The church in the ad is particularly harmful. I had to fight to get out of it, and only after they took 10% of my income for years and trafficked me. They want money, power, and control, not increased numbers at their services.
and trafficked me
There’s a serious “wait, what?!?” here. The church sells slaves?
I was threatened by local leaders and family if I didn’t go on a 2 year mission in another country, then when I got there, they:
- took my passport immediately and locked it in a building I couldn’t access
- required 12 to 16 hours of work a day, with discipline if productivity dropped
- refused to provide adequate food or medical care
- restricted my communication with my family
- assigned me a companion to surveil me 24/7 and report disobedience to leadership (and assigned me to surveil someone else)
- disciplined me when I was physically and sexually assaulted by other missionaries
I didn’t want to call it trafficking for a long time. I figured maybe God just had a weird way of doing things. But my spouse works at a recovery center for survivors of violence (including trafficking) and helped me realize that’s what it was.
A pretty big misconception is that trafficking has to look like selling slaves, and I agree that’s an egregious thing, but it can be a lot more broad than that.
There are a lot of resources at https://humantraffickinghotline.org/en if you’re curious. My mission experience checked just about every box for labor trafficking, and I’ve heard very similar stories from a lot of other people who have been missionaries.
Were you mormon? Or is this more widespread than I thought?
If you are talking about the mormon church, and if what I’ve heard is correct, you missed an added point that makes it look all the worse. That you had to pay for the right to let them do that to you. Normally in a labour trafficking situation you’d at least be expecting some sort of compensation, even if it’s grossly inadequate and ends up largely back in the hands of the traffickers as they charge for accommodation and transport. But from what I’ve heard, mormons do the labour entirely for free, and pay a large amount for the “honour”.
They might be talking about a mission? Personally wouldn’t call that trafficking, but it can be pretty brutal depending on the mission
It is trafficking. Growing up in that church, I still agree with a lot of the stated philosophical beliefs, the actual behavior of most of the community is incredibly disappointing and leans cult-like. The mission isn’t inherently trafficking, the religion isn’t inherently a cult, but it’s not beating the allegations and more within need to call out the members that commit these illegal organized atrocities and make it into a cult.
