So my sister moved to a new city, wanted to make friends, and started a hiking club. It got kinda big and a local reporter wrote a newspaper article on it. In the article they talked about community and such. They went a bit into how my sister was raised Mormon but left the church and how now she's into a bunch of other weird spiritual things like witchcraft, astrology, reiki, card readings, etc. It was a pretty fun article - but apparently my mom latched onto just the church part.
A couple months later and my family is gathered at my mom's for Christmas. And of course my mom brings the article up and says, "you just spent the whole interview dissing the church." It was a bit funny cause 80% of the article was about hiking. But my mom wasn't to be reasoned with. There was some back and forth, and I threw in that if my sister had a bad time with the church, she was well within her rights to talk about those experiences.
My mom reached her limit with that and kind of exploded, saying no one has the right to talk bad about any religion because it might affect others' faith. Crazy idea, but my siblings and I kind of just rolled our eyes and dropped it - there is no way a productive conversation will happen after she starts yelling. But we did tease her quite a bit over the next few hours by using the word "dis" a lot - "Hey, don't dis cranberry sauce." "All you do is dis astrology." - I could tell she was a bit embarrassed that she was the only one who ended up yelling (which honestly is progress with only that).
Anyway, Christmas day we get a video call from my youngest brother, who is serving a mission in Italy. It was nice, he said they were super busy and baptizing a lot of people which surprised me. I guess there are a bunch of refugees and asylum seekers there - which made more sense. I think he was a bit embarrassed to admit that they weren't having any luck with the actual Italians and that he was kinda only there to proselytize the immigrants. Anyway, after that he told some insane stories about people fleeing their homes for different reasons.
One story was about a Muslim (one of the more violent sects, I don't know which) who started investigating Christianity and was kicked out of his home and moved in with his brother. Then I guess his brother and him were jumped by angry Muslims specifically because they betrayed their faith. They were given the option to go back to the Muslim faith or be killed. The brother was killed, and the refugee was stabbed in the stomach but lived. Hence him fleeing to Italy (I don't wanna be insensitive to this horrific story, but in the moment, I definitely was and this is how it went down - sorry about that).
We were all pretty shocked by the stories, but me being a smart-mouth, said, "you should probably tell that investigator not to talk so badly about his old faith, because it might affect other Muslims' faith." I saw rage in my mom's eyes and I got a bit worried - but then I think I saw something click in my her head and she explained to my younger brother that I was just teasing her over something she said earlier.
I don't know that my mom actually now believes that criticism of a religion is okay, or if it's only okay for non-Mormon religions; but either way I see it as a step in the right direction. Obviously some religions, especially violent ones, deserve criticism, and it was a crazy coincidence to get to point that out to my mom with an insanely extreme example.
But yeah, I think the LDS church deserves plenty of criticism and that it's not our job to be sensitive to the current members when we talk about it.
