The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism [1st ed.] 9783030526153, 9783030526160

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The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism Edited by  R. Gordon Shepherd A. Gary Shepherd Ryan T. Cragun

The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism

R. Gordon Shepherd A. Gary Shepherd  •  Ryan T. Cragun Editors

The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism

Editors R. Gordon Shepherd University of Central Arkansas Conway, AR, USA

A. Gary Shepherd Oakland University Rochester, MI, USA

Ryan T. Cragun University of Tampa Tampa, FL, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-52615-3    ISBN 978-3-030-52616-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: VisionsofAmerica/Joe Sohm - Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Armand L. Mauss, respected colleague and distinguished scholar of Mormon Studies

Preface

A majority of the many books written so far about Latter-day Saints (or “Mormons”) and their church—The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—are histories that focus on its nineteenth-century American origin, peculiar doctrinal beliefs, political conflicts, and religious controversies in the United States. Many of these books have been written by academically trained Mormon scholars who nonetheless retain a commitment to their church and its leaders. Meanwhile, as the twenty-first century continues to unfold, Mormonism has become an expanding, international faith with an official worldwide membership today approaching 17 million people who congregate for worship in close to 190 countries around the globe. This is a story that needs to be dispassionately and objectively updated and understood. The scope of this book is purposely broad. The fact that the LDS Church is increasingly a global religion, portending both foreseeable and unseen consequences for its future, is a reality that scholars of religion need to address. We want to give readers a clear idea of where and how the LDS faith has penetrated national and cultural boundaries in Latin America, Oceania, Europe, Asia, and Africa, as well as in North America beyond the borders of Mormon Utah. Furthermore, we do not wish to merely provide readers with a travelogue tour of exotic countries where Mormonism has managed to establish a foothold and appears to be flourishing. We want readers to understand a host of growing concerns within a multinational, multicultural church: What does it means to be a Latter-day Saint in different world regions? What is the faith’s appeal to converts in these places, and how is this both the same and different than being a Latter-day Saint in the United States? What are the peculiar problems for members who must manage Mormon identities in conjunction with their different national, cultural, and ethnic identities? How are LDS ecclesiastical authorities dealing with such issues as the status of women in a patriarchal church, the treatment of LGBTQ members, current trends of greater questioning of religious authority, increasing disaffiliation of young people, and

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decreasing growth rates in North and Latin America while sustaining increasing growth in parts of Asia and Africa? Our book aims to provide an up-to-date, accurate, but nuanced picture of a historically American religion in the throes of the same kinds of global change that virtually every conservative faith tradition faces today in the world’s troubled religious economy. Each chapter is an original essay. Our chapter authors include a good mix of both self-identified Mormons (some employed by LDS institutions of higher education) and non-Mormons, believers and non-believers, senior researchers and younger scholars, and female as well as male authors. All of our authors have academic credentials. Most are currently affiliated with institutions of higher education, but some are independent scholars. All, however, have qualifying backgrounds in teaching and/or researching and writing about topics pertinent to their assigned chapters for this book. Our book’s chapters are data driven, featuring both quantitative and qualitative approaches to the topic of global Mormonism. Several of our chapters rely on survey research and other types of statistical data collection. Other chapters utilize historical narratives based on documentary sources. And some combine ethnographic studies, interview data, and even highly personalized narratives. We believe that the complex nature of our subject matter is enriched by a blend of different disciplinary perspectives, methodological approaches, and actual lived experiences, as well as by the different religious or secular backgrounds that our authors bring to their interpretive study of global Mormonism and the LDS Church. We should note in this regard a subtle distinction between the formal properties of a religious institution and the unofficial properties of its religious culture. When referencing the institutional church, we endeavor to employ its full and correct name—The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—and avoid common but incorrect reference to “the Mormon Church.” At the same time, for convenience sake and in conformity with standard abbreviation practices for frequently used terms and names in scholarly work, we also employ “LDS Church” and “LDS” as an adjective for referencing the institutional church and its organizational aspects. Some of our authors choose to economize further by simply referring to “the Church” when the context makes perfectly clear that it is the LDS Church and its programs or policies which are being described. When, however, referencing the broader religious culture and its people that are sponsored and sustained by the institutional church—but which do not bestow official recognition, sanction, or ownership—many of our chapter authors have taken the liberty of applying the popular designations of “Mormon” and “Mormonism” in their exposition and analysis. Admittedly, these distinctions are not always easy to make or rigorously maintain. When referencing church members, for example, some authors alternate between the terms Latter-day Saints (formally correct) and Mormons (widely recognized informally). Readers will also note that, as editors, we use the terms Mormon and Mormonism in our table of contents headings, and chapter titles, as well as in this preface.

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We have divided the book’s chapters into five general parts. Our intent in Part I (“Foundations of a New Religious Tradition”) is to provide readers— especially those who may be largely unfamiliar with the LDS Church’s complicated history, distinctive beliefs and teachings, and institutional changes over time—with a foundational background in order to appreciate the material more clearly in subsequent chapters on Mormonism as a contemporary global religion. This part begins with an overview account of Mormon history—its early internationalization and change—followed by chapters on its authority structure and ecclesiastical organization, LDS missiology and its organized system of lay missionary service, and its geographical dispersion and growth patterns worldwide since World War II. In Part II (“Contemporary Concerns and Issues Facing an International Church”) we provide chapters that spotlight some of the LDS Church’s major concerns as a global religion moving forward in the twenty-first century. These concerns include (1) negotiating issues of ethnic, national, and religious identity in international Mormonism; (2) fluctuating (and particularly declining) growth rates in different parts of the world; (3) growing retention and disaffiliation concerns; (4) gender and exclusionary male priesthood-authority issues; (5) issues of sexual identity and the current standing of LGBTQ Mormons; and (6) the changing religious attitudes of Mormon young people in an increasingly secular world. These concerns, of course, are not peculiar to the modern LDS Church and are shared worldwide by many other contemporary religions. In Part III (“Living Global Mormonism”) we look closely at what it means to be a Latter-day Saint in different world regions. We cannot, of course, include a chapter on every country where the LDS Church has missionaries and members, but we have attempted to judiciously select particular countries for which we have qualified authors to produce national case studies in order to illustrate the broad diversity of contemporary Mormonism as an international religion. We begin this part with a summary overview chapter on Mormons in major world regions—North America, Latin America, Oceania, Europe, Africa, and Asia—followed by specific chapters on Mormons in Canada, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Hawaii and the Pacific Islands, Australia and New Zealand, Ireland and the United Kingdom, the Nordic and Low Countries, South Africa, Ghana and Nigeria, and Japan. Moreover, we also include a chapter on the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) in the Philippines and conclude with a chapter on “Fundamentalist” Mormons who, though officially repudiated by the LDS Church, maintain their claims to be legitimate Mormons and persist in practicing polygamy in both the United States and Mexico. In Part IV (“Mormon Ethnic Diversity in North America”), we continue highlighting the cultural and ethnic diversity of religious experience for modern Latter-day Saints by drawing attention to different groupings of minority church members in North America. In particular, we have included chapters on Black Mormons, Latinx Mormons, and Native American Mormons who must

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reconcile and practice their religious faith in the national context of a predominantly white church. Finally, in Part V (“Final Concerns and Reflections”), we have added two concluding chapters. The first of these chapters addresses the massive impact of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic and is written as a real-time description of the response of ecclesiastical leaders and managers at LDS headquarters in Salt Lake City as they cope with and attempt to manage a sudden global crisis with seismic repercussions for every institutional nook and cranny of the contemporary LDS Church. The second concluding chapter offers a reflective summary of our contributors’ scholarship concerning Mormonism’s current concerns and future prospects as a global religion in the twenty-first century. As readers will discover, there is a fair amount of overlapping, thematic material produced by the 42 authors who have written the 31 chapters of this book. This should be expected of any competent anthology of this type. The religious, cultural, political, and historical complexities of our subject matter demand the intersecting attention of a range of scholars and practitioners, trained in different academic disciplines and/or schooled by their own firsthand experience. That their accounts of modern Mormonism coalesce on certain critical points about its history, religious turning points, organizational development, international spread, and current challenges and prospects for the future in different parts of the world should be regarded as a strength, not a failing. This is not to say that there is perfect agreement among our authors and certainly not the same emphasis is to be found in what they have written, from either a faith standpoint or a strictly academic point of view. This too we count as a virtue.

Acknowledgments

We are indebted to Palgrave Senior Editor, Philip Getz, for generating the idea behind this book. He first contacted us at the 2018 annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion to say that he was intrigued with the set of sessions sponsored by the Mormon Social Science Association (MSSA) at that conference. He asked if we thought we could secure a sufficient number of scholars to produce an edited collection on contemporary global Mormonism. We, of course, said yes and, in consultation with one of MSSA’s co-founders, Armand Mauss, began developing a roster of qualified authors who could make significant contributions to such a project. A quick examination of Global Mormonism’s table of contents and list of contributors will confirm the basis for our confidence. We salute the 42 authors and co-authors of this book whose collective efforts have produced what we consider to be a unique and important work of scholarship on the global spread of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its distinctive religious culture and institutional challenges and prospects in the twenty-first century. Last but far from least, we acknowledge and appreciate the helpful professionalism of Palgrave Associate Editor, Amy Invernizzi, who patiently guided us through the maze of editing protocols necessary for the publication of this book.

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Contents

Part I Foundations of a New Religious Tradition   1 1 Global Mormonism: A Historical Overview  3 Colleen McDannell 2 The Evolving Ecclesiastical Organization of an International Lay Church 35 Gregory A. Prince 3 The Gathering of Scattered Israel: The Missionary Enterprise of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 57 Ronald E. Bartholomew 4 Geographical Diffusion and Growth Patterns of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Since World War II 91 Samuel M. Otterstrom and Brandon S. Plewe Part II Contemporary Concerns and Issues Facing an International Church 141 5 Pulling Toward Zion: Mormonism in Its Global Dimensions143 Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp 6 The Dynamics of LDS Growth in the Twenty-­First Century163 David G. Stewart, Jr. 7 Vestige of Zion: Mormonism in Utah205 Rick Phillips

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CONTENTS

8 Gender, Belief Level, and Priesthood Authority in the LDS Church235 Nancy Ross and Jessica Duckett Finnigan 9 Framing Eternal Sexual Identity in a Shifting Cultural Landscape263 Laura Vance and Scott Vance 10 Changing Religious and Social Attitudes of Mormon Millennials in Contemporary American Society293 Benjamin R. Knoll and Jana Riess Part III Living Global Mormonism 321 11 Mormons in North America, Latin America, the South Pacific, Europe, Africa, and Asia: An Overview323 Matthew Martinich 12 The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Canada: Historical Milestones and Contemporary Conversations from a Feminist Perspective343 Christine L. Cusack 13 The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mexico369 Rex Eugene Cooper and Moroni Spencer Hernández de Olarte 14 Mormons in Peru: Building Temples with Sacred Cornerstones and Holy Drywall397 Jason Palmer and David C. Knowlton 15 An Oak Tree Bearing International Fruit: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Brazil421 Marcus H. Martins 16 The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Islands of the Pacific431 Riley M. Moffat and Fred E. Woods 17 Lands of Contrast: Latter-day Saint Societies in New Zealand/Aotearoa and Australia 455 Ian G. Barber

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18 Contemporary Issues for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­day Saints in Ireland and the United Kingdom475 Alison Halford and Hazel O’Brien 19 Persisting in a Secular Environment: Mormonism in the Low Countries503 Walter E. A. van Beek, Ellen Decoo, and Wilfried Decoo 20 Mormons in the Nordic Region533 Julie K. Allen and Kim B. Östman 21 The LDS Church in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia559 David G. Stewart, Jr. 22 To Recognize One’s Face in That of a Foreigner: The Latter-­day Saint Experience in West Africa585 Russell Stevenson 23 Finding Peace, Claiming Place: Black South African Women Navigating the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints607 Caroline Kline 24 The LDS Church in Contemporary Japan: Failure or Success?635 Meagan Rainock and Shinji Takagi 25 The Community of Christ (RLDS Church): Structuring Common Differences in the Philippines655 David J. Howlett 26 The History and Culture of Mormon Fundamentalism in the United States677 Janet Benson Bennion Part IV Mormon Ethnic and Racial Diversity in North America 703 27 Building Community and Identity Among Black Latter-day Saints: Toward Completing the Flock Through Conference Connections705 LaShawn C. Williams

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28 Lamanitas, The Spanish-speaking Hermanos: Latinos Loving Their Mormonism Even as They Remain the Other727 Ignacio M. Garcia 29 Views from Turtle Island: Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Mormon Entanglements751 Thomas W. Murphy Part V Final Concerns and Reflections 781 30 The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Response to the 2019–20 Coronavirus Pandemic783 Matthew T. Evans 31 Summing Up: Problems and Prospects for a Global Church in the Twenty-first Century817 Ryan T. Cragun Index851

List of Contributors

Julie K. Allen  Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA Ian G. Barber  University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand Ronald E. Bartholomew  Utah Valley Institute of Religion, Orem, UT, USA Janet Benson Bennion  Lyndon State College, Lyndon, VT, USA Rex  Eugene  Cooper Research and Information Division, Correlation Department, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, UT, USA (Retired) Ryan T. Cragun  University of Tampa, Tampa, FL, USA Christine L. Cusack  University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada Ellen Decoo  Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium Wilfried Decoo  University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium Matthew  T.  Evans  Research Manager, Correlation Research Division, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, UT, USA Jessica Duckett Finnigan  Independent Scholar, Morgan Hill, CA, USA Ignacio M. Garcia  Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA Alison Halford  Coventry University, Coventry, UK Moroni Spencer Hernández de Olarte  Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, Cuernavaca, Mexico David J. Howlett  Smith College, Northampton, MA, USA Caroline Kline  Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA, USA Benjamin R. Knoll  Centre College, Danville, KY, USA David C. Knowlton  Utah Valley University, Orem, UT, USA xvii

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Laurie  F.  Maffly-Kipp Washington University in Saint Louis, Saint Louis, MO, USA Matthew Martinich  The Cumorah Foundation, Colorado Springs, CO, USA Marcus H. Martins  Brigham Young University-Hawaii, Laie, HI, USA Colleen McDannell  University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA Riley M. Moffat  Brigham Young University-Hawaii, Laie, HI, USA Thomas W. Murphy  Edmonds College, Lynnwood, WA, USA Hazel O’Brien  Waterford Institute of Technology, Waterford, Ireland Kim B. Östman  Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA Samuel M. Otterstrom  Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA Jason Palmer  University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA Rick Phillips  University of North Florida, Jacksonville, FL, USA Brandon S. Plewe  Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA Gregory A. Prince  Independent Scholar, Potomac, MD, USA Meagan Rainock  Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA Jana Riess  Religion News Service, Washington, DC, USA Nancy Ross  Dixie State University, Saint George, UT, USA Russell Stevenson  Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA David  G.  Stewart Jr.  Department of Orthopaedics, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV, USA Shinji Takagi  Osaka University, Osaka, Japan Walter E. A. van Beek  Tilburg University, Tilburg, Netherlands Laura Vance  Brevard College, Brevard, NC, USA Scott Vance  Independent Scholar, Lewisburg, PA, USA LaShawn C. Williams  Utah Valley University, Orem, UT, USA Fred E. Woods  Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2

Fig. 4.3

Fig. 4.4

Nineteenth-century Mormon missionary success in North America. Red dots are branches formed during the Kirtland/Missouri periods (1831–1838), green dots the Nauvoo period (1839–1844), and purple dots both periods. Yellow circles indicate the number of reported “conferences” or groups of branches. (Map courtesy of Brandon Plewe, published in Brandon Plewe, S. Kent Brown, Donald Q. Cannon, Richard H. Jackson, eds., Mapping Mormonism: An Atlas of Latter-day Saint History, 2nd edition, Brigham Young University Press, 2014) 67 Nineteenth-century Mormon missions. (Map courtesy of Brandon Plewe, published in Brandon Plewe, S. Kent Brown, Donald Q. Cannon, Richard H. Jackson, eds., Mapping Mormonism: An Atlas of Latter-day Saint History, 2nd edition, Brigham Young University Press, 2014) 69 Conceptual model of the international diffusion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (Source: Authors’ creation) 94 Brazil: Stakes and missions 1969/1979. (Originally published in Samuel M. Otterstrom, 2012. “International Spatial Diffusion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Territoire en Mouvement 13 (2009–1): 102–130 and made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.)112 Brazil: Stakes and missions 1989/1999. (Originally published in Samuel M. Otterstrom, 2012. “International Spatial Diffusion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Territoire en Mouvement 13 (2009–1): 102–130 and made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.)114 Brazil: Stakes and missions 2010. (Originally published in Samuel M. Otterstrom, 2012. “International Spatial Diffusion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Territoire en Mouvement 13 (2009–1): 102–130 and made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.)115 xix

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 4.5

Fig. 4.6

Fig. 4.7

Fig. 4.8

Fig. 4.9 Fig. 4.10 Fig. 4.11 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 11.1 Fig. 11.2 Fig. 11.3 Fig. 11.4 Fig. 13.1 Fig. 16.1 Fig. 17.1

Fig. 20.1 Fig. 20.2

Peru and Ecuador: Stakes and missions 1979–2010. (Originally published in Samuel M. Otterstrom, 2012. “International Spatial Diffusion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Territoire en Mouvement 13 (2009–1): 102–130 and made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.) 116 Mexico: Stakes and missions 1969/1979. (Originally published in Samuel M. Otterstrom, 2012. “International Spatial Diffusion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Territoire en Mouvement 13 (2009–1): 102–130 and made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.)118 Mexico: Stakes and missions 1989/1999. (Originally published in Samuel M. Otterstrom, 2012. “International Spatial Diffusion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Territoire en Mouvement 13 (2009–1): 102–130 and made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.)119 Mexico: Stakes and missions 2010. (Originally published in Samuel M. Otterstrom, 2012. “International Spatial Diffusion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Territoire en Mouvement 13 (2009–1): 102–130 and made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.)120 1950 Diffusion phase by country 122 1980 Diffusion phase by country 123 2010 Diffusion phase by country 123 LDS general conference usage of marriage-related terms 265 LDS general conference usage of sexual orientation-related terms 274 Growth of congregations, stakes, districts, missions, and temples, 1830–2019325 Average number of members per congregation, 1830–2019 326 Average number of members per stake, 1900–2019 327 Average number of members per temple, 1847–2019 328 The Volcanoes Region, eastern part of the State of Mexico. (Source: Author computer generated map using Tableau Data Mapping Software) 372 The Pacific Islands of Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia 432 Australia and New Zealand (Australasia) in southwestern Oceania showing places mentioned in text. New Zealand also lies at the southwestern corner of Polynesia in the eastern Pacific Ocean. (Drawn from base data licensed under CC by 4.0) 457 Cumulative Mormon emigration from Scandinavia, 1850–1926. (Data from Jenson 1927, 533–536) 538 LDS Church membership development in the Nordic countries, 1850–2019. (Data obtained from Jenson 1927, 533–536 and the LDS Church’s Europe Area Office) 543

  LIST OF FIGURES 

Fig. 20.3

Fig. 24.1

Fig. 24.2 Fig. 24.3

Fig. 24.4 Fig. 24.5 Fig. 24.6

Fig. 26.1 Fig. 31.1

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LDS congregations and organization in the Nordic countries, as of February 2020. Congregations are marked with dots, stakes with bold text, stakes with temples with bold and italic text, and districts with regular text. (Map created on the background from https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nordic_passport_union.svg, through a Creative Commons license) 545 Year-end numbers of congregations and stakes, 1967–2019. (Source: Authors’ estimates based on Bunkachō, shūkyō Nenkan, annual issues (for congregations) and various LDS publications (for stakes))638 Year-end numbers of full-time missionaries and missions. (Sources: Authors’ estimates based on Bunkachō, shūkyō Nenkan, annual issues (for missionaries) and various LDS publications (for missions)) 639 Ratios of active to total members in selected Christian denominations in Japan, 2012–18 (in percent; active members defined as those attending Sunday worship). (Sources: Authors’ estimates based on Bunkachō, Shūkyō Nenkan, 1996–2002 and Deseret News, Church Almanac, 1996–2002 (for the LDS Church), and Kirisuto Shinbunsha, Kirisutokyō Nenkan, 2019 (for all others)) 642 Membership in selected indigenous Christian movements in Japan, 1970–2018. (Source: Bunkachō, Shūkyō Nenkan, annual issues) 643 Annual change in LDS Church membership in Japan, 1975–2018. (Source: Authors’ estimates based on Bunkachō, Shūkyō Nenkan, annual issues) 645 LDS members (in thousands) and missionaries in Japan, 1974–2018. (Sources: Deseret News, Church Almanac, annual issues and www.churchofjesuschrist.org; Bunkachō, Shūkyō Nenkan, annual issues) 645 Charting the complex connections of Mormon fundamentalist groups, originally published by Bennion in Polygamy in Primetime, 2012, p. 28 678 Attitudes toward homosexuality in the US, 1973–2018. (Source: General Social Survey) 830

List of Tables

Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 3.3 Table 3.4 Table 3.5 Table 3.6 Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 4.4 Table 4.5 Table 4.6 Table 10.1 Table 10.2 Table 10.3 Table 10.4 Table 10.5 Table 10.6 Table 10.7 Table 10.8

LDS mission calls and missionaries in the nineteenth century The impact of British membership and immigration on total LDS membership, 1840–1890 Number of LDS missionaries serving before and after lowering eligibility ages for young men and women, 2012–2013 LDS Church growth for selected years, 1945–2018 LDS missionary statistics for selected years, 1945–2018 Global distribution of LDS missions, 2018 Nations with more than 20,000 Latter-day Saints on January 1, 2010 Middle America: Early Latter-day Saints diffusion South America: Early Latter-day Saints diffusion Brazil: Diffusion of stakes by cities Peru: Diffusion of stakes by cities Mexico: Diffusion of stakes by cities Demographic characteristics of U.S. Mormons, Evangelicals, and other Americans per the Pew Religious Landscape Survey Generic religious beliefs among Latter-day Saints, Evangelicals, and other Americans, per the Pew Religious Landscape Survey Views of authority and seeking counsel among Latter-day Saints, per the Next Mormons Survey Selected religious behaviors among Latter-day Saints, Evangelicals, and other Americans, per the Pew Religious Landscape Survey LDS religious behaviors among millennial and older Mormons, per the Next Mormons Survey Latter-day Saints who strongly/somewhat agree with LDS identity statements, per the Next Mormon Survey What is “essential to being a good Mormon,” per the Next Mormon Survey Social and political preferences among Latter-day Saints, Evangelicals, and other Americans, per the Pew Religious Landscape Survey

64 68 74 76 76 80 109 110 111 125 130 131 298 302 304 306 307 308 309 311

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 15.1 Brazilian general authority seventies Table 16.1 Statistical profile of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Pacific Table 19.1 Ways of believing in the Netherlands from 1966 to 2015 (figures shown in percentages) Table 20.1 LDS membership and organization in the Nordic countries as of March 2020 Table 24.1 Annual percentage growth, by period, of selected population groups in Japan Table 24.2 Explaining the annual growth of LDS Church membership in Japan: ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates of equation (A5)

426 436 509 544 639 647

PART I

Foundations of a New Religious Tradition

CHAPTER 1

Global Mormonism: A Historical Overview Colleen McDannell

In early February of 1831, Oliver Cowdery, Parley P.  Pratt, and Frederick G. Williams walked across the frozen Kansas River to Delaware Indian villages lining its north bank. The tribes, originally pushed out of their ancestral lands by the British, now were forced to live outside of the United States on unsettled lands west of the Mississippi River. Like other Native people, the Delaware were treated like a sovereign nation—although one whose treaties were constantly being broken and who were addressed as if they were children. When the American missionaries crossed the river near Independence, Missouri, they entered into the foreign territory of “Indian Country.”1 Like the Delaware, the missionaries had also traveled far from their homes. Beginning in October of 1830 (shortly after the founding of their church) Cowdery and Pratt, as well as Peter Whitmer Jr. and Ziba Peterson, began a 1500-mile journey from upstate New York to find the “Lamanites” (a Book of Mormon term for native Indians). The men were seeking converts to what would eventually become known as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While Whitmer and Peterson set up a tailor shop in Independence, Missouri, to earn the funds needed to support the groups’ preaching, Cowdery, Pratt, and Williams pressed on to the Indian villages. In later years, Parley Pratt remembered how Oliver Cowdery preached to the “red men,” explaining they had once occupied the whole continent and were strong and mighty believers in the one God. Over the centuries, however, they had become wicked and killed each other. God then stopped their dreams and visions. The men coming from afar were bringing them a book, which told of this lost history—a book

C. McDannell (*) University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_1

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that had been buried and now recovered. The missionaries left a newly printed copy of their sacred text, called The Book of Mormon. If the tribe would accept this new message, they would recover their rights and prosperity.2 Historians speculate that the Delaware might actually have been interested in these ideas about their divine right to their lands as it echoed their own prophetic placement of Native people at the center of a religious story.3 In his autobiography, Parley Pratt remembered the frustration of a displaced people and their leader: “It is now winter, we are new settlers in this place,” Pratt reported being told. “The snow is deep, our cattle and horses are dying, our wigwams are poor; we have much to do in the spring—to build houses, and fence and make farms.” The Delaware also looked forward to better days: “We will build a council house,” they told the visitors, “and meet together, and you shall read to us and teach us more concerning the Book of our fathers and the will of the Great Spirit.”4 Pratt felt hopeful. Unfortunately for the Latter-day Saint missionaries, in spite of Indian country being perceived as a foreign land, the federal government controlled who had access to the Delaware. Cowdery and his companions had not secured the proper documentation to travel and preach to the Indians. Many Christian communities wanted to convert the “savages,” and traders wanted to sell them guns and liquor. To control who interacted with Indian nations—those forced to exist outside of the United States—federal agencies issued permits. With no permit, “the Saints” (a self-identifying abbreviation adopted by converts to the new faith) were told to stop their efforts and to leave. Methodists and Baptists would later be given the chance to convert the Delaware. The story of the 1831 mission to the Delaware is emblematic of how Latter-­ day Saints sought converts in foreign countries in order to bring about a new social and spiritual order. The very earliest efforts of the Latter-day Saints entailed crafting their religion into a “world” or “global” faith. Cowdery’s mission to the Delaware was stimulated by a revelation proclaimed by the prophet Joseph Smith that the New Jerusalem, the city of Zion, would be built “on the borders by the Lamanites”5—basically in a foreign country. Although Mormonism would become famous as the most successful of the “American”born religions, throughout its history much of its energy was directed outside of the nation’s boundaries. If all had proceeded as the missionaries had planned, the Lamanites and the Latter-day Saints would have joined together to usher in a new era. However, as would be the case throughout much of Latter-day Saint history, neither the foreigners nor the US government embraced the truths embedded in the message presented by the missionaries. And yet, as Parley Pratt and Oliver Cowdery traveled toward Indian country, they found others receptive to the teachings of Joseph Smith. The global orientation of the Latter-day Saints has often produced for them unexpected benefits. In an Ohio town called Kirtland, missionaries baptized 127 people within a few weeks, with the number soon ballooning to one thousand.6 While Pratt would eventually return to Ohio, the other missionaries would stay near Independence, which would come to figure prominently in Latter-day Saint

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history. In 1847, after the death of Joseph Smith, the Saints would travel across the continent to foreign territory then claimed by Mexico. There they would establish their own nation, with economic and social mores that would enflame many of the citizens of the United States. Outreach to foreign peoples might often fail, but in the process Latter-day Saints would alter, develop, and deepen their spiritual sensibilities. Throughout its history, this “American” religion would be intimately connected to the world.

The Gathering, 1830–1887 The motivating spirit behind Cowdery’s mission to the Delaware was the notion of “the Gathering.” Parley P. Pratt, as well as fellow converts Sidney Rigdon and Orson Hyde, shared a notion common in antebellum America: the world was “spiraling downward to its cataclysmic conclusion” in a whirlwind of wars, pestilence, natural disasters, and apostacy.7 “None doeth good,” declared the God of the Mormons, “mine anger is kindling against the inhabitants of the earth to visit them according to their ungodliness.”8 Men like Sidney Rigdon believed their duty was to “usher in the glory of the last days by converting the world” or else the “scorner shall be consumed.”9 To accomplish this, the Lord had raised up apostles, prophets, evangelists. The gifts of the ancient times had been restored; an elect, chosen group of men and women began to heal, speak in heavenly languages, make prophecies, and exert miraculous powers. The anxieties of the last days drove the Saints to venture near and far to instruct and baptize. While many American seers warned of the End Times, the Latter-day Saints offered an additional vision. Those who understood the sacred message were not to wait hopelessly in the storm but, like the animals of Noah, to seek safe refuge in the ark. Believers were to gather together in a special place to work and wait. The sun may darken, the moon may turn to blood, and the stars fall from the sky but “the remnant shall be gathered unto this place.”10 The Jews, the American Indians, and those “adopted” into the House of Israel through conversion would come from all nations to build a New Jerusalem. The Saints would share a promised land, a city of Zion, “a land of peace, a city of refuge, a place of safety”11 (D&C 45:66). This place would first be in Nauvoo, Illinois, and later in Salt Lake City, Utah. As early as 1837, Wilford Woodruff, John Taylor, and Heber C. Kimball and eventually church president Brigham Young, traveled to Great Britain to gather the citizens of “Babylon” to Zion. The Protestants and Catholics, just like the “heathen” of Asia and Africa, needed to be instructed, re-baptized, and gathered. In 1840 Orson Hyde went to Palestine and dedicated it for the “return” of the Jews. In 1844, before the Saints in their wagons had even arrived in Utah, Mormon missionaries had sailed off to the South Pacific. Barely after they built their adobe homes, missionaries were sent to France (1849), Italy (1849), Scandinavia (Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway) (1850), the Sandwich Islands (Hawai‘i, 1850), India (1851), Chile (1851), Australia

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(1851), China (1853), Switzerland (1850), South Africa (1853), and the Netherlands (1864). Building up Zion required the conversion of the world. It was in the industrial sectors of Great Britain that the missionaries had the most success. During the peak year of 1851, missionaries counted 32,894 newly baptized souls.12 At that point, there were only 12,000 Mormons living in Utah.13 England boasted 222 separate Latter-day Saint meeting places with 60 percent established in London and the rest in northern towns.14 Because publishing was much more developed in Great Britain than on the American frontier, England provided the foundation for a growing Mormon print culture. In 1840, ten years before Mormons in Utah had a newspaper, the Millennial Star published its first issue. Read in both Europe and the United States, the Millennial Star was the longest-lived Latter-day Saint periodical, ceasing publication only in 1970 when the church consolidated many of its publications. The first comprehensive treatment of the doctrines of the church, Parley P.  Pratt’s Key to the Science of Theology, was published in Liverpool in 1855. From mission headquarters in the port city, Latter-day Saints distributed their literature across the British Empire—from Ireland to India to South Africa. Music also became a vital aspect of Latter-day Saint worship under the influence of British sensibilities. Parley P.  Pratt, along with Brigham Young and John Taylor, published a hymnal in Manchester (1840) that became the favorite of English-speaking Saints.15 This text-only hymnal relied on popular English tunes to provide the music and went through twenty-five editions before falling out of favor in the early twentieth century. The celebrated Mormon Tabernacle Choir also has British heritage. The designer of the famed organ, the first organist, and seven of the first eight Mormon Tabernacle choir directors were all born in Great Britain. During the nineteenth century, Mormonism was as much a British religion as an American one. The Latter-day Saints, however, did not become yet another nonconformist, British denomination singing hymns and passing out tracts. Mormonism may have started out as a suitcase religion—with Latter-day Saints always on the move—but the Saints intended to build their own fully physical religious kingdom.16 Converts were to “gather” in the Great Basin of the American West and create a self-sustaining, cooperative, and fully righteous society. Historian William Mulder explained that at baptism and with the laying of hands in confirmation, new converts felt an “irresistible longing, which ravished them and filled them with a nostalgia for Zion, their common home.”17 The Gathering succeeded in disciplining the fervor of conversion into something useful and productive. Once temples were built, emigrants would be able to participate in rituals that allowed for eternal spiritual progress toward godhood. While “the Gathering” was a religious principle and practice, it also fits within a colonial mentality that had little difficulty in asserting that God had “given” his Chosen People the rights to land claimed by others. To facilitate emigration to Utah  Territory, church leaders in 1849 established the Perpetual Emigration Fund. The church paid for travel and then expected the newly arrived Saints to pay off their debt through community

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labor. Those who paid into the account made it possible for more to come. Liverpool missionary agents screened the converts for what was needed in Zion, sometimes looking for skilled artisans and farmers and sometimes for long-time church members who were thought to be more conscientious about replaying their loans.18 Although there were never enough funds to go around, the Perpetual Emigration Fund succeeded in actualizing both the idea of the Gathering and the collective values that would enable a religious colony to thrive in the desert. Between 1870 and 1880 an average of 1620 converts came each year from Europe. In the four years between 1880 and 1883, over 8000 emigrants arrived.19 The fund also transported machinery and construction materials in addition to people. The Perpetual Emigration Fund continued until 1887 when the federal government ended it as a punishment for Mormon polygamy. Latter-day Saints celebrate the migration of Europeans to the Great Basin and boast that “Gentile” visitors reported a land of industry and productivity. What is less acknowledged is the impact of the Gathering on the global communities of Saints. Those who did not gather to Zion (even if they counted themselves among the Saints) were “queer fish in the gospel net.”20 Unlike Protestant and Catholic missionaries who expected foreign converts to transform their native lands through the civilizing power of Christianity, Latter-day Saints leaders expected the opposite. In the Mormon mind, European civilization was actually “Babylon,” and it was Mormon community life in the “wild” American frontier that was given to God’s chosen people. What was needed to enable spiritual progression and economic growth of the Saints was to build up the American church, not sustain those unable or unwilling to gather. Not surprisingly those European Saints “left behind” became frustrated, disillusioned, and often inactive. Missionaries were few and stretched across the continent. Publications like the Danish Skandinaviens Stjerne (1851–1856) introduced converts to Mormon history and doctrine, but leaders made no effort to fully train newly baptized men in leadership roles.21 In Finland, and probably in much of Europe, more women converted than men, which also contributed to leadership problems.22 In 1852 Lorenzo Snow arranged for the translation of the Book of Mormon into Italian, but neither he nor any other missionary stayed long enough in the country to truly master Italian or its local dialects. Before the mission closed a few years later, approximately 180 had converted but 39 percent of those were excommunicated for a variety of reasons.23 By 1863 only ten members remained in Italy.24 Salt Lake leaders supported an emigration office in Liverpool but not church buildings. Converts struggled to rent meeting places. In Belfast in 1854, “women pawned their shawls and the men their watches and rings, and even the furniture out of their homes to help pay the expenses for a meeting-place.”25 In northern Italy, members walked miles on Sunday to meet with their fellow Saints. Their poverty was not relieved by church funds, and they were “left alone to deal with their destitution.”26 Those who did not emigrate faced limits on their religious practices, social isolation, and community prejudice. In Denmark, as the Mormons left for the

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New World, it took little effort to brand those who remained as insufficiently patriotic.27 Newly emboldened by their conversion experience, Danish Saints also became less obsequious to their social superiors.28 Latter-day Saints upheld the bifurcation between righteous Saint and evil Gentile. Such antagonism between the Saints and their neighbors was heightened by a literary context of anti-Mormonism. Newspaper stories, popular novels, and even theater performances created a hostile climate not only for missionaries but for those Saints who did not immediately emigrate.29 As far away as India, missionaries preaching among British colonists found that polygamy was “a large pill for many to swallow, and in fact the very first sight of it so nauseates their stomachs, that at present they can scarcely receive anything else.”30 By the end of the nineteenth century, even disgruntled Saints like Englishman William Jarman returned to their home countries to forge careers in anti-Mormon public speaking.31 Competent Saints, both religiously and professionally, were consistently siphoned off to fuel God’s kingdom in the Great Basin. Those who remained overseas struggled. A pattern had been established: as Utah became stronger, global Mormonism suffered. Some missions quickly closed: Chile (1852), China (1853), India (1856). By the 1860s, church leaders came to believe that “sweeping the nations” for the “blood of Israel” had concluded—at least in Europe.32 Missions effectively closed or were consolidated in Germany (1861), France (1864), and Italy (1867). An imaginary “Mormonism” was created in the minds of intellectuals and newspapermen—as either a harbinger of an oppressive, sexually deviant, anti-modern theocracy that “trapped its members within a secret web of surveillance” or a hopeful glimpse of a future utopia that would transform European castoffs into a stable, productive society.33 Although the South Pacific would become fertile mission territory later in the century, in 1852 the Saints left the Society Islands (Tahiti). The South African mission closed in 1865. The closing of the South African mission was a result of the church’s racial policy. While Protestants and Catholics directed their missionary efforts toward the non-European residents of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, Latter-day Saints did not. In 1852 church president Brigham Young announced that men of black African descent would not be permitted to be ordained to the priesthood. Men determined to have “African blood” could not even hold the lowest priesthood office offered to twelve-year-old white boys.34 Both black men and women were also barred from participating in temple rituals, necessary for any eternal spiritual advancement. Church leaders used biblical interpretations and stories about premortal life to justify their discriminatory beliefs. The priesthood ban reflected both general racial prejudice of the era and the specific pressure of Southern Latter-day Saints who sought to maintain their slaves as they gathered to the Utah territory. While the racial policy departed from an earlier and more open church perspective on converting African Americans, during the nineteenth century, there were only a few active black Latter-day Saints. Occasionally, African Americans were baptized and confirmed, but missionary work was not specifically directed toward their communities.35

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Racial prejudice generated from America shaped global missionary efforts. Abroad, missionaries sought converts among the Europeans colonizing Africa but not among its vast native populations. Between 1857 and 1865, approximately 281 white South African members migrated to Utah. Unable to create a sustaining leadership among black Africans and harassed by the white African churches, the mission closed and was not reopened until 1903. Race, however, is not a clear-cut, “obvious” category determined by the country of origin. In Australia, missionaries were influenced by the assumptions that Aborigines were “of the Negro race.” A similar attitude restricted missionary work on the Pacific islands of Papua New Guinea and Fiji.36

Promised Lands in the Pacific, 1850–1898 Other indigenous people of the Pacific were perceived much more positively. In 1851, as he sought converts on the Hawaiian island of Maui, George Q. Cannon believed that the people he met were “descendants of Israel because they resembled them very much.” He noted a native Hawaiian leader also believed that certain local customs “made him think that they were of this race.”37 At the same time in Tahiti, missionary Louisa Pratt identified the Nephites (Israelites who had traveled to the New World) as “the ancient fathers of the Tahitians.”38 Back in Utah, Brigham Young taught in 1858 that “those islanders, and the natives of this country are of the House of Israel.”39 By 1900, George Q. Cannon’s conviction of the chosen heritage of the Pacific Islanders had solidified into a divine vision. Mission president Samuel E. Wooley recalled that Cannon told a group of Hawaiians “they were of the seed of Abraham, he knew it because the Lord told him so at Lahaina.”40 While ascribing ancient Jewish origins to Polynesians was not unique to the Mormons, they used the idea both to explain why Islanders were converting (and not Europeans) and to continue their work among them. In 1868 a church periodical asserted that “the fairer races” of Polynesia were the descendants of the Nephites who left South America.41 According to this line of thought, Hagoth, one of the followers of Lehi’s righteous sons, Nephi, was “an exceedingly curious man.” He built a large ship and “launched it forth into the west sea.” The ship and others like it sailed “to the land northward,” carrying women, children, and provisions. The Book of Mormon writer, Alma, speculated that the ships were “drowned in the depths of the sea.”42 But if Hagoth’s ships ended up in Hawai‘i, could this explain why the natives were the descendants of the House of Israel? Could they have traveled on to New Zealand?43 Native Islanders thus were unlike Native Americans as they were free from the debilitating association with the evil Laman. They descended from the virtuous Nephi via the ships of Hagoth. This positive perspective on Pacific Islanders enabled the missionaries both to expand their preaching outside of the colonializing European community and to foster the curiosity of native peoples regarding Mormonism. Thus, as historian John-Charles Duffy has written, missionaries inserted Native people

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directly into the sacred story. “The Book of Mormon is your book,” missionaries informed their listeners, it is “the record of your ancestors.”44 Baptism among Pacific Islanders reinforced this understanding of their chosen heritage. “Polynesians” thus assumed an elevated status in the eyes of white Latter-day Saint missionaries, who sought to gather them together into a religious community.45 Establishing a “Hawaiian Zion” was no simple task. Some missionaries who arrived in 1850 quickly returned home, but those who stayed met success among the Hawaiians. By late 1854, 4000 Hawaiians had been baptized and missionaries began to seek a way for them to gather as the Saints were doing in Utah.46 They established a village in Lanai in the Palawai Basin, clearing land and planting corn, melons, and potatoes. Even oxen were brought in on boats. A school was established and homes “of native style” were built.47 But, the crops did not produce as planned and worms were eating what did sprout.48 The newness of the religion had worn off and converts were becoming inactive and criticizing church leaders. A similar pattern occurred in the Pacific as had in Europe: “The gathering at the island of Lanai has gleaned out most of the faithful and diligent brethren,” explained then missionary Joseph F. Smith in 1856, “perhaps, this is one cause why the Saints feel so discouraged on the other islands.”49 In the fall of 1857, Brigham Young decided it was best for the missionary elders to return home and let the Hawaiian Saints themselves promote the gospel.50 Into this void in church leadership came the controversial Walter Murray Gibson.51 Coming to Mormonism after adventures in North Carolina, Java, and Europe, Gibson offered Brigham Young his services as a missionary to the East Indies, but he ended up overseeing the declining settlement on Lanai. Throughout the islands, people were dying of diseases brought in by foreigners. Gibson’s leadership of the Saints was rocky and after some disgruntled Hawaiians wrote Brigham Young of their discontent, a coterie of church leaders were sent to check up on Gibson. They found the community acceptable, but Gibson unwilling to submit to their authority. He was excommunicated shortly after in 1864. Gibson initially remained with his schismatic followers but eventually became a figure in Hawaiian politics. A year later, in 1865 the Latter-day Saints purchased 6000 acres of land on the northern side of the island of Oahu that stretched from the sea to the mountains. The Saints would then abandon Lanai for the village of La‘ie. Unlike Protestant and Catholic congregations where foreign missionaries were supported by domestic donations, Latter-day Saint missionaries came without “purse or script” (D&C 84:86) and had to earn their own keep. In La‘ie as in Utah, Latter-day Saints attempted to integrate faith, family, and farming. In contrast with other plantations in Hawai‘i, workers were paid wages and not yoked to the land through long-term contracts. Mission presidents, who served as both plantation managers and religious leaders, stressed that both the missionaries and the residents were to build up the Kingdom of God through cooperative labor. Both groups planted, cultivated, harvested, and processed

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the sugarcane. From the perspective of the foreign Saints, such agricultural production would civilize the natives through the market economy by making them efficient and productive. Utah missionaries carefully maintained hierarchical relationships. Native Hawaiians presided at local branches and served on councils that dealt with acts of immorality, but they did not “work at the highest ecclesiastical levels.”52 Nor did they direct mission or plantation business. In 1873 women founded a small Relief Society Laie to raise money for mission needs and for native women to learn needlework and housekeeping skills from missionary wives. While missionary wife Elizabeth Noall considered needlework and many domestic handicrafts “useless,” their production helped natives “renounce their slothful and indolent habits and make them more fit for the association of white people.”53 Hawaiian Saints prayed, sang hymns, and read from the Bible and Book of Mormon just as the Utah Saints did. But they were seen as “innocent people” rather than equal adult church members. A similar pattern of Mormon paternalism was experienced in New Zealand. After lukewarm reception among the white colonists, Latter-day Saint missionaries turned to the Native people, the Maori. By 1898 there were 4000 members in New Zealand with 90 percent being Maori.54 Like the Hawaiians, the Maori were thought to be part of the children of Israel. Latter-day Saints told the Maori that the Book of Mormon was the story of their ancestors and that they shared a common heritage with those who had gathered in Utah. Latter-­ day Saints also pointed out, and the converted Maori embraced, that traditional prophecies had predicted the coming of the Mormons.55 Latter-day Saints treated the Maori with more respect than other colonists, but they still assumed, as they did with the Hawaiians, their non-Western ways limited their abilities both to be religious leaders and to contain their traditional economic and social lives.

Polygamist Colonies in Mexico and Canada, 1884–1900 For the most part, missionaries were called to La‘ie to work on the plantation and to preach to the natives. In late 1884, however, Joseph F. Smith, a counselor in the First Presidency of the Church to John Taylor, came to Hawai‘i for a different reason. The US federal government had increased its efforts to crush Mormon polygamy and Smith—who had lived in Hawai‘i before— returned to the Islands to avoid arrest.56 As attacks on the Latter-day Saints intensified, church leaders sought safe havens in other parts of the world. In 1886, for instance, British convert and church leader B. H. Roberts traveled to England to assume the editorship of the Millennial Star and to escape prosecution for unlawful cohabitation. Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon, who had been born in Wales, traveled to her uncle’s home in Birmingham to avoid testifying about her marriage to polygamist Angus Cannon. In such cases, the understanding was that once such conflicts were resolved, the Saints would return to their Promised Land.

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By the late nineteenth century, in order to facilitate plural marriage, the church organized and supported whole colonies. Polygamist Saints reversed the principal of the Gathering. Zion now was the place of the storm and foreign countries became where the Saints could work, pray, and raise their families in peace. As early as 1875, Brigham Young had made forays into Mexico looking for possible places for the Saints to settle. When Mexico’s President Porfirio Díaz (1830–1915) assured the Mormons that they would be welcomed (because he wanted people to colonize the fertile lands of the indigenous Indians), the establishment of Mormon colonies became “vigorous and intensive.”57 Unlike missionary outposts in Europe, the church provided aid and supervision to ensure the success of the Saints. In 1886 church president John Taylor spent $12,000 to purchase over 100,000 acres of land for Colonia Díaz (1885) and Colonia Juárez (1886).58 In late 1888, Utah Saints settled Colonia Dublán, farming land rented to them by the church. Within a decade, 3000 Latter-day Saints had constructed water canals, planted shade and fruit trees, harvested staple crops from fertile fields, constructed adobe homes, and sent their youth to Juárez Academy (1897). Although poor and far from family, the ex-pat Mormons duplicated their Utah society. A local Mexican newspaper commended the settlers on their industriousness and well-tended streets and homes. It noted the absence of saloons and billiard halls but neglected to mention the men’s multiple wives.59 The North American Saints ignored, for the most part, their Catholic neighbors—hiring Mexicans to work on their farms when needed but not asking them to embrace their faith. The colonies were focused not on missionary work but on continuing a threatened faith.60 At the same time, 1700 miles to the north, a similar colony was being established. In 1832 Latter-day Saints had sent missionaries to Canada, but the mission closed in 1852 because the newly baptized had moved to Utah. By the end of the century, Canada was also looking for white people to settle in its lands. And, as with Mexico, Latter-day Saints were looking for a place to practice plural marriage without government harassment. In 1886, to aid Charles Ora Card in avoiding arrest, church authorities assigned him to find a place in Canada for a possible colony. After a “fruitless search of the valleys of British Columbia,” Card and his associates decided that Alberta, Canada, was to become the new home of the Saints. The next year forty families settled on the nearly uninhabited plains.61 As with the Mexican colonies, church authorities sent money to purchase and lease land, even providing 500 “church cattle” to jumpstart ranching.62 The Saints lived in villages and farmed the surrounding fields as they did in colonies of the intermountain West. They chartered a joint-­ stock company that pooled capital in order to promote economic enterprises.63 However, what would become “Cardston” was less successful than the Mexican colonies, and by 1893 the community held only 500 Saints. Its growth would be a twentieth-century story.

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Weakening of the Gathering, 1887–1950 By the end of the nineteenth century, global Mormonism was made up of a diverse group of religious establishments. In Europe, the bulk of converts had left for Utah, leaving weakened communities struggling against religious prejudice and the sense of being “left behind.” In the Pacific, Latter-day Saint communities of Native people were securing a foothold in their multireligious nations while colonies of polygamists were duplicating Utah society in Mexico and Canada. Racist understanding of who was a “valiant” Saint and able to take on leadership roles limited Mormon missionary work in Africa. Asia remained a stronghold of Protestant and Catholic missionaries. While Latter-day Saints still hoped to baptize all nations, the reality was that constant conflicts with the federal government both distracted leaders from their religious mission and robbed them of the finances needed to conduct global outreach. In 1887 the federal government disincorporated the Perpetual Emigration Fund and basically banned Mormon immigration in 1891. Beginning in the 1920s, general restrictions on American immigration policy also served to limit the number of the newly baptized from journeying to Utah. The early twentieth century, however, was also a period of modernization for the church. Church leaders—following the values of Progressive Era efficiency—brought finances under control, consolidated priesthood authority, and updated missionary efforts. Heber J. Grant, after finishing up as mission president in Japan, took over the European mission in 1903. For three years, in his newly purchased mission home with his family by his side, Grant encouraged his missionaries to set up street meetings, conduct private gospel conversations, baptize, attend missionary conferences, and distribute literature in “avalanche proportions.”64 A few immigrants from Scandinavia who had settled in Utah returned to their home countries as missionaries where they provided needed language and cultural expertise. In Great Britain, the Latter-day Saint population increased by 10 percent but it still made up a tiny portion of the British population.65 Nevertheless, after a hiatus, European missionary efforts were reviving. In addition, a shift in attitude toward global Mormonism was occurring. In a 1903 address by Joseph F. Smith, the church president admitted that in the past Latter-day Saints assumed their work in the United Kingdom was temporary. They had never built churches, for instance. Now the Saints had “come to stay.”66 A few years later in 1907, the First Presidency addressed a letter to Saints in the Netherlands advising European Saints to not gather to Utah, but build up the Church in their home countries.67 Although a clear theological re-imagining of the Gathering was never articulated, newly minted Saints were encouraged not to leave their native lands. Church support of foreign Latter-day Saints was slow. In the United Kingdom, funding was found to renovate existing buildings but not to build new churches. In a country with an “established church, where would the Saints bury their dead if they owned no property?”68 It was not until 1932 that

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the British Mission office was transferred from Liverpool to London. The port city of Liverpool had been the hub of Mormon activity since 1847 when it became the point for emigration. The move to the capital city gave the foreign religion a boost of “Britishness” and reasserted the idea of building up European Mormonism.69 Of a membership of 6491 in 1930 there were 224 men who held the office of “priest.”70 Still, with no Latter-day Saint temple, British Mormons could not eternally progress unless they came to the United States. The first temple built outside of the then United States was in Hawai‘i. The independent Kingdom of Hawai‘i had become a territory of the United States in 1893, and in 1919 the Latter-day Saints dedicated a temple in La‘ie. The few Pacific Islanders who had gathered in Utah, settling the desert west of Salt Lake in the village of Iosepa, returned. Agricultural work in Hawai‘i was increasingly conducted by non-Hawaiians and in 1919, the same year as the temple was dedicated, the church closed the La‘ie plantation. Latter-day Saints continued to live in the vicinity of the temple, but as in Utah itself, the days of communal experimentation with work and religion were over. By 1930 an estimated 14,455 Latter-day Saints lived in Hawai‘i, more than twice the number that lived in Great Britain.71 The early twentieth century saw a shift from economic communalism to capitalist efficiency throughout the Mormon world. Concerned about the education of the New Zealand natives, in 1913 the church opened the Maori Agricultural College, which offered practical skills for boys. The boys studied subjects ranging from soil management and animal husbandry to public speaking and music. Its five buildings included dormitories, classrooms, laundry facilities, and a chapel. The boys took theology classes, attended Sacrament meetings, and learned leadership skills in Mutual Improvement Association classes. With donated equipment from the United States, they played American baseball and basketball but also rugby.72 The Maori Agricultural College appeared to be a success, but because the Maori were not sending their sons, the cost per pupil was high. In the meantime, the New Zealand government began taking more interest in educating the Maori. In 1931 the church decided to close the school and that same year a series of earthquakes destroyed many of the school buildings. While the college had provided skills to a few Maori, in 1930 of a New Zealand membership of 7256 there were only 259 men who held the office of “priest” and 4 who were “high priests” (an advanced office within the Latter-day Saint Melchizedek priesthood). Latter-day Saint membership in Australia was far less at 1313, although the church owned a few chapels in the larger cities and a mission home in Sydney.73 For the most part, before the mid-twentieth century, Latter-day Saint communities around the globe were small and rarely caused the church hierarchy in Salt Lake City any problems. The exception to this was the “Third Convention” controversy in Mexico. The 1917 Mexican Constitution and the Cristero Rebellion of 1926 effectively barred foreign clergy from working as missionaries. With Americans prohibited from leading branches, the Mexican Saints

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controlled their own church life and their identity as the descendants of the Lamanites with an Israelite heritage and grew stronger. Between 1931 and 1936, convert Margarito Bautista Valencia produced a massive work of amateur scholarship “that grafted modern Mexican history onto Book of Mormon history in a flurry of triumphalist nationalism.”74 Bautista and many other Saints challenged the authority of white leadership in Utah over the Mexican saints in a series of meetings. At the third meeting (the “Third Convention”), they demanded local leadership that reflected what they believed was their “race.” In 1936 Mexican discontent motivated about one-third of total membership into the separatist movement with the ensuing excommunication of their leaders.75 It would take compromise and diplomacy—in Mexico and Utah—to heal the division, which would not be accomplished until 1946. On the eve of World War II, Amy Brown Lyman accompanied her husband to London where he had been called to preside over the European mission. As a first counselor in the Relief Society, Lyman was particularly attuned to the status of female Latter-day Saints. In a retrospective article on her experience she wrote for the Relief Society Magazine, Lyman ignored the European Saints and extolled what nineteenth-century Mormons would have considered “Babylon.” Lyman described the beauties of European art and architecture, its dramatic scenery, and the impressive character of the offices of the League of Nations. She mentioned lunching with various American dignitaries stationed abroad. Occasionally she mentioned the new mission home in Frankfurt or the Dutch women who exhibited their fine handicrafts, including quilt making, which was for them “a new type of work.”76 In the article’s concluding sentence, Lyman wrote, “We sailed from Europe in September 1938, leaving countries overhung with war clouds and overwhelmed with anxiety.”77 Notably, Lyman’s article is devoid of descriptions of Latter-day Saint life in Europe. While it could have been that Lyman wanted to engage her American readers with tales of faraway places, the article also indicates the limited nature of Mormon life in Europe. For Lyman, and most Latter-day Saint leaders, what was of interest in global Mormonism was what American Mormons did within the world. The specific activities of the European Saints were of little interest. Even in Denmark, where Lyman attended three branch meetings on one Sunday, she only mentions a concert that included the wives of three American mission presidents. Most American Latter-day Saints had only a superficial understanding of the religious world outside of the United States. At the end of decades of global economic depression and war, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints remained a small player on the world’s religious landscape. In 1950, out of a global population of 2.5 billion, the number of members cited in the April conference report was slightly over 1.1 million.78 Approximately 3000 missionaries had been trained (but not all destined for overseas work) and the church spent $3.8 million on buildings, maintenance, and the operation of its missions. Considering that the total church budget for the year was $23 million, this was a small percentage.79 Eight temples had been built, of which only two (Hawai‘i and Canada) were outside of the continental

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United States (Hawai‘i would become a state in 1959). With one exception (Juárez Academy), all educational, genealogical, and welfare programs operated within the United States. Latter-day Saints lived in nearly fifty countries, but Mormonism was an American religion.80

Stay Where You Are Planted, 1945–1977 Following the Second World War, the United States fully took its place among the world’s most powerful nations. By the 1950s, it asserted itself as a defender of freedom, family, and faith—waging hot and cold wars against communism. Increasing political and military expansion paralleled economic growth as American businessmen promoted capitalism as the foundation of a modern free society. As in the nineteenth century, not far behind the businessmen were the missionaries. While mainstream Protestant denominations struggled over defining what exactly was a righteous attitude toward foreign religions, evangelical and Pentecostal missionaries felt no such qualms. Fueled by postwar economic abundance and a renewed Christian spirit, conservative Protestants took advantage of the changes wrought by post-colonialization to focus on converting newly independent non-Christians. Europeans were not only slowly relinquishing their colonies; the Holocaust had vividly taught them what happens when minority religious rights are disregarded. Consequently, during the 1960s governments constrained the powers of state churches and loosened the legal restrictions on tax and property rights for groups like the Latter-day Saints. Accompanying the rise of the United States as a global power was the mounting influence of David O. McKay. In 1920, Hugh J. Cannon and McKay (two members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles) began a fact-finding mission to ascertain the state of the church missions after World War I. For over a year, the pair traveled across the globe stopping in Japan, China, Hawai‘i, Samoa, New Zealand, Australia, Tonga, Tahiti, India, Egypt, Palestine, and several European countries. Then, shortly after returning to Salt Lake, McKay was dispatched to Liverpool to head the church’s European mission. McKay’s international experience made a long-lasting impression. Immediately after becoming church president in 1951, David McKay set about creating a truly global church. “The call of the missionaries,” he explained during a 1952 tour of Europe, “would not be to gather to the land of Zion, but rather to come to the spiritual Zion or, in other words, to any place in the world where the pure in heart dwell.”81 Again in 1955, after extensive travels in the Pacific (following trips to Europe, Latin America, and South Africa), McKay stated that church authorities must “put forth every effort within reason and practicability to place within reach of Church members in these distant missions every educational and spiritual privilege that the Church has to offer.”82 For McKay, modern political, transportation, and communication systems had provided a basis for the efficient and effective promotion of the gospel. Standing in the way of the full religious adulthood of Latter-day Saints outside of North America was their lack of consecrated temples. To remedy this,

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in 1952 a plot of land was purchased near Bern, Switzerland, and in 1955 church president McKay dedicated the first temple in Europe. Whereas in the United States, temple workers performed the sacred ritual drama in English, this would be impossible in Europe where members spoke multiple languages. This need for linguistic flexibility motivated officials in Salt Lake to replace the live recital with a film of the ritual that could be easily dubbed into various languages. The Swiss temple also contained fewer rooms. Both the showing of a movie within the temple and its reduced size would eventually become standard not only abroad but in the United States. A requirement for a global church altered church life even in America. Under McKay’s direction, temple building became one part of a massive building program that continued until the mid-1960s. The president believed that by constructing temples and meetinghouses members would see that the church was serious about developing local congregations, thus ending the Saints’ impulse to immigrate to the United States.83 To facilitate building, costs would be shared equally between local wards and church headquarters.84 In the United Kingdom, villas—which once had been purchased to renovate—were now being torn down and new chapels built. Their gardens were transformed into parking lots. Members, including women and children, did the physical labor of digging foundations and laying bricks. They physically “made” their churches via their sacrifice, which gave growing Latter-day Saint communities a sense of independence, ownership, and pride.85 Between 1945 and 1955, 630 meetinghouses were built across the globe. When the program ended in 1965, more than 2000 buildings had been constructed.86 Schools were also being built by “building missionaries.” Throughout the South Pacific, members with construction skills gathered to build the Church College of New Zealand opened in 1958. Their goal was to create a fully accredited coeducational facility that had enough land to provide building supplies and produce its own food. The land even had its own rock quarry.87 Other high schools had been built in Tonga (Liahona, 1952) and Hawai‘i (Church College, 1952) and would be built in Fiji (1969) and Samoa (unknown date). Worried about communism infiltrating Latin America, the church constructed colleges and schools in Mexico (1963) and Chile (1964). In all of these cases, local Saints not only provided money and labor, but they sent their children to the schools. Meetinghouses and schools may have looked American, but behind the exterior facades were the religious commitments of members who increasingly believed they belonged to a global, not Utah, religion. To fill the buildings, Henry D. Moyle and others devised the now dubbed (and often derided) “baseball baptism program.”88 Missionaries exploited the postwar interest in American sports to attract potential converts who were then quickly instructed and baptized. Children were made members, not always with their parents’ permission. While the number of converts soared, their staying power was limited. How does a local community cultivate the faith of teenage boys and girls?89 Because of church policy, those who drifted away had to be formally excommunicated. In spite of such missteps, stakes increased across

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the globe, allowing local Latter-day Saints rather than missionaries to run their own affairs. With increased membership, European wards now were expected to behave like their American counterparts. In England, Derek Plumbley remembered that becoming a Mormon might be easy but staying a Saint was difficult. “The Church in those days took up an enormous amount of your time, even as a new member,” he told an interviewer, “You were there all day on Sunday. Everybody went to MIA.  You were eventually involved in [other] things, your wife [helped] in Primary and this kind of thing, or you were taking your children to Primary, which was an evening as well. It was sort of three evenings a week, I suppose, as well as Sunday, as well as all the other events that were going on. It was a very, very active church.”90 Mid-century Mormonism, in Utah and across the globe, was a total culture—especially for women. They were expected to be members of the Relief Society and gather their own dues, set their own purchasing goals, and manage their own monies. During this period of growth, women raised money both for the building fund and for their own Relief Society activities. As in the United States, goods to be sold in bazaars were often made during Tuesday afternoon Relief Society “work meetings.” They raised money by selling crafts, foods, and services to other members of their ward or stake—even if the goods made little cultural sense. Zina Burr from Alberta, Canada, described in her diary how for one Relief Society bazaar she made more than fifteen pounds of chocolates, a doll cradle out of a grape basket, two nylon dress slips, and two aprons.91 Women’s efforts were creative and relentless. A woman from Cape Town, South Africa, remembered having an “ankle beauty contest” where, dressed in their favorite shoes, women stood behind a curtain and modeled their feet. Relief Society sisters sold tickets to vote for the shapeliest ankle.92 Until the mid-1960s, American culture and history structured Latter-day Saint printed materials. In this, US Latter-day Saints reflected the general ethnocentrism that permeated the “American Century” of the postwar years. Such cultural supremacy, however, was beginning to crack in the United States. The civil rights movement, which gained steam after the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation decision, began to challenge white racial superiority. Among Latter-day Saints, there also was a softening of the church’s racial policies. That same year of 1954, while visiting South Africa, president McKay told a group of Saints in Cape Town that men who bore no physical appearance of black ancestry no longer had to prove their non-African lineage before being ordained as priests. “I should rather, much rather, make a mistake in one case,” he explained, “and if it be found out afterwards, suspend his activity in the Priesthood than to deprive 10 worthy men of the Priesthood.”93 In 1958, after a four-year investigation, McKay also determined that Fijians “are not of the Negroid races” and could be ordained to the priesthood.94 Traveling and seeing global Mormonism, perhaps even more than acknowledging the developing civil rights movement in the United States, helped Latter-­ day Saint leaders realize the problematic nature of their racial theology. Without

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local leadership that reflected the racial and class makeup of the community, Latter-day Saints would never be able to have a foothold in what was increasingly being called the “two-thirds world.” In addition, Africans themselves were asking for missionaries to be sent to their communities. At some point in the 1940s, printed materials about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints caught the attention of individuals in Nigeria. They then sent letters requesting missionaries to church headquarters in Salt Lake City—letters received, considered, and ignored. During the early 1960s “thousands of letters” from Nigeria and Ghana were received at church headquarters.95 As with many independent African Christian communities churches, Nigerians were constructing their own “Mormon” congregations based on their visions, dreams, and personal revelations. In the early 1960s, church authorities tried to send white missionaries, but the newly independent Nigerian government refused to issue the appropriate visas, citing the church’s racial discriminatory theology. By 1977 Latter-day Saint leaders reported total membership of almost 4 million members. There were 25,300 missionaries and countless new and modern buildings where worship services would be held and community activities staged. Fourteen temples were in operation, two were being renovated, and six were planned or under construction.96 Students were being educated on several continents, and the Book of Mormon had been translated into languages as diverse as Thai (1976) and Afrikaans (1972). Church leaders told how “transistors, coaxial cables, and earth-orbiting satellites” enabled “young Carlos down in Argentina” who was preparing to be a missionary to be “instructed by a living prophet,” even though he had to stay up until midnight.97 A new president continued David O. McKay’s firmly established international vision of the church. And just in time. In 1965 immigration restrictions in the United States loosened making it far easier for non-European converts to gather in Zion. Still, the church faced serious problems. By the mid-1960s the building program had created a financial crisis, with the church’s income falling short of its expenditures. In 1950 the total church budget was $23 million, but by 1961 the projected deficit was between $20 and $25 million.98 Not only had there been a construction boom, between 1950 and 1957 Henry D. Moyle facilitated the purchase of 281,000 acres of land in Florida for an estimated $7.6 million. Between 1950 and 1970 the church acquired five more farms and ranches, including one in Alberta, Canada.99 Expansion, especially internationally, had been a costly endeavor. To solve this problem, leaders relied on one of its “foreign” members. In 1963 after the death of Henry D. Moyle, McKay called Canadian N. Eldon Tanner to be his second counselor. Tanner then put a “moratorium” on the ambitious building program and halted stock and bond transactions—thus rescuing the church from a potential disaster. By careful budgeting and investment, in 1969 Tanner had transformed the debt into a surplus of $29.5 million. He also balanced the church’s income between tithing and business sources.100

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A year later, church leaders decided to consolidate their publications, eliminating the women’s Relief Society Magazine. They also determined that auxiliaries, like the Relief Society, would be financed from general church funds. A similar shift, from local responsibility to headquarters, would occur with meetinghouse construction. From general church coffers would come the total payment for all buildings. While this new funding model took a load off of struggling global congregations, it also meant that they had less independence from Salt Lake. Religious restructuring accompanied this financial streamlining and centralization. The steep postwar growth in missions and membership meant that global congregations had been left to their own devices to locate and translate appropriate instructional materials. Interpretations of doctrine also varied and were inconsistent. Since the early twentieth century, church leaders had increasingly valued uniformity, efficiency, and centralization, but during the 1960s their efforts to organize and simplify church materials intensified.101 Under a clearly defined hierarchical body of male leaders, the process of “correlation” would establish an official and approved core set of beliefs and practices for all righteous Latter-day Saints to adhere to and follow. During a period when other Christian denominations were opening up to cultural pluralism, Latter-­ day Saints chose to value universalism. Theirs would be a church not of diversity but of uniformity.

Expansion, Contraction, Re-figuring, 1978–2020 Correlation would become a more prominent element of church organization when the lifting of the priesthood ban stimulated increased missionary efforts. In 1978 the First Presidency announced that a revelation had been received by church president Spencer W. Kimball extending priesthood and temple blessings to all worthy male members of the Church.102 Men of African descent would be permitted church leadership roles and both sexes allowed to receive their temple endowments. With this change, Latter-day Saints could freely seek black converts in countries like multiracial Brazil, where a temple was scheduled to open. The Mormons could also better compete with the other American-born Christian denominations active in the southern hemisphere. In just a two-year period between 1978 and 1980, Latter-day Saint international membership grew by 32 percent and in South America by 72 percent.103 While the number of European baptisms only slowly increased, the global South had become fertile ground for converts. Brazil and the Philippines were particularly receptive to the messages of an increasing number of missionaries. In 1975 approximately 23,000 missionaries served their church but twenty years later in 1995 that number had more than doubled to 48,631.104 Their international efforts had been successful. By 1996 more Latter-day Saints lived outside of the United States than inside.105 At the dawn of the new millennium, English lost its place as the language of the majority of church members.106

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The church’s membership increased at a high rate until the first decade of the twenty-first century. Beginning in 2014 the growth rate steadily declined, with a variety of explanations given for its cause.107 Congregational growth had actually slowed a decade earlier.108 The decline was particularly noticeable in parts of the United States (including Utah), Europe, Mexico, and Brazil, while remaining steady (or increasing) in Africa and the Philippines.109 While official membership statistics are inflated because they do not take into account disaffiliation or inactivity, in 2018 the church claimed 16,313,735 members and 65,137 proselyting missionaries in the field.110 Contemporary Mormonism is marked by two major characteristics: correlation and globalization. Correlation efforts address the needs of international Latter-day Saints by more equitably distributing the church’s resources, clarifying church teachings, and strengthening male priesthood authority. The abilities of new members of the religion, especially those from non-Western countries, are taken seriously when constructing lessons or publications. The correlation process reassures members that distributed materials are legitimate and authoritative. Through correlation, a “standard plan” for architecture makes Latter-day space consistent across countries. To the dismay of many heritage Mormons, who would prefer more depth, nuance, and diversity, correlation strives for uniformity and conformity. What is authoritative and official comes from committees headed at the highest levels by a mostly white, exclusively male, bureaucracy. For instance, in 1912 a Spanish language hymnal produced in Mexico had twenty-three, originally composed, Spanish hymn texts that comprised 25 percent of the total number of hymns. The correlated Spanish hymnal of 1992 was intended for all the Saints around the world who worshiped in Spanish. Even though in theory there was some flexibility in what was placed in the hymnal, only two of the hymns had texts written by Spanish-speaking members. The other songs were translations of hymns written in English and of American/ British origin. All of the hymn book’s music was composed by English speakers. The hymns were better translations, but they were expressions of North American sensibilities and lacked local poetry or cultural color.111 Regional specificity was exchanged for global acceptability. The correlation process also functioned to eliminate activities perceived as not essential to the core mission of the church and that drain its financial resources. In 1970, Neal A.  Maxwell became the Church Commissioner of Education, a new position overseeing church schools, seminaries, and institutes. A year later, Maxwell stated that states should supply non-religious education and the church should supply it only when “other educational systems are nonexistent, seriously deficient or inaccessible to our members.”112 Seminaries and institutes, which focused on religious education, would better carry out the core mission of the church. Chilean church schools started to close in 1977, with the church’s growth and adequate public schools given as reasons for closure. By 1981 church schools had completely closed in Chile, Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay. The closing of the New Zealand Church College

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in 2009 was particularly hard as Latter-day Saints remembered serving as building missionaries and personally constructing the edifice.113 While the Juárez Academy founded by American Latter-day Saints in Mexico remained open, in 2012 church leaders converted Centro Escolar Benemérito de las Américas into a missionary training center. A few schools continued in the Pacific Islands, but the Perpetual Education Fund established in 2001 and the BYU-Idaho Pathways online program are now pointed as examples of the church’s commitment to international higher education. Correlation does limit the amount of flexibility international congregations have in how they execute decisions made at church headquarters, but in recent years there has been more flexibility. Leaders are recognizing that adaptability has its benefits. In Hong Kong, for instance, branches made up almost exclusively of female housekeepers and nannies have flexibility about when they meet and who takes on leadership roles.114 Ethnographic studies demonstrate the subtle ways that wards demonstrate the cultural differences.115 Smaller temples and more of them are displaying local, but approved, art. By limiting its religious reach to official materials and spaces, the church opens up other aspects of life—from popular literature to holiday celebrations and home decorations—to the local innovations of Latter-day Saints. Other examples of the impact of correlation on the modern church could be given; however, what is more significant is to illustrate how correlation facilitates and parallels the rapid globalization of contemporary society. If nationalism was a construct of the nineteenth century, then globalization is of the twentieth and twenty-first. Migration and immigration, economic entanglement that defies national borders, exceedingly fast methods of transmitting information, and even mass tourism are its chief characteristic. Globalization has reorganized production, reconfigured traditional societies, and reworked how religion is expressed. Although the recent rise of substantial—and often violent—nationalism has been one response to globalization, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints both benefits from and accelerates globalization. By keeping national and regional cultural markers at a minimum and by encouraging a small set of core messages, church leaders encourage a “globalized” church. Latter-day Saint leaders prefer to describe this as a “Gospel Culture,” which is the essence of Christianity rather than the result of divisive national cultures. Gospel Culture, however, is also a set of approved images, languages, gestures, and performances that make up contemporary, globalized Mormonism. No longer do church materials exclusively celebrate American pioneers. The globalized church promotes the idea that every community has its “pioneers.” Historians in Salt Lake City collect stories about the sacrifices and efforts of local Saints around the world and train them in writing their own histories.116 Correlated church messages are rapidly spread and reinforced by sophisticated communication systems and by a multinational community of missionaries. Church economics are also international and interwoven. Correlation guarantees that efficient, for-profit companies and wise investment

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portfolio management of tithing income fund an increasingly complex global religious enterprise. Globalized Mormonism certainly originated in the intermountain West but has evolved to the point that most members see it as “Mormon,” not “American.” Globalization, migration, and immigration have introduced diverse groups of people into modern cities and towns. Since Latter-day Saint leaders prefer to begin church planting in cities and then move outward as core ward congregations become stronger, missionaries have found that displaced individuals living in urban centers often are receptive to their message.117 Wards give the newly baptized stability in a fractured and often chaotic world and encourage their spiritual growth and social development. English language facility, a key requirement for flourishing in the globalized world, is offered by missionaries and often is used in wards made up of people of multiple nationalities. The worship style of Sacrament meetings—which vacillates between silence, unscripted prayer, and a few rudimentary hymns—works well in a religious world where members negotiate multiple identities. For example, while studying in France, Italian Latter-day Saint Cristian Mannino met and married Chinese convert Wen Wu. They married in the Swiss temple, had two children to whom they speak in English, and eventually moved to Frankfurt, Germany, where Mannino works in the church’s European office and attends an English-­ language ward.118 Gospel Culture does not eliminate ethnic or national difference, but it does provide a religious parallel to globalization. While the Mannino family has mastered multinational Mormonism, not all Latter-day Saints are so adaptable. Bringing together believers of diverse cultures is a difficult task. In Europe, for instance, Latter-day Saint congregations that once were exclusively made up of one nationality have become multinational. In wards with second- and third-generation Latter-day Saints, new converts—often speaking different languages and of different social classes—can seem alien. As a missionary, American Sydney Dawson found much of her time was taken up trying to convince the more introverted native-born Swedes to socialize with the more extroverted foreign converts.119 In South Africa, women struggled to accept that the traditional bridal practice of paying lobola is contrary to Gospel Culture.120 The Latter-day Saint disapproval of tattooing seems to disregard its traditional significance for Pacific Islanders. Although church leaders in Salt Lake City have become more aware of their own American prejudices and promote Gospel Culture as a more theologically appropriate response to globalization, points of tension within the global community persist. Latter-day Saint missionaries have found success in the global religious marketplace where denominations compete for believers and citizens see truth claims as relative. While the church’s highest leadership is made up of white, male North Americans, its publicity campaigns promote a globalized face. For several months in 2013—following a similar effort in the United States— London was caught up in the “I’m a Mormon” campaign. Images of multiracial, visually photogenic, and culturally interesting Latter-day Saints—with a

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printed website for more information—appeared in underground subway billboards and on the sides of busses. In Europe, where religious hostility tends to be directed toward Muslims, Latter-day Saints (who strongly insist that they are Christians) increasingly are welcomed in multinational countries like the United Kingdom that are experiencing de-Christianization. Even the 2018 decision by church president Russell M.  Nelson to eliminate the word “Mormon” from church discourse underscores the trend of erasing unique historical markers and replacing them with more universal terms.121 Whether or not The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint will continue to benefit from globalization is unknown. As mentioned previously, official membership numbers are inflated and do not reflect self-removal or inactivity. For instance, in 2000 the Mexican government for the first time added the category “Mormon” to its population census. While church roles claimed a membership of 850,000, only 205,000 Mexicans actually ticked the “Mormon” box.122 Younger Mormons in the United States and Europe are dissatisfied with the church’s stance on gender relations and homosexuality.123 In 2020 perhaps the most famous international “Mormon” politician is Jacinda Ardern, the ex-Latter-day Saint president of New Zealand. As church membership facilitates educational achievement and economic prosperity, it might simultaneously sow seeds of discontent among its adherents, especially women. In countries like Ethiopia or Greece, where there are strong national Christian churches of long duration, Latter-day Saints have had less success promoting their globalized faith. Reassertions of national and ethnic identities—asserted against a backdrop of bland cultural homogenization and the broken promises of globalization—may catch church leaders unaware. Even a renewed interest in gathering to Zion, by global Saints unable to actualize their God-given potentials in their home countries, may again weaken the global church. Obviously, the future remains unknown, but the historical trajectory assures the continued global character of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­ day Saints.

Notes 1. G.  St. John Stott, “New Jerusalem Abandoned: The Failure to Carry Mormonism to the Delaware,” Journal of American Studies 21 no. 1 (1987): 71–85, and Brice Obermeyer, John P.  Bowes, “‘The Lands of My Nation’: Delaware Indians in Kansas, 1829–1869,” Great Plains Quarterly 36 (Winter 2016): 2–4. 2. Parley P.  Pratt, ed., Autobiography of Parley Parker Pratt (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1973), 54–56. 3. Jared Hickman, “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse,” American Literature 86 (September 2014): 431; Stott, “New Jerusalem Abandoned,” 77; and Caleb C. Milner, “‘O Stop and Tell me Red Man’: Indian Removal and the Lamanite Mission of 1830–31” (MA thesis Missouri State University, 2018), 61–95. 4. Pratt, Autobiography, 56.

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5. Doctrine and Covenants 28:9. The Doctrine and Covenants is an LDS book of scripture that contains prophetic writings of Joseph Smith that Latter-day Saints consider to be modern revelations. 6. Pratt, Autobiography, 48. 7. Introduction “Joseph Smith Documents Dating through June 1831,” online at https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/doc/introduction-to-documentsvolume-1-july-1828-june-1831. 8. Grant Underwood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 24. 9. Underwood, Millenarian World of Early Mormonism, 25 citing Latter-day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate 3 (November 1836): 401–4 and D&C 45:50. 10. Doctrine and Covenants 45:43. 11. Doctrine and Covenants 45:66. 12. V. Ben Bloxham, et al. Truth will Prevail: The Rise of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the British Isles 1837–1987 (Cambridge, UK: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1987), 213. 13. Bryan J.  Grant, “British Isles, the Church In,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 227. 14. Bloxham, Truth will Prevail, 213. 15. Terryl L.  Givens and Matthew J.  Grow, Parley P.  Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 181. 16. Colleen McDannell, “Mormons and Materialism: Struggling Against the Ideology of Separation,” in David N.  Hempton and Hugh McLeod, Secularization and Religious Innovation in the North Atlantic World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017): 127. 17. William Mulder, “Mormonism’s ‘Gathering’: An American Doctrine with a Difference,” Church History 23 (September 1954): 250. 18. Scott Alan Carson, “Indentured Migration in America’s Great Basin: Occupational Targeting and Adverse Selection,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, Number 3, (Winter 2002): 389–94. 19. Richard Sherlock, “Mormon Migration and Settlement after 1875,” Mormon History 2 (1975): 55. 20. Mulder, “Mormonism’s Gathering,” 250. 21. Julie K. Allen, Danish but not Lutheran: The Impact of Mormonism on Danish Cultural Identity, 1850–1920 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2017), 192. 22. Kim Östman cites 63.6 percent of female to 36.4 percent of male in The Introduction of Mormonism to Finnish Society, 1840–1900 (Turku, Finland: Åbo Akademi University Press, 2010), 216. 23. James A. Toronto, Eric R. Dursteler, and Michael W. Homer, Mormons in the Piazza: History of the Latter-day Saints in Italy (Salt Lake City: Desert Book, 2017), 99 note 38. A similar percentage (36 percent) were excommunicated in Finland; see Östman, The Introduction of Mormonism, ii. 24. Toronto, Mormons in the Piazza, 131. 25. Bloxom, Truth will Prevail, 328 citing Millennial Star 18 (September 6, 1856): 562. 26. Toronto, Mormons in the Piazza, 100–102 at 102. 27. Allen, Danish, but Not Lutheran, 186. 28. Allen, Danish, but Not Lutheran, 198.

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29. See, Craig L. Foster, Penny Tracts and Polemics: A Critical Analysis of Anti-­ Mormon Pamphleteering in Great Britain, 1837–1860 (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2002); Malcolm R. Thorp, “The Mormon Peril: The Crusade against the Saints in Britain,” Journal of Mormon History 2 (1975): 69–88, and “Winifred Graham and the Mormon Image in England,” Journal of Mormon History 6 (1979): 107–121. Wilfried Decoo, “The Image of Mormonism in French Literature: Part I” BYU Studies 14 (January 1974): 157–175, and “Part II,” BYU Studies 16 (January 1976): 265–276. 30. R. Ballantyne to his wife (September 6, 1853) as cited in David J. Whittaker, “Richard Ballantyne and the Defense of Mormonism in India in the 1850s,” in Supporting Saints: Life Stories of Nineteenth-Century Mormons (Provo: Brigham Young University, 1985) online at https://rsc.byu.edu/archived/ supporting-saints-life-stories-nineteenth-century-mormons/7-richard-ballantyne-and-defense. 31. Susan W.  Howard, “William Jarman: ‘That Anti-Mormon Apostle of the British Isles,’” Journal of Mormon History 43 (January 2017): 59–86. 32. Toronto, Mormons in the Piazza, 134. 33. Sebastian Lecourt, “The Mormons, the Victorians, and the Idea of Greater Britain,” Victorian Studies 56 (Autumn 2013): 85. 34. Brigham Young, Speech to the Joint Session of the Legislature (February 5, 1852) online at https://archive.org/details/CR100317B0001F0017/ page/n2. 35. See the biographies and entries in “A Century of Black Mormons,” online at http://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v02-03-century-of-black-mormons/. 36. Ian Barber, “Faith Across Cultures: Research on Mormonism in Oceania,” Mormon Studies Review 6 (2019): 64. 37. The Journal of George Q. Cannon (March 18, 1851) online at https://www. churchhistorianspress.org/george-q-cannon/1850s/1851/031851?lang=eng&highlight=#inline-note17. On the history of the concept of Pacific Islanders being akin to the Hebrews, see Norman Douglas, “The Sons of Lehi and the Seed of Cain: Racial Myths in Mormon Scripture and the Relevance to the Pacific Islands,” 8 (1974) The Journal of Religious History: 90–104. 38. Louisa Pratt was set apart as a missionary along with her husband Addison. In her diary of October 8, 1851, she wrote: “They [the Tahitian women at a meeting] inquired if the ancient Nephites were Europeans. I told them they were the ancient fathers of the Tahitians. At this they appeared greatly interested, and wished to learn more about the book. No organ of their craniums is more prominent than marvelousness.” In S. George Ellsworth, ed. History of Louisa Barnes Pratt (Fort Collins, CO, Logan, UT: University Press of Colorado, Utah State University Press, 1998), 148. 39. Brigham Young, “Idolatry, etc.” Journal of Discourses (February 7, 1858): 199 online at https://jod.mrm.org/6/193. 40. R. Lanier Britsch, Moramona: The Mormons in Hawaii (Laie, Hawaii: Institute for Polynesian Studies, 1989), 116 citing Samuel E.  Woolley diary, Dec. 28, 1900. 41. G. R., “Man and His Varieties,” Juvenile Instructor 3 (October 1, 1868): 146. See also John-Charles Duffy, “The Use of ‘Lamanite’ in Official LDS Discourse,” Journal of Mormon History, 34 (Winter 2008): 127.

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42. Book of Mormon, 63: 5–10. 43. For church speculation on Hagoth, see “Latter-day Prophets Have Indicated that Pacific Islanders are Descendants of Lehi,” Church News (9 July 1988) online at https://www.thechurchnews.com/archives/1988-07-09/latterday-prophets-have-indicated-that-pacific-islanders-are-descendants-oflehi-153045; R. Lanier Britsch, “Maori Traditions and the Mormon Church,” New Era (June 1981) online at https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ new-era/1981/06/maori-traditions-and-the-mormon-church?lang=eng; and Robert E.  Parsons, “Hagoth and the Polynesians,” in The Book of Mormon: Alma, the Testimony of the Word, ed. Monte S. Nyman and Charles D. Tate Jr. (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1992), 249–62 online at https://rsc.byu.edu/archived/ book-mormon-alma-testimony-word/15-hagoth-and-polynesians-0. 44. Duffy, “The Use of Lamanite,” 128. 45. Hokulani Aikau, A Chosen People, a Promised Land Mormonism and Race in Hawaii (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 46. 46. R. Lanier Britsch, “Hawaii, the Church in,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 578. 47. R. Lanier Britsch, “The Lanai Colony: A Hawaiian Extension of the Mormon Colonial Idea,” Hawaiian Journal of History 12 (1978), 74. 48. Fred E.  Woods, “The Palawai Pioneers on the Island of Lanai: The First Hawaiian Latter-day Saint Gathering Place (1854–1864),” Mormon Historical Studies 5, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 15. 49. Joseph F. Smith to George A. Smith, 23 November 1855, “Correspondence,” Deseret News 6 (16 April 1856), 42, as cited in Woods, “Palawai Pioneers,” 33. 50. Brigham Young to Elders Silas Smith, Henry P. Richards, and Edward Partridge (September 4, 1857) as cited in Woods, “Palawai Pioneers,” 33. 51. See Jacob Adler and Robert M. Kamins, The Fantastic Life of Walter Murray Gibson: Hawaii’s Minister of Everything (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986). 52. Cynthia Woolley Compton, “The Making of the Ahupuaa of Laie into a Gathering Place and Plantation: The Creation of an Alternative Space to Capitalism” (PhD diss., Brigham Young University, 2005), 231. 53. Carol Cornwall Madsen, “Mormon Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Polynesia,” in Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp and Reid L. Neilson, Proclamation to the People: Nineteenth-Century Mormonism and the Pacific Basin Frontier (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008), 60, quoting Elizabeth Noall to Zina D. H. Young (December 1888), Salt Lake Stake Relief Society Record. 54. “Country Information New Zealand,” Church News (January 29, 2010) online at https://www.thechurchnews.com/archives/2010-01-29/countryinformation-new-zealand-67296. 55. Peter Lineham, “The Mormon Message in the Context of Maori Culture,” in Maffly-Kipp and Neilson, Proclamation to the People, 198–227. 56. Compton, “Making of the Ahupuaa,” 48, and Richard J.  Dowse, “Joseph F. Smith and the Hawaiian Temple,” in Craig K. Manscill, et al. Joseph F. Smith: Reflections on the Man and His Times (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2013), online at https://rsc.byu.edu/archived/ joseph-f-smith-reflections-man-and-his-times/ joseph-f-smith-and-hawaiian-temple.

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57. Sherlock, “Mormon Migration,” 63. 58. Thomas Cottam Romney, The Mormon Colonies in Mexico (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005), 62. 59. Romney, Mormon Colonies, 72. 60. Jason H. Dormady and Jared M. Tamez, Just South of Zion: The Mormons in Mexico and Its Borderlands (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 6. 61. Lawrence B. Lee, “The Mormons Come to Canada, 1887–1902,” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 59 (January 1968): 14. 62. Sherlock “Mormon Migration,” 64. 63. Lee, “Mormons Come to Canada,” 19. 64. Ronald W. Walker, “Heber J. Grant’s European Mission, 1903–1906,” BYU Studies Quarterly: 43 (2004): 267. 65. Walker, “Heber J. Grant’s European Mission,” 268. 66. Matthew Lyman Rasmussen, Mormonism and the Making of a British Zion (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016), 157. 67. Netherlands: Church Chronology, online at https://www.churchofjesuschrist. org/study/history/global-histories/netherlands/nl-chronology?lang=eng. 68. Rasmussen, Mormonism and the Making of a British Zion, 162–164. 69. Rasmussen, Mormonism and the Making of a British Zion, 176. 70. Andrew Jenson, “British Mission,” Encyclopedic History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Publishing Company, 1941), 92. 71. Compare Andrew Jenson, Encyclopedic History “Hawaiian Mission,” 321 with “British Mission,” 92. 72. Brian William Hunt, “History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in New Zealand” (MA Thesis, Brigham Young University, 1971), 67–89. 73. Jenson, Encyclopedic History “New Zealand Mission,” 581, and “Australian Mission,” 37. 74. Hickman, “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse,” 433. See also Thomas Murphy, “Other Mormon Histories: Lamanite Subjectivity in Mexico,” Journal of Mormon History 26 (2000): 179–214, and Elisa Eastwood Pulido, “The Spiritual Evolution of Margarito Bautista” (PhD diss. The Claremont Graduate University, 2015). 75. F. LaMond Tullis, “A Shepherd to Mexico’s Saints: Arwell L. Pierce and the Third Convention,” BYU Studies Quarterly 37 (1997): 137. 76. Amy Brown Lyman, “In Retrospect,” Relief Society Magazine 29 (November 1942): 763. 77. Lyman, “In Retrospect,” 816. 78. “Population Change in the U.S. and the World from 1950 to 2050,” Pew Research Center https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2014/01/30/chapter-4-population-change-in-the-u-s-and-the-world-from-1950-to-2050/ and 1,111,314 total membership as stated in 121st Annual Conference Report (April 1951): 9. 79. Conference Report (April 1951): 11f. 80. James B.  Allen, “On Becoming a Universal Church: Some Historical Perspectives,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 25 (Spring 1992): 15. 81. Richard O. Cowan, “The Pivotal Swiss Temple,” in Regional Studies in Latter-­ day Saint Church History: Europe, ed. Donald Q. Cannon and Brent L. Top

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(Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2003) online at https://rsc.byu.edu/archived/regional-studies-latter-day-saintchurch-history-europe/pivotal-swiss-temple#_edn9. 82. 125th Conference Report (April 1955): 25. 83. Gregory A. Prince and William Robert Wright, David O. McKay, the Rise of Modern Mormonism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005), 204. 84. Paul L. Anderson and Richard W. Jackson, “Building Program,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism 236f. 85. Rasmussen, Mormonism and the Making of a British Zion, 179. 86. “Building Program,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 236f. 87. Hunt, “History,” 104–109. 88. D.  Michael Quinn, “I-Thou v. I-It Conversions: The Mormon Baseball Baptisms Era,” Sunstone 16 (December 1993): 30–44, and Matthew Martinich, “Reasons for Quick-Baptism Tactics in the LDS Church,” online at https:// c u m o r a h . c o m / i n d e x . p h p ? t a rg e t = v i e w _ o t h e r _ a r t i c l e s & s t o r y _ i d = 476&cat_id=30. 89. Rasmussen, British Zion, 150. 90. Rasmussen, British Zion, 148. 91. Zina Pearl Heninger Burr, diary (November 15, 1953). Church History Library, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 92. Veronica Dalhender, interview by Colleen McDannell (February 11, 2015) as discussed in Colleen McDannell, Sister Saints: Mormon Women Since the End of Polygamy (New York: Oxford University Press), 75. 93. Prince and Wright, David O. McKay, 77f citing Remarks of President David O.  McKay, (January 1954), in Cape Town, South Africa, Johannesburg Mission Office Files. 94. Ian Barber, “Faith Across Cultures: Research on Mormonism in Oceania,” Mormon Studies Review 6 (2019): 6. 95. James B.  Allen, “Would-Be Saints: West Africa Before the 1978 Priesthood Revelation.” Journal of Mormon History, 17 (1991): 214ff. 96. Statistical report 1977 (as reported in April Conference, 1978) https://www. churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1978/05/statistical-repor t1977?lang=eng. 97. 148th Annual Conference Report (April 1978): 53. 98. Prince and Wright, David O. McKay, 211. 99. D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Wealth and Corporate Power (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2017), 82. 100. Quinn, Mormon Hierarchy, 123. 101. Michael A. Goodman, “Correlation: The Turning Point (1960s),” in Salt Lake City: The Place Which God Prepared, ed. Scott C. Esplin and Kenneth L. Alford (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, Salt Lake City, 2011) online at https://rsc.byu.edu/ archived/salt-lake-city/13-correlation-turning-point-1960s. 102. Official Declaration #2 online at https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/ study/scriptures/dc-testament/od/2?lang=eng. 103. Rodney Stark, “The Rise of a New World Faith,” in Latter-day Saint Social Life: Social Research on the LDS Church and Its Members (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1998), online at https://rsc.byu. edu/es/archived/latter-day-saint-social-life-social-research-lds-churchand-its-members/1-rise-new-world.

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104. Compare 145th Conference Report (April 1975): 120 with Statistical Report 1995 online at https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1996/ 05/statistical-report-1995?lang=eng. 105. Ray M. Merrill, et al., “Growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in a Global Context,” Religious Educator 16, no. 1 (2015): 17–127 online at https://rsc.byu.edu/archived/re-16-no-1-2015/growth-churchjesus-christ-latter-day-saints-global-context#_edn4. 106. Jay M.  Todd, “Historic Milestone Achieved: More Non-English Speaking Members now Than English Speaking,” online at https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2000/09/news-of-the-church/ historic-milestone-achieved-more-non-english-speaking-members-now-thanenglish-speaking?lang=eng. 107. Jana Riess, “Mormon Growth Continues to Slow, Church Report Shows,” online at https://religionnews.com/2019/04/06/mormon-growth-continues-to-slow-church-report-shows/ and Peggy Fletcher Stack, “Mormon Growth Rate Falls to Lowest Level in 80 Years,” Salt Lake Tribune (July 7, 2017) online at https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=5381411&it ype=CMSID. 108. Matthew Martinich, “Comparing Congregational and Membership Growth Trends in the LDS Church: 1950–2012” (February 19, 2013) online at https://cumorah.com/index.php?target=view_other_articles&story_id= 545&cat_id=30. 109. Stack, “Mormon Growth Rate.” 110. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/facts-and-statistics. 111. John-Charles Duffy and Hugo Olaiz, “Correlated Praise: The Development of the Spanish Hymnal,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 35 (Summer 2002): 98, 110. 112. Seek Ye Learning Even By Study and Faith: Report for 1971 from Commissioner of Education of the Church, 2 (Salt Lake City: Church Educational System, 1971) as cited in Casey Paul Griffiths, Scott C. Esplin, Barbara Morgan, and E. Vance Randall “Colegios Chilenos de los Santos de los Últimos Dı̄as: The History of Latter-day Saint Schools in Chile,” Journal of Mormon History, 40 (Winter 2014), 130. 113. See Scott C.  Esplin, “Closing the Church College of New Zealand: A Case Study in International Church Education Policy,” in Regional Studies in Latter-­day Saint Church History: The Pacific Isles, ed. Reid L. Neilson, Steven C. Harper, Craig K. Manscill, and Mary Jane Woodger (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2008), 161–80. https://rsc.byu.edu/archived/regional-studies-latter-day-saintchurch-history/10-closing-church-college-new-zealand-case#_ednref45. 114. Peggy Fletcher Stack, “Mormon Congregations in Hong Kong Unlike Any Other,” Salt Lake Tribune (December 24, 2017) online at https://www.sltrib. com/religion/local/2017/12/24/mormon-congregations-in-hong-kongunlike-any-others-theyre-virtually-all-women-and-they-dont-just-hold-services-on-sundays/ and Stacilee Ford, “Sister Acts: Relief Society and Flexible Citizenship in Hong Kong,” in Gina Colvin and Johanna Brook, Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2018), 215–228.

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115. For instance, see Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, “A Tale of Three Primaries: The Gravity of Mormonism’s Informal Institutions,” Gina Colvin and Johanna Brook, Decolonizing Mormonism: 229–262. 116. See, “Global Histories” https://history.churchofjesuschrist.org/landing/ global-histories. 117. Matthew Martinich, “Centers of Strength Policy” (March 8, 2014) online at https://cumorah.com/index.php?target=view_other_articles&story_ id=643&cat_id=35. 118. McDannell, Sister Saints, 146. 119. Sydney Dawson, interview by Colleen McDannell (April 21, 2016) as cited in Sister Saints, 150. 120. On lobola, see McDannell, Sister Saints, 147, and “Tattoos and Your Mission,” h t t p s : / / w w w. c h u r c h o f j e s u s c h r i s t . o r g / y o u t h / a r t i c l e / tattoos-and-your-mission?lang=eng. 121. “The Name of the Church,” online at https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist. org/article/name-of-the-church. 122. Mathew Bowman, The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith (New York: Random House, 2012), 220. 123. Matt Canham, “Utah Sees Latter-day Saint Slowdown and Membership Numbers drop in Salt Lake County,” Salt Lake Tribune (January 5, 2020) online at https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2020/01/05/utah-sees-latterday/, Jana Riess, The Next Mormons: How Millennials are Changing the LDS Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 91–108; Carine DecooVanwelkenhuysen, “Mormon Women In Europe: A Look at Gender Norms,” in Kate Holbrook and Mathew Bowman, Women and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Salt Lake: University of Utah Press, 2016), 213–229.

Bibliography Adler, Jacob, and Robert M. Kamins. 1986. The Fantastic Life of Walter Murray Gibson: Hawaii’s Minister of Everything. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Aikau, Hokulani. 2012. A Chosen People, a Promised Land Mormonism and Race in Hawaii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Allen, James B. 1991. Would-Be Saints: West Africa Before the 1978 Priesthood Revelation. Journal of Mormon History 17: 207–247. ———. 1992. On Becoming a Universal Church: Some Historical Perspectives. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 25 (Spring): 13–36. Allen, Julie K. 2017. Danish But Not Lutheran: The Impact of Mormonism on Danish Cultural Identity, 1850–1920. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Barber, Ian. 2019. Faith Across Cultures: Research on Mormonism in Oceania. Mormon Studies Review 6: 55–66. Bloxham, V. Ben, James R. Moss, and Larry C. Porter. 1987. Truth Will Prevail: The Rise of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the British Isles 1837–1987. Cambridge: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Bowman, Mathew. 2012. The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith. New York: Random House.

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Britsch, R.  Lanier. 1978. The Lanai Colony: A Hawaiian Extension of the Mormon Colonial Idea. Hawaiian Journal of History 12: 68–83. Britsch, R. 1989. Lanier. Moramona: The Mormons in Hawaii. Laie, Hawaii: Institute for Polynesian Studies. Cannon, Donald Q., and Brent L. Top, eds. 2003. Regional Studies in Latter-day Saint Church History: Europe. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University. Carson, Scott Alan. 2002. Indentured Migration in America’s Great Basin: Occupational Targeting and Adverse Selection. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32 (Winter): 387–404. Colvin, Gina, and Johanna Brook. 2018. Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Compton, Cynthia Woolley. 2005. The Making of the Ahupuaa of Laie into a Gathering Place and Plantation: The Creation of an Alternative Space to Capitalism. PhD diss., Brigham Young University. Decoo, Wilfried. 1976. “The Image of Mormonism in French Literature: Part I” BYU Studies 14 (January 1974):157–175, and “Part II”. BYU Studies 16: 265–276. Dormady, Jason H., and Jared M. Tamez. 2005. Just South of Zion: The Mormons in Mexico and Its Borderlands. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Douglas, Norman. 1974. The Sons of Lehi and the Seed of Cain: Racial Myths in Mormon Scripture and the Relevance to the Pacific Islands. The Journal of Religious History 8: 90–104. Duffy, John-Charles. 2008. The Use of ‘Lamanite’ in Official LDS Discourse. Journal of Mormon History 34 (Winter): 127. Duffy, John-Charles, and Hugo Olaiz. 2002. Correlated Praise: The Development of the Spanish Hymnal. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 35 (Summer): 89–113. Ellsworth, S.  George, ed. 1998. History of Louisa Barnes Pratt. Fort Collins, CO; Logan, UT: University Press of Colorado, Utah State University Press. Esplin, Scott C., and Kenneth L. Alford, eds. 2011. Salt Lake City: The Place Which God Prepared. Provo, UT/Salt Lake City: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University/Deseret Book, Salt Lake City. Foster, Craig L. 2002. Penny Tracts and Polemics: A Critical Analysis of Anti-Mormon Pamphleteering in Great Britain, 1837–1860. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books. Givens, Terryl L., and Matthew J.  Grow. 2011. Parley P.  Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism. New York: Oxford University Press. Griffiths, Casey, Paul Scott C. Esplin, Barbara Morgan, and E. Vance Randall. 2014. Colegios Chilenos de los Santos de los Últimos Dı̄as: The History of Latter-day Saint Schools in Chile. Journal of Mormon History 40 (Winter): 97–134. Hickman, Jared. 2014. The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse. American Literature 86: 429–461. Holbrook, Kate, and Mathew Bowman. 2016. Women and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Salt Lake: University of Utah Press. Howard, Susan W. 2017. William Jarman: ‘That Anti-Mormon Apostle of the British Isles’. Journal of Mormon History 43: 59–86. [n.a.]. 1998. Latter-day Saint Social Life: Social Research on the LDS Church and Its Members. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University. Lecourt, Sebastian. 2013. The Mormons, the Victorians, and the Idea of Greater Britain. Victorian Studies 56 (Autumn): 85–111.

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Lee, Lawrence B. 1968. The Mormons Come to Canada, 1887–1902. The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 59: 11–22. Maffly-Kipp, Laurie F., and Reid L.  Neilson. 2008. Proclamation to the People: Nineteenth-Century Mormonism and the Pacific Basin Frontier. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Manscill, Craig K., et al. 2013. Joseph F. Smith: Reflections on the Man and His Times. Provo, UT/Salt Lake City: Religious Studies Center/Deseret Book. McDannell, Colleen. 2017. Mormons and Materialism: Struggling Against the Ideology of Separation. In Secularization and Religious Innovation in the North Atlantic World, ed. David N.  Hempton and Hugh McLeod. New  York: Oxford University Press. ———. Sister Saints: Mormon Women Since the End of Polygamy. New  York: Oxford University Press. Merrill, Ray M., et al. 2015. Growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in a Global Context. Religious Educator 16: 17–127. Milner, Caleb C. 2018. ‘O Stop and Tell me Red Man’: Indian Removal and the Lamanite Mission of 1830–31.” Master’s thesis, Missouri State University. Mulder, William. 1954. Mormonism’s ‘Gathering’: An American Doctrine with a Difference. Church History 23: 248–264. Murphy, Thomas. 2000. Other Mormon Histories: Lamanite Subjectivity in Mexico. Journal of Mormon History 26: 179–214. Nyman, Monte S., and Charles D. Tate Jr., eds. 1992. The Book of Mormon: Alma, the Testimony of the Word. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University. Östman, Kim. 2010. The Introduction of Mormonism to Finnish Society, 1840–1900. Turku, Finland: Åbo Akademi University Press. Pratt, Parley P., ed. 1973. Autobiography of Parley Parker Pratt. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company. Prince, Gregory A., and William Robert Wright. 2005. David O. McKay, the Rise of Modern Mormonism. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Pulido, Elisa Eastwood. 2015. The Spiritual Evolution of Margarito Bautista. PhD diss., The Claremont Graduate University. Quinn, D. Michael. 1993. I-Thou v. I-It Conversions: The Mormon Baseball Baptisms Era. Sunstone 16: 30–44. ———. 2017. The Mormon Hierarchy: Wealth and Corporate Power. Salt Lake City: Signature Books. Rasmussen, Matthew Lyman. 2016. Mormonism and the Making of a British Zion. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Riess, Jana. 2019. The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church. New York: Oxford University Press. Romney, Thomas Cottam. 2005. The Mormon Colonies in Mexico. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Sherlock, Richard. 1975. Mormon Migration and Settlement After 1875. Mormon History 2: 55. Thorp, Malcolm R. 1975. The Mormon Peril: The Crusade Against the Saints in Britain. Journal of Mormon History 2: 69–88. ———. 1979. Winifred Graham and the Mormon Image in England. Journal of Mormon History 6: 107–121.

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Toronto, James A., Eric R. Dursteler, and Michael W. Homer. 2017. Mormons in the Piazza: History of the Latter-day Saints in Italy. Salt Lake City: Desert Book. Tullis, F.  LaMond. 1997. A Shepherd to Mexico’s Saints: Arwell L.  Pierce and the Third Convention. BYU Studies Quarterly 37: 127–157. Underwood, Grant. 1993. The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Walker, Ronald W. 2004. Heber J. Grant’s European Mission, 1903–1906. BYU Studies Quarterly 43: 267. Whittaker, David J. 1985. Supporting Saints: Life Stories of Nineteenth-Century Mormons. Provo: Brigham Young University. Woods, Fred E. 2004. The Palawai Pioneers on the Island of Lanai: The First Hawaiian Latter-day Saint Gathering Place (1854–1864). Mormon Historical Studies 5 (2, Fall): 15.

CHAPTER 2

The Evolving Ecclesiastical Organization of an International Lay Church Gregory A. Prince

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been in continual organizational evolution since its founding in 1830. Initially drawing on scriptural terminology and precedents, its founder, Joseph Smith, appropriated organizational elements from other contemporaneous Christian traditions, and then he and his successors largely charted their own course as the church grew numerically and geographically and responded to a changing cultural milieu. It is useful to envision several stages of ecclesiastical development that will serve as subdivisions of this chapter: (1) Genesis—creating and expanding the church’s structure, a process largely driven by its founding prophet, Joseph Smith. (2) Exodus—adapting to new surroundings in the Great Basin subsequent to the forced departure of the still-young church from the Midwest following the assassination of Smith in 1844. (3) Reinvention—changing the organization, in major ways, in response to the Reed Smoot Hearings (1904–1907). (4) Regional Expansion—extending the church structure beyond the Great Basin, notably California and Washington, DC. (5) International Expansion—increasing missionary outreach beyond North America and reversing, in the mid-twentieth century, a formal policy of “gathering,” wherein converts had been encouraged to leave their native countries and emigrate to “Zion.” (6) Contraction—consolidating church activities and organizations in response to changing times. (7) Rebranding—confronting major challenges on multiple fronts that threaten the very vitality of the church.

G. A. Prince (*) Independent Scholar, Potomac, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_2

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Genesis Arising out of the Second Great Awakening,1 Mormonism’s initial appeal was to those who, fatigued or disillusioned by the trappings of contemporary Christianity, sought a restoration of the Primitive Church. One of its predecessors in the early nineteenth century was the Restoration Movement. It was represented by Alexander Campbell’s Disciples of Christ, founded two decades before Mormonism with a fundamental message of a return to the simple roots of Christianity. One of the Disciples’ highest officials, Sidney Rigdon, would make a deep imprint on Mormonism. Ecclesiastical organization based on a restoration model was important enough to Joseph Smith that he included it as one of the thirteen Articles of Faith that he wrote in 1842: “We believe in the same organization that existed in the Primitive Church, namely, apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, evangelists, and so forth.” Ironically, the organization to which he referred did not exist in his church until years after its founding. Even the name of the church had gone through two evolutionary stages by 1842, first being simply the Church of Christ, and then the Church of Jesus Christ. A Book of Mormon Church A rudimentary ecclesiastical structure was described in the later chapters of the Book of Mormon, which was published shortly before the formal organizing of the church. It consisted of three offices—teacher, priest and elder—and two levels of unnamed authority, with elders holding the higher one. This became the structure of the nascent church that Joseph Smith established. No president was stipulated, not even gradations among elders (although Smith soon elevated himself to First Elder and designated Oliver Cowdery as Second Elder). No deacons. No bishops. No high priests. No patriarchs. No seventies. No apostles. All of those came later.2 The first general conference of the church occurred in June 1830. Men (no women—the church has always functioned with an all-male, lay clergy) were selected and ordained to one of the three offices and issued written licenses. Comparison of the licenses is instructive. John Whitmer says, “A License Liberty Power & Authority … signifying & proveing [sic] that he is an Apostle of Jesus Christ an Elder of this Church of Christ.”3 That of Joseph Smith Sr., bearing the same title as Whitmer’s, says, “signifying & proveing (sic) that he is a Priest of this Church of Christ.”4 A third license, issued to Christian Whitmer, who was ordained a teacher on the same date, has similar wording.5 The double title given to John Whitmer—apostle and elder—is consistent with the Book of Mormon reference to the elders having authority higher than that of priests and teachers. (“Apostle” at this time meant special witness but was not a separate office. That evolutionary step occurred in 1835.) The key distinction of elders was that they, alone, could confer the Gift of the Holy Ghost to those who united with the church through baptism.

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The second point demonstrated by the licenses is that the early church did not operate under the structure later called “priesthood.” The officers were called and given authority through formal ordination, but the offices to which they were called were not yet part of a formal authority structure. Additional evidence that “priesthood” was not yet a developed concept comes from three scripturally mandated prayers contained in the Book of Mormon and early Latter-day Saint revelations, none of which contains the word “priesthood.” The two sacramental prayers6 invoke no authority on the part of the officiator, whereas the baptismal prayer states, “Having authority given me of Jesus Christ ….”7 (A later version, still in use today, states, “Having been commissioned of Jesus Christ …,”8 but neither uses the word “priesthood.”) By contrast, other ordinances performed in today’s LDS Church invoke, by name, the priesthood of the officiator. Sidney Rigdon and the Expansion of Ecclesiology David Whitmer, one of the Three Witnesses to the Book of Mormon, believed that the ecclesiastical organization was complete when the church was founded. Many years later, he wrote, Concerning the spiritual offices in the church, Elders, Priests and Teachers, with their duties as given in the Book of Mormon, they comprise the officers who are qualified to act in all spiritual matters, and there is no need of any more spiritual offices than these in the church, as we can plainly see from the scriptures.9

But Whitmer’s desired status quo was interrupted by Sidney Rigdon less than a year after the founding of the church. A powerful and charismatic preacher, Rigdon rose to the office of bishop in the Disciples of Christ before falling out with Alexander Campbell over the issue of gifts of the spirit. While Campbell acknowledged the reality of the charisms described in the New Testament, he held that they had no place in the modern Restoration Movement. By contrast, Rigdon felt that they were essential—indeed, “signs of the true church.” The split resulted in Rigdon’s departure from the Disciples and nearly coincident embrace of Mormonism, effected by the first Mormon missionaries, who passed through Rigdon’s home of Kirtland, Ohio, on their way to preach to Native Americans in Missouri. Almost immediately after converting, Rigdon traveled to New York to meet Smith. The result was dramatic. To the three offices already in place, Smith, having consulted with Rigdon, added those of bishop and deacon—the only two offices recognized by the Disciples. A short time later, the first Latter-day Saint bishop, Edward Partridge, was called by Joseph Smith, but ordained by Bishop Sidney Rigdon. Of even greater significance was Rigdon’s emphasis on charisms—particularly the need for the Restored Church to have the kind of Pentecostal outpouring described in the Book of Acts, which empowered the early disciples of

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Jesus to go from Jerusalem and take the gospel to the world. Only three weeks after arriving in New York, Rigdon acted as Smith’s scribe as he dictated a revelation that mirrored the twenty-fourth chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke, wherein the resurrected Jesus commanded the assembled disciples to stay in Jerusalem until they were “endowed with power from on high”: Wherefore, for this cause I gave unto you the commandment that ye should go to the Ohio; and there I will give unto you my law; and there you shall be endowed with power from on high.10

Within weeks, Smith and his followers left New York for Kirtland, Ohio— Rigdon’s home. Five months after the revelation, the promised endowment occurred in a Kirtland schoolhouse, where selected elders receiving it were ordained to the “high priesthood,” which later became the office of high priest. Other offices were added in 1833 (patriarch, also called evangelist) and 1835 (apostle and seventy), and in 1835 the nine offices were formally placed into two “priesthoods,” with the Aaronic Priesthood consisting of deacons, teachers, priests and bishops; and the Melchizedek Priesthood consisting of elders, seventies, high priests, apostles and patriarchs. Governance Initially, Joseph Smith was the sole and undisputed leader of the church, which had but one center. But the move to Ohio in 1831 was accompanied by a simultaneous move of other church members to Missouri, which was designated by Smith as the ultimate gathering place of the entire church. To provide a local governing structure, Smith designated each location a “stake,” a reference to the wooden stakes that had supported the tabernacle in which Moses and his followers worshipped. One bishop was appointed to oversee the temporal affairs of each stake. That was a major task, given that both stakes attempted forms of communitarian life, which meant that the bishop had the crucial responsibility of receiving and redistributing member offerings of money and, more commonly, commodities. Later, Smith created “standing high councils” of twelve men in each stake that provided spiritual and judicial oversight, in the latter case resolving disputes among members or disciplining them for transgressions. Subsequently, for other areas, a “traveling high council” was created, whose jurisdiction covered only regions outside the stakes. The structure of worship services likely bore close resemblance to those of the Protestant traditions from which nearly all converts to Mormonism had come, albeit with different preaching content. Services were held on Sundays and, weather permitting, outdoors to accommodate congregations too large for existing buildings. Converts brought with them their Protestant hymnals until, in 1835, Joseph Smith’s wife Emma assembled a hymnal that combined familiar Protestant hymns with uniquely Mormon ones.11 Priests officiated over

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communion (sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, or eucharist), while teachers were assigned to visit members in their homes and help address their needs. Illinois When Smith and those who chose to follow him moved from Ohio to Missouri they could not settle in Jackson County, as the Missouri branch of the church had already been expelled from Independence by original settlers there. Instead, they had to regroup in northern counties of the state. Their stay was short-­ lived and punctuated by severe persecution that included loss of life of both Mormons and Missourians, but primarily Mormons. In 1839, the harried church members moved once again, this time to their own city on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, named Nauvoo. While no additional ordained priesthood offices were created after Kirtland, the position of stake president was introduced in Nauvoo. In contrast to the nine offices mentioned previously, all of which were mentioned in the Bible (albeit sometimes in different contexts than their roles within Smith’s church), stake president had no biblical antecedent. Perhaps for this reason, stake presidents were (and are) “set apart” to their office by the laying on of hands, whereas the other nine kinds of officers are “ordained” by the laying on of hands—a distinction without a difference, but nevertheless still followed. The most significant ecclesiastical development in Nauvoo was the emergence of the “Quorum of the Anointed,”12 which consisted of those initiated into a newly introduced “endowment” ceremony that was soon incorporated into the structure of the temple then under construction. While not carrying any official title, those who received the endowment—and even more so, those who subsequently embraced the then-secret practice of plural marriage— formed the backbone of church governance, at both the local and general levels, for more than a half-century.

Exodus The death of Joseph Smith in June 1844 set in motion a series of events that resulted in the forced departure from Nauvoo of Brigham Young, Smith’s successor, along with most members of the church. (Many of Smith’s extended family, including his wife and mother, chose to remain in Illinois, as did others who eventually regrouped and founded the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.) Upon arriving in the Great Salt Lake Valley in the summer of 1847, Young began, almost immediately, to call families to colonize scores of settlements throughout the Great Basin, with the unrealized goal of forming the State of Deseret, which would have encompassed large parts of nine current states and exceeded the size of Texas. Young wound up having a luxury that Smith never enjoyed: permanence. Smith’s church had moved from New York to Ohio and Missouri, and then to Illinois, never spending a full decade in one place. Salt Lake City, along with many of Young’s colonized

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settlements throughout the western United States, gave the Latter-day Saints the permanence that they had been denied for the first two decades of the church’s existence. Whereas stakes had been the primary organizing unit in Ohio, Missouri and Illinois, Young organized smaller groups within stakes into “wards,” a name derived from political wards common in eastern United States cities. Rather than presiding over temporal matters in entire stakes, bishops now presided over wards that met each week as distinct, geographically defined congregations, each within its own meetinghouse. Next to the bishop, the ordained teachers (as opposed to non-ordained teachers who later served in the Sunday schools) were the most important ecclesiastical officers at the local level. Each was assigned a number of families to watch over, and minutes of the weekly nineteenth-century Teachers Quorum meetings attest to the seriousness with which they approached their assignments. The ascension of Brigham Young to the church presidency was accompanied by a radical transformation of what earlier had been called the traveling high council, also known as the Quorum of the Twelve, whose jurisdiction stopped at the boundaries of stakes. Now, its jurisdiction over-rode stake boundaries and extended to the entire church, with authority second only to the First Presidency, consisting of the church president—Brigham Young from 1847 until his death in 1877—and his counselors. The ascension of the Quorum had not been assured, for at the death of Joseph Smith there had been many possible ways in which his successor might have been chosen—all because of his own inconsistency in addressing the issue of succession in the years prior to his death.13 When the Quorum, with Young as its primary spokesman, won the succession battle, it also cemented its place in the hierarchy. The Rise of the Auxiliary Organizations The stability that the church achieved by moving to the Great Basin came at a cost, albeit one that church members embraced. Whereas they previously had lived within pluralistic communities with abundant options for secular life, they now were alone. Whatever they were to do with their hours not spent in worship, they had to provide for themselves. So, in addition to establishing businesses, schools, libraries, operas and other forms of learning and culture, church members began to create, generally at the grassroots level, five “auxiliary organizations” within the church that would address the needs of various demographics not being met by Sunday worship services. All five remain active to the present day. First came the Relief Society, founded by and for adult women. Organized in 1842 as a grassroots initiative quickly appropriated and reshaped by Joseph Smith, it was discontinued shortly after Smith’s death and remained dormant for two decades. Resuscitated in 1867, it is one of the oldest and largest women’s organizations in the world.

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Through the first two decades of the church’s existence there was a single meeting on Sundays, often referred to simply as “meeting.” Geared for adults, it offered little for children. In 1849, Richard Ballantyne, a convert who previously had been a Sunday school teacher in the Relief Presbyterian Church in Scotland, organized a Sunday school in his own Salt Lake City home for children from ages eight to thirteen. Two decades thereafter, seeing the success of the school, Brigham Young appropriated the concept for the entire church— although it taught only children until the first adult class was organized shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. Concerned about the proper development of young women, Brigham Young gave the nod, in 1869, to begin the Young Ladies’ Department of the Cooperative Retrenchment Association—now, Young Women. Six years later, the young men followed suit with the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association—now, Young Men. In 1878, Aurelia Spencer Rogers started an organization, called the Primary, whose intent was to give children meaningful weekday activities—activities that would keep them out of mischief. Two years later, the Primary Association was launched churchwide. Starting as small and informal, each of these five entities gradually grew and developed into powerful, semi-independent organizations. Each came to have its own monthly magazine and, beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century, its own instructional manuals. Activities expanded to fill available time, and by the early decades of the twentieth century, the auxiliary organizations provided an array of choices for every day of the week. So successful were they, that their independence threatened the leading councils of the church. A major thrust of the Correlation Movement, detailed in a subsequent section, was to clip the wings of these organizations and, for the first time, bring them under the direct control of the Quorum of the Twelve. The Beginning of Canon Law For the first seven decades of the church’s existence, bishops and stake presidents—the two presiding offices at the local level—had no body of literature to guide them in their offices. Neither did they have any formal (seminary) training for the ministry. Questions that inevitably arose as they went about their duties were either resolved on the spot, discussed when general officers visited, or submitted to church headquarters in writing. Results, not surprisingly, were inconsistent. From the time the office of bishop was introduced in the early 1830s, a primary responsibility of bishops was to gather and redistribute member contributions—generally tithing and generally in the form of commodities, as cash was scarce. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, an increase in cash contributions led to a realization that standard instructions for handling contributions should be produced. In 1899, a small pamphlet entitled Instructions to Presidents of Stakes, Bishops of Wards, and Stake Tithing Clerks became the

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first of thirty editions (as of 2020) of the Latter-day Saint equivalent of canon law in other Christian churches.14 What began in 1899 as a fourteen-page pamphlet dealing only with tithing became, by the late twentieth century, a comprehensive tome, several hundred pages in length, covering virtually all aspects of church governance.

Reinvention In November 1902, LDS Apostle Reed Smoot won forty-six votes in his bid to become a U.S. Senator—more than enough to claim the office at a time when senators were elected by state legislatures rather than direct voting by the public.15 Within days, two petitions contesting his election were presented to the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Privileges and Elections. The first claimed that he was a polygamist, and thus should be denied a seat. That claim was untrue and was quickly dismissed. The second was more problematic, claiming that Smoot’s membership in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles was a blatant conflict of interest, given the decades-long sparring between the church and the federal government. The second petition led to hearings stretching from 1904 to 1907 and resulted in thousands of pages of testimony.16 Among those compelled to testify under oath in front of a hostile senate committee was church president Joseph F. Smith. The entire church was put under a virtual magnifying glass and received widespread condemnation for the patriarchal, polygamy-rooted culture that continued to govern it more than a decade after the “Manifesto” of 1890 made, but failed to deliver, a promise to cease the performing of new plural marriages.17 Smoot survived because the majority vote against him did not reach the two-thirds required for expulsion. The hearings, however, had a dramatic and permanent effect on church governance and structure. Shortly after Joseph F. Smith returned from Washington, he issued a “Second Manifesto,” essentially saying, “We’re going to give up polygamy, and this time we really mean it.” Two years later, he called David O. McKay, a monogamist from a totally monogamist family, to be an apostle. McKay went on to become church president in 1951 and transform and transition the church into the modern era.18 More significant in the short term, however, was a prediction—some said prophecy—that President Smith made in the General Conference in which he called McKay to the apostleship: We expect to see the day, if we live long enough (and if some of us do not live long enough to see it, there are others who will), when every council of the Priesthood in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will understand its duty, will assume its own responsibility, will magnify its calling, and fill its place in the Church, to the uttermost, according to the intelligence and ability possessed by it. When that day shall come, there will not be so much necessity for work that is now being done by the auxiliary organizations, because it will be done by the

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regular quorums of the Priesthood. The Lord designed and comprehended it from the beginning, and He has made provision in the Church whereby every need may be met and satisfied through the regular organizations of the Priesthood. It has truly been said that the Church is perfectly organized. The only trouble is that these organizations are not fully alive to the obligations that rest upon them.19

Until this time, priesthood quorums, which included deacons, teachers, priests, elders, seventies and high priests, had existed on paper but were, with the exception of teachers, largely non-functional. Filling the vacuum were the auxiliary organizations, which by 1906 were well organized, powerful and largely independent. Smith’s statement marked the beginning of the Correlation Movement, which after several unsuccessful iterations over the subsequent half-century, became a powerful and permanent fixture within church governance.20 By 1908, the first Correlation Committee was assembled; priesthood quorums caught up with the auxiliary organizations by publishing, for the first time, instruction manuals; and the Improvement Era, which had been the monthly publication of the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Mutual Improvement Associations, became the magazine of the priesthood. By placing the emphasis on local governance by priesthood quorums, the hierarchy began a gradual process of decentralization that has continued, with fits and starts, to the present day. A later iteration of the Correlation Movement began in 1961, when David O. McKay appointed Apostle (and future church president) Harold B. Lee as head of correlation. While Lee’s activities during the remaining decade of McKay’s life focused primarily on coordinating organizations and eliminating contradictions or duplications, after McKay’s death Lee initiated the most significant change in central church leadership since the days of Joseph Smith. Until that time, all church departments and auxiliary organizations reported directly to the First Presidency. Lee gradually shifted nearly all oversight to the Quorum of the Twelve. In doing so, he effectively changed church governance from a monarchy in which the church president was both head of state and head of government to a constitutional monarchy in which the church president remained head of state, but the president of the Quorum of the Twelve became head of government—essentially the prime minister. Regional Expansion From the earliest days of missionary outreach, beginning formally with the establishment of the British Mission in 1837, converts were urged—even directed—to emigrate to “Zion,” which meant wherever the church was headquartered. Most early converts came from Great Britain and Scandinavia, and most were farmers. The problem when the church relocated to the Great Basin was that, unlike the Great Plains surrounding Nauvoo, with virtually limitless, rich soil, arable land in Zion was scarce. Rather than discourage “gathering,” church leaders began to redistribute immigrants to a broader geographical

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array. By the early decades of the twentieth century, significant numbers of church members had relocated outside the Great Basin. Los Angeles attracted enough members to justify the construction of the iconic Hollywood Stake Tabernacle (now the Los Angeles Stake Center) in 1929. The San Francisco Bay Area also became an LDS stronghold, albeit not with the same kind of architectural statement until decades thereafter. And Washington, DC, in part because of Reed Smoot’s three decades of service in the U.S. Senate, became the church’s de facto headquarters in the eastern United States. The Washington, DC, chapel, located on 16th Street, which at that time was Embassy Row, was constructed of Utah birds-eye marble. Until its sale to the Unification Church in 1975, it was the only chapel in the church whose spire was capped by a statue of the Angel Moroni. Its dedication in 1933 was presided over by the entire First Presidency, and for many years organists from the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City rotated to the chapel to give public recitals. With regional expansion came a gradual realization that a church profile that had been fashioned to fit—and shape—a Great Basin population and mentality, was not always a good fit for urban, cosmopolitan cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, DC, where Latter-day Saints comprised a miniscule percentage of the total population. Lack of proximity to church headquarters and accommodation of local conditions, which often included members living scores of miles from chapels, instead of walking distance, led to the development of local cultures that differed from those of the Great Basin. Doctrine was not disputed, and there was never a danger of revolt or schism. Rather, there was a gradual transformation of culture that, while difficult to capture on paper, was immediately perceptible to members who visited from Zion. International Expansion The effectiveness of the policy of gathering can be captured by a single observation: not until 1958, well over a century following the birth of the church and when total church membership had exceeded a million-and-a-half, was the first stake organized outside North America (including Hawai‘i).21 Although all converts had been encouraged to emigrate, those in higher socioeconomic strata were best equipped to do so, while others remained in their homelands. As a result, although the church slowly grew numerically overseas, competent local leadership often was lacking. Young men in their late teens or early twenties, sent from the United States as proselytizing missionaries, by necessity filled the roles of local presidency, with mixed results and constant turnover. David O. McKay and the Impetus for Global Change In 1920, Apostle David O.  McKay was commissioned by church president Heber J. Grant to circumnavigate the globe and visit all foreign missions—the

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first time in the church’s history that a general officer embarked on such a voyage. McKay almost succeeded—South Africa proved problematic given its extreme distance from other missions—and he saw, first-hand and for the first time, the condition of members and meetinghouses. Deprived of leadership talent that had emigrated, local congregations struggled greatly and met in rented spaces often in deplorable condition.22 Upon becoming church president in 1951, McKay moved quickly to shore up the international church. A year later, he reversed the policy of gathering and urged members to grow in place, while simultaneously announcing the construction of Latter-day Saint temples in England, Switzerland and New Zealand—the only time in the history of the church that temples were constructed in the absence of established stakes. In effect: “Build it and they will stay.” The results, while not immediate, were dramatic and permanent. The retention of members with leadership potential allowed a gradual transition from missionary leadership. As congregations grew under local leaders, they more readily attracted converts who also had leadership potential. Preceding the formation of stakes in Europe and Oceania, the church invested heavily in constructing impressive chapels. The completion of temples, beginning with the Swiss temple in 1955, signaled to members that they would not be denied temple ordinances and blessings by remaining in their homelands. As stakes were created, they were led by local bishops and stake presidents. Gradually, more mission presidents and temple presidents were called from local membership. Without any changes in organizational charts, the international church leadership transformed from carpetbaggers to locals. Translating Cultures Far more difficult than building the infrastructure of the international church was the accommodation of local cultures and sensibilities. One effort to address the situation was the creation, in the early 1970s, of a unified church magazine that was translated into dozens of languages each month, with some local content. Instructional materials also were translated, but translating the language did not translate the culture. Stories of early church history, particularly the Mormon pioneers, while foundational to the identity of Great Basin Mormons, puzzled or offended members in other countries. As church leaders confronted these cultural differences, they were obliged to address a question that had hovered, unanswered, for decades: what was bedrock, and what was culture—and thus contingent? For more than a century after its founding, the church had represented the entirety of life for most of its members. And yet, most of the Mormon experience was cultural, rather than doctrinal. Transplanting the Great Basin church culture to other parts of the United States had been incomplete but not threatening, whereas transplanting it to other countries often was a misfit. In some instances, compromises were clear and effective. For example, in Polynesia local leaders adopted the U.S.

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custom of wearing white shirts and ties to church meetings, while simultaneously sporting their lava-lavas from the waist down. Other challenges were far more serious, such as how to raise children to marry other Latter-day Saints in countries where there simply weren’t LDS youth to date, much less marry. Many of these challenges continue to defy solutions either from local or general church leaders.

Contraction In 1973, members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) announced an unprecedented oil boycott. Oil prices shot up and long lines formed at gas stations across the country. Similar actions later in the decade led church president Spencer W. Kimball to reexamine a church calendar that had, over a century-and-a-half, grown to consume members’ time. Sunday meetings were held in two blocs—Sunday school and Priesthood meetings in the morning, and Sacrament meetings in the afternoon or evening. With soaring gas prices, many members in rural areas experienced financial hardships in commuting twice each Sunday, and to additional church meetings during the week. It was the tipping point needed to effect substantive change. In 1979, church leaders announced a consolidation of church meetings that was unprecedented—everything prior to then had involved expansion, rather than contraction. Three Sunday meetings were now combined into a single, three-hour bloc.23 Weekday Relief Society and Primary meetings were eliminated. Youth activities on weeknights and weekends were reevaluated and, often, reduced. Later, “ward budgets,” the funds that previously were raised from members of the congregation and spent at the sole discretion of local leaders, were distributed from church headquarters on a per capita formula, in an attempt to equalize programs in affluent and non-affluent congregations. Rebranding The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is in the midst of its most dire time of crisis in the past century, with problems on several fronts. Leadership at the local and general levels is being severely tested, and a business-as-usual approach, often seen in the past, is no longer adequate to address the problems. A combination of substantive changes—in essence, the rebranding of the church in fact, rather than in name only—will be necessary if downward trends are to be reversed. If they can be reversed. And reversal will depend heavily on decisive, transformational leadership at the top. Among the most daunting challenges: Declining Missionary Success From its earliest days the church has engaged in robust proselytizing, first with informal travels through eastern and midwestern states and Upper Canada, and

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then formally with the formation of the British Mission in 1837. For decades, most members were first-generation Latter-day Saints. In the twentieth century, two world wars and the Great Depression put severe limitations on the missionary program, but the decades after World War II saw explosive growth in many missions. During each decade from 1960 to 1990, average annual increase in total church membership rose from 5.8 percent to 7.3 percent.24 Full-time missionaries totaled 2216 in 1940 and grew dramatically each decade until reaching an all-time high of 85,147 in 2014. Total church membership in 1940, 862,664, increased over 20-fold to the present day. Church leaders often referred to the church as “fastest-growing,” although it was not.25 However, a closer look at the numbers shows that disturbing trends have been apparent for several years and are getting worse. While total membership has continued to grow, the rate of growth has dropped dramatically. From an annualized decade average of 7.3 percent in the 1960s, growth fell to 4.3 percent in the 1990s, 2.8 percent in the 2000s, and an estimated 1.6 percent in the 2010s. And while the missionary force continues to be impressively large, with over 65,000 full-time missionaries in 2018, productivity has dropped precipitously, from a high of 7.6 baptisms per missionary year in 1990 to 3.6 in 2018.26 Conversations over the past two decades with church officials at various levels, including general officers, have consistently noted that up to half of all returned missionaries drop out of church activity within five years likely related to a mission experience that was less than affirming. Faith Crisis To say that the Internet has changed everything is a stretch, but not too much of a stretch. By democratizing data—making them available to anyone with a computer or smart phone—it has allowed or obliged church members to confront historical and doctrinal issues at a level heretofore not even attainable by scholars. And in addition to giving access to data, the Internet serves as a two-­ way information highway, facilitating worldwide, instantaneous communication unimaginable in the pre-digital era. A major problem for church leaders is that they were late to the party. Before they realized the gravity of the situation, scores of websites were launched that contained libraries of resources dating back to the founding days of the church, along with commentary often critical of the church and its truth claims. For years, there was no effective response by the church. And as a result, thousands of church members began to have crises of faith. In 2011, Travis Stratford, John Dehlin and other colleagues, including me, launched a social media-based survey of people who either had left the church or felt marginalized and in danger of leaving.27 We received over 3000 responses and compiled an impressive, if troubling, profile:

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• Most respondents were well educated (60 percent completed college or graduate school), financially stable ($70,000 mean income), and long-­ term or lifelong church members. • About 73 percent of men and 17 percent of women were returned missionaries; the majority of both genders had served in responsible church callings, including bishops, Relief Society presidents, stake presidents and mission presidents. • Over 90 percent did not experience faith crises until the Internet came of age in the late 1990s. • The four most problematic historical issues were, in ranked order, Book of Mormon, Book of Abraham, polygamy, and blacks and the priesthood. It turned out that these four issues coincided almost precisely with those identified earlier by internal studies conducted by the church. I first became aware of these in 2008 at the annual meeting of the Mormon History Association, when then Church Historian Marlin Jensen told me that he was receiving a steady stream of phone calls and letters from parents whose children went to the Internet, read content from websites unfriendly to the church, had a faith crisis, and withdrew from church activity. His response was to commission, from the best scholars in each field, research papers on the issues most troubling to church members—something the church had never done before. Those research papers then became the foundation for briefer essays that were to be posted on the church website, lds.org. While those papers were still in preparation, Travis Stratford and I presented the results of our survey to Elder Jensen, compared notes, and found concordance in our lists. The church initiative produced solid scholarship, but posting of the resulting essays did not begin until late 2013, due to hesitancy on the part of some senior church leaders to publish material that went well beyond, and in many instances contradicted, prior church publications. In the meantime, non-­ sympathetic websites continued to control the discussion. Eventually, the church published over a dozen essays covering some of the most problematic issues of Latter-day Saint history and doctrine, including First Vision Accounts, Book of Mormon Translation, the Book of Mormon and DNA Studies, Mother in Heaven, Polygamy, Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham, and Race and Priesthood. While not always extending to the boundaries of scholarship, the essays are unprecedented. And yet, they present a conundrum—perhaps a reason why leaders delayed publication until it became apparent that a response was mandatory in order to counteract other websites that continued to do damage to church members. The conundrum: the same information that answers the questions of one who is seeking deeper knowledge and understanding can also tip over a more orthodox reader who never knew there were such questions, much less the answers to them. Aware of the impossibility of satisfying both groups of adults with a single approach, it appears church leaders are focusing on younger demographics, essentially “immunizing” them while they are young to deal with questions their

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orthodox parents and other adults, who are set in their beliefs, are incapable of accepting. Millennials All Christian traditions within the United States are seeing dramatic declines in retention of Millennial and Gen Z demographics, and Mormonism is no exception. While a part of the problem for Latter-day Saint Millennials and Gen Z’s is Faith Crisis questions, they share their non-LDS peers’ generational aversion to organized religion of any flavor. Generally spiritual by nature—perhaps more so than their parents’ generation—they view institutional religion as an option perhaps to be considered, but not the duty that prior generations embraced.28 Truth claims, a staple for earlier generations of church members, are irrelevant and even off-putting to them. They look for two things within organized religion: moral authority and community. If the church walks the walk of moral authority, taking courageous stands to uphold values that others assault and helping young church members to navigate a dangerous world, they may affiliate. Similarly, if their congregation is supportive and non-judgmental, they may affiliate. In short, their mantra appears to be, “If it works for me, I stay. If not, I leave.” The challenge for church leaders is how to focus on moral authority and community, while deemphasizing truth claims. LGBTQ The church’s view of homosexuality, while somewhat in flux, still largely reflects sensibilities of the 1950s and earlier.29 Homosexuality is not seen as biologically imprinted, even though a church website, mormonsandgays.org,30 noted that it is “not a choice.” In a balancing act difficult for many LGBTQ persons to embrace, the church, on the one hand, states that one does not choose to be LGBTQ, and yet, on the other hand, will be held accountable for acting on that non-chosen identity, with excommunication as a potential outcome. For LGBTQ persons and their allies, many of whom are young and unforgiving of homophobia in any form, the church sends mixed, and often harmful, signals. At the local level, congregations may be welcoming or hostile, perhaps because of the attitude of but one person, the bishop. But a welcoming congregation cannot address a churchwide culture that remains unfriendly. That remains the prerogative of central leadership, and for now, that leadership is sending mixed signals. Racism The 1978 Revelation on Priesthood fixed one problem, in reversing the ban on ordination of black men that had been in place since shortly after Joseph Smith’s death. But it did not solve the deeper problem of racism within the church.31 Indeed, it may have exacerbated racism, for while blacks were scarce

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in the church before 1978, their conversion in increasing numbers in subsequent decades has obliged non-black church members to confront their racism as they comingle with blacks within their own congregations. Compounding the problem is the persistence in church publications of racist language from the past, despite years of work to identify such language and recommend its removal. More recently, the insertion of racist content in a new Sunday school manual has shone a light on problems within the church bureaucracy, as such content appears not to have been inserted by accident.32 Only decisive action from the top can place the church on a permanent path away from racism. Women Although the church prevailed in the late 1970s in its fight to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, one unintended consequence was an awakening of Mormon feminism. More recently, younger LDS women have embraced a new version of feminism within their tradition, and with it a sense of urgency and impatience. They want inclusion—not only a place at the table, but a voice and, most importantly, a vote. Desire for priesthood ordination appears to be a secondary factor—or not a factor at all—for most LDS women currently, although younger women, particularly Mormon Millennials, are less complacent about women’s secondary status than older women.33 Under the direction of current President Russell M. Nelson, the church has recently made a number of changes in long-standing policies and procedures that allow for greater female participation and recognition. Although the bulk of these changes seem relatively minor and can be dismissed as window dressing to appease critics, they are nevertheless changes that occurred quickly and do give hope to some Mormon feminists that these baby steps could provide momentum/further pressure for more substantial future changes. There is no scriptural mandate against the ordination of women to the priesthood, nor did Joseph Smith, who extended greater roles to women than his successors, proscribe such a possibility.34 Thus, current policies lie outside scriptural norms and, theoretically, are easily amenable to change. However, because of the church’s top-down governance structure, any substantive changes to the role of women will require decisive action within the presiding councils. Sexual Abuse A “dirty secret” within the church is the problem of sexual abuse, in the form either of abuse by local church officials, or of cover-up by local or higher officials of member abuse, often within families. This is not a new problem. In the early 1990s, a friend told me of having had a conversation with Gordon B. Hinckley, then a counselor in the First Presidency, in which Hinckley said, “We have paid millions and millions of dollars to keep these cases out of court.” But the problem is increasing in magnitude, and in the wake of similar scandals

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in the Roman Catholic Church it has gained much media attention in recent months. While some changes have been made, such as training bishops to refer cases to licensed professionals rather than attempting to deal with them directly, unchecked abuse remains a strategic problem facing the church. Indeed, the very mixed bag of skill sets that LDS laity bring to ministerial callings, all without the benefit of the formal training of other denominations, ill prepares them to deal with the social, medical and legal ramifications of sexual abuse. Gerontocracy Weighed against the necessity of substantive change to address these many crises are two built-in features of the Latter-day Saint church. The first is a default position, common to faith traditions in general, that resists change. Religions tend to be conservative, meaning a desire to hold onto a past that is felt to have been God-inspired, even if current events strongly suggest change. Conservatism in religion may be tamed, but it is unlikely to be eliminated. Thus, any significant changes are likely to occur at substantial cost. But they can occur. A second feature is almost unique to Mormonism, and yet, unlike conservatism, is fixable. A century ago, in the United States, four faith traditions had a policy of service-until-death for the top leader: Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, Latter-day Saint, and Reorganized Latter Day Saint (now Community of Christ). The Episcopalians were the first to let go, nearly a century ago. Then, the Community of Christ. Given the retirement of Pope Benedict XVI, it is likely that Roman Catholicism will move to limited tenure for popes. That leaves the Latter-day Saints in a unique and awkward position. Until the middle of the twentieth century, lifelong tenure for church presidents had a limited downside, as their decline in health and subsequent death tended to occur quickly. But by the mid-1960s, with David O. McKay as president, the medical sciences made major strides in prolonging the life of the body, while making little progress in preserving mental acuity. As life expectancy increased, so did the likelihood of prolonged periods of leadership by men with decreased mental function. Since the decline of McKay’s health in the mid-1960s, which lasted for several years before his death, three subsequent presidents—Spencer W.  Kimball, Ezra Taft Benson and Thomas S. Monson—have each experienced prolonged periods (four years or more) of profound to complete mental impairment. In each instance, a “power vacuum” at the top resulted in damaging outcomes that a younger, more vital church president could easily have avoided.35 Concomitant with the problem of dysfunctional presidents is that of a progressively aging hierarchy, namely the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve (together commonly referred to as the Q15). With an average age of up to eighty years, such a group is more prone to struggle with daunting challenges, particularly those coming from members two to three generations their

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junior, than younger leaders more aligned in experience and sensitivities with those members. And yet, the entire Q15 continues to serve until death. There is no scriptural mandate for leaders in the Q15 to have lifetime tenure. According to a grandson of Hugh B.  Brown, who was in the First Presidency under David O. McKay, Brown saw service until death as problematic and attempted to lead by example and step down, but his offer was rejected.36 More recently, in conversations I have had with LDS General Authorities who spoke on condition of anonymity, I have been told that the subject of limited Q15 tenure has been discussed on multiple occasions, albeit with no change in policy. Given the gravity of current crises facing the church, one is easily reminded of the recent transition within Roman Catholicism, wherein the ascension of a young (by Catholic standards) and dynamic Pope Francis took on some of the tradition’s most severe challenges while at the same time reinvigorating the tradition worldwide. However, to get a Pope Francis required first a Pope Benedict. The fact that LDS Church presidents are, on average, living to older ages than their predecessors, as well as becoming president at older ages, virtually guarantees that the challenges of gerontocracy will continue to grow. At some point, change seems inevitable. The question is, who will be Mormonism’s Pope Benedict?

Notes 1. Cross, Whitney R., The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850 (New York: Harper & Row, 1950). 2. Prince, Gregory A., Power from on High: The Development of Mormon Priesthood (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1995). 3. Photocopy of John Whitmer license, dated June 9, 1830. Archive of the Community of Christ, Independence, MO. 4. Photograph of License reproduced in Donald Q.  Cannon, “Licensing in the Early Church,” Brigham Young University Studies 22, no. 1 (Winter 1982): 97. 5. h t t p s : / / w w w . j o s e p h s m i t h p a p e r s . o r g / p a p e r - s u m m a r y / license-for-christian-whitmer-9-june-1830/1. 6. Book of Mormon, Moroni 4:3 (bread) and 5:2 (wine); Doctrine and Covenants 20:77 (bread) and 20:79 (wine/water). 7. Book of Mormon, 3 Nephi 11:25. 8. Doctrine and Covenants 20:73. 9. Whitmer, David, An Address to All Believers in Christ (Richmond, MO: David Whitmer, 1887): 50–51. 10. Doctrine and Covenants 38:32. 11. Smith, Emma, A Collection of Sacred Hymns for the Church of the Latter Day Saints (Kirtland: F. G. Williams & co., 1835). 12. Anderson, Devery S. and Gary James Bergera, eds., Joseph Smith’s Quorum of the Anointed, 1842–1845. A Documentary History (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2005).

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13. Quinn, D. Michael, “The Mormon Succession Crisis of 1844,” Brigham Young University Studies 16, no. 2 (Spring 1976): 1–44. 14. Later titles of the book included General Handbook of Instructions and, currently, Church Handbook of Instructions. 15. Smoot’s two opponents won a combined total of only sixteen votes. The 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1913, shifted senatorial elections to popular vote. 16. United States Congress, Senate, Committee on Privileges and Elections, Proceedings before the Committee on Privileges and Elections of the United States Senate in the matter of the protests against the right of Hon. Reed Smoot, a senator from the state of Utah, to hold his seat … (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904–1906), 4 volumes. 17. Although the number of new plural marriages dropped substantially after 1890, the practice continued “underground.” See Quinn, D. Michael, “LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890–1904.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. 18, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 9–105. Even after the Second Manifesto, these plural marriages continued among highly placed church leaders and select laity. 18. Prince, Gregory A. and Wm. Robert Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005). 19. Smith, Joseph F., Conference Report, April 1906, p. 3. 20. Prince and Wright, David O. McKay, chapter 7. 21. The Auckland, New Zealand Stake was formed in 1958, at the same time the New Zealand Temple was dedicated. 22. Neilson, Reid L. and Carson V.  Teuscher, eds., Pacific Apostle: The 1920–21 Diary of David O.  McKay in the Latter-day Saints Island Missions (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020). Cannon, Hugh J. (Reid L. Neilson, ed.), To the Peripheries of Mormondom: The Apostolic Around-the-World Journey of David O. McKay, 1920–1921 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2011). 23. More recently, the three-hour bloc was reduced to two hours, with one hour of worship service and one hour of classroom instruction. 24. Data are from various editions of the Deseret News Church Almanac, which was published from 1971 until 2013. 25. Pentecostalism, which is nearly a century younger than Mormonism, now includes a half-billion members, approximately 30-fold more than Mormonism. Although there is no single, centralized Pentecostal church organization, the entire movement is still many-fold larger than the sum of all churches descended from Joseph Smith’s. Seventh Day Adventism, however, has enjoyed continuous, large-scale growth that surpasses LDS growth. 26. These numbers are derived from the statistical report from the annual General Conferences in April of each year, as published in the May issue of the Ensign. 27. I participated in the survey and possess a hard copy. While never published, it was circulated to thought leaders in the church, including members of the presiding councils. 28. Riess, Jana, The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 29. Prince, Gregory A., Gay Rights and the Mormon Church: Intended Actions, Unintended Consequences (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019). 30. That website has been replaced by mormonandgay.churchofjesuschrist.org.

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31. Prince and Wright, David O. McKay, chapter 4. 32. https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2020/02/01/latter-day-saints-want/. 33. Riess, The Next Mormons. 34. Prince, Power from on High. 35. Prince, Gregory A., Lester E. Bush and Brent N. Rushforth, “Gerontocracy and the Future of Mormonism,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 49, no. 3 (Autumn 2016): 89–108. 36. Edwin Firmage interviewed by Gregory A. Prince, June 6, 1995 and October 10, 1996.

Bibliography Anderson, Devery S., and Gary James Bergera, eds. 2005. Joseph Smith’s Quorum of the Anointed, 1842–1845: A Documentary History. Salt Lake City: Signature Books. Cannon, Donald Q. 1982. Licensing in the Early Church. Brigham Young University Studies 22 (1, Winter): 97. Cannon, Hugh J., and Reid L. Nielson, eds. 2011. To the Peripheries of Mormonism: The Apostolic Around-the-World Journey of David O. McKay, 1920–1921. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Cross, Whitney R. 1950. The Burned Over-District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850. New York: Harper and Row. Deseret News Almanac. 1971–2013. Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press. Ensign. A Periodical Published Monthly by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­ day Saints. Neilson, Reid L., and Carson V.  Teuscher, eds. 2020. Pacific Apostle: The 1920–21 Diary of David O. McKay in the Latter-Day Saints Island Missions. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Prince, Gregory A. 1995. Power from on High: The Development of Mormon Priesthood. Salt Lake City: Signature Books. ———. 2019. Gay Rights and the Mormon Church: Intended Actions, Unintended Consequences. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Prince, Gregory A., and William Robert Wright. 2005. David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Prince, Gregory A., Lester E. Bush, and Brent N. Rushforth. 2016. Gerontocracy and the Future of Mormonism. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 49 (3, Autumn): 89–108. Quinn, D.  Michael. 1976. The Mormon Succession Crisis of 1844. Brigham Young University Studies 16 (2, Spring): 1–44. ———. 1985. LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890–1904. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18 (1, Spring): 0–105. Riess, Jana. 2019. The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church. Oxford University Press. Smith, Emma. 1835. A Collection of Sacred Hymns for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Kirtland, OH: F.G. Williams and Co. Smith, Joseph F. 1906. Conference Report. Vol. 3. Salt Lake City: Deseret New Press. United States Congress. 1904–06. Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections, Proceedings before the Committee on Privileges and Elections of the United States Senate in the Matter of the Protests against the Right of Hon. Reed Smoot, a Senator from the

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State of Utah to Hold His Seat. (4 vols.). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Whitmer, David. 1887. An Address to All Believes in Christ, 50–51. Richmond, MO: David Whitmer.

CHAPTER 3

The Gathering of Scattered Israel: The Missionary Enterprise of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Ronald E. Bartholomew

To comprehend the emergence of modern Mormonism as a growing international religion, it is essential to comprehend the missionary theology and practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For missionary religions to expand and flourish, they must effectively appeal to the religious aspirations of some segment of a “religious economy.” An active religious economy can exist when religious freedom, and therefore religious choice, is countenanced by the political institutions of the state. Where religious choice is possible and competition among different denominations for adherents is allowed by political authorities, we may speak of a religious market. As in other market economies, action in a religious economy is shaped by both supply and demand. In this chapter, primary emphasis is given to the supply side of the religious equation, namely the institutional resources and human capital invested in the LDS missionary enterprise. Competing denominations must mobilize their resources in a simultaneous attempt to shape and cater to individuals’ religious preferences. The rise and spread of both early and contemporary Mormonism demonstrate the correspondence between the relative success of a new religion and its market appeal to different segments of the religious economy as social change occurs and corresponding adjustments are made in its missionary message over time. Maintaining continuity with its prophetic origins, contemporary Mormonism’s restorationist message continues to be strongly emphasized. Significant

R. E. Bartholomew (*) Utah Valley Institute of Religion, Orem, UT, USA

© The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_3

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adjustments in this message and its modes of delivery, however, have been essential to the modern LDS Church’s missionary success in the global religious economy. Expunged from today’s missionary message are major nineteenth-­century LDS themes such as gathering to Zion, communitarian political and economic solidarity, and doctrinal defense of plural marriage, all of which made Mormonism a target of public opprobrium during its first three generations as a new religious movement. In contrast, contemporary Mormonism’s missionary message highlights the sanctity of monogamous marriage and the nuclear family, traditional gender roles, as well as a morally wholesome and healthy lifestyle. In the religious economy of postmodern secular societies, a message of prophetic spiritual guidance, traditional family values, and lay religious activity appears to resonate primarily with those who seek institutional authority, moral certitude, a strong sense of community identification, and active involvement in what they believe is a transcendent cause. In what follows, attention is focused on LDS missionary theology, changing missionary practices, training, and demographics of the missionary force in historical perspective, the relationship between the size of the missionary force and church growth, and the LDS Church’s global, missionary expansion as an international church. (LDS geographic expansion internationally since World War II is further addressed at length in Chap. 4.)

Theology of Latter-day Saint Mission As missiologist Justice Anderson has asserted, “The starting point of all missiological study should be missionary theology.”1 This is because the theology of missions defines and drives the work of the missionary. Latter-day Saint Mission theology has been universal in scope from its inception, taking Jesus’ injunction to “Go Ye into All the World” quite literally.2 The reiteration of this command, known by Christians as “The Great Commission,” was made doctrinally incumbent on Latter-day Saints in a revelation proclaimed by Joseph Smith Jr. in June 1829. This religious duty was first published in the Book of Commandments in 1833 and subsequently in the various editions of the Doctrine and Covenants since 1835, as Section 18 verse 28. The Commission was repeated five additional times in this book of Latter-day Saint scripture (see Sections 58:64, 68:8, 75:26, 84:62 and 112:280), each instance representing additional revelation prophetically declared by Joseph Smith, dating from August 1, 1831, through July 23, 1837. Of this scriptural reiteration, LDS historians Reid L. Neilson and Fred W. Woods have observed: It is important to note that early Latter-day Saints, like other antebellum American Christians, believed that the resurrected Jesus Christ had commanded his disciples in the Old World to “teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” … Although nearly two millennia had passed since the earliest Christians attempted to meet this obligation, their counterparts in the New World still sought to share the Christian gospel with

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every nation, kindred, and tongue. The Mormons, despite their poverty [and] persecution … helped shoulder the ever-present burden of fulfilling the biblical Great Commission.3

According to LDS leaders Dallin H. Oaks and Lance B. Wickman, this theology should be planted in the minds and hearts of Latter-day Saints from an early age: “‘I hope they call me on a mission, When I have grown a foot or two. I hope by then I will be ready to teach and preach and work as missionaries do.’ Such are the words of a song learned by every Latter-day Saint child in Primary, the organization for children ages three through eleven … This children’s song is but one manifestation of the ‘witnessing culture’ in which Latter-day Saint children are raised.”4 Sociologists Gordon and Gary Shepherd have explained how deeply this theology is a part of the Latter-day Saint consciousness: “Any attempt to understand contemporary Mormonism must recognize the reciprocal connection between organizational requirements of the LDS Church for extensive lay involvement and the willingness of its adherents to invest a sizable fraction of their collective resources into the recruitment, socialization, and maintenance of an unusually large missionary force.”5 In sociological terms, they explain how this acculturation occurs: Within Mormonism certain status sequences are normatively prescribed, especially for children and youth through their young adult years. The anticipation of a missionary call, particularly for males, represents a “turning point” status in the sequence. From an early age, the missionary role is idealized for Mormon youth. Not only is it prescribed as the religious duty of LDS parents to encourage their children to prepare for missionary service, but the church itself systematically incorporates missionary preparation into the sequence of age-graded organizations through which LDS children and youth pass as they grow up. Anticipatory socialization of the missionary role intensifies for Mormon males once they are inducted into the lay priesthood structure of the LDS Church at the age of twelve and begin their advancement through the ranks of the Aaronic Priesthood. At the age of nineteen they are eligible for induction into the higher Melchizedek order of the priesthood, and at this stage of their advancement they are also eligible for a missionary call. At this point the normative pressure excreted by family, peers, and religious officials to fulfill one's missionary obligations becomes most acute.6

Whether the impetus to serve a mission can be completely attributed to what Shepherd and Shepherd call a “status sequence” or not, the net result is the same. Oaks and Wickman pointedly observe, “As we shall see, this duty and this conviction of its God-given importance are still vital to the self-image, faith, and practice of Latter-day Saints. They are people of faith and people of action. For them, lifelong participation in missionary work, including serving [short-term] missions as young people and as retired couples … are natural fruits of loving faith in action.”7 This theology of mission has provided the forward thrust that has resulted in a self-funded, short-term missionary (STMs) force which grew from 16 in 1830 to its zenith in 2014 of over 85,000.8

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Equally significant, and growing alongside the theological notion of “every member a missionary,”9 was and is the doctrine of “The Gathering.” Reid L. Neilson concludes that “Latter-day Saints in America shared much of the same Christian worldview as their Protestant colleagues. Millenarianism, for example, influenced the thought and decision making of Mormon leaders and laity alike.”10 William Mulder, however, explains one significant theological difference. Having given America its primeval migration story … [with the Book of Mormon’s] narrative of an ancient religious migration … Mormonism proceeded to make migration history—in two directions, both stemming from the same impulse to establish Zion: pioneering in the West and proselytizing in Europe. In secular terms, call it building America. The Mormons called it building the kingdom … “The Gathering,” not polygamy, was Mormonism’s oldest and most influential doctrine … The gathering was Mormonism’s way of channeling what the nineteenth century called the religious affections … Inspiration for the gathering sprang from a literal interpretation of Scripture, from a providential reading of history, and from the circumstances of a free-land society in early nineteenth century America … While other millenarians set a time, the Mormons appointed a place.11

Thus, throughout the nineteenth century, the Latter-day Saint “Gathering of Israel” was animated by an apocalyptic millennial zeal to leave “Babylon” and gather to a Zion located in the Great Basin of the Rocky Mountains, in what eventually became part of the United States of America.12 Patrick Mason points out how this unique theology was the impetus for a literal gathering early on. For Mormons, gathering to the prophetically proclaimed “Zion” would, in a very real sense, “be for a defense, and for a refuge from the storm, and from wrath when it shall be poured out.” This notion of divine protection and strength in numbers rang true for Latter-day Saints who had been assailed by mobs on the Jacksonian frontier and besieged by the federal army during the so-called Utah War of 1857–58 … Not only was gathering a defensive strategy, but fervent premillennialist early Mormons were convinced that their task was to prepare the kingdom of God and to call out the righteous from Babylon to gather to Zion in anticipation of the return of Jesus Christ to the earth. Church leaders encouraged new converts to the faith … around the world in the church’s various international missions, to move, as soon as possible, to the Saints’ gathering place in the intermountain West.13

The self-perception that they were the only active agents gathering Israel from the four corners of the earth served, alongside the theological notion that “it becometh every man who hath been warned to warn his neighbor,”14 as the stimulus of the LDS Church’s missionary enterprise from the beginning and continues to figure predominantly in the discourse of current church president, Russell M. Nelson.15

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Despite the well-orchestrated and equally well-documented nineteenth-­ century migration across the American continent alongside an even more impressive immigration from outside the United States,16 the centralized gathering to the intermountain west transitioned over time to the current practice of gathering scattered Israel to local “stakes of Zion”—ecclesiastical jurisdictions which dot the globe.17 However, this shift in emphasis from a literal gathering to a centralized geographic location to a more figurative, spiritual gathering in the local stakes wherever members currently reside has not minimized the theological imperative of “Building Zion.” As Shepherd and Shepherd summarize: “The transcendent cause to which the Latter-day Saints are collectively attached is the millennial belief in a divine mandate to build the kingdom of God on earth as the culminating episode of human history. This belief justifies and inspires the Mormon missionary enterprise.”18 One of the ever-present challenges faced by Latter-day Saint missionaries who are seeking to gather “the elect” from the four quarters of the earth is the fact that they are frequently viewed by other Christians as sheep-stealers, preying on disaffected members of other congregations instead of those not yet converted to Jesus Christ. As such, the activities of LDS missionaries are often not considered by their Christian counterparts to be “missionary work” at all, because they are not involved in converting souls to Christ; rather, that they are converting them away from mainstream Christian churches.19 Laurie F. Maffly-­ Kipp and Reid L. Neilson explain how this practice was implemented during the nineteenth century: “While American Protestants evangelized almost exclusively in non-Christian, non-Western nations, the Latter-day Saints focused their resources on the Christian, Western, Atlantic world. Between 1830 and 1899, LDS general authorities called and set apart more than 12,000 full-time missionaries. Specifically, they assigned 6,444 (53 percent) … to evangelize throughout the United States and Canada and designated 4,798 (40 percent) … to missionize in Europe, especially in Great Britain and Scandinavia.”20 Mason further specifies the effect Mormon missions had on Southern Baptists in Tennessee. Protestant denominations, which already struggled particularly in rural areas to attract churchgoers, naturally felt threatened by an active missionary force that intensified religious competition and stole away not only potential converts but also current church members. In Tennessee, the state Baptist convention grew worried as it considered the aggressiveness of Mormon missionizing compared with the relative laxity of Baptists’ own efforts. The convention’s annual meetings regularly included reports about the number of LDS missionaries in the state and how many converts they had achieved during the previous year … In 1895, Mormons had placed twice as many missionaries in Tennessee than did the Baptists, this in a state where thirty-five county seats, and over 150 towns and cities in general, had no established Baptist church … Conditions were thus ripe for the LDS Church … flooding Bible-poor regions with Mormon tracts and organizing branches that attracted even some Baptists.21

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In defense of these Mormon missionary activities, LDS leaders argued that their missionaries were preaching important supplementary truths which, according to their foundational faith narrative, had been restored by the Prophet Joseph Smith after the long “apostasy” of the Christian churches. Thus, they believed their message added to the already existing Christian message, and with that came a scriptural injunction to take that message to the whole world, regardless of peoples’ current religious affiliations.22

Latter-day Saint Mission in Historical Perspective: Nineteenth-Century Beginnings As with other Christian faiths of the era, from their earliest beginnings, nineteenth-­century Mormon missionary efforts were based on self-selection.23 Neilson notes that “During the 1830s and 1840s … new converts … went forth on their own … with no formal missionary training … Although some were called directly to the work by revelation, the vast majority simply opened their mouths and shared the message with anyone that would listen.”24 According to William E. Hughes: After the organization of the Church on April 6, 1830, this missionary zeal among converts produced what George Ellsworth called the “freelance missionary system.” Every convert considered himself a missionary and sought to share the restored gospel with family, friends, neighbors and acquaintances. No official call needed to be extended, nor area of labor designated—each member sensed the need to spread the gospel. Two factors sustained the freelance missionary system through the decades of the thirties and forties, the first was the enthusiasm of each new convert and his desire to share his newly found religion with others. The second was the continual revelations received by Joseph reinforcing the concept that each person was to “warn his neighbor.” At a conference in New York in 1831, Joseph said, “And let your preaching be the warning voice, every man to his neighbor,” and again this was echoed in December 1832, when it was revealed that “… it becometh every man who hath been warned to warn his neighbor.”25

LDS historian Ronald Walker notes that this freelance system “facilitated the conversion of former preachers … to secure Mormon membership and Mormon priesthood on the same day and continue without interruption their errand for the Lord.”26 This was made possible by the Church’s orthopraxy, which has always been to ordain male converts without training to offices in a strictly lay priesthood. Men ordained to the priesthood were not the only ones who felt compelled to share the gospel informally with their family and friends. It is evident from their journals that many new members perceived that sharing the gospel was part of their divinely appointed duty.27 Hughes explains that, “although many filled formally assigned missions, the freelance missionaries remained the backbone of the Church’s missionary system throughout the 1830s and 1840s … The transition was a gradual one

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which picked up momentum as the Saints moved west. As firm roots were planted in the west, appointed missions became a necessity,” until finally, “during the 1850s, the Mormon missionary system became more routinized and institutionalized … LDS leaders replaced the freelance missionary system with the more organized appointed missionary system.”28 Hughes also describes how these “mission calls” were initially issued. The first year men were called to leave the Salt Lake Valley to serve proselyting missions was 1849 … Brethren of the Church usually received their calls or were appointed to their missions over the pulpit. These calls took place during the semi-annual conferences of the Church or at other special meetings … Even though members of the Church were aware that such calls were made at conferences, it appears that many were shocked when they heard their name read from the pulpit … Many times, men who were called from the pulpit to fill missions were not in attendance at the meetings and did not hear their names read as prospective missionaries. As a result, these men gained knowledge of their calls in a variety of ways. Some were told by neighbors and others by local Church leaders … Very little time elapsed from the moment the missionary heard his name read over the pulpit in conference to the time he departed. Most missionaries were called in the early spring or late summer. This enabled them to make their overland trek to their various destinations under favorable weather conditions … It was no easy task for wives to allow their husbands to leave … When one considers the great sacrifices required and the conditions under which these early missionaries served, it is remarkable that most responded in the affirmative. For example, the Missionary Record indicates that from 1860 to 1869, 702 men were called and only 10 did not honor the call. These numbers are an indication of the strong obligation men felt when they were called to spread the gospel through missionary efforts.29

Hughes’ research reveals that mission calls were extended in this manner from 1849 through the 1880s. Eventually, however, these “pulpit calls” came to an end and other methods of selecting missionaries came into being. Table 3.1 summarizes Hughes’ findings30: In addition to the personal and family sacrifice of being called away from a wife and children for an extended period without warning or consultation, missionaries for the LDS Church have never been compensated for their labors. Like the early New Testament disciples, they were initially commanded to go without purse or scrip.31 Church leaders instructed them to leave any cash they had with their wives and children to support them in their absence, and thousands of missionaries left the Utah Territory’s Great Basin with no money in their pockets and with little more than the coat and shirt on their backs, forcing them to stop their travels mid-way for lack of funds and find work. When enough money was obtained, they continued their journey. Once they reached the east or west coast, horses, mules and wagons were sold to finance their journey oversees.32 As a result, nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint missionaries were almost universally poor, often wearing tattered clothing and worn out

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Table 3.1  LDS mission calls and missionaries in the nineteenth century Decade Method of delivering calls

Average age

Length of service

Marital status

1850s

35

30 months

Mostly married

37

30 months

Mostly married

40

14 months

Mostly married

35

24 months

Mostly married

30

24 months

A growing number of single, younger men and women

1860s 1870s 1880s

1890s

Surprise announcement at General Conference Surprise announcement at General Conference Surprise announcement at General Conference Unsolicited letter—call issued by Apostles, assisted by members of a missionary committee Consulted by their local ecclesiastical leaders before formal assignments were extended

shoes, which, in the end, endeared them to other labor-class Europeans and North Americans who had been marginalized by their middle- and upper-­ middle class clergy.33 As with the early disciples, the command to travel without purse or scrip was later relaxed,34 and as the century ended, most missionaries were not traveling strictly in this manner but rather were supplementing their travels with other forms of finance.35 Another factor that aided in Mormon missionaries’ success was their familiarity with the Bible, which, coupled with a much more biblically literate general populace, facilitated a plausible demonstration of biblical Christianity in their restoration narrative. Historical research reveals that the source material for their sermons was overwhelmingly the Bible. They preached about the Book of Mormon, not from it. Its authenticity was at issue, not its teachings, and the Elders depended upon the Bible to “prove” that authenticity. While there is no evidence of any official directive that nineteenth-century missionaries should give preference to the Bible, the most likely motivation for their emphasis was their familiarity with and love for it. Although the LDS Doctrine and Covenants was available as early as 1845, and by 1869 had gone through six printings, it was used even less than the Book of Mormon in missionary sermons.36 Mason correctly has observed that: Mormonism was born in the religious hothouse of Jacksonian America and displayed many of the traits common to nineteenth-century evangelicalism. The gospel preached by Mormon elders was based on biblical texts and focused on faith in Jesus Christ, repentance, baptism for the remission of sins, obedience and righteousness, and justification and sanctification by the Holy Spirit. The religion encouraged adherence to a behavioral code that—other than a celebration of music and dancing—would have been embraced by most morally conservative Protestants.37

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What kinds of training did these lay missionaries receive during the nineteenth century? Mormon Missiologist R.  Lanier Britsch maintains that, “Occasionally, criticisms have been leveled at the LDS for sending missionaries into the field who are untrained in theology or who lack the generally expected academic degrees. In answer to this, Latter-day Saints usually say, ‘Unschooled, perhaps, but certainly not untrained.’”38 Latter-day Saint historian Richard O. Cowan also points out that At first, the missionary training emphasis was on self-preparation in gaining an understanding of the scriptures and doctrines of the Church. Then, in 1832, a revelation directed Joseph Smith to organize the School of the Prophets … [which] began meeting at Kirtland in 1833 under the direction of Joseph Smith. A similar activity commenced that same year in Jackson County, Missouri, under the leadership of Parley P. Pratt and was known as the School of the Elders. The prime purpose of both schools was to prepare missionaries for their service. The Seventies’ Hall, which opened at Nauvoo in 1844, served the same basic purpose.39

Hughes adds to this account by reporting that In 1867, theological classes were organized in conjunction with the University of Deseret. After a short period, the theological classes became autonomous from the University and became known as the School of the Prophets … Branches of the School of the Prophets were organized in almost every community of considerable size. The School of the Prophets expanded until it embraced nearly the entire adult male membership of the Church … Sunday School and the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association meetings also assisted in the training of missionaries in the 1880s. The first presidency stated in April 1887: “Our Sunday schools and theological classes, and our young men’s mutual improvement associations, should give our young men who avail themselves of these facilities an excellent preparation for missionary labor.” … Each seventies quorum was to hold weekly theological classes which assisted in the training of missionaries, by 1894 the need for formal training was recognized … [and] 1899 was the first year the Church provided formalized training. Experimental missionary classes were taught at several Church institutions.40

However, in terms of proselytizing methodology, Hughes also notes that Between 1849–1900, there were nearly as many proselyting methods as there were missionaries. Not only did each missionary adapt customary methods to fit his own personality, but proselyting methods were also adapted and modified according to the attitudes of the people, and the customs and the laws of the land in which they were used. In addition, each mission was presided over by a mission president who directed proselyting activities as he saw fit. There were no Church-­ wide teaching programs or proselyting systems guiding the labors of organized missions. Missionaries, given their particular circumstances, used the proselyting methods which brought them the most success.41

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Neilson provides a snapshot into typical methods employed by a majority of nineteenth-century Mormon missionaries. Mormon missionaries spent most of their time tracting, or canvassing neighborhoods and busy streets while handing out printed leaflets or other literature on Latter-day doctrines. They sold or loaned out pamphlets to interested persons and then tried to arrange a teaching meeting to discuss unique Latter-day Saint doctrines. The missionaries also used local newspapers to their advantage, especially since the larger dailies were often the organs of anti-Mormon rhetoric. Church writers penned editorials and explanatory essays to defend their cause and spread their message. They also announced preaching meetings through local broadsides. Mormon elders and sisters held public preaching meetings whenever and wherever they could. They even rented other Christian church buildings to hold large audiences. Some Sundays they showed up at Protestant services and were invited to preach by kind clergymen. But after sharing their message of apostasy and restoration, the Latter-day saints were rarely invited back. In some cases, missionaries arranged for spirited debates with other religious leaders.42

So, how successful were these rag-tag nineteenth-century Mormon missionaries? Britsch summarizes some key statistics: The average number of missionaries called from 1830–1844 was 127 per year. The Church grew from a small number of members on April 6, 1830 to 26,146 members at the end of 1844 … [and] most of the 26,146 members were converts, not children born into church membership. The second half of 1844 began a six- or seven-year period of missionary contraction. The average number of missionaries called from 1845 until 1851 was fifty-two per year. But surprisingly, the total number of Church members more than doubled to 52,165 during this period … Just think about it: The Martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum [Smith] took place in June 1844, [and] the majority of [Latter-day] Saints were driven out of Nauvoo in February 1846. The Saints suffered their way to Winter Quarters [Nebraska] and endured countless hardships. In 1847, they began settlement in Great Salt Lake Valley and proceeded to regroup. Despite these significant challenges, missionary work went forward.43

In addition to their nineteenth-century proselytizing successes in America, in terms of sheer numbers (as shown in Fig. 3.1), Mormon missionaries experienced even greater success in Great Britain. Sent by Joseph Smith at a time of Church crisis in Kirtland, Ohio, on June 13, 1837, the first Mormon missionaries began preaching in Preston, England, a rapidly growing mill town, and by the end of the year they had recruited and baptized several hundred followers. This, however, was just the beginning. Initial LDS missionary success in Great Britain exploded exponentially throughout the nineteenth century, and, what has been deemed by many as an “American Religion,”44 quickly became a predominantly British one, as shown in Table 3.2. Sociologist Rodney Stark offers the following observation regarding some of the reasons behind the missionaries’ success in Great Britain during this time:

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Fig. 3.1  Nineteenth-century Mormon missionary success in North America. Red dots are branches formed during the Kirtland/Missouri periods (1831–1838), green dots the Nauvoo period (1839–1844), and purple dots both periods. Yellow circles indicate the number of reported “conferences” or groups of branches. (Map courtesy of Brandon Plewe, published in Brandon Plewe, S.  Kent Brown, Donald Q.  Cannon, Richard H. Jackson, eds., Mapping Mormonism: An Atlas of Latter-day Saint History, 2nd edition, Brigham Young University Press, 2014) Why did the Latter-day Saints do so well in Britain? … The majority of Britain’s seventeen million people were extremely poor; they lived in squalid, crowded tenements or were homeless on the streets. Given these conditions and the extraordinary class contrasts it is no surprise that there was increasingly bitter class antagonism. A substantial amount of this antagonism was directed toward the conventional churches; nearly all of them, including the “fundamentalist” sects, not only opposed the working class in terms of politics but also charged pew rentals that were well beyond the means of most citizens. Of course, most people found it degrading to use them. In contrast, all seats in LDS meeting halls were free. But of even greater importance, Mormonism represented the American dream in very tangible ways. For people who still lacked the vote, had no realistic hope of owning property, and whose children would be lucky to attend school for even a year or two, America was a land of incredible plenty. Rich farm and ranch land was there for the taking. The income of the average American family was many times greater than the average income in any European nation, and even in remote wilderness areas, where there were settlers there were schools … Once in America, surrounded by Latter-day Saint society, the British Saints were models of devotion whose descendants still make up a significant portion of Utah Latter-­ day Saints. In 1990 the U.S. Census asked Americans their ancestry. In Utah, 44

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Table 3.2  The impact of British membership and immigration on total LDS membership, 1840–189045 Year

Cumulative no. of LDS in Great Britain

Total British immigration to USA

LDS membership worldwide

Membership minus British saintsa

1840 1845 1850 1855 1860 1865 1870 1875 1880 1885 1890

3626 10,956 30,747 26,001 13,853 12,403 8804 5411 5112 3991 2770

291 4787 9437 21,918 30,079 43,269 53,749 62,995 71,267 82,161 89,695

16,865 30,332 51,839 63,974 61,082 76,771 90,130 107,167 133,628 164,130 188,263

12,948 14,589 11,655b 16,055 17,150 21,099 27,577 38,761 57,249 77,978 95,798c

British Saints = Latter-day Saints in Britain plus cumulative emigration from Britain

a

b

US Census for 1830 reported 11,354 white persons living in Utah

Non-British Saints outnumbered British Saints for the first time since 1845

c

percent said they were “English,” as compared with 30 percent in Maine, 29 percent in Idaho, 26 percent in Vermont, and 24 percent in New Hampshire.46

In addition to sending missionaries predominantly throughout the United States and to Europe in order to fulfill the Great Commission’s command “to all nations,” LDS leaders also dispatched missionaries “to almost all points of the compass,” as recounted by Britsch: Only five years after the Saints began to settle in the Salt Lake Valley, [Church leaders] called a special conference that was held August 28–29, 1852. This event was one of the great missionary moments. Can you imagine men such as Richard Ballantyne, founder of the Church’s Sunday School program, sitting next to his wife, Hulda, in the Bowery hearing his name read out that he was called to serve a mission in Hindustan? He was not alone … eight other men were called to Hindustan (India), and four were called to Siam (Thailand). Four elders were called to Hong Kong, China. Others were sent to Australia, the Sandwich Islands, Great Britain, and elsewhere. One hundred eight men were sent to almost all points of the compass. A mere twenty-two years after the founding of the Church, [Church leaders] were seemingly ready to convert the whole world. Unlike their Protestant counterparts, who for several centuries, from the Reformation until the late 1700s, believed the Great Commission to “teach all nations” applied only to the original Apostles, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young knew it was the entire Church’s current obligation to teach every people.47

The nineteenth-century distribution of Mormon missions is displayed in Fig. 3.2.

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Fig. 3.2  Nineteenth-century Mormon missions. (Map courtesy of Brandon Plewe, published in Brandon Plewe, S. Kent Brown, Donald Q. Cannon, Richard H. Jackson, eds., Mapping Mormonism: An Atlas of Latter-day Saint History, 2nd edition, Brigham Young University Press, 2014)

Even though Mormon missionaries and their message were particularly well suited for this time in the United States and Western Europe, Latter-day Saints remained self-proclaimed nonconformists to many of the religious and cultural norms of conventional Christianity. And so, despite the unpopularity of a faith that openly practiced plural marriage and made concerted attempts to establish theocratic social orders throughout the United States, tens of thousands joined the LDS Church in the United States and abroad, either migrating or immigrating to help “build Zion.”

The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: Constancy Amid Change While Latter-day Saint missionaries were experiencing remarkable success across many parts of the globe throughout the nineteenth century, the twentieth century brought diverse challenges in unexpected ways and places. For example, Reid L. Neilson, in his landmark work on twentieth-century missions in Asia, notes that while the “mode of evangelism and theological claims to primitive Christianity fired the imagination of prospective converts already saturated in a biblical culture … This entrenched pattern of evangelism, however, paradoxically hampered LDS missionary efforts in non-Christian, non-­ Western nations.” As a result, “the nineteenth century Mormon evangelists ‘imposed’ or ‘translated’ their religious systems in Asia, while other Christian

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groups ‘adapted’ or ‘enculturated’ their faith traditions … Latter-day Saint missionaries dogmatically held to their theological paradigm, which centered on an obsession with identifying [Asians] as descendants of Book of Mormon peoples, thus legitimizing their doctrine of seeking after the ‘believing blood of Israel.’”48 In contrasting the missionaries themselves, Neilson points out that American Protestant Foreign (APF) Missionaries and LDS foreign missionaries differed in significant ways—ways that determined the relative success of the former and the failure of the latter in Asia: (1) APF missionaries were serving as life-time salaried professionals and were not dependent upon the Asian people for survival, thus conveying an image of comparative success and refinement. LDS missionaries, on the other hand, relied on the New Testament model of evangelizing “without purse or scrip,” and were clearly impoverished, a condition that the Japanese and Chinese rejected—although it called forth sympathy and compassionate treatment for the missionaries in western Europe. (2) While the vast majority of APF missionaries (approximately 90 percent by the turn of the century) received formal training in colleges and were highly educated compared to the larger American population, amateur Mormon missionaries received “informal and narrow preparation,” were expected to learn evangelization through practice, and very few had received any higher education. (3) APF missionaries arrived in their mission fields with the realization they had the rest of their life to master the language, and had the funds provided to them for that educational pursuit. In contrast, LDS missionaries not only received no formal language training prior to entering their fields of labor, they could not afford that training upon arrival. (4) Finally, APF missionaries were sent to the non-Christian, non-Western World, unlike LDS foreign missionaries who served almost exclusively in the Christian Western World.49 Perhaps in response to these realities, Mormon historian Jonathan Stapley notes that “Starting at the turn of the twentieth century, mission presidents began to publish manuals of instruction for their missionaries.” “Starting in 1925,” he continues, “a Mission Home in Salt Lake City provided a central location where all missionaries could gather and receive instruction. Generally, a missionary would stay for several days, be set apart as a missionary by a General Authority … [and] missionaries went directly to foreign language areas with no language preparation … In 1937, [the newly created Radio, Publicity, and Mission Literature Committee of the Church] … released the first edition of The Missionary’s Handbook. This book marked the beginning of a centralized focus on a worldwide missionary effort.”50 There also emerged among church leaders a serious concern regarding language training prior to entering the missionaries’ fields of labor. In her study of the history of Latter-day Saint missionary language training, Cynthia Hallen observes that “at first missionaries were proud that they could go directly to the field and learn language(s) without going to school as the Protestants did,” relying more directly on the “gift of tongues.” “It wasn’t long, however,” she notes, “before church leaders, missionaries, and educators sensed a need for

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serious language preparation in order to make more effective use of the time in the mission field.” Still, it wasn’t until the twentieth century that the church began any kind of formal language training. Allen reports that “The Salt Lake Missionary Home introduced classes in English and foreign languages in 1926 … but [General Authorities of the Church] first gave serious consideration to a language training program as early as 1947.”51 After deliberating for more than a decade, “On December 4, 1961, the Missionary Language Institute (MLI) was officially opened” on the campus of Brigham Young University as part of the university.52 The MLI was eventually granted “Mission status,” making it and its operations a formal part of a missionary’s mission call. As a result, its name was changed to the Language Training Mission. As described by Britsch after the training center commenced operations: The Language Training Mission (LTM) [was] founded in 1963 … New missionaries live at this school for six to eight weeks. During this time, they study the language of the mission to which they have been assigned, usually in the context of lesson discussions. In addition, these missionaries study the history and culture of the area. Originally there were LTMs at Ricks College in Idaho, the BYU-­ Hawaii Campus, and at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. [Eventually, the three were] combined at a new facility near BYU. This multimillion-dollar complex produces speakers of [many foreign] languages, and the number is constantly expanding. No one expects these missionaries to be competent in linguistic or cultural matters; nevertheless, they are much better prepared to teach than LDS missionaries have been in years past.53

This latter facility, called the “Missionary Training Center,” or “MTC,” was considered by LDS ecclesiastical authorities to provide much more effective preparation for novice missionaries prior to their departure to the field. At the same time, as the number of missionaries requiring training increased, overcrowding at the Provo MTC became, as Cowan puts it, a “constant challenge.” Consequently, “church leaders considered the possibility of sending North American missionaries to area MTCs for their training.” Despite their success in alleviating overcrowding and providing missionaries in-field language experience, eventually some of these “international” MTCs were closed for economic reasons. It was less costly to fly missionaries to Provo for their three-week orientation than to maintain facilities and staff in other widely dispersed locales.54 Contemporaneously, whether learning a foreign language or not, all “missionaries start their missions with several weeks of training at a Missionary Training Center.”55 Robert Lively observes that “MTCs are akin to monastic communities. Missionaries are allowed only limited access to the outside world, their behavior is closely monitored, and they follow a rigorous daily schedule, which includes personal study, classroom work, and devotional meetings … Most struggle in some way. Issues include homesickness, missing a significant other, being with a companion at all times, and exhaustion. A few return home

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early because they choose to, or because they are told to. The [majority] complete their training and move on to the mission field.”56 Lively notes that, unlike their Catholic and Protestant counterparts, who are typically university professors with PhDs, the instructors at the MTCs around the world are “largely [young, recently] returned missionaries” ranging in age from 20 to 25, many of them students at nearby universities.57 As already noted, missionaries receive not only language instruction at MTCs around the world but also standardized methodological and theological training. Latter-day Saint historian Claudia Bushman summarizes the progression of institutionalized proselytizing methodological training throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century: Gradually leaders created curricular materials, publishing the first Church-wide set of lessons, the Systematic Program for Teaching the Gospel in 1952. The lessons [were] fine-tuned from time to time. A program adopted in 1961 had six discussions to be memorized perfectly. The Uniform System for Teaching Families, adopted in 1973, advised missionaries to memorize the discussions and then use their own words, providing teaching techniques … The lessons adopted in 1985 suggest that missionaries master principles, not memorize lessons, asking open-ended questions so people can share their feelings … In 2003, the new plan focused on memorizing key scriptures, depending on the missionary, to determine what each person or family needed. This plan moved customized teaching from “structure-based” to “principle-based.” Preach My Gospel, a missionary manual released in 2005, stressed goal setting and planning, adding emphasis on “using time wisely, finding people to teach, improving teaching skills, [and] helping people make and keep commitments.”58

After receiving these various kinds of training at one of the MTCs, missionaries are sent “to their assigned geographical region, called a mission. Each mission is presided over by a mission president, who typically has two assistants … Missions are typically subdivided into large regions called zones and further into subregions called districts, with missionary leaders in charge of the work in these areas. Missionaries are to always be with their ‘companions,’ one of whom is typically a ‘senior’ to the other.”59 As Lively notes, “The missionary’s first companion in the field is known as his ‘trainer,’ and it is that person’s responsibility to help the new missionary assimilate into the mission culture and to fulfill mission expectations. Being new to the mission, ‘greenies’ hold the lowest status in the mission.”60 Single, male missionaries typically serve 24 months, while single female missionaries serve 18 months.

Changing Demographics Within the LDS Missionary Force While maintaining a rather rigid mission orthodoxy and orthopraxy throughout the twentieth century, a dramatic demographic change occurred regarding the missionaries themselves in three significant ways: first, younger, single men

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without families were called with an expectation to finance their own missions; secondly, although originally seen as an exclusive duty of an all-male priesthood, single women were gradually extended mission calls; third, mature adults, primarily couples entering retirement were extended calls as “senior missionaries.” Perhaps the most dramatic change concerned the role of female missionaries. Hughes notes that “During the 1830s, Church leaders discouraged wives from accompanying their husbands on missions … In the 1840s, the Church’s stance softened and occasionally women were allowed to accompany their husbands to their assigned areas.”61 In his study of female missionary activity in the LDS Church, Calvin Kunz reports that at the church’s April 1850 general conference, the elders called on missions were instructed to “leave their families at home, and then their minds will be more free to serve the Lord.” As a result, there were only about 220 Latter-day Saint women involved in missionary activities between 1830 and 1898.62 Although this cadre of “sister missionaries” was numerically small, Carol Cornwall Madsen maintains that their contribution was not insignificant: Virtually all of these female missionaries were married women who either accompanied or joined their missionary husbands in mission fields throughout the world. Their experience was characterized by the ambivalence of Church leaders toward female participation in the missionary enterprise and ambiguity in articulating their roles. Utilized at first almost exclusively as the domestic and financial supporters of their proselytizing husbands, missionary wives did not find a ministerial function in mission service until the latter part of the century. Although some mission leaders perceived the need for a broader scope of mission activity for women, it resulted primarily from the initiative of individual missionary wives and the establishment of the Church auxiliary organizations for women and children which offered them administrative and teaching opportunities … This small contingent of Mormon women comprised a little-known segment of a dramatic evangelical movement in nineteenth-century America where women were major participants.63

Despite the minimal involvement and even lesser appreciation of females in missionary endeavors early on, this gradually changed over time. Kunz reports that “The number of women identified with missionary activities each year between l830 and 1864 averaged less than one. When the Civil War ended in 1865 the annual rate for females participating in missionary activities increased significantly. For example, from 1865 up to and including 1878 there were nearly two per year. Then the average number of women participants each year from 1879 to 1889 increased to four and from 1890 to 1898 the yearly average jumped to nearly thirteen.”64 Characterizing gender attitudes of an earlier era, LDS historian Jessie L.  Embry recounts that “A major difference in the treatment of men and women missionaries is that women have never been encouraged to go on missions. While Church leaders tell young men missions are their responsibility,

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they advise young women to marry and have children … ‘We do not wish to create a program that would prevent them from finding a proper companion in marriage, because that is their foremost responsibility if such is able to happen’”65 Shepherd and Shepherd, however, also emphasize the complexities of Mormon women and missionary service that developed throughout the twentieth century: As women increasingly pursue college education and career training while also volunteering in larger numbers than ever before for missionary assignments, we see expanding cohorts of LDS women with greater worldly experience and training who are willing to postpone marriage and family aspirations until later than has been Mormon norm … Mormon society, with its emphasis on gender-based roles in the church and the family, seems at first glance to run counter to this norm because young people of both genders are called to the mission field and more and more young women are going. A closer inspection suggests, however, that Mormon reality is more complex. In general, young women are not expected to serve missions nor, therefore, are they stigmatized for not doing so; those who aspire to a mission are sometimes discouraged on the grounds of gender [no longer the case], while those who serve may encounter male ambivalence in the mission field.66

A major policy shift occurred in October 2012 when LDS Church president Thomas S. Monson announced a change in missionary age for both male and female members of the Church.67 Unable to serve before 21 prior to the announcement, the age shift to 19 resulted in a historic and dramatic increase of female members into the LDS missionary force, as shown in Table 3.3. In addition to lowering the age for female missionaries, President Monson also lowered the minimum age for males from 19 to 18. While the number of female missionaries markedly increased, the number of male missionaries also increased, producing a substantially larger missionary force that was still disproportionately male. Lowering age requirements produced a two-year “surge” in the size of the LDS missionary force that was relatively short-lived. The number of female missionaries doubled and the number of male missionaries increased by almost 20 percent for a short period of time, until the first wave of missionaries ended their service. In addition to these numbers, as Lively points out, single, young adult male and female missionaries, Table 3.3  Number of LDS missionaries serving before and after lowering eligibility ages for young men and women, 2012–201368

Young men Young women Senior couples Totals

OCTOBER 2012

OCTOBER 2013

Percent increase

44,800 8100 5800 58,700

54,600 19,500 6200 80,300

17.9% 58.5% 6.5% 26.9%

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Aren’t the only Latter-day Saints who volunteer for missionary service. Many retired Church members … [numbering to the] thousands serve in a variety of missionary roles around the world. They include senior couples and senior sisters … Some engage in proselytizing missions but the majority prefer other types of activities that draw on their training, experience and abilities, [including] leadership support, genealogical research, temple work, medical assignments, social and educational services, at visitors’ centers and historic sites and in mission offices … There are other categories of service that don’t fit the traditional picture of a missionary. There are Church-service missionaries: people who may work from home or who serve in various capacities at Church sites close to home …. They too are dedicated to supporting the Church and furthering its message, or, as it is said, “helping to move the work along.”69

The LDS Missionary Force and Church Growth Since World War II Like other groups, religious organizations grow over time either through birth rates that exceed death rates and member defections (natural increase) or through recruitment of new members. Historically, both natural increase and missionary recruitment of new members have been essential sources of Mormon growth. Major retarding obstacles to the full flowering of LDS recruitment efforts in the first half of the twentieth century included World War I, the great depression of the 1930s, and World War II—all massive world events that siphoned both human and financial resources away from investment in a truly large-scale missionary enterprise. It was the superpower emergence of the United States following World War II that coincided with the true acceleration of Mormon-centralized proselyting and organizational growth on a world scale. Therefore, the following analysis focuses on post-World War II membership and missionary force data. Tables 3.4 and 3.5 summarize over 70 years of selective growth indicators by decade comparisons from 1950 through 2010. For a more concentrated focus on LDS trends during the last decade, the data in these tables also are formatted to display annual comparisons from 2011 through 2018 (the most recent year for which figures were available). As a cautionary note, it should be remembered that when looking at a religious organization’s reported membership numbers, such figures do not coincide with active member participation or even individuals’ own religious self-identification. Predictably there will be discrepancies, sometimes sizeable ones, between an organization’s formal membership rolls and levels of organizational activity or personal acknowledgment of one’s membership. The Church’s membership figures shown in my data tables only indicate nominal affiliation and not active involvement or member self-identification.71 Total LDS membership since 1950 has officially climbed from a little over one million to over sixteen million today, with the biggest relative growth spurts coming in the decades between 1960 and 1990. With particular respect

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Table 3.4  LDS Church growth for selected years, 1945–201870 Year

1945 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018

Membership

Converts Bapt.

Children Baptized

Converts per Children Bapt.

Stakes

Number

% Number % NUMBER % Number % No. change change change change

% chg.

979,454 1,111,314 1,693,180 2,930,810 4,638,000 7,760,000 11,068,861 14,131,467 14,441,346 14,782,473 15,082,028 15,372,337 15,634,199 15,882,147 16,118,169 16,313,735

– +11.9 +34.4 +42.2 +36.8 +40.2 +29.9 +21.7 +2.1 +2.3 +2.0 +1.9 +1.7 +1.6 +1.5 +1.2

– +13.9 +43.6 +40.6 +55.9 +31.7 +30.9 +4.4 +6.7 +1.7 +2.0 +3.5 +1.9 +2.8 +2.2 +1.2

4957 14,700 48,586 79,126 211,000 330,877 273,973 272,814 281,312 272,814 282,945 296,803 257,402 240,131 233,729 234,332

– +66.3 +69.7 +38.6 +62.5 +36.2 −20.8 −0.4 +3.0 −3.3 +3.8 +4.7 −15.3 −7.2 −2.7 +0.3

16,106 22,808 42,189 55,210 65,000 78,000 81,450 120,528 119,917 122,273 115,482 116,409 114,550 109,246 106,771 102,102

– +29.4 +45.9 +23.6 +15.1 +16.7 +4.2 +32.4 −0.6 +1.9 −5.9 +0.8 −1.6 −4.9 −2.3 −4.6

0.3 0.6 1.2 1.4 3.3 4.2 3.4 2.3 2.3 2.2 2.5 2.6 2.3 2.2 2.2 2.3

– +50.0 +50.0 +14.3 +57.6 +21.4 −23.5 −47.7 0.0 −4.5 +12.0 +3.8 −13.0 −4.5 0.0 +4.3

155 180 319 537 1218 1784 2581 2701 2896 2946 3005 3114 3174 3266 3341 3383

Table 3.5  LDS missionary statistics for selected years, 1945–2018 Year

1945 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018

Missions

Missionaries

Convert Baptisms

Converts per Missionary

Number % change Number % change Number

% change Number

% change

38 43 58 2 188 256 334 340 340 347 405 406 418 421 421 407

– +63.3 +69.7 +38.6 +62.5 +36.2 −20.8 −0.4 +3.0 −2.9 +3.8 +4.7 −15.3 −7.2 −2.7 +0.3

– −200.0 +47.2 +3.6 +21.4 +7.9 −68.9 +13.5 −1.9 −10.9 −35.3 +2.9 0.0 −2.9 +2.9 +2.8

– +11.6 +25.9 +36.9 +51.1 +26.6 +23.4 +1.8 0.0 +2.0 +14.3 +0.2 +2.9 +0.7 0.0 −3.4

592 5313 9097 14,387 29,593 43,651 60,784 52,225 55,410 58,990 83,035 85,147 74,079 70,946 67,049 65,137

– +88.9 +41.6 +36.8 +51.4 +32.3 +28.2 −16.4 +5.7 +6.1 +29.0 +2.5 −14.9 −4.4 −5.8 −2.9

4957 14,700 48,586 79,126 211,000 330,877 273,973 272,814 281,312 272,814 282,945 296,803 257,402 240,131 233,729 234,332

8.4 2.8 5.3 5.5 7.0 7.6 4.5 5.2 5.1 4.6 3.4 3.5 3.5 3.4 3.5 3.6

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to Mormon missionary efforts, by the end of World War II in 1945, there were a mere 592 proselytizing Mormon missionaries in the field, mostly in the United States. Five years later, in 1950, there were 5313 Mormon missionaries in the field, and a decade later, in 1960, the LDS Church reported a total of 9097 missionaries, stationed not only in U.S. missions but increasingly in foreign countries outside the United States. The corresponding number of convert baptisms for those years jumped from an official total of 4957 in 1945 to 14,700  in 1950. A decade later, in 1960, convert baptisms skyrocketed to 48,586. Also in 1960—and for the first time in the twentieth century—the ratio of convert baptisms to children born into the church shifted in favor of convert baptisms. Thus, in 1960, for every child born into the church and added to church membership rolls through baptism at age eight (“children of record”) there were 1.2 convert baptisms. This meant the LDS Church was beginning to grow faster as a result of intensive missionary proselyting than from natural increase, a highly important trend that has continued ever since. Over the last half of the twentieth century, LDS membership figures increased by an average of 36.7 percent per decade. Hand in hand with these 50 years of surging membership growth, we see enormous expansion of the Mormon missionary enterprise and corresponding infrastructural investments in church buildings and new mission organizations. In 1950, a respectable total of 5313 Mormon missionaries labored in 43 designated mission field organizations operating in both the United States and abroad; by 2000, there were 334 LDS mission field organizations worldwide, supervising the daily proselyting efforts of 60,784 full-time missionaries. During this same span of time, the number of LDS stakes (the great majority of which were previously located in the Mormon cultural region of the American Intermountain West) ballooned from 180 to 2581 worldwide.72 While a healthy number of child baptisms was, and continues to be, an important part of the Mormon growth equation, clearly it was the high octane of the LDS missionary program that primarily fueled the rapid expansion of the LDS Church in the global religious economy of the twentieth century. The mutually dependent stories of rapid LDS growth and missionary productivity, however, have become significantly more complicated in the twenty-­ first century. While the LDS Church continues to grow, its rate of growth has slowed substantially. By 2000, membership rates had begun edging down— from 29. 9 percent in 2000 to 21.7 percent in 2010. We do not yet have official figures for 2020, so we cannot continue to report decade comparisons. However, if we compare church membership in 2010 with our most recent data from 2018, we calculate a growth rate of 13.4 percent for that eight-year period, indicating a substantial decline in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Switching to single-year comparisons, beginning in 2011, we see consistent declines from over 2 percent annual growth to a little over 1 percent in 2018. The downturn in LDS member growth has been accompanied by declines in other closely connected growth metrics. Number of convert baptisms has

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declined consistently since 2014; child baptisms similarly have been declining since 2015; the ratio of converts to children of record has shrunk from a high of 4.2 in 1990 to between 2.6 and 2.2 every year since 2010; and the boom decades of stake growth, which averaged 40.5 percent per decade in the second half of the twentieth century, have leveled off to a more modest rate of 20.2 percent over the past eight years between 2010 and 2018. Switching again to single-year comparisons, since 2010 we see annual stake growth dropping from a high of 6.7 percent in 2011 to under 2 percent in 2018. What has not declined in clear-cut, parallel fashion in the twenty-first century is the size of the LDS missionary force. The number of full-time missionaries dropped from a high of 60,784 in 2000 to 52, 225 in 2010, but rebounded in two years to 58,990. However, following the decision to lower missionary age eligibility from 19 to 18 for male missionaries, and from 21 to 19 for female missionaries, the number of LDS missionaries in the field in 2013 zoomed virtually overnight to 83,035 and subsequently peaked in 2014 at 85,147. Since then, the size of the missionary force has dropped back to 65,137 in 2018. While the absolute size of the LDS missionary force has fluctuated a good deal over the past decade, other pertinent growth statistics have steadily declined. One key statistic in this regard is the average number of convert baptisms per missionary in the field. In the 1960s and 1970s, Mormon missionaries baptized between 5.3 and 5.5 converts per missionary on an annual basis. Proselyting productivity increased even more in the1980s and 1990s, when missionaries averaged between 7.0 and 7.6 converts annually per missionary. But, in the twenty-first century, this measure also began dropping. Ultimately, since 2013, the LDS convert to missionary ratio has stabilized at between 3.4 and 3.6 annual converts per missionary. Thus, even though the LDS missionary force is substantially larger now than it was 30  years ago, it produces a smaller number of convert baptisms. To illustrate: In 1990, 43,651 Mormon missionaries baptized 330,877 converts (7.6 per missionary). In 2018, 65,137 missionaries baptized 234,332 converts (3.6 per missionary).73 What explains the relative decline in LDS convert baptism rates in the twenty-first century? It may be argued that mounting retention concerns over high rates of religious inactivity and disaffiliation among Mormon converts has led to greater official emphasis on missionaries being more selective in teaching and certifying “quality” investigators, who are more likely to remain committed members once they join, rather than rushing the baptism of unprepared investigators in order to maximize the number of people nominally brought into the fold. It may also be argued that religious demand in already Christianized countries—especially in the Northern Hemisphere where Mormons have long mined for religious seekers—has virtually expired; that secularization in Western urbanized countries has produced populations of people who have little interest in organized religion; and that LDS proselyting efforts would be more productive if missionary resources were dramatically shifted to politically open, but less secularized countries of the Southern and

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Eastern Hemispheres as new markets for the faith. In more recent years, this transition has, in fact, belatedly commenced, as summarized below.

Geographic Expansion of an International Church As the LDS missionary force experienced periods of both growth and decline throughout the twentieth century, it nonetheless continued to expand geographically. Consistent with the statistical trends summarized above, historian Jan Shipps has observed that: Mormons were the ones who appeared to be making the most headway at home. Mormon proselytizing was especially successful in suburbia, the field whitest to the harvest, where LDS missionaries contended most directly with conservative Protestantism and where the Saints often seemed to be winning … In the twentieth century LDS growth no longer depended on the British mission, but it was impeded by world events … LDS growth slowed to only 13 percent between 1915 and 1920. Following the war, growth returned to prewar levels, only to be sharply reduced during the Great Depression. Then came World War II, and once again foreign travel was impossible. LDS men who might have gone on missions were in the armed forces instead. Then, with wars and the depression behind them, the Latter-day Saints entered a period of very rapid growth—never below 22 percent for any five-year period since 1950. In 1995 LDS membership was nearly ten million. As a result of this rapid growth, Mormonism is no longer an American or British-American movement. As of 1996 more than 50 percent of all Saints lived outside the United States.74

The role LDS President Spencer W.  Kimball played in this expansionary movement cannot be overstated. In addition to mobilizing the young adult men of the church with his preachment that “Every Young Man Should Serve a Mission,”75 President Kimball made a shrewd maneuver as a missionary strategist in 1974 by enlisting David M.  Kennedy, the former Secretary of the Treasury and U.S. Ambassador to NATO, to be the Church’s “special consultant for diplomatic affairs.” Kennedy’s chief task was to win friends in the Washington diplomatic corps and overseas in order to smooth the path for Mormon missionizing. As a result, LDS advances were especially notable in the Communist bloc countries of Eastern Europe. The church won legal recognition in Poland in 1977 and erected a temple in the former East Germany in 1985. A recalcitrant Russia also warily granted post-Communist legality to LDS proselyting in 1998.76 Like other Christian denominations, Mormon mission success has, in fact, transitioned from the Global North and West to the Global South in the twentieth and, especially, twenty-first centuries. Even as late as 1981, however, most LDS Church members lived in the United States and Canada. But 30  years later, a majority of members lived in countries outside the United States and Canada. And, like other Christian churches engaged in missionary work,

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contemporary LDS growth has occurred primarily in Africa and Central and South America—the Global South.77 Mormonism’s relatively recent expansion in the Global South, however, should be considered within the larger, historical context of World Christianity. By 2011, only a slight majority of Latter-day Saints resided in the Global South as compared to two-thirds of Christians worldwide by 2018. These figures suggest that the LDS Church has actually lagged behind the missionary efforts of the worldwide Christian movement in countries of the Southern Hemisphere. Furthermore, as of 2018, most Mormon missionaries were proselytizing in 261 mission organizations in the Global North (North America, Europe, and Asia), relative to only 146 LDS mission organizations operating in the Global South (Oceania, Africa, and South America) (Table 3.6). As I have shown elsewhere, of the 160 countries in which LDS missions operated in 2013, missionaries were sent to 70 of them (43 percent) only after local members informally initiated missionary work.79 In other words, rather than missionary efforts beginning in those countries because LDS leaders had sent formally called missionaries, it began as a result of local lay members first preaching their faith and establishing communities of believers prior to Church authorities organizing a mission or sending formally called missionaries (this was especially the case in West Africa). Its belated start in countries notwithstanding, arguably, it is in them that the LDS Church sees both its international future and its greatest challenges, as other chapters in this book will attest. (LDS international expansion into regions of the Global South is explored in detail by Otterstrom and Plewe in Chap. 4.) That said, what of the future of Latter-day Saint Missions? According to Claudia Bushman, “Critics have warned the future success of the international Church depends upon Mormonism’s capacity to adapt to other cultures. Mormonism comprises a distinct way of life, but world religions must adapt to the diverse ways of world cultures. As colonialism and Western culture fall under attack from a variety of directions, the Mormon message stands at a crossroads. Can the Church adapt to other parts of the world? Will Mormonism produce ethnic forms transcending indigenous culture, or will it produce little Utah enclaves? Will the global Church reproduce American wards? Church growth has always been uneven suggesting the complexity of a single strategy.”80 Regarding these same challenges, Neilson has observed:

Table 3.6  Global distribution of LDS missions, 201878 Global north North America Europe Asia Total

Global south 182 34 45 261

South America Oceania Africa Total

95 17 34 146

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The evolution of the Mormon Missionary program has been influenced by racial, religious and logistical concerns. Sociologist Armand Mauss argues that certain Latter-day Saint theological tenets have focused missionary efforts toward certain races and peoples, while at the same time diverting resources away from other groups … It took a major decline in missionary success in the Christian Atlantic world to convince Mormon leaders that it was time to explore evangelism among these other groups … An explosive number of conversions resulted, convincing leadership … Now a decade into the twenty-first century, Mormon missionaries teach and baptize anyone interested in their mission, regardless of race … This shift to a global, color-blind approach to evangelism has had enormous consequences for what was once a primarily white, American Church … Nevertheless, the Latter-day Saints will continue to learn how to wrestle over how much to accommodate foreign cultures in places like Africa.81

Since its inception, Latter-day Saint evangelizing, as a global enterprise, has struggled to overcome historical stereotypes relative to polygamy and racial prejudice, international political barriers, and secularized post-Christian social trends. Despite these and other tensions, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­ day Saints continues to commission and train missionaries, young and old, in numbers that far surpass most of their Christian counterparts worldwide. While future challenges undoubtedly lie ahead, the vision and scope of the Latter-day Saint mission enterprise has developed into what arguably has become the largest, short-term missionary force embracing the Great Commission in modern times.82 One final point needs to be made concerning Mormonism’s system of lay missionary service. In addition to its manifest function of recruiting new members into the LDS faith, the Mormon missionary ethic, nourished and reinforced from one generation to the next, generates a dynamic, regenerative process within Mormonism that lies at the heart of its members’ lay participation and the ongoing vitality of their church. Upon completion of their missions, tens of thousands of young Mormons, seasoned by their field experience, return annually to their religious communities with strengthened religious convictions if not greatly increased zeal for committing their adult lives to the service of the LDS Church. This, of course, is not the case for every returned Mormon missionary—a certain percentage may already have become disillusioned while in the field or lose their faith upon resuming their educations or pursuing occupational careers in secular society. Nonetheless, for the many whose religious faith and commitment are strengthened by their missionary experience, the socializing value of Mormon missions for the LDS Church is obvious. It is not by coincidence that the great majority of current Mormon general authorities and other high-ranking officials commenced their ecclesiastical careers by serving proselyting missions in their youth. The administrative ranks of the LDS central bureaucracy, as well as lay leadership positions in local LDS wards and stakes, are stocked with returned missionaries. Whatever their socioeconomic or national backgrounds might be, they share the organized experience of the missionary crusade. Each new cohort of returned

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missionaries constitutes a revitalizing pool of young adults from which the LDS Church replenishes its ranks of devoted followers and lay leaders. Thus, even if conversion rates significantly decline in years to come, it’s safe to assume that LDS authorities will continue emphasizing the fundamental importance of lay missionary obligations to church members worldwide. The religious socializing functions of Mormon missions will undoubtedly remain a vital part of Mormon culture for the foreseeable future. Addendum Note As of this writing, the 2020 coronavirus pandemic has had an immediate and massive impact on the global missionary enterprise of the LDS Church. In mid-March of 2020, the Church’s First presidency announced that full-time American missionaries serving in foreign countries would be brought back to their homes in the United States. The Church’s official online news site commenced publishing a page that provided continuing updates on “how COVID-19 (coronavirus) is impacting The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­ day Saints and its global membership.83 The Church is monitoring developments and taking steps to comply with best practices and direction provided by public health organizations of various national governments.” With regard to its tens of thousands of missionaries dispersed in close to 200 countries worldwide, this same page (updated April 1 at 8:30 p.m. MDT) subsequently reported that “Missionaries are in the process of returning to their home nations. This applies to all areas except Europe and Europe East. In addition, U.S. citizens serving in Canada will remain in Canada, and Canadians serving in the U.S. will remain in the U.S.” This update went on to say: “In a letter sent March 31, 2020, the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles outlined temporary adjustments to missionary service. New service options are available for current and prospective missionaries … Moving forward, the Church will rely on public health agencies and individuals to make these notifications. Each missionary who returns home is asked to self-isolate for 14 days following instructions from the World Health Organization and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” The ultimate human and material consequences of this catastrophic event for the future of organized proselyting as a foundational program of the LDS Church can only be guessed at this point in time. One may confidently assume, however, that church leaders will maintain their commitment to moving forward as advocates of a global, missionary religion. Precisely in what ways this missionary commitment will be implemented, however, and with what consequences, remain to be seen.

