MAKING MORMONISM HER OWN

Alice (Allie) Bradford Brown grew up in Provo, Utah as the daughter of a BYU professor and a homemaker, and the granddaughter of a Latter-day Saint feminist icon. But stereotypes have not been her path as she forges her own way through life. Allie is also the Director of Fundraising for the LDS Women Project. 

What’s the 30,000-foot level summary of who you are?

I grew up mostly in Provo, Utah, as the child of a BYU professor and a stay-at-home mom, in the heart of Mormondom. That obviously shaped me, but I have a lot of friends who grew up the exact same way and turned out differently. When you grow up surrounded by other Latter-day Saints, you kind of know what your peers are “supposed” to believe and do, and there’s social pressure to behave in certain ways. Assuming everyone believes the same way just because they’re all members of the Church can lead to unhealthy judgment and hypocrisy, and I was certainly guilty of that. I eventually learned it’s not actually true that all LDS people believe the same way—there are a lot of varied beliefs and perspectives even within Provo, Utah. My parents are both conservative members—not politically, but in terms of obedience and respect for authority. I inherited that, too. It was always easy for me to obey and follow the standards and more importantly, to have faith in Christ and believe in the gospel. Those things came naturally to me and were not a struggle. I also fit in socially and had lots of friends in my ward, so of course that made everything about Church easier.

I went to BYU and became even more immersed in Latter-day Saint culture. I loved it. I really thrived there. It was a great academic fit, and I felt that I really belonged. I studied sociology. BYU’s sociology department is probably one of the more conservative sociology programs in the US, but also one of the most liberal majors at BYU. So I got a lot of world-opening, eye-opening education. I learned about racism, that it still exists—I don’t remember anyone talking about that until then. I learned to grapple with issues of gender and authority. I took Sociology of Gender, and part of our study included the Family Proclamation, the history of the Relief Society, and the authority that women used to have in the Church that has been rescinded, like laying on of hands for healing blessings. We discussed sexuality and where that fits in both the gospel and in a fair and equal society. Some people might find it ironic that BYU was my introduction to a lot of those topics, but they were discussed in a balanced and fair way that was not negative toward the Church, but open to ways that things could be better. It made me not afraid of topics like that.

I was 19 when they lowered the mission age from 21 to 19 for women. I’d always wanted to go, so I finished my sophomore year and left for my mission in May 2013 to Cape Verde. I had never heard of that country. My mission call was a printed letter with a little booklet with information and the mission map. The map was mostly gray with some white spots—mostly water and an archipelago of ten islands, nine of which are inhabited. So my mission map was mostly ocean! No one in my family could have pointed to it on a globe. People call it the Hawaii of Africa—it’s a few hundred miles off the west coast of Senegal in the Atlantic Ocean, with its own time zone. They only started sending Sisters there a handful of years before I arrived. When I read in the scriptures that the Lord’s love extends even to the “isles of the sea,” it means something different and more sacred to me now. Cape Verde is so remote. It’s the tiniest, most inconsequential place on the earth, and I got to go there as a missionary. I love what that taught me about the love of our Heavenly Parents—They are going to bother with even that little island nation of half a million people. They are worth investing in with missionary work, building chapels, and they even dedicated a temple there in 2022. That was a miracle.

I returned from my mission in November 2014 and got engaged to Zach six weeks later, which I never thought I would do! We started dating at the end of our senior year of high school and kept in touch during college when he went to Duke University, and during our missions. By the time I came back, we said, “What’s stopping us?” So we got engaged that winter and were married in May 2015. I graduated from BYU that August, and moved to Durham, North Carolina, a few days later, where Zach was finishing his undergraduate degree at Duke.

We loved our years in North Carolina and we would have been so happy to just stay there. Zach finished college at Duke, and medical school at the University of North Carolina (UNC). I did a master’s degree in Public Administration at UNC and our first baby was born in 2018, then our second in 2021. We moved to Birmingham, Alabama in 2022 for Zach to do his pediatrics residency at the University of Alabama-Birmingham (UAB) Children’s Hospital, and here we are. Baby boy number three will be born any day now (August 2024).
I never, never would have seen myself living in Alabama, but as soon as we found out that Zach matched at the UAB for residency, people started coming out of the woodwork to tell us how much they love Birmingham. It has lived up to the hype! It’s a very family-friendly place. People are super nice here. We don’t know what’s next for us, but we feel very blessed to be here for this season.

