Looking Beyond The Mark

If you are not allowed to ask questions in a religion, it is for their safety and not yours.

“The truth shall set you free”

-Jesus

Looking beyond the mark is a term in Mormonism meant to discourage anyone from looking too deep into the Church and finding out things that may cause them to loose faith in the Church or its leaders, and though the term is different in other questionable faiths, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, it is common in all cults to discourage investigation or study of anything that is not approved by the leaders as a way of tightly controlling what information the members have access to and thus shaping their opinions in a way favorable to the group. I have talked to some length about my journeys in Mormonism, and some of what I say will be familiar to any regular readers of my blog or listening so or my podcast, but every episode is someone’s first episode and I have to lay the groundwork so that those who are coming to this as their first episode will be able to follow along and understand the journey, and I will try to make the redundancies interesting enough so that those who know my story can still enjoy it.

When I was younger I was lost and looking for anything that would make me feel loved and accepted, and I think I would have been willing to accept almost any ideology so long as I felt the people who were teaching it to me loved me and accepted me as one of their own, and the largest contributor to that mindset was my childhood. I grew up in an extremely dysfunctional home and, despite the fact that my mother loved me and proved her love every day by her actions, I was always depressed and never felt truly loved because of my father’s obvious disdain for me and because he was constantly telling me that I was worthless and would never amount to anything and that no one would ever love me. My father even went so far as to say that God did not and could not love me, and he said that my mother was lying about loving me and only told me that she did so that I would do things for her.

Growing up I never had any friends because my sisters and I were home schooled, which kept us pretty isolated, and we moved far too often to make and/or keep any friends. The biggest reason for the home schooling, and the motivation for constantly moving, was my father’s paranoia that he would get caught for some of the nefarious deeds he did. My father even watched America’s Most Wanted every week just to see if he were on it; he never was of course because no none knew about any of the vile things that he did. Honestly, I am not sure what all my father did, and I think I am better off not knowing. What I know about my father is bad enough, and it took me a long time for me to forgive him for the way he treated my sisters, my mother and me.

When my sisters and I were children, father always told us that if we talked to anyone and told them how we lived or anything about him that we would get taken away and separated and that we would get horribly abused and would probably be put into an orphanage or a foster home where we would be sexually abused and beaten every day. I wasn’t sure if my father was telling the truth or if he was just trying to scare us for his own protection, but as horrible as my life sometimes was, I was even more terrified of the unknown. I had become complacent and sort of comfortable in an uncomfortable sort of way, and the unknown was truly scary and what I imagined could happen was undoubtedly worse than anything that would have actually happened, and that was one of the biggest reasons that I never ran away, the other being that I was afraid of what would happen to my mother and sisters if I were to leave.

When Johnny Law finally did catch up with my father for one of his crimes and he went away, I wanted to distance myself from everything that reminded me of him, including anything and everything religious. I even threw away my Bible because my father would always try to control me, and everyone else, by twisting what it said and using verses out of context. My father was an ordained minister, though he never had his own Church or worked for a church because he was too afraid to stay in one place and completely unwilling to ever turn in his social security number. By the time my father went away I knew that practically everything he ever told me was a lie, and I assumed that all the rest was as well. I felt incredibly lost and confused and was desperately searching for anything that would give some sort of meaning and purpose to my life, which made me the perfect candidate for Mormonism. At that point in my life I had a sub-standard education and was not wise to the ways of the world, and I desperately wanted and needed to feel loved above all else, and I would have done about anything to reach that end. I didn’t have any idea what I was looking for, but I was certain it was not religion, but that did not prevent me from falling for it all the same. All I knew for sure was that I was lost like a ship at sea with no ruder or sail.

I was working at a Burger King in Southeast Idaho at the time and practically everyone I knew was Mormon, as was everyone in the area. All I knew about the Mormon religion was what my father had told me, which I assumed to be lies and therefore wrong, and what I had heard on the television propaganda commercials put out by the Church itself. After I had been at the restaurant for a short while I was given the task to train all of the new people when they were hired, and one of the new hires was a young girl close to my age named Lilly. From the moment I saw Lilly I was more than smitten and, I hate to admit this but, she dominated my thoughts for years and I was practically obsessed with her. I laid awake many nights thinking of ways to make her like me, hopefully more than a friend, and in case you are wondering, I did not have any impure thoughts about her, I just desperately wanted her to like me. Even though it was painfully obvious that Lilly would never love me the way I loved her, I held out hope that one day we would get married, and there was a time when her father hoped so as well and told me so. looking back on it, I am truly glad that God doesn’t always give us what we ask or beg for.