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Notes 1. Justice Anderson, “An Overview of Missiology,” in Missiology: An Introduction to the Foundations, History, and Strategies of World Missions, John Mark Terry, Ebbie Smith, and Justice Anderson, eds. (Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman & Holdman Publishers, 1998), 13–15. 2. Significantly, it has been quoted in the interim (1843–present) by no less than 148 general authorities of the church in the Church’s General Conferences. See https://www.lds-general-conference.org/. 3. Fred E.  Woods, Go Ye Into All the World: The Growth and Development of Mormon Missionary Work; 2011 Church History Symposium (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2013), x. 4. Dallin H. Oaks, and Lance B. Wickman, “The Missionary Work of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” in Sharing the Book: Religious Perspectives on the Rights and Wrongs of Proselytism, ed. John Witte Jr. and Richard C. Martin (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), 259–60. 5. Gordon Shepherd and Gary Shepherd, “Sustaining a Lay Religion in Modern Society: The Mormon Missionary Experience,” in Contemporary Mormonism: Social Science Perspectives, Marie Cornwall, Tim B. Heaton, and Lawrence Alfred Young, eds. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 163. 6. Shepherd and Shepherd, “Sustaining a Lay Religion,” 169. 7. Oaks and Wickman, “Missionary Work,” 250. 8. See https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/elder-nielson-providesmormon-missionary-update-after-surge. 9. To understand the impact of Church President David O. McKay’s coining of this phrase and subsequent reiterations by church leaders since, see Marianne Holman, ‘“Every Member a Missionary’ for Fifty Years,” Ensign (April 2009), 77. 10. Reid L.  Neilson, “Mormon Mission Work,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, eds. Terryl Givens and Philip L. Barlow (Oxford University Press, USA, 2015) 183. 11. William Mulder, “Mormonism’s ‘Gathering’: an American Doctrine with a Difference,” Church History 23, no. 3 (1954): 248–264. 12. This sentiment was perhaps best captured in Doctrine and Covenants, section 133, verses four through twelve, as a revelation to Joseph Smith Jr., dated November 1831. It reads: “Wherefore, prepare ye, prepare ye, O my people; sanctify yourselves; gather ye together, O ye people of my church, upon the land of Zion, all you that have not been commanded to tarry. Go ye out from Babylon… Send forth the elders of my church unto the nations which are afar off; unto the islands of the sea; send forth unto foreign lands; call upon all nations, first upon the Gentiles, and then upon the Jews. And behold, and lo, this shall be their cry, and the voice of the Lord unto all people: Go ye forth unto the land of Zion… Prepare yourselves for the great day of the Lord. Watch, therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour. Let them, therefore, who are among the Gentiles flee unto Zion.” 13. Patrick Mason, The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South (Oxford University Press, 2011), 27. 14. See Doctrine and Covenants, section 88 verse 81.

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15. Since his installment as president and prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on January 14, 2018, Russell M. Nelson has directed church members worldwide to engage fully in the “gathering of scattered Israel” five different times: June 3, 2018; October 3, 2018; February 11, 2019; April 7, 2019; and October 2019. However, this is not a new directive. Church leaders have issued the same injunction in church-wide (worldwide) general conferences 86 times since the early 1850s. See https://www.lds-general-conference.org/. 16. For excellent resources on both Mormon migration and immigration, see the “Immigrants Ancestor’s Project,” Center for Family History and Genealogy, Brigham Young University, accessed December 30, 2019, http://immigrants. byu.edu/; “Saints By Sea: Latter-day Saint Immigration to America,” Brigham Young University, accessed December 30, 2019, https://saintsbysea.lib.byu. edu/; and “Overland Travel Pioneer Database,” Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­day Saints, accessed December 30, 2019, https://history.churchofjesuschrist.org/ overlandtravel/. 17. For an example of the contemporary position, see W.  Douglas Shumway, “Marriage and Family: Our Sacred Responsibility,” Ensign, 174th annual General Conference report in which he affirmed: “The current commandment is not to gather to one place but to gather in stakes in our own homelands.” 18. Shepherd and Shepherd, “Sustaining a Lay Religion,” 164–165. 19. Stephen Neill and Owen Chadwick, A History of Christian Missions (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 256. 20. Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp and Reid Larkin Neilson, eds., Proclamation to the People: Nineteenth-century Mormonism and the Pacific Basin Frontier (University of Utah Press, 2008), 4–5. 21. Mason, Mormon Menace, 120–121. 22. Oaks and Wickman, “Missionary Work,” 248. 23. Lisa Olsen Tait, “‘I Quit Other Business’: Early Missionaries: D&C 42, 75, 79, 80, 84, 99,” in Matthew McBride and James Goldberg, eds., Revelations in Context: The Stories behind the Sections of the Doctrine and Covenants (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2016), 84–92. 24. Neilson, “Mormon Mission Work,” 183. 25. William E. Hughes, “A profile of the missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints 1849–1900.” (PhD dissertation, Department of History, Brigham Young University, 1986), 2–3. 26. Ronald W.  Walker, “Cradling Mormonism: The Rise of the Gospel in Early Victorian England,” BYU Studies Quarterly 27, issue 1(1987): 33. 27. See Ronald E. Bartholomew, “The Role of Local Missionaries in Nineteenth-­ Century England,” in Go Ye Into All the World: The Growth and Development of Mormon Missionary Work, Reid L.  Neilson and Fred E.  Woods, eds. (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2012), 311, 314. 28. Hughes, “A Profile,” 7–8. 29. Hughes, “A Profile,” 11–20. 30. Hughes, “A Profile,” 176–181. 31. Oaks and Wickman, “Missionary Work,” 254. 32. See Hughes, “A Profile,” 57. 33. Ronald E.  Bartholomew, “Nineteenth-Century Missiology of the LDS Bedfordshire Conference,” Journal of Mormon History 37, no. 1 (2011): 239.

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34. Oaks and Wickman, “Missionary Work,” 254. 35. See Hughes, “A Profile,” 63. 36. Bartholomew, “Nineteenth-Century Missiology,” 220–23, 239. 37. Mason, Mormon Menace, 125. 38. R. Lanier Britsch, “Mormon Missions: An Introduction to the Latter-day Saints Missionary System,” Occasional Bulletin of Missionary Research 3, no. 1 (1979): 24. 39. Richard O. Cowan, “‘Called to Serve’: A History of Missionary Training,” in Go Ye Into All the World: The Growth and Development of Mormon Missionary Work, Reid L. Neilson and Fred E. Woods, eds. (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2012), 23. 40. Hughes, “A Profile,” 37–41, 44. 41. Hughes, “A Profile,” 85. 42. Nielson, “Mormon Mission Work,” 185. 43. R. Lanier Britsch, “By All Means,” in Go Ye Into All the World: The Growth and Development of Mormon Missionary Work, Reid L. Neilson and Fred E. Woods, eds. (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2012), 4–5. 44. See, for example, Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 127–28; J. Spencer Fluhman, “A Peculiar People”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (UNC Press Books, 2012), x; Eric Alden Eliason, ed. Mormons and Mormonism: an Introduction to an American World Religion (University of Illinois Press, 2001), and Richard Ostling and Joan K. Ostling, Mormon America—Revised and Updated Edition: The Power and the Promise (New York: Harper Collins, 2009). 45. Figures shown in this table were obtained from Rodney Stark (edited by Reid L.  Neilson), The Rise of Mormonism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 211–12. 46. Stark, Rise of Mormonism,” 210, 213–214. 47. Britsch, “By all Means,” 4–5. 48. Reid L. Neilson, Early Mormon Missionary Activities in Japan, 1901–1924, (Salt Lake City, Utah: The University of Utah Press, 2010), 35–36. 49. As summarized from Neilson, “Early Mormon Missionary Activities” in Ronald E.  Bartholomew, “Review of Early Mormon Missionary Activities in Japan,” Journal of Mormon History 39, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 239–241. 50. Jonathan A.  Stapley, “Mormon Missiology,” in Mormonism: A Historical Encyclopedia, W.  Paul Reeve, and Ardis E.  Parshall, eds. (Oxford, England: ABC-­CLIO, 2010), 260–261. 51. Cynthia Leah Hallen, “LDS Language Teaching and Learning: Highlights from 1830–1982,” (Master Thesis, Brigham Young University, 1982), 14–17. 52. Richard O. Cowan, Every Man Shall Hear the Gospel in His Own Language: A History of the Missionary Training Center and its Predecessors, (Provo, Utah: Missionary Training Center, 1984), 15. 53. Britsch, “Mormon Mission: An Introduction,” 24. 54. Cowan, “Called to Serve,” 30. 55. Stapley, “Mormon Missiology,” 265. 56. Robert L.  Lively Jr., The Mormon Missionary: Who IS That Knocking at My Door? (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015), 70.

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57. Lively, Mormon Missionary, 71. 58. Claudia L. Bushman, Contemporary Mormonism: Latter-day Saints in Modern America (Lanham, Maryland: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006), 63–64. 59. Stapley, “Mormon Missiology,” 265–66. 60. Lively, Mormon Missionary, 113. 61. Hughes, “A Profile,” 74. 62. Calvin S.  Kunz, “A History of Female Missionary Activity in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1830–1898” (Master’s Thesis, Brigham Young University, 1976), 13–14, 17, 57. 63. Carol Cornwall Madsen, “Mormon Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Polynesia,” in Proclamation to the People: Nineteenth-century Mormonism and the Pacific Basin Frontier, Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp and Reid Larkin Neilson, eds. (University of Utah Press, 2008), 142. 64. Kunz, “History of Female Missionary Activity,” 27, 34–36. 65. Jessie L. Embry, “Oral History and Mormon Women Missionaries: The Stories Sound the Same,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 19, no: 3 (1998): 174. 66. Shepherd and Shepherd, The Mormon Missionary Experience, 170. 67. Thomas S. Monson, “Welcome to Conference,” Ensign, November 2012, 5. 68. Figures in this table were obtained from “Thousands More Mormons Choose Missionary Service,” Newsroom, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed December 27, 2018, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist. org/article/thousands-more-mormons-choose-missionary-service. 69. Lively, Mormon Missionary, 395–97. 70. Figures for these tables were accumulated from three different sources: Stark, Rise of Mormonism, 209; Church Almanac by the Deseret News, 1974–2013, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Historical Dept, (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret News), 1974–2013 and “Statistical Report,” for 2014–2018, Newsroom, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed December 27, 2019, at https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/ article/ statistics. 71. The accuracy of LDS membership records has been challenged in recent years, calling into question the actual number of Latter-day Saints worldwide. The accuracy of church records—which need to be constantly updated as individuals both affiliate and disaffiliate—and officially claimed membership numbers are problematic concerns in virtually all religious denominations. In the Mormon case, we are obliged to use official LDS statistics for want of superior alternative sources. While exact number counts in official statistics should always be taken with due caution, major statistical trends of growth or decline over time can certainly be inferred from them. 72. LDS stakes are roughly the equivalent of a Catholic diocese. When a new stake is organized, it presupposes a sufficient number of active church members in a designated area to sustain the lay activity of at least five wards—congregational units comparable to Catholic parishes—and the infrastructural facilities needed to support them. As organizational units, stakes may be taken as better proxy indicators of the degree of active LDS growth and religious participation in designated geographical areas than nominal membership figures. 73. The LDS Church released its year-end statistical report for 2019 on April 4, 2020 (https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/2019-statisticalreport). The missionary and membership numbers in this report displayed modest upticks in the number of full-time missionaries serving in the field (67,021,

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a 2.8 percent increase), number of convert baptisms (248,835, a 5.8 percent increase), and total number of members worldwide (16,565,036, a 1.5 percent increase). The one key growth statistic that continued going down instead of up was the number of children added to church rolls (94,266, an 8.3 percent decrease). This was the first time since 2007 that children of record fell below 100,000, pointing to a declining LDS birthrate in those countries with the largest numbers of church members—especially the United States and also Mexico, and Brazil. 74. Jan Shipps, “Is Mormonism Christian? Reflections on a Complicated Question,” in Mormons and Mormonism: An Introduction to an American World Religion, Eric Alden Eliason, ed. (Champagne, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 94–96. 75. Spencer W.  Kimball, “Planning for a Full and Abundant Life,” Ensign, May 1974, 86. Since President Kimball’s address, every subsequent president of the church has repeated the message that every worthy, able young man should prepare to serve a mission. See Ezra Taft Benson, Ensign, May 1986, 44–45; Howard W. Hunter, “Follow the Son of God,” Ensign, Nov. 1994, 87; Gordon B. Hinckley, Ensign, Nov. 1995, 51–52; and Thomas S. Monson, “As We Meet Together Again,” Ensign, October 2010, 4–5. 76. Richard N.  Ostling and Joan K.  Ostling, “Almost Mainstream,” in Mormon America: The Power and Promise, Richard N. Ostling and Joan K. Ostling, eds., (San Francisco: Harper, 1999), 108. 77. See Michael A.  Goodman, “The Worldwide Reach of Mormonism,” in The Worldwide Church: The Global Reach of Mormonism, Michael Goodman and Mauro Properzi, eds. (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center and Deseret Book, 2016), 1–5. 78. Figures for this table were obtained from Newsroom, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed December 27, 2019, see https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/ statistics. 79. Bartholomew, “Role of Local Missionaries,” 311–324. 80. Bushman, Contemporary Mormonism, 73. 81. Neilson, “Mormon Mission Work,” 190–193. 82. Neilson, Early Mormon Missionary Activities, x. 83. See https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/coronavirus-update# missionary-work.

Bibliography Anderson, J. 1998. Missiology: An Introduction to the Foundations, History, and Strategies of World Missions. Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holdman Publishers. Bartholomew, R.E. 2011. Nineteenth-Century Missiology of the LDS Bedfordshire Conference. Journal of Mormon History 37 (1): 239. ———. 2012. The Role of Local Missionaries in Nineteenth-Century England. In Go Ye Into All the World: The Growth and Development of Mormon Missionary Work. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University. ———. 2013. Review of Early Mormon Missionary Activities in Japan. Journal of Mormon History 39 (2): 239–241. Benson, E.T. 1986. Ensign 5 (86): 44–45.

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Bloom, H. 1992. The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. New York: Simon & Schuster. Britsch, R.L. 1979. Mormon Missions: An Introduction to the Latter-day Saints Missionary System. Occasional Bulletin of Missionary Research 3 (1): 24. ———. 2012. By All Means. Go Ye Into All the World: The Growth and Development of Mormon Missionary Work. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University. Bushman, C.L. 2006. Contemporary Mormonism: Latter-day Saints in Modern America. Lanham, MD: Greenwood Publishing Group. Cowan, R.O. 1984. Every Man Shall Hear the Gospel in His Own Language: A History of the Missionary Training Center and its Predecessors. Provo, UT: Missionary Training Center. ———. 2012. “Called to Serve”: A History of Missionary Training. In Go Ye Into All the World: The Growth and Development of Mormon Missionary Work. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University. Eliason, E.A. 2001. Mormons and Mormonism: An Introduction to an American World Religion. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Embry, J.L. 1998. Oral History and Mormon Women Missionaries: The Stories Sound the Same. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 19 (3): 174. Fluhman, J.H. 2012. A Peculiar People: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books. General Conferences. 1843–2019. See https://www.lds-general-conference.org. Goodman, M.A. 2016. The Worldwide Church: The Global Reach of Mormonism. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center and Deseret Book. Hallen, C.L. 1982. LDS Language Teaching and Learning: Highlights from 1830–1982. Master Thesis, Brigham Young University. Hinckley, G.B. 1995. Ensign 11 (95): 51–52. Holman, M. 2009. Every Member a Missionary for Fifty Years. Ensign 4 (9): 77. Hughes, W.E. 1986. A Profile of the Missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­ Day Saints 1849–1900. Master’s Thesis, Brigham Young University. Hunter, H.W. 1994. Follow the Son of God. Ensign 11 (94): 87. Kimball, S.W. 1974. Planning for a Full and Abundant Life. Ensign 5 (74): 86. Kunz, C.A. 1976. A History of Female Missionary Activity in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1830–1898. Master’s Thesis, Brigham Young University. Lively, R.L., Jr. 2015. The Mormon Missionary: Who IS That Knocking at My Door? Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. Madsen, C.C. 2008. Mormon Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Polynesia. In Proclamation to the People: Nineteenth-century Mormonism and the Pacific Basin Frontier, ed. Laurie Maffly-Kipp and Reid L. Neilson. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press. Maffly-Kipp, L.F., and R.L.  Neilson. 2008. Proclamation to the People: Nineteenth-­ century Mormonism and the Pacific Basin Frontier. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press. Mason, P. 2011. The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South. New York: Oxford University Press. Monson, T.H. 2010. As We Meet Together Again. Ensign 10 (10): 4–5. ———. 2012. Welcome to Conference. Ensign 11 (12): 5. Mulder, W. 1954. Mormonism's ‘Gathering’: an American Doctrine with a Difference. Church History 23 (3): 248–264.

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Neill, S., and O.  Chadwick. 1986. A History of Christian Missions. New  York: Penguin Books. Neilson, R.L. 2010. Early Mormon Missionary Activities in Japan, 1901–1924. Salt Lake City, UT: The University of Utah Press. ———. 2015. Mormon Mission Work. In The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism. New York: Oxford University Press. Oaks, D.H., and L.  Wickman. 1999. The Missionary Work of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In Sharing the Book: Religious Perspectives on the Rights and Wrongs of Proselytism. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Ostling, R.N., and J.K. Ostling. 1990. Mormon America: The Power and Promise. San Francisco, CA: Harper. ———. 2009. Mormon America—Revised and Updated Edition: The Power and the Promise. New York: Harper Collins. Plewe, B., S.K. Brown, D.S. Cannon, and R.H. Jackson. 2012. Mapping Mormonism: An Atlas of Latter-day Saint History. Provo UT: BYU Press. Shepherd, Gary, and Gordon Shepherd. 1994. Sustaining a Lay Religion in Modern Society: The Mormon Missionary Experience. In Contemporary Mormonism: Social Science Perspectives, ed. Marie Cornwall, Tim B. Heaton, and Lawrence A. Young. Urban and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Shipps, J. 2001. Is Mormonism Christian? Reflections on a Complicated Question. In Mormons and Mormonism: An Introduction to an American World Religion. Champagne, IL: University of Illinois Press. Stapley, J.A. 2010. Mormon Missiology. In Mormonism: A Historical Encyclopedia. Oxford: ABC-CLIO. Stark, R. 2005. The Rise of Mormonism. New York: Columbia University Press. Tait, L.O. 2017. ‘I Quit My Other Business’: Early Missionaries. In Revelations in Context: The Stories Behind the Sections of the Doctrine and Covenants. Fayette: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Walker, R.W. 1987. Cradling Mormonism: The Rise of the Gospel in Early Victorian England. BYU Studies Quarterly 27 (1): 33. Woods, F.E. 2011. Go Ye Into All the World: The Growth and Development of Mormon Missionary Work. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University.

CHAPTER 4

Geographical Diffusion and Growth Patterns of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Since World War II Samuel M. Otterstrom and Brandon S. Plewe

Introduction The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also referred to in this chapter as the LDS Church or simply the Church) has grown from its modest beginning in 1830 of 6 members in New York State to over 16 million members globally in 2020. Although currently there are Latter-day Saint congregations in at least 187 nations and territories, this significant growth has not been evenly distributed over time and place. The LDS Church proclaims that it has been given a divine mandate to spread its beliefs “throughout every nation, kindred, tongue, and people.”1 Consequently, missionary outreach—as described in Chap. 3—has been a top organizational priority, both domestically and internationally, since the Church’s founding. As a nineteenth-century religious innovation centered in North America, the most substantial worldwide diffusion of the LDS Church has been a relatively recent phenomenon. It was not until the twentieth century, when church authorities began encouraging converts to stay home and support local congregations in their own countries, that the Church began having a permanent international presence. In 1930, approximately 90 percent of all Latter-­ day Saints lived in the United States. This figure has fallen dramatically. In 1980, only 70 percent of church members lived in the United States. By 1991,

S. M. Otterstrom (*) • B. S. Plewe Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_4

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this proportion was less than 55 percent, and in 2009, the number had dropped even further to 44 percent.2 One way of thinking about the growth and international expansion of the modern LDS Church is to borrow from diffusion theories that describe the conditions and ways in which different kinds of market innovations develop and spread in time and place. In this chapter, we discuss a model of religious diffusion that incorporates what historical geographers refer to as both spatial and functional factors in their analysis. We argue that it is precisely these factors that have strongly contributed to the numerical growth and international diffusion of the modern LDS Church.3 Furthermore, we will show that diffusion factors have played a key role in what may be called an “urban hierarchical pattern” of LDS expansion in different countries around the globe. Summary Overview of Diffusion Studies Spatial diffusion has been the subject of much discussion and research in academic geography. These studies are especially indebted to the early work of Torsten Hägerstrand, who wrote his dissertation, Innovation Diffusion as a Spatial Process, in 1953. Hägerstrand’s diffusion model helped explain the spatial nature of the spread of a particular farm implement innovation in Sweden. He argued that because most contact networks are localized, the diffusion of an innovation would initially be a local process where innovations spread outward in a contagious manner.4 Hägerstrand’s work has had great influence on the many paths that diffusion research has followed.5 These studies range from the spread of racial and ethnic neighborhoods to the diffusion of influenza in Iceland to the differential growth of cities in the United States.6 Following Hägerstrand, L.  A. Brown summarizes three general patterns that are often associated with the diffusion process: Over time, a graph of the cumulative level of adoption is expected to approximate an S-shape. In an urban system, the diffusion is expected to proceed from larger to smaller centers, a regularity termed the hierarchy effect. Within the hinterland of a single urban center, diffusion is expected to proceed in a wave-like fashion outward from the urban center, first hitting nearby rather than farther-away locations, and a similar pattern is expected in diffusion among a rural population. This third regularity is termed the neighborhood or contagion effect.7

Later diffusion models also have included the elements of relocation migration and the influence of innovation propagators.8 Relocation is an important element of Latter-day Saint diffusion because much of the geographic spread of their church historically is attributable to the relocation of its members. This type of spatial diffusion has included large migrations in the Church’s early history (e.g. moving from the east and midwestern United States to the Utah Territory and settling new colonies throughout the intermountain west), and movements of families from Utah during the past century for job opportunities,

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schooling, and other reasons. The relocation process has also been fundamental to the international diffusion of the modern LDS Church. Tens of thousands of youthful and senior missionaries—the main instruments of the Church’s spread—are intentionally “relocated” in new countries or regions of countries where the Church has been allowed to proselytize. Other international relocation of American members who are in the military, government, or business fields have also provided the groundwork for the initial diffusion of the Church into a surprising number of countries. Although Brown used business corporations as his examples of “innovation propagators” (e.g. a satellite dish manufacturer, a restaurant franchise corporation, and a department store chain), basic aspects of his conceptual model also help explain the way the LDS Church operates as the propagator of its own faith tradition. Furthermore, Brown argues that it is important to look at a more complete picture of spatial diffusion—considering both market supply and demand factors—rather than solely concentrating on what influences individuals or households to adopt an innovation.9 Brown describes the role that propagators perform in establishing diffusion agencies in different locations. In the case of the LDS Church as a propagator, LDS mission organizations can be thought of as diffusion agencies through which the Church spreads into surrounding areas, helping to structure its future spread as an innovative religion.10 Considered as diffusion agencies, LDS mission organizations (or “missions”) consist of a defined geographic area of the world that is supervised by a church-assigned mission president and approximately 50–200 full-time missionaries, none of whom are seminary trained.11 One other important aspect of the diffusion process is the actual adoption of the innovation by individuals who comprise a potentially receptive market. Most business corporations seek to spread their innovations through predictable stages of diffusion for the purpose of increasing sales and profits. The LDS Church follows a similar pattern. Its avowed goal, however, is not financial profit; rather, it is to increase the number and quality of converts to the LDS faith. It should also be noted that the LDS Church is characterized by a centralized ecclesiastical organization that is responsible for deciding the location of its missions and the number of missionaries who are sent to designated areas around the world. According to Brown, centralized decision-making organizations may employ different growth strategies, resulting in different patterns of diffusion, but the typical diffusion pattern is one that moves “hierarchically,” from larger urban centers to their satellite communities and increasingly to peripheral areas.12 This, as we will demonstrate, is also a typical pattern in the international spread of the LDS Church. Religious Diffusion Conceptual Framework The growth and spread of the LDS Church in international settings display great potential as subjects for diffusion research.13 The spatial patterns of the Church’s global expansion have been shaped by a number of factors that affect

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both its rate of diffusion and degree of penetration in different countries. Furthermore, as described by Brown,14 diffusion can be studied from both a “functional” and “spatial” perspective. Based on these considerations, we have diagramed a conceptual model in Fig.  4.1 that frames the reminder of our discussion.

Fig. 4.1  Conceptual model of the international diffusion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (Source: Authors’ creation)

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As shown in the top portion of Fig. 4.1, the functional perspective in diffusion studies emphasizes supply and demand factors over time, while basic elements of the spatial perspective are represented in a spatial box in the lower portion of the diagram. We incorporate aspects of the functional perspective in our historical narrative of church growth while, in the final part of this chapter, also employing the spatial perspective for showing patterns of LDS spatial diffusion within selected countries of the international church. The functional perspective. Supply and demand factors are both important when looking at the functional manner in which innovations spread over time. In our analysis we must, of course, substitute LDS nomenclature for the general terminology used in the diffusion model. Thus, we may consider Joseph Smith’s prophetic claims of Christian restoration to be a nineteenth-century religious “innovation” and the modern LDS Church headquartered in Salt Lake City to be its propagator. A central decision-making body known as the “general authorities” administers the Church’s programs, including all missionary efforts. These authorities oversee the affairs of the missionary program and decide when and where new missions will be established around the world, as previously mentioned. The demand side of the equation for new missionary faiths consists of religious seekers who are either unaffiliated or dissatisfied with their current religious affiliation. This must be considered first in our analysis, since without religious demand there is no point in considering religious supply factors. Demand for the LDS faith in different countries varies significantly and is affected by such factors as the amount of religious freedom, religious orientation (i.e., percent Christian), degree of secularism, income characteristics, political stability, cultural attitudes, languages, amount of migration or displacement of a country’s people, and population growth rates. It may be inferred that more religious freedom, lower levels of secularism, less per capita income, larger proportions of Christians, and greater political stability exert a positive influence on demand for new religious faiths like the LDS Church. Higher population growth rates also tend to increase demand for the Church, because there will be more second-generation “adopters” of their parents’ religion (i.e., there will be more young children of new converts baptized into the Church when they reach the age of eight required for baptism). Thus, for example, the Church has grown and spread significantly in Latin American countries that are predominantly Catholic and meet many of the other criteria for higher levels of religious demand. Latin American countries have also experienced substantial growth in Pentecostal churches, Seventh-Day Adventists, and members of other evangelizing faiths, some of which have grown even faster than the LDS Church.15 Competitive growth among these newly introduced faiths has prompted significant responses from and within the Catholic Church. Responses include the emergence of the Catholic Charismatic movement, renewed missionary efforts related to “liberation theology,” and attempts to fortify religious conviction among local populations in other ways.16

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Religious supply factors are many and, for the LDS Church, they include such things as the number of members who relocate to foreign countries for military, business, or governmental purposes; the supply of volunteer missionaries available for service periods ranging from one to two years; the number of members in a country who actively participate in sharing their faith with family and friends; availability of international transportation networks; and the financial resources of the Church for supporting missions and associated proselyting strategies (e.g., the Internet, radio, television, and print media). It is religious supply factors that we concentrate our primary attention on in this chapter. The greater the number of church members who relocate to foreign countries, especially those with small native-born Latter-day Saint populations, the greater the likelihood that sustained church growth will occur in those countries. A foundation of more seasoned expatriate members can help support membership increases from convert baptisms. Those who join the Church in foreign countries themselves become part of the supply side because all members are strongly encouraged to share their faith with those around them. It is obvious that a greater supply of missionaries means a larger number of places in the world where the Church can place them as “diffusers” of their religion. Although most missionaries’ living expenses are typically paid for individually, by their families, or with support from their home congregations, the Church still incurs great expense in funding missionary headquarters around the globe, subsidizing missionary travel, translating and printing church literature in foreign languages, and financially assisting missionaries from less developed countries. As the amount of funding the Church devotes to its missionary programs increases, the potential supply of church resources to more remote locations also grows. This is because increasing distance from Salt Lake City and the United States, where the bulk of Latter-day Saints is still concentrated, increases the cost of diffusing an international Church. The majority of missionaries in foreign lands continue to be exported from the United States, where certain conditions can greatly affect the Church’s supply of missionaries. Thus, for example, the federal government can limit the number of missionaries by military conscription (as was the case during the Korean and Vietnam wars), and periods of domestic economic turmoil or global health crises like the recent COVID-19 pandemic may negatively affect the number of American members who can afford or be sent to serve full-time missions outside the United States. Furthermore, the Church’s occasionally changing missionary policies themselves may impact the number of missionaries who choose to serve. In 2002, for example, church authorities raised the personal standards required for serving a mission. This policy change was undoubtedly a factor in the decline of the LDS missionary force from over 60,000 in 2001 to less than 52,000 in 2009.17 More recently, however, lowering the minimum missionary age from 19 to 18 for young men, and from 21 to 19 for young women, produced a double cohort surge in the size of the missionary force.18

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Each country receives different levels of missionary resource support from church headquarters, while simultaneously exhibiting varying degrees of demand for the LDS faith. An increase in demand usually encourages a growth in supply. Conversely, a well-advertised supply may also create a measurable amount of demand. For optimal diffusion rates, however, high amounts of both supply and demand are required. The variable effect that both supply and demand have on diffusion in a particular country is called the “Innovation Diffusion Rate.” Let us consider some illustrative examples. If there is high religious demand for the Church but little or no supply, substitute churches may be formed, as was the case in Nigeria before 1978. When LDS missionaries arrived in Nigeria in 1978, they encountered a number of successful churches already bearing the name of “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­ day Saints,” which had been locally organized without official approval from church headquarters in Salt Lake City.19 On the other hand, low religious demand areas may produce only a few converts annually, even with a consistent missionary supply over many years. In 2010, for example, a number of missions, such as the Germany Munich/ Austria and Switzerland Zurich missions, were combined. The Swiss mission had been operating since 1850, so consolidation there was not because of political difficulties with the state. Instead, this shift was attributable to persistently low conversion rates over many decades in an increasingly secularized region of the world.20 Consolidation of missions predictably signals a decrease in religious supply (e.g., fewer missionaries assigned to those countries), even though there are still millions of people residing there who are not Latter-day Saints.21 With changing missionary numbers, and varying levels of religious demand and corresponding conversion success, the supply of missionaries continues to be adjusted by church authorities for different countries worldwide. Thus, besides combining Swiss and German missions in 2010, the Church also combined missions in Spain, Italy, Scotland/Ireland, Illinois, Ohio, New Jersey, Germany (Hamburg and Berlin), Australia, Puerto Rico, Korea, and Japan. Many of these areas had experienced relatively slow growth and diffusion rates. At the same time, new missions were also created in DR Congo, Peru, Mexico, Nicaragua, Philippines, and Guatemala internationally, and in Utah and New Mexico in the United States. All of these areas had been experiencing more rapid church growth for several decades (see Table 4.1).22 Generally speaking, the supply side of LDS diffusion tends to equalize with demand in a country over time. However, supply factors (missionaries, media programs, etc.) may sometimes be increased in regions of low religious demand in an effort to create more interest in the Church and its message. This, in part, represents a commitment to disseminating what Latter-day Saints believe is “the good news” of the restoration of the primitive Christian church to as many people as possible, thereby fulfilling the prophecy of church founder, Joseph Smith, that “The truth of God will go forth boldly, nobly, and independent, till it has penetrated every continent, visited every clime, swept every

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country, and sounded in every ear, till the purposes of God shall be accomplished, and the Great Jehovah shall say the work is done.”23 The religious goal of disseminating its message to all nations has resulted in a wider apportionment of missionary resources than otherwise would be the case if church leaders focused only on world areas where religious demand and conversion success were greatest. The spatial perspective. Discussion of supply and demand effects on the international diffusion of the LDS Church corresponds with the second part of our growth and dispersion model, namely the spatial perspective. Interaction of both the supply and demand aspects of the LDS international growth equation creates a specific rate of diffusion within every country (shown in the Innovation Diffusion Rate box in Fig. 4.1). Diffusion rates interact with the spatial structure of a country’s population (shown in the diagram as the Functional/Spatial Interface). The greater this rate, the faster the religion will spread throughout a nation. In our model, the spatial patterns exhibited by Latter-day Saint diffusion within a country are depicted as hypothetical stages derived from Hägerstrand’s earlier work.24 Whereas Hägerstrand identified three regularities of diffusion (the S-shape curve for diffusion over time, the hierarchy effect, and the neighborhood effect), we identify four phases for describing LDS diffusion, which we refer to as (1) initial introduction, (2) central staging, (3) metropolitan movement, and (4) contagious concentration. Based on this conceptual framework, our principal narrative hypothesis is that LDS international diffusion following World War II has involved a distinct pattern of initial introduction of the Church in a new country by North American Latter-day Saint expatriates, native citizens converted to the Church elsewhere, or by assigned LDS missionaries. This is followed by increasing conversions and the eventual establishment of additional missions in the country’s largest cities which, through organized proselyting, produce urban hierarchical patterns of church unit formation, the eventual construction of a temple or temples (the most sacred LDS edifices for worship purposes), and increasingly “contagious concentration” in more peripheral areas of the country. Each country is unique in its population size, area and shape of its borders, and rural/urban makeup, so the spatial manifestation of the different phases of diffusion predictably varies among nations. Consequently, some countries may not conform to our basic model. Nonetheless, in what follows we demonstrate that most countries with large Latter-day Saint populations internationally have exhibited similar spatial characteristics in their growth and expansion since World War II. Before exploring these spatial patterns, however, a review of the data and methodology employed to guide our analysis is in order. Data Sources Our analysis of Latter-day Saint growth and worldwide dispersion requires both church data and  country  data. Church data include the locations and dates of the establishment of congregations and missions throughout the

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world, histories of countries, and the rates of membership growth in various nations. Country data consist of the populations of nations, cities, provinces, districts, and/or states that contain LDS stakes and missions. Populations of specific cities, states, and provinces were obtained for our study from GeoNames. org, which has compiled a large database of place names and populations from around the world. In addition, the LDS Church keeps very detailed statistics of the numbers of its members and their location around the globe. For many years, the yearly Deseret News Church Almanac contained a brief overview of church growth in different countries, nations, and territories which, historically speaking, still constitutes an important data source. Today, however, the Church shares much of this same kind of data through its official, online Newsroom site, which regularly posts updated information and church statistics.25 From an LDS perspective, most of the world is divided geographically into stakes—organizational units that contain between 5 and 14 separate congregations.26 Larger congregations are called wards (comprised of 250 to 700 members), while smaller congregations are known as branches (usually having fewer than 250 members). Stakes are created by either dividing one or more larger stakes into additional stakes, or by aggregating multiple large branches from a mission district in order to form wards and then forming a stake. Ecclesiastical leadership in stakes, wards, and branches is provided by a lay clergy of stake presidents, ward bishops, and branch presidents.27 The names of stake and mission organizations always have some geographic reference. Usually, they indicate the location of the stake center or mission headquarters office, and these places are usually the largest city where one or more wards are established. The stake center is the physical chapel where stake offices are located and stake meetings are periodically held. Although stakes and missions are regional in nature and include greater areas than their component wards and branches, they are easier to pinpoint and their dates of creation are readily available. Because wards and branches worldwide are component parts of stakes and missions, one still gets an accurate feel for the overall distribution Latter-day Saints internationally by referencing them as diffusion locators. As of December 2018, there were some 3383 LDS stakes around the world, with about half located outside of the United States. The Almanac contains the location of stakes and missions in each geographic area and the date each stake or mission was created through 2013. Additionally, various editions of the Almanac contained total membership numbers and short overviews of the history of the Church in different countries.28 Since the Almanac has ceased publication, the Church News continues to publish the same kind of information on an almost weekly basis. For this chapter therefore we have relied on data from both the Almanac and Church News, as well as from several other sources.29

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Geographic Overview of LDS International Growth The first half of the twentieth century marked a shift from the historical, inward gathering of converts to Utah and other Latter-day Saint centers to an emphasis on members staying in their respective states and countries to strengthen the Church where they resided.30 Church membership had been climbing steadily, but World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II interrupted missionary activity in many areas for several decades. By the end of World War II, the bulk of Latter-day Saints continued to live in the United States, with all but one stake located in North America. The only stake outside the continental U.S. at that time was the Oahu Stake in Hawai‘i, formed in 1935. In 1920 and 1921, Apostle David O.  McKay and his companion Hugh J. Cannon took a historic trip around the world using ships, railroads, and even camels to visit every LDS mission and thousands of members outside the United States. The trip took over a year. Fast-forward to 2005 when, in vivid contrast, Church President Gordon B. Hinckley flew around the world in just a few days, visiting thousands of members in Asia and Africa alone. In the intervening 85 years, the Church had grown from half a million members to over twelve million. The distribution of members had shifted from almost 80 percent living in Utah and Idaho in 1920 to 80 percent living outside these states in 2005. Not only had the share of international members increased substantially, but also the diffusion of church  members within many countries had moved beyond one or two core cities to smaller communities in the urban hierarchy. Pre-1950 Dominance of the Utah Core On his apostolic voyage, and during his subsequent term as president over the European missions, McKay encountered a church very different from that of his homeland in Zion. “Zion” was comprised of the areas of Utah and surrounding states that were predominately Latter-day Saint in population. There, the Church was a dominating demographic, cultural, and political force. In stakes and wards led by local leaders, the full programs of the Church operated in large ornate meetinghouses. Four large temples anchored the core of the “Mormon Corridor” from St. George to Logan, Utah, while the mostly completed temple in Cardston, Alberta, and the one recently under construction in Mesa, Arizona, established the outposts of Zion. Beyond this concentrated segment of North American—across the United States and around the world—McKay had a very different experience. In the “Mormon Mission Field” outside of Zion during that era, there were no stakes or temples (except for a very small temple recently built in La‘ie, Hawai‘i), and mostly just small branches. These branches were usually administered by missionaries from Utah or the Western United States, holding meetings and religious services in whatever rented spaces were available.31 Most mission presidents in foreign lands also came from the United States.

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Core-Periphery Growth, 1950–1975 As the clouds of world war dispersed in the late 1940s, the Church was poised to take major steps to enlarge and expand its international presence. By the time McKay was ordained president in April 1951, the Church actually had changed very little in the 30 years since his apostolic voyage and subsequent term as president over the European missions. Although total membership had more than doubled to 1.2 million, a smaller proportion of members lived outside the United States (8 percent) than in 1921 (10 percent) and missions and branches were still meeting in rented facilities under missionary leadership. The underlying nature of the international Church, however, was starting to change. First, the migration of international members to Utah and surrounding areas was slowing down. Since 1907, the First Presidency (the highest governing body of the Church) had been requesting international members to cease migrating to Utah, partly for economic reasons: agrarian Utah, Idaho, and Arizona had limited and even diminishing economic opportunities for newcomers. Converts, however, continued to come (although the trend was gradually slowing), believing that fulfillment of their religious aspirations was far more likely to occur in Zion than at home in the “mission field.” However, as more and more members obeyed the counsel of ecclesiastical leaders to stay in their home countries, the need to establish more permanent church buildings and stronger local leadership also became apparent. This transition to local leadership arguably began internationally with the experience of the “Third Convention” in Mexico.32 In the early twentieth century, converts in the area of Mexico City had little intention of moving to the United States. As their knowledge and experience in the Church increased, some started to feel that American missionaries and mission presidents were not treating them as equals. When their petitions to Salt Lake City for local mission leadership received a response of “that is not how things are done,” approximately a third of the 2400 members in central Mexico broke away from the Church in 1936 at their “third convention.” For ten years, dissident Mexican members operated a semi-independent organization, professing allegiance to the Prophet but not to the American mission president. They appointed their own leaders, built new buildings, proselytized new converts, and even wrote new church materials in Spanish. Over the objection of some Apostles in Salt Lake City, who wanted to excommunicate the dissident members, President George Albert Smith visited Mexico City in 1946 and offered complete amnesty to all who were willing to return, promising that more effort would be put into calling and training local leaders, and prophesying that Mexico City would eventually become an LDS stake completely led by Mexicans. In the first years of his administration, David O.  McKay accelerated this changing trend. In 1953, he made an impassioned plea for members around the world not to gather to Zion, but to build up their local branches into full-­ fledged wards and stakes.33 He backed up this new vision with material investments, emphasizing a permanent physical presence of the Church through the

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construction of three small temples in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Switzerland, countries, which at the time had no stake organizations. Here is how McKay explained the new building strategy: “One of the steps which will contribute to the stability and growth of the Church in Europe is the decision to build temples … For some time it has been felt that many of the recent emigrants from Europe, … would have been happier had they had a temple in Europe … rather than to have to come to America for this privilege.”34 At this same time, hundreds of new mission headquarters and chapels were being built in designated countries around the world. As early as the Church’s semi-annual October general conference in 1952, President McKay could exult over 99 church-owned buildings in Europe, and dozens more in the South Pacific.35 Standardized architectural plans made the construction process more cost-efficient. Local-building budgets were subsidized by central tithing funds. Utah-style meetinghouses were built across Europe, often at a size that members could only hope to grow into. In poor countries with great needs, especially in the South Pacific, local “building missionaries” were called, trained, and sent out to build simple but sturdy meetinghouses. In fact, the building program accelerated to the point that in 1965, the Church was experiencing significant financial strain. Consequently, a one-year moratorium on all new meetinghouse construction was imposed while the Church instituted more financially conservative policies.36 Despite these challenges to church resources, the 1950s building program largely fulfilled its goal of strengthening the permanent presence of the Church in many countries internationally. The international Church quickly grew in response to the increase of missionaries following the lowering of missionary ages in 1960, with the number of convert baptisms tripling between 1960 and 1963.37 This was especially apparent in Europe (membership doubling from 59,000 members in 1960 to 124,000 in 1964) and the Pacific (doubling from 36,000 members in 1958 to 74,000 in 1964). Although many of those who were baptized did not continue in their church activity, a substantial portion of the growth was profound and lasting. Soon, several cities and their adjacent regions that had been core mission centers for decades gained a sufficient concentration of members, and a sufficient corps of local leaders, to become stakes: • 1958: Auckland, New Zealand • 1960: Manchester, England; Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, Australia; Hamilton and Hastings, New Zealand • 1961: Mexico City; nationwide stakes in the Netherlands and Switzerland; three stakes in West Germany; four more stakes in England • 1962: Apia, Samoa; Glasgow, Scotland In the late 1960s and early 1970s, growth in Europe and the Pacific slowed, but the Church was accelerating in Asia and especially in Latin America. The Church in Asia had been practically non-existent before a substantial Cold War U.S. military presence there brought local people in contact with Latter-day

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Saint service members, especially in Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. As countries became politically more stable, missionaries arrived to accelerate LDS recruitment. From less than a hundred scattered Asian members in 1947, there were 100,000 by 1979. Growth in Latin America was even more astounding. In 1958, there were half as many members in Latin America as there were in Europe; by 1972, there were twice as many. The Church continued to grow exponentially in Asia and Latin America until the end of the 1990s. Although these regions had initially lagged behind Europe and the Pacific by a few years in their development, the creation of new stakes in major cities headquartered by missions quickly resulted in regional maturation, as indicated by the following examples. • Latin America Stakes: Mexico City 1961 (divided in 1967 and 1975), Buenos Aires 1966, São Paulo 1966, Guatemala City 1967, Montevideo, Uruguay, 1967, Lima 1970, Monterrey, Mexico, 1970, Santiago, Chile, 1972, Rio de Janeiro 1972 • Asia Stakes: Tokyo 1970, Osaka 1972, Seoul 1973, Manila 197338 Emergence of International Strength: 1975–2010 By 1964, there were 21 international LDS stakes, which grew to 79 in 1973, 820 in 1995, and by 2009 there were 1380 international stakes out of a total of 2818.39 During 2009, the 51,000 plus missionary force (mostly young men and women under 25 years of age) baptized an average of 23,300 converts into the Church every month in many countries around the world.40 Let us summarize the story behind these figures. International Latter-day Saints by the 1970s were contributing more and more to overall church strength. The creation of dozens of stakes outside North America gradually led to another shift in both leaders and members’ thinking about the international Church. Similar to President McKay’s earlier international outreach, President Spencer W.  Kimball took several steps that may have seemed minor at the time but which had a profound and lasting impact on the worldwide Church. Previously, stakes and missions had divided their jurisdictions geographically. In regions that were entirely covered by large stakes (especially in Utah), missions had no actual presence. Instead, local “seventies” (lay priesthood quorums) were responsible for stake missionary work and stake presidents reported directly to the governing board of the Twelve Apostles. In regions without stakes, missions and their presidents were charged with full-time proselyting responsibilities. While this division of labor made perfect sense prior to 1920, jurisdiction gradually became less clear as scattered stakes were formed, first across the United States, then internationally. In 1975, church authorities announced the organization of Utah’s first proselyting mission.41 Thus, at a time when much of “the mission field” was becoming Zion, Utah Zion now was becoming part of the mission field. Full-­ time missionaries and mission presidents subsequently would take over the

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primary responsibility for proselytizing both within and outside of stake boundaries worldwide. At first the full-time missionaries worked together with local seventies, but this arrangement gradually diminished, and seventies quorums were discontinued in 1986.42 In May 1975, a system of 18 global areas was announced in which LDS general authorities would have authority over church affairs in different parts of the world.43 In countries outside of North America, designated general authorities were assigned oversight responsibilities for all members and their local stake and ward leaders, but in the United States and Canada, they were only responsible for the functioning of missions.44 In 1976, a new Quorum of Seventies at the general authority level enabled the further development of this system, giving “area supervisors” authority over stakes in North America as well, and requiring the division of the U.S. Mountain West into ten additional areas.45 The next year the number of areas multiplied to 50 and were grouped into zones, each advised by a member of the new Quorum of Seventies.46 The result of these changes was a re-imagining of the division of labor between stakes and missions—from a core-periphery geographic divide to a parallel division of roles, between seeking new converts and taking care of existing members. While church members (especially in Utah) continued referring to “the mission field,” this increasingly signified being on a mission rather than being at home. The prominent status of stake centers that had emerged in the 1960s and 1970s was further bolstered by a wave of international temple building. Starting in São Paulo (1978) and Tokyo (1980), this construction initiative was spurred by the introduction of 2 standardized designs for smaller temples that made them easier to build and, by 1988, 16 additional countries had their own temples. The triumvirate of having a temple, one or more missions, and several stakes gave Latter-day Saints in a number of major international cities the feeling of being every bit a core part of the Church as Utah (or at least as much as major U.S. urban areas like Chicago or Los Angles). This resultant model of contemporary LDS geography is very similar to the Central Place Theory developed by Walter Christaller in 1933 to explain settlement geography.47 Christaller recognized that larger cities tend to provide a wide array of services, including some that can provide for a large regional market, such as a TV station, as well as more local services, such as grocery stores. Spaced out around a large city would be a set of smaller towns, with fewer, more local services, surrounded by even smaller towns, and so forth, until a small village may have no services at all and be completely dependent on the nearest larger town. The geography of the LDS Church that emerged in the 1970s had this same type of geographic hierarchy, featuring: • Temple cities, with area headquarters, a temple, multiple missions, multiple stakes, and dozens of wards which served a region anywhere from the surrounding towns to several countries • Stake cities, with a stake or two and their affiliated wards belonging to the nearest temple district, and also a mission

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• Ward towns, with a ward or branch attached to the nearest stake • Member towns, with a few members attached to the nearest ward or branch Based on the number of active lay priesthood holders, these locations were now expected to be ecclesiastically self-sufficient and contribute to additional church growth. At a 1974 leadership training meeting before his first general conference as church president, Spencer W. Kimball laid out this vision (and coined his most memorable catchphrase, “lengthen your stride”), in which each country with stakes would first supply its own missionaries and subsequently produce a missionary surplus to preach in neighboring countries.48 In addition to contributing their own missionaries, international members began filling leadership roles traditionally held exclusively by those from the mountain west core area of the United States. Twelve (24 percent) of the new 50 mission presidents called in 1975 were from outside the United States—virtually the same proportion as that of all non-U.S. members; at least five of them were the original presidents of stakes formed in their native communities.49 That same year, Belgian Charles Didier, a former mission president, was called as one of the first four members of the First Quorum of the Seventy, the first resident European called as a general authority in the history of the Church.50 Over the next three years, several more European seventies were called, as well as Yoshihiko Kikuchi of Japan. It was not long thereafter that general authorities were called from Latin America as well. By 1990, 14 (20 percent) of the 73 members of the Quorum of the Seventies were from countries outside the United. States and Canada, a proportional trend that has continued growing ever since. While many heretofore peripheral areas internationally had become LDS core centers, new mission frontiers continued to appear as the Church obtained permission to preach in new countries, such as in post-Vietnam Southeast Asia. Arguably, however, the primary impetus behind global expansion during this era was the 1978 “Priesthood Revelation” (which declared that, regardless of their race, the priesthood could be conferred on all worthy Latter-day Saint men, including in particular men of African descent who previously had been denied priesthood ordination). Suddenly an entire continent, as well as large swaths of the Americas, became potentially fertile mission field areas. While, from the point of view of LDS missions, Africa began in the same peripheral condition as much of the earlier international Church had done, it was fully expected to achieve maturity as quickly as possible. Within ten years, stakes sprung up in Nigeria and South Africa, as well as predominantly African areas in the Western Hemisphere, such as the Dominican Republic and northeastern Brazil. As applied to LDS international expansion, the “centers of strength” philosophy is one that follows the advancing growth of a designated congregational unit in which a branch becomes a ward, a district becomes a stake, and a stake becomes multiple stakes, which can then anticipate the construction of a temple. This is not just a matter of civic pride; the assumption is that more

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congregational units mean more trained leaders, more members receiving the “full blessings” of church  programs, and more places that reciprocate both spiritually and temporally as much as they receive. Administrative growth also meant “ministrative” growth. Such growth was especially successful in the late 1970s. Since 1975, each year on average has seen 60 new LDS stakes and 500 new wards or branches. Between 1978 and 1981, this average accelerated to 110 new stakes and over 1000 new wards or branches per year. This spurt was likely the result of a concerted effort to catch up with the exponential membership growth then occurring, especially in Latin America. It was also due to the long-term maturation of existing mission areas. By 1981, for example, almost all of the United States, Canada, and northwestern Europe were covered in stakes, except for their most sparsely populated regions. Such rapid stake growth was a source of pride, both for the local areas and for the Church as a whole.51 Once this pent-up demand was met, administrative growth slowed a bit during the 1980s. In the mid-1990s, it was re-accelerated by the practice of creating smaller wards and stakes. Rather than the traditional seven or eight large wards in a stake, many new stakes were commonly being created with five small wards. This was especially true in rapidly growing areas, such as those in Latin America, where the operating assumption was that more active members and more wards would soon follow from the creation of more stakes. From 1995 to 1997, another growth spurt saw an average of 140 stakes and almost 1000 congregations created each year. Likewise, in Chile from 1994 to 1999, membership grew 45 percent (from 345,000 to 500,000), while the number of stakes grew even more by 75 percent (from 67 to 116). With all of this expansionary success, the next wave of growth was greatly anticipated when the Iron Curtain fell in Eastern Europe in 1989–1990. Several erstwhile communist countries still had LDS members from before the Cold War, especially in Saxony (southern East Germany), where the Church had formed a stake in 1982 and secured permission to build a small temple in 1985. It was assumed that tens of thousands of people were prepared and waiting to hear the message of the restored Gospel in a manner similar to what had occurred in western Europe and the Pacific in the 1960s, in Asia and Latin America in the 1970s, and in Africa in the 1980s. This anticipatory hope was captured in the words of Apostle David B. Haight in 1990: “The transformation of once-mighty man-made empires with such speed and determination has released new springs of faith and hope in the hearts of hundreds of millions of oppressed souls. Where there was despair, now the bright light of freedom shines forth. This only could have happened in such a miraculous way by the intervening hand of the Almighty!”52 LDS missions opened across the region, and branches soon appeared in several countries. While missionary work in Eastern Europe started strong, it soon slowed. Reasons for this likely include the lasting atheistic influence of decades of communist rule, the continuing economic and political struggles that some countries faced, and the commercial sectarianism that many

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countries adopted from their new friends in the West. The first eastern European stake was not organized until Kiev in 2004, and it is still the only city in the region with a temple in 2020 (although two more have been announced). Many Eastern European countries still have only a few hundred members after decades of concerted effort. Another challenge to global church growth emerged in the early 2000s. During the rapid growth period of the 1980s and 1990s, especially in Latin America and the Philippines, many people were baptized who did not maintain active church commitment. By the late 1990s, the problem was becoming serious enough to warrant several unusually direct talks given by general authorities at general conferences.53 In apparent response to increasing inactivity rates, in April 2002, Apostle Jeffrey R. Holland was sent to preside over Chile and Apostle Dallin H. Oaks was called to the Philippines.54 Over the next two years, they refocused the work of local leaders, members and missionaries, especially emphasizing member reactivation over proselytizing. Stakes, wards, and branches that failed to improve their activity levels were eliminated or reduced in status. Between 2000 and 2004, forty-one stakes were discontinued in Chile, six in the Philippines, six in Brazil, and two in Mexico. In fact, the Church as a whole saw a net loss of five stakes in 2002, the only year this had happened since 1842. The major positive initiative during these years was the building of small, standardized temples (about 10,000 square feet in size) starting in 1997.55 Like earlier waves of small temple construction (Hawai‘i in 1919, three others in the 1950s, and several in the 1980s), the stated goal was to bring temples closer to people who were not concentrated in sufficient numbers to support a full-service temple. In the process, dozens of locations both internationally and in North America reached the status of temple cities, creating new centers of strength and extending the geographic hierarchy of the Church. As Church president Gordon B.  Hinckley traveled around the world in 2005, he completed this particular initiative by dedicating the 46th and last of the small temples in Aba Nigeria.56 But his trip was more than that; it was symbolic of the global Church he had helped to forge during his more than four decades in general church leadership. Exponential membership growth continued only in Africa, slowing down considerably everywhere else. Despite long-­ standing issues of member inactivity in many countries, the Church as an international body had become much stronger in more and more places around the globe.

Regional Diffusion Comparisons Since World War II In the remainder of the chapter, we consider spatial diffusion of the LDS Church’s global presence while also commenting on key “functional factors” that have shaped its patterns of growth. We offer an overview of the international diffusion of the Church prior to World War II and continuing until the early 2000s. We pay particular attention to church growth in Middle and South

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America during this period. Consider that Latter-day Saints residing in Middle and South America in 1930 comprised less than 1 percent of the Church’s total population; but by 2009, these two regions claimed almost 40 percent of the world’s Latter-day Saints, second only to the United States.57 Before 1950, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay were the only countries in South America to have LDS branches and, between them, they claimed just over 2300 members. Some 60 years later, there were over 1.5 million members in those same three countries. Additionally, there has been significant growth throughout most of the other countries of South America as well (see Table 4.1). By 2009, there were approximately 3.3 million Latter-day Saints in all of South America.58 The Middle America region as a whole also experienced greatly increased Latter-day Saint growth following World War II. Beginning in some of its northern areas in 1876, Mexico received the earliest and longest lasting Latter-day Saint missionary efforts in Middle America. Mexico today has the largest population of Latter-day Saints of any country in the world outside the United States. Diffusion of the Church into the other countries of Middle America came much later than it did in Mexico. Table 4.2 outlines the methods by which the Church first made its way into the more populous nations in the region, as well as the dates the first branches and missions were organized in each country. The diffusion of the Church into Middle America occurred in a variety of ways, not unlike those pursued in South America (compare Tables 4.2 and 4.3). It appears, however, that formally assigned missionaries introduced more of the countries in Middle America to the Church than they did in South America. This was most likely due to the greater role Latter-day Saint expatriates from the United States and Germany played in South America. At the same time, the importance of men like Rey L. Pratt (Mexican Mission president from 1907 until 1931), John F. O’Donnal (first district president, as well as a mission president in Guatemala), and others from the Latter-day Saint colonies in northern Mexico in establishing the Church in Mexico and Central America cannot be overstated.59 In what follows, we outline detailed accounts of the Church’s spatial diffusion patterns in Brazil, Peru, and Mexico to explore how their growth patterns correspond with our diffusion model. It should be noted that, after the United States, Mexico and Brazil have the largest LDS populations of any countries in the world, while Peru ranks sixth. Based on five- and ten-year intervals, we use these three countries to show their concurrent diffusion of stakes and missions from 1969 (or 1979) through 2010. Taken together, our maps and tables illustrate these countries’ spatial patterns of church growth by city population within the context of each country’s unique geography.

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Table 4.1  Nations with more than 20,000 Latter-day Saints on January 1, 2010 MEMBERS STAKES MISSIONS % of POP 1992-2010 NATION United States Mexico Brazil Philippines Chile Peru Argentina Guatemala Ecuador United Kingdom Canada Colombia Bolivia Venezuela Honduras Australia Japan Dom. Republic El Salvador New Zealand Uruguay Nigeria South Korea Paraguay Samoa Nicaragua Tonga Taiwan South Africa Spain Panama Ghana Portugal Germany Costa Rica France China, Hong Kong Italy Dem. Congo French Polynesia Puerto Rico Russia

a b

REGION N. America Middle Am. S. America Asia S. America S. America S. America Middle Am. S. America Europe N. America S. America S. America S. America Middle Am. South Pacific Asia Middle Am. Middle Am. South Pacific S. America Africa Asia S. America South Pacific Middle Am. South Pacific Asia Africa Europe Middle Am. Africa Europe Europe Middle Am. Europe Asia Europe Africa South Pacific Middle Am. Europe

2010 6,058,907 1,197,573 1,102,428 631,885 561,904 480,816 380,669 220,296 190,498 186,082 179,801 168,514 168,396 146,987 136,408 126,767 124,041 114,571 105,501 100,962 93,935 93,532 82,472 78,220 69,244 67,275 55,173 51,090 51,710 45,729 45,343 40,872 38,509 37,796 36,823 35,427 24,114 23,430 23,615 20,805 20,386 20,276

2010 1451 220 230 79 74 94 70 39 34 45 47 29 24 26 20 33 29 18 17 25 16 16 17 10 16 9 17 10 11 10 8 7 6 14 5 9 4 6 7 6 5 0

TOTAL—for nations with 20,000+ 13,438,782 TOTAL—World 13,824,854

2813 2865

Dec. 31, 1991–Jan. 1, 2010 Russian membership before 1991 < 1000

2010 104 21 27 15 9 7 10 4 3 6 8 3 3 4 3 7 7 3 2 2 2 4 4 2 1 1 1 2 3 4 1 2 2 4 1 2 1 3 1 1 2 8

2010 2.0% 1.0% 0.5% 0.6% 3.3% 1.6% 0.9% 1.6% 1.3% 0.2% 0.5% 0.4% 1.7% 0.5% 1.7% 0.6% 0.1% 1.1% 1.4% 2.4% 2.6% 1.0% 0.2% 1.0% 31.0% 1.0% 45.0% 0.2% 0.1% 1.1% 1.3% 0.2% 0.4% 0.1% 0.9% 0.1% 0.3% 0.0% 0.0% 7.1% 0.5% 0.0%

Growtha 40% 82% 176% 138% 78% 147% 109% 71% 107% 19% 38% 94% 137% 158% 197% 63% 25% 202% 157% 31% 62% 420% 33% 502% 41% 512% 53% 159% 169% 99% 116% 317% 24% -3% 94% 48% 34% 46% 595% 73% 20% b

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Table 4.2  Middle America: Early Latter-day Saints diffusion MIDDLE AMERICA 1ST NATION Mexico Panama Puerto Rico Guatemala

BRANCH 1879 1941 1947 1948

Costa Rica

1950

El Salvador

1951

Honduras

1953

Nicaragua

1954

Jamaica Dominican Rep.

1970 1978

Barbados Belize

1979 1980

Haiti

1980

Trinidad & Tobago

1980

1ST INTRODUCERS Missionaries from the US US Servicemen US Servicemen John F. O'Fonnal from Mormon Colonies in Mex. Missionaries from Mexican Mission & H. Clark Fails Missionaries from Mexican Mission Missionaries from Central America Mission Missionaries from Central America Mission North American families The Amparo and Rappleye families (from the U.S.?) John & Norman Namie families Missionaries from Honduras Tegucigalpa Mission Alexandre Mourra- Haitian converted by LDS literat. Missionaries from Venezuela Caracas Mission

MISSION 1879 1989 1979 1952 1965 1976 1980 1989 1985 1981 1983 1984 1991

Source: Almanac 1992

Brazil In 1851–1852, Parley P. Pratt, an early Latter-day Saint leader, along with his wife and another missionary, attempted to proselytize in Chile. Their efforts ended, however, without producing a single convert.60 This initial failure notwithstanding, South America eventually proved to be the site for some of the Church’s greatest diffusion success in the twentieth century. Seventy years after Pratt’s exploratory mission, the Church began building an actual foundation in South America. German Latter-day Saint immigrants who settled in Argentina and southern Brazil introduced the LDS Church in both those countries during the 1920s. The South American Mission was organized in 1925 in Buenos Aires, Argentina and, initially, the majority of members were German immigrants. In 1928, missionary work spread from Buenos Aires to the city of Joinville in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina. Joinville was home to many other German immigrants (at the time, about 90 percent of the population was German). In 1930, missionaries were sent to Rosario, Argentina, and in 1933 to Porto Alegre, Brazil, another predominantly German city.61 In 1935, the Brazilian

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Table 4.3  South America: Early Latter-day Saints diffusion SOUTH AMERICA

NATION Argentina Brazil Uruguay Paraguay Peru Chile Bolivia

Ecuador Colombia Venezuela Suriname Guyana French Guiana

1ST

1ST

BRANCH INTRODUCERS 1925 LDS German immigrants Wilhelm Friedrichs Emil Hoppe 1928 LDS German immigrants Roberto Lippelt family 1944 North Americans Frederick S. Williams 1948 North Americans Samuel J. Skousen 1956 North Americans Frederick S. Williams 1956 North Americans William Fotheringham 1963 North Americans-Duane Wilcox Dube Thomas Norval Jesperson 1965 Missionaries from Andes Mission in Peru 1966 (est) North Americans 1966 North Americans 1988 Missionaries 1989 Abdulla family converted in Canada & Missionaries 1989 Missionaries

MISSION 1925 1935 1947 1977 1959 1961 1966

1970 1968 1971 none none none

Source: Almanac 1992

and Argentine missions were created from the South American Mission. Productive missionary work, however, continued with scant results; by 1950, there were only 1135 and 724 members in Argentina and Brazil respectively. Since then, in conjunction with the Church’s emerging international agenda, member growth began to soar, with Brazil’s membership rapidly surpassing that of Argentina’s.62 Brazil is larger than the contiguous United States and has a population of over 200 million people. Its population is most dense along the coasts, especially near the huge metropolises of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Sao Paulo, the largest city in South America, was the site for the creation of the first LDS stake in South America in 1966. This was the case even though missionary work first started among Germans in the southern states of Brazil (see Fig. 4.2 and Table 4.4 in the Appendix) and it underscores the urban hierarchical diffusion of the Church that has occurred across the country. By the end of 1974, there were nine stakes in Brazil. Three of the new cities with stakes, including the country’s second largest city of Rio de Janeiro, had over one million inhabitants. Curitiba and Porto Alegre are the largest cities in southern Brazil in the regions where the earliest LDS missionary efforts in

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Fig. 4.2  Brazil: Stakes and missions 1969/1979. (Originally published in Samuel M. Otterstrom, 2012. “International Spatial Diffusion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Territoire en Mouvement 13 (2009–1): 102–130 and made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.)

Brazil were concentrated, so their role as stake headquarters early on is not surprising. The other three Brazilian stakes were centered in cities with populations over 350,000. Additionally, all three of these cities—Campinas, Santos, and Sao Bernardo—are within 100 kilometers of Sao Paulo. This proximity

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may help explain their relatively early history of stake formation, notwithstanding their smaller size. Since the 1978 revelation that lifted the priesthood ban from males of African descent, the Church has grown very quickly in ethnically diverse Brazil. It is especially interesting to note the formation of the Recife Mission in 1979 and the subsequent creation of numerous stakes in the dominantly black northeast. As another indication of Latter-day Saint growth in that region, the Church built a temple in Recife in 2000 and has also constructed temples in Manaus and Fortaleza to go along with Brazilian temples to the south in Sao Paulo, Campinas, Curitiba, and Porto Alegre. Since 1979, the number of stakes in Brazil has increased thirteen-fold. At the end of 2009, there were over 228 stakes and approximately 1.075 million Brazilian members.63 Additionally, there are now 27 missions in the country. Twenty-eight stakes were centered in Sao Paulo proper, while 97 stakes were located in cities (including Sao Paulo) with populations over one million. Many additional stakes were concentrated around Sao Paulo, Recife, Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, and Curitiba, manifesting a certain degree of contagious “infilling” which occurs as the Church grows and spreads in and around a metropolitan area (see Figs. 4.3 and 4.4). In 2009, only ten Brazilian stakes were headquartered in cities of less than 100,000 people, showing the strongly urban hierarchical patterns that are related to church growth in the country. Additionally, distance between cities is also significant as the relatively late organization of stakes in large cities such as Belem, Manaus, and Teresina may be partially explained by the fact that they are located far away from the population centers of the south and are isolated from the coastal metropolises of Fortaleza and Recife in the northeast. LDS missionary success only came later in these cities. Historically, Brazil has shown strong hierarchical patterns of church diffusion. In the future, LDS stakes in Brazil will most likely continue to be concentrated in and around the country’s largest cities. At the same time, the current trend of an increasing number of stakes located in more remote and smaller cities is also likely to continue. Peru With an area greater than the states of Texas and California combined, and a population of over 33 million people, Peru is another South American country with a relatively large number of LDS converts. As Peru’s capital and largest city, Lima totaled 41 percent of the country’s 90 stakes in 2009 (statistics that are similar to those of another dominant Chilean city to the south, Santiago (see Fig. 4.5 and Appendix Table 4.5). Owing to the dominance of Lima and several other large urban communities, Peru’s stakes were headquartered in only 32 cities in 2009. Trujillo, Peru’s second largest city had only 7 stakes compared with Lima’s 37. Similar to Brazil, the pattern of stake creation in Peru has followed a strong hierarchical trend. In 1970, Lima became the first city in the country to have

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Fig. 4.3  Brazil: Stakes and missions 1989/1999. (Originally published in Samuel M. Otterstrom, 2012. “International Spatial Diffusion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Territoire en Mouvement 13 (2009–1): 102–130 and made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.)

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Fig. 4.4  Brazil: Stakes and missions 2010. (Originally published in Samuel M. Otterstrom, 2012. “International Spatial Diffusion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Territoire en Mouvement 13 (2009–1): 102–130 and made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.)

a stake center. Nine years later, Lima had seven stakes of its own, while Trujillo to the north was the only other Peruvian city to have a stake. By 1984, the number of stakes continued to increase in the Lima area and started spreading up the Pacific coast, to Iquitos in the Amazon and south to Arequipa and Tacna. All of these new stakes were established in cities that currently have over 100,000 inhabitants. By 1989, the large cities of Cuzco and Ica also had stakes, and so did the smaller cities of Huacho and Mantaro. The less-populated Huacho gained a stake at the end of a five-year interval, which makes it somewhat less anomalous from an urban, hierarchical standpoint. By 1994, diffusion of the Church in Peru began to include more cities of fewer than 100,000 people. Furthermore, the largest urban areas (Lima, Arequipa, Trujillo, Chiclayo, Chimbote, Piura, Iquitos, and Cuzco) all added at least one stake between 1989 and 1994. This indicates the result of a “contagious diffusion” process at work within the satellite spheres of larger cities. The spread of LDS mission headquarters has followed the same hierarchical pattern in Peru. Lima was the site of the country’s first mission in 1959 and the five current missions in Lima are consistent with its large size as a fertile field

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Fig. 4.5  Peru and Ecuador: Stakes and missions 1979–2010. (Originally published in Samuel M. Otterstrom, 2012. “International Spatial Diffusion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Territoire en Mouvement 13 (2009–1): 102–130 and made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.)

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for missionary work. Arequipa, Peru’s second most populous city, became a mission headquarters in 1978, while the third and fourth largest urban places— Trujillo and Chiclayo—were designated as missions in 1985 and 1993 respectively (the Chiclayo mission is now headquartered in Piura). In 2010, new missions were opened in Lima and Cusco for a total of nine Peruvian missions, over half of which were headquartered in Lima. Peru has shown a pattern of urban hierarchical diffusion very similar to the countries of Argentina and Chile that also have primary core cities. The dominant role that Lima has played as a center for diffusion and adoption of the Latter-day Saint faith in Peru is very clear, and its dominance is highlighted by the announcement of a second temple to be built there. Diffusion of the LDS Church in Peru will probably continue to exhibit hierarchical patterns for years to come. Mexico Mexico’s proximity to the United States and the early establishment of Latter-­ day Saint colonies in northern Mexico decisively aided diffusion of the Church into a Latin American country. The (Colonia) Juarez Stake, Mexico’s first, was created in 1895 in the northern state of Chihuahua. It was comprised of Latter-­ day Saint colonists who had emigrated from the United States as a result of federal prosecution of polygamy in the Utah Territory. The formation of the Juarez Stake was an anomaly relative to normal hierarchical diffusion patterns because it consisted of the wholesale relocation of a Latter-day Saint population into a largely rural area. A large population base to increase potential converts, therefore, was not required. The colonies in Chihuahua have remained small Latter-day Saint communities to this day. By 2009, the advantages of early migration in the late 1800s, coupled with many native converts thereafter, had produced 1,158,236 Latter-day Saints in Mexico. Besides Mexico, only the United States and Brazil currently claim more than one million members. Diffusion of LDS membership in Mexico also has followed a typical hierarchical pattern, dominated by the primary urban center of Mexico City. In 1961, Mexico City was unsurprisingly the country’s second city to become headquarters for an LDS stake (after Colonia Juarez). Figures  4.6 through 4.8 outline the progressive increase in Mexican stakes, with cities ranked according to size (see also Appendix Table 4.6). There are varying estimates of Mexico City’s population, depending on how its outlying districts are included and counted. This can result in widely varying population counts (some of which are well in excess of 20 million people). Whatever Mexico City’s actual population might be, its sheer size helps account for the 41 LDS stakes that were headquartered there in 2009. By 1974, there were five stakes in Mexico City and two in Monterrey, the largest city in Northern Mexico. Besides the Colonia Juarez Stake, by then there were also stakes in Tampico, Monclova, and Valle Hermosa. The early creation of stakes in the smaller cities of Monclova and Valle Hermosa is likely related to the fact

118 

S. M. OTTERSTROM AND B. S. PLEWE

Fig. 4.6  Mexico: Stakes and missions 1969/1979. (Originally published in Samuel M. Otterstrom, 2012. “International Spatial Diffusion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Territoire en Mouvement 13 (2009–1): 102–130 and made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.)

that they are close to the LDS colonies in northern Mexico and to the United States. This proximity and the early establishment of missions in the nearby cities of Torreon and Monterrey have helped multiply stakes in the whole region. In comparison, Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city, but further removed from the United States, did not gain its first stake and mission designation until 1975.

4  GEOGRAPHICAL DIFFUSION AND GROWTH PATTERNS OF THE CHURCH… 

119

Fig. 4.7  Mexico: Stakes and missions 1989/1999. (Originally published in Samuel M. Otterstrom, 2012. “International Spatial Diffusion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Territoire en Mouvement 13 (2009–1): 102–130 and made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.)

120 

S. M. OTTERSTROM AND B. S. PLEWE

Fig. 4.8  Mexico: Stakes and missions 2010. (Originally published in Samuel M. Otterstrom, 2012. “International Spatial Diffusion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Territoire en Mouvement 13 (2009–1): 102–130 and made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.)

During the five years between the end of 1974 and 1979, the number of stakes in Mexico increased rapidly to 53. Correspondingly, the number of cities with stakes grew to 31, which showcased the continuing pattern of stake distribution over the entire country. Forty of these stakes (75.5 percent) were located in cities with over 100,000 people. Mexico City, Monterrey, and Puebla (southeast of Mexico City) together accounted for 22 of the 53 stakes. The large cities of Merida, Poza Rica, and Veracruz had two stakes each. The remainder of LDS stakes in Mexico was distributed in smaller communities with only one stake apiece. In 1984, there were 77 Mexican stakes distributed throughout the country. Latter-day Saint growth in Mexico City, Monterrey, and Puebla continued, while Guadalajara finally gained its second stake. Fifty-nine (76.6 percent) of Mexican stakes were in cities with populations of over 100,000 people. By 1989, there were 105 stakes in the country, with 80 (76.2 percent) of them located in cities of more than 100,000 people. In 1994, the ratio of stakes in large cities over 100,000 to the total number of stakes in the country was 92 out of 126 (73 percent). It is interesting to note that, although the total number of Mexican cities with stakes continued to rise, the share of stakes in communities over 100,000

4  GEOGRAPHICAL DIFFUSION AND GROWTH PATTERNS OF THE CHURCH… 

121

has remained relatively constant at about 75 percent. It is also noteworthy that, while Monterrey is smaller than Guadalajara, it has ten stakes to Guadalajara’s seven. This shows the greater success that the diffusion of the Church has had in Monterrey historically, as well as its advantage of having a mission located there earlier in time. The late (1989) creation of the first stake in the tourist destination of Acapulco may also be related to the factors that led to later growth in Guadalajara. Mexico’s three stakes and five missions in 1969 were only precursors to the rapid diffusion of Latter-day Saint stakes and missions throughout the country over the ensuing 40 years. By 1994, there were 124 stakes and an estimated 800,000 church members. Fifteen years later in 2009, LDS membership in Mexico had increased to over 1.1 million and the number of stakes had swelled to 220. Additionally, there currently are thirteen LDS temples (with one under construction) distributed in most of the significant Latter-day Saint centers throughout the county—a number second only to that of the United States (Figure 4.8). Nonetheless, Latter-day Saints make up just 1 percent of Mexico’s population, leaving plenty of potential for continued LDS expansion. If the past is prologue to future developments, LDS stake growth should continue in hierarchical fashion throughout the country.

Geographical Summary of Latter-day Saint Growth Since 1950 In most countries around the world where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­ day Saints has been successfully established, the correlated patterns of mission and stake diffusion provide a basis for understanding how this has happened. This method of tracking church diffusion shows that the creation of a country’s first LDS mission, followed later by the formation of a stake, usually occurs in a country’s largest city. From there, the spread of missions and stakes has generally proceeded outward and down a “hierarchy of urban places” (i.e. from larger to smaller settings), as well as expanding contagiously within the immediate vicinity of a central city. The specific LDS growth rate subsequently determines how fast stakes are formed and thereafter spread throughout a country. The conceptual model we displayed earlier in Fig. 4.1 specifies four Latter-­ day Saint diffusion phases (compared to Hägerstrand’s three). These four phases nonetheless are very similar to Hägerstrand’s analysis, emphasizing that LDS diffusion within nations has followed a natural pattern, often utilized in studies of the geographical spread of different kinds of innovations. Mechanisms of supply and demand (expounded in the “functional perspective”) affect the specific rate of growth within a country; thus, the faster its growth rate, the faster the LDS Church spreads by progressing through the four general phases of spatial diffusion outlined in Fig. 4.1. A country’s population size, unique area and shape of its borders, and rural/urban makeup contribute to a certain amount of historical variation between countries in terms of LDS spatial diffusion. The particular countries selected for comparison in this chapter, however,

122 

S. M. OTTERSTROM AND B. S. PLEWE

have followed a basic diffusion pattern during the modern era, as summarized here. Phase 1: Initial Introduction period. The diffusion of the Church into a new country begins in one of three ways: by expatriate Latter-day Saints, usually from North America or Europe, who move into a country; by citizens of the country who join the Church elsewhere and return to their own land; or by missionaries who are assigned to the country from an LDS mission in a neighboring country (see Figs. 4.9, 4.10, 4.11). Missionaries must be allowed into a country by government officials, while expatriates or returning citizens can often begin meeting together before the Church is officially recognized by political authorities. In either case, under favorable political conditions, the Church eventually obtains recognition, missionaries begin to proselytize, and branches are organized for local church members and new converts. In most instances, these branches are located in the largest city or cities of the country. As a country nears the end of phase one, a mission is formed in or near the country to increase the supply of missionaries. The mission also is headquartered in or near one of the major cities where branches already are established. By this time, most of the members are not expatriate North Americans. Phase 2: Central Staging period. Proselyting activity is concentrated around the large city that houses mission headquarters. The headquarters acts as a central point of diffusion in the region. The mission president uses available information to determine the best locations to place missionaries. Over time, missionaries are sent to “open” other cities, which often are larger metropolitan areas nearest to the mission headquarters. Diffusion success results in the

Fig. 4.9  1950 Diffusion phase by country

4  GEOGRAPHICAL DIFFUSION AND GROWTH PATTERNS OF THE CHURCH… 

123

Fig. 4.10  1980 Diffusion phase by country

Fig. 4.11  2010 Diffusion phase by country

establishment of a stake, centered in the largest (or close to the largest) city in the country. These developments mark the end of phase two. Phase 3: Metropolitan Movement period. This phase is marked by the creation of additional stakes in the central or primary city where the first stake was created, and the manifestation of an urban hierarchical pattern of stake creation in other large cities around the country. These new stakes encourage the establishment of new missions headquartered in other large urban places in the same country, as well as division of the existing mission in the country’s central city.

124 

S. M. OTTERSTROM AND B. S. PLEWE

The ability to create more missions, however, depends on a growing supply of missionaries from the United States or other countries that are self-sufficient in native missionaries. The additional stakes and missions function as new dispersion sources for yet greater diffusion. Because of their closer proximity to existing church centers and member resources, missionaries are able to expose more people in lower order urban areas to their faith. This development brings a country to the last phase of the diffusion model. Phase 4: Contagious Concentration period. As missions and stakes spread across a country, missionary activities become more localized. Small towns and rural areas are more easily reached by missionaries, and new church units are organized in these places. The diffusion of the Church becomes more contagious in its pattern, emanating from the centers of already existing missions and stakes. Contagious patterns of growth occur in conjunction with the creation of new congregational units in order to accommodate increasing membership, which, in turn, results in more missions and stakes becoming increasingly concentrated in smaller areas. At this point, there are both more members and more missionaries to spread the Church’s message of religious conversion to more people in smaller areas. Theoretically, this phase continues indefinitely, with increasing numbers of missions and stakes being created in more locations throughout the country, until all those in the population who are disposed to join the Church have done so. This level of diffusion has not yet occurred in any country, and, in fact, only the small countries of Samoa and Tonga display significant Latter-day Saint shares of their country’s total populations (see Table 4.1). An interesting additional example is the Philippines, another country with significant numbers of Latter-day Saints. The diffusion of LDS stakes in the islands of the Philippines was initially hierarchical, from Manila outward to other areas of Luzon Island, as well as to the islands of Cebu, Negros, and Mindanao. It appears that after this early diffusion, the relative insulation of these various islands lessened the influence of Manila in the hierarchic order (except on Luzon Island). Growth of the Church in the Philippines thus highlights the fact that each country’s distinct geography affects its particular diffusion process and how closely it adheres to our four-stage model. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has grown significantly throughout the world since 1830, and especially since World War II.  This growth notwithstanding, it is still a relatively small religion internationally with about two members per one thousand people worldwide. For Latter-day Saints there is a long way yet to go before their message is spread to “every nation, kindred tongue and people.” Nonetheless, the global diffusion of the LDS faith continues in a methodically planned, hierarchical manner that, thus far, has proven successful in the process of its transformation from a nineteenth-­ century American religious “innovation” into an international church of substantial stature in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

POPULATION b

10,021,295 6,023,699 2,711,840 2,400,000 2,373,224 2,207,718 1,718,421 1,598,210 1,478,098 1,407,737 1,372,741 1,171,195 1,031,554 1,002,118 954,991 917,237 763,043 744,512 743,372 729,151 702,621 677,856 662,373 650,883 627,123 613,764

CITY

Sao Paulo Rio de Janeiro Salvador Fortaleza Belo Horizonte Brasilia Curitiba Manaus Recife Belem Porto Alegre Goiania Campinas Nova Iguacu Maceio Sao Luis Natal Teresina Sao Bernardo Campo Grande Jaboatao Osasco Santo Andre Joao Pessoa Contagem Sao Jose dos Campos

Table 4.4  Brazil: Diffusion of stakes by cities

2

1969 5 3

3

1 1

1

1

1 1

1

1979

3 1

1974

3 1 2 5 1 1

2 1 2 6

1

1

1 1

1 1

1

1

1

1

2 1 2

2

1

9 4

1989

8 4

1984

Appendix

1 1 1 1 2 1 1 2 1 1

2

16 4 2 5 2 2 6 2 3 1 4 1 3

1994 22 6 2 7 2 4 9 5 5 3 5 2 3 1 3 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 1 2 1 1

1999 22 5 3 7 3 4 9 5 5 3 5 2 3 1 3 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 1 2 1 1

2004 28 6 4 11 4 5 10 8 6 3 5 2 4 1 4 1 4 2 2 1 2 1 1 3 1 1

2009

(continued)

1

1

1

4 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1

MISSIONS

4  GEOGRAPHICAL DIFFUSION AND GROWTH PATTERNS OF THE CHURCH… 

125

563,536

558,862 551,267 521,934 490,175 481,911 471,832 470,193 461,304 456,456 412,724 411,403 394,930 390,633 387,417 386,069 381,270 374,699 366,754 348,936 342,209 335,024 328,291 324,457 321,589 320,674 319,587 312,656

Sorocaba Ribeirao Preto Cuiaba Aracaju Feira de Santana Londrina Juiz De Fora Joinville Niteroi Florianopolis Santos Vila Velha Diadema Campos Maua Caxias do Sul Sao Jose do Rio Preto Olinda Campina Grande Piracicaba Bauru Canoas Sao Vicente Jundiai Pelotas Anapolis Vitoria

POPULATION b

Uberlandia

CITY

Table 4.4 (continued) 1969

1

1974

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1

1 1

1 1 1 1

1 1 1

1 1

1

1

1

1 1

1

1

1

1

1 1 1 1 1 1

1 1

1

1

3 4 1 3 1 2 1 1

1

1999

1

2 4

1994

1

1 1

1989

1

1984

1

1979

4 2 1 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1

1

2004

4 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 1 1 2 2 2 2 1 1

1

2009

1

1

1

1 1

MISSIONS

126  S. M. OTTERSTROM AND B. S. PLEWE

Maringa Guaruja Porto Velho Franca Cariacica Ponta Grossa Caucaia Petropolis Uberaba Rio Branco Novo Hamburgo Vitoria da Conquista Barueri Praia Grande Volta Redonda Santa Maria Gravatai Imperatriz Marilia Sao Leopoldo Itabuna Sao Carlos Hortolandia Mossoro Sete Lagoas Palmas (Tocantins State) Americana Petrolina Maracanau Camacari

CITY

311,724 310,424 306,180 305,041 301,183 292,177 275,019 272,691 260,843 257,642 253,841 253,137 251,994 250,027 249,580 249,219 238,778 218,106 212,218 209,229 205,660 205,035 203,533 202,005 201,334 196,272 196,022 194,650 193,259 188,758

POPULATION b

1969

1974

1

1979

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1989

1

1984

1

1 1

1

1

1

1

1

1994

1 1 1 1

1 1 1 1 1

1 1 1 1

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

2

1 1 1 1

2004

1 1 1 1

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

2

1 1 1 1

1999 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2

2009

(continued)

1

MISSIONS

4  GEOGRAPHICAL DIFFUSION AND GROWTH PATTERNS OF THE CHURCH… 

127

Rio Grande Rio Claro Passo Fundo Aracatuba Araraquara Arapiraca Lages Sobral Vale do Itajai (Itajai) Sao Jose (next to Florianopol Paranagua Itu Sao Jose dos Pinhais Teresopolis Uruguaiana Santa Rita Ribeirao Pires a Camaragibe Garanhuns Guaratingueta Birigui Bage Pinhais (near Curitiba) Alegrete Mogi Mirim Sao Joao da Boa Vista Itatiba Tubarao Cruz Alta

CITY

Table 4.4 (continued)

187,838 180,147 179,529 170,024 168,468 166,562 164,676 157,996 155,716 147,559 141,013 137,586 124,224 123,979 123,480 119,893 111,888 111,119 110,085 105,880 102,277 98,940 89,335 87,236 78,244 76,540 67,934 67,245 65,275

POPULATION b

1969

1974

1

1979

1

1

1

1 1

1989

1

1

1984

1

1

1

1 1

1

1

1 1 1 1

1994

1 1 1 1 1 1

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

1 1 1 1 1 1 1

2004

1 1 1 1 1 1 1

1999 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

2009

MISSIONS

128  S. M. OTTERSTROM AND B. S. PLEWE

population data not found

Population estimate from GeoNames.org from about 2010

b

55,763 54,934 36,721 24,671

POPULATION b

a

Ponta Pora Caico Rosario Do Sul Boa Viagem Arsenal a Cascavel a Livramento a Monte Cristo a TOTAL

CITY

2

1969

9

1974

19

1979

46

1

1984

56

1

1989

0 0 1 1 0 187

1 0 1 1 1 185

1

1 1 108

2004 1

1999 1

1994 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 228

2009

27

MISSIONS

4  GEOGRAPHICAL DIFFUSION AND GROWTH PATTERNS OF THE CHURCH… 

129

130 

S. M. OTTERSTROM AND B. S. PLEWE

Table 4.5  Peru: Diffusion of stakes by cities

a b

CITY

POPULATION b 1974 1979 1984 1989 1994 1999 2004 2009 MISSIONS

Lima Arequipa Trujillo Chiclayo Iquitos Huancayo Piura Chimbote Cusco Pucallpa Tacna Ica Juliaca Sullana Chincha (Alta?) Huanuco Ayacucho Cajamarca Puno Tumbes Cerro de Pasco Pisco Huacho Moquegua Ilo Jaen Sicuani Canto Grandea La Merceda Mantaroa Pomalcaa Ventanillaa TOTAL

7,737,002 841,130 747,450 577,375 437,620 376,657 325,466 316,966 312,140 310,750 280,098 246,844 245,675 160,789 153,076

2

7 1

10 1 2 1 1 1 1 1

1

18 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1

22 3 3 3 3 1 2 2 2 1 2 1 1

32 6 7 5 3 1 2 2 2 1 4 1 1

33 6 7 5 3 1 2 2 2 1 3 1 1

1

0

0

1

2 1 1 2

2 1 1 2

1

1

1 1 1

1 1 1 1

1 1 1 1

1

0

0

1

1

1

1

34

54

1 79

1 79

1 1

147,959 140,033 135,000 116,552 109,223 78,910

1

61,869 54,545 54,517 53,476 52,493 33,575

1

2

8

19

population not found Population estimate from GeoNames.org from about 2010

37 6 7 5 3 1 2 3 2 1 3 1 1 1 0

5 1 1

1 1

2 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 90

9

POPULATION b

11,285,654 1,640,589 1,512,354 1,392,099 1,376,457 1,122,874 1,114,626 717,175 708,267 677,704 658,179 652,136 621,250 611,785 597,099 595,811 592,797 582,469 568,313 542,043 524,066 507,816 505,881 498,654 481,128 468,825

CITY

Mexico City Guadalajara Ciudad Juarez Puebla (de Zaragoza) Tijuana Monterrey Leon Merida Chihuahua San Luis Potosi Aguascalientes Acapulco Saltillo Queretaro Mexicali Hermosillo Morelia Culiacan Veracruz Cancun Torreon San Nicolas Toluca Reynosa Tuxtla Gutierrez Tula

STAKES

Table 4.6  Mexico: Diffusion of stakes by cities

2

1969

2

5

1974

3

1 1 1

1

1 1 1

1

1

3 2

1 2

1 2

2 2

21 2 3 4 2 8 1 3 3 1 1 1 1

1989

1 1

1

18 2 2 4 1 7 1 2 1 1

1984

1 1

2 1

14 1 1 3 1 5

1979

1 1 1 1

3

3 3

2 2

25 3 3 5 2 9 0 4 3 1 1 1 2

1994 37 8 4 7 3 9 1 4 3 2 2 1 2 1 2 2 1 3 4 2 3 1 1 1 2 1

1999 40 8 4 8 5 10 1 4 3 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 3 4 2 3 1 1 2 2 1

2004 41 8 4 8 6 10 1 6 3 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 4 3 3 1 1 2 3 1

2009

(continued)

1

1

1 1

1

1 1 2 1 1 1

5 2

MISSIONS 4  GEOGRAPHICAL DIFFUSION AND GROWTH PATTERNS OF THE CHURCH… 

131

Durango Matamoros Jalapa Villahermosa Benito Juarez Mazatlan Apodaca Nuevo Laredo Cuernavaca Irapuato Pachuca Coacalco Tampico Celaya Tepic Ciudad Victoria Oaxaca Ciudad Obregon Ensenada Tehuacan Uruapan Coatzacoalcos Gomez Palacio Los Mochis Campeche Tapachula Monclova Madero Puerto Vallarta

CITY

Table 4.6 (continued)

457,140 435,145 425,148 362,401 355,017 354,717 352,064 349,550 343,769 339,554 319,581 313,405 309,003 305,901 280,592 269,923 262,566 258,162 256,565 241,429 237,308 230,717 228,577 214,601 205,212 197,961 195,764 192,736 187,134

POPULATION b

STAKES

1969

1

1

1974

1 1 1

1 1

1 1 1 1 1 1 1

1 1 2

1 1

1 1

1 1 1

1

1 1

1984

1 1

1979

2 1 2 1 1 1 1

1 2 3

1 1

2 2 2 1 2 1 1

1 2 3 1

1 1

1 1 1

1

1

1 1 1

1 1 1 2

1994

1 1 1 1

1989

2 2 2 1 2 1 1

2 2 2 1 2 2 2

3 1 1 1 4 3 0 1

1 2 1 2

1 1 1 2 2 1 1 1 3 3 0 1

2 1 1 2 1 2

2004

2 1 1 2 1 1

1999 2 1 1 2 0 2 1 1 2 1 3 1 3 1 1 1 4 3 0 1 1 2 2 2 1 2 2 2 1

2009

1

1

1

1

MISSIONS

132  S. M. OTTERSTROM AND B. S. PLEWE

Poza Rica Metepec La Paz Chalco Minatitlan Cuautla Piedras Negras San Luis Rio Colorado Chetumal San Cristobal Colima Zamora Orizaba Zacatecas Iguala Ciudad Valles Fresnillo Guaymas Delicias Tuxtepec Atlixco Cardenas Tlaxcala Ciudad Mante Salina Cruz Teziutlan Juchitan Chiautempan Papantla

CITY

174,526 172,982 171,485 163,996 150,895 146,178 139,619 139,254 134,412 128,996 127,235 124,916 121,348 118,562 112,106 109,504 105,488 103,449 102,969 92,121 85,891 85,350 84,670 79,981 73,648 70,819 67,637 48,322 47,958

POPULATION b

STAKES

1969

1974

1 1 1 1

1

1 1 1 1

1

1

2

1984

2

1979

1

1

1

1

1

1

1 1 1 1

1

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2

1

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1

1 1

1

1

1

1

1 2 2 3 1

1 1 2 3 1

1 1 1 2 1

2

2004

1 1 1 1 1

2

1999

2

1994

2

1989 2 1 1 2 2 3 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1

2009

(continued)

MISSIONS

4  GEOGRAPHICAL DIFFUSION AND GROWTH PATTERNS OF THE CHURCH… 

133

population not found

Population estimate from GeoNames.org from about 2010

STAKES

b

47,831 46,990 42,601 41,993 39,447 32,462 31,718

POPULATION b

a

Valle Hermoso Acayucan Cabo San Lucas Tizimin Guacamayas Tuxpan Amecameca Galeana a Atotonilco (Tula) a Civac a Colonia Dublan a Colonia Juarez a Tecalco a Tierra Blanca a Valle del Mezquital a TOTAL

CITY

Table 4.6 (continued)

1

11

3

1

1974

1

1969

53

1

1

1979

78

1

1

1984

1 127

1 1 1 106

1

1994

1 1 1

1

1989

1

1

0 1 1 1 1 1 199

1

1

1 1 1 1 1 178

1 1

2004

1 1

1999 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 219

2009

23

MISSIONS

134  S. M. OTTERSTROM AND B. S. PLEWE

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135

Notes 1. Book of Mormon, (Salt Lake City, UT: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1983): Mosiah 3:20. 2. Otterstrom, Samuel M. “The L.D.S. Church: Membership Growth Brings Per Capita GNP Decline,” Honors Thesis (Brigham Young University, 1990): 9; Deseret News Church Almanac 1993–1994 (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret News Press, 1992); Deseret News Church Almanac 2010 (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret News Press, 2010). 3. Otterstrom, Samuel M. “The International Diffusion of the Mormon Church,” Unpublished Master’s Thesis, (Brigham Young University, 1994). 4. Morrill, R. L., G. L. Gaile, and G. I. Thrall, Spatial Diffusion (Newbury Park, CA: SAGE Publications Inc., 1988): 23–24. 5. Brown, L. A., Innovation Diffusion: A New Perspective (New York, NY: Methuen & Co., 1981): 15–21. 6. For example, Richard L. Morrill, “The Negro Ghetto: Problems and alternatives,” Geographical Review 55 (1965): 339–361; Cliff, Andrew D., Peter Haggett, and M.  R. Smallman-Raynor, Island Epidemics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Pred, A.  R., The Spatial Dynamics of U.S.  Urban Industrial Growth, 1800–1914 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966). 7. Brown, Innovation Diffusion, 20–21. 8. Brown, Innovation Diffusion, 28, 52. 9. Brown, Innovation Diffusion, 50. 10. Brown, Innovation Diffusion, 51. 11. Church of Jesus Christ Newsroom (https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/). 12. Brown, Innovation Diffusion, 63. 13. Earlier geographic studies of domestic and international church growth and diffusion include: Leonard J. Arrington, “Historical Development of International Mormonism,” Religious Studies and Theology 1 (1987): 9–22; Lowell C. Bennion, “The Geographic Dynamics of Mormondom 1965–95,” Sunstone 18 (1995): 21–32; G.  W. Johnson and M.  A. Johnson, “On the Trail of the Twentieth-­Century Mormon Outmigration,” BYU Studies 46, no. 1 (2007): 41–83; Johnson, P. T., “An Analysis of the Spread of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from Salt Lake City, Utah Utilizing a Diffusion Model,” Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, State University of Iowa (1966); C. R. Laing, “The Latter-day Saint Diaspora in the United States and the South,” Southeastern Geographer 42, no. 2 (2002): 228–247; Louder, D. R., “A Distributional and Diffusionary Analysis of the Mormon Church 1850–1970,” Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington (1972); D.  R. Louder, “A Simulation Approach to the Diffusion of the Mormon Church,” Proceedings of the Association of American Geographers (1975): 126–30; D.  R. Louder and Lowell Bennion, “Mapping Mormons across the Modern West.” In The Mormon Role in the Settlement of the West, ed. Richard H. Jackson (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1978): 135–67; S. M. Otterstrom, “Divergent Growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the United States, 1990–2004: Diaspora, Gathering, and the East-West Divide,” Population, Space and Place 14 (2008): 231–252; S.  M. Otterstrom, “International Spatial Diffusion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” Territoire en Mouvement 13 (2012): 102–130.

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14. Brown, Innovation Diffusion, 41. 15. Clawson, D.  L., Latin America and the Caribbean: Lands and Peoples (New York, NY: McGraw Hill, 2006): 238–45. 16. Cleary, E. L., How Latin America Saved the Soul of the Catholic Church (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2009); Cleary, E. L., The Rise of Charismatic Catholicism in Latin America (Gainseville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2011). 17. M.  Russell Ballard, “The Greatest Generation of Missionaries,” Ensign (November 2002); LDS Church News (17 Apr 2010): 13. 18. At the end of 2018, there were over 65,000 full-time missionaries around the world, and as of January 2020, there were 399 Latter-day Saint missions. See: https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/ 19. Deseret News Church Almanac (1993–1994), 251; Moss, J.  R., R.  L. Britsch, J.  R. Christianson, and R.  Cowan, The International Church (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Publications, 1982): 331–32. 20. Van Orden, Bruce A. “‘More Nations Than One’: A Global History of the LDS Church.” Unpublished student packet, (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University, 1993): 130. 21. LDS Church News, Feb 13, 2010. 22. LDS Church News, Feb 13, 2010. 23. History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book Company, 1957): v. 4, 540. 24. Hagerstrand, T., The Propagation of Innovation Waves (Lund, Gleerup: Lund Studies in Geography, 1952); Brown, Innovation Diffusion, 21. 25. See https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/ and https://ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com/ 26. The word “stake” comes from a reference in the Bible (Isaiah 54:2-3) see: Ludlow D.  H., ed., Encyclopedia of Mormonism (New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1992): 1412. 27. Ludlow, Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 219, 1411–15, 1541–43. 28. Otterstrom, “The L.D.S. Church”; Otterstrom, “International Spatial Diffusion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” 102–130. 29. Such as Moss, Britsch, Christianson, and Cowan, The International Church; Van Orden, "More Nations Than One”; Stewart, David G. and Matthew Martinich, Reaching the nations: international church growth almanac (Henderson, NV: Cumorah Foundation, 2013). 30. Moss, Britsch, Christianson, and Cowan, The International Church, 270–1. 31. Prince, Gregory A. and William Robert Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005): 200. 32. Gómez Páez, F.  R., The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Lamanite conventions: From darkness to light (Mexico City: El Museo de Historia del Mormonismo en Mexico, 2004). 33. Prince and Wright, David O. McKay, 364. 34. Doyle L. Green and Albert L. Zobell, Jr. “A new era in Church history begins as President David O.  McKay visits Europe,” Improvement Era, 55 no. 9 (September 1952): 634, https://archive.org/details/improvementera5509unse/page/n19. 35. David O.  McKay, “Conditions in Church Encouraging  - Prospects Bright,” Improvement Era, 55, no. 12 (December 1952): 902, https://archive.org/ details/improvementera5512unse/page/n29.

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36. Prince and Wright, David O. McKay, 224. 37. Deseret News Church Almanac 2010, 188, 191, 292. 38. Deseret News Church Almanac 2010 dates for establishment of the stakes listed in the previous few paragraphs are found within different country entries. 39. Deseret News 1974 Church Almanac (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret News Press, 1974), 115; Deseret News Church Almanac 2010. 40. LDS Church News, April 17, 2010. 41. “3 New Missions Created,” Church News, (March 8 1975): 3, https://news. google.com/newspapers?id=k8xSAAAAIBAJ&sjid=PH8DAAAAIBAJ&p g=4210%2C1769192. 42. Benson, Ezra Taft. Godly Characteristics of the Master, General Conference (October 1986), https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1986/10/godly-characteristics-of-the-master. 43. “6 Assistants to Live Abroad,” Church News, (May 3 1975), https://news. google.com/newspapers?id=i1tTAAAAIBAJ&sjid=cYUDAAAAIBAJ&pg=570 8%2C858132. 44. “New Mission Program,” Church News, (May 17 1975): 3, https://news. google.com/newspapers?id=DyVVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=7n8DAAAAIBAJ&p g=3827%2C4562785. 45. “Area Supervision Worldwide,” Church News, (June 26, 1976): 7, https:// news.google.com/newspapers?id=viJZAAAAIBAJ&sjid=NH8DAAAAIBAJ&p g=5744%2C6404734. 46. “General Authorities Receive New Assignments for New Zones,” Ensign (July 1977): 94, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ ensign/1977/07/news-of-the-church/general-authorities-receivenew-assignments-for-new-zones?lang=eng. 47. Christaller, Walter, Central Places in Southern Germany, translated by C. Baskin (Inglewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, [1933] 1966). 48. Kimball, Spencer W. “When the World Will Be Converted,” (transcription of April 1974 regional representatives seminar), Ensign (October 1974), https:// www.chur chofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1974/10/when-theworld-will-be-converted. 49. “Mission Presidents Called,” Ensign (May 1975), https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1975/05/news-of-the-church/mission-presidentscalled. 50. Kimball, Spencer W. “The Time to Labor is Now,” General Conference (October 1975), https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1975/10/the-time-to-labor-is-now. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many general authorities were called who had been born outside the United States, including President John Taylor, but they had immigrated before they were called. 51. “Rate, Location of New Stakes Shows Church’s Rapid Growth: 107 during 1978,” Church News (February 24 1979), https://news.google.com/newspap ers?id=HJ1YAAAAIBAJ&sjid=VYADAAAAIBAJ&pg=5732%2C6524888. 52. Haight, David B. “Filling the Whole Earth,” General Conference (April 1990), https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1990/04/ filling-the-whole-earth.

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53. Hinckley, Gordon B. “Converts and Young Men,” General Conference (April 1997), https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1997/04/converts-and-young-men. 54. “Elders Oaks, Holland Assigned Abroad,” Church News (11 April 2002), h t t p s : / / w w w. t h e c h u r c h n e w s . c o m / a r c h i v e s / 2 0 0 2 - 0 4 - 1 3 / elders-oaks-holland-assigned-abroad-108889. 55. Hinckley, Gordon B., “Some Thoughts on Temples, Retention of Converts, and Missionary Service,” General Conference (October 1997), https://www. churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1997/10/ some-thoughts-on-temples-retention-of-converts-and-missionary-service. 56. Heaps, Julie Dockstader, “Nigerian temple to bring a healing,” LDS Church News (August 12 2005), https://www.thechurchnews.com/ archives/2005-08-13/nigerian-temple-to-bring-a-healing-90222. 57. Deseret News Church Almanac 2010. 58. Deseret News Church Almanac 2010, 186. 59. Moss, Britsch, Christianson, and Cowan, The International Church, 163-6; Deseret News Church Almanac 1993–1994, 226. 60. Moss et al. 1982: 170–3. 61. Moss, Britsch, Christianson, and Cowan, The International Church, 177. 62. Moss, Britsch, Christianson, and Cowan, The International Church, 177–8. 63. Deseret News Church Almanac 2010.

Bibliography Almanac. See Deseret News Church Almanac. Arrington, L.J. 1987. Historical Development of International Mormonism. Religious Studies and Theology 1: 9–22. Ballard, M.R. 2002. The Greatest Generation of Missionaries. Ensign, November. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2002/11/the-greatest-generation-of-missionaries.html?lang=eng#title1. Bennion, L.C. 1995. The Geographic Dynamics of Mormondom 1965–95. Sunstone 18: 21–32. Book of Mormon. 1983. Salt Lake City, UT: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­ day Saints. Brown, L.A. 1981. Innovation Diffusion: A New Perspective. New  York, NY: Methuen & Co. Christaller, Walter. 1966 [1933]. Central Places in Southern Germany. Trans. C. Baskin. Inglewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Church News. Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret News Press, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church/news?lang=eng. various issues and years. Clawson, D.L. 2006. Latin America and the Caribbean: Lands and Peoples. New York, NY: McGraw Hill. Cleary, E.L. 2009. How Latin America Saved the Soul of the Catholic Church. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. ———. 2011. The Rise of Charismatic Catholicism in Latin America. Gainseville, FL: University Press of Florida. Cliff, Andrew D., and Peter Haggett. 2000. In Island Epidemics, ed. M.R. Smallman-Raynor. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Deseret News 1974. 1974. Church Almanac. Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret News Press. Deseret News Church Almanac 1991–1992. 1990. Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret News Press. Deseret News Church Almanac 1993–1994. 1992. Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret News Press. Deseret News Church Almanac 2010. 2010. Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret News Press. Ensign. Salt Lake City, UT: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, various issues and years listed in notes. General Conference, Salt Lake City, UT: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, various conference months and years listed in notes. “GeoNames.” GeoNames. Accessed Sep 2010. http://www.geonames.org/. Gómez Páez, F.R. 2004. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Lamanite conventions: From darkness to light. El Museo de Historia del Mormonismo en Mexico: Mexico City. Green, Doyle L., and Albert L. Zobell, Jr. 1952. A New Era in Church History Begins as President David O. McKay visits Europe. Improvement Era, 55, 9 (September): 634, https://archive.org/details/improvementera5509unse/page/n19. Hagerstrand, T. 1952. The Propagation of Innovation Waves. Lund, Gleerup: Lund Studies in Geography. History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 7  vol. Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book Company, 1957. Johnson, G.W., and M.A.  Johnson. 2007. On the Trail of the Twentieth-Century Mormon Outmigration. BYU Studies 46 (1): 41–83. Johnson, P.T. 1966. An Analysis of the Spread of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­ day Saints from Salt Lake City, Utah Utilizing a Diffusion Model, Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, State University of Iowa. Laing, C.R. 2002. The Latter-day Saint Diaspora in the United States and the South. Southeastern Geographer 42 (2): 228–247. LDS Church News. See Church News. Louder, D R. 1972. A Distributional and Diffusionary Analysis of the Mormon Church 1850–1970. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington. Louder, D.R. 1975. A Simulation Approach to the Diffusion of the Mormon Church. Proceedings of the Association of American Geographers 20: 126–130. Louder, D.R., and L. Bennion. 1978. Mapping Mormons Across the Modern West. In The Mormon Role in the Settlement of the West, ed. Richard H. Jackson, 135–167. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press. Ludlow, D.H., ed. 1992. Encyclopedia of Mormonism. New  York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Company. McKay, David O. 1952. Conditions in Church Encouraging  - Prospects Bright. Improvement Era, 55 (12) (December): 902. https://archive.org/details/improvementera5512unse/page/n29. Morrill, R.L. 1965. The Negro Ghetto: Problems and alternatives. Geographical Review 55: 339–361. Morrill, R.L., G.L. Gaile, and G.I. Thrall. 1988. Spatial Diffusion. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE Publications Inc. Moss, J.R., R.L.  Britsch, J.R.  Christianson, and R.  Cowan. 1982. The International Church. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Publications. Otterstrom, S.M. 1990. The L.D.S. Church: Membership Growth Brings Per Capita GNP Decline. Honors Thesis, Brigham Young University.

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———. 1994. The International Diffusion of the Mormon Church. Unpublished Master’s Thesis, Brigham Young University. ———. 2008. Divergent Growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the United States, 1990–2004: Diaspora, Gathering, and the East-West Divide. Population, Space and Place 14: 231–252. ———. 2012. International Spatial Diffusion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­ day Saints. Territoire en Mouvement 13: 102–130. Peffers, D.D. 1980. The Diffusion and Dispersion of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: An Overview. Unpublished Master's thesis, Brigham Young University. Pred, A.R. 1966. The Spatial Dynamics of U.S. Urban Industrial Growth, 1800–1914. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Prince, Gregory A., and William Robert Wright. 2005. David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Stark, R. 1984. The Rise of a New World Faith. Review of Religious Research 26: 18–27. Stewart, David G., and Matthew Martinich. 2013. Reaching the Nations: International Church Growth Almanac. Henderson, NV: Cumorah Foundation. Van Orden, B.A. 1993. ‘More Nations Than One’: A Global History of the LDS Church. Unpublished student packet, Provo, UT: Brigham Young University.

PART II

Contemporary Concerns and Issues Facing an International Church

CHAPTER 5

Pulling Toward Zion: Mormonism in  Its Global Dimensions Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp

According to its many observers, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is either one of the most American or one of the most international churches of our time. Born during the first decades of the nation in upstate New  York, the early Mormon community pushed westward along the same paths traveled by other Anglo-American pioneers. For decades after the founding of the church, leaders encouraged members scattered abroad to gather with “the Saints in Zion” in order to build up the kingdom of God.1 That early church body was predominantly Anglo-American in origin, sharing commonalities of language, dress, and religious practice nurtured through the 1870s by a steady migration of Europeans to Utah’s Wasatch Range. Even today, LDS history is measured in handcarts, prairie skirts, and a determined self-­sufficiency. Visitors to the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City are treated to an abundance of artifacts of those nineteenth-century pioneering beginnings. Moreover, believers understand the American West, originally designated as the theocratic state of Deseret, as a sacred space, the place in which Zion will be built. At the same, Zion has always been a globalized ideal. The LDS Church began almost immediately after its founding to reach out domestically and internationally to evangelize non-European “others,” including Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and, by the late twentieth century, Africans and African Americans. As a result of this early gathering process, the LDS Church in Utah was arguably at its most international in the 1860s and 1870s, when

L. F. Maffly-Kipp (*) Washington University, Saint Louis, MO, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_5

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thousands of immigrants, primarily from Britain and Scandinavia, flowed into the territory. Encouraged and assisted by a well-mobilized missionary force and the economic sustenance of the church’s Perpetual Emigrating Fund, an estimated 80,000 Europeans settled into the Mormon kingdom by 1900, bringing with them their languages, customs, and foodways. Utah was, at this point, a global space, with a non-indigenous population that was over one-third immigrant. It was considerably more “international” in its demography than many other areas of the mountain west, and the percentage of foreign-born residents outstripped those of every western state but California. Visitors from abroad noticed this diversity, placing their evaluations of Utah alongside those of the Middle East and Africa rather than Illinois or New Jersey. The French naturalist Jules Remy spent a month in Salt Lake City in 1855 chronicling his impressions of the Mormons. Most striking, to his mind, was the cultural mix of its population and the orderliness with which they behaved: “It is a strange spectacle and one full of interest,” he wrote, and he enumerated the “English, Scotch, Canadians, Americans (these are for the most part the original converts of Joseph Smith), Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Germans, Swiss, Poles, Russians, Italians, French, Negroes, Hindoos, and Australians; we even saw a Chinese there.” The Mormons were a separate nation, in Remy’s account, “as little under the control of the government of the United States … as of the firmans of the Grand Turk.”2 How global, then, is the Mormon tradition? And, as a corollary question, we might ask, “How American is Mormonism?” Clearly, one way to answer these questions is historical: from what ideas and communities did the tradition first emerge? But there are other possible ways to characterize it. We might discuss whether a religion has an unchanging essence, and if so, to what is it attached? Is it theology? Is it demography? Is it architecture, sacraments, or literature? And ultimately, does it matter what we call it? This chapter explores the multiple measures of Mormonism (and, currently, of the largest of its institutional expressions, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) by focusing on the notion of Zion—first, as it emerged in relationship to a developing American nation, and second, as it is now being refigured in other parts of the world. I conclude with a case study, an extended example from New Zealand, where the ideal of Zion has taken surprising and complicated turns.

Zion and the American Nation Joseph Smith, Jr., spoke of the ideal of Zion almost immediately after the publication of the Book of Mormon and the founding of what was then the “Church of Christ.” In late 1830, as his followers increasingly were ridiculed by their opponents in upstate New York, Smith returned frequently to the powerful symbol of Zion, that ideal of a place and a people living under God’s protection in safety and peace. Deeply resonant with Jewish and Christian symbolism, the Zion ideal proved richly malleable as the Saints moved westward: First mentioned in the biblical second book of Samuel as a hill in Jerusalem, it

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also came to be used as a synecdoche for the entire city and later by Jews for the nation of Israel, a place of gathering for God’s chosen ones. New Testament writers added to these specific geographical references another layer of meaning: Zion could refer to the future promise of a community of believers unbounded by geography, a “holy city” or “New Jerusalem” promised to God’s elect in the millennium. Exactly how, when, and where this would happen is less clear. The timing of the restored Zion was not specified in the Christian scriptures: so, Jesus’ reference in the book of Matthew to a city “set on a hill,” which the Puritans took as their guide to the creation of a literal Godly society in Massachusetts Bay, could also be interpreted as a figurative individual state of being, a sacred beacon emanating from the individual Saint that could serve as a guide for the world. Finally, it could also connote not an enduring human construction project, but instead the divinely orchestrated, sudden appearance of a “new heaven and a new earth,” such as that described in the New Testament Book of Revelations, chapter 21.3 Ideas about the sacrality of the American landscape, the chosen role of Native Americans in divine history, and the future promise for the building up of the holy city of Zion on the American continent figured largely in early Mormon consciousness. Although the Book of Mormon itself contained no direct reference to “America,” the Saints commonly interpreted the narrative as referring to the arrival of Israelites in the New World. In 1838, Joseph Smith received a revelation that placed the Garden of Eden in Daviess County, Missouri, and another that located the rebuilt temple in nearby Jackson County. Moreover, despite the persecution encountered by Mormons in these regions, Joseph Smith, Jr., and other church leaders continued to pledge loyalty to the legitimacy of the U.S. government and tied an understanding of providence to its founding. In an 1833 revelation, Smith addressed the violence taking place in Clay County, Missouri, with a call for his followers to petition for redress. Speaking for God, he declared that “for this purpose have I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose, and redeemed the land by the shedding of blood” (D&C 101: 80). Sarah Barringer Gordon observes that Smith was intimately involved with the U.S. legal system, becoming enmeshed in over 200 lawsuits in his lifetime, presiding over courts and local government in Nauvoo, Illinois, and even running for the presidency of the United States himself when he determined that it might be the only way to obtain a hearing for Mormon grievances.4 How the Saints aligned their ideals with those of other Americans proved a vexing problem for the next seven decades. Reverence for the U.S. Constitution, and a willingness to make full use of governmental processes, was never divorced from a keen awareness of America’s national inadequacies and acknowledgment of the federal failure to protect a minority religious community. Their search for a place to build a New Jerusalem, along with their increasingly unorthodox religious views, set them at odds with their neighbors, with local and state officials, and eventually, with the U.S. federal government. In its early decades, Mormons were accused by detractors of being anti-democratic,

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heretical, and un-American. Throughout the nineteenth century, as the church waged its battle against the U.S. government over the practice of plural marriage, Mormons were likened to Muslims, despots, slaveholders, or Roman Catholics—in other words, they were figured as manifesting the antithesis of “American” values. For their part, church members castigated other Americans for their sinfulness and celebrated their own “peculiarity” as a virtuous mark of Christian resistance. Theological critiques peppered the missionary rhetoric of the Saints as they traveled to far-flung places excoriating the moral failings of “Babylon,” their term for all other Christian groups that often slid into condemnation of all other Americans. These dreams of Zion alongside an oblique loyalty to the U.S. government have issued in a complex and sometimes contradictory set of political entanglements. Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, vigorously pursued the possibility of establishing a separate nation, the state of Deseret, throughout his lifetime, because of his belief that the United States had corrupted the intentions of the founders and would be overthrown. Parley Pratt, perhaps the first systematizer of Mormon thought, articulated the distinctive set of loyalties and values that characterized Mormon nationalism in a fourth of July address in 1853. After valorizing the founding fathers and the Constitution, he parsed the difference between governmental principles and their (imperfect) execution: “If that Constitution be carried out by a just and wise administration, it is calculated to benefit not only all the people that are born under its particular jurisdiction, but all the people of the earth.”5 As one of the first Mormons to break the news publicly about the doctrine of plural marriage, Pratt felt with full force the power of the state to act “unwisely.” He had been imprisoned in 1838, along with other church leaders, after Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs issued an extermination order on the Mormons, a move that clearly contradicted LDS understandings of the First Amendment. Yet, his fourth of July speech also advocated territorial expansion in the name of the nation. He spoke admirably of the mineral and agricultural resources of Spanish America, noting that neighboring countries were “comparatively unoccupied” and, further, that they were in thrall to “priestcraft.” Like his Protestant compatriots, he boasted of American railroads, industries, schools, steam, and liberty of the press. He even predicted that eventually the rest of the world would be overwhelmed and would “bow to” the “superior greatness” of this country.6 Despite escalating conflicts, and even after the murder of Joseph Smith, Jr., and the exilic migration of over five thousand of his followers to the Salt Lake Basin, Mormons retained a distinctive loyalty to American principles and history. In August 1877, Wilford Woodruff (later to be named LDS Church president) avowed that he had been visited by the spirits of the dead. Over two nights, he wrote in his journal, the signers of the Declaration of Independence and fifty other “eminent men” questioned him about why he had not yet performed baptisms for them in the new St. George temple, where Woodruff presided. Months earlier, Brigham Young, prophet and leader of the church,

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assigned Woodruff to administer a new series of ordinances on behalf of the dead, including baptisms, sealings, plural marriages, and adoptions—all with the intention of allowing deceased persons who had not experienced the blessings of the Mormon restoration in this lifetime to be united with loved ones and choose salvation in the life to come. So, Woodruff got busy. Over the following week, he and his colleagues performed the necessary rites for the founding fathers, John Wesley, Christopher Columbus, and a number of U.S. presidents. Woodruff recalled this sacred series of events at an LDS General Conference meeting in 1898: “Those men who laid the foundation of this American government and signed the Declaration of Independence were the best spirits the God of heaven could find on the face of the earth. They were choice spirits, not wicked men. General Washington and all the men that labored for the purpose were inspired of the Lord.”7 An outsider might well have wondered at the timing of this set of events, coming as they did in the midst of escalating battles between the U.S. government and the Mormons over the practice of plural marriage. Yet it suggests the complicated relationship that this religious movement held to the nation that the Mormons had once fled but which had pursued and incorporated them. Framed by an understanding of history, scripture, and geography that embraced American chosenness but rejected dominant Protestant iterations, the Mormon assent to national identity rubbed up against emerging political and social patterns at many junctures. Nineteenth-century Mormons were nationalists in defiance of the federal government, and patriots whose religious beliefs placed them at odds with other conceptions of national unity and purpose. The nineteenth-century Zion ideal, in this sense, represented an alternative U.S. nationalism, one that was eventually forced into practical compliance but that has never completely released its hold on Mormon communal sensibilities. And the elasticity of the concept bore many meanings over time and in different ways: Zion sometimes referred to a collective, utopian ideal; sometimes to a unified people. It also denoted a geographic site, first in Missouri, then in Utah. And the Saints took the idea of “building Zion” as more than metaphor: it was also, as we shall see, a fully material construction zone. But Zion was— and is—also a metaphor, signifying a large tent with many dispersed stakes. Most recently, perhaps, it has denoted an internalized orientation to individual and communal striving. All of these images were and still are used to characterize the concept at the heart of Mormon fidelity.

Zion as America This stance of defiant and proud American disloyalty changed quickly after 1890, when the LDS Church publicly declared that it had renounced polygamy (a promise that was not fulfilled until after 1907). Almost immediately thereafter, Mormons began an aggressive effort to assimilate, and to claim the status of American patriots. Many writers—both inside and outside the Church—have characterized this transition as a relatively straightforward

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movement from isolation to accommodation, from a Mormon community able to set its own religious, political, and economic course to a group that had to learn to negotiate in American society as just one more religious denomination. And its most visible by-product, the eventual cessation of polygamy by members of the LDS Church, certainly reinforces the idea that Mormons were becoming one among many American churches. In exchange, leaders thereafter emphasized individual moral practices: tithing and the keeping of health codes (no tobacco, no alcohol) became the new markers of “Mormonness.” In other words, Mormons exchanged a communal code for a personal ascetic code.8 This story is true only in a very narrow sense, and only if one focuses exclusively on the primacy of personal choice and individual agency that have become hallmarks of Mormon teachings. It conveys the impression that ordinary Mormons, encouraged by their leadership, simply decided to start observing new behaviors to mark themselves as distinctive. In this way, they could still be different from other Americans, but different in a way that was similar to the ways that other religious groups expressed their difference: through food, dress, and individual giving of resources. In turn, the rhetoric of Zion gradually shifted as well, focusing more on the creation of internal discipline and affect as marks of a “Zion people.” While other understandings of Zion as a literal space never entirely disappeared, the desire to become American favored a more individualized, even “Protestant,” language of religious affiliation. This focus on individual piety and practice obscures the politics and institutional dimensions of this transition. It shortchanges the extent to which Mormon citizenship came with particular promises and perils for those outside the church as well as those inside. It also effaces the enduring significance of Zion as ideal and lived reality. Instead, it is more clarifying to see the Mormon entry into American public life in the twentieth century as a carefully orchestrated dance, a performance figured as an intricate set of actions and reactions, with each side constantly shifting its movements to consider the other’s latest gesture. Even this metaphor doesn’t precisely capture the negotiations taking place, since Mormons were dancing with multiple partners simultaneously, appealing in varying degrees to liberal religious reformers, the media, educators, and even Protestant evangelicals. Mormonism as a collective religious expression may have resolved one major issue by obeying the laws of the land. But individual church members, and the LDS Church as an institution, still had to figure out how to become part of the body politic, how to function simultaneously as Mormons and as American citizens. Seeing that shift in isolation also downplays the effects of generational change on LDS culture, which was still located almost exclusively in the intermountain west in 1910. By then a thriving mix of mostly second- and third-­ generation Euro-American immigrants, many of the Saints participated eagerly in the promises of U.S. citizenship, joining other new Americans in extolling a new national version of the “City on a Hill.” In this updated version, migrants from all nations would fuse into a harmonious community that would work together to build a new, divinely ordained society. As the immigrant writer

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Israel Zangwill noted optimistically, the nation could become a “crucible of love … the most violent antitheses of the past may be fused into a higher unity.” Surely, such sentiments appealed to LDS Church members, who were eager to put behind them the religious animosities of the previous century. Zangwill’s 1908 play “The Melting Pot,” which became one of the most successful Broadway plays ever produced, placed these aspirations in the mouth of its Russian Jewish immigrant hero, David Quixano. East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross—how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God. … What is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labour and look forward!9

Members of the LDS Church were thus both pushed by shifting internal notions of Zion, and also attracted to the opportunities presented by increased participation in a newly remade American nation, one that they could help build. Between the 1910s and 1960, the Saints worked to reinforce both of these “national” ideals, notions that increasingly became entwined. Thomas Simpson has carefully documented how LDS members fell “in love with America again” through their movement into larger academic networks; relationships built at schools such as Harvard, Columbia, MIT, Stanford, and Chicago led, in turn, to ongoing job opportunities and political appointments beyond Utah. By the 1930s, for instance, church leader J. Reuben Clark had moved into national political prominence. Clark had received a law degree from Columbia and had then served as an attorney in the department of state, undersecretary of state for Calvin Coolidge, ambassador to Mexico for Herbert Hoover, and both a delegate to the Pan-American Conference in Montevideo, Uruguay, as well as a member of the Foreign Bondholders Protective Council by Franklin D. Roosevelt. After years of public service, he returned to administration within the LDS Church itself, bringing years of bureaucratic acumen to his role as a counselor in the First Presidency. In this way, through the use of channels of education and politics, the world of Mormon Utah inched ever closer to the national networks of academic and professional power, forging ties cemented by shared intellectual sensibilities and liberal religious sympathies.10 The 1950s represented, in many respects, the apex of Mormon civic inclusion. If we are to judge on the basis of the practices of politics in everyday life—in the participation of Saints in the government and in the educational and business sectors, and in the acknowledgement of Mormon cultural achievements, this was the Mormon moment. The popular media of the 1950s heralded the Mormon business acumen and bevy of successful corporate leaders as a cause for admiration and gushed that their close-knit communities presented a model of civic cooperation. In 1952, Coronet magazine published an article entitled “Those Amazing Mormons,” in which Saints were described as

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“vigorous and independent.” A New York Times Magazine writer in 1952 lauded them for their welfare program and ability to care for members. In 1965, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Wallace Turner published The Mormon Establishment, an analysis of the LDS Church that traced its path from a small, homogeneous community with some radical economic and social ideas to a worldwide corporate and American entity. He admired the buildings lining Temple Square in Salt Lake City, he appreciated the vast church welfare system put into place during the Great Depression, and he favorably compared George Romney, then a potential contender for the Republic presidential nomination, with other moderate party members such as Mark Hatfield. With a few reservations, he concluded, he “found their doctrine to be humane, productive of progress, patriotic, wholesome and praiseworthy.” The Mormons, he concluded, had become a modern American church. And indeed, it was also the moment of peak demographic “Americanness” in the history of the movement: by 1947, membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had reached one million worldwide, with a record 92 percent of those living in the United States. In that era, the material and collective Zion of Utah, located in a divinely blessed American nation, attained its fullest expression.11

Maori Zion Ironically, by the 1950s, the LDS Church, following 120 years of assiduous missionary activity, also was on the verge of becoming a global church. After World War II, LDS missionaries returned to their labors in Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific, and church members who were members of the military service also spread word of the restored gospel abroad. International growth was also intimately tied to economic and political changes at home. Utah’s inland location, available workforce, and proximity to natural resources necessary for defensive purposes (such as tungsten and copper) had transformed the state into a strategically important wartime manufacturing site, and in turn the war effort equipped thousands of laborers with skills useful during the Marshall Plan and rebuilding of Japan. Church leaders such as Ezra Taft Benson, Secretary of Agriculture under Dwight D. Eisenhower, traveled the globe promoting U.S. agriculture and simultaneously boosted the international profile of the Church. David O. McKay, president of the LDS Church from 1951 to 1970, initiated the effort to discourage migration to the Utah Zion and instead promoted the building up of “stakes of the tent of Zion” throughout the world.12 Renewed efforts to instantiate the material New Jerusalem across the globe have been steady and successful for the last half century. By 1996, the number of church members outside the United States had surpassed domestic adherents. In recent years, the small temple building project of the church has prompted the construction of over 160 temples worldwide, so that members not living close to Utah can participate more easily in the promised blessings of temple ordinances. As of early 2020, the LDS Church sends out 65,000

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missionaries a year, who are trained in 11 missionary training centers, serve in 399 mission stations, and distribute church materials in 188 languages. LDS leaders currently claim just over 16 million members, of which 9.3 million live in North America; 4 million in South America; 494,000 in Europe; 621,000 in Africa; 1 million in Asia; and 562,000 in Oceania.13 Because of this long-standing evangelistic activity, the domestic LDS Church is more cosmopolitan than the general U.S. public, as indicated by high rates of multiple language acquisition in Utah. In 2011, the Economic Development Corporation of Utah reported that roughly one-third of the workforce in the state was bilingual. That skill level has, by all reports, increased its attraction as a promising site for business development. When the National Security Agency sought a place to house a “language-analyst” center they chose Provo, Utah, and cited the reputation of the Utah workforce facility with foreign languages for its choice. Recent growth in the IT industry along the Wasatch Front has also been attributed to the foreign language skills of Utah workers. Sixty-five percent of students at the church-run Brigham Young University in Provo speak one or more foreign languages, and nearly half have lived outside the United States for at least one year. The school is the top U.S. producer of foreign language degrees in Arabic, Russian, and Portuguese, and ranks third in the country overall. Far from enforcing cultural homogeneity, this enthusiastic encouragement of bilingualism would seem to indicate an embrace of demonstrable forms of difference. Further, it is a difference that contributes to the economic and political successes of the U.S.-based Church.14 Its effects, however, have not been the same in other parts of the world, sites where the ideal of Zion is equally compelling but more problematic, and where associations with an “American Zion” are not always welcomed. By way of response, U.S.-based church leaders have tried to focus on the creation of a “gospel culture” or a “celestial culture” that transcends, while still recognizing cultural and national differences. In church conferences and official publications, leaders stress the need to separate Mormon culture from other kinds of cultural practice. As leader Dallin Oaks explained in 2012, “gospel culture … is a distinctive way of life, a set of values and expectations and practices common to all members. … The Church teaches us to give up any personal or family traditions or practices that are contrary to the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ and to this gospel culture.” It is not always obvious, however, where gospel culture ends, and national or familial traditions begin. So, for example, Oaks also talks about those cultural practices “that may conflict with gospel culture,” such as weddings or funerals. He explained the problem using Africa as a case in point: local practices in some African cultures require people to go into enormous debt to pay for weddings; not only do “extensive travel and expensive feasts” conflict with gospel culture, Dallin asserted, but the need to save large sums of money for a wedding causes many couples to delay marriage, a practice that bumps up against the LDS encouragement to adults to begin family and childbearing as early as possible. So, too, in New Zealand, where Maori converts are instructed to relinquish the practice of facial

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tattooing because it is not part of gospel culture (but in Maori traditions is often linked to spiritual power). In some framings, gospel culture seems to cover a great deal of ground, although church leaders increasingly acknowledge that it should not be seen as coterminous with Utah mores and values.15 There is no single way in which this tension between “gospel culture” and a global church structure plays itself out. Therefore, a case study helps us explore the dimensions of this struggle in a specific location, in which the ideals of Zion are interlaced with national, communal, and familial ideals. Here, I focus attention on one example that illustrates the particular issues of affiliation that have arisen outside the United States, but which are also intimately related to American Mormon conceptions of purpose and loyalty: in other words, I examine how the “American” Zion and the global ideal of Zion both conflict and overlap. The case of indigenous Maori Mormonism in New Zealand highlights some of the institutional tensions and questions of religious authority that have arisen because of this swift international expansion and the multivalent nature of Zion. Dilemmas related to national identity, gender roles, racial dynamics, and class affinities assume different forms in different places, and church leadership, still centered spatially and psychologically in the Salt Lake Basin, has struggled to keep up with the range of challenges presented in the effort to foster a standardized “gospel culture.” Ra Puriri is a fifth-generation member of the LDS Church in New Zealand. Like many other Maori in that country, his family joined the church after the arrival of Mormon missionaries in the 1880s. The Saints, of course, were not the first pakeha (the term often used for non-Maori or “white” New Zealanders) to set their sights on the island: British imperial agents, merchants, and Christian missionaries of all sorts had established a substantial presence by 1840, when the islands were officially incorporated into the British Empire under the Treaty of Waitangi. But wars between settlers and indigenous inhabitants in the 1860s and 1870s had soured the Maori toward the promises of their colonizers. Maori Anglican converts, in particular, felt abandoned by missionaries and swindled by land confiscations, a sentiment summed up in a frequently repeated refrain: “You taught us to look up to heaven and stole the land from under our feet.” The arrival of Mormon missionaries independent of the British state apparatus and, in some respects, quite critical at the time of their own oppression under the U.S. government, was greeted by many Maori as a renewal of a purer Christian piety. It is estimated that, in the face of these political upheavals, perhaps 80–90 percent of the Maori (including some native Anglican clergy) joined the LDS Church. The movement offered, through conversion, both a spiritual and a cultural salvation in the face of certain cultural extinction.16 Prior to World War II, the distance of Maori church members from Utah also made it possible to creatively combine Mormon and Maori teachings, a feature that kept alive vital aspects of indigenous language, music, and dance. Sacrament meetings often were conducted in the marae, the traditional, spiritually infused complex belonging to a particular iwi (nation or tribe) used for

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communal celebrations and other meetings. Some contemporary Maori who were raised in this mid-century Mormon Maori communal environment credit Mormon missionaries with keeping alive their traditional ways of life. Rather than categorically stamping them out, American LDS missionaries, as Ian Barber has written, demonstrated a “range of conflicting cultural behaviours” in response to Maori practices. He notes that perhaps the single greatest conflict in the early twentieth century arose over the role of the tohunga-Maori or traditional religious practitioners, men and women who engaged in healing practices among their people. Both Mormon and non-Mormon Maori would visit them, and some tohunga themselves blended their rites with Christian teachings. In all of these ways, Maori Saints cemented the bonds between traditional indigenous culture and the “gospel culture” of their adopted church.17 For Ra Puriri and his kin, their identity as Latter-day Saints became inextricably connected to their endurance as an iwi. The Mormon focus on membership of Pacific peoples in the House of Israel, a concept introduced by the Anglicans, was further elaborated in LDS cosmology. Early church prophets and interpreters figured contemporary human beings as descendants of these biblical (and Book of Mormon) peoples and reasoned that different groups would have different roles to play in the unfolding of sacred history. That logic—of mapping scripturally based differences onto contemporary cultural and racial variation—endured through the 1960s and was especially salient for indigenous new world inhabitants or “Lamanites.” By the mid-twentieth century, the term Lamanites was used frequently to refer not just to indigenous North Americans, but also to Pacific Islanders and South Americans. All were presumed to be (potential) members of the chosen class of people to whom the Book of Mormon was directed. As one Maori church member recalls, “The fact that Mormonism saw my ancestry and weaved it into its theology offered me a sense of place and even confidence that no one else could.”18 The ideal of Zion also entered the iwi as a literal construction site. In the late 1940s, the Church decided to build a school, the Church College of New Zealand or CCNZ, for Maori Mormons because they were still, by and large, excluded from the British public educational system. Puriri’s family, along with hundreds of other church members (and some non-affiliated Maori), volunteered as “labour missionaries” to undertake construction of the college and the temple that rose outside of Hamilton, in an area that subsequently became known as Temple View. One of his grandfathers worked in the factory that made the cinderblocks used to build the college. Puriri’s father labored on the plumbing crew, and his mother in the construction office. Uncles and cousins worked as electricians, carpenters, and block layers. Church-owned housing around the temple further added to the sustenance of Mormon Maori community, linking the Zion of the iwi to the sacred site of the temple grounds. Meshweyla Macdonald, a graduate of CCNZ, recounted her grandfather’s work as a labor missionary: “He was not a member of the church but believed in the vision of building something significant that was specifically targeted toward growing and developing Maori youth and he wanted to contribute. He

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went on to join the church and send all but two of his children to Church College. My father met my mother at Church College.” Temple View currently is home to approximately 1200 residents, including a large number of multi-generational inhabitants.19 Even as this new stake of Zion was taking shape, as we have seen, political events back in the United States were shifting religious priorities within the LDS hierarchy. By the mid-twentieth century, Mormons had been accepted in the corridors of U.S. power as consummate insiders. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir was dubbed by American presidents as “America’s Choir,” and the patriotic narrative of westering migrants had been cemented in the popular imagination as a consummate American tale. If part of the impetus for the construction of temples throughout the world stemmed from the desire to bring the stakes of the “tent of Zion” to all believers, it came with an American set of aesthetics forged in this moment of high nationalism, an impulse at odds with the previous policy of leniency toward—and even approval of—indigenous adaptation. Gordon C. Young, appointed mission president in New Zealand in 1948, had expressed concern about the “sad moral state of the Maori” ever since his own missionary tour there in the 1920s. On his return to the island, he abruptly changed tactical course and circumscribed the bounds of “gospel culture” in ways that delegitimized many Maori customs. Elderly male rangatira, revered for their age and mana among their people, were replaced in church leadership by younger men of lesser status. Traditional funerary customs were phased out in favor of Mormon ritual patterns, a standardization made complete after the opening of the New Zealand temple in 1958. He also stepped up a strict enforcement of civil marriages, even among couples who, in keeping with Maori ways, had lived together for decades without legal proceedings. Under Young’s leadership, Mormon members, including those in long-standing relationships, were compelled to be legally married or face excommunication. Young excommunicated between 100 and 200 members for “sexual immorality” between 1950 and 1952.20 Not only did LDS leaders in the United States seek to standardize the behavior of “wayward” Maori members, they also sought to improve the church’s image abroad by upgrading areas surrounding temple grounds, including those in New Zealand. The modest Maori settlement at Temple View did not fit their image of an appropriately worshipful space—and the college was, by the 1970s, bleeding money. Thus, when church officials in Salt Lake City, faced with a changing economic and political climate, began to speak of shutting down the CCNZ and razing the buildings, they were met with the wrath of the Mormon iwi, including that of Ra Puriri. Puriri and other alumni and local residents in Temple View were distressed by the rationale offered by American church leaders that the workmanship of the original buildings was “shoddy” and could not be rehabilitated. Deeply offended by what they took as an insult to their family members, Puriri and others have been on a mission to save the church college buildings and block the planned eviction of families from church-owned structures. Although the CCNZ closed down

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in 2009, the past decade has witnessed ongoing debate over the future of the site.21 More than simply a real estate battle, or, more accurately, in addition to its significance as a real estate battle, since the materiality of the Zion ideal cannot be discounted,22 the conflict over CCNZ is a lesson in the meaning of loyalty to Zion in a church no longer defined exclusively by U.S. national ideals. On his website devoted to criticism of the planned redevelopment, Ra Puriri declares an alternative set of affiliations. He is still a church member, and considers himself a sympathetic, insider critic, but his condemnation juxtaposes church bureaucracy and its associated American mores to another set of ideals.23 He notes that the volunteer labor of his family members was mobilized by a school motto that enjoined workers to “Build for Eternity,” and the sad irony is not lost on him. He now connects his battle not just to a purer, less corporate, and de-Americanized Mormonism, but to his own nationalist ideals. “The request to demolish these historic structures is far more than simply granting permission to remove brick walls, windows, roofs and other materials from the site. These materials are a metaphor for ideals and principles that underpin the very democracy that is New Zealand,” he explains on his website. He concludes his exposition with the first stanza of one of the two national anthems of New Zealand: “God of nations at thy feet in the bonds of love we meet, here our voices we entreat God defend our free land.”24 In short order, the cause of Zion has thereby been linked to New Zealand national ideals. The anthropologist Ann Stoler has noted that “colonialism” is a term that is often used quite carelessly; it tends to frame all cultural interactions in terms of their relation to state power. But it obscures the fact that religious enterprises sometimes distinguished themselves quite consciously from national affiliation. The Mormon case is even more entangled: early Mormons did both. They valorized America but held fast to their own notion of a theocratic Zion, one that existed in multiple registers. As the movement spread abroad, and as the relationship of the LDS Church to the U.S. government shifted dramatically, ideals of Zion multiplied, creating new political and spiritual possibilities. For Mormon leaders, the sanctification of the area around Temple View is seen as a way to preserve sacred space, to provide the blessings of Zion to Mormons in New Zealand. The corporate developers of Temple View describe their goal to “protect the sanctity and environment of the Hamilton New Zealand temple and to re-purpose the previous school property in a way that complements and enhances the long-term family life and the economic vitality of the Temple View community.” They see this ideal, to be sure, in terms of their own American political and economic assumptions, with little awareness of the ideals that shape Maori conceptions of Zion. LDS Maori, in turn, frame their loyalties in terms of memory, identity, and iwi—albeit an iwi shaped by Mormon values and principles. Zion, for them, is integrally connected to the site of the CCNZ, the legacy of their ancestors, and an overarching linkage between community and spiritual vitality. A common Maori aphorism expresses

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this succinctly: “What is the most important thing in this world? I say to you it is people, it is people, it is people.”25 Many Maori, faced with these choices, have cast their lot with the institutional church. Most prominent, perhaps, is Rangi Parker, a woman now in her seventies who has worked with the church to build the Pacifika collections in the newly established Pacific Church History Museum—a building that occupies some of the real estate once taken up by the CCNZ. She too grew up in Temple View and values what it has provided to the Maori community. But for Parker, the LDS Church saved her tradition from certain extinction in the face of British control. Mormon missionaries were the only ones who valued and helped preserve her heritage, she notes. Parker has spent much of the last three decades traveling to the United States to bring back Maori items given to earlier missionaries: beads, a Maori feather cloak, everyday tools, and carved weapons all returned with her as taonga, or “treasures,” that sacralize indigenous ways of life. She also collected dozens of photographs taken by missionaries, including pictures of her own family from the 1930s that she had never seen before, and she retained excerpts from early missionaries who described the building of the CCNZ and temple by Maori laborers. Unlike Ra Puriri, Rangi Parker’s loyalties associate the preservation of the iwi with the institutional church, and she is grateful to see the ongoing efforts of the leadership to valorize her efforts. This story has yet to be fully resolved. The building projects continue at Temple View, although the church has backpedaled since 2013 and is working to win over the confidence of Maori members. Still, members have been evicted, many houses have been razed, and more are going up to be sold on the open market. Members of the Mormon iwi are in sharp disagreement over what the future should hold. The Matthew Cowley Pacific Church History Museum, opened in 2017 (and named after the early twentieth-century missionary most revered by LDS Maori as the guardian of their indigenous practices), provides state-of-the-art archival space and exhibits relating the history of Mormonism around the South Pacific, with special emphasis placed on the historic importance of the CCNZ. As the Museum website explains: Museum guests are greeted by an exuberant celebration of the Church College of New Zealand (CCNZ). For over 50 years, CCNZ was one of New Zealand’s premier coeducational boarding schools, educating thousands of youth from New Zealand and the South Pacific. Our exhibit invites former students to stroll down memory lane while giving others a glimpse into what campus life was like. From the school’s iconic basketball jump circle to the pulpit from which Church leaders spoke, the essence of CCNZ is now on display.26

For Ra Puriri, Meshweyla Macdonald, and others, the “essence” of the CCNZ lies elsewhere. It is unclear what kind of Mormons they will be. Like the early Utah pioneers, these Maori Mormons set the terms of their affiliations in ways that both honor and confound competing collective understandings.

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Zion, that early global vision enunciated by U.S.-based Mormons, also draws from a belief in Zion linked to a distinctive Maori history. Implemented first as a gathering concept, the ideal of Zion provides both a focal point, and, as we have seen, a source of tension, of accommodation, and of the enunciation of related but distinctive collective understandings. The term “gospel culture,” so frequently invoked by Utah leaders to indicate the unity of Mormon strivings, seems a flat and inadequate term to describe this variegated reality. One of the challenges of the global church, therefore, is to reconcile the longings for peoplehood and for physical space that have captured the hearts, minds, and bodies of a worldwide Zion. The situation of the Maori in New Zealand presents a perfect example of the deeply conflicted attitudes of indigenous converts to the church hierarchy. Here, Mormonism began as an anti-colonialist movement in the 1880s and 1890s, when Mormons were facing persecution at the hands of the U.S. government. Latter-day Saints offered, through conversion, both a spiritual and a cultural salvation to the Maori people, and many Maori still see Mormon missionaries as their community’s saviors. More recently, however, the growing bureaucratic structure of the church and its association with American values and mores has raised deep feelings of betrayal among some indigenous church members. This raises the problem that natives do not always “talk back” with a unified voice; in a postcolonial climate, where “choice” has become the watchword of our globalized societies, the concept of choice is forcing decisions about cultural practice where none existed previously.

Conclusion The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a global religious movement led by an American institution, and it has been so since its beginnings. A church of European immigrants in the nineteenth century inspired by a vision of a literal Zion, it donned the mantle of Americanness in the twentieth century, even as it was evangelizing abroad. As a result of its swift growth outside the United States after World War II, the LDS Church is now challenged to keep up with the movements that its own evangelism has generated in other parts of the world. The Zion ideal, elastic and capable of encompassing a variety of meanings, has also proved amenable to new interpretations. LDS Maori, encouraged by American missionaries to build their own Zion, now face the mandate to conform to standards that some of them consider U.S. national impositions on their original faith, and to choose between their iwi and their church. It remains to be seen how far the U.S.-based leadership can stretch to meet the needs of their indigenous brothers and sisters.

Notes 1. “Saints” is used by LDS Church members as an abbreviation of Latter-day Saints.

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2. Jules Remy and Julius Benchley, A Journey to Great-Salt-Lake-City, vol. 1 (London: W. Jeffs, 1861): 199–200. See also David M. Wrobel, Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013): 46–56. 3. On the multiple valences of Zion, see Ryan S Gardner, “A History of the Concepts of Zion and New Jerusalem in America From Early Colonialism to 1835 With A Comparison to the Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith,” Master’s thesis (Brigham Young University, 2002). On the endurance of the theme of the “City on a Hill” in the U.S. context, see Daniel T. Rogers, As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); and Abram C. Van Engen, City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). 4. Gordon, “Mormons and the Law,” in Terryl L. Givens and Philip L. Barlow, The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015): 592. Gordon also notes, however, that like most other Americans of his day, Smith and his followers had little understanding of the differences between state and federal governments, and of the protections to which they were entitled under either one. Sarah Barringer Gordon, Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002): 21. 5. “An Oration by Elder P. P. Pratt, Delivered at Great Salt Lake City, 1853, on the Anniversary of the 4th of July, 1776,” reported by G.D.  Watt, Journal of Discourses, vol. 1 (Liverpool: F.D. and S.W. Richards, 1854): 140. 6. Ibid., 140–41, 143. 7. The Year of Jubilee: A Full Report of the Proceedings of the Fiftieth Annual Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Held in the Large Tabernacle, Salt Lake City, Utah, April 6th, 7th and 8th, A.  D. 1880; Also a Report of the Exercises in the Salt Lake Assembly Hall, on the Sunday and Monday Just Preceding the Conference, Volume 1 (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret News Printing and Publishing Establishment, 1897): 89. 8. On this period of transition, see Thomas G. Alexander, Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890–1930 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1985). 9. Neil Larry Shumsky, “Zangwill’s ‘The Melting Pot’: Ethnic Tensions on Stage,” American Quarterly 27, no. 1 (March 1975): 30; Israel Zangwill, The Melting-­ Pot (New York: The American Jewish Book Company, 1921): n.p. at https:// www.gutenberg.org/files/23893/23893-h/23893-h.htm (accessed January 15, 2020). 10. Thomas W. Simpson, American Universities and the Birth of Modern Mormonism, 1867–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016): 1. On Clark’s career, see D.  Michael Quinn, Elder Statesman: The Biography of J. Reuben Clark (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002). 11. Dennis L. Lythgoe, “The Changing Image of Mormonism,” Dialogue 3, no. 4 (Winter 1968): 47, 48; Wallace Turner, The Mormon Establishment (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965): 331; Brandon S. Plewe, ed., Mapping Mormonism:

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An Atlas of Latter-day Saint History (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2012): 156. 12. Todd Forsyth Carney, “Utah and Mormon Migration in the Twentieth Century: 1890 to 1955” Master’s thesis (Utah State University, 1992): 51; Patrick Q. Mason, “Ezra Taft Benson and Modern (Book of) Mormon Conservatism,” in Out of Obscurity: Mormonism Since 1945, eds. Patrick Q.  Mason and John G. Turner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016): 64–65. 13. Statistics are frequently updated on the official church website at https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/facts-and-statistics# (accessed February 1, 2020). 14. For more on the linkages between economic development and language skills, see Terry Greene Sterling, “Utah: An Economy Powered by Multilingual Missionaries,” The Atlantic (July 23, 2012), at https://www.theatlantic.com/ politics/archive/2012/07/utah-an-economy-powered-by-multilingual-missionaries/428250/; and Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Development 2011 Annual Report and Business Resource Guide, available at https://issuu.com/ goed/docs/annual-report-2011. See also “Which Colleges Grant the Most Bachelor’s Degrees in Foreign Languages?” The Chronicle of Higher Education (January 29, 2019), at https://www.chronicle.com/article/Which-CollegesGrant-the-Most/245567 (accessed January 15, 2020). 15. Dallin H. Oaks, “The Gospel Culture,” delivered during a regional stake and district conference broadcast to Africa on November 21, 2010, emphasis added, at https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2012/03/the-gospelculture?lang=eng (accessed February 10, 2019). 16. Quoted by Peter Lineham, “The Mormon Message in the Context of Maori Culture,” in Tanya Storch, ed., Religions and Missionaries around the Pacific, 1500–1900 (New York: Routledge, 2006): 272. These estimates, however, rarely take into account attrition rates, since the Church only records baptisms. It also does not consider the high probability that Mormons simultaneously retained ties to other churches or newer prophetic movements. 17. Maori often consider the marae their tūrangawaewae, a concept that one author has described as “places where we feel especially empowered and connected. They are our foundation, our place in the world, our home.” [Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal, 'Papatūānuku—the land—Tūrangawaewae—a place to stand', Te Ara—the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/papatuanuku-the-land/page-5 (accessed January 15, 2020).] In other words, a concept bearing resemblance to the Mormon notion of Zion; Ian Barber, “Between Biculturalism and Assimilation: The Changing Place of Maori Culture in the Twentieth-Century New Zealand Mormon Church,” New Zealand Journal of History 29, no.2 (October 1995): 147. 18. Gina Colvin, “Mormon Becoming at the Colonial Outposts: Embracing the Radical Praxis of Uncertainty” (unpublished manuscript, March 24, 2017), typescript. 19. Stephen Dark, “Temple View: An Interview with a New Zealand Campus Activist,” Salt Lake City Weekly (June 11, 2017), at https://www.cityweekly. net/BuzzBlog/archives/2017/06/11/temple-view (accessed October 15, 2019). 20. Barber, “Between Biculturalism,” 164. 21. Similar struggles to “gentrify” areas around temples have also affected La‘ie, Hawai‘i; Philadelphia, and even Ogden, Utah, in recent years. The rationale

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from the church hierarchy is that the approach to these sites is also sacred ground and should be cleared of undesirable sights (and people). 22. There is much more to be said here about the economics of the church. Ra Puriri is quite critical of church finances and the uses of tithing. As Gina Colvin has also pointed out, the fact that the prophet and president of the church is both an ecclesiastical leader and the president of a corporation means that spiritual and financial roles are easily conflated. What kind of authority is being invoked in any given situation? A corporate or a prophetic role? See Colvin, “The Church College of New Zealand, Temple View Saga  – Dialogues with Meshwayla MacDonald, Jodhi Warrick & James Ord,” A Thoughtful Faith podcast, episode 071–074, https://www.athoughtfulfaith.org/072-074thechurch-college-of-new-zealand-temple-view-saga-dialogues-with-meshwaylamcdonald-jodhi-warrick-james-ord/ (accessed February 23, 2019). 23. In fall 2015, Puriri traveled from New Zealand to Utah to voice his dissent in the LDS General Conference to the transformation of Temple View. In Meshweyla Macdonald’s words, the proposed development looked like nothing more than “a modern suburb in Utah,” quoted in Stephen Dark, “Warrior Spirit,” Salt Lake City Weekly (June 7, 2017), at https://www.cityweekly.net/ utah/warrior-spirit/Content?oid=4802182. 24. Rakaipaka Olsen Ahmu Puriri, “In the Matter of the Application for Resource Consent for the Demolition of Buildings in Temple View by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 4 December 2013,” Slideshare.net, https:// www.slideshare.net/kiakaha/satement-of-rakaipaka-o-puriri-ahmu (accessed October 12, 2020). 25. Ann Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002): 141; this language previously appeared on the Temple View official website for the development, but the website appears to have been shut down sometime in 2019. The same language was posted on the LDS Church website in the New Zealand News section, April 19, 2013: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Building Faith, Family, and for the Future in Temple View,” https://pacific. churchofjesuschrist.org/news/2013/building-faith-families-and-for-thefuture-in-temple-view?lang=eng-nz (accessed February 1, 2020); Peter Larmour, The Governance of Common Property in the Pacific Region (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2013): 100–101; also cited in Rangi Parker, My Kia Ngawari Journey (N.P.: Rangi Parker, 2010), 8, in the author’s possession. 26. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Introduction to the Pacific Church History Museum,” https://history.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/ introduction-to-the-pacific-church-histor y-museum?grou pid=11167839727010956570-eng&lang=eng (accessed January 15, 2020).

Bibliography Alexander, Thomas G. 1986. Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890–1930. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Barber, Ian. 1995. Between Biculturalism and Assimilation: The Changing Place of Maori Culture in the Twentieth-Century New Zealand Mormon Church. New Zealand Journal of History 29 (2): 142–169.

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Carney, Todd Forsyth. 1992. Utah and Mormon Migration in the Twentieth Century: 1890 to 1955. Master’s thesis, Utah State University. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 2013. Building Faith, Families and the Future in Temple View. Published April 19. https://pacific.churchofjesuschrist. org/news/2013/building-faith-families-and-for-the-future-in-templeview?lang=eng-nz. ———. 2017. Introduction to the Pacific Church History Museum. Published May 30. https://history.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/introduction-to-the-pacificchurch-history-museum?groupid=11167839727010956570-eng&lang=eng. Colvin, Gina. 2014. The Church College of New Zealand, Temple View Saga  – Dialogues with Meshwayla MacDonald, Jodhi Warrick & James Ord. A Thoughtful Faith. Podcast audio. October 12. https://www.athoughtfulfaith.org/072-074 the-church-college-of-new-zealand-temple-view-saga-dialogues-with-meshwaylamcdonald-jodhi-warrick-james-ord/. ———. 2017. Mormon Becoming at the Colonial Outposts: Embracing the Radical Praxis of Uncertainty. Unpublished manuscript, March 24, typescript. Oaks, Dallin H. 2010. The Gospel Culture. Lecture, Regional Stake and District Conference Broadcast to Africa. November 21. https://www.churchofjesuschrist. org/study/ensign/2012/03/the-gospel-culture?lang=eng. Dark, Stephen. 2017a. Temple View: An Interview with a New Zealand Campus Activist. Salt Lake City Weekly, June 11. https://www.cityweekly.net/BuzzBlog/ archives/2017/06/11/temple-view. ———. 2017b. Warrior Spirit. Salt Lake City Weekly. June 7. https://www.cityweekly. net/utah/warrior-spirit/Content?oid=4802182. Flake, Kathleen. 2003. The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Gardner, Ryan S. 2002. A History of the Concepts of Zion and New Jerusalem in America From Early Colonialism to 1835 With A Comparison to the Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith. Master’s thesis, Brigham Young University. Gordon, Sarah Barringer. 2015. Mormons and the Law. In The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, ed. Terryl L. Givens and Philip L. Barlow, 591–605. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2002. Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-­ Century America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Irvine, John, and George F. Gibbs. (Reporters). 1897. The Year of Jubilee: A Full Report of the Proceedings of the Fiftieth Annual Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Held in the Large Tabernacle, Salt Lake City, Utah, April 6th, 7th and 8th, A. D. 1880 ; Also a Report of the Exercises in the Salt Lake Assembly Hall, on the Sunday and Monday Just Preceding the Conference. Volume 1. Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret News Printing and Publishing Establishment: 88–90. Larmour, Peter. 2013. The Governance of Common Property in the Pacific Region. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Lineham, Peter. 2006. The Mormon Message in the Context of Maori Culture. In Religions and Missionaries around the Pacific, 1500-1900, ed. Tanya Storch, 257–288. New York: Routledge. Lythgoe, Dennis L. 1968. The Changing Image of Mormonism. Dialogue 3 (4): 45–58. Mason, Patrick Q. 2016. Ezra Taft Benson and Modern (Book of) Mormon Conservatism. In Out of Obscurity: Mormonism Since 1945, ed. Patrick Q.  Mason and John G. Turner, 63–80. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Parker, Rangi. 2010. My Kia Ngawari Journey. N.P.: Rangi Parker. Plewe, Brandon S., ed. 2012. Mapping Mormonism: An Atlas of Latter-day Saint History. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press. Puriri, Rakaipaka Olsen Ahmu. 2013. In the Matter of the Application for Resource Consent for the Demolition of Buildings in Temple View by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 4 December. https://www.slideshare.net/kiakaha/ satement-of-rakaipaka-o-puriri-ahmu. Quinn, D. Michael. 2002. Elder Statesman: The Biography of J. Reuben Clark. Salt Lake City: Signature Books. Remy, Jules, and Julius Benchley. 1861. A Journey to Great-Salt-Lake-City. Vol. 1. London: W. Jeffs. Rogers, Daniel T. 2018. As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Royal, Te Ahukaramū Charles. 2007. Papatūānuku  – the land  - Tūrangawaewae  – a place to stand. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. September 24. http:// www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/papatuanuku-the-land/page-5. Shipps, Jan. 1985. Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Shumsky, Neil Larry. 1975. Zangwill’s ‘The Melting Pot’: Ethnic Tensions on Stage. American Quarterly 27 (1): 29–41. Simpson, Thomas W. 2016. American Universities and the Birth of Modern Mormonism, 1867-1940. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Sterling, Terry Greene. 2012. Utah: An Economy Powered by Multilingual Missionaries. The Atlantic, July 23. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/ utah-an-economy-powered-by-multilingual-missionaries/428250/. Stoler, Ann. 2002. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press. Turner, Wallace. 1965. The Mormon Establishment. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Development 2011 Annual Report and Business Resource Guide. 2011. Salt Lake City: Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Development. https://issuu.com/goed/docs/annual-report-2011. Watt, G.D. reporting. 1854. An Oration by Elder P. P. Pratt, Delivered at Great Salt Lake City, 1853, on the Anniversary of the 4th of July, 177. Journal of Discourses. Vol. 1. Liverpool: F.D. and S.W. Richards: 137-143. “Which Colleges Grant the Most Bachelor’s Degrees in Foreign Languages?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 29, 2019. https://www.chronicle.com/ article/Which-Colleges-Grant-the-Most/245567. Wrobel, David M. 2013. Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Van Engen, Abram C. 2020. City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Zangwill, Israel. 1921. The Melting-Pot. New  York: The American Jewish Book Company. Project Gutenberg Ebook.

CHAPTER 6

The Dynamics of LDS Growth in the Twenty-­First Century David G. Stewart Jr.

Introduction The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) has somewhat improbably become a quintessential American faith.1 Members of the LDS Church have been lauded for socially constructive and civic-minded behaviors. Even the faith’s critics have acknowledged that modern Latter-day Saints are well known for their high moral code, chastity, honesty, observance of the Sabbath Day, emphasis on family life, generosity, and care for the poor.2 Social research has found that LDS Church members are among the most educated US Christian groups,3 have higher average incomes, experience increased longevity,4 and a list of additional social virtues. Whereas religiosity has tended to decline with higher education among most other groups, highly educated members of the LDS faith tend to be more active in their church.5 Many LDS members have achieved considerable business success.6 The state of Utah has become a contemporary place of opportunity and economic mobility, at least in part due to aspects of its dominant Mormon culture.7 Expansion of Mormonism around the world figures prominently in LDS theology. Joseph Smith, the faith’s founding prophet, stated in 1834 that “This Church will fill North and South America—it will fill the world.”8 The LDS Church teaches that it is God’s earthly organization, tasked to gather faithful believers in preparation for Christ’s Second Coming. It represents itself as the biblical book of Daniel’s stone, “cut out of the mountain without hands,” which will roll forth to fill the earth, although “its members will still be

D. G. Stewart Jr. (*) Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, University of Nevada Las Vegas School of Medicine, Las Vegas, NV, USA © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_6

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relatively few.”9 Mormon scripture cites that proclaiming the gospel is the activity of greatest worth to believers.10 Representative of many other LDS Church proclamations, President Spencer W. Kimball affirmed that sharing the faith’s message of Christ’s gospel represents “a universal need, and there must be universal coverage.”11 How well has the LDS Church fulfilled its own mandates for growth, and what are its future development prospects in the world at large? Both institutional (or intrinsic) and societal (or extrinsic) factors offer insight into future growth prospects of the LDS Church. Projections based on the forward extrapolation of current growth rates are bound to fail, because the assumption of constant rates does not correspond either to historical church data or to likely future outcomes. Rates across a range of LDS growth indicators have in fact changed markedly over the past several decades. Contemporary social and institutional dynamics suggest likely substantive changes in LDS Church approaches to growth-related issues in the future. Any projection must acknowledge uncertainties, including currently unforeseen developments that may materially impact future results. Nonetheless, today’s realities reflect the consequence of yesterday’s choices, and tomorrow’s results will arise in large part from factors currently at work. The aggregate consideration of growth dynamics, current trajectories, and influencing factors can offer a framework for evaluating likely future outcomes. Growth will also reflect future institutional decisions. Organizational decisions made by religious faiths facing similar external conditions have at times led some to thrive and others to falter. While considerable uncertainty also applies to future organizational decisions yet to be made by the LDS Church, the collective evaluation of the Church’s current needs, historical practices, contemporary priorities, and internal deliberative processes can help to inform projections of future institutional initiatives and adaptations relevant to church growth. This chapter will briefly review recent LDS international growth data and trends before examining various institutional and societal dynamics which impact this growth. These data will then be considered together to assess LDS future growth prospects and to make recommendations that could improve these prospects.

Historical Success Versus Present Realities Growth Trajectory Joseph Smith formally organized the Church of Christ (later renamed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) in 1830 with a total of only six members, including himself. At year-end 2018, the LDS Church reported 16,313,735 members in 30,536 congregations, including 65,137 full-time missionaries and 37,963 church service missionaries.12 For a period covering less than 200 years, these are impressive growth numbers per se. In 1984,

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Sociologist Rodney Stark concluded that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints was emerging as a “new world religion … on the threshold of becoming the first major faith to appear on earth since the Prophet Mohammed rode out of the desert.”13 Stark projected approximately 4 percent annual membership growth going forward from 1980 (based on prior growth rates reported by the LDS Church up to that time). His most conservative formulation estimated that, within approximately 100 years (2080), LDS total membership worldwide would be close to 64 million. Keeping track of his projections, Stark noted in 1996 that growth over the prior fifteen years had exceeded his “highest projection by almost a million members.”14 Also in 1996, Bennion and Young projected that there would be between 36.4 and 121 million LDS members worldwide,15 while acknowledging that “this prediction … may well prove wrong.”16 Since that time, LDS membership growth has decelerated rapidly, falling from over 5 percent in the late 1980s to 2.03 percent in 2013 and 1.21 percent in 2018.17 Annual convert baptisms per missionary halved from 7.6 in 1990 to 3.6 in 2018. In 2017, LDS growth rates declined to their lowest levels since 1937, and convert baptisms fell to a thirty-year low. In 2018, growth receded further as baptisms of “children of record” (i.e. children belonging to already member parents) dropped to 102,102, and convert baptisms changed little from the prior year at 234,332 (compared to the 1990 total of 330,000, the highest number of one-year convert baptisms reported in LDS history). The suspension of in-person proselytism and recall of many missionaries worldwide at the time of this writing, due to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic,18 will likely lead to a further decline in church growth (see a similar projection by Evans in Chap. 30). More concerningly, only a fraction of members claimed by the Church are active. It is unclear what it means to refer to over 16 million members of the LDS Church today, or what projections based in official membership numbers mean, when only a fraction of nominal members participate in church activities or identify the LDS Church as their faith of preference. Many of the trends which factored in the decline in LDS Church growth over the past two decades were present, and information was available about them at the time, but they were not considered in the projections of Stark, Bennion and Young, and some others. Issues dampening LDS growth were systematically identified in this author’s 2003 report.19 These trends have been further expounded in part by other researchers.20,21,22 Systematic and robust evaluation of both institutional and societal data is necessary for a realistic appraisal of future growth prospects.

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Real Growth Nominal Membership Growth Versus Activity and Congregational Growth The challenges of LDS growth are much greater than official membership numbers suggest: church-reported membership statistics do not take into account the actual level of participation or current belief in LDS teachings of members of record. Phillips observes that “the church meticulously counts those who join but does not attend to those who leave.”23 There is thus a substantial gap between counting people who are formally baptized as members of record and counting people who actually consider themselves to be LDS. Census and sociological data from other sources indicate that LDS official figures correlate with self-identified religious preference at a rate of 90 percent for LDS members in the United States but only 28 percent for international members of record.24 Church leaders have cited theological reasons for their membership counting practice, which is unlikely to change.25 A majority of new members in fact are not retained. Many years ago, sociologist Armand Mauss observed that LDS congregational growth trending far below nominal membership growth was a “clear indication of a retention problem.”26 Subsequently Mauss observed in 2001 that “75 percent of foreign [LDS] converts are not attending church within a year of conversion. In the United States, 50 percent of the converts fail to attend after a year.”27 International convert retention rates have been low for decades prior to these observations.28 Based on weighted data from national censuses, Lawson  and Xydias estimated the number of self-identified Latter-day Saints worldwide in 2017 at 8.6 million, or just over half of the Church’s nominal 16.1 million members at the time (compared to 27.7 million self-identifying as Adventists and 17.2 million as Jehovah’s Witness).29 LDS Church attendance rates are lower than self-­ identified religious preference, although member participation varies widely by country. In 1992, weekly church attendance was estimated to be approximately 40–50 percent in North America, 35 percent in Europe and Africa, and 25 percent in Asia and Latin America.30 Activity rates have declined modestly since that time. Overall member activity worldwide, or the number who attend at least once monthly, is now estimated at approximately 30–33 percent, or approximately 5 million of the 16.4 million nominal LDS members of record31 Another 10–15 percent may be “less-actives,” that is, those who attend occasionally. Congregations cannot be formed without active members. Between 1981 and 2017, nominal Mormon membership increased nearly 3.3 times, from 4,936,000 to 16,118,169 (a 2 percent annual increase), while the number of LDS congregations increased only 2.3 times, from 13,213 to 30,506.32 (By comparison, over this same period, Jehovah’s Witness congregations nearly

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tripled from 43,000 to 120,00033 and Seventh-day Adventist congregations quadrupled from 21,861 to 86,576.34) In 2005, 180,000 or 10 percent of LDS members in Utah35 and (as one example) 200,000 of the 535,000 nominal members in Chile (37 percent)36 were on what is termed the Address Unknown File, meaning that the Church cannot locate them. Those without a known address are maintained on the LDS membership rolls until age 110,37 some 38 years longer than the median worldwide life expectancy in 2016.38 Ministering to the church’s many lost and disaffiliated members is not a costless activity. It drains energy and resources that could otherwise be directed to community outreach and can sap the enthusiasm of active members in  local congregations. Statistical analysis of recent LDS growth demonstrates that countries with higher rates of LDS member disaffiliation experience an inhibitory “drag” on their future membership and congregational growth that is in excess of merely a “free rider” effect.39 Fertility and Demographics The birth rate of LDS members in the United States averaged approximately one child more than the national average in the late twentieth century.40 This birth rate has been a key driver of church growth and increase in the full-time missionary force. The Pew Research Center reported in 2015 that eight in ten US Mormons had a spouse or partner within the faith and that Mormons age 40–50 had an average of 3.4 children.41 Few LDS members outside of the United States, however, have large families. Heaton reported in 1989 that Latter-day Saints in Britain and Japan had higher fertility rates at that time than the national average in their countries, but fertility was lower than the national average in other countries, like Mexico.42 However, contemporary Mormons have been marrying later and having fewer children. The 2016 Next Mormons Survey found that adult LDS members in the United States had a mean of 2.42 children, and that 57 percent of Mormon Gen X-ers had zero, one, or two children.43 LDS couples today are divorcing more frequently than non-LDS couples a generation ago. This trend was already emerging some years back; sociologist Timothy Heaton reported from his studies in the late 1990s that the divorce rate of US Mormons lagged only 5–10 percent behind the national average of 50 percent.44 The increasing uncertainty of Mormon marriages, intended to endure for “time and all eternity,” coupled with modern financial pressures, have made higher education and full- or part-time employment necessities for most LDS women. Brigham Young University sociologist Marie Cornwall noted back in 2002 that US Latter-day Saint women “have one more child than the national average, [and] are in the labor force at the same rate as other women, but [are] more likely to be in low-paying jobs.”45 Declining viability of traditional gender roles in modern societies makes a substantial increase in future LDS birth rates unlikely. The LDS Church’s emphasis on marrying within the faith has posed a challenge for members in Europe and other areas with small LDS populations and

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therefore few eligible marital partners. European members (and presumably in other countries as well) sometimes feel pressured into marrying an LDS partner who may not be an ideal match and with whom they have had limited opportunity for acquaintance; others remain single.46 Those who choose to marry a non-member often struggle to remain active in the church and to transmit LDS beliefs and values to their children. Retention of Children The LDS Church has historically retained most of its US member children. In the 1990s, Albrecht noted that 22 percent of US Latter-day Saints remained active lifelong, whereas another 44 percent returned after periods of inactivity.47 The Pew Research Center reported in 2015 that 64 percent of US adults raised as Mormons still identified as Mormons.48 The Pew study reports that Mormons are remaining stable as a proportion of the US population,49 but this proportion is no longer growing. The LDS Church has maintained higher levels of vitality and member commitment relative to other Christian groups also experiencing attrition.50 US Mormons are more likely to be politically conservative than the general population, and those who are moderately politically liberal are more likely to disaffiliate.51 Some Christians (including some Mormons), especially well-educated ones, have been able to reconcile their faith with support for socially progressive causes, arguing that the differences are matters of tradition and interpretation and not the core Christian message. Nevertheless, LDS youth retention is eroding. Riess reports that whereas approximately 50 percent of members in prior generations remained active in the LDS Church, only 25 percent of Millennials remained active, with an average age of 19 at disaffiliation.52 The combination of declining birth rates and declining youth retention creates a demographic “math problem” for the LDS Church.53 The intergenerational transmission of Mormonism in its heartland (the intermountain-west area of the United States) has now fallen below the replacement rate. Based on demographic data, sociologist Ryan Cragun predicts that members of the LDS Church are likely to be a minority in Utah by the 2040s.54 These demographic facts have an impact on convert growth through proselyting: The LDS missionary effort has experienced diminishing results from compounding factors of declining birth rates, which result in fewer young people available at mission ages (18 for males, 19 for females), fewer young people serving missions (due to lower youth retention), and fewer converts per missionary.

LDS International Growth Prospects in Different Regions of the World How do the general LDS demographic and growth trends reviewed above play out in different areas around the world?

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Africa The contemporary LDS Church has achieved some of its highest growth rates in Africa (as well as its highest member activity rates for an area of convert-­ based growth) and also high rates of native missionary service.55 Over half of world births from 2010 to 2050 are expected to be in Sub-Saharan Africa,56 which is expected subsequently to be the only world region experiencing substantial population growth.57 Africa will therefore be one of the LDS Church’s key future markets. In 2019, just 35 of the 399 LDS missions worldwide were in Africa, yet mission resources are increasingly being allocated there: four of the eight new LDS missions announced in 2020 were in Africa.58 Among 47 nations of Sub-Saharan Africa, the LDS Church reported 620,960 members in 2018, up from 153,451 in 2000 (an increase of 305 percent). Over this period, the number of congregations grew commensurately from 564 to 2145 (281 percent increase). Activity across the region was estimated at approximately 43 percent in 2013, with wide variation from a low of approximately 23 percent in Uganda to 75–80 percent in Rwanda, Gabon, and Burundi.59 These higher rates reflect areas where congregations have been established relatively recently and are likely to diminish in time. LDS membership is skewed toward West Africa and South Africa. In 2018, the LDS Church reported 730 nominal members in Burundi, 748 in Rwanda, 1726 in Tanzania, 1933 in Ethiopia, and 16,823 in Uganda. The LDS Church has a larger presence in West Africa, reporting 83,651 members in Ghana and 177,280 in Nigeria. (By way of comparison, the Seventh-day Adventist Church reported an average weekly church attendance in 2017 of 133,362 in Burundi, 542,057 in Rwanda, 400,045 in Tanzania, and 154,200 in Ethiopia, 251,815 in Uganda, 171,767 in Ghana, and 205,929 in Nigeria.60) The LDS Church did not convey its lay priesthood to individuals of African descent before the “1978 Priesthood Revelation.”61 Thus organized LDS proselytism in Sub-Saharan Africa has only been possible for about forty years, and missionaries did not, in fact, enter a number of African nations for many years following the 1978 policy change. Due primarily to its delayed entry over several decades, compared to its religious competitors, the LDS Church remains very small in Africa. Salt Lake Tribune Religion editor, Peggy Fletcher Stack, has reported that the LDS Church is referred to by some in Ghana as the “rich church” due to its large Western-style meetinghouses.62 But the “rich church” is also the small church, as the high financial cost of the LDS paradigm, which requires intensive foreign investment in each local congregation, poses barriers to expansion and allows only slow, measured growth. There are also questions about the scalability of the LDS growth model. Whereas the American LDS Church may be able to carry the expenses of construction and maintenance of the current number of foreign meeting houses, allowing room for gradual expansion, it is less clear that this model would be financially sustainable if there were ten or a hundred times as many new meetinghouses.

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In Botswana and other nations of Sub-Saharan Africa, LDS young women struggle with the requirement for chastity in societies in which bearing children out of wedlock is the norm, and marriage involves an ongoing negotiation between extended families over a period of years.63 LDS Church groups support and fellowship young women who have children out of marriage and encourage ongoing church activity. But converting and retaining whole nuclear families, with male heads of household as potential lay priesthood holders, is an elusive objective (as it is in many African countries). Overall prospects remain favorable for continued LDS growth in many predominately Christian regions of Sub-Saharan Africa. However, the absolute number of African members remains small, and the high foreign investment in individual congregations constrains growth potential. Asia The LDS Asia mission region contains approximately 60 percent of the world’s population and is home to twenty LDS mission fields in mainland countries (which is only about 5 percent of total extant LDS missions). By comparison, in the islands of the Philippines, there are a total of twenty-three missions. Nominal LDS membership in East Asia rose from 731,647  in 2000 to 1,164,069 in 2018, an increase of 59 percent. However, it is estimated that only around 226,000 East Asian members are active. Correspondingly, the number of congregations increased just 3.6 percent during this same time frame, from 1860 to 1928. Most LDS members of record are in the Philippines, with sizable numbers also in Japan (129,858), South Korea (88,418), and Taiwan (61,034). In the Philippines, nominal LDS membership grew 67 percent—from 470,486  in 2000 to 785,164  in 2018—while the number of congregations increased just 6 percent, from 1157 to 1227. Active Philippine membership is estimated at just under 20 percent, or about 150,000 people who attend church regularly and fulfill church-assigned “callings.” Apostle Dallin Oaks was assigned to the Philippines in the early 2000s to troubleshoot problems of convert retention and member attrition. Recent reports suggest that convert retention rates have risen markedly with better teaching and preparation of new converts. The LDS Church thus seems to have modest prospects for future growth in the Philippines, although vast numbers of inactive and disaffiliated members will continue to divert time and resources away from new outreach, and it will take decades for active LDS membership to approach current member activity norms. China requires separate congregations for LDS native and foreign members, but proselytizing outreach is highly restricted, and official church statistics are not published. In Indonesia, a nation of 264 million, the LDS Church reported 7477 nominal members in 2018, up from 5375 in 2000, but current active membership is estimated at fewer than 3000. (By contrast, in 2017, the Seventh-day

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Adventist Church reported average church attendance of 146,351 in its two Indonesian Unions.64) In South Asia, the LDS Church is located mainly in India, with some members in Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Membership in these countries increased from 3964  in 2000 to 15,592  in 2018, with an estimated 6000 currently active members. The number of congregations over this same period increased from thirty-one to sixty-five. The recent growth trajectory suggests that the LDS Church is unlikely to gain significant traction in India. Among other obstacles, the Indian government only permits into the country a limited complement of foreign missionaries from a particular religious faith. From 2014 to 2018, LDS membership in India increased from 12,257 to 13,570, an increase of just 2.6 percent annually. If LDS growth were to continue at this rate into the future, by 2068 there would still be under 50,000 nominal Latter-day Saints in India, including fewer than 20,000 active members. Relative to the overall population of India (which stood at 1.33 billion in 2018), the number of Mormons, active or not, will be tiny. (In contrast, in 2017, the Seventh-day Adventist Church reported average church attendance of 791,398 in India.65) Low LDS growth in major population centers of Asia does reflect a number of external obstacles, including government restrictions and lack of cultural receptivity in largely non-Christian nations. Nonetheless, the LDS Church has erected additional barriers to growth, including mandating that most church services be held in English, entering few new areas that would be open to proselytizing, and failing to translate church materials into major languages spoken by tens of millions (which would require recruitment of many native speakers to assist in such an enterprise). Few native missionaries have been recruited, and local member missionary programs remain weak. Such outcomes do not appear to comport with the Church’s professed mandate for reaching every individual in their own language.66 Contemporary LDS paradigms do not appear to allow for more than meager growth and auger no real prospect of achieving wide outreach or becoming a major faith in the Asian region. Europe LDS membership in Western Europe was reported as being 378,114 members in 2000, which grew to 456,327 by 2018. Of the current number, an estimated 99,000 are active members. However, the number of Western European congregations over this period declined from 1320 in 2000 to 1109 in 2018, reflecting a decline in active membership. This decline is well illustrated in Holland, where, in 1996, Van Beek observed that “almost all older [LDS] couples have one or more, sometimes all, of their children inactive or disaffiliated.”67 With low birth rates and high attrition of member children continuing for several decades throughout Western European countries, the natural growth of multi-generational Mormon families is below replacement level. The impact of this shortfall is acutely felt to the point that many congregations cannot be maintained. Missionary operations are also impacted. Between the

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mid-­1990s and early 2020, approximately half of LDS European missions were closed or consolidated; those that remained saw a reduced missionary complement. For the past four decades, the majority of converts in many Western European missions have been foreign immigrants rather than native peoples. Van Beek noted that “during … the ‘80s and ‘90s, the number of Dutch converts declined, only to be partly replaced with immigrant conversions as European societies became immigration societies.”68 While this has made the LDS Church more diverse in Western Europe, it has also been a factor in low retention. Many migrants are transient, and language and culture differences have presented challenges for fellowshipping and assimilation. In Eastern Europe, nominal membership has nearly doubled, from 34,718 in 2000 to over 60,000  in 2018 (with an estimated 15,000 of these being active members). Even though some cities have been opened in Eastern Europe over the past two decades, the number of congregations declined from 296  in 2000 to 273 in 2018 as a result of member attrition. Overall, the LDS Church in Europe is receding. The future is likely to see further declines in active membership and the closing or consolidation of additional congregations in Europe, even as nominal membership continues to increase. While the church has a strong base of committed members in European countries, the small number of converts and their subsequent low retention are not enough to compensate for existing member aging and attrition rates. Latin America Nominal LDS membership in South America increased 60.5 percent, from 2,548,991 members in 2000 to 4,093,352 members in 2018 (of whom approximately 82,600 are estimated to be active). Over this period, the actual number of LDS congregations fell slightly from 5562 to 5541. During these same years, Central American membership rose 66 percent, from 1,356,109 to 2,253,198 (an estimated 486,000 of whom are active), but the number of congregations increased only 3 percent, from 2878 to 2964. In the Caribbean, membership increased 76 percent, from 115,518 to 203,647 (with 4500 estimated to be active), whereas the number of congregations increased only 18 percent, from 287 to 340. Although LDS missions in Latin America have traditionally reported high baptismal numbers, convert retention has historically been low, and the number of congregations formed has lagged far behind official membership growth rates. These trends (high conversion numbers, offset by low retention rates and slowed congregational growth) reflect historical missionary approaches in this region that focused on achieving quick baptisms rather than making lasting converts and building strong congregations. Convert retention has improved markedly in many areas in recent years with the implementation of basic standards to improve preparation for baptism. Part of the failure to achieve

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meaningful congregational growth over the past two decades reflects the consolidation or closure of hundreds of units in the early 2000s in areas most affected by rampant quick-baptize practices followed by initial rapid expansion of congregations that lacked the necessary convert retention rates to make them viable in the 1980s and 1990s. Continuation of such practices in many Latin American missions, long after the 2004 publication of the Preach My Gospel manual officially altered mission practices and objectives, has correspondingly contributed to continuing slow congregational growth in recent years. Increased active membership in the Latin America region is expected going forward. There should also be modest increases in congregations, as convert retention improves with better methods of teaching to prospective converts, preparing them to be committed members, are utilized. Rates of native missionary service have risen in some nations of the region, which is another plus. At the same time, the LDS Church in Latin America continues to heavily depend on the US church for both missionaries and finances. The vast number of inactive and disaffiliated Latin American members will continue to be a drag on Church growth for decades to come. North America From 2000 to 2018, LDS membership in North America rose 28 percent, from 5,367,350 to 68,795,399 (2.7 million of whom are estimated to be active members). During this same time period, LDS congregations increased 22.7 percent, from 12,031 to 14,766. Fifty-nine percent of all LDS congregations, worldwide, created in this period were in North America. The United States continues to be home to a majority of the faith’s active members, notwithstanding larger nominal membership outside the United States. North America and Sub-Saharan Africa are the only two world regions where congregational growth has come close to keeping pace with growth in nominal membership. The LDS Church continues to highly prioritize North America for missionary work. North America counts less than 5 percent of the world’s population, but, in 2019, 28 percent of the 399 full-time LDS missions were located in North America (109 missions in the United States and 6 in Canada). However, much of the LDS growth in North America has represented an increase in baptism of member children, whereas over 80 percent of convert baptisms occur outside of the United States. While the Mountain West region of the United States is likely to remain the faith’s heartland, Mormons are losing their dominance in Utah and are expected, in the not too distant future, to become a minority population in the state that their pioneer ancestors initially settled. Falling LDS birth rates and youth retention problems pose a “double hit” to increasing active North American membership and also to fielding and maintaining a full-time missionary force of the size desired by church officials. In time, these trends are likely to lead to slowing of new congregation formation in North America and to increasing divergence between nominal membership

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(that will increase fairly rapidly) and congregational growth rates (that will slow down). Oceania Nominal LDS membership in Oceania rose from 373,683  in 2000 to 562,341  in 2018 (a 50 percent increase), whereas congregations grew from 1048 to 1253 (a 19.5 percent increase). Tonga (60.1 percent) and Samoa (41.8 percent) have the highest rates of nominal LDS membership growth in the world, although member activity across the Oceania region is estimated at approximately 35 percent. Recent data suggest some improvement in member activity. However, potential for growth is limited due to the region’s small population and increasing saturation of the religious marketplace by other, successfully competing evangelical faiths.

Critique and Prescriptions Competition for Growth in Nominally Unfavorable Religious Markets Claims that declining Mormon growth is inevitable as a result of external factors beyond its control are disconfirmed by the more rapid growth of other Christian restorationist faiths. Over the past three decades, Mormonism has been overtaken and has fallen increasingly behind its primary restorationist competitors, the Seventh-day Adventist Church and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Seventh-day Adventist Church baptized 1.2 million new members in 2016, followed by 1.27 million baptisms in 2017.69 Back in 1998, the LDS Church reported more members than the Seventh-day Adventist Church, but twenty years later, the SDA Church reported 21,414,779 members at year-end 2018 compared to the LDS Church’s 16,313,735. Likewise, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have experienced steady world growth throughout the 2000s, including in areas like Eastern Europe that have difficult religious markets and an overall decline in Christian self-identification. These faiths quite apparently have found ways to thrive in many challenging areas where other faiths are stagnant or declining, while navigating the same or similar external challenges facing the LDS Church. Seventh-day Adventists have adjusted differently than Jehovah’s Witnesses by deemphasizing competition against other Christian denominations. Adventists have retained a strong presence worldwide but have reduced outreach efforts in competitive, stagnant, and shrinking religious markets—including those in much of Europe—to focus on social service activities among non-Christian populations in highly receptive regions, such as Sub-Saharan Africa and India; these regions now account for over half of the faith’s current converts. Educational and health outreach programs constitute a major fraction of Advent focus. In 2018, there were 6106 Adventist primary schools, 2549 secondary schools, and 118 tertiary institutions around the world that

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altogether tallied 1.88 million students among them.70 There are also over a hundred Adventist hospitals around the world, which, along with the extensive Adventist school system, have contributed significantly to sustainability, outreach, and branding of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Jehovah’s Witnesses have continued to focus on reaching potential converts with their Christian, bible-based message but have adapted to decreasing receptivity in many countries by emphasizing intensive proselyting efforts made by local members, particularly women. Institutional Issues Unfavorably Impacting LDS Growth Prospects Mormonism began as a competitive disruptor, an agile and innovative faith promising ongoing revelation to people whose life circumstances motivated them to seek meaningful changes for themselves and their families. However, today it struggles to adapt to new circumstances. The circumstances of the faith’s founding, as well as subsequent organizational decisions, continue to impact current growth. Each organizational decision involves trade-offs. Legacies that were helpful in the settling and initial propagation of the Utah Zion pose increasing trade-offs today. Some of the most consequential LDS organizational legacies are identified below. Historical Gathering to Zion Theme A key organizational decision, which has impacted all downstream development, was the early Mormon theme of “gathering to Zion,” first in the American Midwest and then in the Mountain West. In an attempt to create a religious utopia and limit outside interference, Mormons were “separated from the world” in their own communities, achieving greater cohesiveness and organizational control. Isolation allowed Mormon leaders to shape an entire society. Member retention in the faith’s heartland was promoted by cultural as well as religious institutions. The regional dominance of the LDS Church over time generated political and economic influence, which by the mid-twentieth century began having national overtones. Gathering and isolation in the Utah Zion achieved an initially desired disconnect from non-Mormons generally, but there is a downside to this disconnect over time. The perceived conditions of missionary work in a Mormon-dominated culture are very different from those prevailing in other cultures. American Versus International Gospel Culture Rigal-Cellard noted that “Mormonism is in a class of its own for it displays cultural influences far more than any other religious group born in America.”71 Binding the institutional LDS Church to American Utah culture, rather than to an international gospel culture, and giving prioritization to adherents in the

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faith’s homeland over international membership and the yet unreached, has had unanticipated consequences. As but one example, Chen points out that, in Taiwan (as in much of the world), “English becomes another, if not the, official language in Church buildings,” and in the same vein observes an “unwitting effort to import American/Utah youth culture as a gospel norm.”72 She further comments that Scholars of Mormonism … point out that international success has, in fact, led to central control from Church headquarters. The claim of being a universal church often deemphasizes the need to integrate the Church into local societies. This universalistic view tends to overemphasize the similar, compatible parts of local culture (e.g., family values in Confucianism) but shuns the incompatible parts of local tradition.73

Instead of engaging in substantial adaptations and allowing broad local autonomy to find indigenous expressions of faith, LDS leadership has doubled down on the primacy of the American church. In consequence, LDS members “in many places outside the American continent … face a double marginalization, a marginalization manifest both inside the Church and in their own country,”74 and international converts have consequently experienced low retention.75 Currently, the LDS Church experiences a vast needs-resource-allocation mismatch that reflects the priority afforded to the American-based church and more generally to LDS missionary enterprises in the Western Hemisphere and Latin America. In early 2020, 115 (28.8 percent) of the Church’s 399 full-time missions were located in the United States and Canada, which account for less than 5 percent of the world’s population. In like manner, 154 (38.5 percent) of missions were located in Latin America, home to just 8.4 percent of living humans. Fewer than one-third of missions serve the remaining 87 percent of the world’s population. Itinerant Missionary Work Although the LDS Church began encouraging members to stay in their own lands to build up the church since the early twentieth century, the former doctrine of gathering to the Utah Zion (and subsequent development of a dominant Mormon culture) came at a cost to future missionary outreach efforts. The emigration of most early converts from their native lands, first to Nauvoo, Illinois and then to the Utah territory, left few members behind to build up the Church locally. Mormonism thus defined itself early in its history as an American faith dependent for growth on the preaching of foreign missionaries rather than on the personal evangelism of local members. In exchange for building a cohesive Mormon society in the Utah homeland, the faith’s missionary approach was focused on reaping an immediate harvest rather than sowing for the long-term growth of local congregations. Itinerant

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missionaries are not connected to local communities and are often disconnected from how non-Mormons in these communities think and feel. They lack accountability and incentive for emphasizing quality converts and for building strong local congregations, since these outcomes are not their primary mission objectives. This dynamic gave rise to a colonial mentality and eventually helped fuel the low-retaining, quick-baptize practices that characterized LDS missionary efforts in the mid- and late twentieth century.76,77,78 In short, itinerant missions served important needs during the nineteenth-­ century gathering to Zion period, but continuation of this model entails drawbacks today. Full-time missionaries incur higher expenses for travel, housing, and board than in-place members preaching locally. They also experience a learning curve with culture and often learning a foreign language, which lessens their effectiveness for a portion of the relatively short term of their mission calling. Severe limitations on missionary visas to populous nations like India, the constitutional prohibition of foreign religious proselytizing in China,79 laws in Russia forbidding public proselytism and requiring the identification of missionaries as “foreign agents,” and other restrictions elsewhere, make reliance on foreign missionaries impractical for most unreached areas of the world. Faiths that evangelize primarily through the efforts of local members, however, are able to establish congregations in many areas not accessible to foreign missionaries. Preaching the Gospel as a Priesthood (Adult Male) Duty Itinerant Mormon missionary work has been designated, from the faith’s inception, as a priesthood duty of adult males. In the twentieth century, full-­ time missionary service became a rite of passage specifically for young LDS men transitioning to adulthood before assuming presumed obligations of marriage and family life. As a corollary norm, prior missionary service of prospective husbands has often been represented by church authorities to young LDS women as an essential prerequisite for marriage. These expectations of missionary service for LDS young men helped to build the largest full-time missionary force of any major Christian denomination throughout the world. Up until 2012, LDS women (although permitted at later ages than young men, upon request) were not encouraged to seek missionary service. Rather they were instructed to marry worthy young men, especially ones having completed a prior successful mission, and then bear children during their fertile years, thus fueling higher birth rates and larger families. Due to a paucity of non-Mormons to preach to in the Mormon heartland during the mid-nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, personal evangelism became largely compartmentalized as a short-term, itinerant missionary duty to the outside world, performed by adult males, rather than being taught as a gospel habit to be implemented regularly by all members in their daily lives. Research has shown that LDS members in the United States are in fact less likely, in their routine life circumstances, to participate in personal

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evangelism than other evangelical Christian groups.80 LDS women and youth of both genders are not systematically engaged in personal evangelism, whereas research indicates that women in other faiths are more likely than men to share their faith.81 For instance, the Pew Research Center recently found that approximately two-thirds of Jehovah’s Witness proclaimers in the United States are women.82 As LDS women are the traditional nurturers and educators of children in their homes, it seems likely that LDS children are not typically taught how to share their faith or to consciously show positive examples to non-­ members. Most young LDS men arrive at the age of full-time missionary service with little or no prior experience in personal evangelism. Leadership Gerontocracy Joseph Smith and most of his co-founding associates were young and able men without much prior experience or tenure in religious leadership positions. Today, the LDS Church is the only US-based faith whose leader typically assumes his position of ultimate authority at a relatively old age and then continues to function in this position until death. This practice has helped to avoid disputes over succession and has lessened the risk of apostasy of senior leaders, both of which were real challenges that confronted the LDS Church in its early days (see Prince’s chapter for more details on this issue). As human life expectancies have increased over time, LDS leaders have acceded to the church presidency only in their twilight years. Scholars of Mormonism have noted that most LDS Church presidents of the past half-­ century have experienced long periods of physical and/or mental decline before their deaths, leaving them as nominal figureheads while key decisions are made by others in the leadership hierarchy: “The severity of the medical problems increasingly experienced by Church presidents has been hidden from the general Church membership for as long as possible, and generally quite successfully.” Consequently, “a power vacuum at the top, caused by the incapacitation of the Church president, can put the entire church at risk of damage that might otherwise be prevented by a competent president.”83 Organizational paralysis and dysfunction from incapacitated leadership have hampered missionary outreach efforts. Several signature missionary mandates have been proclaimed by LDS Church presidents over the last sixty years, including David O. McKay’s “Every Member a Missionary” (1959),84 Spencer W. Kimball’s strategic planning and global coordination for world missions (1974),85 and Ezra Taft Benson’s “Flooding the Earth with the Book of Mormon (1984).”86 Little or no systematic or rigorous, institutional implementation of these declarations subsequently occurred, due to the leaders’ declining health after these announcements were made. Generally speaking, a layered corporate bureaucracy, centered around a self-perpetuating, geriatric core leadership, typically attempts to compensate for the incapacity of senior leadership by simply perpetuating status quo policies. However, a caretaker

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bureaucracy is not typically forward-thinking and lacks a mandate for instituting bold changes when circumstances require timely, adaptive responses. The 2015 Exclusion Policy, which prohibited children of LGBTQ couples from baptism and LDS Church fellowship, was not well received, to say the least, by many younger members. This episode may also reflect gerontocracy issues. Identity-based discrimination is anathema to many people born in the last half-century, who were raised amid secular mantras of tolerance, diversity, and inclusion. By contrast, today’s senior LDS Church leaders grew up in an era of racial segregation, gender chauvinism, and widespread homophobic prejudice. The unhappily formulated Exclusion Policy was reversed in 2019, but only after four years of sustained protests, especially among younger LDS members. Riess and Knoll found that the policy had acted “as one of several factors that, when added together, contributed to higher levels of disillusionment and disaffiliation,” and that “for some, particularly those who were already on the fence to begin with, this resulted in resignations and inactivity.”87 Celebrification and Cloistering of Church Leaders Latter-day Saints believe that their modern church leaders, like early apostles, are literally called by Jesus through modern revelation. Church leaders, especially the prophet-president, have wide-ranging authority and can speak on any matter. Their individual counsel in individual situations is considered virtually on par with scripture when they claim revelatory guidance by the Holy Ghost. However, when matters of momentous portent for the whole church are involved, it is only the president—typically in concert with his counselors (“The First Presidency”) and sustained by unanimous support of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles—who can officially alter or replace existing teachings (or teaching-based policies). These attributions permit much potential flexibility in policy making, allowing new teachings to be introduced for new circumstances rather than relying exclusively on the interpretation and continued implementation of ancient scriptures. But this sort of change is typically slow-coming in practice, hindered as it is by devotion to traditions, bureaucratic caution, and the restraining, long-held assumptions of elderly leadership. LDS dominance in the Mormon Cultural Region has contributed over time to the “celebrification” and simultaneous cloistering of church leaders. The leaders of what was once a geographically isolated Church, who were immediately accessible to ordinary members, gradually became walled off behind a dense bureaucracy. Today LDS Church leaders have little interaction with lay membership and the outside world beyond stage-managed appearances at conferences and public events. Access to leaders—and the information that gets through to them—is carefully controlled. The celebrity status of LDS Church authorities makes it difficult for even able-bodied leaders to directly observe and participate firsthand in missionary outreach activities rather than primarily being the recipients of red-carpet

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treatment when mission field visits are made. The upper echelon of church leadership especially appears to have been genuinely unaware of the mission practices that were fueling a severe worldwide convert retention crisis until apostles Jeffrey R. Holland and Dallin H. Oaks were assigned to live in Chile and the Philippines, respectively, from 2002 to 2004.88 Leaders Versus Managers The remoteness of the Utah Zion from the mission field, the fragile health of aging church leaders, and attempts of the institutional bureaucracy to mask the decline in function of aging leaders, appear to have contributed to the normalization of leader non-participation in direct mission outreach. Modern LDS Church authorities are administrators with little or no personal involvement in finding and teaching non-Mormons. This disconnect has been propagated downstream to lower-level functionaries. The LDS Church has had a good deal of dedicated and skilled pastoral leadership in its mission fields, but, although committed, there is decidedly less proficient leadership supervising mission outreach efforts at headquarters in Salt Lake City. Based on interviews, this author has found that core principles of mission outreach are a “black box” to many mission leaders, who continue to hold stylized views of outreach and conversion methods propagated in the absence of their own regular personal involvement in these activities. Almost all mission presidents I have known have formulated policies and issued directives without ever having gone door to door to make new contacts and without teaching a single missionary lesson to a prospective convert. This lack of leadership involvement in frontline implementation limits insights and impairs responsiveness to emergent outreach needs. Policies that, retrospectively, prove to be problematic, may be less likely to be implemented if mature leaders are regularly engaged in proselytism and thus in a position to develop broader insights and more effective approaches. Nondisclosure and Secret-Keeping A culture of nondisclosure and secret-keeping regarding the practice of polygamy (or plural marriage in LDS parlance) among leaders arose in the LDS Church’s early days. This practice was not disclosed to ordinary members or recent converts until after the followers of Brigham Young reached the Utah Territory.89 Polygamy separated Mormons from non-Mormons, galvanized commitment among members, and increased the cost of maintaining belief. After LDS plural marriage was officially ended in the 1890s, the institutional practice of secret-keeping continued in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including—most pertinently for the focus of this chapter—efforts to mask the poor health of church leaders, a lack of candor about levels of member activity and convert retention, and nondisclosure of church finances.

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Between 1977 and 1987, the LDS Church successively removed multiple fields from its annual statistical reports which pointed to declining member activity rates. LDS Church News stories in the 1990s and early 2000s lauded the faith’s international growth as “astronomic,” “dynamic,” “miraculous,” and “spectacular” while failing to disclose that only a fraction of converts remained active. Some Latter-day Saint scholars wrote glowing missionary accounts with only faint allusions to difficulties, which, “while faith-confirming, tend to fall short in providing insights that come from grappling seriously with uncomfortable data.”90 Awareness and attention to the shortcomings of an institutional missionary program, engineered to achieve “quick sales” rather than developing long-term converts, was hampered for decades by non-disclosure of meaningful indicators of member activity. As the older era of church secret-keeping grudgingly yields to a new age of whistleblowers,91 the revelation of certain institutional secrets—that could have been more favorably disclosed on the Church’s own terms at an earlier time— has fueled anger and resentment by some members and former members while hampering outreach as well. For example, to counteract widespread negative social media criticisms, the LDS Church published, in 2014, a series of authoritative essays on its official website in order to provide “reliable, faith-­promoting information that was true about some of these more difficult aspects of our history.”92 Among a number of problematic topics, acknowledgement is made, for instance, that, yes, founder Joseph Smith had indeed established and practiced polygamy on a large scale. Concerning a more contemporary issue, many LDS leaders (not to mention most ordinary members) were reportedly unaware of the Church’s accumulation of over $100 billion in investments.93 These monetary resources have not been tapped to meet vast outreach, infrastructure, and development needs, reflecting a caretaker bureaucracy which demonstrates prudent stewardship in some spheres, while lacking a clear mandate for implementing visionary action programs to better address present human and structural needs. Mission Ethics The great shortcoming of twentieth-century Mormon missions, and, in some cases, still today, has been the prioritization of obedience over ethics in the pursuit of conversions. From the “Baseball Baptism” era in the United Kingdom94 to the Australian “Pentecost”95 to similar instances in Japan,96 Latin America, and the Philippines, and to quick-baptize practices that persist in the official missionary program today, the institutional missionary program has often objectified prospective converts. Van Beek noted that “the missionary organization is complete with corporate Americanisms: numerical goal setting, the almost strangling focus on baptisms.”97 Divergence of the institutional missionary program from professed principles of unswerving ethics in imitation of Christ has been repeatedly cited as a central factor in low convert retention rates worldwide.

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Policies in official missionary materials, or articulated by mission or area leaders, have unswervingly been viewed as correct, not because they were consistent with impartial morality or timeless principles, but because the official missionary program or mission leaders said so. Some missionaries found themselves in the position of suspending rational judgment and personal conscience to simply follow orders. Although traditional LDS teachings assert that only the church president will not lead the church astray,98 official church policies— such as returning missionary letters sent to higher church authorities, unopened, back to their local mission president and routinely overruling objections of local members—impute de facto infallibility to lesser authorities and offer no remedy or appeal in either missions or congregations. This author has noted four ethical pillars of mission outreach, including (1) the Duty to the Unreached; (2) Nonmaleficence, or the duty to do no harm; (3) Beneficence, or the duty to act in the hearer’s best interest, and (4) Continuous Quality Improvement.99 Recent missionary program reforms have demonstrated meaningful progress toward greater compliance with these pillars. Moral Authority Nietzsche lamented that “the Christians have never practiced the actions Jesus prescribed them,” and saw the tenet of “justification by faith” as “only the consequence of the Church’s lack of courage to profess the works Jesus demanded.”100 In the void left by the rejection of belief in God, Nietzsche premonished “the advent of nihilism,” noting that Western culture was “moving as toward a catastrophe.”101 The LDS Church fills a theological and practical void in its strong emphasis on life implementation of Christian teachings and has ironically been accused by some Christian competitors as being “non-Christian” as a result.102 Mormons are widely known for broad-ranging service and humanitarian activities, personal integrity, hard work, and subscribing to traditional Christian values. The LDS Church has participated in humanitarian causes around the world, from sending relief supplies to Ethiopia during famine times to Haiti following a devastating earthquake, and much more. However, the LDS Church’s record on stances or statements involving human rights has been mixed, at times appearing to reflect corporate self-­ interest rather than a transcendent ethic. Van Beek observed that “The Domestic [US] Church has also become a major player in the American political and religious arena, while almost never being seen as criticizing American actions or issues.”103 He cited the “decline in American credibility” and noted that “the absence of LDS church warnings against war and in favor of peace were sorely missed with the American decision to wage war on Iraq.”104 The 2015 Exclusion Policy, for instance, which blocked children of gay couples from fellowship in the LDS Church until its reversal in 2019 following

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widespread criticism, contravened the church’s own scripture105 and offended the moral sensibilities of many people inside and outside of the Church. In 2018, the LDS Church spoke out against the separation of immigrant families at the US-Mexico border,106 but only after the practice had been condemned by scores of human rights organizations. Statements of the LDS Church advocating congressional action to prevent deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants to the United States107 are clouded by substantive conflicts of interest. These include the Church’s history in assisting illegal immigrants to evade immigration officers in exchange for accepting baptism,108 that an estimated 50–75 percent of immigrants in Utah’s Spanish-language congregations are in the country illegally,109 and the importance of Latin Americans for convert growth. The number of Spanish-speaking Mormons in the United States doubled from 2000 to 2013, including many undocumented immigrants.110 The Church has routinely arranged for undocumented immigrants to serve full-time missions in the United States and has noted that illegal immigration status does not preclude issuing a temple recommend.111 In Utah, the LDS Church has repeatedly been “taking whatever steps are necessary to advance [its] interests while operating behind the scenes” and has exerted heavy pressure on legislators “to vote for illegal alien friendly-bills” notwithstanding personal beliefs, constituent positions, and consequences to the community.112 The LDS Church has been far less vocal about human rights when self-­ interest has not been at stake. For instance, not a word of condemnation was issued regarding a worsening crisis of violence setting new highs annually with over 25,000 murders in Mexico in 2017, 33,000 in 2018,113 and 35,000 in 2019,114 primarily at the hands of criminal cartels which engage in drug trafficking and human smuggling. Gender violence in Mexico kills some ten women per day,115 producing only shrugs from government officials, but there has been no LDS Church condemnation or appeal for greater government intervention, even though Mexico is home to over a million and a half nominal members. The LDS Church has been equally silent about human rights abuses in nations like China and Venezuela, where it has sought favorable treatment for the faith and its members. Christian communities are shrinking across the Near East and in some nations are nearing extinction due to systematic persecution and genocide. Yet the LDS Church has offered no statement of concern for Christians in these nations, notwithstanding significant political clout that could mobilize relief efforts and muster support. No moral guidance was offered in regard to Saudi Arabia’s sectarian war in Yemen, in which millions were displaced and an estimated 50,000 children died of starvation in 2017 alone,116 nor were there protests against the sale of US arms subsequently used against civilians. While the LDS Church has a right to advocate for its own interests, a selective morality based on self-interest demonstrates neither moral authority nor righteous courage. Contemporary church leaders have been perceived as lacking the moral authority and resonance of spiritual figures like Mother Teresa,

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Gandhi, or the Dalai Lama. Moral authority cannot be manufactured by public relations campaigns or the projection of stage-managed personas. It arises from deeply authentic and selfless concern of right rather than expediency, requires a sustained record to build, and can be eroded rapidly by missteps. The faith’s moral authority is an important consideration for both LDS Church members and prospective converts.

Initial LDS Institutional Adaptations to Changing World Circumstances The LDS Church has recognized many challenges to its expansion in the world and has instituted changes and adaptations in an effort to remedy some perceived problems. Although the Church had previously embraced the terms “LDS” and “Mormon,” including for its flagship internet sites,117 church leadership jettisoned both in 2018 as part of a sweeping re-branding initiative that emphasizes the centrality of Jesus Christ to the church’s purpose and functioning.118 Among other responses, Church-owned bookstores have subsequently phased out books containing “Mormon” or “LDS” in their title.119 The LDS Church’s efforts to increase Christian mainstreaming of its identity and message may achieve moderate success in some arenas, as the public space previously occupied by Christianity is increasingly abandoned in many Western nations and traditional definitions of religious orthodoxy are challenged elsewhere around the world. In 2019, the LDS Church transitioned from a three-hour to a two-hour Sunday meeting block of time.120 The Church has intentionally stepped back to reduce peripheral programming, diminish burnout, and free up more together-­ time for individuals and families. Latter-day Saints have fewer church callings and are being directed to be more focused on ministering to the community. The recognition that there is a healthy limit to the number of required burdens that are placed on church members, and giving more priority to implementation of core values, represent substantial, adaptive insights. In April 2018, the LDS home and visiting teaching programs were retired, and the “Ministering” program was introduced. 121 Utah-based home and visiting teaching programs had previously been dysfunctional, with low participation rates occurring particularly in international settings.122 Mauss acknowledged poor prospects of reactivating inactive international members123 and noted that US practices of home and visiting teaching were often viewed as unwanted intrusions.124 Lay “ministering” emphasizes Christian service and prayerful consideration of the needs of each individual,125,126 and encourages members to engage in open conversations with others with sincere warmth and caring.127 The ministering program promotes interactions which are more natural, responsive, and involve real listening in contrast to earlier scripted dialogues that emphasized delivering a designated gospel message. The new emphasis is

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on working to support spiritual development and temporal needs through social and material help in a supportive and low-pressure environment. In October 2012, the age of eligibility for full-time missionary service was lowered to 18 (from 19) for men and to 19 (from 21) for women. These changes have implications on a number of levels, but at least one practical result is allowing completion of mission service for young people prior to university study (and military service in some countries).128 The 2004 publication of the Preach My Gospel manual represented a major missionary program reform. Elements of American culture and psychology from prior missionary manuals were removed, and the missionary role in convert retention was emphasized. However, many remedies in this manual represent half-measures, and substantial problems remain.129 For instance, notwithstanding an ostensible emphasis on the preparation and retention of prospective converts, teaching time was shortened from six lessons to four lessons, each lasting thirty to forty-five minutes; abbreviated summaries were included that can be taught in as little as three to five minutes and counted as full lessons. The Preach My Gospel manual continues to instruct missionaries to ask listeners to commit to baptism at the end of the second lesson, unless missionaries specifically feel guided by the Holy Spirit not to do so (even though most investigators receiving this lesson likely have not attended church and have read only a few selected passages in the Book of Mormon). Prohibitions against alcohol, tobacco, tea, and coffee are raised only in the last lesson before baptism. Not one of the recommended nineteen baptismal interview questions asks whether the prospective convert is currently adhering to the LDS health code (“The Word of Wisdom”), attending church, reading scriptures, and keeping other commitments taught by the missionaries. Quick-baptize practices continued widely after the publication of the Preach My Gospel manual and continue in some mission areas today. Over the past three to five years, more substantial standards for baptism and more realistic evaluation of the preparation of prospective converts have begun to achieve broader implementation. Large areas, including the Philippines and parts of Latin America, have experienced major improvements in convert retention. Contemporary Mormon missionaries are probably better listeners, more sensitive to individual needs and more focused on helping individuals develop gospel habits and achieve meaningful spiritual experiences instead of being singularly focused on a rush to baptism. Similar reforms are needed for the member-missionary program. This author served as a ward mission leader and ward missionary in the late 1990s and 2000s, during which time numerous official missionary programs were rolled out. Offers for free books, free videos, the distribution of pass-along cards, media and internet campaigns, and more, came and went. Stake mission presidencies were called and then dissolved, eliminating coordination of missionary activities among nearby congregations and devolving responsibility for member engagement in mission outreach upon local bishops. A colleague who served as a ward mission leader at this time noted the flurry of programs which

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came and went without changing the underlying dynamics, and opined that church leadership was simply “flipping switches” in the hope that something would work. Stake quorums of seventy, a priesthood office enumerated in Mormon scripture and assigned to assist with mission outreach, were discontinued in 1986.130 The LDS Church has still not found a solution to meaningfully mobilize lay members in personal evangelism in their own communities. The LDS Church today in many ways offers increased individual attention, spiritual mentoring, and support compared to the Church of a generation ago. Recent institutional adaptations have overwhelmingly been necessary, thoughtful, and constructive, although further adaptive responses are clearly needed. Even when meaningful improvements are introduced, old practices may hold influence for many years. Generations of missionaries and members have been taught prior systems; many of today’s mission presidents are those who served youth missions decades ago. Establishing habits of personal evangelism is difficult for adult members brought up with little or no prior participation in these activities. Significant inertia exists in favor of perpetuating the status quo. Consistent effort over time with regular oversight is necessary to broadly implement new initiatives. It remains to be seen whether these and other changes will be enough to reverse negative trends in increasingly competitive and shrinking religious spaces around the world. Improved preparation of converts for church activity could have had a dramatic impact on active LDS membership today had these measures been implemented broadly in the 1980s or 1990s. Such initiatives are welcome today but benefit a smaller number of converts, as receptivity to proselyting efforts has declined worldwide, and church outreach efforts face a number of additional inhibiting factors.

