#i left early esp by mormon standards (started questioning around 10-11. found out im gay at 13.

[dontstandmedown]

Also what’s frustrating is a lot of the stuff that people rag on Mormons about is stuff that Mormons don’t do, or is misinterpreted (biggest example is the polygamy — that is not church doctrine anymore. It certainly was in the past, and there are some extreme Mormons who still practice it, but the institution that is the Mormon church does not condone polygamy.) So this makes it REALLY easy for practicing Mormons to shut down any criticism of the church, because hey that’s not how we do things! But then you ask them questions about actual church doctrine and church history, such as, I don’t know, what was up with Joseph Smith marrying a 15 year old? (I found that factoid out when I was fifteen. I was already atheist by then but I still wonder how any adult could know this and worship Joseph Smith as a prophet). Isn’t it weird how he forced guys to go on missions so he could marry their wives? And how come Emma Smith, his first wife (first and only as Mormons are led to believe), left the church? Why couldn’t Black men receive the priesthood (which is granted to all Mormon men deemed worthy either at the age of twelve or upon conversion) until 1977? And, like this post mentions, what the fuck is up with Mormons, the Book of Mormon, and Indigenous peoples? Why do we treat this book as historical fact when it is so easy to prove how wrong it is? Why are we treating Natives so cruelly and pretending it’s an act of God?

I grew up Mormon, and I didn’t find out that Mormons believed indigenous Americans were descendants of Israelites until after I had mentally left the church. Some Mormons explain this away by saying the Book of Mormon isn’t meant to be interpreted literally, but I grew up in a liberal part of a liberal part of the United States, and everyone treated the BoM like a historical document. I didn’t learn about the Church’s history with racism and sexism until I had mentally left the church, too. There is so much that they just don’t fucking tell you because they know you’ll lose faith otherwise. That’s why I care about being empathetic to the Mormons in my life (especially the younger ones), because I know that they are being lied to and manipulated by the church. There are plenty of Mormons doing the lying, but I don’t have as many run ins with them. I know a lot of people, especially queer POC, who have been deeply hurt by the church but struggle letting go of the comfort that it brings. I know a lot of Mormons who care about anti-racism, LGBTQ rights, and helping those in need. I honestly do not fucking know how they reconcile those things with being in the church, but at the same time… I kinda do. Leaving the Mormon church feels impossible until you’ve done it. And then you wonder how you stayed so long in the first place without getting exhausted from the mental gymnastics.*

*i want to add that i do not blame anyone who hates mormons bc we’ve done some pretty unforgivable shit. It’s just that i can’t help but feel for people who are still in the church because I have firsthand experience with the manipulation used to keep you there. For example, according to Mormon doctrine, I will not be in the same afterlife as any of my Mormon family members because I’m an apostate. I’m prettyy sure that being an apostate is like the worst possible thing a Mormon can be when it comes to the Mormon afterlife, but I can’t quite remember. Mormon heaven is really confusing and believe it or not, I didn’t pay a lot of attention in Sunday School.

It's amazing to me just how good the Mormon church has been at hiding just how bad they really are from public view. Even the shit that gets spread around is the relatively harmless bullshit. They had a crazy prophet with magic glasses. They believe in god-mandated polygyny. They think everyone who is good enough will get their very own planet after the world ends. They wear magic underpants. Mormon men are all paladins.

Here's one of the ones you hear less often:

See, like many other Christian sects, the Mormons really do believe that the existence of Christ obviates the existence of Judaism. Judaism was just a placeholder until the "real" church could be established by Jesus.

And the Mormons in particular believe, dead ass, that the entire inheritance of Israel has been given to them, because the Jews failed to recognize the Messiah when he was on Earth. They really do. They have this whole system where people are given a "divine revelation" about which of the Tribes of Israel they're a member of (don't worry, they decided that most people belong to the two tribes that are willing to "adopt" people. Only the most specialest boys and girls are members of the original ten).

Let's sum up so far. The Mormons believe that they are the people of Israel, chosen and protected by God. If Jews want to get back in on that party, they can always repent and convert to Mormonism, the one true church to which God gave all the rights and blessings that were originally bestowed on Abraham's house.

But it doesn't stop there!

The Mormons also believe, in all seriousness, that all Indigenous peoples of the Americas are descended from a small group of Jewish people who left just before the fall of Jerusalem (~600 bc iirc). Their entire weird-ass extra bible is a chronicle of those people's history in [unspecific part of America]. At the very beginning of the book, two brothers in the original family turn away from god, so they and all their descendants are cursed with dark skin, so that the good Nephites (who remain "white and delightsome") will always be able to tell themselves apart from the wicked Lamanites.

So, you've got supposedly Jewish people running around the Americas. And the "good" ones are white, and the "bad" ones are brown. Then, ofc, Jesus comes to visit them (I guess supposedly that's part of what he was doing during his dirt nap? Or possibly after he left again, it's not clear), and they all convert to Christianity, which they think is clearly the natural evolution of Judaism. Well, at the end of the book, all of them become wicked, in a kind of weird pseudo-apocalyptic series of events. They are all cursed with dark skin, until such time as they repent for their ancestors sins and return to the gospel.

But of course, Mormons being the good and kind people they are, they want everyone to receive the blessings of God and be brought into the houses of Israel etc etc. And it isn't the fault of those poor little Indigenous children that their distant ancestors turned away from God and became wicked.

So what's the natural answer? Well, Mormons are real big on missionary work, as we all know. But apparently that wasn't enough in this case.

Because the Mormon church has been one of the big players in abducting as many Indigenous children as possible, in order to indoctrinate them into being good Mormons, so that they can turn white again and be blessed. My mother remembers hearing talks about this in the 70s and 80s. The church literally had a "Lamanite Adoption Program," where families in the church were encouraged to get as many Indigenous children as possible away from their families and not let them be reunited until they were fully assimilated and ready to go back and proselytize about how wonderful the church is.

The church leadership literally talked about how wonderful it was to see these children becoming whiter. Actually whiter. Like, saying that when they finally saw them with their families again, it was beautiful how much paler they were.

I'm pretty sure this program has been officially ended, but it doesn't take a genius to speculate about who might be behind the curtains on the movement in the western US to gut the ICWA....

So yeah. Next time someone tries to tell you that the Mormons are just harmless weirdos, please remember that they're an antisemitic cult that advocates for the forced assimilation of Indigenous children to help them escape the cursed brown skin of their ancestors.