TV Review: Big Love - Outer Darkness

In the Big Love episode "Outer Darkness", Barb finds out she's going to be excommunicated from the Mormon church. The first thing she does is beg her female relatives to borrow a temple recommend so she can get her endowments. This plot line both confuses and touches me. Here's a little primer on temple recommends. When a Mormon turns 12 they can begin attending the temple, doing baptisms for the dead (which are exactly what they sound like). Endowments are a ritual preformed in the temple (essentially) when young adults become real adults. You must be endowed before going on your mission or being married. Generally, if you've done neither by your mid-twenties you'll get your endowments. It's part of be coming a full adult in the Mormon church. Barb was married in the Mormon church. She would've gotten her endowment shortly before her original marriage to Bill.

Setting that aside, watching Barb go through the endowment ceremony was one of the most poignant moments in the series. She is torn between her faith in the principle (polygamy) and the way she lived for the first thirty odd years of her life. If she doesn't have her endowment, she can't enter into the Celestial Kingdom, the highest kingdom of heaven. The Mormon faith teaches that any lesser level heaven might as well be hell because there is the knowledge that they might've had the Celestial glory.

The very next day, Barb is excommunicated from the Mormon church. Had she not been excommunicated, and had the principle proven to be wrong, she would have qualified for one of the two lower kingdoms of heaven. By being excommunicated, Barb's name was removed from the Church records. She is no longer sealed to any of her family--in the Mormon afterlife she won't be able to be with any of her family. She cannot be sealed to any of her family. Ordinances cannot be preformed for her after her death. It would be as if she never existed. In the afterlife she will be cast into Outer Darkness. Though Barb no longer believes these things, she was raised to believe these things were true.

How do we deal with something like that? When the way you were raised, the people who raised you all say that your actions are as bad as they come. Barb put a lot of effort into avoiding being excommunicated up until the point of explicitly lying. Although she did not believe the Church had the right or even the ability to excommunicate her, Barb still feared that excommunication. Although rationally she knew it shouldn't matter, years of indoctrination made her emotions go off the deep end.

The thing that has made Big Love such a great show in my eyes, is the way it echos my life. I watch Barb deal with the same struggles I have. She left the Church for the principle; I left the Church for Agnosticism. However we both struggle with the same things. We attempted to keep out loss of faith from our families. We fear committing a sin that we can't come back from even as we put more and more walls between us and our former faith. We can't find the support we need or even people who understand where we're coming from. We have yet to find a healthy way to deal with any of this. I am not sure one even exists.