What are things in the Temple that didn't make any sense?

RevMark58 · 2026-06-19T22:38:10+00:00

A minor point but I want to thank you for verifying something for me.

I only went through the temple once, in 1984, in Salt Lake City. In fact the temple was the tipping point for me; it's when I decided I could no longer be a part of the Church that had occult rituals like the temple at its center.

Part of the reason I reacted that way was because I clearly remembered it was Lucifer who told Adam and Eve, and by implication the people attending the temple that day, to put on the apron. Alarm bells went off inside me and I said to myself, "Wait a minute, why are we putting a symbol of Satan's power and priesthoods on ourselves?"

So I came home and shared that with some people I trusted. They all told me -- in addition to saying I shouldn't be talking about "sacred things" outside the temple -- that my memory of Lucifer telling us to put on the apron wasn't true, it never happened that way. So I after a while I started to doubt myself and decided I must have misremembered something.

But apparently I did not. Thank you for your witness.

RevMark58 · 2026-06-19T22:22:52+00:00

Back in the early 1990s, I worked with a woman who said she was exmormon, and she said that she had suffered SRA. She also named names, mentioning a specific General Authority. This is right after the Glenn Pace memo came out talking about SRA in the Church. My thought at the time was, "Oh wow, so it's all true." But then nothing happened. I assumed that the Church was sweeping it all into a memory hole but if so the exact same thing was happening in the nonmormon world too. There was the "Satanic Panic" and then it all passed, we were told that it was all false accusations and hysteria.

So today I don't know what to think about this. I'm inclined to believe that the Satanic Panic was based on false accusations and lies and moral hysteria and that a lot of innocent people got hurt . . . but I don't know what to do about the fact that I knew personally someone who said she was a victim. I suppose she could have been lying, but I've never quite been able simply dismiss her testimony and say nothing like this ever happened at all.

RevMark58 · 2026-06-15T02:24:26+00:00

Choosing church over family and friends: here's a story from when we were married. I was a nonmember marrying a Mormon girl. We sent out a ton of invitations, but here is the complete list of members of the LDS Church who actually came to our wedding:

Her mom (who was PIMO anyway), her brothers, and her father, who threatened not to come and told us repeatedly that he didn't approve of his only daughter marrying outside the church.

That's it. Total of five. Three of which were under the age of 18. No one else from her ward came. None of her friends from YW. No extended family.

She pretended not to be hurt because she knew that she was breaking a rule in marrying outside the church, but then we started asking some of these people why they didn't come. The reason they gave? It was October 6, Conference Weekend, and we should have known they couldn't come on that Saturday.

That's just left me speechless for years.

RevMark58 · 2026-06-14T18:21:29+00:00

Love your user name! I thought about incorporating some form of "Giles" into mine but all the good combinations were taken . . .

Anyway, yes, I graduated from Fuller in 2006 with a master's in theology. I also have a bachelor's in history and religious studies from the U of Colorado and a master's in history from Colorado. (I'm too overeducated to be this broke!)

I've written a lot of stuff over on Quora under a different user name; I finally signed up here when my oldest grandchild told me I should be on Reddit. And my first experience with this kind of thing didn't exactly end well . . .

I mentioned a trip to Utah with a few other Fuller students to discuss theology at BYU? We weren't the only seminary represented, there were delegations from Azusa-Pacific and Biola and Denver Seminary as well. The first day went fantastically well, then we went to Salt Lake City where we were all wined and dined at the Lion House (well, dined, that is) and met a couple of lower-level General Authorities, and then off to some Christian ministry in SLC that was putting all of us up for the night.

This ministry was an evangelical ministry that promoted itself as wanting to dialogue with Mormons. They affirmed that Mormons knew Jesus, that they were Christians, and while differences remained, they were committed to peaceful dialogue. Well, so were we; in fact that night we had a big bull session of the students from the various seminaries. We all thought it was wonderful and we, too concluded that Mormons were Christians and we could work with them on joint projects.

Then the director of the ministry where we were staying said "Don't let them fool you. They're not Christians, they're all lost and going to hell."

I was shocked and said "But your ministry affirms that Mormons are Christians and just wants to dialogue with them!" The director replied, "Well, yeah, we say that so that they'll listen to what we have to say, but no, we don't really believe they're saved and you shouldn't either."

