The Testaments

 (This is Jeremy Hoop, not Ben Stiller.)

You know what shook my faith? The Testaments: Of One Fold and One Shepherd, that Church-made feature about Jesus' visit to the Nephites "somewhere in the Americas". Talk about hyper-sentimental dog shit. I cringed through the entire film wondering how in the world the LDS Church (a church considering itself to be led directly by Christ's own resurrected hand) dare produce such an embarrassment of a film.

The story is sappy as all hell. Helam sees the star of Bethlehem as a teen and sets his heart on one day seeing the Messiah. In the 33-year interlude, Helam has a family; his wife has died and his son, Jacob, has become a rebellious pain in the ass who totally forsakes "the traditions of his fathers" in favor of a secular life in the court of evil Kohor. Jacob eventually changes his mind after witnessing the murder of a prophet of God by Kohor's stooges. Helam's disappointment and pain over his son is only compounded when he loses his sight and can no longer hope to see Jesus in the flesh. Then Jesus shows up in the sky, lands on the temple steps, and sets everything right. The end.

The movie plays the pain-of-lost-family card as much as it can to drive home the sense of fear and despair that is so crucial to the film. To say the music is heavy-handed would be an understatement. The Testaments manages to pound all subtlety to smithereens and send it out of screen with a sneeze. I found the movie horribly distasteful and I didn't want to be associated with it.

To top off my discomfort, the makers of the film decided to place the film squarely into a Mayan context. Seeing a bunch of white and Polynesian Mormons running around Mayan temples with with Mayan headdresses felt disrespectful to the Mayan, kind of like putting on blackface. Besides, the connection of the Nephites/Lamanites/(and all manner of "-ites") doesn't work. They weren't speaking a Hebrew dialect, weren't writing in Reformed Egyptian, weren't talking about the Messiah and American Revolution-related concepts of freedom and civil duty, and were not divided into "-ites". But in the film they're running around like there are singles wards and playing with non-Book of Mormon animals, like monkeys. 

I suppose it didn't help much either that Tomas Kofod was a damned ugly white Jesus...

...but my faith remained in tact. The Testaments is just a film after all, my faith was in the Living Christ and his living church!

Young Women's Conference

Women speakers in General Conference were always the worst. They always seemed to adopt an incredibly high, sappy tone similar to the register one uses when speaking motherese. Even from a very early age I found them impossible to pay attention to, so when I found out that there was a Young Women's Conference I was more than happy I was not required to attend. Who the hell needed nearly two full hours of straight Magic Flute voice? Not I.

But once I got out on my mission I had a change of heart. Young Women's Conference was important. The talks addressing the the future women of the Church were important. They had to be - everything the Church has to say is critically important! I was sure I had overlooked the impressive content simply out of bias toward the method of delivery (i.e. middle-aged women in pastels - the typical color choice for LDS women about to go Magic Flute voice all over the microphone). 

I decided to give their talks a fair shake. I needed to know what they were saying. I needed to tune in to the spirit they brought, if not their voices. So I started reading the Young Women's Conference talks from the Conference editions of the Ensign that had piled up over the years in my mission apartment. I don't know how many conferences-worth I read but I do know the more I read the angrier I became.

Why were all of these talks so doctrine-less? All I could really find in these talks to young women was manipulative bullshit about how they all needed to be virtuous because Heavenly Father loves virtue and wants them to be worthy to marry in the temple. Typically in Mormon speak "virtue" means sexual chastity. All the girls were being told, more or less, was "be happy, don't drink coke, don't dress like a slut, and protect your hymen because otherwise you'll make Heavenly Father sad/disappointed/angry". Obey, girls, you don't want to have any regrets on your wedding night!

It was disgusting. I wrote home about it. I asked my family what the was going on. Had Young Women's Conference always been so doctrinally shallow and so socially manipulative? (It just so happens that all LDS conference addresses are shallow and manipulative, not just the YWM talks.)

I doubted the fair treatment of women in the Church. I could see at least one way in which people with a vagina were treated with at least some level of condescension, and I didn't like it. Why would God instruct his servants to dish out a load of fluff to His daughters, the future mothers of Zion? It didn't seem right. When I never received any response from my family and friends on the topic I of course found a way to cope. I doubted my doubts and moved forward with faith.

Attitudes about women - MTC

While in the Missionary Training Center I got to hear the thoughts of a lot of missionaries as they prepared to go out and teach the world the truths of the Gospel. We were to be the mouth pieces of the Lord's church throughout all kindreds, tongues, and people, and what did we have to say about women, for example?

Nothing especially admirable. As it turns out, the choice young men who were called to serve managed to throw sister missionaries rather easily into a few groups: the sisters who couldn't get married either because they were too ugly or too crazy, and the sisters who could but wouldn't because they were too strong-headed and deviant. The only worthwhile female peers, according to many missionaries, seemed to be those who had either gotten married already or who hadn't given up yet by choosing to go on a mission.

I was appalled not just by the thoughts expressed but by the frequency of these conversations. I tried to dismiss it as typical immature boy talk but I had to recognize that these ideas were coming from somewhere from within the Church. Who's ideas were these missionaries repeating? Who had convinced them of such blatant sexism?

