Are you a Christian? Who cares.
I think that all active members of the Church need to get over the fact that no matter what we do or say, there will still be critics who will Mormons as people who have been brainwashed into worshipping Satan and sacrificing babies in their temples. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but hopefully it makes the point.
The problem is not with us and our professed believes in Jesus as savior of the world, but it is with the critics and their definition of who is, and who is not, Christian.
Here is how it works. Christianity, as a religion, covers a very broad and diverse spectrum. In that spectrum there liberal Christians at one end, people like Revolution Church founder Jay Bakker, who happens to be the son of the infamous televangelist James Bakker. Jay represents the most liberal of Churches considering anyone who comes through the door a member and a Christian.
On the other end of the spectrum there are conservatives and fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, those who produce anti-Mormon publications, and the fallen Ted Haggard. In their eyes your beliefs must conform to theirs in order to be considered a Christian in their eyes. If one is to deviate in the slightest from their rather narrow interpretation of scripture, their claims to being Christian are rejected and they are then labeled secular humanists or cultists, depending on who they are talking about, and whom you talk to.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints members find themselves in an interesting position. While we do not embrace the liberal stance of Bakker and adherents to the extreme liberal view of Christianity, we also shun the close minded, and often hate filled stances that are often taken by the likes of Robertson and Falwell. Because of this middle ground, we find ourselves criticized by those on either extreme ends of the spectrum, and often misunderstood by everyone else in between.
From now on, I am not even going to try and convince critics that I am Christian, because it probably won’t work. I will testify of my conviction that Jesus is not only the Savior of the world but also my Savior and leave it at that. In the end I think that is all that any member of the Church can do.
Nor do I think it very productive to point why I am like other Christians. Instead I am going to celebrate what sets my faith apart from others and am going to be firm in my conviction that whether or not you are Christian, depends more on the heart of the individual and if they follow Jesus teachings as found in the scriptures, then it does the definitions of talking heads who often have hidden agendas.
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Aqualungs
For some reason the stories of those who leave the Church are interesting to me. Maybe it is because I minored in psychology and am interested in thinking, especially in religious communities. That said, I have read a few of these, and even frequented the blog of someone who was struggling to resolve his differences with the Church but ultimately left.
There are several key elements to writing a successful exit story. They all seem so formulaic that I have been able to break it down into a sequence of steps that you will find in just about all of them, and you might find useful if you want to write an exit story yourself.
Step 1: Establish credibility
It is important that you gain the sympathy of your audience from the get go and the most effective way of doing this is by presenting yourself as a believing, testimony bearing, home and visiting teaching, tithe and fast offering paying, mission served, enduring to the end Latter-day saint. Just really put yourself in the best possible light. Really play up the callings that you have held as important and if necessary be creative. If you were a Deacons quorum president you can and should say that you held a really important calling in the Church. If you have not, hey, just make it up; it worked for Ed Decker and Dick Baer (Both of them have claimed to have held callings that they never in fact held).
You don’t have to mention things like adultery, or an addiction pornography, or anything else that would cause you to lose face in the eyes of your readers. Just use the same methods you think that Church uses in writing its’ manuals of emphasizing the goodness of past members and leaders and just build yourself up. And why not? It just might improve your self-esteem
Step 2: Introduce a tough issue you never heard at Church
Once you have established your credibility as a “true blue, dyed in the wool Mormon”, say that you were minding your own business when all of a sudden you came across something that you never heard in all of the Priesthood, Sunday school, Sacrament, Relief Society, or Seminary and Institute classes. Talk about how at first you denied the existence of such a claim as merely the ploy of anti-Mormons to cause active believing members of the Church to question their faith. Take your pick of historical issues you never heard in Church, there are supposedly plenty to choose from. You might choose the “truth” about polygamy, or the so called Brigham Young, Danite, Mountain Meadows Massacre connection, or the Mike Wallace interview with President Hinkley, and a litany of others that make the Church look really bad and lead into our next step.
