Why I Joined Part 4- "Welcome to Orwell's 1984"

We all want to be happy. It's nice to be around happy people who have a positive outlook on life. The world is such a negative place with wars, famines and Sandra Bullock movies that we all want a shelter from it all.

I don't know if those reading this have ever seen LDS promotional literature but it always has a group of happy, clean cut (and until recently) white people. It almost jumps out at you and says "hey...you want this don't you?". Well, I wanted it. But there was a catch. To get it you have to start believing some really weird stuff like:

*Jesus came to America after his resurrection and taught the Indians.
*There is an elderly man in Salt Lake City that very few people know about but this man is God's mouthpiece to the entire world.
*You must wear special underwear with markings over the left and right breast and over the navel and the right knee.
*You must accept as a fact that a young farmer from New York was lead by an angel to a set of golden plates buried in a hill near his home. The plates are engraved with the history of the former inhabitants of the Americans called Nephites and Lamanites.
*Lots of other strange stuff that I'll go into later.

To make things worse, I started dating a Methodist girl at this time who, along with her pastor, was dead set against Mormonism. Talk about confusion. At least I would finally get the other side of the story...or so I thought.

The problem with "anti-Mormon" literature as put out by fundamentalist Christians is that it can be easily answered by most Mormons. So I bought the answers the elders gave me. It was not until years later after coming across scholarly sources from historians such as D. Micheal Quinn that I discovered that the LDS Church had been less than truthful with me about such things as Joseph Smith's money digging activities, his grand banking scam in Kirtland Ohio and his polygamy among other things.

Yet, the elders were my friends, my buddies, my pals. Nice guys rather than the stuck-up church kids and the drunk rednecks I had to choose from in South Georgia. Little did I know that that being my friend was just a way of closing the deal and getting me baptized. On my own mission I would learn about the pressure to bapize at all costs. One day Elder Benham showed me just what a true friend he was when he threatened to "drop me as an investigator" if I didn't make progress towards baptism. What can I say...I was just a kid and wanted to be accepted by a good group.

In order to get me into the church, I had to get a "witness from the Holy Ghost", a testimony. Mormonism, as I was to find out, relies more on feelings than on facts. So I tried and I prayed...and the feelings came! So Mormonism must be true! Yet how was this different from a member of faith healer Benny Hinn's audience who is sure that he/she has been healed? How is it different from those Catholics who go to Lourdes to take the "healing" water from the spring and have great spiritual experiences? How is it different from those who claim to die and come back changed forever (yet don't immediately join the LDS Church)?

How is it different? Mormon feelings are true...all other feelings are false! Believe it or not, that's their answer.

So I took my new but weak faith in Mormonism and was baptized on a cold day in December 1981. For the next several years I got deeper and deeper into Mormonism, embracing not only their religious faith, but their conservative political faith as well.

There were things that still bothered me. Having to lie to people for example. We were always instructed to tell people that the temple was sacred, not secret. Yet when I went through the temple I was told the following word for word:

"....we desire to impress upon your minds the sacred character of the first token of the Aaronic priesthood, with its accompanying name, sign, and penalty, as well as that of all the other tokens of the holy priesthood, with their names, signs, and penalties, which you will receive in the temple this day. They are most sacred and are guarded by solemn covenants and obligations of secrecy to the effect that under no condition, even at the peril of your life, will you ever divulge them, except at a certain place that will be shown you hereafter........I will now explain the covenant and obligation of secrecy which are associated with this token, its name, sign, and penalty, which you will be required to take upon yourselves" (bold added)

We told people that Joseph Smith saw God and Jesus after a great revival in 1820. The fact is, there was not great revival in 1820. Mormons leaders knew this, they just kept letting us repeat the lie.

We told people that polygamy was instituted because there were more women than me. That was a lie! Polygamy was brought about because the early leaders thought it was essential to salvation.

Why was I supposed to tell people that the temple was not secret when the ceremony itself clearly stated that it was? Why was I made to lie about all that other history? I began to learn that in Mormonism it's important to overlook certain things in order to further the work of God. It's called "lying for the Lord". It was like Orwell and 1984!