By Valerie
In my super-Mormon days, I would never have aspired to the title of Prophet(ess). Because women don’t get to be prophets. And I was anything but subversive. But looking back, even the most Mormon of my Mormon-ness has to admit that I had the makings of an excellent prophet. Here is my biggest receipt.
Somewhere in the late 2010s, my parents were talking about my brother’s waywardness (story shared with my brother’s permission). Naturally, the discussion centered around the all-too-common link between conservative religion and conservative politics. His drift from truth and righteousness, my parents reasoned among themselves, was correlated to his left-leaning ideas and philosophies of men (actually at the time, he was still conservative with moderate leanings, but anything that didn’t match the Party Line was “left-wing propaganda”).
Though I had served a full-time mission among an incredible community of Hispanic immigrants in San Diego and was starting my own political drift, I was desperately trying to hold on to my “conservative values,” i.e. parental and community approval. The words just drifted out of my mouth, seemingly unbidden…
“Becoming more liberal in your politics is the first step out of the Church.”
Horrified looks from everyone in the room… (Thank you, Taylor Alison Swift, for those lyrics)
My mom (with more than a hint of glee in her voice) replied, “Valerie, I’m really surprised to hear you say that.”
Truthfully, so was I. I knew I would regret saying it the second it came out of my mouth. But even back then, I could see the writing on the wall. I just didn’t identify why that was a common path out of the Mormon Church.
I have a few theories. But I can only speak to what happened with me.
I believed in Jesus. Not just his title of Savior, but I believed in the words he said and the actions he took. Like chastising the rich and powerful for not using their resources to lift up the poor and outcast. Like welcoming the stranger and making space at your table. Like sitting with people whose lives were hard and sorrowful. Like paying taxes and using your wealth to build the community. I hated war and violence, and I could not understand why people would want to hurt each other. The “turn the other cheek” doctrine was embedded in my makeup, as with any good codependent.
As I was learning about the peace-loving, humble, poor, and kind Jesus, I was also learning about Ezra Taft Benson Mormonism. The capitalist, anti-communist, anti-civil rights, anti-tax, ‘pro-liberty’ Mormonism. The Mormonism that says that there was a war fought in heaven over our freedom to choose. That the government cannot and should not dictate our choices or our morality, especially where our money is concerned. But, of course, we had a moral obligation to block certain types of freedoms, like abortion, gay marriage, gender expression, women’s roles and equality, and other ‘immoral’ choices. I was taught to follow the Republican Party’s guiding principles politically, while following the Jesus teachings in my personal life. And in the home I grew up in, they were synonymous.
There was no wiggle room on this. “You’re either for me or against me, you have no other choice,” an oft-quoted line in my home from the movie Ben-Hur. If the gospel was black and white, so were politics. Democrats were evil, chipping away at the God-inspired constitution with their taxation, their support of abortion, and their positively wicked restrictions on guns. I attended Arizona State University as a political science major/family development minor with ETB Mormonism as my guiding principles. As I learned in my childhood development classes that gender is a social construct, I had memorized the first two paragraphs of The Family: A Proclamation to the World that say it’s eternal. I was one of a very few conservatives in my politics classes, and I must admit that I was the absolute BEST opposition prep for our mock debate between presidential candidates John Kerry (my group’s candidate) and George W. Bush.
I listened to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Medved, and Fox News. I read books from Ann Coulter and commiserated with my mom about the liberal Hollywood types that can’t keep their opinions to themselves. I studied how our political system worked, and I believed that Jesus (as told by his prophets) wanted capitalism, manifest destiny, and Mormonism around the world. And absolutely the anti-abortion thing.
But then I served a mission in 2006-7. In California. With Hispanics. Immigrants. Mostly undocumented. And before I got home, my college bestie wrote to tell me he was gay. And I started sitting uncomfortably in my beliefs.
I stopped listening to talk radio. I started making room for nuance. Surely, this God who espoused freedom from government oppression had a plan for the people I loved. I was still trying to hold on to the idea that conservative capitalism was still God’s plan. After all, didn’t he bring Europeans here to establish religious freedom so that Joseph Smith could find and translate The Book of Mormon and restore the #OneTrueChurch? Wasn’t it all part of #ThePlan? Some people were just meant to have a harder life path, right? It was for their good? Right?
I certainly believed that the democrats were the antithesis of the freedom Jesus wanted. So in 2016 when Donald Trump came on the scene, I was one of those conservatives that held my nose and voted for him to avoid turning the reins over to Hillary Clinton. Because the worst thing would be for government to take our money, our guns, and pay for abortions and allow LGBTQ+ marriages.
