Do Mormon missions constitute human trafficking? This is an interesting claim I’ve seen floated around on Reddit, and my first reaction to it was to recoil at the hyperbole. It seemed ridiculous. Missionaries are volunteers, after all, and I was one. Was I being held against my will?
One of my fellow missionaries who was gay fell in love with a local member, flew home from the mission, then immediately flew back to the area where his bf was. There was no effort to detain him. Honestly, I don’t think the Mission President knew what had happened until after the fact. But, that could be because this Elder was serving in his country of origin. He was not an American. There is common practice in the Church for the Mission President to gather and retain the passports of the missionaries. This prevents them from losing their passports, like dumb kids, but it also prevents them from leaving the country like volunteering adults.
There are also guidelines in the Mission President handbook with tactics to discourage missionaries from choosing to leave. Do they veer into unlawful detention tactics? You decide. From the handbook:
Some missionaries suffer from homesickness or discouragement. Others suffer from a lack of confidence. Some may have difficulty leaving the cares of the world behind. Such missionaries might ask to go home. These concerns are generally most acute during the first 90 days of a missionary’s service.
Opening statement from Mission President’s handbook
You can identify and resolve many of these concerns during your initial interviews with mis- sionaries. **[1]** Explain that such feelings are common in the early weeks, especially on weekends or holidays, and may recur at other times. Help them understand how to combat negative feelings, and make sure they know that you are always ready to give encouragement and counsel.
If a missionary is determined to return home, seek counsel from the Area Presidency and discuss the situation with your Missionary Department In-Field Services representative. To help a struggling missionary, **[2]**you may invite him or her to visit the mission home, or **[3]**you may arrange for a visit to the home of a priesthood leader in the area where the missionary is serv- ing. The atmosphere there, plus **[4]**a personal interview and **[5]**a priesthood blessing, often can re- store sagging spirits. **[6]**Your wife can often have an influence in strengthening a missionary.
**[7]**Help the missionary understand that deciding to return home is a very serious matter but that the final decision is his or hers.
Ask the missionary to talk with **[8]**his or her parents, **[9]**bishop, or **[10]**stake president. You should learn what they say so that you can build on it. **[11]**If the home priesthood leaders know that the family wants the missionary to continue serving, make sure the missionary calls home. Even if the parents were not originally in favor of the mission, they may want their missionary to finish what he or she has started. Parents or priesthood leaders may recommend other people who can help, **[12]**such as a friend (including a girlfriend if she will be supportive), **[13]**a youth leader, a **[14]**seminary teacher, or a **[15]**returned missionary.
**[16]**Some struggling missionaries respond well to a “test period.” You might give a missionary **[17]**an assignment suited to his or her needs. Then you could say, “Try it for three months. If you feel the same way, we’ll call the Area Presidency (or Church headquarters) about your request.” **[18]**You might also ask the missionary to stay at least until the next transfer so that the work will not be disrupted and his or her companion will not need to be transferred.
**[19]**Explain that if the missionary returns home at his or her own insistence, the missionary and the family are to reimburse the Church for the cost of the return trip home.
If after **[20]**counseling with the Area Presidency, all efforts fail and a missionary insists on going home, **[21]**ask your Missionary Department In-Field Services representative for further instructions. You should not feel personally responsible when a missionary goes home early after you have done all you can.
Mission President’s Handbook
Reading through the list, it feels a lot like the scene at the end of the original Stepford Wives when suddenly “people” start popping up from all over to prevent our heroine from finding out the truth: that the Men’s Association has replaced all their wives with audioanimatronic robots, including all her former friends. It also sounds a lot like the coercive tactics cults use to keep members from leaving. Is it well meaning? Is it coercive? Does it cross a line?
There are some definition of human trafficking to consider:
“Human Trafficking is the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of people through force, fraud or deception, with the aim of exploiting them for profit.”
United Nations
“Trafficking victims are deceived by false promises of love, a good job, or a stable life and are lured or forced into situations where they are made to work under deplorable conditions with little or no pay.”
