I was remembering today a conversation that I had with my grandmother when I was 21 years old. It was my final year of college and I was making plans for what to do next. Among the various options, I was thinking seriously about joining the Peace Corps, hoping that this would satisfy simultaneously my interests in international travel and my love of volunteerism. My grandmother was pointing out to me that, so long as I was spending two years doing good for the world, I could do it in another way: by going on a Mormon mission.

I was not at all amenable to this idea, and we argued about it for a good long while. One reason the conversation took so long is that I was avoiding saying point-blank what she must have suspected anyway: that I didn’t want to be a Mormon missionary because I didn’t think the LDS Church was true. It would feel awfully strange to ring people’s doorbells and say, “Hi, I’m a representative from the Mormon Church. I don’t believe in it, but maybe you could!” I had already more or less decided that I was going to apostize sooner or later, but I was still somewhat insecure about the whole thing, so I didn’t want to get into it with such a vocal and uncompromising Mormon as I knew my grandmother to be.

But another reason why the conversation took so long was that I was trying to articulate a rather complicated point. I was explaining, first of all, why a Mormon mission would not satisfy my desires with regards to international travel. One obvious reason for this was that I wouldn’t necessarily be sent abroad if I volunteered for the mission. For all I knew I might be assigned to distribute copies of the Book of Mormon in suburbs in Vermont, or to work the information desk at the Visitor’s Center in Nauvoo, Illinois. That would hardly be a unique cultural experience.

But even if I were sent to a foreign country, the life of a Mormon missionary is highly restricted. The Mormon Church wants its missionaries to seem set apart from the rest of the population. Some of their reasons for this are similar to the reasons why the Church wants priests and religious to be visibly distinguishable from laypeople, but in the Mormon case the image of “religious” is supposed to be clean-cut, businesslike and confident. A good Mormon missionary is supposed to affect something like the demeanor of a good concierge. The Church effects this by regulating missionaries’ dress, as well as their movements and their activities. Missionaries are given one free day a week in which they are permitted to play sports, see movies, listen to music and so forth, but on most days these amusements are forbidden. They are expected to be with their assigned companions at all times, and certainly are not allowed to go out in the evenings to mingle freely with friends. And they will frequently be moved from one area to another, so that their service may be divided between a handful of different regions. The specific ward (aka parish) to which they are assigned will presumably make something of a place for them, but obviously it would be difficult or impossible to get too deeply immersed in the culture itself when they’re living such artificially restricted lives.

That life never appealed to me in the least. I have lived abroad three times (in Scotland, in Israel/Palestine, and finally in Uzbekistan) and in each case what I really wanted was to get a sense for day-to-day life within that country and culture. The anthropologist’s ideal of the participant-observer always appealed to me, and a Peace Corps Volunteer is well situated to embody this. The assigned duties are minimal and the Volunteers are relatively unsupervised, and in reality your primary “job” as a PCV is just to make friends and get people to like you. Peace Corps Volunteers are always teased about “going native” and the ones I knew would do this to varying extents, but it’s really true that, once you get past all the initial barriers of language and basic cultural misunderstandings, you can find yourself an odd but accepted part of a community that’s entirely different from yours. It’s somethig of an exhilirating experience. In the beginning every encounter with a local is a stressful and unpredictable “cross-cultural encounter”, and every local person represents equally a mass of confusing cultural ticks. By the end you find yourself able to relax among locals and Americans alike as friends. The confusing cultural habits that were so glaring at first have begun to seem normal, making it possible to appreciate people’s unique personalities. It’s gratifying to progress from being a freakish, incomprehensible stranger to being someone who can like and be liked — a little like coming of age again, only very rapidly over the course of months.

Well, I guess it’s clear which course I chose for the two years following my college graduation, and obviously I don’t regret having passed up on the mission. But contrasting Mormon missions with Peace Corps service draws out another potentially troubling problem. To some degree, missionaries are prevented from penetrating a foreign culture by arbitrary rules that are set for them by authorities in Salt Lake City. But they are also set apart merely by the nature of what they do. The anthropologist is supposed to maintain a strict policy of not passing moral judgments on the cultural practices of the people they observe. The PCV need not be quite so rigorous, but he still must be prepared to maintain a very high level of patience and tolerance if he is to win acceptance. The missionary, on the other hand, is there with the precise intention of bringing a radical change to the culture that he is entering. However well-intentioned he might be, his very function will make him pestilential many people. Obviously this will make it hard to be accepted by the locals. The interesting question is whether it’s even possible for him to really understand them in a nuanced way.