Future Prospects While expectations for future LDS growth are subject to considerable uncertainty, various factors at work today both direct and constrain the range of likely outcomes. Although the LDS Church has grown considerably during its relatively brief existence on the world stage and has developed a presence in many new countries since the end of World War II, both institutional and larger societal factors suggest, as we have seen, that the Church is less well positioned today for extensive future growth. Some of these factors include the following. Only about 30 percent of LDS nominal members (about 35–40 percent in the United States, 15–25 percent internationally) regularly attended church, and this figure has trended downwards over time. Many “members of record” officially claimed by the LDS Church outside of the United States do not self-identify with the faith. The increasing accumulation of inactive members on official membership rolls exerts an inhibitory “drag” on church growth. Membership growth rates have experienced progressive decline for both converts and member children. At the same time, convert growth rates have fallen markedly as the number of

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baptisms per missionary has dropped. The fertility of LDS US women in the United States has continued to decline. Fewer member children become active adults, leading to proportionally fewer missionaries. All of these trends have continued in a declining mode since the 1980s. Stabilization of these trends, and even some recovery, would be necessary to provide confidence that the bottom has been reached. This has not yet occurred, and the trajectories suggest that further declines are likely. On a positive note, international data do show improving convert retention rates in many nations where more stringent preparation for baptism have been implemented. On the policy side of this growth issue, LDS Church officials still seem to be somewhat influenced by the historical “Gathering to Zion” theme promoted until the mid-twentieth century, as evidenced by the continued skew of active membership toward the Great Basin region of the American West. Competing needs and demands between the Church’s base in the LDS cultural region and the international church appear to result in prioritizing the Church’s US membership over other areas around the world. US prioritization has made it difficult for the Church to take the steps needed to achieve greater international growth, especially outside of the Americas and Oceania. The LDS Church continues to field a large, young, full-time missionary force, yet struggles to engage lay members in personal evangelism and has not systematically involved lay youth and women in member-missionary training and outreach. The Church has suffered from extended incapacitation of senior leaders from health-related complications of advanced age, as well as a gap of nearly two generations between the faith’s leaders and its average members. The normalization of leader non-participation in frontline outreach—in part because of the isolation of the Utah Zion and in part because of the fragile health of senior leaders—has hampered leadership efforts to gain practical insights. A layered bureaucracy assists with corporate functions that tend to perpetuate status quo policies. Decades of exaggerated official reporting of LDS growth and success, combined with a culture of nondisclosure and secret-keeping, have fueled member complacency and have undermined awareness and remedy of critical shortcomings of an institutional missionary program that has historically been focused on making large numbers of “quick sales” rather than developing long-term adherents. Some institutional policies have raised questions regarding the faith’s moral authority and have been among the factors contributing to member disaffiliation. Although there are prospects for future improvement, the LDS Church is substantially disadvantaged compared to several competitors. This is especially true of Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, who already have productive member missionary programs, higher convert retention, successful records of building largely indigenously sustainable and self-perpetuating international congregations, and greater responsiveness to local needs. Following World War II, the LDS Church experienced the convergence of numerous factors favorable for growth: the US baby boom, numerous

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heretofore unreached nations with newly receptive populations, improving human rights in much of the world, and later in the twentieth century, the fall of the Iron Curtain separating communist nations from the West. However, across a range of indicators, societal factors impacting church growth are considerably less favorable today than in the late twentieth century. Christianity is in sharp decline in Europe131,132 with the United States following behind,133 and religious nominalism is prevalent across much of Latin America. Fewer young people are attending religious services, and perceptions of Christianity are less favorable than a generation ago.134 These trends reflect changing societal norms as well as rising perceptions that associate traditional Christianity with hate, bigotry, and intolerance.135 Human rights are also now waning in large areas of the world, which include increasing restrictions on expressions of religious freedom,136, 137 freedom of speech,138,139 and freedom of the press, as competing political groups seek to consolidate power and control over information,140,141 trusted information sources break down,142 polarization worsens,143 and misinformation abounds.144 Freedom of speech, press, religion, and conscience are basic human rights, recognized as self-evident and universal by the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and enshrined in many (but certainly not all) national constitutions. Religious freedom includes the right to freely adopt or abandon faith without prohibition or coercion; to practice one’s chosen faith (or none at all) while respecting the rights of others; to share one’s beliefs; to critique and disagree both publicly and privately; and to receive equal treatment. Other human rights are essential to personal freedom as well as providing religious faiths the opportunity to rise or fall on their merits through fair and ethical proselytism. The status of these rights around the world is important to the LDS Church’s future growth prospects. Freedom of press and freedom of speech have been integral to the spread of Mormonism. Unfortunately, press freedom in large portions of the world is waning. Reporters without Borders reported in 2019: “The number of countries regarded as safe, where journalists can work in complete security, continues to decline, while authoritarian regimes continue to tighten their grip on the media.”145 Prospects for improvement are dim, as human rights violators, including states which have engaged in arbitrary146 and extrajudicial executions,147 have been largely accommodated quid pro quo by Western governments.148,149 Presently, only a few nations which allow proselytism (primarily in Sub-­ Saharan Africa) do not have an LDS Church presence. But prospects for missionary entry into restricted nations appear considerably dimmer than for the Church’s entry into Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Van Beek documented that the LDS Church’s “USA connection … in just a few decades has shifted from an asset to a liability”150 not only with regard to geopolitical rivals like China and Russia, or populous nations like India, but even for receptivity in European nations with positive relations. Most completely unreached nations are Muslim-majority nations, where sharing of non-Islamic faiths is typically restricted not only by government

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regulations, but by orthodox Islam’s death sentence prohibitions of blasphemy and apostasy.151,152 These prohibitions not only prevent the public preaching of other religious traditions but also suppress critical inquiry153 and restrict Muslims from leaving their faith.154 The United Nations Declaration on the elimination of religious discrimination was revised in November 1981 under pressure from Islamic nations to delete the right “to adopt” (or to change) religion and referred only to the right “to have” religion.155 Christians in Muslim countries experience systematic discrimination and persecution; converts face intimidation, harassment, and at times, violence.156,157 Indigenous Christian populations, the principal groups in these nations with prospects for Mormon proselytism, are shrinking in numbers.158 Christians have experienced persecution and genocide while Western governments have “look[ed] the other way”159 and have even treated them as “enemies.”160 Their plight has also been largely ignored by the US and European press.161 Although women make up a slight majority of LDS converts worldwide, women in many Islamic societies are “governed by a set of patriarchal beliefs and laws” regarding which “only the elite and the minority of highly educated women have the luxury of choice, of rejecting or challenging these beliefs and laws.”162 The plight of female dissidents and objectors in many Islamic societies has similarly been ignored by Western activists.163 Outreach to Muslims is an important key to fulfilling the Great Commission,164 but meaningful improvement in this regard is unlikely in at least the medium term, leaving a substantial fraction of the world’s population virtually impervious to LDS proselyting.

Recommendations for Revitalization of Global Mormonism The Seventh-day Adventist Church has reformulated its mission through a growing network of thousands of schools and numerous clinics and hospitals worldwide and in carefully coordinated global outreach to underserved areas. The Jehovah’s Witness organization has found success through its intensive member missionary proselytism and has become a dominant protest movement to national faiths in a growing number of nations. Both of these religious movements, which were organized decades after the LDS Church, have substantially overtaken it in active membership. Future years will see this gap widen as LDS growth flattens while Adventists and Witnesses pull away. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints struggles to project a contemporary identity that transcends being just an “American church,” in the view of international critics, that will resonate more broadly among populations outside of North America and in a few other predominately island nations. Whether the LDS Church is able to successfully implement effective changes that could produce a more palatable international identity will greatly impact its trajectory over the remainder of the twenty-first century. The LDS Church

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has already taken some meaningful steps, and more are likely needed. Not all eventualities can be anticipated, and new challenges will require further adaptations. Even optimal changes instituted very late may be less impactful than approximate adjustments instituted early. A detailed analysis of needed changes, with a correspondingly detailed set of recommendations, is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, several broad areas of concern and potential partial solutions, based on the summary materials presented throughout this chapter, may be adduced. First is the establishment of personal evangelism as a regular habit of gospel living for all able LDS Church members. David O. McKay’s “Every Member a Missionary” mandate has remained largely an empty slogan to this day. While much can be done to enhance engagement and improve member skills and participation in personal evangelism, the status quo is difficult to change when most members have systematically “tuned out” earlier member-missionary exhortations, and leaders themselves rarely participate. The new ministering program provides an important step in this direction, although further development is needed. Asking members as part of the temple recommend interview if they are making regular efforts to share the gospel with others, to the extent of their health, opportunity, and ability, would reflect its importance as a core scriptural obligation and could stimulate engagement in a way that empty admonitions from the pulpit have not. Second, the Church needs competent and healthy leadership. A mandatory age of emeritus status, with retirement from official duties (which is already in place for lower-level authorities), would avoid the organizational paralysis and dysfunction which has repeatedly arisen from the age-related incapacitation of senior leaders. Third, missionary outreach would be strengthened by abolition of non-­ participatory mission leadership. Missionaries, and local members and communities, have a right to be supervised by mission leaders who are regularly engaged in frontline missionary work, who have real understanding and insights into contemporary conditions, and who lead by example instead of decree. A requirement for mission and area leaders to spend a meaningful amount of their time in direct finding and teaching activities with non-Mormons, as well as in new convert retention efforts, would greatly improve the quality and responsiveness of mission leadership worldwide as well as the confidence and motivation of the people under them. Fourth, the enshrinement of inviolable mission ethics and a focus on missionary obedience to broader gospel principles, rather than an emphasis on unquestioned obedience to the decrees of program directives, would help prevent exploitative practices which lower convert retention and degrade missionary spirituality. In turn, higher convert retention would help build stronger congregations. Fifth, the shift in the center of gravity of nominal membership outside of the United States, with significant challenges and needs for local adaptation, would warrant permanent or regular long-term assignments of senior church leaders

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abroad as part of a comprehensive, coordinated, and strategic approach to global outreach. The assignment of two apostles to Chile and to the Philippines in 2002–2004 was a crisis response, related to low convert retention and member activity levels, that produced significant improvement in these areas. But rather than stop-gap measures, there are many similar extant needs around the world which would be better addressed proactively and which require longterm local experience to accurately appraise and develop insights to resolve. Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, with the currently highest LDS growth rates, would benefit from long-term assignment of one or even two apostles. Substantial challenges remain across Latin America, which also warrant longterm assignments of senior church leaders. With over 1.3 billion people, India would surely warrant the long-term assignment of an apostle, which would undoubtedly help remedy the current neglect of outreach and unproductive mission policies. Indonesia, with over 264 million people (twice the population of the Philippines, where the LDS Church has 23 missions), would also benefit from the assignment of senior leaders to address the pattern of stagnation and the lack of any serious growth strategy. Even Europe, where the Church is experiencing contraction, would benefit from the insights of a senior leader, who could evaluate and implement new approaches to support existing members and to promote a sustainable future for the European church. Sixth, mechanisms of checks and balances are needed for systematic oversight and remedy of critical issues arising in both international congregations and missions. Mission presidents would also benefit from local insights obtained through an advisory council of local members and pastoral leaders, similar to the high council and auxiliary councils of LDS stakes. Finally, although many external circumstances are beyond LDS control, much could be done to enhance the Church’s role as an admired voice for ethics and integrity. The LDS Church expanded its mission in 2008 to include care of the poor and needy. An extension of this mission to include broad-­ based, nonpartisan advocacy for protection of human rights worldwide, on the basis of need and severity (rather than often advocating in order to advance or protect its own corporate interests), could help raise awareness and effect real change while building the LDS Church’s moral authority in the eyes of the world.

Notes 1. Bowman, The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith, xiii–xxi. 2. Johnson, “10 Things Christians Can Learn from the Mormons.” 3. “A Portrait of Mormons in the US,” Pew Research Center. 4. Enstrom, James, and Lester Breslow, “Lifestyle and Reduced Mortality Among Active California Mormons,” 133–136. 5. “In America, Does More Education Equal Less Religion?” Pew Research Center. 6. Chua and Rubenfeld, The Triple Package, 30–36 and 134–137. 7. McArdle, “How Utah Keeps the American Dream Alive.”

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8. Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith, 137. 9. “We Believe the Church will Fill the Earth,” Ensign. 10. Doctrine and Covenants 15:6, D&C 16:6, D&C 18:9–18. 11. Kimball, “When the World Will Be Converted.” 12. “Statistical Report,” Ensign, May 2019. 13. Stark, “The Rise of a New World Faith,” 18–27. 14. Stark, “So Far, So Good,” 175–178. 15. Bennion and Young, “The Uncertain Dynamics of LDS Expansion, 1950–2020,” 20. 16. Ibid., 31. 17. Riess, “Mormon Growth Continues to Slow.” 18. Stack, “ ‘Substantial Numbers’ of LDS Missionaries Will Be Coming Home as Coronavirus Response Widens.” 19. Stewart, “LDS Church Growth Today.” 20. Knowlton, “How Many Members Are There Really?” 21. Phillips, “Rethinking the International Expansion of Mormonism.” 22. Stewart and Martinich, Reaching the Nations: International LDS Church Growth Almanac. 23. Phillips, “Rethinking the International Expansion of Mormonism,” 54. 24. Lawson  and Xydias, “Reassessing the Size of Mormons, Adventists and Witnesses Using Census Data.” 25. Canham, “Church Won’t Give Up on ‘Lost Members.’” 26. Stack, Peggy Fletcher, “Growing LDS Church Goes Global,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 10, 1996. 27. Willis, “Mormon Church Is Funding Its Future.” 28. Stewart, Law of the Harvest, 36–50. 29. Lawson  and Xydias, “Reassessing the Size of Mormons, Adventists and Witnesses Using Census Data,” Table 5, Adjustment Method 2. 30. Ludlow, ed., Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 4: 1527–28. 31. Stewart and Martinich, Reaching the Nations. 32. Annual statistical reports are presented at the April session of LDS general conference and published in the May Ensign magazine of each year online at https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/magazines/ensign 33. Jehovah’s Witness Statistical Reports are available as the annual “Service Year Report of Jehovah’s Witnesses Worldwide” and in Annual Yearbook of the Jehovah’s Witnesses online at https://www.jw.org/en/library/books/ 34. Annual Yearbooks of the Seventh-day Adventist Church are available online at https://www.adventistyearbook.org/. 35. Canham, “Church Won’t Give Up on ‘Lost Members.’ ” 36. Stack, “Building Faith. A Special Report: The LDS Church in Chile.” 37. Phillips, “Rethinking the International Expansion of Mormonism.” 38. “Global Health Observatory (GHO) Data, Life Expectancy,” World Health Organization. 39. Stewart, MSSA UVU One-Day Conference, March 2019. 40. Heaton, “Religious Influences on Mormon Fertility: Cross-National Comparisons.” 41. Lipka, “Mormons More Likely to Marry, Have More Children Than Other U.S. Religious Groups.”

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42. Heaton, “Religious Influences on Mormon Fertility: Cross-National Comparisons.” 43. Riess, “The Incredible Shrinking Mormon American Family.” 44. Moore, “Statistics Offer Good and Bad News for LDS.” 45. Stack, Peggy Fletcher, “How Do LDS Women Live Their Lives?” Salt Lake Tribune, October 5, 2002. 46. Decoo, Wilfried, “Feeding the Fleeing Flock: Reflections on the Struggle to Retain Church Members in Europe,” Dialogue 29, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 106–108. 47. Albrecht, “The Consequential Dimension of Mormon Religiosity.” 48. Lipka, “Mormons More Likely to Marry, Have More Children Than Other U.S. Religious Groups.” 49. “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace,” Pew Research Center. 50. Cox, “Most Churches Are Losing Members Fast—but not the Mormons.” 51. Riess, The Next Mormons, 186–188. 52. Riess, “ ‘I’m Not Coming Back’: Former Mormons’ Religious Lives.” 53. Stewart, Law of the Harvest, 25–30. 54. Cragun, “An Uncertain Future: Mormon Growth in the Age of Secularization.” 55. Stewart and Martinich, Reaching the Nations. 56. “Population,” United Nations. 57. Kazeem, “More Than Half of the World’s Population Growth Will Be in Africa by 2050.” 58. “Eight New Missions to Open in July 2020.” ChurchofJesusChrist.org Newsroom. 59. Stewart and Martinich, Reaching the Nations. 60. “2018 Annual Statistical Report,” SDA Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research. 61. “Official Declaration 2,” Doctrine and Covenants. 62. Stack, “Why Mormonism, US-Born Faiths Are Growing in Ghana.” 63. Kline, “African Women Embracing an American-born Church: Mormonism, Gender, and Cultural Tension in the LDS Church in Botswana.” 64. “2018 Annual Statistical Report,” SDA Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research. 65. “2018 Annual Statistical Report,” SDA Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research. 66. Kimball, “When the World will be Converted.” 67. Van Beek, “Ethnization and Accommodation,” 133. 68. Van Beek, “Mormon Europeans or European Mormons?,” 177. 69. Seventh-day Adventist statistical reports are published in annual yearbooks at https://www.adventistyearbook.org/. Additional statistics and analysis are available at adventistarchives.org and adventiststatistics.org. 70. “Quick Statistics on the Seventh-day Adventist Church [1],” AdventistArchives.org. 71. Rigal-Cellard, “Inculturation of Mormonism in France,” 199. 72. Chen, “In Taiwan but Not of Taiwan,” 12. 73. Chen, “In Taiwan but Not of Taiwan,” 21–22. 74. Chen, “In Taiwan but Not of Taiwan,” 3. 75. Chen, “In Taiwan but Not of Taiwan,” 22.

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76. Quinn, “I–Thou vs. I–It Conversions: The Mormon ‘Baseball Baptism’ Era.” 77. Newton, “Towards 2000: Mormonism in Australia.” 78. Numano, “Mormonism in modern Japan” 223–235. 79. Constitution of China, Chapter 2, Article 36. 80. Barna, “Protestants, Catholics and Mormons Reflect Diverse Levels of Religious Activity.” 81. Stewart, Law of the Harvest, 421–423. 82. Lipka, “A Closer Look at Jehovah’s Witnesses Living in the U.S.” 83. Prince, Bush and Rushforth, “Gerontocracy and the Future of Mormonism.” 84. Holman, “ ‘Every Member a Missionary’ for 50 Years.” 85. Kimball, “When the World Will Be Converted.” 86. Benson, “Flooding the Earth with the Book of Mormon.” 87. Riess and Knoll, “Did the 2015 Mormon LGBT Exclusion Policy Drive a Mass Exodus Out of the Church?” 88. Moore, “Elder Holland ‘a Student’ in Chile.” 89. Bartholomew, “Economic Inequality, Classism and Stewardship in 19th Century LDS Mission.” 90. Chen, “In Taiwan but Not of Taiwan,” 22. 91. Carlisle, “LDS Church Is in a New Era of Whistleblowers, with $100B Fund Just the Latest Revelation.” 92. Goodstein, “It’s Official: Mormon Founder Had Up to 40 Wives.” 93. Carlisle, “Excerpts Show How the LDS Church Tried to Keep a Lid on Its $100B Account.” 94. Quinn, D.  Michael. “I–Thou vs. I–It Conversions: The Mormon ‘Baseball Baptism’ Era.” 95. Newton, “Towards 2000: Mormonism in Australia.” 96. Numano, “Mormonism in Modern Japan.” 97. Van Beek, “Mormon Europeans or European Mormons?,” 166. 98. Benson, “Fourteen Fundamentals in Following the Prophet.” 99. Stewart Jr., David G. “Best Practices in Mission Ethics: History, Theology, and Social Research.” Presented at American Society of Missiology, South Bend, Indiana, 15 June 2019. 100. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Book 2:113. 101. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Book 1:3. 102. The Nicene Creed, adopted at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, articulates notions of the Trinity, and is the only creed accepted as authoritative by Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant Christianity. Latter-day Saints reject the post-biblical creeds on the grounds that they were formulated when, according to LDS teachings, the Christian Church was in a state of apostasy and lacked divine authority. 103. Van Beek, “Mormon Europeans or European Mormons?,” 175. 104. Van Beek, “Mormon Europeans or European Mormons?,” 177. 105. Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 26:33. 106. “Church Statement on Separation of Families at the US-Mexico Border,” 18 June 2018. 107. Mims and Noyce, “New Mormon Leadership Takes Its First Public Stance, Calls on Congress to Make Room for ‘Dreamers.’ ” 108. Historian D. Michael Quinn recorded that, in the early 1980s, the San Diego mission became the highest-baptizing mission in the LDS Church due to the

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Doubt It will Happen. Salt Lake Tribune, 16 August. Accessed 21 March 2020. https://www.sltrib.com/news/2018/08/16/lds-church-wants-everyone/. Stack, Peggy Fletcher, and Lisa Schencker. 2012. News of Lower Mission Age Excites Mormons. Salt Lake Tribune, 8 October. Accessed 21 February 2020. https:// archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=55035591&itype=cmsid. Stake Seventies Quorums Discontinued. 1986. Ensign, November 1986. Accessed 21 March 2020. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1986/11/ news-of-the-church/stake-seventies-quorums-discontinued. Stark, Rodney. 1984. The Rise of a New World Faith. Review of Religious Research 26 (1): 18–27. ———. 1996. So Far, So Good: A Brief Assessment of Mormon Membership Projections. Review of Religious Research 38 (2): 175–178. Statistical Report, 2018. 2019. Ensign, May. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/ study/ensign/2019/05/statistical-report-2018?lang=eng Stephenson, Kathy. 2018. Deseret Book to Phase Out Books with ‘Mormon’ or ‘LDS’ in Titles. Salt Lake Tribune, 20 December. Accessed 21 March 2020. https://www. sltrib.com/news/2018/12/20/deseret-book-phase-out/. Stewart Jr., David G. 2003. LDS Church Growth Today. Cumorah.com, 5 September. archive.org, 2 October. Accessed 19 April 2020. http://web.archive.org/ web/20031002040539/http://www.cumorah.com/report.html. Stewart, David G., Jr. 2007. Law of the Harvest: Practical Principles of Effective Missionary Work. Henderson: Cumorah Foundation. Accessed 1 January 2020. https://cumorah.com/lawoftheharvest.pdf. Stewart Jr., David G. 2019. Best Practices in Mission Ethics: History, Theology, and Social Research. Presented at American Society of Missiology, South Bend, Indiana, 15 June. Stewart, David G., Jr., and Matthew Martinich. 2013. Reaching the Nations: International LDS Church Growth Almanac. Vol. 2. Henderson: Cumorah Foundation. Accessed 6 January 2020. https://cumorah.com/reachingthenations1. pdf and https://cumorah.com/reachingthenations2.pdf. Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith. 2007. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 137. The History of LDS.org Shows God’s hands—Part 2 of 2. ChurchofJesusChrist.org. Accessed 21 March 2020. https://tech.churchofjesuschrist.org/blog/606-thehistory-of-ldsorg-shows-gods-hands-part-2. Van Beek, Walter E.A. 1996. Ethnization and Accommodation: Dutch Mormons in Twenty-First Century Europe. Dialogue 29 (1): 119–138. ———. 2018. Mormon Europeans or European Mormons? An ‘Afro-European’ View on Religious Colonization. In Mormonism in Europe: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Irén E.  Annus, David M.  Morris, and Kim B. Östman. Szeged: Americana. Venezuela Does Not Belong on the UN Human Rights Council. 2019. Freedom House, 18 October. Accessed 8 January 2019. https://freedomhouse.org/article/ venezuela-does-not-belong-un-human-rights-council. Warraq, Ibn. 1995. Why I Am Not a Muslim. Amherst: Prometheus Books. We Believe the Church will Fill the Earth. 2017. Ensign, January. Accessed 15 January 2020. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2017/01/we-believethe-church-will-fill-the-earth.

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Williams, Linda. 2018. LDS Home, Visiting Teaching Programs Change. ksl.com, 1 April. Accessed 20 November 2019. https://www.ksl.com/article/46291666/ home-visiting-teaching-to-be-retired-lds-church-announces. Willis, Stacy. 2001. Mormon Church Is Funding Its Future. Las Vegas Sun, May 4. World Press Freedom Index 2015. Reporters Without Borders. Accessed 31 December 2019. https://rsf.org/en/world-press-freedom-index-2015. World Watch List 2020. Open Doors USA. Accessed 22 January 2020. https://www. opendoorsusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2020_World_Watch_List.pdf. Zylstra, Sarah Eekhoff. 2018. The Top 50 Countries Where It’s Most Dangerous to Follow Jesus. Christianity Today, 10 January. Accessed 1 January 2020. https:// www.christianitytoday.com/news/2018/january/top-50-christian-persecutionopen-doors-world-watch-list.html.

CHAPTER 7

Vestige of Zion: Mormonism in Utah Rick Phillips

Recent work in the social scientific study of Mormonism is disproportionately focused on the international expansion of the church.1 This research agenda was energized in the 1980s when Rodney Stark, an eminent sociologist of religion, examined rapid membership growth within the church and projected these rates a century into the future. Stark declared that the LDS Church was an incipient world religion, and likely to have 280 million members by 2080.2 Mormon church growth has fallen short of Stark’s projections, and the pace of Mormon growth has slowed.3 But despite this, a research agenda focusing on the international church, with an emphasis on its growth and growing pains, was established. This agenda has been central to the social scientific study of the institutional church ever since. An important thread in the sociology of global Mormonism examines how features of a denomination tied both geographically and theologically to the United States have affected the establishment and development of Mormonism in nations with very different polities and cultures.4 The corporatization and bureaucratization of the church, which began accelerating in the 1960s, has been widely interpreted as a response to the difficulties of managing a far-flung membership living in places where the church lacks a solid institutional presence.5 The shift from a regional subculture in Utah to an international denomination has been studied primarily by looking at “scattered” Mormonism, and focuses on the pressures and strains Mormons encounter as they experience the church in its global, corporate incarnation.6 Tensions caused by lingering institutional and theological ties to the United States and a hierarchy embedded in Utah are important elements of this work7 By contrast, little has been written

R. Phillips (*) University of North Florida, Jacksonville, FL, USA

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about how the internationalization of Mormonism has impacted over 2 million people on church rolls who live in Utah. Utah Mormons are much more likely to be lifelong members of the church and raised from infancy in a Mormon subculture.8 For these Latter-day Saints, programs and teachings crafted for a regional church administered by leaders who have experienced the faith as they have is not a source of tension, but rather a component of their faith.9 Utah Mormonism has been generally neglected by social scientists in the twenty-first century, all while substantial demographic, political, and ecclesiastical change has been remaking the Mormon homeland. How has the declining emphasis on place and subculture within the church affected “gathered” Mormonism? In this chapter, I examine Utah Mormonism, and investigate how various social forces—that is, demographic change, the encroachment of federal law, advances in technology, and the changing bureaucratic priorities of the LDS Church—have altered Mormon identity and solidarity in Utah since the arrival of the first pioneers in 1847. I view these social forces in the context of overlapping and intersecting trends that have either bolstered the salience of Utah Mormonism or weakened it. Mormon dominance in Utah and the primacy of Utah Mormons within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can be imagined as tides that wax and wane as forces both intrinsic and extrinsic to the church impact the demographic, social, and political characteristics of Utah, and of the denomination itself. I begin by recounting the history of Utah Mormonism.

Building the Kingdom Utah began as a utopian experiment. Following the assassination of the founding prophet Joseph Smith, a leadership succession crisis engulfed the church. After a period of chaos and schism, Brigham Young—president of the powerful Quorum of the Twelve Apostles—secured the allegiance of most of the Mormons.10 Young sought to relocate his flock outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts and beyond the reach of law enforcement. He chose to resettle in the valley of the Great Salt Lake, in what was then Alta California, a territory of Mexico. This valley was chosen over several other sites with better soil and a longer growing season because the isolation and inhospitable climate would presumably keep the Mormons—who called themselves Saints—sequestered from mainstream society.11 The Saints organized for an arduous journey across the continent. Brigham Young and a pioneer vanguard arrived in the valley in the summer of 1847 and began laying the groundwork for new settlements. Wagon trains filled with the faithful began streaming across the plains shortly thereafter.12 The pioneer trek recast Mormon identity. The Old Testament provided a script for reimagining themselves as a new incarnation of ancient Israel. The journey was likened to the exodus from Egypt, and the valley of the Great Salt Lake was their promised land.13 Other imagery was borrowed from the story of the Hebrews’ return from the Babylonian exile recounted in the Book of Ezra.

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They sang a pioneer hymn with the chorus: “O Babylon, O Babylon, we bid thee farewell; We’re going to the mountains of Ephraim to dwell.”14 Brigham Young declared: “God … has planted this people in a place not desired by the wicked … This is a good place to make Saints.”15 The Saints appropriated Old Testament prophecies about the destiny of ancient Israel and applied them to themselves and to their new desert home.16 They proclaimed that they would make the desert “blossom as a rose,” an allusion to verses in the book of Isaiah about the renewal of Israel and the destruction of her enemies.17 The Mormons referred to those outside the church as “gentiles,” a practice commenced in the early days of the church that became ubiquitous and colloquial in the valley.18 The geography of the region made Old Testament imagery seem literal and immanent. The Great Salt Lake is connected to a freshwater lake by a stream. This recalls the stream linking the salty Dead Sea to the adjacent, freshwater Sea of Galilee. Accordingly, Mormons named this stream the Jordan River, after its Levantine counterpart. The Old Testament provided other place names. The towns of Ephraim and Moab are examples. To this day, Mormons refer to Utah as Zion, a name used in the Bible for the city of Jerusalem, for the land of Israel generally, and for a future Utopia. In a popular hymn, the Mormons sang: “O Zion! dear Zion! home of the free, Now my own mountain home, unto thee I have come; All my fond hopes are centered in thee.”19 The Gathering. Mormons instructed new converts to the faith to emigrate to Zion. A general fund was established to help finance the grueling journey.20 The Mormon Zion was the incipient kingdom of God on earth, and all subjects of the kingdom were enjoined to live together. This was known as the doctrine of “gathering.”21 England provided a steady stream of converts fleeing the Dickensian strife of industrializing Britain to pursue stability and prosperity in the New World.22 Out of necessity, church and civic life were merged in the initial years of settlement. Irrigation was placed under the jurisdiction of church leaders, and private ownership of timber was forbidden.23 This gave the church total control over agriculture and construction. Nevertheless, coercive power was rarely needed to maintain order in the beginning, because cooperation was essential for survival. Taming the harsh landscape forged a strong sense of community and identity among the Mormons, who saw the building of Zion as both a material and a spiritual project.24 The site for a new temple was identified just days after the pioneer vanguard entered the valley, and the cornerstone was laid on April 6, 1853.25 The temple lot was the literal and symbolic center of the city. Temple Square was bordered by four streets named North, South, East, and West Temple streets. Streets parallel to each of these streets were numbered, marking the city with grid coordinates that designate how far one is from the temple site.26 For example, standing on the corner of 3rd East and 2nd South puts one 3 blocks east and two blocks south of Temple Square. To this day, most addresses in Salt Lake City are still positioned on this grid, and the temple remains the city’s

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centerpiece.27 The temple was a massive project that took decades to complete. As it rose over the landscape, it became a bellwether of the burgeoning kingdom. The rising temple, and the city fanning out around it, benchmarked both the spiritual and temporal progress of Zion. Theocracy in Utah. Other aspects of building the kingdom blended the Mormons’ spiritual and temporal goals. Leaders routinely organized missions and called on church members to suspend their lives and serve. Most of these missions were religious callings and missionaries were sent abroad to proselytize and seek new converts. But other missions were organized to found new settlements, or to establish new industries.28 For example, in 1850, a group of pioneers from Britain were sent to southern Utah to establish a blast furnace and an iron manufacturing plant.29 Others were called to determine if cotton could grow in the Virgin River basin, where winters were milder than in Salt Lake City.30 Still others left to attempt dry farming in the Nevada desert.31 These enterprises were the functional equivalent of proselytizing missions, and all were efforts to build the kingdom. As the settlements grew, cultural developments also accelerated. Shortly after arriving in the valley, Brigham Young unveiled the practice with which the Mormons are most associated: polygamy, or plural marriage. Clandestine polygamy was practiced under Joseph Smith in Nauvoo. Attempts to keep it a secret set off the chain of events that led to Smith’s assassination.32 But now that the Saints were far from the reach of hostile neighbors, polygamy was normalized. Not every Mormon man had multiple wives, but the practice was common among the leadership. Ostling and Ostling write: “In pioneer Utah any man who aspired to become part of Mormonism’s power structure became a polygamist.”33 Taking a second (or subsequent) wife was a manifestation of total loyalty to the church, because these marriages forged familial bonds that were illegal outside the territory.34 Any polygamist who left the church would be simultaneously severed from his family.35 The practice of polygamy added considerable density to Mormon networks in Utah by expanding and concentrating extended family ties. Kin and church networks were fused in these families, with each network fortifying the other. This was particularly true for the top echelons of Mormon leadership. Quinn describes the Mormon hierarchy as an enormous extended family joined by blood and marriage. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the number of high church leaders with fathers, uncles, siblings, and cousins serving in similar positions gave the hierarchy some characteristics of an aristocracy.36 Names like Kimball and Romney are the Utah equivalent of names like Rockefeller and Kennedy in the larger society. Religion and social structure were also commingled for the rank-and-file. The church adopted a parish system and divided the settlements into geographic units. “Stakes” were the equivalent of dioceses, and “wards” were analogous to local parishes. This system consolidated the boundaries of neighborhoods and congregations and preserved a sense of intimate localism for church members even as the settlements began to expand rapidly.37 Stakes and

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wards were designed to meet both the religious and temporal needs of their resident members. Wards were headed by bishops, who served as aldermen appointed for an indefinite term.38 Thomas Jefferson McCullough was bishop of Alpine for a quarter of a century while simultaneously serving as mayor of the town.39 Bishops were paid a stipend for their labors.40 Civic affairs were routinely discussed over the pulpit, and both points of theology and irrigation schedules could be on the agenda in the same meeting. Order in the congregation was maintained through ecclesiastical courts. In addition to penance for sin, church courts could mete out fines.41 Excommunication, the most severe ecclesiastical punishment, was tantamount to exile from the territory. Simmonds writes: “In early Utah, as in Puritan New England, ecclesiastical exclusion was the severest form of censure. Its use usually brought ready compliance.”42 The attitude toward worship services was very different than it is today. Church attendance was not an essential component of religiosity among the Saints, and only a small fraction of the ward was in the pews on Sunday. Because of the fusion of church and civic life, any activity that contributed to the building of the kingdom was considered religious in nature. Laboring on public works projects—damming streams, building fences, and so on—were as indicative of one’s religious devotion as was going to Sunday meetings. A good citizen was a good church member, and someone working hard to improve the community was also striving to advance the faith. Alexander writes: “Church attendance and priesthood activities were secondary since their entire beings were wrapped up in the church.”43 And May adds: “Since building the Kingdom of God was equated with establishing a cooperative, prosperous, settled society in Utah, personal belief became less of an index of commitment than public behavior.”44

The Nation Encroaches Mormon isolation was short-lived. Almost as soon as the valley of the Great Salt Lake was settled, political changes in Washington and westward migration from the United States began to erode the power of Mormon theocracy. In 1848, less than a year after the Mormons’ arrival in the valley, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo placed the settlements under the jurisdiction of the U.S. government. Shortly thereafter, reports of Mormon insurrection and polygamy reached Washington. In response, President James Buchanan sent a military detachment to Utah to bring the Mormons to heel.45 News that the army was en route sparked a period of religious fervor among the Mormons, known as the Mormon Reformation. Rhetoric against the army and the U.S. government reached a fever pitch, and there was concern that war would break out. In the end, neither side was interested in fighting, and when the army finally arrived, they passed through Salt Lake City without incident and set up a garrison west of Utah Lake.46 Their first task was to remove Brigham Young as governor of the territory and replace him with a non-Mormon

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appointee. The army also bolstered the power of federal courts, administered mostly by non-Mormon jurists. This established a non-Mormon presence in Utah, which “cracked and weakened the cement that held the temporal and spiritual spheres together.”47 The Civil War forestalled further attempts to curtail Mormon theocracy, and the army was recalled in 1861. But once reconstruction began, Congress renewed their interest in eradicating polygamy, this time using the federal courts.48 New technology tied Utah to the rest of the nation. The telegraph arrived in 1861. Messages that were once carried across the continent with a Pony Express rider could now be relayed instantly. The telegraph was a boon to the Mormons because it allowed outlying settlements to communicate with church headquarters. The church was a major stakeholder in the Deseret Telegraph Company. But the telegraph also linked Utah with the rest of the nation, bringing news and events from the east into the state and shrinking the once vast distance between the Mormons and mainstream society. It also allowed the church’s critics to send messages back to Washington.49 The arrival of the railroad in 1869 brought momentous change. The railroad dramatically reduced the time and increased the safety of the trek to Utah. But it also transported throngs of non-Mormon settlers, who brought with them goods and industrial equipment that was previously unavailable in the territory. This allowed outsiders to gain a foothold in Utah’s economy, and set up shop in the settlements.50 Mining was an important industry controlled by gentiles. The Mormons lacked the expertise and machinery to exploit the ore and mineral resources of the region.51 The railroad and the subsequent gentile influx prompted a strong response from the Brigham Young. He called for a boycott of gentile merchants and condemned Mormons who sought employment with the mining companies.52 But the mines paid well, and gentile merchants had goods that Mormons wanted, so these boycotts failed.53 Meanwhile, anti-polygamy legislation passed in Congress was getting more aggressive. Church leaders were arrested on bigamy charges and sent to territorial prison. After the death of Brigham Young, his successor John Taylor and other church leaders went into hiding to avoid arrest. In 1887, Congress passed the Edmunds-Tucker Act which would have disincorporated the church and seized its assets. Faced with financial ruin and the prospect of draconian federal oversight, Wilford Woodruff, the fourth president of the church, issued a manifesto in 1890 calling for an end to polygamy.54 The Manifesto is seen by historians as a major turning point in Mormon history, and a capitulation to Washington’s power that transformed the church from a separatist organization to one oriented toward assimilation. Jan Shipps argues that polygamy was the hallmark of Mormon theocracy, and when it was abandoned the goal of a literal kingdom of God on earth was abandoned with it.55 The Mormons dissolved their political party in 1891 and the Saints were urged to affiliate with the national party of their choice.56 They began to embrace a market economy.57 The Manifesto sparked a wave of schisms among those who saw polygamy as an essential feature of the faith. Known colloquially as “Mormon

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fundamentalists,” some of these schismatic groups persist in the desert southwest and in other parts of the nation. The religion they practice is closer to nineteenth-century Mormonism than is the theology and ritual of the contemporary Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.58 Utah became a state in 1896. Mormon leaders had always preferred statehood to territorial status because elections would free them from the rule of federal appointees. Previous applications for statehood had always failed because of polygamy. Now that the practice was abandoned, the last impediment to statehood was removed.59 Before the struggle with the federal government the Mormons saw Utah as their  besieged kingdom. Now they began to see themselves as a subculture within the larger society. The dawn of the twentieth century is regarded as a period of assimilation and integration into the social and political fabric of the nation.60 But this assimilation process was not linear and did not manifest evenly in all spheres of Mormon life.

“Ethnic” Mormonism The end of polygamy set a course for assimilation in economic and political matters, but cultural assimilation was attenuated by a countervailing demographic trend in Utah that commenced soon after statehood. The Mormons’ preference for large families began to swell the ranks of the Saints, and children born in the new state developed a religious identity different from that of their parents. The original pioneers that settled in the region were either emigrants from settlements founded by Joseph Smith or converts arriving from the mission fields. Among this pioneer generation, a Mormon identity was instilled by suppressing different ethnic and cultural differences and by inculcating a distinctive Mormon worldview through assent and practice. Arrington and Bitton write: “The usual harsh differences between different nationalities and between old and new arrivals were softened by Mormon values and programs.”61 By contrast, the children of the pioneers were steeped from infancy in the ethos of the faith, and Mormonism was instilled through basic childhood socialization. For this generation, Mormonism was axiomatic and innate.62 The distinctive lifestyle of these new, native Utahns congealed into what some have called a new ethnicity—an ascribed subcultural identity with primordial roots in kin and place.63 They are genetically homogeneous, and their insularity fosters epidemiological and linguistic anomalies that distinguish them from others in the state.64 Thus, while Utah’s economy and political system were assimilating into the American mainstream, Mormon culture was becoming more homogeneous, concentrated, and distinct.65 The amalgamation of subculture and religion meant that for native Utahns, the legends of the pioneers were not just the mythology of the faith, they were also the literal history of their forbears.66 Reminders of this ancestral link are everywhere in Utah. Historic buildings dot the landscape. The names of places, structures, and institutions of every kind invoke the pioneers. July 24—the day that Brigham

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Young and his vanguard entered the Salt Lake valley—is both a state holiday, and a church holiday.67 Utah culture and Mormon culture were synonymous. One consequence of this was a conflation of status in the community and status in the church.68 Post-statehood Mormonism has always had a lay clergy. Wards and stakes are administered by volunteers who are called based on their worthiness and leadership ability. Some ward and stake callings confer considerable prestige. This has led to a correlation between holding a prestigious church calling and occupational stature. The causal arrow points both ways. In Utah, church leadership is a mark of trustworthiness and moral fitness. This affects hiring and promotion decisions and reduces perceived risk in commercial transactions. Similarly, the personal characteristics that predict success in business and government are the same ones that make for a good ward or stake leader.69 Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, stake presidents were more educated and had more prestigious professions than the average member of the stake.70 The melding of church and secular prestige hierarchies has a dark side. There is a long history of con men in Utah using their church affiliation and the trust it engenders to perpetrate fraud. Financial swindles are especially common, and Utah was the first state to implement a white-collar crime registry that functions like a sex offender registry to help Utahns avoid fraudsters.71 For the generation born and raised in Utah, the ward was only one site for constructing and maintaining their religious identity, and perhaps not the most essential one. The legacy of polygamy and the extensive kin ties it produced blurred the distinction between kin and coreligionist. Extended family gatherings among Utah Mormons were de facto church gatherings, and often had a religious dimension.72 The Mormon priesthood—an essential prerequisite for lay clergy responsibilities—is conferred through a process of ritual ordination. Only men can hold the priesthood, and among Utah Mormons it is generally passed from father to son. By contrast, many converts are ordained by ward leaders or missionaries. Mormons sometimes carry a card with their “line of authority,” which is a genealogy of their priesthood ordinations going back to the founding of the church. For Utah Mormons, this priesthood genealogy is also a patrilineal genealogy, demonstrating the conflation of lineage and religion.73 Within the church there are many age-graded rites that mark a young person’s passage to adulthood. In Utah, these rites are administered by fathers and extended family who visit the congregation and perform them while ward members observe. Elsewhere in the church, fathers are generally assisted by ward members since extended family are typically not members of the church.74 Thus, Utah Mormon identity—anchored by geography and bolstered by lineage—is intertwined with the institutional church, but neither wholly emanates from nor entirely depends on the church for its existence. This is illustrated by the phenomenon of “Jack Mormons”—people who are descended from the pioneers and raised in a Mormon setting, but who no longer practice the faith.75 Until very recently, Jack Mormons were considered within the fold

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by the devout, albeit on the margins. Much like secular Jews, Jack Mormons have sometimes been regarded by other Utah Mormons as even more authentic than converts, because the ethnic aspects of their identity are salient in-­ group markers.76

The Mormon Diaspora But just as Latter-day Saints born and reared in Mormon enclaves began to mold Utah’s religious subculture, a new demographic trend emerged that promptly began eroding their power and significance within the church. This time, however, the change did not come from outsiders moving in, but rather from the success of Mormon missionary efforts and burgeoning wards and stakes established outside Utah. The doctrine of gathering was designed to concentrate the Mormons in one place. New converts were expected to find their way to Utah and join with others to build the kingdom. But by the turn of the twentieth century, Utah’s arid valleys were full, and there was little arable land left for new arrivals, and scant work in other industries. In response, the church suspended the doctrine of gathering, and instructed converts to stay in place and build a Mormon community wherever they were. The cessation of the gathering happened in fits and starts, but church leaders began discouraging emigration to Utah shortly after statehood.77 The repeal of the gathering altered the Mormon conception of Zion. The Kingdom of God was transformed from a literal place built and managed by the Saints to a spiritual community based on shared ideology. There was scriptural support for this shift in attitude, and a verse from the Pearl of Great Price became the new motto of this redefined, spiritual Zion. It reads: “And the Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness …”78 Conspicuously, the verse does not mention physical location. The Mormons were no longer required to gather physically but were instead required to gather morally. Shared beliefs and adherence to Mormon behavioral strictures became the essential markers of Mormon identity, supplanting propinquity and a shared homeland.79 Missionaries baptized thousands of converts, and established congregations outside Utah in what Mormons called the “mission field.” Growth began in the western United States, but soon fanned out across the country and internationally.80 First generation converts in mission field wards were a small religious minority in settings where Mormonism had no public power. They practiced their new religion outside Utah’s Mormon enclaves and without extensive kin ties in the faith. Because the ward was the sole locus of Mormon life in the mission field, attendance at worship services and other church functions became indispensable benchmarks of religiosity and important venues for constructing a Mormon identity.81 Ward and neighborhood boundaries were not synonymous in the mission field. New converts encountered few coreligionists outside their congregation.

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Thus, there was no subculture to buttress orthopraxy among these fledgling  Mormons. Instead, they were tied to the faith by individual assent to a distinctive lifestyle. Self-control was not augmented by social control, and there were no Jack Mormons in the mission field.82 Many of the doctrines and practices of the church that were ordinary in Utah were deviant and strange in the mission field. Abstaining from coffee was something converts had to explain to family and coworkers. Wearing temple garments precluded wearing ordinary summer clothes, prompting queries from non-Mormon associates.83 Mormons refer to themselves as a “peculiar people”—an appellation appropriated from the first epistle of Peter in the New Testament.84 In Utah, the Mormons were collectively peculiar: seen as eccentric and esoteric by the mainstream society. But in the mission field they were individually peculiar: seen as odd and inscrutable by their family, neighbors, and coworkers. Correlation. By 1940, there were more U.S. Mormons outside of Utah than inside. To accommodate these far-flung members, the church needed to divert resources to the mission field and change its procedures and policies. This was accomplished through a series of bureaucratic reforms known as “correlation.”85 A central goal of correlation was making religious expression within the church uniform across the globe. The extent of this standardization is remarkable. A Mormon walking into a meeting house in Australia, Ghana, or Ireland will experience a worship service with an identical format and hymnal. They will encounter the same local polity and organizational structure housed in a building constructed with a similar floorplan and architecture. Cleverley writes: “Today’s centralized church … works fastidiously to assure that the gospel message plus the church organization is the same everywhere.”86 Indeed, “the church is the same wherever you go” is a standard Mormon cliché. The culmination of the correlation movement was the implementation of a block meeting schedule in 1980. Before this change, church meetings were held throughout the week. The children’s and women’s auxiliaries met on weekdays. Sundays began with a morning meeting, and then after a break for lunch (and perhaps a nap), everyone returned for an afternoon service. The block meeting schedule compressed all church meetings into three hours on Sunday. The switch to the block program was necessary in areas where Mormons were sparse because travelling to the meetinghouse several times a week was onerous.87 The policy change was precipitated by a spike in gasoline prices.88 Correlation also shifted the metrics used by the church to measure its progress. Recall that in the nineteenth century the progress of Zion was measured by the development of settlements and the expansion of industry. These were signs of both civic and spiritual achievement. But now an international denomination untethered from its homeland needed new ways to chart success. For individuals and congregations, church attendance and paying tithes served this purpose. Churchwide, however, membership growth became the most visible and important metric, and leaders began to tout growth statistics and

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milestones from the podium. They were also featured in church publications and presented as evidence that this new permutation of the kingdom was advancing.89 Scholars have argued that growth became so important that it morphed from a metric measuring progress toward a goal into the very goal itself. Accordingly, the missionary force was greatly expanded, and enormous resources were channeled into finding converts across the globe.90 This further lowered the percentage of Mormons in Utah and sharpened the focus on the mission field flock. By 1996, half of all Mormons on official church rolls lived outside the United States.91

Center and Periphery The internationalization of Mormonism reoriented the institutional church and shifted its goals and priorities away from Utah. But beneath this overall shift, the demography of Utah was fostering a cultural undercurrent that would once again strengthen the state’s regional subculture. Mormon pronatalism— ensconced in both church doctrine and subcultural norms—had always engendered high birthrates among the Saints, and by the 1920s natural increase began to outpace gentile in-migration. The Mormon share of Utah’s population rose steadily throughout the twentieth century, peaking around 1990 at over 75 percent. Burgeoning majorities sustained, and in some ways intensified, the Mormon subculture in Utah all while the internationalization of the faith accelerated. This intensification was manifest in dense, extended families, and in communities characterized by Mormon supermajorities.92 Extended families. Utah Mormons have traditionally had larger families than Mormons elsewhere in the United States93 Recall that extended family is a bulwark of Utah Mormon identity. Extended family ties can promote religious activity beyond the effects of subjective religiosity. For example, since religiosity can wax and wane throughout the life course, having grandparents invested in the religious upbringing of their grandchildren can keep the religious socialization of children on track if parents take a break from church.94 It is common in Utah for children with less active parents to attend church with grandparents or other extended family. These relatives are a potential safety net that can forestall apostasy. By contrast, the children of first generation converts in the mission field are less likely to have this extended family support.95 Mormon Majority. Along with kin networks, Mormon supermajorities in many Utah towns and counties undergird the state’s distinctive subculture. This subculture permeates social life in Utah resulting in “the almost unconscious blending of the religious and the civil.”96 Church and community norms are entwined, and social costs that transcend the ecclesiastical sphere accompany non-compliance with church behavioral mandates.97 There are many manifestations of the seamless integration of church and community in Utah. For example, Utah high schools have an adjacent church building that provides religious instruction for Latter-day Saint students as part

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of the normal school day. Students have “released time” where they cross the street to the “seminary,” which is adjacent to, but not on, public school property. Seminary classes used to confer ordinary school credit in Utah before this was struck down in federal court.98 As late as 2020 the church has been able to cooperate with developers to place seminaries next to new high schools in Utah. Outside Utah, seminary is offered in the early morning before school either at the meetinghouse or in the teacher’s home. The church’s influence on Utah politics is considerable and enduring. Local church leaders are commonly elected to the state legislature.99 Because state leaders are church leaders, the church has typically been able to secure the legislative outcomes it wants without overtly meddling in politics. This has led to high-profile clashes with the federal government, with some cases being settled in the Supreme Court.100 Utah’s religious subculture is produced both in intimate microenvironments, and at the societal level. At the micro level, the parish system adopted by the pioneers persists in Utah, and a patchwork of wards and stakes stretches across the state.101 Ward and neighborhood boundaries are often coterminous, and some wards may have only one or two non-Mormon households within them. Utah Mormons are familiar with a larger share of their neighbors than is typical across the nation because they also know these people from church. This promotes neighborhood cohesion.102 Wards can develop distinct identities and microcultures.103 Before the 1980s, wards were partially responsible for funding their own chapel, giving members a stake in the building.104 Throughout the 1970s, church members were counselled to cultivate a beautiful yard, because well-kept yards reflected on the ward.105 Friendly rivalries between adjacent wards are common. Church basketball leagues, featuring competition between local wards, were notoriously rough-and-tumble.106 Wards also produced musical theater, and these “roadshows” went on tour throughout the stake. Children in the ward are also classmates. Fun activities at church often draw children and youths who are not regular church attenders, since they know everyone in their age group from the neighborhood and school. This makes it easy for any young person in Utah to ease into church activity if they choose, even if their parents are inactive. Conversely, where Mormons are sparse, young people in the ward and classmates are different sets, making this avenue to church activity less available.107 When wards comprise just a few city blocks, church members can observe one another and assess compliance with church behavioral mandates outside of formal church settings. For example, neighbors are likely to be seen if they regularly wear clothing that is incompatible with temple garments or engage in activities prohibited on Sunday. Informal surveillance is a social control mechanism existing outside the ecclesiastical sphere that constrains the behavior of Utah Mormons net of any intrinsic constraints imposed by subjective religiosity.108

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At the societal level, the density of Mormons in Utah can sometimes improve the odds that people will remain affiliated with the church just by chance. Statistically, a courtship in Utah is likely to involve two Latter-day Saints regardless of the religiosity or intentions of the couple. Inactive couples can easily transition to church activity if they choose. Outside Utah, marriage within Mormonism is almost always by design. Ceteris paribus, religious participation is lower in mixed faith marriages. Mormon majorities ensure that work and civic networks are suffused with religious ties. Business transactions have a higher level of trust when all participants are members of the church. The informal surveillance in Utah wards extends to virtually any context where church members who care about being seen as good Mormons associate. This binds Utah Mormons to the church with cords that reach beyond the ecclesiastical sphere.109 It is no surprise, then, that in the early 1990s, when the Mormon share of Utah’s population was near its peak, the church retained about 93 percent of its members, a far higher share than in most other denominations.110 Utah Mormon identity differs from that of first generation converts in the mission field.111 These groups sometimes clash when they interact. Goldsmith writes: “Mormons and Gentiles alike often draw distinctions between Utah Mormons and out-of-state Mormons.”112 Converts accuse Utah Mormons of confusing aspects of their regional culture with church doctrine.113 Some grumble that since the church bureaucracy is centered in Utah and comprised of Utahns, the church remains too Utah-centric (Decoo 2013; Decoo 1996). Utah Mormons still dominate the top echelons of church leadership. In 2020, only five of the fifteen men who comprise the church’s governing First Presidency and Quorum of twelve apostles were born outside Utah, even though Utah comprises only 13 percent of the church’s 2020 membership.114 On the other hand, Utah Mormons sometimes think converts are less Mormon than they are. A folk doctrine in Utah, common until the 1990s, held that those born in the church were especially valiant in a premortal existence, and being “born in the covenant” is their reward. Converts are a step below.115 This view was epitomized in Saturday’s Warrior, a popular theater production that toured Utah in the 1970s. Non-Mormons in Utah. The Mormon subculture also affects the lives of non-Mormons in Utah. Mormons are clannish and some outsiders complain that it is hard for them to fully integrate into Utah society.116 Schools are a common site for these complaints.117 Non-LDS students report trouble finding playmates or dates to dances.118 As Wallace Stegner observes: “A chosen people is probably inspiring for the chosen to live among; it is not so comfortable for outsiders to live with.”119 Church authorities have cautioned against clannishness over the pulpit. Leaders are particularly critical of Mormons telling their non-LDS neighbors that they should leave if they don’t like Utah society—a common, glib rejoinder to gentile complaints.120 But clannishness is inevitable in a subculture that is fiercely endogamous, believes it has exclusive access to religious truths, and

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has dietary and behavioral restrictions that are not morally relevant for those outside the fold. In response, some non-Mormons in Utah have adopted a “go along to get along” attitude to maximize their ability to assimilate. Dominant faiths impact the behavior of outsiders living within their sphere of influence.121 For example, since church membership and attendance are barometers of good character in Utah, Catholics and Protestants in the state attend church more frequently than members of their respective denominations elsewhere in the nation.122 They also have more children, reflecting the community’s pronatalism.123 Correlation in Utah. The Mormon share of Utah’s population was cresting while the correlation movement was standardizing the practice of Mormonism worldwide. The changes wrought by correlation were implemented in Utah even though they were designed for the mission field. These changes chipped away at aspects of Mormon practice unique to Utah. For example, roadshows— a Utah tradition—were jettisoned because they could not be implemented where Mormons are sparse. The three-hour meeting schedule was also implemented in Utah, even though most Utahns live mere blocks away from their church. The razing of the historic tabernacle in Coalville, Utah, was an early manifestation of the impulse to standardize. The building was dedicated in 1899 and was the centerpiece of Mormon life in Coalville. But when the church’s programs evolved, the tabernacle could not be repurposed to accommodate them. The church deemed it more important for worship in Coalville to conform to new standards than to allow the Saints there to carry on as they had, so the building was torn down despite its historical significance. The uproar over this event is one of the few times that Utah Mormons have organized to protest against their own church.124 The correlation movement emphasized self-control and strict adherence to church teachings. This emphasis was amplified and reinforced by the existing system of social controls that undergird the Utah Mormon subculture. This altered religious activity among Utah Mormons. For example, in the United States, most denominations are characterized by “convert zeal.” Those who join churches by choice are generally more religious than those who inherit their religion from parents.125 But Utah Mormons have traditionally had higher rates of church attendance than converts, defying this tendency.126 The standardization of Mormon practice worldwide also made religious expression in Utah more uniform. In previous generations, Mormon religious activity in Utah was highest in places where Latter-day Saints were most concentrated. It stands to reason that the densest Mormon communities had the most pervasive social controls, which in turn exacted compliance. But by 2000, there was no connection between the concentration of church members in Utah communities and church activity. By the twenty-first century, Mormon church participation in Utah was uniformly higher and less variable across wards as a consequence of the correlation reforms.127

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The Waning of Zion The Mormon share of Utah’s population peaked in 1990 at 77 percent.128 This demographic base was a solid foundation for a subculture that fortified Latter-­ day Saint religiosity and distinctiveness. But as the new millennium approached, yet another demographic shift began to alter Mormon life in the state. Mormon birth rates began to decline.129 This drop in natural increase was consistent, and happened alongside increasing numbers of non-Mormons moving into the state. These trends combined to erode Mormon majorities. By 2008, a census of religious affiliation based on a nationally representative sample found that the Mormon share of Utah’s population had fallen to 57 percent. In 2016 a similar census showed that Mormons were a bare majority of Utahns at 51 percent.130 In 2018 Salt Lake County became minority Mormon for the first time since the 1930s.131 Utah wards and neighborhoods are no longer as tightly consolidated as they once were, particularly in Salt Lake City. Neighbors with different behavioral standards are beginning to change the character of these communities. A classic theory in the sociology of religion holds that denominations are most powerful in settings where they predominate. When everyone shares the same faith, religion functions as a “sacred canopy” that integrates all aspects of social life. Doctrines and truth claims are uncontested under this canopy because there are no competing ideologies. The emergence of religious pluralism fractures the canopy because competing claims to exclusive truth cancel each other out. Doctrines are less plausible when they are contested versus when they are axiomatic. Indifference to religion ensues.132 The recent arrival of a significant contingent of non-Mormons in Utah has fractured Mormonism’s sacred canopy. For these new Utahns, subcultural prohibitions against things like drinking coffee and transacting commerce on Sunday is not considered immoral, and these norms are simply ignored. Because of their numbers, Mormons can no longer respond by reverting to “us” versus “them” tribalism or by excluding non-Mormons from public life.133 In early Utah, gentile intrusion was met with boycotts and action from the state’s theocratic government. But even though the Utah state legislature remains overwhelmingly Mormon,134 there are limits on their ability to legislate a Mormon way of life. In an era where federal power is ascending, the United States courts are increasingly protecting the lifestyle of non-Mormon Utahns. For example, in 1983, the Utah legislature passed the Cable TV Decency Act, which prohibited the broadcast of R-rated movies over premium cable TV networks. This law was shot down by the Supreme Court. After this decision, any Utahn could view movies with content that the church finds objectionable, including curious Mormons who could now watch in the comfort of their home without the risk of being seen exiting a theater.135 As a result, the prohibition on R-rated movies in Utah is now observed only by the very religious.

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The legalization of gay marriage was a substantial blow to the church because a justification for the Mormon prohibition of homosexuality was that sex outside of legal marriage was sinful. This stance allowed the church to claim that it had a single standard of sexual morality and was not singling out gay people. The decision in Obergefell v. Hodges forced the church to admit to discrimination. This has been poorly received by younger Mormons and is a known catalyst for disaffection from the church.136 The mere presence of people with mainstream attitudes presents a challenge to Mormon lifeways.137 It is hard, for example, to condemn a good, responsible neighbor who happens to have a liquor cabinet in their home. Finding ways to censure coworkers who wear tasteful, trendy clothes that are nevertheless incompatible with temple garments is similarly difficult. This has transformed Mormon subcultural norms that are inconsistent with prevailing national norms from being “things that are objectively wrong” into “things that are wrong for us.” The latter has less coercive power, because any Mormon tempted to have a coffee or go to a movie on Sunday can escape disapproval by spending time with non-Mormon associates, who are now more abundant than ever. Indeed, Riess finds that younger Mormons are less concerned about prohibitions against coffee and alcohol than are their parents, and this may be why.138 Erosion of the demographic base supporting Utah’s religious subculture is also leading to outright apostasy. The conflation of church and community that once glued Mormons to their church is dissolving. Up to one-third of Mormons raised in the faith have now left the church, up from just 7 percent thirty years ago.139 Mormon life in Utah—particularly in Salt Lake City—is now starting to resemble Mormon life in the mission field. Those who are active in the church do so based on their subjective religious commitments. Those who lack these commitments are increasingly deciding to spend their Sundays doing other things.140 Projections for the twenty-first century suggest that the Mormon share of Utah’s population will continue to decline. What this will mean for the institutional church, still headquartered in the state and staffed by Utahns, remains to be seen.

Notes 1. Mark L. Grover, “Mormons in Latin America,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, eds. Terryl L. Givens and Philip L. Barlow (New York: Oxford University Press), 515–528; Ronald Lawson and Kenneth Xydias, “Reassessing the Size of Mormons, Adventists and Witnesses: Using Census Data to Test the Reliability of Membership Data and Accounting for the Disparate Patterns Found,” Review of Religious Research forthcoming, doi:https://doi. org/10.1007/s13644-020-00408-z. 2. Rodney Stark, “The Rise of a New World Faith,” Review of Religious Research 26, no 4 (1984): 18–27.

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3. Lawson, Ronald, and Ryan T.  Cragun. “Comparing the Global Growth, Geographic Distribution and Socioeconomic Status of Mormons, Adventists and Witnesses,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 51, no. 2 (2012): 220–240. 4. Arien Hall, “A World Religion from a Chosen Land: The Competing Identities of the Contemporary Mormon Church,” in The Changing World Religion Map, ed. Stanley D. Brunn (Dordrecht, NL: Springer, 2015), 803–817. 5. Gregory A. Prince and Wm. Robert Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005); Francis M.  Gibbons, The Expanding Church: Three Decades of Remarkable Growth Among the Latter-­day Saints, 1970–1999 (Bountiful, UT: Horizon, 1999). 6. R. Lanier Britsch, “By All Means: The Boldness of the Mormon Missionary Enterprise,” in Go Ye into All The World: The Growth and Development of Mormon Missionary Work, eds. Reid L.  Neilson and Fred E.  Woods (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, 2012), 1–20. 7. Wilfried Decoo, “In Search of Mormon Identity: Mormon Culture, Gospel Culture, and an American Worldwide Church,” International Journal of Mormon Studies 6, no. 1 (2013): 1–53. 8. Rick Phillips and Ryan T. Cragun, “Contemporary Mormon Religiosity and the Legacy of ‘Gathering,’” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 16, no. 3 (2013): 77–94. 9. Rick Phillips, “Demography and Information Technology Affect Religious Commitment among Latter-day Saints in Utah and the Intermountain West,” Journal of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 95, no. 1 (2018): 317–332. 10. D. Michael Quinn, “The Mormon Succession Crisis of 1844,” BYU Studies 16, no. 2 (1976): 187–233. 11. Thomas G. Alexander, Brigham Young and the Expansion of the Mormon Faith (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019). 12. Richard E.  Bennett, We’ll Find the Place: The Mormon Exodus, 1846–1848 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009). 13. Richard V.  Francaviglia, “Geography and Mormon Identity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, eds. Terryl L.  Givens and Philip L.  Barlow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 425–438. 14. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Hymns of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1985), 34. 15. Brigham Young, August 17, 1856. Journal of Discourses, volume 4, p. 32. 16. Steven Epperson, Mormons and Jews: Early Mormon Theologies of Israel (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1992). Arnold H.  Green, “Gathering and Election: Israelite Descent and Universalism in Mormon Discourse,” Journal of Mormon History 25, no. 1 (1999): 131–173. 17. Isaiah 34–35, esp. 35:1, King James Version. 18. Robert Joseph Dwyer, The Gentile Comes to Utah: A Study in Religious and Social Conflict, 1862–1890 (Salt Lake City, UT: Western Epics, 1971). 19. Hymns of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 5. 20. Gustav Larson, Prelude to Kingdom: Mormon Desert Conquest (Francetown, NH: Marshall Jones Company, 1947).

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21. Rick Phillips and Ryan Cragun, “Contemporary Mormon Religiosity and the Legacy of ‘Gathering,’” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 16, no. 3 (2013): 77–94. 22. P. A. M. Taylor, Expectations Westward: The Mormon Emigration of their British Converts in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966). 23. Alexander, Brigham Young and the Expansion of the Mormon Faith. Michael Scott Raber, “Religious Polity and Local Production: The Origins of a Mormon Town” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1978). 24. Leonard J. Arrington, Feramorz Y. Fox and Dean L. May, Building the City of God: Community and Cooperation among the Mormons (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992). 25. Richard O.  Cowan, “The Design, Construction and Role of the Salt Lake Temple,” in Salt Lake City: The Place Which God Prepared, eds. Scott C Esplin and Kenneth L Alford (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, 2011), 47–67. 26. Daniel H. Olsen, “Contesting Identity, Space and Sacred Site Management at Temple Square in Salt Lake City Utah” (PhD diss., University of Waterloo, 2008). 27. Craig James Ostler, “Salt Lake City: City Stake of Zion,” in Salt Lake City: The Place Which God Prepared, eds. Scott C Esplin and Kenneth L Alford (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, 2015), 339–352. 28. Lee L. Bean, Geraldine Mineau and Douglas Anderton, Fertility Change on the American Frontier: Adaptation and Innovation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). 29. Morris A.  Shirts and Kathryn Shirts. A Trial Furnace: Southern Utah’s Iron Mission (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2001). 30. Larry M.  Logue, A Sermon in the Desert: Belief and Behavior in Early St. George, Utah (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 31. Marshall E.  Bowen, Utah People in the Nevada Desert: Homestead and Community on a Twentieth Century Farmer’s Frontier (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1994). 32. George D. Smith, “Nauvoo Polygamy: … But We Called It Celestial Marriage” (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2011). 33. Richard N. Ostling and Joan K Ostling, Mormon America: The Power and the Promise (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1999), 69. 34. Kathryn M. Daynes, “Celestial Marriage (Eternal and Plural),” in The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, eds. Terryl L.  Givens and Philip L.  Barlow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 334–348. 35. Richard S. Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy: A History (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1986). 36. D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1997), 175–178. 37. Dean L. May, Lee L. Bean and Mark H. Skolnick, “The Stability Ratio: An Index of Community Cohesiveness in Ninetheenth-Century Mormon Towns,” in Generations and Change: Genealogical Perspectives in Social History, eds. Robert M. Taylor, Jr. and Ralph J. Crandall (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986), 141–158.

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38. Thomas G. Alexander, Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890–1930 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 106. 39. Dean L. May, Three Frontiers: Family, Land, and Society in the American West, 1850–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 206. 40. General Handbook of Instruction, No. 5: Annual Instructions to Presidents of Stakes and Counselors, High Counselors and Stake Tithing Clerks in Zion. 1903, p. 21. [A manual for local leaders distributed by the church. In the author’s possession.] 41. Alexander, Mormonism in Transition, 96–104. May, Three Frontiers, 235. 42. A. J. Simmonds, The Gentile Comes to Cache Valley (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1976), 4. 43. Alexander, Mormonism in Transition, 114. 44. May, Three Frontiers, 219. 45. David L. Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American West,1847–1896 (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1998). 46. Paul Bailey, Holy Smoke: A Dissertation on the Utah War (Los Angeles: Westernlore Books, 1978). 47. Thomas G.  Alexander. “Mormon Primitivism and Modernization,” in The Primitive Church in the Modern World, ed. R.  T. Hughes (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 174. 48. E.  B. Long, The Saints and the Union: Utah Territory during the Civil War (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1981); Brent M.  Rogers, “The Application of Federal Power in Utah Territory” in Reconstruction and Mormon America, eds. Clyde A.  Milner II and Brian Q.  Cannon (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), 116–149. 49. Leonard J.  Arrington, “The Deseret Telegraph: A Church-owned Public Utility,” The Journal of Economic History 11, no. 2 (1951): 117–139. 50. Jonathan Bliss, Merchants and Miners in Utah: The Walker Brothers and Their Bank (Salt Lake City: Western Epics, 1983). 51. Colleen Whitley, From the Ground Up: A History of Mining in Utah (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2006). 52. Edward J.  Allen, The Second United Order Among the Mormons (New York: AMS Press, 1967). 53. Simmonds, The Gentile Comes to Cache Valley, 13–17. 54. For an account of the last days of polygamy, see B.  Carmon Hardy, Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992). 55. Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1985). 56. Alexander, Mormonism in Transition, 7. 57. Leonard J.  Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004). 58. Craig L.  Foster and Marianne T.  Watson, American Polygamy: A History of Fundamentalist Mormon Faith (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2019). 59. Edward Leo Lyman, Finally Statehood! Utah’s Struggles, 1849–1896 (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2019). 60. Ethan R. Yorgason, Transformation of the Mormon Culture Region (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010).

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61. Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 143. 62. Thomas O’Dea, The Mormons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). 63. Dean L.  May, “Mormons,” in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Thernstrom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 720–731. Phillips Hammond and Kee Warner, “Religion and Ethnicity in Late-Twentieth-Century America,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 527, no. 1 (1993): 55–66. 64. David Eddington and Matthew Savage, “Where Are the Mountains in Utah?” American Speech 87, no. 3 (2012): 336–349; David Bowie, “Acoustic Characteristics of Utah’s Card-Cord Merger,” American Speech 83, no. 1 (2008): 35–61; Rune Lindahl-Jacobsen, Heidi A.  Hanson, Anna Oksuzyan, Geraldine P.  Mineau, Kaare Christensen, Ken R.  Smith, “The Male-Female Health-Survival Paradox and Sex Differences in Cohort Life Expectancy in Utah, Denmark, and Sweden 1850–1910,” Annals of Epidemiology 23, no. 4 (2013): 161–166. 65. Ethan R.  Yorgason, “Creating Regional Identity, Moral Orders and Spatial Contiguity: Imagined Landscapes of Mormon Americanization,” Cultural Geographies 9, no. 4 (2002): 448–466. 66. Richard D. Poll, “Utah and the Mormons: A Symbiotic Relationship,” in New Views of Mormon History: Essays in Honor of Leonard J. Arrington, ed. Davis Bitton and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987), 323–341. 67. John S. McCormick, The Gathering Place: An Illustrated History of Salt Lake City (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2000). 68. Clark S. Knowlton, “A Community Study of Social Change in Goshen” (MA Thesis, Brigham Young University, 1948); Lowry Nelson, The Mormon Village (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1952). 69. Stan L. Albrecht and Tim B. Heaton, “Secularization, Higher Education, and Religiosity,” in Latter-day Saint Social Life: Social Research on the LDS Church and its Members, ed. James T.  Duke (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1998), 293–314. 70. Bean, Mineau and Anderton, Fertility Change on the American Frontier, 66. 71. Bourree Lam, “Why Is Utah the First State to Have a White-Collar Crime Registry?” The Atlantic, March 29, 2016. 72. Richard D. Phillips, “Saints in Zion, Saints in Babylon: Religious Pluralism and the Transformation of American Mormonism” (Ph.D.  Diss. Rutgers University, 2001). 73. ibid. 74. ibid. 75. Ezra Anthon Greene, “Dissent in Zion: Outsider Practices in Utah,” New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry 9, no. 2 (2018): 66–76. 76. Michael R.  Cope, “You Don’t Know Jack: The Dynamics of Mormon Religious/Ethnic Identity” (MS Thesis, Brigham Young University, 2009). 77. Phillips and Cragun, “Contemporary Mormon Religiosity and the Legacy of ‘Gathering,’” 77–94. 78. The verse is Moses 7:18, from the Pearl of Great Price, a book of Mormon scripture.

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79. Rick Phillips, “Can Rising Rates of Church Participation Be Evidence of Secularization?” Sociology of Religion 65, no. 2 (2004): 139–153. 80. Seth L.  Bryant, Henri Gooren, Rick Phillips and David G.  Stewart Jr., “Conversion and Retention in Mormonism,” in Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, ed. Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 765–785. 81. For an account of life in a mission field ward, see Fayone Willes, Minnesota Mormons: A History of the Minneapolis Minnesota Stake (No publication data). 82. Susan Buhler Taber, Mormon Lives: A Year in the Elkton Ward (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993). 83. Phillips, “Saints in Zion, Saints in Babylon,” 35–36. 84. 1 Peter 2:9, King James Version. 85. Matthew Bowman, “Zion: The Progressive Roots of Mormon Correlation,” in Directions for Mormon Studies in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Patrick Q. Mason (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016), 15–34. 86. J. M. Cleverely, “Mormonism on the Big Mac standard,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 29 no. 2 (1996): 69–75. 87. Gibbons, The Expanding Church, 187–188. 88. “Mormons May Limit Church Gatherings,” New York Times, September 30, 1979, p. 45. 89. Rick Phillips, “Rethinking the International Expansion of Mormonism,” Nova Religio: The Journal of New and Emergent Religions 10, no. 1 (2006): 52–68. 90. David G.  Stewart, The Law of the Harvest: Practical Principles of Effective Missionary Work (Henderson, NV: Cumorah Foundation, 2007). 91. Jay M.  Todd, “More Members Now Outside U.S.  Than in U.S.,” Ensign, March 1996, pp. 76–77. 92. Rick Phillips, “The ‘Secularization’ of Utah and Mormon Church Growth,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 38 no. 1 (1999): 72–82. 93. Rick Phillips and Ryan Cragun, Mormons in the United States, 1990–2008: Socio-Demographic Trends and Regional Differences (Hartford, CT: Program on Public Values, Trinity College, 2011); Bean, Mineau and Anderton, Fertility Change on the American Frontier, 67. 94. James T. Duke and Barry L. Johnson. “Changes in the Religious Devotion of Latter-day Saints Throughout the Life Cycle,” BYU Studies 36, no. 1 (1996): 139–158. 95. Phillips, “Saints in Zion, Saints in Babylon,” 21–23. 96. Michael D.  Zimmerman, “Introduction,” in God and Country: Politics in Utah, ed. Jeffery E. Sells (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2005), xvi. 97. Rick Phillips, Ryan T. Cragun, and Barry A. Kosmin, “Increasing Sex Ratio Imbalance among Utah Mormons: Sources and Implications,” Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 11, no. 1 (2015): 1–27. 98. Linda Sillitoe, Friendly Fire: The ACLU in Utah (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1996), 51–52. 99. Calvin L. Rampton, “Toleration of Religious Sentiment: Making It Work from the Governor’s Chair,” in God and Country: Politics in Utah, ed. Jeffery E. Sells (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2005), 85. 100. Rick Phillips and Ryan T. Cragun, “Religious Traditions in Politics: Latter-day Saints,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics (New York: Oxford University

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Press, 2020). doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/ acrefore/9780190228637.013.800. 101. Ronald W. Walker, “‘Going to Meeting’ in Salt Lake City’s Thirteenth Ward, 1849–1881: A Microanalysis,” in New Views of Mormon History: Essays in Honor of Leonard J.  Arrington, ed. Davis Bitton, and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1987), 138–161. 102. Michael McBride, “Club Mormon: Free-Riders, Monitoring, and Exclusion in the LDS Church,” Rationality and Society 19, no. 4 (2007): 395–424. 103. Daniel Robertson and Tyler Bowles, “The Economics of Geographical Ward Boundaries in the LDS Church,” Journal of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 87, no. 1 (2010): 317–335. 104. Gibbons, The Expanding Church, 151. 105. ibid., 54, 178–179. 106. Stanford J.  Layton, Red Stockings and Out-of-Towners: Sports in Utah (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2003); Jessie L. Embry, “LDS All-Church Athletic Tournaments, 1950–1971,” BYU Studies 48, no. 3 (2009): 93–124. 107. Jessie L. Embry, Mormon Wards as Community (Binghamton, NY: Binghamton University, 2001). 108. Michael McBride, “Club Mormon,” 395–424. 109. Todd Goodsell, “Maintaining Solidarity: A Look Back at the Mormon Village,” Rural Sociology 65, no. 3 (2000): 358–375. 110. Tim B.  Heaton, “Vital Statistics,” in Latter-Day Saint Social Life: Social Research on the LDS Church and its Members, ed. James T. Duke (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, 1998) 105–132. 111. Kristin L. Hansen, Laurie Page, Lane Fischer, and Marleen Williams, Marleen, “Religious Acculturation and Spirituality in Latter-Day Saint Committed Converts,” Issues in Religion and Psychotherapy 35, no. 1 (2013): 16–29. 112. Thomas R. Goldsmith, “The Trouble with Dominant Religions,” in God and Country: Politics in Utah, ed. Jeffery E. Sells (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2005), 177. 113. Reid J. Leamaster and Mangala Subramaniam, “Career and/or Motherhood? Gender and the LDS Church,” Sociological Perspectives 59, no. 4 (2015): 776–797. 114. Henry B. Eyring is one of the five born outside Utah. Eyring is the son of a noted chemist from a prominent pioneer family who left Utah to join the faculty at Princeton. Eyring is thus an exception that reinforces the rule. 115. Karen Marguerite Moloney, “Beached on the Wasatch Front: Probing the Us and Them Paradigm,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 22, no. 2 (1989): 101–113. 116. Greene, “Dissent in Zion,” 66–76. 117. Kim Abunuwara, Ryan T.  Cragun, and J.  E. Sumerau, “Complicating Marginalisation: The Case of Mormon and Nonreligious College Students in a Predominantly Mormon Context,” Journal of Beliefs and Values 39, no. 3 (2018): 317–329; Eric-Jon K. Marlowe, “Treatment of Religious Expression and Belief in Utah Public Schools: Perspectives of the Religious Minority” (PhD diss., Brigham Young University, 2005). 118. Sillitoe, Friendly Fire, 79; Simmonds, The Gentile Comes to Cache Valley, 68. 119. Wallace Stegner, The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 1992), 24, emphasis in original.

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120. John J. Flynn, “The Ethics of Marginalization: The Utah Example,” in God and Country: Politics in Utah, ed. Jeffery E. Sells (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2005), 204–205. 121. Daniel V.  A. Olson, “The Influence of Your Neighbors’ Religions on You, Your Attitudes and Behaviors, and Your Community,” Sociology of Religion 80, no. 2 (2019): 147–167. 122. Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, “Religions in Context: The Response of Non-­ Mormon Faiths in Utah,” Review of Religious Research 45, no. 3 (2004): 293–298. 123. Michael B.  Toney, Banu Golesorkhi, and William F.  Stinner, “Residence Exposure and Fertility Expectations of Young Mormon and Non-Mormon Women in Utah,” Journal of Marriage and Family 47, no. 2 (1985): 459–465. 124. Mark Leone, “Why the Coalville Tabernacle Had to Be Razed,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 8, no. 2 (1973): 30–39. 125. “The ‘Zeal of the Convert’: Is it the Real Deal?” Pew Research Center. https://www.pewforum.org/2009/10/28/the-zeal-of-the-convert-is-itthe-real-deal/, Accessed May 26, 2020. 126. Rick Phillips, “Religious Market Share and Mormon Activity,” Sociology of Religion 59, no. 2 (1998): 139–153. 127. Rick Phillips, “Sources of Mormon Religious Activity in the United States: How Latter-day Saint Communities Function Where Mormons Predominate, and Where They Are Sparse,” Journal of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 91, no. 1 (2015): 259–276. 128. Deseret News Church Almanac. Published biennially 1974–2013. Salt Lake City: Deseret News. 129. Kem C.  Gardner Policy Institute, “Utah Demographics Fact Sheet” 2016. Accessed May 16, 2020, at http://gardner.utah.edu/wp-content/ uploads/2016/02/Fact-Sheet.pdf. 130. Public Religion Research Institute, “America’s Changing Religious Identity: Findings from the 2016 American Values Atlas,” 2017, p. 42. Accessed May 26, 2020, at https://www.prri.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/PRRIReligion-Report.pdf. Rick Phillips, “Demography and Information Technology Affect Religious Commitment among Latter-day Saints in Utah and the Intermountain West,” Journal of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 95, no. 1 (2018): 317–332. 131. Matt Canham, “Salt Lake County Is Now Minority Mormon, and the Impacts Are Far-Reaching,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 9, 2018. 132. Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy (New York: Anchor Books, 167). 133. Phillips, Cragun, and Kosmin, “Increasing Sex Ratio Imbalance,” 1–27. 134. “Mormons Account for Nearly 90 Percent of State Legislature,” US News and World Report, January 27, 2019. Accessed May 26, 2000. 135. Ken Levine, “Constitutional Law: Utah’s Cable Decency Act: An Indecent Act,” Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review 3, no. 1 (1987): 401–415. Available at: http://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/elr/vol7/iss2/9. 136. Jana Riess, The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 137. Sarah Wilkins-LaFlamme, “Secularization and the Wider Gap in Values and Personal Religiosity Between the Religious and Nonreligious,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 55, no. 4 (2016): 717–736.

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138. Riess, The Next Mormons, 160. 139. Rick Phillips, “Demography and Information Technology,” 318. 140. Howard M.  Bahr and Stan L.  Albrecht, “Strangers Once More: Patterns of Disaffiliation from Mormonism,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 28, no. 2 (1989): 180–200.

Bibliography “Mormons Account for Nearly 90 Percent of State Legislature”. 2019. US News and World Report, January 27. Accessed 25 May 2000. “Mormons May Limit Church Gatherings”. 1979. New York Times, September 30, p. 45. “The ‘Zeal of the Convert’: Is it the Real Deal?” Pew Research Center. https://www. pewforum.org/2009/10/28/the-zeal-of-the-convert-is-it-the-real-deal/, Accessed 26 May 2020. Albrecht, Stan L., and Tim B. Heaton. 1998. Secularization, Higher Education, and Religiosity. In Latter-day Saint Social Life: Social Research on the LDS Church and its Members, ed. James T.  Duke, 293–314. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University. Alexander, Thomas G. 1986. Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890–1930. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. ———. 1995. Mormon Primitivism and Modernization. In The Primitive Church in the Modern World, ed. R.T. Hughes, 167–196. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2019. Brigham Young and the Expansion of the Mormon Faith. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Allen, Edward J. 1967. The Second United Order Among the Mormons. New  York: AMS Press. Arrington, Leonard J. 1951. The Deseret Telegraph: A Church-owned Public Utility. The Journal of Economic History 11 (2): 117–139. ———. 2004. Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Arrington, Leonard J., and Davis Bitton. 1992. The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Arrington, Leonard J., Feramorz Y. Fox, and Dean L. May. 1992. Building the City of God: Community and Cooperation among the Mormons. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Bahr, Howard M., and Stan L.  Albrecht. 1989. Strangers Once More: Patterns of Disaffiliation from Mormonism. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 28 (2): 180–200. Bailey, Paul. 1978. Holy Smoke: A Dissertation on the Utah War. Los Angeles: Westernlore Books. Bean, Lee L., Geraldine Mineau, and Douglas Anderton. 1990. Fertility Change on the American Frontier: Adaptation and Innovation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bennet, Richard E. 2009. We’ll Find the Place: The Mormon Exodus, 1846–1848. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Berger, Peter L. 1967. The Sacred Canopy. New York: Anchor Books.

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Bigler, David L. 1998. Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American West, 1847–1896. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Bliss, Jonathan. 1983. Merchants and Miners in Utah: The Walker Brothers and Their Bank. Salt Lake City: Western Epics. Bowen, Marshall E. 1994. Utah People in the Nevada Desert: Homestead and Community on a Twentieth Century Farmer’s Frontier. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Bowie, David. 2008. Acoustic Characteristics of Utah’s Card-Cord Merger. American Speech 83 (1): 35–61. Bowman, Matthew. 2016. Zion: The Progressive Roots of Mormon Correlation. In Directions for Mormon Studies in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Patrick Q.  Mason, 15–34. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Britsch, R.  Lanier. 2012. By All Means: The Boldness of the Mormon Missionary Enterprise. In Go Ye Into All The World: The Growth and Development of Mormon Missionary Work, ed. Reid L. Neilson and Fred E. Woods, 1–20. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center. Bryant, Seth L., Henri Gooren, Rick Phillips, and David G. Stewart Jr. 2014. Conversion and Retention in Mormonism. In Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, ed. Lewis R.  Rambo and Charles E.  Farhadian, 765–785. Oxford University Press: New York. Canham, Matt. 2018. Salt Lake County Is Now Minority Mormon, and the Impacts are Far-Reaching, Salt Lake Tribune, December 9. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 1985. Hymns of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Cleverely, J.M. 1996. Mormonism on the Big Mac Standard. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29 (2): 69–75. Cope, Michael R. 2009. You Don’t Know Jack: The Dynamics of Mormon Religious/ Ethnic Identity. MS Thesis, Brigham Young University. Cowan, Richard O. 2011. The Design, Construction and Role of the Salt Lake Temple. In Salt Lake City: The Place Which God Prepared, ed. Scott C. Esplin and Kenneth L. Alford, 47–67. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center. Daynes, Kathryn M. 2015. Celestial Marriage (Eternal and Plural). In The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, ed. Terryl L.  Givens and Philip L.  Barlow, 515–528. New York: Oxford University Press. Decoo, Wilfried. 2013. In Search of Mormon Identity: Mormon Culture, Gospel Culture, and an American Worldwide Church. International Journal of Mormon Studies 6 (1): 1–53. Deseret News Church Almanac. Published Biennially 1974–2013. Salt Lake City: Deseret News. Duke, James T., and Barry L. Johnson. 1996. Changes in the Religious Devotion of Latter-day Saints Throughout the Life Cycle. BYU Studies 36 (1): 139–158. Dwyer, Robert Joseph. 1971. The Gentile Comes to Utah: A Study in Religious and Social Conflict, 1862–1890. Salt Lake City, UT: Western Epics. Eddington, David, and Matthew Savage. 2012. Where are the Mountains in Utah? American Speech 87 (3): 336–349. Embry, Jessie L. 2001. Mormon Wards as Community. Binghamton, NY: Binghamton University. ———. 2009. LDS All-Church Athletic Tournaments, 1950–1971. BYU Studies 48 (3): 93–124.

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Epperson, Steven. 1992. Mormons and Jews: Early Mormon Theologies of Israel. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books. Flynn, John J. 2005. The Ethics of Marginalization: The Utah Example. In God and Country: Politics in Utah, ed. Jeffery E.  Sells, 203–230. Salt Lake City: Signature Books. Foster, Craig L., and Marianne T.  Watson. 2019. American Polygamy: A History of Fundamentalist Mormon Faith. Charleston, SC: The History Press. Francaviglia, Richard V. 2015. Geography and Mormon Identity. In The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, ed. Terryl L.  Givens and Philip L.  Barlow, 515–528. New York: Oxford University Press. General Handbook of Instruction, No. 5: Annual Instructions to Presidents of Stakes and Counselors, High Counselors and Stake Tithing Clerks in Zion. 1903. p. 21. [A Manual for Local Leaders Distributed by the Church. In the Author’s Possession.] Gibbons, Francis M. 1999. The Expanding Church: Three Decades of Remarkable Growth Among the Latter-day Saints, 1970–1999. Bountiful, UT: Horizon. Goldsmith, Thomas R. 2005. The Trouble with Dominant Religions. In God and Country: Politics in Utah, ed. Jeffery E.  Sells, 171–183. Salt Lake City: Signature Books. Goodsell, Todd. 2000. Maintaining Solidarity: A Look Back at the Mormon Village. Rural Sociology 65 (3): 358–375. Green, Arnold H. 1999. Gathering and Election: Israelite Descent and Universalism in Mormon Discourse. Journal of Mormon History 25 (1): 131–173. Greene, Ezra Anthon. 2018. Dissent in Zion: Outsider Practices in Utah. New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry 9 (2): 66–76. Grover, Mark L. 2015. Mormons in Latin America. In The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, ed. Terryl L. Givens and Philip L. Barlow, 515–528. New York: Oxford University Press. Hall, Arien. 2015. A World Religion from a Chosen Land: The Competing Identities of the Contemporary Mormon Church. In The Changing World Religion Map, ed. Stanley D. Brunn, 803–817. Dordrecht, NL: Springer. Hammond, Phillip, and Kee Warner. 1993. Religion and Ethnicity in Late-Twentieth-­ Century America. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 527 (1): 55–66. Hansen, Kristin L., Laurie Page, Lane Fischer, and Marleen Williams. 2013. Religious Acculturation and Spirituality in Latter-Day Saint Committed Converts. Issues in Religion and Psychotherapy 35 (1): 16–29. Hardy, B. 1992. Carmon. Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Heaton, Tim B. 1998. Vital Statistics. In Latter-Day Saint Social Life: Social Research on the LDS Church and its Members, ed. James T. Duke, 105–132. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center. Journal of Discourses. 1854–86. Vol. 26. London: LDS Booksellers Depot. Kim, Abunuwara, Ryan T.  Cragun, and J.E.  Sumerau. 2018. Complicating Marginalisation: The Case of Mormon and Nonreligious College Students in a Predominantly Mormon Context. Journal of Beliefs and Values 39 (3): 317–329. Knowlton, Clark S. 1948. A Community Study of Social Change in Goshen. MA Thesis, Brigham Young University. Lam, Bourree. 2016. Why is Utah the First State to Have a White-Collar Crime Registry? The Atlantic, March 29.

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Larson, Gustav. 1947. Prelude to Kingdom: Mormon Desert Conquest. Francetown, NH: Marshall Jones Company. Lawson, Ronald, and Ryan T.  Cragun. 2012. Comparing the Global Growth, Geographic Distribution and Socioeconomic Status of Mormons, Adventists and Witnesses. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 51 (2): 220–240. Lawson, Ronald, and Kenneth Xydias. forthcoming. Reassessing the Size of Mormons, Adventists and Witnesses: Using Census Data to Test the Reliability of Membership Data and Accounting for the Disparate Patterns Found. Review of Religious Research. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-020-00408-z. Layton, Stanford J. 2003. Red Stockings and Out-of-Towners: Sports in Utah. Salt Lake City: Signature Books. Leamaster, Reid J., and Mangala Subramaniam. 2015. Career and/or Motherhood? Gender and the LDS Church. Sociological Perspectives 59 (4): 776–797. Leone, Mark. 1973. Why the Coalville Tabernacle had to be Razed. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 8 (2): 30–39. Levine, Ken. 1987. Constitutional Law: Utah’s Cable Decency Act: an Indecent Act. Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review 3 (1): 401–415. Lindahl Jacobsen, Rune, Heidi A.  Hanson, Anna Oksuzyan, Geraldine P.  Mineau, Kaare Christensen, and Ken R.  Smith. 2013. The Male-Female Health-Survival Paradox and Sex Differences in Cohort Life Expectancy in Utah, Denmark, and Sweden 1850–1910. Annals of Epidemiology 23 (4): 161–166. Logue, Larry M. 1988. A Sermon in the Desert: Belief and Behavior in Early St. George, Utah. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Long, E.B. 1981. The Saints and the Union: Utah Territory during the Civil War. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Lyman, Edward Leo. 2019. Finally Statehood! Utah’s Struggles, 1849–1896. Salt Lake City: Signature Books. Marlowe, Eric-Jon K. 2005. Treatment of Religious Expression and Belief in Utah Public Schools: Perspectives of the Religious Minority. PhD diss., Brigham Young University. May, Dean L. 1980. Mormons. In Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Thernstrom, 720–731. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. May, Deal L. 1994. Three Frontiers: Family, Land, and Society in the American West, 1850–1900. New York: Cambridge University Press. May, Dean L., Lee L. Bean, and Mark H. Skolnick. 1986. The Stability Ratio: An Index of Community Cohesiveness in Nineteenth-Century Mormon Towns. In Generations and Change: Genealogical Perspectives in Social History, ed. Robert M. Taylor Jr. and Ralph J. Crandall, 141–158. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. McBride, Michael. 2007. Club Mormon: Free-Riders, Monitoring, and Exclusion in the LDS Church. Rationality and Society 19 (4): 395–424. McCormick, John S. 2000. The Gathering Place: An Illustrated History of Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City: Signature Books. Moloney, Karen Marguerite. 1989. Beached on the Wasatch Front: Probing the Us and Them Paradigm. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 22 (2): 101–113. Nelson, Lowry. 1952. The Mormon Village. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. O’Dea, Thomas. 1957. The Mormons. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Olsen, Daniel H. 2008. Contesting Identity, Space and Sacred Site Management at Temple Square in Salt Lake City Utah. PhD diss., University of Waterloo. Olson, Daniel V.A. 2019. The Influence of Your Neighbors’ Religions on You, Your Attitudes and Behaviors, and Your Community. Sociology of Religion 80 (2): 147–167.

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Ostler, Craig James. 2011. Salt Lake City: City Stake of Zion. In Salt Lake City: The Place Which God Prepared, ed. Scott C.  Esplin and Kenneth L.  Alford, 339–352. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center. Ostling, Richard N., and Joan K. Ostling. 1999. Mormon America: The Power and the Promise. San Francisco: Harper Collins. Phillips, Rick. 1998. Religious Market Share and Mormon Activity. Sociology of Religion 59 (2): 139–153. ———. 1999. The ‘Secularization’ of Utah and Mormon Church Growth. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 38 (1): 72–82. Phillips, Richard D. 2001. Saints in Zion, Saints in Babylon: Religious Pluralism and the Transformation of American Mormonism. Ph.D. Diss. Rutgers University. Phillips, Rick. 2004. Can Rising Rates of Church Participation be Evidence of Secularization? Sociology of Religion 65 (2): 139–153. ———. 2006. Rethinking the International Expansion of Mormonism. Nova Religio: The Journal of New and Emergent Religions 10 (1): 52–68. ———. 2015. Sources of Mormon Religious Activity in the United States: How Latter-­ day Saint Communities Function where Mormons Predominate, and Where They Are Sparse. Journal of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 91 (1): 259–276. ———. 2018. Demography and Information Technology Affect Religious Commitment among Latter-day Saints in Utah and the Intermountain West. Journal of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 95 (1): 317–332. Phillips, Rick, and Ryan Cragun. 2011. Mormons in the United States, 1990–2008: Socio-­ Demographic Trends and Regional Differences. Hartford, CT: Program on Public Values, Trinity College. ———. 2013a. Contemporary Mormon Religiosity and the Legacy of ‘Gathering. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 16 (3): 77–94. _____. 2013b. Contemporary Mormon Religiosity and the Legacy of ‘Gathering. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 16 (3): 77–94. ———. 2020. Religious Traditions in Politics: Latter-day Saints. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. New  York: Oxford University Press. https://doi. org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.800. Phillips, Rick, Ryan T.  Cragun, and Barry A.  Kosmin. 2015. Increasing Sex Ratio Imbalance among Utah Mormons: Sources and Implications. Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 11 (1): 1–27. Poll, Richard D. 1987. Utah and the Mormons: A Symbiotic Relationship. In New Views of Mormon History: Essays in Honor of Leonard J. Arrington, ed. Davis Bitton and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, 323–341. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press. Prince, Gregory A., and Wm. Robert Wright. 2005. David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Public Religion Research Institute. 2017. America’s Changing Religious Identity: Findings from the 2016 American Values Atlas. p.  42. https://www.prri.org/wpcontent/uploads/2017/09/PRRI-Religion-Report.pdf. Accessed 26 May 2020 Quinn, D.  Michael. 1976. The Mormon Succession Crisis of 1844. BYU Studies 16 (2): 187–233. ———. 1997. The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books. Raber, Michael Scott. 1978. Religious Polity and Local Production: The Origins of a Mormon Town. PhD diss., Yale University.

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Rampton, Calvin L. 2005. Toleration of Religious Sentiment: Making it Work from the Governor’s Chair. In God and Country: Politics in Utah, ed. Jeffery E. Sells, 77–96. Salt Lake City: Signature Books. Riess, Jana. 2019. The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church. New York: Oxford University Press. Robertson, Daniel, and Tyler Bowles. 2010. The Economics of Geographical Ward Boundaries in the LDS Church. Journal of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 87 (1): 317–335. Rogers, Brent M. 2019. The Application of Federal Power in Utah Territory. In Reconstruction and Mormon America, ed. Clyde A. Milner II and Brian Q. Cannon, 116–149. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Shipps, Jan. 1985. Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition. Urbana, Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Shirts, Morris A., and Kathryn Shirts. 2001. A Trial Furnace: Southern Utah’s Iron Mission. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press. Sillitoe, Linda. 1996. Friendly Fire: The ACLU in Utah. Salt Lake City: Signature Books. Simmonds, A.J. 1976. The Gentile Comes to Cache Valley. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Smith, George D. 2011. Nauvoo Polygamy: … But We Called It Celestial Marriage. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books. Stark, Rodney. 1984. The Rise of a New World Faith. Review of Religious Research 26 (4): 18–27. Stark, Rodney, and Roger Finke. 2004. Religions in Context: The Response of Non-­ Mormon Faiths in Utah. Review of Religious Research 45 (3): 293–298. Stegner, Wallace. 1992. The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail. Lincoln, NE: Bison Books. Stewart, David G., Jr. 2007. The Law of the Harvest: Practical Principles of Effective Missionary Work. Henderson, NV: Cumorah Foundation. Taber, Susan Buhler. 1993. Mormon Lives: A Year in the Elkton Ward. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Taylor, P.A.M. 1966. Expectations Westward: The Mormon Emigration of their British Converts in the Nineteenth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Todd, Jay M. 1996. More Members Now outside U.S. Than in U.S. Ensign, March, pp. 76–77. Toney, Michael B., Banu Golesorkhi, and William F. Stinner. 1985. Residence Exposure and Fertility Expectations of Young Mormon and Non-Mormon Women in Utah. Journal of Marriage and Family 47 (2): 459–465. Van Wagoner, Richard. 1986. Mormon Polygamy: A History. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books. Walker, Ronald W. 1987. ‘Going to Meeting’ in Salt Lake City’s Thirteenth Ward, 1849–1881: A Microanalysis. In New Views of Mormon History: Essays in Honor of Leonard J. Arrington, ed. Davis Bitton and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, 138–161. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press. Whitley, Colleen. 2006. From the Ground Up: A History of Mining in Utah. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Wilkins-LaFlamme, Sarah. 2016. Secularization and the Wider Gap in Values and Personal Religiosity Between the Religious and Nonreligious. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 55 (4): 717–736.

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Willes, Fayone. Minnesota Mormons: A History of the Minneapolis Minnesota Stake. No Publication Data. Yorgason, Ethan R. 2002. Creating Regional Identity, Moral Orders and Spatial Contiguity: Imagined Landscapes of Mormon Americanization. Cultural Geographies 9 (4): 448–466. ———. 2010. Transformation of the Mormon Culture Region. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Zimmerman, Michael D. 2005. Introduction. In God and Country: Politics in Utah, ed. Jeffery E. Sells, xv–xvi. Salt Lake City: Signature Books.

CHAPTER 8

Gender, Belief Level, and Priesthood Authority in the LDS Church Nancy Ross and Jessica Duckett Finnigan

In the early twentieth century, then apostle David O. McKay instituted a movement within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church/ Mormons) to unify church programs and curriculum and in order to bring those elements better under the control of priesthood leaders.1 This movement, called “correlation,” cemented institutional hierarchical priesthood structures in the church that produced modern Mormonism.2 The LDS Church defines priesthood as “the power and authority of God.”3 While the goal of correlation is to create a common understanding of church teaching and practice, scholar Gregory A. Prince asserts that “priesthood… is generally misunderstood by both church members and outsiders.”4 This chapter explores the wide variety of ways in which church members do understand priesthood, depending on a number of factors which impact their beliefs. Contemporary social science research on the LDS Church reveals that members’ perspectives and experiences are less correlated than priesthood authorities intended.5 Intersectional theory accounts for these differences, because it addresses the ways in which identity and social location impact individual experiences and an understanding of church teaching.6 The Mormon Gender Issues Survey of 2014 (N > 50,000) asked participants to identify a range of opinions and beliefs about priesthood authority and leadership and captured both qualitative and quantitative data from a diverse pool of participants. The respondents articulated a wide range of worldviews which reflect

N. Ross (*) Dixie State University, Saint George, UT, USA J. D. Finnigan Independent Scholar, Morgan Hill, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_8

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different understandings and perspectives on LDS practice and culture. In mapping these different perspectives, gender, belief level, and nationality emerged as significant identity intersections for understanding variations in beliefs about structures of power in the LDS Church. The LDS Church correlation project is predicated upon the assumption that a unified worldwide curriculum and consistent messaging in church programs will produce similar kinds of believers with similar kinds of habits and practices surrounding that belief. Intersectional theory pushes against this idea of a singular LDS experience. Instead, intersectional theory holds that individuals have different collections of identities (e.g. gender, race, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, geographic location, nationality, etc.) from which they absorb lessons and frame life experiences, producing meaningfully different perspectives. There is no one LDS member worldview, but rather a multitude of competing worldviews. In previous work, we have demonstrated that belief level and gender categories correspond with different perceptions of community.7 This chapter pursues these intersections with further questions: How do LDS Church members perceive priesthood—both what it is and how it functions—given their gender and belief levels? Within these gender and belief categories, how does location (US vs. international) also impact their perspectives? We will see that asking these kinds of questions reveals considerable diversity in the ways that LDS members around the world understand priesthood.

A Brief Overview of LDS Priesthood Men and boys 11 years and older, who are deemed “worthy,” are ordained to be priesthood holders in the LDS Church.8 There are two different levels of priesthood, Aaronic and Melchizedek. Melchizedek priesthood is a higher level than Aaronic; each level contains multiple offices, which bestow different degrees of administrative and ritual authority on the bearer.9 The brief summary that follows below highlights the basic way that scholars have typically described the meaning and functions of LDS priesthood (and the common subtopics treated within these discussions). As we will see, the two dominant themes that emerge from much historical and sociological scholarship on LDS priesthood emphasize the notions of hierarchical power and exclusion. Priesthood is typically seen by scholars as a system that creates and preserves earthly and eternal hierarchies of power. Marie Cornwall has noted that hierarchies are central to LDS Church theology, organizational structure, and practice.10 Matthew Harris and Newell Bringhurst describe the organizational hierarchy as a pyramid, based on an all-male priesthood, with the First Presidency at the top and numerous local bishops at the bottom.11 Matthew Bowman observes that priesthood authority is believed necessary to reunite mortals with the divine in the temple “endowment” ritual, making priesthood the vehicle for salvation in Mormon theology.12 In the earliest years of the

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twentieth century, B. H. Roberts, President of the First Quorum of Seventies, began to redefine priesthood from being a somewhat murky concept to a clearer understanding that priesthood bestows on its authorized bearers certain spiritual gifts and ritual authority.13 Linda King Newell notes that this new emphasis on priesthood came with a call to have greater respect for all priesthood holders, not just higher church leaders, together with a redefinition of the roles of women.14 Some have suggested that the lay priesthood espoused and practiced by ordinary LDS Church members, as opposed to a professional priesthood class, creates greater equality in Mormonism. But Kendall and Daryl White argue that this is a false narrative which perpetuates the opposite: an unequal power system within the LDS Church.15 Much scholarly literature on LDS priesthood highlights the exclusion of women and black men. It is commonly thought that women have never been ordained to the priesthood (though historical sources indicate that Emma Smith was ordained, although not to a specific priesthood office.16) The early church ordained black men, but from 1849 to 1978, they were denied priesthood ordination.17 However, direct comparison of ongoing priesthood denial to women with the historical denial of priesthood to men of African descent is not equivalent. Except for the first year or so, worthy LDS women have always been allowed entrance and ritual participation in temples, despite not being ordained priesthood holders. But no black members, men or women, prior to 1978, were allowed into temples and thus were denied participation in temple ordinances that the Church teaches are necessary for salvation and exaltation.18 Mica McGriggs, Ignacio Garcia, and Elise Boxer separately describe the impact of the pre-1978 exclusion of black men from holding the priesthood and the corresponding exclusion of all black members from the temple as having ongoing negative social consequences within the LDS Church, which Janan Graham describes as the “black elephant in the room”.19 Scholarship that addresses LDS exclusion practice is much more likely to label the exclusion of black men as racist than it is to name the exclusion of women as sexist. This implies a tendency for scholars to view the pre-1978 priesthood exclusion of black men as an unfortunate period in Mormon history, In contrast, not seeing the continuing priesthood exclusion of women as sexist implies that it is foundational to Mormon theology. There have been limited discussions on the ways in which LDS priesthood is viewed as operating from the point of view of ordinary members. Jana Riess notes that the majority of “Mormon millennials” she surveyed are periodically bothered by women’s exclusion from the priesthood.20 And, also recently, a number of scholars contributed essays and research findings that focused on the Ordain Women movement among feminist LDS Church members, presenting strong arguments and evidence that emphasize how increasing numbers of Mormon women feel at least ambivalent, if not unhappy, about their exclusion from priesthood decision making and other benefits that men enjoy.21 Official LDS Church discourse describes priesthood in markedly different ways than do scholars. Often, priesthood is described as a power given to

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individual men to make them more compassionate leaders and to connect them to the will of God.22 The internal discussion within the LDS Church focuses on individual priesthood holders and points out the way in which the whole community benefits from the exercise of male priesthood, while ignoring the ways in which women are excluded from decision making. This gap between earlier scholarly analysis and the more positive Church framing of priesthood is compelling. Until recently, an important consideration has remained largely under-­ reported: neither perspective has offered much insight into the ways in which priesthood is actually understood and experienced by ordinary members. This newly emergent issue is brought into focus by the large-scale study that we summarize below.

The Mormon Gender Issues Study The Mormon Gender Issues Survey was conducted online in November 2014 by a large interdisciplinary group of scholars (including ourselves).23 The members of the Mormon Gender Issues Survey team thought that we could, as community insiders, improve upon the wording used in a frequently-cited survey report from Pew Research Center about LDS women’s ordination.24 The purposive (snowball) sample survey was posted to multiple sites, pages, and groups on different social media platforms that had different orientations within Mormon culture. The research team involved in this study were hoping for as many as 5000 responses but instead received an astonishing 30,000 on the first day. By the time the survey closed a week later, it had elicited more than 50,000 responses.25 The survey does not draw from a random sample, and its results, therefore, may not be generalizable to all members of the LDS Church. Nevertheless, the data derived from this huge sample can offer new insights into the ways in which different subsets of LDS people view the definition of priesthood and the exercise of the priesthood in their faith communities.26 The survey contained over 50 questions about the demographic characteristics, religious beliefs, religious practices, and religious policy positions of LDS respondents. In addition, the survey asked three open-ended questions which address issues related to gender and priesthood: 1. Men and women are treated differently in the [LDS] Church. Some of these differences are considered cultural, other doctrinal. Please describe these differences and why you feel they are beneficial or not beneficial. 2. If women were to serve in more administrative and leadership roles in the LDS Church, how would that affect your religious/spiritual life? Please comment in as much detail as possible. 3. What changes related to women, if any, do you hope the [LDS] Church will implement over the next ten or twenty years? Describe these changes in as much detail as possible. Why do you believe these changes are important?

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Demographic Results In order to explore the complexities of LDS member experience, we divided participants (N = 58,939) into four main categories: gender, belief, geographic location, and race. Dividing participant responses by these four categories does not create tidy and homogenous groups with unified perspectives, but they do identify different important identities that help explain the range of worldviews existing within the LDS Church membership. It is important to note that although this survey was conducted on the internet and was available to LDS members globally, individuals who could participate were largely limited by three factors: internet access within the week that the survey was open, reading and writing ability in English, and connection to the existing LDS/Mormon networks on social media. Gender Results Analysis of gender differences is one of the most common approaches used in Mormon studies. There is a clear understanding that men and women have unique life experiences within a church that emphasizes fixed gender roles. This study goes beyond the usual female-male division of respondents by also disaggregating transgender people as a third gender category. While the LDS Church does not affirm transgender identities, it is clear that some members are claiming gender identities outside of their socially assigned gender and/or outside of the gender binary. Thus, 218 respondents claimed a transgender identity, and 181 further described themselves using a number of specific identity terms, such as “agender,” “androgynous,” “bigender,” “genderqueer,” “genderfluid,” “transgender man,” “transgender woman,” “non-binary,” “two spirit,” “intersex,” and “pangender.” The size of the transgender group in the sample is small (N = 218) compared with the totals for men (N = 17,059) and women (N  =  41,745). The insights that come from this group’s open-­ ended responses to questions about priesthood and gender are significant.27 Belief Level Results Measuring levels or degrees of religious belief in cross-cultural comparisons is frequently absent in modern social science research.28 This failure imposes an unspoken assumption of equal representation of believers at all levels within comparison groups. We have noticed, for instance, that the social science literature on Mormons, or members of the LDS Church, tends to focus primarily on those with high belief. It may be the case that some LDS researchers are interested in showing how LDS beliefs and practices benefitted members, thus leading researchers to unintentionally bias study samples toward high believers. It is also likely easier to sample high believers, especially those residing in the U.S, because these believers tend to be closely networked with each other and easier to identify due to active participation in their religious communities.

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However, high believer, US sampling bias perpetuates a problematic internal LDS narrative: only high believers in the United States are “real Mormons.” Excluding low believers or under sampling them makes the LDS Church appear more unique on a number of religious dimensions, which is part of the mystique surrounding the Church. But members on the margins of the LDS community are made to feel that their voices are not heard, represented, or cared about. We suspect that this same bias likely exists in studies of other religious groups. Not measuring belief level assumes that a population is well represented in a sample of mostly high believers, but this of course is not the case. Large contemporary shifts are occurring in rates and types of religious participation29; correspondingly, researchers need to be collecting and tracking data about variations in belief levels.30 Several examples from research that does differentiate level of belief among respondents include a recent study conducted by the authors of this chapter that examined how LDS Church members, depending on the intersection of their gender and belief level, felt about the sacred garments, or underclothing, that temple worthy members are supposed to wear.31 The Mormon Gender Issues study examines the open-ended responses of participants who identified both their gender and their belief level (N = 58,939) and then divides the survey respondents into six groups, according to gender and belief level: high-believing men (N  =  7778), high-believing women (21,391), high-believing transgender people (N  =  28), low-believing men (N = 9259), low-believing women (20,299), low-believing transgender people (N = 190). To distinguish high vs. low levels of belief among the comparison groups, the survey asked participants: “Which statement comes closer to your own view, even if neither is exactly right?” Participants had four options to choose from: (1) “Some teachings of the LDS Church are hard for me to accept,” (2) “I believe wholeheartedly in all the teachings of the LDS Church,” (3) “Don’t know,” and (4) “Prefer not to respond.” For purposes of this chapter, we will focus only on responses to the first two questions: respondents who chose the first option are called “low-believers,” and those who chose the second are “high-believers.”32 US vs Global Most social science studies on Mormons have been conducted with samples from the United States. There are practical reasons for limiting survey data to the United States, such as greater ability to randomly sample. However, in 1996 the LDS Church reported that more members lived outside of the United States.33 Splitting the participants between US respondents and international respondents allowed us to look at how location impacts Mormon lived experience. These new divisions allowed us to examine how living outside of the social and political culture of the United States shapes respondents’ perceptions of women and priesthood. The total number of international respondents to our survey is 3088, which represents only about five percent of the total

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sample size. With more than half of LDS Church members living outside of the United States this represents a significant under-sampling. Nevertheless, this survey sample of international LDS members is the largest ever obtained. Countries with the highest numbers of respondents were: Canada (N = 995), United Kingdom (N = 639), Australia (N = 237), Germany (N = 135), Mexico (N = 59), New Zealand (N = 58). Race Results Race is often ignored in religious studies. This tendency may reflect the assumption that many religious congregations or denominations are racially uniform. The LDS Church in the United States is today more racially diverse than many other mainline Christian denominations, with 15 percent of US members identifying as people of color.34 Given the LDS Church’s history with the temple-­ priesthood ban of black males (lifted in 1978) and its colonizing tendencies in the twentieth century with Native American populations at home and other indigenous populations abroad, it is especially important to disaggregate contemporary research data on the Church by race. In our survey, individuals were asked to indicate their racial identity: Five percent of survey participants identified as people of color (N = 2923), a large under-representation of this subset of the LDS population, both in the United States and globally.

Findings on LDS Member Beliefs About Priesthood and Gender Each of the sections below will (1) briefly describe the demographics of each gender-belief group (including age range, education level, income, race, and nationality), (2) indicate the percentage of support in each group for ordaining women to the priesthood, and (3) examine the different ways in which members of each group typically define and perceive the function of priesthood. We will use selected comments from respondents’ written statements to illustrate these different perceptions. High-believing Men Within the group of high-believing men (N  =  7778), 75 percent are ages 18–40. College graduates make up 71 percent of the group, and 56 percent of them report a yearly household income of $50,000 or more. The top five non­US countries represented in this group are Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, and Brazil. For US respondents within this group, five percent are men of color, whereas twelve percent are men of color in the international subgroup. Eighty-three percent of this group oppose the priesthood ordination of women.

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High-believing men were the most likely of all of the gender-belief level groups to answer the open-ended survey questions by repeating LDS Church teaching. To illustrate, one high-believing US man describes priesthood. I know that the priesthood responsibility given to us is for the sole purpose of service in the Lord’s Kingdom. For many roles within the church, that priesthood authority is required in order to fulfil the duties of that calling. For example, any time an ordinance is performed, the authority of the priesthood is required in order to validate that ordinance. In my mind, there are roles that simply cannot be fulfilled without that authority, so women will never (unless serious changes occur through revelation) hold those callings- this, however, does not mean that the women in callings of responsibility… should not be relied on equally in order to accomplish the work of God.

Three themes that emerge from this quote—typical of many responses in this group—are: responsibility, authority, and work. Emphasis on priesthood as a responsibility regularly occurs in official LDS teaching, as illustrated in an authoritative General Conference address that outlined priesthood responsibilities as a man’s responsibility to (1) his family, (2) his employer, (3) the LDS Church, and (4) himself.35 Again, typically, this respondent also repeatedly references priesthood authority in terms of gender: Both men and women carry out church work, but certain activities are only valid when men do them. Many of the respondents in this group use the term “priesthood” as a substitute for the word “men.” This identification of LDS men with priesthood has an ongoing place in official LDS discourse.36 Another high-believing male respondent indicated that “the priesthood is tied up with Church administration and direction.” This responsibility also includes performing church rituals (“ordinances” in LDS terminology), such as blessing babies, blessing the sacrament, performing baptisms and confirmation, etc.). However, few men in this group mentioned rituals in describing priesthood. Instead, they referenced administrative jobs and physical labor tasks like setting up and taking down chairs in the chapel and helping people load and unload trucks when changing residence. These sorts of ordinary work tasks were more frequently cited by High believing US men than by their international counterparts. Perhaps in the international church, such mundane responsibilities are shared among genders, as suggested by scholar Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye.37 A similar distinction between US and international men in this group was the tendency of US men to refer to priesthood as a specific kind of intangible burden. For example, one US man wrote the following: Again, why do you [women] want the world on your shoulders? Would crime cease to exist, wars stop, famines and pestilence disappear because you [women] get to choose who talks for 15 to 20 minutes each week? Do you want the sins of all those whom you are a steward over on your heads, do you want the blood of

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hundreds of people heaped on your shoulders, or in the case of the stake high council question, thousands of stewards’ blood and sins heaped on your shoulders? Thou shalt not covet thy husbands responsibility! Alright I made that up, but for what purpose would women need the priesthood? For the glory? Fame? For the control? If you can’t abide having a man with you, how will you be able to abide with God the Father presiding over you in the next life? This life shows us (to ourselves) who we really are. God already knows us and who we are! If you cannot handle a bishop presiding over you, how will you handle God and Jesus Christ?

This highly emotional response reveals the way in which some high-­believing US men are framing the priesthood in their minds. For this man (and a number of others as well), priesthood is about carrying the sins of others. (None of the high-believing international men gave such a response.) At the beginning of his comment, the high-belief US respondent references the kind of mundane administrative tasks that bishops and their counselors routinely perform, such as choosing speakers for Sunday meetings, which fall under the umbrella of priesthood authority and responsibility. At the same time, he acknowledges that priesthood means power over other people in his comments about control and presiding. These comments, similar to many other high-believing men, point to the flip side of authority, which is submission. The idea that priesthood is power changes when a woman wants it; then it becomes a collection of boring or burdening tasks. Similar patterns of argument flip-flops are common among both US and international men and have been observed by Mormon feminists in a series of internet memes.38 However, the frank acknowledgment that women play a submissive role in the church is uncommon among high-believing men. A common myth is that priesthood does not give men power over women. One high-believing US man wrote “People view men’s’ holding of the priesthood as inequality. If holding the priesthood were a blessing to its holder then it would be inequality, but holding the priesthood just enables a man to be a servant.” This is another way to express the idea of priesthood as a burden while overlooking the way in which church authority is structured around priesthood. High-belief male respondents habitually describe women’s relationship to their own priesthood authority as being one of receiving blessings. Men get to hold the authority, and women receive spiritual blessings from that authority without having to take on the responsibilities of priesthood. In many ways, men describe the ways in which they protect women from priesthood responsibility. The previous response suggests this protection. Both US and international high-belief men are committed to traditional gender roles, but international men show more flexibility. One US man wrote: It’s hard to imagine women getting the priesthood, which would seem to be a precursor to being called as bishops or apostles. Our gender came with us from the premortal realm, and is part of our eternal existence. By nature, we play different roles and have different responsibilities.

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In LDS theology, God created people spiritually before they were born, which is referred to as the premortal realm or pre-existence. The man quoted above, like many others in this group, expressed the idea that gender identity is eternal and unchanging, an idea which is reinforced in the authoritative LDS Church document known as the Proclamation on the Family.39 In this view of gender, men and women are inherently different and play complementary roles in the family and at church. For many, gender roles create equality. For example, one international man wrote “Any perceived doctrinal gender differences … are an extension of our biological differences, which are the things that are real. I see the gender role differences in my marriage as being complementary and useful.” High-believing Women High-believing women make up the single largest gender-belief level group (N = 21,391) in the survey. Seventy-three percent of the group fall between the ages 18–40. This group is the least likely to be college graduates (64 percent). Just 55 percent of the group lives in a household that earns $50,000 per year or more. The top five non-US countries represented in this group are Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, and Finland. For US respondents within this group, four percent are women of color, whereas nine percent are women of color in the international subgroup. This makes high-­ believing women the least racially diverse group in the study. This group is overwhelmingly against the ordination of women, with 90 percent indicating that they would not like to see women ordained in the LDS Church. High-believing women’s understanding of priesthood is similar to that of high-believing men. For instance, one high-believing US woman wrote: The priesthood is authority to act in God’s name. God has sent these men special priesthood authority in each of their callings. We don’t all need the priesthood, we all have access to it which is what counts. I have the priesthood in my home through my husband and am just as blessed through it as he is, my family can receive blessings and follow inspiration he receives as head of our house. The revelation from God to our home is for our entire family, not just the priesthood holder.

This woman’s view on priesthood mirrors that of many high-belief men, namely that she receives the blessings of it through her husband. Unlike most high-believing men, however, high-believing women point out that priesthood benefits men. This respondent (and others in her group) point to men receiving revelation (guidance) from God for the family as a benefit that they all enjoy. Another high-believing US woman writes that “the priesthood is what guides men to be inspired to do what is right; therefore, I would rather have men in main leadership roles.” This respondent indicates that divine guidance is beneficial to those who are leading, and that women do not have nor, indeed,

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need access to this kind of inspiration. Another kind of benefit that high-­ believing women ascribed to men was that priesthood helped men to serve others. One US woman wrote The idea that I could hold the priesthood is very overwhelming to me. I think the priesthood is designed to help men understand and care for others, in a way that Heavenly Father has already divinely instilled in women.

This respondent reflects the view that priesthood makes men more compassionate than they would be without priesthood. In this view, expressed by many in this group, priesthood puts men on an equal footing with women, as women are naturally (biologically) placed by God on a higher spiritual plane than men. The prospect of holding the priesthood overwhelms this respondent, alluding to the kind of burden that many high-believing men say women should be protected from having to bear. High-believing women see gender roles advocated within the LDS Church as reflective of divine realities, standing in opposition to secular norms. One high-believing US woman wrote: I already have enough responsibility, as it is, serving in a primary presidency. Adding more options would be overwhelming. It would also feel more like a secular society and not a church. I go to church to worship Christ and help others feel his spirit, not to compare what I do with what other people do. Having that concern makes me think someone is coming to church to be seen of men and not of God. I wouldn’t like it.

For this respondent, and many others in this group, gender equality signals worldliness. High-believing women frequently reference “the world” or “the secular world” when talking about cultural beliefs or practices that stand outside of religious norms. In LDS culture, to be “of the world,” or “worldly” indicates a lesser position of worthiness, and not being capable of listening to or responding to the influence of God. This last comment also alludes to the exhaustion and burnout that many women in this group feel with regard to church service. One high-believing international woman wrote “I have enough responsibility in my life without having that too. I don’t want the priesthood.” Another US woman wrote Women tend to try to do too much anyway. We wear SO many hats, and we suffer from SO much burnout from trying to be everything for everyone. When it comes to church administrative and leadership positions, I don’t need them and don’t want them.

This response speaks to the culture of women’s self-sacrifice in the home and in the church organization. A number of high-believing women expressed this kind of involvement as a buffer against taking on priesthood responsibility. Other high-believing women expressed a readiness to take on even more

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responsibility but stopping short of priesthood. One woman wrote “I think it would be great for women to serve in more leadership roles, that it could enhance church services, but I don’t feel that giving women the priesthood is necessary for that.” Many respondents mentioned motherhood as being equivalent to priesthood, and that this is how they find equality in the church. I do not think men and women are treated differently in the church. We have different roles, women have motherhood and men have the priesthood, but we learn that we are equal, and should be treated equally at home. In the church. I have learned since I was little and keep on learning from local and general leaders that men and women are to be treated with love and respect, and they actually emphasize that. So I have never felt these differences at all.

The rhetoric of motherhood roles as compensatory to priesthood roles has been examined at length by Mormon feminists past and present.40 High-believing Transgender People The high-believing transgender group is by far the smallest (N = 23) and the youngest, with 87% identifying between the ages of 18–40. This tiny group is the best educated, with 100 percent being college graduates. In this group, participants (70 percent) were the most likely to be living in households earning $50,000 or more. Less than a handful of participants in this group identified the country they lived in as being outside of the United States, and only Canada and Hungary were identified. For US respondents within this group, ten percent were people of color, whereas 33 percent were people of color in the international subgroup. Eighty-seven percent of the group were opposed to women receiving the priesthood, with no one indicating that they wanted women to be ordained. We were able to capture much more quantitative data on this group than qualitative data, as there were just a few respondents who wrote answers to the open-ended questions. From the little qualitative data that we have, we can still suggest a few things. The high-believing transgender respondents, both US and international, largely look like other high believers, who affirm a commitment to traditional gender roles. However, high-believing transgender people are also likely to point out the limits of those gender roles. One respondent wrote: I have no problem whatsoever with the differences between the roles of men and women. They are the way they are because our Heavenly Father told us through his prophets that this is the best way to learn and grow. I always felt the same way about these roles. Motherhood is hard, creating and maintaining a peaceful, happy, safe haven called home is hard, but women are more capable of doing so because of their special gifts and talents that stem from their nature. And same is true for men and their roles. I know that circumstances are different, and I don’t

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say that a man can’t create a home when it is necessary, but it is harder for him by nature. Also, a woman can have great desire to work outside the home, and she can have great achievements in her career, but at the end of the day, deep inside, I am sure she would consider her greatest role to be a mother and a creator of a home, or this would be her deepest desire if she hadn’t had a chance to get married and have children.

This respondent begins his comment by affirming gender roles, but then goes on to hint at the limits of those roles. Others in this group demonstrated similar patterns in their comments. One US respondent stated: There is doctrine that men and women have different roles and strengths. This provides an excellent organization for families. However, Mormon culture tends to make things black and white. I think the gospel and the world are more gray. There is room for personal revelation and application of gospel principles in the individual lives of members and families. It is okay for women to work, it is okay for men to be “stay-at-home-dads.” The gospel allows us to do things that best fit our needs.

Again, this person started by praising traditional gender roles but then acknowledged such roles should have more flexibility. Compared to high-believing men and women, high-believing transgender people are more likely to articulate and analyze the limitations of traditional gender roles for both men and women in the LDS Church. Low-believing Men Seventy-five percent of low-believing men (N  =  9258) are in the age range 18–40, and 77 percent of them are college graduates. Sixty-five percent of respondents in this group live in households reporting annual incomes of $50,000 per year or more. The top five non-US countries represented in this group are Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, and New Zealand. For US respondents within this group, five percent are men of color, whereas nine percent are men of color in the international subgroup. Overall, the majority of this group (54 percent) would like to see women ordained to the priesthood. Low-believing men’s conceptions of priesthood are distributed on a continuum between traditional views on one end and more imaginative thoughts, on the other end, about the ways in which the LDS Church could change the relationship between women and the priesthood. On the traditional end, low-­ believing men’s comments about priesthood touch on the same themes and understanding as those from high-believing men. One international man wrote I believe that if the Church we to allow women into these types of roles it would have a negative impact on the spirituality of myself, my family and the Church as a whole. I have seen how emotional meetings can become when Women are

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involved. I worry that there would be far less rational decisions made but rather more emotional ones.

This respondent talks about women in leadership as having a negative impact on himself, on his family, and in the church generally. The reasons he gives for these negative impacts, however, are different from the reasons that most high-­ believing men gave. This respondent utilizes stereotypes about women being ruled by their emotions. (But we did also see this kind of stereotyping of women and their emotions in comments of high-believing women). In contrast, on the innovative change side of the continuum, one low-believing US man wrote: I have seen in my mind’s eye a tall young woman blessing the sacrament and passing it to the deacons to take to the members… The restoration of all things is not complete until the daughters of Zion take-up their role in calling upon the powers of heaven and blessing us all… I do not believe that the priesthood is a zero-­ sum game. If the women are ordained, I do not believe the men will leave—any more than they do right now.

This man is exercising his theological imagination, in hoping for the ordination of women, by envisioning women engaging in specific priesthood ordinances. He does not see priesthood as necessarily excluding women, rather he describes priesthood in terms of ritual, which the other high-believing groups rarely did. Other high-believers were likely to view priesthood as a “zero-sum game.” Some low-believing men invoke gender stereotypes in ways that high-­ believing men and women do not. High-believing men’s and women’s commitment to traditional gender roles and gender complementarity seem to be polished veneers for the idea that men and women’s distinct behavior is somehow biologically and divinely established. Some low-believing men do not repeat these more polished and palatable frameworks for masking of stereotypes; they express them directly. For example, one US man wrote: As a man, I would NOT want to be brought in to a woman’s office to confess sexual sins. I would be fearful of the potential for gossip as well as a women’s emotional attachment to such circumstances. Yes, I know that sounds very sexist, and since I am male, I don’t really know what it would be like for a woman to go to a Bishop’s office right now. Yet, men are traditionally very logical about judging such matters, and are more able to separate their own emotions from someone else’s situation.

This man’s objection to confessing sexual sins to a woman, because of her presumed lack of discretion, overly emotional reactions, and inability to exercise detached logical judgment, spotlights three long-standing stereotypes about women. Other low-believing men were able to work through similar kinds of concerns without engaging in gender stereotypes and by expressing empathy for

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the power differential created by both traditional gender roles and the inequality of priesthood authority. For instance, one US man reported: Having served as a bishop, I grant that some of the most uncomfortable moments were when I had to hear confessions from young women regarding sexual sins. I always made sure to teach the young men and young women that they should feel welcome to bring someone with them if they felt the need to speak to me about an issue; on a couple of occasions, young women would bring the young women’s president with them. I found this to be effective. While I was the one hearing the confession and giving counsel on what next steps could be to help the young woman heal, having a sister present on those occasions helped the young women to feel more comfortable. In subsequent appointments, the young women would choose to come alone, often saying that having made it over the hurdle of telling me what was going on, they felt I wasn’t judging them and they felt comfortable talking to me openly.

This respondent, as a bishop, felt discomfort and empathy over the imbalance of power and worked to empower girls during the interview process by seeking the helpful presence of an adult women member. Mormon feminists have noted that, with or without compassionate bishops, the significant power imbalances and traditional culture of one-on-one bishop interviews with children opens a door for potential abuse.41 Recent changes allow children to request that an additional adult be present, but this puts the responsibility for safety back on children.42 Whereas high-believing men and women were wary of “the world” and its ideas about gender equality, some low-believing men observe the ways in which secular ideas about gender equality and diversity improve institutions. One low-believing international man said: I work in the tech industry. The current struggle there for more diversity in the industry has allowed me to see how additional voices and viewpoints from multiple perspectives helps us make better, more informed decisions for all affected stakeholders. Allowing more diversity (from different racial, cultural and socioeconomic demographics) in leadership roles in the Church has helped us as a church to grow in both number of members and in reach of influence. Yet we continue to exclude the single largest demographic within our membership from any level of significant leadership—meaning those voices and information are not heard. I believe this is already causing a significant number of members to fall away from the church, and the exclusion of women from leadership roles will eventually hinder the church’s growth and missionary efforts.

This man was able to see how traditional gender roles limited the voices of women and how that was detrimental to the church. He connects women’s limited leadership roles in the church with a larger observation that a number of people are leaving the LDS Church for precisely this reason. Whereas

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high-believers see the notion of traditional gender role complementarity as a divinely inspired asset, this low-belief man sees them as a liability. Yet another US man indicated how he observes traditional LDS ideas about gender roles having a sexist, negative institutional and community impact outside of church activities per se. I no longer consider myself Mormon (despite never officially leaving). But I teach philosophy at a university in Utah county, and Mormonism has a heavy impact on the lives of my students. Women are treated more poorly in the work environment by both the male employees and students at my school. I attribute this poor treatment to the institutional sexism of the LDS church. If the LDS church were to treat women equally, I believe that this would have a positive effect on the community in which I live.

Low-believing Women Low-believing women are the second largest group (N  =  20,299), with 78 percent of the group in the 18–40 age range. College graduates make up 71 percent of the group and 60 percent reported a yearly household income of $50,000 or more. The top non-US countries represented in this group are Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea. For US respondents within this group, five percent are women of color, whereas seven percent are women of color in the international subgroup. Overall, just 30 percent of this group indicated that they support the ordination of women, 41 percent did not support it, and the remaining 29% either gave different kinds of answers in between these two options, skipped answering the open-­ ended question, or indicated that they do not know how they feel about the issue. Thus, as with low-believing men and high-believing transgender people, low-believing women express a wide range of perspectives on priesthood. One low-believing woman who opposes women having the priesthood wrote Having the priesthood is a big part of leadership. I believe that only men should have the priesthood and should be our leaders. They have a responsibility and the priesthood helps them to have the faith and authority to make those decisions. Women have a responsibility to support the men and help them… I think that the women in the church have their own responsibilities and they do not need to be in the leadership.

This woman subscribes to traditional gendered divisions of labor but does not attribute this division to God. Her view is simply that men have the priesthood and leadership positions, and women should support the men. Another low-believing woman in opposition draws on stereotypes about women being overbearing and catty to support her claim that women should not have the priesthood.

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Having spent many years away from the Church and seeing how women have taken many administrative roles in Evangelical and Catholic churches, I have seen some of the consequences of this firsthand. As women, we have natural tendencies that are not necessarily positive, which are often magnified when we take on leadership roles. Having a man who isn’t necessarily affected by leadership the same way, makes it easier for me to live my religious/spiritual life without all the worry of the social/political infighting that happens when women assume leadership positions. In my experience, only women least fit for leadership roles are the women who pursue them. When the Priesthood is in charge, women are free from this temptation or having to deal with overbearing women.

Both responses reflect some of the patterns we saw with high believers: men and women’s roles and responsibilities are clearly defined as different but complementary, and women have innate flaws, not shared by men, which disqualify them from leadership. The low-believing women who give these kinds of responses do not offer them from within a theological framework but rather from prevailing, long-standing stereotypes. Other low-believing women offer critiques of women’s behavior which are not based on stereotypes. One low-believing US woman expressed her perception that leadership of high-believing women can promote even greater denigration of women who seek careers over their primary roles as mothers. Some things [done by the] Relief Society and the Young Women’s organization do far more to promote sexism that the Priesthood organizations do. After all, one of the messages they aggressively teach women at times is that their value as a person is attached to their ability to raise righteous members of the Church, and sometimes this message comes along with the implication that the right way to do this is to abandon all other career opportunities. This is an area where LDS women do a lot to bully each other. They frequently use their callings as a platform from which they can fight their “mommy wars.” I know a number of women who have been put in positions of power who have used that power to spread highly critical messages towards women.

For this respondent, giving women more responsibility and authority will not address her concerns about rigid gender role definitions, because her concerns are likely to be made even worse by women assuming more leadership roles in her congregation She perceives that high-believing women have more power within the LDS Church, because they vocally affirm men’s leadership and use that power to criticize women who do not share their views. Another US low-belief woman, however, sees women’s leadership in a more beneficial light. If women were to serve in more administrative and leadership roles, I would see myself as more capable of being a religious leader myself. I would feel like I mattered more to God than I do now. My daughters would also feel more invested in the church and more valuable in God’s eyes. My husband has served in leadership roles our entire marriage, including as bishop and in the stake presidency.

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Over time I have felt like my greatest contribution to the church is to be support staff--keep the meals cooked, clothes clean, and children happy. While I love my work as a mother and wife, I feel like the church doesn’t want or need ME, just wants me to be quiet with no needs. My husband matters, but I don’t. My husband doesn’t make me feel this way, the system creates this dynamic.

This respondent notes that leadership roles affirm the value of men, and that holding priesthood affirms divine love. She imagines feeling those things for herself and how they would benefit her own life. Instead, the reality she perceives is that the way she has actually lived out her role as a woman has not validated her worth by the church.43 Another US woman shares the view that women having priesthood would “[give] me the spiritual confirmation from God that His daughters are as spiritually enlightened and capable as His sons.” Low-believing international women tend to view the rigidity of LDS gender roles as artifacts of US culture. One international woman writes The church reinforces the mid-twentieth century American gender roles. This is more than not beneficial, it is harmful. The oppression of females limits their ability to live to the fullest measure of their creation, curtails joy and attenuates agency. The hyper-masculinity of men has similar consequences.

Outside of the United States, the LDS Church’s approach to gender is distasteful even to many high-believing women. However, low-believing women are quicker to name the problem as “oppression.” Some low-believing women report that their experiences of sexism erode their faith in the LDS Church. One US woman wrote I have left the church due to its extreme sexism. I had a full ride [scholarship] to Harvard and was told by my bishop that my place and most important role in life was as a mother and wife, and that my first goal should be to train for these duties and to stay worthy of them. I have gone on to get my degree in biochemistry from a different university, and I am applying to medical school; whereas my male Mormon counterparts receive praise I receive ridicule and concern!!!! People worry I will never get married, and I am only 23. I would like to think giving the priesthood to women would make a difference, but I fear that until the underlying attitudes are changed the priesthood issue is more of a symptom than cause.

This respondent notes a common theme among low-belief, educated women that LDS gender and priesthood definitions created very different expectations for her outside of her church experience. Her church leader counseled her to steer her away from the same rigorous and beneficial education opportunities that he, and presumably most others, would celebrate in men. She believes priesthood exclusion for women stems from cultural sexism and hopes for cultural changes that would liberate women’s choices.

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Low-believing Transgender People The low-believing transgender group (N = 190) is much larger than the high-­ believing transgender group, and many more people in this group responded to the open-ended survey questions. They are more likely than any of the other groups to be in the 18–40 age range, with 85 percent falling within this range. They are less likely to have a yearly household income that is $50,000 per year or higher, with just 31 percent of this group achieving that middle-income benchmark. However, 62 percent are college graduates. The top six non-US countries represented in this group are the United Kingdom, Germany, Guatemala, Canada, and Finland. For US respondents within this group, 11 percent are people of color, whereas nine percent are people of color in the international subgroup. People in this group are overall more likely than any other gender-belief category to support the idea of women being ordained to the priesthood at 71 percent approval. Transgender identities create unique situations with regard to gendered power differentials in the LDS Church. One low-believing US transgender woman explains: I really don’t feel that the administrative roles would change anything. Personally, I feel that the leaders have taken the idea that women would rather speak to women about their problems into consideration. Bishops can assign women to speak to another sister, and men to speak to another man, either of which could help them in their spiritual quest. I will say this though, as a man that identifies internally as a woman, I find it much easier to talk to women about some of my problems. Other men judge my issues as unfounded, and it makes me feel like less of a person, and not even worthy of love.

For this low-believing transgender woman, like so many high and low-­believing women, talking with the bishop about personal matters and confessing sins feels uncomfortable. Her transgender identity creates a further layer of complexity in her interactions with priesthood leaders.44 Not surprisingly, low-believing transgender people voice some of the sharpest critiques of traditional gender roles, though there is still a range of perspectives within their responses. Comments from this group demonstrate more theological imagination than other groups, perhaps because these individuals have had to negotiate gender in a way that most cisgender respondents have not experienced. One international respondent wrote If men and women are treated differently based solely on their sex and not their knowledge, skills, aptitudes, etc., it is simply and purely discrimination. An institution that preaches love and justice and acceptance should not condone discrimination.

Another international person wrote:

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LDS Cosmology talks about Mother and Father God, but reading both Pratt and Snow suggests these positions were egalitarian, and that Mother God being subjugated to Father God was a recent development. I think doctrinally that we should return to the radical egalitarian quality of early Mormon history. I also think the recent changes in encouraging fathers to be active parents, could be considered a model for women to be active leaders. Lastly, I wonder about the genderless quality of the spirts in heaven, and the problems of transgendered discourse within LDS contexts.

Yet another international respondent said: In my dreams, religious institutions would just drop the whole gender role expectations and let people be and act and feel just as persons, as who they are without feeling confined to strict expectations of what “a woman (or man) should be.”

High-believing men and women described the ways in which gender roles are essential to create order in the church. Low-believing transgender people are clearly saying that gender roles are not only not required in LDS culture and doctrine but distort human behavior and foster discrimination. One US respondent wrote that they would like to see the following changes in the LDS Church: Consistent anti-racist critique and interpretation of scripture, no condescending, paternalistic doctrine and treatment of those with disabilities, non-punitive structure of encouraging and learning from each other’s spirituality, queer and polyamorous family structures given love, thinking of gender and race in non-binary ways that are reflected from the pulpit. These changes are important because this is what our spiritual family looks like. What good is a faith that denies the existence of others?

Conclusion The picture of LDS Church members and their definitions and views of priesthood are deeply tied to ideas about gender. High-believers embrace the LDS Church’s messaging on gender roles and gender complementarity as producing equality. The LDS Church is not unique in holding to these conservative religious ideas, but it is increasingly unique for large-scale institutions in the contemporary world. High-believers perceive this is as a beneficial feature of Mormonism. For low-believers, these conservative religious ideas about gender are seen as a problem to be fixed. Given larger contemporary shifts in religion in developed English-speaking countries, these LDS low-believers are clearly at risk to join the ranks of religious “Nones” that so much current scholarship and concerned religious institutions focus upon.45

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The intersections of gender and nationality all help to explain the range and variety of viewpoints among members of the LDS Church. There were not enough open-ended responses from people of color to determine the ways in which race impacts perceptions and experiences of priesthood.46 High-believing LDS men in this survey appear to be happy with the way that things are and are not, as a group, pushing for structural or doctrinal change. These men see their priesthood authority and its associated hierarchies as representative of a divine order. High-believing LDS women tend to argue that they are equal to men within a model of gender role complementarity. High-believing transgender people tend to affirm loyalty to the LDS Church priesthood structure, and some of them try to reconcile gender inequality within the Church. There is a greater range of responses from lower believing LDS Members. Some low-believing men affirmed gender stereotypes, while others saw the structural inequality that women face being excluded from the priesthood. Low-believing men were more likely than high-believing men to acknowledge and reflect on the ways in which priesthood gave them privilege. Some low-­ believing women discussed exclusion from priesthood as inequality within the structure of the LDS Church, while others affirmed gender stereotypes. Low-­ believing transgender people saw the structural inequality most clearly, and were most likely to call it out. International LDS members were more likely to be skeptical of traditional gender roles, which they viewed as stemming from stereotyped attitudes in US culture. Embracing the messiness of belief among members within the contemporary LDS Church reveals insights that would be otherwise missed. As just one example, the theological imagination expressed by some low believers would likely be characterized by LDS high- believing members as faithlessness or even heresy. Many of these imaginative ideas do in fact represent a different kind of faith and belief, one that is not dependent on institutions and traditional dogmas. The founding story of Mormonism was one of mistrust of existing religious institutions and the pursuit of a newly imagined faith. It is important to note the echoes of this story in the perceptions voiced by its lower level believers as the LDS Church continues to change and mature as a religious institution.

Notes 1. Bowman, Matthew, The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith (New York, NY: Random House, 2012): 190–191. 2. Cornwall, Marie, “The institutional role of Mormon women,” in Marie Cornwall, Tim B.  Heaton, and Lawrence A.  Young (eds), Contemporary Mormonism: Social science perspectives, (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994): 240; Bowman, The Mormon People, 191. 3. Ibid., 239–264; Mauss, Armand L., “Refuge and retrenchment: The Mormon quest for identity,” in Marie Cornwall, Tim B. Heaton, and Lawrence A. Young (eds), Contemporary Mormonism: Social science perspectives, (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994): 32.

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4. Bowman, The Mormon People, 191; Prince, Gregory A., “Mormon Priesthood and Organization,” in Terryl L.  Givens, Philip L.  Barlow (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism (New York, NY: Oxford Handbooks, 2015): 168. 5. Mauss, Armand L., All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003): 1–3. 6. Kim, Grace Ji-Sun, and Susan M. Shaw, Intersectional Theology: An Introductory Guide (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2018): 2–3. 7. Finnigan, Jessica and Nancy Ross, “‘Your Religion is Showing:’ Negotiation and Personal Experience in Mormon Garments,” in Marie Dallam and Benjamin Zeller (eds), Religion, Attire, and Adornment in North America, (Princeton University Press, 2021). 8. Basquiat, Jennifer Huss, “Reproducing patriarchy and erasing feminism: The selective construction of history within the Mormon community,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 17, no. 2 (2001): 5–37. 9. Ibidem, 5–37; Bowman, The Mormon People, 255–256. 10. Cornwall, Contemporary Mormonism, 240. 11. Harris and Bringhurst, The Mormon Church and Blacks, 2. 12. Bowman, The Mormon People, 76. 13. Newell, Women and Authority, 23–48. 14. Ibid., 23–48. 15. White Jr, O. Kendall, and Daryl White, “Abandoning an unpopular policy: An analysis of the decision granting the Mormon priesthood to Blacks,” Sociological Analysis 41, no. 3 (1980): 231–245. 16. Newell, Linda King, “The historical relationship of Mormon women and priesthood,” in Maxine Hanks (ed), Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1992): 23–48; Quinn, D.  Michael, “Mormon Women Have Had the Priesthood Since 1843,” in Maxine Hanks (ed), Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1992): 365–410. 17. Esplin, Ronald K, “Brigham Young and Priesthood Denial to the Blacks: An Alternate View,” Brigham Young University Studies 19, no. 3 (1979): 394–402; Harris, Matthew L., “Mormonism’s Problematic Racial Past and the Evolution of the Divine-Curse Doctrine,” The John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 33, no. 1 (2013): 90–114. 18. Quinn, Women and Authority, 376; White and White, “Abandoning an unpopular policy,” 231–245; Harris, Matthew L., and Newell G. Bringhurst (eds), The Mormon Church and Blacks: A Documentary History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015): 50–52. 19. McGriggs, Mica, “What I Learned at Girls Camp or Developing a Racial Identity Leads to Liberation,” in Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks (eds), Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2018): 131–138; Boxer, Elise, ““This is the Place!” Disrupting Mormon Settler Colonialism,” in Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks (eds), Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2018): 77–99; Garcia, Ignacio, “Empowering Latino Saints to Transcend Historical Racialism: A Bishop’s Tale,” in Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks (eds), Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2018): 139–160; Graham, Janan, “Addressing the Black Elephant in the Room: Intersectional Mormon Feminism,

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Race & The Priesthood Temple Ban,” A Life Diasporatic (blog), December 12, 2013. https://alifediasporatic.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/addressing-theblack-elephant-in-the-room/. 20. Riess, Jana, The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019): 98. 21. Gordon Shepherd, Lavina Fielding Anderson, and Gary Shepherd (eds), Voices for Equality: Ordain Women and Resurgent Mormon Feminism (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2015), 277–295. 22. Oaks, Dallin H., “Priesthood Authority in the Family and the Church,” LDS General Conference, October 2005. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/ study/general-conference/2005/10/priesthood-authority-in-thefamily-and-the-church?lang=eng. 23. A more detailed story of the survey is present in Brent D. Beal, Heather K. Olson Beal, and S. Matthew Stearmer, “An Insider Account of the Mormon Gender Issues Survey: Why We Did It and Why a Vocal Minority Hated It,” in Gordon Shepherd, Lavina Fielding Anderson, and Gary Shepherd (eds), Voices for Equality: Ordain Women and Resurgent Mormon Feminism (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2015), 277–295. 24. “Mormons in America Certain in Their Beliefs, Uncertain of Their Place in Society,” Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2012. 25. Ibid., 277. 26. Ross, Nancy, Jessica Finnigan, Heather K.  Olson Beal, Kristy Money, Amber Choruby Whiteley, and Caitlin Carrol, “Finding the Middle Ground: Negotiating Mormonism and Gender,” in Gordon Shepherd, Lavina Fielding Anderson, and Gary Shepherd (eds), Voices for Equality: Ordain Women and Resurgent Mormon Feminism (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2015), 319–334. 27. … especially when understood in light of the paucity of scholarship on transgender LDS people. A recent study from the Williams Institute suggests that about 0.6 percent of the US population identify as transgender, meaning that the transgender group in this sample is under-represented in the survey (0.36 percent). Women and people under 40 are oversampled in our study. See J. Edward Sumerau and Ryan Cragun, “Trans-forming Mormonism: Transgender Perspectives on Gender and Priesthood Ordination,” in Gordon Shepherd, Lavina Fielding Anderson, and Gary Shepherd (eds), Voices for Equality: Ordain Women and Resurgent Mormon Feminism (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2015), 115–132; Flores, Andrew R., Jody L. Herman, Gary J. Gates, and Taylor N. T. Brown, “How Many Adults Identify as Transgender in the United States?” (Los Angeles, CA: The Williams Institute, 2016): 1–13. 28. Adam B. Cohen, Gina L. Mazza, Kathryn A. Johnson, Craig K. Enders, Carolyn M. Warner, Michael H. Pasek, and Jonathan E. Cook, “Theorizing and measuring religiosity across cultures,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 43 no. 12 (2017): 1724–1736; The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Handbook 1: Stake Presidents and Bishops (2010), 3.3.3. 29. “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace: An update on America’s changing religious landscape” Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2019. 30. Excluding low believers or under sampling them makes Mormons appear more unique (“peculiar” in Mormon parlance), which is part of the mystique sur-

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rounding the group. People on the margins of the community already feel that their voices are not heard or represented. Not accounting for belief level in academic research has further marginalized these people. 31. Finnigan and Ross, Religion, Attire, and Adornment in North America. 32. Previous studies that have measured belief among LDS people have focused on specific issues of beliefs related to temple recommend questions, but this single question also cuts to the heart of the issue. Belief level also indicates an individual’s level of loyalty to and trust in the LDS Church. See Finnigan and Ross, 2021; Chadwick et al., Shield of Faith, 23–64. 33. Todd, Jay M., “More Members Now outside U.S. than in U.S.,” Ensign, March 1996, 76–77. 34. “Religious Landscape Study” Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2014. 35. Costa, Claudio R. M., “Priesthood Responsibilities,” LDS General Conference, April 2009. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2009/04/priesthood-responsibilities?lang=eng. 36. Nelson, Russell M., “Honoring the Priesthood,” LDS General Conference, April 1993. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1993/04/honoring-the-priesthood?lang=eng. 37. Inouye, Melissa Wei-Tsing, “Building Zion: Folding Chairs,” in Emily W. Jensen and Tracy McKay Lamb (eds), A Book of Mormons: Latter-day Saints on a Modern-day Zion (Ashland, OR: White Cloud Press): 5–19. 38. Ross, Nancy, “Ordain Women Memes: Disposable Art for the Digital Age,” paper presented at the Pop Culture Association, New Orleans, LA, April 2015, 1–11. https://www.academia.edu/11774770/Ordain_Women_ Memes_Disposable_Art_for_the_Digital_Age. 39. First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” Ensign October 1995. 40. Newell, Women and Authority, 23–48; Cornwall, Contemporary Mormonism, 244; Kline, Caroline, “The Mormon Conception of Women’s Nature and Role: A Feminist Analysis,” Feminist Theology 22, no. 2 (2014): 186–202. 41. L. Katie, “Worthiness Interviews and Church PR… Again,” Feminist Mormon Housewives (blog), July 30, 2018. https://www.feministmormonhousewives. org/2018/07/worthiness-interviews-and-church-pr-again/; Guest Post, “#hearLDSwomen: My Bishop Asked Me Sexually Explicit Questions I Didn’t Understand, so I Researched Them. I Was Eleven,” The Exponent (blog), November 15, 2018. https://www.the-exponent.com/hearldswomen-mybishop-asked-me-sexually-explicit-questions-i-didnt-understand-so-iresearched-them-i-was-eleven/. 42. Weaver, Sara Jane, “First Presidency Releases New Guidelines for Interviewing Youth,” Church News, June 20, 2018. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/ church/news/first-presidency-releases-new-guidelines-for-interviewingyouth?lang=eng. 43. Knoll, Benjamin R., and Cammie Jo Bolin, She Preached the Word: Women’s Ordination in Modern America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018): 119–146. 44. Further research should explore the relationship between LDS transgender women and their insights about priesthood and gender. The limitations of sur-

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vey methodology prevented us from gathering further data about transgender Mormon women holding the priesthood. 45. Putnam, Robert D., and David E.  Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2012): 123–125. 46. The low number of open-ended responses from people of color largely resembled those of white people in their same gender and belief level groups.

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12. https://alifediasporatic.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/addressing-the-blackelephant-in-the-room/. Guest Post. 2018. #hearLDSwomen: My Bishop Asked Me Sexually Explicit Questions I Didn’t Understand, So I Researched Them. I Was Eleven. The Exponent (blog), November 15. https://www.the-exponent.com/hearldswomen-mybishop-asked-me-sexually-explicit-questions-i-didnt-understand-so-i-researchedthem-i-was-eleven/. Harris, Matthew L. 2013. Mormonism’s Problematic Racial Past and the Evolution of the Divine-Curse Doctrine. The John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 33 (1): 90–114. Harris, Matthew L., and Newell G. Bringhurst, eds. 2015. The Mormon Church and Blacks: A Documentary History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Katie, L. 2018. Worthiness Interviews and Church PR… Again. Feminist Mormon Housewives (blog), July 30. https://www.feministmormonhousewives. org/2018/07/worthiness-interviews-and-church-pr-again/ Inouye, Melissa Wei-Tsing. 2015. Building Zion: Folding Chairs. In A Book of Mormons: Latter-day Saints on a Modern-day Zion, ed. Emily W.  Jensen and Tracy McKay Lamb. Ashland, OR: White Cloud Press. Kim, Grace Ji-Sun, and Susan M. Shaw. 2018. Intersectional Theology: An Introductory Guide. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Knoll, Benjamin R., and Cammie Jo Bolin. 2018. She Preached the Word: Women’s Ordination in Modern America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Mauss, Armand L. 1994. Refuge and Retrenchment: The Mormon Quest for Identity. In Contemporary Mormonism: Social Science Perspectives, ed. Marie Cornwall, Tim B. Heaton, and Lawrence A. Young. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2003. All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. McGriggs, Mica. 2018. What I Learned at Girls Camp or Developing a Racial Identity Leads to Liberation. In Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion, ed. Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press. Mormons in America Certain in Their Beliefs, Uncertain of Their Place in Society. 2012. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Nelson, Russell M. 1993. Honoring the Priesthood. LDS General Conference, April. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1993/04/ honoring-the-priesthood?lang=eng. Newell, Linda King. 1992. The Historical Relationship of Mormon Women and Priesthood. In Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism, ed. Maxine Hanks. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books. Oaks, Dallin H. 2005. Priesthood Authority in the Family and the Church. LDS General Conference, October. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2005/10/priesthood-authority-in-the-family-and-the-church?lang=eng. Prince, Gregory A. 2015. Mormon Priesthood and Organization. In The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, ed. Terryl L. Givens and Philip L. Barlow. New York, NY: Oxford Handbooks. Putnam, Robert D., and David E.  Campbell. 2012. American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Religious Landscape Study. 2014. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Riess, Jana. 2019. The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 98.

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Ross, Nancy. 2015. Ordain Women Memes: Disposable Art for the Digital Age. Paper presented at the Pop Culture Association, New Orleans, LA, April, 1–11. https://www.academia. edu/11774770/Ordain_Women_Memes_Disposable_Art_for_the_Digital_Age. Ross, Nancy, Jessica Finnigan, Heather K. Olson Beal, Kristy Money, Amber Choruby Whiteley, and Caitlin Carrol. 2015. Finding the Middle Ground: Negotiating Mormonism and Gender. In Voices for Equality: Ordain Women and Resurgent Mormon Feminism, ed. Gordon Shepherd, Lavina Fielding Anderson, and Gary Shepherd. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books. Sumerau, J. Edward, and Ryan Cragun. 2015. Trans-forming Mormonism: Transgender Perspectives on Gender and Priesthood Ordination. In Voices for Equality: Ordain Women and Resurgent Mormon Feminism, ed. Gordon Shepherd, Lavina Fielding Anderson, and Gary Shepherd. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books. Todd, Jay M. 1996, March. More Members Now Outside U.S. than in U.S. Ensign: 76–77. Quinn, D. Michael. 1992. Mormon Women Have Had the Priesthood Since 1843. In Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism, ed. Maxine Hanks. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 2010. Handbook 1: Stake Presidents and Bishops. White, O. Kendall, Jr., and Daryl White. 1980. Abandoning an Unpopular Policy: An Analysis of the Decision Granting the Mormon Priesthood to Blacks. Sociological Analysis 41 (3): 231–245.

CHAPTER 9

Framing Eternal Sexual Identity in a Shifting Cultural Landscape Laura Vance and Scott Vance

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints provides an especially interesting example of one denomination’s attempt to construct sexual identity and expression in theology, religious and secular policies, law, public relations, and the lives of its members in a changing cultural context. This chapter contextualizes the LDS response to sexual orientation and gender identity by examining the church’s shifting official construction of ideal sexuality. From at least the 1840s, Latter-day Saint leaders centered sexuality as a core element of Mormon thought, beginning with Joseph Smith, Jr.’s novel theological contributions providing justification for plural marriage. As the church abandoned polygamy in the twentieth century, it refocused its theology around monogamous heterosexual families—codified in teachings which it calls the plan of salvation— and concomitantly embraced the heterosexual dyad as God’s ideal for humans before, during, and after life. With the growth of the LGBT+ rights movement in the United States since the 1960s, LDS leaders used rhetoric and policy to identify homosexuality as a “perversion” and “grievous sin.” As of 2020, church leaders have begun to make oblique references to “LGBT” people, and some contemporary LDS leaders have supported limited legal protections for gay men and lesbians, but the LDS Church continues to play a key role opposing same-sex marriage in national battles, and continues to define same-sex relationships as violating God’s law of chastity.1

L. Vance (*) Brevard College, Brevard, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] S. Vance Independent Scholar, Lewisburg, PA, USA

© The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_9

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The ideal Mormon family promoted by modern Church leaders is heterosexual, gender dyadic, and monogamous. “Righteous women” are key to the ideal, so much so that contemporary LDS girls are encouraged to “prepare now to become a righteous wife and mother,” while boys are encouraged to grow into men who marry heterosexually, become fathers and “righteous priesthood holders,” and provide for and protect their families.2 These ideals were systematized in an official declaration entitled “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” which President Hinckley first read to female members in 1995. The Family proclamation asserts that dyadic gender roles and the heterosexual nuclear family are divine, eternal, and necessary for exaltation in the afterlife, as well as foundational to social order in the here and now.3 According to Apostle Dallin Oaks “God created us male and female. What we call gender was an essential characteristic of our existence prior to birth.”4 Today, the LDS family is presented as a bulwark against social changes in normative family constructions, especially those involving same-sex marriage or acceptance of gender fluidity. This chapter explores the transition from plural marriage to the modern LDS focus on monogamous heterosexual temple marriage in order to explore LDS responses to LGBT members.

If Any Man Desires to Espouse Another: Early Mormon Sexuality The LDS Church was not always a defender of the heterosexual, monogamous nuclear family. Beginning in the 1830s, some of Joseph Smith’s most novel theological contributions, centered on sexuality, described God as gendered and corporeal, and provided justification for plural marriage.5 Smith married at least thirty-three women and girls.6 Two of these were 14 years old, and at least nine were legally married to other men at the time of their marriage to Smith. Emma Smith, Joseph’s first and only legal wife, vociferously opposed the practice, and Mormon polygyny was always controversial. Though Joseph Smith only shared the practice with trusted associates and LDS leaders officially denied plural marriage, rumors of it dogged Mormon communities.7 Indeed, published accusations of the practice helped to spark the conflict that led to Smith’s assassination in 1844. It was not until Latter-day Saints migrated west and settled in the Utah territory that Apostle Orson Pratt publicly acknowledged plural marriage to church members in 1852.8 Even after pressure from the Edmunds-Tucker Act and the bid for Utah statehood led LDS President Wilford Woodruff to officially renounce plural marriage in the 1890 Manifesto, the practice persisted among some Mormon leaders who continued taking new wives until at least 1904; the practice was eventually abandoned by the LDS Church (see the chapter by Bennion for other groups that continue to practice polygamy).9

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Celestial Marriage and Promotion of the Heterosexual Dyad The attempt to disassociate Mormonism from polygamy helped to refocus the movement around the monogamous heterosexual family. In the first half of the twentieth century, LDS leaders increasingly highlighted religious principles and practices similar to those of mainstream Protestants, and downplayed or abandoned theologies and concepts previously used to justify plural marriage. The term celestial marriage referred exclusively to plural marriage prior to 1890, for example, and was used often in church-wide general conference meetings in the 1870s. It was removed from general usage in church-wide conferences by 1901 as leaders distanced themselves from the practice.10 By the 1930s, leaders instead referred to “temple marriage” to emphasize monogamy in conference meetings. Once the ideal of monogamy was well established, around 1940, the term “celestial marriage” was reintroduced in church-wide conferences, newly defined as monogamous heterosexual temple marriage. By the 1940s, most Mormon polygynists had died and plural marriage among members was no longer tolerated.11 In the 1950s the term “celestial marriage” was again widely used in presentations by LDS leaders at church-wide conferences, though it never again achieved the wide usage of the 1870s, and “plurality of wives” was abandoned (see Fig. 9.1).12

Fig. 9.1  LDS general conference usage of marriage-related terms

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This Ugly Practice: Excluding Homosexual Individuals from God’s Plan Celestial marriage, originally a theological construct that justified LDS plural marriages was, by the 1950s, the centerpiece of a revised formulation of family that prioritized heterosexual monogamy. At the same time, LDS teachings embraced then dominant social constructions of homosexuality as unnatural and wrong.13 As Cragun, Sumerau, and Williams note, by the 1950s “LDS leaders interpret[ed] homosexuality within the context of religious doctrines that define heterosexual relationships and reproduction as essential for both bringing disembodied souls into this life and determining one’s status—as well as the status of one’s family—in the next life.” By the middle of the twentieth century, LDS leaders’ rhetoric constructed homosexuality not just as wrong, but as precluding participation in this life and for eternity, in God’s plan of salvation.14 Apostles Spencer Kimball and Mark Peterson, charged with counseling homosexual individuals who had undergone church discipline, led this effort, along with Apostle Boyd Packer.15 In his highly influential book, The Miracle of Forgiveness, Kimball taught that masturbation caused homosexuality, that homosexuality led to bestiality, and that it could be cured through repentance and heterosexual marriage.16 For example, Kimball wrote that: After consideration of the evil aspects, the ugliness and prevalence of the evil of homosexuality, the glorious thing to remember is that it is curable and forgivable. The Lord has promised that all sins can be forgiven except certain ones enumerated, and this evil was not among those named. Thus it can be forgivable if totally abandoned and if repentance is sincere and absolute. Certainly it can be overcome, for there are numerous happy people who were once involved in its clutches and who have since completely transformed their lives … To those of you who say this practice or any other evil is incurable, I respond, “How can you say the door cannot be opened until your knuckles are bloody, till your head is bruised, till your muscles are sore? It can be done.”17

The Miracle of Forgiveness was followed by publication of several official pamphlets in the 1970s, including Hope for Transgressors, New Horizons for Homosexuals, and A Letter to a Friend.18 Each described homosexuality in pejorative terms—as a “despicable practice,” a “perversion,” and an unclean and unhealthy way of life. Each identified it as a sin “in the same degree as adultery and fornication,” and promised a cure. Leaders were instructed to “assist any such person to recover himself and become normal again.”19 Homosexuality was a sin while monogamous heterosexual marriage was, by the twentieth century, necessary for eternal progression. A 1974 bulletin for LDS lay leaders explained that “eternal life means returning to the Lord’s exalted presence and enjoying the privilege of eternal increase. According to his revealed word, the only acceptable sexual relationship occurs within the family between a husband and a wife.”20 In his 1976 address, “To Young Men

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Only,” Packer instructed LDS males to avoid masturbation and, like Kimball, taught that masturbation could lead to “physical mischief with another man,” which he called “forbidden,” and told followers to “vigorously resist.”21 He asserted that God created all his children as [cisgender] men and women with a heterosexual orientation. There is a falsehood that some are born with an attraction to their own kind, with nothing they can do about it. They are just “that way” and can only yield to those desires. That is a malicious and destructive lie. While it is a convincing idea to some, it is of the devil. No one is locked into that kind of life. From our premortal life we were directed into a physical body. There is no mismatching of bodies and spirits. Boys are to become men—masculine manly men—ultimately to become husbands and fathers. No one is predestined to a perverted use of these powers.22

Packer denied the possibility of a stable gay or lesbian sexual orientation and called homosexuality unnatural, abnormal, an affliction, immoral, a transgression, and asserted that it could become an addiction.23 Trans people were addressed less often, but when noted transgender identity was called an “extreme condition,” and “so-called ‘change’ operations” were depicted as leading one to become “captive of the adversary.”24 Trans people and lesbians were rarely mentioned in these publications, and intersex people were absent. Packer and other LDS leaders who addressed homosexuality in the 1970s and 1980s described it much like a contagion, and asserted that even talking about it could encourage curiosity and lead to homosexual behavior.25 Packer explicitly compared homosexuality to a disease—something to resist and suppress so as to cure and avoid spreading it.26 Members were cautioned to avoid exposure to images, text, or conversations about homosexuality or with homosexuals, and were coached about how to redirect homoerotic thoughts. Gay students at Brigham Young University were counseled to participate in sessions in which they were administered electric shocks while viewing homoerotic images; Packer posited to “those few, those very few, who may be subject to homosexual temptation” that homosexuality was a temporary and curable condition, and called any claim of a stable homosexual orientation false doctrine.27 He and other church leaders supported attempts to redirect or cure homosexuality at Evergreen International and North Star, and in the 1970s church leaders promoted the idea that gay men should date and marry women to help them become heterosexual. Counseling and other supposedly curative strategies were outlined in pamphlets distributed from the 1970s through the 1990s to guide lay leaders and LDS Family Services employees in treating the “grave concern” of homosexuality.28 Regional and local leaders were instructed that it would be their “privilege and responsibility to assist” “those with homosexual tendencies” to “affect a cure and bring their lives back into total normalcy.”29 While lay leaders were instructed that “professionals do not agree on the causes of homosexual

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behavior,” they were also informed about its supposed roots in disturbed families, poor relationships, and unhealthy attitudes, Most research supports the view that homosexual behavior is learned and influenced by unhealthy emotional development in early childhood. This explanation is most consistent with what the Lord has revealed concerning the eternal nature of man as the offspring of divine parents. Although there are probably many factors affecting the development of homosexuality, the following elements appear quite consistently:

1. Disturbed family background … 2. Poor relationships with peers … 3. Unhealthy sexual attitudes … 4. Early homosexual experience…30

Publications to assist in “curing” homosexuality suggested that it sometimes resulted from “molest[ation] by strangers, acquaintances, or even relatives” and promised leaders of congregations that “homosexuality CAN be cured if the battle is well organized and pursued vigorously and continuously.”31 The path to ending homosexuality was one of self-mastery.32 It was alleged that many were able to “overcome the problem through repentance, prayer, a diligent program of self-mastery, and the concern of others.”33 Self-discipline and submission to church authorities were key. Lay leaders were warned that “the most crucial single factor in the rehabilitation of a member with homosexual problems is his attitude,” and a “rebellious attitude is almost always a clear indication of the need to be sternly disciplined.”34 Both pornography and masturbation were portrayed as temptations to resist on the road to recovery. Leaders taught that pornography and masturbation led to and almost always accompanied homosexual sin, and should “be strictly avoided and replaced with wholesome books and activities,” such as scripture study, reading The Miracle of Forgiveness, exercise, prayer, adherence to the Word of Wisdom, community service, and paying tithing and fast offerings.35 Lay leaders were repeatedly encouraged to recommend that gay and—when they were noted— lesbian congregants read three church pamphlets: To the One, A Letter to a Friend, and, for men, To Young Men Only. “There is no place in God’s Church,” lay leaders were informed, “for those who persist in vile behavior.”36 Changes in behavior required avoiding other gay or lesbian people. Regional leaders were instructed that “many people try to repent while clinging to unhealthy relationships with others with similar problems.” Repenting members must “free themselves from these relationships.”37 Leaders were cautioned that “many perverts will claim to have great ‘love’ for some with whom they have been involved, especially where there has been a sustained relationship,” and they were encouraged to try to break up relationships.38 A gay man should be in “appropriate situations with members of the opposite sex, even if he has

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to force himself.” Regional and local leaders should “encourage him (if single) to begin dating and gradually increase its frequency.”39 According to LDS Church leaders at the time, a cure was not only possible, it was urgent; left unchecked, homosexuality was a threat to the individual, the family, and society. To the individual it was evil, a major transgression, “that prevents one from receiving … eternal blessings,” and “counter to divine objectives.”40 Without treatment, homosexuality led to despair that “prompts feelings of hopelessness,” “and hopelessness, combined with the burden of unresolved sin and guilt, may lead an individual to contemplate or attempt suicide.”41 Beyond the individual, it meant “an end to the family and the civilization.”42 Kimball, by then church president, asked Latter-day Saints to imagine a society in which “lawmakers rescin[d] laws against such sin, [leading to] public sentiment accepting the perversion so that neither judge nor jury nor law-enforcement officers could protect society.” “The world,” he told Latter-­ day Saints, “cannot survive through this ugly practice. Imagine if you can the total race skidding down in this practice like Sodom did—no more marriage, no more children … just one generation of gratification of lusts and the end.”43 Change was possible, but lay leaders were warned that it was difficult, especially in cases of sustained homosexual behavior. Moreover, “one of the characteristics of homosexuals is their skillful rationalization.”44 Leaders rejected homosexuality as innate, stable, or resulting in healthy relationships through the 1970s.45 In the same decade, Welfare Services Packet 1, published for LDS Family Services personnel, instructed that if a congregant resisted change he or she should be disciplined: “An attitude of stiffneckedness and rebellion is almost always a clear indication of the need to be sternly disciplined, even to excommunication so that others are not contaminated by unclean habits.”46

Resist Any Efforts: Handbook Policies and Responses to Marriage Equality The most severe discipline the LDS Church may impose is excommunication— expelling a person from membership—as it severs the individual from the religious community and the hope of salvation. LDS policy handbooks first specifically addressed LGBT+ Mormons in 1968 by requiring permission of the General Authorities for anyone with a “sex perversion” to serve an LDS mission.47 In 1983, the Handbook reiterated the same clearance requirement for “homosexual[s] or other sexual perver[ts].”48 By 1991 a comma separated “homosexual activity, [and] other sexual perversions,” a revision that subsequent Handbooks retained until 2020.49 Both the 1998 and 2006 Handbooks, published in the midst of state and national battles over marriage equality, promoted opposition to any efforts to legalize same-sex marriages. Quoting from the First Presidency Letter of February 1, 1994, these Handbooks instructed that “Church members are encouraged ‘to appeal to legislators, judges, and other government officials …

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to reject all efforts to give legal authorization or other approval or support to marriages of persons of the same gender.”50 The 2006 Handbook affirms as a doctrinal principle that “marriage between a man and a woman is essential to God’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children.” In both its 1998 and 2006 editions, the Handbook instructs bishoprics and stake presidencies that “homosexual behavior violates the commandments of God, is contrary to the purposes of human sexuality, distorts loving relationships, and deprives people of the blessings that can be found in family life and in the saving ordinances of the gospel,” and advises local leaders to consult Understanding and Helping Those Who Have Homosexual Problems as a resource. Trans people are addressed less often but much more harshly by LDS policies, which originally attended far more to sexuality than to gender identity. Social scientists distinguish between sex and gender. Sex is used by a society to classify people into categories such as female, male, and intersex on the basis of biological characteristics such as genitalia, while gender encompasses the socially created roles, behaviors, and expectations assigned to people based on that categorization. Before the 1980s, instructive materials published by the church focused almost exclusively on gay men. The 1983 Handbook is the first to address “Transsexual Operations,” and directs that “a change in a member’s sex ordinarily justifies excommunication.” Not only was it suggested that members who “undergo such procedures” should receive disciplinary action, but “members who are doctors who perform such operations may also require disciplinary action.” Unlike murderers, apostates, or lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, if excommunicated, transgender individuals were not eligible again for baptism.51 Some allowance was made for investigators who had already undergone operations to transition, as they could be “baptized if otherwise worthy on condition that an appropriate notation be made on the membership record so as to preclude such individuals from either receiving the priesthood or temple recommends.”52 The 2006 Handbook instructs that “Church leaders council against elective transsexual operations,” and that anyone who has had such surgery could not receive the priesthood or a temple recommend.53 By 2006, however, rather than requiring excommunication, undergoing sex reassignment surgery “may be cause for formal church discipline.”54 The same Handbook includes “elective transsexual operation” on a list of seven sins so serious that, following excommunication for any of them, one must have permission of the First Presidency to be reinstated into membership.55 If a trans person was readmitted to membership, the “transgression” was deemed so consequential that the person’s record must include a permanent annotation to “hel[p] the bishop protect Church members and others from such individuals.”56 In the same year that the Handbook first specified discipline for trans people, Gordon Hinckley, in a general conference address to young Mormon women, emphasized gender distinctions: “God has created us male and female … the woman is the bearer and the nurturer of children. The man is the provider and protector … any legislation which is designed to create neuter gender of that which God created

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male and female will bring more problems than benefits. Of that I am convinced.”57 LDS policies regarding LGBT people shifted from a focus on influencing individual thinking and behavior to state and federal laws regarding same-sex marriage in concert with state and constitutional battles over marriage equality in the United States.58 The LDS Church was involved, and encouraged members’ involvement, in efforts to ban state or federal recognition of same-sex marriage. Two years after the Hawaiian Supreme Court ruled in 1993 that denying marriage to same-sex couples violated the equal protection guaranteed in the state’s constitution, the church donated a half-million dollars in support of the 1998 Alaskan referendum that imposed a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.59 In 1999, the LDS Area Presidency of North America West instructed local leaders to read in church a letter instructing members to “do all you can by donating your means and time” to pass Proposition 22. Proposition 22, a referendum barring the state of California from recognizing same-sex marriages, was approved by voters in 2000, but was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of California in 2008. In 2008 LDS leaders again asked members to donate their funds and time in support of Proposition 8, a proposed amendment that declared “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”60 The church played a pivotal role in the narrow approval of Proposition 8 by California voters in November of that year.61 The victory of Proposition 8 notwithstanding, a number of states moved to legalize same-sex marriage. In October of 2008 Connecticut’s supreme court legalized same-sex marriage, as did Iowa’s supreme court, and legislatures in Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire followed in 2009. By 2010, U.S. district courts ruled that Proposition 8 and a key section of the Defense of Marriage Act were unconstitutional. Public opinion on this was shifting, and by 2010 about half of those in the U.S. supported legalizing same-sex marriage.62

Kindness, Religious Freedom, and Chastity: Changing Rhetoric, Not Rules In the face of shifting laws and national attitudes, LDS rhetoric softened. In 2010, the Handbook instructed that “people who experience same-sex attraction or identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual can make and keep covenants with God and fully participate in the Church. Identifying as gay, lesbian, or bisexual or experiencing same-sex attraction is not a sin and does not prohibit one from participating in the Church, holding callings, or attending the temple.”63 While it was no longer a sin to identify as bisexual, lesbian, or gay, it was a sin to act on those feelings. According to Church leaders, sexual purity was an essential part of God’s plan, and for lesbian and gay people this meant abstaining from intimate romantic attachment. Marriage was no longer posited generically as the domain of approved sexuality; now sex was “reserved for a man and a

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woman who are married.” Same-sex marriage, dating, or affection was a violation of the law of chastity.64 Around the same time, Brigham Young University modified campus policies to allow lesbian and gay students to attend so long as they adhered to the same strict standard, and the church released its mormonandgay.org website (now defunct), which acknowledged the possibility of a stable gay or lesbian orientation. State battles over same-sex marriage were rendered moot with Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision which held that marriage was a right protected under both the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. In the days following the decision, the First Presidency released a statement, which it directed be read to all young adult Mormons, that “restates and reaffirms the doctrinal foundation of Church teachings on morality, marriage, and the family,” including that “marriage between a man and a woman was instituted by God and is central to His plan for His children and for the well-being of society.” The statement described families “guided by a loving mother and father” as “the fundamental institution for nurturing children, instilling faith, and transmitting to future generations the moral strengths and values that are important to civilization and vital to eternal salvation.”65 The same First Presidency statement also emphasized “our individual right to religious freedom.” In keeping with a growing effort among socially conservative evangelical groups to frame refusal to perform marriage ceremonies or provide goods or services to LGBT+ people as a religious right, Mormon leaders began to develop a well-funded and organized campaign to support “religious freedom.” As the LDS Church uses the term, they are not primarily referring to the right for someone to have the religion of their choosing but rather that people should be allowed to practice their religion free from any legal ramifications. In other words, it should be legal to discriminate against LGBT+ individuals, so long as it is done on religious grounds. Claiming religious freedom as a basic principle of Mormonism and a fundamental human right, official church publications since Obergefell find support for religious freedom in the writings of Joseph Smith, and highlight religious freedom in articles, conference talks, and instructional materials for all ages.66 The church provides materials that coach members on how to respond to LGBT+ equality advocates within the framework of religious freedom, and address questions of religion in civil life more broadly.67 Religious freedom efforts are a contemporary Mormon response to LGBT+ equality efforts. Another major response was a controversial LDS policy change that was implemented in Handbook 1  in November 2015.68 The change designated Mormons in same-sex marriages as apostates, and informed regional and local leaders that members in a “same gender marriage or similar relationship commit sin that warrants a Church disciplinary council”—effectively directing the excommunication of lesbian or gay members in relationships, and bi members in same-gender relationships. Regional leaders were further instructed not to allow children of these members to be blessed as infants, baptized, or serve

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missions.69 The latter two could occur for adult children of same-sex partners only if, after the age of 18, they renounced their parents’ relationship and received permission from the First Presidency. The policy received international media attention and public criticism, including a demonstration held at church headquarters on November 16, 2015, at which around 1000 Mormons resigned their memberships en masse.70 Some critics of this policy focused on its implications for youth suicide. At least some LGBT+ Latter-day Saints have publicly blamed church policies for Utah’s high rate of youth suicide—the fifth highest in the nation according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.71 Benjamin Knoll notes that “while there is little direct evidence available to be able to conclusively demonstrate that a Mormon environment results in higher levels of [LGBT] youth suicides, there is sufficient indirect and anecdotal evidence that, when combined with what direct evidence is available, strongly points to a link between these factors.”72 Church leaders initially defended this policy from critics. Apostle Todd Christofferson asserted that the policy originated “out of compassion … from a desire to protect children in their innocence and in their minority years.”73 In January of 2016 Russell Nelson described the policy as resulting from a prophetic process in which church leaders “wrestled [with the issues involved] at length” and “met repeatedly in the temple in fasting and prayer” seeking further guidance. He described the policy as the “mind and the will of the Lord,” and noted that church leaders felt a spiritual confirmation of the rightness of the policy when the confirmation was received.74 At the October 2017 general conference, Apostle Dallin Oaks decried growing acceptance of same-sex marriage and reaffirmed the 1995 Proclamation on the Family as doctrinal and eternal truth. “We must live with the marriage laws and other traditions of a declining world,” he told followers, but “in God’s plan … exaltation is a family matter,” and that family must be heterosexual.75 Despite these defenses, three and one-half years after it was announced, this policy was revised.76 On April 4, 2019, Dallin Oaks announced that “children of parents who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender” could be blessed and baptized without First Presidency approval and that, though same-sex marriage remained a serious transgression, it would no longer be characterized as apostasy for the purpose of church discipline.77 The changes were characterized in a First Presidency statement as part of the process of ongoing revelation following lengthy discussions and prayer among the leaders. The statement insisted that the “doctrine of the Plan of Salvation and the importance of chastity will not change.”78 In the same year in which they reversed this policy, LDS Church leaders modified temple rituals to explicitly preclude same-sex marriage, and thereby reinforced prohibition on same-sex relationships in this life and the next. Language of the ceremony was altered to redefine chastity as including sex only within “legal and lawful marriage according to His law.”79 Currently, LDS leaders employ the longstanding Mormon concept of chastity to reposition LDS prohibition of lesbian and gay sexuality as equitable.

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Previously the First Presidency insisted that the “Lord’s law of moral conduct is abstinence outside of lawful marriage and fidelity within it.”80 In advance of the October 2019 general conference, Oaks laid out the argument: First, … God created “male and female,” [and this] binary creation is essential to the plan of salvation. Second, modern revelation teaches that eternal life, the greatest gift of God to His children, is only possible through the creative powers inherent in the combination of male and female joined in an eternal marriage. That is why the law of chastity is so important. Finally, the long-standing doctrinal statements reaffirmed in [The Family: A Proclamation to the World] 23 years ago will not change. They may be clarified as directed by inspiration. [Further,] the intended meaning of gender in the family proclamation and as used in Church statements and publications since that time is biological sex at birth.81

In short, God created gender dualism, eternal life requires cis and gender-­ dyadic heterosexual marriage, and “God’s commandments forbid all unchaste behavior”—any sexual expression that is not heterosexual. At the same time, the “Church and its faithful members should reach out with understanding and respect to individuals who are attracted to those of the same sex or whose sexual orientation or gender identity is inconsistent with their sex at birth.”82 This more accepting public posture toward LGBT people holds fast to the cisgender heterosexual dyad as God’s eternal ideal. In October 2019, President Nelson and Oaks presented nearly identical addresses in which they at once underscored official commitment to the divine and eternal role of the heterosexual family, and attempted to embrace LGBT people. For the first time in general conference communications Oaks used the initialism “LGBT” in his remarks, and then decried rejection of LGBT people (see Fig.  9.2: LDS

Fig. 9.2  LDS general conference usage of sexual orientation-related terms

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general conference usage of sexual orientation terms). Calling it regretful that “some persons facing these [LGBT] issues continue to feel marginalized and rejected by some members and leaders in our families, wards, and stakes,” they encouraged members to be nicer to “those who follow lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender teachings and actions.” LGBT people, they insisted, should be treated with the “love our Savior commands us to show toward all our neighbors.” At the same time, Nelson and Oaks reiterated that “in the beginning … marriage was ordained by God! … God has not changed His definition of marriage.”83 “Our commission as Apostles is to teach nothing but truth,” they averred, and asserted “that commission does not give us the authority to modify divine law.” Members were advised “not [to] compromise on commandments but show forth a full measure of understanding and love” to those “who are uncertain about their sexual orientation.”84 Less than two months later, in December of 2019, the Handbook appeared to seek a moratorium on the topic when it was revised to instruct members to “avoid … making political statements or speaking of sexual orientation or other personal characteristics in a way that detracts from meetings.”85 The current LDS response to LGBT+ people slightly diverts attention from the issue by focusing on chastity while attempting to balance (1) condemnation of sexuality outside of the cisgendered heterosexual dyad with (2) more conciliatory and accepting rhetoric. Navigating rapidly changing public attitudes toward LGBT+ people and the legal changes those portend has so far proven complicated for LDS leaders, as is evidenced by implementation and rapid reversal of the policy from November 2015. Around the same time, Brigham Young University, facing the threat of a lawsuit by the National Dance Council, announced that same-sex partners from other colleges could participate in competitions on campus. In another example, church leaders announced support for legislation banning the use of conversion therapy on LGBT minors in Utah in February of 2019, then opposed similar legislation in October of the same year, and finally changed course again to support a regulation curtailing the practice by licensed therapists in November of 2019.86 In February of 2020, church leaders consolidated policies on LGBT+ members in a new General Handbook—the first on church administration made available to the membership as a whole. The 2020 Handbook continues to codify the response to LGBT+ people vis-à-vis the “Lord’s law of chastity.” Excommunication, now called “withdrawal of membership,” is no longer required for gay or lesbian members, though the handbook stipulates that same-sex relations violate God’s law, as does same-sex marriage.87 It provides the first public LDS attempt to address intersex people, and instructs regional leaders to direct questions about “youth or adults who were born with sexual ambiguity … to the Office of the First Presidency.”88 The 2020 handbook uses physical appearance of genitalia at birth to define people as intersex.

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Gender is eternal, according to the handbook and is determined by “biological sex at birth.” The 2020 handbook confuses sex and gender in a manner that has potentially grave implications for trans, intersex, gender nonconforming and gender fluid people. It allows that trans people may be baptized, “partake of the sacrament and receive priesthood blessings,” but “priesthood ordination and temple ordinances are received according to birth sex.” It “counsels against social transitioning” by “changing dress or grooming,” “changing a name or pronouns,” or “present[ing]” oneself in a manner out of keeping with one’s sex at birth. For trans believers, this guidance denies expression in keeping with gender, one of the most central aspects of individual and social identity. Any transition or gender nonconformity—even something as simple as wearing clothing of the “wrong” gender, styling one’s hair in a certain way, wearing nail polish, or asking friends to use “they” as a pronoun— may be “cause for Church membership restrictions.” Just as LGB members may now acknowledge their sexual identity but not act on it, trans members may now let others know that they are trans, but are left in a perpetual state of gender dysphoria, never allowed to align their gender expression with their gender identity.89

Chastity: Rhetoric and Implications for LGBT Mormons Latter-day Saint leaders insist that their current approach applies a single standard—the norm of chastity—to all, and that “homosexual immorality w[ill] be treated in the eyes of the Church in the same manner as heterosexual immorality.”90 Leaders maintain that gay and lesbian members must remain celibate and trans people must live out of sync with their gender, and at the same time call for “kindness, inclusion, and respect for all God’s children.”91 The Mormonandgay.com website redirects readers to a church-sponsored page on Same-Sex Attraction, which provides models of celibacy and heterosexual marriage. All of the member stories on the page emphasize that same-sex attraction is a struggle and that acting on it is a sin. As one individual, Laurie, highlighted on the site, explains of her past relationship with a woman, “really, what felt right [dating a woman] was wrong, and what felt wrong [dating a man] was right. At times the conflict would rage, and I’d consider suicide.”92 No stories of trans or intersex individuals are provided, and accounts highlight that mixed-­ orientation marriages lead to eternal reward. Another individual described on the website, Ricardo, observes that after marrying his wife, “it is great to feel worthy of the Savior’s Atonement and not feel tormented by my same-sex attraction anymore. I can see myself for who I am, a son of God, a true man worthy of the blessings of eternal life.”93 Elizabeth, his wife, emphasizes the sacrifices she makes in their marriage, such as feeling neglected: Ricardo “promised to give me 10 minutes of his undivided attention after the kids went to bed. [But] he is still working on that.”94

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The alternative to heterosexual marriage is life-long celibacy. As another individual described on the site, Andy, a young gay Mormon, suggested, this is his most likely path: The first and biggest challenge I have faced both before and after being “out” is heartache, in a variety of forms. One form is loneliness. At first I was fairly committed to the idea that I would live a celibate life since that is what would be required to maintain the full blessings of the gospel. Up to that point, I’d mostly only known the physical attraction. However, as I stopped repressing my feelings and began thinking about what I really wanted in life, I came to perceive the kind of joy that can be felt in sharing my life with someone I truly love. It’s easier on some days than on others to face the probability that I will go through this life without being married. In the grand scheme of things, I know I can live a happy and fulfilling life as a single person.95

Arguably, though options for LGBT believers have not changed, leaders’ rhetoric has softened—they no longer call homosexuality a perversion, compare it to bestiality, or insist, as Kimball did in his 1978 Letter to a Friend, that “the world cannot survive through this ugly practice.”96 Nonetheless, as Cragun, Sumerau, and Williams point out, LDS leaders’ softer rhetoric may reinforce homophobia. Although it may be tempting to interpret [LDS leaders’] shifting rhetoric as a sign of greater acceptance and recognition of homosexual experience … our analysis reveals some ways that shifting rhetoric may reinforce the subordination of sexual minorities and condemnation of homosexuality … while hiding these oppressive conditions behind a kinder, gentler facade. [LDS leaders’] conceptualiz[ation of] homosexuals as sympathetic victims of immoral forces or as a subcultural element to be tolerated or met in certain situations … reproduces the notion of sexual minorities as social beings separate from, contrary to, and ultimately lesser than [heterosexual Latter-day Saints].97

Family is the cord that binds Latter-day Saints to each other, to time, to the pre-existence and the afterlife, and to their religious community and God. For LGBT members, the practical implication of current policy is that they may now let others know that they are bisexual, gay, lesbian, or trans (though they are cautioned to prayerfully consider who they should tell before doing so).98 Beyond that, unless they wish to face church discipline, gay and lesbian members may not date or form any romantic attachment, bisexual people are mostly ignored or encouraged to act straight, and trans people are confined to a life in which they must present as a gender other than their own. Though policy does not call for their discipline, intersex members are encouraged to follow gender patterns based on the physical appearance of their genitalia at birth. According to Dallin Oaks, first counselor in the First Presidency and next in line to lead the church in a 2006 interview:

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There is no such thing in the Lord’s eyes as something called same-gender marriage. Homosexual behavior is and will always remain before the Lord an abominable sin. Calling it something else by virtue of some political definition does not change that reality…. There can be no coexistence of two marriages. Either there is marriage as it is now defined and as defined by the Lord, or there is what could thus be described as genderless marriage. The latter is abhorrent to God, who, as we’ve been discussing, Himself described what marriage is—between a man and a woman.99

Brigham Young University’s recent revision of its Honor Code in concert with the release of the 2020 Handbook makes clear how little has changed for LGBT+ members. Where previously students were forbidden to engage in “all forms of physical intimacy that give expression to homosexual feelings,” now all students are to adhere to the law of chastity.100 Within days of the revision, facing questions from lesbian, bisexual, and gay students about whether they could hold hands, kiss, or date, the Church Educational System Commissioner sent a letter to students, faculty, and staff of all church-operated colleges and universities clarifying that the “moral standards of the Church did not change with the recent release of the General Handbook or the Updated Honor Code…. Same-sex behavior cannot lead to eternal marriage and is therefore not compatible” with LDS principles.101 These policies harm LGBT believers. Research on same-sex attracted Mormons demonstrates that adherence to church policy is associated with higher levels of depression, internalized homophobia, and sexual identity distress.102 John Dehlin’s extensive research on 1621 current and former same-sex attracted Latter-day Saints indicates that efforts to change sexual orientation are common, with 66 percent of participants reporting use of multiple strategies. Participants sought to change their sexual orientation using methods promoted by leaders, such as by fasting, reading scripture, and praying. Despite using these strategies for, on average, more than a decade, the efforts failed: “Overall, 0% of those attempting change reported an elimination of same-sex attraction, and less than 4% reported any change in sexual orientation.”103 Moreover, related research among GBTQ Mormon males indicates that unsuccessful attempts to change orientation, “[result in] a loss of belonging, belief, and participation, along with increased negative emotions and a sense of mistreatment.”104 In fact, Dehlin concludes that for the majority, “these efforts [are] either ineffective or damaging.” He found that more than half of his sample ultimately rejected their religious identity, and more than a third “compartmentalized their religious and sexual identities.” Less than 4 percent successfully integrated their sexual and Mormon identities. Indeed, Dehlin noted that participants who decreased their religious participation, rejected celibacy, and/or “purs[ed] committed, legal same-sex relationships” had better overall psychosocial health.105

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All of God’s Children: Room for Change? Current LDS policy promises inclusion but continues to harm many LGBT members and those who love them. Clarifications of recent policy revisions do not allow LGBT people to live their lives and relationships openly. Even so, we speculate that these rhetorical shifts will contribute to greater regional variation in enforcement of policy. In more progressive areas, and under more progressive local leaders—especially in urban centers of the west coast and northeastern U.S., Canada, and in most European countries—local bishops will increasingly fail to discipline those who are gender nonconforming or in same-­ sex relationships as societal attitudes continue to change. By 2011 more Americans supported than opposed same-sex marriage, and currently 61 percent of people in the U.S. favor same-sex marriage. Though overall only 29 percent of white evangelicals support same-sex marriage, about half (45%) of young evangelicals do.106 Attitudes in numerous countries are far more accepting of same-sex marriage than in the past, and local LDS leaders of urban and suburban congregations will face mounting pressure, especially from young congregants and families and friends of LGBT members, to be more inclusive. We expect these pressures, especially in the face of the declining rate of retention of LDS youth in North America and the European Union, will result in increasingly accepting practices in these countries. Initially, some bishops will fail to enforce disciplinary measures for LGBT people. In progressive countries and regions, they will overlook non-gender-­ conforming dress and grooming. Bishops will welcome children of members who appear gender nonconforming, who wear ties and nail polish to church gatherings, for example. They will fail to discipline members, especially young congregants, who hold hands with those of the same sex, or date. This will allow some LGBT members, especially those who are young, to grow into adulthood with integrated religious and gender identities/orientations, and to feel more fully accepted as Mormons in some congregations; to both live in keeping with their orientation/gender identity and attend church dances, be called to serve, and engage more fully in their wards. As these well-integrated members move into adulthood, they will expect to celebrate rites of passage with their Mormon sisters and brothers. They will want to bring their same-sex partner to church, to hold a wedding reception in the gymnasium of their meeting house, bring their newborn to church to be blessed, and participate in ward activities with the families they create. To the degree that LGBT participation falls under the purview of local leaders, it will occur more quickly. Changes requiring approval by higher levels of leadership, such as same-sex temple marriage, will occur far more slowly. We speculate that same-sex temple weddings will not occur until a more progressive apostle becomes church president or functions in that capacity under a president who is incapacitated by age. The two major doctrinal shifts in LDS policy, rejection of plural marriage and extension of the priesthood to Black men, followed changes to top-level

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leadership. President John Taylor, who served as president from 1880 to 1887, promised that the church would not abandon plural marriage no matter the consequences, but his successor, Wilford Woodruff, publicly abandoned the practice within about a year of assuming leadership. Similarly, Harold B. Lee, president until 1973, promised that Blacks would never receive the priesthood while he was alive, and they did not. However, less than five years after his death, his successor, Kimball, extended the priesthood to Black men. We do not expect full equality for LGBT Latter-day Saints until a more progressive next-generation apostle assumes leadership. Public pressure will encourage incrementally greater inclusion of LGBT Mormons, but church-wide doctrinal changes that embrace same-sex partners and gender non-conforming people in eternal families in the celestial kingdom are likely decades away. Both the end of plural marriage and extension of the priesthood to Black men followed intransigence by church leaders despite significant public pressure over decades. About four decades passed between the public acknowledgment of plural marriage by church leaders and their public abandonment of it. Extension of the priesthood to Blacks occurred in a social context in which explicit racial discrimination was less acceptable, more than a decade after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In the interim, shifting social attitudes on LGBT people will hinder retention and recruitment in wealthy nations. Given the pace of past doctrinal shifts of similar significance, we do not expect church policy to allow full participation in doctrine and practice for at least another decade. Pressure resulting from lawsuits by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or others, or media coverage of protests—such as those in 2020  in support of LGBT Brigham Young University students—could shorten this time frame.

Conclusion The monogamous heterosexual family was originally elevated in Mormonism as part of an effort to distance the church from its early embrace of polygamy. Antithetical to U.S. sexual norms, plural marriage attracted public derision. As leaders moved to promote the heterosexual monogamous family, they embraced the then-dominant cultural standard. By the middle of the twentieth century, Mormon reactions to homosexuality were mostly in keeping with those in the larger cultural context. Later, with legal and attitudinal acceptance of same-sex marriage in the United States and several other post-industrial democracies, modern Mormons found themselves once again out of step with prevailing cultural norms in developed, Western countries. Recent rhetorical shifts seek to diminish the gap between the church and its secular context. Lesbian and gay members are no longer described as perverts, and leaders urge members to love their gay and lesbian children. Trans and intersex members are now addressed in policies, even though the policies reflect a poor understanding of who these individuals are. The 2020 handbook includes some ambiguity of policy which may provide regional leaders in more progressive communities greater

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flexibility in responding to LGBT congregants. Nonetheless, recent emphasis on public acceptance overlays policy and doctrinal positions that continue to define sex and gender as eternal and unchanging, and insist that church membership in this life and salvation in the next preclude any sexual or gender expression outside of cisgender heterosexuality.

Notes 1. Jennifer Dobner, “‘Milestone’ Herbert Signs LGBT Nondiscrimination, Religious Freedom Protections Bill,” The Salt Lake Tribune, March 31, 2015, https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=2283645&itype=CMSID 2. Dieter F.  Uchtdorf, “The Influence of Righteous Women,” Liahona (September 2009): 2–7, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/liahona/2009/09/the-influence-of-righteous-women?lang=eng (accessed January 9, 2020). 3. In the face of a burgeoning marriage equality campaign and debate over Mormon women’s access to the priesthood, as well as a number of other contemporary social changes, the First Presidency issued “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” in 1995. The Proclamation describes “marriage between man and woman” as “essential to [God’s] plan,” describes gender as an “essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.” The First Presidency and Council of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/the-familya-pr oclamation-to-the-world/the-family-a-pr oclamation-to-theworld?lang=eng (accessed January 12, 2020). 4. Dallin H.  Oaks, “Same-Gender Attraction,” Ensign (October 1995): 7, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1995/10/same-gender-attraction?lang=eng (accessed August 1, 2019). 5. Another unusual ritual Smith introduced was the practice of sealing men to other men of higher priesthood authority, implemented contemporaneously with polygyny to create dynasties in the eternities and to provide a hierarchical leadership structure while crossing the planes was widely practiced between about 1845 and 1855, but was in decline prior to being officially discontinued in 1896. This process of sealing two men, called the Law of Adoption, created clans or family groups entailing familial responsibilities. 6. Compton, Todd, In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1997): 1–24. 7. Compton, In Sacred Loneliness, 56. 8. David J.  Whittaker, “The Bone in the Throat: Orson Pratt and the Public Announcement of Plural Marriage,” Western Historical Quarterly 18, no. 3 (July 1987): 293–314, https://academic.oup.com/whq/article-abstract/18 /3/293/1927730?redirectedFrom=PDF 9. D.  Michael Quinn, “LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890–1904,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 9–105. 10. Smith, George D. Nauvoo Polygamy: …But We Called it Celestial Marriage (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2008).

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11. Lawrence R.  Flake, “Richard Roswell Lyman,” Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, https://rsc.byu.edu/archived/prophets-andapostles-last-dispensation/members-quorum-o-f-twelve-apostles/52-richard. Apostle Richard Lyman was excommunicated in 1943 for a plural marriage that he began in 1925, and rebaptized in 1954. 12. By 1896, temples became less a place for solemnizing celestial or plural marriages, and became instead a place where members could be sealed across generations to non-believing dead relatives. To facilitate this effort, church leaders founded the Genealogy Society of Utah that was organized in 1894 and began gathering names of deceased individuals in Europe. Probably around 1906, the language of the temple marriage ceremony was revised for the first time to define a man’s spouse as someone to whom he was “lawful[ly] married,” though the language probably continued to include wives “who are given you by the holy priesthood” until at least 1927. First-hand accounts of the ceremony were published by A.  J. Montgomery in “Temple Mormonism: Its Evolution, Ritual and Meaning,” (New York, 1931), 21. https://archive.org/ details/TempleMormonism1931/page/n19. 13. Boyd K.  Packer, “To the One,” (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1978). Homosexuality was used typically synonymously, by LDS leaders in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, with gay men, who were identified as the “problem”: lesbians, bisexuals, and trans people were not addressed in a standardized or significant way prior to 1990, though trans people were discussed briefly in “To the One.” 14. Ryan Cragun, J. E. Sumerau, and Emily Williams, “From Sodomy to Sympathy: LDS Elites’ Discursive Construction of Homosexuality Over Time,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 54, no. 2 (May 2015): 291–310, https:// doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12180. 15. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Hope for Transgressors,” 7, https://archive.org/details/HopeForTransgressors (accessed January 16, 2020); Prince, Gregory A., Gay Rights and the Mormon Church: Intended Actions, Unintended Consequences (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2018): 32–33. See also Gregory L. Smith, “Shattered Glass: The Traditions of Mormon Same-Sex Marriage Advocates Encounter Boyd K. Packer.” Mormon Studies Review 23, no. 1 (2011): 61–85. 16. Kimball, Spencer W., The Miracle of Forgiveness, (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1969). 17. Kimball, The Miracle, 79. 18. Prince, Gay Rights, 36. http://www.connellodonovan.com/transgressors2.html. 19. “Hope,” 1, 5, 6, 7; Kimball, Spencer W. “A Letter to a Friend,” 2, https:// www.docdroid.net/ygCrZMK/1978-a-letter-to-a-friend-spencer-kimball.pdf (accessed January 16, 2020); Corporation of the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Welfare Services Packet 1,” (Utah Printing, 1974): 1, 10 https://ia600804.us.archive.org/31/items/329384642Homos e x u a l i t y We l f a r e S e r v i c e s P a c k e t 1 L D S V i c t o r B r o w n / 3 2 9 3 8 4 6 4 2 Homosexuality-Welfare-Services-Packet-1-LDS-Victor-Brown.pdf (accessed January 9, 2020). 20. “Welfare Services Packet 1,” 1.

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21. Boyd. K. Packer, “To Young Men Only,” address given at the priesthood session of the general conference, October 2, 1976 (Intellectual Reserve, 1976): 14, https://laytreasuresinheaven.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/ To-Young-Men-Only.pdf (accessed January 9, 2020). Later published in revised form in Boyd K. Packer, “To the One,” address given to the Twelve Stake Fireside, Brigham Young University, March 5, 1978, https://archive. org/details/ToTheOne/page/n1 (accessed September 5, 2020). 22. Packer, “To Young Men Only,” 16. 23. Packer, “To the One,” 2, 9. 24. Packer, “To the One,” 8. 25. Packer, “To the One,” 11, 18–19. 26. Packer, “To the One,” 16. 27. Packer, “To the One,” 2–3, 6. 28. “Welfare Services Packet,” 3. 29. “Hope,” 1. 30. First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Homosexuality,” second edition (Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1981), https://mormonleaks.io/wiki/documents/4/4c/Homosexuality-1981.pdf (accessed January 17, 2020), 1–2. 31. “Welfare Services Packet,” 3, 4–5; “A Letter to a Friend,” 28, emphasis in original. 32. “Understanding and Helping,” 3. 33. “Homosexuality,” 3. 34. “Homosexuality,” 3. 35. “Homosexuality,” 3, 6, 7. 36. “Welfare Services Packet 1,” 20. 37. “Understanding and Helping,” 4. 38. “Hope,” 4. 39. “Homosexuality,” 6. By 1992, with the spread of AIDS, this changed, see “Understanding and Helping” 1992, 4. 40. “Welfare Services Packet,” 5, 7, 1. Kimball wrote that “the death penalty was exacted in the days of Israel for such wrongdoing,” “Letter to a Friend,” 3; see also “To the One,” 2. 41. “Homosexuality,” 4. This is a particularly pernicious claim considering the number of people who committed suicide because they were rejected by their family, friends, and religion, not because they were gay but because they were rejected for being gay. 42. “Letter to Friend,” 9. 43. “Letter to Friend,” 17. 44. “Welfare Services Packet,” 3. 45. “Homosexuality,” 2. 46. “Welfare Services Packet,” 9, emphasis in original. 47. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, General Handbook of Instructions, No. 20 (Salt Lake City: Deseret Press, 1968): 173. Others requiring this high level of clearance included those involved in “fornication” or drug abuse, or who had “committed a serious violation.” On page 69 in the 1977 Handbook, Supplement 1.

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48. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, General Handbook of Instructions (Salt Lake City, 1983): 47. 49. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1991 Supplement to the 1989 Church Handbook of Instructions (Salt Lake City, 1991): 5. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Church Handbook of Instructions: Book 1 Stake Presidencies and Bishoprics (Salt Lake City: Intellectual Reserve, 2006): 93. https://file.wikileaks.org/file/mormon-handbook-of-instructions-2006.pdf. 50. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Church Handbook of Instructions: Book 1 Stake Presidencies and Bishoprics, (Salt Lake City: Intellectual Reserve, 1998): 159; Church of Jesus Christ, “Handbook,” 2006: 187. 51. Church of Jesus Christ, “Handbook,” 1983: 52 52. Church of Jesus Christ, “Handbook,” 1983: 52–53. 53. Church of Jesus Christ, “Handbook,” 2006: 41, 78. 54. Church of Jesus Christ, “Handbook,” 2006: 111. Emphasis added. 55. Church of Jesus Christ, “Handbook,” 2006: 120. Other sins on the list include “murder,” “incest,” and “sexual offense against a child.” 56. Church of Jesus Christ, “Handbook,” 2006: 147. 57. Hinckley, Gordon B., “Live Up to Your Inheritance,” Ensign (November 1983), https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1983/11/liveup-to-your-inheritance?lang=eng (accessed September 25, 2019). 58. Howard Hunter was beset by health problems during his nine-month tenure as President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including broken ribs sustained during a fall at general conference, and Gordon Hinckley, his First counselor, consequently influenced the direction of the First Presidency prior to becoming LDS Church President with Hunter’s death in 1995. Hinckley, who previously worked on the public affairs committee for the LDS Church starting in 1972 and had a degree in journalism, attempted to cultivate a low public profile in LDS efforts to oppose legalization of same-sex marriage. 59. Rimmerman, Craig A., Kenneth D.  Wald, and Clyde Wilcox, The Politics of Gay Rights (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000): 170. 60. Mormon support for Prop 8 attracted controversy and media attention, especially after an investigation by the California Fair Political Practices Commission revealed that the church failed to report $134,774 of its $189,904 in institutional contributions to the “Yes on 8” campaign until months after the vote. The church was fined $5539 for its failure to follow the state’s political-contributions laws. An LDS spokesperson characterized the church’s failure to comply with California campaign reporting laws as a mistake, but Human Rights Campaign president Joe Solmonese called that claim “not credible,” adding, “California requires early disclosure so voters know who’s behind these referendum fights, and, clearly, the Mormon Church worked overtime to keep their full involvement hidden from the people of California.” Rosemary Winters, “LDS Church Fined for Tardy Financial Reports During Prop 8,” The Salt Lake Tribune, June 9, 2010. 61. William N. Eskridge Jr., “Latter-day Constitutionalism: Sexuality, Gender, and Mormons,” University of Illinois Law Review (2016):1227–1286, https://illinoislawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Eskridge.pdf (accessed January 12, 2020).

