lostsheep wrote:Converting my ancestors so that i would be raised a Mormon.
sock puppet wrote:There it is, the most evil act perpetrated by the Church.
I am grateful for the day, after back from my mission, I started digging deep (deeper than the correlated crap, that is). I'd have probably done it on my mission, but it was 'against the rules' to read anything but the Standard Works, the little white missionary handbook, materials handed out at zone conferences or from the mission office, SWK's The Miracle of Forgiveness, Talmadge's Jesus the Christ and Articles of Faith, and Richards' A Marvelous Work and a Wonder--oh, and the LDS Hymn Book. Limiting the reading list so, the 2-year whitewash was on.
But once free of that reading list bondage, I looked. And lo and behold, what I found was--well, the truth has set me free (as well as my parents, but not my yet poor, deluded only sibling).
liz3564 wrote:
Sock Puppet...Did you convince your parents to leave the Church? That sounds like a fascinating story, particularly since it seems you were brought up in the LDS faith. How did you convince them to leave the Church and their culture behind?
I was BIC and brought up in the LDS faith (my mother would take us as kids to GC--she tells of David O McKay, the prophet, taking me as a one-year-old infant in his arms after one of the sessions). I am 5th gen Mo in the longest ancestral strain, 3rd gen Mo in the shortest. One great-grandfather was produced by a 2nd wife, another a 4th wife (Mormon polygamy). I graduated seminary (barely tasted beer), earned BYU degrees (28 credits of Mormon religion), served a mission. All of my aunts and uncles yet alive attend LDS Church religiously. Of 13 first cousins, 10 are yet ardently active. Mormonism is the faith of my fathers, it was my belief system for 26 years.
That was my Mormon cred to the point of my apostasy. The blotch on that record to the time of my full-fledged apostasy, I had not married.
My parents were divorced (I yet know not why) but both remained very staunchly active, my mother in my home ward and my father a few ward boundaries away. Each of them were impressed by my LDS devotion. So there was a bit of LDS awe by each toward me. (I never understood why they felt that way; I thought they were far superior 'spiritually'.)
When I stopped going to church, they first thought it must be because I felt uncomfortable going as I was yet single. That wasn't quite it, as I was yet attending a singles ward, I was yet going to law school. So obviously the solution was to put the blitz pressure on me to get married. After all and 'heaven forbid', I might not "like girls" (the closest they could come to the notion of homosexuality--for which I think they yet thought the Old Testament idea of stoning was appropriate).
Later I did get married, to a wonderful lady who had apostatized at the age of 15 after one of those young women's nights where the bishop comes and tells the girls that they need to find a good, LDS man to marry, but then to support whatever decisions he makes in the home since he has the priesthood. My AW had been starting to teeter from the time she was 12 over the gender discrimination issue prevalent in the LDS teachings and culture.
My marriage was a mixed bag for my parents. 'My son has married, he likes girls', but she is an apostate.
About a year after that, my mother asked me when my AW and I were going to return to the Church and become active. In probably my most impudent moment towards her, I told him when hell freezes over. Another year passed, and she asked me what had happened, why I did not believe anymore. I asked her if she really wanted to know, that it might be challenging to her own faith. She insisted that she did. Over about two years I started unpacking it for her. Slowly, with time, she has abandoned all but the social. She enjoys when the visiting teachers come, but insists on no religion talk or praying. My mother is very social. So as not to upset her extended family, she will be buried in temple clothing, etc. For her, she kept wondering how her great grandfather could have been taken in by JSJr given all that we've learned about the Nauvoo period. However, that ancestor was on the fringe of society anyway, and had left the east coast for the frontier when he bumped into the Mormons as he was passing through Nauvoo headed west towards Iowa/Nebraska.
My father took longer before asking me, I unrolled it all for him almost in one sitting, and after a few months, he dropped the Church entirely, and will often remark about a point of LDS teaching, "I just don't believe that." For him, the real rather than sanitized story of JSJr in spite of the Church's sylized teachings nailed it for dad.
Both are tea-totalers to this day. They live most all of the life teachings. One of my cousins calls them Dried-out Mormons (rather than never baptized, dry Mormons). He doesn't call me that. After all, I'm the horned devil himself, don't ya know (in real life and online)?