Politics on the Road to Zion: A Conversation with the Co-Leaders of Mormon Women for Ethical Government

Credit: Julia Blake Art

One reason I remain cautiously optimistic about the future of U.S. democracy is the wave of civic innovation set in motion by our recent troubles. A noteworthy example is Mormon Women for Ethical Government (MWEG), a grassroots network with 7,000+ members across 49 states. MWEG’s mission is “to inspire women of faith to be ambassadors of peace who transcend partisanship and courageously advocate for ethical government.” It organizes its work through a 501(c)3 entity that trains and develops its membership and a 501(c)4 entity that carries out its advocacy.

I have increasingly been hearing about the impressive contributions MWEG is making to our public life. To learn more about its work, I recently caught up with MWEG’s Co-Executive Directors, Emma Petty Addams and Jennifer Walker Thomas. The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Daniel: What is the origin story of Mormon Women for Ethical Government?

Emma: It's a grassroots story. It began with a group of women who had different political ideologies. They were friends and colleagues who worked on a literary journal together. In early 2017, they were all struggling with growing polarization and vitriol within our community and among their friends and family. So they set up a Facebook group to talk about politics and the results of the election. But they didn't tell each other not to invite their friends! So within a week, there were 1,000 women signed up. In a month there were 4,000. It’s the reverse of a lot of movements. We had the people before we had the thing.

Daniel: What is your mission and how do you seek to realize it?

Jennifer: In practice, there are two parts to it. The first is to advocate for ethical government. The foundation of all that work is our commitment to protecting democracy. All our other advocacy efforts flow out of and support that. Our five advocacy areas are protecting democracy, working with children and families, caring for creation or environmental stewardship, anti-racism efforts, and immigration and refugees. 

The second part of our mission supports the first. It is to help women become powerful, peaceful, and informed political actors. We want our women to rely on patterns of peacemaking as they approach their advocacy. We want to make sure that they are informed. We want them to feel confident that, in every situation, they're going to advocate for something that is true and based on fact. We want them to know how to spot mis- and disinformation and the threats it poses to our democracy. We want them to inhabit what it means to use political power, which has been so misused, in a principled way. 

The final element is that we want them to be independent. MWEG is doing work, and we bring them opportunities and ask, “Hey, would you like to participate in this advocacy effort?” But one of the great fruits of this organization is that women use the skills we help them build to go out and solve problems in their states and communities that we don’t see and that don’t fall under our purview. 

Daniel: How do you foster the peacemaking ethos that is central to your work?

Emma: Peacemaking is the larger philosophical frame for the entire organization and those on both sides within it. We see protecting democracy as an essential element of peacemaking. Dr. King’s six principles of non-violence provide the philosophical frame for our peacemaking. It can be difficult for them to soak in. But over time, if women are advocating with us, it's becoming part of who they are.

Jennifer: One of the things that we help women understand is the big difference between keeping peace and making peace. Keeping peace is just stopping conflict. Making peace is creating systems and relationships that can endure and transcend conflict. Our women, often in a faith-based environment, have internalized the idea that “I just have to keep the peace.” That actually is problematic. Too often that means you keep the injustices in place. Conflict is something that we need to engage with and move toward, but we need to do it in a way that doesn't promote violence and contention.

Daniel: your membership spans the two parties. How do you keep everyone in sync on issues like democracy, immigration, and climate, which are so apt to pull us apart?

Emma: I'd answer that in two ways. First, we're very selective about the actual policies that we advocate for. There's a lot of discussion and negotiation behind the scenes. These decisions are made by a cross-partisan group of women after a large amount of careful listening to hear what our members are feeling and thinking about it. 

The other element is that we're really transparent about what our principles of ethical government are. All our policy decisions flow from them. If women can agree on those principles–which, if they've joined MWEG, they can–then there's a level of trust that any policy advocacy we do flows from them. That’s our recipe.

Daniel: How do you recruit and organize your members? What do you ask of them?

Jennifer: We have never done any recruiting or membership drives. It is all the result of organic growth. In fact, at one point early on, we paused accepting new members because we needed to build more of a platform for them. The barrier to membership is low. We ask, are you a woman? Do you want to become a member? We make it clear that we are run by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, but we don’t require members to belong to our church. 

Emma: We have lots of members who are at various places within our faith and some who are outside of it. I have friends from college who are not LDS who said, “I really want to become part of this!” They've become members, and they are totally welcome.  We don't require dues, but we do have a sustaining member program. About ten percent of our members pay a monthly amount varying from $5 to $25. That's a base of ongoing support that provides for our operations. 

We have chapters only where we have the leadership and capacity to do so, in about a dozen states. They vary in size and how much they do. Some will do advocacy within their state legislative sessions. Several of them are focused on growing the capacity and relationships within their group and in their communities. 

Daniel: Most Americans presume that when you combine religion and politics, you end up corrupting one or the other, or both. MWEG thinks the opposite: faith can help redeem politics, and vice versa. Say more about why you think this. 

Jennifer: Let's take that in those two parts. First, for a lot of the women of our faith, part of their political awakening has been opening their eyes and realizing they had assumed political identities that were highly partisan. They'd been led to believe that participation in a particular party was reflective of their faith. And then they sat up one day and were like, “Holy cow. This is not at all reflective of who I am or what I believe. There's some pretty significant tension here!” 

