What Is A Mormon

Mormons having a 'moment,' but is the buzz good or bad?

Hard to believe Donny is now 53 and his sister is 51. They’re still a hot-ticket show in Las Vegas. Marie just remarried her first husband and former Brigham Young University basketball player Stephen Craig (in the same dress from their 1982 wedding!), and teens to grandmothers continue to swoon over Donny, who was ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars” champ in season nine.

The Mormon mom of three from Arizona says the wildly popular “Twilight” teen-vampire series came to her in a dream. The books have sold more than 100 million copies in nearly 40 languages, and the movies lit a fire at the box office. Meyer made Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and USA Today’s Author of the Year. Not bad for a former receptionist who had never even written a short story before penning the first “Twilight” novel.

Mark Brenchley takes his Mormon faith seriously.

Others, apparently, do not.

Brenchley admits he gets “a little steamed inside” when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints is heckled, parodied, maligned and ridiculed in the national media. And that’s been happening a lot lately.

On the other hand, all this attention could turn into a good thing.

“I’m choosing to look at as a teachable moment,” says Brenchley, a municipal site-plan examiner and Tampa church leader. “If it makes people more curious about us and they start asking questions, we can tell them the truth about our religion.”

Without question, the LDS church is the religious denomination du jour. From Broadway’s , Mormons are making news. A few weeks ago, Newsweek magazine put a digital image of a dancing Mitt Romney on the cover for a story on “The Mormon Moment: How the Outsider Faith Creates Winners.”

How they handle the spotlight could affect public opinion of a fast-growing faith that claims about 14 million worldwide, about half of them in the United States.

A 2009 church estimate placed the number of Mormons in Florida at 132,000. Ground was broken in Davie in June for a temple that will serve about 25,000 members from congregations in Stuart to the Florida Keys, as well as Mormons in Fort Myers, Naples and the Bahamas.

Good Mormon Feminists Vs. Bad Mormon Feminists: The Dividing Line ...

In a couple of different conversations I’ve had with her, Mormon feminist Lorie Winder Stromberg has proposed that many Mormons commonly perceive two types of feminists within the Church.

The first are the good Mormon feminists. These are feminists, often professional women, who may question gender roles and women’s lack of visibility in texts and leadership, but are on the whole seen as faithful and dedicated to the Church.

The second are the bad Mormon feminists.  These are the feminists that are regarded as dangerous, apostate, and disloyal to the Church.

According to Stromberg’s theory, the dividing line between these two groups of feminists — the thing that makes the one group good and the one group bad — is the issue of women’s ordination to the priesthood.

If a woman calls herself a feminist, but doesn’t focus on or talk about the issue of women’s ordination, then other Mormons are often willing to regard these women as benign, despite their strange feminist leanings. However, if a feminist does reveal her convictions that women should have the priesthood, she is automatically regarded as a threat to Mormon leadership and Mormonism in general.

I think this is a valid theory.

If one accepts this narrative, my  follow up questions are these: Why does women’s ordination function as this dividing line? What is it about a woman thinking that priesthood should be available to all humans that makes her such a threat, whereas a woman questioning prescribed  Mormon gender roles or a woman who wants to see an expanded space for women’s action and participation in Church is not such a threat?

I don’t know that I have a great answer to this huge question I just posed, but here’s an initial attempt. I suspect that people aren’t as threatened by women questioning gender roles or women’s lack of visibility in leadership because there appears to be wiggle room on these issues. The Proclamation on the Family , which has some of Mormonism’s heaviest prescriptions on men’s roles vs. women’s, does have that line about how individual circumstances may vary. Also, women who want expanded roles for women’s leadership have only to go back to our own Mormon past to see women who were really running their own programs, controlling their own funds, and highly visible in their callings. (How times have changed.

What is a Mormon?

Religions of America, ferment and faith in an age of crisis : a new guide and almanac

The Mormon Cult, A Former Missionary Reveals the Secrets of Mormon Mind Control

A guide to the religions of America, the famous Look magazine series on religion, plus facts, figures, tables, charts, articles, and comprehensive reference material on churches and religious groups in the United States

The Book of Mormon, a very short introduction