For a short period of time beginning in the late 1950s, Latter-day Saint missionaries in certain parts of the world required youth to be baptized as a prerequisite for learning how to play baseball. Missionaries had initially used baseball as a tool to befriend the community, but overzealous mission leaders soon took the initiative in a new direction. For a time, it also received the support of general authorities like Alvin R. Dyer and Henry D. Moyle before President David O. McKay dispatched Marion D. Hanks to “clean up the mess.” In this interview, Greg Prince explains the history of baseball baptisms.
Learn more about baseball baptisms in the biography of David O. McKay by Gregory A. Prince.
What were baseball baptisms?
Elders in the British Mission in the late 1950s, under constant pressure from their mission president to achieve higher and higher numbers of baptisms, found that American baseball, then almost unknown in England, was a powerful attractant to young boys and an entrée to their families.
What began as an innovative and innocent approach to proselytizing morphed into a scandal whose ripples reached the highest echelons of the church and triggered a strident response from church president David O. McKay.
How did the concept of baseball baptisms originate?
It was unintentional, perhaps even accidental. American missionaries who wanted something to do on their Diversion Day (later renamed Preparation Day) asked their families to send bats, balls, and mitts so they could play baseball in parks. At that time, when England was still struggling to recover from the devastation of World War II, all things American were attractive, and especially to the young boys. They knew cricket, but baseball was alien, exotic, and magnetic. They wanted to learn this new game.
The American elders, always looking for ways to introduce the gospel, saw it as an entrée to British homes. They would teach the boys baseball, the boys would introduce them to their parents, they would proselytize the families, and baptisms would result.
And, in the early months of this accidental program, baptisms of entire families often occurred.
Who were the key figures?
It is not clear which elders first realized they were onto something that could result in baptisms, but it was “trickle-up revelation,” with the idea originating with the elders and percolating up to the mission president, T. Bowring Woodbury. A salesman by profession, he was always on the lookout for new ways to sell the gospel.
Which general authorities supported or opposed it?
Alvin R. Dyer and Baseball Baptisms
Two supporters stood out. Alvin R. Dyer, an Assistant to the Twelve at the time, was president of the West European Mission (roughly analogous to today’s Area President), with supervision over the British Mission and others in the British Isles and the continent.
He was all-in when Woodbury’s baptism numbers took off.
Several years earlier, Dyer had been president of the Central States Mission, headquartered in Missouri, and Woodbury had been one of his counselors in the mission presidency. Dyer had pioneered what he termed “the manner of conversion,” which differed radically from the traditional proselytizing approach that required months of teaching prior to baptism.
Dyer felt conversion by the spirit could take place within days, in contrast to prolonged conversion through didactics. He, too, was a salesman, and so he was all-in when Woodbury’s baptism numbers took off.
Henry D. Moyle and Baseball Baptisms
The second supporter was Henry D. Moyle, who was second counselor to David O. McKay in the First Presidency. Missionary work and the building program were in his portfolio, and he pushed both to hitherto unimaginable lengths.
One General Authority told me that Moyle promised three new mission presidents he would see to it that they became General Authorities if they performed well—that is, produced high numbers of baptisms.
The three were Woodbury in England, Bernard Brockbank in Scotland, and George Aposhian in the Mid-Atlantic States. (Only Brockbank saw the promise fulfilled.)
General Authority Concerns About Baseball Baptisms
Initially, virtually all the General Authorities assented to the program. But as it began to spin out of control, voices of caution, even opposition, began to emerge.
Harold B. Lee was one prominent voice, but it is not clear how much of his caution or opposition came from the excesses of the baseball baptisms, and how much arose from his mortally-wounded prior friendship with Moyle. Moyle was several places junior to Lee in the Quorum of the Twelve, and Lee never got over Moyle’s being promoted into the First Presidency over himself.
Hugh Brown, a member of the Twelve and not yet in the First Presidency, likely was another opposed to the practice.
And yet another skeptic was Marion D. Hanks, whose role will be explained below.
What motivated missionaries and leaders to engage in baseball baptisms?
Initially, the motivation was simple: baseball opened doors, and traditional proselytizing success followed. (In earlier years, elders in some missions had formed basketball teams that competed with existing leagues, and thus gave exposure to the church. But basketball was already in those areas, and so it didn’t act as the magnet that baseball did.)
