by

Emma Croft grew up near Seattle and is currently studying English and creative writing at Brigham Young University. She enjoys traveling, cooking delicious things, hosting book club meetings, and brainstorming ways to make the LDS community more welcoming to those who struggle to find their place in the church. She spends much of her time writing personal essays, conducting research on early Book of Mormon usage, and helping students improve their writing.

I watched my first rated-R movie as a sophomore in high school. It all started when my World History teacher offered extra credit to any student who stayed after school to watch Defiance, a 2008 film about a group of Russian rebels who banded together to kill Nazis in the forest. It sounded great, but I figured out pretty quickly that choosing to watch it would mean ignoring what I had learned in church for as long as I could remember: no rated-R movies, at all, under any circumstances.

I was torn. I needed the extra credit. I also made sure to carefully pore over the “parental advisory” section on IMDb and ultimately decided that the “5 uses of f—k” and several scenes of graphic wartime violence couldn’t mar my spirituality any more than an average day existing in a high school. After talking with my parents, I believed that watching the movie would provide an overall positive experience with valuable payoff, even if it felt immoral. Learning that any “ungodly” content would destroy a film’s value and cause the viewer irreparable harm left me with the impression that—on some level—I was sinning.

Growing up LDS, I received yearly lessons in church involving salty cookies, analogies about dog poop brownies and spitting in milkshakes, and a MormonAd depicting a cockroach nestled into a scoop of ice cream. The message was always the same: watching a movie or a show, reading a book, or listening to a song that contains language, violence, or sexually explicit material is akin to eating something delicious that’s been contaminated. It is, essentially, a disgusting act that can hurt you before you even realize you’re making a mistake. “It’s really good, except for that one part,” would never be good enough for a Mormon like me.

I understand why the church wants to teach youth to monitor their media habits, especially during the formative years. There are several films I have seen and enjoyed as an adult that likely would have messed me up as a kid. It makes sense to encourage young people to think critically about the media they consume, because early exposure to certain content can be troubling to especially sensitive individuals. In addition, most kids lack the proper judgment to discern fiction from reality, and it’s important they understand healthy relationships, appropriate adult behavior, and good decision-making before they have the chance to embrace what Hollywood portrays as normal.

I also believe adults have every right to avoid whatever media they deem unacceptable. It’s not my job to judge or police other people’s unique thresholds. If you’re a grown man or woman who doesn’t want to watch any movies with swear words, that’s your prerogative. If you want to shield your kids from all profanity until they’re old enough to leave the comforts of home, I may question your parenting, but I believe it’s within your rights to attempt it.

However, the way we teach kids about media at church completely ignores the fact that watching R-rated movies and reading adult-oriented literature is normal and likely to happen over the course of one’s education. As a senior English student at BYU, I can assure you that even we read literature that contains profanity and sex, and most of us are doing just fine. Isolating ourselves from a world of quality art and discourse due to its “ungodliness” isn’t helping anyone. Choosing to ignore reality in favor of a PG-version of the world and its history inhibits our lifelong goal to “learn of things both in heaven and in the earth” (D&C 88:79).

Beyond the practical flaws of the dog poop brownie model are the problems that arise when we teach young Mormons that most of their non-LDS peers are, in fact, eating shit every time they watch, read, or hear something “inappropriate.” There must be a way to teach youth to respect other people’s decisions while also reducing the guilt they might feel when choosing to engage with media they’ve been told is disgusting and dangerous.

The truth is, plenty of card-carrying Mormons choose to watch R-rated films or read adult-oriented books. They decide that the value in watching something outweighs any potential spiritual risk. I, for one, think engaging with ideas that aren’t necessarily common or available within our own culture is vital to building empathy and understanding other humans with whom we share this world. I sincerely believe it’s good for people to branch out beyond Disney and YA fantasy because real life, for most of us, isn’t anything like that. It does us good to understand a broad range of stories and experiences.

As a church that relies heavily on the doctrine of personal revelation, shouldn’t we let our own relationships with the Spirit influence our choices? Why rely on a strict, universal list of rules when the very foundation of our belief is that we have the agency to choose what is best for us and turn to God if the consequences are unexpectedly harmful? There are several films I find offensive without regard to arbitrary MPAA classifications, and others that bring joy to my soul despite the capital-R that’s displayed on the screen before they start. If our job here is to avoid the negative influences of “the world,” why would we let a worldly organization determine what movies we can and cannot watch?

I believe it’s time we change the way church lesson manuals talk about media. Sex isn’t dog poop. Profanity is not salty cookies. Violence (the most problematic offender of the three, in my opinion) is not a cockroach. Let’s abandon the silly metaphors to teach real critical thinking, share the positive and negative effects all types of media can have on us (including problems with racial stereotypes, misogyny, homophobia, and other types of bigotry), and stop pretending we’re the good guys for keeping everything incessantly PG. It’s a one-dimensional approach to a multi-dimensional problem, and it’s setting our youth up for unnecessary discomfort.

When the day finally came to gather in the school library to watch Defiance, I surrounded myself with friends and trusted teachers to watch a film that, by most accounts, would scar me for life due to its R-rating. The only other Mormon in my class chose not to attend. I wondered if I had made a huge mistake. Would the spirit leave me? Would disturbing images be permanently burned into my mind?

To this day, I cannot remember a single detail about the film. If I ate a cockroach that day, it must have tasted like nothing. Maybe it even went well with the ice cream. I did not become apostate. I did not start swearing like a sailor. I did not become sexually promiscuous, and I did not begin shooting people for sport. In fact, it marked a change in my ability to discern for myself what I wanted to see, learn, and know. It was a moment that taught me to trust myself to seek out uplifting entertainment and reading material; to engage with uncomfortable ideas to better understand what it means to be good. I engaged with the “opposition in all things,” and I grew into a better person because of it (2 Nephi 2:11). If anything from that movie stayed with me for life, it’s that Nazis are really bad. Clearly, I am not worse off for seeing it.

As a growing, changing church, we deserve better than reductive worldviews that encourage judgment and shame, and can choose for ourselves what is “virtuous, lovely, or of good report, or praiseworthy” (Article of Faith 13). Hint: it might not all come from the children’s section.