There was a book I read from my grandmother called “Mormonism, Mama and Me.” I thought of that when I was wring this title.
I was raised Catholic but that wasn’t the reason I didn’t want to be Mormon. I had real problems with faith with no evidence. It seemed to me that people could believe anything, and that was clearly dangerous.
Now the reason I am writing about missionaries is that I had a couple encounters with them even though I was in a heavily Mormon populated state.
The first encounter was in college. I was hanging out with a Mormon woman. We weren’t dating, we weren’t friends, it was complicated. She brought me to her home to meet her family and the Mormon missionaries came by to visit them. They talked to me and I was friendly. I don’t mind talking to people.
I was not at a Mormon college, but when there are so many Mormons it might as well be considered one. Another experience was “The fireside chat”. This is where Mormons gather to listen to a prophet or church elder talk about religious things. That was interesting.
Another time was during high school where they had a class called Seminary where Mormon kids would go during the day to learn about the Mormon faith. It was off campus but directly across from the High school so they could just walk to it. They didn’t get any academic credit for it, but the school standards were so low you could flunk many classes and still graduate. Remember how I shared that Republican states spend low per student and have terrible test scores? It felt like they were trying to keep us stupid on purpose.
When I left the state and figured that the days of meeting Mormon missionaries were over. Nope. I was helping a coworker at their home and guess who came knocking? Mormon missionaries. He answered the door and I was delighted to see them. I had learned more about the bible so I had lots of interesting things to talk about and was ready to see how much they knew. When I started asking them questions they nope out of there. I went back to continue to help my coworker with his computer.
Now given my experience what do you think you would have done differently? I listen to people and give them a chance to share facts, and when they don’t then they don’t interest me anymore.