tales of a mormon teen
sorry to the dead ppl i baptized
From ages 14 to 17, I was a devout Mormon. I was at church all day Sunday, all night Wednesday, went on Mormon excursions, and hung out with mostly Mormon kids. I had to be baptized to become an official Mormon and the steps were laid out for me:
1) 6-week course learning the religion inside and out.
2) Spend time with the Elders, asking questions.
3) Get baptized.
The Elders only came to my house once. We sat on my couch and they asked if I had read the Book of Mormon. I hadn’t read the whole thing. They laughed because reading the whole thing seemed impossible to everyone. They asked if I had any questions. I had questions but I didn’t know how to ask them. I asked if Mormons were Christian and they said yes. The only real difference was that God stopped speaking to other Christians. God never stopped speaking to Mormons... This made sense to me.
I’d really wanted to find my religion. I wanted something to grasp onto where the kids my age and the adults in the church weren’t hypocritical. I had serious life experience with Pentecostal. I tried non-denominational Christian megachurches. I tried Catholicism. I tried Baptist churches. My experience was the same in each: no matter what the rules were, people were breaking them. I heard gossip about pastors who were fired for assaulting children, or about leaders of the church who were committing adultery. I saw people my age engaging in sex but screaming about saving themselves until marriage. This always messed with my head. I didn’t like all the lying! I wanted to find a religion where people stood up for what’s right, believed it, and actually stuck by their word.
I went to Mormon church, took a few seminary classes, and hung out with the Mormon crowd. They were as righteous as they said they were. No one was having sex, no one was doing drugs, no one was lying, none of the old men were creeping on teens. It was my first religious safe space. I could trust these people. I went to a sleep away Mormon girls camp, and it wasn’t until well into my adulthood that I realized I had a major crush on my camp counselor. At the time, I just knew I wanted to be around her. She was so pretty and so Mormon! I wanted to be... like her???? I guess?
The whole camp sat around a big campfire, singing along with the cool-acoustic-guitar-playing Mormon. We sang along to church songs and once in a while they’d throw in an acoustic pop song everyone knew. We ate s'mores, played outdoor games, ran around in the woods, did church crafts, and had a talent show. It was similar to the Vacation Bible Schools (VBS) I’d gone to as a kid. There were bunk beds. We ate soggy french fries and bagged cheeseburgers. We signed each other’s pillowcases. I felt “normal” the way normal looked on TV. I felt like the kids in Mary-Kate and Ashley movies! Kids who had friends and did extracurriculars!
Having a group of like-minded people to do activities with was key to me feeling normal. There was a sense of belonging that I’d longed for as a kid, whether or not I realized that’s what I wanted. Being Mormon gave me the opportunity to feel like I was a part of something. I also appreciated having some structure in my life. My mom saw herself as one of the “cool parents” who didn’t set many boundaries or restrictions in our home life. This seems great in theory, but in reality it was difficult. To be a kid with no structure meant I was constantly wondering if I was going to get in trouble or something was off limits. I rarely tried anything new for fear it would cause disruption in our household. Having a classic Mormon structure was helpful. Don’t have sex before you're married, don’t drink alcohol, don’t be a liar. Do treat people with kindness, make meals for people who need them, and show up every Sunday at 8am. Structure was something my child-mind needed, and Mormonism is where I found it. When it was time for the youth to take a road trip together, I enjoyed having to be at church early on a Saturday and needing to bring $10 for lunch.
All of us, aged 13 - 16, crowded in a van together on our way to Columbia, SC to visit the Temple. The Mormon Temple was a very sacred place. It wasn’t like a regular Mormon church where you show up to eat bread chunks, watch movies, and fall asleep during the slow hymns. The temple is where people go to do more extravagant things. One example is a Sealing which is for couple’s getting married, this is an ETERNAL Marriage Ceremony complete with complimentary baptism. The temple is also where people take their “endowments” which is where people get a new name and make promises to God, I think? And it’s where our van full of teens went to Baptize The Dead. About halfway to Columbia I started to understand the general concept of what we would be doing. We’d get baptized on behalf of someone who was not baptized when they were alive. They’d missed the opportunity by either not knowing what Mormonism was, never hearing about God, or being brainwashed into a different religion. Upon first hearing of this concept, I was confused.
“So, what if they don’t want to be Mormon?” I asked the van full of teenagers and our Elders, which were the 19 year old missionaries assigned to our town…aka also teenagers.
“Well, it’s not their fault for not knowing right? But, they don’t deserve to spend eternity in limbo because they didn’t have an opportunity to learn the truth.”
“What if their whole family is a different religion though and then we steal them from that afterlife and take them to ours.” I clarified my question.
“I mean, come on, you know there is only one afterlife. Besides, God wants all of us to be with him in Glory, no one should have to suffer because their family didn’t know any better.” one of the Elders told me. I got the sense that my curiosity was peaked a little too much for their liking. I nodded, because it was true, people don’t deserve punishment for things they do not know. I wasn’t quite sure how we could know all these dead people wanted to be Baptized, but it made sense to me they also wouldn’t know they wanted to be baptized, especially since they didn’t even know about baptism. So, maybe we were doing these people a solid.
