The Book of Mormon Girl (12 page)

Surely
he
was here, I thought, as I looked across the dormitory lawns. I tried again to conjure in my head the shape of the man I would marry, as I had been doing whenever I was in large crowds of Mormons from the time I was thirteen or fourteen years old. So much on earth and in heaven depended on finding
him
, the one who would truly understand me and to whom I would have to explain nothing. And as my dormmates and I trooped around campus for orientation, I tried to ignore it—the sinking feeling in my belly. For all around
me, crossing the quad between buildings named for apostles and prophets, from the Abraham O. Smoot Administration Building to the Harold B. Lee Library, climbing the steps from the George Albert Smith Fieldhouse, leaning on the glass counter at the Candy Jar outside the Varsity Theater, I saw so very many, very pretty Mormon girls, perfectly clear complected, lips perfectly glossed, long hair perfectly curled, girls who shimmered like the flanks of caramel-colored palominos in the sun. I looked down at my short fingernails and plain T-shirt tucked into baggy jeans; I reached up to touch my dark hair in its boyish cut. Panic seized me there in the lobby of the Ernest L. Wilkinson Student Center. There were so very many of
them
. How would
he
ever think to find
me
?

Our orientation tour finished in a classroom in the basement of the humanities building, where I took my place at a little student desk, still carrying the knot of panic in my belly. In through the door came a man of gentle mien with a crown of graying blond hair and useful-looking square hands. He set a few books down on the table at the front of the room, and with a clear, soft voice, introduced himself as Eugene England, a professor in the department of English. “Welcome to Brigham Young University.” He smiled at us, his expression exquisitely kind.

Professor Eugene England did not carry himself in a way typical to Mormon men in authority. He did not wear a suit, white shirt, and tie, or speak with that Mormon mix of formality and sentiment. Instead, he wore a pressed denim shirt
and khaki pants, and he moved about the classroom in a way that reminded me of my father in his stockinged feet in the kitchen on Saturday mornings, making hot cereal for his children.

On the chalkboard, Professor England wrote the following words, a verse from the Book of Mormon: “He denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile.” Then, he turned to watch us absorb the words into our minds.
All are alike unto God
.
Black and white
.
Male and female
.

I studied the round, outdoor-wizened face of Eugene England. I felt the knot of panic in my belly loosen and disappear. Deep inside my chest, a door opened. Light and oxygen flooded the room. And here it was again: that marvelous vision of an expansive and infinite universe, the dilation and contraction of time, all things at once present before God. But whereas, before, my cosmic Mormon vision had been colored by the dark tones of the end-times, I now saw it anew, here in this basement classroom in the BYU humanities building: “the glory of God was intelligence,” as Joseph Smith wrote, “or, in other words, light and truth.” I felt the universe unfurl in fractals of possibility, justice, and love, like the fronds of a great primeval fern. This thinking, this feeling—this was what we had been made for.

That fall and in the years that followed, I met other BYU professors who modeled for me what had yet been the great
unmapped possibilities of Mormonism: a life of searching inquiry, fearless because we knew all truths pointed finally to the glory of God. I met seventy-year-old physicists who took me into their basement offices in the Carl F. Eyring Science Center, down among the giant particle accelerators, and patiently listened to an eighteen-year-old girl unbend the limbs of her mind. I met psychology professors who had served their missions among the Hopis fifty years before and who, with tongues chastened by the difficulty of the Hopi language, spoke as reverently of the rituals conducted in kivas as they did of our own Mormon temples. I met Utah-born women poets who lent me their own personal copies of Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf.
Books
. For the first time in my life I learned how to find all the books I needed.

It was at Brigham Young University that I also found at the very heart of Mormonism something so rich and gentle, a variety of faith I had only glimpsed, only dreamed of from my Orange County suburb. But here they were—Mormon poets who had words to articulate the peculiar beauty of our world, Mormon historians who had been allowed to plunge freely into its archives until those archives were closed in the 1980s. In study rooms at the library, on walking trails in groves of box elder, black walnut, and horse chestnut trees south of campus, I met other young Mormon men and women like me, with searching minds, denim shirts, woolen socks, and clumsy haircuts, hungry for our legacy, hungry to learn this way of being Mormon in the world.

