As you likely know by now, last week at Women’s Conference President Camille Johnson gave a talk in which she emphasized that “[t]he commandment for us to come down and for us to multiply and replenish the earth remains in force” and that “if women cease to bear and nurture children, this mortal experience ends.”  She described how in her own life it would have made sense to delay childbearing for financial or childbearing reasons, but she instead had her first baby one year after passing the bar and beginning her legal career.  Johnson did, however, work throughout that career.  

There have been a lot of reactions to this talk, and I’m not going to repeat them here.  They fall into several categories, such as: 

  • Appreciation that she talked about her professional life, seemingly giving women permission to pursue careers so long as motherhood is their primary focus;
  • Anger that she mentioned her experience without also acknowledging the fact that–at the time she was making these decisions–Church leaders quite explicitly discouraged women from working outside the home, and many of her peers listened to this counsel and now as older women harbor extreme regrets about having given up on educational and professional pursuits (many of whom have suffered financial difficulties as adults, particularly if they got divorced);
  • Anger that she does not seem to recognize that it was her privilege as a woman with financial resources, family support, and childcare that permitted her to balance have children relatively early in her career while maintaining a foothold in the professional world–a set of favorable circumstances that many women do not experience and who have endured extreme financial and/or personal distress when trying to do both kids and a career or education at a young age;
  • Appreciation that in telling her story about letting “God prevail” (Nelsonism alert), she reinforced that women are entitled to personal revelation about how to go about their lives and it’s OK if those lives look different from other people’s.  
  • Sadness about the many women who would love to, but have not been given the opportunity to be, mothers.  Although Johnson addressed this in her talk, telling people they’ll be able to fulfill their highest purpose after they die is not a great way to help something get through this life when their hopes have been disappointed.  

Those responses all resonate with me to an extent, but here I want to talk about something else that struck me:  that Johnson, like all other LDS Church leaders, focuses on the need for women to find answers about their most personal and difficult decisions from sources outside of themselves:  “the prophet, the scriptures, and the spirit.”  This struck me because, in the years I have been deconstructing my own faith and listening to stories of countless other women (and men), I’ve become convinced that this is one of the most pernicious and harmful teachings in the LDS Church–especially for women.  

First, I’m going to talk generally about the way Church teachings about how to find answers actually teach us to distrust ourselves and why that’s harmful.  Then I’m going to talk specifically about how teachings about women having children are particularly destructive in this regard.  

***

From the earliest age, we are taught that “the natural man is an enemy to God” and that, therefore, we cannot trust what the natural man wants.  Instead, we need to listen to outside sources–the prophet (who Johnson spends considerable time fawning over in her talk and claims that as a father of nine daughters, “understands [women]”) and the scriptures, for starters, and also the spirit as we “let God prevail”.  

Some might contend that the “spirit” can just be another word for “intuition”–for a while, that’s how I reformulated the “spirit” in my own thinking.  But I not longer see that as an apt comparison, and in my view even teachings that we can get individualized answers from “the spirit” are problematic. 

 Why?  

Well, first, because that concept removes ourselves from the equation:  good answers come from outside of ourselves, from some disembodied member of the Godhead that we must rely on to come to correct conclusions (and, by the way, if those conclusions contradict with what LDS leaders have said–ask again).  More on this in part two, but one of the interesting things about getting older and seeing many friends leave the Church is that we are all trying to figure out at age forty how to make decisions, how to actually listen to our bodies and to our intuition, how to develop our own set of values to guide our choices and actions, after spending a lifetime looking outside of us for guidance and suppressing what our own bodies and intuition were telling us.  (We are also learning how to buy normal human underwear, but I digress.)

For me personally, I can see how although in some respects it was a comfort to believe I could access answers from God about difficult decisions, in other respects it taught me not to trust myself or my own inklings and desires–particularly if those were inconsistent with what I was being told I should want and answers I should be receiving and how I should feel.    

I can’t really overstate how problematic this is, how many women I know who are having to do deep, difficult work to excavate the self that they buried underneath a heap of doctrine and dogma that they adopted as their own over the quiet objections of their own inner knowing.  The work of reclaiming personal autonomy is the work of our second half of life, and we mourn how deeply we buried ourselves for so long.  