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62. Opinion Research Corporation, “CNN Opinion Research Poll,” for release Wednesday, August 11 at noon, http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/ images/08/11/rel11a.pdf (accessed January 20, 2020); Associated Press, Roper, GFK, “The AP National Constitution Center Poll,” http://surveys. associatedpress.com/data/GfK/AP-GfK%20Poll%20August%20NCC%20 topline.pdf (accessed January 20, 2020). 63. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Same-Sex Attraction,” https:// www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/same-sexattraction?lang=eng (accessed January 20, 2020). 64. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Church Handbook of Instructions: Book 2 Administering the Church, (Salt Lake City: Intellectual Reserve, 2010): section 21.4.6. 65. First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Response to the Supreme Court Decision Legalizing Same-Sex Marriage in the United States,” https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/multimedia/file/1stPres.-Letter-SSM.pdf (accessed January 20, 2020). 66. The Joseph Smith Papers, “Religious Freedom,” https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/articles/religious-freedom (accessed January 12, 2020); The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Prophets and Apostles Speak Today: In Favor of Religious Freedom,” Ensign (July 2016), https://www. churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2016/07/in-favor-of-religiousfreedom?lang=eng (accessed January 13, 2020). 67. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Video Series Helps Mormons Defend Religious Freedom While Respecting Differences,” Church Newsroom, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/video-series-mormonsdefend-religious-freedom-respect-differences (accessed December 12, 2019). 68. The policy, in section 16.13 of the Handbook, was publicly confirmed by an official spokesperson after a version containing grammatical errors was leaked on social media. 69. In response to criticism of the policy, LDS leaders in Salt Lake clarified that prohibitions of rituals for children of same-sex partners “apply only to those children whose primary residence is with a couple living in a same-gender marriage or similar relationship.” Office of the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “First Presidency Clarifies Church Handbook Changes,” November 13, 2015, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/ pages/church-handbook-changes?lang=eng (accessed January 12, 2020). 70. Alexandra Starr, “More Than 1000 Mormons Resign from the LDS Church in Protest,” National Public Radio, November 16, 2015. 71. Riley Bunch, “’Endure Until You Die’: LDS Church’s LGBTQ Policies Put Youth at Risk, Advocates Say.” Idaho Statesman, September 8, 2019, https:// www.idahostatesman.com/living/religion/article234746332.html (accessed November 15, 2019). Utah’s youth suicide rate is 22.7 annual deaths per 100,000 people in the population, and only Montana (28.9), Alaska (27), New Mexico (23.3) and Idaho (23.2) have higher suicide rates. National Center for Health Statistics, “Suicide Mortality by State,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/ suicide-mortality/suicide.htm (accessed November 21, 2019).

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72. Knoll, Benjamin, “Youth Suicide Rates and Mormon Religious Context,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 49, no. 2: 25–26. Emphasis in original. 73. Sarah Jane Weaver, “Elder Christofferson Says Handbook Changes Help Protect Children,” Church News, November 12, 2015, https://www. churchofjesuschrist.org/church/news/elder-christofferson-says-handbookchanges-regarding-same-sex-marriages-help-protect-children?lang=eng (accessed January 13, 2020). 74. Peggy Fletcher Stack, “Mormon Gay Policy is ‘Will of the Lord’ Through His Prophet, Senior Apostle Says,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 3, 2016 https:// archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=3391057&itype=CMSID (accessed January 20, 2020). 75. Oaks, Dallin H. “The Plan and the Proclamation,” address, General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints October 2017, https:// www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2017/10/the-planand-the-proclamation?lang=eng (accessed January 13, 2020). 76. Changes by the First Presidency “are being sent to its leaders worldwide and will be included in online updates to its handbook.” Laurel Wamsley, “In Major Shift LDS Church Rolls Back Controversial Policies Toward LGBT Members.” National Public Radio, April 4, 2019, https://www.npr. org/2019/04/04/709988377/in-major-shift-mormon-church-rolls-backcontroversial-policies-toward-lgbt-membe (accessed December 22, 2019). 77. Sarah Jane Weaver, “Policy Changes Announced for Members in Gay Marriages, Children of LGBT Parents,” Church News, April 4, 2019, https:// www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church/news/policy-changes-announced-formembers-in-gay-marriages-children-of-lgbt-parents?lang=eng (accessed January 12, 2020). 78. Peggy Fletcher Stack, “LDS Church Dumps its Controversial LGBTQ Policy, Cites ‘Continuing revelation’ from God,” Salt Lake Tribune, April 4, 2019, updated April 5, 2019, https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2019/04/04/ldschurch-dumps-its/ (accessed January 13, 2020). 79. “Mormon Temple Ceremony (w/changes noted)” You Tube, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=7VOb0XNjdXE&feature=youtu.be&t=3508 (accessed January 13, 2019). Emphasis added. 80. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Understanding and Helping Those with Homosexual Problems: Suggestions for Ecclesiastical Leaders, (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1992): 1, https:// mormonleaks.io/wiki/documents/0/0c/Understanding_and_Helping_ Those_Who_Have_Homosexual_Problems-1992.pdf (accessed January 13, 2020). 81. Church Newsroom, “General Conference Leadership Meetings Begin,” October 2, 2019, Salt Lake City, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/ article/october-2019-general-conference-first-presidency-leadership-session (accessed January 13, 2020). 82. Church Newsroom, “General Conference Leadership Meetings,” 2019. 83. Church Newsroom, “General Conference Leadership Meetings,” 2019. Between 2006 and 2009, several high-ranking LDS leaders explained that “these conditions [being LGBT] will not exist post-mortality.” “Jeffery R. Holland Interview,” Frontline, American Experience, Public Broadcasting

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Service, 2006, https://www.pbs.org/mormons/interviews/holland.html (accessed January 13, 2020). 84. Oaks, Dallin H. “Two Great Commandments,” general conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints October 2019, https://www. churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2019/10/35oaks?lang= eng (accessed January 13, 2020). 85. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Handbook 2: Administering the Church,” (Salt Lake City: Intellectual Reserve, December 2019), Section 21.5.1 https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/handbook2-administering-the-church/selected-church-policies-and-guidelines/ selected-church-policies?lang=eng (accessed January 13, 2020. 86. Erica Evans, “‘We Don’t Want to Lose Any of You’: Utah Legislators Unveil Bill Banning Conversion Therapy for Gay Teens, Hoping to Prevent Suicide,” Deseret News, February 21, 2019, https://www.deseret. com/2019/2/21/20666499/we-don-t-want-to-lose-any-of-you-utah-legislators-unveil-bill-banning-conversion-therapy-for-gay-tee#connell-odonovantalks-with-preston-hilburn-before-a-press-conference-to-announce-hb399-anew-bill-called-prohibition-of-the-practice-of-conversion-therapy-uponminors-at-the-capitol-in-salt-lake-city-on-thursday-feb-21-2019 (accessed January 13, 2020); Lee Davidson, “LDS Church Opposes Proposed Rule that Would Ban ‘Conversion Therapy’,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 15, 2019, updated October 16, 2019, https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2019/10/16/lds-church-opposes/ (accessed January 13, 2020). The regulation went into effect in January 2020, but includes some exemptions for clergy. See Tara Law, “Why the LDS Church Joined LGBTQ Advocates in Supporting Utah’s Conversion Therapy Ban,” Time, November 30, 2019, https://time.com/5741789/utah-conversion-therapy-ban-lds/ (accessed January 13, 2020). 87. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “General Handbook: Serving in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” (Salt Lake City: Intellectual Reserve, 2020, version 11/19), Section 38.6.5. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/general-handbook/title-page?lang=eng (accessed March 9, 2020). Emphasis added. 88. “General Handbook,” Section 38.6.21. 89. “General Handbook,” Section 38.6.21. See also sections 38.2.3.14, 38.2.3.15 and 38.2.5.4. 90. Nelson, Russell M. “The Love and Laws of God,” Devotional at Brigham Young University, September 17, 2019, https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/ russell-m-nelson/love-laws-god/ (accessed January 13, 2020). 91. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Same-Sex Attraction,” https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/topics/gay/?lang=eng. 92. “Same-Sex Attraction, Laurie’s Story.” 93. “Same-Sex Attraction, Ricardo’s Story.” 94. “Same-Sex Attraction, Elizabeth’s Story.” 95. “Same-Sex Attraction, Andy’s Story.” 96. Kimball, “Letter,” 17. 97. Ryan Cragun, J. E. Sumerau, and Emily Williams, “From Sodomy to Sympathy: LDS Elites’ Discursive Construction of Homosexuality Over Time,” Journal

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for the Scientific Study of Religion 54 no. 2 (May 2015): 307, https://doi. org/10.1111/jssr.12180 (accessed April 12, 2020). 98. “Same-Sex Attraction,” (accessed April 4, 2020). 99. Church Newsroom, “Interview with Elder Dallin H.  Oaks and Elder Lance B.  Wickman: ‘Same-Gender Attraction’,” 2006, https://newsroom. churchofjesuschrist.org/article/interview-oaks-wickman-same-gender-attraction (accessed April 12, 2020). 100. Brigham Young University Policies, “Church Educational System Honor Code,” https://policy.byu.edu/view/index.php?p=26&s=s1164 (accessed January 23, 2020). 101. Sarah Jane Weaver, “Church Provides Clarifying Statement on Honor Code Language for BYU, Other Latter-day Saint Schools,” Church News, March 4, 2020, https://www.thechurchnews.com/leaders-and-ministry/2020-03-04/ byu-honor-code-language-clarification-ces-statement-176245 (accessed March 9, 2020). Emphasis added. 102. John P.  Dehlin, Renee V.  Galliher, William S.  Bradshaw and Katherine A.  Crowell, “Psychosocial Correlates of Religious Approaches to Same-Sex Attraction: A Mormon Perspective,” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health, 18 no. 3 (April 2014): 284–311, DOI: 10.1080/19359705.2014.912970 (accessed April 12, 2020). 103. John P.  Dehlin, “Sexual Orientation Change Efforts, Identity Conflict, and Psychosocial Health Amongst Same-Sex Attracted Mormons,” PhD dissertation, (2015): iii, Digital Commons, https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/ etd/4251 (accessed April 12, 2020). 104. William S.  Bradshaw, Tim B.  Heaton, Ellen Decoo, John P.  Dehlin, Renee V.  Galliher, and Katherine A.  Cromwell, “Religious Experiences of GBTQ Mormon Males,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 54, no. 2 (September 2015): 311. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/ toc/14685906/2015/54/2 (accessed April 12, 2020). 105. Dehlin, “Sexual Orientation Change Efforts,” iv. 106. Jeff Diamant, “Though Still Conservative, Young Evangelicals are More Liberal than their Elders on Some Issues,” May 4, 2017, Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/04/though-still-conservative-young-evangelicals-are-more-liberal-than-their-elders-on-some-issues/ (accessed on April 18, 2020).

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Mormon Perspective. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health 18 (3): 284–311. https://doi.org/10.1080/19359705.2014.912970. Dehlin, John P. 2015. Sexual Orientation Change Efforts, Identity Conflict, and Psychosocial Health Amongst Same-Sex Attracted Mormons. PhD dissertation, Digital Commons. Accessed 12 April 2020. https://digitalcommons.usu. edu/etd/4251. Diamant, Jeff. 2017. Though Still Conservative, Young Evangelicals are More Liberal than their Elders on Some Issues. Pew Research Center, May 4. Accessed 18 April 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/04/though-still-conservative-young-evangelicals-are-more-liberal-than-their-elders-on-some-issues/. Dobner, Jennifer. 2015. ‘Milestone’ Herbert Signs LGBT Nondiscrimination, Religious Freedom Protections Bill. The Salt Lake Tribune, March 31. https://archive.sltrib. com/article.php?id=2283645&itype=CMSID. Drescher, Jack. 2015. Out of DSM: Depathologizing Homosexuality. Behavioral Science 5 (4): 565–575. Eskridge Jr., William N. 2016. Latter-day Constitutionalism: Sexuality, Gender, and Mormons. University of Illinois Law Review, 1227–1286. https://illinoislawreview. org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Eskridge.pdf. Evans, Erica. 2019. ‘We Don’t Want to Lose Any of You’: Utah Legislators Unveil Bill Banning Conversion Therapy for Gay Teens, Hoping to Prevent Suicide. Deseret News, February 21. https://www.deseret.com/2019/2/21/20666499/ we-don-t-want-to-lose-any-of-you-utah-legislators-unveil-bill-banning-conversiontherapy-for-gay-tee#connell-odonovan-talks-with-preston-hilburn-before-a-pressconference-to-announce-hb399-a-new-bill-called-prohibition-of-the-practice-ofconversion-therapy-upon-minors-at-the-capitol-in-salt-lake-city-on-thursdayfeb-21-2019. First Presidency and Council of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Family: A Proclamation to the World. https://www. churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/the-family-a-proclamation-to-the-world/ the-family-a-proclamation-to-the-world?lang=eng. First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 1981. Homosexuality, 2nd ed. Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://mormonleaks.io/wiki/ documents/4/4c/Homosexuality-1981.pdf. First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 1968. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Handbook of Instructions, No. 20, Salt Lake City. ———. 1983. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Handbook of Instructions. Flake, Lawrence R. Richard Roswell Lyman. Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University. https://rsc.byu.edu/archived/prophets-and-apostles-last-dispensation/ members-quorum-o-f-twelve-apostles/52-richard. Frontline. 2006. Jeffery R.  Holland Interview. American Experience, Public Broadcasting Service. Accessed 13 January 2020. https://www.pbs.org/mormons/ interviews/holland.html. Haldeman, Douglas C. 1991. Sexual Orientation Conversion Therapy for Gay Men and Lesbians: A Scientific Examination. In Homosexuality: Research Implications for Public Policy, ed. J.C. Gonsiorek and J.D. Weinrich, 149–160. Newbury, CA: Sage Publications.

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Hinckley, Gordon B. 1983. Live Up to Your Inheritance. Ensign, November. h t t p s : / / w w w. c h u r c h o f j e s u s c h r i s t . o r g / s t u d y / e n s i g n / 1 9 8 3 / 1 1 / live-up-to-your-inheritance?lang=eng. Joseph Smith Papers. Religious Freedom. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/articles/religious-freedom. Kimball, Spencer W. 1969. The Miracle of Forgiveness. Salt Lake City: Bookcraft. Kimball, Spencer W. A Letter to a Friend. https://www.docdroid.net/ygCrZMK/1978a-letter-to-a-friend-spencer-kimball.pdf. Knoll, Benjamin. 2016. Youth Suicide Rates and Mormon Religious Context. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 49 (2): 25–26. Law, Tara. 2019. Why the LDS Church Joined LGBTQ Advocates in Supporting Utah’s Conversion Therapy Ban. Time, November 30. https://time.com/5741789/ utah-conversion-therapy-ban-lds/. Montgomery, A.  J. 1931. Temple Mormonism: Its Evolution, Ritual and Meaning, New York. https://archive.org/details/TempleMormonism1931/page/n19. National Center for Health Statistics. Suicide Mortality by State. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/suicidemortality/suicide.htm. Oaks, Dallin H. 1995. Same-Gender Attraction. Ensign, October. https:// www. c hur c hof j e su sc h ri st .o rg/ st u d y / e n sign/ 1995/ 10/ sa me -ge nde rattraction?lang=eng. ———. 2017. The Plan and the Proclamation. Address given to general conference, October. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2017/10/the-plan-and-the-proclamation?lang=eng. ———. 2019. Two Great Commandments. Address given to general conference, October. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2019/ 10/35oaks?lang=eng. Office of the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 2015. First Presidency Clarifies Church Handbook Changes. November 13. https://www. churchofjesuschrist.org/pages/church-handbook-changes?lang=eng. Opinion Research Corporation. CNN Opinion Research Poll. For release Wednesday, August 11 at noon. http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/images/08/11/ rel11a.pdf. Packer, Boyd K. 1976. To Young Men Only. Address given at the Priesthood Session of General Conference, October 2 (Intellectual Reserve, 1976). https://laytreasuresinheaven.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/To-Young-Men-Only.pdf. ———. 1978. To the One. Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://archive.org/details/ToTheOne/page/n1. Packer, Boyd K. For Time and All Eternity. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1993/10/for-time-and-all-eternity?lang=eng. Pew Research Center. 2019. Attitudes on Same-Sex Marriage. Pew Forums, May 4. https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage. Prince, Gregory A. 2018. Gay Rights and the Mormon Church: Intended Actions, Unintended Consequences. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Quinn, D.  Michael. 1985. LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890–1904. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18 (1): 9–105. Rimmerman, Craig A., Kenneth D. Wald, and Clyde Wilcox. 2000. The Politics of Gay Rights. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Russell, M. Nelson. 2019. The Love and Laws of God. Devotional at Brigham Young University, September 17. https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/russell-m-nelson/ love-laws-god/. Smith, George D. 2008. Nauvoo Polygamy: … But We Called It Celestial Marriage. Salt Lake City: Signature Books. Smith, Gregory L. 2011. Shattered Glass: The Traditions of Mormon Same-Sex Marriage Advocates Encounter Boyd K.  Packer. Mormon Studies Review 23 (1): 61–85. Stack, Peggy Fletcher. 2016. Mormon Gay Policy is ‘Will of the Lord’ Through His Prophet, Senior Apostle Says. Salt Lake Tribune, February 3. https://archive.sltrib. com/article.php?id=3391057&itype=CMSID. ———. 2019. LDS Church Dumps its Controversial LGBTQ Policy, Cites ‘Continuing revelation’ from God. Salt Lake Tribune, April 4, updated April 5, 2019. https:// www.sltrib.com/religion/2019/04/04/lds-church-dumps-its/. Starr, Alexandra. 2015. More Than 1000 Mormons Resign From the LDS Church in Protest. National Public Radio, November 16. Uctdorf, Dieter F. 2009. The Influence of Righteous Women. Liahona, 2–7. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/liahona/2009/09/the-influence-ofrighteous-women?lang=eng. Wamsley, Laurel. 2019. In Major Shift LDS Church Rolls Back Controversial Policies Toward LGBT Members. National Public Radio, April 4. https://www.npr. org/2019/04/04/709988377/in-major-shift-mormon-church-rolls-back-controversial-policies-toward-lgbt-membe. Weaver, Sarah Jane. 2015. Elder Christofferson Says Handbook Changes Help Protect Children. Church News, November 12. Accessed 13 January 2020. https:// www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church/news/elder-christofferson-says-handbookchanges-regarding-same-sex-marriages-help-protect-children?lang=eng. ———. 2019. Policy Changes Announced for Members in Gay Marriages, Children of LGBT Parents. Church News, April 4. Accessed 12 January 2020. https://www. churchofjesuschrist.org/church/news/policy-changes-announced-for-members-ingay-marriages-children-of-lgbt-parents?lang=eng. Whittaker, David J. 1987. The Bone in the Throat: Orson Pratt and the Public Announcement of Plural Marriage. Western Historical Quarterly 18 (3): 293–314. https://academic.oup.com/whq/article-abstract/18/3/293/1927730?redirected From=PDF. Winters, Rosemary. 2010. LDS Church Fined for Tardy Financial Reports During Prop 8. The Salt Lake Tribune, June 9.

CHAPTER 10

Changing Religious and Social Attitudes of Mormon Millennials in Contemporary American Society Benjamin R. Knoll and Jana Riess

While the subject matter of this book is global Mormonism, it should not be forgotten that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah and is still a predominantly American church. Like other organized religions in twenty-first century America, the LDS Church faces significant institutional challenges in a society that continues to become more urbanized, ethnically diverse, more highly educated, and less religious— at least in terms of conventional denominational loyalties and orthodox obedience on the part of younger Americans to the moral and behavioral dictates of ecclesiastical authorities. In what follows we spotlight emerging generational differences in the religious orientations of “Millennial” Americans in general and those of Latter-day Saint Millennials in particular. These generational shifts of religious orientation arguably portend significant institutional adjustments and change for conservative religions like the LDS Church in the twenty-first century.

B. R. Knoll (*) Centre College, Danville, KY, USA e-mail: [email protected] J. Riess Religion News Service, Washington, DC, USA © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_10

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The Ascendancy of Millennials in American Religion and Politics As the 2010s drew to a close, Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) officially overtook Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) as America’s largest generational cohort.1 Millennials also now constitute a strong plurality of the workforce2 and will become the largest generational cohort of the voting electorate after the 2020 election.3 In their mid-twenties to late thirties at the time of this writing, Millennials are beginning to assume prominent positions of political and social power. Millennials who won in the 2018 midterm elections, for example, include Republican Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri, Democratic Congresswoman Abby Finkenauer of Iowa, and Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Millennials Pete Buttigieg of Indiana and Tulsi Gabbard of Hawai‘i both competed in the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination contest. And as his daughter and son-in-­ law, Millennials Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are two of President Donald Trump’s closet advisors and White House staffers. The growing ascendance of Millennials in American society coincides with one of the most significant religious trends of the last half-century, the rise of religious “Nones” who do not identify with any particular religious denomination or institution. Currently, more than a third of Millennials claim to be religious Nones; by way of comparison, only one in ten Americans over the age of 65 claim no denominational attachments.4 This movement away from organized religion coincides with another key shift in America’s religious and political landscape in the twenty-first century: frequency of church attendance has become one of the strongest predictors of a person’s political party affiliation and voting preferences.5 Within the larger context of generational changes currently underway in the United States, what may be said about generational comparisons both within the LDS Church and between its members and their religious counterparts in other denominational segments of the American religious economy? While currently comprising only 1.5 percent of America’s population,6 Latter-day Saints constitute an excellent case study for illuminating some of the complexities of broader national trends. Thus, for example, while in previous generations the LDS Church appears to have done a better job of retaining its members into adulthood than many other American denominations,7 there is mounting evidence that Mormon Millennials are bucking that trend and leaving the LDS Church at significantly higher rates than in the past.8 Even though the LDS Church and a majority of its members have a monolithic reputation for being deeply conservative—religiously, socially, and politically—cracks are beginning to show. Mormon Millennials who maintain their LDS membership nonetheless are distancing themselves from many of their elders’ traditional religious views and practices while, simultaneously, maintaining continuity in their conformity to other aspects of the Mormon faith tradition.9

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With this in mind, our goals in this chapter are twofold. First, we document and describe basic patterns of generational continuity and change among American Mormons based on findings from American public opinion surveys. In what ways are Millennial Mormons similar to or different in their religious commitments compared to their parents and grandparents’ generations? Second, we document how Mormon generational differences are both similar to and different from those of other selected American comparison groups. In doing this we may ask: To what extent are Mormon generational shifts unique and to what extent are they primarily a reflection of larger patterns of social change taking place in contemporary American society? Answering these questions is important for our understanding of twenty-­ first century Mormonism because Millennials are beginning to assume a plurality (soon to become a majority) of leadership positions within the lay ecclesiastical organization of the LDS Church. The agenda of the LDS Church, including its priorities, values, and initiatives, is set jointly by its First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. As of this writing, the average age of these top officials is 76 and ranges from 61 to 95 years of age. Senior leaders of the LDS Church came of age during World War II, the postwar world of the 1950s, and the tumultuous era of the 1960s. If recent appointment trends hold, the first Millennials will be called into the governing councils of the LDS Church starting around 2040 and will continue filling top-tier leadership positions for the next several decades. By 2060, Millennials will be senior members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and occupy other upper echelon positions in the Church’s ecclesiastical organization. What might the LDS Church’s institutional priorities and policies look like when it is governed by people whose formative life experiences were not WWII and the postwar period of the 1950s and 1960s, but instead the 9/11 attacks on American soil, the election (and re-election) of President Barack Obama, the Global Economic Crisis of 2007–2008, and the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020? We explore these questions by way of the Millennial studies offered in Paul Taylor’s 2016 book, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown10 and Stella Rouse and Ashley Ross’s 2018 book, The Politics of Millennials: Political Beliefs and Policy Preferences of America’s Most Diverse Generation.11 Taylor’s data show that Millennials experience distinctively lower levels of engagement and identification with religious organizations while, at the same time, they express significantly more liberal social and political views than previous generations of Americans. Rouse and Ross argue that the primary lens through which Millennials see and interpret the world is one of diversity. Most Millennials take it for granted that diversity—especially when it comes to personal identity—is a core social value that should be prioritized in politics, religion, business, and other areas of contemporary life. In our own analysis of Mormon Millennials we will focus particular attention on three related aspects of what it means to be a religious person: Belief orthodoxy (e.g., literal versus metaphorical interpretation of scripture); religious behavior (e.g.,

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frequency of church attendance); and group belonging (e.g., identification with a specific tradition or denomination).12 In the concluding section of this chapter we will also consider Millennial Mormons’ social and political views and the extent to which their views correspond (or fail to correspond) with those of other U.S. Millennials.

Data and Methodological Concerns In our analysis of Mormon Millennials we rely on two key surveys of public opinion. The first is the 2014 Pew Religious Landscape Survey (RLS),13 a nationally representative telephone interview sample of more than 35,000 American adults fielded in the summer of 2014. For our purposes, this survey included 651 respondents who self-identified as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This Mormon sample from the RLS has a ±5.0 percent margin of error.14 For many of the religious and political measures we discuss in this chapter, we draw comparisons to one other religiously conservative subgroup represented in the RLS: Self-identified Evangelical Protestants, who, with 8,417 RLS respondents, give us a ±1.2 percent margin of error. Finally, for purposes of larger comparison, we also include in our analysis the entire RLS sample of all adult Americans, including those whose religious affiliations, are unspecified. This group consisted of 35,071 respondents, providing a ±0.6 percent margin of error when discussing them in our comparative analysis. Unless otherwise noted, we have employed Pew’s recommended sample weighting to ensure that survey results are as representative as possible.15 While the RLS is an excellent data source in many ways, it is designed to describe Americans’ general religious orientations and thus lacks questions about beliefs and practices specific to any one particular religious group. To compensate for this, we supplement our data analysis in this chapter with findings from the Next Mormons Survey (NMS), a nationally representative online survey of U.S. Latter-day Saints that we designed and fielded in the autumn of 2016.16 The NMS includes survey questions designed specifically for Latter-­ day Saint respondents. The sample for this survey was gathered using a “panel-­ matching” technique that invited panel respondents within a specified set of quotas (including religious identity, age, gender, and geography). Ultimately, we obtained 1,156 completed responses from self-identified Latter-day Saints.17 After the survey was collected we compared our respondents’ demographic, religious, and political characteristics to Latter-day Saints surveyed in Pew’s Religious Landscape Survey and found that, in most respects, our NMS survey was satisfactorily representative of the Mormon population in the United States. We then employed a post-survey weighting procedure similar to that used by the RLS to correct for response biases associated with gender, education, and age, which resulted in a final ±3.0 percent margin of error for our national Mormon sample.18 A few other things should be kept clearly in mind as we report and interpret the findings from these two surveys. First, the LDS Church defines members as

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those who have been formally baptized and confirmed.19 By this definition, as of 2020, there were more than 6.6  million Latter-day Saints in the United States.20 In contrast, social scientists most often define religious membership by means of self-identification: What do survey respondents say their religious affiliation/identity is? Given that this is how most public opinion surveys define and measure religious affiliation, it is also the way that we do in this chapter. As might be expected, self-identified Latter-day Saints are a smaller and more committed population than that which the LDS Church claims as its total U.S. membership. Second, both the RLS and NMS are cross-sectional surveys, meaning that they are snapshots of our subjects at one point in time. Prior research has shown that there has been a high degree of religious “churn” in American society over the last several decades, as more than half of Americans currently identify with a denomination or religious tradition different than the one they were raised in.21 Thus, self-identified Mormons in both our surveys may not have always identified as such, nor will all of them continue to do so in the future. This has important implications for how we interpret the findings from these surveys. The generational differences we report are those that were manifest at the time the surveys were conducted and we must therefore exercise caution when making predictions about the future (or explanations about the past) based on our snapshot data. For example, we document below that young Latter-day Saints who participated in the 2014 RLS reported they attended church at roughly the same frequency as their elders, which is different from the decline in generational attendance reported by other Americans. This could mean: (1) there is, in fact, no decline in church attendance among younger Latter-day Saints, or (2) there is decline but it is masked because many young people who have ceased attending have left the church altogether, and are no longer included as self-identified Mormons in our survey data. For the purposes of this chapter, we focus on describing differences between self-identified Millennial Mormons and other LDS generational cohorts, namely: GenXers, Baby Boomers, and Silent Generation Mormons as they are classified in the RLS and NMS data. At times we use the descriptor “GenX+” to characterize members of all three older generations combined; at other times we may refer to them—in comparison to Millennials—as their “elders” or parents/grandparents’ generation. We again note that these data were collected in 2014 and 2016 and thus reflect trends present in the mid-2010s. We look forward to conducting future surveys shedding light on how Latter-day Saints’ religious and political views continue to change (or not) in the early 2020s and beyond.

Demographic Characteristics of Mormon Millennials One consistent theme from research on American Millennials is their demographic diversity. As previously noted, Rouse and Ross also argue that diversity is the organizing lens through which Millennials interpret everything else in

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society.22 Whereas approximately two-thirds of GenX+ Americans identify racially as white, only a little over half of Millennials do. According to Rouse and Ross’s demographic categories, by 2018, Hispanics (21 percent), blacks (14 percent), Asians (6 percent), and multi-racial (2 percent) made up most of the other half of America’s young adults.23 To what extent do these and other demographic variables displayed in Table 10.1 also describe LDS Millennials and older GenX+ Latter-day Saints? Here and throughout the remainder of the chapter we compare Mormons to Evangelical Protestants as another prominently conservative, Christian subculture in the United States, and also to religiously undifferentiated Americans Table 10.1  Demographic characteristics of U.S. Mormons, Evangelicals, and other Americans per the Pew Religious Landscape Survey Latter-day Saint Millennial Gender Male 50.5 Female 49.5 Race White 83.8 Black 1.3 Hispanic 8.0 Other 7.0 Education High school 56.3 (>24) College (>24) 28.5 Post college 15.3 (>24) Marriage and family Currently 47.5 married/ widowed? Average 0.9 children Immigration status Immigrant 6.8 (born outside U.S.) Second-gen 14.8 immigrant (either mother or father born outside of U.S.)

Latter-­ Evangelical day Millennial Saint GenX+

Evangelical U.S. Millennial U.S. GenX+ GenX+

43.5 56.5

45.2 54.8

45.7 54.3

51.0 49.0

47.7 52.3

85.0 0.4 8.5 6.0

65.0 8.0 17.3 9.7

79.1 5.5 9.6 5.8

55.6 13.3 20.0 11.0

70.4 10.8 12.7 6.0

64.1

71.8

78.8

66.7

70.8

22.6 13.3

16.6 11.6

12.7 8.5

20.3 13.0

15.5 13.8

80.6

32.6

72.1

22.9

66.9

3.2

0.8

2.3

0.6

2.1

7.9

11.6

7.9

16.1

14.1

14.7

25.2

14.0

32.4

23.1

Note: Figures shown as percentages of column totals in each row category

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in general. We have organized Table 10.1 to permit comparisons between these three groups, divided by generational cohorts according to the following demographic variables: gender, race, education, marriage/family size, and immigration status. By making these comparisons we can determine which generational trends in religious commitment are representative of Americans in general, which are representative of conservative Evangelicals in particular, and which, if any, are specific to Latter-day Saints. Gender comparisons from Table 10.1 show that females outnumber males in all three comparison groups among older, GenX+ respondents, while in the LDS and U. S. Millennial samples the gender ratio is virtually even for males and females. This latter finding, however, is not the case for Evangelical Millennials, among whom females outnumber males by almost 10 percentage points. For the Pew Survey as a whole, females outnumbered males by over 5 percentage points, reminding us that women typically make up a larger, active proportion of most religious communities than do men.24 With respect to race, Table  10.1 show that Millennials are more racially diverse than older Americans in general and that this is also the case for Evangelical Protestants. This, however, is largely not the case among Latter-day Saints. Whereas we see 14-point differences in white identity between both Evangelical and U. S. Millennials and their parents/grandparents, for Latter-­ day Saints there are virtually no generational differences in racial identity: Both LDS Millennials and their elders in the sample are disproportionately white—84 and 85 percent respectively. Keeping in mind that our data come from American and not international surveys, this finding could be related to corresponding differences in respondents’ immigrant backgrounds. Millennial Evangelicals are 16 points more likely to identify as second-generation immigrants than their older Evangelical counterparts, and there is a 9-point generational difference for Americans in general. By contrast, there is no corresponding difference in immigrant status between younger and older Latter-day Saints in the United States. It should also be pointed out that, while LDS growth in parts of Africa, the Philippines, and Latin America has been substantial, missionary recruitment of racial minorities in the U. S. has always been considerably less successful. Educationally, we should note that Mormon survey respondents (both Millennials and GenX+ Mormons) are more highly educated on average than their Evangelical and U.  S. counterparts. This is especially true of Mormon Millennials, 43.8 percent of whom reported having either a college or post college education. By way of comparison, Evangelicals had significantly lower education levels (28.2 percent of Millennials having a college education or higher, and GenX+ Evangelicals reporting the lowest education levels of all our comparison groups, with 78.8 percent reporting a high school education and only 21.2 percent having any higher education). Furthermore, we see that younger Latter-day Saints are much more likely to be married (or have been married) than the national average. Whereas less than a quarter of U.S. Millennials in general are married (22.9 percent), almost half

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of Mormon Millennials report that they are currently married or have been married (47.5 percent). This also is significantly higher than the third of Evangelical Millennials in the sample who were married (32.6 percent). LDS theology emphasizes procreation as a key function of marriage and, like Catholics, Mormons are well known for having larger families than most other Americans. Our data for older cohort comparisons bear this out. Older Mormon respondents reported having 3.2 children on average in comparison to older Evangelical parents (2.3 children) and U.S. GenX+ parents (2.1 children)—a Mormon difference that amounts to an extra child per married household. Among Millennials, however, the Mormon birth-rate distinction fails to hold. LDS Millennial parents are virtually on par with their counter parts when it comes to children (on average, 0.9 children for younger Mormons, 0.8 for Evangelicals, and 0.6 for U. S. Millennials). It may be, of course, that younger Latter-day Saints in this sample are planning to have more children than their non-Mormon counterparts down the road, eventually duplicating their parents’ norm. However, when we asked Millennials in the 2016 Next Mormon Survey about their ideal number of children they reported an average of 2.8 children. In contrast, for GenX+ Mormons in that same survey, we calculated their ideal to be 3.5 children.25 It seems, then, that LDS Millennials are indeed planning smaller families than their parents and in ways that are closer to national trends, with their projected ideal family size of 2.8 children roughly in line with a national average of 2.6.26 To recap, based on RLS data, Mormon Millennials are divided equally between males and females and, educationally, they have the highest average educational level among their Evangelical and U. S. peers. At the same time, they are significantly less diversified racially than the national average, even when compared to conservative U.S. Evangelicals. Millennial Latter-day Saints seem to be as enthusiastic as previous Mormon generations about getting married at higher rates than most other groups, but they also appear to be moving much closer to national averages with regard to the number of children in marriage and ideal family size. This is notable given that the global economic recession of 2007–2008 was a major formative event in the lives of American Millennials, leading many of them to espouse a more cautious and risk-averse approach concerning economic decisions and their personal finances.27 Personal cost, it should be noted, is routinely cited by Americans as a decisive factor for deciding how many children to have.28

Generational Continuities and Differences with Respect to Religious Belief While Mormon theology includes distinctive tenets that are rejected by other Christian faiths, Latter-day Saints share fundamental notions with other Christians about God, the sanctity of scripture as an expression of God’s will, and aspirations for salvation and eternal life. These kinds of generic beliefs

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allow us to make statistical comparisons between self-identified Latter-day Saints, their Evangelical counterparts, and other, religiously undifferentiated Americans who responded to the Pew RLS, as summarized in Table 10.2. By and large, Latter-day Saint Millennials’ generic religious beliefs show more consistencies then differences when compared to older LDS generational cohorts. In some areas, they even report slightly higher degrees of orthodoxy. For example, as shown in Table 10.2, younger Latter-day Saints are only marginally less certain than their elders when it comes to their strength of belief in God: 84.1 percent of Millennial Mormons express absolute certainty in this belief, compared to 87.7 percent of their elders. Moreover, Mormon Millennials and their elders are almost equally likely (92.4 percent and 91.2 percent) to comprehend God as a person (rather than an “impersonal force”) with whom they can have a relationship. This should come as little surprise given the basic LDS doctrine of divine embodiment in which God is believed to be an exalted person “of flesh and bone.”29 At the same time, Millennial Mormons are almost 10 points more likely than their elders to believe that scripture should be interpreted metaphorically rather than literally (although majorities of both LDS cohort groups, in fact, agreed with metaphorical interpretations of scripture).30 This finding is, perhaps, reflective of the LDS Church’s 8th Article of Faith which says, in part: “We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly.” Most significantly, Mormon Millennials were also 10 points more likely than older Latter-day Saints to prefer adjusting their faith’s practices and teachings in the light of “modern circumstances.” This latter difference is also descriptive of cohort comparisons among Evangelicals and other Americans who are undifferentiated by denominational identification. In this respect, Mormon Millennials, like other young Americans, seem less dogmatic and more open to religious change than their parents or grandparents. One area where Millennial Latter-day Saints were more orthodox than their elders in the RLS was the extent to which they agreed (67.7 percent to 57.0 percent) that “My religion is the one true faith leading to eternal life.” Surprisingly, this reverse trend of Mormon Millennials showing stronger belief in the ultimate salvation claims of their own religious faith was also true for the Evangelical and undifferentiated U. S. samples. Taken at face value, this could betoken a growing commitment to religious particularism among younger Americans. Alternatively, this finding could again mask the fact that many young people who disagree with the exclusive truth claims of their parents’ faith tradition are more likely to identify as religious “Nones” instead of Latter-­ day Saints, Evangelicals, or with some other religious community. Another way we can compare LDS religious beliefs across generations is on matters of religious authority. The LDS Church promotes a complex and somewhat paradoxical understanding of individual versus institutional religious authority.31 On one hand, Mormons are routinely counseled to “follow the promptings of the Spirit” and seek personal and individualized revelation from God to help guide them in their day-to-day lives. On the other hand, they also are routinely reminded that their ecclesiastical leaders—from the

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Table 10.2  Generic religious beliefs among Latter-day Saints, Evangelicals, and other Americans, per the Pew Religious Landscape Survey Latter-day Latter-­ Evangelical Evangelical U.S. Millennial U.S. GenX+ Saint day Millennial GenX+ Millennial Saint GenX+ Theistic belief Belief in God: 84.1 87.7 absolutely certain Belief in God: 14.1 9.6 fairly certain Belief in God: 1.0 2.4 not too certain Do not believe 0.8 0.3 in God Relationship with God God is a person 92.4 91.2 with whom we can have a relationship God is an 7.6 8.8 impersonal force Scriptural interpretation Interpret holy 28.7 38.1 text literally Interpret text 63.8 55.7 metaphorically Interpret holy 7.4 6.2 text as a human book Religious tradition versus change My religious 66.3 75.6 community should maintain traditional beliefs and practices My religious 29.8 20.8 community should adjust beliefs and practices in light of modern circumstances My religious 3.9 3.6 community should adopt modern beliefs and practices

83.9

89.7

53.5

69.1

14.3

9.0

22.4

19.4

1.7

1.0

8.3

4.5

0.1

0.2

15.8

7.1

84.4

85.7

65.1

70.1

15.6

14.3

34.9

29.9

43.2

64.6

46.4

32.7

45.1

28.0

30.3

29.1

11.7

7.5

23.3

38.2

52.6

68.4

42.0

50.9

35.9

23.8

40.0

35.2

11.5

7.8

18.0

13.8

(continued)

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Table 10.2 (continued) Latter-day Latter-­ Evangelical Evangelical U.S. Millennial U.S. GenX+ Saint day Millennial GenX+ Millennial Saint GenX+ Exclusive salvation My religion is 67.7 one true faith leading to eternal life Many Christian 3.4 faiths can lead to eternal life Some non-­ 28.9 Christian religions can lead to eternal life

57.0

50.9

44.3

37.7

30.6

7.3

10.7

22.2

7.9

15.3

35.7

38.4

33.6

54.4

54.2

Note: Figures shown as percentages of column totals in each row category

congregational level up the organizational ranks to the prophetic pinnacle of the LDS hierarchy—are apportioned unique “priesthood keys” that entitle them to receive divine guidance and revelation on behalf of whatever group or community they preside over. It is commonly assumed that members’ own personal revelations will support and confirm the decisions of church leaders so that (theoretically) the two should never conflict. There is, however, a notable lack of cultural and doctrinal consensus on what the appropriate course of action should be when these two sources of religious authority do come into conflict. In the Next Mormons Survey (NMS), we asked self-identified Mormon respondents to “pick a side,” as it were, to this question: “Which comes closer to your view, even if neither is 100 percent accurate? (1) Good Latter-day Saints should obey the counsel of priesthood leaders even if they don’t necessarily know or understand why. (2) Good Latter-day Saints should first seek their own personal revelation on a matter and act accordingly, even if it is in conflict with the counsel of priesthood leaders.” As shown in Table  10.3, Millennial Mormons are split almost perfectly down the middle: 51 percent agreed with Statement 1, while 49 percent agreed with Statement 2. In contrast, GenX+ Mormons were almost 10 points more likely to defer to institutional authority over individual revelation. It is interesting to note that there is no clear agreement on this issue among either Millennial or GenX+ Latter-day Saints, indicating that the issue of individual versus institutional authority seems alive and well in contemporary Latter-day Saint communities. But the data also suggest movement toward greater reliance on

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Table 10.3  Views of authority and seeking counsel among Latter-day Saints, per the Next Mormons Survey

Decision-making authority “Good Latter-day Saints should obey the counsel of priesthood leaders even if they don’t necessarily know or understand why.” “Good Latter-day Saints should first seek their own personal revelation on a matter and act accordingly, even if it is in conflict with the counsel of priesthood leaders.” Seeking counsel Seek counsel from Bishop: very often Seek counsel from Bishop: sometimes Seek counsel from Bishop: hardly ever/never

Latter-day Saint Millennial

Latter-day Saint GenX+

50.7

59.2

49.3

40.8

22.6 46.7 30.7

10.6 38.3 51.1

Note: Figures shown as percentages of column totals in each row category

individual authority among Mormon Millennials in comparison to their parents and grandparents. While Millennial Latter-day Saints seem somewhat more likely to put their trust in individual over institutional authority, Table  10.3 also indicates that they are much more willing to seek counsel and advice from their local congregational leaders (bishops or branch presidents). Nearly a quarter of LDS Millennials said they seek out advice from their bishops regularly, while another half said “sometimes,” leaving only about a third who never seek their local leaders’ counsel. In contrast, only about one in ten GenX+ Latter-day Saints solicit regular counsel from their bishops and a full half (51 percent) say they never do. These findings could, of course, reflect a lifecycle pattern more than a cohort effect, with individuals feeling less need for regular pastoral guidance over time as they move through their adult lives. To summarize our generational analysis of religious belief: In most respects, Millennial Mormons appear to be fairly close to their elders when it comes to acceptance of generic beliefs about God, scripture, exclusive truth, salvation, and respect for authority. More finely grained comparisons suggest, however, that Millennials are slightly less orthodox than GenX+ Latter-day Saints, which is also true for Americans of other faith traditions. Supplementing Pew RLS findings with our own from the NMS, we have other evidence suggesting that younger Latter-day Saints take a somewhat more individualistic approach to religious authority while, at the same time, they are more likely than their elders to regularly seek counsel and advice from local congregational leaders.

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Generational Continuities and Differences with Respect to Religious Behavior In religious communities, people’s behavior is normatively shaped to a greater or lesser degree by their shared beliefs. To be religious is not only a matter of professed belief but also of religiously mandated conduct. Latter-day Saints are frequently identified (and even praised) as being among the most religious people in the United States. In 2014 the Pew RLS reported that more than three-quarters (77 percent) of Mormon respondents claimed to attend religious services at least once a week, a higher level than for all major denominations in the United States, and second only to Jehovah’s Witnesses.32 The RLS also found that Utah (which, per the RLS, is 55 percent Mormon) is one of only three U. S. states in which more than half of adults report attending religious services weekly. Utah also routinely leads the nation in terms of per capita charitable giving and volunteer service hours.33 A key question for us, then, is whether Millennial Mormons are showing any signs of slowing down when it comes to standard measures of religious behavior such as church attendance, personal prayer, and scripture reading. As shown in Table 10.4, at over 75 percent, Mormon Millennials are virtually on par with their elders’ high rate of church attendance. There is also very little generational difference in church attendance among Evangelicals (whose overall church attendance, however, is almost 20 points lower than it is for Mormons). It is among the religiously undifferentiated respondents that we see the most striking comparison results: Neither U.S. GenX+ nor U.S. Millennials are regular church attenders—especially not Millennials, whose weekly church attendance rate is only 27.2 percent (12 points lower than their elders’ 39.2 percent). We should note, though, that our own NMS study offers a more nuanced view. While the NMS showed attendance rates similar to those reported by RLS for Mormons claiming attending church “at least weekly,” when asked if they had attended church in the last month, only 47 percent of Millennials said yes, compared to 57 percent for GenX and 69 percent for older Latter-day Saints.34 This follow-up finding suggests there may be some degree of inflation in Millennial Mormons reporting on the frequency of their church attendance. A more nuanced view of Mormon Millennials’ behavioral religiosity also comes from the NMS in which respondents described themselves as being “active” members or not. In Mormon parlance, those who attend church regularly and fulfill volunteer ministry assignments are categorized as “active,” whereas those who attend less frequently and/or don’t accept church callings are considered “less active” or even “inactive.” The NMS asked respondents whether they considered themselves to be “very active,” “somewhat active,” “not too active,” or “not at all active.” When viewed alongside the self-reported frequency of their church attendance, Millennial Latter-day Saints were somewhat less strict in their definition of “active.” Among those who self-described as “very active,” two-thirds (67 percent) said they attended church weekly,

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Table 10.4  Selected religious behaviors among Latter-day Saints, Evangelicals, and other Americans, per the Pew Religious Landscape Survey Latter-day Saint Millennial

Latter-­ day Saint GenX+

Church attendance Attend 75.7 77.2 weekly or more Attend a few 18.8 12.0 times monthly/ yearly Attend 5.6 10.8 seldom/ never Prayer, scriptures & spirituality Pray daily or 83.5 85.7 more Read 75.1 78.1 scripture weekly or more Feel deep 80.3 82.7 sense of spiritual peace/ well-being

Evangelical Millennial

Evangelical GenX+

U.S. Millennial U.S. GenX+

56.4

58.4

27.2

39.2

33.1

29.1

37.2

32.2

10.5

12.5

35.7

28.7

73.3

80.8

42.4

60.6

56.6

64.8

27.2

38.7

69.8

76.8

51.8

62.3

Note: Figures shown as percentages of column totals in each row category

with another 13 percent saying they attended once or twice a month. Among older Latter-day Saints who considered themselves to be “very active,” three-­ quarters (75 percent) said they attended weekly, compared to just 5 percent who attend once or twice a month. This suggests that younger Mormons may be modestly expanding what they consider to be acceptable attendance norms for members in good standing; thus they are a little more likely than their elders to consider themselves active church members, even if they do not attend church as frequently. When it comes to other religious behaviors, the RLS shows more continuity than change between younger and older Latter-day Saints (which is not as strongly the case among Evangelicals or other Americans as a whole). Thus, we see in Table 10.4 that frequency of personal prayer, reading scripture outside of religious services, and experiencing a general sense of spiritual peace or well-­ being are just as common among Millennial Mormons as among older Latter-­ day Saints. As already mentioned, there may be some degree of over-reporting on these items among Mormon Millennials. Generally speaking, though, the

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trend is clear: Much like their elders, Mormon Millennials continue to project themselves as strong on a variety of religious behavioral indicators. NMS data presented in Table 10.5 allows us to take a deeper dive into differences between younger and older Latter-day Saints with respect to a set of specifically Mormon behavioral norms. These data suggest that, in just a few areas, Millennials are more orthoprax than their LDS parents or grandparents. Thus, for example, they are about 13 points more likely to wear formal church clothes all day on Sunday35 and 20 points more likely to have served a full-time LDS mission.36 On most orthodoxy indicators in Table  10.5, however, Millennials are somewhat less religiously observant than their elders. With regard to pornography, for example, 18.5 percent of Millennials (admittedly a small minority) reported that they recently had viewed pornography. In general, Mormon Millennials were more likely to have more permissive views than older Mormons on abortion, sex reassignment surgery, premarital sex, and (married) homosexual sex, all of which are strongly discouraged or officially forbidden by the LDS Church. Millennials were also 14 points less likely to have recently watched “General Conference”37 and 8 points less likely to have a temple recommend.38 Furthermore, Millennials were more likely to recently have consumed non-herbal tea, alcohol, and caffeinated coffee as well.39

Table 10.5  LDS religious behaviors among millennial and older Mormons, per the Next Mormons Survey Latter-day Saint Millennial

Latter-day Saint GenX+

Religious behaviors that are encouraged in the LDS community Viewed general conference in the last 6 months 44.0 58.2 Served a proselyting mission 55.3 34.6 Possesses a current temple recommend 47.3 54.8 Regularly tithe 10 percent (net or gross) of 69.8 66.7 income Stay in formal church clothes all day on Sundays 35.4 22.4 Religious behaviors that are discouraged and/or prohibited in the LDS community Agree that abortion is morally acceptable 20.7 7.2 Agree that premarital heterosexual sex is morally 27.4 12.3 acceptable Agree that marital homosexual sex is morally 33.7 16.8 acceptable Agree that sex reassignment surgery is morally 19.5 7.3 acceptable Viewed an “R-rated” movie in the last 6 months 41.9 34.4 Viewed “explicit pornography” in the last 18.5 8.0 6 months Consumed non-herbal tea in the last 6 months 26.8 23.6 Consumed alcohol in the last 6 months 28.9 22.8 Consumed coffee in the last 6 months 39.3 32.9 Note: Figures shown as percentages of column totals in each row category

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Comparing the findings in Table 10.4 with those in Table 10.5, a fair summary might be that Millennial Mormons are generally similar to their elders when it comes to common religious behaviors like church attendance, prayer, scripture reading, etc. But, at the same time, they are somewhat less rigorous when it comes to specific Latter-day Saint behavioral norms. In other words, there is some evidence that a non-trivial proportion of Mormon Millennials may be attempting to renegotiate what it means to be an “active” Latter-day Saint in good standing in their church.

Religious Belonging and Mormon Identity Many American Millennials are disproportionately becoming religious “Nones” (claiming no religious affiliation) or “Dones” (withdrawing their participation from organized religion altogether). Much also has been written about the increase among Millennials who claim to be “spiritual but not religious,” providing some evidence that “Nones” are not necessarily irreligious, but rather eschew traditional denominational identification in favor of more personalized and individual approaches to spirituality.40 To what extent is this true for contemporary American Mormons? How do members understand their identification with the LDS Church and their own personal spirituality? And, especially, how do these understandings vary between Millennials and older church members? To shed light on these questions, in Table 10.6 we summarize respondents’ answers to several LDS identity indicators obtained from the Next Mormons Survey. Our NMS findings support the conclusion that there is solid, generational consistency among American Mormons with regard to a shared, Latter-day Saint identity. As shown in Table 10.6, Mormon Millennials were about equally likely, with older church members, to agree with religious identity statements such as: “When I talk about Mormons, I usually say ‘we’ rather than ‘they’”

Table 10.6  Latter-day Saints who strongly/somewhat agree with LDS identity statements, per the Next Mormon Survey Identity statements “When I talk about Mormons, I usually say ‘we’ rather than ‘they.’” “Being a Mormon is an essential part of who I am.” “I’m similar to other Mormons in many ways.” “If a Mormon were elected president, I would feel proud.” “When someone criticizes Mormons, it feels like a personal insult.”

Latter-day Saint Millennial

Latter-day Saint GenX+

82.9

82.4

80.0 75.8 82.6

81.8 79.0 84.4

77.8

72.1

Note: Figures shown as percentages of column totals in each row category

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(82.9 and 82.4 percent respectively): “Being a Mormon is an essential part of who I am” (80.1 and 81.8 percent respectively); and, “I’m similar to other Mormons in many ways” (75.8 and 79.0 percent respectively). These statistics indicate that Millennials are almost as strongly committed to an LDS identity as are older Mormons in the United States. We must, of course, again remind readers that survey results showing robust solidarity between generations could, in part, be an artifact of disillusioned or inactive members failing to self-­ identify as church members to survey researchers. To qualify our conclusion, we can say this much: Among those who did self-identify as LDS, the great majority of our respondents, both younger and older, see their religious identities as Latter-day Saints as core and central to their personal identities. We can also assess important aspects of Latter-day Saints’ shared sense of religious belonging by how widely or narrowly church members draw the boundaries of what it means to be a “good Mormon.” To measure this we asked NMS respondents to consider a variety of Mormon behavior and belief norms and indicate whether they thought they were “essential, important but not essential, not too important, or not at all important” for being a good Mormon. Table 10.7 displays the percentage of both Millennial and GenX+ Latter-day Saints who said “essential” for each item on the list. In some respects, Millennial Latter-day Saints differed little from their older counterparts in how they think about their community’s moral boundaries. They were about equally likely to say that good Latter-day Saints should work to help the poor and the needy (59.7 percent vs. 61.0 percent), hold regular Family Home Evenings (51.7 percent vs. 47.4 percent), and avoid R-rated movies (29.0 percent vs. 27.7 percent). At the same time, we see that Millennials Table 10.7  What is “essential to being a good Mormon,” per the Next Mormon Survey Essential beliefs/practices? Believing that Joseph Smith actually saw God the Father and Jesus Christ Not drinking coffee and tea Working to help the poor and needy Having regular family home evenings or family nights Not watching R-rated movies Believing that Jesus Christ is the Savior Obeying the counsel of the LDS prophet and other general authorities Attending church regularly Believing that the LDS Church is the only true church Not drinking alcoholic beverages

Latter-day Saint Millennial

Latter-day Saint GenX+

56.5

68.2

31.2 59.7 51.7

40.9 61.0 47.4

29.0 76.3 58.8

27.7 89.6 65.2

54.0 48.7

63.9 61.6

45.0

63.2

Note: Figures shown as percentages of column totals in each row category

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were a little less likely to say that obeying the LDS prophet and General Authorities (58.8 percent vs. 65.2 percent) or attending church regularly (54.0 percent vs. 63.9 percent) are “essential.” The largest differences we observe in Table 10.7, however, have to do with specific doctrinal beliefs and obedience to the “Word of Wisdom” (Mormonism’s dietary law). Only a little over half (56.5 percent) of Millennials agreed that believing Joseph Smith literally saw God the Father and Jesus Christ in his First Vision is essential to being a good Mormon, compared to 68.2 percent of GenX+ respondents. Similarly, three-­ quarters (76.3 percent) of Millennials agreed that belief in Jesus Christ as the Savior of humanity, compared to nine in ten (89.6 percent) of older respondents. Less than half of Millennials (48.7 percent) said it was essential for good Mormons to believe that their faith is the only true faith, compared to 61.6 percent of GenX+ (which is an interesting contrast to evidence presented earlier from the RLS that younger Mormons were a little more likely than their elders to believe this). When it comes to the LDS Word of Wisdom, Millennials were less likely than older Mormons to say that abstaining from coffee and tea (31.2 percent to 40.9 percent) or alcohol (45.0 percent to 63.2 percent) were essential to being a good Latter-day Saint. Thus, while Millennial Mormons appear to be committed to their religious identity at rates similar to those of their elders, they also tend to be more tolerant of those who do not adhere to orthodox standards of church belief and practice—broadening the boundaries of what it means to be a “good Latter-­ day Saint” to include those who may violate normative standards like the Word of Wisdom. These latter findings aligns well with other research showing that Millennials tend to be more tolerant of difference41 and open to diversity in society.42 Similarly, Mormon Millennials seem to be more willing than older Latter-day Saints to express tolerance for greater diversity in thought and practice within the Mormon community.

Mormon Political and Social Values By some measures, Mormons are among the most consistently conservative religious groups in American society when it comes to politics,43 and so we should expect Latter-day Saints—both young and old—to be more conservative on average than their generational cohort counterparts in the larger society. At the same time, numerous studies of contemporary American political preferences show that Millennials are consistently more likely than GenX+ Americans to identify as Democrats or liberals and to support progressive political policies—especially when it comes to social diversity, immigration, and same-sex marriage.44 For our purposes, the most important question to ask is not whether Mormons are politically or socially more conservative than other groups. Rather, we want to focus on the extent to which Mormon generational differences politically and socially are the same or different compared to generational differences among Evangelicals and other Americans. Thus, the last four columns of Table  10.8 (which display the political views of Evangelical

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Table 10.8  Social and political preferences among Latter-day Saints, Evangelicals, and other Americans, per the Pew Religious Landscape Survey Latter-day Latter-­ Evangelical Evangelical U.S. Millennial U.S. GenX+ Saint day Millennial GenX+ Millennial Saint GenX+ Views on political and social issues Prefer bigger 28.7 19.3 government with more services over smaller government and fewer services Agree that 51.5 41.2 stricter environmental laws are worth the cost Agree that 32.4 32.5 government aid to the poor does more good than harm Agree that 28 27.3 abortion should be legal in most/all cases Agree that a 31.4 23.9 growing population of immigrants has changed American society for the better Agree that more 62.3 48.7 women in the workforce has changed American society for better Same-sex 26.6 27.6 marriage should be legal in the U.S. Political affiliation Identify as a 15.6 20.4 Democrat

43.1

28.8

53.5

41.4

57.5

45.8

66.2

57.8

46.9

38.6

57

51.2

33.5

34.3

57

55

30

14.8

38.5

24.5

73.4

57.4

77.6

67.2

57.9

25.3

72.7

51.8

30.2

27.7

46.6

43.8 (continued)

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Table 10.8  (continued) Latter-day Latter-­ Evangelical Evangelical U.S. Millennial U.S. GenX+ Saint day Millennial GenX+ Millennial Saint GenX+ Identify as Independent Identify as Republican Political ideology Identify as liberal Identify as moderate Identify as conservative

9.8

10.9

18.7

14.9

21.0

16.9

74.6

68.7

51.2

57.4

32.3

39.3

10.7

8.8

17.9

12.4

32.4

23.6

31.2

26.2

37.1

26.1

39.2

34.0

58.1

65.1

45.1

61.5

28.3

42.3

Note: Figures shown as percentages of column totals in each row category

and generic Americans) provide a “baseline” for comparing generational political and social differences among Latter-day Saints. For some of the political and social opinions itemized in Table 10.8, generational differences among LDS respondents are not terribly unique when compared to the Evangelical and generic U.  S. Samples. Thus, generational differences were roughly the same for all three comparison groups on the following items: Millennials were more likely to support bigger government, stricter environmental laws, and women in the work force. (There were virtually no generational differences with respect to the issue of abortion; modest majorities of both Millennial and GenX+ generic Americans supported a woman’s legal right to abortion in all or most cases, whereas only statistical minorities of Millennials and GenX+ respondents in both the LDS and Evangelical samples expressed approval). Similarly, generational differences with respect to political party preferences were also relatively small within comparison groups (Mormons and Evangelicals, regardless of generation, were most likely to self-­identify as Republicans and, regardless of generation, generic Americans were more likely to self-identify as Democrats). There were, however, some clear differences in generational change among Mormons compared to either Evangelicals or Americans as a whole. For example, Latter-day Saints of all generations were closer in their views on immigration than either of their Evangelical and generic American counterparts. Older, GenX+ Latter-day Saints were only 7 points less likely than LDS Millennials to agree that a growing population of immigrants has changed America for the better, whereas the generational differences among Evangelicals and generic Americans on this item were 15 and 14 points respectively. Similarly, there are no discernable generational differences among Latter-day Saints when it comes to attitudes toward government aid to the poor, whereas younger Evangelicals

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and Americans are slightly more supportive of this aid than their older counterparts. Finally, the great majority of Millennial Mormons refrained from adopting a liberal political label, identifying instead as conservative to a greater degree than either their Evangelical or generic American counterparts. Perhaps the most telling comparative difference in Table  10.8, however, concerns respondents’ views on same-sex marriage. While there are major differences between Millennial and GenX+ attitudes among Evangelicals (Millennials were in greater support by 33 points) and generic Americans (Millennials were in greater support by 21 points), attitudes among Millennial Mormons are virtually identical to those of their GenX+ counterparts: Only 26.6 percent of Mormon Millennials supported legalizing same-sex marriage— a mere 1-point difference when compared to the 27.6 percent support of GenX+ Mormons. Mormons across generations appear unified in their opposition to same-sex marriage, whereas we see wide generational differences among other Americans and even among Evangelical Protestants. We should note, though, that the RLS was conducted in 2014, one year before the Supreme Court made same-sex marriage legal in all fifty states. Given the rapid change in American attitudes on this issue, we suspect Later-­ day Saints attitudes are also changing, which is indeed what other recent data suggests. Even though Latter-day Saint support for same-sex marriage is consistently lower than national averages (not surprising given the strong opposition to same-sex marriage legalization by LDS Church leaders), a 2017 survey by the Public Religious Research Institute showed Mormon support for same-­ sex marriage in the United States had reached 40 percent.45 Especially notable in this survey was that Mormon Millennials supported same-sex marriage by a margin of 52 percent. Whereas Mormon Millennials in 2014 were in lock-step with GenX+ members in opposition to same-sex marriage, by 2017 they had nearly doubled their support from 27 percent to 52 percent (older Mormons in the survey were changing their views too, only more slowly).

Summary and a Look to the Future We end by returning to the generalizations about contemporary American young adults that we summarized at the outset of this chapter. Previous research on Millennials has confirmed several key themes that characterize this generation. Broadly speaking, Millennials in the United States are less religious, more politically liberal, and more likely to interpret the world through a diversity lens than older Americans. In many ways, Mormon Millennials are out of alignment with these demographic trends. Compared to their Evangelical counterparts and younger Americans in general, we see more generational continuity than change among Latter-day Saints. By and large, self-identified Mormon Millennials continue to be as religiously “active” as their elders (though there is evidence that some are beginning to define “activity” more generously to include reduced levels of church attendance). They pray, read their scriptures, and feel deep spiritual

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peace at roughly the same rates as older Mormons. They also are impressively observant compared to other young Americans and even to young Evangelicals. That said, Millennial Latter-day Saints are more open to change in their religious community than their elders and more likely to say that the Church should adjust its beliefs and practices in light of modern circumstances. Most love being Mormon and take great pride in their religious identity. While having a somewhat more individualistic orientation in their views of religious authority than their elders, they also are much more likely to have regular interaction with local congregational leaders and seek their guidance and counsel. Both the RLS and NMS show that, while rapid secularization and an upsurge in religious “Nones” may increasingly characterize American society, self-­ identified Millennial Mormons are generally happy with their religious community and take great pride in being part of it. In terms of politics and social attitudes, we might characterize Millennial Latter-day Saints as somewhat more liberal and progressive than their elders but, from an objective standpoint, they are still considerably more conservative than their Millennial counterparts in American society. Where we see change in more progressive directions, it is often at rates similar to those reported for both Evangelical Millennials and younger Americans more broadly. This, of course, indicates, that Mormons are subject to the same shaping pressures for generational change as other groups in contemporary society. As we have pointed out, one issue in particular for gauging generational change concerns attitudes toward same-sex marriage. Triangulating from a variety of public opinion surveys, it appears that, prior to 2015, Mormon Millennials were closely aligned with GenX+ Mormons in opposing same-sex marriage (with support from either age cohort never exceeding 30 percent). After 2015, however, the data tell a story of rapid acceptance of same-sex marriage among many Latter-day Saints, even doubling support among Millennials, despite opposition from the LDS hierarchy. Given the strong tendency of Latter-day Saints to “follow counsel” and especially to obey the General Authorities when they publicly take united stands on an issue,46 the noncompliant attitude of many Millennial Mormons on this issue is noteworthy indeed. When it comes to diversity—the keynote theme in describing American Millennials—LDS Millennials are notably not more racially/ethnically diverse than their GenX+ elders. They, in fact, continue in the United States to be part of a predominantly white church in which 86 percent of both Millennials and GenX+ members identify as white. By contrast, in the 2014 RLS data set, a little over two-thirds of Americans as a whole identified as white, but among Millennials the proportion of white respondents dropped to little more than half. In other words, there is a substantial racial gap in the United States between Mormon Millennials and their non-LDS peers. The findings of our 2016 NMS are also consistent with this picture: Mormon Millennials in the NMS were slightly more racially diverse than their elders, but not nearly as diverse as their counterpart Millennials outside the LDS Church.

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At the same time, one consistent data theme from the NMS was that LDS Millennials are somewhat more generous and tolerant in how they define what it means to be “a good Mormon.” Broadening their religious “in-group” circle to include those less orthodox and scrupulously observant than LDS leaders advocate, may be one small way in which they express their age cohort’s positive valuation of diversity. Millennial Mormons are more willing than their elders to say that drinking alcohol, coffee, and tea is not “essential” to judging a person’s good standing in the religious community. And they are less likely to say that belief in key doctrinal claims, such as Joseph Smith’s First Vision or the literal resurrection of Jesus Christ, is essential to being considered a good Mormon. In these ways, Mormon Millennials appear to be moving the needle in the direction of greater diversity of contemporary thought and practice in the LDS Church. Returning to one of our original questions: What might the values and priorities of the LDS Church be once Millennials move into the Church’s highest governing councils, starting around 2040 and through the 2060s? While we can only speculate, the trends identified in our research suggest more continuity than change. LDS religious culture will likely continue emphasizing high levels of religious engagement and church activity for lay members. It will likely continue emphasizing evangelism and missionary work and focusing on LDS-­ specific teachings regarding priesthood authority, temples, and modern-day prophets. But unless there is a substantial shift in demographic trends, the LDS Church in the United States will also continue functioning as a predominantly white church in a society that is rapidly diversifying racially and ethnically—a society that by some estimates will become a “majority-minority” country by 2045.47 Perhaps the most interesting unknowns regarding future trends in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints revolve around questions concerning the continuity of LDS orthodoxy and orthopraxy. American Mormons are known for relatively high levels of religious conformity in both belief and practice—a reputation supported by much of the survey data we have presented in this chapter. While current Millennial Mormons still rate relatively high on various orthodoxy measures, we also have seen here that they are more tolerant of religious diversity within larger boundaries of what it means to be “a good Mormon.” They also have a higher incidence of leaving the Church than previous generations. Among those who remain—as they increasingly assume prominent and influential leadership positions in coming decades—we might anticipate growing institutional efforts to “widen the tent” of Latter-day Saint identity. Perhaps, for example, LDS dietary restrictions might be reclassified as “recommendations” rather than virtual commandments; it’s also possible to plausibly imagine greater official tolerance for diversity of independent thought and speech in religious settings. Time will tell in this regard when eventually the LDS Church is governed by leaders whose generation expressed greater support than the opposition for legalizing same-sex marriage.

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This assumes that in coming decades Millennials who are invited into the LDS Church’s highest governing councils will continue to hail primarily from the United States. However, there are currently more Latter-day Saints living outside the United States than within. Perhaps as the Church’s center of gravity continues to shift toward Latin America, Africa, and Asia, more leaders will be called from those areas who are often more orthodox and theologically conservative than their European and American counterparts. In that case, we could actually see a reverse trend: a global church that becomes more racially and ethnically diverse but even more narrow in how it defines its membership boundaries and behavioral expectations.

Notes 1. Richard Fry, “Millennials Expected to Outnumber Boomers in 2019,” Pew Research Center (blog), March 1, 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2018/03/01/millennials-overtake-baby-boomers/. 2. Richard Fry, “Millennials Are Largest Generation in the U.S. Labor Force,” Pew Research Center (blog), April 11, 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2018/04/11/millennials-largest-generation-us-labor-force/. 3. Anthony Cilluffo and Richard Fry, “An Early Look at the 2020 Electorate,” Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project (blog), January 30, 2019, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/essay/ an-early-look-at-the-2020-electorate/. 4. Pew Research Center, “Religious Landscape Study,” 2014 Religious Landscape Survey (blog), 2015, http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/. 5. Luis Lugo, “Religion & Public Life: A Faith-Based Partisan Divide” (Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 2005), https://assets.pewresearch.org/wpcontent/uploads/sites/11/2005/01/religion-and-politics-report.pdf. 6. Pew Research Center, “Religious Landscape Study,” 2014 Religious Landscape Survey: Gender Composition (blog), 2015, http://www.pewforum.org/ religious-landscape-study/. 7. Pew Research Center, “Religious Switching: Change in America’s Religion Landscape,” Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project (blog), May 12, 2015, https://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/ chapter-2-religious-switching-and-intermarriage/. 8. Jana Riess, The Next Latter-day Saints: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 5–6. 9. Riess, The Next Mormons. 10. Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown, Reprint edition (PublicAffairs, 2016). 11. Stella M. Rouse and Ashley D. Ross, The Politics of Millennials: Political Beliefs and Policy Preferences of America’s Most Diverse Generation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018). 12. Corwin Smidt, Lyman Kellstedt, and James L. Guth, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Religion and American Politics, 1st edition (Oxford University Press, USA, 2009), chap. 1. 13. Pew Research Center, “Religious Landscape Study,” 2015.

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14. In other words, there is a 95 percent chance that the actual value in the population of adult Latter-day Saints is within 5 percent above or below of the indicated statistics, but the margin of error increases when looking at subsamples (example: Millennials vs. those older than Millennials). Thus, we recommend that readers interpret the results presented here with this in mind. 15. This is necessary because individuals often do not participate in public opinion surveys in the same degree to which those similar to them are represented in the wider population. The statistical weighting procedure artificially inflates or deflates responses from individuals in the proportion to which their demographic groups are under- or over-represented in the survey sample, respectively. 16. Benjamin R. Knoll and Jana Riess, “The 2016 Next Mormons Survey,” in The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church (Oxford University Press, USA, 2019), 237–248. 17. More specifically, with an online “panel-matching” procedure, surveyors specify criteria for responses which the survey firm then uses to recruit responses until those criteria have been satisfied. For example, a surveyor might specify that half of the sample must come from the western portion of a particular region and the other half must come from the eastern portion. The survey firm would then recruit respondents until 50 percent of the total sample self-identified as being from the west and the other half from the east. When employed using relevant criteria and in combination with other procedures (such as the post-stratification weighting approach described here), this allows surveyors to correct for the non-­randomized nature of the online sampling procedure to ensure a representative sample of a given population. 18. For more information about the Next Latter-day Saints Survey, see www. thenextmormons.org. 19. This number includes some young children who have been blessed as babies but not yet baptized. If they reach the age of nine and have not yet been formally baptized, their names are dropped from the rolls of the Church. Mormon Social Science Association, “What are ‘Children of Record’ and Are They Included in the Total Membership of the LDS?” MSSA website, May 22, 2008, https:// www.mormonsocialscience.org/2008/05/22/q-what-are-children-of-recordand-are-they-included-in-the-total-membership-of-the-lds/. 20. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Facts and Statistics,” https:// newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/facts-and-statistics/country/united-states. 21. Robert D.  Putnam and David E.  Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), chap. 6. 22. Rouse and Ross, The Politics of Millennials, chap. 1. 23. William H.  Frey, “The Millennial Generation: A Demographic Bridge to America’s Diverse Future,” Brookings (blog), January 24, 2018, https://www. brookings.edu/research/millennials/. 24. Pew Research Center, “The Gender Gap in Religion Around the World,” Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project (blog), March 22, 2016, https://www.pewforum.org/2016/03/22/the-gender-gap-in-religionaround-the-world/. 25. Numerical mean and standard deviation reported.

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26. Frank Newport and Joy Wilke, “Desire for Children Still Norm in U.S.,” Gallup. com, September 25, 2013, https://news.gallup.com/poll/164618/desirechildren-norm.aspx. 27. Newport and Wilke. 28. Newport and Wilke. 29. Terryl L.  Givens, Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity, 1 edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), chaps. 8, 11. 30. We qualify this, though, with findings from the NMS that Millennials are about 10 percent less likely than those in the Boomer/Silent generation believe that scriptures should be interpreted metaphorically rather than literally. 31. Terryl L. Givens, People of Paradox: A History Of Mormon Culture, Reprint edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Usa, 2012), chap. 1. 32. Pew Research Center, “Attendance at Religious Services – Religion in America: U.S.  Religious Data, Demographics and Statistics,” Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project (blog), 2014, https://www.pewforum.org/ religious-landscape-study/. 33. Karsten Strauss, “The Most and Least Charitable States in the U.S. In 2017,” Forbes, December 4, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2017/12/04/the-most-and-least-charitable-states-in-the-u-sin-2017/. 34. Riess, The Next Mormons, 155. 35. It should be noted that this is an informal standard that is unevenly emphasized in Mormon communities. 36. Young Latter-day Saint men are strongly encouraged to serve a two-year proselyting mission (or equivalent) as part of their “priesthood duty,” while young Latter-day Saint women are enthusiastically invited to serve an 18-month proselyting mission but without the same degree of obligation as are men. 37. General Conference is a semi-annual gathering of LDS Church members to hear discourses by Church General Authorities. 38. This is a certificate from an ecclesiastical leader attesting to the individual’s orthodoxy and orthopraxy so as to gain entrance to temples which are separate buildings from standard local congregational meeting houses that Latter-day Saints refer to simply as “churches” or “church buildings.” 39. These are all forbidden by the Mormon dietary code known as the “Word of Wisdom,” along with tobacco and illicit drugs. 40. Taylor, The Next America, chap. 10. 41. Taylor, The Next America. 42. Rouse and Ross, The Politics of Millennials. 43. David E. Campbell, John C. Green, and J. Quin Monson, Seeking the Promised Land: Mormons and American Politics (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 44. Taylor, The Next America. 45. Alex Vandermaas-Peeler et al., “Emerging Consensus on LGBT Issues: Findings From the 2017 American Values Atlas,” May 1, 2018, https://www.prri.org/ research/emerging-consensus-on-lgbt-issues-findings-from-the-2017american-values-atlas/.

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46. David E. Campbell and J. Quin Monson, “Dry Kindling: A Political Profile of American Mormons,” in From Pews to Polling Places: Faith and Politics in the American Religious Mosaic (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2007), 105–129. 47. William H.  Frey, “The US Will Become ‘Minority White’ in 2045, Census Projects,” Brookings (blog), March 14, 2018, https://www.brookings.edu/ blog/the-avenue/2018/03/14/the-us-will-become-minority-white-in2045-census-projects/.

Bibliography Campbell, David E., John C. Green, and J. Quin Monson. 2014. Seeking the Promised Land: Mormons and American Politics. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Campbell, David E., and J. Quin Monson. 2007. Dry Kindling: A Political Profile of American Mormons. In From Pews to Polling Places: Faith and Politics in the American Religious Mosaic, 105–129. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Cilluffo, Anthony, and Richard Fry. 2019. An Early Look at the 2020 Electorate. Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project (blog), January 30. https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/essay/an-early-look-at-the-2020-electorate/. Frey, William H. 2018a. The Millennial Generation: A Demographic Bridge to America’s Diverse Future. Brookings (blog), January 24. https://www.brookings.edu/ research/millennials/. ———. 2018b. The US Will Become ‘Minority White’ in 2045, Census Projects. Brookings (blog), March 14. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/03/14/ the-us-will-become-minority-white-in-2045-census-projects/. Fry, Richard. 2018a. Millennials Are Largest Generation in the U.S. Labor Force. Pew Research Center (blog), April 11. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ 2018/04/11/millennials-largest-generation-us-labor-force/. ———. 2018b. Millennials Expected to Outnumber Boomers in 2019. Pew Research Center (blog), March 1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/01/ millennials-overtake-baby-boomers/. Givens, Terryl L. 2012. People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture. Reprint ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2014. Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity. 1st ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Knoll, Benjamin R., and Jana Riess. 2019. The 2016 Next Mormons Survey. In The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church, 237–248. Oxford University Press. Lugo, Luis. 2005. Religion & Public Life: A Faith-Based Partisan Divide. Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/ sites/11/2005/01/religion-and-politics-report.pdf. Newport, Frank, and Joy Wilke. 2013. Desire for Children Still Norm in U.S. Gallup. com, September 25. https://news.gallup.com/poll/164618/desire-childrennorm.aspx.

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Pew Research Center. 2014. Attendance at Religious Services  – Religion in America: U.S. Religious Data, Demographics and Statistics. Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project (blog). https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscapestudy/. ———. 2015a. Religious Landscape Study. 2014 Religious Landscape Survey (blog). http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/. ———. 2015b. Religious Landscape Study. 2014 Religious Landscape Survey: Gender Composition (blog). http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/. ———. 2015c. Religious Switching: Change in America’s Religion Landscape. Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project (blog), May 12. https://www. pewforum.org/2015/05/12/chapter-2-religious-switching-and-intermarriage/. Putnam, Robert D., and David E.  Campbell. 2012. American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. New York: Simon & Schuster. Riess, Jana. 2019. The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church. New York: Oxford University Press. Rouse, Stella M., and Ashley D. Ross. 2018. The Politics of Millennials: Political Beliefs and Policy Preferences of America’s Most Diverse Generation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Smidt, Corwin, Lyman Kellstedt, and James L. Guth, eds. 2009. The Oxford Handbook of Religion and American Politics. 1st ed. USA: Oxford University Press. Strauss, Karsten. 2017. The Most and Least Charitable States in the U.S.  In 2017. Forbes, December 4. https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2017/12/04/ the-most-and-least-charitable-states-in-the-u-s-in-2017/. Taylor, Paul. 2016. The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown. Reprint ed: PublicAffairs. Vandermaas-Peeler, Alex, Daniel Cox, Molly Fisch-Friedman, Rob Griffin, and Robert P.  Jones. 2018. Emerging Consensus on LGBT Issues: Findings from the 2017 American Values Atlas. May 1. https://www.prri.org/research/emergingconsensus-on-lgbt-issues-findings-from-the-2017-american-values-atlas/.

PART III

Living Global Mormonism

CHAPTER 11

Mormons in North America, Latin America, the South Pacific, Europe, Africa, and Asia: An Overview Matthew Martinich

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has experienced significant membership growth within the past century. Church membership reached one million in 1947, five million in 1982, 10 million in 1997, and 15 million in 2013.1 Although impressive on paper, only about one-third of Church-reported members regularly attend church services. Moreover, membership growth rates have dramatically slowed within the past three decades. Nevertheless, membership growth trends in the twenty-first century have significantly varied by region from rapid growth to stagnant growth or slight decline.

Global Trends for Key Metrics The Church publishes several growth metrics in its annual statistical reports released in its annual General Conferences. Metrics consistently reported during the past 3–4 decades have included the number of members, new children of record added during the year, converts baptized during the year, full-time missionaries, Church-service missionaries, temples in operation, temples dedicated during the year, temples rededicated during the year, stakes, missions, districts, and official congregations (i.e. wards and branches).2 However, other statistics not officially reported by the Church, but deduced from other sources such as Church websites, can provide additional information regarding growth

M. Martinich (*) The Cumorah Foundation, Colorado Springs, CO, USA © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_11

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trends, such as outreach expansion efforts per the Church’s online meetinghouse locator website.3 Each of these metrics is discussed in detail below. Membership Growth The Church’s annual membership growth rate has substantially slowed from generally 4–6 percent per year in the 1970s and 1980s to approximately 3–4 percent in the 1990s, 2–3 percent in the 2000s, and 1–2 percent in the 2010s. There has been no noticeable change in the number of new members added to Church records each year since the mid-1980s despite total membership nearly tripling. In 2018, approximately 57 percent of Church-reported membership lived in North America, Central America, and the Caribbean, whereas 25 percent lived in South America, seven percent lived in Asia, four percent lived in Africa, three-and-a-half percent lived in Oceania, and three percent lived in Europe.4 Some countries collect information about the religious affiliation of census respondents, particularly in Oceania, Latin America, and Europe. The number of self-identified Latter-day Saints on censuses may present more accurate data regarding the total number of individuals who consider themselves members of the Church rather than Church-reported figures which include all baptized and confirmed individuals regardless of current activity status or self-­ reported affiliation. These census figures generally correspond to between one-­ quarter and one-half of Church-reported membership for the same year, indicating problems with convert attrition and member inactivity. Congregational Growth As noted, membership growth does not take into account the activity status of individuals on the Church’s rolls. However, the creation of congregations (i.e. wards and branches) usually requires an increase in the number of active members as there are certain requirements that the Church must meet to organize congregations. For example, the Church requires at least 15 active, full-tithe paying Melchizedek Priesthood holders (FTPMPHs) in a specific geographical area (at least 20 FTPMPHs in the United States and Canada) in order for a ward to be organized. Also, the Church requires that certain ratios of general membership to FTPMPHs be met for a ward to operate, which is generally one FTPMPH per 20 or fewer members. Similarly, new branches within the boundaries of stakes should have at least four FTPMPHs, whereas new branches under the direct supervision of a mission or area presidency should have at least one FTPMPH and three other priesthood holders.5 Congregational growth trends for the global Church have vacillated from rapid growth (annual growth rates of 4–5 percent between the 1950s and 1990s) to essentially stagnant growth (annual growth rates of less than 0.5 percent from 2002–2003, and 2011 and 2018). In general, annual growth rates have decelerated from 4–5 percent during the latter half of the twentieth century to 0–1 percent between 1999 and 2003, 1–2 percent between 2004

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and 2009, and 0.5–1.3% between 2010 and 2019. Factors that have influenced rates of congregational growth include area and mission policies that proscribe the recommended number of active members per congregation, trends in member activity and convert retention, and efforts to expand the Church’s outreach into lesser-reached or unreached locations. The worldwide total of congregations reached 100  in 1841, 500  in 1849, 1000  in 1901, 2000  in 1936, 5000  in 1961, 10,000  in 1979, 15,000  in 1985, 20,000  in 1992, 25,000 in 1998,6 and 30,000 in 2015 (see Fig. 11.1). The average number of members per congregation serves as a good indicator for member activity rates and outreach expansion efforts by the Church. A smaller ratio of members per congregation usually implies higher member activity rates and the expansion of the Church into new areas. More specifically, fewer total numbers of Latter-day Saints are needed to organize more congregations if there are larger numbers of active members capable and willing to fill leadership and teaching positions. Moreover, small numbers of active members are usually present when the Church organizes its first branch in a previously unreached city, town, or village. Nevertheless, this members-to-congregations ratio can provide misleading speculation about member activity rates, particularly in countries where there are mostly branches with few total members and low member activity rates like Russia. The average number of members per congregation has increased since the mid-nineteenth century from 61 in 1852 to a record high of 535 in 2019 (Fig. 11.2).

Number of Congregations

30,000 25,000

4,000

CONGREGATIONS STAKES

3,500

DISTRICTS 3,000

MISSIONS TEMPLES

2,500

20,000 2,000 15,000 1,500 10,000

1,000

5,000

500 -

18 30 18 38 18 46 18 54 18 62 18 70 18 78 18 86 18 94 19 02 19 10 19 18 19 26 19 34 19 42 19 50 19 58 19 66 19 74 19 82 19 90 19 98 20 06 20 14

-

Number of Stakes, Districts, Missions, and Temples

35,000

Year

Fig. 11.1  Growth of congregations, stakes, districts, missions, and temples, 1830–2019

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600 500 400 300 200 100

12 19 20

05

20

98

20

91

19

84

19

77

19

70

19

63

19

56

19

49

19

42

19

35

19

28

19

21

19

14

19

07

19

00

19

93

19

86

18

79

18

72

18

65

18

58

18

51

18

44

18

37

18

18

18

30

-

Year

Fig. 11.2  Average number of members per congregation, 1830–2019

Outreach Expansion The pace at which additional cities have opened to the Church has dramatically slowed on a worldwide scale since the early 1990s, which appears to partially account for decelerating membership growth rates. In contrast, the Church aggressively opened hundreds of cities in the 1970s and 1980s during years of the most rapid membership growth reported by the Church. The centers of strength policy has guided missionary expansion efforts for decades, which is the principle of establishing Church centers in a limited number of areas until these areas become self-sustaining in meeting their own leadership and missionary needs. The centers of strength policy was more conservatively followed starting in the early 1990s for most areas of the world. As a result, the Church’s missionary resources have been channeled into a limited number of areas with the intent to have these areas become self-sufficient centers of strength for the Church before expanding into previously unreached areas. Stake and District Growth Like increases in the number of congregations, increases in the number of stakes is a strong indicator of increases in active church membership as these organizations require certain numbers of active members and congregations to operate. For example, there must be at least 3000 members and 180 FTPMPHs for a stake to be organized in the United States and Canada, whereas there must be at least 1900 members and 120 FTPMPHs to organize a stake in all other countries.7 Stakes are hierarchical organizations akin to diocese that generally supervise and support 5–12 larger congregations called wards.8 The

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8,000 7,000 6,000 5,000 4,000 3,000 2,000 1,000

19

0 19 0 0 19 4 0 19 8 1 19 2 1 19 6 2 19 0 2 19 4 2 19 8 3 19 2 3 19 6 4 19 0 4 19 4 4 19 8 5 19 2 5 19 6 6 19 0 6 19 4 6 19 8 7 19 2 7 19 6 8 19 0 8 19 4 8 19 8 9 19 2 9 20 6 0 20 0 0 20 4 0 20 8 1 20 2 16

Year

Fig. 11.3  Average number of members per stake, 1900–2019

number of stakes in the Church has steadily increased year-to-year with almost no exception for over one hundred years. Steady stake growth occurred between the mid-twentieth century and the late 1990s, but this growth substantially slowed in the early 2000s. Nevertheless, stake growth has slightly accelerated since the late 2000s. The number of stakes worldwide increased from 180 in 1950 to 537 in 1970, 1218 in 1980, 1784 in 1990, 2581 in 2000, 2896 in 2010, and 3437 in 2018 (see Fig. 11.1). The average number of members per stake has slightly decreased since 1900 from approximately 6500 to approximately 3700 in the early 1980s, and has slowly increased since this time to 4820 in 2019 (see Fig. 11.3). Temples Temples are the most holy buildings in the Church where sacred rites are performed for the living and the dead.9 The construction of temples is costly given the emphasis on the use of high-quality materials to build a House of the Lord. Former Church President Gordon B.  Hinckley indicated that temples cost three times as much per square foot to build than does a stake center meetinghouse.10 The announcement to construct additional temples is influenced by a variety of factors, such as the number of temple recommend holders in a specific geographical area11 and the number of stakes in a given area.12 Thus, increases in the number of temples in the Church can correlate with the growth of the Church. The number of temples in the Church (dedicated and announced) significantly increased between the mid-twentieth century and the end of the century from 12 in 1955 to 50 in 1991 and 114 in 1999. Much of this growth was due

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Average Number of Members per Temple: 1847-2019 and Dedicated)

(Announced

2,50,000

2,00,000

1,50,000

1,00,000

50,000

18

4 18 7 5 18 3 5 18 9 6 18 5 7 18 1 77 18 8 18 3 8 18 9 9 19 5 0 19 1 0 19 7 1 19 3 1 19 9 2 19 5 3 19 1 3 19 7 43 19 4 19 9 5 19 5 61 19 6 19 7 7 19 3 7 19 9 8 19 5 9 19 1 97 20 0 20 3 0 20 9 15

Year

Fig. 11.4  Average number of members per temple, 1847–2019

to a combination of the worldwide growth of the Church and the development of small temples in areas distant from the nearest temple. Significant growth in the number of temples has also occurred in the twenty-first century as the number of temples (dedicated and announced) totaled 131 in 2005, 157 in 2010, 173 in 2015, and 225 in April 2020. The geographical breakdown of the Church’s 225 announced or dedicated temples as of April 2020 was as follows: North America (47 percent), Latin America and the Caribbean (25 percent), Asia (eight percent), Europe (seven percent), Oceania (seven percent), Sub-Saharan Africa (six percent). The average number of members per temple generally increased from the mid-nineteenth century until 1975 from 51,839 in 1850 to 70,941 in 1900, 119,852 in 1950, and 198,456 in 1975. However, the average number of members per temple has generally decreased since the mid-1970s to 161,667  in 1990, 91,478  in 2000, 90,009  in 2010, and 76,337 in 2019 (see Fig. 11.4).

Regional Trends United States and Canada Membership Growth. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the United States claims 6.72 million members—four and a half times the number of members reported in the country with the second most members (Mexico). Annual membership growth rates in the United States and Canada have slowed to less than 1 percent since 2016. The number of stakes in both countries has slowly but steadily increased for many consecutive decades. The 2011 Canadian

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census reported 105,365 Latter-day Saints13—57 percent of Church-reported membership at the time. Generally, the Church in the United States and Canada reports stable member activity rates that are moderate (approximately 40 percent) compared to world averages. Slowing membership growth rates in North America have appeared to be strongly influenced by declining birth rates in the Church in recent decades as well as challenges with no increases or decreases in the number of convert baptisms. Congregational Growth. Despite slow membership growth rates, the Church in North America has reported significant increases in the number of congregations. The total number of wards and branches increased by nearly one thousand between 2008 and 2018—a seven percent increase. There are more congregations in the United States (14,459 at year-end 2019) than any other country in the world. Temples. The number of temples has significantly increased in North America. There were four temples in 1900—all of which were in Utah. The number of announced or dedicated temples in the United States increased to nine in 1961, 15 in 1980, 24 in 1990, 56 in 2000, 75 in 2010, and 96 in April 2020. In Canada, the number of announced or dedicated temples increased from one in 1913 to two in 1984, six in 1999, seven in 2006, eight in 2008, and nine in 2011. Latin America and the Caribbean The Church has reported slow membership growth in most Latin American and Caribbean countries since the mid-2000s. The number of stakes has increased in many of these countries despite significant deceleration in membership growth rates, suggesting improvements in member activity and leadership development. For example, there was no net increase in the number of stakes in Peru between 1997 and 2005 even though Church membership increased by 104,060 during this time (a 33 percent increase). However, the number of stakes in Peru increased from 81 in 2005 to 112 in 2019 (a 38 percent increase), whereas Church membership increased from 416,060 to 619,042 during this same 14-year period (a 49 percent increase). Annual membership growth rates in Peru have decelerated from 3.5–6 percent in the late 1990s to 3–4 percent in the 2000s, and 2–3 percent in the 2010s. Similarly, the number of stakes in Brazil was virtually unchanged from the late 1990s to mid-2000s at approximately 186 during which time annual membership growth rates were generally 4–8 percent. Annual membership growth rates have since slowed to 4–5 percent in the late 2000s and 2–3 percent in the 2010s, whereas the number of stakes has steadily increased to 277 as of year-­ end 2019. Nevertheless, other nations have reported no significant increases in the number of stakes and decelerating membership growth rates, such as Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Membership Growth. The Church reports approximately 6.6 million members in Latin America and the Caribbean. Of these members, 22 percent live in

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Mexico, 21 percent live in Brazil, nine percent live in Peru, nine percent live in Chile, seven percent live in Argentina, and 32 percent live in other countries. The countries with the highest percentage of Church-reported membership include Chile (3.3 percent), Uruguay (3.2 percent), Peru (1.9 percent), Bolivia (1.8 percent), and Ecuador (1.5 percent). The Church is least established in the Caribbean, particularly in Cuba (one Latter-day Saint per approximately 31,000 people), Martinique (one Latter-day Saint per 1667 people), and Guadeloupe (one Latter-day Saint per 869 people). Annual membership growth rates have typically ranged between 1–5 percent for most countries in Latin America and the Caribbean in the past decade. Congregational Growth. The Church reported a net decrease of 38 congregations between 2008 and 2018 for the region as a whole with significant differences between countries. For example, there were large net decreases in congregations in some countries, like Mexico (−131), Argentina (−104), and Venezuela (−41), while large net increases in congregations in others, like Brazil (+262), Guatemala (+23), and Nicaragua (+19). Overall, compounding problems with low member activity rates and convert attrition primarily explain stagnant trends in congregational growth in the region, with the Church in certain nations continuing to consolidate small wards and branches to form congregations with larger numbers of active members. However, the Church in nations like Peru and Bolivia has experienced a recent increase in the creation of new congregations. For example, the Church in Peru and Bolivia reported a net increase of 21 and 13 congregations in 2019, respectively. Temples. In 1975, the Church announced its first temple in South America in São Paulo, Brazil. The first temple in Mexico was announced in Mexico City in 1976, followed by the first temple in Central America in Guatemala City, Guatemala in 1981. The first Caribbean temple was completed in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic in 2000. In early 2020, there were 57 temples in Latin America and the Caribbean (31 in South America, 14 in Mexico, nine in Central America, and three in the Caribbean). With the announcement of the Managua Nicaragua Temple in 2018, all Spanish-speaking countries in Central America and South America had at least one temple announced or dedicated. Countries with two or more announced or dedicated temples include Mexico (14), Brazil (11), Argentina (5), Peru (4), Chile (3), Guatemala (3), Colombia (2), Ecuador (2), and Honduras (2). Most temples in Latin America and the Caribbean were announced during two time periods: 1995–2000 (19) and 2015–2020 (15). The expansion of temple building worldwide appears the best explanation for why most temples in Latin America and the Caribbean were announced during these time periods. The number of announced or dedicated temples totaled eight in 1990, 28  in 2000, 39  in 2010, and 56 in 2019. The Mexico City Mexico Temple is the Church’s largest temple outside of the United States and only international temple with at least 100,000 square feet. However, most temples in Latin America and the Caribbean are small or medium-sized buildings under 30,000 square feet. This

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indicates that the Church has planned on relatively few members utilizing the temple at any given time in the region as a whole. Europe Stagnant or very slow membership growth has occurred in most European countries during the past decade. The number of stakes has been essentially unchanged during the past two decades. Most countries have reported no measurable change in the number of active members during this time. Therefore, the Church has not created or discontinued a sizable number of stakes in the region as a result. Secularization, strong ethnic or national ties to traditional religious faiths, and high competition from other missionary-minded denominations (i.e. Jehovah’s Witnesses) among populations with little interest in organized religion appear to best explain the lack of Latter-day Saint growth in the continent in the 2010s. Russia is classified as part of Europe in this chapter as the bulk of the Russian population and Latter-day Saint membership reside west of the Ural Mountains. Membership Growth. There are approximately 500,000 Latter-day Saints in Europe, of which 38 percent live in the United Kingdom, 12 percent live in Spain, nine percent live in Portugal, eight percent live in Germany, eight percent live in France, five percent live in Italy, and 20 percent live in other countries. The Church reports its highest percentage of members in the population in Portugal (0.44 percent), the Isle of Man (0.33 percent), Jersey (0.30 percent), the United Kingdom (0.29 percent), Spain (0.12 percent), Switzerland (0.11 percent), and Albania (0.10 percent). The most limited Latter-day Saint presence is in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Of countries with an official Church presence, the Church is least established in North Macedonia (one member per 51,682), Bosnia and Herzegovina (one member per 48,124), Montenegro (one member per 26,706), Slovakia (one member per 19,173), and Serbia (one member per 19,078). Annual membership growth rates are generally between 0–4 percent. Denmark is arguably the European country where the Church has experienced its slowest growth in the past 50 years as membership has remained relatively unchanged during the past half century at approximately 4200–4500. Nevertheless, the Church in Greece also holds the distinction of perhaps the country where the Church has assigned the most full-time missionaries with the fewest number of coverts who have joined the Church. For example, the Church in Greece reports approximately 800 members on the records despite a continuous missionary presence for several decades. Strong opposition from the Greek Orthodox Church against proselytism activities by nontraditional Christian faiths, severe societal pressure and persecution of Latter-day Saint Greek converts, and the lack of a sizable local Greek Latter-day Saint community all appear primarily responsible for the minuscule size of the Church in Greece today. The most consistent membership growth has occurred in Spain and Portugal. For example, in Spain the Church grew from 10,000 members in the early 1980s to 31,695 members in

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2000, 47,337 in 2010, and 58,061 in 2018. Latin Americans who joined the Church in their home countries and immigrated to Spain or Portugal, or Latin Americans who have immigrated to Spain or Portugal and joined the Church later, primarily explain the more rapid Church growth trends in these two nations compared to the rest of the continent. The Church in Albania has also consistently reported more rapid membership growth rates than the rest of Europe at 4–10 percent in the past decade. Lower levels of economic development and weak ethnic ties to specific religious groups among most of the population appear to primarily explain higher receptivity to the Church in Albania compared to most other countries in the region. Government census figures indicate significant variability in regards to member activity rates and rates of disaffiliation among nominal Latter-day Saints in Europe. For example, the 2015 Finland census counted 3259 Latter-­ day Saints14—66 percent of Church-reported membership. However, the 2011 Scotland census enumerated only 4651 Latter-day Saints—a mere 17 percent of Church-reported membership.15 Broad societal influences on religious attitudes have appeared to primarily influence member activity rates for the Church in Europe, and countries where the bulk of membership identifies with a strong-knit community of local Latter-day Saints rather than foreign transplants appear to report some of the highest member activity rates such as Finland. Congregational Growth. The Church in Europe reported a substantial net decrease in the number of congregations in Europe between 2008 and 2018 as the total number of congregations decreased by 117 from 1499 to 1382—a 7.8% decrease. Countries where the Church experienced its largest net decreases in the number of congregations include Russia (−32), Germany (−20), Ukraine (−15), Bulgaria (−13), and the United Kingdom (−13). The Church reported its most dramatic consolidation of congregations in Bulgaria and Belgium where the total number of congregations decreased by 65 percent and 33 percent, respectively. Only a few countries reported a net increase of congregations during this period, including Spain (+5), Albania (+4), Hungary (+3), Bosnia and Herzegovina (+2), Moldova (+2), Montenegro (+1), North Macedonia (+1), and Iceland (+1), albeit the net increase in some of these countries (i.e. Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia) is attributed to the Church’s creation of its first branches in these countries during the past decade. Temples. The first temple in Europe was dedicated in 1955  in Bern, Switzerland. The total number of dedicated or announced temples reached five in 1982, 11 in 2000, and 16 in 2019. Countries with dedicated or announced temples include Germany (2), the United Kingdom (2), Denmark, Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Ukraine. Most temples in Europe are small buildings under 20,000 square feet although there are several medium or large-sized temples, such as the Preston England Temple, the London England Temple, the Paris

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France Temple, and the Madrid Spain Temple. Thus, most temples in Europe have been constructed to accommodate few members at any given time. Sub-Saharan Africa Approximately half of the countries with a Church presence in Sub-Saharan Africa have reported rapid membership growth (exceeding 8% a year) during the past decade. The most rapid growth has occurred in West Africa and Central Africa. However, other countries have reported slow membership growth, such as in South Africa, Tanzania, and Ethiopia. The number of stakes has substantially increased throughout the continent. For example, the number of stakes in West Africa increased from 22 in 2000 to over 100 in 2018. There has been a significant expansion of the Church into previously unreached countries during the past decade as the first branches were organized in Burundi (2011), Gabon (2012), Senegal (2016), Guinea (2017), and Mali (2017), and there were plans announced in late 2019 to organize the first branch in Burkina Faso in 2020. Membership Growth. Rapid annual membership growth rates have been sustained in Sub-Saharan Africa for decades. Although high rates of membership growth may not be substantial in some countries when there are few members and a low base (e.g. under one thousand members), the Church in Sub-Saharan Africa has often achieved significant membership growth even when Church membership totals in the tens of thousands. During the decade between 2008 and 2018, church membership increased by 116 percent in the region. In 2018, there were 620,960 Latter-day Saints in Sub-Saharan Africa, of which 29 percent lived in Nigeria, 14 percent lived in Ghana, 11 percent lived in South Africa, 10 percent lived in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, eight percent lived in Cote d’Ivoire, and 28 percent lived in other countries. Countries with the highest percentage of Latter-day Saints include Cabo Verde (2.63 percent), Sierra Lone (0.34 percent), Ghana (0.30 percent), Liberia (0.28 percent), Zimbabwe (0.23 percent), Eswatini [Swaziland] (0.19 percent), and Cote d’Ivoire [Ivory Coast] (0.19 percent). The Church maintains its most limited presence usually in countries where there has been a recent Church establishment, such as Mali (one member per 230,374), Guinea (one member per 196,351), and Senegal (one member per 139,083), or countries where the Church has historically channeled extremely few missionary resources and that are distant from area headquarters, such as Ethiopia (one member per 56,072). Annual membership growth rates vastly differ by country, with annual membership growth rates in rare cases exceeding 50 percent, whereas other countries report essentially stagnant membership growth. Nevertheless, on average most African countries report annual membership growth rates between 5–15 percent. Congregational Growth. Significant congregational growth occurred between 2008 and 2018 as the number of congregations increased from 841 to 2145—a 155% increase. The Church reported its largest net increases in the

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number of congregations in Nigeria (+389), Ghana (+215), Cote d’Ivoire (+199), and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) (+126). Most of this increase has been attributed to increases in the number of wards (usually large congregations) rather than an increase in the number of branches (usually small congregations that are often more recently established). For example, the net increase in the number of wards for these four countries between 2008 and 2018 is as follows: Nigeria (+270), Ghana (+126), Cote d’Ivoire (+97), and the DR Congo (+108). However, it is important to note many wards in Sub-Saharan Africa were originally organized as branches which later became wards once they reached the minimum membership/leadership requirements and were within the boundaries of a stake. Moreover, the proliferation of wards in Sub-Saharan Africa also indicates the Church’s significant emphasis on the centers of strength policy. Most of the Church’s growth in the region has been in the most populous cities rather than in rural communities or smaller cities or towns as the operation of stakes and wards may be more difficult in these locations due to distance, linguistic diversity, limited transportation, and low living standards that discourages the assignment of full-time missionaries. Between 2008 and 2018, the Church reported its highest percentage increases in the number of congregations in Benin (1700 percent), Angola (1400 percent), Cote d’Ivoire (622 percent), and Togo (533 percent) albeit only the Church in Cote d’Ivoire reported more than 100 congregations in 2018 among these four nations. There were a few countries where the Church reported no change in the number of congregations, such as the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, and Reunion. Temples. The Church announced its first temple in Africa in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1981. Additional temples have since been announced in Accra, Ghana (1998); Aba, Nigeria (2000); Durban, South Africa (2011); Kinshasa, DR Congo (2011); Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire (2015); Harare, Zimbabwe (2016), Nairobi, Kenya (2017); Lagos, Nigeria (2018); Praia, Cabo Verde (2018); Freetown, Sierra Leone (2019); Benin City, Nigeria (2020); and Lubumbashi, DR Congo (2020). The total number of announced or dedicated temples increased to two in 1998, five in 2011, and 13 in April 2020. In early 2020, there were only five dedicated temples in Africa as most are in the planning or construction stages. There are now nine African countries with a temple dedicated or announced. All dedicated temples are small buildings under 20,000 square feet in size. Asia Industrialized nations have generally reported slow or stagnant membership growth for the past two decades which is primarily attributable to secularization. Moreover, membership growth has slowed for most developing countries in the past decade, likely due to increasing secularization in these nations as well.16 Only a few countries report moderate or rapid growth. New stakes continue to be regularly organized, especially in areas of countries where no stakes

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previously operated such as in Southeast Asia and the Philippines. The Philippines reports some of the highest growth, whereas Japan and South Korea report stagnant growth. Higher rates of receptivity to organized religious groups in the Philippines appears to be due to a predominantly Christian population and relatively low living standards in most areas, whereas rates of low receptivity to organized religious groups in South Korea and Japan appear more complex (see Rainock and Takagi’s chapter in this volume for insights on Japan). More specifically, the Church in South Korea initially experienced rapid growth in the late twentieth century, and Christians constitute one of the largest religious groups in the country. High competition for converts among Christian denominations, as well as the rise of new religious movements that are culturally marginalized, of which The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been associated, contribute to the stagnant growth of the Church in Japan and South Korea today. Furthermore, the Church in South Korea has also struggled with the emigration of active members which has left voids in leadership and destabilized the social framework of congregations. Lastly, nations in the Middle East are examined in a separate section in this chapter for the Middle East and North Africa. Membership Growth. There were nearly 1.2 million Latter-day Saints in Asia as of year-end 2018, of which 66 percent lived in the Philippines, 11 percent lived in Japan, seven percent lived in South Korea, five percent lived in Taiwan, and 11 percent lived in other countries. Latter-day Saints comprise the largest percentage of the population in the Philippines (0.74 percent), Mongolia (0.38 percent), Hong Kong (0.35 percent), Taiwan (0.26 percent), Macau (0.24 percent), and South Korea (0.17 percent). The Church is least established in Central Asia and South Asia. Of countries where there is a least one official branch, Latter-day Saints comprise the smallest percentage of the population in Bangladesh (one Latter-day Saint per approximately three million people), Nepal (one Latter-day Saint per approximately 150,000 people), Afghanistan and mainland China (one Latter-day Saint per approximately 115,000 people), Kazakhstan (one Latter-day Saint per 95,150 people), and India (one Latter-­ day Saint per 92,664 people). The Church in Asia generally achieves stagnant or very low membership growth rates of 0–2 percent in industrialized countries. Annual membership growth rates in the Philippines have held steady at 2–4 percent annually for the past two decades. However, member activity rates have been low as the number of Latter-day Saints as reported by the 2015 census totaled only 27 percent of Church-reported membership for the year.17 Rushed baptismal preparation with cursory teaching during prior years of the most rapid membership growth for the Church in the Philippines appears a major culprit for member inactivity challenges in the country. The Church in most Southeast Asian countries reports slow-to-moderate membership growth rates. Recently opened countries to the Church, such as Myanmar and Laos, experience the most rapid membership growth, but also have comparatively few members (less than 500).

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Congregational Growth. The total number of congregations in Asia increased from 1840 to 2008 between 2008 and 2018—a 9.1 percent increase. There was significant variation between countries based on congregational growth rate. For example, the Church reported its largest net increases in the number of congregations in the Philippines (+140), India (+17), Taiwan (+16), and Malaysia (+14), whereas the Church reported its largest net decreases in the number of congregations in South Korea (−39), Japan (−27), and Armenia (−4). Temples. The first Asian temple was announced for Tokyo, Japan in 1975. The number of dedicated or announced temples totaled four in 1982, six in 1998, nine in 2010, and 18 in April 2020. Most recently, the Church announced a temple for Shanghai, China to exclusively serve citizens of the People’s Republic of China who face limitations to attend temples elsewhere. Approximately half of the temples in Asia were announced during the latter-­ half of the 2010s. Of the 18 temples in Asia, seven are in the Philippines and four are in Japan. Other countries with dedicated or announced temples include Cambodia, China, India, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. Temple size widely varies from less than 10,000 square feet, such as the Taipei Taiwan Temple, to more than 52,000 square feet in the Tokyo Japan Temple. However, these differences in square footage appear related to changes in temple sizes based on the time period when the temple was announced (i.e. larger buildings during earlier and most recent announcements) rather than the anticipated number of patrons. Oceania Similar to Asia, industrialized countries report slow membership growth. Most Polynesian nations report slow growth but increasing numbers of Latter-day Saints on government censuses, and increases in the number of stakes. Moderate to rapid membership growth generally occurs in Micronesia and Melanesia, where stakes have recently been organized in several nations for the first time. Growth rates do not appear significantly related to the size of membership in the region. For example, the Church in Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea has historically reported some of the most rapid membership growth rates and each of these nations had at least 10,000 members as of year-end 2019. Membership Growth. The Church in Oceania reported 562,341 Latter-day Saints as of year-end 2018. Of these members, 27 percent lived in Australia, 20 percent lived in New Zealand, 15 percent lived in Samoa, 12 percent lived in Tonga, and 26 percent lived in other countries. Countries or territories with the highest percentage of Church-reported membership in the population include Tonga (61.6 percent), Samoa (40.8 percent), American Samoa (32.3 percent), the Cook Islands (20.5 percent), Niue (19.1 percent), Kiribati (18.6 percent), and French Polynesia (9.7 percent). Countries or territories with the lowest percentage of Church-reported membership include the Solomon Islands (0.19 percent), Papua New Guinea (0.40 percent), Australia (0.65 percent), New Caledonia (0.86 percent), and Nauru (1.3 percent). Approximately

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1.4 percent of the population of Oceania are members on Church records—the second highest in the world after North America. Substantial increases in the number of self-identified Latter-day Saints on recent government censuses have occurred in several countries. The increase in the number of self-identified members between the two most recent censuses has grown at a more rapid rate than official Church-reported numbers, such as in New Zealand, Samoa, Kiribati, and Palau. For example, the 2016 Samoa census enumerated 33,077 Latter-day Saints—an increase of 35.8 percent from the number of Latter-day Saints reported in the 2011 Samoa census18—whereas the Church reported 78,746 members at year-end 2016—an increase of 8.9 percent from 2011. Nevertheless, census-reported figures for the number of Latter-day Saints obtained by government censuses in Oceania are usually only 30–50 percent of Church-reported membership for the same year, indicating that the number of active Latter-day Saints is a much smaller number than what the Church reports on paper due to convert attrition and member inactivity. For example, census-reported numbers of Latter-day Saints as a percentage of Church-reported membership is as follows: Palau (2015—56 percent), New Zealand (2018—47 percent), Kiribati (2015—34 percent), and Tonga (2016—29 percent).19 Congregational Growth. The total number of Latter-day Saint congregations increased between 2008 and 2018 from 1106 to 1253—a 13% increase. The Church reported either no change or a net increase in the number of congregations for all nations and territories/dependencies in Oceania during this period. Countries where the highest increases in the number of congregations occurred included Papua New Guinea (+27), Samoa (+24), New Zealand (+21) and Australia (+19). Temples. The Church announced its first temple in Oceania in Hamilton, New Zealand in 1955. The number of announced or dedicated temples in the region increased to two in 1977, five in 1980, eight in 1998, and 15 in 2019. There were 15 announced or dedicated temples in Oceania as of 2019, including five in Australia, two in New Zealand, two in Tonga, and one each in American Samoa, Guam, Fiji, French Polynesia, Papua New Guinea, and Samoa. The Hamilton New Zealand Temple and the Sydney Australia Temples are the largest temples in the region (each over 30,000 square feet), whereas most temples are small buildings between 10,000 and 20,000 square feet. Middle East and North Africa The Church maintains an extremely limited presence in the Middle East and North Africa primarily due to religious freedom restrictions that bar traditional proselytism with full-time missionaries, political conflict, and out of respect to traditional religious beliefs and culture in locations where proselytism is permitted. There were no temples in this region of the world planned or dedicated until the announcement of the Dubai United Arab Emirates Temple in April 2020. There were approximately 5000 Latter-day Saints in the region as of

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year-end 2018—most of whom lived in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. Of the 19 sovereign North African and Middle Eastern countries, the Church operates an official ward or branch in only 14 countries. Of these 14 countries with a Church presence, eight have a ward or branch in only one city. Slow congregational growth occurred during the 2010s. Most Latter-day Saints are foreign expatriates from North America, Europe, and the Philippines. However, there are small and growing local, non-Western and non-Filipino Latter-day Saint communities in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, and Iraqi Kurdistan.

Conclusion The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has established a presence in most of the sovereign nations of the world, but its presence remains extremely limited in most nations. Moreover, the Church’s growth rates have gradually decelerated in recent decades as a result of limiting its operations to specific geographical areas in favor of building from centers of strength, declining birth rates in the United States among Latter-day Saint women, the secularization of many countries in the world which results in waning interest in organized religion, and no increases in the annual number of convert baptisms in almost 30 years. Low member activity rates and convert attrition remain significant challenges for the Church as evidenced by slower congregational and stake growth rates than membership growth rates, and significant discrepancies between Church-reported membership and government census-reported enumerations for Latter-day Saints. Despite these challenges, the Church has made significant progress in other areas, such as improving the accessibility of temples to Church membership, improvements in member activity and convert retention rates in several Latin American countries, and the rapid growth of the Church in Sub-Saharan Africa as indicated by all metrics discussed in this chapter. Furthermore, the Church ranks among the largest religious groups in many nations in Oceania where census-reported numbers of Latter-day Saints have increased at a faster rate than Church-reported membership within the past decade. Overall, the future presents a combination of opportunities and challenges both within and outside of the Church to achieve its unwavering missionary objectives.

Notes 1. Martinich, Matthew. “Membership Growth  – Encyclopedia on Missionary Work and Church Growth (Missiology),” cumorah.com, 4 October 2014. http://cumorah.com/index.php?target=view_other_ar ticles&stor y_ id=669&cat_id=35. 2. “2018 Statistical Report for 2019 April Conference.” 6 April 2019. https:// newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/2018-statistical-report.

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3. “Classic Maps.” Accessed 20 January 2020. https://classic.churchofjesuschrist. org/maps. 4. “Facts and Statistics.” Mormon Newsroom. Accessed 14 May 2019. https:// www.mormonnewsroom.org/facts-and-statistics. 5. “Creating, Changing, and Naming New Units.” General Handbook: Serving in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Accessed 28 April 2020. https:// w w w. c h u r c h o f j e s u s c h r i s t . o rg / s t u d y / m a n u a l / g e n e r a l - h a n d b o o k / 36-creating-changing-and-naming-new-units?lang=eng#p1. 6. Martinich, Matthew. “Congregational Growth.” LDS Growth Encyclopedia on Missionary Work and Church Growth (Missiology). 6 October 2014. https:// cumorah.com/index.php?target=view_other_ar ticles&stor y_id= 674&cat_id=35. 7. “Creating, Changing, and Naming New Units.” General Handbook: Serving in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Accessed 28 April 2020. https:// w w w. c h u r c h o f j e s u s c h r i s t . o rg / s t u d y / m a n u a l / g e n e r a l - h a n d b o o k / 36-creating-changing-and-naming-new-units?lang=eng#p1. 8. “Church Administration.” True to the Faith. 2004. P. 36. 9. “Temples.” ChurchofJesusChrist.org. Accessed 20 January 2020. https:// www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/temples. 10. “Notable progress in the Philippines,” LDS Church News, 30 April 2005. http://www.ldschurchnews.com/articles/47240/Notable-progress-in-thePhilippines.html. 11. “Notable progress in the Philippines,” LDS Church News, 30 April 2005. http://www.ldschurchnews.com/articles/47240/Notable-progress-in-thePhilippines.html. 12. Kellerstrass, J., Kellerstrass, P. “First Stake in India Organized,” Liahona, October 2012. https://www.lds.org/liahona/2012/10/first-stake-in-indiaorganized. 13. “2011 National Household Survey: Data tables.” Statistics Canada. Accessed 28 April 2020. https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/dp-pd/dt-td/ Rp-eng.cfm?LANG=E&APATH=3&DETAIL=0&DIM=0&FL=A&FREE=0 &GC=0&GID=0&GK=0&GRP=0&PID=105399&PRID=0&PTYPE =105277&S=0&SHOWALL=0&SUB=0&Temporal=2013&THEME=95&VI D=0&VNAMEE=&VNAMEF=. 14. “Appendix table 6. Population by religious community in 2000 to 2015.” Statistics Finland. Accessed 28 April 2020. https://www.stat.fi/til/ vaerak/2015/01/vaerak_2015_01_2016-09-23_tau_006_en.html. 15. Martinich, Matthew. “LDS Membership and Government Census Data— Australia, Canada, Finland, New Zealand, Philippines, and Scotland.” Growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Accessed 8 August 2017. http://ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com/2017/08/lds-membership-and-government-census.html. 16. Cragun, Ryan T., and Ronald Lawson. 2010. “The Secular Transition: The Worldwide Growth of Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Seventh-day Adventists.” Sociology of Religion 71(3): 349–373. 17. Martinich, Matthew. “LDS Membership and Government Census Data— Australia, Canada, Finland, New Zealand, Philippines, and Scotland.” Growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Accessed 8 August 2017.

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http://ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com/2017/08/lds-membership-and-government-census.html. 18. “Population and Demography.” Samoa Bureau of Statistics. Accessed 31 December 2019. https://www.sbs.gov.ws/populationanddemography. 19. Martinich, Matthew. 2019. “Top Ten Most Encouraging and Top Ten Most Discouraging Growth and Missionary Developments for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 2019.” Accessed 28 April 2020. https:// cumorah.com/index.php?target=view_other_articles&story_id=687&cat_ id=30.

Bibliography Cragun, Ryan T., and Ronald Lawson. 2010. The Secular Transition: The Worldwide Growth of Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Seventh-day Adventists. Sociology of Religion 71 (3): 349–373. Kellerstrass, J., and Kellerstrass, P. 2012. First Stake in India Organized. Liahona, October. https://www.lds.org/liahona/2012/10/first-stake-in-india-organized. Martinich, Matthew. 2014a. Congregational Growth. LDS Growth Encyclopedia on Missionary Work and Church Growth (Missiology), 6 October. https://cumorah. com/index.php?target=view_other_articles&story_id=674&cat_id=35. ———. 2014b. Membership Growth—Encyclopedia on Missionary Work and Church Growth (Missiology). cumorah.com, 4 October. http://cumorah.com/index. php?target=view_other_articles&story_id=669&cat_id=35. ———. 2017. LDS Membership and Government Census Data—Australia, Canada, Finland, New Zealand, Philippines, and Scotland. Growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Accessed 8 August 2017. http://ldschurchgrowth. blogspot.com/2017/08/lds-membership-and-government-census.html. ———. 2019. Top Ten Most Encouraging and Top Ten Most Discouraging Growth and Missionary Developments for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 2019. Accessed 28 April 2020. https://cumorah.com/index.php?target=view_ other_articles&story_id=687&cat_id=30. Samoa Bureau of Statistics. Population and Demography. Accessed 31 December 2019. https://www.sbs.gov.ws/populationanddemography. Statistics Canada. 2011. 2011 National Household Survey: Data Tables. Accessed 28 April 2020. https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/dp-pd/dt-td/Rp-eng. cfm?LANG=E&APATH=3&DETAIL=0&DIM=0&FL=A&FREE=0&GC=0&GI D=0&GK=0&GRP=0&PID=105399&PRID=0&PTYPE=105277&S=0&SHOW A L L = 0 & S U B = 0 & Te m p o r a l = 2 0 1 3 & T H E M E = 9 5 & V I D = 0 & V N A M EE=&VNAMEF=. Statistics Finland. 2015. Appendix Table  6. Population by Religious Community in 2000 to 2015. Accessed 28 April 2020. https://www.stat.fi/til/vaerak/2015/01/ vaerak_2015_01_2016-09-23_tau_006_en.html. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 2004. Church Administration. True to the Faith, p. 36. ———. 2005. Notable progress in the Philippines. LDS Church News, 30 April. http:// w w w. l d s c h u r c h n e w s . c o m / a r t i c l e s / 4 7 2 4 0 / N o t a b l e - p r o g r e s s - i n - t h e Philippines.html.

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———. 2019a. 2018 Statistical Report for 2019 April Conference. 6 April. https:// newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/2018-statistical-report. ———. Facts and Statistics. Mormon Newsroom. Accessed 14 May 2019b. https:// www.mormonnewsroom.org/facts-and-statistics. ———. Classic Maps. Accessed 20 January 2020a. https://classic.churchofjesuschrist.org/maps. ———. Creating, Changing, and Naming New Units. General Handbook: Serving in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Accessed 28 April 2020b. https:// www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/general-handbook/36-creatingchanging-and-naming-new-units?lang=eng#p1. ———. Temples. ChurchofJesusChrist.org. Accessed 20 January 2020c. https://www. churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/temples.

CHAPTER 12

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Canada: Historical Milestones and Contemporary Conversations from a Feminist Perspective Christine L. Cusack This chapter traces the establishment, historical milestones, and contemporary challenges of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) in Canada.1 From a handful of early Canadian followers, the LDS Church now has a membership of close to 200,000 people in 497 congregations from coast to coast. Although members make up less than one percent of the population, the people and symbols of Mormonism are nevertheless familiar sights in Canada. Hundreds of chapels dot urban centres and rural hamlets, thousands of distinctively dressed volunteer missionaries serve in communities across the country, and architecturally striking temples are found in nearly every major city. Today, the LDS Church and its faithful are very much a visible part of the diverse religious landscape of Canada. In this chapter, I first explore the nineteenth century beginnings of this faith tradition and how geography and political circumstances in both Canada and the United States influenced early membership growth. I then offer a summary of how missionary work contributed to steady increases in member conversions during the decades that followed. Next, I pay particular attention to contemporary concerns about the status and activism of LDS women, issues of equality which emerged when the historical connection of the LDS Church with Canadian scouting came to an end in 2019, and the problems of gender in the Church and its institutional finances. Finally, I consider the LDS response to

C. L. Cusack (*) University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_12

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Canada’s state project of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. This chapter concludes with a discussion of how the forward-facing challenges for the LDS Church in Canada, including parallel flashpoints from the American context— such as women’s priesthood ordination, financial transparency, LGBTQ inclusion, and membership decline—influence the lived experience of members in a number of geographic regions.

The Establishment of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Canada The early establishment of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Canada unfolded in several distinct time frames which were shaped by both land contiguity and the shifting political climates of these eras. The story of Mormonism in Canada begins in the east. With less than two hundred miles separating church founder Joseph Smith Jr’s birthplace in Sharon, Vermont and the Canadian border, proximity was a key to early growth. In 1830, the same year Joseph Smith, Jr. published the Book of Mormon and officially organized his nascent movement in Fayette, New York, 2 his father, Joseph Smith Sr., and brother, Don Carlos, travelled north, crossing the border into Upper Canada or present-day southern Ontario.3 With copies of the Book of Mormon in hand, they were the first to disseminate the message of this new Mormon movement. The Smith men were followed in subsequent years by numerous other notable Mormon leaders, including Oliver Cowdery, Hiram Page, John E. Page, Parley P. Pratt, Sidney Rigdon, and Brigham Young.4 Joseph Smith, Jr. himself travelled to Canada to seek new converts in 1833.5 In the two decades which followed, nearly 2500 people joined the faith, many of whom eventually left Canada to join American church members in their westward pioneer migrations.6 One of the most notable Canadian converts of this era was Toronto resident John Taylor, an immigrant from England, who would later become the emergent movement’s third president and prophet in 1880.7 Once the followers of Brigham Young had firmly established themselves in the valley of the Great Salt Lake, LDS Church growth in Canada’s own western region ensued not long thereafter. Considering the over six hundred miles of mountainous terrain between America’s Utah territory and the Canadian border, the arrival of Latter-day Saints in western Canada owed much more to political turmoil than to proximity. When New Yorker Charles Ora Card’s family converted to the faith and migrated west to Utah in the mid 1800’s, that young man likely could never have envisioned his later life as a religious leader, fugitive, and founder of Cardston, Alberta, Canada.8 Under intensifying persecution for the practice of plural marriage in the wake of the Edmund’s Antipolygamy Act of 1882,9 Card was jailed in Utah but later escaped with the intention of fleeing with his four wives to Mexico.10 However, at the behest of then LDS Church president John Taylor, Card instead travelled north from

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Utah to southern Alberta in 1886–1887 and established a safe haven beyond the legal purview of the American government.11,12 Despite animosity towards the peculiar marriage practices of these would-be newcomers, the Canadian government supported LDS immigration as part of a broader national project of agricultural development in the west.13 The establishment of Cardston, Alberta14 and the later 1913 ground breaking for the first LDS temple15 to be built outside of the United States, magnetised successive surges of immigration to western Canada.16

Missionary Efforts and Modern LDS Growth in Canada Driven by a centrally orchestrated missionary effort, the third growth-stage of the LDS Church began in the early mid-twentieth century and ran through the beginning of the twenty-first century. This proselytization endeavour generated initially slow but continual expansion in the number of members and congregations across the country.17 In his analysis of Canadian census data, Laval University professor Dean Louder traced the following growth patterns in LDS membership in Canada up to the mid 1980s: In 1921 there were 12,257 members; in 1941 there were 16,468; in 1961 membership grew to 38,748; in 1970 membership was 57,633; in 1981 it was 82,090; and in 1986 there were a total of 90,945 adherents.18 Membership progress was notably sluggish in Quebec, however, due to linguistic barriers as well as reputational ones. After the LDS Church introduced French-speaking missionaries, and an arduous process to acquire legal status in the province was completed in 1967, the “climate of opinion improved” and missionary work progressed.19 Institutional presence at two watershed events in Quebec during the sixties especially precipitated an upsurge in membership noted between the census years 1970 and 1981. The first was in 1967, when the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performed at the Montreal World’s Fair, commonly referred to as Expo67. According to the archives of the City of Montreal, “the famous Mormon Tabernacle Choir gave a concert in front of a full house at the Maisonneuve Theatre, after which the audience offered a lengthy standing ovation.”20 The second was in 1969 when the LDS Church hosted a pavilion at Terre des hommes (Man and His World), a long-term exposition which followed the World’s Fair.21 The mobilization of more French-speaking missionaries during the event catalyzed interest among the thousands of visitors hearing about the LDS Church for the first time. This exposure resulted in a rapid rise in conversions in Quebec, about which Lauder states “of particular note is the nearly tenfold increase in Québec, a relatively ‘Mormon-less’ region in 1961.”22 Growth was indeed, impressive: In 1961 there were 557 members; in 1981 the number rose to 2121, and in 1986 there were 4536 members participating in both French and English congregations.23 The timing of the church’s public presence during a period of significant social, cultural and political evolution in Quebec would later come to be seen by historians as serendipitous. Known as La Révolution Tranquille, the Quiet Revolution was an era during which the

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omnipresent influence of the Catholic Church dramatically contracted in both public and private spheres.24 On the fortuitous timing of events and social changes, Prete, Jarvis and Jarvis assert the sweeping changes to Quebec society that accompanied the Quiet Revolution created a pliable social fabric that permitted the growth of new ideas and novel movements, religious and otherwise. This permitted the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, along with other new religions, to come out from under decades of oppression, and, building on its roots among the English-speaking population of Quebec, take hold among French Quebecers.25

Since the late 1980s, official LDS Church membership in Canada has more than doubled: Canadian membership in 2020 was 197,710 (1 in 186 Canadians are Mormon, which represents 0.054% of the population).26 Today, there are 497 individual congregations (“wards” in LDS parlance) operating across the country. Congregational ward chapels are where members engage in social and cultural activities during the week as well as participate in the more formal rituals of Sunday worship services. These rites consist of a sacrament service (the LDS equivalent of holy communion) and may include blessings of babies, baptisms, and ordination of males to the priesthood. Six Canadian missions are in operation (serving the organizational needs of the nationwide network of volunteer missionaries), as are eight temples (devoted to performance of special rituals, including LDS marriages or “temple sealings”), and 156 Family History Centers (for conducting genealogical research).27 A number of LDS members have risen to prominence in Canada. For instance, in the political realm, several LDS men have had notable careers in Canadian politics. LDS men elected to Parliament include John H. Blackmore (1935 to 1958), Solon Low (1945 to 1958), and Grant Hill (1993 to 2004). Nathan Eldon Tanner served as Speaker in the Alberta Legislature (1935) and was then appointed as Minister of Lands and Forests (1937–1950).28 Subsequently, Tanner was called and ordained as an LDS apostle (1960) and then elevated to become a long-time, influential member of the LDS Church First Presidency (1963–1982).29

Contemporary Issues Facing the LDS Church in Canada Women and Inequality University of Calgary historian David Marshall asserted in 2013 that “the landscape of Mormon historiography in Canada is virtually barren.”30 It is true that Mormon Studies as a broad academic discipline, has not yet gained significant traction among Canadian scholars. Consequently, there is a parallel dearth of information by and or about LDS women in Canada. At the time of this writing, there is not a scholarly volume devoted entirely to their experiences. LDS women’s stories, voices, and examples of activism, however, are woven

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throughout North American anthologies, articles, art shows, blog posts, dissertations, and in popular media.31 Assembled together, these accounts demonstrate a rich engagement of LDS women with a range of issues such as agency, feminism, gender, inclusion, and intersectionality. Though far from the epicentre of American LDS culture in Utah, women in Canada took part in the early days of liberal-leaning internet conversations via listservs and forums beginning in the 1980s.32 In Feller’s exploration of the rise of these online LDS spaces, he noted that women carved out their own niche groups within these virtual congregations which empowered them to be “part of a powerful feminine community safe from the threat of ecclesiastical discipline.”33 Participation thus enabled the cross-border flow of information between LDS women in the Intermountain region of the United States (with more dense LDS populations) and Canada. The cogwheels of forthright exchange about the “benevolent” LDS patriarchy, the perils of gender complementarianism, and the ecclesiastical erasure of women’s voices, were turning.34 As a natural extension to online conversations occurring beyond the disciplinary radar of LDS ward bishops and stake presidents (all-male leadership positions at the congregational and diocese levels), Canadian LDS women assembled in small, private consciousness raising groups reminiscent of gatherings held during the era of second wave feminism. Questions on the metaphorical table often revolved around navigating the gendered restrictions and expectations of women at church and home.35 Canadian scholar of law and religious diversity, Lori G. Beaman, explored this type of complex navigation in her oft-cited article “Molly Mormons, Mormon Feminists and Moderates.”36 In it, she put forth a typology of boundary negotiation gleaned from interviews, participant observation, and interactions with LDS women in southern Alberta. Her research demonstrated a “rich diversity of the different ways in which they exercise agency at multiple levels, and in diverse ways over the course of their lives.”37 Ideas birthed during subsequent years of online and in-person dialogues were later transformed into action for Canadian women, as a “resurgence” of Mormon feminism materialized in the early 2000s.38 Canadian “Mofems”39 were quick to join new, online virtual communities, which operated as decentralized, uncorrelated40 spaces with flattened hierarchies. In other words, a new generation’s participation in what some scholars deem feminism’s fourth wave,41 offered a welcome alternative (or addendum) to many women’s experience in LDS organizational life.42 Online interactions and brainstorming also begat offline activism. A number of LDS Canadian women joined in a variety of historic “actions,” even though public involvement in the renewed project of Mormon feminism (or even feminism writ large) was, and remains, a fraught endeavor.43 On the first “Wear Pants to Church Day” in 2012, Canadian Latter-day Saint women  united with an international contingent of “Mofem” sisters to challenge gendered clothing norms at worship services.44 To outsiders, a modern debate about women wearing pants anywhere may seem like a wildly anachronistic deliberation. For insiders, defying deeply embedded expectations for

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female sabbath-day attire made a bold statement in a culture that prizes obedience.45 Canadian LDS women were also among the first to post profiles in 2014 on the fledgling website Ordain Women, taking the difficult step of making public their advocacy of women’s ordination within the LDS lay priesthood structure.46 Canadian women travelled to Utah to take part in the Ordain Women efforts to attend male-only annual meetings held at Salt Lake City’s Temple Square.47 They have likewise been active in dialogue about the tradition’s unique theological belief in the “divine feminine,” or “Heavenly Mother.” Once a taboo topic for previous generations (even, if pushed “too far,” a cause for excommunication from the church), Canadian LDS women have contributed proactively to these doctrinal conversations in art and prose.48 The historic 2017 Global Women’s March was another pivotal moment for many LDS women who had never before participated in a political protest. Latter-day Saint women from Alberta, Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Quebec marched in their respective geographic regions, wearing pink knitted hats, pushing strollers, with some carrying Mormon feminist slogan posters.49 Many marched to bring awareness about gender inequality in LDS circles, or joined in one of the 26 Canadian “sister marches,” in what one woman described as “a good start for me to teach my kids how to be catalysts of change for a better world.”50 Pants and protest marches were not the only items on the equality agenda for Canadian LDS women. Representatives from the LDS Church’s Public affairs group in Montreal, Quebec have been extremely active in supporting a growing scholarly (and community) interest in Mormon Studies and feminism. Bringing prominent female academics to speak at universities and interfaith events in Montreal, these representatives coordinated several conferences with the McGill Centre for Research on Religion (CREOR), the Université de Montréal (UdeM Chaire en gestion de la diversité culturelle et religieuse), and at Concordia University. In November 2014, Emerita Professor of American Studies at Columbia University, Claudia Bushman, presented a paper entitled “Mormon Feminism: Historical and Contemporary Issues” in a workshop hosted by UdeM and McGill, during which presentation she engaged audiences in conversations about women’s ordination and other gender issues in the LDS Church.51 Three years later, Harvard Historian and Pulitzer Prize winner, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, led a discussion about her work, “Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism: Breaking down the stereotypes” at McGill in October 2017, along with a master class on historical research for the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Work Group at Concordia University.52 In these scholarly gatherings, Ulrich situated her penchant for diary studies as a way to understand change: “We don’t just want to know about wars and battles and presidents and elections and conflict. We want to know how change unfolds in the lives of ordinary people. And even more than that, we want to know how ordinary people create change.”53 Despite Quebec’s status as crossroads for the study of religion, church/state relations and religious diversity, Mormon Studies (and specifically Mormon feminism) has only recently caught the

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attention of researchers in the academic community in eastern Canada. LDS women have been active partners in fostering these intellectual connections. Though perhaps operating in the shadow of publicity bestowed on their American counterparts, LDS women in Canada are actively involved in micro, mezzo, and macro thinking about social change. They work in the interstices of academia, the blogosphere and beyond, to nourish conversations about equality, both in LDS circles and in wider communities. Canadian Scouting Robert Baden Powell’s 1908 publication of Scouting for Boys marked the beginning of a wide-reaching movement which found favor with LDS leaders in Canada, who were eager to shape the “physical and mental fitness, character and citizenship” of their youth.54 The first LDS scout troop was formed in Aetna, Alberta in 1911. This start grew into a longstanding, all-male tradition of scouting sponsored by the LDS Church which would eventually include 7000 LDS boys and young men throughout Canada.55 In 1976, the national Canadian scouting organization dropped the word “boy” from its official title and replaced it with the more inclusive appellation “Scouts Canada.” This change signalled a gradual development of allowing mixed-gender scout troops and the eventual inclusion of LGBTQ youth and leaders. Inclusivity stopped at the door of LDS Chapels in Canada, however, as girls (and gay youth or leaders) were not allowed to participate in LDS-sponsored troops and packs. As a result, some families placed their daughters in community-based or other religiously affiliated scouting groups and were thus excluded from benefits derived from the substantial financial support LDS congregations paid to Scouts Canada. Frustration with the significant imbalances between overall funding for boys’ and girls’ activities in LDS congregations prompted some women members, from 2014 to 2016, to petition local church leaders to remove gender restrictions for LDS scout troops.56 Their requests for gender parity in scouting (and funding) went unheeded. Women were vexed on several fronts by the Scouts Canada issue—ironically, they could serve as volunteer scout leaders for their sons, but their daughters could not participate. Women also righteously complained that they contributed financially to the church, including such auxiliary programs as scouting, through their tithing dollars, but were excluded, on the basis of gender, from decisions about budget allocations. In an abrupt (albeit not entirely unexpected communication), Latter-day Saint members in Canada’s National Capital region were notified in June 2016 that LDS involvement with Scouts Canada would cease.57 Later on, in May 2018, LDS Church headquarters in Salt Lake City announced that the Church was also going to cut ties with the Boy Scouts of America on the grounds its programs were not available worldwide, and because new emphasis would henceforth be placed on LDS Church-created youth programs. In December 2019, all LDS connections to scouting organizations on both sides of the border came to an end.58 There was widespread

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disappointment within LDS circles for this loss of a time-honoured and wellloved tradition. The women who made formal requests based on core values of equality and the removal of discriminatory policies blocking full participation of LDS youth, were crestfallen. The exclusion of female representation exposed, once again, the tensions inherent in gendered divisions of decision making in the LDS Church. Notwithstanding the significant financial losses incurred in the dissolution of the LDS-Scouts Canada partnership, scouting continues on as a fully inclusive movement in Canada. Organizational Finances Scholars and journalists have long been fascinated by the finances of the LDS Church, which, in addition to ten percent tithing of income donated from millions of faithful members, are also fed by stock, mutual fund, and bond market investments; real estate holdings; communications networks; shopping malls; cattle ranches; agricultural operations; and even tourist venues. 59 Commentaries and hypotheses about the vast wealth of the church are plentiful.60 The LDS Church does not make its financial records public, but it has reported giving $2.2 billion U.S. dollars in charitable support since 1985, and does issue an annual LDS Charities report, which describes its worldwide humanitarian outreach programs.61 Most recently, an exposé about LDS Church assets and revenue came in the form of a whistleblower complaint which estimated certain investments of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be worth in excess of $100 billion U.S. dollars.62 While the “shrouded” financial workings and status of the LDS Church, according to historian Johnathan Turner, certainly compel “ethical and moral questions in addition to legal ones,” much of the speculation is focused on the U.S. based corporate organization, where finances of religious organizations are not open to public scrutiny.63 Some researchers turn to country specific information resources (where requirements to publish annual tax returns are in place), in order to glean more specific information. In the Canadian context, for example, financial reports of all registered charities, including religious organizations, are a matter of public record.64 From a feminist perspective, however, what is missing from the complex, macro-level financial analyses, is how gender plays out on the ground: Payment of tithing is compulsory for faithful LDS members, but financial oversight and decision making are the exclusive domain of men. Women are not ordained priesthood holders in the LDS tradition, and holding the priesthood is a prerequisite for handling church finances. Applying a gender lens to a cursory review of official church guidelines reveals a systematic disempowerment of women in the financial realm of LDS life. On this point, well known LDS feminist blogger April Young Bennet asks Can Mormon women count money? Of course we can! But here is another question: Do LDS Church policy makers know that Mormon women can count

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money? Based on church financial policies, it does not appear that they do. Only men may collect, count, distribute or audit LDS Church funds.65

According to section 34.4.1.2 Of the LDS General Handbook “All members who have income should pay tithing.”66 Women are, therefore, under the same obligations as men to pay tithes. In terms of financial management, women can and do hold limited leadership roles in LDS congregations and, in the context of those positions, make decisions on how to spend (predetermined) budgeted funds for specific activities. Beyond this trivial exception, women are excluded from decision making involvement in all other financial matters. In reading of the “Finances and Audits” section of the General Handbook (used in all LDS congregations across the world) the only pronouns used to qualify those who have authority to handle financial matters are “he” and “his.”67 In the United States (and other countries with similar tax reporting rules) ordinary members (except for a bishop, counselor, or clerk) of a typical ward congregation are likewise not privy to the total amounts of donations received in any given year. As an important side note, the total amount of tithing collected by an individual ward in any given year is confidential, and not announced to congregations in any countries, as mandated by the General Handbook. However, for many years, Canadian members had public access to the tax returns of individual congregations and could readily see how much money was flowing into and out of their units. As an example, information retrieved from the Canada Revenue Agency’s (CRA) list of registered charities68 in 2012 shows that a single LDS ward or congregation in eastern Ontario collected “receipted donations” of $404, 657 and had a total revenue of $425, 824. Of this amount, $28,180 (7 percent) was spent on its charitable program, $1074 on management and administration, and $393,131 (93 percent) was listed under “gifts to other registered charities and qualified donees.” Unfortunately, this kind of public access is no longer available in Canada. For the past several years, only one annual tax return for the entire LDS Church in Canada may be viewed on the CRA website. In the 2018 tax year, for instance, total aggregate revenue for the entire LDS Church in Canada was listed as $186, 876, 698.00 and total expenses as $184, 805, 816.00.69 My aim in using these examples is not to offer more data points from which to estimate a fuller financial portrait; I leave this to fiscal experts. Rather, I simply wish to emphasize the obvious: LDS women are making significant financial contributions to their local congregations yet are excluded from having a voice in how these very significant sums are managed. Relatively few LDS women have spoken publicly about gender discrimination in the financial matters of the church. There are a number of plausible reasons for this absence, such as a cultural proclivity towards conflict avoidance, fear of retribution from male leaders who hold decisional power over temple recommends and callings for women, or deeply held beliefs about divinely designed gender roles (“headship” men as providers and women as nurturers or “helpmeets” in the home).70

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Nevertheless, from a Canadian perspective (where gender parity in federal government cabinets is now de rigeur),71 gender-based discrimination is an untenable state of affairs for institutions in the twenty-first century, especially those that benefit from charitable tax statuses. It remains to be seen if demands for transparency and equal access to decision making might eventually come from voices within the LDS tradition or from external pressures. Indigenous Reconciliation The final contemporary challenge for the LDS Church in Canada I wish to address concerns the national project of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. For well over 100 years, the Canadian government operated a country-­ wide residential school system which had as its main objective the assimilation of Indigenous peoples.72 The “Colonial Project” was undergirded by an unequivocal acceptance of the Doctrine of Discovery73 and carried out in concert with Christian Churches. Over several generations, the government forcibly separated Indigenous children from their families resulting in the erasure of Indigenous languages and lifeways. Abuse, neglect, and illness were pervasive conditions in the residential schools, and intergenerational trauma remains as a lasting impact of the era. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada issued 94 Calls to Action which serve as a starting point for repairing harms committed against Indigenous peoples. Four of these are action calls addressed directly to religious organizations: 48. We call upon the church parties to the Settlement agreement and all other faith groups and interfaith social justice groups in Canada who have not already done so, to formally adopt and comply with the principles, norms and standards of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as a framework for reconciliation... 49. We call upon all religious denominations and faith groups who have not already done so to repudiate concepts used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous lands and peoples, such as the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius. 59. We call upon church parties to the Settlement Agreement to develop ongoing education strategies to ensure that their respective congregations learn about their church’s role in colonization, the history and legacy of residential schools, and why apologies to former residential school students, their families, and communities were necessary. 60. We call upon leaders of the church parties to the Settlement Agreement and all other faiths, in collaboration with Indigenous spiritual leaders, Survivors, schools of theology, seminaries, and other religious training centres, to develop and teach curriculum for all student clergy, and all clergy and staff who work in Aboriginal communities, on the need to respect Indigenous spirituality in its own right, the history and legacy of residential schools and the roles of the church parties in that system, the history and legacy of religious conflict in Aboriginal

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families and communities, and the responsibility that churches have to mitigate such conflicts and prevent spiritual violence.74

TRC has called upon “all other faith groups” to join in the reconciliation process and several Canadian church groups have already issued apologies.75 In this excerpt for example, the Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Canada, Fred Hiltz, stated: My heart is heavy with the burden of our many sins against the Indigenous Peoples throughout Turtle Island. For every way in which we insulted their dignity and took their lands, silenced their languages and suppressed their culture, tore apart their families and assaulted their children, I must never weary of saying on behalf of our church, “I am sorry”…In renouncing the Doctrine of Discovery that drove colonial expansion—regarding “discovered lands” as empty lands; and treating the First Peoples of the land as savages to be conquered, civilized, and Christianized, our church described that doctrine “as fundamentally opposed to the gospel of Christ and our understanding of the inherent rights that individuals and peoples have received from God.”76

Although the LDS Church was not directly involved with the Canadian residential school system, its now defunct “pseudo-voluntary” Indian Placement Program operated under similar ideological commitments in both the U.S. and Canada.77 The program ran from the 1950s to the 1990s, and many LDS families who “fostered” Indigenous children were often motivated by deeply held beliefs that “Native Americans [were] the descendants of a civilization described in the Book of Mormon,” and “that they had a special responsibility for the welfare and conversion of all American Indian peoples.”78 This is just one example of the numerous problematic beliefs about Indigenous peoples which remain in the LDS imagination, its official manuals, and even embedded in current interpretations of its central sacred texts. Understood correctly, the Calls to Action pose a significant challenge to elements of the LDS faith’s origin story, aspects of its truth claims, and some of the objectives of its worldwide missionary program. A current LDS Church website entry titled “American Indians,”79 is an egregious example of the magnitude of changes required. Even this brief text is replete with the rhetoric of colonial violence and suggests that an apology along the order of what the Anglican Church of Canada has offered may be unlikely in the foreseeable future. Adoption of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery, educating LDS members about the history of its own Indian Placement Program, and the need to “respect Indigenous spirituality in its own right,” all call for a large-scale restorying of the Mormon movement. In their landmark anthology, Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion, Colvin and Brooks assert

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It was through the violent and exploitive mechanisms of European colonization in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries that Christianity came to the Americas, the Pacific, Africa, and Asia. Mormonism’s rise in the nineteenth century and global growth in the twentieth century also took place within the context of colonization and neo-colonization and drew from colonialist and neo-colonialist attitudes.80

Colvin and Brooks specifically reference Canada as one of the countries “where Indigenous people continue to be outnumbered and governed by Euro-­ American settler populations, [and] where decolonization movements are active as Indigenous communities uproot harmful ideas about the inferiority of Indigenous peoples sown in them by colonialism.”81 Since the 2015 release of the TRC report, the LDS Church in Canada acknowledged, through its Public Affairs councils, the pressing need to foster awareness about reconciliation and the Calls to Action. In conjunction with interfaith groups, the church has hosted a number of cultural events and academic lectures featuring Indigenous community leaders and scholars.82 These initiatives have included talks by John Borrows, who is the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Law at the University of Victoria, and Anishinaabe/Ojibway, a member of the Chippewa of the Nawash First Nation (Ontario), and also a member of the LDS Church.83 Borrows has been a key figure in the Church’s outreach, and his work has brought much needed clarity to LDS and interfaith audiences about the reconciliation process. What remains to be seen is how the LDS Church in Canada may specifically address some of the more harmful thoughts and practices which touch directly upon the faith’s doctrinal core. LDS Anthropologist Thomas Murphy further argues that “Mormonism presents a complex case for decolonization.”84 For Murphy, the most urgent and difficult initial step onto the path of decolonization will entail a tectonic shift in LDS thought and practice on the issue of “truth.” He points to “the dangerous obsession Latter-day Saints have with our own truth claims” and emphasizes that “decolonization necessarily de-centers and unravels universal truth claims.”85 This, of course, is a thorny proposition for a tradition that understands itself to be—and continues to reinforce the notion of—its status as “the one true church.” In his enumeration of the necessary phases of decolonizing work, Murphy also specifies how literal interpretations of the Book of Mormon are an impediment to intellectual, theological, and spiritual progress and how the aims of the worldwide LDS missionary program must be reconsidered in a post-colonial era. Herein lie his core challenges for change in the LDS tradition: To claim the Book of Mormon is a history of the Americas is a breach of civility and an act of cultural violence that seeks to displace Indigenous histories with a colonial one. In a decolonized Mormonism, there would be no more efforts to displace indigenous narratives with colonial stories that privilege whiteness. Instead, the value of Mormonism, like that of tribal religions, would come from

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the questions we ask, the ways that we ask them, and the relationships we build. The sharing of stories would replace evangelisation and conversion.86

Institutional LDS involvement in reconciliation projects in Canada is nascent and still unfamiliar to many members who live on Turtle Island (i.e., the North American continent).87 Those who are already deeply engaged in the work, however, know that stories hold the power to transform, shift, and deepen new understandings. Perhaps when the origin stories of Eve, Adam and the Garden of Eden are recounted alongside (and on par with) those of Skywoman, Skyworld, Raven, or Wolverine in Canadian LDS meeting houses and homes, the work of reconciliation will have made significant leaps forward. 88

Conclusion: Disenchantment, Disaffiliation, and Decline in Canada This chapter has outlined the story of the LDS Church in Canada from the time the tradition’s earliest acolytes made their way across the American Canadian border to the establishment of congregations from east to west and the rise of LDS representation in national politics. Missionary-driven growth during the mid-twentieth century combined with an increased public presence in the religiously diverse national landscape, laid the foundation for the church to eventually occupy a position of recognition as a Christian (or “Christian-­ adjacent”) institution in the Canadian social imagination. Subsequently, the advent of online Latter-day Saint women’s discussion groups operated as a driving force in reshaping religious thought on the liberal fringes of the conservative-­ leaning LDS Church population. These virtual conversations, (unfettered by fear of institutional discipline) fostered a burgeoning LDS feminist movement which later manifested in online and in-person, cross-border activism. LDS women in Canada have been particularly active in the push for greater equality on a number of fronts; though their numbers are small, their participation alongside others in the “resurgent” Mormon feminist movement, has been remarkable. Perhaps their grass-roots efforts will help to hasten full spiritual empowerment (women’s ordination) and an equal voice in the (hopefully more transparent) financial management of the religious institution (to which they devote time, talent, and monetary support). At a time when the nation is coming to terms with the harms of its colonial legacy, the LDS Church in Canada has made many preliminary public steps to address reconciliation, giving reason to hope such education efforts in congregations across the country will continue. In her recent book The Next Mormons: How Millennials are Changing the LDS Church, noted scholar and journalist Jana Riess, offers a comprehensive portrait of possible trajectories for the church in terms of belief, activity, and member retention rates. Millennials, it seems, may be leading the way towards an entirely different kind of Mormonism, wherein certain doctrinal beliefs are

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shifting (or diminishing), rejection of gender discrimination is growing, and openness towards marriage equality and full inclusion of LGBTQ members is moving towards becoming the norm.89 Her analysis of generational changes with regard to “traditional Christian beliefs” (e.g., belief in a literal resurrection and Jesus as “Saviour,” among others), shows a “notable drop in certainty on every theological measure.”90 Even with possible increases due to “life cycle effect,” Riess asserts “the trend is nonetheless striking.”91 The Next Mormons study was based on data from members in the United States, however results from its conclusions are clearly germane to conversations about the LDS Church in Canada.92 I suggest that Riess’ findings may portend a future scenario similar to what scholars Clarke and MacDonald have projected in the Canadian context. In Leaving Christianity: Changing Allegiances in Canada since 1945, the authors draw on data from the Canadian Census (which asked questions about religion in every decade from 1871 to 2011), the National Household Survey, and other surveys conducted by Statistics Canada. They contend the data reveal a story of profound religious change, one in which many Canadians are leaving Christianity. The growing incidence of Canadians identifying themselves in the Census as having No Religion is but one indication of this shift, one that, as we will discover, understates the depth and extent of this trend … Our message, then, is quite straightforward. Decline in Christian affiliation, membership, and participation started in the 1960s and has picked up pace rapidly since then. This trend is likely to continue and, indeed, accelerate as an increasing portion of the country’s population  – among youth especially  – have never been exposed to Christianity. Moreover, disaffiliation is now occurring among older segments of the population. In short, Canadian society is entering into a new era, a post-Christian era.”93

The LDS Church in Canada is certainly not in a post-Mormon era, but there are indications which suggest disaffiliation among members, may over time, produce a generation of youth with little to no religious memory. The 2013 institutional release of successive “Gospel Topics Essays” which addressed many contentious topics in LDS doctrine and history, were, ironically, for many Canadians the beginning of the end for their congregational participation.94 The transition was abrupt for some families, who had baptized older children but subsequently opted out of this fundamental, traditional ritual for younger children due to growing disbelief.95 In his ethnographic work on religious disenchantment entitled Disenchanted Lives: Apostacy and Ex-Mormonism among the Latter-day Saints, E. Marshall Brooks argues that the LDS Church’s own sponsored Gospel Topics Essays “have collectively contributed to if not directly caused [a] rash of apostacy” in recent years.96 Another major tipping point for many Canadian Latter-day Saints occurred in 2015. Five months after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in June, 2015, the LDS Church declared that members in same-sex

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marriages would be disciplined, and their children would be refused LDS religious rites, such as blessings and baptisms. Canadians were flummoxed when a high-ranking church official said the reasoning stemmed from “a desire to protect children in their innocence and their minority years,” and that “we don’t want the child to have to deal with issues that might arise when parents feel one way and the expectations of the church are very different.”97 A full decade earlier, the Canadian Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2005, with no church policy announcement about “protecting” Canadian children. It was a threshold moment for many Canadian Latter-day Saints, who were already questioning their religious commitments. They had doubts about the new same-sex marriage policy as “inspiration” and instead saw it as yet another institutional pushback against the evolution of new understandings about gender and sexuality.98 Although the LDS Church reversed course on the exclusion policy a mere four years later, many members in Canada did not return to activity.99 Evidently, there is much more to the story of the LDS Church in Canada happening on the ground, outside the realm of official statistics. More research—qualitative as well as quantitative—is needed in order to understand the dynamics at play in patterns of growth, retention, disaffiliation and decline. Notwithstanding the lack of indisputable empirical evidence, the signs of fraying along the edges of the Canadian LDS patchwork quilt are beginning to show.

Notes 1. This chapter is focused on the establishment and contemporary manifestation, in Canada, of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or that particular group who followed its second president, Brigham Young, to Utah. Bringhurst and Hamer (2007), offer a comprehensive historical review of the fragmentation and schisms of the “Latter Day Saint movement” which produced more than 400 discrete religious communities. Some of these groups, including the Community of Christ (formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints or RLDS), established themselves in Canada in the middle of the nineteenth century. See Bringhurst Newell G. and Hamer, John C. (Eds.), Scattering of the Saints: Schism within Mormonism, (Independence: John Whitmer Books, 2007). 2. Uncertainty persists regarding the exact location of the LDS Church’s original incorporation. Details may be found here: https://www.churchofjesuschrist. org/study/ensign/1989/02/fayette-the-place-the-church-wasorganized?lang=eng. 3. These proselyting forays into Canada are described by Richard E. Bennett in, “Plucking not Planting” Mormonism in Eastern Canada.” In The Mormon Presence in Canada, ed. Brigham Young Card et al (Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 1990), 19. From the Joseph Smith Papers Project we learn that the town of Kingston (present-day Ontario, Canada) was a center “for the editing, publishing, and selling of books” and a focus of Joseph Smith to secure a

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copyright for the Book of Mormon. See https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/ paper-summary/revelation-circa-early-1830/1#full-transcript. 4. “Revelation, circa Early 1830.” The Joseph Smith Papers. Salt Lake City: The Church Historian’s Press, 1830. Retrieved from https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/revelation-circa-early-1830/1#full-transcript 5. “Revelation, circa Early 1830.” The Joseph Smith Papers. 6. “History of the Church in Canada.” (n.d.). 7. Bennett, “Plucking not Planting” Mormonism in Eastern Canada,” 24. 8. “Charles Ora Card, 1839–1906,” Alberta Settlement, accessed December 28, 2019. https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/eppp-archive/100/200/301/ic/ can_digital_collections/ pasttopresent/settlement/aa_Charles_Ora_Card.html. 9. The Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) offers an integrated timeline of Mormonism, including photos of original documents from the Edmunds-­ Tucker Era. http://www.thearda.com/timeline/events/event_136.asp 10. “Charles Ora Card, 1839–1906.” 11. Ibid. 12. See Maureen Ursenbach Beecher for an illuminating account of the gendered experiences of early prairie life. “Mormon Women in Southern Alberta: The Pioneer Years” in Card, Brigham Y.; Northcott, Hebert C.; Foster, John E.; Palmer, Howard and George K. Jarvis, eds. The Mormon Presence in Canada. Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 1990: 211–230. 13. Lee, Lawrence B. “The Mormons Come to Canada, 1887–1902,” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 59, no. 1 (1968): 11–22. 14. “The new Mormon community enjoyed the support of the federal government in Ottawa on the condition that the practice of polygamy be discontinued. In 1888 Mormon leaders, including Card himself, traveled east to Ottawa to seek permission to bring their plural families to Canada, but their request was denied. In 1890, the Mormon Church officially abandoned polygamy and tensions were eased somewhat for the new Mormon community,” https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/eppp-archive/100/200/301/ic/can_digital_collections/pasttopresent/settlement/aa_Charles_Ora_Card.html. 15. 15 Cardston, Alberta Temple. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/temples/ details/cardston-alberta-temple?lang=eng. 16. Roy A. Prete and Prete, Carma T. Canadian Mormons: History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Canada. (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2017): 7–9. 17. Prete and Prete, Canadian Mormons, 2017. 18. Dean R.  Louder, “Canadian Mormon Identity and the French Fact1” In The Mormon Presence in Canada, edited by Brigham Y. Card; Northcott, Hebert C.; Foster, John E.; Palmer, Howard and George K. Jarvis, 302–307. Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press. 309. Louder also emphasizes, “It is important to note that not until 1981 did Statistics Canada differentiate between the Salt Lake City based Latter-day Saints and members of the Independence, Missouri based Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the most important of the schismatic groups which evolved following the martyrdom of Mormon founder, Joseph Smith.” Louder, Dean R. “Canadian Mormons in Their North American Context: A Portrait.” Social Compass 40, no. 2 (1993): 272.

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19. Roy A. Prete, Jarvis, Eric G. and Jarvis, Jonathan, “The Linguistic and Ethnic Transformation of the Church in Quebec since the Mid-1960s,” Journal of Mormon History 43, no. 4 (October 2017): 163–164. 20. Translated by the author from the original French : « Parmi les manifestations musicales du Festival mondial, le célèbre Mormon Tabernacle Choir a donné un concert au théâtre Maisonneuve devant une salle comble qui l’a longuement ovationné. » Jour 117, Mardi 22 août 1967 http://archivesdemontreal. com/2017/08/04/expo-67-au-jour-le-jour-aout/ 21. Prete and Prete, Canadian Mormons, 421–423. 22. Louder, 307. 23. Ibid, 309. 24. Gauvreau, Michael., The Catholic origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2005). 25. Prete, Jarvis and Jarvis, “The Linguistic and Ethnic Transformation,” 165–166. As of 2020, there were 12,436 members and 35 congregations in Quebec. See “Quebec,” https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/facts-and-statistics/ province/quebec. 26. “Facts and Statistics: Canada,” Retrieved January 2020, https://newsroom. churchofjesuschrist.org/facts-and-statistics/country/canada 27. “Facts and Statistics: Canada,” Retrieved January 2020. 28. David Elton, Political behavior of Mormons in Canada. 266–271. See also, Country Information: Canada, accessed January 30, 2020, https://www.thechurchnews.com/archives/ 2010-01-28/country-information-canada-67402. 29. Prete and Prete, 2017. 30. David B. Marshall, “The Latter-day Saints, the Doughnut, and Post-Christian Canada.” Journal of Mormon History 39 (Spring 2013): 35–77. 31. Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, one of the foremost female voices in LDS scholarship is Canadian. Born in Calgary, Alberta in 1935, Ursenbach Beecher is a well-known writer on women and Mormonism. She was a historian for the LDS Church and professor at LDS-owned Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Her books about notable women in early LDS history and her edited volume, Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective are foundational to the cannon of writings about LDS women’s experience. 32. Feller’s (2018) article, “Communing with compromise: Mormonism and the early internet,” offers a comprehensive account of LDS internet forums. Women, in particular, found the new technology empowering. “A group of Mormon women particularly put off by, as one user put it, the “extreme hostility” they experienced from men on platforms like MORMON-L, created the Electronic Women’s Caucus (ELWC) listserv as an alternative gathering space. As “the only ward in the church that is led by mostly women,” ELWC gave its participants “a place to say what is sometimes difficult in a ward setting.” Lynn Mathews Anderson, the listserv’s creator, said the “virtual ward” reproduced “what goes on in the hallways [of an LDS Church]. 68 33. Feller, “Communing with compromise,” 68. 34. Albertan Arta Johnson, for example, has written about the complicated interplay of past and present tensions around polygamy in LDS history and theology. She affirms “I should begin by stating that I identify myself as a mainstream Mormon feminist. When the accent of that phrase is on ‘mainstream,’ people situate me alongside those Mormons who deny that they are associated with any

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of the modern iterations of polygamy. When the accent is on ‘feminist,’ I am placed with a different group of Mormons, those once seen by the mainstream church as among its three prime enemies—feminists, intellectuals, and the gay community” (2014: 89). 35. A small LDS consciousness raising group in Ottawa, Ontario, for example, arranged a private screening of the documentary Where We Stand and hosted a live Skype discussion with film director Kristine Stolakis (2015) Paper Bridge Films. https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/511433/ female-priesthood-mormon-church/. 36. Beaman, Lori G. “Molly Mormons, Mormon Feminists and Moderates: Religious Diversity and the Latter-day Saints Church.” Sociology of Religion, 62, no.1 (2001): 84. 37. Ibid. 38. Brooks, Joanna, Rachel Hunt Steenblik and Hannah Wheelwright. Mormon Feminism: Essential Writings, (New York: Oxford University Press). See also, Finnegan, Jessica and Nancy Ross. “I’m a Mormon Feminist”: How Social Media Revitalized a Movement, Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion, 9, no. 12 (2013): 1–25. 39. The portmanteau “Mofem,” from the combination of “Mormon” and “feminist,” is widely used on LDS blogs and websites. 40. The term “correlation” has a precise meaning within the LDS tradition. Brooks, Steenblik and Wheelwright explain: “An LDS Church initiative known as ‘Priesthood Correlation,’ first launched in 1908, had over the course of the twentieth century brought all Church operations under the bureaucratic management of exclusively male priesthood offices…The limiting effects of correlation were compounded by the gendered side effects of Mormonism’s efforts to assimilate within the American mainstream” (2016: 11). 41. Munro argues “the existence of a feminist ‘fourth wave’ has been challenged by those who maintain that increased usage of the internet is not enough to delineate a new era. But it is increasingly clear that the internet has facilitated the creation of a global community of feminists who use the internet both for discussion and activism.” Munro, Alasdair, “Feminism: A Fourth Wave?” Political Insight, 4 no. 2 (August 2013) 22–25. 42. Canadian contributions to blogs were part of the “Mormon feminist resurgence.” See, for example, the story of one woman’s imagined scenario about baptizing her own daughter: https://ordainwomen.org/baptismmissionary/. 43. Canadian women described a range of institutional sanctions experienced once local leaders knew of their involvement in Mormon feminist actions. Removal or exclusion from “callings” (service opportunities) and possible denial of temple recommends (needed for access to the highest rituals of LDS practice) were commonplace. Personal correspondence with the author, April 10, 2014. 44. Canadian women who wore pants during the historic action (including some men and boys who wore purple shirts or ties in solidarity) donated their clothing to the “Pants Quilt” project. The quilt “Sunday Morning,” graces the cover of the landmark volume Mormon Feminism: Essential Writings, by Brooks, Steenblik and Wheelwright, xi. 45. Glionna, John M. “Mormon feminists tout ‘Wear Pants to Church Day’: fury ensues,” Los Angeles Times, (Dec. 14, 2012). https://www.latimes.com/

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nation/la-xpm-2012-dec-14-la-na-nn-mormon-women-pants-facebook20121214-story.html. 46. Ordain Women International, https://ordainwomen.org/ow-international/. See also, “Baptism: A Returned Missionary’s Story 2015,” Ordain Women, https://ordainwomen.org/ baptismmissionary/. 47. Dobner, Jennifer. “Mormon women, seeking wider role, denied entrance to allmale priesthood meeting,” Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usamormon-women/mormon-women-seeking-wider-role-denied-entranceto-all-male-priesthood-meeting-idUSBREA340O720140406; see also, Wheelwright, Hannah. “This is not for you.” Young Mormon Feminists, https:// youngmormonfeminists.org/2014/04/08/this-is-not-for-you/. 48. Caron, Avril. “Heavenly Mother,” acrylic on canvas, Segullah, 2019, https:// segullah.org/journal/2019-visual-arts-contest-winners/. See also, Thompson, Janine. “Celebrating Mother’s Day Across Canada,” Ottawa LDS Newsroom, (May12,2017). https://news-ca.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/celebrating-mother-sday-across-canada. 49. “Mormon Women March,” (2017), The Exponent https://www.the-exponent. com/mormon-women-march/. 50. Evans, Alanna. “Why I’m Marching”: 32 Women on the Women’s March. Flare. (January 19, 2017).https://www.flare.com/tv-movies/womens-marchwhy-im-marching/#gallery/why-i-march/slide-26. 51. “Dr. Claudia L. Bushman, conférencière invitée à la Chaire. Chaire en gestion de la diversité culturelle et religieuse,” Université de Montréal, http://www. gdcr.umontreal.ca/evenements /2014/index.html. See also, “Mormon Academics Speak at McGill University,” (December 6, 2014), https://news-ca. churchofjesuschrist.org/article/mormon-academics-speak-at-mcgill-university. 52. “Professor Laurel Ulrich—Digging into Diaries,” Concordia University News. http://www.concordia.ca/cunews/artsci/religionscultures/2017/10/digging_into_diaries_Oct27.html. 53. “Digging into diaries: A conversation between Catherine Jarvis and Laurel Ulrich discussing Mormon Women in the 19th century.” Canada Public Affairs, (Nov. 3, 2017). https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=kn0V hnWdrck&feature=emb_title 54. “Scouting in Canada,” Church of Jesus Christ, accessed January 24, 2020. https://news-ca.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/scouting-in-canada. 55. Jason Herring, “Scouts lose around 2,400 members in Alberta as Mormon Church ends ties,” Calgary Herald (Calgary, AB), Dec. 27, 2019. 56. Personal correspondence with the author, December 22, 2014. 57. Personal correspondence with the author, July 12, 2016. 58. Herring, Scouts lose. 59. Michael D. Quinn. The Mormon Hierarchy: Wealth and Corporate Power, (Salt Lake City, Signature Books, 2017). 60. The Mormon Global Business Empire. Bloomberg (July 12, 2012), https:// w w w. b l o o m b e r g . c o m / n e w s / p h o t o - e s s a y s / 2 0 1 2 - 0 7 - 1 2 / the-mormon-global-business-empire. 61. The 2018 LDS Charities Report is available here: https://www.latterdaysaintcharities.org/bc/content/ldscharities/annual-report/2018/ LDS_ Charities_2018_English.pdf?lang=eng. See also, Weaver, Sara Jane. “2018 LDS Charities Annual Report Shows the ‘Brotherly Kindness’ of Tens of Thousands.”

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Church News. (March 4, 2019). https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church/ news/2018-lds-charities-annual-report-shows-the-brotherly-kindness-of-tensof-thousands?lang=eng. 62. Swaine, Jon; MacMillan, Douglas and Boorstein, Michelle. “Mormon Church has misled members on $100 billion tax-exempt investment fund, whistleblower alleges.” The Washington Post, (December 17, 2019). https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/mormon-church-has-misled-members-on100-billion-tax-exempt-investment-fund-whistleblower-alleges/2019/12/16/ e3619bd2-2004-11ea-86f3-3b5019d451db_story.html. 63. John Turner, “Mormons and money: An Unorthodox and Messy History of Church Finances,” The Conversation. December 20, 2019. https:// theconversation.com/mormons-and-money-an-unorthodox-and-messyhistory-of-church-finances-129132. 64. Based on publicly available data, Cragun estimated annual LDS tithing revenues in 2012 to be upwards of $7 billion. See Henderson, Peter. “Insight: Mormon church made wealthy by donations.” Reuters. (August 12, 2012). https:// www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-politics-mormons/insight-mormon-churchmade-wealthy-by-donations-idUSBRE87B05W20120812. 65. Bennett Young, April. Can Mormon Women Count Money? The Exponent II https://www.the-exponent.com/can-mormon-women-count-money/. 66. The LDS General Handbook indicates only missionaries and members who are supported by church welfare are exempted from the obligation to pay tithing, h t t p s : / / w w w. c h u r c h o f j e s u s c h r i s t . o r g / s t u d y / m a n u a l / g e n e r a l handbook/34-finances-and-audits?lang=eng#title_number2. 67. Further research is needed to examine how the exclusion of women from the financial management of a charity to which they donate money, may contravene equality regulations which govern registered Canadian charities or human rights frameworks which guide their work. 68. A “Quick View” search for The Church of Jesus Christ in Canada on the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) website shows the last four years of tax returns for this single, aggregate taxpayer registration number 826344632 RR 0001. In prior years, tax returns for individual congregations could be viewed. The CRA indicates these registration numbers were voluntary revoked by the LDS Church, https://apps.cra-arc.gc.ca/ebci/hacc/srch/pub/dsplyRprtngPrd?q.srchNm= Church+of+Jesus+Christ+of+Latter+Day+Saints&q.stts=0007&selectedCharit yBn=826344632RR0001&dsrdPg=1. 69. All publicly available details for the 2018 tax return of the LDS Church in Canada are listed in the appendix. 70. Natasha Frost, “Mormon women are caught between economic pressures and the word of God.” Quartz, (December 31, 2019). https://qz.com/1778333/ the-brigham-young-university-wage-gap-tells-the-stor y-of-mormonfeminism/. 71. Rouillard, Carol-Ann and Lalancette, Mirelle. “Trudeau’s new cabinet: Gender parity because it’s 2019? Or due to competence?” The Conversation. (November 10, 2019). https://theconversation.com/trudeaus-new-cabinet-gender-paritybecause-its-2019-or-due-to-competence-126646. 72. See “About the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.” National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. http://nctr.ca/about-new.php

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73. According to the Assembly of First Nations “the Doctrine of Discovery emanates from a series of Papal Bulls (formal statements from the Pope) and extensions, originating in the 1400s. Discovery was used as legal and moral justification for colonial dispossession of sovereign Indigenous Nations, including First Nations in what is now Canada. During the European ‘Age of Discovery’, Christian explorers ‘claimed’ lands for their monarchs who felt they could exploit the land, regardless of the original inhabitants.” “Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery,” Assembly of First Nations, (January, 2018): 2. 74. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action. Winnipeg: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015: 5–7. http://nctr.ca/ assets/reports/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf. 75. Kairos Canada, an organization run by the United Church of Canada, maintains a list of responses to the TRC from churches in Canada. See list here: https:// www.kair oscanada.org/what-we-do/indigenous-rights/chur chesresponse-call-action-48. 76. Hiltz, Fred. “Let our “yes” be yes.” The Anglican Church of Canada. https:// www.anglican.ca/news/let-yes-yes/30015309/. 77. Kevin Snow, Fear and Loathing in Lamanite Territory: Lessons from Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to the Mormon Indian Placement Program and Beyond,” Indigenous Policy Journal, XXVIII, no 3 (Winter, 2018). 78. Brandon Morgan, “Educating the Lamanites: A Brief History of the LDS Indian Student Placement Program,” Journal of Mormon History 35. No. 4 (Fall, 2009): 191–217. 79. “American Indians.” https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/ topics/american-indians?lang=eng. 80. Colvin, Gina and Joanna Brooks. (Eds). Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Post-Colonial Zion. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2018): 7. 81. Colvin and Brooks, Decolonizing Mormonism, 7–8. 82. Mormons Seek Truth and Reconciliation Through First Nations Events. Canada Newsroom. (June 20, 2017). https://news-ca.churchofjesuschrist.org/ article/mormons-seek-truth-and-reconciliation-through-first-nations-events. 83. Borrows is a preeminent legal scholar who co-organized the launch of the first ever Common Law and Indigenous Law Orders degree program (JD/JID) at the University of Victoria in 2018. https://www.uvic.ca/law/about/indigenous/jid/index.php. See also, Religion and Reconciliation—Focus of CMHR Lecture, https://news-ca.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/religion-and-reconci liation%2D%2Dmdash%2D%2Dfocus-of-cmhr-lecture?imageView=7%2D%2DCMHR.jpg. 84. Murphy, Thomas. “Decolonization on the Salish Sea: A Tribal Journey back to Mormon Studies.” In Colvin, Gina and Brooks, Joanna, (Eds). Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Post-Colonial Zion. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2018, 47–66. 85. Murphy, “Decolonization on the Salish Sea,” 53. 86. Murphy, 55. 87. In this McGill Law Journal article “Heroes, Tricksters, Monsters and Caretakers: Indigenous Law and Legal Education,” legal scholar John Borrows discusses the symbol of the turtle and genesis of the term “Turtle Island” in the Anishinaabe creation story: “In the creation cycle, Gizhe-manidoo is a pre-­ eminent hero who set in motion the systems that regulate our lives. The turtle

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who gave his back to house the Earth and the muskrat who sacrificed himself to bring up soil to lodge on the turtle’s back are also Anishinaabe heroes” (2016: 828). 88. See Robinson, Amanda. “Turtle Island.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. https:// www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/turtle-island. 89. Jana Riess, The Next Mormons: How Millennials are Changing the LDS Church, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 90. Jana Riess, The Next Mormons, 2016: 16–17. 91. Ibid., 17–18. 92. “The Next Mormons Survey.” The Next Mormons, 2016. https://thenextmormons.org. 93. Clarke, Brian and Stuart MacDonald, Leaving Christianity: Changing Allegiances in Canada since 1945. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017): 11. 94. E. Marshall Brooks, Disenchanted Lives: Apostacy and Ex-Mormonism among the Latter-day Saints, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018): 218. 95. Personal correspondence with the author, 2013–2015. 96. Personal correspondence with the author, 2016. 97. “Elder Christofferson Provides Context on Handbook Changes Affecting SameSex Marriages,” Church Newsroom, Nov. 6, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v= iEEMyc6aZms. See also, David Lindsay LDS Policy on Same Sex Couples was a Revelation from God. KUTV January 10, 2016. https://kutv. com/news/local/lds-apostle-policy-on-same-sex-couples-revelation-from-god. 98. The book Gay Rights and the Mormon Church: Intended Actions, Unintended Consequences by Gregory A. Prince, had already started to circulate among LDS Canadians, bringing new information about the history of the Church’s involvement in anti-LGBTQ legislation. 99. According to Elizabeth Dias “the decision rolled back a 2015 rule that had ripped congregations apart by declaring that church members in same-sex marriages were apostates and subject to excommunication, and that children of same-­sex couples were banned from rituals like baptisms and baby-naming ceremonies.” Mormon Church to Allow Children of L.G.B.T.  Parents to Be Baptized, New York Times, April 4, 2019.

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Frost, Natasha. 2019. Mormon Women Are Caught Between Economic Pressures and the Word of God. Quartz, December 31. https://qz.com/1778333/ the-brigham-young-university-wage-gap-tells-the-story-of-mormon-feminism/. Gauvreau, Michael. 2005. The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. General Handbook: Serving in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https:// www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/general-handbook?lang=eng. Glionna, John M. 2012. Mormon Feminists Tout “Wear Pants to Church Day”: fury ensues. Los Angeles Times. (Dec. 14). https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-xpm2012-dec-14-la-na-nn-mormon-women-pants-facebook-20121214-story.html. Herring, Jason. 2019. Scouts lose around 2,400 members in Alberta as Mormon Church ends ties, Calgary Herald (Calgary, Alberta), Dec. 27. Hiltz, Fred. 2016. Let Our “Yes” Be Yes. The Anglican Church of Canada, March 19. https://www.anglican.ca/news/let-yes-yes/30015309/. History of the Church in Canada. n.d.. Retrieved from https://ca.churchofjesuschrist. org/history-of-the-church-in-canada. Jarvis, Catherine. 2017. A Conversation between Catherine Jarvis and Laurel Ulrich discussing Mormon Women in the 19th century. Digging into Diaries. Canada Public Affairs. November 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=kn0 VhnWdrck&feature=emb_title. Johnson, Arta B. 2014. Are They Not Us? A Personal Reflection on Polygamy. In Polygamy’s Rights and Wrongs: Perspectives on Harm, Family and Law, ed. Gillian Calder and G. Beaman Lori, 89–96. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Kairos Canada. Churches Response to Call to Action #48. https://www.kairoscanada. org/what-we-do/indigenous-rights/churches-response-call-action-48. Lee, Lawrence B. 1968. The Mormons Come to Canada, 1887–1902. The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 59 (1): 11–22. Louder, Dean R. 1990. Canadian Mormon Identity and the French Fact1. In The Mormon Presence in Canada, ed. Brigham Y.  Card, Hebert C.  Northcott, John E.  Foster, Howard Palmer, and George K.  Jarvis, 302–307. Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press. ———. 1993. Canadian Mormons in Their North American Context: A Portrait. Social Compass 40 (2): 271–290. Marshall, David B. 2013. The Latter-day Saints, the Doughnut, and Post-Christian Canada. Journal of Mormon History 39: 35–77. Mormon Women March. 2017, January 25. Exponent II. [Blog Post]. https://www. the-exponent.com/mormon-women-march/. Morgan, Brandon. 2009. Educating the Lamanites: A Brief History of the LDS Indian Student Placement Program. Journal of Mormon History 35 (4): 191–217. Moulton, Kristen. 2014. Some Women Get into Mormon Priesthood Session. The Salt Lake Tribune (Salt Lake City, UT), Oct. 6. https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?i d=58487302&itype=CMSID. Murphy, Thomas. 2018. Decolonization on the Salish Sea: A Tribal Journey back to Mormon Studies. In Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Post-Colonial Zion, ed. Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks, 47–66. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. University of Manitoba. http://nctr.ca/ about-new.php. Oliver Cowdery and Hiram Page’s Journey to Upper Canada. 1830. The Joseph Smith Papers. Salt Lake City: The Church Historian’s Press. Retrieved from

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https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/event/oliver-cowdery-and-hiram-pagesjourney-to-upper-canada?highlight=Canada. Prete, Roy A., and Carma T. Prete. 2017. Canadian Mormons: History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Canada. Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University. Prince, Gregory A. 2019. Gay Rights and the Mormon Church: Intended Actions, Unintended Consequences. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Reiss, Jana. 2019. The Next Mormons: How Millennials are Changing the LDS Church. New York: Oxford University Press. “Revelation, circa Early 1830.” The Joseph Smith Papers. Salt Lake City: The Church Historian’s Press, 1830. Retrieved from https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/ paper-summary/revelation-circa-early-1830/1#full-transcript. Robinson, Amanda. 2018. Turtle Island. The Canadian Encyclopedia, November 6. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/turtle-island. “Scouting in Canada.” Church of Jesus Christ. https://news-ca.churchofjesuschrist. org/article/scouting-in-canada. Accessed 24 Jan 2020. Snow, Kevin. 2018. Fear and Loathing in Lamanite Territory: Lessons from Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to the Mormon Indian Placement Program and Beyond. Indigenous Policy Journal XXVIII (3). “The Next Mormons Survey.” The Next Mormons. 2016. https://thenextmormons.org. “Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action.” (Winnipeg, MB: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015). Retrieved from http:// nctr.ca/assets/reports/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf. Turner, John. 2019. Mormons and Money: An Unorthodox and Messy History of Church Finances, The Conversation. December 20. https://theconversation.com/ mormons-and-money-an-unorthodox-and-messy-histor y-of-churchfinances-129132. Ursenbach Beecher, Maureen. 1990. Mormon Women in Southern Alberta: The Pioneer Years. In The Mormon Presence in Canada, ed. Brigham Y.  Card, Hebert C.  Northcott, John E.  Foster, Howard Palmer, and George K.  Jarvis, 211–230. Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press. Ursenbach Beecher, Maureen, and Lavina Fielding Anderson, eds. 1992. Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Weaver, Sara Jane. 2019. 2018 LDS Charities Annual Report Shows the ‘Brotherly Kindness’ of Tens of Thousands. Church News, March 4. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church/news/2018-lds-charities-annual-report-shows-the-brotherlykindness-of-tens-of-thousands?lang=eng. Wheelwright, Hannah. 2014. This Is Not for You. Young Mormon Feminists, April 8. https://youngmormonfeminists.org/2014/04/08/this-is-not-for-you/.

CHAPTER 13

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mexico Rex Eugene Cooper and Moroni Spencer Hernández de Olarte

Early Development of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mexico The Establishment of an LDS Presence in Mexico The growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) in Mexico may be seen as one example, perhaps somewhat specialized, of the expansion of non-Catholic Christianity that has transpired in Latin America in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Three events that occurred in the closing decades of the nineteenth century may be regarded as the chief formative factors leading to the establishment of the LDS Church in Mexico. First, in 1874, selections from the Book of Mormon (the LDS Church’s foundational scripture) were published in Spanish. This was followed in 1886 by the publication of the complete text. Second, in 1879, the LDS Church established a proselyting mission with headquarters in Mexico City. And third,

Dr. Cooper (retired Research and Information Division, Correlation Department, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) authored the sections of this chapter that examine growth and issues connected with the Modern LDS Church in Mexico since World War II. Professor Hernández de Olarte authored the sections of this chapter that treat the early history of the LDS Church in Mexico up until World War II. R. E. Cooper (*) Independent Scholar, Salt Lake City, UT, USA M. S. H. de Olarte Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, Cuernavaca, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_13

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beginning in 1885, the LDS Church established nine settlements (generally referred to among Latter-day Saints as “the Mormon colonies”) in northern Mexico to which some 4000 church members subsequently migrated from the United States.1 These Anglo colonies were extremely instrumental in providing leadership and manpower for LDS Church work among ethnic Mexicans. It is this second group (i.e., ethnic Mexicans) that is the focus of this chapter. The Beginning of Proselyting Efforts in Mexico City. In November 1879, LDS Apostle Moses Thatcher and missionaries James Z. Stewart and Melitón González Trejo arrived in Mexico City to form what became known as the Mexican Mission. Following some initial proselyting efforts, Thatcher organized a branch in Mexico City, the first branch of the LDS Church in the center of the country.2 Despite the missionaries’ enthusiasm, difficulties soon arose in the newly formed little branch, including defections of recently converted members and lack of further proselytizing success. Undoubtedly, one of the factors that contributed most to these difficulties was the negative representation of Mormons in Mexican newspapers. For instance, on January 11, 1880, El Monitor Republicano published the opinion of Enrique Chavarri,3 who wrote: Plurality of women is not a rare crime among us, but it would be fearful, above all for the beautiful sex, to have here, very close by, almost another society, where crime was allowed and where a man, despised by some ill-matched love, could go and take revenge by having several wives. … From this point of view, I consider the approximation of that great tribe [Mormons] to be dangerous for women.4

To ease criticism, Apostle Thatcher and his missionary companions visited several newspaper offices. This seemed to help ease criticism. For example, they met with Enrique Chavarri (El Monitor Repulicano), author of the critical piece cited above, with whom they chatted for more than an hour. In his January 18 column, Chavarri stated: A few days ago we had the opportunity to talk with a young and attentive gentleman who apparently enjoys a high position among Brigham Young’s sectarians. He comes, from what we could understand, to visit the country and study its history and traditions. Taking advantage of the amiability of this person, and delighting in his varied instruction, we allowed ourselves to question him about certain details that we did not understand about Mormonism.5

Despite these public relations attempts, missionary efforts to gain new converts, while avoiding loss of existing ones, had only limited success. In February 1880, Thatcher was called back to Salt Lake City to personally submit a report on his management of the mission in Mexico. While gone, he commissioned James Stewart to act in his stead back in Mexico City. Without Thatcher’s connections to Mexican politicians, however, both the work and relations with the press further eroded. Stewart and Trejo did their best to hold the little branch together, yet their efforts seemed to bear no fruit. In May, Trejo returned to the United States, leaving Stewart and the few Mormon converts alone. Upon

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learning this, Thatcher asked LDS Church President John Taylor to send him back to Mexico, which was approved. Thatcher invited Brigham Young’s son Feramonz to join him. Upon arriving in the capital city, Thatcher and Young met with Stewart and the few converted Mexican Mormons who had remained faithful. The report they received was not encouraging. Discouraged by a lack of interest in the “Mormon gospel” demonstrated by the inhabitants of Mexico City, Thatcher and Stewart began to wonder about the feasibility of continuing proselytizing work. In the first months of 1881 the situation became even more complicated, as the newspaper El Abogado Cristiano6 repeatedly attacked them. Despite the continued efforts of Thatcher, Stewart, and Young to respond to these attacks, they failed to change the negative perception that was generally held of them and the religion they defended. The time had come to make a decision: Continue with the mission or return to the United States? The solution was found in transferring proselyting efforts from Mexico City to smaller surrounding communities. The Volcanoes Region: A Fertile Place for Mormon Growth. One of the most important allies that the missionaries had previously acquired in Mexico City was the writer and liberal politician, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano. He advised Thatcher and his companions to leave the city and head to the “Region of the Volcanoes” (the southeastern part of the State of Mexico).7 Altamirano knew this region well, as he had traveled to it on several occasions accompanied by his great friend, Colonel Silvestre López Torquemada—a native of the village of Amecameca. His recommendation to introduce Mormonism to this part of Mexico was in response to the fact that liberal ideals (including religious freedom) were held in high esteem by many educated Mexicans including Colonel López Torquemada. Altamirano wrote a letter to López Torquemada in which he asked López to help the “Mormons.” From 1881 onward, López Torquemada welcomed LDS Church missionaries into his home, shared his table with them, and allowed them to speak at the Protestant church of his native Amecameca.8 But, perhaps most importantly, he brought the missionaries into contact with liberal figures from key communities of the Volcanoes Region, such as Ozumba, Amecameca, Tepetlixpa, and Atlautla, (all of which would later make their mark on the history of Mormonism in Mexico) (Fig. 13.1). Over time the missionaries saw that, with the help of Silvestre López, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, and other liberal leaders, Mormonism would be able to take root. On April 6, 1881, Moses Thatcher, James Stewart, Feramonz Young, Silviano Arteaga, Fernando A. Lara, Ventura Páez, Zárate Marciano Pérez, and Florentino Páez ascended the famous, nearby Popocatépetl volcano, arriving finally at “Pico del Fraile” (Friar Peak). Thatcher uttered a special prayer known now as the “Prayer of Dedication,” thus officially dedicating Mexico for the reception of the LDS gospel. Following this event, a new stage of LDS proselytism was inaugurated in Mexico, during which time the Volcanoes Region would be the core of Mormon missionary work in the country. With renewed optimism, additional missionaries were requested and dispatched from Salt

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Fig. 13.1  The Volcanoes Region, eastern part of the State of Mexico. (Source: Author computer generated map using Tableau Data Mapping Software)

Lake City. López Torquemada always encouraged the missionaries to “change the mentality of the Mexican, so that people develop their true potential … so that Mexico would not be left in the darkness that the years of domination had imposed.” Thanks to the hard work and support of Silvestre López, several families from communities such as Amecameca, Ozumba, and Atlautla were baptized into the LDS Church. New branches were established, the first in Tecalco, Ozumba municipality. Rey L. Pratt and the Continued Spread of the LDS Church. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, various leaders, dispatched by authorities in Salt Lake City, held the position of president of the Mexican Mission. The most consequential of these was Rey Lucero Pratt, who had risen in the Mormon colonies in northern Mexico. Called as Mexican Mission president in 1907, he served in that position until his death in 1931. From the moment Pratt arrived in Mexico City he devised a new way of expanding Mormonism by strengthening existing congregations so that they could then become the basis of evangelization in Mexico. In this plan, the Volcanoes Region had a central role. Missionaries arriving from the Anglo-Mormon colonies in the north of Mexico, or from the United States, were sent to communities in this area for the purpose of learning the Mexican culture and perfecting their Spanish language skills. Upon completion of their studies, they were called to open new proselyting areas. This method resulted in the establishment of congregations in the states of Morelos, Puebla, and Hidalgo. In addition, this system allowed better control over the converted members of the newly established congregations, which continued to grow.

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The most important factor in the successful management of President Rey L. Pratt was Pratt himself. He was not like the previous mission presidents; he possessed a unique charisma that helped him gain the trust of local Mormons, whom he “protected and helped like a father.” Rather than staying stationary in the mission offices, he was constantly traveling and living with faithful LDS Church members. His memoirs show that he knew each LDS Church family personally. On these trips, Pratt reports that “I ate chili, helped on the pixca, slept on petate, learned Mexican, rode a donkey and horse, carried firewood…” As reported by a member of that time: “He was one of us, that’s why we loved him.” The Mexican Revolution During the early decades of the Mexican Mission’s existence, the number of converted ethnic Mexican members slowly increased. By 1910 the LDS Church was reporting approximately 1000 members in Mexico. That year (1910) armed conflict broke out in Mexico. Generally referred to as the Mexican Revolution, the struggle continued until around 1920 and had a profound impact on the Mexican people, including those who had converted to the LDS Church. The Revolution began as an attempt to remove long-time Mexican President Porfirio Díaz from office and address some of the abuses that his dictatorship had engendered. It evolved into a complex war in which there were shifting loyalties and competing causes. Its three chief “caudillos” or leaders were Francisco Villa and Venustiano Carranza from the north and Emiliano Zapata from the State of Morelos, just south of the Volcanoes Region, where the largest number of ethnic Mormons resided. Deeply concerned about the armed conflicts in the surrounding areas and the increasingly xenophobic feelings expressed by many Mexicans, Anglo-­ Mormons in colonies in northern Mexico became increasingly worried about their safety. Acting upon those feelings, in the fall of 1912, they abandoned their homes and fled north to El Paso. With the Revolution continuing to increase in intensity, in August 1913 the US government advised all American citizens to leave Mexico. President Pratt deemed it prudent to heed that advice. The branches around Mexico City were organized into one district with Isaias Juárez as district president and Abel Páez and Isaias Juárez and Bernabé Parra as his first and second counselors. Pratt instructed the local LDS Church leaders and members as best he could, among other things counseling them to remain neutral in the revolutionary conflict. Then in September, Pratt, his family, and the remaining missionaries working in central Mexico left for the United States, leaving the district presidency in charge. Local Mexican leaders of the LDS Church were now left alone to deal with the complexities of church administration and the well-being of members in an area torn by civil strife. Mormonism and Zapatismo in the Volcanoes Region. Two months after President Pratt’s departure, many of LDS Church members in the Volcanoes Region9 sought refuge in the Zapatista barracks of Tecomaxusco, located in the

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municipality of Ecatzingo, State of Mexico, and operating under the command of General Gregorio S.  Rivero.10 For some time LDS Church members had known Rivero as a friend to the Mormon people. Rivero now asked General Emiliano Zapata himself for permission to accept non-Catholic people (i.e., Mormons) into their camp. The response was positive. With Zapata’s endorsement, church members left their homes from throughout the Volcanoes Region to head to the Zapatista camp of Teco. At first the LDS Church members helped with domestic tasks, such as collecting firewood, searching for food, repairing and cleaning weapons, and keeping the ground clean.11 Over time, these LDS Church members began to internalize Zapatist ideals and turned to the Book of Mormon to know whether it was right to take up arms in defense of just causes. The answer, to them, was clear, based on several Book of Mormon heroes, such as Captain Moroni—who opposed Amalickiah (a corrupt politician of his day), hoisted the Title of Liberty, and organized an army12—and Helaman, who recruited 2000 young warriors to fight and defend their parents from a tyrannical government. Clearly, they felt, the Book of Mormon allowed them to take up arms and shed blood, if necessary, to defend “good” causes.13 Zapatistaism, in their eyes, was such a cause. In emulation of these Book of Mormon examples they organized their small “Mormon Zapatista Battalion” and began to engage in fighting, led by one of their own, Captain Pablo Rojas. Although their actions were contrary to the counsel they had received from President Pratt, they were now in a situation where they had to make their own decisions. Their active participation in the Revolution may well have been viewed by fellow Mexicans as a manifestation of Mormons’ patriotism and love of country. It was during this time that the LDS Church members of the Volcanoes Region forged bonds of friendship with revolutionary leaders including Emiliano Zapata himself. These association and the circumstances under which they were now living, along with relevant parallels they saw in the Book of Mormon, allowed them to assimilate the Zapatista discourse in a very particular way: They saw in Emiliano Zapata a “man of God,” even to the point of comparing him to Captain Moroni in the Book of Mormon.14 Their alinement with the Zapatistas might be viewed as more than a mere outgrowth of the protection that they were receiving. Of all the principal revolutionary leaders, Zapata was most concerned about the plight of the poor and the oppressed and his thinking thus most in line with some of the underlying philosophy of the Book of Mormon. The Mormon Zapatista Battalion participated in several battles. One of these occurred on May 15, 1914, when General Tomás García asked Gregorio S. Rivero for support to attack the towns of Ayotzingo and Cocotitlán. Rivero in turn ordered LDS member, Captain Pablo Rojas, to stand with García and “defend the cause.” The attack was a success. Following the conclusion of the Mexican Revolution, Mormons from the Volcanoes Region and revolutionaries maintained their battle-forged friendship, a friendship that would play an important role in the further history of Mormonism in Mexico.

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Mormons and the Revolution to the North of Mexico City. LDS Church members in branches to the north of Mexico City had quite a different experience during the Revolution from those in the Volcanoes Region. The northern branches generally were newer and more spread apart. Perhaps an even more important difference was that at varying periods, the area was occupied by opposing revolutionary force. As a result, a lasting alliance with any one of these groups would have been temporary at best, even if this had been attempted. The branch in San Marcos in the State of Hidalgo perhaps suffered the most. “Carranza and Zapata had made San Marcos a dueling ground, ripping up railroad beds, setting locomotive and rolling stock aflame, and weekly alternating control of the town.… One time, when the Zapatistas held San Marcos, (LDS Church branch president Rafael) Monroy was denounced for being in league with Carranza and associating with Americans.… The Zapatistas picked him up (together with fellow LDS Church member Vicente Morales).”15 When the Zapatistas learned that they were LDS, they told them that they would spare their lives if they would renounce their new religion. When they refused to do so, they were executed. From the Mexican Revolution to the Third Convention By the early 1920s, life in Mexico generally began to be more settled. Most of the LDS Church branches in the Mexico City area had survived the disruptions of the Revolution and, indeed, had developed a new level of maturity. It was the native leaders who held the Mormon branches together. LDS Church members had returned to their towns, gradually rebuilt their homes and meetinghouses, and resumed their religious services. During the same period a number of the Anglo-Mormons who had left the Mormon colonies in 1912 returned to their homes in northern Mexico. The majority of the colonists, however, remained in the United States. Many of these as well as their descendants maintained strong emotional ties with Mexico. In the long run, the execution of Rafael Monroy and Morales in San Marcos contributed in positive ways to the development of the LDS Church in the areas north of Mexico City and indeed throughout Mexico. Many Mexican members came to regard Monroy and Morales as martyrs to the faith. San Marcos became an area of LDS Church strength, and descendants of Monroy, Morales, and fellow San Marcos branch members became some of the LDS Church’s strongest Mexican leaders. Support of LDS Church members in the Volcanoes Region for the Zapatista revolutionary movement led to three things: (1) the emergence of new native leaders, (2) consolidation of the authority of those leaders called before the Revolution, and (3) cementing of friendship between Mexican Mormon leaders with revolutionary leaders. These factors produced for LDS Church members in the Volcanoes Region new way of seeing and feeling about themselves as Mormons. This new sense of identity is an essential element in understanding what, in LDS Church history in Mexico, are known as the “First, Second

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and Third Conventions.” These identity movements among Mexican LDS Church members, which we will shortly examine, did not fully ripen, however, for another decade. During the Revolution and shortly thereafter laws came into force that undermined organized religion in general and in particular the independent authority and functioning of foreign religious leaders in Mexico.16 The best known of these were the 1917 Constitution, which forbids all churches from owning property, and the “Calles Law,” which required that all ministers of religion in Mexico to be Mexican by birth. Given such difficulties, during the late 1920s and early 1930s, the LDS Church almost completely ceased any proselyting efforts in Mexico. During a special LDS Church meeting held in Tecalco in 1931, municipal government envoys abruptly entered the chapel and “pushed the missionaries around, saying they had no right to be on the stand because they were not Mexican,” and “threatened to take them to prison and ‘close the house of prayer.’” The branch members in attendance were disturbed and prevented the representatives of the municipality from removing the American elders from the meetinghouse.17 To avoid a larger altercation, former Mormon Colonel Florencio Galicia Castillo intervened in defense of the missionaries, but he had to promise that “they would no longer be allowed to sit on the stand to lead worship services.” Similar actions by other government officials in other locales soon forced President Rey Lucero Pratt and his American missionaries once again out of the country.18 Soon thereafter, LDS Church members in Mexico received the shocking news that President Pratt had died not long after his departure from Mexico. The Saints in Mexico mourned the loss of their beloved president, performed several funeral services in his memory, and waited intently for decisions to come from Salt Lake City regarding the fate of the Mexican members. Antoine R. Ivins was called by LDS Church leaders as the new Mexican Mission president.19 However, Ivins did not come to Mexico, saying that Mexican laws prevented him from doing so. Many Mexican members did not accept this reasoning. They had firmly imprinted in their minds the image of Rey Lucero Pratt who, despite legal prohibitions, continued to make at least short visits to Mexico to “minister, bless us, support us in our pain and share our joys.” Therefore, they did not understand and did not accept Ivins’ argument against assuming his post in Mexico. This disappointment triggered the organization of a series of local member meetings that in LDS Church history are known as “The First and Second Conventions.”20 The premise of these meetings was simple. If Mexican law was the reason why the mission president could not remain in or even visit the country, then why not “ask the head of the Church to call a Mexican to the position of president of the Mission.”21 The First and Second Conventions were held in either Mexico City or San Pedro Martir and were led by Isaias Juárez and Bernabé Parra, the district president and his second counselor, neither of whom had actively participated in the Revolution and, unlike first counselor Abel Páez,

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were also not native to the Volcanoes Region.22 These two meetings reflected the relatively moderate member movement behind them. Thus, when Antoine R. Ivins, almost a year after being called as mission president finally did come to Mexico City in response to the “Conventionistas” concerns and requests—to solve the “Mexican problem”—Ivins was able to somewhat mollify church members, and their agitated mood calmed down. Ivins, however, did not stay long in Mexico and subsequently did not return. The sense of being abandoned by American church leaders therefore continued, which further helped in strengthening the perceived legitimacy of the native leadership in the absence of the officially designated mission president. Finally, in 1934, three years following the death of Rey L. Pratt, news arrived in Mexico from Salt Lake City that Ivins would be removed from his post as president of the Mexican Mission and would be replaced by Harold W. Pratt. Having been born and raised in the Mormon colony of Dublan in northern Mexico and thus under Mexican law, he was able to function as a “minister.” Two weeks after his installment in Salt Lake City as the new Mexican Mission president, Pratt conducted an extensive tour of LDS Church branches in central Mexico; he realized the Mexican Mission’s need for attention. During the several prior years of “abandonment,” Isaiah Juárez, Abel Páez, and Bernabé Parra (the district presidency) had tried their best to keep the scattered LDS Church congregations together, but their limited financial resources and relative lack of knowledge regarding LDS Church policies, procedures, and theological teachings had handicapped them considerably. Pratt brought in missionaries from the northern Anglo colonies, who arrived with overflowing enthusiasm. He began taking away some roles from native branch presidents and delegated these instead to the new missionaries. He also informed the district presidency that from that point on he would take charge of all important matters pertaining to the branches. These actions produced feelings of resentment toward Pratt and his young missionaries. Pratt and the Anglo missionaries seemed oblivious to the need to take into consideration Mexican culture and the fact that during years of essentially acting autonomously, local leaders had developed effective ways of filling their callings. This administrative difficulty was exacerbated by the increasing force of what might be termed “Mexican religious nationalism.” This nationalism extolled such general values and terms as homeland, flag, family, and “blood” (or Mexican racial identity) and was manifested in part by prohibition against foreign religious ministers being involved in Mexican religious affairs. Among some ethnic Mexican members of the LDS Church, Mexican religious nationalism took a particular form of viewing themselves as a particularly chosen people of the Lord. This view was forcefully set forth in a book written by Margarito Bautista, a highly intelligent Mexican member of the LDS Church. Using passages from the Book of Mormon, Bautista built the case that the Mexican people were what the Book of Mormon termed “Lamanites,” a remnant of the Covenant House of Israel to whom it was prophesied Gentiles (in

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the form of Anglo-Mormons) were to bring the gospel after which they would flourish and prosper. Not appearing to appreciate these issues, Pratt’s actions deepened a crack that would lead to a full-blown break. During 1934 and 1935, the division between portions of the local Mexican leadership/membership and the mission presidency became increasingly apparent. For Pratt, the changes he had made were necessary for the proper functioning of the mission. For local leaders—particularly for those in the Volcanoes Region—the changes were perceived as hurting the development of the church in Mexico.23 Antoine W. Ivins had seemingly wanted to do nothing as a nominal mission president, and now Harold Pratt wanted to do it all. In both cases, local Mexican church leaders and members felt relegated and humiliated. The social conditions were now conducive for a much more radical movement to erupt than had occurred in the first two conventions five years earlier. The event that triggered this rupture happened in the first months of 1936. The LDS First Presidency in Salt Lake City announced a division of the existing mission as follows: . Mexican Mission: To comprise all of Mexico. 1 2. Hispanic American Mission: To include Spanish-speaking people in the southwestern United States. This news pleased some native Mexican leaders and portions of local LDS Church branch membership, who felt that their prayers and voices had been heard and that they would soon be put in charge of directing their own mission. Everyone was looking forward to a favorable resolution on who would be called to preside. The follow-up answer came quickly: Harold W. Pratt would continue to be president of the Mexican Mission. Re-designating Pratt as mission president was a major blow to the national and religious pride of those members who had become immersed in the Mexican nationalism of the 1930s. In many Mexican members’ eyes, the LDS Church had not heard them; it was now necessary to make themselves heard, and a Third Convention would be the way to do it. The Third (Lamanite) Convention Plans were made for the Third Convention to begin on April 26, 1936, in the LDS meetinghouse in the town of Tecalco. Abel Páez, first counselor in the district presidency, would preside at the convention. Neither district president Isaias Juárez nor second counselor Bernabé Parra wanted the convention to be held and neither would be in attendance. Abel Páez, however, did have the support of several Zapatist military leaders with whom he had interacted during the Revolution and with whom he consulted regarding the convention. At least one, although not a member of the LDS Church, planned to attend. Tecalco in the Volcanoes Region had intentionally been selected as the site of the convention because this was the area where the strongest support for the goals of the convention was found.

