Social Stratification

Excerpt from my term paper titled “Understanding stratification of faiths, religious extremism and the vulnerable position of women through the beliefs and practices of the Mormon Fundamentalists”

This is an excerpt for the purpose of word limit and presentation purposes; the case studies that substantiate my arguments will be touched upon during the presentation.

This paper deals with the concepts of religion and gender in ways they are not usually explored. The purpose of writing this is majorly two-fold: first, I wish to establish an exaggerated control of women’s sexuality in an extremist society, and two, I probe to understand such extremism within a larger hierarchy that operates with regard to modern religions; this hierarchy not only has implications differently on the women of these religions but also on the general treatment of the kind of practices that place within these groups. To substantiate my argument, I have primarily drawn on the events of the polygamous Mormon cult amongst the Christians. My paper critically analyses the beliefs of this cult, its position in the hierarchy of faiths, and the factors that arise with respect to the status of the women of this cult.

Having outlined the various practices and beliefs amongst the cult with the help of various case studies and court cases, I have raised question around the nature of consent, position of women and the idea of freedom in the following section (I have added footnotes for clarity, wherever required):

From the arguments of the women and children involved from cases like that of the Greens¹, it becomes difficult to persecute such a practice (of forced marriage or violence) as abusive when the conscious, rightful consent of the actors involved is so openly present. Consent, however, is a category much more complicated than the statement of a yes or no. Cooke’s idea of “consenting adults”² must be viewed under Steven Luke’s theory of power, especially when talking about consent within cults. Lukes discusses how the role of power in a society goes beyond making someone do something against their will. Power, according to him, is manifest most prominently when it shapes the very thought and interests of the people such that their will is guided towards the will of the powerful, thus shaping the people’s very nature of consent and decision-making. Thus, the idea of how consensual consent is, and how much of a choice do people actually have when they make a choice is a highly ambiguous, as captured in the term “manufactured consent” coined by Noam Chomsky. This idea is prevalent amongst the feminists too; choice feminism argues that any choice a woman makes for herself is inherently feminist, and if she chooses to get married at the age of sixteen or leave her job to raise her family, it is her individual freedom to do so. This strand of feminism is argued against the agency of choice itself being limited for women, not only by how he has been socialized to think but also in the limited alterative available for her. This leads to a choice being highly manufactured, conditioned through institutions such as family, religion, school, media, and the very breed of ideologies with which one is brought up. As Leavitt argues³, the daughters of Mormon families are incapable of imagining alternatives to polygamy, rendering their choice and consent to mere fancy words. And this problem is not limited to spaces of extremism; a ‘modern’ woman chooses to quit her job and focus on the family, but one cannot see this choice as isolated from her upbringing, family values, the people that she’s surrounded with, and the larger social structure she’s a part of, all of which shapes her attitudes towards her roles as a wife and mother. This process of shaping becomes much more direct and outright in fundamentalist spaces, where a kind of socialization is not only subconsciously percolated but actively propagated as a community belief.

Another notable belief amongst the Mormons, one that particularly aroused my interest in the exploration of this cult and pushed me to draw imperative links between religion and gender, is the ideation of the “true Mormon”, a man who must take wives, raise children, defend the teachings of Smith, and thus uphold their religious duty. What is interesting is that in the event of this man failing to serve his duties, his wives and children are handed over to someone more capable, someone who is a truer Mormon. This implies the treatment of women and their sexualities as a transferable property, a usable value that must be utilized for procreation and the correct upbringing of children into truest of the Mormons. In fact, the UEP⁴ believes that women and children are not attached to their husband or their families, but only to the priesthood like all other property owned by the members of the cult, and can thus be claimed by it at any time. DeLoy, for instance, has shared that after he decided to quit the religion, his wives were told to leave him. When they refused and decided to stay with DeLoy, the wives, the children and DeLoy were deemed apostates, which are people who have betrayed their faith as well as their own soul, thus being termed as the “darkest person on the earth” or “tools of devil.”

The treatment of women as transferable property and the very idea of taking multiple wives (and rarely husbands) must be looked at through the larger structure at work where the reproductive rights of women no longer remain a personal choice when motherhood becomes a social institution, making the role of a women as a mother something that comes to her naturally and is thus socially desirable: giving birth and providing care is seen to be the ultimate duty of a woman which is not forced upon but is a part of her biological and emotional virtues. A woman’s location is accordingly limited to the private sphere, and her engagement with the public of norms, values and behaviours as well as her upbringing of her own children is controlled and regulated by her husband. The man who functionally acts as the mediator between the public and the private by playing the role of the breadwinner and caretaker associates his honour to the honour of his family, and mainly of the women of his family. The wearing of hijaab amongst Muslims or the parda system in North India is reflective of such attitudes. There is a reiteration of the controlling of sexuality in every social space, and even if women are being ‘allowed’ to go out and work in the modern era, the society carefully curates the ‘right jobs’, ‘right timings’, ‘right pay’, and a set of ‘safety measures’ for her to keep the honour intact.

There is certainly a complex historical trajectory the patriarchy that has produced such gender roles, and the consequent differential treatment of male and female sexuality, but what is important to our discussion her is that when such a setting of patriarchy interacts with religious extremism, where both are seen as unproblematic because of how they have become a part of the socialization, it gives rise to another form of double burden for the women. The control and mediation becomes much more heightened in extremist cults such as the Mormons, where polygamy plays its function of controlling the women of the cult by not letting young girls go wayward, protecting their honour by early marriage and kids, and making sure they are dignified and true to the Mormon code. In addition to being the bearers of the Mormon code, women are also the primary procreators and carriers of the bloodline who must be monitored such that they marry only true Mormons and thus produce a pure lineage. A cult that operates on principles of control for the survival of its ideals, the women and the children are the most precarious category for it is their conduct that goes on to reflect how well the leaders have been able to disseminate their beliefs, and how much cohesiveness exists in the cult. A wayward man simply becomes an apostate, but a wayward woman runs the risk of challenging the very legitimacy of the cult and its leaders.

