A Dutch writer, Karin Spaink, …ended up being personally sued by Scientology for almost ten years (1995-2005); and she won thrice.
Read more about it on Wikipedia.
I’ll be in my bunk.
It depends whether she dragged you by the ear.
Bingo. I’m talking about church discipline that proceeds according to the rules of the church, which could be anything from a large, formal affair with a “Judge”, “Prosecutor”, and with rules of evidence to a one man matter with the Pastor announcing, “You have been accused by Deacon Jones of Promoting Heresy and have denied the charges and requested a hearing. This is it. No witnesses will be called - I will go into the sanctuary and pray for God’s wisdom and the Holy Spirit will give me the verdict. If the answer is Guilty, the Spirit will move me to establish God’s desired punishment. Wait here please.” Clearly, in countries such as the US, the extent to which a church can impose a temporal penalty onto an unwilling member (or ex-member) is seriously limited by law. For example, they could strip you of any church offices you hold, excommunicate you, or denounce you in front of the congregation, but couldn’t imprison you in a church dungeon unless you willingly “submitted” to it as part of a penitential process or something.
Is this true for every felony? I can see how this might work in the US, but what if a Mormon is convicted in an Iranian court of blaspheming Islam due to the fact that they converted to the Mormon faith or was preaching it? That could get really weird really fast.
I looked it up, and I was wrong. If you are convicted of a felony, then a disciplinary council is automatic and you will be, at the very least, “disfellowshipped.” Disfellowshipping is a level of discipline below excommunication. It means you can attend church, but not participate in any way. And the only way to stop being disfellowshipped is to reconvene the trial. I believe that Mormon convicts are required to be disfellowshipped until they are off probation.
Excommunication is only automatic for murder. And of course, even this is not quite absolute.
[QUOTE=Church Handbook of Instructions]
As used here, murder refers to the deliberate and unjustified taking of human life. It requires excommunication. It does not include police or military action in the line of duty. Abortion is not defined as murder for this purpose. If death was caused by carelessness or by defense of self or others, or if mitigating circumstances prevail (such as deficient mental capacity), the taking of a human life might not be defined as murder. Bishops refer questions on specific cases to the stake president. He may direct questions of the Office of the First Presidency if necessary.
[/QUOTE]
Anyway, you can learn all you ever wanted to know about Mormon church discipline here. It’s a pretty good overview.
I’ve never been disciplined, but as a member of the Standing Committee of a diocese of the Episcopal Church I’ve participated in disciplinary proceedings against clergy. Typically this includes certifying that a priest has abandoned the doctrine, worship or discipline of the Episcopal Church and recommending inhibition of the priest or a release from orders. The process is detailed in Canon IV of the Canons of the Episcopal Church.
I’ve not yet had a situation come up where a priest was accused of an actual crime or other misconduct. Typically it has been priests who have voluntarily left the Episcopal Church for another denomination or church body.
My uncle was excommunicated from Mormonism for sins that were never described in detail to minors. I know it involved adultery, but I can only guess at the details. At the time, he expressed gratitude to Jesus for allowing him to be forgiven of his sins, but did not intend to rejoin the LDS church. He is now openly atheist.
My sister’s husband planted video cameras in bathrooms. He was caught when a teenage family member found a camera facing her toilet in her home. After spending 30 days in prison, he was brought before the Mormon “Council of Love”. At some point he had confessed to planting cameras in his own shower to film my wife and me, so I got to participate in the disciplinary council. The Stake President, his two counselors, and 12 “high councilmen” heard testimony from witnesses and victims, and then excommunicated him. Every year I have been asked to send in a written statement expressing my feelings on rebaptizing him. I sent in letters for a few years until I ran out of giveashit. I don’t know if he has been rebaptised now.
:eek:
Wow, that is nasty. Did he attend the “Court of Love”? If you were asked to submit a letter each year, does that mean he was applying to be rebaptized every year?
He’s probably a Sunbeam or CTR teacher now.
If I remember correctly, he attended some portions and my family attended other portions. Prior to the hearing, the church had arranged a couple of meetings so his victims and their families could yell at him.
Yes, he was applying for rebaptism. He was rejected the first year. I think he was rejected the second year, but has probably been rebaptised by now. Since then, his family and my family have both moved away from Utah. I have resigned from Mormonism (not related to my brother-in-law’s fiasco), so the LDS church probably doesn’t want any more victim’s impact statements from my family.
There is circumstantial evidence that he now makes a living selling videos on the internet, but if so the videos are of a nature that I can’t find them by googling his name or email address. And there is also wild speculation that he has become a polygamist, either with or without my sister’s knowledge. Your guess that he teaches Sunday School to mormon toddlers is probably accurate.
I got banned from a church I was not a part of and had never been to in my life.
When I was in high school, my best friend dated a classmate of ours who was a member of a freaky Fundamentalist church. I do not have any idea how I got involved in this or what thier issue was, but somehow I was banned from thier property and forbidden to join the congregation for my association with my friend and the fact that we were fans of heavy metal music. They even sent a letter to me informing me of this. I assume they got my address from his GF.