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On the appointed day, men, women, girls, and boys gradually arrived at the small LDS meetinghouse in Tecalco. LDS Church member José de la Luz entered the hall, accompanied by General Gregorio S.  Rivero, and together they sat on the front row bench. Several branch members came to greet the general, renewing the bonds of friendship forged during the Revolution in which they had mutually participated, years previously. Abel Páez gave General Rivero a cordial, formal welcome, saying, “I thank you for your presence on this important day for the Mexican people.”24 The Third Convention had begun, and the support and influence of former Zapatist revolutionaries was evident to all in attendance. In the course of the convention the Conventionists decided to formally separate from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­ day Saints. Within a few months, “Páez and more than eight hundred Mexican Saints aligned themselves with the Third Convention (by now an institution with its own organizational structure) [while] more than two thousand opted to remain with the mainline Mormon Church (despite the objections of even some of them to the missionary system and leadership arrangements).”25 During the final decades of the 1930s and throughout the World War II years of the 1940s, LDS Church leaders in Salt Lake City expended considerable time and effort to find ways to reconcile with the Third Conventionists. Missionary work in Mexico was at a standstill, and LDS Church branches that remained loyal to the church struggled to operate on their own. Change, however, was slowing occurring. In May 1942, LDS Church leaders in Salt Lake City had called Arwell L. Pierce as president of the Mexican Mission with a special commission to heal the schism. “He was an ecclesiastically experienced man, a diplomat, and a politically sensitive leader. He developed a greater sense of propriety with respect to the society of Mexican Mormons than anyone the church had sent to Mexico since Rey L. Pratt.”26 Pierce expended great effort working with the Conventionistas, attending their meetings, and becoming acquainted with them. As confidence grew, he spent considerable time with Conventionistas leaders, coming to understand their grievances and finally discussing with them the route by which the Conventionists might once again begin to affiliate with the larger mainline LDS Church. Such discussions were facilitated both by the fact that the two groups were not divided by theological issues and by the concerns Convention leaders had regarding what religious path their children would take once they themselves had died. Among other things Pierce suggested to Conventionist leaders that the most important goal to work toward was not the appointment of an ethnic Mexican as mission president but the establishment of a stake. After all, a mission’s purposes were primarily proselyting and the nurturing of immature branches. A stake on the other hand, composed of local members, was the mature form of LDS ecclesiastical organization. With the organization of a stake, the LDS Church would fully come of age in the Valley of Mexico.27 Finally, in 1946 a series of conferences of reconciliation and unification occurred. President George Albert Smith came for the occasion, the first time

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an LDS Church president had visited central Mexico. “Mainliners and Conventionists alike were immensely proud to receive the man all Mormons recognized as Prophet, Seer, and Revelator.… For President Smith’s visit to the Tecalco conference, the home of the Third Convention, they spread flowers along the lane leading into the chapel and stood on each side in long lines singing ‘We Thank Thee O God for a Prophet.’”28 Although some on both sides of the conflict continued to harbor negative feelings, almost all Third Conventionists reunited with the mainline LDS Church. Some Conventionists, however, did hold out, and there are still at least two small groups in central Mexico whose origins can be traced back to the Third Conventionista movement.29

Modern Developments and Concerns The resolution of the schism resulting from the Third Conventionist movement was in many ways a turning point for the LDS Church in Mexico. It broadly coincided with important changes occurring both in Mexican society and in directions and practices of the LDS Church. By the end of World War II, Mexico generally became free of the large-scale revolts and conflicts that had plagued Mexico during the previous decades. And while anti-religious laws were still on the books, the Mexican government showed decreasing interest in enforcing them and increased interest in allowing freedom of religious belief and practice. The conflicts that had occurred between the government and more liberal Mexicans on the one hand and the more orthodox, conservative Catholics on the other, however, contributed to the formation of a significant minority of Mexicans who, although deeply religious, did not feel a strong allegiance to the Catholic Church. At the same time, partly due to the educational and economic policies of the government, a growing number of Mexicans were experiencing a degree of upward social and economic mobility. It was among such individuals that converts to the LDS Church would primarily come. Following the end of World War II and the beginning of the administration of Church President David O. McKay in 1951, the LDS Church began to place increased emphasis on its international expansion and development, with significant stress being placed on growth in Latin America. Among other things, this resulted in the construction of numerous church buildings in areas where members had previously been meeting in converted homes or inadequate, rented facilities. It also produced a dramatic increase in LDS Church proselyting activities. These and other factors led to what might be regarded as a golden period of LDS Church development in Mexico. While such developments were impressive, however, they were accompanied by a number of challenges and difficulties. For several years following World War II there was not a significant upturn in LDS  Church growth in Mexico. In 1940 (in the middle of the Third Conventionist controversy) the LDS Church in Mexico had a reported membership of 4195. Ten years later, in 1950, the membership had only grown to

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5915. However, over the next ten years it more than doubled to 12,695. By 1970, membership had more than quintupled, to 67,965. In subsequent years, membership continued to increase substantially. At the end of 2018 the reported membership was 1,455,774. This is the highest number of Latter-day Saints in any country outside the United States and represents 1.16 percent of the total Mexican population.30 Rapid Proselyting and Low Retention The first leap in membership, between 1960 and 1970, was in part the result of a new approach in missionary techniques that might be termed “rapid proselyting.” Missionaries were instructed to rapidly contact people in their homes, during which time they were to attempt to identify people who had sufficient interest in their message to consider baptism into the LDS Church within a short time. The missionaries would then return to these homes, present a series of six discussions that introduced listeners to basic elements of LDS belief and practice, and challenge them to be baptized within two or three weeks. The missionaries assumed that those who didn’t seem ready to accept baptism when they contacted them would likely be contacted by another set of missionaries within six months or so. At that time, they might be more ready, and if not then, perhaps at an even later time. With certain modifications, this general form of proselyting continues to the present time. This model for proselyting has certainly contributed to the rapid growth of the LDS Church in Mexico. It likely has also contributed to a fairly low retention rate. It seems reasonable to question whether two or three weeks is sufficient time for investigators to understand adequately the teachings of the LDS Church and then become integrated into a local congregation. And it further seems reasonable to anticipate that a fairly high percentage of new members who are converted under these circumstances would likely soon fall away from their professed baptismal commitments. Low convert retention rates are, in fact, reflected in the following figures. In 2010 the LDS Church reported a membership in Mexico of 1,197,573 (an essentially accurate reflection of the number of LDS Church members of record in that country). In the Mexican national census for that year, however, only 314,932 individuals reported being members of the LDS Church (about a third of those on the official membership records of the LDS Church).31 Issues Affecting Mexican Converts to the LDS Church Abrupt Change. The fact that baptized members are not actively participating in the LDS Church and may not even identify themselves as LDS on the Mexican census, however, does not necessarily mean that they regret having been baptized. In the mid-1980s a sample of nonparticipating Mexican members in various locations were visited in their homes by myself and other researchers. With very few exceptions those we contacted had fond memories

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of the missionaries who taught them, were not critical of the teachings of the LDS Church, and were happy to talk about their experiences with the LDS Church. The most common reasons they gave for their lack of participation were that (1) they had difficulty forming friendships with other members in their local congregation and (2) they had disagreements and conflicts with some of them. Public Religious Participation. The following are other reasons for inactivity among recent converts that also appear important. Most Mexican converts to the LDS Church come from nominally Catholic backgrounds. As Catholics, the religiosity of these converts was primarily personal and domestic. They had rarely attended mass or other public religious activities. Coming from this background of low public religious observance, they now found it difficult as newly baptized members of the LDS Church to adjust to the high degree of public religious participation that is expected of LDS Church members. Family Conflicts. Added to this difficulty are familial conflicts. Given the general growth of non-Catholic denominations in Mexico, conversion to the LDS Church itself generally does not elicit strong negative reactions from family members. What can and often do generate conflicts are changes in established patterns of familial interaction. Mexican extended families traditionally spend Sundays together. They share a large meal and together attend sporting events or movies. New converts to the LDS Church can experience serious conflicts with non-converted family members when they stop participating in Sunday family activities because of LDS Sunday religious obligations. Some converts come to feel that they are forced to choose between family solidarity and activity in the LDS Church. Relationships with Missionaries. Converts to the LDS Church also often develop very strong relationships with the missionaries who taught them. When these missionaries leave the area, new converts can feel abandoned and isolated. The LDS Church attempts to deal with such problems by having specific members of the congregation take over from the missionaries by frequently visiting newly baptized members, fellowshipping them, and integrating them into the congregation. In Mexico, however, such visiting often is not done. Expectations of Membership. In addition to problems with congregational involvement and potential disruptions in social relationships, new converts can find the sundry demands and expectations of the LDS Church to be extremely challenging. A fully compliant member of the LDS Church is expected to do much more than regularly attend religious services (a minimum of two hours each Sunday). He or she is expected to adhere to a dietary code (strict abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, coffee, green or black tea, and illegal narcotic drugs); pay 10 percent of one’s annual income as tithing to the church (as well as contribute monthly “fast offerings” to help poorer members); fill and carry out positions (referred to as “callings”) in the ecclesiastical organization without monetary compensation; help clean and maintain the local meetinghouse; fellowship and reactivate fellow members; regularly study the scriptures and

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LDS publications; and adhere to LDS teachings regarding chastity and loving maintenance of family relationships. Progress and Personal Development. Mexican converts who remain active LDS Church participants tend to be individuals who are striving for upward mobility and attempting to improve the conditions of their lives. Their conversion to the LDS Church can be viewed as one aspect of this more general endeavor. In one study, I asked a number of Mexican Latter-day Saints, what were the basic characteristics of fully participating members of the LDS Church. By far the most common response was that they are people who are seeking to improve in all aspects of their lives. For such individuals, the expectations of the LDS Church may be seen as ways to improve both their spiritual and temporal well-­being. For others, the expectations can appear overwhelming and perhaps unrealistic. While conducting a research project, I once asked a Mexican convert to the LDS Church if he had been aware of what he was agreeing to at the time of his baptism. “Yes,” he replied, “but I didn’t think that the missionaries were serious.” Machismo and Family Relationships. Individuals who have studied Mexican domestic life have often paid particular attention to what in Spanish is referred to as “machismo.” This may broadly be defined as hyper-masculinity. Many men in traditional Mexican society have held the view that the true male is one who is sexually promiscuous and domineering over his wife and children. At the same time, such beliefs and their implementation are clearly in conflict with traditional Mexican men’s idealization of women, exemplified in their strong ties to their mothers and their at least nominal adoration of the Virgin Mary. Mexican men consequently are often viewed by researchers as fundamentally conflicted.32 Machismo in many ways is inconsistent with LDS teachings that sexual relations should only occur between a husband and wife and that men should treat their wives and children with love and respect. In interviews I held with local Mexican LDS Church leaders, these leaders often stressed that they regularly discuss LDS Church views on the proper role of husbands and fathers in meetings held with male church members. This approach appears to have some impact on rank-and-file members. In research projects I often asked participating converts, “What is the biggest change that has occurred in your life since joining the LDS Church?” The most common response by married men was, “How I treat my wife and children,” and the most common response of married women was, “How my husband treats me.” The apparent modification in Mexican men’s relationship to their wives and children might in part be understood as LDS Church leaders’ ability to help them resolve the conflict they feel between their belief in machismo and their idealization of women as reflected in their respect for their mothers.

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LDS Ecclesiastical Organization From Branches and Districts to Wards and Stakes. When Arwell Pierce discussed with Conventionist leaders that stake organization and not mission leadership with the thing that they should focus one, he had reference to basic principles of LDS ecclesiastical organization. When the LDS Church is beginning to develop in a given area, local members are organized into what are referred to as branches. A number of branches in turn are organized into a district. Branches and districts are under the jurisdiction of a mission president, who simultaneously has jurisdiction over a group of missionaries. There are generally approximately 100–120 missionaries assigned to a given mission (which typically also subsumes a number of member districts). Proselyting missionaries currently are young men and women between the ages of about 18 (19 for females) and 25 who without compensation dedicate two years (18 months for females) to full-time missionary service. In newly formed branches, most organizational “callings” (i.e., to preside, administer, perform ordinances, and teach) are held by missionaries. As branches develop, they become larger and organizationally more complex. When this happens, more and more of the branch organizational callings are turned over to local members, most of whom are fairly recent converts to the LDS Church. When branches reach a certain level of maturity and size, they become wards, which are grouped into what are termed stakes. (The relationship between LDS wards and stakes might be viewed as somewhat similar to that of parishes and dioceses within the Catholic Church.) Wards and stakes are regarded as fully mature ecclesiastical units in the LDS Church. Unlike branches and districts, they are independent of missions, and only under unusual circumstances would a missionary hold a calling within a ward. Missionaries who proselyte within ward boundaries coordinate their efforts with ward leaders, but organizationally they remain essentially independent of them and continue to be subject to the authority and direction of the mission president. Ward organization is more complex than that of branches. A ward may have from about 200 to 400 members, and each active ward member will typically have at least one and sometimes several callings. A ward is presided over by a bishop and his two counselors; these are local ward members. These local officials have regular jobs outside their church assignments and are called to serve without compensation for about three years as members of what is called the ward “bishopric.” Bishoprics call members to the various ward positions and supervise their work. They are particularly responsible for the youth of the ward but are also expected to have concern for the health, financial security, and spiritual and emotional well-being of all ward members. A stake is presided over by a stake presidency, consisting of a stake president and two counselors. Among other responsibilities, a stake presidency presides over a stake high council, consisting of 12 high priests. Members of the high council supervise the wards of the stake and serve as staff to the stake presidency.

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One measure of the maturity of the LDS Church in a given country is the number of wards and stakes. For many years the only organized stake in Mexico was the one situated in the Anglo-American colonies in northern Mexico (organized in 1895). All other members in Mexico were under the jurisdiction of the president of the Mexican Mission. In 1954 the Mexican Mission was divided into two missions. These in turn have subsequently been divided and subdivided until by the end of 2018 there were 32 separate missions in Mexico.33 The presidents of some of these missions are Mexicans while others are Anglos. The ethnicity of a mission president is no longer something that anyone seems much concerned about. Although missions in Mexico began multiplying in 1954, it was not until 1961 that a second stake in Mexico was organized. This was in Mexico City, the first stake in the LDS Church to be comprised almost exclusively of ethnic Mexicans. The president of this stake, Harold Brown, however, was an Anglo who had been raised in the Colonies. When this stake in turn was divided in 1967, however, the president of the new stake, Agícol Lozano (who had served as Brown’s counselor), was the LDS Church’s first ethnic Mexican stake president. (President Lozano incidentally had been born in Tula, a town adjacent to San Marcos, Hidalgo, where his mother at one time had been a maid in the household of Rafael Monroy, San Marcos’ martyred branch president.) It had taken time and effort for Pierce’s vision of ethnic Mexican stakes with Mexican leadership to become reality, but it had at last occurred. Just over a half-century later, there were 1354 Mexican wards organized into 220 stakes, and 492 branches organized into 47 districts by the end of 2018.34 Nearly all the wards and stakes were headed by ethnic Mexicans. Church Leadership and the Issue of Personalism. While the recent growth of Mexican wards and stakes is impressive, their creation presents their own challenges. One challenge resulting from increased growth is the need to call ever larger numbers of lay leaders at all levels of ward and stake organization. The term “personalism” has often been applied to the traditional style of Mexican leadership. Among other things, this implies that the relationship between leader and follower is based either on a bond of friendship or on the leader’s ability to bestow favors on the follower. The leader consequently has difficulty maintaining control over followers with whom he cannot maintain personal ties. In contrast to traditional Mexican personalism, the LDS Church official leadership style is more impersonal and bureaucratic, such as that which is typically found in a US corporation. Mexican converts tend to come into the LDS Church with notions of leadership that they have picked up from general Mexican society. As either leaders or followers they thus seek to forge and maintain personalistic relationships. The actual functioning of wards and stakes can consequently be quite different from what Anglo-American Church administrators regard as ideal. For example, Anglo-American leaders envision a somewhat impersonal chain of command within wards and between wards and stakes in which members primarily interact ecclesiastically with leaders who have immediate jurisdiction over them.

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In reality, Mexican members often go directly to ward bishops with their concerns. Bishops in turn may bypass the heads of organizations in their ward and attempt personally to run all programs and activities within the ward. A related problem is that individuals who receive important callings can regard these as personal favors or rewards from the leaders who issue them. When they are later released from this calling and given one that they regard as less important, they can view the change as an affront and an indication that they are now out of favor with the church leader who has jurisdiction over them. This may result in their going inactive. The problem of personalism can be exacerbated by the fact that many ward and stake leaders themselves have been members of the LDS Church for only a short time and thus have had little direct experience with LDS Church modes of organization and leadership. This lack of experience generates various problems that negatively affect retention issues.35

Prospects for the Future In recent years there has been somewhat of a decline in the number of convert baptisms. This has been interpreted by some observers as reflecting a decrease in the popularity of the LDS Church in Mexico. This may not be the actual situation. The LDS Church probably could increase the number of convert baptisms by modifying its proselyting procedures, such as concentrating its efforts on a poorer stratum of society. Recently LDS Church leadership has put increased emphasis on what is often referred to as “real growth.” This term encompasses such things as achieving a higher retention of converts and the development of members as active participants in their local congregations. If effective, such endeavors should result in future higher retention rates. The Establishment of Temples A number of recent developments may lead to more real growth in Mexico. One of these is the increasing number of LDS temples built and located throughout the country. Rituals routinely performed within the LDS Church are termed “ordinances.” Certain of these ordinances are performed only in special religious structures designated as temples. Committed members of the LDS Church believe, and there is good reason to suppose, that regular participation in temple ordinances can significantly elevate members’ spirituality, increase their commitment to family life, and solidify their commitment to adhere to LDS teachings. Temples are viewed by committed LDS Church members as profoundly sacred spaces, and only members who certify that they are living the basic requirements of the LDS Church are allowed to enter. Within the temple, adult members go through a two-hour ordinance ceremony referred to as the “endowment.” During this ceremony, they make solemn covenants to adhere to the basic teachings of the LDS Church. In addition, members of a family can undergo an ordinance referred to as “sealing,” which

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they believe eternally binds them together as a family unit. Among other things, this ordinance articulates what the LDS Church teaches is the proper relationship between husband and wife. As one Mexican member told me, “Going to the temple has helped me understand that what calling you have in the Church is not important. What is important is the relationship you have with your wife and children.” Members of the LDS Church believe that endowments and sealings, as well as proxy baptisms, can be performed for the dead. This belief results in members returning often to temples in order to vicariously perform these ordinances for their ancestors and other deceased individuals. The repetition of these ordinances tends to increasingly impress their importance upon participants. At the current time youth as young as 12 can perform proxy baptisms, and adults can participate in the performance of all temple ordnances essentially as often as they desire. For many years there was no LDS temple in Mexico and little hope that in the foreseeable future there ever would be. Part of the reason for this feeling was the existence of Mexican laws stipulating that religious edifices were property of the government and should be open to all. This was inconsistent with the LDS belief that temples should be accessible only to compliant LDS Church members who enter in order to participate in sacred ordinances. Mexican members who wanted to participate in temple ordinances in earlier times had to travel to temples in the United States. In the early 1980s, however, the LDS Church at long last constructed a temple in Mexico City. Despite the continued existence of laws prohibiting the nongovernmental ownership of religious buildings at that time, the Mexican government respected the wishes of the LDS Church, and the Mexico City temple remained closed to all but LDS Church members who were deemed worthy to enter it. In 1992 the Mexican Constitution was amended, giving churches legal status and allowing them to own property. Mexican churches, including the LDS Church, consequently now own their buildings. After the passage of this law, the LDS Church engaged in extensive temple construction in Mexico. As of early 2020 there are 13 functioning temples in Mexico. These are located in larger cities throughout the country.36 Thus, most Mexican LDS Church members now have ready access to a temple. Although there are no available statistics to demonstrate this point, it is reasonable to assume that this increased level of temple access should lead to a higher retention rate and more religious stability among members. Youth Development Secular Education. Much of the surge in LDS Church Mexican membership that occurred in the second half of the twentieth century involved children and adolescents. Especially during the early decades of the member surge, many LDS youth had limited opportunities for educational development. Their situation was not atypical of Mexican youth in general. In the late 1950s only 56

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percent of Mexican children were completing even two years of primary education, and only 11 percent began (what in the United States would be termed) high school.37 In order to provide LDS youth with greater educational opportunity, in about 1960 the LDS Church began establishing schools in various parts of Mexico that were fully accredited by the government. The flagship of this endeavor was a large boarding school that the LDS Church built on the outskirts of Mexico City. It opened in 1964 and was known as CEBA (Centro Escolar Benemérito de las Américas). It included both a normal school for training teachers and a preparatory school, whose graduates were qualified for university education. By 1980 the LDS Church in Mexico operated 32 primary schools, 5 secondary, 1 normal school, and 1 preparatory school, in which some 9234 students were enrolled.38 Although these schools contributed greatly to the development of LDS Mexican youth, in 1980 the LDS Church made the decision to begin closing these schools as well as others that it had established in other developing countries. At least part of the reason for this decision was financial in nature. The church was finding it difficult to provide for the educational needs of its growing membership in various developing areas. Also affecting the decision was the fact that, by this point in time, the Mexican federal educational system had developed to the point that it could provide most of its youth with an adequate basic education. The LDS Church consequently no longer felt a pressing need to provide schools for its own youth. In the years immediately following the 1980 announcement, virtually all the LDS primary schools in Mexico were closed. Benemérito de las Américas in Mexico City continued to function for several years. In 2013, however, it was closed, and its campus converted to a center for training missionaries. At the current time the only school the LDS Church operates in Mexico is the Juárez Academy, a secondary school. Located in the Mormon colonies in northern Mexico, it enrolls about 400 students. Seminaries and Institutes. The closure of its Mexican school system did not indicate a decreased interest of LDS Church leaders in the well-being of its younger Mexican membership. In part to compensate for the decreased influence that it previously had been able to exert through its secular schools, it now fortified its institute and seminary programs. In the LDS Church, the term “seminaries” refers to religion classes taught to high school students. In Mexico these are taught at the church meetinghouses or a member’s home on weekday mornings before the regular school day begins. Most branches and wards in Mexico offer seminary classes. The emphasis in these classes is on scripture study and the application of LDS Church teachings to daily living. “Institute” classes are a step up from the lower age level seminary classes. They are generally held in the evenings on a stake level. The courses are designed for college-age students, and all LDS youth ages 18–30 are encouraged to attend. While seminaries and institutes help Latter-day Saint youth increase their understanding of

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LDS doctrine, their greatest importance may well be the context they provide for young people to associate with other LDS youth.39 Perpetual Education Fund. In 2001 top LDS Church leaders in Salt Lake City announced the formation of what they termed the Perpetual Education Fund. In doing so they signaled their continuing interest in both the educational and the economic well-being of LDS youth in developing areas of the world. The basic idea behind the fund was quite simple: the church would provide LDS youth with low-interest loans that they were expected to use to acquire vocational and post–high school level training. When they completed their schooling and obtained employment, they would be expected to repay their loans. The church would then use those funds to assist other youth. From the inception of the Perpetual Education Fund, large numbers of LDS Church youth in Mexico began applying for educational loans. Over the years, the program has been modified in various ways; it might still be regarded as a work in progress. Among other changes, youth can now enroll without cost in church-sponsored courses that help them understand vocational options, how to effectively present themselves at job interviews, and how to start their own businesses. Local fund administrators also attempt to conduct an employment service to help youth connect with companies looking to hire individuals with the skills they have developed. Through their involvement in such programs, LDS youth in the coming years should increasingly be able to assume the responsibilities of full engagement in the LDS Church. The Mexification of the Missionary Force In the third quarter of the twentieth century, proselyting missionaries serving in Mexico were predominately from the United States or the Mormon colonies in northern Mexico. In more recent years, however, the missionary force has increasingly been composed of ethnic Mexicans coming from throughout Mexico. Indeed, as compared to 20 or 30 years ago, at the present time it is somewhat unusual for an Anglo-American to be called to serve as a proselyting missionary in Mexico. As already indicated, in 2013 the LDS Church transformed El Benemérito de las Américas campus from a boarding school to a missionary training center that at one time can accommodate over 1000 newly called missionaries. All newly called Mexican missionaries spend a few weeks in training at this center before beginning their proselyting activities. The increasing number of young Mexican members serving as full-time missionaries should have important consequences for the real growth of the LDS Church in Mexico. The time they spend as missionaries should cement their allegiance to the LDS Church as well as better accustom them to live by its rules and expectations. Beyond this, the experiences they have as missionaries should better equip them to fulfill callings and positions in a manner consistent with the expectations of the church. At its best, the increasing number of young Mexicans serving full-time missions will result in higher activity and more effective leadership within the LDS Church in Mexico.

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Administrative Modifications A number of other recent changes also have the potential for increasing real growth within the LDS Church in Mexico. I will discuss three of them. The Computerization of Membership Records. Until recently the membership records for a ward or branch in Mexico were kept in a fiberglass box container that was stored in an office at the meetinghouse. It was time-consuming to go through the records and derive much sense from them regarding the composition of the ward or branch. Many of these records were often of less-active members who were not known by the local leadership. When such individuals moved from the ward or branch, their records often stayed behind. This might be because leaders were not aware that the move had occurred or because of the difficult procedures of sending the records of “lost members” to LDS Church headquarters. In recent years membership records have been digitized and are accessible by computer. This innovation has made it much easier for bishops to be aware of new and less-active members and of youth and other particular categories of members. As a result, leaders are more likely to assign responsible members to fellowship or “minister” to new and less-active individuals and help them progress in the church. Changes in Fellowshipping. A somewhat related issue is that the LDS Church has recently and significantly modified the guidelines regarding fellowshipping. For example, ward members who are assigned to be “fellowshippers” (or now, formally designated as “ministers”) are no longer required to make monthly visits, to go as set companionships with a partner, or to center their visit around delivering a religious message. As ministers they are now expected to look out for both the temporal and the spiritual well-being of their assigned fellow members and reach out to help whenever and in whatever ways seem needed and most appropriate. When they become aware of unusually difficult problems, they will pass this information on to the ward bishop. Taken together, it is hoped that the computerization of membership records, and changes in how fellowshipping occurs, will have a positive effect on member retention and development. Training Videos. While discussing with me the challenges they faced, Mexican LDS Church leaders repeatedly focused on difficulties they and others encountered in understanding LDS Church handbooks and other instructional materials. From their point of view, there are two basic reasons for such difficulties. The first reason is that such materials are too abbreviated and make too many assumptions regarding the reader’s prior understanding of church policies and procedures. As one Mexican leader explained, “We suspect [that the handbooks] are written by individuals who have lived (as the expression goes) by being suckled on the programs of the church. These individuals do not understand that a particular word, which to them seems perfectly clear, invokes a world of experience, and that a person living where the church is just

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beginning does not have these images and cannot understand by means of a particular phrase the whole world of experience that is called up in their own minds.” The second reason is that the creators of these materials do not pay sufficient attention to the role of pictorial representations in the Mexican educational system. In this system, teaching begins by using pure illustrations. Words describing the picture are added as children start learning to read. Over the years, more and more text is added. The dependence on pictures, however, is never completely eliminated. Even with advanced textbooks that contain few pictures, the concepts in their associated study guides are still based on pictures. The picture in the study guide thus becomes a mnemonic device to recall the text. As a result, concepts are still brought to mind through pictures. University-trained Mexicans have told me that the most difficult transition in their educational training occurred when they were required to use Americanwritten textbooks in which text was presented independent of pictures. Given such an educational background, Mexicans often find difficulty when encountering LDS Church materials that are essentially devoid of pictures. As one Mexican stated, “I believe that the materials have to be more illustrated. Our people are intimately bound to illustrations.” Another affirmed, “I believe that we have some members who don’t study because the manuals contain so many words, or (in other words) all they have are words until the members have no ambition for studying.” When local Mexican LDS Church leaders considered solutions to this difficulty, many of them expressed to me the desire that videos be made regarding the various activities associated with specific callings and administrative meetings. Thus, when members were asked to accept callings or to conduct or attend a particular administrative meeting, they could have a good understanding of what is expected of them and how to accomplish their assignment. For example, one Mexican leader informed me that previous to his call as stake president, he had never served in a bishopric, on a high council, or in a stake presidency. He therefore had no experience attending the many administrative meetings over which he was now expected to preside. He said that if he could just watch videos of such meetings, he would have a much better idea of how to conduct them. The LDS Church has now developed a visually compatible approach for members throughout the world. The videos produced are accessible in multiple languages (including Spanish) through the Internet to individual members or in conjunction with group training meetings. This should help members become much better informed regarding their responsibilities and the requirements of their callings.

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Conclusion It seems likely the LDS Church in Mexico is currently moving from a condition of youthful expansion to one of young maturity. Many second-generation Mexican youth are serving missions and returning home to hold important callings within their wards and stakes. From an LDS Church point of view, it is hoped that their mission experiences have prepared them for the responsibilities that these callings entail. Because of developments within the Mexican federal education system and the help that the church is providing through its Perpetual Education Fund, more and more of them will achieve economic security and not suffer the depravations experienced by earlier generations of Mexicans. From the perspective of the LDS Church, perhaps the most important result of these considerations is that young people will more likely marry fellow Latter-­day Saints and together, while enjoying increased prosperity, raise a new generation of LDS Church members in Mexico. Because Mexico has experienced the greatest growth in LDS Church membership outside the United States, it provides a good case study for examining the international expansion of the LDS Church in particular and similar religious organizations more generally. Some of the points the Mexican case illustrates are as follows. First, there are a number of external factors beyond a church’s control which influence its ability to expand in a given country. Among these are the degree of civil conflict, religious freedom, nationalist sentiments, and the religiosity and religious attitudes of its citizens. Second, a church seeking to expand in a foreign county must be willing to make a significant investment in resources. In the case of the LDS Church, these have included a large missionary force and financial resources for such activities as the building of chapels, schools, and temples. Third, a church that wants to rapidly proselyte should probably expect a low retention rate. Fourth, in many ways it is more difficult to develop a mature and effective ecclesiastical organization than an adequate proselyting system. Fifth, foreign administrators must be sensitive to the feelings and aspirations of the people among whom they are working. And finally, a church must be willing to adjust its approaches as it seeks to improve the conditions of its members.

Notes 1. Agrícol Lozano Herrera, Historia del Mormonism en Mexico (Mexico, DF: Editorial Zarahemla, 1983), 8–29; F. LaMond Tulliis, Mormons in Mexico: The Dynamics of Faith and Culture (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1987) 34–84. 2. When the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints begins missionary efforts in a new area, the first organizations to emerge are branches (small congregations), each led by a branch president. A grouping of branches forms a district, led by a district presidency. District presidencies serve under the direction of a

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mission president, who also is in charge of proselyting missionaries serving in the mission over which he presides. 3. An intellectual and journalist with great influence in Mexico during the second half of the nineteenth century. 4. Enrique Chavarri, “Sunday Talk,” El Monitor Republicano 30 no. 10 (Mexico City) (11 Jan. 1880), Hemeroteca Nacional de México (HNM). 5. Enrique Chavarri, “Sunday Talk,” El Monitor Republicano 30 no. 16 (Mexico City) 18 Jan. 1880, HNM. 6. “The Mormons,” 4 no. 11, 8 Jan. 1880; “Mormonism Again,” 4 no. 12, 1 Mar. 1881, “Religious News,” 5 no. 2, 1 May 1881 among other dates, The Christian Lawyer (Mexico City), HNM. 7. A region of Mexico where communities such as Ozumba, Amecameca, Tecalco, Atlautla, Tepetlixpa, and Chimal are located, which were of great importance in the history of Mormonism in Mexico. 8. The residents of this area were generally known as liberal people who supported the various reforms that transformed Mexico into a secular state. 9. Perfecto Carmona, Private Archive (hereinafter APPC) December 1913. 10. Gregorio S. Rivero, Private Archive, 1913, loose papers. The documents suggest that from February and March of that year some Mormons already had contact with him. 11. APPC, Diary, several years. 12. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price, United States of America, Deseret Editorial, 1993, [Book of Alma 46: 4–36], pp. 387–388. The Title of Liberty reads, “In remembrance of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives and our children.” 13. Ibid. [Book of Alma 56: 10–54], pp. 420–423. 14. CéCeriani Cernadas Sar, “Border of Religious Imagination. Indians and Mormons in Eastern Formosa (Argentina),” in Interacts. Culture and Community (2009) (Brazil: Pontifical Catholic University of Mines) vol. 4, No. 5, p. 129. 15. Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, p. 103. 16. Beginning in the mid-1920s, the Mexican government made concerted efforts to enforce the anti-religious provisions of the 1917 Constitution. One result of these efforts was the ignition of a nationalist movement to make religion an essentially Mexican institution. A near civil war ensued, resulting in the deaths of some 90,000 Mexicans. Peace was not completely reestablished until 1940. 17. Florencio Galicia Castillo, Private Archives (hereafter APFGC) indela 1926, Memoirs. 18. APFGC, 1926, Memoirs. 19. History of the Mexican Mission, April 1931. 20. Pilar Páez, Private Archive (hereinafter APAP), January 1932, personal notes-­ loose papers. 21. APAP, February 1932, minutes, no page number. 22. Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, pp. 131–132, note 32. 23. Brian Connaughton, Ideology and Society in Guadalajara (1788–1853) (1992), (Mexico: National Council for Culture and Arts-UNAM), p. 17. 24. APAP, April 26, 1936, loose papers. 25. Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, p. 142.

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26. Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, p. 150. 27. Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, pp. 154–155. 28. Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, p. 157. 29. Thomas W. Murphy, “Stronger than Ever: Remains of the Third Convention,” The Journal of Latter Day Saint History 10 (1998) 1, 8–11. 30. http://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/chuchnewsroom (accessed 4/3/2020). 31. http://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/chuchnewsroom (accessed 4/3/2020). 32. Gutmann, Matthew, Being a Man in Mexico City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Bron Ingoldsby, “The Latin American Family: Familism vs. Machismo,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 1, no. 1 (1991): 57–62; Paz, Octavio, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico (New York: Grove Press, 1961): 65–88. 33. http://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/chuchnewsroom (accessed 4/3/2020). 34. Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, pp. 159, 206; http://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/ chuchnewsroom (accessed 4/3/2020). 35. Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, pp. 184–186. 36. Lozano Herrera, Mormonismo, pp. 176–206. http://www.churchofjesuschrist. org/chuchnewsroom (accessed 4/3/2020). 37. Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, pp. 186–192. 38. Lozano Herrera, Mormonismo, pp. 113–122. 39. Lozano Herrera, Mormonismo, pp. 123–124.

Bibliography Carmona, Perfecto. Private Archive. Chavarri, Enrique. 1880a. Sunday Talk. The Republican Monitor, 30 no. 10 (Mexico City) (11 Jan. 1880). HNM. ———. 1880b. Sunday Talk. The Republican Monitor, 30 no. 16 (Mexico City) (18 Jan. 1880). HNM. Connaughton, Brian. 1992. Ideology and Society in Guadalajara (1788–1853). Mexico: National Council for Culture and Arts-UNAM. Galicia Castillo, Florencio. 1926. Private Archives. Memoirs. Gutmann, Matthew. 1996. Being a Man in Mexico City. Berkley: University of California Press. Ingoldsby, Bron. 1991. The Latin American Family: Familism vs. Machismo. Journal of Comparative Family Studies 22 (1): 57–62. Lozano Herrera, Agícol. 1983. Historia del Mormonismo en Mexico. Mexico, DF: Editorial Zarahemla. Murphy, Thomas W. 1998. Stronger Than Ever: Remains of the Third Convention. The Journal of Latter Day Saint History 10 (1): 8–11. Páez, Pilar. 1932. Private Archive, January. Personal notes-loose papers. Paz, Octavio. 1961. The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico. New York: Grove Press. Rivero, Gregorio S. 1913. Private Archive. Loose papers. Sar, Cernadas. 2009. CéCeriani Border of Religious Imagination. Indians and Mormons in Eastern Formosa (Argentina). Interacts, Culture and Community 4 (5): 129. (Brazil: Pontifical Catholic University of Mines). The Christian Lawyer (Mexico City). Various dates. HNM.

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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 1993. Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price. United States of America, Deseret Editorial. Tullis, F.  LaMond. 1987. Mormons in Mexico: The Dynamics of Faith and Culture. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Website for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Church Newsroom. http:// www.churchofjesuschrist.org/chuchnewsroom.

CHAPTER 14

Mormons in Peru Building Temples with Sacred Cornerstones and Holy Drywall Jason Palmer and David C. Knowlton

Introduction In this chapter we will not provide an overview account of the progress and problems of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Peru. Instead, employing the ethnographic field research approach common to our discipline of anthropology, we focus on a particular subset of Peruvian Mormons in a particular locale (Arequipa, Peru) and on a singular topic. The story we relate does, however, have wider implications for LDS Peruvians generally, as well as for Mormons throughout Latin America and for Latinx Mormons in the U.S. In assessing the tension between grassroots control and institutional control over the meaning of significant LDS places, our overarching framework rests on a distinction between places that are “sacred” (generally referring to insurgent spirituality) and place that are “holy” (generally referring to official spirituality). We begin making these distinctions by quoting portions of two distinctive prayers delivered at the dedication ceremonies of two different LDS temples in two different times and places (Salt Lake City in 1893 and Arequipa, Peru in 2019. We pray Thee, Heavenly Father, to accept this building in all its parts … We pray Thee to bless, that they decay not, all the walls, partitions, floors … the elevators,

J. Palmer (*) Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA D. C. Knowlton Department of Anthropology, Utah Valley University, Orem, UT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_14

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stairways, railings and steps, the frames, doors, windows, and other openings, all things connected with the lighting, heating, and sanitary apparatus, the boilers, engines, and dynamos, the connecting pipes and wires, the lamps and burners, and all utensils, furniture and articles used in or connected with the holy ordinances administered in this house … we pray Thee to bless all the furniture, seats, cushions, curtains, hangings, locks, and fastenings, and multitudinous other appliances and appurtenances found in and belonging to this Temple and its annexes with all the work or ornamentation thereon, the painting and plastering, the gilding and bronzing, the fine work in wood and metal of every kind, the embroidery and needlework … and precious stones, all these and all else herein we humbly present for Thine acceptance and sanctifying blessing. -Salt Lake City Temple, 18931 We dedicate all the features of this beautiful edifice for Thy holy purposes. We dedicate this structure from its foundation to its spire. We dedicate each room for its purpose, including the baptistry, endowment rooms, sealing rooms, and celestial room. We dedicate the administrative areas and all supporting functions. We dedicate the ground on which this temple stands and its landscaping, that it can be a spiritual refuge from the world. We dedicate the ancillary buildings that they may perform their proper functions. -Arequipa, Peru Temple, 20192

The first quotation above is only a fraction of the many “materialistic” sentences uttered by the president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (hereafter, the Church), Wilford Woodruff, as he dedicated the Salt Lake City, Utah Temple in English on April 6, 1893. In his prayer, the sacredness of what may be called a “situated materiality”3 specific to Salt Lake City, is palpable. The second quotation above is all that President Russell Nelson wrote about the architecture and placement of the Arequipa, Peru Temple in a prayer (English in the original) read by apostle Ulisses Soares in Spanish on December 15, 2019. In this prayer, the locational and emotional qualities of the material references are so scant and functional as to seem interchangeable and importable, like gears on an assembly line. Thus, the materiality of objects evoked in the prayer is not identifiably arequipeño. As such, these objects and places are difficult for arequipeño church members to make sacred, even though the prayer connects them ostensibly to the heavens. We offer these two dedicatory prayers, divided by over a century of time and a continent of distance, as contrasting epigraphs to this chapter on Peruvian Mormonism in order to highlight the historic trajectory with which Peruvian members of the Church contend as they seek to participate in making their own sacred places. In our contemporary anthropological research among Mormon and non-Mormon Peruvians in Peru and Utah, and in our historical research among early Anglo Mormon writings, we have encountered a common reality: Material artifacts and locations—be they plates, stones, or places— even if not strictly holy, can still be sacred.

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Temples, as opposed to chapels and other routine meeting venues, are the holiest of LDS spaces, and they encapsulate relationships that are separate from, yet intimately tied to sacred places. Such similarities and differences between the “holy” and the “sacred” pervade Mormonism. Without the rites that can only be performed in holy temples in this world, humans, according to LDS belief, cannot form parts of whole families in the next.4 Temple-­ associated objects, therefore, become sacred as they are invested with people’s hopes, passions, experiences, and fears. These objects—and, in fact, any objects—often acquire a certain subjectivity in Peru and in the many extant versions of Mormonism. They are never merely symbols. They adopt an agency—a sacredness—based on the way their symbology interacts with the humans who allow themselves to become reflected inside them. However, “there is danger in this.”5 The danger is that the attraction between humans and designated aspects of the material environment can turn into a kind of refraction wherein a chain reaction quickly moves beyond institutional control. This results in an unauthorized expansion of what is popularly defined as sacred, a reaction that preeminent scholar of the sacred, Emile Durkheim, described as “effervescent.” Though he was describing whole societies, not particular institutions, his analysis is still relevant for appreciating the unstable nature of things experienced as sacred: The very act of congregating is an exceptionally powerful stimulant. Once the individuals are gathered together, a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness and quickly launches them to an extraordinary height of exaltation. Every emotion expressed resonates without interference in consciousnesses that are wide open to external impressions, each one echoing the others.6

The Church, as an institution, has always understood the necessity of this sacred reaction along with the volatility and danger it represents, not to its members, but to its authority. The Church both needs and fears the sacred. We, therefore, suggest a distinction between the holy and the sacred, a distinction that resembles, but does not precisely match, the distinction between that which is established and official and that which is insurgent and set apart.7 During the Arequipa, Peru temple construction project we illustrate below, the LDS Church attempted to stop its members from defining objects as sacred— including local plots of land and buildings—by deftly controlling the architectural production of “external impressions” and by impeding local “consciousnesses” from infusion into the temple and into its land. Since putting essential aspects of one’s self into an object has the potential to make it sacred, the newly imported Church in Arequipa allowed its members to embed less and less of themselves and their locality into its newly imported holy temple. One explanation for why the Church limits the popular fusion of self and object is that allowing subjectively sacred objects to proliferate would greatly increase the heterogeneity of members’ beliefs and of the actions that these beliefs catalyze. The Church strives instead for homogeneity of belief and

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practice by imposing what anthropologist Hannah Appel calls “modularity.” In her ethnographic work on the construction of offshore drilling rigs in Equatorial Guinea, Appel predicted that the concept of modularity could “scale across domains:” “Even democratization projects, where democracy has to be made into something that moves easily from place to place, can be carried in a suitcase or a Power-Point presentation.”8 In the LDS Church, modularity can be scaled to the domain of holiness. The basic idea would be that one should be able to set up a small-scale Mormon franchise wherever one goes using a kind of standardized “space-for-holiness-making kit” that transcends locality and emphasizes a single line of universal authority. However, in Peruvian Mormonism—a highly migratory form of Mormonism—we investigate in this chapter some of the ways in which official attempts to impose modularity fail. We do so by revealing evidence of how the unofficial, local and sacred aspects of Peruvian Mormonism seep in between the fissures of holy global homogeneities designed by LDS authorities in Utah.

Pilgrimage to the Unmediated Sacred Knowing from the anthropological literature that pilgrimage is the best place to find the seepage of sacred disorder through the cracks of holy order,9 Jason joined hundreds of LDS Church members on the once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to the dedication of the Arequipa Temple in December 2019. For Jason, this was a return to his 2017–2018 dissertation field site where he forged lasting relationships with both the arequipeño Mormons who fought to participate in the temple construction and with the handful of Anglo Mormons who— together with colombianos, trujillanos, limeños and only the occasional lucky arequipeño—exercised absolute power over every aspect of the construction, even down to Woodruff’s sacred “embroidery and needlework.” As an example of pilgrimage, we note that for Catholicism (Peru’s predominant religion) sites are often considered sacred because a localized miracle rapidly spreads the belief-impulse that “worship is to be rendered in a place.”10 Anthropologists Edith and Victor Turner explain that pilgrimage to such sacred sites is ritualistic and a liminal or transitional phenomenon in that it fosters a newly shared sense of communitas, a kind of space between the established structures of society.11 For the Turners, pilgrims seek the liminoid, a contact point in a newly designated sacred center beyond the existing structures of ordinary society. Even though the site to which pilgrims travel has often become institutionalized, the sacred center is personal, not institutional, and is often initially on the periphery of the site. Pilgrimage is, among other things on the Turners’ list of definitions, a dynamic of “individuality posed against the institutionalized milieu.”12 Its position against the institution means pilgrimage occurs “often outside the sphere of the organized church”13 and “in some cases it is even conducted in defiance of authorities.”14 Pilgrims often achieve “direct contact with the sacred”15 “unmediated by church powers and representatives,”16 even when

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the institution attempting to channel and control the pilgrims’ experiences emphasizes mediation. This tension between inflexible official direction and avoidance of mediation has a long history in Christianity. Christianity did not have official pilgrimages until it became the imperial religion of Rome,17 whereupon pilgrimages were used to convert pagans, instilling in them fear of the power imperial saints had over newly conquered places.18 Soon, populace-­ selected saint shrines proliferated uncontrollably, so in 123419 the right to deem someone a saint was reserved for the pope alone. Still, pilgrims in the cult of saints displayed perturbing propensities toward expanding the unmediated sacred. This motivated the Catholic church, after The Council of Trent, to “increase its control over the saint-making process.”20 But this control has not always prevailed. Today, for example, Portuguese pilgrims to the Marian shrine of our Lady of Fatima, like pilgrims to such shrines in Peru and nearby, resist control. In Fatima they travel to the shrine, sometimes on their knees, against the urging of Catholic authorities who advise a less unruly completion of vows to Fatima, such as by monetary donation.21 In Copacabana, on the edge of Peru, David has seen pilgrims buy and bless stones and miniatures, have their futures read on the Hill of Calvary, and make offerings to the Toad—not simply to the Virgin—for wealth and blessings. As pilgrims ignore the priests’ advice in both these shrines, authorities coopt the pilgrims’ ceremonies, placing priests in front of the crowd as if they were the ones leading it. Institutional authorities often eventually build churches atop sacred sites, as they have done at the pilgrimages of Copacabana in Bolivia, Chapi in Arequipa, and Qoyllur Rit’i in neighboring Cusco. However, “one common characteristic of pilgrimage sites is that they offer experiences of the sacred outside the physical boundaries of the church.”22 This is why devotees of St. Francis in Brazil focus more on the spontaneous pile of creative ex-votos23 “off to the side”24 than on the holy St. Francis Church itself. As David points out, it is common in highland Peru to find a chapel for votive candles off to the side of the main body of a Catholic church.

Off to the Side with Altar Doilies It was not difficult for Jason to seek the Mormon equivalent to this creative space of “off to the side” during the Arequipa Temple dedication. He himself was sidelined by the central holy-making ceremony in that he did not have a temple recommend card and, as such, was not deemed officially worthy to enter the temple proper where the dedication rite would take place. He could not even enter one of the seven special chapels, called “stake centers,” in Arequipa where the ceremony would be transmitted through electronic devices calibrated by the church’s all-Anglo audiovisual team, which flew in just for the occasion. In a manifestation of the kinds of hierarchical separations relating to “the holy” that organize formal Mormonism, these broadcasts would be transmitted to stake centers in the Arequipa Temple district,25 converting them into

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temporary temples wherein only the worthiest, full tithe-paying Mormons could enter. A temple recommend was not the only thing Jason lacked. He lacked a pass, or as many of his fellow pilgrims called it, “an invitation.” People with only a temple recommend card could get into one of the stake center broadcasts, but in order to be in the temple itself during its dedication they had to have both a recommend and a pass. These passes were supposed to have been distributed to all the congregations in the temple district, but most travelers reported having no chance of procuring one. Jason’s fellow pilgrims, who traveled from Lima, Cusco, Nasca, Tacna, Puno, Chile, and Bolivia to Arequipa for the temple dedication, did not consider themselves pilgrims. But most of them met every one of the criteria specified in the literature on pilgrimage, including and especially their near universal lack of officiality, their lack of a pass. They were hoping against hope that somehow, despite their lack of a pass, they would be allowed to skirt the holy strictures and enter unofficially for unmediated, un-­ broadcast access to the moment when, faithful Church members believe, Jesus Christ would officially take possession of his arequipeño home. Jason spent the night prior to the dedication in a hostel that a local member, Rosa, had set up a few blocks from the temple. Rosa, like many arequipeña Mormons, is a single mother. She and her daughter had been running the hostel since the temple’s open house in November 2019. They christened it, “Winter Quarters,” (in English) a place name from early Anglo Mormon plains-crossing mythology that most long-time Mormons in Peru are familiar with. Even though Rosa was one of the select few who got in on the temple’s volunteer security detail, she too was not given a pass. Despite this rampant absence of passes, excitement was high among the pilgrims, both in Winter Quarters and, as Jason found out later, in another hostel up the street named after the Book of Mormon city, Zarahemla. That hostel housed a “caravana” of 23 pilgrims from Cusco. The language of “caravana,” indicative of pilgrimage, has long been used in Peruvian Mormonism to refer to the annual, congregational chartering of buses for distant temple travel to Lima or other South American destinations. These distances now greatly shortened by the Arequipa Temple, dedicatory pilgrims jubilantly compared new travel times. Jason witnessed young cusqueños, themselves having traveled 10 hours, expressing their sympathy to elderly ladies from Chile: “You poor things, traveling seven hours!” “That’s nothing. We’ve been traveling the 31 hours one-way to the Lima Temple since before you all were born.” Most pilgrim conversation, however, revolved around asking—and chastising each other for daring to ask—four questions: Will the prophet, Russell Nelson recover from his stomach bug and dedicate the temple in person, or will we be stuck with a lesser authority; a “mere” apostle? Will the cornerstone ceremony that precedes the dedication outside the walls of the temple (literally “off to the side”) be open to those without a pass? Will the pass-less among us be allowed entry to the dedication itself if we stand near the temple entrance with faith, or will we have to settle for a stake center

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broadcast? And is there truly a difference in the magnitude of experience between participating inside a stake center versus inside the temple? Abuzz with such questions, the Winter Quarters pilgrims chatted late into the evening before the day of dedication in conversations that mobilized feelings of sanctity and their relationship with it, while also referencing holiness. They drank coca tea, a millenarian Andean herb (Coca Cola’s namesake) that helps with altitude sickness (the temple sits at nearly 8000 feet above sea level.) Of the ten pilgrims around the dining room table, five hailed from Lima, one from Pisco, two from La Paz, Bolivia, one from Arica, Chile, and one (Jason) from a place the others called “La Fábrica” (The Factory), meaning Utah, the place where Mormons are mass produced. Eight were female and two were male, a common gender ratio in most temple-related endeavors in Peruvian Mormonism except, as we shall see, official endeavors. Rosa was absent at first because she was busy selling her hand-embroidered handkerchiefs to all the youth coming out of their highly exclusive two-hour devotional at a nearby stake center. The speaker was, as Rosa reported later with well-concealed disappointment, Apostle Ulisses Soares. Only the most worthy youth were allowed to attend the meeting, and though it started at 7:00 p.m., they all showed up at 4:00 p.m. and sat reverently in their hardwood pews for three hours thinking that the Church’s prophet himself—President Nelson—would appear as a reward for their intensely un-Peruvian punctuality. One girl fainted from reverence fatigue and had to be carried out. Rosa sold 70 white handkerchiefs that night, all with an image of the Arequipa Temple expertly stitched into their centers. The white handkerchief is an important material aspect of the temple dedication ceremony that allows all dedication attendees to physically usher Christ into his new home on a rising wave of white as they stretch these small banners into the air and shout Hosanna three times. In Jason’s many conversations with Rosa, she never depicted her sales as a business opportunity capitalizing on the pilgrims’ need for a talisman. Though she admitted that many youth, especially in the caravanas from Moquegua, Cusco, and Puno, had forgotten to bring white handkerchiefs, she depicted her textile venture as a way to place parts of herself into the temple and not as a demand-based economic reaction. In the recent past, local women of the Church have been able to apply their talents to sacred place-making by knitting the white doilies used on the altars of their local temples. In contrast, for the Arequipa Temple, the architectural blueprints (Jason saw them) were so specific that it would not be surprising if they specified the number of loops on the altar doilies. There was no way the construction managers (whom Jason interviewed) were going to allow lay members to add local flairs and personalize the Church’s standardized, holy plans. Holiness, unlike sacredness, is ostensibly created by perfect order stemming from authority. Every last detail in the temple was precisely calculated (by a shockingly young, Anglo Mormon architect from La Fábrica named Gavin) to support that order.

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All the Mormon women to whom Jason talked in Arequipa expected to be able to contribute to their temple through altar doilies. By adding to the temple, they hoped to bring the holy and the sacred into their lives. When the Church confirmed that alter doilies would be externally imposed, Rosa found a way “off to the side” to put her “embroidery and needlework” into the creation of her sacred place.

Unheard Of in Peru When Rosa returned that evening as matron of Winter Quarters, the pilgrims, fast friends after only hours of meeting each other, discussed their strategic plans for the next day. There would be three dedicatory sessions, one at 9:00 a.m., one at 12:00 p.m., and one at 3:00 p.m. Though, in Jason’s mind, only the first session would include the precise moment of divine real-estate possession (the rest being mere reenactments), none of the other pilgrims expressed any preference for a particular session. They simply wanted to see one from inside the temple. This, despite the fact that they all knew that even if they made it into the temple, they would likely not be in the same room as apostle Ulisses Soares—the celestial room26—meaning they would still be participating through electronically mediated transmission. Meanwhile, at Zarahemla, there was a pass-less couple from Nazca with so much faith that they would be allowed into the temple that they got off their six-hour bus ride dressed in all white. This shocked their fellow lodgers since temple worshipers are only supposed to change into all white clothing—complete with white belt, white shoes, white shoelaces, white tie, and white stockings—once inside the temple dressing room, and then, only in a temple that is already functioning. Yet, citing an Anglo Mormon pioneer story wherein all the Utah townsfolk prayed for rain but only one came prepared with an umbrella— meaning only one actually expected the prayer to be answered—this couple was using their white clothing to show they were fully prepared to receive the Lord’s miracle of being allowed to see the dedication from inside the temple. Jason’s Winter Quarters bunkmate’s plan was notably less brazen. Also pass-­ less, his bunkmate was a single returned missionary from Camaná, a small city on the Southern Peruvian coast, three hours away from Arequipa. He had left his family and business behind for a few days—very spur-of-the-moment— in order to attend the dedication by broadcast in Arequipa, even though it was also broadcast to his stake center in Camaná. Jason asked him why, if he was going to attend by broadcast anyway, not just stay in Camaná? His answer was that, being in Arequipa, he could attend the broadcast at a stake center and then rush up to the temple grounds and take selfies for Facebook. For his Facebook friends, it would be as if he had attended the dedication inside the temple itself. Strangely, he refused to even try to go ex officio and gain temple entry without a pass, even though Jason gave him a vital inside scoop to which his previous ethnographic fieldwork among the Anglo orchestrators of the Arequipa

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Temple had made him privy. Before revealing this scoop, let us delineate a few other pertinent things Jason learned during his 2017–2018 stay in Arequipa and his membership in the Anglo temple-construction crew’s “Taco Tuesday Gringo Group.” This group met once a week in Arequipa’s only Mexican restaurant to simultaneously deride and extoll all things related to Mormon expatriate life in Peru. Through these conversations, some of them digitally recorded, Jason gleaned many insights. Here are a few: • Though the local members fully expected the temple façade to be done in sillar—the locally-quarried volcanic white stone used in most arequipeño edifices since 1540, earning Arequipa the title, “The White City”—the temple would instead be clothed in a grayish granite from a quarry in China by a team of skilled masons from Colombia. Reasoning: Sillar is not a “quality stone.” • The Arequipa Temple was deliberately designed by a Salt Lake City based architectural firm to include virtually nothing that arequipeños could recognize as arequipeño except for a few stylistic nods to local Catholic churches  and some cornicing and stained glass motifes based on the texao, a local flower. Reasoning: If members are seeking sacred symbology in the place where they are worshipping, they will get distracted from the holiness of the rituals they are performing. As the Los Olivos, Peru Temple’s Anglo project manager said during the press conference of its June 2019 groundbreaking, “the construction of these buildings will not change your life … it is your time within them that will change your life. And that is the message. The construction is the construction, but what we do inside the temples; that’s the important part.”27 In other words, it is the globally standardized rituals that are vessels for the holy, not the space itself. Sacred  locality must not be allowed to detract from holy modularity. • Despite a rich and distinctive arequipeño painting tradition and dozens of local masters of that tradition (many of them members of the Church), the original paintings in the temple baptistry would be done by a male, Anglo, Salt Lake City artist and would depict baptisms of indistinct “traditionally clad indigenous people” in a generic river. These paintings would not even show the majestic volcano Misti, which would have placed the river as the Chili, the lifeblood of arequipeño agriculture. The reasoning for this, and for the fact that all of the Church’s upper-level temple project managerial positions in Arequipa were filled by male Anglos from Utah, was that these men had done good jobs in the past, and the Church’s work is too urgent to risk losing time in finding new talent. • While the youth in Trujillo, Peru were able to impress their Anglo church leaders with an extremely well-rehearsed folkloric jubilee the day before their temple’s 2015 dedication, the youth in Arequipa would be allowed

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to do nothing but sit for a two-hour devotional about temple worthiness. Reasoning: Youth cultural extravaganzas have “gotten out of hand.” It is important to note that these reasonings behind what Jason learned were not necessarily the reasonings of his temple construction friends. They were described to him as the reasonings of the disembodied Church under which they worked, representing a logic common within Mormonism wherein the Church becomes an existing ideal that must be separated from the actions of people. In many cases, his gringo buddies disagreed vehemently with the Church that employed them and felt like pawns in what they themselves sometimes recognized as more a sacred place containment apparatus than a sacred-­ site construction project. Nevertheless, most of the Anglo expatriates felt the arequipeño members needed them and that arequipeños were incapable of constructing the temple on their own. The following transcription excerpt from “Taco Tuesday,” April 24, 2018 that exemplifies this sentiment also brings up another thing Jason learned. Apparently, good-ole all-American drywall is a celestial material, essential for any house of God. MIKE:

That’s why these temples cost so much more than temples built in the United States. One reason—drywall. JASON: I didn’t know they cost more. MIKE: They cost lots more. JAKE: Importation. MIKE: Yeah, they have to import in so much—Drywall’s not a thing down here in Peru, so where do the studs come from? Not Peru. And you bring them through customs, and there’s a 30% tax. So, the materials for the job site here are all of a sudden 30% higher than they are in the States, because that’s where they’re coming from. Roofing, same deal. The roofing systems are brought in, they’re taxed. JASON: Ok, final question. You said you have differences of opinion with Reilly [Mike’s and Jake’s supervisor], what are some of those? MIKE: Well, I think when it came up was when he was talking about how the building itself causes you—how certain effects, certain architectural effects in the building cause you to have—to think in certain ways? Something like that. But for me, I only question methods. Means and methods. The plans are fine. JAKE: But the thing is, Reilly has experience. MIKE: Reilly has experience— JAKE: Mike doesn’t have any experience building a temple in Peru, but Reilly does. MIKE: Well, part of the problem that you have down here is—you have to have sheetrock walls and you have—every electrical box that goes in there has what they call a mud rim, okay? It brings the box out to the face of the sheetrock, specified in the plans. Unheard of, unavailable here in Peru. So I say things like, “Why aren’t things progress-

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ing?” The reason is because somebody didn’t order enough mud rims for the electrical boxes. Reilly doesn’t worry about that because he has bought the project, and it’s not going to change his costs at this point whether they do it this way or whether they do it that way. But see, my whole career was built on trying to eke out more profit from a fixed bid, and I did that by being more efficient and using the best means of method possible. Using those means and methods was the difference between whether we made a lot of money on a job or not. And so he just goes through, and I get really frustrated because they’re doing things really stupid. Like Eleodoro [a non-Mormon contractor from Trujillo, Peru], you know, they [the Peruvian construction workers] are going up to the third floor, and then they have one access hole over here on the side of the building that they haven’t filled in. They hadn’t done the concrete in yet, and the guys start working on it, and I just say, “Eleodoro, why are you closing that access hole? You still have to get in there and grade the slab. You got to pull out all of the shoring posts. All its going to do is just block your access. So, you’re going to have to feed everything through one little tiny hole. Why are you doing that?” “Oh, because it’s on the cronograma, it’s on the schedule to do it right now.” And I say, “well, don’t you think you ought to wait like three months until you can get everything out of there and your slab’s poured and everything?” And what do they do? They just fill that thing in, and they come back, and they say, “Oh, in hindsight I probably should have left that hole open.” Or I tell them, “the drywall on the second floor”—this is just complaining, okay? I hope this doesn’t make your report. JASON: [laughs] JAKE: He just gets frustrated, the bottom line is— MIKE: —I can’t! I tell ‘em!— JAKE: —is the Peruvians have different ways of doing things. MIKE: I tell ‘em, I say, “Okay, you’re in there framing all these little walls. Why don’t you just not frame anything yet and do all the exterior walls while you still have an open space and all this room to mobilize and get all those exterior walls framed and sheet rocked and then start the interior walls?” And again, Eleodoro comes to me two months later and says, “That would have been a good idea.” JAKE: Why didn’t their schedules say that then? MIKE: Because— JAKE: —If that’s a good idea— MIKE: —Because they don’t know how to build a schedule. That’s part of the problem. JAKE: And by “they” you mean COSAPI [the Lima-based Peruvian company that, despite receiving little credit in this conversation, ran the

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entire temple construction project and are almost solely responsible for its success]— MIKE: —Yeah, and another thing, you know, a problem I have, it’s not with Reilly, it’s with the Church. JAKE: [laughs] Better turn your recorder off. MIKE: Turn your machine off for this one. JAKE: We’re going to get fired. [laughs] MIKE: If I were given a job for a high school and I were given two and a half years to complete it, I would have programmed in my cost of overhead through the whole job, okay? If I finish that job three months early, I save that overhead. The way the Church has the contract scheduled is if COSAPI finishes 3 months early, they have to give that overhead back. There’s no incentive for these guys to finish earlier than exactly 2 years, 6 months. There is none. And— JAKE: —But then, you know, you don’t want the Peruvians cutting corners to finish early. MIKE: I don’t want them cutting corners but— JAKE: —The Church has a certain— MIKE: —but still— JAKE: —expectation— MIKE: —still there needs to be an incentive. I mean it’s, it’s—and so, I have a problem sometimes with the business aspect of the Church. That does not affect my testimony [my sense that the Church is true], okay? I have been able to compartmentalize those two sections right there, the corporate side of the Church and the ecclesiastical side. This excerpt not only grants a glimpse into the Church’s ecclesiastical versus business dichotomy, suggesting a possible analogy to the sacred versus holy distinction, it also demonstrates the kinds of access Jason’s white privilege provided him. It is certainly not coincidental that the color associated with Jason’s racial designation that allowed him access to the Taco Tuesday Gringo Group— white—just so happens to be the same color central to holy temple symbology. The above conversation would not have occurred were it not for two linkages foundational to Mormonism: the linkage between whiteness and official holiness and  the linkage between indigeneity  and potentially dangerous sacred expansion. The excerpt also opens a window into the day-to-day, material nitty gritty of the Arequipa holiness-construction site that most arequipeño Mormons, despite their desire, devotion and intense striving toward worthiness—meaning, in part, whiteness—never got to experience.28 Ironically, Jason, a man with zero personal stake in making Arequipa a sacred place, got to include more of himself into the visceral temple construction than the thousands of Peruvian Mormons who staked their spiritual lives on that construction. Through the Taco Tuesday Gringo Group, he became one of the few outsiders allowed into the construction site. On one occasion, he even signed his name into the construction site guest book, a book included in the time

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capsule that will remain encased in the cornerstone of the Arequipa Temple until Christ comes to reign personally upon the earth.

The People’s Cement Speaking of the cornerstone, let us get back to the inside scoop Jason shared with his bunkmate. In the Lima airport on the way to Arequipa, Jason noticed a formally-dressed Anglo couple reading aloud to each other from the Church’s magazine, The Ensign. Assuming they were going to the temple dedication, he struck up a conversation with Dick and Betty and found that Dick was Reilly’s boss from the Church’s temple construction department in Salt Lake City. Dick had spent his entire career living in Latin America building temples for the Church, so he knew firsthand that, though people with passes are allowed inside first, there are invariably enough seats for people without passes to be let in later, especially in the third session. Furthermore, the cornerstone ceremony at 9:00 a.m. would require neither a pass nor a recommend, meaning Jason would get his chance to be literally “off to the side” and watch the establishment of the sacred take place before the site was able to host the holy. His bunkmate’s underwhelming response to this intel did not detract from the electricity it sparked among the others at Winter Quarters. The cusqueños at Zarahemla found out about it independently. All who discovered this unpublished information in time rejoiced in it, not only because it vindicated their boldness in journeying without a pass, but because they had assumed that they would have to watch the cornerstone ceremony from outside the temple fence even if they had a pass. They assumed that the members of the highly selective choir—those few Peruvian Mormons who were able to sight-read European style sheet music—would be the only local members allowed to stand on the actual grass next to the cornerstone and witness a representative of the Lord, and other church dignitaries, use a white trowel to place bits of cement to seal the space between the cornerstone and the other granite blocks, essentially making the finishing touches on the temple’s corporal construction preparatory to its spiritual dedication. The barrier of the fence now removed from their imaginations, the pilgrims dared wonder if they too, as laity, might be able to—perchance—apply some of their own bodily work toward the construction of the temple through the energetic laying of that same—now sacred—cement. On the day of dedication, pilgrims from both hostels, and many others, had already been standing in wait on the lush temple gardens for two hours when Jason showed up at 8:15 a.m. He was met with bad news from local volunteer security. The garden was at capacity. Soon, however, Jason’s old friend Reilly was there to warmly shake his hand, override security, and lead him across a ropedoff, carpeted walkway through the garden that culminated in the temporary platform upon which the German-Brazilian apostle Ulisses Soares soon stood, dressed in all white, to say a few words in the most fluent Spanish Jason had ever heard from the lips of a Mormon apostle. After speaking, Elder Soares anointed

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the cornerstone’s gap with his dab of cement from a small rectangular trough that Reilly was assiduously mixing in order to maintain perfect consistency. The apostle then handed the ceremonial trowel to each Church dignitary in turn “and their wives,” and each added their dab, some more skillfully than others. Then, to an audible gasp from the audience, the apostle called up eight pre-­ selected, well-dressed local children, including a boy with Down’s Syndrome, to come add their own bits of self to the temple masonry. When the ceremony was over, the choir sang, the dignitaries went inside the temple, and Dick and Reilly allowed anybody who desired to line up and have their own turn at placing cement in the still unfinished stone wall of their temple. Those who took advantage of this opportunity to literally participate in the construction of their sacred site and take photographs of themselves—trowel in hand—next to their handiwork, did so instead of attending the first dedicatory session going on simultaneously inside. They did so with the unquestioned assumption that their cement would remain part of the temple structure in perpetuity, just like Jason’s name inside the cornerstone. Over an hour later, when there were no longer any pilgrims in line, only Reilly, Emily (Reilly’s spouse), Dick, Betty, Mike, Jake and Jason remained at this sacred stone “off to the side.” Reilly carefully cleaned off the excess cement with a white towel and had Jason take a photograph of the group next to the cornerstone outlined in fresh cement. There they were, the small group of Utahns partially responsible for this magnificently out-of-place structure. Their little piece of Utah in Arequipa was finally complete. Or was it? Suddenly, Reilly unceremoniously stuck his fingers in the corners of the cement, pried loose the foam rubber noodles he had placed there, and stripped out all the parts of self the pilgrims and authorities had deposited with so much faith. He and the others were in a hurry now. They all had “golden passes” to the celestial room for the 12:00 session. He rapidly swept up the cement pieces from the ground, dusted them back into the trough and cleaned up. The entire cementing ceremony had only been for show. In the trough, each cement piece retained its individuality, like thin, geometric ice-cream scoops. Jason gazed upon these pieces as if mourning solid bits of pilgrims’ shattered faith, dying baby birds, or scraps of discarded legacy. Reilly, perceiving Jason’s shock, remarked with chilling offhandedness, “the COSAPI guys will come in and fill the gaps with silicone so the cornerstone is uniform with the rest of the structure. We can’t have one stone sealed with one substance while the others are sealed with something else.”

What Will Our Sacrifice Be? For Reilly, uniformity trumped sacred place. “Off to the side” sacredness was quickly dispatched in favor of central holiness. One should expect this of a church that has made centrality its organizing principle. When it officially opened a mission in Peru in the mid-1950’s, the Church did so in what it

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considered Peru’s center, Lima, the same city apostle Parley P. Pratt had visited 100 years earlier deeming it the “best informed and most influential city … of South America, for the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and the fullness of the Gospel to be introduced.”29 However, in the small port city of Mollendo, a 14-hour bus ride “off to the side” of Lima—very near Arequipa—a more grassroots structure of Mormonism was taking root well before the Church’s Lima mission office deployed its first missionaries.30 Though the first officially dedicated Peruvian Mormon space for holiness was the Lima Tambo chapel, it required the assistance of “construction missionaries” brought in from Arequipa. When these pioneer arequipeño Mormons speak of these early days, they focus on the joy of participating in the messy, taxing, and often painfully embodied construction of sacred places. Naturally, the joyousness of their retellings multiplies when these places include Arequipa. In Arequipa, kids would gather pebbles from the Chili river to mix with ash from the volcano Misti while adult males made cement and adult females boiled kinship into nonalcoholic chicha morada (purple corn beer) and other refreshments, binding all who consumed these refreshments to each other, the Church, and the cement. Under guidance from Anglo contractors, flown in from Salt Lake City, they would pour the cement into the earth that they—both male and female, young and old—had pounded and pickaxed into readiness. What made these places sacred was not just their ceremonial dedications by Church officials or their similitude to Utah constructions, i.e. their modular holiness. What made these places sacred was that the members were allowed to deposit parts of themselves into their own local materials, granting these materials—and, by extension, themselves—subjectivity, legacy, and a sense of belonging in place. The desire to secrete self into the cracks between building stones, creating place rather than simply inhabiting space, is not unique to arequipeño Mormonism. As two of only a handful of anthropologists of Mormonism in the world, we often attend conferences of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and ancillary meetings of the Mormon Social Science Association (MSSA). At the October 2019 conference, during the question and answer portion of Laurie Maffly-Kipp’s MSSA-sponsored Glen M. Vernon Lecture on Maori Mormons’ resistance to the Church’s razing of what officials considered the Maori members’ “shoddily built” residences near the Hamilton, New Zealand Temple—homes imbued with sacredness—most of the questions from the almost exclusively Anglo audience of Mormon scholars were not questions at all. They were nostalgic reflections sparked by the Mormon Maori reminder that though Christ has transcended the fallen earth, the sacred still emanates from earthy objects. We dispassionate Anglos remembered our own, long forgotten connections to the sacred materiality that Mormon buildings can evoke when they are built with contributing parts of self. One conference attendee mentioned that his father had laid the basketball court in a chapel in Northern California and pricked by a splinter, had bled into the wood. Remnants of his blood were lacquered in place, dedicated along with the building, and dribbled

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upon by basketball players for years. Today, that chapel is sacred for that son despite his becoming an empirical sociologist, who just so happens to work for the very department of the Church responsible for scientifically perfecting its centrality and modularity. Arequipa, Hamilton, and Northern California are distant points on the globe with seemingly incommensurable cultures divided by numerous international borderlands. What has the power to convert these estranged and disparate spaces into similarly sacred places—or even places for holiness—under the same religious institution? Mormonism’s first prophet, Joseph Smith, had an answer: “a religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things, never has the power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life.”31 Borderland philosophy’s first poet, Gloria Anzaldúa, had a similar answer: This is the sacrifice that the act of creation requires, a blood sacrifice. For only through the body, through the pulling of flesh, can the human soul be transformed. And for images, words, stories to have this transformative power, they must arise from the human body—flesh and bone—and from the Earth’s body— stone, sky, liquid, soil.32

When Church headquarters announced the Arequipa Temple in 2012, arequipeño Mormons shed tears into their Earth’s body, overwhelmed with emotion. Finally, they would become a center unto themselves, not simply Utah’s or Lima’s periphery. More importantly, they would finally be able to sacrifice their own sweat to make sacred their own stone. As the years went by, however, the Church regulated away one opportunity for sacrifice after another: no more sillar, no more doilies, no more jubilees, and certainly no more amateur construction labor. Fortunately, these prohibitions did not deter faithful local members like Ofelia Dominguez in the slightest. Jason met her during his first week of preliminary research in Arequipa in 2016 and now holds over fifty hours of her digitally recorded experiences. She was baptized Mormon in 2001, but was born and raised Catholic in Arequipa. The following interview took place on July 2, 2016, nearly a year before the Arequipa Temple groundbreaking. JASON:

And what feeling are you going to have toward the Arequipa Temple once it is built, being the temple of your home city? OFELIA: Being the temple of my home city? A special feeling, but I will also always remember the Lima Temple. We were just commenting about that with a lot of the sisters. They were saying, “now that we are going to have our own temple in Arequipa, we don’t have to travel sixteen hours to Lima with our spines hurting, thankfully.” But I stopped and thought about that and said, “yes, we are blessed with a temple in our city. It may be true that we won’t have to go through those tough times traveling uncomfortably on the bus, but then what will our sacrifice be? Just have the taxi drop us

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off and that’s it?” It will no longer be the same desire that those of us who have to travel continue to feel. It may be true that we don’t have to travel with our handcarts [laughs] like the pioneers, but from the moment that we save for the bus fare we start sacrificing a lot of things to get that money together. We risk our jobs because… we run the risk of our bosses saying, “sorry, if you take time off, don’t come back.” Even so, we sacrifice it … because we want to go to the house of the Lord. I think that it’s not going to require much of a sacrifice anymore. The feeling of: “It doesn’t matter how we get there, but let’s get there. It doesn’t matter if we don’t eat those days, but we are there. We are there.” … I think that there will still be a sacrifice with the new temple, but it won’t be SUCH a huge sacrifice like the one that our ancient pioneers made. Right? Maybe the sacrifice that we have to do now, or rather—the duty that is ours now, is to accelerate the construction of the temple by doing our genealogy, the vicarious work for our dead. That is what they [local leaders] are asking us to do now so that the construction can accelerate. Ofelia was careful to not put herself on par with the Anglo Mormon pioneers of 1847, whom she identified as her own “ancient pioneers,” yet she included her personal sacrifices among those that pioneered arequipeña Mormon temple worship. She is part of the temple’s story in that she believes her sacrifice of time spent in researching her ancestors directly accelerated the construction of the temple where those ancestors can now be “sealed” to her in a ritual that is necessary for both her salvation and theirs.33 In the official Church, temples do require that ancestor names be submitted regularly in order to function at full capacity. But Church real estate lawyers do not require ancestor names in order to litigate faster or better perform their other functions. However, Ofelia claimed otherwise. She interpreted for Jason a very localized belief, bred from speculation, about the unusually long preconstruction delay in procuring government approval to build on the chosen site. After talking to Reilly, and to the Ministry of Culture’s local archaeologists, Jason discovered that the delay stemmed from the problematic legality of developing a protected, pre-Incan archaeological zone. However, according to Ofelia and other church members with whom Jason attended church meetings, rumor had it that the delay was in fact a divine chastisement of local members for their lack of enough ancestor data to make the temple worth building. Thinking it superstitious, Reilly sought to quell this rumor, but Ofelia channeled it into the temple production as a way to sacrifice. Through the rumor, which local Peruvian bishops permutated through local pulpits, genealogy became a way to materially participate in temple construction, a way to accumulate sacrifice under Arequipa’s ground and, in the process, recruit ancestral spirits in the fight against Peru’s Ministry of Culture that regulated the possibility of construction.

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It appeared to work. Members increased their digital production of ancestor names like never before, and, suddenly, permission was granted and construction commenced. Reilly’s attempted debunking of Ofelia’s belief ignored her need to sacrifice for her temple on her land. It also ignored the importance of ancestors, especially pre-Christian machulas, in many arequipeños’ relationships to place. Reilly saw the temple’s eventual triumph over Peru’s Ministry of Culture’s legal hurdles as miraculous, but he refused to attribute this miracle to Ofelia’s ancestors, some of whom, like the machulas (or “gentiles,” as they are also called) may even have built the pre-Incan terracing upon which the temple now stands.

Sacred Stone A year later, Ofelia found another, more literal, way to sacrifice for her temple. Through a series of miracles, she succeeded in finagling her way into becoming one of four adults to have the privilege of blistering their hands with pickaxes and shovels as they, and the small group of youth they chaperoned, prepared the temple construction site for the groundbreaking ceremony’s seating arrangements and awnings. On March 20, 2017, Jason interrupted her recounting of this experience to ask a question about her relationship to the plot of land chosen for her temple. JASON:

I wanted to ask you a question. During all your digging, did you end up collecting a little bottle of earth from there like you told me you wanted to? OFELIA: Yes, but I only ended up bringing back a stone. JASON: Oh, even better. OFELIA: I have here the little stone. It is among my collection of little stones that I have. So, I have a stone that stays there and that, well, since I went with my seminary students I told them that we could each take one, one stone from the temple to have it as a memento of something that was part of the land. So, I have a stone that I took right from that spot. A little piece of earth. That is what I have. And well—where were we? Ofelia did not want to dwell on this topic because she knew Jason was assigning meaning to her rock collecting that she did not believe was true. Even though stone, and the relationship of people with stone, is very important in the Andean past, Ofelia did not consider her temple rock to be a “subjective object,”34 a sacred Andean huaca, or a symptom of her Andean-Mormon syncretism.35 Yet, she did keep it, and, to this day, she does have it on her display of mementos, which looks strikingly like an altar. Denying that her rock has sacred power keeps her in line with the Christian belief that the sacred, along with Christ, has transcended materiality. In the Andes, the sacred was often found deep in stone and place, but after Catholic

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arrival, if the sacred did not transcend the dark earth, it risked implicating the ancestral inner world, a world that early Catholic missionaries took great pains to symbolically associate with the diabolical underworld. Despite the ostensible success of this Catholic effort, David finds that the sacred inner world still creeps into Peruvian Catholic life in one way or another.36 As a result of this history, and of Peruvian Mormonisms’ desire to jettison all things associated with Peruvian Catholicism, many of Jason’s Peruvian Mormon friends feel a sense of danger associated with assigning sacredness to objects and places. Paradoxically, despite their sacrifices to make their places sacred, they react defensively when asked if arequipeño places are sacred. They want to make sure that Jason knows that they know that the sacred is not supposed to be locally placed, and that their journey to the temple dedication was not supposed to be a pilgrimage. “Pilgrimage” to them indexes Catholic pilgrimages to shrines not infrequently associated with pre-Hispanic—and, as such, problematically pagan—sacred places, such as the volcano Misti, herself iconographically mirrored in triangular depictions of the Virgen of Chapi, Arequipa’s chief defender against volcanic eruption. Catholic arequipeños make pilgrimages to nearby Chapi with its miraculous Virgin, as well as to distant Copacabana, as David has witnessed—one of the three most sacred places for the Incas and pre-Incas. Arequipeño Mormons understandably harbor a complex multivalence toward the emplaced sacred. Nevertheless, Ofelia, with her little stone from the temple grounds, made herself part of arequipeño Mormon sacred place. Referring to her stone as one of the “little details” that cumulate into legacy, she stated on May 13, 2017: We should work to leave a legacy for our kids, to leave these legacies [pointing to her stone], and may these little details do that work for them and— We also cultivate in our generations the desire to leave those little details as a legacy because they are going to have them as treasures for themselves. That is what I have also learned in the church. So that maybe if I happened to go over there to the temple lot and I found something, well, I grab it, even if it be only a little stone. And I’d say, “Here.” “Look.” “This is it.” “This is what I brought from that place.”

She went on to say that she took that stone from the temple site so that she could tell her “future generation:” “I went to the land of the temple when it was not yet built and this is the evidence, and this is what it was like before being. Before the temple was constructed.” The sacredness of the stone lay not it its housing of ancestral spirits, such as the spirit of her Quechua-speaking grandmother, whose llama bell sits near the temple stone in Ofelia’s display of mementos, but in its encapsulation of herself in connection to her future kin; a kin for whom she will be the temple-building hero. She will not admit that the stone itself is sacred—like the stones Andean Catholics bring back from pilgrimages or deposit onto apachetas (stone piles)— but for her descendants it will be. Her stone will be sacred and, she hopes, provide some small inducement toward the holy. It will prove that she was on

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that local spot of earth before a foreign Mormon apostle proclaimed it a place for holiness. That spot, extracted from the site and injected into the stone, is latent sacred place. The stone is a piece of arequipeña mormona identity that belongs to her and makes her into the link that connects a disorderly, pre-Incan plot of land to a future chapter in the ongoing story of Mormonism in Peru that her grandchildren will read. In this way, links to land and stone lend another valence to her templar sacrifice, designating Ofelia as one of the first on the land of a Peruvian Mormon sacred site.

Conclusion The LDS Church, in its striving toward modernity, wishes to separate the sacred and the holy from the land. The Church did not allow temple district members access to the ways they expected to sacrifice for their temple. The impression created is that the Church did not want the temple to belong to the local members. Now the Church owns the temple, and it appears to seek ownership of the rights of control over its sacredness. Yet, temple sacredness, and perhaps even holiness, finds a breach and seeps out, pooling in unexpected places “off to the side.” Rosa’s handkerchiefs, Reilly’s cement, and Ofelia’s stone are but a few examples of these places. Despite the Church’s best efforts to mass produce duplicatable, generic spaces for holiness—faithful to the pattern that some Peruvian Mormons refer to as being of La Fábrica—local members have made the Arequipa Temple into a situated, sacred place. They have secreted their bodies and their sacrifices into the disappointingly grey granite and imported drywall, transforming the Church’s temple into their own.

Notes 1. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, “Dedicatory Prayer: Salt Lake Temple, 6 April 1893.” Temples, accessed December 27, 2019, paragraph 10, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/temples/details/salt-lake-temple/praye r/1893-04-06?lang=eng. 2. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, “Arequipa Peru Temple Dedicatory Prayer: 17 December 2019.” Church News, accessed December 27, 2019, paragraphs 11–13, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church/news/ arequipa-peru-temple-dedicatory-prayer?lang=eng. 3. Anthropologists think of “materiality” as not just the physical nature of objects in the environment but also the dialectical relationship between humans and these empirical objects. 4. Contemporary LDS theology highlights the continuation of family relationships in the afterlife. 5. This is according to Pascuala Cusicanchi, one of Jason’s principal collaborators in his ethnographic study of Peruvian Mormonism as discussed in his forthcoming dissertation, “Peruvian Mormon: Pioneer Indigeneity and Forever Families Between Peru and Utah.”

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6. Emile Durkheim, [1915] The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964), 217–18. 7. For Durkheim, one of the key marks of the sacred is that it transcends ordinary reality. 8. Hannah Appel, “Offshore Work: Oil, Modularity, and the How of Capitalism in Equatorial Guinea,” American Ethnologist 39, no. 4 (2012): 698. 9. Jill Dubisch, In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics of a Greek Island Shrine. (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1995). 10. Deana L.  Weibel, “Of Consciousness Changes and Fortified Faith: Creativist and Catholic Pilgrimage at French Catholic Shrines,” in Pilgrimage and Healing, eds. Jill Dubisch and Michael Winkelman (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005), 116. 11. Victor Turner, [1967] “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” in Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, eds. William Armand Lessa and Evon Zartman Vogt (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). 12. Victor Turner and Edith Turner, [1978] Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 34. 13. Paul Post, Jos Pieper, and Marinus Van Ulden, The Modern Pilgrim: Multidisciplinary Explorations of Christian Pilgrimage (Walpole, MA: Peeters, 1998), 1. 14. Michael Winkelman and Jill Dubisch, “Introduction: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage,” in Pilgrimage and Healing, eds, Jill Dubisch and Michael Winkelman (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005), xvi. 15. Ibid., xxiii. 16. Ibid., xxii. 17. J.  Stopford, “Some approaches to the archaeology of Christian pilgrimage,” World Archaeology 26, no. 1 (1994): 58 18. Sidney M. Greenfield and Antonio Mourao Cavalcante, “Pilgrimage Healing in Northeast Brazil: A Cultural-biological Explanation,” in Pilgrimage and Healing, eds. Jill Dubisch and Michael Winkelman (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005). 19. This was 100 years before the Incan Empire appropriated the terracing near the Arequipa Temple. 20. Ibid., 7. 21. Lena Gemzoe, “The Feminization of Healing in Pilgrimage to Fatima,” in Pilgrimage and Healing, eds. Jill Dubisch and Michael Winkelman (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005). 22. Ibid., 46. 23. Ex votos, in this case, are sculptures of the devotees’ body parts that the saint healed. 24. C. Lindsey King, “Pilgrimage, Promises, and Ex-Votos: Ingredients for Healing in Northeast Brazil,” in Pilgrimage and Healing, eds. Jill Dubisch and Michael Winkelman (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2005), 59. 25. The Arequipa Temple district includes most of Southern Peru and parts of Bolivia and Chile. 26. In LDS temples, the celestial room is, in some ways, the sacred apex of the temple ceremony, wherein participants are symbolically ushered into the celes-

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tial kingdom—the highest level of heaven in LDS theology—after successful completion of a ritualistic, symbolic journey. 27. Isaac Angulo, Ceremonia de La Palada Inicial Del Templo de Los Olivos (Lima, Perú: MasFe, June 8, 2019), video, 02:19, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=npKP1CPL7Xk, translation ours. Isaac Angulo is the producer of the video, not the individual quoted. 28. Approximately four lower-level COSAPI employees who worked on the temple were active members of the Church. 29. Parley Pratt, The Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt (Chicago: Law, King & Law, 1888), 447. 30. The early grassroots beginning of Mormonism in Mollendo seems to stem from a Utah-connected mine in Toquepala. This information comes from Jason’s conversations with arequipeño members, but has yet to be corroborated with documentary evidence. 31. Joseph Smith, Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­Day Saints (Nauvoo, IL: John Taylor, 1844), 69. 32. Gloria Anzaldúa, [1987] Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: aunt lute books, 2012), 97. 33. To be sealed in an LDS temple means that one party is bound to the other in an eternal relationship. 34. Fernando Santos-Granero, “Introduction: Amerindian Constructional Views of the World,” in The Occult Life of Things: Native Amazonian Theories of Materiality and Personhood, ed. Fernando Santos-Granero (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009), 9. 35. Syncretism refers to the often-observed amalgamation, over time, of divergent religious beliefs and practices, emanating from separate cultures, into a new, integrated expression 36. Olivia Harris, “The Eternal Return of Conversion: Christianity as Contested Domain in Highland Bolivia,” in The Anthropology of Christianity, ed. Fenella Cannell (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2006).

Bibliography Angulo, Isaac. 2019. Ceremonia de La Palada Inicial Del Templo de Los Olivos. Masfe. org. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npKP1CPL7Xk. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2012. Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: aunt lute books. Appel, Hannah. 2012. Offshore Work: Oil, Modularity, and the How of Capitalism in Equatorial Guinea. American Ethnologist 39 (4): 692–709. Dubisch, Jill. 1995. In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics of a Greek Island Shrine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Durkheim, Emile. 1964. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Allen & Unwin. Gemzoe, Lena. 2005. The Feminization of Healing in Pilgrimage to Fatima. In Pilgrimage and Healing, ed. Jill Dubisch and Michael Winkelman, 25–48. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

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Greenfield, Sidney M., and Antonio Mourao Cavalcante. 2005. Pilgrimage Healing in Northeast Brazil: A Cultrualbiological Explanation. In Pilgrimage and Healing, ed. Jill Dubisch and Michael Winkelman, 3–23. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Harris, Olivia. 2006. The Eternal Return of Conversion: Christianity as Contested Domain in Highland Bolivia. In The Anthropology of Christianity, ed. Fenella Cannell, 51–76. Durham: Duke University Press. King, C. Lindsey. 2005. Pilgrimage, Promises, and Ex-Votos: Ingredients for Healing in Northeast Brazil. In Pilgrimage and Healing, ed. Jill Dubisch and Michael Winkelman, 49–68. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Palmer, Jason. forthcoming. Peruvian Mormon: Pioneer Indigeneity and Forever Families Between Peru and Utah. PhD diss., University of California, Irvine. Post, Paul, Jos Pieper, and Marinus Van Ulden. 1998. The Modern Pilgrim  : Multidisciplinary Explorations of Christian Pilgrimage. Walpole, MA: Peeters. Pratt, Parley P. 1888. The Autobiography of Parley Parker Pratt. Chicago: Law, King & Law. Santos-Granero, Fernando. 2009. Introduction: Amerindian Constructional Views of the World. In The Occult Life of Things: Native Amazonian Theories of Materiality and Personhood, ed. Fernando Santos-Granero, 1–23. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Smith, Joseph. 1844. Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Nauvoo, IL: John Taylor. Stopford, J. 1994. Some approaches to the archaeology of Christian pilgrimage. World Archaeology 26 (1): 57–72. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. 1893. Dedicatory Prayer: Salt Lake Temple, 6 April. Temples. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/temples/details/ salt-lake-temple/prayer/1893-04-06?lang=eng. ———. 2019. Arequipa Peru Temple Dedicatory Prayer: 17 December. Church News. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church/news/arequipa-peru-templededicatory-prayer?lang=eng. Turner, Victor. 1979. Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage. In Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, ed. William Armand Lessa and Evon Zartman Vogt, 234–243. New York: Harper & Row. Turner, Victor, and Edith Turner. 2011. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Weibel, Deana L. 2005. Of Consciousness Changes and Fortified Faith: Creativist and Catholic Pilgrimage at French Catholic Shrines. In Pilgrimage and Healing, ed. Jill Dubisch and Michael Winkelman, 111–134. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Winkelman, Michael, and Jill Dubisch. 2005. Introduction: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage. In Pilgrimage and Healing, ed. Jill Dubisch and Michael Winkelman, ix–xxxvi. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

CHAPTER 15

An Oak Tree Bearing International Fruit: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Brazil Marcus H. Martins

LDS Church Growth in Brazil The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints1 has been a subject of increased interest to social scientists and other intellectuals since Thomas O’Dea published his famous 1957 work, The Mormons.2 Prominent scholar Rodney Stark invited the research community in the field of the sociology of religion to pay particular attention to this religious denomination, arguing that the rapid international emergence of Mormonism in the twentieth century offered a unique opportunity to empirically study the development of a new world religion, something that is no longer possible to do with the long established worldwide faiths of, say, Islam or Roman Catholicism.3 Such a projection of worldwide growth had long been anticipated by LDS Church authorities. Illustrative of many similar predictions for other areas of the world, Elder Melvin J. Ballard, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, predicted, in 1925, that church growth in South America would be slow at first, “… just like the oak tree grows from an acorn …” but eventually “… the South American mission will become a power in the Church.”4

M. H. Martins (*) Brigham Young University-Hawaii, Laie, HI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_15

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My focus in this brief chapter is on the remarkable growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Brazil as one example of the fulfillment of Apostle Ballard’s prediction.5 By 1995 Brazil already had the largest Latter-day Saint population in a South American country. Starting at first only in southern Brazil on a small scale, the LDS Church began growing at amazing rates throughout the country after the 1970s. Between 1978 and 1990, LDS Brazilian membership increased from 54,000 to 302,000. In terms of organizational units, the Church expanded from 15 to 107 stakes6 during this same time period and also built one operational temple.7 As we approach the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century one might say that, based on its organizational growth and the services rendered by Brazilian members, the LDS Church in Brazil has ended its teenage years and is entering its adulthood. This transition can be observed both in the number of congregations, as well as in the quality and strength of local ecclesiastical leadership. By the end of 2019, official LDS Church statistics for Brazil reported close to 1.4 million members in a little over 2100 congregations, 273 stakes, 35 missions, and six operating temples, with another four temples announced to be built or already at different stages of construction or completion.8 The rapid international growth of the LDS Church—to the point of having for the first time in its history more than half of its members residing outside the United States9—has also brought unique challenges in terms of cultural adaptation and the management of human, physical, and financial resources. Despite these challenges, the Church continues to grow at remarkable rates in many parts of the world, although whether this growth will continue in more westernized areas of the globe has become a matter of concern in recent years [as indicated in several other chapters of this volume].10 Nevertheless, growth success stories remain abundant in Central and South America and Mexico. Within South America, Brazil is particularly emblematic of this growth. In the remainder of this chapter I will summarize some of the significant events that have taken place in Brazil which have contributed to LDS Brazilian development.

Brazilian Influence on Lay Priesthood in the LDS Church One of the most controversial topics in the history of the LDS Church is the former policy that prohibited male members of Black African descent from being ordained to the lay priesthood of the Church.11 This policy was officially established in 1852 and ended on June 8, 1978, by what is colloquially called “The 1978 Priesthood Revelation,” or simply “The 1978 Revelation.” The establishment of the LDS Church in Brazil began among German immigrant settlers in the early twentieth century. At first, proselyting work was restricted to this subpopulation in the southern region of the country, with

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American Anglo missionaries preaching primarily in German to their listeners. This minimized encounters with Brazilians of Black African ancestry. However, at the beginning of World War II, following a demand from the government of President Getúlio Vargas, Portuguese was adopted as the exclusive language of religious proselytizing. Subsequently LDS missionary work expanded to the southeastern region of the country, where there was much greater racial diversity and Portuguese was spoken. Senior leadership at the LDS Church headquarters in Salt Lake City, USA, recognized that Brazil’s continental size and large population augured great potential for growth of new convert members. Metaphorically, these leaders saw Brazil as the most promising South American “branch” of the “oak” spoken of by Elder Ballard in 1925. Yet, for many of these same LDS leaders (and members too) in the 1960s and 1970s, the existing ban on the ordination to the priesthood of men with any trace of black African ancestry was a significant problem. Although the LDS Church was well established in the southeastern region of Brazil—especially in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Curitiba—vast areas in other regions of the country did not at that time have a significant presence of Church members, because presiding mission leaders were wary of sending missionaries to regions where the population was more racially mixed. Traditionally, newly converted male Latter-day Saint converts, age 12 and older are invited to accept priesthood ordination shortly after their baptisms. However, prior to June 1978, this meant that church leaders at the local level needed to ensure that each recent male convert had no black African ancestry. In the interviews I conducted in 1995, Brazilians who held local leadership positions in the church during the 1960s and 1970s described this practice using terms such as “discomfort,” “embarrassment,” or an “obstacle.”12 Precisely because of its great potential for growth, the church in Brazil had become a topic of significant concern within the two main regulatory councils at LDS Church headquarters: The First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.13 Two factors were widely recognized as critical in those high-­ level discussions: (1) the 1975 announcement of plans to construct a temple— the first in South America—in Sao Paulo, Brazil,14 and (2) the 1972 baptism of Helvécio Martins with his family15 in Rio de Janeiro.16 In contrast to what happens in regular LDS meetinghouses (commonly called “chapels”), in which Sunday worship and social activities are open to the general public, temples, and the religious activities that occur within them, are open only to members who are deemed “worthy.” For male members, an important element of being eligible for temple entrance is possession of the priesthood. Lacking priesthood, a husband or father, for instance, is unable to take his family into an LDS temple in order to participate in “sealing ordinances” that the Church teaches are necessary for binding them together as an eternal family unit. Thus the then-prevailing priesthood ban of males with African lineage posed an enormous problem for the Church in Brazil. As one

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of my 1995 interviewees stated: “With historical miscegenation, it was impossible to determine who did or did not have [Black] African lineage.”17 In early 1975, when the LDS First Presidency announced plans for construction of a temple in Sao Paulo, they did not state—and did not yet know— how, they would resolve the racial issue. The crucial question was: How to build a temple in a country where local leaders would have to prevent a number of their faithful members from attending? Prior to the temple conundrum, the baptism of Helvécio Martins and his family in 1972 was another significant factor for pondering the issue of African lineage among both existing Brazilian Church members and prospective new member converts. At that time Martins was a senior executive in the national oil company and an adjunct professor of accounting and finance at UERJ-Rio de Janeiro State University. A man of great leadership potential, his presence and service in the church quickly made him a “special case” for Church leaders, both in Brazil and at Church headquarters in Salt Lake City. He was a worthy man in every respect, but he had African lineage, which prevented him from having the priesthood necessary to fulfill his leadership potential for the Church. The LDS Church president at that time, Spencer W.  Kimball, had met Helvécio Martins personally during a brief visit he made to Rio de Janeiro in 1973. Thereafter, President Kimball demonstrated a personal interest in this Brazilian church member and his family. And, at the same time, the vexing question concerning the growing number of Church members—in Brazil and around the world—who were unable to enter LDS temples, especially in the future Sao Paulo Brazil temple, weighed heavily on President Kimball’s mind. Specific requests to Church headquarters for religious guidance from Blacks residing in African countries [see especially Chap. 22 of this volume] also significantly contributed to President Kimball’s thinking and weighing of options. Finally, in 1978, through an inspirational conclusion arrived at by President Kimball and supported by the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the LDS Church announced that the so-called “priesthood ban” for people with Black African ancestry was ended. It seems clear, then, that the growing size of the LDS Church in Brazil, including the dilemma of having increasing numbers of worthy and talented Brazilian men unable to assume local leadership positions, exerted a strong influence on the radical change in longstanding Church priesthood policies and traditionally held beliefs about race. This June 1, 1978 revelation was a seminal event in the church, and profound repercussions have been felt subsequently in doctrinal development and in religious practice. Even after four decades have passed, the revelation is still remembered and celebrated by LDS Church members around the world— including the millions of members born or who joined the Church in subsequent decades, many of whom have Black African ancestry.

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Exporting Brazilian LDS Missionaries, Leaders, and Service Programs The contemporary success of the LDS Church in Brazil harmonizes well with the tremendous growth potential I foresaw in my own early research back in 1996. I had studied Church development and Brazilian Latter-day Saints’ leaders’ experiences in the 1970s–1980s and then concluded that, in the not too distant future, Brazil would (1) be able to “export” its own missionaries and ecclesiastical leaders to other countries and (2) become a spiritual center for the LDS Church that would contribute to the spiritual vitality of the Church internationally.18 More specifically, here is what I saw at that time as potential future outcomes for Brazilian Latter-day Saints: If the Brazilian economy once again allows the people to enjoy the same (or hopefully higher) levels of economic well-being that existed in the early 1970’s, and if in a matter of 10 to 15 years ever-increasing numbers of Brazilian Latter-­ Day Saints participate in that economic growth, Brazil would be able to ‘export’ missionaries and ecclesiastical leaders to all countries in the world …These Brazilian missionaries could be of service, for example, in places where the ever-­ present anti-American sentiment might be a problem … Brazil has a long tradition of friendly relationships with [many] nations in the world … including those nations that have historically provided large numbers of immigrants to Brazil, [especially]: Italy, Germany, Japan, Lebanon, Turkey, Ukraine, Russia … In a not too-distant future, Brazil may become a great spiritual center of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.19

One of the key principles that guides religious practice in the LDS Church is volunteer service. Correspondingly, one of the greatest examples of contemporary influence that Brazilian members have had on the Church internationally is through the “Helping Hands” program: In August 2000, the Helping Hands program was created in Brazil, a permanent proposal for humanitarian aid and community service that mobilizes thousands of volunteers, members and friends of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in partnership with private companies, government agencies, media outlets, NGOs and religious institutions. The actions taken by the Church have already benefited all the capitals of the federation and about 200 other cities. Remodeling in public schools; assistance to hospitals, orphanages, day care centers and nursing homes; recovery and cleaning of squares, parks and beaches and blood donation, as well as volunteer labor and material aid in emergency situations and public calamity have been some of the fields. In December 2001, at a UN meeting held in the Swiss city of Geneva, attended by representatives of 123 countries, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was recognized for its voluntary service in Brazil. Over the course of each year, hundreds of actions are taken in every state. In addition, traditionally, a national action—in a single day, holiday or not—brings together more than

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120,000 volunteers simultaneously. For example, on July 24, 2010, 115,000 volunteers turned that day into a ‘Solidarity Saturday’ and hundreds of outreach and community improvement actions took place.20

This program was adopted by senior leadership at LDS Church headquarters and has subsequently been implemented in many of the countries around the world where the Church is operating. The Brazilian origin of this program has been quite visible, since the clothing designed in Brazil for volunteers has been adopted in other countries. Program participants all over the world wear T-shirts or vests with the colors of the Brazilian flag—yellow, green, and blue— similar to the traditional uniform of the Brazilian national soccer team.

Exporting Brazilian Missionaries and Leaders Another expectation generated by my early research was that, at some point in the future, the LDS Church would increasingly rely on the services of young Brazilians as full-time Missionaries abroad. Although official statistics are not publicly available, anecdotal evidence from personal contacts and social media observations suggest that substantial numbers of Brazilian missionaries have been serving in other countries, particularly in those with significant numbers of Portuguese-speakers, such as Angola, the United States, England, Japan, Mozambique, and Portugal. Brazilian church members have also made important service contributions through callings to high leadership positions in the LDS Church. I highlight here Brazilians who have been called to occupy those General Authority offices known as the Quorums of Seventy, or just “Seventies.” The Seventies constitute what could be classified as the “third echelon” in the hierarchy of the international LDS Church. The following Brazilians have served thus far in this position (Table 15.1): The work of the Seventies has international impact, because they are charged with making regular reports to the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles on the status of Church members in each country and with Table 15.1  Brazilian general authority seventies Hélio da Rocha Camargo Helvécio Martins

1985–1990

Carlos A. Godoy

2008–

1990–1995

2008–

Cláudio R. M. Costa

1994–2019— emeritus 1998–2002

Marcos Antony Aidukaitis Jairo Mazzagardi

Athos Marques Amorim Ulisses Soares

Joni Luiz Koch

2005–2018—apostle Adilson de Paula Parrella

Source: Author self-produced excel table

2010–2016— emeritus 2017– 2017–

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making corresponding recommendations to address local members’ temporal and spiritual needs. Their reports and recommendations help shape subsequent international church policies. Perhaps the most visible and significant example of a Brazilian member’s leadership contribution to the worldwide Church is the service of Elder Ulisses Soares, who, in April 2018, was called to serve as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the “second echelon” in the LDS Church hierarchy. Members of the Quorum of the Twelve are supported by Church members worldwide as “prophets, seers, and revelators.” As a member of this quorum, Soares not only has worldwide ecclesiastical authority, but is also in the direct “line of succession” to potentially become president of the Church.21 Only time will tell if, in a few decades from now, a Brazilian will be presiding over the LDS Church worldwide. In the meantime, the rise to prominence of Brazilian LDS leaders and programs, commensurate with membership growth—similar to developments in other nations of the world—confirms another observation I made over 25 years ago: The spiritual vitality of Mormonism [will] no longer be dependent solely on western, mostly American, symbolisms, but on symbolisms … [that have] emerged out of all nations. [This will transform the Church] into a true worldwide religion, instead of [just] a U.S based … institution.22

Not only is this transformation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints well underway in Brazil, but I believe we are also seeing a similar worldwide transformation of the Church, from a purely American institution into a truly international religion that draws upon the cultural strengths and unique contribution of its members residing in every country where the Church is established.

Notes 1. Henceforth also referred to as “LDS Church.” 2. O’Dea, The Mormons. 3. Stark, “The Rise of a New World Faith.” 4. Deseret News 1995–1996 Church Almanac. 5. See Grover, Mormonism in Brazil. 6. In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, local congregations are called “wards” and a group of wards is called a “stake”. Smaller congregations are called “branches” and a group of branches is called a “district”. 7. Temples of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints provide a good indicator of the church’s growth. Unlike meetinghouses, the LDS Church only builds a temple in places where it is firmly established, with significant numbers of members and stable rates of growth. When the Sao Paulo Brazil Temple was dedicated in 1978, the LDS Church had been in the country for 43 years.

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8. Newsroom, “Brazil Facts and Statistics.” 9. Ensign Magazine, “Church Growing.” 10. For an early expression of concern about these trends, see Bennion and Young, “The Uncertain Dynamics of LDS Expansion.” 11. LDS Church website, “Race and the Priesthood.” 12. Martins, The Oak Tree Revisited. 13. Grover, Mormonism in Brazil, and “The Mormon Priesthood Revelation.” 14. LDS Church website, “Race and the Priesthood.” 15. I am the son of Helvécio and Rudá Martins, and with them I became a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1972. I was ordained a high priest in 1981 and have served as an LDS bishop, high councilor, and mission president. 16. Grover, ibid. 17. Martins, ibid. 18. Martins, ibid. 19. Martins, ibid. 20. LDS Church website, “Race and the Priesthood.” 21. Since the succession of Brigham Young as president of the LDS Church following the assassination of Joseph Smith in 1846, that member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles who has served the longest in his office succeeds the incumbent president upon that president’s death. (See Chap. 2 for a more detailed explanation of presidential succession in the LDS Church.) 22. Martins, ibid.

Bibliography Bennion, Lowell C., and Lawrence Young. 1996. The Uncertain Dynamics of LDS Expansion: 1950–2020. Dialogue 29: 8–32. Brazil: Facts and Statistics. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints—Newsroom. Accessed 14 January 2020. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/facts-andstatistics/country/brazil. Church Growing in More Than 160 Countries. 2005. Ensign 35(1): 76–77. Accessed 15 January 2020. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2005/01/ news-of-the-church/church-growing-in-more-than-160-countries?lang=eng. Deseret News 1995–1996 Church Almanac. 1994. Salt Lake City: Deseret News. Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. 2015. Salt Lake City: Intellectual Reserve, Inc. Grover, Mark L. 1985. Mormonism in Brazil: Religion and Dependency in Latin America. Ph.D. Dissertation. Indiana University. ———. 1990. The Mormon Priesthood Revelation and the São Paulo, Brazil Temple. Dialogue 23: 39–53. ———. n.d. Helvécio Martins: A Modern Pioneer. Unpublished manuscript in author’s possession. “Mãos que Ajudam” (“Helping Hands”). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Newsroom—Brazil. Accessed 06 July 2019. https://www.saladeimprensamormon.org.br/artigo/maos-que-ajudam. Martins, Marcus H. 1986. The Oak Tree Revisited: Brazilian LDS Leaders’ Insights on the Growth of the Church in Brazil. Ph.D. Dissertation. Brigham Young University.

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———. 1994. Worldwide Institution or Worldwide Religion: A Dilemma in Contemporary Mormonism. Unpublished Paper, in Author’s Possession. Race and the Priesthood. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Accessed 06 July 2019. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topicsessays/race-and-the-priesthood?lang=eng. Stark, Rodney. 1984. The Rise of a New World Faith. in. Review of Religious Research 26: 18–27. Zweig, Stefan. 1943. Brazil: Land of the Future. New York: The Viking Press.

CHAPTER 16

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Islands of the Pacific Riley M. Moffat and Fred E. Woods

The Pacific is a vast place filled with different cultures and diverse religious expressions. The experience of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) in the Pacific cannot be summed up easily in general terms. Each nation or territory has a different story. To understand the history and future of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in this region of the world means looking at the various parts individually.1 In what follows we examine the background and status of the LDS Church in the islands of the Pacific, consisting of the cultural regions of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia while considering the challenges and prospects for the religion of the Latter-day Saints in these regions in the twenty-first century.2 In particular we will provide an overview of early LDS missionary efforts in Polynesia and proceed to consider church education and translation needs, the role of LDS temples, native missionaries, church humanitarian efforts, cultural issues, the current challenges of the Polynesian diaspora, and member retention and reactivation concerns (Fig. 16.1).

R. M. Moffat (*) Brigham Young University-Hawaii, Laie, HI, USA e-mail: [email protected] F. E. Woods Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_16

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R. M. MOFFAT AND F. E. WOODS

Fig. 16.1  The Pacific Islands of Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia

Synopsis of Early Latter-day Saint Missions in Polynesia The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has long had a strong interest in the islands of the Pacific. Since its founding in the United States in 1830, LDS modern-day revelation and scripture have specifically mentioned the “isles of the sea.” Pacific Islanders, and Polynesians in particular, were seen, along with native Americans, as having the blood of Israel through their relationships to the people of the Book of Mormon.3 The first LDS foreign language missionary effort in 1843 was, in fact, to the Pacific Islands.4 As prophet and president of what his followers believed was the restored church of Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith Jr. called four elders (elder is an office in the LDS lay priesthood) to open a mission in the Pacific. They left Nauvoo, Illinois, in May of 1843, ostensibly headed for the Sandwich Islands where one of the elders, Addison Pratt, had spent time as a whaler. However, when they reached the island of Tubuai in the Austral Group of the Society Islands, they felt inspired to stop there and commenced their missionary labors.5 Thus, the LDS Church first encountered the Pacific Islanders of Polynesia in French Polynesia (Tahiti) and was focused on Tubuai and the Tuamotu Archipelago. Here, as elsewhere in the Pacific, the first challenge LDS missionaries faced came from other Christian organizations who thought the religious duty of converting native people had already been accomplished through their efforts and that there was no need for groups like the “Mormons” to send missionaries preaching their version of the Christian gospel. The London

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Missionary Society and Roman Catholic ministers, priests, and the government officials they influenced in Tahiti therefore were not welcoming.6 There was a further barrier in that the LDS Church functioned in the Tahitian language, not in the French language. Over the past half-century the church has worked to break down these barriers and has been fairly successful. A leading challenge for the church in Tahiti today is secularism and the worldliness found in much of Tahitian society. Being a French overseas territory, there has been less out-­ migration into the largely English-speaking world compared to other Polynesian nations where the LDS Church has gained a presence. Historically, the church’s greatest missionary success in the Pacific was eventually achieved in Hawai‘i, after LDS missionaries arrived in 1850. The message of the Book of Mormon as a record of the ancestors of the Polynesians, along with other aspects of the LDS gospel message proclaimed by missionaries, resonated with many Hawaiians (and other Polynesians). These young North American missionaries who learned their language, lived with them, ate with them, and did not ask them for land or money but served at their own expense, set an example the people found endearing. But coming forward publicly and accepting their message in the face of family, community, and cultural opposition, particularly in the early years, required great courage, faith, and conviction. Once again, the established Christian denomination—this time, the Congregational Church, which influenced the government of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i—was not happy with the arrival of Mormon missionaries. Native Hawaiians, however, were very receptive to the missionaries’ message, and by the 1920s, approximately one-third of native Hawaiians were members of the LDS Church. Up until the middle of the twentieth century, the LDS Church in Hawai‘i was, in fact, viewed primarily as a Hawaiian church, often conducted in the Hawaiian language. Since then, active proselyting with other ethnic groups in Hawai‘i’s highly multicultural society (including emigrants from other Pacific areas) has created a wonderful cultural mix in Hawaiian LDS congregations. As part of the United States for over one hundred years, Hawai‘i is the most developed region in Polynesia. At the same time, Hawai’i shares many of the same societal challenges facing other states in the United States, about which we will later comment. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the LDS Church moved into Samoa and Tonga in central Polynesia. The London Missionary Society in Samoa and the Wesleyan Church in Tonga, who led the original Christianization of those islands, did what they could to discourage Mormon missionaries and their converts by telling the people they were being disloyal to their chiefs by accepting this new religion. Nevertheless, Latter-day Saint missionaries made many strong converts and their faith helped build the LDS Church to the point that by the twenty-first century it was among the largest religious denominations in their countries. At the same time, in spite of high birth rates, population growth in Tonga and Samoa today appears to be somewhat stagnant. This primarily is the result of high out-migration, making Tongans and Samoans

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some of their countries’ most significant exports. Consequently, those church members who have migrated beyond the reef to the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and other regions have taken their faith to strengthen hundreds of LDS congregations in many other parts of the world. Today, sturdy Latter-day Saint chapels can be seen in practically every village in Tonga and Samoa. These, along with good LDS secondary schools and distinctive temple grounds and buildings, have done much to promote the church’s status and respected standing in these locales. Initially, small congregations called branches were organized into districts in these countries, which were administered by a mission president appointed by church headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, usually for three-year terms. As the LDS Church matured in a designated area, a stake—similar to a diocese, with five to twelve larger congregations called wards along with some smaller branches—would be organized and led by local lay leaders. Stake organizations offer a full complement of the church’s material and organizational benefits to local members and may be considered as indicators of institutional maturity. As developing countries, Tonga and Samoa face certain unique challenges, such as those involved in the practice of “remittances.” Traditionally, as many family members move overseas for better jobs, they are expected to send back some of their earnings to other family members still in Tonga or Samoa. This constitutes a significant input to the local economy by allowing people to purchase better homes and maybe a car or truck. But over time this can also create a financial dependency that erodes the initiative of family members in the islands as they become accustomed to receiving remittances. Emphasizing the importance of self-reliance to its members and new converts is a concern for LDS officials that we will revisit later. Latter-day Saints first encountered Micronesia during World War II when American LDS servicemen were stationed there. They left at the end of the war, except on Guam and the Marshall Islands where US military bases were maintained. Until the 1950s the church made no organized effort to proselyte in Melanesia. Thereafter, however, missionaries began receiving assignments to Fiji, a multicultural society where they found success in converting native Fijians. As in Tonga and Samoa, LDS primary and secondary schools were built to provide educational opportunities for Fijian members. By the twenty-first century, LDS growth in Fiji had taken off. About this same time, Tahitians and other Polynesian church members who had emigrated to Melanesia for economic reasons (e.g., Tahitians in New Caledonia) requested church headquarters to send missionaries. This initiative soon was expanded to LDS proselyting in almost all of the islands of Melanesia. An interesting local system evolved in Papua New Guinea. In a nation with hundreds of unique ethnic and language groups, individuals would migrate to Port Moresby for work or school where, starting in the 1980s, they encountered the LDS faith. Then they would return to their home villages, share the LDS gospel in their village, and then report back to Port Moresby requesting missionaries. This resulted in entire villages potentially becoming branches of

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the LDS Church. Safety and security concerns, however, are an issue in Papua New Guinea, so only local or Pacific Islander missionaries have been called by the church to serve there. In the 1980s the United States withdrew from the United Nations trusteeship relationship it had been awarded after World War II. The new relationship between most of Micronesia and the United States was called the Compact of Free Association, which granted citizens of the former Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands special rights to enter the United States. This opened the doors of migration for Micronesians into the United States (who in their diasporic communities were often near the bottom of the socio-economic ladder), where they sought better employment, education, and access to health care. In the current century the challenge for the LDS Church in Micronesia has been to simultaneously help with the integration of members migrating to the United States while building up new church leadership back in the islands. An interesting side story is how young, non-LDS boys and girls from the Gilbert Islands (now called Kiribati) who were enrolled at the church’s Liahona High School in Tonga were converted and then returned as missionaries to start the church in the Gilbert Islands. Today the LDS Church operates one of the best secondary schools in Kiribati.7 Unfortunately, this former British colony does not have many natural resources, and  its citizens have greater challenges  to migrate overseas, while facing the hazards of global warming which threaten their low-­ lying atolls with rising sea levels. Worldwide migration issues brought about by the economic and political forces of globalization have deeply affected the church and many of its international members, including those inhabiting the Islands of the Pacific. The ultimate impact of these global issues remains to be seen, but today, after 175 years of missionary endeavor and expansion, the LDS Church can be found in just about all the nations and territories of the Pacific. As of 2019, there were approximately 380,000 Latter-day Saints of record in these islands, double the number of just twenty years ago. Traditionally, Christian churches in the Pacific were rather slow to develop local ecclesiastical leadership, believing that only trained ministers from overseas were capable of leading their congregations. The LDS Church, on the other hand, was organizationally invested in developing local members to lead their congregations by ordaining men to the LDS lay priesthood to preside over local congregations and calling women to lead various auxiliary organizations. This allowed missionaries to focus on proselyting and converting new members rather than administering congregations. The example of church leaders serving without monetary compensation effectively modeled to islanders the lay ministry pattern of the New Testament primitive Christian church. Local members were called to lead their local congregations, or branches, as soon as they were deemed prepared. In addition, church callings afforded local members opportunities to obtain valuable leadership experience which could be applied in their families and occupational employment. By the 1970s World, just about all church leadership in the Pacific was in local members’ hands. At

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R. M. MOFFAT AND F. E. WOODS

that point, membership was sufficient to begin organizing groups of congregations into stakes, which form the highest level of local church organization. Now, in the twenty-first century, stakes are being formed in many areas of Melanesia and Micronesia as well (see Table 16.1) and Pacific Islanders can be found in the highest councils of the LDS Church. Table 16.1  Statistical profile of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Pacific By Riley M. Moffat, November 2019 Place

Population

LDS members

Missionaries arrived

Stakes

51,000

16,000

1888

5-1st 1969 0 0 10-1st 1972 16-1st 1938 30-1st 1958 0 20-1st 1962 21-1st 1968 0 0

Polynesia American Samoa Cook Islands Easter Island French Polynesia Hawai‘i

9000 7800 290,000

1800 150 28,000

1954 1987 1844

1,420,000

75,000

1850

New Zealand

4,545,000

114,000

1854

Niue Samoa

1600 201,000

300 82,000

1952 1888

Tonga

106,000

65,000

1891

270

1985

926,000

21,000

1954

283,000

2400

1968

7,000,000

28,000

1979

660,000

1200

1994

288,000

9600

103,000

Tuvalu Wallis and Futuna Melanesia Fiji New Caledonia Papua New Guinea Solomon Islands Vanuatu Micronesia Federated States of Micronesia Guam Kiribati

11,000 15,700

–

Congregations Temples

43

1 announced

5 1 94

0 0 1-1983

141 225 2 158 170 1 0

2-1919, 2000 1-1958 + 1 announced 0 1-1983 1-1983 + 1 announced 0 0

4-1st 1983 1-1st 2012 2-1st 1995 0

50

5

0

1974

1-1st 2016

35

0

6200

1976

1-1st 2014

22

0

167,000

2500

1944

4

109,000

20,000

1975

1-1st 2010 2-1st 1996

9 80

32

12000 0 1 announced

1 announced 0 (continued)

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Table 16.1  (continued) By Riley M. Moffat, November 2019 Place

Population

Marshall Islands Nauru Northern Marianas Palau Australia

76,000 9600 52,000 21,500 25,000,000

LDS members

Missionaries arrived

Stakes

Congregations Temples

7000

1977

12

0

120 840

1998 1975

2-1st 2009 0 0

1 1

0 0

500 153,000

1978 1851

0 41-1st 1960

1 303

0 5-1st 1984

Sources: cumorah.com, newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/factsandstatistics/country and CIA World Factbook 2019

Educational Needs A foundational tenet of the LDS Church is for its members to acquire as much education as possible.8 According to Latter-day Saint doctrine, “the glory of God is intelligence.”9 For church members, the ability to read scriptures was and is critical to understanding the gospel message of their faith. Thus, education was seen as very desirable for native islanders.10 Initially, missionaries would organize little village schools for teaching English, which was considered a very desirable skill in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These early LDS schools were taught by young missionaries, who generally had little or no teaching experience. Yet government educational inspectors tended to give them high marks after reviewing their schools.11 Beginning in 1950, LDS authorities decided to build a state-of-the-art secondary school in Tonga. Veteran craftsmen from the United States were called as volunteer missionaries to train and supervise local men—also called to serve volunteer missions—in its construction. This was the genesis of the church’s building mission program.12 Over the next fifteen years, dozens of sturdy, concrete-­block chapels and schools were constructed throughout the Pacific Islands region. They were also among the strongest buildings in the islands and became a refuge for all community residents when a cyclone or other natural disaster struck. These chapels and schools helped to radically change the image of the LDS Church in the Islands. It sent the message that the Mormons were there to stay and that the church was invested in contributing to the well-being of local communities. This also, of course, has contributed significantly to LDS missionary efforts in the Pacific. Thus, by the second half of the twentieth century, the church’s early missionary schools had evolved into established teaching institutions with some of the best facilities in the region. Originally  they were staffed by full-time

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missionaries and some Tongan and Samoan graduates of the LDS Maori Agricultural College in New Zealand. These schools not only provided a solid secular education but also emphasized the importance of spiritual education. With the establishment of the church’s Pacific Board of Education in 1957, qualified professional educators from North America were hired to teach in the church’s Pacific schools along with experienced local teachers. Subsequently, state-of-the-art schools have been built in Tonga, Samoa, Fiji, and Kiribati. These primary, middle, and secondary schools serve the educational needs of approximately 6000 students each year. Their programs provide a solid academic curriculum that is highly regarded in their countries. They also provide LDS gospel instruction to help students prepare for missions and church service after they graduate. The LDS Church also supports a branch of Brigham Young University (BYU) in Hawai‘i that currently serves the higher-education needs of over 3000 students. At BYU-Hawaii, Pacific Islands students can participate in the university’s International Work Opportunity Return-ability Kuleana (IWORK) program, which loans needy students money for their university expenses and then forgives part of the loan each year after graduation contingent on their returning home and using their education to serve their people and strengthen the church. The IWORK program is designed to promote students’ self-reliance in a way that is also consistent with BYU-Hawaii’s motto: “Harmony amidst diversity.” At BYU-Hawaii, every cultural group on campus (including students from the US mainland) is considered a minority and students are taught that, through shared ideals, all cultures can live together harmoniously. “Seminary” classes are available to secondary school age youth in all LDS wards and branches, especially in areas without access to a church school, and “Institute” classes are held in many locations for post-secondary young adults. Both the seminary and institute programs function to provide LDS youth and college age young adults with additional religious instruction beyond what they receive at home or at church. There are currently about 16,000 secondary age students in the Pacific who are enrolled in the early morning seminary program. The institute program supports over 11,000 young single adults in the islands, providing not only religious education but also a vibrant social environment where students can mingle with other young people who share the same personal standards and goals in life. With the advent of internet technology, brick and mortar schools are not as essential as they used to be. Both academic and religious curriculums are available wherever there is a computer and internet access. Keeping abreast of changing educational technologies, the church is committed to taking advantage of all appropriate avenues of access to provide opportunities for educational advancement and religious study. Also, over the past few decades there has been a concerted effort to internationalize church curriculums to make them more relevant to a worldwide, multicultural church, including the far-flung reaches of the Pacific Islands. This requires much translation into local languages, a concern which we address shortly.

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For LDS students, getting an education is defined as a key component of self-reliance and provident living, as emphasized in the IWORK program previously mentioned. In addition, the church’s “Perpetual Education Fund,” established in 2001, helps meet these goals by offering loans to members in less-advantaged areas to further their education, generally in vocational and technical areas. These loans, when repaid, provide the ongoing means for other students in financial need to follow suit. Along with self-reliance initiatives, the church’s purpose in supporting educational programs is to help its members realize their potential as Latter-day Saints in secular society while also preparing them for church service.13 As one Tongan Latter-day Saint, Pita Hopoate, puts it: In the 1960s, there were students from Fiji, Niue, and Tahiti sent by the church to attend Liahona High School in Tonga… in the 1970s, students from Kiribati and the Cook Islands  were sent… [and] in the 1990s, students from Papua Niugini [also] were sent to attend Liahona High School. The ultimate purpose of sending these students to Liahona High School was to prepare them to serve in the Church after returning to their own countries.14

Today, the foreign student population at Liahona High School in Tonga comes largely from Papua New Guinea. For the foreseeable future, these and other students from Melanesian will likely continue to obtain their schooling at Liahona. At the same time, in several instances LDS preparatory schools in the Pacific have been closed after it became apparent that local governments could provide students with adequate education, and some were converted for other uses. Mapusaga High School in American Samoa, for example, became the government’s American Samoa Community College, and the École Primaire Élémentaire in Papeete became the site of the Papeete Tahiti Temple. Graduates of the church’s secondary schools in the Pacific are often qualified to matriculate to university-level studies, usually at Brigham Young University– Hawaii or at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. In areas such as Melanesia, Micronesia, and some parts of Polynesia where LDS schools do not exist, the church provides early morning or distance seminary instruction for secondary students taught by locally appointed instructors, as well as institute classes for post-secondary young people. Nonetheless, access to adequate education, particularly in parts of Melanesia, remains a serious challenge for some members. In the twenty-first century the church has provided distance learning, post-­ secondary educational opportunities through BYU’s Pathway program and also scholarship funding for local vocational study under the Perpetual Education Fund, as already mentioned. Current enrollment for Pacific Islanders in the Pathway program is approximately 650. The Perpetual Educational program is available in Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Kiribati, Vanuatu, and the Marshall Islands. These programs address a critical need for post-­ secondary education among recently returned local missionaries and other

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young adults by helping them gain skills relevant to their countries’ job markets. These programs are also part of the church’s self-reliance initiative, which aims to strengthen the material well-being of LDS families and individuals worldwide.15

Translation Concerns Latter-day Saints believe that having the word of God available in native tongues is crucial to the success of their church’s missionary efforts. By the time LDS missionaries arrived in the various island groups, the Bible had generally been translated and published in many island languages. As Mormon missionaries mastered the local languages, translations of LDS scriptures became available with the help of bilingual natives. Curriculum and manuals for church auxiliaries and lay priesthood organizations were translated, beginning in the various mission offices. Later, however, this was done at centralized translation departments in Auckland and Salt Lake City. Now all Latter-day Saint scriptures are available in Fijian, Samoan, Tongan, Tok Pisin, Tahitian, Kiribati, Marshallese, Chamorro, Chuukese, Rarotongan, Pohnpeian, Palauan, Yapese, Niuean, and Bislama, as well as church magazines, manuals, and handbooks and most other LDS written materials. The latter are also available in Kosraean, Motu, and Rotuman. For immigrants to the Pacific Islands, LDS scriptures and other materials are available in French, Chinese, and Hindi. Melanesia poses a particular language challenge because of its one thousand tribal languages and invented Creole languages, such as Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea and Bislama in Vanuatu, which are meant to facilitate communication on a national level. But in the case of Tok Pisin, with its 800 or so unique languages, there has been much language modification on the local level and a single translation that is intelligible for the entire country is probably not possible. This leaves English in Papua New Guinea and French in Vanuatu and New Caledonia as the most effective means for disseminating religious materials. At the same time, the spread of internet technology in the twenty-first century allows for easier communication and dissemination of church information in most languages throughout the islands

The Role of Latter-day Saint Temples in the Lives of Pacific Islanders For Latter-day Saints, the greatest rewards of their faith are obtained in LDS temples.16 The first temple built outside of Utah was in La‘ie, Hawai‘i, in 1919. This temple was meant to serve the entire Pacific Basin, but very few members outside of Hawai‘i could arrange the means to travel there during the early twentieth century. A temple in New Zealand, dedicated in 1958, was much more accessible to many Pacific Islands members but still required much financial sacrifice. In 1983, additional temples were dedicated in Samoa, Tonga, and

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Tahiti, bringing much greater temple access, pride, and joy to members in those areas. In 2000, additional temples were dedicated in Kona, Hawai‘i, and Suva, Fiji. Other temples are currently planned for American Samoa, Vava‘u, Tonga, Papua New Guinea, and Guam, thus bringing the religious benefits of temple worship closer to many Pacific Islanders. As Tongan educator, Mele Taumoepeau summarizes: Having the temple in country is saving the saints the exorbitant amounts typically required to get their families to New Zealand and other places to get sealed as families. Many of the early saints sold all their earthly possessions to be able to make that often once in a lifetime trip. Now with the temple right in their midst, they are able to frequent the temple and thus grow their testimonies, both of the temple and of the church. Individual members and the church as a whole have become greatly blessed by the presence of the temple.17

Through the temple covenants they make, and with enhanced religious understanding received through temple instruction, LDS members in the Pacific believe they are strengthened against the trials and challenges of the modern world. Among other things, the Latter-day Saint belief that family relationships can continue to exist after death appeals to traditional Pacific cultures. LDS doctrine teaches, however, that these relationships can only be realized through covenantal ordinances performed in the temples of the LDS Church. The church, therefore, is making every effort to find and preserve genealogical records that can help identify ancestral relationships. As a result, today there are scores of Family History Centers located in chapels throughout the Pacific Islands that collect, preserve, and share genealogical information with members and non-members alike. Through these ancestral records, members holding temple recommends (that certify their compliance with LDS faith requirements) can make eternal covenants by proxy for family members who have passed on.

Pacific Islander Missionaries Both at Home and Abroad As summarized, the religious message of the LDS Church has been proclaimed throughout the Pacific Islands from Rapa Nui to Papua New Guinea and from Hawai‘i to Rarotonga. Restrictions on foreign missionaries in Tonga, Samoa, Tahiti, and Fiji in the early and mid-twentieth century and the total withdrawal of foreign missionaries from 1940 to 1946 during World War II did not stop proselyting by native missionaries. Consequently, the church not only survived but thrived. Through the 1950s, LDS missionary work in the Pacific Islands was basically the task of young men from North America, who served full-time at their own expense for generally two to three years, with the assistance of local men or couples who served shorter terms. Subsequently, local young men native to the islands began accepting calls to serve full-time missions for two

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years. Also, at that time young men and women from diasporic Pacific Islander communities were called to return to the Pacific Islands to serve their missions. By the late twentieth century there were more Polynesian young men and women desiring to serve missions than the local missions in the Pacific Islands could realistically use. Beginning in the 1980s Pacific Islander missionaries were being called to serve outside the Pacific, often in areas that could be challenging for North Americans such as the Philippines, Latin America, and Africa. This experience provided many of them with a wider worldview, and it also made the temporary exporting of missionaries overseas from places like Tonga, Samoa, and Tahiti an important part of the islands’ cultural economy. Today, missionaries called from the Pacific Islands to overseas missions are sent either to the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah, where the languages of Fijian, Kiribati, Marshallese, Tahitian, Samoan, and Tongan are taught, usually by returned missionaries from those areas, or to the Missionary Training Center in Auckland, New Zealand, which teaches English as a second language to missionaries returning to their home countries. Other local languages such as Bislama in Vanuatu are learned while in country. These are the young men and women with the black nametags that can be seen serving in most of the cities, towns, and villages throughout the Pacific. Those missionaries coming from overseas are often required to learn one, and in the case of Tahiti, two other languages in order to serve effectively. This experience gives them a broader worldview and sensitivity to other cultures. Besides the young men and women seen sharing their faith throughout the Pacific region, scores of senior retired couples also choose to serve volunteer missions as well. Their maturity and life experiences bring an added dimension to mission work. Some are called as member and leadership-support missionaries to advise and train local leaders and fellowship less active members. Others serve educational missions, teaching in LDS schools or serving as advisers in BYU’s Pathway Worldwide online programs. Others coordinate humanitarian initiatives with local governments and charities. In the twenty-first century a number of senior couple missionaries are called to serve in self-reliance efforts as well as addiction recovery programs. They bring with them their personal and professional experience and in turn learn to love and appreciate local cultures and their people. Given its commitment to encourage its young people to serve two-year missions, a resulting challenge for the LDS Church has been to help them obtain further education and training for better employment after they return home. Linked to this concern in the twenty-first century was the development of the church’s self-reliance program, as previously mentioned, that is helping Pacific Islanders improve their employment skills, education, and resource management. Senior couples from overseas with extensive resumes are called on missions to the Islands to teach and train both individuals and families on how to improve their personal and professional circumstances. For the foreseeable future, local members in the Pacific will continue being called to serve missions in their own country or overseas. Likewise, some

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missionaries will continue being called from overseas to serve in the Pacific. Several Pacific nations produce more missionaries than they need and those missionaries seem to be more adaptable to foreign environments, especially in the developing world. Pacific Islanders called to serve overseas bring back a wider worldview from working in a foreign culture and environment. The missionaries called from overseas to the Pacific similarly return to their homes with a greater appreciation for the island cultures they have encountered.

Latter-day Saint Humanitarian Efforts In the twenty-first century the church has made it a point to be among the first responders to natural disasters and other emergencies worldwide, including the Pacific Islands. The December 2019 headline that the LDS Church may have as much as $100 billion saved for a rainy day18 illustrates leaders’ decision to save and prepare for future emergencies, such as humanitarian crises. Throughout the Pacific, there are LDS welfare managers who coordinate and lead humanitarian activities. Through its lay priesthood organizations, the church can quickly assess local needs in the case of a natural disaster and help organize relief efforts. According to the LDS Pacific Area Office, during the period 2011–2019, the church organized twenty-nine national-level relief efforts in the Pacific for disease, drought, earthquakes, forest fires, flooding, famine, cyclones, and hurricanes.19 The traditional Christian injunction to share one’s abundance with the poor and less fortunate is formally expressed in LDS scripture, the Doctrine and Covenants (104: 15–18). Whenever it is appropriate, various church agencies seek to coordinate with other humanitarian organizations in helping to alleviate the results of poverty, natural disasters, and the effects of war. In doing this the church does not discriminate between members of the Latter-day Saint faith and those who are not members. Community emergencies also afford opportunities for local church members to volunteer their personal service, as seen when Latter-day Saints in yellow “helping hands” T-shirts or vests show up to help in the aftermath of local disasters. In the long term the church also works to address persistent health needs, such as diabetes in Tonga and heart disease in Samoa or organize donations of wheelchairs and hospital equipment. Many church members also serve independently in assisting their native communities. For example, Gaugau Tavana travels from Utah to Samoa several times each year to screen over 5000 children annually for rheumatic heart disease.20 Similar contributions are also made annually by other church members to various local charitable and health organizations. Members donate “fast offerings” on a monthly basis and local lay leaders use these donations to help those within their ecclesiastical jurisdictions who are in need. Connected to this directive is the LDS Church’s effort to inspire and train members to be more self-reliant and wise stewards of their resources. The intended outcome of the LDS Church’s relief efforts is not just to provide a handout in times of need but to inspire self-reliance, preparedness, and the goal of sharing resources on

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an individual, family, and community level as natural and man-made disasters continue to occur in the Pacific and elsewhere around the globe.

Cultural Issues in the Pacific Historically, Christian missionaries have renounced various native cultural practices that do not conform to their religious doctrines or ideas of appropriate behavior. This has also been an area of some concern for the LDS Church in the Pacific when some native customs are in direct conflict with church teachings— especially in such areas as modesty, sexual morality, and the LDS health code known as the Word of Wisdom. LDS officials generally have accepted and even encouraged traditional singing and dancing, such as hula in Hawai‘i, ma‘ulu‘ulu and lakalaka in Tonga, taualuga in Samoa, and many traditional Tahitian and Micronesian dances and other cultural presentations. They have even encouraged competitions in these skills in an effort to preserve local cultures. Thus, for example, in its commitment to support cultural traditions in the islands (and also to offer employment to Pacific  Islands students at BYU-­ Hawaii), in 1963 the church created the Polynesian Cultural Center (PCC). From its inception the Center shared Polynesian culture with visitors and tourists as displayed and performed by students from the Church College of Hawaii (later BYU-Hawaii), whose campus is located adjacent to the Center. Highly skilled cultural practitioners from each island group supervise and teach native skills to these students, who then pass them on to their student replacements. Having grown up in modern environments without learning these skills at home, many Polynesian students attending BYU-Hawaii from other Pacific Islands in the twenty-first century are able to learn them at the PCC, thereby helping to preserve their native cultures. About one million visitors visit the Polynesian Cultural Center each year to see authentic cultural presentations, making it the number one paid attraction in Hawai‘i.21 In addition to the church-operated Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawai‘i, the Matthew Cowley Pacific Church History Centre near Hamilton, New Zealand, has recently been opened to collect and house archival records and display historical artifacts relating to the LDS Church in the Pacific. Ethnic integration has generally not been an issue for the LDS Church in the Pacific Islands, as most island cultures are rather homogenous. However, in some Pacific nations that are less homogenous—such as Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, and Fiji—ethnic issues continue to create problems in the general population. But these contentions tend to be less of a concern in most Latter-day Saint congregations in which a unifying religious culture is promoted and shared. But not surprisingly, there are also cultural challenges for an aspiring international church as it expands in different regions of the world. One cultural challenge facing the church in many Pacific Islands concerns the use of traditional native substances that can involve health risks or be potentially addicting, such as kava (a mild depressant) and betel nut (a mild stimulant). The use of

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these substances is a regionally debated issue, but when combined with the church’s prohibitions on alcohol, tobacco, and narcotic drugs, it can create religious stumbling blocks for some Latter-day Saints in seeking admittance to LDS temples. Admittance to LDS temples—where the religion’s most sacred ordinances are performed—requires not only compliance with specified doctrinal and behavior standards but also adherence to the church’s health code. The Pacific Islands share many of the same societal issues seen elsewhere in the world, such as serious poverty and inadequate education. Sex and gender issues are also contemporary concerns in the islands. Some Christian denominations have and continue to condemn homosexuality and bisexuality as well as transgender identities. The LDS Church does not condone these either, but in recent years, its ecclesiastical leaders have modified their stances in reaching out to members who struggle with their sexual and gender identities in tension with the rules of their faith.22 At the same time, all Pacific cultures, particularly those in more developed areas, are being eroded by cultural globalism, largely introduced through internet technology and social media. While the internet and social media have many positive applications, many young people spend time on gaming and pornography. These practices tend to weaken traditional cultural values and the LDS Church strongly discourages its youth from engaging in such activities. As part of its self-reliance initiative in recent years, the church offers addiction recovery programs that focus on alcohol, tobacco, narcotics, pornography, and various forms of family abuse. In many of these areas the church has taken the lead in South Pacific countries. Thus, for example, Samoan Latter-day Saint Gaugau Tavana affirms that in Samoa the LDS Church is the only church that offers an addiction recovery program and is the only one which is teaching youth how to use technology to avoid addictive behavior. According to Gaugau, “we don’t just limit our programs to the members of the church, we open it up to anyone and everyone who is interested.”23 Another issue the LDS Church faces in some of the more traditional island cultures is the status of women. Particularly in Melanesia, women are culturally seen as second-class citizens, whereas LDS doctrine teaches that they are co-­ equal partners in marriage, family, and other spheres of social life—that all human beings are sons and daughters of God, equally treasured by a loving Father in heaven. This kind of teaching constitutes a radical change in highly patriarchal societies, and egalitarian change is often resisted. Nonetheless, among LDS female converts in traditional societies, the concept of god-­ sanctioned equality can be very empowering, freeing them to aspire to a greater realization of their potential as women. It should be pointed out that while the question of priesthood ordination for women has become an issue for some US Latter-day Saints, it is not a significant issue for church members in most Polynesian countries. It is also true that there has been an “LDS gospel culture” imported by some Latter-day Saint missionaries and implanted in the lives of native converts. But this does not necessarily mean that converts’ native cultures have

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been transformed into a Western-style, American LDS culture. This may have been more the case in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries but is much less so today. In principle, the LDS Church’s “gospel culture” only comes in conflict with native culture over such LDS standards as chastity, Word of Wisdom observance, and body markings. As previously stated, kava drinking and betel nut chewing (as well as tattooing) are discouraged by church authorities but, may not ultimately prevent members from being given temple recommends. There may be local ceremonial occasions in which drinking a cup of kava is considered appropriate, for example, in order to show the proper amount of respect required in official circumstances. Otherwise, church members are encouraged to use discernment in expressing themselves culturally within LDS guidelines. The LDS position on cultural issues has been stated by Dieter F. Uchtdorf, one of the church’s highest ranking officials, as follows: “It is certain that some aspects of culture, ideology, and political practices are more compatible with gospel principles than others, and from that point they are temporally preferable, but only the principles of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ constitute eternal truth.”24 One Island Latter-day Saint explained that, for him, the key is for Polynesian culture “to be sifted through the gospel of Jesus Christ” and not the other way around.25

Challenges of the Polynesian Diaspora The Pacific Islands are somewhat unique in the international LDS Church in that a large number of members currently are emigrating overseas primarily for economic and educational reasons. It appears that up to half of ethnic Tongan and Samoan members reside overseas, mostly in the US mainland, Hawai‘i, New Zealand, and Australia. This figure applies to the general population of Tongans and Samoans as well. In some islands, such as Niue and the Cook Islands, LDS membership appears somewhat stagnant. Because of their special relationship with New Zealand, however, it is easy for citizens of those islands to emigrate to New Zealand. The populations of those islands are actually shrinking, while membership of ethnic Niueans and Cook Islanders in New Zealand is steadily growing. In Hawai‘i, as in other high-cost-of-living areas, young Latter-day Saints are finding they can no longer afford to stay and are having to move away, generally to the US mainland. Eric Beaver, who is Hawaiian/Samoan, explains, “We have homes in Laie that are going for $1  million and more right in La‘ie [Hawai‘i] and limited job opportunities and so on and so forth.… We’re starting to see people leave the island altogether. I’m a living example of that. I have five children, they’re all adults, they’re all living in the mainland now.”26 Unemployment and under-employment are current challenges the church is working to address through local employment specialists and self-reliance missionaries. But the larger market forces of economic globalization have created significant concerns for many church members here and in other parts of the world. To illustrate the magnitude of islander dispersion internationally,

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currently there are 170 Latter-day Saint congregations in Tonga and another 110 Tongan-speaking congregations overseas. (This does not include Tongan members who are assimilated into non-Tongan speaking, overseas congregations.) On the bright side, the movement of Pacific Islanders in and out of their island homes, whether for economic advancement, educational opportunities, or simply a desire to experience something new, reflects the same trait that motivated their ancestors to discover and populate the world’s largest ocean. It is prime evidence of the effects of globalization and internationalization of the LDS Church in the twenty-first century. Pacific Islanders are taking their cultures and their faith into a plethora of new communities worldwide. This diaspora brings not only individuals but also their culture into their new host communities. Polynesians are happy to share their culture with others in foodways, song, dance, and athletics. Often, they may appear as the exotic other, but generally in very positive ways. This usually makes them welcome in their new communities. This welcoming and inclusive spirit is commonly expressed as “aloha.” It is the same spirit that the church attempts to share with visitors to the Polynesian Cultural Center in La‘ie, Hawai‘i. Sometimes, however, serious challenges arise in islanders’ acculturation to new homelands. Older people can be more culturally set in their ways and may have problems finding adequate work and learning English. Younger people, especially adolescents, can feel disconnected as they acculturate in different and sometimes negative ways. This sense of cultural disconnection can also apply to their religious lives. With mixed results, LDS leaders attempt to use religious instruction provided in Sunday services as well as seminary and institute classes—along with a new worldwide home-based curriculum “Come Follow Me” during the week—to help keep younger Pacific Island members and the church globally to be better connected to their faith. To further assist in the acculturation process, the church has organized scores of Pacific language congregations conducted in native languages that allow overseas immigrants to worship in their native tongues, including Tongan, Samoan, Marshallese, I-Kiribati, Niuean, and Cook Islanders. One additional and increasingly severe threat facing LDS island inhabitants in the South Pacific results from global warming. A number of members live on atolls or other low-lying areas that may not only be flooded but completely submerged by rising sea levels in the years ahead. They, along with others in their communities, would lose everything they have and be forcibly dispersed to relocate to other regions of the world. This potential disaster notwithstanding, there are some church members, like Tereua Kainitoka, who are determined to preserve the cultural heritage of their people in the island Republic of Kiribati. (Kiribati is an independent republic in Micronesia, located approximately 2500 miles southwest of Hawai‘i.) Kainitoka, who currently teaches the first university course in the Kiribati language at Brigham Young University-­ Provo, has made it clear that, although climate change and rising water levels may cause her beloved islands to disappear, the Kiribati heritage must be

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preserved. As she forcefully states the matter, “our cultures, our languages, can’t sink.”27 The fate of Kiribati Islanders and others who inhabit the atolls of the South Pacific merits being closely followed in the years to come. The LDS Church has had and continues to have a special interest in the Islands of the Pacific. The church has invested a great deal of human and material resources in the Pacific compared with other areas of similar population size. In spite of the challenges of globalization, diaspora, and even global warming, the future still appears bright as the church builds upon past successes in Polynesia and is currently augmenting its missionary and humanitarian efforts in Melanesia and Micronesia.

Member Retention and Reactivation Concerns Member retention issues and organizational attempts to reactivate those whose faith and commitment have waned are significant concerns for the contemporary LDS Church. The Latter-day Saints of the Pacific Islands tend to be more faithful to their baptismal covenants than is the case for many other regions of the international church. Yet many do slip away into inactivity at some point after conversion or face challenges living various LDS religious standards. To help bring these members back into full activity, senior missionaries have been given church callings to seek them out and encourage them to renew their religious commitments. These reactivation efforts are also part of the work assigned to young proselyting missionaries. On average, church activity rates in the Pacific Islands varies between 30 and 50 percent. But in specific areas, activity rates may be as high as 75–80 percent or as low as 15–20 percent. The islands of Polynesia, compared to Melanesia or Micronesia, generally have higher activity rates. In countries where religious membership is counted in national censuses, the number who self-report as Latter-day Saints generally appears to coincide with the number of those who actively participate in church programs. Of those who choose not to identify as Latter-day Saints in census surveys, many arguably were not genuinely converted at the time of their baptisms and/or subsequently discover that they are unable or unwilling to adhere to church standards. Others drop out due to an assortment of family, social, or cultural pressures. For some, there is even a question of dual affiliation. Some LDS converts return to participate in their previous denominations for social rather than doctrinal reasons. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been active in the Pacific Islands for over 175 years. Many, if not most, Polynesians have family members or ancestors who are or were members of the church. Virtually everyone in Polynesia has been visited by the Latter-day Saint missionaries. This constitutes a widespread support system that facilitates reactivation efforts which consequently are heavily stressed and more productive. In Melanesia and Micronesia, however, reactivation efforts are still a work in progress. Given the mounting worldwide demand on church resources, many LDS programs such as temples, genealogy libraries, and church schools in the Pacific are less feasible today in

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less populated regions. Access to church teaching resources online, however, may help make up for some of these support deficiencies in the future.

Conclusion The traditional cultures of the Pacific Islands have long promoted deep spiritual values and resilience among their inhabitants. Islanders are people of faith and many have been highly receptive to the contemporary teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints concerning the primary importance of family and kin, parental responsibilities for raising children, their eternal connectedness in the life to come, and their theological destiny as part of the House of Israel. Today, the LDS Church enjoys a positive image and reputation in the Pacific Islands. Its members are generally faithful, law-abiding citizens, happy to donate their time and talents to worthy community causes. The church is at the forefront of responding to natural disasters with aid and the service of local members to help in local rebuilding efforts for the sake of everyone, regardless of their faith or culture. In the Pacific Islands as a whole, the church benefits from a strong base of mature local leadership, general self-­ sufficiency in its missionary force, and a solid infrastructure of congregations, stakes, and temples. Looking toward the future, increasing secularization undoubtedly will continue to be one of the greatest challenges the LDS Church faces in the twenty-­ first century, even in the less-developed island groups. As the twenty-first century moves forward, because of their religious standards and beliefs Latter-­ day Saints in the Pacific will stand out in ever greater contrast to other groups. At the same time, the church is committed to developing initiatives and programs to strengthen families and their young people as they face these challenges. Church leaders will also continue striving to build bridges of understanding with government leaders, religious leaders, humanitarian donors, the media, and the institutions of academia.28 In the process of doing these things, the authors of this chapter are optimistic that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will continue to steadily make new converts and reactivate less active members. Congregations will grow and multiply. New temples will meet increased demand by members for their spiritual covenants  endowments in order to strengthen individuals and families. At the same time, large numbers of Pacific Islanders, including members of the church, can be expected to continue relocating out of the smaller islands for better economic and educational opportunities elsewhere. This may weaken some LDS congregations locally but strengthen others that receive them as immigrants. These immigrants will continue to share their culture and “aloha” spirit with their new neighbors throughout the world. No doubt the twenty-first century will bring both new challenges and opportunities, but we are personally confident that the Latter-day Saints of the Pacific are prepared to meet and profit from the tests that lie ahead.

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Notes 1. For a more specific look at the religious situation and outlook for LDS proselyting prospects in individual island states and territories, see David Stewart and Matthew Martinich, Reaching the Nations, vol. 1 (Henderson, NV: Cumorah Foundation, 2013), 470–584. 2. New Zealand is combined with Australia in another chapter and therefore is not treated here. 3. See Grant Underwood, “Joseph Smith’s Legacy in Latin America and the Pacific” in Global Mormonism in the 21st Century (Provo: BYU Religious Studies Center, 2008), 30–46, and Russell T.  Clement, “Polynesian Origins: More Word on the Mormon Perspective,” in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 13, no. 4 (Winter 1980): 88–98. 4. Sources of information on the church’s involvement in the Pacific include the following: R. Lanier Britsch, “Mormons in the Pacific” in The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 529–542; Grant Underwood, “The Historiography of Latter-day Saints in the Pacific” in Telling the Story of Mormon History (Provo: BYU Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History, 2004), 101–118; Grant Underwood, “Latter-day Saints in the Pacific” in Pioneers in the Pacific (Provo: BYU Religious Studies Center, 2005), 293–305; Russell T.  Clement, Mormons in the Pacific: A Bibliography (Laie: The Institute for Polynesian Studies, 1981); Laurie MafflyKipp, “Looking West: Mormonism in the Pacific World,” Journal of Mormon History, 2000. 40–63. A general history is R. Lanier Britsch, Unto the Islands of the Sea (Salt Lake City: Deseret Press, 1986). And examinations of current issues can be found in David Stewart and Matthew Martinich, Reaching the Nations, vol. 1 (Henderson, NV: Cumorah Foundation, 2013), 431–584; and Reid L. Neilson, ed., Global Mormonism in the 21st Century (Provo: BYU Religious Studies Center, 2008). 5. Concerning their voyage and mission, see Fred E.  Woods, “Launching Mormonism in the South Pacific: The Voyage of the Timoleon,” chapter in Reid L. Neilson and Fred E. Woods, eds. Go Ye Into All the World: The Growth and Development of Missionary Work (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, BYU/ Deseret Book, 2012), 191–216. 6. For sources that review the resistance to LDS proselyting efforts in the Pacific Islands and other early struggles, see Guy M.  Bishop, “Waging Holy War: Mormon—Congregationalist Conflict in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Hawaii,” Journal of Mormon History 17 (1991): 110–119; R.  Lanier Britsch, Unto the Islands of the Sea (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 1986), 16–20; Kathleen L Perrin and S. George Ellsworth, Seasons of Faith and Courage (Sandy, UT: Yves R.  Perrin, 1994), 17–30; R.  Lanier Britsch. Moramona, 2nd ed. (La‘ie, HI: Jonathon Napela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Islands Studies, 2018) 124–144; Riley M. Moffat, Fred E. Woods, and Brent R. Anderson, Saints of Tonga (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 2019), 106–115. R. Lanier Britsch, “Mormon Intruders in Tonga: The Passport Act of 1922,” in Mormons, Scripture, and the Ancient World (Provo, UT: FARMS, 1998), 121–148; W. James Jacob and Meli U. Lesuma, “History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Fiji” in Pioneers in the Pacific (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2005), 247–248.

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7. Grant Howlett. “From Beginnings to an Open Door in the Gilbert Islands (Kiribati).” Typescript at Church History Library. Also, George Moleni, interview by Lindsay Dil, February 7, 2016, at Church History Library. 8. Several LDS scriptural passages provide a strong doctrinal base for obtaining language and general knowledge or education viewed as necessary to preach the gospel. See, for example, Doctrine and Covenants 88: 79–81; 90:15, 93:36; and 30:18–19. 9. Doctrine & Covenants 93:36. 10. Ibid. 88: 118, 90:15, 109:7, 14. 11. Riley M.  Moffat, Fred E.  Woods, and Jeffrey N.  Walker, Gathering to La‘ie (La‘ie, Hawai‘i: Jonathon Napela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Islands Studies, 2011), 72. Also, Riley M.  Moffat, Fred E.  Woods, and Brent R. Anderson, Saints of Tonga: A Century of Island Faith (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book, 2019), 65, 161. 12. For a general overview of the LDS Church building program, see David W.  Cummings, Mighty Missionary of the Pacific: The Building Program of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Its History, Scope, and Significance (Salt Lake City, Utah: Bookcraft, 1961). 13. Doctrine and Covenants 58:3. 14. December 27, 2019, email from Pita Hopoate to Fred E. Woods. 15. The authors wish to thank Keith Chapman, Matt Heiss, Eric Rogers, and Brad Hales for the help in compiling these educational statistics. 16. For more information on temples and temple work in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, see www.churchofjesuschrist.org/temples. 17. Email from Mele Taumoepeau to Fred E. Woods, October 25, 2019. 18. The Washington Post broke this story on December 17, 2019 www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/Mormon-church. The LDS Church responded on February 14, 2020 www.deseret.com/faith/2020/2/14/21133740. 19. The authors wish to thank Keith Chapman of the LDS Pacific Area Office for collecting and sharing these statistics. 20. Interview with Gaugau Tavana by Fred E.  Woods, BYU campus, December 6, 2019. 21. For a popular treatment on the history of the Polynesian Cultural Center, see Laura F. Willes, Miracle in the Pacific: The Polynesian Cultural Center (Salt Lake City, Utah, Deseret Book, 2012). Other scholarly treatments of the Polynesian Cultural Center have been written by Vernice Wineera “Selves and Others: A Study of Reflexivity and the Representation of Culture in Touristic Display at the Polynesian Cultural Center,” PhD dissertation, University of Hawaii, 2000; Terry D.  Webb, “Mormonism and Tourist Art in Hawaii,” PhD dissertation, Arizona State U., 1990; Ann Marie Robinson, “The Polynesian Cultural Center: A Study in Authenticity,” MA thesis, California State University–Chico, 1991; Christopher B. Balme, Staging the Pacific: Framing Authenticity in Performances for Tourists at the Polynesian Cultural Center (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Pr., 1998); Richard R. Ramoutar, “An Exploration of Cultural Hybridization at the Polynesian Cultural Center: A Case Study on a Living Museum and Communication Medium,” MA thesis, BYU, 2002; and James Whitehurst, “Mormons and the Hula,” The Journal of American Culture, 12, no. 1(Spring 1989): 1–5.

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22. For statements from the LDS Church on these issues, see https://newsroom. Churchofjesuschrist.org/official-statement/same-gender-attraction, and https://mormonandgay.churchofjesuschrist.org/. 23. Interview with Gaugau Tavana by Fred E.  Woods, BYU campus, December 6, 2019. 24. Dieter F.  Uchtdorf, “The Church in a Cross-Cultural World,” in Global Mormonism in the 21st Century, ed. Reid L.  Neilson (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2008), 305. 25. Phone interview with Eric Beaver by Fred E. Woods, December 17, 2019. 26. Phone interview with Eric Beaver by Fred E. Woods, December 17, 2019. 27. Laura Standage Combrink, “Keeping Kiribati Afloat,” BYU Magazine (Fall 2019): 10. 28. Hugh Matheson, “Challenges from Religious Communities in Spreading the Gospel,” Global Mormonism in the 21st Century (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2008), 104–113. Though focusing on Africa, it is equally relevant to the Pacific.

Bibliography Balme, Christopher B. 1998. Staging the Pacific: Framing Authenticity in Performances for Tourists at the Polynesian Cultural Center. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bishop, Guy M. 1991. Waging Holy War: Mormon—Congregationalist Conflict in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Hawaii. Journal of Mormon History 17: 110–119. Britsch, R. Lanier. 1986. Unto the Islands of the Sea: A History of the Latter-day Saints in the Pacific. Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book. ———. 1998. Mormon Intruders in Tonga: The Passport Act of 1922. In Mormons, Scripture, and the Ancient World, 121–148. Provo, UT: FARMS. ———. 2004. Unto the Islands of the Sea: A History of the Latter-day Saints in the Pacific. Salt Lake City. “Mormons in the Pacific”. In The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, 101–118. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2018. Moramona: The Mormons in Hawai‘i. 2nd ed. La‘ie, HI: Jonathon Napela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Islands Studies. Clement, Russell, T. 1980. Polynesian Origins: More Word on the Mormon Perspective. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 13 (4, Winter): 88–98. ———. 1981. Mormons in the Pacific: A Bibliography. Laie: The Institute for Polynesian Studies. Combrink, Laura Standage. 2019, Fall. Keeping Kiribati Afloat. BYU Magazine, p. 10. Harris, R. Carl. 2006. Building the Kingdom in Samoa, 1888–2005. Heber City, UT: R. Carl Harris. Howlett, Grant. From Beginnings to an Open Door in the Gilbert Islands (Kiribati). Typescript at Church History Library. Jacob, W. James, and Meli U. Lesuma. 2005. History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Fiji. In Pioneers in the Pacific, 247–248. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University. Maffly-Kipp, Laurie. 2000. Looking West: Mormonism in the Pacific World. Journal of Mormon History: 40–63.

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Matheson, Hugh. “Challenges from Religious Communities in Spreading the Gospel,” Global Mormonism in the 21st Century. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2008, 104–113. Moffat, Riley M., Fred E. Woods, and Brent R. Anderson. 2011. Gathering to La‘ie, 72. La‘ie, Hawai‘i: Jonathon Napela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Islands Studies. ———. 2019. Saints of Tonga: A Century of Island Faith. Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book. Nielson, Reid L., ed. 2008. Global Mormonism in the 21st Century. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University. Perrin, Kathleen L., and S.  George Ellsworth. 1994. Seasons of Faith and Courage. Sandy, UT: Yves R. Perrin. Ramoutar, Richard R. 2002. An Exploration of Cultural Hybridization at the Polynesian Cultural Center: A Case Study on a Living Museum and Communication Medium. MA thesis, Brigham Young University. Robinson, Ann Marie. 1991. The Polynesian Cultural Center: A Study in Authenticity. MA thesis, California State University–Chico. Stewart, David, and Matthew Martinich. 2013. Reaching the Nations. Vol. 1, 431–584. Henderson, NV: Cumorah Foundation. Uchtdorf, Dieter F. 2008. The Church in a Cross-cultural World. In Global Mormonism in the 21st Century, ed. Reid L. Neilson, 294–306. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University. Underwood, Grant. 2004. The Historiography of Latter-day Saints in the Pacific. In Telling the Story of Mormon History, 101–114. Provo, UT: Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History at Brigham Young University. ———. 2005. Latter-day Saints in the Pacific: A Bibliographic Essay. In Pioneers in the Pacific, 293–305. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University. ———. 2008. Joseph Smith’s Legacy in Latin America and the Pacific. In Global Mormonism in the 21st Century, 30–46. Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center. Webb, Terry D. 1990. Mormonism and Tourist Art in Hawaii. PhD dissertation, Arizona State University. Whitehurst, James. 1989. Mormons and the Hula. The Journal of American Culture 12 (1, Spring): 1–5. Willes, Laura F. 2012. Miracle in the Pacific: The Polynesian Cultural Center. Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book. Wineera, Vernice. 2000. Selves and Others: A Study of Reflexivity and the Representation of Culture in Touristic Display at the Polynesian Cultural Center. PhD dissertation, University of Hawaii. Woods, Fred E. 2012. Launching Mormonism in the South Pacific: The Voyage of the Timoleon. In Go Ye Into All the World: The Growth and Development of Missionary Work, ed. Reid L.  Neilson and Fred E.  Woods, 191–216. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, BYU/Deseret Book.

CHAPTER 17

Lands of Contrast: Latter-day Saint Societies in New Zealand/Aotearoa and Australia Ian G. Barber

The region of Australasia in southwestern Oceania incorporates two independent nation-states: the Federal Commonwealth of Australia and New Zealand/ Aotearoa (the last term used hereafter with reference to Indigenous New Zealand in particular). Both of these parliamentary nations are former colonies of the (then) United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (Britain hereafter). Both share constitutional links to the monarchy of the United Kingdom and belong today to the Commonwealth of Nations. Descendants of Anglo settlers constitute the greater part of each nation’s population, albeit joined increasingly since the later twentieth century, especially in Australia, by new migrants from Britain, non-Anglo European countries, the Pacific Islands, and Asia. Indigenous populations in both nations also represent diverse and contrasting peoples and settlement traditions. Descendants of the people who first settled the Australian island-continent from the Asia-Pacific region beginning over 40,000 years ago remain substantially marginalized across much of Australia today. In contrast, Māori who settled Aotearoa about 800 years ago from tropical eastern Polynesia have emerged as a growing political and cultural force in the modern nation, in spite of ongoing social problems and challenges.1 The different Indigenous  settlement and colonization  histories of both nations have affected the reception and consequent emergence of Australasian societies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). As of 2019, when Australia’s population exceeded 25 million, there were 154,595 Australian Latter-day Saints of record—dominated numerically by European I. G. Barber (*) University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_17

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settler descendants and more recent arrivals of Polynesian descent. Indigenous Australian Aborigines have only recently joined the LDS Church in any number at all (probably no more than hundreds at most), and there was no concerted Mormon missionary work among any  First Australian communities before the 1960s. In contrast, Mormon missionaries have actively proselytized among Indigenous  communities in Aotearoa since 1881, with thousands of Māori converts joining the LDS Church by the turn of the twentieth century. Today, Māori and diasporic Polynesian communities represent more than 50 percent of the 115,236 New Zealand Latter-day Saints of record in a country of nearly 5 million people (2019 figures).2 To understand contemporary Latter-day Saints societies in Australasia, it is important to assess LDS social origins and developments in cultural context over both time and space in the neighboring but very different countries of Australia and New Zealand. To this end, a form of historical anthropology is applied in this chapter. This general approach involves a qualitative comparative assessment of the dynamic group identities, beliefs, and behaviors that constitute LDS societies in both countries. Historical records and studies related to the diverse communities of Australasian Latter-day Saints are interpreted to better understand how these groups perceived themselves, were contested, and lived in their own worlds over time. Following other practitioners of this approach, strategies of collective identity are evaluated “situationally and ideologically,” and not in rigid, typological ways.3 The fundamental aim is to consider how these religious societies have defined themselves while living historically in the distinct nations of southwestern Oceania and within the larger religious culture of an American-led church (Fig. 17.1).

Latter-day Saints in New Zealand/Aotearoa In October 1854, LDS missionaries from the United States first arrived in the young New Zealand colony. Chiefly leaders (rangatira) of Māori descent groups (hapū or sub-tribal units) had first formally recognized British colonial governance in this southwestern Polynesian island group 14 years earlier in the unified nation’s founding Treaty of Waitangi. By 1854, there were an estimated 32,554 non-Māori to 60,650 Māori in New Zealand, the former representing sustained, early nineteenth-century colonization from Britain. The proselytizing efforts of the first Latter-day Saints missionaries were directed to this initially smaller British settler population until 1881. Between 1854 and 1881, New Zealand Latter-day Saints were concentrated in a few small branches of British settler converts. Encouraged by the nineteenth-­ century Mormon doctrine of “the gathering,” a number of these converts eventually left for Utah. The doctrine declared that Israelite descendants, who had been scattered historically around the world, including Europe, would be redeemed and gathered in the pre-millennial latter-days in accordance with biblical covenants. The nineteenth-century LDS Church strongly encouraged these purported European-Israelites to gather to a new, American Zion. The

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20°

AUSTRALIA Brisbane (Queensland)

Ballarat (Victoria)

NEW ZEALAND/ AOTEAROA

Sydney (New South Wales)

NORTH ISLAND Hamilton

Whangaruru Auckland Te Māhia

40°

SOUTH ISLAND 120°

140°

160°

180°

Fig. 17.1  Australia and New Zealand (Australasia) in southwestern Oceania showing places mentioned in text. New Zealand also lies at the southwestern corner of Polynesia in the eastern Pacific Ocean. (Drawn from base data licensed under CC by 4.0)

emigration to Utah of converts of means with strong religious commitments, however, left the small New Zealand branches to struggle or even disappear. In that respect, as Marjorie Newton notes, these first New Zealand congregations of British settler converts were not necessarily expected to be permanent.4 At the same time, another doctrine of Israelite redemption was playing out among Māori communities in the colony. Māori ancestors had first settled in Aotearoa about 800 years ago from tropical central-eastern Polynesia, bringing introduced crops, dogs, and rats into two large islands (and other smaller ones) with a temperate climate and no native terrestrial mammals other than bats. Māori developed modes of seasonal production around introduced root crops where possible and regionally differentiated marine and terrestrial foraging otherwise. Associated with these economic strategies, strong regional identities emerged around extended family groups, or whānau, nested within hapū to iwi—tribal units of descent—who constituted themselves as tangata whenua (people of the land). The land that produced crops in warmer climates and food otherwise obtained from native fauna and flora was critical economically, politically, and even spiritually to these descent groups. In recognition of this, the colony’s founding 1840 Treaty of Waitangi guaranteed tino rangatiratanga (chiefly rule) to the hapū over their taonga (treasured possessions). These treasured possessions were interpreted in the English text version of the treaty to mean “lands and estates, forests, fisheries, and other properties.” In return, Māori rangatira would recognize British and ultimately crown governorship

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in New Zealand. Over the nineteenth-century course of British colonization, however, traditional Māori resources and lands were increasingly appropriated by the Crown through various contested methods, including confiscation following armed conflict. Māori viewed the alienation of their taonga as a breach of the treaty and resisted by various means, including movements led by their own prophets or poropiti.5 These movements turned the Christian scriptures and religious traditions of the colonists against the British settler government, as the poropiti likened the plight of their people to Israelite oppression. In this narrative, Māori became both symbolically and lineally a part of biblical Israel as covenant descendants of Noah’s son Shem. The British in contrast were perceived to be descendants of Noah’s son Japheth.6 In 1881, Latter-day Saints missionaries in New Zealand began to proselytize actively among the Māori. While one would not expect that these missionaries were aware of all the cultural nuances of colonization, the LDS press of 1876 had  referred to those who would “swindle” Māori out of “home and lands under the transparent fraud of barter … as some ‘Christian’ missionaries have done.”7 This publication followed an 1868 article in the same periodical that had discussed a possible scriptural link between Māori and the ancient Israelites of the Book of Mormon.  The  link came through Hagoth, an “exceedingly curious” man of the mythic, American-Israelite Nephite lineage who had built and launched ships with many people and provisions into the “west” sea. Two of these ships were “never heard of more.” With reference to this narrative, the  1868 writer  referred to the “general impression” that an “adventurous Nephite sailor of old” had reached the Pacific Islands. The 1876 article also affirmed that Māori “are undoubtedly of the seed of Jacob.”8 Given the later nineteenth-century profile of this mythic Israelite-Māori connection and decades of low LDS growth among New Zealand’s British settler colonists, the 1880s decision to concentrate missionary efforts on the Māori, as the “seed of Jacob,” is unsurprising. Another influence behind this decision may have been the later nineteenth-century LDS belief that growing conflict with the US federal government would lead directly to the pre-­ millennial apocalypse. In this context, the Book of Mormon was understood to have prophesied that the latter-day gathering and restoration of Israel, including Native Americans whose ancestors were believed to have brought by God to their own “land of promise,” would be accomplished before the millennium. This explains renewed later nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint interest in Native Americans in the United States. But the Book of Mormon also promised that Israel would be gathered from the “islands of the sea,” and Māori-­ Israelites were understood to be heirs of these promises.9 Following this redirection of missionary focus, thousands of Māori people from several iwi across North Island districts to northern South Island joined the LDS Church between 1881 and 1900.10 A number of studies have considered the reasons for these conversions, including active community engagement and use of the Māori language (te reo) by LDS missionaries; similarities

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between nineteenth-century American Mormon and Māori societies, including the practice of plural marriage and a corresponding emphasis on ancestral family connections; and shared nineteenth-century themes of Israelite descent, the importance of prophet-leaders (poropiti), and restoration of ancient lands in accordance with biblical promises and covenants. Some researchers of the topic have also pointed to later nineteenth-century Māori disenchantment with British Christianity, as well as colonial government, especially since the British monarch was also head of the influential Anglican Church of England in the colony. For a number of Māori, this alienation was reinforced by the New Zealand Supreme Court decision in the case Wi Parata v. The Bishop of Wellington, which sought the return of Māori land given to the Anglicans for a school that was never constructed. The judgment delivered by Chief Justice Sir James Prendergast decided for the Anglicans, as it declared the Treaty of Waitangi a “simple nullity” and its Māori signatories “primitive barbarians.” It is instructive here that several central Aotearoa whānau (extended families) affected by this decision would join the Latter-day Saints around the last decade of the nineteenth century and that a 1902 round of litigation over the ruling was initiated by a Latter-day Saint convert, Hohepa Wi Neera.11 In this context, the LDS doctrine of the gathering of Israel offered something far more substantive and positive to people who had suffered massive land loss, including forced confiscation. As linked to this doctrine in the late nineteenth century, the Hagoth myth assured Māori that they were heirs to Book of Mormon promises of a “restoration” to ancestral American lands.12 In the east coast North Island region of Te Māhia, LDS missionary Nelson Spicer Bishop referred in his 1886 diary (November 28 entry) to “the spirit of gathering” among Māori Saints. This was “all they can think of,” Bishop wrote, “and they want to go right away.” Bishop responded that while the time for the gathering was not yet, it would be near in the future. The 1880s mission leadership reiterated this promise. In a farewell address to assembled North Island Māori converts in 1888, mission president William Paxman looked forward to the time “when you shall be gathered to the land of your forefathers, the land blessed above all others, where you can help to build up Zion and labor in the temples.” To the record of this conference, the clerk added the observation that “the [Māori] Saints are greatly interested in the subject of gathering and are anxiously looking forward to the time when they will have the privilege of going to the land of Zion to be united with the Saints and be partakers of the many blessings they are now debarred from in this land.” In this last clause, the clerk captured a key appeal of late nineteenth-century Mormonism for Māori people: anticipation that their ancestral rights lost in the course of colonization would be restored as Latter-day Saints gathered to America. This reflects a very different appeal of the doctrine of gathering to Māori as opposed to British-­ settler New Zealand converts.13 Twentieth-century Mormonism saw the demise of the doctrine of a literal gathering to America, although it was still promoted occasionally to Māori

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converts in the early decades of the century.14 However, ecclesiastical support for the use of Māori language (te reo) in church meetings and participation in selected customs continued. This support paralleled a period of broader, if sometimes inconsistently applied, government encouragement for Māori initiatives, the latter led by important Māori politicians.15 Especially after World War II, New Zealand society and politics increasingly moved toward a more assimilationist worldview, which was to the detriment of Māori cultural identity and practice. At the same time, the general authorities of the post-war LDS Church consistently encouraged global members of the faith to remain in and establish religious communities in their own countries. Under the post-war administration of long-serving, globalist church president, David O. McKay, this encouragement came with an organizational emphasis on “correlation.” Through correlation, church leaders endeavored to ensure uniform adherence to standard doctrines, policies, and global programs directed by priesthood quorums in the English language, wherever that seemed to be an option. In effect, correlation produced a universal religious culture that was often less responsive to local differences and more conformist than previously had been the case.16 Reflecting on the outcomes of the correlation movement instigated at church headquarters in Salt Lake City, Māori educationalist Gina Colvin describes the emergence of a Utah-based “gospel culture” that defined a “distinctive way of life, common to all members.” However, for Māori specifically, Colvin bluntly concludes that LDS gospel culture is an “inadequate substitute” that has “arrogantly and ignorantly” called Indigenous political struggle and resistance into question.17 In Aotearoa, this post-war emphasis on a universal, Eurocentric church culture was manifest in the growing encouragement by Latter-day Saints officials for Māori integration into a predominantly English-speaking New Zealand society, insofar as religious strictures would allow. The post-war New Zealand church also directed its missionary efforts once again to European settler descendants (or Pākehā). The early phase of this shift is referenced in the sentiments of a 1950 letter written by LDS New Zealand mission president, Gordon C Young, to church president McKay, affirming that a mission to New Zealand’s Europeans was of “equal importance” to the Māori mission. In tandem, local church leaders emphasized Māori assimilation within the larger, LDS global movement and American-centered gospel culture. New Zealand church membership in this era was also bolstered by increasing numbers of Tongan and Samoan Latter-day Saints who had migrated from western Polynesia. In this more diverse New Zealand church, missionary leaders began opposing the use of te reo in church settings and separate congregational meetings organized along language and, therefore, ethnic lines. The new orientation was espoused in 1951 by mission president Young in a letter to the church’s First Presidency that envisioned a society of New Zealand Saints who were “not Maoris and Samoans and Tongans and Europeans, just LATTER DAY SAINTS.”18

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A salient example of this shift in both policy and practice is evident in the church’s active opposition after 1950 to the traditional Māori, three-day funerary rite (tangihanga) held generally at the community’s ceremonial marae (meeting place, especially courtyard, including community buildings in modern use). Here, mourners would hongi (greet through pressed noses) with each other and the deceased in an open casket on display throughout the ceremony. Recalling his time as New Zealand mission president in the late 1950s, Ariel S. Ballif observed that “we tried extra hard to discourage it [tangihanga] while we were there.” Ballif’s opposition extended to concern over the expense involved, as well as his cultural-bound view that the Māori funerary rite was “no good.” Regarding the latter concern, Ballif specified that “we believe in proper burial and proper ceremonies and then burying people and going to your home.”19 A further concern raised by church leaders of the time concerned the burial of deceased LDS temple patrons. The 1958 dedication of a Latter-day Saints temple in Hamilton, North Island, brought widespread participation in the church’s highest closed ordinances to Māori Saints. Deceased temple patrons were dressed in special clothing worn during the temple endowment—a form of ceremonial initiation into eternity. Accordingly, church leaders were concerned over the public display of temple robes in the traditional tangihanga ceremonies. Māori members were now expected to follow Anglo-American funeral customs even though the tangihanga has remained a core expression of the Māori community and culture to the present day.20 Anthropologist Eric Schwimmer captured the impact of this change in church policy during his 1960–1961 ethnographic study of the predominantly Latter-day Saints Māori community of northern North Island iwi Ngāti Wai in Whangaruru. Until 1960, Schwimmer noted, coffins were left open in this community during tangihanga, although by that time, “local people did not hongi with the corpse.” However, during a 1960 Whangaruru tangihanga, Schwimmer observed “an old lady from another district” who insisted that she would hongi with the “consecrated” deceased, an endowed temple patron. The woman was lifted bodily away from the deceased, after which the local branch president screwed down the lid of the casket. This caused “great annoyance” among the mourning Māori members who felt that the woman should have been allowed to hongi or at least have been moved by persuasion rather than force. Thereafter, Schwimmer recorded, coffin lids were fitted with transparent plastic covers (an effective barrier to hongi). In Whangaruru and elsewhere, this covering became “a characteristic feature of a Mormon tangi” (short for Māori tangihanga).21 Many Māori Mormons, however, quietly continued to maintain selected traditional worldviews and practices in spite of the pressures of assimilation. Ironically, the construction of the LDS Hamilton temple as a place for proxy religious ordinances on behalf of deceased ancestors (baptisms, marriage, family sealings, and endowment rites) provided a mechanism of cultural maintenance. The LDS genealogical program had been developed to support church members in their family research so as to meet the requirements of proxy

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temple ordinances. Māori had carefully maintained genealogical records or whakapapa that would affirm traditional descent, including land rights, and, in post-1840 New Zealand, belonging and identity. The use of whakapapa records for temple work validated ancient customs for Māori Mormons that was bolstered by a publication of the church’s genealogical society on Polynesian (including Māori) genealogical records and traditions in 1961.22 At the beginning of the 1960s, Schwimmer also documented the persistent belief in spiritual guardian animals among Whangaruru Ngāti Wai—guardians known collectively as mana who were identified with important ancestors. During a church priesthood meeting, Schwimmer noted that “all the speakers dismissed the suggestion that, as ‘pagan gods,’ their Whangaruru guardian animals were evil,” even while the Māori priesthood holders also acknowledged “that the church regards them as idols.” The speakers agreed that “gradually” the mana would vanish. As I have noted elsewhere, communities of Māori Saints among other iwi have—hand in hand with their LDS faith commitments—similarly maintained belief in ancestral, guardian spirits who manifest themselves as various animals.23 The New Zealand church also has accommodated a subtle twenty-first-­ century shift toward diversity by adopting a more obviously inclusive definition of its cultural boundaries. In part this is the result of the migration of thousands of tropical Pacific Islanders to New Zealand, now identified collectively and commonly as Pasifika. Historically these migrants came in greater numbers  from Tonga and Samoa in western Polynesia, including many who are Latter-day Saints. For economic reasons, these migrants have settled preferentially in large urban centers, especially Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city.24 Accordingly, the church’s New Zealand webpage profiles a society that recognizes “cultural diversity.” New Zealanders from many cultures embraced the gospel, and membership grew from 17,000  in 1958 to 100,000 50 years later. Immigrating Latter-day Saint families came from the islands of the Pacific, and today the Church in New Zealand enjoys great cultural diversity.25

In the context of assimilationist goals (embodied in the universal “gospel culture” ideal, discussed earlier), such cultural diversity as may be allowed in the twenty-first-century church has not come about without some tension. Around 1980 church leaders in Auckland and Wellington sought to integrate separate Samoan-language ecclesiastical units into English-language congregations. In response, hundreds of Samoan Latter-day Saints formed their own language units without ecclesiastical sanction (some were excommunicated), while New Zealand Samoan church leaders petitioned church headquarters in Salt Lake City. Leaders signaled a reversal of sorts. In 1982 Samoan members of the Auckland Mount Roskill Stake were advised that they could meet monthly “to worship in their own language.” Since then, separate Polynesian units have been established in growing numbers. For Auckland alone, researcher

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Matthew Martinich notes that the number of congregations “designated for languages spoken by Pacific Islanders (Samoan, Tongan, and Niuean) increased from 23 in 2001 to 27 in April 2013.” By April 2013 there were “13 Samoanspeaking wards [congregational units], 13 Tongan-speaking wards, and one Niuean-speaking ward” in Auckland.26 However, against the picture of thousands of Polynesian Latter-day Saints added to the New Zealand church, growth among Pākehā or non-Polynesian populations more broadly has been relatively slow in the twenty-first century. Martinich summarizes this situation and suggests possible cultural causes from data available in 2013. The Church continues to experience challenges converting Anglo New Zealanders due to lower receptivity incurred by secularism, materialism, and disinterest in organized religion. Public perception that the Church is a predominately Maori and Pacific Islander institution has appeared to also reduce receptivity among white New Zealanders.27

With regard to Māori in particular, the LDS Church now finds itself in a post-colonial New Zealand nation where there is a growing political profile and public empowerment of Māori groups. Iwi organizations in particular have benefitted from widespread (if partial) state redress for loss of land and culture as recommended by the Waitangi Tribunal, and marae (Māori meeting grounds and cultural sites) have a greater profile in the community generally. In 1987, Māori (te reo) was also declared an official language. For many postcolonial Māori, te reo has been a critical expression of culture and is considered a taonga. National recognition of te reo, including formal, combined Māori and English names for all government departments, has been a critical element of redress for the Māori people in contemporary New Zealand.28 Since the late twentieth century, the LDS Church has moved, at least to some extent, to accommodate a new Māori profile and politics.29 This was flagged in the guidelines of a memorandum on “Language and Cultural Values in New Zealand” sent to LDS New Zealand ecclesiastical leaders in 1992 from the church’s Pacific Area Presidency. The guidelines sanction te reo to be used cautiously in some church settings, including congregational testimony meetings where “no one should forbid such expression of testimony.” Otherwise, the memorandum acknowledges “many occasions” when “the Maori language is most appropriate.” Concerning tangihanga held on marae, the guidelines direct priesthood leaders to “always respect Maori customs and protocol.” And in a significant reversal of the policy that Schwimmer observed in application at Whangaruru in 1960, the memorandum advised that funeral caskets “may remain open or closed” during the viewing.30 Alongside these modest cultural accommodations from the late twentieth century, a new generation of Māori Mormons has continued to integrate the principles and theologies of their LDS faith with an attachment to traditional customs. Twenty-first-century LDS Māori researchers have highlighted the spiritual values of their convert ancestors who were committed to tikanga Māori (embedded Māori values; customary practice). In addition, they have

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revisited historical accounts of matakite—traditional prophets or seers and their prophecies—and nineteenth-century prophets (poropiti) believed to have predicted the Mormon advent among Māori. These sorts of interpretations validate the integrity of both Māori tradition and Latter-day Saints faith beliefs.31 But the contemporary faith journey of many Māori Latter-day Saints is also more than a return to historical assumptions and relationships. There is general acknowledgment of, and respect for, the place of the Hagoth myth in the formation of an earlier Māori-Mormon Israelite identity, as the narrative is cherished still by older Māori and Polynesian church members. But younger, educated Māori and other Polynesian Latter-day Saints in particular find the Hagoth myth to be unsound scientifically and problematic in the politics and society of twenty-first-century Aotearoa. In 2014, Gina Colvin summarized the situation from her lived experience as a politically aware Māori Latter-­ day Saint. A bicultural political landscape means that Māori are more literate about their origins, more comfortable in their identity, and more assertive in their politics … Stories of Hagoth are occasionally recited in Sunday school class or sacrament talks but they don’t get much traction from young Pasifika people. They simply don’t sit well in our cultural lexicon.32

Colvin also observed that “in 2014 more and more LDS Maori are present in the realm of Indigenous politics and activism”—a presence that may challenge the devotional and conforming Latter-day Saint message.33 Political leader and life-long member of the LDS Church, Marama Fox exemplifies the new Māori cultural synthesis. In her maiden speech to Parliament as Māori co-­ leader of the minority Māori party, Fox extolled the virtues of home and family and even cited the Mormon hymn, “When There’s Love at Home.” In a discourse that would not be out of place in any Latter-day Saints sermon, Fox added, “When also we change what we do in our homes, we will change society.” But with no less fervor, Fox championed Ma¯ori values and activism. In a 2016 interview, Fox articulated the vision of a New Zealand that “would gradually move to its own unique form of governance, one that would abandon the Westminster model in favour of Maori customs, principles and values.” Fox was equally adamant about the importance of culture and language, expressed succinctly in her observation: “It’s a world view.”34 This review of the Latter-day Saints in New Zealand history challenges some earlier views that have highlighted Māori-Mormon acculturation and cultural loss. For example, in the late twentieth century, historian Peter Lineham observed that “the so-called unique [historical] relationship between the Latter-day Saints and the Maori people proves to have little substance to it” and that the relationship was replaced after World War II by “a deliberately more European-style mission.” This, according to Lineham, “enabled Americanisms to be used without discomfit.” Schwimmer’s earlier take on this, in accordance with the theory of structural anthropology, proposed the

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replacement of an older and vanishing Māori worldview with a progressive and modern Mormon worldview. For Schwimmer, contradictions between Māori and Mormon ideas in areas of conflict (such as tangihanga) are resolved in the traditional Māori view of vanishing or passing away.35 Yet the transformation of cultural forms that Schwimmer predicted was neither as complete nor as widespread as his structuralist model predicted. Rather, history would see many Māori Latter-day Saints caught up in the cultural renaissance that began in the later twentieth century so as to accommodate Mormon community values and political activism.36 Moreover, many Mormon-­ Māori communities have been beneficiaries of redress for treaty breaches. The LDS  Church’s tentative, late twentieth-century re-accommodation of Māori culture would seem to recognize this new political reality, including the views of self-determination espoused by leaders such as Marama Fox. However, Colvin’s observations would suggest that the divide between politically active Māori Mormons and the dominating model of devotional, obedient Latter-day Saints is one that persists.

Latter-day Saints in Australia Until recent decades, the society of American missionary and European settler Latter-day Saints in Australia has been less culturally diverse than in New Zealand. The LDS Church was first introduced to the island continent by emigrant converts from Britain in the 1840s. Historian Marjorie Newton has applied social and cultural history perspectives in tracking the subsequent course of the Australian LDS Church.37 In some respects, its initial course paralleled the experience of nineteenth-century British settlers in colonial New Zealand, as discussed earlier. Newton observes that nineteenth-century Australasian converts in both countries anticipated gathering to the American “Zion” in accordance with British-Israel doctrinal beliefs and expectations. Consequently, home branches of the church were often left depleted and sometimes had to close. Religious conviction appears to have been the primary motivation for this. There was no other inducement for established British settlers in relatively wealthy colonies of Australia and New Zealand to leave their homes and gather to the western United States.38 After the nineteenth century the LDS Church would encourage international converts to remain in their own lands and help build a global church. Even so, Australian membership growth remained slow and new converts numbers remained relatively low through the earlier twentieth century. Newton’s review of Latter-day Saints missionary correspondence from the 1850s to the 1920s highlights themes of Australian “indifference” to religion in general and to the religious message of Mormon missionaries in particular. Newton prefaces this review by noting a “general agreement that Australians have always shown marked apathy” toward religion. Concurring with this assessment, historian Anne O’Brien observes that on the eve of Australian federation, “less than half of the population attended worship regularly, even

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though 96 per cent identified as Christian.”39 In part this was a product of geography, with European settler communities scattered and often isolated “in the bush” across Australia’s challenging landscape. Furthermore, the early twentieth-century Anglo-American Latter-day Saints mission to Europeans in Australian cities was countered by Protestant missionary campaigns that railed against “false creeds such as socialism, Roman Catholicism and Mormonism.” In the early twentieth century especially, anti-Mormon messaging in Australia was influenced by crusading British churches, as well as by negative media representations (in newspapers, periodicals, and eventually film) that portrayed “Mormonism” as a theocratic organization advocating polygamy. These kinds of accusations were also publicized in Australia by the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a separate trajectory of Joseph Smith’s restoration movement, that denied divine sanction for plural marriage. Cumulatively, these countervailing forces adversely affected LDS missionary efforts and church growth in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.40 In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, LDS growth in Australia increased at an exponential rate. In particular, the decade of the 1950s saw an unprecedented rise in membership numbers, from 3500 in 1955 to 10,000 in 1960. In the decades thereafter, tens of thousands of members have been added to produce, by 2019, an official membership of 154,595. The rate of growth, however, has slowed in recent years. For Newton, the church’s “highly structured program” that calls for “deep involvement and commitment” provides some explanation for the unprecedented membership increases in the latter part of the twentieth century. Here Newton applies the general observations of sociologist Hans Mol to suggest that this growth reflected an appeal to Australians who might otherwise be caught in the “loose weave” of a society that is increasingly “less capable of shaping convictions” and “implementing norms.” Mol’s argument that this has created a “need” among many Australians for “firm structures” underscores Newton’s explanation.41 The contrast between a secular Australian society and the kind of organized religious life endorsed by the LDS Church continues to be acknowledged by the church itself, so as to reinforce an Australian Latter-day Saint identity. This is reflected in the church’s press coverage of a May 2019 conference in Sydney attended by about 8000 people at which church president Russell M. Nelson spoke. A Church News headline and text reported statistical evidence of the “decline” of religion in Australia. “Nearly one-third of Australians (30%) reported in the 2016 census that they are not religious,” the article noted. Local Area Seventy (an LDS ecclesiastical position), Elder Robert Dudfield, was reported as telling the conference that “it can be hard for [Australian] Latter-day Saints to share their views about marriage and family,” as these were “constantly under attack.” In spite of the challenges, he maintained that Latter-­ day Saints were “happy people who are striving to do their best” and are regularly “seen out ministering in the communities.”42 Converts from migrant or new Australian communities also have contributed to LDS growth in Australia in recent decades. At the May 2019

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conference, Elder Dudfield observed that “in addition to our English heritage membership, we also have Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese and other language units that meet throughout the country.”43 As an earlier indicator of this growing diversification of the Australian church, Newton refers to a 1990 report from the Sydney Parramatta Stake (a Diocese-level unit, incorporating a number of ward congregations) that 40 percent of its members were born outside of Australia. These new Australian Latter-day Saints included diverse peoples from continental Europe (especially Greece and Italy), Polynesian migrants from Samoa and Tonga in particular, New Zealanders (predominantly Māori and other peoples of Polynesian descent), Latin Americans, and Asians—some of whom were meeting in separate language wards.44 On occasion the twentyfirst century Australian church has responded to this growth and its consequent diversity with an assimilationist impulse not unlike that of the later twentieth-century New Zealand LDS Church. In a salient example, the Samoan language designation of several wards in the greater Brisbane metropolitan area of Queensland was withdrawn between 2007 and 2008, even though LDS Church members in Queensland attributed “immigration from New Zealand and Polynesia” as factors in “recent church growth” in 2013. Samoan Saints affected by the 2007–2008 changes took a legal case against the church that claimed discrimination in the imposition of English language worship. The case (Iliafi v The Church) was dismissed on appeal in 2014, although it is of note that LDS Samoan language services have resumed in Queensland since.45 Iliafi v The Church indicates that  LDS growth in Australia has not come without its  problems. Among other  twenty-first-century “challenges” in the Australian church, Latter-day Saint Sherie Gavin, who migrated from the United States and is a resident in Ballarat, Victoria, reports that “disparity between the economic situations of Australian Latter-day Saints and Pasifika Latter-day Saints in the region means that there are a variety of needs, and it’s often difficult for regional church headquarters to meet all those needs.” Gavin also observes “some American culture seeping into Australian church practice.”46 Referencing this same concern years ago, Newton reported that church leadership rhetoric and lesson manuals of the 1980s “moved towards an ideal of universalism,” but that in practice, this universalism seemed “unattainable,” producing “an anaemic Americanism” instead.47 Newton draws on personal experience as much as research to explore this process in Australia, as cultural tensions have followed the implementation of some North American Latter-­ day Saints programs. Newton’s argument is not unlike Colvin’s “gospel culture” critique, but Newton frames Australian tensions as a clash between national identity and a kind of American flavored “internationalism.”48 Be that as it may, the situation is complex. Newton concedes that some Australian Saints do not agree with her views, while acknowledging “widespread” Australian members’ affection for American Latter-day Saints leaders.49 To an extent, the incorporation of diasporic Polynesian (including Māori) populations into the Australian LDS Church has brought the two lands of contrast closer together, insofar as their distinctive Latter-day Saints societies are concerned. But the legacy of a very salient historical difference in LDS relationships

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with Indigenous communities remains. Latter-day Saints missionaries showed no inclination to take their message to First Australians—Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples—until the later twentieth century. This disinclination was influenced by popular racist Mormon beliefs that Aboriginal Australians and Africans alike were—unlike mythic Māori-­Israelites—“cursed” by God so as to be ineligible for priesthood ordination in accordance with pre-1978 LDS policy. These attitudes were captured in a 1938 Queensland LDS branch mission entry that commented on an Aboriginal Australian family who “asked for baptism.” The recorder noted “orders” from the mission president who “was not anxious to have them come into the church.” Reportedly these “orders” had the support of two visiting general authorities from Salt Lake City. Aborigines were “of the Negro race,” the record added, by way of apparent explanation.50 The church’s governing First Presidency finally approved priesthood ordination for “worthy” Australian Aboriginal men in 1964, less than ten years after a similar determination was made for Indigenous Fijian men.51 Since 1964, growing numbers of Indigenous Australian men and women have joined the church, especially in central and northern Australia. Some have been set apart as ecclesiastical leaders and missionaries, while in the twenty-first century, mission efforts have been directed toward, and modified for, rural First Australian communities.52 These indications of inclusivity suggest that the society of Australian Latter-day Saints is moving beyond a concern with mythic “Israelite” lineage, as may also be the case for LDS Māori in Aotearoa. Certainly, official church rhetoric is shifting. As Elder Dudfield told the May 2019 Sydney conference (in the company of LDS president Russell M. Nelson): “Our message is applicable to people of every nation, every kindred, tongue and color.”53 The vision of what an increasingly inclusive and diverse Australian church might deliver is captured in a personal essay by Marjorie Newton, writing as a practicing Latter-day Saint of Anglo-European descent. This vision, I suggest, effectively captures the dynamism and social potential of the increasingly diverse LDS communities in both Australia and New Zealand. I must not live in the glow of what was but try to make today as meaningful as yesterday. I look lovingly and with new eyes at my ward members, the preponderance of dark eyes and black hair symbolizing a new Australia. They are different from the fair-haired, blue-eyed congregation I remember but they are enriching our country and our culture and revitalizing our ward with their energy and their testimonies.54

Notes 1. Atholl Anderson, Judith Binney and Aroha Harris, Tangata Whenua: An Illustrated History (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2014); Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre, editors, The Cambridge History of Australia, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Auckland, New Zealand: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1996); Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the

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Year 2000 (Auckland, New Zealand: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1996); F. G. Clarke, The History of Australia (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002). 2. Ian G. Barber, “Faith Across Cultures: Research on Mormonism in Oceania,” Mormon Studies Review 6 (2019): 55–66; Ian G.  Barber and David Gilgen, “Between Covenant and Treaty: the LDS Future in New Zealand,” Dialogue 29, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 207–22; Cumorah Project, Growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), Updated Country Statistical Profiles, April 21, 2020, http://www.ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com (accessed May 1, 2020); Marjorie Newton, Southern Cross Saints: The Mormons in Australia (Laie, Hawaii: The Institute of Polynesian Studies, 1991); Newton, Tiki and Temple: The Mormon Mission in New Zealand, 1854–1958 (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2012); Newton, Maori and Mormon (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2014). For an earlier but still important historical review of the church in Oceania, including Australasia, see R. Lanier Britsch, Unto the Islands of the Sea: A History of the Latter-day Saints in the Pacific (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1986). 3. Patrick Geary, “Power and Ethnicity History and Anthropology,” History and Anthropology 26, no. 1 (2015): 16. For a critical discussion of typological issues in the application of this method, see Walter Pohl, “Comparing Communities— The Limits of Typology, History and Anthropology,” History and Anthropology 26, no. 1 (2015): 18–35. 4. Stats NZ Tatauranga Aotearoa, Long-term Data Series, Al Size, Distribution and Ethnicity, http://www.archive.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/economic_ indicators/NationalAccounts/long-term-data-series.aspx (accessed May 1, 2020); Armand L.  Mauss, All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 17–40; Marjorie Newton, “Nineteenth-Century Pakeha Mormons in New Zealand,” in Proclamation to the People: Nineteenth-Century Mormonism and the Pacific Basin Frontier, edited by Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp and Reid L. Neilson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008), pp. 228–54; Newton, Tiki and Temple, 1–39. 5. Anderson, Binney and Harris, Tangata Whenua; Belich, Making Peoples. 6. Judith Binney, “Ancestral Voices: Maori Prophet Leaders,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of New Zealand, edited by Keith Sinclair (Auckland, New Zealand: Oxford University Press, 1990), 153–84; Bronwyn Elsmore, Mana from Heaven: A Century of Maori Prophets in New Zealand (1989; new edition, Auckland, New Zealand: Reed, 1999). 7. Hugh Knough, “A Trip to Our Antipodes,” Juvenile Instructor 11, no. 16 (August 15, 1876): 187–88. 8. George Reynolds [“GR”], “Man and His Varieties,” Juvenile Instructor 3, no. 19 (October 1, 1868): 146; Knough, “A Trip to Our Antipodes,” 188. See also Ian G. Barber, “Matakite, Mormon Conversions, and Māori-Israelite Identity Work,” Journal of Mormon History 41, no. 3 (2015): 203–07.  9. Ian G. Barber, “Between Biculturalism and Assimilation: The Changing Place of Maori Culture in the Twentieth Century New Zealand Mormon Church,” New Zealand Journal of History 29, no. 2 (October 1995): 142–69; Barber, “As a Lion Among the Sheep: Indigenous Americans and the National Apocalypse in Early Mormon Thought,” in Framing the Apocalypse: Visions of the End-ofTimes, edited by S. Bibb and A. Simon-López (Oxford, UK: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2015), pp. 37–66; Barber, “Matakite, Mormon Conversions, and MāoriIsraelite Identity Work.”

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10. Barber, “Matakite, Mormon Conversions, and Māori-Israelite Identity Work”; Peter Lineham, “The Mormon Message in the Context of Maori Culture,” Journal of Mormon History 17, no. 1 (1992): 62–93; Newton, Mormon and Maori. 11. Ibid.; Britsch, Unto the Islands of the Sea, 272–78; Robert Joseph, “Intercultural Exchange, Matakite Māori and the Mormon Church,” in Mana Māori and Christianity, edited by Hugh Morrison, Lachy Paterson, Brett Knowles, and Murray Rae (Wellington, New Zealand: Huia Publishers 2012), 43–72; Newton, Tiki and Temple, 41–44; Grant Underwood, “Mormonism, the Maori and Cultural Authenticity,” Journal of Pacific History 35, no. 2 (2000): 133–46;  David V.  Williams, A Simple Nullity? The Wi Parata Case in New Zealand Law and History (Auckland: University of Auckland Press, 2011), 124. Williams’s text is the comprehensive legal history study of Wi Parata. 12. Barber, “Matakite, Mormon Conversions, and Māori-Israelite Identity Work,” 174–77, 203–08, 211–14. 13. Nelson Bishop diary for 1886 and 1888 mission conference citations follow sources referenced in Barber, “Matakite, Mormon Conversions, and Māori-­ Israelite Identity Work,” 211–213. 14. Barber, “Between Biculturalism and Assimilation,” 218–19; Newton, Mormon and Maori, 155–58. 15. Anderson, Binney and Harris, Tangata Whenua, 352–81; Barber, “Between Biculturalism and Assimilation,” 142–59; Belich, Paradise Reforged, 189–215; Newton, Mormon and Maori. 16. Barber, “Between Biculturalism and Assimilation,” 159–69; Gregory A. Prince and Wm. Robert Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005), 139–58, 358–79; Newton, Mormon and Maori. 17. Gina Colvin, “A Maori Mormon Testimony,” in Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion, edited by Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2018), 38. 18. Barber, “Between Biculturalism and Assimilation,” 159–65, including citations in text from Young’s letters to David O. McKay (May 12, 1950) and the First Presidency (January 23, 1951) from Gordon C. Young papers, Latter-day Saint Church History Library, Salt Lake City; Newton, Mormon and Maori. 19. Bailiff Oral History (1973) as cited in Newton, Mormon and Maori, 131. 20. Ibid., 127–137; see also Barber and Gilgen, “Between Covenant and Treaty,” 219–20. 21. Erik Schwimmer, “Guardian Animals of the Maori,” Journal of the Polynesian Society vol. 72, no. 4 (December 1963): 397–410; Schwimmer, “The Cognitive Aspect of Culture Change,” Journal of the Polynesian Society vol. 74, no. 2 (June 1965): 163–65. 22. William A. Cole and Elwin W. Jensen, Israel in the Pacific (Salt Lake City: Utah Genealogical Society, 1961). 23. Schwimmer, “Guardian Animals of the Maori”; Schwimmer, “The Cognitive Aspect of Culture Change,” 165–66; Barber, “Between Biculturalism and Assimilation,” 167–68. 24. Stats NZ Tatauranga Aotearoa, Demographics of New Zealand’s Pacific Population, http://www.archive.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/people_and_ communities/pacific_peoples/pacific-progress-demography/geographical-distribution.aspx (accessed May 1, 2020)

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25. Newsroom, Facts and Statistics, Worldwide Church, Oceania (Pacific), New Zealand, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/facts-and-statistics/country/new-zealand (accessed May 1, 2020). 26. Barber and Gilgen, “Between Covenant and Treaty,” 215–16; Matthew Martinich, “Analysis of LDS Growth in Auckland, New Zealand,” Cumorah Project, https://cumorah.com/index.php?target=view_other_articles&story_ id=570&cat_id=30 (accessed May 1, 2020). 27. Ibid. 28. Anderson, Binney and Harris, Tangata Whenua, 416–87. 29. Barber and Gilgen, “Between Covenant and Treaty”; Newton, Tiki and Temple; Maori and Mormon. 30. Memorandum from the Latter-day Saints Pacific Area Presidency dated May 25, 1992, as cited and analyzed in Barber and Gilgen, “Between Covenant and Treaty,” 218–20; see also Newton, Mormon and Maori, 136. 31. For example, see Joseph, “Intercultural Exchange, Matakite Māori and the Mormon Church,”; Selwyn Katene, ed., Turning the Hearts of the Children: Early Māori Leaders in the Mormon Church (Wellington: Steele Roberts Aotearoa, 2017) and Katene, ed., By Their Fruits You Will Know Them: Early Maori Leaders in the Mormon Church Volume 2 (Wellington: Steele Roberts Aotearoa, 2017). 32. Colvin, “A Maori Mormon Testimony,” 42–43. Colvin’s observation updates the interpretation of the myth’s influence among Māori Saints proposed by historians Grant Underwood (“Mormonism, the Maori and Cultural Authenticity”) and Marjorie Newton (Mormon and Maori, 179–80). For current anthropological knowledge and debates on the Asia-Pacific (rather than American) origins of the Polynesian (including Māori) peoples, see Anderson, Binney and Harris, Tangata Whenua; Barber, “Matakite, Mormon Conversions, and MāoriIsraelite Identity Work,” 207–08, n. 113; Patrick Vinton Kirch, On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands Before European Contact, rev. and exp. version (2000; Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017). 33. Colvin, “A Maori Mormon Testimony,” 44. 34. Karl du Fresne, “Maori Party Co-leader Marama Fox on Why Politics Has to Change,” The Listener, May 28, 2016, https://www.noted.co.nz/currently/ currently-profiles/maori-party-co-leader-marama-fox-on-why-politics-has-tochange (accessed May 1, 2020). 35. Lineham, “The Mormon Message,” 92; Schwimmer, “Guardian Animals of the Maori”; Schwimmer, “The Cognitive Aspect of Culture Change.” 36. Colvin, “A Maori Mormon Testimony.” 37. Newton, Southern Cross Saints. 38. Ibid.; “Pakeha Mormons in New Zealand,” 236; Tiki and Temple, 16, 38. 39. Newton, Southern Cross Saints, 69–71; Anne O’Brien, “Religion,” in Bashford and Macintyre, Cambridge History of Australia, 436. 40. Ibid., 428; Britsch, Unto the Islands of the Sea, 212–14; Newton, Southern Cross Saints, 35, 65–66, 72–75. 41. Newton, Southern Cross Saints, 188–215 (Mol quote pp. 214–15). 42. Sarah Jane Weaver, “Pacific Tour: As Religion Declines in Australia, President Nelson Speaks on Book of Mormon, Happiness,” Church News, May 19, 2019, https://www.thechurchnews.com/leaders-and-ministry/2019-05-19/president-nelson-in-australia-to-be-happy-chose-the-way-of-the-lord-he-tells-sydney-devotional-attendees-1929 (accessed May 1, 2020). 43. Ibid.

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44. Membership statistics for national origin or ethnic composition are not generally released by the church. The notes in text draw on a mix of personal observations and communications with Australian Saints as well as Marjorie Newton, Southern Cross Saints, 207–09; Newton, “Towards 2000: Mormonism in Australia,” Dialogue 29, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 201; Newton, “My Family, My Friends, My Faith,” BYU Studies 41, no. 1 (2002): 141–46; Newton, Mormon and Maori, 172. 45. Matthew Martinich, “Analysis of LDS Growth in South East Queensland, Australia,” Cumorah Project, posted January 26, 2013, https://cumorah.com/ index.php?target=view_other_articles&story_id=540&cat_id=30 (accessed May 1, 2020);  Iliafi v The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Australia [2014] FCAFC 26. 46. Mormonism and Migration Project, Sherie Morreal Gavin, United States-­ Australia, Claremont Graduate University, https://research.cgu.edu/mormonism-migration-project/people/gavin (accessed May 1, 2020). 47. Marjorie Newton, “‘Almost Like Us’: The American Socialization of Australian Converts,” Dialogue 24, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 18; see also Newton, Southern Cross Saints, 204. 48. Newton, Southern Cross Saints, 202–207, 215 (quote p. 204); Newton “‘Almost Like Us,’” 9–20; see also Newton “Towards 2000: Mormonism in Australia,” Dialogue 29, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 193–206. 49. Newton, Southern Cross Saints, 207; Newton “‘Almost Like Us,’” 15–16. 50. Newton, Southern Cross Saints, 209–12, citing a 1938 Australian church (branch) record held privately (211). On the church’s historical policy toward Africans and priesthood ordination, see Prince and Wright, David O. McKay, 60–105, and W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 51. Newton, Southern Cross Saints, 210. On the later 1950s authorization of ordination for Fijian men by David O. McKay, see Britsch, Unto the Islands of the Sea, 502; Prince and Wright, David O. McKay, 80–81. 52. Matthew Martinich, “LDS Outreach Among the Indigenous Australians (Aborigines) of Australia,” LDS Growth Case Studies (http://www.cumorah.com/index. php?target=view_other_articles&story_id=538&cat_id=30, posted January 21, 2013, last accessed May 2018); Newton, Southern Cross Saints, 210–11. 53. Weaver, “Pacific tour.” 54. Newton, “My Family, My Friends, My Faith,” 146.

Bibliography Anderson, Atholl, Judith Binney, and Aroha Harris. 2014. Tangata Whenua: An Illustrated History. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books. Barber, Ian G. 1995. Between Biculturalism and Assimilation: The Changing Place of Maori Culture in the Twentieth Century New Zealand Mormon Church. New Zealand Journal of History 29 (2): 142–169. ———. 2015a. As a Lion Among the Sheep: Indigenous Americans and the National Apocalypse in Early Mormon Thought. In Framing the Apocalypse: Visions of the End-of-Times, ed. S.  Bibb and A.  Simon-López, 37–66. Oxford: Inter-­ disciplinary Press. ———. 2015b. Matakite, Mormon Conversions, and Māori-Israelite Identity Work. Journal of Mormon History 41 (3): 177–220.

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———. 2019. Faith Across Cultures: Research on Mormonism in Oceania. Mormon Studies Review 6: 55–66. Barber, Ian G., and David Gilgen. 1996. Between Covenant and Treaty: the LDS Future in New Zealand. Dialogue 29 (1, Spring): 207–222. Bashford, Alison, and Stuart Macintyre, eds. 2013. The Cambridge History of Australia Volume 1: Indigenous and Colonial Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Belich, James. 1996a. Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century. Auckland: Allen Lane/Penguin. ———. 1996b. Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders From the 1880s to the Year 2000. Auckland: Allen Lane/Penguin. Binney, Judith. 1990. Ancestral Voices: Maori Prophet Leaders. In The Oxford Illustrated History of New Zealand, ed. Keith Sinclair, 153–184. Auckland: Oxford University Press. Britsch, R. Lanier. 1986. Unto the Islands of the Sea: A History of the Latter-day Saints in the Pacific. Deseret Book: Salt Lake City. ———. 2005. The Story Continues: The Latter-day Saints in the Pacific. In Pioneers in the Pacific, ed. Grant Underwood, 161–175. Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University. Clarke, F.G. 2002. The History of Australia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Cole, William A., and Elwin W. Jensen. 1961. Israel in the Pacific. Salt Lake City: Utah Genealogical Society. Colvin, Gina. 2018. A Maori Mormon Testimony. In Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion, ed. Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks, 27–46. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Cumorah Project. 2020. Growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). Updated Country Statistical Profiles, April 21. http://www.ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com. Accessed 1 May 2020. du Fresne, Karl. 2016. Maori Party Co-leader Marama Fox on Why Politics Has to Change. The Listener, May 28. https://www.noted.co.nz/currently/currently-profiles/maori-party-co-leader-marama-fox-on-why-politics-has-to-change. Accessed 1 May 2020. Elsmore, Bronwyn. 1999 (1989). Mana from Heaven: A Century of Maori Prophets in New Zealand. New ed. Auckland: Reed. Geary, Patrick. 2015. Power and Ethnicity History and Anthropology. History and Anthropology 26 (1): 8–17. Joseph, Robert. 2012. Intercultural Exchange, Matakite Māori and the Mormon Church. In Mana Māori and Christianity, ed. Hugh Morrison, Lachy Paterson, Brett Knowles, and Murray Rae, 43–72. Wellington: Huia Publishers. Katene, Selwyn, ed. 2017a. Turning the Hearts of the Children: Early Māori Leaders in the Mormon Church. Wellington: Steele Roberts Aotearoa. ———, ed. 2017b. By Their Fruits You Will Know Them: Early Maori Leaders in the Mormon Church. Vol. 2. Wellington: Steele Roberts Aotearoa. Kirch, Patrick Vinton. 2017 (2000). On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact. Rev. and exp. version. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Knough, Hugh. 1876. A Trip to Our Antipodes. Juvenile Instructor 11 (16): 187–188. Martinich, Matthew. 2013a. Analysis of LDS Growth in South East Queensland, Australia. Cumorah Project, posted January 26. https://cumorah.com/index. php?target=view_other_articles&story_id=540&cat_id=30. Accessed 1 May 2020.

