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Interesting question of whether gay marriage is an unintended outcome of Christian values or culture. I have thought about it myself; and while I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Christianity resulted in (the concept of) gay marriage, I do think it’s an inevitable outgrowth of legalistic Western society. Legalism is a mental construct which creates structure where it does not literally exist and draws definitions that are more exact than what would actually exist. For example, there are actually some live-in relationships which have no legal recognition but are for all practical social and psychological purposes stronger than a lot of marriages. But in a society where just about anything that counts is defined legalistically–everything from property to academic credentials to personal identity–it is inevitable that people will want their relationships to be legally defined for emotional as well as utilitarian reasons. The downside of this, of course, is that gay marriages risk being socially regarded by many as less than completely real, in the same way that African-American men having been endowed with constitutional rights after the Civil War still had to wait a century before social legitimacy caught up. Christianity is at the very least a co-conspirator in all of this because the highly legalistic nature of Western society is directly inherited from an era in which the church and society and government were indistinguishable (up to the 19th century). The LDS Church is an unwitting accomplice because it has tied its own religious and spiritual notions to legalistic definitions. We do not simply regard temple sealings as a religious rite separate and apart from civil marriage but ideally as one and the same. And I think this is the conundrum in which LDS leadership finds itself today: a choice between continuing to align our rites with the greater legalistic structure in society and risk being encroached upon; or separating the two and forcing its members to do the harder conceptual task of mentally distinguishing legalistic from spiritual.
hope wrote:I feel promptings & and hear whisperings. Beyond that, I don’t know anymore what is real.
Hi Hope, I’m Tom and I have dealt with the sense of not knowing what is real and what isn’t. Based on my own experience, I can tell you for certain that you are firmly grounded and heading in the right direction. Those last two sentences that you wrote make all the difference. That is what it is all about. And those promptings and whisperings lead to greater things, things that ultimately do confirm that the Church is true.
I myself have spent years wrestling with what seems to be overwhelming evidence that none of these historical events actually happened. It’s fine with me if they never happened as long as the fruits of the Gospel are real … and yes, they are real and even tangible. You know why Joseph Smith wrote about messengers shaking hands (D&C 129)? Probably because he knew that there are things from beyond the veil that are indeed real, even physically real, not just thoughts or dreams or visions. I know this too. So if somehow the narrative that we’ve been taught was never literally true, that’s ok with me.
nibbler wrote:Will science one day disprove service, love, charity?
Actually, Nibbler, yes. The 21st century is going to see an explosion of scientific findings about the neurological basis of who we are in terms of our self-consciousness, how we think, what we do. I expect that we will find out that a lot of values we thought were universally applicable are not. For example, let’s say we have a paradigm of love that is embodied in certain people that we greatly admire at church, and we want people to emulate that example of love. How do we even know that that particular manifestation of love is not rooted in genetics, brain chemistry, or childhood environment? If it is, we may be wasting our efforts trying to get everyone else to follow that example. I myself have stopped trying to pattern my own sense of charity on those people who are commonly admired in the ward. Don’t get me wrong–I care a lot about other people and I don’t have a lack of love in my heart, but it always seems to come out differently.
That is just one small example. Most if not all of the things that we think science cannot “disprove” will eventually be either explained or at least put in context. When that day comes, we will have to rethink such basic concepts as agency, sin, love, accountability, and many others.
SilentDawning wrote:What do you think should be the role of research findings in influencing our belief systems, even when the conclusions from the research conflicts with prevailing thought from the LDS leadership?
What a provocative question! I must weigh in on this. I think there are several areas of research that should inform our belief systems.
1. Research into church history. This is vitally important for all sorts of reasons. To be able to understand how the Church works–and why it has to be dragged kicking and screaming at every juncture of history–it is helpful to read Quinn’s research into the evolution of church governance. But more importantly, research into Joseph Smith’s personal history has helped me to have a better idea of what his actual spiritual experiences were and weren’t. I need this badly because I have had many powerful spiritual events and they don’t have any parallels in the official version of his life story and what the official story would imply about his spiritual learning curve.
2. Research into scripture, both in terms of BOM/POGP as well as the Bible. We as a church have many of the same misconceptions of Biblical interpretation as Protestants do. Understanding that the New Testament was written many years after Christ’s death has actually helped me to better appreciate the role of the BOM as inspired literature (even if it may be fictional). I’d rather rely on scripture written by a spiritually insightful person which I believe JS was in our time, rather than rely solely on a culturally corrupted account of Jesus in the NT.
