Eliza Snow
The Salt Lake City Temple Square grounds are crowded with tourists. I step into the North Visitors’ Center, where a bird’s-eye diorama of first-century Jerusalem dominates the foyer. The diorama is behind glass, and a wide-eyed blond woman surrounded by her six towheaded children gesticulates over it, describing Jesus riding into the city on a donkey.
“A donkey!” two boys squinch their noises, giggling.
“Oh, yes,” she says, and she traces the path where his followers had lain out palm fronds like a red carpet, much to the Pharisees’ chagrin.
I trail behind them into the next room, an atrium of paintings depicting Jesus’ miracles or Old Testament prophets predicting them: Jesus feeding the masses at Galilee; Isaiah prophesying the Virgin birth; Jesus healing the leper; Ezekiel’s desert vision of the Messiah’s four faces; Jesus surprising Mary Magdalene outside his tomb—there he is, with his arms out, like, Mary, “oh, ye of little faith,” you’ve been punk’d; I’m alive! It’s high divine comedy, the resurrection. When I look up, the family is gone. I scan the room for evidence of anything other than mainline Christiandom but come up short, except for the three sets of missionaries, with their laminated nametags and identical uniforms, idling in pairs at the information desk.
It isn’t until I ascend a spiral ramp to the second floor that the Mormon cosmology begins to reveal itself. A gleaming twelve-foot Byzantine Jesus stands at the landing, surrounded by a 360-degree painting of the solar system in saturated blues and purples. Visitors encircle the statue on benches, snapping photos or whispering among themselves. Here is a Christ no Calvin or Luther could have conceived of. A risen Lord who presides not only over the earth but over the universe, who calls forth a new set of questions about the nature of our existence and the scope of His domain, especially in regard to other planets.
The first place where Mormon theology departs from mainline Christianity is in its interpretation of the first line of Genesis: “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth,” for which the original Hebrew uses the plural form of “god”: Elohim. Catholics interpret this plurality as the trinity—Father, Son, Holy Ghost—but Mormons read this as evidence of multiple gods presiding over other parts of the universe. But our Heavenly Father, to whom we owe worship, is also referred to as Elohim, and he is the literal parent of Jesus, and the literal parent of all human spirits on Earth. As Latter-Day Saints founder Joseph Smith said, even “God the Father had a Father.” Smith taught that before earthly time, God was a man on another planet, who ascended into Heaven and created the Celestial Kingdom where every single soul that would ever exist on Earth was born. So Smith professed a theology whereby married men, sealed in eternity to their families, could one day assume godhead in the afterlife. (But Mormons think about this probably as often as Presbyterians parse out the trinity when they pray: Am I talking to God, Jesus, or the Holy Ghost? Whatever, please accept my thanks, please help me.)
The rest of the second floor is devoted to more wall-to-wall paintings depicting other Old Testament parables and the minor miracles of the New. Around a bend, I find life-size figures of Adam and Eve, coifed and wearing tunics, against a pastel Eden. Here, too, I begin to see differences: They’re confident and healthy; there is no apple or serpent in sight. Eve is not the bearer of the Fall, nor the temptress, but rather the woman who gave us the opportunity to be fully human.
Flanking each gallery are movie theaters screening two films on repeat: in one, the passion story, and in the other, the narrative of the Book of Mormon, the lost testimony. I sidle in as quietly as I can, only to find that I am completely alone in the two-hundred-seat theater. I sit in the back row anyway. The film dramatizes the story of how, amid great persecution, the lost tribes of Israel journeyed to North America six hundred years before the crucifixion; upon their arrival they battled the natives for untold generations until the lost tribes were almost extinct. During the three-day journey from Hell to Heaven following his crucifixion, Jesus visited the remaining Israelites in America and delivered his final dictum, which was inscribed onto golden tablets by the prophet Moroni and discovered by Joseph Smith in the woods outside of Palmyra, New York, approximately one thousand years later.
It’s the basement of the North Visitors’ Center, which I almost miss, that explicitly depicts the religious history unique to Mormons. That it’s in the basement—the site of secrets or storage, that which we’d prefer to keep out of sight—calls into question the idea of assimilation, the merits of revealing theology in degrees if you’re used to nonbelievers calling you a cult. In the middle of the room is a pyramid structure of the Book of Mormon in all eighty-three languages it’s been translated into, and toward the back are small video stations where visitors can watch various addresses given by current and former presidents of the church, the living prophets, on any number of topics, from parenting to politics to gender parity.
