Learning How to Take Up Space at the Right Hand of God
I consider myself an active member of the LDS faith. I go to church, I pay my tithing, I take the sacrament. But I don’t fast anymore. That’s one of the rules you have to follow when skipping meals becomes an addiction, because no one shoots up once a month in the name of God and stays clean.
Not everyone has to follow rules of eating disorder recovery. Many people credit fasting with the benefit of powerful spiritual experiences or blessings, and many more will at least remain unharmed by the practice. But when looking out on the temple through my dietitian’s office window, fasting appears to be emblematic of a deeper disease: the LDS culture of extreme self-sacrifice, specifically women’s self-sacrifice.
In the LDS church, men and women are both encouraged to make sacrifices. But women’s sacrifices tend to be more physical and embodied than men’s sacrifices. The highest spiritual calling for a man is leadership. Men may give up material possessions such as time and money to work in the bishopric, stake presidency, or other hierarchical positions. The highest spiritual calling for a woman is motherhood. Women give up their own bodies. The sacred responsibilities of attracting a husband, procreating life, bearing children, breastfeeding, etc. are often incredibly painful. They leave permanent scars if not open wounds. Ancient Christian tradition invokes imagery of the pelican who pierces her own breast to feed her chicks the blood that trickles down.
Not only are women’s sacrifices more physical, they typically encourage women to take up less space. This disappearing act is uniquely gendered. A bishop’s sacrifices set him up to become a powerful authority. A mother’s sacrifices set her up to become a selfless ghost. If you do not believe me, listen closely to the pulpit on Mother’s Day. When we speak lovingly of women in the LDS church, we do not point to the things they gave, but gave up: sleep, comfort, education, careers, physical and mental health, their very selfhood. Women are socialized by Primary, Young Women’s, Relief Society, and every other stage of the institution to put others first. In the process of all this service to others, they risk losing themselves. Christ said to lose yourself to find yourself. But what if you simply stay lost? What if you keep losing more and more of yourself until there is nothing left to find?
The line between religious fasting and an eating disorder has always been tantalizingly thin. The first recorded eating disorders in Western history were explicitly spiritual and specifically Christian. In the Middle Ages, devout women sought spiritual purification by starving themselves, subsisting off only the daily sacrament cracker and wine. Then came the Renaissance’s Miraculous Maids, who claimed to subsist off nothing at all. The name of these precursors to modern anorexia nervosa, anorexia mirabilis, is derived from the Latin phrase for “miraculously inspired loss of appetite” as if to suggest that the ability to survive without proper nutrition was a sign of divine favor. These miraculously-still-alive women earned large cult followings and many, such as Catherine of Siena, ascended to sainthood after their untimely deaths.
The issue of fasting stems from a larger Christian rejection of the human body. There is a strong dichotomy between body and spirit in Christian theology, with one representing worldly evil and the other representing divine goodness. In order to receive salvation, one must reject physical desires, “for to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace, because the carnal man is enmity against God” (Romans 8:6-7). This language is present in the Book of Mormon as well, when King Benjamin declares “the natural man is an enemy to God [...] and will be forever and ever, until he yield to the enticings of the holy spirit and putteth off the natural man” (Mosiah 3:19). The creation of mutually exclusive categories affords no room for nuance. Gluttony and hunger become the same sin. Within this diametric framework, it is easy to stumble across the line from self-sacrifice to self-harm.
This doctrine is compounded by Christianity’s disproportionate emphasis on the female body as a source of sin. When the scriptures speak of the “natural man” they may as well say “natural woman” because lust is associated entirely with the female body. If ancient Christians blamed Eve and her temptation for Adam’s fall, how else could they interpret salvation if not a punishment for female appetite? As the mystic philosopher Simone Weil wrote after her conversion to Catholicism in the 1930s, “If Eve lost our humanity by eating a fruit, the reverse attitude–looking at a fruit without eating it–must be what saves.” She died of self-imposed starvation at the age of 34.
The choice to use starvation is not just a theological interpretation of Eve’s choice. Food has always been assigned female. The task of food preparation is historically a women’s task, even across socioeconomic statuses, with the mayor’s wife being required to supervise the scullery maids. Poisons and potions are the forms of evil most commonly associated with women because of this gendered proximity: women feed and men consume. Who stays in the kitchen making the funeral potatoes, the jello salads, the casseroles? Who sits out in the cultural hall to eat them? Men do not display the same fondness for starvation, even when motivated by the same desires for spiritual purification. In contrast to the Miraculous Maids, devout men of 15th century Europe frequently engaged in whipping, cutting, and other more overt methods of self-harm to conquer their own carnality. Diet is often the instinctive choice for women seeking control.
Beyond the rejection of the physical body, there is a conflation between spiritual purity and temporal suffering in Christianity that defines sacrifice as the path to God. In ancient Christianity, this idea focused on fasting as a way to connect to Christ through empathy. As Teresa of Avila wrote in the mid-1500s, “I desire to suffer Lord, because Thou didst suffer.” In modern LDS culture, fasting manifests as a highly transactional way to access Christ, acting as though the number of hours gone without food or water directly corresponds to the number of blessings. The propensity to have family, ward, or world-wide fasts indicates that God’s math adds up everyone’s individual hours to determine the total blessings earned. When we fast, we are told that our sacrifice, our suffering, is the mechanism by which God will recognize our holiness and bless us. Being smaller appears to be a way to fast-track prayers to God’s ears. I deny my body nutrition so that God will grant me blessings. Self-mutilation for divine favor.
That is the belief that I carried with me in my eating disorder. I did not starve myself for God. But I did starve myself for good. Once the arithmetic of fasting is learned, it is difficult to contain. I got high on the sense of worth and praise I received from being a thin, obedient girl. A research study conducted by Sydney Rasmussen, a BYU Honors student, determined that among all BYU students, college-age LDS women judged smaller-bodied females as being more moral and righteous than larger-bodied females with impressive statistical significance. The weight stigma displayed by women is taught to us by a culture which conflates restriction with attractiveness, attractiveness with marriageability, and marriageability with eternal salvation. Thinness is next to godliness. At my lowest, I was a shrunken, hollowed-out version of myself. Still, I truly believed that the best version of myself was the smallest one, the most invisible one, the one that took up the least amount of space.
But this idea is antithetical to the LDS emphasis on the human body as beautiful, essential, sacramental. Joseph Smith’s radical story of God the Father and God the Son, two separate beings with flesh and bone, is a defining feature of Mormonism that celebrates the human body. The plan of salvation necessitates a body, claiming that physicality is the only prerequisite for eternal salvation. Church leaders emphasize again and again that the body is a temple, the body is a divine gift, the body is a pathway to godhood.
As a Mormon, I refuse to believe in a God who wants me to be less than I am. I refuse to believe in a God who demands self-mutilation. I believe in a God who revealed “men are, that they might have joy” and even the joy of a thick slice of chocolate cake (2 Nephi 2:25). It took an astounding amount of effort and resources to unlearn my behaviors and learn that the people who truly love me want more of me, not less of me. I am still learning how to take up space. I have relapsed before, and I will probably relapse again. But I am now firm in my conviction that when I come home to God, I will deserve every inch of space that I take up in His arms.