# Mormon church: Joseph Smith married girls and other men's wives

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mormon-church-joseph-smith-married-girls-and-other-mens-wives/702652>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [October 27, 2014, 3:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mormon-church-joseph-smith-married-girls-and-other-mens-wives/702652 "2014-10-27T15:25:15Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 142

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**Author:** ![TokyoBayer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tokyobayer/32/13989_2.png) [@TokyoBayer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TokyoBayer)\
**Post date:** [December 24, 2014, 4:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mormon-church-joseph-smith-married-girls-and-other-mens-wives/702652/142 "2014-12-24T16:41:14Z")

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> [@robert\_columbia](#):
>
> I remember reading somewhere that an oversized percentage of converts that the LDS receives in Japan are teen girls primarily for this reason. Most people there don’t really care too much to look into the faith. Heaps of teen girls go gaga over the cute Western boys who don’t drink, smoke, or sleep around and end up spending more time with them, and end up converting.

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.

You can read about [the story here](http://elderkikuchi.blogspot.tw/2010/05/heading-another-heading-row-1-cell-1.html).

> [@](#):
>
> On October 1, 1977, Yoshihiko Kikuchi was called as the first Japanese general authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Kikuchi had studied business psychology in college and was a sales manager of the Japanese branch of Rena Ware, a multi-level marketing company. He used his manipulative business skills to pressure members not only into buying his products, but also into paying for various church expenses.
> 
> For example, although the church often says that tithing is used to pay for its temples, many of such structures have been constructed through the use of separate “temple funds,” which are collected in addition to the tithe members must pay if they wish to hold a temple recommend (which without, they cannot enter the temple further than the lobby).
> 
> The Tokyo Temple was one of such temples, and it was Kikuchi who “was able to lead the dedicated Saints of Japan to gather 124% of the temple funds within a year and a half.” Sadly, this was just one of many incidents in which the church financially took advantage of the Japanese people.
> 
> On July 1, 1978 - less than a year after Kikuchi had been called as a Seventy - the Japan Tokyo South Mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was formed through the division of the Japan Tokyo Mission into the Japan Tokyo North and Japan Tokyo South missions.
> 
> Delbert H. Groberg was called to open this new mission and preside as its first president; he would serve under Kikuchi, who was then the Executive Administrator for Japan and Korea. On the second day after his arrival in Japan, Groberg met with Kikuchi and was told of his vision. That night, Groberg wrote the following in his journal:
> 
> ```
> Elder Kikuchi came out to our home and we talked from 3:30pm until 7:00pm. He really has high expectations of me. I had thought that 10 times as many baptisms as they are getting now would be a good goal to shoot for (about 10,000). Before telling him, I asked him what he felt I should do. He mapped out the progress as he expected and it turned out to be 25 times as much as what is currently happening minimum! (And he stressed minimum!) That seems like a lot, but I believe we can make it.
> 
> ```

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.

> [@](#):
>
> As mentioned previously, members of the LDS faith like to praise those they are trying to appeal to as “wonderful people.” This is one of the techniques used by Groberg, who instructed his missionaries to use “Open-Heart Teaching” to draw closer to potential investigators. This method involved missionaries teaching a 10- to 15-minute introductory lesson before they moved into the 6 actual lessons that taught about the church.
> 
> During this introductory lesson, missionaries would “1) Develop a genuinely warm, friendly relationship with the investigator. 2) Introduce himself (where from, what he used to do, family, interests, etc.) and give some personal goals. 3) Find out a little about the investigator, including a few of his personal goals (be an accountant, be a good father, etc.) and confirm his general goals (grow and progress, be happy, etc.); also get his schedule so he would know when he had time to meet next.” After having this cookie-cutter conversation, missionaries would then press the investigator for a commitment to listen.
> 
> Groberg provides us with an example of how such a conversation should follow in his thesis; missionaries were to say, “Now that we’re friends, would you like to hear a little about why we are here (in Japan)? (Explain) Even though I’m spending my own time and money I’m very happy to be a missionary among the great (Japanese) people. You teach me a lot, and I hope I can teach you some things too.”
> 
> The missionaries would then begin teaching about the church and its gospel. Notice that in the phrase “the great (Japanese) people,” the parenthetical group could be replaced by just about anything and still have the same effect anticipated by the church. It is also worth pointing out that the missionaries were to find out potential investigators’ schedules before telling them about the church; this would make it harder for an individual to make up an excuse of why he couldn’t meet on a certain day after learning the missionaries’ true intentions.
> 
> This is especially true in the case of the Japanese, who are often too polite to say “no” in the first place, which was only made more difficult because many Japanese were (and still are to some degree) intimidated by foreigners.
> 
> Groberg also had missionaries stop focusing on families and instructed them to go out and look for young people, mainly those “from mid-high school to late college.” He was aware that “these years coincided with a time of searching for identity, establishing values, and determining their purposes in life,” and wanted to convert the Japanese youth so that the church would be the one to determine their identity. Groberg did research on the legal age at which investigators could receive baptism without parental permission, and found out that it was 18 and not 20 as had been assumed.
> 
> As a result, he got many young college students to convert to Mormonism while completely disregarding how their parents might feel. As Groberg puts it, “Parental permission was no longer required as a condition of receiving baptism. Suddenly a major barrier had been removed.” It is interesting that a church which claims to be family-oriented would encourage individuals be secretive about their membership.
> 
> Something else Groberg did was give a special title to missionaries who were able to get large numbers of baptisms by doing “what hadn’t been done before.” Such individuals were called “Ensign” missionaries, and it was through their “diligent” efforts that the Japan Tokyo South mission was able to break the 1000-baptisms-per-month barrier.
> 
> However, as many returned missionaries from the Groberg Era have reported, these high-baptizing missionaries would often use illegitimate methods of attaining baptisms, such as going out and getting drunk at parties to make new friends, whom they would immediately baptize thereafter. Groberg eventually constructed “collapsible fonts and supplied one to each unit in which missionaries were working,” so even performing on-site baptisms at parties became feasible. Many of these missionaries admitted to using dishonest methods of conversion to Groberg, but he was apparently fine with whatever the means were as long as the missionaries were meeting their quota for baptisms.
> 
> The exceptional missionaries were invited to a monthly “recognition dinner at the mission president’s home,” while those who weren’t able to meet the quotas were chewed out in personal interviews with Groberg. The mission newsletter was turned into a stats sheet where those who were seeing the most success were praised as exemplary missionaries. The pressure and guilt that Groberg (and those above him) heaped upon the young men and women who were sacrificing 2 years to serve the church in Japan were almost unimaginable.

(huge wall of text broken into paragraphs)

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.

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