And the Mormon Moment grabs the spotlight again- with Pantspocalypse!<\/p>\n
A nutshell attempt: Mormon feminist Stephanie Lauritzen vents<\/a> online about the slow, tip-toeing steps Mormon Feminism has tried to take towards gender equality over the past decades. She urges women to \u201cstop playing nice\u201d and model American suffragists by \u201cstarting a revolution\u201d of civil disobedience to effect (mostly) cultural and policy-related changes<\/a>. She and other women form the group All Enlisted, whose first move is to unite all LDS women and feminists by wearing pants to church services on Sunday. Complication and confusion ensue from a symbol that highlights the ambiguous line between culture and doctrine. Officially, <\/em>pants are not prohibited<\/a>; culturally, many (but not all) Mormons<\/a> feel that they are taboo, either because they disrespect God as insufficiently formal, or because they blur the sensitive and heavily guarded line of gender differentiation. The group chooses pants as a \u201clegal\u201d but slightly edgy group-identification that will \u201cchallenge<\/a> a gendered custom so as to become visible as Mormon feminists to each other and our wards.\u201d The particulars over pants and the angst over gender issues explode all over Facebook and blogs in a shocking array of emotional intensity from jubilation to hostility.<\/p>\n So\u2013 is it about the pants? Or isn\u2019t it??<\/p>\n Well, I\u2019ll leave you to your blog-scanning skills to draw your own conclusions. As much as I would love to plunge into questions about dissent and protest in a spiritually egalitarian but hierarchically ordered (and surprisingly diverse) faith community\u2014or about Mormonism\u2019s ongoing angst with gender differentiation and equality and ambiguity in general\u2014or that messy and hopeless sifting process of \u201cpolicy,\u201d \u201cdoctrine,\u201d and \u201cculture\u201d\u2014many posts elsewhere have addressed those topics. In any case, my opinion is rather irrelevant to where I want to take this issue in this post.<\/p>\n It seems that active Mormon feminists face limited options: 1) Be true to your ideals and values and shake this place up until it falls into line with them, at the risk of tearing fragile community bonds and being misunderstood or marginalized. 2) Be \u201cfaithful\u201d (i.e. accepting) and bear the discomfort, anger, or spiritual pain in the assurance that positive changes will come on a divine timetable, through divinely appointed means (i.e. \u2018legal\u2019 revelation). 3) Be creative, via a middle way<\/a> of working incremental changes within the existing structure. \u00a0(It can be argued that Pantspocalypse was intended to fit within this third approach, though clearly it was not understood that way).<\/p>\n I want to suggest that there might be another option worth considering (and one as difficult to accurately condense as the previous ones, so bear with me here):<\/p>\n 4) Lower Your Expectations.<\/p>\n No, I don\u2019t mean resignation. I\u2019m suggesting we might be expecting the Church to do things that it isn\u2019t intended to do.<\/p>\n First, an analog most Mormon feminists, intellectuals, etc. are familiar with. One of the best things that members can do who are struggling with blatantly racist, misogynist, or confusing things that leaders in the past have said, is to accept the bar<\/a> that God has been trying to set for the Church and its leaders from the beginning, from Moses to Joseph Smith and beyond: To \u201cproclaim the gospel\u2026by the weak<\/em> and the simple\u2026in their weakness<\/em>, after the manner of their language.\u201d (That revelation continues to explain that his servants\u2019 errors<\/em> will be made known, their lack of wisdom<\/em>, instructed; their sins<\/em>, chastened; their humility<\/em>, met with knowledge \u201cfrom time to time<\/em>.\u201d <\/strong>Just in case there is any confusion about prophetic infallibility or omniscience: it doesn\u2019t exist. Quite intentionally.)<\/p>\n So what do we learn to do? \u00a0We reorient our expectations<\/strong>. We don\u2019t expect a Jesus Christ out of a prophet, let alone our bishop. We don\u2019t look to leaders and authorities for what we should think about local civic matters, or whether to be vegan, or for the perfect Sunday dress code. We look to them as a channel of revelation, from whom God\u2019s word will come\u2014but not from whom every word is God\u2019s. \u00a0We expect them to err, stumble, and learn, like we do; but we know where to look for God\u2019s official word for when it does come\u2014from<\/em> time to time.