Episode 254 (Transcript): Big Ideas | Piety
Episode Transcript
Many thanks to listener Christine Fitz 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:
CW: We make good things happen in our lives. We make God bless us; we bind God. So yeah, I think piety gives us a false sense of control.
SH: Well, it certainly did me, and I didn’t only just think I could control myself, I thought I could control other people, too, through my goodness.
CW: Oh, for sure!
SH: My goodness was all about control, which was probably the most damaging thing about my goodness - reckoning with the idea that I have to give up control in order to actually have faith.
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CW: Hello, I’m Cynthia Winward.
SH: And I’m Susan Hinkley.
CW: And this is At Last She Said It. We’re women of faith discussing complicated things. The title of today’s episode is “Big Ideas: Piety”.
SH: Piety, Cynthia! Why are we talking about piety?
CW: Oh my goodness. Why are we talking about piety? Because… I’m just gonna turn that over to you because you jumpstarted this episode with the notes. So why are we talking about piety?
SH: Well, it’s really interesting because when I started the notes… the first line on my notes is why are we… I remember this came up in a text convo, but what were we talking about? I don’t remember. But then since then, I have re-listened to our sin episode and realized that we had piety sprinkled all over in that conversation.
CW: Yeah, we did.
SH: And so I think that’s probably why it was front of mind for me whenever it came up next that made me sit down and start on these notes. So, the thing about the “big ideas” theme is that (and I’m already starting to see this) I think they’re all kind of related. It’s like one “big idea” leads to the next, if you see what I mean.
CW: Yes, that’s what I’ve noticed.
SH: They’re kindof connected in some way. So maybe all of them actually point to one really really “big idea”. I don’t know, but I felt like piety was a spoke in this wheel. And so when we started talking about belief and we started talking about sin, and I’m like, “You know what? I think piety has a place in this conversation.”
CW: A hundred percent.
SH: So that’s why we’re doing it. One of my more cynical observations that I have made in writing, and I think probably on this mic over the years - I think many Latter-day Saints are more interested in looking like good Latter-day Saints than they are in actually being good people, or at least as interested in that, you know?
And I’m not sure that it’s even a conscious thing. I think it’s sort of bred into us that it’s really really important to avoid the appearance of evil, right? We like to look like we’re doing Mormon-ing right.
CW: I mean, we kind of have a whole… Mormons have a whole look and people outside our religion know what that look is, right? People within know - you can spot the other Mormons at Disneyland, right?
SH: Right. Absolutely.
CW: And then the caricatures, the Saturday Night Live skits - I’ve seen all of them about Mormons and they all point to like our clean cut look, so I definitely think you’re right that we care about it as much as actually being good - looking pious. Looking good.
SH: Yep. I’m afraid that that is true. Okay, I have two really quick anecdotes to set up this conversation. And the first was when I was living in Seattle and I went out in my yard. I don’t even know why - maybe get my mail or something.
I just went out my front door, into my front yard. And a minute later, my next door neighbor (who was a member of the church) comes barreling out her front door, runs across the driveway to me, and she stopped and she said, “Oh, thank goodness! I thought you were smoking!” I had a lollipop in my mouth, Cynthia. I had a white like sucker stick in my mouth…
CW: Thank goodness! [laughter]
SH: …because I was sucking a lollipop, okay?
CW: Oh my goodness!
SH: It took her one second to land on my doorstep because she thought I was smoking. So I’m just gonna drop that one there first. That’s anecdote number one. Number two is that I had words with my mom at some point, and my mom and I like… we’re… my whole family, we’re not really fighting people. I can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve had fight-y conversations with my mom. In my whole life.
CW: Like, elevated volume?
SH: Not necessarily elevated volume, but like we were really arguing about something or angry about something.
So I don’t even remember what this was about. I was either late teens, I may already have been married (if I was, it was early on). But my mom said to me, “Well, you’re Miss Lily White and Pure!” And when she called me Miss Lily White and Pure, it just went straight somewhere so deep because [00:05:00] nobody knows… who knows your faults better than your own mom?
Like, nobody. My mom knows me, man. She knows all the dirt, she knows all of the… she knows who I am. And so to hear her say that, it was very clear that she also knew about me that it really mattered to me: looking good. I like to look good. I like to look lily, white, and pure. I like to always come out looking good in the conversation, in whatever.
CW: In everything. Yeah.
SH: In everything. And so, like, the first of those two stories is such an eye roll for me, and it made me wonder how many times I have misjudged (or been misjudged by) other Latter-day Saints for stupid things, right? Are we just… do we just have some weird, “we’re looking for outward signs with Latter-day Saints all the time”?
CW: Wow. Good question.
SH: I mean, I just feel like maybe we are, or some of us clearly are.
CW: Some of us are. Yeah.
SH: I mean, my next door neighbor was, right? She was quite horrified that she thought I was smoking. And then the second one, there was something about the realization that that was true and that I knew it was true and that my mom knew it was true. Ouch. I’ve never recovered from it. You know, I mean we’re talking, this is like 40 years ago.
CW: Yeah, I was gonna say, you still remember this, Susan. So there’s a reason…
SH: Uh-huh and there was nothing more... I was gonna say hurtful, but that’s not even right. There was nothing more quite to the point that she could have said to me than that. She hit it right on.
CW: She was putting you in your place.
SH: She was and she did. So anyway, those two things just tell you a little bit about how as a Latter-day Saint for my lifetime how I come into this conversation of piety.
CW: That’s good. There’s something fascinating now to think about a lollipop being mistaken for a cigarette. Like, could there be anything worse for a Mormon to-
SH: Right! Right.
CW: I mean, you obviously didn’t give up lollipops, Susan, so you were not as concerned about the appearance of evil. [laughter]
SH: No, but I mean it really… like I’d heard my whole life, “avoid the appearance of evil”. But I hadn’t ever really taken it to that degree! I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, I guess it didn’t matter.
CW: Well, I’m glad you didn’t give up lollipops.
SH: I absolutely did not give up lollipops, Cynthia, you know that.
CW: Right? I know that about you. But I’m really glad that we are having this “big idea” conversation. Like you said, it’s a spoke in the wheel for sure. And maybe we haven’t even totally figured out what the wheel is yet?
SH: Right, right.
CW: I don’t know the overarching idea. Maybe we’ll get there, but as the self-proclaimed #gracepeddlers, Susan, (and I think we are at this point) maybe we’re interested in this convo because piety is the opposite of grace.
And we’re gonna talk about grace a little bit more, but maybe we’re on such a high horse about piety right now because it’s like the umbrella term that encompasses all of our other “ouchie” topics like worthiness and prosperity gospel and being unspotted from the world and sanctification.
SH: Right. Right.
CW: And all of our kind of circle the wagon mentality that I think we definitely still have which is basically like an us versus them. Anyway, none of that probably makes sense, except it made sense in my brain when I really sat down and tried to look at the thing behind the thing.
Like, why are Susan and I so wanting to talk about piety on a microphone? And all of those topics kind of came to mind. And like you said, like our recent episode about sin, our season opener on belief, we’re gonna end up touching on those in this episode too, so. So yeah, there’s something-
SH: Right. Purity! We had the conversation with CA about purity, right? And that’s part of it also.
CW: Yes!
