Huffington Post Writes About Mormon Missionaries

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Kylie Ravsten

Joined: May 2014

Huffington Post published an article yesterday, written by Craig Harline, that goes through nine different things you may or may not know about missionaries of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The following is an excerpt from Harline’s article:

1. They Are Not All the Same Person

Sure, you know in theory that every human being is a complicated piece of work, but in practice it’s always easier to lump together those who belong to a group a) we don’t understand, b) we don’t like, c) we do like, or d) whose constituent members dress almost exactly the same. Same-dressing is less of a problem for female missionaries than for male, since females are allowed a little variety, although for a time they too tended to blur together thanks to skirt-lengths that threatened to reach Antarctica. But male or female, there are serious differences in personalities, language-skills, social-skills, and bodily-hygiene-skills, not to mention beliefs, conviction, and motives.

2. The Male Missionary Outfit Wasn’t Always a Religious Habit

If you’re a male missionary, it’s not easy for people to see beyond your white shirt, tie, and nametag. The outfit has become something of a habit (in every sense), in that it started out (sans nametag) as the unfathomably ordinary look of a given place and time, but when the look went out of fashion the outfit was kept anyway as a sort of trend-defying badge-of-honor. Most males own around seven increasingly translucent shirts, a couple of stainless-steel suits that will last into the next Millennium even if you don’t want them to, shoes with a 60,000-mile warranty that you’d never wear in real life, and an assortment of ties. Origins of the look are vague, but circumstantial evidence points to a wardrobe-guy for Ward Cleaver.

3. They Aren’t Required to Go But They Get a Lot of Nudges That Way

Especially males do, both culturally and officially, but now females do too, only culturally and not officially (that’s another subject). So whereas about 80 percent of missionaries were for many decades usually young men, now about half volunteering to go are young women, who will no doubt soon be ubiquitous enough to have a musical made about them as well. The addition of all those women is the main reason the total number of current missionaries has jumped to a record-breaking 80,000.

Read Harline’s full article, “Five to Nine Things You Maybe Didn’t Know About Mormon Missionaries,” at huffintonpost.com