What the church does for people.

Since I left the church, the staunch and zealous opinions I held in my youth have given way to something I think is much more practical. Now I consider myself a humanist…with religious sympathies.

What does that mean? It means that I believe, in general, people are more important than the ideas that frame our existence on this planet. And that anything setup to govern people’s behavior in life should be centered on helping people live happier lives, rather than causing needless suffering in support of a principle. In short – pragmatism. Do what works. If it doesn’t work, do something that does. I understand it’s not a panacea, but it makes sense to me.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is just one of many, many religions in this world that are defined by its own set of principles and rules. I believe religions are here to help people in this life. That they are largely human creations made to respond to some very real human needs, and to give people answers to questions that nobody really has answers to. Whether or not each religion’s set of answers are true and factual is almost irrelevant. If people choose to believe and trust in a religion, it gives back to them a comfort and support that can be incredibly powerful.

Case in point:

Two weeks ago our family suffered an incredibly tragedy. My cousin’s son died at the age of 22 from a rare liver disorder that he suffered from birth. Before he was a year old he received a liver transplant. Eventually his health stabilized. He grew up living a normal life, though he always had to take medication and occasionally needed to spend time in a hospital when something went wrong. When he was rushed to the hospital for the last time three weeks ago he was living with cousins and planning to go to college. His younger brother was on a mission, something he could never do because of his health problems.

While his death wasn’t as unexpected as it would’ve been were he healthy, it was still absolutely devastating to those closest to him.

I went to the funeral with my brother and parents. His brother gave the life sketch. My mother sang. It was beautiful.

But what I remember most from the funeral was the talk given by the boy’s uncle, who happens to also be my cousin. He’s older (in his late 40’s now) and has almost definitely taken his tour through many church leadership positions. A man very close to the church.

Perhaps more than any other branch of the family, his was closest to the family of the boy who died. He related to the congregation that when the family asked him to speak, naturally, he felt inadequate. And of course! I mean, what do you say? How do you inspire comfort when what happened was so impossibly unfair?

After several minutes of recalling happy memories which everyone smiled and laughed at, his voice lowered and petered out, obviously heavy with emotion. He started again, and even though he was at the pulpit it was obvious he was speaking directly to the boy’s family. He spoke quietly and halting with tears saying something to the like of, “I went to the temple to ask for help with this talk…God help me say what I need to say… [speaking to the mother] I’m supposed to tell you that you are a wonderful mother and that your son is still being mothered, [to the father] you are a wonderful father, [to the brother who came home from his mission for the funeral] that you are a wonderful brother.”

My recollection of it isn’t doing the moment justice. It was much more personal and special than what I can recall.

If you’re familiar with LDS sacrament meetings there’s a magical moment that happens occasionally when something really singular, or personal is being said. The normal background hum of the congregation quiets down and a different atmosphere takes over as people pay closer attention. In the church they call it “the spirit”. At this very special moment of the funeral, probably the most important moment of the entire day, the spirit was very intense. I’m sure many would say - the veil was very thin at that moment.

I sat there listening to my cousin, in the middle of a room full of relatives and friends having a very special and spiritual experience. I was touched, but I forced myself to remain dispassionate and logical about what was happening; and given the importance of the temple amongst faithful, including the many accounts of spiritual experiences had by people there (some bordering on the supernatural), I listened very carefully for any explicit mention of some sort of ‘visitation’.

There was none. If he experienced anything like that, he left it out either because it was too sacred for him to relate, or because it didn’t happen. In either case, he left it open ended; probably for the best.

This is my point. The church did something very important for my family on that day - it comforted the living and made the loss a little more palatable. Whether or not the afterlife is as the LDS church says it is isn’t as important as helping the living cope with lost loved ones and to continue living their own lives without fear or misery.

In light of this I ask, what good is the truth if it’s as bleak and terminal as science has it? Boyd K. Packer has said, “There is much that is true that isn’t useful.” I’ve come to agree with him.

What does this mean in respect to me coming out of the closet and leaving the church? Am I going to run back to into church activity, out of the arms of my fiancé and back into the closet again? No. A thousand times, no. What is does mean is I’ve gained a renewed respect and admiration for what the church can do to help people. And if people are the most important thing, then it gives me hope for the future of gays in the LDS church.