Your grandmother was one of the Latter-day Saint feminist icons of the 1970s and 80s, Mary Lythgoe Bradford. So your father grew up with a working mom, but you also indicated that he’s respectful of ecclesiastical authority, which specifically discouraged working mothers in your grandmother’s lifetime. How did this mix of perspectives affect you?

My grandfather passed away before I was born, but he was a bishop for many years and very much by-the-handbook. I think my dad took after his dad in that way. As the story goes, when my grandma was the editor of Dialogue, her workspace was in the basement of their house and my grandpa was doing bishopric work from the upstairs of their house. They joked that it was the Celestial Kingdom and the Terrestrial Kingdom. He was a Republican and she was a Democrat, too. They just got along and made it work because they loved each other.

So my dad did grow up with a working mom and I never heard that he had issues with that. I don’t think anyone in our family did. I think it taught him the importance of education. She had a master’s degree when many women didn’t. My dad got a PhD, his sister had a Master’s, his brother has a law degree. Education, books, and critical thinking were very important in their family and that’s what really stuck with my dad that he passed on to us.

I was a little surprised when I was about to get engaged—I thought my dad would be so pleased that I was a returned missionary about to get married in the temple, checking all the boxes, and I was only 21. We had a frank conversation—he was worried that I was sacrificing my education to get married. (I did drop my minor and hurried to finish the classes I needed to graduate from BYU so I could move to North Carolina with Zach.) I did not expect that from my dad, but he wanted to make sure I wasn’t rushing into marriage when I could be investing more in my education. His concern seemed to come from the perspective that as soon as I got married, my education would be done. Getting married was the right thing to do and the time was right, and I did get a master’s degree a couple years later.

My mom was a stay-at-home mom. As far as I could tell, she loved it and thrived there, and I always thought that’s what I would do, too. But when I had my first baby and the time came to make those decisions for my own life, being a stay-at-home mom was incredibly difficult for me, and I decided to keep working part-time. So I was really lucky to be raised with both examples and taught that either way is okay.

My grandmother was mostly retired in my lifetime, but she always kept her feminist, independent identity and wore it proudly. She continued writing books all her life and published her first novel the year she turned 90. It really blessed me to know the circles she ran in. A lot of her best friends were the “alternative” or “critical thinking” Sunstone-Dialogue-Exponent II voices of Mormonism. She wrote the biography of Lowell Bennion so he was a household name. I met Eugene England a couple of times as a child at family gatherings, and I knew he was like an uncle to my dad. It was a huge honor to connect with Carol Lynn Pearson later in life because of her friendship with my grandmother. Nama, as we called her, was always visiting friends and attending symposiums and things when she came to stay with us in Utah.

I think I would have otherwise been a lot more judgmental and cautious about groups that think critically and make Mormonism their own. It became important to me as I got older and started having questions and doubts that I wanted to resolve. I knew I could work through questions, even publicly, stand up for what’s in my conscience, and still be a faithful member of the Church and a good person. This led me to join the LDS Women Project Editorial Board, and work for a couple of years with my mother-in-law and sister-in-law on an Instagram account @Brave.Like.Eve that was both faith-promoting and an outlet for thinking deeply about gospel topics.

What did you do to further develop your education and volunteer work after BYU?

When I first moved to Durham, I had a bachelor’s degree in sociology that I do not regret… but it was worthless. I was in a new state with no connections and the kind of degree that takes you everywhere and nowhere, so I started doing temp work and volunteering at a GED prep program (high school equivalency for teenagers and adults who did not finish high school). I learned that they needed someone to fill their AmeriCorps position, which is a year of service dedicated to a nonprofit organization. I did AmeriCorps for two years and in my second year, I started to get excited about nonprofit management—the effectiveness of nonprofit organizations more than the direct service.

I found the Masters of Public Administration at UNC—they have an online format with the same curriculum and teachers as the in-person classes on campus, and I could do it in the evenings from home. That worked out really well because it was Zach’s last year at Duke, and we didn’t know where we were going for medical school. We also wanted to start our family. I was pregnant with our first son during my first year of graduate school. I remember throwing up while taking an exam for Law For Nonprofits. Awful. In my last semester, I took a grant writing class and the heavens opened—this was it. I was pregnant with our second child and knew working full-time in nonprofits would not make sense because of daycare costs. It sounded more stressful than it would be worth, and I wanted part-time flexible work to also be with our kids a lot. Grant writing checked that box because I could do it on a freelance basis and stay in control of my schedule and workload. It was a great mental outlet for me and helped our family financially—a win-win! I wanted to work, I wanted to do something with my brain, I needed a break from my children sometimes. It has been a really good balance.

