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Women and Temples
By: Mormon HereticIt’s amazing what you can learn on the Bloggernacle. Layne at Feminist Mormon Housewives expressed concern about a policy at a temple she attended. As Young Women’s advisor, she took the young women in her ward to perform baptisms for the dead. Apparently the unnamed temple she attended had a policy that women currently experiencing their period would not be allowed to participate in baptisms, but would be allowed to participate in confirmations. Rebecca at By Common Consent noted that some temples have the policy, and some don’t. According to Rebecca,
There is no rational basis for this policy. It needs to go. Period.
(Sorry. Couldn’t resist.)
Being a guy, such an issue had never crossed my mind–apparently it hadn’t crossed some women’s minds either. They have started a Google Docs spreadsheet to track the issue and see if the issue can be resolved. I can understand that a young woman would be mortified to find she couldn’t participate if she hadn’t known the policy and was informed of the policy at the temple. If you read the comments, there are several stories of women driving hours to a temple and then being informed of the policy. (Don’t read the comments if you are squeamish–there are quite a few tales of the facts of life women deal with on a monthly basis.) Some have wondered if there was any sort of a basis scripturally.
Well, I’ve been watching a documentary from National Geographic called “The Real Mary Magdalene.” It’s a fantastic video, part of a 3 DVD set of Science of the Bible (it’s on disk 3). Ancient Judaism had some interesting practices relating to menstruation and the temple. Quoting from the DVD,
Jewish society in the first century forced a sharp division between men and women. The division began at the temple in Jerusalem. Women could not enter the Court of the Priests where the sacrifices took place. Instead, they had to stay in the court of the women. Ritual purity was vital in the temple. Priests had to immerse in a special pool called a mikvah every day in order to be holy.
Rabbi Lawrence Schiffman, New York University, “Men and women are segregated in the temple because the way access works to the temple. People gain closer and closer access based on the higher potentials of ritual purity.”
Menstrual blood made women impure every month. They had to bathe in the mikvah before they could have sexual contact with their husbands. These ritual differences between men and women in the temple were reflected in life.
A Mikvah is very similar to the more modern practice of baptism, and it appears that Christian baptism evolved from the practice of mikvah. I talked about Mikvah and baptism previously. Anyway, I am not here to promote or defend temple issues here (I’ll defer to the women that say there is no problem performing baptisms even if having a period), but I will say that menstrual bleeding was considered unclean in ancient Judaism. Without the modern feminine hygiene products we have now, I’d be surprised if ancient Christians would have allowed women to perform baptisms while menstruating. What do you make of this issue? Do you think the Church should make an official policy one way or the other?
I’m sorry you didn’t realize there was an update on FMH here:
http://www.feministmormonhousewives.org/?p=8713#more-8713
The SL Tribune quotes a church spokesperson here where it says that the church policy is that everyone is welcome to participate in baptisms if they are 12 and have a recommend.
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/blogsfaithblog/53650972-180/temple-women-baptisms-mormon.html.csp
The SL Trib article says:
Trouble is, such a ban is bogus. If temple workers are excluding young women from doing baptismal work while having their periods, church spokesman Scott Trotter said, they are not following LDS policy.
“Performing baptisms in church temples is a sacred ordinance open to all members who are at least 12 years of age and who meet the standards of the church,” Trotter said in a statement. “The decision of whether or not to participate in baptisms during a menstrual cycle is personal and left up to the individual.”
The bottom line is no one knew if there actually was an official position on this. Some individual temple workers or certain temples were making up policy according to what they thought was right, or tradition. It is great to now know that the official position is it is there is no bann. So now ok to send my daughter to the temple even during her period and I don’t have to worry that she might be turned away in an embarrassing encounter.
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What do you make of this issue?
It’s a carry-over of the patriarchy and fear of the feminine traditions that were had among saints anciently.
If any blood should be considered “ritually clean” blood — it should be menstrual blood. It’s the only blood not produced by injury or trauma — and it is a sign of regular fertile cycles in women.
But men in power who didn’t understand it just shamed and tabooed the heck out of it — and we’re still carrying that shame with us, for the most part, today.
Do you think the Church should make an official policy one way or the other?
I don’t know how much it would change things — for the Church to read an “official” letter stating the case one way or the other.
