Sisters are doing it for… a creepy old man

Mark Honeychurch - 30 October 2023

A couple of years ago, I was visited by a pair of kind, young Mormon missionaries. We spent a good hour or more chatting about their faith. Of course, being in the middle of a pandemic, missionaries had been unable to do their usual overseas stint, so the lads I had been visited by had come from Hamilton - not the most exciting.

A couple of months after this, I received a call from the same phone number. But, rather than Brother Leith and his partner in crime, this time Sister Arohanui and another Sister who had just started her mission said that they would like to visit me.

This one was more interesting, as, although these were another couple of local missionaries, for one of the sisters this was her very first house visit. Part way through the meeting I was shown an image of the current “prophet”, and Sister Arohanui had a weird look of love in her eyes. To me at least, the image, of Russell Nelson, looked more creepy than adorable:

It felt so wrong to see young Māori and Pacific Island Sisters fawning over this old, privileged white man - a man placed in a role that will probably always be filled with an old white man from Utah. After we had spent an hour or more talking, we finished off with a prayer before they left me with a copy of the Book of Mormon.

Since then I’ve had a couple of Mormon missionary pairs try to come out and visit me, although one group didn’t manage to follow through on their promise of a visit. And then last Thursday I received a call, asking if two new Sister missionaries could visit me. Of course they could, I said, and let them know that Saturday afternoon would work well for me. Sure enough, at about 2pm on Saturday, two young American women turned up on my doorstep. I guess the world is open again, and Mormons are once again jet-setting around the world to preach the Revealed Truth to the ignorant.

I invited the Sisters in, knowing not to offer them “hot drinks”, as caffeine is a no-no for Mormons. Instead they settled for a glass of water each, and we settled in the living room for what ended up being a two hour chat.

The conversation was wide-ranging, and involved a lot of questions on both sides.

I was told that the church is apparently very accepting of gay people, but with the caveat that God insists marriage is just for a man and a woman. I hear this line from pretty much every church where this comes up in conversation, for example the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Supposedly churches all love gay people, and are very accepting. However, I think they have a weird way of showing acceptance, as almost without exception the gay people I’ve talked to who have been in churches have felt anything but loving acceptance. And, of course, when it comes to any kind of legislation around equal rights for gay couples, churches are usually there spending their money lobbying to keep the status quo.

On a related note, we talked about marriage between a man and multiple women, a topic we roamed onto while we were talking about how the church sometimes announces that God has changed His mind on a topic. The Sisters said that only relatively minor church policies are changed by successive prophets, but not any of the basic tenets of the church. I responded that plural marriage certainly felt to me more like a basic tenet than a “policy” - and the church (or at least most of it) has definitely changed its mind on that, possibly in large part due to pressure from the US government. Once again, I could see that the “prophet” Russell Nelson was being revered in a way that creeped me out. He’s just a man, but it seems that to Mormons, they can almost see God in him, like there’s a halo floating over his head.

I was asked about what I knew about Joseph Smith. Mormons obviously have a special place in their heart for Joseph as a divinely inspired man, and it often feels akin to how the Catholic church treats Mary - not quite divine, but bordering on blasphemous at times. I, however, have learned about Joseph from sources such as South Park and the slightly more serious CES Letter website. So, I told the Sisters that from what I understood Joseph had a history of using “seer stones” to look for treasure as a young man, something that was a popular grift at the time. And, later on, Joseph used a similar technique of employing seer stones and a hat to decode some golden tablets that he had found, which became the Book of Mormon. I said that, to an outsider like me, Joseph comes across as more of a con man than a prophet, to which I was told that it takes a lot of faith to accept some of the more thorny parts of the church’s history.

I mentioned that I had visited the Temple in Hamilton while it was open during renovations, and I was asked about what my impression was of the building. I told the Sisters that it was an impressive structure, but that it had a feel of faded glory, like a 5 star hotel from the 1960s. I said that its opulence made me think that Jesus would not be happy if he ever returned to see the edifices that the Mormons have built to honour him, and that he’d probably have preferred to see the money spent on caring for the poor and sick. I also mentioned just how white the Jesus depicted in the paintings in the Temple was - a very Western-looking man.

We talked about the time I visited a service in Hataitai, and some of the things I observed during the service, such as a focus on rank, as bestowed through positions with a Ward, and the fact that communion uses water instead of wine, as Mormons are tee-totalers.

One of the sisters talked a little about their experience at Brigham Young university, while we were chatting about some of the difficulties young members have squaring their faith with some of the diversity they inevitably have in their social circles. She mentioned that one of her friends at university “fell away” from the church, and that this is something they often see happening.

We even talked about the name Mormon - a name that the church has recently been asking members not to use, instead preferring the Church of Jesus Christ (a contraction of their formal name, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). Both Sisters talked about how strange it was to be told to stop referring to themselves as Mormons, when only a few years ago the church apparently ran a campaign telling its members to proudly use the term.

At the end of the meeting the Sisters invited me to join them at their local branch for a confirmation of a member in her 70s. Sadly I missed this, but I will endeavour to visit them soon. I always find visits to events like church services to be a great way to learn about groups who have strange beliefs, and hopefully my next Mormon fact-finding mission will be no exception.

On Thursday evening last week, during our Skeptical Activism meeting in the Fork and Brewer, I received a phone call - the missionaries wanted to come and visit me again, for the second weekend in a row. As one of the Sisters was finishing up the part of her mission where she’s based in Porirua, there is now a new Sister who is being shown the ropes, and I guess by this point I’ve been marked down as a friendly proving-ground for new missionaries - somewhere they can come to have a robust but friendly chat about their faith, and to hear politely worded objections to their claims.

Unfortunately, due to the good weather, I had to postpone the visit as I had friends coming round for a barbecue. But we’re currently trying to reschedule, and hopefully I’ll be able to ask some searching questions, and possibly lay the seeds of doubt, and foster the idea that it’s okay to question things with a new young Mormon in the next week or so. Maybe I have as much chance of deconverting a Mormon as they have of converting me, which is not much, but I enjoy chatting with them, and for some reason they seem keen to come to my house, so I guess it’s a win-win!