3. Research into the workings of the brain. It is clear to me that our spirituality is essentially mental. I am not saying there is nothing beyond the veil that is actually physically real; I am saying that our perception and understanding of these things is skewed by limitations of consciousness. Among many other possibilities, neurological research will give us a better sense of how we really make decisions and lead to a very different conception of agency and sin.
4. Archaelogical and geological research debunking traditional Mormon beliefs about history, including the BOM. This does not mean that the educated Latter-Day Saint should necessarily assume that humans evolved as is now commonly believed by scientifically-educated people. But the starting point for any conjecture about our past cannot rely on 19th-century beliefs about the age of the Earth that Mormons borrowed from contemporary Protestantism.
5. Research into the sociology and psychology of group association. There are so many LDS assumptions about our own group dynamics that I suspect are not valid. Why does the Church have so much turnover among converts? Is it simply because they fall away into sin or is it because of inherent limitations in our participatory model? Does the conformity of LDS society drive out certain personalities, such as creative types?
The willingness to face what research might prove is one of the hardest acts of deconstruction. It is a process that I continue even as I affirm my belief in the Church and its unique purpose in the world. Thanks, SilentDawning, for bringing this up.
My faith crisis/transition took place in the late 1990s when I’d been a member of the Church for about six years. By 1998 I had deconstructed to the point of being atheistic (or non-theistic) in my thinking. I asked to have my name removed, but that was more to see if local leaders even cared (they did) and not because I wouldn’t give the Church another chance. Recently, an ex-mo friend of mine asked me how I was able to deconstruct so thoroughly and not go completely inactive or leave the Church. At the moment I didn’t have an answer for him. Now that I think about it for the sake of this thread, I think it’s because I was not raised to be dogmatic about religion. My parents were from the Far East, and Eastern religions are by nature non-dogmatic (that is, if A is true it does not preclude the opposite of A). So when I found out that the evidence against the BOM is damning, I didn’t take that to mean that the Church is necessarily a complete fraud (or a fraud at all) and therefore I have to leave. On the flip side of that, missionaries who serve in the Far East know how frustrating it is to have an investigator conclude the Church is true but not agree that they have to be baptized.
When I talk to atheists I often see this same Western Christian dogmatism in their language, and I am put off by it. Freethinkers and skeptics should search themselves for ingrained habits of dogmatic thinking. It helps so much to throw out the “it’s all true or it’s not true at all” dichotomy. And that is how I stayed LDS.
My garden of innocence was that three-year-period right after I was baptized in 1992. It’s painfully hilarious to remember how literally I took everything and how obedient I tried to be. I even wrote my favorite BOM verses on aluminum foil just for fun. Even anti-Mormon books had no effect on me. I read Deborah Laake’s book “Secret Ceremonies” and innocently asked an old man in the Temple about the old endowment ceremony. To my surprise, he gave me a candid answer, then invited me to go ask the temple president, to which I replied “no, that’s okay.” The unraveling started when I got to be a veil worker at the Atlanta Temple, and they explained that if anyone forgot a certain bit of information, it’s the same for everyone who went through on that day. That was an “oh …” moment. I had it committed to memory. After that I realized that even the Church doesn’t take these things literally.
Today I still consider myself as having a testimony of the Church. I occasionally get up in F&TM and speak. I really do believe in the Church. My testimony today is based on spiritual experiences, but without having to make everything fit. If it doesn’t fit, I let it go. And I wouldn’t want to go back to my 1994 belief system for anything in the world.
Hi open, I am somewhat familiar with intellectual LDS apologetics, which is what Fair is, because in my area we used to have a very unconventional member of the Church who was a university academic and apologist. I don’t know whether you should go. It depends on the intellectual quality of the people who will be presenting. Fair not being officially associated with the Church, my understanding is that they do engage the help of people who are intellectually sophisticated (at least by LDS standards) so at least they are unlikely to be insultingly simplistic. They will not just be spouting the lds.org talking points. Since it’s held as a church meeting though, it’s probably somewhere between the extremes of a free-for-all discussion and the highly sanitized atmosphere of a missionary fireside. You can bet the presenters, as intellectually honest as they may turn out to be, will be vastly outnumbered by an audience with traditional apologist answers (including all the ones you’ve heard 1,000 times) and missionaries. It would remind me of those missionary events where the visitors are outnumbered 50-to-one by the members. I personally would go, but just to observe the dynamics and throw in a few provocative queries. If you do decide to go, let us know how it went!
