Nostalgia for times that don’t deserve it

We often look back at simpler times with fondness. But the times weren't simpler, or better.

I played baseball with my wife and kids at a park last week.

It wasn’t a normal thing for us; in fact, we’d never done it before with the whole family. We didn’t even have all the things we needed to play baseball. Our first step was to go to a thrift store, where we got a couple of bats and a ball, and mitts for anyone who didn’t have one they could use.

I used my old mitt.

This is my old baseball mitt. It’s not much to look at, these days.

I got this mitt for my birthday when I was a young boy, more than 30 years ago. I sure loved it. I played baseball all the time in my front yard; I was Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco and Dennis Eckersley, hitting home runs and stealing bases and striking out opposing batters. When I wasn’t using it, I lovingly oiled it, put a ball in it, and wrapped rubber bands around it so that it would continue to break in and soften up.

Now, it looks barely passable as a mitt. Its brown outer layer has mostly disintegrated from being in storage for years, leaving only illegibility where it used to say “genuine leather” (and I now wonder how genuine that really was). When you put your hand in it, a little bit more of it comes apart, and your hand gets dirty with old mitt dust. It’s the same mitt, but the passage of time has waged war on its former glory.

Nostalgia is a weird thing. We're all able to look back at simpler times, when we were young. Times before bills, rent, jobs, insurance, repairs, lawnmowers, cars, adult relationships, having our own kids, not knowing how to handle our kids, and worrying that we’re failing our kids. We all make mistakes, and always have, but adulthood and parenthood dramatically increase the accountability and consequence of those mistakes. At that point, being a six-year-old or an eight-year-old or really anything before the teenage years seems pretty appealing.

But that's a narrow nostalgia, and a narrow concept of the past. What we remember is our own small, finite world; as a child, that world often didn’t span much farther than home, school, and church. The world still had pain and hate and suffering in that distant past—sometimes more than it does now. Instead of being nostalgic for a time, we’re nostalgic for the time when we were ignorant of what was happening around us.

I was born…

…just a handful of years after the priesthood and temple blessings were restored to Black Latter-day Saints in 1978. It was a turning point in Church policy and a blessing to the entire Church—most especially to those faithful Black Saints who had waited so long for it. But it’s also not as though racist attitudes in the Church immediately dissolved when the revelation was announced; they absolutely continued to persist (and continue to persist for many people today, especially in older generations). W. Paul Reeve, a scholar on the topic and author of the excellent Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood, lends his authority to that idea:

Over forty years have passed since the 1978 revelation, and I continue to hear justifications designed to excuse or explain away the restrictions rather than doing the work it takes to root out racism.¹

The history of race in the Church is not one I’m proud of. I don’t know how many thousands of Saints lived their faith and were still denied blessings because of the Church’s policy on skin color and African ancestry. I don’t know how many millions of other children of God simply weren’t taught the gospel over that ~120 year span because of that policy that was later rescinded, and its most popular excuses disavowed.

I'm not nostalgic about that time. I hope life in the Church is objectively better now for people of color than it used to be. We now have 25 temples built or announced in Africa—that’s more than there were in the entire world when I was born. We have a long way to go in the Church in rooting out racism, as President Nelson and President Oaks have recently told us. But there’s been progress.

I was raised…

…in an era where it was openly taught, in the Church and elsewhere, that women belonged in domestic roles. Toxic ideas of complementarianism and that wives should be submissive to their husbands were abundant and even popular.

