Are Mormons spared from reality? Hardly

A common claim during this "Mormon Moment," in opinion columns and elsewhere, is that Mormons live in a bubble. Most specifically, Mormonism is said to have isolated a certain current presidential candidate from "real life" (during his missionary service, for example).

So I've been reflecting upon my own experience, and on how my faith has — or hasn't — insulated me from the Real World.

Like most contemporary Latter-day Saints, I grew up outside of Utah. I had no Mormon teachers in school and my friends were all Catholics, Protestants or agnostics; the youth culture of late 1960s California was anything but church-approved.

I served a mission. Like other missionaries, my equally young companion and I went door to door on our own, never knowing what we would encounter.

Serving in German-speaking Switzerland, I encountered friendly atheists, militant Evangelical critics, drunks, verbal abuse, devout Catholics, contemptuous secularists, complacent materialists, frank sensualists and hostile policemen. One man brandished a pistol just six inches from my nose. ("My husband isn't very enthused," his embarrassed wife explained.) Late one night, while the mission president was away, a would-be suicide called mission headquarters. I spent roughly four hours persuading her not to kill herself. I'd just turned 21.

But Switzerland was downright comfortable compared to many places where young missionaries serve. Seeing the open sewers near a nephew's last mission apartment, his mother exclaimed, "But you never mentioned this in your letters!" "You think I'm crazy?" he replied. "I didn't want you trying to bring me home."

Missionary service seems an odd method for keeping impressionable young Mormons within a protective bubble.

So does life in a typical Mormon congregation. Many of the people I've worshipped with might have been my friends anyway, even without the church. Many wouldn't have. And some have been quite irritating. (I probably exasperated them, too.) Nonetheless, we've learned to worship and to serve together.

Church service just doesn't seem a very good instrument for sparing Mormons from exposure to reality.

During my tenure as a bishop, for instance, I worked with many congregants leading good, healthy, successful lives. But I often also had to deal, one on one, with people suffering the consequences of drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, emotional problems, dysfunctional families, poverty, various chronic limitations, joblessness and despair. I expect that everybody who has been asked to serve in such positions — and this includes that current presidential candidate — has had comparable experiences.