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Thousands Leave the LDS
Now you might have missed this news, what with the attacks in Paris and the childishness in the universities, but breaking news: The Church of LDS believes homosexuality sinful. Gasp! Who knew such beliefs lurked deep in their ways? Oh wait, everyone. Still, last week, that didn’t stop a few thousand from making a scene over a recent policy: the church will not baptize children of same-sex couples until they turn 18 and denounce same-sex marriage. So of course my social network feed exploded in outrage, of which I’d estimate 10 percent came from actual Mormons.
The latest news is that recently a few thousand made a public stand to quit the church, with at least 1,500 showing up in person, and another 2,000 (approximately) sending in legal representation to affect the same. (Side note: my lovely wife Amanda is unimpressed by sending your lawyer to submit your resignation. As she knows, you just need write a letter saying that you’re out.)
In my skepticism, I’d wager that few if any of those making this stand are seriously active in the church at all. I have a good friend who is very active in the “Ordain Women” movement and publicly denounced this decision by the church, but she remains equally active in her church. This likely was just a convenient excuse for those leaving to do so while making oneself look important.
The church responded, expressing that these individuals should reconsider this decision as there would be eternal consequences. This was met by mockery from the social progressives. “When threatening people with eternal damnation doesn’t work anymore, you know you’ve lost them.” Again, this doesn’t impress my lovely wife any, as she received similar warnings when she wrote that she was leaving the church. Naturally, leaving the LDS because one has converted to mainstream evangelical Christianity is less exciting (no colorful rainbow flags or news coverage), but the message was essentially the same: “Reconsider!”
I’ve never been Mormon, and I disagree quite a bit with the Church of Latter Day Saints, but here I turn and stand in their defense for a moment. Rather than trying to divide, the church is actually trying to consider all involved while remaining true to their doctrine. “Family is Forever” is a major concept within the church, so pitting children at the age of eight against their same-sex parents creates problems in many ways.
This policy is similar to that when dealing with children of Muslims: don’t cause familial strife. Wait until the child is of majority age and allow them to make the decision then. As for the “threats of eternal damnation” – well those are hardly such. Those religions that believe in the hereafter also tend to believe that one’s actions now will have consequences in one’s afterlife. The reply is a compassionate warning: don’t just consider the present, consider eternity. Understanding that there are rather nasty consequences for apostasy according to their beliefs, it’d be far crueler to say, “Okay, bye guys. Enjoy the Outer Darkness!”
That doesn’t matter to the social progressive. When you’re on the right side of history, you don’t have to argue or even listen to others. You just get to demand everyone embrace your ideals right now. Like the Huffington Post, you know that things are far more complex and that it takes smart, enlightened Social Progressives to figure things out. We religious types just need to take a back seat and let them drive.
Of interesting note is the second bullet point: How is the lay leader of a local Mormon congregation to make this determination when courts and lawyers find [shared custody] challenging?
For decades social progressives have told us that they have a better way, but they have taken a simple concept like marriage and made it so complex that it now supposedly requires lawyers, judges, and associated experts to puzzle out just what is a family and who is a parent. This is the aftermath of no-fault divorce, cohabitation, and shared custody. We can only expect more headaches and issues with same-sex marriage. And we have a bevy of legal experts and politicians in the wings ready to sweep in and confuse the issue even more, and then tell us that we’re too inexpert to understand the real complexities of what makes a family.
In our debates over same-sex marriage, I have stated that if a word can mean anything it will soon mean nothing. We’re finding that marriage and family as a cultural and social institution are quickly approaching nothing, and it’s the legal carrion crows that are picking over the remains. Only in the religious sense will those words maintain a sense of meaning. That is why the social progressives attack the attempts of religious leaders to negotiate and deliberate this morass.
Published in Marriage, Religion & Philosophy
You forgot to mention third party reproduction in the what makes a family question–egg from one, sperm from another and surrogate to produce a child for yet another set of parents of whatever gender or none. No child or anyone else would be confused by that.