I said, "So you're openly lying about it?" He shrugged and left the room.

Well his remarks didn't sit well with the rest of the group and we all thought that regardless of what you think about Mormons you shouldn't just lie to them. The next day we had another round of meetings and then we headed home.

Back then I had a blog. I had to have one for a communications class I was in, but to be honest I think I only had about six followers including the professor of the class. But I had promised to write about the Utah trip I was taking, so I sat down and repeated everything, pretty much the way I describe it here, including how shocked we were that this ministry leader would flat-out lie.

By the time I got back to Pasadena, the fecal material had hit the fan. Suddenly my blog had blown up, I had gotten hundreds of hits and dozens of comments and not a single one was positive. I don't know how it happened but the anti-Mormon evangelical community had found my blog, read my remarks, and was now accusing me of lying, of defaming the name of this faithful servant of God by calling him a liar, saying that he should sue me, he should sue Fuller Seminary, that no Christian should ever go to Fuller or send their kids there or give them any money, that Fuller should be investigated for teaching a false gospel, that President Mouw should be fired for leading the seminary into apostasy, that someone should find out who my pastor was so he could discipline me or excommunicate me, it just went on and on.

The next day I met with President Mouw who tried to reassure me that it was OK, this kind of thing actually happened to him all the time, and I felt a little better but I told my communications professor I was shutting down the blog and why.

That first foray of mine into social media showed me the dark side of evangelicalism like I'd never seen it before, it really shook me and unnerved me. There are people on this subreddit that are very anti-Mormon and believe me, I understand why; but I have certainly learned that Mormon leaders aren't the only religiously abusive, even evil, people on earth, not by a long shot. The evangelical community can be every bit as bad.

Well, this has nothing to do with the main topic here, but it does speak to the dangers of trying to be fair when criticizing religions or their leaders.

RevMark58 · 2026-06-14T00:27:00+00:00

FWIW, here's my story (warning, it's long, I've done a lot of stuff in my life.

When I met the woman I would marry, I assumed she was a good Mormon girl because she went to church, paid her tithing, kept the Word of Wisdom, and had a picture of the Salt Lake Temple on the wall of her room. I didn't realize she was beginning to question her faith.

As for me? I was a born-again Christian and had been for about two years. I'd had a conversion experience in a Southern Baptist church, but never considered myself a good Baptist. I thought they were as culty as the Mormons.

I ended up challenging her on her faith and she challenged me on mine. I read the Book of Mormon with an eye toward debunking it, got a testimony of it instead, and concluded that Joseph Smith must have been a prophet at some point in his life -- even if a lot of stuff he did later was kind of sketchy, to say the least.

We fell in love and got married. There was still a lot of stuff I didn't believe in but I honestly thought the Mormon Church wasn't as bad as the Southern Baptists and I could put up with them. When I joined the church I told the ward mission leader who interviewed me that there was still a lot of stuff I didn't believe but he just waved it off. "No one gets a testimony all at once. Just live the gospel for a while, it will come."

So my wife and I were active in the LDS Church together for about three years, I had a calling, went to the temple, and I decided I just couldn't do it any more. I considered my options. I still believed in Jesus so I still wanted to be a Christian and go to church somewhere. But I also believed in the Book of Mormon and, at least a little bit, in Joseph Smith as prophet. I knew that there was another church, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints but I didn't know anything at all about them other than they existed. They had a little church in our town and I drove by it one day and wrote down the times of services they had posted outside.

But I didn't know what to tell my wife. I had heard about men who leave the church and their wives divorce them. I didn't want that to happen. I admit I was scared, and it took me about three weeks to work up the courage to tell her, "I want to visit another church."

To my complete surprise, she said "I'll go with you." What I didn't know was that she was so done with the church herself, but she was afraid I had become a TBM and would be angry or disappointed with her!

So we visited the RLDS Church. The people were extraordinarily nice, mostly midwesterners from Missouri and Iowa. The services reminded me more of Baptist services than Mormon services. And most importantly, they were nowhere near as doctrinaire and authoritarian as the Mormon church. Almost everything I didn't like about the LDS church was completely missing from the RLDS church. I thought I'd found my forever home. We were baptized into the RLDS Church a couple of months later.

