You can be happy when you’re dead.

Photo by Alexander Milo on Unsplash

I learned a pretty hairshirt version of Mormonism growing up. As I’ve blogged about before, I was a neurotic kid, and was probably extra sensitive to any harsh messages I read or heard from both GAs and local leaders. I realize this isn’t everyone’s experience, as the punitive, anti-happiness strain of Mormonism clearly isn’t the only one. But I also thought it might be interesting to think back and see if I could find some of the most influential bits of scripture and GA teachings that helped me reach the conclusion that the unstated commandment underlying all others was Thou shalt not have any fun.

  • Any mention of “recreation” was invariably preceded by the modifier “wholesome.” Although I couldn’t put this into words as a kid, this GA tic really sounded to me like they were suspicious of the whole idea of recreation, and maybe would prefer that we all just be working all the time. It seemed clear that they didn’t think we members could even be trusted to choose our own leisure activities without them reminding us that we shouldn’t have too much fun. Wholesome recreation just doesn’t sound as fun as just plain old recreation. Wholesome recreation is to recreation as the mildly humorous jokes told in Conference are to actual comedy.

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Modesty and Locus of Control

The discussion over at the Exponent about the Utah woman who had her bishop and stake president refuse to renew her temple recommend because she refused to follow their counsel to cover herself while breastfeeding in church reminded me of a concept I remember discussing in psychology classes. That concept is locus of control. Here’s the first line of the Wikipedia article on the subject:

In personality psychology, locus of control is the degree to which people believe that they have control over the outcome of events in their lives, as opposed to external forces beyond their control.

People are thought to fall along a continuum from having an internal locus of control–those who think that what happens to them is primarily caused by decisions they make–to an external locus of control–those who think that what happens to them is primarily caused by other people or other things outside themselves. You can read the full Wikipedia article or look up any of a big pile of academic papers talking about locus of control, but the level I’m thinking about it is as simple as this brief description.

I think it’s clear that Church teachings are heavily focused on pushing us to have an internal locus of control. For example, Lehi tells Jacob in 2 Nephi 2:27: Read More

For the Discouragement of Youth

In the “Entertainment and Media” section, the For the Strength of Youth booklet advises:

Do not attend, view, or participate in anything that is vulgar, immoral, violent, or pornographic in any way [p. 11; all page references are to the PDF version].

I saw this bit of FtSoY quoted recently in a discussion somewhere on the Bloggernacle (sorry–I don’t recall where), and it struck me as being overly absolute. In any way? For violence in particular, doesn’t this rule out all kinds of sports and virtually all movies? Isn’t this a little unrealistic?

Running into this statement got me to wondering about whether this type of absolute phrasing was common, or if this was just an isolated example. To find out, I read through the rest of the FtSoY booklet. I was actually pleasantly surprised at how few similar statements I found, but I did find several others that I think have the same problem. In this post, I’ll quote the statements from FtSoY that I think are a problem, and then explain what I think is wrong with them.

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Blind spot: The assumption that all women can use their sexuality to influence others.

I was recently listening to the awesome feminist mormon housewives podcast episode in which Lisa Butterworth talks to Brad Kramer about what it means to be a male feminist.  I particularly liked his discussion about modesty and sexuality and how he wants to frame those issues for his children.  There are many, many parts of this discussion that I wholeheartedly agree with.  For example, I really like his discussion about how the current modesty rhetoric in the church reinforces the idea that girls and young women are primarily sexual instead of sexuality being only a part of who they are as a person overall.

That being said, there were a couple of statements within this discussion that brought me up short.  Read More