Department of Justice
The problem with applying these two definitions to missionary work is that these are volunteers, not “workers.” Working for the Peace Corps or on a house building expedition is not human trafficking just because it’s unpaid or at the expense of the volunteers. The living conditions might also be subpar (certainly by American standards) in some of these volunteer situations, but not by local standards. The living conditions are probably a salient point, though. In my own experience, some of the places missionaries lived bordered on unsafe due to crime and security. When missionaries raised concerns to their parents, the President told them not to worry their mothers by sharing this type of information, sort of a “What happens in the mission stays in the mission” approach.
Model of Human Trafficking:
Action – Inducing, recruiting, transporting, and harboring people
Means – Using fraud and coercion
Purpose – To perform labor/services intended to profit the entity
The A-P-M Model of human trafficking
The argument among ex-Mos regarding these points, which probably feel like a stretch to Church members is that Church claims are “fraudulent” and that social pressures to do a mission are “coercive.” One could certainly argue that all religious claims are false if one does not believe, but fraudulence requires that the one giving the information knows it is false and only shares the information to obatin the free labor. Social coercion is another tricky one to prove, although I think the case is stronger here. The amount of pressure and the social consequences for failure to serve or for returning early are much steeper than they are for other volunteer experiences. As to the third point, critics would state that the Church’s purpose is to retain and grow tithe payers, but the faithful would counter that tithing is simply a byproduct of being a Church member, and that the objective is to grow the membership, not to fill the coffers. Proving intent on this basis is problematic, particularly given how much preference is given to religions in cases of rights.
Signs of human trafficking include:
https://ag.nv.gov/Human_Trafficking/HT_Signs/
- Appearing malnourished
- Seeming to adhere to scripted or rehearsed responses in social interaction (discussions, approved material)
- Lacking official identification documents (taking your passport so you can’t leave on your own)
- Lacking personal possessions
- Working excessively long hours
- Living at place of employment
- Not allowing people to go into public alone, or speak for themselves
A look at the site this is taken from shows that the list is cherry-picked quite a bit to exclude things that don’t apply: signs of physical injuries or abuse, avoiding eye contact or social interaction or authority figures, appearing destitute, checking into hotels with older males, poor physical or dental health, tattoos or branding, untreated sexually transmitted disease, underage workers, barbed wire or bars on windows to prevent workers from exiting.
The one area that seems to pose a huge potential problem for the Church is the practice of retaining the missionaries’ passports combined with the litany of tactics used to discourage the missionary from leaving. If a missionary wants to go home and doesn’t have his or her travel documents, the Mission President is supposed to take 21 steps (as noted in the handbook above) to prevent the missionary from going home. Employing these tactics and putting them in writing feels like a risk if a missionary or their parents ever decided to sue for unlawful detainment or kidnapping. It certainly feels like the Mission President who employs these tactics while holding the missionary’s travel documents is at risk. Holding the passport is not the issue; failure to return it on request is. If you go on a cruise, for example, you may be required to submit your passport to the Purser’s Office at the beginning of your cruise, and it is returned to you at the end. However, if at any point a passenger requests his or her passport, it is given to them. This is not the practice as outlined for Mission Presidents who, as the guideline says, are only blameless after they’ve done “all they can do” to prevent the missionary from leaving. American citizens traveling abroad have rights.
There are many potential risks to the Church’s strategy. At any of those 21 points, someone might know the actual rights of the missionary as a United States citizen travelling abroad and might inform them of those rights. As soon as the missionary contacts the embassy, the jig is up. The passport is the property of the United States, not the Church. It is unlawful for it to be retained when a citizen has requested its return. This is not a gray area. That sets up a tension between Mission Presidents trying to follow the Church guidelines while retaining a passport in violation of international law. Do Mission Presidents understand that? Doubtful since it’s not specified in their guidelines. What is specified is that they need to exhaust all efforts to prevent the missionary from leaving before allowing them to leave.
- Do you think missions qualify as human trafficking or do you see this as hyperbole?
- Where do you see the Church having risk or exposure here?
