Mormons Make Great FBI Recruits

As a former mormon with most of my family in intelligence or military, the Security Clearance reason may be valid but I call bullshit on the language skills reason. Most mormon missionaries will never learn enough of their respective mission languages to actually have normal conversations, as 99% of their conversations revolve around religion. And the FBI doesn’t really have an emphasis on language anyway, that is more of a CIA thing (which also recruits a lot of Mormons). It’s funny how all of the glowing traits that are claimed about Mormons that are cited as reasons to hire them always come from the perspective of other Mormons.

That being said, this is the first one that I’ve read that has slightly touched on one of the major reasons: Mormon nepotism. The Mormon Mafia talk in this article may sound like a joke, but it is very much a real phenomenon. If you hire a single Mormon, and that person achieves a position of influence in your company, you will wake up some day to the realization that there are now hundreds of Mormons...and they all had a say in hiring each other, and they all give glowing reviews about each other, and they all end up in the same organizations, and they all get promoted in lockstep with each other. The Mormon Mafia isn't an FBI thing, it is a real phenomenon that happens in a lot of different places. I got a great job out of college primarily out of Mormon nepotism. I got fired after leaving Mormonism for the same reason.

A good way to prevent this from happening is, not surprisingly, a general anti-nepotism practice: don’t allow people interview candidates from their alma mater. 99% of these asshole Mormons that try to create Mormon Mafias within companies went to BYU, and 99% of the people they want to hire at the exclusion of others also went to BYU. It works surprisingly well for non-Mormon nepotism as well...never underestimate an HBS grad's tendency to think other HBS grads are the bee's knees. Don’t let them have a say in their hiring.

It helps that the mormon faith is fairly harmless as far as religions go. Aside from maybe polygamy and abuse cases, there are few explicit conflicts of interests. The LDS church runs hedge funds and have a somewhat less extreme political orientation than e.g. southern baptists or Scientologists . Most Mormons actually practice the family values they preach, unlike say evangelicals.

"Productive" is a judgement about tactics that like-minded people can disagree on. Calling someone a bigot isn't an indictment of their soul or character or motivations. It is a shorthand for describing their actions. Mormonism frequently works towards and supports discriminatory policies, and so can reasonably be described as bigoted.

They can individually act differently, but if you're associated with a politically active abrahamic religion you're gonna have to carry that cross, so to speak. No one owes anyone the benefit of the doubt on this.

Certainly, but shorthand usually gets corrupted by sloganeering and shuts down productive discussions over preference.

Once you realize all politics is preference, it’s illuminating to consider more nuanced strategy.