This is one of the interesting points of the garments, is, as Reloy says, that you wear them after going through the temple and receiving the endowment. What’s not mentioned is why after the temple ceremony, which goes back to early church history, Joseph Smith and polygamy.
Smith introduced polygamy secretly, first for himself and then for trusted insiders. He introduced a temple ceremony, with secret handshakes and oaths of secrecy which show remarkable similarities to the Masons’ rites, (which he was a member) and had the first garments made. This early temple ceremony was for initiation into polygamy, and so garments were an early sign of who was polygamous while it was still practiced in secret.
The origins of the protections against harm comes from when Joseph Smith, along with his brother Hyrum was shot by a mob while in jail while two others survived. The Smiths were not wearing their garments, but John Taylor, who was shot several times but lived, was wearing his.
Back to the missionary thing. I served in Japan in the early 80s, and we had a quota system which would make any sales manager proud. Get XX number of initial contact, XX number of lessons, etc. While the Regional Authority (or whatever his title was) over all the missions in Japan cane and gave us that speech, this was the first time I felt that an ordained top leader of the church was full of shit.
Shortly afterwards, he was fired. They don’t use that term, but reassigned to a desk job back in SLC where he would do less harm. The next Regional Authority came over with a new task for us, which was to un-convert people. Everyone has gone overboard and baptized too many people, most of whom weren’t interested in continuing. There were so many “inactive” members that it was impossible for the local branches and wards to cope.
The idea was to track down people, and, if they had no interest in continuing, to let them just pretend it didn’t happen. We would turn in the paperwork and “poof” their names went off the records. I was better at getting people to quit than I was at getting them to join, so I wound up with a net negative number.
This isn’t common, and I haven’t heard of it happening elsewhere.
I apologize. You’re right; as Just Thinkin’ noted, Mormons use the phrase “Heavenly Father” almost exclusively instead of God. Why? It’s partially a cultural thing, and also to help distinguish God from Jesus. Mormons don’t believe in the trinity (that God/Jesus/Holy Spirit are kind of the same person (a crude summary, I know)). They believe that God and Jesus are completely separate beings, God being the Father and Jesus being the son of God the Father. However, in practical terms, it means “God” and “Heavenly Father” are completely interchangeable. On my mission, I almost never used the phrase “Heavenly Father” because people wouldn’t have known what the hell I was talking about. For all their preoccupation with appearances, Mormons can be surprisingly tone-deaf about how things sound to people outside the faith.
Interesting. Was this the Inn at Temple Square? I guess the female missionaries who work on Temple Square must have lived on those two floors. I learn something new every day!
Not just white (short-sleeved) shirts, but ties. In the Caribbean. In really hot and humid conditions, where nobody but executives who work in air-conditioned offices wear ties.
This is interesting to me. About 30 years ago I was a member of the RLDS church. Their story was that Smith never preached or practiced polygamy but Brigham Young did and attributed it to Smith after JS was killed. I haven’t checked recently to see if they have changed their story. Is there new information or documentation that did indeed practice and preach polygamy?
btw I think the head buried in the sand analogy is very apt for a lot of true believers. It was for me.
Thank you for expanding on that, TokyoPlayer. So much of early Mormon history is inextricably tied up with the then-secret practice of polygamy. However, the modern Mormon church likes to pretend that it’s all behind us, and has nothing to do with the modern practice of Mormonism. For example, any Mormon can tell you that Joseph Smith was arrested for destroying a printing press and was subsequently murdered in prison. But if you ask why did he destroy the printing press, they’ll say something like, “Oh, it was publishing anti-Mormon lies.” Umm, no. It was printing accurate information about Joseph Smith’s polygamous marriages and the polygamous marriages he was performing for his closest associates. However, he hadn’t told the rank-and-file members about it, so he was threatened by the truth coming out. If the Straight Dope had existed back then, Joseph Smith would be launching denial of service attacks on us.
