118. The Missionary Episode: How Religious Institutions are Changing to Cater to the Youth

I'M THE VILLAIN

Is soaking really a thing? Bubble porn? That thing where you get on a top bunk and have your friends jump around on the bottom bunk as a way to simulate sex? These are all things that people on Tiktok say the Mormon Youth do to get around the Mormon requirement not to have sex before marriage. In part 2 of this episode series, we continue our conversation with Cody Crabb from last week, and he debunks some myths about what The Youth are up to.

He also tells us what it is like being a missionary. On this show we like to use the podcast as an opportunity to talk to people who have different experiences from us, and it is hard to imagine a more different life from ours than that of a Mormon missionary. He describes it like this: "Imagine if someone just set you on the street somewhere and said 'Just do nice things for people.'" Help an old an out with his garden, help someone take in their groceries. You're dressed in white, and are often the only white person in a neighborhood of brown people. Eventually they are going to ask you what you are doing here. That's what the over 80,000 missionaries out in the world are up to right now.

Cody served his mission in Culiacán, Sinaloa, the place in Mexico where the show "Narcos" took place. And the mission could really be grueling: you wake up at 6am every day, do hours of text study, and then you're out in the sun all day talking to people. There were times when Cody didn't talk to his parents for 6 months. (Luckily, now the LDS church is changing the way they do missions because it turns out needing to be isolated from your family for that long can be kind of whack for your mental health.)

But we get to the elephant in the room: going to a country of poor indigenous people as a white person to try to convert them to your religion looks a lot like colonialism. And how, as a progressive person now, he reflects on that experience and thinks, "I look back and I can't even believe I did it."

Links:

Cody's website: https://www.codycrabb.com/

Cody's email: codycrabb8 [at] gmail.com

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

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