The Role of Women, Part 2: Let's Talk About Divinity

In the LDS faith, the word “divine” is thrown around a lot, especially in association with women. Women are taught that they have a “divine role” within the church. This phrase is employed by countless leaders in the Church to alleviate the contentions that some women have in regards to their status within the church. A woman’s role in god’s plan is to have kids and raise them to be righteous followers of god while a man is endowed with the power of the Priesthood, which allows him to heal people, perform special blessings, preside over meetings and make all decisions in the Church (this last one will not be admitted outright by most men). If a woman expresses her displeasure in her role, she’s told that hers is a role of “divinity” which is supposed to somehow elevate her to the same level of a man. Well, it doesn’t.

From the age of 12, young women are taught about Divine Nature, which is one of the 8 values in the Personal Progress program. In this program, those who participate are asked to fulfill 3 required “value experiences” and 3 additional “value experiences” of their choosing from a list that is provided in the handbook. All ten experiences for each of the values focus on 1 of 3 things: discovering what “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” says about being a woman and a mother, making your home life better by developing relationships through being a peacemaker, and learning how to be more obedient.

What really bothers me about all 8 of the value experiences, not just Divine Nature, is that young women are never encouraged or taught how to be leaders, which is something I personally believe is an important concept to learn about and to exercise. Do I think that everyone, male and female, should be a leader in some capacity or other? No, but learning what it takes to be a leader and experiencing that level of responsibility helps individuals learn to think for themselves, to think critically, and to take other people’s opinions into consideration without accepting them at face value. Coupled together, the Personal Progress values and the very idea of a woman’s “divine role” leads young women to become meek and submissive without any real ability to think or stand up for themselves. I understand that there are exceptions to this. Some women are natural born leaders with their motivations and ambitions, but for the most part, I honestly believe that women are held back from achieving a real individual identity because of what they are told they are supposed to be by religious leaders.

The word “divine” is one of those words that you just intuitively know the definition of, mostly because it’s usually employed in a religious setting. This word relates to a god, especially a Supreme Being. When coupled with the word “role”, divine suddenly makes the individual in that “role” assume the characteristics of or befitting a deity. The phrase “divine role” is used for women more often that it is used for a man. This suggests, and the Church has no qualms in perpetuating this idea either, that women are already so close to being godlike that they don’t need to shoulder the added responsibility of the priesthood because men need the extra help in learning how to become more godlike. Church leaders (who are predominantly men) love to make deprecating remarks about the fallibility of men and commend women for their “natural” propensity to be practically perfect; that without a women’s strength behind them, the men of the church, and the world, would be without purpose or direction. A very common remark, usually made in regards to Bishops (the leader of a congregation, goes something like this: "I (the Stake President) pondered, prayed and fasted to discover the most worthy member of the congregation. And then I called her husband." This type of comment is meant to uplift the wife of the Bishop and elevate her in the eyes of the congregation, but what is this comment really saying? "Well, you are the most worthy person in this congregation, but because you're a woman, I'm going to call your husband, even if he's not as in-tune with the Spirit as you are." Despite the obviouse double edged sword where these deprecating remarks are concerned, the egos of many LDS women are quite often boosted, which effectively covers up the fairly obvious fact that men and women are not equal in the eyes of the Church.

So why talk about divinity? Well, in my latest quest to more fully understand the role that women play in religion, I visited my local library and picked up a few books that relate to women in scripture, one of which was entitled The Divinity of Women. This book was authored by two members of the LDS faith, which is why I chose to read this book first, as it’s the religion I am most familiar with.

 Ultimately, this book is meant to assure women that they are indeed represented in the scriptures; that their role in the Church now is no different than what a woman’s role was in the time of the ancients. The message to women is clear: a woman must be faithful, obedient, devoted to family and god, and willing to sacrifice their own autonomy for the good of others. A woman must be all of these things if she is to live a life worthy enough to return to the highest exaltation above.

Eventually I want to review the various characters that the authors of The Divinity of Women extol in their book. My purpose in reviewing this book will be to show that despite the authors best efforts, the qualities that most of these women embody perpetuate the inequality between men and women rather than close the gap.