- Are missions truly volunteer service? E. Bednar recently stated that by being baptized at age 8, young men no longer have the right to make a choice. Does that make it mandatory?
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
Hyperbole.
I’d say it depends on leadership roulette – who you get for a mission president. Sounds like we peruse the same Reddit thread and most of the experiences that ex-mos share of their mission time fit the model of human trafficking. That said, there are many who had a positive experience. It really boils down to where you serve and who is in charge.
The intense pressure to serve a mission is the result of years of grooming from every side. So while technically it is a volunteer activity, too many YM don’t actually feel like they have a choice. I can remember a bishop counseling me to always say “when you serve your mission” to my son in conversations, never “if you decide or want to go”. I didn’t take his advice. He went to BYU-I for one year and refused to go back. He’d be having his 19th birthday and he said the pressure would be unbearable. Bednar retroactively telling young men that they covenanted to serve a mission at baptism is manipulative and wrong. I’ve never met anyone who was given a list of what they were supposedly covenanting to at baptism. Baptism is being spiritually reborn as a disciple of Christ, it’s following His example. It is not a list of uninformed consent items that can be edited at will by those in charge.
When MPs keep passports and won’t return them until months of “negotiations” occur, then the Church is definitely putting itself at risk. The YW were taught the value of choice and accountability – when a missionary calls the embassy or consulate, then the Church is experiencing their accountability.
Hyperbole. My mission president didn’t keep our passports (Europe). An employer is allowed to try to persuade an employee to stay after he voices a desire to quit, and a college counselor is allowed to encourage a struggling student to stick around until the end of the semester and to return for the next term.
I haven’t heard what Bednar is apparently teaching about not having a choice after being baptized at age 8. I don’t know what he taught, but one always has a choice, and one does not sin by not serving a mission. None of the three in the FP served missions. I am glad that I served, but I won’t call my sons sinners if they do not serve. Nor if they marry outside the faith, for the marriage bed is honorable. I think that marrying in the faith helps because marriage is hard, but I want them to love whomever they marry.
Saying that LDS missionary work constitutes human trafficking is a little like saying that the LDS Church steals from tithe paying members. Technically, these two statements are not true as there are many justifications to undermine them. But in the back of conscience, we know there’s at least a little truth there.
The policy that any missionary who leaves early has to pay his or her own ticket back home is just petty. Do missionaries sign any sort of contract or agreement before they enter service? Is there any informed consent occurring? Is the missionary ever told, “We’ll pay your way there, but if you choose to leave early, say after providing free labor for 12 months and then deciding to go home, you will pay your own ticket home”? Or that they will receive spotty medical care? Substandard housing? Travel around on bicycles? Is there any corporation or even nonprofit in the US that makes its employees travel around on bikes for business? With a hundred billion dollars (or much more) squirreled away in assets, they certainly have the money to give missionaries an office and a car, befitting the importance of their calling and the work they do. I’ll bet every GA gets and office and a car. SPs get an office. Bishops get an office.
Agreeing to serve a mission is a little like joining the Army, but with none of the disclosures or agreements that one signs when entering the military, so there are no terms spelled out. You as a missionary have no contractual rights and the Church has no contractual duties to you as a missionary. It’s all just fly by the seat of your pants, with the missionaries generally getting the short end of the stick. Plainly, the Church takes advantage of young missionaries, who are technically adults but are treated like and act like children while serving.
If it’s not really trafficking, it is certainly the case that the Church takes advantage of young missionaries. It’s more like the free labor that Scientology extracts from some of its followers, except it lasts two years. Which isn’t trafficking, but it isn’t a very good look. The whole system is designed to benefit the Church, not the missionary.
Definitely hyperbole.
Sorry, but this is ridiculously hyperbolic. To compare voluntary participation to human trafficking is an insult to those that have actually have been trafficked.
Not sure when it happened, but Wheat and Tares is becoming increasingly less enjoyable to read.
