Of course everyone has different experiences, and I’m not going to disagree with someone who says their experience was much worse than my own.

It’s funny, now that you mention it, I remember being afraid to Google Mormonism. Now there’s nothing that I can think of that I’d be afraid to Google. What a difference a few years make!

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i disagree with anyone who says mormonism is tame. As an obedient and faithful mormon mother of 4 children who GAVE herself to her husband in the temple and he RECEIVED her unto himself all while wearing a baker’s hat and a green apron i’m pretty sure i was in a cult.

i honestly feel brain damaged. i hope i can heal from the hell that is mormon womanhood someday.

What does mormonism promise the faithful mormon woman in the afterlife except another version of hell as one of her husband’s wives eternally bearing children. i knew something was wrong the first time i admitted to myself i absolutely dreaded the thought of the celestial kingdom.

It took 3 more years to work up the courage to google my own “religion.”

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I think correlation was designed to do exactly that – to turn a rather disparate grouping into a more cohesive, orthodox whole. Before correlation, things like homosexuality, breaking the word of wisdom, and even the role of women were less strictly controlled or punished. There was far more heterodoxy and -praxy and far more room for intellectualism and critical analysis of church doctrines and history. That all disappeared with correlation and ended up turning the church back into a very strictly monitored authoritarian religion. The church leaders who enacted correlation didn’t like the diverse nature and sought to control and unify it. To then it certainly seemed like a positive thing to enact changes which would make people have less diverse beliefs and practises, and would discourage people from going off-script. To most of us here though, I think we recognise that as limiting basic human freedoms and being the root of a lot of the homophobia, anti-feminism, and anti-intellectualism that so plagues and harms the church.

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Regarding the point several people have made about the LDS church being perhaps less cultish now than it used to be–I wonder if size is a factor. Lots of Jonathan’s questions require direct contact between general members and either leader(s) or real zealots. As an organization gets bigger, it’s hard to admit only the zealots. Then some of the people tasked with keeping the organization pure end up being half-hearted and the organization as a whole becomes less controllable.

Craig, regarding your point, I wonder if Correlation wasn’t the Church’s attempt to respond to this issue.

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Two photos. The first shows a Japanese kamikaze flying his plane into a US warship. The second shows an old Japanese pilot huddled behind the barricade at the entrance to his small Pacific island cave, twenty years after his country’s surrender.

Or maybe it was these two: One is a photo taken during the war showing a column of goose-stepping Nazi soldiers. The other was taken twenty years later and shows a group of American neo-Nazis posing in German WWII military costumes.

Or maybe I should just register my agreement with Craig’s last paragraph and step away from the keyboard

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@LdChino: Can you expand what you mean? I don’t quite follow.

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Contra those arguing that the early church was somehow more cultish than its modern iterations, I tend to think that the presence (or absence) of distinctive mutually held animating ideas matters.

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I think it’s more like a continuum where one organisation can be compared to others with comparative degree of cultishness, but I think almost any organisation which has hierarchy inherently has certain elements which are cultish. That I think makes it less useful to make a two category determination of “cult” and “not-cult”. Perhaps giving a rating of 98% cultish or 57% depending on how many and to what degree the characteristics of a cult are (or aren’t) satisfied.

This is just all really just a thought experiment to satisfy my need to categorise everything into neat little packages, tied up with strings.

To speak to the idea that early Mormonism was more cultish and modern Mormonism less, I agree mostly, though I think there are certain cult-aspects which modern Mormonism has adopted which weren’t present or perhaps nearly as widespread until the past 50 years or so (Correlation resulting with very rigid rules of orthopraxy and -doxy being the main one which springs to mind). I also think that Mormonism became less cultish for a while in the early 20th century before becoming more authoritarian again.

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A great book about addiction (with some about al-anon) is beautiful boy by David Sheff.

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I really hope people don’t use this list as a bludgeon to beat another person’s group. I think it would be far more valuable as a way to evaluate human nature, our personal history, a group that we want to join or are a member of, etc.

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