How to Respond to Mormon Missionaries

You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. And I want to explore the issue of Mormonism, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and more broadly the family of religious traditions that date back to Joseph Smith in the 19th century, and specifically to ask, how should we as Catholics, or more broadly Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, respond to Mormon missionaries when they knock? And I think this is an area where it’s very tempting to respond in a way that’s really unhelpful and really negative.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. In 1 Peter 3:15, when we talk about apologetics, we tend to look at this passage, because it mentions apologia defense. St. Peter tells us to, “Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence and keep your conscience clear so that when you are abused, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.”

Now, usually when we talk about it, we focus on that first part, be prepared to make a defense, be ready with apologetics, give an apologia. And that’s not wrong. I mean, that’s literally my job. I’m an apologist. But that’s a really incomplete understanding of what Christian apologetics ought to look like. And we know that from the context, because Peter goes on to talk about how we need to be able to give an account for the hope that is in you. So, it’s not just apologetics. It has to first be rooted in Christian hope, that people should be asking questions about the manner in which you’re living. And then, he gives us instructions to do this with gentleness, and with reverence, and to keep our conscience clear. And he says, “When you are abused.” In other words, you are not abusing other people, you are allowing yourself to be abused. “That in those cases, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.”

Now, why do I mention that here in the context of Mormonism? Because Mormons more than most other groups are routinely the subject of public ridicule. You’ve got the Book of Mormon, you’ve got a lot of protests, usually by gay marriage and other things, where Mormonism is kind of made fun of. You’ve got the famous South Park episode. And so, in all of these cases, there’s a temptation to just laugh at Mormonism.

And I think that doesn’t work for a few reasons. First, it’s not really the Christian response. It’s hard to look at what St. Peter talks about in terms of making a defense rooted in our hope with gentleness and reverence, keeping our conscience clear, allowing ourselves to be abused rather than abusing others, having this good behavior in Christ, and look at that and say, “Yeah, I think he’s telling us to just mock, and scorn, and ridicule other people for their beliefs.” No, of course not. That Christian apologetics needs to be rooted in respect. Now, that respect does not mean that we accept falsehood as true, but it does mean that we’re approaching other human beings, made in the image of God, which gentleness and respect, that if you have a little bit of compassion it’ll go a long way.

And so, what I propose to do in this episode is to give some tips for how I think we can better correct Mormonism or Mormon theology with advantage. And that reference to correcting with advantage, I’m getting from Blaise Pascal who Pope Francis just did a great document talking about his life and contribution. And in The Pensées, I believe I’m pronouncing that right, I’ve had my French corrected on this point before, so if you’re a French speaker, I’m sorry. But in The Pensées, Pascal is just writing down these random thoughts. There’s not a lot of structure or rhyme or reason, but Pascal’s a brilliant mathematician and philosopher. And so, literally just his journal of random jotted down thoughts is a classic, because people are like, “Wow, there’s a lot of wisdom in here.”

One of the things he says that I think we would do well to remember is that people are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others. Now, I’ll explain what that means in a second here. But it means just as… I will give a little preview. If you just tell someone what the right answer is, that doesn’t stick in the same way that it does if you gently guide people into the right answer.

And so, you may be saying, “Well, how do you do that?” Well, he tells us, “When we wish to correct with advantage and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter. For on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that for he sees that he was not mistaken and that he only failed to see all sides.” I try to follow this advice on this channel as much as I can to point out, hey, here are the areas of agreement, rather than just focusing on the areas of disagreement.

Now, obviously a lot of what I’m doing is saying, here’s where we part company and here’s why I think so-and-so’s wrong. And sometimes people in the comments are like, “Why would you demonize? But it’s like, “No, no, I’m not trying to do that.” Now, maybe I fall short. I said I’ve got human failings. And so, maybe I’m engaged in two-dimensional stereotypes at times. I’m actively trying not to do that, trying to say, what is this person grasping at? What can we affirm? And then, how can we distinguish and correct? And that usually is more effective. It’s more charitable. It’s more in keeping what St. Peter calls us to, but it also works better.

Now, I’m going to give maybe three steps for how we can do this. First, you find the common ground. What is it that we have in common? Second, you emphasize the common ground. It’s not enough to just recognize in your own mind or in your own heart, oh yeah, we definitely agree on these things. You want to actually stress that and make a point of it. And then third, and only then, you show what’s missing. Where does this fall short?

