Much has been written on Mormon Blogs about the awful object lessons given to young women during chastity talks. While having never been a young women myself, I’ve heard of several. Most have a common theme. Something nice and pristine is shown the girls. Then that item is desecrated or fouled in some manner. Then they are asked if they still want it. The implication, often said explicitly, is that object is their body, and if it is ever defiled no man will want it. The ones I’ve heard about are:
- Chewed Gum: Teacher has a piece of gum, asked who wants it. Then puts it in her mouth, chews it, and then offers it to the girl that wanted it.
- A nice piece of wood is shown the girls. Then a nail is hammered in, and it is said this is them breaking the law of chastity. They repent so the nail is removed, but the hole remains.
- A cake is baked, and is placed on the table. The girls are told they get a piece after the lesson. During the lesson, the cake is likened to their bodies, and then the teacher puts her hand in it and completely destroys it. Nobody want s apiece now.
Even Elizabeth Smart talked about how the lessons she received in YW contributed to her being unwilling to leave her captors.
“I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m that chewed up piece of gum, nobody re-chews a piece of gum, you throw it away.’ And that’s how easy it is to feel like you know longer have worth, you know longer have value,” Smart said. “Why would it even be worth screaming out? Why would it even make a difference if you are rescued? Your life still has no value.”
All these objects lessons are a product of the antiquated belief that a women’s value is in her virginity, and that once taken (or give) can never be restored, thus the “damaged goods” belief. All of them completely ignore the atonement, and the teaching that you can be made completely whole after a sin. If the nail in the wood lesson was to be given with the atonement in play, then after the nail was removed, the hole would be miraculously filled in and made whole. I could see a teacher taking the board with the nail hole in it, putting it away and bringing out a new piece of wood, and telling the girls this is them after repentance, with no trace or remembrance of a hole ever being there! What a wonderful lesson!
But now on to the subject of this post, the worlds worst object lesson, which I played a part in! It was a Sunday, sometime in the early 1970’s, and church had just gotten out. I was probably 16 at the time in Priest quorum. Unknown to us Priests, the YW of our corresponding age (Laurels) had just finished a lesson with the cake example listed above. As us Priests were leaving the class and entering the foyer, a young woman was carrying the now destroyed cake through the foyer to the trash. Several of us approached the young woman and asked what she was doing with the cake, and she said she was throwing it out. So, being hungry boys, we proceeded to take handfuls of the destroyed cake and eat it there in the the foyer. While so engaged in eating the cake and getting frosting on our faces due to the messy condition of it, in came the rest of the young women and the YW leaders who had just finished the lesson. The YW laughed, while the leaders looked on in horror. The object lesson was completely ruined! Not only will boys want a YW if she has been defiled, they will eagerly devourer her! Being immature at the time, any sexual overtones of what was happening was lost on my 16 year old mind, but I’m sure the YW leaders realized the total disaster the lesson had become!
Do you have any personal experiences with bad object lessons, or maybe some good ones?
SMASHED BIRTHDAY CAKE BY JASONSISK USED UNDER A CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE
Wheat & Tares 
Oh the delicious irony!
This is will not qualify for the worst analogy. However, the underlying tone is the point.
On the mission we were told that the less active members have better get on the train (the church) because it is leaving the station and will leave them behind. If the less active, along with prospective converts, do not get on the train NOW, then their opportunity is gone and the train will not return for them.
This analogy along with many others used fear to have people get with the program. So many Mormon analogies use fear. Now Ballard brought in the boat.
Interesting how before the church had control of the narrative and the train left the people, now the people know the narrative and are leaving the boat !
In Mormonism we were taught so much symbolism. Symbolism has its role in the world, but in Mormonism it has been misused and abused. When you give lay teachers, with a vast variety of skill-sets and experiences, dozens of hours of lesson planning each year, the lesson quality can be all over the map. With correlation, book-manual lessons are less appealing and some people get creative (although they are instructed not to). A specific lesson designed for only a specific person or audience, then can become poorly replicated and we end up with these cultural institution symbolism lessons, but not gospel lessons. These ideas expand and are perverted. Many of these ideas come from teachers, and mission presidents who are trying to impress their audience with their lessons and teaching skills. Since in the church we are not allowed to use critical thinking skills and give appropriate feedback to bad ideas these concepts and symbolism lessons are passed on and on.
