ClobberBlog | Mormonism, Evangelical Christianity

The missionaries tried to stop by a week or two ago. I was home with just my two children, wearing a strappy nursing tank top, and probably covered in baby spit. These were male missionaries, so of course they couldn’t come in. They said they were looking for my husband, I said he was at work, and they said they’d come back some other time.

Come Sunday afternoon, my husband said to me, “Oh, the missionaries are coming over tonight.” “What do they want?” I asked warily. “To share a message,” he replied. “Don’t worry, I warned them that this ‘message’ better not be an attempt to convert you.” “Thanks,” I said, and relaxed a bit.

They came, we had dinner, we made amicable conversation. I told them that I was a graduate of BYU and told them about my thesis research on Mormon exaltation. Dinner wrapped up and we moved to the living room so that they could share this message they wanted to share. My husband was bouncing our 6-week-old son, only half paying attention.

They said that the message was found in Moroni 10, and I thought, You have got to be kidding me. I thought my husband asked you not to do this??? But nope, they were going to Moroni 10:3-5 me.

I tried to politely deflect. I said that while I respected the Book of Mormon, I regarded it as a work of 19th century demi-Protestant fiction and did not regard it as either inspired or as ancient history. I showed them my thoroughly marked-up BoM and said I had read it quite a few times, at least two times before I went to BYU. I said I had indeed prayed about it and did not receive any witness.

“But did you ponder the mercies of God first?” the senior companion asked me.

Outwardly I was still being polite. I had sympathy for these guys. I know what it is to be young, to feel like you can change the world, to believe you’re “led by the Spirit,” and to think you know better than everyone else. Besides, we all did stupid stuff when we were that age. In fact, I still do lots of stupid stuff at age 31. I really, really did not want to be angry about what they were doing.

Inwardly I was fuming. My husband had welcomed them into our home on the condition that they not try to convert me, and they had ignored that and gone straight to the mother of all Mormon proselyting passages. I was in no mood for this. I was recently told that my newborn son probably has craniosynostosis. I was emotionally exhausted, sleep-deprived, tired of being a human canteen to a tiny cuddle monster, and behind on other deadlines and commitments. The last thing I needed was two barely-more-than-teenage-boys coming into my home under false pretenses and finding fault with my past investigation of the Book of Mormon.

It would be a little bit like someone trying to convert Bart Ehrman with a copy of Mere Christianity, if Bart Ehrman were lactating and had a cocktail of postpartum hormones coursing through him and had recently been told that his newborn child probably has a condition that will require invasive surgery to prevent brain damage. That’s how much hot water these missionaries were diving into.

Then my husband said from behind me, “Elders—There’s the door.”

They started to grab their things as he continued. “I served a mission, and I’m a member of the church, and I’m married to her, and I’ve known her a lot longer than you have, and I KNOW this stuff doesn’t work on her. And when you asked to come over, I asked you not to do this, and you did it anyway. So there’s the door.”

I felt bad for them, even though they had brought it on themselves, so I asked them to pray for Constantine before they left. Then they were gone.

“I’m betting that’s the first time a member has ever kicked them out of his home,” my husband said after they were gone. My marriage is far from perfect right now, and I still felt bad for the missionaries, but I was grateful that my husband had ended things.

This was only the second time that missionaries had ever attempted to convert me under false pretenses. The first occurred when I was 16 and was urged to take the missionary discussions “just to learn about the church” and was promised that it wouldn’t be a proselyting thing. It was.

I think it will be a while before we invite young missionaries into our home again.

If any future LDS missionaries ever read this post, I hope you take this story to heart and don’t enter people’s homes under a promise of not proselyting, then renege on your word. That is all.