The Weird and The Wacky Meet

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Escape From Utah

                 Social learning theory says that our identity is formed in response to social stimuli.   The story of my own identity is marked by contrast and role strain.  My socialization was filled with conflicting expectations that no one person could possibly satisfy.  What I am today is the result of deciding which expectations are worth fulfilling.

                 My family was my first agent of micro-level socialization.  In addition to all the typical things parents teach their children, there were some that were unusual and had a significant influence upon my life.  One was the idea, which both of my parents continually stressed, that I could grow up to be anything I wanted, that no legitimate career was closed to me, and that the road to whatever goal I chose is education, not merely in the sense of credentialism but as an enabling choice.

                 In this, they were speaking from their own experience, as both of them had started from humble beginnings and succeeded largely due to their willingness to learn and their overall educational attainment.  My father has a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s in social work, with numerous professional certifications and licenses.  My mother stopped one semester short of her psychology degree, but the education she received was worth more than the paper she never quite earned, and her latter success came from further education.  Besides, there are reasons why she never graduated, which I’ll get into later.  My aunt, who helped raise me and was a major influence, had earned a doctorate in journalism and taught at the University of Utah.  All of them had parlayed their education into interesting careers with a high socioeconomic status and prestige; I was expected to do the same.  This was a key value I was indoctrinated in as part of my socialization.

                 The admirable emphasis on education was in contrast with the expectations of my ethnicity.  You see, I was not raised as an American, at least not of the ordinary sort, part of society at large.  From the start, I was a member of a special group that was at once foreign to the popular culture of the country and yet somehow more natively and genuinely American.  I was a Mormon, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS).

                 The LDS church and its unique cultural heritage was a macro-level agent of religious socialization.  In fact, Mormonism, as an exclusive religious group, formed the basis of my roots and identity.  I was taught that I was a proud descendent of rugged settlers who had fled across the country to escape from religious persecution, ending up in a briny valley where they’d carved out an exceptional and religiously pure life for themselves.  I saw myself as a saint in a nation of gentiles, keenly aware that I was fundamentally different and somehow better.  My ethnocentric history tied me not only to my ancestors, whose names were carefully mapped out on the genealogical charts for generations back, but to my father, who kept those charts in an office that doubled as family museum and shrine.  He was always more faithful to his history than his religion, a value that rubbed off on me more than he ever expected.

                 At first, I thought that what I was being taught at home was the norm, at least for my group.  And, in fact, my parents shared many of the socially and politically conservative attitudes common in LDS families, with my mother staying home to raise me and my siblings while my father worked in the prison system and in Republican politics.  Even then, she was not a typical Mormon mother and housewife.  She was handy with tools, not so great in the kitchen, and quick to do things that might be considered unorthodox, such as picking me up from school on a moped.  She only had four children, which is below the norm for Mormons, and the moment her youngest child entered grade school, she fled the house to become an electrical engineer, convincing her new employer to pay her to be trained.  Soon she was a dedicated, hard-working, and well-paid professional who raised her children in her spare time.  The impact of this remedial gender socialization was increased by its coinciding with the period in my life when I was already questioning my role.

                 It hadn’t always been this way.  In fact, it wasn’t until I was old enough to begin to really understand the content and consequences of what I had been memorizing in Sunday school that I started to experience role strain, but then it hit me with a vengeance.  In stark contrast to my parents’ more open view, the LDS church has a very clear and rigid idea of what a woman can be, strictly limiting her to a traditional life as a wife and mother, very much other-directed and subservient, with her gender as her master status.

                 This notion of fixed gender roles and gender segregation ran deep.  Within the church itself, all men have priesthood from the age of twelve, advancing through the ranks with age, commitment and inspiration, all the way up to the Prophet/President who spoke for God.  Women, in contrast, are taught that they are separate but equal, with motherhood taking the place of priesthood.  In short, they’re expected not to complain about being excluded from any leadership role, any control over the patriarchal religion that influences so much of their lives.  This sort of segregation was not new to the church.  Until 1978, it was based on race in addition to gender, with black men denied priesthood as surely as all women are, without even motherhood for compensation.

                 For a young girl who deeply identified with and loved her culture and religion, this was confusing.  I couldn’t figure out why adults stared at me when I said I wanted to grow up to be a missionary or a bishop.  When I finally did understand, it was disheartening and very sad.  I just couldn’t accept the idea that my church only wanted me to breed and be there as a “helpmeet” for my husband.  It just didn’t fit in with my parent’s values about educational and occupational opportunity, nor their stories of independent, ultra-competent settlers who did whatever was needed.

