We are delighted to feature a guest post reflection from Mofem matriarch Bradamante.
Sometime in the mid-oughts, one of my grown children, who was undergoing a faith transition at the time, remarked to me that the Church I grew up in wasn’t the one he grew up in. He was certainly right about that, though I honestly hadn’t noticed this when he was actually growing up. I had, foolishly as it turns out, thought that it would be the birthright of all of my kids to experience the same optimistic and nurturing Mormon adolescent experience that I had been (as I realize now) unbelievably fortunate to have had. It had actually been one of the things I had looked forward to most when I anticipated my future family, back in the day: that the Church would nurture them as it had nurtured me. I had internalized the “it takes a village” idea long before Hillary Clinton came on the scene to articulate it, and I looked forward to raising my kids in that village.
Privilege. So often you don’t know you have it. Growing up in that uncorrelated Eden of the past,* I had no way of knowing how much things would change. Below I’m going to talk about several different categories of Thens and Nows – not always in chronological order. (*Slight ironical tone intended here. Things look more Edenic the farther away they get, of course.)
I was born in Southern California in 1951, and grew up in the San Fernando Valley, in a half-Mormon family that was several shades of Republican (from Eisenhower-ite to John Bircher). My closest friend at church came from a half-Canadian politically-liberal family, and most of my school friends (and Girl Scout friends; I was in a Mariner “ship”) came from Reform Jewish families who voted Democrat. There were a dozen or so girls in my age cohort at church and only one boy. My Young Women group was a mostly non-competitive, entirely inclusive homo-social tribe, very tolerant of thought diversity, in a ward that also tolerated it. (We had no opportunity for tolerance of ethnic diversity; a couple of us were mildly brownish of a European variety, but that was it.) We were rowdy in class, enjoyed being that way, and were not penalized for it; we were blessed with a perennial Sunday School teacher who was moved up with us for years and didn’t mind challenges. (“Let’s learn about the White Horse Prophecy!” we’d yell out, or something like it; and in those pre-Internet days Bro. Jessop would bust himself finding out whatever he could, and bring it back the next week. No question was off the table; that was part of the fun.) There was no sense of Forbidden Books: I read from No Man Knows My History at a Mutual party at the Girls Camp Director’s house, where it featured prominently on a bookshelf.
My MIA leaders and Girls Camp leaders taught me, by lessons and by subtle visible examples, that sharing an enthusiastic sex life with a bonded soul-mate was a lifelong delight, something well worth looking forward to. I don’t remember experiencing any horrible sex-ed object lessons myself, but perhaps my memory has mercifully edited them out, because they were definitely around, in my stake. (Geography and gender seem to have produced variations, since my husband, growing up in southwestern Idaho at exactly the same time, vividly remembers his Young Men cohort getting the “sex outside of marriage is next to murder” Corianton lesson. Repeatedly.)
The teenage me was fiercely proud of being a Mormon, proud of my pioneer ancestors, and proud of a strong intellectual tradition that taught me that the glory of God was intelligence; that eternal progression was in the script for me; that I should go and “seek out of the best books” learning of every kind; that other churches had truth in them, and I should respect that; and that the World Out There was (among other things) a great orchard of trees-of-knowledge just ripe for the picking. I was proud that the Church taught all of us how to speak from a pulpit and how to act on a stage and how to sing in a quartet and how to lash a latrine and how to bake bread. What sexism and male privilege that I could observe in the Church were also present in the world at large; you could get mad at them, but there didn’t seem to be much point to it, since that sector of “how things just are” didn’t look likely to change any time soon.
Later, in the Seventies, I would become a fairly classic Second Wave Feminist, mostly an optimistic one: since these issues and problems were coming so prominently into public discourse, it meant they would change (and in time for my children)! Living in D.C. at the end of the decade, I met and admired the Mormons for ERA and had a ringside seat for Sonia Johnson’s excommunication. For the first time, I felt anger — at the institutional Church itself, not just at individual fallible humans in it.
At BYU, I had learned to be proud of our great LDS intellectuals. I had had a freshman philosophy class from Truman Madsen that introduced me to the “foundations” books by Sterling McMurrin. Later I discovered Wayne Booth, Eugene England, Robert Rees, Juanita Brooks, Frances Menlove, Emma Lou Thayne, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Levi Peterson, Terry Tempest Williams, and the Eggertsen sisters (Virginia, Esther, Thelma and Algie [Google them!]) – and many other thinkers and activists, whose work still makes me near-burst with tribal pride.
