The Security Apparatus Loves Anti-Intellectualism and White Supremacy

When we were in high school, I and my siblings had to go to our local LDS church for religious indoctrination at 6 am every single school day (in addition, of course, to the required 3 hours of church on Sundays plus various activities and "firesides" we had to go to throughout the week).  Not even fundamentalist Christians or even Mennonites did such a thing.  And what did we learn?  Well, it was ostensibly instruction on the LDS "standard works" - Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price - but according to the church the real purpose was to help impressionable young people "feel the spirit," i.e. have emotional experiences that would tie them to the church and cause them to go to church schools such as BYU, go on missions, get married in exclusionary LDS temples, and pay 10% of their income to the church in tithes for life.

The actual content was incredibly impoverished and often offensive.  In my freshman year, we were supposed to study the Old Testament in the poorly-translated King James Version as a means of supporting the validity of the LDS church's truth claims.  Even active LDS members acknowledge that this kind of proof-texting is incredibly anachronistic and misleading.  It didn't help that we also read Joseph Smith's risible and self-promoting "translation" and "correction" of ancient texts that he could not read.  Of course, such ignorance also did not stop him from hilariously mistranslating Egyptian hieroglyphics (on papyri that he bought from a traveling mummy salesman) that were ordinary funerary inscriptions and claiming that the writings came directly from the hand of the patriarch Abraham.

Of course, the security apparatus was always terrified of my desire to learn so they pulled some bizarre stunt where they claimed that our teacher died.  I thought the guy was fine, unlike my senior year Book of Mormon teacher who literally told us every single day that he was incredibly special because he had served a mission in Ecuador and LDS president Spencer Kimball had said that the indigenous people of the region were supposedly the purest descendants of the mythical savage and wicked dark-skinned Lamanites who had exterminated their white, righteous, and civilized kinsmen at the conclusion of the Book of Mormon.  Of course, Kimball also claimed that Native children who were sent to live with suburban Mormon families literally had their skin turned whiter as divine reward for their righteousness in becoming culturally assimilated into white Mormon society.

Oh, and this guy was getting some kind of degree in education and told me that people at UVa were antichrists.