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———. 2013b. LDS Outreach Among the Indigenous Australians (Aborigines) of Australia. Cumorah Project, posted January 21. http://www.cumorah.com/index. php?target=view_other_articles&story_id=538&cat_id=30. Accessed 1 May 2020. ———. Analysis of LDS Growth in Auckland, New Zealand. Cumorah Project. https:// www.cumorah.com/index.php?target=view_other_articles&story_id=570&cat_ id=30. Accessed 1 May 2020. Mormonism and Migration Project, Sherie Morreal Gavin, United States-Australia. Claremont Graduate University. https://research.cgu.edu/mormonism-migrationproject/people/gavin. Accessed 1 May 2020. Newton, Marjorie. 1991a. Southern Cross Saints: The Mormons in Australia. Laie, Hawaii: The Institute of Polynesian Studies. ———. 1991b. ‘Almost Like Us’: The American Socialization of Australian converts. Dialogue 24 (3, Fall): 9–20. ———. 1996. Towards 2000: Mormonism in Australia. Dialogue 29 (1, Spring): 193–206. ———. 2008. Nineteenth-century Pakeha Mormons in New Zealand. In Proclamation to the People: Nineteenth-century Mormonism and the Pacific Basin Frontier, ed. Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp and Reid L. Neilson, 228–254. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. ———. 2012. Tiki and Temple: The Mormon Mission in New Zealand, 1854–1958. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books. ———. 2014. Maori and Mormon. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books. Pohl, Walter. 2015. Comparing Communities—The Limits of Typology, History and Anthropology. History and Anthropology 26 (1): 18–35. Prince, Gregory A. 2005. and Wm. Robert Wright. David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Reeve, W. 2015. Paul. Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness. New York: Oxford University Press. Reynolds, George [“GR”]. 1868. Man and His Varieties. Juvenile Instructor 3 (19): 146. Schwimmer, Erik. 1963. Guardian Animals of the Maori. Journal of the Polynesian Society 72 (4): 397–410. ———. June 1965. The Cognitive Aspect of Culture Change. Journal of the Polynesian Society 74 (2): 149–181. Stats NZ Tatauranga Aotearoa, Demographics of New Zealand’s Pacific Population. http://www.archive.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/people_and_communities/ pacific_peoples/pacific-progress-demography/geographical-distribution.aspx. Accessed 1 May 2020. Stats NZ Tatauranga Aotearoa, Long-term Data Series; Al Size, Distribution and Ethnicity. http://www.archive.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/economic_indicators/NationalAccounts/long-term-data-series.aspx. Accessed 1 May 2020. Underwood, Grant. 2000. Mormonism, the Maori and Cultural Authenticity. Journal of Pacific History 35 (2): 133–146. Weaver, Sarah Jane. 2019. Pacific Tour: As Religion Declines in Australia, President Nelson Speaks on Book of Mormon, Happiness. Church News, May 19. https:// www.thechurchnews.com/leaders-and-ministry/2019-05-19/president-nelson-inaustralia-to-be-happy-chose-the-way-of-the-lord-he-tells-sydney-devotional-attendees-1929. Accessed 1 May 2020. Williams, David V. 2011. A Simple Nullity? The Wi Parata Case in New Zealand Law and History. Auckland: University of Auckland Press.

CHAPTER 18

Contemporary Issues for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ireland and the United Kingdom Alison Halford and Hazel O’Brien

The relationship of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) to its members in a variety of cultural locations has come under increasing scholarly scrutiny in recent years. We hope to contribute to these discussions within this chapter by demonstrating how identity in global religions is shaped by history, context, and the majority culture of host nations. Whilst Ireland and the United Kingdom (UK) are geographically close, politics and history have combined to give each region its own experience of faith, culture, and globalised religion. We outline below how the LDS Church is experienced in these locations, the challenges it encounters in conducting missionary work, and the commonalities and divergences in the everyday religious experiences of its UK and Irish membership.

A. Halford (*) Coventry University, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] H. O’Brien Waterford Institute of Technology, Waterford, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_18

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Understanding the Political and Cultural Context Underpinning the Development of Mormonism in Ireland and the United Kingdom In March 2016, then Prime Minister David Cameron declared that Britain is “a Christian Country” based on “Christian values.”1 Cameron suggested that between British communities there is a shared Christian culture. Cameron’s homogenising of religious expression not only fails to acknowledge the increasing presence in the UK of non-western faith practices, such as Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism but also minimises the religious differences between England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Although the UK official religion is Protestant Christianity,2 the UK is a union of four previously independent countries, each with its own religious affiliations,3 history, and culture.4 The UK religious landscape is thus complex and contradictory. For example, in Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales) the increasing separation of religious institutions, which were and still are to a degree embedded into civic society,5 is resulting in a post-Christian, multifaith, secularised society,6 whilst Northern Ireland  arguably  appears  a more overtly religious region.7 This growing secularisation, alongside the impact of global migration from southern regions, means that, for some areas of the UK, there is not only a decline of traditional Christianity but also greater diversity in religious practices.8 According to Ulrich Beck,9 the “paradox of secularisation” is that the removing of religion from the public arena results in the creation of “God’s of one’s own.”10 Beck suggests this results in not so much a revival or return of religion but more an increased tolerance towards  eclectic faith and non-­ traditional forms of worship in public spaces.11 Therefore, in certain parts of the UK, growing disaffiliation from dominant indigenous Christian traditions facilitates greater religious plurality, seemingly allowing previously stigmatised new religious movements (NRMs) to shift in public perception from cult to established denomination.12 In the case of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, societal changing attitudes has seen, for instance, political leaders go from proposing anti-­ Mormon legislation13 and refusal of entry for Mormon missionaries at the start of the twentieth century to LDS Church leaders being invited as guests in the Houses of Parliament in 2018.14 This changing public status of the LDS Church is partly due to a contemporary re-imaging that has occurred within the British15 mainstream media of the relationship between polygamy and Mormonism. Recent British media coverage of polygamy not only demarcates between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and fundamentalist Mormon sects but is also appears to actively distance the LDS Church from continuing polygamous practices.16 In comparison, when Victorian British media detailed the extent of polygamy in Mormon communities in the United States (US), it generated lurid accounts of male missionaries abducting UK women, including fantastic claims that missionaries had built a tunnel from Liverpool to Utah to facilitate sex trafficking of young women.17

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LDS Church-appointed male missionaries have been in operation in the UK since their first arrival in England in 1837.18 By comparison, the first single sister missionaries from Utah arrived in 1898.19 Except during the Second World War, when “home missionaries” were assigned to cover the temporary absence of US missionaries,20 the sending of proselytising missionaries to the UK by the LDS Church has continued to this day. However, had the bulk of converts remained in the UK, estimates suggest that modern UK membership totals, rather than being less than 190,000 would now be close to one million people.21 Instead, early British Latter-day Saint converts migrated to North America by the tens of thousands, not only to seek improved economic opportunities, but to assist the LDS Church in “building Zion” by colonising the vast, unoccupied (by white Europeans, at least) spaces of the then-Utah Territory and also to escape from persecution in their homeland.22 It was not until the 1950s that Latter-day Saint congregations in Britain felt less transient as a result of church leaders strongly recommending that members remain in their own country rather than immigrating to “Zion.” The permanency of LDS British members residing in their homelands was powerfully and symbolically represented by church investment in building such structures as the Temple in East Grinstead, London.23 Once it had finally secured a respectable, visible presence in the religious landscape, the LDS Church in the UK saw unprecedented growth between 1960 and 1990 as membership increased from 16,600 to approximately 153,000 during these decades.24 Consequently, at the rededication of the London Temple in 1992, then-prophet Gordon B. Hinckley announced that the church was going to build another temple in Chorley, near Preston, Manchester, England.25 Unlike the London Temple, the purpose of which was to serve all European Latter-day Saints, the Preston Temple was intended primarily for members in Scotland, Ireland, and Northern England, a symbolic representation of the nineteenth-century mass conversions that had occurred in these areas. With the building of temples and the establishment of generational membership and mature leadership, some observers saw this as the beginning of a new era of church activity for British members: After a hundred years of serving primarily as a source of immigrants for the Church in North America, the Church in Britain, at last, attained all the spiritual, intellectual, social and temporal advantages of the full Church programme, and could look to a future of building the kingdom in a way that was distinctly British.26

The UK continues to host the tenth largest LDS membership among the nations of the world, and the LDS Church has achieved a significant, although

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still somewhat contested, accommodation into mainstream British society. Nevertheless, there has, in fact, been little overall progress over the past three decades. Since the millennium, congregational growth (as measured by “ward” or congregational membership) is either stagnating or declining and activity rates for members “of record” are between 15 and 20 per cent.27 Missionary work is viewed as crucial to the future of the LDS Church in the UK, where, according to authoritative mandates from Salt Lake City, efforts to convert and baptise new members “should be done in large measure by your own [British] people.”28 However, official approaches to missionary work in the UK manifest an orientation based on a kind of North American business model, which sees churches as religious companies that compete in the marketplace to promote their spiritual goods.29 For example, missionary efforts in Britain during the 1960s were, for a time, animated by “baseball baptisms,” a proselyting scheme that encouraged young people to become members through participation in an LDS Church-sponsored baseball programme.30 In the 1970s, LDS missionary efforts benefited from the popularity of The Osmonds—an LDS teen singing group from Utah—who mirrored the image of missionaries: overwhelmingly young, white, North American males. Fans of the group were encouraged to find out more about the Osmond brothers’ beliefs. This “Osmondmania”31 could account for why later studies found a “disproportionately young, female and white” LDS membership in Britain during that time.32 The continuing emphasis by the LDS Church on uninvited religious proselyting in public spaces seems counterproductive in a nation where the populace not only has an increasing distrust of religious institutions but is also suspicious of overt religious expression.33 Tensions inevitably arise when North American LDS missionaries, whose primary purpose is to promote religious conversion, are transposed onto a country where most British people consider religious expressions a private matter34 and less than 5 per cent regularly attend Christian churches.35 Yet, LDS Church leaders in Europe continue to announce plans designed to double the number of active members in the UK through various techniques of public engagement, in particular by utilising existing members’ friendship groups through social media. Moreover, as we will later see in more detail, because the LDS Church in the UK retains a centralised organisational structure that emanates from Salt Lake City, British Latter-day Saints continue to struggle with negative public labelling that they belong to an “American religion.”36

The Church in Ireland: Coping with Colonial Legacies in Contemporary Times In Ireland, Latter-day Saint members have suffered from the invisibility that comes from colonialism in its many forms. The LDS Church continues to place Ireland within the same administrative area as the UK, even though Ireland

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gained independence from the UK in 1922. This remote and culturally insensitive bureaucratic designation has not helped to foster a uniquely “Irish” Latterday Saint identity among LDS Church members in Ireland. Any explanation of the political and cultural context in which the Irish LDS Church has developed must be understood through this lens. The dearth of academic literature examining the development of the LDS Church in a specifically Irish context demonstrates this point. Although there are multiple sources available that detail the emergence of Mormonism in the UK and/or the British Isles,37 only a few sources make more than a brief reference to Ireland.38 Additionally, some of these Irish-focused pieces are only relevant in relation to more recent periods of Ireland’s history.39 Prior to Irish independence, much of the literature on British Mormonism appeared to interpret Britain in the 1800s and early 1900s to mean England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The south of Ireland (what is now the Republic of Ireland) was still under the control of the British at that time yet was regularly overlooked in discussions of Mormonism. Until recently there has been little acknowledgement of how the experiences and history of Mormonism in the north of Ireland may not have been relevant or applicable to the experiences of the south; the religious landscapes of Ireland’s two regions are quite different and have different impacts. The first Mormon missionaries to the island of Ireland arrived in County Down, Northern Ireland, in 1840.40 Ten years later, missionaries arrived in Dublin and began proselytising to the mainly Catholic population of the south. Their work was obstructed by an organised anti-Mormon movement, and various groups made violent threats that caused the Dublin missionaries to fear for their personal safety; their “efforts in Ireland were not very fruitful.”41 An article from one of the Dublin missionaries in the Mormon periodical, The Millennial Star, sums up the situation: “Things are going well in the north of Ireland. There are not so many Catholics there, and consequently, we get along better there than about Dublin.”42 The Catholicism prevailing in the south of Ireland thus constituted a barrier to Mormon proselytising than in Northern Ireland, where Protestantism prevailed, was not experienced in the same degree. The LDS Church’s focus on Northern Ireland, and the easier reception that Mormonism received there, has a long legacy with contemporary consequences. According to 2014 church figures,43 there are approximately 5358 members in Northern Ireland but just 3071 members in the larger Republic. However, church membership numbers are invariably higher than national census reports. For instance, recent census figures for the Republic of Ireland identify only 1332 reporting members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­ day Saints.44 It was not until 1963 that the LDS Church showed renewed interest in further developing missionary efforts in the Republic of Ireland. Six missionaries were sent to the Republic, and small congregations were established in Cork and Limerick, the first outside of Dublin. By the end of 1967 there were 107 members within the Republic of Ireland, half of them based outside of Dublin.45

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Since then, the church has seen slow but relatively positive success in terms of increased membership and the establishment of new congregations in the Republic, which now stand at 13; a combination of wards and branches which are managed under one stake and one district. However, LDS Church membership in the Republic still, of course, constitutes a very small minority at just 0.03 per cent of the overall Irish population.46 And it must be remembered that, although there is no official state religion in the Republic of Ireland, Catholicism continues to shape the cultural and institutional structures of the country despite recent decline.

Bridging the Irish Sea? Difference and Convergence in the Narratives of British and Irish Mormons To understand how British Latter-day Saints negotiate a legitimate religious presence in their host nation while remaining within the boundaries of LDS Church expectations, I [A. Halford] am drawing upon 36 qualitative in-depth interviews I conducted in 2017 with Latter-day Saint women in Britain. These women, who self-identified as active in their congregation, were recruited through word of mouth. In referring to Britain (i.e., England, Scotland, and Wales) rather than the UK, I acknowledge the limitations of representation in this chapter. In doing so, I make no claim to generalisable findings but, instead, show rich data that are indicative of trends and patterns. Moreover, selecting only women narratives was not only a political act to address the absence of contemporary British Latter-day female experiences in scholarship, but “starting off research from women’s lives will generate less partial and distorted accounts not only of women’s lives but also of men’s lives and of the whole social order.”47 Contemporary Britain has undergone a significant religious change. Christianity, still has a significant presence, but it has considerably declined in social influence and status. Emancipation from religious authority in public spheres and a decline in religious practices and beliefs throughout Britain have created widespread religious indifference.48 However, “[i]n the historical processes of European secularisation, the religious and the secular are inextricably bound together and mutually condition each other.”49 In regard to Latter-day Saints in Britain, this means that members are continually negotiating acceptable expression of their religion in both secular and religious spaces in order to maintain a minimal level of tension with mainstream society. Modern British social norms frame faith as a private matter, which means overt religious expression in public spaces are often avoided, which places the LDS Church missionary system—with its emphasis on preaching to convert listners —in tension with mainstream British culture. The missionary programme is characterised by the highly visible public presence of mostly young people, with the result that “Latter-day Saint missionaries can be seen on the streets of hundreds of major cities in the world as well as in thousands of smaller

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communities.”50 Whilst the LDS missionary approach emphasises “persuasion and conversion rather than force,”51 in certain respects LDS missionary organisation is more akin to a religious military force in which missionaries are socialised to be “disciplined” rather than seeking discipleship.52 In the UK, Europe, and elsewhere around the world, it appears at times that full-time missionaries are deployed according to the mandates of business models, driven by managerial frameworks that tend to see missions as religious goal-driven work. Such an approach is often insensitive to nuances in different cultural contexts that require adaptive changes.53 Recent efforts by the LDS Church—such as allowing for more flexibility of full-time missionary structures to better reflect local needs—signal a change in strategy.54 In contrast, however, British local member missionary efforts remain tied to the religious marketplace model of seeking to convert new members through personal, social networks.55 Regional and local priesthood leaders seek to engage local members in missionary work by requesting they “invite friends to [your] homes, sacrament and other meetings to learn of Christ.” Such admonitions prove difficult for some British Latter-day Saints.56 Thus the institutional LDS Church, through its leaders, encourages British Latter-day Saints to engage in a kind of informal, quasi-missionary effort that is both prescriptive and homogenised and out of synch with prevailing religious norms. For some British Latter-day Saint women, this continuing official construct of missionary work is problematic. When interviewed about giving expression to their faith, despite a willingness to disclose their religious affiliation through lived practices, most women said they were cautious about declaring their faith in public, especially in the workplace. To clarify, when discussing the reticence of some Mormon women to disclose their faith, I am referring to how they perceive the extent they can talk about their doctrine and practices rather than the freedom to declare their religious affiliation. Although some participants felt there is less intolerance towards Mormonism as a religion in ways that perhaps their parents faced, they still feel an unspoken pressure to limit lived religious practices in public to avoid conflict between themselves and the wider community. LDS women’s most frequently expressed rationale for rendering their religiosity invisible in the workplace was compliance with educational and governmental policy. Religious belief is a “protected characteristic in Britain,” along with age, disability, gender reassignment, race, sex, sexual orientation, marriage and civil partnership, and pregnancy.57 Legalisation is in place to combat discrimination related to any of these characteristics. De jure, British Latter-day Saint women are permitted to display a certain level of religiosity if it does not conflict with other protected characteristics. However, de facto, institutions (public or private) appear to accommodate religious expression in the workplace as long as it has little or no influence upon the structure or policies of workplace organisations.58 Paradoxically, the Equality Act 2010 saw the public sector implementing changes to accommodate religious practices and more robust responses to religious hate crime.  Yet, women who  I spoke with,

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who worked in the public sector, felt more compelled to limit discussions of religion at work; they were willing to comply with what they perceived as public  policy  that religious sentiments are to be avoided or were inappropriate whilst in the workplace: If you’re in education or an educator, then this (religion) shouldn’t be discussed unless it’s within the curriculum… in this country, that is the way it should be done.

Thus at least some British Latter-day Saint women interpret legal requirements as policing or restraining religion rather than developing religious tolerance for its expression in public spaces and institutions. The reluctance by some British Latter-day Saint women to talk about religion outside of religious settings supports Beck’s belief that religious institutions can “no longer claim to be the expert on everything, but only on spirituality and religiosity.”59 For example, one interviewee, a mother of two and a teacher, would rather let her children learn sexual norms at home than request that the school change the way it teaches about sexual topics: What they teach about sex education is very different from what we believe. [For instance,] they would teach that is okay to masturbate, but we don’t quite feel the same. But you can’t go into the school saying you can’t do that; you just have to do those things at home and talk to them in the home about it, because a school has the responsibility to teach everybody.

Preference for consigning religious discourse to the private sphere places some British Latter-day Saint women in opposition to the church missionary programme, which expects members to publicly proselyte and give expression to their religious faith. To navigate this tension between observing socially prescribed religious boundaries in the workplace and being obedient to LDS Church expectations for visible promotion of religious faith, several of the women I interviewed state they are content to have their LDS religious affiliation acknowledged but will minimise discussions of their religious beliefs: I have no problem in telling people that I’m a Christian and specifically I’m a member of the church, but I don’t think it’s a place [work] where you try and preach or convert them. I just think it would be weird to say I’m a follower of Christ in that scenario.

For other British Latter-day Saint women, reluctance to openly express their religious beliefs in the workplace has less to do with taking a utilitarian approach to religion and more with the vulnerability they feel when secular values conflict with church beliefs in institutional settings. For example, one of the women I interviewed said: I would share it [faith] cautiously as my one sister, who is not active [does not attend Church] at the moment, said that, with friends at work, it would be easier

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for her to say that she was gay than to say that she was a Mormon. And when I think about it properly, it is the sense of social shame.

The belief that diminishing their publicly professed religious identity will immunise them from conflict in public spaces is not limited to British Latter-­ day Saint women; women of other faiths encounter the same dilemma.60 Line Nyhagen’s study of Muslim and Christian women in Britain found that the contested nature of religious expression in public places, leading to privatisation of religious practice, in turn creates exclusion from the democratic process. That is, British women who have strong religious commitments may have greater difficulty finding acceptable avenues for assuming decision-making roles in public life without invoking some form of social censure. Therefore, some British Latter-day Saint women, especially those working in the public sector, feel it is best to limit their expressions of religiosity to minimise tension in what they perceive as the prevailing secularised values of the workplace. Going beyond feelings of public propriety  are a small number of British Latter-day Saint women who are circumspect about disclosing their faith identity in religious public spaces. The history of the LDS Church is a narrative of exclusion, even abuse in Britain, and for these women, discrimination against LDS members still feels present in contemporary British society, especially from advocates of mainstream religious traditions: The only time I have felt attacked for my religion is from my family and the local vicar before I got baptised. I’ve had really negative response from my family, because my mother was a Church of England vicar and my brother is a Methodist Minister, and I can’t spend time with him without him preaching to me and questioning my faith. I’ve no idea why he does it, because I’ve been a member so long, but he feels he’s right and I’m wrong. I sometimes think it’s rather bigoted, which makes me sad, because my brother and Mum profess to be Christians, but they are not Christian about my faith.

There is also an issue of how the British educational system frames the LDS Church in its classroom curriculum. British pupils are taught about “Mormons” in schools but not in Religious Education. Instead, Mormons are referenced in the part of the curriculum that deals with the expansion of the American West.61 This suggests that public education about the LDS Church translates as nineteenth-­century Mormonism, which, despite shifting attitudes in the media, reinforces traditional British perceptions that the Latter-day Saint Church is simply an American sect built upon polygamy. This popular conception of the LDS Church dovetails with what we have already seen, namely that some LDS British women do not disclose their faith in the workplace for fear of hostility or ridicule: I have a position of responsibility over my colleagues. I don’t talk about my beliefs, not because I’m ashamed but to protect myself, and maybe it’s because I think they don’t have a very good perception of Mormonism. I’m very careful

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about not expressing any faith belief, and I don’t know if that is because of my own perception that we are becoming an anti-Christian society, because actually I do talk to my colleagues and parents about their beliefs and their religion, but I would never express my own.

Because the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a small and often hidden religious community in Britain, and there is little actual understanding of LDS values and beliefs, accommodation within secular structures seems difficult to achieve. Latter-day Saint women become somewhat complicit in their invisibility by being content to remain inconspicuous. We are very multicultural and acknowledge that people are different. In terms of Mormonism, I don’t think people, with [us as] such a minority, [it] even registers with them. How can a hospital recognise [us] when they don’t even know what Mormonism is? That [makes it] hard to express your religious beliefs. I think because Mormonism is a hidden religion, the structure [is only] good at providing for overt religion; you know, [something] apparent, something tangible.

The LDS Church missionary programme, driven by seemingly  American marketplace values and policies, heightens the dissonance between some Latter-­ day Saint women as it challenges British framing of Christianity as predominately Anglican and therefore inherently British. Reluctance by established Christian denominations to accept Latter-day Saint communities as legitimate causes some LDS women to accept this derogation of their religious faith as being outside of the mainstream. Conversely, whilst some British Latter-day Saint women struggle to express their faith within secular settings and retreat into their own communities for validation, others ironically find themselves acting vicariously in religious ways  for non-religious friends and families. Several interviewees noted that when trying times arise, such as death or significant trauma of other kinds, some of their non-religious work colleagues, friends, or family members will ask them for prayers. This suggests that religiously unaffiliated Britons accept the piety of Latter-day Saint women as an acceptable religious identity, permitting these women to act vicariously on their behalf.62 The designation of British Latter-day Saint women by some non-religiously affiliated Britons as having access to God not only grants them status as a private resource when religious intervention is needed but also implies that institutional legitimacy of one’s faith is not required to carry out religious tasks. This also implies that, from a secular perspective, all religions are in some sense on an equal footing. In other words, for some non-religious people in Britain, vicarious religion is less about religious affiliation or organisation and more a recognition of an individual’s personal, lived connection to a divine being.63 It is the perceived private piety of Latter-day Saint women that matters. These considerations about LDS British women stand in contrast with the visible public presence of full-time LDS missionaries who explicitly represent an American-based organisation and overtly proselytise on behalf of their religious

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beliefs. By and large this approach is not successful with the non-religious British majority. As the contemporary LDS Church continues to promote itself as a global religion, it would appear helpful for its missionary programme to decouple itself from its North American focus and adapt its approach to accommodate different forms of secularisation occurring in different nations. In Britain, some Latter-day Saint women are adept at navigating between multiple identities and values, including secular norms that elevate the priority of societal obligations over those of an Americanised Latter-day Saint Church.64 Latter-day Saint women are constrained by the society in which they live in the same way as Muslim migrants in Britain, who are developing a “new way of living, gradually becoming a part of British society, that had to be ultimately justified in terms of compatibility with the [Muslim] faith.”65 British Latter-day Saint women embrace their faith as a critical personal identity, but as we have seen, some women are mostly resigned to being circumspect about their faith in public spheres in order to maintain secular and establishment religious acceptance. One potential consequence of this self-­ imposed detachment is that British Latter-day Saint women might retreat into “religion and nothing else,”66 which embeds members into the LDS Church community, distancing them from secular society and association with other religions. Moreover, the reluctance of some Latter-day Saint women to engage in religious discourse in public spaces potentially limits opportunities for them to become part of the wider religious community and to openly engage in broader conversations, outside of the LDS Church, on issues of faith in an increasingly non-religious Britain.

Challenges to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Catholic Ireland In Ireland, public expressions of faith are also often met with suspicion, and this forms a key commonality between the experiences of British and Irish Latter-day Saint members. Many Latter-day Saint adherents I [H. O’Brien] spoke with echoed the voices of the British women discussed in the previous section who feel religion does not belong within public spaces such as work. As in the UK, LDS missionary efforts in Ireland stumble due to both an increasing privatisation of people’s faith and a missionary system which does not adequately reflect the culture within which it works. My ethnographic fieldwork involved one year attending church services and associated events with two LDS branches. In addition, I conducted in-depth interviews with 30 active members of these branches. There was a fairly even mix of young and old, male and female, those who were Irish and those from Europe, the US, and elsewhere, who had settled in Ireland. These interviews also involved a mixture of those who were converts to the church and those who were second-generation members or of even longer LDS family heritage. Most interviewees were obtained through the rapport that developed in my regularly participating in church activities, leading many individuals to

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volunteer themselves for interviews. Others were recruited through word of mouth within the congregations. LDS Church members and missionaries affirm that perceptions of the LDS Church as being an American religion negatively affects missionary proselytising in Ireland. Many missionaries in Ireland, even in the current global era of the LDS Church, are North American. They are typically unfamiliar with the Irish cultural and religious milieu and consequently struggle in their proselytising attempts. One missionary explained to me how she had come to learn through experience that religious conversion in Ireland had very specific meanings: “With you guys in Ireland, it’s not just your religion, but it’s your country background, it’s your history, it’s a place.” Since the 1990s Ireland has undergone rapid and significant social change, including rising marriage age, reduced average family size, and the legalisation of divorce, same-sex marriage, and abortion; these changes have reshaped the cultural and religious landscape of the country. Where once the LDS Church found overlap between some of its teachings and the conservative religious culture of Irish society, this is no longer the case. Diminishment of conservative compatibility has negatively affected the success of LDS missionaries in Ireland, some of whom tell me that the people they now speak to are either content with a cultural Catholicism of little actual religious content or are non-religious altogether and opposed to the more conservative aspects of the church, including traditional conceptions of family and marriage. The relatively quick decline of Catholic Church influence in Ireland has transformed the religious landscape in which Irish Mormonism is situated. Following Irish independence from the UK in 1922, Ireland asserted its sovereignty through Irish language, culture, and strong adherence to Catholicism.67 Catholicism thus became bound up with the nationalist project and became an important part of creating a separate and distinct “Irish” identity. Although Catholicism is still Ireland’s dominant faith, the extent of its social and political influence is now much declined, and the nature of being Catholic in Ireland has adapted to fit the new social environment.68 Religiosity indicators demonstrate a slow but steady decline of Irish Catholic adherents from the twentieth century: those who self-identify as Catholic have dropped from 94.9 per cent of the population in 1961 to 78.3 per cent in 2016. Additionally, data indicate that the speed of that decline is accelerating.69 Attendance at mass is now associated with older generations and is a significant cause of concern amongst Irish Catholic leadership.70 Conversely, non-religious affiliation, agnosticism, and atheism have increased sharply71; as a combined category, non-religious persons now constitute over ten per cent of the total Irish population.72 Nevertheless, neither Catholicism as a basic orientation nor religion more broadly speaking is in total retreat.73 Personal faith remains high in Ireland, and a large majority in the country still identify with Catholicism. At the same time, other world religions (e.g., Christian Orthodox, Islam, and Pentecostalism74) and new religious movements (e.g., New Age and alternative spiritualities75) are growing. However, the LDS Church in Ireland is not included within these trends; its growth has more or less stagnated in recent

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years.76 Understandings about the nature and role of religion in society have dramatically changed in both Ireland and the UK, and the LDS Church and its members will need to find ways to accommodate these changes in order to sustain growth.

Stuck in the Past? The Effects of Ireland’s Cultural Trauma on the Latter-day Saint Church Arguably, the most significant difference between Irish and UK Latter-day Saint members is in the historical and cultural relationship of their countries to each other and the ways this relationship affects their experience of being LDS members. Irish independence from British colonialisation occurred in 1922, resulting in the partition of the island of Ireland as the price paid for independence, the bitter Irish civil war, and the subsequent “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. For close to 100 years, the fraught and complex relationship between Ireland and the UK has been endlessly reflected upon, reworked, and reimagined in the manner of a person dealing with a great trauma.77 Some argue that the modern creation of Ireland has involved a “repression of historical memory and a denial of many aspects of Irish history, in particular the Irish experience of trauma, diaspora, and colonialisation.”78 Repression of memory refers to the ways in which the Irish have not fully processed or come to terms with their own history and that this failure negatively impacts the present.79 How does this repression of colonial trauma affect Irish members’ relationship to the LDS Church? The primary effect is resentment and bitterness on the part of some Irish Latter-day Saints who feel that their church continues, 100 years post-independence, to view Ireland and the UK as one homogenous region. Administratively, the region of Ireland and the UK has always been managed as one area; currently the region’s mission headquarters are based in Edinburgh in the UK. Some Irish Latter-day Saints have told me that they resent how little UK leaders understand the complex social, political, and religious history of both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. There is frustration that the cultural distance between the LDS Church in the UK and Ireland leads to a lack of full understanding of how British colonialism continues to shape the experience of members in both the UK and Ireland. Some Irish Latter-day Saint members wish for better British appreciation of the social and cultural history of Ireland which, they argue, shapes Irish faith in ways that often bears little relationship to the British experience of the same faith. An Irish LDS member of long standing, who had worked extensively with church area leaders as part of his callings, told me: People in Salt Lake need to be educated properly with regards to what I’ve been pushing lately, and, to be honest, it’s that this is a sovereign republic. You either give us due recognition or continue to insult us by telling us we have to do what England tells us to do. And they say, “Oh no it’s not like that,” and I say “Well, the facts prove otherwise.”

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As this comment makes clear, what seems to LDS Church headquarters to be a simple matter of bureaucratic administration can cause frustration and resentment at a grassroots level. The LDS Church in Ireland is small, even by European standards, and from an organisational perspective, it’s easy to understand why the church would invest more in locations of growth rather than stagnation. However, another key theme throughout my research with Irish congregations is the lack of investment by the LDS Church in “purpose-built” meetinghouses and the lack of an Irish temple. The lack of a temple and appropriate meetinghouses has multiple effects. Members have told me that the plentiful presence of imposing Catholic churches across the Irish landscape lends continuing legitimacy to Catholicism in the eyes of the wider Irish population, even though many are not pious or even believers. In contrast, some Latter-day Saints feel that the absence of purposefully constructed and identifiable LDS chapels delegitimises their faith in a country where popular attitudes and understanding about religious minorities are already poor. For example, one second-generation LDS member told me: I think for me it’s just the idea of being somewhere respectable… I just want to go somewhere that’s nice, that you can bring people, and they are not looking at the outside going, “What have I got myself in for.” You just want somewhere that’s welcoming.

Irish LDS member comments make it apparent that their understanding of the legitimacy of their faith is impacted by the dominance of Catholicism within the Irish religious realm. In addition, the legitimacy of their faith as truly Irish, and not British or American, hinges upon the perceived respect accorded to Irish members, which is diminished by LDS Church failure to invest in meetinghouses or at least plan towards construction of an Irish temple. In one very stable congregation with a long history that I visited, the continuing lack of an appropriate church building caused real distress for many members, as did the conflicting messages coming from area leadership regarding what the criteria were in order for purpose-built church buildings to be allocated. Some members described these messages to me as a constant “moving of the goalposts” on the part of church leaders. The issue leads to congregational division, as some members try to make the best of things and argue that “We already have a church,” or “Church is wherever we are.” There is less disagreement about the absence of a temple for Ireland: many times Irish members have expressed to me their sense of sadness and resentment at having to travel to the UK to participate in the most sacred activities of their faith, most bitingly illustrated when one member complained that “ten per cent of my earnings are going to pay for a temple in another country.” Many LDS members revel in opportunities to incorporate Irish aspects of their culture into expressions of their faith. At an analytical level, these

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occurrences may be interpreted as attempts to reclaim an Irish LDS identity in repudiation of historical British colonialisation and contemporary US cultural colonialism. The best example of this would be a distinctive Latter-day Saint celebration of St Patrick’s Day.80 That this celebration took place within the building designated for church use further added to the symbolism of the moment, constituting a kind of official sanction to place Irishness front and centre. Irish music, history, and myth (and even a little reference to Irish Catholicism) were essential portions of the celebration and provided an opportunity for a multinational congregation to coalesce around something they shared in common: their experiences of Ireland. Thus, Irish tradition was manifest in a Latter-day Saint context and, operating at a local level, liberated the experience of being Latter-day Saint from US/UK cultural patterns and transformed it into something that was Irish. Another interesting point of divergence between LDS members in the UK and Ireland is a tendency of Irish converts to retain certain elements of their former religious practices while simultaneously complying with requirements of their new LDS faith. For instance, some first-generation LDS members told me that they still frequent Catholic churches to pray, even after leaving Catholicism to join the LDS Church. They say these churches provide a space of peace, sacredness, and familiarity and that the desire to continue experiencing such feelings is not eradicated after becoming members of the LDS Church, especially given the absence of true chapels designed and constructed for LDS worship. In a similar vein, about 90 per cent of Irish schools are managed by organisations connected to the Catholic Church, and these schools maintain a Catholic ethos which includes preparation for Catholic sacraments as part of the school day. This means that most Latter-day Saint children are educated within a Catholic setting and absorb Catholic patterns of prayer and other elements of religious learning, which Latter-day Saint parents must then resolve with their children as best they can. In one case narrated to me, this meant allowing a child to cross herself in the Catholic way before night-time prayers and then say a prayer in the typical Latter-day Saint style. These examples remind us of the importance of collective memory and early childhood socialisation experience; Catholic converts are still connected to an Irish Catholic collective memory of their ancestors. Conversion does not break this chain of memory.81 Such practices allow Irish Latter-day Saints an opportunity to create a version of their faith that facilitates Irish identity and to re-­ work what it means to be Latter-day Saint in modern Ireland. First-generation converts argue that retention of some elements of former religious practice does not undermine their Latter-day Saint testimony. Rather they say their testimonies are strengthened by allowing themselves a way in which they can reconcile their two most significant identities as both Irish and Latter-day Saint.

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Conclusions What is the future for the church in this region? Despite the assertion that “We don’t do God in public spaces,” religion still claims a visible if somewhat contested presence in UK and Irish societies.82 One can forgive LDS Church leaders for feeling somewhat stuck. The UK’s increasingly secular orientation, along with Ireland’s complex ongoing relationship with Catholicism, suggests that member recruitment through current, standard missionary approaches is likely to continue being unsuccessful. Although this chapter has illumined significant differences between how religious faith and practice are experienced in Ireland and the UK, we have also emphasised that people in both Ireland and the UK share negative perceptions of the LDS Church as an American institution and of the public intrusiveness of its missionary strategies. Yet the standardised LDS missionary programme continues to be presented as the keyway for prospective members to first encounter the church. How might some of these difficulties be alleviated? One solution could be partial decentralising of the LDS missionary programme in order to empower local units to design and implement missionary efforts that reflect and celebrate regional practices, thereby decreasing perceptions of American exceptionalism in the UK and continuation of British colonialism in Ireland. Another approach might be to re-imagine the purpose of missions in the UK and Ireland as being more community service focused with more missionaries engaged in various social justice and welfare projects (such as food banks, clothing and needed commodities distribution, and disaster relief). Whatever the particular changes might be, the LDS Church needs to develop a more flexible missionary programme that can navigate between changes in both secular and religious arenas of Ireland and the UK while also being sensitive to and accommodating of regional differences in history and culture.

Notes 1. Stone, Jon, “Britain must defend its Christian values against terrorism, David Cameron says,” Independent, Sunday, March 27, 2016; [online] https://www. independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/david-cameron-easter-message2016-christian-values-christian-country-a6954996.html [December 16, 2019]. 2. Brierley, Peter, UK Church Statistics. Vol. 3. Tonbridge: ADBC Publishers, 2018. 3. In England and Wales, the official state church is the Church of England, whilst the national church in Scotland is the Presbyterian Church of Scotland; there is no national established church in Northern Ireland. 4. England as a Kingdom was established in around c. 925 AD.  In 1536, King Henry VIII unified England and Wales through legislation as being the same country. In 1707, Scotland joined England (which included Wales) to create Great Britain. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was formed in 1801, but in 1922 the Republic of Ireland (Eire, or “Southern Ireland”) withdrew from the union, leaving just the northern counties of Ireland. Today, therefore, the British Isles is England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Ireland. The United Kingdom is England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland,

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and Great Britain is England, Wales, and Scotland. See Cannon, John. A Dictionary of British History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 5. Davie, Grace. Religion in Britain since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1994). Davie suggests that historical challenges to religious authority in Britain, such as Henry VII’s decoupling of Roman Catholic religious metanarratives from governmental politics, along with enlightenment thinking of the eighteenth-century demands for democracy, have contributed to Britain being both religious pluralistic and secularised. 6. Weller, Paul. Time for Change: Reconfiguring Religion, State and Society (London: Continuum, 2005). 7. Northern Ireland’s religious landscape refers to how secularisation in Northern Ireland is occurring in a different context, for example, abortion and same-sex marriage have only recently been legalised there. See Page, Chris. Northern Ireland abortion and same-sex marriage laws change [online] https://www.bbc. co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-50128860 [22 October 2019]. 8. Voas, David, and Steve Bruce, in “Religion, Behaviour and Belief over Two Decades.” In Curtice, J., Clery, E., Perry, J., Phillips M. and Rahim, N. British Social Attitudes 36. Religion. London: The National Centre for Social Research, 2019. 1–29. 9. Beck, Ulrich, A God of One’s Own (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 24, 27. 10. Beck, Ulrich, A God of One’s Own, 21. 11. Beck, Ulrich, A God of One’s Own, 27. 12. Johnson, Benton, “On Church and Sect.” American Sociological Review 28, no. 4 (August 1963): 539–549. 13. According to Alexander Baugh (2007), “In 1910, the  then Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, commented, ‘I am aware that the matter [allegations of British Mormons practising polygamy] is causing a great deal of concern in this country. I am treating it in a serious spirit, and looking into it very thoroughly.’” Baugh, Alexander, “The Church in the Twentieth-Century Great Britain: A Historical Overview” 240  in Doxey, Cynthia, Freeman, Robert, Holzapfel, Richard, and Wright, Dennis. (2007) Regional Studies in Latter-Day Saint Church History. The British Isles. Salt Lake City: Brigham Young University. 237–260. 14. Welch, Todd. “An Apostle in England: British Prime Minister Theresa May Pauses from Brexit to Meet with Elder Jeffrey R.  Holland.” Deseret News. November 21, 2018. 15. People from the UK or Great Britain are referred to as British. 16. Pemberton, Becky. “Holy Huddle: What Is Mormonism, Why Can Men Have Multiple Wives, What Are Their Beliefs and What Is the Book of Mormon?” The Sun, October 11, 2017. [Online] https://www.thesun.co.uk/living/3147788/ mormonism-mormon-multiple-wives-beliefs-book/. [December 2, 2019]. 17. Bartholomew, Rebecca. Audacious Women: Early British Mormon Immigrants (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1995). See also Lecourt, S. “The Mormons, the Victorians, and the Idea of Greater Britain.” Victorian Studies 56 (1) (2013): 85–112; Perkins, Jerome. “The Story of the British Saints in their Own Words: 1900–1950” in eds Doxey, Cynthia, Freeman, Robert, Holzapfel, Richard, and Wright, Dennis. Regional Studies in Latter-Day Saint Church History. The British Isles (Salt Lake City: Brigham Young University, 2007) 149–171. 18. The first missionaries in Scotland arrived on December 20, 1839, followed by missionaries in Northern Ireland and Wales in 1840. See Cuthbert, M. “Saints

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Around the World: Strong Saints in Scotland” Ensign, October 1978 [online] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1978/10/the-saintsaround-the-world-strong-saints-in-scotland?lang=eng; See also Ensign, August 2010, “Wales” [online] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/liahona/2010/08/small-and-simple-things/wales?lang=eng; Church of Jesus Christ Newsroom. “Ireland” [online] https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist. org/facts-and-statistics/country/ireland. 19. Combs, Ryan. “The History of Missionary Work and the Early Mormon Missionaries Database,” June 28, 2018, https://history.churchofjesuschrist. org/blog/the-history-of-missionary-work-and-the-early-mormon-missionaries-database?lang=eng [December 10, 2019]. 20. See Cardon, Louis B. “The First World War and the Great Depression, 1914–1939” in V. Ben Bloxham, James R. Moss and Larry C. Porter eds., Truth will Prevail: The Rise of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the British Isles, 1837–1987 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 335–361. The recall of North American missionaries during the First World War saw British Latter-day Saint women taking a more significant role in proselyting. During the Second World War, over 500 LDS British members were called as home missionaries, donating between 4 and 18 hours a week to missionary work (Baugh, “The Church in the Twentieth-Century Great Britain: A Historical Overview,” 243–244). 21. Cowan, Richard, “Church Growth in England 1841–1914” in V. Ben Bloxham, James R.  Moss and Larry C.  Porter eds., Truth will Prevail: The Rise of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the British Isles, 1837–1987 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 199–236. Cowan states that by 1850, there were more members in the UK than in North America: 202. See also Baugh, “The Story of the British Saints in their Own Words: 1900–1950,” 237. 22. Jensen, Robert, “The British Gathering of Zion” in V.  Ben Bloxham, James R. Moss and Larry C. Porter eds., Truth will Prevail: The Rise of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the British Isles, 1837–1987 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 165–199. 23. Cuthbert, The Second Coming: Latter-day Saints in Great Britain, 1937–1987 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1987) 1: 23–34. 24. In 1960 church membership in the UK was 17,332; two years later, it was 45,206 (Baugh, 246). See also Cuthbert, Derek, The Second Coming: Latter-day Saints in Great Britain, 1937–1987. 1:35–75. 25. Cowan, Richard. “A Tale of Two Temple” in Doxey, Cynthia, Freeman, Robert, Holzapfel, Richard, and Wright, Dennis. (2007) Regional Studies in Latter-Day Saint Church History. The British Isles. Salt Lake City: Brigham Young University. 227. 26. Moss, James. “The Great Awakening” in V. Ben Bloxham, James R. Moss and Larry C. Porter eds., Truth will Prevail: The Rise of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the British Isles, 1837–1987 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 395. 27. Martinich, Matthew, and Stewart, David, “Cumorah.” Reaching the Nations, 2018. [Online] The UK accounts for 28 per cent of LDS membership in Europe and the former Soviet Union. Active membership in Britain is estimated at approximately 30,000, or 15–20 per cent of total church membership. https://

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cumorah.com/index.php?target=countries&cnt_res=1&wid=230&cmdfind=Se arch. [10 December 2019]. 28. Fielding Smith, Joseph. “To the Saints in Great Britain.” Ensign, 1971. https:// w w w. c h u r c h o f j e s u s c h r i s t . o r g / s t u d y / e n s i g n / 1 9 7 1 / 0 9 / to-the-saints-in-great-britain?lang=eng. 29. Stark and Bainbridge, 1985. 30. Cuthbert, The Second Coming: Latter-day Saints in Great Britain, 1937–1987. 1: 54–56. 31. Baugh, “The Story of the British Saints in their Own Words: 1900–1950,” 249. 32. Heaton, Tim, Albrecht, Stan, and Johnson, J.  Randall, “The Making of the British Saints in Historical Perspective,” BYU Studies 27 (1) (Spring 1987) 129. 33. Voas and Bruce, “Religion, Behaviour and Belief over Two Decades.” 20. 34. Voas and Bruce, “Religion, Behaviour and Belief over Two Decades.” 16. 35. Research carried out by Brierley Consultancy (2017) in the UK found although only 5 per cent of the population attended church regularly, 48 per cent had a belief in a higher spiritual power. He furthermore predicts that by 2067 Christianity will disappear from Britain completely. 36. Fetzer, L. “Tolstoy and Mormonism.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 6, no. 1 (1971): 13–29. 37. Such as Heaton et  al. 1987; Grant 1992; Cuthbert 1987; Thomas 1987; Fielding Smith 1950; and Bloxham, Moss, and Porter 1987. 38. Claudia W. Harris, “Mormons on the Warfront: The Protestant Mormons and Catholic Mormons of Northern Ireland,” BYU Studies Quarterly 30, no. 4 (1990): 7–19, t: http://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol30/iss4/2; Brent A. Barlow, “Ireland,” in Encyclopedia of Latter-Day Saint History, ed. Arnold K. Garr, Donald Q. Cannon, and Richard O. Cowen (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 2000), http://globalmormonism.byu.edu/?page_id=103; Orson Scott Card, “The Saints in Ireland,” Ensign (Salt Lake City, 1978), https://www.lds.org/ensign/1978/02/the-saints-in-ireland?lang=eng; James. B Allen, “When Our Enemies Are Also Saints: Response to Claudia W.  Harris’s Mormons On The Warfront,” BYU Studies Quarterly 30, no. 4 (1990): 21–26, http://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl e=2684&context=byusq; Claudia W.  Harris, “Making Sense of the Senseless: An Irish Education,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 17, no. 4 (1984): 83–102, https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/issues/ V17N04.pdf; Brent A. Barlow, “History of the Church of Jesus Christ of LatterDay Saints in Ireland since 1840.” MA (Brigham Young University, 1968), http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/MTAF/id/15538. 39. Allen, “When Our Enemies Are Also Saints”; Harris, “Mormons on the Warfront”; Harris, “Making Sense of the Senseless.” 40. Barlow, “History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ireland since 1840” MA; Card, “The Saints in Ireland.” 41. Heaton, Albrecht, and Johnson, “The Making of British Saints in Historical Perspective,” 121. 42. The Millennial Star, XVIII, 1856, 561–562, cited in Barlow 1986, 52. 43. Central Statistics Office, 2017. 44. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Facts and Statistics: Ireland,” The Mormon Newsroom, accessed November 12, 2014, http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/facts-and-statistics/country/ireland/

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45. Barlow “History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ireland since 1940,” MA. 46. Central Statistics Office, “Details of Census” (Cork: Government of Ireland, 2017), http://www.cso.ie/px/pxeirestat/Database/eirestat/Profile 8  - Irish Travellers, Ethnicity and Religion/Profile 8  - Irish Travellers, Ethnicity and Religion_statbank.asp?SP=Profile 8 - Irish Travellers, Ethnicity and Religion=0. 47. Harding, Sandra, “Is there a Feminist Method?” in Harding, Sandra, ed, Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) 56. 48. According to Steve Bruce (2008), the term religious indifference, rather than secularist beliefs, captures more fully British attitudes to religion, as it suggests that faith beliefs are irrelevant for operational and interpersonal civic structures. See also Casanova, 2007, and Trzebiatowska and Bruce, 2012. 49. Casanova, J. (2007) “Rethinking Secularisation: A Global Comparative” in Beyer, Peter, and Beaman, Lois, ed, Religion, Globalization and Culture (USA: Brill Publishing, 2007) 111. 50. Church Newsroom available from https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/ topic/missionary-program 51. Shepherd, Gordon, and Shepherd, Gary “Sustaining a Lay Religion in Modern Society: The Mormon Missionary Experience” in Cornwall, Marie, Heaton, Tim and Lawrence Young, Contemporary Mormonism: Social Science Perspectives (Chicago: University of Illinois, 2001 [1994]), 164. 52. Shepherd and Shepherd, “Sustaining a Lay Religion in Modern Society,” 165. 53. Sherman, Tarah, “Uncovering Institutionally Imposed Norms Through the Interaction Interview.” Language Management in Contact Situations, 2006. 54. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Changes to Missionaries Daily Schedule Allows More Time to Teach Gospel” The Mormon Newsroom, accessed March 12, 2020, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church/ news/changes-to-missionaries-daily-schedule-allows-more-time-to-teachgospel?lang=eng. 55. Young, Lawrence, “Confronting Turbulent Environments: Issues in the Organizational Growth and Globalization of Mormonism” in Cornwall, Marie, Heaton, Tim and Lawrence Young Contemporary Mormonism: Social Science Perspectives (Chicago: University of Illinois, 2001), 44–62. 56. LDS.org.uk European Area Plan 2019 “Invite friends to our homes, sacrament and other meetings to learn of Christ” [online] https://www.lds.org.uk/acp/ bc/cp/Europe/area-plan/2019/pdf/plan/2018-06-2019-Europe-AreaPlan-A4-eng.pdf [accessed December 4, 2019]. 57. Equality Act 2010. [Online] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/ contents 58. Dinham, Adam, and Jackson, Robert. “Religion, Welfare and Education” in Woodhead, Linda, and Catto, Rebecca, Religion and Change in Modern Britain (Oxon: Routledge, 2012), 272–295. 59. Beck, A God’s of One’s Own (2010: 27). 60. Nyhagen, Line, “Conceptualizing Lived Religious Citizenship: A Case Study of Christian and Muslim women in Norway and the United Kingdom.” Citizenship Studies (2015): 1–15. 61. Head, Ronan, “The Experience of Mormon Children in English School-Based Religious Education and Collective Worship,” International Journal of Mormon Studies (2009) 2, 196–205.

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62. Davie, Grace, “Vicarious Religion: A Methodological Challenge” in Ammerman, Nancy, Everyday Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 22. See also Davie Grace, “Vicarious Religion: A Response,” Journal of Contemporary Religion, (2007) 25: 2, 261–266, and Bruce, Steve, and Voas, David, “Vicarious Religion: An Examination and Critique,” Journal of Contemporary Religion, (2011) 25(2), 243–259. 63. Ammerman, Nancy, Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 64. See also Van Beek, Walter, “Mormon Europeans or European Mormons? An ‘Afro-European’ View on Religious Colonization,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, (2008) 38 (4), 3–36. 65. Modood, Tariq, Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity, and Muslims in Britain (USA: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 31. 66. Beck, Ulrich. A God’s of One’s Own, 25. 67. J. H. Whyte, Church and State in Modern Ireland 1923–1979, 2nd ed. (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1976). 68. Gladys Ganiel, Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland: Religious Practice in Late Modernity (Oxford, New  York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Tom Inglis, “Catholic Identity in Contemporary Ireland: Belief and Belonging to Tradition,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 22, no. 2 (May 21, 2007): 205–220, https:// doi.org/10.1080/13537900701331064; John Coakley and Michael Gallagher, eds., Politics in the Republic of Ireland, 5th ed. (Abingdon, UK: Taylor & Francis, PSAI Press, 2010), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203403136. 69. Central Statistics Office, “Details of Census”; Central Statistics Office, “Census of Population 2011: Profile 8 Religion, Ethnicity, and Irish Traveller” (Cork, 2012), http://www.cso.ie/en/census/census2011reports/census2011profile7religionethnicityandirishtravellers-ethnicandculturalbackgroundinireland/. 70. Diarmuid Martin, “Homily at Liturgy Spring Seminar,” in Spring Seminar Dublin Diocese (Dublin, 2011), http://www.dublindiocese. ie/522011-homily-at-liturgy-spring-seminar/. 71. Central Statistics Office, “Persons, Males and Females, Classified by Religious Denomination with Actual and Percentage Change, 2006 and 2011,” 2012, http://cso.ie/en/census/census2011reports/census2011thisisirelandpart1/. 72. Central Statistics Office, “Details of Census.” 73. Gladys Ganiel, Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland: Religious Practice in Late Modernity; Grace Davie, Religion in Europe: A Memory Mutates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 74. Antje Rö, “Old and New Religious Minorities: Examining the Changing Religious Profile of the Republic of Ireland,” Irish Journal of Sociology, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1177/0791603516660562. 75. Flynn, 2006; Ugba, 2008; Gierek, 2011; Kuhling, 2011; Scharbrodt and Sakaranaho, 2011. 76. Central Statistics Office, “Details of Census”; David Stewart and Matthew Martinich, “Statistical Profile: Ireland,” Cumorah, accessed January 12, 2014, http://www.cumorah.com/index.php?target=countries&cnt_res=2&wid=105 &cmdfind=Search. 77. Peader Kirby, Luke Gibbons, and Michael Cronin, “Conclusions and Transformations” in Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society, and the Global Economy, ed. Peader Kirby, Luke Gibbons, and Michael Cronin (London: Pluto

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Press, 2002), 196–209; Lawrence J.  Taylor, “Colonialism and Community Structure in Western Ireland,” Ethnohistory 27, no. 2 (1980): 169–181; Geraldine Moane, “Colonialism and the Celtic Tiger,” in Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society, and the Global Economy, ed. Peader Kirby, Luke Gibbons, and Michael Cronin (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 196–209; Nuala C.  Johnson, “The Contours of Memory in Post-Conflict Societies: Enacting Public Remembrance of the Bomb in Omagh, Northern Ireland,” Cultural Geographies 19, no. 2 (2011): 237–258, https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474011422026. 78. Carmen Kuhling and Kieran Keohane, Cosmopolitan Ireland: Globalisation and Quality of Life (United Kingdom: Pluto Press, 2007), 66. 79. Kirby, Gibbons, and Cronin, “Conclusions and Transformations”; Moane, “Colonialism and the Celtic Tiger”; Geraldine Moane, “Postcolonial Legacies and the Irish Psyche,” in Are The Irish Different?, ed. Tom Inglis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 121–33. 80. Hazel O’ Brien, “The Marginality of ‘Irish Mormonism’: Confronting Irish Boundaries of Belonging,” Journal of the British Association for the Study of Religions 21 (2019): 52–75, http://www.jbasr.com/ojs/index.php/jbasr/ article/view/40/43. 81. Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory (Cambridge; Malden MA: Polity Press, 2000). 82. Alistair Campbell, as aide to British Premier Tony Blair, famously replied “we don’t do God” when the Prime Minister was asked by the media about his faith. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1429109/Campbellinterrupted-Blair-as-he-spoke-of-his-faith-We-dont-do-God.html [January 3, 2020].

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Bloxham, V. Ben, James R. Moss, and Larry C. Porter, eds. 1987. Truth will Prevail: The Rise of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the British Isles, 1837–1987, 335–361. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brierley, Peter. 2018. UK Church Statistics. Vol. 3. Tonbridge: ADBC Publishers. Bruce, Steve, and David Voas. 2011. Vicarious Religion: An Examination and Critique. Journal of Contemporary Religion 25 (2): 243–259. Cannon, John. 2005. A Dictionary of British History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Card, Orson Scott. 1978. The Saints in Ireland. Ensign, Salt Lake City. [Online] Accessed 6 October 2014. https://www.lds.org/ensign/1978/02/ the-saints-in-ireland?lang=eng. Cardon, Louis B. 1987. The First World War and the Great Depression, 1914–1939. In Truth will Prevail: The Rise of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the British Isles, 1837–1987, ed. V. Ben Bloxham, James R. Moss, and Larry C. Porter, 335–361. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Casanova, J. 2007. Rethinking Secularisation: A Global Comparative. In Religion, Globalization and Culture, ed. Peter Beyer and Lois Beaman, 101–120. Boston, MA: Brill Publishing. Central Statistics Office. 2012. Persons, Males and Females, Classified by Religious Denomination with Actual and Percentage Change, 2006 and 2011. Cork: Government of Ireland. [Online] Accessed 14 December 2019. http://cso.ie/en/ census/census2011reports/census2011thisisirelandpart1/ ———. 2017. Details of Census. Cork: Government of Ireland. [Online] Accessed 14 December 2019. http://www.cso.ie/px/pxeirestat/Database/eirestat/Profile 8  Irish Travellers, Ethnicity and Religion/Profile 8  - Irish Travellers, Ethnicity and Religion_statbank.asp?SP=Profile 8 - Irish Travellers, Ethnicity and Religion=0. Church Newsroom. Ireland. [Online] Accessed 12 November 2014. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/facts-and-statistics/country/ireland. Church Newsroom. Missionary Program [Online]. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/topic/missionary-program. Coakley, John, and Michael Gallagher, eds. 2010. Politics in the Republic of Ireland. 5th ed. Abingdon, UK: Taylor & Francis and PSAI Press. Combs, Ryan. 2018. The History of Missionary Work and the Early Mormon Missionaries Database, June 28. Accessed 10 December 2019. https://history. churchofjesuschrist.org/blog/the-history-of-missionary-work-and-the-early-mormon-missionaries-database?lang=eng. Cowan, Richard. 1987. Church Growth in England 1841–1914. In Truth will Prevail: The Rise of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the British Isles, 1837–1987, ed. V.  Ben Bloxham, James R.  Moss, and Larry C.  Porter, 199–236. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2007. A Tale of Two Temples. In Regional Studies in Latter-Day Saint Church History. The British Isles, ed. Cynthia Doxey et al., 219–237. Salt Lake City: Brigham Young University. Cuthbert, M. 1978. Saints Around the World: Strong Saints in Scotland. Ensign, October. [Online]. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1978/10/ the-saints-around-the-world-strong-saints-in-scotland?lang=eng. Cuthbert, Derek. 1987a. The Second Coming: Latter-day Saints in Great Britain, 1937–1987. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. ———. 1987b. Church Growth in the British Isles. BYU Studies Quarterly 27 (2): 13–27.

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Davie, Grace. 1994. Religion in Britain since 1945. Oxford: Blackwell Press. ———. 2000. Religion in Europe: A Memory Mutates. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2007a. Vicarious Religion: A Response. Journal of Contemporary Religion 25 (2): 261–266. ———. 2007b. Vicarious Religion: A Methodological Challenge. In Everyday Religion, ed. Nancy Ammerman, 21–37. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dinham, Adam, and Robert Jackson. 2012. Religion, Welfare and Education. In Religion and Change in Modern Britain, ed. Linda Woodhead and Rebecca Catto, 272–295. Oxon: Routledge. Equality Act 2010. [Online]. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ ukpga/2010/15/contents. Fetzer, L. 1971. Tolstoy and Mormonism. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 6 (1): 13–29. Flynn, Kieran. 2006. Understanding Islam in Ireland. Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 17 (2): 223–238. Ganiel, Gladys. 2016. Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland: Religious Practice in Late Modernity. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Gierek, Boěena. 2011. ‘Celtic Spirituality’ in Contemporary Ireland. In Ireland’s New Religious Movements, ed. Olivia Cosgrove et al., 300–318. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Grant, Bryan J. 1992. The Church in the British Isles. In The Encyclopaedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel H.  Ludlow, 227–232. New  York: Macmillan Publishing Company. [Online] Accessed 26 November 2014. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ cdm/compoundobjecTheEnclyclopediaofMormonismt/collection/EoM/ id/4391/show/5562. Harding, Sandra. 1993. Introduction: Is There a Feminist Method? In Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues, ed. Sandra Harding, 1–15. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Harris, Claudia W. 1984. Making Sense of the Senseless: An Irish Education. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 17 (4): 83–102. [Online] Accessed 2 October 2015. https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/issues/V17N04.pdf. ———. 1990. Mormons on the Warfront: The Protestant Mormons and Catholic Mormons of Northern Ireland. BYU Studies Quarterly 30 (4): 7–19. [Online] Accessed 2 October 2015. http://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol30/iss4/2. Head, Ronan. 2009. The Experience of Mormon Children in English School-Based Religious Education and Collective Worship. International Journal of Mormon Studies 2: 196–205. Heaton, Tim, Stan Albrecht, and J. Randall Johnson. 1987. The Making of the British Saints in Historical Perspective. BYU Studies 27 (1): 119–135. Hervieu-Léger, Danièle. 2000. Religion as a Chain of Memory. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Inglis, Tom. 2007. Catholic Identity in Contemporary Ireland: Belief and Belonging to Tradition. Journal of Contemporary Religion 22 (2): 205–220. https://doi. org/10.1080/13537900701331064. Jensen, Robert. 1987. The British Gathering of Zion. In Truth will Prevail: The Rise of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the British Isles, 1837–1987, ed. V.  Ben Bloxham, James R.  Moss, and Larry C.  Porter, 165–199. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Johnson, Benton. 1963. On Church and Sect. American Sociological Review 28 (4): 539–549. Johnson, Nuala C. 2011. The Contours of Memory in Post-Conflict Societies: Enacting Public Remembrance of the Bomb in Omagh, Northern Ireland. Cultural Geographies 19 (2): 237–258. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474011422026. Kirby, Peader, Luke Gibbons, and Michael Cronin. 2002. Conclusions and Transformations. In Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society, and the Global Economy, ed. Peader Kirby, Luke Gibbons, and Michael Cronin, 196–209. London: Pluto Press. Kuhling, Carmen. 2011. New Age Re-enchantment in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. In Ireland’s New Religious Movements, ed. Olivia Cosgrove et al., 201–220. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Kuhling, Carmen, and Kieran Keohane. 2007. Cosmopolitan Ireland: Globalisation and Quality of Life, 66. London: Pluto Press. Lecourt, S. 2013. The Mormons, the Victorians, and the Idea of Greater Britain. Victorian Studies 56 (1): 85–112. Martin, Diarmuid. 2011. Homily at Liturgy Spring Seminar. Spring Seminar Dublin Diocese, Dublin. [Online] Accessed 17 September 2015. http://www.dublindiocese.ie/522011-homily-at-liturgy-spring-seminar/. Martinich, Matthew, and David Stewart. 2014. Statistical Profile: Ireland. Cumorah. [Online] Accessed 12 January 2014. http://www.cumorah.com/index. php?target=countries&cnt_res=2&wid=105&cmdfind=Search ———. 2018. Reaching the Nations. Cumorah. [Online] Accessed 10 December 2019. https://cumorah.com/index.php?target=countries&cnt_res=1&wid=230&cmd find=Search. Moane, Geraldine. 2002. Colonialism and the Celtic Tiger. In Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society, and the Global Economy, ed. Peader Kirby, Luke Gibbons, and Michael Cronin, 196–209. London: Pluto Press. ———. 2014. Postcolonial Legacies and the Irish Psyche. In Are the Irish Different? ed. Tom Inglis, 121–133. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Modood, Tariq. 2005. Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity, and Muslims in Britain. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Moss, James. 1987. The Great Awakening. In Truth will Prevail: The Rise of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the British Isles, 1837–1987, ed. V. Ben Bloxham, James R. Moss, and Larry C. Porter, 395. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nyhagen, Line. 2015. Conceptualizing Lived Religious Citizenship: A Case Study of Christian and Muslim women in Norway and the United Kingdom. Citizenship Studies 19: 1–15. O’Brien, Hazel. 2019. The Marginality of ‘Irish Mormonism’: Confronting Irish Boundaries of Belonging. Journal of the British Association for the Study of Religions 21: 52–75. [Online] Accessed 2 January 2020. http://www.jbasr.com/ojs/index. php/jbasr/article/view/40/43. Pemberton, Becky. 2017. Holy Huddle: What Is Mormonism, Why Can Men Have Multiple Wives, What Are Their Beliefs and What Is the Book of Mormon? The Sun, October 11. [Online] Accessed 2 December 2019. https://www.thesun.co.uk/living/3147788/mormonism-mormon-multiple-wives-beliefs-book/. Perkins, Jerome. 2007. The Story of the British Saints in their Own Words: 1900–1950. In Regional Studies in Latter-Day Saint Church History. The British Isles, ed. Cynthia Doxey et al., 149–171. Salt Lake City: Brigham Young University.

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Phillips, R. 2006. Rethinking the International Expansion of Mormonism. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 10 (1): 52–68. ———. 2008. ‘De Facto Congregationalism’ and Mormon Missionary Outreach: An Ethnographic Case Study. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 47 (4): 628–643. Rö, Antje. 2016. Old and New Religious Minorities: Examining the Changing Religious Profile of the Republic of Ireland. Irish Journal of Sociology 25 (3): 1–10. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0791603516660562. Scharbrodt, Oliver, and Tuula Sakaranaho. 2011. Islam and Muslims in the Republic of Ireland: An Introduction to the Special Issue. Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 31 (4): 469–485. Shepherd, Gordon, and Gary Shepherd. 2001 [1994]. Sustaining a Lay Religion in Modern Society: The Mormon Missionary Experience. In Contemporary Mormonism: Social Science Perspectives, ed. Marie Cornwall, Tim Heaton, and Lawrence Young, 161–182. Chicago: University of Illinois. Sherman, Tarah. 2006. Uncovering Institutionally Imposed Norms Through the Interaction Interview. Language Management in Contact Situations. Smith, Fielding Joseph. 1950. Essentials in Church History. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company. ———. 1971. To the Saints in Great Britain. Ensign. https://www.churchofjesuschrist. org/study/ensign/1971/09/to-the-saints-in-great-britain?lang=eng. Stark, Rodney, and William Bainbridge. 1985. Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation. California: University of California. Stone, Jon. 2016. Britain Must Defend Its Christian Values Against Terrorism, David Cameron Says. Independent, Sunday, March 27. [Online] Accessed 16 December 2019. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/david-cameron-eastermessage-2016-christian-values-christian-country-a6954996.html. Taylor, Lawrence J. 1980. Colonialism and Community Structure in Western Ireland. Ethnohistory 27 (2): 169–181. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 2010. Wales. Liahona, August. [Online] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/liahona/2010/08/smalland-simple-things/wales?lang=eng. ———. Facts and Statistics: Ireland. The Mormon Newsroom. [Online] Accessed 12 November 2014. http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/facts-and-statistics/country/ireland/. ———. 2019. Invite Friends to Our Homes, Sacrament and Other Meetings to Learn of Christ. [Online] Accessed 4 December 2019. https://www.lds.org.uk/acp/bc/ cp/Europe/area-plan/2019/pdf/plan/2018-06-2019-Europe-Area-PlanA4-eng.pdf. Thomas, Madison S. 1987. The Influence of Traditional British Social Patterns on LDS Church Growth in Southwest Britain. BYU Studies Quarterly 27 (1): 107–118. Trzebiatowska, Marta, and Steve Bruce. 2012. Why are Women More Religious Than Men? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ugba, Abel. 2008. A Part of and Apart from Society? Pentecostal Africans in the ‘New Ireland’. Translocations: Migration and Social Change 4 (1): 86–101. Van Beek, Walter. 2008. Mormon Europeans or European Mormons? An ‘Afro-­ European’ View on Religious Colonization. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 38 (4): 3–36.

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Voas, David, and Steve Bruce. 2019. Religion, Behaviour and Belief over Two Decades. In British Social Attitudes 36. Religion, ed. J.  Curtice et  al., 1–29. London: The National Centre for Social Research. Welch, Todd. 2018. An Apostle in England: British Prime Minister Theresa May Pauses from Brexit to Meet with Elder Jeffrey R. Holland. Deseret News, November 21. Weller, Paul. 2005. Time for Change: Reconfiguring Religion, State and Society. London: Continuum. Whyte, J.H. 1976. Church and State in Modern Ireland 1923–1979. 2nd ed. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Young, Lawrence. 2001. Confronting Turbulent Environments: Issues in the Organizational Growth and Globalization of Mormonism. In Contemporary Mormonism: Social Science Perspectives, ed. Marie Cornwall, Tim Heaton, and Lawrence Young, 44–62. Chicago: University of Illinois.

CHAPTER 19

Persisting in a Secular Environment: Mormonism in the Low Countries Walter E. A. van Beek, Ellen Decoo, and Wilfried Decoo

Together, the Netherlands and Flanders constitute the Dutch-speaking region historically known as the Low Countries. This name stands for the coastal region, north of France and west of Germany, where three main European rivers—the Rhine, Meuse, and Scheldt—pass along their broad final stretches to the North Sea. Vital for trade to and from the French and German hinterlands, and to and from England on the other side of the Channel, for centuries the Low Countries remained a disputed region between major European powers. Its various parts, with—for outsiders—confusing names such as Holland and Zeeland, changed hands repeatedly. The religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries split the Low Countries into a northern Calvinist part, the Netherlands, and a southern Catholic part, Flanders (which in 1830 became part of Belgium). At present the Netherlands has a population of 17 million and Flanders—officially “the Flemish Region”—almost 7  million. Note that the noun “the Dutch” and the adjective “Dutch” pertain to the Netherlands.

W. E. A. van Beek (*) Tilburg University, Tilburg, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] E. Decoo Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] W. Decoo University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_19

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However, when “Dutch” refers to the language, it pertains to the language spoken in both countries.

Introduction: A Bird’s Eye View of Mormonism in the Low Countries In the nineteenth century, Low Countries’ inhabitants were clearly identified by their respective church allegiances, with the Netherlands distinctly split into various Christian denominations and Flanders uniformly Catholic. When in 1861 the first missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) arrived in the Netherlands, they faced skepticism and even revulsion, fed by newspaper tales of ghastly Mormon harems in the Wild West. They nevertheless found converts, mainly among already dissident believers and the socially alienated, who were drawn by the Mormons’ daring doctrines and the prospect of emigration to America. Emigration of converts would remain a constant feature of Low Countries’ Mormonism, even after LDS Church leadership encouraged members to stay in their home countries. Some 6500 converts left the Netherlands between 1861 and 1966. This represented nearly half of the 14,000 converts missionaries brought into the church in the Netherlands during those 100 years.1 Those who left for Zion were often the most able and dedicated, depleting the local branches of leadership and stability. By 1961 the church had sufficient strength to organize members in the center of the Netherlands into a “stake” (similar to a Catholic diocese) with local leadership. It was the first LDS stake on European soil and the first non-­ English-­speaking in the world. In the following decades a few more stakes followed, culminating in 2002 with the dedication of an LDS temple, Mormonism’s most sacred building and a hallmark of maturity.2 In contrast to the Netherlands, where religious pluralism made church-­ switching more acceptable, Catholic Flanders was not permeable to alternative faiths. The first Mormon missionary efforts in the 1880s yielded hardly any results. Thereafter the Flemish region was forgotten, squeezed between the Netherlands and the French-speaking south. Only in 1948 did Mormon missionary efforts resume from the side of the Netherlands mission. Slow growth eventually led to the organization of the Antwerp Stake in 1994, covering the whole of Flanders and part of the south of the Netherlands. Thus, Flemish and Dutch Mormon life have nearly always been intertwined. In 1998 the official membership of the present four LDS stakes in the Netherlands and Flanders stood at 6434.3 Twenty years later, in 2017, it stood at 7728, a net growth of only 65 people per year.4 Taking into account the impact of births, the deceased, and those no longer on church rolls as a consequence of excommunication or voluntary withdrawal, the Mormon presence in the Netherlands and Flanders is basically at a standstill or even in decline. The gender balance is equal up to age 50  years, but then tilts to a larger female

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presence (55 percent), possibly indicating an older generation of single-women converts. The official figures include all those on the church membership rolls. “Practicing” or “being active” is measured in regular attendance at church meetings. The latest available figures for the Low Countries point to a meager average of 27 percent activity. Retention of converts has always been a problem,5 but the loss of even long-anchored members explains the recent merging of congregations, euphemistically called “consolidation” by LDS leaders. In 2017, the nine Flemish congregations were reduced to four, obliging members from the closed ward units to travel to the remaining units for church services. Though less drastic, similar consolidations are occurring in the Netherlands. With an average of 130 full-time missionaries in the Dutch-speaking field, their proselytism yielded 95 converts in 2016, 88 in 2017, 94 in 2018, and 66 in 2019—an average of just 0.7 converts per missionary per year, way below the present-world LDS average of 3.5 converts. This means that a missionary in the Low Countries can expect to baptize one or two converts for his or her whole mission, one of whom will become inactive soon after baptism. As in other West European countries, many of these converts are immigrants. More open to missionaries and in search of inclusion, they contribute to multiracial congregations. So, in Low Countries’ Mormonism, there is a small religious presence which is stable, does not grow, and is increasingly multicultural.6 This small denomination, with strong links to the United States, is situated in heavily secularized countries inside the European Union (EU). What does this mean for the local members? Four external dynamics are at play: church interaction with a secular cultural environment, the place of Mormonism in the spectrum of other Low Countries’ faiths and churches, the ambivalent relation of Low Countries’ Mormons with the United States, and the issue of national representation. Significant internal issues that impact the contemporary LDS Church in the Low Countries include political and ideological strains, the church’s relation to science, women’s and LGBT issues, organizational tensions, and the development of racially diverse congregations. We will take a look at the external factors first and then zoom in on the challenges Mormons face today in the Low Countries.

The External Dynamics of Social and Religious Variables in the Low Countries Secularization and the Market for Mormonism At present the Netherlands and Flanders are both secular societies, each the outcome of complex and diverging historical dynamics, but together they form a prime showcase for the dominant paradigm in the sociology of religion: the secularization thesis. We define secularization at three levels:7 (1) decline of religious beliefs and practices, including attendance and formal church membership. (2) Functional differentiation of religion and the state: services

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formally rendered by churches have become the core of specialized institutions such as law, politics, health care, and education, which are under secular state supervision and dominated by specialists. (3) Religious privatization: religious affiliation has become a choice, an option for individual interpretations of the meaning of life. Secularization theory integrates both the erstwhile power position of religion in society and its social functions with an agnostic world view. In this paradigm, secularization is seen as a more or less inevitable result of the larger process of modernization and part of a grand narrative leading from the Enlightenment to the marginalization of religious institutions and the “disenchantment of the world.” Religion has moved from being an absolute pivot of socio-political history to occupying an ever more restricted, private sphere— constituting a fall from power over the last four centuries. This has led to a European “process of temporal liberation from ascribed confessional identities,”8 in which freedom of religion in Europe has come to mean primarily freedom from religion. As a general rule, secularization-as-modernity holds for the majority of Europe, but internal differences between individual countries can be substantial. Secularization is a grand meshwork narrative consisting of many diverging threads, but with a clear overall direction.9 This general transformation of the archaic principle of cuius regio, eius religio10 (the religion of a ruler decides the religion of those ruled) has given way to a system in which privatized religion exists by the grace of a secular space that is well evidenced in the history of the two Low Countries. The counter-thesis to this modernization paradigm stems from the United States, with its quite different religious history,11 and employs the economic model of the market. The prime focus in this model is on religious pluralism which, according to José Casanova, results from a different process: the formation of denominations. Secularization and pluralization are viewed as distinguishable processes.12 In the pluralism model, religion is approached as a response to individual human needs based on the assumption of inherent human religiosity. In this view, an open market for religion stimulates the competing efforts of denominational market “stalls,” facilitating a better balance between religious supply and demand and enhancing religious participation. Thus, religious modernity is considered to be quite possible, provided competing denominations have a level playing field in which the market is an open market. In practice, religious market theory works, to some extent, for the United States, as well as for cases elsewhere around the world. It is not, however, an alternative to the grand narrative of the secularization thesis, within which it might very well be integrated. By any measure, we do live in a “secular age,” in the form of either the uneasy coexistence of religion and secularism or multi-religion pluralism in an open religious market.13 In their historical religious trajectories and present dynamics, the Netherlands and Belgium (to which Flanders belongs) illustrate well the grand secularization narrative and its “discontents.”14 In these countries religious institutions have lost much of their former political power, institutional functions, and influence on private beliefs when compared, for example, to the beginning of

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the twentieth century. Church attendance and membership have dropped to unprecedented lows and still continue to drop. Fewer people go to church, fewer people marry or have their infants baptized in church, and fewer and fewer are “returned to dust” in church rituals. Indeed, “religion has been diminished from an all-encompassing, defining and binding authority to a narrow and specialized domain.”15 Even adjacent countries can have variant pathways of secularization, and the Netherlands and Flanders also illustrate this. The Dutch merchant nation fitted snugly into Max Weber’s thesis on how Calvinist Protestantism led to the development of early capitalism, and in the seventeenth century, the Dutch conglomerate of provinces indeed became the richest nation in the world. Yet, for several reasons, the dominant Dutch Reformed Church never fully acquired the status of a state religion. First, the Dutch formed a republic from the start, and the country acquired a nominal monarchy only much later, so there never was a close relation of any religious authority to a crowned head. Second, Calvinist Protestantism has a penchant for schism, impeding development of a monolithic religious power. Finally, a large Roman Catholic minority in the south of the Dutch Republic—at first repressed and muted but later becoming a respected religious minority—precluded identification of Dutch unity with one church. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Netherlands were two-thirds Protestant and one-third Catholic, a situation which usually intensifies institutional religiosity. This took a highly peculiar form, however, called “pillarization.” Three so-called pillars arose—one Protestant, one Catholic, and one Social Democrat—each comprising a complete set of societal institutions. Inside these pillars individual lives were gradually enveloped in comprehensive institutional structures, including distinct primary and secondary schools, universities, political parties, health-care facilities, sports clubs, and even broadcasting companies. These differentiated pillars promoted an intense preoccupation with preserving a coherent world view that formed a religious “antithesis” to the rapid changes in the world.16 This pillar system proved quite stable through two world wars, but from the 1960s onward crumbled with astonishing rapidity. The resulting “strange death of Dutch religion” showcased the secularization thesis in a spectacular way. Religion’s demise was fueled by the cultural revolution of the 1970s, which eroded authority and coincided with a rapid increase in wealth, a political turning outward to Europe, and to the massive immigration of foreign labor. Thus, Dutch denominations had to find other concerns with which to profile themselves, and more and more defined the province of religion to be that of social ethics. It is at this point that market theory became relevant. The Social Democratic pillar had already been secular from the start, so in the field of social ethics, the churches were one player among many, one type of stall in a large market square. In addition, the 1980s saw alternative religions enter the market, such as Pentecostalism, New Age and oriental religions, Paganism, and

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of course the missionizing Christianities such as Jehovah Witnesses and—yes—Mormons. The diversification of the religious market did not stop secularization, however; rather, it was an accompanying feature of the larger picture. At present in the Netherlands, some 1800 church buildings are empty and scheduled for reuse, almost all of them from the mainstream Protestant and Catholic Churches. One of the authors lived right opposite a Catholic Church, which has been refurbished into a condominium. This large neo-Gothic edifice was built in 1901 and served as the parish church for the central urban neighborhood during the two world wars. But by 1981, it was converted into 34 apartments, in one of which lived a couple who had been wed at the altar that had stood on the very spot where they now had their bedroom, standing today as an icon of secularization. The mainstream churches reacted to the encroaching forces of secularization by liberalization and merging; internal differences were downplayed, salvific exclusivity faded away, and the religious authority argument vanished—a process that has been called “internal secularization.”17 In politics the same process resulted in one major, generalized Christian party, with the exclusion of two right-wing Protestant splinters. Liberalization of the churches did not stem the secular tide, however, and the religious center continues to lose membership and influence. The “sacred canopy” of Dutch mainstream culture has rapidly evaporated in just a few decades. Low Countries’ Mormons in the Spectrum of Other Faiths and Churches  eceptivity to Mormonism in the Netherlands R What is the present situation and how are Mormons positioned in the Dutch religious landscape? The ultra-orthodox Calvinist churches are holding out. There is a Bible belt in the Netherlands, a broad strip running from the Southwest to the Northeast, consisting of rural towns with a large presence of the ultra-orthodox. The Pentecostals are also doing well in this region. New Age groups flourished toward the end of the twentieth century, but are now fading away.18 Immigrant religions, such as various forms of Buddhism and Hinduism, are growing, but the game changer has been Islam. The labor migration of the 1960s and 1970s brought a major influx of people from Morocco and Turkey, first as “guest workers,” later as “immigrants,” and now in Dutch as “allochthones” or “people with a migration history.” Numerically, Islam has become the second largest religion in the Low Countries. Helped initially by the liberal Christian churches, the growth of Islamic communities has led to some important political shifts. Populist parties on the ultra-right are now capitalizing on

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Table 19.1  Ways of believing in the Netherlands from 1966 to 2015 (figures shown in percentages)

Theists Ietsists Agnostics Atheists

1966

1979

2006

2015

47 31 16 6

33 40 18 9

24 39 27 14

24 28 34 24

Ton Bernts and Joantine Berghuijs, God in Nederland 1966–2015 (Utrecht: Ten Have, 2016)

anti-Islam sentiment, a feeling fueled by 9/11 in the United States and other Islamist attacks in Paris, London, Madrid, and Brussels. The state of Dutch religion has been followed closely by a longitudinal research project from 1966 onward called God in Nederland, with a nation-­ wide survey conducted every ten years. Distinguishing among four ways of believing, the latest published results of this survey provide the figures shown in Table  19.1. Ways of believing include Theism (belief in a personal God); Ietsism (“somethingism”: there must be “something” that guides life, a vague notion of a vague power); Agnosticism (not knowing whether there is anything such as a God or supernatural agent); and Atheism (denial of the existence of any God or any form of supernatural reality). In 2015, for the first time in their history, more than half of the Dutch population (58 percent) defined themselves as unbelievers in any religion. The main changes in belief over the past 50 years have occurred in the last three categories of the table: theists have declined markedly relative to the combined categories of “ietsists,” agnostics, and atheists, especially in comparison to the growing numbers of Dutch agnostics and atheists. Theists now include a growing numbers of Muslims, who constitute some 6 percent of the population. Remarkably, in contrast to Christians, Muslims have grown more orthodox over the decade, practicing the precepts of their faith more closely and with Muslim women wearing headscarves more often. This is occurring worldwide, for reasons beyond the scope of this article. Among Christians, however, only a quarter of the Dutch population today believe in a personal God—a number that is much higher among the ultra-orthodox Calvinist rim (83 percent), higher in the mainstream Protestant denominations (51 percent), but which reaches an astonishing low (17 percent!) in the Roman Catholic Church. All in all, Dutch religion has turned from being institutional, authoritarian, and bureaucratic, toward a personalistic construction of world views and aims in life, focusing on feelings and personal experiences. Religion has become both experiential and incidental. This is even demonstrated in public events that have an emotional impact. Thus, for example, the well-televised return of the MH17 air tragedy victims, with its fully secular format, was a major religious experience for the country. But this also holds for individuals. Religion now is viewed as a “service station,” resorted to in times of stress and crisis, or

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as a default option to fall back upon to highlight family occasions such as weddings or funerals. Though some have actively disengaged from their original faith, most have simply faded away, considering religious issues as less and less relevant in daily life. The use of ad hoc religious bricolage for primarily commemorating meaningful events and incidents in life is a phenomenon sometimes dubbed “new spirituality.”19 How do these historical changes comport with the introduction and continued presence of Mormonism in Dutch culture? In the Netherlands the first Mormon missionaries arrived in 1861, just a few years after Catholic bishops had been reinstituted as the first step toward emancipation of the Roman Catholic minority. This also made religious faiths other than Protestantism possible. The Mormons never became very visible; however, since up until the 1960s many of the Dutch members continued to emigrate to the United States. Despite injunctions from Salt Lake City, the Netherlands remained de facto an emigration mission. Enough Dutch converts eventually emigrated to Utah to siphon off any local growth. But emigration as such was normal in the Netherlands, especially right after World War II, so those disappearing LDS members were part of a national trend. During the 1960s, however, as discussed previously, the space for alternative religions opened up and the Dutch LDS Church grew to its present size. Other missionary denominations, such as the Jehovah Witnesses, followed the same pathway. The Netherlands has no system of official recognition of specific religions, and the Dutch LDS became part of the religious landscape as a quaintly American, marginal kind of Christianity, with tax exemption for church donations. Effectively, it was secularization in the Low Countries that made room for religious plurality, but this very same trend rendered religion increasingly irrelevant for the construction of individual life worlds. Being religious became an oddity, and having a religious identity called for explanation. Being fully secular, even staunchly atheistic, had become a respected option, and church membership was no longer seen as helpful in raising Dutch families. As a general view on life, professing “spirituality” rather than religious affiliation or church attendance became increasingly common as the “believing without belonging” option.20 As for Dutch Mormons, the relationship between them and their cultural milieu changed. They now combine the “oddity of being believers” with the added peculiarity of belonging to a divergent and quite American religion with additional scripture to the Christian Bible. Doctrinally they belong to the cultural rim of orthodox churches, but they lack the respectability of the old Calvinists. In a nation with a sharp dividing line between Protestants and Catholics, the LDS position of belonging to neither is awkward. Thus, positioned within a marginal cultural rim, Mormonism became doubly marginal, and it is likely to stay that way in the Netherlands, resembling quite closely those fundamentalist neighbors who most object to its presence. Does the pluralism of the Dutch religious landscape represent a truly open religious market? The answer is that pluralism in the Low Countries does not offer a level playing field. Not only do the various denominations enjoy

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different levels of respect, many of the civil institutions also still bear the imprint of their denominational heritage. But even more fundamentally, pluralism arrived in Europe as part of a deinstitutionalization process, so at the same historical moment the LDS Church arrived on the scene, organized religion was suffering a credibility crisis. A religious market emerged but with culturally discredited stalls on the outskirts of town. Culturally, Low Countries’ Mormonism swims against the current of liberalization, heterogeneity, and deinstitutionalization. The main LDS profile is that of a highly organized and hierarchical church—claiming to be the “true church”—which offers an exclusive pathway of salvation through a tightly controlled lay priesthood. These are all elements that go against the grain of present-day Dutch culture. Mormonism offers a message of authority in an anti-authoritarian environment, of a founding hero in countries where heroism has become suspect, of American exaltation where the United States has fallen from grace, and of exclusive salvation in an environment where most churches themselves have embraced secularism.  eceptivity to Mormonism in Flanders R As noted for the Netherlands, the same aspects of secularization, liberalization, deinstitutionalization, and immigration are equally valid for Flanders. The cultural and religious backdrop, however, is quite different. Flanders (and the rest of Belgium) is historically a Catholic region, popularly known for its Burgundian culture in contrast to the more sober and frugal Netherlands with its Calvinist roots. When Mormon apostle David O. McKay visited Belgium in 1923, he noted, “A Catholic Church celebration was held last night. People drinking and carousing until 6:30 this morning. O what a Godless farce that organization is!”21 At that time, Mormon doctrine called the Catholic Church “the Church of the Devil”—a corrupt organization that epitomized the Great Apostasy of Christianity. McKay saw this confirmed in his coincidental observation of a Catholic kermesse, since medieval times the festive after-Mass dancing, eating, drinking, and gaming. Flemish painters are famous for their celebration of luscious feasts and parties. Belgium—home of Rubens, Tintin, and the Smurfs—cherishes its reputation for enjoying the good life, with its gastronomy, its numerous abbey beers, its waffles and chocolate. Sundays are filled with public social life, including sport events, scouting, free concerts, open houses in institutions and factories, major outdoor happenings, folklore festivals, parades, and more. Dutch people attracted to this realm come to Flanders for enjoyment. As the Dutch singer Paul van Vliet expresses it in a famous song, “When I go to Flanders, I feel free and lighthearted. When I want to laugh, I go to Flanders.” In this sense the Flemish are culturally much closer to their French-speaking co-Belgians than to the Dutch. Hofstede even concluded from his values research that no two countries with a common border and a common language are “so far apart culturally as [Flemish] Belgium and the Netherlands.”22 The matter is interesting because in setting local church geographical boundaries based on language, LDS Church headquarters in Salt

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Lake City never understood these national dynamics. The occasional tensions between the Flemish and the French-speaking communities in Belgium are mainly political and only at the elite levels, not cultural and not among the general population. Flemish Mormons must find their place in a complex setting. In the nineteenth century, Belgium was partitioned into three ideological pillars, just as the Netherlands was. But here one was Catholic and two were anti-clerical— socialist for laborers and liberal for entrepreneurs (the latter mostly with masonic ties). These three pillars formed Flemish political parties. Moreover, since this is Belgium, each entity is subdivided into Dutch-speaking and French-­ speaking sides. These multiple oppositions lead to excessive compartmentalization affecting all public sectors: schools, hospitals, press, unions, social security, and even sports and music organizations. However neutral some Belgians may call themselves, the schools they send their children to or the newspapers they buy are choices in this compartmentalization. Even if most people avoid open ideological conflicts or trivialize them altogether, they remain conditioned by the social structures created by these ideologies.23 In contrast to the Netherlands, Belgium has officially recognized religions: Catholicism, Protestantism, Anglicanism, Judaism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and, since 1974, also Islam. The state also recognizes “non-religious philosophy” as an official ideology. These entities enjoy subsidies for buildings, staff operatives, and class hours at schools. Although freedom of religion is constitutionally guaranteed, non-recognized religious groups are, nonetheless, monitored out of fear of cultish deviancy. As occurred in the Netherlands, Belgium in the 1960s and 1970s commenced an era of profound secularization. Between 1965 and 1973, Catholic Church attendance, measured in weekly practice, dropped from 50 to 32 percent. In 1986 it stood at 25 percent, in 1998 at 13 percent, and by 2018, it had dropped to 9 percent.24 In particular, among young adults, individuation, sexual liberation, pursuit of leisure, and a rational forfeiture of literal faith are cited as main causes. Those who still practice “pick and choose” beliefs and create an à la carte “bricolage [which] includes elements alien to their own religion.”25 Moreover, serious cases of clerical sexual abuse have further undermined the credibility of the Catholic Church. Religion-driven terrorism adds to the distrust, as horribly exemplified by the Brussels bombings in March 2016. A 2017 survey revealed that 68 percent of Belgians think that “religion does more harm than good”—the highest rating in the world on this survey item.26 Catholic schools and hospitals have adapted by de-emphasizing their confessional identity. Catholic schools have morphed their religious education from confessional to ethical–dialogical and are welcoming a growing number of Muslim pupils.27 The original Catholic political party, once an ineluctable bulwark, has shrunk to a shadow of its former glory. The Belgian Catholic authorities did not even try to oppose the legalization of same-sex marriage (SSM) in 2003.28 Still, in spite of low weekly church attendance, more than half of the population self-identify as Catholic.29 In 2018, Pew Research noted for Belgium

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that 10 percent of the population consisted of “Church-attending Christians” and 46 percent “Non-practicing Christians.”30 Nearly all of these Christians are Catholic. The “non-practicing” include many who still go to church for life-­ landmarks such as infant baptisms, confirmations, weddings, and funerals, though in diminishing numbers over the years. Religious ceremonies are now tailored to individual tastes. The festive, Burgundian sphere is never far away. In this secularized landscape the Mormons are an oddity, even more so than in the Netherlands with its multiple denominations and acceptance of its Calvinist heritage. From the 1950s on, early Flemish Mormon converts—convinced of Catholic degeneration, committed to teetotalism and strict Sabbath-­ observance—marginalized themselves from society and from non-Mormon family members.31 The Catholic Church contributed equally to their marginalization by warning against the Mormon “cult”32 (Flemish principles of religious freedom, however, impeded any outright persecution). The handful of LDS members still enjoyed an intense social life among themselves, replicating within their own religious community Flemish norms of enjoyment, albeit without beer.33 A major step forward for the LDS Church was the creation of a separate mission field for Flanders in 1975, named the Belgium Antwerp Mission, with some 150 missionaries working in a dozen cities. The church was able to profile itself positively in the media through participation in Flemish cultural events. Membership reached some 800 active members. The momentum gained from embracing a Flemish identity was broken in 1982, however, when the church returned the jurisdiction over Flanders to the Netherlands. In 1990, LDS authorities recreated the Belgium Antwerp Mission but discontinued it again in 1995 to place Flanders back under the Netherlands Amsterdam Mission. Then, in 2002, that mission was consolidated with the French-­ speaking Belgium Brussels Mission, creating a large bilingual area. But in 2010, the French-speaking part of Belgium was transferred to the France Paris Mission. Meanwhile, in 1994 the Belgium Antwerp Stake was created, including the nine Flemish wards plus some other congregational units in the south of the Netherlands. This led to mixed Flemish–Dutch lay leadership. In 2017, in a major move to consolidate smaller wards into larger ones, the nine Flemish congregations were reduced to four, obliging members from the closed units to travel to the remaining units, some in the Netherlands, for church services. As a result of all these changes, over which local members had no say whatsoever, the LDS Church in Flanders has never been able to regain the identity and the zest it had achieved by the late 1970s. Where does this leave present-day Flemish Mormons? Their broader, self-­ imposed social marginalization remains. Church members spend their Sundays isolated from the buoyant social events all over the country but try to compensate by stimulating their internal social life with soup or hot chocolate after Sunday services, community dinners, church outings, and concerts. Unsurprisingly, the French-speaking Mormon Belgians do the same.

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The Ambivalent Relation of Mormons in the Low Countries to the United States The double marginalization of Mormonism in the Low Countries, religiously and culturally, is highlighted by the shift in the international reputation of the United States. Following World War II, the United States emerged as a liberator, a land of promise and hope, and a democratic beacon for the world. Though Europe never saw it in terms of “manifest destiny,” this sterling reputation was a major factor in the LDS Church’s post-war missionizing success— moderate perhaps compared with other parts of the world, but in Low Countries’ terms, the consolidation of a religious presence. Toward the beginning of the twenty-first century, high regard for the United States diminished as a result of the emergence of a stronger, continental European identity, America’s international military engagements, and the unappealing qualities of certain US presidents. This especially is the case with Donald Trump, who is massively unpopular in Europe. At present, the status and political reputation of the United States have hit an all-time low. American “exceptionalism” does not resonate with the European view of the United States. Being linked to America as a church has become a Mormon liability instead of an asset. For Low Countries’ LDS, who on the whole share European culture,34 this is awkward. Many have close personal links with the United States through family and friends who have emigrated there. Also, Mormon missionaries form a viable link across the ocean, mainly with Utah or the larger Mormon cultural region of the Intermountain West. Most leading families in the Low Countries’ LDS Church have kinsmen “over there,” and for this reason, they identify to a larger extent with the United States than is common in the Low Countries. Quite a few families are split, with some family members living in the United States and others in Europe (this is the case for the second two authors of this chapter). Mormon National Representation in the Low Countries A curious effect of LDS Church organization in European countries is the absence of a recognizable organization at each national level. Europe consists of sovereign states in an economic and regulatory meshwork—the European Union (EU)—and some LDS Church representation in each of these nation-­ states would at times be helpful. Belgium and the Netherlands serve as a good case in point. For most of Mormonism’s history in the Netherlands, the mission president was the spokesman for the LDS Church. Since 1982, stake presidents have been meeting on a regular basis with the mission president for coordination at the national Dutch level. At first this was an informal meeting, but it sufficed to address national matters of interest to Dutch Latter-day Saints. In 2002 the mission headquarters moved to Brussels, and the LDS regional office in Frankfurt appointed the stake president of The Hague stake in the unofficial position of spokesman for the Netherlands. When that

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particular stake president was promoted to a higher position in the ecclesiastical hierarchy (“Area Seventy”), the spokesman role fell even more naturally on him. At that point his position became crucial with regard to taxes. In the Netherlands, tax exemption for LDS tithing donations has been an accepted practice for decades. Since the country has no policy for official recognition of religious organizations, all are routinely considered to be charitable institutions. In 2008, however, a new register for tax exempt organizations stipulated some administrative requirements, such as administrative openness and one central contact point or person. Subsequently, this particular church spokesman was able to solve a thorny administrative problem and the LDS Church’s tax exemption was not lost in the Netherlands. Continuing as the National Director of Public Affairs and Communications for the Netherlands, he still serves as the central contact person for validating the church’s tax exempt status. The situation is completely different in Flanders, which is part of Belgium. Though Flanders has a number of governmental competencies, religious, judicial, and fiscal matters are treated on the national, Belgian level. But the Belgian Mormon community is divided between the French- and Dutch-speaking (Flanders) parts of the country. Moreover, part of the LDS Flemish stake covers the south of the Netherlands. On top of that, the designated mission areas in Belgium are actually part of different church entities: Flanders in the Netherlands Amsterdam Mission and the French-speaking part in the France Paris Mission. As far as the Belgian government is concerned, there is no “Belgian LDS Church,” only a small legal non-profit association to take care of tax matters for real estate, whose administrator has no official relation to LDS ecclesiastical leaders. Over the years, the lack of proper coordination with the government has led to numerous problems for the LDS Church concerning governmental services, taxes, missionary visas, legal status, real estate issues, and more. In 1996, a Belgian Parliamentary Commission was tasked to investigate all lesser-known religious sects in Belgium.35 A questionnaire was sent to all. The one intended for the LDS Church ended up at the address of the French-speaking Brussels mission home, where US missionaries paid no attention to it, not even after a reminder from the government. As a result, the Commission’s report noted that of all religious organizations, only the Mormons had failed to respond, implying they did so deliberately. Subsequently, the Commission formulated a report based on old and unofficial sources to describe Mormonism as a “cult.” This later resulted in an official brochure, still in use, from the National Information Center on Cults, characterizing the Mormon faith as sponsoring belief in polygamy, racism, unequal treatment of women, and becoming gods who own their own planets. Focusing on different languages as the criterion for organizing LDS missions and stakes, high-level ecclesiastical leaders in Salt Lake have never considered the formation of a Belgian-Mormon organizational entity, which, as evidenced in the cases of all other religions in Belgium, even the non-­recognized ones, would be perfectly possible. The latter have a clear national representation by their respective leaders. A single Belgian Mormon presence, with both

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Dutch and French lingual parts working in harmony, could plausibly work well. But perhaps LDS leaders purposely avoid the creation of nationally connected entities, mindful of potential nationalistic expressions within the global church, such as occurred with Mexico’s “Third Convention” in the 1940s.36 Such a national representation, which should not be foreign and definitely not American, does need some margin in which to operate. For instance, in Switzerland, in 2002, a convention was agreed upon with the EU (of which Switzerland is not a member), making it easy for all Europeans to enter the country and find work, but very hard from anyone outside the EU. In 2010, Switzerland turned this into a law, and since a court decided that an LDS mission equaled employment, American missionaries were no longer allowed a long stay in the country. Church leaders responded by sending delegations from the United States, supported by the regional office in Frankfurt. Local Swiss members themselves were marginal in this process. For the American-­ based church, this was a matter of freedom of religion which, in the American definition, also includes the freedom to preach one’s conviction. For the Swiss civil authorities, who harbor a European notion of religious freedom as the liberty to worship according to one’s conscience, this was essentially a work-­ related issue. LDS missionaries were considered a work force and, if American, thus were excluded under the Swiss–EU convention. The approach that European Mormons would have preferred in support of the proselyting activities of their missionary force would have been to emphasize educational “study”: foreign students are exempt from the Swiss rule regarding work. In other instances this approach has proved productive. Thus, for a time in the Netherlands, the costs for a missionary abroad could be tax deductible since missionaries abroad were considered “students” on an “exchange.” There are worse definitions of being a missionary since, surely in Europe, most Mormon missionaries learn more about themselves and the countries in which they serve than they ever do producing converts. It just might have worked in Switzerland, but the LDS Church’s insistence on religious freedom made this angle impossible. What created resentment in Switzerland, however, was the involvement of American LDS politicians, who demanded that the country rescind its measure based on their arguments about freedom of religion. This is not an effective way to deal with national issues by American foreigners, nor by Germans for that matter. In any case, the outcome was that American Mormon missionaries are indeed no longer welcome in Switzerland, only Mormon missionaries sent from other European countries can enter the country without restrictions. At present, most Mormon missionaries, in fact, come from Europe, and any American missionaries who are sent can only stay for three months on a tourist visa. At the end of 2010, the Swiss mission was split up and merged with the missions in South Germany, France, and Italy.

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Contemporary Internal Issues for Low Countries’ Mormons Political and Ideological Strains One area that deserves further consideration is the political or ideological backgrounds of Mormon converts. For local converts (non-immigrants) two contending inclinations seem to play a role. On the one hand, alienation from the religion of their childhood, or familial anti-religiosity, gives a number of them a markedly leftist preference. But a longing for the certainties of religion leads them to embrace Mormonism—attractive for some as an unconventional haven which views other churches as “apostate.” Within Mormonism they retain their leftist sympathies, but in time may feel uncomfortable when they realize to what extent American Mormons are conservative Republicans. In contrast, former Protestants or Catholics, disappointed by the normative slackening of their childhood faiths, find in Mormonism a rejuvenation of conservative values. These are the converts who are most likely to underscore their strong convictions when teaching lay church classes and giving lay sermons in  local LDS congregations. As to current developments, social media seem to play a sizable role in forming or adjusting ideological inclinations among church members. Many converts are on Facebook or similar platforms, interacting with returned American missionaries as friends, and by extension with other American Mormons. As far as we can observe, information is regularly communicated from climate-change deniers, anti-socialists, anti-vaxxers, religious freedom defenders, and similar rightist advocates, but seldom or never from differing viewpoints. A number of local members tend to “like” and share such messages coming from dear friends—some perhaps without fully understanding the gist of what they see posted. They assimilate these right-wing social media viewpoints or remain aloof from any discussion of their merits for the sake of continued friendly relations. A paradoxical picture emerges. The general political leaning in the Low Countries, both in and outside the LDS community, is more to the left than it is for most American Mormons, and this holds for most of Europe as well. For instance, Europeans never cease to be amazed at the inability of Americans to distinguish between socialism and communism. Furthermore, the United States and Europe are divided by different definitions of democracy. In an LDS stake priesthood conference, which occurred during a general election, one of this chapter’s authors (who was stake president at the time) conducted an improvised vote on Dutch politics. The main confessional parties in the countries had just merged into a generalized Christian party, and the question was whether that would provide a political haven for LDS Church members. What became apparent was that Dutch members at the conference did not recognize themselves in terms of generalized Christianity. They voted for non-­confessional parties but with a slight shift to the right, toward the conservative side. Yet, in

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a similar vote between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, we estimate that a majority of Dutch LDS voters might well have favored Obama, whose reputation in Europe was huge. So the close emotional connection with the United States through historical and family ties generates cognitive dissonance, and Low Countries’ members have to compartmentalize their thinking, distinguishing between Americanisms and LDS ecclesiastical authority. As a consequence, some LDS Church policies tend to be viewed as American rather than revelatory. Relation to Science The anti-science stand of right-wing American culture resonates little in Europe, yet among some local LDS members, it has gained some credence, creating another tension with the surrounding culture. American creationism, for example, never gained a significant foothold. Some ultra-orthodox Calvinists in the Netherlands produce creationist writings, but these are religious groups the LDS membership does not want to be associated with and who in turn reject Mormonism the most vehemently. Most Low Countries’ Mormons simply feel uncomfortable around evolutionist discourse, without acting against it. The dominance of the evolutionist paradigm in life sciences and public discourse is simply too great, and in Low Countries’ public schools, there is no question of “equal time.” On the latter question, in 2002 the Dutch education minister, who was an orthodox Protestant, organized a series of lectures-cum-­ debates, featuring both scientists and representatives of the various Christian churches. One of this chapter’s authors had the opportunity to represent the Dutch LDS community. All participants agreed on the fact that no form of creationism should be taught in schools, even under the guise of “intelligent design.” Compartmentalization helps here: while generally accepting the scientific world view, LDS members entertain an internal church discourse on special creation, without feeling obliged to solve the paleoanthropic puzzle. In Flanders no such sensibility exists, as evolution is never questioned. Women’s Issues Despite strong public insistence on women’s equality, feminist issues are not major concerns for Mormons in the Low Countries. In 2013 and 2019 two inquiries with extensive semi-structured interviews probed Mormon women’s experiences and reflections on a variety of gender issues, including women’s relation to the priesthood, schooling, employment, marriage, children, family state support, and sex education. The 2013 inquiry included 50 Mormon women from all over Europe.37 For our summary here, we selected data from the 16 respondents from the Low Countries. The 2019 inquiry addressed 14 women from the Low Countries, including 2 women of African origin.38 Their ages ranged from 21 to 91 years, with a distribution of single, married, divorced,

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and widowed women with different gender identities, and a political range from conservative to liberal. Counter to the contemporary tendencies of American Mormon feminism, LDS women in the Low Countries do not challenge the male-controlled structure of the church nor their exclusion from priesthood ordination. To them, feminism is an elapsed concept, outstripped by the emancipation of women distinctive of their countries. To the question, should women receive the priesthood, their unanimous response was no. When rephrased in a conditional form, that is, “If the prophet announced that from now on women can also receive the priesthood, (a) would you agree? (b) would you be happy?”— almost all agreed with (a), but for (b) still more than half replied in the negative. Their follow-up comments clarified that they were not eager for more church work assignments and responsibilities, that having the priesthood would not change anything in their relationship with God, and that it would entail the risk of less church activity among Mormon men. Low Countries’ LDS women believe that rather than bolstering them, the Mormon lay priesthood helps to mitigate their husband’s and son’s attitudes of male domination. When probed about conflictual situations with local church leaders, respondents asserted that they voiced their dissent in meetings with the male leadership. “I am also entitled to revelation,” a 42-year-old Flemish member said. “The women in my ward are used to retort, in all kinds of meetings and discussions,” a 55-year-old Dutch member commented. Several women pointed with some pride to their activism in dealing with American mission presidents not used to demurrals when it comes to baptizing ill-prepared converts: “I told him flatly he was wrong. He stood up and left the meeting.” In such contexts, the most engaged women, those who carry the burden in the women-led local auxiliary organizations, feel warranted in their occasional dissents by their perceived irreplaceability. Ward bishops cannot afford to lose their support. On the other hand, when confronted with the question of whether a woman, already overburdened by family and social duties, was entitled to refuse a demanding church calling, nearly all respondents felt that she should accept. A deep religious loyalty prevails among Low Countries’ Mormon women. A brief overview of other women’s concerns: for women’s schooling, the norms of the host society to maximize one’s education prevail, which is not contradicted by LDS Church values. LDS women’s employment follows local demographic trends: between 70 and 80 percent work outside the home. As for the best age to marry, all survey respondents ignored the counsel given by LDS general authorities to not postpone marriage. They favored diplomas, employment, and self-sufficiency before marriage, attributing divorce to premature and rushed weddings. The American dating system was rejected: they prefer the deep-rooted tradition of friendships in groups from which a one-to-­ one relationship may grow and take a long time to ripen before marriage is decided. In contrast to prevailing opinions among many American Mormons about socialism, Low Countries’ women acclaim European social laws that provide generous family allowances, maternity leave, and health coverage:

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“When I read about situations in America, I am so grateful for the solidarity that pays for our social provisions,” a 26-year-old said. On sex education, these women have no qualms about the age-appropriate but quite explicit courses provided at school, since they can complement it at home and at church with Mormon principles. National pride pervades: “Americans in general think of Holland as the modern Sodom and Gomorrah. Indeed, in Holland we are very open and we are rebels by nature. So yes, liberal thinking—and we openly talk about sex and drugs. But that liberty does not lead to more problems. Teen moms are a rare thing in Holland, and drug use by young people is lower than anywhere else in Europe,” a 40-year-old Mormon woman affirmed. Although Mormon culture, church lessons, and programs instill in children gendered expectations and gendered socialization in an androcentric religious environment, the results do not override the sense of woman’s equality, agentic prerogatives, and empowerment that the Dutch and Belgian societies at large provide. Local values predominate. They are more Mormon Europeans than European Mormons.39 LGBTQ Issues When it comes to gay rights, the Netherlands and Belgium have been social policy pioneers. They were among the first countries to introduce anti-­ discrimination legislation. They were the first countries to legalize same-sex marriage (SSM), respectively in 2001 and 2003. By framing gay rights as human rights, policymakers steered the discussion away from morality politics. The incentive to burnish an international reputation of progressiveness and tolerance was not foreign to the identity projection of these two small countries on the world stage. Since the 1990s, Dutch and Belgian media have been buttressing the naturalness of homosexuality and SSM. Homophobic attitudes and utterances are prone to immediate stigmatization. In 2019 the Netherlands and Belgium scored among the top ten European countries in regard to LGBT acceptance (their previous top position having declined somewhat due to antigay sentiments among a growing immigrant population).40 In the late 1990s, after decades of outspoken homo-negativity, LDS Church leaders came to recognize that homosexual attraction is not a choice. Still, they continue to consider any sexual relation outside a heterosexual marriage to be unacceptable. It is telling that in the very same years the Netherlands and Belgium were maturing toward SSM-legalization, the LDS Church waged major public campaigns against it in the United States (though never including Europe in their discourse). In the wake of Proposition 8 in California in 2008, but long after the Netherlands had legalized gay marriages, a high-ranking LDS Church official urged European stake presidents to take a political stand against SSM marriages, chiding local Dutch church leaders for not having stood up publicly against such marriages. His intervention showed his ignorance of Dutch political culture, in which it is social suicide for an organization to display any form of antigay sentiment. Also, his admonitions came a decade

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too late. Clearly, for the LDS Church, the crux for political action on these and other conservative issues lies in the United States, not in the European LDS Church. In June 2015 the US Supreme Court recognized the legality of SSM in all 50 states. Five months later the LDS Church issued a worldwide policy which excluded not only same-sex couples from normal church membership but also their children. This “policy of exclusion” deeply affected many members around the world. In Belgium, despondent members requested interviews with local leaders. One wrote a four-page essay which he distributed among members, expressing his indignation and grief, but concluding with a plea for Christian understanding. In the Netherlands a former stake president and an ex-bishop, among others, left the church over the issue. The LDS exclusion policy was rescinded in April 2019, but the impermissibility of homosexual conduct for members remains in place. Our inquiry among local LDS women revealed an almost unequivocal acceptance of LGBTQs, reflecting the social sentiments of the host society. Though religious conservatism is usually a factor for increased homo-­negativity, we found no trace of it among our respondents. Moreover, they shared the conviction that SSM will in due time be permitted in the LDS Church. Thus our respondents, including several conservative members, found solace in taking a future perspective. For example, “True, a religion must be allowed to set rules, but if these rules discriminate, they will need to be changed”; “Years from now, the leaders will recognize how laggard they were.” The two dissenting voices in our survey came from immigrant converts from Africa: “People who are gay—it’s very bad for them. Don’t force it on the Church. I don’t think that God takes his words back. What he said yesterday is going to be the same today, tomorrow, and forever.” The latter dissenting viewpoint notwithstanding, the primarily tolerant orientation of the broader Dutch and Flemish environments predominates in the personal convictions of LDS Church members. In spite of the overall understanding that Mormon LGBTQs members may expect from friends in their Dutch or Flemish wards, the strain between their religious and sexual identities is as equally testing as in other parts of the world. Many prefer not to “come out” and consequently suffer in silence, their plight known only to a few. Many have left the church over this issue, often in bitterness. Our interviews with a number of LGBTQ Latter-day Saints reveal an enduring problem.41 Organizational Tensions The local lay LDS Church organization, based on volunteers and unpaid labor, in itself does not pose a specific cultural challenge, since many voluntary associations (sports clubs, cultural organizations, political parties, etc.) operate in the same way. The latter, of course, do not attribute the same level of authority as Mormons do to leadership positions in their groups.

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Even so, Dutch Mormons exhibit some cultural difference when compared to Flemish Mormons, with the Dutch more inclined to question hierarchy and insist on gaining a social consensus after lengthy debates. The primary Dutch approach is “to polder” any new territory (or policy areas) through general and intensive negotiation.42 By way of analogy and in contrast to church directives, the “polder” itself is not elevated but characterized by fundamental equality. A little compartmentalization might supervene this contradiction. The ways of the LDS Church are top-down, while the polder is Dutch. What remains is the idea that true authority has to be earned, not assumed by virtue of occupying an institutional position. Rotation of local lay callings, another pivotal aspect of LDS Church operation, does not fit easily with Dutch culture. The amount of authority invested in church callings is rather exceptional for temporary positions, and it presents two challenges: a minor one when assuming the mantle, but a larger one when one is stepping down or rather “being stepped down.” Though the association between personal worth and power of one’s position is not as closely connected in Dutch culture as it is elsewhere,43 losing the authority and power of a leading position is never easy. The LDS Church does not give the same attention to “has-beens” as it does to the newly invested. Lay leaders who step down, such as bishops and stake presidents, may become significantly less active or even inactive—a process which we dub “bleeding from the top.” As we see it, a challenge for the LDS Church is to adopt procedures for dealing with the loss of ecclesiastical authority by those who are officially released from their former ward or stake positions. First, those recently released have to be imbued with a feeling of worth, of a job well done, as part of a managerial relay in which they carried and subsequently transferred the leadership baton. Too often attention is almost exclusively on the new team as the ones who are going to solve current problems, which by implication are partly the legacy of the old team. Second, the accrued experience of former leaders could be utilized much better, in advisory or consulting capacities, leading to a larger institutional memory for local organizations. If this is to mean more than tokenism, it would have important repercussions for church leadership. LDS top-down management practices, which rely on a top-down information stream, create dependency of the lower ranks on the higher echelons of authority. With greater provision for institutional memory in local leadership, stakes and wards would be in a better position to develop their own leadership style and achieve better adaptation to their own cultural environments in the global church. Developing Racially Diverse Congregations Historically, local Dutch and Flemish congregations have always experienced a bicultural dimension due to the presence of American missionaries. Social bonding between them, their converts, and long-term local members—their usually very different age ranges and class profiles not withstanding—has set patterns of positive interaction with newcomers. Belonging to a strong,

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self-affirming minority religion is deeply connecting. Over the years this bicultural dimension has turned multicultural. An increasing number of Mormon converts—in fact the majority—are non-European immigrants, refugees, temporary workers, and international students, in particular from sub-­Saharan Africa. Such immigrants are more open to missionaries and are in search of inclusion. They contribute to multicultural congregations, but they often and naturally form their own native or racial clusters. Some newcomers were already Mormon in their country of origin before migrating. In major cities such as Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Brussels, it makes the local congregation multilingual and multiracial. The centralized governance of the LDS Church prohibits the natural emergence of ethnically segregated wards, as members must attend the designated ward of their particular geographical area. Acculturation of these immigrants involves intersectional dynamics pertaining to religion, ethnicity, community, and gender,44 in the following ways. (1) As Mormons, immigrants are religiously marginal in their Dutch and Flemish host societies (which are mainly Protestant and Catholic), but they also share this peripheral position with the native members. LDS Church rhetoric reinforces this feeling of moral exceptionality “against the world.” (2) When immigrants come from a country, region, or clan with a strong religious identity, their conversion to Mormonism may lead to ostracism within their larger ethnic group. At the same time, within a local Mormon congregation, they naturally form small, same-ethnic, or same-lingual clusters (e.g., by sitting together in church meetings or having their own Sunday school class in English, Spanish, or French). While these clusters serve as havens for preserving their original identity, they are still embedded in the congregation as a whole. (3) Indeed, as to community, Mormon worship easily incorporates immigrants by having males officiate in the Sunday ordinance of the sacrament and by having both males and females offer prayers and give sermons. The spatial sharing in these core religious activities fosters feelings of community. Further steps follow. Faithful and dependable immigrants are being called to leadership positions, which Mormon wards amply offer in their intricate organizational structure. Men serve in priesthood roles, and women as presidents, counselors, or teachers in auxiliary organizations. Such visible multiracial ministry underscores the acceptance of diversity.45 (4) From a gendered perspective, this kind of church involvement can be particularly beneficial for those migrant women whose lives tend to be confined to family life. By collaborating with local women and by joining in service activities in the wider community, they are able to expand their social circle beyond the limitations that other migrants encounter. As such, Mormon congregations can function as an effective intermediate step toward their broader integration in local society. In short, Mormon congregations in the Low Countries (and in European countries in general) can contribute to overcoming racial divides and fostering migrants’ integration, provided that proper attention is paid to this potential. At the same time, local native members will have to adapt to their changing congregational identity.

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Future Developments and Expectations for Mormonism in the Low Countries Our most realistic assessment is that there will be no “second harvest” in the Low Countries.46 For those who insist on a second harvest, it already came during the 1980s and a third is not in the cards. Secularization is not going to stop in Europe, and organized religions in European countries will continue to lose power. That is to say, the religious aspect of churches will become less important, and their reliance on belief in the supernatural as a basis for their power will continue to dwindle. What remains strong is the community function of religious organizations, something at which the LDS Church excels. Personal bonds and social belonging are the main ingredients for the cohesive functioning of LDS wards and branches, a situation long acknowledged. A sense of relative isolation from the mainstream culture is quite effective in bringing about we-feeling and intense social interaction. This is a dynamic fueled both by the notion of belonging to the “true church” and discourse concerning “the world” as an opponent. The Mormon Word of Wisdom has long been recognized as a social marker, with the non-drinking of coffee as a major badge of difference in the Low Countries, in which not drinking alcohol has become quite acceptable and non-smoking is now the norm. Statistically, the average Mormon in the Low Countries is religiously inactive (some 70–75 percent of the members on record). In the recent past, Low Countries’ Mormonism displayed very little margin between active members and the ones who never showed up. With a longer and more established presence, the phenomenon of the “cultural Mormon” is now emerging. These are individuals who are church members but seldom show up in the ward to attend meetings or participate in church activities (usually only on special occasions). A few of these, in fact, are former leaders, who after an intense involvement in the church now maintain a greater distance. But the largest fraction of cultural Mormons today are children of active LDS parents, who are going their own way, but still retain a little “Mormon DNA.” Although returning to the fold does occur, it is rare. It is also a moment of deep rejoicing for a local LDS ward. In the United States, most returnees are motivated by the prospect of raising a family, for which the warm nest of a well-­ functioning Mormon ward is a definite asset. In the Low Countries churches were never viewed as crucial in raising children, and at present, contemporary religion is considered a divisive issue in both families and other social gatherings. People tend to avoid speaking about religion for several reasons: religion has become highly personal, the past has seen too much strife over religion to be comfortable in conversation, and agreement to disagree is easier in politics—and certainly in voetbal (soccer), the prime topic for conversation, together with the weather, among people of the Low Countries. The social function of Dutch and Flemish wards will probably increase, providing as they do a safe haven for social interaction and mutual discourse on existential matters. Ethnic diversity in the LDS Church will increase further,

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since ethnic minorities in the Low Countries not only will continue to grow but also are less affected by secularization. Multicultural wards, on the other hand, are also multilingual wards, which makes full participation in lay leadership positions by immigrants challenging. So, the present trend will continue: a small core of leading families, often second or third generation, will bear the burden of church leadership (and receive the benefits in terms of status and recognition), hosting a fragmented fringe of congregations that speak only English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, or Romanian. Since Dutch is not a world language, the learning of foreign languages is a major part of education and culture in the Low Countries. Hence, multilingualism is easily accepted. Verbalized feelings of patriotic superiority are considered out of place, so multiculturalism is promoted. A major issue for church members in the Low Countries is how they will react to the increasing difference between their in-house “Mormonese” discourse and the realities in the larger society. Will local Mormonism slide into a more fundamentalist position, defining itself ever more as “not of this world”? Viewing the level of integration of the majority of members in their communities and general society, this is improbable.47 Although members tend to favor contacts with fellow believers, in their work, families, and community, they are always surrounded by non-LDS in secular settings in which they feel very much at home. For them a secular public space is not only a given, it is also an asset. Any religious space in Europe is filled with other religions which are definitely not LDS, and these other religious groups are much more hostile to the LDS presence than is secular society. So neither religious secularism nor secularization is seen as a particular problem for local Mormons. For them (contrary to the American view), a secular space is one in which church members can be themselves. In short, Dutch and Flemish Mormons—as is the case generally in Europe—are fully at ease in a church which does not have political power. In the past they have seen too much abuse of religious power to strive for a close connection between the religion of their choice and the centers of power. This position in the social margin can be quite comfortable, and Dutch and Flemish Mormons are not inclined to impose their world view upon others. This attitude, of course, stands perpendicular to the popular Mormon catchphrase, “every member a missionary.” Nonetheless, talks and presentations about missionary work in Low Countries’ congregations quickly turn willing ears tone-­ deaf. It is telling that in the Netherlands and Flanders, almost no converts are gained from member referrals. As already suggested, comfort in the margin can only be obtained by compartmentalized thinking plus a precarious balance between cognitive and emotional costs and benefits in terms of market theory analysis. Armand Mauss has commented on the costs and benefits for European members of the LDS Church,48 and the development of this equation will color its future in the Low Countries. Secularization marginalizes belief, and being religious will increasingly demand greater explanation—a clear social cost. On the other hand, religions still have a strong foothold in ethical debates, and it might be well for

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Mormons to engage more in these debates. Experience shows that if one does, it usually is appreciated unless, of course, fundamentalist sentiments are expressed, which turns very much against the church. Secularity has a religious vacuum at its center, or, in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, “Europe has a God-­ shaped hole at its heart.”49 Thus, to some extent Low Countries’ Mormonism could become part of a European ethical consciousness. But vis-à-vis other churches on the societal rim, LDS discourse as “the one and only true church” would have to be subdued, even muted, since such claims are increasingly seen as outdated. This would ease isolation and decrease the social cost of LDS membership. Having a strong and welcoming LDS ward or branch is probably the crucial element in the cost–benefit equation. In a secular environment life’s major questions become increasingly difficult to speak about outside the orbit of specialized professional settings, and a clear religious demarcation of a safe discourse environment is a great asset. The LDS Church in Europe is predominantly an urban phenomenon, a setting inherently lacking self-evident, small-scale communities. It is here where the local LDS ward fits well as a social haven. The internal religious discourse will be at variance with the national discourses, and this is where compartmentalization can help. A church culture that is different from the culture at large needs a compartmentalized definition of itself. In this regard the LDS Church would need to strike a precarious balance between being different enough to produce a sheltering environment, yet close enough to fit into a national culture along with fellow citizens on the religious margins. Mormonism is a high-cost, high-investment religion. Members have to cherish returns on their investment in terms of spiritual comfort and social belonging against the cost of isolation. It is difficult to see how this process can be achieved in the Low Countries without further developing an appropriate LDS culture more in tune with Dutch and Flemish cultural norms and with less reliance on outside input from LDS headquarters in Salt Lake City.

Notes 1. Keith C. Warner, “History of the Netherlands Mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1861–1966,” Master’s thesis (Brigham Young University, 1967): 149. 2. See Walter van Beek, “The Temple and the Sacred: Dutch Temple Experiences,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 45, no. 4 (2012): 27–54. 3. The church administration keeps track of its membership demographics, church attendance, and involvement, but does not disclose this information. We could obtain only limited figures. See also David Clark Knowlton, “How Many Members Are There Really? Two Censuses and the Meaning of LDS Membership in Chile and Mexico,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 38, no. 2 (2005): 53–78. 4. Figures obtained from church headquarters. The public figures which the Church Newsroom provides mention for the whole of the Netherlands 9421 members for 2018. The figures are difficult to parse because the Antwerp Stake,

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with its base in Flanders, now also includes parts of the south of the Netherlands. For Belgium, the Church Newsroom provides figures for the whole country, thus including the French-speaking south. At the end of 2019, the four Dutchspeaking stakes (Antwerp, Apeldoorn, The Hague, and Rotterdam) report a total of 9869 members, but transfer of the international ward in Brussels to the Antwerp Stake further muddles precise counting. 5. Wilfried Decoo, “Feeding the Fleeing Flock: Reflections on the Struggle to Retain Church Members in Europe,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29, no. 1 (1996): 97–118. 6. Gary C.  Lobb, “Mormon Membership Trends in Europe Among People of Color: Present and Future Assessment,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 33, no. 4 (2000): 55–68. 7. José Casanova, “The Karel Dobbelaere Lecture: Divergent Global Roads to Secularization and Religious Pluralism,” Social Compass 65, no. 2 (2018): 187–98. 8. Casanova, “The Karel Dobbelaere Lecture,” 191. 9. David Martin, On Secularization. Towards a Revised General Theory (London: Ashgate, 2005). 10. This Latin phrase literally means “whose region, his religion.” Before toleration of individual religious differences became widely accepted, most European political theorists took it for granted that religious diversity weakened the power of the state under monarchical control. The expression formed the catchphrase in the treaty of Augsburg in 1555, that settled the religious differences within the Holy Roman Empire of Charles V, between Lutherans and Catholics. 11. José Casanova, Public Religion and the Modern World (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999); Grace Davie, “Patterns of Religion in Western Europe: An Exceptional Case,” in Bernice Martin and Richard K.  Fenn, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Sociology of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001): 264–78. 12. Casanova, “The Karel Dobbelaere Lecture,” 192. 13. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). See also Peter Berger, The Many Altars of Modernity. Towards a Paradigm for Religions in a Pluralist Age (Boston MA: De Gruyter, 2014). 14. Rob S. Warner, Secularization and Its Discontents (London: A&C Black, 2010). 15. Warner, Secularization, 24. 16. Gerard Dekker, Van het Centrum naar de Marge. De Ontwikkeling van de Christelijke Godsdienst in Nederland (Kampen: Kok, 2006): 98. 17. Dekker, Van het Centrum, 211. 18. De Hart, Zwevende Gelovigen, 217. See also Warner, Secularization, 68. 19. Joep de Hart, Zwevende Gelovigen. Oude Religie en Spiritualiteit (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2011). 20. Davie, “Patterns,” 270. 21. Gregory A. Prince and Wim Robert Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005): 113. 22. Geert Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations (London: Sage, 2001): 63. 23. Wilfried Decoo, “Mormonism in a European Catholic Region: Contribution to the Social Psychology of LDS Converts,” BYU Studies 24, no. 1 (1984): 61–77. 24. Jaak Billiet, “De evolutie van de betrokkenheid bij de katholieke kerk in Vlaanderen 1996–2015,” in Ann Carton, Jan Pickery, and Dries Verlet, eds., 20

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jaar peilen in Vlaanderen! De survey ‘Sociaal-culturele verschuivingen in Vlaanderen’ (Brussel: Studiedienst Vlaamse Regering, 2017): 125–50. 25. Karel Dobbelaere and Liliane Voyé, “From Pillar to Postmodernity: The Changing Situation of Religion in Belgium,” Sociological Analysis 51, Special Issue (1990): S1–S13. 26. Ipsos, American and Global Views on Religion (New York: Ipsos, 2017). 27. Leni Franken and Paul Vermeer, “Deconfessionalising RE in Pillarised Education Systems: A Case Study of Belgium and the Netherlands,” British Journal of Religious Education 41, no. 3 (2019): 272–85; Leni Franken, “Ethics and Religious Culture: An Inspiring Example for Religious Education in Flanders,” Journal of Religious Education 67, no. 1 (2019): 1–19. 28. Paul Borghs and Bart Eeckhout, “LGB Rights in Belgium, 1999–2007: A Historical Survey of a Velvet Revolution,” International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family 24, no. 1 (2009): 1–28. 29. Herman Cosijns, ed., De Katholieke Kerk in België 2018: Jaarrapport (Brussel: Licap, 2018). 30. Pew Research Center, “Being Christian in Western Europe” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2018). 31. Decoo, “Mormonism.” 32. Adelbert Denaux, Godsdienstsekten in Vlaanderen (Leuven: Davidsfonds 1982). 33. George Tuffin, Mormonen in Vlaanderen, Deel 1  – 1840–1959, Deel 2  – 1960–1969 (Kerk van Jezus Christus van de Heiligen der Laatste Dagen, 2012, 2018). 34. Walter van Beek, “Mormon Europeans or European Mormons? An Afro-­ European look at religious colonization,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 38, no. 4 (2005): 3–36. 35. Adelbert Denaux, “The Attitude of Belgian Authorities toward New Religious Movements,” Brigham Young University Law Review (2002): 237–67. 36. Thomas W.  Murphy, “‘Stronger Than Ever’: Remnants of the Third Convention,” The Journal of Latter Day Saint History 10, no. 1 (1998): 8–11; F.  LaMond Tullis, Mormons in Mexico: The Dynamics of Faith and Culture (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1987). 37. Carine Decoo-Vanwelkenhuysen, “Mormon Women in Europe: A Look at Gender Norms,” in Kate Holbrook and Matthew Burton Bowman, eds., Women and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2016): 213–29. 38. Ellen Decoo, PhD work in progress, University of Ghent. 39. Van Beek, “Mormon Europeans,” 28. 40. Kristof De Witte, Kaat Iterbeke, and Oliver Holz. “Teachers’ and Pupils’ Perspectives on Homosexuality: A Comparative Analysis across European Countries.” International Sociology 34.4 (2019): 471–519; European Commission, Eurobarometer on Discrimination 2019: The Social Acceptance of LGBTI People in the EU (Brussels: European Commission, 2019). 41. Wilfried Decoo and Ellen Decoo, “De visie op homoseksualiteit bij mormonen: verkenning in een historisch-sociologisch kader,” Religie & Samenleving 14, no. 3 (2019): 244–71. 42. “Poldering” is a method of reclaiming land from the sea involving the use of “polders” as a way to control floods. A polder is a piece of land in a low-lying

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area that has been reclaimed from a body of water by building dikes and drainage canals. 43. Jennifer Huss Basquiat, “Embodied Mormonism: Performance, Vodou and the LDS Faith in Haiti,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 37, no. 4 (2004): 1–34. 44. Curtiss Paul DeYoung, Michael O. Emerson, George Yancey, and Karen Chai Kim, United by Faith: The Multiracial Congregation as an Answer to the Problem of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Janet Saltzman Chafetz and Helen Rose Ebaugh, Religion and the New Immigrants: Continuities and Adaptations in Immigrant Congregations (Walnut Cree, CA: AltaMira Press, 2000); Brandon C. Martinez, “The Integration of Racial and Ethnic Minorities into White Congregations,” Sociological Inquiry 88, no. 3 (2018): 467–93; George Yancey and Michael Emerson, “Integrated Sundays: An Exploratory Study into the Formation of Multiracial Churches,” Sociological Focus 36, no. 2 (2003): 111–26. 45. Kevin D. Dougherty and Kimberly R. Huyser, “Racially Diverse Congregations: Organizational Identity and the Accommodation of Differences,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 47, no. 1 (2008): 23–44. 46. Armand L. Mauss, “Can There Be a ‘Second Harvest’?: Controlling the Costs of Latter-day Saint Membership in Europe,” International Journal of Mormon Studies 1 (2008): 1–59. 47. Walter van Beek, “Ethnization and Accommodation: Dutch Mormons in Twenty-First Century Europe,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29, no. 1 (1996): 119–38. 48. Mauss, “Can There Be,” 2008. 49. Cited in Karen Armstrong, A History of God, From Abraham to the Present: the 4000 year Quest for God (London: Heinemann, 1995): 418.

Bibliography Armstrong, Karen. 1995. A History of God, From Abraham to the Present: The 4000 year Quest for God. London: Heinemann. Basquiat, Jennifer Huss. 2004. Embodied Mormonism: Performance, Vodou and the LDS Faith in Haiti. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 37 (4): 1–34. Berger, Peter. 2014. The Many Altars of Modernity. Towards a Paradigm for Religions in a Pluralist Age. Boston, MA: De Gruyter. Bernts, Ton, and Joantine Berghuijs. 2016. God in Nederland 1966–2015. Utrecht: Ten Have. Billiet, Jaak. 2017. De evolutie van de betrokkenheid bij de katholieke kerk in Vlaanderen 1996–2015. In 20 jaar peilen in Vlaanderen! De survey ‘Sociaal-culturele verschuivingen in Vlaanderen’, ed. Ann Carton, Jan Pickery, and Dries Verlet, 125–150. Brussel: Studiedienst Vlaamse Regering. Borghs, Paul, and Bart Eeckhout. 2009. LGB Rights in Belgium, 1999–2007: A Historical Survey of a Velvet Revolution. International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family 24 (1): 1–28. Casanova, José. 1999. Public Religion and the Modern World. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

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———. 2018. The Karel Dobbelaere Lecture: Divergent Global Roads to Secularization and Religious Pluralism. Social Compass 65 (2): 187–198. Chafetz, Janet Saltzman, and Helen Rose Ebaugh. 2000. Religion and the New Immigrants: Continuities and Adaptations in Immigrant Congregations. Walnut Cree, CA: AltaMira Press. Cosijns, Herman, ed. 2018. De Katholieke Kerk in België 2018: Jaarrapport. Brussel: Licap. Davie, Grace. 2001. Patterns of Religion in Western Europe: An Exceptional Case. In The Blackwell Companion to Sociology of Religion, ed. Bernice Martin and Richard K. Fenn, 264–278. Oxford: Blackwell. De Hart, Joep. 2011. Zwevende Gelovigen. Oude Religie en Spiritualiteit. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker. De Witte, Kristof, Kaat Iterbeke, and Oliver Holz. 2019. Teachers’ and Pupils’ Perspectives on Homosexuality: A Comparative Analysis Across European Countries. International Sociology 34 (4): 471–519. Decoo, Wilfried. 1984. Mormonism in a European Catholic Country: Contribution to the Social Psychology of LDS Converts. BYU Studies 24 (1): 61–77. ———. 1996. Feeding the Fleeing Flock: Reflections on the Struggle to Retain Church Members in Europe. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29 (1): 97–118. Decoo, Wilfried, and Ellen Decoo. 2019. De visie op homoseksualiteit bij mormonen: verkenning in een historisch-sociologisch kader. Religie & Samenleving 14 (3): 244–271. Decoo-Vanwelkenhuysen, Carine. 2016. Mormon Women in Europe: A Look at Gender Norms. In Women and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Kate Holbrook and Matthew Burton Bowman, 213–229. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press. Dekker, Gerard. 2006. Van het Centrum naar de Marge. De Ontwikkeling van de Christelijke Godsdienst in Nederland. Kampen: Kok. Denaux, Adelbert. 1982. Godsdienstsekten in Vlaanderen. Leuven: Davidsfonds. ———. 2002. The Attitude of Belgian Authorities toward New Religious Movements. Brigham Young University Law Review 2002: 237–267. DeYoung, Curtiss Paul, Michael O.  Emerson, George Yancey, and Karen Chai Kim. 2004. United by Faith: The Multiracial Congregation as an Answer to the Problem of Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dobbelaere, Karel, and Liliane Voyé. 1990. From Pillar to Postmodernity: The Changing Situation of Religion in Belgium. Sociological Analysis 51: S1–S13. Dougherty, Kevin D., and Kimberly R. Huyser. 2008. Racially Diverse Congregations: Organizational Identity and the Accommodation of Differences. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 47 (1): 23–44. European Commission. 2019. Eurobarometer on Discrimination 2019: The Social Acceptance of LGBTI People in the EU. Brussels: European Commission. Franken, Leni. 2019. Ethics and Religious Culture: An Inspiring Example for Religious Education in Flanders. Journal of Religious Education 67 (1): 1–19. Franken, Leni, and Paul Vermeer. 2019. Deconfessionalising RE in Pillarised Education Systems: A Case Study of Belgium and the Netherlands. British Journal of Religious Education 41 (3): 272–285. Hofstede, Geert. 2001. Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations. London: Sage. Ipsos. 2017. American and Global Views on Religion. New York: Ipsos.

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Knowlton, David Clark. 2005. How Many Members Are There Really? Two Censuses and the Meaning of LDS Membership in Chile and Mexico. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 38 (2): 53–78. Lobb, C. Gary. 2000. Mormon Membership Trends in Europe among People of Color: Present and Future Assessment. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 33 (4): 59–68. Martin, David. 2005. On Secularization. Towards a Revised General Theory. London: Ashgate. Martinez, Brandon C. 2018. The Integration of Racial and Ethnic Minorities into White Congregations. Sociological Inquiry 88 (3): 467–493. Mauss, Armand L. 2008. Can There Be a ‘Second Harvest’?: Controlling the Costs of Latter-day Saint Membership in Europe. International Journal of Mormon Studies 1: 1–59. Murphy, Thomas W. 1998. ‘Stronger Than Ever’: Remnants of the Third Convention. The Journal of Latter Day Saint History 10 (1): 8–11. Pew Research Center. 2018. Being Christian in Western Europe. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Prince, Gregory A., and Wim Robert Wright. 2005. David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tuffin, George. 2018. Mormonen in Vlaanderen: Deel 1  – 1840–1959, Deel 2  – 1960–1969. Antwerpen: Kerk van Jezus Christus van de Heiligen der Laatste Dagen, 2012. Tullis, F.  LaMond. 1987. Mormons in Mexico: The Dynamics of Faith and Culture. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Van Beek, Walter E.A. 1996. Ethnization and Accommodation: Dutch Mormons in Twenty First-Century Europe. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29 (1): 119–138. ———. 2005. Mormon Europeans or European Mormons? An ‘Afro-European’ View on Religious Colonization. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 38 (4): 3–36. ———. 2012. The Temple and the Sacred: Dutch Temple Experiences. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 45 (4): 27–52. Warner, Keith C. 1967. History of the Netherlands Mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1861–1966. Master’s thesis, Brigham Young University. Warner, Rob S. 2010. Secularization and Its Discontents. London: A&C Black. Yancey, George, and Michael Emerson. 2003. Integrated Sundays: An Exploratory Study into the Formation of Multiracial Churches. Sociological Focus 36 (2): 111–126.

CHAPTER 20

Mormons in the Nordic Region Julie K. Allen and Kim B. Östman

Despite its present reputation as one of the most secular parts of the world, the Nordic region of Europe1—comprised of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands—was, on the whole, a high growth area for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS)2 in the nineteenth century. However, while the large-scale immigration of over 20,000 Nordic converts to the Utah territory made significant contributions to the success of the fledgling American Mormon settlement, LDS congregations in the Nordic countries themselves have rarely been particularly large or influential in their local contexts. For those church members who stayed in—or returned to—the Nordic countries, the struggle to maintain and expand the LDS Church has been a constant one. The LDS Church has maintained a constant presence in the Nordic region since May 1850, with dramatic fluctuations in membership size during the nineteenth century, largely due to emigration and disaffection, but its membership has been largely stable or slowly increasing in numbers since the mid-twentieth century. This is true for all Nordic countries except Greenland and the Faroe Islands, where the LDS Church has not been officially established. Given the close cultural and, until fairly recently in most of the Nordic countries, legal connections between the Lutheran religion and the state, being a Mormon in Scandinavia has meant breaking away from mainstream society and accepting an identity as non-normative in relation to the surrounding

J. K. Allen (*) • K. B. Östman Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_20

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culture. One result of the cultural marginalization of Nordic Mormons has been the development of very close-knit church communities in each of the Nordic countries, which have a highly developed sense of identity, largely independent of the cultural norms of the LDS Church in the US. This chapter will begin with an abbreviated historical overview of LDS activity in the Nordic region, before assessing the state of LDS Church membership in the Nordic countries today, paying particular attention to the faith’s appeal and the challenges it presents to members in these areas in comparison to the US.

An Abbreviated History of the LDS Church in the Nordic Region The history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Nordic region is inextricable from the social and political conditions in the region. The Church’s initial forays into Scandinavia took place during the second half of the nineteenth century as the Nordic countries began their slow turn away from absolutism toward secularism and democracy, while in the present, these hybrid capitalist-social democratic Nordic states lead the world in providing a social safety net and low levels of regular church attendance. While a few Scandinavians, largely sailors, had joined the LDS Church in the US before 1850, the establishment of local congregations in country was crucial to the large-scale conversion of Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, and Icelanders in the 1850s and 1860s, with smaller groups of Finnish converts forming in the 1870s and 1880s. Native Dane Peter Olsen Hansen (1818–1894), who had been baptized by his brother in Boston in 1844, was commissioned by LDS Church authorities in 1849 to preach in Scandinavia, together with apostle Erastus Snow (1818–1888), while native Swede John Erik Forsgren (1816–1890)—who had joined the Church in Boston in 1843—successfully petitioned church leaders for permission to return to his homeland as a missionary as well. When they stopped in the United Kingdom on their way east to raise funds for their mission, they were joined by George Parker Dykes (1804–1888), who had learned some Norwegian while proselytizing among Norwegian settlers in the Fox River Valley, Illinois. These first representatives of the LDS Church in Scandinavia arrived in Copenhagen, Denmark, in May and June 1850, almost precisely one year after Denmark had adopted its first democratic constitution, which established protection for a range of civil rights, including the freedom to worship according to one’s conscience. This unprecedented step came in response to half a century of religious agitation in the region sparked by a Pietistic revival movement that led to the emergence of dissenter groups such as the Haugeans in Norway, Janssonists in Sweden, and Laestadians in Sápmi, as well as initial incursions by American religions, notably the Baptists, which had formed an illegal congregation in Copenhagen in 1839, led by Peter Christian Mønster. A political crisis that erupted in the early 1840s over governmental attempts to forcibly

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baptize the children of Baptists into the state Lutheran church had provided some of the impetus for the establishment of limited religious freedom in the 1849 constitution.3 The LDS missionary efforts in Denmark found their first foothold in the cities of Copenhagen and Aalborg, among Danish Baptists, who shared the LDS belief in adult baptism by immersion. Peter Hansen, whose brother had been a Baptist prior to his conversion to Mormonism, arrived in Copenhagen several weeks before his fellows and was immediately befriended by two Baptist sailors. When Snow and Dykes arrived, one of the first people they met with was Pastor Mønster, who initially welcomed the LDS missionaries as allies. In his notes about their meeting, Snow acknowledged that Mønster had experienced much the same persecution in Denmark as early Mormons in the US,4 but that did not prevent him from focusing LDS missionary work on Mønster’s congregation, which yielded the first 150 converts to Mormonism in Denmark, the first of whom were baptized on August 12, 1850, in the sea near Copenhagen. The people baptized that day were not the first Mormon converts in Scandinavia—Forsgren had baptized his brother Peter Adolph, his sister Christina Erika, and a few others in Gävle, Sweden, on July 26, 1850, and 17 members of a group of America-bound emigrants on August 6—but they laid the foundation for the LDS Church in Denmark and the Nordic region as a whole. By contrast, Forsgren’s efforts bore little immediate fruit, as Swedish laws against proselytizing inhibited missionary work in the 1850s—Forsgren himself was deported back to Denmark in September 1850. Although the 1809 Swedish constitution stated that the king’s responsibility was to protect each person’s free exercise of religion “provided he does not thereby disturb public order or occasion general offense” (article 16), it still defined religion as “synonymous with the Evangelical Lutheran faith as expressed in the Augsburg Confession of 1530 and upheld by the Uppsala Synod of 1593.”5 It would be another decade until the Dissenter Act of 1860 gave Swedes the right to leave the state church and convert to an approved Christian denomination, while also legalizing the establishment of Christian congregations by non-Lutheran groups, subject to royal approval. Nonetheless, in May 1851, two Swedish men who had been baptized as Latter-day Saints in Copenhagen were sent back to the southern Swedish province of Skåne with the instructions “by a wise, prudent course to avoid conflict with the Swedish police.”6 Four LDS congregations were established in Skåne in 1853, expanding to 36 branches by 1860, but the Church didn’t buy any property in Sweden until 1905. Meanwhile, in Denmark, the Church grew rapidly. The four missionaries from the US, assisted by new converts deputized as local missionaries, baptized around 260 people in their first year. This enabled them to organize congregations in Copenhagen, Aalborg, and Hals, in addition to informal meetings held in Odense, Aarhus, Roskilde, Fredericia, Rønne, and many other Danish towns. Under Snow’s direction and with the editorial services of a Danish woman

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whose name has unfortunately not been recorded, Hansen completed the translation of the Book of Mormon into Danish that he had begun a decade earlier in Nauvoo, Illinois. When it was published in 1851, Mormons Bog became the first foreign-language edition of the Book of Mormon. Given the mutual comprehensibility of the Scandinavian languages in their written form, it served the entire Nordic region until the publication of a Swedish translation in 1878. The first Norwegian edition did not appear until 1950, followed by Finnish in 1954, and Icelandic in 1981. The Book of Mormon has not yet been translated into Faroese, Greenlandic, or any of the Sámi languages. Despite the rights granted in the 1849 Danish constitution, it took several years for specific laws in support of the exercise of religious freedom to be enacted. The missionaries’ success aroused the opposition of the Danish Lutheran clergy, who published anti-Mormon articles and books, began holding evening meetings to compete with the Mormons, instructed their parishioners not to speak to or support either the missionaries or their converts in any way, and often read over the pulpit the names of those who “had been lost to Mormonism … [which seemed] to the Mormons a fiendish device for identifying converts and setting neighbor against neighbor, a call to ostracize, to boycott, and to persecute.”7 In some cases, Danish pastors even incited their parishioners to mob violence against Mormon gatherings. Missionaries in Odense and Aalborg, among other cities, reported having their meetings disrupted, their premises destroyed, and their lives threatened, though none suffered serious harm. Although many local government officials and law enforcement officers either continued to enforce outdated laws or failed to protect the free exercise of religion, ordinary citizens often rallied to the missionaries’ defense. In Denmark, such treatment only lasted for the first few years of Mormon activity, subsiding into more subtle ways of expressing disapproval or disdain for this new and often confrontational type of religious identity in their midst, while the Church continued to grow, particularly in the Jutland peninsula, from where more than half of all Danish converts in this period originated.8 LDS missionary work quickly spread to the neighboring Nordic countries of Norway and Iceland. A Norwegian ship captain named Svend Larsen joined the Church in Aalborg in September 1851, taking two missionaries back to Norway with him, while two converts in Copenhagen were Icelanders—Thorarinn Haflidason Thorason and Gudmund Gudmundson—who returned to Iceland in April 1851 and began preaching there, eventually establishing a small congregation in the Westman Islands in June 1853, despite Thorason’s accidental drowning in December 1851. In Norway, where the first two LDS congregations were formed in July 1852, religious practice outside the parameters of the state-supported Norwegian Lutheran church was technically possible with the passage of the so-called Dissenter Law of 1845, which allowed Christian dissenters to establish congregations in Norway, but since the clergy did not consider the “Mormon” church to be Christian, LDS missionaries were still regularly harassed by mobs and local authorities, and frequently imprisoned and

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fined.9 As they were not allowed to meet in public, as they could in Denmark, most early LDS gatherings in Norway took place in private homes; the great distance between Norwegian towns and the challenging physical terrain also limited the ground the missionaries could cover. Even against such odds, LDS missionaries baptized 1758 Norwegians in their first decade in the country, which might explain why, as historian Frode Ulvund notes, Mormons were regarded, along with Jews and Jesuits, as particularly dangerous by the political and theological establishment and were accused of attempting to create a “state within the state” that threatened national sovereignty.10 Similarly, despite the fact that Iceland was part of the Danish empire until 1944 and thus technically subject to the Danish constitution, difficulties were severe enough that Iceland was closed to missionary work from 1914 to 1975. The situation in Finland was rather different since the LDS Church did not establish an official presence there in the nineteenth century, due to the country’s status as a grand duchy of the Russian Empire from 1809 until 1917. Until the passage of a Dissenter Law in 1889, the only legal options for religious affiliation were the Russian Orthodox church and the Lutheran church of Finland. Mormon missionaries from the Stockholm Conference began preaching in Finland in 1875, but ran into difficulties with both Lutheran clergy and civil authorities, who regarded Mormonism as a religious threat and an illegal religious movement, respectively. These difficulties are illustrated by the case of Swedish gardener Johan Blom, who moved to neighboring Finland with his family in 1880 to help establish the Church, performed two baptisms in 1882, for which he served prison time in early 1886. Despite such difficulties and the fact that the Church did not seek recognition under the Dissenter Law of 1889, about 80 Finns were baptized between 1876 and 1900.11 The already-­ Mormon Blom family emigrated to Utah later in 1886, but fewer than ten of the early Finnish converts did so. Some of those who stayed behind tried to maintain their religious practice on their own, with a few sporadic visits from missionaries and church leaders, but church activity effectively died out for several decades. Only one group in rural west-coast Larsmo managed to keep going and began to receive increasing missionary visits in the 1930s.12 While this restoration of relations contributed to bringing about, on the one hand, the organization of the Finnish mission in 1947, with 129 members at year’s end, it also enabled a second, larger wave of Finnish migration to Utah after World War II.13 Paradoxically, the flow of emigrants from the Nordic countries to the Utah territory—which began with the first shipload of Danish converts in 1852 and eventually grew to encompass over 20,000 Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Icelanders, and Finns in the nineteenth century—was both one of the causes of the LDS Church’s rapid growth in the US and one of its greatest challenges in the Nordic region. The displacement of converts from their native lands to the western US was crucial to the Church’s survival in the 1850s and 1860s, but it also weakened the Church’s position in the countries from which those convertemigrants were drawn.14 Converts were strongly encouraged to join the main

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body of the Church in the Utah territory, a doctrine known as “gathering to Zion,” and LDS authorities offered not only logistical support, between 1852 and 1890, for organizing emigrant companies and undertaking the voyage, usually with a returning missionary as a guide, but also the possibility of a loan to cover travel costs through the Perpetual Emigration Fund, which ceased operations in 1887. Such strong push factors and the equally attractive pull factors as the promise of free land and increased social mobility in the US meant that the majority of early Nordic converts chose to leave. Historians William Mulder and Andrew Jenson agree, based on data printed in the Mormon newspaper Skandinaviens Stjerne, that 45,524 people joined the LDS Church in the Nordic countries between 1850 and 1900, of whom 21,173 emigrated in companies, a number supplemented by a few hundred who traveled to Utah on their own.15 After excommunicated members are deducted from the total, roughly 48 percent of all converts in Scandinavia emigrated during those years. Of this total, 57 percent were Danish, 32 percent Swedish, and 10 percent Norwegian (see Fig. 20.1). The number of Icelandic and Finnish converts who emigrated was so small that their percentage share is statistically negligible. Taken together, immigrants from the Nordic countries made up the second largest group of foreign-born church members in Utah, surpassed only by the 55,000 convertimmigrants from Great Britain.

Fig. 20.1  Cumulative Mormon emigration from Scandinavia, 1850–1926. (Data from Jenson 1927, 533–536)

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In terms of the Church’s survival in the Nordic countries, however, the size of the group that remained behind was of greater consequence than the number of those who emigrated. Nearly all of the members of the first congregation in Iceland emigrated, for example, setting a precedent for the approximately 400 Icelandic convert-immigrants who eventually built up the Icelandic community in Sanpete County, Utah, that Icelandic author Halldór Laxness describes in his novel Paradise Reclaimed (1960), but rendering it impossible for the Church to establish a permanent presence in Iceland for more than a century. In Denmark, where the Church had experienced the numerically greatest success, about 47 percent of the 26,389 people baptized between 1850 and 1926 did not leave for Utah, but many of those who stayed in Denmark did not remain affiliated with the Church. Just as people joined the Church in a steady trickle, they did not emigrate all at once, so the number of Mormons in Denmark hovered at around 2000 for most of the late nineteenth century, dropping to just over 1000 in 1890, which required a consolidation of local congregations. Where there had been 102 small LDS congregations in Denmark in 1861, there were only 10 in 1926.16 Once the flood of emigration to America tapered off, however, Danish Mormons began to establish themselves as committed, engaged members of Danish society, following the example of Danish politician F. F. Samuelsen’s work in the Danish Parliament, rather than transients eager to shake the dust of their homeland from their feet. Membership numbers rose slowly to 1227 in 1900 and 1267 in 1910. By the time the first permanent LDS meetinghouse in Copenhagen was built in the late 1920s, on Priorvej in Frederiksberg, demonstrating the rootedness of the Danish Mormon community in the Danish capital, the Danish LDS Church had around 1500 members. Despite the Church’s discouragement of convert immigration beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century, recurring waves of Danish Mormon emigration, particularly in the years immediately following World War II and often of families with children, made Danish congregations unduly reliant on American missionaries (albeit often of Danish descent) and forced them to endure frequent, destabilizing changes in leadership until well into the 1950s. In Odense, for example, the branch was led by ten different presidents between November 1952 and February 1963, and only survived a significant schism in 1963–1964 with the help of two American missionary couples.17 Convert emigration from Sweden was also disruptive to local church growth. The number of Swedish convert-emigrants was 7463 out of a total 16,963 converts in the country between 1850 and 1905, of which 36 percent came from the Stockholm area, 34 percent from southern Sweden, and the remainder from the rest of the country.18 With an emigration rate of 62 percent, in addition to approximately 5000 excommunicants, Sweden’s LDS population was decimated by the turn of the century. Since that population had been relatively small to begin with, twentieth-century Swedish Mormons had little to build on, numerically speaking. An independent Swedish mission was established in 1905, encompassing Finland, Russia, and Sweden. Led by

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Swedish-born American missionary Peter Matson, the mission faced the daunting task of augmenting the country’s 2000 members through convert baptisms in a period when the “Mormon question” and its alleged connection to the white slave trade were debated on no fewer than five occasions in the Swedish parliament. Over the next decade, approximately 1000 Swedes embraced the LDS faith, but the total number of members decreased by 300, due in large part to 372 member deaths and a further 764 emigrations, and would not reach 2000 again until after World War II.19 Carl-Erik Johansson notes that even after the turn of the century, “the [local] branch was [regarded as] a holding station for many converts until they were able to join the main body of the Saints in their Rocky Mountain Empire,”20 so little serious attention was paid to training local leaders until well into the 1960s. Johansson, himself a post-World War II Swedish immigrant to Utah, reported that he and many others were tired of being so isolated during the war years and simply wanted to join the main body of the Church.21 Johansson explains that nearly every branch lost valuable members, including “three large three-generation families, … consisting of nearly 50 people altogether, in each case led by a family patriarch, who for many years had stood as a great leader in his Mormon congregation.”22 As understandable as these feelings may be from an individual perspective, the institutional cost of postwar Mormon emigration from Sweden was high, particularly as it coincided with the passage of a bill establishing full religious freedom in Sweden in 1952, which should have given the Church’s proselytizing activities a boost, rather than simply allowing it to keep itself intact. The same pattern held true for Norway. Jenson reports that between 1850 and 1905, 6463 Norwegians were baptized, of whom 2618 emigrated, beginning with a single Norwegian member of a Danish emigrant company in December 1853 and peaking in 1875 with 152 emigrants.23 About 60 percent of Norwegian converts did not emigrate, but since that includes people who left the Church altogether, local congregations remained small. Although Norway gained political independence from Sweden in 1905, a separate LDS Norwegian mission was not created until 1920. The rate of conversions decreased markedly after the turn of the century, despite the fact that the mission had expanded from the southern seacoast to encompass the entire country, in part because of the disruption caused by World War I. The number of LDS missionaries working in Norway between 1915 and 1924 fell to 61, from a reported 570 between 1905 and 1914. The 551 baptisms that occurred between 1915 and 1924 brought the total LDS membership in Norway in 1924 to 1364,24 a number that remained fairly stable for the next 35 years. While the economically and politically tumultuous interwar period was merely a period of slow growth for the LDS Church in the Nordic region, World War II, with the Russian invasion of Finland in 1939 and the Nazi invasion of Norway and Denmark in April 1940, effectively severed connections between the Church in the Nordic countries and the US for a number of years.

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Since only Sweden was able to maintain its neutrality, formal missionary work was largely impossible across the region, while local leaders struggled simply to keep their congregations together. Many of the Swedish priesthood leaders were called up to serve in the army, which made it difficult for them to attend or conduct services regularly. Olaf Sonsteby, who served as acting president of the Norwegian mission for six years during the war, did his best to send regular reports to church headquarters, outlining the difficulties church members faced, particularly during the fight for Norway in the spring of 1940, from bombing raids to food rationing. In Denmark, where the initially peaceful occupation earned the country the sobriquet the “whipped cream front,” the rise of an often violent anti-Nazi resistance in the final years of the war caused some tensions within the Mormon community, though not to the same extent as in Germany. Some Danish Mormons were active in the Danish resistance, including two young men in Silkeborg—24-year-old Poul Møller Rasmussen and 21-year-old Arly Hess Thomsen—who were killed by German soldiers in May 1945. Being cut off from the Church’s American base required local congregations to take more responsibility for themselves. Given that a large percentage of the early missionaries who came back to Scandinavia in the half-century prior to the war were first- and second-generation converts from the Nordic region, one could perhaps argue that the Church in Scandinavia was not being run entirely by Americans, but the war gave new, non-negotiable impetus to local self-sufficiency. Olaf Sonsteby’s letter of February 1945 from Norway reported that member donations had increased during the war years and relationships between members had improved.25 In Sweden, C. Fritz Johansson, a convert of just a few years who was a grocer by trade, was installed as mission president once all of the American missionaries had been evacuated in 1939; his goal initially was simply to “hold the line until the new president arrives,” but he accomplished instead a spiritual renewal among the Swedish church members, whose tithing increased by 300 percent and who “began to realize the value of doing and living the Gospel.”26 He reflected later that their initial timidity “came probably from too much dependence on the missionaries. It was customary that they were the pillars in the branches, for they handled everything … and the [local] priesthood had, it seemed, turned over too much of its responsibility to them.”27 During the war, country-wide conferences, particularly in Sweden, became the high point of members’ church lives, giving members a chance to strengthen each other, discuss subjects such as “cooperative activity, purchase of a summer home for all of the members for vacation, how to get in contact with nonmembers, and calling full-time missionaries.”28 To a certain extent, therefore, the story of Mormonism in the Nordic region today begins in the post-World War II era, when the national Mormon communities put down deeper roots and began focusing on integration and autonomy more than emigration. In Norway, for example, renewed attempts in the postwar period to gain recognition of the LDS Church as a recognized denomination eventually made it possible for the Church to acquire land for building

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chapels in Drammen, Bergen, Oslo, and Trondheim, while the first Norwegian edition of the Book of Mormon appeared in 1950. Both of these developments seemed to have a positive effect on convert numbers, which grew by about 100 people a year throughout the 1950s. Yet at the same time, renewed waves of emigration in the postwar period, despite the American church’s efforts to encourage members to stay in their native countries and build the Church there, continued to sap the strength of local congregations. In 1958, Norwegian mission president Ray Engelbretsen reported to headquarters that local church members hoped to emigrate due to anxiety about the future and concerns about the immorality of their neighbors, particularly with regard to excessive consumption of alcohol and tobacco.29 While many Scandinavian Mormons hoped to find a more spiritually supportive environment in Utah, others, such as Johannes Larsen and his wife Traudel in Odense, Denmark, decided to stay put and see if they could help improve their own environment instead, even as many of their Mormon friends and neighbors emigrated. In the case of the Larsen family, only Traudel was a baptized member in the 1950s, but as a result of their decision not to emigrate in 1958, Johannes was baptized in 1966 and went on to lead the Odense congregation three times, for a total of more than 17 years, during which time he contributed significantly to the congregation’s robust growth and vitality.30 While three of the Larsens’ four children did eventually settle in the US, the son who remained in Denmark has served many years as both bishop of an Odense ward and president of the Jutland stake. The LDS Church in the Nordic countries grew rapidly in the 1960s, as it did across much of the rest of Western Europe, as the continent rebuilt after the devastation of the war. As Fig.  20.2 illustrates, membership numbers in Denmark and Sweden doubled from 1960 to 1970, reaching 4193 and 4967, respectively, and the institution of a volunteer building program in 1961 resulted in the construction of many new LDS meetinghouses across the region. LDS membership in Norway saw an increase of nearly 50 percent in the same decade, to 2978 members, and then again between 1970 and 1994, when the official membership count passed 4000. However, while the Danish and Norwegian churches have experienced minimal growth since then, Sweden managed to sustain a higher growth rate, reaching 6000 members in 1979, 7000 in 1987, 8000 in 1991, and 9000 in 2009, which was likely a major factor in the decision to locate the first LDS temple in the Nordic region in Stockholm in the early 1980s, which was then a stimulus to further growth. After the LDS Church gained official status in Finland in 1948, meetinghouses were constructed and membership grew rapidly, reaching 3642  in 1977, when the first regional stake was organized, and 4200 by 1990. Illustrating Finland’s delicate political situation in the postwar era, missionary work was occasionally impacted by the fact that the political left sometimes suspected LDS missionaries of being American spies. This was especially the case during the Cold War when Finland was placed between Western and Eastern interests and influenced by both.31 As a result of the US military

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Fig. 20.2  LDS Church membership development in the Nordic countries, 1850–2019. (Data obtained from Jenson 1927, 533–536 and the LDS Church’s Europe Area Office)

presence in Iceland from World War II until the early 2000s, the Church reopened the Icelandic mission in 1975, leading to the establishment of a congregation with ten members in 1976, the translation of the Book of Mormon into Icelandic in 1980, and the construction of the first purpose-built LDS meetinghouse in 2000.

The LDS Church in the Nordic Countries Today In comparison to the large numbers of Scandinavians who embraced Mormonism in the nineteenth century, the LDS Church in the Nordic countries today is very small, both as an institution and in terms of individual congregations. The Church is not particularly visible within Nordic national communities, where Lutheranism continues to be the default religious affiliation of most of the population and the foundation of cultural and political norms. Many Scandinavians are unaware that the LDS Church even exists in their countries. As Table 20.1 and Fig.  20.3 illustrate, each of the Nordic countries, with the exception of Sweden and Iceland, which are outliers on their respective ends of the spectrum, have around 4500 members of record spread across two or three dozen congregations, organized into a couple of larger regional stake groupings. Approximately half of each country’s officially registered members attend at least one LDS

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Table 20.1  LDS membership and organization in the Nordic countries as of March 2020

Political type Area (thousand sq. km) Population (million, end of 2019) LDS year of entry LDS membership (end of 2019) LDS proportion of population (%) LDS temples LDS stakes LDS districts LDS congregations

Denmark

Finland

Iceland

Norway

Sweden

Monarchy

Republic

Republic

Monarchy

Monarchy

43 5.8 1850 4468 0.08 1 2 0 21

338 5.5 1875 4888 0.09 1 2 3 31

385 5.4 1851 4567 0.08 0 2 0 20

450 10.3 1850 9646 0.09 1 4 1 40

103 0.36 1851 300 0.08 0 0 0 3

LDS data obtained from the Europe Area Office and the online LDS Meetinghouse Locator

religious service per quarter. Even accepting official membership statistics at face value, which can be problematic given the Church’s policy of keeping members on record long after they have ceased active participation unless they explicitly request to be removed, members of the LDS Church do not make up more than one-tenth of a percent of any Nordic national population. As a result of these small but largely stable membership numbers, the LDS Church in the Nordic countries tends to be very close-knit, with a core group of multi-generational families who form the backbone of individual congregations. While Nordic Mormons today tend to be more prosperous and better educated than the early converts, who were largely, though not exclusively, drawn from the agricultural working classes, the LDS Church in the Nordic countries does not struggle with the same extremes of wealth and educational level that can be divisive in US congregations. Naturally, the demographics of each congregation vary greatly by location—in Denmark, for example, some members perceive a clear distinction between the more rural, blue-collar character of the Aarhus (Jutland) stake and the urban, white-collar character of the Copenhagen (Zealand) stake—while different areas also attract people at different life stages, for example, the college students who attend the Odense, Aarhus, and greater Copenhagen wards, whereas the Fredericia ward has more people working in industrial jobs. Still, the low income inequality and high social mobility across the Nordic region allow for a high degree of social coherence within LDS congregations, which tend to become the focal point of members’ social lives. Of his childhood in Sweden in the 1950s, Johansson recalls, “The Saints were somewhat isolated from the rest of the community. They had different ideals, different interests and usually had to make a choice between the Church and other things. … There was not time for both. So life centered in the branch with the simple meeting hall as the focal point.”32 Bernd Larsen describes his similar experience in Denmark in the 1960s, with Sunday

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Fig. 20.3  LDS congregations and organization in the Nordic countries, as of February 2020. Congregations are marked with dots, stakes with bold text, stakes with temples with bold and italic text, and districts with regular text. (Map created on the background from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nordic_passport_union.svg, through a Creative Commons license)

meetings, mid-week lessons and activities for the youth, monthly excursions on Saturdays, and regional activities a few weekends a year filling up his family’s social calendar.33 Quarterly “Super Saturday” activities are still an important part of the LDS social experience for many Nordic Mormon youth. One disadvantage of the active church membership being so very small in the Nordic countries is that there can be a very limited range of opinions and life experiences to draw on in talks and lessons, as well as insufficient human resources to carry the burden of keeping the individual congregations fully

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functional. Many members in the Nordic countries have the sense that it is easier to be a member of the LDS Church in the US, with a wider demographic spread, easier access to church leadership, and more people to share the workload. Some Nordic Mormons express frustration that they always have to fight to keep all of the programs and activities going, which requires a lot of commitment from those members who are fully active. While this can give them valuable opportunities to develop leadership skills that are often transferable to professional situations, it can also exhaust members’ emotional resources, put stress on families—particularly a generation or two ago, when current members’ parents and grandparents were building their chapels as part of the volunteer building program—, and create invisible social barriers between members and their non-member countrymen, whose social networks revolve around other voluntary organizations, such as sports clubs and interest groups. Numbers aside, however, the LDS Church is firmly grounded in each of the Nordic countries, with a distinctive hybrid culture informed by both the Church’s American roots and each congregation’s local context. The Church mostly operates through the unpaid efforts of the local membership, except for translation office, youth education management, building management, and temple personnel. Nearly all local leaders are natives, except for the temple and mission presidents, who are often foreigners—Americans, as a rule—with some recent exceptions, such as Knud B. Andersen, who was the first Danish mission president to serve in Denmark (1995–1998) since the wartime service of Orson B. West and the current native temple and mission presidents in Finland. In stark contrast to the situation in the mid-twentieth century, the LDS Church in the Nordic countries is largely self-directed and self-sufficient, at least in leadership terms, and has deep roots in Nordic soil. One important symbol of this grounding is the construction of LDS temples in Sweden, Denmark, and Finland, dedicated in 1985, 2004, and 2006, respectively, located in or near the capital cities of Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Helsinki. These tangible representations of LDS beliefs in the physical landscape, harking back to the temples that early Mormons built to sanctify their settlements in Ohio, Illinois, and Utah, have given the Church increased public visibility in the region, particularly during the periods prior to their dedication when the temples have been open to the general public. Media attention connected with the announcement, construction, public opening, and dedication of the Helsinki temple, for example, included more than a hundred newspaper, radio, and television reports around the country, concentrated most heavily around Helsinki, between May 2001 and December 2006. Although a 2003 survey had concluded that 57 percent of Finns had a negative opinion of the LDS Church, a total of 55,791 visitors toured the Helsinki temple between September 21 and October 7, 2006, exceeding the Church’s own goal by more than 100 percent. Yet although the temple was constructed by and for Finns, as the Church’s spokespersons repeatedly emphasized, many Finnish reporters described it as an American space, with a luxurious

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Hollywood-­style decor and broadly smiling, American English-speaking missionary ushers with excessively white teeth.34 As such assessments suggest, the LDS Church in the Nordic region is still frequently regarded as a foreign entity, despite the 170 years it has been part of Nordic society. This is due at least in part to the visibility of its (often American) missionaries and the non-visibility of its local members, who bear no outward signs of being Mormon. The institutional LDS Church’s irrelevance to Nordic political discourse in the postwar era means that it is rarely a target of either positive or negative attention by Nordic politicians, though the service of Mormon politicians Keith Nyborg as US ambassador to Finland from 1981 to 1986 and Richard Swett as US ambassador to Denmark from 1998 to 2001 earned the Church positive political credit. More recently, the Church has attracted positive attention from some conservative Danish politicians, such as Inger Støjberg of the right-wing Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti), for its relaxed, good-humored response to being caricatured in the popular musical, The Book of Mormon, which was staged in various Danish cities between 2017 and 2019. To a certain extent, the Church contributes to its own relative invisibility by not making public statements after local political events or tragedies and by not weighing in on the hot topics of the day, as it often does in the US. After decades of trying to invest the term “Mormon” with some (generally positive) currency, the Church’s 2018 directive to avoid its use has complicated Scandinavian church members’ attempts to profile their local congregations’ contributions to their communities, with the result that the centralized church dominates their image. To outside observers, the perceived American nature and composition of the LDS Church—from its clean-cut missionaries to its all-male highest leadership—can be positive or negative, depending on external factors such as world politics. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, for example, many Scandinavians regarded Mormonism’s American ties as an asset, whereas the nationalist turn in US politics in recent years has had an alienating effect. Within the Church itself, the many linguistic, aesthetic, and behavioral norms imported along with LDS theology can be either a source of comfort or irritation. For example, the frequent use of American-inflected terminology (such as “Primary” for the children’s organization) flags Mormon worship services as foreign, so the recent move in Denmark toward using more familiar religious terminology, such as “congregation” instead of “ward,” and the Church-wide discontinuance of anachronistic age-group designations “Beehive,” “Miamaid,” and “Laurel” for young women are steps toward a less defamiliarizing use of language. When asked about the perceived American influence on the Church, some Nordic Mormons express concern that American-produced church media don’t appeal to Nordic aesthetic sensibilities (e.g., background music that feels manipulative, romanticized images of Jesus, etc.), while others praise the simplicity of the Church’s streamlined, hierarchical organizational structure as a refreshing alternative to the unwieldy (and often politicized) collective decision-­ making practices in many Nordic institutions.35

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This tension between the Church’s perceived foreignness and a Nordic church member’s national identity is an intrinsic part of being a Mormon in the Nordic countries, as it is for Mormons in many other countries. There are no political obstacles to or consequences for belonging to the LDS Church in the Nordic countries, but being a Mormon in Scandinavia means, to some extent at least, standing outside of the normative (Lutheran) national cultural community, being excluded by choice from its self-evident practices and traditions. Given the prevalence of coffee and alcohol consumption in social settings, living according to the LDS health code known as the Word of Wisdom becomes a visible sign that a Mormon is “different” from the average Scandinavian. In many cases, this sense of being conspicuous leads Nordic Mormons to isolate themselves socially within the Church community, associating primarily with other church members in order to feel secure and accepted. In light of the wide cultural gap between US American and Western European aesthetic and sociopolitical norms, Flemish scholar Wilfried Decoo has described a European church member’s decision to embrace Mormonism as a “countercultural step” that requires a mental “realignment to notions of the self-actualization of the individual” in opposition to prevailing Western European norms.36 He speculates that American Mormons have difficulty understanding the scope of this disruption, particularly for people from societies, like those of the Nordic countries, where “a ‘pillar’ of families, institutions, and social networks has been dominated by a single ideological tradition.”37 Similarly, Dutch anthropologist Walter van Beek has interrogated whether church members in Europe should be considered Mormon Europeans rather than European Mormons, according to which identity category determines their sense of self—does their religious affiliation with the LDS Church take priority over the values and norms inculcated by their home society or vice versa?38 As the Nordic countries have become increasingly secular, simply being a believing, practicing Christian has become unusual, to say nothing of belonging to a non-Lutheran “sect.” Unlike in the US, where membership in different religious groups is a major part of an individual’s identity, religious affiliation is generally a non-issue in the Nordic countries, because of both the longstanding predominance of state-supported Lutheran churches as the default mode of religiosity and the relatively low status of religious belief in contemporary Nordic societies. For members of the LDS Church in the Nordic region, it is centrally important to be able to find a way to explain religious beliefs in secular terms, without using LDS-specific terminology or presuming a belief in the value of, for example, chastity or monogamy. The Church’s founding question, posed by Joseph Smith in prayer in 1820, of “which church is right?,” is rarely high on the list of Nordic people’s priorities, having been replaced by the more existential question of why one should claim any formal religious affiliation at all. Since most Nordics don’t subscribe to traditional theological beliefs (such as an embodied anthropomorphic god, scriptural canon, sacred ritual, etc.), there is much less perceived need to belong to a church.

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Yet this disconnect does not mean that Nordics are not Christian, at least in the sense of valuing and enacting the fundamentally egalitarian, compassionate principles of New Testament Christianity. Where the US tends to distinguish very clearly between “church” and “state” in its formal institutions (though not in its rhetoric), the Nordic countries tend to have a much closer formal relationship between church and state (along a spectrum from total legal integration, as in Denmark, to officially separate but still treated preferentially, as in Sweden and Norway), but also a much higher incorporation of traditionally “Christian” principles (such as caring for the poor, respecting the value of each person’s life and agency, etc.) into the political and social structures of the welfare state. Still, the explicit embrace of living according to such values is one of the central reasons that many Nordic Mormons choose to stay faithful to LDS belief and practice. Much as Engelbretsen reported already in 1958, the Church is seen as a refuge from the immorality of mainstream Scandinavian society, a conservative community that teaches basic ethical principles and offers a structured, supportive space for bringing up children in the midst of a society that is regarded as being in liberal turmoil and change, beset by moral relativism and social constructivism. Like the nineteenth-century converts for whom conversion entailed embracing new values, personal transformation, and a new identity as a member of a group that stands against the corruption of the world, Nordic Mormons often credit the LDS Church with teaching members a set of principles that they can use as a basis for making life choices, a guide that they perceive most of their peers as lacking, for example, with regard to the culture of alcohol consumption that is highly prevalent throughout the region. Given their sense of the larger society’s a- or immorality, one of the challenges for Mormons in the Nordic region has long been finding a marital partner who shares those values, particularly given the numerically small LDS population. Since the beginning of the LDS presence in Scandinavia in the 1850s, many Nordic Mormons have joined the LDS Church without their marital partners or married outside the faith. Marriage rates have fallen precipitously in present-day Scandinavia, as out-of-wedlock births have become the norm, though a majority of such children are raised by both biological parents.39 The primacy of the nuclear family within LDS theology makes the Church a strong advocate for endogamous marriages whenever possible, but marriage rates have fallen. As the LDS congregations in the Nordic countries became more self-­ sufficient, one of the most effective tools they hit upon for promoting regional coherence and stability within the local church was bringing the young people of the various congregations together across regional and national borders. Wartime conferences for all members in Sweden grew out of specifically youth-­ oriented meetings, a tradition that was renewed in the 1950s, eventually leading to the establishment of a regional meeting for young people from across the Nordic region called “Festinord” (Party in the North). In 1966, the first

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year it was held, more than 600 participants aged 14 to 26 from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland gathered to socialize and strengthen each other’s faith. After being held annually from 1966 to 1971, for a while it shifted to a biannual schedule in order to control costs, the minimum age was eventually raised to 18, and participation restricted to unmarried people, except for adult leaders.40 Not least in the number of endogamous marriages it has helped to bring about, the now-annual Festinord has established itself as an impactful, regionally specific tradition that meets local needs. From its earliest beginnings, the LDS Church in the Nordic region has had difficulty retaining new converts and young adult church members. There are myriad reasons why people choose to disaffiliate themselves, including mistrust of leadership, inability or unwillingness to observe LDS behavioral codes, and dissatisfaction with the Church’s institutional character. In his analysis of the costs of conversion and LDS Church membership specifically for European Mormons, sociologist Armand Mauss points out the large investments of time and energy required to attend church meetings when congregations are few and far between, the time-consuming nature of LDS Church meetings and social life that can strain a member’s relationships to non-member family and friends, the heavier financial burden of 10 percent tithing (usually not tax-­ deductible, unlike in the US) as opposed to state church taxes of 1–2 percent, and the pressure to participate in missionary work that can feel like an invasion of one’s neighbors’ privacy.41 Moreover, despite the influx of many people of African, Asian, and Middle Eastern descent into the Nordic countries in the past few decades, many of them from former European colonies, the LDS Church membership in the region remains predominantly white. This is despite the fact that recent immigrants tend to be more receptive to the missionaries than native-born Nordics, due in part to their need for a religious community and desire for new social connections. Rising anti-immigrant sentiment among Nordics, Mormon and Lutheran, has complicated proselytizing efforts among immigrants and refugees, however, leading to a proliferation of independent, so-called migrant churches, with multinational congregations and services conducted in non-­ local languages. Despite frequent promises of a “second harvest” of LDS converts from Scandinavia and occasional goal-setting exercises designed to increase baptisms, member retention remains a serious problem that receives too little systematic attention. In Mauss’ view, strengthening the Church’s message of doctrinal distinctiveness, rather than trying to emphasize Mormon normalcy, and loosening the policy guidelines that isolate church members from their existing social networks would go far toward addressing this problem.42

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Mormonism Between Nordic and American Cultural Contexts As an organization, the LDS Church exercises significant centripetal force on church units around the globe, micromanaging details at all levels of the organization, from the designation of regional church leaders to the fabric used on couches in meetinghouse lobbies. These concerted attempts to synchronize belief and practice within church congregations around the world with American Mormon norms have the effect, as the Finnish journalists cited above noted, of making LDS facilities and missionaries appear distinctly foreign everywhere but the US. Yet the geographic, cultural, and ideological distance of Nordic Mormons from the US church counterbalances these centripetal impulses with corresponding centrifugal tendencies that give Mormonism in the Nordic countries a different character than its US counterpart, with different preoccupations and local concerns. This is particularly apparent in terms of issues that become flashpoints in US partisan politics. Such matters frequently function as boundary-maintenance controls within US congregations, but they rarely resonate with Nordic Mormons, who generally do not talk politics at church and whose national political spectra lie largely to the left of the American spectrum. When LDS Church headquarters issues a statement about such an issue that is under discussion in American politics, whether it be about refugees, gender equality legislation, legal abortion, or the civil rights of the LGBTQ+ community, local leaders in the Nordic countries naturally take these positions seriously and convey them to their congregations, but that does not necessarily translate into Nordic Mormons replicating American debates about them, especially when those topics are not controversial in the Nordic countries. One such high-profile topic in the US church in recent years has been the question of female ordination to LDS priesthood offices and gender equality more generally. Although the national Lutheran churches in the Nordic countries have permitted the ordination of female pastors and bishops since the mid-twentieth century (1938 in Norway, 1947 in Denmark, 1953 in Sweden, 1974 in Iceland, and 1986 in Finland), there has never been a push for female ordination in the LDS Church in the Nordic countries. The Ordain Women movement, which was co-founded by attorney Kate Kelly in Washington, D.C. in March 2013, achieved very little visibility or resonance in the Nordic countries. This may have a lot to do with the fact that women in the Nordic countries enjoy considerably more legal protection of their economic and legal equality with men than women in the US do, as well as having less restrictive gender norms to grapple with. Although Nordic Mormon women generally accept the Church’s teaching that motherhood is a sacred duty, it is much less common for that belief to be interpreted as a requirement to refrain from getting an education or working outside the home. Denmark, for example, has one of the highest rates of women in the workforce, approximately 70 percent, so many Danish Mormon mothers work, supported by generous state support

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for parental leave and childcare that far exceeds anything available in the US. In this regard, Nordic Mormon women align with other European Mormon women, whose perspectives, according to a 2015 study on their domestic and sociopolitical views, “reflect the gender norms of their own education and of evolving societal standards” in their home countries more than American Mormon norms.43 A more vexing question for Nordic Mormons is the Church’s cultural, though not doctrinal, emphasis on unquestioned acceptance of and subservience to religious authority. Official titles carry very little weight in Nordic societies and the unwritten “Jante law” promotes a view of radical equality among members of the national community. On the one hand, this egalitarianism aligns well with the lay structure of the LDS Church, where a garbage collector can preside over a banker, but, on the other hand, it conflicts with the widespread tendency in the Church to regard priesthood leaders as inspired. While Nordic LDS congregations are not hotbeds of dissent by any means, Mormons in the Nordic countries tend to deal pragmatically with the Church’s hierarchical structure and implicit demands for conformity, quietly disregarding practices that seem too Utah-centric to be locally effective and looking for compromise solutions that will fit their local needs. The Church’s top-down leadership style and emphasis on authoritative proclamations clash with the Nordic countries’ informal, collective approach to matters such as self-­ governance and education. The corporate leadership model the Church favors—along with its preference for short haircuts, no facial hair, and white dress shirts with sober ties—rubs some members and many outsiders the wrong way, as does the imposition of “one-size-fits-all” solutions to very localized problems, for example, teaching the Church-sponsored youth scriptural study program known as “Seminary” like an academic course, with a focus on exams and grades rather than on content mastery for its own sake. Self-help programs like the Church’s self-reliance programs can feel both inadequate and unnecessary in Nordic countries where the state can and does provide all manner of educational and professional support (including job training) much more effectively and efficiently than part-time church volunteers are able to. Such areas of friction, however trivial on their own, underscore the peripherality of the LDS congregations in the Nordic countries to the centralized church, with minimal input on curriculum, materials, programs, or policies. While the Nordic countries produced many church publications for themselves from the 1850s to the 1960s, the policy of correlation, according to which church members around the globe should receive essentially the same information from the Church, led to the discontinuation of these publications, to be replaced by a brief news insert for the region in a more generic church magazine. All materials used in Nordic LDS Churches are produced in Utah, then translated into the various Nordic languages, which ensures that the US church controls what is taught. Van Beek notes that “the fact that lesson materials are made in the Domestic Church, to be translated afterwards, indicates that information flows only one way: from the center to the satellite Church, and not

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vice versa.”44 Although the process of translating church materials was displaced from Utah to the respective countries in 1960, the head office in Utah exercises considerable oversight over the final product. Local Nordic cultures are hardly visible in church services and events. Church programs, organizational structures, and attitudes toward outward manifestations of sacredness, such as norms for church attire, rules for which musical instruments are appropriate for use in worship services, and so on, are imported from the US, not determined according to local customs. One exception is the inclusion of a few local hymns (particularly Christmas songs) in various editions of the LDS hymnal; a call in 2019 for new songs composed specifically for the LDS Church has the potential for incorporating diverse cultural impulses, but the end result remains to be seen. Official church websites are also carefully non-descript in cultural terms, which can be read as either universalizing or simply bland. Relatively few Nordic Mormons regard the subordinate status of their congregations to the central church as a problem. There is not enough of a critical mass of members in any of the Nordic countries to produce their own materials or spearhead initiatives to raise the Church’s visibility, if that were to be asked of them by church authorities. Instead, the constant stream of generic curricular materials produced and provided by church headquarters relieves local congregations of the responsibility for developing their own culture- and context-specific materials. While this can lead to a fairly passive attitude toward doctrinal issues, the global LDS Church’s shift in 2019 toward a more home-­ based, open-ended curriculum explicitly returns primary responsibility for doctrinal study to the individual. At the same time, the tendency of church-produced materials, in the service of affirming faith, to gloss over challenging areas of Mormon history and practice, combined with the lack of Nordic-language versions of most more nuanced sources, such as the recent historical survey Saints, can render Nordic Mormons unprepared for the complexities of church history and present-day church operations. This makes them particularly vulnerable to disillusionment when confronted with information of which they had previously been unaware. The high-profile disaffiliation of the Swedish former regional church leader Hans Mattsson and his wife Birgitta in the early 2010s illustrates what a challenge the situation poses to Nordic Mormons, who may be fluent in English, but lack both sources and venues for deeper intellectual engagement with the faith.45 When it comes to the observance of traditional cultural practices by LDS congregations, opinions are more divided. While it is common for LDS congregations far from Utah to celebrate (and even re-enact) the arrival of Mormon pioneers in the Utah valley in 1847, many of those same congregations are divided about whether to celebrate local traditions associated with the Lutheran faith. While Johansson recalls his congregation in Sweden in the 1950s conducting a traditional Swedish Christmas morning worship service, known as julotta, with lighted candles and a pageant,46 a Finnish congregation encountered resistance in the 1990s from members who felt that it was too closely

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associated with Lutheran practice to be appropriate for the LDS Church. Another important cultural practice in Finland is the sauna, which serves many more purposes than simply cleanliness—some of Finland’s most delicate foreign policy negotiations have been conducted in the sauna. Saunas are so central to Finnish culture and experience that some members joke that if saunas were forbidden for regular members, it would kill the Church in Finland. However, for several years, LDS missionaries were not allowed to visit saunas because of decisions made by American leaders on the area level. The culturally sensitive American mission president, at the time the decision was made, said the leadership should send him home if they forbade missionaries from using the sauna, so the policy came into effect only after a new mission president was installed in 2002. The policy was reversed in 2020.

Conclusion The LDS Church has a long, rich history in the Nordic countries, full of heroic stories of valiant missionaries, brave convert-emigrants, and wartime adventures, as well as echoes of social upheaval, a constantly shifting organizational landscape, and ongoing negotiations between local and institutional norms. More than half a century after the last great waves of emigration that transferred so many converts from the Nordic Mormon community to the US, LDS congregations across the Nordic region today tend to be small but stable, interconnected through generations of church members, frequent social interactions, and a strong sense of group identity. This identity can be very empowering, giving church members access to a robust social network and emotional support from people with similar attitudes toward religious beliefs and lifestyle choices. It can also be isolating, causing church members to become estranged from family, friends, neighbors, and their larger national cultural community. Nordic Mormonism is a hybrid phenomenon, characterized by a blend of explicit and implicit guidance from the US church on how to worship, live, and interact with other people, and Nordic Mormons’ own ideas, insights, and priorities derived from their particular sociocultural contexts and experiences. This admixture, in which the directives of the US church, emanating from the Church’s global headquarters in Salt Lake City, routinely take precedence over local ideas, can cause friction when culturally specific concerns are treated in the same universalizing way as doctrinal matters. The same issues may not matter as much to Mormons in other parts of the world and the same ways of doing things aren’t equally effective everywhere. During the Swedish membership crisis in 2010, LDS Church historian Marlin K. Jensen recalled that when he had asked German LDS leader Erich Kopischke how to be a good American LDS leader in Europe, Kopischke had answered, “Listen to the European leaders.”47 This advice, and the necessity of giving it, foregrounds the unequal relationship between the centralized church administration and the subordinate status of its satellites in other areas, including Scandinavia. Furthermore,

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the context in which it was given underscores the importance of ameliorating that inequality, if the LDS Church is to continue to develop in the Nordic region.

Notes 1. Since the term “Scandinavia” as a geographic label, strictly speaking, only applies to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, we have chosen to prioritize using the term “Nordic.” This represents a broader focus on the entire region and includes those countries such as Iceland and the Faroes that speak a Scandinavian language, as well as those, like Finland and Greenland, that have historically been culturally and politically oriented toward Scandinavia. 2. Although the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, now known as Community of Christ, had some success proselytizing in nineteenth-­ century Scandinavia, their lack of a sustained, widespread presence in the region prompted the authors to focus solely on the Utah variety of Mormonism. 3. Allen, Julie K., Danish but Not Lutheran: The Impact of Mormonism on Danish Cultural Identity, 1850–1920 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2017). 4. Snow, Erastus, Journal, vol. 5, n.d. Erastus Snow Collection, LDS Church History Library. Qtd. in: Jenson, Andrew, History of the Scandinavian Mission (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1927): 6. 5. Jessup, David E., “The Language of Religious Liberty in the Swedish Constitution of 1809.” Scandinavian Studies 82, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 169. 6. Jenson, History of the Scandinavian Mission, 26. 7. Mulder, William, Homeward to Zion: The Mormon Migration from Scandinavia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1957): 55. For more information about the disruption of meetings and other forms of harassment, see Allen, Danish but Not Lutheran, 68–74. 8. Mulder, Homeward to Zion, 54. 9. Hunsaker, Curtis B., “History of the Norwegian Mission from 1851 to 1960,” unpublished Master’s Thesis (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, 1965): 24–25. 10. Ulvund, Frode, Nasjonens antiborgere: Forestillinger om religiøse minoriteter som samfunnsfiender i Norge, ca. 1814–1964 (Oslo: Cappelen Damm Akademisk Forlag, 2017): 15. 11. Östman, Kim B., The Introduction of Mormonism to Finnish Society, 1840–1900 (Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press, 2010), 161–234. 12. Östman, The Introduction of Mormonism to Finnish Society, 1840–1900, 340–379. Rinne, Anna-Liisa, Kristuksen Kirkko Suomessa (Turku, Finland: Privately published, 1986): 4–9. 13. Rinne, Kristuksen Kirkko Suomessa, 21–32, 171–174, and 248. 14. Morris, David M., “The Rhetoric of the Gathering and Zion: Consistency through Change, 1831–1920,” International Journal of Mormon Studies 1 (2008): 158. 15. Mulder, William, “Mormons from Scandinavia 1850–1900: A Shepherded Migration,” Pacific Historical Review 23, no. 3 (August 1954): 227. Jenson, Scandinavian Mission, 355–356. There are some discrepancies between the total number of emigrants reported in various publications by Mulder and Jenson.

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16. Jenson, Scandinavian Mission, 534. Andersen, Knud B. et al., Historien om mormonerne i Fredericia og omegn (Fredericia: Privately published, 2001), 38. 17. Larsen, Bernd J., Du skulle være præst, Johannes! Hånden på ploven. Erindringer om min far (Aarhus, Denmark: ScandinavianBook, 2016): 212. 18. Mulder, William, “Utah’s Ugly Ducklings. A Profile of the Scandinavian Immigrant.” Utah Historical Quarterly 23, no. 1–4 (1955): 236. Jenson, Scandinavian Mission, 535. 19. Jenson, Scandinavian Mission, 535. Johansson, Carl-Erik, “History of the Swedish Mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1905–1973,” unpublished Master’s Thesis (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, 1973): 10. 20. Johansson, “History of the Swedish Mission,” 11. 21. Johansson, “History of the Swedish Mission,” 34. 22. Johansson, “History of the Swedish Mission,” 34. 23. Jenson, Scandinavian Mission, 536. 24. Hunsaker, “History of the Norwegian Mission,” 85, 47. 25. “The First Norwegian Letter,” The Improvement Era XXXXVIII, no. 2 (February 1945): 106. Qtd. in Hunsaker, “History of the Norwegian Mission,” 90. 26. Johansson, “History of the Swedish Mission,” 71. 27. Johansson, “History of the Swedish Mission,” 72. 28. Johansson, “History of the Swedish Mission,” 84. 29. Ray Engelbretsen, Quarterly Report for the Norwegian Mission, January 5, 1958. 30. Larsen, Du skulle være præst, 218–221. 31. Östman, Kim B. “The Mormon Espionage Scare and Its Coverage in Finland, 1982–84,” Journal of Mormon History 34, no. 1 (Winter 2008), 82–117. 32. Johansson, “History of the Swedish Mission,” 131. 33. Larsen, Du skulle være præst, 148. 34. Östman, Kim B., “‘The Other’ in the Limelight: One Perspective on the Publicity Surrounding the New LDS Temple in Finland,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 40, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 73, 77. 35. Oral interviews conducted by the authors. 36. Decoo, Wilfried, “Mormons in Europe,” The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, ed. Terryl L.  Givens and Philip L.  Barlow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015): 548–549. 37. Decoo, Wilfried. “Feeding the Fleeing Flock: Reflections on the Struggle to Retain Church Members in Europe,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 100. 38. Van Beek, Walter A., “Mormon Europeans or European Mormons? An ‘Afro-­ European’ View on Religious Colonization,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 38, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 20. 39. C.  Gary Lobb, “Mormon Membership Trends in Europe among People of Color: Present and Future Assessment,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 33, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 61. 40. Johansson, “History of the Swedish Mission,” 92. 41. Armand Mauss, “Seeking a ‘Second Harvest’: Controlling the Costs of LDS Membership in Europe,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 41, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 9–10. 42. Decoo, “Feeding the Fleeing Flock,” 117.

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43. Carine Decoo-Vanwelkenhuysen, “Mormon Women in Europe: A Look at Gender Norms,” in Women and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Kate Holbrook and Matthew Bowman (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016): 226–227. 44. Van Beek, “Mormon Europeans,” 20. 45. Mattsson, Hans and Christina Hanke, Sökte sanning—fann tvivel (Handen: XP Media, 2018). 46. Johansson, “History of the Swedish Mission,” 132. 47. “Special Fireside for Disaffected Latter-day Saints in Sweden,” PDF transcript, 31 December 2013. http://www.mormonthink.com/files/swedish-transcript.pdf.

Bibliography Allen, Julie K. 2017. Danish but Not Lutheran: The Impact of Mormonism on Danish Cultural Identity, 1850–1920. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Andersen, Knud B., et  al. 2001. Historien om mormonerne i Fredericia og omegn. Fredericia, Denmark: Privately published. Decoo, Wilfried. Spring 1996. Feeding the Fleeing Flock: Reflections on the Struggle to Retain Church Members in Europe. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29 (1): 97–118. ———. 2015. Mormons in Europe. In The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, ed. Terryl L. Givens and Philip L. Barlow, 543–558. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Decoo-Vanwelkenhuysen, Carine. 2016. Mormon Women in Europe. A Look at Gender Norms. In Women and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Kate Holbrook and Matthew Bowman, 213–229. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Engelbretsen, Ray. 1958. Quarterly Report for the Norwegian Mission, January 5. Hunsaker, Curtis B. 1965. History of the Norwegian Mission from 1851 to 1960. Unpublished Master’s Thesis. Provo, Utah, Brigham Young University. Jenson, Andrew. 1927. The History of the Scandinavian Mission. Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press. Jessup, David E.  Summer 2010. The Language of Religious Liberty in the Swedish Constitution of 1809. Scandinavian Studies 82 (2): 159–182. Johansson, Carl-Erik. 1973. History of the Swedish Mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1905–1973. Unpublished Master’s Thesis. Provo, Utah, Brigham Young University. Larsen, Bernd J. 2016. Du skulle være præst, Johannes! Hånden på ploven. Erindringer om min far. Aarhus, Denmark: ScandinavianBook. Lobb, C. Gary. 2000. Mormon Membership Trends in Europe among People of Color: Present and Future Assessment. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 33 (4): 55–68. Mattsson, Hans, and Christina Hanke. 2018. Sökte sanning—fann tvivel. Handen: XP Media. Mauss, Armand L. Winter 2008. Can There Be a ‘Second Harvest’?: Controlling the Costs of Latter-day Saint Membership in Europe. Dialogue. A Journal of Mormon Thought 41 (4): 1–54.

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Morris, David M. 2008. The Rhetoric of the Gathering and Zion: Consistency through Change, 1831–1920. International Journal of Mormon Studies 1: 154–171. Mulder, William. August 1954. Mormons from Scandinavia 1850–1900: A Shepherded Migration. Pacific Historical Review 23 (3): 227–246. ———. 1955. Utah’s Ugly Ducklings. A Profile of the Scandinavian Immigrant. Utah Historical Quarterly 23 (1–4): 233–259. ———. 2000 [1957]. Homeward to Zion: The Mormon Migration from Scandinavia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Östman, Kim B. Winter 2007. The Other’ in the Limelight: One Perspective on the Publicity Surrounding the New LDS Temple in Finland. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 40 (4): 71–106. ———. Winter 2008. The Mormon Espionage Scare and Its Coverage in Finland, 1982–84. Journal of Mormon History 34 (1): 82–117. ———. 2010. The Introduction of Mormonism to Finnish Society, 1840–1900. Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press. Rinne, Anna-Liisa. 1986. Kristuksen Kirkko Suomessa. Turku, Finland: Privately published. “Special Fireside for Disaffected Latter-day Saints in Sweden,” PDF transcript, 31 December 2013. Accessed February 9, 2020. http://www.mormonthink.com/ files/swedish-transcript.pdf. Ulvund, Frode. 2017. Nasjonens antiborgere: Forestillinger om religiøse minoriteter som samfunnsfiender i Norge, ca 1814–1964. Oslo: Cappelen Damm Akademisk. Van Beek, Walter A.  Winter 2005. Mormon Europeans or European Mormons? An ‘Afro-European’ View on Religious Colonization. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 38 (4): 3–36.

CHAPTER 21

The LDS Church in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia David G. Stewart Jr.

Author Preliminary Note: Each Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) missionary (and convert) has a unique story. I served an LDS mission in Saint Petersburg, Russia, from 1992 to 1994. My father, a professional translator, who had taught Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking converts during his own youth mission to Brazil, paid the medical expenses of my birth with the proceeds from translating a Russian-language engineering manual. In May 1975 the 30th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany was commemorated by an exchange, for the first time since World War II, in which two Russian warships from Leningrad—the Boiki and the Zhguchi—visited Boston, and two American warships visited Leningrad.1 My parents lived near Boston, and my father was able to gain admittance because he spoke Russian. Photos of me as a toddler being held by Russian sailors at this unique moment in history are part of my childhood photo album. I became fascinated by Russia and queried my father’s Russian-speaking friends. During high school, I studied the Russian language independently and read the entire Russian-language translation of the Book of Mormon. After completing my first year of college as a presidential scholar and the first National Advanced Placement scholar to attend Brigham Young University (BYU), I received my mission call to St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) in the summer of 1992. Upon returning from the mission field in 1994, I studied Ukrainian and Polish languages independently. During the 1996 summer break while attending medical school, I traveled to Utah to teach Ukrainian at the Senior Missionary Training Center at Brigham Young University and to translate missionary training materials. The early 1990s in Eastern Europe marked a transition full of both excitement and uncertainty. I found a vibrant and colorful world as a missionary there which left deep impressions. My mission companions were exceptional in their own ways: a

D. G. Stewart Jr. (*) Department of Orthopaedics, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV, USA © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_21

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grandson of Ezra Taft Benson, the church president at the time; the son of a candidate for governor of Idaho; two converts from Ukraine; and many others who brought unique talents and accomplishments. We achieved considerable successes. My Mormon belief in the evangelical necessity of preaching the gospel message for the salvation of every individual, in combination with my perception of the wide gap between potential and actual institutional performance, spurred me to work diligently and to strive to learn and improve. Upon returning from my mission, I embarked on systematic research to understand where the institutional missionary program had fallen short and what could be done better. For some 15 years, memories of people and experiences would come to me with vivid precision at all hours. The Law of the Harvest (Stewart, 2007) was written as a compilation of the findings from my experience as an LDS missionary in Russia and from subsequent research. My brief assessment of results from this research is that the combination of low independent missionary contacting, poor time management, high attrition from quick-baptize methods, and limited leadership insights has contributed to slow LDS growth and poor retention in Eastern Europe and Russia, even while other denominations experienced rapid expansion.2

Eastern European Missions and the Future of Mormonism Notwithstanding the relatively small size of the LDS Church,3 the success or failure of missions in Eastern Europe has profound implications for the future prospects of the faith’s  worldwide growth. Bennion and Young observed in 1996 that 85 percent of LDS members lived in the Western Hemisphere, and the LDS faith had scarcely achieved significant numbers of adherents outside of the Americas beyond modest “beachheads” on “the Christianized or Westernized edges of the eastern hemisphere.”4 These percentages have changed little since that time. The expansion of the LDS Church into former Eastern Bloc nations represents the largest attempt to date to build up a sizeable following in non-Western regions of the continental Eurasian landmass that is home to nearly two-thirds of the world population. Eastern European cultures are less different from the West than the unreached peoples of the Middle East, India, China, and Southeast Asia. Church growth in Eastern Europe (and countries of the former Soviet Union) is a key litmus test of the LDS Church’s ability to adapt its message, approach, and programs to non-­ Western cultures.

History of the LDS Church in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sees itself as the successor to the early Christian Church and is committed to teaching the restored, pure Christian gospel. In 1843, church founder Joseph Smith called Apostle Orson Hyde and George J. Adams to a mission in the Russian Empire “to introduce the fullness of the Gospel to the people of that vast empire, and [to this] is attached some of the most important things concerning the advancement and

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building up of the kingdom of God in the last days, which cannot be explained at this time.”5 These plans were disrupted by Joseph Smith’s martyrdom in 1844 and the subsequent migration of those Mormons who acceded to Brigham Young’s leadership as prophet successor to Smith and followed Young to the Great Basin region of the United States. It wasn’t until around the turn of the twentieth century, however, that any LDS proselytizing efforts were actually accomplished in either Russia or Eastern Europe; Mormon missionary Mischa Markow preached for brief periods in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Russia, but no permanent congregations were organized.6,7 LDS missionary efforts in Europe up to that time had been concentrated mostly in England, Scandinavia, and Germany. Due to the prevailing doctrine of LDS members “gathering” to Zion in the Utah Territory, most converts left their European homelands and emigrated to the United States. The LDS Church virtually had no organized presence in most nations of Eastern Europe (and certainly not in Russia) for the greater part of the twentieth century. The communist state in the former Russian Empire (beginning in 1917) was envisioned as ushering in a utopia of the common man, based on state atheism with ostensibly scientific and rationalist claims. Religion was to be actively suppressed as delusional and counterrevolutionary. In the newly formed USSR, antireligious campaigns were conducted from 1921 to 1928 and from 1928 to 1941. Priests were painted as enemies of the working class and were rounded up and shot. Eighty-five thousand Russian Orthodox priests were murdered in 1937 alone.8 Over this period, the number of Orthodox Churches in the Russian Republic declined from 29,584 to fewer than 500.9 Remaining Orthodox institutions were heavily infiltrated by government informants. The post-World War II period saw marked declines in religiosity across much of Europe. The suffering inflicted by the war and oppressive governments led many to question belief in a God who cared and participated in the world. Mainline churches, which in some cases had been complicit with authoritarian governments in the oppression of religious and ethnic minorities, were increasingly viewed as self-interested, power-hungry, and corrupt organizations rather than as God’s kingdom on earth. Poland and Lithuania were exceptions, as the Catholic Church resisted both fascism and communism and retained moral authority. Elsewhere, individuals increasingly identified as atheist, agnostic, or “spiritual but not religious.” While sincere believers remained, many who identified specifically as Christians did so as a matter of culture rather than conviction. As communism spread throughout Eastern Europe and areas of Central Europe toward and after the end of World War II, communist officials were principally concerned with suppressing armed political resistance. Once control had been consolidated, campaigns were conducted to suppress religion. In Poland, a new constitution imposed by the communist government in 1952 omitted previously guaranteed religious freedoms. Catholic schools were closed, and social and charitable organizations affiliated with the church were

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made illegal. A terror campaign was conducted against monasteries and parishes, and clergy were arrested and put on trial. Communist collaborators were appointed to take over dioceses. The situation in other Eastern Bloc nations was similar, with suppression of existing religious institutions and imprisonment or execution of clergy. Pranskevičiūtė-Amoson observed that alternative religiosity under the communist regime was a “form of resistance which did not emerge in open opposition toward communist ideology,” instead of representing “an attempt to exist in an oppressive sociocultural environment.”10 In Central Asia, communism sought to undermine Islamic clergy and religious traditions. A state-controlled Islam kept religious practice and teachings under close government supervision. Between 1948 and 1991, only two madrassas, or Islamic religious schools, functioned in all of Central Asia, both in Uzbekistan.11 Meanwhile, prior to and following World War II, a few scattered LDS Church members in Eastern Europe worshipped individually or as families, particularly in Czechoslovakia. In 1939, 13,402 Mormons lived in Germany and Austria (of which at least 997 were killed during World War II12). Some German-speaking Mormons in Zelwagi (formerly Selbongen) found themselves in Poland because of the realignment of national boundaries after World War II.13 The LDS congregation that subsequently formed there was discontinued in 1947, due to laws requiring that only Polish be spoken at public meetings, but was resumed in 1949 with Polish-language meetings. The LDS Church was officially registered in Poland in 1961, but the last Polish branch was discontinued in 1971 due to Polish members’ emigration.14 Some individuals from Western Poland were baptized as LDS members on trips to Germany in the mid-1970s. With but one exception, no official LDS missionary activity occurred in Eastern Bloc (communist) countries until the late 1980s. The exception was in Yugoslavia where the Church was able to send a small number of missionaries between 1977 and 1980 due to the efforts of Krešimir Ćosić, a Croatian-born basketball star who joined the LDS Church while attending BYU (1970–1973). Ćosić translated the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants into Croatian. Ćosić later served as deputy ambassador to the United States from Croatia before passing away from cancer in 1995, but his legacy has had lasting impact.

Early Growth and the Importance of Eastern Europe to Church Leadership After the end of the Cold War and the fall of the so-called Iron Curtain, the LDS Church immediately sent missionaries to most Eastern European nations in the late 1980s. Proselytism was initially supervised from the Finland Helsinki East and Austria Vienna East missions. Missions were established in Russia, Ukraine, and other former Eastern Bloc nations between 1990 and 1993.15

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The first LDS congregation in Russia was organized in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) in 1990. By mid-1993, there were 15 LDS congregations in St. Petersburg, 18 in Moscow, and 16 in Kyiv. With a complement of just 80 missionaries, the Russia St. Petersburg Mission baptized over 500 converts in 1992 alone. Initial contacts were primarily through word of mouth. “Sign boarding” (missionaries would speak to passers-by, adjacent to street displays) and street contacting were also used to generate new investigators. This initial period of high religious interest was characterized by saturation levels of investigators, providing more opportunities than many missionaries’ time management skills allowed them to utilize. Ukrainian missions consistently outperformed the Russian missions, with the Ukraine Kyiv Mission sometimes baptizing over 100 converts during peak summer months, when many in the northern cities left to grow food at their country cottages. New missions were organized throughout the region. The early growth of the LDS Church in Yerevan, Armenia; Almaty, Kazakhstan; and Vladivostok, Russia, was due to the outreach efforts of expatriate members, who established branches and baptized converts years before full-time missionaries were assigned. Odessa, Ukraine, was opened for proselytism by native member-missionaries due to a restriction on foreign missionaries at the time; missionaries were pulled from Moldova in 2004 and reentered only in 2007. The LDS Church quickly came to view Russian and Eastern European missions as important and tried to lay the foundation for successful growth. Visiting leaders affirmed on multiple occasions that the Church sent many of who they considered to be their best missionaries to Eastern Europe. During my own time as a missionary in the Russia Saint Petersburg Mission (1992–1994), the small missionary complement, which ranged from 60 to 100, included a grandson of then LDS Church president Ezra Taft Benson, relatives of LDS apostles Haight and Wirthlin, the daughter of a member of the LDS area presidency, and relatives of other prominent Mormons. The only son and namesake of Apostle Russell M.  Nelson (now LDS Church president) served a mission in Moscow during this time and accompanied his father to Saint Petersburg to translate for him upon completion of his missionary service. The visits of foreign LDS Church dignitaries, who rotated disproportionately frequently through our small mission, were marked by charismatic zeal. Firesides with Latter-day Saint apostles, to which members and interested listeners alike were invited, were held in rented Soviet-era “palaces of culture.” Visiting dignitaries shared with missionaries their expansive vision for the LDS Church in Russia. In 1993, one visiting apostle pointed to several large adjacent apartment buildings and stated that in the future those buildings would constitute one stake (an ecclesiastical unit of multiple large congregations) and that Saint Petersburg would have many stakes. Others envisioned numerous congregations in the city and promised dynamic growth with hard work and perseverance. While visiting Ukraine in 2009, Apostle Neil L. Anderson stated that “people will join the church here by the hundreds and thousands.”16

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With the establishment of missions across the region following the fall of the Iron Curtain, the LDS Church attracted many deeply committed and exceptional converts who served as pioneers in building the church in their local areas. Most converts had previously believed in a higher power, but their religious observance was largely personal. Some were former atheists or prominent adherents of other faiths. In Russian missions, ethnic Russians predominated, although a full spectrum of ethnic minorities were represented, including large numbers of Ukrainians and Armenians. Early LDS converts in Eastern Europe and Russia were relatively well educated. Tania Rands observed that in Ukraine, “intelligentsia are relatively well represented among early converts to Mormonism. Especially in Kiev [Kyiv] there are scientists, lawyers, university professors, business executives, engineers, two prominent surgeons and other health professionals, musicians and artists, a ballet master and a dramatist, several journalists and a prominent anchorwoman for Ukrainian television, linguists, teachers, and museum docents.”17 On my own mission in St. Petersburg, converts included a physicist, teachers, successful businessmen, and other professionals. Profiles of early converts have been chronicled by former mission presidents Gary Browning,18 Thomas Rogers,19 and Howard Biddulph20 and historian Kahlile Mehr.21 Latter-day Saint members across Eastern Europe include many kind, thoughtful, and deeply spiritual individuals committed to serving their communities. Each is a first- or second-generation Latter-day Saint who continues to participate, not because of external cultural expectations but because of experiencing personal conversion.