They did promise to keep praying for my soul, though.
I got over it. 
Yes.
Yes, it was a “sin” fairly specific to the religion, i.e., premarital sex. I was 15.
During my 15th summer, I was raped repeatedly by my 30-year-old, temple-garment-wearing, true believing, priesthood-holding stepbrother (who was married at the time and had three kids). My parents found out about it because he’d bragged to some of his sisters, who told my stepmom. My father quite literally threw me physically into the bishop’s office to force a confession.
Yeah, what was memorable is that my bishop decided to hold a 15-year-old responsible for her own abuse and I was sentenced to probation for six months. At six months, I went to the bishop and asked to be reinstated and he told me no because he didn’t think I’d forgiven myself yet. I blinked and asked him, “For what?” He blinked back and walked away. I never did figure out what I did wrong that I needed for forgive myself for. It was at that moment, I realized the church was nothing but a pack of lies and I left as soon as I turned 18. My stepbrother, btw, was excommunicated, but the abuse was never reported to any authorities and we continued to live in the same house for a couple months until he secured another place to stay. The bishop recommended counseling for me and we went to a mormon psychologist. After three sessions, when it began to look like my stepmom had pretty much just hung me out to dry, she declared we were all fine and nobody needed therapy and I wasn’t allowed to continue on with it on my own. I finally got real therapy as an adult, as soon as I had a job with insurance.
Probation, at that time in the mormon church, meant I had to be released from my calling (my youth group class president), I wasn’t allowed to publicly bear my testimony, or give public prayers, or take the sacrament.
I was put through what is called a “bishop’s court” wherein I had to meet with four middle-aged adult men with no parental support or supervision and tell them all the explicit details of everything that happened to me. I was asked probing, inappropriate questions such as “Did you enjoy it?” “Did you try to fight him off?” “Are you in love with him?” After being grilled, I was sent out of the room where these men presumably knelt down and prayed to god about how to handle my case. They were inspired of the Lord to punish a girl for not fighting to the death and giving up her virtue. I was now worthless, damaged goods in the eyes of the Lord and no decent, righteous, good man would ever want me. (That message stayed with me, unfortunately, until about five years ago.)
Flash forward a few years and this poor girl, Elizabeth Smart, gets kidnapped and raped at the same age I was. I cried for that kid every day, especially after they found her. Then I heard her bishop say, on CNN no less, that she was still pure in the eyes of the Lord. Apparently, the Lord plays favorites with his rape victims; some are forgiven and still considered pure and others are punished and considered dirty and broken. Shortly after that press conference with Ed Smart and his bishop, I went from merely being an inactive, nonpracticing, nonbelieving mormon to being a fully resigned apostate. I sent a letter to Salt Lake City and formally quit.
Most of the churches I’ve attended had a written policy for how they’d handle disciplinary issues, but they tended to be very brief and mostly just said ‘as laid out by scripture, if we have issues with someone’s behavior, we talk to them individually in private first. If that doesn’t work, then we talk to them in a small group. If that doesn’t work, then we can think about other measures.’ I never saw it used, which means either it wasn’t used or the churches were good about keeping such matters private. Obviously there were different expectations for elders and other positions of authority than there were for casual attendees.
The closest I saw to church discipline was when two members of the church (both married to other people, with kids) had an affair with each other. They left the church of their own initiative, I believe, if ‘beating a hasty retreat while people burn you with laser beam eyes’ counts as their own initiative. The pastor probably would have asked them to leave if they’d tried to stay. It was a small church and a very nasty situation. In an attempt to head off gossip and drama there was a brief announcement to the entire congregation a few months later that the cheaters were divorcing their spouses and marrying each other. One of the cheated-upon spouses and kids stayed with the church, the other moved on, I believe.
Dogzilla, I just saw your post - I am so sorry all that happened to you. I don’t have words to express my contempt and horror for church ‘leaders’ like that.
Thank you.
After that experience, I don’t have words to express my contempt and disgust at organized religion in general.
When people ask me about the Penn State thing, I have to work hard not to spew out a vicious rant about patriarchal cults that foster environments that are ripe for this manner of abuse. I tend to just change the subject and try to go sit in a meadow full of daisies or something. Believe me, I’m not nearly as angry and rage-a-licious as I was 20 years ago. I’ve come a long way! 
I think one or more Dopers are members of churches or organizations that have been picketed by Phelps & Phamily if that counts as ‘being in trouble’…
Hopefully DangerMom will be along shortly to give a good spin on Mormon leaders.
Or some other practicing mormon will come along and deny my entire experience as if I wasn’t there and it didn’t even happen. That’s the reason I don’t discuss this on this board very much. It’s not that I don’t expect support from fellow Dopers; it’s that I expected mormons to be so uncomfortable with this revelation that they’d have no choice but to deny and diminish or risk facing cognitive dissonance. I found a lot of great support at the former mormon boards, of which there are several.