Jesus taught with symbols and did so very masterfully. The underlying tone of his lessons was to build up and inspire the listeners. His criticisms were only to awaken the religious leadership to their errors. I can not think of any of Christ’s parables that have secondary underlying tones that we can now in retrospect wish that he would not have shared. The parables still hold 2,000 years later. The Mormon parables have not survived a single generation.
As a youth, my family experienced extreme poverty. We had the very basics, but anything outside of that was seen as the purview of the rich. One such unimaginable luxury was chewing gum. It was incomprehensible that someone would use their precious money to buy something you’d chew and then spit out. And yet, the allure was inescapable: the sweet smell emanating from their breath, the flexing jaw that screamed ‘cool!’, and the sultry way that the girls looked upon the gum-chewers. In fact, the only crime I committed as a youth was to shoplift a pack (jumbo sized, not the wimpy 5 pack) of Wrigley Doublemint Gum. Frankly, if I was going to trade in my spot in the Celestial Kingdom for chewing gum, I wanted two girls looking at me in a longing fashion.
You see where this is going.
At a YW/YM fireside, the speaker took out a stick of Big Red gum, unwrapped it, gave it to the person in the front row and asked her to examine it, and pass it on. Everyone had to take a good, long look at this stick of gum. With a curiosity that rivaled Ralphie’s for the secret decoder, my brother and I sat in the back row with all our friends, anxiously waiting for the gum to make its way to us.
The speaker droned on and on – I have no recollection of what he was saying – as the gum slowly got closer. Finally it reached the back row. Only a few people separated us from the prized wonder. Suddenly, the speaker’s ramblings came into sharp focus: “Is there anyone here who would eat this gum?” he said tauntingly. ” Go on, take it! It’s all yours!” he mocked.
Like the gates opening at the Kentucky Derby, my brother and I jumped out of our seats and dove towards the gum. Here was FREE GUM!! And we had to get to it before the rest of the crowd did. Our sudden movement quickened a primal instinct in the nearby youth, and they also sprung into action, in a way that only impulsive teenagers can do.
There were perhaps 8-10 of us who dove for the precious stick of gum. My brother, being larger and more athletic than most managed to wrangle it from the shocked holder. Then, with the rest of us piled haphazardly on top of each other and tipped over folding chairs, my brother stood triumphantly, and held the stick of gum high in the air, and with great flair slowly twisted the stick of gum into his mouth, much to the delight of the crowd.
Again, I have no recollection of how the fireside ended up, only that my brother collected all sorts of pats on the back and “slap fives” (for the youngsters, that’s the predecessor of the high five). And yes, by my recollection, he did catch the eye of the pretty girls in the audience.
Object Lesson: 0
Undeveloped Prefrontal Cortex: 1
I issue my strongest possible condemnation to object lessons if all kinds. They are distracting and rarely have any solid message behind them.
Object lessons are a symptom of the disease of untrained teaching. They spring from a desire of an untrained teacher to be remembered for being entertaining. This is wrong on every level. The lesson should be remembered for its message, rather than the teacher for being a celebrity-wanna-be.
Some object lessons are good (effective), some aren’t. Mr. Charity just jumped the shark by issuing his “strongest possible condemnation” of them all. (I suspect he knows this and is trolling as usual but here I am taking the bait)
The point the author is making isn’t that object lessons themselves are wrong. The point is we should be placing an emphasis on the right object (forgiveness, atonement, etc.) not perfect purity via sexual shaming.
Not a church lesson, but in college in the mid-90s the local DARE officer from the Sheriff’s office came to one of my classes and showed a series of pics of horribly deformed babies, and yelled for 30 minutes about how if you smoke pot (even once!) this is exactly what your kids would look like. My buddy and I were actually high as a kite in that class that day and couldn’t stop laughing, which made the DARE officer very mad.
Fast forward a quarter century, my kids are all almost adults and none of them looked like that.
