Anyone on social media is confronted daily with meme images. These cute or inspirational images impart a small package of wisdom which is easily spread from person to person.

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Meme (/ˈmiːm/ meem)

An idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme.

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If you have any faithful Mormons in your social network, then chances are you have come across memes which take their source from the wisdom of LDS General Authorities.

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Mormon Meme

A Meme circulated on social media in the form of an image with an inspirational message attributed to a Mormon church authority on the background of an inspirational photograph.

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Over the past few years, Mormon Memes have been created and distributed by both unofficial sources as well as from the Church media departments officially. It is now a tradition that over general conference weekend new memes are created, posted and distributed before the conference is even over.

Pay attention in the upcoming conference and you will see that many of the memes have been given professional graphic design treatment that would lead you to believe that the quotes were preselected and anticipated to be socially viral and prepared prior to the airing of conference. (This is not nefarious, but rather excellent message marketing.)

Some Mormon memes are inspirational and healthy. They may give us confidence, help us to appreciate the beauty of the world or find inner strength to overcome adversity.

Other memes may seem to be positive and uplifting, but actually contain a message which can be psychologically manipulative and/or harmful. Now – this sounds like an alarmist exaggerated claim so hear me out.

Someone Else’s Problem

First, consider that there are other organizations that want to keep their membership blind to their groups past and bound to psychological dependency on the group. Let’s take this meme from the Jehovah’s Witnesses as an example:

This meme has messaging both in the imagery and the text. It introduces an elements of fear for the end of the world, fear for losing your family and fear of false information about peace and security being given from world leaders. The uncertainty and fear about these impending events puts a form of psychological pressure on the faithful viewer.

Jehovah’s Witnesses hold the belief that their Governing Body of 7 men are the sole channels of God Jehovah’s will on Earth. Only by keeping faith and obedience to this organization are members able to feel safe and secure from the coming armageddon (which is always just around the corner). With this in mind, it is possible to see how a meme like this has the effect of psychologically manipulating members to maintain belief and conformity in the organization’s teachings.

The JW organization is going through a very similar experience as the Latter-day Saints in that members have unprecedented access to historical records and publications of the church and when members are exposed to this information which they have never had access to before, many of them leave the organization. Because of the groups strong position on shunning, former Jehovah’s Witnesses pay a much higher price than even Mormon’s do when they resign or are disfellowshipped.

What could an organization going through this type of crisis do to stem the tide of members finding information on the internet, interpreting it themselves and withdrawing their consent to remain a member of the group? This meme, also from a JW source, is one approach:

In order to perceive the full impact of this meme on the minds of faithful Witnesses you have to understand that “Trust in Jehovah” is synonymous with “Trust in the Governing Body, the Watchtower Society and its official publications and the hierarchy of leadership down to the local level.” With that in mind, this meme primes Witnesses to disregard any of their own assessment of information they come across about their own church history. Instead, they must defer to only those sources of information and interpretations that come from the official organization itself.

In essence, the Witness is told to disregard their own mental faculties, personal judgment and conscience in favor of what their leaders tell them.

To anyone outside the group, this is very clearly a form of control of information. People who study the psychological manipulations employed by groups that exert undue influence over their members call this tactic “Milieu Control“. This strategy is employed by such groups to limit the information members are exposed to which would otherwise contradict the claims of the group.

Mormon Meme Translator

So here we have seen two different examples of how memes can be both positive and helpful to the individual as well as act as very efficient bundles of psychological manipulation which serve to bind members to the influence of a demanding organization.

The remarkable thing about examining these techniques is that once you know about them – you tend to detect them more readily and their ability to exert control over you is lessened. This is a good thing.

What does this have to do with Mormon Memes? Well, now that we have seen some clear examples from outside Mormonism it is interesting to go back and examine Mormon Memes to see if any similar tactics are employed, and yes – they show up in Mormon Memes. Frequently.

I have created a new Project called the Mormon Meme Translator which takes hurtful or manipulative memes and strips away the flowery language and emotional triggers and lays bear what the actual messaging is. With each translation, a brief discussion about the tactic employed by the meme is presented.

