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this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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So I was raised LDS, and the exmormon community says all Mormons have a "shelf"
Basically everytime you ask a question and the answer is along the lines of "we don't have the answer to everything, all will be revealed in time" we put that weird thing on out shelf. Eventually, too many things are on the shelf, and it breaks.
Some people who want to stay in the LDS church because it makes them happy have a very strong shelf. Those who want to stay because of fear/social pressure avoid looking at anything that might need to be on their shelves.
Some common shelf items that were on mine:
Book of Mormon describes the natives having very European technology around 0 AD. They have metal swords, horses, chariots, to name a few. Yeah they just didn't.
Even in a time when it was incredibly common to be anti slavery since the Civil War was around the corner, the idea that black people were inferior to white people and should serve them was heavily recorded in the early church. And black men couldn't reach full status like a white man until 1978. They preach that God loves all his children equally... but apparently there were a few qualifiers about skin color.
How they treat women is trash.
Prophets supposedly are getting revelation from the same God, but keep contradicting each other. Most famous example is "Adam was God" theory. Most recent high profile example was a previous prophet ran a campaign called "meet the Mormons" trying to sell the idea that being a mormon was super normal. But current prophet says "mormon" is a derogatory term and a win for Satan?
The way they demand super poor people pay tithing, while holding upwards of a hundred billion in reserve for no apparent reason. They could easily end hunger in the US, and maybe even homelessness. And they would if they actually followed the teachings of the loving christ they claim to follow.
They claim that they have magical gifts, like being able to tell if people lie. Given the rapists and worse that have been high ranking members of the church, either they are liars or complicit. But given how often they defend rapists that were obviously guilty, probably just both.
I could go on for awhile... but those were my shelf items. One day it just broke and I was like... huh this is all just nonsense isn't it.
I was also raised LDS. I was out as soon as I moved out of my parents house. That was over 20 years ago. Last month I was talking with my mom and she was finally starting to question things. I didn't want to go overboard with support, but I'm so proud of her for finally starting to think more for herself and abandoning the obedient wife mentality.
I’m not an ex-Mormon specifically, but this shelf analogy resonates with my experience as someone who was raised in an evangelical Protestant church. Eventually you stack up too many inconsistencies and the cognitive dissonance is too much.
Yeah it feels right for a lot of situations!
It's just how much bs a belief can hold before it all falls apart.
I personally got compounding items on my shelf. Because I would ask "hey what happened to the metal swords the book of Mormon talks a lot about?"
Instead of a reasonable answer, I was more or less told not to ask those questions. So "it's bad to ask questions" gets added to the shelf. I imagine it was the same for a most people leaving religion.
Yeah it’s wild how many ways humans can express “don’t question the dogma,” both explicitly and implicitly with deflection, body language, etc. I’m a child of clergy, so I very much grew up “in” a church. Consequently, I don’t even have any specific memories of asking questions and being told not to doubt or what have you. I’d never not been immersed in the fundamentalist milieu, so I subconsciously learned to police my own thoughts and actions without realizing it. It’s taken years to recontextualize some of my childhood behavior. Most of it is sad stuff, like realizing “oh I ghosted that friend because I was trying to avoid becoming aware of the homosexual crush I was developing”. Anyway, I guess my point is that we can be good at preventing ourselves from questioning dogma, too. Until the shelf collapses.