Not everybody is attached to the plan of preserving the garments. Lindsay Perez, 24, who life in Salt Lake City, applied to experience persistent urinary tract bacterial infections that she thinks were being made worse by her garments. She now leaves them off at night time, and right after she showers.
If she had her option, she explained, she would favor to dress in a cross necklace, or a ring — well-known between youthful church associates — with the letters C.T.R., a reference to the motto “Choose the Ideal,” a reminder to make moral possibilities. “There are so numerous various techniques to remind myself of what I have promised,” Ms. Perez claimed. “I do not will need that to be by way of my underwear.”
In non-public Facebook groups for females in the church, she explained, clothes are a continuous topic of discussion, with some women hoping for advancements and many others defending the clothes as they are. But couple of women feel snug approaching male leaders to examine bodily fluids, bacterial infections and sexual intimacy.
“People are fearful to be brutally trustworthy, to say: ‘This isn’t performing for me. It is not bringing me nearer to Christ, it is offering me U.T.I.s,’” Ms. Perez claimed.
Open dialogue is also thorny mainly because the garments are frequent targets of mockery from outsiders. When Mitt Romney, a church member, was running for president in 2012, he was derided by some mainstream commentators for wearing “magic underwear.”
That type of ridicule is “acutely distressing,” explained Jana Riess, a senior columnist for Faith News Service who writes about the church and who carried out the 2016 poll with a colleague.
It is particularly hurtful mainly because the garments symbolize a profound religious connection to God. “One of the most lovely points about them is they are underwear,” Ms. Riess mentioned. “It expresses my perception that there’s no aspect of my messy humanity that isn’t beloved of God.”