You can visit the Facebook page for the Mormon Meme Translator here. The memes will be added on a daily basis there and then batches of meme translations will be combined to periodic posts here at Thoughts on Things and Stuff.

Without further ado – lets look at the first batch:

Meme 1 – “Truth Filter”

This Mormon Meme from DeseretNews contains a quote from Neil Anderson, one of the junior Apostles in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Now that you are familiar with the concept of “Milieu Control” you can see how the message of this meme is conceptually identical to that of the last JW meme we examined.

A first level translation of this meme would produce the following results:

This is the practical effect of the original meme. Since there is no truth filter, then how can you trust anything you read on the internet – even if it sounds absolutely convincing, some information is simply not true! The safest thing has to be to only believe or expose yourself to information coming from the official church – just like the JW!

Consider the fact that large amounts of the information that would be categorized as “anti-mormon” is actually taken from early official church publication. But, on the other hand, that would make it more convincing – which could mean that it was simply not true!

In the end, trusting only information you get from the church leaders isn’t the core idea of this meme. The most significant message encoded in this meme is as follows:

You see, what if you come across information that does come from early leaders in official church sources, for example Brigham Young teaching that Adam was God or that Blood Atonement was a way to compensate for a not-quite infinite atonement of Christ, which are both found in the Journal of Discourses which enjoyed official church endorsement at the time of its publication. What are you to do then? If you trust that information is true because it came from the Church itself, then your personal judgement and conscience may tempt you to conclude that there is no way such teachings could come from a legitimate prophet of God, then you might deduce that if Brigham was only a pretended Prophet, then all subsequent Prophets cannot claim anything more than this. Then it might make you go back and re-evaluate Joseph Smith himself to see if he also did things that no true Prophet would do – such as marry other men’s wives or incorrectly translate figures from Egyptian Papyri into the Book of Abraham.

These are not safe conclusions for the church. They don’t want members to come to these conclusions. This is why the real message of this meme is that members should not trust their personal judgement, mental faculties or moral compass – those things are the very things that make some information on the internet seem very convincing and lead to such uncomfortable conclusions. No. The faithful member must simply remind themselves that since some absolutely and unequivocally convincing evidence is simply not true, they must only turn to the current leaders as a source for reliable information and interpretation of events.

As we previously discussed, this is textbook milieu control. It is the exact same thing that JWs, Scientologists, Christian Scientists and the Moonies do to keep their members devoted and bound to their respective organizations and leaders. A legitimately true church which allowed freedom of thought and conscience from its members would not deal in such manipulative and evasive messaging.

This is how the Jehovah’s Witnesses do it:

Is this the only way members are encouraged to close their minds to the facts and conclusions of history? not quite – that brings us to Meme #2

Meme 2 – Leave it in the past

This quote is taken from a 2009 BYU devotional given by Apostle Jeffrey R. Holland called The Best is Yet To Be. The context of the quote is that of allowing people to move on from personal mistakes:

Let people repent. Let people grow. Believe that people can change and improve. Is that faith? Yes! Is that hope? Yes! Is that charity? Yes! Above all, it is charity, the pure love of Christ. If something is buried in the past, leave it buried. Don’t keep going back with your little sand pail and beach shovel to dig it up, wave it around, and then throw it at someone, saying, “Hey! Do you remember this?” Splat! Well, guess what? That is probably going to result in some ugly morsel being dug up out of your landfill with the reply, “Yeah, I remember it. Do you remember this?” Splat. And soon enough everyone comes out of that exchange dirty and muddy and unhappy and hurt, when what our Father in Heaven pleads for is cleanliness and kindness and happiness and healing.

This sounds like a healthy and positive message of forgiveness and healing. How could it possibly be manipulative? Here is the translation:

Okay, now if you are skeptical – that is a good sign! You shouldn’t just accept these conclusions because they are printed here, but let me explain.

Messages meant to instruct members in how to deal with forgiving each other for past wrongs may be misappropriated in order to shield the group from accountability for the past actions of leaders.

