Who Will Save Your Soul?

The subject of this post is one I have been wrestling with for the last week. It’s the same week I decided to write a book. Today I decided the book will be published upon my death. I don’t plan to die, and books probably won’t be a thing when I do, so it will just be a final post to the internet. Gonna say some crazy shit and see if anyone reads it.

Today's subject is religion. The hardest part about writing the feelings and observations I have with religion is that no matter how I present them, they are going to be judged heavily by those that are religious. That is how it is for almost anyone when they read about something that makes up a big part of who they are. Sports, politics, religion… these are hot topics that inevitably make us choose a side. Humans that can objectively read others' opinions without internalizing it all seem to be rare, and maybe we are meant to internalize as an evolutionary trait. More often, myself included, we tend to look for signals of who is trustworthy in a tribe by how they take positions on these topics.

Let’s start with sports. I can tell a story about a century-old rivalry between Roma and Lazio, but 99% of people don’t know what that rivalry is or cares. That rivalry is real for millions of people, as it is across Europe and the world with so many soccer clubs, but it’s just not your reality. Politics is a much more problematic discussion, as the consequences of disagreement can lead to civil unrest and even war.

And then comes religion. The subject that pretty much dictates how you feel about magic and miracles. Religion tries to explain what happens when we die. It asks us to focus on all the stuff that we can’t prove. For some, it’s a nothing-burger of a conversation because they didn’t grow up with religion being a major part of their daily conversations or actions. They see religion like you may see European soccer: nothing to concern yourself with, but it might be fun to see a game sometime or watch a World Cup game on TV. But for some of us, we grew up in a battleground of religion. For me, it was a war zone for our very salvation. I went to war for my religion like Israelis have mandatory service in their army; Mormonism has missionaries. I was called to battle in Italy from 1999 to 2001.

I found myself last Sunday in the same building I was in 23 years ago as a 20-year-old suit-and-tie Mormon missionary. I have almost zero photos of this era, and it’s a regret yet also a fantastic reminder of the impermanence of all we are experiencing. Downtown Genoa, 200 feet from the birthplace of Columbus, is the LDS meeting place. I walked into the front door of an eight-story building where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is located on the third floor next to a lawyer's office and a few other businesses. It was the same place I would go several times a week for the six months I was assigned to grow the church in Genoa in 2001.

Most young missionaries are told when you leave for a mission that saving even just ONE SOUL is so great in the eyes of the Lord. That one soul can even be your own. This is especially true for most missionaries who end up going to Europe, where conversions are much more rare than in areas that were growing in the 90s like South America. The Mormon faith is full of stories and verses that come from the Book of Mormon or just lore. It’s a fantastical community of so many new words and allegories that only we have. My job for two years was to teach these words in my broken Italian to anyone willing to listen for a hot minute.

You’ve got to understand something about 90s Mormons. We were told things in our Sunday school about how the Church was going to flood the entire world. All the technology, like the internet, was invented so the gospel would spread faster. Christopher Columbus found America, guided by God so that our Church could be started. Now I am headed back to the birth town of Columbus to tell the people living there that their Pope doesn’t have the Priesthood and that the Mormons are the only TRUE Church. It could be a different message now, but I am pretty sure they are saying the same thing.

Well, you can imagine the conditioning a young susceptible brain must go through to prepare itself for two full years of free labor (actually, you pay to go on a mission) with very limited communication (by design) with friends or family. All this conditioning to grow an organization in a foreign country, telling these Italians this new story the majority don’t want to hear.

At the same time I am there, the Mormon faith is in the process of retracting some of its words from decades in the past that called the Catholic Church a whore and a great abomination. Luckily, the policies and doctrine of Mormonism are as fluid and evolving, and just like polygamy and racism, they changed their tone on Catholics. But in the 2000s, you have the internet surging, and it’s much easier for anyone investigating the Church's claims to find all sides of the story.

As a 19-year-old, I knew nothing about the Church I was representing other than the songs we sang as kids, the lessons on Sunday, and the Book of Mormon I had read. Just like most religions, you aren’t taught the history objectively… you have to discover that outside of the core curriculum. I had no idea about the actual methods used to organize the Church and grow its membership through polygamy. I knew it happened but had no idea how it happened. It’s probably best because I was already confused about dinosaurs and evolution, and had those as an unanswered question as I was leaving for Italy. I wasn’t ready for the crazier parts of Mormonism.

We get trained in the language and culture and how to sell Mormonism and how to be extra righteous in the Missionary Training Center for two months. This is the most insane part of the whole gig. You filter into a massive auditorium and every hour a new batch goes through. You sing in unison and then get separated from your family for two years and go straight into 16-hour days of language training and indoctrination. I use that word carefully because there is no other place I know of that is more efficient and exemplifies what indoctrination means than the Missionary Training Center (MTC).

