Missionary (im)Position

I just caught this on the news last night and don't quite know how to react. Apparently some fella in Las Vegas (Chad Hardy) was just excommunicated from the LDS Church for publishing a calendar of shirtless returned missionaries.

Here's a link to the AP article.

I checked out the website and the poses seemed modest enough, but I can understand why the church wouldn't want to be associated with it. Calendars like that are clearly designed to titillate. The website (mormonsexposed.com) also featured some hilarious tongue-in-cheek t-shirts. Even funnier, they named the colors each t-shirt came in. (Brigham Blue, Dutch Oven Brown, Fireside Orange, We don't drink Coffee...)

So...mormonsexposed.com...is that "Mormons Exposed" or "Mormon Sex Posed"? And more importantly, did the news coverage prompt such an influx of curiosity that the website crashed? I checked it out last night and it was sluggish...this morning, the site was down. Wrath of God, perhaps? Or has the media coverage created a widespread missionary fetish?

So are the guys really returned missionaries, or did they hire a bunch of models and make up stories to go along with their profiles? One could probably dismiss the calendar as good-natured fun if the former is true, and based on the website, it appears that it is. But if they just hired models and fabricated mission backgrounds, as benign as the pictures may be, someone's crossed a line. While I completely support people's right to expression, holding someone else's values up for public ridicule is unconscionable. Very poor taste.

Still, how can anybody really know Hardy's intent? I seriously doubt it was to ridicule the LDS Church and its values. At the same time, it does seem an odd vehicle for self expression. Ultimately, I think this is simply a case of another businessperson who has identified a product that will sell. There's obviously a market, and I don't really see the harm. Chad Hardy doesn't claim to be publishing it under the auspices of the church, and the church has distanced itself from the project by excommunicating him. In a happier note, it appears that a portion of the calendar sales is going to charity. I sincerely hope so.

One final thought: in my twenty-five months in North Carolina as a missionary, I saw quite a few shirtless elders. Few looked like the boys in the calendar. Granted there are a lot of pretty missionaries, but there are a lot of pretty-average ones too. And as the elders are notorious for their eating abilities, maybe THAT would make a good (or at least accurate) calendar. Men on a Mission II: Suppertime.