- Daniel H on Filet-O-Fish and Keeping Mormonism Weird: “@sure Anecdotal, but as a kid I hated primary. It made me hate the church and the gospel. I’m in the primary now and I see lots of children who feel the same way. Some primaries are good and some bad but sitting a child down and telling them what they are supposed to believe does not work for these kids. Becoming converted to the church required me to first disassociate it from my primary experience.” Jun 19, 11:45
- on More Than Mercy: Robert Alter on the Covenantal Weight of Hesed: “Hesed has become a fraught and cursed word in my mind ever since Russel Nelson defined it as “a special kind of love and mercy that God feels for and extends to those who have made a covenant with Him” To me this suggests that if you are one of the lucky 0.17% of people who for some reason made a covenant in this church, then God loves you more than everyone else, and you are worth more. This just goes against what I consider fundamental beliefs about God. Did Jesus not teach that all souls have immense but equal worth?” Jun 19, 11:20
- on Filet-O-Fish and Keeping Mormonism Weird: “Sorry for the length here. Sue: Before the three-hour block was instituted in 1980, there was Junior Sunday School Sunday morning (about an hour), and Primary on a weeknight (usually an hour, longer if we had to rehearse or something). I remember JSS had an opening song, a prayer song, the sacrament gem, a sacrament song (I forget the order of those two) and the sacrament, along with a few other things in opening exercises, and then usually a class, but sometimes a movie – I remember “John Baker’s Last Race” among others. Primary was pre-Primary (to keep us occupied until the meeting started), then opening exercises and then class. Both were padded out. I remember seeing the same filmstrips over and over again. Some were entertaining, and some had a moral lesson somewhere. I also remember cultural lessons (e.g., why some days are marked red on the calendar, or how people in say, China or Japan had different cultural norms). I remember there was a great deal of material that wasn’t religious at all. Sunday Primary basically combined the two. The total time went from 120+ minutes to 100 minutes, but the only things really cut were the prayer song and the sacrament, and they were replaced with more singing time. There was still a lot of repetition and fluff with the material. I remember still drawing and painting and playing Hangman a lot during Primary class even when it was on Sunday. On my mission I came to recognize that when there was Gospel being taught, the Holy Ghost was whispering in my ear all along (even well before I was eight) confirming the truth of it. But while that extended out to all meetings (including the weeknight meetings, which continued with Scouting for me right about the same time we went to the three-hour block), only the core Gospel truth really received that confirmation. When I was eleven and the last one in my year to graduate from Primary, the teacher would have me run (you guessed it) the filmstrip projector, and do whatever else to help, rather than sit through closing exercises in my own row by myself week after week. She said about that time (this made it into my mother’s book Mormon Wives) that Primary with the three-hour block was way too long, especially for the kids. What I’m trying to say here is that fifty-five minutes of Primary is plenty, if you actually focus on the Gospel and it’s not dragged down with all the time-fillers that were in Primary and Sunday School before the three-hour block. (Many of them ended only recently.) Not a Cougar: Looking back – I’ve been back in the same area I grew up in for a while now. Of those I grew up with here, a good chunk (not all of them the children of the migrating professionals who still dominate the local leadership here) of the youth went off to BYU or someplace else in the western states, and never really came back. I’m the exception on that, but it was basically kicking and screaming. I didn’t get a professional job here until I was almost thirty. While I resented staying here for that, I don’t think I could have been an assistant stake clerk for over twenty years anywhere else. Sure, at least some who stuck around are still involved, but not that many. While they wouldn’t ever deny their own Church membership, they never really passed it down to their children. One of my youth Sunday School teachers warned us that we need needed to develop our own testimonies because we wouldn’t be able to lean on our parents’ or friends’ testimonies much longer. Part of the problem, though, was that especially at that age and time, Church activity included a lot of hoops to jump through. Early-morning seminary was a big one. So was Scouting. The youth leaders pushed Scouting very hard – to the point that every unit in our stake had its own Varsity team – but many who were pushed through to Eagle Scout pretty much disappeared from Church after that. (I knew of at least one member who had finished the work for Eagle in a Church troop, but none of it had been properly documented, so he didn’t get the award and wound up quite bitter about the Church as a result.) Those who say now that seminary graduates are more likely to be actively involved as adults, mistaking correlation for causation. The same mistake was being made a few decades ago regarding Eagle Scouts. That really was not the case in my ward, though. The group a few years ahead of me produced six or seven Eagle Scouts, but the only one who actually went on a mission had found the Church through coming to Scouts with his friend and neighbor. My father was bishop around the time that group was wrapping up high school, and sat down with a couple of them – including that neighbor friend – about missions. Neither of them thought they were “good enough”. If they had gone, others from my ward might have too. Frankly, those two especially would have been better missionaries than most of the ones in my mission who grew up in someplace like Orem or Bountiful who had gone out because everyone else there did. A big problem through all of this was, yes, the migrating professionals in the leadership who set things up for the youth, that were really aimed just at their own children. While we were a majority of the “active” youth, in no way did we really represent the whole group. Overall, there was a cultural difference too, between those of us who on one end had been to the Church sites in and around Utah many times growing up, and the other end who had never been that far west in their lives. In the last couple of years, our ward (dominated by migrating corporate lawyers and their families) has had somewhere around 75-80 baptisms of new converts, mostly with a very different cultural upbringing to say the least, and a much “lower socioeconomic level”. Only about twenty of them come to church on a given Sunday, though. My wife and I are ward missionaries now, with an assignment to work with these new members, helping to plan their baptisms and trying to get up to speed with this new church they’ve joined. Hopefully we can get somewhere with some of them. The thing is though, even with only twenty or so coming on a given Sunday, our chapel and overflow are now packed every Sunday.” Jun 19, 10:24
- on Unsettling Settler Mormon Lifeways: A Review of Elise Boxer’s Mormon Settler Colonialism by Jason Palmer: “Having read this review, I have decided to become more colonialist than I already was.” Jun 19, 09:59
- on Filet-O-Fish and Keeping Mormonism Weird: “jader3rd, not to make this about homeschooling but most homeschooling families I know do not do it because they are scared of their kids interacting with non-member peers but because they think they can do education better than public schools. As for this article, I think the church as institution kind of has to become less weird given the legal and cultural constraints placed on it. But that doesn’t mean that local wards and stakes have to be just as mainstream-adjacent. There is a lot of room in the doctrine and the handbook for local flavor.” Jun 18, 23:42
- on Filet-O-Fish and Keeping Mormonism Weird: “Sure, thanks for your comment. I’d be hard pressed to demonstrate that more kids are falling through the cracks than in years past. Our retention rates for new converts have been dismal seemingly forever, and I personally haven’t seen evidence that the move to a 2-hour block in and of itself has accelerated the exodus of youth by themselves any more than it was previously (though perhaps the change is too new to show up yet). What I do see are long-attending adults stepping away far more often and taking their children with them (or at least their children being far less active than before the parent or parents left).” Jun 18, 20:37
- on Filet-O-Fish and Keeping Mormonism Weird: ““when we look at the changes that the Church has made, especially since President Nelson took office” I’m going to get controversial, but I’ll say it now that some time has passed. What President Nelson did will eventually be seen to be more destructive to church than anything else in the last 50-100 years. What is that you say? What is by far, the most successful program of the church? Not the missionary program. Not the young women’s program. Not the bishoprics, elders relief societies and stake high council’s. It’s the Primary. And the amount of time kids spend in Primary got cut in half. And they were the ones that loved it. That is proving and will prove to be more devastating across this rising generation then anything else. I’ve served in multiple wards in primary and I’ve got a front row seat to it. Kids that age are so impressionable, and we’ve cut their time in half, all in the name of fitting more people into buildings. There was no missionary impetus to move to 2-hr church. That’s nice, but it’s not THE reason. There was no real concern with Bishops spending too much time at church that necessitated this. The issue was not that parents need a break (so let’s put them individually in charge of teaching rother than collectively doing it as a community????) — that doesn’t even make sense from operational man hours perspective. President Nelson, whk never or rarely went to primary himself, doesn’t really ever have seemed to even like being a “Mormon”, cut the amount of time in half that our little ones learn about scripture stories and sing songs. We can tell ourselves we need to pick up the slack in the home. But what got cut isn’t truly being replaced. All that said, whoever is in charge, whatever decisions get made, it’s still up to us to live and teach the gospel (same thing). So the burden still falls on our shoulders. There’s just less of a community doing it and more kids are falling through the cracks. There are some GREAT outlier examples though.” Jun 18, 13:15
- on Finding Meaning in Sacrament Meeting: Participation and Meaning in Church (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About) Yesterday, 6/14?: “No profound lessons this week, but I was touched by the testimony both speakers bore. One read their talk word for word, but it was well-prepared and heartfelt. A few grammar choices that strongly suggest chatpgt was greatly involved in preparing it, but surprisingly that didn’t seem to impact the spirit of the talk. That gives me a little hope for AI models. Kent, Adding to your discussion of ways to ponder and meditate during meetings, I often times find myself thinking through why the speaker brought up a particular story or scripture and how they relate to it, particularly when it does not resonate with me.” Jun 18, 10:56
- on Filet-O-Fish and Keeping Mormonism Weird: “Which is why I do appreciate Pres. Oaks calling out members for not letting their kids play with non-member kids.” Jun 18, 10:01
- on Filet-O-Fish and Keeping Mormonism Weird: “There are a good handful of things that church leadership could do to make us different for the sake of being different. For example, shunning everything Harry Potter related. I’m glad that leadership doesn’t do that. I think that the church is overall good at picking and choosing its battles when it comes to lifestyle decisions. What I think makes for bad trying to fit it, is trying to identify as just one more Christian denomination. Especially when it comes to Bible literalism. That said, I think that the way that the church needs to push more for being seen as normal is to discourage (okay ban) home schooling and home schooling co-ops. Being scared that your kids would interact with fellow peers is not how we can be a light to those who would need us.” Jun 17, 22:23
