Ezra Taft Benson + I Converted to Unitarian Universalism

My page that includes the full text of LDS Church President Ezra Taft Benson's 1987 talk "To the Mothers in Zion" has undergone a significant spike in traffic in the last couple of days. I can guess why. General Relief Society president Camille Johnson spoke on Friday, and she talked about balancing her education and career with raising a family, without mentioning that she was in direct defiance of the prophet at the time by having a career at all. Countless other Mormon women sacrificed their career ambitions because the prophet told them to. He didn't say, "Make your own decisions based on your individual circumstances." He didn't say, "Motherhood should be your highest priority, but you can do other things too." He said, "Contrary to conventional wisdom, a mother’s calling is in the home, not in the marketplace." He was not ambiguous. He was not open to interpretation. This was only six years before I was born, and when I grew up in the 2000s, I was still being taught at church that married women shouldn't work outside the home if they had a choice. My YSA bishop was also very adamant about that as recently as 2021.

And now, as anyone familiar with its usual lack of transparency and accountability would expect, the LDS Church is quietly pretending that didn't happen and celebrating a woman who disobeyed the prophet. But of course many people are seeing through that and calling it out. And apparently some of them are using my copy of the talk as a source. Glad I could be of help. On the flip side, several Mormons are lying that the church's vendetta against working mothers was just "culture" or the "interpretation" of a few zealots in your ward, and that's also infuriating but not unexpected. I understand all too well the cognitive dissonance that comes from facing the reality that the men you've been taught to revere as mouthpieces for God were as misogynistic as they were racist.

Anyway, I formally joined the Unitarian Universalist church today because it's been a good spiritual community that shares my values. It's been at the forefront of social justice movements in the United States instead of getting dragged kicking and screaming behind them like some churches I could mention. I first became aware of it over a decade ago when I had a friend who'd converted to it from the LDS Church, and then I visited it for a religious studies class. I thought the building was weird. It's literally a house. And I understood the appeal of the whole "Love everyone and believe whatever you want" shtick, but I didn't like it. That's exactly the sort of liberal claptrap that I'd been taught to dismiss. Love isn't enough, I thought. You can't just believe whatever you want, I thought. There's objective truth and it matters. At some point, a random woman stopped me on the sidewalk, and I don't remember what she said exactly, but basically she sensed a lot of stress or anxiety in me and suggested I check out Unitarian Universalism, which I didn't. In hindsight, maybe she was led by the Spirit. Or maybe she said that to everybody.

Long story short, my perspective has changed. A lot of what I thought was objective truth was actually bullshit, and I have a lot more humility about how much I don't know and probably never will. I still value truth and I still intend to seek after it for the rest of my life, but I no longer think it's the most important thing. I think love is the most important thing after all. Why should God be more concerned about what we believe than how we treat each other? I've increasingly noticed that people who think that way are insufferable if not horrible people. After I lost my faith, I shopped around a little for a new one because I desperately needed the community. And I ended up sticking around with the Unitarian Univeralists, and after a year or so they asked me if I wanted to formally join, and I saw no reason not to. I don't believe it's the "one true religion," and it doesn't claim to be. It's just a community that works for me and a tool for doing good in the world. My imminent departure from Logan puts a bit of a damper on things, but I'll love this congregation while I'm here and then maybe I'll find another in Salt Lake. Things don't have to last forever to be worthwhile.