![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
On a whim today I watched some South Park, including the show "All About Mormons". The episode came with a commentary track, talking about the Mormon friends the producers had while growing up.
It reminded me of my ex, and how hilarious and quotable she thought the episode was. She's ex-mormon, and her family is ex-mormon, and I think it's a nice validation of the episode that someone who was directly involved in the church would find it so entertaining. The episode also showed a lot of the positive aspects of Mormon domestic life, which I'd forgotten about in the nearly two decades since I'd last seen it. That domestic life and the church are inextricably bonded, and my ex knew the dark side of that domestic life all too well: The savage rejection of anything that isn't sanctioned by the church.
When she told me about her experience, I was amazed to find parallels in my memory from a friendship I'd started in high-school. My friend had struggled almost the same way, especially with the gravitational effect that his large family unit exerted on him -- except unlike my ex's family, his never could break free from the church. In fact a few years after I last saw them, they packed up and left California specifically to return to the supportive arms of the Mormon community. For years my friend fought to establish his own identity and domestic space independent of that, but found himself reeled back in. With the gift of hindsight I can say now that the intensity of his struggle was born partly of deliberate sabotage: When your parents train you to relate only to other church members and subconsciously portray everyone beyond as inscrutable heathens, you don't exactly leave home with a well-developed social toolbox for building - or even joining - a different community. Even if you find one, you are very likely to be forced into a choice between your family and your community: Any friend or romantic interest you bring to meet the family will be eternally judged by the Mormon standard and found wanting. The emotional hassle of leaving the church also fulfills its own prophecy: People outside it won't understand how hard you had to work to leave. (I suspect this is why ex-mormons so often seek the romantic comfort of other ex-mormons. There are even online dating sites built for this market.)
My friend's younger brother ended up committing suicide, because try as he might, he could not reconcile his real identity with what his family told him it should be. I suspected he was in the closet when I knew him - if not for homosexuality then for something - but I never put the pieces together and realized how miserable he truly was. I never got close enough. I could have been a lifeline, but in my defense, I wasn't yet aware of how deeply irredeemable his family's religion made him feel. I had been raised outside that abattoir, and whenever I walked into it for a social visit, the walls were always hosed clean.
Excruciating doubt, married to compulsory joy. A strange kind of clamoring for the bright side to any event. I suppose the difference between my family and theirs was a fundamentally different approach to bad feelings: Accepting them as natural companions to the good. The few times I overheard my friend talking with his own parents about deep depressing matters, I felt angry on his behalf. "If you're feeling sad, you're feeling wrong," was the essence of what they told him. "It's just a great big abyss out there, and by looking into it, you're dragging everyone else down. Stop looking. Put those feelings to sleep and conjure up a smile. It's better for us all."
Religious standards of emotional conduct, and the pharmaceutical industry: A match made in heaven.
Terror grows in the hiding from it. Constantly running to keep their demons from getting too close, a devout family can cover a lot of ground -- raise a lot of children, till a lot of soil, bake a lot of pies. (I was always impressed by the amount of baking that went on in that house.) Trouble is, with all philosophical roads leading back to the church, nothing stops a family from going in a massive loop. But to them that's fine, because like the runners of the Caucus Race from Alice In Wonderland, nothing makes sense anyway. The point is to keep those demons below the horizon, and your reward for keeping your head down and running hard does not need physical evidence: Your paradise is beyond the veil of death. (Which, bizarrely, in the Mormon scripture is described as a repeat of that Caucus Race, just on a larger scale.)
My ex spoke very frankly about the hell that the church put her mother, and then her, through. Her mother had five children, starting early, and dove headfirst into everything the church glorified for women. She worked brutally hard to make ends meet but was extremely unhappy, and over the years that manifested as abuse, growing in severity until after the family split up and they all got plenty of distance from each other. I don't blame all of that outcome on the Mormon church, but I do definitely blame the church for the completely avoidable pressure it dropped squarely on my ex's mother, for her entire youth, to have children as quickly and thoroughly as possible, despite deep misgivings about it. I've heard that particular story over and over.
I think of the cassette tape that she gave to me to copy - "I'm a Mormon" - full of songs that glorify motherhood and family*, pitched straight at prepubescent girls. Hearing it as an adult, it gives me a terrible chill. I can imagine myself listening to it as a small child, feeling an odd combination of yearning and deep confusion, wondering why the vision for my future that it laid out seemed like a blissfully comfortable armchair that I desperately wanted to relax into -- and knowing instinctively that it was just a bit too small, and if I wanted to fit into it, I would have to amputate something -- something I couldn't quite describe yet. And perhaps that choice would plague me as I got older. I would feel like a failure for selfishly choosing to keep my soul intact, when I should have just sawed part of it away and sat down in the damn chair like everyone expected. Maybe true happiness had been there, like the cassette promised. Those other women sure present as happy...
