Stepping up to the legendary lectern at the Cambridge Union was one of the most nerve-wracking and electrifying moments of my life. I felt like both a paradox and a provocation: an unexpected guest at the table of tradition.
The audible reaction to my introduction was both surreal and overwhelming. The room had to be gaveled to order when they announced me as a “Mormon Feminist.” This was a striking affirmation of the debate itself—whether feminism and religion are compatible—arguing for my very existence as a Mormon feminist. In that moment, I realized I was not just speaking for myself, but for countless others who inhabit the liminal spaces where faith and feminism converge, defying the expectations of many in the room who saw me as both an anomaly and an anachronism. It’s okay—fitting neatly into one mold has never been my strong suit.
The initial uproar could have been daunting, but what followed was nothing short of extraordinary. I was met with warmth, curiosity, and a level of intellectual generosity that left me in awe. The response to my speech—people sharing their stories, offering heartfelt encouragement, and even telling me I had changed their minds—was profoundly humbling. It was a moment that crystallized for me the power of dialogue and the enduring importance of spaces like the Cambridge Union.
The hospitality extended to me was exceptional, and I especially loved meeting the student ambassadors. To have been invited into such an illustrious space was an honor; to leave feeling connected, challenged, and changed was a gift.
Initially, my remarks were prepared to fit a ten-minute slot, but with the addition of two speakers, we were asked to condense our arguments to under eight minutes. What follows is the full version of my speech, where I argued against the House’s proposition that “Feminism and Religion are Incompatible.” (The video of my speech is below).
I am a woman born from seven generations of devout Mormon stock, with ancestors who carved their faith into the unforgiving lands of the American West. To shoulder the extreme, relentless burdens we faced, we needed powerful stories. Stories became the bedrock of our lives.
And in the world my people built, the rules were absolute. In this universe, as a woman, my place was clear: submissive, obedient, a willing sacrifice. What others called sexism, we called God’s plan—a divinely woven order where patriarchy was seen as natural law, deeply embedded not only in belief and ritual but in our legal, social, and cultural fabric.
For a time, this lens held because to leave it seemed as impossible as leaving the world itself. And even as I distanced myself from orthodoxy, I found echoes of this belief recapitulated outside my faith. Yes, the secular world, too, seemed shaped by these same unseen lines, as if patriarchy were as immutable as gravity, embedded in the law of all things.
And that’s the architecture I was raised in. A patriarchal religion that defined itself by the world it competed with to hobble women’s equity. But to diagnose Mormonism as the singular villain in the race against women’s rights is to ignore how other institutions uphold patriarchy, reinforcing its structure within religious spaces.
At its core, religion offers beliefs, practices, and values that attempt to elevate the human experience by providing meaning, purpose, and guidance.
In my experience, faith has fallen short of its promises, and the infection of sexism is just one of the many threads of oppression that moves through its body, constantly undermining its aim.
If you take feminism seriously in its goals, it seeks to liberate and move toward equality. So it’s in covenant with many things, including faith to accomplish these objectives.
Perhaps I’m wrong, and a secular heaven is really a kingdom of perfect Laïcité—where empirical certitude rules, and institutional abuse fades because the god who authored them is dying.
But that’s not my world. I’ll concede that mine’s rooted in complexity. I’ll even confess that I think the framing of the question we’re here to argue is an unhelpful one.
So I’ll defer to my roots as a good Mormon woman and I’ll apologize for my bad manners.
Feminism didn’t emerge in opposition to religion; it arose as a response to patriarchy itself. And it rose right in my own heart before I had a word or language for it.
I first encountered feminism as a young, orthodox mother in rural Utah. Raised in a harmful, isolated discourse, I absorbed its poison, believing my suffering was a personal failure—that the rules weren’t wrong; I was. Haunted by the impossible quest for perfection, I fell asleep each night bathed in shame. I closed my eyes comforted only by the image of a swinging noose.
But meeting women in my faith who resisted these narratives, who met me where I was at, without judgment or demands, was a revelation, transforming that noose into a ladder, lifting me from my own gallows and helping me find my voice. A voice silenced by the design of men who made the mistake of thinking we’d never find what we had a right to.
My ancestors deliberately sought to replicate the great American machine of conquest, trading secular abuses of power for religious ones. Why did they do that? Because humans, no matter how brave and grown, are scared little children when facing the sky, and we need a story. We’d rather have a bad story than no story at all.
When I first questioned narratives I had both inherited and perpetuated, I groped for new stories that would fill the void of the big question—one that, if I think many of us are really honest, we’re all asking: what the hell is going on here? How did all this happen and how did we let this happen?
Maybe that last part is just for those of us who leave religion, bewildered and shocked, wondering how we got out alive. So we search for kinder tales to tuck us in at night. I don’t know anyone who left religion who didn’t find a new story.
My current iteration of religion is one that blends mystic tarot-white girl nonsense, simulation theory, and Mormon prayers. And this is fine. I mean, my beliefs are bananas, but all of us hold magical beliefs, especially those of us that think we have it all figured out.
What I’m saying is, it’s all narrative in this big mystery of life.
We let science tell stories in data, let secular laws script morality, and let God fill in the gaps of the unknown—assigning villains as we please.