Let’s hope either a stroke of pragmatism strikes the church leadership, or a real stroke strikes down those who stand in its way.

8: The Mormon Proposition - Soundtrack now available

The soundtrack to 8: The Mormon Proposition has just been released on iTunes.

Click on the link below to listen.

Sweet n' Sour

-I'm glad the church seemed to lessen it's stance on gays.

-I hate that I'm expected to feel grateful for their support for my rudimentary rights.

-I'm astonished that people really do think I'm out to destroy their families.

-I'm happy my family has the church and what it does for them.

-I'm sorry the church has my family and what it does to them.

-I like living in Utah.

-I hate living in Utah.

-I admit to a bit of schadenfreude towards the church. To them, it must be like living a real-life Battlestar Galactica. Wait, you're a cylon?! The whole time you were a cylon?!!

Carefully choreographed, for your spiritual enlightenment.

A couple things about the most recent LDS general conference -

On my way to the parents house for bread bowls and soup (fantastic cold-weather fair by the way), I decided to turn on the radio and listen to a little of the LDS general conference the hour-ride afforded me.

The part I listened to was Elder Jeffrey R. Holland's rousing testimony of the Book of Mormon. If you didn't hear it (chances are 50/50 you didn't if you read this blog) then you should, because it's a fantastic example of the power of a well-seasoned public speaker. Lot's of general authorities have given their testimonies of the Book of Mormon, but I can't remember one that sounded so....

....so angry.

Here are some thoughts I had as I listened:

Holland asserts that the Book of Mormon has to be true because Joseph and Hyrum Smith both took solace in it's pages as they waited to die in Cartridge jail, and that if the Book of Mormon was a fraud then wouldn't the brothers' mind's be elsewhere as they contemplated their impending death?

A few responses to that:

- Yes, the fact that they were reading the BoM in a time of great trial, possibly aware they were about to die, DOES bolster their true and undying faith in the truthfulness of the book; but that does not mean the book is true. Many people in history have believed themselves to be prophets; and I'm not talking about the type of malicious people who consciously grasp their own deceptive intentions, but people who REALLY believe they are some sort of prophet. Why not this scenario? - Joseph, in all honesty of heart, created the Book of Mormon thinking it was sent of God; and then throughout his life used it, taught from it, took succor from it's pages, even to the end of his life. Why not?

Can things resonate truth to our souls, but still be fiction? Sorry if the example offends you, but how many of us cried when the character of Dobby died in the final Harry Potter book? Did this creature ever exist except in our collective imaginations? Did that make how we felt any less...real?

This leads me to a larger point about conference and LDS meetings in general; let me frame it with a question: Have you ever read a book, watched a movie, or been on a ride at Disneyland that was so immersive and convincing in its fiction that you lost hold of "reality" for a while and were completely transported?

While I was in my car and listening to Holland yell at me about the absolute truthfulness of the BoM, some part of me couldn't help but feel moved and effected by it. Luckily my life experience (especially within the church) has taught me not all things that glitter are gold. How can anyone completely resist his testimony, especially considering he whole heartedly believes in what he's saying, and that his words were delivered from within a forum where nothing can be questioned and everything is designed to reinforce his message: from the music to the color scheme in the flower arrangement?

Another tangentially related point - The church is only interested in building faith; whether this is accomplished with truth or fiction is irrelevant.

Boyd K. Paker, in a BYU publication from 1981 said:

"There is a temptation for the writer or the teacher of Church history to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith promoting or not. Some things that are true are not very useful."

Really Paker? How far does this principle extend? If something within the historical record is discovered that casts real and serious doubt on the veracity of the church, would the church leadership respect its existence and deal with it, or would they do everything in their power to bury it? And might the inverse be true? - If something that isn't true builds faith, would it be allowed to propagate?

The assertion of the LDS church that it is the only true church on the earth today is heavily reliant on it's history, especially in regards to Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. It's very hard to study the history of the church when the custodian of the historical record is seriously invested in the picture the record paints.

Soooo.....

I don't want to destroy faith. I understand the church's function in the lives of my loved ones and I would never want to take it away from them, even though I personally don't believe it anymore.

But when I heard Holland's talk, rife with it's absolutisms and pointed hyperbole, I can't help but respond; even though about 10 people may read it, and no one in my family. For what it's worth.

Masturbation

I discovered it like most boys do I suppose. It wasn't long after that I also discovered the church for myself, if that makes any sense, and quickly became an unreasonable zealot about it. When you throw being gay into the mix - I started a long cycle of shame and self-loathing that lasted from my early teens through my mission into my mid-20's.

Here's how I'm going to do this: Instead of trying to sew together a blog-post that flows from one idea to the next, I'm going to be lazy and give you little snatches of thought, opinion, and personal experiences without any effort to come to any earth-shattering conclusion.

Masturbation:

- One of my mission companions was a real douche-bag about sticking to the smallest rules and regulations of being a missionary; to the point that we even lost a potential baptism because he thought it more important to leave in the middle of a baptismal discussion than be a few minutes late getting home at the end of the day.

....but I digress....

We were at a member's home for a dinner appointment. They sat us down in the living room while they finished making dinner. On the table they had a number of magazines, one of which was a Victoria Secret catalogue. I thought that was quite amusing, leaving such a magazine out with the missionaries over; so I picked it up, flipped through a couple pages and put it back down on the table, literally - 5 seconds. Elder Douchebag looked shocked and wispered sharply, "What are you doing?!!"

"Nothing," I said.

I didn't hear anything about it until our next interviews with the mission president a few weeks later. My companion told the mission president about the incident in his interview, and when it was my turn to get interviewed by the mission president I had literally no inkling what I was walking into. The mission president yelled at me, called me a liar, tied the magazine to my issues with masturbation (apparently completely forgetting my conversations with him months earlier about having same-sex attraction), and told me he wanted me to write him an essay explaining exactly what I was going to do to fix this problem. Disgusted, he ended the interview.

I took it to heart and wrote him the essay, delivering it to him during the next interviews. He asked if he could use the essay to help other missionaries who also struggled with masturbation. "Of course," I said.

Over the next series of months he gave me reports during our interviews about how many copies of my essay he gave out during his travels to the different mission zones. I remember once he said, "26 just last week."

That was my first revelation that almost everybody masturbates.

When I came home, and as I continued to struggle with being gay, I sought help on websites like www.lds-ssa.org. They made a request for articles, so I gave them a copy of the essay and they published it. The site is down now, but Google still has it cached and you can read the article (if you want) at this link:

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:beycg5nIDgMJ:www.lds-ssa.org/index.php%3Foption%3Dcom_content%26task%3Dview%26id%3D14%26Itemid%3D30+%22overcoming+masturbation%22+lds&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

........

- I've had many bishops over the years, especially as an "on the move" college student who rarely stayed in any one place more than a year. By the last few years of my activity in the church I had stopped mentioning masturbation to them; but before then my experience with bishops' reactions ranged from "forget about it" to "lets talk about disfellowship". Everybody knows different bishops can have wildly differing opinions and policies about various subjects. And as every anomaly about the church, believers tweak their own belief systems to accommodate it. For me, it was by no means the only reason, but I would be lying if I didn't say it was one of the reasons I left the church.

....

- While in college at BYU-Idaho I decided that my research paper for my English class would be on sexual addiction, specifically about the role guilt plays in keeping people in their addictions and the irony within Mormonism (and other conservative groups) that the guilt intended to stop people from these addictions actually keeps them in the cycle. I had a fantastic idea to set up a table in the Manwaring Student Center and ask willing students to anonymously fill out a questionnaire. The questionnaire would ask them something like how frequently they masturbated and how they felt it ranked in relation to other sins, something like that. At the last minute I decided to run my idea past my teacher. He put the kibosh on it, of course. Instead, I decided to take my questionnaire to the support group for.....[ahem], "Compulsive Behaviors" I was going to on campus every week. Almost everyone there filled one out. Overwhelmingly, people seemed to think their masturbating made them as bad, or almost as bad as murderers in the eyes of God.

......