Declining Conversions and Low Member Retention in Russia and Eastern Europe However, by 1993 church growth in Russia and Eastern Europe began to decelerate. Fewer than half of the members baptized in Saint Petersburg, Russia, between 1990 and 1992 were active by 1993. President Thomas Rogers of the Russia Saint Petersburg Mission (1993–1996) wrote that “as of the summer of 1994 … attendance at Church meetings had generally fallen off from an earlier 50–60% to 30–40%” across the region.22 Attrition was particularly severe among youth: “in Moscow, we had lost 90% of our young men ages 12–18.” Van Beek observed that in Holland, “almost all older [LDS] couples have one or more, sometimes all, of their children inactive or disaffiliated.”23 Similar trends have developed across Eastern Europe. With low birth rates and high attrition of member children, the natural growth of multi-generational LDS families is below replacement level. The Russia Saint Petersburg Mission fell to approximately 150 baptisms in 1993, fewer than one-third of the prior year’s total. From 1994, the number of annual converts in the Saint Petersburg Mission plateaued at approximately 60–100 annually before declining further. Similar retrenchment occurred in

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Moscow, Kyiv, Warsaw, and other major Eastern European cities. With notable exceptions in Ukraine and Albania, most missions fell to fewer than 100 baptisms annually by 1994. In 1999, the Ukraine Kyiv Mission was baptizing approximately 50 people most months or one baptism per companionship per month. By contrast, in the twenty-first century, even the most productive Eastern European missions are baptizing significantly fewer converts than low-­ growth Western European missions were baptizing 15 years prior. For example, the Ukraine Kyiv Mission, which was tied for second place for growth in the Europe East Area with the Russia Rostov Mission and behind only the Armenia Yerevan Mission, reported 106 baptisms in 2006, but then declining to 84 in 2007 and 76 in 2008—only 58 percent of the earlier Dutch mission average.24 This rate of about one baptism per missionary per year for the mission’s 80 missionaries was far below the world average of 4.5–5.1 converts per missionary per year at the time; other missions reported considerably fewer converts. Yet missionaries in Ukraine reported an abundance of people to teach and little time spent on “finding activities.” In L’viv, missionaries reported teaching an average of 10–25 lessons per week per companionship, but few investigators attended church or progressed toward membership. Sociologist and former missionary to Ukraine, Tania Rands (now Lyon), wrote that “Sacrament meeting attendance in the three largest cities of the Donetsk Mission for March 1996 averaged 38 percent.”25 On my own research trips in 1998 and 1999, LDS activity rates were reported by mission offices, local members, and full-time missionaries as being approximately 25 percent in the Czech Republic, 28 percent in Hungary, 20 percent in Estonia, and 20 percent in Poland. These figures are broadly consistent with estimated activity rates for Western Europe during this time, centering around 25 percent.26,27 Attrition in Russia and Eastern Europe was high even among previously very active members. For instance, President Thomas F. Rogers reported that 14 current or former branch presidents left the LDS Church or became inactive during his three-year period in St. Petersburg (1993–1996).28 In 2009, approximately 50 attended church weekly in L’viv, Ukraine, fewer than in 1999—only three years after missionaries had first entered the city—when approximately 75 attended. In 1996, Wilfried Decoo wrote that “massive defection of members in former communist countries” was already occurring,29 and Bennion and Young observed that “Eastern Europe’s and Russia’s current civil wars, economic chaos, and conservative religious backlash have hindered missionary work enough to dampen initial expectations.”30 Missionaries had been consistently admonished from the beginning that their principal objectives were to establish the church properly and to build strong membership branches; authorities did not emphasize generating large numbers of quick conversions. However, the emphasis on quality was a subjective determination, unaccompanied by established, specific standards for evaluating the preparation and commitment of prospective converts. Among other concerns, “Word of Wisdom” problems

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have been a major obstacle for many prospective converts. Alcohol and tobacco use are widespread in Eastern Europe and Russia, especially among men. By the mid-1990s, slowed growth and low retention became matters of deep concern for mission and area leaders. A survey, which included responses from 16 of the first 17 current and former mission presidents in the former USSR, was conducted by President Thomas F. Rogers.31 President Rogers wrote, “These were issues which from time to time had puzzled, even agonized a number of us—mission presidents, front line missionaries, and also members of the Seventy in our area presidency in Frankfurt: ‘What are we doing wrong? What should we do differently?’”32 The mission presidents surveyed cited a variety of causes for slow growth and low retention, including encroaching societal materialism, inadequate church accommodations, leadership training needs, the lack of a “critical mass” of members, and the need for better support systems for new members.33 President Rogers reported that in the late 1990s, some positive growth trends were seen in certain missions, most prominently in Samara and Kyiv. Missions in Ukraine and the Baltic states reported 80–90 percent convert retention rates during certain periods.34 He noted that during the first half of 1999, “The number of baptisms throughout Eastern Europe had quite unexpectedly markedly increased and in some cases even doubled.” However, as President Rogers surmised at the time, the construction of meetinghouses across Eastern Europe has not subsequently led to any objective improvement in growth or retention,35 nor have retention rates or member-missionary participation seemingly improved, even as nominal membership numbers have somewhat increased. Thus, the positive trends of the mid-1990s were not sustained. Relatively little has been published on the LDS Church in Eastern Europe since 2000.36 In short, most LDS growth in Eastern Europe was achieved by 1995–2000. Eastern European missions subsequently experienced a progressive decline with growth rates falling below those of even the slow years of the late 1990s. Active membership in most countries of the region fell to 1995 levels or below by 2015. The wife of one former Russian mission president lamented that church attendance numbers were static but that “the people attending are different.” Missionary efforts struggled to replace those lost to inactivity. The past 20 years of growth stagnation in Eastern Europe constitute the “lost decades” for the LDS Church.

Contemporary LDS Life in Eastern Europe and Russia In many Eastern European congregations of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, church life is as immersive as schedules allow. During fieldwork in L’viv, Ukraine, in May and June 2009, we found that in addition to the three-hour Sunday meeting block, church members spent time at church activities almost every day of the week. A ward family home evening was held on Monday evening. On Tuesday and Thursday evenings, missionaries taught 90-minute English classes to members and visitors. Institute of Religion classes

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were held Wednesday evenings. On Saturday mornings, youth gathered to play Frisbee with the missionaries; at 6 pm members, investigators, and English students gathered for a showing of English-language church films. Special events also occurred during our first week there. On Monday, a ward picnic was held in a local park at noon to celebrate the Pentecost holiday, and on Saturday at 5 pm a seminary and institute graduation ceremony was held in the chapel. Only on Friday were there no scheduled church events. Missions across the larger designated region organized temple trips for worthy members once or twice yearly. Members from Saint Petersburg, Russia, would travel to the Finland Helsinki Temple, where they remained for several days. Members who could afford to save regularly for these trips did so, while the LDS Church subsidized those with limited financial means. The Ukraine Kyiv Temple was dedicated in August 2010 to serve members across the region (although temple trips for Russian missions were diverted elsewhere, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014). Because small congregations in Ukraine, with only 30–40 active members (often with as few as 4–6 active Melchizedek priesthood holders, that is, adult men eligible for leadership callings), try to implement a full church program, members often hold two or three church callings or assignments. As only a few cities have more than one congregation, and most members rely on public transportation, many members spend 30–60 minutes in travel time each way. The cost to members in time and resources of implementing such a program is considerably greater than in the US Mormon Cultural Region on the Intermountain West, where members rarely spend more than 5–10 minutes in travel time. Other LDS congregations in the Eastern European region experience similar dynamics with small groups of highly involved members. Walter Van Beek has discussed the former role of societal “pillars” in religious society in the Netherlands37 and the role of the cultural institutions of the Utah LDS Church in promoting expectations of church activity and missionary service. His observations apply to the international LDS Church broadly: The Church aims at having a large place in the lives of its members. It is what in sociology is sometimes called a ‘greedy institution,’ one claiming the whole life of the individual. General Authorities readily concede this point, citing it as evidence of the Church’s trueness. However, such claims give the institution the task of filling the void it has created by separating converts from their old environment. Mormonism never was simply a faith; it always was a ‘way of life.’38

The intensive level of involvement provides support and fellowshipping for investigators, members, and converts. It can also contribute to member exhaustion. Personal daily scripture reading, family relationships, and other essentials taught by the LDS Church can be diluted when other congregational demands become too consuming. Members may walk the line between burnout and isolation, at times experiencing both.

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The experiences of Latter-day Saints in Russia and in Central and Eastern Europe are diverse but share several common themes, including the immersive nature of religious life, participation in small, tight-knit religious communities, close relationships with foreign (predominately US) full-time missionaries, and status as adherents of a small religious minority. These Latter-day Saint members have demonstrated faith, hope, and resilience in challenging environments. The LDS Church’s “lost years” in Eastern Europe, defined by deceleration and stagnation in growth, correspond to national counter-proselytism initiatives and trends. These include a resurgence of national faiths, with emphasis on traditional ethnic or national religious identities; a backlash against religious pluralism; representation of foreign-based faiths as unpatriotic; and, in some cases, new laws and regulations restricting religious outreach. Secularization, materialism, and European integration have also been factors, particularly in nations that have acceded to the European Union. A large portion of the LDS core adult membership and local leadership in Eastern Europe consists of returned missionaries. Returned native missionaries are an important source of strength to many congregations. Local full-time missionary service rates in Eastern Europe were among the highest in the LDS Church in the 1990s. In 1994, a LDS authority visiting Saint Petersburg declared the goal of having missions staffed by at least 25 percent native missionaries within two years. But, by mid-2009, only eight native missionaries served in the Ukraine Kyiv Mission, or 10 percent of the total. These numbers have changed little since that time. LDS youth can serve “mini-missions,” lasting anywhere between one week and several months. One sister in Ukraine reported to us that she spent eight months on successive “mini-missions.” Such opportunities help to train members in sharing the gospel and offer flexibility to those unable to serve a full-­ time mission due to other commitments. At the same time, full-time missionary experience of returned missionaries does not necessarily translate into effective member-missionary work; one returned Ukrainian sister-missionary noted that she found it easy for her to share the gospel with strangers on a mini-mission in a different city but much harder to approach friends and acquaintances in her own city. Missionaries in many Eastern European missions offer English lessons as part of their service program. One missionary reported to us that their focus is purely on English teaching and that they say nothing about their religious faith unless asked. Whereas such classes in the 1990s were largely random and improvised, by the late 2000s they were well organized, professionally implemented, and held at a weekly standard time. Notably, English lessons have augmented growth in the face of stagnation from other “finding” methods sources, despite the averred non-proselyting focus of these classes. Eight of the 28 members (29 percent) interviewed in Western Ukraine in 2009 reported learning of the LDS Church through free English lessons. Of those baptized in

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the four years prior, five of eight converts (63 percent) also learned of the church through English lessons. Some crossover does exist between teaching English and other finding methods. A missionary in Kazakhstan observed that although 90 percent of their investigators were found through street contacting, a review of records demonstrated that most had also previously participated in English lessons. Leo Merrill, president of the Ukraine Donetsk Mission in 1995, stated that “the best thing that can happen is for the Americans to get out so it can be seen as a Ukrainian church.”39 In many nations, government leaders have expressed preference for interfacing with native church leaders rather than foreign ones. Yet transition to indigenous leadership has posed challenges. Most Eastern Europeans are traditionally consumers of religion rather than active participants, as Van Beek has also observed of many non-Western cultures.40 Tania Rands, a sociologist who previously served an LDS mission in Ukraine, wrote that the “transition of having foreign missionaries move out of leadership positions and Ukrainians from the congregation called in their place … was almost always accompanied by complaints and a drop in church attendance.”41 The late Russia Moscow Mission President Richard Chapple stated: “Our number one challenge here is … simply training, training leadership.”42 The LDS Church’s organizational paradigm of rotating lay clergy, supported by universal member participation, requires a fundamental shift in orientation for many converts. In Eastern Europe, many local leaders are also church employees, especially at the higher levels. Both district presidents during my time as a missionary in St. Petersburg were salaried church employees. In L’viv, Ukraine, in 2009, one of the two branch presidents worked as a facilities manager, and two of three visiting authorities from Kyiv were employed by the LDS Church. Knowlton observes that in Latin America, “salaried leaders occupy a career track leading to the highest ranks of church leadership, including the general authorities,” as few others can afford to leave their jobs to serve as mission presidents. This pattern (applicable in all countries where a large proportion of ordinary members struggles economically) “undermines the tradition of a lay church” and “carries a potential for serious conflict.”43

Contemporary Russia and Eastern Europe: Continuing Congregational Decline Since the mid-1990s, few new cities have been opened for missionary work across Eastern Europe and Russia, and since 2005, old congregations have been consolidated or dissolved nearly as fast as new ones have been created. Although nominal membership numbers have continued to increase (because “the church meticulously counts those who join but does not attend to those who leave”),44 actual participating membership has plateaued and even declined in many areas. Since congregations require participating members to operate,

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trends in recorded congregational numbers provide a more reliable indicator of participation membership than official LDS Church membership figures. When this author arrived as a missionary in St. Petersburg, Russia, in September 1992, there were five Latter-day Saint congregations in the city attended weekly by approximately 200 people. By mid-1993, there were 15 congregations. When I left in August 1994, approximately 500 people were attending LDS meetings citywide. The number of congregations in Moscow and Kyiv similarly grew to around 20 by 1993. However, due to slowing growth and low retention, these congregations were consolidated to between five and eight in each city by 1995.45 By mid-2019, there were only four congregations in three meeting places in Saint Petersburg proper, and weekly church attendance citywide had fallen to fewer than 300 people, notwithstanding a nominal membership of above 3000. There were 97 congregations in Russia at year-end 1997 and 103 in 1999. But in 2007, congregations numbered only 129, despite nominal doubling of official membership from 8000 to 15,615. Membership grew to 23,252 by 2017, but only 85 congregations in Russia were listed on the LDS Church’s Meetinghouse Locator in 2019 (along with an additional four congregations in Crimea, annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014). The net closure of 44 congregations in Russia between 2007 and 2019 included many cities with previously vibrant congregations. However, all of these congregations experienced slow growth and member attrition to the point where too few participating members remained for the congregations to function. In cities with still operating congregations, members of dissolved units have to travel farther to church, contributing to additional attrition. The first meetinghouse built by the LDS Church in Eastern Europe was constructed on Wolska Street in Warsaw, Poland, with groundbreaking in 1989 and dedication in 1991.46 By the mid-1990s, Warsaw had gone from six LDS congregations scattered throughout the city to just one meeting in the Wolska chapel. Situated on the city’s western periphery, the Wolska chapel is poorly accessible to those living in the city’s other regions. Ukraine had 59 congregations in 1999 and the same number in 2007, except that eight branches (small congregations) had become wards (large congregations). By 2017, there were only 48 Ukrainian congregations, despite official membership numbers more than doubling from 5000 to 11,167. In 2017, Poland had only one more congregation (13) than in 1995, and the Czech Republic had one fewer congregation than the 13 that operated in 1993. Stakes, or administrative units of multiple large congregations, were organized in Kyiv, Ukraine (2004); Moscow, Russia (2011); Budapest, Hungary (2006); Saint Petersburg, Russia (2012); Tirana, Albania (2014); and Saratov, Russia (2015). Although the official number of ordained adult male Melchizedek Priesthood holders had grown, church attendance (except in Albania) was broadly lower than a decade prior. The decline in congregations has been accompanied by corresponding shuttering of missions due to poor results. The Ukraine Odessa Mission was

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announced in 199947 and then rescinded. Numerous missions were closed and consolidated: the Russia Moscow South (established 1997, renamed Moscow West in 2006, and discontinued in 2012), Ukraine Donetsk (1993–2014), Russia Vladivostok (1999–2017), Bulgaria Sofia (1991–2018), Romania Bucharest (1993–2018), Russia Samara (1993–2018), and Ukraine L’viv (2013–2018). Further closures are likely.

The LDS Church Experience in Contemporary Caucasus and Central Asia: Georgia, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Azerbaijan In 2019, the LDS Church reported 3560 members in 11 congregations in Armenia48 and 253 members in two congregations in neighboring Georgia.49 At first glance, these figures might appear to suggest that Armenians are much more receptive than Georgians to the Mormon message. Yet data from other faiths suggest that Georgians are at least as receptive to restorationist Christianity. For instance, in 2018, the Jehovah’s Witnesses reported 10,977 publishers and 277 baptisms in 134 congregations in Armenia but almost double these numbers in Georgia with 18,173 publishers and 456 baptisms in 219 congregations.50 During the 2008 Russian-Georgian War, LDS missionaries were removed from Georgia for three months. Although the only LDS congregations were located in Tbilisi, where no fighting or infrastructure damage occurred, membership suffered severe attrition during this period. Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, however, were largely able to maintain their numbers during this same period. Such comparisons demonstrate the importance of sustainable, self-sufficient, and self-perpetuating models of congregational growth which are not highly dependent on foreign missionaries and funding. In 2009, LDS literature in Georgian was limited to two pamphlets. It is unclear on what basis church leaders believed Georgians would join and retain their faith without more substantive literature in their own language. The Georgian translation of the Book of Mormon was finally published in 201851 after more than 20 years of LDS proselytism in the country. The prevailing policy that LDS literature is translated into new languages only as the LDS Church achieves critical mass of members in a given country seems undergirded by circular logic, as membership is unlikely to grow in new areas without investment in language-based resources. As Duke observed, growth opportunities are time-sensitive: “favorable conditions do not last forever,” and “if a sizable membership can be built up during the good years, the Church will be able to maintain a strong membership when conditions are less favorable.”52 The LDS Church in Armenia arose from the outreach of expatriate Mormon employees of the Huntsman Chemical Corporation (founded by LDS businessman John Huntsman Sr.), who were living in Armenia in the early 2000s,

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and also by the subsequent work of senior couple missionaries. The story of LDS expansion in Armenia offers a cautionary tale applicable to other missionary efforts in new areas of the world. After an initial period of modest growth, Armenia led the Europe East Area in baptisms in the mid-2000s, largely due to a locally imposed, aggressive proselyting rule that missionaries were not allowed to return for a second teaching visit unless investigators had committed to baptism at the conclusion of the first visit. Unsurprisingly, as a consequence of such a premature demand for conversion, fewer than 20 percent of converts of the “Armenian Pentecost” subsequently remained active. (One wonders how such a high-pressure directive for immediate baptismal commitments was seen as squaring with the scriptural challenge to thoughtfully ponder and pray to receive a testimony or for the need to bring forth the fruits of repentance through life change before baptism.) This policy was implemented, notwithstanding a 2002 directive from the LDS First Presidency that all converts must have attended several sacrament meetings prior to baptism and be consistently keeping all commitments.53 This directive was subsequently reinforced by the 2004 Preach My Gospel missionary program reformation, numerous cautions from then Presidents Hinckley and Monson regarding the need for adequate convert preparation, and responsibility for oversight delegated to LDS area presidencies around the world. Finally, in early 2009, the policy of first-visit baptismal commitment in Armenia was reversed by a new mission president who required prospective converts to attend church meetings at least six times prior to baptism, dramatically improving retention. That the original policy had been introduced and continued for years, despite numerous cautions, attests to the strong pressure to achieve success (measured by baptismal numbers) that mission presidents and missionaries experience, often at the expense of garnering lasting, quality conversions. Ongoing appearance of such practices elsewhere in LDS mission areas raises concern regarding official missionary instructions to unquestioningly obey local mission leaders. The prioritization of obedience over ethics effectively grants mission presidents carte blanche in determining specific rules for conducting proselyting activities. These concerns are magnified by the lack of remedy or appeal and what is often scanty oversight. LDS growth in Kazakhstan occurred primarily as the result of expatriate members starting in the late 1990s. Missionary work is presently confined to just two cities, Almaty and Nur-Sultan (formerly Astana), in which the requisite number of existing members meets registration requirements. Kyrgyzstan, initially the country most politically receptive to religious expression among Central Asian nations, has allowed entrance of some foreign missionaries since 1993. Subsequently, a number of denominations experienced rapid growth there. However, the LDS Church chose not to enter Kyrgyzstan when proselytism first became relatively unrestricted. More than 1200 foreign missionaries were admitted to the country between 1996 and 2009, none of whom were LDS.

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The LDS Church’s failure to enter Kyrgyzstan during the initial years of widespread religious freedom seems to have been based on an expectation that favorable conditions would last indefinitely. Then Apostle Russell M. Nelson (now LDS president and prophet) traveled to Kyrgyzstan in 2003 at the invitation of government leaders,54 but no LDS missionaries were subsequently sent. In late 2008, a new law increased the number of citizens required for a religious group to be registered from 10 to 200.55 No proselytizing or missionary activity can occur without a sponsoring organization that is officially registered as a religious group. After the LDS Church missed the original window of opportunity, it now finds itself locked out of the country with no means of reaching the required membership threshold in this small nation that experiences little immigration. Faiths which entered previous to the Kyrgyzstan 2008 laws, however, are thriving. The US Embassy reported in 2009 that there were 49 Jehovah’s Witness and 30 Seventh-day Adventist congregations in the country, as well as numerous Protestant groups.56 With a little attention in the early years, it is possible that the LDS Church could have achieved strong growth in Kyrgyzstan, similar to what it has experienced in Mongolia. If LDS’ full entry into the country is somehow achieved in future decades, it will be in a landscape of resurgent Islam and the established organizational presence of other Christian denominations. Azerbaijan was similarly passed over by the LDS Church during that country’s earlier acceptance of foreign religious groups. Now, the faith lacks adequate membership to register there as an officially recognized Christian organization. (It should be noted that any proselytizing is now limited in Azerbaijan, even for registered Christian groups.)

The Value of Missiological Research in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia The study of the establishment and growth of the LDS Church from its inception in Eastern Europe (and subsequently into Russia and Central Asia) offers valuable insights into mission policy and church growth generally. LDS Missionary Department research conducted in North America and English-­ speaking nations has often been confounded by variables not present in other areas of the world. These include a large pre-existing member base with established attitudes and practices and existing cultural and social influences of the LDS Church in these areas. These factors can make it difficult to distinguish the impact of missionary initiatives per se from the behaviors and attitudes of local members. The maturity of North American congregations has helped to compensate for elements of the institutional LDS Church missionary program that would do less well in isolation. In turn, assumptions of a large member base, strong pastoral leadership, and well-coordinated support for prospective converts have been baked into the standardized LDS missionary program.

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Mature congregations with many lifelong members do not require converts to function, and convert retention has historically not been a prominent focus of the missionary program. The conditions of the American LDS Church have impacted not only the conclusions of mission research—many of which may be less applicable or even counterproductive in other cultural settings—but the very questions which have been asked. Almost all new units of US Latter-day Saint congregations are formed by splitting existing units rather than as a consequence of building on de novo proselytization. Essential questions for establishing the LDS Church in new areas are neither asked nor answered by the Church’s North American-­ based missionary research. Some of these questions should include the following: How does one successfully establish vibrant, functioning congregations in areas with no members? How does one successfully retain converts in areas with few or no members to fellowship them? When is it appropriate or necessary to build meetinghouses? How does one foster self-sufficiency of local congregations from their inception? When is it appropriate to turn leadership of congregations over to local members? How does one find the right balance between finding investigators through tracting or street contacting, soliciting member referrals, and utilizing the media in new areas? How can missionaries in remote areas make appropriate and effective use of local media? These and other questions can be at least partially answered from careful missiological research in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia. The LDS Church was established from essentially no prior base across Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain. It should therefore be possible to directly correlate church growth with mission practices and policies untainted by many other confounding factors. Current members in these regions of the world have joined the LDS Church within the framework of the contemporary missionary program and have less carry-over baggage from earlier church policies. The ultimate responsibility for the overall growth and conversion experiences of new members in these countries therefore devolves upon missionaries and their leaders. Perhaps the largest factor in the LDS Church’s low numerical growth in the region is that missionaries have spent relatively little effort making new contacts. Many missionaries struggled with time management, making multiple visits to individuals who were not attending church, reading scripture, or putting forth other efforts, while being “too busy” to meet new people. In late 1993, President Thomas Rogers conducted a survey of the Russia Saint Petersburg Mission. He found that the average missionary companionship reported approaching an average of only five to ten new people, and urged improvement. My field interviews with nearly 200 missionaries serving in 12 Eastern European missions between 1999 and 2019 found that the average missionary reported spending a median of fewer than four hours per week on independent finding efforts. Thirty to forty percent of missionaries reported no independent finding at all over the prior week. Fewer than 10 percent reported spending up to 10–14 hours a week tracting or street contacting, still

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remote from historical 8–10-hour days of tracting in many Western European missions. Most missionaries believed that contacting through their own efforts was of minimal importance, likely as a result of “tracting, street contacting, and speaking with everyone” being listed as the three least effective finding methods in the “white” LDS Missionary Handbook.57 Notwithstanding a heavy area-wide emphasis on member referrals, most Eastern European converts have come into the LDS Church through missionary tracting and street contacting, except in areas where these methods have been artificially limited. Sixteen of 28 (57 percent) LDS converts I interviewed in Western Ukraine in 2009 were found through missionary tracting or street contacting, 8 (29 percent) through English lessons, 2 (7 percent) through member referrals, and 2 (7 percent) through investigator referrals. In 2008, missionaries in Kazakhstan reported finding 90 percent of their investigators through tracting and street contacting. Missionaries in Russia, Poland, Slovakia, and elsewhere also confirmed that most converts were found through missionary finding efforts. Annus and Csepregi noted with interest that all ten randomly selected active LDS volunteers they interviewed in three cities in Hungary in 2010 became acquainted with the LDS Church through the missionaries themselves.58 These data appear broadly consistent with trends in Western Europe. Van Beek observed that of converts in the Dutch Mission from 1980 to 1994, approximately one-third come “from member referrals and two-thirds from missionary contacts.”59 While receptivity varies widely, it is difficult for any faith which is not regularly reaching large numbers of people to maintain high convert growth. In 1998, 1999, and 2009, I conducted street surveys of more than 200 people in Kyiv, L’viv, Warsaw, Prague, Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn, all major cities where LDS missionaries had served between 7 and 13 years at the time. Only 2–6 percent of individuals reported ever having been approached by LDS or Mormon missionaries, whereas 65 percent reported having been personally approached by Jehovah’s Witnesses, many on more than one occasion. LDS missions lacked a vision for broad outreach, and the results have reflected this. More remarkable than any specific insights among the 16 former mission presidents queried by President Rogers,60 as well as some I have interviewed subsequently, is that extremely low rates of contacting by missionaries did not even register as a concern in leadership efforts to diagnose the LDS Church’s poor growth. To the contrary, at least two former Russian mission presidents went so far as to ban missionary tracting and street contacting at a time when these activities were legally permitted with the intent of encouraging missionaries to engage in ostensibly more “effective” finding methods. Others imposed quotas of member visits or hours. Such policies did not arise from any credible local data but arose from the uncritical acceptance of paradigms of the Utah-­ based missionary program. High convert attrition soon after baptism in many missions reflected quick-­ baptize directives of the institutional missionary program. Church authorities tended to conflate merely spending time with quality teaching. Missionaries

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spent considerable time with prospective converts, yet the degree of preparation was often poor due to a lack of specific standards. When individuals agreed to be baptized, they were often rushed to baptism with minimal church attendance and scripture study, without firmly overcoming tobacco and alcohol addictions, and without becoming integrated into the local congregation. In late 1993, the Eastern Europe area presidency instructed missionaries to spend half their time with members and promised that convert baptisms would double if missionaries would work effectively with members. Instead, convert baptisms dropped to less than half their prior level as missionaries spent more time with the few active members and even less time making new contacts. That same year, based on a perceived deficiency of male priesthood leadership, the area presidency directed missionaries to stop teaching women unless they had an interested husband or other male listener. Such directives are difficult to reconcile with the LDS Church’s own scripture. Unsurprisingly, convert baptisms declined further as missionaries discontinued teaching many female investigators while failing to achieve any meaningful increase in male converts, and the directive was eventually discontinued. Bennion and Young observed in 1996 that “since at least 1973 … the church has aggressively pursued its own ‘Open Door’ policy. It has sought for any opening that would allow it to establish a new mission field.”61 This practice ended with the introduction of the LDS “Building from Centers of Strength” policy in 1993. Centers of Strength essentially focuses on growing “tall” (i.e., developing small numbers of congregations with large numbers of members) in order to implement extensive church programming and to develop a “critical mass” of members that (so the theory goes) will become self-sustaining. (This contrasts with a “wide” growth policy, which focuses on numerous small and medium-sized congregations more broadly situated.) Following implementation of the “Centers of Strength” paradigm, the LDS Church organized few new congregations in Eastern Europe. For example, in 2009, only half of the large cities in Russia with over 100,000 people had a single LDS congregation. Due to the belief of mission and area leaders that meetinghouses would legitimize the LDS  Church as an accepted local faith and promote convert growth and member retention, LDS meetinghouses in Eastern Europe were overbuilt in the early years for optimistic growth expectations rather than present needs. The L’viv Ukraine chapel, built in the early 2000s, could reasonably accommodate three wards, totaling 900 members, but by 2019 it housed just one small congregation. Other LDS meetinghouses throughout Eastern Europe and Russia also operate at a fraction of capacity. By comparison, through 2003, the Seventh-day Adventists purchased 291 church meeting places in Russia and Ukraine, including apartments, cottages, and other sites, for a total of $3.5 million62: only slightly more than the LDS Church spent on a single facility during the same time frame.63 In contrast, LDS organizational paradigms require the purchase or construction of oversized meetinghouses for small congregations in mission field areas. Related

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expenditures include continued upkeep costs, the permanent assignment of two to four missionary companionships to a city, and the hiring of local members as church employees, including Church Educational System (CES) teachers and administrators, translators, and facilities directors. These costs are often not financially sustainable by the few local members and require ongoing subsidization by the LDS Church. The high cost of LDS congregations in both resources and missionary manpower comes at the cost of severely limiting outreach into new areas. The “rich church,” as the LDS Church is called in Ghana for its expensive Western-style meetinghouses, is also the small church.64 Anecdotal accounts suggest lost opportunities incurred by rigid adherence to a Center of Strength policy. During my own LDS mission in St. Petersburg, for instance, a man asked missionaries to come to his city of Petrozavodsk and offered accommodations as well as introductions to several interested families. After the mission president consulted with Area Authorities, this offer was declined due to a lack of available missionary resources. LDS missionaries entered the city approximately five years later under far less favorable conditions. I also met others who had carefully studied LDS scripture, attended church meetings, and made considerable sacrifices (one was expelled from an Orthodox seminary upon announcing his conviction for the LDS faith, another had traveled from Voronezh to Saint Petersburg to meet LDS missionaries) but were denied baptism because of the lack of permanent residence in the city. These cases contrast with those of numerous locals who were baptized without putting forth real effort or sacrifice, who had read no more than a few brief passages in the Book of Mormon, and who fell away without ever experiencing meaningful church activity. Episodes like these have not been unique. The LDS Church has been unable to muster the responsiveness of the Apostle Paul, who preached in Macedonia in response to a vision in which a man asked “Come over into Macedonia, and help us.”65 A paradox exists in which missionaries in Eastern Europe and elsewhere are currently baptizing less than one person per year, and less than one convert per missionary remains active as a result of an average two-year mission, yet resources and manpower cannot be allocated to accommodate receptive people’s requests to be taught in new areas.

Future Prospects for the LDS Church in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Russia, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia have demonstrated dedication, faith, and perseverance in the face of adversity. Due to a combination of shrinking demographics, native societal resistance, and institutional issues within the LDS Church, trends of stagnant growth in active LDS membership (throughout most of the region under consideration in this chapter) in the twenty-first century are unlikely to broadly rebound.

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Uneven change is more likely, with some regions or small nations experiencing periods of modest LDS growth and high convert retention, even as membership remains static or declines elsewhere. Medium-term stability is likely in most nations of the region, including Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia; the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; states of the former Yugoslavia, including Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Serbia, Slovenia, and the territory of Kosovo; Armenia in the Caucasus; and Kazakhstan in Central Asia. All of these nations have a strong base of committed members, and most have well-trained native leadership; most also have numerous returned missionaries. However, in these same countries, converts have been few; retention has been mixed, and convert growth has done little more than keep pace with member attrition. A mildly negative outlook may be expected for Bulgaria, Romania, and Ukraine, where missions have been consolidated and numerous congregations have been dissolved. LDS missionaries in each of these nations have found abundant people to teach but have been unable to make many committed converts despite recording numerous discussions with curious locals. The attrition of previously active members has resulted in a trend toward lower attendance in many congregations in these countries. In Russia, substantial declines in active membership and congregations seem likely in coming years. Since 2016, drastic restrictions on the rights of religious minorities have ended public proselytism and severely curtailed even private sharing of faith with friends and acquaintances.66 Even if requested, members are not permitted to share religious beliefs or answer questions. Religious literature can be distributed and interested parties can be taught only by authorized officials in registered meeting places. Full-time missionaries to Russia have become “service volunteers,” unable to engage in core missionary duties. The number of LDS foreign “volunteers” has dwindled to a fraction of prior levels due to difficulty obtaining visas. Several Russian missions have been shuttered; others teeter on the brink with only skeleton staff in place. Converts are still found through member acquaintances and public service activities, but numbers of baptisms have declined markedly. Russian members who converted in the initial wave of proselytism in the early to mid-1990s are aging, whereas others have been lost to attrition; natural growth in member children is below the replacement rate. Many highly dedicated members do remain, including significant numbers of young people. It is likely that the LDS Church in Russia could survive and even grow without foreign missionaries if local members were permitted to share their faith by Russian authorities. But in the absence of meaningful opportunities for proselytism, there is little opportunity to replace lost members, let alone to grow. The core of dedicated members is sufficient for the faith to maintain a presence for decades to come. Yet, barring the restoration of constitutionally guaranteed religious freedoms, continuing decline in active membership is likely. While acknowledging some societal conditions beyond the control of LDS Church missions, results have been underwhelming even in nations with broad

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religious freedoms and open-minded societal attitudes toward foreign missionaries. The underperformance of LDS Church growth in Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (former Republics of the USSR in Central Asia) raises broader questions for the institutional LDS missionary program: why are missionaries—who are surrounded by friendly people willing to be taught, who in many cases are teaching 10–25 discussions a week, and who perceived little necessity to make new contacts beyond those they already have—unable to baptize more than an average of one convert a year, with less than half of these converts becoming active members? If missionaries cannot do well, even in a nation like Ukraine—where most people are religiously tolerant and favorably disposed toward Americans, and where missionaries have no difficulty filling teaching schedules with minimal finding effort—how is the LDS Church to succeed in other nations where missionaries have difficulty getting discussions at all and where attitudes toward both US missionaries and the LDS faith are less tolerant?

Notes 1. Kifner, “Soviet Sailors in Boston and Americans in Leningrad.” 2. Stewart, “Statistical Analysis of Jehovah’s Witness, Seventh-day Adventist, and Mormon Growth and Retention in Post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe.” 3. The LDS Church reported membership of 16,313,735 at year-end 2018, of whom fewer than one-third are active. Active LDS membership constituted approximately 0.07 percent of an estimated 7.7 billion world population in mid-2019. 4. Bennion and Young, “The Uncertain Dynamics of LDS Expansion,” 16. 5. Roberts, History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 6:41. 6. Mehr, Kahlile B., Mormon Missionaries Enter Eastern Europe. 7. Cowan, Encyclopedia of Latter-day Saint History, 708. 8. York, “Why father of glasnost is despised in Russia.” 9. Pospielovsky, A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, The Believer, vol. 2: Soviet Antireligious Campaigns and Persecutions. 10. Pranskevičiūtė-Amoson, “The Hare Krishna Community in the Light of KGB Persecutions.” 11. Thibault, “The Soviet Secularization Project in Central Asia: Accommodation and Institutional Legacies,” 16. 12. Minert, “German and Austrian Latter-day Saints in World War II.” 13. Taylor, “LDS Church in Poland has had long, hard journey.” 14. Taylor, “LDS Church in Poland has had long, hard journey.” 15. Mehr and Heiss, “Freedom or Servitude: Russia and the LDS Church.” 16. Taylor, “President Uchtdorf, Elder Anderson visit Russia and Ukraine.” 17. Rands, “Mormonism in a Post-Soviet Society: Notes from Ukraine,” 83. 18. Browning, Russia and the Restored Gospel. 19. Rogers, A Call to Russia: Glimpses of Missionary Life. 20. Biddulph, The Morning Breaks: Stories of Conversion and Faith in the Former Soviet Union.

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21. Mehr, Mormon Missionaries Enter Eastern Europe. 22. Rogers, “Mormonism’s First Decade in the Former USSR: Patterns of Growth and Retention.” 23. Van Beek, “Ethnization and Accommodation,” 133. 24. Van Beek, “Ethnization and Accommodation,” 129. 25. Rands, “Mormonism in a Post-Soviet Society: Notes from Ukraine,” 92. 26. Decoo, Wilfried, “Issues in Writing European History and in Building the Church in Europe,” 164. 27. Lobb, “Mormon Membership Trends in Europe among People of Color.” 28. Rogers, “Mormonism’s First Decade in the Former USSR: Patterns of Growth and Retention.” 29. Decoo, “Feeding the Fleeing Flock,” 110. 30. Bennion and Young, “The Uncertain Dynamics of LDS Expansion, 1950–2020,” 24. 31. Rogers, “Mormonism’s First Decade in the Former USSR: Patterns of Growth and Retention.” 32. Rogers, ibid. 33. Rogers, ibid. 34. Rogers, ibid. 35. “More aggressively and effectively than ever, much is in fact now being done to acquire adequate and permanent Church facilities. A certain amount of risk taking, and the avoidance of delay occasioned by multiple hierarchical approvals, has finally come into play. However, to what extent facilities alone will turn the tide is, in my view, debatable. I say this, recalling the dismay with which, during my first mission in North Germany and Berlin ten years after World War II, we observed how at least five beautiful new chapels—donated by a former president of our mission and millionaire—were rarely half full, and the spirit in them correspondingly tepid, by contrast with the Begeisterung with which our East German members crowded into the dilapidated near ruins they had managed to rent near Berlin Alexanderplatz and elsewhere in the East Zone” (Rogers, ibid.). 36. Since books written by the first wave of mission presidents (including Browning, Rogers, and Biddulph), I am aware of no published work on the LDS Church in Eastern Europe by a former mission president. One mission president who served in the late 1990s stated that he had been instructed by the area presidency not to write a book after returning from the mission. Others may have received similar instructions. 37. Van Beek, “Ethnization and Accommodation,” 119-138. 38. Van Beek, “Mormon Europeans or European Mormons?” 24–25. 39. Rands, “Mormonism in a Post-Soviet Society: Notes from Ukraine,” 82. 40. Van Beek, “Ethnization and Accommodation,” 129. 41. Rands, “Mormonism in a Post-Soviet Society: Notes from Ukraine,” 85. 42. Rogers, “Mormonism’s First Decade in the Former USSR.” 43. Knowlton, “Mormonism in Latin America: Towards the Twenty-First Century,” 172. 44. Phillips, “Rethinking the International Expansion of Mormonism” 54. 45. Mehr and Heiss, “Freedom or Servitude: Russia and the LDS Church.” 46. Taylor, “LDS Church in Poland has had long, hard journey.” 47. Rogers, “Mormonism’s First Decade in the Former USSR.”

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48. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/facts-and-statistics/country/ armenia. 49. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/facts-and-statistics/country/ georgia. 50. 2018 Service Year Report of Jehovah’s Witnesses Worldwide. 51. Martinich, “Georgian Translation of the Book of Mormon Completed and Published.” 52. Duke, “Latter-day Saints in a Secular World.” 53. First Presidency letter, December 11, 2002. 54. “Elder Nelson Dedicates Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic,” Ensign, Nov. 2003, 124–25. 55. Mamaraimov, “Kyrgyz Law Targets Religious Minorities.” 56. “International Religious Freedom Report,” US Embassy in Kyrgyzstan. 57. See Stewart, Law of the Harvest, 159–161. 58. Annus and Csepregi, “Identity under Construction: The Conversion Experience of Hungarian Latter-day Saints,” 214. 59. Van Beek “Ethnization and Accommodation: Dutch Mormons in Twenty-­First Century Europe,” 129. 60. Rogers, “Mormonism’s First Decade in the Former USSR.” 61. Bennion and Young 1996, 26. 62. Kellner, “Russia: Church Planters Near Goals in Former Soviet Union.” 63. One source estimated the cost of an LDS meetinghouse in Ufa, Russia, at $2.5 million, which is a city with approximately 100 active members. See “Mormonsky Khram Otrkylsya v Ufe” (Mormon Church Opens in Ufa—Russian), Mir Religii. 64. Stack, “Why Mormonism, US-Born Faiths are Growing in Ghana.” 65. Acts 16:9. 66. Chandler, “Missionaries are struggling to work under new Russia law banning proselytizing.”

Bibliography 2018 Service Year Report of Jehovah’s Witnesses Worldwide, 2018 Country and Territory Reports. Accessed 3 April 2020. https://www.jw.org/en/library/ books/2018-service-year-report/2018-country-territory/. Annus, Irén E., and Nóra Csepregi. 2018. Identity under Construction: The Conversion Experience of Hungarian Latter-day Saints. In Mormonism in Europe: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Irén E. Annus, David M. Morris, and Kim B. Östman, 209–225. Szeged: Americana. Beek, Van, and E.A. Walter. 1996. Ethnization and Accommodation: Dutch Mormons in Twenty-First Century Europe. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29 (1): 119–138. Bennion, Lowell C., and Lawrence Young. 1996. The Uncertain Dynamics of LDS Expansion, 1950–2020. Dialogue (Spring): 8–32. Biddulph, Howard. 1996. The Morning Breaks: Stories of Conversion and Faith in the Former Soviet Union. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book. Browning, Gary. 1997. Russia and the Restored Gospel. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book.

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Chandler, Michael A. 2016. Missionaries Are Struggling to Work under New Russia Law Banning Proselytizing. Washington Post 20 September. Accessed 4 March 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/09/20/ missionaries-struggle-to-work-in-russia-under-new-law-that-bans-proselytizing. Cowan, Richard O. 2000. Mischa Markow. In Encyclopedia of Latter-day Saint History, ed. Arnold K.  Garr, Donald Q.  Cannon, and Richard O.  Cowan, 708. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book. Decoo, Wilfried. 1996. Feeding the Fleeing Flock: Reflections on the Struggle to Retain Church Members in Europe. Dialogue 29 (1): 97–118. ———. 1997. Issues in Writing European History and in Building the Church in Europe, 140–176. Spring: Journal of Mormon History. Duke, James T. 1999. Latter-day Saints in a Secular World: What We Have Learned about Latter-day Saints from Social Research. In Martin B. Hickman 1999 Lecture, Brigham Young University College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences, 4 March. “International Religious Freedom Report.” 2009. United States Embassy in Kyrgyzstan, 2009. Accessed 6 March 2020. https://kg.usembassy.gov/wp-content/uploads/ sites/190/2017/05/International-Religious-Freedom-Report-2009.pdf. Kellner, Mark. 2003. Russia: Church Planters Near Goals in Former Soviet Union. Adventist News Network, June 17, 2003. Kifner, John. 1975. Soviet Sailors in Boston and Americans in Leningrad: First Exchange Visit in 30 Years. New York Times, 13 May. Accessed 26 February 2020. https:// www.nytimes.com/1975/05/13/archives/soviet-sailors-in-boston-and-americansin-leningrad-first-exchange.html. Knowlton, David. 1996. Mormonism in Latin America: Towards the Twenty-First Century. Dialogue 29 (Spring): 159–176. Lobb, Gary C. 2000. Mormon Membership Trends in Europe among People of Color: Present and Future Assessment. Dialogue 33 (4): 55–68. Mamaraimov, Abdumomun. 2008. Kyrgyz Law Targets Religious Minorities. Institute for War and Peace Reporting, 6 November. Accessed 6 March 2020. https://iwpr. net/global-voices/kyrgyz-law-targets-religious-minorities. Martinich, Matthew. 2018. Georgian Translation of the Book of Mormon Completed and Published. LDS Church Growth Blog, 15 November. Accessed 22 February 2020. http://ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com/2018/11/georgian-translation-ofbook-of-mormon.html. Mehr, Kahlile. 2002. Mormon Missionaries Enter Eastern Europe. Provo: Brigham Young University Press. Mehr, Kahlile B., and Matthew K. Heiss. 2018. Freedom or Servitude: Russia and the LDS Church. In Mormonism in Europe: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Irén E.  Annus, David M.  Morris, and Kim B. Östman, 257–287. Americana: Szeged. Minert, Roger P. 2010. German and Austrian Latter-day Saints in World War II: An Analysis of the Casualties and Losses. Mormon Historical Studies 11 (2): 1–21. “Mormonsky Khram Otrkylsya v Ufe” 2001. Mormon Church Opens in Ufa—Russian), Mir Religii, May 30. Phillips, Rick. 2006. Rethinking the International Expansion of Mormonism. Nova Religio 10 (1): 52–68. Pospielovsky, Dimitry V. 1988. A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, and the Believer, Soviet Antireligious Campaigns and Persecutions. Vol. Vol. 2. New York: St Martin’s Press.

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Pranskevičiūtė-Amoson, Rasa. 2019. The Hare Krishna Community in the Light of KGB Persecutions: The Case of the Soviet Republic of Lithuania. European Association for the Study of Religion Conference, Tartu, Estonia, 27 June. Rands, Tania. 1997. Mormonism in a Post-Soviet Society: Notes from Ukraine. Dialogue 30 (1): 71–96. Roberts, B.H., ed. 1971. History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2nd ed., Rev., Vol. 6. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, p. 4. Rogers, Thomas F. 1999. A Call to Russia: Glimpses of Missionary Life. Provo: Brigham Young University Press. ———. 2000. Mormonism’s First Decade in the Former USSR: Patterns of Growth and Retention. Presented at the Mormon History Association meeting, Copenhagen, Denmark. Stack, Peggy F. 2014. Why Mormonism, US-Born Faiths are Growing in Ghana. Salt Lake Tribune, 6 June. Accessed 3 April 2020. https://archive.sltrib.com/article. php?id=58004010&itype=cmsid. Stewart, David G., Jr. 2019. Statistical Analysis of Jehovah’s Witness, Seventh-day Adventist, and Mormon Growth and Retention in Post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe. European Association for the Study of Religion, Tartu, Estonia, 27 June. Accessed 4 April 2020. http://cumorah.com/2019-Stewart-EASR-JW-SDALDS.pdf and http://cumorah.com/2019-Stewart-EASR-JW-SDA-LDS-PPT.pdf. Stewart, David G., Jr., and Matthew Martinich. 2013. Reaching the Nations: International LDS Church Growth Almanac, 2  vol. Henderson: Cumorah Foundation. Taylor, Scott. 2009. President Uchtdorf, Elder Anderson visit Russia and Ukraine. Deseret News, 3 June. Accessed 3 April 2020. https://www.deseret. com/2009/6/4/20321725/pr esident-uchtdor f-elder-andersen-visitrussia-and-ukraine. ———. 2010. LDS Church in Poland Has Had Long, Hard Journey. Deseret News, 13 September. Accessed 31 March 2020. https://www.deseret. com/2010/9/13/20383957/lds-church-in-poland-has-had-long-hard-journey. Thibault, Hélène. 2015. The Soviet Secularization Project in Central Asia: Accommodation and Institutional Legacies. Eurostudia 10 (1): 11–31. Van Beek, Walter E.A. 2005. Mormon Europeans or European Mormons? An ‘Afro-­ European’ View on Religious Colonization. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 38 (4): 3–36. York, Geoffrey. n.d. Why Father of Glasnost Is Despised in Russia. The Globe and Mail (Canada), 9 March. Accessed 3 April 2020. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/ news/world/why-father-of-glasnost-is-despised-in-russia/article22399254/.

CHAPTER 22

To Recognize One’s Face in That of a Foreigner: The Latter-day Saint Experience in West Africa Russell Stevenson

“Achọrọ m i ̣chọta ụlọ ụka ndị ọcha” (“I want to find the white people’s church”), I told the motorcycle driver. He smiled and told me to climb aboard. We wended our way through the Nigerian town of Nsukka, with typical street fare lining the landscape—a Fine Brothers electronic shop, an MTN cellphone store co-existing with an assortment of clothing, fruit, and street-hawking vendors running along the road. Its relative smallness belies its centrality to the Nigerian nation-state, a virtual vortex in which societies and systems have converged: Hausa Christian refugees and Igbo academics, Fulani herdsmen and expatriate Americans. We found our way to New Anglican Road, the site for a well-furnished brick structure called by all: “ụlọ ụka ndi ̣ ọcha”: the white people’s church or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS)—despite the fact that few Westerners visit it. Although decidedly West African in its demographics, the LDS Church in Nigeria (as well as in Ghana) has a reputation of being administered and supported by white Americans. The reason for and significance of this reputation will unfold as this chapter reviews the Church’s story in the context of West Africa’s colonial and post-colonial history and the ensuing development of political independence in African countries and associated questions of religious identity.

R. Stevenson (*) Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_22

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The LDS Church and Post-colonial West Africa Scholars have long considered Africa and the broader “global South” to represent the future of Christianity. Noted missiologist Andrew Walls has concluded that “the Western academy is sick” and in need of revival from an infusion of cultural renewal.1 Africanist theologian John Mbiti matter-of-factly observes that “the centers of the church’s universality [are] no longer in Geneva, Rome, Athens, Paris, London, New York, but Kinshasa, Buenos Aires, Addis Ababa and Manila.”2 Scholarly consensus today holds that Christianity can no longer be considered as an essentially European religious system. Where it has spread throughout Africa and other regions of the global South, Christianity may be functionally described as a religious social network binding together communities in post-European colonial states. In acknowledging Christianity’s global shift, readers should also remember that colonial imperialism was a massive movement of self-enrichment that denigrated native religions and righteously proclaimed the “white man’s burden” was to civilize the world’s non-white races through the imposition of Christianity and the capitalistic institutions of European commerce. Retrospectively, it can be argued that a good many of the world’s contemporary social upheavals, cultural resentments, and political conflicts are historically rooted in the latent consequences of European colonialism. In this larger global context, the contemporary presence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in West Africa poses significant questions: How does the LDS faith tradition in Anglophone West Africa (specifically Ghana and Nigeria) reflect the region’s religious history of colonial imperialism? Is the LDS Church another religious version of white cultural supremacy—this time a distinctly American rather than European version? In Africa, is it an American religion that harmonizes, however unwittingly, with anti-­ indigenous prejudice and negative stereotyping commonly experienced by indigenous people in their own native lands? Let us acknowledge that these questions and the cultural realities that underlie them are complex, and that efforts to address them are unlikely to produce a single, definitive answer. Nonetheless, drawing on oral ethnography as well as archival records, I will argue that, for West Africans, converting to the LDS Church and adopting an LDS identity is part of a broader pattern of global cultural exchange and not merely an expression of reactionary, anti-indigenous politics in post-colonial Africa. More specifically, I argue that LDS identity in Ghana and Nigeria cannot be expressed in monolithic terms but, rather, offers a kaleidoscope of contradictory meanings to both local LDS adherents and expatriate officials. As a faith driven by indigenous African actors, being a Latter-day Saint provides a distinctive religious experience in the robust pantheon of what scholars call African Initiated Christianities (AIC). AIC refers to Christian churches independently started in Africa by Africans rather than by missionaries sent from other continents. As noted in several earlier chapters of this book, an LDS presence in Nigeria spontaneously emerged two decades before authorized missionaries were formally called to preach and organize local congregations.

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In that interim, some local Nigerians learned about the LDS Church in the late 1950s through magazine articles, sent for church literature, and began meeting unofficially in the Church’s name. LDS missionaries, however, were not sent to Nigeria by Salt Lake City until church president Spencer Kimball’s 1978 revelation lifted the ban on ordination of African males to the LDS priesthood. From that point forward, American missionaries imported virtually all of the Latter-day Saints’ formal ecclesiastical institutions into Nigeria’s (and Ghana’s) self-converted LDS communities. It may be argued, however, that the African cultural context in which these institutional forms were belatedly implemented shaped their meaning more decisively for Nigerian and Ghanaian converts than the eventual arrival and ministration of American missionaries. Before exploring how an LDS identity fits within the Nigerian and Ghanaian cultural settings, let us first consider the problems of “indigenous identity” when native people embrace religions imported from outside their own land and cultural traditions.

The Contested Question of Indigenous Identity In recent academic debates, indigenous African scholars have encouraged Africanists to challenge the very notion of an essential “African-ness”—that is, the theoretically pristine concept of what it means to be African, untouched by external engagement with non-African people and their cultures. Indigenous or “indigeneity” are reference categories that often reflect idealized notions of the essential essence of designated native groups and their traditional cultures. The designation of “African Mormonism” invites scholars to consider the characteristics of what an indigenous identity means in the contemporary world of globalized economies and international cultural commodities. That “Mormonism” could take root in independent African states, such as Nigeria and Ghana, highlights the global transmission of what originally was a local, geographically bounded, and foreign new religion. Understanding contemporary LDS identity in its West African, post-­colonial context requires a critical engagement with the question of what constitutes “indigenous identity.” Nationalist African scholars’ efforts to reassert geographically based notions of African religious identity have served as cultural tools for challenging the coalition of Anglican Christianity and British military force that re-shaped the West African religious landscape. According to Cameroonian theorist Achille Mbembe, certain Africanist cultural and political discourses have based their legitimacy solely on the criteria of “autonomy, resistance, and emancipation.”3 Igbo scholar Chielezona Eze concurs that African nationalists’ persistent “recourse to nativist, relativist, and autochthonous arguments” are an important “means to fight erasure.” Mbembe, however, also had hoped that indigenous, nationalist approaches could serve as a “starting point for a philosophical and critical interpretation of the apparent long rise toward nothingness that Africa has experienced all through its history … But such a synthesis did not occur.” Eze instead concludes that the duality of

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colonizer and colonized has led to a “dead end.”4 The culturally critical discourses assessed by Eze, clearly, are more anti-colonial than post-colonial. Arguing for a post-colonial approach for moving forward and better understanding contemporary Africa, Eze and Mbembe have stimulated the broader debate over an “Afropolitan” model of indigeneity. Eze argues that “the African is contaminated in the sense that she is not culturally or biologically pure. And this is good.”5 Eze rejects efforts to explain any manifestation of “indigenous religion” in “purist, essentialist, and oppositional terms or by reference only to Africa.”6 In agreement, Mbembe contends that “Afropolitanism” enables its advocates to “recognize one’s face in that of a foreigner” [author’s emphasis].7 Similarly, the Niger-Ghanaian scholar Taiye Tuakli-Worsonu presents herself as an “Afro-politan,” rejecting a purely “African” identity through her “funny blend of London fashion, New York jargon, African ethics, and academic successes.”8 Derek Peterson has offered an extensive exploration of this kind of post-­ colonial thought in his study of East African religious conversions. Extrapolating from Pilgrim’s Progress, a seventeenth-century British religious novel, Peterson shows how external, multi-cultural influences helped shape a “supra-national community” of East Africans who sought to leave behind the limitations imposed upon them by the colonial nation-state or even local community boundaries. Similarly, Igbo inhabitants of pre-colonial Nsukka and Nri did not live apart from external influences but resided at the vortex of a host of foreign trading networks. The notion of an untouched “African indigeneity” is, as Mbembe concludes, a “primal fantasy.” That Ghanaians or Nigerians would adopt—or even fully embrace the LDS faith—no more undermines their fundamental identities than any other identity options in contemporary West Africa, be they Igbo, Tiv, Hausa, or something else. Language, culture, and a multiplicity of religious practice not only can be but also have been incorporated and adopted by many West Africans in accordance with the principles of Afro-politan consciousness. Long before colonialism left its indelible marks, the internal dynamics of coercion and religious control had already been in play between Igbo-speaking Nri and Nsukka societies, as well as Fulani subjects and Hausa rulers. Nri imposed their own gods on Nsukka life, and Fulani Islamic jihadists “packaged, consecrated, and policed” an Islamic consciousness on their Hausa subjects following the establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate.9 Moreover, a Talensi deity from northern Ghana, “Tongnaab,” spreads across national borders and has been adapted by West Africans in a number of ethno-linguistic contexts.10 Supposing that Nigerians could also adopt an LDS identity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries fits comfortably with the long history of exchange and cultural cross-­ pollination prevalent in West Africa.

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Early Christianization of West Africa The Gold Coast (contemporary Ghana) and Nigeria (a name produced by English journalist Flora Shaw, a back-formation from the words: “Niger Area”) have been considered the “rival siblings” of the British Empire in Ghana and Nigeria. At their height, both colonies served as major sources of key imports for British markets: cocoa, palm oil, cotton, and to a lesser extent, ground nuts. With robust linkages to British markets through the port cities of Lagos and Calabar, or Cape Coast and Accra, the colonies enjoyed access and integration not only to Anglophone commodities but also to Anglophone ideas and institutions. The spread of Christianity throughout the region, however, relied little on direct government engagement, but primarily on the proliferation of Christian mission schools and medical teams. The British Gold Coast and Nigeria ostensibly relied on a governance system of what noted colonial theorist and administrator, Frederick Lugard, styled as “indirect rule,” in which the administrative offices at Whitehall (the London center for the British civil service and government offices) issued authorizing authority to local chieftaincies, such as the Igbo-speaking areas of the Eastern Niger. For the first generations of rule, the British government made few formal and/or sustained efforts to assimilate Gold Coast and Niger Delta colonial subjects into the English imperial commonwealth. Lugard advocated for the preservation of “indigenous institutions” under the aegis of the “warrant chieftaincy”—authority given to a local figure to rule the area on behalf of the British government. By contrast, French administrators claimed to be “assimilating” French West African colonial subjects in order to become fully functioning members of the French republic (such a vision, however, was rarely, if ever, realized). In both contexts, French administrators neither imposed their authority as much as their rhetoric claimed, nor the British as little. As David Robinson has shown, French colonial officials afforded Muslim Sufi orders considerable sovereignty in religion, culture, and local economies, while the British readily ousted the “warrant chiefs” when they did not comply with British policies.11 In Nigeria, Lugard afforded a privileged status to Islamic emirs in the Fulani North, forbidding all Christian proselytizing activity. The acknowledged authority of Muslim emirs, Lugard argued, provided social stability and predictability that Christianity could not match. The eventual spread of Christianity meant a rupture with conventional religious systems in sub-Saharan Africa; it provided new avenues for power and privilege—and, as in the case of the charismatic pastor Honey Johnson, a kind of Nigerian Christian nationalism. Various proselytizing movements, such as the Church Missionary Society (Anglican), and the Presbyterians in Calabar attempted to import their modalities of Western Christianity, with varying effect. Christianization led to ethnic and racial assimilation, yes, but it also provided theological tools for challenging the dominance of external, European regimes.12

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The rise of competing Christian denominations in both colonies prompted local challenges, adaptations, and revisions to the Christian mission system. While Christianization in some ways served as an anti-colonial mechanism, its agents also imported assumptions about racial and/or cultural superiority. The noted chronicler of Afro-Christianities, Bengt Sundkler, classified these different emphases into two contrasting movements: “Ethiopian” and “Zionist.”13 “Ethiopic” Christians embraced the totality of received Christian traditions while advocating for complete indigenous control over its institutions. “Zionist Christianity”—a title intended to connote a faith connected to sacred sites in specified local areas—signified African development of indigenous churches, entirely free and independent of mission strictures, and often drew upon indigenous traditions in their worship forms. Such labels as these, Terence Ranger has argued, cannot be used uncritically; after all, several “Zionist” movements expressed profound disgust over indigenous African practices, while several “Ethiopian” movements celebrated the strength of local traditions. Regardless, these contrasting labels, as J. E. Tishken and A. Heuser observe, “remain in currency to this day.”14 LDS religious ideas initially circulated through informal networks in the late 1950s. Earlier, American-based missionary groups had received scrutiny during the European colonial era because of their perceived subversive potential. The American-based Watchtower Society, for example, had been a pariah since colonial days. Then, with Marcus Garvey’s Pan-African, “Back to Africa” movement in the early twentieth century, rumors spread throughout Northern Nigeria of a coming black messiah who would liberate Nigeria from colonial rule. A resident Anglo-Irish author, Joyce Cary, was surprised at the time to see that “primitive people in their isolated villages” would hear news of “black victor[ies]” within short order.15 Rumors concerning the imminent arrival of Americans were not confined to claims of black saviors coming to rescue them from colonial bondage; it applied to white churches, too, who could lead them, either figuratively or literally, to a “Celestial City” in a faraway land. These notions and emerging expectations were all preparatory to the eventual arrival later in the century of Mormon missionaries from Salt Lake City, Utah.

Political Upheaval and War: The Inauspicious Beginnings of the West African LDS Church In the era leading up to Ghanaian and Nigerian independence, from 1957 through 1960, Nigeria and Ghana become hotbeds of competing Christian theological claims and were teeming with indigenous Catholic and Protestant priests and ministers, as well as foreign missionaries, with evangelical Christian churches proliferating throughout the countryside. When the LDS Church emerged in post-independence Ghana and Nigeria, it played little role in promoting Christianity per se to most of its adherents. Whatever distinctive

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theological appeal there was behind LDS missionary expansion in West Africa, it came late compared to the Christian movements of a prior era. How did the LDS Church—exported from the United States—appeal to newly independent African people in Nigeria and Ghana? The roots for their vision was, as Chielezona Eze would style it, “contaminated”—mixed and mingled with various ingredients from mission Christianity. Throughout Anglophone West Africa, Christianity serves as a symbolic vernacular, a kind of visual and linguistic lingua franca. The acknowledged father of modern Nigerian nationalism, Nnamdi Azikiwe—an African journalist with a particular talent for wordplay and invective—regularly used Jesus-centered and messianic discourse to describe his own nationalist mission as savior from colonial rule. Even today, political advertisements frequently and explicitly continue to invoke the mandate of deity, such as one campaign billboard from Eastern Nigeria in 2016 that proclaimed, “If God is with us, who can be against us?” By the time Ghana and Nigeria had achieved independence, several thousand religious seekers in both countries already had identified as “Latter-day Saints.” A small number of these seekers from their countries’ multi-cultural contact zones began proclaiming the religious vision of this faraway church in America. In 1960–1961, LDS missionary department functionaries such as Glen Fisher, LaMar Williams, and Marvin Jones assessed the nominal LDS congregations that had already developed on indigenous terms. They were impressed. Previously they had harbored profound skepticism—skepticism reinforced by top-level church leadership that the Nigerians were engaging in a cynical stunt to acquire money from the American church. As Marvin Jones put it, “it is so hard to tell what their underlying motives are. Sincerity or the want of finance.”16 Unfortunately for the LDS Church, in 1963, a racist volume (Mormonism and the Negro, written by Utah State University institute director, John J. Stewart) which defended LDS priesthood and temple restrictions on people of African descent, came to the awareness of the Nigerian government.17 Ambrose Chukwu, an Igbo student in the United States, had composed an angry review of the pamphlet for the Eastern Government’s outlet, Nigerian Outlook, in which he derided the LDS faith as “importing ungodliness” at the hands of “madmen” bent on degrading black Africans to a state of spiritual servility.18 This strident review proved to be a blow to LDS Nigerians’ incipient aspirations for recognition by the American church. LDS Church President David O. McKay also had entertained hopes for establishing a proselytizing and educational mission in Nigeria, and by 1963, four missionaries had been called awaiting visas. When, however, Azikiwe was overthrown in a 1966 coup, his successor, Kwame Nkrumah, attributed his fall to Central Intelligence Agency-­ organized American evangelizing. Whatever the factual merits of his accusations about CIA involvement, greatly increased American proselytizing in post-independence Nigeria was a reality.

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Few competing colonial churches were encumbered to the same extent as the LDS Church by discriminatory racial policies. The Anglican Church had appointed Samuel Ajayi Crowther, one of its early Yoruba converts, to be the first African bishop in 1864. By 1960, all mission organizations—from the Sudan Interior Medical Mission in Kaduna and Kano to the Roman Catholic congregations in Owerri and Calabar—had ordained, indigenous clergy. By the end of the twentieth century, the Presbyterians in Calabar had turned over ecclesiastical stewardship to locals. In the Gold Coast, a similar proliferation of religious institutions spread throughout the twentieth century in the southern coast cities of Accra, Takoradi-Sekondi, and Cape Coast.19 In none of these cases had there been the kind of strict racial segregation that existed within the LDS faith. Whatever the institutional limitations African pastors had faced—and they had faced many—LDS leaders could not credibly tell officials from the land where Samuel Ajayi Crowther had translated the Bible into Yoruba that their discriminatory practice reflected the policies of their Christian competitors in Africa. The Nigerian immigration service promptly canceled all LDS missionary visas. The following year, however, LaMar Williams (an employee of the LDS Missionary Department) made inroads with local regimes to use LDS agricultural talent and resources to provide humanitarian support to their jurisdictions. Williams adapted to the local political circumstances, sidestepped the hierarchical echelons of LDS Church administration, and informed the Nigerian government that the church projects were managed by local people.20 Once Williams could demonstrate the Church’s material utility to the new nation-state, its history of racist policy and practice became cynically less relevant to government officials who were more concerned about integrating Nigeria into the world economy. In retrospect, Nigeria’s first president, Nnamdi Azikiwe, is an important example of post-independence Nigerian willingness to deploy religious imagery for national ends. Ambitious and flexible, Azikiwe had long proven his cultural and religious adaptability. His own religious journey displayed shifting denominational allegiances from Roman Catholicism to Anglicanism, Wesleyan Methodism, Presbyterianism, the Salvation Army, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Baptist, Congregationalism, back to Presbyterianism and, ultimately, back to Methodism.21 Although his government’s visa ban on LDS missionaries was sublimated in the language of anti-discriminatory rhetoric, it reflected enduring anxiety about the integrity of Nigeria’s newly won independence. Popularly renowned as the father of Nigerian nationalism, Azikiwe had received his education at American universities such as Howard and the University of Pennsylvania. Many of Nigeria’s political elite, who participated in the Action Group National Conference of Nigeria and the Cameroons and the Northern People’s Congress, also had been educated at American universities. Nigerian leaders, who otherwise were committed to independence, expressed little hesitation to forge relationships with American corporate and educational agencies. Some, like Azikiwe, re-appropriated American institutions in the spirit of

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dismantling enduring British influence. Azikiwe himself was eager to partner with American institutions—ranging from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations to Michigan State University—in support of the Nigerian state. Azikiwe’s pet project of a University at Nsukka drew extensively on American educational models and personnel. In both Nigeria and Ghana, initial LDS interest in the possibility of establishing missions in West Africa coincided with a period of political instability and mounting violence. National independence appeared to be faltering. In Nigeria, which was something akin to a federal republic with three ethnically and religiously distinct regions (East, West, and North), a coup, counter-coup, and then a series of anti-Igbo attacks throughout the Muslim-dominant Northern Region laid the groundwork for regional separatism of the Eastern Region from the rest of the federation. By the time the Church was starting to make inroads in 1965, its American leaders received word that the small LDS indigenous communities were in a politically marginalized territory, susceptible to sectionalism and resistance to federal authority. Consequently, church authorities in Salt Lake City ceased all missionary efforts in the area. Their intelligence proved only indirectly correct; while Eastern Region officials in West African pushed for separation, they only advocated political separation following the violence of the 1966 Igbo attacks. But in May 1967, Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Ojukwu declared an independent state of Biafra, which elicited immediate military retaliation from the federal regime. Thus, within seven years of independence, Nigeria exploded into a civil war between the separatist Biafra nation and the Nigerian Federal Government—a war that eventually produced over 2 million dead from violence, disease, and starvation. 22 This war proved near fatal for self-initiated, native congregations in Nigeria. Most of the early LDS adherents in Uyo and Port Harcourt were killed, leaving the existing congregations decimated of membership. Meanwhile, with limited international support, Biafra struggled until January 1970 when its leaders surrendered to the Nigerian Federal Government. While avoiding civil war, Ghana also went through a period of political turmoil during this same period, including a military coup in 1966. The National Liberation Council, Ghana’s new leadership group (with probable support from the CIA), became more oriented in its political and economic policies toward the United States and the United Kingdom. This, of course, created a friendlier environment for post-colonial, evangelical churches seeking converts and growth in Ghana. As in Nigeria, a small number of native Ghanaians had become interested in the LDS faith through copies of the Book of Mormon and church pamphlets that they obtained abroad or from friends. In the early 1960s, Raphael A. F. Mensah self-converted after reading some church literature and meeting Lilian Clark, a Sufi Muslim in the United Kingdom. Writing to church headquarters for more church literature, Mensah began preaching the LDS gospel to friends and neighbors. In 1964 he converted W. J. B. Johnson, who joined Mensah in preaching and conducting meetings. Together they formed several congregations of believers, eventually growing to almost 1000

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members. Mensah, Johnson, and other new leaders registered their congregations with the government as “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon Church) Ghana Mission.” Their congregations aspired to ecclesiastical unity by maintaining social networks and establishing a formal hierarchy of authority.23 Like their neighboring Nigerian proselytes, Ghanaians also hoped for integration with the American church. Johnson went so far as to name his son, “Brigham,” and established a local school named after Brigham Young.24 Meanwhile, the Nigerian-Biafra war ravaged the Owerri–Mbaise region of the country where a native Nigerian, Anthony Obinna, resided. A Christian convert, Obinna had a dream in which he read John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and, in emulation of Bunyan’s protagonist, was instructed to seek the “Celestial City” and leave behind the “City of Destruction.” For Obinna, the Celestial City eventually acquired a name: Salt Lake City, Utah—the city of the Saints. Some years after his visionary experience, he chanced upon a Reader’s Digest article on “The Mormons,” which seemed to coincide with his dream. Obinna contacted LDS headquarters and requested literature and information about joining the Church. Informed that the Church had no immediate plans to open a mission in Nigeria, Obinna undauntedly formed an unofficial congregation on his own initiative and began recruiting members to the faith, while persistently requesting LDS authorities that missionaries be sent to baptize them.25 In 1978, after two decades of waiting, Obinna challenged President Spencer W. Kimball in a letter, accusing him of neglect: “The Spirit of God has called me to this Church, and there is nothing you can do to keep us out.” Obinna considered the priesthood and temple restrictions on Africans to be an unrighteous renunciation of the common brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind.26 Formally announced on June 9, 1978, LDS President Kimball’s priesthood revelation lifted the restriction on African men and their families from priesthood ordinances and temple worship. While earlier church leaders had established a support group for African-American Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City called the Genesis Group, this was not seen as a harbinger for a wave of black American conversions. LDS historians—and to a lesser extent, non-church scholars—considered Kimball’s revelation to be more significant for LDS growth outside the United States. When explaining the revised priesthood policy, few leading church officials accounted for or credited black American Latter-day Saints for the change. LDS Apostle LeGrand Richards (and numerous others) attributed the change to growing pressure from black Brazilians who were increasingly eager to join the Church.27 First Brazil and then Africa became the central theaters for new LDS growth following the 1978 decree, not African-Americans in the United States. In November 1978, five months after President Kimball’s announcement, two senior missionary couples (Ted and Janath Cannon and Rendell and Rachel Mabey) were sent to officially commence missionary operations in Nigeria. Based in Enugu, the first branch they organized was Anthony Obinna’s

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congregation, over which he was now officially called to serve as branch president. Most of the earliest converts they baptized lived in villages throughout south-eastern Nigeria where they had been meeting and seeking church membership for years.28 When American missionaries officially arrived in Nigeria and Ghana, however, they encountered countries recovering from factionalization and war more than a well-ripened mission field. Neither Obinna nor W.  J. B.  Johnson by this time was entirely representative of Nigerian or Ghanaian Latter-day Saints as a whole. In Ghana, Rebecca Mould, one of the earliest leaders of the faith, left the Church with a third of the flock over women’s leadership issues. She had administered her own church and experienced her own visions before the American church and its missionaries arrived. Only men can be ordained to the LDS priesthood and administer ecclesiastical affairs, and Mould had little inclination to be displaced by an inexperienced man. In Nigeria, the Nigeria-Biafra war had brought about the demise of many of the earlier converts. A handful of Nigerian students had attended Brigham Young University on scholarship, but they soon disappeared from church activity. Furthermore, divisions and intra-church fighting had torn Mensah’s Ghanaian congregation apart. In 1971, Mensah was forced from his leadership position by convert Matthew Koomson. Koomson (who later apostatized) resorted to threats and acts of violence to compel members to either affiliate with his church or serve as an object example to those who remained reticent— one female member received a serious facial wound from one of Koomson’s men. She later served in the LDS Relief Society under the aegis of the American church. But Mensah never again affiliated with the LDS movement, wandering from Christian congregation to congregation for the rest of his life.29 Nonetheless, arrival of the American LDS  Church in 1978 provided the legitimization and stability that many (if not all) indigenous Nigerian and Ghanaian Latter-day Saints had long sought. In Owerri and Cape Coast in the 1960s, Anthony Obinna and W. J. B. Johnson had been mocked for forming congregations without a patron. Surely, their detractors claimed, if the Americans cared about them, they would integrate their church communities as other denominations—such as the Faith Tabernacle Pentecostals—had done. Formal affiliation at long last provided the Nigerian and Ghanaian Latter-day Saints access to institutional linkages of patronage and church resources. The “Celestial City’s” American wealth would provide the buildings and infrastructures that Obinna and Johnson had been longing for.

The LDS African Narrative of Divine Guidance and Church Growth Can LDS religious institutions be disentangled from American cultural and political networks? Perhaps not, but for many Ghanaian and Nigerian Latter-­ day Saints, this interconnectedness is viewed as an asset, not a deficit. As

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national entities, Ghana and Nigeria have enjoyed full sovereignty over the right of LDS religious institutions to operate in their countries. The eventual construction of LDS temples in Accra, Ghana and Aba, Nigeria required considerable negotiation and political support from local entities. Many foreign organizations, including evangelical churches, circulate throughout sub-­ Saharan Africa with relative ease—all without nationalist scholars supposing they pose an existential threat to local, African identities. For many Nigerian and Ghanaian Latter-day Saints, the “American-ness” of their chosen church has become an important part of their own, native identities. As one Latter-day Saint in Ikot Eyo told me, while pridefully describing the beauty of LDS chapels and temples, “We believe that America is the leader in the whole world … so when people say that this is an American church, we are happy to associate with the Americans.”30 Since 1978, the LDS Church has grown exponentially in West Africa. How does this growth compare to that of competing denominations in the region, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-day Adventists? The latter churches, it should be noted, had a head start and were already established in West Africa by the time the LDS Church began proselyting in earnest. But what about their comparative rates of growth? Over the course of 41 years—from 1978 through 2019—LDS membership in Nigeria grew by an average of 4575 converts a year and a corresponding growth rate of 3.84 percent per year. As of 2019, the LDS Church reported a total of 192,144 members in Nigeria, representing only 0.1 percent of the country’s population. In Ghana, Latter-day Saints have joined in smaller overall numbers—89,135 members by 2019—but this constitutes a somewhat larger fraction (0.3 percent) of Ghana’s smaller population.31 While these figures are encouraging to LDS authorities and missionary department planners, they are relatively modest compared to the 7–11-percent growth rates currently reported by Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-day Adventists in Nigeria.32 Phillip Jenkins, an open critic of virtually all LDS theological claims, concluded a decade ago that the “Mormon experience in Africa has actually been disappointing,” but also acknowledged that “Nigeria itself has been quite a success story.”33 LDS growth has continued in Francophone West Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo since Jenkins’s critical assessment, but it still is not any greater than that experienced by competing denominations in those countries. Arguably, what has made LDS growth in Africa most distinctive is not its strength compared to competing denominations, but its relative strength compared to American, Latin American, and European countries— where LDS growth rates have declined or stalled. Many LDS officials responded to the Church’s initial growth rate in Africa with an almost Pauline enthusiasm, extolling it in terms akin to how Paul projected Christian growth among Gentiles in the Roman empire. “The Spirit of God is brooding over Africa,” one General Authority observed, urging Latter-­ day Saints to look toward the “ancient lands and peoples” of Africa to understand the full ramifications of the 1978 priesthood decree.34 Brigham Young

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University professor, Spencer J.  Palmer, celebrated Nigeria as “the next Mormon country.”35 Pieces peppered official publications about church growth in West Africa, and Anthony Obinna received wide church coverage as a “West African pioneer.” This, it should be noted, caused some annoyance among the Akwa Ibom Latter-day Saints, who proudly celebrate their pioneering role in the country’s LDS history; it is their baptismal site, not pictures of Obinna’s home of Mbaise, that church publications employ to celebrate church growth in West Africa. The Africa narrative has proven useful to church publicists. Images of African Latter-day Saints provided important public affairs content for a church anxious to prove that it was serious about its unbiased racial credentials. Rendell and Rachel Mabey published widely on their 1978 missionary assignment to open up West Africa, releasing portions of their journal to outlets such as the Utah periodical, This People.36 In addition, Rendell Mabey published Brother to Brother: An African Heritage—a first-of-its-kind missionary memoir of experiences in “black Africa.”37 The Mabeys published their memoirs in the midst of a wave of black LDS devotional literature, such as Mary Sturlaugson Eyer’s A Soul So Rebellious (a memoir by the first LDS black sister missionary) and Alan Cherry’s It’s You and Me, Lord. But black American LDS literature never quite captured the same hold on white consciousness that LDS literature on African Latter-day Saints accomplished. While Spencer J.  Palmer and other church spokespersons waxed eloquent about African Latter-day Saints, African-­ Americans, whose sojourn in the faith had been tested for generations, could only wonder why commensurate enthusiasm for their experiences was not also expressed. Regrettably, an adequate explanation for this apparent disparity lies beyond the scope of this chapter.

LDS Temple Sites in Ghana and Nigeria As reported in other chapters, the construction of LDS temples in designated locations worldwide serves as indicators of a certain level of church growth and local organizational maturity. To date, two temples are in service in West Africa—one in Accra Ghana (opened in 1998) and the other in Aba Nigeria (opened in 2005 while a third temple designated for Lagos, Nigeria is currently in the planning stage). The sheer presence of both West African temples stands in considerable contrast, both culturally and aesthetically, against the local communities in which they are situated. The Accra Ghana Temple sits in Independence Square, near a monument to anti-colonial protestors. In Nigeria, the Aba Temple shares virtually no aesthetic commonality with the architecture and buildings of the surrounding city. As a giant granite structure with landscaped turf across the street from a lineup of small shops, the Aba Temple is the largest monument in the city. Aba is considered to be one of the Eastern Region’s trading centers as well as the site of one of the African continent’s most famous anti-colonial agitation movements, the Aba ogu umunwanyi (women’s war). To this day, a local epithet (celebrated between locals but

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offensive from non-Aba to Aba residents) is nwa Aba: “a child of Aba,” which intimates someone with an unusual degree of street savvy and ingenuity. During the Aba Temple construction process between 2002 and 2005, the LDS Church built a new paved road connecting the main city to the temple construction site. Following the completion of the temple, the Church donated the street to the city of Aba. The Aba Temple attracts both suspicion and wonder from native residents. While monumental, the closed-off nature of the temple, coupled with the spoken sound of “Mormon” (with its similarity to “Mammon”), communicates to the local population a kind of sinister aura— with some locals walking on the other side of the street to avoid proximity to the temple complex. Juxtaposed against the reputation of Aba as run-down, unhygienic, and unsafe, the Aba Temple conveys an image of American wealth, in stark contrast to Aba’s squalor, traders, and hustlers. In 2009, the temple in fact was shut down in the context of an outbreak of local violence. Crime had exploded in the area surrounding the temple, including kidnappings and a drive-by shooting. Gangs led by prominent ndi nkwu (big men) such as Osisi Ka Nkwu, robbed banks and gold-carrying vehicles with little recourse from law enforcement. One group that proved effective in fighting crime was a band of local paramilitary strongmen called the “Bakassi Boys,” named after a group of Igbo market traders in Cameroon who banded together to push back against robbers waylaying their goods. The Bakassi Boys collaborated with government officials to capture and, at times, kill street criminals, while law enforcement officials were perceived as unwilling to protect residents. For a time, LDS Church security officials hired the Boys as a private security detail for the temple. Whatever the challenges of building LDS communities in the context of post-colonial Africa might be, it is clear that the Church connotes American prestige and wealth. The Aba Latter-day Saint temple stands as a kind of citadel, connected to the city by a church-funded road that is free of the potholes and even craters typical of Nigeria’s Eastern Region. While lush in resources— crude oil brings in millions to companies such as Shell and Chevron—Nigeria’s infrastructure is unevenly distributed. The well-paved streets of Victoria Island and Abuja have little in common with the shantytown neighborhoods scattered throughout the rest of the country. In the cities of Aba and Owerri—humming trade centers with a robust history of anti-colonial and later anti-northern Igbo agitation—LDS chapels project a sense of wealth, financial stability, and status. While LDS growth in West Africa has continued, the rate of growth in recent years has been relatively modest in Nigeria and certainly in Ghana. Nonetheless, an easy inference is tempting: the LDS Church’s American origin, American mythos, and continued American patronage support the supposition that “Mormonism” is an appendage to Nigerian life rather than a part of it—that it is a vestige from colonial days which local converts can leverage for financial gain. This caricature is not only insulting to faithful African Latter-day Saints, it reduces them to the kinds of essentialist caricatures Nigerian novelist Chinua

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Achebe loathed to read at the University College, Ibadan. While claiming foreign exploitation, such caricatures depict the African Latter-day Saint as “sinister and stupid or, at the most, cunning.” Only as he matured did Achebe realize that Europeans saw him as “one of those strange beings jumping up and down on the riverbank, making horrid faces.” Such stories, Achebe realized, “are not innocent” and can be “used to put you in the wrong crowd, in the party of the man who has come to dispossess you.”38 Economic motives are, of course, difficult to ignore; they often generate disingenuous and fraudulent behavior throughout poor areas worldwide: from Appalachia to the rural Mississippi Delta to Calcutta, India, and the slums of Rio de Janeiro. In fall 2018, a large generator was stolen from a Nsukka chapel, and the year prior, an LDS stake president was excommunicated for embezzlement. Former LDS mission president David Eka once dismissed many of the earliest Nigerian converts as hustlers seeking for “what we can get from the Americans.”39 These and probably many other cases of graft and fraud in the global LDS Church are not peculiar to LDS communities. They predictably abound wherever people of faith gather to live the idealized precepts of their religion in congregations that face a lack of access to steady incomes or reliable government infrastructure.

The Africanized English of West African Latter-day Saints Indigenous languages co-exist with various degrees of ease alongside English in West Africa. In Nsukka, Igbo, Latter-day Saints chatter in Igbo in the hallways and speak English over the pulpit. The same is true in Ibadan and Calabar, where members use church English in meetings but converse primarily in Yoruba or Efik, respectively. It is improper to speak of these as “tribal languages” or “dialects.” Most of Nigeria’s languages are mutually unintelligible. The Nigerian national language, however, is English, decided upon in spite of a host of Nigerian parliamentarians lobbying for education in their indigenous languages. Earlier, European scholars considered that English was the “greatest heritage” bequeathed to the people at the end of British colonialism. Be that as it may, in 1978, contemporary Nigerian linguistic scholar, Mark Attah, advocated for an “indigenized version of standard English” as a national language to resolve linguistic tensions throughout the country and help Nigerians to “cement national unity” through a language “to cherish as their own rather than an inheritance from the British.”40 LDS missionary work, however, does not adhere strictly to national languages. In the United States, Spanish is not a national language, but Spanish-­ speaking missionaries proliferate throughout different regions of the United States. In Scandinavia, LDS missions could easily adopt English as a language of proselytizing, but missionaries continue to teach in Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Danish—in spite of abysmally low baptism numbers in those

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countries. While written courses in the vernacular are available and, in some measure, required at the standard levels in Ghana and Nigeria, the written culture of both is Anglo-dominant. English is one of the few cultural threads that binds Ghana’s and Nigeria’s complex, multi-cultural identities. Edwin E.  Okafor, professor of archeology and tourism at the University of Nigeria Nsukka, maintains that “the economic and cultural lives of the country essentially depend on the usage of the English language” and concludes that the “sociocultural integration of Nigeria” would be “very difficult and very long” if Nigerian national leadership adopted the “extreme nationalist opinion,” for mandating an indigenous language.41 The LDS Church privileges five major world languages (while adapting to a very large range of additional languages, as necessity dictates): English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and French. If one of these five languages can be used in a country, it receives greater institutional support and language resources than other minority languages. This rule applies throughout most of Africa: whatever the local languages may be, LDS worship services and instructional classes are conducted largely in the language of that country’s colonial heritage (though individual church units at times incorporate indigenous expressions or even lessons into their services). As younger generations become more integrated into Anglophone educational institutions in West Africa, efforts to incorporate indigenous languages have declined. It is not uncommon to hear Igbo senior members complain about the lackadaisical approach younger people take in speaking Igbo. But efforts to incorporate local African languages would fail to provide an overarching sense of shared identity; Igbo language groups differ considerably between Imo, Enugu, Delta, and Anambra states in Nigeria. West African variants of English are increasingly seen as additional manifestations of the English language, comparable to the English variants of the American Deep South, Australian English, or East End London English. Like these other variants, West African English functions in its own cultural context, a context in which the current generation learns neither English like the British nor Igbo like the ndi ichie (elders) of the traditional villages; rather, they learn a version of English distinctive to the changing circumstances of the social environment in which they live. As is increasingly acknowledged by cultural linguists, English no longer belongs to the nations that gave it life. English has become a global language—with different manifestations: American, British, Ghanaian, Nigerian, and so on. The Anglo-American world no longer owns the English language. While the English of Anglophone West African churches draws on a colonial heritage, Anglophone West African Latter-day Saints claim their own English. Unless a Nigerian or Ghanaian Latter-day Saint has received extensive training in either the United States or the United Kingdom (such opportunities are expensive and therefore relatively rare), the English of most West African Latterday Saints will reflect the Nigerian or Ghanaian articulation of the English language. It may be argued that what is true of Africanized English is, to some unmeasured degree, also true of what has become the African LDS Church.

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Conclusion What, then, are we to make of this ụlọ ụka ndi ̣ ọcha—the “white man’s church” in West Africa? This chapter offers a multi-dimensional understanding of African Latter-day Saints that acknowledges their agency and leaves behind the essentialist view of indigenous African religion. Neither neo-colonial sellouts nor calculating opportunists seeking personal, material benefits from a white American church, Latter-day Saints in Ghana and Nigeria abide at the ambiguous center of a complex set of historical, cultural, political, and religious pressures. But as they choose to seek the “Celestial City” on earth, they became agents of their own religious creation, capable and willing participants in the making of supranational LDS community across the Atlantic and across racial divides.

Notes 1. Andrew Walls, “Theology is Moving South,” In Trust, https://www.intrust. org/Magazine/Issues/New-Year-2003/Theology-is-moving-south (accessed April 21, 2020). 2. Jenkins, Phillip, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2. 3. Achille Mbembe, “African Modes of Self-Writing,” Public Culture 14, 1 (2002): 241. 4. Chielezona Eze, “Rethinking African culture and identity: the Afropolitan Model,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 26, 2 (2014): 237. 5. Eze, “Rethinking African culture and identity: the Afropolitan Model,” 239. 6. Eze, “Rethinking African culture and identity: the Afropolitan Model,” 239. 7. Achille Mbembe, “Afropolitanism,” in Njami Simon and Lucy Duran, eds., Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2007), 28. 8. Taiye Tuakli-Worsonu, “Bye-Bye Babar,” http://thelip.robertsharp.co.uk/? p=76 (accessed April 20, 2020). 9. Ochonu, Moses, Colonialism by Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt Consciousness in Nigeria (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). 10. Allman, Jean, and Parker, John, Tongnaab: The History of a West African God (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005). 11. Robinson, David, Paths of Accommodation: Muslim Societies and French Colonial Authorities in Senegal and Mauritania, 1880–1920 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000). 12. Ayandele, Emmanuel, The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria, 1842–1914 (London: Longmans, 1966). 13. Sundkler, Bengt, Bantu Prophets in South Africa (New York: James Clarke and Co., 2004).

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14. J.E. Tishken and A. Heuser, “‘Africa always brings us something new’: a historiography of African Zionist and Pentecostal Christianities,” Religion 45, 2 (2015): 156. 15. Ewing, Adam, The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 76. 16. Marvin Jones, Diary, October 24, LDS Church History Library. 17. John J.  Stewart, Mormonism and the Negro (Orem, UT: Community Press, 1960). 18. Ambrose Chukwu, “They’re Importing Ungodliness,” Nigerian Outlook, March 5, 1963, 3. 19. A wide literature exists on the presence of African indigenous leadership. For examples, see Shankar, Shobana, Who Shall Enter Paradise: Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014); Cooper, Barbara, Evangelical Missions in the Muslim Sahel (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006); Marshall, Ruth, Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Ekechi, Felix, Missionary Enterprise and Rivalry in Igboland, 1857–1914 (New York: Psychology Press, 1972); Hackett, Rosalind, I.J. Religion in Calabar: The Religious Life and History of a Nigerian Town (Leiden: De Gruyter, 2013). 20. Lamar S. Williams, Letter to I.A. Emeludamu, July 23, 1963, Edwin Cannon Papers, Box 1, Folder 1, LDS Church History Library. 21. K.A.B. Jones-Quartey, “The Moulding of Azikiwe,” Transition, 15 (1964): 53. 22. There is a massive body of literature on the Nigeria-Biafra war. An early work by Frederick Forsyth, The Biafra Story: The Making of an African Legend (Barnsley, U.K.: Pen and Sword, 2007) offers a journalist, Biafra-sympathetic account. Chinua Achebe’s memoir, There Was a Country offers a prominent memoir of the famed author’s on-the-ground experiences (New York: Penguin Books, 2013). Lasse Heerten’s The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) provides a recent analysis of the war against the context of humanitarian institutions and activism in the “developing world” following the close of the imperial era. 23. Russell W.  Stevenson, “‘We Have Prophetesses’: Mormonism in Ghana, 1965–1979,” Journal of Mormon History 41, no. 3 (2015): 221–257. 24. Kissi, Walking in the Sand, chapter 1. 25. Russell W.  Stevenson, “‘The Celestial City’: ‘Mormonism’ and American Identity in Post-Independence Nigeria,” African Studies Review, forthcoming. 26. Anthony U. Obinna, Letter to the Council of the Twelve, September 28, 1978. Edwin Cannon Correspondence, LDS Church History Archives. 27. Mark L.  Grover, “The Mormon Priesthood Revelation and the Sao Paulo, Brazil Temple,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 23 (1): 39–53. 28. For a faith-promoting, apologetic account of the importation of LDS American missionaries to Nigeria and Ghana, see Mabey, Rendell N., and Gordon T. Allred. Brother to Brother: The Story of the Latter-day Saint Missionaries who took the Gospel to Black Africa (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1984). 29. For a brief account of the internal tumult, see Emmanuel A. Kissi, Walking in the Sand: A History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ghana (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 2004).

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30. Honorable Williams, interview with author, August 19, 2018. Iket Eyo Latter-­ day Saint Chapel. 31. Growth data culled from newsroom.lds.org, accessed April 21, 2020, and from Matthew Martinich, http://ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com/. See also Bushman, Claudia, Contemporary Mormonism: Latter-day Saints in Modern America (New York: Praeger, 2006), 72. 32. Matthew Martinich, “Mormon Land” podcast, April 15, 2020, 24:50. 33. Phillip Jenkins, “Letting Go: Understanding Mormon Growth in Africa,” Journal of Mormon History 35, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 16. 34. Alexander B.  Morrison, “The Dawning of a New Day in Africa,” Ensign (November 1987): 25–26. 35. Michael Moody notes re: Spencer J. Palmer Address, November 29, 1979, CR 108 54, Church History Library. 36. Rendell and Rachel Mabey, “A Mission to West Africa.” This People, Spring 1980, pp. 24–37. 37. Rendell N. Mabey, Brother to Brother: The Story of Latter-day Saint Missionaries Who Took the Gospel to Black Africa (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1984). 38. Chinua Achebe, “The Song of Ourselves,” New Statesman, February 9, 1990, reprinted March 22, 2013. https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2013/03/ song-ourselves (accessed April 21, 2020) 39. David Eka, Interview with E. Dale LeBaron, Box 1, fd. 10, 45, June 5, 1988, E. Dale LeBaron Oral History Collection, Perry Special Collections (Hereafter Eka Oral History). 40. Mark O.  Attah, “The National Language Problem in Nigeria,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 21, 3 (1987): 399–400. 41. Edwin E.  Okafor, “Hégémonie de l'anglais au Nigeria,” Presence Africaine 133/134 (1985): 15.

Bibliography Achebe, Chinua. 2013a. The Song of Ourselves. New Statesman, February 9, 1990, reprinted March 22. https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2013/03/ song-ourselves. ———. 2013b. There Was a Country: A Personal Memoir of Biafra. New  York: Penguin Books. Allman, Jean, and John Parker. 2005. Tongnaab: The History of a West African God. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Attah, Mark O. 1987. The National Language Problem in Nigeria. Canadian Journal of African Studies 21 (3): 393–401. Ayandele, Emmanuel. 1966. The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria, 1842–1914. London: Longmans. Bushman, Claudia. 2006. Contemporary Mormonism: Latter-day Saints in Modern America. New York: Praeger. Chukwu, Ambrose. 1963. They’re Importing Ungodliness. Nigerian Outlook, March 5. Cooper, Barbara. 2006. Evangelical Missions in the Muslim Sahel. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Ekechi, Felix. 1972. Missionary Enterprise and Rivalry in Igboland, 1857–1914. New York: Psychology Press.

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Ewing, Adam. 2014. The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Eze, Chielezona. 2014. Rethinking African Culture and Identity: The Afropolitan Model. Journal of African Cultural Studies 26 (2): 234–247. Forsyth, Frederick. 2007. The Biafra Story: The Making of an African Legend. Barnsley, UK: Pen and Sword. Grover, Mark L. 1990. The Mormon Priesthood Revelation and the Sao Paulo, Brazil Temple. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 23 (1): 39–53. Hackett, Rosalind I.J. 2013. Religion in Calabar: The Religious Life and History of a Nigerian Town. Leiden: De Gruyter. Heerten, Lasse. 2017. The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jenkins, Phillip. 2009. Letting Go: Understanding Mormon Growth in Africa. Journal of Mormon History 35 (2): 1–25. ———. 2011. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Jones-Quartey, K.A.B. 1964. The Moulding of Azikiwe. Transition 15: 50–53. Kissi, Emmanuel A. 2004. Walking in the Sand: A History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ghana. Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center. Mabey, Rendell. 1984. Brother to Brother: The Story of Latter-day Saint Missionaries Who Took the Gospel to Black Africa. Salt Lake City: Bookcraft. Mabey, Rendell, and Rachel Mabey. 1980. A Mission to West Africa. This People, (Spring): 24–37. Marshall, Ruth. 2009. Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Martinich, Matthew. 2020. http://ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com/.—“Mormon Land” podcast, April 15, 24:50. Mbembe, Achille. 2002. African Modes of Self-Writing. Trans. Steven Rendall, Public Culture 14(1): 239–273. ———. 2007. Afropolitanism. In Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, ed. Njami Simon and Lucy Duran. Johannesburg: Jacana Media. Morrison, Alexander B. 1987. The Dawning of a New Day in Africa. Ensign (November): 25–26. Ochonu, Moses. 2014. Colonialism by Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt Consciousness in Nigeria. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Okafor, Edwin E. 1985. Hégémonie de l’anglais au Nigeria. Presence Africaine 133 (134): 3–18. Robinson, David. 2000. Paths of Accommodation: Muslim Societies and French Colonial Authorities in Senegal and Mauritania, 1880–1920. Athens: Ohio University Press. Shankar, Shobana. 2014. Who Shall Enter Paradise: Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Stevenson, Russell W. 2015. ‘We Have Prophetesses’: Mormonism in Ghana, 1965–1979. Journal of Mormon History 41 (3): 221–257. ———. forthcoming. ‘The Celestial City’: ‘Mormonism’ and American Identity in Post-Independence Nigeria. African Studies Review. Stewart, John J. 1960. Mormonism and the Negro. Orem, UT: Community Press. Sundkler, Bengt. 2004. Bantu Prophets in South Africa. New York: James Clarke and Co.

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Tishken, J.E., and A.  Heuser. 2015. ‘Africa Always Brings Us Something New’: A Historiography of African Zionist and Pentecostal Christianities. Religion 45 (2): 153–173. Tuakli-Worsonu, Taiye. n.d. Bye-Bye Babar. Accessed April 20, 2020. http://thelip. robertsharp.co.uk/? p=76. Walls, Andrew. n.d. Theology Is Moving South. In Trust. https://www.intrust.org/ Magazine/Issues/New-Year-2003/Theology-is-moving-south.

CHAPTER 23

Finding Peace, Claiming Place: Black South African Women Navigating the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Caroline Kline

One of the best-known stories of Mormonism in South Africa centers on the faith and patience of Moses Mahlangu and a small group of black South Africans, who found a Book of Mormon in the 1960s, believed its truthfulness, discovered a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) congregation in the area in 1968, and then waited over a decade until local and mission authorities agreed to baptize them.1 Joining the LDS Church as black Africans was a difficult process in the 1960s and 1970s, for these converts were hindered not only by apartheid legislation and prevailing culture which promoted the strict separation of blacks and whites in society but also by the church’s priesthood and temple restrictions on black members, in place until 1978.2 With these difficulties, exacerbated by mission presidents’, local leaders’, and Salt Lake City authorities’ caution regarding intermixing races in worship services given an overall environment of racial prejudice, Mahlangu and many in his group were not allowed to get baptized until 1980 or later.3 However with their baptisms, a branch in Johannesburg’s most famous township, Soweto, was eventually established in the early 1980s. Soweto, an urban settlement created in the 1930s when the government started separating blacks from whites, was the site of major civil unrest during the apartheid regime. In 1976, Soweto saw riots after a ruling banning native languages in African schools, resulting in 176 striking students being killed. Apartheid, formally instituted in 1948,

C. Kline (*) Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_23

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engendered the systematic subordination of black to white as an inviolable principle of public and private relation; [it] reserved the vast bulk of land for whites, prohibited Africans from leasing land owned by whites, and shunted Africans to reserves—later called ‘homelands’ … [It] restricted the access of Africans to labor markets … reserved jobs for whites … imposed residential and territorial segregation … [and] regarded government as the preserve of whites.4

Yet, surprisingly, in this township of Soweto, known for black resistance, the American-born and white-led LDS Church has found a foothold in recent decades.5 Julia Mavimbela, a black convert to the church in 1981, may be Soweto’s most famous Latter-day Saint. During the Soweto uprisings of 1976 which closed schools for two years, she taught children how to garden and read. She later became the co-founder of Women for Peace and worked across racial lines to promote peaceful democracy and improve the lives of women in South Africa.6 While Julia Mavimbela’s words and life story are well-documented, little is known about the everyday black women who have chosen the church—despite its reputation as a “white men’s church” by black South Africans—amidst this history of oppression and white supremacy. This chapter examines the oral histories of black LDS women in South Africa, most from Soweto. These oral history interviews—twenty-four in total—were conducted in 2016 by two white LDS women from the United States involved in the Mormon Women’s Oral History Project at Claremont Graduate University.7 Acknowledging the positionality of these two interviewers is important, according to feminist research methodology, as it gives readers a better sense of the factors involved in the production of interviews and oral life history narratives.8 Oral histories are best considered co-created documents in some sense, shaped by both interviewers and narrators.9 Thus, the positionality of interviewers inevitably affects the stories that emerge, and moreover, the social location of the scholar writing about the oral histories affects the analysis. No doubt my own positionality as a white American feminist Latterday Saint influences the threads and themes I lift up, explicate, and contextualize in these narratives. Despite the differences in social location between narrators and interviewers, remarkable stories emerge in these oral histories, giving glimpses of these women’s struggles, values, and choices. These oral histories reveal aspects of ordinary women’s lives on the margins of the Mormon movement. They show the inherent tensions and successes of the globalizing tradition as they confront issues of gender, race, and culture within the church. In this chapter, I highlight and analyze three particular themes that emerge in the oral histories. First, I find that the LDS Church’s emphasis on strong families and involved fathers is a particularly attractive feature for many of these women, who have seen many marital relationships fracture under the pressure of apartheid and residual issues stemming from it. Second, I find that these Latter-day Saints often employ a discourse which downplays issues of race, particularly within the church. The women tend to use universalizing discourse about black and white equality and emphasize the importance of reconciliation and community beyond racial lines. However, other discourses are present

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which do acknowledge and critique issues of racial inequity. Finally, I find that women carefully negotiate issues of culture, navigating between traditional African practices, church guidelines, and family loyalties. These complex negotiations point to the formation of complex identities and multiple consciousnesses. I ultimately argue that these women’s choices, reflections, and navigations reveal a particular worldview which privileges the establishment of vitalizing, productive, and positive relationships with others. This moral paradigm, which I call non-oppressive connectedness, emerges as an appropriate lens through which to evaluate traditional religious women who are less motivated by issues of equality and female autonomy (a common lens in scholarship focusing on women and religion) and more motivated by relationality, so long as those relationships are non-oppressive and positive.10 These women’s commitment to non-oppressive connectedness helps to explain both their attractions to and tensions with the LDS Church.

“Understand What I Want”: Marriage, Proactive Masculinity, and Women’s Issues in the Church Nuclear family systems often fragment in contexts of oppression. In South Africa, restrictive apartheid legislation and policies pertaining to migrant labor, group areas, forced removal, and random detentions fractured many nuclear black families.11 Edith, an older Soweto woman who lived most of her life during apartheid years, spoke to the economic pressures which resulted in men leaving families for most of the year to work in mines: “The mining system that came with the gold mining is the one which destroyed the families because the men who used to come to work at the mines used to have barracks at the mines. But they were allowed to go to the township and do their thing without anybody reprimanding them. So they had families at home and families out here.”12 She traces male familial absence to this time period and to the unfair governmental policies that created economic pressures that broke apart families. She herself experienced a fractured family when her activist husband had to flee the country in 1975 in order to escape from the brutal South African police. He returned to the country thirty years later, but by that time, of course, there was no marriage left to speak of. Like many other women in South Africa, she finds Mormonism’s emphasis on the nuclear family appealing. Having never had a stable long-term marriage, she sees the value of that structure: “The Family Proclamation from the church is fantastic. You destroy the family, you destroy the whole nation. Without families we are absolutely nothing.”13 Even decades after apartheid, non-nuclear family formations are quite common among black South Africans. Patterns that have de-emphasized marriage emerged in the traumatic years of colonization and apartheid. Many of the women who were interviewed described a culture in which it is common for young black women to have children outside of wedlock.14 Tabitha, an LDS woman in her thirties, stated, “In my family, and in most families, when you’re

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my age—especially with them not being members—everyone has a child. My younger sister had a baby when she was sixteen, my older sister had a baby when she was eighteen.”15 Tabitha resisted this pattern until she turned 30 and had a baby with a boyfriend. She loves her child but recognizes the costs this pattern entails to the mother, saying, “If you get pregnant, you’re the one that carries the baby, you’re the one that has to take care of the baby and all that, while the men are out there making more babies! Women have to take care of everything, and have all the responsibility. And you know, it is just sad. It is sad.”16 In the void created by absent fathers, grandmothers and other extended members often step in, helping to raise the children and provide support.17 These strong extended kin networks are an important safety net and source of strength in a culture where out-of-wedlock children are common. Ahmale, whose grandparents were among the group of founding black LDS members in Soweto, speaks of the help her grandmother and other family members gave her when she had a baby with a boyfriend at nineteen. She recounted, “She was there for me, and everybody in the family was there for me. And there was a time when I felt like, you know what, I can’t keep this baby. And they said, ‘You know what, you can, and you will love that baby. And you will teach it the right way.’”18 While these extended kin networks often provide single mothers much-­ needed  assistance to help them carve out a path for survival, the Mormon vision of devoted fathers and husbands is alluring to many women who choose the LDS Church. Particularly attractive are teachings which encourage men to be helpful and proactive in the home. Ahmale, who is now separated from her non-member husband, shared an anecdote which speaks to the appeal of these teachings about benevolent and proactive masculinity that are outlined in church-produced manuals: The book, Marriage and Family Relations, I once gave it to my husband when he came back last year. I said, “Read this, so that you can understand what I want.” And he read it, and he came back and said, “I wish I had known what I know now, because things would be better.” So it shows that the church has good resources … So now when we go visit him, he’ll be doing the cooking! “What are you doing?” [He replies,] “Oh, because you are visiting me, I thought I would cook for you and the kids!” And I’m like “What?! What are you cooking there?!” And it’s better than nothing! So he’s reading those books, and he’s trying. He’s reading the Book of Mormon, so we are hoping that someday he will be a member.19

Church teachings which encourage men to participate in domestic tasks were appealing to women as they felt that such teachings led to the formation of stronger, more unified marriages.20 Not only do church teachings and culture encourage proactive male involvement in the family, they also critique male dominance and abuse, which several interviewed women mentioned as a serious challenge for women in South

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Africa. Hannah said that she felt that the biggest problem for women in South Africa is abuse: “That’s the biggest problem. Women and children are being abused on a daily basis. They are being raped, they are being abused.” Hannah finds hope in activists who are bringing attention to this issue so that “the Lord will intervene and see our sisters.”21 Mary agrees, seeing abuse and cultural traditions which keep women silent about abuse problematic. She related, I feel that women face the challenge of not speaking out … In my African point of view, in our culture, how we are brought up, women cannot say as much, especially when you are married … That’s how we were brought up. So, that’s still a challenge. It is still there and we can be abused physically or emotionally and we just keep quiet, saying, ‘Oh, this is life.’22

While domestic violence is certainly a world-wide problem present in every culture and socio-economic group, scholars have noted how colonialization and globalization have ravaged traditional modes of masculinity.23 In contexts of economic and social injustice, where traditional roles and ways of life have been disrupted, domestic violence can erupt. In the face of this reality, LDS congregations, as Mary went on to say, are instituting programs to try to stop patterns of abuse. She recounts that her ward (congregation) has implemented programs teaching women about domestic violence: Like in my ward we have had lots of programs of counseling. We would have those problems and we would go and have counseling, and that’s when you understand. Mostly it’s women who have been abused either physically or emotionally. And emotionally is a dangerous one because most of the time we don’t realize that it’s there. But it is. So that is a challenge even in the church—speaking out. We don’t.24

While there are powerful cultural forces that pressure women to defer to men and quietly accept abuse, local LDS congregations are trying to counteract these patterns and promulgate ideas about loving partnership in marriage and the importance of benevolent masculinity. Programs such as these materially improve the lives of women as they point toward paths that create better and more equitable relationships. They are an attractive element of the church to many women, who feel empowered by messages of cooperative female/male partnership. Mpho, for instance, has realized through church teachings that women are “not to be a subject to your husband, but to be a companion, and that helps you realize you can’t keep putting yourself down.”25 She states that she has adopted a healthier self-image and an increased sense of confidence through church teachings which emphasize female and male loving partnerships. In presenting ideals of marriage that encourage unity, love, benevolence, and mutual family devotion, the church can help couples break out of damaging patterns of silence, abuse, and male abdication. As Elizabeth Brusco discusses in her work about Colombian evangelicalism, conversion to conservative Christian traditions can serve as an antidote to abusive or abdicating modes of masculinity as they “reform gender roles in a way that enhances female status”

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and orient husbands toward domesticity.26 In turning husbands’ attention to building strong families, loving their wives, and proactively helping in the household, some LDS messages on marriage are working toward chipping away at certain negative masculine patterns. While LDS teachings over the last few decades have indeed encouraged equal partnership and condemned marital abuse, it is important to note that these teachings simultaneously promote soft or benevolent patriarchy, in which complementary gender roles are upheld as ideal.27 Fathers are taught to function as benevolent priesthood holders who lovingly provide and preside over their families, while mothers are taught that their main responsibility is to nurture children. The LDS Church therefore employs a “double discourse” on marital power dynamics in the home, retaining patriarchal language of male familial presiding and (until 2019) rituals of female submission in the temple, even as it also advocates for equal partnership within marriage.28 This double discourse on equal partnership and male presiding in families is most prominent in the near-canonized 1995 Proclamation on the Family, which states, “By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness.” Two sentences later the same document emphasizes equal partnership, stating, “Fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners.”29 This paradoxical simultaneous employment of both male headship and egalitarian marital rhetoric allows for patriarchal models emphasizing male dominance to emerge in some LDS families. One South African oral history attests to the presence of this other discourse—one which works against the cultivation of partnership-oriented marriages—in a South African LDS community. Rebecca recounted, “I have learned a lot, especially in Relief Society and Young Women, as to being a woman and embracing it and supporting it and being humble.” She said that she used to be stubborn, “to the point that my husband would smack me.” She says that now, “I understand why, because I was very stubborn … But now I just zip it.”30 Rebecca has learned from fellow female congregants to create peace in her marriage through deference, but it is a peace that puts her in a subordinate position. Thus, in South African congregations, discourses which emphasize female humility and submission exist alongside discourses emphasizing more equitable partnership. Layering Mormon patriarchal notions of male presiding on top of other cultural patriarchal notions within a church which emphasizes harmony in marriage may at times result in relationships in which women are subordinated. Ultimately, Mormonism’s message of benevolent masculinity and proactive male partnership in the home is an attractive element to these South African women, particularly given an overarching historical context of strain on nuclear families. None of these women struggled with male-only priesthood or complementary gender roles, generally finding church teachings on families and women to enhance women’s status and improve their relationships. Notably, a couple of younger women envisioned ideal future lives which included career and family, thus indicating that discourses about non-employed motherhood

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were not prominent in their congregations.31 Indeed, stay-at-home motherhood was not even a consideration for most of these women, as mothers’ incomes are necessary for survival in their community. Concerns about women’s issues tended to hinge on domestic violence and male abdication rather than on issues of structural equality and gender roles within the church and home. Ultimately, these women’s comments on women and gender reveal a moral orientation toward non-oppressive connectedness as they seek to reject abuse and cultivate positive and sustaining connections within the home.

“To Be Able to Forgive”: Women’s Reflections on Historical White Oppression and Race Relations in the Church I met Karabo a few days before her 2015 oral history interview when I stopped in South Africa for a few days before embarking on a research trip to Botswana. As we were driving around Soweto with her young granddaughter, I asked Karabo how people reacted when she decided to join the LDS Church in the 1990s, given its reputation as a “white men’s church” and her history of resistance during apartheid. She chuckled and told me that people liked her much better once she became a Mormon. She found, she told me, a measure of peace when she joined the church. Karabo’s choice—and the choice of other South African black women, some involved in anti-apartheid resistance movements—to join the LDS Church is striking, particularly given the church’s troubling history with race. In 1852 Joseph Smith’s successor Brigham Young initiated a practice of denying ordination to black men and temple rites to black women and men, a ban which lasted until 1978.32 In those intervening years, several disturbing justifications for the ban emerged in Mormon writings, often positing that black people were less-valiant in pre-earth life and were cursed with the “seed of Cain.”33 The church has only recently—and with little fanfare—repudiated these teachings on the church’s official website, but members must still confront passages in the Book of Mormon that characterize black skin as a curse.34 Karabo, like many other interviewed women, did not focus on the priesthood temple ban in her discussion, saying that the ban was not an important issue for her when she decided to join the church, as she was quite familiar with segregationist thinking and had come to a point in her life where she was tired of being angry at injustice.35 She had lived much of her life during apartheid, and as a younger person, she had been outraged by the many injustices she saw, not the least of which was the killing of her own father, “a political elimination.” Witnessing so much injustice propelled her to activism against the government. These acts of police harassment and arrests brought a lot of resentment. When I witnessed with frustration atrocities done to other people, it used to hurt and

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infuriate me, leaving me feeling hopeless or powerless for being unable to help. Those actions influenced my thoughts that when I grow up, I have to vindicate myself and my people. And this is how one ended up being a limb of the struggle as an activist.36

One event that remains particularly strong in her memory is an incident of two white police officers pulling her over while she was driving her two young sons to school. When one of them pinned her nine-year-old to the car and then took both her sons by the scruffs of their shirts, Karabo physically attacked an officer, beating him. With a crowd gathering to watch the event, the officers backed down and let them go, but as Karabo said, “You begin to harbour anger and wait for an opportunity, wanting to settle the score and avenge your hurting feelings.”37 Karabo decided to join the LDS Church when she accompanied her mother, who converted in the 1980s, on a trip to Salt Lake City. She loved the bells that played “Come, Come Ye Saints,” and she saw many old couples walking around downtown, showing affection for each other. She herself was engaged to a man at the time and was thinking about her relationship and her future. Suddenly a change of heart came over her: It’s the kind of thing that I can’t explain, I can’t put it in proper context of words, but it’s a feeling that overwhelmed me, and it felt that this is right and remains unforgettable to this day. This … it felt that this is what I’ve been looking for. I didn’t need to have the hate when there is so much beauty, love and peace in the world. It made me feel and realize that we’re all human, even those that hurt us, they also do feel pain. Then I asked myself, “Do I still want to retaliate the way I initially felt? Do I want to avenge my feelings the way that I have always wanted to?” And I found that it was not necessary. Life was just too beautiful and precious to be wasted with negative energy. Though often there would be the feeling that I didn’t know why it should not be necessary to avenge my anger feelings. And with time, I came to realize that I could still address that pain effectively by doing something good that was inclusive of color. My circle of European friends became firmer, more sincere, lovable and unifying. Indeed I felt the binding spirit of being one as our Heavenly Father’s children.38

Karabo’s healing had begun. Upon her conversion, Karabo has moved from anger to a context in which racial injustice is not the dominant lens through which she views the world, including the church. Her priorities have shifted to reconciliation, unity, and inclusive community. She speaks of her new attitude toward whites, saying, “[Europeans] are people and human just like my African folks. The errors of a handful do not merit a blanket opinion about them. Personally I engage with people, not color, nor creed or gender.”39 In viewing white people as individuals rather than members of an oppressive regime, Karabo has been able to bridge racial divides and create stronger community. Scholarship on religion and healing has emphasized that religion can bring a sense of resilience to people as they deal with adversity, oppression, or even

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collective trauma. Yolanda Dreyer writes about resilience and spirituality in the context of post-apartheid South Africa, finding that “faith and faith practices such as prayer and ritual can contribute to feelings of gratitude, hope, and peace … Rituals and ceremonies provide a sense of connection with others.”40 Karabo’s personal suffering, anger, and resentment were lessened upon her moment of conversion as she let go of desires for retaliation and decided to cultivate relationships with people regardless of race. Her story is one of finding inner peace as she began to view white South Africans as individuals rather than as enemies. Amy Hoyt, in her discussion of reconciliation, says, “Only when combatants can view each other as fully human can they transition to peaceful co-existence. Just as conflict begins on a personal level, reconciliation also begins on the micro level, as people work to repair relationships with one another.”41 She cites this particular oral history as an example of this kind of reconciliation, as the narrator “articulates the way in which forgiveness operates to bring her back into relation with ‘the other’ and rehumanizes those who once sought to destroy her, as they did her father. This is reconciliation.”42 While Karabo still encounters racism from some white South Africans, she sees these interactions as indicative of individuals’ moral failings and not indicative of whites as a whole. She inhabits a complex positioning on race as she recognizes structural inequities in her society and lauds those activists who “fought the ills of injustice and stood for the rights of our people in our country,” while also working hard to develop a mind frame that allows her to see white people as individuals.43 Reconciliation, forgiveness, peace, and connections beyond the color barrier were emphasized by other black South African LDS women. The ability to bury the hurts of the past, judge people as individuals, and reach out beyond boundaries of race is a hallmark of many of the LDS black South African women interviewed. Mary, a middle-aged woman who converted to the church through her LDS husband, spoke of moving to a white neighborhood with her husband and fearfully knocking on the door of her next-door neighbors, an older white couple. There were tentative overtures at first, but eventually, a loving relationship was established, with this couple becoming de facto grandparents to her children, often watching them when Mary and her husband were at work. She said, This all happened because of the Gospel. Because if it was just me, during apartheid time, with a white person, we would not have had the chance to get to know them … It’s beautiful. My daughter, when she was in day care, the kids would ask her, ‘How come you have a white grandma?’ … It’s the beauty of the Gospel. We should see individuals as Heavenly Father sees them. There is always good in anyone else. In someone else there is something good.44

This attitude of racial inclusion was present in several interviews. Many women downplayed viewing the world through a lens of race and racial oppression, even women who experienced firsthand the horrors of those years of oppression. Deborah was once part of the resistance on the front lines during apartheid, a student in Soweto during those turbulent years in the 1970s. Her

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brother had to leave the country to survive, and policemen would burst into her home at night looking for him. “I was on the street, fighting,” she said. She was there on that fateful day when the police attacked people who had sought sanctuary at the Catholic church, Regina Mundi, shooting tear gas and bullets into the church. She recalled, “We were crying, and we jumped high walls because they were shooting at us now.”45 She cited Nelson Mandela as a huge inspiration for containing possible retributive violence, saying, “He preached peace. There should be peace. We love them, even though they don’t love us. But we must just reconcile and there was this reconciliation, and he always preached peace. Peace, peace, peace, peace.”46 She became a teacher and found the church through her teenage son. Impressed by the two white young missionaries, the focus on reading your own scriptures, and the strong sense of community—the missionaries visited her when she was sick in the hospital— she agreed to be baptized. Given her history with racial injustice and apartheid, one might expect Deborah to be troubled by the dominance of white leadership or the racism of white members in the area. She takes a pragmatic approach, saying, “Some people are ok. Some people are not … But if the gospel didn’t change them, there’s nothing we can do … But you have to concentrate on yourself and what you can do. So it’s [racism is] still there, even though it’s starting to heal.”47 She is not particularly troubled by the dominance of white leadership, saying, “I don’t see color. I listen to the message. Whether they are black, whether they are white, if the message is good, I take it.”48 Tabitha, a generation younger, echoes the same attitude downplaying issues of race, saying, “To me, personally, race has never been a huge matter … Color to me is color. It’s nothing!”49 And yet, she acknowledges she might think differently if she had lived through apartheid. An older woman, a former Relief Society president, likewise emphasized unity over issues of race, saying that the white leadership of the church never bothered her, “Because in the Lord’s eyes we are all the same whether black or white.”50 In their oral histories, these women are choosing to promote unifying language which minimizes distance between blacks and whites. While this discourse often emerges in discussions about the general white leadership of the church, it is also sometimes present as they reflect on issues beyond a church context. This downplaying of race issues, particularly regarding the church and its predominantly white general leadership, is one prominent discourse on race in this black LDS community. As I was reading these oral histories, it struck me that what many were voicing is something of a “color-blind” attitude toward race—emphasizing everyone’s equality and minimizing an interpretive paradigm that observes the world through the lens of race and structural power. On one level this is not enormously surprising. These women chose to belong to this church, and this is a discourse that reduces tensions regarding white leadership and remnants of racist discourse and behavior lingering among some white members there. These devout women appreciate a lot of what the church does and teaches, and are choosing to not emphasize issues of race that might lead

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to feelings of dissonance with their leaders or other members. Their ethical priorities of creating and fostering connections rather than divisions understandably lead them to distance themselves from language they might consider divisive. But, on the other hand, this discourse is striking. These are women who experienced racial oppression and some of whom directly fought for structural equality between blacks and whites in their society. Moreover, critical race theorists have written that “color-blindness” or “non-racialism” (the South African term largely synonymous with the American term color-blindness) has become a new rhetorical tool for whites wanting to avoid redressing the socio-­economic legacies of apartheid.51 By expressing color-blindness or non-racialism, these whites effectively, according to Amy Ansell, “cast a blind eye toward the enduring problem of racial injustice.”52 Non-racialist discourse downplays the realities of racial hierarchy and racial privilege as whites use this language to push against measures that seek to address and redress inequities. So, given that scholars have pointed to troubling implications of non-racialist discourse when employed by whites, how should we understand this discourse when it is black LDS women who are expressing it? When these women use this discourse, does it function to cast a blind eye toward racial injustice? Scholars have noted that those with less structural power in society often employ various strategies to cope with inequities. These “subordinate adaptation” strategies range from forming alternative subcultures to accepting the status quo in order to derive various benefits from those in power.53 One takeaway that Schwalbe et al. discuss is that adaptations often have complex results, both challenging inequities and reproducing them in some form. These women’s unifying discourse which downplays the role of race in church and even society may be viewed as a form of subordinate adaptation as it allows the women to maintain their church affiliation and obtain desired benefits from their association with church. It also promotes a vision and hope for a non-­ racialized society where one’s status in church or society is not affected by one’s race. While this discourse therefore challenges inequality by promoting visions of a racially just world, it also runs the risk of reproducing it, as the realities of racial inequities are not emphasized and critiqued. While such discourses may play out in complex ways, both promulgating and challenging inequities, I contend that there are other ways to understand and contextualize this language and that this discourse is functioning toward other ends and goals important to this community of black Latter-day Saints. First, Durrheim et al.’s article provides some helpful context and points toward one possible explanation for this discourse. They write that race attitudes have shifted in post-apartheid society. Whereas before apartheid it was common for white South Africans to express prejudice against blacks, “by 2007 anti-white prejudice among black Africans had become higher than anti-black prejudice among whites.”54 The authors surmise that this decline of stated anti-black prejudice among whites may have more to do with changing social norms that deem such expressions unacceptable than with actual commitments toward

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integration and change. Be that as it may, they do find a clear upswing in expressions of anti-white prejudice by black people, due, they surmise, to “the ongoing reality of racial inequality and discrimination.”55 The interviewed LDS women could be interpreted as resisting discursive trends in society which are creating more distance between blacks and whites in an already fractured society. By emphasizing unity, peace, and most particularly, the importance of judging people as individuals and not dismissing entire racial groups, these women are pushing against divisive trends. For these LDS women whose moral imperative is non-oppressive connectedness, fostering positive relationships across color lines and creating inclusive community is a moral priority. Another factor that might contribute to this discourse is that it, to some degree, echoes discourses from their own history as black South Africans. Nelson Mandela, a beloved hero to these women, often spoke in non-racialist terms, arguing for national unity and reconciliation.56 In apartheid times, according to Ansell, black liberationists like Mandela often used inclusive language in order to argue for breaking down racial barriers. This language served the country well as it transitioned away from apartheid and toward civil and political equality for all races in South Africa.57 Additionally, the African notion of ubuntu, which emphasizes human interdependence, may be a factor in these women’s expressions of non-racialism and inclusive community. Archbishop Desmond Tutu called upon this concept of ubuntu as he responded to apartheid, saying, “It [ubuntu] is to say, ‘My humanity is caught up inextricably bound up, in yours.’ … We say, ‘A person is a person through other persons.’”58 Thus, traditional notions of interdependence and communal values may also be contributing to these women’s decisions to de-emphasize racial divisions in the church and society and foster inclusive connections and community. In calling upon discourses from African tradition and from respected black liberationists, these women are working to heal divisions and create a better, more Zion-like community. Another possible factor leading to this discourse that must not be discounted is the positionality of the interviewers. As mentioned above, these South African women were interviewed by two white LDS women, strangers from the United States, and it is entirely conceivable that out of a sense of politeness or caution, they would downplay concerns about race, particularly within the church. If a member of their own community was conducting the oral history interviews, other stories or perspectives might have been emphasized. A final issue to keep in mind as we consider their responses to questions of race is that while some of these women expressed universalizing and unifying discourse and downplayed issues of race in the church, they also, sometimes simultaneously, held up other discourses that revealed a critical eye toward issues of race and power in the church and society. The following anecdotes give a glimpse of the ways this other discourse emerged in women’s oral histories. They reveal the multiple discourses and experiences that exist in black communities and that sometimes, critical race-conscious ones can exist side by

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side with ones that minimize issues of race in favor of inclusive, unifying discourse. Mary, who developed such a close relationship with her white neighbors, stands as an example of a black LDS woman who voices multiple discourses regarding race. While she emphasized the issue of unity and relationships across color lines, she also gently spoke to issues of structural imbalance in the white church hierarchy, saying, “I do hope we have more black leadership in the future, and that we are represented. I do feel there is more coming. I can see the potential.” Notably she sees particular progress on the part of incorporating diverse women into general leadership. She said, “There are two women now that are in the general positions. One black and one white, so we are getting there. We are looking at it from the women’s point of view that we can be as strong as men here and contribute in bringing up the work. But with time. If women will talk, then everything will happen. But if they don’t then it won’t.”59 For Mary, women who speak up and speak out will lead the way in modeling and incorporating a more inclusive church structure. Indeed, the Relief Society, the women’s auxiliary of the LDS Church, has modeled more diverse general presidencies than the (male) First Presidency of the LDS Church, and individual women leaders such as Chieko Okazaki who have spoken out on inclusive themes have had lasting and important impacts on the thinking of LDS women.60 However, as Michael Emerson and Christian Smith have soberingly argued in an American religious context, emphases on individual behavior, so common in evangelical and Mormon discourse, may often not be able to counteract racial inequity as they place responsibility for problems on individuals rather than on systemic structures.61 Other women are even more frank in critically assessing issues of race. Ahmale, who had some luck getting her husband to be more helpful in the home, thanks to church manuals, has not found a solution to the paucity of blacks in broadcasts from Salt Lake City. In a humorous but poignant anecdote, she recounted, At first … when there would be General Conference, we’d turn it on and watch it, and I’d be like, “Oh, no. There’s something wrong. Why is there no black person there?! And the Twelve, they’re like white, white, white, white. There needs to be a black person there. Are you sure we’re in the right church?!” And you talk to someone, and they’re like, “No, it’s fine!” And I’d say, “No, I’m asking you honestly, but did you see a black person there?” Even my hubby would be like, “Something’s wrong here. Why are they all white?! Where is black?” And I’m like, “Look, there’s black over there.” And he’s like, “One, two, three, four--that’s it. No. Something is wrong.” But now I tell him, “No, the church is starting to grow. It was on that side of the world, and now it’s in Africa, so we are growing.” And he’s like “Oh, ok. So what if I want to be [one of] them?” And I’m like “Alright, let’s turn it off.” So yeah, it’s difficult!62

She has chosen to not emphasize general broadcasts from Utah as the lack of diversity brings up troubling questions for her and her family. She also

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recognizes the difficult questions that can arise from the LDS Church’s pervasive depictions of Jesus as a white European in official LDS artwork.63 Her young daughter has questioned why Jesus is white in church art, and Ahmale recounts a story of an investigator attending Sunday School class and likewise questioning the racial depiction of a white Jesus in LDS artwork, as well as why LDS prophets are white. Ahmale reported that the class members looked around uncomfortably after the investigator raised these questions and that she herself “stood up and went to the other Sunday School class, and I let the missionaries tackle that question.”64 Ahmale seems to have accepted the LDS Church’s depictions of a white Jesus, but her reactions to the investigator and to her daughter—she chose not to disabuse her daughter of the child’s idea that he’ll be “pitch black” when Jesus returns—point to the difficulties she and other black South Africans contend with when presented with ubiquitous church images of a very white Jesus.65 Edward Blum and Paul Harvey have discussed the troubling implications of depictions of white Jesus, arguing that these images have often served to emphasize and reflect racial privilege, thus giving “whiteness … itself a holy face.”66 While Ahmale does not directly associate the LDS white Jesus with racial privilege or challenge the depictions of white Jesus, her oral history attests to the discomfort she and others in South Africa can feel when being surrounded by pervasive images of holiness in the form of white men. Ultimately, Ahmale feels like there is still work to do in South Africa and in the church to heal from racial injustices. She said, “There is still a lot of hate. It won’t go anytime soon. It won’t. Because you can see it. Even in the church, somehow, you still see it. Usually it’s more benign, but it’s there. It won’t go anytime soon. In the church, and everywhere.”67 But her hope is that “if people could understand our gospel, and if they understood that they need to put God first … I think we could live in a better world.”68 Ahmale recognizes pervasive, even structural problems regarding race in church and society, but like Mary above, she hopes that individual righteousness and behavior will shift society toward a better path. While recognizing systemic issues with race in the church, neither women articulate a desire for systemic restructurings of the church. Even more difficult than the lack of black leadership beyond the local level are explanations of the priesthood ban. Most women interviewed did not bring up the priesthood ban when asked about issues of race in the church. This is most likely due to the wording of the race question, which focused on whether the women felt distant from church leaders in America due to race or culture. One oral history, however, was a notable exception. Lindiwe, a young woman in her twenties who was raised by an LDS uncle and aunt after her parents broke up, spoke of learning in an Institute class about the priesthood ban which prevented black men from holding the priesthood until 1978. She had been going to church “since she was born,” yet she had not known about the policy against ordaining black men to the priesthood. She was dismayed and “fuming,” unhappy that the white teacher was shying away from her questions. She was equally unhappy when her uncle gave her a couple books about

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Mormonism and race, one of which talked about the cursed lineage of Ham and “how we were ‘in-betweeners,’ … I was so angry.”69 Lindiwe eventually found peace through reading her scriptures and through her understanding that the priesthood ban was not revelation but a policy and a “big mistake.” Still, she’s frustrated by the casual racism she experiences in mixed race wards and Institute classes. She speaks of a white class member asking her, “How do you feel about being cursed?” and white members joking about black neighborhoods being dangerous. She says, “even though it [the comment about black neighborhoods] wasn’t meant to be racist, it’s a racist comment, and things like that happen every single day.”70 She feels that “deeper issues … haven’t been addressed in South Africa as a whole,” and insensitive comments and jokes in mixed race wards are indicative that more work needs to be done to truly create a Zion community. Clearly, multiple discourses on issues of race exist in this community of black Latter-day Saints. Many women downplay racial issues, emphasizing unity between blacks and whites, and others are critical toward racial inequities in church and society, while still others bridge both discourses. All these discourses, however, are based on a commitment to making a better, more unified community. All of these women want a community where blacks and whites are treated as individuals and not dismissed because of their race. For some, working toward that goal means emphasizing ideas of unity, reconciliation, peace, righteousness, and a godly love that sees no color. Others hope to work toward that unity and peace through articulating and critiquing inequities, racism, and problematic teachings, in the hopes they will be addressed and corrected. But for all, connecting to a loving God and creating better relationships with others is a dominant moral priority, part of their non-oppressive connectedness moral paradigm. Mormonism even offers these Saints unique opportunities to connect beyond relationships in this life. Julia Mavimbela, the famous LDS peace worker, was initially drawn to the church because it laid out a way for her to be tied eternally to her beloved dead husband.71 In this society, fractured by racial injustice for so long, Mormonism offers these women connections in this world and beyond, as well as structures and guidelines for living productive lives, grounded in connection and community. Tensions, however, can emerge when women sense that black people are not being truly embraced and respected within the community.

Cultural Melding, Plural Consciousness, and Hybridity While issues of race may cause some black Latter-day Saints tension, issues of culture can also prove to be delicate and complicated within this highly centralized church. The LDS Church prides itself on its services, practices, teachings, and even buildings that look and sound similar throughout the world. While Salt Lake-produced guidelines, manuals, and broadcasts may be generally seen as helpful and even appealing in that they connect these Saints to a global

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religious network, they can also incite complications when church teachings or policy conflict with beloved local traditions and expectations.72 Take, for instance, the topic of lobola or bridewealth. This is a cultural wedding practice common in parts of Africa in which the groom’s family gives cash or property to the bride’s family. In 2010, Apostle Dallin H. Oaks critiqued this practice as going against “gospel culture” and as one of a few “negative cultural traditions” in Africa. He encouraged members to discontinue the tradition since it delays marriage for young men who have not had time to amass wealth.73 As I and others have discussed, his critique of the practice, which he described as “purchase[ing] his bride,” is framed in a Western understanding of the concept and ignores the deeply embedded cultural values underpinning the practice—values of bringing together extended families and honoring the importance of women.74 Thus, injunctions against the practice have proved troubling to many African Saints, as the practice confers legitimacy on the union in the minds of the extended family. As Lindiwe said in her oral history interview, “In our culture, where if lobola isn’t paid, you’re looked down upon … You’re not his wife, you’re just some person that got married … you’re not part of the family.”75 In a culture where extended family relationships are so important, and where connectedness and embeddedness in community are traditional moral values, abandoning lobola is a difficult prescription to follow. Lindiwe, the young woman who found a way to resolve her troubled feelings over the priesthood ban, has also found a way to navigate between her culture, her family, and her church’s dictates on the issue of lobola. Lindiwe’s mother wanted  lobola to be paid upon Lindiwe’s marriage, as did  Lindiwe’s LDS fiancé, knowing it would confer legitimacy on his bride among his non-­ member relations. But Lindiwe has decided that if the prophet has come out against the practice, she needs to take that seriously. She said, “I decided the prophet has said we are done with lobola. And if we believe that the prophet is the prophet, and we say all these things, then we have to live it. We have to be the example for our kids. We can’t say, ‘We’ll stop the next generation, but it’s alright for us.’”76 However, knowing that this practice was so important to extended family, Lindiwe decided that they would have the traditional lobola meeting between families, but without actually paying lobola. She said, “So we did have lobola negotiations. But no lobola was paid. What happened during the lobola negotiations was really [negotiations on] how much his family would be contributing towards the wedding.”77 This satisfied all parties as they were able to essentially have a lobola negotiation ceremony, with all the attendant traditional dress and practices, and money was given to the bride’s family. However, by renaming these funds “wedding expenses,” Lindiwe found a way to honor the dictates of church leaders as well as traditional cultural practices and the wishes of family. Lindiwe’s anecdote provides a rich glimpse into the complicated negotiations global Saints undertake when various loyalties pull them in different directions. In some senses, her compromise solution is reminiscent of the kind

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of navigation that Amy Hoyt describes in her work on LDS women’s agency. Hoyt notes that LDS women sometimes enact a complex kind of agency which simultaneously resists and upholds religious boundaries.78 In retaining the traditional practice of lobola negotiations, but adjusting it slightly and renaming the funds, Lindiwe exhibits this kind of complex navigation between individual, religious, and kinship loyalties. This anecdote also provides some insight into the ways Latter-day Saints adopt hybrid identities in postcolonial societies. Lindiwe might have chosen to abandon lobola negotiations entirely or ignore the church’s injunctions. However, she chose a middle path, a hybrid solution which navigated between traditional culture and LDS norms. As Rita Abrahamsen explained, “Hybridity is seen to signify the creative adaptation, interpretation and transformation of Western cultural symbols and practices, and shows that formerly colonized peoples are not simply passive victims in the face of an all-powerful Western culture.”79 In her choice to enact a creative adaptation of the lobola ceremony, Lindiwe embraced and honored her various identities and loyalties. She also demonstrated significant agency in deciding the extent to which and the manner in which she would comply with church dictates. As Abrahamsen alludes, sometimes scholars dismiss Western religious traditions and their missionaries as vehicles for cultural imperialism, but this reduction does not do justice to the complicated negotiations global Latter-day Saints engage in. As Ryan Dunch points out, such a reduction actually invalidates the agency of people in various cultures deliberately choosing these religious traditions and grappling with these traditions’ practices.80 Lindiwe’s thoughtful and deliberate choice to embrace both Mormon and traditional practice shows us how Saints around the world consciously adopt and adapt religion to their cultures and norms. In her simultaneous embrace of both Mormon and African practice, Lindiwe honored all her commitments, upheld all her relationships, and found a way through this problem with all connections intact. Rather than employing an either/or dualistic mentality, she embraced a plural consciousness and identity which upheld the good of multiple ways of being. Tabitha exhibited a similar rejection of dualistic either/or thinking in her discussion of traditional African healers, known as sangoma. While Lindiwe’s plural identity emerges in an anecdote of tension between two loyalties, Tabitha’s emerges in an anecdote of cultural overlap. As Newell Bringhurst noted years ago, there are some confluences between traditional African thought and Mormonism that might make the faith tradition particularly appealing to Africans. He pointed to the following LDS teachings which Africans might find attractive: “Belief in a plurality of Gods, pre-existence, eternal progression, apocalyptic millennialism, the idea of a church led by a living prophet, the ability to perform sacred ordinances for one’s dead ancestors, and an emphasis on the virtues of a strong family.”81 While several oral histories from South Africa revealed these Latter-day Saints’ attraction to strong family values, Tabitha’s oral history in particular picks up on that fortuitous

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confluence between Mormonism and traditional African connections to dead ancestors. Tabitha was initially converted to the church through the Book of Mormon when she was a teenager. Later, she deeply appreciated her LDS community when she became pregnant out of wedlock. Her oral history recounts the women of her ward throwing her a surprise baby shower, and she was overwhelmed by their kindness and generosity. She said that at that moment, “I was thinking, ‘Goodness. Is this happening? Is this real?’ You know that moment when it comes to you, when you cry after? Because I was shocked. After, I was like—wow. The love I feel in this gospel. It is truly, truly amazing.”82 Tabitha deeply appreciates the sisterhood and solidarity of her Relief Society cohorts who stood with her and offered support at a difficult time. While community and connections to those around her are clearly an important part of her life, her oral history reveals that connections to the dead are also profoundly meaningful to her. She loves the fact that the church encourages people to think about their dead and to do sacred ordinances for them. This appeals to her African heritage and to her family’s practice of traditional African medicine, including rituals showing respect to deceased ancestors. She explained, In the African tradition, my mother is a sangoma [a traditional healer of Southern Africa]. My father is a sangoma. So they thought I’d be a sangoma too. And I believe that the gospel of Jesus Christ has an answer for every culture—every question in every culture. When they said I should be a sangoma, I said no. You know? I’m doing family history work. I mean, there’s ancestors, it’s the same person, only now we are approaching them on a higher level, and we’re helping them the way they’re supposed to be helped. And after that, no one ever said anything about me being a sangoma. I was the sangoma of the church now! [Laughter]. You know, I’m helping people do their family history work. I’m helping their ancestors get baptized.83

With these comments, Tabitha is simultaneously creating distance between herself and the traditional practice of a sangoma, but also upholding and embracing the identity at the same time. By claiming her identity as the sangoma of the church, she upholds the multiple identities and value systems that have shaped her, and finds a happy confluence between them. Her self-­ description as sangoma of the church, and the plural and complicated identity that it connotes, is reminiscent of the work of Gloria Anzaldua, who discusses mestiza consciousness, an identity shaped through the influences of multiple cultures and worldviews. Anzaldua writes about the importance of the “uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness.”84 Tabitha is, in some sense, engaging in this kind of rejection of dualistic thinking as she upholds the values and the intent of African traditional practices and reshapes them into her chosen religious context. She is effectively a living bridge between her communities, anchored and appreciated in both.

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Tabitha reported that even her sangoma mother has had a change of heart about the church, which she initially viewed with suspicion. Tabitha recounted her mother’s reaction to her daughter’s interest in the church: I’ve got white people visiting me. My mom’s like, “Mm-mm. Something’s wrong.” I think that’s why she didn’t like the church. But now, she adores it! Because of family history! I told you she’s a sangoma. You know? The communications [between the living and the dead]. Family history is such a huge draw to her.85

The church’s emphasis on family history has worked to quell Tabitha’s family’s distrust of this historically white church. Her mother has moved from suspicion to appreciation because Mormonism is a tradition which values what her tradition values—responsibility and connection to those who have gone before. Both Tabitha and her mother demonstrate an expansive worldview that appreciates the intent and the values underpinning various practices across lines of difference. Tabitha’s practice of connecting to and honoring the dead may be different than her mother’s, but she, like her mother, recognizes that the end goal—connecting beyond the grave—is the same. Like so many other women in this South African LDS community, she operates from a worldview which prioritizes connection, care, and relationality. In seeing the church practice of family history as an expression of serving ancestors that resonates with that of African tradition, she is able to operate in and maintain connections and respect across lines of religious and cultural difference. Undergirding both Lindiwe’s and Tabitha’s choices to uphold and locate themselves within both African and LDS traditions is their commitment to a non-oppressive connectedness moral paradigm. In finding a comfortable middle ground that honors both worldviews, Lindiwe honors and maintains vitalizing connections to her mother, her fiancé’s family, her church, and the values and traditions which undergird the traditional practice. She found a fruitful middle ground that enabled connections on all sides. Tabitha doesn’t enact a compromise practice in the way Lindiwe does, but she inhabits a worldview that values, appreciates, and melds a compelling aspect of her chosen religion and an important facet of her African tradition—that of connecting to and serving the dead. As “sangoma of the church,” she layers an indigenous identity into her LDS identity, creating a pluralistic sense of self. In so doing, she maintains relationships of respect with family while simultaneously honoring her ancestors. In embracing that indigenous term, she exposes a worldview privileging the incorporation and melding of identities, rather than excising and abandoning them. She, like Lindiwe, establishes links between her worlds, not fissures.

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Conclusion These oral histories of black LDS South Africans reveal rich glimpses into their perspectives, values, and experiences. As these women navigate issues of gender, race, and culture, their dominant ethical paradigm of non-oppressive connectedness emerges. This drive for positive, uplifting connection helps to situate those spaces of confluence with the LDS Church—emphases on proactive benevolent masculinity, opportunities to connect beyond racial lines, and appreciation for Mormon rituals which establish connections between the living and the dead. This drive toward positive connectedness also helps to explain sites of tension when their senses of healthy community, human dignity, and appreciation across lines of difference come into conflict with church practice or teachings. As these women thoughtfully navigate their postcolonial global LDS worlds, they demonstrate a complex identity, holding together in their hearts and minds multiple discourses and multiple goods. Out of this complex identity, informed by histories of systemic racial oppressions, broken families, and commitment to their chosen faith tradition, they embrace the best of what Mormonism has to offer and thoughtfully adapt it into their culture and value systems. In finding peace and claiming place in Mormonism, they have, as Joanna Brooks says of indigenous and global southern Latter-day Saints, claimed Mormonism for themselves and found within it a resource for imaging a different way of being in the world.86

Notes 1. Richard E. Turley Jr. and Jeffrey G. Cannon, “A Faithful Band: Moses Mahlangu and the First Soweto Saints,” BYU Studies Quarterly 55, no. 1 (2016): 9–38. 2. Ibid., 9, 14–15. The authors write that while apartheid did codify and enforce the separation of blacks and whites in nearly every aspect of life, including educational and employment opportunities, where one lived, and whom one could marry, there actually was no legislation outlawing blacks from worshipping in white churches, so long as black people’s presence was not considered a “disturbance.” 3. Ibid., 33. 4. Michael MacDonald, Why Race Matters in South Africa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 10. 5. On a local level, LDS congregations often have leaders of color from the community. However, the centralized church which exerts a large amount of control over congregations around the world, is dominated by white male leaders in the United States. 6. Julia Mavimbela, “Where There Has Been a Bloodstain, A Beautiful Flower Must Grow,” in All Are Alike Unto God: Fascinating Conversion Stories of African Saints, ed. E. Dale LeBaron (Orem, UT: Granite Publishing, 1998), 171–184. Andrew Clark, “The Fading Curse of Cain: Mormonism in South Africa,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 27, no. 4 (1994): 43–46. 7. Elizabeth Layton Johnson and Heather Sundahl were the interviewers. Johnson was the co-director of the Mormon Women’s Oral History Project, and Sundahl

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was an experienced interviewer, having participated in an oral history project in Botswana the year before. 8. Sandra Harding, “Introduction: Is There a Feminist Method?” in Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues, ed. Sandra Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 1–14 and Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber, Patricia Leavy, and Michelle L.  Yaiser, “Feminist Approaches to Research as a Process: Reconceptualizing Epistemology, Methodology, and Method,” in Feminist Perspectives on Social Research, eds. Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 12. 9. Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, “Introduction,” in Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, eds. Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai (New York: Routledge, 1991), 3. 10. I discuss this paradigm throughout my dissertation, which examines communities of LDS women of color in Mexico, Botswana, and the United States. Caroline Kline, “Navigating Mormonism’s Gendered Theology and Practice: Mormon Women in a Global Context,” (PhD diss., Claremont Graduate University, 2018). 11. Keith U. C. Appolis, From Fragmentation to Wholeness: The Black South African Family Under Seige (New York: University Press of America, 1996), 1. 12. Anonymous, interview by Elizabeth Layton Johnson, May 30, 2016, Soweto, South Africa, Claremont Mormon Women Oral History Collection, #212, transcript, pp. 4–5, Special Collections, The Claremont Colleges Library, Claremont, California. I have given pseudonyms to all the narrators quoted or referenced in this chapter. 13. Ibid., 5. 14. This pattern, evident in Botswana as well as South Africa, is explicated more in depth in Caroline Kline, “Global Mormon Perspectives and Experiences of Familial Structures,” in The Routledge Handbook of Mormonism and Gender, eds. Taylor Petrey and Amy Hoyt (New York: Routledge, 2020), 321–335. 15. Anonymous, interview by Elizabeth Layton Johnson, June 6, 2016, Johannesburg, South Africa, Claremont Mormon Women Oral History Collection, #226 (2016), transcript, pp. 4–5, Special Collections, The Claremont Colleges Library, Claremont, California. 16. Ibid., 6. 17. In addition to kin networks helping single mothers, LDS ward (congregation) members may also provide moral support. Tabitha recounts that the women of her ward embraced her when she told them she was pregnant, encouraging her to come to church and throwing a surprise baby shower for her. Tabitha makes no mention of church discipline in her oral history. 18. Anonymous, interview by Elizabeth Layton Johnson, June 1, 2016, Johannesburg, South Africa, Claremont Mormon Women Oral History Collection, #220, transcript p. 3, Special Collections, The Claremont Colleges Library, Claremont, California. 19. Ibid., 5. 20. LDS women in Botswana also discussed their attraction to the companionate, unified, loving, and domestic task-sharing marriages that LDS Church leaders encourage. See Kline, “Navigating Mormonism’s Gendered Theology and Practice,” 134–145.

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21. Anonymous, interview by Elizabeth Layton Johnson, June 1, 2016, Johannesburg, South Africa, Claremont Mormon Women Oral History Collection #214, transcript p. 4, Special Collections, The Claremont Colleges Library, Claremont, California. 22. Anonymous, interview by Elizabeth Layton Johnson, June 1, 2016, Claremont Mormon Women Oral History Collection, #213, transcript p.  6, Special Collections, The Claremont Colleges Library, Claremont, California. I discuss domestic violence in various LDS communities, including South Africa, in Kline, “Global Mormon Perspectives.” 23. For more on the ways colonialism has disempowered men in Sub-Saharan Africa, see Margrethe Silberschmidt, “Poverty, Male Disempowerment, and Male Sexuality: Rethinking Men and Masculinities in Rural and Urban East Africa,” in African Masculinities, eds., Lahoucine Ouzgane and Robert Morrell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 189–204. 24. Claremont Mormon Women Oral History Collection, #213, 6. 25. Anonymous, interview by Elizabeth Layton Johnson, June 1–2, 2016, Johannesburg, South Africa, Claremont Mormon Women Oral History Collection, #225, transcript p. 4, Special Collections, The Claremont Colleges Library, Claremont, California. 26. Elizabeth Brusco, The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 6. 27. W.  Bradford Wilcox describes soft patriarchy in conservative Protestantism as “servant-leadership” in which men’s headship in the family entails attending to wives’ and children’s spiritual and emotional needs. Much of contemporary LDS Church leaders’ rhetoric on male benevolent headship mirrors this language. W. Bradford Wilcox, Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 172–173. Other researchers point out that no matter how benevolent the headship or patriarchy, decision-making power does tend to accrue to men in complementarian systems, as men assume leadership roles in society, church, and family. For more on the topic of benevolent patriarchy, see Peter Glick and Susan T. Fiske, “An Ambivalent Alliance: Hostile and Benevolent Sexism as Complementary Justifications for Gender Inequality,” American Psychologist 56, no. 2 (2001): 109–118. 28. In 2019, the LDS temple endowment ceremony changed to eliminate ritual female submission to husbands. At the time of these interviews, it was still in place. For more on the double discourse of male presiding alongside equal partnership, see Caroline Kline, “Saying Goodbye to the Final Say: The Softening and Reimagining of Mormon Male Headship Ideologies,” in Out of Obscurity: Mormonism Since 1945, eds. Patrick Mason and John Turner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 214–233. 29. “The Family.” Ensign, November 1995, 102. This document, later retitled “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” is commonly known as “The Proclamation on the Family” among Latter-day Saints. 30. Anonymous, interview by Heather Sundahl, June 5, 2016, Soweto, South Africa, Claremont Mormon Women Oral History Collection, #224, transcript p.  5, Special Collections, The Claremont Colleges Library, Claremont, California.

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31. Colleen McDannell points to the 1995 Proclamation on the Family as offering a “theology of silence” regarding women’s activities outside of nurturing children. She finds the Proclamation’s lack of specificity regarding women and wage labor as enabling the expansion of women’s roles. Colleen McDannell, Sister Saints: Mormon Women Since the End of Polygamy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 165–166. 32. See Lester Bush Jr., “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 8, no. 1 (Spring, 1973): 11–68. Max Perry Mueller discusses the effect of this practice on Jane Manning James, a nineteenth-­century black female convert who was denied access to the temple endowment. Max Perry Mueller, Race and the Making of the Mormon People (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 119–152. W. Paul Reeve finds that distaste for intermarriage between blacks and whites (a feeling shared by many early church leaders) was an important factor in motivating Brigham Young to initiate the priesthood temple ban on black members. W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 106–139. 33. Ibid. See also Armand Mauss, All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 212–230. 34. “Race and the Priesthood,” Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed January 3, 2020, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospeltopics-essays/race-and-the-priesthood?lang=eng. This essay stands as the fullest repudiation of these past racist teachings and was first published on the church’s official website in December 2013. The Book of Mormon passage that connects dark skin to a curse is 2 Nephi 5:21–24, which reads in part, “And he [the Lord] had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them.” 35. Anonymous, interview by Elizabeth Layton Johnson, June 1, 2016, Soweto, South Africa, Claremont Mormon Women Oral History Collection, #218, transcript p. 17, Special Collections, The Claremont Colleges Library, Claremont, California. Most women were not specifically asked about the priesthood ban in their oral history interviews, while they were asked about the predominance of white general leadership in the LDS Church. This no doubt accounts for why so few women brought up the priesthood ban. 36. Claremont Mormon Women Oral History Collection, #218, 4–5. 37. Ibid., 6. 38. Ibid., 7. Karabo uses the term “European” to refer to white people. 39. Ibid., 6. 40. Yolanda Dreyer, “Community Resilience and Spirituality: Keys to Hope for a Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Pastoral Psychology 64, no. 5 (2015): 657. 41. Amy Hoyt, “Women, Religion and Transitional Justice: LDS Women in Botswana and South Africa,” paper presented at the Decentered Mormonism: Assessing 180 Years of International Expansion Conference in Bordeaux, France, March 29, 2019. 42. Ibid.

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43. Claremont Mormon Women Oral History Collection, #218, 4. 44. Claremont Mormon Women Oral History Collection, #213, 3. 45. Anonymous, interview by Elizabeth Layton Johnson, June 2, 2016, Johannesburg, South Africa, Claremont Mormon Women Oral History Collection, #211, transcript, pp.  4–5, Special Collections, The Claremont Colleges Library, Claremont, California. 46. Ibid., 6. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Claremont Mormon Women Oral History Collection, # 226, 5. 50. Anonymous, interview by Heather Sundahl, May 31, 2016, Soweto, South Africa, Claremont Mormon Women Oral History Collection, #233, transcript p.  16, Special Collections, The Claremont Colleges Library, Claremont, California. 51. Marzia Milazzo, “The Rhetorics of Racial Power: Enforcing Colorblindness in Post-apartheid Scholarship on Race,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 8, no. 1 (2015): 8. Often color-blindness and non-racialism are terms associated with the political realm, but they can also prefer to broader ideologies that downplay the category of race. 52. Amy E.  Ansell, “Casting a Blind Eye: The Ironic Consequences of Color-­ Blindness in South Africa and the United States,” Critical Sociology 32, Issue 2–3 (2006): 354. 53. See Michael Schwalbe, Sandra Godwin, Daphne Holden, Douglas Schrock, Shealy Thompson, and Michele Wolkomir, “Generic Processes in the Reproduction of Inequality: An Interactionist Analysis.” Social Forces 79, no. 2 (2000): 419–452. 54. Kevin Durrheim, Colin Tredoux, Don Foster, John Dixon, “Historical Trends in South African Race Attitudes,” South African Journal of Psychology 41, no. 3 (2011): 274. 55. Ibid., 276. 56. Ansell, “Casting a Blind Eye,” 340–341. 57. Ibid. Ansell argues that while this language was appropriate and useful during times of transition toward political equality, it is less useful in addressing the racialized socio-economic dimensions of post-apartheid South African society. 58. Desmond Mpilo Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 31. 59. Claremont Mormon Women Oral History Collection, #213, 7. The black woman in a general position to which she refers is South African Dorah Mkhabela who joined the Young Women General Board in 2014. I was unable to find the name of the white South African woman to whom she refers. 60. Chieko Okazaki, a member of the Relief Society General Presidency in the 1990s, wrote nine books and gave many influential talks and sermons. Her theological reflections are the foundation of a 2015 series on the blog Feminist Mormon Housewives, which featured forty-one lessons based on her writings. Feminist Mormon Housewives (blog), http://www.feministmormonhousewives.org/category/the-teachings-of-chieko-okazaki-series/. 61. Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 62. Claremont Mormon Women Oral History Collection, #220, 10.

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63. Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey discuss the white Jesus of the modern LDS Church, as well as the rise of depictions of a dark-skinned Jesus in traditions influenced by liberation theologies of the 1960s. Edward J.  Blum and Paul Harvey, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 253–255; 234–249. John Turner also discusses correlated depictions of Jesus in the LDS Church, finding that they remain overwhelmingly white. However, there have been small movements toward more racially diverse depictions of Jesus in certain recent videos and online art exhibitions. John Turner, The Mormon Jesus: A Biography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 278–279. 64. Claremont Mormon Women Oral History Collection, 12. 65. Ibid. 66. Blum and Harvey, The Color of Christ, 8. 67. Ibid., 8. 68. Ibid., 10. 69. Anonymous, interview by Heather Sundahl, June 2, 2016, Johannesburg, South Africa, Claremont Mormon Women Oral History Collection, #227, transcript, pp. 5–6, Special Collections, The Claremont Colleges Library, Claremont, California. Lindiwe was most likely referring to the book Mormonism and the Negro, which advances the idea that black people were not valiant in the pre-­ existence and therefore born into a cursed lineage. John J. Stewart, Mormonism and the Negro (Salt Lake City, UT: Bookmark, 1960). 70. Claremont Mormon Women Oral History Collection, #227, 22. 71. Clark, “The Fading Curse of Cain,” 44. 72. McDannell, Sister Saints, 134. 73. Dallin H.  Oaks, “The Gospel Culture,” Ensign, March 2012, https://www. churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2012/03/the-gospel-culture?lang =eng. 74. Walter E.  A. van Beek, “Church Unity and the Challenge of Cultural Diversity: A View from across the Sahara,” in Directions for Mormon Studies in the Twenty-­First Century, ed. Patrick Q. Mason (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016), 78. McDannell, Sister Saints, 147–148; Kline, “Navigating Mormonism’s Gendered Theology and Practice,” 126–135. See Gina Colvin for a more wide-­ranging critique of the idea of a “Gospel culture.” Gina Colvin, “There’s No Such Thing as a Gospel Culture,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 50, no. 4 (2017): 57–69. 75. Mormon Women Oral History Collection, #227, 15. 76. Ibid., 16. 77. Ibid. 78. Amy Hoyt, “Agency, Subjectivity and Essentialism with Traditional Religious Cultures: An Ethnographic Study of an American Latter-day Saint Community” (PhD diss., Claremont Graduate University, 2007), 132. 79. Rita Abrahamsen, “African Studies and the Postcolonial Challenge,” African Affairs 102, no. 407 (April 2003): 206. 80. Ryan Dunch, “Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Theory, Christian Missions, and Global Modernity,” History and Theory 41, no. 3 (2002): 307. 81. Newell Bringhurst, “Mormonism in Black Africa: Changing Attitudes and Practices 1830–1981,” Sunstone (May/June 1981): 16–17. 82. Claremont Mormon Women Oral History Collection, #226, 3.

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83. Ibid., 2–3. 84. Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 80. 85. Claremont Mormon Women Oral History Collection, #226, 5. 86. Joanna Brooks, “Mormonism as Colonialism, Mormonism as Anti-­Colonialism, Mormonism as Minor Transnationalism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives,” in Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion, eds. Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2018), 184.

Bibliography Abrahamsen, Rita. April 2003. African Studies and the Postcolonial Challenge. African Affairs 102 (407): 189–210. Ansell, Amy E. 2006. Casting a Blind Eye: The Ironic Consequences of Color-Blindness in South Africa and the United States. Critical Sociology 32 (2–3): 333–356. Anzaldua, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.  San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Appolis, Keith U.C. 1996. From Fragmentation to Wholeness: The Black South African Family Under Seige. New York: University Press of America. Berger Gluck, Sherna, and Daphne Patai. 1991. Introduction. In Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, ed. Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, 1–6. New York: Routledge. Blum, Edward J., and Paul Harvey. 2012. The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Bringhurst, Newell. May/June 1981. Mormonism in Black Africa: Changing Attitudes and Practices 1830–1981. Sunstone 6 (3): 15–21. Brooks, Joanna. 2018. Mormonism as Colonialism, Mormonism as Anti-Colonialism, Mormonism as Minor Transnationalism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. In Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion, ed. Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks, 163–185. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Brusco, Elizabeth. 1995. The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bush, Lester Jr. Spring, 1973. Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 8 (1): 11–68. Clark, Andrew. 1994. The Fading Curse of Cain: Mormonism in South Africa. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 27 (4): 41–56. Colvin, Gina. 2017. There’s No Such Thing as a Gospel Culture. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 50 (4): 57–69. Dallin, H. Oaks. 2012. The Gospel Culture. Ensign, March, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2012/03/the-gospel-culture?lang=eng. Dreyer, Yolanda. 2015. Community Resilience and Spirituality: Keys to Hope for a Post-Apartheid South Africa. Pastoral Psychology 64 (5): 657. Dunch, Ryan. 2002. Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Theory, Christian Missions, and Global Modernity. History and Theory 41 (3): 301–325. Durrheim, Kevin, Colin Tredoux, Don Foster, and John Dixon. 2011. Historical Trends in South African Race Attitudes. South African Journal of Psychology 41 (3): 263–278.

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Emerson, Michael, and Christian Smith. 2000. Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Glick, Peter, and Susan T. Fiske. 2001. An Ambivalent Alliance: Hostile and Benevolent Sexism as Complementary Justifications for Gender Inequality. American Psychologist 56 (2): 109–118. Harding, Sandra. 1988. Introduction: Is There a Feminist Method? In Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues, ed. Sandra Harding, 1–14. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hoyt, Amy. 2007. Agency, Subjectivity and Essentialism with Traditional Religious Cultures: An Ethnographic Study of an American Latter-day Saint Community. PhD diss., Claremont Graduate University. ———. 2019. Women, Religion and Transitional Justice: LDS Women in Botswana and South Africa. Paper Presented at the Decentered Mormonism: Assessing 180 Years of International Expansion Conference in Bordeaux, France, March 29. Kline, Caroline. 2016. Saying Goodbye to the Final Say: The Softening and Reimagining of Mormon Male Headship Ideologies. In Out of Obscurity: Mormonism Since 1945, ed. Patrick Mason and John Turner, 214–233. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2018. Navigating Mormonism’s Gendered Theology and Practice: Mormon Women in a Global Context. PhD diss., Claremont Graduate University. ———. 2020. Global Mormon Perspectives and Experiences of Familial Structures. In The Routledge Handbook of Mormonism and Gender, ed. Taylor Petrey and Amy Hoyt, 321–335. New York: Routledge. MacDonald, Michael. 2006. Why Race Matters in South Africa. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Mauss, Armand. 2003. All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Mavimbela, Julia. 1998. Where There Has Been a Bloodstain, A Beautiful Flower Must Grow. In All Are Alike Unto God: Fascinating Conversion Stories of African Saints, ed. E. Dale LeBaron, 171–184. Orem, UT: Granite Publishing. McDannell, Colleen. 2019. Sister Saints: Mormon Women Since the End of Polygamy. New York: Oxford University Press. Milazzo, Marzia. 2015. The Rhetorics of Racial Power: Enforcing Colorblindness in Post-apartheid Scholarship on Race. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 8 (1): 7-26. Mueller, Max Perry. 2017. Race and the Making of the Mormon People. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Nagy Hesse-Biber, Sharlene, Patricia Leavy, and Michelle L.  Yaiser. 2004. Feminist Approaches to Research as a Process: Reconceptualizing Epistemology, Methodology, and Method. In Feminist Perspectives on Social Research, ed. Sharlene Nagy Hesse-­ Biber, Patricia Leavy, and Michelle L. Yaiser, 3–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reeve, W. Paul. 2015. Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness. New York: Oxford University Press. Schwalbe, Michael, Sandra Godwin, Daphne Holden, Douglas Schrock, Shealy Thompson, and Michele Wolkomir. 2000. Generic Processes in the Reproduction of Inequality: An Interactionist Analysis. Social Forces 79 (2): 419–452. Silberschmidt, Margarethe. 2005. Poverty, Male Disempowerment, and Male Sexuality: Rethinking Men and Masculinities in Rural and Urban East Africa. In African Masculinities, ed. Lahoucine Ouzgane and Robert Morrell, 189–204. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Stewart, John J. 1960. Mormonism and the Negro. Salt Lake City, UT: Bookmark. Turley, Richard E., Jr., and Jeffrey G. Cannon. 2016. A Faithful Band: Moses Mahlangu and the First Soweto Saints. BYU Studies Quarterly 55 (1): 9–38. Turner, John. 2016. The Mormon Jesus: A Biography. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tutu, Desmond Mpilo. 1999. No Future Without Forgiveness. New York: Doubleday. van Beek, Walter E. A. 2016. Church Unity and the Challenge of Cultural Diversity: A View from across the Sahara. In Directions for Mormon Studies in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Patrick Q. Mason, 72–98. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Wilcox, W. Bradford. 2004. Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 24

The LDS Church in Contemporary Japan: Failure or Success? Meagan Rainock and Shinji Takagi

This chapter provides an analysis of the presence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (hereafter referred to as the LDS Church) in contemporary Japan. According to Japan’s official government statistics, the LDS Church, with a membership of 127,535 at the end of 2018, is the country’s second largest nationally registered Christian denomination.1 Yet the church faces formidable challenges as it navigates its future, including Japan’s adverse demographic trend, rising religious indifference, and the cultural tension its teachings create for its members within the larger society. Given these challenges, the fact that the LDS Church has remained a viable institution compared to other Christian denominations is an impressive feat. How the church has come thus far since its humble beginnings in 1901, and how it is currently faring in this overwhelmingly non-Christian and secular society, must be of more than a cursory interest, not just to Latter-day Saint (LDS) readers but also to a broader informed public. We begin by providing a brief historical overview of the church in Japan in Sect. “Historical Background, 1902–68”, and, in Sect. “The Growth of the Contemporary Church, 1968–2019”, we outline the more recent organizational structure that now constitutes the contemporary LDS Church. In Sects. “The Role of Religious Capital” and “The Role of Tension”, we discuss in

M. Rainock Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA e-mail: [email protected] S. Takagi (*) Osaka University, Toyonaka, Osaka, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_24

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greater depth various social forces that simultaneously constrain and support the LDS Church’s success in a foreign context, both historically as well as moving forward. In Sect. “Secularization, Demographics, and Missionary Work”, we analyze current sources to situate recent membership growth trends within Japanese society. In Sect. “Being Japanese, Being a Latter-day Saint”, we discuss additional aspects of how Japanese members manage cultural tensions when they embrace the LDS faith. Finally, in Sect. “Conclusion”, we conclude by revisiting the challenges that the church faces, and the choices it has moving forward.

Historical Background, 1902–68 The LDS Church’s beginnings in Japan are traced to the turn of the twentieth century, when in 1901 it sent Apostle Heber J. Grant and his three companions to this then emerging nation, making it Asia’s first country in which LDS missionary work was carried out on a sustained basis.2 For the purposes of this historical overview, we might conveniently think of the pre-contemporary period of LDS work in Japan as consisting of three subperiods: prewar (1901–24), intervening (1924–48), and early postwar (1948–68). During the first subperiod, corresponding to the original Japan Mission, 88 full-time missionaries saw 174 baptisms.3 During the second subperiod, there was no formal church presence, except for short-lived attempts to restore limited church activity before World War II (1941–45) and, following the conclusion of the war, for the self-initiated efforts of American servicemen in the occupation forces. During the third and final subperiods, corresponding to the postwar Japanese Mission (renamed in 1955 as the Northern Far East Mission), an estimated 1142 missionaries labored to claim an estimated 9570 converts. The church’s general lack of commitment to prewar Japan is evident in the number of missionaries assigned to labor in the field: for a country of 45–55 million people (about half the population of the United States), the number averaged 12.5 and never exceeded 20 at any given time. With so few convert baptisms, the LDS proselytizing effort in prewar Japan is generally considered by most observers to have been a failure, but such a conclusion is not warranted. In fact, missionary productivity (defined as the number of convert baptisms divided by the number of missionaries) was 1.02 during 1915–22 (with a peak of 1.82 in 1922), which turns out to be somewhat larger than the productivity of current LDS missionary work in Japan. The number of converts was small only because the number of missionaries was small.4 Yet, judging the missionary work to have been a failure, the LDS Church closed down the mission in 1924 when Japan was about to move into an unprecedented period of openness to foreign ideas.5 Unlike some major Christian denominations, LDS missionary work in prewar Japan did not involve the construction of schools or hospitals. As the church relies on lay priesthood for leadership, no seminary was established to train ministers. This, coupled with the smallness of the membership, explains

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why the church owned no property when it left in 1924 (though there was some talk of purchasing property for the mission home in the late 1910s). It was only in 1948 that the church purchased its first piece of property in Japan following the end of World War II. In the early years of the postwar mission, the church purchased a number of existing buildings—mostly large, vintage Japanese homes—to use as meetinghouses. With a pickup in the number of convert baptisms, the church began to construct modern building facilities from 1962 based initially on the labor missionary program under which member volunteers constructed buildings. The active construction program, now performed by commercial firms, has continued to this day, including the construction of temples in Tokyo (1980), Fukuoka (2000), and Sapporo (2016). The number of missionaries was limited not just during the prewar era but also during the early postwar era. While it is true that the number of missionaries serving in Japan at any given time was much larger than that in the prewar period once the mission was fully established, all of the country was under the jurisdiction of a single mission until 1968, which placed an upper limit on the number of missionaries that could be supported. The number gradually increased from less than 20 to about 80 during the occupation period (1948–52); it was only in the early 1960s that the number exceeded 100 for the first time. The LDS Church would double and then triple the number of missionaries and start penetrating virtually every corner of Japan only in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, as the number of missions multiplied.

The Growth of the Contemporary Church, 1968–2019 The LDS Church has seen a tenfold increase in its membership in Japan, from 12,896  in 1970 to 127,535  in 2018, with most of the growth taking place through the mid-1990s. Along with the membership growth, the numbers of congregations (wards and branches) and of stakes (umbrella organizations comprising wards and branches) have correspondingly increased as well (Fig. 24.1). At the end of 2018, there were 261 congregations and 28 stakes throughout Japan. It should be noted that following the initial growth spurred by the split of the mission in 1968, the number of congregations has not changed much since the early 1980s; the peak was in 1982 at 319, and the number has since declined. Likewise, the number of stakes increased rapidly during the 1970s (following the establishment of the first stake in Tokyo in 1970), but the peak was reached at 31 in 2000. The variations in the number of units in recent years (when membership remained relatively stable) largely reflect the church leadership’s changing views on optimal organizational size. Congregations are located in various cities across the country. It is probably not far from the truth to state that anyone living in or near a city of more than 150,000 can find an LDS meetinghouse within an hour’s driving distance. The stronghold of the church is in the capital region of Kanto around Tokyo. Kanto accounts for 25 percent of all congregations and 36 percent of all stakes in Japan. Kanto is followed by the Kansai region around Osaka, another

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250

25

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0

0

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76 19 79 19 82 19 85 19 88 19 91 19 94 19 97 20 00 20 03 20 06 20 09 20 12 20 15 20 18

30

73

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35

67

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Stakes (right scale)

Congregations (left scale)

Fig. 24.1  Year-end numbers of congregations and stakes, 1967–2019. (Source: Authors’ estimates based on Bunkachō , shūkyo ̄ Nenkan, annual issues (for congregations) and various LDS publications (for stakes))

population center, where 16 percent of congregations and 18 percent of stakes are located. Yet the geographical distribution of the units does not fully reflect the distribution of the population. Relative to the population, the most successful area of the LDS Church among the seven principal regions of the country is Hokkaido, where there is a unit for approximately every 205,000 persons. The corresponding number for Kanto is 721,000 (suggesting that despite the larger number of units, the LDS Church is the least established there), and the average for Japan is 468,000 persons per unit. The numbers of full-time missionaries and missions provide information about the attitude of the LDS Church toward Japan as well as the material resources and religious commitment of Japanese Latter-day Saints (Fig. 24.2). First, the number of missions in Japan peaked at 10 in the early 1990s; it has since declined (except for a temporary increase following the church-wide surge in the number of missionaries when the eligibility age was dropped for both men and women in 2012). Currently, it stands at 6, the number last seen in 1977. Second, as expected, the number of full-time missionaries has followed a similar pattern, except that, at 820 at the end of 2018, it has not declined to the trough (of 575) observed in 2010. The peak was recorded in 1990, at 1580. Third, Japanese membership has been consistently supplying 200 or more missionaries in any given year since the early 1980s, accounting for roughly 20–35 percent of all full-time missionaries. The domestic church has been a less volatile source of full-time missionaries when the number of foreign missionaries has fluctuated considerably. Yet the peak (at 377) was observed some 35 years ago in 1985; while there does not appear to be a discernible trend in recent years, it is an open question whether the LDS Church

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1800 1600 1400 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0

12 10 8 6 4 2

82 19 85 19 88 19 91 19 94 19 97 20 00 20 03 20 06 20 09 20 12 20 15 20 18

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76

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Domestic missionaries

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Missions (right scale)

Fig. 24.2  Year-end numbers of full-time missionaries and missions. (Sources: Authors’ estimates based on Bunkachō , shūkyo ̄ Nenkan, annual issues (for missionaries) and various LDS publications (for missions)) Table 24.1  Annual percentage growth, by period, of selected population groups in Japana 1970–80 1980–90 1990–2000 2000–10 2010–18b Latter-day Saints Jehovah’s Witnesses Christiansc Non-Shinto, non-Buddhist adherentsd Total population

15.16 17.95 0.01 4.69 1.21

5.62 10.16 −0.42 −4.07 0.54

1.68 4.30 0.05 −0.28 0.27

1.09 −0.08 −0.29 −0.80 0.08

0.37 −0.27 −1.21 −1.98 −0.13

Sources: Authors’ calculations based on Deseret News, Church Almanac, annual issues and www.churchofjesuschrist.org; Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, Service Report, various issues and www.jw.org; Kirisuto Shinbunsha, Kirisutokyo ̄ Nenkan, annual issues; Bunkachō , Shūkyo ̄ Nenkan, annual issues; www.stat.go.jp. a Percentage changes are approximated by first differences in natural logarithms b 2010–17 for non-Shinto, non-Buddhist adherents only c Excluding Latter-day Saints and Jehovah’s Witnesses where they are included in early years d Excluding Christians; they are designated as shokyo ̄ (lit. miscellaneous religions) in the government publication Shūkyo ̄ Nenkan

can continue to count on a steady supply of domestic missionaries in coming years. The LDS Church has established its presence among the Christian denominations in Japan through years of sustained membership growth, which averaged 6.53 percent per year from 1960 to 2018. Although it was not as rapid as Jehovah’s Witnesses, its membership growth exceeded 15 percent per year during 1970–80 and maintained the momentum (at more than 5 percent per year) through the early 1990s (Table  24.1). As noted, however, the growth

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decelerated sharply in the 1990s and, more recently, virtually ceased. Even so, this “stagnation” contrasts with the experience of most other religious groups, including Jehovah’s Witnesses. Not only did those religious groups begin to experience stagnation earlier, but they have also more recently seen outright declines in membership. For example, non-traditional religions (i.e., “non-­ Shinto, non-Buddhist,” but excluding Christian, religions) began to suffer a membership decline starting in the 1980s; the membership growth of all Christian churches combined (excluding Jehovah’s Witnesses and Latter-day Saints) has been stagnant since the 1970s. The stagnant or negative growth of Christian and other non-traditional religions in Japan has occurred against the background of a decelerating growth of the general population during the past few decades. Japan’s population peaked in 2008 at 128 million and has been declining since.

The Role of Religious Capital Success or failure is a relative concept. The LDS Church may well have been more successful in claiming converts than many other Christian denominations in post-World War II Japan, but its growth performance pales in comparison with such new religious movements as Sō ka Gakkai and Risshō Kō seikai, each of which claimed millions of converts during the same period.6 In fact, Christianity has not been very successful in penetrating Japanese society, which should put into perspective any notion of the LDS Church’s success relative to other Christian denominations. The number of nationally registered Christians (which is the usual metric used in public discourse on Christianity in Japan) has never exceeded 1 percent of the population. Even if one includes all Christian denominations for which membership numbers are available, the number of Christians in Japan is estimated to be a mere 1.5–2.0 percent of the population. After more than half a century’s proselytizing work, Latter-day Saints remain a tiny fraction of Japan’s total population, accounting for no more than 0.1 percent. Undoubtedly, this reflects the sharp departure of Christian beliefs and norms from Japan’s culture and history. The large literature on the sociology and economics of religion suggests that individuals are more likely to adopt a religion that builds upon their existing cultural and religious capital, that is, their cultural and religious knowledge, behaviors, and beliefs (Verter 2003; Stark 1998; Iannaccone 1990). For example, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1986) argues that cultural capital forms the basis for social structure and one’s position within this structure. Displaying this capital through symbolism embedded in behaviors, mannerisms, possessions, credentials, and the like enables individuals to improve or secure their status within the social hierarchy. Likewise, Laurence Iannaccone (1990) argues that the process of participating in a religion transforms time and effort into knowledge and worldviews that constitute religious capital. By understanding religious participation through this lens, we understand why it is difficult for individuals to abandon their

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accumulated capital entirely. Participation in a religion that conflicts with the worldviews of the individual’s community means abandoning the accumulation of valuable capital, threatening one’s status within that community. Even though the LDS Church’s claims to Christianity are sometimes contested by other churches, many of its doctrines and practices are clearly consistent with Western Christian perspectives, perspectives alien and even hostile to most of Japanese society. Transition to a Western religion such as the LDS Church is difficult within this social context for two reasons. First, the adoption of this religion requires acquiring a vast amount of new religious capital, including belief in a Judeo-Christian deity; belief in the Christian concepts of sin, atonement, and mortality; belief of the LDS-specific perspective of mortality, salvation, and deity; and understanding of the social and structural organization of the church. On top of this, adoption of the LDS faith further requires abandoning prior knowledge and worldviews that have been accumulated over years of participating in Japanese society. The differences between the two different worlds appear even in other forms of cultural capital, such as language usage. In Japanese LDS parlance, English transliterated words abound, even more so than in other Christian denominations, including wādo (ward) and sukēku (stake). In 2009, the LDS Church introduced the transliterated word for bishop (bishoppu) to replace the century-­ old biblical term kantoku, ostensibly because Japanese members associate kantoku with the general manager of a baseball team (for which the same word is used). On the same occasion, the church also introduced a new set of terms for ecclesiastical offices to correspond more closely with the English originals, thereby creating a strange vocabulary totally out of line with conventional Japanese colloquial usage. The prevalence of non-traditional language in the LDS Church is probably an outlier even among the Christian churches, but this shows that Japanese and English belong to different language families and establishing correspondence is impossible. Second, as another kind of difficulty faced by a potential LDS convert in Japan, abandonment of cultural capital can take a heavy toll on social status as it means abandoning the resources necessary for maintaining and negotiating status in community. Declining jobs that would require working on Sundays, constantly refusing an offer of green tea, and navigating the expectations of social drinking in the workplace are just a few examples of how one must give up cultural capital to be a Latter-day Saint in Japan. This understanding of cultural capital, we believe, explains why only a tiny proportion of the Japanese population has embraced any Christian denomination, let alone the LDS Church.

The Role of Tension A more relevant measure of church strength in Japan may be active membership, as opposed to total membership. Attrition is a common feature of any religious organization, but especially of a Christian denomination in Japan.

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According to the ratio of active to total members, the LDS Church does poorly in comparison with other Christian denominations (Fig. 24.3), but a word of caution is in order. Different denominations define membership differently, so this exercise is only meant to be illustrative. Here, for the purpose of this exercise and putting aside potential issues with variable definitions of membership across denominations, we take all numbers from the Christian Yearbook published annually by Kirisuto Shinbunsha, where the ratio of active to total members is obtained from dividing the average number attending Sunday worship by the number of total members for 2012–18. Only for the LDS Church, we obtain the numbers from the official government and church statistics for 1995–2001.7 There is reason to believe that the ratio calculated from this period has been reasonably stable in recent decades.8 Figure 24.3 compares the ratio of active to total membership across selected Christian groups. For some denominations, there are two numbers when they report separately the number of communicant members (e.g., those baptized, those who have made a formal confession of faith, or those eligible to receive communion, depending on the denomination); for the others, the two numbers are the same. As expected, the ratio based on the communicant membership is larger, given the fact that communicant members are a subset of total membership and presumably include more committed ones. Regardless of which number is used, at 18.57 percent, the LDS Church has the smallest ratio (“activity rate”) of any Christian group.9 In contrast, the activity rate was 23.9 percent for all Christians, 24.7 percent for all Protestants, 23.4 percent for all

90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

All Christians Protestants

Catholics

Latter-day Saints (19952001)

Total membership

Spirit of Holy Ecclesia United Jesus of Jesus Church of Christ

Episcopals

Communicant membership only

Fig. 24.3  Ratios of active to total members in selected Christian denominations in Japan, 2012–18 (in percent; active members defined as those attending Sunday worship). (Sources: Authors’ estimates based on Bunkachō , Shūkyo ̄ Nenkan, 1996–2002 and Deseret News, Church Almanac, 1996–2002 (for the LDS Church), and Kirisuto Shinbunsha, Kirisutokyō Nenkan, 2019 (for all others))

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Catholics, and 31.7 percent for the United Church of Christ, when the broader membership category is used as the denominator. The activity rate, at 43.0 and 52.7 percent, respectively, was considerably higher for the Spirit of Jesus Church (Iesu no Mitama Kyō kai, founded in 1941) and the Holy Ecclesia of Jesus (Sei Iesu Kai, 1946), two indigenous Christian denominations. The high member attrition and the low member activity of the LDS Church in Japan may well be an indication that the social costs of remaining an “active” member are higher for the LDS Church than for other Christian denominations. The plausibility of such an interpretation is strengthened by the much higher activity rates of the two indigenous churches, which have pushed the cultural adaptation of Christianity to the limit and thereby virtually eliminated the social costs of being Christians in a non-Christian society.10 Yet it would be too short-sighted simply to argue for greater indigenization of the LDS Church, as attested by another metric of activity among the indigenous Christian movements (Fig. 24.4). Considering here, in addition to the Spirit of Jesus Church and the Holy Ecclesia of Jesus, the Christian Canaan Church (Kirisuto Kānan Kyōdan, founded in 1940),11 we find that at least two of them appear to be heading toward institutional extinction and the other remains insignificant and stagnant at best. The experience of the Spirit of Jesus Church, by far the most successful of all indigenous Christian movements, is particularly instructive. By 1960, it had grown to become the third largest Protestant denomination in Japan; by the mid-1980s, it had claimed a membership of over 300,000.12 The momentum, however, could not be sustained long after the death, in 1970, of its charismatic founder. The membership declined to a mere 14,580 in 2018. Based on this and the experiences of other indigenous Christian movements in Japan, religious studies scholar Mark Mullins concludes that while Christianity is “too 400000

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1970 1972 1974 1976 1978 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018

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0

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Fig. 24.4  Membership in selected indigenous Christian movements in Japan, 1970–2018. (Source: Bunkachō , Shūkyo ̄ Nenkan, annual issues)

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deviant for widespread acceptance by Japanese,” churches could “dig their own graves through ‘over-indigenization’” (Mullins 1998, pp. 167, 169). What Mullins is here alluding to is the notion that the “free-rider” problem can dilute resources and commitment. In other words, over-indigenization could increase non-committed members who participate for the purposes of receiving social or economic resources without paying their dues (Wallis 1991; Stark 1998). There can be a variety of such motives, including financial support, daycare, social interaction, even the positive emotions of what eminent French sociologist Émile Durkheim termed “collective effervescence” where one feels at home within a strong religious community (Durkheim 1917). These motives are not a problem in and of themselves; in fact, many of these are legitimate purposes of religious participation. Even so, when too many of those in attendance refuse to participate in lay ministry, do not reinvest financial resources through tithes and offerings, or otherwise do not invest time or effort, the religious organization will begin to feel that strain as resources and active participants dwindle. In this context, American sociologist Rodney Stark argued that for a new religion to increase commitment and combat the issues of free-ridership, it must maintain a moderate tension with the majority society. A level of “strictness” creates a barrier that filters out the non-committed, while also generating greater conviction as a higher level of investment often translates into a higher sense of commitment among members (Stark 1998; Stryker and Burke 2000). Ryan Cragun and others have examined this issue, in the context of the Mormon practice of polygamy, from the standpoint of the tradeoff between “legitimization” (the need for social acceptance) and “differentiation” (the need to distinguish themselves from others), while noting that the nature of the tradeoff itself shifts according to a changing social context (Cragun et al. 2011). Achieving this delicate balance of moderate tension—just enough to reward commitment, but not enough to discourage growth—in the context of Japan remains a continuing question for the LDS Church.

Secularization, Demographics, and Missionary Work Having explained the different social forces that historically have contributed to the niche status of LDS Church membership in Japanese society, we turn to a more thorough analysis of current membership trends within that niche context. A question naturally arises as to why the LDS Church’s membership in Japan grew rapidly through the early 1990s, but the growth subsequently decelerated to the point of having virtually ceased in the early 2000s (Fig. 24.5). For example, the average net increase in membership (including convert baptisms, net move-ins, and net births) was 4488 persons per year from 1975 to 1991;13 even when one excludes the aberrant years of 1978–81, during which several LDS missions in Japan substantially lowered the eligibility standards for baptism (Numano 2010), the average was as large as 3274. In contrast, the average net increase in membership from 1992 to 2018 was 1144 persons per

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14000 12000 10000 8000 6000 4000 2000

85 19 87 19 89 19 91 19 93 19 95 19 97 19 99 20 01 20 03 20 05 20 07 20 09 20 11 20 13 20 15 20 17

83

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Fig. 24.5  Annual change in LDS Church membership in Japan, 1975–2018. (Source: Authors’ estimates based on Bunkachō , Shūkyo ̄ Nenkan, annual issues) 140

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0 Missionaries (right scale)

Fig. 24.6  LDS members (in thousands) and missionaries in Japan, 1974–2018. (Sources: Deseret News, Church Almanac, annual issues and www.churchofjesuschrist. org; Bunkachō , Shūkyo ̄ Nenkan, annual issues)

year; for the period 2002–18 alone, the average, at 737 persons, was even smaller. Part of the deceleration in membership growth from the early 1990s is likely related to a propitious fall in the number of missionaries assigned to Japan from the mid-1990s (Fig. 24.6). From 1975 to 1995, for example, the average number of missionaries (calculated as the average of end-year balances) was 1312 persons, whereas the average for the period 1996–2013 was as few as 810 persons. At the same time, the number of missionaries cannot be the sole factor explaining the rise and fall of the church’s membership growth. Even though

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the number picked up somewhat in 2014, there was no corresponding increase in church membership. By dividing the annual increase in church membership by the previous end-year balance of missionaries, what may be called “missionary productivity” was 3.48 persons per year during 1975–91 but declined to 1.18 persons during 1992–2018. Additional factors are at play in the determination of LDS membership growth. For instance, it is widely observed that religiosity has been influenced by the overall trend of secularization in the modern world, a concept originating in the social sciences in nineteenth-century Europe but still found to be applicable in many contexts today. Japan is no exception. The country has seen declining rates in many measures of individual religiosity, which undoubtedly has negatively impacted Christian denominations (Mullins 2012). This trend of secularization may also have reduced the growth of LDS Church membership as existing members disaffiliate or fewer Japanese persons join as new members. Yet another factor that contributes to the growth and success of religious movements is demographics, especially fertility. In most regions of the world, members of the LDS Church appear to have higher fertility rates on average, which accounted for some of the church’s membership growth at least in the past (Heaton 1998). We know of no official statistics that indicate a higher fertility rate for the LDS population in Japan. Even if this is the case, the church’s demographic trend must be affected to some extent by society’s overall trend. Moreover, Japan’s fertility rates have remained below replacement numbers, causing the church to draw its membership from a steadily dwindling population of youth. Unbundling the sources of growth or membership change among these various competing factors requires a formal statistical analysis, the technical description of which exceeds the general level of understanding aimed for in this chapter. For readers with an interest in the technical details of our analysis, we have provided a Methodological Appendix at the end of this chapter. Our primary hypotheses are that demographics and societal religiosity both contribute to annual LDS membership growth. (To measure societal demographic trends, we use general population growth in Japan; to measure the level of religiosity in Japan—and subsequently to identify the effects of secularization on church membership—we use two specifications: annual growth in the number of nationally registered Christians excluding Latter-day Saints, and annual growth in the number of non-Shinto, non-Buddhist adherents excluding Christians.) The effect of demographics is expected to work through the extent to which societal factors influencing fertility decisions affect the number of children an LDS family in Japan would have and the size of the pool of young people from which the LDS Church predominantly draws its converts. Likewise, the effect of religiosity is expected to work through its influence on the effectiveness of missionary work and the attrition of youth growing up in the church. Our secondary hypothesis is that missionaries contribute positively to annual membership growth (which is measured by how much church membership changes in response to a 1-percent increase in the number of missionaries). The findings from our statistical analysis are summarized in Table 24.2.

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Table 24.2  Explaining the annual growth of LDS Church membership in Japan: ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates of equation (A5) Dependent variable: LINC Sample period: 1975–2017; Number of observations: 43 Dependent variable

With the restriction β = 0

With the restriction β = 0.2

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

LMIS (α)

1.135 (0.361)*** 0.107 (0.043)*** 0.035 (0.046) – 1.215 (0.318)*** 0.607 0.566 14.70***

1.135 (0.362)*** 0.107 (0.043)*** – 0.027 (0.039) 1.211 (0.320)*** 0.607 0.565 14.64***

1.216 (0.381)*** 0.116 (0.045)*** 0.028 (0.041) – 1.305 (0.337)*** 0.617 0.577 15.32***

1.216 (0.380)*** 0.116 (0.045)*** – 0.035 (0.049) 1.308 (0.335)*** 0.618 0.578 15.36***

LPOP (γ) LREL-1 (λ) LREL-2 (λ) DUM (ϕ) R2 Adjusted-R2 F statistic

Source: Authors’ calculations based on Bunkachō , Shūkyo ̄ Nenkan, 1996–2002 and Deseret News, Church Almanac, 1996–2002; www.stat.go.jp Notes: Standard errors are in parentheses; *** indicates that the statistic is significant at the 1-percent level; for methodological details, including the restrictions on β, see Methodological Appendix at the end of this chapter

These estimates suggest that the combined influence of demographics (denoted in the table as LPOP), societal religiosity (LREL-1 or LREL-2), and size of the LDS missionary force (LMIS) explains a substantial amount—about 60 percent—of the variance in annual membership growth. In particular, a 1-percent increase (decrease) in the number of missionaries on average increased (decreased) the annual growth of church membership by 1.1–1.2 percent. Likewise, a 1-percent increase (decrease) in the country’s population on average increased (decreased) the annual growth of church membership by about 0.1 percent. Based on these findings, we tentatively conclude that (1) annual LDS membership growth in Japan is significantly affected by Japan’s general demographic trend; (2) it is weakly affected by a measure of religiosity, whether it is proxied by the growth of membership in all nationally registered Christian denominations or all non-traditional religions, excluding Christianity; and (3) LDS missionary work contributes effectively to annual membership growth, with an elasticity of slightly more than 1. Combined, we conjecture that the recent deceleration in membership growth in Japan reflects the impact of larger societal factors and that, unlike other Christian and non-traditional religious groups, the LDS Church has not experienced an outright decline in membership because of the relative effectiveness of its evangelical work. What appears to be a stagnation is in fact a sign of resilience in the face of adverse external shocks.

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Being Japanese, Being a Latter-day Saint Based on the previously outlined theories of cultural capital, the current lack of institutional acculturation makes it unlikely that the LDS Church will be readily accepted by a large segment of the Japanese population. We can see from the LDS Church and other Christian denominations that a foreign religion, even a completely unadulterated one, can attract a small following, but it will never rise above being a niche religion without building bridges for crossing the cultural divide. Still, within this niche context, the LDS Church has demonstrated resilience in maintaining its membership. The current lack of institutional acculturation also means that indigenization and cultural bridge-building takes place at the individual level. According to Sheldon Stryker’s theory of identity salience (Stryker and Burke 2000), the adoption of a new identity is only feasible if it does not heavily conflict with pre-existing identities held and enforced by the surrounding community. In other words, conversion to a new religion is most difficult when it clashes with one’s pre-existing identity in the context of one’s family, friends, coworkers, schoolmates, neighbors, and so on. If being a member of the LDS Church does not conflict with one’s identity of being a parent, a spouse, a friend, an employee within a specific company one has worked at for years, or whatever identities one may have had previously, it becomes easier to remain in the LDS Church. If there is too much conflict, then one of the identities will lose its saliency and perhaps even be abandoned altogether. This manifests in ways such as career changes, friend group changes, downplaying one’s membership in the church, or leaving the church. To maintain the existence of identities that appear to conflict but remain important to the individual, there needs to be inner accommodations made to reduce conflict and bring the identities in harmony with each other. Because of the tension between what it means to be a Latter-day Saint and what it means to be Japanese (i.e., to participate in the various social roles associated with living and working in Japanese society), those who do adopt this new identity must make personal adjustments that accommodate both identities. When Japanese persons accept a foreign religion, they bring to it their own cultural packaging that enables them to interpret those principles within the context of their current social identities, while finding ways of minimizing the conflict between identities. This may include, among other things, choosing an occupation that would allow them to go to church on Sundays (which is not always easy) or avoiding social circles and careers that would place them in frequent situations of social drinking or politely refusing green tea. This process of negotiating what it means to be a Latter-day Saint and what it means to be Japanese requires embracing particular aspects of the religion over others, applying religious beliefs into a Japanese context, and relying on others’ cultural interpretations in learning how to balance these identities. As a consequence of individual members making their own acculturation, the LDS Church in Japan has collectively developed its own religious culture,

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which is neither Japanese nor American. This explains why some American members find the church in Japan an inhospitable place to engage in their version of personal religious expression, as evidenced by the creation of a parallel English-speaking structure that exists side by side but with little interaction with the Japanese counterpart.14 Melissa Inouye, a distinguished American scholar of Christianity in Asia, has argued that global Mormonism is held together, not by shared beliefs, but by shared organizational structures.15 This statement strikes at the heart of what is involved in the transplantation of a foreign religion, namely, that once transplanted, it becomes almost a different religion, irrespective of the intention or action of the messenger.

Conclusion This chapter has reviewed the achievements of the LDS Church in Japan, analyzed the sources of membership growth, and discussed the outstanding issues and challenges the church currently faces. The church has been among the most successful Christian denominations, having experienced rapid growth in the 1970s through the early 1990s. Yet membership has hardly increased during the past quarter century. Our statistical analysis has shown that (1) what appears to be stagnation in the LDS Church’s membership growth reflects the adverse national demographic trend and (to a much lesser extent) rising secularization affecting all religious groups; and (2) the church has not yet experienced an outright decline in membership, unlike many other Christian and non-Christian groups, thanks to the effectiveness of its missionary work. In terms of the rate of activity, however, the LDS Church fares poorly in comparison with other Christian denominations, reflecting the higher attrition of its members. This chapter has argued that while the LDS Church’s lack of institutional acculturation has raised the costs for the members of remaining active, the experience of indigenous Christian movements does not support the simple argument that it should be more indigenized. Some tension with the host society is necessary for the church to remain viable, though the same tension also means that it will never become a majority religion. The choice available to the LDS Church appears to be between (1) staying the course to remain a niche religion and (2) making judicious cultural adaptations to increase its appeal to a larger segment of society while reducing the cultural tension somewhat. The LDS Church is widely perceived as an American institution in Japan, with little evidence of adapting to Japanese culture. It need not remain so. Given Japan’s demographic headwind and increasing religious indifference, staying the course likely means that the church will experience an outright decline in membership sometime in the future.

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Methodological Appendix This appendix provides details on the methodology used in Sect. “Secularization, Demographics, and Missionary Work”. Consider the following representative two-factor version of the Cobb-Douglas production function:

Z = cX α Y β

where Z is total output, c is a number known as total factor productivity,16 X and Y are factor inputs (such as labor and capital), and α and β are the technology-­determined output elasticities with respect to X and Y, respectively. Here, output is annual church membership growth or the net increase in the number of church members per year (denoted by INC); as factor inputs, we consider the number of missionaries engaged in evangelical work (MIS) and the number of church members who contribute to annual membership growth through missionary work or procreation (MEM). That is,

INC = c MISα MEM β

(A1)

The log-linear transformation of equation (A1) is given by:

LINC = Lc + α LMIS + β LMEM

(A2)

where LINC is the natural logarithm of INC, Lc is the natural logarithm of c, LMIS is the natural logarithm of MIS, and LMEM is the natural logarithm of MEM. We further assume that the contribution of missionaries and members to annual membership growth not only depends on their quantities but is also subject to external influences, such as general population growth (POP) and the changing climate of religiosity in society (REL). As proxies for these influences, we use annual general population growth and annual membership growth in non-traditional religions, which are believed to influence LDS membership growth through total factor productivity (c):

c = f ( POP, REL )



(A3)

Two specifications are considered for REL: (i) annual growth in the number of nationally registered Christians excluding Latter-day Saints (denoted by REL-1) and (ii) annual growth in the number of non-Shinto, non-Buddhist adherents excluding Christians (denoted by REL-2). The log-linear version of equation (A3) is assumed to take the form:

Lc = d + γ LPOP + λ LREL

(A4)

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where d is a constant, LPOP is the natural logarithm of POP, LREL is the natural logarithm of REL (either REL-1 or REL-2), and γ and λ denote the elasticities of c with respect to POP and REL, respectively. By substituting equation (A4) into equation (A2), and appropriately rearranging, we have the following equation to be estimated: LINCt = d + α LMISt + β LMEM t + γ LPOPt + λ LREL t + φ DUM t + ε t (A5) where d, α, β, γ, λ, ϕ are unknown coefficients to be estimated; ε is a normally distributed random error term; t is a discrete time subscript; and DUM (with the coefficient ϕ) is a dummy variable that takes the value of one for t = 1978–81 and zero otherwise. The dummy variable is designed to control for any impact of the aberrant years 1978–81. Because POP, REL-1, REL-2 take negative values, their time-series are adjusted by adding the respective minimum values plus one in order to ensure that all the log values are defined and the smallest is zero. This is a standard procedure when working with log-linear models. Neither covariances nor coefficient estimates are affected by this procedure. Ideally, LMIS should be the average number of missionaries for the year, but the time series of LMIS are year-end figures. In estimating equation (A5), both the current-year and one-year-lagged values of LMIS were used. The use of the current-year values yielded a much better fit, and only the results based on the current-year values are reported in the text. LMIS should be considered to be a proxy for the annual average. Essentially, the same argument applies to LMEM, the year-end number of members (and, for the same reason, only the results based on the current-year values are reported). It turns out that estimation of equation (A5) by ordinary least squares (OLS) consistently yields a negative coefficient estimate for β, that is, annual membership negatively contributes to annual growth, regardless of whether LREL-1 or LREL-2 is used. This is a nonsensical result, likely an artifact of the simple observed fact that the net annual increase in membership declined even as the scale of membership increased over much of the period. The model is not sufficiently detailed to disentangle any positive contribution of annual membership to annual growth from its negative observed correlation with growth. For this reason, we simply assume β = 0 (members make no contribution to membership) and β = 0.2 (members make a very small contribution to membership growth). It should be noted, however, that the coefficient estimates (other than for β) are remarkably similar, regardless of whether or not we impose these coefficient restrictions.

Notes 1. The LDS Church is the third or even fourth largest when those not nationally registered are considered. In this chapter we make no distinction between denomination and sect as may be customary in the literature. Denomination or group is uniformly used for all Christian entities.

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2. Short-lived missionary work had been carried out, in the early 1850s, in Hindustan (India), Siam (Thailand), and Hong Kong. Much of the historical information in this section comes from Takagi (2016). 3. This number includes five member children who were baptized at the age of eight or (in one instance) nine. 4. If the Japan Mission had received the same number of missionaries as the Swiss– German Mission (90 missionaries at the end of 1920), the same productivity observed for the 9 missionaries serving in Japan would have produced 100 baptisms, placing it in 18th place (or 11th place outside the United States) out of the 25 existing missions of the church. 5. Missionary work by other Christian denominations went on as usual. In fact, at least 29 new Christian mission organizations arrived in Japan between 1925 and 1938. Among them was the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, whose pacifist teachings resonated with the Japanese society of the late 1920s. In the early months of 1940, Christian missionaries were still able to carry out their assignments without hindrance from the authorities and more missionaries were being sent to Japan from their mission boards abroad. 6. Both are Buddhism-derived organizations. Risshō Kō seikai grew in membership from 1.6 million in 1960 to 6.4 million in 1990, but its membership has been declining in more recent years. Comparable numbers do not exist for Sō ka Gakkai. The latest membership number, which it has not updated since 2005, is 8.3 million households. 7. The LDS Church does not release official data on the ratio of active to total members by country. From 1995 to 2001, however, its religious corporation in Japan reported the number of active members to the Ministry of Education. As the LDS Church Almanac published the number of total members by country during those years, it is possible to calculate the ratio of active to total members based on the government and church statistics. 8. Young (1994, Table 3.3, p. 58) observes that in 1980, 17 percent of adult male members in Japan held the Melchizedek priesthood, compared to 59 percent in the United States (70 percent in Utah), 39 percent in Africa, 38 percent in Scandinavia, 34 percent in Europe, and 25 percent in South America. The local pages for the Japanese edition of the August 2005 Liahona magazine of the LDS Church had a graph showing that the number of people attending sacrament meeting divided by total members fluctuated between 20 and 25 percent, from 2001 to 2004. This number is likely an overestimation, given the fact that those not having membership records locally (including visitors and full-time missionaries from outside the country) attend sacrament meeting. 9. At 17.65 percent for 2012–18 (when total membership is used as the denominator), the Anglican Episcopal Church in Japan (Seikō kai) has a lower activity rate. It should be noted that the LDS Church’s activity rate of 18.57 was for 1995–2001 and that the rate may have declined somewhat in recent years. When communicant membership is used as the denominator, the Episcopal church’s average activity rate for 2012–18 increases to 46.71 percent. 10. The Spirit of Jesus Church practices the New Testament rituals of foot-­washing and baptism for the dead. It has been the most successful of all indigenous Christian movements, establishing branches throughout the country. The Holy Ecclesia of Jesus believes in continuing revelation and provides Christian alter-

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natives for a number of rituals traditionally observed at Shinto shrines and, as in Japanese Buddhism, memorial services for the dead. See Mullins (1998). 11. The Christian Canaan Church observes memorials for the dead according to the Japanese calendar and custom. 12. According to Mullins (1998, pp. 163–164), the church counted as a member anyone who had attended a meeting and received water and spirit baptism. Mullins thinks that a more realistic figure was less than 10 percent of the total claimed. Reporting of a more realistic number may explain part of the subsequent sharp decline in membership. 13. Births to active LDS homes are additions to total membership even though children are not baptized until eight years of age. For statistical purposes, unbaptized children are counted as members when membership records are created and removed as members only when they are not baptized at the age of nine. See Fletcher (2019). 14. The LDS units that bear the Japanese capital’s name, Tokyo First and Second Wards, are English-speaking (expat) congregations. 15. In a personal correspondence. 16. If α + β = 1, c can be interpreted as the output divided by a weighted average of X and Y. Hence the name total factor productivity. In the log-linear version (see equation [A2] below), c can be interpreted as the increase in output that is not attributable to increases in X or Y.

Bibliography Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. The Forms of Capital. In Handbook of Theory of Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson, 241–258. Greenwood: Westport, CT. Bunkachō , annual issues, shūkyō Nenkan, Tokyo: Bunkachō . Cragun, Ryan T., Michael Nielsen, and Heather Clingenpeel. 2011. The Struggle for Legitimacy: Tension between the LDS and the FLDS.  In Saints under Siege: The Texas State Raid on the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, ed. S.A.  Wright and J.T. Richardson, 80106. New York: New York University Press. Deseret News, annual issues, Church Almanac, Salt Lake City: Deseret News. Durkheim, Émile. 1917. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology. London: G. Allen & Unwin. Fletcher, Peggy Stack. 2019. LDS Church Tops 16.3 Mission Members, but Number Reflect Lowest Net Increase in 40 Years. Salt Lake Tribune, April 6. Heaton, Tim B. 1998. Vital Statistics. In Latter-day Saint Social Life: Social Research on the LDS Church and its Members, ed. James T.  Duke, 105–132. Provo: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University. Iannaccone, Laurence R. 1990. Religious Practice: A Human Capital Approach. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 29 (3): 297–314. Kirisuto Shinbunsha, annual issues, Kirisutokyō Nenkan. Mullins, Mark R. 1998. Christianity Made in Japan: A Study of Indigenous Movements. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ———. 2012. Secularization, Deprivatization, and the Reappearance of ‘Public Religion’ in Japanese Society. Journal of Religion in Japan 1 (1): 61–82. Numano, Jiro. 2010. Hasty Baptisms in Japan: The Early 1980s in the LDS Church. Journal of Mormon History 36 (4): 18–40.