Having lived under dogma and then escaping to this supposed heaven of reason, it seems everywhere I go, no matter what banner is flown at power’s door, someone wants to hold someone else down. A boot on the neck by the state or by Jesus still makes it hard to breathe. Hierarchical power marries well with patriarchy—secular or sacred.
And I hate that. I hate that this pattern has been pervasive and consistent throughout history, in spite of feminist hermeneutics (which I adore, btw). Admitting they exist is not a defense for them. Let’s be clear on that. But we combat things we don’t like that show up in nature, not by praying them away in blind faith, but by making choices to build cultures that remediate them.
Culture is defined by our choices and we have the power and the capacity to decide which things in culture we will value and which things we will reject. And only part of culture is affected and reflected in religion.
Religions, especially the powerful ones, have been poor authors of equity. But that’s what human beings do, we make up stories. I can’t account for all the bad stories we tell in the world—not just in religion, but everywhere.
Clearly, some narratives are better than others, and some institutions are more vulnerable to unhealthy authority. But there is no story that the values of feminism don’t improve upon.
The patriarchal oppression I’ve lived first-hand, that took me to the brink, did not argue against compatibility, it argued for deeper integration.
So yeah, I’ll argue for the compatibility that saved my life.
Where there’s oppression, there’s resistance. Human beings resist. Resistance to harm makes for a protagonist in an individual human story. Use postmodern words or ancient ones. As I see it, feminism, though a modern word, is an old idea: negotiating your personal dignity no matter whose heel is against your cheek, no matter what culture defines you, no matter what era you’re constrained by.
When you see those poor polygamous women from my heritage—wearing prairie dresses on TV, married horrifically by older, patriarchal predators who try to coerce and control them with a heavenly father’s dictates—you’re only seeing the half of the hell they’re going through.
What you also must try to see, even when the camera stops rolling, is women that still find ways to negotiate their power and dignity over the course of their lives. Is that not feminism?
Sure, it’s not a pure, academic, gender-studies version that we’d like to convert them to, but it’s resistance just the same.
We so love to strip down those who suffer the most and rob them of dignity because it’s tempting to collapse a narrative and point the finger at religion.
But that’s a bad story, too—a harmful one. In my experiences in this space, it usurps the lives of victims and uses them to further our own agendas of pain and politics. Or maybe we just need our type of justice to feel pure, like our gods.
As we advocate for women, should we force them to comport to our idea of what a good woman looks like? Of what a good feminist looks like? Should we tell a dangerous story that’s incompatible with their lives?
Here’s a better story: There’s a human institution named religion, and He—ever Male—has a chronic, terminal disease. He’s afflicted with patriarchy.
But then he encounters the medicine of feminism, a reaction to patriarchy, a response to his debilitation. The two are compatible because they must be. Medicine doesn’t refuse to work within an afflicted body.
Our impatience with complexity seeks to shortcut the arc of history. It turns feminism into a religion instead of a cure. As a tool, it harmonizes; as a doctrine, it devolves into a crusade. But that’s not the only danger…
When we accept the question of this debate, we, whether by design or ignorance, offer a cruel choice to many women who have the least access to equity.
Pick one: feminism or religion.
And what this does, what this fundamentally does, is stops the medicine of better narratives from accessing the parts of the body most insulated by the diseases of oppression.
Arguing that feminism is incompatible with religion reeks of scarcity—something I know well, as my people are poor in love and rich in fear. Good theology is so often co-opted by fear, rooted in the belief that there’s only so much liberation to go around, and a single, one-true-path to get there. How is that any different from the beliefs in my faith that once harmed me?
Arguing that feminism and religion are inherently incompatible is to oversimplify a complex drama—84% of the world follows religions often entangled with patriarchy.
Feminism isn’t here to convert those traditions; it’s here to subvert harm. Otherwise, we only replicate the abuses we aim to dismantle, narrowing feminism’s power into prescriptive demands.
To believe you can eradicate religion or let feminism work in a vacuum is an insane proposition.
Leave that sort of magical thinking to old, white, male theologians. Religion—ancient and modern—is a deeply ingrained human construct. The question isn’t whether religion is flawed—that’s the wrong altar to kneel at tonight. The debate is about compatibility. Yet we talk as if religion can simply be exorcised from humanity. We aren’t getting rid of religion. Let a few more million years of evolution work on the human brain’s need to understand itself. Maybe Darwin will prove to be the prophet science dreamed him to be.
The work instead is to evolve towards healthier ideas in all spheres of being. To inject the opportunity to choose equity against the darkness of primal impulse.
Membership in major religions may be declining, but faith itself isn’t dying; it’s just resurrecting—into wellness cults, new-age spirituality, and other modern-day theologies of meaning.
In all of them the potential of feminism emerges. It exists as a response to patriarchy and shows up where it’s needed. Its power can be maximized if it’s met with hope and patience, because where feminism arises, it transmutes injustice to truth and excavates the hero in the heart of the oppressed. Feminism is always more powerful when it’s chosen and not imposed.
So let it integrate, not separate, itself from those who live under the propaganda papered by selfish authors. Do not cast it in opposition to the things it was meant to heal.
Feminism can be both bridge and ladder woven into even the most patriarchal structures, transforming them from within. In every institution, sacred or secular, feminism belongs—not to divide, but to enlighten and liberate. It’s a story worth telling, and good stories are good medicine, especially to those most sick.
Thank you.
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Here is a video of the speech: