More Mormon Missionaries + Finding a Feminist Friend

Different Mormon sister missionaries from the ones I talked to came to my house to give my landlord cookies, and he brought them downstairs to use the bathroom because his is off-limits for some reason. Cue them asking if I'm in the ward and me telling them I'm not a member because I don't lead with telling people that I've already been part of and rejected their religion, though I'm probably overthinking it because every Mormon their age knows twenty people who have left. My landlord actually isn't a member either, and he joked that he'll get baptized when he's ninety, but I took the missionaries' side and reminded him that he doesn't know if he'll live that long. They asked if he's talked to me much about the church, and I laughed, and he joked that I don't know anything about the church. They asked if I'd been to any church meetings, how long I'd been here, where I'm from, whether I was raised religious in New York, what religion I was raised in, and whether my church records are in New York, and next time I'm just going to tell them everything up front instead of looking like I have something to hide.

Because the conversation took this trajectory, these missionaries (by which I mean the one missionary who did most of the talking) asked a different question than all the other missionaries I've talked to since 2022. Instead of asking why I left the church, they asked why I had my records removed. Those questions have different answers. Perhaps I should have acted like a Mormon apologist and answered the question they should have asked, but I didn't. I gave them a brief summary of the child sex abuse scandal that broke less than three months after I had fully stopped believing, which certainly would have made me fully stop believing if I hadn't already, and in any case removed any lingering desire to be affiliated with that organization. Out of tact, I only told these innocent young women that Paul Douglas Adams "abused" his daughters, not that he frequently filmed himself raping them and uploaded the videos to the internet, which is how he was exposed by police in New Zealand seven years after his bishop in Arizona didn't report him. I can imagine the progression of thoughts that I would have had if I were them listening to the story:

Oh, you removed your records because one LDS guy abused his kids? That's dumb.

Oh, the church's lawyers told the abuser's bishop not to report the abuse because it was against the law in Arizona, which wasn't true? Um. I mean... I guess they're just lawyers... The Book of Mormon says that lawyers suck...

Oh, the church as an institution - which, to recap, claims to be led by Jesus Christ himself - fought against the abuser's victims in court instead of using a fraction of a percent of its massive wealth to compensate them for what happened under its watch, which would have been a more Christlike thing to do even if it had no legal liability?

...Shit.

In any case, I'm certain a switch turned in their brains as they realized they had no chance in hell of reconverting me. They expressed condolences, said I was welcome to come to church stuff anyway, and didn't pursue the conversation. I never wanted to cause them cognitive dissonance, but now I hope they're experiencing cognitive dissonance, because if they can just not worry about what I told them, they're not good people. I kind of wanted to be like, "Yeah, so I dare you to tell me I was deceived by Satan." Why do missionaries even ask those questions? They aren't trained to deal with the answers. I'm positive nobody has ever said, "I left because I stopped reading the Book of Mormon enough, but now that you're here, you can challenge me to read it again!"

After they left, my landlord launched into arguing with me about feminism again, which is a thing he's been periodically doing as a result of me sharing stuff on Facebook like a Salt Lake Tribune article about why women are now leaving the LDS Church at a higher rate than men. Being from India and having converted to the LDS Church, he has a more "traditional" view of gender roles and what constitutes equality, and he also keeps pointing out the ways that men get screwed. Those are valid. They should be fixed. I personally don't prioritize that. I'm aware that I get screwed in various ways because I'm a man, but the thought of what it would be like to be a woman horrifies me. I regularly walk wherever the hell I want at night with headphones on and zero anxiety, so I can live with the fact that I had to register for Selective Service before I could access some of my civil rights. So he launched back into this debate even though he knew I was in the middle of work. I tried to find common ground by expressing my disgust for the batshit insane women who support Lindsay Clancy and insist that her husband did it because female intuition and astrology told them so, but that just set him off about how the justice system is more lenient toward women. Of course I don't support that either. To me, feminism means treating women as equals in every respect.

Across these debates, my landlord - who, I want to note so you don't get an unfair and one-sided picture, mostly leans left, hates Trump, and has no problem with women having careers or being presidents of things - has sometimes brought up the same points and asked the same questions as if he thinks it's for the first time, even though he can remember something I said around 2014. The gender wage gap was one of those. I have also heard that the gender wage gap is a myth when you break down the math, and it's not something I've ever devoted energy to complaining about. I'm more concerned about women being treated differently from their male colleagues despite having equal rights on paper, e.g., being seen as "bossy" or "bitchy" if they don't preface their contribution with an apology. But the second time he mentioned the gender wage gap, he first mentioned that his friend had mentioned it, and then he'd explained to her why she was wrong. I knew this friend, but nothing about her. Now the implication that she was a feminist despite being a Mormon made me want to know more.

I thought she was my roommate's girlfriend after they came home late together on my first night here and she, startled to see me in the backyard looking at stars and assuming I was her friend, the landlord, yelled, "Don't do that!" My roommate and her are clearly close, but now I don't think they're dating because they don't do touchy stuff and he spends almost every evening at home playing computer games with his brother. Anyway, she came over on Friday morning for him to help her assemble a shelf for her fish tank, and they did that on the patio, where I was already working, and they barely talked to each other except to discuss the instructions, so I had my chance to broach the topic. She was not particularly pleased that my landlord had mentioned her in that way. Oops. But this got us talking. Yes, I virtue signaled. Normally I hate virtue signaling so much that I get embarrassed when women compliment my Ruth Bader Ginsburg shirt. In this case, though, I simply wanted to communicate that we seemed to be on similar wavelengths and could maybe get along well.

My roommate also chimed in a little, and when he said, "I don't want to sound sexist, but -" he had his back to me, and his probably-not-girlfriend looked at me with a big grin, and I cherished that moment of bonding. I didn't think what he said after the "but" was that bad, though. It makes perfect sense to suggest that a majority of women tend to be certain ways and a majority of men tend to be certain other ways, as long as we acknowledge individual variation and cultural conditioning and don't tell either group that they're not allowed to do certain things regardless of their actual qualifications. His probably-not-girlfriend pushed back a little, and he said it could even be 70-30 or 60-40, which sounds fair to me. If he hadn't been there, I would have gone ahead and asked her how she feels about being denied privileges and positions in her church due to what it claims are all women's innate eternal traits, but hopefully I'll get to that another time.

My virtue signaling worked. I was all but invisible to her before. Now she became very friendly toward me, and we also talked about her career and interests, and after she left and came back for the lunch that my roommate does with church people every Friday and has never specifically invited me to, though he has mentioned that I'm welcome to join whatever is going on, she invited me to it. Naturally, most of the conversations were related to the church in some way. I was fascinated when the guy next to me said that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints lobbied the state government to let them ban firearms in meetinghouses and that it was stupid. So on the one hand, he felt a need to use the full name of the church in accordance with the recently deceased prophet's personal pet peeve, which most Mormons in this age group don't even bother with, but on the other hand, he didn't hesitate to tell a bunch of other Mormons that something the church did was stupid. I think this is an illustration of how the LDS Church is screwed because people across the political spectrum don't take it as seriously as it demands to be taken.

My roommate's probably-not-girlfriend, who is thirty, accidentally referred to the new Young Single Adult ward bishop and his wife as "the only adults there," then said that she hated how the YSAs get treated like children. If I wanted to deconvert her, I would have taken notice of that and filed it away under possible avenues of approach alongside the feminist stuff. But of course I wouldn't attempt that because it would only validate Mormons' belief that I was deceived by Satan and am now being used by Satan to deceive others. Satan isn't real, by the way.