Hipster Members

This is one of a series social media posts that I wrote in 2021 during the height of my Faith Transition. Because I was publicly deconstructing in front of an entirely faithful network of friends and followers, I received a lot reactions, questions, and backlash from people I loved regarding my journey. Many of them were dismissive or hostile towards me because they had been trained to me as a “defector.”

Since an overly long response in a comment or personal message would have been seen as aggressive, I took quotes from these reactions to write these public posts in response. I never attributed the person who asked the question since I didn’t want anyone to feel specifically blamed or called out for having the response. The questions are also not unique. They are part of the scripted response we were taught to have as members of the “in-group.” Still, each post begins with a quotation because it is a question I personally received during my Transition.

Q: “You talk as if members don’t know anything about their own Church. My parents told me all of this growing up.”

When I look back on my growing up, I really think my parents tried to be transparent with me. They didn’t tell me everything they knew, and that’s been surprising to find out as an adult, but, when you’re fully “in” the Church, there are just certain things that you’re not allowed to say (or think).

😮‍💨 Thankfully, in the LDS Church, barbaric reactions of physical violence are not a consequence for dissent anymore, but generally, we think of ourselves as honest, sincere people and that means not allowing ourselves to say or think about our Church, in certain ways. For the lay-membership, this isn’t a conscious choice to hide things, so much as a mental prohibition from introducing a debilitating level of cognitive dissonance into our lives. (This was especially in the 90s and early 2000s–it’s gotten a little easier in recent years, as more people have spoken up).

📌Practically speaking, this means that even though I was kind of aware of the Church history around practicing polygamy, I didn’t know about Joseph’s personal practice, the number of wives or their ages, the justifications, secret meetings, lies to Emma and the public, the code-words, and/or the long-term prophecies that had been given about it.

📌Similarly, even though I was aware of Rough Stone Rolling being published (one of Bushman’s assistants was a Young Men’s leader, while I was in Young Women’s and my Dad had the book, right afterwards), I had never read it or even considered that it might have significant additions to the stories of Joseph that I was hearing in Seminary and Sunday school. Those things already kept me super busy, after all, and I assumed the Church was going to be honest with me, just like it was checking to make sure that I was “honest with my fellow men.”

📌Even though I was aware that the Temple ceremony had similarities with Masonry, I swallowed all the (totally unfounded) assertions that it matched the practices of Ancient Israelites and I didn’t know why people would be upset that Masonry had some similar (or identical) material.

📌Even though I was aware that speakers kept reassuring women that they were “special” in General Conference, I didn’t really know why women needed that reminder, because as a child and youth, growing up in a relatively feminist Mormon household outside of Utah, I hadn’t yet felt the suffocating weight of sexism in the Church.

👉All this is to say: just because you “know of” some problematic aspects of Church history, doesn’t mean you understand them or the magnitude of their impact on the overall truth claims and current social dynamics of the LDS Church.

📚The subsequent post to this one will be a lightly-annotated resource list, combining the LDS Church’s current Gospel Topics Essays and resources from lay-members or post-members who have published more thoroughly on the same topics. If you’re not in a place to read deeply right now, you can always save it or scoop the links to a separate document to look at later.

🗣I don’t have a specific goal in sharing this resource list.

🤷‍♀️Maybe it will inspire you to write a faith-promoting biography like Richard Bushman, who has stayed in the Church.

🤷‍♀️Maybe it will inspire you to write candid journalism on modern Mormonism, like Jana Riess, who has also stayed.

🤷‍♀️On the other hand, maybe it will clarify for you (like it did for us) that the firm part of our spiritual foundation actually didn’t depend on the Church at all and that you can love people better without fearing or judging them, first.

🤷‍♀️Maybe it will inspire you to make the Church community more interdenominational and welcoming to all types of spiritual journeying–who knows!

❤️‍🩹As we used to say in our companionship inventories, though: it’s better to directly address problems instead of building up resentment in the background. What hurts from frankness will become poisoners with passive aggression.