There was a real risk of two things happening for women finding themselves in this position–either disengaging completely from politics or disengaging from the faith that had connected them to a political party they now saw as corrupt. One of the things in the early period that was most important for us, particularly in an environment with women of lots of different ideologies, was to figure out how we were going to think and talk about political identity. We decided to frame it around principled citizenship. What we help women do is develop a political identity that reflects their core values and principles. 

For the second part, given the LDS tradition of proselytizing, you might think we are trying to impose our doctrinal beliefs through politics. But this isn't advocacy for doctrinal belief. It is advocacy for what we deeply respect as a pluralistic environment of the sort that allowed our particular faith to emerge. I don't know that it could have emerged anywhere but here, in America. We are very much a minority faith. Now I think we have a lot to offer, but the only way we're going to be able to offer it–and be able to stay safe as we do–is to have a robust, healthy pluralistic democracy. Democracy allows us to participate. Pluralism allows us to do it on our terms, to retain our own religious identity without needing to conform to anyone else's. 

Thinking about it this way both gives space for our faith to shine and gives space for a democracy to flourish in healthy ways that draw on lots of other people of different faiths. We're not just trying to protect our faith–we're trying to protect everybody's, because we see faith as a powerful contributor to democracy.

Daniel: Another counter-intuitive idea MWEG holds is that change has to start internally and personally before it can radiate outwards. Most groups in the democracy field start by asking, how can we change those other people? Say more about how you see the sequencing between internal and external change.

Emma: I would say it's more that the internal and external changes are mutually reinforcing and transformative. We are trying to design advocacy pathways that honor the whole self of the advocate. That is both philosophical and strategic. It's philosophical in that we are an organization built by women for women. We have to always be thinking about creating ways for them to engage that reinforce their best selves and build up the skills they desire to grow into. We should be making people better right? If we're advocating for policies to make our country better and make things better for the people in it, we need to become better ourselves as we make the case for it. 

We would also argue that makes us better long-term advocates. One reason is that it helps reduce burnout. It prepares people to be in it for the long haul. It also takes an often adversarial and extractive model of advocacy and makes it collaborative so it is more nourishing to those who work in it. Like they might come to a workshop on peacemaking because they initially wanted to learn how to interact with their legislator, and then they walk away and realize, “Wow, I can be a better spouse and parent because of what I learned!” 

Jennifer: Let me add to that. It's really easy in democratic advocacy, when you're involving people in the process, to put them at the point of the spear and use them instrumentally to get something accomplished. We have been reticent to do that. We want our women to lead, but we don't want them to bear the brunt of things that will crush them. Particularly as we need to make very difficult choices in our nation, and as we might be called upon to do hard things, it's going to be increasingly important for our advocacy groups to be morally healthy, and to have a strong sense of community with people who care for one another. 

Daniel: Is there something about the intersection of women and the LDS church that has given rise to your unique network? 

Jennifer: Members of our faith have had a very strong call to civic engagement from the very beginning of our church. They had to push for things that were promised under the Constitution but were not being granted. They had to learn to advocate very early when systems of injustice were being set against them. But this also made them strong proponents for the Constitution, because they saw how beneficial it was to groups like theirs. So we've always had this strong understanding of and commitment to constitutional government.

We also have rich scripture that supports this. Our unique canons of scripture, the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants are rife with all sorts of strong messages on good governance and collaborative civic engagement. When you read it that way, you're like, “That's a great how-to manual there!” 

As LDS women, we know that our church’s governing systems are authoritative. That's how they work. That's not a value judgment at all. It's just top-down. But that is not how democracies work. Democracies have to be collaborative. All people have to have a voice. And as women with lifelong experience in authoritative structures, we've become very, very good at collaboration, at persuasion, at not expecting that we'll just say something and everyone will do it, but having to negotiate to get people on board. Those skills are essential to a democracy, right? And suddenly, the women who all had these skills that maybe we saw as not really that important, well, it turns out they are the lifeblood of democracy. MWEG is giving them the ability to see those skills in themselves and showing them how they can be transmitted into political power.

Emma: We also have a rich history of women in our church advocating. The first woman to vote in the U.S. was in Utah. We are drawing upon that history. And volunteerism–MWEG was built by volunteers, by women who just expect to volunteer their time. That’s what we do.

Daniel: In your article “Bending the Arc of Politics Toward Zion” the two of you note that MWEG members seek to turn toward circumstances of confusion and conflict in politics instead of shying away from them. How do you help them do this?

Emma: We do training, for example, that clarifies the difference between being assertive and being aggressive or passive-aggressive. Another way we prepare women to do this is to model it internally so that, as they're doing it externally, it's like their native language. We point out all the ways that they're already doing it, then give them the support they need to do it more intentionally and effectively. We also have discussion spaces in MWEG in which members disagree with each other in constructive ways, so they get comfortable with the fact it can be done

Jennifer: As women of faith, we share an understanding that so much of life is pursuing intangible things. That's also true of democracy. That's true of equality. That's true of all of these values that we want to pursue in our nation. We also have a comfort with longer timelines. We see the arc of things happening. We sense that maybe there's a role we can play in them; that we can find communities that reinforce these values, bring people together, and provide mutual support; that the things we are doing are hard, but they must be done over time, and with elements of sacrifice; that we can support one another with a shared vision to the future; and that we have an opportunity to not only save democracy but also reinvigorate the moral and emotional health of people in our country.

Daniel: That is a very fitting place to wrap up. Thanks to you both, and to MWEG’s membership, for the important and timely work you are doing!