Holly @34: persuasion ≠ coercion, but the difference may be difficult to define, even if we all surely know it when we see it.

Bob @36: hear, hear! Although this may not completely negate the coercive element; I consider my Catholic confirmation to be the result of coercive pressure, but I knew full well going into it what it involved. I do think, however, that the Mormon church seems to rely so heavily on secrecy that shining the light of day upon their practices (even just among those who honestly want to know more about the faith) can only be good for them in the long run.

…I guess this just means I have nothing original to say.

i also managed to grow up not believing god damned anyone who believed differently than i.

if you feel that way, then there’s not much urgency about trying to convert someone. One of the points of missionary work, one of the ways people are inspired (coerced?) to do it, is a focus on the suffering and unhappiness that will come t0 people if they don’t become members of God’s one and only true church, the church that will give them the signs and tokens and so forth they need in order to get into the celestial kingdom (which, let’s not forget, is guarded by a gauntlet of angels asking for passwords and secret handshakes).

i think if both the missionary and the investigator, to use mormon parlance, had such a vision of god [as loving and universalist] that might lessen the possibility for coercion.

It would also lessen the need for missionary work. People who believe in a loving god who will offer salvation to people no matter what their religious beliefs don’t need to engage in either a search or proselytizing for God’s one true church. They’re more the “live and let live” crowd.

i’m not really trying to argue that missions and missionary work are not coercive so much as that they are not by definition coercive. i certainly recognize the potential for them to be–both coercive of investigators and the missionaries themselves. and of course this is a huge tangent from john’s original post. my apologies for that. i just find the question very interesting.

to bring it back around to the question of the temple, my experience is very different from john’s in many ways. i didn’t go until 99, so i didn’t experience the same endowment he did, which is part of the difference. i think that perhaps the biggest difference is that i see all the coerciveness of the temple that john sees, along with several other problems, but it has simultaneously shaped my rather heterodox (for a mormon) understanding of life and deity more than almost anything else. and i mean that in a positive sense. so i have this very mixed bag of experience where the temple is concerned. part of me hates it for how it reinscribes horrible gender roles and stereotypes (to put it mildly) and how it coerces people into making commitments that should only be made with very serious consideration; but another part of me loves it for leading me to the conclusion that god is in us and all that matters is this moment now, not some distant afterlife with vague promises of glory.

bleh. i have no idea how much of that makes sense because i’m tired. i’d like to write more about my own experiences of the temple, but it will have to wait.

Haven’t thought much about it yet. One major emotional issue at a time.

it’s an issue of analyzing what others did to you vs. analyzing what you did to others, and yes, I concede that the second bit usually comes later.

amelia @32: i’m curious if you find all attempts at persuasion (and persuasion is always about getting people to adopt at least your belief, if not also your practice) are coercive. is there such a thing as persuasion that is not coercive?

Of course not all attempts at persuasion are coercive. Of course not. A straightforward statement like, “I really think we shouldn’t go out for a hike this morning, because it’s all gray and weather.com says it’s supposed to rain really hard” need not be coercive–though it could be, if there’s some sort of dishonest manipulation involved, or some sort of additional threat in play if the hike isn’t canceled no matter what.

How coercive something is depends on several things, including what sort of techniques are used as part of the persuasion, and what sort of ramifications are posited if the persuadee resists.

Any attempt at persuasion in which eternal damnation is posited as the result of resistance to persuasion is definitely coercive.

I’ll quote a few passages from “Not In His Image” by John Lamb Lash (which I am currently reading and finding very upsetting) to explain what I mean–though admittedly, Lash is discussing the widespread and aggressive imposition of Christianity on pagan Europe and on the Americas:

“Evangalization is a process of coercion and co-optation. People convert in order to survive in the dominant social order. If they seem to undergo a genuine, soul-centered conversion, this is more a measure of psychic adaptation than spiritual transformation. (Historians wearily repeat tales of how Pagan peoples, long after conversion, still cling to their ancestral ways.) Unless there is internal force for resistance, psychic immunity, so to speak, the individual psyche will adapt to the stress of collective imagination. It will become what it believes and forget what it knows…. The salvific message attached to Jesus the Redeemer was something the natives had better accept, or pay the consequences. The menace of the superhuman messiah backed by a vengeful father god loomed behind the promise of love embodied in the persona of Jesus.”

That last bit, “The menace of the superhuman messiah backed by a vengeful father god loomed behind the promise of love embodied in the persona of Jesus,” is still very much a part of missionary work.

I was particularly struck by the following passage, which I think gets to some of the frustration some of us have expressed at finding that if you take the church really seriously, you run the risk of being seriously hurt by it:

“Salvationist religion prevailed because it delivered the opposite of what it promised to people who were, at first, unable to perceive the double standard, and then, when they finally did see it, found themselves enmeshed in it, counting on it to show them the way out of their plight.”

The church promised me happiness and meaning. It delivered chaos and despair. And the chaos and despair got worse and worse, because I thought the chaos and despair were my fault, and that salvation from them could be found through the church, so I pursued the methods it recommended with greater and greater zeal. No. Escape could be found only by leaving the church.

John, thanks for clarifying–sorry for not doing my homework.

In my own experience, there were the constant questions about when I was getting married.

The was also the more general pressure, sometimes subtle and sometimes not subtle at all, to conform to the LDS version of how women should be, was immense. This, to the point of (and I’ve said this here before) of being told repeatedly that some of my interests (science, for example) weren’t “ladylike”.