In late 2021, I took a part-time staff position at a really great organization called Student U that works with students in Durham Public Schools from sixth grade through college graduation. It gave me more consistent work than freelancing, and I was able to do it all from home. It uses my skills, it gives me something to feel accomplished and fulfilled by outside of motherhood. When we moved to Birmingham, they let me be fully remote so I took the job with me and I still love doing it.

I wouldn’t trade it, I’m happy with it. But there is a catch—I’m not a stay-at-home mom, I’m also not a working mom. So it’s hard to fit in sometimes. Because I do have to work, I’m somewhat outside the mom group at church that gets together often, but we show up sometimes and they are some incredible moms that I love spending time with. But my life is not totally relatable to full-time moms, and not totally relatable to moms who work full-time. I’m navigating it. But I need the balance of both worlds.

What does it mean to you to be a Latter-day Saint woman?

I think being a Latter-day Saint woman means living the gospel in whatever way your gifts and talents push you. As a child, I might have described one certain way to live the gospel, a lot of black and white, yes or no. I still believe there are things that are firm and important, and there are commandments that loving Heavenly Parents have given us because They know it will make our mortal life happier and more enriching. Within that, there’s a lot of wiggle room to choose different paths. It’s an amazing thing.

Being a stay-at-home mom is a beautiful way to nurture God’s children. Working or volunteering in the outside world is also a beautiful way to nurture God’s children, because the world has problems and issues that need to be solved, and I believe that we need women’s full participation in a variety of fields to get there. Latter-day Saint women can serve as a light and an example in the workplace, in school, and volunteering in ways that we cannot access if we’re home all day. When we think about fulfilling the measure of our creation, we’re each created differently and uniquely, and part of our job on Earth is to explore how we fulfill that. Being a Latter-day Saint woman can look as many different ways as there are women. As long as we are maintaining a covenant relationship with Jesus Christ, we can’t go wrong.

What are you doing to build your relationship with our Heavenly Parents?

It depends on the day and the month and the year. I’ve been trying to go to the temple every time we have ward temple night once a month, because they offer babysitting. I went to the temple probably ten times last year, which is pretty good for a mom with toddlers. The temple has been complicated and hard for me in some ways, but every time I go and sit through it, as I’m leaving, I feel like it was right. The Spirit was there. So I try to go back regularly to be reminded of that.

The other thing I’m doing is listening. I have a regular feed of podcasts and conference talks that bring me closer to Christ and our Heavenly Parents. I have that in the background as I’m doing dishes or folding laundry. Sometimes that’s the best I can do for scripture study, but it makes me feel connected back to Them. I’ve noticed a difference when I let a long time pass and I don’t have that connection—that’s when my questions and concerns and doubts start to feel stronger, especially if I spend too much time on social media. But if I keep the uplifting, faith-affirming content in my brain along with all the rest of it, I really do feel that the gospel is true and living it is worthwhile.

I particularly love Mandy Green’s Reflecting Light and the Faith Matters podcasts. They cover such diverse topics that help me learn new lenses to see the gospel through. Sometimes they answer questions I didn’t even have—it’s always interesting and inspiring to hear someone else thinking through things and sharing faith-affirming experiences or research.

Any final thoughts?

About the LDS Women Project—I read Neylan McBaine’s book, Women at Church, and I was so impressed by it. I’m so grateful that someone had written it and thought about women’s issues in that way. I saw in the book that she had founded this project, and that’s how I learned about it. I was excited to get involved, too, because I think it’s so important to have a faith-affirming place where women can gather and learn from each other and our different experiences. It can be hard to be a woman in the Church if you don’t know that other people are also grappling with women’s issues. It’s easy to say, “This isn’t for me, this isn’t working.” But I love the way the LDS Women Project lets women voice their own version of being an LDS woman and I hope that the effect is that all LDS women feel seen and know that part of the genius design of the gospel is that there’s always a sisterhood we can rely on.

At A Glance

Name: Allie Bradford Brown

Age: 31

Location: Birmingham, Alabama

Marital History: Married since 2015

Children: Three boys ages 5, and 3, and due in August 2024

Occupation: Part-time grant writer & full-time mom

Convert to the Church: No

Schools Attended: B.S. in Sociology (Brigham Young University), Master’s in Public Administration (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Languages Spoken At Home: English

Favorite Hymn: Lord, I Will Follow Thee

Interview Produced By: Trina Caudle