Shortly after meeting Lilly I asked her to go someplace with me on a Sunday and she told me that her religion did not allow her to do anything recreational on Sunday, which was a completely foreign concept to me, despite my extremely religious upbringing. I was intrigued and started asking a lot of questions about the Mormon religion, and I was told the proper name is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I found out my boss was also Mormon and started asking him question as well, and I learned all I could about the faith from anyone that could tell me. My interest in Mormonism, at least at first, was equal parts trying to impress Lilly and a fascination with her strange religion, though I eventually cared more about learning about the religion than I did about impressing her, or anyone else for that matter. When I found out that Mormons did not drink coffee or tea I was blown away, especially since every church I had ever gone to served coffee and tea.

Lilly worked at her family’s shaved ice business when she was not working at Burger King and I would often drop by to talk, much to her annoyance, though I convinced myself that she enjoyed it as much as I did, though looking back I am not sure how I could have ever been so delusional. Lilly was sweet and kind about it, but her disinterest in me could not have been any clearer had she put up a sign. At any rate, the topic of our discussions became more and more about Mormonism all the time, and not only did I start caring more about learning the doctrine and history of the religion than I did about impressing her, she was also much more interested in talking to me when she thought she was converting me to her faith. After a while, like any Mormon worth his or her salt, Lilly invited me to go to church, and though I hoped it would eventually lead to the two of us dating, I genuinely wanted to go to learn more about what the religion believed, even if Lilly and I were never more than friends. When Lilly told me the congregation she went to was comprised entirely of young single adults I was completely shocked as I had never heard such a thing, and I had no idea at the time how hard the religion tries to marry off their young. I later learned that Mormon congregations are called wards and ones designed to pair up the young adults are called singles wards. I was later to discover that the members have no real choice which ward they go to and have to go to the ward they are assigned to based on their geographical location. After I was baptized I had to go to a different singles ward than the one Lilly went to.

When Sunday rolled around and Lilly came to pick me up I was extremely disappointed that several of her cousins were riding along with her and that I had to ride in the back of the car. On the way to church, Lilly’s male cousins were doing their best to win me over as a convert and convince me that I already believed what they believed, but since I had been lied to so much while growing up I had no clear idea what I actually believed. My first Sunday at a Mormon Church was strange, to say the least, but my curiosity overpowered the urge to flee that came from the weirdness of it all. It also helped that everyone acted like I was their new best friend. Some of the people even invited me to a whitewater rafting event the church was having the following Saturday, and I decided to go, even if Lilly did not.

It wasn’t long before Lilly’s parents had her bring me to their house for dinner to meet the missionaries. After dinner the missionaries told me that everything I knew about God was wrong because a fourteen year old Joseph Smith had met God and was told to start the “true” church. Among other things, I was told that God loved me, the members loved me, and that I could earn my salvation if I could follow all of the rules.

Honestly, had I been thinking critically, all sorts of red flags would have gone off, but I was so happy to hear that people loved and accepted me and that I could go to heaven by following what I was told were a few simple rules that I was afraid to hear anything that would make me question it because I so badly wanted to believe it. For the first time in my life, I felty truly loved and accepted, so I bought into Mormonism hook line and sinker. I was given The Book of Mormon, the foundational book of the faith, and was asked to read a few specific verses and pray about them. At the time I did not occur to me that having a good feeling about something does not make it right or true, nor did I consider that the Bible does not support a good feeling proving something is true. At any rate, I was told that I would be given a spiritual witness that The Book of Moron and the Church were true, but I never received any such witness, not in the ten years I faithfully attended. I wound up getting baptized into the Church because I desperately wanted to believe it was true, partially because the people were so nice, but mostly because it gave purpose and meaning to my life.

I probably would not have been convinced so easily to be baptized into Mormonism had I not had an extremely vivid dream in which I went to hell that had striking similarities to a vision sequence in The Book of Mormon. In my dream I woke up in a large castle like building, floating high above the ground. The building had no doors or furnishings of any kind, and all of the large windows were completely open with no glass, no bars and no coverings of any kind. From where I was I could see people below happily walking and talking with Jesus in a peaceful meadow, and I was tortured by the fact that I could not get down to the glorious scene. When Jesus was directly below me I yelled out the window for him to help me, but the devil quickly put his hand over my mouth and told me that I blew my chance to be with Jesus and that I was his for all of eternity. There were a lot more details to the dream that I don’t have time to go into, but suffice it to say that the dream shook me and was one of the most real feeling dreams I have ever had.

