Posted by:
Elder Strangelove
(
)
Date: April 27, 2017 01:03AM
Hey JoD,
I don't get to hop on here often anymore, but have missed your posts when I do log in. Sounds like your discovery was about a year before my mental breaking point.
Although the PBS program disturbed me, I only saw snippets of it at the time it aired. Shortly after, there was a Stake level meeting (a Stake Conference, maybe), and the Stake President was in damage control mode. He encouraged anyone with questions regarding The Mormons to meet with him personally after the meeting. Things I couldn't shake were the multiple titles Joseph Smith had bestowed on himself in Navoo. Also, the segment "The Mormon Church and Gays" made me much more sympathetic to the gays than to the arguments of the church against gays. But, I felt like raising my concerns with the Stake President would not result in an open, honest discussion. He would simply attempt to assuage my concerns. And these were more like little ripples not worth raising with the Stake President. Furthermore, I knew I would be marked in his mind as one who questions. I knew the church appreciated loyalty, and questions betrayed loyalty.
I remember Margaret Toscano's interview as well. Recounting her excommunication, she said, "I afterwards talked about sort of the horror of niceness -- that on the one hand they're cutting me off from eternal salvation and telling me that I'm this apostate ... I'm this nice woman that they're going to shake my hand. There's something vicious about niceness that struck me in this -- that the niceness covered over the violence of what was being done, because, in fact, excommunication is a violent action. . . Afterward it almost made me shudder, that incongruity between the violence of that excommunication and the niceness of the discourse that went on."
Reading over the transcript reminds me of this as well: after deliberating over her excommunication, she says, "the first thing that the stake president said to me is, he said, 'I want you to know that the high council was very impressed with you. . . They were all amazed at how articulate you are and how passionate you are and what a nice person you are.'"
(link to transcript:
http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1970035,1970035#REPLY)
That's a bit funny, as just recently a family member of mine visited my former ward, where I apparently have a reputation as a nice apostate. My family member emailed me to say, "At church we were introduced to someone who said he had once been your home teacher. He noted he had enjoyed your family, and asked how you were. He also made an interesting observation that I appreciated: that you had spoken to him when you left the church, but you had not spoken with any anger. That stayed with him pretty vividly, maybe because he has seen too many who were angry."
It's funny, because I feel like I didn't have the luxury of being angry. That is, it seems like church members can't hear the words behind the anger, the reasons for the anger. They hear only anger, and brush off the rest. But the truth is, I was angry for a long time. The only reason I managed to hold a reasonably civil discussion about my reasons for leaving was that at the time of the conversation with the home teacher, I'd had several years to simmer and vent. I just didn't have it in me any longer.
Anyway, good to see you're still here and posting from time to time.
If this isn't too vague a request, can you re-post your story of sitting in the parking lot outside the church?