What am I supposed to do when I see Mormon missionaries in my neighborhood?

This is a real question

I moved to New York for the same reason I’ve moved many places — to try to get to somewhere that feels like a different country from the one I was raised in, the country of Mormonism. So a reality I, clumsily, hadn’t factored into my decision was that it frequently happens that I see Mormon missionaries in New York, who appear like ghostly emissaries from a time zone I thought I’d never return to. More than that, I often see the physical presence of the Church all around me, the way that major cities are often headquarters for religious movements that function, effectively, as large extractive businesses.

It is always jarring. There's a pair of elders that frequent my neighborhood in Ridgewood, an area on the border of Queens and Brooklyn that is still largely home to a lot of Spanish speaking families and communities. Because of that, I assume, the missionaries, the ELDERS, I should say, appear to have been assigned to speak Spanish. Their tags reflect it: their surnames, and then, "La Iglesia de Jesucristo de los Santos de los Últimos Días." The Church of Latter-Day Saints of the Ultimate Days, I always like to think of it, even though I know it means the last days, or latter days, as we insist upon it in English. It might be a kinder or more FUN way to think about living through what is almost unavoidably a period of time of unforgivable cruelty as the world sinks to its knees, the time we now live in: are these the last days, or just the ULTIMATE days to live in? Like, super sick and wild days, the ultimate days of all? Think about it, man. Watching the world consume itself alive through the machinations of capitalist fascism all over the world, boil itself to death through climate change, might be a lot of things, but you have to admit it's pretty… ultimate. 😎

I've reached the point in my journey away from Mormonism, and the point in my own healing from my own indelibly traumatizing experience with the Church, that the sight of Mormon missionaries — ELDERS, they made us call them, these 18 year old fetus boys with the sacred stupid Priesthood, naturally inaccessible to women — causes a deep fight or flight response in my body. I feel agitated, panicked, angry. My pulse picks up. I want to scream and point and say, "Look, I did that!! I, too, was scammed into doing that, when I was too young and too brainwashed to make a real choice!! Believe me!! It's insane that we're letting them do that!!" I want to yell at them. I want to tell them to go home, go to therapy, call their mothers, look in the mirror, ask themselves if they really believe what they're so passionately preaching to absolute strangers. Actually, passionately preaching isn't so much what I'd call it; when I saw them last, they were mostly just standing in the open marketplace area around the Myrtle-Wyckoff L train stop, tiredly standing around, almost indistinguishable from the cell phone contract salespeople. A great place to bother people.

I know, on some deeper level, that the best thing to do would be to detach, let it go, not give it my energy. That's what my therapist would probably say, that's what my inner instinct tells me. A significant plurality of my friends and family are still, on some level, practicing Mormons, and would probably get quietly uncomfortable, or a little defensive, if I were to tell them how deeply upset and agitated I get when I see missionaries in the wild, in my own world, instead of far way, where I did my own missionary work and where I try to leave the remembrance of it: on the other side of the world, on the other side of my mind, a place I never visit.

But something broke in me, the past few years. I no longer feel like it's possible to be quietly forgiving; I want to throw a brick into the face of the stupid fat capitalist god I once worshiped, the god that once ruled me and made me believe, truly, that my body and mind were not mine, that they were disgusting and unforgivably unobedient. I want to scream, and I want to interrogate.

I did, once. I went up to one of the elders, and started off the way my mother used to engage them when we'd see them around Seattle, where I grew up, in my high pitched “ordering breakfast at McDonald’s” voice: "Hi, elders! I'm Eliza! I served my mission a few years ago in Bulgaria! How's it going?" The one I spoke to looked so young, so tender. His hair was bleached blonde the way children's hair gets in the summer, like it had seen one too many swimming pools in American Fork, sweaty like a baby having just woken up from a nap. He had slumped shoulders, he couldn't meet my eyes. He was from a small town in Utah where I once bought roller skates, a town where I not-infrequently saw a pickup truck that liked to go on joyrides, waving an American flag on one side and a confederate flag on the other. He could not meet my eyes. I felt my voice start to shake, I felt my stomach start to wobble, but I couldn't stop. I told him I'd left the church. I told him I was queer, I told him I wanted, so badly, to have a family and be married in the temple and all of that, all of the things that Mormonism teaches are central to being saved, the things that are cut off, forever, from anyone who deviates from obedience. Queers, certainly. I asked him: what do you think of that? Do you really agree with teaching that to people, that being queer is something that keeps you from God? He could not meet my eyes.

