Boyd K. Packer Said he:
Our local leaders must deal with all three of them with ever-increasing frequency. In each case, the members who are hurting have the conviction that the Church somehow is doing something wrong to members or that the Church is not doing enough for them.Elder Packer, known for his candid, strict approach to Mormon teachings and doctrine, introduced correspondence he received from Latter-day Saints that explained their view that the Church wasn’t doing enough to accommodate their preferred social or political movement.
Elder Packer then introduced a letter from a Mormon feminist. “[This is] from a woman who is hurting, and perhaps wonders if anyone but the feminists care about her problems:”
I’m upset that I was always advised to go back and try harder only to get abused more. I need some comfort, I need solace, need hope, need to know Heavenly Father sees all that I have endured. What hope do I have for a chance to live with Heavenly Father? If temple marriage is the key to the celestial [kingdom], where am I? Outside gnashing my teeth for eternity? Help me.“Help! I am a Mormon but I don’t want to be married because it oppresses women!”
One does not know exactly what this woman was going through, but clearly she is not married. She is perhaps a recently divorced woman and not happy. Or possibly she never married and just believes what feminists tell her about men routinely beating women. In truth, in an abusive relationship, both men and women are equally likely to be abusive. In Mormon culture, men and women are equipped with the tools and resources to deal with their challenges in an appropriate manner. LDS Family Services is there to assist families with abuse issues. No responsible leader in the church would tell a woman, or a man, that they are obligated to accept ongoing abuse, and in extreme cases ways to temporarily, maybe even permanently, separate the couple would be sought–although efforts would be made to make permanent separation and severing the last resort. In this culture of women divorcing men for money or convenience, LDS Family Services is a beacon of hope to those who honestly want to repair their marriage.
But with the contemporary myth that men are more likely to be abusers than women, and a court system set up where men are guilty until proven innocent that hands out ex parte restraining orders and more, couples are frequently not afforded the time, tools, or educational resources to ameliorate their relationship issues.
Needless to say, people can get better and can improve their relationships. No one is obligated to withstand the horrors of abuse. But that does not necessitate every woman in the world joining hands on the doorstep of that woman to preach the evil nature of men and encourage her to immediately abrogate her marital covenants.
Ever the “independent woman,” this proverbial feminist supposes she can sidestep the critical Mormon doctrine of eternal marriage (called a sealing and performed in a temple) to accommodate her own interpretation of achieving the highest degree of heavenly glory: the Celestial Kingdom. To be clear, divorce is allowed, just heavily discouraged. This apparently is not good enough for her. She wants to get into the highest degree of heaven without the hard work of committing to marriage to the best of her ability.
That’s a problem.
Let me emphasize how important marriage and family is in the Mormon faith. To put it simply: it is everything. You can’t get into the Celestial Kingdom unless you have been married in the temple – what Mormons consider to be the house of the Lord and the most sacred placed on earth.
Women afflicted with a convoluted, antifamily worldview are growing in numbers throughout the world. Women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are unfortunately no exception to this trend. Ironically, Mormons the world over enjoy a faith deeply rooted in familial bonding, eternal relationships, progression, and eventual exaltation. Essentially, feminists in the Church are disassembling doctrine and patching back the tenets that are acceptable to them.
LDS Meetinghouse in Gunlock, Utah
Which should be troubling to them, considering they are knowingly quarreling with supernal doctrine that Mormon theology holds as coming directly from God or the Prophet.
A Dangerous, Subversive Dissent
The feminist movement, as Elder Packer predicted more than 20 years ago, has endangered the Church and its mission. Church leaders have taught that “Marriage between man and woman is essential to His eternal plan. Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity” (The Family: A Proclamation to the World).
That doesn’t sound too unreasonable, does it? Right. A kid is entitled to grow up with a loving mother, a supportive father, and have those two individuals be faithful to one another. But to feminists (and yes, even Mormon feminists), that’s abusive and oppressive.
Love at Home
Let’s read a bit more from the Proclamation:
All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.Read: men and women are equal in the eyes of the Godhead, but different genders have different responsibilities. No hatred there. Still with me?
Church Headquarters in Salt Lake City
Moving on:By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners. Disability, death, or other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation. Extended families should lend support when needed.Thus, God loves every one of His children and wants them all to love one another. In a perfect Mormon world, everyone should have a mom and a dad that love each other and can perhaps raise their children with a relative degree of stability. Moms should nurture their kids, Dads should lead the family. However, both parents are equal.
Sounds pretty great, right? Have the opportunity to grow up with loving parents, who are equal partners, and someday grow up to be a great mom or dad, just like your own parents. That is good. But not for feminists.
But why?
Priesthood Envy
All worthy men in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints are privileged to receive the Holy Priesthood. Mormon theology places a huge emphasis on the Priesthood, as it is the power and authority to act in God’s name. It is the power by which families in the LDS faith can sustain eternal relationships that bond parents and children throughout the eternities.
Over the past twenty years, a growing fringe coterie of Latter-day Saint women has been aggressively vocalizing their demand for the Holy Priesthood. Even though most LDS women don’t want ordination, the feminist flock is fighting the orthodox principle that males are the Priesthood holders in the church.
