Month: December 2021

Email to Our Ward Missionaries – My Mormon Story, Condensed

~ Mormon Mouse ~ Leave a comment

(I posted the following to r/exmormon reddit on 12-28-21:)

Earlier this week our ward missionaries left me a voicemail saying they hoped we had a Merry Christmas and that they’d like to come by and introduce themselves and share a spiritual thought with us. I sent them a text in response saying we have COVID at our house right now but that I would send them an email in the next day or so to explain a little about our current situation in regards to the church.

In case any of you find this interesting or useful in some way, here is the text of the email I sent them today (with the subject line “My Mormon Story, Condensed”). Since religion is their full-time job I felt it would be okay to go into some detail, but for a different audience I would probably shorten this down to a few sentences or a paragraph:

Dear Elder_____ and Elder _____,

Greetings and Salutations,

Thanks again for your voicemail yesterday and for reaching out. Hopefully you got my text response last night. I do want to point out that on the voicemail you said you wanted to introduce yourselves, and I believe we already met when you stopped by our house awhile back – not sure if you forgot that you met us already or if it was just a figure of speech.

I’ve been debating about the best way to respond to you, and decided it felt best to write an email to give you some details about our history and current situation in regards to the church so you can have the information you need to decide if it’s worth continuing to reach out to us or not. I enjoy writing, and I especially enjoy writing about religion, science, and philosophy, but I will try to be relatively concise and not go on for twenty pages or anything like that, even though part of me wants to.

Where to begin?

I’ll start with a simple statement to explain why we haven’t been to church (Zoom or in-person) for over a year and half:

Our beliefs have changed, and we don’t feel like we can be ourselves at church anymore without making conservative, faithful members feel uncomfortable or offended, and without risking being demoted to second class citizens.

I think my wife _____ and my kids _____ and _____ would all agree with that statement, and now I’ll add some more details but will speak mostly just for myself, even though they may also agree with some or all of the rest of the things I write:

I’m a lifelong member of the church. Everyone on my dad’s side of the family is a member and we have pioneer roots back to John D. Lee. I graduated from early-morning seminary, served a Spanish speaking mission in Boston (1999-2000), got married and sealed to my high school sweetheart _____ in the temple in 2002, and have had a variety of callings and experiences serving in the church since then.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with some aspects of being a member of the church, even back to when I was a little kid, but I always assumed I should just go along with it all because it was obviously all just as factually true as parents, teachers, and leaders had taught. In 2014 there were a few things that happened in my life that caused me to question the church in a way that I never had before, including my experience watching the series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. I learned some things about science that I’d never heard and/or never paid much attention to before, and I had the thought “I wonder how all this science stuff squares with the church’s doctrine?” I looked things up on the internet about the church that I’d never looked up before, and so, just before my 36th birthday, I slowly began to learn that the church’s doctrine, history, and culture is not what I thought and not what I was taught. I went down a rabbit-hole that turned into hundreds and maybe thousands of hours of research – books, articles, websites, podcasts, and videos exploring both faithful and critical perspectives on the church (much of it from the church’s own materials, including the scriptures), as well as a lot of world religion, science, and philosophy stuff and over time as I found ways to rationalize all of the problems and continue to be faithful only to eventually revert back to a more scientific approach, I came to some important conclusions, and I’ll share just a few of them:

