Back in my day when you weren't allowed to go until you were 19 -- they made they made you spend a whole year out of high school resisting temptations to go to college or begin a life instead of doing the one thing they beat into your head since youth -- there were some Elders I spent a long a time with. I reconnected with one of them, and it was very interesting.

He and his companion knew me as the Bishop's kid that was shy but that knew all things about scripture. As we shared dinner, I told him I recently discovered I was on was on the spectrum. He has a son who was diagnosed as a baby, level 2. I'm level 1. We compared notes about our experiences with the disability, and then he moved the conversation to my apostasy. He is still in the church.

I said something about not having had a good time growing up in the church, and to be fair I feel like I need to say a large part of it was my condition. But then, I'm a bit salty that my native culture was so anti-medicine and anti-psychology in my childhood. Further, I didn't appreciate the way that my angst was misdiagnosed by men with no psych or mental health counseling training whatsoever as sin and treated in a way that made me so scrupulous.

That struck a chord with him. He disclosed to me that he struggled with scrupulosity too. Still does, but it's getting better. Porn is a thing, off and on. There's something about me that when Mormons trust me they tell me stuff. I don't know what the dynamic is. Maybe they have to know my Dad, who has always been in some position or another in the local priesthood hierarchy. And then on top of that, maybe they're impressed by my command of certain topics in a 1-on-1 setting. It's this dynamic that makes me describe growing up as a bishop's kid like feeling like a prince in a royal family or something. Firstborn too: the heir apparent. Being a soul on the spectrum, it feels like people hide their emotions from me every day, and back as a teenager who hadn't yet disappointed everyone, if I played into those expectations, people just gave me privileged access like that. I still had that dynamic with him.

I don't know what to do with emotional access except to information dump on topics they may find helpful. So, at dinner, I deconstructed his entire notion that the church's Purity culture is Biblical. We also swapped stories about about feeling emotionally isolated by the church and the futility of dumping your woes on the bishop like that gives you any peace.

Fun facts: Onan was smitten by God not for spilling it on the ground but because he didn't do his duty to give his late brother an adopted heir by knocking up the widow. In the New Testament, the phrase "abusers of themselves" seems to occur in connection to taking the pagan sacrament (the eating of unclean meats or things sacrificed to an idol). And generally, I can't find anything in the Bible about the Lord's sexual mores being motivated by a fundamental respect for women. Women were something between chattel and human beings back in those days in the eyes of the social compact. Marriage law had more to do with keeping men from getting blue balls and causing a ruckus; therefore was each man entitled to his woman or women, and that property line was to be respected except in very niche circumstances. Greek has no word for "wife," only "woman." Your wife is "your woman" with a possessive article. So when Jesus is quoted as saying that if you so much as look upon a woman to lust after her, again that has nothing to do with modern Puritan sentiments or respect for women. It's a reiteration of the old New Testament attitude combined with a new requirement that you write the tablets of the Lord on your heart and consider yourself a sinner the moment you hypothetically consider adultery with intent.

He absorbed all that with trust, and we talked about his right to privacy and autonomy. I'm not trying to persuade him out of the church even, just out of that hell where you feel trapped by a commandment that seems so designed that you cannot keep it while your bishop and your own family relations hound you about it. It wouldn't be such an affliction if lying to these people didn't feel so terrible. The purity culture isn't fair, and it's not making anybody a better person: it just makes the whole church depressed and otherwise fixes nothing. That's about how well human beings do with constant internet access. But in some sense we've always been this way as a species, because Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter is a relevant as ever. It's the shame that kills, not the scarlet letter. When the taboo is out in the open, you can grow into it and deal with it if society will leave you alone and let you have some kind of life. But when you have to hide it, shame in isolation gnaws your mind and drives you crazy. The thing is that this shouldn't be anybody's business in the first place. The same curiosity with which, assuming scripture to be true, the Lord endowed Adam and Eve with to "figure it out" is the same curiosity that almost universally drives Mormon youth to depression at some time or another. It's part of the human condition, and winding everyone up to feel guilty for just having it is fucking stupid. That approach is not even scriptural. It's more Catholic in origin than anything, tradition more than textual, and that's the sort of things Mormons are supposed to reject. I think the Mormon priesthood discovered what the Catholic priesthood figured out millennia ago: this propensity for sexual guilt is very useful for controlling populations.

