RE: Door knocking
September 18, 2019 at 7:50 pm
(This post was last modified: September 18, 2019 at 7:51 pm by mordant.)
The JWs and Mormons, of course, really flog this and you're a fourth-class citizen of the community at best if you don't uphold these imperatives of going door to door. This is an artifact of their minority status within the religious world, and their desire, despite not subscribing to the traditional Christian creeds, to be considered Christians. They desperately want to grow their numbers, any way they can.
In the evangelical world I come from, door to door visitation was something a very few did, and there were occasional half-hearted efforts to shame the rest of us into it, but it never reached critical mass. We used indirect means sometimes, such as busing children to Sunday School and promoting that and things like Vacation Bible School and release-time classes as fun events where they can give parents a break in exchange for indoctrinating their little ones, and if the kids keep coming or wanting to come, they hopefully drag their parents along eventually.
In most of the rest of Protestantism and Catholicism, cold-call proselytization is exceedingly rare. It is more a cultural pull, and sometimes, as in the case of state religions, there would be a mixture of piety with public policy.
Recently I've been reading between the lines of these little communities in places like Italy and Ireland that are putting out incentives for people to move to these areas that are struggling to keep their population from shrinking, and what you find is that they don't just want you to move in and mind your own business, they want you to be "community oriented" or some other euphemism for participating in the prevailing religious education and observance. Even when it's not overtly in the pitch I would be unsurprised to find it in the practice.
So it goes, there are a million ways to compel conformance and discourage deviance. Overtly awkward practices like door to door calling is just one of them, and not the most common, either.
In the evangelical world I come from, door to door visitation was something a very few did, and there were occasional half-hearted efforts to shame the rest of us into it, but it never reached critical mass. We used indirect means sometimes, such as busing children to Sunday School and promoting that and things like Vacation Bible School and release-time classes as fun events where they can give parents a break in exchange for indoctrinating their little ones, and if the kids keep coming or wanting to come, they hopefully drag their parents along eventually.
In most of the rest of Protestantism and Catholicism, cold-call proselytization is exceedingly rare. It is more a cultural pull, and sometimes, as in the case of state religions, there would be a mixture of piety with public policy.
Recently I've been reading between the lines of these little communities in places like Italy and Ireland that are putting out incentives for people to move to these areas that are struggling to keep their population from shrinking, and what you find is that they don't just want you to move in and mind your own business, they want you to be "community oriented" or some other euphemism for participating in the prevailing religious education and observance. Even when it's not overtly in the pitch I would be unsurprised to find it in the practice.
So it goes, there are a million ways to compel conformance and discourage deviance. Overtly awkward practices like door to door calling is just one of them, and not the most common, either.
