I don’t know what it’s like to run a centrally-located international church so I have no judgment but I do wonder why Mormons never build in these rural areas. When the Seventh-day Adventists come to a town, they convert the whole town and usually build a school or hospital.

In Bolivia, I’ve seen lots of people eating fries with toothpicks but it’s usually when it’s on the go and you’re carrying your bag of fries.

The membership is strongly contained in the city of Cusco and in a very few regional centers away from Cusco. It is almost not present among rural peoples.

Did we make the wrong choice Steve? The idealist in me that was a missionary in Bolivia would say yes. I was often frustrated when people outside the cities were interested and we were discouraged from teaching them.

But if the goal is building wards and stakes as they are currently structured, then perhaps not. The current structure requires a certain kind of social background to function well. That is generally found in the cities. Again a cultural politics…

Building the Church is not the same thing as sharing the gospel. In that coils a huge dilemma.

I am cutting and pasting a couple of paragraphs from a manuscript I wrote which included this issue.

“The vision and techniques of missionary work adapted to working among European immigrants and the growing Argentine urban class of Buenos Aires were ill wrought for working in Jujuy or the Chaco. In the neighboring Bolivia, of the time, Protestants were spreading their vision of the world, but they were doing so through the creation of social institutions, such as schools and hospitals. There was little separation of Church and society in the Andean area, outside of certain urban areas. Mormons did not take this approach.

Mormons were seeking people who could join as individuals and build a congregation where lay people performed ongoing work to keep it functioning. They were not building institutions to provide services. Furthermore they were encountering in the north areas very different from the working class neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. These were worlds where religion was critical for the identity of the social group and relationships of social integration. Mormons had yet to find a mechanism for fitting into these societies.

This frustration has been an ongoing theme in Latin America as well as jubilation when indigenes do join the church. As a result President Stoof “decided to have the missionaries devote all their efforts for the time being to the millions of cosmopolitan people of Argentina.” Despite these cultural politics, the ideological focus of Mormon proselyting remained on the Lamanites, or indigenous peoples, even though most proselyting was among European immigrants and their descendents. Williams writes “although it began among the Germans the South American mission would grow away from the Germans and more towards the Spanish-speaking Argentines. Yet, the real fulfillment of the prophecy…would come when the Lamanites of the land accepted the gospel.” . . . ”there would be other attempts to teach Indians, but the real proselyting thrust among them would come only after the work was begun in Peru, over thirty years later. Curiously, two of the early missionaries to South America would start the work. When my family and I moved to Peru in 1956 we precipitated work in that land. I was the first branch president of the Church on the west coast of South America; the Church was officially opened in our home. Three years later, J. Vernon Sharp, [another early missionary in Argentina] became the president of the Andes mission with its headquarters in Lima, Peru.”

Yet, as we shall see, even in the Andes, the LDS Church has been frustrated in its efforts to work with indigenous communities. Lamanite has been defined in a different way than Latin American Indian so that it can encompass the urban Spanish-speaking population, while the latter is still preferentially rural speakers of Indian languages who live in Indian communities.”

(since I wrote this manuscript I must note that the ethnic politics of contemporary Bolivia and somewhat Peru have created Urban Indians, something unthinkable before.)

So…I think there is an embedded cultural politics in Church processes which favor some people and disfavor others. I do not know the situation of the Africans in London. But the cultural politics of the ways in which Mormonism is presented and lived in wards and stakes, can present an insurmountable barrier for conversion and then activity. The people within the Church may not see the politics, caught up as they are with living the Gospel, but they are often very evident to people from the outside, particularly potential investigators.

Sometimes those politics even become part of the motivation for conversion. A testimony is built within their frame.

This seemed to infuriate the bishop, whose face turned red and who began to speak with markedly increased intensity. He instructed his ward members that the Lord wanted them all to learn Spanish immediately. By not learning Spanish, he said, they were thwarting God and depriving themselves of the gospel.

Of course, this was just so much hogwash. The gospel is, as the Doctrine and Covenants tells us, to be preached in people’s own tongues. They aren’t supposed to have to conform to colonialist demands in order to have the scriptures. In fact, the scriptures are available in Quechua in audio format. All that was needed was a number of tape players and some taped copies of the Quechua scriptures. Yet when a sizable donation to provide such was offered to the relevant stake in Cuzco, it was declined. Leadership there felt that the problem was with a lack of individual motivation, not with a lack of materials.

The attitudes David discusses are, in my experience, widespread in Mormonism.

Seriously, this stuff even happens in our own congregations. the single worst experience I’ve ever had at a Mormon church took place at the Inti Raymi (sp?) stake center in Cuzco. Half of the congregation were Quechua speakers, but the bishopric were mestizo. Sunday School was an hour long rant from the bishop about what nasty, lazy savages the Quechy all were, because they didn’t read the BOM every day. (They were illiterate, and most of them didn’t speak Spanish anyway; and there was no Quechua transliteration available, only Spanish translation). And most of the non-indigenous ward members felt the situation was reasonable.

But after many years of experience in this town I see the action as fitting into a context of treating Indians as lesser. I could tell many stories of that from many years.

But part of the difficulty with inequality, as perceived, is that it is not a strictly empirical question. Rather it depends on the frames people bring to the encounter and how they understand and experience the encounter. I know that for the people of the Quispes’ community, named Huacuyo, unequal treatment from townsmen is part of their ordinary experience. Occasionally, in very rare moments, the equation gets turned around and the rural peoples “get even” so to speak. I will never forget the thrill in the voice of people from Huaucyo–not the Quispes per se–when in 1979 they marched into the town to demand change and thoroughly frightened the townsmen.

Michael Taussig speaks of epistemic murk as being an important characteristic of the experience of violence as well as inequality. The murkiness, rather than the empirical precision, is what can make the experience overwhelmingly powerful for people.

I do not know how the Quispes interpreted the experience. It is so minor and fits with many other experiences, overlain with long term relationships with the townsmen. Nevertheless, inequality is inherent.

I try to treat them with the welcome they gave me, but in that I break other established codes rather thoughtlessly, and sometimes idealistically. But in this for me is a gospel dictum.

Many later mission presidents have been similarly frustrated and made similar choices. At the same time, however, Protestants were laying early foundations of what became a massive growth of their religion among indigenous communities in the twentieth century. In relative terms, there is a higher percentage of Protestants in the countryside than in the cities. Mormons and Catholics are strong in Latin America’s cities.

David, did we make the wrong choices here?