Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions

by Cami Ostman

  “Yes, the Church and the Book of Mormon are true,” I tell him. “Yes, Joseph Smith was the true prophet of Heavenly Father.” “Yes, my testimony is strong and, yes, I am a faithful believer.”

  Bishop Carlson checks off the last item on his list. He pulls out a small card from his desk and signs it, then tucks it into a file folder on his desk.

  “See you at the temple,” he says, smiling. I grin, relieved that I have proven my worthiness.

  NORMALLY, I LIKE NOTHING better than to spend my Saturday mornings burrowed between the sheets, but on the Saturday of temple work, I fly out of bed the second my alarm clock starts shrieking. In the next thirty minutes, I shower, eat, and put on my prettiest church dress, a long yellow one with mauve poppies. I check my makeup and sling a backpack filled with toiletries and clean underwear over my shoulder and walk to church.

  When I get to the meetinghouse, a group of teenagers is standing around on the lawn near the parking lot, waiting for the youth leaders to arrive in their minivans. I join my best friend, Andrea, on the lawn, and we regard each other with sleepy nods and yawns. The minivans arrive and we climb in, claiming the backseat for ourselves.

  A half hour later, our convoy pulls into downtown Salt Lake City. We park a few blocks away and walk through the dewy spring morning to Temple Square. By this time we are wide awake. Our jokes and laughter echo down the empty streets at this early-morning hour.

  The temple grounds are nearly vacant. The only signs of human life are the attractive lady missionaries, who serve as ambassadors to the small armies of camera-wielding tourists who will stop by the visitor’s center later in the day. We bypass the visitor’s center as our leaders guide us into a small building at the base of the temple. A thrill quivers in my chest as we enter; this building is for members only.

  We cram inside the lobby of the building and are greeted by a group of temple workers dressed entirely in white. White dresses for the women, white ties and shirtsleeves for the men, white hair on every head that has it. An army of old, white-haired temple elves. A Young Men’s leader hands a stack of temple recommends to an older man behind a desk. Andrea and I stand in the back whispering while we wait for the adults to finish their business. A temple worker finally gestures us to follow him.

  We march through a labyrinth of hallways that smells dank and moist, like the locker room at school. The sound of fluorescent lights buzzes overhead as we pass temple workers driving golf carts. They all greet us with the same cheerful smiles. Through endless tunnels we walk for so long that I wonder if we are lost. Finally we climb a short staircase and pass through a set of heavy wooden doors into a beige waiting room, furnished with outdated furniture and filled with church-issued literature and Books of Mormon. I feel a pang of disappointment; I expected more from the temple.

  We move on to a room filled with rows of tall shelves piled high with stacks of neatly folded white cloth. Each of us takes a turn at the counter, telling the temple workers our size. They disappear into the shelves and come back with armloads of more white cloth. Our next stop is the locker room, where we change out of our Sunday best and into our temple wear.

  The first garment I put on is a jumper that is meant to serve as underwear. I’d rather wear my own—how could my simple cotton briefs from JCPenney do any harm? But I follow the instructions I’ve been given and put on the jumper. It billows like a sail and the crotch hangs down well below my knees. I have no idea how many women have worn this over the years, and I’m sure I don’t really want to know.

  The next item of clothing in my stack is a white jumpsuit made out of stiff canvas; it reminds me of something you’d wear to work with toxic chemicals or at a nuclear power plant. I pull it on over my saggy old-lady underwear and zip it up the front. When I let go, the neck of the hazmat suit droops and exposes my nonexistent breasts. I am mortified. I bunch up the collar of the suit in one hand and grab my backpack with the other, then shuffle dejectedly through the locker room. On the way out, I catch a glimpse of myself in a full-length mirror. A wretched girl stares balefully back at me. She doesn’t look like someone about to take part in one of the most sacred rituals of her religion; she looks like she’s going to a costume party dressed as a deflated Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.

