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 a piece 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 disconcerting and strange, and have sometimes commented in passing how sad it is that such an able person should be under the sway of such delusions. My innate shyness has often led me to avoid confrontation and debate, but here I wish to reply to those people and all others who have 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 secularists. I want to say the seemingly unspeakable: I enjoyed my mission.
Like most young Mormons, I served as a Mormon missionary when I turned 19. Ever since my sixteenth birthday, I had been saving money for this planned event. My meditations and my prayers about this future were generally one and the same, or at least 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 profound importance; and time, experience, and careful, heavy, solemn thoughts can only discover them. Your mind, oh man! if you want to lead a soul to salvation, you must reach as high as the farthest heavens, and peer and gaze into the darkest abyss and 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 maternal 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 thought. The truth of a thing is found in doing it. So I studied and lived what I read, and over 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, a fact must first be accepted and placed in the best light or in the most charitable gaze. Logic, as my philosophy professor in college repeatedly said, is simply a tool that builds a priori assumptions and how a machine calculates the necessary conclusions. It is not knowledge in itself, but a framework for organizing knowledge. A person of faith is as capable of reasoning and inquiry as the most ardent adept of positivism.
What does a Mormon missionary do? This question certainly puzzles some. Some, whose own lack of ingrained values so distorts their perception of the world, refuse to believe that anyone would actually spend two years of their own time; delay school, career, dating, and friendships; and on his account he spends day after day sharing a message that he knows most will reject. It sounds like a quixotic stagecoach and maybe it is. But let me put myself on the witness stand as someone who did it and has no regrets. For two years I wore out my shoes and got calluses from daily work and walking. I was shunned, spat on, stones thrown at me (and once with ketchup packets), insulted, harassed, almost arrested twice, and once threatened at gunpoint.
I will not try to claim that I enjoyed this negative treatment. Sometimes, though, he could understand the person’s frustrations and anger. It can be irritating when someone approaches you and tries 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 them and frankly discuss each other’s beliefs, enjoyed the conversations even if they chose not to believe what we were teaching. . Some were staunchly antithetical to our beliefs or practices and would probably have annoyed my mother’s presence in her vicinity. To all who were willing to listen, I taught my beliefs and gave a somber testimony of the influence that 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 other 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 enjoyable conversations with people from all walks of life, from the educated to the ignorant, from the most grounded Americans to the most recent immigrants. I quickly learned that debating and arguing were useless pursuits. I am convinced, and my later life has more convinced of this, that truth and understanding are the greatest victims 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 that 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 really call themselves interlocutors, speak so alone and disconnected that there is no exchange of ideas. or even an acknowledgment of the other’s point of view. It is rather the solipsistic pontificant of pundits and spokesmen.
As Mormon missionaries, we were taught, and I purposed, to share our message, invite others to consider it, pray about it, and live it, but no more. True, we were sometimes goaded into debate and I succumbed to many of those attacks, but more often than not my fellow missionaries and I tried and warned and invited others to listen to our message without bad feelings. Some have tried to argue that our reluctance to debate evidences some deeply held fears on our part about the truth of our message; but such criticism is wrong. We simply recognize that rarely does anything good come out of such 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 grasp the point of view of others that the debate would simply have been a battle of wills and egos.
So, you might ask yourself, why do we do it? Why do we risk arousing such controversy and resentment? I am convinced, after much experience, that it is the missionary work of this Church that inspires such vehement diatribes 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 enervating hypocrisy. We believe that 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 opinion of many who maintain that truth and values are relative, but failing to share 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 in 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 so as 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 when it comes to religion. This call has been made before and will be made again. I am under no illusions that this little essay will have a big effect on society, but I hope someone will listen to me. True discussion and true communication about ideas and values requires that we first understand the opinions and beliefs of our interlocutors. Too many people are too quick to assume that they know what someone else believes about this or that. Such intellectual mondegreens stifle our ability to communicate because language and discourse are fluid and highly dependent on socioeconomic conditions. It is not enough to know what God Y Grace Y values mean to us, we must understand what they mean to others. If not, we will gleefully and arrogantly attack figureheads 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 source 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 are lying about their own beliefs or hiding the truth about what Mormons really believe. They will no doubt 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 the claims of prejudiced and blind eyes. As a former Mormon missionary who was proud to serve his faith and still follows the tenets of his religion, let me say that while we in America and the West probably still disagree, the first step to improving our speaking is to improve our listening.
Unless we first seek to understand, we can never be understood. I have grown tired of the prejudices, casual slights, quick dismissals, and self-righteous outrage from those who attack not only my faith, but all beliefs and belief systems. These deliberately ignorant and prejudiced 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 in something you find fantastic will only serve to divide and exacerbate our public discourse. Let me end as I began by saying the unbelievable: I believe in God and in 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 be suddenly converted to my faith, but rather I hope that with an open and inquiring mind you will seek to understand those of us who still believe in faith and hope through a living God.