  • The church is true after all, but only subjectively. Objectively, it is not what it claims to be. In other words the church is true when you believe it’s true, but it isn’t true on its own. If a person truly believes something is true they tend to have much the same experience that they would have if it really was true, even if it’s not true. It’s fine to seek after and enjoy living a life and a religion based around subjective truths if it helps you to be a better person, but when thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and personal experiences are presented as objective facts that is where the conflicts begin, especially when it leads to the oppression of minorities and vulnerable individuals and groups who don’t fit in.
  • Never trust that you have the whole truth from someone who won’t let you look at all of the evidence. For example, the reason Joseph had to give the gold plates back to Moroni is because there were no gold plates in objective reality, or if there were, they couldn’t pass critical inspection. But, if you truly believe and have faith that there were gold plates then you end up having much the same experience as you would if there really were gold plates. The experiences of the three and eight witnesses are far more complicated and much more subjective than the church has a history of teaching. And, once I served on a jury and watched enough true crime documentaries to realize how many people have been wrongly convicted on eyewitness testimony, I realized eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable in establishing the objective facts, even in the one true church.
  • I don’t believe in an embodied God who kills. Even if I’m wrong and this killing God is real, I wouldn’t want to worship him. It doesn’t make sense to me that a loving, immortal Father who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good would ever kill one of his children for any reason (especially innocent people, especially innocent women and children), particularly now that I’ve gained a better understanding of the natural world and how it works on its own. It does make sense that human beings would create a God who does this though. It’s ironic that 3 Nephi Chapters 8-10 come right before the chapter that I used to go around trying to get people to read on my mission. At the time I never thought very carefully about what’s really going on in those chapters, and don’t remember it ever bothering me before. I now see them much differently. If I had to blame losing my “testimony” on one thing and one thing only, I might choose 3 Nephi 8-10. I’m also now greatly troubled by a variety of other scriptures in the Book of Mormon (and other books of scripture as well of course) including 1 Nephi 4, Alma 14-15, and Helaman 7-11. I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I do believe in “God” by the way, I just believe something very different from what the church teaches.
  • The church does a lot of good and it really works for some people, but it also does a lot of harm and doesn’t really work for other people, and that should be acknowledged and accepted by both the faithful and the critics.

Elders, there are hundreds of other things I would enjoy going into as well, but this is probably already too long for an unsolicited email, and so the question becomes, is it a good use of your time to visit with us and share spiritual thoughts? I would only enjoy it if I felt like I could express myself fully and freely (and politely of course), and it would most likely always turn into the kind of friendly but time-consuming debate that I don’t think the church wants its missionaries spending a lot of time on. Also, my wife and kids aren’t interested in having churchy missionary visits right now.

If you need someone to help you out of the church then I am your guy and we are your family. If you need someone to help you in temporal ways, we are nice people and would be glad to help. If you need someone to be a real friend on a human level, with no church strings attached, then we could probably help with that. But if your ultimate goal on your mission is to reactivate and baptize people through teaching and service, then you will be wasting your time with us. Maybe that will change someday, but at the moment, I doubt it. I would need some really good objective evidence that the church is true, and I’ve been looking for a long time and I’m still looking and I still haven’t found any, although there is a mountain of subjective evidence. By the way, back in 2013 I set a goal to read all of the general conference talks given in my lifetime and I am still working on it, and I hope that tells you something positive about who I am and where I am coming from with all of this. I am currently working on April 2013 conference and am excited to finish this monumental reading project. I’ve read well over 2,000 talks so far. I still love reading, writing, and thinking about the church.

I’m not going to be the guy who says don’t contact us, because it’s not in my nature, and I will always try to be nice when you or anyone does contact us, but in response to your message I felt you should know more about where we’re coming from to help you decide how best to spend your time.

Good luck with your missions, and I really do wish you the best!

Mormon Mouse

The Less Than Two Percenters: A Speculative Estimate of Mormon Missionary Conversion Rates

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When I worked for large real estate firms in the apartment management business the commonly agreed upon standard was that one out of every three people inquiring about your apartments should end up renting an apartment if you are doing your job right.  Although things didn’t always work out that well, over time working at multiple properties and for multiple companies I found this to be a fairly reasonable and achievable standard, or at least it was realistic enough to work towards.  I think we called it our conversion rate.

Recently I realized that the average worldwide conversion rate for Mormon missionary work is extremely low by comparison – most likely less than two percent.