Questions from my LDS peers among the young women that were baldly rude, from my point of view, were not uncommon. The one that sticks out in my mind is “Don’t you want to be like everyone else?” As if everyone in the world should strive to be just exactly like everyone else in the world.

I experienced all this as coercive because, others in the church, especially the other young women would extend or withhold their fellowship based on whether or not I was being sufficiently “Molly”, for want of a better term.

And, yes, I’m aware that this is just my experience. But it was my experience, and it was awful. Yet, I took the baptism promises so seriously that it took me years…no, decades, to realize that it wasn’t something wrong with me and finally got out.

“The penalties were wholly eliminated from the endowment when the ceremony was streamlined in April 1990.”

There’s only so much room in a post, and so many ways to slice and dice a topic. I count on commenters to fill in the gaps and to keep me honest.

Has your growing ability and willingness to acknowledge and criticize the coercive nature of the temple increased your willingness to acknowledge other coercive elements of the church, such as missionary work?

Haven’t thought much about it yet. One major emotional issue at a time. Certainly I experienced the mission rule regime as coercive. The program itself has strong cultish elements as well.

Or do you still feel that the purity of your motives as you experienced them insulated your work as a missionary from any characterization as coercive?

My mission experience was complex. Maybe I’ll think more about it and see more coercive elements. It still remains, in my memory, as a largely positive experience. And certainly my experience was not your experience.

Or are there other elements I’m missing, that affect how you remember and characterize your mission?

1. Japanese missionary work in the early 90s was extremely low-key compared to other countries. This was an extreme reaction to a period 8-10 years earlier when missionaries in Japan went through a very very high pressure campaign remembered as the “Groberg Era”.

We also spent about a day a week in some areas doing non-proselytizing service. I established a rep in two districts working with the hearing impaired–no lessons, no converts, and that was fine, and it was rewarding enough that I considered becoming a special ed teacher for several years.

2. It was my motherland. Every moment I was immersed in a culture I grew up with but wasn’t fully experience since my childhood, and here I was in fucking Japan. The food, the culture, the language, the history, the people, were all a continual joy. Japan’s as much my home as the US is.

I was also encouraged to spend non-proselytizing time with my aunt who lived in my area, and attended the funeral of my beloved grampa, sans companion, and with no time limit.

3. I was a recent, on-fire convert of a year, so I was completely sincere and believing. Doubts didn’t really hit me until I returned home.

4. Finally, the mission was the closest I’ve ever come to an ascetic and mystical discipline. I think I was strange even among missionaries for some of my attraction to these elements. I prayed constantly (so much so that I had a reputation for it) and had some powerful mystical experiences of love towards God and towards the people of Japan (but not towards my fellow missionaries…).

So I guess, yes, I do have some elements that probably contributed to my remembering my mission, to this day, as a relatively positive experience.

I have another question for you. As has been demonstrated here quite thoroughly, people are often bewildered and hurt when something that gave their lives meaning is characterized as coercive.

Several years ago, you made a comment about how meaningful you found your mission, how while you were on it, you felt a connection to and love for everyone you interacted with, much as you imagined Buddha or Christ must have.

I responded by pointing out that however genuine the love and connection you felt, they were nonetheless rooted in something coercive, because the fundamental objective of a mission is to persuade the people you interact with to embrace your beliefs and adopt your practices. As I’ve said above (#17), this is how I experienced my mission even while I was on it.

You were angry, and in an email exchange, you told me that it was unfair and inaccurate of me to characterize your mission as coercive and to demean the genuine love you felt at the time.

I suppose I was naive if I imagined you’d be anything but upset by my statement. I wonder how you feel about it now, however.

For instance, if someone doesn’t want to join the church, missionaries are supposed to stop visiting them. To rephrase Jana’s statement above (#16), “What is friendly about showing up at someone’s doorstep and conducting scripted conversations about why this person should become more like us and less like those around them?”

Has your growing ability and willingness to acknowledge and criticize the coercive nature of the temple increased your willingness to acknowledge other coercive elements of the church, such as missionary work? Or do you still feel that the purity of your motives as you experienced them insulated your work as a missionary from any characterization as coercive? Or are there other elements I’m missing, that affect how you remember and characterize your mission?

Jana @16: re: love. I have always felt that the “love” people feel for church members now no longer attending church is a hollow or a shallow sort of a love. Love me for me; not for the extra soul I bring your god. People who love only when their god is on the line are not worth your time.

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with this one. Yes, the more seriously you take it, the harder it is…

I just deleted a paragraph that detailed so many of the ways I tried over the years to bring myself closer to God and more fully live the law of consecration as well as other commandments. Gah, I can’t even make that list w/o remembering how hard I tried. John was the same way, too, totally internalizing the “exact obedience” stuff during his mission.

It’s just not in my personality to do things halfway. Since I’ve left I’ve met so many Mormons who just coast thru church meetings, they fudge on the WoW, they wear their G’s only when it’s convenient, etc. That really never occurred to me when I was active.

When people suggest that I didn’t “try hard enough” to be a good Mormon I think what they really mean is that I didn’t try hard enough to be ‘cafeteria’ Mormon–only picking and choosing the parts of the gospel that were easy.

It’s easiest for you if religion is just a family tradition. In between are the people who are players, the folks that cry at sacrament meeting as a bid for status or to advance their career.

Afterward, they do what they want.

I guess, it’s my own fault for trying to take it seriously.