My worst experience was in the late 80s. We had been promised a Hawaiian themed youth night activity complete with fake luau and Hawaiian treats. This sounded so fun to me. My life was rather bleak at the time and I was really looking forward to such a fun activity.
The overflow had been set up like an airplane and we took a fake flight with the leaders passing out drinks and peanuts. It was all so great until the plane fake crashed and we all died and spent the rest of the night going room to room around the building learning the plan of salvation and which kingdom we would end up in if we weren’t good enough. Our parents were all in white in the chapel which was the celestial kingdom and I was so confused at why all the adults in my ward owned white suits and dresses.
Maybe they talked about repentance and the Atonement but I didn’t notice cause I was in such a bad mood that this great, fun event had turned into a boring, spiritual experience. Teen me was NOT appreciative of the bait and switch.
Spot on. We do our youth a huge disservice by teaching them to see all people and things in a purity binary. You’re either Worthy or Unworthy, marriageable material or damaged goods, nothing in between. Once again, we’re left out in the cold when it comes to moral reasoning, unable to make holistic judgments on the people and influences in our lives so that when a spouse confesses to porn use or doubts about the church, it’s taken as a betrayal of the entire marriage because the illusion of purity is ruined. We’re too hung up on the wrong dealbreakers.
That Elizabeth Smart quote is utterly heartbreaking.
I remember the shortcomings of object lessons being called out:
1) At a fireside, Michael McClean told about having the lesson of nails pounded into a board example taught to him as a youth, but for him it was compared to repentance, “but the holes are still there”.
He stated clearly that the comparison was wrong, that with repentance, the board is made whole, no blemishes.
2) My Laurel teacher compared premarital sex to eating an unbaked cake. She taught that sex is beautiful, but that timing is important.
3) I am pretty sure I read the chewed gum analogy in Especially For Mormons. I don’t remember hearing it in a lesson.
4) Not an object lesson, but I did have a Mia Maid advisor who organized an overnighter for our class. During it, she and another leader taught sexual boundaries, and explained terms (masturbation was new to me). The lessons could be tweaked today, but I value that she used proper terminology, and was clear and straightforward with the class.
These object lessons are incredibly sexist. Ruined cake, chewed-up gum, and empty holes all allude to a broken hymen, as if to say that the violated undesirables are all women. Add to this lessons that shame women who dress immodestly as “walking pornography” as if to label women as inherently temptresses and men as helpless victims.
Plus never mind the fact that heterosexual men in this world do actually desire to marry women who have had sex before marriage.
JCS may have faults, but inconsistency is not one of them. While I generally have a much more liberal view than him, I agree with him here.
Object lessons are almost always wrong-headed. And that’s at their best. They quite often are downright insensitive or offensive.
As this example points out, object lessons are usually geared toward making students feel bad for mistakes they have made or will make. They are guilt trips in 3D.
We should focus on mess of love and understanding. Leave the smashed cakes at home.
Trish, Are you formerly British?
Merriam-Webster:
Definition of object lesson — : something that serves as a practical example of a principle or abstract idea
Collins:
object lesson in British English —
1. a convincing demonstration of some principle or ideal
2. (esp formerly) a lesson in which a material object forms the basis of the teaching and is available to be inspected
in American English —
a practical or concrete illustration of a principle
2 small detours:
Don’t blame the boat on Ballard. It was Brigham’s 1866 adoption of an old metaphor – older even than the irony of Brigham’s using the metaphor used earlier by the Old Ship A.M.E. Zion Church, the oldest Black Church in the City of Montgomery. “The Court Street Methodist Church … gave Black people … this building in 1852. Resourceful Black slaves… helped a freed Black contractor… roll the church on logs to its present location… It is reported that someone asked the men engaged in logging the church down the street, ‘What are you going to name the church?’ The answer was, ‘The Old Ship of Zion,’ so it was named…” (Wikipedia)
The chewed gum lesson and its effect on Elizabeth Smart could be used as a valuable object lesson (not the formerly British kind) on appropriate teaching, the fact that we all (including teachers in Church) make mistakes, and as a springboard for an object lesson on reading scripture without the harmful assumption that its words mean what we initially think they mean. I’d be tempted to use it in dealing with Moroni 9:9 (“many of the daughters of the Lamanites have they taken prisoners; and after depriving them of that which was most dear and precious above all things, which is chastity and virtue…”). That passage has been too often read as if chastity meant virginity and as if virtue was always a concept of sexual morality. Read that way it makes no sense in the context of the gospel of Christ. Perhaps to the extent the BoM was “translated” after the manner of the language of JS we could find Webster’s 1828 dictionary instructive. There the first definition of “virtue” is “strength”, while the definition of “chastity” includes “freedom from all unlawful commerce of sexes.” Understood this way, perhaps Moroni is saying that rape (an unlawful commerce of sexes) deprives the victim of the “most dear and precious thing” – freedom and the power of choice including power over one’s own body. While that’s a mere possibility, it may be worth raising in an effort to teach how to read and think about scripture (and how wrong some traditional readings may be). What do you think?