                 There were other conflicts.  With women limited to the narrow traditional role, their education becomes less important.  It’s true that Mormons value schooling more so than most other conservative Christian denominations and that they even have many young women attending college.  However, it is often the case that the women enter college without the primary intention of getting an education and a degree.   Instead, the plan is to snag one of the eligible men – returned missionaries are best – and immediately quit to start a large family.  A tired but still valid joke about women attending Mormon-centered Brigham Young University is that they’re going for their “Mrs.” degree.  Given this, it should be unsurprising that many young women are encouraged to go to college, but not given enough financial support by their parents to make it through the whole four years.

                 This is, in fact, why my mother dropped out just 13 credits short of her degree; once she married my father, school was an expense that got in the way of building up enough financial stability to let them start a family.  If anything, what made her decision unusual is not that she left school, but that she delayed having children until she could properly provide for them.  The more common expectation was for act against rational choice theory by embracing motherhood as something to be launched into as quickly, enthusiastically and repeatedly as possible, relying on support from parents, God and Deseret Industries (the Mormon answer to welfare, established during the Great Depression) when things invariably got tough.  Her decision to value the quality of her children’s lives above their mere quantity was an influence in my own decision to put off pregnancy until I’m capable of giving them the lives they deserve.

                  Perhaps the most important difference between the socialization coming from my parents and the one coming from the LDS church, beside gender roles, is the emphasis placed on social conscience and politics.  The church wants all its members to be active in volunteer work and in politics, but it wants to dictate the direction these things take, turning them into callings that the bishop informs you of.  My parents always taught me that I should follow my own conscience and ideals when thinking about any particular issue.  They tried to pass on other values and mores so I would think more like them, but they emphasized my role in deciding things for myself.

                 When I was 19, my father told me, “You can leave the church, you can become a lesbian, but if you become a Democrat you’ll break my heart.”  This was in 1996, and I had just voted for Bill Clinton in the first presidential election I was old enough to participate in.  Of course my dad was joking, partially.  My parents, despite their conservative leanings, also stressed compassion as a value.  This, combined with my dad’s love of politics as a means to societal change, led me to become active in politics without being a Republican.  Key to this was the influence of the mass media, which I touch on later in this essay.

                 I’ve talked a lot about the value both my parents and the church placed on education, but another strong agent of socialization was the Utah educational system itself.  Like everyone else, I had a series of good and bad teachers, some of whom influenced me more than others.  When I was in elementary school, educators were first beginning to realize that girls were being left behind.  I benefited from this enormously and my education began to slowly overpower the repressive values I was being taught at church.

                 I think the most important thing I learned in school was critical thinking.  My parents never really used this term, even though they always told me I had to make up my own mind.  It was something that I really begin to get a handle on in high school when I started taking debate and autonomous learner classes.  Debate gave me the ability to look at both sides of an issue and consider the strongest arguments that could be made for each.  Once I had this ability, I really began to exercise my parents’ values about thinking for myself, even when it led me to beliefs that differed from theirs, to the point of debunking what they held most sacred.

                 School also interacted with my religious socialization.  In my autonomous learner class, my teacher put a copy of Siddhartha in my hands.  From that moment on, I couldn’t get enough books about other religions.  They opened up a whole new world to me that I never knew existed.  Buddhism, in particular, held a special appeal.  Even though I would not label myself a Buddhist today, it will always hold a special place in my heart for the religion that allowed me to look at Mormonism differently from outside and see its faults, to take the role of the other and gain some objectivity.

                 It was at this point that I really begin to use my sociological imagination to see through what I had been taught.  I began to recognize that there were significant conflicting values that were causing role strain.  Something had to give.  When I was 17, I was serving on a committee in church to plan out a girl’s camping outing.  We worked hard and came up with a budget where we would ask each girl to contribute only nine dollars for a three-day trip.  We took this figure to the bishop, who told us that nine dollars was too much money to expect parents to spend for a girl’s camping activities.  That same week, my younger brother presented my parents with a $170 bill for a church-sponsored camping trip.  It may seem like a small thing, but the gross inequity of this instance of gender stratification was the beginning of the end of my membership in the Mormon church.  I couldn’t belong to an institution that didn’t value me as an equal and wanted me to conform to something I clearly was not.  For me, it became symbolic of the inferior role in the social structure they wanted to confine me in.  I rejected this ideology and rebelled.  Over the next two years, I weaned myself from Mormonism, slowly expanding my circle of friends to include more gentiles and other deviants, as I alienated myself from the group I was raised in.

