The difference

I have mentioned previously that I don't enjoy church as much as I used to.

Egotistically (perhaps), I blame that on the other members.

I remember a time when it seemed like talks and lessons were all more spiritual, and the people were just the best. It was a pleasure to learn and socialize with them.

That actually started changing a long time ago, but I have been thinking more about the reasons.

It's been over a decade since I was in a singles ward, but I remember noticing the change there, gradually.

I remember thinking it was because the population had gotten so much younger. 

Now, when I first started going to Canyon Road Ward, I was eighteen, so I may have overestimated the ages of some of the other members. There was a fairly large contingent of dental students, but that would probably still be early 20s.

As I got older and the general population of the ward stayed in their early 20s, I did notice a shallowness, but attributed it to age.

People were not as service-focused, and more self-absorbed, so it made sense that they wouldn't be as spiritual. I guess I thought they needed more time.

You can become more caring of the needs of others as you get older. but it doesn't happen automatically.

You can also put other people's needs too much over your own. There is a balance to be achieved, and it doesn't happen easily, but it seemed to be happening less and less. What was the cause of that?

There could be several reasons that people are generally more selfish and less spiritual; there are many currents in society that could contribute to that. There was one thought that was more disturbing to me, which is probably why I am writing about this now.

I have told this story before, but I don't think it was on this blog.

When I was a child there was a serial killer targeting prostitutes. It must have been the Green River Killer for this particular story, but there have been a few notorious cases.

Someone I knew and loved from church said it looked like someone had decided to do some cleaning up. 

I was disturbed by it, but I was also sure that if she was confronted with a prostitute in need that she would see their humanity and help. She might not sympathize in the abstract, but in the personal, I believed she would.

I still think and hope I was right about that, but I have started to wonder if part of the new hardness of heart is that we are confronted by differences so much. Was it easier for church members of the 70s and 80s to be loving and kind because we were all so homogeneous? And that was not just at church.

I am influenced by growing up in Oregon, which has historically been very white. When I was younger, it was more common for gay people to stay closeted.

I hate philosophy, but I read a fair amount of it because sometimes I believe it's important to understand the influences and the points of view. 

Often, their end goal seems to be to produce stability (at least with political philosophy), but it is amazing how often their answer for that is to make everyone more similar, as if we can't handle getting along with people who are different from us in some way.

This is my long and roundabout way of wondering whether the reason that some church members are such jerks -- especially about gay people or racism or any other bigotry-adjacent subject -- is because they have to admit they exist and previously they didn't need to?

And the corollary to that is that while I have mentioned dominator culture here and there, I want to spend some time being explicit on it.