I was a sophomore when bombs started falling on Baghdad. It was January 1991, and Provo, Utah, was thousands upon thousands of miles from Iraq, but every night we gathered in the living rooms of our thin-walled BYU-approved apartments and watched round-the-clock CNN coverage of Desert Storm. Transfixing, it was, to me at least, and somehow perfectly coordinated—nighttime bombing raids, glowing green tracers and halos captured with night vision cameras, all scheduled for rebroadcast during peak nighttime viewing hours back in the United States. As the bombs fell, my roommates and their boyfriends sometimes cast a sidelong glance at the television screen, but generally proceeded as usual, coming and going, laughing loudly, the sound of hollow-core metal doors echoing through the apartment building halls.

How was one supposed to feel about the war? In my Honors classes, our professors guided us through classics of world religion—the
Upanishads
, the
Bhagavad Gita
, the
Tao Te Ching
. From small-town Arizona boys who had grown out their missionary haircuts and wore their hair tucked behind their ears—tempting the edges of the campus dress code—I gathered bits of information about President George H. W. Bush, Saddam Hussein, Saudi Arabia, oil revenues, and civilian targets. In the back row of my English classes, clear-eyed young women huddled together and trafficked in details about the antiwar march at the capital, the teach-in at the BYU campus Varsity Theater.

What if war was wrong?
I wondered.

The scriptures routinely condemned violence. The Book of Mormon warned that pride led to the destruction of civilizations. Wasn’t this a kind of pride: the callous delight we took in these nightly video-game-like images of human destruction?

I turned the idea over slowly in my mind. It was like nothing I had ever heard at home. Every Orange County Mormon I knew was an ardent conservative who accepted all wars as necessary sorties in the great Cold War battle against Communism: good versus evil, freedom versus unfreedom, a battle to the end of times. But what if the story was more complicated than it seemed? What if it was not so easy to trace the hand of God in history? What if the war was not as it had been presented as some unambiguously righteous endeavor but rather a story as much about ancient rivalries, human greed, and hunger for power, with innocent lives at stake? Such ideas seemed like an exotic species of wisdom from a civilization far away. But they too might be worth exploring, like the
Tao Te Ching
, or the
Bhagavad Gita
. This moral caution might be an element of intelligence a gentle and expansive Mormonism would find lovely and embrace.

Somehow I came into possession of a small peace-sign button. I turned it over in the palm of my hand, considered it carefully, and then pinned it to my shoulder bag. Soon it attracted the notice of roommates and their boyfriends, and
then of the dwellers in the other thin-walled apartments up and down the halls.

One morning I opened the door of the apartment and found there freezing on the doorstep a six-pack of beer and a cassette tape—the chorus from the Cure song “Killing an Arab” recorded over and over and over again, thirty minutes straight. “Go ahead,” said the note tucked in between the beer cans. “Have a drink. You’re already there.”

A few days later, on another cold February morning, I was walking from my apartment toward the groves at the south edge of campus. It was early, and I stepped carefully across the icy sidewalks. My hair was cut short in a pixie, and I was wearing thick black tights and a black and pink floral baby-doll dress I had sewn myself. My book bag with the peace-sign button hung on my shoulder.

A car pulled up behind me. Words hurled out the window: “Anti-Christ!”

The sting of shame spread across my shoulders—my first introduction to the martial edge of Mormon orthodoxy.

I kept walking. Ahead of me was school, the professors I loved, and the powerful ideas—all of them potentially sacred—from which I was fashioning my future.

I didn’t look back.