There are so many things wrong with this object lesson, and Bill talked about the denial of the atonement, but there are other problems that smack you when you are a sexual abuse survivor or rape victim.
The worst part about that worst object lesson is that in many of them, like the cake smashing, there is violence done against the cake. Hardly an analogy of the boy friend and girl friend willingly “going too far.” No, that is a much better analogy for rape. The violence in the one I heard as a teen was a flower with each petal being yanked off. That kind of violence in the object lesson make it so the rape victims apply it to themselves more than the girl who broke the law of chastity. It misses the intended mark of those who violate the law of chastity and hits hard on the innocent victim of rape or childhood sex abuse. Notice that the cake did not choose to be violated. A perpetrator did it to the victim. This does the most damage to the innocent victims, like Elizabeth Smart, because she didn’t choose to be raped anymore than the cake choose to be mashed.
But let’s back up, those objects in the object lessons are not humans, but objects. Talk about objectification of the young women. The very premise of this lesson is that the girls are things to be lusted after, used, devoured, or discarded by males. Such a lovely lesson and we Mormons accuse Hollywood of teaching our daughters that their worth is all tied up in their sexual desirability and how Hollywood objectifies women. Then we teach our daughters they are a delicious cake for hungry men.
And as a final blow, we teach that the Savior will save everyone but a woman who is sexually sullied, whether it was against her will or not, innocent victim or not. Somehow women are not worth the Savior bothering with, even the innocent ones. Once dirtied, forever worthless. This just undid 1,000 lessons on how Jesus loves us and we are children of God of infinite worth. Nope, you’re nothing but a soiled cupcake, a chewed piece of gum. Go sing “I am a child of God” and substitute the words “child of God” with dirty cupcake”
This kind of object lesson doesn’t just make the atonement ineffective, it makes women into objects with no worth other than sexual purity. It teaches that God doesn’t care if you are a victim of a violent rape; your only worth is as a sexually pure object. You are not a beloved child of God, just a dirty piece of trash.
Count me as another person taught I was worthless to God because of what somebody else did to me.
Intro to D&C – “Although most of the sections are directed to members of the church…the messages…are for the benefit of all mankind” – I disagree and am tired of our modern-day metaphors of the Lord commanding someone to sell their farm in 1831, etc.
Sorry, if commenting again, but wanted to share these stories of object lessons. As a reference, these all occurred in 1987
I went to release time Seminary in Utah. The teachers wanted everyone to be engaged attending and inviting non-members. They did many unique projects. At the time, I thought we had best seminary classes.
In one, they built a Wheel of Fortune roulette wheel, to actual size. For 1 day, all the seminary classes played a gospel/ scripture chase wheel of fortune. They also brought in a new car and actually tore down and reconstructed a brick wall of the building to place it inside the seminary building. Furthermore, they had thousands of $$$ of cash (unsure if it was real, at the time I believed it was) and were flashing it to the “winners”. This project must a cost a lot of tithing dollars. In retrospect, I did not remember any lessons learned but how they went to an unnecessary expense to build the wheel and tear down and rebuild the seminary front wall
On another occasion the seminary teachers played a trick on us, and kept us confined to the seminary building. They then told all the students that the Russians had fired a nuclear bomb. They had a the girls crying and the guys in panic. At the end of the period, they told us it was a hoax. But if we were to die now, what changes would we make in our life. We then had to promise not to tell the students in the next hour.
