PBS The Mormons

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_beastie
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Post by _beastie »

Huck, here's your answer, the best I can at this point:

I’m not sure why I was so moved by the documentary. I wonder if it was symbolic somehow of my own LDS journey – what I thought I had found in Mormonism, overlaid with emotional complications and the seamier underside of LDS history. I’m sorting out the “why” literally as I type.

It is certainly not a coincidence that I joined the church at a confusing crossroads in my life. I had entered college a year earlier than most folks, at what I now believe is “far too young to be leaving home” barely 17. My first year was rough. I was one of those people who always knew what they wanted to be when they grew up – an actress. I didn’t want to be a movie star – I wanted to be a stage actress. I inadvertently discovered I could act much better than my peers way back in fifth grade, and I never looked back after that. Acting was a cathartic, exhilarating experience for me, an opportunity to live in someone else’s skin and experience life through their eyes, and experience a range of emotions I had not yet encountered in life. So it was devastating and life-altering for me to decide, after my freshman year majoring in theater in a school known for its drama program, that, largely due to my inability to sing, I was probably destined for a life of waitressing with off-off-off broadway parts in between. I decided acting would have to be a passionate hobby rather than my career, but that was the only clarity I had about anything at the moment. I dabbled in various majors, all the while spending most of my time outside of class in plays, but nothing grabbed me. It was like the life I always knew I would lead was suddenly erased, with nothing to replace it.

This lack of focus seemed to heighten my desire to “figure life out” in general. While I had grown up in a believing household, my mother kneeling down with us to pray every night, attending church faithfully, no swearing, little alcohol, no carrying-on, when I became a teenager I rejected the youthful, trusting belief I had been taught to had. Typical teenage experimentation, I suppose. But the “God Question” didn’t go away entirely, and my new-found loss of focus, career-wise, seemed to make the “God Question” loom even larger.

So, a young college student at a crossroads, confused, looking for direction, whose admired older sister recently joined the LDS church = Golden Contact.

The missionaries taught me how to pray (in retrospect, perhaps it should have struck me odd that God required some sort of “proper form”, but I’d been brought up in mainstream Christianity, which had plenty of “proper forms”) and told me to ask if the Book of Mormon was “true” and if Joseph Smith was a prophet. I did, and received an extremely intense answer to the first, and zero answer to the second – (ever). After my initial exhilaration of feeling what I automatically believed to be God in response to the Book of Mormon prayer, I experienced despair when that same God refused to answer question number 2. Nothing. Nada. Zip. If I had been strict with what the missionaries taught me and what LDS scripture said, I would have concluded the answer to: “was Joseph Smith a true prophet”? was “no”. But I couldn’t bring myself to believe that, because I wanted to believe in and re-experience what I had felt after the Book of Mormon prayer, so I was easily convinced by my sister and the missionaries that if God answered prayer one, he had also answered prayer two. (reasoning I had already intuited to be fallacious but chose my heart over my mind)

Being a young convert in the LDS church was like falling in love, or what I imagined falling in love should be. Everything seemed more alive, I felt more alive, and in constant, intimate communion with God. Does an infant in the womb feel this way? Constantly upheld and caressed in something warm and loving? I did, and the feeling lasting at quite an intense level for several months, before leveling off into normalcy.

Of course I knew nothing about the Mormon church at that point, outside the basic missionary lessons. So this part of my life experience seemed echoed in the awed voice of Teryl Givens. The first part of the documentary emphasized that Joseph’s radical idea was that every believer could access God in the very direct way he told us he had experienced God himself. It was all about revelation – personal, intimate revelation, the “relationship” with God. The dogma and actual teachings, though they interested me a great deal and I was like a sponge ready to soak up all this new, “correct” knowledge, was still secondary to the numinous event, and I yearned to repeat that numinous event as often as possible. I fasted literally every Sunday, having learned this was a measure of devotion, and having experienced how much easier it was to “tap into” that mystical energy field when dehydrated and hungry. I prayed at length at least once a day, (even more when I went to BYU), and at shorter periods in between, and I often was “talking” to God inside as I went about my business otherwise. I suppose, in some way, I threw myself into being LDS and experience God first-hand, in a way I don’t remember being taught to expect in the mainstream religion I had experienced (mainly the Methodist church), the way I had previously threw myself into being an actress. In fact, perhaps I was living life in a new way, the way I had formerly done through stage roles. Although I have no proof of this other than anecdotal exchange of information, it seems to me that people with a flair for drama (not being a dramatic person, but flair for acting and truly “being” another person and experience those emotions of a different life) are probably more liable to experience intense religious epiphanies.

