Mormons on a mission

Every year, thousands of young believers cut ties with family to enter a Mormon training center in Utah. They emerge, says Daniel Brook in Good magazine, as a missionary army unlike any the world has seen.

At dusk, Elder Mortensen and Elder Warby escort a flock of 19-year-olds on a quick walking tour of their training grounds. Between the dim evening light and the fact that the buildings are all identical yellow-brick structures, Warby concedes, “it takes about a week before you really know your way around.” At the end of the tour, Warby points to the snowcapped mountains beyond the parking lot and the fence: “That’s the outside world,” he says. “You won’t know that again.”

Warby is half joking. This is not a military installation, nor a prison. It’s the Missionary Training Center of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, commonly known as the Mormons. These missionaries-in-training will, of course, know the outside world again, but far from this picturesque 10-acre expanse in Provo, Utah. As in the military, though, recruits go by a title—in this case “Elder,” followed by their last name—and the training is rigorous. “I don’t even know if we have first names anymore,” one missionary quips. “I forgot mine,” another replies. And after two months of doctrinal and foreign-language training, graduates will travel the world as part of the most successful missionary force on the planet. Warby and Mortensen are just two of the 20,000 recruits to come through the training center each year who go on to convert roughly 300,000 people annually.

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Despite the trying mix of social control and social isolation, in addition to the academic demands of learning a foreign language at breakneck speed, the MTC does not lack for volunteers. Recruits pay their own way to the tune of about $10,000 for the two years. It’s like a proselytizing version

of the Peace Corps—except the Mormons have seven times as many volunteers in the field as the Peace Corps, and they’re in 145 countries—as opposed to the Peace Corps’ 75. In many parts of the world, a Mormon missionary is the only American the locals will ever meet; the clean-cut, idealistic young face of our nation. With foreign-language fluency and the perpetually sunny demeanor of the true believer, they’re incredibly successful at winning converts. In 1950, there were just 1 million Mormons; today, there are nearly 13 million.

Benjamin Mortensen was born for this. He grew up in an idyllic Mormon home—his older brothers and his father, the sole proprietor of Stone Mountain Carpet in Farmington, N.M., all served in missions. He looks the part, too: Tan, tall, and charismatic, with a sincere intensity in his eyes,

Mortensen is a natural missionary.

Already halfway through his training, Mortensen appears to be right at home. “Growing up in the church, you always have that goal set in your mind,” he says. “But then you have a point you reach in which you have to decide which is more important to you: staying home and continuing your life or going to serve the Lord for two years.” At age 16, he worked with a local missionary to successfully convert a Navajo boy who lived on the reservation near his hometown. No surprise, Mortensen has been tapped to be a zone leader, the enforcer of the rules in his dormitory. Ultimately, he plans to go back to college and major in industrial organizational psychology, the study of how to control large groups of people. The MTC, he believes, constitutes a perfect lab. He’s also interested in politics and is closely following the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts and a prominent member of the church, who went to France as a missionary in the 1960s.

Today, Mortensen and his friend Weston Warby are relative veterans on-site; just hours earlier, the new recruits wept as they said goodbye to their parents. The welcoming ceremony was reminiscent of a college freshman assembly, with a mix of inspirational exhortations (“You have now

joined the ranks of over 53,000 missionaries throughout the world who are carrying out the Lord’s work”) and the mundane details of institutional life (“Don’t lose your meal cards”). But here you’ll find no floppy-haired nonconformists, little racial diversity, and only a handful of women. Apparently, conformity breeds camaraderie: After one drill, an instructor congratulates his underling: “That was awesome! Damn! Great explanation of why we need to be baptized!”

Though the church now has more foreign members than Americans, the

missionary corps and church hierarchy remain overwhelmingly white and

Middle American. Male recruits, with short-cropped “missionary” haircuts

and identical dark suits and ties, make up about 90 percent of the missionaries (service is expected of young men and optional for young women). The women wear dresses, sweater sets and skirts, or pantsuits—unified only by their uniform dowdiness.

“You probably noticed an 8-foot fence around the Missionary Training Center,” drawls the tall, grandfatherly President Joseph “F as in foxtrot” Boone, a retired Air Force chaplain who is the religious leader of the MTC. “This is not to keep the missionaries in, but to keep the grandmothers and

mothers out.” The joke draws laughs from those who can make out his words over the crying babies. (Because they prohibit birth control, Mormons have apparently developed a remarkable tolerance for screaming

babies; Boone himself has nine children.)

Encouraged by the laughter, Boone continues his folksy shtick, though he can’t hide his military background. Referring to the missionary textbook Preach My Gospel, Boone says, “If you’re not familiar with it, don’t worry. Bright and early tomorrow morning we’re going to give you that opportunity. In fact, I think that you will eat, drink, sleep, and dream about Preach My Gospel while you’re here.” Boone’s Full Metal Jacket–style pep talk is no surprise. Early in his career, he served at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, the installation where new recruits are brought for basic training.

