Shaking in my (tall, black, leather, four inch-heeled, fuck-me) boots

From:     Rhonda Relief Society* <rrsociety@gmail.com> 

Subject:     Contact with LDS Church

Date:     August 7, 2009 8:26:27 AM EDT

To:     myemailaddress@University.edu

Hi Amy,

It has probably been a few months since you last received an email from the 1st Ward Relief Society, due to our slower summer, vacation filled months. I hope your summer is going well.

I'm grateful that you allow us to send you (via email) invites to these activities, but we definitely do not want to be a burden and end up in your spam box. I'm certain that there are reasons why you and your husband have not been attending church services (or perhaps you have and I just haven't met you yet). In either case, I would like to ask you (and your family) what your desire level of contact with the church is. Would you be comfortable with home and visiting teachers, newsletters, telephone calls, receiving weekly ward and RS email announcements, or no contact at all. This last option is quite extreme resulting in either a personal, telephone or mail contact from and with Bishop Oooohhh Intimidating Priesthood Authority**.

Please prayerfully consider what you would like and what you would like us to do, and I hope to hear back from you within the next few days.

Thanks for your time and understanding.

Best,

Rho*

_________________________________________________

This was an email from some woman, maybe the RS President, in the local ward.  I had never attended there.  My thoughts were:

• "How did they get my email address?" After I searched through my emails I remembered that I had sent an email in response to one of these "invites" informing them that they had been sending the emails to my husband's email address and that I was never going to attend a RS event. We assume that they got his address through the online student directory where he was a student, which can only be accessed by students and faculty and is specifically NOT supposed to be used for non-academic purposes.
• "I am sure she sincerely hopes that a stranger's summer is going well. Stupid niceties."
• "Are you grateful?  Really? Why?"
• "When did I give permission or state that I would 'allow' you to send these emails?  And how could I have prevented it?"
• "You TOTALLY want to be a burden and you TOTALLY ended up in my spam box."
• "You are certain that there are reasons I am not attending?  Yeah, no shit.  I don't do anything without some sort of reason. I am certain that you just threw in this sentence so that you could passively-aggressively imply that my reasons are invalid."
• "Perhaps you just haven't met me?  You have some doubt about whether I am or am not attending at yet you are willing to send this accusatory email?  Would it not be worth finding out if I attend before sending this?"
• "Is my desire(d) level of contact with the church not implied by my complete absence from it?  If I wanted contact, I would show up occasionally or respond to my home teachers.  I might even give my phone number to someone."
• "Wait. Whoa. Has there been some sort of paradigm shift in the church since I left?  Have gender roles been eliminated?  Do I actually get to speak not just for myself but also for my family and the priesthood holder in my home? Can I be trusted to determine what is best for me? Is my husband's authority over me and my submission to his decisions no longer required?"
• "No contact at all. I definitely choose no contact at all."
• "Oh, that last 'option' is 'quite extreme'?"
• "Are you threatening me?  If I don't show up or submit to allowing others to harass me I will be forced to submit to harassment by the Bishop? And how will that be enforced? How can I be made to meet with, open the door for, answer calls from, or read correspondence from the Bishop? Bwaaahahahahahah!  You actually think that the church has some authority over me!  That I would recognize or tolerate that authority! Silly woman."
• "If I believed in prayer would you need to ask me to please prayerfully consider what I want? Wouldn't I have already prayed about my relationship to the church?  Has it occurred to you that perhaps I no longer attend because I don't believe in a god to whom I could pray?"
• "Oh Honey!  Believe me when I say that you do NOT want to hear back from me.  I don't respond calmly to veiled threats, passive-aggressive insults, or faked concern. I've got nothing nice to say to you and I am hoping that my non-response is understood as the response that it is intended to be."
• "I don't 'understand' you or the motivation behind this email at all."
• "Shit.  Fuck. Damn.  Am I about to be excommunicated? Is this email intended to elicit a response that can be used as evidence so that I can be convicted of apostasy? Am I paranoid?  Has the church been notified about the negative things I say on my blog. Why is this email sent now, eight years after I stopped attending? Very minimal effort has been made to have contact with me previously but I haven't been threatened with Bishop confrontation before."  

I didn't respond to the email.  I was tempted to tell this woman exactly what I thought of her tactics but I held myself back.  I never heard from her or the Bishop or anyone else for that matter.  This email was the last straw for me.  I knew I was never going back but I wasn't sure resigning was really necessary.  This email made it clear to me that the attempts to visiting/home teach me, drop-in visits from the missionaries, emails, letters, and phone calls would never stop until I insisted that they MUST.

*Name changed to protect the passive aggressive bitchy stranger innocent.
**Name changed to protect the Self-Important Local Patriarch innocent.