I had 10 AM seminary so we had no idea….by the end of the day everyone knew of the game. How this would be never accepted in today’s world; how was this still able to pass by so many people and heads not roll. Then again, the seminary president was changed the next year.
My final seminary story, was where the seminary classrooms were turned into outer darkness, telestial, terrestrial, and celestial kingdoms. We had to do scripture searches in a pitch black room, then progressing onto rooms with more light and treats. When we achieved and arrived at the Celestial kingdom they were playing re-runs of ALF and the Cosby show. That is what The celestial kingdom was watching Bill Cosby and eating snacks. (Bill Cosby as the entertainer in heaven? …..if they only knew the future )
The seminary program that year spent a lot of money for object lessons, to which I really did not learn anything new. At least I did not interpret the lessons to be shamed or such, and even at the time the Russian one only sent me more into TBM mode.
The memories of countless hours in LDS classes……………………to what end ?
My dad had an object lesson that was pretty good. It was based on “though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow”.
I don’t know what chemicals he employed, but he started with a glass of clear liquid. He added something that made it bright red. Then, through the atonement, he added another substance that turned the liquid white.
He only applied it to sin in general and emphasized the total cleansing power of the atonement.
Not quite an object lesson, but an analogy I heard in a lesson at some point was that young women were like apples on a tree, and we needed to cling to the tree until we were picked, not drop to the ground to get dirty and rotten where only the boys who were spiritually idle would pick us up, but eventually nobody would because once you leave the tree, you start to rot. At the time, I thought the tree was chastity or maybe the ground was sexual activity, but now I think maybe it meant the Church (?). Either way, I strenously objected to the idea that WE were passive objects to be selected by boys (who had the autonomy and right to choose what they wanted to consume). The teacher wasn’t ready for a feminist smackdown, but that’s what she (rightly!) got.
I’d completely agree that not all object lessons are created equal. But after attending Church faithfully as a youth, as well as all four years of seminary, I came out of it believing sin should be avoided, that the Atonement was fully there for us to utilize if we didn’t avoid it (or if we just wanted to be better), and that men and women were equal and deserving of the utmost respect. Although my parents helped with that as well, I’d say the Church was successful in those regards.
You dedicated a whole post to the “poop in brownies” analogy, which I’ve never been a huge fan of. By that standard, no general authority should be quoting Shakespeare in conference.
I remember an object lesson in seminary in which our soul was compared to a paper cup. Keeping the Spirit in our lives was compared to filling the cup with water. The teacher then took a needle, which was basically opposition, temptation, and other adversity, and started poking multiple holes in the cup, so that keeping it filled with water was a constant battle. I remember thinking that I was probably more resilient than a paper cup, but I did appreciate the admonition to constantly look for ways to fill our lives with the Spirit. I’ve come to realize, though, that if that lesson was truly accurate, the very nature and structure of the cup would change over time, even if it still needed filling from time to time.
BeenThere, I had a version of that object lesson when I was a teen, in which a teacher put drops of red food coloring into a glass of water, each drop representing sin, a bad choice, etc. After the water turned blood-red, she poured some kind of bleaching substance (I think it was just plain Clorox based on the smell), but the water didn’t become clear like she intended, just cloudy and gray and totally unappetizing. Rule number one of object lessons: test them out at home before you present them to your students!
Years later I saw a Baptist minister give a similar demonstration using what appeared to be a religious chemistry kit specifically designed for teaching that lesson. His attempt actually turned the liquid clear again, but by that time I was a jaded young adult who had already taken chemistry and was not that impressed.
I had an institute teacher who poured salt into a bowl of water, which resulted in a light bulb gradually fading on to full brightness. It was a simple circuit that was wired to pass through the water (ionizing the water with salt made it conductive). He was teaching about the “salt of the earth” passage of scripture or something, I’m not certain what exactly he was trying to get across. Again, as a college student who had already studied some basic electronics, I found this lesson unimpressive, if not dangerous (open unprotected live AC wires touching water in a small classroom).