•   •   •

So it happened that I was there at Brigham Young University just in time to witness a remarkable upwelling of Mormon
feminism, a feminism that started very simply in basement classrooms with the idea that
all were alike unto God
. The University hired more women faculty in the late 1980s and 1990s, including Mormon women who had studied feminism and, finding nothing at its core incompatible with a just and loving God, dared to make it their own. One by one, Mormon feminist historians were publishing books reconstructing the lost worlds of early Mormon women, who, we learned, once commanded priesthood powers and forms of authority lost to women in the modern bureaucratic church. Mormon writers like Terry Tempest Williams fearlessly spoke out for the rural southern Utah “downwinders” who lived under plumes of atomic fallout, their lives and their wholeness knowingly sacrificed by the United States government, while Carol Lynn Pearson penned a play that dared to celebrate openly our hushed Mormon belief in God the Mother.

We were not the first Mormon feminists, to be sure. There were many others before us: early visionary Mormon women, pioneer widows who commanded their sick oxen to stand and carry their wagons across the plains, plural wives who traveled east from Utah in the 1870s to become medical doctors, women who continued to anoint and bless one another’s bodies before confinement and childbirth, and in the 1970s and 1980s the courageous and embattled Mormons who campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment. It was happening again in the early 1990s at Brigham Young
University, another wave of Mormon feminism. Together, in study groups and consciousness-raising meetings where Mormon women permitted only Mormon women to speak, we taught ourselves once again to tentatively (if sometimes clumsily) parse the grammar of Mormon feminism:
all are alike unto God
;
God is a Mother and a Father; Mormon women matter
.

Little did we then realize the powerful fears this grammar would disturb.

•   •   •

On August 6, 1992, at a gathering of Mormon liberals, artists, and intellectuals in Salt Lake City, Lavina Fielding Anderson, a sixth generation member of the Church, a feminist historian, and editor of the
Journal of Mormon History
, disclosed the existence of the Strengthening the Members Committee, “an internal espionage system” organized by Church elders in the 1980s to keep files on members perceived to be critical of the Church.
Files
. It was another set of files, but unlike the ones up Little Cottonwood Canyon, these were organized not for the salvation of the dead but for the surveillance of the living. BYU professor and renowned Mormon intellectual Eugene England, speaking on the same panel as Lavina, reacted immediately by denouncing the Strengthening the Members Committee and calling for its dissolution.

Church spokesman Don LeFevre confirmed the existence of the committee the following week. He explained to newspapers that the committee “receives complaints from church members about other members who have made statements that ‘conceivably could do harm to the church,’” then “pass the information along to the person’s ecclesiastical leader” to “provide local church leadership with information designed to help them counsel with members who, however well-meaning, may hinder the progress of the church through public criticism.” Another Mormon elder compared the Strengthening the Members Committee to a kind of “clipping service” that tracked critical writings, including letters to the editors, published by Church members.

On August 22, 1992, the First Presidency of the Church issued a statement defending the Strengthening the Members Committee, citing instructions from Joseph Smith in 1839, when he was imprisoned by the state of Missouri during the “Mormon War,” that a record should be made of “sufferings and abuses put on” Mormons and the “names of all persons that have had a hand in their oppressions.”

That same summer, Church members Paul and Margaret Merrill Toscano founded the Mormon Alliance to counter what they described as growing patterns of spiritual intimidation within the institutional Mormon Church. In the fall of 1992, Lavina Fielding Anderson and Mormon feminist Janice Merrill Allred formed a special Mormon Alliance subcommittee
to document instances of spiritual intimidation and abuses of ecclesiastical authority within the institutional Church, while Eugene England made a public apology for denouncing the Strengthening the Members Committee, which he admitted he had first incorrectly thought to be composed of regular church employees but which, in fact, included some of the highest ranking members of the Church leadership, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

In the spring of 1993, Lavina Fielding Anderson published in the Mormon journal
Dialogue
an article describing a growing pattern of “spiritual and ecclesiastical abuse” in the Church, wherein members critical of church authoritarianism were being subjected to ecclesiastical investigation and their church membership threatened.