Now, you may ask yourself what Mormons actually want from their doctrine, momentarily disregarding the extant ideology. Harvard Professor Robert Putnam and David Campbell found that 90 percent of LDS women opposed female ordination in their 2010 book, “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us.”
A Statue Depicting the Restoration of the Priesthood
Let’s back up for a second. If you don’t understand the way Latter-day Saint Priesthood works, it can get a little tricky, so here’s a bit of information:The Priesthood is officially known as the Priesthood after the Order of the Son of God, however, to steer clear of recurrent use of the name of the Son of God, the priesthood is referred to as the Melchizedek Priesthood (Melchizedek is the high priest that Abraham paid his tithes to in the Old Testament). There are two orders of the Priesthood:
- Aaronic Priesthood (Young men and adult converts)
- Melchizedek Priesthood (Men aged 18 and over; converts in the church for more than a year)
Girls and women are far from ignored. Girls have their own organizational structure, as do women. In fact, women in the LDS Church are automatically empaneled in the Relief Society – the world’s oldest and largest organization for women.
Comparable to the Priesthood structure, women are organized with the primary distinguishing variable being age:
Naturally, men and women in the church have different needs. They have different responsibilities. Despite these legitimate and necessary organizational and gender contrasts, women are still allowed, encouraged, and called upon to:
- Lead congregations in prayer
- Give talks during sacrament meeting
- Give talks during General Conferences of the church
- Serve in leadership positions
- Serve as missionaries
While the Priesthood inherently incorporates power from God by virtue of the fact that it is the power to act in God’s name, “men are not the priesthood,” as Elder Dallin H. Oaks asserted during the October 2005 General Conference of the church. He went on to say:
Priesthood meeting is a meeting of those who hold and exercise the priesthood. The blessings of the priesthood, such as baptism, receiving the Holy Ghost, the temple endowment, and eternal marriage, are available to men and women alike. The authority of the priesthood functions in the family and in the Church, according to the principles the Lord has established.Elder Oaks is certainly not anti-woman. He even lost his father at an early age and his mother had the mantle of raising a family fall to her:
When my father died, my mother presided over our family. She had no priesthood office, but as the surviving parent in her marriage she had become the governing officer in her family. At the same time, she was always totally respectful of the priesthood authority of our bishop and other Church leaders. She presided over her family, but they presided over the Church.But this semi-splinter group of radical feminist Mormons, once again, erroneously perceives that the world is plotting against them. The “patriarchy” is structured to work against them (conspiracy!).
Instead of recognizing that the Priesthood and church leaders (called General Authorities) are there to lead, care, love, and guide, these theologically inept would-be revisionists maintain that it’s all about control and women are wholly ostracized from leadership.
This could not be further from the truth.
Girl Power!
So what do these peripheral fanatics do to support their cause? Demand entrance into the Priesthood meeting.
Groups like Ordain Women and Feminist Mormon Housewives have sprouted up. Despite their isolating and theologically impossible demands, they continue to roar about what they perceive to be gender inequity while what they insist on is, in fact, divisive and schismatic. They maintain that women are not equal to men on the basis that they lack Priesthood ordination.
Ruth Todd, spokesperson for Church Public Affairs (a woman in power? gasp!), had this to say: ”Most church members would see such efforts as divisive. Even so, these are our sisters and we want them among us, and hope they will find the peace and joy we all seek in the gospel.”
Quite kind and diplomatic in the face of opposition if you ask me.
The suggestion that women are unequal and powerless in the Church of Jesus Christ is wholly without merit. In the general leadership of the church, there is a Young Women Presidency (all women), a Primary Presidency (all women), and a Relief Society Presidency (all women). Then, on the stake (a group of about 2,000 people from ~10 congregations) and ward (individual congregations, these make up a stake) level, there are Young Women, Primary, and Relief Society Presidencies at each rung of leadership. Women are not excluded or unequal in the church – they are celebrated, admired, and treasured.
The feminist lie of inequality and the demand for female ordination has fused to create a brand of Mormon feminism that is unlike any previously seen strand of feminism. This incredibly bizarre schismatic fad has ordination to the Priesthood as its primary demand. That is tantamount, at least in Mormon culture, to a single Mormon woman demanding her children to call her “Dad.”
It’s just not possible. Men will always be dads and husbands. Women will always be moms and wives.
The Priesthood in the LDS Church aims to benefit all of humanity – moms and dads, husbands and wives, sons and daughters alike.
Elder Oaks didn’t turn out so bad. He became a renowned University of Chicago professor and a Utah Supreme Court justice prior to his call to the Holy Apostleship. The way his mother reared him is to be admired – and she made it all happen without holding the Priesthood. All it took was some old-fashioned motherly love and guardianship, relying on the devotion and ability of her Bishop and other church leaders to portray the example of a good Priesthood holder and exercise the powers of the priesthood.
Women can teach men to be good fathers. But women can’t become fathers.
But we WANT the Priesthood!
