On Being a Mormon Missionary: A Manifesto of Faith and Reason
Sometimes during my studies in college and grad school, I felt like I was some kind of mythological beast like the legendary Yeti or, to take something from one part of the country, a Jackalope. I am a faithful, believing and ordinary Mormon. I am also a student at a major university studying history. In a sea of doubt, pessimism and agnosticism, my colleagues find my faith bewildering and strange, and have sometimes remarked in passing how sad it is that such an able person should be in the grip of such delusions. My innate shyness often led me to avoid confrontation and debate, but here I want to respond to those people and everyone else who has made similar comments over the years. Most of the discourse I see related to Mormon missionaries on the internet and in the media is cynical and critical. The authors highlight the minority of cases in which a missionary hated his missionary experience or in which missionaries clashed with ministers of religion or seers of secularism. I want to say the seemingly unspeakable: I enjoyed my mission.
Like most Mormon youth, I served as a Mormon missionary when I turned 19. Since my sixteenth birthday, I had been saving money for this planned event. My meditations and my prayers about this future were usually one and the same, or at least they flowed so naturally from one another that I was never quite sure what I was doing. I determined that I would not go unless I felt and knew in my heart that it was the right thing to do. The Prophet Joseph Smith once said:
[T]The things of God are of deep importance; and time, experience, and careful, heavy, solemn thoughts can only discover them. Your mind, oh man! if you would lead a soul to salvation, you must stretch out as high as the furthest heavens, and peer and gaze into the darkest abyss and the wide expanse of eternity, you must commune with God. How much more worthy and noble are the thoughts of God than the vain imaginations of the human heart! Only fools will play with the souls of men. (Joseph Smith, History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 7 vols. 3:295)
In Mormonism, God is not found simply through motherly reflections as in natural theology, but through experiences with Him, and those experiences come from service to God and humanity. As Joseph Smith said, what is needed is time, experience, and deep reflection. The truth of a thing is found in doing it. So I studied and lived what I read, and in time I came to the conviction that God lives and that the Book of Mormon was true. As a Mormon missionary, I spent two years teaching that to everyone he knew. Another essay at another time will perhaps deal more fully with my basis for theism, but here let me say that faith is not irrational. It is not illogical. It arises from a spiritual longing and understands that sometimes, to be understood, you must first accept a fact and place it in the best light or in the most charitable gaze. Logic, as my college philosophy professor said repeatedly, is simply a tool that builds a priori assumptions and like a machine calculates the necessary conclusions. It is not knowledge itself, but a framework for organizing knowledge. A person of faith is as capable of reasoning and research as the most ardent adherent of positivism.
What does a Mormon missionary do? This question no doubt baffles some. Some, whose own lack of entrenched values so distorts their perception of the world, refuse to believe that anyone would actually put in two years of their own time; delay school, career, dating and friendships; and by his account he spends day after day sharing a message that he knows most will reject. It seems like a quixotic stagecoach and maybe it is. But let me stand on the witness stand as someone who did it and has no regrets. For two years I wore out my shoes and developed calluses from daily work and walking. I was shunned, spat at, pelted with rocks (and once with ketchup packets), insulted, harassed, almost arrested twice, and threatened at gunpoint once.
I will not try to claim that I enjoyed this negative treatment. Sometimes, however, he could understand the person’s frustrations and anger. It can be irritating to have someone come up to you and try to steer you into a conversation about something as deeply personal as religion. However, my experience has taught me that most people, once my fellow missionary and I were able to sit down with each other and frankly discuss each other’s beliefs, enjoyed the conversations even if they chose not to believe what we taught. Some were devoutly antithetical to our beliefs or practices and would probably have resented my mother’s presence in her vicinity. To all who were willing to listen, I taught my beliefs and gave them a grim testimony of the influence God and my commitment to Him have had on my life. In those two years I learned more about myself, my God, and my fellow men than in any comparable period, and it is not unlikely that I will continue to exploit these experiences for the rest of my life.
