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My initial observations about our survey over the past 10 days. There were 22 people weighing in on questions about god, but only 8 on each of Keeping Covenants, Honesty and Temple Covenants; and 9 on each of Unresolved sins and Worthiness. Please take a moment and comment on those questions where you haven’t yet weighed in. the trend of 22 at the beginning to 8 at the end is pretty typical, but I’d sure like to see as many weigh in as they can.
The top issue areas for participants were:
Restoration – 50% could not answer yes.
Sustaining LDS Leaderhsip – 43% could not answer yes
Tithing – 42%
Keeping Covenants (non-temple version
– 38%.The top areas where participants answered in a compliant way:
God – only 9% had an issue here
Worthiness and unresolved sins – 11%
Holy Ghost – 12%
Atonement, honesty, and unresolved sins – 13%
Jesus Christ and Affiliating with Apostates – 17% (interesting pairing).
Temple covenants – 25%
Word of Wisdom – 31% (although there were some very creative interpretations).
The key issues seem to be Restoration, linking to the history of the church, and sustaining Church leadership today. These areas of disaffection correspond well to the work by Dehlin on why LDS are disaffected. Tithing, keeping covenants, and word of wisdom follow, which LDS TBM’s might impute as ‘desire to sin’. I sense from the comments, however, that tithing is affected by modern corporate policy, keeping covenants was a bit confused as to what covenants were, so I’m not sure this is significant. As for word of wisdom, it appears that disaffection preceeded word of wisdom non-compliance for those not keeping the current church definition of word of wisdom.
Most respondents had some kind of belief in god, Jesus Christ, the holy ghost, and the atonement, although about 1/4 of the respondents reflected some fairly unorthodox beliefs. Most had no issues with honesty, or sympathizing with bona-fide apostates. All respondent felt worthy to go to the temple, although one responded that he didn’t think the church would think so – importantly, by self assessment, all felt worthy.
Obviously this small sample is statistically meaningless, although my sense is that for the people coming to StayLDS, the key issues holding them back from temple attendance is a loss in testimony about the restoration and church leadership, and not worthiness as a primary cause.
As this started with a thought to revise the guidance on answering temple recommend questions, perhaps more attuned to belief rather than evasion, I think we’ve succeeded in identifying many very good and legitimate ways to answer the questions. Some of the most important findings are:
1. The need to pre-assess your answers to questions before the interview. This ins’t to try to practice answers, but rather, to really take a personal inventory, and if there is an area for concern, determine for yourself ahead of time how to resolve issue prior to the interview.
2. All respondents feel personally worthy to enter the temple. This finding surprised and encouraged me.
3. People are much harder on themselves than they need to be to legitimately answer these questions. It tells me that if someone legitimately wants to go to the temple, there isn’t much that has to be done to go there.
4. There are legitimate reasons to not want to go to the temple, and not seek a recommend — and that’s ok.
5. This is really a great bunch of people — the answers were courteous, thoughtful, honest (from what I could tell), and I don’t think people supressed what they really felt.
Thoughts?
Quote:People are much harder on themselves than they need to be to legitimately answer these questions.
That has been my belief for a long, long time.
Personally, it has been an interesting process. There were good responses from all of you that made me ask some tough questions about what I really believe. I also ask myself, do I really want or need a TR? Do I really want or need to go to the Temple to be more spiritual or closer to God?
If I choose to get a TR again, I will be in a better or honest position during the TR interview.
I agree with this statement:
Quote:People are much harder on themselves than they need to be to legitimately answer these questions.
Thanks to everyone that participated. You’ve helped me alot to better define what I believe.
Mike from Milton.
Wayfarer, thanks for going to all the effort to put that together and summarize the results, and for sharing your own personal views. I appreciated reading everyone’s responses … very enlightening. IN case you’re interested, I found that once we got past the first few questions, the questions lost any relevance for me personally. While I am concerned about my relationship with god, I can take or leave the rest, I guess, and so I was much less likely to respond.
As we progressed through the questions, I found myself getting more and more irritated. I finally just quit responding. Sure, I understand the church does this to admit folks into their temples, but, you know what…I don’t think it is productive or healthy to have the church poking it’s nose into the personal lives of it’s members like this. I think they have the right to make their rules…but I don’t think they have a right to insert themselves between man/woman and the gods. Yeah, I understand that the TR is suppose to be a self reflection…but it is not. It is used as a litmus test to determine loyalty to the institution, and a tool used to control behavior…by enforcing obedience with promise of exaltation.
That is wrong. To me.
And I know it is used this way, because when I got accused of apostasy, they grilled me about the first four TR questions for hours. I have since learned that at least two other acquaintances had the same type of interviews…first four questions….
Like Doug said…after the first two questions…what is the point? It is just a litmus test, IMO.
I’m done with that kind of stuff.
cwald wrote:As we progressed through the questions, I found myself getting more and more irritated. I finally just quit responding.
Hmmm. i don’t really agree with the process either, but it is what it is. sometimes i have to ask, “how important is it?”wayfarer wrote:cwald wrote:As we progressed through the questions, I found myself getting more and more irritated. I finally just quit responding.
Hmmm. i don’t really agree with the process either, but it is what it is. sometimes i have to ask, “how important is it?”Good question.
I think going through the TR questions was a good idea. I just got to the point where I had nothing productive to add.
Sent from my SCH-I500 using Tapatalk 2
wayfarer wrote:There were 22 people weighing in on questions about god, but only 8 on each of Keeping Covenants, Honesty and Temple Covenants; and 9 on each of Unresolved sins and Worthiness. Please take a moment and comment on those questions where you haven’t yet weighed in. the trend of 22 at the beginning to 8 at the end is pretty typical, but I’d sure like to see as many weigh in as they can.