From the second I entered the Temple I felt anxious. Now, anxiety and excitement feel similar in the body, a slight buzzing, a quick heart rate, mind racing, so… maybe I was PUMPED to get these DeadGuys BapTized! We were all given a full body white outfit, zipper from the crotch to the neck, to dawn during the process. We stood in a single-file-line that curled around the Baptism tub and down the temple corridor. The line was long, multiple vans of teenagers from all over the region had been bussed in and were about to be baptized on behalf of someone’s decaying carcass. I watched as some of the unknown teens got dunked in water and tried to move my ears around with the inside of my head to get the best audiovisual. It seemed like the grown man in the tub was mumbling on purpose. I couldn’t hear shit. “Gummalummajimbledoobedoo Amen.”
“Huh?” I accidentally said out loud
“SHHHHH” the regional teen collective whisper-yelled all at once. I tried to stop trying to hear, but it was instinctive. I needed to know exactly what was being said, as I was volunteering my body up for this practice!! My friend, Shantel was in front of me and gave me a thumbs up as she descended the stairs into the giant tub of clear water.
“Somethingsomethingsomething I baptize NAME-OF-A-DEAD-MAN in the name of the father, the son, and the holy ghost” Shantel plugs her nose and DUNK. She is completely submerged for just a second and pops back up in a flash. Then it was my turn. I descended the stairs and got dunked. I tried to memorize the name of the person I was baptized for as a way to honor them, but I forgot almost immediately, because I can’t memorize for shit. I had this deep fear that I’d show up to Heaven one day and the person I got baptized for would be like, “Bro, you were not supposed to baptize me!!” After we all got baptized on behalf of some wormfood that didn’t ask to be baptized, we drove 5 minutes down the street to eat burgers and fries at a fast food restaurant called RUSH’S. I was promised it would be the best burger I’d ever eaten, it was so much better than McDonalds! But I simply could not focus on food because I was concerned I’d been a part of a scheme to fuck up someone else’s afterlife!
In the Mormon world, when people stand up to talk about the miracles in their lives, what they’re grateful for, what they’re struggling with, or if they need us to pray for them, they approach the podium and say, “I know this church is true” before saying their piece. The phrase I had heard the most, remember the loudest, and associate the most with my experience in the Mormon religion: “I know this church is true.”
I said it once. After I was baptized, at church that Sunday everyone wanted me to say something. I didn’t want to say anything. I didn’t know what to say. Everyone told me to speak from my heart. And say what? At least I knew how to start. “I know this church is true.” I begged Shantel to come up with me. She said she would if I really wanted her to. And I REEEAAALLLY wanted her to. I brought her on stage, stood at the podium, said “I’m Dan and I know this church is true—” the rest I totally blacked out. I don’t know what I said, I don’t remember getting off stage. But I do know I never said that shit again.
There are three parts to the Sunday service. First, everyone sits in the main area and the Bishop talks, we drink grape juice and eat bread chunks, we pray together, we sing together, speakers from the congregation come up and say a few words. Then we split off by age group. Small groups have different activities—one group of teens watching a movie, one group learning about the next steps of Mormonism. Third, we split off by gender.
I was 15 in the teen girl group—the Mia Maids—and our classes were joint with the Laurels (16 to 17 year olds), so sometimes they got *racy.* One Sunday afternoon, I was sat in class learning about sex from a woman who was in the group called “Relief Society.” She was married at 19 and went on her Mormon mission to another country for two years while her husband went on a mission somewhere else. They both came home, she got pregnant, and he went off on another mission. She was home with this new baby, writing letters to her husband in Vietnam. He was trying to convert more people to Mormonism and could not use the phone/internet to talk to his wife or see his baby. They were what we call “Devout Mormon.”
Our class began with this newly adult, new mother holding up an Oreo. We all love Oreos. There was a box of them and we were ready for class to be over so we could all have whatever Oreos were left over after whatever weird thing our teaching was about to do.
“Who wants an Oreo?” she asked. We all did! We all love Oreos! She pulled apart the Oreo, licked the icing in the middle, put the cookie back on the spitty icing, and handed it to someone sitting in front of me. We all gasped in disgust. “Pass it around, whoever wants it can have it.”
The Oreo made its way around the room. By the time it reached me, it had been licked and in the paws of at least ten people. I passed it quickly, wondering what the lesson was going to be here. This, she tells us, is how our future husbands will feel if we are with another man before him. The Oreo lesson was teaching us to save ourselves for marriage. She taught me that my body is a temple. My body is a temple and if a man has anything to do with it, my temple is dirty. I would never find a husband if my temple was dirty because who wants to be with a dirty temple when they could find someone whose temple is clean? I am the spitty icing.
I thought it was weird, but I also thought sex was weird and dangerous so I was cool with it. I could get into my body being a temple and saving myself for marriage because it’s a great excuse to not have sex with people and I DID NOT want to be having sex with people.
Senior year in high school, Shantel got some new friends and started smoking weed. I felt like my world was crumbling. I thought I’d found a religion where no one did anything bad and here was the person who’d taught me about being Mormon… doing bad things. Soon after the weed smoking started, one of the outstanding young men at my church got someone pregnant. He was 16, she was 17—he was shunned by church members and stopped showing up on Sunday mornings. Until weeks later, when he decided to get married to the impregnated. Suddenly he was invited back and more involved than ever. People congratulated him on having a child and he started wearing suit jackets. He became one of the dudes who runs classes.
When I left for college I was already done with being Mormon.
I loved reading this!