  Another temple elf steers me into a cavernous room where wafts of chlorine and dense warm humidity greet me. Still clenching the neck of my suit, I find a seat with the girls at the end of a marble bench along the right wall. The boys sit on the other side of the room. With a furtive glance I note that everyone else looks just as ridiculous as I do. I lean back against the wall and take in my surroundings.

  I am sitting in the most opulent room I’ve ever been in. My feet rest on slabs of cool white marble shot through with streaks of gray. The wide staircase that leads up to the massive baptismal font is constructed from chunks of the same marble. The font is a giant bowl at least twenty feet around, carved with grapes and ivy leaves. It rises from the floor on the backs of twelve shiny, golden bulls, each one as high as my shoulders. I feel like I have walked into the pages of my Roman history textbook, leaving Salt Lake City and the twentieth century far behind.

  At my own baptism I was submerged in a narrow hot tub tucked behind a divider in a classroom at the meeting house. As I gaze at the gleaming bulls and rub the smooth cool marble with my feet, my baptism feels shoddy in comparison. Then again, at least I wanted to become a member of the Mormon Church. I can’t say the same for the dead people on whose behalf I await my turn to baptize.

  Soon I hear my named called and step gingerly up the marble stairs, careful not to slip. At the lip of the font I see Brother Douglas standing in the waist-deep water, waiting for me to join him. I descend into the warm, crystal-blue water, my hazmat suit unfurls, billowing around my body as it swirls in the water.

  Bishop Carlson and another elder from the ward sit in a pair of padded folding chairs on a small platform overlooking the font, a small television near their feet. Another, larger television faces the middle of the font. The men are dressed in white. But, unlike the smiling temple workers, these elders look serious. Even jovial Bishop Carlson looks somber and preoccupied as we begin.

  Brother Douglas takes my hands and positions them so I am holding his arm. I remember my grandfather holding me the same way when he baptized me four years earlier. I let go of the collar of my hazmat suit and let it fall, exposing my thirteen-year-old chest. I pray that the elders are truly as righteous as they are supposed to be.

  Brother Douglas holds his free arm over my head, then says the same words my grandfather said:

  “Having been commissioned of Jesus Christ, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

  But instead of saying my name after “I baptize you,” Brother Douglas reads a name and a date of death from a list on the television. Then he lowers me into the water. A second later, he brings me back up. I have just enough time to wipe my eyes and nose before he puts my arms back in place and says the same words again, this time with a new name and date of death, and back under I go.

  Name after name I go under the water and come back up, each time with a new name and date of death.

  Head above the water. More words. New name. Back under the water.

  After the final baptism, I stand quietly trying to catch my breath so I can walk out of the font. I am dizzy and my nose burns with chlorine. Only now do I realize that I have just been baptized for a dozen women, all named Anna, who lived and died in the 1600s.

  Who were these Annas? I wonder. Are they now Mormons? What about their own religions?

  Brother Douglas shakes my hand and thanks me, and I walk up the stairs on the other side of the font, still a bit dazed. A temple worker hands me a towel and a rectangle of white polyester with a hole in the middle that she calls a shield. She tells me to put it over my head and wrap it around my body when I am done showering. As I make my way back to the locker room, I am flooded with question
s. Why would Heavenly Father make eternal salvation dependent on a few sentences and a dip in a hot tub? Can’t He just look in our hearts and know? But there’s no time for my questions. There’s still one more ceremony to go through to secure the salvation of those just baptized. They have to be confirmed, too. I get dressed and make my way to another waiting area where I pick up a pamphlet about the temple and halfheartedly page through it.

  When I hear my name called I am once more led into a different room, where the same three elders who baptized me are waiting. They direct me to a big leather chair and gather around, gently placing their hands on my head while they confirm me, over and over again, once for each Anna. Their hands are heavy and the leather is slippery. I struggle to keep myself upright and try to ignore the newly formed questions swarming my mind.

  WHEN WE LEAVE THE temple it is late morning. Hundreds of long-dead people are now members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The souls of a dozen women named Anna are one step closer to living with Heavenly Father forever in the afterlife, or so I am told. Outside, hundreds of living people stroll around the temple, gazing up at its sacred spires. The sun has brightened the thin city air, and as we walk to the van I feel the warmth on my damp hair. I try to stop thinking about baptisms for the dead and listen to the cars and people passing by.