I went to a extremely tightwad christian school called Bob Jones University. Worst place to be in the world! YMMV. They always punished or disciplined people for the most stupid things. You would receive demerits which would affect what you were allowed to do, and they even would affect GPA and living conditions. For example, I was once caught wearing denim(blue jeans) this is a expulsion out of school immediately. While in front of a tribunal, someone else talked and said I went to the mall, which is punishable by expulsion. I was locked in a hallway to determine my fate. They generally grab all of your friends to talk about you, being promised immunity. Well that day, I was expelled with over a few thousand demerits, when 250 is enough to say goodbye to you for the rest of your life. Every single person who was associated with me and narced on me was expelled that day as well!
Eventually they learned that i got off campus to go trick or treating, again something so frowned upon it wasn’t even written in any rule book but again was punishable by expulsion. Had everything i did not been added up, each individual offense would have expelled me, but if it had not, i would have been on restriction (2 meals a day, accompany to anywhere by a PC or prayer captain, plus many other stupid things that i have forgotten.
SO, here’s what happened, I was kicked out, they made my parents and everyone else’s parents pay the rest of the years tuition, and then probably filled the dorms with new suckers and lined their pockets with new tuition money. ALL of this is unnecessary since even if you graduate with a fucking 4 year degree, you can’t use it anywhere in life since the school has no fucking accreditation. That means this college is to train you to go to another college somewhere so you can get a real degree that actually lets you get a job somewhere. Of course you don’t know about this until after you were kicked out or graduated, and Google bob jones university.
There are many things i did that i was not caught for, like making out with girls in utility rooms and skateboarding and even listening to any music with percussion or drums since all of these things are of the secular world. I was good at not getting caught having grown up in a christian home almost like this, such as learning how to skate so well i was scouted by X game people and others like play it again sports and kryptonics to sponsor me to the 98 x games in Australia.
So yea, i was punished, they tried to ruin my life, when i got home i ran away, life has been great ever since. All of this bullshit had to happen to me so i could meet my wife, so i would go to hell and back again for her, so i guess ide do it all again, but this is my story.
Want to see some rules for yourself?
This is nothing compared to the horror that Dogzilla went through, but at the same age (15) my mother was called out in front of her congregation for “fornication”—extrapolated from being seen together with a boy. At school, in public, fully clothed. Of course, the boy wasn’t a Jehovah’s Witness, so why associate with him if not for fornication? No physical punishment, but pretty harsh psychologically.
I’m pretty tolerant of religion in general, and sometimes I think this board goes too far: in their hatred of religion, it seems like people embrace ignorance. Easier to dismiss something as stupid than understand it. That said, I am completely irrational about Jehovah’s Witnesses because of the things that have happened in my family, and Dogzilla’s story is astounding and appalling. How much more of that goes on?
I have been, no kidding, denounced from the pulpit by a catholic bishop visiting our town.
Background: I used to own two newspapers. Local weeklies. It was fun. For the week between Christmas and New Year’s we always ran a joke issue. Nothing was happening worth reporting on so we cut the page count and made up WAY over the top stories for the entertainment of our readers. We labeled the issues as made up on the front and interior.
In 2009 one of my writers came up with the idea that the local catholic church was going to take over a bar that had gone out of business and hold services there as they were undergoing renovation. It included mention that the host would be served in the peanut bowls at the bar.
Clearly, I should have known better.
A visiting bishop, in town for I know not what, saw it and took the time that Sunday to denounce the paper for writing the story. He said it mocked the church, it mocked the faith, and, by involved the eucharist, it mocked Jesus and God himself. He then went on to name me as owner of the newspaper and let me have it as a hater of Catholicism that no one should have dealings with.
Wham.
I started getting texts from friends inside the church AS it was happening. I’m told the congregation got up and cheered against me during the talk.
Oy.
Anyway, I was away when it happened. When I got back I tried calling Father Mike, head of the church. No return calls. I stopped by (it was 1/2 block from my house) and he refused to see me. I stopped trying and let it slide.
But yes…I’ve been in trouble with the church.
When I was a teenager (15 and 16) and a member of the Mormon church I dated one of the (at the time) Bishop’s sons, the “good” one. My family were not members (long story), mom was married to my first stepfather who was an active alcoholic, both my mom and stepdad smoked, and I literally lived on the wrong side of the tracks, in a mobile home no less. Nobody said much, either within the church or out and we had a fairly normal teenage dating relationship. Lots of making out and heavy petting after dates, which were most often to church functions.
Anyway, after a year he was preparing to go on a mission and his mother pressured him to break up with me and go out with a proper Mormon girl, which he did. I was heartbroken and buried myself in the Church. After a period of time I felt that, as a true believer, I needed to confess my sins to the Bishop, who then held a Bishop’s Council, and I was disfellowshiped for a year. It was embarrassing and hurtful, and I eventually left the church at the age of 19, although for reasons other than my disfellowshipment.
Interestingly, he came to me after I had disclosed all to the nasty minded Bishopric and thanked me for spilling the beans to his dad. Seems he was too yellowbellied to come clean on his own, and he appreciated me for taking the heat so his spirit could be cleansed. He was never disfellowshipped, he went on his mission as planned, and came home to marry Polly Pureheart.
There are not enough roll eyes in the world…