Episode 235 (Transcript): Is it Too Expensive to be a Latter-day Saint? | A Conversation with Natalie Brown

Episode Transcript

Many thanks to listener Amanda Davis for her work in transcribing this episode!

This episode can be found on any podcast app or can be listened to here on our website as well. All the notes and resources we cited in the episode are found at this link as well:

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CW: Hello, everyone, Cynthia here. Just wanting to give you a quick message before we jump into today's episode that, sadly, we did have some sound issues in recording this. So you may not be able to listen to it if you're driving 70 miles an hour in traffic on the freeway, but we hope you will listen anyway, maybe when you're in a quieter space because the wisdom that Natalie brought to this episode blew us away.

She brought up so many things that we just can't wait to share with you. Enjoy!

NB: You know, so I have not decided how I personally want to pay my tithing going forward, but I did spend a lot of time reading, you know, the scriptures about tithing, about the United Order, and I don't think it was intended to be a system in which people are going without in order to pay tithing. That, does not feel right to me.

CW: Agreed.

NB:I don't know what the system is intended to be, but I think that my own understanding has perhaps been too formulaic and that I need to think more deeply about this issue and how it applies to today's moment.

SH: Hello, I'm Susan Hinkley.

CW: And I am Cynthia Winward.

SH: And this is At Last She Said It.

We are women of faith discussing complicated things, and the title of today's episode “Is it Too Expensive to be a Latter Day Saint? A conversation with Natalie Brown.” Welcome, Natalie!

NB: Hey, I'm so happy to be here again.

CW: We are happy to have you back.

SH: We are thrilled to have you. Our listeners might remember your name from episode 211, which wasn't that long ago, but I mean a while ago now, which was, “Who's the decider?” We were talking about change and prophetic revelation.

CW: It was a good one.

SH: So I will link to that in the show notes if people wanna go hear more from you. And I have a feeling that they will.

Natalie, before we jump into our topic today, is there anything you want our listeners to know about you?

Can you give them just maybe a tiny bit of context about who you are and why you are the one here having this conversation?

NB: Alright, I'm thrilled to be here today. My name's Natalie Brown. I live in Colorado. I have written in the past for By Common Consent, and The Salt Lake Tribune. And all of my articles for the past five years or so have circulated around this topic that it is simply very expensive to live what was preached to us as the ideal Mormon lifestyle, and that that's having big consequences for the church.

I also just have to provide a mandatory disclaimer that I am here in my personal capacity and my views do not represent my employer.

SH: Well, Cynthia's gonna take us through the discussion today, so I guess I'm just gonna turn it over to her and let's get right into it. We have a lot in the notes today.

CW: Well, like Natalie mentioned, she writes for The Salt Lake Tribune here and there. She writes for By Common Consent, that's a churchy blog. And one of the articles in The Salt Lake Tribune that Natalie sent to Susan and I for homework was fantastic and we swiped a line from it where she said, “I worry that we have been so busy defining families that we have forgotten what they need.”

So the Family Proclamation has many issues. Can I say problems? Depends on how harsh I wanna be, but one of, one of those issues that we are going to discuss today has to do with how families financially lived in 1995 when it was written, and how they look 30 years later today in 2025.

And so, in that Salt Lake Tribune article that Natalie wrote, she said this, “The current economy, however, has largely failed many of us who came of age in the 21st century. It is no longer news that supporting a family on one income is difficult in the wake of the Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic. Wage stagnation and inflation that has been especially high in vital areas such as housing and education.”

Way to lay it all out right there, Natalie, in that one paragraph, you have such a way with words.

We're gonna link to the articles that we're gonna be jump-starting from today so that others can read your wise words, but let's just go ahead and jump in then, Natalie, and talk about all those things.

NB: Perfect. Well, basically, the thesis of a lot of my writing is that it has become very difficult economically for many Latter-day Saints in the United States to live the ideals set forth in the Proclamation, and that this has a lot of consequences. Not only because living this family model was so linked to what it meant to be a righteous Latter-day Saint, and, it was, to our theology, but also because, I think, our church’s organizational structure really relied on having a pool of basically unpaid caregivers that could source a lot of its volunteer labor.

And when that goes away, [00:05:00] we don't have people who can staff our activities, who can staff the temples, who can be our senior missionaries and what do we do? Where do we go from there?

SH: So, so that makes it sound a lot bigger than just the Family Proclamation idea. I mean, actually the changes that are happening culturally as the world continues to march forward, make it so the whole structure of the church isn't really working as well as it maybe once did.

We're just not built for this perhaps.

NB: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, I don't think we can understate how much the church organization and the family theology that we developed in the 20th century was based on a significant amount of economic prosperity in post World War II America.

SH: Right.

NB: And that we have seen some real shifts in that, over the last few decades that are making some of those structures untenable, are in need of some summary innovation. And while I think the church is trying, I mean they, they've certainly moved, like the two hour block or reduction of activities, I think are a nod to the fact that members are somewhat over extended.

I think a lot of us also feel that we're missing community, and we don't quite know how to reform it or reconstitute it in this new environment.

SH: Well, and a church that is much less integral to people's daily lives. And I don't mean necessarily in any kind of spiritual way, but I mean

NB: Right.

SH: Just speaking practically.

You know, I grew up in a time where everything was centered around the ward and the activities going on there. There was always something going on. So now that we've moved to a much different model, it makes me question, “Can the church have the same kind of staying power or influence in people's lives?”