Gradually through my mid-20's I decided to stop feeling bad about masturbating. Soon after, I decided to stop feeling bad about being gay. I'm sure most active members in the church would recognize something like a "path to apostasy" in that progression, and they would be right.

The truth is leaving the church saved my life and has made me whole. No regrets.

Story and Automatons

I've learned not to ever ever burden casual acquaintances from my BYU days with details about my personal life, even though they ask.

Case in point: I work part-time at a coffee shop. A familiar face from my BYU days popped in for some coffee (which is always a source of secret hilarity to me when that happens). He asked me if I was married.

"Kind of," I said.

"Your kind-of married?"

"Well, I'm gay; that's why I left BYU before graduating. Me and my fiance live in Orem now."

The former acquaintance (soon to be a former, former acquaintance) starts backing away while he tries to continue talking naturally through his shock and embarrassment. It's obvious he's not taking it well. He gets his coffee and leaves the store without getting the pastry he bought from me. He never came back for it.

I think I'll come up with a elaborate lie. Something impressive like.....I'm a neurologist and part-time inventor. I have seven kids and am thinking of adopting more.

------

I don't have strong opinions about many things, but I do have a handful; and here's one of them:

Members of the church who believe marriage should only be between a man and women often have a litany of well-worn, oft repeated reasons supporting their opinion (and to be fair, so do we). In fact, today I got the "marriage is sacred" variant on an argument from a customer who thinks my coffee shop is her own little version of Cheers [where everybody knows your name] and decided to go a little too deep for pleasant coffee-shop chit-chat.

I would almost never do this, but I've always wanted to ask these people this question: If the prophet announced tomorrow that he received a revelation affirming homosexuality and gay marriage, would your opinion change?

I tell you that any member who answers yes, that their opinion would change in that unlikely event - that person does not have my respect. They can take all their well-rehearsed bullet points and shove them. They are automatons. I fully understand why they believe they way they do, and still I say - they are unthinking and heartless. I understand the real reason (prophet speaks>obey). Everything else is hot air.

Which is why I'm so intrigued with the current drama of Scott & Sarah. In a nutshell - they're a gay-straight married couple trying to stay active in the church. After Scott came out to the ward in testimony meeting (God!), the most recent trial is trying their best to keep a foothold in the church while insisting they can sustain the prophet while disagreeing with him on some issues (guess which issues).

Reading their blog is kind of like being a voyeur and rubbernecking at the same time. I can't look away no matter how hard I try.

Google Trends & Proposition 8

This comes from the Wikipedia article for Google Trends:

"Google Trends shows how often a particular search term is entered relative the total search volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages.  Below the main graph, popularity is broken down by region, city and language. It is possible to refine the main graph by region and time period."

The above graph comes from Google Trends and lists the top ten cites that searched the term "Proposition 8" in 2008.

Some questions that come to my mind:

-Logic would assume that Californians would be the most interested in a Californian ballot measure.  Why then are the top two cities in Utah, NOT California?

-Why was "Proposition 8" Googled in Provo dramatically more than any other city, including Salt Lake?

-How does this list compare to the LDS Church's assertion that, monetarily-speaking, its contributions to the passage of Proposition 8 were "...less than one half of one percent of the total funds raised for the "Yes on 8" campaign."?

That's all.

Motivations

Okay, first off…

It’s obvious I’m not one for regular blog posts. When I started my blogs late last year I was so excited. “At last,” I thought, “a way to inject my opinion into the public's eye.”

Or something like that.

But after a handful of posts it seemed I didn’t have much to inject into anyone’s eye. My attempts to become a major voice in the Moho sphere was more like my ham-handed attempts at learning how to draw or to speak German; and my blog – the drawing desk gathering dust in my garage. The book on the shelf.

This is not to say I haven’t been actively reading your blogs. Everyday I check my my computer and iPhone for your posts with the faithfulness of any stalker, and after a few months of hugging the walls of the cultural hall, jealously watching the rest of you, I’m back for another dance.

I don’t want to talk about Chris Buttars. I’m sure you have your own opinions about him and I can’t bring anything new to the table. I’m sure you also have your thoughts on the large block of legislators who hold the same opinions as Buttars toward homosexuals. To me, these other people, while not afflicted so much as Buttars with diarrhea of the mouth, vote the same way as he; and in mathematical terms: ≈Buttars.