  The donuts and orange juice we eat on our way home taste better than I imagine possible. After we finish, Andrea and I make plans for our sleepover later that night. We talk about what movies we will watch and how late we will be able to stay up. I think about which pajamas I want to bring and what we’ll do in the morning. As we leave the city I watch the landscape turn from gray to brown, and I think about anything but the Annas of the 1600s.

  Uniforms

  Leah Lax

  “Okaaayy!” That was a twentysomething bearded rabbi at the opening orientation for the Live and Learn Sabbath Experience, rubbing his hands together as he addressed the crowd. Dallas’s Shearith Israel synagogue was hosting the Lubavitcher Hassidim from Brooklyn, Jews who still lived by the old Code of Jewish Law. The men, like this rabbi, wore beards and yarmulkes and black-and-white clothes. Their wives, somewhere in the background, were in long skirts and long sleeves, their hair covered with wigs or scarves. We were among the attendees he was addressing, me and my friend Ana. It was 1972, and I was sixteen. I was immersed in college plans, intent on graduating early, moving out to make my mark in the world.

  We all sat in rows of folding chairs at one end of the social hall. It looked like about fifty of us had shown up for the weekend-long program. I figured most in the crowd were there for the same reason we were, had come like tourists to see Hassidim in action, and that many were probably members of the synagogue hosting this event.

  We were to sleep over in Sunday School rooms and experience an orthodox Sabbath, follow all the rules. Which explains why Ana and I had both come in costume, that is, in the women’s dress code we’d been handed when we registered: skirt length to the calf, sleeves at least to mid forearm, closed neckline, and pantyhose. I rarely wore a skirt, preferring my jeans or red overalls, but it was important to me to get this right.

  Going make-believe orthodox with Ana for a weekend was like a game, one that was playful but also serious. There was a soaring spirit feeling I wanted out of religion that I imagined I could find—somewhere—and I believed the Hassidim were all about that spirit. Transcendence, Ana called it. A leap above, to God.

  Ana was a college student at SMU (Southern Methodist University), two years my senior, and I wanted to follow her, would follow her, anywhere. I had first met her two years before when I had cut Sunday School class at our liberal, social-minded Reform Temple and wandered the halls. Since I’d been small I understood that my mother sent me and my sisters to Sunday School only to sit among the children of her peers and create an impression of our family’s propriety. That was our job. We were to exemplify good behavior as the teachers talked at us about do-good theology, while at home cockroaches ran up the walls and my mother slept through her drugged days and our mentally ill father spent his time in the living room recliner grinding his teeth away and reading every word in the newspaper, including the classifieds. Now in high school, I still went to Sunday School, but I had taken to skipping the classes.

  One Sunday, I found Ana leading a group of singing kids on her guitar, her soprano voice floating above the rest with a lovely lilting vibrato. When I got home, I looked up her number and started calling her every day like a pesky little sister, and even though she said I called too often, it didn’t take long for us to become friends. We may have been an odd pair given our age difference, but Ana said I was deep and fearless, and I was simply smitten. She didn’t seem to notice. I’d often find her waiting near my school bus in the morning in sunglasses, long brown hair feathered in the wind, the top of her convertible down, radio blaring. Skipping school was an easy decision.

  Together we were taking a different look at Judaism—reading books and experimenting with the rituals that our modern synagogue spurned, trying on and exchanging ideas and identities like costumes in a backstage dressing room. Others of our friends were affecting a hippie air or carrying around Quotations from Chairman Mao or The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, or Dune. Regardless of our various current identities, we all had the same vocabulary, using words like materialism and establishment to mean our parents’ pettiness, heavy and peace to indicate a value of rising above the small-minded adults. It wasn’t a big jump from there to religion. Our religion. Ana’s father was a composer of Jewish liturgical music, and it seemed important to her to figure out how to reframe the religion that she lived with day-to-day in her family. I was happy to examine it with her, side by side.