NB: Yeah I absolutely agree. And one of, you know, I have two children who are Primary age, and one of the things I have noticed is that they are really struggling to cultivate a sense of Mormon identity. You know, one of the consequences I think of the two hour block is that our kids are not being indoctrinated in church, but they're also not being indoctrinated. I mean, they, my kids, just know very little about the scriptures, about Mormon history and they don't have nearly the same number of touch points with church that I had growing up, or the number of families to mentor them. It's an open question to me, what being Mormon is going to be for them when many of the ways in which I thought about what it meant to be Mormon are going out.

CW: Yeah, that's true.

NB: Okay. So one of the things that became very apparent to me once I moved to Boulder, Colorado, which was very expensive was that cheap housing in America was almost a precondition of the kinds of nuclear families that we outlined in the Proclamation. When my spouse and I moved to Colorado, we had both been working as professionals on the East Coast and we should have been able to afford a house.

But we found that even with two incomes, our ability to buy a house was very constrained. That got, that is what really triggered my interest in this problem. And I think Boulder was just a few years ahead of places like Utah and Salt Lake in having this housing affordability issue. But what I have noticed over the past, you know, decade or so that we've lived here, is that there's sort of a pattern that begins to happen and that the areas closest to jobs will become too expensive and then families will move to the next area out. And then within a couple of years, that area becomes too expensive and then families move even further out.

And you know, if I look at what this means for our wards, since we have moved to Colorado, we have been through two rounds of ward reorganizations. And each time it's because the families are moving out of the places closest to jobs and moving further and further away. Yeah. And it's had a lot of really practical consequences on the ground.

So I think one of, you know, the big consequences we see is that. Our wards have become really unbalanced in terms of the number of families. So, you know, when we moved into our current neighborhood, it was considered like the family neighborhood. Well, flash forward to today, and we are looking, my son is about to go into Young Men's and I believe there are only two other active young men in the ward.

And so what we've seen is that, you know, that the families move out and people just are not coming back in to replace them.

CW: Right.

NB: And so our ward is aging. Its youth programs have become very small. Whereas the opposite problem exists sort of in the communities that are less expensive and further away, where I'm told that they [00:10:00] are teaming with children.

They, you know, don't have enough space for them. They're all over extended. Whereas our building is sitting almost empty. And that's a problem. It's a problem in terms of like, why are we investing? How do we invest in real estate for our chapels, when, you know, where the people are is gonna shift every five or ten years.

It's a real problem for a ward structure that is designed with the expectation that there are people of different ages in the ward who can fulfill different functions.

CW: I think about my own ward here in West Provo, and when I was in the Primary presidency a decade ago, we had 150, maybe closer to 180 children.

And our Primary, you can imagine, like, staffing that, I mean, it took 72 callings to staff Primary, Scouts, Activity Days, all of that. And now my ward, for every reason you just mentioned about housing costs, we're down to 20 children.

Families cannot afford to live in Provo anymore.

They have to go further and further away to more, well, rural areas, you know. Those rural areas eventually become more metropolitan. But yeah, it's the same here as it is in Colorado, Natalie.

NB: I think that, to me, is what has really changed about this conversation. I think like, a decade ago, we all expected, you know, the Bay Area or New York City to have this problem,

SH: right?

NB: But this is occurring in Provo, it's occurring in Salt Lake. It is occurring in areas that we expect and that we really benefited from being family friendly centers that can nurture our next generation of Mormons and help us, you know, live all the family values that we became accustomed to.

Yeah. And so I, you know, I think this has a lot of very practical consequences for people in all ages of life. Because I am a parent of primary age kids, I'm somewhat more attuned to the problems that younger generations are facing. But I will say that, also, speaking to a number of seniors who are seeing the same problem from a different, you know, from a different perspective.

And, you know, an anecdote I keep thinking about is that we now live about two, we live two streets away from where my in-laws, you know, several decades ago had four children on a post-doc salary. And today, you know, living in a, functionally, that same house is requiring my family to have two incomes at least on and off.

And we delayed having children, and we only have two. And that is, had we not been able to, you know, amass a fairly substantial amount of savings before we had children we simply would not be able to afford to live here.

SH: But we're not really encouraged to approach establishing a family that way.

Is that fair to say? I mean, what's coming over the pulpit at General Conference is not “Be wise. Take quite a few years to figure out, you know, when's the right time for you to have children. And save money so that you'll be able to buy a home or do the things that you need to do to support your family.”

This is not the kind of advice that young people receive in our church.

CW: Nope.

NB: It is not. And I think Dallin H. Oaks has been one of the few apostles I've heard sort of directly acknowledge this affordability crisis that it's occurring. And I may be wrong in my recollection, but I think it was in the context of actually telling people, it's like, you know, it's expensive, but you know, you don't need to delay.

SH: Right.

NB: Having your family,

CW: How is that helpful?

NB: Yeah. And I wanna be–I just wanna say the reason we had our children somewhat late is due to when I met my spouse and when I got married, it was not an intentional thing on our part. And I think there's some real upsides to having children earlier. I mean, my father died somewhat prematurely–I’m very glad that he got to meet my children because he had us earlier. And I often wish, actually, I had my children maybe while I was in school, so I didn't need to disrupt my career later on.

So I'm not saying that there's a formula necessarily here, whatsoever. It just so happened to be that what worked out for my marriage and my family was that we ended up having them a little bit later than is normal in LDS circles.

The upside of that is that it enabled us to afford a house that we otherwise would not have been able to afford.. But it's not a very nice house. It's an 1800-square-foot square bi-level from the 1960s that we are very grateful to have.

CW: Sure.

SH: Well, I think that it gets complicated too. I mean, I, yeah, I absolutely appreciate what you're saying and I have never regretted having my children really young, so I'm gonna say the same thing. Preface it by saying that the model worked well for me, actually, but I think Latter-day Saints don't take as long in the whole dating [00:15:00] process, in the whole, you know, considering how they're gonna move into their married life or adult life.

