Lesson 5

Title:  Finding Joy In Our Divine Potential

Objective: Each young woman will understand her divine potential and learn how to find joy in it.

Key Point: “The gospel guides and blesses our lives by helping us understand our divine roles and potential as women.”

Lesson 6

Title:  Finding Joy Now

Objective: Each class member will feel the joy of being a Latter-day Saint young woman.

Key Point: “Happiness does not depend on what happens outside of you but on what happens inside of you.” (Why such an ominous quote from Church President Harold B. Lee?)

Lesson 7

Title: Homemaking

Objective: Each young woman will better appreciate the joys that can come from homemaking. (This is easily the most scripted lesson of the group.)

Key Point: “Homemaking is one of the responsibilities we have been given. Heavenly Father wants all men and women to give their greatest priority to their homes, their spouses, and their families. Our families are part of our divine mission.” (Now we are starting to get the point of Lesson 6, right?)

Lesson 8

Title:  Attitudes About our Divine Roles

Objective: Each young woman will develop a positive attitude about her divine roles of wife and mother.

Key Point(s):

“Do not … make the mistake of being drawn off into secondary tasks which will cause the neglect of your eternal assignments such as giving birth to and rearing the spirit children of our Father in Heaven” (This is a warning from President Spencer W. Kimball.)

“The worldly view of women’s roles is false partly because it is selfcentered. It focuses so much on a woman’s rights to receive that it almost ignores her opportunities to give.”

“By cheerfully and enthusiastically supporting our husbands and by bearing, nurturing, and teaching righteous spirits, we can experience the greatest fulfillment.”

“A woman should never minimize the tremendous power of being a comfort and help to her husband. He may have need to be comforted and encouraged to perform his roles as husband, provider, leader, or teacher.”

“Young women should plan and prepare for marriage and the bearing and rearing of children. It is your divine right and the avenue to the greatest and most supreme happiness” (Another admonition of President Spencer W. Kimball.)

I think we find, in Lesson 8, the “divine potential” of young women in the LDS Church: “wife and mother“.  All of the lessons leading up to Lesson 8 are carefully crafted to prepare the young women to hear the difficult truth about their destiny within the Church, which is limited to finding and serving a husband, bearing children, and managing a household.

I don’t have a problem with a woman getting married, having children, and choosing to be a homemaker (from among a whole world of options).  I have a big problem with the tripartite “wife/mother/homemaker” option being the only valid one for a woman to choose.  Men in the LDS Church are not limited in this way–sure, they are expected to be husbands and fathers, but they are also allowed to freely choose a career outside the home, and their identity and purpose aren’t bound up in their biological functions.  As a result, young men in the Church do not need a group of manipulative lessons like the young women receive, prodding them into compliance with the Church’s expectations.

These expectations were recently illustrated very efficiently in a disturbing little story told in an April 2011 General Conference talk by Elder Quentin L. Cook (who apparently thinks it’s cute for a group of people to dig through and comment on the contents of somebody’s lost purse).  I will close out this post with his (incredibly condescending!) words:

When I was recently assigned to a conference in the Mission Viejo California Stake, I was touched by an account of their four-stake New Year’s Eve youth dance. Following the dance, a purse was found with no outside identification. I share with you part of what Sister Monica Sedgwick, the Young Women president in the Laguna Niguel stake, recorded: “We didn’t want to pry; this was someone’s personal stuff! So we gingerly opened it and grabbed the first thing that was on top—hopefully, it would identify her. It did, but in another way—it was a For the Strength of Youth pamphlet. Wow! This told us something about her. Then we reached in for the next item, a little notebook. Surely this would give us answers, but not the kind we were expecting. The first page was a list of favorite scriptures. There were five more pages of carefully written scriptures and personal notes.”

The sisters immediately wanted to meet this stalwart young woman. They returned to that purse to identify its owner. They pulled out some breath mints, soap, lotion, and a brush. I loved their comments: “Oh, good things come out of her mouth; she has clean and soft hands; and she takes care of herself.”

They eagerly awaited the next treasure. Out came a clever little homemade coin purse made from a cardboard juice carton, and there was some money in a zippered pocket. They exclaimed, “Ahh, she’s creative and prepared!” They felt like little children on Christmas morning. What they pulled out next surprised them even more: a recipe for Black Forest chocolate cake and a note to make the cake for a friend’s birthday. They almost screamed, “She’s a HOMEMAKER! Thoughtful and service minded.” Then, yes, finally some identification. The youth leaders said they felt greatly blessed “to observe the quiet example of a young lady living the gospel.”