Hi Jazzy Lou. I’m Tom, and I am a convert, too, so I understand a lot of what you’re talking about. I won’t try to sugarcoat it or try to defend the people who kicked you, but there are some things that are hard for a convert to perceive because of lack of perspective (not having any friends or family to explain). For example, there are questions that many members of the Church don’t know the real answer to. If you went around asking what’s the difference between the baptismal covenant and the Temple covenant, a lot of lifelong members would be hard-pressed to give a conceptual answer that isn’t legalistic. Same with worthiness for the Temple–other than the interview questions, what’s really at issue? Basically, it’s maturity, basic knowledge, and a lifestyle conducive to spiritual progression. The first is about age, the second is implied if you’ve been going to Gospel Essentials class, the third is known both from an interview as well as what else is obvious about you. But enough of that–I know that’s not really what’s getting at you.
The truth is there are actually some lifelong members of the Church who are indifferent or hostile to converts. I will say definitely that there are three groups of people I have always found to be very kind to converts–the really gung-ho conservative members who are fanatics (because to them converts “prove” the truth of the Church); and liberal dissenters because to them converts bring in much-needed relief from the conformity of the Church, even if they have a literal take on LDS doctrine which is typical of converts. Also, a third group–quirky members who just don’t fit into the LDS mold. The remainder are a lot of lukewarm Latter-Day Saints who are not on fire with the Gospel nor are they people who rock the boat. These people often don’t know how to relate to the experiences of converts (especially if they didn’t serve a mission) and they often relate to the Church purely on a cynical social level which may involve things like cliquishness, gossip, etc.
Bishops are often misunderstood by converts who expect a higher degree of spiritual enlightenment than is common. What converts expect of bishops is more often found in stake presidents and mission presidents–that kind of person who is a LDS paragon of love, understanding, charity– and that is by design in the selection criteria for higher leaders. Some people may disagree with my generalizations here but I think that it is still a good guide to understanding how the Church works and why converts so often have disappointing experiences with bishops.
Another thing about bishops is that the Church is very strict about temple recommends, and bishops don’t have leeway on this. I have been given callings such as teaching the youth even when not paying tithing, but that’s common. Unfortunately, the Church does not distinguish between reasons for not being able to pay tithing–it is an absolute requirement, as far as I know. Say you started a business and it wasn’t working out (a typical scenario); that is not an acceptable reason. The spiritual underpinning for tithing is that in order to progress to a certain level of enlightenment, one does have to be able to transcend the natural urge to want total security.
I think that you’ve got to give the LDS experience more time before it starts to pay off. I know a woman who told me that for the first five years after she got baptized it was like she went to hell. Only her testimony kept her in the Church. My experience and timeline was similar.
When you seek counseling on things, never hesitate to seek out a member of the stake presidency (doesn’t have to be the SP, his counselors will do). Those men are often more mature and spiritual than the average bishop, and my experience with stake presidencies have been almost always positive. One nice thing about the Church is that its leaders especially at stake level and above are people who really do genuinely love others in a way that is not common in society.
Quote:“But, why don’t they allow worthy couples who get married outside of the temple to get sealed immediately?”
(By the way you can just call me Tom, my real name.) I don’t know … it really frustrates me that on so many issues like this the Church just leaves it to us to speculate about the reasons. That hurts the Church in the long run because the antis come up with really dark theories. I think the most plausible spiritual reason is that they don’t want the whole concept of marriage to get associated in your mind with the conventions of the world–picture in your mind the whole image of the “wedding” with the cake and the flowers and the silly vows (of course, they’re not silly, I’m just trying to put myself in the mindset of Temple-is-superior-to-worldly-wedding) and the bridesmaids with their matching dresses. But wait … all of that is present at the reception (except for the vows) and of course there are many people who don’t really have a spiritual/testimony level of understanding of the Temple.
I almost did not join the Church because of the rule against anyone who is not “worthy” being able to witness the sealing. You cannot expect an investigator to have a witness of the Temple much less being willing right away to ditch mom and dad. And I’m a guy … just imagine what a normal young woman in her 20’s would feel … and we wonder why usually it’s quirky people who are willing to join the Church (in contrast to LDS videos that always depict converts as conventional people … LOL).