Along the wall are a series of exhibits. Beginning with the Old Testament prophets, I work my way through Job, Isaiah, Elijah, Daniel, Peter, Paul, and then Joseph Smith. I look up and see Sweeney across the room, legs akimbo and face tilted upward, like the gallant Adam I saw upstairs. He’s standing in front of a smaller quartet of exhibits, the forgotten prophets who happened in between: Nephi, Lehi, Alma, Moroni. The New Testament ends, and the Book of Mormon fills in the gaps: God continued to create prophets, and continues to today.
It was 1845. It was night. Eliza Roxcy Snow sat on a little upturned barrel trying to write. They were fewer in numbers by then, many having given up and stayed in Illinois or returned east. She’d left her family in Ohio, long back—it wasn’t even a disagreement or anything; they’d converted, too, but they just hadn’t been willing to keep moving. They had property, other children, all of that. So Eliza Snow went west with the Latter-Day Saints, over the Mississippi River into Missouri, where they’d been battered and run out, then deeper into the heartland, to Nauvoo, Illinois. By then she was considered old, and she was barren.
Something had happened to her during the Mormon War in Missouri about which no one spoke but everyone knew. Joseph Smith had approached her in a little stand of buckeyes and proposed to her a plural marriage, to make her a “mother in Israel,” if not on Earth. She moved into his home. Then two years later he was lynched, and now they were on the move again, in wagons. She tried to keep her focus on the Celestial Plan, what Smith had whispered to her in the moonlight, under the trees. He was up on some new planet, tending and tilling for their eventual arrival, all the wives and children. She pressed the graphite to the paper again, trying to understand a celestial organization that could take her as she was, a God who could understand what it felt like to be a woman on Earth at that moment. And then something new happened:
I had learned to call thee Father,
Thru thy Spirit from on high,
But, until the key of knowledge
Was restored, I knew not why.
In the heav’ns are parents single?
No, the thought makes reason stare!
Truth is reason; truth eternal
Tells me I’ve a mother there.
A Heavenly Mother. Women weren’t supposed to—aren’t supposed to—be able to receive revelation, and so the church has never acknowledged the poem “O My Father” to have been divinely inspired. Rather, the church’s narrative focuses more on Snow’s selflessness, how she sought to comfort the Saints with poetry during the worst of their persecution by reinforcing the religion’s full scope: that their souls were literally conceived in Heaven by God, where they existed in a pre-birth state as a family in the Celestial Kingdom.
For a wise and glorious purpose
Thou hast placed me here on earth
And withheld the recollection
Of my former friends and birth
So the church accepts this premise, braids it into doctrine, says nothing. “O My Father” is adapted into the official hymnal. Later, when Snow starts performing blessings, no one says a thing. She gets to Zion. She enters into a plural marriage with Brigham Young. She starts the Women’s Relief Society. She runs that town.
We know now that Eliza had likely been raped not long before she wrote “O My Father,” during the war. But it took two hundred years before historian Andrea Radke-Moss said this out loud, from a conference lectern at Brigham Young University, after an agonized unveiling of some old primary documents. Mormon women from all over the world clung to this news: women abused and assaulted and silenced. Eliza Snow, like the Heavenly Mother, might know the pain of continuing to live in that body, a body violated and made invisible. Weirdly, my first association is musician and activist Kathleen Hanna in the documentary The Punk Singer: She’s standing on her deck, squinting into the sun, saying, “When a man tells the truth, it’s the truth. And when as a woman I go to tell the truth, I feel I have to negotiate the way I’ll be perceived. I feel like there’s always the suspicion around a woman’s truth—the idea that she’s exaggerating.” Concerning her own experiences with abuse, and how it led to the formation of the riot grrrl movement, Hanna says, “I wouldn’t want to tell anybody the whole entire story because it sounded crazy. It sounded just, like, too big of a can of worms. Like, who would believe me? And then I was like, other women would believe me.”
Sweeney and I are at the Salt Lake City temple grounds with my father and stepmother. It’s summertime, and it’s hot. My dad and Tessa were going to drive out to Wyoming to stay with us but decided that the trip would be too much; they suggested we meet them in Utah. So we drove across the Continental Divide, not so far off course from the Mormon Trail.
