Episode 186 (Transcript) What Happened to Community? : A Conversation with Candice Wendt

Episode Transcript

Many thanks to listener, Erica Larsen, for her work in transcribing this episode!

This episode can be found on any podcast app, or can be listened to here on Substack.

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CW: Hi, I'm Cynthia Winward. 

SH: And I'm Susan Hinckley. 

CW: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things. And the title of this week's episode is, What Happened to Community? A Conversation with Candice Wendt. It's a beefy question, Candice. We're so glad to have you with us today.

SH: Hi Candice. 

Candice: Hi everyone, it's such a pleasure to be here. I feel like I just got called down to play The Price is Right or something. I'm just delighted –out of all the listeners! 

CW: You have no idea, but Susan and I just had a long conversation this week about the Price is Right. So… 

Candice: That's how excited I am.

SH: Well, let's play some Conversational Plinko, shall we?

CW: Yes! At the end, we'll let you spin the wheel and see what you win. But anyway. Well, thank you so much, Candice, for being our guest today. Can you just go ahead and give our audience a quick snapshot of who you are and what brings you to this conversation today? 

Candice: Sure. I am raising two teens in an urban center with my husband in the church in Montreal. And this is maybe a little bit different than what I expected for my life. It's a bilingual lifestyle, carless lifestyle for me. Lots of snow and very, very few members of the church. I work at McGill University in the office of religious and spiritual life. And over the past two, three years, I've had a lot of things that have come together to break down the walls of religious certainty and superiority and dogmas in my life. Raising teens, ministering to women going through really complicated things, and also doing interfaith work. Really connecting with other people. For me having those walls come down has been really joyful. 

In terms of my personality, I'm someone who's more introverted and sensitive, faced a lot of social anxiety growing up, but I also have a really bold side that I've always been aware of. First time this came out, I was on a youth trek actually and there was this boy, I think his name was Kevin, bullying me and teasing me every day of this trek. At the end we went to Dairy Queen and for some reason he was offering for everyone to lick his ice cream cone. And like, something just snapped in me. I put the entire ice cream cone in my mouth and I just took it without even thinking. From that day on I have known, I've had things to say. Maybe I wasn't saying it, maybe I was just eating ice cream cones, but there was something inside me that needed to be said. So this is a good community for me. 

SH: I love that story –I really resonate with that story. Someone once described me to myself as an outspoken, shy person, and I thought, “That's it!”

Candice: Yeah no, Susan, I think our personalities are a bit similar. And it's not that I'm serious, with being a more shy person. I'm very silly. I laugh easily. But I have these two extremes that wrestle together, but the boldness is coming out the older I get. 

CW: I love that. Wow. You and Susan do have a lot in common. 

SH: We actually do. I can't even tell you how much I resonate with that story. That's wonderful. I see myself there. Oh, thank you for sharing that! 

CW: Well, the reason we wanted to have Candice with us today is because she wrote an article that is getting a lot of buzz on the Exponent blog, and it's called, “The Insidious Exchange of Community for Covenants.”

And Susan and I read it, we started texting each other and we're like, wait a minute… Candice is pretty active in our At Last She Said It community. Maybe she would be willing to come on and have a conversation about this with us. And so I know it's getting buzz and a lot of other places as well. And I think that it shows just how resonant your words have been for so many of us in this LDS space.

How about Susan, you go ahead and kind of introduce our topic today, and then I will be our emcee, and then we'll jump in and just start asking lots of questions of Candice about her article. 

SH: Sounds good. I'm pretty sure that I was texting Cynthia before I was even halfway through your essay, Candice, because this is a conversation that Cynthia and I have been having for a couple of years, maybe for as long as we've been in conversation, actually. This is something that comes up often for both of us.

And so I want to start giving some context to our discussion today by quoting a line from your Exponent essay, and it says this, “Life as a member offers relatively little social time or enjoyment. Being in the ward is mostly about passive listening and being told to follow leaders and go to the temple. You're more likely to get asked to clean our very dirty building than to be asked to dinner.” 

CW: Hmm. 

SH: Exactly. The whole essay is a bit of a gut punch in the best possible way, right? Because it was just like I was having all of my church experiences validated in one place. I 100 % agree that this is what church has become, but it isn't what church used to be –in my experience.

I grew up in Salt Lake City in the 60s and 70s,and that meant church as a community. We had a summer band, staging musicals, dance festivals, roadshows, water skiing trips, ward parades, barbecues, bazaars, picnics. I went to midweek choir practice at 6 a.m. on Friday mornings. We had ward concerts. There was basketball, softball. Relief Society was a midweek work meeting. Primary was weekday, and it was mostly about having fun. Fun. There was always something going on in our community and that mostly meant at the ward building, right? 

And I realized that not everywhere is Salt Lake City and never was. I'm talking about a very specific childhood in a very specific church context. And I also realized that the world has changed and that families have changed. And so I'm willing to give space for all of that. 

However. I recently, just about a month ago, came across my mother's Beehive manual from the 1940s and it was full of fascinating things. It had lessons on tree identification, for instance, on stargazing and constellations. It was full of games and songs and stories. It's like I was looking at it and thinking, how can this be a Beehive manual? It doesn't have any church lessons, right? It was more like a manual of living in the world lessons.