This account illustrates the commitment of our young women to Church standards. It is also an example of caring, interested, dedicated Young Women leaders all over the world. They are incredible!

- Quentin L. Cook, LDS Women are Incredible!, April 2011 General Conference

-PWM

As an example of this, I will use Lesson No. 5 in the current YW Lesson Manual 1, titled ”Finding Joy in our Divine Potential“.  Here is the stated objective of Lesson 5:

OBJECTIVE:  Each young woman will understand her divine potential and learn how to find joy in it. (emphasis added)

Clearly, a young woman’s “divine potential” (whatever that happens to be) is not something she would be happy with naturally.  The Church recognizes that she needs to be persuaded and taught, from a young age, how she can adjust her thinking to eventually feel okay about it.  

What is this “divine potential”?  Amazingly, despite the clear lesson objective stating that each young woman will understand it by the end of the lesson, the “divine potential” is not actually explained or defined in the lesson materials.   The only way for a young woman to understand her divine potential is to draw inferences from whatever is presented to her during the course of the lesson.   Here are some clues from the manual:

PREPARATION:

1. Invite an exemplary sister (preferably one who has married in the temple and has a family), who has been approved by priesthood advisers, to speak to the young women about the joy of being a woman.

2. You may invite a grandmother, mother, and young married woman, who have been approved by priesthood advisers, to briefly express the joys of womanhood they are presently experiencing.

3. If it is possible and you wish to do so, prepare a copy of the message from the Young Women general presidency [comprised of four women appointed and supervised by the President of the Church] for each class member and guest.

(emphasis and bracketed explanation added)

Note that the messages above are supposed to be delivered by women (i) who are married in the temple and/or have children, and (ii) who have been specifically approved by the priesthood (i.e., male) leaders.  Apparently, in the Church’s view, the only people qualified to teach about the “divine potential” of young women are married mothers who say what the local male church leaders want them to say.  So perhaps it’s fair to infer that a young woman’s “divine potential” is related to being temple married, having children, and being approved by the priesthood.

The message from the Young Women general presidency referred to in Item 3 above provides clues about how to obtain this elusive “divine potential”:

Our Heavenly Father knows…you. He has confidence and faith that you will use these years of preparation in being an obedient child of God who can be molded and shaped for the special mission and destiny he would have you fill. Pray always, know your Savior Jesus Christ, study the scriptures, and think of specific ways you can apply the teachings in your life. Live to be worthy of the blessings of the priesthood, be happy, and walk tall with joy and thanksgiving in the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ. (emphasis added)

So, a young woman’s “divine potential” is achieved through learning how to be an obedient child of God who is molded and shaped for whatever purpose God would have her fill.  To do this she should obey the teachings of Jesus Christ and “be worthy of the blessings of the priesthood.”  Of course, in practice, all of these things (i.e., God’s special purposes, Christ’s teachings, and her personal worthiness) are delivered, interpreted, and judged within the Church by male priesthood authorities.  Thus, a young woman will be on the path to realizing her “divine potential” when she obeys and defers to the men of the Church and is joyful and thankful in doing so.

It is no wonder that finding joy in being a young woman in the Church is an acquired skill.  The confidence and will that she was born with must be broken (i.e., “molded and shaped”) somehow, so the men of the Church can take control.

And that’s the end of this lesson.  The concept of a young woman’s “divine potential” is not analyzed or explained, but the means of reaching it (obedience and subservience), and the results of reaching it (joy) are directly spoon-fed to the girls.  As a result, they may walk away from the lesson not really knowing their “divine potential”, but they certainly do know that the Church expects them to be submissive and happy.

Note that there is no similar lesson in the YM curriculum.

-PWM

You may have noticed that the names of these two organizations are not symmetrical. The boys’ organization is named after the priesthood–the power authority to act for God–bestowed upon the boys at that age in a religious ceremony that the whole family and friends in the congregation attend. The girls’ organization, on the other hand, has a generic name, because girls are bestowed with nothing of any spiritual or doctrinal substance at that age. There is no formal rite of passage for girls who turn 12, or 14, or 16 comparable to the advancement in the Aaronic Priesthood organization the boys experience at those ages.

Thus, there is a subtle (and sometimes not subtle) set of messages LDS boys and girls receive through personal experience in the Church, from at least the time they turn 12. Boys have authority in the Church hierarchy, and girls do not. Boys are natural leaders, and girls are not. Boys have clear evidence that God accepts them, and girls do not. Boys have a special connection to God, and girls do not. If a girl wants any of these things, she needs to marry a boy and get it vicariously through him.

