Another thought on perceived prestige

Joseph Fielding Smith, in the October 1955 general conference, reporting on his recent trip to dedicate a number of areas in Southeast Asia and the western North Pacific (e.g., Korea, the Philippines) for preaching:

Now I want to say to you mothers, particularly, fathers, too…If your sons are called to go to the Far East to labor among the Japanese people, the Korean people, the people on these islands of the Far Pacific, do not feel disappointed. Do not feel sorry and wish that they had been appointed to some European country or somewhere within the borders of the United States or the South Pacific.

It’s just…interesting. That’s all.

On the nature of prestige

So i think most members of the church would, if asked, initially say that all of the missions of the church are of equal prestige, but if pressed (“No, really?”), they’d cave and admit that there’s a hierarchy, at least for those missionaries being assigned from the United States and Canada. F’rex, Europe is more prestigious than North America, with maybe carve-outs for Québec (foreign language!) or the United Kingdom (maybe especially England). And within the United States, even, there’s probably a difference between, say, New England (higher prestige) and California (lower prestige, even if only because there are just so many missions in California), assigned language, and so on—and the the jello belt is particularly, um, let us just say looked askance at.

TL;DR: It’s a little complicated, but actually mostly straightforward.

Except.

So my oldest child recently received a mission call, which included an assignment to a Utah mission. The reaction from most of the Mormons who have heard this assignment have been what Mormons might well expect—just that barest little decisecond catch before offering congratulations.

However: I’m in a private social media group made up of parents of kids who graduated high school the same year as my oldest. Among them—non-Mormons all, it’s important to note for the story—as well as among all the other non-Mormons who’ve heard about her assignment, it’s been rather different: No hesitation at all, just straight-up congratulations, often with a ”It’s a beautiful area, she’ll love it!” or “That’s on my bucket list!” or, in one interesting case, someone saying that her (non-Mormon) in-laws live nearby, and that she’s always been jealous of them for living there.

Footnote: The Utah missions are often the highest-baptizing in the world, so we get into a prestige vs. success argument. Note to self: There’s probably some fruitful thinking about othering and exoticism related to this…

Fun with ages

So we have an April general conference coming up soon, and i for one am quite looking forward to the statistical report, to see what the full-time missionary numbers look like after the ages to qualify for a full-time mission were lowered in the past October general conference.

I figure we’re going to see a notable increase, if only because you’re getting close to a couple years’ worth of new full-time missionaries all at once.* I’m hoping that we get some sort of idea of the increase in male and female full-time missionaries separately, actually, ’cause that would give us an early idea of whether any stigma connected to women serving as full-time missionaries† is disappearing.

But that’s not what i really came to talk about today.

I came to talk about the practicalities connected with the fact that we now have female full-time missionaries entering the mission field who are nineteen (i.e., put in their application as early as they possibly could once the new age limit was announced), twenty, and twenty-one (i.e., they weren’t affected by the age limit announcement ’cause they’d already reached or very nearly reached the previous age limit).††

I’m thinking that the women who are currently entering service as full-time missionaries at twenty-one can have some fun with this in a year. Then they’ll be twenty-two and clearly didn’t start their mission service at age nineteen, but nineteen-year-old women will be starting up as full-time missionaries—which gives the now-twenty-two-year-olds a chance to say things like, “Well, yeah, i would’ve gone on a mission when i was younger like you, but i had to get that whole, you know, gang thing cleared up first.”

* Though i suspect that a chunk of that increase will come in over the coming summer, as people put in their applications for calls beginning during college summer breaks. Probably not as big of an issue for the men, since their age was only lowered by a single year, but quite possibly for women who might want to time things so that their missions start at the beginning of summer break and end prior to the spring semester** in a year and a half.

** For Brigham Young University, read winter semester. I’ve written what i’ve written to reflect normal school calendars, not theirs.

† Yes, in some corners of the church, there is a stigma connected with female full-time missionaries. The technical term for this attitude is, i believe, idiocy.

†† And, of course, some who are older—but just for simplicity, i’ll leave those aside.

Laws? What laws?

The position of the Mormon church is that one should obey the laws of the nation in which one resides. In fact, holding (at least most, maybe even any) callings generally requires that one is not currently in a state of breaking local laws. However, the church makes it a point to not inquire into immigration status—so if someone is a resident of a place but they are breaking the law by not holding a legally valid residency status (i.e., citizenship or some other sort of residency permit), they can still hold a calling. In fact, i have known people who did not hold legal residence status in their country of residence but still received callings as full-time missionaries.

