If ye have love...

In my ward growing up there was a fast and testimony meeting where many of the members expressed their love for each other.  An investigator got up and proclaimed his desire to be baptized because he felt we had demonstrated what Jesus taught when he said that his disciples would be known for having love one for another.  Ironicaly, he couldn't be baptized because he traveled around a bit and his primary residence was in another state.  Even though his recent travels had brought him to our congregation on a regular basis, the church would only allow him to be formally taught the discussions in a way that counted towards baptism and join the church from his primary place of residence.  But our ward was where he had felt that spirit of love and he expressed some confusion why the rules were so technical that even though he was converted here he could only be baptized there.

Hopefully he eventually found his way to his home ward and he could join in communion with God through us and feel that same spirit of Love.  We'd always like to assume that every ward is equally loving and amazing.  Of course, that isn't always the case.  I was talking to people recently about some experiences they had in a ward where the members had been cold hearted towards them, apparently more interested in belonging to upper class cliques than in love- leading to a real sense of exclusion.  And I could relate to feeling excluded from a ward family.  I've been in a ward where mostly no one seemed to think it was their responsibility to love me or my family because I wasn't planning on living within the ward boundaries for the rest of my life.  I didn't really count to them.  I've been in an Elder's quorum where the teacher clearly only wanted participation of returned missionaries.  It just didn't occur to him that I counted as a member of his Quorum even if I didn't go on a mission for medical reasons.  And my own experiences are more minor compared to some.  One of my friends growing up once was disruptive in our youth Sunday school, probably because his older brother had just died earlier that very week.  The instructor came right out and told him that it didn't matter if he was having a hard week because he just had a family member die, but that if he was going to behave that way he wasn't welcome and should just leave.  So he left... and to my memory never came back to that class.  After being treated that way I think I can understand why, he was rejected when he was needing acceptance.

Because we are fallen human beings, there are often some reasons that we give ourselves excuses not to love other people.  If you've ever read C.S. Lewis's "The Great Divorce" you can easily think of some examples, like the woman in the story who loves her son so much that she hates everyone else.  Or people who love their country so much that they hate foreigners, love a sports team so much as to hate rivals, love a church so much as to hate anyone their perceive questioning it or fear non members, love their views on chastity/marriage so much that they hate or are afraid of gays, or love anything you can imagine so much that they hate what they think the opposite is.

Christ's apostles serve as great examples of how this lofty concept of universal love is so hard to attain, even when taught every day at the feet of the Master.  There are accounts of the apostles bickering with each other over who was the greatest or would receive particular honors in the kingdom of heaven.  Their love for each other and love for God could be eclipsed by a striving for importance and stature in the Kingdom of God.  Just because Jesus commanded them to love each other didn't mean they automatically just got the concept.

Similarly, just because Love is supposed to be written into the programs of the church doesn't mean that any particular group of church members have actually adopted commandment to love one another fully into their lives.  It can become like a character says in "The Brothers Karamazov," the more love one has for universal mankind the less one has for anyone in particular, with organizational or ideological love replacing love for individuals.  Just being stamped with membership in any church has no relevance on whether you have mastered loving others.  No matter what memberships we have, it is the love that indicates discipleship.  Without love for others we won't deserve to be known as disciples of Jesus. We will be just one more of that group of people that say to him that we have performed many mighty works in his name, just to be rejected with the condemnation that He never knew us.  And how could we know him without a fullness of love, when God is Love?

In the end, we fulfill the commandment to love as individuals and hopefully form communities of faithful that together exercise this love.  If we do not love, no membership in Mormonism or any other Christian religion will make all men or God know that we are disciples of Christ.

Sexting and Consent

Some time ago there was a national controversy about a young man who raped his drunk date during a party after the prom.  A lot of useless talk happened about how the young man's life was ruined because of his conviction, not so much recognition that he had done some pretty long lasting damage to his date.  The more interesting side story was that during this same wild party there was another pair of teenagers where the boy was legally prosecuted for child molestation because the laws in their state assumed that was what all oral sex between teenagers was, even though consent was given and the participants were close enough in age no crime would have been committed if they had just risked pregnancy instead of throat cancer.  It seems to me the guiding principles for the law should be protecting consent, recognizing the mental maturity issues involved in consent, and preventing exploitation.  Charging a teen boy for child molestation because he broke a cultural taboo even though no exploitation or consent violation occurred just seems wrong.