  On the days that I skipped school to be with Ana, we would wander, shop, chatter over Chinese food about our reading and our dreams. Spending the weekend with the Hassidim was just another costume to try on, one all the more appealing because we did it together. Besides, we had planned to go camping, but it looked like rain.

  The rabbi standing before us had long white strings hanging over his belt at either hip that I thought curious. His full beard was reddish, he wore a large black yarmulke on his already-balding head, and he was pale. Three other men about the same age stood behind him, all dressed in the same black and white, all seeming a bit on display and mildly self-conscious about it, arms clasped behind, looking out at the crowd. “Before we get started,” our rabbi announced, “here are the Sabbath rules.”

  Ana grinned. “Game rules,” she whispered.

  He had quite a list: The Sabbath begins tonight at sundown and is over tomorrow night after sundown. Set the lights in your rooms before the Sabbath begins and don’t touch the switch until it’s over. No writing; no using a car or telephone. Do not use or touch anything that requires electricity. Don’t tear anything—cloth, paper, or other material. No scrubbing or washing, whether it’s an object or one’s own body, so better not to brush teeth; no showers, no hot water or soap, but it’s okay to rinse off in cold water if you must.

  There were murmurs, but little apparent surprise—none of the laughs or shaking heads I had expected. It seemed many here, unlike me, were familiar with the Sabbath laws. A few asked informed questions: Isn’t it allowed to get a child to turn off the light if I forgot and left it on? I’m a doctor, so doesn’t that mean I can use the telephone for my work?

  But they all sounded a little meek before rabbinic authority, as if the rabbi owned Jewish Law. I felt that way, too. He owned us as well, for the time being, even if that was voluntary. Only one question sounded incredulous. “We can’t tear anything, but surely,” the woman said, “you can tear toilet paper?”

  We couldn’t. We had to prepare that in advance.

  “We’re Jews,” I whispered to Ana. “But I didn’t know any of this stuff.”

  I was both leery of rules and attracted to them. My mother was incredibly inconsistent, would suddenly decide she h
ad rules we should have known, even if she’d never revealed them to us. Her anger for not following them would come like a shot out of nowhere, a demand, we knew, to make her happy. There was love at stake for us bound up with those unknowable rules. I was always uncertain around my mother, trying to please, never getting it right. In high school as well, there seemed to be unwritten rules among the girls that made being one of them my endless social failure. There I was in my overalls, longing for my girlfriend and dreaming at night that I was a boy, watching mystified as the other girls pretended to be women, girls I’d known a long time who didn’t seem themselves anymore as they touched up their makeup in the bathroom mirrors and swished around boys. I couldn’t figure out their rules either, and I wanted to.

  “Here’s our schedule for the evening,” the rabbi said. “In a few minutes, the women are going to light the Sabbath candles. When they say the candle blessing, that’s when Shabbos begins. It is our women who inaugurate the holy Sabbath.”

  Our women. The phrase swept me solidly into the group, into a reassuring and rare sense of belonging. But it also sounded as if these strangers owned us. But then again, by “our,” didn’t he just mean “Jewish”? So wasn’t I already in? I was confused, conflicted. Both attracted and repelled. Our women.

  “Oh, and one more thing,” the rabbi said, like an afterthought. Then he glanced sideways and swallowed. “Throughout the Sabbath, the women and men will participate separately.”

  I looked up.

  “This is the modest way,” he said. “Separate is Godly.” For the rest of this timeless Sabbath, the women were to sit separated from the men at meals and behind a partition at prayers. We would gather in designated areas; pray apart, with low voices; eat apart.

  So much was coming at me so fast. Out in the world, there was a budding feminist movement: Bella Abzug in Congress in her hats, the Equal Rights Amendment making its slow movement state to state, women burning bras on television. But at this event we had stepped into a different society apart from all that. I supposed this gender divide was no more strange than all the other new rules. Maybe, I thought, this was just like summer camp orientation, reasonable enough that we would be subdivided into groups with different activities. In any case, I liked that I had just been deemed a woman and thus an adult.