Thanks everyone for all your support! Be back in full swing in June!
Click here to see Stuart and his wife talk about Mormon Sexual Repression. Click here to watch Stuart’s wife Kerri talk about the fear of losing her family while she was a practicing Mormon.
I went to the Brazil, Riberao Preto mission, which at that time was the 2nd baptizing mission in central and south America. Our mission motto was “So’ Baptize” which means, “Just Baptize”. another motto of the mission was sacrifice brings blessing, so we lived in unsanitary shitholes, and deprived ourselves of sleep to call upon the powers of heaven to help us. We also had some of the same manipulatiative crap that this video is talking about. Our mission rewrote the the discussions only making them 5 minutes long, and they focused more on emotion, such as christ suffering, or how wonderful and loving god is to call a prophet in the latter days. We performed these discussions almost like a play, using exaggerated hand and body motions insync with the content of the lesson . We acted out the first vision by getting on our knees, looking at the ceiling with our arms stretch out in front of our face (like this painting http://downloads.sugardoodle.net/sdclipart/2007/08/1vision.jpg ). We also changed the words in the first vision, making it more personal than the official versions. “Joseph, this is my beloved son, listen to him Joseph……..listen to him.”
If by the fourth discussion the investigator was still unsure about baptism, it was our protocol to say this, “Ok well I would like you to meet with another missionary, who is above us and greater than us due to his great service to the Lord. This is a powerful servant of the Lord that has really helped me understand the gospel, and I know that by you just talking to him, you will feel of God’s love and power, and you will know what Christ’s will is. Would you like to meet with this missionary?” The Missionary was nothing more than just a missionary giving the baptismal interview. When he would come for the baptismal interview, we would introduce him is a grand manner and say, I will leave you two alone now. The interviewing missionary would slyly perform a baptismal interview, if the investigator passed any of the questions during the baptismal interview, the missionary would compliment them and express that the lord has been preparing this person to recieve the fullness of the gospel for quite a while now. If they passed the interview the missionary would say that he can feel God’s presence really strong and ask the investigator if they could feel it, the investigator would usually say yes, to which he would say, this feeling is God confirming to you that he wants you to be baptized, so will you follow the example of Christ by being baptized this Sunday? If they still said no, the missionary would tell them that when the time is right they will know, and then he would ask them to keep reading the scriptures and keep going to church. On Sunday’s we would wake up early so that would could round up all our investigators and herd them into the church. If we didn’t do this, then they usually would not show up. I have pictures of me giving the thumbs up with about 14 investigators trailing me (most brazilians didn’t have a car) Sometimes we would rent a taxi to pick people up, because we knew that if we got them into the chapel, we could baptize them. We had a technique called “Sala Esquente” (hot room) were we would sit the investigator down in a room and play church music, sing hymns, and talk about the sacrifices that the saints would to become members of this church. If that didn’t work we would talk about the 3 degrees of glory and say that since the gospel has been presented to them, if they refused baptism they couldn’t go to heaven. Of coarse we would tell them that we loved them and that God loved them and that we just want them to be happy and that the only way to be happy is to be a member of the LDS church. This technique would usually work, and after church meetings we would fill up the baptismal font and baptize them. We would then call up the Zone leader that night and say, “(# of people we baptized during the week) got wet!!” During my mission, our Mission President got replaced and the new one got rid of some of these techniques, but most of the missionaries still did them.
When I was a District Leader, I stood up to the leaders once in a Zone Meeting, giving a lesson on that our investigators need to be fully prepared and have an understanding of the gospel before we baptize them. It was a very uncomfortable meeting. 2 weeks later I was them demoted from being district leader, sent to worst area of our mission, and given a crazy, mentally unstable companion. It only took about 6 weeks for the leaders to break me and put me back in the “just baptize” mode again. I look at it like this, here I was in the worst area of the mission, I hated my companion, I tried to teach the gospel the way that I was taught to teach it in the MTC, and I was having no success at all. I was suffering from tons of anxiety because all the leaders hated me, I dared not question that the Lord put the leaders in their position, because that thought would open the door to, my leaders aren’t inspired, so what else isn’t inspired. The thought that the church couldn’t be true was too devistating of a thought that I couldn’t even begin think of it. Well after they broke me, I, according to my leaders words, “became on fire, and had a magnificant change of heart.” I become one of the top baptizers in the mission again, testifying that I was much happier doing what the leaders told me to do. I soon became a Zone Leader in my mission and we ended up baptizing a lot of people.
Wow! I haven’t thought about this in years. I think that I supressed these thoughts because they are very painful. It’s a time of my life that I was too weak to stand up for what I believed and too weak to trust my own judgement. I really regret not being stronger, but I guess I am making up for it now. My mission was a fucken brainwash bootcamp, the missionaries that baptized the most were the most manipulative. Obedience did not correlate to success like they taught us in the MTC or that we learn in the book of mormon. It all makes sense no though, because now I know that the church is all bullshit.
That’s a very powerful story!