Baseball Baptisms and the British Mission

Missionary service is a time of growth and an opportunity to serve, but it can also be a source of extreme pressures and stress for missionaries that manifests in different ways. One of the more famous examples came in the 1950s in the British Isles, where pressure from a mission president led to people taking advantage of the appeal of baseball to increase the number of baptisms they reported, regardless of whether it led to actual, long-term conversion. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog, Greg Prince discussed baseball baptisms. What follows here is a copost to the full interview.

What Were Baseball Baptisms?

To start, Greg Prince described the origins of the baseball baptisms:

It was unintentional, perhaps even accidental. American missionaries who wanted something to do on their Diversion Day (later renamed Preparation Day) asked their families to send bats, balls, and mitts so they could play baseball in parks. At that time, when England was still struggling to recover from the devastation of World War II, all things American were attractive, and especially to the young boys. They knew cricket, but baseball was alien, exotic, and magnetic. They wanted to learn this new game.

The American elders, always looking for ways to introduce the gospel, saw it as an entrée to British homes. They would teach the boys baseball, the boys would introduce them to their parents, they would proselytize the families, and baptisms would result.

And, in the early months of this accidental program, baptisms of entire families often occurred.

Thus far, it was innocent and effective enough as an approach, however, things soon took a wrong turn:

I think the primary catalyst of the darkening of baseball baptisms was President Woodbury. Always a salesman, he took each month’s baptismal numbers as a new baseline and pushed the missionaries to increase them incrementally the following month.

The pressure was intense and unremitting. Elders who did not produce were shamed and punished. Their response was to turn a corner and use baseball as the doorway to youth baptisms, rather than the doorway to meeting the boys’ families. It got to the point where to join a baseball team, a boy was required to go through an initiation: baptism.

Many of those boys had no idea what the initiation rite meant, which was confirmed later when elders were assigned to visit the homes of the boys and inquire as to their religious affiliation, only to find the parents oblivious. …

The unremitting pressure, particularly from Woodbury, drove some elders to visit cemeteries, copy names from tombstones, and report the names as baptisms.

As Prince noted elsewhere in the interview, “the idea originating with the elders and percolating up to the mission president, T. Bowring Woodbury. A salesman by profession, he was always on the lookout for new ways to sell the gospel.”

Eventually, things reached the point where something had to be done:

Marion D. Hanks was a favorite of David O. McKay. Some say he had been told he would become an apostle. But in 1962, McKay called him in and asked him to go to England to “clean up the mess” (Hanks’s words to me).

Hanks responded by coming down hard on the excesses in the British Mission, shutting down proselytizing completely until he could assess the situation and regroup. He was not diplomatic, and in public settings he called out by name General Authorities senior to himself who he felt to have been complicit in the baseball baptisms scandal.

His missionaries adored him, but not so many of his colleagues back home. By his own account, some of them shunned him for a couple of years after he returned. While he was in England, a vacancy in the Twelve was filled by Thomas S. Monson, and no additional vacancies occurred prior to McKay’s death. After McKay died, Hanks was essentially banished to Hong Kong for several years.

A missionary who worked under Hanks told me Hanks was summoned by Prince Philip to Buckingham Palace. The message:

Mr. Hanks, I’m very grateful that you are here. Had you not come here, we were going to ask the Mormon Church to leave England. We are well aware of these baseball programs, and all of these silver dollar things and all of this that has been going on with your missionaries. We were this close to initiating legal action to expel the Latter-day Saint Church from England, because of this.

Paraphrase of Prince Philip to Marion D. Hanks

It was a much-needed corrective action, even if parts of it could have been handled more diplomatically.

While the specific approach of baseball baptisms is a thing of the past, the general idea is something that constant vigilance is required to avoid:

Baptism and conversion should cohabitate. But the zeal that is so characteristic of missionaries and such an important part of their success in one of the most demanding challenges a teenager can face, can also turn a dark corner. Excess is always waiting around the next corner, and we all must be vigilant in curbing it.

While never reaching the dubious approaches that the baseball baptisms epitomize, I did feel similar types of pressure on my mission in the Midwest around 2010 (particularly with my first mission president) and can both understand and sympathize with the missionaries and the choices they made, including the disillusionment many of them experienced in retrospect.

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For more information about baseball baptisms, go ahead and follow the link to the Latter-day Saint history blog, From the Desk to read the full interview with Gregory A. Prince.