’t worth being told, and (I suspect) there is no pain that wouldn’t be  understood.

And so it is with these widows.   Mormon to the bone they spend their twilight days in the quiet pursuit of something meaningful and find it in their dignified service to the Church and in the quiet pleasure of their families.  I love that my church brings me into proximity with such  good, kind, humorous, loving and decent women.  And so I salute  you, my  brilliant, wonderful, gracious Mormon mothers.  Notwithstanding the searing interrogation of Mormonism I am inclined to, I want it publicly acknowledged that there is a gentle dignity in aspects of  the Mormon life that is captured most beautifully in the lives of our women who make me feel proud to be a Mormon girl.

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March 21, 2012

The Church of what?

In October 2010, in a fit of pique with our increasingly banal church publications, I wrote the following  to The Ensign:

 

From: Gina Colvin
Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 2010 8:19 PM
To: Ensign
Subject: The Tabloidification of The Ensign

Please accept this feedback with the good grace that is intended.

I have long been a happy recipient of The Ensign.  However over the last ten years I have been sadly  underwhelmed by both its format and its content.  It appears now to be written in sound bites which work to engage its readers with more emotion than information.   Is there room in The Ensign to consider more complex, doctrinally engaging copy or will I have to rely on the Bloggernacle for something more robust?

For your information I have received similar unsolicited comments from numerous of my church acquaintances.

Regards
GMC

Today, 18 months later, I got the following, most surprising, reply:

Thank you. You have an excellent point that the Ensign is working to address.

Sincerely,

The Ensign Staff

While I’m thrilled that there is somebody actually out there receiving, thinking about, and responding to emails I can only imagine how many suggestions, letters of complaint, or queries The Ensign must receive to have taken this long to get back to me.    I’ve done some rudimentary arithmetic and have figured out that if it took 2 minutes to write this email (and I’m being pretty generous  here), based on an average working day of 7.5 hours, and one person alone responding to such feedback, taking  an average of 2 minutes to reply to each email,  I have calculated that they must get about 54,000 emails per year!!

I can only imagine the pressure The Ensign staff and other ‘Cobbers’  (church office employees) must be under to respond to a membership who, from all accounts seems to be assiduously concerned with petitioning, questioning, second guessing, providing suggestions for, and criticizing the machinations of the ‘Holy SLC’, (an affectionate play on the term the ‘Holy See’ – the Catholic seat of government).  A woman I know was a telephonist at the COB for a brief time and can confirm the huge volume of nuisance phone calls they receive from a disgruntled public.  I’ve heard that front line staff are issued a book which describes what to say in certain events.  Perhaps it looks like this:

Its, Sister … here.  I have a question for President Monson.

[Code Monson: page 3,  note 1]  Thank you for your call, please direct your query to your unit leader.

But I don’t want to talk to him, I want to talk to President Monson.

[Code Monson: page 3,  note 2] We encourage all queries to go to your unit leader in the first instance.

But this doesn’t concern my bishop, it concerns President Monson. He’s asked me to do something, I’m supposed to follow him,  but I just want a wee chat to figure out some specifics.

[Code Monson: page 3,  note 3]  Our apologies Sister… President Monson is unable to answer questions of a personal nature.  Please seek a response from your unit leader.  If you are unsuccessful in this instance then you should pursue the matter with your Stake President.

It’s a slick operation, the Holy SLC, the COB.  And it’s very difficult to find anything out about them without leaning on an insider to give you the skinny.  The ex-employees are the best people to tackle with questions.   If they are mid-career ex-employees chances are they’ll be peeved about something, and from my experience it doesn’t take much to winkle it out of them.

Despite the intriguing investigations of Daymon Smith, the inner machinations of the COB remain somewhat of an enigma.   In fact I still remain puzzled about the role, influence, and authority of the COB in ecclesiastical affairs because I have a sneaking suspicion that it isn’t insignificant.   Which leads me to ask the question   (which I won’t direct at President Monson because he’s clearly to busy for the riff raff ),   ‘Who is the church?’

In a previous post I posited that ‘we’ are the ‘Church’.  We are the body of Christ.  This would be the answer if we were to conduct a thorough scriptural exposition.  Through the blood of Christ he claims us through our offering of a broken heart and a contrite spirit.  We are his, a community of worshipers who have come together in the faith to work out our salvation and to build a people fit for the Kingdom of God on earth.

That’s all well and good in theory, but I’m puzzled by the Mormon usage of the term ‘The Church’  which has become something of a trope to refer to an entity that exists outside the collective members.  ‘The Church’ it would appear is an inscrutable body corporate who exercises a degree of control over us, to whom we have an obligation to align ourselves with, irrespective of our inability to entirely apprehend  ‘The Church’.   Enough has been said to me about ‘The Church’s’ position on this or that, the way things ought to be done in ‘The Church’, ‘Church Discipline’ etc. to feel reasonably assured that those who talk in this manner are referring to something apart from me, or us.  They are referring to an external force with coercive and disciplinary powers and functions whose ‘reality’ I need to be reminded of if I attempt to interrogate and question the ‘authorized’ version of ‘The Church’.

