Guest post by Holly Welker
“It’s hard to be Mormon and not think a lot about marriage,” I write in the introduction to Baring Witness: 36 Mormon Women Talk Candidly About Love, Sex, and Marriage (University of Illinois Press, 2016). So many conversations directed to me and other young women at church in my youth were explicitly intended to prepare us to marry in the temple, because, as Latter-day Saints all know, in our theology, marriage is seen as crucial to happiness in this life and salvation in the next. The most important document The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has issued in the last thirty years is the Family Proclamation, which declares that “that God has commanded that the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully wedded as husband and wife.”
It’s easy to find declarations by church leaders about the importance of marriage; it’s been less easy to find statements from ordinary Latter-day Saints about what their marriages mean to them, especially because spousehood and parenthood are often conflated in LDS discourse. When I noticed this lack, I decided to fill it, and Baring Witness was my first attempt to do so. I worked extremely hard to make the collection as strong as I possibly could, because I imagined I might not get another chance to discuss Mormon marriage in such depth. Luckily, however, University of Illinois Press was happy enough with Baring Witness that they let me put together a second book: Revising Eternity: 27 Latter-day Saint Men Reflect on Modern Relationships, which is officially available this month. While the two books are companions of sorts, they also stand alone and need not be read together.
People have sometimes assumed that I have some covert, malign motive for wanting to understand the complex, fascinating topic of Mormon marriage. Some who know nothing of me have accused me of working under the guidance of leaders in Salt Lake City to burnish the church’s image and produce books that are airbrushed accounts of marital bliss, which is wrong on both counts: I neither sought nor received guidance from the church on any of the books I have published, and the essays in both collections involve some sort of conflict, because conflict is crucial to narrative tension.
There are also people who find me particularly suspect because of two things: I am single, and I am no longer active in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some people have accused me of putting together a collection of essays about marriage in order to destroy the institution, as if that were even possible. They’ve also accused me of trying to make the church look bad, but I’ve had no agenda regarding the church itself in these books except to document accurately and analyze fairly some of the positions it has taken regarding marriage and related issues.
So I will take this opportunity to state what my motives have really been.
My initial motive for pursuing the project that became Baring Witness and Revising Eternity was to understand more about my mother after she died at age seventy-two following a painful illness, six months before my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. My mother was a force of nature and extremely candid, in that she would never sugarcoat the truth as she saw it, but she was also an intensely private person who kept her interior life to herself. There were so many things I wanted to understand about her life once she was gone, but since I couldn’t ask her, I had to ask women around me whose life resembled hers.
Beyond that, I’ve wanted to show that Mormon marriage is not monolithic, that Latter-day Saints have all sorts of ways of navigating their relationships with a spouse and with the church. I’ve wanted to document how naiveté about marriage can limit spouses’ options when difficulties arise, and to provide information that can counteract that naiveté.
My PhD is in English literature, with an emphasis in literary nonfiction, meaning essays, autobiography, and memoir. I love works that attempt to tell the truth about a writer’s lived experience—especially in surprising ways. A major goal for me all along has been to showcase good writing and compelling narratives of individual lives, and simply to produce readable, engaging, interesting books.
I want readers to admire the insight and eloquence of my contributors (a list that includes Joanna Brooks, Marilyn Bushman-Carlton, Stephen Carter, Tyler Chadwick, Gina Colvin, Joey Franklin, Dayna Patterson, Boyd J. Petersen, Robert Raleigh, Robert A. Rees, Mary Ellen Robertson, and Margaret Toscano), to Google them, and to be interested in their other works—or at least follow them on Twitter.
Topics addressed in the two collections include addiction, bereavement, divorce, domestic violence, fertility, illness, loss of faith, mental illness, mixed-orientation marriage, polygamy, and same-sex marriage. I’ve never imagined them as any sort of definitive statement on marriage in general or even on specific marriages, but as contributions to our ongoing conversation about the intersection of love, desire, and faith in individual lives and the community at large.
Because the books are peer-reviewed works published by a university press, they each include a (more or less) scholarly introduction and a bibliography for readers who might be interested in such things. While the books are marketed to a general audience, they’re also intended to be suitable texts for college courses in disciplines such as gender studies, religious studies, literature, sociology, and marriage and family counseling.
Both books have been a labor of love, and I feel very enriched by what I’ve learned about the lives of the writers who wrote essays for the collections. I hope readers both in and out of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will find the books entertaining, enlightening, and worth discussing.
Holly Welker is the editor of Baring Witness: 36 Mormon Women Talk Candidly about Love, Sex, and Marriage, and co-editor of Singing and Dancing to The Book of Mormon: Critical Essays on the Broadway Musical. Her poetry and prose have appeared in publications ranging from The New Era to Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought to Best American Essays to the New York Times.