Hyperbole. Missions are voluntary, despite the eagerness some church leaders and members to argue otherwise. Here’s reality:
1) The vast majority of missionaries have supportive parents and they are in frequent contact with family and friends. Such missionaries have a robust safety net to protect them and to raise alarm if the mission was going wrong.
2) There are missionaries who do not have a supportive family. There are also missionaries who due to finances are wholly dependent on the church for their mission support. These missionaries are more vulnerable, but vulnerable to what? The financial comforts of a mission may keep a missionary on the mission, but how is that harmful? The notion that the church is doing illegal things with missionaries is baseless.
3) There are missionaries who exercise their agency to flaunt mission rules and who “do their own thing”. Some of this exercise of agency can harm other missionaries. Mission presidents and parents need to be wise to this risk. At the same time, the presence of this risk is not unique to LDS missions.
Seems like the passport thing is anecdotal at best. I also served in Europe, and like Georgis didn’t have my passport taken. That just sounds silly, but for the acknowledgment that 19-21 year-olds (on average) are not typically as fastidious with their important documents as they should be. And like a stick having two ends, the excerpts can be read in either a positive (ministerial) light, or negative (manipulative) light. It would seem to be more a function of either (1) the reader’s own biases when reading, or (2) the “roulette” of how a given mission president reads and implements those guidelines (or both together).
I think it’s a function of our current culture. We can’t just disagree with people. Anyone who doesn’t think as I do is obviously evil.
For those who have sincere disagreements or concerns about missions, couching those concerns in this kind of hyperbole would seem to be counterproductive.
The hyperbole here is teetering on the edge of clickbait.
You can cherry pick similarities between human trafficking and almost anything…LDS missions, military service, Peace Corps, grad school…Elephants share a lot of similarities with cats, but it’s the differences that matter. Cherry picking paints a misleading picture.
Here’s the actual whole list from the Nevada AG’s website referenced in the OP:
– Appearing malnourished
– Showing signs of physical injuries and abuse
– Avoiding eye contact, social interaction, and authority figures/law enforcement
– Seeming to adhere to scripted or rehearsed responses in social interaction
– Lacking official identification documents
– Appearing destitute/lacking personal possessions
– Working excessively long hours
– Living at place of employment
– Checking into hotels/motels with older males, and referring to those males as boyfriend or “daddy,” which is often street slang for pimp
– Poor physical or dental health
– Tattoos/ branding on the neck and/or lower back
– Untreated sexually transmitted diseases
– Small children serving in a family restaurant
– Security measures that appear to keep people inside an establishment – barbed wire inside of a fence, bars covering the insides of windows
– Not allowing people to go into public alone, or speak for themselves
..the full list paints a much different picture of what human trafficking looks like.
My views on the LDS church have changed a lot since I was a missionary, and I am well past toeing the line for the church.
Of course there are people who have bad experiences, struggle personally, get a zealot MP, or simply want to go home. But equating missionary service to human trafficking is plain silly and insulting to actual victims of human trafficking.
(Let me know when missionaries start calling the MP “daddy”)
Familywomen is right – MP roulette is real and can be insidious. When I served in Paris, we had a missionary from Honolulu who was clearly suffering. He lost 30 pounds.in his first six weeks and was suffering from all the symptoms of depression. The MP used the standard Mormon guilt trip tactics- denied him the opportunity to receive medical care and refused to consider sending him home. It was only after his persistent mother intervened at the HQ level that he was allowed to return home.
While bishop, we had an Elder assigned to a mission in Fresno, CA. The MP was an absolute control freak. He required all elders to have identical haircuts with the hair parted on the right side and enforced all sorts of draconian rules more appropriate for Marine boot camp than missionary service. Fortunately, the Elder’s parents were able to contact Elder Richard Hinckley who facilitated a reassignment and a reprimand for the rogue MP.
Truth is many MPs are not fit to serve. The Church needs to do a better job of sifting out the bad apples who, in their zeal for control, exhibit human trafficking tendencies. Considering their span of responsibility, MPs have very little accountability and are woefully unsupervised. This structure does not fly in the real world.
