Family history: we're different.

I'm starting to realize that my perspective on Mormonism is a rather unusual one. I think this is largely because my LDS extended family is not typical.

Already the fact that I was raised as a fourth-generation "mission field Mormon" is a little bit unusual. So my family has a strong Mormon tradition without having an "inter-mountain west" tradition.

My dad was a convert, so I'm talking about my mom's family here. My mom's dad was born and raised in Utah and came from pioneer stock tracing back to Nauvoo, etc., but in some ways he was like an import or infusion of official history into a clan that was strongly centered in Illinois. My mother's mother's family all lived together in the same area long enough to ensure that our oral tradition has always centered around my great-grandfather: my mother's mother's father Grandpa G, who converted to the LDS church in the 1920's.

Grandpa G was something of a Joseph Smith figure. I don't mean that in any of the negative ways that will immediately jump to the minds of my exmo friends (womanizer, shiftless charlatan, etc.). Rather I mean that Grandpa G came from humble, rural beginnings yet had enormous ambition and enormous confidence.

Reading Grandma and Grandpa G's memoirs, they essentially tell the following story:

They were born and raised as hillbillies in the back woods of southern Illinois. They had a limited education and limited opportunities, and they were surrounded by limited people who had no ambition and no concept of how big the world might be outside their tiny, petty town. (I know that sounds bad, but that's basically the portrait they paint.) But Grandpa G was different. He had the capacity to make something of himself.

(Grandma G too, but apparently to a lesser degree, at least according to the memoir.)

So they moved out of the back hills and into civilization -- to a town not far from Chicago -- where Grandpa G found a good job.

Mormonism gave Grandpa G the opportunity to become a leader. The LDS church had almost no presence in their new town at the time, so Grandma and Grandpa G built up a branch essentially from zero. Salt Lake sent missionaries and other support, but this was a distant enough outpost that our dominant and charismatic Grandpa G largely had free reign to run things as he saw fit for decades while the LDS church in his area grew. (Many people were introduced to the church through the huge regular neighborhood fried-chicken-and-corn-on-the-cob dinners they used to throw at their house, according to the memoir.)

My mother wrote a charming memoir herself about what it was like to attend her grandfather's branch back in the fifties, and maybe she'll let me run it here sometime.

Now there is a stereotype within Mormonism that Mormon men are a bunch of yes-men who are totally incapable of standing up for themselves because they have to submit 100% to the church hierarchy which micromanages their lives right down to which church roles they fulfill, which meetings they attend with whom and at what time, which friends they must visit, etc. People say that the LDS church needs to subjugate women because that's the reward that is offered to men: the man gets to be the president of his own family, and in exchange he must hand his balls over to the next guy up in the church hierarchy. You may object to this characterization, but it's pretty clearly a common view.

Grandpa G was no cowering yes-man. My mom used to joke that her grandpa was John Wayne. So some of the most dramatic stories in our family's oral tradition center around the power struggle as Salt Lake tried to reign Grandpa G in a bit.

The church leadership demands strict obedience and must be in control over the local leaders, but they apparently worked out something of a truce with Grandpa G since they didn't want to alienate him too much. He was too good at running things and at attracting new members. So to some degree Salt Lake was willing to work around the fact that Grandpa G wasn't about to hand his balls to the next guy up the ladder. No way, no how.

The LDS ethic has an interesting blend of "do as you're told" and "do it yourself." I think that because of my extended family's stories and traditions, I was raised on an extra heavy dose of "do it yourself." I grew up surrounded by the message: "We're different. We're special. We're not limited -- we can do anything. Anything at all. Just step aside and watch us do it."

I'm not going to say that this is a good message or a bad message. However, I will say that I think this may be part of the reason why so many of the members of our extended family of my generation (my siblings and cousins) have left the church.

An organization needs a few take-charge strong-willed free spirits to keep it lively and kicking. So even a rigid, authoritarian hierarchy can find a way to accommodate a certain number of them. But only so many...