LDS human rights lawyer Kate Kelly will found Ordain Women, an organization seeking gender equality in the Mormon church. OW, among other things, is compelling the prophets to pray for the ordination of women in the priesthood: to allow them to administer the sacrament, blessings, and baptisms, as well as to assume seats of authority within the annual priesthood sessions. The hope for ordination is primary here, but it’s more symptom than goal to OW’s larger mission: to intervene in what they see as a failure in the church’s imagination, a failure that has stymied women’s full participation and potential as Latter-Day Saints. OW is not claiming revelation; they are asking the First Presidency, the church’s highest governing office, for the right to try to seek it—and, in a somewhat more complicated move, they are compelling the First Presidency to seek revelation on their behalf. They do not identify as rebels. Their mission statement asserts that the “fundamental tenets of Mormonism support gender equality: God is male and female, father and mother, and all of us can progress to be like them someday. Priesthood, we are taught, is essential to this process.” The last time there was an onslaught of people proposing feminist prophecy in the Mormon church was in 1993, when six members were excommunicated for, among other things, publishing at length about the importance of the Mother in Heaven.
But today I am only dimly aware of this. Sweeney, my dad, Tessa, and I are at the temple grounds only as happenstance tourists.
After I find Sweeney in the basement of the North Visitors’ Center, the four of us reconnect on the central walkway and decide to step across the street for a cigarette—a luxury my parents partake in only when they’re with us. Tessa smokes a clove.
I ask everyone what they think so far. I turn on a small digital recorder.
“I don’t know yet,” Sweeney says.
Tessa pipes up. “I find the architecture really focused and imaginative and purposeful. It’s quite enviable, really, because as a musician I’m used to seeing squashed-down committee rot. This is very intentional and quite amazing, actually. Looking at everything, from the staging to the fact that there was all this rehearsal space in the convention center, the sense of color and proportion. There have been no compromises.”
My dad spews a bit of smoke. “What she said.”
“Also,” Tessa says, “when you look at the choice of flora that they use on the externals and the internals of the architecture—it’s a really carefully chosen English pastoral version of what plants are supposed to be. In no way do you have native plants around here, or rough, unruly plants.”
“Yeah,” I say. “No feisty fighter plants. Which is interesting because I feel like desert plants would actually be emblematic of the Mormon experience.”
Tessa nods. “Yes, but this is the afterlife.”
I nod.
My dad finally speaks. “Actually, this place creeps me out—”
Tessa: “What he said.”
My dad: “—where you’ve got one religion, one intention, and everyone follows along. And so yes, you can pour all your resources into realizing one unified, you know, vision or manifestation, like that conference center, but it doesn’t reflect any independent thought, either. So it’s admirable and creepy.”
“Why do you think there are beehives everywhere?” I ask.
Tessa responds instantly. “I think it’s all being part of the hive, being in service. Yes.”
Women pass us by, wearing T-shirts under their tank tops, on their way to the grounds. It seems we are the only people smoking cigarettes for a thousand miles, and I’m embarrassed.
A couple days earlier, Sweeney and I had gone to one of the two bars in Provo, a city of one hundred thousand people. (For perspective, we had just been in Walden, Colorado, a town of six hundred people and eight bars). At the Provo bar, we were served in thirty-two-ounce glasses because all the beer is 4 percent alcohol content. We were visiting our friend Hallie, who was working for the Utah Forest Service that summer and renting a room just down the street from Brigham Young University and the missionary training center headquarters. Hallie had taken us to the bar, where the clientele was like a cartoon of “bar” types: everyone had tattoos, facial piercings, biker beards, and late-stage alcoholism. She looked at us as we walked in, like, Right? Instead of coffee shops, there were ice cream parlors everywhere. We slept in hammocks on her porch that night, and talked with her roommates, all ex-Mormons who had all completed their missions at twenty, twenty-one years old, and then promptly left the church. Anyway, I can’t remember if this is true or not, but I felt like I could see Salt Lake from that porch, shining, yellow as sulfur, far below.
Eliza Snow grew up in a progressive Reformed Baptist family in Mantua, Ohio, and, like her brothers, received a full intellectual education. She started publishing poems in periodicals at seventeen years old, and even as a child, according to Brigham Young professor Maureen Beecher, had composed her homework in verse. On Independence Day of 1826, she was tapped by a prominent newspaper to write the elegies for John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom had died within hours of one another. From there she became a minor name of letters, a wunderkind.
