Caring Less About Past Things

Recently, there was a new social media storm about the new garments for Mormon women (yes, I’m still using that word). This has followed numerous other storms, one about Mormon women having more power in the church than women in any other church, and one about the current president of the church Russell M. Nelson telling Mormons to not listen to any non-Mormons and that they weren’t going to be in heaven with any of their family members who weren’t church leaders. Each time, I’ve kind of waited to see how it would feel.

More and more, it doesn’t feel like much. If I dig into it, yes, I get angry. Why change garments in a way that is exactly the opposite of what Mormon women surveyed need and want—the bottoms, which cause yeast infections? Sure, let them have porn shoulders. That’s what the women want. Give them what they want? See, Mormon women, you have power. And now that they’ve changed the garment, you can convince people to come back so everyone can go to the celestial kingdom.

I remember caring deeply about these things. I still care about individual Mormons I know. I still think they are largely deeply good, deeply moral people. I even still care about Utah voting for Trump (though I don’t think there’s anything I can really do about it and I avoid political conversations with most Mormons I know like the plague). It’s just that these things aren’t relevant to my life anymore, and that is because I’ve deliberated crafted a life that doesn’t bump up against Mormons a lot. I don’t spend a lot of time with Mormons and devout Mormons even less so. It was too painful and so I just—stopped. I avoid watching General Conference. I even tend to avoid ex-Mormon stuff because I think it’s still really all the same things, though with a lot less nuance.

Could I go back to believing in God? Maybe, but I just don’t see much reason to want to do that. Religion was a very bad thing for me, at least in the end when I started questioning things I wasn’t supposed to question. It’s not that I think I have nothing in common with people who are religious. I just don’t want to talk to them about it. I used to want to talk about it all the time, and I wrote about it all the time. And then, I just—couldn’t and didn’t.

For a long time, I thought of myself as someone who could be a “bridge,” who could explain Mormonism to people who were outside of Mormonism, because my daughter’s death had made me a bit of an anthropologist of Mormons. And that is still true, but less so. I can still explain Mormonism to other people, but I admit, I’m not as nice about it. I try less hard to make other people see Mormons as “normal” or the religion itself as “Christian.” I see good things and bad things within Mormonism, but mostly I get to live on the other side.

I used to be a Mormon intellectual. I was a writer who was also a stay-at-home mom. I was, as one non-Mormon friend called me, an “iconoclast,” the last thing you’d expect from a Mormon woman. I was a feminist, very well-educated, and able to talk about Mormonism without ever stepping into the “evangelical, proselytizing mode.” I didn’t defend it. I just explained how it worked, what it felt like from inside, and why Mormons stayed Mormon. I still love Mormons, and I still have occasional fondness for Mormon doctrine, even for The Book of Mormon (which I consider a beautiful fictional text that is about the founding of America by white people). I still watch from the outskirts, but it just doesn’t hurt me like it used to. I’m not cheering for it to become better.

I suppose this is a lot like how I feel about America, too. There’s something in that combination, I think. To me, America was a certain kind of America because of Mormonism. But it isn’t that anymore. It’s not that I hate America now. I just see it with a kind of side-eye. It’s not mine anymore. Yes, I live here. But I’m not invested in it particularly. If that sounds crazy to you, I get it. But I got worn out of caring too much about things that I just have no power to change. And no, I don’t think I have power to change either of them. I never did. I just see the truth now.