Let me give you two concrete examples for interactions with Mormon missionaries. This is just the beginning. So today I’m going to talk about personal witness and testimony and I’m going to talk about abortion, because these are big issues on which we have some profound agreement and some really important disagreement. And then, next week I’m going to get into the meatiest and most important issue in some way, the question of whether there was a great apostasy. Leave that out of your mind for now, because we’ll get to that next week.

First, let’s talk about, how do we correct with advantage in terms of testimony? So, what are the ways in which we can affirm personal testimony and what are the limits of personal testimony? If you’ve ever encountered Mormon missionaries, you may have noticed that there’s a very strong emphasis on here’s my witness, here’s my testimony. And pray on this, and if God wants to show it to you, and you pray with a good heart, He will. That kind of reasoning. And that can be really frustrating as a Catholic, because we’re always wanting to say, “Well, what is objectively true? I don’t want to hear about your subjective experience. I want to know what’s subjectively objectively true.” And I think we sometimes go to too far of an extreme. And so, let me give where the Mormons are coming from on this and then maybe what we can learn from it, and then where there’s a place of correction.

One of the quorum of the 12 apostles, it’s complicated explaining the structure of the Mormon hierarchy, but there’s a first presidency and then there’s a quorum of the 12 apostles. So, these guys are called elders, but they’re also considered to be apostles. And he wrote a piece called The Power of a Personal Testimony in which he says, “A testimony is the most precious possession because it is not acquired by logic or reason alone. It cannot be purchased with earthly possessions and it cannot be given as a present or inherited from our ancestors. We cannot depend on the testimonies of other people. We need to know for ourselves.” President Gordon B. Hinkley said, “Every Latter-day Saint has a responsibility to know for himself or herself with the certainty beyond doubt that Jesus is the resurrected living son of the living God.” And I think all of that is true.

I think that is a good reminder for us as Catholics. At some point, the faith needs to be a personal lived experience for you. It’s not enough for it simply to be an objectively true set of propositions. It has to actually be this transformative thing, where in your heart these things are true.

Now, we might hesitate a little bit because of this language about not by logic or reason alone. But as long as you notice that the word alone there is playing an important role, then we can even agree with this. We don’t want to divorce testimony from logic and reason. If your testimony is illogical or unreasonable, if it contradicts everything we know. If you say, “God revealed to me triangles have four sides,” well, I don’t believe you. I mean, maybe you’re telling the truth that this is what you think God did. But the God who made truth didn’t suddenly contradict truth. Nevertheless, there is a real sense in which testimony isn’t reducible to logic and reason. And what’s more, this is something that is tremendously important in the modern world.

If I go around telling everyone, “Hey, everyone should be Catholic,” which by the way is what I believe, there’s a certain subset of the population that will just immediately close their hearts, close their minds and refuse to listen to anything else, because that reads as intolerant. Now, logically it shouldn’t. If I say two plus two is four and everyone should believe that, I’m not being intolerant, I’m just believing in truth. And so, in that sense, we should be intolerant of error. We should tolerate true things. Now, we should also tolerate people who may believe false things. But the point of tolerance isn’t let’s allow two plus two to be four or five depending on who says it. No, that’s an abuse of tolerance. That’s an abuse of subjectivity. So, with all of that in mind, I still want to stress that, as Catholics, we need to take seriously the role of personal testimony.

Pope Francis has said the same thing. He says, “The transmission of faith on the other hand often lacks the passion of a lived history.” To hand on the faith it’s not just to say things, blah, blah, blah. No, it is to speak about the experience of faith. And so, how can it draw people to choose love forever, fidelity to the given word, perseverance and dedication, compassion for wounded and disheartened faces? Of course, the stories of life must be transformed into testimony and the testimony must be faithful.

Now, this is very much the idea of what the apostles are doing. They’re not just saying, here’s some true facts about Jesus. They’re witnessing to what they’ve seen, what they’ve experienced. They share personal testimony. Now it’s not reducible to that, but this is part of what they’re doing. John famously, in the beginning of his gospel, talks about his own experience of coming to follow Jesus. And he mentions, almost as this little detail, that it was about 4:00 in the afternoon. And I love that detail because it shows how personal this is. There doesn’t seem to be any symbolic significance of it being 4:00. It’s not, “Oh, this is a great hour of prayer that would be 3:00 or 6:00.” No, it’s just this is about when it had happened in the afternoon. He still remembers decades later, as he’s writing the gospel, that afternoon encountering Jesus and being invited to follow Him. And there’s something tremendously beautiful about that and something that really breaks through even in the modern world.

