Episode 198 (Bonus): What About Women Leaving the Church? | Revisiting Messages to Our Daughters
An August 2024 Church Handbook update includes instruction inviting “Young Women class presidencies to organize youth to minister by welcoming visitors and members as they enter the chapel.” Does this baby step represent leadership’s awareness of the need for Latter-day Saint young women to have some kind of systematic responsibility at the ward level? In Episode 198, Cynthia and Susan discuss this change in the context of research detailing historic shifts in religious engagement for Gen Z men and women. This episode also revisits a previous exploration of the question many of the Church’s children are asking: “When will girls be able to pass the sacrament?”
Notes & Quotes:
ALSSI Episode 142: Messages to Our Daughters | Part 1—About Girls and the Sacrament
In a First Among Christians, Young Men Are More Religious than Young Women, by Ruth Graham, New York Times, 9/23/2024
Church Handbook 29.2.1.3, Time Before the Meeting
The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology, by Jonathan Stapley
Letters from Love with Elizabeth Gilbert
Recent study finds nearly 1,000 BYU student survey respondents identify as LGBTQ, by Lindsey Reese, The Daily Universe, 3/11/2021
Salt Lake Tribune, Oct 3, 2018, Girls Pass Sacrament
“Young priesthood officers needed a regular duty to perform. Their canonical duties—’to warn, exhort, expound and teach and invite all to come to Christ’—were certainly still in effect but were also impractical to systematize among young boys. Participation in the weekly ritual of the Lord's Supper was something meaningful and regular for the boys to do." —Jonathan Stapley
Being a sahm means most of my social contacts are from church. It makes me especially vulnerable to whatever social pressures there are in the church, including being a woman in a patriarchy. In some ways, I think if I had worked I could have just blithely ignored the men's club and got my own feelings of power and belonging in a work situation. Being a sahm cuts me off from all that, and leaves me dependent in some ways.
Another great episode. Thank you! I, like many women, chose to be a stay at home mom. Now that my kids are raised, I just want to voice how this choice had its good as well as bad. I loved being with my kids. This being said, the anxiety I felt on a daily basis, that if my husband left me, I would be in a very difficult situation without an education or work experience. This was a heavy burden. I felt like I had no power or control in my life and I handed it all over to my husband. That is a scary place to be for a woman. I was lucky. Not all women are. I have many, many friends whose husbands cheated and left them with nothing. This needs to be a wake up call for women. Protect yourself. Men shouldn’t hold all the power.