These kinds of lessons (old parlor tricks or children’s science demonstrations) do little to have lasting impact in teaching the Gospel. These things only reinforce a superficial “Jesus is Magic!” understanding of the atonement, rather than the meaty discussions of ethics and morality and justice and forgiveness that we should be having at church, but aren’t.
Another one–
At a youth activity, after playing some silly icebreaker game, we were given delicious-looking cupcakes as a refreshment. We eagerly bit into them, and they tasted terrible. I think they replaced the sugar in the recipe with garlic salt. Disgusting! I think the lesson was that bad things can take on the appearance of good, and that we had to be extra careful to avoid the pitfalls of sin when they are presented in an appealing way, or some such nonsense. At any rate, the point of the lesson was lost on all of us, especially the boys, as we just felt angry and betrayed that we didn’t get the delicious treat we were expecting.
But in hindsight, it gave me a solid foundation for lifelong trust issues, and taught me to always be suspicious of our Church leaders and their motives, which I’m sure wasn’t the intention, but it’s a valuable lesson for any Mormon kid to learn.
HDP, the picture in my mind of your brother holding the stick of gum up triumphantly, then putting it in his mouth is priceless, and has the same opposite effect as my cake experience. Great story! Does your brother remember it?
When I was a teen in the 80s, our ward did a giant game night. We entered the cultural hall, and it was set up with both spiritual games and more fun-type games. We were to play the spiritual games to earn tokens. Then we paid out the token to play the fun games for credits. Then the credits could be redeemed for prizes at the prize table. The grand prize was being able to borrow a ward member’s super expensive sports car for prom (likely chauffeured by the owner, I don’t remember).
One of our group didn’t have a lot of money and wanted that car for prom so, so, so badly. Our group of friends all got together and decided to work together to earn it for her. We killed ourselves playing games as fast as possible, and as a group we won the car.
Of course, then we were all picked off one-by-one to ‘die’, taken before a judge (bishop in a white suite in the dark with a flashlight on his face) where our credits were taken away, the car certificate was taken away, and our tokens were counted and came up insufficient. We were told that since we’d wasted our tokens on foolish/temporary things we were going to the Telestial kingdom.
The Telestial Kingdom was a empty room (not even chairs) screened off from the Terrestial and Celestial (Celestial got sofas, decorations, and a huge layout of deserts that never were shared with the other Kingdoms). I was so pissed and felt so betrayed that I still remember the whole thing in detail.
The lesson I took away from it was to not trust the ward leadership when it came to giant, super activities (this one had been advertised for *months*).
Years later, several of the other youth and I that had worked so hard to win that car happened to have a conversation about it. As adults, we got a good laugh at it. Essentially, we’d been sent to the Telestial kingdom for sacrificing our own wants/needs/desires for someone else’s. Not likely what the ward leadership had intended to teach!
I taught a decent one once! We were reading in the book of Numbers, and in 11:5 the wandering Israelites resentfully think about the treats they miss most from their time of captivity, saying “We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic.”
I had made a nice salad of cucumber, onions, and herbs, and invited the class to imagine that they had to spend years in a hot, dry desert. I passed around samples of the salad, and asked them to imagine how delicious it would’ve been to have such a treat in the desert. We then read God’s response to the griping (a typically Old Testament one resulting in death and punishment), and I talked about how our instincts towards comfort and pleasure sometimes put us at odds with God’s plans, which can be frustrating.
I don’t think anyone felt shamed or traumatized, but it was some tasty salad.
Bill, he does remember it, daresay even fondly. We laugh about it often.
The best object lesson I ever had, didn’t have much of a lesson involved. I was 18 and joining the “old guys” in Elders Quorum. The EQP was giving the lesson. He started the lesson by taking a half-gallon of vanilla ice cream and cutting open the box (one of the rectangular ice-cream boxes, not the tubs). He then let us watch longingly at the block of ice cream, so tantalizingly begin to melt in that 3rd hour of church. He proceeded to start his lesson by reading a quote and in my mind, I felt resigned to the fact that I’d have to watch that ice cream melt for 30+ minutes as we talked about the lesson. But sometimes, people are genuinely good.
