The Inquisitions: Holding Space, Stand your Ground, and why Sheri Dew bummed me out

I’ve been very quiet on social media these last few weeks, allowing myself to step back from the ever-continuing discussions of faith, theology, agency, belief, and reform within the LDS diaspora that I am part of. Whenever I read a text (academically), I always allow myself to encounter it first with my own solo read before I engage with the thoughts or commentary of others, allowing myself time to draw my own conclusions without being influenced by the ideas of others, no matter how articulate or substantiated those ideas may be.

In the past, I’ve been guilty of silencing my own thought-process and allowing the assessments of others to hold as truth. I do feel that this is a reflection of my Mormon upbringing---if we are in doubt or have questions on a matter and come to a conclusion that’s at odds with an approved narrative, we are (both overtly and covertly) taught to outsource our own spirituality for the conclusions and narrative of one who is in authority (typically, a Priesthood leader); as any child of LDS upbringing could tell you, we “follow the Prophet” and “don’t go astray!”

As I continue on my faith journey, I find myself in a kind of dance---advancing into a conversation, engaging, and then retreating back into the shadows, observing. My recent social media silence is a reflection of this kind of mini-retreat---providing time and space for observing, thinking, reflecting, etc.

At the moment, I am in Denver. Denver is a place of reflection for me; I presented at my first regional Society for Biblical Literature/American Academy of Religion meeting in Denver, and then this past year came back full circle to my faith crisis as I was driving around the Denver suburbs and saw a pair of sister missionaries standing on the corner. This was just three weeks distance from when I got that fateful and unexpected call from BYU’s HR department, notifying me that I had been terminated from my job of 5 years as faculty in the Ancient Scripture department. Seeing them, I found myself automatically waving to the sisters, rolling down my window and engaging in a casual conversation with them (asking where they were from, how they were doing, etc.) As we chatted, I felt as if I was looking into a mirror, seeing myself 12 years ago when I was just like those sisters---eager, optimistic, and believing of the general historical narrative and apologetic explanations that my church had taught me.

That night, I found myself restless and agitated. At around 2am, the emotional dam within my heart burst and I let the sobs come, ugly and choking. My husband found me curled up on the side of the bed, my body in a kind of self-protecting fetal position, the tears running down my face. This was one of many episodes of unexpected and emotional triggers I experienced that summer, all of which my husband patiently saw me through, talking to me as I vomited out the complex emotions I was then feeling and that I would continue to feel for the next several months.

And so here I am again, in Denver, and ironically, I find myself triggered and no longer able to stay “in the shadows,” and so I have advanced back out on the dance floor of discussion, prepared to engage with what is in my heart and on my mind.

Recently, BYU held its always-anticipated Women’s Conference. A few of the speakers were colleagues of mine as well as two speakers who were and are particular figures that I as a woman in the church pay attention to and admire---Sheri Dew and Sharon Eubank. As a young girl, I was on Temple Square with my dad when we spotted Sheri Dew walking in front of us. At the time, she was serving as a counselor in the Relief Society general presidency. Feeling the need to point her out to me (and a supporter of seeing more women at the pulpit), my dad intentionally (but gently) nudged/pushed me into her, telling me after “I want some of Sherri Dew to rub off on you---” following up with, “she has a voice and she uses it for God. You have a voice too, Kajsa, and you too can use it for God!” For the longest time, Sherri was a kind of shero for me, one of the few women within the LDS church organization who had a visible presence in a leadership capacity.

Thousands, if not millions, of LDS women hunger for the presence of more women at the pulpit of LDS General Conferences, trainings, events, and classrooms. I was saddened when I read recently on social media that a sister in the church saw women’s desire for more representation as a “tactic of Satan—pushing us to care ‘who’ is speaking rather than ‘what’ they are speaking about.” As a woman who does, in fact, care about representation, I responded with the following:

“how is it you are so sure that it is Satan who is making it seem that representation matters? Is it possible that it is Satan who is making YOU think representation DOESN’T matter?”

Sadly, it seems as if the current narrative of church leaders supports this simplistic narrative that seeing, acknowledging, and challenging the handling of an issue leads to division, ergo division is a tool of Satan, thus, if you feel the need to be open and discuss issues found within the church, you then are under Satan’s influence.