In other words, by my speculative estimation less than two out of every one hundred people who are invited in some way to learn more about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints actually end up joining the church.  If the church’s message is as true and as powerful as it claims to be, and if the church has the most powerful beings in the universe, namely Heavenly Father, our Savior Jesus Christ, and The Holy Ghost as uniquely in its corner as it claims, then why in the world is it so hard to get people to join up?  I think the leaders of the church would attribute the church’s low conversion rate to failures on the part of the members and the missionaries, attacks from Satan and his minions, and that the people of the world are not using their free agency to choose the right.  If the leaders blame themselves in any way at all, most likely the members will never know, because, as Dallin H. Oaks famously said (quoting himself) in Helen Whitney’s 2007 documentary The Mormons, “It’s wrong to criticize leaders of the church, even if the criticism is true.”

Although the church is responsible for how it shares its message with the world, the low conversion rate of its missionary work is actually nobody’s fault.  It is what it is.  But if a surprisingly low number of people are truly interested in a particular message in any lasting and meaningful way, what does that say about the message itself?  At some point, doesn’t the message itself have to bear some of the responsibility for its failure to inspire conversion in the lives of any significant percentage of those who hear it?  And who is ultimately responsible for the message itself?  If the church’s claims are all true, isn’t God himself ultimately responsible for the message itself? 

Or what if there is nothing wrong with the message or the messengers and it’s all just as true as the church claims?  Won’t the celestial kingdom be a  relatively strange and lonely place if less than two percent of God’s children manage to qualify?  This gets into all sorts of questions involving church doctrines (or lack thereof) around the different kingdoms of heaven and interaction and progression between them, baptisms for the dead, free agency, etc. – all subjects for another day.

What should the conversion rate be? I don’t know for sure, but I feel comfortable saying that if the message is as great as it’s supposed to be, then it should be higher. Ten percent? Higher? It seems like if everybody’s eternal life and salvation is at stake, and if the message is the most important message in the world and it truly comes from God himself, then it would sure be nice if he could bring home at least one in ten, but ideally even more than that.

Isn’t God. the Father directing the work of his one true church through his son Jesus Christ and The Holy Ghost? If so, why is he having so much trouble reaching his children through his Mormon missionaries? Missionaries who have special access to the omniscient creator of the universe should have some of the best conversion rates around – shouldn’t they?

Ideally, if God is perfect, maybe he should have a perfect record in the conversion department as well, that is, if one must be converted to his “one true church” in order to be “saved,” which in Mormonism is often confused or conflated with gaining “eternal life,” a.k.a. exaltation, the highest degree of the celestial kingdom.

Some might say that God is perfect but because he has gifted us with our free agency it’s our fault and not God’s if we choose to not be converted to his one true church. But why do we choose what we choose? We might think we know, and we might even be right, but do any of us have any idea why we choose to choose what we choose? At some point, the cause/effect structure of our chain of choices leads back into the unknown, into a realm that we can’t access or control but that an all-knowing, all-powerful God presumably can.

For the year 2019, the last full year unaffected by a worldwide pandemic, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reported 67,021 full-time missionaries and 248,835 convert baptisms.

Full-time Mormon missionaries typically work in “companionships” of two and most often invite and teach the same people together, so I will estimate that there were approximately 33,511 full-time missionary companionships in 2019.

I believe it’s relatively safe to estimate that on average each missionary companionship invited at least one person per day to learn about the church, for a total of 12,231,515 invitations (33,511 companionships x 1 invitation per day x 365 days in the year). Any attempt to share the message of the church with someone counts as an invitation, with the idea being that each convert baptized had to start somewhere and so each one was prompted somehow, at some point, by a missionary or a member of the church.

Church membership for 2019 was reported as 16,565,036.  If we estimate that approximately 1/3 of total membership was fully active and faithful (4,969,511) and that 1/3 of those members invited at least one person per year to learn about the church, we can add an additional 1,490,853 invitations, for a total of 13,722,186.

