"The Church Has Made My Life Better"

[_Goldenbrass]

My life would have been much better without the LDS Church involved in any aspect of it, but being born in the covenant since there's a good chance I wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Mormonism. That's more a result of chance but it was through the Church that my parents met and existing is much better than not existing.

There are a few different people who have expressed a similar sentiment to me and they all fit into one of the following;

1) Members who stopped attending early and whose experience of the Church is similar to that of any other Church.
2) People with serious problems who somehow overcame insurmountable challenges and have no idea how they managed it.
3) Members who use the Church for the benefits it offers on their own terms and get much more from it than it takes from them.
4) Believing members who believe that everything good they do is a chance to promote the Church, but somehow the Church isn't responsible when things go wrong.

I think there's something different going on psychologically in each case, but what they all have in common is that they're giving the Church too much credit for things that often have very little to do with the Church.

[_I have a question]

Members of the LDS Church have made my life better than it would probably have been.

The Church, as an institution, lets these good people down. The members deserve leadership that values and promotes inclusion, transparency, which cares more about people than it does about PR and image protection and money. The Church is not led by good people. The Organization makes lives worse, but sometimes the good members can mitigate the damage.

[_Jersey Girl]

Members of the LDS Church have made my life better than it would probably have been.

The Church, as an institution, lets these good people down. The members deserve leadership that values and promotes inclusion, transparency, which cares more about people than it does about PR and image protection and money. The Church is not led by good people. The Organization makes lives worse, but sometimes the good members can mitigate the damage.

Stuff I underlined.

1. Was the Church this way from the start?
2. If not, what changed that produced the Church we see today?

[_Meadowchik]

I wouldn't have married so early nor so badly. I suspect this was true for many more than me.

In my early life, I would have been more tolerant. My politics would have been better thought out, not just handed to me on a dirty plate. My ethics would have been cleaner.

That one mechanism, the belief that others can speak for us, is so incredibly powerful. Now, as a parent, I have learned that so painfully, since I taught Mormonism to my children, seeing just one hold on to that belief, and how dangerous that could be for him, is very frightening.

I married young as well, but my husband was a convert and in his late 20s and a foreigner. All that helped us, I think.

The imprimatur of God colors everything in Mormon culture and stifles independent thought and feeling. My own thoughts and feelings were better than those demanded by the LDS Church. It took me too long to know that.

It took me until this past year to figure that out. I wasted so much energy in my life trying to make Mormonism better than it was.

[_Meadowchik]

A while back I posted a link to my essay "My Response to Jonathan Haidt" about the Mormon Cultural Membrane. I have concluded that the group cohesion of Mormonism is too tight for good health. I would say that the healthier people in Mormonism have usually found some way to adapt to this attribute by some kind of loosening of that tightness.

Below is the in order to podcast link to it, and I'll put the transcript here. Mormonism is very well-adapted to the 18-1900s for the survival of the group, but it is failing the individual more, less and less does it represent an advantage. Now less women in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic) countries need benevolent sexism as an antidote to hostile sexism, for example.