I agree that your experience is very unusual, TokyoPlayer, but it has happened elsewhere, most notably the UK. In the early 1960s, missionaries in Great Britain baptized large numbers of British youth as a requirement to play in the baseball games the missionaries were running. They were baptized without any religious instruction and without knowning that they were joining another church. These are colloquially known as “baseball baptisms.” For years, all these names clogged up the membership lists in the UK with adults who didn’t know anything about the church and certainly didn’t want to be contacted. They finally had to go and purge the names as best they could just so the units could function.
I had no idea that happened in Japan, though. I know that Chile has been undergoing a massive consolidation of units because of the remarkably low number of participating Mormons. In 2002, the Chilean census showed 107,000 Chileans self-identifying as Mormons. Meanwhile, the Mormon church listed 500,000 members in Chile.
This sounds like a bizarre kind of revisionism to me. Everything I have seen shows Smith was the creator of polygamy in the Church and he practiced it extensively. Young was reluctant to go along with it at first, but eventually warmed to idea to the tune of dozens of wives and 57 children. Smith had dozens of wives as well.
Why are the missionaries always wearing white shirts? Why never yellow or blue or anything else?
Oh, yes. White dress shirt (long or short-sleeved, your choice), a tie, and dark-colored dress pants (no khakis). They give you a full-color photo spread showing the acceptable types of outfits and haircuts. Hair has to be short (above the collar) and no facial hair is allowed. Sideburns cannot extend below the middle of the ear. Yes, these are all real official rules. That’s why all the Mormon missionaries look so similar. I won’t go into the rules for female missionaries, but they have to wear conservative dresses or skirts.
Interesting, cosmosdan. I know the RLDS (now CoC) has never accepted polygamy as a doctrine, but I don’t know how they reconcile Joseph’s well-documented forays into the lifestyle. Looking just now at their website, they seem to skirt the issue:
This “special” knowledge was polygamy. And the Nauvoo Expositor exposed the polygamy of Joseph Smith and church leaders. You can read the entire text of the newspaper online. It seems like polygamy is the Word That Dare Not Speak Its Name on the CoC website. Their website blurb almost seems to be written in code: if you know the history of Joseph Smith, you’ll know what they’re talking about, but if you don’t, you won’t be exposed to the troubling concept and history of polygamy. Seems a bit dishonest to me, but that’s just my opinion.
Amen and amen. As for the white shirts, there isn’t really an official reason, but the leaders of the church seem to feel that white shirts are more dressy and formal than blue or pastel-colored shirts. Also, the white shirts at this point are kind of a trademark. Unfortunately, it’s no exaggeration to say that Mormon leaders are a bit obsessed with white dress shirts. No member of the Mormon leadership will ever attend a church service in anything other than a white shirt. Even at the local level, the Bishops and Stake Presidents are pretty much required to wear a white shirt to church. I’ve even heard of local leaders requiring young men to wear white shirts to church or they aren’t allowed to distribute the communion (or sacrament as we call it). Bizarre? Yes. It’s just a cultural thing, not official religious doctrine, but there it is. My theory is that the church, being run by octogenarians, is still stuck in the 1950s IBM cultural world. White dress shirt = formal, blue dress shirt = hippies!
This question is more for Mormons/ex-Mormons who grew up in Utah and parts of Idaho/Arizona that had a Mormon majority: is any part of the Mormon account of the American Indians/Israelites connection taught in public schools? Or for that matter Mormon history in general in public schools? Are there LDS private academies?
For those who grew up where Mormons were the minority, was it addressed in church why none of the official histories of America mention Lehi and his family? Are the accusations against Joseph Smith (plagiarism of Solomon Spalding, changing story, the church’s purchase of the Salamander forgeries, etc.) taught inside the church? How is the abolition of polygamy explained, and is polygamy still an acceptable choice in the afterlife [i.e. could a modern Mormon woman, especially one without kids, be sealed to Joseph Smith for eternity]? And is Kolob an actual teaching? What about the virgin birth of Jesus?
