Posted by:
derrida
(
)
Date: December 06, 2010 10:50PM
Anyone else had this experience?
Scenario One: I was at the local fair and ran into someone who had been in the EQ presidency with me a two or three years back. He comes up to me and says "Hi." We shake hands, ask each other how it's going, and my kid tugs on my arm. I turn to him. Answer his question quickly. Then I turn back to continue my conversation with the TBM and he's gone, like a bullet, whoosh. I don't see him anywhere.
Scenario Two: I am manning a table at a local school fundraiser. Lots of people milling about. And just like at the fair another TBM walks by, says "Hi," we shake hands, and before I can get another word out he keeps walking.
These guys were my church friends. I'd still do anything for them, but I don't think they know that. My mostly TBM wife says that they just don't know what to say--they don't want to "offend."
I think I get it. They're basically scared and uncomfortable. I just think it's a tad weird. If these were old work mates, I don't think they'd be running off so fast. If they were old friends from school, I don't think they'd be jetting away. But the church creates such a barrier. The Church of Jesus Christ (™) shows its members crippled in relating to ex-mormons. It'd be funny if it weren't so sad.
Again, my wife says they keep the interaction to a minimum because they don't want to offend. That's a convenient explanation because then I'm the problem. I think they don't know what to make of me: happy, normal, no tatoos or piercings, non-drug addicted, non-divorced (so far!), and still employed.
I can't say across the board, as others like Peregrine at Postmormon.org says he has, that I have "normal conversations with TBMs" yet. There are things that I think and feel and believe that I can't say to them, and that's why I have much richer friendships with my "worldly" heathen or just garden variety Baptist and Methodist and Catholic and Episcopal and Lutheran and Jewish and Buddhist friends. We can talk about different kinds of beer, the love of a good cigar, the attractiveness of attractive people, the merits of various religions, Prop 8, Democratic candidates, a bawdy joke, or a joke about a Scotsman coming out of a pub in winter carrying a bottle of scotch. He slips on a patch of ice, falling down, feels something wet, and says worriedly, "I hope that's just blood!" I can't even share an adult or rated M or TV-14 joke with TBMs. They're too good for that, too "righteous" (™), too pure, too beyond such "mess of pottage" frivolities or vanities. Man, I start thinking about some of those suit and tie a$shats and just want to stop typing and get away from the bull$hit perfect people.
There are TBMs (or people somewhat close to TBM status) that I can have relatively "normal conversations with." They'll talk about things that fall between my atheism and their "drug of choice" (Peregrine)--"forever families."
Maybe the ones who walk off so fast are the ones whose social skills are weak (Peregrine again)--they really don't know how to engage someone who has left the fold, someone who doesn't compute or factor into their protected or constricted view of the world. I get it: They're in a 19th century "tribe" or "clan" or cultic "mafia."
The black and white, either/or, us/them polarized thinking is very much alive in the "Church of Jesus Christ" (™). "In" the world, not "of" it, okay--but not afraid "of" it. Jesus wasn't afraid of worldly people. I guess if you want a way to know who is strong in their faith and who isn't, then leaving the church is a way to separate the truly "Christlike" (™) from the camp followers.
I realize I think the church is a big fat cheating scam--I'm not unbiased at all on the question of the church--but taking good people and making them have such phobic reactions to other human beings who happen to no longer belong to their club anymore just doesn't make sense coming, as it does, from putative "followers of Christ" (™).
Even some family members will only accept you on the condition that you are an active happy member of the organization. As a middle aged convert, raised in a fairly liberal Protestant tradition, that blows my mind. The very idea that people would chuck family members over church membership would have struck me ten or twenty years ago, as it does now, as over-the-top, mean-spirited, and crazy--something only the worst sorts of fundamentalist zealots could do.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/06/2010 10:54PM by derrida.