Warning sign of abuse #1-Pushes for quick involvement: An abuser pressures the new partner for an exclusive committment almost immediately.
Anybody that has ever encountered missionaries can tell you this one. Boys age 19 and girls age 21 spend their own money to serve a mission, supposedly called of individually by the Prophet. You can’t pick where you go, which is unfortunate for my little brother who dreamed of South America but was instead called to the Detroit Michigan mission. For TWO YEARS. Sounds like a jail sentence to me, but he was…er….”thrilled.”
So there are a set number of “Discussions,” I believe they now call them “Lessons.” These missionaries have been extensively trained at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, trained on sales skills. They prescribe to what’s called the Committment Pattern. “Investigators” (those who are interested in the Church) are asked to commit to various things during each lesson, such as stopping smoking, drinking, going to meetings, etc. On the third lesson they are asked to commit to baptism.
Which is GREAT, if you knew exactly what you were getting into….being a Mormon is not something you can just half-ass. There are plenty of jobs to do. And if you have any questions about the Church that are….problematic? There’s something called “giving the milk before the meat”….which basically means they want you to FEEL good (think of the last movie you saw that made you cry….that “feeling” is what they call the “spirit” and if you cry that means you have it, and the missionaries high-five each other on the way out) because as long as they can get you to feel emotional about something then you won’t be asking any of the hard questions.
WHY is it so important to be a member before you know anything about the Church, even before you’ve had a chance to read the whole Book of Mormon?
Another way the church pushes for quick involvement is with marriage and starting families. Utah has the youngest population in the US…members marry quite young and have children right away. In the Temple, the young couple is commanded (not something you take lightly) to “multiply and replenish the earth.” I can see how this was important when there were….TWO people, but billions?
WHY? WHY not wait? Why get involved so quickly….What is the rush?
I suspect it has more to do with money than their rush to get you into the Celestial Kingdom. As I posted here, there are only a dozen or so men at the top of this multi-billion dollar corporate ladder- highly successful business men, and your 10% tithing goes directly to that asset column. The sooner they can get you to “work” in the church the better. If they can squeeze more Mormons out of you, you’re gold.
I conclude that Yes, the Mormon Church does exhibit this particular trait that is a warning sign of abuse.
<i took this pic in chinatown, new york city>
Yes missionaries can be quite manipulative, and down right evil, you have no idea what I mean by evil until you’ve been a COMPANION to some of these guys. But I must say a word about the nature of what Mormons call the Spirit. You’re right, it is what makes you cry at a good movie like Dead Poet’s Society, it is the name they give to that collective self that trancends conciousness, that superhumanity that is in us connecting us together. So when we see something that approximates perfection made by a fellow human approaching an ultimate potential of enlightenment such as the cinemetography in Nacho Libre, we feel something, C.S. Lewis calls it JOY, that which reminds us that we are not orignially from here, that our destiny is beyond. The guy who wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance calls it QUALITY or that which allows every human to understand objectively if something is quality or not. It is what Victor Frankle calls something I can’t remember in his extremely boring book Man’s Search For Meaning. It is what the Mormons, and exclusively the Mormons call the SPIRIT. Interestingly other Christians similarly revile Mormons for using this feeling as a barometer for truth. Yet it is what leads us to the ultimate truth of all things, and it, or rather HE has guided me throughout my life in even small desisions. But I agree, using emotions that may or may not be the actual SPIRIT to manipulate people is unethical, especially when they come home from their missions and use this same pattern to sell multilevel marketing stuff like satelite dishes and home security systems. BYU Idaho is a hotbed for recruiting new RM’s for this sort of wickedness.
Comment by Jason — April 11, 2009 @ 3:22 pm
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