Meanwhile, it was the Second Great Awakening. Americans went to revivals as a form of entertainment, often al fresco. You went to get your heart moved, to have demons cast out, to feel the real, material presence of the Holy Spirit, and to have a conversion experience—even if you already belonged to a church. Religion was hot. The part of New York where Joseph Smith grew up was called the “burned over” district because it was considered to have been torched by revival, and he was part of that moment. And somewhere in the wilds of Ohio, Eliza Snow was awaiting her own conversion experience.
Snow’s parents actually helped establish one of Mantua’s Baptist congregations, and also, later on, participated in its split, entertaining various itinerant preachers and doctrines for a number of years, until the Latter-Day Saints were invited to their church one day in 1831 to give their spiel, just a year after Joseph Smith had dug up the golden tablets. But Snow was notably the last of her relatives to join the Saints.
Snow said of her upbringing, “Although my parents adhered to the Baptist creed, they extended to their children the right, and afforded us every opportunity we desired, to examine all creeds—to hear and judge—to ‘prove all things.’” Snow, too, was actively engaged in the theological conversations of her parents and community. She even wrote in her journals prior to her Mormon conversion about studying the “ancient prophets” and attending LDS mission meetings and discussions, and being especially convinced by individuals’ testimonies and the reasoning behind a belief in the continuation of prophecy. Still, she carried on in removed consideration for four years before asking for a baptism.
All of this is to say: Snow’s conversion was deliberate, and its story helps to show that she took great pains to familiarize herself with Mormon doctrine and theology—and she refused to concede to it until she felt that she fully understood.
When she wrote “O My Father” on that wagon train, they were heading west to Zion. They were finally somewhat out of American society’s reach, and the Ute Indians didn’t take issue with the faith’s new reading of the Crucifixion. She entered into a plural marriage with prophet Brigham Young and became a presidentess. She saw to the needs of widows, the sick and elderly, and organized the education of wives in domestic industry: how to can, pickle, save grain, reconstitute rags, purify water. Her op-eds on family welfare, domestic industry, theology, and politics were featured often in the Women’s Exponent, as were her poems. Later she labored for women’s suffrage, too, but she was not a feminist, and she was not fond of what her contemporaries were up to back east.
Snow wasn’t against the idea of equal rights per se—she just wasn’t focused on things happening in real time. For her, equal rights for women was eschatological. In her 1976 paper “Eliza R. Snow and the Woman Question,” LDS research historian Jill Mulvay Derr clarifies that for Snow, female empowerment could happen only within the proper bounds of hierarchy provided by the divinely sanctioned priesthood. Derr concludes that Snow saw her role, and the role she inspired other Mormon women to fulfill, as that of a “steward” to their godly husbands, and that she believed the passage to liberation could only happen by fulfilling their mandate as helpmeet, abolishing the “curse of Eve.”
In an 1852 address to the Women’s Relief Society, Snow—critiquing the rebelliousness of the eastern suffragists—says:
It was through disobedience that woman came into her present position, and it is only by obedience, honoring God in all the institutions He has revealed to us, that we can come out from under that curse, regain the position originally occupied by Eve, and attain a fullness of exaltation in the presence of God.
And what was Eve’s original position, in the LDS tradition? It is starkly different than all other Abrahamic readings. Eve was equal partner to Adam, co-creator with God, noble and mighty, “Mother of All Living,” and she understood the necessity of the Fall: that in order to multiply, in order to have children and populate the Heavenly Kingdom, in order to experience spiritual ascension, she had to become mortal. So, after a deep emotional, intellectual, and spiritual deliberation, she selflessly partook of the Tree of Knowledge. She was a hero.
Thinking of Eve, Snow (according to Derr) “did not ignore the woman question, but rather attempted to synthesize an assortment of Mormon doctrines into a neat package that would provide for the eternal expansion of women’s roles”—and by “the eternal,” she means the celestial realm.
But it actually happened. Snow drastically enlarged women’s lives in Utah in many of the same ways as her eastern contemporaries—except not by protest, but by being so fine an orator, so close to the core of the empire, that she was able to give agency to women while still satisfying her role as a mouthpiece for men. The rhetorician of Zion.
