{"id":517,"date":"2004-12-09T10:20:12","date_gmt":"2004-12-09T14:20:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/snarl\/2004\/12\/09\/mormons-mormons-everywhere\/"},"modified":"2004-12-09T10:20:12","modified_gmt":"2004-12-09T14:20:12","slug":"mormons-mormons-everywhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/2004\/12\/09\/mormons-mormons-everywhere\/","title":{"rendered":"Mormons, Mormons Everywhere"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I was never too familiar with the Mormon religion. In fact, I’d never knowingly met a Mormon until recently. As a child on Cape Cod, there were few (if not none). As an adult, I’ve lived in Boston for 15 years and, until recently, never saw their elders walking around. <\/P>
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…until recently<\/P>
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All of a sudden, I’m seeing post-pubescent “elders” on the subways and in the streets – dressed in their finest Anderson-Little suits (do they still exist?) with little black-and-white name tags on the lapel. Now, I’ll say it again – I’m not all that familiar with Mormons. But I have seen the movie “Latter Days” and watched a few episodes of “Amish in the City” so I think that qualifies me as somewhat knowledgable when it comes to the process of “coming of age” in various religious communities (please note this is sarcasm).<\/P>
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I believe the responsibility of these 18 (+\/-) year-old elders is to act as missionaries to spread the word and maybe even convert or save people throughout the country. But I think it would be far more fun if the results were reversed. I would love it if I could corrupt a Mormon. This reminds me of when I first moved to Boston and a Scientologist “befriended” me. He brought me back to their compound(?) on Beacon Street in the Back Bay and put me and my friend, Carolyn, into a room where they shut the door and left us there alone to complete a test. Becoming suspicious, we completed the surveys with fake names and the attributes of people we aspired to be (nope, I don’t go to Wentworth, I went to MIT….nope, I’m not a poor college student, I make $250,000 a year). Eventually, we tried sneaking out but they stopped us – and then we bolted.<\/P>
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Ah, youth.<\/P>
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Looking back, I think it would have been more fun to screw around with their minds instead of them trying to screw around with ours. Because at this stage of my life, I’m not so willing to put myself in a position where I’m in contact with such people. If only was as devious then as I am now. I could have shown him a whole new use for his Dianetics book.<\/P>
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Anyway, I wonder whether this new influx of local Mormon’s has anything to do with our recent Mormon Governor, Mitt Romney? It can’t just be coincidental that I’m noticing a greater Mormon presence suddenly now that he’s in office. It’s probably also no small coincidence that the largest Mormon Tabernacle in New England (possibly the east coast) was recently built in his town of Belmont. Food for thought.<\/P>
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I was never too familiar with the Mormon religion. In fact, I’d never knowingly met a Mormon until recently. As a child on Cape Cod, there were few (if not none). As an adult, I’ve lived in Boston for 15 years and, until recently, never saw their elders walking around. …until recently All of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}