The very definition of indoctrination is: “the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically.” If you had doubts in the MTC or on your mission, you were sent to a male authority and then asked to pray harder and fast for answers. They would never answer the questions because the answers aren’t there. You pray and get them personally. I was told to put my doubts on a shelf and come back to visit them in the future. It felt like such good advice and honestly, it worked. I just plowed forward. I had mostly wonderful moments in this training center and made a few friends, one who is close to me to this day and we even experienced a spiritual experience that neither of us can explain.

I am going to jump 18 months forward in this story to when I am sent from Milan to Genoa. I had spent a year in Milan and made so many friends and even saw one Italian man get re-baptized after years of being a Nazi sympathizer. He repented and joined the Church again, a little less Nazi than he was before. Most of my Milan experience was working with immigrants from South American countries. I am friends with them to this day and even sponsored one young woman to come live and work in Utah.

In Genoa, where I am sitting outside as I write this, is where I finished my mission. It is where I had this huge realization this week about my mission that helped me close a loop. This last Sunday, I was in the very chapel where I was a missionary 24 years prior. I don’t see many familiar faces. I see one or two and I’m sure they don’t recognize me. There have been 1,000 missionaries in this small ward of roughly 35 people. The missionaries are usually white Americans from the Mormon belt (Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California) as was the case when I was there and when I visited this week.

Remember this is my journal entry, I am just publishing it because I know ONE SOUL out there that will meditate on these words. Maybe it’s a missionary that went to Italy or Russia. But I publish to connect with other humans who may have had similar experiences to mine. I don’t consider any of my mission traumatic, but it was something. You are sent from home being told you are part of an army of God and you are called to save souls; that’s gonna do stuff to your brain. I can’t think of many more mentally difficult experiments you can run on teenagers than this, but at the same time, I loved it and regret nothing.

So here is the final part of this stream of consciousness today. I sat in this chapel and realized that I was on the losing team in the religion sport. My politics were not popular in this country. My religion was… dying. The Church had not grown at all in 24 years. It was hanging on just barely, trying to force itself to be relevant with the help of outside missionaries and a few key members that were baptized in the 1970s and had children that stayed active. Not a soul looked joyful in this congregation. It was a tired bunch, people of all ages that were doing a play that was taught to them a hundred years earlier by Americans, and the tradition is just not that exciting anymore. In all of the area of Liguria and really all of Italy, there are so few members, despite LDS being possibly the richest church with a massive sales and marketing budget. The community is struggling. It felt like the last years of Kmart or Circuit City.

It’s no individual’s fault it’s dying on a vine, and it’s not because Satan is so strong in the heart of Italians like missionaries would say to make sense of why no one converts. For me, my takeaway and the reason the Mormon church is dying in Italy is because Italians have a superior community than our exported American business religion. The selling points of Mormonism have nothing to offer; the only thing that might work is to convince them into thinking the only way to return to the highest kingdom of God is to leave Catholicism and fork out 10% of their earnings for an inferior community.

I had an overwhelming sadness at first upon seeing this on Sunday. I know it’s a perception, but it felt real. And then I looked at a few of the single Italian members who I know won’t date non-members, and I realized that because they are Mormon in Italy, the pool of options to find love and community is slim to none. You have very few options when you are told to make a family within people of the same faith, and that faith has very few people in it, especially men.

It was at this moment that my mind played a reverse Uno card on me and I was full of joy and happiness that I came to Italy, made great friends, and converted none of them to the Mormon faith. Now, after 23 years, I realize they converted me. Everything I want for myself and my family, Italians do organically and have for many years. They are religious, but not in a way that makes them feel superior to any other group. They actually don’t have that vibe in much that they do. They just want to eat, make love, go to the beach, eat and drink again, and talk with their hands. I don’t want to stereotype, but my Italian friends are all nodding their heads right now. They want little to do with our American religions; it’s in the numbers and numbers don’t lie. They live well, they don’t need gyms on every corner, influencers selling diets, or therapists like we have in the States. They just live and walk a lot. They don’t make the salaries we make in the US, but they somehow vacation often and retire early.

So my mission was a success. I saved ONE SOUL, and it was my own. I got exposed to a way of life and viewpoints that trumped the very message I was sent to deliver. I am a Roman Mormon Catholic. I am American in Italy. I am human partnering with AI. I have been indoctrinated and have indoctrinated others. I failed to indoctrinate many and feel so at peace about that failure. Communities are special and the Mormons have set them up all over the world. They will thrive in some places and some will die and wither. I see a day where there remain only relics of the Mormon faith, and I am so glad I was part of it for a season. I also am excited to try new faiths, new politics, and new sports.

If you have something you would like to indoctrinate me with, I am easily influenced. Give me, give me, I need, I need. -Bob Wiley

If you want to try Mormonism, I am happy to teach you just as I did when I was a missionary. I will even baptize you.

SP

If you haven’t listened to Pressure Machine, I would try the whole album. If you don’t feel something profound from Brandon’s lyrics and voice, then you most likely don’t have a soul to save;)