I think we are on a pretty truncated schedule, generally, with those things. And so there's just not a lot of pre-planning that gets to go on before you're right in the thick of it. And so I don't necessarily think everyone needs to, you know, always delay having children, but I just feel like never once, ever, have I heard the message, “Use wisdom and move through these things in your own individual time.”

NB: Right?

SH: Yeah. It's always just, here are the check marks and you move through it. You know, you just, you move through that.

NB: I agree. I feel very much like we, we were presented with formulas growing up that like, you know, this is a script and I'm actually writing…

CW: For sure!

NB: …on this topic. Yeah, so we were given these formulas for happiness that worked really well in the 1990s when I was growing up because it corresponded with a period of economic prosperity in which, you know, most people, for most people following the formula, odds were pretty good that it would work out.

CW: Well, and speaking of the 1990s, like I, I crunched a few numbers before this episode and my husband and I bought our first home in 1998. And since 1998, housing has gone up in my very neighborhood. 235%.

NB: Wow.

CW: So what worked in 1990? You're right, Natalie. It absolutely doesn't work today.

Hence why we only have 20 kids left in my primary. Families cannot afford to live here.

NB: Yeah. And I haven't crunched the numbers, but I'm pretty sure salaries have not gone up by that same…

CW: No!

SH: I think we all know that

CW: No. Inflation, and apologies to our international listeners, we're being very American centric right now, but inflation for the US since, I think, the mid-nineties was about 23%.

So no, an increase of housing in 235% is well beyond what we would call normal inflation. So it is untenable at this point to be a stay at home parent in my neighborhood. And I live in a very normal neighborhood. Some people call our homes starter homes. I hate that term: I think it's elitist and classist.

I mean, I grew up in a very small home, but that's the kind of neighborhood I live in. Like I always like to say, I'm not talking Laguna Beach here, people. Like this is West Provo. These are very regular homes and they are completely out of reach now with 235% inflation.

SH: Some of this disconnect kind of goes back further though, in my opinion, because when you look at the whole model that is set up for the LDS family, this is something that really grows out of a post-World War II period in American history. Right?

And so by the time we even get to the 1990s and they're putting together the Family Proclamation, it's already feeling a little out of sync, in my opinion, with where the culture is gone and the trajectory that it's on for women in the U.S.

NB: Yeah.

CW: Good point.

NB: Absolutely. You know, and I very much respect and admire our apostles and our leadership, and I do think this is a place in which you see where people who are 100, do not have the same experience of child raising that we are having today. And that there is a disconnect.

I mean, I've had examples from my own ward or my own, just, you know, interactions that have really given me pause and they've been very little things. Like I remember I was invited to take a marriage class and it was excellent. It was a really fun second hour class. And at one point I just. Someone who is somewhat older than me talked about, you know, the importance of hiring a babysitter and going on dates and the other young mom in the class and I just looked at each other and started laughing because like, first of all, who would I hire out of this, you know, tiny pool of youth we have in our ward?

And secondly, you know, going to dinner and a movie probably costs us about $200,

SH: Right?

NB: At today's babysitting rates, like this is just something we can't afford. Like, my spouse and I do not go on dates. Childcare is extremely expensive. Even if you are just a stay at home mom who wants a little bit of preschool on the side at, like, a local, at a local church, it's all priced for dual incomes. Youth are very overextended today. They don't have the capacities to just go babysit.

CW: Yep.

NB: And it was just, you know, it's such a small thing, but it's one of those moments that just really clarified how much the parenting experience has changed over the course of the last few decades.

SH: Right. [00:20:00]

CW: Oh gosh. That illustrates so well. I mean, I'm assuming, or maybe I missed that the person that made the comment about date night was an older person?

NB: Yeah. Just slightly older than me, but not that much older. Like I, it’s just interesting. But, you know, I think this has just so rapidly changed.

CW: Yes.

NB: That what was accessible to people, even, you know, 10 years ahead of me, is inaccessible to someone of my age. And what's accessible to me, I'm seeing, is now inaccessible to people 10 years younger than me. It's just like, we're on this race in which you can never catch up.

CW: I think you're right that things really did change that quickly, like less than 10 years. Like, definitely COVID is when the housing crisis like, hit us full force.

NB: Yeah. And I just said, you know, I've been more attuned to the experiences of people who are having kids or who are feeling that they cannot have children because it's untenably expensive, but I don't wanna minimize that.

I think this is having a big impact on seniors as well. You know, I've heard several say that, you know, I'd like to move near my family, or I'd like my family to move near me. But those kinds of moves, that ability to live together in a multi-generational setting that would, you know, be a win-win is unavailable due to the costs of housing.

CW: I mean, that's why my husband and I raised our kids 600 miles away from our parents. We couldn't afford to go back to Southern California after college. There was no way. And now my own kids can't afford to buy a house in Utah. So yeah, it's just kicking that can down, you know, the road, the problems.

NB: Your comment underscores to me that, I mean, this is not an entirely new problem, and I really don't wanna minimize that. Other past generations have had similar moments of economic challenges. I just think that the scale of the problem.

CW: Yeah, the scale.

NB: It’s something that's unusual in the last few decades of our experience. It's that, it's penetrating, even Provo, like that is not the community that we expected to become so highly unaffordable to have California pricing.

CW: Right, right.

NB: You know, and this has very practical consequences for wards. My mother-in-law lives in a large house in Provo, and she made the point to me that, you know, if they wanted to downsize and, you know, give up their home so that some family could occupy it and and, you know, live in a smaller place, they literally could not do so without leaving their ward boundaries and giving up their entire social circle.

