“Every member a missionary.” You’ve probably heard this phrase more times than you can count. But what you probably don’t know is that it has its roots in the silent films Trapped by the Mormons and Married to a Mormon.
Winifred Graham was one of the most ardent anti-Mormons in Britain. She had written two pulp fiction novels about Mormon polygamy—Ezra the Mormon (1907) and The Love Story of a Mormon (1911)—as well as approved of a bevy of films attacking the Church, such as A Victim of the Mormons (1911), The Flower of the Mormon City (1911), The Mountain Meadows Massacre (1912), The Danites (1912), and Marriage or Death (1912).
In the early 1920s, she was fresh back from a visit to the United States where she had succeeded in getting apostle James Talmage booed off a Pittsburgh stage, and she was determined to keep the Mormons out of England.
Even though the threat of American missionaries abducting British girls for their polygamous harems in Utah seemed like a rather remote one in 1922, a full thirty-two years after the Woodruff Manifesto, she somehow succeeded in convincing the Master Films studio in southwest London to make two films about exactly that.
The first was Married to a Mormon and the second was Trapped by the Mormons, adapted from her own The Love Story of a Mormon (one of the few silent films about Mormonism you can watch on YouTube today). Both featured American missionaries using treachery and violence to entrap their unsuspecting victims only to have them saved from certain death at the last moment by their faithful British beaus.
While critics panned the movies, the public ate them up. Future LDS Church President (but then missionary) Ezra Taft Benson was so oppressed by agitated crowds that at one point he had to call on police protection, writing in his journal, “Winnifred Graham on our track again.”
European Mission President Orson Whitney, who struggled to handle the situation, was replaced in November 1922 by his younger colleague David O. McKay. He responded to the public fear the films had produced by forbidding all door-to-door proselytizing throughout England as well as street meetings in most areas. He also reinstated a rule from 1912 forbidding missionaries from teaching or even being seen with young women.
The common assumption is that the rule to not be alone with members of the opposite sex is to prevent romantic or sexual situations, and while this may be its primary function today, its original purpose was McKay trying to avoid charges of polygamous kidnappings.
McKay’s measures helped calm the storm of anti-Mormon sentiment, but without door-to-door or street contacting, how were the missionaries to do their work? McKay struck upon a solution: he would empower the local British Mormons to find friends and family members for the missionaries to teach. He summed his idea up in the catchy slogan “Every member a missionary,” and implemented it throughout the mission. When he became Church president in 1951, he made it a centerpiece of his administration.
To this day, all Church members, not just missionaries, are expected to share the gospel, a cultural norm that didn’t exist before Trapped and Married created the atmosphere that drove McKay to reshape the very concept of missionary work. If Winifred Graham had hoped her films would stop the spread of Mormonism, she would be very disappointed in the actual legacy they left.