So, because my one (Mormon) colleague who I chat scholarship with is doing a project involving the Book of Mormon, I decided that I needed to get a copy, so I can better understand some sections of his book proposal and whatnot by going back and reading the underlying scripture whenever I think that it's necessary.
So, I looked online, and in order to get a free copy, I had to have the missionaries visit, so I decided that that was fine, and so I signed up for that.
They looked incredibly young - like college freshmen, and the one even younger! - and I got permission from my landlord so we could sit out in my building's backyard on the furniture in the open air.
Because of the academic project talk around my needing a Book of Mormon, I ended up a few times going off on tangents, like how some crazy historical Jesus people say Mary Magdalene was his wife, and how Jesus might have been a Pharisee, and how smart-"aleck" (! - I was considerate) doubters have been around for a while, and how Hinduism was brought to the United States.
I had been open in my contact form about the reasons for the visit, but I don't think they knew how to respond to all of that (they kind of just listened).
Anyhow, with the pandemic, they said that they really didn't know anything because they're kept away from media, but they had come across murmurs and a Walmart rush, and then some bureaucrat in their church reached out to all the missionaries in the metropolitan area and was like, "It's time to go store food, boys!"
They also said that social media guidelines got relaxed, and for a long time they were reaching out to people on Facebook, and also by calls.
Also, both had been golfing in the city; one at an outright golf course, and the other at a driving range.
Afterwards, I texted my one (Mormon) colleague and told him that they wished him luck with his book project, and he asked me how the visit went. His response to my tangents was like, "Well, it's probably healthy for them to find out that there's a lot to know about religion."
I also mentioned where they came from and how one lived in a really, really black part of the city, and he was like, "Wow," and he said that the place where that one came from was small and white even by Utah standards.
(I told him that he seemed to be keyed into basic issues affecting that particular neighborhood, so it looked like he was at least talking to his neighbors, and that was probably a healthy learning experience for him.)
My one (Mormon) colleauge also said that the age of missionaries had recently shifted downwards, so they probably both really were like college freshmen age, more or less.
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