SH: So I have been… since the beginning of this season and since the piety question has been kind of going in my mind, I’ve had a couple of things I’ve been chewing on and sort of as an interrogation, but also maybe a little bit of an indictment of myself and of my whole church culture. And so I’m gonna try and boil that down to three questions. And these are the three:
Does piety serve anything at all besides the ego?
Also, is our Latter-day Saint piety an asset or a liability?
And then the third one is, what are we getting from it?
Cause I believe when something gets cultivated in a culture or in a relationship or in your personality or in whatever, there’s a reason, right? You are getting something from it. And so, what are we getting from our piety (collectively and maybe individually)?
And so I just wanna put those questions here at the beginning of this conversation, and I don’t know if we’ll answer [00:10:00] them or not, but they’re things that sort of frame my thinking as I sat down to write the notes for this episode.
CW: I think we’ll get to some of those for sure, but also some of them, like the idea of, “what are we getting from it?” Like that makes me need to lie down.
SH: [laughter] A little bit! I mean, I agree.
CW: Because we’re getting something. We really are. We wouldn’t have taken hold, like you just said.
SH: We have to be. Right. We have to be getting something.
CW: So then let’s jump in.
SH: All right. Well, let’s start by defining what we mean when we say piety. And the Cambridge dictionary tells me that piety is, “strong belief in a religion that is shown in the way someone lives”. Now that actually sounds pretty good to me.
CW: Yeah.
SH: Like, I don’t see any negative connotation there. But for the purposes of this conversation, we’re thinking more about “churchiness”, right? About this sort of excessive devotion to the outward forms of church. And of religious devotion. So we’re thinking more about that. I guess, more about the appearance of piety, really. If you know what I mean.
So to me, the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of this is the most obvious reputation of it which comes right in Matthew, right? Right In the New Testament. This is Matthew 6:1 from the NIV: “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.” So in other words, you’re not gonna get rewarded twice. So don’t do things to be seen by other people unless that’s what you want from them.
CW: And I feel like I’ve heard that scripture my whole life phrased exactly that same way. And yet…
SH: And yet! You know, it’s a fine line, though, because I see things from the church newsroom come through my feed all the time that advertise good things the church does. Promotional stories about stuff that we’re doing. Maybe Light the World stuff at Christmas or disaster relief stuff that we-
CW: Yeah, the yellow shirts.
SH: Yeah. The yellow shirts. I see that stuff. And honestly, Cynthia, I’m glad to know about those things and I’m glad other people sure know about those things. Like, I want people to see the good things that my church is doing.
So… yes, that’s definitely advertising our own righteousness, but I guess this is where you have to start to interrogate motive a little bit. And one of the things I’ve realized as I’ve moved deeper into my life is that although the outward behaviors have remained the same for me on a lot of things, my motive has changed.
And that really has changed everything about my religious life and why I do the things that I do, and what I do, and what I’ve set down and don’t carry any longer. It gets to why I’m doing it.
And so I can’t really answer that for the church, you know. I can look at those posts and I can say, “Oh, here’s what I like about that.” But I can’t answer really what our motivation is for doing that. My guess is it’s gonna be mixed: gonna be some virtuous motive behind that, and also part of us just wants to be seen… well, just wants to be seen, first of all, but also wants to be seen as being good.
CW: I still think as a religion (because we’re such a young religion) we’re still trying to make it to the map.
SH: Right.
CW: And that’s probably a whole ‘nother conversation. But yeah, I think we still have a little bit of an inferiority complex, and so that’s probably one of the reasons why we lean so heavily on public relations.
SH: No, I think so too. And I think that we have struggled to have any kind of cred at all among Christians, and so that’s another reason that we wanna be seen as Christians and “let us show you the ways that we’re moving through the world as Christians”. So I feel like that happens a lot with our church too.
CW: Yeah. And I have a lot of compassion for that part of it…
SH: Same. Yep.
CW: …as someone who’s a Jesus follower and (not while I’ve lived in Utah necessarily, but earlier in my life) was mocked for my beliefs and for my church.
SH: Right. Yeah. So that’s why I say it gets complicated. We’re gonna quote a lot from Richard Rohr today, and apologies to our listeners, but I mean, you and I are both doing The Living School right now. So our lives are pretty Richard Rohr “focused”, I guess is the right word. We’re hearing a lot of his teachings studying him, so they’re going to show up in our episodes.
CW: Well and also I think we’re gonna lean so heavily on Richard Rohr because he’s probably… as someone who he says he’s still on the inside of the edge (I think you and I also because we’re those people on the inside of the edge), I think what he teaches on this about piety really really resonated with us because he probably more than any other religious-y figure type person really gets it when it comes to this.
And that’s probably why it resonates so much with us as he’s kind of the primary person [00:15:00] I’ve heard to really talk about this.
SH: Same, yeah. No, I agree. I think that’s why. He’s certainly the one that probably first put it on my thought map anyway. And so that’s kind of where I go in my thinking.
But he has warned about what passes for religion today. He calls it “cosmetic piety”, right? A surface level faith. That’s concerned with things like appearances, certainty, being right, but not so much with deep inner transformation. And the thing about that is when you’re doing performance religion (you know, “churchiness” as we might call it), that makes religion pretty superficial.
And it first masks any real inner transformation. But second, I think it can be… I think you can hide behind it. It can be used to mask your true self, even from yourself. And so it puts up this barrier between us and really what we’re trying to accomplish or get to through religion.
CW: Couldn’t agree more.
SH: Yeah. Dr. Aisling O’Donnell said, “Being pious is not the same as being true.”
CW: Ooh.
SH: And I love her use of the word “true” there because it speaks to what you’re projecting into the world, but also what’s going on inside you.
CW: “True” is a big word for us in our church. So I could see why that really stood out to you and your including it here.
SH: Yeah.
CW: Well, when I think of cosmetic piety… and truly, Richard Rohr should trademark that because–
SH: Yes, he should. It’s really good. It’s really good. [laughter]
CW: It is so good. He needs to trademark that. But it makes me think of the Book of Mormon story of the Rameumptom.
SH: Of course. Of course.
CW: And for those who don’t know or those who maybe need reminding, there’s a story in the Book of Mormon where these disaffected members of the church… they’re apostate Zoramites, and they build a stand or pulpit and they would stand up there to pray and the prayer that they would shout was, “We thank thee, oh God, for we are a chosen people unto thee, while others shall perish.” [Alma 31:12-23] ] I’m sorry, I can’t even read it without laughing because it’s just so outlandish.
SH: I mean, yeah. It is. But is it?
CW: Well, okay. Exactly. We’re laughing, but it’s kind of a [awkward laughter sound].
SH: Right! [laughter]
CW: But here’s something that I never realized until a few days ago when I really was combing through that story (like I hadn’t in a few years) is that this story kind of has a definite “us versus them” storyline. Because it specifically says that these people were people who had left the true church. So right away we know that they are apostates.
SH: Yeah. They miss the point.
CW: They miss the point. But how often is… I’d rather focus on, like, how often is the call coming from inside the house, Susan? How often? I want to think that I’m the kind of person now more often than not, hopefully not always that says, “Lord, is it I? Lord, is it I who has this cosmetic piety?”
Whereas the scripture story of the apostate Zoramites, it’s very much an us versus them. The story is very much painting, “there are the good people and then here are the bad people who have a Rameumptom who are up there saying, ‘Yay God, we’re awesome and everybody else sucks.’”