This humble servant of God merely read a short quote from the lesson and said “What I really wanted to do today was have root beer floats with you.” and he pulled out a couple of 2-liter bottles of root beer and some plastic cups. We had root beer floats for Elders Quorum. BEST OBJECT LESSON EVER.
Next Youth lesson I teach will feature nailing a piece of chewed gum to a cake, a veritable trifecta of object lessons. If that doesn’t change hearts & minds, nothing will.
HereAmI, I remember having that same activity. In our version, there was no car as a prize, but nonetheless we were brought into the chapel one by one and placed into “kingdoms” depending on how we played the game. The celestial-bound kids were seated in the choir loft behind the pulpit, the terrestrial kids were seated in the main pews, and the telestial kids (me among them) were relegated to the folding chairs in the overflow. We were then forced to sit through a talk by the bishop about the importance of using your time on earth wisely, choosing honorable pursuits, etc. The only kids who managed to achieve “celestial glory” was a clique of the 6 most popular kids in my ward, one of whom somehow knew about the subterfuge in advance and told their friends how to beat the system. They spent the rest of the evening sitting smugly on the stand looking down on the rest of us, literally and figuratively.
There a lot of things wrong with that object lesson. But just as we learned by playing Oregon Trail when we were kids, you can make all the right choices in life and still have your entire family die of dysentery.
These stories of object-lessons-gone-wrong are indeed amusing (though sometimes cringeworthy). But also amusing are the incomplete take-aways from some of the ruined or backfired stories. For instance, following the cake story at the top, the OP reports that, “Not only will boys want a YW if she has been defiled, they will eagerly devoured her!” That’s true in some cases (though I’m hoping here that the YW consents and is okay with just being “devoured”). But the OP stopped the take-aways from this particular object-lesson-gone-wrong too soon!
Sure, most boys will eagerly eat a piece of smashed cake in the church foyer if it’s free. In fact, if they’re hungry, most boys will consume almost any kind of cake before running back out the door and going on with whatever it is boys do. But once the boys need to commit half their resources towards just one kind of cake (and henceforth promise to not snack on any other), most boys will pass on the crumbs in the foyer if given the alternative of an entire fresh cake in their favorite flavor just for them.
Although I dislike the cake object lesson for some of the reasons already mentioned, one could imagine engaging the OP and his friends to help extend the “ruined” object lesson and draw-out something deeper.
Pagan – Some how I just can’t see Jesus seeing some women as unwanted crumbs and other women as fresh baked in a special flavor just to please a boy. Reading your comment made me feel ill.
You know… Every week we participate in a food based objet lesson taught by Jesus himself, namely the sacrament. Christ called himself the bread of life. Lehi’s dream in an object lesson of sorts. Many of Jesus’s parabled and lessons used physical objects as stand ins for abstract principles, think coins, beams and sheep. So it’s not that object part of the lessons above make tham bad, but the the implied lesson or principle is incorrect. When your underlying theory is wrong, your models based upon it will be equally erroneous.
@lehcarjt… I feel likewise. You’re repeating the fundamental problem (as the OP brought out) with cake-based (or chewing gum-based) chastity object lessons. Just keep in mind that, while it may make some feel ill, the reality is that how boys respond to free offers of cake is likely at odds with how Jesus would respond.
Pagan, I disagree with you on both comments. So, here is the parable of Jesus and the smashed cake.
One day Jesus was at the home of Mary and Martha. Martha baked a cake, frosted it and started to take it into the dining room. She tripped and fell. With tears in her eyes, she picked up the damaged cake. No dirt, as it hit the table sideways on the way down. The cake though sIs smashed, crumbled, and ugly. She took the damaged cake into Jesus and still with tears in her eyes, she apologized for the ugly cake.
Now, the Jesus I believe in, would assure Martha that everything is fine and would eat the cake. There is nothing wrong with it but how it looks, and what little dirt may have been on the table. Jesus would want to assure Martha that her offering was still acceptable. Her best efforts were good enough.
Jesus, who turned water into wine, could make the cake undirty if it had fallen in a pig trough. He could have just blessed it and, poof, it is perfect again. THAT is what the atonement is all about. Yup, the cake would have been *good enough * for Jesus if it had fallen in a pig trough. Because He fixes things, even women who have made bad choices or had bad things done to them.
