‘Come, Follow Me’, The Sacralising of the Home, and The Guardian of the Family: How Do European Women Negotiate the Domestic Space in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints?

Alison Halford

doi:10.3390/rel12050338

Abstract

In October 2018, the Prophet Russell M. Nelson informed members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that the Church teaching curriculum would shift focus away from lessons taught on Sunday. Instead, members were now asked to engage with ‘home-centred, church-supported’ religious instruction using the Church materials ‘Come, Follow Me’. In a religion where Church leaders still defend the idealised family structure of a stay-at-home mother and a father as the provider, the renewed emphasis on the domestic sphere as the site for Church teaching could also reinforce traditional Mormon gender roles. This article draws upon the lived religion of Latter-day Saint women in Sweden, Greece and England to understand how they negotiate gender in their homes. Looking at the implementation of ‘Come, Follow Me’ of sacralising of the home as a gendered practice, there appears to be reinforcing the primacy of the domestic space in the reproduction of religious practices and doctrinal instruction. Simultaneously, in conceptualising a gender role, the guardian of the family, I show the ways that European Latter-day Saint women are providing, protecting and nurturing their families. The domestic space then becomes instrumental in providing space for more nuanced, complex gender constructs that accommodate Mormon beliefs, cultural context and secular notions of gender without destabilising the institutional structure.

Highlights

Practices and creed are instrumental in how gendered identities are constructed in private spaces, congregations, workplaces and the wider community, even more so in traditional Christian communities where women are arguably subject to greater gender inequality through patriarchal institutional structures and androcentric religious dogma (Keysar 2014; Trzebiatowska and Bruce 2012)
In the case of women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Church teachings promote the uniformity of gender construction (Sumerau and Cragun 2015), suggesting that Mormon construction of gender reproduces homogeneity between women while making it difficult for members to express diverse forms of gender in congregational spaces (Petrey 2020)
In increasingly post-Christian countries, like Sweden and Britain or, in the case of Greece, a highly religious country that is opposed to religious plurality in the public space, the orthopraxis Mormon home is using the private space to construct alternative forms of Mormon practices and gender roles

Summary

Introduction

Practices and creed are instrumental in how gendered identities are constructed in private spaces, congregations, workplaces and the wider community, even more so in traditional Christian communities where women are arguably subject to greater gender inequality through patriarchal institutional structures and androcentric religious dogma (Keysar 2014; Trzebiatowska and Bruce 2012). In the case of women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Church teachings promote the uniformity of gender construction (Sumerau and Cragun 2015), suggesting that Mormon construction of gender reproduces homogeneity between women while making it difficult for members to express diverse forms of gender in congregational spaces (Petrey 2020). By offering a more expansive depiction of the daily practices of Latter-day Saint women, I show that at times negotiating religion, gender and cultural norms can mean they are de-emphasising Church institutional ideals of gender. By questioning the uniformity in experience between Latterday Saint women broadens the understanding of gender constructs, roles, and practices and recognises expansive expressions of gendered religious lives. I will contextualise the dominant narratives around gender and cultural practices (Mormon or otherwise) by locating the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the European landscape. I discuss the extent to which implementing ‘Come, Follow

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