There were a bunch of things that I was not taught at Church, growing up. But my kids were taught them.
I was not taught at Church that “obedience was the first law of heaven.” I have never owned a copy of McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine, which, as I understand, is the source text for this. Since 2000, the Web informs me, this quote has been the title of a chapter in an Institute manual, Doctrines of the Gospel. I had been actively discouraged by my half-Canadian Church friend from taking Mormon Doctrine and its ideas at all seriously. In fact when we were freshman roommates at BYU the two of us used to read through a roommate’s copy of it,* in search of the goofiest entries – “Face Cards,” “Gospel Hobbies,” and the like – and laugh at them. What would have been the point, to me then, of obedience being the first law of heaven? I had already concluded (and still maintain) that the takeaway from the Garden of Eden story was that Adam and Eve (paradoxically) had had to not obey for their story to proceed where God intended it to go. (*The other thing my roommate and I did for fun in this vein was read through the BYU Student Directory marking all the Mormon-Corridor names of that era: LaPriel, JaNae, LaVerd, LaBruce. There was even a LaRalph. There was a wide gulf between us Californians and the Idahoans and Utahns we went to class with, and we were not always charitable.)
I was not taught at Church to revere the General Authorities as prophets. (There was only one of those at a time, and mostly we called him President McKay, not The Prophet. [Joseph Smith was The Prophet.]) I liked General Conferences; I got a Beehive Honor Badge for taking notes at a bunch of them; but the leader-worship didn’t rub off on me, although it must have been around. This was a pre-Teleprompter era and I totally enjoyed the folksy unscripted style of speakers like Le Grand Richards. I thought there was a special General Authority accent. (I didn’t find out until I came to BYU in 1968 that it was just a Utah accent.)
There was a much tighter connection between the Church in those olden days and the outside world of philosophy, literature and poetry. We had General Authorities who had been English majors (Gordon B. Hinckley) and who routinely quoted from the 101 Famous Poems (David O. McKay and Spencer W. Kimball) and who wrote poetry of their own (S. Dilworth Young). We had roadshows and speech festivals. We had Relief Society lesson manuals that walked us through the Anglophone literary classics and took us on tours of the world. Poetry was routinely quoted from the pulpit in our wardhouses: Abou Ben Adhem, The Touch of the Master’s Hand, A Builder Builded a Temple. Even that entirely embarrassing pre-feminist book, Fascinating Womanhood by Mormon author Helen B. Andelin, could reliably assume that its readers would be familiar with the Dickens, Thackeray, and Victor Hugo novels from which it drew its examples. The father of one of my closest BYU student friends was a professor of Shakespeare whose family routinely went down to Cedar City for the festival. To hear them talk about it, it was clear that the bawdy jokes were part of the fun, and that the Utah culture of the time didn’t mind them at all.
That was then. Now it is different. Now we are prudes who are afraid of the potential delights that are housed in our bodies. We don’t want to know about philosophy or novels or poetry. Many of us state proudly that we don’t read fiction because there is nothing edifying in it. Our Sunday lessons and our children’s CES lessons come out of correlated manuals of astonishing blandness. In our Relief Society book groups, if we start or join one, we have to be very careful about the books we pick (no sex! no cussing!), because the culture of the world is potentially toxic and we are afraid of its contagion. Music still plays a prominent role in our families and wardhouses, but I suspect it is because it has no words and is therefore deemed to be safely content-free.
My undergrad major and my graduate work were both literature-based, and those choices were certainly partially driven by the literature-loving Church of my childhood, and partially by the family culture of my LDS half. Those LDS ancestors were Swiss, English and northern German. German was spoken in the house of my Papa and my Granny, and when I was sixteen my Granny gave me a German edition of Boccaccio’s Decameron with saucy Art Deco illustrations that had been Papa’s, because, as she said, I was the one who would appreciate it. I have also inherited Papa’s editions of Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson and his set of the Harvard Classics.
Science had also been a prominent part of my BYU experience. The science-for-poets class that I took in the BYU Honors Program when I was a freshman included an amazing geology (coed!) campout to Horseshoe Bend where we lay under the stars and indulged ourselves in wild speculative theology on the nature of the universe and its inhabitants. We were given copies, in that class, of both The Earth and Man (James E. Talmage) and Man: His Origin and Destiny (Joseph Fielding Smith) – in those funky old BYU-bookstore- pamphlet formats – so we could make up our own minds how we felt about evolution. Everyone that I talked to favored Talmage – which I think had been the intent of our professor (J. Duane Dudley) in the first place.
