Katie Langston’s Sealed

One good reason to read about other people’s lives is to learn about their experiences that are different from our own. But another good reason is to learn about their experiences that are the same, because it makes us feel less alone. It is for this second reason that I most enjoyed Katie Langston’s memoir Sealed: An Unexpected Journey into the Heart of Grace.

I’ve blogged before about how I grew up a neurotic Mormon. I worried about being able to keep track of all my many sins so I could properly repent of them all. I worried about impending nuclear war that some people seemed to so gleefully anticipate. But where I was neurotic, Katie (sorry I’m going to be all uncouth and call her by her first name because I know her through the Mormon feminist groups) suffered from full-on scrupulosity, although it wasn’t until she was an adult that she was able to put a name to it. She was so worried as a child that she was sinning and not remembering that she began confessing to her parents about things she was quite sure she hadn’t done, but couldn’t be 100% certain, so it seemed safer to confess and accept punishment than risk letting a sin be forgotten. She writes about how, when she turned eight and the time came to be baptized, she hoped to put it off a little, figuring that if she only got one chance to wipe her slate clean, she shouldn’t be too hasty to rush in and use it up. Unfortunately, by bringing the scheduling question up with her father, she found that she had inadvertently accelerated the process. Although I never thought of this strategy as a kid, I had so much the same line of thinking about sin.

Similarly relating her experience back to mine, where I grew up with parents who were pretty strict about church teachings, hers leaned toward fundamentalism. She was homeschooled for years, to keep her mind safe from the wickedness of secular ideas. Her parents fell into the orbit of anti-government preppers, but fortunately, when some of the most radical among them asked her parents to go with them to Mexico and become polygamists, they declined, and the experience may have pushed them toward finally sending Katie to public school.

Over and over, I so much identified with her stress about her sins. She continued to struggle with scrupulosity while on her mission in Bulgaria. Here’s a passage that I think captures her dilemma perfectly:

The Questions showed no mercy. Every day, they threatened to overtake me with despair; every night, I lay in bed, weeping silently so as to prevent my companion from hearing. I read Book of Mormon passages where characters had profound born-again experiences and felt the Spirit was their guilt away. I wanted desperately to sense something similar. What was wrong with me, that God wouldn’t grant me an experience like that? I had never, for as long as I could remember, felt whole. I’d had moments—an hour or two here, a day or two there—but always The Questions returned, driving me to the brink of what was bearable, urging me to succumb to darkness.

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Joanna Brooks’s Mormonism and White Supremacy

I recently read (listened to, actually[1]) Joanna Brooks’s book Mormonism and White Supremacy. It was a fascinating book. She covers pieces of Church history with the priesthood/temple ban that I maybe knew the broad strokes of, but that I didn’t know any of the details of.

For example, she traces the reported recollections of men who were actually present at and in some cases participants in the ordination of black men like Elijah Abel in the early years of the Church. Two of them, Abraham Smoot and Zebedee Coltrin, had changed their tune by 1879, when they both told John Taylor in a meeting that Joseph Smith had always opposed the ordination of black men. Joseph F. Smith disagreed with them in 1879, but by 1908, he had come around to their point of view and reported that Joseph Smith had later declared Abel’s ordination “null and void.” Brooks hypothesizes that Joseph F. Smith’s change of heart might have been related to the recent death of Jane Manning James. She suggests that the presence of prominent black Mormons like James might have actually served as a brake for a while on such editing of recollections. In any case, I was fascinated to read this bit of connecting of dots as to how the Church went from ordaining black men at the beginning to deciding that no, in fact, black people were to be barred from both priesthood and the temple.

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Jana Riess’s The Next Mormons

Of all the discussions I read on the Bloggernacle, probably my favorite are the ones where people share their experience with the church. I love to hear about people’s experience with YW activities or missions or weird Sunday School classes. Church policies and doctrines and history can be interesting too, but it’s really the contemporary on the ground experience that fascinates me the most. Given this, I’m really the perfect target audience for Jana Riess’s book The Next Mormons.

The book was published in early 2019, which I know feels like about a decade ago in coronavirus time, and I know I’m slow in getting around to comment on it, and that if you’re reading this, it’s likely you’ve already read it. But I’ll continue just in case you haven’t. The heart of the book is a survey of American Mormons that Riess and Benjamin Knoll designed and had carried out in late 2016. They got responses from over 1,100 current Mormons and over 500 former Mormons. They asked a ton of interesting questions that Riess reports results on in the book. For example, they asked about personal beliefs and worship and spiritual practices, serving missions, temple worship, and family size, as well as more controversial issues like women’s ordination, the priesthood/temple ban, and the November policy. The subtitle of the book is “How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church,” so her focus is clearly on generational differences. But she also reports all kinds of interesting breakdowns by variables like gender, race, and current vs. former Mormon. Read More

Write What You Know, Know What You Write: A Review of Bradford Tice’s “Missionaries”

On my way out to Utah last week to attend my sister Melyngoch’s farewell and see her off on her mission to Sweden, my plane was delayed in Denver, and I violated the budget my husband and I agreed upon just hours before and bought the Atlantic’s summer fiction issue. (The Zelophehad family is not noted for the ability to delay gratification.) After a hilarious story by Marjorie Kemper about a priest who gets into massive debt trying to help his poverty-stricken parishioners entitled “Specific Gravity” and Tobias Wolff’s excellent “Bible,” I flipped to Bradford Tice’s rather tiresomely predictable story about Mormon missionaries. (Religion is clearly in the air, even among the secular MFA crowd.) Read More

A Movie Review and Some Thoughts on Communities

About a week ago I went to see the recently released documentary on The Dixie Chicks, Shut up and Sing! The movie was quite enjoyable, and much of the reason I enjoyed it was because it had a lot of good music. However, I think what I appreciated about the movie the most was that its messages emotionally resonated with me on a number of levels. Read More