I went to a discussion held by a Catholic young adult group recently, and the topic was evangelism.  There were some good insights, but I came away less sure about the topic than I have been in the past.

A scene from my past gave me some insight into this subject, though.

In high school, there was one Mormon guy in my grade.  Well, there might have been others, but I only knew one who was quite definitely Mormon.  I knew because he talked about it to people, not in a bragging way but the way you might talk about your family life or your favorite TV show–it was part of his life, and other people knew it was part of his life.  It never occurred to me until recently that he actually suffered for his faith, though.  And he did, in terms of social stature, in ways that I can only see after over 10 years of retrospection.  I remember two incidents in particular.

First, he took up our history teacher’s offer to leave the class when we were watching a sexually explicit scene from Legends of the Fall.  He left to snickers from his classmates.  I don’t remember his comportment while leaving the room.  But here’s the funny thing: he didn’t have to do that.  The teacher didn’t require us to obtain parent signatures.  I don’t think my parents ever knew, because I don’t remember telling them.  This was unusual at my school–when we watched Schindler’s List in another history class, every student was required to obtain a release from parents.  But in this instance, when his parents wouldn’t know–only he would know–he chose to leave the class, regardless of what other people thought.

Second, there was the poll he took of other guys that several of us uncomfortable.  As part of a social studies project, he asked guys randomly if they masturbated.  He recorded the yes or no answer.  He elicited weird looks, particularly because none of us expected that he would ever mention sex to anyone else.  We all figured him for a prude.  And if we would have asked ourselves why he was conducting the poll, we might have assumed he was being judgmental.  But that would have been dishonest of us, because after the initial shocked reaction, he always said, “Come on, everyone does it,” implying, of course, that so did he.  This wasn’t an attempt to get blackmail but an honest, straightforward, intellectual inquiry into the sexual mores of his classmates.  He was curious to find out what his classmates honestly thought, and he followed that interest to its most uncomfortable extent, for us anyway.  It’s tough to fit this into the evangelism model, and I realize it’s stretched.  But I see it this way: we all knew he was Mormon, and we all had some perception of his church as morally repressive.  But he defied our expectations not by contradicting his faith; rather, he explored what the rest of us thought and felt without judgment or malice.

From talking about his faith plainly to leaving the room for an R-rated movie to inquiring about his peers’ sexual assumptions, this guy got something right about living God’s word in the world, without pretension or apology.  There’s something to be said for that.  I guess I’m saying it now, over 10 years later.

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