I had my first epiphany that the winds were drastically shifting – not just for individuals, but perhaps institutionally — in the late 80s, when our family was living in Michigan and the Relief Society teacher drew a dark vertical line down the blackboard and invited us to fill in Good Things the Church Offers Us on one side and Evil Things the World Has to Offer on the other. We were being encouraged, in a Church lesson, to actively fear the Gentile world and its wisdom. My first reaction was to think that this was a profoundly un-Mormon way to look at things. (Boyd K. Packer’s talk about the three enemies was still five or six years in the future.)
I didn’t say anything, sitting angry and confused in that room in the Williamston Ward circa 1988. (I did know that the teacher was dealing with wayward teenagers in her family, which might partially explain the way she was spinning her lesson.) I had no idea that this fierce us-and-them paradigm would become, within my lifetime, the default Mormon way to look at things; and that all three of my children would each, in their turn, be profoundly hurt by the same Church that had so warmly nurtured me. But that is, in fact, what happened.
The seismic shifts I’ve listed here have been well documented and explained as the natural consequences of institutional growth in books by O. Kendall White (Mormon Neo-Orthodoxy) and Armand Mauss (The Angel and the Beehive, et al) and in Greg Prince’s biography of David O. McKay and in Jackson Newell’s book of interviews with Sterling McMurrin. By contrast, what I’ve intended to do here is to provide one wistful, personal voice of how those shifts played out down on the real-people level.
As Disney’s Eeyore (though not Milne’s) so often says, Thanks for listenin’. And thanks to Galdralag for the invite.
by Bradamante
This is a delightful and kind of sad read, Bradamante: I would have loved to grow up in the Mormon church you describe, and I wish desperately that I had. I wonder what it would take to recover some of this sense of wonder and joy in our church observances– this idea, as you put it so well, that “the World Out There was (among other things) a great orchard of trees-of-knowledge just ripe for the picking.” This resonates so strongly with me, this sense that the world is just full of things to learn and discover and our short lives are hardly equal to the possibilities, but I’ve always felt like that was an attitude I was expected to check at the door of the meetinghouse. And the struggles I have now with the church might be easier to bear if I didn’t look all the way back down to my childhood and see, mostly, only struggles with the church.
Thanks so much for writing this for us. Also, “Bradamante” = A+++ for pick of blognym. 🙂
Thank you so much for sharing this with us, Bradamante.
Sometimes I feel, especially around Conference time when I look up at the sea of dark suits and ties, that our matriarchs are as silent and hidden as Heavenly Mother.
I don’t think it’s intentional. I’d like to think it’s a fully unintended byproduct of correlation; that it was simply an unforeseen inevitability that, as the Church streamlined its image and presentation and absorbed the control and direction of the Relief Society into a monolithic male-run organization, the public presence and voice of women became less accessible. Looking back into Church history it’s clear that in its earlier days the Relief Society was very robust; a public force to be reckoned with alongside the priesthood organization. Now, though, the broader body of the Church hears far less from our matriarchs, and I worry that people may think that our token female leadership presence is how it’s supposed to be by some kind of grand design. I hope that someday we can easily hear from a significant plurality of wise female voices in the same way that we hear a variety of perspectives from respected men. Perhaps this is part of what Russell Nelson was expressing a few days ago — I hope so. So, in our age of scant female presence on the world stage, thank you for giving us some of your thoughts on our small stage.
Even though I’m a male 3 years younger than you, almost everything you write about was my experience too, from SoCal LDS growing up to BYU’s early 70s optimism and outreach to the world. Thanks for putting into words the shift I’ve seen in my church in my lifetime. I would only add two things.
The primary songs of my childhood spoke of the beauty of the earth and God’s creation and about the fun things in life. Primary songs today seem to beat the children over the head with their humorless didacticism and morose messages of doom.
The temple experience of my youth was always one of doing a service to those who couldn’t do it for themselves, of being saviors on Mt. Zion. The temple experience today is usually promoted as a way to get personal blessings.
