OCR Text |
Show Acting Alone Page 395 people for such perilous, seemingly irreligious missions as the Elder's encampment; but, with the new zeal for Christ and His Gospel in Reagan's America, there were simply too many missionaries for missionary positions available. Because they were his coreligionists the Elder was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that, to the extent they still were capable of feeling personal wants and ambitions, the missionaries (or "Companions," as young Axelrad thought they were called) would rather baptize than bomb people. But they must take what positions were available to serve the Lord. And so they did, with that strange, impeccably clean, empty-eyed expression they passed off for cheerfulness, a frigid gaze that, even at this late date, struck a strange awe in a certain vestigially Italian corner of Elder Cicerone's heart. The missionary youth of the Elder's church did indeed resemble automatons and zombies and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's famous "galvanized corpse," as the Elder's more secular young friends so unkindly put it. And it was really too bad that the church felt obliged to indoctrinate its young people so thoroughly, some would say brutally, just to extract an ounce of loyalty from them. But there you have the contemporary American sensibility: corrupt at every level with the irreverence and individualism of the leftwing forces of decay who have run the country for the past thirty years. But such sterilization, shall we say, of personality has its attendant practical advantages. There could be absolutely no security problems among the missionaries. There was never cause to worry about any of them getting curious about anything at all. They asked no question beyond, "What do I do now?" for they'd been taught from birth to accept the wisdom and authority |