By the time I was baptized, a few short weeks after I first met the missionaries, I had read The Book of Moron in its entirety several times, as well as several of the Church’s other canonized book which I had purchased on my own. I was told that reading the Church’s scriptures with such passion was somewhat uncommon for life long members to do, and almost unheard of for converts. Everyone was convinced that I was going to become some high ranking leader of the Church, and I probably would have had I not started thinking critically about the Church and asking too many pointed questions that had troubling answers. I eventually came to realize that truth can stand up to question and has nothing to fear from inquiry, and I decided to learn all I could and to follow the truth to whatever ends it led.

Despite how hard I tried to not let anything I learned about the Church bother me or cause me to loose faith, I encountered a lot of things that stirred up questions in my mind, and since I am naturally an over thinker, I could not just let them drop. I thought that I would get sufficient answers to my questions, but I quickly learned that any question that did not have a faith promoting answer was discouraged, and anything that is not taught in Sunday school is not to be studied. Whenever I would ask questions that had embarrassing answers I was told that looking beyond the mark would cause me to fall away, which comes from a verse in The Book of Mormon.

But behold, the Jews were a stiffnecked people; and they despised the words of plainness, and killed the prophets, and sought for things that they could not understand. Wherefore, because of their blindness, which blindness came by looking beyond the mark, they must needs fall; for God hath taken away his plainness from them, and delivered unto them many things which they cannot understand, because they desired it. And because they desired it God hath done it, that they may stumble.

Jacob 4:14

I can’t tell you how many times my questions were shot down by saying that I was “looking beyond the mark” and that doing so would cause me to fall astray, which was true, but at the time I did not know it was true or why it was true. When I started doing research on my own, despite the fact that it was all from Church approved sources, at least initially, I quickly learned why they did not want me, or anyone else, to study too deeply, and that reason is that the Church is not at all what it portrays itself to be and they know that once a person sees the proverbial man behind the curtain they can never unsee him and they will realize the Church is a cult and leave.

On my two year Church mission, my mission president yelled at me for asking a question, and once I returned home from my mission, several local stake leaders, including the stake president, told me that if I kept asking the type of questions I was asking that I would be excommunicated. What really annoys me now is that the Church officially has answers to almost all of the questions that I was told not to ask and they claim they never discouraged members from studying in those areas. In that way the Mormon Church is a lot like Big Brother in the book Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell. However, not only do I vividly remember being censured for asking those questions, I have years of journals cataloging my life and I wrote about it at the time it happened so there is no chance they will convince me that it didn’t happen.

Sometimes I am ashamed of myself for falling for all of the lies, and for being so unwilling to believe the truth when I was being slapped in the face with it, but I was so desperate to be accepted that I willingly bought into it. Some people turn to drugs, alcohol and promiscuity when they are lost and looking for meaning, but I turned to Mormonism. I don’t in any way wish that I had followed any vice, but I can’t help but think the other group had a lot more fun on their journey to find meaning than I did, and many of them wound up exactly where I am now, in the loving arms of Jesus, the true Jesus, not some version made up by Joseph Smith that doesn’t have the power to save us without our help, but the Jesus of the Bible, the God of the universe who was always God and always will be God.

The Mormon Jesus was not always God as John 1:1 tells us but was created by the father who was not always God either but was created as a man and eventually accomplished enough good works to become a god himself. One of the questions I was threatened for asking was, if the god of Mormonism used to be a man and was therefore created, why they didn’t worship the ultimate God instead of some lower god, and why there was more than one god when the Bible, and The Book of Mormon, clearly tells us that there is only one God.

This doesn’t just go for Mormonism but for any belief structure, if they don’t want you to learn about the more obscure doctrines or the more shady history of the faith or organization than there is a reason, and it is not that they are trying to protect you from anything, unless that thing is the truth. The truth is hidden for their protection, not yours. Jesus said that he did nothing in secret (John 18:20), so if a religion tells you they are his church and keeps secrets, whether it be doctrines, how they spend money or what goes on inside of any of their buildings, even if they claim it is sacred, they are clearly not affiliated with Jesus.

Jesus said, “You will know the truth and the truth shall make you free,” (John 8:32) and the truth has nothing to fear from questions. If you are not allowed to ask questions or learn about the faith except from approved sources than they are absolutely positively hiding something and you should get out. Don’t walk, run.