The prophets and the church found a great way to perpetuate their genes, didn't they? Tie reproduction deeply into spirituality. All it takes is a few rounds: Recruit a group of young, gullible women to move far away from their wiser, more skeptical female elders, and convince them that the highest calling in their life is to spit out offspring. Then enlist their help in convincing their offspring to do the same. Like a tumor, life itself is hijacked and made to serve growth for its own sake. Two generations, maybe three, with the young massively outnumbering the old, and the skeptics driven quickly and quietly away, and you've got yourself a self-perpetuating Caucus Race; the women pounding the earth even as they nurse infants; mothers lining up their daughters to be run into the ground; all the rebellion chased or frightened out of them.
Not a pretty vision from the outside. My family had game nights, camping trips, dances, big holidays, art projects, and a sense of peace and order. No religious overlords required. Moving across the world I am increasingly dismayed at how rare that kind of family life is. Abrahamic religion, in all its variations, has been ordering us to run this race for over a thousand years -- and it's a central feature of the Mormon church since the first day and all the way through to right now.
If I think of the cult-like mixing of religion and reproduction as a tumor, then the metaphor suggests an interesting way to combat it when it's grown too large to ignore: Cultural chemotherapy. Insist on a secular educational system. Insist on sending all children to it. Then insist on a secular media that encourages skepticism of religion but is still humanist, that shows other ways to organize your life, that portrays people outside the church as human, and real, and having the real shot at happiness that they do -- and then find ways to deliver that message, that can pass over even the high walls of the church and its family units. All cults rely on restricting and censoring access to outside information to protect their false promises, so litter the landscape with devices and wires and antenna and software that make it hard for people to covertly censor each other. The more democratized the media infrastructure, the more resistant the individuals are to cult influence.
I'm getting way off track from my original thoughts here, but I want to mention at this point that I have deep misgivings about the way social media works on the internet, because it does in fact provide plenty of means for groups and agencies to covertly censor people. In fact, the selective editing built into a "feed" that is the core concept of all large-scale social media, from Facebook on down, is the very essence of this censorship. So the future is not necessarily a bright one: In pursuit of market share, companies like Facebook actively cater to groups that desire covert censorship - and tracking - of their members. (Pursuit of growth over all else -- hmm, wasn't I just talking about that?)
"All About Mormons" brought up a lot of interesting thoughts. South Park's satire often veers into a nihilistic "both sides suck" territory that doesn't age well, but in this case, they held their worst impulses at bay and fashioned a story that just presents a couple of major aspects of being Mormon as-is, in all their weirdness. Watching it now, I reacted about the same as I did two decades ago ... Except I wish I'd known earlier in life how deeply it was affecting my friends, and what I might say to help them feel confident enough to leave the Caucus Race.
* "The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful." -Father Merrin, "The Exorcist", 1973.
It reminded me of my ex, and how hilarious and quotable she thought the episode was. She's ex-mormon, and her family is ex-mormon, and I think it's a nice validation of the episode that someone who was directly involved in the church would find it so entertaining. The episode also showed a lot of the positive aspects of Mormon domestic life, which I'd forgotten about in the nearly two decades since I'd last seen it. That domestic life and the church are inextricably bonded, and my ex knew the dark side of that domestic life all too well: The savage rejection of anything that isn't sanctioned by the church.
When she told me about her experience, I was amazed to find parallels in my memory from a friendship I'd started in high-school. My friend had struggled almost the same way, especially with the gravitational effect that his large family unit exerted on him -- except unlike my ex's family, his never could break free from the church. In fact a few years after I last saw them, they packed up and left California specifically to return to the supportive arms of the Mormon community. For years my friend fought to establish his own identity and domestic space independent of that, but found himself reeled back in. With the gift of hindsight I can say now that the intensity of his struggle was born partly of deliberate sabotage: When your parents train you to relate only to other church members and subconsciously portray everyone beyond as inscrutable heathens, you don't exactly leave home with a well-developed social toolbox for building - or even joining - a different community. Even if you find one, you are very likely to be forced into a choice between your family and your community: Any friend or romantic interest you bring to meet the family will be eternally judged by the Mormon standard and found wanting. The emotional hassle of leaving the church also fulfills its own prophecy: People outside it won't understand how hard you had to work to leave. (I suspect this is why ex-mormons so often seek the romantic comfort of other ex-mormons. There are even online dating sites built for this market.)My friend's younger brother ended up committing suicide, because try as he might, he could not reconcile his real identity with what his family told him it should be. I suspected he was in the closet when I knew him - if not for homosexuality then for something - but I never put the pieces together and realized how miserable he truly was. I never got close enough. I could have been a lifeline, but in my defense, I wasn't yet aware of how deeply irredeemable his family's religion made him feel. I had been raised outside that abattoir, and whenever I walked into it for a social visit, the walls were always hosed clean.
Excruciating doubt, married to compulsory joy. A strange kind of clamoring for the bright side to any event. I suppose the difference between my family and theirs was a fundamentally different approach to bad feelings: Accepting them as natural companions to the good. The few times I overheard my friend talking with his own parents about deep depressing matters, I felt angry on his behalf. "If you're feeling sad, you're feeling wrong," was the essence of what they told him. "It's just a great big abyss out there, and by looking into it, you're dragging everyone else down. Stop looking. Put those feelings to sleep and conjure up a smile. It's better for us all."