 Recently, I saw a blog post which suggested we should worry about teen sexting because those engaged in it could be considered guilty of production, possession, and distribution of child pornography and that supposedly many jurisdictions were aggressively prosecuting such cases, even pushing to have teens tried as adults.  The blog post referred to a policeman who routinely searched young men's cell phones on the assumption that naked pictures of girlfriends could always be found to charge the young men with child pornography crimes.  This seems to beg the same kinds of questions as the case of the young man charged with child molestation.  If no exploitation occurred, if consent was obtained, and the participants were of legally permissible ages to have had sex with each other, should it be illegal for them to share erotic photos of themselves with each other?  It might be stupid, but I don't think it should be illegal.

Obviously a host of other issues come up.  If a photo was taken without consent or shared with the purpose to humiliate that should be illegal.  If the photo is sent as an unwanted advance that should constitute sexual harassment and be illegal.  If a couple exchanges such photos with consent but then shares them with the purpose to humiliate after they break up that should be illegal.  If such a photo is shared between people who are far enough apart in age that sexual acts would be considered statutory rape then it should be considered illegal and a child pornography crime.  These different sorts of crimes should have punishments appropriate to the type of exploitation occurring.  For instance, a young man who harasses young women by sending unsolicited pictures of his crotch deserves a different punishment than a child pornographer.

Its possible all of this is meaningless because the blog article I read might be over playing how such behaviors are actually prosecuted.  But, its possible the legal grey area is more important for its vagueness rather than for a history of overzealous convictions.  But it sounds to me as if it might possibly be time the child pornography laws were updated so that protecting consent and preventing exploitation are the principles that matter, not whether cell phones existed when the laws were written.

Motherhood

Today my Elder's quorum president complained that in talking about motherhood in church meetings he had attended earlier, the atonement of Christ failed to be connected to the discussion in any way, making the meeting not centered on worshiping Christ.  He invited us to bring up ways in which we could connect these subjects.  These were some of the thoughts I had in response to his question.

I've heard a lot of talk about how motherhood is inherently Christlike because of the service given as it is performed in daily tasks.  I think this praise is essentially good, but lacking nuance.  Today while in church I started pondering what the doctrines Christ taught about love had to say about whether mothering was essentially Christlike.  One in particular came to mind. 

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?

Getting up with a sleepless child over and over again is an act of service, and can be a very selfless one.  But the full essence of the kind of love Jesus is teaching us to have here isn't just serving people, its serving people who actually pretty much hate your guts and are intentionally mean to you.  While serving children can often by physically and emotionally demanding, you can easily argue that there are many times when performing the service is no particular virtue because the children you are serving love you in return.  On the other hand, loving and serving a child with a disobedient streak who seems to love to make your life hard or serving a teenager who is rebelling as hard as they can against you instead of just becoming angry and self serving, well now, that is something unusual and an excellent example of something Christ would hold up as an example of particular virtue.

This isn't to say that sometimes the love that a newborn gives you just doesn't really pay you back for being up every 2 hours in the night with them when they just won't seem to gain weight and you have to push feed them.  And honestly, the love and service a 2 year old gives back to you often doesn't seem to add up to all the work you put in to them.  Its an inherently unbalanced relationship where you give much more than you receive because it isn't possible for it to be any other way.  Children simply cannot contribute as much to the relationship as you can.  Christ also said

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
When there is access to reasonable medical care etc, it is not common for a woman to have to give up her life for her children, but she often gives up a lot of sleep, time to spend with friends, personal development opportunities, and countless other things.  So it can't be said there is nothing Christlike about the sacrifices mothers make.  But when a child looks up at you with those pleading eyes and ask if you can read them another book, serving them by reading often might just mean you are an average decent human being.  How you love them if they grow up into teenagers who tell you that they hate you just might tell you a lot more about how Christlike you are.