I don’t know. That just stood out to me before... I don’t remember noticing that before that the story in the Book of Mormon was specifically calling out these people as apostates. And so that’s easy for us to see, but how often is it those of us in the church on our Rameumptom? Like I said, is the call coming from inside the house? I think so.
SH: I mean, I think it certainly has been at some times in my own life, I’m just gonna say. The older I get, I love the phrase “cosmetic piety”. I’m just sitting here thinking about… because the older I get, the less and less makeup, the less cosmetics I’m using because, Cynthia, what’s going on is when you’re an older woman, the more makeup you put on it, it’s like the more attention it draws to it, you know? I mean, it’s not helpful. It’s not great. It ain’t fixing the problem anymore! It’s just drawing attention to the problem.
So I’m hoping in my spiritual life that the deeper and deeper I get (maybe the closer I get to anything resembling actual transformation) the less and less cosmetic piety I am also applying in my life. And I’m starting to feel like that’s true. I just don’t care as much as I used to whether I look the part, I guess.
CW: I mean, I’m just gonna call you out right now, Susan…
SH: Uh-oh
CW: …and say, I know this to be true because the other day you texted me on your way home from church and you said, “I have the top down and I have my [00:20:00] largest cross on.”
So I’m sitting here thinking I know this to be true about you, that you really are scrapping the cosmetic piety because Susan Hinckley 20 years ago would not have worn a giant cross to church.
SH: No. Even when I started wearing crosses, I didn’t wear ‘em on Sunday for a long time. And then when I did…
CW: See?
SH: …I wore a very tiny one. I mean, in large part because I didn’t wanna make people around me uncomfortable, right?
CW: Oh! Okay.
SH: So that was a big part of it. But I don’t wanna say I care less about that now either. But I guess I started to realize after a while that that really wasn’t doing anyone a favor because it wasn’t “true”, if you see what I mean. It’s not true. Piety is not true as we were saying.
CW: There you go.
SH: And so, yeah, I just decided that if I was making someone uncomfortable, I hope that maybe they would say something to me. They probably wouldn’t. But I would welcome that conversation. And there’s no way for me to invite that conversation if I’m not willing to show up and be honest with them about what a cross around my neck is about. If that makes sense.
CW: It does, it totally makes sense. Now I wanna have a whole side conversation about that just because the idea that you didn’t wanna make other people uncomfortable says so much about the difference between you and me. ‘Cause that never would’ve crossed my mind showing up at church with a cross for me.
SH: Oh, interesting!
CW: Before I started wearing a cross to church, it was more about, “I need to control my reputation.” Whereas you were looking at it more as, “I don’t wanna make others uncomfy.” Once again, we are so different.
SH: That’s what I love about us, Cynthia. That’s what I love.
CW: Yeah.
SH: It brings so many dimensions to the conversation.
[Musical Interlude]
SH: Okay. My personal collision between the 10 virgins and the sheep and goats that happened for me a few weeks ago is a big part of why we’re having this conversation right now. And I know I was texting you immediately, like later in the day, I was like, “Here’s what happened today.” And I had to tell someone about it. So I wanna talk about that for a second.
It made me kind of wanna redo our whole other 10 Virgins episode, but we’re just gonna put it right here. The super condensed version. We had a sacrament meeting talk given in our ward about the parable of the 10 virgins. And of course I thought, “Oh, here we go. It’s gonna be the same old, tired interpretation.” And it was.
There was nothing that I didn’t expect there, but the woman who gave the talk used a quote about the ways that we accumulate “drops of oil” in our lamps. And it was a quote I’d heard before. I went looking for it this morning. It actually comes from President Kimball originally, but I think it’s been quoted by other people because I think she was quoting it from a more recent conference talk than that. So it must… you know… this is one of those self perpetuating quotes from the church.
But anyway, she started listing the ways we accumulate “drops of oil” and they were things like praying, scripture study, attending sacrament meeting, going to the temple. I looked up the original quote from President Kimball and he also lists chaste thoughts…
CW: See?
SH: Purity, right? Keeping our covenants. I mean, they’re all of these things. And it occurred to me as she reeled off this list that all of these things were about increasing our personal righteousness.
That that’s what constituted oil, I guess, in the lives and so probably in the minds of many Latter-day Saints. And it’s so funny because… okay, all this is happening in Matthew 25, right? And later in that, which I know is like your favorite–
CW: Oh, my favorite!
SH: –it’s your favorite chapter. Later in that chapter, we come to the sheep and goats, and you and I had just been having a conversation.
I think we had just recorded an episode where you had referenced the sheep and goats, and so I was thinking, “Okay, well now this gets pretty funny because in the story of the sheep and goats, everything on the list is something done for someone else.”
CW: Uh-huh.
SH: Everything that Jesus lists is something done for someone else, right? “For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.” [Matthew 25:35-36] There is nothing in there about going to sacrament meeting, personal scripture study, saying your prayers, and going to the temple.
Nothing. Not one thing on that list. And then it gets even funnier because in that story, in that parable, as Jesus is giving it, both the sheep and the goats ask the same follow-up question. Do you remember what that is?
CW: “When did we see thee?”
SH: Right? “When did we see thee?” And I just think that’s hilarious because that means [00:25:00] that the ones who got it right didn’t even know they were being righteous, Cynthia.
CW: Yeah.
SH: They didn’t realize they were being righteous.
CW: Oh my gosh. That says so much.
SH: It says so much. It is such a different mindset than being over here anxiously trying to accumulate (hoard may I even say?) oil in your own lamp, right? Through all of these purity actions. I just thought we’ve missed the whole point. The whole point.
CW: Okay. So can we add a subtitle to this episode? “Righteousness Ain’t the Point.” Can we add that? {laughter]
SH: I think we’re gonna have several subtitles as we go along. And I think, “Righteousness Can’t Be the Point,” has gotta be one of ‘em. I don’t know. It led me to ask myself, “Okay, could I change the world by being more pious or filling my lamp with oil in the traditional ways that we talk about it as Latter-day Saints? Would that change anything meaningfully for anyone? Besides myself?”
CW: Wow.
SH: No. Then, “How might I make a difference in the world?” That’s the question, right? So I have the first of my Richard Rohr quotes here and he says, “You cannot avoid sin or mistakes anyway (see Romans 5:12), but if you try too fervently, it often creates even worse problems. Jesus loves to tell stories like those of the tax collector and the Pharisee (Luke 18:9–14) and the famous one about the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32), in which one character does life totally right and is, in fact, wrong, while the other, who does it totally wrong, ends up God’s beloved! Now deal with that!,” says Richard.
CW: “Deal with that!” [laughter] Righteousness ain’t the point! Deal with that.
SH: Exactly! That’s exactly what he’s saying. And this is Jesus messing with people’s heads like we were talking about the other day. I don’t think it means we have to throw out religious observance, but we just need to keep it in its proper place. And to me Jesus’ whole ministry makes it clear that the proper place is real life and people first and then church.
CW: That’s just crazy talk, Susan. That’s crazy talk.
SH: Well, I mean, is it? Am I thinking about that wrong?
CW: No, of course… I mean, I don’t think you’re thinking about it wrong, but I think… and I think you recently said this on an episode, like when you started to go to Jesus’s words, when you started going straight to the scriptures...
SH: Right.