And, second, this concept is problematic because it is LDS men who control the conditions by which the gift of the Holy Ghost is bestowed upon people and set conditions upon which it can be accessed once received.  Although we have some confusing teachings around the “spirit” and “the light of Christ” being available to everyone (otherwise, how could we expect investigators to get answers about whether the Church is True), we are very clear that there is something distinct about receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost, which we can only receive from a priesthood-holding man who acts as an intermediary between us and God.  Even more problematically, we are taught that the gift isn’t effective if we aren’t keeping rules set by LDS Church leaders–if we are impure.  

This is an excellent means of control, for sure–while I was always a good girl who followed all the rules, at times scrupulosity would set in and I would worry that I was not entitled to answers to prayers or revelation if anything in my life was amiss.  Where answers were not forthcoming, I anguished over whether there was some unresolved sin or indiscretion that was blocking me from accessing the Holy Ghost.  While I do think that living out of harmony with our own values and integrity might make it difficult for us to listen to ourselves for answers, that’s very different than anxiety and shame associated with thinking that if we stepped out of line–zap!  We’d make terrible decisions on our own. 

I was listening to a podcast from John Larsen once and he said something that stopped me in my tracks:  Religion takes what we already have and sells us back an inferior version. 

I believe that whole-heartedly.  Religion takes from us our most precious resource (our inner knowing, our intuition), and sells us back (literally, given that tithing is a prerequisite to worthiness to access the Holy Ghost, along with all the other requirements) an inferior version (a version that comes from outside rather than within and that will only give us correlated answers).  This is where I have a hard time thinking “live and let live” when it comes to Church.  Because I think there is true harm being done, true violence to our souls, by what appears to be a fairly innocuous and even inspiring teaching about how we can access a higher power (outside of ourselves) for guidance and help.

Everything you need you already have.  

***

Ok, having laid that groundwork, let me talk specifically about Church teachings that women’s highest, holiest calling is to mother children and the impact it had on me personally.

Mine is not a story about an ambitious woman who gave up educational or career aspirations to stay home with children and now in mid-life is suffering financial hardships (particularly if she finds herself divorced or widowed) or simply mourning the loss of an important part of herself that she never gave herself permission to explore or develop.  There are stories out there about that, and those are important, but they aren’t my story.  I didn’t have a choice but to work, and in hindsight although that was very difficult for me at the time, I’m beyond grateful that those circumstances saved me from Church teachings.     

I was born with professional ambitions.  I remember from the very earliest ages thinking about career options despite having literally zero examples of professional or working women in my own life.  In fact, the first career idea I can remember having, which must have been around kindergarten, was to be a garbage truck driver because I learned they made more money than teachers and it seemed pretty easy and garbage trucks were cool.  For much of elementary school, I wanted to be a “pediatric neurologist”, probably just because it sounded fancy and smart and I was an extremely bright and ambitious kid who worried that colleges might look at my grades in 6th grade in case of a tie between me and other candidates.  I worked my tail off all through elementary, middle, and high school; attended a competitive university and worked my tail off there, too; and graduated at the top of my class in law school with dozens of job offers.  

All through this time, I experienced significant anguish about why what I wanted for my life, what I couldn’t remember ever not wanting, did not line up with what Church leaders told me that God wanted for me.  I thought I was selfish or bad or just somehow wrong.  All through college and into law school, I was deeply afraid that I would be punished because of my choice to attend a non-BYU school and have educational and career ambitions.  Luckily, I did occasionally hear the refrain that I could get my own answers, but that seemed mostly followed up with an assurance that when the time came to have kids that was indeed what I would want to do.  And it didn’t make the fears that my ambitions & work towards those ambitions would disqualify me from marriage or motherhood.  (And for real, in some sense they did–I was not exactly getting asked out a lot, not too many LDS men I came across were interested in dating someone smarter or more successful than them.)    

But I had a trump card, a secret tool that I imagine most women did not: my patriarchal blessing expressly told me to get a good education so that I could support myself for a time and help support my own family later on.  I spent many, many hours poring over that when I doubted myself.  Why that patriarch said that I do not know–although I no longer see something like a patriarchal blessing the way I did at the time, I still think that anyone who is trying to help someone else, to channel God’s love, can be inspired.  So I don’t know.  I guess the guy was inspired.  I honestly don’t know how I would have felt or what I would have done if I hadn’t had that couple of sentences in my blessing.  And I can’t imagine a lot of women my age had the same resource.  

