Discussion Group Report

"As you can see, everything is structured as to what you do. I had several leaders, when I was having trouble getting someone to tell me to commit to pray, that the reason I had failed was that I failed to 'follow up properly,' or other reasons. The teaching helps are not required, and are left up to the missionary, when he is teaching (the right column). The left column was always to be given, and nothing was to be left out. It was often a lack of faith, or slip-shoddiness if something was left out while teaching. Sometimes it was even considered a sin (depending on who your leader was)."

Thus David Egan Evans, a member of Humanists of Utah, described in a paper he presented to the study group as an example of how LDS leaders put missionaries on a guilt trip to get them to conform. The missionary was to blame for the fact that the person he was proselytizing didn't want to pray; it couldn't be that the person simply didn't want to pray and would have made the decision not to regardless of what the missionary had said or done. It had to be the missionary's fault. And the missionary's leaving out something from the left column wasn't a simple error of omission of the kind all of us make from time to time; it happened because of his undesirable motivation.

If you are a Mormon boy, you are taught from the time you are a toddler that all good Mormon boys go on missions. The social pressure put on you to comply by your family, your friends, and especially the bishop of your local church is intense. It is socially undesirable to choose not to go. Some of those who opt not to go feel either guilt or rage at what they consider unreasonable pressure. For Mormon girls, however, the proportion who go on missions, for one reason or another, including marriage, is much smaller than for boys.

If you go as a young missionary, for 1 1/2 years if you are a woman, and two years if you are a man, you put your life under the complete control of the Lord, or more correctly, of the church authorities, at an age when you are very impressionable and inexperienced. You are never at any time free from the austere rules set by your leaders.

You attend the missionary training center for two or three weeks, or for 2 1/2 months if a language is to be learned. Your work day begins there at 6:00 a.m. and ends at 10:30 p.m. After completing training there, you go to a distant place, where you carry out your mission. You have a companion of the same sex with whom you are expected to be together at all times. The only exception is when you are transferred to another locality, in which case every effort is made to make sure you have a companion to travel with you. You are given a moral and ethical guidebook, which you are expected to keep on your person at all times and to read cover-to-cover at least once a week. Behavioral deviation from the rules in this book is not permitted. Your day begins at 6:30 a.m. with a half-hour for you and your companion to shower, followed by an hour's study with your companion to prepare your lessons, and then a half-hour's individual study. You must leave your apartment for proselytizing work by 9:30.

Scientific studies show that a young man's sex drive is the strongest it will ever be at about the age of nineteen, the age at which you begin your missionary service if you are a male; but you are expected to suppress this natural, normal and very powerful impulse completely. In the periodic interview with your leader, you may be asked whether you masturbate. You are not to associate with women at any time during your mission except in the performance of church duties. Many missionaries have sweethearts at home. A good number of them get "Dear John" letters while on their mission. If you are one of these, you are stuck far away from home and unable to get back to defend yourself. No matter, the needs of the church institution take precedence over your emotional needs, even some of the most powerful ones in your life.

The adverse effect that the tight thought and behavior control regimen imposed upon you can have upon your emotional health is obvious. The idea is to make you blindly obedient, rather than capable of doing your own thinking and discerning truth by looking at the evidence logically and critically, by using reason. The leaders also resort to the copious use of love and fear to obtain the desired behavior. You are a wonderful person if you comply, but you will incur the displeasure of the Lord of all the universe if you don't.

However, this discipline pays off handsomely for the church. At the end of your mission, if you are typical, you return home, bear your testimony, as expected, that the church is true, that Joseph Smith, the church founder, was a prophet of God and that the present church president is a prophet, etc. You have become an unquestioning and true believer and remain so throughout your life. And you will probably receive greater love and honor from more people than those who doubt because each culture gives these gifts in more abundance to those who subscribe unquestioningly to its myths. If you excel in conforming you will receive even greater love and honor than more ordinary conformists.

But if you choose, as a few returned missionaries do, to the dismay of the church leaders and many lay members, to lay aside the intense indoctrination you have received, to live an individual life, and to dare to think for yourself, using your critical thinking abilities, unlike the conformist, you will know the thrill of the adventure of making the search for truth with an untrammeled mind. You will become, as Joseph Campbell says, a person of heart. Your ways may lead, as one of the greatest poets of the Middle Ages tells us, to "all those things that go to make heaven and earth."