The Next Mormons by Jana Riess

Author:Jana Riess
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Social and Political Views among Current and Former Mormons

Natalie, a forty-year-old mother of four, knew she had what she refers to as “liberal political leanings” compared to her fellow Latter-day Saints, but she was a rule-following Mormon in just about every way: she had served a mission in Russia, graduated from BYU, and held regular scripture study and Family Home Evening with her husband and kids.1 She was active in the church, and stayed active even after she began to experience what she calls a faith crisis. Natalie started to feel uncomfortable in the temple endowment, where she realized that women were not given equal access to God without male mediation. And she noticed other ways the church did not seem to value women, including their professional contributions. She had decided to be a stay-at-home mom instead of pursuing a master’s degree, and now she regretted it—“absolutely, I felt it as a loss”—despite the deep love she feels for her kids. But it was politics that ultimately pushed her away from the church.

It was the fall of 2016, and Natalie, like many Americans, was closely following the presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. “The 2016 election was very hard for me,” she says. “I viewed it as an attack on Hillary Clinton as a woman, less than as a politician.” Then, in October 2016, a recorded interview surfaced in which Donald Trump boasted of trying to commit adultery with a married woman and of sexually assaulting women who refused his advances.2 Natalie was appalled. She was even more devastated when she logged on to social media and saw how many fellow Mormons were rallying around the GOP candidate anyway:

I went on my Facebook feed and watched active member after active member, male and female, defend his vile actions. I literally could not put on my garments after that. This church literally does not value the equality of women. They’re willing to sweep all this under the rug so that they can get him elected so they can ram their conservative agenda through regardless of the cost.

Suddenly, that night and at that moment, I could no longer separate all of the things I had put on a shelf about the temple and women. I saw the far-reaching effects of the second-class nature of women in the temple and how that had infected our Mormon culture to the point where they could ignore Trump’s comments and actions.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.