Of course we do not know for sure how many invitations were made in 2019. I am intentionally trying to underestimate (perhaps even vastly underestimate) the number of invitations in the church’s favor because I would prefer to question critically from a position that is puffed up in my opponent’s favor than my own.

We can now divide the total number of convert baptisms by the estimated number of invitations to get a rough estimate of the conversion rate:

248,835 / 13,722,186 = 0.01813377, or 1.8 percent.

Or, in other words, less than two percent of invitations to learn more about the church result in conversion and baptism.

Think about that.

Now, I realize I’m speculating.  It’s a rough estimate.  I’m guesstimating really.  But I think it’s a fairly educated and reasonably polite guess because the invitations are most likely underestimated in the church’s favor and the rest of the numbers are the church’s own and are presumed to be accurate.  And if the missionaries are not averaging at least one invitation per day per companionship and the church membership is not averaging at least 1 invitation per year for 1/9 of their membership, then why aren’t they?  Again, surely I’ve underestimated the number of invitations and the actual number is greater – isn’t it?  When I was a Spanish-speaking missionary in Boston in 1999-2000, each week we had to keep track of and report how many “Golden Questions” we asked people in order to try and stimulate a gospel discussion (and hopefully an appointment to teach again and eventually baptize).  An example of a Golden Question might be if I walked up to someone on the street and asked them if they had ever heard of The Book of Mormon.  The total number of Golden Questions asked by my companion and I was sometimes in the 200-300 range per week if I remember right. 

Now that we’ve looked at some numbers for 2019 because it was the last full year unaffected by the pandemic, let’s see how those same numbers compare to other years in the period 2015-2020.

2020

Total membership: 16,663,663

Converts baptized during 2020: 125,930

Full-time missionaries: 51,819

Approximate number of missionary companionships: 25,910

25,910 companionships (making 1 invitation per day) x 365 days per year = 9,457,150 invitations

1/3 of total church membership = 5,554,554

1/3 of 1/3 of total membership (making 1 invitation per year) = 1,851,518 invitations

Total estimated invitations = 11,308,668

125,930 convert baptisms / 11,308,668 invitations = 0.01113571, or 1.1 percent

2019

Total membership: 16,565,036

Converts baptized during 2019: 248,835

Full-time missionaries: 67,021

Approximate number of missionary companionships: 33,511

33,511 companionships (making 1 invitation per day) x 365 days per year = 12,231,515 invitations

1/3 of total church membership = 4,969,511

1/3 of 1/3 of total membership (making 1 invitation per year) = 1,490,853 invitations

Total estimated invitations = 13,722,186

248,835 convert baptisms / 13,722,186 invitiations = 0.01813377, or 1.8 percent.

2018

Total membership: 16,313,735

Converts baptized during 2018: 234,332

Full-time missionaries: 65,137

Approximate number of missionary companionships: 32,569

32,569 companionships (making 1 invitation per day) x 365 days per year = 11,887,685 invitations

1/3 of total church membership = 5,437,912

1/3 of 1/3 of total membership (making 1 invitation per year) = 1,812,637 invitations

Total estimated invitations = 13,700,322

234,332 convert baptisms / 13,700,322 invitations = 0.01710412, or 1.7 percent conversion rate

2017

Total membership: 16,118,169

Converts baptized during 2017: 233,729

Full-time missionaries: 67,049

Approximate number of missionary companionships: 33,525

33,525 companionships (making 1 invitation per day) x 365 days per year =  12,236,625 invitations

1/3 of total church membership = 5,372,723

1/3 of 1/3 of total membership (making 1 invitation per year) = 1,790,908 invitations

Total estimated invitations = 14,027,533

233,729 convert baptisms /  14,027,533 invitations = 0.01666216, or 1.6 percent conversion rate

2016

Total membership: 15,882,417

Converts baptized during 2016: 240,131

Full-time missionaries: 70,946

Approximate number of missionary companionships: 35,473

35,473 companionships (making 1 invitation per day) x 365 days per year =  12,947,645 invitations

