I was that kid who didn’t watch R-rated movies

And now I'm learning that outsourcing our morality doesn't draw us closer to God.

When I was in high school, my World History class watched “Schindler’s List.” Everybody but me, anyway.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the movie—it’s the epic story of a man who saved thousands of Jewish people from certain death during the Holocaust. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1994 and is widely considered one of the greatest movies ever made.

It is also rated R. Which is why when my class watched Schindler’s List, I didn’t have my parents sign the permission slip. I sat in the school library and did an alternate assignment. I was a good Mormon boy in the 1990s,¹ and that meant I didn’t watch R-rated movies. I simply did not think twice—it didn’t matter what the movie was about, why it had the rating, or whether it had historic significance. I just didn’t watch R-rated movies. Including this one.

It was common at the time for Latter-day Saint families to have a rule against watching R-rated movies. It wasn’t a rule in every home, but even if your family allowed R-rated movies you knew another Latter-day Saint family who didn’t. Growing up, I was taught over and over again—in Young Men for sure, but probably as early as Primary too—that I shouldn’t watch R-rated movies.²

But this is one of those surprising things where something that seemed like an absolutely pervasive rule—“no R-rated movies”—was less pervasive than I thought. R-rated movies did come up in General Conference a few times, but it’s been almost 25 years since they have. And R-rated movies were never mentioned in the Church Handbook of Instructions or in the For the Strength of Youth pamphlet.

Really, go check. I could have sworn it was in the version of For the Strength of Youth we used when I was a youth. I checked, and it really wasn’t there.

But now this guideline is less useful than it used to be. There are Latter-day Saints all over the world, and other countries don’t use the U.S.-based MPAA rating system for movies. Movies on TV and on planes can be edited, but aren’t always. And of course, lots of TV shows that are rated TV-MA have as much or more adult content as R-rated movies, but have never had the same stigma within the Church. You can’t just boil it down to “don’t watch R-rated movies” anymore.

And the ratings should have never been the point.

I definitely believed, as a youth, that watching an R-rated movie was a sin. That I’d be docked for it at the final judgment; that it would accrue some Bad points that might someday slot me into a lower kingdom of glory. But when I view the gospel through the lens of the two great commandments, loving God and loving our neighbor, I see it differently.

Having this black-and-white rule—“R-rated movies are bad”—outsources our morality. It’s letting a Hollywood trade association decide what will and won’t be spiritually harmful to us. It’s us not trusting ourselves to make real decisions about what media content enhances our relationship with God and those around us.

We all do this, and we do it in lots of different ways in the Church. Instead of understanding what makes a Sabbath day holy, we outsource it to a list of things to do and not do. We frantically google to find out if “chai” is something we can have.

Where I live, stake leaders have started to talk about ministering a little bit differently. While the original thrust of ministering was moving away from the once-a-month visit model of home and visiting teaching, lately they’ve been saying, “Maybe it’s a once-a-month visit after all.” Trusting members of the Church to follow personal revelation is tough, because as Hugh Nibley said, “You can’t trust revelation because you can’t control it.”

We all do this, as parents and leaders. Instead of teaching our youth what modesty means, we tell them it has to do with types of swimsuits and whether your skirt reaches your fingertips. Instead of teaching them how to understand and appreciate the miracle that is their God-given bodies, for decades we regurgitated that having two pairs of earrings is Bad.

You have to start somewhere, I get that, and clear rules are good for that. That’s why we teach children this way: don’t run into the street, don’t talk to strangers, don’t watch R-rated movies. We have these rules with our own kids. Movie ratings matter here.

But in the Church we don’t have a good way to grow out of this and into something that centers your relationship with God. I think that having this black-and-white rule as an adult—“R-rated movies are bad”—actually hindered me from being able to tell for myself what content was compatible and enriching to my spiritual life. It told me to look at ratings instead of understanding how it impacted my ability to love God and love my neighbor.

With movies, there are ages and maturity levels where some things become appropriate that weren’t appropriate before. That maturity brings understanding. It’s possible that we also grow into spiritual maturity that helps us see some of these “rules” differently. We start to replace the rules with higher-order principles.

That doesn’t mean we throw everything away. Commandments don’t go away just because we see their weakness when they’re not backed with something greater. You should still keep the Word of Wisdom and the law of chastity. But there are plenty of other things in our Latter-day Saint culture that aren’t commandments. We can just do them, or we can plumb their depths to see what they have to offer us spiritually.

My oldest is sixteen, and as his parents, we’ve tried to make it clear that we don’t hold an expectation for him to go on a mission. We hope he does, because my wife and I both served missions and they were incredibly meaningful and impactful to us. But we hope he does it because he wants to share the gospel with others, not because that’s just what good Latter-day Saint boys do.

Can you do both? Meaning, can you rely on rules and routines while also deriving spiritual benefit? Sure. I think many Latter-day Saints (and Christians in general) do. It’s when the rule becomes the point, that’s the problem; it’s when the behavior (the act of going on a mission, in this case) becomes more important than the love it was designed to foster.

But we have to understand the why. We don’t have to try everything to get there. I don’t need to try alcohol to understand the effect it can have on my life. I didn’t need to try premarital sex to see that it wasn’t right for me and my spiritual life. But if this life was simply a test of obedience, we’d be given a clear list of rules and a scorecard for keeping them. Instead, we have a world full of gray areas and ambiguity, a world where we have to decide what we ourselves believe.

President Nelson said, “I urge you to stretch beyond your current spiritual ability to receive personal revelation.” I think he meant this. I think he meant that we shouldn’t outsource our morality, but that we should understand what we do, why we do it, and how it affects our relationship with God and others.

I watched Schindler’s List this past week. Only ~27 years after I chose not to watch it in high school. I’m in my 40’s, and I think it’s the first R-rated movie that I’ve ever watched unedited.

It’s an amazing film, of course. It’s rated R for a number of reasons; officially “language, some sexuality and actuality violence,” per the MPAA. If my sixteen-year-old’s high school class were to watch it, and he felt like it was something he could handle—well, I’d want to have a conversation with him about it first. But I think I’d sign the permission slip.

1. We were called Mormons back then. And I still consider myself a good Mormon boy, even if the terminology has changed.

2. Whenever I say something like this, I get someone in the comments who says, “You weren’t taught that!” Your experience might have been different than mine, but I was definitely taught that watching R-rated movies was off-limits.