This is a sidebar to epiphanes' post about who joins Mormonism.


I think it's useful to recognize that people generally meet the missionaries first and then are inspired/pressured/coaxed to join, but it's not always so. Some people join for significant others, parents, or other family members.

I have made the point before that in my mission we had two types of people who talked to missionaries: people who were lonely and people who were attracted to the missionaries.

For us, the first group had:
- elderly people who just needed someone/anyone to talk to
- immigrants who were often shunned in the dominant society
- people with paranoia and delusional disorders

The second group consisted of:
- teenage girls
- divorcées
- gay men

(It's worth noting that the overwhelming majority of the people who talked to us were single, divorced, or widowed. The most likely people to talk to us as whole families were immigrants.)


The second group almost never joined the church. The gay men figured out quickly that we were cute but off-limits, and that they weren't welcome in the faith. The divorcées enjoyed the young male attention and some kept it going for years, knowing that, though it would always be chaste, a Mrs. Robinson scenario was tantalizingly close. The teenage girls tended to idolize the cute American boys, but then they'd move on.

For the first group, the elderly never joined - why would they want to leave Catholicism? We might have reminded some of them of the WWII GIs of their younger days. (Several wanted to play us jazz records.)

That left the immigrants and the delusional. And to answer epiphanes' question, they were the majority of our converts.

The immigrants often found a tense sort of community among the Mormons, though some of them actually thrived. Their churn was high, but so was their conversion rate vis-à-vis that of the native-born population.

And the delusional joined - to be honest, it was often hard to tell them from the non-delusional when it came to Mormonism. Among the ones who talked to us, we had the conspiracists, the folks who had seen Jesus and were themselves prophets, the folks with delusions of grandeur who were going to revolutionize industries in which they had no working interest nor ideas, and so forth. At least one of them who converted many years before I served later went on to lead a breakaway sect that took something like 10 or 15 families in one area out of the church.


For other missions, the people who talked to missionaries might have been different, so the teaching pools might have been different.

Tyson

Who talked to the missionaries in your mission? Almost no one.

Argentina South 69 to 71 and your list is pretty accurate for me when we could get anyone at all to talk to us.

They were Catholic and they were staying Catholic.

The well educated avoided us and we got no conversation from them but plenty of eye-rolls.

The poor were interested until they found out no funds would be coming their way and in fact the reverse was true.

The gay guys would listen to us, invite us in. It was no secret as to why. I was happy to talk religion to them until my companions figured out what they wanted. Chaste lust I called it.

Never ran into the elderly much.

There was one retired preacher who had immigrated from England who loved to talk to us but in the end he was lonely and discussing religion was a treat for him. Also anyone who wanted to challenge us or take us task would talk to us for a while. We always thought they would come around once they heard our message haha. That was only fuel for them.


So in the end, the Mission President's guilt trips that it was our fault if we weren't getting baptisms were offensive though I didn't take them that way at the time. I knew how hard we had worked and how diligent we had been and his words came off as uninspired though I dared not think that then.

Argentina 1958
Naci catolico
morirre catolico

I WAS BORN CATHOLIC
I will die catholic
was the most common respose I remember

"Je suis né catholique et je mourrai catholique."

That was very common.


Other common refusals included:

"Je suis pressé." (I'm busy.)
"Je n'ai pas le temps." (I don't have time.)
"Témoins de Jéhovah? Ca ne m'intéresse pas." (Jehovah's Witnesses? I'm not interested.)

Tyson

Soy católico como mis padres, mis abuelos etc.
(I’m Catholic like my parents, my grandparents, and so on).

I’m really embarrassed looking back. Who did we think we were? A bunch of clueless 19 and 20-year-old barely-adult visitors in a foreign country, trying to convince folks to abandon their common beliefs, traditions, oftentimes families, and society and embrace a North American church, based on a religious con from the 1800s.

