I had insomnia at 4am last night, due to the excessive consumption of wine a few hours earlier. What do I do when I can't sleep? I read tweets from my fellow insomniacs. One of those oddballs shot me over to Walter Kirn's essay on Mormonism. It was just awesome.
I DON’T REMEMBER the missionaries’ names, only that one was blond and one was dark, one was from Oregon and one was from Utah. They arrived at our house on secondhand bicycles carrying bundles of inspirational literature. They smelled, I remember, of witch hazel and toothpaste. The blond one, whose hair had a complicated wave in it and whose body was shaped like a hay bale, broad and square, wiped his feet with vigor on our doormat and complimented my mother on our house, a one-story, ranch-style affair in central Phoenix that never fully cooled off during the night and had scorpions and black widow spiders in the walls. The boys—because that’s how they looked to me that evening, when I was 13 and my brother was eleven and my parents were in their mid-thirties—shook hands with us and sat down in the living room, where my mother had set out lemonade and cookies and my father had turned off the television so we could talk. They smiled at us. They smiled with their whole faces. Then they asked, softly, politely, if we could pray.
Apt. 11d 
It is hard to object to proselytizing religions in this context, where the Kims called the Mormons (not vice versa), who showed up when they were invited, and counseled them through a tough time. Heaven bless these Mormons.
Intense religion seems to be very helpful to a lot of people. But, without defending juvenile and offensive religious attacks (“magic underwear”), if that was the extent of their interactions, I would have no problem with any religion at all. It is when they get together on Proposition 8 (distant Mormons) or have little placards on election day reading “Vote for Life” (local church down the street from me), or knock on my door on a weekend morning to ask if I have heard the Good News (lots of them, everywhere) that I feel that they are trying to impose their religious belief on those who did not ask for them, and that is what I think most of us with anti-religious feelings are thinking about when we want to get religion out of the public square.
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Another good ex-Mormon story.
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thanks for the link… I read it when you posted it and thoroughly enjoyed it.
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