No time now, but you won’t be surprised to hear that I have more to say about this! Thanks for bringing it up.
Mormons also don’t baptize the children of polygamists until they reach 18, and then only if they have left the polygamous household.
Putting the position on gay marriage aside, doesn’t it seem a little… harsh and unfair to target specific individuals, who haven’t done anything wrong themselves, to have extra requirements to be allowed in?
…One of which is tantamount to publicly disowning their parents?
The stance is one thing, but doesn’t the way they are choosing to enforce it not have the best… optics?
I feel like we have talked about this at length recently. perhaps we shouldn’t bring it up in yet another post.
Oh and a few thousand members our of 15 million? Call me when you reach 20%
It is harsh. Following one’s faith frequently requires one to make very difficult choices. If anything, the LDS could be commended for not requiring an eight-year-old child to make this choice, instead waiting for him or her to reach age of majority before asking one to make a choice like that.
Indeed. Especially since prolonged conversation with certain Mormon Ricochetians (most notably Frozen Chosen) has impressed on me that Mormons do not share the same doctrine of eternal damnation that many other Christian denominations share. Apparently, Hell is viewed less as a point of no return, and more as a “spirit prison”, a place of remedial punishment that can still be escaped in the hereafter by repentance after death.
Such a doctrine would not make Hell a fun place to be, but by allowing the possibility of escape from Hell after death, the threat of Hell becomes less of a shakedown.
If the LDS leadership does not stand up for the LDS moral positions, who will? I too am not Mormon but I was pleased that they would maintain this position in the face of opposition. Being right, no matter how costly, is the correct thing to do and these people were correct to do so.
I did read about this and had an impression: The rats were leaving a ship that will remain afloat. Good for the ship.
Does the lds church consider baptism necessary for the hereafter? If so aren’t they risking the mortal souls of children with this policy?
I was under the impression that this was a newly created policy. Did the leadership say what they based this new interpretation on?
Well, I’ll leave that to an LDS member who wants to dig into it. But I can suggest that it is an outgrowth of existing LDS moral positions involving the LDS vision of marriage, family life, and quite probably raising children as Mormons.
If the LDS managed to flush out Jack Mormons who don’t hold the LDS vision of marriage, family life, and raising the children in the LDS, they won’t have lost anything because they did not have it to begin with. Should some people read what the LDS did, find it desirable and return to the LDS, good.
Mormons have long refused to baptize the children of polygamous families. It’s a similar thing. The policy prevents children from being put in an uncomfortable position between church and home until they are of age, and it prevents difficulties within the church where empathy for the children might cause members to start to doubt what is a very important doctrine for the church given our holistic view of marriage. That holistic view means that we have rejected the sexual revolution in all its forms. Faithful members do not live together or have sex before marriage, they are expected to have children if they can, they marry in the temple for eternity and it is not easy to extricate oneself from a temple marriage, the opposite of no-fault divorce.
Courtship, marriage, bearing children, raising children, taking care of parents in old age, knowing about ancestors, all of this is seen as part of a divine process that connects the generations and gives people a blueprint by which to live on earth. Heaven is the place where you will be with your family forever. I hope you can all understand why this does not fit with redefined marriage or with third party reproduction. Adopted children can be sealed to their adoptive parents in the temple, so they too are part of the process. Children born to a temple married couple are automatically sealed to their parents forever, if they all live worthy lives, of course.
I hope my comment above makes it clear that you cannot separate all of these issues. It is entirely relevant to the question that CU Doug raised. These practices greatly add to the meaninglessness of the word family, and the word marriage for that matter. It greatly puzzles me that so many here seem to think third party reproduction is unrelated to redefined marriage and family questions.
Just to clarify a couple of things;
Thanks for the clarification, FroCho.
Thanks, what is the policy toward single parent households or shacking up households?
So it’s awesome that the worst you can do is effectively another Earth, but it’s likely this Earth would contain the worst people who’ve ever existed. On the other hand, I imagine they wouldn’t be able to do terrible things anymore.
