13 June 2003

Imagine you happened upon a major scientific breakthrough, a truly astounding find, a staggeringly genius theory. However, when you speak with others about it, while some accept it, many others do not and become hostile to your message. They see no need for it, or they do not agree with your findings, or perhaps it contradicts their own pet theory. How would you go about persuading the world? How would you fight to win converts to your cause?

I imagine I would gather together all the evidence supporting my case, put it in an easy-to-understand format and back it up with mounds of supporting material, if a question on a particular topic ever arose. I would likely go to the most intelligent first, best able to understand my ideas. I would encourage them to do as much research on their own as possible, weighing both the positives and negatives until they have reached their final conclusion.

As I’ve been proselyting, sharing the message of the Restoration of the Church of Jesus Christ, I’ve been struck with the great differences of our techniques with the ones I’ve just outlined. Our usual method is to go house to house (verboten in Luke x:7, strangely enough) seeking for personal and private contact with people. Investigation in outside sources is not encouraged, and in fact when a person comes in contact with “anti” material, the investigator is almost always given up as lost. Meetings are usually kept limited to small numbers, as large group meetings (especially with authority figures, such as pastors) tend to produce overwhelming questions and skepticism.

Poor and uneducated people swarm to the church, while those in the upper echelons of society are unimpressed by our stories. Those who are eventually converted were often either already seeking for a church, or who have or make friends within the church social groups. We do not encourage rational thought on the subject, but rather exhort our subjects to read through our material, and pray concerning it, with the promise that some sort of “feeling” will confirm its truthfulness. While contemplation over the information is recommended, it is only to search through our provided material (as well as the Bible), never to check our sources against other, perhaps less biased, data.

Of course, I’m not being entirely fair. Religious matters are in a slightly different realm from scientific questions. Assuming that religion and belief in God does make sense, and that faith in the Bible is justified, the question can be looked at from quite a different view. We do, as missionaries, package our message into a lowest-common-denominator package, and keep plenty of Biblical support for various in-depth topics. We may not go to the most intelligent first, but as I previously mentioned, this isn’t a scientific theory that demands great intelligence. It is a religious discussion which requires spirituality. Hence it would make sense for us to go to those who are most “spiritual”, and best able to “spiritually” understand our ideas. We then encourage them to do as much research on their own as possible—but not in a scientific nor data-gathering manner. This research does not consist of collecting reports of various sides of the question. This research is mainly of a spiritual nature—study of the Bible, followed by sincere prayer and listening for the promptings of the Holy Ghost—but it is research nonetheless.

The question, I suppose, hinges upon whether prayer is effective, whether the Bible is God’s word, and whether satisfactory answers can be found to spiritual questions through a mainly spiritual (as opposed to logical and rational) fashion. If not, and those whom we term most “spiritual” are in actuality the most gullible, and our “spiritual research” will actually only ever tell the people what they want to hear, then our efforts and religious zeal actually amount to nothing less than manipulation.