Hopefully the lowering of the age requirement for sister missionaries will help level the social playing field among the Church's missionaries.

The temple - the invitations to leave

At a couple of points in the endowment ceremony attendees are invited to leave if they do not feel comfortable or ready to make the covenants about to be presented. These invites really bothered me for a few reasons.

1. My first time through I deeply doubted whether I should go through with the covenants. Maybe I really wasn't worthy and they were calling me out. Maybe they were going to be really weird covenants that I would honestly not want to take on.

2. Later I realized that they were asking me to make a decision about something I knew nothing about. How is that fair? How could I have possibly known what was best for me when they hadn't yet explained what the stakes were?

3. The vast majority everyone going through the temple in any given session has already been through before and are going through vicariously for someone who has died. Why would a repeat attender ever back out? Frankly I can't see why they would. Is the spirit of the deceased ever going to prompt someone to back out of the endowment on its behalf? Probably not if it's there in the temple waiting to receive the ordinances. So who exactly would ever back out of the temple covenants besides kids in their late teens and early twenties going through for the first time?

4. Has anyone ever backed out? How could someone back out when you're surrounded by so many people who are choosing to stay, many of whom might be immediate and extended family, friends, and members of his or her congregation? The pressure to go through with the temple ordinances is tremendous. It's peer pressure with your eternal salvation on the line.

It struck me as a nefarious set up. While at the time I still rejected the term, I think the best way to describe the scenario is "cultish". 

No, no! It had to be holy. Shoot, it even says "Holiness to the LORD" out over the entrance to the temple! Doubt your doubts! The temple endowment's the best!

The temple - boredom

The discomfort I felt my first time through the temple didn't deter me from going again, instead it spurred me on. I knew the temple was holy and that I needed to get comfortable with the ways of the Lord. 

I expected the temple ordinances to slowly come into focus for me, but by about the third or fourth session I started falling asleep. The endowment, as it turns out, is simply boring. You do the same things every time and watch the same shitty movie (yes, there are/were a couple different versions) and it takes an hour and a half minimum. What shitty full length film would you like to sit through over and over? How badly do you want to go play Pat-a-cake with total strangers over and over. Go to the temple enough and it starts to feel like the movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray. 

A couple months into weekly attendance it was a miracle if I could keep awake through an entire session. I did get more comfortable with the clothing, hand gestures, bowing my head and saying yes to covenants, whispering formulas through a curtain, all of that. Maybe even too comfortable. It also became easier and easier to be critical and/or suspicious of the whole thing. 

But I still believed it wholeheartedly for years afterward. I told myself to focus more on the content, not the format. Something marvelous was right before my eyes, I just had to learn to see it.

The temple - the Celestial room

This was the ultimate dream.

I had seen pictures of different Celestial rooms over the course of my life and had been through at least two temple open houses, but for some reason I thought passing through the temple veil into the Celestial room would feel more satisfying. I was hoping for a feeling a relief, acceptance, gladness, and maybe even pride. Instead it felt like I had just stepped into a hotel lobby full of weirdoes and all eyes were on me, the new guy. What I recall is hoping for a chance to reflect and maybe feel the Spirit so I might feel better about the whole endowment experience because what I was feeling was anxious. I was anxious to get out – out of the clothes, out from under everyone’s eyes, away from expectations – and get an explanation of some kind. 

Somewhere in my mind I had been harboring the idea of really awesome Gospel lessons taking place in the Celestial room. Where was the 12-yr-old Jesus when he was teaching in the temple? Why had my dad referred to the temple as “the Lord’s real university”? I hadn’t learned much of anything in the endowment. The story of the Creation and the Fall were old news and the Freemasonry stuff fell far short of the Mysteries of the Universe. Where did all the teaching and learning take place? Were we all waiting around for the temple teacher to show up? Did we need to move to another room?

No? No. No lesson. No discussion. No real time to reflect and pray either. Almost everyone wanted to head home right away. Only a few family members hung around a bit.

Why did it all feel like such a letdown? Why didn’t I get it? I couldn’t help but doubt, nor could I help doubting my doubts just as I had been trained to do throughout my life.

 This is exactly how it feels. Quiet, sanitized, empty.

The temple - passwords

I had a hard time understanding why our Heavenly Father would require anyone to know a password to obtain His glory and live with Him in the eternities, but that's what Mormonism teaches you in the temple. For those of you who want to be prepared just in case, it goes a little something like this:

"Health in the navel, marrow in the bones, strength in the loins and in the sinews, power in the priesthood be upon me and upon my posterity through all generations of time and throughout all eternity".

Assistant, "Eve", sentinel of the Veil 

OK, so there's a little more to "passing through the veil" than just that. You have to do the Freemason handshakes with someone who offers his or her hand to you from the other side of the veil, you have to summon that person by knocking, you have to be accompanied by a temple worker who acts as an intermediary between you and the hidden hand shaker. If you want to know how it all goes down just go to your favorite search engine and the mysteries of Heaven can be yours within seconds.

Why would God require all this bizarre back and forth and recitation of cryptic blabber about strong loins and generations? It made no sense to me. Where was Jesus waiting to accept me with open arms? Why did God have to send someone to open the doors to His Kingdom instead of coming Himself? Where was God in any of this?