It has been stated that if the church is true, it’s arguably the most important thing to know about in the world. It’s the most important news we can share with anyone in the universe. Eternal salvation is at stake. The truth should be trumpeted from the rooftops!
Wherever you have come from, shout it from the rooftops: “The kingdom of God has been restored to the earth by the Prophet Joseph Smith.” And if you suffer from acrophobia—that is fear of heights—don’t climb the roof, but simply stay on the ground and give your friends and neighbors this same message: “The kingdom of God has been restored to the earth by the Prophet Joseph Smith.”
Shout It from the Rooftops, General Conference April 1976, Elder Jacob de Jager, Of the First Quorum of the Seventy
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1976/04/shout-it-from-the-rooftops
Church members spend an inordinate amount of time proclaiming the Gospel. They send their children on missions to proselytize full-time to strangers in most nations of the world. They push their Americanized religion and culture onto any and every other culture they can manage. They come with the message that they have the secret sauce that no one else does. They have the “fullness” and are willing to share it with the goodness of their own hearts. But of course, it comes at a price.
Members and missionaries don’t care who they offend or who they trouble with their message. They believe it to be true, or at least that’s what they’ve been told. They rehearse memorized passages of correlated lessons designed specifically to evoke emotional responses. They don’t mention and often don’t even see the cost. They put on their own blinders and can’t even see the hypocrisy in their missionary work.
Would They Want to Know the Inverse?
But what about the inverse? Is it also as important for believing members to know if it is NOT true? Should Mormons be pressed with this question? Should freshly de-converted ex-Mormons proselytize to members of the church? Should they go door-to-door asking believing members this question? Should they know if it is not true? Would they even want to know?
Whether you were born into the church or muddled into believing it via some combination of missionary work, warm feelings, and correlated (whitewashed) church history it’s an important possibility to consider. Do they sit in the pew as a member of the church because it is their tradition? Do they stay because they find it useful in their own life? Do they show up and serve and pay tithing only because they believe it is the One True Church?
There are plenty of members who are happy to just keep the status quo. They shut up and do their part as a cog in the great Mormon machine. They are eager to be a part of the stone “rolling down the mountain without hands”.
There are others who are invested because they truly believe (or at least hope) it is true. There may be good things in the church and in the community, but they show up because they believe it is literally true. They make life decisions based on that presumption: who to marry, when to marry, when to have kids, how many kids, where to go to school, what to study, which job to take, and so on! Every church member deserves to understand that we do what we do with our lives because the church at least guides these decisions. Have members given consent for this? If the presumption that the church is true, turns out to not be what it claims to be, what does it do to all these life-altering decisions?
Would You Want to Know?
This is the red-pill blue-pill dilemma from The Matrix. Would you want to know if the reality of your life was different than you thought and expected? Different than you had been taught to believe it was? Are you saving up treasures in heaven at the expense of enjoying your single life on earth?
What if everything you believed about yourself, your purpose in life, the world around you and the hereafter was founded on the fanciful imaginings of a 19th-century self-proclaimed prophet? What if every decision you made was based on the assumption that the religion you cherished and embraced was absolutely true when in reality it wasn’t? Tracy Tennant, mother of ten and devout Mormon embarks on a spiritual journey that leads her to the startling truth.
Mormonism, the Matrix, and Me: My Journey from Kolob to Calvary
https://www.tracytennant.com/books/mormonism-the-matrix-and-me/
Into The Rabbit Hole
If you would rather have the truth, no matter what it was, than live believing something that could be a lie, you would explore the rabbit hole. Once you see though, there’s no turning back. Have you taken the leap? Did you follow the rabbit? Did the red pill open your eyes? What was the transition experience like? Join the movement and share your own faith transition story at wasmormon.org.
More reading:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_pill_and_blue_pill
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaZ7O1sbKVc
- https://www.instagram.com/p/Bmex4Zrluhi/
- https://blog.nocoolnametom.com/matrix-inception-exmormon
- Mormonism, the Matrix, and Me: My Journey from Kolob to Calvary
- https://www.tracytennant.com/books/mormonism-the-matrix-and-me/
- No Surprise that Every Ex-Mormon is Still a Missionary