I’m sure many individual temple presidencies would stick to the “old ways” that are “more pure” regardless of anything the First Presidency causes to be read from Sunday pulpits.
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The Church had already made a “policy” by not specifically excluding a menstruating female from doing temple baptisms. But as is often the case, sometimes there’s a twit on the local level that gets an idea in his or her head, and can’t resist the urge to be a ‘tin god’. I’ve seen this with bishops all the time. Our leaders (and temple workers) are, as the fictional Sarek of Vulcan would say with disdain, “so human”.
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We do gag at gnats ……
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Roger, who is gagging, you?
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Justin, I am not inclined to blame this on patriarchy. It seems to me that it is the matrons making this policy.
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I also don’t think this should be read over pulpits. A letter to temple presidents and workers should fix the problem quite nicely.
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A letter isn’t needed. After all, there is no change in policy — just continuation of the current policy.
I also agree that this isn’t “patriarchy” or “men in power” — almost certainly, in whatever temples the practice was had of excluding girls during menstruation, it was initiated and policed by women. Good women, mind you, but still women.
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I’ll continue my no. 8 — good women, honorable women, well-intentioned women, women who will be found in the celestial kingdom of our God notwithstanding this very small matter…
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JI,I disagree–a letter is needed. The last time I checked, just 27 of 73 temples (37%) were in compliance with the “official” church position. It is clear that the majority of temples are out of compliance, so a reminder is necessary. If we can be reminded every year to vote, it shouldn’t be a big deal to send a letter to temple presidents to fix this problem in which so many temples are out of compliance. Click here to see the list of offending temples if you’re interested.
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MH (no. 10) — You don’t want to paint a picture that only 37% of temples “were in compliance” — that’s bad statistics, with over half of the temples not being included in the count (according to your list).
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MH:
Both men and women [including temple matrons] can participate in the assigning privilege to the interests of boys and men over the integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women.
Besides — I said it represents a carry-over of the patriarchy and fear of all things feminine that were had among saints anciently.
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A dynamic similar to these anomalies in treatment of young women in temples also apparently accounts for mistreatment of minorities throughout history. Slaves. People of color. People with diseases. People with malformations and impairments, mental and physical. Anomalous sexual attractions and intersexes. Whatever it is, we, following leaders, often scapegoat and victimize. The trouble is, such often gets Canonized (e.g., slavery, women as property, homosexuals, etc.).
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Is it possible that there are local regulations, OR misinterpretations of same, treating the baptismal font as like a public swimming pool?
I checked the “rules” at the gym that I attend that has pools and spas at almost every facility. I saw nothing regarding women paying the monthly bill. If there were any regs by the Sacramento County Health Department governing same, certainly they’d be enforced both at California Family Fitness and the Sacramento LDS Temple. To the best of my knowledge, not an issue.
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Wow! Some people are taking this matter far too seriously. Surely no one in this matter is “assigning privilege to the interests of boys and men over the integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women.” And surely no one is “scapegoat[ing] and victimiz[ing]” girls.
Some well-intentioned but perhaps misguided sisters may have been overzealous in their callings, that’s all. At least, that’s all I see.
Controversial! What do you think?
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As one of the people who ran this project and called over half the temples represented in the Google doc let me clarify a few things.
1) We went out of our way to collect the data in a way that distinguished between a temple’s explicit policy and a random act that might occur at a temple due to untrained workers. 30% of temples we contacted (at the time we called back in March) explicitly said they had a *policy* of not allowing women on their period to do baptisms or actively discouraged them from doing so.
2) In some temples we included in the “allows women” category there were lots of indications that local experience could vary substantially.
My favorite anecdote which i haven’t shared anywhere else. In a temple I called personally, I talked to the recorder (a nice man). He told me that the temple’s policy was to allow women to do as they like. Then he told me to wait a minute “while he closed the door”. He then proceeded to tell me that it was still quite possible that depending on who was running the baptismal font I still might here our YW told they should not do baptisms even with a tampon. He indicated this was mostly due to their “generation”. I asked him what I should do in that case. I suggested I politely take the person aside and mention that I had called in advance and was told the actual policy of the temple was to allow the girls to do baptisms. He said “That wouldn’t be a good idea. You should just tell your YW before they come that they should ignore such instruction.” “And if they ask directly?” He told me they should lie. No kidding. Super nice guy. But apparently the feelings of some temple workers are important enough we should instruct our young women to lie to them while in the temple.
