It’s early to call it but my fact of the year must surely be that Chorley – yes, that Chorley, halfway between Wigan and Preston – is the European centre of Mormonism, the Lancastrian home of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). It is the UK’s Salt Lake City.
I suspect that the documentary The Mormons Are Coming is a direct result of this fact reaching the ears of a BBC researcher who, after a disbelieving shake of the head and a quick online search to confirm, got on the phone to the nearest commissioner and informed him that Auntie had a duty to bring this extraordinary news to the people.
And lo it came to pass that the viewers were visited by an hour-long programme about a handful of the 800 or so clean-cut, bright-eyed young things who come to Chorley every year from around the world to be trained in the missionary work that is a central part of the Mormon faith, then sent out on their first postings.
Once they enter the training scheme, they give up their first names in favour of Elder/Sister titles and gain a constant companion (privacy is not a priority). They then spend six hours every day, bar the sabbath, studying the gospel, in role-playing sessions with unbelievers and potential converts, creating content for social media and attending lectures with names such as “Normal and Natural Interactions” to help them connect with people who do not belong to the church. Yet!
We meet Elder Cook, an 18-year-old from an LDS family in Utah who is devoted to his mother, who fought for his ADHD diagnosis when school was ready to give up on him. He is happy to leave home for two years to try to spread God’s word. Similarly eager, if slightly more daunted, is 19-year-old Sister Cooper from a Mormon family in Hertfordshire. Her faith helped her deal with anxiety and depression, and the Heavenly Father has told her she can use her experience to bring comfort to others.
Everyone we meet is lovely – gentle, kind, sincere. It is hard not to warm to them each individually, and generally to a faith that chose not to protest about The Book of Mormon musical (which leans hard into the essential absurdity of a religion based on a book made of golden plates revealed by an angel to a 24-year-old farmer’s son 200 years ago) but chose instead to stand outside theatres cheerily asking exiting crowds if they would like to hear about the real thing now.
And yet. To an atheist especially, which I am, there is something so unsettling about the ranks of shining faces beaming atop crisp white shirts and black ties or modest dresses awaiting instruction on how to persuade people to their way of thinking. Or, to put it more strongly, convince them of a falsehood. Or, to put it more strongly still, fill people’s emotional voids with their lies. Which description you feel most apt will depend on your own upbringing, temperament and voids of course, but you will probably find yourself swinging between at least the first two, especially when Sister Cooper’s brother Matt speaks. He left the church after finding himself “increasingly comfortable in queer spaces” and uncomfortable with the LDS emphasis on heterosexual marriage and family, and the strict conception of homosexuality as a sin. Their mother, too, has pulled away from the church but cries at the thought that this means she and her husband will be separated in heaven, unlike “true” Mormon couples.
President Ostler, the head of the Chorley training scheme, is questioned about some of this, and 2019 footage is played of the head of the church warning against marriage between gay people (“God has not changed his definition”) but this is not designed to be a hugely interrogative documentary. It mentions that the polygamy for which the Mormons are known was outlawed in 1890but not the continuing effects and practice of it by offshoot fundamentalist groups. It mentions that Black members were only fully accepted in 1978 but doesn’t ask Elder Johnson, who is Black, how he feels about that or how genuine or widespread the welcome is. And it ends with the wedding between two charming young Mormons, Ashlyn and Joe (yes, that is a lovebite on Joe’s premarital neck – “I didn’t say we weren’t allowed to kiss”, says Ashlyn) who are looking forward to this life and the next together; and with the baptism of Sister Cooper’s first convert.
The church granted the team unprecedented access. It must, overall, be very pleased with what it received in return. Whether viewers feel likewise I would hesitate to say.
The Mormons Are Coming aired on BBC Two and is now on iPlayer.
• This article was amended on 1 March 2023. An earlier version said that although Mormons outlawed polygamy in 1890 it was frequently practised. In fact, polygamy continues only in some offshoot fundamentalist groups that are not related to LDS. This article was further amended on 2 March to make it clear that there have always been Black members of the LDS but they were not allowed to be priests until 1978.