But like I said, I don’t want to talk about Buttars. He’s a symptom. There’s something more fundamental behind it all that I want to write about – Mormonism.

“Wow Chester, what a breakthrough!” you seem to say. “I never would’ve thought that what drives these people’s opinions about the world is rooted in their religion!”

Oh, it’s true.

Alright, enough sarcasm. I know this is fundamental but I think a lot of the dialogue on the net reflects a serious lapse in understanding; or at least (especially for Moho's) an inability to remember what it was like to be unshakably Mormon, if ever a state of being existed for you. As we try to see the path forward for gay rights here in Utah (and the nation) it’s essential to understand not only what the other side believes, but also why they believe it.


Mormons will never give in.

The threefold mission of the Mormon Church is to proclaim the gospel, perfect the saints, and redeem the dead. Two of those three missions are specifically about people who are not or ever were Mormon. Why are Mormons so fixated on “saving” the world? - Because they believe 1000% that they are right. And more to the point – they believe there are no other ways to be fully right. What this means is it’s not OK for them to let you remain a Catholic, Buddhist, atheist, or anything else. At the heart of Mormonism there is no “live and let live” policy. You must be a Mormon to be saved (I mean saved in the best sense…. there are different levels of “saved”).
This is one of the reasons Mormons are so against LGBT: They see it so antithetical to their world view that nothing but total dismissal of it is a sort of apostasy. The way they see it, if it’s OK for me to be gay, then Mormonism is wrong.

Did you catch that? – If it’s OK for me to be gay, then Mormonism is wrong. Of course, to them, Mormonism is 1000% correct; and so there’s no concession.

But this is not all that is driving the Mormons opposition to gay rights. In a very real sense they see themselves as the protectors of society. They have to stand up to the gay movement because, as they see it, if homosexuality is given a place at the table then the machinery that keeps the human race tumbling on through time will cease to function.

Moreover, for Mormons, God seems to have a “had it up to here” gauge in regards to a nation’s wickedness. There’s a prevailing idea in the church that were it not for the prayers and actions of the righteous that God would erase America from the planet. It’s as if God were a social worker and Mormons are the frantic parent trying to make the household seem up to snuff, and they’re always worried that if he really knew how things were he’d take the kids away.

OK, maybe a forced metaphor. But you get the idea.

There are other reasons that aren’t rooted so much in doctrine that make the church members fight like they do. I’ve said in an earlier post that the church has a history of being persecuted, and that modern church members look for opportunities to connect in some small way with their pioneer ancestors (consciously or not) by playing the victim (real or not). Some would say that in the current fight this is only a tactic to try to gain the church sympathy in spite of being unsympathetic.  Normally I would agree with that, but it seems many in the church truly believe they are being victimized!


Mormons will give in.

If you look carefully, you can see that the leaders of the church saw this fight coming from a long way off, and that they were talking about it way before Spencer W. Kimball gave the priesthood to blacks. But despite everything the leadership of the church has done over the years to sandbag against the GLBT movement, change is going to come as it always does.  The only question is how it will come.

If change happens from within the church (highly unlikely in the short-term) then this is why: Men with extreme opinions die and (hopefully) are replaced with men holding less extreme opinions. Over the years the scales tip and change happens. That’s the way of it. I’m sure that behind the fences, the granite, the high rooms with closed doors, behind the monolithic face of it all, and behind the strange and secret order that directs how council is spread and digested amongst the leaders of the church; there exists a group of men with subtly differing opinions. I’m sure there are more than a handful of those men who truly understand how difficult it is for homosexuals in the church. Men blessed with more pragmatism than idealism and a willingness to assert so when they can.

But with gay rights, change in the church is most likely to happen when concessions are made due to pressure from inside and/or outside the church (and most likely coupled with leadership changes). If you’re reading this blog chances are you have your own experience with family members having to deal with you or a loved one coming out to them as well as the accompanying struggle they have as they work out what that means for them and their beliefs.
This is the fight, as it exists within the church. It’s virtually the same fight that we all have gone through (or are going through) as we struggle to resolve our beliefs with our own sexuality.