                 My friends had always been key agents of micro-level socialization.  I naturally looked to them to establish a baseline for normality, a reference group by which to judge myself.  Initially, I was surrounded by Mormons who naturally reinforced Mormon ideals and values.  I do remember having one or two non-Mormon friends growing up, which is quite a feat considering the area of Utah where I grew up was 92% LDS.  However, none of my gentile friends really affected my decisions about the church because they were desperately trying to stay under the radar, to conform – at least on the surface – to the dominant culture.  In Utah, even non-Mormons quickly learn to hide their deviation from acceptable Mormon behavior.

                 Much of this deviation came in the form of vices.  The LDS church highly values abstinence in pretty much everything that might be pleasurable.  Growing up, my parents and church railed against smoking, premarital sex and cohabitation, alcohol, tattoos, and even coffee and tea, with cola on the dangerous borderline where the brave took guilty pleasure.  I didn’t feel a yearning for these forbidden fruits and my friends, at least up to high school, never subjected me to much peer pressure.  Like any good Mormon girl, I just took it at face value that all these things were pretty bad, that the propaganda was fact.  When I was older and had some critical thinking skills, I realized that most of these things, with the exception of smoking, could be indulged in responsibly and in moderation, doing no real harm and even having some benefits.

                 When I finally gave in to some of these temptations after apostatizing, I found that the stern warnings and dire predictions were empty threats that were used to socialize me in a particular direction.  I also found myself in good company, as my peers now included many people who still accepted me when I openly flaunted my lack of abstinence.  I’d fallen in with the booming Utah counterculture, the openly deviant subculture that has sprung up in the underbelly of Salt Lake City in opposition to the conformity of the mainstream, where what had been a stigma became a badge of honor, rendering the social sanctions of my family and church toothless.  Only in Utah do coffee bars have the aura of sin, with people looking around nervously before plunging through the doorway.   Only in Utah is sipping on a mocha latte in public tantamount to an act of civil disobedience.  Once I moved to New York, it really surprised me to learn that there was nothing quite like this, but it makes sense that there’s just less to rebel against.

                 Another agent of my macro-level socialization is the mass media.  Mormons aren’t portrayed in the media much, which just reinforced the idea that I came from a chosen, special people.  As a result, one of the role models I picked was Lisa Simpson, the confident, intelligent and only mildly religious daughter of the oafish Homer.  I empathized with her because she was under some of the same pressures I was, especially in her obvious role strain.  She had to contend with the mixed messages of her school, family and religion, and she dealt with them in an enlightened, amusing and empowering way, maintaining her self-esteem in the face of adversity.

                 I was 12 when “The Simpsons” first came on the air, and my mother made it taboo, forcing me to sneak off and watch it when she wasn’t looking.  I’m sure this only added to the appeal, but I still wonder what made it seem so bad to her, given that it was one of the few shows on television where the mother stays home, there is no divorce or single parenting, the family goes to church every week, and everyone seems to really love each other.  It was even merciful towards the ultra-religious Ned Flanders.  Aside from the biting liberal commentary and horrible acts of child abuse played for comedic value, it has very strong family values.  I guess she realized at some level how subversive the show was, how incompatible it was with the norms she espoused.

                 I’ve come a long way from my childhood.  In some ways, I had to resocialize myself so that I could become a whole person, working out the conflicts in what I had been indoctrinated in.  Once I applied critical thinking to the expectations I had been burdened with, engaging my sociological imagination, I was able to pick and choose from the choices presented to me.  By altering my relationships, literally uprooting myself to move across the country to live with a different kind of people, I’ve changed my looking-glass self significantly.

                 I didn’t just uproot myself, though; I grew new roots.  For example, I had debunked Mormonism and traditional creedal religion to the point that I was a secular humanist and weak atheist (a subtle distinction my parents still can’t grasp).  But rather than go it alone, I went on to join various social justice movements. Likewise, while I no longer go door to door handing out leaflets for my dad and other Republican candidates, I’ve volunteered in the campaigns of liberal Democrats and participated in protests and forums.

                 I still have my father’s love of politics and history.  I just can’t be a Republican and still be true to the value of compassion.  My favorite quote in the entire world comes from a French bureaucrat named Ségolène Royal.  She said, "No decision like this is wholly without flaws, but at the same time there exists a universal morality that demands that we relieve human suffering when we can."  I think that pretty much explains why I switched so drastically to another political party with little heart-searching.  Once I was rid of the church it was easy to see which political party I belonged to.

                 In the end, I took personal responsibility for my values and norms, picking the ones I felt are valid and justified.  I looked through my life with my sociological imagination and saw something besides that which I was raised with, and I’m happy with it.

 

Copyright 2003

by Amanda Evans

Date: 10/20/03