Before hugging goodbye and departing through doorways marked by imitation road signs reading “Family Exit” and “Missionary Exit,” the assembly sings the hymn “Called to Serve Our King,” a reference to the “call letter” each initiate has received, signed by the leader of the church,

exhorting them to “[leave] aside all other personal affairs.” He wasn’t kidding. Weekly letters to parents are encouraged but telephone calls are forbidden. Elder Warby, who grew up just 15 miles from the MTC, says he feels totally cut off from his friends. “I could be 15,000 miles away for all I know,” he says. Once in the field, missionaries are permitted to call home just twice a year, on Christmas and Mother’s Day.

Missionaries rise at 6:30 each morning and study more or less straight through until bedtime at 10:30 sharp. Beyond forfeiting control of one’s life to the church hierarchy, throughout their service, each missionary is assigned a rotating “companion”—creating a system of constant surveillance that makes it all but impossible to stray. As the little white Missionary Handbook reads, for e-mail “use only MyLDSMail.net, the filtered service established by the church. … While using computers, always stay next to

your companion so that you can see each other’s monitors.”

Perhaps the toughest part of service is learning a foreign language; missionaries are required to learn one of the 50 offered, and they almost invariably succeed. When the MTC was founded, the staff modeled its language training after the U.S. military’s. Now the military comes to the Mormons, expressing amazement that the MTC students stay focused in class for more than six hours a day.

The method of instruction at the center is varied. In an afternoon session, Warby and Mortensen practice speaking Portuguese with Jeff Zwick, a missionary who recently returned from Portugal and now teaches at the training center. Zwick role-plays being a Portuguese native who has invited Warby and Mortensen over for dinner, casting himself as a convincing and hilarious Portuguese Everyman. First Zwick rants about the unhealthfulness of American fast food. In the next breath, he urges the missionaries to eat another heaping portion of his homemade roast pork.

“So where are you from?” Zwick asks Mortensen.

“New Mexico,” he replies.

“I thought you said you were American? I didn’t realize you were a Mexican,” Zwick says, goading Mortensen to explain further.

“What? There are two Mexicos?” Zwick continues, playing dumb and forcing

Mortensen to explain more clearly.

Warby and Mortensen arrived at the MTC just five weeks ago without a word

of Portuguese between them, but they can already hold their own. Before the meal ends, the missionaries casually ask Zwick if he knows of anyone interested in learning more about the church. The conversation flows, though slowly.

Missionaries are trained to make interactions that are in fact highly scripted seem natural. Another “life rehearsal” involves making a purchase in a department store. The missionaries are instructed to buy something and then chat up the clerk explaining why they’re so far from home in the hope of parlaying it into an appointment to teach them about the church. In missionary materials, the word “friendship” is turned into a verb. Missionaries are taught that through “friendshipping” individuals, they can

enlarge the church.

On average, each missionary baptizes only six converts a year during their two years of service. But when you send out tens of thousands of missionaries, those numbers add up. Any small evangelical church in the Sun Belt can send members down to Honduras to preach in Spanish. But only the Mormons, due to the scale and sophistication of the MTC, can preach the gospel in Hmong and Haitian Creole. Their willingness to study obscure tongues helps them corner the market on conversions in certain

parts of the world.

Each week, the missionaries fill out a document noting the number of potential converts they have contacted. The form looks like something out of a Fortune 500 company’s sales and marketing department. The information is then passed up the chain of command all the way to mission presidents.

Often one gets the sense among the Mormons, however, that time is out of joint. Members believe that the church’s current president, Gordon B. Hinckley, is a prophet who speaks with and for God, no different from Moses or John the Baptist. They also believe that when Jesus returns to Earth, the New Jerusalem will be located on the Missouri side of suburban Kansas City. Mormons are famous for bans not only on smoking, drinking, and premarital sex, but even coffee and tea.

Because the religion was founded less than 200 years ago, though, Mormonism has a missionary zeal reminiscent of Christianity circa A.D. 200 or Islam circa 800. Like those two groups, the Mormons endured an early period of persecution and then embarked upon a rapid proselytization

push. But while Saint Paul trolled the Mediterranean by ship and Roman highway and Mohammed crossed the sands of Arabia on horseback, Mormon missionaries travel to the ends of the earth by 747, lifting off from Salt Lake City International Airport.

And there is no time to tarry. Mormons believe, of course, that we are living in the “latter days,” that the end is near.

From a longer story that appears in the current issue of Good magazine. ©2007 by Daniel Brook. Used with permission.