"I have no use for your kings."

This is for encouragement, ideas, and support for people going through a faith transition no matter where you hope to end up. This is also the place to laugh, cry, and love together.
Post Reply
Reuben
Posts: 1455
Joined: Sat Oct 28, 2017 3:01 pm

"I have no use for your kings."

Post by Reuben » Tue Sep 25, 2018 4:08 am

My latest addition to the pithy statements I could respond with should anyone ever ask me why I haven't been to church is this: "I have no use for your kings."

History time.

My family is visiting Scottish historical sites while on vacation. (Some of it is very cool. Yesterday, my wife played the pipe organ in Dunfermline Abbey for her distant ancestor Robert the Bruce, who is interred there under the pulpit.) One thing I've been repeatedly stuck by is how much work old monarchs put into establishing their authority.

Oh, sometimes they earned their authority, by protecting their people, doing good, or being wise and just. But most of the time, they just asserted it. They married the right nobles. They had feasts and parades. They built grand palaces with statues of themselves and royal ancestors and Greek heroes all set on the same level. They buddied up with the church in Rome and chiseled their names on cathedrals.

It was all theater designed to elicit loyalty. Look how French and fashionable I am! Look at my prosperity and might! See how I am like Hercules! Behold my royal forebears! God himself says I'm your king!

Why? Because authority that isn't founded on loyalty is tenuous and weak. A king who hasn't earned loyalty needs great PR and God on his side to get it. The kingdom's stability depends on his people, especially the nobility, buying in.

The church is presided over by 15 kings who protect us from evil, and are good, wise and just. They assure us of these facts! And they well should be good, wise and just, because they and their nobility hold the power to save or destroy us. Oh, that's not enough, you say? How about this, then: God himself says they're our kings.

So much of Mormonism is theater designed to elicit loyalty to her kings. Voting to sustain or oppose? Theater. Singing "Follow the Prophet"? Theater. Priesthood lines of authority? Theater. Denigrating doubters and "the world"? Making Joseph Smith an epic hero? Writing whitewashed Sunday School manuals? Building new temples without filling the old ones? Bearing testimony that the church is true? Licking the president's boots in General Conference talks? Theater, all theater, designed to elicit loyalty, lest the kingdom destabilize and her people succumb to evil.

When life opened my eyes, I saw that I was being protected from nothing supernatural, that members were having evil done to them in the name of good, and that the Mormon kings' claims to God's authority were exactly as strong as King James V of Scotland's. Most of the theater became vanity: actors on a stage, begging and demanding my approval for unsupportable and meaningless reasons.

Have Mormonism's kings ever truly earned my loyalty? Yes, sometimes. Is theater ever necessary? Of course! But so little earning and so much theater tells me that they don't deserve much.

I have no problem being loyal to Mormonism's people, who have been as good to me as they know how to be. But I have no use for her kings.
Learn to doubt the stories you tell about yourselves and your adversaries.


User avatar
w2mz
Posts: 246
Joined: Tue Oct 18, 2016 3:38 pm

Re: "I have no use for your kings."

Post by w2mz » Tue Sep 25, 2018 9:19 am

Great insights. The short version that appeals to my low brow humor is:

“Not my circus, not my monkeys”
The church has engineered your eternal family into a commodity that can be purchased with an annual fee. The fact that full tithing payment is a requirement for saving ordinances is the biggest red flag imaginable. Hagoth

User avatar
profit_seizer
Posts: 55
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 12:59 pm
Location: rose city
Contact:

Re: "I have no use for your kings."

Post by profit_seizer » Tue Sep 25, 2018 10:35 am


Reuben wrote:"I have no use for your kings."
Hellllllllllll yeeeeeeeah! The whole post is fantastic but this is beautiful. We are going to talk about agency, we're going to talk about equality, we're going to talk about God being no respecter of persons, but then we're going to have literal kings in a literal kingdom? F*ck that!

Leaving the church was about taking my life back, taking my agency back, fighting for real equality, and pulling down power.
"The history of human thought recalls the swinging of a pendulum which takes centuries to swing. After a long period of slumber comes a moment of awakening." —Peter Kropotkin

Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 43 guests