CW: You know, and I just think that’s kind of what we’re talking about right now. We have all these ideas of righteousness in our heads and how much it matters and piety and drops of oil. And yet when you go and see what Jesus actually said in the New Testament, uh, whoops! You’ve been focusing on the wrong things.
SH: I mean, I think we have to at least make room for the possibility that we’ve been focusing on the wrong things. It at least calls into question some of the things that we’ve been focusing on. Let’s say it that way. It did for me anyway.
CW: Right, right. Yeah. ‘Cause I’m not saying righteousness doesn’t matter at all, be as horrible as you want or whatever. I think both of us are trying to say, “Can we look at this with fresh eyes and give righteousness its proper place?”
SH: Right. Well, here’s something else Richard Rohr says about it. He says, “For some reason, religious people tend to confuse the means with the actual goal. In the beginning, you tend to think that God really cares about your exact posture, the exact day of the week for public prayer, the authorship and wordings of your prayers, and other such things. Once your life has become a constant communion, you know that all the techniques, formulas, sacraments, and practices were just a dress rehearsal for the real thing—life itself—which can actually become a constant intentional prayer. Your conscious and loving existence gives glory to God.”
In other words, worship changes to how you’re living, from a thing that you show up in a church building and do.
CW: I keep thinking of that Adam Miller quote that we read on our belief episode that we can be lulled into thinking that the hard work of being faithful is done when in fact we haven’t even started.
SH: Yes. Yes.
CW: So the actual goal of what you just read from the Richard Rohr quote is very telling because what is the actual goal? Again, let’s step back a little bit and see what that is. So I think you aptly named this section, “How is piety missing the mark?” Spoiler: I think we miss the mark big time when piety is our focus.
SH: Right?
CW: So does Richard.
SH: So does Richard. We’re in good company. Okay, next question. How can piety be a stumbling block?
CW: Aha!
SH: Yeah. And here’s what Richard says about that: “I just saw so many people climbing the ladder of perfection, each defined differently, each person what perfection was, and of course, always failing at it, and then thinking there was something wrong with them, which I would call the way of ascent, climbing, to be more moral, more virtuous, more heroic. Those are desires of the ego. They’re not desires of the soul. The soul knows that it has learned best in darkness, not in light.”
That quote makes me think of my favorite Thomas Merton line, which is that, “People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall”.
CW: Oh my gosh.
SH: I think piety is the wrong wall.
CW: Yeah.
SH: Piety is the wrong wall. I’m not sure it’s going to get us where we really are trying to go. So like, my question is, “Is religious success the same as discipleship success? Is what looks good in religion the same as what makes us good followers of Jesus?” I mean, in some places I’m sure there is crossover on those two things.
CW: Sure. But this is where we’ve reached the lying down part of the episode for me. Because when you ask that question: “Is worthiness a load bearing wall?” Well, first of all, if we haven’t shouted it loud enough that worthiness isn’t a load-bearing wall (at least it hasn’t been for you or me)… I mean, we shouted about it in our book. We’ve shouted about it on I don’t know how many episodes.
‘Kay, let me just say it again. I thought my worthiness, my piety, my righteousness would have spared me certain types of anguish. And it didn’t. And I’ll go as far as to say my obsession (because again, I wouldn’t wear the cross to church ‘cause I need to control my reputation)… So I’m gonna say my obsession with my own piety was the crumbling of it all.
My ladder against the wrong wall caused me to fall all the way down that ladder because really, I don’t think piety… it just can’t bear the load of a messy life. The messy life of being a human. We’re all in the messy humanness.
So, I don’t know, it makes me think of Kate Bowler, her book, No Cure for Being Human.
SH: Right? Best title ever.
CW: Yeah, best title ever. And in that book, she’s talking about a conversation she has with her therapist soon after she gets her cancer diagnosis. And she’s so young, she’s 35, right? She has a brand new baby, and her therapist turns out to be this big hiker. I think he hiked the Appalachian Trail.
And he said it takes like six months to hike the trail. It’s like 2000 miles. And for new hikers, he said the first stop is always the most important. And it’s where they learn to set things down. Like, do you really need that cooking pot? Do you really need that fleece hoodie? And she says that her therapist turns to her and says, “This will be a hard journey. Is there anything you can set down?”
SH: Oh, wow.
CW: So I had to set worthiness down a long time ago because it was weighing down my pack.
And I’ve stolen your metaphor, Susan, of the psychic brick, right? You’ve talked about that psychic brick before that was pressing down on your head. And so that was pressing down on me - the external nature of it, of worthiness, which is kind of how I define piety. Like, it broke me.
And so as I was working on these notes after you made them (’cause you started them and then I jumped in and, “ooh, let me add this, let me add that!”), I texted you ‘cause this is the lie down part. And I said, “Susan, is this episode a trauma response? I’m asking for a friend.” [laughter]
SH: And I’m pretty sure that I said, “That should be the title of this episode.”
CW: I know. So there’s our next subtitle.
SH: Oh yeah, subtitle number two.
CW: “Is This a Trauma Response?” Because… oh gosh. Anyway, enough about the worthiness ‘cause people know how I feel about my ladder leaning against the wrong wall.
SH: I feel like Richard Rohr sums it up so well in these few little lines. He says, “By denying their pain and avoiding the necessary falling, many have kept themselves from their own spiritual depths—and therefore have been kept from their own spiritual heights.”
CW: Yes!
SH: In other words, piety may keep us in this place, this very even place. But we’re not getting the full range of our own spiritual experience and it therefore stunts our opportunity to grow.
CW: 100%.
[Musical Interlude]
SH: Okay, let’s talk about the paradox for a minute of… I think piety may be the ultimate religious paradox. And you and I heard Randy Woodley giving a lecture about something. I don’t know what we were listening to. We both heard him say this line and it landed for both of us.
And he said, “People like to be Godlike. I want to be humanlike, because that’s who God made me to be, is a human.” So do we become more (can we become more) God-like by being more human?
CW: Love it. Love it.
SH: I mean, I feel like if Jesus’ loyalty was to human suffering (which we’ve expressed that thought a lot of times on our podcast), then I think we must assume that we do… that becoming, moving deeper into our humanity is something that can bring us closer to godliness. But I wasn’t taught that at church.
CW: Uh-uh. I think that’s why you and I love that line so much about being human-like.
SH: Right.
CW: I mean, I’ve seen Randy teach this idea in many other places, and so we’re gonna link to a Facebook post where he says, “Being human is the most natural and spiritual way we can be.”
So how had I never thought of this before? I mean, why were you and I texting each other furiously about that idea? Like, it seems like those dots should be really close together. But connecting those dots, I guess, has taken me a long time. And I guess because we come from a religious tradition that teaches us, “you are gods in embryo.”
Remember that Kimball quote (speaking of President Kimball again in this episode), his famous quote of, “You are gods in embryo”? Well, first of all, do I aspire to be God? I can’t think of anything I’d rather be less than and we’ve talked about that before, too!
SH: Agreed! Not interested.
CW: Yeah. The dangling carrot in front of me doesn’t need to be, “you get to be a God.” ‘cause I’m like, huh? There are many things I wish I were and being God is not one of them, but I love, love, love that idea of embracing being human-like, of embracing my humanness. And again, I guess that’s why this is a paradox, why you pose that question.