I figure that a number of people find this either good or bad,* but i simply find it interesting that the church has effectively decided to ignore one statutory part of the nature of national borders.

* And note that if there are any comments that seem to me to be even remotely a rant about immigration policy and enforcement, no matter how cogent they might be, will be summarily deleted.

Learning and growing

So people say that serving a full-time mission gets you to grow and learn in cool ways, but they generally mean spiritual things by that.

For me, i think that the most important thing i learned from being a full-time missionary was how to laugh. I come to this conclusion by recalling how many people commented on how after my mission i was able to give in fully to laughter when i thought something was funny, whereas beforehand i’d always been a bit reserved about laughter.

And i think that just that result alone would have been reason enough to have gone.

Scary sex!

A discussion on the wonderful Keepapitchinin blog has brought to mind what, to my mind, is one of the most troubling aspects of Mormon culture: the degree to which sex, and particularly the fear of sex, consumes us.

Consider the following:

• Full-time missionaries aren’t allowed into the homes of single women* (which means that, say, a 70-year-old woman can’t serve lunch to the missionaries in her own home unless she goes through the trouble of getting a chaperone).
• Mixed-gender couples who are married but not to each other, as well as mixed-gender couples where one is married and the other is single, aren’t allowed to ride in the same car to and from church events or meetings. (And this one’s even enshrined into church policy in the Handbook!)
• A home teacher isn’t supposed to go into the home of a single sister he home teaches until the other home teacher is there, leading to the absurdity of guys waiting in their cars in the cold or stifling heat instead of going inside and being able to fellowship with the saints (and, in fact, the particular saint they’re assigned to fellowship as a priesthood responsibility).
• There is a strong social pressure on romantically involved couples to get engaged quickly, and to have a very short engagement, rather than taking time to get to know each other a bit better.
• Relatedly, there is pretty strong pressure brought onto young Mormons to get married pretty young (for the men, very soon after their return from a full-time mission), even to the point of being taught in general conferences.
• There is a strong social stigma attached to the sight of perfectly sexually innocent patches of skin, such as bare shoulders on women. (Or even prepubescent girls!)
• …And so on.

Basically, many (maybe most, but even i'm not that cynical most days) faithful Mormons seem to believe that nonmarital sex is something that human beings have no ability to resist, and therefore we have to build fences around the law—really, really horrible fences, in some cases.

I don't really get it, myself, but it's there—and i find it remarkably unhealthy. Not sure what to do about it, though. Thoughts?

* This rule wasn’t enforced in my mission when i was a full-time missionary twenty or so years ago, or at least all or most of us full-time missionaries in that mission weren’t aware of the rule. I’ve met others who served around the same time who report that it was an incredibly firm rule for them, though, and it’s been a pretty intensely-taught rule for the full-time missionaries in every mission i’ve lived in since then, too.

Some interesting stats

I was reading the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life’s 2008 U.S.  Religious Landscape Survey results for a linguistics research project,* and i ran across some interesting statistics that had nothing to do with my research, but i thought they were worth repeating here (but note that these stats reflect patterns only among U.S. adults):

Of all the adults who said that they grew up Mormon, 70% have stayed in the faith—and comparatively, that’s a pretty good rate.** Of those who left Mormonism, effectively half joined another church and half are now unaffiliated with any religion (which is pretty much normal for those who leave non-Protestant religions).

On the other side of things, 26% of all adult Mormons have converted from another faith, with fully half of those coming from Protestant faiths. Not necessarily surprising, that, given that pretty much half of all adults in the United States are Protestant—what surprised me was that only 1% of our adult membership grew up in churches that are neither Protestant nor Roman Catholic, even though those groups make up better than 7% of the nation’s population. (5% of our members were initially unaffiliated, though.)

* There’s actually a tangential Mormon connection to it—i’ll have to post something about it here sometime.

** Higher than us: Hindus at 84% retention, Jews at 76%, and members of Orthodox faiths at 73%. Roman Catholics are close at 68%. Interestingly, the majority of those raised unaffiliated with any religion have ended up affiliated with a religion, which actually surprised me.

Songs as you never expected them

Back when i was a full-time missionary, i lived in an apartment that held two companionships. One of the members of the other pair could sing the chorus of “Behold! A Royal Army” sounding just like a late eighties/early nineties highly filtered dance/house/techno singer.

The song works surprisingly well that way.

Who teaches those who teach the teachers?

So (since i brought up church lesson manuals a couple posts ago) i was looking through the church’s Preach My Gospel manual.* This is an important manual—it’s the sourcebook for teaching the teachers of those entering the faith (i.e., the full-time missionaries).

