The New York Times recently claimed that Latter-day Saint women are “taking over our screens” — dominating reality TV, social media influence and entrepreneurial ventures.
Nearly half this season’s “Dancing With the Stars” professionals were raised in the church. And cast members from “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” are landing Broadway roles, book deals and millions of followers.
This presents a puzzle: How does an institution frequently criticized as patriarchal and restrictive produce such a disproportionate number of visible, successful, entrepreneurial women?
Perhaps it’s not so contradictory as it seems. The roles and responsibilities of life within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are sometimes called “high demand.” And it’s true that membership in the church asks a lot of you. In addition to the well known prohibitions against premarital sex and substances, my husband and I sometimes clock upwards of 10 hours a week in combined volunteer service for the church, on top of personal and family devotional practices during the week.
Life in the church is hard to square with our typical expectations for personal freedom. However, “high demand” religion is also high yield.
Jesus Christ warned us that we’d have to lose our life in order to find it, which Elder L. Tom Perry taught as “obedience to law is liberty.” Elder Perry’s point was that divine laws are not strictures, they’re scaffolding.
The duties and responsibilities of committed Latter-day Saints are powerfully formative — not despite its structure, but because of it.
For example, women in the church teach, speak and lead from the time they are children. In my congregation, girls and women regularly teach lessons, organize activities and service projects — while regularly addressing our congregation.
Sheri L. Dew, executive vice president and chief content officer of Deseret Management Corporation and former counselor in the Relief Society general presidency, has written that she has “searched the world over to find any organization — the largest governments and religions, multinational businesses, worldwide charities, major universities — where so many women had so much bona fide responsibility and authority as in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”
Dew concludes that “Latter-day Saint women have always been able to hold their own. The doctrine and practices of the church regarding women give us confidence born of the Spirit and teach us how to lead, teach, testify, rally others to a worthy cause, and express ourselves.”
The New York Times article highlights the secret sauce in the church’s development of strong women: connecting their sense of self-worth to an unchanging divine identity. Latter-day Saint Rebbie Brassfield told the Times: “in Young Women’s, I grew up every week learning that I had inherent worth, that I had a divine nature and that nothing could take away my worth.”
Latter-day Saints don’t just believe God is our metaphorical father. As his literal spiritual offspring, there are virtually no limits to the development of anyone’s talents or capacities. Progress is in our spiritual DNA.
This may explain why “Mormon women ” — even nonpracticing ones, as is the case of many highlighted by the Times — punch above their weight in media representation. Armed with countless hours of public speaking and organizational skills, as well as implicit confidence in their worth and potential, they occupy more of the public stage than our small numbers should otherwise merit.
The idea of church structure as a positive scaffolding extends beyond skill development, though. New York Times readers may be perplexed that “women are unable to hold the top leadership positions” yet “they are decision makers in their households and, increasingly, breadwinners.” This confusion proceeds from a laser focus in public discussion on egalitarian roles in the church which overshadows how the church’s structure addresses less obvious obstacles to female flourishing — the kind that show up in my own story.
When I joined the church at 16, one of the steppingstones out of my dysfunctional childhood was entering a culture in which restraint, responsibility, commitment and care were expected of men.
The costs of poorly formed men — single motherhood, sexual and domestic assault, crime, and poverty — are high, and they are disproportionately born by women in places where men fall through institutional cracks. The church’s hierarchical structure gives men mentorship and provides accountability (to other men) throughout their lives.
That mentorship and accountability is provided to women in the church as well. But this culture of men who build and care for others can help protect women from sexual exploitation and abandonment, while also distributing the work of community-building between the sexes.
As a young convert, male church leaders drove me to activities (never alone), tenderly listened to my hardships, offered me financial assistance and frequently conveyed God’s love for me. Caring and trustworthy males were so scarce during my childhood that I didn’t know what a big difference they could make .
Perhaps this is what the President Gordon B. Hinckley, president of the Church of Jesus Christ from 1995 to 2008, meant when he said to the National Press Club: “People wonder what we do for our women. I will tell you what we do: We get out of their way and look with wonder at what they are accomplishing.”
Concerns that the Church of Jesus Christ is a rigid, patriarchal institution that stifles women reflect a kind of survivorship bias. Women who have already reaped the tremendous socioeconomic benefits of a culture of committed and loving men consequently have a much larger reach.
For the same reason, we are much less likely to hear from the women struggling against the second and third order consequences of destructive male behavior.
The advantages to life in the church are easy to overlook; from the outside, our starchy lifestyles may look more prudish than protective. Institutional constraints are understandable with little context, while their benefits only show up in the bigger, long-term picture.
This may be why the media spotlight shines brightest on the women who leave. But if we care about the well-being of all women — at every level of society — we need to look at how faith and family life in their early years helps lay the foundation for their success.