There is often an uneasy tension between setting out to be someone’s friend and setting out to minister to him as an apostle. This is ironic given that, on some level, the nicest thing you can do for an unbeliever is to bring him to the faith. Nonetheless, friendship requires the appreciation of another’s character, and, to some degree, the adoption of his goals and interests as one’s own. If (as it seems to me) a person’s religion is one of the deep, defining aspects of his life, it becomes difficult to show the appropriate kind of disinterested regard for him if you reject many of the ideals and motivations that shape his life. This isn’t just a question of not offending people with, say, hostile or insensitive comments. A person who is burning with missionary zeal will often be literally unable to be a friend to the unconverted, because he will be unable to achieve the sympathy, and sense of common purpose, that friendship requires.

There was in Andijan (the Uzbek city in which I was working) a group of missionaries, mostly Americans from various Protestant denominations, who had established a development center in the city as a justification for their presence there. Proselytizing is illegal in Uzbekistan, so their religious efforts had to be very covert, and indeed, they must have been very covert. They went to great efforts to integrate culturally, by moving their families to Andijan and living there for years at a time. And yet, in my two years in Andijan I only twice encountered locals who seemed conscious at all of the missionary aspect of the operation, even though these Americans were among the best-known individuals in the whole city. (And this is saying something, because Andijan is not a tiny village; it has more than half a million inhabitants.)

The Andijan Development Center boasted a large library, English classes for a modest fee, courses in computer skills and web design, and special camps, sports clubs, and other events. The youth of Andijan loved the place, and many of my best English students had studied there, and yet, for all the good the center was doing, I’m not even sure my students were even aware that the Americans who worked there were Christians. I admired these compatriots of mine in many ways, but as soldiers for the faith, I can’t think that they were terribly successful. In one of the two instances in which I did hear about their missionary efforts, the intended target was a young woman of my acquaintance who had been involved with some of their programs. The religious overtures they had made to her disturbed her deeply, and she told me that she felt betrayed, as though she had been deceived by them. As she explained to me: she had thought they liked her as a person, and it turned out she was merely a project. I’m not suggesting that this was the right way for her to see things (and indeed, I did my best to explain their side of the issue sympathetically) but I think the reaction is somewhat understandable.

I myself was prohibited by Peace Corps from using my job to push a personal religious agenda, but by way of incidental contact I like to think I made some small impact. I wasn’t allowed to preach on street corners, but I had no reason to hide anything; no one who knew the first thing about Peace Corps would think that it was a religious organization. My Uzbek friends and students did at least know that I was a Christian, and they got an opportunity to see that I read my own religious texts, that I observed feasts and fasts of my own (the fasts particularly impressed them – they thought Muslims were the only people who did that), and that I was honest in my work (not taking bribes for grades, for example, which almost all of their teachers did). I got many opportunities to explain aspects of Christianity to people, just in the way of casual conversations among friends or acquaintances, or in answer to random questions put to me in the bazaar. (Uzbeks can be very forward at times, and I was regularly detained in public places by people I didn’t know who just wanted some Q and A about America, Christianity, my personal life etc.) So I hope I did a little bit of good, but I’m hardly expecting a medal of commendation for any of that. I certainly wasn’t standing up to anybody and admonishing them to quit their twisted and false religion and give themselves to the One True Church.

But what can we do? If I had shouted truths of the faith from the rooftops, or passed out Bibles and Catechisms on street corners, I would have been dismissed as a crank, and with some justification. What reason would the people have to listen to me, if I show no interest in them beyond a raw zeal for their conversion? On the other hand coming to understand and appreciate the subtleties of the culture almost invariably puts one in the way of compromises. Certain criticisms must be left unsaid, and fraternal correction must sometimes be withheld even when it seems warranted.

Very holy people can sometimes, I think, ease their way through these barriers artlessly. The very personalities of such figures as St. Paul or St. Francis are so arresting that people from all cultures are drawn to them. Most of us, unfortunately, are not quite like that. We can sometimes be thrown together with others through common goals. For example, natural disasters or other calamities can sometimes give Christians a “disinterested” motive for coming into contact with another culture, which can allow for the planting of other kinds of seeds. But more overt missionary efforts will remain for most of us a difficult endeavor, involving an endless balancing of different strategies and emotions, and a multitude of worries and doubts. Until we can combine burning charity with a clear and steadfast faith, ministering to unbelievers will be a project fraught with pain and peril.