These messages (and the psychological baggage they carry) form the focus, in one way or another, of much of the Young Women (YW) and Aaronic Priesthood (YM) programs’ respective curricula and activities. Some of the messages are countered and their effects mitigated (to an extent), while others are basically supported and reinforced. I will discuss this further in future posts.

-PWM

Mormon Woman Wondering asked:

Please help me understand how you…speak with your children, with integrity to your beliefs and with sensitivity to their need for something to hold onto in this world.

This is a tough question, particularly for somebody like me, with a spouse who is active in the Church, and who wants our kids to be active too. Obviously, my solution is a compromise, and could possibly have been different if she felt differently.  But I think this solution does take into account the potential need for kids to have something to hold onto as they develop their own worldview.

As background, I think it is useful to note that my wife and I share the opinion that childhood is a key time for a person to learn basic lessons about how the world works, and the older a person gets, the more costly those lessons will generally become (e.g., getting caught cheating on a test when you are eight years old is less costly than getting caught cheating on a final exam in college).  As parents, we have a chance to control, to a significant extent, the circumstances under which our children get their lessons, in order to best help them prepare for adulthood and the real world.  The issue my wife and I are dealing with, then, is deciding which circumstances are best for teaching our kids the lessons.

My wife believes that going to church is a good way for the kids to get some of those lessons, and at the age the kids are at right now (5-9 years old), I agree.  At this age, the church teaches kids simple lessons about gratitude, sharing with others, respect for other people, honesty, obedience, and other basic concepts that help them get along in society.  The fact that these lessons are often taught in the context of myths and legends about Joseph Smith, or characters in the Book of Mormon or Bible, is not that big of a deal to me.  I think children are well-equipped to learn through stories that are presented as true, whether they actually are or not.  It is not much different to me than using any other more conventional fairy tales to teach morality and ethics (i.e. Goldilocks and the Three Bears, or Santa Claus), so I have gone along with the process, limiting my input to questions meant to gauge their understanding of the lessons they learn in church.

I don’t go to church, and my kids notice that.  But just like times when they notice that Santa doesn’t being me very many presents, I refrain from completely leveling with them.  My response so far has been to say that I have graduated from church, just like I graduated from school.  I can say this with sincerity, because it is the truth, from my perspective.  It works as an answer for my kids and my wife, because, just like school, I am not giving them a reason to give her trouble about staying home.  They go and learn their lessons, just like their mom and I went when we were their age, and they will have a chance to “graduate” when they are old enough to make that decision.  We have stayed vague about the details of graduation.

Of course, as our kids get older, the focus of the lessons taught in the Church will gradually change from teaching them basic moral and ethical concepts to indoctrinating them into the LDS worldview (regarding gender roles, sexuality, sin, Truth, religious authority, non-LDS beliefs, etc.).  I do have serious concerns about that, but my wife and I haven’t formally developed a game plan for dealing with it yet.  I might write more about the issue in a future post.

-PWM

When I was 18 years old, I realized that I was mere months away from high school graduation, and that I was expected to follow through on my lifelong plan to go on a two-year mission for the LDS Church, during which time I would work to persuade people to join the Church. I decided that I should prepare for my mission by making an effort to learn more about the Church than I had learned in Sunday school and daily seminary classes.

I found a book on my dad’s bookshelf titled Indian Origins and the Book of Mormon. I thought that would be a great place for me to start supplementing my understanding, since the Book of Mormon–a key proselyting tool for LDS missionaries–is about the Semitic ancestors of the present-day Native Americans. I stood at the bookshelf thumbing through the book, and soon my excited curiosity turned to confusion, and then to alarm, as I realized that the author of the book was coming from the perspective that Joseph Smith had written the Book of Mormon himself, and that it wasn’t actually a literal history of the ancient American inhabitants merely discovered and translated by Joseph Smith. I was astonished that a scholarly book with that thesis could be published, since it seemed so mind-blowingly counter to all I had been taught about the “keystone of our religion”.

I immediately went and asked my dad about the book. Why did he have it? Did he believe its assertion that the Book of Mormon is not a product of divine intervention?

I know what you might be thinking. This is the part where my dad smiles at me and says “Congratulations son, you have just discovered one of the secrets we adults in the Church keep from the kids until they are ready to take the next step into adulthood. You are mature enough now to learn that there is actually no hard evidence substantiating Joseph Smith’s claims about the Book of Mormon–no ancient American artifacts pointing to the Semitic people described in the book, no proof that Joseph dug the plates out of the ground at the direction of an angel, and not even any evidence that Joseph Smith had the ability to translate ancient languages into English (in fact, he feigned that ability more than once, with disastrous results). Even if you aren’t convinced that the book is literally true, there are valuable lessons and principles in it that I hope have shaped your understanding of yourself and your culture, and have given you reference points for exploring and conceptualizing your newly-expanded world. I’m proud of you for autonomously reaching for knowledge beyond what you are spoon-fed, and I am certain that if you continue actively pursuing knowledge, you will reap great rewards throughout your life. Lets go grab dinner and celebrate. My treat.”