Religious standards of emotional conduct, and the pharmaceutical industry: A match made in heaven.
Terror grows in the hiding from it. Constantly running to keep their demons from getting too close, a devout family can cover a lot of ground -- raise a lot of children, till a lot of soil, bake a lot of pies. (I was always impressed by the amount of baking that went on in that house.) Trouble is, with all philosophical roads leading back to the church, nothing stops a family from going in a massive loop. But to them that's fine, because like the runners of the Caucus Race from Alice In Wonderland, nothing makes sense anyway. The point is to keep those demons below the horizon, and your reward for keeping your head down and running hard does not need physical evidence: Your paradise is beyond the veil of death. (Which, bizarrely, in the Mormon scripture is described as a repeat of that Caucus Race, just on a larger scale.)
My ex spoke very frankly about the hell that the church put her mother, and then her, through. Her mother had five children, starting early, and dove headfirst into everything the church glorified for women. She worked brutally hard to make ends meet but was extremely unhappy, and over the years that manifested as abuse, growing in severity until after the family split up and they all got plenty of distance from each other. I don't blame all of that outcome on the Mormon church, but I do definitely blame the church for the completely avoidable pressure it dropped squarely on my ex's mother, for her entire youth, to have children as quickly and thoroughly as possible, despite deep misgivings about it. I've heard that particular story over and over.
I think of the cassette tape that she gave to me to copy - "I'm a Mormon" - full of songs that glorify motherhood and family*, pitched straight at prepubescent girls. Hearing it as an adult, it gives me a terrible chill. I can imagine myself listening to it as a small child, feeling an odd combination of yearning and deep confusion, wondering why the vision for my future that it laid out seemed like a blissfully comfortable armchair that I desperately wanted to relax into -- and knowing instinctively that it was just a bit too small, and if I wanted to fit into it, I would have to amputate something -- something I couldn't quite describe yet. And perhaps that choice would plague me as I got older. I would feel like a failure for selfishly choosing to keep my soul intact, when I should have just sawed part of it away and sat down in the damn chair like everyone expected. Maybe true happiness had been there, like the cassette promised. Those other women sure present as happy...
The prophets and the church found a great way to perpetuate their genes, didn't they? Tie reproduction deeply into spirituality. All it takes is a few rounds: Recruit a group of young, gullible women to move far away from their wiser, more skeptical female elders, and convince them that the highest calling in their life is to spit out offspring. Then enlist their help in convincing their offspring to do the same. Like a tumor, life itself is hijacked and made to serve growth for its own sake. Two generations, maybe three, with the young massively outnumbering the old, and the skeptics driven quickly and quietly away, and you've got yourself a self-perpetuating Caucus Race; the women pounding the earth even as they nurse infants; mothers lining up their daughters to be run into the ground; all the rebellion chased or frightened out of them.
Not a pretty vision from the outside. My family had game nights, camping trips, dances, big holidays, art projects, and a sense of peace and order. No religious overlords required. Moving across the world I am increasingly dismayed at how rare that kind of family life is. Abrahamic religion, in all its variations, has been ordering us to run this race for over a thousand years -- and it's a central feature of the Mormon church since the first day and all the way through to right now.
If I think of the cult-like mixing of religion and reproduction as a tumor, then the metaphor suggests an interesting way to combat it when it's grown too large to ignore: Cultural chemotherapy. Insist on a secular educational system. Insist on sending all children to it. Then insist on a secular media that encourages skepticism of religion but is still humanist, that shows other ways to organize your life, that portrays people outside the church as human, and real, and having the real shot at happiness that they do -- and then find ways to deliver that message, that can pass over even the high walls of the church and its family units. All cults rely on restricting and censoring access to outside information to protect their false promises, so litter the landscape with devices and wires and antenna and software that make it hard for people to covertly censor each other. The more democratized the media infrastructure, the more resistant the individuals are to cult influence.
I'm getting way off track from my original thoughts here, but I want to mention at this point that I have deep misgivings about the way social media works on the internet, because it does in fact provide plenty of means for groups and agencies to covertly censor people. In fact, the selective editing built into a "feed" that is the core concept of all large-scale social media, from Facebook on down, is the very essence of this censorship. So the future is not necessarily a bright one: In pursuit of market share, companies like Facebook actively cater to groups that desire covert censorship - and tracking - of their members. (Pursuit of growth over all else -- hmm, wasn't I just talking about that?)
"All About Mormons" brought up a lot of interesting thoughts. South Park's satire often veers into a nihilistic "both sides suck" territory that doesn't age well, but in this case, they held their worst impulses at bay and fashioned a story that just presents a couple of major aspects of being Mormon as-is, in all their weirdness. Watching it now, I reacted about the same as I did two decades ago ... Except I wish I'd known earlier in life how deeply it was affecting my friends, and what I might say to help them feel confident enough to leave the Caucus Race.
* "The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful." -Father Merrin, "The Exorcist", 1973.