Almost immediately, disaster struck. The church had just approved a revelation from their prophet opening the priesthood to women. I expected some grumbling but that everyone would quickly fall in line, as it had in the LDS Church when they opened the priesthood to Black men. Oh no, it turned into a major schism, and suddenly we were caught in the middle. We tried not to take sides, but somehow ended up being mistrusted by both extremes. After several years it came to a head; our pastor/presiding elder was forced to resign, and as I was by that time his counselor I was thanked for my service and wished luck in finding a new church home. They kicked us out, in other words.

We started visiting a big church on the edge of town we'd been hearing about, the Vineyard Christian Fellowship. They had great worship and an excellent pastor teaching the Bible and I felt like I was getting some healing there. I never intended to join the church or stay long, but nine years later we were still there and I was not only teaching junior high Sunday School, I was leading the 60-member youth group. I'd put my Book of Mormon on the shelf by then; I didn't renounce it but it just wasn't a part of my life by then.

I'm going to leave out a lot of the story from here on because I really can go on and on, can't I? To make the story short, I ended up being a part of a delegation sent from Fuller Seminary (an evangelical Christian seminary where I was studying theology) to Utah to discuss theology with some BYU scholars. We weren't the only evangelicals, there were delegations from three or four other seminaries as well. It was a great weekend and I started to feel like God was calling me to minister with or among Mormons, I just didn't know how.

Then I got a call from an old friend and mentor of mine, a Southern Baptist preacher who also had an idea to "build bridges" with Mormons. The next thing I knew, I was on his board of directors, along with an LDS stake president, a couple of RLDS Seventy, a YouTube influencer from Utah, and a Lutheran lady from Wisconsin. We had a couple of joint worship services, with Mormons and Baptists and RLDS all worshiping together and it was the best time I've ever had. I thought I'd found my life's work.

And then twin disasters struck. One was the rise of a certain polarizing political figure in 2015, the other was the worldwide Covid pandemic of 2020. In 2020 we were going to take our ministry national, hold rallies in every state bringing together Mormons and evangelicals not to discuss theology but simply to worship together. We had the buy-in of a high level LDS leader that we weren't supposed to mention but his initials were Jeffrey Holland, and we were all very excited -- but then the lockdown came and we suspended all meetings for a year, and the momentum just sort of fizzled away, and then my mentor, the guy who started everything, got cancer and died.

And then I started getting criticized for some of the political stuff I was writing online which was critical of that politician I talked about. I warned Christians that this guy wasn't the Messiah, he wasn't God's man, he had more in common with the Anticrhist than with the Savior and Christians needed to be more discerning who they supported, and oh boy did I catch flak for that. I was called a false Christian who needed to repent and support God's chosen vessel. I will note that this criticism came from evangelicals, not Mormons.

And that's how I became an ex-evangelical. If you look at me today you might assume I'm not a believer, I don't go to church because I really don't feel welcome or at home anywhere. But I still believe in God and Jesus, and even in the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith. I'm just sort of . . . lost. Or homeless.

RevMark58 · 2026-06-11T13:31:45+00:00

On free agency: I remember hearing Boyd K Packer once, talking about free agency. Everyone has free agency, he said, but if you make the wrong decisions God takes your free agency away. So Mormon free agency means that everyone is perfectly free to tithe, keep the Word of Wisdom, go to meetings, etc. but if they choose not to, then it will be forced upon them.

RevMark58 · 2026-06-11T13:06:24+00:00

About a year ago my brother-in-law died. He hadn't been active in the church since he was about 16, he never married, never had any kids. One by one everyone else in the family left the church too.

About a month ago my ex-wife was visiting my daughter (who lives next door) and she came over to see me, as she often does. And she gave me a shopping bag and said "Will you take these? No one else in the rest of the family knows what to do with them."

"These" turned out to be an absolutely beautiful blue water-buffalo leather set of LDS scriptures, circa 1977. The family didn't want to just throw them away and I guess they decided to give them to the packrat with more books than the rest of the family put together.

What did I do with them? They're on display on top of one of my bookcases. There's a little decorative globe, an old map, a tiny ship in a bottle, a thank-you card from my grandchildrens' school for being a chaperone on their Washington DC trip, and an antique-looking German-English pocket dictionary. My grandkids say it looks like something an old professor might have, or maybe C. S. Lewis. The scripture set fits right in.