I think the primary catalyst of the darkening of baseball baptisms was President Woodbury. Always a salesman, he took each month’s baptismal numbers as a new baseline and pushed the missionaries to increase them incrementally the following month.
Elders who did not produce were shamed and punished.
The pressure was intense and unremitting. Elders who did not produce were shamed and punished. Their response was to turn a corner and use baseball as the doorway to youth baptisms, rather than the doorway to meeting the boys’ families. It got to the point where to join a baseball team, a boy was required to go through an initiation: baptism.
Many of those boys had no idea what the initiation rite meant, which was confirmed later when elders were assigned to visit the homes of the boys and inquire as to their religious affiliation, only to find the parents oblivious.
Not to be outdone, missionaries in Scotland came up with their own scheme for producing youth baptisms. A member of my ward in Los Angeles, several years my senior, told me about what had happened in that mission shortly before he arrived, but had been terminated abruptly. The elders called it “chip-and-dip,” where they would take boys out for fish and chips in return for them being baptized.
The unremitting pressure, particularly from Woodbury, drove some elders to visit cemeteries, copy names from tombstones, and report the names as baptisms.
How were baseball baptisms connected with Henry D. Moyle’s financial ideology?
Henry D. Moyle fostered a top-down approach to lifting the image of the church, which he thought would benefit its programs, particularly the missionary program. He purchased mission homes throughout the world that conveyed an image of financial success—sometimes going overboard and buying palaces that projected imperialism rather than success.
Under his direction the building program, which had been latent during World War II and the Korean War, took off like a shot, with American-style chapels being built throughout the world, even where there were insufficient numbers of church members to sustain them.
The baseball baptisms were a bottom-up phenomenon with whose genesis he had nothing to do with.
But numbers spoke loudly, and he quickly bought into the numbers game.
What were the short-term effects of baseball baptisms on reported conversion numbers?
Baptismal numbers skyrocketed. The Church News regularly reported the statistics of missions, and the three competing missions—British, Scottish, and Mid-Atlantic—featured prominently as world leaders.
What kind of retention rates resulted?
Exact numbers likely do not exist, but estimates are that they were abysmally small.
One can assume that boys who were baptized to become members of a baseball team, and whose families later disavowed knowledge that their sons had joined the church, would never have darkened the doorway of a chapel.
When did Church headquarters notice that things had gone beyond faithful enthusiasm?
It was not a single event. Some General Authorities became increasingly suspicious of what was going on, but since the numbers were happening in President McKay’s ancestral home (Scotland and Wales), he was reluctant to see them as bogus.
Reports began to trickle back from disenchanted missionaries, and even more from returned missionaries who viewed themselves failures because they hadn’t measured up to impossible standards. I heard a report of at least one returned missionary taking his own life because he felt himself a complete failure.
What role did David O. McKay play in addressing the baseball baptisms issue?
With the benefit of hindsight, one can see that President David O. McKay missed the signs—perhaps intentionally so—that should have tipped him off that something was amiss. But such was his way of dealing with other issues: he gave trust and latitude, but if he felt his trust had been violated, he acted precipitously.
Once he understood the magnitude of the excesses, he replaced Woodbury with Marion D. Hanks; Alvin Dyer with N. Eldon Tanner; and took the missionary and building program portfolios from Henry D. Moyle.
What role did Marion D. Hanks play?
Marion D. Hanks was a favorite of David O. McKay. Some say he had been told he would become an apostle. But in 1962, McKay called him in and asked him to go to England to “clean up the mess” (Hanks’s words to me).
Hanks responded by coming down hard on the excesses in the British Mission, shutting down proselytizing completely until he could assess the situation and regroup. He was not diplomatic, and in public settings he called out by name General Authorities senior to himself who he felt to have been complicit in the baseball baptisms scandal.
Some of them shunned him.
His missionaries adored him, but not so many of his colleagues back home. By his own account, some of them shunned him for a couple of years after he returned. While he was in England, a vacancy in the Twelve was filled by Thomas S. Monson, and no additional vacancies occurred prior to McKay’s death. After McKay died, Hanks was essentially banished to Hong Kong for several years.
A missionary who worked under Hanks told me Hanks was summoned by Prince Philip to Buckingham Palace. The message:
Mr. Hanks, I’m very grateful that you are here. Had you not come here, we were going to ask the Mormon Church to leave England. We are well aware of these baseball programs, and all of these silver dollar things and all of this that has been going on with your missionaries. We were this close to initiating legal action to expel the Latter-day Saint Church from England, because of this.