What feminists and feminist Mormons don’t understand is that they aren’t oppressed, unequal, or irrelevant. In fact, they are just the opposite. The structure of the LDS Church is built to be sustainable – with a heavy emphasis on decentralization. Men throughout the world are called as Bishops and Stake Presidents. Mormons believe that these men are called by God Himself – and that calling comes to the leadership through revelation.
Inspiration from God.
So, Mormons sustain the Prophet, raise their hands twice a year in support of him and all other church leaders, and profess that he is the only man on earth that can receive revelation for the entire church. You would think that Mormons – feminist or not – would be cognizant of their sustaining vote and its defining characteristics. For the most part, they are.
But apparently feminists have taught Mormons who side with their warped view of an unequal gender world to organize stand-ins outside the Conference Center in Salt Lake City, hoping to get in to the General Priesthood Session, hoping to get ordained, as if they’ve completely disregarded the detail that God has made up His mind about the Priesthood and if he needed to change anything, he would let the Prophet know. Besides, women have their own General Women’s Meeting that they attend, and women are essential and indispensable participants in temple ordinances.
To understand the austere silliness of the demands of Mormon feminists, you have to know about what Mormons do when they go to church. On Sundays, there are three meetings. Everybody gets together for the first meeting to hear men, women, and children speak about topics like families, repentance, and Jesus Christ. Then, everyone goes to Sunday School. Then, the men and women are divided into their respective quorums and groups – where men learn how to be better fathers and sons and women learn how to be better mothers and daughters.
Women have their own meetings, callings and responsibilities. Adding to those callings by ordaining women to the Priesthood would be futile, overburdening, and against what God has told the Prophet.
Behold: God’s word and law is apparently not good enough for Mormon feminists.
And besides, men cannot be mothers. Women are mothers. Men are fathers.
Why is this so hard for feminists to understand? And why can’t they find joy in motherhood? Why do they need to aspire to the role of a father and a Priesthood holder when they have their own Relief Society and motherly responsibilities?
Because feminism fallaciously teaches women that they are unequal, irrelevant, and unimportant.
Interestingly enough, the movement is just getting plain wacky. Last month, Reuters reported that some Mormon women showed up to church with pants on instead of dresses, alleging gender inequity throughout the church. One Bishop, Thomas Denison, suavely responded with “The clothing that we wear doesn’t really have anything to do with the message of the Church.” He said he does not care how members dress as long as they come to church.
How is asking women to be good mothers and good wives indicative of gender inequity?
Julie B. Beck, former Relief Society President, gave a powerful talk to the worldwide gathering of women in 2007. Here is a segment:
Who will prepare this righteous generation of sons and daughters? Latter-day Saint women will do this—women who know and love the Lord and bear testimony of Him, women who are strong and immovable and who do not give up during difficult and discouraging times. We are led by an inspired prophet of God who has called upon the women of the Church to “stand strong and immovable for that which is correct and proper under the plan of the Lord.” He has asked us to “begin in [our] own homes” to teach children the ways of truth. Latter-day Saint women should be the very best in the world at upholding, nurturing, and protecting families. I have every confidence that our women will do this and will come to be known as mothers who “knew.”Sounds important to me. Makes women seem equal, relevant, and important. Which they are.
But so are men. And we have our own responsibilities, duties, and obligations.
Time and time again we see feminism seep in to the most unlikely of places. The Mormon feminist movement is distinctive because Mormons have always placed such a high emphasis on well-defined gender roles – mothers being great, nurturing moms, and fathers being hardworking, cheerful dads. The strand of Mormon feminism seeks to destroy definitive gender responsibilities and skew parental roles rooted in religiosity.
Elder Packer: 1 Feminists: 0
And as we slowly return to the words of the venerable Elder Packer, we see that to some, he is a hero. To others, he has been called a fascist. But for one man with a huge responsibility on his shoulders, he has defended the family.
He has defended men.
He has taught that we are still relevant.
He has done a favor for men everywhere – especially in a day and age when men need all the favors they can get to remain equal and masculine in this feminized world. And not just Mormon men – but men of all faiths and even those of no faith.
He dared to say that men are men and women are women.
The woman pleading for help needs to see the eternal nature of things and to know that her trials — however hard to bear — in the eternal scheme of things may be compared to a very, very bad experience in the second semester of the first grade. She will find no enduring peace in the feminist movement. There she will have no hope. If she knows the plan of redemption, she can be filled with hope.Words to be revered and lived by for men and women everywhere.
Share this with a Mormon friend or a non-Mormon friend. Not for the purposes of proselytization, but to demonstrate how feminism can not only creep into the most unlikely of places, but also aims to strip men of their defining characteristics, their history, their legacy, their skills, their talents, and their responsibilities.
___________
Editorial note: AVfM takes no stand on religion or lack of religion. We neither endorse nor oppose religious principles. We do not run articles that proselytize. This is an article about Mormons, but if you are not a Mormon, don’t worry about it, you will probably still find it interesting. This is an article on how feminism has negatively impacted one religious group, and that’s all you need to read it as. –DE
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