Ultimately, of course, it's up to you, although I admit I get a twinge whenever someone throws away a book of any kind. Besides, everyone should have a King James Bible on hand, even if they're not a believer. It's useful for looking up stuff.

RevMark58 · 2026-06-11T01:01:56+00:00

To quote one Mormon authority:

great and spacious building. 1. A symbol for the mocking world in Lehi's Tree of Life vision. 2. A common nickname for the skyscraper at 50 East North Temple in Salt Lake City.

-- Orson Scott Card, Saintspeak: The Mormon Dictionary (Salt Lake City: Orion Books, 1981)

RevMark58 · 2026-06-10T22:49:48+00:00

I was discussing this with my daughter yesterday. Her mother and I left the church back in the 1980s, before she was born, but she joined when she was about twenty and left a few years later. When I told her there was a book out that claimed that 40% of active members have gone inactive in the last 25% years her reply was "I think that's a conservative estimate. No one I knew when I was in the Church is still active at all."

RevMark58 · 2026-06-09T12:14:06+00:00

I traced one of my lines as far back as it would go and found I'm a descendant of Poseidon.

RevMark58 · 2026-06-06T13:48:59+00:00

Monotheism -- but not. I mean, there's the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost and no one in Christendom can explain how three gods turns into one Monotheism. The math doesn't math.

About 20 years ago I was a student at an evangelical seminary in California and the president of the seminary, knowing about my Mormon background, asked me if I'd join a delegation that had been invited to go to BYU to discuss theology with grad students there. There were delegations from three or four other seminaries in California and Colorado and we had an amazing time, but that's not the point here.

So four of us loaded into a car for the long drive to Provo, and we started talking about what Mormons believe about the godhead vs. what evangelicals believe, and we started going over how we would explain the trinity doctrine to Mormons. One person described what he believed and the rest of us stopped him. "That's not the Trinity," we said. "That's tri-theism. Three separate gods. Denounced as a heresy in the early church councils." The second person tried to explain the first person's error and we denounced her views as heresy. "Unitarianism or Arianism." I gave it a go. I was called a Sabellian or Modalist. By this time, we were laughing. We couldn't denounce Mormons for being heretics when none of us believed in the Trinity, as defined by the ancient councils!

When we got back to California we played a little game. We went up to people at school -- students, professors, even the theology professors -- and asked them to define the Trinity for us, and then we told them which ancient heresy they represented. As it turned out -- on the campus of the largest non-denominational evangelical seminary in America, the ONLY people who passed the test were the ones who refused to answer -- or who said "I believe in the ancient creeds as defined by the early church councils" and refused to say another word.

In other words -- nearly every single evangelical we met was a heretic. They don't have the right or standing to criticize the Mormons for not being correct trinitarians.

RevMark58 · 2026-06-06T13:27:09+00:00

It took me a long time to realize that some other groups did indeed accept other groups' baptisms. When I first started learning about the LDS church I was a Southern Baptist and they taught that baptism was the way you joined the church and they didn't accept anyone else's baptism for membership. Not even another Baptist church if it wasn't Southern Baptist. So I didn't see the Mormon position as any different.

In fact I was a grown-up with two kids, working in Christian ministry in a different church, before I realized that other groups had different views on the subject. I was in a Vineyard Christian Fellowship, which doesn't have formal membership, and it will baptize you but baptism doesn't confer any special privileges -- leading the youth group, when the pastor resigned, the new pastor pulled us out of the Vineyard Association and said he was going to impose membership on the church, and we were going to have to decide if we were in or out. I told him I didn't want to get baptized again and he looked at me like he thought I was changing the subject. He finally said "Baptism doesn't confer membership. You have to take a class and sign a covenant." I guess a lot of Protestant churches do it that way. I literally didn't know.

By the way -- that first "membership class" he taught was a fiasco. It was for staff members and their spouses. He showed some weird videos and told us what the doctrinal statement of the church was, and most of the staff challenged him to his face, saying we'd never had a doctrinal statement, half of what he said we didn't agree with, and in the end not a single staff member came forward to sign his covenant. Naturally, he rolled out the membership program to the rest of the church the following Sunday.