SH: Well, because I feel like everything in my religious life has felt more geared to helping me transcend my humanness.
CW: Exactly.
SH: The atonement gets me over that hump. Repentance is supposed to get me closer, get me more pure, get me less human. Remove these earth stains, right?
CW: Yes!
SH: It has never been about being… I was gonna say the best human I can be. I don’t think it’s been about being human at all. I don’t think being human is even necessarily acceptable. If no unclean thing is acceptable and every human is unclean, then I mean, the bottom line message we’re giving is that you are not okay as a human. You’re gonna have to become something better than that.
CW: Right. It’s just hitting me now as we’re talking about this that Randy Woodley is an indigenous teacher, and so I think this is something we can definitely… that Western Christianity can learn from our indigenous friends is… because I think they have a closeness to nature that we don’t really have, and so of course they embrace the messy humanness better than those of us who are always like, “gods in embryo”, ascending, or like you just said a minute ago about kind of transcending this humanness.
SH: Yeah, I mean, even think about baptism like we’re washing our humanness off. That’s what goes on. Not just in our church. I’m just talking about Christianity generally, I think, has been obsessed with cleaning our humanness off of us from the beginning.
I feel like you’re right. I feel like there are indigenous cultures that are much much more embracing of the connections between human beings and the earth, and the way that all of those things are interrelated and meant to work together.
That they find divinity in that connection, right? In the very humanness that Christianity has not embraced at all. So it feels like a drink of fresh spring water to me when I hear that. It feels so deeply true.
CW: Same, same.
SH: You and I both read Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic book, and we loved it.
I loved what he said about this in that book. He said, “If Christianity is anything, it’s a refusal to see human behavior as ruled by the balance sheet. We’re not supposed to see the things we do as adding up into piles of good and evil we can subtract from each according to some kind of calculus to tell us how, on balance, we’re doing.”
CW: [chuckling] Okay. This is where we enter the conversation… where I think we have roots in our denial of grace because that’s what he’s talking about right there, right?
SH: Well, I think he is.
CW: He’s using the metaphor of a balance sheet. I mean, I’ve always used the analogy of like a scoreboard, but I don’t know. That’s what I’m seeing, is a conversation there about grace.
SH: I mean, I think so too. I think… but I kind of wanna amend what he’s saying ‘cause he’s saying if Christianity is anything, it’s a refusal to look at the balance sheet. But to me, I feel like Christianity is what [00:40:00] trained me to see the balance sheet.
CW: Oh, yeah.
SH: And so I think that this means we have misunderstood what Christianity is meant to be. Because I think he’s right. I think the whole idea of grace is that there’s no balance sheet, right?
CW: Exactly.
SH: There’s no balance sheet. So was I not a good Christian? Did Mormonism not give me the purest understanding (maybe) of Christianity and ideally what that is meant to be? I don’t know. All I know is I absorbed something wrong there based on that quote. I want the Christianity he’s talking about in that quote, but it’s not what I’ve experienced.
CW: I think that’s what we’re hinting at, Susan. It’s not just that you and I absorbed things this way. I think some things were pretty explicit…
SH: Yeah, I think so.
CW: …about living a pious life (like I said earlier) in Western Christianity. This isn’t just us, our little church.
SH: No, I think that’s true and I think American Christianity gets to be an even more explicit flavor. And then American Christianity of New England in certain years gets to be an even more specific flavor.
And so we grew up in a very specific and kind of Puritan-informed Christianity. We might’ve had a whole different experience if we’d come up in Rome. I’m sure that would have other problems, right? But I think it would’ve been different from what we got.
Okay. So here’s my question: How does piety then interface with faith? ‘Cause when we’re trying to appear or actually be (which I feel like Latter-day Saints are)... when we’re trying to be perfect, then where is our focus? Can we truly focus on loving other people when we are focused on saving ourselves? If we’re focused on that balance sheet and grace doesn’t really mean anything, we have a huge responsibility for ourselves, and to perfect ourselves. Is it possible to love other people?
CW: I mean, loving other people is definitely not number one when you put it that way. Number one is our saving of ourselves, our piety, our righteousness.
SH: Yeah. I don’t like to hear that, though. [laughter] That makes me think that every church leader would say to me, “Susan, you got it wrong. We weren’t ever saying that.”
CW: Okay, that’s fine. They get to have their opinion. We’re just telling our stories.
SH: I mean, that’s a good point. That’s a good point. I was appreciative of…I love Jonathan Sacks, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks…
CW: Yes, you do.
SH: …and I sometimes love that he gives me a perspective that feels very close to my own understanding, but it comes from a different tradition entirely - Judaism. So we’re operating outside of Christianity, right?
But he says this: “If faith in God means anything, it means humility toward oneself and love of neighbour and the stranger. Sadly, faith has not always led to these things. It can sometimes lead to self-righteousness and hatred of the stranger.”
And then he says this: “Faith is understood in the living and proved in the doing. We encounter the Divine presence in prayer and ritual, story and song. These lift us beyond ourselves toward the infinite Thou at the heart of being, who teaches us to see His face in the face of the human other, leading us to acts of loving kindness that make gentle the life of this world. Faith is the bond of loyalty and listening that binds us to God and through Him to humanity. Faith is life lived in the light of love.”
Now that is a connection of the dots between religious observance and worship with the humanity piece of the puzzle - how one lifts us toward the other, actually. Ideally. I feel like that’s an expression of it that I really can get behind.
That is like a meshing of the piety… because he is talking about prayer and ritual and story and song, things that I would consider to be this sort of outward religious trappings, but about how actually they’re meant to get us to this other thing. And that is love of the other.
So like, how… I guess, how could we do that better as Latter-day Saints? Or how are we not doing it? And maybe how have we managed to do it? Maybe some people have very much had that experience in their lives as Latter-day Saints.
But I have to think that the woman who saw me sucking a lollipop and came running across the street, fearful that I was smoking, had not made that leap in quite the way that he’s talking about. And I fear that I have fallen into the same trap that she did. So we’re not… I think we’re not that special. [00:45:00] [laughter]
CW: We’re not.
SH: I think that part of why we’re supposed to rely on faith in God’s grace and not on our own perfection is that it frees us up to focus on other people.
CW: Yes. That’s the beauty of grace to me. That’s what I was trying to explain to my daughter and I told this story in the book, right? Of sitting there at Family Home Evening and explaining grace. And then she’s like, “Well, that makes me think I don’t have to try anymore.” And I’m like, “No! The beauty of grace is all of the other stuff is taken care of, so now you get to focus on the things that really matter.”
And I get that that messes with our heads, and that’s the mystery of grace. Maybe we’ll never totally understand it, but I trust it. ‘Cause it feels good. It feels like good fruit, tastes like good fruit to me. Whereas piety interferes with our acceptance of grace, right? The spreadsheet, the scoreboard.
SH: Right. Right.
CW: And I think that’s why in our belief episode, we used an image of hurdles. Because we were like, “Oh gosh, belief is this huge hurdle we have to overcome.” Well, I think piety is another one of our hurdles to overcome.
SH: Totally agree.
CW: It’s the hugest hurdle, I think, to overcome so that we can jump into grace. There’s a quote by Diana Butler Bass in her book Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. And talking about this very topic, she says this: “The why for Christians is therefore deceptively simple: Christians do certain things seeking to imitate Jesus and Jesus’s followers who went before. This is not a set of rules, a prescribed piety, a list of dos and don’ts, or convention. Rather, following Jesus and our forebears involves encountering the same God they encountered through prayers, study, and worship…” Do you see what’s in common with Rabbi Sacks’ list there?
