I wouldn’t call Mormonism an outright cult. I was in Tokyo when the Aum Shinrikyo were killing people in the subways, and those people were in a cult.
However, Mormonism is definitely cult-like in some aspects.
From the list:
This is actually a big issue and goes along with some other items of the checklist which weren’t quoted above.
Something that ex-Mormons talk about again and again and again is how doubts about the Church needed to be buried deeply, not allowed to surface and how they had to go into contortions to deal with this cognitive dissonance.
The pressure to not question the party line can be pretty intense.
I know a lot of highly intelligent Mormons who simply refuse to look at how modern scholarship in science as well as the work of professional and amateur historians are able to disprove any of Mormonism’s truth claims.
Without getting into the nitty-gritty, boring details of any particulars, the First Vision is one of the foundational events within Mormonism, in which Smith claimed to see God. There are lots of specific claims in the account which have been shown to not be true, but it’s sort of a litmus test to proclaim belief to this story.
People react differently to this. Some don’t really care about the details. Others like me were taught that the details really matter, yet when you ask about questions, the doubts are treated as if they are temptations from Satin.
When I was going through a faith crisis after my mission, I went to the bishop, (lay leader in charge of a congregation) with my specific questions. He couldn’t answer them and made me feel guilty for having the questions instead. I was my fault for asking the questions rather than looking at how to live without answers.
Double-dog amen to everything in this post. I escaped Provo, Utah, and Mormonism when I was 18 (1987), so I’ve been away for decades. However, when I visit family in Utah it’s clear that not much has changed.
Fun tidbit: I’m a product of polygamy. My gr-gr -grandparents were amongst the last practitioners in Podunk Southern Utah.
I went over to a pro-Mormon forum to see what their take was on the name change, and read a thread about evolution.
Here were some presumably reasonably educated Mormons (hell, they probably can even spell “Satan” correctly) and were giving such biting retorts as “when people can become humble and admit that their worship of science can be misplaced.” “Science and religion are similar in that they both can be open to interpretation.” “Someone once made a fossil in a lab class and it was carbon dated as thousands of years old.”
People, myself included, believe all sorts of irrational things. Fundamentalist type religions such as Mormonism take that to the nth degree, proving a place for group think while strongly rejecting questioning what the leaders preach.
I have two sets of gr-gr-grandparents who were polygamous, but they were up in Northern Utah. My father’s side was in central Utah and was as poor as dirt, making it harder to have multiple wives.
We’re probably still cousins – an amazing number of my grandparents’ and parents’ generation married second and third cousins. This is one good genetic reason to dragoon fresh blood into Utah via converts (there are some interesting studies done in Utah on genetic diseases; some rural areas are much like the Amish – lots of intermarrying).
Today I bought two very sweat-drenched missionaries from Utah a Sprite at 7-11. Poor kids are from Ogden and SLC, biking around Jersey wearing black slacks and ties in 183% humidity.
That was a nice thing to do. My mom has occasionally had the missionaries at her dood and always gives them a drink, water or juice, not soda. She doesn’t invite them in, but still feels sorry for how hard they have to work, or the crap they take.
I see missionaries as people delivering the plague - the thing they’re doing is reprehensible and should be opposed at every turn. The fact that the actual deliveryboys are pretty much entirely innocent complicates the issue - they’re tools of the regime, not the mastermind, so I find myself hating the message and sympathizing, very very slightly, with the messenger.
I feel for 'em. My nephew is on a mission in Connecticut right now. I can’t imagine this is the funnest life for 19yo men and women, no matter how strong one’s faith.
How Mormon were you growing up? TBM (true believing Mormon)? Or just doing you time until you could get the hell out of dodge?
As I posted earlier, up through early high school, I was 100% all in. Mormonism was my entire existence. I started to have doubts but simply could not consciously form the doubts in my mind. Completely losing your identity was just too much pressure for me to handle as a teenage, so it wasn’t until my 20s that I was finally able to get out.