She was sincere, don’t get me wrong—a true believer. I don’t mean that her revelations and piety were disingenuous. Rather, she must have had great faith and loyalty to the kingdom to have known both so well that she could usher in seismic changes in their own language. Snow introduced socially controversial charges by using theological reasoning—that women should be allowed to perform blessings and devote their lives to vocations, and that a Heavenly Mother resides alongside the Heavenly Father—without ever being seen publicly as anything but the ideal of Mormon womanhood.
Missionaries roam the Temple Square grounds, offering to answer questions and give tours. I decline a few times but finally accept one from Sister Alvine, a young woman around my age from Cameroon. Our first stop is the old tabernacle. She asks me to sit in the pews while she assumes her position behind the pulpit. Dropping a penny and then a pin upon the lectern, she demonstrates the astounding acoustics. Then she plays a recording of “O My Father” so that I might get a full taste of what choral music sounded like during the century and a half when the hall was used for annual church conferences.
She walks back to me along the central aisle and exclaims what an amazing feat it was for the pioneers to have built this space out in the desert where “there was no one.” Of course, there wasn’t “no one”; there were all the tribes of the southwest deserts, like the Ute Indians. She runs her hand along one of the columns that hold up the mezzanine, which are constructed from pine painted to look like marble (“Could you have guessed?” she asks) and continues to speak of the great, beautiful Utah desert—the desolate, lonely gift of a place—which she considers now with a visceral affection, as though she herself had been among the pioneers.
The connection to the landscape of Zion is a significant part of LDS inheritance, even for an ex-Catholic émigré from Cameroon. The openness of the desert, perhaps, made possible a certain kind of theological reflection, a reordering of the American man’s relationship to the earth. I think of essayist Gretel Ehrlich’s description in The Solace of Open Spaces of the expanses of the American West as having a “spiritual equivalent” and being able to “heal what is burdensome and divided in us . . . Space represents sanity, not a life purified, dull, or ‘spaced out’ but one that might accommodate intelligently any idea or situation.” The Saints found terror, but also freedom from persecution, at the shores of that improbable lake, not much more than a mirage.
Standing now in the tabernacle with Sister Alvine, I wonder what her feelings are about the fact that just twenty years earlier, women weren’t allowed to be missionaries, let alone what’s going on with Ordain Women. But when she smiles, all I ask is, “Do you know the work of Eliza Snow? I think she wrote that hymn.” She smiles at me but shakes her head. Then she clasps her hands together. “Shall we go to the Main Visitors’ Center?” She leads us across another big green lawn. While we walk, she asks if I have any questions, and I have a lot, but all I come up with is whether Latter-Day Saints believe in the Trinity, which I already know the answer to. (They don’t.) “You know, some people think we baptize corpses, dead bodies,” she laughs. (They don’t.)
Inside the next building, she offers us our own copy of the Book of Mormon and her missionary calling card before leading us to a model cross-section of the temple, which looks like an elaborate dollhouse. The temple itself—huge and castle-like and gleaming white—sits just outside the window. Only those in good standing with the church, the most pure of heart, the sanctified, are allowed inside, and it is where all the most important ceremonies are carried out: marriages, baptisms, sealings—Sister Alvine describes the belief about celestial families, how in order to spend eternity on your heavenly planet with your loved ones, you must be sealed. My stepmother, who has held it together until now, screws up her face. “But what if your family sucks and you don’t want to spend eternity with them?”
“Oh,” Sister Alvine says, “it’s not required. Just if you want to, like a marriage.”
To picture it is ridiculous, all of us together: me, my mom, Aaron, my sister Charlie, my stepbrother Noel, Leo, my dad, Tessa, my stepparents’ extended families, from whom they are almost entirely estranged, all our pets over the years—everyone, alone on a planet, tending a garden, like the Little Prince on asteroid B-612 with a rake, a tree, a single flower. I know that’s not right, that we’d be gods—or maybe just the husbands would be gods, I’m not sure. Surely Mormons have weird families, too. But there is something about the idea that strikes me.