With those thoughts in mind, as I reviewed the content of Sheri Dew’s recent talk at BYU’s Women’s Conference, I felt my heart sink a bit with disappointment and frustration. A portion of her talk focused on the perils of social media and internet discussion, warning that “separating ourselves into tribes plays perfectly into Satan’s plans because disunity leaves everyone vulnerable to deception, including from former members eager to justify their exit from the church.”

Now, Christ himself said that “if ye are not one ye are not mine.” That being said, to equate the stories of former members in regards to their journey out of the church as “Satan’s plan” uses fear as a weapon to hold the line of orthodoxy. Dew’s usage of the word “justify” reflects the notion that any reason for leaving the church is rash, unjustified, ignorant, and simply wrong. Thus, we have applied judgement to someone attempting to tell their story without even allowing a person to speak.

In response, I would like to challenge Dew’s position.

To clarify --- as we silence our brothers and sisters, whether in or out of the circle of orthodoxy, we divide. In contrast, by listening and making space for experiences not our own, we include.

Further perturbing to me was her claim that “Social media inflames all of these divisions, by dishing up snippets of facts with rarely telling the whole truth…” As a student of 4th Wave Feminism, it has been my experience that while social media can in fact be inflammatory and misleading, unrestricted speech allows for exactly that---speech. Voices of Mormons both active and departed are free to tell their own story, allowing the individual to draw their own conclusions. Urging members to go to only “church approved sources” is a tired and worn-out method of signaling “good history” from “bad history,” when in fact as people are allowed their voices, what we end up with is simply “history,” and a history that in the case of the LDS church looks more like what was once considered “anti-Mormon” but can now be found on the official LDS church website and updated narrative.

My sense of frustrated irony compounded as I reflected on Dew’s earlier words, delivered to an impressionable student body at BYU Idaho in 2016, where she stated,

“There have always been and will always be charismatic men and women who can launch what sound like, on the surface, reasoned arguments against the Father and the Son, the Restoration, the Prophet Joseph, the Book of Mormon, and living prophets. But doubters and pundits never tell the whole story, because they don't know the whole story-and don't want to know. They opt for clever sound bites, hoping no one digs deeper than they have.”[1]

Growing up with and around articulate LDS apologists, it would be disingenuous to insinuate that it’s only the critics of the church who use seemingly “reasoned” arguments to challenge faith claims---LDS apologists have LONG used similar tactics in hope that, as Dew points out, “no one digs deeper than they have.”

Much like Gutenberg’s printing press, the internet has allowed for mass distribution of information that allows for the average layperson to review content that was once “classified.” Additionally, the fear of those in Priesthood authority at the time of the press’s debut exposed their desire to control the narrative of the Christian faith, reflective of the concern the LDS church has had with certain portions of their history. Sadly, it would seem that this attempt to subterfuge and distract from the more unpleasant aspects of LDS history has backfired---as I have seen on discussion groups involving thousands of nuanced Mormons, it isn’t the information itself that puts them over the edge, but rather, the way in which the Church has attempted to distract from this information and then, in due process, pretend that there never was, in fact, an effort to deter open conversation on these issues.

As stated by J. Reuben Clark, “if we have the truth, it cannot be harmed by investigation. If we have not the truth, it ought to be harmed.”[2]

Professor and author Dr. Beth Allison Barr (The Making of Biblical Womanhood) invites us to fearlessly examine our history, in attempts to find that which is “useful,” (no matter how controversial) from which we can re-examine the messy contents, glean new insights, and correct the trajectory of our theology. For Latter-day Saints, the idea of “correcting our trajectory” can cause one to balk, due to the fact that we not only stem from a restorationist tradition, but in claiming to be “the only true church on the earth” (an exclusionist stance that has made many faithful LDS academics/apologists uncomfortable), is trajectory correction needed?

I argue that yes, theological trajectory change is needed and as Kenton Sparks argues, “redemptive theology” is a natural extension of one’s faith in Jesus Christ. Being open as I am in my criticism of my childhood faith, some have asked “why don’t you just leave?” Gratefully, I have enough big-hearted people in my life (friends, colleagues, family members) who hold space for me as I stand in opposition to and outside the elements of orthodoxy that I ethically must challenge, while I in turn hold space for those who stand within.

#listen #love #learn

[1] https://www.byui.edu/devotionals/sheri-dew_ [2] J. Reuben Clark: The Church Years. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1983, p. 24