u/InvestigatorHour311

When I graduated from university, my parents came across the world to watch me walk at my graduation. (I was an international student.) That Sunday, we went to the lds church I was a part of. I don't want to get into specifics, but I'm very close to the Bishop and his wife. They controlled the talks, they knew that my parents would be there on that day months in advance and that they weren't members. They made the talks about Temples. Sadly, the main mesage for most of the talks were eternal families and that we can't be together forever unless we go through the Temple. Maybe I was running off adrenaline from the day before (graduation), but I was absolutely furious. It also doesn't help that the Bishop and his wife pushed the eternal family's idea on my parents a lot the day before in the RS and Bishop crying voice they do.

To hell with that idea! My parents sacrificed so much for me, and I'm incredibly close to them, yet they think God would separate us because of a stupid set of handshakes? It became more frustrating later because I learned how neglectful and dismissive the Bishop and his wife are to their children, and yet in those moments the pretend like they are better parents than mine because they are members of the church. I'm still having a hard time with these feelings. I don't know how to let them go. My shelf was newly broken at the time, so I was going through a lot of tough emotions about the church. My partner and I just spent the second hour walking around in the woods because I was absolutely beside myself crying, punching the air, and swearing at the Church. I tried to talk to my parents about it later to explain why I left for a while and that I don't believe in this BS anymore. I'm not sure how much that came across, though.

For me, I had a cultural anthropology class in community college, where my teacher told us she was raised as a missionary kid. She saw how much Christianity stripped away the culture of the people she was teaching. Beautiful, long-held traditions and beliefs gone in a few weeks or months because of the missionaries efforts to "share the gospel." We learned a lot about how diverse the world can be and good qualities in many cultures. At the time, I was a TBM, and she even graciously gave me a soapbox to preach about mormonism when we were learning about religions around the world. She tried so hard to teach us about the ethics of anthropology like: who are we to say that this culture is bad when it makes people feel fulfilled, even if the thing that makes them feel fulfilled is self harm? I always disagreed in my head when she said that missionary work harms cultures because my naive TBM brain said "but people need the gospel to get into heaven," and "some cultures are wrong because God says so in the Bible" (yes, even then I would not be able to site a single Bible verse off the top of my head that would justify my beliefs.) At the time, I so fully believed that only I and other mormons were taught the truth, that I look back on it now and my arrogance makes me sick. As it should.

By the end of the semester, I had big questions on my shelf, and I've added more despite my shelf being smashed to pieces now. Questions like:"Who am I to encourage the extinction of a culture because it's not my culture? Even if the culture was absorbed into the religion, it still messes with people's sense of identity because they have to denounce a part of themselves that once brought meaning and freedom to their culture, eg., dance. Why should european/american whitness be the model culture? Why would god make only one culture aware of his teachings if he knew other people would go through emence pain to let go of the culture they built without him?