Kate Kelly—Excommunicated Mormon Feminist—Wants to Recruit You

Kate Kelly used to cover her shoulders anytime she left the house. She used to be a believer. As a little girl, she would sing along to a popular Mormon kids’ song: “When I grow up, I want to be a mother and have a family / One little, two little, three little babies of my own / Of all the jobs for me I’ll choose no other / Four little, five little, six little babies in my home.”

Now on Sundays she sits in a tank top next to her girlfriend, getting ready to read the 17 books about abortion that she just bought.

As a teenager, Kelly idolized Ann Coulter. Now she leads spiritual gatherings with a female imam, a woman Baptist preacher, and an Orthodox rabbi, who is a transgender woman. After college, Kelly went to law school to study human rights law, but prayed to never become a radical who distanced herself from God, like many feminists. Now Kelly is devoting her life to the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, which would make gender equality a guaranteed constitutional right.

How did Coulter-loving, shoulder-covering Kate Kelly become friend-of-Muslims, self-made abortion expert Kate Kelly? How did a woman who went on a mission to create new converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints become a woman on a mission to amend the U.S. Constitution?

“I’m really, probably more than most people, willing to change my mind,” Kelly says. “That’s what you do as a Mormon missionary—you get people to question their fundamental beliefs and reexamine them. I took that inquiry seriously myself.”

Working as a missionary, Kelly observed how bizarre it is to be excluded from a religion to which you are actively recruiting new followers. She came home and got involved with Mormon feminism groups, but she wanted more than they offered. “We can make all these cosmetic changes and blah blah, but if women cannot be leaders at any level and if every person in a position of power in the institution is male, it won’t ever be equal,” she recalls realizing.

“In activism, you have to have an ask,” Kelly says. “You can’t just say, ‘I want women to be equal’; you need something concrete and actionable.” Female ordination—the consecration of women as priests in the Mormon church—was the perfect ask. She founded Ordain Women, an organization of Mormon feminists that pushed for the ordination of female priests.

And then, in 2014, after a life spent entirely in the church, Kelly was forced out. For loudly, publicly, proudly pushing for equality for women at the highest levels of her faith, Kelly was excommunicated.

So she moved to Nairobi. Then she moved to the heart of Mormon life, and got a job as a lawyer for Planned Parenthood in Salt Lake City. Then she moved to New York City, and championed women’s and LGBTQ equality all the way to the United Nations. She cofounded a feminist interfaith prayer community, Sacred Space. She started a podcast, Ordinary Equality. She helped push the Equal Rights Amendment closer to ratification than it has been in the almost 100 years since it was written.

Kelly’s life has changed. Her mind has been changed. But Kelly hasn’t changed at all.

“What I believe in, and this has been consistent over time, is women,” Kelly says. “I believe in our power. I believe in our equality. I believe in our capacity for good. That’s my theology.”

Here, Kelly tells Glamour how she manages a career that could possibly change the course of United States history—and why you should answer her call.

On how Mormonism turned her into a raging feminist

Ironically, the teachings of Mormonism—if you take them to their logical conclusion—actually are very socially progressive! There are a lot of communitarian ideas and radical politics if you go to the actual original founding of the group. On my Mormon mission I was meeting immigrants for the first time. I learned Spanish. I could talk to people I’d never talked to before. I could speak to undocumented immigrants. I was meeting all kinds of people who are marginalized in society, and my full-time job for two years was to reach out to them. Probably not a lot of people are radicalized politically by their Mormon mission, but there are some of us who think, Wait a minute—I don’t hate immigrants and women! I’m in my little modest missionary costume, walking around trying to talk to strangers about Jesus, learning about the world. By trying to convert people to my religion I was converted myself, to a bigger, wider worldview.

On actually destroying the patriarchy

Patriarchy is not complicated. Patriarchy operates in the same way in every context that I’ve been in. The way that men maintain power is the same in Mormonism as the U.S. government, and all the other places I’ve worked in and been to—Somalia, the Dominican Republic.

Most patriarchies are not explicit patriarchies, like Mormonism, which calls itself the Patriarchal Order. But look at the U.S. government—our most fundamental document, the Constitution, excludes women. Well, how can we change that? We have to amend it. I’m not satisfied by superficial changes. Like—yay, we had The Year of the Woman and 100 women got elected to congress. That puts us at 24%. That’s still so abysmal. Other countries who have gender provisions have quotas in their legislative bodies and ways of getting no less than 50%. Why are we so far behind countries like Rwanda? I don’t want to work and work and work for this patchwork of lesser concessions. I want the organization or the group or the country or the government to change so fundamentally that everything else will change. The ERA is a foundation upon which we’re going to build a scaffolding of equality for women in this country. The people who are really gonna benefit from the ERA getting ratified aren’t alive yet. It’s 100 years in the making, and we’re closer now than we’ve ever been.

On how she does it

A lot of Mormon women my age have five, six, seven, or more children, and I don’t. I don’t have any kids—my life’s work is different. I’ve structured my life in a way so that what I produce is fighting for equality. In the long run that’s what I was meant to do and that’s what I’m confident is going to be the most meaningful thing for me to do. I never wanted kids; that’s the thing I struggled with the most as a Mormon. My New Year's resolution was to never say, “I don’t have time for that.” Instead I say, “That is not a priority for me,” so that I’m clear about what my priorities are. I feel like you have time for what you make time for.

On the gift of excommunication

Looking back now, I think the excommunication was a gift, because I’m a very loyal person. I don’t know that I would have left on my own. I was giving a lot of energy to an institution that does not value women. It did not value me. So I think in that way it was a gift because it set me free to work on other causes and things I am passionate about and places that actually need me and value my work. And it’s kind of like an abusive relationship—you can throw so much at it year after year after year after year and it’s not going to get any better. A lot of people leave what they call “high-demand religions”—which is the diplomatic way of saying "cult"—it takes years of anguish and decades of deprogramming and all of these different things, and for me it was kind of like ripping off a Band-Aid. One day I was Mormon and the next day I wasn’t.

On what keeps her up at night

I helped cofound a thing called the National Coalition to End Child Marriage in the U.S. Only two states in the United States have banned child marriage. In 20 states in the U.S., there’s no floor, so with a judicial waiver you can marry at any age. And ironically, our foreign policy says, “18, no exceptions.” My emphasis is that freedom of religion includes freedom from religion. I am really passionate about holding organizations accountable to their own professed values. I wanted to hold Mormonism accountable to the idea that all people are children of God, and are equal. Is that true? Apparently that’s not true. But I wanted to hold them accountable. Is gender equality an American value? Is that something that is actually part of who we are? If it is, it should be in the Constitution.

Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.

Originally Appeared on Glamour