Are missions human trafficking? not quite. Are they treating the missionaries like adult human beings? Not at all. Both my husband and my son were treated in ways that were really not right. Although, I wouldn’t go as far as calling it human trafficking, I find myself at a loss for a word that fits better.
Just what would you call denying appropriate medical care that causes percent damage? And not letting the missionary even tell his parents how sick he really is? And not sending him home when it becomes clear that the local doctor is not helping after several weeks? I call it abuse.
Hyperbole, usually. I agree with others that exactly how different mission presidents employ those 21 steps makes a world of difference. Going on a mission is a big decision that should be made after careful consideration, and then prospective missionaries have time to sit with that decision and change their mind. Leaving a mission early is similarly a big decision, and a mission president asking a missionary to take some time to consider why they are there in the first place and make some efforts to improve issues that might be contributing to their desire to return home is very reasonable.
I do have a couple comments about those 21 steps. First, thinking of them as 21 separate events makes the process feel intentionally long and arduous. In reality, a trip to the mission home might be accomplished in a single afternoon (depending on location) and cover steps 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 16/17/18 all at once. Also, the handbook seems to be listing 21 ideas of things to do to help the missionary decide what to do, not that they can only go home after all 21 have been tried and exhausted.
[7] “… the final decision is his or hers.” It’s nice that this is explicitly stated. They should make it bold so no one misses it.
[11] Any missionary should be able to discuss this with their parents, not just parents that will leaning towards “stay”. Most of our missionaries are barely adults. Their parents know them best. If a child of mine wrote a letter home that said “I really want to come home but MP won’t let me talk to you about it” he’d be getting a phone call from me that day.
[12] Apparently missionaries might have girlfriends, but never boyfriends.
[18] A decision to stay a little longer and see if things improve (#16) seems like a reasonable idea under many circumstances, but phrasing to be “you need to stick around and be miserable so other people aren’t inconvenienced” is a little ridiculous. I mean, maybe if regular transfers are a few days away or something ….
[19] Nope. This one is just garbage. I think the vast, vast majority of these kids go out and try to make a mission work. Sometimes it doesn’t. We don’t need to charge them extra just because they had a terrible experience. If we have a significant problem with kids that don’t give things a serious shot, and/or are completely unprepared or unwilling to live with the rigors of a mission (they aren’t easy!) then the fault is with all of the adults (parents, bishop, SP, etc.) that approved sending them out there, not the teenager. (Maybe we should bill the bishop/SP/ward/stake when a missionary comes home early?)
I follow Wheat and Tares with interest. A couple of years ago, I stopped offering my comments. However, for this post I will offer a few observations:
1. I am not a fan of the Amway culture that pervades many missions. For those too young to remember, Amway was a 1980s-era multi-marketing scheme that took America by storm for a few years.
2. I served as a missionary in Taiwan between 1977-1979. Passports were kept in the office safe, because at that time, a Western passport would sell on the black market for more than $10,000 USD. The policy was implemented after several missionaries had their passports stolen from their apartments, while they were out during the day proselytizing.
3. I had to take take an emergency leave of absence for three weeks, to take care of my ailing father, and had no trouble getting my passport out of the office safe. I was blessed with a helpful Mission President, and was able to return.
Thank you,
Taiwan Missionary
I think in general I agree with the hyperbole-bordering-on-clickbait position here. I think a -really- bad MP could make me question that proposition.
What I find sad and telling is that there are those among us who’ve been so hurt by how TCoJCoLDS operates, that these are the conclusions they draw. While I don’t agree, I think it’s important to acknowledge that this is how it feels and looks to some people.
Thanks for the post!
When I served my mission in Guatemala (1992-1994), the mission office held our passports for us. One of the primary reasons for this was the potential for theft, as mentioned above. Another was that we had to have our visas renewed every 90 days. If the missionaries had to return to the embassy in the capital every 90 days to do this on their own, the mission work would have been seriously interrupted, let alone the possibility of immigration or visa violations leading to potential criminal action.
