Vivian Meik (1894-1955) was a noted British newspaperman in the middle of the 20th century. He first became aware of Mormonism in a favorable way immediately after World War II, when he saw the Church Welfare Plan in action in Great Britain and elsewhere in Europe. He wrote a number of newspaper articles about Mormonism, including this open letter to Church members in 1947 suggesting what changes would be needed in the standard program to make missionary efforts as successful in Britain as welfare efforts were proving to be.

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This is one of the most difficult articles I have ever faced. I have spent weeks of personal enquiry on it. I have made more than two hundred long distance calls across the length and breadth of Britain and through every grade of British society. I have checked and double-checked my facts.

But I am still doubtful about your reaction.

I am going to suggest that the time has come when several adjustments in your missionary approach to this country might be profitably considered.

Some of you may reject my suggestion out of hand as an impertinent criticism. To those I would say in all sincerity that there is no impertinence in my heart.

On the contrary, I am writing this because I have learned to esteem those of you whom I have met here doing their great work so selflessly. For them and for those who follow them, and for those who send them, this is the offering of a friend. I offer my knowledge and experience of my own people in the hope that it may help make their future work a little less onerous, perhaps a little more fruitful.

I believe sincerely that never has so great or promising a field of endeavor been offered to you as in Britain today. I believe that you could revive my spiritually starved country in one generation.

IF …

IF you could find the only way into its heart – a way jealously guarded by the twin dragons of age-old insular prejudice and aspen-leaf conservatism.

I believe I can help you past these dragons.

Because I have been so impressed by the efficiency with which you have organized your relief work in this part of the world, I began to wonder why your Church had not met wit an equally great success in your missionary work here. You have done well, but as I see it you deserve to do many hundred times better. You have the right personnel, unfaltering zeal and the spiritual message for which the world is hungering without knowing the urgency of its need.

So after I came to know men like your Presidents Ezra Taft Benson, Alma Sonne, Hugh B. Brown and Selvoy Boyer, I determined to find out for myself.

As a first step I decided to approach fifty typical Britishers – all utter strangers – from every walk of life and, using my official credentials to give them confidence, ask them two questions without preliminary notice:

“What do you thin about Mormonism? What do Christmas and Easter mean to you?”

Because I could hardly credit their replies, I actually asked three hundred people.

These ranged from Dukes to dustmen, countesses to charwomen. They included accountants, bankers, clerks, commission agents, shop girls, telegraphists, lawyers, bus conductors, school teachers, truck drivers, housewives, fishermen, soldiers, sailors and airmen, nurses, policemen, members of Parliament (Senators to you) miners, farmers, rich playboys, business executives, ex-convicts and street walkers.

Among them were people from every part of England, Scotland and Wales – from the cold, dour north of the crofters near John o’Groats, from the gloomy, grim, industrial England of Durham and Yorkshire, from Lancashire and Wales across the country to the hunting shires, from the fat acres of the rich south and the glorious red earth of Devon and Cornwall to Land’s end.

Two hundred and ninety four of these people countered with their own query: “Aren’t Mormons the people who have lots of wives?” Six “didn’t know.” Seventeen of the former mixed you up with Moslems and harems.

To my second question, one hundred and ninety-six said Christmas and Easter meant only good time holidays with pay. Eighty-one said they were Church festivals used as an excuse to break away from work. Thirteen (and none was from the upper brackets) gave the correct answer.

I can guess what these figures tell you. I too, feel ashamed, humbled – heartbroken.

It is idle to pretend that our spiritual near-bankruptcy is not our own fault. Britain’s, I mean, of course. Some may plead long years of extenuating circumstances – the war, the struggle for bare survival against overwhelming odds, our tightened belts, our disillusion, our suffering in the aftermath of broken pledges of our leaders in Church and State, our depressing future – altogether almost a gospel of despair for 45,000,000 people.

But to my mind that is not sufficient excuse. The tragedy is that these are the same millions who somehow raised enough faith and courage in 1940 to stand alone and undismayed against the evil that straddled Europe like a colossus as it thrust forward to enslave the world.

After the shock of my questionnaire, I imposed a task on myself. I want to do my little bit in helping to build a new bridge across which you can reach us spiritually in the same way as your brilliantly efficient relief missions are reaching out and saving your hungry friends in Europe.

That bridge is a new understanding.

May I begin then, by suggesting that the methods you are using today in your missionary work, while of proved success in U.S.A. and elsewhere, mean much less than they should to the British mentality. Except in isolated instances they simply do not register. It is not your fault – far form it. One explanation is in the revelation of the hide-bound prejudice created by the outworn slander about polygamy which my question on Mormonism uncovered as a still living, active thing. I have ample supporting evidence to show that it will not be allowed to die – unless you kill it, again and again.