Absolutely not. I just checked with my little sister, who was in high school much more recently than I, to see what she remembered, and she agreed with me. I grew up in a tiny Mormon community, in a tiny school district, where people could pretty much get away with that sort of thing if they wanted to, and the American Indians/Israelites connection was never taught in school. Now, Mormon history, to an extent, was taught, because the history of the Mormon church is the history of Utah. So we covered who lived in Utah prior to the first pioneers, covering the different Indian groups, as well as the Spanish missionaries/priests who cut through Utah, trappers, and the explorers (many areas of Utah are named after and for these people. Provo, Ogden, Cache County, etc). After that, we learn about the Mormon Pioneers. Basically, “the LDS Church left Illinois after their founder, Joseph Smith Jr, died. The first wagon party consisted of Brigham Young and…”. And then there’s a unit on the difficulty of settling Utah (and it was no picnic. They all nearly died of starvation since they arrived so late in the summer and then had a harsh winter. They mainly survived on the bulbs of Seagull Lilies, which is now the state flower). Then we learn about how SLC was built, and when other cities began to settle, etc.
I don’t know if there are private LDS Academies. I suspect there are a few in SLC (I think there’s one called Benjamin Franklin High with like 25 people in it), but there are a crapload of private schools in SLC. Now, LDS members do attend seminary once they reach high school. In Utah, that is part of the school day–that is, we’re all released from school for an hour (a free period) to go across the street to the seminary building. It’s not required, though. You could choose to be released for that hour, or take an extra elective. In California (and other states I assume) people don’t have that option, so they go at 6:30 in the morning. When I moved to CA and realized I had to get up at 6, I said “Fuck that shit.” So, I only went to seminary for 2 years.
There isn’t any “new” information and documentation that proves that Smith practiced polygamy because he did practice polygamy. He had (I believe) 19 wives. The real reason that the RLDS Church taught that Smith had nothing to do with Polygamy comes down to the history of both churches, and the reason they split. Emma Smith never, ever, ever approved of or condoned polygamy, and it was a source of great conflict in the marriage (not to mention the fact that Joseph was routinely arrested, and one night he was dragged out of his house, tarred and feathered, on a cold winter night–as a result, one of their small babies died. Also, it’s still a source of tension, at least in my experience. People want to honor Emma Smith as the wife of the True Prophet, but it’s really difficult to reconcile honoring her with how things eventually went down, so everybody does what everybody does best and ignore the difficult parts). When Joseph was murdered, there was no plan for who should take his place as the Prophet/President. There was a rift between members–some thought that Joseph Smith III should be the next in line. Others agreed with Brigham Young and his claim to “the throne.” Emma, like a lot of people, hated Brigham. And Brigham loved polygamy. The split happened, Joseph’s widows were distributed to the quorum (mostly to Brigham), and the history of each church was shaped accordingly.
I lived in Salt Lake City until I was 15. In my personal experience, there was never any teaching of church doctrine at my public schools. It’s hard to estimate thinking that far past, but a good percentage of my teachers were non-Mormon, maybe 50%. We had to learn Utah history in 7th grade (I think it’s fairly common to have to learn state history during this grade), but besides discussion of Brigham Young, the first governor, there wasn’t that much religious stuff that I remember. The only moment in class that I remember as being directed at Mormons specifically was when we were learning about evolution in 9th grade. My Biology teacher (a Mormon, we knew, because he got his degree at BYU) plead with us not to discount the lessons on evolution for religious reasons. “God could have used evolution as the tool to create all the animals,” he said, or something along those lines. Fortunately, Mormons of my generation are not as hostile to things like evolution (though they usually believe in a sort of limited, God-driven evolution, not the whole thing) as our parents’ and grandparents’ generations.
I am not aware of any private Mormon secondary schools.
I think this is a kind of confusing way to phrase the question. I mean, there are no “official histories of America.” It’s easier to sum up thusly: the Book of Mormon, which Mormons hold to be absolutely, 100% accurate, claims that a family of Jews moved to somewhere in the Americas in 600 B.C.E. and spawned a civilization of at least several hundred thousand people (if not millions) spread across the land, and they had chariots, horses, and steel weapons. The civilization eventually disintegrated, and Joseph Smith claimed that these people were the ancestors of Native Americans. Obviously, any archeological expert can tell you that there were no horses in America at that time, that there is no evidence of any smelting, and that no civilization like this ever existed. They can further point to evidence that the Native Americans are descended from a population that crossed the land bridge from Asia in 10,000 B.C.E.