I have found this to be a helpful exercise. I had to take some time to contemplate some of the questions. I have taken about a week mulling over possible interpretations of the Restoration of the Gospel. If I had answered immediately I would have answered no. But now I believe that I am prepared to answer yes.
I do not currently have a TR. I do not believe that I could answer “correctly” to all of the questions. In the coming year I would like to baptize DD. I assume that the bishop will go through these questions in determining whether or not to issue permission to perform a live ordinance. I also assume the the greater percentage of questions I can answer “correctly” the better my chances.
So in summary – My 3 biggest benefits from this exercise have been:
1) Introspective analysis and formation of positive belief.
2) Improved chance of performing live ordinance when the time comes.
3) Yet another opportunity to build meaningful bridges between where I am now and my faith heritage. This is also important in being able to interact with and speak the lingo of more traditional believers.
wayfarer wrote:Obviously this small sample is statistically meaningless
The sample is also self selected. Of all the members, how many have a faith crisis? Of those that have a faith crisis, how many seek out online support groups? Of those that seek out online support groups, how many gravitate to the “stayLDS” model? Of those that come here how many post? Of those that post how many answered all the TR survey questions?
I think that we can learn important lessons from the survey questions, but there are a number of limitations applying these lessons to all members or even to all disaffected members.
cwald wrote:I think going through the TR questions was a good idea. I just got to the point where I had nothing productive to add.
I understand. The reality is that most of the participants here are good with the first two and the last two. and, given the last two are a summary of personal perception of worthiness, the rest don’t really matter.but they ask, and we are basically honest people. so what happens is because we feel we can’t answer honestly to what we perceive as their intent, we deny ourselves of the blessings of the temple. so what happens is that an unthinking TBM who justifies his personal hatred of gays by the political position of the church goes to the temple, and another person who cannot support what he perceives as the position of the church leaders on gays stays out. and both brethren are wrong, but the questions don’t ask whether we love and pray for our enemies, so the first guy is off the hook.
so, can we be reasonable? without dissembling, can we answer the questions how we feel is right? i think we can, but it requires us to sort out what we believe, and then be confident about it.
i wonder if knowing what you do now, would you provide different answers to the questions asked to you during the four hour inquisition on the first four questions?
wayfarer wrote:so, can we be reasonable? without dissembling, can we answer the questions how we feel is right?
What some people see as reasonable, others might see as deceptive, though what the intent of that deception might be, I’m not sure. So
arewe free to do this — to reframe the rules of a game which we once clearly understood to have one meaning to a set of entirely new ones that we by necessity make up as we go along? Who “owns” the temple (not the building itself, but the whole experience surrounding it) anyway? I haven’t the faintest idea what the answers to these questions are, or if I even care.
Thanks for the summary and for the exercise. As cwald stated, although perhaps in different words, my biggest reaction to this exercise was the “wrongness” of the Mormon church using worthiness as a gatekeeper to entering in and having a religious/spiritual experience. At the core it seems exactly opposite of the core of what Christ taught in the New Testament. It seems exclusionary, judgmental, Pharasitic, etc.
I do however, think it would be very productive to review the specific covenants that are entered into when receiving an endowment for the first time before attending the temple for the endowment. A person probably should not attend an endowment session unless they feel that they are prepared to make and keep these covenants. Once you are in the temple the peer pressure is too extreme to decline – besides too much is happening too fast to really understand what you are committing to. Unfortunately, I fear, there is never really a point that an LDS member is really cognizant of making a commitment. 8 is too young to really understand the ramifications & the temple covenants are made on the spot without really having the opportunity to think it through (it’s too much like checking the terms & conditions user agreements online.)
However, as a secondary item I was definitely able to understand the whole concept that was being discussed of the “spirit of the law” in these questions. I found it interesting that those of us who seemed to be the most frustrated were the two ends of the spectrum – those closest to TBM had a hard time with this approach and those of us the furthest from TBMs seemed to have a hard time with this approach. There are definitely times that “spirit of the law” applies, but to me the line between rationalization and searching for the deeper spiritual meaning is very fuzzy – there were also times that IMO it went way past deeper meaning and well into rationalization.
I also found it interesting that a number of the questions seemed to be worded in such a way that it was confusing even ambiguous to understand the intent of the question. If find this problematic because very often this means that the local priesthood leader will provide the interpretation – the not affiliating with apostates questions is probably the best example of this.
I also suspect that TBM are much harder on themselves for these questions that those who answered on this board.
I just haven’t had enough time to keep up with all the questions and by the time I participated in 1 or 2, others had already stated close to what I would have. Will go back and do the poll checking now though. Thank you for putting your time into this project. I think that when people start questioning the restoration, it opens the door to picking and choosing which of the other “shoulds” they should obey. There was an article I read some time ago called “centrality of beliefs” that indicates certain beliefs, when dislocated, cause a huge ripple effect. Deprogrammers, and people wishing to change others’ minds should seek those beliefs that are most central if they want to effect widespread changes in others’ beliefs.
Not that we are deprogrammers, but the principle applies here. The more central the belief, the greater the ripple effect.
If you picture a set of nested circles, I think God is at the center, then Christ, then the restoration. This group of the people made it past the God and Jesus epicenters, but feel down at the restoration, which then led to a break-down in a wide variety of personal covenants and gospel habits found in the other questions.
Excellent point SD. Sent from my SCH-I500 using Tapatalk 2
PS….how are you feeling? Sent from my SCH-I500 using Tapatalk 2
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