I'm not trying to say motherhood isn't Christlike.  But I'd rather that instead of talking about mothers being inherently wonderful that we talked about what it is about parenting that can be Christlike and what Christ actually said about love that matters regarding motherhood.  For example,

Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

This scripture suggests that if we parade our parental sacrifices about to show off our love, that our efforts don't help to sanctify us.  Not that women don't need to be able to talk about their daily frustrations and work or that they don't occasionally need praise for the often thankless work they put in.  But if the discussion shifts into showing off and one upping other people or talking about how real righteous women would change their parenting or housekeeping methods, something is wrong.

I appreciate that we celebrate the service of women and mothers, but it feels to me as if church should be a place for the celebration of the sanctification of still imperfect sinners, and a place of reflection on what we might lack in our seeking of additional purification.  So if we described how many mothers were an excellent example of the teachings of Jesus instead of just saying that motherhood itself is Christlike, that would help answer the question of how to have a Christ centered mothers day at church.

What I wish I could say...

I work customer service and tech support by phone.  And I'm on the autistic spectrum.  Those are things that don't normally go together.  Honestly, its so weird that I keep it a secret from almost all of my coworkers and managers.  Only a very few ever find out, and then partially because anything that affects that much of you that you try to hide that much just needs to come out somewhere.

Occasionally I have a call where the customer just stops and praises me for having very good empathy skills, how I just calmed them down immediately with my amazing emotional tone and really helped them.  Once, apparently the prolonged length of my calls attracted attention from a big whig who decided to use my calls as an example to discuss things with his team of managers.  One of the managers came to me afterwards and told me how the big whig had said that they could tell I really cared about my customers.  When I receive praise like that from a customer or a manager I often just want to press pause on the official interaction, transport them to my living room, and explain what its like to be an autistic customer service agent.

I'd tell them that my earliest customer service by phone roles were almost entirely scripted, where I was barely allowed to paraphrase.  And tell them that this was a good way for me to start out because talking on the phone tends to make me freeze up unless I have some kind of script to guide what I say.

I'd tell them about how I, along with my past coworkers, had been through countless trainings on how to be empathetic in a company approved manner following the company approved formula.  And how none of it really made any sense to me.

I'd tell them how on any customer service or tech support job there's always these problem spots where the basic facts of the situation are almost guaranteed to make someone mad unless its presented well.  And then I'd tell them how I tend to take months or maybe even longer perfecting just the right phrasing to get past those danger zones because to me figuring out how to emotionally present things effectively is like tinkering with an old beat up car, you just keep analyzing and listening until you figure our which parts need replacing until you get it working.  It doesn't happen automatically.

I'd tell them about how I was once responsible to fake that I was a supervisor to take calls from angry people who didn't want to talk to base level agents anymore.  I often did pretty well.  My emotional response range is so calm to most things that its hard for most customers to get under my skin, and remaining calm is probably 3/4rs of the battle in taking care of angry people.

But when I was asked to intensively multi task while doing those calls I started to have a pattern of people asking to speak to my manager because they felt I wasn't empathetic enough.  I just couldn't concentrate on sounding nice at the same time as doing too many other things.

I'd tell them that probably the biggest reason I sound good emotionally is because I've been perfecting my phone voice for the last 7 years.

I'd tell them about how even though I can mask my innate emotional lack of intuitive empathy by lots of practice, I still have the detail oriented mind result in calls so long I tend to be on the verge of getting fired over it.  And that my poor ability to emotionally connect with people still makes my sales offers sound like more like something smelly, warm, and soft going splat rather than the money making music the company wants to hear.

I'd tell them about how I once had manager a couple levels up from me try to have me officially written up for submitting credit requests that were too wordy.  And how my direct manager who knew about my being autistic shielded me from them because she felt that the other person could use having to get used to someone like me.

I'd tell them about how once someone did manage to get me reprimanded because I included, at the customers request, personal medical details that related to a credit request and how I started to melt down get upset because I couldn't understand what the problem was.  And how this same manager who knew my diagnosis respected me when I told her that it wasn't worth it and that I needed to disengage.

I'd tell them how for me empathy is more a choice I make and a point of view I explore rather than a feeling that spills out of my guts without me choosing when it happens.

I'd tell them I am an empathy practitioner.  Meaning that I have to practice it because the way I naturally express it probably wouldn't come across in a way they would understand.  But that its still there as part of who I am.  I just have to translate it.