Dave W: I agree with you that the 21 steps to discourage the missionary from going home really really depend on the MP who has both a lot of latitude here, and also has the instruction / pressure to retain missionaries, despite any personal risk of being accused of withholding travel documents / unlawful detention. I suppose a consolation is that an MP who does veer into unlawful detention is the one most likely to suffer the liability, but the Church might very easily take the hit publicly as well. If they want to avoid that, they should advise MPs of the legal rights of the missionaries.
I think the other salient question is how many of those who want to go home benefit from staying (what are their real reasons?) and how many should just go, and that’s going to vary greatly by person (as well as their support network). I know of one elder whose mother was diagnosed with cancer, and he started having anxiety and depression because of not being there to support her. I am not aware of what the MP did in this case, but the elder’s YM leader came out of the woodwork, calling him with a berating-style “pep talk” about staying, hinting at his mother’s health being protected if he did (talk about a huge risk!) and basically attempting to shame him into staying, despite his personal needs. But the elder did go home for several months, and it was the right thing for him and his family. While it all worked out, that former YM leader was completely out of line, but I know a list of people who received his “tough love” speeches over the years. They only work to convince everyone what an a-hole this guy is. The Church may not be a cult, but guys like him sure act like it is.
There is for sure a lot of variation in the temperament of mission presidents and their approach to heading up a mission. My impression is that the church intentionally gives MPs a wide degree of latitude so they can try to meet the specific conditions of the areas the oversee…this can be a double-edged sword.
Since people have mentioned some specific about their missions, here’s some from mine (fwiw, my MP was a very reasonable, caring, non-zealot):
– Our mission spanned three different countries in Europe and we were regularly crossing international borders even within a single area, so we kept our own passports. We also had to get identity cards for each country we were working in. We were encouraged to carry a photocopy of the passport unless we needed the real thing for something.
– My MTC companion became clinically depressed when we got to the field and had tried to go home. The MP knew we were in the MTC together, so he called me to ask if I’d be ok with an emergency transfer to put the two of us together for awhile. There happened to be an American expat psychiatrist practicing the area who was willing to help him and his family was ok with him receiving treatment while staying in the field. There was not pressure to get any major missionary work done while he got back on his feet. Against typical missionary rules, I spent a lot of hours alone in the lobby of the clinic while he received medical care and counseling. When he was feeling better he was able to finish the rest of his mission in a positive way.
– The MP didn’t try to control what music we listened to or try to micromanage how we worked. He just asked us to get out and just do some good in the community, support the struggling local wards/branches, and teach anyone we found who was interested without forcing it on them. There were rules, but we were also allowed to be autonomous and make use our own judgement.
There are definitely militant, authoritarian MPs – I was lucky not to get stuck with one.
I would like to better understand how MPs are vetted – hopefully they’re moving away from the more fanatical types.
Back in the mid 60s, I served in a European mission. One elder, as his release date approached, send his passport and his immunization certificate home so it would not get lost. When he was preparing to meet up with his parents upon his release his error in judgement was discovered and his trip home was delayed while someone at home located his documents and couriered them to him. Perhaps if the mission home had kept his documents for him, this foolish mistake would have been avoided!
Many times as a French missionary, I rode the bus without paying. Please forward this apology to Church HQ for the potential legal exposure I created almost 32 years ago. I could have ended up in a French prison !!
The world has need of willing people but the Church has need of future leaders and teachers in Pocatello, Orem, Henderson NV etc so the institution should treat current missionaries with respect and dignity. It feels like Bednar and his disciples would prohibit crocs and sweatpants as P-Day attire.
If you were to use the Geneva Conventions as a basic standard of humane treatment, sometimes (not always) LDS missions fall below those standards. I’m aware of too many stories of missionaries who were willfully deprived of adequate food, shelter, medical care, uncensored/unrestricted mail or mental health support to view them as isolated incidents perpetrated by a few renegade hardcore MPs–its a systemic problem. In some cases, POWs are afforded more rights than LDS missionaries. By that measure, along with the known withholding of passports and exploitation for free labor, I would say the LDS mission experience isn’t far off from human trafficking.