We ended on that note. The context was weird, but idk. I hope he finds his peace and I hope it doesn't cost him his family. He bore his testimony to me just so I understood he wasn't asking for a way out of his religion. Touche. That was when I put on my Mormon hat, which is the version of me he always respected. I just want him to be happy and to feel secure and I enjoyed talking to him like old times. Mormons afflict themselves and nobody is making them do it. You don't have to bust out of the church and be a full heathen. Just be nicer to yourself, and if your habit really bothers you that much maybe you'll find more self-control in a better mental space where you don't feel trapped and you don't need it to escape. I've found that leaving the church cured more or less 95% of my old scrupulous angst, and I made sure he knew that. But maybe there's a middle path he can find.

It sucks that a man cannot find his way on such matters without the church's silhouette looming over the process with a baseball bat threatening to take everything and everyone he loves away from him if he doesn't magically fix something that all men have wrestled with from Adam. Virtually all men have that little dick in the back of their minds telling them to get laid, telling them to think about getting laid, driving them to spread their seed as far and wide as a Conifer tree spreads its pollen but for our higher brain functions telling it no. Some of the greatest men in history folded like cheap chairs to the importuning of a beautiful woman because of this fact, and far too many proceed without any invitation or consent. This is the male condition. It's all because of the way your balls are hardwired to the rest of your brain. It's easier to bridle your passions when you don't feel like your mere existence offends God, and a lot of good men bridle their passions regardless even when they're fighting depression. Hell, there are statistics showing drops in violent crime that coincide with the spread of the internet in the nineties. The internet is three quarters porn sites. A guy at home with his pants around his ankles and a cell phone in his hand isn't bothering anybody, and it releases a lot of angst that would otherwise build and become something dark, which is maybe why "JudeoChristian" culture is full of pedophiles and predators from the Catholic priests to the Cub Scout leaders.

I'm damned good at reasoning with a Mormon in his own tongue if he'll let me. But the necessity of having to approach them that way reminds me how frustrating the whole religious experience is in that church. We are endowed with reason, and using it does not unravel society. Giving yourself permission to use your own brain is the best thing you can do for yourself and those around you. The main hump is learning that thinking for yourself does not immediately cost you everyone you love, because nobody can read your mind and even if everyone could they might have compassion anyway or simply not care.

IMO the founding reason for purity culture in *any* church was fairly straightforward -- in the days before reliable birth control, and abortion, it was to ensure that children were born into a stable, married home. It was meant well, and quite often worked in practice, but there were horrible side effects. For one thing, as a part of that, divorce was frowned upon, and both men and women found themselves stuck in horrible marriages. There was also a lot of gossip about if some particular bride "deserved" to wear a white dress. And couples did not have the ability to control the size of their families, which often resulted in families stretched to the breaking point.

Things started to change in the wider culture with the advent of the pill. Suddenly women were freed from unwanted childbearing. Abortion was used as a back-up measure. Women were starting to enter the workforce in large numbers, and reveled in their new freedom. The advent of the pill led to female empowerment.

But the churches were often stuck in the past. As you noted, sexuality became a handy way to control the masses through the use of shame. For the Mormons, something that doesn't matter at all, masturbation, was and is a very big deal. The use of pornography was and is a very big deal. The shame aspect sometimes has affected how women view their sexuality after marriage as well. A number of years ago, there were posts on this board from men whose wives would only have sex with them once or twice a year, if that.

For myself, the mistreatment of women by the Christian churches led me down the rabbit hole of disengagement, and eventually, disbelief.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/09/2023 08:31AM by summer.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/09/2023 08:27PM by Cold-Dodger.

Interestingly, I just wrote a piece on shame, and the damage that happens when we sweep it under the rug. Will be posting shortly.