When I worked at the NGO, my boss was a French Catholic, very Catholic who had a nun as a best friend. One day she asked me about my faith and I told her: “We are the ones called Mormon or Latter-day Saints,” and she said, “and before joining the LDS church, which church were you going to?” I explained to her that I was Lutheran, but I married a Catholic, but since my husband refused to go to church, I did not go there anymore. So she asked me, “Why don’t you just become Lutheran again and stop going to the Catholic church then; why did you convert to Mormonism?” I told her that the LDS church convinced me. My boss thought that the LDS church was a strange church. She said many things to me. There were also neighbors who were saying bad things about the LDS church but they stopped persecuting me when they found out that my faith to the gospel is well rooted. I know that I’m not perfect; sometimes I make mistakes, but it doesn’t bother the church as long as I keep my faith strong.
The church doesn’t force people to do anything because we have our free will. Take for example the Famadihana [a funerary tradition in Madagascar that involves exhuming dead relatives, rewrapping them, and dancing with their corpses]. Even though the church doesn’t accept this custom, it doesn’t prevent people from attending it. According to the church, we shouldn’t play with the dead because they can’t feel anything anymore. Moreover, it forces other people to spend money. Personally, I go to this kind of event even though I don’t agree one hundred percent because it’s very important for my family. I don’t want to deceive them. There is a big difference between the Famadihana and the baptism for the dead. The baptism for the dead gives choice to those who are already dead to accept or refuse the baptism and the gospel of the church.