If only I could go back in time and deny it all before I fell under the spell of “every worthy young man should serve a mission.”

¡Ay, Dios mío!

Looking back on my mission, I'm sure there were lonely people who liked to talk to the missionaries, but now I'm wondering if the people we thought were lonely and who usually let us in didn't also feel a little sorry for the nice young missionaries who knocked on doors all day/night, especially if it was raining or snowing outside. Maybe they thought they were doing us a favor.

I can remember people who talked to us because we were so pushy. They let us in for one discussion. They were kind but didn't let us come back.

I'm pretty sure the only two "investigators" I helped to teach and were baptized - both political refugees who had been talking to several sets of missionaries for over a year - finally were baptized because they felt sorry for the missionaries who had invested so much time in teaching them the discussions. They both stopped attending church shortly after they were baptized.

So don't be too sure most people who let the missionaries in their homes were lonely and in need of someone to talk to. Perhaps they were just being kind to the missionaries. Although I didn't think so during my mission, looking back it seems to me that the majority of the people who allowed my comp and I to talk to them or teach them a discussion, did so because they were being kind to us. They thought they were doing us a favor.

I should be clear that most people didn't let us in at all, but those who did seemed like they needed someone to talk to. That could be calqued in other ways than "lonely" to be sure.

Tyson

We tracked day and night in arctic cold, snow, ice, in winters and driving rain in the summers. We were out from early morning until late at night. A few people told us they were not interested in religion but offered us to come in out of the cold and warm up, some wanted to just talk about life in the US, some wanted to talk about Elvis (he died a few weeks before I left on my mission), some just liked to talk to Americans about sports and world affairs, two guys who were drunk were great singers and they wanted to sing their Mormon tab favorites. I sang " A Mighty Fortress" in their garage during a raging blizzard. My favorite were three college age girls in their bras and panties who invited us in to tell them how to sign up for polygamy. During the World Cup soccer summer I was invited in several times to watch. Several Pakastaniand Turkish families invited us in for hot tea or coffee and seemed to be fortified with alcohol. I was sad to tell them we could not drink even regular tea when it was -20 F outside.

Oh and I forgot to add, we were forbidden to teach Pakastani or Turkish folks, upon orders of our racist mission president.

I believe lately immigrants from the middle east, Eastern Europe and Africa make up the vast majority of converts in my former mission.

I don't know about in America, but in Mexico, and I suspect many other countries, the Laurels seemed to like to talk to the Elders.   I'm sure I was not the only "sophisticated" Elder to worry about the "country bumkin" Elders from Utah and Idaho falling prey to these darling, but voracious, young ladies.   And in the established wards, more dinner invites came from families with Laurels than other families.

I have the cutest photo, sent in one of his weekly emails by my one RM grandson, of some Elders and some Laurels chatting together.   But which, when cropped properly, creates a photo of a very cute couple; him looking at the camera while the very pretty Argentine Laurel is standing right next to him, with her head turned, looking up at him in adoration.

The only thing missing is that his name is not Hardy . . .

One wonders, if he had gone back to there to claim her, could she have nipped his fanatical StarWarsism in the bud?   

I hope it's not some form of discrimination, but there have been instances in my life when I wondered if women from "less sophisticated" cultures had their heads screwed on tighter than the BIC young women at the Y.

Thank ghawd we men can always be counted on . . .

>And the delusional joined - to be honest, it was often hard to tell them from the non-delusional when it came to Mormonism.

I had to laugh when I read that. Between recent threads about the Dream Mine, Paul Gregersen ranting about the BoA and Star Wars, and David Bateman getting national attention for claiming and apparently actually believing that covid vaccines are a Jewish plot to depopulate the world, seems to me Mormonism attracts/creates more than its fair share of people who in all likelihood could qualify as clinically delusional.

Yet they walk among us.

Chad and Lori are one of the more toxic recent manifestations, along with LeBarons, Laffertys, Kingstons, Mark Hofmann, ..., you know the list.