I didn’t serve a mission, but I did serve in the military, which is another high-demand culture that is also not easy for dissatisfied members to leave from early. However, military members are paid a fair wage, enjoy generous benefits, are trained in useful skills, and can use their free time to call their families and pursue romantic relationships as much as they like. If you incur injuries or illnesses during your military service that have lifelong health effects, the promise of free medical care and disability payments for life exists. No such promise exists for missionaries, who sometimes do incur lifelong injuries but get zero assistance from the Church to deal with them (that’s another topic entirely).
Add to that all the manipulation and coercion in the rhetoric that surrounds missionary service, and how the experience is sold to the young men (and perhaps the young women to some extent); that it’s a duty or obligation rather than a choice, and that enduring difficult mission experiences bring “blessings” etc. If missions were so amazing, why would leaders have to use such manipulation to get boys to sign up? The coercion and lack of transparency are also similar to that of human trafficking operations.
20+ years ago, my wife had a mission president that imposed artificial starvation by reducing missionaries’ living allowance to less than half of what one could reasonably, frugally live on (this was in a prosperous European country with a high cost of living), reasoning that he starved on his own mission years before, and it was a character building experience for him. They depended on the mercy of local members, who were few and far between and were often near poverty themselves, while nearly passing out from malnutrition on a daily basis. One of her companions developed permanent health complications from the malnutrition. Years later, that MP was eventually promoted to area 70 then to the 1st Quorum of the 70. This is the kind of leadership that gets rewarded, further indicating a systemic problem.
To the Church’s credit, in recent years they have been working to reduce the stigma of early returning missionaries, but only to a point. The excerpt from the MP manual above, as well as some experiences I’ve heard, suggests that many MPs may be willing to use the threat of early return shame to keep a struggling missionary in the field.
This marginalizes the horror of human trafficking. Even suggesting that middle-class (most missionary-age young men and women) LDS are trafficked, is such a reach, it borders disrespectful to real victims.
Wanna know where the LDS human trafficking occurs? International child adoptions. Look into it. LDS adopt children from around the world. A few years back, young mothers (Philippines) were told their children would be raised and educated in America, with the understanding that they would return at some point—LDS mothers unwittingly stole children from other mothers, and adoption agencies were at the heart of it. Tell that story.
And if you notice a few thousand highly-desirable WHITE children in Utah with Ukrainian accents, don’t be surprised if it is revealed at some point in the future to be the same scandalous business model repeated by adoption agencies…
For the commenters complaining about this post being over-the-top hyperbole, I have a story:
Two years ago I had lunch with Ziff at the Sunstone Symposium. As a regular blogger, who struggles to come up with interesting material, Ziff expressed awe for the permanent bloggers at W&T who post quality OPs weekly. Yes, some are better than others, but on the whole, I find the overall quality very good.
A syndrome/condition/diagnosis, etc, does not need to have every single behavior/sign/symptom, etc, to qualify for the label. The DSM-V, for example, may state that a person with 7 of 10 listed symptoms can be positively diagnosed as having a particular mental health disorder.
Each item on a list could be considered a red flag.
That LDS missions exhibit/practice some items on human trafficking lists is concerning. We can do/be better.
I agree with the comment that despite some similarities, to call missions trafficking is disrespectful to victims of real trafficking. Yes, some mission experiences look more like it than others. A good mission president will not let a missionary who wants to go home feel trapped, handbook nonsense notwithstanding. We know some will try to go by the book, and yes, the handbook goes too far possibly does expose the church to some potential legal liability. I don’t recall the details 30 years later, but I think my passport was kept in the mission office safe primarily because of a significant risk of them being stolen, and also because the office renewed visas on our behalf multiple times.
Missions aren’t mandatory, but we’ve developed a culture where the social pressure is really strong. I assume this culture dates to the 1970s when Kimball declared they were expected of all young men. I’m too young to remember anything different. I think the church and the missionary force would be better served if a strong effort was made to teach young members that it’s a choice. Bednar of course is getting in the way here, so like many “nice things that we can’t have” in the church, this one’s going to have to wait until he’s not around any longer.