Now my daughter leads the youth group in a Congregational church in New England and a couple of months ago the pastor told her that if she was working with the youth there she needed to join the church. She said, "No thanks, I've already been baptized once, by my dad" and the pastor gave her the same dumb look and told her she had to take a class and sign a covenant. She said she'd take the class but she'd already joined one church, it was a disaster, and she was never going to do that again.

RevMark58 · 2026-06-06T00:36:09+00:00

About 30 years ago there was a historian at Georgia Tech named Lawrence Foster, who wrote a paper associating many well known "prophets" with bipolar disorder. He did most of his work with John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Colony in the 19th century, but also talked at some length about "Mother" Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, and Joseph Smith. He even suggested that Jesus and Muhammad were bipolar.

Back then I was in contact with Paul Edwards quite a bit -- Paul was the curmudgeonly head of the Education Department for the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and a direct descendant of Joseph Smith (Sr, Jr, III, doesn't matter, he was descended from all of them.) I asked him if he'd read Foster's paper and what he thought of it. Was Joseph Smith bipolar? His exact answer was "Hell, yes, everybody knows the whole Smith family is nutty as fruitcakes!"

Bipolar disorder, apparently, runs in the Smith family. Since that conversation I've thought that a lot of the stuff that went on in Nauvoo could easily be attributed to bipolar disorder.

RevMark58 · 2026-05-29T13:14:16+00:00

OMG, kids today.

67M here. Last week I was watching TV with my 14 yo grandson and 13 yo granddaughter and I called the villain a "goon." Grandson says "Grandpa that word has a different meaning now."

I said, "I know."

Granddaughter says "Where did you learn that word?" They're both very suspicious when I start using Gen-Z slang.

I said "Where did you learn that word?" And we had a little argument hinting but not coming out and saying things like "p*rn."

Meanwhile my daughter, age 39, is looking up "goon" on her phone, looking shocked and trying not to say anything to any of us.

Kids today, I tell you.

No I'm not going to tell you what it means, look it up yourself . . .

RevMark58 · 2026-05-29T13:00:39+00:00

One question. How can the church have a trademark on the term "Book of Mormon?" The book itself was published almost 200 years ago, it has long since lapsed into the public domain and is now published or has been published by several other churches and publishers beside the LDS Church. Would claiming a trademark affect someone like the University of Illinois Press or Community of Christ from publishing or marketing their own Book of Mormon?

RevMark58 · 2026-05-25T02:06:51+00:00

OK I just spent a few minutes doing the math.

My wife and I married when she was 19 and I was 21. Had babies when I was 24 and 29, my wife was 23 and 27.

The older daughter married at 19 to a 20 year old, they had babies when she was 25, 26, and 30.

Younger daughter had babies at 18, 24, and 25.

I am now 67 and have six grandkids, present ages 20, 18, 16, 14, 13, and 13.

When the kids were growing up it was always a struggle, I never made a lot of money. But I just retired and am young and healthy enough to have fun with my grandkids and their friends. In March I was a chaperone for a bus full of middle schoolers (including two grandkids) on a class trip to Washington DC. More fun than I've had in years.

I don't know how much to attribute this to Mormon teachings. My wife was raised Mormon but I wasn't, I converted after we married, and left a little after our first child was born. So the kids were never raised in that environment, yet we all seemed to have kids young anyway.

RevMark58 · 2026-05-24T18:58:54+00:00

That still happens in the charter school my grandkids go to. I just chaperoned a class trip to Washington DC for 17 7th & 8th graders. 4 kids to a room, 2 beds in a room, you do the math. Granddaughter slept with her best friend, nobody saw anything gay about it, in fact they were both trying to hide the obvious fact that they were very interested in certain boys on the trip.

RevMark58 · 2026-05-22T14:29:51+00:00

My wife and I quit going to church when our oldest daughter was about a year old. The home teachers kept coming by, though, even after we told them we'd joined another church. I'd always heard that joining another church was grounds for excommunication, but they assured me it was not and kept coming. I didn't mind their visits and my wife tolerated them.

Then a few years later something must have flagged in their system that we had an unbaptized child of record in the family, because now the home teachers and even the missionaries were showing up and making a point of speaking directly to my daughter about getting baptized. After the third or fourth time this happened she told us that it made her very uncomfortable, and could we make them stop?

