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I am not a Mormon, I just do not put much stock in those type articles.
I am certain you can find similar articles about every religion. Typically these articles are not intended to convince adherents of a religion, but to discourage non-adherents from joining.
A form of reverse proselytizing.
Last edited by Woodrow LI; 10-21-2013 at 12:37 PM..
Reason: Spelling correction
I will be away all afternoon, and who knows if this thread will even still be here when I get back to my computer. Threads like this do seem to bring out the worst in some posters.
All I really have time to say right now is that this article appears to be to be highly sensationalized. If this thread is still open tonight, I'll comment in greater depth.
I don't see anything sensational in the article. It's just someone sharing their experience.
There are always greater consequences for someone "high up" in any faith to leave it. That would include laypersons in prominent positions such as being a professor or teacher at a church-affiliated school or university. For someone who has gone that deeply into any teaching to be entrusted with the education of its sheltered youth, damage / spin control, disbelief, and incredulity is to be expected. Think of it: the very fact that a church must create, validate, and support its own segregated educational institutions is in itself an admission that its young people don't have a compelling enough value proposition in front of them to withstand the supposedly empty and vain philosophies of the secular world -- so they must be protected from those influences. All teachers in such institutions are implicitly entrusted with this protective influence. To then become apostate is to violate that trust in a particularly damaging manner.
This means that the ostracism, character assassination, and persecution directed at people who can no longer in good conscience buy the doctrines of the church are both understandable and yet at the same time, reprehensible (particularly when the people simply resign and give an honest answer for that resignation. Somehow I suspect that if they had lied and said they resigned because they decided they wanted to change careers or move East to take care of a sick relative or some other reason that didn't hint at the remotest possibility that one could rationally disagree with church dogma, it would be perfectly fine).
It was interesting in that it provided an inside look at the pressures employed to keep women within the faith despite the incredibly demeaning status that women held within it. I was ultimately disappointed at the end because the author's big triumph wasn't overcoming the ungrounded doctrines which form the faith, rather her escape was mainly motivated by the manner in which she was treated. At the end she moves from being an exploited Mormon woman to being a welfare mother and this is presented as some great thing, but I couldn't help but seeing it as moving from one circumstance of dependency to another.
It was interesting in that it provided an inside look at the pressures employed to keep women within the faith despite the incredibly demeaning status that women held within it. I was ultimately disappointed at the end because the author's big triumph wasn't overcoming the ungrounded doctrines which form the faith, rather her escape was mainly motivated by the manner in which she was treated. At the end she moves from being an exploited Mormon woman to being a welfare mother and this is presented as some great thing, but I couldn't help but seeing it as moving from one circumstance of dependency to another.
The group Elissa Wall fled is the FLDS. Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
They are NOT affiliated with the LDS (Mormon) church.
Katzpur may choose to expand on that if she gets the chance to post on this thread. It must make her nuts when people think Warren Jeffs and his merry band of felons are members of the LDS church. I'm not a Mormon and it makes me nuts.
(I think Katzpur is proof that women are not demeaned within the LDS church. )
Last edited by DewDropInn; 10-21-2013 at 02:14 PM..
Location: In a little house on the prairie - literally
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Agreed that when the subject of Mormonism comes up invariably Jeff Warren's is brought out. It behooves those that make comments to know the difference.
Agreed that when the subject of Mormonism comes up invariably Jeff Warren's is brought out. It behooves those that make comments to know the difference.
I mentioned that book because it is the only one on the subject of escape from Mormonism which I have read.
I am quite aware that Warren Jeffs represents a splinter group, but he doesn't cease being a Mormon any more than Protestants ceased being Christians when they broke from the Catholic Church. Your OP didn't specify mainstream Mormonism only.
Perhaps a better title for the article would have been, "Adventures of an ex-Mormon Drama Queen." For starters, nobody has to "escape" from Mormonism. It is not the slightest bit difficult to go from being a Mormon to being an ex-Mormon. As a matter of fact, the exaggerations in the story were so over-the-top as to be positively laughable, starting with her description of how she "mustered the courage to drive two hours away from our largely Mormon community in Utah to attend a non-Mormon church on a Saturday night." The LDS Church has absolutely no restrictions on its members visiting other churches. Here in Salt Lake City, I've attended a Catholic Mass as well as a Unitarian Universalist service and two separate non-denominational Christian services. It didn't even occur to me to drive two hours from home to do so, nor would it have done had I been on the faculty at BYU. I would guess that a great many BYU faculty members have attended non-LDS worship services and that none of them felt the need to hide the fact. The author, Ms. Wilder, describes herself as "paranoid." I'd have to agree with her on that. She said, "Every time we drove the two hours there, we sweated bullets for fear of being discovered." Paranoid probably doesn't even come close to describing her.
She said that her husband was "guarded," and that "he knew that if we bucked the Mormon church, I’d never work again." That doesn't say much for her credentials as a teacher. Even within Utah, there are several public colleges and universities where no one would care one bit what religion she was or what religion she used to be. And that's only if she had wanted to stay in Utah. In looking into her background, it appears as if her degree is in education. There is an outstanding liberal arts college in Utah that is highly regarded as a having an excellent college of education. If Ms. Wilder would really "never work again," she had more working against her than a change in religion.
She continues, "My apostasy would be splashed across the pages of the Mormon-owned newspaper and the Mormon-owned TV station in Salt Lake City. Who knows what else they could dredge up to report?" Now here's a woman with a real need for her 15 minutes of fame. I was subscribing to that "Mormon-owned newspaper" at the time. Since I was unable to recall any story about her "splashed across [its] pages," I looked into the newspaper's archives online and came up with exactly NOTHING. I'd never heard of Ms. Wilder until I saw this article. Apparently she never quite attained the celebrity status she'd hoped for.