Obviously, Joseph Smith had no idea that science would prove his wild speculations wrong. That the Mound Builders were actually a lost off-shoot of the lost tribes of Israel was a popular theory in the early 1800s and Smith (or whoever composed the Book of Mormon) ran with it. They certainly didn’t foresee that science would push the Mormon church into an increasingly untenable position in hundreds of years.
Most Mormons aren’t familiar with the science or the fact that archeology has consistently showed no evidence for the Book of Mormon. On the contrary, whenever a Mayan city is unearthed in the jungles of Mexico or Guatemala, Mormons start talking about how it is from the Book of Mormon. My parents went on a trip to the Yucatan, and instead of learning all kinds of interesting facts about the Maya and other ancient people, they went to Mayan ruins with a Mormon tour guide who explained how it all corresponded to the Book of Mormon. What a waste.
Now defenders of the religion, usually known as Mormon apologists, have tried to use various arguments to show that the story as related in the Book of Mormon is still plausible based on today’s science. They claim (contrary to Joseph Smith’s preaching) that the civilization in the Book of Mormon was tiny, and quickly subsumed into the larger Native American population, which is why there is no trace of them in archeology or linguistics (the Book of Mormon people apparently spoke a derivative of Hebrew, coming from Jerusalem, yet no Native American language shows any Hebraic influence). These apologists’ claims, while trying to carve out a space for faith, completely contradict everything Joseph Smith and every other modern Mormon prophet has said about the Book of Mormon and Book of Mormon peoples. Mormon prophets have been calling Native Americans and Polynesians “Lamanites” (a tribe in the Book of Mormon) for years and years.
No negative things or even mildly embarrassing things are taught at church. All the lessons are pretty sanitized. The most hilarious example is that a couple of years ago, the Mormon church produced a lesson plan based on the teachings of Brigham Young. It had extensive quotations from his sermons, and every time he said something about a husband and his wives, they’d emend it to, “[wife]”. Reading the lessons, you would have had no idea that Brigham Young wasn’t a monogamist!
Solomon Spaulding is never mentioned, nor the Hoffman forgeries. The abolilition of polygamy is explained like this: “It’s an eternal principle, but we just weren’t ready for it, so the Lord had to take it away. Plus, the U.S. government wouldn’t leave us alone while we practiced it, so it’s good that He took it away. Plus, I certainly wouldn’t want to practice it; I can barely handle one wife, ha ha.”
Polygamy will definitely be practiced in the afterlife, not just by Brigham Young and the early Mormon polygamists, but also by, say, husbands whose first wife dies, and then remarry. Also, it’s generally thought that there’ll be a surplus of women in heaven, and they’ll end up with righteous men and women in polygamous unions, but all the details are not known and won’t be worked out until the afterlife.
Single women cannot get sealed to Joseph Smith, or any other dead person that they weren’t married to in real life. It did happen in the early days of the church, but they put the kibosh on that.
Just to clarify, Kolob is the name of a star near to where God is. It’s not the name of the planet he lives on, as is commonly thought. It is, however, a bit weird. Joseph Smith “translated” the Book of Abraham from Egyptian papyrus that he bought along with some mummies from Egypt. Modern translation of the papyrus scrolls show that they have no relation to the “translation” that Joseph Smith produced. Furthermore, his book of Egyptian grammar and his interpretation of some illustrations from the papyrus (which have also been canonized) show that he did not, in fact, understand heiroglyphics. The whole thing would be funny, if it weren’t so sad.
The Virgin birth of Jesus is a bit more complicated. Mormons believe that Jesus is the literal son of God the Father, but they generally don’t believe that any hanky-panky happened between God and Mary, as some earlier Mormon thinkers have speculated.
This is honest: Why are you so concerned/secretive about people’s interest in your own lives while the Church is seen as obsessed with the details of the lives of non-members?
I refer to 2 broad topics - 1, the whole idea of going on missions seems to be to introduce people to the group, so why get in a lather when people are curious?
2 - Prop 8 in California and same sex marriage in general - what borders and boundaries if any does the Church have regarding participation in secular life outside of their jurisdictions as individuals and Churches? Why is it so important to Mormons that gays in California and elsewhere not participate in a civil marriage?
