TLDR:
1. Strong foreign language skills from overseas missions.
2. It's easier getting them security clearances since they don't use drugs or alcohol.
replies(6):
> I have a drinking problem? Fuck you, Peck! You're a Mormon! Next to you, we all have a drinking problem!
From the members I have conversed with, they are forbidden from using caffeine.
> It took a great deal of time, repetition, patience; no small amount of hope and faith; lots of reassurance from my wife; and many liters of a diet soda that shall remain nameless.
[0] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference...
Source: grew up Mormon, and still have a close relationship with my Mormon family.
It's probably more politically safe to claim Mormons are more likely to be sexual abusers, but I wouldn't feel any less safe leaving my children with a Mormon family than with a Jewish family, a Muslim family, or a Hindu family.
Having grown up Mormon, I'd add a 4th that wasn't mentioned in the article: deference to authority. The Mormon church is a very hierarchal organization. Orders go from the top down. People lower on the ladder should not ever contradict their leaders. When a Mormon leader asks you to do something, you expected to comply. I imagine that this mindset would make you fit in well in the FBI, at least in the lower and middle layers of the organization.
eg The nephew of the owner, prepping for his missionary work, gravely explained to me that he has to be careful not to immerse himself in open waters (or maybe it was just moving water) past the belt line. Something about being vulnerable to witches or demonic possession or whatever. And it was totally true because his cousin's best friend knew a guy who swam while on mission and then died.
There are a whole lot of people who have their own interpretations of the commandments, and that coupled with our history of secrecy surrounding the temple could definitely give rise to the idea that it's difficult to know what all the requirements are, but it's all online and available to everyone at this point.
Here's the relevant information about the health code[1]:
> The Lord revealed in the Word of Wisdom that the following substances are harmful:
> Alcoholic drinks (see Doctrine and Covenants 89:5–7).
> Tobacco (see Doctrine and Covenants 89:8).
> Tea and coffee (see Doctrine and Covenants 89:9; latter-day prophets have taught that the term “hot drinks,” as written in this verse, refers to tea and coffee).
[0] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/temples/what-is-temple-e...
[1] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topi...
Clarifications as to what the 'hot drinks' section means has come over time, generally being shared during the twice-annual General Conference. The most prominent call came in 1921.
You can read more about it here: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/revelations...
1. Unclear doctrinal specifics
2. An orthopraxic rather than an orthodoxic culture
The first item is that the only doctrine possibly relating to caffeine is a single verse in modern scripture that says "hot drinks are not for the body or belly". Long-standing teaching by leadership has merely narrowed down "hot drinks" to mean tea and coffee.
The second item is by far more important in the debate: Mormons are _highly_ orthopraxic, meaning that you're usually free to hold heterodox doctrinal beliefs as long as your public life and behavior reflects the common orthopraxy. Or, to put it simply, the public appearance of righteousness is culturally far more important than internal doctrinal beliefs (this is, ironically enough, not technically doctrinal). The same chapter that defines "hot drinks" (coffee/tea) as not good for the belly defines beer ("barley... for mild drinks") as entirely appropriate, but since the orthopraxic behavior is to be seen as avoiding coffee, tea, hard liquor (which is specifically called out in the same scripture) then avoiding anything above and beyond those is often seen as an increased sign of righteousness.
So you'll often have arguments between Mormons who follow the letter of the law and others who follow what they define as the spirit of the law. And since coffee and tea both contain caffeine then many Mormons will avoid caffeine as well.
You'll find this same argument about following just the doctrine defined in the open canon versus following behavioral practices above and beyond it in other aspects of Mormon life, such as: not calling members of the church or the church "Mormon," payment of 10% of monthly income (though the scriptures call for 10% of an annual "increase"), women only wearing at most one set of earrings, no dating for youth below the age of 16, men applying to serve missions the instant their 18th birthday arrives (though the window for honorable service is many years wide), no clapping in meetings, no drums or brass in meetings, and so on for many other cultural practices.
This is, as you can probably recognize from some of the items in that list, in no way a phenomenon isolated to the LDS religion, but it does inform the inevitable debate you'll hear if you ever bring up caffeine in a group of Mormons.
Think of it as Jewish Kosher or Muslim Halal.
The particular belief in question here arises from modern LDS scripture (D&C 61) where God says to a group of early LDS missionaries that "there are many dangers upon the waters." These dangers are from Satan being given power over the waters as the world approaches Armageddon, and while faithful LDS missionaries will be preserved while traveling over any water (canal, lake, sea, etc) they're encouraged not to risk it if their faith is not strong enough.
This used to be a pretty common teaching from leadership, but in recent decades it's fallen out of fashion. Missionaries are still forbidden from going swimming at any point during their missions, but usually it's presented as a result of insurance dangers facing unsupervised 18 year olds (which, let's be honest, is an entirely reasonable and accurate concern).
For almost every weird or odd belief you've heard that at least some Mormons believe, there are usually a combination of scriptures and old leadership quotes behind it, but the modern teachings have left them behind with the hope that if these odd teachings are ignored they'll go away (which works out pretty well, for the most part).