So I think in an LDS context, or at least in a Utah LDS context, where a ward really can be a couple of streets or a couple of blocks, there's another dimension that, that trading housing means giving up your entire social circle.

SH: Right.

CW: I had never thought about that before until you had put it in the notes. And I've been thinking about that for days and just thinking about how important, like, we're talking about community a little bit, right? And how important community is, and how when it's time for an older person or couple to downsize their house when they're done raising their eight children, that also means they give up everything in their ward. And wards are very often, everything, every social community aspect to a person. So that's a really good point. Thank you.

NB: Right.Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't give up my house if that meant moving my entire friend circle either.

And you know, it's interesting too, because now most of my siblings live in houses that are too small to accommodate guests or extended family reunions.

One who lives in a more remote area of the country, has a house that could do it, but the rest of us don't. And so now I see so many people in my friend circle talking about, okay, well now do we need a, like a vacation home or an Airbnb and someplace cheaper that can host our family?

Because none of us can host our families when they wanna come for Christmas or Thanksgiving and be together. And so I'm unsure if there's a perfect solution to any of this.

CW: Yeah, good point.

NB: But we're in a moment where many of us are in sort of unsuitable housing for our needs, and it just, it has a lot of downstream consequences.

Excellent. So it's been interesting to hear about wards that are starting to experiment with ways to address this problem. My mother lives in Salt Lake in a more historic community that has, you know, it's aging a bit, it's lost a lot of kids. And their stake decided to create a designated family ward, much in the way we have designated singles wards, in which all of the people who had children at home would attend one ward, because that was the only way in which their stake could get a critical mass of children in the same place. And they wanted to prioritize that.

SH: Wow. Okay. But I love hearing [00:25:00] this because this is exactly the kind of flexibility that I feel like our church is gonna have to move toward in order to address some of these problems.

Like, I was thinking when you were talking about older people who might want to move to a different area of the city to downsize if they had the flexibility to continue to attend their old ward, if that worked for them then they would feel a lot more freedom maybe to be able to do that.

NB: Right. I think that's exactly right. I think we're gonna have to move towards more flexibility. My mom told me that when their stake created the family ward, it was somewhat hard at first because a lot of, you know, those the older grandmas in the ward, like, missed that connection with the primary children.

But she said her perspective, though, is that as it's gone on, people have come around to it because it's allowed one ward to focus on the needs of children. And as you know, as Cynthia, as you put it now, I mean, that could take like 70 people to staff a functioning youth program and Primary, while the other wards are more able to focus on the needs of, you know, people who might be empty nesters or single. And that it's actually allowed the wards to dedicate more resources to their respective communities.

CW: Well, and it shouldn't completely surprise us that maybe in the Salt Lake area, they created a family ward. I mean, we have Spanish wards, right? Yeah. We have deaf wards, like, right? We already have been accustomed to accommodating different situations that individuals have, different families have, and so the fact that, like, a family ward is being created so that youth can socialize with others

CW: Well, how do you feel about that, Natalie? Like you just said, like, your children don't really have children to grow up with. Like, is that something you wish would happen in your area?

NB: I do. I think that's what we should do. Actually, when I heard that proposal, it was like, that is probably the right solution to our area because there are not enough children in any one city or ward to have, I think a truly functioning youth and primary program.

Yeah I would love that. I think that's what we should do. And, you know, another thing my mother-in-law in Provo told me that her stake addressed this issue by choosing to dissolve one of its wards and moving, you know, some of the students who might have been in apartments into their wards. They could rebalance the demographics a bit, but that's, then, that's yet again, another example I think is that we might need more flexibility that's, you know, outlined in the policies for forming stakes and wards to be like, okay, this area has this problem.

And we're gonna have to think outside of these frameworks to address it. And also I just wanna say, you know, these problems, the pace of change in these communities is so quickly that I do think we just need the flexibility to, like, redo ward boundaries more often too. You know, it could take five years for the youth program to disappear in a ward due to these demographic shifts.

SH: So we're not just talking about needing maybe more flexibility in defining what a family and the balance of those roles are supposed to look like. We also need more flexibility in defining what a ward is supposed to look like. All of it, I think, just comes down to loosening up a little on our preconceived ideas about how everything is supposed to be.

NB: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, and I think the other thing I've noticed, living in a shrinking ward is, you know, going back to this topic, is that we relied on, sort of, the unpaid labor of women and for, yes, a while, to staff wards and to run these programs and, you know, two income families have less time to volunteer, right?

There's just a lot of unseen consequences or, you know, we rely a lot on senior missionaries right now to staff a lot of functions in the larger church, like temples, museums. And these are all wonderful contributions, but I, you know, I'm already planning to be providing childcare for my kids because unless something changes I, I don't know what they're going to do, which means I'm not going to be serving a senior mission.

So I think there's just a lot of things that we need to think about, maybe a little bit more flexibly.

CW: Yeah, we definitely have relied on the free labor of women to staff a lot of things in the church. I mean, I never knew any dads that had Cub Scout callings. It was always moms. 'Cause they assumed, you know, moms could do scout activities at three o'clock and maybe that's one reason we got rid of scouting, I don't know. But we've seen change before. So yeah. We need more flexibility and adaptability.

NB: Yeah, and I think we're actually in a little bit of a catch-22, and I think the church has actually acknowledged that maybe we don't have the capacity to run these programs like scouts anymore, or to run three hours of church.

But then the flip side of that is I think a lot of us are really missing our community and missing more, an identity, and we're not quite sure how to bring it back in a way that works in this economy.