On to some of her comments about Mormonism... She says, "The first night we were there, the pastor preached directly from the Bible about the cross on which Jesus had paid my debt. This was a foreign concept to me. Mormons don’t revere the cross. They see it as an instrument of death, not the place where Christ became the savior." When I read that, my first thought was: How could anyone be a Mormon for 30 years and say that Jesus Christ's sacrifice for us is a "foreign concept"? Where was Ms. Wilder's brain for those 30 years? I could post dozens upon dozens of links to General Conference addresses by the LDS leadership on the power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. And if anyone doubts me, please say so. I'll be happy to provide them.
Another comment: "I read my Bible, sometimes hours a day, and truly felt I was being washed. So it apparently took leaving Mormonism for Ms. Wilder to start reading the Bible. Again, I can't help but wonder why she wouldn't have been reading it all along -- during those 30 years she was a Mormon. In the LDS Church, we have adult Sunday School every week as part of the three hours we spend in church. We rotate our course of study every year and then repeat the process. One year, we focus on the Old Testament, the next year on the New Testament, the third year on the Book of Mormon and the fourth on the Doctrine and Covenants. Equal time is given to the Bible as to the other books in the LDS canon. And yet she'd never gotten around to reading it?!?
She says she "met a Jesus who was able to save me from my life of working to be good." This gal apparently really missed the boat when it comes to understanding the role of "works" in the gospel. Jesus Christ said that if we love Him, we are to keep His commandments. He said that more is required of us than saying, "Lord, Lord!" He said that those who will enter into the kingdom of heaven are those who do the will of the Father. And Paul taught that Christ was "the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him." Yes, Mormons believe in walking the walk and not just talking the talk. We believe that "faith" and "faithfulness" are integrally connected. And yet, when all is said and done, we do not believe any any human being who has ever lived can be saved apart from the grace of Jesus Christ.
Now, with regards to the issue of her cross necklace... Mormons are not, as she stated, "offended by the cross." We speak with love and reverence of Christ's crucifixion on the cross. We have paintings depicting that event. We sing hymns relating to the cross in our worship services. No, we don't use the cross as a symbol of our faith, because we prefer to think of the glorious, resurrected Christ and not the Christ dying in agony. The Church does not prohibit anyone from wearing the cross as a piece of jewelry, though, even though I'm not personally aware of anyone who does so. Her statement that "If I was caught wearing a cross, I would be called in by my superiors and lose the ecclesiatical clearance I needed to work there," is pure BS! Nobody ever got fired from BYU for wearing a cross. That's absolutely absurd. The worse that would happen would be that someone would look at you funny and say, "What's up with the cross?" We just don't wear them, that's all. There is no rule against doing so.
Yes, "BYU is a theocracy, not a democracy," just as she said. It's a Church-owned and operated university, for crying out loud. It has every right to be a theocracy! If a person wants to be a full-time tenured faculty member of BYU, he or she must be a member of the Church in good standing. There is nothing at all unreasonable about that. BYU does, incidentally, occasionally bring on a non-LDS visiting professor or adjunct professor for a semester or two. And the university frequently brings in non-LDS guest speakers, religious leaders and scholars to speak to the student body. Honestly, what did Ms. Wilder expect to happen once she "came out"?
The publicity seeker that she was, she didn't have the decency to simply go to her superiors at BYU, and tell them she no longer considered herself to be a believing Mormon. No sir! Instead, she took what she apparently saw as the high rode "came out" on a talk show. And, I'll be damned... she was all aghast at the fact that her former friends and co-workers didn't appreciate her disingenuous methodology. She didn't actually need to lose any friends at all, or at least only a very few. Most people she interacted with would have felt bad that she'd decided to leave the Church, but the vast majority of them would have had a whole lot more respect for her decision had she not behaved like a spoiled child looking for attention. People join the LDS Church all the time and people leave it, too. That's how it works in all churches. The problem is that a relative few who leave it just can't leave it alone. They spend the rest of their lives harboring hatred for something that apparently worked for them for a long, long time. Ms. Wilder is a perfect example of that kind of sick mentality. Sooner or later, she'll probably get tired of fighting something that has no desire to fight back. For her sake, I hope it's sooner rather than later.
I mentioned that book because it is the only one on the subject of escape from Mormonism which I have read.
I am quite aware that Warren Jeffs represents a splinter group, but he doesn't cease being a Mormon any more than Protestants ceased being Christians when they broke from the Catholic Church. Your OP didn't specify mainstream Mormonism only.
You know, the "mainstream" LDS Church has a membership of 15 million people. These people live in roughly 150 countries around the world. More than half of them live outside the US and Canada. Only 15% live in Utah.
The FLDS Church (Warren Jeff's church) has 10,000 members. I don't even know for sure that they refer to themselves as "Mormons," but if they do, that's their business. I don't really care much one way or the other what they call themselves. The point is that, assuming that they do call themselves "Mormons," they would account for .07% of all Mormons in the world today. That's not 7% -- it's 7/100ths of 1%. The other 99.93% of "Mormons" are LDS. The only reason I can think of why any educated person would want to lump the FLDS in together with the LDS is that it makes it a whole lot easier to make the rest of us look bad.
You're right that when the Protestants broke away from the Catholic Church, they didn't cease to be Christians. They did, however, cease being Catholics, and nobody today groups them in with Catholicism when they refer to Catholics. The FLDS, however, continue to be included in "Mormonism" by people who would love everybody to think that members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are a bunch of polygamists, and worse -- pedophiles.
Someone who leaves Warren Jeff's church can truly be said to have "escaped." The same cannot be said of someone who leaves the LDS Church.
Last edited by Katzpur; 10-21-2013 at 07:45 PM..
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