Multiple Currents within the Mainstream

I can think of other ones –

Pop Mormons and intellectual Mormons. One lot tend towards the tacky and simple, whereas the other lot intellectualize it all, perhaps too much.

I also think the Liahona/Iron Rod division is a valid one.

Converts and BICs have radically different experiences, as do those from “Deseret” and the rest.

I just had my mom visiting for a couple weeks. She cracks me up because she really likes to stir the pot on ideas in the church, especially how women are treated and how impressed she is with people who break rules for valid reasons, and are not focused on the letter of the law. She likes to play devil’s advocate sometimes to make it interesting. She’s a hoot.

However, she considers herself very “mainstream” mormon with liberal views, and would be offended if someone called her a radical mormon, or a maverick, or heretical in any way (and I don’t think she is…but certain groups in the church would definitely characterize her ideas as such).

In some ways, the currents are more alike then they are different. It often depends on our point of view, I think.

cwald, maybe you have been – since it might be necessary to swim against the stream a bit to leave the middle of the river and reach a place more toward the edges where you would enjoy swimming. Also, perhaps those in the middle create their own mini-current that kind of swirls around them and makes it harder for people to break free. I just know it’s possible to swim outside the middle and still be swimming in the stream.

In most ways, I am as mainstream as it gets…Everyone knows I am fully committed to the Church, so my opinions aren’t viewed as threatening or argumentative or non-mainstream. I don’t think I’m the exception as far as my actual views being slightly (or even significantly) different than others. I think there are LOTS of members who are like me in that regard, but most of them aren’t as comfortable expressing their differing views as I am. However, I think there are many who don’t want or need to try to construct their own puzzle. They are fine with taking the puzzle built by others and living within it – and most of them live righteous, productive, caring lives. I don’t begrudge them their perspective, since it works for them.

I guess you could say that the traditional LDS doctrines work for most active members at least well enough that they haven’t had problems with them to the point that they felt compelled to leave yet. However, I think many of these active members go along with some of this not so much because they really want to or are completely content with it as much as simply because they think that’s what they are supposed to do and that it’s what others expect out of them. The problem is that the Church expects so much conformity in terms of specific beliefs (testimony) and obedience to strict rules (temple worthiness) that many members don’t have much tolerance for anyone that openly disagrees with some of these doctrines and policies and they think significant diversity of beliefs should not exist at all in the Church. Rather than bending much to accommodate some reasonable differences of opinion the Church is so rigid about things that it fails completely in many cases when members give up on it and become inactive or leave.

Personally, I don’t think “mainstream” is a very good word to describe most orthodox practicing Mormons because the Church has become so extreme compared to much of the rest of the world with things like insisting that drinking beer is a terrible sin and expecting members to sacrifice so much time and money for the sake of the Church. It’s almost gotten to the point that if you ever have much fun then it must be a sin of some kind. That’s one of the main reasons there are so many inactive members because many of them basically think that if they are already breaking some of these rules like the WoW then they just don’t belong in the Church and there’s no point in having much of anything to do with it.