SH: Yeah.
CW: She goes on to say, “...imitating Jesus and the saints means enacting God’s love in the world by feeding the hungry, comforting the sorrowful, standing for the oppressed, caring for the poor, healing the sick, and making peace. Jesus and the saints serve as models and mentors in the way of practice. Indeed, Jesus promised his friends that they would not only do the extraordinary things that he had done, but would do “greater works than these” (John 14:12).
[Musical Interlude]
SH: I can’t do an episode on piety without touching on the idea that our piety, I think, sometimes causes members of our church to think we have more control in our lives than we do, as you sort of alluded to earlier.
CW: Yes yes yes!
SH: So I was thinking specifically of garments as fire insurance, for instance. We sometimes make these kinds of strange, faulty connections between the things we do and why they matter, in my opinion.
CW: Yeah. Tithing is fire insurance as well, right? And I think with garments, we’ve all heard the mythical stories. They were burned…
SH: They were burned on every inch of their body except where their garments were! [laughter]
CW: Right, right. Apparently we’re really afraid of fire in this church. [laughter]
SH: I think we are, and maybe rightfully so. I think that was downloaded into us with our Christianity. We’re afraid of fire.
CW: Yeah, but when you talk about… when you pose that question, “Does piety make us think we have more control?” I immediately thought of that scripture: “I am bound when you do what I say.” [D&C 82:10] That famous scripture from the Doctrine and Covenants because… well, I don’t know.
I wish, Susan… maybe another time I would love to have a whole different episode nuancing that scripture and looking at it with fresh eyes, because I don’t think it means what we… either it doesn’t mean what we think it means, or I just have to dismiss it because I’m like, “Wait, really?” Because the only way I’ve ever heard it talked about is this: like, “Look, I do everything God has told me to do. So basically I can paint God into a corner. Maybe not in this life, but definitely in eternity.”
SH: Oh 100%.
CW: And I know this isn’t an episode about Prosperity Gospel, but I think it’s all tangled up.
SH: Oh, it is! This is definitely an episode about that. Yes.
CW: We make good things happen in our lives. We make God bless us; we bind God. So yeah, I think piety gives us a false sense of control.
SH: Well, it certainly did me, and I didn’t only just think I could control myself, I thought I could control other people, too, through my goodness.
CW: Oh, for sure!
SH: My goodness was all about control, which was probably the most damaging thing about my goodness, I think - is that it led me to believe I had control in my life. That’s been the hardest and most ongoing thing to overcome.
That was the big stumbling block for [00:50:00] me. Reckoning with the idea that I have to give up control in order to actually have faith. I don’t know. That’s a tough one.
CW: Ouch. Okay. Because we’re At Last She Said It, I don’t feel like we can have a conversation about piety without zoning in on the gender component a little bit here.
SH: Absolutely. Yep.
CW: I don’t think there is any Christian woman out there who can argue that we have put a greater weight on women bearing the weight of piety than we have put on men. And we’ve had two episodes on purity culture. We just had one. And like we said on our most recent episode about sin, where we mainly care about body sins, like, that is heaped on women way more.
And if we’re gonna be talking about the gender component here, I just can’t forget that (I don’t know, was it five years ago?) when Russell Nelson challenged the women, “Get off social media for a month,” and I thought, “Oh, surely he’s gonna give this same challenge to men.” No.
SH: No.
CW: But I also think about… gosh, it’s 25 years old now. I went and reread that talk by Margaret Nadauld. You know, the famous talk: “The world has enough coarse women; we need more kind women. We have enough vain women; we need more virtuous women.” [Margaret D. Nadauld, “The Joy of Womanhood,” Ensign, Nov. 2000, 15] Again, that’s pointed at women.
SH: Do you know what I did for fun this morning? I’m gonna give this as an entertainment tip.
CW: For fun?
SH: Yes. When I saw that we were gonna have this conversation, I went onto the church website and I just typed in the question, “Are women more spiritual than men?” [laughter]
I can tell you there’s a lot of “bleep” on that website in answer to that question. So, yes, you are exactly right. We have put greater weight on women for this than we do men. There’s just no question.
CW: Well, and I think there’s a reason for that because I think… I mean, as women we are the marginalized group in our church. Full stop. We’re the largest marginalized group. We have other… our LGBTQ friends are marginalized, but as far as being over 50% of the church, that’s us. Full stop.
And so men make the decisions, they make the rules, they’re in charge of all of it. But when it comes to piety, the male leaders seem to want to put a finer point on it for women being pious and being the more spiritual ones. Like you said, go Google that for a good time - are women more spiritual? [laughter]
And I think the reason why they have given us the gold medal in spiritual piety is because we don’t have equality. So we get the pedestal of piety instead of not having power.
SH: Yes.
CW: And I know there are plenty of women who would disagree with that, but that’s kind of how I see they have gotten away with holding all the power is they say, “Oh, but you’re the more spiritual ones.”
SH: I think you’re exactly right. And I think that we’ve shown that Mormons do value piety and so therefore they have bestowed a meaningful, or what they would assume would be a meaningful title, on us which also gives them room to worry about it a little bit less than we have to.
CW: Yes! Okay. Thank you for saying that ‘cause that leads right into a quote I had found by Joanna Brooks in her book Mormon Feminism Essential Writings, where she said, “While the first generations of Mormon feminists developed analyses of power disparities between Mormon men and women, there is additional work to be done in analyzing modes of power that have been available to Mormon women, including the use of public piety, submission, ostracization, and other forms of microaggression to establish hierarchies among Mormon women and to manage our relationship with the non-Mormon world.” So, absolutely!
SH: Ouch. Yeah.
CW: There are hierarchies among Mormon women. We have good Mormon women, we have bad Mormon women, right?
SH: Right.
CW: We know judging is the number one reason that women walk away from the church. So, my gosh, let’s talk about gold medals again. This is how we carry water for the patriarchy, I think, is judging each other - how we women can judge each other.
SH: Yes, but how you win in that contest, it largely revolves around piety, I think.
CW: Absolutely! I think that’s exactly what Joanna Brooks is saying. That’s one of our modes of power. Since we don’t have real power, our power is in our public piety, submission, etc etc etc.
SH: Yep.
CW: Oh that’s ouchie.
SH: Feels true, though. Feels true. Ouch indeed.
CW: Well, and this isn’t obviously just a problem within Mormonism, as we’ve said a hundred times already. So I went out on the worldwide web and just Googled this about how women hurt each other. And I found this article on Vanderbilt University… like their student paper. They wrote about this and there was an article from Veronica Tadross and [00:55:00] she wrote about this.
She quoted Nadiah Kristensen, who is a research scientist in evolutionary modeling, and she kind of coined the phrase the “patriarchal bargain”, which I think is what Joanna Brooks was talking about in that quote. So her quote goes something like this. She said that, “Nadiah Kristensen… uses the idea of the ‘patriarchal bargain’ to explain that women criticizing fellow women is sometimes the only way to gain relative power in a system that disadvantages them.”
Ding ding ding! “Women don’t tear each other down because they dislike each other, but because they need to do so to succeed in a male-dominated society. For women to change, the system needs to change.”