1/3 of total church membership = 5,294,139

1/3 of 1/3 of total membership (making 1 invitation per year) = 1,764,713 invitations

Total estimated invitations = 14,712,358

240,131 convert baptisms / 14,712,358 invitations = 0.01632172, or 1.6 percent conversion rate

2015

Total membership: 15,634,199

Converts baptized during 2015: 257,402

Full-time missionaries: 74,079

Approximate number of missionary companionships: 37,040

37,040 companionships (making 1 invitation per day) x 365 days per year =  13,519,600 invitations

1/3 of total church membership = 5,211,400

1/3 of 1/3 of total membership (making 1 invitation per year) = 1,737,133 invitations

Total estimated invitations = 15,256,733

257,402 convert baptisms /  15,256,733 invitations = 0.1687137, or 1.7 percent conversion rate

Now let’s skip back even further in time.  Here are the same stats and calculations for the five years with the highest number of convert baptisms in church history.  This will give us an idea of the range of conversion rates from the five most recent years versus the five highest baptizing years.

1999

Total membership: 10,752,984

Converts baptized during  1999:  306,171

Full-time missionaries: 58,593

Approximate number of missionary companionships: 29,297

29,297 companionships (making 1 invitation per day) x 365 days per year =  10,693,405 invitations

1/3 of total church membership = 3,584,328

1/3 of 1/3 of total membership (making 1 invitation per year) = 1,194,776 invitations

Total estimated invitations = 11,888,181

306,171 convert baptisms /  11,888,181 invitations = 0.02575423, or 2.5 percent conversion rate

1997

Total membership: 10,071,783

Converts baptized during  1997: 317,798

Full-time missionaries: 56,531

Approximate number of missionary companionships: 28,266

28,266 companionships (making 1 invitation per day) x 365 days per year =  10,317,090 invitations

1/3 of total church membership = 3,357,261

1/3 of 1/3 of total membership (making 1 invitation per year) = 1,119,087 invitations

Total estimated invitations = 11,436,177317,798 convert baptisms /  11,436,177 invitations = 0.02778883, or 2.8 percent conversion rate

1996

Total membership: 9,692,441

Converts baptized during  1996: 321,385

Full-time missionaries: 52,938

Approximate number of missionary companionships: 26,469

26,469 companionships (making 1 invitation per day) x 365 days per year =  9,661,185 invitations

1/3 of total church membership = 3,230,813

1/3 of 1/3 of total membership (making 1 invitation per year) = 1,076,938 invitations

Total estimated invitations = 10,738,123

321,385 convert baptisms /  10,738,123 invitations = 0.02992934, or 2.9 percent conversion rate

1990

Total membership: 7,761,207

Converts baptized during  1990: 330,877

Full-time missionaries: 43,651

Approximate number of missionary companionships: 21,826

21,826 companionships (making 1 invitation per day) x 365 days per year =  7,966,490 invitations

1/3 of total church membership = 2,587,069

1/3 of 1/3 of total membership (making 1 invitation per year) = 862,356 invitations

Total estimated invitations = 8,828,846

330,877 convert baptisms /  8,828,846 invitations = 0.03747681, or 3.7 percent conversion rate

1989

Total membership: 7,308,444

Converts baptized during  1989: 318,940

Full-time missionaries: 39,739

Approximate number of missionary companionships: 19,870

19,870 companionships (making 1 invitation per day) x 365 days per year =  7,252,550 invitations

1/3 of total church membership = 2,436,148

1/3 of 1/3 of total membership (making 1 invitation per year) = 812,049 invitations

Total estimated invitations = 8,064,599

318,940 convert baptisms / 8,064,599 invitations = 0.03954815, or 3.9 percent conversion rate

Looks like the church had a higher conversion rate during the all-time top baptizing years of 1989-1990, 1996-1997, and 1999. Good for them. It still wasn’t as high as it should have been, given the supposed marvelousness of the message. I mean, it’s “a marvelous work and a wonder” isn’t it? And we haven’t mentioned an elephant in the room yet – retention rates. Once they are converted, how many of God’s children stay faithful and stick around in his one true church? The future population of the celestial kingdom seems to be slipping away like so much sand in an hourglass.

