For the Strength of Youth: Why I Don’t Feel Super Happy When the Church Makes a Good Change

In General Conference earlier this month, the church introduced a new version of the For the Strength of Youth pamphlet. Overall, this new version is a massive improvement over the previous one: gone are the gendered and specific modesty requirements, the arbitrary prohibitions on tattoos or piercings, and much of the shaming language. It’s not perfect: it still contains anti-LGBTQ rhetoric (“Feeling same-sex attraction is not a sin,” but don’t act on it and God loves you, basically), and while I find the church’s position on this to be incredibly harmful, it’s still a huge improvement from the now two-versions-removed 1990 FSY booklet I grew up with where gay relationships were placed on the same level as incest. (Yes, incest: “The Lord specifically forbids certain behaviors, including…sex perversion (such as homosexuality, rape, and incest)”. It also deployed words like “abomination” and “unnatural,” and I’m suddenly understanding why it took me until my late twenties to realize Queer folks are, y’know, regular people deserving of love just like me. Anyway.) From a big-picture, look-how-far-we’ve-come perspective, this new edition is a win.

So why, for so many of us, does it not feel like a win?

Any time there is a progressive change in the church, those of us who have been advocating for such changes can sometimes have surprisingly complicated feelings when they finally occur. It can feel validating–hooray, someone else noticed this thing and agreed it needs to be changed!–but it can also feel like gaslighting or erasure when the church doesn’t acknowledge that the original thing was wrong and doesn’t apologize for the harm the original thing caused and immediately pretends that the original thing never existed at all. And suddenly, according to many of our fellow congregants who vigorously defended the original thing but are now very excited about the new change, any pain we continue to feel due to the original thing is no longer valid because the thing no longer exists, thus negating any previous potential harm (nevermind the fact that any harm we experienced before the change was never actually valid to them in the first place because the original thing was obviously how the prophet/Jesus wanted it, so criticism meant we had no testimony). 

When the hearken covenant in the temple was changed a couple years ago and women were no longer required to covenant to hearken to their husbands or promised the “blessing” of becoming queens and priestesses to their husbands while their husbands got to become kings and priests directly to God, I felt happy that no other woman would be completely blindsided by the glaring inequity of the male vs. female covenants like I was. But even though they changed the covenant, which was a good thing, they told people not to talk about it and they buried the same inequity into the new verbiage: men are still to become kings and priests to God, but women are now to become queens and priestesses “in the new and everlasting covenant,” i.e. in marriage, i.e. to their husbands. The language is a little less starkly upsetting now, but it’s still pretty much the same in function. Husbands still take their wives through the veil before marriage acting as their husband-God. And now, gender roles are explicitly stated in the new sealing covenant. I find all of this to be extremely upsetting. So while I’m glad for the improvements, I’m still so angry that millions of women–those who had to covenant to obey their husbands pre-1990, those who had to covenant to hearken to their husbands pre-2019, and those who still notice and feel the inequities today–have had to try to reconcile their understanding of a loving God with the male-centric, man-favoring God in the temple. 

When, three and a half years after it leaked in 2015, the church rescinded its draconian policy which prohibited the blessing or baptism of children with a gay parent and labeled members in a same-sex marriage as apostates, there was celebration but also sadness and anger. The church did not apologize. The church did not acknowledge that the policy was wrong (glaringly, obviously wrong) or even that it was a mistake. The church did not take ownership of the harm it caused, even though people literally died because of their policy. Those of us who advocated for this change were relieved but furious it was ever needed in the first place.

When people, or, indeed, the church itself, celebrate the church-created good coming from a change of policy or doctrine but ignore the church-created bad resulting from whatever the previous doctrine or policy was, it doesn’t feel like a victory. Often, the things that finally force change are a critical mass of collateral damage and social pressure resulting from bad press. The problems that changes solve have been of the church’s own making. It is hard to applaud an organization for righting its own wrongs when there is no repentance, no restitution, no renunciation, no remorse.

How did you feel when you learned of the changes in the new For the Strength of Youth pamphlet? What were your experiences with FSY as a young person, and how did it shape your adolescence and adulthood? We’d like to collect your responses to the one you grew up with and the one just released and share them in our new series, #MyFSY. Please send essay-length submissions (typically between 600-1400 words), along with your preferred author name/moniker, a brief bio, and a public domain (or your own) picture to morewomenplease at gmail dot com. Shorter responses (fewer than 400 words or so) are also welcome and will be bundled and published with other brief submissions; for these, please just include an author name/moniker. Please send your submissions by November 30, 2022.