What's the problem here! Am I not good enough for your delusional list, don't I measure up?

I was in Toronto in the early 90s, Spanish speaking. As such, we drew from (preyed upon) a large pool of unfortunate folks who had been dispossessed of home and heritage because of societal turmoil and threats of death in their native countries. (El Salvador in particular was just coming out of an horrific civil war, which involved atrocities beyond description). I think that they were mostly looking to find cultural connections, and since Mormonism still had a bit of a positive reputation, they were receptive to joining. At the time, Toronto, Etobicoke, and Scarborough had robust Spanish speaking wards with lots of social opportunities available. There were combined English/Spanish wards in London, Hamilton, and Kitchener. We had a harder time attracting victims in those cities.

Pardon my compulsion to reminisce, but I wanted to add a bit more detail: The Toronto ward was especially active and effective at providing a sense of inclusion, safety, and acceptance to newcomers. This, in spite of the enormous challenge of catering to a huge cultural diversity, with the only common thread being the Spanish language. I don't think I'm surprising anyone by saying that Argentina, Peru, and Honduras are very different places.

A lot of the success, I believe, was due to a particular missionary. He had made a deal with the president to remain in that area as long as he baptized every month, and as a result was able to create a bit of a following. He was one of the most intelligent people I've ever worked with and had phenomenal leadership and communication skills, his age notwithstanding. He had huge influence on the ward and how it was run. He had converts flowing in.

About some of the people that joined the church at my invitation, I have little regret. They were able to join a community that had, at the time, much to offer. I've never been in a ward where the members have seemed as exceptionally happy to be there as that one.

Interesting perspective. As I've opined before, there are people for whom membership is a net plus--at least for a while.

I wonder what happened to that socially gifted missionary. . .

Out of curiosity I did a quick online search... his immediate internet presence looks limited, but I can see that he lives in a very large house on a golf course, in a very Mormon city, and was owner of an energy company. I was mostly curious if there was any indication that he has left the church...but no such luck, and I'm only willing to stalk so much...

He sounds like one of those good-hearted but naive people who has never felt compelled to renounce the church.

Perhaps I'm being too harsh, but I've long suspected that in order to renounce the religion of your birth, you have to develop a conscience.

The same harshness compels me to agree. One must possess a talent for overlooking some ugly stuff that I find hard to accept.

Further, this idea strikes a nerve as I have an older brother who can overlook any ugliness in the church in order to continue showering himself with self adulation for being the greatest Mormon of all time, and, he has the SA to prove it.

Perhaps. There was nothing I found that would indicate either way, but it wouldn't surprise me if he's out. Or in.

I had another ZL who was the opposite of this guy, in that his best qualities were deeply buried by his worst...I looked him up, too. He's now a lawyer for the church and calls it his dream job. This was not surprising at all.

1. We found one lady who was an alcoholic and her son was an alcoholic. She knew Mormons who had quit drinking and she wanted us to help her. ( Two twenty year old boys, who had no clue about alcoholism or life in general.)

2. Lots of people who let us in had recently had a tragic life event, death in the family, painful divorce, loss of their business, cancer diagonosis etc. They needed somebody to talk to and hoped we might have something to offer to help them through.

3. We found a guy who was sick of his wife's overwhelming devotion to the Seventh Day Adventist Church. He joined Mormonism to piss his wife off. He was a real character.

I have a close relative who was a mission matron (is that the word?) a couple decades ago. While serving in that role, she in exasperation said of the mission's converts that "there's something wrong with every one of them, every single one of them." It was a memorable turn of phrase.

She didn't think that the mission and the missionaries were strengthening the church at all. In one door, out the other.

I served in France and Switzerland.

Mostly high school and college age people talked to us about the USA. That's really the only thing that interested them about us. They liked knowing about music and trends from the USA. Since we were in the same age bracket, we got along pretty well unless we pushed the religion topic.