I remember suddenly the feeling I had when my father-in-law Dan told me about the family escape plan. It was years ago—I’d probably been with Sweeney for just a few months at that point. We were sitting at Michael’s Pub in Pleasantville, New York, and Dan said, “Have I told you about the escape plan? I think it’s time to tell her.” He looked at Sweeney, then his daughter, then his other son. “Here it is: If there’s ever a natural disaster, or another September eleventh–type event in New York, in the city, no matter where we all are, we all have to try to gather at thirty-seven Sutton Place—” that was Sweeney’s mother’s house, which Dan had moved out of years ago after the divorce and which, through a contentious settlement, they were in the middle of selling, mostly by Dan’s insistence. I knew that; he knew that I knew that; but that’s where we had to meet, all of us, “even Grandma Rodway. Then we’ll make our way up the Taconic Parkway to Jo Jo’s Pizza. So if someone can’t make it to thirty-seven Sutton Place, then they should just go straight to Jo Jo’s, by whatever means, ninety miles north. There will be water there, pizza, a goat farm, other animals.” From there we could begin to eke out a plan for the end of the world.
Now, whether or not heading up a major highway out of the nation’s biggest city is a very sophisticated plan is debatable. I doubt any other family would choose Jo Jo’s in particular, but there would be millions and millions of people heading up that thruway. And then—what? Was this a mass shooting, a flood, the apocalypse? In Dan’s scenarios—and he brought up the escape plan with me over and over for years—it always seemed to be all of the above. And in a way he, and therefore we, greatly relished in these plans to survive the end, about where we would go from there—Maine, Cape May, the ocean.
I have never known anyone to fantasize about the apocalypse as much as Dan. There’s a heroism in it, that’s part of it—he’s a lawyer, and he loves saving people. I don’t mean to imply that those two things are inalterably linked, but for him they are. If you’re in trouble—booked in jail, having a mental health crisis, stuck on the side of the highway in Ohio, or just scared and sad—he will drive over valleys and rivers to get to you. His kids inherited his fierce sense of family loyalty, too, a mythology so powerful that it had been made true. But preparing for end times also springs from his conservative politics, ever battling that “house of cards” liberal administration, the “shredding” of the constitution, the end of America. When I first met him, he told me he used to be Republican but was now an anarchist, although his was an anarchism that mimicked the Tea Party, which of course didn’t exist yet.
As the years went on, we’d fight bitterly about politics, about human rights, white privilege, racism, cresting one night as protests formed in Ferguson, Missouri, following the murder of Michael Brown.
“What would you have done if the military started driving tanks into Pleasantville?” I demanded.
“I’d pack up my family and go!”
“Well, you should be so lucky that you had enough capital to do that!”
“Do you blame me for raising my family in Pleasantville, for making money?”
The next time I saw him, Sweeney was having a panic attack and so Dan had left work early, come to our house, and then called his other kids to come, too, and we sat in our little living room, laughing, talking about the darkness, and he said that we must always, always do this for each other.
He is always saving people. That’s his thing. And when he told me about the escape plan, I felt saved, I felt accounted for, very squarely and haphazardly accounted for, whether it was a good plan or not. I was going to be counted on the last day. They were going to be waiting for me at Jo Jo’s. It felt like what I imagine a sealing might. He had vision. Jo Jo’s was the afterlife.
In 1867, as the president-elect of the Women’s Relief Society, Snow announced, “We will do as we are directed by the Priesthood—” winking, if not to anyone in particular, then to herself, “—to do good, to bring into requisition every capacity we possess for doing good.” But the scholar Maureen Beecher notes that when Snow’s Relief Society initiatives were thwarted, she often commanded that the disapproving priesthood leader should be “reasoned” with. Moreover, in that same address, Snow calls her fellow Mormon women “stewards” to the priesthood, “relieving their masters of certain tasks.” Just a few minutes in, and we are in murky terrain; she is already making agents of the women. “Do not run to him with every trifle,” and, “If anything, we should relieve the Bishops rather than adding to their multitudinous labors.” In saying both of these things, Snow was able to make a case satisfying enough to the priesthood for women to continue their spiritual, social, and professional work with relative independence. This was the sort of public reasoning she used, over and over again, to justify that women should be trained in medicine, business, accounting, and journalism, and allowed (though not officially ordained) to perform blessings.
In 1870, during the height of accusations that Mormon women were “enslaved” by, among other things, plural marriage, Snow asks the women of Zion, “Do you know of any place on the face of the earth where woman has more liberty, and where she enjoys such high and glorious privileges, as she does here as a Latter-Day Saint?” Derr insists that Snow’s exhortations were not “mere rhetoric,” primarily because the mid-1800s had in fact ushered in a massive expansion of the female sphere in Utah, since they lived in a society at that moment that was egalitarian by necessity, including, that very year, the right to vote.
