Mormon missions do not always take place overseas, and they aren’t required of everyone. (It’s a social expectation of men, but still optional even for them, and very much a voluntary thing for women.)
Point taken; should I have said ‘policy of having many or most Mormon men and some women go far away’? I could be wrong, but I don’t think that materially weakens the ‘Stockholm syndrome effect’, as it were, the possible utility of making everyone serve in the military.
(And it may be a social expectation but I wonder how important the distinction between expectation and policy/law is; when I was a Catholic, we were told clearly that confirmation was optional—yet not one of us felt that we had the genuine option to not be confirmed, and so all of us were.)
Confirmation in Catholicism is administered to children, who are less free to reject social expectations than most adults. Mormon missionaries have all reached the age of majority, and while there may be social consequences, they’re a bit farther removed than “disappointment of parents on whom one is unavoidably materially dependent”. I personally know multiple adult Mormon men who never went on a mission.
Mormon missions do not always take place overseas, and they aren’t required of everyone. (It’s a social expectation of men, but still optional even for them, and very much a voluntary thing for women.)
Point taken; should I have said ‘policy of having many or most Mormon men and some women go far away’? I could be wrong, but I don’t think that materially weakens the ‘Stockholm syndrome effect’, as it were, the possible utility of making everyone serve in the military.
(And it may be a social expectation but I wonder how important the distinction between expectation and policy/law is; when I was a Catholic, we were told clearly that confirmation was optional—yet not one of us felt that we had the genuine option to not be confirmed, and so all of us were.)
Confirmation in Catholicism is administered to children, who are less free to reject social expectations than most adults. Mormon missionaries have all reached the age of majority, and while there may be social consequences, they’re a bit farther removed than “disappointment of parents on whom one is unavoidably materially dependent”. I personally know multiple adult Mormon men who never went on a mission.