Square Two has a response to Taylor Petrey’s attempt to imagine a Mormonism without the central Mormon doctrines of eternal marriage, descent, and ancestry.

The best response is that his arguments make no sense and show even less understanding of Mormonism than I would expect from an ex-Mormon Unitarian like Petrey. The second best response is that stripping the central truths from Mormonism is an act of desecration. But the third best response is Square Two’s mounting feminist indignation. I am congenitally adverse to mounting feminist indignation but as I read on despite myself I grudgingly had to agree. Petrey is faking up a pretend Mormonism where there is no need for women and where all the messiness of child birth and mothering, all pains and blood and snot, everything that C.S. Lewis associated with Ungit in Till We Have Faces, is done away.

If I were going to make the same point in my own terms, I would say that Petrey is really attacking embodiment and mortality. He sees this mortal mess as at best a distasteful necessity to be discarded in toto as soon as can be. He misses what is true in Steven Peck’s poem My Turn on Earth. But we Mormons see it as an experience that will shape us forever, a pattern for eternity, and ineradicably an essential part of our being, our relationships, and our happiness. We glory in its weakness. We worship the God who fully entered into mortality and was born of a woman. Like Him, when we are weak, then we are strong.


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