And I feel like our church has really moved away from trying to engage children on anything outside of commitment to the church organization and commandments. And so I feel like all of this started to happen way back when they consolidated Church meetings. We went to what was called the block schedule, right? And so it started there and it's just continued and continued. And now we're down to these two hours of meetings per week and it's like, it's just shrinking further. And none of this was overnight. I feel like it's been this gradual slipping away of things that I recognize and identify with the “Mormon experience.” And so now we have religion basically distilled to only the religious parts –Even in primary, even for our youngest children. 

I'm going to admit it's my birthday this weekend. So I'm thinking about birthday cake –I've been obsessing over cake all week. But this metaphor came to me. It's like someone brought me a birthday cake, right? But they took off the candles. They took off my name in icing, they took off the sprinkles, the filling, the frosting, the ice cream, the special party plates, the song, and the laughing, and the wish making, and a candle blowing out, and all of those things that come with a birthday cake. And then try to convince me that they've kept the important part for me, right?

So it's still cake and they might have still made the cake to celebrate my birthday, but where's the magic part of that? What remains to make that a special cake that I look forward to all year? 

CW: An enjoyable cake. 

SH: An enjoyable cake, exactly. 

I was telling Cynthia this morning, it feels like a bait and switch church to me. That was the church I joined, and now this is the church I'm in now. And I'd have never really agreed to be in this church. I'm not sure that I would choose it as an adult. I'm not sure this is what I'm looking for when I'm thinking about worshiping in a faith community. And so today's conversation is about all of these things that we've lost. But also about what's important and what remains for us, and what all of that means in the lives of members because I think that Church in the lives of members is profoundly changed. And then as part of this conversation, as the title of your piece suggested, we want to talk about covenants because it seems like covenants and talk of temples and covenants are on the rise and it's almost like that's what is supposed to be going to step in and fill the vacuum that is left.

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And so my question is: Should those things fill that vacuum? Can they? Is this really the direction that we want to continue to move? Will it be durable in the lives of members? Will it keep our young people? All of those kinds of things. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. And I think that Cynthia has some questions for you about that, Candice.

CW: Yeah. Well, and before we jump into those questions, Susan, I think there was a little sign from the universe that as you were talking about bait and switch, one of us in the background I could hear something like a tractor backing up –beep, beep, beep. And I thought, yes! Can we back up? Can we back up just a little bit and maybe bring back a few of those things?

I mean, I don't know if we live in a society anymore where people have time for roadshows and golden green balls and all those things. That would be like level 10 commitment. 

SH: The world the world is different –admittedly.

CW: The world is different! I don't have the time either to do level 10 things like put on roadshows and pageants either. But there's something lost that's kind of this ephemeral thing that I hope we can try to name today. What exactly happened?

And anyway, now I'm the one going off. So Candice, let's go ahead and start. You had this one line that I'd love you to say more about. You wrote he, meaning your son, “He witnesses that church is a revolving door with people entering and exiting as they realize we're not as communitarian as we seemed.”

So say more about that. And maybe specifically, to living in Montreal that would obviously be different from those of us who live in the inner Mountain West. Do you think this is a church-wide problem? Is it exacerbated being in an urban area? 

Candice: I like this question. So I guess I should explain that when I go to a typical Sunday, there are often baptisms announced and it's often multiple baptisms. Not every week, but there are a large number of baptisms in my ward. And from what I understand, any place where the church has a presence, where it's organized and there's a lot of missionary work going on, I think you'd have that in major metropolitan centers. Like I would imagine there might be wards like mine in like London or Berlin or Paris, those kinds of places.

But I think what I hear from connections throughout North America is that in a more typical ward, you will have some of this revolving door going on. Well, my ward is weird. I call it a revolving door, partly because in recent years we have so many people who join, but the ward never splits. Do you know what I mean? Like it never actually grows. 

I think in a more normal ward you will see some of that revolving door where it might be hard for new members to really integrate into the ward, but what I would call it more for a more normal ward is more just people being drawn to the exit door. Even like some of your friends who were really strong members, your favorite families, people exiting as they don't find church as compelling anymore or they face faith difficulties. And then even if we feel really supportive of them and we understand why they leave, the grief that we feel as people are exiting and how that diminishes our community life that we were enjoying with them. Friendships..

CW: And so that's something you're actively seeing in your ward is families or individuals heading towards the exit.  

Candice: Yeah, some of that happens, some of that goes on in my state for sure. But it's definitely something that friends report to me, in different states throughout the U. S. for example, that “Oh, my close friend's family just left the church,” and then they're going through this grieving process.

SH: Right. 

CW: I think Susan and I, we say to each other when we hear yet another person who's exited the church we say, “We bleed, and we bleed, and we bleed.”

Candice: Yeah and it's not necessarily because you are in a stance where you're judging that person. It's…

SH: Oh, no, no, no! It's not that at all. It's a mourning for this organization and for the loss that we're experiencing. For what we're allowing to happen. Even encouraging to happen in some instances. Cynthia and I did a whole episode called We are Good at Showing People the Door because it really does feel like that sometimes.