In interpersonal conflict resolution offending individuals may acknowledge past wrong-doing and inflicted harm, apologize and reconcile – thereby justifying a form of interpersonal closure which justifies no further accusation.

By instructing members not to accuse each other, leaders convey the secondary message that they should also not accuse church leaders by exploiting this interpersonal dynamic and inappropriately applying it to the institution. Leaders then avoid accountability without having gone through the steps of conflict resolution and reconciliation.

The message that members should not look into a repentant individual’s past mistakes gets transposed onto the institution. Group members are primed not to investigate troubling issues in the history of the organization or its leaders. Joseph Smith applied a similar concept: “If you do not accuse each other, God will not accuse you. If you have no accuser you will enter heaven, and if you follow the revelations and instructions which God gives you through me, I will take you into heaven on my back load. If you will not accuse me, I will not accuse you. If you will throw a cloak of charity over my sins, I will over yours-for charity covereth a multitude of sins. What many people call sin is not sin; I do many things to break down superstition, and I will break it down.” (Joseph Smith’s November 7, 1841 discourse in, Joseph Smith et al, History of the Church 4:445. byu.edu)

How do I know that this message is used to silence discussion about Church History?

When we bring up lies, whitewashing, toxic doctrine, altered revelations, secret adultery, racism, etc. we are bringing up dark sins from the past. Each of these were committed by real men, living real lives. Our bringing them up and using them as evidence of the illegitimacy of the claims of the church and its leaders is doing exactly what Holland is telling people not to do – digging up sins from the past and throwing them in people’s face.

If the effects of their sins in this regard were limited to just a few close relatives, and the leader had acknowledged their mistake, apologized, repented and made amends – then the advice in the meme is sound. The effects of those past sins were far reaching, however, and affect us still today. There has been no public acknowledgment of the reality of the sin, the effect of the hurt, admission of the implicit lack of moral authority, administrative humility, apology or reconciliation. As such, people will no doubt continue to dig it up and throw it at people, despite the admonition of Elder Holland.

The original quote may have been from a discussion about individual sins and repentance – but it has been and will be applied to discussions of church history.

For example, when bringing up issues that concern you in church history it is this very concept that Holland is conveying that members will use to try to stop the discussion:

Doubter: “Joseph married other men’s wives…” Defender: “Well, are you perfect? Prophets aren’t perfect. Stop trying to judge people whose lives are in the past – you don’t want people dragging up your mistakes – so don’t go digging into the lives of people who are long dead!”

(This is an exchange I have had with several faithful members)

Perhaps these two memes are outliers. Could there possibly be another way that the church tries to restrict access to troubling information about its past?

Meme 3 – Empowered or Enslaved

This quote comes from a talk in the spring 2014 Priesthood session of General Conference, which you can find here. The section in the talk is addressing the scourge of Pornography:

“My young brothers, if you are not proactive in educating your desires, the world will do it for you. Every day the world seeks to influence your desires, enticing you to buy something, click on something, play something, read or watch something. Ultimately, the choice is yours. You have agency. It is the power to not only act on your desires but also to refine, purify, and elevate your desires. Agency is your power to become. Each choice takes you closer to or further from what you are meant to become; each click has meaning. Always ask yourself, “Where will this choice lead?” Develop the ability to see beyond the moment. Satan wants to control your agency so he can control what you become. He knows that one of the best ways to do this is by trapping you with addictive behavior. Your choices determine whether technology will empower you or enslave you.”

Like the Holland quote in the prior meme, this message has multiple layers and transposes one concept onto another. It seems at the surface that the warning is only about pornography – it is related to the use of technology and there are many messages about the dangers of addiction to pornography. Certainly the young men target audience of the talk are at risk for indulging in this media exposure.

Notice that the meme uses the emotionally charged ideas of empower or enslavement relative to how the member chooses to use technology. The insidious undertone of fear is employed to compel the faithful member to avoid using the internet to view spiritually damaging material. Do not be fooled. This message is about so much more than pornography. We know this because the church itself has taught members that “anti-mormon” literature is a form of theological pornography – with even more potential for spiritual damage than conventional porn.

