209: Creating Religious Pollution: The LDS Church & Latin America: Samy Galvez

Low retention and a failure to contextualize means that the LDS Church continues to be a minority faith tradition in South American.   Missionaries who are called to serve from nations outside,  are more often than not culturally incompetent to proselyte in this region of the world and sometimes do more mischief than good.  With complex economic and political conditions and even more strained historical relationships with the United States, missionaries and General Authorities too often speak into a cultural void,  organising the LDS Church around ideas that work in Utah but have little relevance anywhere else.

Samy Galvez (Guatemala) joins me to discuss the Latin American Mormon context and to critique the issues of class, religion, politics, race, culture and ethnicity that are either overlooked or misunderstood in LDS Latin American mission and ecclesial practice.