Single parent households aren’t treated any differently than married households. As for folks who are shacking up, if they are not members of the church they need to either get married or move out before they can join the church; if they are members shacking up they need to talk to their bishop; if non-members are shacking up and have a child who wants to join the church then I believe they can with their parent’s permission(both actual parents, not the shack-up partner). I’m not sure if the policy has changed recently is the last case.
I suppose that’s fair because it completely puzzles me how you think it is in any way related to marriage and family questions.
Very true, Mike. We are told that the lowest kingdom is far better than this earth and that is where the murderers, liars, thieves, Progressives(just kidding!), etc will go after they have paid the price for their sins. They won’t be doing horrible things in that kingdom, the evil will be gone from them.
However, they will not be able to progress to higher kingdoms and their development will be stopped. They will remain in that condition for eternity.
Those in the highest kingdom, by contrast, will continue to increase eternally and their progress will never stop, which is why we want everyone to go to that kingdom.
Because the babies it produces have to be raised by someone. Typically children are raised by a family, that is generally formed by the two people who produced the child. What is the meaning of family when children are produced in a crowd-sourced way? How do the lawyers and social workers figure out who belongs to the family?
Again there have already been a couple of threads recently where we have tried to hash this out. You and I are on opposite sides of this issue. I understand where you are coming from, but I disagree with your position. Let’s agree to disagree.
Interesting.
My parents (unwisely, in my opinion), moved in together for a very long time, but put off marriage until right before they started trying for children. I’m not, as a Christian, comfortable with the idea of emulating or promulgating such behavior. And though one could argue that, once my parents finally married, their prior indiscretion simply vanished, I’d say that’s wishful thinking.
Even so, I would be uncomfortable feeling as if I were obliged to demonstrate disloyalty to my parents for an unwisdom they persisted in for a very long time – and one they never felt the need to repent of – in order to prove my faith.
Similar would apply to children of divorce. Remaining loyal to divorced parents is not the same as approving of divorce itself.
Whether or not we are on opposite sides of the issue, it is related to family and marriage. And as I pointed out in one of my comments, Mormons make marriage and family, created the old-fashioned way, central to our theology. We don’t think family is just anything anyone wants it to be and we don’t think children should be bought and sold. That is my point. I’m fine with not discussing it here, but I am not very excited that you scold me for bringing it up and deny that it has anything to do with family, especially since I AM a Mormon, and these ARE issues I discuss with my Mormon friends in relation to our theology and culture.
You wouldn’t be. But this is different than polygamy or same-sex couples.
I’m going to leap to the left here. There was a fairly famous case recently where two women married. One of them carried the fertilized egg to birth. Then they divorced, and the courts found that the mother, the woman who carried the child in utero for nine months, was cut out of the child’s life. No recognition of her maternity, no recognition of maternal rights. O U T
In a legal situation where everything seems to be going the wrong way, what should a church with actual beliefs do? Here I can write with some authority. In the Catholic Church, the rite and sacrament of baptism cannot be denied, but can be withheld until such a time as the parents (this assumes one of each gender) begin living a regular life, measured by the Catholic Church as regular Sunday attendance and contributions to the support of the Church. Being seen and accounted for.
The LDS has the same obligation to both the adults and the children and have arrived at position that they can maintain. One assumes that if the parents’ circumstances change and are amenable to the LDS, then such steps as baptism might be offered.
I had a lot of Mormon friends growing up so I’m well versed.
Cheater! ;)
I think these issues aren’t as near and dear to the hearts of those in different denominations/religions because marriage and family, while very important, doesn’t take quite as central a role in other theologies. So the stress you place on those issues seem misplaced/disproportionate to someone for whom those issues don’t carry as much weight.
VC, do you think I am unaware of this? And yet we are talking here about Mormons, are we not? So that I, a Mormon, would bring up issues that are related to Mormons on a Mormon thread, might not be out of place.
No, of course not. Just a way of explaining why non-Mormons on engaging in this post may be puzzled or not understand.