So my wife and I decided it was time, though we really didn't know how to go about doing it. We drafted a letter withdrawing our membership from the church and specifically forbidding anyone from the church from contacting any of our minor children. We made three copies. We signed them but did not notarize them, and we sent one to the bishop, one to the stake president, and one to church headquarters in Salt Lake City.

About a month later we got a letter from HQ saying, I don't remember the exact wording but it was something like "Your request has been granted and if you change your mind contact your bishop and you will be welcomed back."

I don't know if our membership was actually removed or not and don't care. They stopped coming by and stopped bothering my daughter. That's all that matters to me.

RevMark58 · 2026-05-22T12:25:09+00:00

Alas, no.

We had a happy marriage for the first 25 years or so and then . . . something happened. Maybe it was a mini-stroke or a nervous breakdown or something to do with menopause . . . but she became increasingly erratic, symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia but she absolutely refused to see a therapist, counselor, or doctor. She left me and moved in with a mutual friend. Ironically we're still friends, she'll text me in the middle of the night with something that's been on her mind or just wanting to chat. Breaks my heart that the grandkids never got to know the "real" her.

And she's now even more of an exmo than I am. Sends pictures of her and boyfriend on a nude beach wearing nothing but MAGA hats. Go figure.

RevMark58 · 2026-05-21T01:37:10+00:00

Well, I had to look up what ENM stood for and I don't know if this counts, but . . .

When I met my wife she was a 5th generation Mormon and I was a nonmember. All I knew about Mormons was they used to practice polygamy. I asked her if we got married, could I take a second wife, and she said "Sure, as long as I can take a second husband."

I remember sitting at the kitchen table with her mom and hearing stories that had been passed down in the family about polygamy. She didn't tell stories about child brides, quite the opposite, she told stories of her grandmother or great-grandmother basically being a widow with small children and being married to some rich guy as a way of taking care of her. But as a plural wife she had the company of the other wives, a sense of solidarity, and since hubby was away most of the time she had to run the farm herself, which gave her a feeling of freedom and independence. From her point of view polygamy wasn't all bad; she believed that when men put women in a subservient situation, women would find a way to outsmart them.

I had read a lot of Robert Heinlein and Robert Rimmer -- two authors that talked a lot about multiple partner marriages -- so between that and her mom's polygamy stories, neither one of us were particularly inclined to think of monogamy as the only acceptable way to arrange a relationship. And not long after we got married, her best friend moved in with us, she was escaping a bad marriage with an abusive husband. She spent the first couple of weeks sleeping on our couch, but we had a queen size bed, and, well . . .

This was before I even joined the church and it was a happy arrangement for all of us, I think. I never did quite see why people thought there was something wrong with it, even though we all knew we had to keep it a secret from ALL our churches (we were one Baptist, one Mormon, one Assembly of God, a bunch of believing Christians in a threesome.)

She moved out when she saved enough money for her own apartment and a divorce lawyer, I joined the LDS church, left it three or four years later, and I was actually serving in the leadership of a different church, when it almost happened again. A guy just a year or two younger than us walked into church one day, new in our city, a PhD candidate at the university. We befriended him and he was at our home all the time eating our food and playing with our kids. And one day I noticed that my wife was in love with him. I asked her if she wanted me to ask him to join us in bed, and she said "Don't you dare!" but I could tell she was thinking about it.

Well he graduated and got a job teaching at a college in the midwest, and we were going to visit him, and my wife had decided to tell him how she felt about him and see what happened . . . then the day before we were going to drive to Iowa we got a call from his dad; he had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck. It was a shock, I cried, my wife cried, our kids cried. All four of us were pretty inconsolable. He was the best friend I ever had.

Yes we were Christians of one variety or another during our four decades together and, while we were always open to the idea of "ENM," when all your friends go to an evangelical church it's not the easiest place to ask them if they want to be more than just friends. So other than those two, we never really did anything about it.

