Posted on 02/22/2008 7:11:29 AM PST by Alex Murphy
SALT LAKE CITY ---- Last fall, the head of the Mormon church's Relief Society delivered a treatise on motherhood that equated nurturing with keeping a tidy house. Women in poor countries who dress their daughters in clean, ironed dresses, the speaker said, honor a sacred covenant.
Julie B. Beck's exhortation at the church's General Conference that Mormon women strive to be "the best homemakers in the world" did not go unanswered. More than 250 women signed an online rebuttal.
The exchange illustrates that while the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is years removed from open hostilities over feminism, passions still run high over the role of women in a patriarchal church.
No one can profess to know how women's issues will be handled by the successor to church president Gordon B. Hinckley, who died Sunday at 97.
But few expect major changes along the lines of opening the Mormon priesthood -- an office granted only to Mormon men ---- to women.
But women could still emerge as stronger voices of the church.
"My feeling is that things are not going to change much, that the church is going to keep its very conservative positions on women's roles," said Margaret Toscano, a self-described feminist activist who was excommunicated in 2000 and teaches language and literature at the University of Utah.
Although the church did not reveal why Toscano was excommunicated, she argued a historical precedence for women in the priesthood. She also promoted the concept of a "Mother God," a deity who was described in an early Mormon poem as a consort to God in heaven.
Today, Mormon feminism thrives in a different form. A blog called Feminist Mormon Housewives, for instance, calls itself as "a safe place to be feminist and faithful" and offers the protection of anonymity.
Toscano said Beck's 1950s vision of motherhood astonished many Mormon women who believed the church, while not encouraging career women, had at least acknowledged women could work and still be good mothers.
Beck was not available for interviews, church officials said. Other LDS women came to Beck's defense, and pointed out that her talk also made clear that wives are "in equal partnership" with their husbands.
The agency which Beck heads, the Relief Society, is one of three Mormon offices open to women. Billed as one of the world's largest women's groups, with 5.5 million members, it provides spiritual instruction to women and aids needy families, among other things.
Mormon women are increasingly visible in worship, often called upon to give the major talk during sacramental meetings, said Jan Shipps, an emeritus professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.
"Women can't be bishops, they can't be pastors, but they're much more visible and much more a part of leadership of local congregations than they were 30 years ago," said Shipps, a non-Mormon scholar of the faith.
Kim Farah, an LDS spokeswoman, said in a statement that women play an integral role in the church, from preaching to teaching to "sitting in council" with male priesthood leaders about running congregations.
"However, we believe that great happiness comes from our work in the home and that, regardless of individual circumstances, women have perhaps the greatest influence for good when it comes to the family," Farah said. "Personally, this gives me great peace, joy and self-esteem."
In a 1996 interview with CBS' "60 Minutes," Hinckley said, "In this church the man neither walks ahead of his wife nor behind his wife but at her side. They are coequals in this life in a great enterprise."
Hinckley's likely successor, Thomas S. Monson, said in a speech last year that women should seek secular education ---- not to pursue careers, but because their husbands might fall ill or die.
"You may find yourself in the role of financial provider," Monson said. "Some of you already occupy that role. I urge you to pursue your education ---- if you are not already doing so or have not done so -- that you might be prepared to provide if circumstances necessitate such."
Claudia Bushman, a Mormon author who has studied women's issues, said there has been little progress giving Mormon women new opportunities in the church, although she envisions greater roles in representing the church in civic settings and working with other faith traditions.
"The church does repress women, but it really doesn't repress women as much as bring men forward," Bushman said. "From the time Mormons are children, boys get a lot more encouragement than girls because they are needed for leadership roles. Men need more encouragement, I think."
Obviously, not all those who have read the “Nicene Creed” or carry it around with them agree with the fact that God is one Power, 3 distinct personalities: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, a Triune God.
Believing anything different makes it into a polytheistic religion. And I worship One God: the eternal I AM.
You don’t know what integrity is.
Well, we believe they are three acting as one. In perfect unity.
And you also believe that god the father has a goddess wife with whom he created Jesus and Lucifer.
Hence the HUGE MACRO disparity between the Jesus, creature, you worship and the Jesus the Christ, without beginning and without end, Creator, I worship.
Oh yes I do. It just makes me sick to my stomach to think of some faithful Mormon woman going out of her way to visit you, not knowing how malicious you are, and that you are sneering at and maligning everything she believes in. How does your conscience let you continue to do that? Why don’t you just tell the Church how you really feel and have your name removed from the rolls? Or do you think you can do more damage by remaining nominally a Mormon? Kind of like “Catholics for a Free Choice?”