My first suggestion, therefore, is that somehow you adjust your missionary training to make the clearance of this slander your first aim. I will go so far as to say that, in my opinion, unless and until that prejudice is wiped out of the British mass mind once and for all, 95 percent of your great and selfless work will remain barren. But once that is cleared away you will go right ahead to a success beyond your own dreams.

You have undoubted genius in your ranks – and I, for one, will never believe that it cannot devise a solution.

My next suggestion towards a better understanding of our character is that there should be far greater participation by your young missionaries in our social life. Britain doesn’t know nearly enough about your personalities.

The other night I dined with your President Sonne and President Boyer. I have never spent a more delightful evening, or felt more sincerely welcome and at home. yet almost all those non-Mormons here whom I have met who know a little about you, envisage your missionaries as one-idea, stodgy, humorless people who want to ram God down our throats, hymn books and all.

After dinner I met some of your young missionaries. I have no hesitation in saying they are as fine examples as I have seen anywhere of clean living, vigorous intelligence. They are obviously able to hold their own anywhere in sport or social intercourse, and thousands like me would give them a welcome in our homes and clubs, if only we knew how to get them there!

Yes, I would definitely like to see these fine young people living, not in your mission headquarters but in English homes, meeting us at our best and at our worst, in good times and hard – the real us. Automatically then your unchallengeable faith would receive its greatest propagation in the routine behaviour of their day-to-day lives.

From what I saw of them, those young men and women I met at the Boyers’ could “behave” their way into any British understanding and, much more important, into our hearts.

If they could live thus as a matter of course, I forecast that soon there would be no question of any hard preaching, but almost one of defense against a continual barrage of eager, thrusting questions from my people for knowledge and yet more knowledge.

This brings me to the written word. I think that I know enough about it – in Britain anyway – to suspect that much of your effort is being wasted, measured in the terms of results, either by disposal of your Books of Mormon or the distribution of haphazard pamphlets, selected without studied plan of continuity. As it is done at present, that evangel, too, does not register on the British mind.

The explanation is that for many years – the last seven specially – we have been gradually reduced to a form of tabloid living. Our newspapers have been reduced to mere four and six page rags built up of terse paragraphs; our once square meals are now only small rations of calories and vitamins. Our coal, once by the ton is now delivered (perhaps) by the rationed sack. Everything in our lives today is on this miniature scale – a contracted, intensified tabloid – and this has also happened to the spiritual side of England.

so instead of your present technique, I should like to see your greatest authorities at home extract all that is finest and most beautiful and vital in your Mormon books and put it into simple English in separate yet closely linked publications, bigger than pamphlets, smaller than standard books.

if these were distributed – through your missionaries living in and knowing our English homes – your teaching would soon cover Britain. What is more, it would keep Britain permanently covered.

But just as I have stressed the primary need for destroying once and for all that “polygamy complex,” let me again stress the need for greatest simplicity in your literature of tomorrow.

This is not only because we know so little of you today, but because I am thinking as far ahead as the day after tomorrow, for by then our newest tragedy will have reached its peak – the tragedy of the near-illiteracy of our growing folk.

For six years, cowering under the hail of Hitler’s bombs and dislocated even in evacuation areas, education almost came to a standstill. The result is that a new generation is arising which can do little more than barely read or write. All the “cultural” background they have is the fantastic chimera of the modern motion picture with its distortion of gangsterism and divorce.

to this generation God and His word will have to be explained almost in words of one syllable. It is a terrible prospect – but it is also an inescapable fact. Let me give you just one example of how close this problem is getting. Even in the British army, second only to your own in personal standards, nearly 20 percent of the latest draft are below the minimum literacy requirements.

You will appreciate, I know, how vital this matter of the simple word has become.

There are other things I should like much to discuss with you but unfortunately I have not the space. But I shall feel proud and privileged if any of my suggestions find a little niche in your long term policy for Britain.

You for your faith, I in my search for the spiritual ease both my loved people and I need so much, literally must find a rendezvous where we can reach into each others’ hearts and minds. There is only one possible rendezvous and one road to that final meeting place – over the bridge of Understanding to the forecourt of a Temple in Britain.

I pray that I will see the laying of the first stone.

Full disclosure: Vivian Meik converted and was baptized a member of the Church not long after publishing this article. At the time he wrote it, though, he was not a member.