Step 3: Make yourself out to be the victim
Talk about how for so long you struggled with these things and instead of doing things to promote your faith, you delved further into history by D. Michael Quinn, Dan Vogel, and other “scholarly” publications by “experts” in Mormon history who bring up tough issues but do not give people in history the benefit of the doubt, or purposefully choose, considering all historical documents are equal, to take the humanistic approach where everyone is in it for themselves.
Fail to mention that for every historian on the fringe, there are plenty of believing historians such as Arrington, Bitton, Bushman, Givens, and many, many, others who are just as aware of these things and yet have maintained their testimonies and have even gone on to hold “important” callings in the Church.
Talk about how no matter where you went, no one could resolve your issues. Talk about the suffering and pain of this period and that despite your best efforts, you still could not come find rest to your soul.
Step 4: Villainize the leaders
Be sure to say that there were and are many, if not thousands of wonderful members of the Church. Be sure to emphasize that while there are many Leaders with different styles of leadership, personality, and interpretations of doctrine and counsel both past and present, that they are all stern, and be sure to say that they are close minded and not even willing to consider your discoveries. Be sure to convince your audience that leaders of the Church want to have nothing to do with “serious” academic inquiry and that they blew off your concerns.
If at all possible, make them out to be as unchristian and close-minded as possible so that even the most believing Mormon will sympathize with you.
If your leaders are in fact complex humans who are doing their best to lead an organization with no financial remuneration or formal training in such areas as business management, organizational behavior, but do what they do, if for no other reason then they were asked to.
Step 5: The realization
This point will either make or break or your story. It is important that up to this point you have convinced your audience that you have wrestled with both the Church and the “issues” for a sufficient amount of time to get an answer. You should make your realization appear to be an epiphany not unlike what a convert experiences when they have read and prayed in faith about the Book of Mormon. If you want, take the ex-Mormons for Jesus route, talking about how you discovered the real Jesus, the Biblical Jesus, as opposed to the inventions of Joseph Smith you believed before.
Now what you will have to do is categorically deny every spiritual experience that you, or anyone else has had in Mormonism as delusion. You can get technical call these sacred experiences self-fulfilling prophecies, or that people wanted to believe and find meaning in Mormonism, and therefore convinced themselves that they were experiencing something divine when in fact, they were really meeting their own emotional deficiencies.
But anyways be sure to mention that because there seemed to be no solution, that you came to the conclusion that the Church must not be true and that everything, be sure to include everything, is a lie.
Step 6: Martyrdom (Optional)
Now if you want to improve your status in the ex-Mormon community and therefore your credibility, it pays to stick around and wait until the Church excommunicates you for apostasy. Start a blog, and then find a way for your stake president to get a hold of it. This might take months, and may require you to take a more direct approach. But the key is you want them to throw you out only to make the point that the Mormon hierarchy is only interested in thought control and orthodoxy and therefore has no love for dissidents.
It is important that exclude that Armaund Mauss, Leonard Arrington, and others in the Mormon studies community have had their differences over so called difficult issues but were not cast out. If you hint at this, it will severely weaken your case.
Step 7: Move on?
After you have left the Church at this point, talk about how happy you are since extricating yourself from the nonsense you once believed. Talk about the peace you have found in associating with others who now actively seek to tear down the faith of those who don’t have a problem. Be sure to revel in your ex-Mormoness on message boards and blogs. And if you really get ambitious, attend an ExMo conference. These kinds of things will be sure sign that you have left the Church and have moved on with your life because you are still thinking about these things only from a very negative perspective.
If you follow these simple steps and include some flair in your writing style, you too can write a successful and persuasive exit story bound to earn you the compassion of other dissidents and the scorn of those, especially those, who are aware of tough issues but are smart enough to make sense of them and keep their testimonies.