http://infantsonthrones.com/listener-es ... by-miriam/

Jonathan Haidt shares an animation of microscopic organisms to illustrate the dynamic of living things functioning as groups. He describes the fascinating eventuality where, sometime in the deep prehistory, one organism swallowed another and together they began to function as a new organism, a superorganism.
This superorganism becomes stronger than the sum of its parts, more robust and more adaptible.
Humanity is much like a superorganism. As social creatures, we need each other and benefit greatly from each other. Groups provide interaction that produces more strategic and material resources beneficial for individual survival.
In a way, the individual is "swallowed" into a social group and then becomes one of many functioning organs of the whole creature, the group.
This group distinguishes itself, Jonathan Haidt continues, with transcendence. Europhoria, and ecstasy within the group coalescs the group members into a like mindset focused on a joint belief or cause. Imagine a hunting party spread out at important landmarks on a game trail, each playing a role in finding, separating, and then killing the hunted prey. They each contribute and for the time act in consonance as one, and they each benefit from the kill.
Collaboration like this is found at virtually all levels of human society. It it in our institutions, in our traditions, in our genes. Babies are born with proportionately large heads and facial features that induce affectionate feelings in adults, they cry in ways that cause us physiological distress, creating incentive for attending to their needs. Rites of passage like circumcision, quincinearas, weddings, and funeral wakes attach meaning to different life stages and events, producing repeatable feelings of union with others and a sense of communal belonging.
Participating in traditional events signals that you are in the group, and Mormon has its own brand of validation:
In one moment, a new move-in to a Mormon ward can communicate their credentials:
"Hi, I'm Lehi Johansen, this is my wife, Jessica, and our kids Joseph, Natalie, Taylor, Mahonri, and Elisabeth. " The males have white shirts and ties, the females have white tees and jumpers, everyone is clean-shaven, scriptures inhome-sewn scripture satchels in hand.
This gesture occurs in a matter of seconds, but effects passage of these would-be strangers through the barrier. They are on the other side, they are part of the ward, family members to be congealed into pre-determined roles in the group superorganism.
Haidt goes over the boating race scenario, where individual members of each respective team may compete within their team, but one boat carrying an entire team works in concert to win the race against competing boats. The boat is a superorganism, members following commands and captains issuing orders.
Imagine the deep doctrine debates in high priests' group, or Relief Society mothers comparing and judging each other based on their groomed children. Such in-group competitions differ drastically from debates and comparisons with outsiders and especially differ when an apostate enters the scene. The same complaint from a believing, contributing member in the boat will be treated differently than from an open apostate, who is outside the boat, for example.
Speaking of apostates, first, more background from Haidt: human beings form cohesive groups similar to superorganisms, yet they are not the most cohesive and are not as cohesive as bees. This is where, in my opinion, humanity surmounted a threshold of existence, because people can leave their groups. They can leave their groups, then forms other groups, then the new group can compete against the original group, even absorb its members. Then another group might form from leavers, which competes, and so on.
On a whole, this ability to break away mathematically improves our ability to adapt. Instead of being tied to one group and also one type of cohesion, the superorganism groups can be variant and offer people more options and more viable options improve adaptability.
As a result, the entire human superorganism, global and dynamic, is more adaptible. Don't believe this supreorganism mumbo jumbo? Consider the pencil, the yellow painted iconic Number Two pencil with the aluminum band and eraser at the top. It literally takes hundreds of thousands of people, possibly millions, to make one pencil from scratch, to mine, find, and grow the raw resources, to build and power the ships to transport those resources, to refine and mix those materials that eventually, after hundreds and hundreds of steps, until these components are mechanically formed into a pencil.
Go off the grid, even, and you will likely take something with you that is as sophisticated and work-intensive as a pencil, be it a hammer, or seeds, or nails, or medicines. Try to reproduce and raise a family and you will need such things to survive and continue in perpetuity.
So, back to that cultural membrane, one more specific and tightly-binding than capitalism and trade: the religions, and specifically, Mormonism. Mormonism's membrane is belief, centered around the claims of Joseph Smith, the passage of central authority through his male sucessors and the limited distribution of that authority to local male "priesthood" leaders.
Remember the ward's new family, the Johansens? They walk into a ward of complete strangers, consider the process by which they are to accept the new bishop, the man who has final priesthood authority over the ward and over their future participation in it:
"Hi, I'm Bishop Jones, nice to meet you!"
((pause))
That's it basically.
The Johansen's take his divine authority on faith. Lehi, Jessica, Joseph, Natalie, Taylor, Mahonri, and Elisabeth will all eventually pass through Bishop Jones' office to stand before him and be judged on their personal worthiness before God. Bishop Jones will decide if they pass. Lehi and Jessica are showing their children that they can trust the Bishop, and by extension, that they can trust all the males exercising priesthood roles in the ward.
Inside the Mormon cultural membrane, there is a special protection, the feeling of being safe because we believe the same and we believe that we believe the best beliefs. It is a warm feeling untainted by cynicism or fighting. The feeling is produced and reproduced by the signals of language, appearance, and practice. When others signify their loyalty, "we know they are one of us." Especially when priesthood males signify their loyalty, other Mormons know they can be trusted.
This authority is then used thoroughly, establishing the general path of a person's entire life but also dictated small details like what we eat, what we wear under our clothes, how we have sex, and what we do on any given day of the week.
Yet in this membrane, the priesthood authority exists exclusively through the males. Half the population does not ever have representation in the ultimate authority of the church, be it on the ward, stake, or church-wide level, not even in the home. Thus, none of those with the final say can, from an experiential perspective, see, understand, or addressing basic problems of the human experience faced by a near-majority of human beings. Except it feels good, so good and warm, because "we believe that we believe the best beliefs" and that the patriarchal order works the best of anything that works.
And thus, even in people with the best intentions, there is an abundance of certainty in Mormonland. With certainty, it is very hard for doubts to encroach and disrupt the framework. Thus it is very hard for problems, especially systemic problems, to be addressed, understood, or even seen. This is compounded by the concentration of priesthood authority because it keeps the authorities in ignorance of experiential knowledge since it excludes half the members. This is further compounded because individual members are taught to trust priesthood authorities to the extreme on an intimate basis, making them more vulnerable to improprieties of leaders and making leaders more impervious to criticism.
Thus, Mormons are working on a boat that is very good at promoting loyalty and trust in the group, and with that, many of the benefits associated with tightly supportive groups. Yet when things go wrong with the boat itself, you could say the loyalty is so tight that it takes a great deal to change the boat or fix it.
I enjoyed Jonathan Haidt's talk and how it helped me think about Mormon culture, of somewhat how it functions and how we functioned in it. Most of all, I like the idea of not merely transcendending self from time to time and becoming part of something more, but of transcending culture for something more and better and hopefully creating some thing better.
There is something that makes Mormonism inevitably counterproductive to individual progress, it inhibits that thing that makes humans as adaptible as we are because Mormonism inhibits group disloyalty. Is it a coincidence that Utah is called the Beehive State? Mormonism makes humans more cohesive than thay should be or need to be for their own good. This is what is so intenable and this is what ultimately damns the church.
The genius of humans is that they can both collaborate in cohesive groups but then also break away from groups to form competing alternatives, improving overall human adaptability. So inasmuch as the church denies an individual their ultimate personal authority over their own lives, it denies them their selves. Stomp out this basic genius of the human condition and you destroy collective and individual progress.
My name is Rebecca and unfortunately I speak from experience. also fortunately I also speak from experience. Most of my immediate family left the church earlier this year: a family of nine, hubs and I met and married at BYU, our first three were born in Provo when we lived at Wymount Terrace. We've experienced the church in three US states and three different countries and languages. Our children age from 6 to 18 and we are so, so glad we can start course-correcting now. We have two LGBT children and two agnostic kids. Since the start of this year, they can openly acknowledge those parts of themselves and their father and I can respond to the needs of all our children in healthier, more rational and compassionate ways. I am so happily mindful of the intuition I have and the brain I have that has led me to this place and helped me bring my family to my place. So glad to adapt and learn. Thanks, infants, for helping.