*Statistics for the years 2015-2020 were taken from the church’s statistical reports on its website at http://www.churchofjesuschrist.org. Statistics for the years 1989-1990, 1996-1997, and 1999 were taken from the “Raw Data and Calculations” spreadsheet on http://www.fullerconsideration.org.

The Hard Problem of Heavenly Mother

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One of the biggest problems with the Mormon concept of Heavenly Mother is that if she is real then most likely one of two things would be true: either there is more than one of her, or polygamy in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints wasn’t divinely sanctioned after all. 

If polygamy was ever a principle that was inspired, revealed, or commanded by God as a way of bringing his children back into his presence in the highest level of the celestial kingdom, then God himself would need to practice polygamy as well.  Otherwise, some of his male children would have more wives than him in the celestial kingdom.  

If God isn’t a polygamist but polygamy was divinely sanctioned, then Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and the rest of the early Mormon polygamists and even modern eternal polygamists such as Russell M. Nelson and Dallin H. Oaks will all have more wives than God in heaven. They will have more wives than everyone else who wasn’t or isn’t a polygamist as well.

So, as the church continues to slowly incorporate more of Heavenly Mother into their mainstream doctrine and culture as they seem to be doing, perhaps the members could in good conscience begin to ask the leaders of the church which Heavenly Mother they are referring to, or whether Joseph Smith made up the whole polygamy thing on his own.

In other words, if the church wants to teach Heavenly Mother, then they should also teach that there is more than one Heavenly Mother, or they should finally renounce their polygamous history and doctrines once and for all.

From Human Beings to Supreme Beings

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We humans don’t have any more control over the thoughts in our minds or the feelings in our bodies than we do over the blood in our veins or the marrow in our bones.  It does not matter that we feel like we do have control, because the feeling of having control and the degree to which we feel we have control are themselves feelings over which we have no control.  And there are many things in life that feel like one thing but are in fact something else entirely.  It may feel like we live on a flat Earth covered by a sky dome and that the sun revolves around us, but we know that is not the case at all.  It may feel like the Earth is sitting still in space in the center of a universe of stars, but that is not the case either.  The better we can become as a species at distinguishing our subjective feelings from objective reality, the more likely we are to achieve a greater degree of unity amongst ourselves and to survive indefinitely into the future.  We’ve actually made great progress, and we will continue to make great progress if we can manage to not extinguish ourselves first.  The longer we human beings can survive into the future, the more likely we are to actually become the Supreme Beings that we thought were there all along, but we will be much better Supreme Beings than our ancient ancestors ever imagined into existence.

The Whole Truth

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Never trust that you have the whole truth from someone who won’t let you look at all of the evidence.

In the case of Joseph Smith and the gold plates, his claim that he gave them back to the angel Moroni smells of deceit. When I had my faithful Mormon hat on, I accepted his claim without a second thought really. Of course he had to give them back to the angel Moroni because God didn’t want the world to mess The Book of Mormon up like it messed up the Bible, right? Now that I have my skeptic’s hat on I’ve realized that an intentional withholding of the very evidence that would validate your claim is a classic characteristic of con artists and magicians. Grant Palmer helped me realize that Joseph Smith believed the ends justify the means when you’re bringing people to Christ. The faithful might say that God withholds evidence to test our faith, but that doesn’t work in the case of The Book of Mormon (if ever). Why? Because even with a historically authenticated set of gold plates in a museum, it would still require faith to believe that the supernatural events that the plates describe actually happened and aren’t just ancient stories.