KLC: I _totally_ agree about the Primary songs! I sat in Primary about ten years ago and watched an amiable music lady try (in vain) to get the room excited about singing about keeping “my body pure and habit-free”. I almost laughed out loud but it was too sad 🙁
There was a good Primary song book in the Seventies — not the turquoise “The Children Sing” of our youth, but the orange one (“Sing With Me,” 1969, the Web tells me) — and it had things like Emily Dickinson’s “I Never Saw a Moor” in it, with a beautiful minor-key tune. But this new one is dismal dismal dismal. It’s like some festival soundtrack from the former East Germany.
Melyngoch — I’m glad you like my nom de blog! I have always liked yours 🙂 I am sorry that you young folks have experienced a Church/World gulf. I have realized that my youth corresponded with a kind of honeymoon between the Church and the greater American culture. We had a popular pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in 1964 and the King Family was on TV and _everybody_ of every kind of religion tuned in on Sunday mornings to hear Music and the Spoken Word with Richard L. Evans and the MoTabs. I thought that happy interface would last forever. I saw it start to crack (with good reason) in the Civil Rights era.
Galdralag, I hope as you do that women will be a louder presence in the Church that is to come. I just got Joanna Brooks’ Mormon feminism historical overview anthology in the mail, and it’s crafted and selected to be hopeful, and shows how _all the MoFems, of all the generations_ have contributed to the discussion, and to the changes we have all hoped for, in different ways. I love that insight so much.
Thank you for taking me home. This was the church and life I remember and I couldn’t figure out where it went, now you’ve shown me. Thank you very much. I think I may just try on vintage Mormonism for a while. You know, what’s old is new is a great adage to live by.
Wow, Bradamante, I loved reading your reflections on changes in the Church. I’m a couple of decades younger than you are, and I feel like I got just a whiff of what it was like before the dark times. Before the empire! No, seriously, I vaguely remember a time of road shows and happier primary songs (I share KLC’s concern here: ” It shouldn’t be hard to sit very still / And think about Jesus, his cross on the hill.” So now we make kids self-guilt for not being able to sit still? No. Just no.) but it has been difficult to separate out the causes of my disillusionment with the Church between my own aging and the Church changing. It’s so interesting (and sad!) to hear your perspective as someone who can see the changes clearly.
It’s intriguing to read about an experience of a more expansive Mormonism than the one I experienced growing up in Utah Valley in the 1980s, which by and large turned fearfully from the world. Thank you, Bradamante. (Great name!)
And I reflect on being 30 and finally feeling confident in the wisdom of the outside world to read 1984; bc when I was at Ricks College in 1999 a professor tried to make us all read it, and it made me feel uncomfortable, and I’d been taught that any uncomfortable feeling was the HG telling you to flee. So I dropped the class and changed my major to accounting. It was safer. Sigh
I loved this, I’m attempting to recreate this life on my own in my 30s. Thanks.
I am much younger than you, but still remember participating in road shows, and definitely knew about the more literary and generally more complex curriculum in church classes. The new materials are far easier to translate into dozens of languages and the supplementary materials are also available in many languages. I am very grateful we do not have annual road shows, with 3 teens at home, the practice schedule would be killer.
Maybe the solution to some of the issues would be to supplement lessons/talks with appropriate material in some form. This frequently happens in my ward, although we also get ward council members reading excerpts from a conference talk as a sacrament meeting sermon. Do not hate on everything, remember that you have more time to join the regular community book club.
I was raised in Australia, joining the Church with my parents in the late 60s and seeing them deal with leadership opportunities in “the mission field”. I think one of the major changes I feel is the change in enthusiasm for the Church itself. In the 70s members from our ward, 100 miles from the nearest Stake Center, would willingly wake at some unearthly hour in order to be there for a roadshow rehearsal 3 hours away. There was a sense of fun in the sacrifice. Before block meetings a number of ward members who came from too far away to go home between meetings would have picnics at the chapel or go to other members’ homes where our children became friends and parents got to know one another in an entirely different way.
Nowadays, I lament that all Church activity feels like “obligation”. We are weary of meetings, unwilling to invest more time than necessary after attending our 3 hour block and perhaps choir practice and then mutual during the week. In the 1980s while living in California, our ward would put on a fully staged play every two years – drama one time, musical the next. I went to Ricks when there were still church-wide dance festivals. All gone.
My Utah experience is filled with fondness for wonderful people in a great ward (I am blessed) but it’s all about getting to meetings and getting home as soon as possible. You don’t linger, you don’t really know your neighbour unless you’ve lived in the ward forever, or else are an inveterate busybody (guilty!) and try to get to know the people behind the callings.