Over the next four years as more of his awfulness became exposed, I started to hope that republicans would nominate someone else for the 2020 election. But it became quite clear that he was the #ChosenOne of the party. Covid hit, people lost their minds about mask mandates and public safety initiatives, screaming that their rights were being siphoned away because they had to wear a thin piece of cloth over their mouth to stem the spread of an unprecedented and confusing new disease.
The vitriol that I saw over this was ridiculous. What was happening? Why did the people I love have such animosity towards wearing a mask? As I saw it, if wearing a mask and social distancing could help protect my mom (who had incidentally experienced multiple pulmonary emboli just a few years earlier) from a new and deadly respiratory illness, why wouldn’t I take every precaution? There were viral posts from conservatives insisting that masks don’t work and how stupid social distancing was and how the people who bought into the Covid scare were commie liberals who just wanted to take our freedoms away. And this anti-masker movement was hand in hand with Trump’s “Make America Great Again” rhetoric, amping up the animosity and hatred towards the left. It seemed so insane to me that community wellness had absolutely no importance to conservatives. But … I’m pretty sure Jesus would have worn a mask? And probably would have asked and encouraged others to do that as well?
Other important things had been creeping in… March 2019 my daughter was born. My one and only child. I had dreamed of being a stay-at-home-mom my whole life, because that was the #OneTruePath for a woman in the church, at least according to ETB and my mom. But as my 8 month old was sleeping on my chest in her wrap, I watch the first all-female space walk and wept. These women were doing incredible things! I wanted nothing more than to have my daughter know that she could do that too if she wanted.
I had also married a public school teacher and became keenly aware of school shootings. Active shooter drills were a routine part of his life. Every time another school shooting made the news, my anxiety spiked. And every time I heard a conservative talk about arming teachers or putting more cops in schools or building schools like prisons I would try and bring in some gun reform ideas. Forgive the imagery, but I was shot down immediately and every time. Background checks are unconstitutional! Waiting periods are an infringement! Mental health screening is an invasion of privacy! The answer to (mostly) white young men murdering children in our schools was NEVER to limit their access to weapons and ALWAYS about traumatizing our kids with shooter drills and metal detectors and bullet proof backpacks. Horrifying. I’m pretty sure Jesus would limit the weapons of war, not traumatize the kids.
I was growing increasingly uncomfortable with the cognitive dissonance between following Jesus and following ETB Mormonism. It appeared to me that the Republican Party was in a downward spiral, steering away from Jesus and towards an authoritarianism that I did not like. Good people who called themselves Christians were saying the most vile and hateful things online about people that disagreed with them politically. Death threats. Insults. Accusations. It was overwhelming and confusing, and my friend and family circles became a little too anxiety-inducing.
In the middle of the summer of the pandemic, my husband, child, and I sold our house, packed our things, and moved to Salt Lake. Donald Trump’s presidency was in glorious danger of not being renewed for another 4 years. Polls were neck and neck between him and Joe Biden, and he started to get desperate. He began floating ideas about a rigged election and that if Biden were to win, it would be because he cheated. Because Donald Trump (according to himself) was the best president ever and there’s never been a better president and the people love him and he’s so so popular and ‘Crooked Joe’ was a terrible person.
I started to wonder if I could vote for him again. My education had taught me to be wary of narcissistic leaders who crave power. I started seeing the warning signs. The one that made my decision for me was when Trump, as a sitting US president, floated the idea of postponing the election ‘because of Covid’. The man who had been against social distancing was all of a sudden worried about people coming together to vote. Highly suspicious. Not to mention completely outside of his jurisdiction. My hackles were up. I had studied political science in college, and had more than one class on what happens when leaders get too much power. I had studied Hitler’s rise to power. Trump’s assertion was alarming enough to me to sit out the 2020 election.
Long story short, Biden won, Trump claimed it was rigged, and families became more divided than ever.
Here is where things really start to take off. I had made my intentions known a couple of months before the election to abstain from voting this time around. And immediately following the election, through some events that I won’t recount here, a politically-charged altercation with a beloved family member was severe enough to shatter the glass on my perception of reality. Everything turned upside down. Right and wrong were suddenly not so clear. Because “right” to me was kindness, love, Jesus, compassion, and family first… but what I was experiencing was intolerance, anger, dismissal of my opinions and feelings, insults, and venom. From someone who was supposed to love me as themselves.
I had so little to cling to. The more I tried to stay connected to Jesus, the greater the disconnect I saw between what Jesus taught and what conservative politics was turning into. Money. Guns. Excusing and covering up abuse. Tolerating and supporting sex offenders. Misogyny. Racism. Money. Ignoring science and data. Hatred towards difference. Guns. Outrage. Fear. More misogyny. More racism. And more money.