But fifteen years in, the Women’s Relief Society was making the priesthood wary. What did they do, exactly? Organize child care, demonstrate food-saving practices, start hospitals, build granaries, publish a newspaper, sure, but what else?
In 1880, the priesthood—bishops, husbands, whomever—called for an accounting. Snow invited them to give final remarks at the Relief Society’s annual conference, in order for, in her own words, “the stronger to follow the weak that if anything needs correcting, it can be corrected.” The minutes from the conference report that, among other similar elucidations, “Sister Eliza explained that she had been given the mission to assist the priesthood [in organizing Relief Societies].” As the men, their arms waving frantically in explanation, emphasized that the women’s roles were to remain distinct from the male sphere, that they were “set apart” for special work, Snow nodded, her mouth trained in a serious listener’s frown. That’s right, she said, taking the stage back, women need to “serve and uphold [your] husbands and brothers like the devout and steadfast Miriam in upholding the hands of Moses.”
Miriam? I look her up: She was an Old Testament prophetess. Does anyone in the room register this? She was Moses’ heroic sister who sang a song for the Jews as the Red Sea collapsed on the Egyptian army. She was given the words and the melody by God, picked up an instrument and told others to do the same, and then led them, with music and dance, into the utterly unsafe desert. Set apart, you see, for special work. In the camps described in Exodus, Miriam and her other brother Aaron seethe: “Was it only to Moses that God spoke? Did He not speak to us as well?” God intervenes here, corrects Miriam. Yes, he did speak to her, and to Aaron, but Moses has been chosen to lead, all right? So God punishes her, and Aaron too, for their complaints. Miriam gets zapped with illness and Moses has to ask God to please just let her be, so he does. It was like that back then, with God.
I don’t know what happens to Miriam after that; she disappears in the landscape of Jewish patriarchs. But Eliza Snow could have invoked anyone as a model that day at the conference, she could have said Sarah or Mary or many other women whose lives and meanings have been pilfered by patriarchy and appropriated—but she said Miriam, the complicated prophetess. And no one in the room but her seemed to know.
Back at the temple, we’re leaving, driving away. Tessa remarks that the most moving parts of the visit for her were the depictions of the plants and animals, especially the twelve golden oxen upholding the baptismal font in the temple basement, which of course we did not see in person, we saw it in a miniature model of the temple’s interior. Tessa is saying she believes in the mystical power of things on Earth, social contracts, earthly empathy and ethics. She keeps reiterating, as we drive through the endlessly undulating brown mountains, that she can’t understand why anyone believes in this shit, or that she has no patience—“I just have no patience. I believe in animals, that’s my religion. You know?” I mean, I do know, in a way, and I don’t—because it actually seems really important to me that one should try to understand why people believe the shit they do, and I feel like my position on this should be obvious to Tessa by now. Bewilderingly, my dad, a small feather hanging from his earring, says nothing. Sweeney is driving, and he drives like a go-cart racer, and everyone is nervous but me.
In 2014, Kate Kelly, the founder of Ordain Women, was excommunicated for apostasy.
I listened to an episode about it on the podcast Mormon Stories a couple of months later. Mormon Stories gives voice to the experiences of progressive or post-Mormons; the host himself, John Dehlin, is an observant Latter-Day Saint, though he also has been excommunicated for his public acceptance of homosexuality. In this episode, Dehlin interviews Kelly at length. She is quick and funny and articulate about her formation in the church, her devotion to the theology, even the contested historicity of the Book of Mormon—she doesn’t really care because divine inspiration works in strange ways.
Dehlin asks her what she thinks about the speculation that it was not the content of Ordain Women’s request, but rather the “tone” she took up, which had pinned her as apostate. Kelly laughs, says that of course the accusation revealed more about the church than her: “When they say tone was the problem, I agree that it was a problem for them. The tone was effective . . . It was respectable, because we spoke the language of Mormons, because I said ‘I am a returned missionary, I was married in the temple, I went to BYU, and I believe that women should be ordained.’”
She says that while women’s ordination is one of her concerns, what she thinks the church is most rattled by are her ideas about how revelation takes place: “I believe revelation is participatory.”