While I’m grateful for that, in hindsight I still find it problematic because I still was not learning to trust myself.  I trusted a patriarch who had never met me until moments before giving me that blessing to know what was best for me more than I trusted myself.  And, I was constantly praying and seeking answers and revelation to confirm my path.  Again, there’s nothing wrong with praying and meditating and seeking, but it is problematic to bury our own feelings, our own desires, in search of what something external to us tells us.  

I even remember one time some old man in the temple, who I don’t know, saw that I was pregnant and said that I would bring “many more sons into the world.”  And here’s the crazy thing.  I didn’t think he was crazy, or inappropriate.  I actually believed–in the context of where this occurred–that maybe he was actually speaking for God when he said that.  Like God would tell some rando who I had never met before what he had in store for me, instead of telling, umm, me.    

Skipping ahead, I graduated during an economic downturn and job opportunities were limited.  This meant I didn’t have a choice but to work–or, I guess, have no money or healthcare insurance to care for my family.  Even then, I still felt a tremendous amount of guilt for working, felt like maybe we’d done something wrong to land ourselves in a situation that was “contrary” to what God wanted us to be doing.  Any concern with a kid I blamed on myself for working.  I was not particularly invested in my career–I liked what I did, and I did a good job because that’s my nature, but it took me a long time before I started thinking more long-term and strategically about my career because for many years I hoped to be able to quit around the corner.  

Eventually, my confidence in my career grew, and my deference to Church leaders when it came to personal matters (or any other matters) decreased.  That’s a longer story for another day, but I will say that reclaiming personal autonomy and learning to listen to and trust myself has been a huge amount of work over the last several years–and it’s work that many women I know are also doing. 

***

What’s ironic about all of this is that–newsflash–women don’t need Church leaders to tell them to have families.  

I’ve spent much of my educational & professional life in a primarily non-LDS context.  And guess what.  Women at my prestigious undergraduate university were trying to think about career paths that would be family-friendly.  Women at my law firm made sacrifices to spend more time with their kids / be the lead parent–whether that was taking time off, stepping back completely, or taking on a reduced schedule.  My two closest law firm friends, not LDS, had three and four kids respectively, and worked many years on a reduced schedule so that they could be the lead parent where they had a husband who traveled a lot / worked crazier hours.  We talked about being good moms all the time.  No religious organization had to tell us we should think that was important.   

So what does this pressure from Church leaders do?  As in my experience, it just adds guilt and shame and confusion to what is already a difficult decision for women. For many, it fills them with regret years later when they realize they didn’t really get to make a choice (which is much worse than making a tough choice and living with it).

It adds nothing helpful.  Nada.  Zilch.  It fills women with self-doubt and self-distrust if the thing that they want in their heart of hearts is apparently contrary to the thing they’ve been told God wants for them.  It fills them with fears that if their marriages don’t work out or children aren’t perfect, it was their fault for working.  

This issue, and so many in the Church, comes down to a very simple and unfortunate reality:  Church leaders do not trust women to make their own decisions.  Church leaders do not trust women to know what is best for their families and themselves.  And women growing up in this environment learn not to trust themselves, either, if their own yearnings aren’t sufficiently correlated.

***
I spent a lot of years trying to be the “example” to LDS women that I always wished I had–mother, professional, progressive, still faithful.  That’s a lot of pressure.  I don’t put a ton of pressure on my self to be any kind of “example” any more–or at least, not to make decisions based on that–but if I could be any kind of example now, it would be to show and tell women this:

You are in charge of yourself.  Nobody–NOBODY–knows better than you what’s right for you and your family.  Stop seeking validation from Church leaders and neighbors and family and friends.  It will never be enough.  The only thing that will ever be enough is to learn that everything you have or need to be whole and to make decisions is right there inside of you and it has been all along.

***

I recently spent time with some non-LDS friends who knew me well when I was very orthodox.  When I shared with them that I am no longer very orthodox and my Church participation is fairly limited, they asked, “What’s been the best part?”

I said:

“Not needing to fit every idea I come across or thought I have into a box that somebody else defined.  Not needing to filter everything through a Church lens.  Just being open to ideas, the world, other people, and taking them as they are. 

Belonging to myself.   

Oh, and wearing normal underwear.”