SH: Well, okay, then if that’s true and if one really big symptom of that system is that women are competing always in the piety Olympics with each other, then what it would take to change “women being the problem” in our church (I use air quotes when I say that because we’ve talked about it), the value of piety in our culture would need to change. So that that currency was devalued…
CW: Yes!
SH: …and therefore that would no longer be a means of women policing each other.
CW: Okay. We’ve had bra burning. Maybe we need piety burning.
SH: I think we do. [laughter] I need to throw our piety medals on the fire, Cynthia. Oh gosh. Alright.
I also wanna talk about, “Do Latter-day Saints see a false path to unity in our piety?” Because Latter-day Saints talk a lot about the importance of being of one heart and one mind and having no contention and all of those kinds of things.
CW: Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
SH: So my question is, “Is piety carrying water for us in that ideal (I guess)?” All the things on the LDS checklist, as I think about it, can create this comforting sense of sameness in a congregation.
CW: Oh, for sure.
SH: Right? And so being of one heart and mind is not supposed to be about a checklist of beliefs or political ideas or uniformity or appearance to, or conformity to cultural norms. Is it?
CW: Well…
SH: I mean, maybe some Latter-day Saints would say it is supposed to be that, but that’s not how I understand it.
When I think about Zion, that’s not really what I’m thinking of is that I’m gonna move into the Stepford Wives suburb and everyone’s going to look and be exactly the same. I don’t know, isn’t it supposed to be about love? Which is hard work because love is about bridging difference between human beings?
That’s what love is about, that’s how we practice it, that’s where we exercise it, that’s where it manifests itself in our lives. So do we avoid doing the hard work of bridging difference when we stamp out difference in our LDS congregations by putting on this cloak of piety?
CW: Wow, Susan, that’s a big question. I mean, I’m glad it’s on our big ideas episode, but that’s a really big question. Do we avoid doing the hard work of bridging difference?
SH: Yeah. So I think it’s avoiding doing the hard work, but I think it manifests in all kinds of really sneaky ways. Like, I don’t think anybody wakes up in the morning specifically thinking, “I’m going to avoid the hard work of loving people by being really really good,” right?
CW: Right.
SH: But I found a quote from Debie Thomas in a blog post called Journey with Jesus (that I will link to, of course) where she described a problem that, although she is not Latter-day Saint, it seemed very Latter-day Saint specific to me.
And she said, “I wonder if the problem is in part a cultural one. As a 21st century Christian living in America, I am inclined to read Jesus’s sermon—or rather, I am inclined to read all of Scripture…” She’s talking about the Sermon on the Mount, actually. “...—through an individualistic lens. Whenever I see ‘you’ in the text, I think: ‘Me. … This is a warning to and for me.’”
Now, aren’t we told as Letter-day Saints that we’re supposed to “liken the scriptures” to ourselves? You know, I’m sure you’ve heard, “Go through and try replacing… you know, putting your name in the scriptures,” right? So this is exactly what she’s talking about.
And then she says, “But that is not an accurate reading. Jesus isn’t admonishing individuals in his Sermon on the Mount; he is calling forth a new community. A blessed community. A beloved community. A community meant to initiate a radical way of doing life on the earth. A community Jesus trusts will follow in his footsteps, and incarnate divine love to a world hungry for hope and healing.”
Could it be that in demanding piety as part of what gives you currency as a Latter-day Saint… Could it be that we are working against, actually, the very community that Jesus was [01:00:00] actually trying to teach us?
CW: Like I said, that’s a really big question.
SH: When I’m making the scriptures about me. Just about me… Then it’s like making everything about me. It’s like making my whole approach to religion and everything else about me.
CW: So insular. So insular.
SH: Yes. Again, the focus is misplaced, I feel like. And we’re never gonna get to the kind of unity... We’re never gonna get to the one heart and mind thing when I’m trapped in my own heart and mind.
CW: One of the things that you’ve said here on this podcast pretty early on that I have never forgotten, is you said something like, “You show up someday at the pearly gates and God says to you, ‘where’s everybody else?’”
SH: Oh, right, right. “You came alone?”
CW: Yeah, “You came alone?” Right, because that’s what we’re doing when we just have it so focused on “me”. Like Debie said, “Me, Debie Thomas. This is a warning for me.” It’s like, why aren’t we looking at that more communally? I’ve been so touched watching the moms in Minneapolis and Chicago as they unify in protecting their neighbors.
SH: It’s extraordinary.
CW: It’s extraordinary. The shared unity of relieving suffering? It’s my bright hope right now in this really dark time. That has given me hope. That’s what I focus on, is seeing these amazing women standing up for their neighbors, and I feel like that kind of unity is really sacred because it’s focused on the right thing. It’s not focused on same beliefs, it’s not focused on them being the same, it’s not focused on piety. It’s just, like, the raw work of relieving suffering.
And I need to think about that a lot more because as I have felt so hopeless as an American right now, seeing the people (not just the moms), seeing the clergy linked arm in arm at different protests like in the Minneapolis airport… seeing all of that, I just am like, “Oh my gosh, this is about community.” And that’s the real path, not the false path, right?
SH: Not the false path. Right.
CW: That’s the real path to unity.
SH: My husband said to me the other day, “I’ve lived all over the world, lived all these different places. I have never felt like I lived immersed in Christianity in the way that Minneapolis is a place immersed in Christianity.”
CW: Oh, gosh.
SH: And he grew up in Salt Lake City, right? So this is saying something. But he’s not wrong. One of the interesting things when we moved to Minneapolis is that we noticed immediately it was one of the most religious places that we… like, everybody went to church, but apparently… I mean, they went to all kinds of different churches, right? They weren’t all going to our church. In fact, when we first moved to Minneapolis, our church was pretty small there.
There’s been a lot of growth since, but what I love that we’ve seen happen in Minneapolis this winter is that Christianity has had to make the leap into what does that mean in community? Like, what does this actually look like when my neighbors need me?
CW: Yes, yes, yes.
SH: And it’s like they passed that test. They’ve done it. So there was something real and durable in the faith that people were practicing going to church every week in that community that I don’t think… I think my husband and I have both been surprised to watch it and yet not surprised because I think this is what was behind his statement, like, “I should have known it would work this way,” if they came to Minneapolis.
And yet I’m not sure coming from Salt Lake I would’ve expected it to work that way in the same way, even though that was a very religious community that I grew up in.
[Musical Interlude]
SH: Okay, Cynthia, last thing. “How might our LDS piety keep us from what really matters right now in our lives, in the world we live in?” And of course, the thing that made me want to talk about this for a second was the famous Cynthia Winward line: “I need a church for the living, not for dead people.” [laughter]
It’s one of our listeners’ favorite things you’ve ever said and one of my favorite things. It makes me think of - and this is totally out of context, but it makes me think of the famous Simone Weil line about, “Piety in regard to the dead: to do everything for what does not exist.” [laughter]
Sometimes I fear that my religious life has been about that. I don’t know. I had a non LDS friend say to me one day, “You know, LDS people go to the temple and they feel virtuous, like they’ve done actual service for people.” And I never thought about that.
I mean, we call it “doing service” in the temple. We do think of it as service, right? And his remark really just [01:05:00] cut me because, not to dismiss anyone’s deeply held beliefs about our need to do temple work for people who have passed, but what percentage of our time and energy as members and as a church should be devoted to the people who are not on earth with us right now? I have to at least ask the question.
