The Members Are the Church

Q; “You say you love members but then talk trash about the Church, but the member are the Church. You can’t separate them.”

🦬🦬🦬Have you ever watched one of those aerial shots of a herd of water buffalo moving across the Serengeti? They’re all individual animals but they move in such predictable ways…

After watching the seemingly random, yet strangely consistent patterns of wildebeests, bees, and other animals like this, in “Welcome to Earth,” Will Smith noted that while each animal was unique, their actions as a unit took a mind and form of their own. 

🐝🐝🐝That understanding applies to humans, too. 

🧔🏻🧑🏽‍🦱👱🏻‍♀️When we act as a herd or swarm of human animals, guided by a common understanding or ideology, we tend to form a consistent collective personality, regardless of the uniqueness of the individuals making up that swarm. 

⛪️From what I can see, “the Church” as a governing structure, set of dogmas, and swarm-like personality when compared with “Church members,” 👩🏼‍🦰👨🏻👵🏻👩🏽‍🦱 as individuals participating in that system expresses this dynamic, too.

👉 But, more to the core of the issue: I think that distinguishing between these two ideas is critical to healing relations between Members and Post-members and to updating the swarm-mind of the current Church to become healthier for the remaining members. 

Allow me to explain…

🕸 One of the key challenges that members of the LDS (and FLDS, JW, Scientologist, and other extreme, high-demand groups) face is a lack of differentiation between themselves and their allegiant group. 

🫂Their identities become enmeshed with the group identity, such that a perceived threat or a perceived boon to the group is felt as a personal threat or boon to oneself. This is because high-demand groups interact with their members in very analogous ways to the way Narcissistic Personalities interact with their dependents. They set perfectionistic standards, use approval (or “worthiness”) to manipulate the dependents’ actions,  and exploit the vulnerabilities of the dependent, in order to gain access to money, resources, labor, or favors. 

It looks like this, in the LDS Church context: 

 🥨 Demands for excessive praise and admiration (“protect the good name of the Church!”) 

🥨 Preoccupation with fantasies of its own brilliance (“Church will roll forth body, nobly, and triumphant…”)  

🥨 Feelings of superiority compared to others (“the one true Church”) 

🥨 Expectations of unquestioning compliance (“follow the Prophet!”)

🥨 Opportunistic use of others to accomplish selfish ends (“sacrifice your time, talents, and everything with which the Lord may bless you, even your own lives, if necessary.”)

🥨 Reactivity/being easily slighted (“don’t call us Mormon!”)

🥨 Reactions of rage or contempt to make itself feel superior (“those are Anti-Mormon lies spread by the spawn-of-Satan apostates!!” Also: read any full speech from Brigham Young)

And more* 

😕 This creates an environment in which members’ pour so much of themselves into the perpetuation or protection of the Narcissistic system, that they may forget or never learn how to separate their idea of themselves as distinct from their conception as a part of the group.

In other words: the faithful member’s whole concept of “self” IS BEING a cog in the machine. 

⚙️This is why a missionary can say with perfect sincerity that having people turn down solicitations to hear a rehearsed pitch from Preach My Gospel feels like a personal rejection.

⚙️This is why a member can be whistling through their faithful life and be emotionally derailed by a water-cooler conversation in which a coworker casually mentions that the Church “didn’t work for them.”

⚙️ This is why a member can be cisgender and heterosexual in a predominantly cisgendered and hetero-normative environment, yet be completely preoccupied by the perceived threats of the “gay agenda.”

(😅 These are not abstract examples, by the way–these are all roles I have personally played, in my time with this Narcissistic system.) 

🐾 Evolutionarily, this behavior of group assimilation probably had some big advantages, when it came to species survival in a pre-digital, variably hostile world. However, in the super-populated, social-media-heavy modern world, this kind of group mentality is leading to massive harm and dysfunction. And, in the hands of an organization like the LDS Church, which already has a long history of creating dogmatic echo-chambers…

💔 It’s causing parents to reject their children based on their sexual orientation. 

💔 It’s causing spouses to separate because one of them drinks coffee or doesn’t wear garments. 

💔 It’s causing women to whittle their dreams into splinters, as they try to fit into the Church-given identity of producing many children and never taking time to restore themselves.

💔 It’s causing parents to be shut out of their child’s wedding because the parent doesn’t feel good about paying another contribution to the Church’s investment funds. 

💔It’s causing victims of abuse to suffocate themselves and forgo healing, because their abusers are still in Priesthood leadership positions, sometimes in their own families. 

This list could go on and on. 

Since the lack of differentiation between members and their system creates this problem, the solution starts with allowing for differentiation, again. 

〰️The Church is already super good at creating a boundary line between members and “the world,” so I imagine that a shift like this wouldn’t be too hard to accomplish. 

However, it would include some heavy changes, like 

📎informing members fully about the Church’s history, doctrines, and changes in doctrines over the past 200 years (maybe just start with advertising the Gospel Topics Essays) 

📎removing all the weird and brainwashy rules during their service 

📎 rewriting Sunday School and Seminary manuals that show an honest representation about Joseph Smith’s life

📎 informing members about any possible criminal conduct of any leaders they or their children may have been exposed to

📎 encouraging members to prioritize their personal revelation over that of leaders

📎 removing the power of Bishops to skewer someone’s career, education, or marriage (at BYU or Church facilities) 

📎 making members in charge of determining their own worthiness 

I am not a Joseph Smith fan, but there are some things he said that I can conditionally get behind. One of them is this: 

“Teach people correct principles and they will govern themselves.” 

Joseph and I would certainly disagree on what counts as “correct principles” 👀 since his principles included a lot of hiding, lying, swindling, coercing, and sneaking around, but nonetheless–this quote could be a great start for justifying a Church-wide refocus on both male and female and other members’ agency. 

👐To round this out, let me say this:

I can and do separate the members of the Church from the system we/our ancestors have created. 

I can and do  

Love

The 

Members

Of 

The 

LDS 

Church, 

I also object to the conduct and behavior that is being allowed by the members not holding their institution accountable for the collective harm that has been done and is being done to serve the Church’s hidden finances.

Because I love the members (maybe that’s you), I’m calling out the weird and disturbing things that happen to most members when they are confronted with information that challenges the conventional narratives put forth by the Church, at large. 

They shut down. 

They disconnect. 

The ghost the conversation.

They repeat over and over that the Church works “for them.”  

They cherry-pick the nice quotes.

They deflect real issues and dismiss experiences of real people.

They mourn over people who leave like we have died. 

💔This isn’t normal or healthy relationship behavior. 

👉In my view, it is necessary and appropriate to call out these patterns, while also recognizing that there are full, complex people involved inside of them. 

🙅‍♀️The patterns, the dogmas, the system of the Church does not equal =/= the individual people.🙅‍♀️

But when people show up willing to change, the system must change too.

🌿When that recognition is made en masse, the real work of healing can begin. 🌿

*For more on Narcissistic Personality Disorder, this is a brief overview from the Mayo Clinic. I could think of applications for every item on their list in regards to both Joseph Smith personally and the modern Church, as a whole. Let me know what examples came to your mind, below.