Take for instance last Sunday.  I was asked at the last minute to teach the Relief Society lesson. As this was a text conversation I said ‘yes’ before I found out that the lesson was ‘Sustaining our Leaders’.  I have no problem whatsoever with the notion of ‘sustaining’ our leaders – I’m entirely in favour of them doing a good job and will offer any advice they might seek from me to do so (said tongue in cheek).  I do however have a problem with the conflation of ideas such as obedience, deference, and conformity with the notion of ‘sustaining’.   I study ideological tyrannies for a living and feel very comfortable and at peace with resisting what can end up being deeply problematic social arrangements.

However,  I agreed to teach this lesson, beginning with an examination of  the holy writ in order to identify the desirable attributes of spiritual leaders.  We decided in the discussion that these are:

a) an acknowledgement of Christ as our head

b) an absence of spiritual hierarchy

c) humility

d) a service and servant orientation

e) an eschewal of dominion

f)  above all demonstrable charity with the primary role of the spiritual leader being that of one who directs us to seek out, know, love and serve Christ. 

Having arrived at a consensus, and having used the  canon as a basis for our continued discussion I then asked how the class understood ‘sustain’ in this context. It began well as we talked about being yoked to Christ and thereby to each other in the pursuit of a Zion community.  Then the predictable Mormon fascists began brandishing their books at me to remind me to look at the manual which states:

Those who oppose and find fault will not find joy in their opposition. Those who criticize and seek to destroy the influence of the leaders of the Church will suffer the result of their wrong-doing.6

 

How our previously engaging discussion about Christ was thrown into the ditch with some pointed remarks referring not obliquely to my own, errant, and un-cultural Mormon like practices I can’t quite pin point.   But I concluded the class with some disappointment that an opportunity for us to be thinking about Christ was displaced over wranglings about our disposition with respect to an expected deference to authority.  We could have talked about leadership and sustaining in the context of being first and foremost followers of Jesus Christ.  But we didn’t – at least not to my satisfaction.

But, once again, that  notion of the ‘Church’ and its concurrent discursive slippage into being popularly constituted as a coercive entity outside of the general membership has caused me to ask a number of questions:

If I would rather talk about and from the scriptures, than The Ensign, the Laurel’s manual, the ‘Teachings of the Prophet’ series, am I undermining Christ, the President of the Church,  the Correlation Committee, or the COB paid employees who had the primary responsibility of cobbling the lesson material together in the first place?

If I’m appalled at the hierarchies of power in the church that run through all of its institutional operations and creates boundaries, exclusions, silences and disavowals that protect those in the upper echelons of ecclesiastical authority and corporate power,  am I undermining Christ, the President of the Church, or the COB employees who have manufactured these corporate arrangements in the first place.

If I am disgusted by the access to no limit  no accountability credit cards to certain church leaders, first class travel, corporate sized ‘stipends’ for ecclesiastical leader’s, the payment of GA children’s tuition fees at BYU, special GA family seating at conference, special dinners, a hierarchized car fleet with Ghia models for those at the top, a building where power relations are reflected in the floor arrangements, am I undermining Christ, the President of the Church, or the COB who sanctions, arranges and physically directs tithe payer money to support these arrangements in the first place?

If I feel uneasy about the role of the PR department in their not insignificant ‘production’ of an ‘image’ of the church which discursively bleeds into how we are supposed to understand ourselves and our doctrine, does that compromise my relationship with Christ, the President of the church, or the COB who have saturated the message of Christ with feel gooders, photo ops with the ‘who’s who?’, emotionally charged sound bites, and woozy tear jerker music?

If I feel utterly saddened by the vilification of good, good people who love the LDS church profoundly but are censured when they seek to bring their ‘unauthorized’ and ‘uncorrelated’ voice to discussions about our faith because nobody at the COB has ‘Code Monson, page 3, note 4:  “Patch them through to the President, he loves to talk to the people as much as he is able”’ in their telephonist response manual, does that make me disloyal to Christ, to the President of the church, or the COB?

While I feel reasonably sure that there are those who will argue that Christ is the Prophet is the Church is the COB, I am emphatic about parting company with you here.  If you could provide me with a scriptural exposition on how each of the above are indeed each other, then I might reconsider my position.  In the meantime I will continue to disaggregate them. –I’ll devote my life to Christ,  I’ll listen attentively for the  Prophetic messages which leads me to Christ, but I’ll refuse to accept the role of the COB as anything but a spiritual liability who have entangled themselves, their B.Coms, and their grasping corporate, post-Fordist, neo-liberal ways  into  matters sublime and transformative.      Jesus didn’t put them there, tithe payers, and a passable CV did.

PS:  I’m off to SLC next week and plan to take tour of the COB.  If I can break through some doors I might just ask them myself!!

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