When Protecting Your Child Means Leaving Your Faith: Reflections on “The Name of Eve”
Welcome back to Music in Conversation, where we explore documentary songs as pathways into what it means to be a human in this complicated world. This month’s exploration of “EXTEND” asks a difficult question: What happens when protecting someone you love requires leaving everything you’ve known?
In this song, Laurie Rodriguez tells the story of what she did when faced with a choice between her faith community and her son. Working together as storyteller and teaching artist, Laurie and her son Ben transform her experience into a documentary song that captures how sometimes the bravest thing you can do is refuse to comply with systems that would harm those you love.
When Worthiness Becomes a Weapon
In telling her story, Laurie explains that she approached her temple recommend interview with sincerity. Within the Mormon faith, this interview determines whether someone can enter the temple—a sacred place believed to be God’s house on earth. Church leaders ask questions to decide if you’re spiritually worthy.
“They were deciding my standing with God,” Laurie writes. “Think about the word worthy.”
What Laurie expected was routine questioning. What she found was interrogation. The bishop held her “to the fire for supporting my son.” She describes feeling them chip away at who she was, questioning her spiritual worthiness for the simple act of supporting her child.
The bishop quoted scripture about unclean things being unable to enter heaven, then asked with calculated casualness: “Can you tell me what that means to you?”
According to Laurie, this wasn’t really about spirituality—it was manipulation designed to make Laurie condemn her own child. Each time that seemingly innocent question returned, it carried the same ultimatum: abandon your son to keep your place here.
Her response became the anthem that runs through her song: “I took on the name Eve, held my ground.”
Recognizing Harm
As Laurie watched her church’s treatment of marginalized community members, like Ben, she began to see what she describes in her song as a train barreling down tracks, unable to swerve even when people stand in its path. Instead of stopping or warning, leaders tell those in danger to stay put: “you need to learn to trust, there’s safety in not getting ahead of the prophet.”
The train metaphor beautifully captures how systems work when they prioritize their own trajectory over people’s lives. Laurie realized she’d been trapped inside what she calls “a frame”—a way of seeing that made alternatives perspectives all but invisible. The institution had conditioned her to view anything outside its boundaries as deception. But watching “death and destruction with a smile,” she began to see the frame itself.
Then came the threat that shattered everything. Church leaders told Ben directly: “You’re not gonna have your family if you don’t stay on the covenant path”—their term for strict obedience to church teachings.
That attempt to separate her son from his family became, in Laurie’s words, “the wedge that was big enough to break me out.” Sometimes protecting someone means refusing to cooperate with systems that claim authority over their lives.
Building Something Together
What does it mean for a son to help his mother turn her story of institutional rejection into music?
For Ben, it meant creating a cello performance that holds the tension his mother lived through—dissonance that mirrors the experience of choosing between competing loyalties, musical phrases that resist easy resolution because some experiences can’t be tied up neatly. For Laurie, it meant her private pain became something she could share, something that might help other parents facing similar choices.
Their collaboration reveals two kinds of belonging. One requires you to shrink yourself to fit. The other lets you remain whole. Working together, Ben and Laurie created a story that honors both the pain of leaving and the relief of finally matching your actions to your values.
Reclaiming Ancient Stories
Traditional religious art has depicted Eve in shame—Masaccio’s famous expulsion from Eden shows her face twisted in anguish, consistent with centuries of artwork showing her hunched in despair.
However, in claiming Eve’s name, Laurie joins a different tradition of artistsm reclaiming this ancient figure. For example, contemporary artist, Jenie Gao, offers a different vision of Eve in “Feminist Allegories: Eve’s Quest for Knowledge”—Eve standing confidently in modern dress, the tree of knowledge growing from within her own body. For Laurie, Eve is not as the woman who ruined everything, but the first mother brave enough to choose difficult knowledge over comfortable ignorance.
What Extends Forward
Laurie’s song ends where it begins—with her taking Eve’s name and holding her ground. Her decision extends something essential to her children: permission to trust their own judgment when institutions fail, knowledge they can question and choose, confidence they can hold their ground when love demands it.
Sometimes extending protection means extending yourself beyond everything familiar.
How do we know when a system is asking us to sacrifice our conscience for belonging? Laurie’s story suggests that sometimes the most loving response is the one that looks like disobedience from the inside—choosing the harder path of trusting your own moral compass over the approval of others.
We’d love to hear your stories about “EXTEND.” When have you extended yourself beyond comfortable boundaries to protect someone? How have you learned to extend trust to your own judgment when institutions demand conformity? Share your experiences through this link or email Caroline at [email protected].