Now, I mentioned a moment ago that there’s a certain subset of the population that hears claims about objective truth, or hears that everyone should be Catholic, or fill in the blank, and they hear that’s intolerant. That same subset of people is often deeply moved by personal stories, and witnesses, and biographical accounts. They want to hear about the subjective, they don’t want to hear about the objective.

Now, those people are wrong to reject objective truth. But one way you can reach them is by sharing how God has impacted your life. These are the stories of faith that Pope Francis talks about. And it’s significant, this role of story. Jesus routinely with the crowds uses story. He uses parable. And that’s something we need to take very seriously. How are we using stories in the proclamation of truth? Or are we reducing the faith to a set of propositions?

The faith is not a set of propositions. The faith is a relationship with the living God. It’s much bigger than proposition. Now, to be sure propositions are included in that. One of the ways my relationship with my wife is demarcated is we’re legally married. We’re sacramentally united. We have children. If we didn’t know those things, we would have a distorted view of our relationship. Well, likewise theology gives us a clearer view of the relationship, but theology is no substitute for the relationship itself. Hopefully that makes sense.

But this is something that I think we’d want to say Mormons are right to see this. They’re right to stress this. And particularly at the moment we’re in, in the modern world, which is so relativistic, which is so despairing of the idea of objective truth, that it’s probably more important now than at many points in history to really reclaim this. So, that’s the first two parts. We want to identify the common ground, really claim and stress the common ground.

Now, let’s talk about the room for correction. What if our subjective experience contradicts objective reality? Again, remember the apostle who talked about the power of personal testimony, the LDS apostle. And he says it’s not acquired by logic or reason alone. But then the question is, okay, well can it contradict logic or reason?

This is a point that is a really fruitful area of conversation with Mormon missionaries. Can your personal witness trump objective facts? I don’t know how the missionary’s going to answer that question. You have to talk about that with him. But this is a point to stress. Now, this point is not just true of Mormons, but anyone who’s living by personal testimony or personal, “I believe in my heart God wants me to do X,” that notion of the really subjective faith. We talked about this a week ago with Protestants and the nature of the idea of a self-attesting cannon, John Calvin’s belief that God would just tell every Christian which books belonged in the Bible. Well, can you contradict objective reality on the basis of this personal experience of I think God is calling me to this?

And now, there are a few things to point out here. Number one, there are a lot of people in a lot of different religious traditions who think God has led them into those different places. Does God contradict Himself? Does He want one group of people to believe one thing about Him and another group to believe an incompatible thing about Him? Is He tricking people? Is He lying to people or purposely leading people into deception? Those are areas to stress. Because if that’s not the case, then we have to really notice that it’s possible for our personal testimony and our personal witness to be inadequate. In other words, a personal witness is a really vital part of faith, but it can’t just be that.

In the same way that you might be totally convinced the girl you met in high school is a girl of your dreams and you’re going to be married forever, and maybe 10 other guys are convinced of the same thing. Well, at least nine of you are wrong. I’ll go out on a limb and say probably 10 of you are wrong. When you have those kind of incompatible truth claims, at least all but one of you is wrong by definition. That’s just the nature of truth. Truth can’t contradict truth. These are important, rudimentary, fundamental things. But I think they’re worth digging into and stressing to say it’s great that you have a personal witness. I mean that. It is great that you have a personal witness. It’s great.

When we’re talking about Mormon missionaries, we’re often talking about 18, 19-year-old, 20-year-old guys. 80% of them are male. And they’re usually just embarking into the adult world, and they’re trying to understand God better, and bring what they understand the truth about God to other people. And there’s something really noble about that, even if they’re wrong, which I think they clearly are. Their ambitions and their intentions are still good.

And so, we can criticize the execution, we can criticize the belief system, but we should recognize the good intention. These are people who are trying to share personal witness and personal experience. And we want to stress that’s really good, but that cannot trump objective reality, cannot trump objective truth. And so then we can dig in on things like the authority of the Bible. Then we can dig in on things like the appropriate role of reason. Again, that’s not going to immediately resolve everything, but I think it gives you an important framework.