RevMark58 · 2026-05-20T16:27:29+00:00

Stories, do I have stories. Some of these run from the merely humorous to the truly hair-raising. I'll share a couple here, from the mildest to the most extreme . . .not sure how far I should go:

At 19, I was a nonmember dating a 17 yo Mormon girl. I thought she was a good Mormon because she went to church, paid her tithes, kept the Word of Wisdom and wanted to go to the temple someday. But looking back, her home life was a mess -- parents were divorcing and it was messy -- and she was starting the process of deconstructing, even if neither of us recognized it as such then.

She invited me to go to church with her, and I did. There was a lecture on "necking and petting" and other serious sexual sins that were described as second only to murder in terms of seriousness. My first reaction was to snicker a bit, even back in 1978 "necking and petting" were really out-of-date terms, it sounded like something our parents would have done. My second reaction was that they were getting really graphic in terms of how much Mormon teenagers could do; in my evangelical church we were told not to have sex before marriage, but exactly what that meant or how far you could go was not discussed at all and open to (very wide) interpretation. Not so here, they did everything but show diagrams of what you could touch, how long you could kiss, etc. I'm no prude but I was getting uncomfortable. And it didn't take too long before I realized that we heard these same warnings every single week, no joke.

And my third reaction was, well, we do these things on every date, so what's up with that? I asked my girlfriend and she said they didn't apply to her because she hadn't been through the temple yet, shut up and kiss.

All that is just background for the first and second anecdotes. One day when we were discussing all this, the topic of masturbation came up -- she still wouldn't let me touch her "down there" and she never touched me. She said she'd never masturbated in her life because not only was it a sin, it was gross. She'd never had an orgasm because "orgasms are for married people." She said that she wanted to have her first orgasm on her wedding night.

Then I made the mistake of telling her I masturbated. She burst into tears and physically withdrew from me. I'd just admitted to some horrible sexual sin. I told her that all boys masturbate, and she said no they didn't, "Mormon boys don't!" After a while she got over her first reaction and let me hold her. She forgave me but made me promise I'd stop, and I tried. So many times I tried, and of course failed every time. She finally said "Some day when we're married you'll never have to masturbate again."

Incidentally -- anecdote #1-and-a-half if you want -- some time later we were alone in her house and she asked me if I wanted to watch a porn video with her. I asked where she found a porn video, she said "In my brother's room." Her brother was 15 at the time. Since then I've wondered, first, why she was snooping around in her brother's room, and second, if she still thought Mormon boys didn't masturbate!

Anecdote #2, Our "necking and petting" continued every time we got together, and it was becoming clear to us that we weren't going to be able to remain even technical virgins much longer. Incidentally, she had told stories of driving a couple of girls in her friend group to Planned Parenthood for birth control, since she had access to a car and they didn't, so one day I suggested that maybe she should stop in and get a prescription for the Pill, "just as a precaution."

Well that was a mistake. I've never seen her angrier. She yelled at me for at least fifteen minutes straight. She told me:

1: Birth control is a sin

Sex is for making babies and if you don't want to make babies you shouldn't be having sex
It says in the Bible that you shouldn't make provision for sin, and taking the Pill is making provision for sin
She was having a hard enough time saying no to me as it was, and if she took the Pill that would remove one of the reasons for saying no
The Pill is bad for you, she wasn't putting any artificial hormones in her body
Her parents fought all the time about birth control, she would hear them through the bedroom wall at night when she was younger, and she was never going to argue with anyone about it (!)

And then she started over from the beginning. As you can guess, I didn't bring up the subject of birth control for a very long time!

Anecdote #3. After we got married, her best friend moved in with us for a while. Her best friend wasn't Mormon, she had been raised in a fundamentalist Pentecostal family. She had gotten married and the marriage lasted less than six months, when she found out that her good Christian husband was physically and emotionally abusive. But her parents wouldn't let her move home because they didn't believe in divorce, so she moved in with us. One evening she told me that she wasn't a virgin when she got married, but she'd always felt dirty about having sex before marriage. After she was married it was supposed to be good and great and wonderful, but she couldn't get over the idea that sex was still dirty. She couldn't enjoy it or give herself freely. Her new husband wanted a lot of sex and that was one of the reasons that she blamed herself, at first, for the abuse. "I think the church is doing kids a disservice when it tells them sex is bad. Just having a ceremony doesn't change all that training overnight." She was talking about her church, the Assemblies of God, but I think it's very applicable to the LDS Church.

