In various Hollywood movies, there is a scene in which people either enter an airport terminal from the street, or from an arriving plane, and as they file into the building, there stands a Christian, a Hare Krishna, a Scientologist, a Jehovah’s Witness etc., and missionaries of various other religions, each trying to talk to you to convert you to their religion.
Is there a truth to this, or is this just an exaggeration in movies?
43 comments
I’ve never seen it irl.
I haven’t ever seen that happen
Not real.
It was very big back in the 1970’s. The depiction in the movie “Airplane!” was on target. But it stopped happening decades ago.
What movies other than Airplane have you seen this in?
I’ve never heard of this in my life.
There are usually Jehovah’s Witness displays/stands in the area between the public transportation station and the terminal in ATL, but I’ve never seen anyone/anything else.
I haven’t seen this since the 70’s when Hare Krishna was big. Hippies in the lobby and flight insurance for individual flights was sold. It was a very strange time
I’ve never even seen this in a movie, let alone IRL.
It was mostly the Hare Krishnas who did this in any organized way, and it isn’t really a thing anymore. And not just airports….I used to run into folks like this at county fairs and the like.
I think there was one specific cult that used to do that a long time ago.
Nope. Not a thing.
Hare Krishna was definitely a thing pre-9/11. In those days, anyone could just wander around an airport but since then, you are confined to the small area outside of the TSA checkpoint. I don’t remember seeing any other sect but it might have happened.
I have never seen or heard of this happening in a movie, and definitely not in real life.
I have never seen this in my life and I have been to multiple of airports in different regions of the country.
That is actually real. It has declined since the 70s but there are still groups who do it. I saw on JWs in the airport just recently.
I’ve flown hundreds of times. If this exists, I’ve been too busy to notice. Quite frankly the airport seems like one of the worst places possible for this type of “recruitment”. People are busy, stressed, and trying to make it to places on time.
Now they come to college campuses honestly.
It was common to see Hari Krishnas in the airport in the 70’s and maybe early 80’s. I vaguely remember seeing Christian preachers, but not nearly as many. The scene in Airplane where he hits the Krishna guy got cheers in the theatre because it’s what everyone wanted to do but couldn’t.
It used to be. Not these days.
It was definitely a thing with Hare Krishna. Also remember people giving flags for vet donations and people passing out crosses for donations too. There used to be all types of weird things going on at airports, but ramped up security stopped it pretty much.
I remember seeing the Hare Krishna groups occassionally at airports in the 80s, but this was apparently a huge drop from their near omnipresence in the 70s. I stopped seeing them by the 90s.
Airports got a lot more aggressive about security and driving off people just loitering around, so it’s a bit of a dead trope now, a dead unicorn trope, in fact.
If anything they’d probably be going after arrivals, immigrants are prime targets (you don’t have as strong a social group here and if you’re willing to change countries you’re probably open to changing religions as well).
This was pretty common , but a 1991 Supreme Court case (https://www.oyez.org/cases/1991/91-155) ruled that airplane terminals aren’t public spaces, for those purposes. They vanished from airports after that, though they can still proselytize outside them.
(Simply distributing literature was, apparently, approved, but only in certain areas.)
I don’t know that the Hare Krishnas were the most aggressive of the bunch, but in those days, they wore their hair in a particular way and wore robes, so they were certainly the easiest to spot.
On a related note, here in some train stations in NYC, you still see something similar- when I worked at Grand Central Station, there was a place where the Jehovah’s Witnesses always set up, and another where a guy from Falun Gong would set up a sign and meditate near it. They mainly handed out their literature if asked- the old school way, pre court case, they might have actively approached you.
(Scientologists set up in a pedestrian tunnel over in the 42nd St station, handing pamphlets out- you can frequently see little piles of the pamphlets on the ground about 20 feet away from this, where people have read them while walking and just dropped them.)
I used to run into Hare Krishna people in the Boston Common/Downtown Crossing area of Boston, all the time. By this time, they weren’t wearing the robes and dressed kind of like college students.
And college campuses get missionaries in certain areas, but they tend to be the kind who harangue you instead of actually try for converts.