Another area that we must interrogate is that of religious freedom, its relation with the state, and the nature of its boundaries- who defines these peripheries and on what basis. This is a question that looms over the principle of freedom itself, for instance, the present-day debate over censorship around whether certain limitations to freedom are necessary or does that negate the very point of freedom. During the Pyle raid in 1953⁵, the major outcry on part of the public was against ‘religious persecution’ by the state. The United States does grant religious freedom to its citizens, but at the same time criminalizes polygamy. One often finds such crossroads; it becomes extremely challenging to design a legal code which accommodates all kinds of religious and ethnic diversities, especially in the case of personal law where ideas of marriage, family or rights over children carry a sentimental and interference with this does not only hurt a particular community’s beliefs but also puts in jeopardy the lives of the people involved. For instance, Marry Ann sued her father and uncle on charges of polygamy and underage sex, but they were soon freed and Mary Ann had to live them again. It did not only put her under a lot of mental turmoil, but also put the rest of her life in danger.

An interesting occurrence was when the Mormons had managed to rally the support of gay-right activists even though the cult held homosexuality as punishable by death, but they both converged against religious prosecution by the state. This weird collation indicates how religion subsumes other social relations and ideologies. Even the unaffected people of the States did not favour the anti-polygamy attempts by the government, because as soon as the question of religion comes in the picture, people tend to morph the other factors involved. This can be seen as a consequence of the globally charged environment towards religion and the insecurity we all harbour towards it, both at personal and public levels. Religious matters cannot be thought over objectively anymore, and it has become a delicate and volatile category that must be treated with a lot of precaution, and there is hence a temptation to justify any sort of action in the name of religion, and declare any step towards neutrality as an act of persecution. Polygamy amongst the Mormons holds a social sanction, a practice between consenting adults who are exercising religious freedom and have the right as well as privacy of space to do so, but at the same time our current legal and framework forbids polygamy and sees it as a violation of women’s rights and dignity. This contradiction brings us to the question of who decides what is freedom, religion, morality or the law. And more importantly, the idea od justice that follows freedom should be defined parochially or should we have certain universal tenets of justice.

I had with expressing concern over a lack of consciousness with regard to religious stratification. By bringing out the extremist tendencies of the Mormon cult, I have provided a starting point for us to refute the setting the stereotype of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ religions and instead trace potent elements of fundamentalism within the character of religion itself. We as a generation are collectively facing religious fundamentalism at a level of global crisis, but our notions about it are extremely narrow and almost synonymous to Islamic terrorism. As far as Islamic countries are concerned, there is little worry over religious prosecution by the rest of the world, and their religion is something we feel needs to civilized and modernized. This takes us away from a more comprehensive and problem-oriented approach towards fundamentalism. The argument is to not belittle the graveness of Islamic terrorism is any way, but only challenge the reduction of religious fundamentalism to Islamic terrorism. The idea is to show how the country that has waged a war against religious fundamentalism is not only a home to extremist cults (I have only talked about one of the many) but also has citizens defending these cults on grounds of religious freedom. Lila-Abu Lughod has written a thought-provoking book “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?” where she questions the American responsibility of freeing women of the Middle East from their hijaab; isn’t the wearing of hijaab an expression of religious freedom too, as is polygamy amongst the Mormons? Of course, both the practices by so-called consensual adults has to be understood in the realm of socialized choices as we have already discussed, but the crux of the comparison lies in how defining religious freedom is not just a complex process, but also the privilege of the few that are on the ‘good’ side of religion. The moment you cross the line, this freedom at once become fascism.

Concluding, I would like to drive a few points back home that must be mulled over. Women in an extremist cult are under a double burden that is much more dangerous in its effect than other, because this is much more internalized and invisible. Even if we draw a certain parameter for one to make a legitimate choice, a women is very likely to “choose” polygamy if she’s a Mormon, or choose to wear a hijaab if she’s a Muslim. Religious ideas are much more powerful than impositions of caste and class, because they are rarely recognized as impositions. They are belief systems that people live by, both men and women, and would find their lives to be meaningless if they are disassociated from that religious identity. Similarly, it is also much more difficult to locate fundamentalism as a threatening issue in Christian cults than in Islam, because in the former extremism very easily slips into freedom by the virtue of the wider modern framework it operates in. Such is the ignorance that ranking of faiths is a way of life, a global structure around which most of our ideas and arguments circulate.

Thus, what this paper attacks are two realms of almost invisible problems, and hopes to have brought out the nuances behind both such that both women in religion and religions in the world can be thought of in newer paradigms.

Arushi Sahay

1^ Tom Green’s family in Juba County openly celebrates their polygamous nature, where Green and his wives are popular in the media for promoting plural marriage and its many benefits it terms of a cohesive family environment.

2^ Beth Cooke, one of Green’s wives and also the mother of his another wife, spoke about the privacy of the bedroom and how polygamy should be as much a question of consent as a live-in relationship is.

3^ David O. Leavitt, the attorney of Juba County, was irked by Tom Green bragging about his multiple young wives, but struggled with prosecuting him due to presence of consent.

4^ In Colorado City, situated at the Utah-Arizona border, reside three Mormon Fundamentalist sects, more commonly known as the United Effort Plan (UEP), living under the leadership of the 92-year old Rulon Jeffs who is referred to by his followers as “Uncle Rulon.”

5^ Howard Pyle arrested 122 polygamous families of Short Creek, leading to negative public reaction against compromising religious freedom and breaking families.