She jokes about how the church now believes she’ll be cast into the outer darkness when she dies—though she is not worried. She discusses an upcoming Ordain Women action, a worldwide fast for gender justice in all religions. She is confident that her excommunication portends greater changes to come. “I’m not sure when, but someday a young Mormon girl will say I’m a sellout.” She laughs. Then she adds, “And I’ll be happy!”
In the few years after this interview, Kelly goes to Kenya, works for women’s rights in Somalia, maintains her board seat for Ordain Women, gets a divorce, and moves back to Salt Lake City to work as a strategic advocate and policy counsel for Planned Parenthood.
In 2016, she appears on a live audience taping of Mormon Stories once more. She looks absolutely vibrant, sitting onstage with the host. She wears a stylish sleeveless dress and dark-rimmed glasses, smiling. She shares a bit about her feelings about transitioning out of the church, the clean break it allowed her because the church revealed itself to be “fundamentally misogynistic” and because she knows she did the right thing. She shares about trying alcohol for the first time, talks about her divorce, and laughs about how she’s fulfilling all of the things Mormons warn about. “You see, you see . . . That’s what happens to apostates. And I work at Planned Parenthood now, so I’m, like, at the bottom of the slippery slope.” She laughs and laughs, and the audience laughs, too.
She talks a lot, then, about reproductive rights, about what Planned Parenthood Utah does and is up to, and about how important sexual education is within the church and outside of it, and she talks frankly and passionately about how important a woman’s right to choose is—no exceptions. And I watch this video, brimming with joy, because I think I’m about to see a theological defense of abortion, a theological defense of women’s rights.
A woman from the audience asks Kelly how her belief in the Heavenly Mother informs the work she does now, and Kelly takes a while to answer. She visibly deflates at the question, looking suddenly tired, incredulous, like, I don’t have time for this kind of thing anymore, I just don’t have any patience. She says finally, sharply—“It wasn’t empowering at all because no one talked about her.” I’m waiting, as I always am, for a religious feminist to say that the moral framework of Christianity fundamentally compels her to support women, to dismantle the patriarchy as Christ did, or whatever, just to do the thing that the Religious Right does and say something like, “I just know that I am fulfilling God’s will, and anyone who disagrees is a heretic.” Instead she says, “Does the woman down the street have enough to eat? Can women control their own destinies? Those are the things that matter to me. And so I actually don’t think about God that much at all.” She presses her lips together, looks directly at the questioner, and nods.
But I guess this is the thing—is that God? That is God. That is thinking about God. That is a life in service. That is everything Jesus/ God was talking about. And once you’re doing it, once you’re actually doing it, you’re like, whatever, middle fingers up—God, no God, I’m gonna make sure that lady has enough to eat, and that that other lady can control her destiny.
So why does Kelly remain in Ordain Women? She’s doing it for her niece, she says, and for all the LDS girls like her niece. But her participation will not last long, cannot last long, if she has no stake. If she is only a secular savior, then her arguments will lose meaning for everyone, mostly her. What do you do, as a leftist feminist, in any church? You stay in the shitty place where you’ll never win because the systems by which it operates are so fundamentally patriarchal that there is no way out, save a revolution. So you do your amazing work and forget God. Who can blame her? She’s like, Ah, what am I going to do, battle around for decades with these old-man “prophets” with dementia about fuck-all? Nah.
So what do women do? They break away and make their own church. That happens. Or they stay and wait for eternity in faith that things will change, but things don’t really change, not much. Or they become secular.
I say all this to Sweeney, and he says, “Dorothy Day stayed,” and I say, “Yeah, but she basically started another religion,” and he says, “She would be offended to hear you say that.”
In recent years, the list of requests from Ordain Women have deescalated in scope. Rather than full ordination, they’ve gotten more specific: They want to be official witnesses at baptisms (a role reserved for males), sit with young Mormon women during their private worthiness interviews with local male leaders, serve as witnesses at marriages and sealings (again, a duty assigned to males), and hold their own babies while male priesthood holders perform naming blessings. Much of their work takes place on the internet, or standing plaintively outside of priesthood meetings waiting to be invited inside. In 2015, they released a series of photos of women performing the various tasks of their request, so that the Mormon public might be able to see what it would look like, literally, so that people could begin to imagine it. To have revelation.