Thank you for reminding me of some of the things I miss about the “good old days”.
Aussieexpat
While I appreciate much of what you’ve written here, I had a couple of comments.
First off, I’m not sure why we should take issue with the concept of obedience. As we know, from the 3rd Article of Faith, obedience is a necessary principle of salvation. I can see how overemphasis may have contributed to the current plague of GA worship, but I don’t fault Elder McConkie for pointing out it’s essential value.
As for bland Sunday School lessons, I’d say it might be best to just get outside of the Mormon Belt. I grew up in Mesa, AZ, where I definitely saw how rigid and lifeless talks and lessons could be. I have since moved to Ohio where I’ve lived in 2 wards that are much more alive than what I was used to out west. Here we commonly hear citations from Tolstoy, NPR, Rabbis, the Dalai Lama and others, and discussions in Sunday School and other meetings are very engaging and invigorating.
A somewhat crude analogy comes to mind: “Mormons can be like manure. Spread them around and they can do a lot of good, but pile them all together and they start to just stink.”
This is beautiful; thank you for sharing. I have never experienced the Church the way you described it. It sounds like the paradise to my current experience’s prison. I’ve found it really hard to stay Mormon in the last few years. I wish I could cling to that kinder, more open Mormonism that I have never experienced.
Bradamante, I grew up in the same era in northern CA and experienced a similar sense of creativity, intellectual curiosity etc. that you did. However, the one difference is that I was also, at the same time, very aware of the less positive aspects of church thinking that you articulate, both coming from the institution and from within the local culture. That’s probably because my very faithful and active and intellectually inclined parents were aware of those and talked about them. However, none of the young women I happily grew up with in my ward had that kind of awareness on their radar screen. I think most of my peers were not thinking about such things. We knew that one early morning seminary teacher was boring as heck, and another thought about things a lot, but that was about it.
I read Richard Poll’s 1967 seminal Dialogue article on Liahonas and Iron Rods as a young teen (that article was first a talk he gave in the stake I grew up in). So I grew up assuming that those two views of church and gospel were always part of the general church experience and have assumed as an adult that I will expect to find them wherever I have lived. And I have.
I am grateful for my parents’ honest and charitable (though sometimes a bit annoyed) discussions of the different approaches to gospel and church life among their fellow saints all those decades ago and their quiet work to foster those who understood things the way they did and respond with patient forbearance to those whose approaches were ones they thought really missed the mark.
So though I agree with much of what you have written, I don’t think that this is a development that did not exist when you and I were growing up. I think it’s always been part of church experience. We just become aware of it at different times in our lives. And the sooner we become aware of it, the more time we have in life to understand that it is just part of what happens when people are free to choose, and to learn how to feel undisturbed when not everyone we work with in our faith community gets it the way we do.
Yes, it would be sweet if everyone did get it. It would be sweet if all the people who made decisions got it. But that’s never going to happen in my lifetime. Learning, as an individual, to live peacefully with that fact and to continue to confidently teach and speak with love, without fear, and not needing validation from others is crucial for any faith community. Fortunately it gets easier as we get older.
I believe that one of the best things we old folks can do is to empower the next generation by modeling that understanding and quiet, charitable, unmoveable inner peace in the face of things we disagree with or perspectives we strongly feel are misguided. As a young adult I was impatient with the slowness of change and what I saw as the short-sighted perspective of others. As an older adult have come to understand church work as a venue for quietly and lovingly fostering vision and understanding as it develops in our fellows. And I also know that, because of just life, for others that understanding may not come until they are out of this world, but that God will eventually get through to them when they are ready. And, to my surprise, I have learned that when I am patient with that, that readiness happens sooner.
Hi MB! I might know who you are, if you grew up on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto 🙂 (Your parents were AMAZING. If that’s you.) Yes, I know those attitudes were around, but chose deliberately to hang with those who didn’t have them. Liahona types, as we called them then. (Loved Richard Poll.) At BYU there was a grapevine of sorts that helped students to choose the religion professors that fit their own personal styles (whichever ones they had). I was only blindsided once — Teachings of the Living Prophets, with Prof. W. B. _That_ really rubbed my nose in the Obedience narrative. It was quite instructive to me, and worth it as a growth experience.
Bradamante. Yes. That’s me. And I would agree, my parents were, and still are, in my opinion, remarkable. Feel free to email me and let me know who you are too. I would welcome connection with and news from you.
