Jan 16, 2025
Doctrines that were set during the founding years of the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints enthroned as eternal (and how
it is in heaven) many things that were true of life in those days
but would later change. Among these was defining different roles
for men and women, and also the priority of procreation. If
families were going to survive in those days where most everything
the family needs was produced by its own labor, the more children
you had, the better. And since women were the ones who carried and
gave birth to children, they, by necessity, were consigned to work
that could be done while pregnant and raising children too young to
work. Men's work was more physical, and it concentrated on labor
that needed to be performed outside the house.
What happens when these necessities change but the doctrine taught
as what God wants and what heaven is all about does not? A term for
the friction caused by increasingly larger mis-matches between
theology and the evolving ideas/needs used by Dr. Carrie
Miles, our LDF guest for this episode, is the problem of
"syncretism." Two systems (our examples here are doctrine and
changing economic patterns and societal shifts brought on by them)
clash and each must learn to somehow manage the tensions the other.
How successfully churches accommodate these shifts is a key factor
in determining if a religious system stays relevant to those who
are being raised in later generations.
As we know, the LDS Church has had great difficulty in retaining
its younger members as well as others who feel these tensions most
acutely. More and more Latter-day Saints come to feel that they are
not "safe" within Mormon congregations and within a church at large
that does not successfully manage the crisis of
syncretism.
As a way of talking about this issue of "safety," Dr. Miles draws
on the “Polyvagal Theory “first introduced by Stephen Porges, which
maps the effects on individuals when they feel disturbed. Any and
all the body systems controlled by the vagus nerve react
unconsciously to stress and any feelings of danger or a sense that
something is “off.”
In short, the storyline of this LDF episode is the tale of church members feeling less and less safe—physically emotionally—the greater the gap becomes between teachings and the rhetoric from those who present them, the less safe people feel in the Church when their own life situations, experiences, beliefs, and primary values don’t match with formal LDS positions, which have been taught as “eternal” even though they were heavily shaped by the assumptions, gender roles, and sense of sexual morality of the society in which the church emerged.
This is a fascinating conversation! Listen in!