And [00:30:00] I think we maybe need to be more flexible about thinking about how we spend money as a church as well, and a number on a number of other things.

One of the pieces I wrote for By Common Consent, I gathered just conversations that I've had with people about what ideas they have for addressing this issue of declining community and overextended families. And I know they really had quite a few.

I mean, what I really liked was that we could start designing buildings as community centers that had more flexible spaces so that you know, even if the church isn't interested itself in running daycares, which I would completely understand. You know, why not let a mom's group just organize a co-op preschool and have a space in a chapel that could accommodate them?

You know, I guess as I've been meditating on these solutions I was, at first, too embarrassed and felt too ashamed to say this, but the more and more I've been thinking about it I think the, perhaps easiest fix is rethinking tithing and what we expect families to pay in tithing and how we make that contribution.

SH: Oh, good luck with that; say more.

NB: Yeah and I say this as someone who really believes in tithing.

CW: Yeah. Say more about that, Natalie!

NB: So I truly believe in the principles of tithing. I think it's very important to have to confront one's budget and say, “I have enough, I can afford to give more.” And to recognize that the Lord, at least in my life, I do feel that the Lord has provided a way when I make those sacrifices.

I also reached a point in which, when I was a young mom with toddlers at home, I did not have adequate preschool and it was taking a big mental health toll on my life. And I've realized, in retrospect, that the amount we were paying in tithing was pretty much the amount I would've needed to have sent my children to preschool. For my own mental health, but also for their social development.

We had some preschool, but it just, it wasn't quite enough because preschool is, you know, really priced for two income families in our neighborhood. And at the time I was staying home with them and we just didn't have that big of a budget.

And so I just wonder now, you know, we're, when tithing, the start of the church was very poor. That's no longer the case. And I just wonder if we don't need more flexibility to adjust tithing to individual circumstances. And if you're, like, if you are a nuclear family in the church, with a stay at home mom, how do you compete against dual income families, especially when you are paying 10% of your income to the church that they are not? I mean, just structurally it is such a huge disadvantage, right?

SH: Right.

CW: Well, and I feel like, I mean, the church, at least one person, Joseph F. Smith, he addressed this a hundred years ago in like 1906, when he said, we expect to see the day when we will not have to ask you for $1 of donation for any purpose.

He's the only leader, as far as I know, that ever said, you know, someday we won't need tithing. And I think, hands down, there's no way the church hasn't reached that point with, you know, a hundred plus billion dollars in cash and assets and shell companies and you know, all the things. And I don't think what you're saying, Natalie is crazy talk. Like, to me it sounds very prophetic, like it was prophetic for Joseph Smith to say that. It sounds very doable.

NB: Yeah. And I do think we, we do provide welfare. We do subsidize tuition at BYU. We, I assume, we subsidize missions as well.

So the church is giving some of this money back to its members. But anytime you have an intermediary deciding, you know, what we're gonna subsidize or who deserves welfare, there's just great inefficiencies in that system. And, you know, not everyone's gonna be sending their kids to BYU, you know. I felt that my kids needed more preschool than they were receiving,

but, is that a traditional welfare need? It's not like a healthcare crisis, it's not a housing crisis.

I don't know. And I do think this is where it's also complicated that we're an international church. Because I think, you know, in the United States we've been accustomed to a very high standard of living, and it does seem somewhat outrageous to say that, you know, this middle class person's educational needs are on par with, you know, like hunger in some other part of the world.

But this is a real conversation I think that we do need to have, like if it's becoming difficult to meet the standards within your own [00:35:00] country.

CW: Absolutely.

NB: You know, so I have not decided how I personally want to pay my tithing going forward, but I did spend a lot of time reading, you know, the scriptures about tithing, about the United Order, and I don't think it was intended to be a system in which people are going without in order to pay tithing; that does not feel right to me.

I don't know what the system is intended to be, but I think that my own understanding has perhaps been too formulaic and that I need to, I need to think more deeply about this issue and how it applies to today's moment.

CW: Well, and for good reason. It's been formulaic. I feel like that was pretty explicit.

I mean, we've all heard the things like you pay on your gross because you want the gross blessings, not the net blessings. I mean, it's just, it's such a part of our culture that we, like you were saying, Natalie, like when you actually go back and read, well, what's the section about tithing in the Doctrine and Covenants? It's very differently explained there than what we live today or at least culturally say we should be living today.

NB: Yeah. And also, you know, our economy is very different than it was in the 1800s. I mean, we think about the pioneers, and like a lot of their tithing is in kind–it's in labor. I mean, we're coming out of an agricultural community in which there wasn't as much wage labor. There wasn't as much cash.

And you know, as someone who has both at times worked for pay and has at times, you know, been a caregiver, I wonder, you know, what is the value of that unpaid caregiving I'm giving? It's, there's not a cash value on it, but I can like put on my taxes or that I can pay tithing on. But it is real work.

CW: No arguments from us there.

Oh goodness. Yeah, I totally get that the church is an international church and they can't necessarily address every situation around the world and every economy. But I have two things to say about that. One, the church is centered here in Salt Lake City, in the Intermountain West, so you would think that when the problems are acutely are acutely acute here in, in the western half of the United States, that it would at least be addressed. And like you said, Oaks is the only one who's addressed it. And even then it was like, well, we know it's expensive, but have faith. And it's like, wait, what? Faith doesn't pay the bills?

But secondly, I think going to what you're saying about tithing, like can there be flexibility? Like surely there should be a different model for some, you know, for women like us who live in the United States in our middle class, as opposed to, like, for instance, my son served his mission, the Dominican Republic, and when we went there to visit some families, he only took one family member with him. He says, “Mom, they only own two chairs and they're lawn chairs. Like they only own two chairs in their house. There is nowhere for anyone else to sit.” So should I be paying differently than that person, in my opinion, absolutely. Yeah.