He recited lines, quietly, ones that I recognized: "I don't understand it, but I trust the Church leaders and blah blah blah." He didn't seem to be saying them, they seemed to be coming from some place where he kept pre-programmed responses to shame. The way we all, in a subway car, collectively look down when an unhoused person comes in and begs for anything, anything. Look away. Don't engage. It isn't your fault. You are in the right. You're doing your best. This elder did not meet my eyes, he did not look at me. He did not want to see me, a living person, a queer person indelibly and possibly permanently damaged by the Church whose name he wore on his chest, and I guess I have to understand. I would have done the same, probably. I knew, from my own experience of living in the 24-hour performance of righteousness in which he was now engaged, that something about him was lost, that he was fundamentally masking some part of himself that was capable of distinguishing his own beliefs, his own instincts. I guess I have to understand.

There’s another part of it, which is this: missionaries are not doing well, for the most part. Despite my impulse to yell and scream at them, to be cruel, to get some release, the larger part of me knows that these tiny little young people are probably in need more of my urgent sympathy than anything else, and that my anger will probably only drive them deeper into their self-punishment. Because the reality is that most Mormon missionaries are, at any given moment you might see them, in deep desperation, deep unsafety, and very few have the means of finding a way to say no, or to get themselves out, without fear of spiritual reprisal, or deep shame, up to and including the threat of lifelong unworthiness.

Mormon missionaries are forbidden from contacting their families or anyone from home for upwards of eighteen months to two years. They are forbidden from reading anything but Church-approved materials, they are more or less forbidden from listening to music or reading the news or going on the internet. WE are, I should say, because I, too, lived this horror, although much of it has been blessedly blocked out by my mind trying to forget. Missionaries are required to keep a working schedule of up to 15 hours a day, required to get up and sleep at the same time, every night, required to report any violation of their "worthiness," so as not to taint the potential of their work of saving God's children with the sins of, for example, having "same-sex attraction," or any sexual thoughts to speak of. Masturbating, certainly, would be cause for serious concern, perhaps cause to be sent home, certainly cause for serious punishment.

Our missionaries are exhausted, emotionally and physically, and many of them are probably sick, subtly or not subtly discouraged from seeking help or medical treatment when they might need it, which is how so many come home with chronic injuries, destroyed mental health, parasites (or mangled feet from countless hours walking in dress shoes with ingrown toenails, as in the case of one friend of mine). It would be weak, and sinful, to seek help, or so goes the culture of most missions. It would be a betrayal of God’s trust in your holy mantle to say no, to create any boundaries around yourself. Most missionaries, I know, are so tired that, like me, they probably take every opportunity to say a prayer so that they can bend their heads and sleep for 3 seconds, a blessed respite. Maybe, like me, they as so depressed and anxious that they've taken to giving into emotional manipulation or abuse by their fellow missionaries or Church members, or self-harming behavior or crippling attacks of obsessive compulsion (perfect obedience is the term we use for constantly self-surveilling for even sinful thoughts or impulses, which would take us further from God and further from being able to minister to His Children).

Maybe, like me, they have started to wonder if being gay maybe IS a sin, if abortion maybe IS cause to prevent someone from being baptized, to forget deeply held convictions in favor of approval within a never-ending echo chamber of religious agitprop training. Maybe, like me, they have not exercised or rested in months and are starting to forget their mother's face. Maybe, like me, they wander around a grocery store on their one 6-hour period of free time per week and think, "What am I doing what am I doing get me out of here get me out of here what am I doing..." Maybe, like me, they have been repeatedly sexually assaulted or confronted by many, many male strangers, men who kissed them, grabbed their long-skirted bodies, asked them about their sexual habits, called them dirty whores, chased and kicked them. Maybe, and probably, most missionaries I meet are desperate, young, and scared, and just need someone, anyone, to care about their well-being, to let them sit down and speak gently and quietly to them, to give them some water and some nutritious food, even as they are too brainwashed to understand that what they're doing is causing perhaps decades of damage.

In the end, with this elder, I asked him if he had enough water, if he and his companion were keeping healthy, how things were going with Covid. "Oh, well, it's basically over, which is great," he said, perking up. "So yeah, we're pretty much not thinking about stuff like that anymore." I gaped at him, not surprised, but horrified. "So you don't wear masks on the train, or when you visit people or go somewhere crowded?" I asked. "No, because it's like, pretty much over! It's great," he said, beaming. I wasn't sure what to say, but I tried to quickly assure him that Covid is very much not over, especially in New York City, that rates are actually high again, and that masks were probably a good idea. I tried not to think about the chain of leadership responsible for this teenager, this person who was so recently a child, sending him out into the world for two years of his life, lying to him and denying him access to any real information, telling him that it is in God's hands, that Covid is over, to go and preach for 16 hours a day with no mask, that angels were watching him. And then I couldn't take it anymore, and I walked away, wishing him a good day.