Hi Curtis! I totally agree with your post. Modest (which in LDS-speak means covered up) is not always non-provocative, and immodest (revealing) is not always provocative. Which is more sexually provocative to a 20-year-old male missionary passing by: a young woman dressed in a black tank top and short shorts and flip flops on a hot summer day, with very little makeup and plain straight hair pulled back with a scrunchie, and her bare legs are ewww not worthy of being bare; or a middle-aged woman with Farrah-Fawcett-era hair and perfect makeup to go with her botox and other cosmetic ahem enhancements, dressed in a satin blouse and knee-length pencil skirt with four-inch black pumps, who knows how to act and walk in a sexy way?
Thank you, Inquiring Mind. I too have gone back to the Temple on certain occasions after reconstructing (which is actually a process not a one-time occurrence). It was good to read of someone going to the Temple with a specific objective of enlightenment in mind and not just to do work. I think it is possible both to not go to the Temple enough (or not enough to provoke any kind of epiphany) and to go too often (relative to one’s sense of purpose). Your experience is a good example of how we should really be teaching Temple attendance if we were concerned about spiritual enlightenment and not numbers or legalistic thinking. The one time that I went to the Temple with a very specific objective was in 2007, and I wanted to verify an impression I got from spiritual manifestations. It has to do with what is meant by the levels of priesthood represented in the endowment ceremony, and what Joseph Smith probably understood. These questions were burning in my head, so I jumped the gun and went on the Internet to look it up on a website that had the modern post-1990 ceremony. (I really didn’t want to do that but I couldn’t wait.) Then I went to the Temple and yes, I felt my impressions were correct. Joseph Smith most likely saw the levels of priesthood as representing levels of enlightenment that people can attain in mortality.
That’s just my own impression. I am not preaching this as gospel. Maybe JS wasn’t that deep and I’m reading too much into him. But that is the beauty of the Temple experience that I see in your account. Thanks.
Hi amateurparent, I am so sorry for your loss. I think I sort of know what kind of experience you’re talking about with the ward, because I was in a ward like that–the kind of ward that has mostly very affluent people, very busy with their myriad activities, often standoff-ish. In that ward, I saw at least two young women who had no friends. The other young women who shunned them had parents that were regarded (whether rightly or wrongly) as good Latter-Day Saints.
In all the time that I’ve been a member of the Church (two decades as a convert), I have only once heard a talk where the speaker had a sad ending. Their child died. Usually these talks end with “and then everything turned out great in the end.” I have always wanted to ask them, “What about the other people who die?” I think it is inherently very frightening for Latter-Day Saints to think about tragedy where there is no easy pat answer. You will notice, too, that even GA’s and apostles tend to avoid talks with sad or unknown outcomes, with the notable exception of BKP’s mention of the Japanese boy on the train platform who was left out in the cold as the future Elder Packer struggled to get out some money for him but the train started moving.
It’s ok to be angry. I’ve been angry at a lot of people and even the Church. I’m not angry anymore but it was understandable back then because there is such a contrast between the promise of the true church and the reality of how unenlightened a lot of it is. Just try to focus on the positive–the few members who are truly compassionate and exhibit the LDS sense of charity as pure love (even my old ward had a few).
There is no easy explanation for the obtuseness and the pat answers (that you listed examples of). But part of it, I think, is generational. I have noticed that LDS people who were born in the Church prior to about 1970 and especially before 1960 were taught a lot of explanatory doctrine. Perhaps the most harmful example being the idea that people’s birth circumstances reflect what they deserved from lack of valiance in the premortal existence. Many of the insensitive comments that you’ve heard are probably coming from people who heard these explanations growing up. I believe that the Saints born after 1980 are far less prone to this kind of insensitivity because the Church to its credit has made sure to stop (officially) teaching these kinds of explanatory doctrines.
As for your child’s predicament in the youth program, I can only say that I know it will get better when she’s a grown up in the church among adults who have testimonies. I don’t have any children, but I have taught the youth, and I notice that the youth include by default people who have no testimony and will never have one. They will not be around after the age of 18. There are others who will grow up and discover the meaning of the Gospel, then they will be sorry that they mistreated someone. Still there are others who probably never meant to shun someone but didn’t have the courage to do anything about it, or perhaps they were not observant enough to realize that it was happening.
I hope that helps a bit. Keep posting, and let us know how you are coping.