I wrote about this in the post on Theological Bubble Modesty, which I encourage you to read, but the salient quote is this:

“Even now, after five years of limited involvement, President Kimball’s great vision reaches out before us. He has set a work in motion that no enemy or foe will frustrate. Compare the majesty of this magnificent soul to the spiritual pygmies who hurl their own faithless frustrations upon the Church or try to drag others down to their level of empty faith. Elder Packer said, “They leave the Church but they can’t leave it alone” (Utah State University baccalaureate address). They publish theological pornography that is damaging to the spirit. None of it is worth casting an eye upon. Do not read the anti-Mormon materials. That is not the way you resolve questions about the truthfulness of the restored gospel. Simply go back and read and ponder and pray about the Book of Mormon and you will know it is true. Those who try to dissuade us from the truth want to tear down what we have, but they do not have anything to replace it when it’s gone. A person who has sexual hang-ups should not read pornographic material as a means of dealing with his or her problem. Likewise, a person who is weak in the faith should not read pornographic theological material. It only destroys and takes away; it never replaces that which was lost.”

(“The Last Drop in the Chalice” Vaughn J. Featherstone Sep 24, 1985. byu.edu)

As you can see, church leaders direct members to restrict their use of internet technology to only those sources which are friendly to the church and towards maintaining faithfulness in its leaders and teachings. While the decades are different, you can ask any active bishop if the same warnings applied to pornography would also apply to “anti-mormon” websites and literature and the answer would be an emphatic “yes!”

With that in mind, the translation of this meme is this:

Unethical, coercive groups tell their members that their restrictions on what websites to visit is for the good of the member – to keep them from being “enslaved”. What they are actually doing is keeping their members from reading the words of apostates who would show them facts from the groups history and publications that contradict the current claims of the church. Reading and accepting these things would have the effect of liberating the member from the deception and control of the group.

So the effect of this meme is actually to keep the leaders in power and to keep the members enslaved to a false system of belief and allegiance to false masters. Once again, it is all about milieu control, albeit from a different angle of fear.

Meme 4 – The Lord Commands

Mormons revere their Prophets. These anointed men are given the full keys of God’s Priesthood power on earth and are the humble and true servants of God. They alone have the authority to speak God’s will for the entire church and the world. They may delegate a portion of this authority to their councilors and the Apostles – each considered a lesser Prophet, but a Prophet none the less. Since these Prophets are the ones who bear the weighty responsibility of conveying God’s will – then, in the capacity of their calling, their commands are God’s commands.

This is made explicitly clear in the Doctrine and Covenants 1:38:

38 What I the Lord have spoken, I have spoken, and I excuse not myself; and though the heavens and the earth pass away, my word shall not pass away, but shall all be fulfilled, whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same.

(Doctrine and Covenants 1:38, lds.org)

Does this sound familiar? This is exactly the same claim of authority that the Governing Body of the Jehovah’s Witnesses make. With this in mind we can see a first level translation of the meme is as follows:

One of the most frequent and powerful methods of control is for a group to exploit the sincere reverence for God that exists among faithful people. By claiming that its leaders have been granted a special relationship with God – either speaking for God or in some cases as God himself, the group is primed to extract high levels of obedience from the members.

This arrangement is ubiquitous among groups that exert undue influence over their members. It is part of a dynamic called “Sacred Science.” The concept of Sacred Science in totalistic groups is one where the dogma of the group is imbued with an aura of sacredness. This sacredness is most evidence in the tacit or implicit prohibition against the questioning of the basic assumptions, the originators of the doctrines, the current leaders or the doctrine itself. After all, if the leader’s commands are God’s commands, then questioning the leader is tantamount to questioning God and who among the faithful would ever interrogate the supreme creator of the universe?

