So you’re going on a mission for the Mormon Church?
Well, it’s not your fault! Stay with me a minute and consider the following “food for thought.”
There is no denying that you have been groomed from a very young age by a very powerful social force, the Mormon Church. But it’s at least worth considering whether you would choose to do this if you weren’t brought up in the church, and asked to choose it as an adult. I’ve heard even Mormons say “If I wasn’t born in the church, I’d probably not be a member.” If that is true, then perhaps you should consider what should be your conclusion. (Hint: The answer is not that Satan is very powerful.)
When I say it’s not your fault, I mean, consider what the church has invested in you and what they’ve taught you.
Bear your testimony
You’ve been taught to “bear your testimony” from a young age. You may understand when you’re older — you may even “get it” now — that this is at best, faulty advice. It’s a form of manipulation and bad training. It is encouraging kids to lie to themselves and to others. You’ve been counseled by leaders and even Apostles like Elder Boyd K. Packer and Elder Dallin H. Oaks on how to gain a testimony:
“It is not unusual to have a missionary say, ‘How can I bear testimony until I get one?’ … Oh, if I could teach you this one principle: a testimony is to be found in the bearing of it!”
– Boyd K. Packer, The Quest for Spiritual Knowledge“Another way to seek a testimony seems astonishing when compared with the methods of obtaining other knowledge. We gain or strengthen a testimony by bearing it. Someone even suggested that some testimonies are better gained on the feet bearing them than on the knees praying for them.”
– Dallin H. Oaks, Testimony
Repeat things over and over until you’re convinced that it’s true. What kind of advice is this? …and from the Lord’s best and brightest!, that if you don’t have a testimony, bear one anyway?
And all along, the adults around you are going along with it like it’s Santa Claus. Next time you hear another person “bearing their testimony”, how are you supposed to know whether they actually have a testimony or if they’re just following advice, lying their way into one? Wishful thinking may confirm the truth to you, but that’s another topic.
It’s not your fault! This is very powerful social conditioning.
Seminary
Have you ever considered the effect of attending seminary every day of high school has on you? Have you ever thought of the cost (to you) of going to seminary class, every day of high school? Think about the logic of submitting yourself to daily religious lessons by the church. The church’s stated goal and highest priority is to convert the young. They know they’ll have you for a lifetime if they get you committed as a youth.
Choose not to attend seminary and you will find the mormon machine fires up against you and your parents to bring you back, to conform. Their reasons will involve fear of harm and threats against your well-being. Try it — see if “satan” or his influence isn’t mentioned a few times. The threats sound so real. But they are so, not.
Summer Camps (aka Youth Conference)
Every summer the church sponsors camps whose declared objective (declared only to the leaders, never the attendees) is to “build testimonies” and “strengthen faith” of the attendees. You have loved going to them because you get to meet boys and girls and dance with them and exchange phone numbers. But the reason you are there is for those times when you are asked to “bear your testimony” to one another. It all feels good, but for reasons that have nothing to do with what you’re taught or the truthiness of the stories you’re sold (told/sold).
Such a massive effort to convert the young.
It’s your privilege to pay your own way
You spend your time, your money, at a time when you are just old enough to be on your own, to go out and recruit life-time tithe payers for the church. You may not even have a testimony yet. (How ethical is that?!) And if you don’t serve a mission, there are a lifetime of social penalties.
Summary
The church and church life is powerful; i.e. socially — that this institution (the church) gets families to pay their own money, and donate their own childrens’ productivity for hours and hours as they grow up, and then for two solid years, to convert more people to donate tithing for a lifetime to the church.
You are basically going out to convert, to recruit, to do what you can to persuade people to fall in with the mormon lifestyle, and pay a lot fo money and give a lot of time, even to the point of their own children being groomed by everyone else in the church (leaders, teachers, etc) at every point in their upbringing to go themselves on these recruiting missions for the church.
If the church is as it claims (the-only-true-church-on-earth), then it’s what you’d expect from people who think they know the truth and want to share it. But if it’s false, then its very diabolical.
However, what would one expect? The church has a responsibility to self preserve. So we should expect it to be what it is. Much like a union. Consider that a teachers union, for example, is not made for the children, but for the teachers. If it helps children, it’s only because it’s helping teachers. But you can’t expect a teachers union to ever do anything that will be against the union itself, whether it’s a good idea or a bad idea, the union will never vote itself out of power, or do anything that would jepardize itself as an organization.
So goes it with the church. The church, no matter what, will never go against itself. Therefore what do you end up with? You end up with a whole bunch of people who have been selected and socially persuaded through a lifetime of experience and culture in the church to do things without questioning, and think of that as a virtuous way to live ones life. The sad thing is, along the way, that anti-science, and anti-knowledge and anti-education and anti-…looking at things as they are, creeps in along the way, and that’s where it gets messy, and offensive, and disgusting, and wrong. The fact that religion is doing it gives it a pass. No one would ever think that a religion would do anything bad, right?