That being said, we've got our own offshoot groups that we don't consider "really Mormon", so I get where people are coming from on that question.
> Orthopraxic v. orthodoxic: In the study of religion, orthopraxy is correct conduct, both ethical and liturgical, as opposed to faith or grace.[1][2][3] Orthopraxy is in contrast with orthodoxy, which emphasizes correct belief. The word is a neoclassical compound—ὀρθοπραξία (orthopraxia) meaning 'right practice'. [1]
That's speaking of teachings and doctrine, of course. When it comes to history that's less like trying to nail Jell-o to the wall and it's much easier to find sources for more accurate history, and I agree that it's a bit sad how little accuracy in history seems to be respected by some believing and formerly-believing members.
The type of thing I had in mind are things that aren't ambiguous but rather are pretty clear. Things like "the actual edicts ... aren't really supposed to be published or talked about" regarding caffeine/word of wisdom. I certainly don't claim to know everything, but I have spent an insane amount of time reading/researching Mormon history and I've never heard that before. Stuff like that seems to pop up constantly for some reason when I talk about things with ex-mormons.
This is the type of black and white response that I find so common with ex-mormons. If somebody pushes back on disinformation (even easily disproved like the above thing about keeping caffeine teachings secret), the superstitious thinking kicks in and excuses fly (like "they must be a secret apologist" which I heard recently). It's every bit as ridiculous as the believers are when they dismiss inconvenient facts like Zelph the White Lamanite[1][2] because it goes against their preferred narrative. It's superstitious thinking.
Edit: Hah! I couldn't have asked for a better real-time example to demonstrate my point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35774479
In western states, yes. In the east it ran from supportive to apathetic to passive-aggressively hostile. In some councils, the split wasn't all bad for the BSA.
If every folk belief held by any Pope or Church Father was held as a controlling 'belief' of the Catholic Church, it'd spin apart instantly via the contradictions.
The 'Mormon' church has to deal with the contradiction of near-infallibility of its leaders with their very human frailties and willingness to opine on things without much knowledge.
Considering their need to weld together tens of thousands of converts under murder, oppression, and official government endorsement of their extermination, it was understandable they needed to centralize a belief in their leadership in order to survive. Climbing down from that philosophy has been understandably fraught and drawn out.
> I am a member, and every actual commandment is definitely public record. Even the temple covenants are (as of recently) public record[0], and those used to be the ones that were held in the highest level of secrecy.
Great! So here's a very legit question: is there a PDF version that I could read linearly to get a good idea of the whole doctrine? (I mean something like the Talmud)
I'm just curious and want to learn.
Beyond that, the Gospel Topics[1] section is, as you found, a bit of a rabbit hole, but contains the church's official stance on any topic where they've taken a stance. If you can't find it there, it's likely that there isn't an official consensus.
[0] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/handbooks-and-call...
[1] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topi...
> This is the Mormon immune response
OP literally said they don't identify as a Mormon any more, so your response feels like a knee-jerk reaction against something you've seen elsewhere, rather than an actual response to their comment. They're speaking from the outside looking at others on the outside, not trying to justify their own current beliefs.
The exmormon community is extremely thorough and factual when it comes to talking about the church, because it is to their benefit. More people have left the church after unsuccessfully trying to refute The CES Letter than have ever left due to smear campaigns and slander. The truth is to the rational thinker’s benefit, which is why the church spends so much time and money hiding it and whitewashing it.
Um, I think you're confusing MormonThink and MormonR for "FAIR" or the "BoM Foundation". They're two "middle-way" sources that try to balance the knife's edge of giving just enough of the negative-yet-factual information that faith is still possible, as opposed to something like the CES Letter which is a compendium of pretty much every negative-yet-factual piece of information that, in total, make faith in the organization pretty much impossible for the average member who reads it. But they're definitely not apologetic sites, they're just more of a "shallow water" approach than a "throw you in the deep end of the pool" approach.
Honestly, the best approximation of LDS doctrine is probably not found in any form of text but is best found through the practices of the majority of the active membership. Oh, and the Wikipedia pages are also probably a good place to start, since they can be changed to keep things current with changing emphasis and practice.
Of course, that's not to say that you can't find attempts by LDS individuals and academics to create what you're asking for, it's just that as time moves on each attempt has fallen out of favor as the culture of the organization shifts away on certain items:
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_Doctrine_(book)
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_of_Mormonism
3: https://deseretbook.com/p/lds-beliefs-doctrinal-reference-ro...
Mormonr is IMHO very fair, just on the other side fence. They're a faithful group, but they are committed to truth and scholarship and they're willing to say, "yeah that embarrassing thing does seem to be true" when it seems to be true.
For someone so committed to "truth", "rational thinking," and being "extremely thorough and factual" you've sure gotten a lot wrong in just this message. Mormonthink is far from a prominent apologist foundation. Most Mormons consider them anti. You should probably look at the site before jumping to such a confirmation-bias driven conclusion.