We’re close, and both my wife and I talked with her. She says she doesn’t care about religion, she just wants to be with him. She doesn’t seem to be able to understand that both him & his family care a lot about their “religion” though. His family won’t even acknowledge her as his girlfriend. They say “she’s a friend”, even though they’re not even a PDA discreet couple. My wife says they most likely view her as just someone who their son is fooling around with at the moment - they don’t take her seriously or see her as a “real candidate”. Wife believes she’ll most likely get angry about it all once the infatuation ends and break it off with him. The surveillance thing is scary, I wonder if we’ve already been “looked into” due to daughter’s association with this family…

I just commented something related to this; the boyfriend does this exact same thing!!! He won’t talk about anything.

The part that really stood up to me was that the boyfriend himself won’t talk about his religion’s beliefs or practices with neither my daughter nor us (her parents), if you ask him he’ll only say surface level abstract stuff & will say the rest is members-only. He’ll say the Church “is family and these things are family business”. It’s weird not even being able to get a member to explain things to you.

Thanks!

Honestly one of the most freakish things I’ve heard from my daughter is that even though her boyfriend’s family’s rich, they don’t employ actual household staff, but they use volunteers from an internal organization of the church (Sea Org I think?), and volunteers don’t get paid except for food, board and small allowance - it’s “a life of service”. Which sounds uncomfortably close to slavery to me…