Therefore…what?

People with the most extreme positions against the gay movement are more than likely people without any close connection to a homosexual. In my opinion, the most effective thing we can do to effect change is to be open about ourselves. As Harvey Milk said:

“...Gay brothers and sisters,...You must come out. Come out...to your parents...I know that it is hard and will hurt them but think about how they will hurt you in the voting booth! Come out to your relatives. ..come out to your friends...if indeed they are your friends. Come out to your neighbors...to your fellow workers...to the people who work where you eat and shop...come out only to the people you know, and who know you. Not to anyone else. But once and for all, break down the myths, destroy the lies and distortions. For your sake. For their sake.”

Along those lines (and albeit for me to argue a conservative stance), too often it’s the most extreme LGBTs that are at the forefront of the fight for gay rights while the vast majority of homosexuals living a comparatively conservative life are hugging the walls…

It’s unfortunate, but the people who have the most to give towards this fight in Utah are usually the ones with the most to loose.

Vignettes

- I wondered aloud to my fiance whether we should boycott our local movie theater chain (Cinemark) because the owner donated almost $10,000 to the Yes on Prop. 8 campaign. His response was, “What does that leave us with? Megaplex? (Larry H. Miller’s chain). Please.”

And then he patiently reminded me that I was, myself, at that very moment, doing some work on two new TV commercials for the church.

“Oh yeah,” I said.

- My father dressed up as Santa Claus last Sunday for a local hotel’s Christmas party in exchange for a room for me and my fiance Christmas Eve. I have very cool parents.

- I don’t have much reason to go to BYU campus these days, but sometimes I do. When I’m there I love to watch people’s reaction to my facial hair. It’s something between shock and disgust. Muted, but very noticeable.

- I still feel compelled to stay in the closet around certain people. There are some pretty good reasons for this, and hopefully I won’t be compelled to much longer; but it gets kind of annoying when people I work with tell me they want to set me up with a lady-friend of theirs. I’m not sure I can keep a consistent back-story to the imaginary girlfriend I’ve made up to get out of their advances. What was her name again? Jennifer? Ariel maybe?

- This is the first year we’ve had to decide whether Christmas cards and gifts should include both our names or just one or the other. For now it serves to be extra vigilant because it’s very annoying to accidentally out yourself by putting two names when you really meant to put one.

I’m starting to see why being in the closet sucks so much.

Coffee and Pragmatism.

It’s been said that sons are put on this earth to torment their fathers. I think most boys reach a point in their lives where they choose to embrace something they know will aggravate the hell out of their parents. As I entered this phase in my youth, my rebellion, funny enough, was to be as active in the church as possible.

My father converted to the LDS church after he married my mother who was a lifelong member. I doubt it was more than a year or two after they were sealed in the temple that my father settled into a casual relationship with the church where, for him, staying only for sacrament meeting was OK, drinking coffee was fine, even occasional smoking and drinking wasn’t that big of a deal.

Starting around 13 I began my aforementioned “rebellion”. Instead of spending time with my family on Sunday, I would lock myself in my room because I didn’t want to watch TV on the Sabbath. I refused once to go to Sunday brunch with the rest of the family even though uncle-so-and-so was in town and wanted to take us out; and instead I stayed home and read scriptures. I would silently chide my father in my journal for not taking me to complete our home teaching assignment every month, or for never holding family home evening.

Now as I look back on those years I feel my father unwittingly gave me a lifeline. What if my father was the man I wished he were when I was a teenager? Would he have been nearly as accepting of me when I came out last year? Would it have been as easy for me set aside my religion when I finally did? Probably not. The alternate-universe scenario I can’t shake from my head is one where I live celibate and devout into my late 30’s, and ends when I take my own life. In this way (and I hope this makes sense) - I think my father’s coffee habit saved my life. Thanks for the safety valve dad.

I won’t pretend it wasn’t hard for my family when I told them I was gay and that I had just started dating someone. It was hardest on my mother, but both my parents have been wonderfully respectful and understanding of my decisions.