Point is what the data showed was that the problem was NOT constrained to idiosyncratic, one time, mistakes. It a significant minority of temples there policies were not aligned with the church’s central policy and even in places where it was it is quite possible that you run across local issues.
3) There are reports of a new letter circulating at the stake level in some areas reiterating the Church policy. So they are still trying to change and communicate it in at least some areas, which is great.
Thanks for bringing this to people’s attention again. Please go read the FMH links about the project. I don’t know how up-to-date the spread sheet is at this point. It would be worthwhile to check, but hopefully at this point the offending temples might have changed. I plan to do a follow up here in a few months to actually measure the change of local temple policies. Hopefully, it will be good news!!
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ji
And can I say it is that exact attitude that “this isn’t a big issue” is where the root of this problem lies. It isn’t just random one off sisters in baptistries, though that is STILL a problem regardless of a temple’s policy. It is precisely because we have a systematic tendency to treat women’s issue as “light matters” or “not important” across a range of issues that we have more problems than we should. Someone needs to be looking out for the interests of our adolescent girls and women who drive to our most sacred spaces only to be randomly told they can’t participate where in most other temples they would. Someone needs to think this is important enough to make sure the policy is actually followed and that local temples don’t create their own folk policy. Someone needs to pay enough attention to define the size of the problem instead of just assuming it away as a small glitch. I would submit to you that if we had women in leadership positions at much higher rates these “small” women specific issues would just be taken care of as a matter of course. We might have things like women’s garments that fit, young women’s programs systematically comparable to the young mens. We might have been ahead of instead of behind the curve in helping our leaders dealing with abuse in marriage appropriately instead of way behind it. (Thanks to Hinkley for finally taking it seriously at an institutional level!)
Yes these things matter and I find it sad you don’t think they do, at least not enough to actually look at the data provided and empathize with all the young women this was still affecting.
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rah – I applaud the project, the information, and appreciate your resources, suggestions, and anecdotes. It’s been very enlightening. Thank you for doing this.
I disagree that having women in higher positions would eliminate this problem. I don’t think this came about because women are sidelined. I think this came about because women are just as likely as men in positions of authority to take that authority on themselves. I don’t think we can pawn a problem caused by female temple workers onto the patriarchy. I think it’s exactly as you describe: a problem of generation.
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Bonnie,
Do you think if we had female bishops, stake presidents, 70 and apostles that we would still be struggling with getting equal funding for YW programs? Do you think the current AD program would still be treated as the poor cousin to the cub scout program? Do you think that the YW manual would be the absolute last church manual to be updated? Do you think we would still have stakes and wards where women are systematically excluded from saying some prayers in meetings? I have a feeling the answer would be no or at least at much lower rates. I actually think that in the case of this temple issue, the fact that we have a majority of temples with not only good policies but good active support of women is because there is a powerful respected female position, the temple matron, who has a fine grained understanding of feminine hygiene issues and is sensitive to it.
Keep in mind that the “generational” issue is highly related to how gendered that generations world is and was. It impacts the women as well as the men. Certainly the women can be just as strong if not stronger enforcers of the gender roles and norms.
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This bugs me: “(Don’t read the comments if you are squeamish–there are quite a few tales of the facts of life women deal with on a monthly basis.)” A lot. It’s just this kind of attitude that it’s dirty or taboo or “nobody wants to hear about that!!!!” that leads to body shame in girls, and to people perpetuating policies like this in temples. There’s a culture of needless knee-jerk “ewww!!!” reaction without really being informed. We’re grown ups, just give us the link so we can read it. And if it bugs any reader, GOOD, they *need* this exposure to help them get over it.
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rah – when I was YWP our program was funded at 4X the YM. AD struggles because it doesn’t have an extremely old external structure supporting it and because it keeps changing (and that doesn’t come from the male leadership; it comes from the female.) Women are systematically excluded from saying prayers by ignorant local leadership, when it happens, which is more and more rare. We can’t fix ignorant local leadership in a generation, or the apostles would have a whole lot fewer problems.
I’m truly not the enemy of progress. I am a woman comfortable with power and I have loved the powerful leadership of many women. I just don’t think we have to do violence to the priesthood structure to have powerful women, and I don’t think the fact that men sometimes mess up means that women need to take over their job. And many of the problems women face in the church are because women mess up anyway.