We believe that God the Father is the father of all our spiritual bodies, that’s true. (We’ve never had an official doctrine to my knowledge about a “mother in heaven,” but it makes sense.) But we also believe that before we had spiritual bodies, we will existed in some form. Sometimes it is referred to as intelligences, and that intelligences are co-eternal with God.
But that's not in Scripture, yet you take that as fact.
The closest thing that I know of in Scripture concerns God's knowledge and plan for those whom He would later create, not that they previously existed until creation but in His own mind:
"Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, 'Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I haw appointed you a prophet to the nations." (Jeremiah 1:5)
"For whom He foreknew He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the first-horn among many brethren." (Romans 8:29).
It’s in our additional scripture — modern day revelation — which I know you don’t believe, so I don’t expect you to accept it. I’m just telling you what we believe. I’m not debating.
What I don’t get is how you can dismiss/discard established Scriptures, which say not to add to or take away from Scriptures and so easily replace it with someone who claims what he’s added is “right,” even though it contradicts what was established Scripture.
And then you say, that’s okay because HE said established Scripture was found to be “wrong.”
So, according to that philosophy, EVERYTHING he says must be RIGHT.
But when what he’s said was proven wrong, he’s still right....because you believe he’s still right.
This lady, and she is younger than me by the way, knows exactly how I feel. She wants to share her message with me, and I let her.
That, my dear is integrity.
Did something in the message I posted spur you into such a tirade? What did I do or say that suggested you are free to impugn my integrity?
We don’t believe it does contradict scripture. We believe it illuminates the Bible. You must admit that the Bible is ambiguous on many points. Otherwise you wouldn’t have so many different Christian sects. Heck, the Bible is ambiguous on the nature of God. That’s why they had to have the Councils of Nicea.
So as far as belief in “established scripture,” the question has to be, “Whose interpretation of established scripture.”
It’s well established that the “don’t add anything” language in Revelations, just like the same language in Deuteronomy, refers to that book, itself. Many of the books of the New Testament were written after Revelations.
Sometimes I think we Mormons are the only ones who really do believe in the Bible. We are the only ones who believe that God still sends us prophets, just like in the Bible. I think it’s a whole lot easier to say you believe in prophets from a distance of thousands of years, than to say you still believe that God deals with us in the same way that he did in the Bible.
I believe it because I have asked for spiritual confirmation, and I have received it at various times, usually depending on my obedience to the commandments.
I also believe it because I know as a person who makes her living writing, that the Book of Mormon could not have been written by Joseph Smith. He was a barely literate farmboy who dicated the book in about two months, in one draft. But it is rich and complex, internally consistent, and full of details that have since been confirmed, but which he could not possibly have known about. In the last 20 years, the anti-Mormon seminar people have had to continually revise their talking points as evidence of the Book of Mormon has been discovered.
I also believe it because its fruits in my life have been unambiguously good.
But, I know I won’t convince you of anything. You just asked, so I told you.
Sometime when I’m at home where I have my great-grandfather’s autobiography handy, I’ll quote you some of it. He was a part-time Methodist preacher in South Africa who knew the Bible backwards and forward. He recognized Mormonism and Mormon doctrine as a fulfillment of the Bible. It helped him understand it better. He recognized it as the “restoration” of the church established by Christ, which he and his fellow Methodists believed was required. I think this particular doctrine of Protestantism has since been suppressed.
I repeat the question. If you don’t believe it — if you hate it as you have previously admitted that you do — why do you stay on the Church rolls? Integrity means that your actions and your beliefs are in sync with each other.
I also seriously doubt that your visiting teacher has seen some of the garbage that you post on FR, or has any real idea of how hard you work to hurt the church.
You actually don’t know if I am on the Church rolls or not.
I’m just assuming that you are since your ward is still sending you a visiting teacher. Why won’t you say whether you are?
Of course it doesn’t embarrass me. I did my visiting teaching last night and delivered the same message.
So have you done the right thing and had your name taken off the rolls?
Amen. From the time we are in Primary, we give talks and participate in meetings. I was taught when reading the Bible, Book of Mormon, etc that when the word ‘he’ was mentioned, I was to consider that applied to both sexes (in most cases.) It never bothered me. Plus I grew up in a home where my mother was valued. That example has always showed me that I can do anything.
My Bishop told me to tell you, “it’s none of your business.”
It’s killin ya, isn’t it? :-D
Are you a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints? If not, how are we still ‘second class citizens’ in the church? We’re not. We have different roles in life than men do. Not worse, not better, just different.
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