A Tribute to my Mexican Irish Roomate's Search for Christ

When I first came to school in Cedar City, the apartment I rented was really just a house with all the rooms rented out.  It wasn't in the nicest area of town, rent was dirt cheap, and the roommates you ended up with could be almost anyone.  I once shared the house with a man who was half Mexican and half Irish.  I honestly don't know if I ever knew what the real name was, but for this blog post I'll call him Bob.  He told me he was wanted by the police down in Las Vegas and so had been living under a pseudonym.  It turns out that he had been a member of a gang down in sin city and a Mormon friend of his helped him move out to try to start a new life away from the gang where he had been getting in trouble.  At first he had stayed with this friend of his and then eventually moved in with the group of students that shared the house I was in.  He was ready for a change in his life, and was spiritually hungry.  Being in Utah, when he looked around for a place to spiritually feast, what he found was Mormonism.

Bob had no particular illusions that Mormons were somehow more righteous than other people.  He flat out told me that his Mormon friend who helped him move to Utah was a car thief and a spouse abuser.  Bob described watching his friend act almost as if on the verge of attacking the woman.  Bob told me he decided if the man started to hit his wife, Bob was going to punch him out.  Looking at his biceps, I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of Bob's righteous indignation.  But knowing one bad person wasn't stopping his interest in Mormonism.  Bob had tried for some time to investigate the church, but with little luck.

I don't know if maybe the missionaries were scared of Bob.  He says several sets of them stood him up for appointments and never showed up again.  He had tried even just showing up directly at our meetings.  But Bob wasn't a Mormon or even an ex-Mormon.  He didn't know anything about the confusing array of family, single non student, single student, or married student wards with their overlapping boundaries and age limitations.  All he knew was he tried showing up several times and someone would keep telling him that he wasn't allowed to attend in that church, that he really belonged somewhere else.  I'm sure no one meant any harm, it just didn't occur to them to just let him come and worship and investigate as he chose.  They were really concerned that he his attendance match his life circumstances.  My roommates and I told him to just come with us, who cared if he was technically too old for our student singles ward.  And for a while I think he liked coming with us.  He told me that the young teachers in our ward taught more and he learned faster from our congregation than from others. 

Sometimes he would ask me questions about religion or morality.  I'd like to say I had all the answers he needed.  I didn't.  I remember once he asked me what was so wrong about pornography.  Maybe this came up because some of the roommates I think were ignoring the law and throwing out junk mail ads for subscriptions to pornographic magazines that were addressed to him.  I knew what the answer was that the church tells its members about Satan attacking the family and how we are sons and daughters of God, but this was a man who didn't really believe yet in all the talk about how family was central to God's plan and what does being God's child have to do with whether its immoral to get turned on by a pretty naked girl?  Growing up I was taught that using it would make me into Ted Bundy and I would end up on the electric chair.  Not a good answer for someone who is using it and obviously hadn't turned into a mass murderer.  All I could remember was a talk by Boyd K. Packer in which he said that our sexual moral code in the church could only be understood in the context of understanding our divine worth as God's children and that once we understood that, the sexual moral code would inherently make sense.  President Packer spent a lot of time discussing the divine worth part of the question, but never got back around to mentioning how that connected back to sexual morality and pornography.  I didn't want to tell him that when it came down to it I had no idea why pornography was wrong, so I told him that pornography being wrong was something that only made sense once you believed other doctrines.  That's about what President Packer had taught me.  I think I could answer him now, but only because I've looked beyond the simple answers to understand things like human trafficking and how abusive depictions are often used.

There were other things I knew the answers to much better.  Bob had a Jehovah's Witness friend who wanted to come debate with me.  I was hesitant, knowing that a Bible bash did no one any good.  But Bob insisted.  The funny thing was I don't think the Jehovah's Witness preacher knew much about Mormonism.  He spent a large amount of time trying to prove shared beliefs out of the Bible, as if I didn't know what they were about.  I kept saying for about the first half of the meeting "thanks for pointing out that scripture, that is a belief we share."  Then he started getting into some weirder stuff pulling the scriptures out of context and using pseudepigraphal sources.  That I could respectfully disagree with him on, tell him I admired his fervor in studying his scriptures, and to have a nice day.  Bob told me he thought it was wonderful watching us because he realized nothing could be proven by just arguing from the scriptures.