Hi Dontknow, I just joined recently. I am a convert, so I never really liked the families are forever concept when it is taken at face value because obviously people who are culturally LDS would have a huge advantage. You don’t have to have deconstructed a lot to see that a person’s acceptance of the Gospel is a lot easier if they are surrounded by faithful family members in Utah vs. some convert’s spouse or parent or adult child who is a devoted follower of another religion. This is one of those teachings in the Church that works in a closed society where everyone is LDS and of similar ethnicity and pioneer ancestry and where it is hard to leave because of a hostile outside world. I have noticed that in the two decades since I got baptized, the Church has been softening these kinds of teachings because they can’t be so easily applied to the situations of converts and lifelong members who are not multigenerational. Temple sealing vs. civil wedding: the Church always likes to align its practices with the practices of the world whenever possible because that way people who are more literal minded simply associate the higher concept with the lower concept. (You can see this in the practice of promoting priesthood leaders who are more affluent or educated so the hierarchy mirrors social stratification.) I am not rationalizing this or saying it’s spiritually correct, just saying that’s what the Church likes to do. I believe the Church wants sexual experience and the Temple sealing to coincide for the first time for both. Sex is a surreal experience, and so is the Temple endowment/sealing to a lesser degree. This is why in those countries where a civil wedding is mandated by law, the Church wants its members to not consummate the marriage until after the sealing. If they approve the separation of civil vs. sealing here in the U.S., no doubt the Church will require you to turn around and get sealed immediately.
I have had the faith crises (plural). To really progress spiritually, we have to confront our worst fears–like what if the Church is completely a fraud and participation in it is completely useless? I don’t think it is useless or a fraud, but I am glad that I got over the fear of thinking about that long ago.
Ann wrote:Hi, Tom – If you’re comfortable, I would love to hear more about both of these things.
Hi Ann, yes, I feel comfortable talking about my time in inactivity and also the epiphanies in the Temple. I was only inactive for several months sometime around 1998, but to talk about it I have to back up a bit. I got my endowment in the Atlanta Temple in late 1993. Like most people going through for the first time, I really didn’t think much of it. Within a few months I was already thinking a lot about things that I’d never pondered on before–like what the world would be in the future. I was not deconstructing yet–at this point I still took the Church’s teachings almost completely at face value–but my thinking was a lot deeper than at anytime before getting my endowment. You could say I was becoming mystical in my spiritualism.
So by 1998, when I considered leaving the Church, I was far beyond the level where someone would want to go back and “investigate” any other churches. It was so funny: I remember when the stake president asked me later why in the world would I pick a hell-fire-and-brimstone evangelical mega-church, I had no answer for him. There was nothing they taught that resonated with me. It felt like someone in high school having to go back to kindergarten–the questions and issues they raise in other Christian churches really were distressingly elementary to me. The LDS theological system is so much more sophisticated than theirs. The real reason I went to that church was to have company–just the single adult sunday school classes alone approached the population of an LDS YSA branch!
Epiphany in the Temple: at some point, I began to attend the Temple again. In 2002, I was watching the beginning of the video and I remember thinking that the music sounded a lot like science fiction music. Science fiction as a genre of movie and literature has always provoked a lot of thought in me. So at that very moment, it occurred to me that in the scientific era in which we live, we automatically accept futuristic vision while rejecting or looking down on classical/ancient renderings. When you tell people that Jesus will descend from a staircase in the sky, they naturally scoff at that; but the idea of “First Contact” with extraterrestrials is taken seriously. I am not saying that I thought that Jesus would be coming from another planet, just that I was making that comparison in my mind.
At that very moment, just having held that thought in my mind for a second, I was hit with the greatest realization of anything that I’d experienced up to that point in my life. It was like trying to drink from a fire hose, thoughts were racing through my mind faster than I could stop and think. All sorts of thoughts–like what if the Garden of Eden was not the place as described in Genesis but a vastly more advanced civilization (again I am not saying that is what it is, just that that was what I was thinking at the moment). All sorts of implications of these thoughts, far too many to remember, all going through my mind in the span of maybe five to ten seconds. The whole experience instantly left me exhausted and distracted. I wanted nothing more than to hurry up and get out of the Temple so I could finish thinking about all the implications. It became very difficult to focus on the endowment ceremony. This experience really marked the beginning of my belief, which continues to this day, that it is possible to have revelatory experiences in the form of thought that is far more profound than what we normally experience on a daily basis.
mercyngrace wrote:I’m interested in your definition of “true” and how the church meets that definition. Would you explain?
Thanks for asking. Basically it has to do with the Temple. Truman Madsen said the Temple is a catalyst (his word). I believe there is a potential for very powerful experiences coming out of Temple attendance. Why, I am not absolutely sure but I think it has to do with the unique environment in there. We in the Church appear to be unique in having access to this catalyst. That is why I have no problem with the Mormon mantra “the Church is true” although I am sure my home teachers have a very different understanding of that every time I say it.