NB: I agree. And I think when you start to really ponder the issue, probably some of us should be paying more than 10%, but it might be this concept of flexibility and I see the ease and the beauty of the 10%. I see why that had a lot more staying power than the United Order.

I feel that this is an area in which I need to confront seriously, that I think all of the scriptures tell us that economic inequality is not good. And that we need to do our part to get rid of it, while also trying to process what it means to be a middle class woman raising a family in America. And how I, you know, I, we, our religion is experienced within our economic and political systems, and sometimes there's gonna be some tensions there, but at least I need to think really seriously about them.

So, we've talked a lot about the practical consequences, but I wanna also talk a little bit about some of the theological consequences here. And also what this has meant for Mormon feminism and maybe some of the generational gaps that we're, that we're experiencing.

You know, I have been really struggling to articulate a sense of Mormon identity right now because a lot of the things I've associated with being a Mormon are going away.

You know, one being that this family model is very out of reach. You know, other things just being, I think we're seeing a lot more flexibility amongst younger generations, of how they interpret garments and the Word of Wisdom and some of these cultural markers that were so strong for me, I just, that visual Mormon identity is, for better or worse, I think really under pressure right now.

And, you know, what does this like, you [00:40:00] know, for so long motherhood has been pointed out as the alternative to priesthood for women, and now the majority of members in the church are single, or we're gonna be spending less of our lives engaged in motherhood because we're not gonna be able to afford to have the number of kids of previous generations. And, you know, what does that mean for how we think about the position of women in the church?

SH: Right?

NB: What does it mean to be following the Lord if these cultural scripts that were so strong have, are starting to crumble.

CW: Well, and because it's At Last She Said it, we've talked about lots of these issues before, I mean, in our very first 10 episodes, I, episode nine, we had an episode called “As a Cook, I Was a Piano Teacher,” which is a funny title. You'll have to listen to the episode to understand what we were talking about. But we were talking about, you know, women's roles, doctrine versus culture, frugality, and one of our biggest episodes was episode 155, where we talked, it was called “To the Children of the Mothers in Zion.” And just, you know, have patience with your moms because they're going through a big change. We were taught to give up our careers in the eighties and nineties and, just like we're talking about today, Natalie, like that is not possible. So yes, there are huge consequences to our culture, to our spirituality, to our family structure when these fundamental roles that we've been told are the most important have changed.

NB: Yeah. You know, and that's interesting 'cause I have actually felt quite a bit of tension between Mormon feminists surrounding these economic topics. You know, when I think about my younger self, Mormon feminism, to me, was centered on this idea of whether or not I could work outside the home.

SH: Right.

CW: Like I, I was an angsty youth who was just trying to say I could be something in addition to being a mother.

SH: Right.

CW: And you know, in some ways the economy has resolved that debate. Most women my age, especially those younger, are going to need to work for pay at some point in their life.

But it's really changed. I think, you know, what it meant to be, it is like, you know, for people who didn't have that chance to work I think work can seem like a very aspirational thing. Like, it's supposed to be a fulfilling, I mean, that's what I thought. I was like, I was gonna work in this job that was gonna be fulfilling and give me all this personal meaning.

It never in my mind was really about making money because my spouse was gonna do that. Whereas now that I'm in the reality of this economy, where I have had on and off, like work outside the home. This is not bringing me that kind of personal fulfillment. It feels very much to me like I'm working at these gigs to try to afford the lifestyle my parents were able to have on one income.

And I, there's a lot of tension there between like generations about, you know, how did we think about work? Are we still longing for this kind of ideal of fulfilling work that maybe isn't available, but that we're maybe projecting onto younger generations, going? There's a lot to discuss there.

CW: Can I read back one paragraph that you wrote in your By Common Consent article that I think gets to the heart of what you're talking about, of about feeling abandoned and you say,

“I am one of many, though not all, Latter-day Saint mothers who struggle with feelings of abandonment because they were raised within a church that preaches the paramount importance of motherhood, but provides mothers with little practical or financial support. Mothers in particular are often asked to bear the physical, emotional, and economic risks of parenthood with few safety nets outside family.”

NB: Yep. Yeah. I feel this every day. It impacts how I think about work, about topics like inheritance, about, you know, just, tithing

CW: All of it.

NB: Yeah, all of it.

SH: But my question is, “Has the messaging that we're giving younger girls, are the ways in which we're preparing them for what will be the realities of their lives as Latter- day Saint women changing?”

I mean, and I don't really know the answer to that. I would like to think that we are preparing girls with better ways of thinking about the work that is going to be required, you know, in their future. It's not, a career is no longer aspirational. It's probably going to be mandatory.

But we had a Substack chat the other day, a conversation going in our Substack chat in which someone was talking about what had happened at girls camp in their stake.

And there had been an activity about, I don't remember what it was called, “Marrying the Broom.” Cynthia, do you remember this?

CW: Yeah.

SH: Did you read it?

CW: Yeah. Like “Bride and Broom,” or something.

SH: and broom. Yes. And so it was this thing in which the girl is made up as a bride and the groom is a broom, obviously, and this is who they're marrying, but I thought, “Man, we could be having, I don't know, some kind of career workshop, some kind, you know, some kind of mentorship going on in this situation [00:45:00] that is not about marriage.”

NB: Yes.

SH: Which is not necessarily going to happen, but is instead about preparing a girl for life in the world as a working woman, which is almost absolutely going to happen.

NB:Yeah, it's true. Like far more of us are gonna experience life as a working woman than will experience motherhood, even if we are eventually mothers.