He never gained a testimony of the Book of Mormon or of Joseph Smith.  As far as I could tell, he never read the Book of Mormon, despite the missionaries hammering him on it.  My other roommates and I were suspicious that he might not have been able to read well enough to understand the book because he never gave any indication that he had tried, despite desperately wanting to grow spiritually from what Mormonism had to offer.  Eventually, the Bishop in our ward assigned someone to give a talk on the evils of improper dress and appearance.  Unfortunately, Bob didn't have any dress clothes and wore jeans and a T-Shirt to our meetings, and the T-shirt didn't cover the extensive tattooing on his arms.  Bob felt ashamed and felt as if the other members were laughing at him, and stopped being so interested in attending.  My roommates and I discussed pitching in together to pick him up some church clothes he might feel more comfortable in, but the idea fell through for some reason.

I hope Bob found his way to Christ somehow.  I'm a firm believer that no matter what road you take to find love in your heart for God and your fellow man, it’s the right road as long as you get there.  But, I'm afraid that Mormonism at that time wasn't going to lead him to Christ.  At most, it told him that what building he showed up in was more important than whether he worshiped, and what he looked like was more important than whether he was searching for repentance and sanctification.  And since our conversion process centers around reading a book, I think we unintentionally told him that he had to know how to read to be saved.  During the time he stayed with us I watched him lose many of his rough edges and become a more gentle and loving person.  And I can always respect the memory of the man flexing his biceps explaining how he was going to take care of any man who beat a wife.  I just wish I could have led him closer to Christ without all our cultural baggage getting in the way.

Church Culture and Doctrine

So this post has been sitting around on my computer waiting for me to finish it ever since another blogger suggested I write it.  I don't think she ever needed it, but I figured it was time to dust it off and bring it out

A big problem of separating church doctrine and culture is that church members tend to simultaneously believe fully that revelation that can be received by their church leaders is infallible, but that the church leaders themselves are slightly fallible.  Since if church leaders were very fallible its assumed God wouldn’t have asked them to lead the church, by default church members believe that almost any statement or policy is the result of revelation direct from God or is so affected by the extent of their revelations of the future and past to be just as good as revelation.  We as a people take the idea of honoring our church leaders as a way to honor the office they hold so seriously that trying to separate out where the man ends and where revealed truth begins makes us very uncomfortable.  For every person you can find who might be willing to dismiss statements by any given church leader as a personal opinion, you will find many people who would rather insist the statement was the word of God coming to us through his servants.  There are very few procedures by which church teachings can be automatically counted as absolute doctrine or absolute opinion unless the leader speaking states which they think they are saying explicitly, and even that is unsure.  I grew up being told to treat any statement from a powerful church leader as being the absolute will of God having an absolute claim on my obedience with very little emphasis given on what kind of thought process I might use to critique which of these statements should have a claim on me.  A few examples that illustrate how that causes problems would be caffeinated beverages, blacks and the priesthood, politics, and courtship.

Take the whole no drinking caffeinated beverages thing.  Some leaders in the church noticed that both coffee and tea had caffeine and they decided that the caffeine must be the important chemical to avoid.  You can find a history of statements from prominent church leaders saying that caffeinated beverages were against the church health code.  These statements were never “canonized” but it is extremely rare in the church for anything to be officially canonized in the sense of being voted on.  I grew up being told that caffeine was only advised against by the church but since these people were prophets seers and revelators I could depend on them having received revelation from God that the spiritual and physical costs of caffeine being something I should avoid.  As a result I remember growing up expecting to hear eventually that science had confirmed the supposed harms of caffeine.  I was very interested when a biologist I knew explained that caffeine can cause problems with calcium levels in the body (his recommendation was drink milk if you want to drink caffeine, but that otherwise there was no health risk he was aware of).  I think the church in the United States has shared that anticipation, even to the extent that an article was published in the official church magazine preaching against the evils of overconsumption of caffeine in energy drinks.  More recently, the church had a statement released by their PR department stating that there was no official doctrinal position saying that you couldn’t drink caffeine.  Looking back I’m glad I’m not dependent on expensive caffeine sources to keep me energized for my day, but I feel a little silly having spent so much effort avoiding mildly caffeinated sodas.   Turns out it wasn’t the will of God, it was just church leaders concerned about their community trying to do the best with the understanding they had.

