Someone on lemmy commented that the purpose of those conversion drives is not to garner new members (though it’s a nice benefit if it works), but to help reinforce the “us” versus “them” division in the people out knocking on doors. It really makes a lot of sense to me.
I agree with that. I think the point of Mormons being forced to go door-to-door and engage with the outside world in a way that is guaranteed to create discomfort and hostility… is that they’ll learn the the outside world equals discomfort and hostility. I can’t imagine that it has any nonzero effect in terms of converting people to Mormonism at all.
I think how it works for Christians probably depends on the nonuniform details of how exactly they do the proselytizing, but I’m imagine it works mostly the same in most cases.
Someone on lemmy commented that the purpose of those conversion drives is not to garner new members (though it’s a nice benefit if it works), but to help reinforce the “us” versus “them” division in the people out knocking on doors. It really makes a lot of sense to me.
I agree with that. I think the point of Mormons being forced to go door-to-door and engage with the outside world in a way that is guaranteed to create discomfort and hostility… is that they’ll learn the the outside world equals discomfort and hostility. I can’t imagine that it has any nonzero effect in terms of converting people to Mormonism at all.
I think how it works for Christians probably depends on the nonuniform details of how exactly they do the proselytizing, but I’m imagine it works mostly the same in most cases.