So we can see that the real, practical effect which is most beneficial to the group leaders is conveyed in the root level translation of the meme here:

We can see that Joseph Smith used this concept to a vigorous extent. When his decrees and commands are equated with that of God the members are thereby disuaded from questioning them and enjoined to accept them. This primes the members to allow themselves to be taken advantage of in many different ways.

This translation gives you one example:

Among totalistic groups, one of the most common features is that the leader provides a theological framework that grants him special sexual access to the members. It was a part of Branch Davidians under David Koresh, Jim Jones in Peoples Temple, and Sun Myung Moon in the “Moonies.” In each case, the leaders did not simply say “you. sex. now” but instead produced a rationale rooted in the dogma of the group. Coming from the leader as it was, this new doctrine was protected from questioning or refusal by reverence for the Sacred Science and the leader as the agent of God. In each case, the participants were liable to feel special for being trusted with new doctrine and consented to things that they would not otherwise have consented to.

Meme 5 – Purpose

There are two separate premises encoded in the meme which bind the member to the leaders. First there is the unspoken, but implicit concept that we have just covered which is that what members understand as the will of God is, in fact, the will of the leader.

As such, this meme may be translated similarly to the last thusly:

This is not the end of the story, however. Next, there is the idea that an individuals purpose in life only has value insomuch as they follow the will of God. By looking at these two messages in concert with each other, we can see that the real message here is this:

This idea that an individual purpose and existence in life is only valid and good so long as they are aligned with the doctrines of the group and the edicts of the leader is another common mechanism of control employed in groups that operate on such totalistic ideologies. It falls under the concept of “Dispensation of Existence.” Robert J Lifton described it in his seminal book on Thought Reform:

“For the individual, the polar emotional conflict is the ultimate existential one of “being versus nothingness.” He is likely to be drawn to a conversion experience, which he sees as the only means of attaining a path of existence for the future. The totalist environment – even when it does not resort to physical abuse – thus stimulates in everyone a fear of extinction or annihilation. A person can overcome this fear and find (in martin Buber’s term) “confirmation,” not in his individual relationships, but only from the fount of all existence, the totalist Organization. Existence comes to depend upon creed (I believe, therefore I am), upon submission (I obey, therefore I am) and beyond these, upon a sense of total merger with the ideological movement. Ultimately of course one compromises and combines the totalist “confirmation” with independent elements of personal identity; but one is ever made aware that, should he stray too far along this “erroneous path,” his right to existence may be withdrawn.”

(“Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism” By Robert Jay Lifton, M.D., Chapt. 22 culteducation.com)

Essentially, the individual is confined to an existence where the only acceptable purpose for his life is to align himself with the decrees and dogma of the group and its leaders. In this way the group hijacks the individual identity of tis members.

Meme 6 – Obedience

As we have seen, groups who equate the will of their leaders with the will of God expect their members to give the same deference to the leaders as they teach them to give to God. Obey without question. Follow without reservation.

This same formula has been used again and again in groups that exert undue influence over their members. It primes members to accept unethical and immoral actions from their leaders that they would not accept from people who claim no divine sanction.

This meme takes a slightly different angle in that it holds out the approbation of God as dependant upon compliance with the men who claim to speak for him.

This is how the Jehovah’s Witnesses do it:

“We need to obey the faithful and discreet slave to have Jehovah’s approval” JW.org

The “faithful and discreet slave” refers to the men in the Governing Body that leads the JW organization.

Conclusion

I hope it is becoming clear that many Mormon Memes are actually small bundles of psychological manipulation. They circulate among the faithful and do the work of reinforcing messaging that binds members to the group through subtle means.

It is possible that you may think to yourself that analysis such as the above is overblown and not really the intent of the leaders. Remember that psychological manipulation is effective because it does not have the overt appearance of control. Like the movie “Inception” the effect of this type of message holds its power by distorting the individuals perceptions so that they believe that their decisions are their own and not the result of outside influence.

It doesn’t matter to me if you agree with the interpretations provided here, but it is important for people to be aware that these manipulations exist. It is always easier to see them in someone else’s religion, but it takes a real effort to see it in your own.

Stay tuned for Mormon Meme Translator II