For another example take the whole blacks and the priesthood thing.  There is a very clear historical record that many early church leaders were very in sync with their times about racial concerns, which is a nice way of saying they fully believed a lot of racist trash.  Despite clear evidence that there hadn’t been a ban on blacks receiving the priesthood under Joseph Smith (one black man in particular even was ordained as an Elder, later a member of a quorum of seventy, and even participated in a variety of temple worship ceremonies before Brigham Young stopped him), the church had to find reasons or explanations to justify the ban on blacks receiving the priesthood so there were many statements issued in general meetings by authorities that were presumed to know the will of God on the subject because they were declared as “prophets, seers, and revelators” who authoritatively said a lot of really racist stuff as doctrine.  I grew up being taught some of those ideas.  It was presented that somehow those ideas were doctrine and mattered until God stated otherwise and then they somehow no longer mattered.  It wasn’t until I checked on the subject as an adult that I learned that a lot of the theological concepts appealed to in the bible to support the church’s position are so divorced from the actual scriptural text that pretty much every other church abandoned the ideas long ago.  In response to a CES instructor who was still teaching the old doctrines, the church has again disavowed the racist teachings (thank goodness), but has failed to replace this history of racist doctrine with anything to explain why it happened.  All we get is a “we don’t know when, who, how, or why.”

A few more examples will help make this all more clear.  Take politics. 

I grew up being taught that since Ezra Taft Benson had from the pulpit espoused certain radical polical beliefs as if they were doctrine, that I should accept those beliefs too.  I heard some people vaguely suggesting that all his supposedly apostolic teachings somehow just didn't count, but I was never taught about B. H. Roberts or any other apostles who more or less contradicted these teachings.  So my family growing up participated in passionate conservative republicanism, belief in widespread communist conspiracies, and even subscribed to the magazine of the John Birch Society.  As an adult, I realize now that church leaders have made political pronouncements favoring multiple opinions and have learned about the steps the church made to distance itself from President Benson’s politics after his death.  Today I’d consider myself a moderate liberal, but I live in an LDS culture where extreme conservatism is assumed to be an article of faith and I regularly listen to political pronouncements from local church and church wide leaders who care about their community and try to provide it with leadership including guidance on their political beliefs.

Courtship practices are an interesting place to point out the difference of church culture and doctrine as well.  I grew up outside Utah in a place where physical affection was somewhat more casual.  By casual I mean that as a teenager I exchanged affectionateless embraces with many girls with whom I had no functional relationship, it was somewhat on the level of saying hello to a casual friend.  This cultural norm of physical affection somewhat affected expectations in actual courtship, although not in an extreme way.  Youth were just somewhat warmer with each other.  When I moved to Utah for college I discovered that friendship and courtship norms were somewhat more reserved, casual friendship hugs weren’t as common and every physical touch seemed to carry more weight of meaning.  I even knew a man who claimed that back east those evil members of the church seemed to believe that unless a date included some kind of sexual contact that it wasn’t a date, leading to a confusion of the church teaching people to date once a week meaning that they should have premarital sex.  Strictly speaking this isn’t true, I’d rate my eastern friends who were members of the church as equally chaste as the friends I found in Utah.  However I knew what the man meant, where I grew up there was more expectation of a low level of physical affection.  To be certain teenagers are likely to fall into all sorts of mischief no matter where they live, but hand holding, hugs, and a kiss goodnight are not exactly what I think of as sexual excess.  Many statements are made by church leaders about courtship norms, often trying to encourage a restoration of an idealized image of the 1950's which supposedly involved less premarital sex and marriage ages and birth rates based on principle instead of economics.  The problem is, in the past young people still had premarital sex.  And arguably, birth rates and marriage ages are determined by economic realities just like they always have been- we just have a different kind of economic structure and average income today.  Official church statements trying to sanctify the 1950's family arrangements as ideal can probably be counted as having as much doctrinal weight as early church leaders decrying the waltz as sexually decedant.