Nowadays, at least in places like Central Park un NYC (but I saw them in Chicago too) there are “monks” collecting money for their “temple”, but they are just scam artists (there’s no temple, they’re just hustling money).
Anyway, post 9/11, there’s a lot of restrictions on who can just hang around an air-terminal at all, so you also don’t see panhandlers, political campaigners, etc. like you used to.
Definitely a relic of the past. I haven’t seen anyone doing the airport missionary thing in decades. Like since I was a kid in the 1970s. And even then, I don’t remember that being much of a thing.
Saw some at DTW
The missionaries have moved their way onto college campuses.
I’ve been to a few airports in major cities (i.e. Hartford, Nashville, Albany, Indy, etc.) and I’ve never seen it personally.
I’d be more likely to see them on sidewalks in bigger cities, but I’ve only seen it once (and I travel at least once a year).
I’ve never seen that in a movie, and I’ve certainly never seen it in real life. When I lived in Utah (high Mormon population), it was common to see groups of Mormons at the airport welcoming a missionary back from their trip, but they weren’t trying to convert anyone who walked by.
Airplane!
I do remember seeing Hare Krishna at LAX and Ontario when I was a kid in the early 90s, though. I regularly fly through those airports now and I haven’t seen any of them now that I think of it
I’ve never seen anything like that in my life
I’m more likely to get a Jehova’s Witness at my door than to be asked about religion at an airport.
To the limited extent it happened decades ago, post-9/11 restrictions on who could get into the terminals pretty much killed it off altogether.
With security the way it is these days, that hobby of long gone.
They did used to hang at airports, especially the Moonies but 9/11 basically put a stop to that
I occasionally ran into ambush-style missionaries on my college campus. Christians and Buddhists, mostly. It was never anything as extreme as what you’re thinking. Another college in my state would get those people with the giant anti-abortion posters, but I’ve personally never seen something that extreme.
There are two Jehovah’s Witnesses stationed at the entrance to one of the skybridges between the parking garage and the terminal at Seattle-Tacoma Interational Airport every day.
They’ve been there for years. It’s how I know I’m on the right skybridge to get to the PreCheck security line inside.
People would have to be really dedicated to do this in most American airports.
* Expect to pay $20 a day or more to park, and that’s at an uncovered, far away lot that you might have to take a shuttle to get to the airport.
* Not to mention commuting time. As most people do not want to live near a loud airport, they usually end up having a dead zone around it. So that’s another 20-30 minutes just to get there and get parked
* You can only access the pre-security sections of the airport, which often doesn’t have as many shops and amenities as post-security.
* Speaking of costs, have fun paying $20 for a cold sandwich and a bottle of water for your lunch break
* Most people just want to get in and out of airports as soon as possible and aren’t open to random people talking to them.
Anyway, I have never seen any type of proselytizing at any airports.
I have never seen this in my 30 years of life or my past 5 years of frequent flying, but my parents tell me it used to happen back in the 70s and 80s.
I’ve seen the Hare Krishna at the airport before but it was decades ago.
I occasionally see the Mormon missionaries riding their bikes or walking. I’m not sure about the JWs. They came to my house once but it was a very long time ago.
Having them lining up is an exaggeration to be hilarious. But having them in airports from time to time absolutely does happen.
It used to be more common before 9/11 happened and the Internet became the main communication system everybody uses during the early to mid 2000s.
However there is still a lot of religious freedom related items in most of our major airports. Almost all of them have prayer rooms intended for Muslim employees to use multiple times a day from inside security, though anybody can use one. Many have Christian Science reading rooms somewhere.
Sometimes you will see people from the cult religions looking for followers or advertisements from Falun Gong / Shen Yun and so on.
There can also be other unusual things such as multilingual signs in restrooms explaining how to escape from being a human trafficking victim. Weird overparanoid customs checkpoints trying to find drugs. Government sniffing dogs.
US airports have been very strange and rather shitty ever since the 9/11 attacks.
Never seen in real life more common in our jails criminals just use religion to exchange drugs with each other.
I’ve never seen this in a movie or in real life