KevinSim wrote:sock puppet wrote:So, I'm curious how current Internet TBMs with family or friends that are NOMs or flat-out apostates might compare the LDS cultural attitude today towards those NOMs and apostates to what it was back in the day.
Sock Puppet, I can't give you
precisely the information you want, since the only friend I have who's left the LDS Church left back around 1986. I actually briefly lived with David in 1985. In 1986 he was, with nine other LDS men, renting a room in a big house (aptly called by them the "Big House") in Seattle's University District. David had served a mission to France, and had studied history at BYU, and I guess had been struggling with his testimony much of that time. He finally told me he was going to leave the Church. I spent some frantic days trying to talk him out of it, but David finally sent his priesthood leaders the necessary letters, and he's been out of the LDS Church now for 27 years. He thought he was going to get kicked out of the Big House due to his departure, but one of the guys who had lived there longest put his foot down and insisted that David be allowed to stay, and the other guys deferred to his judgement.
When my Sunday School teachers gave the lesson on shunning I must have been playing hooky; at any rate nobody ever told me I was supposed to shun David, so I didn't. I was as much friends with him as I was friends with anyone, until I got married, in 1991. My wife never has been extremely fond of David, so that cut down on what I did with David a little. Then I moved to Texas and kind of lost touch with him. A few years after my move to Utah I was electronically posting somewhere and David noticed me and we started up corresponding by e-mail, and we've been doing it off and on ever since. My wife has come out and said it's an unhealthy relationship, and she wishes it would stop, but I worked out a compromise in which I only answer David's e-mails once a week (on Saturdays, usually), and I limit my response to one screenful, no more than eighty columns wide, no more than 55 lines long.
Then about two years ago my older sister Joyce's oldest daughter Rachel had her records removed, probably because of the LDS Church's support of California's Proposition 8. Actually, all Joyce told me was that Rachel didn't like the Church's position on gay rights, and that that was why she left. Apparently Joyce missed the Sunday School class on shunning too, because she's stayed just as much in contact with Rachel as she ever has. She sends out e-mails to all her siblings pretty regularly informing us of the health of our somewhat-frail father, and I've noticed that Rachel is on the list of people being sent those e-mails all the time, just like her sister who is still active in the LDS Church.
I've read people in this thread who insist that shunning is going on, and I don't doubt their honesty; hearing them makes me think that some people in the Church
are shunning friends and family who leave. But in all honesty I've never seen it, not in my family, not among the people I know who have left the Church.
sock puppet wrote:Also, Wiki Wonka in the quoted passage is basically pointing out he has no beef with MormonStories because his/her apostate family members were not, to his knowledge, affected by MormonStories in their exit. So what is the attitude of current TBMs, for example, towards the facilitators (like MormonStories has been to many) to exit TBMhood by family and friends that are now apostates?
Were MormonStories et al even available back in 1986? At any rate as far as I know MormonStories played no role in either David's or Rachel's departure from the Church.