I’m pretty sure everyone has little culture and “x-type-of-person” things in the church that irk them. I get frustrated with bowties passing the sacrament, for example. Or when people bless “by the power” rather than “by the authority”. But there’s just way too many of these little things for church leaders to spend all their time micro-managing all of them and correcting everyone. And usually when people get micro-managed they don’t take it very well anyway and get all uppity about the church leader not also micro-managing all of THEIR pet-gospel-peeves. It gets messy very fast and this is what happens when we don’t teach raw principles and let the people govern themselves. Particularly when its blurry whether what they’re doing is, strictly speaking, wrong. Preparing for doomsday seems fine to me as long as they do not leave the other undone?

For the record, I have once heard an apostle teach directly that food storage doesn’t mean “guns to fight off starving people”, though I don’t remember where or who.

Of course I’m also of the opinion that these things are functionally useful as well.

On the subject of the Apocalypse, I don’t see any point in continuing to emphasize it. To me there are much better reasons to de-emphasize it than there are for continuing to obsess over it. Certain leaders of the Church have tried to force Mormonism into the conservative Christian camp, and Mormonism doesn’t fit well. A continued emphasis on the Apocalypse seems like an overt attempt to narrow the gap between us and conservative Christianity. Not a development that I find very appealing.

My second objection is that it catastrophizes things: if we are truly hoarding food and guns instead of preparing to meet God, that seems like a case where dramatic correction is needed. We must immediately stop hoarding food and guns and start preparing to meet God instead. We must put vain material things out of our minds and focus on inner spiritual truth. And so on.

But I don’t think it’s nearly so clear cut. Sometimes there really are ice storms, and when my yard was full of downed branches and I didn’t have an effective way to cook food, I was extremely grateful for the guys who knew how to work a chain saw and who brought over a spare gas cooker, and I was glad that they thought about material preparation, and I can’t guarantee that I would have agreed with their interpretation of the second amendment. My open-carry neighbor was a diligent home teacher. I can’t say that they weren’t preparing to meet God.

And, finally, I think the “we” formulation ends up being exclusionary, although that was not the intent behind it. When you write “we hoard food and guns,” it sounds very much like a definition. What is a non-gun-hoarding Mormon to make of it? One option is to accept one’s alienation from Mormonism (according to the “we hoard food and guns” definition). A second possibility is to reject the definition. Another option is to request a more precise definition.

In the future, I will try to remember to word things more precisely. Or maybe include the following essay on why I include nut cases I violently disagree with as “us”.

See, from my perspective at the opposite far left end of the Mormon political spectrum, I suppose I look at most all Mormons as to the right of my position, and I still consider myself Mormon, so those nuts all the way to the right of the political spectrum are still *MY* tribe. Still “us” and “we”. I can see how you only want the orthodox considered as “we Mormons” because to imply that the nut cases are typical Mormons is an insult to the group. So, you won’t consider me Mormon either as most Mormons would be quite insulted to have me considered as Mormon.

And, sadly, I don’t know whether to include myself among “Mormons” or decide I am a left wing nut case fringe and that it is really me that the tribe doesn’t want. See, I fear that if the right wing fringe of the church is emotionally kicked out by “us” intellectuals and disowned, then I as left wing fringe also am emotionally kicked out. (as the church has officially done to so many feminist, or gay rights supporting Mormons already) The church excommunicates the left fringe more often than it does the right fringe. So, according to that, the right fringe is much more “Mormon” than I am.

So, as much as my right wing, Trump voting, gun toting, neighbors irritate me, I still want a church big enough to say “we Mormons” and consider them as part of “us.” I think “we” Mormons also make the mistake of making our tent too small or making a big difference between cultural beliefs or “official” correlated beliefs. Both cultural Mormon beliefs and correlated Mormon beliefs are Mormon beliefs and trying to make a clean line between them isn’t really possible. Sure, some of the cultural Mormon beliefs are a bit twisted up *in my opinion,* but in my Mormon neighbor’s opinions, I am on the road to hell for allowing a gay married couple to sleep in the same bed at my house and for thinking women should be ordained, or voting for H. They for certain see me as less “Mormon” than what they see themselves.

By saying “we” for the mistakes “some” Mormons make, I hold all of us responsible for working to correct the errors. If I said, “those nut case people who call themselves Mormon” you would have understood one point but missed another. To say it as “them” then I make them “other” and not part of my tribe. I make them the only party responsible for correcting unChristlike attitudes. But as long as I call myself Mormon, then I need to work on all of us to make the whole Mormon tribe more Christlike. It is like if one person in my family is alcoholic, I can say “they” have a problem, or I can say we as a family have a problem and then do what I can to fix our problem. I was taught in my family counseling classes that whenever one member of the family has a problem, the whole family has a problem. It is the same for my tribe.

We have a problem that apocoliptic teachings are abused. We enable that by not calling them out when they preach things we feel are not right, just as in a family, the nondrinkers enable the drinker.

But I suppose it is easier to divide Mormons into righteous and unrighteous, fringe and center categories, correlated, cafeteria, and hobby categories than it is to explain with every comment I make that I want us all to be responsible for each other as if we are all the same tribe. So it should be my wording that changes, even if I have to speak a language that divides us into us and them. Ick.