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A Bible, A Bible
A post over at Faith Promoting Rumor asked why does it seem that most members of the Church are deficient when it comes to the New Testament, or the Bible as a whole. I have thought about my own experiences with the New Testament and why I often prefer the Book of Mormon, or say, the Pearl of Great Price in my study of the scripture.
Redding California, back in 1998, was the first place that I ever attempted to read the NT, mostly in effort to be able to missionary work in a community that had a high concentration of Evangelical Christians. I made it through the four gospels and the Acts, but when I reached the first Pauline Epistle, I felt like I had slammed up against a brick wall. I had no idea what Paul was talking about. To me, his words were not plain, and I would only come to appreciate his words after years of scripture study.
As I mentioned, the language was my big hang up. Part of the problem is with who translated the New Testament for the King James Version. They were the most learned men of their time, doing a translation that would largely be read by other educated people. From what I know, the KJV represents the best scholarship of the times, and from what I know about scholars, their words are not often accessible to the common man.
For me, that was the only obstacle. I knew that the NT was valuable, and therefore I invested the time and effort to understand the Epistles, and have since come to love them.
Language obstacle aside, many members, especially those only familiar with Latter-day Scripture, see the Bible as inferior because of the “plain and precious parts” that have been removed by the Great and Abominable Church. Unfortunately they fail to realize that though Nephi pointed out that sacred truth had been removed, he never discounted the value of that record and saw that it would be the means of keeping the coals of faith burning throughout centuries of apostasy and darkness.
Those with this perspective, forget that it was that the General Epistle of James that inspired Joseph Smith to ask god in prayer which church was right, something that he had never thought of.
But that said, I have made the Bible part of my personal study. I will still say that while I prefer the Book of Mormon and am most familiar with that sacred record, I know that all the testaments of Christ, which contain sacred truth, will make anyone a better person if they will but embrace and live by the truth contained in those records.
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“Mormoness”
Yesterday a friend and coworker said something that left me taken back; it caught me off guard. We were talking about faith and religion and my friend said that I was not like other Mormons she has known. This seemed odd. I began wonder if somehow, because of my personal intellectual and spiritual interests, I was somehow less “Mormon” then others.
It gave me a chance to ponder my “Mormoness” and do some soul searching. After some careful thought I came up with what follows.
First of all I am proud of the classification Mormon. For a long time I wanted to be thought of by others as a Christian because my faith was not in Mormon, Joseph Smith, or any other person from the Book of Mormon or in the church’s hierarchy, but in Jesus Christ, the Savior and redeemer of the world. Now I feel good with considering myself, and even calling myself Mormon because it distinguishes me from other Christians, and helps me maintain my individuality and uniqueness in a sea of conformity, but still consider myself a Christian (I guess you can be a Mormon and Christian after all).
For some people that I do know and have known, they know that the Church is true and there is nothing else they worry about. Most other things become irrelevant outside, and they comfortably settle into whatever Mormon community is available to them interacting with nonmembers only in work and on a very limited basis as neighbors and members of whatever communities they live in.
Others could be considered ultra orthodox. Everything they do is in their minds the result of “official” pronouncements, either past or present, or opinion that has come from general authorities. They tend have a very closed, literal, interpretation of the scriptures, not taking the time to consider the wonder and beauty that is found in the symbolic, and esoteric ideas that present themselves on almost every page, and perhaps every verse.
Much depression, despondency, and even apostasy has resulted from Latter-day Saints taking commandments and standards that are good, and then adding a pharisaic, restrictive, and confining oral tradition, or hedge, that prevents a person from violating a covenant or commandment. Their zeal can transform homes into prisons, leaving more independent children believing that there is no other option then to escape at the first chance.
Then are those who in the words of Richard Bushman are interested in the heights and depths of the faith, its’ possibilities and ends. This group oddly enough feels liberated through keeping the commandments and making covenants with God. When you are around them their words and actions towards you and others causes your soul to expand during the time you are with them.