I believe there’s an unspoken pragmatism at work within some members of the church. Whether on a conscious level or not, they understand that despite the “only true church” tenet that drives nearly everything Mormons do; people understand happiness in life is more important than anguish in devotion. Likewise, there are those of us within the GLBT community who are trying desperately to keep sight of what is good about the church in spite of recent actions the leadership has taken against us; and why our friends and family continue to believe in it even as they fight for us.

In a few days it’ll have been exactly one year since I came out to my family. My fiance and I regularly drive to my parents’ house for Sunday dinner. Dad, now in the high council of his stake, usually enlists me to help him take extra dinner plates to a couple widows he home teaches in his ward. Usually, we swing by Starbucks before going home.

LDS church primed for persecution.

I spent many years of my life listening (or teaching) Sunday School lessons.  For Mormons, stories from the early days of the church are used to teach gospel principles as frequently as stories from the Bible and The Book of Mormon are used. Topics from these stories range from tithing to Sabbath day observance, but some of the biggest lessons they offer come from stories of faith in the face of sacrifice, persecution, and death.

The greatest story I can think of to illustrate this comes from when Joseph Smith was a prisoner for a number of months at Liberty Jail.  While there, he received a number of revelations including D&C section 121, which, I think, is one of the most impassioned and beautiful sections of the Doctrine and Covenants.  At the end of verse 7 it reads:

...if the billowing surge conspire against thee; if fierce winds become thine enemy; if the heavens gather blackness, and all the elements combine to hedge up the way; and above all, if the very jaws of hell shall gape open the mouth wide after thee, know thou, my son, that all these things shall give the experience, and shall be for thy good.   D&C 122:7

Fast forward to today.

Many generations have passed since the days of Joseph Smith Jr.  Mormons are still regarded as odd, but mostly the church is accepted as a mainstream religion.  Within the church, stories from the early days of persecution are continually taught to help inspire faith.  For most members though, daily trials have died down to nothing more than what the average person experiences, Mormon or not.  The persecution of the early saints has evaporated and modern members are left in a haze of weekly worship, temple attendance, tithing, and dietary restrictions to help them define their "mormonism".  

That is, until November 4th 2008.

Today there are thousands of people (perhaps more) protesting the church's involvement in the Yes on Proposition 8 campaign:  Rallies at temples and church houses, people calling for an end to the church's tax-exempt status, members who donated to help support Prop. 8 being singled out, boycotting Utah, etc.

How are members of the church reacting to this?  Here are a couple snippets from Prop. 8/LDS supporters taken from recent opinion articles in the Deseret News and Salt Lake Tribune:

"I say bring on the boycott!"

-Tonia Freeman Doussett; Sandy, UT

"Like Lincoln, we will not be 'slandered from our duty by false accusations, nor frightened from it by the menaces of destruction'."

-Sandra Brimhall; West Jordan, UT

"Buckle up, Saints!  The prophecy that the LDS Church and its members would be extremely persecuted in the last days is only beginning."

-Lauren Payne; Riverton, UT

"They're trying to intimidate me and adherents to my faith at our places of worship.  It will not work."

-Jeremy Roberts; Sandy, UT

Mormons know something about persecution (which is what makes the current struggle so odd...so sad).  Millions of members, especially in Utah, have spent their entire lives hearing about how early Mormons stood strong in the face of persecution, some to the point of sacrificing their lives for their beliefs; and how those individuals were assured their exaltation because of standing "on the side of the Lord".

The protests, the persecution, the intimidation, all the negative energy the church has drawn to itself recently - most members are PRIMED for it.  They look forward to tests of their resolve because in their mind it helps them become better, helps them prove to the Lord that they are one of the faithful,  and it helps them connect in some way to the early saints who too were persecuted.  

Just for the record, and before you think I'm making a case for the church - I think Proposition 8 is a mistake.  I used to not have anything against the church, but now I find it increasingly impossible to not harbor hostility toward it.  It seems unfathomable to me that since I have left the church to pursue happines how I see fit, the church now doesn't seem to want to leave me alone.

But I wonder if the escalating hostility towards the church is the best way to make progress.  Sure it's natural to want to hurt them because they hurt us, but hostility is only deepening and hardening the church membership against gay marriage.  In a weird way, it's also giving them something they want desperately - A chance to prove their faith to God.

Do we really want to give them that?