....EFY stands for Especially for Youth. Not totally sure, but I think that is just the title of a pamphlet the church published in the late 1970's, and is still in print to this day. The pamphlet largely consists of a speech given by Boyd Packer about sexual purity in LDS teenagers.
It is similar to what youth conference use to be but now it is total mormon indoctrination. There is a strict dress code and clothing worn is closely monitored. The speakers and activities are mind numbing and every activity is focused on teaching a gospel principle.
They lure the teens in by telling them it is going to be so fun and it will be 2 nights in a dorm with your friends.
They are similar except youth conference is sponsored by the local ward or stake where EFY is a for profit venture where the kids pay to attend and professional lds speakers are employed to speak, etc.
All I know is my kids could never go. My boys hair never met the strict standards and my daughter laughed at the idea. Plus it's extremely expensive, no thanks.
Eft is usually a week long m-f where you pay ~$500 to go to a college campus and do a "Jesus camp." There are classes where you hear motivational speakers and tons of lds indoctrination. There are also dances and talent shoes and fun activities and outdoor games and meeting new people.
Youth conference is usually a 1-2 day event at the ward or stake level, and it's usually one activity (boating or hiking) followed by testimony meeting followed by a camp out.
Fwiw I always liked EFY more than youth conference. It may have been the new people or the living on a college campus. I had a day to feel like everyone was crazy, but after you embrace the crazy... It was fun.
When I was young, Especially for Youth took place at BYU, for a week during the summer. Those of us from outside of Utah would travel across country or from other parts of the world to attend. It was a rare opportunity to meet other young Mormons from all over the country and a few from other countries, and to make friends, including those of the opposite sex. If you met someone there that week, you could stay in touch and later make arrangements to travel to see eachother to date afterward. Youth Conference took place not far from your home stake and you often knew ahead of time, many of those who attended.
It's a small world. These two events, in addition to locally held church dances for the youth, I think made possible a very tight and widely cast social network. I don't know how it is now but when I was young, it was common to meet some other church member from another part of the country or somewhere else in the world and say "oh, do you know (person's name)" and get an answer like "yes, he was in my stake" or "yes, she dated a friend of mine". I don't know if that network has deminished or grown since I left. But there are also benefits to anonymity and privacy.
As much as I hate the church and believe it's a cult, they got things right when it came to creating social activities for their youth. The problem is that along the way, you get taught things that fuck up your life later. The church wouldn't be as big and financially strong as they are if they didn't get some things right. They got a lot of money out of me, taught me how to lie for them without me believing that I was lieing, and then got me to do it for them fulltime for free and at my own expense for two years. That's not a bad return on investment for little more than sponsoring activities that people pay to attend.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/28/2014 01:14PM by azsteve.
"As much as I hate the church and believe it's a cult, they got things right when it came to creating social activities for their youth. The problem is that along the way, you get taught things that fuck up your life later. The church wouldn't be as big and financially strong as they are if they didn't get some things right. They got a lot of money out of me, taught me how to lie for them without me believing that I was lieing, and then got me to do it for them fulltime for free and at my own expense for two years. That's not a bad return on investment for little more than sponsoring activities that people pay to attend."
So true. And we felt special for the privilege of paying the organization so that we could serve it.
My niece was apparently unhappy with the church until she went to EFY. Then she went to BYU, went on a mission, married in the temple, and now has a little baby. Good results for the church.
It is Jesus camp. They have "celebrity" speakers, like John bytheway, who give talks like:
How the gospel is like your locker or how life is like a football game. The goal is to oversimplify life and inspire these kids to associate success, friendship, joy and morality with TSCC. There is a lot of well planned peer pressure to get the kids to give testimony/make covenants.
They walk away thinking they just earned a degree in theology and eager to go on missions, go to church and get married to members.
Kids are easy prey to manipulative car salesmany psychology, guilt and peer pressure. This is where that magic happens.
Thank you for your responses. That's exactly what I was afraid of. Indoctrination Camp. At least my wife paid for the whole thing. Now if only I could send our daughter to a skeptic's camp so she could get equal time...
I went to it as a teen (over 20 years ago) and my daughter went about 3 years ago.
Think about EFY as a brainwashing camp for the LDS church. That's what they do. One of the less disturbing experiences my daughter came home with (and I bit my tongue, kept my mouth shut, figured she had to make her own choices!), was that she felt incredibly pressured to get up and talk about what a spiritual experience she was having a camp.
She had been dating an LDS guy for a few months when she went, which I was not thrilled about but figured I was better off keeping my mouth shut. This ended up being a really good policy, because she figured it out on her own, without my interjections (which was REALLY hard!!!).
There were a whole bunch of kids she met at EFY who wanted to hang out with her at "Mormon" activities, but never appeared in day to day life. Fortunately, she figured it out herself pretty quickly. She still shudders when she remembers the testimony meeting at EFY where she was pressured into, "bearing her testimony."
My sister is currently working as a counselor for EFY. She's really smart and I hope that she wakes up and smells the espresso someday. She's currently a graduate student at Northern Arizona University in the English literature department.
EFY can be a great place to meet pretty girls that might think like you as in a great place to hook up. Maybe even get a handjob or something more from same wave length thinking female participant. Maybe that kind of thing hapens even more with the youth of today are getting smarter as they can lookup any amount of bullshit on their smartphone quickly and get a free vacation out of it away from mom and dad. Then "Act" like it was the best thing, you cried, felt the spirit or whatever.
Back in the day it was humourous having those testimony meeting with 2 to 3 shots of rasberry vodka down the throat. Felt the "spirit" as a fire is burning down from the cheap liquor. It made those meetings tolerable and a lot fun laughing at the participants.