Its impossible to talk about church culture without acknowledging that it is different around the world and that I don’t know much about that.  I’ve lived in two towns in Utah and in one town on the east coast.  There are differences in how authoritative church statements are interpreted every where you go.  But, based on my own experience and on the experiences of a friend whose father was in the military and therefore moved around a lot, I’d say that in the United States there is a cultural tendency for members of the church to believe they are more righteous than members of the church elsewhere.  They tend to see it as inevitable that their particular cultural environment is better suited to being righteous that somewhere else.  To be certain there are specific cultural differences throughout the church that are remarkable and interesting, however I think anyone who believes this actual means one group is better than the other has had too narrow of an experience in the world.  When my father visited Nepal on a business trip a church member there asked if he thought being rich made it harder for him to live the gospel.  Is that any more or less true than the idea that righteousness is easier when you have the support of those around you or that righteousness its easier when your testimony is more pure when you stand out from the people around you?  Every area of the world has its eccentricities and customs and norms, but I don’t believe that you can divide people by geography to show that any one group has a better chance at salvation than another.  Speaking of the rich young man, Christ said that salvation was impossible for all men, but with God anything is possible.

Over the rainbow

While visiting my parents in their new place I explored a little loft they had for a grand kids playroom.  It was a very emotional experience.  Seeing all the little toys that we had played with growing up it felt like someone had taken a bunch of my memories, put them in a box, shaken them, and then poured them out all-out of context.  One toy in particular caught my attention.  There was a little plastic toy music box shaped like a radio that played over the rainbow.  I can still remember seeing it on the shelf at the store and imagining that if I moved the little blue slider up and down that it would play different "channels" or songs but I was pretty happy that it just played over the rainbow.  I really liked musical toys growing up and this was one of the three that I at times insisted should play simultaneously while I was going to sleep.  Finding it in the playroom, my son took a liking to the box and insisted that I play the song over and over again so he could listen entranced while watching the little display showed pictures of kids flying over a rainbow.

Growing up involved its hard knocks.  I was ordered twice to leave the home and never come back and once walked the streets for a good part of the evening before a member of the church found me and took me back home.  I can remember being screamed at to ask if I thought my mother was stupid because I couldn't accept her word as perfect truth 100% of the time even on matters as trivial as what size clothes would fit me or not, being told that I would never accomplish anything in life, being laughed at for being stupid to try to motivate me to think harder on math problems, being told that I was inherently untrustworthy to figure out life skills my own way, and being punished as intentionally rebellious when I honestly had trouble figuring out all my life skills as fast as was wanted.  I rarely had any issues where I intentionally and blatantly tried to defy my parents, but was treated more or less like I was on a pretty regular basis.  Or there were the ways my emotional needs were kind of steam rolled over to make room for the emotional needs of other family members.  These are memories I more or less try to avoid.  They don't bring me happiness to dwell on them.

I prefer to remember how I beat the system and convinced my mother that I wasn't evil.  Like how I chose to have my biggest fight with my parents where I intentionally defied them  about whether I was being an evil rebel child for staying up late to read my scriptures more.  If you pick the right ground to fight on its hard to loose and I won my parents respect.  I won what one of my sibling told me at the time was the first time in which any of us had convinced my mother that we were privileged to conduct our own direct conflict resolution with another sibling instead of having it all controlled and done in isolation by my mother.  I remember doing the math to prove that the rate at which I was doing my homeschooling work had me on pace to complete everything we had planned before I went to college almost an entire year early- that kind of shot down the you'll never get to college put down that I was zinged with on a regular basis before.  I remember being put in situations where a lot of parental support was withdrawn to intentionally try to make me fail at something to force me to accept increasing levels of control and I fought back by achieving my own independence- simultaneously withdrawing my trust in my folks while winning their respect.  These are victory memories which helped define the kind of person I wanted to be.  But victories happen in battles, and battles happen with a lot of bloodshed.  You can be glad you fought the battles, but you don't want to relive them.

Listening to that little music box play over the rainbow was a reminder of all the bright moments, times when there was joy and peace.  The memories of the song aren't about how I survived emotional abuse or even about any other person but me.  Its about laying in bed quietly waiting for sleep while thinking about hope.  Its about finding joy in the beauty of music.  Its about remembering that there is something more to your past than just the dragons you had to slay to survive growing up.  Or a smile or laughter that spilled out often in spite of the circumstances, because life is just a happy place.