That’s not what happened. My dad seemed taken aback by my questions. He told me that he had read a lot of books contradicting the claims of Mormonism, but he had never read anything that overcame his feeling–his testimony–that the LDS Church is absolutely God’s one true church. My anxiety was assuaged to some extent just by the notion that my dad had faced down those competing theories about our religion, but was still convinced of its truth. I thought maybe I could still consider serving a mission, despite realizing that there was serious, reasoned (published) opposition to my worldview out there that I knew very little about. I wondered if, instead of engaging that opposition, I could simply pray to Heavenly Father and ask him to give me a testimony of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon, like my dad had.

I went to my room, closed the door, got down on my knees and prepared to pray for a long time. This wasn’t going to be easy. Anxiety and doubts kept coming over me in waves. I began the prayer, concentrating all of my energy on communicating with God. Then, suddenly, I couldn’t remember why I was praying. I knew that I had been very worked up and worried about something, but I just couldn’t remember what it was. The burden was gone; I felt free and light. I remember wiping the tears from my eyes and laughing out loud to myself about the whole crazy situation. I got in bed and went peacefully to sleep.

The next morning, I was able to remember the whole incident. I still had the same questions about the Book of Mormon, but they just didn’t seem as intense or important as before. I was a bit disappointed that I hadn’t had a stereotypical “Holy Ghost” feeling confirming the truth of the Book of Mormon, but then I remembered a passsage of scripture that seemed applicable. I opened Doctrine & Covenants 9:8-9:

8. But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right.

9. But if it be not right you shall have no such feelings, but you shall have a stupor of thought that shall cause you to forget the thing which is wrong…

I read that and realized that I had been looking for a verse 8 “bosom shall burn within you” feeling confirming that the Book of Mormon was true, but when I forgot my worry that the Book of Mormon might not be true, I was actually having a verse 9 “stupor of thought” causing me to “forget the thing that was wrong”. I was very pleased and relieved to realize that I had gotten the message from the Holy Ghost, and could say that I had a testimony that the Book of Mormon was true. Whatever books were out there denying that fact could wait until I completed my mission.

-PWM

Jack Mormons, despite having left the Church, continue to view the world essentially through the lens of Mormonism, and maintain the essential beliefs of the mainstream LDS Church. They are basically orthodox (i.e., correct in their religious beliefs), but they are not orthoprax (i.e., correct in their religious practices). Jack Mormons and mainstream members of the LDS Church get along pretty well, because Jack Mormons confirm and support LDS religious beliefs; their only problem is failing to obey the rules. They agree that they aren’t doing what they are “supposed” to do, and they can often be coaxed back into participation.

Apostates are a different story. Apostates and mainstream members of the LDS Church generally have a much harder time getting along, because Apostates are often neither orthodox nor orthoprax–they have knowingly discarded the essential LDS paradigm and beliefs, and that is why they do not obey the rules. The dynamic of the relationship is different from the relationship with Jack Mormons–it’s not merely about participating (”active”) vs. non-participating (”inactive”) Mormons, it’s about believing vs. non-believing Mormons. When believing Mormons engage Apostates, they come dangerously close to questioning their own beliefs, and becoming Apostates themselves. Not surprisingly, the LDS Church openly demonizes and belittles people it considers to be Apostates, and teaches that they are covenant-breaking servants of Satan (see, for example, this 2007 adult Sunday school lesson, titled “Beware the Bitter Fruits of Apostasy”, which was recently presented in LDS congregations worldwide).

Apostle Jeffrey R. Holland recently publicly belittled people who don’t believe in the literal historicity of the Book of Mormon. He called them “foolish”, “misled”, and “deceived”, and derided their attempts to explain the origins of the Book of Mormon in naturalistic terms as “pathetic”. He likened people who leave the Church for intellectual reasons to insects or vermin of some sort who have to “crawl over, or under, or around the Book of Mormon to make that exit.” Jeffrey R. Holland apparently likes to pontificate about the awful fates and consequences that await intellectual dissenters from the Church (and their children). I wrote more about that here.

Obviously, if you want to leave, but still maintain relatively positive contact and open relationships with members of LDS communities, it is easier to be a Jack Mormon than to be an Apostate.

-PWM