Unfortunately, the teachers apparently aren’t always being taught things that are consonant with current church policy. For the specific case i noticed, a quote from p. 77 [emphasis added]:

Chastity requires faithfulness in thought and action. We must keep our thoughts clean and be modest in our dress, speech, and actions. We must avoid pornography in any form. We should treat the God-given procreative power and our bodies as sacred. Baptismal candidates are to live the law of chastity, which prohibits any sexual relations outside of a legal marriage between a man and a woman. They are not to participate in abortions or homosexual or lesbian relations. Those who have committed sexual sin can repent and be forgiven.

This paragraph summarizes church dogma nicely, except for the bit i bolded—the church’s policy on abortion is actually a bit more nuanced than that, holding that abortion (while always regrettable) is justifiable to the point of not being sinful in cases where the life or health of the mother is seriously jeopardized by the pregnancy, where the fetus will not survive birth, or where the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.**

However, these exceptions†† aren’t mentioned anywhere in Preach My Gospel—and that’s important information for our missionaries to know! If someone asks a missionary what the Mormon church’s position on abortion is, and they base their understanding on the contents of the manual explaining what they’re to teach, our missionaries will be teaching something that doesn’t actually match our church’s policies.‡ This can’t be a good thing, can it?

* I can’t find an online version of it aside from a PDF file containing the whole thing, which seems a bit unwieldy to link to here.

** Such exceptions are one reason some of the more ardent† anti-abortion activist groups consider the Mormon church a pro-abortion group.

† Well, extreme would be a better word than ardent. Even most anti-abortion groups that think the Mormon church carves out too many exceptions generally find the church a worthwhile ally in their cause all in all, i think.

†† For one more exception, as far as i can tell (read: i may well be wrong in this, and would appreciate finding out—but i know of nothing about it either way in the church’s handbooks), a medical professional who is required to perform abortion procedures as a condition of employment has their church standing under no threat (assuming they don’t actively seek out opportunities to do so, presumably).

‡ Rather, the missionary would teach them how to be a good Roman Catholic. I’m happy that we’ve got Catholicism in our world—absolutely beautiful rites, especially if you can find a nice high mass, just nothing but beautiful—but it’s not us.

Violence and missionary work

I once heard a full-time missionary speak in sacrament meeting about people “getting hit with” the Book of Mormon, something completely new to them. I got this incredibly vivid image of missionaries bopping people over the head with Books of Mormon, causing the people to then fall into baptismal fonts.

Something about the “converting power of the Book of Mormon” should probably come here…

Never ask a lady her age

So the church just announced a batch of new mission presidents. Nothing unusual in the bunch, but when i was scanning through them, i noticed a bit of an oddity: In every case, the names of both the new (male, by virtue of church policy) mission president and his wife are given, but while every man has an age attached to his name, none of the women’s ages are given.

I have to wonder why. My favored (though, sadly, probably wrong) explanation is that it’s to keep anyone from figuring out whether they’ve broken the “half-plus-seven” rule.

Sometimes being a missionary is fun

Completely true personal story: Back when i was a full-time missionary (i was sent to Germany and Austria), i had a missionary companion (a Utahn) who, when introducing himself to people, would go on and on at length about how Utah was the greatest place on earth—and one of his “proofs” of this was that Utah has every sort of landscape possible: there's desert, mountains, forest, &c. I dealt with this for a while until i as a born-and-bred Marylander couldn't take it any longer and i broke in (in German and as innocent-sounding as i could manage it) with “Really? I didn't know Utah had any ocean coastline.” I still think that the minimal cruelty was entirely worth it for the expression on his face.

A bit of light demography

Self-identified Mormons make up 2 to 2½ percent of the United States population (depending on survey methodology). About 25 to 30 percent of the United States population has had personal contact (even briefly) with someone they know was Mormon. (This includes things like chatting with the full-time missionaries at the door.)

This means

1. we’re doing a pretty good job at contacting people and being open about our religion, and
2. we’ve got a whole lot of work left to do.

Why missionary efforts are doomed

I’m tired of being told i have to be careful about teaching my children correct gospel principles, because otherwise they’re guaranteed to be lost (in the religious sense) forever. I mean, it just doesn'’t work logically—consider:

1. Assumption: If children aren’t taught correct gospel principles, they won’t live according to them when they grow up.
2. The only reason that assumption could work would be if there’s no way someone who’s not taught gospel principles in childhood would follow those principles when they’re older.
3. Therefore, the church’s missionary efforts are doomed because conversions to the church are completely impossible, since the missionaries’ efforts largely target those who weren’t taught gospel principles as children.

Or, in other words, reductio ad absurdum.