Erdosain, thank you for starting this thread and being so honest and well informed.
I’m also an ex-mormon. My father and his second wife converted to the church when I was in elementary school. We ended up in Provo, Utah due to their religious fervor. I started questioning ‘the church’ at about age 18 and quit identifying as a mormon around age 25. I would call myself a well-read agnostic more than an atheist. I haven’t been active in mormonism since the early 80’s. How long has it been for you?
My experience in living in Utah is that in Salt Lake City there seem to be more ex-mormons than practicing mormons, except in the state legislature.
A couple years ago another ex-mormon friend gave a very informative and well-researched book entitled One Nation Under Gods about the early history of the mormon church. If anyone is curious about early mormon history and wants information that is accurate and not whitewashed by the church, I recommend this book.
What I want to know is, why are people so fascinated with what I or others do in my bedroom? Don’t you people have something better to do with your lives?
It’s nice to meet you, BMax, and all the other ex-Mormons on the board. I completely stopped believing about three years ago, after trying to reconcile my faith with all the new information I was discovering on the internet. After a certain point, I just couldn’t deny that the preponderance of evidence pointed to Mormonism being false. After I allowed for that possibilty, everything else fell into place and finally made sense.
I’ve never read One Nation Under Gods, so I can’t attest to its accuracy, but I generally don’t recommend it because the author, Richard Abanes, rubs me the wrong way. He seems more interested in pushing his brand of Evangelical Christianity on ex-Mormons than anything else. I’m sure there’s a lot of accurate information is his book, but he is really invested in “proving” that Mormons aren’t Christians (insert roll eyes here, even from an ex-Mormon) instead of taking some time to critically examine his own beliefs. Christianity is almost as wacky as Mormonism, only it’s 2,000 years old, so we don’t have any independent records about what a lout Peter was, or that Paul was a traveling con-man who changed his name to escape his creditors. I also feel, (and I admit that I don’t know what Abanes’ beliefs are on this front) that people who believe in a 6,000-year-old Earth can throw stones at people who believe in gold books and magic spectacles. Stupid is stupid, no matter what religion it is.
In short, I would recommend any of the books on Dogzilla’s list above as being informative and accurate.
Richard and I have communicated many times over the past years. Richard is a supremely nice person, and we’ve had some wonderful conversations. But he does push his Evangelical line rather hard. So we’ve agreed to disagree, and go on as friends.
And yes, I’m also an RM ex-mo. I wrote a Staff Report about the church in 2005, and am active on several post-mormon sites. My favorite is here, but just a warning, it is a little rougher around the edges than some of the others.
I was a member of RLDS 30 years ago so whatever information available was not as easily accessed back then. I remember reading about Emma denying JS practiced polygamy. I also remember a claim that JS had designated his son as the next leader which was RLDS claim to the title of the “real” church.
Interestingly, the Mormon church has recently (within the last dozen years or so) really started to mainstream itself, and downplays polygamy. I don’t have the link on hand, but when asked about the irony of the church opposition to Prop 8, a church spokesman was quoted as saying that early many Mormons were opposed to polygamy, and said something like Brigham Young was surprised when he first heard about it. Again, they neglected to say how enthusiastically he embraced it.
I grew up in family of pioneer stock, which taught the good ol’ fashion Mormonism. It’s strange to hear Mormons, including the top leaders back away from the doctrine of eternal progression (the concept that we all can be gods in the next life) and polygamy. They used to be important doctrine. I wonder what other teachings will be abandoned.
That was the problem in Japan. There would be branches or wards with thousands of members on record and only 50 or so active members. In ’82 the Regional Authority said that over 90% of the members baptized in the previous 5 years were already completely inactive. It was worse in Tokyo, where a lot of young people got baptized by overzealous missionaries.
One lady we talked to was really bitter about the whole experience. She had met some great foreign guys, thought that they were interested in being friends and hanging out. They asked her to go to a church one day, then everyone pressured her to be baptized that day. Once she was a member, the missionaries wouldn’t give her the time of day. She also found out about tithing and no drinking or coffee after she was a member.