CW: By chance, is this your friend who is a Franciscan who said this?
SH: Yes it is. And he lives in Salt Lake City, right? So he observes a lot of Mormons.
CW: Yes. Yes. But that also makes sense from a Franciscan because his lens is different.
SH: Yes, it does. He’s baffled by it.
CW: Yeah. Okay. Well, as someone who did a lot of genealogy specifically for the purpose of doing my relatives’ temple work, especially for my Mexican ancestors… Like Susan, I took a specific class at BYU on Latin American temple work, okay? So I was all in, like, I was learning how to read the old records and everything.
So I never want to poo poo genealogy and temple work, but I do think there is definitely room to reevaluate it as, like you said, is this really a service for people? And really quickly, I was at the family history library last fall. My daughter-in-law, who is from Mexico, needed some help with doing some of her genealogy.
So we went to “The” genealogy library there at Temple Square, and I sat there for hours. Hours. [laughter] I wanna emphasize hours with my little grandson playing blocks and then taking him into the cafeteria while Diana was working with some of the family history volunteers (missionaries) there, and I sat there almost crying at the beauty of these people helping my sweet daughter-in-law.
And old Cynthia (Cynthia 1.0)... I would have framed those tender feelings as, “Oh this shows to me the importance of temple work,” whereas now I’ve reframed my feelings of temple work from “saving our dead” and how important that is to, I think, just the love we should all have and the indebtedness to our ancestors for the whole of human family, maybe not just our ancestors.
So, I don’t know, it was a really special kind of moment for me to kind of sit there and analyze my tender feelings. I guess what I’m trying to say is I still have a tenderness for family history. I’ve just reframed it now away from it being “saving our dead”, if that makes sense.
SH: It absolutely makes sense. I love that perspective. Thank you for sharing that. It was the perfect thing, I think, to bring to this conversation for me because I don’t wanna suggest that I have an answer to that question. I honestly don’t know.
I just know that as a member in the church right now in 2026, there’s an awful lot of emphasis on temple in our church now. There’s just a lot of emphasis on it. And so I have to at least ask the question, “What are we getting from this/is it doing for us? Is it getting us closer, really, to the beloved community on earth?” I don’t know the answer, but I think it’s worth having a conversation, so thank you for that. That’s really good.
Quick last point about spiritual bypassing. I think that piety can definitely fall into that category. And if people don’t know what spiritual bypassing is, it’s the tendency to use our spiritual beliefs or practices or jargon or whatever to avoid the hard stuff - to avoid our unresolved life issues or maybe trauma or wounds or whatever we’re trying to get away from.
Ingrid Clayton defines it in Psychology Today: “Spiritual bypass is a defense mechanism. Although the defense looks a lot prettier than other defenses, it serves the same purpose. Spiritual bypass shields us from the truth, it disconnects us from our feelings, and helps us avoid the big picture. It is more about checking out than checking in—and the difference is so subtle that we usually don’t even know we are doing it.”
The thing that that made me think of was how when I would teach Relief Society there were a couple of women specifically who would… their hands would shoot up immediately to testify when things were making them uncomfortable. And I feel like that was their way of checking out from my lesson, not checking into whatever discussion we were having, right?
CW: So good. I’m really glad you brought up the point of spiritual bypassing because I see it almost daily right now as someone who still chooses to participate in social media, right? Like you see people talking about the hard things going on, and then you see people jump in to testify.
SH: Right.
CW: “We don’t need to focus on that. We just need to… we have the truth of the gospel. All will be well, blah, blah, blah.” Things are happy. And that kind of made me think again of how we’re always pointing towards eternity, pointing towards the church for dead people, rather than focusing on the church right now for living.
And again, just one more quote by Randy Woodley from his book Mission and the Cultural Other: A Closer Look, he [01:10:00] said, “Even the word humus, from which we derive human, is connected to the organic soil, animated by billions of living organisms.”
So I love that idea of our humanness being part of the organic soil of… okay, messiness, right? Soil is dirt. So it just reminded me kind of what we talked about earlier, about being human-like, and not checking out and not doing the spiritual bypassing, but really staying with it - checking in, if that makes sense.
SH: Yeah. Oh, it totally makes sense. I think sometimes we think, “Well, we’re gonna hold ourselves above the fray somehow. We’re not going into the gutter with the world. I’m gonna be right up here.”
But I think it totally disconnects us from our humanness, from the world, from what’s going on around us, from presence in our lives in a very real way. And if we can’t experience presence, then I don’t know how we can experience any kind of actual divine communion in our lives.
CW: Gosh! Yes!
SH: I mean, that demands presence, right? And so holding ourselves above the soil of the world really does get in the way of what my personal goal for my spiritual life is. The things I’m looking for I’m no longer gonna get through piety. Let’s just say it that way. It’s not gonna get me there anymore.
CW: Maybe we’ll talk more about spiritual bypassing another time because there’s so much more I wanna say about this, but we’re out of time. But I’m really glad we at least nodded to it in this conversation.
SH: Can I just sum up this conversation in one line? I’m gonna give a one line conclusion.
CW: Ooh.
SH: It comes from Richard Rohr and he says, “You’re much happier when you don’t need to be perfect.” I think that sounds true, Cynthia. [laughter]
CW: Susan, we could have just said that line at the beginning and closed the episode!
SH: We should’ve just said that and we’d already be done! Thank you my friend.
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Voicemail 1: Um, hello. I was just listening to the polygamy episode - re-post of it. And there was a moment where one of you guys asked, “Well, so what about polygamy? It’s not practiced earthly technically right now, so what about it?” And for me, when I was digging into polygamy, the “so what” was so in my face because it explains why my family lives where they live currently because our ancestors were asked to move from Utah away so that they could continue to practice polygamy and it’s still where my family lives.
It also explains why during COVID I had so many family members who were very anti-government and they put pressure on me to be anti-government. And I was really confused where that mentality was coming from. But polygamy made the Latter-day Saints be anti-government for so many years that it is just part of our culture’s narrative, even if it’s something that people don’t recognize.
And so for me, polygamy is still impacting my daily life, even if it’s not being practiced.
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Voicemail 2: Hi Cynthia and Susan. My name is Robin Bond. I just finished listening to your episode on curiosity and it really spoke to me, especially the section where you talk through what religion can learn from the scientific community. As a scientist, I have plenty of thoughts on that and I thought you might like to hear some of them.
One of the things anyone doing a PhD in science learns very quickly is that you have to learn to not only sit with the discomfort of not knowing, you have to act on it. In our church, we sometimes say the word, “Faith is a belief that leads to action” and that is what I as a scientist do all the time in my research based on things I have heard and said.
I believe that something may be true. Scientists would say, “I make a hypothesis, and then I work to see whether my hypothesis is not true or whether the world shows that it’s a reasonable explanation for what’s happening.” In church, it’s often said that you should pray to find out whether a principle is true, but Moroni specifically tells us that we should pray about whether these things are not true.
So I think it can go both ways, but a lot of time, as you pointed out, I end up learning one teeny tiny thing while also becoming aware of 50 million things that I don’t know. I have a lot more that I could say, but I will stop here. Thanks for listening and thanks for your great podcast.
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