So the drama of Mormonism seemed to be the drama of my conversion, too. It was a passionate conversion, and that passion lasted well over a decade, until the second part of the drama began to unfold, which was echoed all along in the documentary. Of course, the second part of the drama was my gradual discovery of an entirely different Mormon history – different than the one I’d been taught by the missionaries and in church.

Sidebar – I must comment on the oft-repeated inanity that it is somehow the fault of specific Mormons if they never knew about this “other” church history. We were lazy. All that information was right at our fingertips. That may be true for internet-connected individuals today, but it most adamantly was not true for most of my time in the church. I tried to obtain outsider information about the LDS church before joining, but could only find two slim EV anti-mormon booklets in my college library, and they were so patently biased I found it easy to ignore them. Other than that, there was nothing available to me. Moreover, I didn’t even know there WAS an “other side” of LDS history, so how could I know to look for it? I would never, never have imagined I was being fed a whitewashed version of sacred history. Truth meant too much in Mormonism for me to suspect such a thing. It was all about Truth – that was why Joseph went to the grove to begin with – the search for Truth. The church leaders would never mislead members. Honesty was too important.

My exposure to the other side of church history was inadvertent – picking up Mormon Enigma in my local library from the “new book” shelf, amazed that I had found a book about the church (I live back east where there is little interest in things Mormon) at all, and feeling safe because it was written by members. Little did I know that book contained information that rocked me to the core, and began an entirely different sort of journey.

So in the documentary, we had scenes of religious fervor, epiphanies, and numinous events of Joseph and converts, with sidebar comments in-between: rumors of sexual improprieties. Different versions of the First Vision. Lack of evidence for the Book of Mormon. It is like a wildly contradictory, bizarre combination. Sure, I had heard of the agony and the ecstasy, but never realized BOTH could be so well delivered by one vehicle.

I don’t mean to sound that I found Mormon culture to be a great fit – I didn’t. I did not grow up fantasizing about getting married and having kids. I grew up fantasizing about being an actress, and when that failed, was obsessed with what career I would replace that fantasy with. It’s hard to believe for those so influenced by Mormon culture, but marriage and motherhood was never a consideration for me. I’m not sure I would have ever have married and had children, had I not become a Mormon, to be frank. It’s not that I wasn’t interested in men – I was very interested in men and had strong heterosexual drives. It was just the marriage and motherhood part that didn’t factor into my imagination at all. So it was a very odd fit to suddenly feel religiously compelled to adopt marriage and motherhood as my primary life goal, but adopt it I did.

I became a different person for my belief.

I guess that is why I related, in my own way, to the parts in the documentary about how converts devoted their entire lives and livelihoods to the church. I am fairly certain I would have done the same, because I changed “who I was” for the church, anyway.

In short, I was a passionate convert, so I related to the imagery and stories of the early passionate converts.

But, as with most things in life, it all turned out to be much more complicated and burdened than it appeared at the beginning. As someone pointed out, the real message of the documentary is that this is a man-made church, that has the potential to both significant benefit and harm human beings, and that was the primary lesson I learned in part 2 of my drama.

But it was a poignant lesson for me, just as it appeared to be for many in the documentary. While Mormonism was not a good cultural fit for me, and I made some very bad decisions due to the LDS influence, I was a passionate believer, “in love”, I suppose, with the whole idea that the documentary pointed to as pivotal to Joseph Smith’ primary lesson to others: he had experienced God intimately, and each one of us could, as well.

It seems like a beautiful lesson for theists in general. But, in the end, for me it was a beautiful story slain by ugly facts.

There was just something about the documentary that captured that for me – beauty and the beast.
We hate to seem like we don’t trust every nut with a story, but there’s evidence we can point to, and dance while shouting taunting phrases.

Penn & Teller

http://www.mormonmesoamerica.com
_Who Knows
_Emeritus
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Post by _Who Knows »

Great thoughts beastie.