<\/em><\/p>\n Another example: I once vented (as many have\u2014prophets<\/a>, too) about the lack of Mormon Miltons, Shakespeares, and Beethovens. Why, in the Church we believe to be restored from God, was there such an embarrassingly, achingly huge dearth of beauty? How are we to worship \u201cin the beauty of holiness\u201d if the only beauty Mormonism has is a temple the lucky ones in proximity can visit, and occasionally likeable MoTab hits?<\/p>\n I was reminded that we do have them: we have Milton, Shakespeare, and Beethoven. Joseph Smith declared: \u201cMormonism is truth, and every man that embrace it felt himself at liberty to embrace every truth.\u201d I learned (begrudgingly) to scale back my expectations<\/strong>, and expand my horizons. I shouldn\u2019t expect the Church to fulfill every aesthetic need I had; that\u2019s not what it was for. So I sought and claimed Gregorian chant, Michelangelo\u2019s Piet\u00e0<\/em>, and George Herbert.<\/p>\n Bringing me to the point at hand: Should we expect the institutional Church to embody the perfect social order or articulate and affirm my precise gender identity? Perhaps not. Perhaps I need to rethink my expectations<\/strong>. The Church, in its barest essentials, is meant to provide saving ordinances and fundamental truths that enable us to return to God. The tools of personal revelation, a few core beliefs about the nature of God, and sanctifying covenants are what I expect<\/em> from the Church. Over time, the Church has accumulated handbooks of policies and cultural codes (spoken and unspoken), none of which are defined as eternal principles. Most of what the institution offers is guidance, pastoral care, spiritual comfort, and a perhaps most significant to my spiritual growth, a structure that forces me to learn to serve and love people who are very, very different from me.<\/p>\n But a detailed blueprint for how to be a woman of God? \u00a0Nope. As far as I can tell, Christ showed us how to be saved; he didn\u2019t give us a perfect, detailed blueprint for how to be the perfect husband, the perfect wife, or the perfect ward, or the perfect Church. He gave us a skeletal template based on ordinances, gospel laws, a few specific commandments, and revelation:\u00a0 the means by which prophets can, when necessary, unfold those laws and by which we can understand them. Everything else, we can accept or dismiss as inspired (or uninspired) efforts of leaders and prophets to help us apply those fundamentals in our lives, families, and communities. Elder Dallin H. Oaks addressed<\/a> that tricky line between general and universal principles: \u201cAs a General Authority, it is my responsibility to preach general principles\u2026 Whether an exception applies to you is your responsibility. You must work that out individually between you and the Lord.\u201d Yet our fear of responsibility and ambiguity, meant to spiritually expand and challenge us, can harden many an unnecessary line.<\/p>\n A last thought: \u00a0A general authority quoted D&C 29:32<\/a> to my brother\u2019s<\/a> mission, reminding them that this was a warning that the Lord\u2019s work in the latter days would be temporal<\/em> before it was spiritual<\/em>. Perhaps some of the hurt stems from us confusing the temporal institution with the spiritual church.<\/p>\n That spiritual church might be a long way off; but in the meantime, we can keep working away at the transformation together. We can be the men, women, parents, spouses, neighbors, and so on, that we feel Christ teaches us to be.\u00a0In pants or not.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" And the Mormon Moment grabs the spotlight again- with Pantspocalypse! A nutshell attempt: Mormon feminist Stephanie Lauritzen vents online about the slow, tip-toeing steps Mormon Feminism has tried to take towards gender equality over the past decades. She urges women to \u201cstop playing nice\u201d and model American suffragists by \u201cstarting a revolution\u201d of civil disobedience […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":906,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,6,21,24,25,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-diversity","category-feminism","category-gender","category-modern-mormonism","category-revelation"],"yoast_head":"\n