Mormons desperately want everyone else to see how happy they are with the True Gospel of Jesus Christ as taught by the One True Church, covet that boundless happiness, look into Mormonism, decide it's true, and join the fold of the most intensely happy religious practitioners in the world. There are, however, reasons to doubt Mormon happiness. The two biggest in my mind have to do with Utah's extremely high consumption of antidepressants. Naturally Mormons will deny there's any connection of the state's depression to Mormonism stating that Mormon women claim to be happy (so they must be), or that it's probably the Mormons struggling to live the lifestyle who are depressed, or maybe Mormons are more responsible about getting help than people in other states. The counter is that Utah is not the only state to boast both high religious fervor and high antidepressant use.
Utah's new state song.
We might also want to ask just why it is that Utahns are number one for porn subscriptions when the LDS Church specifically prohibits pornography and why it is that Salt Lake City is one of the top U.S. cities for cosmetic surgeries and Utah is 8th for plastic surgeons per capita.
Why wait until the Resurrection to have a perfect body?
Do these look like statistics of a happy people? How might Mormonism be
contributing to the pain and rejection people feel? To their secret
habits? The desires to be more perfect? Isn't it possible that Mormonism
has some seriously ugly side effects on one's mental health?
And what about the kind of self-interrogation designed to make believers feel like utter shit? I couldn't help but wonder.
When I ran across Heber Grant's comment about "losing" your chastity in the Church manual Gospel Principles I nearly threw up. I read it again hoping I had misunderstood. I read it again because I couldn't believe the words. And again because it still wasn't sinking in. I couldn't imagine any loving parent of any faith tradition believing this kind of bullshit: "There is no true Latter-day Saint who would not rather bury a son or a
daughter than to have him or her lose his or her chastity – realizing
that chastity is of more value than anything else in all the world.”
Words of a prophet, people. A modern-day one. This is the kind of enlightenment God has graced his latter-day saints with. Not only should your child be slut shamed, but you as a parent should wish they had died.
Today if you pick up a copy of Gospel Doctrines you won't find this quote (it was removed for the 2006 English edition, if I'm not mistaken), but the this comment and others like it have been spoken, printed, and spread around the Church for decades. I cannot imagine the kind of damage this has caused both parents and children.
I hated this concept. Guilty of sexual indiscretion? You'd be better off dead. Raped? You'd be better off dead. Who says so? The prophets of God. Who cares? Your parents, your siblings, your grandparents, your aunts and uncles, your cousins, your friends, your friends' parents, your bishop, your youth leaders, and anyone else who is truly Mormon.
The only way I managed to put this one on my shelf was by reminding me that most everyone I cared about probably didn't believe this and they seemed like decent Mormons to me. This was just an old idea, outdated now that we better understand Christ's loving atonement, right?
