Posted by:
derrida
(
)
Date: November 12, 2018 07:53PM
I recall, in bishopric or ward council, when a report would come up that some "less active" person wanted to resign, that the bishop would instruct the missionary or EQP to have the person write the bishop a letter. The bishop didn't seem to care too much. He just wanted documentation to move forward with.
Local bishops, from what I've seen, will usually not try to force the issue of resignation. Unless the person is vociferous about not believing and is acting mightily and publicly pissed about the whole thing, in which case resignation and excommunication would seem to be on the agenda. Otherwise, people just stop coming to church.
You seem, however, to have identified a big part of the problem, this all or nothingism one finds in fundamentalist religions: Believe or resign. Do you want to resign? Then you'll be excommunicated. Public mockery. Trial. Local infamy. The whole nine yards of ritual drama. Most people aren't up for that. They'd rather quit than be fired.
Most people just go inactive and deal with the emotional fallout *privately*, and that's where the church wants it. So it's an interesting dilemma for the disaffected: Make the fight public and the church locally has to cope with your ouster and its social ramifications, which it has chosen to do, self-protectively, as a ridiculous medieval-style trial. Make the fight private and anonymous online, and the church could give a fig. Suffer all you want. Whatever. Who cares? Just go away with your disaffection. (One hears this echoed in what members say of exmormons: "Why do you have to be so angry? If you don't believe it and don't love it, then why can't you just let it go and shut up already?" That's a typical response.)
The church has made resignation so difficult in the past one would think that being able to resign on one's own was some sort of big secret.
In fact, one of the benefits of the online exmo community is that there are people who post the process for how to resign--who to email and what to say--and this is done often and repeatedly to help people who want to resign. There's even an office in the church HQ setup for this resignation process.
But I guess that's the point. People leaving the church go online and have to search out how to resign. You just email someone at church HQ and say you're done. Meanwhile, these solitary folks are processing their disaffection and exit, usually alone, and usually in all manner of ways, often in pain, their marriages and families in upheaval, and all in private. The church owns none of it. Maybe this is why the church is an inadequate organization: It doesn't really help people when they need help the most and it doesn't want to except on its own terms and for its own needs.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/12/2018 07:55PM by derrida.