Just curious, is your sister still LDS?
WK: "Joseph Smith asserted that the Book of Mormon peoples were the original inhabitants of the americas"
Will Schryver: "No, he didn’t." 3/19/08
Still waiting for Will to back this up...
_beastie
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Joined: Thu Nov 02, 2006 2:26 am

Post by _beastie »

Yes, that sister is.

My oldest sister was the first to convert, along with her husband, when they were tracted out by sister missionaries at a crossroads in their lives, as well. They were very young first parents, and feeling the need to change for their new child's sake. She didn't actually try to convert me, oddly, I just overheard some of her conversations with my mother and became interested on my own.

Between the two of us, we succeeded in converting my next older sister and my parents and our much younger sister (who was 8 when they all joined).

My parents remain quite active, as does my oldest sister, who raised four sons in the church, three of whom went on missions and married in the temple. My other older sister is an atheist like me, although she never bothered having her name removed from church records. My youngest sister's beliefs are uncertain - she does still attend church, but I'm not sure how regularly, married a nonmormon and lived with him before marriage. (she, like me, also served a mission)

What's interesting about this is when I first starting reading the "other" church history, my oldest sister and mother were reading the same books as I was. We had many, many shocked phone conversations. All of our faith was wavering. However, both my mother and sister came to a crossroads where they knew if they continued to study church history they would completely lose faith and leave the church. Neither considered it an acceptable option, for familial/marital reasons. So they both stopped reading the "other" church history and immersed themselves in faith promoting literature (my sister joined FARMS and immersed herself in that).

They clearly "chose" to continue believing. Whenever I hear believers talking about "choosing" to believe, it reminds me of my sister and mother. The situation was that they HAD to choose to continue to believe, because belief no longer came naturally in face of the information they had learned. So the choice was to find a way to continue to believe despite the information they had learned.

Despite the fact that, prior to my exodus, the three of us regularly discussed these issues, once I left, I was on the "other side" and the conversation was now taboo.

Ironically, it is my oldest sister who encouraged me to leave the church when my children were still young, because otherwise the cost and consequences of open loss of belief might be too high to pay, when one's children have all become adult or near-adult believers. She really believed her husband and children would reject her if she openly disbelieved.
We hate to seem like we don’t trust every nut with a story, but there’s evidence we can point to, and dance while shouting taunting phrases.

Penn & Teller

http://www.mormonmesoamerica.com
_Jason Bourne
_Emeritus
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Re: Kevin Barney's insight on the PBS show ...

Post by _Jason Bourne »

Rollo Tomasi wrote:Kevin Barney posted this over on "By Common Consent." I found it very insightful (and suspect that even DCP would agree):

There are open threads all over the Bloggernacle on this documentary (to which I direct you for general commentary), and so here I simply want to comment on one particular ramification of it. But first let me say that I enjoyed it and thought it was very well done. There was the occasional mistake, and there were choices made that I wouldn’t have made, but overall I think Helen did a superb job.

The particular thought I had as I sat in my family room watching it last night had to do with the topic of inoculation. To illustrate: I feel pretty confident that I could stand up in front of my ward’s Sunday School class and ask whether Joseph Smith started plural marriage in the Church, and only a small minority would have the confidence and knowledge to be able to answer in the affirmative. Most members of the Church today really don’t know; for them, hmmm, maybe it was Brigham Young.

The Church as an institution doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to educate its members on this and other controversial topics. The hope appears to be that they will manage to navigate their entire lives and not come face to face with them, a hope that is becoming less rational in the internet age. I’m of the view that intelligent Latter-day Saints in developed nations with internet access sooner or later are going to come across these kinds of issues, and that it would be in our interest to broach these subjects first in a faithful context. But for the time being, that simply is not going to happen.

So the thought occurred to me that the PBS special is actually serving to some extent as an inoculation, in a way that the Church itself could never accomplish. It is exposing not only non-LDS, but many, many LDS, to difficult issues in our history, of which the average LDS is ignorant. And while it is not doing so in a faithful context, it is doing so in a sympathetic, sensitive context. I think average Mormons who view this special might be troubled by some aspects of it over the short term, but over the long haul their faith will be strengthened and made less vulnerable to easy attack on these topics.

As I like to say, “Sunshine is the best disinfectant.” Surely it is not easy to hear Richard Bushman talk about Joseph pressuring women to marry him. But getting that out in the open and on the table in a responsible way can only be good for the Church.



A big AMEN to this.
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