Paraphrase of Prince Philip to Marion D. Hanks
How did it eventually get stopped? Was there a singular catalyst?
As noted above, there was not a single, catalytic event. Rather, there was a gradual accumulation of troubling indicators and an eventual tipping point.
Marion D. Hanks was the stopper in the British Mission, but the word went out to other missions to end the abuses. I went to the Brazilian South Mission just three years after Hanks returned from England, and although we heard whispers of what had happened earlier, we saw none of it.
Did any leaders feel the Church moved too far in the other direction after stopping baseball baptisms?
Yes, although I don’t have names. There has never been a consensus about the “numbers game.”
Some, like Hanks, detested and condemned it, while others asked the rhetorical question, “Is it better to baptize twenty and have ten remain active, or baptize one hundred and have twenty remain active?”
One’s answer likely depends on where one sits.
As an elders’ quorum president for four years, I had the responsibility of trying to engage and reactivate countless members who never took hold. I would gladly have swapped the eighty for the ten. But if you are a “bean counter” whose focus is the “big number”—total membership—you may hold a different opinion.
What lessons can we learn from baseball baptisms?
Baptism and conversion should cohabitate. But the zeal that is so characteristic of missionaries and such an important part of their success in one of the most demanding challenges a teenager can face, can also turn a dark corner. Excess is always waiting around the next corner, and we all must be vigilant in curbing it.
Did you learn something from this article?
Sign up to be notified when we publish new content!
About the Interview Participant
Gregory A. Prince is a Latter-day Saint historian who has researched and written about baseball baptisms in the 1950s. He is the author of several related books about 20th century church history, including David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism, Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History, and Gay Rights and the Mormon Church: Intended Actions, Unintended Consequences.
Further Reading
- What Was Latter-day Saint Rebaptism?
- Who Was Clare Middlemiss?
- How Did David O. McKay Transform the Church Into a Global Faith?
- How Was the 1978 Priesthood Revelation a Process?
- What Was the Chicago Experiment?
Baseball Baptisms Resources
- David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism (University of Utah Press)
- To Be a Friend of Christ: The Life of Marion D. Hanks (Signature Books)
- Lengthen Your Stride: The Presidency of Spencer W. Kimball (Deseret Book)
- I-Thou vs. I-It Conversions: The Mormon “Baseball Baptism” Era [PDF] (Sunstone)
- The Cumorah Baseball Club : Mormon Missionaries and Baseball in South Africa (Journal of Mormon History)
- The Woodbury Years: An Insider’s Look at Baseball Baptisms in Britain (Sunstone)
6 replies on “What Were Baseball Baptisms?”
Kurt, I read all your “From the Desk reports avidly. They’re always well done. The recent report on Marion D Hank’s and this one are somewhat companion pieces. Very good. Keep it up!
Thanks, Jeff!
Thanks Kurt for sharing the article. I was enthralled with your history on the use of “baseball baptisms.” As a 11 year old boy, my brother and I, who was nine, were approached about playing baseball. They found us playing in an old park in San Antonio, Texas, and asked our parents if we could play on the team. We were both very excited and agreed to do so with my parents permission. They never talked to us about the gospel. I can still remember riding in the back seat of their car to a game. All I remember is it was fun and I love the Elders. Three years later we were in Florida, and another set of missionaries knocked on our door. They wanted to teach us the gospel. Because I had had such a positive experience with them earlier, it was a given that we were ready to listen to their most important message. Long story short we were baptized in May of 67 and have never looked back. Since that initial introduction to the missionaries was such a pivotal moment in my families life, I can only say that “baseball baptisms” worked for us. I was wondering if it might be possible to find out where you got the painting of the missionaries with the kids on the ball field. I would love to get a copy of it for my posterity. Thanks again for sharing the history around this controversial missionary approach. At least from my perspective I will always remember those “angels in the outfield.” Steve Sunday
What an incredible story. Thanks for sharing this, Steve!
Kurt. Nice website and content. I have enjoyed reading. This article was very interesting. I am a retired illustrator and did many pieces for the church and have always tried to keep up with current artists. I don’t recognize the style or artist of the illustration you use for this article. Who is the artist or was this AI generated?
Thanks for reading, Scott! The featured image was created in the style of Norman Rockwell using Midjourney.