Last month before Melissa Inouye passed away she visited with Tamarra Kemsley. In the resulting article from the SLTrib, two things stick out to me.

First she shares that many folks who have lost trust in the leaders and the institution have come to her asking for help and her best advice is to rely on local experiences; that our strength is our community meetings and activities that bring different people together in circumstances to develop relationships that might never have occured otherwise and cause us to learn and grow and love and develop in community in ways God wants us to.

I have also worked the last few years to practice discipleship locally in Rexburg like this as my spirituality has felt more emotionally distant from SLC as time goes on. As opposed to her, I believe that overall, I’ve had a lot of negative experiences in my local practice. In fact, I’ve lived in 4 different states and worked in jobs outside of Mormon Valley, and by far I’ve been treated better by folks outside the church than I have been inside. Most of the negative experiences of rejection and persecution have come from my fellow saints, my neighbors, family, and friends. I don’t know if there’s something about tragedies like floods and cancer that help LDS members set aside their differences and just show up with goodness, but if the main thing about you is being liberal or queer or feminist, it feels like we’d rather have you shut your mouth or go away, please and thanks. So far, I’ve fought for my place at the table, this is as much my mormonism as it is theirs.

But looking back at my mix of positive and negative experiences in LDS wards some real doozies stick out (leaving out the widespread youth 90s experiences of purity and modesty culture we nearly all lived with) as a YW I was grilled inappropriately about sexual types of experiences. Including being asked if I participated in bestiality as a beehive and being told that any kind of “self abuse” is a sin second only in seriousness to murder. A large amount of women I grew up with in the 90s also experienced sexual abuse and molestation to which the families and leaders looked the other way.

    My experiences in Relief Society while infertile could be described as ostracizing and belittling at best. I’ve also sat in a RS lesson in a ward where I was the only woman who wore pants to church and the teacher spent 20 minutes of her lesson on the sin of women wearing pants to church. After bringing my concerns up with RS president, I was told they were surprised I took it so personally, because I was never mentioned by name. I’ve been in the middle of a comment in RS about how I have single and childless friends who don’t feel welcome when we define womanhood so narrowly as motherhood, when a sister I sat by put her hand in my face, interrupted me and told me I was spreading false doctrine and she wouldn’t stand for it.

    I stopped bringing Neylan McBaine’s women at church book to local leaders, or asking local leaders for relatively inocuous things (like mentioning in a bishopric training that women can speak last in church) because nearly every single one of those interactions I came away realizing how desperately far away LDS men are from getting “women’s issues.” They either try to impress me with how much they get it or lecture me for not being submissive to my local leaders enough, even if theyre wrong.

    I can only imagine if I were outwardly queer or not white, the comparitive mountains of negative experiences I’d have piling up.

    All of this reminds me: Inouye’s advice doesn’t work for many people. My theory I’ve developed and shared a few times over the years on twitter is that everyone has a net meter on their church experience. The folks for whom the church works with ease, their net meter is overflowingly positive and what bumps in the road or questions they do have are very easy to navigate. In my opinion, even moderate amounts of negativity can be navigated with Inouye’s advice. But as soon as we’re in somewhat serious negative territory? that clock starts ticking on how long they can last.

    For some folks who feel like leaving the church is leaving Christ, our one source of relief and solace? I beg you to have broader definitions of how Christ loves all of humanity. Sure folks aren’t going to have great and amazing lives by automatically leaving the church, but at least their source of their pain won’t be the thing that supposedly is supposed to bring relief and healing to their lives.