I was never particularly interested in any of it. I was a voracious reader of fiction from very, very early, and by the time I began forming a coherent worldview I recognized that the Mormon belief system felt more like it’s own fictional mythos than anything connected to or relating to the real world. So when it comes to belief, there was never anything to get out of. As for getting out of the religion, here are some ‘milestones’:
At 8 I reportedly protested that I didn’t want to be baptized. I was overruled and went through with it anyway.
I submitted to getting the aaronic priesthood with disinterest but no protest that I recall.
I flatly refused the melchizedek priesthood on the grounds that I was quite a firm atheist by then.
I didn’t go on a mission, of course. (I vaguely recall that this sort of went along with refusing the melchizedek priesthood.)
By twenty I had received permission to completely stop attending without being evicted. (I was living at my parent’s house at the time, attending the local college. I didn’t actually ask for this permission - I considered attendance part of the condition of living there. My mom just casually pointed out that I didn’t need to go anymore one sunday, and that was that.)
I…never was officially removed from the church rolls, as far as I know. I was asked whether I wanted to be, but answered that I honestly considered the mormon church so unimportant and insignificant that whether they thought I was a member or not was completely unimportant.
I’ll let you decide at what point in that process I “got out”.
I was born into a dyed-in-the-wool-true-believer family and extended family and it was just a given that everyone was born a TBM. I realized very early on I was queer and “not like the other things,” so it was incredibly distressing when I realized, around age 12-13, that I was one of the sexual deviants being preached against. My parents had a hideous divorce when I was 16 (a big no-no), mom fell away from the Church, and by then I was VERY happy to stop going to boring shit meetings and pretending I was a nice little straight girl looking forward to Temple marriage and so on.
So there were a few years that we were treated as the outcast family in our town (Mom started partying after the divorce, as did I), but I don’t remember caring too much about being shunned, I was really busy with sports. There were cruddy moments of being treated badly by former friends and some neighbors, but I recall mostly feeling relieved. I left Utah two weeks after I turned 18, went back for 10 or so months in '85-86, then left for far away and never looked back.
I think I was born agnostic-atheistic, as I can’t recall ever feeling a religious glow or being truly moved by anything Church-related. What I really remember is being horribly, horribly bored in interminable meetings and wondering to myself if people really enjoyed this crap and believed in “Guys in the Skies” stuff. I spend a few years when I was in my 30s going to different churches (Catholic, Universalist, Episcopalian, etc) to see if anything moved me – nope, nada.
Heh, the boring, interminable shit meetings. I spent all those reading books. And not the boring shit religious books either - proper fiction-that-admits-to-being-fiction books. (My parents made the mistake of letting me read kid books to keep me quiet as a two/three year old, and there never was an obvious time to stop me doing it later. :D)
Two words that strike fear into any ex-Mormon who gets bored easily: Sacrament Meeting. In my day some of these suckers were nearly three hours long (and followed by Sunday School).
At least Catholics get to stand, kneel, and do other audience participation activities and you’re generally imprisoned for just an hour.
I fear them not, because I didn’t get bored - I read!
It occurs to me that being allowed to engage in, well, disengaging activities during such meetings might aid people in staying aloof to TBM syndrome. While I noted earlier that the mormon church doesn’t engage in most of the hardcore traditional brainwashing techniques, paying attention during those meetings and singing the songs and bowing head for those prayers are as close as mormonism comes to ‘one of us’ behaviors. I’m sure that my being allowed to essentially tune them out was contributory to my ease in shrugging off the whole kit and kaboodle.
Smart observations about “one of us” behaviors. I’ve always wondered how many folks born into Utah Mormonism really, really believe and how many just find it the easiest way to fit in and roll along with life. If one is of the unquestioning ilk I suppose it can be a good life, filled with mostly predictable happenings.
We were never given a choice about attending church, getting baptized, assuming the priesthood, etc. There were never conversations about belief, it was just a given that you were amongst God’s chosen, so why question anything?
I’ve not a single doubt that my maternal grandparents were true believers; on my dad’s side his father, uncles, and brothers went through the motions on Sunday and drank coffee (and some smoked!!) down at the truck stop on weekday mornings with the other good ol’ boys.