Because, if you don’t do this, I’ll just tell you now from personal experience, if they’re talking personal experience, personal experience, personal experience, and you’re quoting chapter and verse and saying, “Well, theologically, we know this to be true and that to be true,” you’re just talking past each other. And you are, to them, coming off as someone who’s very heady, but without a heart on fire for God. They need to see that you actually do have a heart on fire for God, and then see your theology makes a lot more sense. That’s much more likely to get you somewhere. That’s the first area that I want to talk about this.

The second one is on abortion. Now, on abortion, I actually want to say, this thing I’m talking about correcting with advantage, this is not just true with Mormons. I’ll give an example from personal experience. I’ve maybe given this example before, in which case, sorry I guess. I was doing some evangelization on campus at a public college or not a religious college. And I was speaking to a young woman who was from a Catholic family but was no longer going to mass.

When we were talking about it, she said one of the reasons was she disagreed with the church on abortion. And she said, “Look, I wouldn’t be okay with abortion in most cases, but I think it should be legal in cases of rape and incest, and life of the mother,” whatever the examples that she gave. She was expecting me to immediately jump into our disagreement, and I didn’t. I said, “So, why are you against abortion in those other cases?” And the question caught her off guard enough that she actually started to answer the question she thought I was going to ask and then I think realized like, oh, that’s not what he asked at all. He asked the opposite. I didn’t ask, “Why are you sometimes pro-choice?” I asked, “Why are you most of the time pro-life?”

Now, why did I do that? Because remember the thing Pascal says, that people are more persuaded by the ideas that they find in their own mind than the ones in your mind. And so, rather than telling her, here’s why I’m pro-life, I was trying to help her see, well, I’m actually pro-life in most of these cases, because I believe the unborn is alive. I believe this is a real human child. And then we can look at the disagreement. Because if we both agree that abortion is taking the life of an unborn child, okay, then why would this ever be okay? And now we can have a much more fruitful conversation than if we just started from, I don’t know where you’re coming from. You don’t know where I’m coming from, let’s just disagree. That way, which is what we normally do with disagreement, very rarely works. If you can find out where the person is coming from, find the common ground, now there’s an actual basis for a real and fruitful disagreement.

I mention all of this as a longhand way of saying everything I did with that young woman is also true when talking with Mormon missionaries. Here’s what I mean. Mormons, let’s stress the common ground, institutionally are good on abortion most of the time. Pew Research Center categorize different religious groups in terms of where they fall on abortion and Catholics, Southern Baptist, Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, Hindus, Assemblies of God, African Methodist, Episcopalian, and then the LDS Church, the Mormons, those are the ones who are in the opposes abortion rights with few or no exceptions category. They’re good. They’re pro-life. And in fact, one of the Pew researchers pointed out David Massey, that 75% of Jehovah’s Witnesses and 70% of Mormons say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.

In comparison, that’s only like 47% of Catholics. So Catholics are in a rough spot. 48% support legal abortion, 47% oppose. So, both institutions are doing a good job of proclaiming the pro-life message. In practice, you’ve got a real problem with lukewarm Catholics. You’ve got plenty of people who call themselves Catholic but never go to church, don’t care what the church has to say, and don’t believe any of the things that would normally make someone a Catholic. And those people who are a big part of that 48% who support legal abortion do make the church look bad, frankly. And so, any discussion of abortion should probably start with a little place of humility and acknowledgement, whether you’re a Catholic or Protestant, to just say, yeah, most of our denominations, most of our churches, they’re not doing as good a job as the LDS Church of getting people actually fired up and against abortion. That’s an area I want to stress, and even an area in which I think we can say, yeah, maybe we can take some pointers, maybe we can take some tips.

So with that said, let’s look a little bit what the LDS have to say, and then where we’re going to get into a really profound area of disagreement. So an elder, again, apostle, Russell Nelson, he’s part of the quorum of the 12, he had a piece in Inside Magazine called Abortion and Assault on the Defenseless in 2008, which he points out that there’s more than 40 million abortions worldwide every year. And he says, “This war called abortion is a war on the defenseless and the voiceless. It is a war on the unborn. This war is being waged globally. Ironically, civilized societies that have generally placed safeguards on human lives have now passed laws that sanction this practice.” Those are strong words. And this has been going on for decades. Really, actually about a century, you can find LDS statements against infanticide and feticide.