Discussing problems and solutions in the missionary department is valid, but there’s just really not any broad equivalence between lds missions and human trafficking or wars without the Geneva Convention.
The hyperbole marginalizes real victims of violence/exploitation while dismissing the people who feel their mission had a positive impact on their life (including many who have left the church).
We also can’t ignore the way that suffering on a mission is used as virtue signaling to other church members. There’s a perceived credibility that comes with starving in the jungle for Jesus…and when it doesn’t exist naturally, the suffering is often manufactured.
I served in Western Europe, so there was no real need for suffering. Yet here are real examples of how some in my mission tried to up their hardship cred:
– Taking only cold showers.
– Refusing to replace worn shoes that were causing physical pain and harm (some even displaying them in trophy cases when they got home).
– Starving themselves rather than spending their money of food so they could give as much money as possible back at the end.
– Attempting to fast for a week or more.
– One missionary even decided to “challenge” himself by not washing his sheets or towels for the full two years (I wish I was exaggerating).
All of this and more was done voluntarily…and done in spite of an MP who openly denounced that sort of thing.
This isn’t an attempt to discredit real issues in the missionary department, but to take a look at the other side of the coin as well. There’s a real part of the culture that thrives on the idea that hardship=righteousness…whether it’s real or manufactured.
For me, it’s hyberbole. But the mixed votes given to those who also say so tell me that one’s opinion is something of a Rorschach (inkblot) test. Some mission presidents can indeed be zealous, coercive, and overly manipulatuve. I suspect that most, though, are more chill and are just likewise volunteering their time in an attempt to give others a positive experience. So, which type of MP one gets, mixed with one’s own personality, determines the outcome. One could be critical of the randomness in this and call it “mission president roullete”. But similar levels of randomness exist in most major life experiences.
Thanks for the thought question though. The discussion highlights how LDS missions look extra strange when viewed from outside their cultural context.
Probably mission folklore but allegedly a US missionary serving in my Brasilian mission wanted desperately to go home. The MP refused, going through most of the 21-point retention plan. So the missionary one night left his comp alone in their apartment, went to a bar, got drunk, and went home with a woman. The next day, he called the MP and, recounting the previous night’s activities, said, “President, now you have to send me home.”
Not sure if I believe it, but the story makes for good mission gossip
“Some mission presidents can indeed be zealous, coercive, and overly manipulatuve. I suspect that most, though, are more chill and are just likewise volunteering their time in an attempt to give others a positive experience. ”
Undoubtedly some mission presidents have only good intentions. There are also intangible benefits for them:
-the calling is a church status symbol
-it can be a step on the ladder to GA
-if a mp is retired, it allows much of his retirement assets to grow for 3 years
When the mp title is used aspirationally, his motives may be distorted. He may resort to being “zealous, coercive, and overly manipulatuve”.
Hyperbolic, grotesquely disrespectful to actual human trafficking victims, false equivalencies, cherry-picking, bad-faith arguments—everything y’all have accused church apologists of doing, this post is doing. In fact, if an apologist wanted dismiss the bloggernacle as pointless to engage or read, they could just point to this post. To paraphrase The Simpsons, W&T turned into clickbait so slowly I almost didn’t notice.
Sorry to keep dogpiling on this post days after this thread died out, but you are all better than this—or at least should be—and need to be called out when you get lazy. If you don’t have a good idea for a weekly post, it’s ok to post nothing rather than something this half-assed.
J: Your reading comprehension seems to stop at the title which I suppose supports your “clickbait” charge. The post says the same things you are saying, that the charge (which is from Reddit and does not originate here) relies on a whole lot of cherry picking. However, there are some mission presidents who are pushing it if they refuse to release the passport of a missionary in an effort to convince them to stay. That’s the tl;dr of the post. Given that this is a claim I’ve seen *several* times in exMo spaces, it seems worthwhile to discuss it. Don’t you think it should matter to the Church what people are saying about it?