Bradamante,
I really enjoyed your reminiscences. I am two decades younger but I was raised in the liberal college town, Madison, WI where (I was told) one bishop in the late sixties or early seventies exhorted the ward to write letters to the 1st presidency asking that the priesthood and temple ban be lifted. Hard to imagine anything like that happening these days.
Anyway, I think many of my positive church experiences were also rooted in that kind of Mormon environment where intellectualism was embraced rather than demonized and the church culture was not derived from inbred majority Mormon homogeneity, but of necessity faced out towards the wider community in which we Mormons constituted but a small and peculiar minority. Many members were not from the west, and many of those who were had moved to Madison to stay, so there was not a sense that we were simply a temporary way station on the way back to Utah. I believe that these factors created a church experience that was embracing and empowering, where GA infallibility, modesty lectures, or creationism didn’t even seem to occur to us.
Then we moved to Utah in the 80s, which was also a lovely experience but that presaged my later church experiences that have become less positive as time goes on and that are heavily colored by conformity, infallibility, obedience, and fear of the Other.
I often long for my kids to have the same positive church experiences I had growing up, but your essay makes we wonder whether I’m longing for something that mostly doesn’t exist anymore. And it makes me sad.
This was so interesting (and insightful) to read. Thank you.
Bradamante –
I was born a decade later and grew up in the Midwest, but your memories are similar to mine. Diversity of thought was the norm among members who became well-acquainted outside of church through many fundraising projects. My dad was bishop and then stake president, a faithful man of science who guided conversations at home so we would learn to question what we read or heard and think for ourselves. My Danish mother was a staunch Democrat and very involved in local politics. No one batted an eye.
An early moment of concern–getting an issue of the Ensign (early to mid 80s?) and calling my dad–“The font size is bigger, the margins wider, and the language simplified. Nothing in it is challenging.” The Ensign had lost my interest.
During the past decade I have heard many comments from church members about the impossibility of gray areas in the gospel/life/choices. It’s white or black, God or Satan, in or out. My different viewpoints are often tolerated, but barely.
Bradamante,
Thanks for sharing your memories of the church I joined in 1970. It has been hard to remember during my recent years of faith crisis. Galdarag, thanks so very much for inviting B. to post.
Hi Lotte, I remember being alarmed when the _Improvement Era_ turned into the _Ensign_ (in 1970, Wikipedia tells me), because every page in the _Ensign_ that first year was like a motivational poster — big art and a tiny block of text. I wondered if it meant we were stressing the written word less (and flashy design more). The current _Ensign_ has more text, so I guess that’s good.
I’ve been thinking about this insightful essay since I read it earlier this week. I also grew up in the San Fernando Valley, as did my parents (wish we could play the name game! I’ll bet we have lots in common). I heard lots of stories while growing up in the 80’s about the way church used to be–the dance festivals and theater festivals and debating societies and extended ward vacations. I saw vestiges of some of these things (I think my stake still did a more elaborate roadshow production than many others in the church were doing, and girls camp was much more rogue than what goes on these days), but as you point out, the experience was very different for my generation.
And I’ve been thinking all week about how that’s influenced the way I feel about the church versus how my parents and their siblings felt about it. I think for my parents’ generation, church felt more like a family, and for me, it’s felt more like an institution. In a family there’s a whole lot less us vs. them, a whole lot less boundary maintenance, a whole lot more tolerance for someone who believes a little differently. I marvel sometimes at how much affection my mother and her siblings had for the church–even her siblings who were not active relished their memories, spoke in such loving terms. My own affection is tinged with ample frustration, and as I’ve stopped attending, I’ve been disappointed to find that I hardly miss it.
Thanks for your insights, Bradamante.
I really enjoyed this look back. These last vestiges were on the way out when I joined many years ago. Initially I felt like I was part of a family and I was happy to follow its rules. Now I feel I am part of some sort of mega corp and our feelings and beliefs are being broken against handbooks and trounced by talks. I have a gathering theory that we seemed to have been influenced by some homegrown Mormon versions of McCarthyism with all the paranoia, negativity, and nosiness. My own research has revealed that the cultural shifts within the church coincided with social change outside of it. It seems to be a knee jerk patriarchal fear of social change.
I really appreciated the OP. I have never tasted the kind church you describe, Bradamante, but your writing here causes me to wish that I had.