Back in 1985, elder or apostle Russell Nelson, same guy, had a piece called Reverence for Life. It was a talk that he gave. And he says, “The woman’s choice for her own body does not validate choice for the body of another.” I love that line actually, that my body, my choice, doesn’t give me the right to kill your body, even if you’re living inside of me. The basic principle of bodily autonomy is actually an argument against abortion and not for it. That’s a clever point that he’s making. “The expression terminate the pregnancy applies literally only to the woman. The consequence of terminating the fetus therein involves the body and very life of another. These two individuals have separate brains, separate hearts, and separate circulatory systems. To pretend that there is no child and no life there is to deny a reality.” Great, so we agree.

He points out, “It’s not a question when meaningful life begins or when the spirit quickens the body.” We don’t have to debate, well, when did the medievals think biology started? That’s completely ridiculous now. Because we now know, biologically, that life begins when two germ cells, gametes, unite to become one cell, bringing together 23 chromosomes from both the father and from the mother. In other words, he says, “The onset of life is not a debatable issue, but a fact of science.” Now, that is, again, one of those areas that, depending on who you’re talking to, you may have to work on stressing, do we care scientifically when life begins, in abortion conversations. But he’s being very clear about this. So you might say, “Okay, well, what’s the problem? It sounds like they’re saying and doing all the right things on abortion.”

But then, you read the LDS General Handbook, and when it gets to murder, it describes murder as a deliberate unjustified taking of human life. And it says, abortion is not defined as murder in this context. Why? It doesn’t say. It simply declaims that abortion is murder. Well, why does that matter? Because the LDS church newsroom, in their publication, they’re the PR department, they talk about abortion. And they explain The church allows for abortions for its members in the following cases, rape, incest, if the life or health of the mother is in serious jeopardy, or if the fetus has severe defects that will not allow the baby to survive beyond birth. Now, they stress that even these exceptions don’t automatically justify abortion. Abortion is a most serious matter. It should be considered only after the persons responsible have received confirmation through prayer. Members may counsel their bishops as part of this process.

Now, I have actually walked through this exact argument with Mormon missionaries who were shocked that their church taught this, because they did not know that the bishops could okay the killing of unborn children. Because why on earth would they? It’s insane to say on the one hand, this is the taking of innocent human life and the taking of innocent human life on purpose is murder, and yet this isn’t murder, and in fact the bishops can tell you it’s okay. There’s no logic there.

This exception clause, both the exception to treating abortion as murder… Now, I should stress here, it’s possible for an abortion not to be murder in certain cases, specifically if the person doing it is unaware it’s a child. I’ll give a really easy example. If you take some kind of drug that kills your unborn child, and that’s not what you’re trying to do, and you’re not even aware that’s happening, you may be guilty of taking an innocent human life involuntarily, but you’re not voluntarily ending a human life. In the same way, if you’re driving and you think there’s just like a bump on the road and it’s actually a person lying in the street, you’re not guilty of murder. You might be negligent, you might be reckless. There may be something you’re guilty of, but it’s not murder if you’re not trying to or indifferent to the humanity of the other. I’m not claiming to judge every mother in this situation.

I can say the act itself is the taking of human life. And if you’re intentionally taking innocent human life, that is murder. But whether you are intentionally taking innocent human life or not is not a question I can know. That’s really a question you and God can know. Now, I stress that not to mitigate it, but just to say, if we’re going to speak accurately about abortion, it is at least much of the time murder. Because, the people doing it know that they’re ending a human life, and they know that is not a death penalty case. They’re not saying, this baby murdered another baby. No, there’s nothing like that. Of course not. These are the most innocent members of society being killed. And yet, the LDS church says that’s okay if the child’s father was a rapist, or if the child’s father was related to the mother too closely.

Now, the incest one is weird. Why? So, if the mother and father are consensually… Because remember, it’s rape or incest. So, they’re saying even in the case of consensual incest, two cousins or close relatives have a child together, then you can kill the child. What logic would allow for this? You could say, “Well, maybe the child’s at a higher rate of birth defects.” So is a child born to a woman in her thirties or forties. That doesn’t give us the right to kill them. Even if a child has known birth defects, why would you kill them? If you went into a NICU and you found all these kids who were in serious medical distress and you went around and said, “Well, I don’t know if you’re going to survive long beyond birth, so I’m going to kill you all,” you would obviously be a murderer. Again, what logic, what principle justifies this?