SH: Right,

NB: Right.

SH: Good point.

NB: I do not have young women. My, I have two boys who are still in Primary, but I would love for you to have someone on the show to discuss this topic of what messaging we're giving to our youth.

Because when I speak to other parents today. I feel that all of us are absolutely lost about how to prepare our kids for this new economy. Because the educational paths that we took, even the career paths that seem very promising, like STEM or computer science are being called into question by changes in the economy.

And ai, you know, I, there was an article in the New York Times just this week about how computer science grads are struggling to find work. You know, I feel I have not figured out this topic for myself, and I'm in my forties and I'm still trying to figure out what it means to earn money and to be a mother.

And everything that I knew about every educational path that I took, that led to success, every career path I took that led to success, is under significant strain right now. And I, to some extent, feel that I'm living on a prayer and just hoping that the Lord will inspire me because I do not know how to educate my children for a future that I cannot envision.

CW: Right. Well, I love that you just said Natalie, like you're like, it sounds like you're really trusting personal revelation in this matter, for God to guide you in what's right for you and your family. And I hope that is the message that we are giving to young people today is that they will need to rely heavily on that.

But like we were just saying, we don't know what the messages are that are, that we are giving to our young women today, but we have to trust we have to trust our promptings on this because like you said, like everything is changing so fast that what will be right for your family isn't necessarily what's right for other families and yet for so long it was, there was one message that we were giving to all young women. Right?

NB: Yeah.

CW: I got the same message that Susan got. That you got and we're all in different decades, like forties, fifties, and sixties, right? So is that messaging changing or is, it should hopefully always be up to the individual to interpret that for her own life.

But then that brings other consequences too, of judgment and shame and not fitting in and belonging anyway. A whole host of things.

NB: Yeah. And I think the opportunity of living through a moment in which these scripts that we were handed no longer work for most of us, is that we do have an opportunity to become more in touch with personal revelation and our spiritual intuition.

Not an opportunity we necessarily want, but what has been thrust upon us in unstable conditions.

But, you know, I also wanna conclude with a helpful note since I'm saying that I don't know how to educate my kids. And I think that's true. I'm not sure what messaging I want to provide them because everything is changing so quickly.

But, you know, my children, they're in Primary, but they have already lived through a pandemic. My oldest started kindergarten on the computer. I had been so worried about making sure he was in the right school only to realize that I didn't even know if he was going to be in school.

SH: Right.

NB: You know, we have had a mass shooting in our neighborhood. We had a wildfire that burned something like a thousand houses in our neighboring cities. But my kids seem to be okay. Like I realized that they are more resilient, but also more attuned to the realities of what are going on now than I ever was as a child. And I think to some extent, when this is your baseline, when this kind of uncertainty is the only thing you've ever known, they are not processing the same sense of regret and loss and nostalgia that I am.

And they are able to, I think more so than me, look upon this chaos as an opportunity to make a contribution in the world, as an opportunity that's somewhat exciting to chart new paths and I might feel a little too old to be optimistic all the time at this moment.

But, you know, I was also talking to some new grad students in our communities.

I live in a college town, and I realized, you know, they still had hope for solar power technologies, or for the future of like, Mormon history. And to be in touch with their hope was really important.

CW: Well, we've been talking a lot about hope this [00:50:00] season, so that dovetails perfectly.

SH: Yeah. That, yeah, that does sound hopeful to me.

It's interesting because I'm listening to you talk in that last little section. I'm thinking, I'm still struck by, I think it was Cynthia who said that we're women in our forties, fifties, and sixties.

NB: Yeah.

SH: Yeah. So it's interesting, really interesting to me that we're talking about this spread of three decades, and yet we all received basically the same messaging.

CW: Yeah.

SH: At church, right? Yeah. Yeah. But the world did change in those 30 years, certainly. And then to hear you talk about, you know, what your children's experience has been, and I'm just talking so far in their very short lives.

NB: Yeah.

SH: Some of the things that they've had to navigate. It's very stark to me that our messaging has got to become more flexible.

Cynthia, I think we're gonna have to add flexibility to our bingo cards for this season because it's coming up a lot.

But to me, the place to find hope really would be in our ability to respond to what feels like a truly dynamic world. I mean, I think it always has been, but I think the rate of change in the world right now, things are moving at an accelerated pace compared to, you know, when I was growing up in the sixties and seventies in some very real ways.

Our children are experiencing a faster pace of life than we were. And so if we can figure out a way, even if all the church could do, would be to say, “Lean into your own personal revelation.”

CW: Yes.

SH: One of the best ways to prepare your children and help them adapt to the world that they're living in, even if that's the only shift that they made, I feel like that would be an extremely hopeful shift.

I hope for more than just that message. But I do hope for that message because I think what you're saying is really true: It's hard to know as a parent how to prepare them in this kind of environment that they're in. And if it's hard for you to know, then for sure it's really hard for a gerontocracy, to use that word, to respond to.

NB: Yeah. And you know, I'm thinking about how I've noticed that younger generations have a more flexible approach to topics like garments and the Word of Wisdom and tithing and all these things that I feel I have to do very by the book.

SH: Yes.

NB: And I do think that their decision to seize this flexibility for themselves is because we haven't been responsive enough in our messaging.

SH: Yes. Yes.

NB: Because we haven't changed the message, and because that message is now, in some ways, incompatible with the realities that they're facing, that they've had to cultivate that personal decision making. And, you know, I'm a big fan of the Word of Wisdom. That would be where I would choose to be flexible.

But I, I do think it's a response and a very natural response to the fact that we haven't updated our messaging.