The person that the conservative, religious right was propping up was an admitted adulterer and predator, bragging about his conquests “whether they liked it or not”, unable to articulate a single biblical passage that was meaningful to him, a welsher on his financial commitments, a man who used every loophole to avoid “render[ing] unto Caesar that which [was] Caesar’s.” A man who routinely advocated for violent responses to the “woke agenda”. A man who promised to build a wall to keep out immigrants.
Things that were explicitly condemned by Jesus. I believe that Jesus certainly would NOT be wearing a MAGA hat or standing behind DJT in the Oval Office with his hand on his shoulder (an image someone sent me as an attempt to steer me back to the “right” side of things).
Nothing in the Make America Great Again movement reflected the Jesus I knew and loved.
While I was absolutely drowning, trying to understand, I began digging into the Bible, specifically the Old Testament. And guess what I found?
Misogyny. Racism. Violence. A god who commanded the brutal genocide of an entire community so that his chosen people could have land. A god who had no problem drowning all of his kids. A god who refuses to let his kids be in his presence because they ate something he had forbidden. A god who let children be mauled by a bear because they insulted someone’s bald head. A god who demands his temple be made of the most expensive shit. A god who lets his leaders marry and procreate with multiple women and who allows one group of people to enslave another group of people.
I didn’t like that god. It sounded like that guy would have worn a MAGA hat.
But there was also the god that appointed women to be prophets (Huldah, Miriam, and Deborah). A god that held men accountable for their abuse of women. The god that freed the Israelites from slavery. The god that took care of Hagar when Sarah kicked her out and the god that forgave the entire city of Nineveh and helped them change.
That god would probably have voted blue.
So which god was right? Or were they all wrong together? A familiar question to my faith tradition.
During this time, my own church was coming under fire for hoarding over $100 billion in investments while unhoused people right outside its headquarters were dying from exposure to the cold. My own church was facing allegations of child sex abuse cover ups with their “helpline” staffed by attorneys rather than counselors. My own church.
Digging into the history of my church yielded the same result as digging into the Old Testament.
Polygamy. Financial fraud. Abuse. Violence. Racism. And also, goodness, hope, love, cooperation, kindness.
It seemed to me that humans made god, instead of the other way around. Humans were creating whatever god suited them. If they wanted land, they’d take it and blame god. If they wanted women, they’d take them and blame god. If they wanted to murder and steal and lie, they’d do it all and claim that god told them to. The Book of Mormon begins with a man beheading another man so he can steal the scriptures from him because he would follow them better. Ummmm…. ? No…..??
And in my own personal searching, I begged for god to help me find the truth, any truth that I could hold on to. All of this was overwhelming, confusing, and very, very disorienting. I prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed. I studied and prayed some more. I went to the temple and prayed. And then I prayed again. And you know what came? The most profound answer:
Not a damn thing.
The most earth-shattering revelation was that there was no revelation. The god that I had created did not exist. And neither did any other god. Mankind made all of them. And if god is man-made, why would I trust someone as imperfect as I am more than I trust myself? So I began to lean into my own soul. And my soul profoundly rejects racism, misogyny, greed, capitalism, violence, guns, and ignorance. My soul rejects Donald J. Trump and everything he stands for. My soul rejects the Broligarchy and the greed that motivates it. My soul rejects a religious organization that hoards hundreds of billions of dollars and covers up abuse of women and children. My soul rejects the idea that I am broken and sinful and in need of a human sacrifice to save me from my own father’s punishment. My soul rejects outsourcing my authority to men who claim to worship Jesus but act in direct opposition to Jesus’ words.
My statement all those years ago was definitely prophetic for me. Becoming more liberal in my politics was my first step out of the Church. And it was absolutely time to go.
… Fifteen years, fifteen million tears
Begging ’til my knees bled
I gave it my all, he gave me nothin’ at all
Then wondered why I left
… Now he sits on his throne in his palace of bones
Praying to his greed
He’s got my past frozen behind glass
But I’ve got me
… That old familiar body ache
The snaps from the same little breaks in my soul
I know when it’s time to go
… Sometimes, givin’ up is the strong thing
Sometimes, to run is the brave thing
Sometimes, walkin’ out is the one thing
That will find you the right thing
Sometimes, givin’ up is the strong thing
Sometimes, to run is the brave thing
Sometimes, walkin’ out is the one thing
That will find you the right thing
… That will find you the right thing
And you know in your soul
And you know in your soul
When it’s time to go
“it’s time to go” by Taylor Swift
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