I want to return to something Russell Nelson says. He says, “Scripture declares that the life of the flesh is in the blood.” Abortion sheds that innocent blood. And so the question I have for more missionaries is always like, okay, why is it okay for your church to intentionally shed innocent blood then? And it’s always an awkward conversation from there, but I think a really important conversation to really have and to press into. So again, I’m not going to claim either of these are total silver bullets. If you just say these things, the person will become Christian, will become Catholic, protestant, whatever. No, I’m not saying that. But I am saying if we can find the areas that we agree, we can have more fruitful conversations, we can correct with advantage, and there’s greater likelihood of the conversation going in a really healthy and fruitful direction.

The last thing I want to leave you with is the example of St. Dominic, the founder of the Dominicans. He is from Spain, but he was traveling with his bishop into Southern France at a time when a lot of Southern France was in the grip of the Cathar Albigensian heresy. And Catharsism Albigensian, it’s a crazy heresy. I hope I’m not offending all of the Albigensian viewers. But it’s wild. It doesn’t make a lot of sense theologically. And it’s a bad theology. And so, you might be saying, why were people drawn to that? And that’s exactly the right question. Because you need to figure out what is attractive about this if you ever hope to correct it.

What Dominic discovered is that the Albigensian preachers were better preachers than the ordinary Catholic priests in Spain. And they were living simpler lifestyles. If you have a priest who’s complacent and living high on the hog, people are not inspired or drawn to that, especially if he’s a bad preacher. And if you have a radical out there in the streets proclaiming this bold new idea, and he’s totally convinced of it, even if he’s totally wrong and he’s living this radical poverty where you know he’s not trying to gain anything from it, there’s something incredibly attractive about that.

What did St. Dominic do? He did not say, “Well, we need to write a bunch of stuff about why the Albigensians are wrong to live in poverty, or why they’re wrong to be good preachers,” none of that, because he recognized this is all really good. So what did he do? He went back and he founded the Order of Preachers, now known as the Dominicans. And the point of it, as you can tell from the title, is to preach. But they were a mendicant order, and they still are a mendicant order. Meaning, that they were to live on the alms of others. They were to be a beggar order that was also a preaching order.

Now, it’s possible over the centuries to get complacent in that. But notice what Dominic was doing there. He was finding the areas of agreement, and then he was doing those things even better than the Albigensians did. Oh, you’ve had apostolic poverty, you’ve got preaching? We’ll have even better versions of the same. And why? In service of the one true God and the one true church, in service of the truth and out of love of neighbor.

There’s two temptations we can fall into that are extremes on opposite sides. One is to only see what heretics get wrong, to only see the areas of disagreement, to only see the heresy. And if you do that, you’ll never understand it, because you’ll never see what attracts people to it in the first place. Because what attracts them is probably not the wrong stuff. What attracts them is probably something that is comforting or attractive in some way. And so, don’t just take the simplistic, two-dimensional, cheap version, try to really understand it.

On the other extreme, in the modern age, there’s sometimes a view that let’s just celebrate our similarities and that’s it. But Dominic’s not doing that. He’s going and preaching against the Albigensians. And so, that’s my counsel for anyone faced with Mormon missionaries. First, don’t just slam the door in their face. Let them in. When I was living in DC, I had two friends who lived very close to the regional headquarters of the Mormons in the DC area, or Northern Virginia area actually. And they regularly have dinner with them and say, “If you ever need to use the internet to email your family or anything like that, feel free,” and trying to be as accommodating as possible to these people who are doing this radical thing. And they would go and play basketball with them. And they’d do all of this stuff. They were not pretending that they were about to become Mormon or anything like that.

They would regularly say, “Here’s where we agree, here’s where we disagree.” And it was really effective. And two of them, Mormon missionaries, came with us to mass, and just to experience it, see what it was like. And I think it left an impression. I have no idea what God’s going to do with that. But in those cases, it works a lot better than just slamming the door.

Now, I say all of this to say it’s really easy to feel overwhelmed, to say, “I don’t have all the answers,” and that’s okay. I’m hopefully giving you a couple of things you can work with here. Remember, to sum up, number one, personal testimony can’t contradict truth, objective truth, which we know from both faith and reason. And number two, that abortion, if it’s the intentional taking of human life, can’t be justified by an LDS bishop, because that makes them complicit in murder. Those two points hopefully aren’t too hard to grasp, and you can just have the conversation however you want to have it.

But it’s not, in other words, a question of having all of the answers. It’s a question of seeing the other person, treating them lovingly, and then gently, reverently, explaining the hope that you have within you. So, I think I can say on behalf of both of St. Peter and St. Dominic, there are better ways that we can respond to Mormon missionaries than treating them scornfully and dismissively. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.

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