But the mistake you are making is taking them as representative of typical Mormon belief and practice. What you wrote (“Instead of preparing our inner selves and our home to meet God, we hoard food and guns. We act as if our survival is more important than the quality of our soul. The preaching on preparedness is all about a hoard of food and not about how Christ is going to judge us”) just isn’t at all an accurate representation of Mormon belief or practice. I don’t accept your use of “we” to describe a fringe as the whole. And I have certainly heard it taught that part of the reason for food storage is to help our neighbors. I though everybody knew that, actually.

Of course there are things about gun culture in the western U.S. or at church to discuss, maybe even things about it that are indefensible. But that critique has to be founded in reality rather than in exaggeration or overgeneralization about what Mormons teach and do.

I thought I was very clear that I believe the things I mentioned were abuses of, or perversions of proper doctrine. Of course I have never heard survivalist crap taught from the top church leadership. They don’t teach it. But people on a local level in many places do.

And anyone who has never heard the extreme survivalists, well I envy you. I grew up in Provo and we had several of these John Bircher nut cases in the ward. They would bare their “testimony” every month and talk about crap like this, how we were all going to need guns to protect ourselves on the long walk back to Misouri. Now I live in Southern Utah and know people who are of the same mentality as Cliven Bundy (in fact, I don’t live too far from the Bundy ranch) and people here still spout this survivalist stuff in church as if it is the gospel.

I am VERY well aware that that kind of stuff is not the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is why I mentioned it as an abuse of the teachings on the apocalypse.

It bothers me that people who believe this are allowed to stand up in church and teach this stuff as if it was gospel and they do not seem to ever be corrected by the leadership. People don’t want to offend the nut cases by telling them they are preaching false doctrine. When have you ever heard a GA specifically state that guns are not recommended for food storage, or that part of storing food in case of a disaster is so we will have some to share with friends, neighbors and strangers after the hurricane, earthquake, whatever. Of course I have never seen guns on the recommended list of things to store. The church does not teach that. But it fails to teach against it, perhaps because like some here, they have never heard it in a church meeting?

But in line with your call to be adults, not children, I can’t agree with your final paragraph. The attitudes and beliefs you describe are things I have never encountered in all the wards I’ve lived, including in some deep red, gun-toting places. Perhaps there were a few people who thought like that, but they never talked like that, and the people who talked always included spiritual preparation in the discussion. I’ve never heard even the least suggestion that firearms replace food supply. There is a lunatic fringe to everything, including Mormonism. What you’re describing is a very small part of the outer fringe. Don’t mistake that for actual Mormon beliefs as taught in our curriculum, preached by the apostles, popularized by Deseret Book and the like, commemorated by monuments and reenactments, incorporated into daily lived religious practice, celebrated in our ordinances, and all the other things that suggest something is part of the inner logic of Mormonism.

It was members who created the doomsday expectation. Even so, general church leaders seem to have done little to correct the understanding.

I think there are a lot of ways that all of the teachings about the second coming are abused. Roger pointed out one with the idea of taking care of our stewardship over our earth. A second one that bugs me is survivalism. And Clark pointed out one with his idea that people think of it as a Mad Max theme park. The idea that a lot of people will burn, while we saints sit and cheer the end of evil, is itself very evil. So people who think others will burn and are glad, they themselves will be burning. If you think it isn’t you, well, it is.

Roger’s objection to apocolipticism is really an objection to one of the many ways end of time talk is abused by lazy, selfish people. His objection is that too often people who think Christ is coming really soon, are counting on Christ cleaning up after us. They ignore the pollution coal and oil use cause because Christ is coming and the earth will be renewed. So, they interpret “renewed” as Christ is going to fix the water and air and soil pollution, so we don’t need to got to the extra expense and hard work of cleaning up after ourselves. People act like small children, unconcerned by the mess they make of their bedroom because Mom is going to clean up after them.

But we can never become gods by acting like small children.

Instead we need to be more like Mom and hustle about cleaning house before our important visitor comes. Do we really want Jesus coming to the earth and not wanting to set foot on the dirty ground or breath the Utah Vally inversion. Imagine Christ hovering above the Salt Lake Temple just above the inversion layer and thinking to himself, “Ewwwwww, yuck, I can’t go down there into that crud.”

Yes, the earth will be renewed….by us people. By our hard word and expense. Christ never said he was cleaning up after us and we are making a lot more work for ourselves in cleaning up than we need to.

And finally, I get really frustrated with the way we as Mormons prepare. Instead of preparing our inner selves and our home to meet God, we hoard food and guns. We act as if our survival is more important than the quality of our soul. The preaching on preparedness is all about a hoard of food and not about how Christ is going to judge us. People talk about how your supply of food won’t help unless you have guns to defend it and brag about how they have stocked up on guns and amo. Then someone’s jokes about how you don’t needs to store food if you store guns and amo, because the guns will allow you to take the food of your good Mormon neighbor’s. The whole focus is too often on survival. So, just how will God judge us by what we do with all that stored food when our hungry neighbors come to us for help? Will we defend our food and water supply with the guns we stocked up on? or welcome our neighbor to share what we have? What would Jesus do?