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Cynthia, you go girl, (but MH really is a nice guy.)
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JI, a quibble. It isn’t “bad statistics”, it is “incomplete” statistics. There is a difference. The question is whether the other 70 or so temples will follow the pattern of the first 1/2 that have been surveyed. I doubt the others are going to be in perfect compliance with the first half, though there obviously could be differences. So, the statement is correct, though incomplete.
Rah, thanks for the update, that is interesting. Justin, I don’t see this as a patriarchy issue, and I agree with rah that it is probably a generational issue.
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Bonnie,
I do think that if we take seriously the idea that men and women bring different things to the table – temperaments, knowledge, experiences etc. that we are by default going to suffer blind spots when women’s voices are not equal with men’s. I grant there is a lot of variation in wards and local leadership. I have no doubt that there are wards where the YW budget if 4 times that of YM. However, I would bet my eye teeth if you collected all the data you would find a persistent and appreciable average difference in spending on YW versus YM. One that has probably shrunk slowly over time, but still appreciable, held in place by policies such as unequal limits of fundraisers etc. I also think that we have a responsibility as a church to improve our local governance. This includes standing up against policies that limit the ways women worship. I think the COB and leaders have a responsibility to pay attention to and fix these problems as well. I am not all anger and doom and gloom. Things HAVE gotten better, slowly, over time. I believe if fixing things not burning them down. I don’t want to do “violence” to the priesthood structure. I wouldn’t consider having women more represented in the governance structure of the church as doing “violence” to it. The opposite in fact. Indeed I could even imagine ways to include women in governance that wouldn’t require giving them the priesthood. Expand the role of RSP, for example. Open us SS presidencies and ward mission leader positions to women. Expand the number of women auxiliary GAs. Our move toward more inclusive ward council culture and practices is a positive change.
At very least if we are going to continue with an all-male governance structure we should at least explicitly acknowledge that this structure will have a tendency to miss and discount women’s concerns so that we can try to avoid this pitfall wherever possible. Denying it does no good. There is so much evidence of how this has slowed progress in the church. I mean can we really be proud that it took us until 1992 to change the temple covenant language to something that didn’t send a good portion of women screaming for the exit? 1992? And then we haven’t even done the easy things that are left to equalize the language. Can’t we have women pray in General Conference? Does it still have to be 2012 and have a good portion of our temples excluding our girls from baptism for no good reason because no one is paying attention?
And these are just the small injustices. The big cosmic ones, unsymmetrical information about women’s spiritual destiny, asymmetrical sealing practices that stop women from getting sealed to men they love, our reticence to answer the polygamy question so our women can see if they need to be prepared to share their husband in the afterlife. The regression that has happened in women’s practice of blessings. The long historical injustices suffered by women in all these things in my mind must be a reflection of man’s weakness not God’s reticence to treat his daughters equally. And I am not by the way placing this exclusively at the feet of the leaders. That is a cop out. I am just as responsible. We all are.
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MH,
You got the percentages backward. 70% were in compliance. 30% were out of compliance.
However, you are right about the data. We called all the English speaking temples. Plus a few other big ones. I would say our sample is probably pretty representative of the English speaking temples. I could easily see there being a different pattern for Non-English speaking temples, especially the smaller ones – though I would guess they would be slightly less likely to be in compliance, but I could be wrong.
JI – Please feel free to call any of the temples that have been contacted if you want to increase the scope of the data. For an ad hoc data collection effort we did pretty well I think. Obviously it was helpful enough that it helped the church recognize the need to communicate on this topic better.
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rah (#24) – that was fabulous and I agreed with every single thing you said. Now, could I be so lucky that you also love gardening and homemade ice cream?
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Rah, I think this comes down to one of definitions, because when I checked, here’s how I categorized them.
27 temples = NO restrictions = in compliance
31 temples = partial restrictions (generally tampons)= partial compliance
15 temples = Restricted = Out of compliance
73 total temples.
Now you could define it differently and look at the 15/73 are out of compliance (21%), instead of the 27/73 in compliance (37%). The partials are a bit hard to categorize, as they could go in either group I suppose, so it depends on how you want to define things. Certainly both ways to define it are valid, but I went with No restrictions = full compliance, so that’s how I got my number.
