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The Mormons' True Great Trek Has Been To Social Acceptance And A $30
Billion Church Empire
 In Salt Lake City, Utah, on a block known
informally as Welfare Square, stands a 15-barreled silo filled with wheat:
19 million lbs., enough to feed a small city for six months. At the foot
of the silo stands a man--a bishop with the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints--trying to explain why the wheat must not be moved, sold
or given away.
Around the corner is something called the bishop's storehouse. It is
filled with goods whose sole purpose is to be given away. On its shelves,
Deseret-brand laundry soaps manufactured by the Mormon Church nestle next
to Deseret-brand canned peaches from the Mormon cannery in Boise, Idaho.
Nearby are Deseret tuna from the church's plant in San Diego, beans from
its farms in Idaho, Deseret peanut butter and Deseret pudding. There is no
mystery to these goods: they are all part of the huge Mormon welfare
system, perhaps the largest nonpublic venture of its kind in the country.
They will be taken away by grateful recipients, replaced, and the
replacements will be taken away.
But the grain in the silo goes nowhere. The bishop, whose name is Kevin
Nield, is trying to explain why. "It's a reserve," he is saying. "In case
there is a time of need."
What sort of time of need?
"Oh, if things got bad enough so that the normal systems of
distribution didn't work." Huh? "The point is, if those other systems
broke down, the church would still be able to care for the poor and
needy."
What he means, although he won't come out and say it, is that although
the grain might be broken out in case of a truly bad recession, its root
purpose is as a reserve to tide people over in the tough days just before
the Second Coming.
"Of course," says the bishop, "we rotate it every once in a while."
For more than a century, the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints suffered because their vision of themselves and the
universe was different from those of the people around them. Their
tormentors portrayed them as a nation within a nation, radical
communalists who threatened the economic order and polygamists out to
destroy the American family. Attacked in print, and physically by mobs,
some 30,000 were forced to flee their dream city of Nauvoo, Ill., in 1846.
Led by their assassinated founder's successor, they set out on a
thousand-mile trek westward derided by nonbelievers as being as absurd as
their faith.
This year their circumstances could not be more changed. Last Tuesday,
150 years to the week after their forefathers, 200 exultant and sunburned
Latter-day Saints reached Salt Lake City, having re-enacted the grueling
great trek. Their arrival at the spot where, according to legend, Brigham
Young announced, "This is the right place" was cheered in person by a
crowd of 50,000--and observed approvingly by millions. The copious and
burnished national media attention merely ratified a long-standing truth:
that although the Mormon faith remains unique, the land in which it was
born has come to accept--no, to lionize--its adherents as paragons of the
national spirit. It was in the 1950s, says historian Jan Shipps, that the
Mormons went from being "vilified" to being "venerated," and their
combination of family orientation, clean-cut optimism, honesty and
pleasant aggressiveness seems increasingly in demand. Fifteen Mormon
Senators and Representatives currently trek the halls of Congress. Mormon
author and consultant Stephen R. Covey bottled parts of the ethos in
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which has been on
best-seller lists for five years. The FBI and CIA, drawn by a seemingly
incorruptible rectitude, have instituted Mormon-recruitment plans.
The Mormon Church is by far the most numerically successful creed born
on American soil and one of the fastest growing anywhere. Its U.S.
membership of 4.8 million is the seventh largest in the country, while its
hefty 4.7% annual American growth rate is nearly doubled abroad, where
there are already 4.9 million adherents. Gordon B. Hinckley, the church's
President--and its current Prophet--is engaged in massive foreign
construction, spending billions to erect 350 church-size meetinghouses a
year and adding 15 cathedral-size temples to the existing 50. University
of Washington sociologist Rodney Stark projects that in about 83 years,
worldwide Mormon membership should reach 260
million. |
