I was about seventeen when I realized that my church didnt think I belonged in heaven. Yet another lesson in Young Women’s concerning God’s Plan for us, and it was very concerned with genitals. I guess I should explain for the unitiated.
Mormonism occupies a theological no-mans-land in Christianity. On the one hand, you have the Catholic Church, the very organization that gave Protestants so much to protest. One of the main contentions that Martin Luther had with the Catholic Church was the selling of indulgences. The Roman Catholic Church believes you must earn your way into Heaven, which early on transformed from “Be a good person and do good deeds”, to “give the Church some money and we’ll save you a seat” – a logical thing to protest, I should think. So a big Protestant article of faith is that you cannot earn your way into heaven; Christ’s death on the cross got you that spot – the “grace” in “Amazing Grace”, and there’s no possible way to repay that, so all you have to do is proclaim belief, and *poof* Heaven. Some forms of Protestantism seem to have turned that into a requirement NOT to do good things, to continue acting on your basest nature, and then “repent” to prove that Grace works. I guess there’s no idea so pure that it can’t be twisted by the lazy and the shitty.
Mormonism is… complicated. Historically as non-Catholics, they’ve been lumped in with the Protestants, a very uneasy position, given that they claim they were not a reaction to the Catholic Church (otherwise known as the Whore of Babylon to many Mormons), but in fact, sprang fully formed from the head of Joseph Smith, restoring the True Priesthood, lost since Jesus ascended to Heaven, to the earth. But they too require Works to get into Heaven. And many of those Works somehow wind up enriching the Church.
Now Mormons have three levels of Heaven, the Telestial, the Terrestrial, and the Celestial Kingdoms. You may be unfamiliar with that first word. That’s because it was made up by people who didn’t know how etymology worked but wanted to sound smart. The Telestial Kingdom is the Denny’s of Heavens. It’s fine. It’s sure as hell better than making your own pancakes, eggs, and bacon, and you don’t have to clean up, so pretty good. It’s where moderately shitty people – your Pol Pots, Osama Bin Ladens, Jerry Fallwells and Ronald Reagans – will go after they die, and the biggest A-list celeb there is The Holy Ghost. The Terrestrial is a step above, like a non-racist (or not, given Mormon teachings on non-white people) Cracker Barrel. Way better beige foods, and they serve funeral potatoes any time of day. It’s where decent people who were not Mormons, like Mr. Rogers, Harriet Tubman, and Ruth Bader-Ginsburg – go, and their biggest celeb is Jesus. The Celestial Kingdom, now that’s the REAL heaven. It’s where good Mormons who have the Priesthood go when they die, and it’s presided over by God Himself*. Sounds pretty sweet, but you know there’s a catch.
So let’s say you’re a faithul Mormon. You honor your calling(s) – Mormons do not have paid clergy or choir directors, or leaders, so you could be teaching Primary, or directing the choir or any number of uncompensated work, You pay your tithing – 10% of your income, which is audited annually – so you can go to the Temple and perform important liturgical rites, such as Baptisms for the Dead, or Endowments (yeah, I was too young for that so I don’t know what it entailed, other than paying your tithing to earn Temple admission). That’s all well and good, but you need that Priesthood token to get into the Best Heaven. How do you do that? Don’t worry – it’s not like being ordained a Priest in the Catholic or Episcopal churches. You don’t have to go to six years of seminary, learn to read the Bible in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic. To have access to the blessings of the Priesthood in the Mormon church, you must do one of two things:
- Have a Penis.
- Marry a Mormon with a Penis.
I remember sitting in that itchy, orange upholstered chair and grimacing. I was a good kid. I was not fooling around with boys (which in and of itself was a bit of a concern to some of my Young Women teachers, given the importance of finding the right Penis-haver to commit myself to). I had read the Bible, the Book of Mormon, Word of Wisdom and Pearl of Great Price from cover to cover, I dressed modestly, attended church every Sunday and the obligatory Young Women’s Activity every Thursday, I paid my tithing (usually), I did not take the Lord’s name in vain, and while I will admit to attempting to start a mosh pit at more than one church dance, and the fabrics chosen for my Young Women Activity Craft projects were more apt to involve dinosaurs than gingham and eyelet, none of that was expressly forbidden in the Word of Wisdom. If you asked any of my peers at the time, I’m sure they would have classed me as a goody-two-shoes. But week after week, it was made clear to me the Mormon God did not think I was worthy to go to the Celestial Kingdom.
I knew from an early age – about the same early age the Church started telling little girls that their true destiny was to have as many babies as possible – that I did not want to have children. By the time I was seventeen, I had very much NOT given much thought to marriage, because if I had thought too much about it, I would have had to admit that I wasn’t especially interested in marriage at all. It’s only recently that I’ve come to terms with how absolutely fucked up that whole concept is. Even the most Fundamentalist of Catholic and Protestant churches don’t have a deity who requires marriage to get into Heaven.** WTF?
So I sat there, chewing on my inner cheek, trying to decide what I was going to do with this information. My parents always told me that if there was a religious concept that seemed wrong, I shouldn’t worry about it; humans can misunderstand, and they were sure God would clarify everything in due time. But I had heard this lesson multiple times, from people with all kinds of authority – there were church approved visual aids! How could this be a misinterpretation when it was so consistent? I raised my hand and asked the teacher:
“What if a woman who is very righteous never gets married before she dies?”
I’m sure Sister Williams knew I was “asking for a friend (who is me)”. She smiled and replied soothingly:
“She will be allowed in the Celestial Kingom, as a servant and helpmeet of those who were sealed in the Temple.”
It took me a couple more years before I left the church for good. In high school, I had many friends in the church, the activities were nice. It kept me out of the kind of trouble The Youth can get into. But once I graduated, I knew there was no longer a place for me. At seventeen, there was not one Mormon boy my age who didn’t think he was superior to me in every way, not one who treated me as an equal. Why should they? They had the Priesthood, and knew every Mormon girl needed that to get into Heaven. This attitude was unlikely to improve.
But then, really, who wants to get into Heaven anyway when you’re going to spend time and all eternity getting pregnant and birthing spirit babies?
*(OK, sorry, here’s a whole parenthetical paragraph: there are a few things that might have stood out to anyone raised in any other Christian denomination. Like, where’s Hell? Mormons don’t believe in “Hell”, they believe in “Outer Darkness”, which is way worse than anyone else’s hell, duh. It’s reserved for Apostates – those who had a full understanding of the Gospel, but rejected it. Is Hitler here? Nope. He’s up in the Telestial Kingdom having a Moons-Over-My-Hammy. Of the three heaven kingdoms and the one Hellier Than Thou, it sounds like it’s the one I’m most qualified for. So there’s that. The other thing is the Mormon concept of the Trinity, which is very much… not. Jesus is the Son of God, but he is not God. This is a HUGE bone of contention with every other Christian denomination, and is one of the reasons they are accused of NOT being actual Christians. It’s also why I was re-baptized into the Episcopal Church, even though they don’t require it of other Christians.)
**(look, I’m not going to let other panty-sniffing Christians off the hook; many of the mainline Protty churches and the Pope himself seem to have a really difficult time with certain aspects of the full range of humanity that were never mentioned by the Big J himself, and many of these churches seem to have spent a lot of time and entery contemplating what other people do with their genitals so they can roundly condemn it that might have been better spent studying and imitating Christ, but what do I know?)
nerdycellist 