Of course, the 77 temples with Unknown status are important to know, but with a roughly 50% response rate, that’s pretty good for a sample (especially for a bunch of unpaid volunteers that just got the info.) Often statistical samples get 20-30% response rate for surveys. So, if we want to get them all, that would be the best.
But with a church record that encourages us to “Be ye therefore perfect”, whether you want to classify the failure rate at 21% or 63%, while those number differ because of how you want to define partials, it certainly is not “perfection” in the wonderfully correlated Mormon world of Harold B. Lee, though it probably is better than our home teaching numbers. ;)
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There is some irony here — in a matter controlled by women, on the women’s side of the temple, is a practice imposed on women and girls by women — there are no men involved — and yet, some want to blame men for the problem, and others want men to write a letter to correct the problem.
There is another principle — that of calling people and letting them manage their callings — the temple matrons and sisters who supervise the temple baptistries magnify their callings — some of them make up rules such as are discussed in this posting — in my mind, all of them are well-intentioned and none of them are being unkind. I don’t think it is wise for the men in Salt Lake City to make every policy for every practice at every temple — I’m okay with letting temple presidents and temple matrons and shift supervisors magnify their callings — I’m okay with every once in a while some improvident decision or happening such as is discussed here — we can learn from these experiences, or we can throw stones.
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Let me also add that when Zogby, or Pew, or Dan Jones or one of these big statistical survey companies sample public opinion, they generally pick 1000 people of a few million. In that case the sample size is a micro-percent of the population, and we don’t question the accuracy of their numbers. While it isn’t practical for Pew to interview every single American (a census), and it is practical to do a census of 140 temples, the response rate is pretty darn good when compared to most samples.
ji, I don’t think of it as casting stones, I think of it as cleansing the temple as Jesus did. I guess if you look at Jesus from the point of the money changers, Jesus was casting stones though. ;)
I do agree with your comment that these people are trying to magnify their callings the best way they know how, and there are no ill intentions on their part. I hope that “we can learn from these experiences” as you said, and empathize better for the young women who would be mortified that they can’t participate because a matron deems them unfit to participate due to their period. I am sure that these young women may think that others may assume that they’re somehow unworthy, and that certainly isn’t the case. I’m just saying that if I was a teenage boy on a long bus trip to a faraway temple, I would wonder why one of the young women didn’t participate. At that age, it never would have occurred to me that she may be having a period, and I might jump to a conclusion that she must have done something wrong. So, I think the tender feelings of these young women are really trampled on when we fail to acknowledge the potential shame involved here, and I think that plays a pretty big role in the initial post at FMH.
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ji
As mentioned in the original posts on FMH, I think that the positive approach taken by the majority of the temples is, at least in part, due to having a strong female position in the temple. This is why it is all the more striking that 30% had hurtful policies.
Also, your solution of allowing local temples or even shift workers to make this decision as a matter of magnifying their callings is one of the biggest actual problems. In general I am all in favor of more local control and initiative, but in this case uniformity is important. It is the variability and unpredictability in this case that causes the most harmful situations. Most my life I have lived a long way away from temples. It is a major undertaking to get there. If as you suggest we should leave this up to shift workers how I am to know if the YW/Women with my group on their periods are going to be able to get in? Should they get on the bus for the 5 hour drive? I could call and ask in advance, but what if the shift worker changes and they magnify their calling differently? Letting such a policy shift around by temple presidency and temple is simply problematic. Youth trips are infrequent enough and leaders change rapidly enough that a non-uniform policy is problematic. And of course, the most basic question should the church allow well-meaning people exclude people from sacred ordinances for no good reason in the name of local autonomy. There are only 140 temples. This is not a hard thing to fix, if, and this is the big if, one cares enough to pay attention to it. Your responses in my opinion display the exact type of gendered apathy to women’s issues that lead to so many unnecessary problems in the church. Have some empathy for our girls and women.
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MH
Thanks for clarifying. I guess we interpreted requiring tampons as being in compliance as it seems like a reasonable precaution given the nature of white clothing, the public nature of the ritual and the shared font. All the women we talked to seem to think this is very reasonable and not an imposition so we lumped them together. Again, we were also trying to give the temple’s the benefit of the doubt where there was a question so that our estimate of problematic temples was conservative, largely to anticipate the reaction that we were blowing something out of proportion by counting with a bias to criticize. Avoid the appearance of evil and all that!
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