More seriously, i still don’t get why we have so much trouble coming to terms with the idea that people make their own decisions about their spiritual lives, even those who were raised in the church.

Knocking doors

So i heard about a friend of mine who’s really, really annoyed at the Mormon church because a pair of our missionaries rang her doorbell, not just invading her space but also waking up her son, who had just unwillingly gone down for a very, very much-needed nap.

It’s not just the Mormons her ire is directed against, though—it’s all groups or businesses or whatever that intrude on her privacy* by coming to her door without permission.

There’s got to be a better way. In fact, if you read church history, knocking on doors isn’t mentioned—it seems that the preferred methods were along the lines of street preaching or renting a hall and preaching.** And yeah, i know the whole thing about member referrals, but i’m talking about finding through missionary efforts here—isn’t there some worthwhile way for missionaries in the United States to use their finding time that doesn't involve bothering people who are relaxing at home?

* As she perceives it, at least. Of course, having—like her—grown up in the urbanized part of the eastern United States, i completely understand and actually feel pretty much the same way.

** What ever happened to renting a hall for preaching? Was it the victim of social changes? It’s not like it was an ineffective method back when it was used.

An unexpected biography

Thurl Bailey played basketball for the Utah Jazz from 1983 to 1991, and currently lives in Salt Lake City. He is also a Mormon. All of these things would seem to go together.

The fun thing about this is that he wasn’t a Mormon when he played for the Jazz—he became a Mormon some years later, when he was playing professional basketball in Italy.

Not at all significant, really, i just found it an amusing bit of unexpectedness.

p.s. And he has an amazing bass—basso profondo, really—singing voice.

Qualifications

Section 4 of the book of Doctrine and Covenants does not say (as is commonly claimed) that faith, hope, love, &c. qualify you for the work—it says that the desire to do the work qualifies you, and that’s a far more intriguing claim.

Just a brief rant today

We just had stake conference here, and there were dozens (seriously, dozens) of mentions of the importance of getting 19– to 25–year-old men to serve as full-time missionaries, but only two phrases given in passing that even acknowledged that 21+–year-old women can serve as full-time missionaries.*

Well, as a father of daughters and no sons, i started to get annoyed at having to sit through being told multiple times that i was remiss in my spiritual duties if i didn’t “prepare [my] sons to serve a full-time mission”—so i have this to say:

No, i’m not preparing any sons to serve as full-time missionaries—but i am preparing my daughters to, and i’m preparing them to be better teachers on their full-time missions than your sons will ever be.

* And this is through priesthood leadership meeting, the adult session,** and the general session.

** That reminds me of something. I’ll post it next time.

Ignoring the prophets, again

M. Russell Ballard’s “Raising the Bar” address was delivered in the October 2002 general conference. (Yes, it was that long ago, and yes, you really are that old.) The quote everyone seems to use from it is:

Please understand this: The bar that is the standard for missionary service is being raised.

To my mind, though, the most interesting thing was stated very near the end of the address (emphasis added):

Upon you bishops and you stake presidents rests the responsibility to recommend only those young men and women whom you judge to be spiritually, physically, mentally, and emotionally prepared to face today’s realities of missionary work. Brethren, judge wisely and remember: Not every young man needs to be called to serve away from his home; some may best serve under your direction as ward missionaries.

In my observation, however, this has been pretty much ignored—the goal is still to get every male 19-year-old in the church to serve as a full-time missionary, and those that don’t are viewed as failures on the part of the young men’s program leadership and/or the priesthood leadership of the ward and/or the young man himself (or, possibly most often, on the part of all three). And even if that’s not the view in a particular case, there’s certainly still a cultural bias against a young adult male in the church who opts (for whatever reason) not to serve as a full-time missionary.

And so, as is always the case when i notice something like this, my question is deceptively simple: Why?

Choosing to serve

My parents didn’t grow up in the church (and so didn’t serve full-time missions), i didn’t hang out with returned full-time missionaries while i was growing up, and i lived with a non-Mormon relative for the couple years before i served as a full-time missionary—all that to say that i didn’t really have any “role models” to follow on the whole serving a mission thing.

Perhaps as a result of this, i was shocked (and i mean that quite honestly) when i was in the Missionary Training center and learned that there were a lot of people there who had chosen to serve a mission even partly out of social, non-internal reasons. My experience was, of course, rather different, and almost zen—the opportunity was there to serve, so i chose to serve. (There wasn’t even really any “Should i go?” questioning. I wonder how widespread or not such an experience is. I’m guessing it’s not all that unusual, but it doesn’t make for good stories so we don’t hear about it very much.)