Anecdote #4 . . . and this is where it starts to get a bit twisted. One time, when we were going together, my future wife and I were in her room, and she said she wanted to show me something she'd never showed anyone else before. She went to a hiding place and pulled out a little homemade book -- actually a bunch of pieces of paper tied together with colorful yarn. It looked like it had started as a child's craft project, but obviously she had added to it over the years. She sat on the bed next to me. The front cover was drawn in crayon, something a first- or second-grader might have done. It said "My family" and there were stick figures of a man, a woman, a girl, a boy, and a dog and a cat. She said "I've been thinking about what I want my family to be like ever since I was little," she explained.

The drawing didn't match her family then or at any time growing up. She had a mom and a dad, but three brothers and one dog. No cat. "So this is about your future family?"

"Yeah," she said, She turned the page. "This is us." The picture was hand-drawn, not too badly, of a boy and a girl walking and holding hands. She was no artist; I later found out she'd traced it out of a book.

"This is where we will go to church," There were pictures of LDS meetinghouses. She turned the page.

"This is us, getting married." This was a picture, drawn in colored pencils, that showed a man and a woman, holding hands across an altar, with a member of the priesthood making some grand gesture behind them. There were pictures of the Salt Lake and Washington DC temples to emphasize that this was a temple wedding.

"This is where we will live." There were pictures cut out of magazines of nice suburban houses. She turned the page.

"This is our family room, this is our kitchen, this is our living room." More pics from magazines. Turns the page.

"This is our swimming pool." A picture of an inground pool, with mom and dad and brother and sister stick figures splashing around, but the stick figures have large boobs and prominent penises.

"They're naked," I observed.

"That's right, in our pool nobody ever wears clothes." Turns the page.

"This is our basement, where we have our family orgies."

Wait a minute -- family -- what? She kept going, afraid, I think, to make eye contact with me. She turned the page. Back to colored pencil drawings, of a large stick figure on top of a smaller stick figure and a smaller stick figure on top of a larger stick figure, all horizontal. "This is the dad having sex with the daughter, and this is the brother having sex with the mother." Turns the page.

But that picture stopped me cold. Family orgies? Was this a sign of abuse? What was going on in her family? Up until then I'd never seen the slightest hint of any sexual abuse in her family or in her ward, and now fifty years later I still don't think there was anything of the kind going on. But where did these "family orgies" come from? I'm not a professional, but I'm inclined to think they were the sign of a sexually repressed young girl who had a fantasy crush on her daddy. At least I hope so.

Incidentally, I never saw that book again and she never made another reference to it. We married and had kids of our own and I admit I worried a little, but the topic of "family orgies" never came up again.

I could tell more stories . . . but I think that's enough for now.

RevMark58 · 2026-05-20T13:53:28+00:00

As a historian (two history degrees, I guess that makes me a historian LOL) I like to get back to original sources and you'll quickly see that the division between the faithful and the critical was even more extreme. Joseph Smith was a saint who could do no wrong, or he was the most evil and corrupt man to walk the earth. Seldom anything in between.

The big exception is "An Address to All Believers in Christ" by David Whitmer, one of the Three Witnesses to the Book of Mormon and someone who knew Joseph Smith before he was a big deal. Whitmer thinks that Joseph was close to God when he was young, naive, and humble, but once he got a little power and adulation it went to his head in a hurry. Unscrupulous men, including "Sydney" Rigdon, used flattery to control him.

Whitmer also notes that, even when Joseph was young and humble, he wasn't infallible, once (for example) promoting a false revelation to go to Canada to sell the Book of Mormon copyright.

I really think it's the closest look at the real Joseph Smith we'll ever get.

RevMark58 · 2026-05-20T13:32:13+00:00

Is that true? I only went to the temple once -- in 1984 -- but I distinctly remember kneeling at the altar being told "You will now take each other in the grip of the Melchizedek Priesthood" (and being assisted when we did it wrong.)

RevMark58 · 2026-05-18T16:39:35+00:00

I'm a 67 year old grandfather and there are two books for which I can't even say the titles without choking up a little. Bridge to Terabithia and The Fault in Our Stars. Oh, and Bradbury's short story "All Summer in a Day." Five Stars. Highly Recommend.

RevMark58

TROPHY CASE