SH: That's a really good point. And I think a lot of older adults might look at that and think, well, this younger generation, they're just not toeing the line, you know? Whereas I look at that as a very hopeful sign that, “You know what? We waited around for you guys to do something–you're not doing it. And so we gotta make this thing work for us.”

NB: Yeah.

SH: In our real lives right now. And in a way that they feel empowered to do that.

NB: Yeah. And I knowI'm an older millennial. I think I'm part of a transitional generation for which the scripts worked well enough, but then started to crumble.

Whereas, you know, for people younger than me, they haven't been in a moment in which many of these economic, educational, religious scripts we gave them were able to function.

CW: Well, maybe that's the silver lining in all this, because we haven't updated our scripts for our kids. We can see that their flexibility, (bingo card, Susan), their flexibility has had to become number one in their life in terms of how they interpret what church leaders teach them, because it just simply isn't matching their lived reality.

So yeah, a great deal of individuality, flexibility, adaptability.

NB: Yeah. Claiming our own spiritual authority and personal intuition is no longer a choice. It's a necessity for navigating today's world.

CW: Right. Ooh, that's the perfect line to end this on actually, Natalie. Excellent.

NB: Okay.

Thank you. So, oh, this has been very fun. It's a topic I really like thinking about, so I'm really grateful that you guys invited me on to chat about this.

SH: Oh, well, thank you for sharing all of your thoughts with us because as you've done so there were all kinds of “aha” moments for me as I read through your notes for this episode.

Like, you really are ahead of me in your thinking on this, and so I really appreciate you inviting us into this conversation.

NB: Yeah. It's when we moved to Boulder and on two incomes could not afford more than a [00:55:00] 1960s, 1800-square-foot, bi-level, but it just sent me into, like, a bit of a personal crisis and then I actually went back to Columbia and finished my dissertation on authors who like, struggled with housing because I was so upset.

Just, Boulder is like, it's a little bit of a mini Palo Alto and just, I think because it was about a decade ahead of the country on this shift, it got me thinking about these topics a few years earlier than they started like hitting Utah and like, because like, I just saw what was happening here was like, “This is a disaster.”

So yeah, so it really was just, like, forced upon me.

CW: So your thoughts on this have been prophetic and we are all benefiting from it. And thank you Natalie for coming on. You're a great thinker. We've been so delighted to discuss this with you today.

SH: This has been so much fun. Let's do it again. Thanks, Natalie.

Voicemail 1: Hi, Cindy and Susan. My name is Sydney. I just wanted to share an experience that has really shaped my perspective as a member of the church. About 15 years ago, my husband attended an Ivy League business school, and we had just welcomed our first daughter. We had to move across the country in order for him to attend this school.

And we were very grateful for him to be accepted to this program because very genuinely it's changed our lives for the better exponentially. But when we were first there, his first semester, his finals came up and all of his finals were scheduled on a Sunday. Initially, we were very upset 'cause of our beliefs in keeping the Sabbath day holy.

But when he and some of the other LDS members of this program spoke to professors about it, they pointed out that the exams had to be on a Sunday because there were many Jewish members of the program. And they could not take their exams on Saturday, which was their Sabbath day. Obviously this was an east coast school–there were far more Jewish members than there were Mormon members. And so their religion had to take precedence, which makes sense and was fair.

And everyone got on board with it. No one was upset. But that experience was very helpful in teaching me that in order for me to perfectly observe my religion as a member of a community in a greater world, then that means that other people can't perfectly observe their religion.

And it has really helped my perspective as to when there are events on Sundays, understanding that sometimes that helps accommodate people of other religions. And sometimes that's just how schedules work out and it's not that big of a deal.

Anyway, I thank you for all you do and I thank all of the people that are so vulnerable in sharing on your platform.

Voicemail 2: Hi, Cynthia and Susan and team. This is Emily. I was just listening to your recent mailbag episode, which I loved. I would absolutely listen to more, to whatever extent you feel like it's sustainable for you and your team to add that work to your plate. I was listening to you talking about whether men can speak to women's issues and to women's concerns, and maybe we need women leaders to do that.

And I was thinking that, you know, there are a lot of times when our male leaders have spoken to issues around women, thinking of you know, president Benson speaking to the mothers of Zion, or I think it was an October, 2024 conference talk that explicitly discussed what kind of clothing might be appropriate for women to wear, using the example of yoga pants in particular.

So our leaders absolutely do speak to issues related to women when it's a way of reinforcing or policing boundaries. And I think the same thing goes when there's a talk that it puts women up on a pedestal. What they have not seemed like they're able to do, at least so far, is to speak to issues that might be of concern to women.

And that seems like a really big difference. Thanks again for all your work.

Voicemail 3: Hi, my name is Francesca. I read a really interesting book not too long ago called The Anatomy of Peace, and it's a wonderful book that I would highly recommend. It talks a lot about the “I-it, I-thou” principle. Which to sum up basically means we either treat people as people, or we treat them as obstacles to be removed.

And my dad and I had gotten into yet another fight about religion and the church and it was not good. And I realized in that moment that I was treating him as an obstacle. He's a member of the stake presidency in his stake, and I felt like he had more power to change anything than I do. So if he would just listen to me, maybe I would see some change, even if it was only from him.

And that just wasn't going to happen. He was not willing to change his heart. And I realized that I was looking at him as an abstract version of himself. He was a member of a stake presidency. He was not my dad. He was not himself. He was an object, and I needed to treat him as a person. And it has been one of the times that I have been able to feel like I am actually trying to be like Christ [01:00:00] because I have the tools to love in spite of everything else because I can love him as a person, even if I wish we believed things more similarly.

Love is just so important.

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