I think that my Mormoness is relatively fluid and that at different times of life I have been in each camp. Right now I am in some ways in the last category of the existential optimists and those who are content with simple, childlike, faith, with specklings of the ultra orthodox in such things as the word of wisdom and law of chastity, but not much else as far as that category goes.
What do you consider yourself? How would you describe your Mormoness, or non-Mormoness?
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Big things
Today was big. Some things that were tying me to my life in Georgia were suddenly removed. But first let me explain what has made today, of all days, significant.
Over the summer I worked for EFY and had an awesome experience. In October I met with President Weiler and was able to lay to rest some things that had been damning me for years. Those two events had a profound, if not life changing, “saving”, effect on me. I began to experience confidence not unlike what I experienced before going on a mission. From there I decided that life is too short to live in indecision and be sullen, or be angry for very long with others who have wronged you. The line from The Shawshank Redemption, “Either get busy living or get busy dieing”, seemed applicable.
After that I got serious about my graduate school applications. I began to put forth more effort at work, and for the first time in a long time began to really enjoy being a member of the Church (I like being Mormon again).
Strangely as all of this has happened I have felt less and less connected to people and institutions that were keeping me in Georgia. It was like God was giving me permission to finally, after so many years, to follow my dreams, which may or may not mean living in the southeast.
Just a few hours ago there were a couple of things that happened that have caused me to think about moving west, or at least moving somewhere else. The first is that Caroline and Linda, two people that I have worked with and developed a pretty close relationship with, have decided to end their careers working with persons with severe autism and move to the new mild classroom that will be opening in the fall. At least they are going to apply for a transfer, which I am confident they will get.
Rikki, the remaining member of the crew, who is also a dear friend, will be leaving to do her student teaching and wants to start her career with the public schools as a teacher next year. I think that she will do well. She has a genuine love and regard for the kids and I think that will go a long, long, way.
Because the job is so demanding, and because it is such a team effort, I am thinking very seriously about moving on.org myself. Something inside keeps telling me to call Brother Shaw to be observed in my early morning seminary teaching. Perhaps this would lead to a student teaching position with CES next year. Who knows? All I know is that almost daily I am prompted to do this.
So what does all this mean? In three weeks I will have heard back from all of the schools that I have applied to and received either the “yeah” or the “nay” from each of them. Once I have all my cards, I will then be able to play my hand. I will then decide whether to move west or not.
Right now I am pretty sure that I got accepted to BYU’s special education certification program. The Instructional Psychology thing could go either way. I will probably not hear from USU until May which is kind of frustrating but okay.
But had I not been “saved” earlier from depression, I do not think that I would be able to do all of this. All that I ask now is for the strength to make a decision and then follow it through to the end.
Continue reading ‘Big things’
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Lobster at the end of the world
Last night I had a crazy dream. I have since entitled it Lobster at the end of the world.
The dream went as follows.
My friends and I were hanging out when there was a blinding flash that filled the sky. Immediately we realized that the sun had just died and that soon, life as we know it on earth would cease.
As you could imagine there was general pandemonium. The freeways were clogged as people tried to make their way underground in order to survive. In our quest for underground sanctuary from the cold that would soon ensue we happened upon a wedding reception that had been abandoned.
This was a real high-class affair, complete with a very large main lobster at each plate and a sophisticated computerized machine designed to de-shell our fare relieving one of the mess that results from eating lobster.
So there we were. Sitting around enjoying the fact that we were enjoying this ill-gotten lobster at the end of the world.
Unfortunately I awoke and sadly, there was no lobster.
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An ode to no one
Welcome to an ode to no one. This is a place for me to say what I want to say and not worry about any of the consequences. Dumping ground for descent, a place for opining, or just a place to unwind and decompress. So if you like this, then bookmark it and come often, there will usually be something new.
So welcome to An ode to no one.
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An Ode To No One 