There is NO WAY that this kind of object lesson where a person is irreparable damaged can be made right. The basic premise that a human female is a *thing * is dead wrong. OK, but Christ used things to symbolize people in his parables, and this is just a symbolic analogy. But the problem with the argument that people are compared to things in other parables is that much too often it is a woman who is objectified sexually. This is so constant in our culture that we need to be fighting it, not just playing along with another objectification of women as sexual things. We get so much of it from Hollywood, that we just don’t need to add to it with religion. The second premise is that sexual damage is permanent. Sure, it can have consequences, such as unwed pregnancy and STDs that are permanent. But there is a big difference between consequences and permanent unworthiness. These object lessons teach that the sexual sin is permanent even when there WAS no sin, such as cases of rape. The third problem with these object lessons is that they equate sexual purity with worth. I really like the object lesson where someone takes a twenty dollar bill, oh not just any 20, but a brand spanking new 20 dollar bill, and asks who wants it. Then they dirty up the 20 bill, and ask again who wants it. Well, everybody still wants it because it’s value has not changed. Our value to God does not change just because we sin. We are still beloved children of God and this object lesson teaches the opposite.
@Anna… thank you for your thoughtful reply. What a wonderful idea for a Savior’s parable. I love it. I think, though, that you may have misunderstood my earlier posts. I’ve made no mention of the *Savior* or that he doesn’t value those who’ve sexually transgressed or been abused. My comments are meant instead to truly describe *boys*–who are a very poor stand-in for the the Savior when it comes to how they value smashed cake. In the OP’s story, the boys appeared to ruin the (already bad) object lesson by eagerly consuming the smashed cake. However, the true relationship between boys (not the Savior) and cake is more complex. It’s true: boys will devour almost any cake when hungry–even if smashed (or especially if smashed?). However, when they need to settle on one single cake to eat for the rest of their lives, most boys prefer cake that’s un-smashed, in their favorite flavor, and that they won’t have to share with others. So, if the OP’s point was was that the hungry boys ruined the object lesson (that smashed cake is less valued), a more complete understanding of boys and cake somewhat ruins the OP’s ruin. (Again, I’m talking about how boys, not the Savior, value smashed cake).
I should add that one needs to be careful when crafting a parable about the Savior eating smashed cake. The OP, the YW leaders he mentions, and your very own pretend-parable all treat eating smashed cake as a metaphor with casual sex overtones. So, when you talk about the Savior eating smashed cake… well, maybe we just ought not go there :-).
Not an object lesson but my daughter told me about a book she had been reading – @adamgrant book Think Again, and he shared how the boiling water and frog analogy is actually false. A 🐸 will jump out of water if it begins to get hot… I’ve heard the analogy in church settings so many times.
Jesus’ object lessons peel back to reveal multiple layers of complexity/messaging. Your average person can barely make an object lesson that “works” at the most superficial level, let alone any subsequent layers. From our scripture study, we are conditioned to feel and react to such things – in the sub-layers. If the superficial layer flops, the sub-layers are inevitably clunkers, even heretical or apostate. And that’s where we are resonating.
But, you know, “fur cute! Super fun!”
Here’s an idea. Why don’t we teach Christ’s allegories instead of trying to make up our own?
I’m not sure I agree that object lessons are inherently bad teaching devices, but they can be a crutch that amateur teachers rely on too much, and that inhibits the rest of the learning/teaching. And people have a tendency to use them because they are cute, without thinking them through.
A few years back, the church came out and said stop using handouts as a teaching crutch (candy, cutsite take-home trinkets related to the lesson) and instead focus on the message. Spend more time prepping your teaching than the crafting. Maybe it’s time for the church to ban object lessons too. I cringe suggesting it because the church only uses broad strokes and it would erase the legitimate tool for everyone else who isn’t teaching chewed gum. The last thing we need right now is for the church to start tying our hands when we try to teach.
The question is, if they removed these horrible object lessons, wouldn’t the people still teach the same unforgiving and punitive concepts in another way? Isn’t that the problem, not necessarily the mode of communication? We are after all, children of the puritans, inventors of the scarlet letter, Pharisees, judges and juries combined.