Facebook users?

[Catholic_Lady]

Hadn't thought about it that way. Good points.

I don't mean to keep harping on this, but I thought I would share my findings from an informal survey I just performed on facebook (speaking of facebook).  I'm part of an Ex-Mormon group there (I'm not ex-mo, but I was invited to join by one so I accepted) and here's what they had to say:

My question to the group:

Were you ever taught or instructed to behave a certain way around non-Mormons? For example, did you think you had to portray a happy face to no-mos because you were a representative of the LDS church?

Comments? Thoughts?

These are all of the relevant* comments posted to that thread:

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The answer: yes, absolutely. Happy Mormons make for good slave labor PR.

I was never taught to act anyway or heard of anything like that....

We were never taught that either. But then mo's have never ever looked happy to me.

Explicitly taught? No. But it's definitely implied through the culture. And not just to non Mormons, but to other Mormons as well. Good Mormons like to show other Mormons how good of a Mormon they are and how blessed they are because of it.

We were never allowed to play with non members. In public we just acted normal. Of course I grew up in the Mormon capital, so everyone had the same blank, stepford wife look.

Sometimes statements are said to you like "You are a later day saint, act like it." Or, "Remember what the CTR ring says....Choose the right!"

YES. There was a whole church combined meeting about it, how we need to make "Zion" look attractive. Even had a talk about it in institute.

I was taught that non-believers were constantly watching and waiting for us to slip up so that they could pounce and use the slip-up as evidence against the church's effectiveness at producing happy, healthy, morally-upstanding people. I was put under extreme pressure to succeed at everything in order to be someone that others would look up to... So that when they asked me how I managed to be so wonderful I could smile and say "It's all because I'm Mormon!" And I was very good at it. I excelled in sports and academics and made sure to mention faith anytime my success gave me a platform to proselytize. Nevermind that family and personal problems were to be kept strictly inside the home (i.e. completely ignored) to maintain the illusion of perfection. And then as a teenager, when these pressures helped bring about the end of my parents' marriage, the ward turned their backs on us--We clearly weren't living the gospel or God would have blessed the marriage more, and they didn't want to be associated with a broken home. As much as it sucked to have all my LDS friends stop associating with me in high school, I feel even worse for all the husbands and wives and children who weren't able to use divorce as a way to escape from abusive domestic situations so that they could maintain that illusion of perfection in the rat race to see who can demonstrate being blessed with the most happiness and prosperity.

Yes, in much the same way [the comment above*] mentioned. We represented the church and if we misbehaved we'd give them a bad name. Plus the whole non members can't experience true happiness bit had a way of guilting me into acting happy because I must not be righteous enough if I wasn't always happy. Then there was a lesson about depression being from the devil and I broke down. So, there's a lot of different mind fuck techniques they use to get that perfect happy image.

*I have removed the poster's name.

"Wickedness never was happiness" implies that righteous people are happy people. My mom had a stupidly fake smile she always wore in church. Like most mormon parents my parents were abusive, heavy handed conservatives who held a strict code of honor forbidding any talk of the abuse.

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* I say the relevant comments and by that I mean the ones that directly answer the thread question; there are quite a few very heavy abuse stories being shared in the comments that I feel would be an invasion of the poster's privacy to share here.

Sorry, again, for harping on this.  I'm not meaning to derail your facebook thread, but hearing you say that Mormons have always seemed to have "this aura" (presumably of happiness) about them really irked me having learned what I've learned from these people and the sort of shit they've gone through growing up Mormon.  

Okay, back to on-topic discussions.

No need to apologize. I appreciate you taking the time to address what I said.

I am not denying the bad experiences of these people and of those you have omitted. But in the defense of Mormonism, I do think we have to put these comments into perspective. They were taken from a group of ex Mormons who felt compelled to join an ex Mormon group. Many of these people probably left the faith after having had bad experiences. I think if this question were to be answered completely honestly by all Mormons (current and ex), it would be a lot less doom and gloom. Just my humble opinion.