The vast but little-known fund of the Mormon Church

I can third this. I left about 7 years ago. I have moved from Wisconsin, to North Carolina, to Virginia, to Texas, and then to Washington. The Mormon church managed to find me each time. (I briefly moved to Pennsylvania for work for about 6 months between living in NC and VA, and that was the one time they never found me).

I have always rejected all attempts to "re-activate" me. I have never provided notice of my leaving, and I have never as much as attended church once in any of these locations. Several of the moves I didn't even leave forwarding addresses or change of address at the post office. Heck about a year ago I missed some important documents from the IRS, because even they didn't know my new address. They were contacting a previous address, yet the Mormon church had already visited me (against my requests) a total of three times at that new address.

The Mormon church in fact does encourage harassment of ex members, they just don't advertise it as harassment. I am assuming the top comment in this feed that claims they never promote harassment is probably from a current member. The church promotes and encourages members to visit ex-members "out of love" to "save them". It even goes as far as assigning certain members to "re-activate" specific lost members as a task or chore that they must report back progress on.

So the members are harassing, but they do it under the guise of "love" and "salvation". The leaders of the church teach this twice a year in their worldwide broadcast conference (General Conference) where they tell stories (generally fictitious but claiming to be true-to-life) about how active members have gone to ex-members' homes and pushed and prodded for months and years to get members to re-activate. They will hail these persistent efforts to ignore the privacy requests of the ex-members and to push them even despite threats, because according to the story it eventually worked. They will laugh and say that "the spirit" will eventually get through to these ex-members if you just push them hard enough. This is all harassment. Yes, it is done naively from brainwashed members who think they are helping, but it is indeed harassment.

Imagine breaking up with a significant other who then continues to say they know you were meant for each other. They keep showing up at your work and at your house trying to get you to fall back in love with them. They are convinced that if they insert themselves back into your life that you will feel that love again. But you want nothing to do with this person. That person feels like they are doing something out of love, but to you it is harassment.

I've watched countless families destroyed over mormonism. It is toxic, but in the most crafty ways possible. Looking back, I did it all. I harrassed exmembers and gained pleasure from it. I thought I was truly helping them. We would laugh afterward at the threats we got. It was harrassement but I did it... i was brainwashed without realizing it. I am sick to my stomach for admitting it, but I was guilty of these acts for 30 years. My perspective has changed with many years out of the church. But trust me, it is part of the Mormon culture. I speak from experience. I am guilty of harrassing hundreds of people against their will as a Mormon.

Further, it is worth noting that according to Mormon doctrine, someone who is an active member and leaves the church is "an apostate". Depending how far they went through the ladder of Mormonism (such as going through the temple or even working at the temple) this actually destines someone to a future life in "outer darkness". This is a place reserved for basically only apostates (people that left the church). The mormon church has even taught terrorists and hitler will be able to seek forgiveness in the next life and go to a lower form of heaven, but not as low as outer darkness. This literally puts people who leave the church as worse than mass murderers.

The government shouldn't be in the business of deciding what is a dangerous apocalyptic cult and what is a legitimate congregation of spiritual seekers. (Some non-US governments do exactly this incidentally).

But dangerous apocalyptic cults do exist. They harm adherents and harm society at large. So yes, it can and it does happen.

The ability to accumulate massive wealth is not needed for spiritual practice, provides severe moral hazards (often contrary to the stated purposes of the religion) and provides means to carry out social agendas which affect non-adherents. So the simple and common sense solution is to legally prevent this accumulation.

There are already restrictions on freedom of religion (and speech, and firearms etc). You can't slap a "Church" label on a prostitution ring and have it fly (this actually has happened). Nor in my estimation should you be able to slap a Church label on a business or real estate company and have it fly. You are one or the other, you get to chose for tax purposes and amount of wealth the organization is allowed to accumulate.

A bit off topic but for the record, I think it is manifestly dangerous to allow individuals or corporations too much power (financial or otherwise) also. But religions have a history of behaving much more irrationally because it is such a personal emotional issue and is less regulated by rational self interest. Thus it can be more dangerous. Keep churches churches and they will be better churches. Make them businesses (or even worse governments) and everyone is screwed.

Also someone downvoted you because they apparently don't agree. For whatever it's worth I'm reversing that because I think your points are worth considering.

And how do you know that your experience is the common one? The exmormon subreddit is an extremely large and active subreddit, with lots of unity in experiences. Its by far the largest known community of ex members of any religion on reddit.

If your experience were more common, the exmormon subreddit would probably be as dead as the /r/excatholic subreddit. Now that is a community that really doesn't give a shit if you decide to not show up to church anymore.

How do you know the bank wasn't church owned or controlled? The church isn't exactly upfront with their holdings. They have been found to use shell companies to obscure their holdings. The fact that he was on the board is actually a huge clue that suggests that the bank was actually owned by the church. He did that with lots of church owned businesses.

https://mormonleaks.io/newsroom/2018/05/30/mormonleaks-compi...

It actually doesn't remove it from Missionary records. Missionary records are intentionally kept separate from church records. I was a missionary and we visited people who have left the church (and had their name removed) many, many times. We have left their records behind after we were told to fuck off for future missionaries to continue to contact. If the threats get violent enough a missionary might choose to remove it from missionary records (we did this only once during my two year mission, after someone threatening to kill us and posting pictures of us at our apartment). Other threats were just shrugged off and I guarantee missionaries that came behind me re-visted that member again and probably still are to this day.