Yes, that happens, although they don’t even think that much about the drink, smoke and sleep around. They are cute Western boys.
[del]I was a Mormon missionary to Japan in the early 80s, and only had two girls fall in love with me. That was because I never talked to anyone. [/del] That was my friend, really. I’m not stealth bragging.
There were guys who were actively hitting on anything which moved and would need to be transferred from one area to the next to the next.
This was more than 30 years ago, and with much less knowledge of the Western world, suddenly having 19- and 20-year-old polite boys in and of itself affected a certain percentage of teenage girls and young women. I’ve always heard about girls who thing that French men are super romantic or love British accents, so I think it’s probably the same thing. Of course, guys have their particular traits as well. I knew one “sister” (woman) missionary who was rather well endowed. She had boys falling in love with her as well.
On a more serious side, the church ran into a huge problem in the late 1970s to early 80s, the period when I was a missionary. It wasn’t just young women joining, the missionaries were targeting young men for converts as well.
This was at the tail end of the “Kikuchi / Groberg” era which saw 1,000 baptisms per month in the Tokyo South Mission. Typical missions are about 200 missionaries (100 sets) and the number of converts really depends on the area. South America used to see several hundred, Africa is doing really well, now. Europe, there’s very few.
Basically, Elder Kikuchi was called as the area supervisor and decided to take the Tokyo South mission from baptizing less than 100 per month to over 2,000 per month. That would be 20 converts per companionship each month.
What happened next was predictable.
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Back to me. Our mission was getting about a hundred per month and Elder Kikuchi came down and read us the riot act. This was the first time I ever felt that a general authority was clearly wrong. I was translating his harangue into Japanese for the native missionaries, and I simply lied about what he was saying.
Halfway through my mission, Elder Kikuchi was fired, “reassigned” as they put it, and a replacement came from Salt Lake. He admitted that more than 90% of the people baptized in the previous five years were completely inactive. Our new assignment was to track them down and see if they wanted to simply pretend it never happened.
I had undergone a faith crisis and the used-car salesman approach appalled me. Even before I went home, all the people we had dunked were inactive. I had not wanted to push them so quickly but was overruled by my senior companions.
The idea of righting past wrongs invigorated me; I threw my heart into it, and perhaps unsurprisingly, I was much better at this task. I’m probably one of the few missionaries with a net negative number of baptisms.
Not surprising for non-Mormons, this wasn’t the first time this sort of thing happened and it’s not the last.