Among my fondest memories were many pleasant conversations with people from all walks of life, from the educated to the ignorant, from the most entrenched Americans to the most recent immigrants. I quickly learned that debating and arguing were useless enterprises. I am convinced, and my later life has been more convinced of this, that truth and understanding are the biggest casualties of forensic science. The result is often the same: both sides become more convinced of the truth of their own position, and the issue becomes more polarized than before. By confessing this intuition, I feel that I am committing a sin against modern society where debate has become a value per se. Let me clarify that I am not referring to disagreement or discussion, but to that puerile variety of parallel argumentation that so dominates our public discourse where the speakers, who cannot truly be called interlocutors, speak so alone and disconnected that there is no exchange of ideas or even recognition of the other’s point of view. It is rather the pontificating solipsist of the experts and spokesmen.
As Mormon missionaries, we were taught, and my goal was to share our message, invite others to consider it, pray about it, and live it, but nothing more. True, sometimes we were prompted to debate and I succumbed to many of those attacks, but most of the time my fellow missionaries and I tried and warned and invited others to listen to our message without ill feeling. Some have tried to argue that our reluctance to debate evidences some deeply held fears on our part about the veracity of our message; but such criticism is wrong. We simply recognize that rarely anything good comes out of such a debate and the casualty of such battles is often good relations between people. Most of those who wanted to debate with us were so lacking in the ability to listen and get the point of view of others that the debate would have simply been a battle of wills and egos.
So, you might ask, why do we do it? Why do we risk stirring up such controversy and resentment? I am convinced, after much experience, that it is the missionary work of this Church that inspires such vehement tirades against us more than any peculiarity of practice or principle. Similarly, many groups have divergent beliefs about God and salvation, but no other group goes to such lengths to make sure everyone else knows about them. I can only respond by saying that our belief compels us to do so and if we ignore the imperative to share this message, we would sink into unnerving hypocrisy. We believe our message can calm hearts, strengthen relationships, and enable all people to understand and worship God. This belief will cause controversy and will earn us the bad appraisal of many who maintain that truth and values are relative, but not sharing our message would be like denying that we believe it and that we cannot do it; I cannot do that, because I have had too many experiences that have confirmed the truth of this message and the need to share it with others. I have seen faith, both in God and myself, work too many miracles to step aside now and say that I will not work to help others because it might offend some. Life has taught me this: someone will be offended no matter what I do, that’s why I will live not to offend my conscience because that will be my constant and eternal companion.
My plea is this: that people take more time to understand each other in our public discourse, particularly regarding religion. This call has been made before and will be made again. I’m under no illusions that this little essay will have a big effect on society, but I hope someone will listen. True discussion and true communication about ideas and values requires that we first understand the opinions and beliefs of our interlocutors. Too many people assume too quickly that they know what someone else believes about this or that. Such intellectual mondegreens stifle our ability to communicate because language and speech are fluid and highly dependent on socioeconomic conditions. It is not enough to know what God and funny and values mean to us, we must understand what they mean to others. If not, we will gleefully and arrogantly attack front men of our own making because, as Cervantes said, “they can be giants.” Then, when we have overcome our chimerical adversary, we will unilaterally and meaninglessly proclaim our hollow victory.
Go to the fountain and ask a Mormon what a Mormon believes. Those who devote their energies to attacking Mormon windmills and killing Mormon chimeras will no doubt continue to claim that all Mormons either lie about their own beliefs or hide the truth about what Mormons really believe. No doubt they will continue to claim that Mormon missionaries are highly-skilled propagandists and purveyors of misinformation (nothing could be further from the truth), but such claims are circular and based on blind-eyed, prejudiced claims. As a returned Mormon missionary who was proud to serve his faith and still follows the tenets of his religion, let me say that while we in the United States and the West probably still disagree, the first step to improving our speech is to improve our listening.
Unless we first seek to understand, we can never be understood. I have grown weary of the prejudices, the casual slights, the quick dismissals, and the self-righteous outrage of those who attack not only my faith, but all beliefs and belief systems. These willfully ignorant and biased attacks come not only from other religious leaders, but also from secularists who are so isolated in their own belief systems that they believe anything else must be irrational. Such dismissal of even the ability of others to rationally disagree with you and rationally believe something you find fantastic will only serve to divide and exacerbate our public discourse. Let me end where I started by saying the unbelievable: I believe in God and the message of Mormonism, and I do so with full understanding and with all the faculties of my mind. I do not ask any reader to suddenly convert to my faith, but rather hope that with an open and inquisitive mind they seek to understand those of us who still believe in faith and hope through a living God.