One decade earlier, one of the top-selling non-fiction books in the U.S. was a guide for women on their supposed role in marriage. The book asserted a man’s right to rule and have all his needs met—and the self-abnegation and self-cheapening that a woman should pursue to make that happen. Kristin Du Mez, author of “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation,” described it this way:

[The author]'s advice had a religious foundation: "The biblical remedy for marital conflict" was the submission of wives to husbands. It was God's plan for women to be under a husband's rule… To begin with, it was important for women to keep up their "curb appeal," to "look and smell delicious," to be "feminine, soft, and touchable," not "dumpy, stringy, or exhausted"—at least if they wanted husbands to come home to them.²

While these attitudes were rampant in evangelical Christianity, it was a short hop into Latter-day Saint culture. In 1987, Ezra Taft Benson gave a fireside talk³ that amplified these complementarian ideas in Latter-day Saint culture, teaching that “a mother’s calling is in the home,” making it clear that husbands should be breadwinners and that “mothers [should] spend their full time in the home in rearing and caring for their children.” There was more than a subtle implication that divorces result from women working outside the home.

I'm not nostalgic for that time. I don’t want to go back to a time when women’s roles were decided for them. I’m grateful that we've come a long way in opening doors and removing glass ceilings for women, with many left to go. I am better, and my family is better, because of strong, independent women who are living their fullest lives and not being boxed in.

And beyond home and societal expectations, the experience for women in the Church is not yet the same as it is for men. We can point to small steps of progress that have been made, but we have a long way to go yet.

I grew up…

…in a time when LGBTQ+ individuals were often afraid to be their whole selves publicly.

I had a number of friends in high school in the 1990s who later came out as gay. I wish I was more confident that I would have reacted well if they came out while we were classmates. Instead, I was a teenager who used homophobic terms to mean something was “lame”⁴ or “dumb.” I regret this, deeply. I am grateful for repentance, as I’ve needed it for the way I treated people who were, at least at the time, among the “least of these.”

I wish I could say that the time of not being accepting and loving of people based on their sexual orientation was a thing of the past. It’s not. This is another topic where our kids typically are better at than we are, and hopefully we’re better than our parents and grandparents were. More Gen Z individuals identify as LGBTQ+ than in prior generations (including more than 1 in 5 LDS youth), at least in part because there was less support and space made for those who came out decades ago.

I’m not nostalgic for that time. I’m not nostalgic about how, as a teenager, I may have been hurtful to those I was too ignorant to understand. I’m not nostalgic for hate or intolerance. And in a few decades I won’t be nostalgic for the times right now, when transgender individuals are political targets and dying by suicide at tragic rates.

When we look back at the past…

…as simpler, happier days, we do so with historical blinders on. We lean on that brand of nostalgia that paints over the ugly parts and delivers a picture more beautiful than the world really was. The Church’s history, like the United States’s or like any organization’s, has some parts that feel like they should be painted over.

We’ve been promised an ongoing restoration. Inherent in that concept is the idea that we don’t know everything right now. This is a challenging thought; we’ve been taught that we live in the fulness of times, and that we are a chosen generation. It’s easy for us to assume that the gospel is fully restored, or at least 95% so. But President Nelson doesn’t seem to think that’s the case. In his words, “Wait till next year, and then the next year… it’s going to be exciting.”

But what we learn from looking at the past is that ongoing restoration doesn’t just mean we don’t have everything; it means we probably have some things wrong. Possibly very wrong. What is yet to be restored, that will give us the same jolt that the revelation on priesthood did in 1978? What cultural shifts will occur, that will make our current views look as dated as old talks about women’s roles do now? Our responsibility is to do the best we can with what we have now—but in doing so, we also know that more is coming. And when it does, we’ll do the best we can with that.

That’s the difference between the gospel and my old baseball mitt. That mitt really was better in the past; it was brown and shiny and I felt like a pro when I played with it. But now it’s crumbling and falling apart, as earthly things do.

But the gospel? We can look back at its history, and we should. We should learn everything we can from where we’ve been as a Church and a people. But the good news of the ongoing restoration is that it’s just going to keep getting better.

1. Reeve, W. Paul, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2023), 114-115.

2. Du Mez, Kristin Kobes, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2021), 61. I am intentionally obscuring the name of the book that’s being referenced here, in an effort to not spread it any more widely.

3. I am also not linking to this talk, for the same reason.

4. …a term that can be problematic as well.