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Stark, Rodney. 1998. The Basis of Mormon Success: A Theoretical Application. In Latter-day Saint Social Life: Social Research on the LDS Church and its Members, ed. James T. Duke, 29–70. Provo: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University. Stryker, Sheldon, and Peter J. Burke. 2000. The Past, Present, and Future of an Identity Theory. Social Psychology Quarterly 63 (4): 284–297. Takagi, Shinji. 2016. The Trek East: Mormonism Meets Japan, 1901–1968. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford. Verter, Bradford. 2003. Spiritual Capital: Theorizing Religion with Bourdieu against Bourdieu. Sociological Theory 21 (2): 150–174. Wallis, Joe L. 1991. Church Ministry and the Free Rider Problem: Religious Liberty and Disestablishment. The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 50 (2): 183–196. Young, Lawrence A. 1994. Confronting Turbulent Environments: Issues in the Organizational Growth and Globalization of Mormonism. In Contemporary Mormonism: Social Science Perspectives, ed. M. Cornwall, T. Heaton, and L.A. Young, 43–63. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

CHAPTER 25

The Community of Christ (RLDS Church): Structuring Common Differences in the Philippines David J. Howlett

In the small Filipino town of Simimbaan, a coral-blue church with peaked gothic windows sits prominently in the middle of a rural barangay (village). The church building itself dates from the early 2000s, though its congregation members have been meeting in the barangay since the 1970s. Large wooden doors on the chapel feature a carved relief of a lion, a lamb, and a small child, with the words “Peace” below them. The sign outside the congregation reads, “Simimbaan Community of Christ.” However, many locals refer to it somewhat pejoratively as “the evacuees’ church,” a reference to the older congregation members who, in the mid-1970s, fled an insurgency in a mountainous region of their province to establish a new home and new congregation in Simimbaan. Once a strong congregation with more than 200 in attendance, the Simimbaan Community of Christ congregation now attracts 60–70 on any given Sunday, many of them related to the De Guzman family, former Adventists who were among the 1970s evacuees.1 If the mostly Catholic and evangelical local population in Simimbaan know something of the origins of the “evacuees’ church,” they know less about the congregation’s connections to a distant American-based denomination, even if the building itself bears opaque clues to this. For example, the gothic windows on the building, designed by a local Filipino member, are an architectural gesture toward the Kirtland Temple, the very first Mormon temple in the

D. J. Howlett (*) Smith College, Northampton, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_25

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US. Additionally, the front doors of the building, complete with carved “Peace” seal, are inspired by a temple in Independence, Missouri. These details are surely lost on all those but the local congregation members themselves. However, longtime Simimbaan residents might know that the congregation once bore a very long denominational name on its sign, “the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints” (RLDS). In the past, this name often led locals to think that the Simimbaan congregation was part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), a denomination that now claims more than 785,000 members in the Philippines with congregations in almost every major town in Luzon. Simimbaan Community of Christ members themselves were somewhat relieved when their global denomination changed its name in 2001 to the much shorter “Community of Christ”; after this, locals no longer conflated the two churches.2 Compared to the LDS Church in the Philippines, the Community of Christ in the Philippines has remained miniscule, claiming only 1500 members and organized into 11 congregations, almost all in the northern areas of rural Luzon. Both churches exist as religious minorities within the most Christian nation in Asia, a country in which 80 percent identify as Catholic, 8 percent identify as Protestant, and 3 percent as members of other Christian groups.3 With an official presence in the Philippines dating back to the 1960s, Community of Christ and the LDS Church compete for members with other American-based churches that arrived much earlier during the American imperial occupation in the early twentieth century, including the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ in the Philippines (UCCP), the Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) Church, and the Episcopal Church. Later entrants into the Philippines including all varieties of evangelicals, Pentecostals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses also vie for adherents with indigenous Filipino churches, including the Iglesia ni Cristo and Aglipayan Church (Philippine Independent Church). The rural areas of Luzon bear witness to the presence of all of these faiths. A person like myself, traveling by car in 2015 to interview Filipino Community of Christ members, could easily identify the meeting places of various religious groups by their distinctive standardized architecture, including LDS wards, Adventist congregations, Iglesia ni Christo churches, Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Halls, Aglipayan parishes, Episcopal parishes, and, as I learned in Simimbaan, Community of Christ congregations. In recent decades, out migration by young people looking for jobs abroad has transformed the Philippines, as more and more move, temporarily or permanently, to countries like the US, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and Australia.4 This out migration has taken a toll on the skeletal network of Filipino Community of Christ congregations. Many congregations, like the Simimbaan congregation, have declined significantly in membership. Nevertheless, church members who have left their rural Filipino congregations have established small congregations in Germany and Spain, as well as joined existing Community of Christ congregations in metropoles like London, Los Angeles, and Toronto. Simimbaan Community of Christ congregation members have relatives living

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in all of these places, and their relatives abroad occasionally send them plane tickets to visit their children, nieces, nephews, and grandchildren in these distant places. Despite its small size, the network of Filipino Community of Christ congregations provides insight into the flows of social practices, the displacement and migration of peoples, the unequal economic exchanges, and even the violence rendered by forces that scholars collectively class as globalization. More specifically, the Filipino Community of Christ provides a suggestive example of how a Christian denomination has responded to and been shaped by two countervailing forces in late-modern globalization: the standardizing processes theorized as McDonaldization, or, more broadly, grobalization; and the adaptive, localization of those processes theorized as glocalization.5 In what follows, I provide a brief sketch of the origins of the Filipino Community of Christ in the mid-1960s, an age in which the global Community of Christ embraced a theology and ethos of indigenization for its missionary endeavors. I show how former Adventists-turned-Community of Christ members provide an example of denominational rebranding akin to what other scholars argue about the origins of global Pentecostalism. Yet, with the establishment of Community of Christ NGOs in the Philippines in the 1970s and 1980s, this Adventist-Community of Christ alliance of sorts began to shift in subtle ways, realized most fully in the changes wrought by second- and third-­ generation church members who transformed their local churches to look more like the American Community of Christ and less like their grandparents’ Adventist-Community of Christ synthesis. Finally, I reflect on how the Community of Christ’s desire for global diversity has been channeled and coopted by much larger neo-liberal forces to create what one scholar has termed “structures of common difference,” that is, differences contained within global categories that mute radical difference.6 First, though, I will provide background to the emergence and expansion of the Community of Christ in nineteenth-century America before turning to its emergence in the Philippines during the global 1960s and 1970s.

The Emergence of the RLDS Church The RLDS emerged in the American Midwest on the ruins of Joseph Smith Jr.’s Nauvoo-era church. Begun initially in Wisconsin and Illinois in the 1850s, the RLDS Church spread quickly across the US once Joseph Smith III, the oldest son of the founding Mormon prophet, agreed to lead the fledgling organization in 1860. Joseph III welded together dissenters from many Mormon factions, drawing former followers of Alpheus Cutler, James J. Strang, Lyman Wight, and many others, and forming them into an organization that soon began to evangelize both within the US and abroad. Under Joseph III’s pragmatic-­minded leadership, the RLDS Church grew from a few hundred members in 1860 to more than 75,000 by Joseph III’s death in 1914. With its headquarters in Independence, Missouri, by 1910, the RLDS Church

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constituted, then and now, the second-largest Mormon tradition church and provided an enduring alternative to the much larger LDS Church headquartered in Salt Lake City.7 Late nineteenth-century RLDS members embraced a Kirtland-era Mormonism that rejected or denied the innovations of Nauvoo-era Mormonism. This meant that RLDS leaders embraced the doctrine of a restored gospel, an authoritative priesthood structure, and two additional books of scripture beyond the Bible (the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants). However, it also meant that they rejected much of what came to be seen as distinctive LDS doctrines and practices drawn from the Nauvoo and early Utah periods. For example, while RLDS leaders flirted with accepting baptism for the dead, they ultimately rejected it, along with eternal marriage sealings, eternal adoption sealings, the temple endowment ceremony, the ban on African-­ American participation in priesthood and temples, and, above all else, the practice of plural marriage (polygamy). By the end of the nineteenth century, most RLDS members believed that Joseph Smith, Jr., had never practiced polygamy, and this despite the fact that some early RLDS members from the Nauvoo-era church knew better. Nonetheless, opposition to polygamy became a bedrock doctrine within the RLDS Church for a century, creating a clear boundary that RLDS members used to differentiate themselves from their literal or spiritual cousins in the LDS Church.8

Twentieth-Century RLDS International Expansion and a Missiology of Indigenization By the early twentieth century, RLDS leaders began to embrace trends that would differentiate them even further from their LDS cousins in Utah. For example, while LDS leaders like Joseph Fielding Smith came under the influence Protestant Fundamentalist ideas, RLDS leaders drank deep from the intellectual well of Social Gospel Protestants and their progressive successors. RLDS leaders began to earn advanced degrees in sociology, psychology, and theology from America’s best universities. And, the ideas of this larger liberal Protestant world began to surface in RLDS conference sermons, educational materials, and books published by the official church printing press.9 Meanwhile, modest growth continued in the RLDS Church throughout the early twentieth century, including significant growth in French Polynesia; a modest network of congregations in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand; and a skeletal network of churches in places like Germany, Norway, Sweden, and Palestine. Still, the bulk of RLDS members resided in the American Midwest, the true center place for the denomination.10 By the late 1950s, the RLDS Church, now numbering 174,000 members, entered an era of bureaucratic professionalization, doctrinal reformation, and ecclesiastical internationalization.11 These developments led to a startlingly different strategy for global expansion compared to that pursued by the LDS

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Church in the same era. RLDS leaders began to embrace a church expansion strategy that self-consciously advocated for indigenization rather than a transplantation of their American church abroad with all of its structures, doctrines, and practices.12 While this allowed for initial expansion and missionary success in places like Nigeria, India, and the Philippines, it also created problems for the future church as leaders and church members alike, conscious of their membership in a globalizing church, sought ways of relating to each other and their often divergent on-the-ground polities.13 Beyond this, RLDS members across the world became enmeshed in cultural processes not entirely of their own making as the social, economic, and political forces of globalization remade their worlds and the very means by which they related to others. The case of the RLDS Church in the Philippines, in particular, points to how the glocalizing tendencies of the post-World War II RLDS expansion eventually became transformed by the homogenizing forces of grobalization, with “culture” becoming a common category that formatted differences in standardized ways. It is to this story that we now turn.

The Filipino Community of Christ, Conversion, and Denominational Rebranding RLDS congregations emerged in the Philippines as a result of contact with two different groups: American armed forces personnel stationed in the Philippines and Filipinos living abroad in the US. The former group helped establish small congregations in places adjacent to US military bases, like Clark Air Force Base, and included a mix of US military personnel and Filipinos. These congregations ceased to exist once the American military presence severely declined after 1990.14 However, Filipinos living abroad helped establish the small network of congregations that endure today, largely composed of family networks in rural villages in northern Luzon. The origins of these particular congregations can be traced to Filipinos who were first Adventists and then joined the RLDS Church in the 1960s. In the 1930s, two cousins from northern Luzon, Potenciano Carino and Benito Maliwat, traveled to Hawai‘i and then the Pacific coast of the US. Part of a larger trend of inter-colonial labor recruitment within the American empire, Carino and Maliwat served as agricultural field workers along with tens of thousands of other Filipinos in this era.15 While working in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, Carino and Maliwat joined a small Adventist church, the Church of God, 7th Day. This church had remained independent of the SDA Church, but could trace its origins to the earliest Adventist movement in the nineteenth century. Members of the 1930s Church of God, 7th Day, kept the Sabbath on Saturday, practiced full immersion baptisms and the blessing of babies, consumed what they considered biblical “clean meats” (fish was a “clean meat,” but not pork), and embraced a church structure that included the offices of apostle and seventy.16 While in Oregon, Carino was ordained as a

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minister in the Church of God, 7th Day, and when he returned to the Philippines a few years later, he was made General Overseer of the Church of God, 7th Day, in the Philippines. Over the next two decades, Carino organized a Filipino conference of the Church of God, 7th Day, with approximately 350 members, mostly concentrated in the rural barangays of the northern island of Luzon.17 In contrast, Carino’s cousin, Maliwat, stayed in the US and eventually moved to Independence, Missouri. There, Maliwat joined the RLDS Church and subsequently married an American RLDS member. In the early 1960s, Maliwat wrote to his cousin, Carino, about his new church, sending missionary tracts and bearing his testimony of the RLDS Church’s truthfulness. Carino took the material very seriously and corresponded with Maliwat for more than three years about the American-based RLDS Church. He also began to discuss the church’s ideas with his closest cadre of ministers, including a young Maximo Cabida. Carino also received visits from RLDS elders serving in the Philippines with the US military. Finally, in 1966, Carino arranged for two RLDS apostles to visit the annual conference of the Church of God, 7th Day, held in Binalonan, Pangasinan province.18 RLDS apostles Charles Neff and Clifford Cole, both regarded as progressives within the Council of Twelve Apostles, visited Carino’s conference in early February 1966. By that time, Neff had been supervising the RLDS Church’s expansion into Asia for the past six years, and his four-year experience of living in Japan in the early 1960s had convinced him of the futility of a traditional RLDS missionary strategy that exported the American church in toto. A convert himself to the RLDS Church, he embraced a minimalist version of RLDS theology that he articulated as “the worth of all persons” and “the reality of God,” both versions of the biblical “Great Commandments.” Neff had also been influenced by liberal Protestant indigenization theology and explicitly propounded a missiology based upon it.19 Among liberal American Protestant churches, a missiology of indigenization was paired with other structural adjustments in their global missions, resulting in “a model of global Christianity that emphasizes nationally led evangelism, extols the virtues of cultural exchange between Christians in different world regions, and champions aid programs because they ostensibly maintain the sovereignty of each national church.”20 As will be seen, the RLDS Church followed this liberal Protestant path, paralleling what Methodists and liberal Lutherans were doing in the same era. For example, by the late 1960s, Neff and his progressive allies in the Council of Twelve had formed “national churches” in places like Japan, South Korea, India, Nigeria, and the Philippines. “National ministers,” all of them indigenous to the area, led these national churches and were given a great deal of autonomy, answering only to the apostle in charge of a global region (always an American, Brit, or Aussie, until 1980 when a Japanese man became the first Asian apostle).21 NGOs, as will be noted later, were soon to follow in the wake of the organization of national churches.

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As an upshot of a missiology of indigenization, many traditional RLDS beliefs became dispensable as the church expanded into Asia. Neff, for example, regarded the following elements as relatively unimportant to the church’s message: Joseph Smith’s prophethood, the restoration of the priesthood, the RLDS Church as the one true church, Independence as the center place of Zion, and the Book of Mormon as scripture. While these elements, in varying ways, might be meaningful for American RLDS members, Neff saw them as irrelevant to potential converts in Asia, many of whom had never been Christian.22 And, despite the fact that the Philippines had long been Christian and had a teeming number of sects and denominations, Neff took this generally dim view of traditional RLDS theology with him when he met with Carino and his Church of God, 7th Day conference in the Philippines in February of 1966. After several days of classes with the apostles, members of Carino’s conference were divided on how they should respond. Ironically, many beliefs that Neff found irrelevant, such as the church’s structure, were very relevant to the Filipino Adventists who found the RLDS priesthood structure, with apostles and seventies, a chief means by which they were attracted to the church. There were still some doctrinal sticking points, such as the day for worship and dietary constraints. Neff and Cole left the dietary constraints to be decided by Filipinos, but maintained that RLDS worship should happen on Sunday. The conference ended without the group making a final decision about affiliation with the RLDS Church. A few weeks later, an RLDS official living in Japan, Dayle Bethel, visited Carino and his pastors once more, and four Church of God, 7th Day ministers, including Carino and Cabida, requested baptism. Bethel performed these baptisms at Colorado Falls, Pangasinan, on March 13, 1966, and then ordained the four men as elders in the RLDS Church. To this day, the Filipino church celebrates this day, rather than April 6, as the “birthday” of their church, holding special commemorative services on the Sunday closest to this date. In the short term, however, the conversion of four ministers sent the Filipino Church of God, 7th Day into a crisis, as their overseer and three other ministers had joined a new church.23 Over the next few years, the aging Carino and the young Cabida worked to establish new RLDS congregations that relied upon kinship networks already existing in Church of God, 7th Day congregations. For example, in the small village of Diffun, Cabida converted his nieces, nephews, and cousins, all of whom had once been members of the Church of God, 7th Day. By 1968, Carino and Cabida had convinced a charismatic Church of God, 7th Day minister, Alfredo De Guzman, to join their movement in the remote mountain village of Dingading, Isabela. De Guzman subsequently brought with him several congregations largely consisting of his extended family. Without exaggeration, the nine RLDS congregations established in northern Luzon by the early 1970s were mostly populated by members related to the Cabidas or the De Guzmans.24 Thus, the early RLDS Filipino Church was not simply a fictive kin network, but a literal kinship network.

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Beyond the patterns of conversion noted above, the early Filipino RLDS Church in many ways was simply a rebranding of the existing Church of God, 7th Day. In fact, Maximo Cabida and Potenciano Carino had concluded when they joined the church in 1966 that the Church of God, 7th Day and the RLDS Church were “the same [church] with only some different tactics.”25 To underscore this point, Cabida simply changed the name on the sign of his congregation and continued worshipping and teaching in largely the same manner as before his affiliation with the RLDS Church. Pastor Wenceslao De Guzman, a nephew of Alfredo De Guzman and the longtime pastor of the Dingading congregation, emphasized a similar orientation to his affiliation with the RLDS Church. In a 2015 interview with me, he used phrases such as, “When the church came to this place under the name of Church of God, 7th Day” and “When the church came to this place under the name of the Reorganized Church …”26 For him, the church was the same church. It only had different names. Rather than see their conversions as a radical break from their Adventist past, Cabida and De Guzman saw resonances and continuities with that past. Recently, several scholars of the Catholic Charismatic movement have argued against locating the Charismatic movement’s origins in America and then tracking its subsequent spread to the rest of the world. Instead, they argue for a plurality of origin points and a process whereby pre-existing indigenous Christian groups were “co-opted into the international [Charismatic] movement,” a process that could be thought of as religious rebranding.27 Tackling a similar issue, historian Laura Premack has provocatively argued for the coeval origins of Protestant Pentecostalism in a set of global interactions involving Africans, Europeans, and North Americans rather than see Pentecostalism as originating in North America and then later taken to Africa.28 Both of these ideas, denominational rebranding and coeval origins, can be productively applied to the case study briefly offered in this chapter. As we have seen, thinking of the Community of Christ’s origins in the Philippines as “denominational rebranding” carries with it real merit as almost all converts were members of the Church of God, 7th Day, and all of the older ministers that I interviewed saw continuities rather than differences between the two churches. These observations challenge a now regnant model for religious conversion offered by anthropologist Joel Robbins, a model that emphasizes cultural ruptures in the language and practices of converts.29 However, going beyond these observations about rebranding and conversion, I think that Premack’s notion of coeval origins can help reframe not simply the establishment of the Filipino church but also the origins of the contemporary Community of Christ. In 1997, RLDS President Grant McMurray claimed that “the real international missional thrust of the church began with great intentionality in the early 1960s” and that “it pressed us to examine the most foundational, universal principles of the faith.”30 In other words, McMurray saw the encounter with new converts in Asia as an occasion for what scholar of global Christianity Jehu Hanciles would call “multidirectional (reciprocal) transformation,” what Premack might call the “coeval origins” of a

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movement.31 In short, I argue that in our case study of the Filipino church, we glimpse that the “RLDS Reformation” of the late twentieth century had its origins in both the US and Asia.32 Whatever continuities there were between the Church of God, 7th Day congregations and their re-branding as RLDS congregations in the 1960s and 1970s, those continuities would become attenuated with the rising of a new generation of Filipino RLDS leaders by the 1990s. They would react against the Adventist beliefs of their parents and bring the church much more in line with American progressive Protestant values that they came to value, as well. They found these values through attending international RLDS youth gatherings and the RLDS World Conference. However, they also embraced these values due to the structural and material conditions in which they found themselves—a world in which the social, economic, and political forces of globalization reshaped their small rural villages.

RLDS NGOs and Auditing Cultures In the early 1970s, American and Filipino RLDS leaders established an NGO to resettle church members caught in the crosshairs of armed conflict between the Marcos government and the Marxist-inspired New People’s Army (NPA) in the mountainous village of Dingading, San Guillermo, Roxas. On September 22, 1972, the Marcos government declared martial law in the Philippines in response to several assassinations of government officials by leftist militants. In turn, the military wing of the Communist Party in the Philippines, the NPA, began carrying out an armed insurgency in several regions, including the mountainous areas of Isabela province.33 Armed fighting came to the doorstep of the small mountainous village of Dingading, a village where approximately 20 RLDS families lived, led by the charismatic pastor Alfredo De Guzman. The NPA forces began operating in the area in the years preceding this, and in the fall of 1972, government forces moved into the region to engage them. After several months in which government forces faced ambush after ambush by the smaller, more nimble NPA forces, the Filipino government ordered the civilian population in and around Dingading to relocate en masse as the Filipino army moved in to clear the region of NPA bases. Consequently, the members of the RLDS Dingading congregation, traumatized by the daily threat of violence coming from all directions, were forced to leave behind their livestock, homes, and farmland, carrying their household possessions in their arms or in carts. Now as refugees, the congregation members lived in tents or boarded with families in a nearby town.34 To alleviate the plight of these families, De Guzman sought direct aid from American RLDS officials. Apostle Charles Neff, Filipino church leaders, and the American-based RLDS Bishopric, the latter the group tasked with administering the church’s financial resources, struck upon a bold plan to relocate the evacuees far away from the fighting. They set up an NGO to purchase farmland in a rural area where De Guzman had extended family. Furthermore, they

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provided each of the 20 relocated families with low-interest loans to purchase 2 hectare farm plots, seedlings to plant on their plots, and instructional help from agricultural specialists to transition the mountain farmers to grow new lowland crops, like rice. Out of this effort, the first RLDS NGO was established, Community One Resource Development (CORD).35 While CORD was founded in an ad hoc manner to meet an emergency situation, it had long-ranging effects on the RLDS Church in the Philippines. Namely, CORD more firmly established a financial system that structured the modern RLDS Church—one based upon extensive financial documentation and periodic audits. And, whatever the intentions of the NGO founders, they introduced a system that ran contrary to the egalitarian ethos of their theology of indigenization. Individual Filipinos became directly accountable to a system that placed the Americans, or more specifically, the American RLDS Bishopric, in a position of immense power over the Filipino church and its local leaders. Such a phenomenon was replicated by any number of other American denominations who embraced a theology of indigenization and shifted their emphasis from evangelization to aid. As Britt Halvorson noted for American Lutherans in the same era, “accountability [found in auditing practices] elucidates an irresolvable tension between the ethical ideal of mutuality between global Christians based on equal footing and aid as an asymmetrical exchange.”36 Furthermore, individualist discourses of accountability within aid NGOs created conditions “conducive to neoliberalism.”37 Taken as a whole, these practices were part and parcel of what some anthropologists have called the extension of “audit culture” wrought by late capitalism.38 This was not without real consequence. In fact, the extension of American financial practices across the global RLDS Church created the means by which one was evaluated as a faithful church leader, at least in areas outside of the US, the UK, and Australia. For instance, in India, Haiti, and Nigeria over the course of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, American RLDS leaders removed indigenous leaders, more often than not, for what the Americans considered financial malfeasance (the misappropriation of church funds, taking bribes, or successfully claiming ownership of properties bought by the American church for the use of the national churches).39 No Filipino leader was removed from office due to charges of financial corruption, though several came under local censure as charges and counter charges were made against them. If financial malfeasance could get one removed from their priesthood duties, few, if any, indigenous leaders were removed for heterodox teachings and practices in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In stark contrast, the same American RLDS denominational leaders revoked the priesthood of thousands of American priesthood members who actively opposed women’s ordination, a practice which began in 1985.40 Thus, ecclesiastical discipline within the American church and between the American church and its satellite international churches operated on different lines of difference. If CORD introduced NGOs to the RLDS Filipino Church, an RLDS NGO that grew out of it, Outreach International (OI), would make the church in

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some ways an extension of an NGO.  Founded by Charles Neff, the same American apostle who supervised RLDS growth in the Philippines in the 1960s, Outreach International was based upon the community organizing principles of Saul Alinsky and sought to establish an ethos of helping communities in need organize themselves to obtain resources from pre-existing government institutions. In this way, Outreach International did not directly give funds to a group, but funded community organizers instead. Crucially, the Philippines became a hub for Outreach’s work, and Neff made the Filipino Dennis Labayan, a devout Catholic and medical doctor, the director of Outreach International. A parallel Filipino organization, Outreach Philippines International (OPI), oversaw development projects not just in the Philippines, but also in India. While OI and OPI were not officially RLDS organizations, church members in both the US and the Philippines readily identified them as such.41 The presence of RLDS NGOs in the Philippines was not insignificant for the shape of the church there. In the last 50 years, most church leaders worked for a time as an employee of CORD, OPI, or OI. NGOs and church employment also formed the most stable, well-paying jobs in rural areas where many college graduates could not find employment after national structural adjustments in the 1990s. NGO employees/church leaders might not have earned what Filipino government employees made, but they did earn salaries and benefits far beyond what most farmers made. They often traveled for trainings in the US or held retreats in various parts of the Philippines or even Thailand.42 They spoke a common NGO language, too, a language that drew upon the lingua franca of neo-liberal aid networks, summarized by Joseph Hill as “sustainable development, technological progress, universal human rights, self-reliance, investment in human capital, [and] women’s empowerment.”43 In short, Filipino RLDS NGO workers represented a cosmopolitan Filipino identity.

Ecclesiastical Reforms and Structures of Common Difference In the early 2000s, a new generation of Filipino leaders took to reforming their church, since 2001 known as Community of Christ. Jennifer De Guzman-­ Gutierrez, the great niece of Alfredo De Guzman, in particular reshaped the church into one that only dimly resembled the early Adventist-RLDS hybrid established by Cabida and her charismatic great uncle. As a teenager in the 1990s, De Guzman-Gutierrez attended several RLDS World Youth forum gatherings and quickly realized that the church in the Philippines was unlike the church in the US. She became disturbed at the disparity between the two, and she would often argue with her powerful great uncle about the basis for Filipino RLDS practices versus those in the US.  De Guzman-Gutierrez also served a stint in the RLDS World Service Corps in the US. This summer-long internship had her giving tours of RLDS-owned historic sites in Nauvoo,

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Illinois, as well as the RLDS Temple in Independence, Missouri. As she related to me in a 2015 interview, this experience in the US further reinforced her desire to change the Filipino church.44 In 2004, the 30-year-old De Guzman-Gutierrez was ordained as the first woman to serve as the assistant mission center president for the Philippines. An American apostle remained the official mission center president, but given that the American apostle lived thousands of miles away, De Guzman-Gutierrez became the de facto leader of the Filipino church. De Guzman-Gutierrez introduced new American worship rituals to the Filipino church, such as the Daily Prayer for Peace, ordained many more women to the priesthood, and attempted to implement a standardized church architecture plan for Filipino churches that would brand them as distinctly Community of Christ. The Simimbaan congregation, with its distinct “Kirtland Temple” windows and coral-blue paint scheme, was a result of this, and at least three other congregational structures built in this era replicated the standardized architectural forms.45 Under De Guzman-Gutierrez, the Filipino church became much more ecumenical in its scope and reach. In the Simimbaan area, local priesthood began to participate in the area ministerial alliance, composed mainly of Protestant churches. Filipino Community of Christ leaders employed by the church began to attend a seminary sponsored by the UCCP, the most socially progressive Filipino denomination.46 Individual Community of Christ congregations began to hold joint services with other churches for special events or even jointly sponsor youth camps. For example, the rural Tumauini congregation began to hold a joint Christmas services with the SDA Church that sat directly across the street from it (the latter group was established after the RLDS congregation had been formed in the area).47 The tiny Diffun congregation sponsored a youth camp supported by several of the churches in the area (Baptist, Adventist, and Community of Christ). The only groups who would not participate in the Community of Christ-sponsored Diffun youth camp were the local LDS branch and the Iglesia ni Cristo congregation, both committed to less religious boundary crossing than others in their small barangay.48 The way priesthood has functioned in the Filipino Community of Christ reveals how localized patterns for religious leadership have blunted attempts to standardize a broad-based system of lay priesthood like in the US.  In many ways, Filipino priesthood functions in an economy of sorts that runs at two speeds: one part of the economy runs according to the rhythms of small villages where priesthood members all function as unpaid neighborhood “pastors” and the other runs at the speed of the national denomination where a half dozen priesthood members are traveling administrators paid by the global denomination. In the small villages, any ordained member, whether a deacon, teacher, priest, or elder, becomes a de facto “pastor” in their neighborhood, called upon by locals, whether Community of Christ members or not, to preside over funerals and blessings at birthday gatherings. As funerals may take up to nine

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nights in rural areas, this places a severe burden on the unpaid, volunteer priesthood members. Consequently, in recent decades, Community of Christ leaders have found it extraordinarily difficult to find members who will accept ordination to the priesthood.49 Furthermore, out migration for jobs in recent years has meant that fewer younger adults and middle-aged adults remain in local congregations, placing the burden for leadership in local areas increasingly on older church members. For example, in the early 2010s, the re-­established Dingading congregation was pastored by Priest Norma Grate, a talented woman in her 50s. However, she moved to Canada soon after her ordination, and the congregation had to rely upon a newly ordained elder in her 30s, assisted by the aged Wenceslao De Guzman. The later soon resumed his duties as pastor. In contrast to the lay local priesthood who serve in congregations, priesthood members who work full-time for the denomination function as administrators, traveling from congregation to congregation to preach or supervise conferences, coordinating efforts with NGOs in various regions, attending international leader gatherings in Thailand or the US, and, at times, traveling to bring ministry to diasporic Filipino congregations in places like Spain and Germany. These priesthood members, constituting around six women and men at any given time since the early 2000s, mirror the responsibilities of a professional class of priesthood across the global Community of Christ. In their home congregation, they feel the press of local demands, though, assuming duties to preside over neighborhood-based rituals and sacraments when necessary.50 In the last 20 years, more changes have been introduced to the Filipino Community of Christ that has reformatted it in a way that celebrates certain socially constructed differences through the currency of “culture.” Three examples, in particular, illustrate the ways in which elements that have been coded as culture have mediated local and global flows: hymns, food practices, and conferences. In 1968, the RLDS Church in the Philippines produced its first hymnal. Following Apostle Neff’s assurance that the church could decide on what parts of the gospel were relevant to their local setting, Filipino leader like Maximo Cabida constructed a hymnal using songs almost exclusively from their Church of God, 7th Day hymnal. In contrast, by 2015, Filipino Community of Christ leaders were at work on a new hymnal that would take a 100-song core shared by Community of Christ across the world and then add hymns popular in their local areas.51 Thus, diversity in hymnody was given space, but also circumscribed by new global guidelines across the Community of Christ. Dietary practices also had changed by the twenty-first century. Whereas Maximo Cabida had insisted that church members follow Church of God, 7th Day dietary proscriptions, the next generation of church leaders embraced popular Filipino dietary standards. This meant that blood sausage and pork, both explicitly condemned by Filipino church leaders in previous generations, found their way among foods served at church potlucks.52 While we could read

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these dietary changes as the dissolution of differences, I think they are better read as the formation of differences in the context of different communities and different boundaries. Cabida’s church was one called out from among other Filipino churches, and as such, its dietary practices connoted their holiness in contrast to their Filipino neighbors. De Guzman-Gutierrez’s church was a Filipino church in relationship with a global Community of Christ where food differences in French Polynesia, the US, and the Philippines were markers of diverse “cultures,” not holiness. Finally, the annual Mission Center Conference formed the most important yearly gathering for the Filipino church. In some ways, it was a miniaturization of the Community of Christ’s triennial “World Conference” held in Independence, Missouri. Like the “World Conference,” the Filipino Mission Center Conference was part legislative assembly, part worship gathering that might include ordinations, and part spiritual retreat. In the late 1990s, Filipino members added a distinctive fourth element to their conferences—a much anticipated “cultural presentation” that took the place of an evening worship service. At the “cultural presentation,” delegates from each congregation performed a song from their local region, acted out a short drama, or even produced and performed an elaborate dance routine to either “traditional” music from their region or pop music. In some cases, congregations spent months preparing their dance routine.53 Thus, individual congregations playfully constructed difference among themselves based upon dance, drama, and song, even as they sought common policies voted upon in a legislative assembly that mirrored the structure of the denomination’s global legislative gathering. When we compare congregational dance routines with financial auditing practices in Community of Christ, we observe particularly suggestive examples of how the global Community of Christ has attempted to manage the tensions between the local and global, the pull toward diversity and the desire for unity. Anthropologist Richard Wilk has argued that globalization’s fusion of the local and global has been accomplished through “structures of common difference.” By this, Wilk means that “the global stage does not consist of common content, a lexicon of goods or knowledge” but instead is “marked [by] a common set of formats and structures that mediate between cultures.” Even “diversity” itself is channeled “in a common frame” and scaled “along a limited number of dimensions, celebrating some kinds of difference and submerging others.”54 Thus, in a denomination that prizes “unity in diversity,” some forms of diversity—dance, food, and songs—are celebrated, but other forms of deeper difference, such as local financial practices, are proscribed with serious consequences.

Conclusions Starting with the Community of Christ’s founding in the Philippines in 1966, this chapter showed how Filipino converts from an Adventist church took American Community of Christ beliefs, practices, and priesthood offices and

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adapted them to a pre-existing Filipino Adventist framework. Community of Christ leaders in the US tolerated, even celebrated, such adaptations as they fit within the American leaders’ emerging missiology, one that explicitly asserted a global Community of Christ should be adapted to local circumstances. However, in the subsequent decades, standardizing processes wrought through bureaucratic procedures emanating from the American headquarters, such as auditing and accounting processes (part of what Marilyn Strathern has called global “audit culture”), as well as Filipino leaders’ work in development NGOs, altered the Filipino Community of Christ so that it increasingly resembled its liberalizing American-sponsoring church. By the early twenty-first century, differences remained between the Filipino and American churches, such as foods eaten at potlucks and even local priesthood duties. Yet, these differences were ones of content rather than form; put another way, a more limited range of differences were tolerated within “structures of common difference.”55 Thus, two intentionally localized churches (the Filipino Community of Christ and the American Community of Christ) came to be more similar as globalizing forces reshaped them along neo-liberal contours, despite their initial determinations to resist these forces. To recognize this last point does not mean that Filipino and American Community of Christ members capitulated to neo-liberal market logics in the past 50 years. As anthropologist Robert Hefner has argued, “in Southeast Asia as in the late-modern West, the capitalist transformations that have reshaped our world do not always end in a narrowed, ‘neoliberal’ self-interest.”56 So also it is in this case study. To observe that neo-liberal contours have reshaped global denominations like Community of Christ simply brings critical attention to how many religious communities must negotiate power, identity, and belonging in a globalized world.

Notes 1. Jennifer De Guzman-Gutierrez, interview with author, July 13, 2015, Simimbaan, Roxas, Philippines. 2. De Guzman-Gutierrez, interview; “Facts and Statistics: Philippines,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed March 24, 2020, https:// newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/facts-and-statistics/country/philippines. 3. “East Asia/Southeast Asia: Philippines,” World Fact Book, Central Intelligence Agency, accessed March 24, 2020, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/ resources/the-world-factbook/geos/rp.html#field-anchor-people-and-societyreligions; for more detailed demographic information, see “Household Population by Religious Affiliation and Sex,” Philippine Statistical Yearbook, PSY (Quezon City, Philippines: Philippines Statistics Authority, 2015), section 1–30. 4. Nearly 10 percent of Filipinos worked and lived abroad by 2010. See Robin Magalit Rodriguez, Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xii.

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5. George Ritzer, The Globalization of Nothing (Thousand Oaks, California: Pine Forge Press, 2004), 74–96; Victor Roudometof, Glocalization: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2016), 1–15. 6. Richard Wilk, “Learning to Be Local in Belize: Global Systems of Common Difference,” in Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local, ed. Daniel Miller (New York: Routledge, 1995), 111. 7. Roger D.  Launius, “‘Neither Mormon nor Protestant’: The Reorganized Church and the Challenge of Identity,” in Mormon Identities in Transition, ed. by Douglas J. Davies (New York: Cassell, 1996), 52–60; David J. Howlett and John-Charles Duffy, Mormonism: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 2017), 47–48, 132. 8. Alma R.  Blair, “RLDS Views of Polygamy: Some Historiographical Notes,” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 5 (1985): 16–19; Roger D. Launius, “An Ambivalent Rejection: Baptism for the Dead and the Reorganized Church Experience,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 23.2 (1990): 63–69; Launius, “Neither Mormon nor Protestant,” 53–54. 9. David J.  Howlett, “The Death and Resurrection of the RLDS Zion: A Case Study in ‘Failed Prophecy’,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 40.3 (2007): 115–116. 10. Mark A Scherer, The Journey of a People: The Era of Reorganization, 1844 to 1946 (Independence, Missouri: Community of Christ Seminary Press, 2013), 344–385. 11. “Membership Information,” Saints Herald 118.4 (1971): 8. 12. Charles D. Neff, “An Oral History Memoir by Charles D. Neff,” interview by E.  Keith Henry, 1980, transcript, Community of Christ Archives, 186; Reed M. Holmes, “The Waters of Yamuna,” Saints Herald 105 (1958): 585; Mark A. Scherer, The Journey of a People: The Era of Worldwide Community, 1946 to 2015 (Independence, Missouri: Community of Christ Seminary Press, 2015), 179–194. 13. D.  Dmitri Hurlbut, “Gobert Edet and the Entry of the RLDS Church into Southeastern Nigeria, 1962–1966,” Journal of Mormon History 45.4 (2019): 81–104; David J.  Howlett, “Why Denominations Can Climb Hills: RLDS Conversions in Highland Tribal India and Midwestern America, 1964–2000,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, forthcoming. 14. “Regular Services Held in the Philippine Islands,” Saints Herald 109.18 (1962): 663; “Missions Abroad,” Saints Herald 116.3 (1969): 32–33; Chito Magabilin, “History of the Philippine Church,” trans. by Josie Cabida-Magabilin, unpublished manuscript in possession of the author. 15. Neff, “Oral History,” 97; Clifford Cole, “An Oral History Memoir by Clifford Cole,” interview by E.  Keith Henry, 1985, transcript, Community of Christ Archives, 147; Magabilin, “History of the Philippine Church”; Dorothy B.  Fujita-­Rony, American Workers, Colonial Power: Philippine Seattle and the Transpacific West, 1919–1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 16. Joel Björling, The Churches of God, Seventh Day: A Bibliography (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), 36–37. 17. Maximo Cabida, interview by author, July 2, 2015, Binalonan, Pangasinan, Philippines; “Neff and Cole Return from the Orient,” Saints Herald 113 (1966): 75; Raymond C.  Cole, “Church of God—How Did It Come to the

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USA and to the Philippines and Now Called ‘Church of God, The Eternal’?” Church of God, The Eternal (newsletter), November 1994, 4. 18. Chito Magabilin, “History of the Philippine Church”; Maximo Cabida, “History of the Philippines Church (Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints),” unpublished manuscript, P95, f170, Community of Christ Archives, 1–2. 19. Neff, “Oral History,” 186; David Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World But Changed America (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2018), 62–73; Dana L. Robert, “The First Globalization?: The Internationalization of the Protestant Missionary Movement Between the Wars,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 26.2 (2002): 54–58. 20. Britt Halvorson, Conversionary Sites: Transforming Medical Aid and Global Christianity from Madagascar to Minnesota (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 61. 21. Cole, “Oral History,” 211–212. 22. Charles D. Neff, “What Shall We Teach?” Saints Herald 114 (1967): 726–727, 739; Neff, Oral History, 186–187, 203–206. 23. Maximo Cabida, interview; Maximo Cabida, “Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Certificate of Baptism and Confirmation,” image in possession of the author; Cole, “Oral History,” 147; Neff, “Oral History,” 99. 24. Maximo Cabida, interview; Cesar De Guzman, interview by the author, July 11, 2015, Simimbaan, Roxas, Philippines; Marcelina De Guzman, interview by the author, July 11, 2015, Simimbaan, Roxas, Philippines; Neff, “Oral History,” 126; “Report on the Philippines,” Saints Herald 117.9 (1970):6; J.  Ronald Dudley, “Saints of Zaragosa,” Saints Herald 124 (1977): 680–681. 25. Maximo Cabida, interview with the author, July 30, 2015, Binalonan, Pangasinan, Philippines. 26. Wenceslao De Guzman, interview with author, July 15, 2015, Dingading, Isabela, Philippines. 27. Thomas J. Csordas, “Global Religion and the Re-Enchantment of the World: The Case of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal,” Anthropological Theory 7.3 (2007): 297. 28. Laura Premack, “Prophets, Evangelists and Missionaries: Trans-Atlantic Interactions in the Emergence of Nigerian Pentecostalism,” Religion 45.2 (2015): 221–238. 29. Joel Robbins, “On the Paradoxes of Global Pentecostalism and the Perils of Continuity Thinking,” Religion 33.3 (2003): 221–231; Joel Robbins, “Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture: Belief, Time, and the Anthropology of Christianity,” Current Anthropology 48.1 (2007): 5–17; Joel Robbins, “Afterword: Some Reflections on Rupture,” in Ruptures: Anthropologies of Discontinuity in Times of Turmoil, ed. by Martin Holbraad, Bruce Kapferer, and Julia F. Sauma (London: UCL Press, 2019), 221–225. 30. Jim Cable, “Our International Evangelistic Calling: President McMurray Ponders Sri Lanka and India Journey,” Saints Herald 144 (1997): 226. 31. Jehu J. Hanciles, “‘Would That All God’s People Were Prophets’: Mormonism and the New Shape of Global Christianity,” in From the Outside Looking in: Essays on Mormon History, Theology, and Culture, ed. by Reid L. Neilson and

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Matthew J. Grow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 357; Premack, “Prophets, Evangelists and Missionaries” 224. 32. The concept of a late-twentieth-century “RLDS Reformation” was first articulated in Larry W.  Conrad and Paul Shupe, “An RLDS Reformation?: Constructing the Task of RLDS Theology,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18.2 (1985): 92–103. For an excellent summary of more recent developments, see Chrystal Vanel, “Community of Christ: An American Progressive Christianity, With Mormonism as an Option,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 50, no. 3 (2017): 39–72. 33. Jose V. Fuentecilla, Fighting from a Distance: How Filipino Exiles Helped Topple a Dictator (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 27; F.A.  Mediansky, “The New People’s Army: A Nation-wide Insurgency in the Philippines,” Contemporary Southeast Asia 8, no. 1 (1986): 2. 34. Marcelina De Guzman, interview; Jesse De Guzman, interview with author, July 12, 2015, Simimbaan, Roxas, Philippines; Rogelio De Guzman, interview with the author, July 17, 2015, Cabulay, Isabela, Philippines. 35. Cesar De Guzman, interview; Marcelina De Guzman, “The Philippine RLDS Church,” unpublished manuscript, ca. 1991, P95, f170, Community of Christ Archives, 5; Neff, “Oral History,” 198–199. 36. Halvorson, Conversionary Sites, 211. 37. Daromir Rudnyckyj, “Spiritual Economies: Islam and Neoliberalism in Contemporary Indonesia,” Cultural Anthropology 24 (2009): 130. 38. Marilyn Strathern, ed., Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy (New York: Routledge, 2000). 39. For example, see correspondence related to the removal of RLDS national minister in India, G. S. Chawla, for the misappropriation of funds, Howard S. Sheehy to B. K. Panigraphy, July 28, 1971, RG28, f53, Community of Christ Archives. 40. Larry W.  Conrad, “Dissent among Dissenters: Theological Dimensions of Dissent in the Reorganization,” in Let Contention Cease: The Dynamics of Dissent in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, eds. Roger D. Launius and W. B. “Pat” Spillman, eds. (Independence, Missouri: Graceland/ Park University Press, 1991), 237; George N. Walton, “Sect to Denomination: Counting the Progress of the RLDS Reformation,” The John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 18 (1998): 49–50. 41. Roger Yarrington, “OI Reaches Out: Outreach International Funds Projects in Twenty-three Countries,” Saints Herald 132 (1985): 340–341; Matthew Bolton, Apostle to the Poor: The Life and Work of Missionary and Humanitarian Charles D.  Neff (Independence, Missouri: John Whitmer Books, 2005), 111–114; Eduardo “Toto” Delfin, interview with author, July 6, 2015, Cabanatuan City, Nueva Ecija, Philippines. 42. Emily Garubo, interview with the author, July 6, 2015, Cabanatuan City, Nueva Ecija, Philippines; Leslie Pascua Jr., interview with the author, July 24, 2015, Tumauini, Isabela, Philippines; Leslie Pascua Jr., interview with the author, July 28, 2015, Urdaneta, Pangasinan, Philippines; Astroval Aquino, interview with the author, July 18, 2015, Simimbaan, Roxas, Philippines. 43. Joseph Hill, “The Cosmopolitan Sahara: Building a Global Islamic Village in Mauritania,” City & Society 24.1 (2012): 66. 44. De Guzman-Gutierrez, interview. 45. De Guzman-Gutierrez, interview.

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46. Josie Cabida-Magabilin, interview with author, July 5, 2015, Binalonan, Pangasinan, Philippines; Aquino, interview; Dahlia Valdez, interview with author, July 14, 2015, Damsite, Isabela, Philippines; Carlos Valdez, interview with author, July 14, 2015, Damsite, Isabela, Philippines. 47. Pascua, interview. 48. Amado Cabida, interview with the author, July 8, 2015, Diffun, Quirino, Philippines. 49. De Guzman-Gutierrez interview; Wenceslao De Guzman, interview; Aquino, interview. 50. Aquino, interview; Pascua, interview; De Guzman-Gutierrez, interview; Mary Lou Morales, interview with author, July 6, 2015, Binalonan, Pangasinan, Philippines; Chito Magabilin, interview with author, July 28, 2015, Binalonan, Pangasinan, Philippines. 51. De Guzman-Gutierrez, interview; Aquino, interview; a 1995 hymnal, put together after Maximo Cabida’s retirement as national minister, incorporated several dozen English-language hymns in addition to the many Ilocano- and Tagalog-language hymns drawn from the earlier hymnal. See “Apostle McLaughlin Ministers in Philippines and French Polynesia,” Saints Herald 142 (1995): 258. 52. Josie Cabida-Magabilin, interview. 53. Chito Magabilin, interview. 54. Wilk, “Learning to Be Local in Belize,” 111. 55. Wilk, “Learning to Be Local in Belize,” 111. 56. Robert W.  Hefner, “Epilogue: Capitalist Rationalities and Religious Rationalities—An Agonistic Plurality,” in New Religiosities, Modern Capitalism, and Moral Complexities in Southeast Asia, ed. by Juliette Koning and Gwenaël Njoto-Feillard (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 282.

Bibliography Apostle McLaughlin Ministers in Philippines and French Polynesia. 1995. Saints Herald 142: 258. Aquino, Astroval. 2015. Interview with the author. Simimbaan, Roxas, Philippines, July 18. Björling, Joel. 1987. The Churches of God, Seventh Day: A Bibliography. New  York: Garland Publishing. Blair, Alma R. 1985. RLDS Views of Polygamy: Some Historiographical Notes. John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 5: 16–28. Bolton, Matthew. 2005. Apostle to the Poor: The Life and Work of Missionary and Humanitarian Charles D. Neff. Independence, MO: John Whitmer Books. Cabida, Amado. 2015a. Interview with author. Diffun, Quirino, Philippines, July 8. Cabida, Maximo. 2015b. Interview with author. Binalonan, Pangasinan, Philippines, July 2. ———. 2015c. Interview with author. Binalonan, Pangasinan, Philippines, July 30. ———. History of the Philippines Church (Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints). Box P95. Folder 170. Community of Christ Archives. Cabida-Magabilin, Josie. 2015. Interview with author. Binalonan, Pangasinan, Philippines, July 5.

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Cable, Jim. 1997. Our International Evangelistic Calling: President McMurray Ponders Sri Lanka and India Journey. Saints Herald 144: 225–227. Cole, Clifford. 1985. An Oral History Memoir by Clifford Cole. Interview by E. Keith Henry. Transcript. Community of Christ Archives. Cole, Raymond C. 1994. Church of God—How Did It Come to the USA and to the Philippines and Now Called ‘Church of God, The Eternal’? Church of God, The Eternal (newsletter), November 1–7. Conrad, Larry W. 1991. Dissent among Dissenters: Theological Dimensions of Dissent in the Reorganization. In Let Contention Cease: The Dynamics of Dissent in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, ed. Roger D. Launius and W.B. “Pat” Spillman, 125–151. Independence, MO: Graceland and Park University Press. Conrad, Larry W., and Paul Shupe. 1985. An RLDS Reformation?: Constructing the Task of RLDS Theology. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18 (2): 92–103. Csordas, Thomas J. 2007. Global Religion and the Re-enchantment of the World: The Case of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. Anthropological Theory 7 (3): 295–314. De Guzman, Cesar. 2015a. Interview with author. Simimbaan, Roxas, Philippines, July 11. De Guzman, Jesse. 2015b. Interview with author. Simimbaan, Roxas, Philippines, July 12. De Guzman, Marcelina. 2015c. Interview with author. Simimbaan, Roxas, Philippines, July 11. De Guzman, Rogelio. 2015d. Interview with the author. Cabulay, Isabela, Philippines, July 17. De Guzman, Wenceslao. 2015e. Interview with author. Dingading, Isabela, Philippines, July 15. De Guzman, Marcelina. The Philippine RLDS Church. Box P95. Folder 170. Community of Christ Archives. De Guzman-Gutierrez, Jennifer. 2015. Interview with author. Simimbaan, Roxas, Philippines, July 13. Delfin, Eduardo. 2015. Toto. Interview with author. Cabanatuan City, Nueva Ecija, Philippines, July 6. Dudley, J. Ronald. 1977. Saints of Zaragosa. Saints Herald 124: 680–681. East Asia/Southeast Asia: Philippines. World Fact Book. Central Intelligence Agency. Accessed 24 March 2020. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/ the-world-factbook/geos/rp.html#field-anchor-people-and-society-religions. Facts and Statistics: Philippines. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Accessed 24 March 2020. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/facts-andstatistics/country/philippines. Fuentecilla, Jose V. 2013. Fighting from a Distance: How Filipino Exiles Helped Topple a Dictator. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Fujita-Rony, Dorothy B. 2003. American Workers, Colonial Power: Philippine Seattle and the Transpacific West, 1919–1941. Berkeley: University of California Press. Garubo, Emily. 2015. Interview with the author. Cabanatuan City, Nueva Ecija, Philippines, July 6. Halvorson, Britt. 2018. Conversionary Sites: Transforming Medical Aid and Global Christianity from Madagascar to Minnesota. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hanciles, Jehu J. 2016. ‘Would That All God’s People Were Prophets’: Mormonism and the New Shape of Global Christianity. In From the Outside Looking In: Essays on Mormon History, Theology, and Culture, ed. Reid L. Neilson and Matthew J. Grow, 353–381. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Hefner, Robert W. 2017. Epilogue: Capitalist Rationalities and Religious Rationalities— An Agonistic Plurality. In New Religiosities, Modern Capitalism, and Moral Complexities in Southeast Asia, ed. Juliette Koning and Gwenaël Njoto-Feillard, 265–285. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. Hill, Joseph. 2012. The Cosmopolitan Sahara: Building a Global Islamic Village in Mauritania. City & Society 24 (1): 62–83. Hollinger, David. 2018. Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World But Changed America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Holmes, Reed M. 1958. The Waters of Yamuna. Saints Herald 105: 584–585. Howlett, David J. 2007. The Death and Resurrection of the RLDS Zion: A Case Study in ‘Failed Prophecy’. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 40 (3): 112–131. ———. forthcoming. Why Denominations Can Climb Hills: RLDS Conversions in Highland Tribal India and Midwestern America, 1964–2000. Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture. Howlett, David J., and Duffy John-Charles. 2017. Mormonism: The Basics. New York: Routledge. Hurlbut, D.  Dmitri. 2019. Gobert Edet and the Entry of the RLDS Church into Southeastern Nigeria, 1962–1966. Journal of Mormon History 45 (4): 81–104. Launius, Roger D. 1900. An Ambivalent Rejection: Baptism for the Dead and the Reorganized Church Experience. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 23 (2): 61–83. ———. 1996. ‘Neither Mormon nor Protestant’: The Reorganized Church and the Challenge of Identity. In Mormon Identities in Transition, ed. Douglas J.  Davies, 52–60. New York: Cassell. Magabilin, Chito. 2015. Interview with author. Binalonan, Pangasinan, Philippines, July 28. ———. History of the Philippine Church. Translated by Josie Cabida-Magabilin. Unpublished manuscript in possession of the author. Mediansky, F.A. 1986. The New People’s Army: A Nation-Wide Insurgency in the Philippines. Contemporary Southeast Asia 8 (1): 1–17. Membership Information. 1971. Saints Herald 118 (4): 8. Missions Abroad. 1969. Saints Herald 116 (3): 32–33. Morales, Mary Lou. 2015. Interview with author. Binalonan, Pangasinan, Philippines, July 6. Neff, Charles D. 1967. What Shall We Teach? Saints Herald 114: 726–727, 739. ———. 1980. An Oral History Memoir by Charles D.  Neff. Interview by E.  Keith Henry. Transcript. Community of Christ Archives. Neff and Cole Return from the Orient. 1966. Saints Herald 113: 75. Pascua Jr., Leslie. 2015a. Interview with the author. Tumauini, Isabela, Philippines, 24 July. ———. 2015b. Interview with the author. Urdaneta, Pangasinan, Philippines, 28 July. Philippine Statistical Yearbook, PSY. 2015. Quezon City, Philippines: Philippines Statistics Authority. Premack, Laura. 2015. Prophets, Evangelists and Missionaries: Trans-Atlantic Interactions in the Emergence of Nigerian Pentecostalism. Religion 45 (2): 221–238. Regular Services Held in the Philippine Islands. 1962. Saints Herald 109 (18): 663. Report on the Philippines. 1970. Saints Herald 117 (9): 6. Ritzer, George. 2003. Rethinking Globalization: Glocalization/Grobalization and Something/Nothing. Sociological Theory 21 (3): 193–209.

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Robbins, Joel. 2003. On the Paradoxes of Global Pentecostalism and the Perils of Continuity Thinking. Religion 33 (3): 221–231. ———. 2007. Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture: Belief, Time, and the Anthropology of Christianity. Current Anthropology 48 (1): 5–38. ———. 2019. Afterword: Some Reflections on Rupture. In Ruptures: Anthropologies of Discontinuity in Times of Turmoil, ed. Martin Holbraad, Bruce Kapferer, and Julia F. Sauma, 218–233. London: UCL Press. Robert, Dana L. 2002. The First Globalization?: The Internationalization of the Protestant Missionary Movement Between the Wars. International Bulletin of Missionary Research 26 (2): 50–66. Rodriguez, Robin Magalit. 2010. Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Roudometof, Victor. 2016. Glocalization: A Critical Introduction. New  York: Routledge. Rudnyckyj, Daromir. 2009. Spiritual Economies: Islam and Neoliberalism in Contemporary Indonesia. Cultural Anthropology 24: 104–141. San Francisco, Jose Mario. 2011. The Philippines. In Christianities in Asia, ed. Peter Phan, 97–128. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Scherer, Mark A. 2013. The Journey of a People: The Era of Reorganization, 1844 to 1946. Independence, MO: Community of Christ Seminary Press. ———. 2015. The Journey of a People: The Era of Worldwide Community, 1946 to 2015. Independence, MO: Community of Christ Seminary Press. Sheehy, Howard S. to B.  K. Panigraphy. July 28, 1971. Box RG28. Folder 53. Community of Christ Archives. Strathern, Marilyn, ed. 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. New York: Routledge. Valdez, Carlos. 2015a. Interview with author. Damsite, Isabela, Philippines, July 14. Valdez, Dahlia. 2015b. Interview with author. Damsite, Isabela, Philippines, July 14. Vanel, Chrystal. 2017. Community of Christ: An American Progressive Christianity, With Mormonism as an Option. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 50 (3): 39–72. Walton, George N. 1998. Sect to Denomination: Counting the Progress of the RLDS Reformation. The John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 18: 38–62. Wilk, Richard. 1995. Learning to Be Local in Belize: Global Systems of Common Difference. In Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local, ed. Daniel Miller, 110–133. New York: Routledge. Yarrington, Roger. 1985. OI Reaches Out: Outreach International Funds Projects in Twenty-three Countries. Saints Herald 132: 340–341.

CHAPTER 26

The History and Culture of Mormon Fundamentalism in the United States Janet Benson Bennion

Mormon fundamentalism has challenged the way contemporary family life is typically viewed in America. It involves people who subscribe to a brand of theology associated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (hereafter LDS Church or just Church, in appropriate contexts) founded by Joseph Smith in 1830. The most important theological points include polygamy (or plural marriage in LDS parlance), and also patriarchal authority, traditional gender roles, and religious communalism. Most fundamentalists who continue practising polygamy and communal economics (which the modern LDS Church does not) belong to schismatic, break-away movements that are strongly denounced as apostate by the LDS Church. About 75 percent of the approximately 50,000 fundamentalists residing in North America are members of the three largest movements—the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), the Apostolic United Brethren (AUB), and the Kingston Clan. The remainder come from the Mexican LeBaron group (The Church of the First Born) and a number of unaffiliated polygamists spread throughout the western United States (who are known as “independents.”) The connections, overlaps, and distinctions between these groups are complex. In what follows, I will attempt to bring some clarity to this complexity with a brief overview of each movement and the ways in which they are both similar and different. First, though, I will summarize the early beginnings of polygamy in Mormon thought and practice, the ultimate official abandonment of “plural marriage” by the LDS Church in the early 1890s as a result of federal

J. B. Bennion (*) Lyndon State College, Lyndon, VT, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_26

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Fig. 26.1  Charting the complex connections of Mormon fundamentalist groups, originally published by Bennion in Polygamy in Primetime, 2012, p. 28

government prosecutions, the resultant protest of this abandonment by certain Church members, and the subsequent activities of these schismatic protestors that eventually led to the organized beginnings of the fundamentalist Mormon movement in the 1920s (Fig. 26.1).

Early Mormon Polygamy: Federal Opposition and LDS Church Change Although many mainstream Mormons seek to distance themselves today from even thinking about polygamy in the abstract, the practice of polygamy first arose in the Mormon context in 1831 when Joseph Smith Jr. claimed to have a revelation that it was his duty to restore plural marriage to the earth. Smith, who secretly married at least thirty-three women and had children with thirteen of them, claimed that he had been given the authority to practice “celestial marriage” from the same source that commanded Abraham to bed his handmaid, Hagar, in order to produce a righteous seed and glorious progeny. Smith, like others of his era in western New York, was caught up in the “American dream of perpetual social progress, believing in a unique theology made up of an eternal monopoly of resources (including women) by males and whole congeries of gods.”1

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Though polygamy was practiced in secret for decades, in 1852, Brigham Young, then leader of the LDS Church, revealed the practice of plural marriage as official doctrine, and subsequently it was canonized in LDS scripture (D & C 132) in 1876. Young, hesitant at first, eventually overcame his timidity and married fifty-five wives, who bore fifty-seven children. In its heyday in the Utah territory, however, polygamy was practiced by only about 15–20  percent of LDS adults, mostly among the leadership.2 It was preached that while monogamy was associated with societal ills, such as infidelity and prostitution, polygamy could meet the need for sexual outlets for men in a more benign way.3 Politicians in Washington did not welcome this marital innovation within the boundaries of the United States. In 1856, the Republican Party condemned “twin relics of barbarism:” polygamy and slavery. In 1862, the federal government outlawed polygamy in the territories through passage of the Morrill Anti-­ Bigamy Act. Mormons, who were the majority residents of the Utah territory, ignored the act. Prosecutions for polygamy proved difficult because evidence of unregistered plural marriages was scarce. Reynolds v. US, a central judgment in American constitutional law, sought to resolve the problem once and for all. The ruling was prompted by a challenge to the bigamy conviction of George Reynolds, a Mormon who had argued that his faith required him to take multiple wives. The Supreme Court responded that if such a claim were allowed, it would make the “professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself” (Reynolds v. US, 98 US 145 1878, 133 US 333). In spite of Reynolds, Mormons continued to practice plural marriage. Then, in 1887, the Edmunds-Tucker Act made polygamy a felony offense and permitted prosecution based on mere cohabitation between partners who were not legally married. Scores of Mormon polygamists residing in the Utah Territory were convicted of illegal cohabitation under the new law, (including my own ancestors, Angus Cannon and his brother, George Q. Cannon, who were each sentenced to six months in federal prison). Some polygamists began an exodus from the Utah Territory to Mexico in 1885 to avoid prosecution. There, they created a small handful of colonies where they could continue the practice of plural marriage (three of which—Colonias Juarez, Dublan, and Diaz—are still intact today, although polygamy is no longer practiced). Edmunds-Tucker allowed Congress to dissolve the corporation of the LDS Church, confiscate most of its property, and disenfranchise polygamous voters. Among other results, polygamous families with limited funding had to abandon extra wives, creating a large group of single and impoverished women. The act also revoked women’s right to vote, thereby disenfranchising the empowerment of women, who had been steadily gaining political and economic footing. In 1890, LDS Church President Wilford Woodruff’s “Manifesto” renounced the practice of polygamy, thereby alleviating the dire organizational consequences of federal prosecution and allowing Utah to be admitted as a new state into the Union by 1896.

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The Emergence of Mormon Fundamentalist Dissent Many LDS men, including my own Cannon and Bennion ancestors, continued to obtain wives after the 1890 manifesto prohibited it. In 1904, to address the continued, covert practice of contracting plural marriage, new church president Joseph F. Smith formally condemned solemnizing such unions, although he also secretly continued allowing plural marriages to continue in the Mormon colonies in Mexico and Canada.4 Fundamentalists believe that both Woodruff’s and Smith’s manifestos were improperly used to alter holy celestial marriage covenants for political gain.5 They also believed that God had transferred the power to perpetuate plural marriages to President John Taylor (third prophet of the LDS Church) through an unpublished revelation secretly given in 1886. This claimed revelation then became the defining narrative for those church members who became the first fundamentalists, and it eventually led to their separation from the LDS Church.6 The Fundamentalist narrative concerning these matters claims that President Taylor, while hiding from federal prosecutors in loyal follower John Woolley’s home in Centerville, Utah, spent a whole night in spiritual conversation with Joseph Smith, who commanded him to continue polygamy despite intense federal prosecution to abolish the practice. John Woolley’s son, Lorin, a bodyguard to the prophet, claimed to be present during a subsequent, clandestine meeting on September 27th in the Woolley household at which John Taylor ordained George Q.  Cannon, John W. Woolley, Samuel Bateman, Charles Wilkins, and Lorin Woolley as “sub rosa” priests and gave them the authority to perform plural marriages. John Woolley said he was the first man given the keys to the patriarchal order, or priesthood keys, and subsequently passed them to his son, Lorin; Lorin was later excommunicated by the LDS Church for “pernicious falsehood.” By 1910, LDS Church leadership began excommunicating those members who had formed unauthorized new polygamous alliances. However, “fundamentalist” leaders and their followers refused to stop practising polygamy and thereby risked arrest and disenfranchisement, as well as excommunication. Lorin C. Woolley formed a schismatic group called the Council of Seven, also known as the Council of Friends. This group was comprised of Lorin Woolley, John Y. Barlow, Leslie Broadbent, Charles Zitting, Joseph Musser, LeGrand Woolley, and Louis Kelsch. Lorin Woolley claimed that, since the LDS Church had abandoned the holy principle of plural marriage, the council was now the true priesthood authority on earth. The Council of Friends became the forerunner leadership organization for what later was to become the Fundamentalist Latter-day Saints Church (FLDS Church), the Apostolic United Brethren (AUB), and the Church of the First Born. Although the Council of Friends started in Salt Lake City, in order to avoid prosecution, it moved its organized fellowship to the town of Short Creek on the Utah-Arizona border. The establishment of a community at Short Creek set the stage for reestablishment of the United Order or United Effort Plan

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(UEP), as a way to organize properties and manage lands. The location, surrounded by majestic red rock buttes and tiny fertile creek beds, and near what today is Zion National Park, had originally been consecrated by Brigham Young back in the nineteenth century; he reportedly said it would be the “head not the tail” of the Church.7 For a decade in the 1920s, Short Creek was the gathering place for many LDS members who wanted to keep polygamy alive. The members of the Council of Friends were generally in agreement about how to run their underground priesthood movement. The number of adherents to Mormon fundamentalism began to grow, mostly through natural increase and the immigration of disgruntled LDS Church members who wanted to live the “old ways.” In 1935, the Utah legislature elevated the state crime of unlawful cohabitation from a misdemeanor to a felony. That same year, Utah and Arizona law enforcement officers raided the polygamous settlement at Short Creek in response to allegations of polygamy and sex trafficking. The LDS Church asked Short Creek members to support the LDS First Presidency and sign an oath denouncing plural marriage. Twenty-one church members refused to sign and were subsequently excommunicated. Several members were jailed for bigamy.8 Coinciding with the fundamentalist organization of Short Creek was the development of another fundamentalist movement in Colonia Juarez in northern Mexico. Benjamin Johnson, a member of the Council of Fifty in the mid-­1850s (a kind of world government formed by Joseph Smith and carried further by Brigham Young (Hansen 2014)),9 claimed to have obtained the priesthood keys from Young. He, in turn, gave them to his great-nephew, Alma “Dayer” LeBaron. In 1924, Dayer established Colonia LeBaron, located 80 miles southeast of long-established LDS Church sponsored Colonia Juarez in the State of Chihuahua as a refuge for those who wanted to continue practising plural marriage. Meanwhile, back in Short Creek, the council leadership shifted from Lorin C. Woolley, who died in 1934, to J. Leslie Broadbent, who led until his death in 1935. John Y. Barlow then took over as prophet from 1935 to 1949, after which Joseph Musser controlled the priesthood council, establishing three degrees of priesthood leadership:10 (1) the “true priesthood,” made up of high priests, anciently known as the Sanhedrin, or power of God on earth; (2) the kingdom of God, the channel through which the power and authority of God functions in managing the earth and “inhabitants thereof in things political”; and (3) the LDS Church, which has only ecclesiastical jurisdiction over its members. The first category, according to Musser, was comprised of the fundamentalist key holders—himself and other members of the council. The second category referred to the body of fundamentalist members, who obeyed the key holders. The third referred to the LDS Church, which no longer had direct authority to do God’s work but still provided a valuable stepping-stone to the other two levels. In 1944, during Barlow’s leadership, the US government raided Short Creek and also Salt Lake City polygamist homes, resulting in fifteen men and

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nine women being convicted of illegal cohabitation and serving prison terms. In 1951, after suffering a stroke, Joseph Musser called on his physician, Rulon Allred, to succeed him as head of the priesthood council. Musser’s decision was vetoed by most of the council, who were absent during the appointment of Allred, resulting in contentions and different interpretations over who would be the “one mighty and strong.” This bickering led to an organizational split, with Rulon Allred leading one faction and Louis Kelsch leading the other. Leroy S. Johnson and Charles Zitting, who were loyal to Kelsch, remained in Short Creek, where they organized the Fundamentalist Latter-day Saint (FLDS) Church, while Musser, Jessop, and Allred began work on what would eventually be called the Apostolic United Brethren (AUB). This latter group created a new, alternative council in 1952, made up of E.  Jenson, John Butchereit, Lyman Jessop, Owen Allred, Marvin Allred, and Joseph Thompson. Although this split led to major changes in the expression and dispersion of Mormon fundamentalism, all contemporary groups whose origins lie in the original Short Creek movement share common threads of kinship, marriage, and core beliefs. Before elaborating the further history of the FLDS, AUB (and other, subsequent fundamentalist splinter groups), I will first summarize the core beliefs they all share in common. This summary is heavily based on my own field research, beginning with observations of the AUB “Allred Branch” I made in 1989 in the Montana Bitterroot Valley.

Core Beliefs Shared in Common by Fundamentalist Mormon Groups My first glimpse of Mormon polygamy in 1989 presented a stark contrast to what I had read in the newspapers (and what I had heard in my own orthodox Mormon congregation in Vernon, Utah).11 The women of the AUB “Allred” branch in the Montana Bitterroots were not brainwashed victims of a cult led by “thugs, rapists, and lawbreakers.”12 Here was a group of men and women who were struggling to feed and clothe their families and worship God in their own way without interference. They had entered plural marriage, seeking to revive an ancient and complex family form that is practised by at least one-third of the world’s cultures and as much as 85 percent of human groups.13 I had expected to find rampant child sexual molestations and beaten and cloistered women reminiscent of some of the depictions of women’s lives in Afghanistan during the Taliban rule. Instead I found feminism, female autonomy, and widespread sharing. I found a subculture of people living in unique poly relationships with their own set of challenges and quirky, often contradictory, features such as food storage, herbalism, midwifery, Goddesshood, Jell-o salads, and Mother Earth News coinciding with beliefs in blood atonement, National Rifle Association (NRA) advocacy, libertarianism, home schooling, gospel “mysteries,” the Savior on Mt. Zion, and a patriarchal priesthood.

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The women developed a fierce interdependence with each other in the face of cold weather and frequent absences of their husbands doing construction work and priesthood business in Utah, Oregon, and Mexico. Surprisingly, many of them experienced autonomy by forming efficient female economic and spiritual networks that included a Montessori school program, a wheat-­ grinding mill, a fruit cannery, and a dairy—all operated by the Relief Society, an auxiliary project led by women that was designed to help fulfill the needs of the community. This matrifocal network provided these women with shared childcare that enabled them to pursue an education or a career outside the community. It offered them relief in companionship and solidarity when they were abandoned by their husbands. Female converts from the mainstream LDS Church found solace from their status as divorcees, single mothers, widows, and “un-marriageables,” feeling it to be better to be the subsequent wife of a good man than being the only wife of a bad one. These co-wives could then unite in opposition if that husband got out of line. Their husbands, on the other hand, seemed less content than their wives— always scurrying around from wife to wife, community to community, job to job, like vagabonds in search of themselves. How could they remember all those birthdays and anniversaries? I would often see Marvin, an Allred man, sitting alone in his Ford pickup right in front of one of his houses, asleep or reading. He was not anxious to enter a house where scores of kids and wives would make demands of him. I observed, that first winter, how hard the life can be on young men as well (something you never read about in the newspapers) who compete for their father’s affections and stewardships with dozens of other brothers.14 Polygamy could also be abusive to women, especially in particular groups or families that required strict obedience of all children and wives, and where punishment for disobedience was often corporal through whipping or cutting, known as “blood atonement.” Although not generally adopted, rules followed in some families also restricted female travel, education, and medical care and required young women to marry much older men against their will. More generally, Mormon fundamentalists actively pursue “further light and knowledge” and embrace the “mysteries of the kingdom” (D&C 63:23; 76:1–7). But not just anyone can understand these mysteries. Only the truly righteous, who must have “eyes to see and ears to hear,” are able to discern the truth about the fulness of the gospel. Members of fundamentalist groups see their own modern prophet as the source of divine revelation, but “independents” often claim that they themselves hold the “sacred secret” of direct man-­ to-­God revelation. For some, this is a major lure of fundamentalism—that you can be your own prophet, seer, and king. When I was taught the “mysteries” as part of my deep-dive field work with the AUB in Montana, I was cautioned that the “faint of heart” should not attempt to understand them, because they would seem absurd or irrational if heard without spiritual understanding. (I was also asked to rely on my “Savior on Mt. Zion,” or related male priesthood holder, to interpret the mysteries.

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This was impossible, as my father was dead, and my husband was an LDS Church apostate.) Additionally, I was told that only God completely understands the far-reaching consequences of the doctrines he reveals to his Chosen, even when they are spiritually ready and willing to try to understand. The “mysteries” include divine steps to test the validity of revelations and true prophets. One involves making the calling and election “sure,” so that the Chosen will have the right to converse with the dead “beyond the veil” and gain personal revelations from God.15 Another step is to humble oneself in the true order of prayer, a method believed to have been used by Adam. Those who follow this practice wear temple garments, kneel, and pray with upraised hands of praise and supplication, crying, “Oh God, hear the words of my mouth.” In the same way that Joseph Smith had revealed to him divine ordinances and doctrines, so too can any man receive revelation, if he seeks with the appropriate priesthood authority, honors his covenants, and who hungers and thirsts for knowledge. Another central mystery is embodied in a process by which Saints, who devote themselves to righteousness and receive higher ordinances of exaltation, become members of the “church of the firstborn”—an inner circle of faithful Saints who practice the fulness of the gospel and who will be joint heirs with Christ in receiving all that the Father has.16 They will be sealed by “the holy spirit of promise,” will become kings and Gods in the making, and will take part in the first resurrection. This will enable them to live on Mt. Zion with God in the company of angels in the Celestial Kingdom (D&C 76:50–70). Members of the firstborn may even be asked to break the law of the land in service to the higher law, perhaps even take a human life, just as Book of Mormon prophet Nephi was commanded by God to kill an evil man, Laban. It is by adhering to revealed, higher laws that “just men will be made perfect” and be given the gifts of “kingdoms and principalities” in new worlds beyond the limits of their imaginations. Besides the “mysteries,” fundamentalists believe that the most valued fundamentalist principles that were abandoned by the LDS Church are the Adam-­ God doctrine,17 the Law of Consecration, and, of course, plural marriage. When these principles are intact, the order of heaven is correlated with four different gospel-oriented elements in a workable system: political, spiritual, economic, and social. The political element is the kingdom of God or the government of God; the spiritual element is the priesthood as the conduit for divine revelation; the economic element is the United Order (communitarian sharing); and the social element of the heavenly order is plural marriage.

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Similarities Between Fundamentalists and the LDS Church Not only do various fundamentalist groups share many beliefs and practices in common, but, by and large, I found most fundamentalists also to be similar in a number of ways to orthodox members of the LDS Church. For instance, Fundamentalists, like most LDS members, believe in the evolution of God, Jesus’ atonement and resurrection, and the use of core scriptures such as the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants (D&C), and the Pearl of Great Price. They both believe in a patrilineally established kingdom of heaven, in three degrees of glory (in the afterlife), the Word of Wisdom (which encourages wholesome eating and the avoidance of alcohol and tobacco), and share common pioneer ancestry. As in the LDS Church, only men in fundamentalist groups can hold the priesthood. Women and children learn to respect and obey their spiritual male “head.” And the male (often elderly) prophet is the conduit for direct revelation from God. Male-directed families are built upon the promise that they will become heavenly micro kingdoms in the Hereafter. As in LDS orthodoxy, one’s religion is one’s lifestyle, not something to be observed in church once a week, but an everyday practice that puts faith into action through “good works.” Both fundamentalists and orthodox LDS members believe in modesty, hard work, eternal families, and community service. They both require baptism by immersion, followed by confirmation, through the agency of male priesthood holders, and believe that temple endowment sealing rituals are necessary to unite family members for all eternity. Fundamentalists and orthodox LDS members also jointly believe that God was once a mortal man who has become exalted, and that if they are worthy, they too will become gods and goddesses of their own worlds through the law of eternal progression.18

Differences Between Fundamentalists and the LDS Church Unlike the LDS Church, fundamentalists, of course, still practice polygamy, which they believe will offset an imbalance in sex ratios related to the abundance of religious women and the dearth of good men, as recorded in Isaiah 4. Polygamy is seen, not only as a direct commandment of God, but as a catch-all solution for prostitution, infidelity, homosexuality, spinsterhood, and childlessness.19 Other major differences between fundamentalist groups and the LDS Church exist regarding fundamentalist’s beliefs about the practice of missionary work, beliefs about the nature of priesthood, the necessity of adhering to the United Order, belief in the concept of a literal gathering of Israel, belief in the Adam-God theory, emphasis on the “one mighty and strong” concept, beliefs about blacks and right to hold priesthood, belief concerning the nature

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of the kingdom of God, and the fundamentalist’s belief that men must acquire plural wives through the Law of Sarah in order to attain the highest glories of the Celestial Kingdom. Fundamentalists also insist that God’s laws are unchanging; accordingly, if God told Joseph Smith to practice polygamy, it should be practiced today and always.20 By this same reasoning, temple endowment rites, fundamentalists insist, should not be altered, as they were by the LDS Church in 1927, when LDS apostle Stephen Richards publicly renounced the “Adam-God doctrine” and the Church subsequently removed symbols from the priesthood garment associated with the doctrine.21 Other LDS changes in temple practices—that fundamentalists renounce—occurred again in the 1990s, when LDS prophet Ezra T. Benson reformed the temple ceremony to allow a symbolic, direct pathway to God for women rather than needing to go through their husbands or fathers. This latter change also removed ritual symbols and gestures of punishment to illustrate what might befall one if the sacred rites were divulged (not unlike those formerly used in Masonic Temple ceremonies). Later, The LDS Church further altered the ceremonial temple ritual that brings Saints into God’s presence and also shortened the length and modernized the appearance of the holy garment, or underwear, that temple-worthy members are supposed to wear. Fundamentalists believe that all these temple rites and symbols, that the LDS Church has taken away, should be reinstated. They also maintain that the exact wording of all sacred ceremonies—the same ones used in Joseph Smith’s day when priesthood blessings were first conferred—should be used in the modern day. As alluded to above, Fundamentalists also reject the 1978 revelation announced by President Spencer W.  Kimball that allowed black males to be ordained into the priesthood (D&C, Declaration 2). They believe that God told Joseph Smith that “negroids” are marked by the blood of Cain and would defile the priesthood and temples. The FLDS removed a Polynesian from member standing in their community, stating that he was too dark, and they frown on interracial marriages of any kind, asserting that blacks are wild, untamed, and unintelligent. The AUB and LeBaron fundamentalist groups are also opposed to men of African descent holding the priesthood but do allow mixed marital alliances with both Hispanics and Polynesians. Nevertheless, the AUB removed Richard Kunz (an individual who is phenotypic white and genotypic black) from his position on their priesthood council.22 Another difference between the LDS Church and fundamentalism is that fundamentalist offshoots believe that God’s law is intended to surpass man’s laws, even in the here and now of everyday life. Welfare fraud, bigamy, the collection of illegal armaments, or certain types of home schooling violate civil laws, but these infractions are justified by many fundamentalists as a means for following God’s higher mandate in order to provide for, protect, and properly teach large numbers of righteous children.23 It should be noted, however, that some polygamist communities, such as the AUB in Pinesdale, Montana, work

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very closely with law enforcement and are law-abiding. They register any sex offenders and excommunicate any convicted criminals.

Summary Historical Accounts of Contemporary Fundamentalist Groups Fundamentalist Latter-day Saint Church (FLDS) and Its Offshoots The initial years following the 1951 organizational split that produced the FLDS Church and the Apostolic United brethren, summarized earlier, were tumultuous. The first president and prophet of the newly formed FLDS Church, Louis Kelsch, promptly died after assuming his office, followed as president by Charles Zitting, who survived in his office for only two years before dying. In 1953, while Zitting was still presiding, the State of Arizona dispatched law officers and National Guard Troops to Short Creek, arrested thirty-one men and nine women, and removed 263 children from their homes, placing them in state custody. Of these 263 children, 150 were not allowed to return to their parents for more than two years. Other parents never regained custody of their children. After this raid on Short Creek, many Utah and Arizona polygamists either “went underground” or fled to Mexico or Canada. However, many also remained in the United States and continued to openly practice their religious beliefs. Leroy S. Johnson succeeded Kelsch as FLDS president in 1954 and promptly renamed Short Creek, Colorado City, to disassociate the remaining fundamentalist community from the devastating Arizona State raid. About this same time, Harold and Ray Blackmore, with FLDS approval, began the British Columbia colony, creating a Bridgeway for underage marriage exchange between the two branches. For thirty years, the rather avuncular LeRoy Johnson led the FLDS, overseeing a lengthy era of relative stability, growth, and prosperity. Given the hostile public reaction to images of children forcibly being removed from their parents during the Short Creek raid, and the emergence of greater American tolerance for divergent lifestyles, western state authorities, for the most part, did not enforce antipolygamy laws for over fifty years. Instead, government officials more often focused on crimes committed by polygamists, such as child abuse, statutory rape, welfare fraud, and incest. The official position of the Utah attorney general’s office, for instance, has been to not pursue cases of bigamy between consenting adults. The land and houses occupied by the FLDS Church were originally owned by the United Effort Plan (UEP). The UEP began to thrive on land deals, various in-house industries, and machine shops that sell airplane components to the US government (ironic, since bigamist practices are considered a Class C felony under federal law).24 Formal FLDS teachings required that wives be subordinate to their husbands and, among other restrictions, wear their hair long. To this day, women avoid makeup, pants, or any skirt above the knees.

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Men wear plain clothing, usually a long-sleeved collared shirt and full-length pants. Tattoos or body piercings are forbidden, and women and girls usually wear homemade, solid-colored, long-sleeved “prairie dresses” with hems between ankle and mid-calf and long stockings or trousers underneath. They keep their hair braided in back with a Gibson wave in front. Rulon Jeffs succeeded Johnson as FLDS prophet and president in 1986 and quickly gained a reputation for rigid patriarchal control. Jeffs personally arranged marriages of young girls to older men as a normative practice and expelled members who dissented. Some dissenters, such as Marion Hammond and Alma and John Timpson, left the Colorado-Hildale community and organized a new group in nearby Centennial Park, Arizona, calling themselves The Work. This offshoot group currently has about 1500 members who still practice a form of arranged plural marriage, but dress in a slightly more contemporary clothing and live in large, upscale homes paid for by The Work members of Centennial Park. In 2020, another schismatic group—the Nielsen/Naylor followers—then split from The Work in Centennial Park; they now live in Salt Lake City and number approximately 200 members. Throughout the 1990s, Rulon Jeffs began having a series of strokes.25 When Rulon died in 2002, he had accumulated twenty-two wives and propagated more than sixty children. His son, Warren Jeffs, succeeded him as prophet, then proceeded to marry several of his father’s wives. He also married a number of other women, including eight of Merril Jessop’s daughters, forging strong links between these two families. By 2008, Warren had far surpassed his father’s spousal total, having acquired somewhere between sixty to eighty plural wives. FLDS leaders have previously taught that a man must have plural wives in order to attain the highest degree of salvation in the Celestial Kingdom. Under Warren Jeff’s regime, each FLDS man averaged 3.5 wives and eight children per wife.26 Because of its focus on underage marriage and its emphasis on wife quotas, the FLDS has often come to be associated with human trafficking, incest, and child abuse. Abuses also occurred against boys and men during Warren Jeff’s presidency. For example, from 2004 to 2008, Jeff excommunicated approximately 400 unmarried young men (and removed up to 1000 teenage boys), many of whom later ended up fending for themselves on the streets of Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, and St. George, Utah.27 In 2004, Dan Barlow, a highly ranked FLDS member, and about twenty other married men were excommunicated and stripped of their wives and children. Warren Jeffs implemented what he called the “law of placement,” transferring the wives and children of excommunicated men to himself and other high-ranking officials who remained in good standing with him. Warren’s diary reveals a man who was obsessed with control.28 He micromanaged all decisions in each household within each family. Warren said that God guided his actions, even to the point of telling him to monitor sun-tanning activities at the local salon. Warren also required people to avoid wearing red (that color belonged to Jesus, he said) and to keep their

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hair long so they could bathe the feet of Christ when he comes again. He also forbade people to use the word “fun.” Prior to 2008, The FLDS was the largest Mormon fundamentalist group. Its approximately 10,000 members lived in the adjoining towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona. Sagebrush, piñon pines, and juniper trees grow abundantly in the two towns. Irrigated farm fields and walled individual home sites impede curious outsiders from obtaining close-up views of community life. In 2004, approximately 700 FLDS members migrated to the Yearning for Zion (YFA) Ranch in Eldorado, Texas. This community consisted of twenty-five two-story log cabin-style homes and a number of workshops and factories, scattered over 1700 acres. A gleaming white stone temple sits in the center. Other FLDS members migrated to Bountiful, British Columbia, where the church is currently under scrutiny for its practice of marrying underage girls to older men. Other FLDS branches are located in Colorado and South Dakota. After approximately 50  years of relative tolerance by western state law authorities, in April 2008, the state of Texas, responding to allegations of child abuse, raided the relatively newly established FLDS “Yearning for Zion Ranch” located near Eldorado and removed 460 children from their families. A subsequent investigation found that one-quarter of girls between twelve and fifteen years of age residing at the Yearning For Zion (YFZ) Ranch had entered into “spiritual marriages” with older males and some had given birth to children. As a result, twelve men were prosecuted for child sexual assault. Nevertheless, perhaps partially in response to perceptions of government overreach in separating all children in the community from parents, regardless of non-illegal involvement, and despite widespread national perception of Warren Jeffs as a crazy pervert, general sympathy toward the practice of polygamy subsequently began to grow. This was, in part, also fueled by Home Box Office (HBO)’s fictional series, Big Love, and the True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days (TLC)’s reality series, Sister Wives; these two series were viewed by a combined audience of more than four million people each week.29 Prior to the Texas raid on the YFZ Ranch, in 2005, an Arizona grand jury had already charged Warren Jeffs, in abstentia, with child sex abuse, and in Utah two civil suits were brought against him on various abuse charges. After spending over a year on the lam to avoid legal issues in Utah and Arizona—and earning a spot on the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s Ten Most Wanted list—Warren was caught in 2006, convicted of various charges in Arizona and Utah, and then eventually sentenced in Texas to life plus twenty years in 2011 for sexually assaulting a twenty-three-year-old and a fourteen-year-old girl. Eleven other FLDS Church members were put on trial in Texas, including Jeffs’ heir apparent, Merrill Jessop, who was indicted for performing the marriage of Jeffs to an underage girl. When other lawsuits were brought against Merrill Jessop in Utah, relating to his misuse of United Effort funds, the Utah Attorney General seized FLDS assets, including land and homes in Bountiful, Utah. Though his attorneys

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made a statement that Warren Jeffs had resigned as president of the church upon his conviction in Texas, FLDS members still call him their prophet. Any remaining assets held by the UEP were seized in the Elissa Walls court settlement in 2017,30 which bankrupted the group. As a result, men with large, polygynous extended families began to shed responsibility for plural wives and children, and a massive exodus of LDS members from the Colorado-Hildale community ensued. FLDS refugees have flooded into southern Utah towns like Cedar City and Hurricane, often relying on the mainstream LDS Church for support. The Apostolic United Brethren (AUB) or Allred Group Compared to the FLDS, the AUB (or Allred Group) are relatively moderate in their fundamentalist practices. They have approximately 8000 members throughout the world and have not been linked to the kinds of sex and welfare felonies and other abuses associated with the FLDS or Kingston group (centered in northern suburbs of Salt Lake City). Their official headquarters is in Bluffdale, Utah (located in the southern end of the Salt Lake Valley), where they have built a chapel/cultural hall, an endowment house, a school, archives, and sports field. Most AUB members live in medium-sized split-level homes and work in construction-related business. The more successful members own huge compounds in Eagle Mountain and Rocky Ridge that accommodate four to five wives and 25 children. The AUB Church operates at least three private schools, but many families home school or send their children to public or public charter schools, thus blending with the mainstream populace of non-­ members. Other AUB branches are located in Cedar City, Lehi, and Granite, Utah; Pinesdale, Montana; Lovell, Wyoming; Mesa, Arizona; Humansville, Missouri; and Ozumba, Mexico (where around 700 followers are able to support a temple). Small, scattered groups of AUB members live in Germany, the Netherlands, and England. As earlier recounted, Dr. Rulon C. Allred, a naturopath, became an AUB prophet in 1954, after he and other dissenters, split from the Short Creek fundamentalist community in 1952. The AUB adopted polygamy as a fundamental principle and practice while still maintaining personal allegiance to the LDS Church, even after the LDS Church excommunicated Allred. He did not see the fundamentalist movement as being above the LDS Church but rather said it was parallel to it, feeling that not everyone could (or should) participate in plural marriage. By 1959, the AUB had grown to 1000 members with the help of Joseph Lyman Jessop, Joseph Thompson, and other converts, who met covertly in the Bluffdale home of Owen Allred, Rulon’s brother. In 1960, Rulon Allred bought 640 acres in Pinesdale, Montana for $42,500, and by 1973 more than 400 fundamentalists called it home. When I was there conducting field research from 1989 to 1993, there was a school/church complex, a library, a cattle operation, a machine shop, and the vestiges of a dairy operation. I counted

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approximately 60–70 married men (patriarchs) with around 140–150 wives (around 2.8 each, on average) and 720 children. The Jessops (Marvin and Morris) and their eldest sons were the leaders of Pinesdale, along with less powerful members of the priesthood council. The AUB boasted of attracting more converts than any other fundamentalist group. Converts were drawn to the promise of homesteading and kingdom building in a group with few restrictions. Plural marriage ceremonies were performed by the priesthood council in homes, in the endowment house, in the church building, or even on a convenient hillside or meadow. By 1970, the number of AUB members was close to 2500, expanding its membership from southern Utah to and along the Wasatch Front in northern Utah.31 In 1977, Rulon Allred was killed by a female assassin sent by the murderous Ervil LeBaron, founder of yet another fundamentalist group, The Church of the First Born of the Lamb. Rulon’s older brother, Owen, then took the AUB helm. Owen subsequently led the group for twenty-eight years, a period during which the AUB expanded its membership and entered into a period of collaboration with the press, academic researchers, and the Utah attorney general’s office. The AUB uses LDS Church produced material in their sermons and for Sunday school lessons. Many of its offices and callings are the same. The AUB’s members also tend to integrate with surrounding LDS communities, largely due to the Owen Allred’s desire to work with local law enforcement officials and end the practice of arranged marriages with underage girls. Allred believed that transparency was an important factor in his efforts to show the non-­ Mormon community that the AUB and its members were not a threat. Although AUB women have experienced their share of abuse, especially during the John Ray years of leadership during the 1970s, the rates of abuse among them are no greater than what might be found in mainstream monogamist communities throughout the United States. AUB men who perpetrate abuse are excommunicated, and victims are encouraged to report incidents to the police. AUB is arguably more progressive and law-abiding than other fundamentalist groups in other ways. Its members pay their taxes, do not mandate unusual dress or grooming styles, send their kids to public school, and even sponsor an official Boy Scout troop. Some flies occasionally pop up in the AUB ointment, including evidence of money laundering and some welfare fraud. According to one former member, attorney John Llewellyn, plural wives in Canada are sent into nearby Hamilton to apply for welfare as single mothers and then take this money directly to the priesthood Brethren.32 In my own research in 1993, I heard of welfare misuse in 25 percent of my sample of fifteen extended families. These women looked on such practices in much the same way that the FLDS wives did, as “creative financing” that reallocated funds from a corrupt entity, the federal government. In 2005, Owen Allred died at the age of ninety-one, after appointing Lamoine Jensen to be his successor, passing up more senior council members. In 2015, Lamoine died of intestinal cancer, resulting in a leadership dispute

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that led to a major split, with some members following Lynn Thompson and the others following Morris and Marvin Jessop. Those who disagree with Thompson call themselves the Second Ward. The schism has risked the future of the school and put into dispute the ownership of land and buildings. The Kingston Group (or Latter-day Church of Christ) The Kingston Group (formally, The Latter-day Church of Christ) is the third largest fundamentalist group, with around 1500 members and is currently led by Paul E. Kingston. The church is based in Salt Lake City but has a branch in Davis County and settlements scattered along the Wasatch Front in Utah. The group started back in the 1930s when Charles W. Kingston left the Short Creek Council of Friends after being denied the mantle of leadership. Subsequently, his son Elden claimed that an angel visited him in a cave near Bountiful, Utah, and directed him to build up a society based on the United Order. In 1941, Elden, teaching the need to do away with war and bloodshed, create a self-­ sustaining community, establish brotherly love among all men, and operate a thriving economic enterprise, formally organized a following around his leadership that continued for thirty-five years. Following Elden’s death, his son, John Ortel Kingston, expanded the group further before relinquishing his leadership role (along with the title, “the one mighty and strong”) 1987 to his nephew Paul in 1987. By 2011, the Kingston group held about $150 million in mining, gambling, and various other investments, including a 300-acre dairy farm in Davis County; a cattle ranch and coal mine in Emery County; a 3200-acre farm and 1200 acres in Idaho; a discount store; a grocery store; and a restaurant supply company with outlets in Tucson, Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas, Boise, Portland, and Los Angeles. In the early days of the church, the Kingston men wore blue coverall-type suits tied with strings, and the women and girls wore plain blue dresses. Blue was seen as symbolic of the Kingston renunciation of worldly goods. The outer clothing contained no pockets for possessions, and many members wore no hats or shoes. Since those times they’ve adopted a rather 1950s style of dress. Men wear white business attire with skinny ties or bolo ties, and women wear modest homemade long-sleeved dresses with hemlines at the ankle. Long hair is preferred for women. The Kingstons believe that some foods, like squash or radishes, should be consumed on certain days, and that other foods on these days should be avoided. The Kingstons are secretive, use armed guards outside their Sunday meetings, and ban visitors. They are known for the large number of underage marriages they perform, the highest number of incestuous marriages, and the highest natural birth rate of any of the fundamentalist Mormon groups. Girls are often married soon after their first menarche in order to increase the possible number of children they can have over their lifetimes. Priesthood leaders determine who these girls will marry, typically assigning them to the most powerful, “pureblood” patriarchs. This practice meshes nicely with the

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Kingston goal of kingdom building and making sure member bloodlines are pure, tracing all the way back to Jesus Christ. This is called the Law of Satisfaction, a blood hierarchy established with numbers, similar to biblical kinship nomenclature for distributing resources and calculating tribute obligations, with the prophet/god at the top. Also connected to this “purity” concern is the practice of inbreeding, which is common in the Kingston Clan.33 In 1987, when John Ortell died, he had twenty-five wives and dozens of children. He had given all his seven sons from his first wife the highest positions of financial and religious power. They were awarded the most wives and were given authority to determine how the group would be run. These sons claimed to come from genetically superior ancestry, which gave them an advantage over all others. They used this power to convince much younger women (some as young as fourteen) to join their bloodline. This ensured that other men would find it difficult to obtain suitable wives and would wind up becoming servants to the pureblood lines. Paul Kingston, current leader and now in his sixties, has followed his uncle John’s precepts. He sanctions inbreeding and marriages to child brides. He is a certified public accountant and attorney with forty wives who, it is estimated, have born him approximately 300 children.34 He believes that plural marriage allows a man to achieve glory by having as many wives and children as possible. He encourages his wives to restrict lactation to only a few months after birthing their babies, so they will be ready to conceive again shortly after childbirth. John Daniel Kingston, Paul’s brother, was accused of beating his sixteen-­ year-­old daughter, Mary Ann, when she fled the group. She was the 15th wife of her uncle, David Kingston. John Kingston served seven months in jail and David was convicted of incest and sentenced to four years in prison. John was also involved in a custody battle with one of his wives, Heidi Mattingly Foster, during which he had problems remembering the names of his children. In 1987, Carl Kingston gave his sixteen-year-old daughter to his cousin, David, in a Bountiful wedding. The groom already had two wives. Jeremy Ortell Kingston, Paul’s nephew, also defended by Carl, was convicted for his marriage to fifteen-year-old LuAnn, his first cousin. In 2000, she attempted to leave the group with her children. She was taught that if you were not married by seventeen, you were considered an old maid in the Kingston clan.35 Carl also defended his uncle, J. Ortell Kingston, the former prophet of the group, in 1983, when he was sued for welfare fraud. Interestingly, at a time when the group had assets of $70 million, J. Ortell’s four wives, at his encouragement, posed as single mothers and collected public assistance for a decade. He repaid the state $250,000 in welfare compensation and the case against him was dropped. In spite of the wealth of the group, some families live in extreme poverty and must go on welfare or scrounge for their food and clothing. It was reported that the homes of lower-ranking wives are often rundown and had peeling paint and broken windows.

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The Church of the First Born of the Fullness of Times (The LeBarons) In the mid-1920s, Alma “Dayer” LeBaron left the LDS Mormon colony and his thriving orchard business in Juarez, Mexico, because he continued to espouse and practice plural marriage in opposition to twentieth century LDS policy, for which he was censured by his fellow Mormon congregationalists. He and his family drove south from Casas Grandes until they reached a location where Dayer announced, “This is where we are to settle.”36 The designated location was near the black hills in an ejido (or designated communal land) between the towns of Galeana and San Buenaventura. The initial LeBaron structure was a single adobe dwelling with a dirt floor and a dirt roof. Under the Mexican law of possession, Dayer acquired several 50-acre farms in the nearby El Valle region. In 1944, the LeBarons were finally excommunicated from the LDS Church for teaching and practising plural marriage. Dayer LeBaron subsequently aligned himself with Rulon Allred’s faction, who had long standing disputes with other fundamentalist leaders. The Allreds and LeBarons had intermarried and lived together peacefully for ten years in the Chihuahua Desert. In the early 1950s, however, they fell into disagreement about who should be the succeeding prophet. In 1955, Joel LeBaron, son of Dayer, claimed to have received the leadership mantle of the priesthood from his father and founded a distinctive new group.37 Joel’s father, Alma Dayer LeBaron, and his brothers, Floren, Ross, and Ervil, became the first members of the new church—The Church of the First Born of the Fullness of Times. The LeBarons then officially established Colonia LeBaron as a sanctuary headquarters for members of the Church of the First Born of the Fullness of Times in the northern Mexican desert, removed from the sin and corruption of the modern world.38 Joel taught that Jesus Christ had tried to institutionalize the kingdom of God on earth by establishing the royal laws of obedience but was not successful because the political world of the time was too corrupt. He explained that Joseph Smith had much later taken up the mantle from Christ to build his kingdom on earth by establishing the economic order of God (the United Order) and celestial or plural marriage as the most holy forms of unity. But people were still not ready to accept such powerful laws of liberty and truth, and they murdered both Joseph and his brother Hyrum. So, it was up to Joel, the next in line by his reckoning, to establish the kingdom of God, outside the United States, in the Chihuahua Desert. Joel made it clear that he was establishing one kingdom for all Christian people—Catholics, fundamentalists, Mormons, and Protestants. He summoned all true Saints of God’s kingdom to leave the United States and other “nations of Babylon” and gather in the Mexican wilderness, where the kingdom would be built anew under his divine leadership. The bloodlines of new converts would be fused with Joel’s own royal blood. He called himself the First Born. New First Born members were asked to consecrate all their properties and assets to the church in order to be “worthy to have their names written in the

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book of the law of God.”39 They were asked to increase their stewardship (private industry), so that the church could give 10 percent of any surplus to the poor and help build up Zion. In addition, members needed to contribute labor to build a communal school, a laundry facility, and a kitchen. Each of these projects was overseen by Joel’s younger brother, Ervil, and were intended to eradicate the twin evils of wealth and poverty. Joel’s proclaimed royal laws of God included love, but also stiff punishments for disobedience, including death for treason, murder, and adultery. These laws were designed to “preserve the inalienable rights of mankind” and create “a peaceful harmonious kingdom for all peoples.”40 The young church also established three grand orders of priesthood: first is the priesthood designation of prophet, representing the Melchizedek Priesthood, centered on the Right of the First Born, whose authority is traced directly back to Abraham and then through the lines of Christ to Joel LeBaron. Second is the patriarchal role associated with Aaron, the brother of Moses, which role holds the keys of blessings, works for the dead, and is designed for apostleship. Third is the priesthood role of bishop, who holds the keys of temporal blessings. As the Grand Head of the priesthood, a “Firstborn,” Joel considered himself the true representative of Christ on earth. He had been called by God to organize God’s children in three distinct areas: spiritual, economic, and civil. He placed his brother Ervil, as patriarch, in the role of a spiritual leader with the task of ensuring that individuals were living up to their moral obligations. Many current members now admit that Ervil took his patriarchal mandate too far by controlling their assets and inflicting pain (even death) on those whom he felt had disobeyed the laws. Ervil was depicted as narcissistic, crafty, uncontrollable, and insane. By 1967, Ervil was teaching that he, not Joel, was the “one mighty and strong.” In August of 1972, Ervil formed a rival church called the Church of the Lamb of God. He preached that since he was the real prophet, all others were fakes and should be put to death, including his brother, Joel. On August 20, 1972, Joel LeBaron was shot in the head by Dan Jordan, one of Ervil’s followers. Verlan, Joel’s other surviving brother, became the new prophet of the Church of the First Born, but he was also killed, in an automobile “accident” in 1981, presumably by another of Ervil’s followers.41 The Church of the First Born currently has approximately 1000 members. The church’s tumultuous early history is likely due to, in large measure, severe mental illnesses associated with the LeBaron gene pool. But today it is a peaceful agrarian community of a few hundred members.42 The group’s main center is still hidden in the Mexican Chihuahua Desert adjacent to the small town of Galeana, thirty-five miles south of Casas Grandes. I conducted fieldwork there in the summer of 1999 with a few students from Utah Valley University, staying with the family of Brent LeBaron and his three wives.43 Colonia LeBaron has orchards, fields, and a community church/schoolhouse. It is located in a flattened desert basin next to mountains. Natural feed for cattle and horses is scarce. The community relies heavily on the strength of family farms and on seasonal migratory work for US farmers and construction

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companies. This work centers primarily in orchard and drywall businesses but also includes selling pine nuts and fireworks and doing contract construction work. The LeBarons tap into traditional Mormon beliefs stressing the importance of hard work and self-reliance, along with right wing patriotism. Most members will tell you that they despise taxes and government interference. Their parenting style is strongly authoritarian, applying the “old pioneer tradition” of physical discipline coupled with strict religious training. The LeBarons have branches in Los Molinos, Baja California; San Diego, California; and parts of Central America. In addition, several hundred members are scattered around the Salt Lake Valley. Smaller Fundamentalist Groups and Independents In addition to the major fundamentalist groups summarized above, there exist several other smaller groupings. One of these is the small sect known as the ULDC (United Latter-day Church of Jesus Christ), whose early leaders were George Woolley Smith, Heber Gerald Smith, and Steven H. Tucker. George W. Smith claimed that his status as the holder of the keys of priesthood came directly from his grandfather, John Woolley. G.W. Smith initially joined other underground polygamists in Short Creek in the 1930s. Eventually becoming dissatisfied, he attracted some followers and then moved with them to Nebraska. He and his 12 wives produced offspring who subsequently moved to several different locations: a few in California, a handful in Wyoming, and the rest in northern Utah. Following his death, Smith was succeeded by his son Heber. Another small group of about 100 to 160 members is called the Righteous Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and is led by Gerald Peterson, who at one time was a member of the AUB. Peterson founded this new church based on a claimed vision of an angel, who gave him the priesthood keys following the death of AUB prophet, Rulon Allred. This group mirrors much of the liberal philosophy of the AUB and has branches in Utah and Nevada. Another independent fundamentalist, Jim Harmston, was known for drawing women from other polygamist movements into his fold. His church, called the True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days (TLC), was founded in Manti, Utah, 130 miles south of Salt Lake during the mid-­1990s, and, at its peak, numbered about 400 people. Harmston and his first wife sought to restore their new church before the Second Coming of Christ.44 Harmston said he was confirmed in the Melchizedek priesthood through a heavenly visitation of Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and Moses, who ordained him in his calling. He preached plural marriage, consecration, and “mortal probations,” the latter of which refers to Harmston as the reincarnated Joseph Smith with the ability to beam himself to various planets in the night. Harmston governed his church through the Quorum of the Twelve, a group of a dozen men who had forty wives among them, mostly well educated, career-minded women. By 2004, Harmston had married twenty-one women,

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two of whom were mother and daughter pairs. In 2006, however, his flock dissolved when members failed to see the second coming of Jesus, and the world did not end as predicted. Harmston was also accused of racketeering and fraud. By 2008, Jim was down to eight wives, and many members of the Quorum of Twelve and the First Presidency had apostatized. Harmston died in 2013; a few straggling members retain their faith and practice. In the 1980s, other breakoff fundamentalists inhabited limestone caverns in Missouri, where they created an underground structure to house their homes, a church, workshops, and a temple. These folks believe that their prophet is the reborn Christ and that his three councilors are Peter, Paul, and James. They await the Millennium in Adam-ondi-Ahman, an early Mormon community site that Joseph Smith taught was the location of the biblical garden of Eden. Two other fundamentalist groups have come to light in relatively recent years. The Church of the First Born of the General Assembly of Heaven started in 2004 in Magna, Utah, when its prophet, Terrill Dalton, claimed that he had received a revelation in which Jesus called him the Holy Ghost and commanded him to start a new church. The small family-church fled Utah for Idaho and then to Montana, due to charges of sexual abuse against Dalton. Dalton claims that his followers were persecuted by federal agents after Dalton’s threat to assassinate President Barack Obama, former president George Bush, and then LDS president Thomas Monson. Another group from Humansville, Missouri, affiliated with the AUB, is currently under investigation for the alleged statutory rape of two young women. Many unaffiliated independent polygamists, who have attracted some public attention, now live or have lived in and around Utah, Arizona, Montana, Oregon, Canada, and Mexico, including Tom Green, Roy Potter, Addam Swapp, Fred Collier, Ogden Kraut, John Singer, John Bryant, Alex Joseph (deceased), and Ron and Dan Lafferty. The Lafferty brothers murdered Brenda and Erica Lafferty, their sister-in-law and her daughter, claiming that God had ordered them to do so.45 Ron died of natural causes in prison while awaiting execution in 2019, and Dan continues serving a lifetime prison sentence. John Singer’s crime was trying to home school his children without government interference. He died in an FBI-led shootout in 1979. Both Ogden Kraut and Fred Collier are famous as authors of Mormon fundamentalist doctrine and philosophy. Another independent, Bob Simons, had a vision that told him to preach plural marriage to American Indians, known as Lamanites to Mormons. He lived on a ranch near Grantsville, Utah, with his two wives until he was killed by Ervil LeBaron in 1975. A recent court case has huge implications for the future of Mormon fundamentalism. In December of 2013, the United States District Court in Utah struck down a provision of Utah’s bigamy law that made it an offense for a legally married person not only to purport to marry a second spouse but also merely to cohabit with someone in a marriage-like relationship.46 This case raises serious questions about how we should deal with polygamy. Should it remain a crime? Should it become legal? Many scholars have

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suggested that the criminalization of polygamy does not resolve any of the abuses associated with it; rather, it leads to families “often practicing polygamy clandestinely and inconspicuously,” creating the potential for loss of perspective and abuse within the group.47 Isolation and abuse are not limited to polygamous family relationships. Examples of abuse within monogamous relationships related to isolation have been found in northern Maine, the state with the highest rate of sexual abuse in the United States, and in other remote areas of the United States.48 On February 28, 2020, the Utah Senate gave final approval to a bill that will decriminalize polygamy, representing a stunning, historical shift in how the state treats those who practice plural marriage.

Notes 1. Young, Kimball. “Sex Roles in Polygamous Mormon Families.” In Readings in Psychology, edited by Theodore Newcomb and Eugene Hartley. New  York: Holt, 1954: 373–393. 2. Quinn, D.  Michael. “Plural Marriage and Mormon Fundamentalism.” In Fundamentalisms and Society, edited by Martin Marty and R.  Scott Appleby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993: 240–266. 3. Gordon, Sarah. The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. 4. See D.  Michael Quinn’s “LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890–1904.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18 (1) 1985: 9–105. 5. Anderson, Scott. “The Polygamists.” National Geographic, February, 2010: 34–61. 6. Driggs, Ken. “‘This Will Someday be the Head and Not the Tail of the Church’: A History of the Mormon Fundamentalists at Short Creek.” Journal of Church and State, January 1, 2001: 49–80. ———. “Imprisonment, Defiance, and Division: A History of Mormon Fundamentalism in the 1940s and 1950s.” Dialogue 38 (1) 2005: 65–95. 7. See Driggs’ “This Will Someday be the Head”. 8. See Martha Bradley’s “The Women of Fundamentalism: Short Creek.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 1990, 23 (2) 1953: 15–37. 9. See Klaus Hansen’s The Council of Fifty: A Documentary History, edited by Jedediah Rogers, Signature Books, 2014. 10. Musser, Joseph, and L.  Broadbent. Supplement to the New and Everlasting Covenant of Marriage (Pamphlet). Salt Lake City: Truth Publishing Company, 1934. 11. The culmination of 20 years of my fieldwork among Mormon Fundamentalists can be found in Polygamy in Primetime (Brandeis University Press, 2012). I excerpt observations from Primetime throughout this article. 12. Perkins, Nancy “Plural Wives Defend Lifestyle.” Deseret News, August 23, 2003: 1. 13. Murdock, George Peter. “Ethnographic Atlas.” Ethnology 6, 1967: 109–236. 14. These young men are also at risk for being expelled from the community when the population of men increases beyond marital capacity, as in the case of the FLDS group under the leadership of Warren Jeffs.

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15. Young, Brigham. Journal of Discourses. Liverpool: LDS Church, November 12: 103, 1867. 16. McConkie, Bruce R. Mormon Doctrine. Salt Lake City: Bookcraft. [Encyclopedic work originally written in 1958; not an official publication of the LDS Church.] 1991: 139–140. 17. The Adam-God doctrine is a set of theological ideas taught by Brigham Young: That Adam was from another planet and came to earth as Michael, the archangel. He then became a mortal man, Adam, establishing the human race with his second wife, Eve. After his ascent to heaven, he served as God, the Heavenly Father of humankind. 18. Official emphasis on the deification potential of human beings and related themes has been greatly reduced in contemporary times. See Shepherd and Shepherd, A Kingdom Transformed, 2016, chap. 9. 19. Polygamy, or Celestial Marriage, was put into official doctrine in 1876  in Doctrine and Covenants (D&C) 132: “If any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent, and if he espouse the second … then is he justified.” 20. In other words, truth is a knowledge of “things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come” (D&C 93:24). Smith also stated that if “any man preach any other gospel than that which I have preached, he shall be cursed” and that God “set the ordinances to be the same forever and ever.” 21. Richards, Stephen. Sermon delivered at April 1932 LDS general conference, also quoted in the Salt Lake Tribune, April 10, 1932. 22. Both the removal of the Polynesian elder and Richard Kunz occurred during my fieldwork. I was unable to obtain official records of the occurrences, but these events were common knowledge in the group. 23. Hales, Brian. Modern Polygamy and Mormon Fundamentalism: The Generations After the Manifesto. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2006. 24. From 1998 to 2007, the community received more than $1.7 million from the government for airplane components. 25. Within this time frame, Winston Blackmore, who had been serving in Canada as the Bishop of Bountiful for the FLDS Church was excommunicated by Rulon. Blackmore was subsequently arrested for illegal trafficking in underage marriages by a British Columbian court in 2018. 26. Altman, Irwin, and Joseph Ginat. Polygamous Families in Contemporary Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 27. See Julian Borger’s “the Lost Boys, Thrown out of US Sect So that Older Men Can Marry More Wives,” The Guardian, June 13, 2005. 28. The diary was seized during the 2008 Texas Eldorado raid. 29. Not long after the 2008 arrest of Warren Jeffs and the Eldorado Texas raid, The FLDS was depicted by National Geographic as “an isolated cult whose members, worn down by rigid social control, display a disturbing fealty to one man, the prophet Warren Jeffs” (See Scott Anderson’s “Polygamy in America,” National Geographic, Feb, 2010, page 50). During this same time, a British Columbia court convened to test the constitutionality of Canada’s current polygamy law, as laid out in Section 293 of the Criminal Code, and the court did so again in 2018. Decisions in both cases supported the constitutionality of the polygamy ban. This ban on polygamy continues to be upheld in the United States despite the growing presence of four major fundamentalist movements,

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although future court tests appear to be in the offing. In February of 2020 the Utah Senate voted unanimously to decriminalize polygamy among consenting adults, reducing penalties on par with a parking ticket. This bill was not meant to fully legalize polygamy but allows victims of crimes to come into the light of the legal system for protection (See Jennifer Dobner’s “Utah Senate Votes to Decriminalize Polygamy Among Consenting Adults,” Reuters, February 18, 2020). 30. Carlisle, Nate, “Once a Child Bride, Elissa Wall Now has Ambitions to Remake a Polygamous Community,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 10, 2017. 31. Rulon Allred’s priesthood council included Rulon, Owen Allred, George Scott, Ormand Lavery, Marvin Jessop and his brother Morris Jessop, Lamoine Jensen, George Maycock, John Ray, and Bill Baird. Over the years, Rulon replaced council members who died, who were excommunicated (as in the case of John Ray), or who apostatized. Rulon kept his two brothers, Owen and Marvin, close at hand, bestowing upon them favorable stewardships and granting them permission to marry several wives each. 32. John Llewellyn’s, Polygamy Under Attack, Salt Lake City: Agreka Books, 2004. 33. In fact, Jason Ortell Kingston was married to Andrea Johnson, his half-sister. Jeremy Ortell Kingston was married to LuAnn Kingston, both his first cousin and his aunt. And David O. Kingston married his fifteen-year-old niece, Mary Ann Kingston. 34. Tracy, Kathleen. The Secret Story of Polygamy. Naperville, IL: Source books, 2001. 35. Janofsky, Michael. “Young Brides Stir New Outcry on Utah Polygamy.” New York Times, February, 2003: 27. 36. LeBaron, Verlan. The LeBaron Story. El Paso: Keels and Co, 1981: 107. 37. Ibid, Bennion, 2004. 38. Ibid, LeBaron, Verlan. 1981. 39. Ibid, LeBaron, Verlan. 1981: 166. 40. Ibid, LeBaron, Verlan. 1981: 179. 41. Ibid, LeBaron, Verlan. 1981. 42. In 2018, three women and six children of the LeBaron group were savagely killed by a Mexican drug cartel while driving on a rural road between Sonora and Chihuahua (See Loan Grillio, “Nine Mormons Died in a Brutal Ambush in Mexico.” The Business Insider, online at https://www.insider.com/americanmormon-murder-mexico-trump-obrador-cartel-juarez (accessed 12/05/2020). 43. Bennion, Janet. Desert Patriarchy: Gender Dynamics in the Chihuahua Valley. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 44. Johns, Becky. “The Manti Mormons: The Rise of the Latest Mormon Church.” Sunstone, June, 1996: 30–36. 45. See Jon Krakauer’s, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, Anchor Books. 46. Brown v. Buhman, (10th Circuit Court) April 11, 2016: 20. 47. Campbell, Angela, et al. “Polygamy in Canada: Legal and Social Implications for Women and Children: A Collection of Policy Research Reports.” Ottawa: Status of Women Canada, 2005. Available at http://www.vancouversun.com/ pdf/polygamy_021209.pdf. 48. Keller, James. 2006. “Canada Should Legalize Polygamy: Study.” CTV News, January 13.

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Bibliography Altman, Irwin, and Joseph Ginat. 1996. Polygamous Families in Contemporary Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Anderson, Scott. 2010. The Polygamists. National Geographic, February, 34–61. Bennion, Janet. 2004. Desert Patriarchy: Gender Dynamics in the Chihuahua Valley. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. ———. 2012. Polygamy in Primetime: Media, Gender, and Politics in Mormon Fundamentalism. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press. Borger, Julian. 2005. The Lost Boys, Thrown out of US Sect So that Older Men Can Marry More Wives. The Guardian, June 13. Bradley, Martha. 1987. The Women of Fundamentalism: Short Creek, 1953. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 23 (2): 15–37. Brown v. Buhman. 2016. 10th Circuit Court, April 11, p. 20. Campbell, Angela, et al. 2005. Polygamy in Canada: Legal and Social Implications for Women and Children: A Collection of Policy Research Reports. Ottawa: Status of Women Canada. http://www.vancouversun.com/pdf/polygamy_021209.pdf. Carlisle, Nate. 2017. Once a Child Bride, Elissa Wall Now has Ambitions to Remake a Polygamous Community. Salt Lake Tribune, September 10. Dobner, Jennifer. 2020. Utah Senate Votes to Decriminalize Polygamy Among Consenting Adults. Reuters, February 18. Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latte-day Saints. 2013. Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Driggs, Ken. 2001. ‘This Will Someday be the Head and Not the Tail of the Church’: A History of the Mormon Fundamentalists at Short Creek. Journal of Church and State 43 (Jan.): 49–80. ———. 2005. Imprisonment, Defiance, and Division: A History of Mormon Fundamentalism in the 1940s and 1950s. Dialogue 38 (1): 65–95. Gordon, Sarah. 2001. The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hales, Brian. 2006. Modern Polygamy and Mormon Fundamentalism: The Generations After the Manifesto. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books. Hansen, Klaus. 2014. The Council of Fifty: A Documentary History. Edited by Jedediah Rogers. Signature Books. Janofsky, Michael. 2003. Young Brides Stir New Outcry on Utah Polygamy. New York Times, February 27. Johns, Becky. 1996. The Manti Mormons: The Rise of the Latest Mormon Church. Sunstone, June, 30–36. Keller, James. 2006. Canada Should Legalize Polygamy: Study. CTV News, January 13. Krakauer, Jon. 2003. Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith. Anchor Books. LeBaron, Verlan. 1981. The LeBaron Story, 107. El Paso: Keels and Co. Llewellyn, John. 2004. Polygamy Under Attack. Salt Lake City: Agreka Books. McConkie, Bruce R. 1991. Mormon Doctrine. Salt Lake City: Bookcraft [Encyclopedic work originally written in 1958; not an official publication of the LDS Church.]: 139–140. Murdock, George Peter. 1967. Ethnographic Atlas. Ethnology 6: 109–236. Musser, Joseph, and L.  Broadbent. 1934. Supplement to the New and Everlasting Covenant of Marriage (Pamphlet). Salt Lake City: Truth Publishing Company. Perkins, Nancy. 2003. Plural Wives Defend Lifestyle. Deseret News, August 23, p. 1.

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Quinn, D.  Michael. 1993. Plural Marriage and Mormon Fundamentalism. In Fundamentalisms and Society, ed. Martin Marty and R.  Scott Appleby, 240–266. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1985. LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890–1904. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18 (1): 9–105. Richards, Stephen. 1932. Sermon Delivered at April 1932 LDS General Conference, Also Quoted in the Salt Lake Tribune, April 10. Shepherd, Gordon, and Gary Shepherd. 2016. A Kingdom Transformed: Early Mormonism and the Modern LDS Church. 2nd ed. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Tracy, Kathleen. 2001. The Secret Story of Polygamy. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks. Young, Brigham. 1867. Journal of Discourses. Vol. 12, 103. Liverpool: LDS Church. November. Young, Kimball. 1954. Sex Roles in Polygamous Mormon Families. In Readings in Psychology, ed. Theodore Newcomb and Eugene Hartley, 373–393. New York: Holt.

PART IV

Mormon Ethnic and Racial Diversity in North America

CHAPTER 27

Building Community and Identity Among Black Latter-day Saints: Toward Completing the Flock Through Conference Connections LaShawn C. Williams

Rather than a detached academic essay, this chapter offers a personal account of my own irregular journey as a Black member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, similar in general terms, I believe, to the experiences of many other Black Latter-day Saints. My account emphasizes the particular, simultaneous problem of finding and strengthening a positive identity as both a Black person in American society at large as well as being a Black member of a church burdened by a past history of racial discrimination. In my journey I have discovered the restorative power of relational and community connectedness. This power of connection, in my case, has come most fully to fruition through my involvement in helping to establish and maintain a mechanism for Black Latter-day Saints that promotes our mutually shared identities and historical cultural legacies: the now annual Black Latter-day Saints Legacy Conference.

The Black Latter-day Saints Legacy Conference African-descended members in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have gathered annually for a Black Latter-day Saint Legacy Conference at the Washington, D.C. Temple Visitor’s Center since 2018. They are surrounded and supported by members of all backgrounds from the Washington, D.C. area—including temple, stake, and mission leadership—as well as from

L. C. Williams (*) Utah Valley University, Orem, UT, USA © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_27

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Virginia and Maryland Latter-day Saint congregations. Black members from this region and elsewhere have begun to see their stories and their legacy— both historic and contemporary—centered at the core of each conference theme and resulting gathering. The inaugural convening of this conference commemorated the 40th anniversary of the lifting of the LDS temple and priesthood exclusion ban for members of African descent.1 Subsequently, this conference has grown and become increasingly impactful on individual and collective understandings of Black Latter-day Saint history and experiences; it honors the deep legacy bequeathed to them; it highlights their abiding relational connection to the LDS Church as their chosen spiritual home and is becoming a significant transition point for their cultural and faith identities. In this chapter, I will share an abbreviated account of the growth in my own identity as a Black Latter-day Saint. I will also link this growth to the value of gathering with other Black members—such as at the Black LDS Legacy Conference—in ways that open new community and spiritual spaces for understanding and reconciliation. Throughout these narrative accounts, I will employ concepts derived from “relational cultural theory” to organize and illuminate underlying patterns and themes. The overarching objective of this chapter is to explore potential ways to create and maintain psychospiritual safety and foster the growth of a Black faith community within integrated LDS congregations that have a history of racialized experiences.

Relational Cultural Theory: Movement Through Connection In order to effectively frame the conversation within this chapter, a brief overview of Relational Cultural Theory is necessary. Relational Cultural Theory emerged in the 1970s in the US context of social movements relating to gender, racial and social equality, war involvement, and economic impacts. Its most commonly referenced concepts are generally grouped within three categories of relational movement, namely: (1) connection, (2) disconnection, and (3) relational transformation.2 Each of these categories, in turn, has three stages: (1) benefits from healthy movement, (2) how to know when healthy movement is stopping, and (3) how to get healthy movement to begin again.3 Five cognitive-emotional qualities are typically associated with the beginning of a relational connection: zest, clarity, empowerment, sense of worth, and a desire for more relationships. When relationships go through the process of disconnection, another, opposite set of qualities tend to emerge: lack of energy, confusion, helplessness/immobility, diminished sense of worth, and withdrawal from relationships. When attempts are made to repair and transform disconnected relationships, a process aimed at creating mutual empathy must occur. Actions and attitudes necessary to move from disconnection to reconnection include: constructive conflict, respecting differences, supported vulnerability, authentic expression, and empathic resonance.4 I will weave these

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theoretical ideas into the narrative that follows, charting portions of my own story as a Black Latter-day Saint, culminating with lessons learned through the collective voices of other Black LDS members as we have strengthened our shared identities and created more meaningful connections to our faith through the medium of the Black LDS Legacy Conference.

Living the Legacy: Seeds of Community Planted in Conflict and Faith In the summer of 1996, at the age of 17, I attended my last “Especially for Youth” (EFY) summer camp in Wilmington, North Carolina. This camp originated in the mid-1970s as a Brigham Young University sponsored program to create an “education week” for teenagers where LDS youth could interact with other young people from various places in the country, rather than just with those from their own community.5 It was a camp that provided me with a number of relational experiences that would deeply impact my identity and my faith—then and in future years. My favorite inspirational speaker, John Bytheway,6 was there; I’m pretty sure I fell in love with a returned missionary camp counselor; I got to know the cool kids from all over the South Eastern region of the United States; I also got to hang with the misfits, who felt invisible to everyone else; and, most importantly, it was the first time I had met other Black Latter-day Saint teenage girls like me. It was also the first time I felt comfortable enough in my own racial identity development process where these other girls and I could openly socialize together as Black youths without worrying about being seen as separating ourselves from the larger group. The theme of EFY that year was “Living the Legacy.” This theme and its attendant relational experiences would become a fruitful seed, planting in my consciousness for the first time an awareness of the need for and benefit of shared culture and community-specific worship for Black American LDS Church members. The Struggle to Maintain Connection and Community Among a plethora of conversation topics during the EFY camp, my two new Black friends from South Carolina told me about how their once majority African American LDS congregation (designated as a “ward” in LDS parlance) had been recently divided and re-organized. Previous to this reorganization, congregational members regularly stayed after church services to eat a meal together in the chapel. This has become a practice of many Southern LDS congregations (otherwise known as a “break-the-fast” event) once a month on Sundays following completion of a 24 hour fasting ritual. At the same time, sharing a regular Sunday meal after church services is also a common sociocultural practice in Southern states within many Baptist and Black church communities. These are of course structured community experiences that strengthen member connections within their faith.

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For my new EFY friends, the practice of congregational meals in their old LDS ward, featuring a predominantly Black membership, was clearly a merger of Black Southern culture and LDS religious practices—a cultural carryover for these Black LDS members that allowed them to continue connecting with each other over meals within the setting of their LDS meeting house. Not only did my friends feel more connected to each other, they also felt renewed and energized to confront upcoming challenges that faced them in the new week ahead. This was definitely “zest” and empowerment in action! Unfortunately, however, after LDS regional leadership re-organized the location-based boundaries that defined membership in their old ward, the predominantly Black ward membership was divided into sections that were then added to different, predominantly White wards. The prevailing rumor was that the old ward had become “too Black” and needed new, presumably non-Black, leadership. In short, the predominantly Black bishopric of the old ward was released, the ward was split up, and its members were reassigned to attend predominantly White wards. A new, all-White, Bishopric was called to serve as a replacement to preside over the remnants of the newly integrated Black ward. According to my friends, Black members stopped going to church after the change. It certainly affected my friends’ connection to church attendance. They felt that they had lost their community. It was a powerful experience of structural harm that produced a significant disconnection between them and the LDS Church. My Black friends and I also shared our respective trials of attempting to date that, as young women, we experienced because we were members of the LDS Church. Far from facilitating the kinds of connections we hoped would guide us toward eventually finding eternal marriage partners, we had to deal with the taboos of interracial dating within our LDS youth group in the South. We so often became objects of the mostly well-meant experimentation of young White men in our wards, who liked us but not enough to seriously pursue us or even protect us from their family’s rarely implicit objections to Black and White dating relationships. We saw our bodily physical developments become weaponized as cautionary modesty lessons at church meetings. We felt ourselves being regularly on high alert about how our bodies were interpreted, and how we were seen as threatening to the chaste behavior of White adolescent priesthood holders who ostensibly had future aspirations for mission service. So, at times, we dated within our Black cultural group, outside of our LDS Church membership, subsequently had to manage questions from “concerned” ward members, and then witness the conflicted attempts of our parents to provide answers to questions from both of the worlds in which we were trying to live. Our church environment was nestled in the history of our country’s race relations. We were counseled about our choices and found ourselves attempting to fit into prescribed social notions that were not structurally or historically accessible to us without serious challenges and, sometimes, significant personal

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costs. Without realizing it, we were actively moving toward structural and situational disconnection from our faith. EFY had been my first time not feeling like—or being—“the only one,” so far as my LDS membership as a Black person was concerned. I no longer felt alone in asking questions that most others were not asking and wanting to have conversations that others were not having. When interacting with others in larger EFY group settings, the three of us implicitly decided not to ask the kinds of questions that we were discussing with each other. We had been socialized to believe in the anomaly that our experiences were individual and not socially structured or culturally systemic. Nevertheless, the questions we raised between ourselves were showing us that our individual truths might be more similar than they were different. We were demonstrating recognition of our ability to see and question our LDS membership with regard to race and racism, compared to our White counterparts’ inability to do the same. Beverly Daniel Tatum nicely captures this situation: “If mutual empathy requires the interest and motivation to know the other, then everyday racism often, if not always, represent the failure of mutual empathy.7” Moreover, “In order to empathize one must have a well-differentiated sense of self in addition to an appreciation of and sensitivity to the differentness as well as the sameness of another person.8” Our time at EFY showed us both the sameness of our Black LDS experiences and the differentness of our White peers’ experience while also conveying the risk of assuming that our differentness would be seen or appreciated by our White peers or counselors. As a result, we became disconnected with them while developing a strong connection among ourselves. The week I spent with my new friends at EFY was empowering and introduced feelings of both connection and disconnection. Our conversations raised some new questions for all of us as we shared similar experiences and compared examples of the double consciousness introduced into our lives as “Black Mormons.” I didn’t want the week with them to end. I did not like leaving my sisters behind; I wanted to carry them with me. The strength I felt with them partially diminished when we parted ways. Their names weren’t on the contact list we would sometimes get after attending EFY sessions. I couldn’t name what I needed from them or exactly what I had received from a week’s worth of time together. But I knew that it was missing when I returned home. My relationship with those Black young women at EFY was new to me. Not all of the questions we asked each other and discussed were new for me, but hearing that others had similar experiences and similar questions was very validating. It made leaving the small, temporary community we had created a new experience of grief for me. I was not aware of the desire I would have for consistent Black relationships within my church, beyond my biological family, until I experienced it. It was new, and it stayed with me. Our conversations had fueled me with an energetic desire to continue asking the same kinds of questions we had so intensely hashed through at EFY. Upon returning home to my own LDS congregation, I started asking these questions, especially concerning our history of disconnection with Black communities around the priesthood

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ban. I hadn’t previously known much about the ban as a priesthood and temple exclusion policy for African-descended communities in the church, but it became increasingly apparent to me that asking my local church leadership would not give me clear or consistent answers. The theme for EFY in 1996 was “Living the Legacy.” I didn’t know then that the conversations I had with those two Black young women, so similar to myself, would contribute, 22  years later, to my participation in what would become an annual Black history and cultural legacy themed conference within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I didn’t know then that I was actually living the legacy of my ethnic and cultural and spiritual lineage—my identity as a Black Latter-day Saint. Those tiny mustard seeds, however, were being planted at that time, and my subsequent job was to ready the soil for an ultimate blossoming. In the meantime, I fell in love with a young White member in my home ward, who I had met at a prior youth conference. My dreams were utterly traditional: go to college and graduate at 21; marry my high school sweetheart at 22; and be a stay-at-home spouse and parent by age 23. However, my boyfriend’s family was the economic and educational opposite of my own. My parents were both post-graduate educated medical professionals—my step-­ father a surgeon and my mother a charge nurse (hospital nursing floor supervisor). They had both served as officers in the armed forces, my father retiring as a colonel and my mother as a major. My boyfriend’s family was poor, and his parents were not college educated. But they were White, and my family was Black. In retrospect I see the powerful imbalance of White entitlement and White privilege norms that we implicitly accepted, assuming that our shared faith and church attendance with my boyfriend’s family were equalizers. My mother proactively tutored my boyfriend through his junior year in high school, due to his reading skill deficits and failing grades, so that, as a senior the following year, he was able to graduate with his class. My parents also paid for his college application to a historically Black college, where he could attend on an affirmative action basis as a White person. Then, suddenly, my unrealistic dreams of marriage, children, and equality were shattered when I was forbidden to attend my boyfriend’s high school graduation: my boyfriend’s grandmother, not a member of our faith, said she would not attend if my family and I were present to mingle with his family. My parents had made strenuous efforts, as children and young adults during the Jim Crow era of segregation, to achieve educational and economic footholds in life, buoyed by hopes of being seen and treated as equal under the law and in the eyes of White society. Proscription of attending a simple graduation ceremony, despite a shared religious faith and compassionate volunteer helping (based on superior educational credentials and economic resources) showed that none of this mattered when weighed in the scale with race. It was the first time I was made painfully aware that church-prescribed checklists for obtaining happiness did not always work, especially when you are Black.

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Leaving the Fold, Exploring the World, and Returning to Faith My EFY awakening and bitter break-up with my erstwhile boyfriend propelled me into yet another year of continued questioning about LDS Church practices within a yet-to-be-understood church culture. (I didn’t then have a conception of churches as religious institutions with attendant political and business overtones.) My questions ushered me into a young adulthood of being in and out of church activity as I ventured off to college experiences at Duke University, just an hour from home. When I couldn’t get the answers I needed to foster and maintain church connection, I could sense disconnection coming and even began to embrace withdrawal for what I felt was my own psychological and spiritual safety. Through my twenties, though, I still kept a “checklist for success on the plan of happiness,” as I had been taught growing up. Despite my recent disillusionment over what had happened with my former boyfriend, I held onto my list, at least in theory and sometimes in practice. It was a list of actions needed to maintain the cultural and spiritual connections I had to the church as a core entity of my faith. And I never lost my connection to the intellectual curiosity sparked in my mind about Mormon mysticism and Mormon interpretations of and applications to Christianity. I engaged in conversations on my university campus about Mormon missionaries after attending a Latter-day Saint Student Association meeting. My LDS woman visiting teacher at that time was a person I still credit with reaching out to me and keeping me at least marginally connected to the gospel while I was irregularly attending church meetings. The few times I did attend I found myself experiencing the same feelings of connectedness that I had valued before my college years. I was wrestling at my university with emerging new levels of Black consciousness, stimulated by my liberal arts coursework, attempting to balance what I was learning about the structural and social psychological roots of racism with my own church’s organizational history pertaining to racial issues. But I lacked concrete help in rectifying or reconciling my concerns in conversations with my LDS peers. I noticed that I could be supported by other LDS students when they heard me explain my own religious roots and their connection to secular history or current psychology. But when it came to engaging with me in these same terms and explaining to me the racist history of the church, they could not. What would begin as a friendly connection and respect for intentional intellectual conversation quickly turned into accusations from my peers of me lacking faith, of damaging and disrespecting church leadership, of being brainwashed and possessing a feeble mind. This was especially true if I attached the term racist to any church leader’s name who was connected to the ban that excluded LDS Black families from specific church ordinances or services beyond baptism. Initially I would try to deny my own experiences and knowledge in the service of embracing theirs. However, my friends did not reciprocate; a “failure of mutual empathy” prevailed and silenced me. My peers lacked the ability to

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sit on my side of the historical perspective about our church and could only reiterate defenses of indefensible leadership and indefensible practices against Black membership in our faith. Thus I soon lost connection to my presumed spiritual peers; I became disconnected from the group. I was visited again, this time by two priesthood holding male home teachers, who asked why I was not attending church meetings much anymore. I had reached a point where I decided it was time to be totally candid. I responded by asking them why nobody in the church talked about the priesthood ban and racism, and why I kept having the same conversations that put me in a defensive position both in and outside of church settings. One of the home teachers said he didn’t understand “why what happened in the past happened.” He also told me he didn’t think it was right, but that he appreciated the times when I did attend church meetings; that just as he always learned something different each time he attended, perhaps I would too. I appreciated his candor and hopes that I would remain connected. However, I didn’t start attending church services regularly again until my family had moved to Pennsylvania—my parents’ first retirement location—and I had begun graduate studies for my master’s degree in social work and public administration at Marywood University. There had been two constants for me in a life-time of military-related moves for my parents: my family and the church. Joining my parents and siblings in our new home in Pennsylvania, I was once again confronted with unfamiliar surroundings and few friends. But I did have my family and a continuing, tenacious belief in core LDS teachings that soon helped me reconnect with the church. Family and church were comforts I had relied on since early childhood. Once reactivated, I was soon called into a regional level, young adults leadership position. My involvement in this position of course put me in constant contact with other young people of my own approximate age. I was aware of expectations that I would no doubt date within this coterie and eventually find a suitable marital companion. However, I had been deeply affected by prior experiences that denied my humanity as an intrinsically worthy partner within the boundaries prescribed by my church. I debated within myself how and when I should implement my own checklist of success within LDS Church parameters. Maintaining my track record of only selective obedience, bolstered by an LDS ingrained philosophy of free agency, I started considering the possibility of serving an LDS mission instead of focusing on marriage. I began brainstorming about the types of questions I might encounter as a religious service missionary and the responses I might give. I couldn’t see myself serving a mission and having to defend the past priesthood and temple exclusion ban [revoked in 1978] as anything less than systemic racism during the early years of LDS Church development unless I had better information. So, I began a deep research project about my church’s history. I bought C.S. Lewis books because of quotes and references to him from church leaders. I read essays on race in the church, found academic LDS Church literature— magazine publications and journal articles. I even read anti-Mormon literature

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and reached out to the authors on websites I encountered. I found books and emailed Brigham Young University professors, and I considered and reconsidered my thoughts about serving a mission versus seeking a suitable husband. I was also having a hard time finding either in-person or online communities, where discussion of the priesthood ban and its effects was occurring, or sites where it seemed safe enough to do so. I still missed my EFY sisters. It wasn’t until I finally found and read the Standing on the Promises trilogy, by Darius Gray and Margaret Young,9 that I felt I could finally engage in meaningful conversations about racial issues in my church. But by then, I had also unexpectedly begun dating a person I was very attracted to. Given this development, I revisited the church’s bifurcated choice for LDS young women on the checklist for happiness: mission or marriage? I decided to get spiritual guidance beyond my local ecclesiastical leaders. I sought the insights of our regional leader, who was charged with pronouncing patriarchal blessings10 on members within his assigned area. Just shy of turning 25, I received my patriarchal blessing. The import of this blessing swung me away from my missionary planning. Two years later, I was married and pregnant with my first child, content with the idea that I could still serve a mission later in my life.

Connecting to Legacy: My Interracial Family The relationship that created my marriage began in Pennsylvania and ended in Utah, United States. It lasted almost ten years and produced three children, raising my consciousness yet again to the realities and the misperceptions of race in a predominantly White environment. When my kids were in public with me, their Black mother, I found myself answering strangers’ questions in the grocery checkout line, as they were subsequently in need of receiving biology 101 explanations about the “recipes” that dominant and recessive genetics created. This seemed to happen to me much more frequently than it happened when my kids were accompanying their White Latino father. My children’s phenotypical features—predominantly White in appearance—also challenged much of what I had been told to expect by marrying interracially in the church. As a teen, I had internalized colloquial notions about the so-called biblical “curse of Cain.” Even as an adult woman, I irrationally worried that my prospective children would be born darker than me, because I was a Black woman, even though I was lighter skinned and partnered with a White Latino man. It led me to wonder what kind of environment I might help create to make discussions of race, our church’s history with race, and its potential role in the creation of a “Zion community”11 most beneficial, authentic, and impactful to myself, my kids, and our current communities. I sat disconnectedly in predominantly White LDS congregations within the state that houses the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints listening to fellow Saints share thinly veiled support of racist sentiments previously expressed by some of our church leadership and their interpretations of the scriptures. I hovered at the edge of choosing to disconnect from my

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church again and retreat into the safety of myself. Then, almost providentially, I was introduced to the Genesis Group. It was a monthly gathering for Black Latter-day Saints, founded in 1971 and supported by the leadership of the LDS Church in cooperation with Black male members. These men had voiced concerns for their own—and their sons’—future in the church at a time when the priesthood ban was still in place: how could they acquire a place in the church’s lay leadership structures while restricted from ordination to the priesthood? How could they participate in other opportunities enjoyed by priesthood holders, such as missionary service, or, more importantly, receive the blessings afforded by entrance into LDS temples for the sealing of their marriages, so that Black families could insure their eternal legacies? The Genesis group became a growth-fostering connection for me. It became, for me, a powerful source of mutual empathy, a home away from my home ward. Here, the first Sunday of each month, we could openly discuss the untold stories of Black Latter-day Saints. We could learn their names and their histories. We could feel in our meetings that we were living history ourselves and be buoyed enough from the experience that we could return to attend Sunday services in our home wards with equanimity for the rest of the month. I felt my old sense of community and cultural connection again. I felt zest, clarity, and empowerment! I thought of my EFY friends. A few years later, in 2012, when racial undertones in the United States began to crescendo once again into protests and affirmational support of the movement for Black lives, I found myself seeking even greater depth of community. The Genesis Group had been very good for me and other Black LDS members, but it wasn’t at the forefront of publicly and unapologetically asserting the historical existence and contemporary value of Black membership and denouncing past and present racism in the experiences of Black Latter-day Saints. I felt that, overtime, Genesis had moved somewhat from its focus on Black members’ history and experiences to facilitate the concerns of a growing number of disenchanted White members, who learned that they too could attend Genesis meetings and feel connected to something more than their local ward communities were providing. Genesis was especially experiencing an influx of White, transracial adoptive families seeking a supportive community for their Black children. We saw and understood these parents’ need for support while simultaneously trying to manage their emotional reactions to the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement. They seemed to find themselves ambiguously being both in the center and along the periphery of experiences that their Black children were living through, and they were trying to make sense of what was happening. But they needed support from Black members at Genesis in ways that were different from the support that Black Genesis members needed from each other. I saw disconnection on the horizon again.

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A Disconnection That Moved into Connection One Friday in July 2013, a non-Black man was acquitted of killing an unarmed young Black man—Trayvon Martin—who was walking home from a convenience store in Sanford, Florida.12 The Sunday following that verdict, the silence in LDS congregations, where Black people attended and sought the solace associated with sharing in a presumably supportive community space, was deafening. Subsequently, more news about unarmed Black people being killed by police kept assaulting my mind. I didn’t want to go to church to be further assaulted with more indifference from my White ward members while these terrible things were happening. Then my bishop texted me on Friday, asking how I was doing and saying that he wanted to reach out. I was honest and said that I was hurting and was part of a separate community, like myself, in pain. My bishop replied that he knew he couldn’t understand all that I was going through, but that if I ever needed anything, I could ask him. It wasn’t your regular “home teacher” message; it was a genuine “I don’t know what to do, but I want you to know that I’m here for you” kind of message. With misgivings, I did go to church that Sunday. In our ward relief society class, the lesson was themed around the parable of the “good shepherd” and framed by the words of former church president, Howard W. Hunter: To those who have transgressed or been offended, we say, come back. To those who are hurt and struggling or afraid, we say, let us stand with you and dry your tears. To those who are confused and assailed by error on ever side, we say, come to the God of all truth and the Church of continuing revelation. Come back. Stand with us. Carry on. Be believing. All is well, and all will be well. Feast at the table laid before you in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and strive to follow the Good Shepherd who has provided it. Have hope, exert faith, receive—and give—charity, the pure love of Christ.13

The real clincher, for me, of this message?: an accompanying picture in the lesson manual, painted years ago by Minerva Teichert, featuring Jesus—the Good Shepherd—carrying a Black lamb amidst a White flock.14 I went spinning off into my own space, with my Shepherd, surrounded by my friends, being rescued by the one who always sees me. The one who made me Black—not by accident, not as punishment, but on purpose. The one who consecrated my melanin and called me to do his work. The one who needs ME and those who look like me, to know how many sheep he has at a glance. To know how many sheep are truly with Him. To know who is truly following him, physically, emotionally, and with charity. The one who says, when YOU are lost, I will leave these others and come for you, because YOU, my Black sheep, are how I keep track of the others. Later, one Black LDS sister called another Black sister to share the pain of her invisibility within her congregation and the fear that any relief from this pain from fellow ward members was not going to be forthcoming. That call quickly expanded into regular conversations between five to seven sisters,

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including me. We wanted to create a community space to share stories that fostered mutual connection and growth. The regular conversations we had, as Black LDS women, might be characterized as “creative work toward mutual empathy” in action. We believed that we could construct something positive from the conflicts we were experiencing as members of the LDS Church, and we committed ourselves to intentionally focus on only this objective. Our levels of consciousness, related to issues impacting Black experiences in the United States generally, were varied We learned to respect the prior differences in experiences each of us had. We were committed to support one another’s vulnerabilities in this creative process. We knew that we would have to share—share deeply—in order to create the kind of connective space we needed. We encouraged authentic expressions inclusive of sadness, grief, rage, anger, and disappointment. We celebrated authentic expressions of small moments of hope that we might be able to hold onto while listening to the words of particular church leaders during the upcoming worldwide LDS Church General Conference in October. We committed ourselves to empathic resonance with each other. We agreed to reserve emotional space for one another, or, in Comstock’s terms, to “hold the tension:” “Holding,” in this context, means that group leaders may find themselves the “lone container of hope” for the group, the visionary who has to “hold the possibility for relational resilience” (Jordan 1992, p. 6) until this responsibility can be more fully shared between group members. It is particularly empowering for group members when they become increasingly able to hold these tensions and find new ways of working creatively through disconnections on their own. This creative energy leads to increased mutuality, as group members become more able to represent their individual experiences more authentically.”15 (Comstock 2002, p. 262)

Our conversations had started as a woven connection of women working to hold onto our faith, ourselves, and each other, and they wound up being poured into a more focused effort to create a sacred space for seeing and validating Black experiences within our church’s history. The concept for a Black LDS Legacy Conference was born. Five years later, the first Black LDS Legacy Conference premiered in Washington, D.C. at the Washington, D.C. Temple Visitor’s Center.

The Healing Connection of Black Conference Gatherings In 2018, the Legacy of Black LDS Pioneers Conference was conceived to be a seminar on Black history in the church, because there was an available weekend at the Washington D.C.  Temple Visitors Center in February during Black History Month in the United States. Our conference also happened to land on

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the same weekend as the blockbusting cinematic debut of Marvel Comic’s first Black hero, “Black Panther;” for African Americans, another Black pioneer. We worked to create connection among attendees from the moment the conference opened until the closing song. The planning committee made an intentional and purposeful decision to commemorate the 1978 restoration of the priesthood and its blessings to Black families. The overarching conference theme in 2018 was on temples and missionary work. We hosted workshops on topics ranging from a history of Black missionary work, contemporary conversations on race, Black LDS women’s interactions with the priesthood and the temple, and intersectional identities within Black LDS membership. Our keynote speaker made a presentation on the usage of the word “black” in the scriptures, and another workshop generated reflections on resistance to racism in the history of the United States where the LDS Church is established. Attendees enthusiastically reported experiencing renewed energy and increased knowledge about Black experience in their local wards. Subsequently, regional LDS leadership in the Washington D.C. area invited the conference to return again in 2019. Meanwhile, June 2018 was the 40th anniversary of the LDS Church’s affirmation that men of all races were worthy to receive the priesthood, thus removing the previous ban that had excluded men of African descent from being priesthood holders. Our local planning committee of Black Latter-day Saints organized a performative devotional at the General Conference Center in Salt Lake City (which was part of a larger, global church celebration of the priesthood ban removal called “Be One”).16 Descendants of early Black LDS Church members narrated a gripping account of the African diaspora through the routes of the trans-Atlantic trafficking trade to American shores and then linked these accounts to the conversion and eventual LDS Church growth of Black member communities around the world. Narrators recounted the experiences of members in their home countries before and after rescindment of the priesthood ban. The support of church leaders—particularly Apostle Gary E. Stevenson and Elders Edward Dube and Joseph W. Sitati (these latter two officials being African by birth)—and their participation on the night of the event—followed by their expressions of appreciation to event organizers over dinner (which, for some ranking officials, required returning home early from various international locations in order to attend the event)—greatly encouraged our planning committee. It created new potential for establishing “deep and abiding connections through creative work and a commitment to mutual empathy.” We felt empowered and institutionally supported to continue planning for the next Black Legacy Conference in 2019, and we applied lessons learned from the favorable events experienced in 2018 in so doing. Our February 2019 conference theme was “Representing a Black LDS Legacy: Beyond Be One.” Conference topics again centered on Black experiences in a worldwide church, such as “Becoming One: Creating the Worldwide ‘Be One’ Faith Celebration” and emphasized the importance of constructing Black Latter-day Saint identities. A community forum was added to the

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program in order to give attendees time to connect with each other, process the information gained from each session, and develop ideas for strengthening continued membership and engagement in their home wards. We had begun hearing some participants saying to us that, due to negative experiences they were having in their home wards and branches, they had anticipated this Legacy Conference would be their last stop on the way out of the church. Our planning committee shared this feedback with local LDS leadership in the D.C. area to help us better reach out to area mission fields for improving support of these members. Legacy Conference themes, workshop topics, and keynote selections each year are planned to highlight the importance of making and strengthening connections. Commitment to represent diverse voices in different Black communities reflects the committee’s attempt to create an environment that truly reflects the body of Christ in action. Our conference has become an important forum for discussion of what it means to embrace and honor the history of Black Latter-day Saints and to carry the legacy forward. Most recently, in February 2020, the Legacy conference theme was “Honoring our Divine Birthright.” This theme focused on making a connection to what it means to identify as a Black person of faith within the Latter-­day Saint Community. The goal was to continue showcasing a variety of perspectives by sharing different experiences through creative expression, such as writing, artistry, and music. An author’s question and answer workshop elaborated on the collaborative work process between an LDS member (Margaret Olsen Hemming) and a former LDS member but now a Baptist preacher (Rev. Dr. Fatimah Salleh). Their co-authored book, The Book of Mormon for the Least of These, employed tenets of liberation theology to assess the Book of Mormon’s message to oppressed peoples. Melissa Kamba-Boggs, a Black artist, presented detailed paintings that demonstrated the power of what adding Black representation to the church’s artwork could look like. (The paintings presented and discussed in her workshop were on display at the Temple Visitor’s Center throughout the 2020 conference.) The keynote presentations had similar identity and connection purposes and effects. One focused on the faith of the great American civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and connected it to types of faith and action described within the Book of Mormon. The other expounded on the importance of genealogy work in African-descended communities, especially those impacted by the history of chattel enslavement in the United States for both descendants of the enslaved as well as descendants of the enslavers. Legacy Conference Impact on the Creation of Safe, Integrated Congregations for Black LDS Members The potential for healing evidenced from experiences and knowledge obtained at these conferences is rooted in the relational concepts of mutual engagement,

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mutual empathy, and mutual empowerment described by relational therapist Julie Mencher: Mutual engagement is the capacity in both people for attention and interest … Mutual empathy refers to being attuned to and responsive to the subjective inner experience of the other, and the capacity to share in and comprehend the momentary psychological state of the other person … it requires neither sameness or differentness, but can exist in either case … Mutual empowerment is the mutual capacity to be moved by, respond to, and move the other.17

At our Legacy Conferences, attendees and regional leadership clearly demonstrate a desire and a capacity for attention to and interest in Black experiences and Black history within the LDS Church. Mutual empathy is both a starting point and a goal for the continuance of the Black LDS Legacy Conference. The inner experiences of Black Latter-day Saints are able to find a safe, brief home that is shared among other attendees across ethnic backgrounds. Concentrated listening occurs at this conference in a way that does not yet happen in home congregations, based on attendee feedback we have received. Finally, the potential for mutual empowerment for attendees as a result of attending the Legacy conference is high. One marker for demonstrating growth in mutual empowerment is an improved ability to be moved by, respond to, and reciprocally move others. And an even more important marker is, if attendees are not connected to LDS Black communities where they live, can they make mutual empowerment actions work within non-Black church environments? Most research about contemporary Black Latter-day Saints focuses on the history of Black individual member experiences within the church. They rarely address the structural and systemic consequences of antebellum enslavement and subsequent racist experiences that affected, and continue to affect, the interpersonal relationships between Black and non-Black church members. African-descended LDS Black members in the United States are the only ethnic group not afforded an opportunity by the church to have culture-specific congregations rooted in language needs similar to other ethnic and cultural groups, with migration histories in the United States, who do not speak English as a first language. The equivalency of a shared language for African Americans is their cultural and social legacies, derived from a common history of enslavement, colonization, and bigoted discrimination against them. Connections within Black communities are protected by this “language” that non-African Americans must learn in order to fully engage, appreciate, and connect with their Black brothers and sisters. Nevertheless, until such time as ancient prejudices become truly eradicated among their fellow Saints, it is incumbent on new Black members to integrate their LDS wards and gamble their psychological safety in the process of seeking mutual connections within their faith.

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Survey Questions Regarding Conference Impacts on Attendees At the conclusion of each conference (and the numerous informal conversations that it has facilitated), attendees are given opportunities to share their experiences and major takeaways. Based on this feedback, committee members begin meeting to plan the next year’s conference theme based on what seem to be the interests and concerns of Black communities, both inside and outside of the LDS Church. One of the issues that has emerged for the committee relates to the actual effect of the conference on attendees in trying to create worship environments in LDS congregations in which Black members and their historical legacy are fully embraced. After the last session of the 2020 Black LDS Legacy Conference, attendees were systematically surveyed and asked a number of questions about their motivations to attend, their insights and takeaways from the conference, and their ability to engage in conversations with members of their home wards about Black history as a result of attending Legacy Conferences. Attendees’ responses to all questions will not be included for summary review here. Rather I will highlight responses related to aspects of relational movement that were introduced earlier in this chapter. These responses provide ideas for potential ways forward for Black LDS members to strengthen connections within the church, given its prior racist history but also its current improvements in race relations. Attendee Motivations and Conference Impact: A Desire to Connect Respondents generally shared positive and curiosity-based motivations for attending the conference. Those who live outside of a Black community reported that they were seeking spiritual uplift, wanting to satisfy a need for unity and healing, to be supportive of Black communities, to improve their education, to experience authentically told stories of others, and broaden their understanding of who they were. Those proximal to a Black community through marriage or familial relationships, as well as members of a Black community per se, were motivated to attend the conference because they were seeking community with others who understand the experience of being Black members in the LDS Church. Virtually all conference attendees employed positive terms to describe the conference. The most frequently reported words were: educational, informative, unifying, uplifting, inspirational, and enlightening. A reasonable inference from these responses is that, in terms of making connections, attendees viewed the conference as an experience that facilitated a deeper relationship with themselves, their faith, and their home communities.

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Engaging Disconnection: The Impact of Conference Keynotes/ Workshops Conference attendees cited particular keynote presentations as providing them with concepts and language to better share their Black community experiences with others. They expressed gratitude for the conference as an opportunity to create and share understandings rooted in a shared faith. Many were positively impacted by hearing liberation theology applied to the Book of Mormon. Others pointed to the imparted sense of Black representation and empowerment through images of Black art, finding hope in the works and words presented in the artist workshop, as they confirmed everyday experiences of Black family members who seek representation in church spaces. Still others cited gaining greater understanding about the impact of family history on Black families, especially those descended from chattel slavery in the United States. Attendees also noted how they appreciated learning how to deal with harmful use of scriptures and how to read them “critically and by the spirit” to avoid taking words literally if those words could be harmful to fellow members. Other significant takeaways included references to the power of visual images, the ways to have conversations that create deeper understandings, and the acquisition of additional layers of understanding characters in scripture and interpretations of scripture. Something that almost all attendees mentioned experiencing was an appreciation for the power of genealogy within Black communities. Many attendees acknowledged that their prior ignorance about Black LDS community experience had prevented them from seeking out information, but that they would leave the conference with elevated belief in and support of Black members’ legacy in the church. And many felt themselves better able to be of service in contributing to the fourfold mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (i.e., to perfect the Saints, proclaim the gospel, redeem the dead, and care for the poor and needy).18 Some Black LDS member attendees stated an improved ability to see themselves as equal to all Saints, a dramatic change from believing in their own inferiority. White members, with proximity to the Black community, acknowledged seeing the benefit of gathering with other Saints who were Black, as they “understand struggles that I cannot as a White person.” Yet these White members also see themselves as partners in the work of anti-racism, while at the same time feeling themselves and their experiences validated too. Finally, all participants found themselves confirmed in a personalized gospel, encouraged to worship in diverse ways, and empowered to have open conversations about issues important to others. Creative Work Toward Mutual Empathy: Attendee’s Ward Experiences A number of attendees stated that their local church participation has been positively impacted by attending past Legacy Conferences. They indicated improved awareness and ability to speak up when situations in their wards are

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experienced as harmful to the history and contemporary standing of Black Saints. They express a feeling of increased and improved belonging in their wards, along with more familiarity with their Black congregants. They feel emboldened and empowered to speak up, because they see value in their individual experiences that can help change collective experiences within their congregations. Other attendees noted that, when listening to certain discussions in church, they were able to remember how similar topics were covered in past Legacy conference sessions they had attended. They reported an improved ability to talk about Black history, and they feel freer and more entitled to speak up because they now have a better vocabulary to share their thoughts and feelings. They experience greater peace related to their concerns about controversial issues in the church, because they have a better understanding of Black Latter-day Saint perspectives. Many felt that the most important thing taken away from attending the conference was a stronger testimony of the gospel and its potential power to help all members, Black members included, to be seen, valued, and needed in the church; that it’s important to ensure a valued place for everyone. One participant even noted an immediate positive change in her husband’s response to recent racist experiences in their LDS stake and within their own family as a result of the ways that previous Legacy conferences had validated him. Seeking Relational Transformation: A Message to Leadership Attendees repeatedly shared with the conference committee messages of thanks they had sent to LDS Church leadership in Washington, D.C. for hosting, supporting, and helping to create a safe social psychological space in which the conference could occur. To the organizing committee specifically, attendees sent supportive messages of gratitude for providing a learning experience and a place where members felt like they “truly belonged” and were validated. Attendees shared a desire and commitment to bring others with them to future conferences. Some attendees passed along insights obtained from attending local ward council meetings that saw the Legacy Conference as a resource only for their Black members. In this regard, these attendees had a number of suggestions and requests for Area LDS Church leadership, in particular requests for more publicity in local congregations about the conference, advertising it as beneficial to all members and not limited only to Black members, including attendance of local leaders. Attendees want to see conferences like this organized locally and more support given for member attendance from areas outside of Washington, D.C. Suggestions were also given to church leaders to generally “do more to help include, validate, and learn from our Black brothers and sisters,” to reciprocate the efforts that Black communities were making to follow gos pel principles and establish relationships with Christ while striving to diminish institutional racism and work toward unity as a community of Saints.

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Finally, attendees sent a specific message to leadership at church headquarters in Salt Lake City requesting that Black LDS Legacy Conference presenters be able to speak to the church as a whole through videos of the conference shared on the church website. Attendees also asked for more transparent support of leadership at church headquarters in efforts to help heal lingering past wounds caused by racism. In a sense, attendees were attempting to create a mini-Zion which would fully embrace the racist challenges posed by our history and rebuke and renounce any instances of it in our present. Attendees want to see leadership that is more representative of our global membership and to see events like the Legacy Conference more widely available to Church members throughout the United States.

Concluding Reflections I have often thought of my EFY sisters from 22 years ago and wondered if they are still active in our Latter-day Saint faith, especially when my own activity ebbs and flows. The opportunity to become involved in an annual conference that centers on Black LDS membership experiences has been a way for me to revitalize my own faith, something I didn’t fully know I needed until I experienced how much others needed it too. I accept this as part of a mission call I sought after years ago. I am often reminded of a conversation—and my subsequent reflections and sudden epiphany in an LDS Church meeting—about the intentional purposes of the New Testament parable of the “lost sheep.”19 Black, brown, and other colors of sheep, within a shepherd’s flock of otherwise White sheep, are known as the “counters.” They occur in nature at the rate of one per every 100 sheep, allowing the shepherd to know, at a glance, how many sheep are under her care. The flocks are not considered gathered to safety until the “counters” are in. How apt a comparison, and how necessary a shift, to consider the power that can be shared through a conference designated for God’s “counters” in the LDS faith—the literal Black sheep. Consider the paradigm shift that occurs when we embrace an understanding that Blackness is not a curse, but a calling, as explained by Elijah Abel’s character in “Standing on the Promises.20” May we honor work that supports the Counters, whether they determine on their own or are encouraged by others, to attend the Black LDS Legacy Conferences, and other similar conferences, in their times of need. May we facilitate the conversations and the transformations that empower connection and mutuality, inclusive of our racialized history. May we actively see and support the Counters who gather together and then return to their flocks. May we see these kinds of conferences as relational connections that endow and empower each of us with a responsibility to connect our shared Latter-day Saint faith, to see each other and be seen, to stand and be counted, to lead and repair and become inclusive, to provide for the safety of our brothers and sisters in the whole of the body of Christ. When the Counters are gathered in, the flock is complete.

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Notes 1. From about 1852 until 1978, the LDS Church did not permit men of African descent to be ordained as priesthood holders. This prohibition effectively blocked Black LDS males (and their wives, if married) from entering and participating in the sacred activities performed only in LDS temples. It also prevented Black LDS males from full participation in local congregations, which are structured around the leadership of lay priesthood holders. This exclusionary policy was lifted in 1978, after then-church president and prophet, Spencer W. Kimball, proclaimed revelatory guidance in ending the ban, allowing all worthy male members of the Church Of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be ordained to the priesthood without regard for race or color. 2. Miller, Jean Baker, Toward a New Psychology of Women; Comstock, Dana L., “The Relational-Cultural Model: A Framework for Group Process.” 3. Collins, Black Feminist Thought. 4. Ibid., Comstock. 5. For more on EFY, see website at [email protected] (last accessed 20/20). 6. John Bytheway is an LDS author and speaker who specializes in communicating with young people. 7. Tatum, Beverly, “Racial Identity Development and Relational Theory.” 8. Jordan, et al. “Women and Empathy.” 9. Young, Margaret Blair and Darius Aiden Gray. Standing on the Promises [Books I, II, and III]. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2000, 2002, and 2003. 10. A patriarchal blessing in the LDS Church is given to a worthy member, upon request, typically at some time during young adulthood by an authorized “church patriarch.” This blessing conveys to the recipient what is believed to be an inspired set of promises that are contingent on continuing worthiness of the recipient, thus providing a general forecast for potential future life outcomes. See Shepherd, Gary and Gordon Shepherd, Binding Earth and Heaven: Patriarchal Blessings in the Prophetic Development of Early Mormonism (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). 11. The notion of Zion first appears in the Old Testament of the Bible: “The Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them” Moses 7:18. 12. “Shooting of Trayvon Martin,” Wikipedia. (Accessed 05/10/2020). 13. “Come Back and Feast at the Table of the Lord.” 14. Minerva Teichert was a Mormon artist whose paintings have adorned many LDS meeting houses, temples, and instructional materials. 15. Ibid., Comstock, 262. 16. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church/events/worldwide-priesthoodcelebration?lang=eng. (Last accessed 05/07/2020). 17. Mencher, “Intimacy in Lesbian Relationships,” 322–323. 18. Young, Margaret Blair and Darius Aidan Gray, Standing on the Promises. 19. See my blog posting at https://rationalfaiths.com/black-sheep-blacklivesmatter/ for a deeper account of my” black-sheep-as-counter” insight and applications. 20. Young, Margaret Blair and Darius Aidan Gray, Standing on the Promises.

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Bibliography Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Come and Feast at the Table of the Lord,” Teachings of the Presidents of the Church: Howard W. Hunter. Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Ch. 12. Comstock, Dana, Thelma Duffey, and Holly St. George. 2002. The Relational-Cultural Model: A Framework for Group Process. The Journal for Specialists in Group Work 27 (3): 254–272. Comstock, Dana L., et al. 2008. Relational-Cultural Theory: A Framework for Bridging Relational, Multicultural, and Social Justice Competencies. Journal of Counseling and Development 86: 279–287. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Jordan, Judith, et  al. 1991. Women and Empathy: Implications for Psychological Development and Psychotherapy. In Women’s Growth in Connection: Writings from the Stone Center, ed. Judith Jordan et al. New York: Guilford Press. Mencher, Judith. 1997. Intimacy in Lesbian Relationships: A Critical Re-Examination of Fusion. In Women’s Growth in Diversity: More Writings from the Stone Center, ed. Judith Jordan, 311–328. New York: Guilford Press. Miller, Jane B. 1976. Toward a New Psychology of Women. Boston: Beacon Press. Tatum, Beverly. 1997. Racial Identity Development and Relational Theory: The Case of Black Women in White Communities. In Women’s Growth in Diversity: More Writings from the Stone Center, ed. Judith Jordan, 91–106. New York: Guilford Press. Williams, LaShawn C.  Of Black Sheep and #Blacklives Matter. Accessed 5 October 2020. https://rationalfaiths.com/black-sheep-blacklivesmatter/.

CHAPTER 28

Lamanitas, The Spanish-speaking Hermanos: Latinos Loving Their Mormonism Even as They Remain the Other Ignacio M. Garcia

I stood in the lobby of the chapel in my green Army uniform, staring at the few people asking each other about their week. Mine was the only brown face and it would be a lonely brown face as I left the chapel a couple of hours later. I don’t remember if it was the Latter-day Saint (LDS) bishop or one of his counselors who asked me a question or two, the only interaction of my worship time there, but he did not actually welcome me. I remember never going back and simply reading my scriptures, praying and watching “clean movies” during my sabbaths at Valley Forge Surgical Hospital in Pennsylvania where I was a medical corpsman in 1970. I attended a predominantly white ward (congregation) of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints one more time after college—it was actually a mixed congregation on the United States-Mexican border—with mostly white leaders who sought to make all their services and classes bilingual. Notwithstanding the noble gesture, it sounded awkward hearing one prayer in Spanish, another in English, and following that approach throughout all the classes. I know the Latino counselor seemed committed to make it work but, with few exceptions, neither group seemed all that interested in the language-­ switching. He probably saw this bilingual approach to worship as the only way to keep his fellow Latino worshippers from being overwhelmed by the whiteness of the Latter-day Saint gospel, particularly in places like Texas, and even

I. M. Garcia (*) Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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more so in the border region where “loyalty” to American ideals and leaders is expected and privately demanded. The bishop in Laredo, Texas was happy to see me, contemplating another “bilingual brother” to help out in the difficult chore of keeping the dual language services going. But, in trying to strike up a conversation, he commented on how “difficult” my people were. My response shocked him. “So are your people,” I said. He had no answer but his need for “helping hands” mitigated any concerns he might have had, and he called me as a youth teacher. Shortly after, however, I moved to another city. I never again attended a white ward, though as a stake priesthood leader several times, I did have reason to interact with my white brothers and sisters, counsel them, and train them in their callings. After those two experiences, however, I’ve pretty much accepted that while the “restored gospel” is the same anywhere we go—as most Latter-day Saint leaders like to believe—the feeling that we are in “Zion” everywhere we go is not. Race, class, ethnicity, and national origin do matter when people try to get together. This does not mean that Latino Latter-day Saints and white Latter-­ day Saints do not congregate together, or that one group is always excluded from the other, or that there aren’t any members of either racial group that don’t “live” very happily in a ward where they are a minority. Every Spanish-­ language ward I’ve attended always had more than one and sometimes several white/Latino mixed families and in some cases all-white families. They seemed happy and most felt received wholeheartedly. The same goes for Latino Saints in some white wards. Yet, those early experiences and numerous others convinced me that at least one of the groups has to predominate in order for that situation to work. Full equality in the congregations of Zion is not yet functional. It may work in other mixed-race societies—though it probably is the exception rather than the rule—but it rarely works in American congregations. This has been the case for Latinos and other Latter-day Saints of color since the church was first established among them.1 No one has written a history of Latino Latter-day Saints in the United States, so we know little about the establishment of Latino congregations, and what we do know is still based on sketchy information and assumptions. It is probable, however, that the first congregations of the “Spanish-speaking,” as they were known for a long time, opened around the same time (1920) in El Paso, Salt Lake City, and Mesa, Arizona.2 Within three years all of them had become branches (small LDS congregations) specifically for Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants. In 1921 Margarito Bautista becomes president of the “Misión Mexicana Local” in Salt Lake City, and two years later José Apolinar Balderas becomes branch president in El Paso. Margarito Bautista became one of the most infamous of Latino Latter-day Saints, but his most important years were spent in Mexico where he returned to serve a mission and basically never returned to the United States.3 Balderas, an immigrant from Celaya, Mexico, a barber by profession and a “silver tongued” preacher, became the first truly transnational Latter-day Saint

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leader as he served as branch president, first in El Paso, then Mexico City and then returned to Texas to devote himself to missionary work. His son, Eduardo, was one of the first Mexican American missionaries for the church and eventually became the church’s first full-time translator, while his other son, Guillermo, became one of the mainstays of Mexican American Mormons in El Paso and the first Latino bishop in the United States. Eduardo later became one of the first, if not the first Latino patriarch in the church.4 Other branches and eventually wards arose over the next decades, most of them havens for Mexican immigrants coming across the border looking for work or escaping the violence that hampered Mexico until almost the 1930s when one party rule became the norm and with it institutional stability.5 Of course, border crossings have never ceased, but the ebb and flow continues according to the economic situation in Mexico and the pull factors of American agricultural and industrial needs. The border, the first space for Mexican migration and for Mexican Latter-day Saint gatherings eventually, extended “culturally and socially” across most of the Southwest and further north, often following the migrant trails that extended from the border to el Norte— Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, and various communities in between.6 The church’s work among Latinos started after it made its first missionary forage into Mexico in 1875 when Brigham Young sent five missionaries with a Spanish-language selection of the faith’s major scripture, the Book of Mormon. The effort proved to be short-lived—only 13 years—though at least 18 missionaries tarried in the missionary field and converted about 241 souls to the church while establishing two congregations, mostly in central Mexico. Unfortunately for them, work in the urban centers did not prove fruitful and rural congregations were difficult to maintain active. Several missionaries, including Apostle Abraham O. Woodruff, died while proselyting there. Also, things in Utah were difficult for the church as it engaged in a conflict with the federal government over polygamy and political control of the state. This conflict took the church to the brink of collapse, but it survived by abandoning polygamy and isolationist politics, and creating an American hyper-patriotism. In a manner of speaking, Utah Mormons became “white,” as other groups have done to be acceptable in US Society.7 By the mid-twentieth century, white Mormon peculiarity evolved from doctrinal to cultural and social, with its members—particularly its elites—finding ways to downplay their nonmainstream views and emphasize their patriotism and whiteness.8 It was only in the “colonies” or the “mission field,” as some like to call it, that they tried to maintain more solid boundaries of belief.9 Boundary-maintenance became centered on the “other” Latter-day Saints, imitating in some form, white America’s focus on regulating and monitoring their “ethnics” and people of color. That it was done in a more paternalistic rather than overtly racist manner—without violence or complete shunning— did not eliminate the social control aspects of American cultural bias, prejudice and yes, some “mild” forms of racism. Of course, “mild racism” may not be interpreted as such by the different groups affected.10

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The case of the “Third Convention” in Mexico reveals how the monitoring and regulating revealed itself. A number of works have been published on the “Third Convention,” so I will summarize and only point out its importance for understanding how the LDS Church developed its regulatory approach to Spanish-speaking congregations. The Third Convention was formed from a combination of Mexican nationalism following the Mexican Revolution and the distinctive LDS belief that “the time of the Lamanite” (indigenous people) had come.11 While none of this was explicitly mentioned in Third Convention rhetoric initially, it reverberated through its actions. Mexican Saints, after having been left to fend for themselves, but without any priesthood authority when white LDS officials fled the Mexican Revolution, demanded that they be given Mexican leadership and more material resources to expand the work in Mexico. The church refused to acknowledge their grievances or to sit and negotiate with them, and this led to an almost ten-year split that ended in 1946 when church president and Mormon prophet, George Albert Smith, went to visit the “Convencionistas.” He promised them local leadership—which did not come for decades—and wooed the leaders of the movement with a promise that allowed them to enter the church’s temples to engage in the most important Latter-day Saint rituals.12 The church did provide more Spanish-language materials and hired its first full-time translator—and first Spanish-language translator—who translated the church’s scriptural cannon, developed a magazine in Mexico, selected and translated songs for a Spanish-language hymn book, and eventually translated LDS temple rituals to Spanish, thus making the faith’s most important covenants available to Mexican Saints.13 Salt Lake City church officials also built schools and provided more training for local church leaders in Mexico. The Third Convention had won concessions but did so at a high price, making that experience fundamentally important for the growth of the church south of the border, but also institutionalizing a centralized leadership structure that slowed the rise of a more indigenous theology in Latin America and created an orthodox, inner-focused brand of Latino Mormonism that still prevails in many congregations in Latin America. White Latter-day Saints continued to dominate the upper echelons of church leadership in Mexico, and often very young white missionaries provided leadership in local congregations, re-affirming the supremacy of religious whiteness among the Mexican Saints. The teachings of the Book of Mormon, a scripture often seen as promising a bright and liberating future for indigenous Saints, became a reminder that, notwithstanding a glorious future, they would still be led and “nurtured” by white leadership that would determine when and how “El Lamanita” would “blossom.”14 This religion of racial asymmetries so strongly gripped the Latter-day Saint psyche that even the Third Convention’s most fervent nationalists, like Margarito Bautista, accepted that their ancestors had been “cursed” with a dark skin for disobedience but would one day become “white and delightsome” through obedience to the commandments of the restored gospel.15

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While modern science, most political philosophies, and most theological treatises reject the notion of skin color as determining intelligence, abilities, or religious favor, Latter-day Saints accepted these asymmetries as official doctrine until almost the end of the 1970s. LDS authorities subsequently rejected these beliefs as folklore rather than doctrine, but there are still white Latter-day Saints who believe in some form of spiritual pecking order and, regrettably, a host of indigenous Saints also still accept these historical racist notions about themselves and their own people.16 Making things difficult for Latino/indigenous Saints has been the church’s unwillingness to see the racial mistakes of the past outside the black/white binary of American racial thought. Latino Saints, like most other non-black Saints of color, are left to linger in some third space between cursed and non-­ cursed, with the apparent solution coming through assimilation to some form of whiteness, even if it’s simply in shades within their own societies and racial groups. This, of course, creates fissures among people of color because they lack a religious history that both exposes white colonialist actions against them, and yet extols the faith of those who have been loyal in spite of racial/ethnic asymmetries. These asymmetries continue to make non-black people of color invisible unless they get close to or away from the extremes of the white/black binary. This is why many members saw the much-praised “Be One” celebration as the final word on the church’s racial problem, and liberal LDS scholars can see themselves striking a blow for church racial equality by focusing on the smallest ethnic/racial group in the church.17 This mirrors what has happened to Latino history in the American narrative, so it is not surprising—given the racial asymmetry of its leadership—that it also has happened in the LDS Church. While some Latinos might see the church’s official panethnic approach—we are all habla Español people, have the same language and culture, and see the gospel in the same way—as giving them more influence, it actually robs them of their history, traditions, culture, and language dialects, while offering them a “more sensitive” assimilation that sifts away the best and brightest—and their potential to be the “whitest”—among them.18 While Latino panethnicity is a situation peculiar to the United States, other forms of panethnicity in the LDS Church also function around the world as different groups of Latter-day Saints of color are forced to use American Mormonism as their binding glue. This is because a real discussion of ethnicity and race are taboo subjects in Mormon multicultural settings, even where whites are a miniscule minority.19 Latino Saints, as I have written before, are often umbrella-ed under a cover of white sovereignty in church administration, theology, and resource distribution. This is not always calculated but it does reflect the racial/ethnic pecking order deeply engrained in the American Latter-day Saint mind. Latino Saints thus become the modern-day gentiles of Paul’s time, expected to conform not only to doctrinal commandments but also to traditions, customs, cultural interpretations, and white leadership. Ironically, a people—at least those of indigenous genealogy—who were once seen as natural branches of the House of

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Israel must now be grafted onto the American tree of Latter-day Saintism in order to fulfill their destiny within the Kingdom of God. Latino Saints, no doubt, will one day sit in the highest councils of the LDS Church, given their numbers and their more western ways, but only after much grafting and assimilating, thus calling into question how well they will represent who they really are. To be fair, though, Latino general authorities do speak to Latino congregants in the language of the promises of the Book of Mormon. They remind them of their genealogy, their language, and their cultural traits that are consistent with “gospel ideals.” Unfortunately, they rarely speak that language or interpret it to a larger audience, concentrating instead on their people’s humility, their sacrifice to join the Latter-day Saint church, and their willingness to follow their leaders. This, of course, is comforting to white members who see no threats to their cultural and social version of the gospel.20 Latter-day Saints are a prophetic people, and they tend to follow their leaders and believe things will be alright in the end, though they are not beyond believing that God makes occasional “course corrections” and their leaders can be wrong. This, however, only applies to past leaders and former policies. Thus, the prophetic inclination can become disempowered when it fails to address current realities of the human condition, particularly those that arise out of poverty, racial asymmetry, colonialism, exploitation, violence, and cultural differences. Like other white dominated, conservative religious organizations, the LDS Church officially proclaims a universalistic vision of the Christian life, but also fosters a mixture of middle-class values, patriotism, capitalist-competitive individualism, and racial asymmetry. To many Latter-day Saint believers, however, and particularly to Latino and other Saints of color, the gospel message is actually liberating and inspiring, providing answers to most of life’s questions extending beyond the proverbial box of orthodox pronouncements. I say this not within any established theological framework but in terms of a “religion on the ground.” That is, Mormonism continues to be inspiring for many because it works on the ground. In my opinion, it functions as its founder Joseph Smith intended it. In his wonderful biography of Joseph Smith, Richard Bushman argues that while other nineteenth century religious leaders like Alexander Campbell reveled in quiet contemplation, Joseph was a doer, a builder, a preacher of practicalities, while maintaining a steady stream of “revelations” from on high. According to Joseph, both men and women were to become Gods in the afterlife—which meant being like their “Heavenly parents”—engaged in the eternal work of building a celestial order.21 With centralized authority, lots of moving parts with limited but still extensive powers at the local and regional level, the church Joseph established became attractive to many poor immigrants, first from Europe, then the southern states, and eventually to those from the “colored” parts of the world.22 By mid-twentieth century, the biggest group in the latter category of converts were Mexicans, on both sides of the border, and behind them, came other, much more diverse groups from Latin America and the Caribbean. These

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people saw order, stability, and promise in this new American religion. After numerous revolutions, civil wars, class and racial conflicts, economic roller coasters, and religious conflict, most converts from south of the border found the Mormon gospel—or el evangelio de los Mormones—attractive as a new way to change their lives. This was the case even though initially it seemed foreign and difficult to practice in their communities due to cultural and Catholic traditions, as well as hostility from their neighbors who saw them not only leaving the faith but also their Mexicanness or Hispanic roots.23 With time, however, el Mormonismo became a distinguishing feature of the converts’ lives and a way to distance themselves from the traditions, vices, and conflicts that they saw in their native communities. It became a badge of courage for working class Latino men to wear a white shirt and tie (where available), to assume lay leadership—something unavailable to most of them before—to study books without going to school, and to develop discipline in their lives. Latinas now saw validation in their domestic sphere, found a sisterhood not always available in their previous lives, and, at the same time discovered opportunities to be teachers—teaching even the men in their lives—auxiliary presidents, secretaries, able to give talks, develop agendas, and contemplate their eternal prospects in ways they never imagined possible as women.24 It is important to note that most Latino Latter-day Saint women have always worked, either full-time or periodically, in order for their families to survive economically. Larger families, with undocumented status for some, discrimination in jobs and in school, as well as prejudices and racism in the larger society, have kept LDS Latinos on the margins economically and socially. Yet, within their congregations, they find a sense of equity in treatment and validation as individuals and families. The church also eases some of their familial burdens as the men stay home more often, treat wives and children with greater respect, and leave behind their vices and bad habits. Far from total equality, these unions nonetheless are often much better after conversion to Mormonism than before. Latter-day Saint culture might sustain patriarchy through its traditions and priesthood rituals, but it does not encourage it among men who are not already prone to it. In my experience, the often-mentioned machismo of Mexican men tends to diminish rather than grow in the LDS Church. While far from creating for them a liberating environment that modern feminists might approve, the church does improve the lives of Latina women tremendously as compared to many of their neighbors. One simple reason for this is the order and stability it brings to their lives, which can at times serve as a foundation for personal, educational, and economic improvement. For many, the spaces provided by their wards and branches, by the buildings in their barrios, the softball fields, the basketball courts, the recreational halls, kitchens and the theater stages, allows them to create a world that belongs to them, that insulates them from other Latinos with different values and customs. The Latter-day Saint concept of being “a peculiar people” resonates with them because for many this is the first time that they saw (see) themselves as “special.” Ironically, this American church helped many Latino Saints enhance

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pride in their ethnicity and provided them an identity that is both cultural and racial but also, they believe, divinely inspired. This social-religious womb emerged in the first small congregations that Mexican converts attended. The stories of the Salt Lake City LDS branch and the El Paso, and Mesa, Arizona branches are the stories of internal community-building. Often disparaged by the larger white society and insulated from some Mexican and Mexican American social practices, these new converts sought to maintain their sense of identity. The fact that the pre-1970s LDS gospel, as taught to the Mexican Saints, was all about their Book of Mormon identity made it easier to confront the problems they and their Mexican working class communities faced.25 Of course, this Latin Latter-day Saint internal community-building was similar to the one by other Mexican immigrants (which would be replicated by other Latino immigrants) to help them navigate their new land. Catholicism also offered numerous lay activities and served as the foundation for the mutual aid societies that sprang up in almost every immigrant community in the United States. These societies served as protectors and defenders of the immigrant community, as well as a place to congregate with people of similar backgrounds and aspirations. Mutual aid societies, while often created to assist immigrant parents, became fundamental to the socialization of first-and second-­generation immigrant youth in cultivating an appreciation for their own people and culture. At the same time, aid societies helped them to assimilate into American society and culture by “making ethnic” certain American customs and practices, thus facilitating their appreciation and their practice.26 Many a young man or woman fondly remembers their growing up in an LDS barrio church which they saw as an oasis from the desert that was their poor neighborhoods: the self-destructive gang violence, the rampant discrimination and hopelessness of dreams that seem always to escape those who are poor, immigrant, and racially different. I also remember as a young man feeling that the church was the only place where I could dream. I would sit against the back outside wall of the chapel and wonder what I could do with life, and what God might want from me. The fact that the sturdy wall of the chapel “had my back” made all dreams seem possible. More than that, it was in one of those barrio churches where I learned public speaking, sports, writing, leadership, and social interaction. For a poor immigrant boy with few skills, whose family had little money to put him into sports or to take him to cultural activities, the ward youth activities, and the men and women who taught us, organized and accompanied us in these youthful activities changed my life and that of many other youths in the Mexican/Latino church. In Sunday and weekday lessons and in breaks during activities, these leaders often taught us about service and our responsibility to others. In some Latino wards and branches more than others, leaders teach about culture, emphasizing that Latino Saints have a sacred history and that the “future” for us “Lamanitas” is bright. We are the future of the church. This might seem farfetched but some of us believed it. For me, it was through these activities and the mentoring of these dedicated individuals that I learned to think like an

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adult and to empathize with those even more poor and in more dire circumstances than myself. I also learned to feel comfortable—as much as one can when one is poor and brown—around white Mormons and eventually other whites.27 I lost my need to please those who saw themselves above me. That gave me the courage to get involved in a protest in high school over educational discrimination, helped me organize maintenance workers at the university I attended, prepared me to become chair of a county political party, and developed me into a writer and historian. Most importantly, it helped me make the choice between dedicating myself to a life of personal gain and stability versus one that engaged in improving other people’s lives, even in the smallest of ways. The choice to engage in the latter has brought many consequences: lost jobs, missed opportunities, and lack of institutional leadership roles. Yet it also brings me greater joy than any personal accomplishments. That is what these wards and branches have meant for many Latino Saints, a great many who did not live extraordinary lives but made extraordinary contributions to their faith communities and neighborhoods. Yet, only until recently has church leadership truly understood the value of the ethnic wards, which have often been seen as a way to facilitate assimilation into the Latter-day Saint mainstream. This lack of understanding is caused by the absence of a Hispanic Ministry. While Latter-day Saints don’t normally like to use the word “ministry,” they nonetheless recently replaced the traditional male priesthood role of “home teaching” (a monthly assignment to visit a group of member families) with the idea of “ministering” to families rather than just visiting them and providing a lesson or service. As of the writing of this essay, this new “ministering” approach remains vague in the minds of many church members who are uncomfortable with the notion of being “ministers of Christ,” which to them sounds like something more akin to Protestant worship and belief.28 Latter-day Saints see themselves a practical people who have figured out a “work assignment” approach for most needs in the church. Many members moved from “worshipping” to doing the “work” of the Lord. Temple worship became temple work, and missionary service became missionary work, charity became charitable work … one gets the picture. From the 1950s to the 1990s, the proliferation of business-minded priesthood leaders led to Latter-day Saint worship being encapsulated into a “correlation” framework that necessitates agendas, plans of action, goals, statistics, reports, stewardship meetings, and gives a “corporate sense” to religious work—forcing even local lay ecclesiastical leaders to push back against the large bureaucracy that is the institutional church.29 Over the last several decades there has been pushback both by the lay membership—particularly younger members—and by local leaders who seem uncomfortable with the power of church “bureaucrats.” This assessment comes from informal bits and pieces of information I’ve picked up from those who work at church headquarters that dominates several square blocks of downtown Salt Lake City.

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This “corporate culture,” for lack of a better word, has also nuclearized the Latter-day Saint community, making the nuclear family the unit of most importance to the church. Latter-day Saint leaders today emphasize a community of nuclear families rather than the extended family extolled in the distinctive Mormon doctrines of Zion and the afterlife. White LDS wards have become “useable” spaces much like malls, schools, and public parks. People go there to do the essential and then go home to do the important. This hampers efforts to minister because ministering requires communion and communion requires congregations that worship together and don’t simply meet to be then divided into different groups for recongregating in separate physical spaces within the same house of worship. The physical compartmentalization of contemporary LDS worship—in contrast to the communion of early Christians and early Mormon communities—arguably means that many current members, particularly the young, are not experiencing those events and spaces that keep them grounded to the church. My own remembrances of being in those holy spaces helped me navigate the usual youthful moments of doubt. About a year ago, as I was driving with one of my grandsons while telling him about my growing up in the church, he said to me, “But I have not experienced those things in my life.” Luckily, his family moved to another town where he got those kinds of communal experiences and I can tell the difference. While formerly he hung on to his parents’ “testimony” of the Latter-day Saint gospel, today he is finding his own religious identity through church activities that go beyond the normal Sunday class. The new youth program that replaces Scouting for the young men, and the Young Women in Excellence program for young women with new activities, is meant to prepare them more spiritually and get them to develop a greater connection with the institutional church. This approach is similar to the one that I experienced as a youth in my barrio church, but without all the new manuals and the sponsored institutional activities. For many LDS leaders, “more is always better.” Time will tell if these new programs, which seem to run counter to the church’s renewed focus on the nuclear family, will prove fruitful in combatting the growing loss of the youth in the church. Admittedly, Latter-day Saint youth have been taught about “community” for a long time but are slowly being disconnected by the nuclearism of a middle-class life. This social contradiction has played out for Latter-day Saints as far back as the founding of their faith, when Joseph Smith sought to establish communal bonds through families instead of individuals. This required a lot of “working and worshipping” together and an abundance of activities—dances, sports, picnics, theatrical productions, firesides, and so on—to keep families connected with one another. This began to disappear as the church cut back on ward sponsored activities like sports and roadshows in order to allow the modern nuclear family to spend more time together. These older ward programs have been replaced by youth “super activities” that involve only a few adult leaders. LDS youth are being given more responsibilities for their lessons and activities and are then sent back to homes where they might or might not be allowed such latitude. This is

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particularly complicated in Latino homes where the patriarchal structure is more present, and where the familial is—or was at one time—focused on the extended family and the faith community. In this particularly challenging time for LDS youth, the experiences of the church in the peripheries—both nationally and internationally—have been particularly useful. Unable to use American scouting and some young women’s related programs, most Latter-day Saints outside the United States have improvised and mixed bonding activities with service and spiritual learning that is often outside the normal, seminary-style learning that is so common in US LDS congregations. While justifying the need for more flexible church programming in foreign locales due to various cultural constraints, the reality is that the American church is actually following the lead of those international— and even ethnic—units that have focused for decades on meeting the spiritual needs of their members through innovation that comes from their own cultural and social circumstances. Unfortunately, these pragmatic efforts are often overlooked and underappreciated by the church bureaucracy. This flexibility provides an opportunity for Latino wards and branches to innovate and prepare their own youth to be Latter-day Saints, not just assimilated to American society and acculturated to its institutional culture, but in fact to become leaders in their own church communities. A deeply spiritual approach to religion is not a problem for Latinos but institutionalized activities sometimes are, because they often require the kind of religious “infrastructure” that many immigrant and other Latinos lack, and often are based on middle-­ class American ideals of the religious life that don’t always resonate with Latter-­ day Saints of color. Many of these Americanized programs require funds, time, and information or knowledge that Latino Saints might lack. They often require white leadership, or as one colleague said, “Latinos who are perceived as white and might have all the requirements of whiteness.” Unfortunately, such leaders might not fully understand how Latinos think or how they worship. Many Latino Saints take a collective approach to learning. For Latinos, “learning at home” is learning that takes place through action. While Latino parents give advice and counsel like other parents, they often do not do so in structured ways. As one successful Latino patriarch told me, “I can give great lessons at church, but I struggle with structured lessons in family home evening with my own children.” That is not the case, of course, with all Latino parents, many of whom have assimilated the church’s home-learning culture, but many still feel more comfortable teaching their children while at work or while engaging in some activity. They depend on teachers and leaders in their local congregations to provide points of theology or doctrine that might be missed in the more experiential teaching they provide to their children. My father, who never became a Latter-day Saint, taught me much about life and about his spiritual values while we worked together at a restaurant he managed, while we walked or did our Saturday morning runs to the nearby lake, or when we listened to his album of Rosicrucian chants. I learned great lessons about work by working alongside him, by seeing him leave hours early to his

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job, and by his tenacity in doing something at every moment of the day. I would see the same in other men and women who became influential in my spiritual life. They were great teachers of the divine, but they did their teaching in unstructured situations. “Learning at home” usually meant going to someone’s home for a fireside chat or inviting families over to my home—after getting married—and having a family home evening lesson that involved much more discussion than lecturing or teaching. I also had youth leaders who felt the necessity of taking us out of a structured environment so that they could teach us religious principles, and my memories of those teachings rarely involved a classroom. Another important element of this teaching was that discussion boundaries were much wider, and the lessons often dealt with our reality in a white world and a white church. The teaching was not explicitly political or ideological, but it did touch on things we needed to learn. This continues to happen in numerous wards and branches of immigrants and other Latino Saints, as well as those of other congregations of color. I have often described what Latino Latter-day Saints do in their church work as engaging in a “theology of action.” This does not mean that decisions, discussions, learning, and leadership take place at the moment without planning; rather, they occur in the moment of a need to do something. Latinos, because of their work schedules, their extended familial connections, and their communal view of religion, often find themselves doing multiple things at multiple times. “Gospel principles” might be their guiding values but the necessity to cover many bases is what determines their actions. Critics may be right that Latinos do not plan as well as their white counterparts, but one reason is that their lives are rarely as orderly as that of American Mormons. The LDS Church has attempted for years to “create” order in the lives of ordinary Latter-day Saints, to institutionalize them so as to make it easier to teach, discipline, and organize them into an army of lay volunteers. From the president of the church to the local bishop and women’s auxiliary presidents, there is an expectation that church members will perform long-term religious duties and, at a second’s notice, respond to emergencies, and do so willingly and efficiently. This, however, only works when the members’ lives are patterned in a particular way, and that is usually not the case with Latino Saints. This has less to do with chaotic lives (though occasionally it may be the case for poorer, less educated Latinos) and more to do with having larger families, less economic stability, and a communal rather than institutional approach to service. What do I mean by this? It means that the familial obligations for Latino members are often compounded by both parents or single parents spending much time in the workplace, sometimes working more than one job, having inadequate child-care unless an extended family member lives nearby, and having fewer resources and time to share or volunteer. This does not mean that Latino Saints are not engaged in helping their friends and fellow Saints, only that the availability of that time is much more limited, or that service is done in ways that are not quantifiable or reportable. Church “area-wide service days”

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often come on Saturdays when many work, and early afternoon service projects or activities come when most of them are coming home tired from work. Yet, many local lay leaders, including those in their own community, who find themselves constantly looking back over their shoulders, afraid of how their stake leaders are assessing them, are sometimes not sensitive or understanding of the challenges their congregants face. Too often their leadership style is contextualized by “stewardship” meetings with their stake leaders who do not always understand Latino ways of worship, but do understand numbers, statistics, and conventional white Latter-day Saint efficiency. Latino Saints often do not “fit the bill”—even to themselves—of an “active” member: someone who is always there, whose job provides them administrative skills or lots of time to engage in “church work,” whose home environment displays middle-class values, who rarely questions anything that comes from the top, whose heroes are the early Utah pioneers, or the “white” general authorities. They see their own people “lacking” in what it takes to be a faithful member. Their sense of “righteousness” rests on their ability to look (or act) like their white counterparts. Sometimes Latino leaders feel the need to spend their time assuring and reassuring their congregations that the stake leaders “love them,” and are there to “teach them,” that the white wards know how to live the gospel.30 When called to speak, some Latino Saints find that their heavy accents and discomfort in speaking the “white language of the gospel” makes them timid, self-critical, full of praise for white members, and apologetic. The Algerian revolutionary Franz Fannon would call that wearing a “white mask” over a brown body, the desire to “act white” while remaining trapped in one’s own brown body.31 Correspondingly, Latinos still come across to the white members as “noble, humble members” in need of salvation, not only spiritually but also temporally. The tragedy is that without that sense of inferiority, many of those feelings and thoughts are actual signs of a Christian faith, as they reflect humility, a recognition that we all fall short, that we love our brothers and sisters who are different from us, and that speaking to one’s fellow Latter-day Saints should be a humbling experience, one we do not take too lightly or in which we act too haughty. There is a lot of sincerity in the words of the Latino Saint asked to speak—mostly to share his or her testimony—at an LDS stake conference, for example, but the asymmetric circumstances too often provide a picture of discomfort to other Latino Saints who want to be able to see themselves represented with skill and certainty at the pulpit. This then re-enforces the “not-ready-for-primetime” feelings that many have of their own people. It also reassures white members that the church is theirs to lead and that their view of the gospel and the church is the correct one. Latino members as well as other Saints of color are there to affirm the good work that is being done for them. This eases any discomfort that a white leader might feel about the “uneven” circumstances of local or area-wide congregations when it comes to leadership callings, financial resources, and doctrinal interpretation.

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This situation is often a result of a direct effort to assimilate Latino adults and youth away from their congregations and toward a “colorblind, fully equal” future with little diversity and no messiness, which some see as the way to create a body of Latter-day Saints with equal rights in the church. I remember as a Mormon bishop in Tucson, Arizona the suspicion that some white stake and area leaders had about a series of “Lamanite conferences” put together by Latino branches and wards in the southern part of the state, with occasional participation from a Mexican ward south of the border.32 It wasn’t that they suspected that we would say anything incorrect about church doctrine or speak ill of the Brethren; by their own admission, the Latino leaders were all good men and women and some of them were quite liked by those same leaders. The problem was whether this kind of activity would hamper the future “integration” of the youth into English-language units. In one stake in Phoenix, Arizona, the Latino youth were taken out of their ward classes to attend those in the English-speaking wards, and sometimes they were even separated during the sacrament meetings. Whether those leaders were fully cognizant or not, they were expressing a fear of a future of unassimilated Latino membership in the same way many Americans fear an unassimilated Latino population in their own communities. Ironically, in the ward I presided over, there were several middle-and working class Latino families disconcerted by the potential discomfort of their white leaders, and by the fact that these “Lamanite conferences” subtly challenged their own views of a Latino ward. While a significant minority, they nonetheless stood out by their years in the church, their multiple church callings in the past, and their economic status. Proud of their Mexican roots, their language and their church genealogy, they nonetheless envisioned their wards as simply “brown” versions of the English-language units in the stake. They had no vision beyond that. They also saw the Lamanite conferences, quite accurately, as presenting a vision of living the Latter-day Saint gospel but doing so with a knowledge of their history, a familiarity with church protocol and structure, and with the experience of seeing a “church environment” that placed Latino Latter-day Saints front and center. This unnecessarily brought into question their own navigation of the “Mormon” gospel. Far from revolutionary in any religious sense, the conferences simply allowed Latino youth space to find their Latter-day Saint identity by connecting them back to their communities where they could find Latino Latter-day Saint heroes, mentors, and discover words of counsel developed over the years in traversing American society in a majority white church as brown people. While not patterned after earlier “Lamanite conferences” that the church promoted in the 1930s-1950s, these conferences had the same intent of strengthening Spanish-speaking members’ faith—particularly that of their children. Our conferences focused on providing an identity that went beyond membership in the church.33 The earlier church conferences sought to help Spanish-speaking members in the United States find their identity as descendants of the peoples of the Book of Mormon. At the time, most church leaders

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and members believed that Native Americans and mestizos were direct descendants of those people. LDS president Spencer W. Kimball, in particular, promoted this effort. Ironically, the Mesa Arizona Temple had been dedicated in part to the “Lamanites”—Indians, as they were known then—but soon became the temple for the “Lamanita,” the Spanish-speaking mestizo. The conference speakers in those times spoke of the prophecies of the Book of Mormon, which proclaimed that the Sons of Jacob or the descendants of the children of Lehi, would one day “blossom as a rose” and would transcend their “gentile” brothers and sisters. This message, in one form or another, had been used in missionary work in Mexico and later became prevalent in the Southwestern part of the United States until it was mostly abandoned by the 1970s after President Kimball died.34 This message resonated with Mexican, Mexican American, and Latino indigenous investigators and converts because it promised them an important role in Mormon cosmology, and, of course, it meant a potentially better life in the secular world. But it also promised a “whitening” which would reflect their evolution as a righteous people. Kimball first started pointing this out to Native Americans and then shifted his attention to the Spanish-speaking populations, particularly those in Mexico. In today’s world this would strike us as rather racist. Many Spanish-speaking members, however, focused on the “blossoming” and on the fact that as a “lion” they would tear up unrighteous gentiles.35 As a young man, I know I was not beyond gleaming at the thought of “getting back” at whites—not church members, of course, or maybe just a few—who mistreated my people. For a community that was marginalized both in Mexico and the states, the prophetic pronouncement of the coming day of the Lamanite was inviting. Rey L.  Pratt, one of the early mission presidents to work with Mexicans and Mexican American, promoted this line of preaching, and a number of other mission presidents, particularly in Mexico did the same.36 Individuals like Arturo de Hoyos, a Brigham Young University (BYU) professor, and Margarito Bautista, a Mexican intellectual who broke with the church, represent those whose Mormon identity centered on being “Lamanita.” In the dedication to his book El Lamanita Mestizo, de Hoyos wrote, “This book is dedicated to the Lamanita youth of the last days. These youth will educate themselves and will change the environment in which many of them live, deprived of their identity, ignorant of their mission and distanced from their glorious destiny.”37 He added that their mission was to save the two nation’s whose [blood] “runs in their veins.”38 Bautista was even more explicit in his view of the “birth right” of the Mexican indigenous people to become not only the masters of their destiny, but also its leaders. It would be these kinds of ideas that eventually got him excommunicated from the church. There were many others, less public about their views, who shared the dream that the Lamanita would blossom, while others argued they were already blossoming. This attempt to construct a religious identity based on race and genealogy stemming from the Book of Mormon spoke both to the prophetic and to the practical aspect of missionary work among the Spanish-speaking, and these two

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went hand-in-hand for at least until the 1970s, reaching their zenith during the administration of Spencer W. Kimball.39 This has complicated and yet maintains the hope of those people of indigenous roots who have been swallowed up in the category of the “Children of Lehi” (a Book of Mormon Patriarch who fathered the Lamanite people). The complicating part is that the promises of the Book of Mormon for “Lamanite” people come only after tragedy, harsh trials, and being “nurtured” by their white brothers and sisters for generations. It continues to be so because it seems that it is white leaders who will decide when the Children of Lehi are to “blossom as a rose.” Having a Latino Latter-day Saint identity, however constructed, will prove shallow without institutional and group history, and without a theology that comes out of their experience. While a Latino theology exists in nascent form wherever there are Latino Saints, it cannot grow collectively, or expand beyond personal or ward boundaries because there are no established conduits or forums through which this theology can evolve.40 Most importantly, few Latino leaders have defined or developed a ministerial vision within their church stewardship.41 This means that Latino Latter-day Saint theology remains grounded in personal experiences or expressions shared only with families or friends, or at a ward talk here and there, thus lacking any institutional or collective affirmation. What is this Latino (US-based) theology? There is none if we think of it as a coherent set of principles. There is one, however, if we frame it as a theology of action, where each response to institutional norms is founded on the experience of being immigrant, brown, usually poor or of poor background, of being second-class citizens in the larger society, and of lacking institutional genealogy. It is also one that grows in diversity as more Mormon converts from all over Latin American immigrate to the United States and are lumped together in Spanish-language wards or branches. Language, customs, food, music, cultural biases, and religious perceptions are constantly being negotiated even as they develop their own hybridity. This brings a diversity to a Latino ward that few other church units face, and it plays a part in developing a “theology on the ground” that is often exercised outside the ward as these members navigate American society, but which can also intrude into Sunday classrooms and sacrament meeting talks. It is an aspirational theology. It reacts both in favor of and against institutional assimilation, where the attractiveness is the “accomplishment and togetherness” of white members and their heroic history, and the pushback is against the notion that white members are higher in the pecking order in the church, in this life, and possibly in the life to come.42 It also reveals itself in the disappointment, discomfort, and sometimes anger when white men are called to lead their congregations, or when other, “more assimilated” Latino leaders are brought into the fold to do the same. Whether aware or not, Latino Latter-day Saints face the legacy of the doctrine of Ephraim, a theological premise widely believed for generations in the church that white Saints were to be the first recipients of the blessings of Mormonism and were called to preside over every other group of Latter-day

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Saints.43 Few church leaders talk about this now, at least in public, but it remains one of those unspoken theological stumbling blocks for many white members to see Saints of color as full partners in the building up of the “Kingdom.” Being an “equal” member and being a “full partner” are two different things. One implies the same blessings; the other infers the right to lead and to have an influence in the final word on doctrinal or theological interpretations. Having virtually no recorded heroic religious history, having contributed little to the theological development of the “institutional gospel,” and only recently having entered the highest echelons of priesthood authority in the church, Latino Saints remain on the periphery of institutional importance, even as the need for their numbers increases in a white nation that is increasingly less prone to religious conversion. Getting completely rid of the legacies of the doctrine of Ephraim is on the horizon but its demise will fundamentally challenge LDS theology, even more so than the revelation on the priesthood that allowed black males to hold the priesthood, and black women to attend the temple to do work beyond proxy baptisms.44 The challenge posed by rejecting the doctrine of Ephraim is that it will reveal that much of the asymmetric relationship between white Saints and Saints of color was based on racial prejudice and racism. This means that many prophetic pronouncements and theological interpretations that deal with Saints of color, suggesting a pecking order within the Latter-day Saint cosmology, will have to be filtered through a prism of race, something that will fundamentally challenge some of the church’s earlier claims dealing with people of color.45 Ironically, this type of doctrinal reinterpretation is likely to negatively impact white Latter-day Saints more than Saints of color who, as the “other” in American society, have never doubted that the institutions to which they might belong, outside their own communities, have been fundamentally prejudicial, racist, or simply indifferent to them. Notwithstanding this troubled history, Latinos have a bright future in the church. Their youth are going on missions, becoming educated, assuming leadership at all levels of the church, and beginning to challenge their religion’s racialism, even if only in their own localities. Latino Saints actually have a long history, yet to be fully uncovered, from which heroes and theological concepts can emerge. They bring a different experience to the church while sharing many of the same religious and cultural experiences with their white counterparts. For the most part, Latino Saints are neither all white nor all indigenous. They were the first hybrids of the Americas and church membership in the future will look more like them than the white membership. They can be, and should be, a bridge for people of color to open the church to a more “all-­ people” focused religion. This will make for a church less concerned about looking clean-cut and patriotic, accumulating massive amounts of material goods, engaging in conservative politics, and one that is more dedicated to social justice. That, however, will not happen until more Latinos and other organic leaders of color invest time and effort in formalizing a theology that speaks for the least in the church and society, discovers their people’s history of

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struggle for equality, and challenges the influence of the wealthy and powerful who continue to have too much sway in the way the church functions.46 Latino Saints, undoubtedly, will need to step up their game. While the LDS Church has been more sensitive to the plight of the immigrant in recent years, and has put out statements about treating them and other refuges with compassion, its leaders have yet to “discomfort the rich, and the powerful,” instead relying on their goodwill to support a more compassionate approach to those who have fled horrendous violence and heartbreaking poverty. Ironically, it is those dispossessed who are more likely to listen to the “gospel message” than are most white Americans, who long ago stopped being likely candidates for conversion to the LDS faith. Latino members and leaders will need to show that their faith leads them to engage with the world of the dispossessed, disadvantaged, oppressed, and exploited. They need to be willing to serve in positions of leadership but do so with a vision that departs from the corporate approach to religion often reflected in current church policy. They need to envision a “Latino ministry” that engages other ministries of color in order to make the church more sensitive to the problems of all of its diverse, global membership. At present, the LDS Church and its current leaders are lacking in the ability to speak the language of social justice. While President Russell M. Nelson has spoken the language of love and brotherhood, his counselors and others in the Quorum of the Twelve continue to talk around the issues of social justice. There is a tendency among many Latter-day Saint leaders, who do care about the poor and the afflicted, to believe that they can provide money, resources, show sympathy and love for the needy, and so on, without having to “call out” the nation’s economic and political structures that have greatly benefitted the church, while simultaneously producing a growing dichotomy of haves and have-nots. Today the church continues to want to have it both ways. It wants to be charitable and caring about the poor, but also seen as a patriotic institution that conforms to American values that no longer seem to be working well for those in need. Not only does this duality challenge the church’s religious mission, it forces many Latter-day Saints, including many Latinos, to focus inward, to spend too much time on their personal economic needs and middle-class status attainment, while ignoring—except for when they’re asked to engage in some kind of service project—those beyond their congregational boundaries.47 For LDS Latino members, this has often caused them to maintain their distance from Latino organizations seeking change in their communities. While many of them participated in the massive immigrant marches of 2006, and continue to be concerned about this issue, their activism has failed to create new community leaders and organizations among the faithful. Latino Latter-­ day Saints, like their white counterparts, are often seen as nice, helpful people during catastrophes and emergencies, but not as allies in an effort to make a more just society.48 For Latino Latter-day Saints to be more than just numbers for the church, they need to develop a vision of themselves as people who

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contribute to an expansion of the Latter-day Saint gospel through their own theological interpretations, leadership, and perspective of a just society. They also need to continue changing church institutions from the inside out by participating, learning church protocol even as they change it, and begin to show organic leadership that crosses multiple boundaries. To accomplish this, they must do a better job of retaining their brown brothers and sisters who join the church, and they need to see their own life experience and their own views of the eternal principles of their faith as important to the evolution of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Notes 1. LDS wards have always been segregated in that people of color have mostly had their own congregations. Attempts at mass integration have failed and ethnic and racial wards continue to be the norm. At the same time, it may be argued that it would probably not work well to force integration. 2. My friend and colleague Sujey Vega argues that the first Mexican congregation in the United States began in Mesa, Arizona, and there is also the possibility that Salt Lake City had the first one, but nothing published affirms this and so this discussion is based on conjecture. 3. For more on Margarito Bautista, see Pulido’ The Spiritual Evolution of Margarito Bautista: Mexican Mormon Evangelizer, Polygamous Dissident, and Utopian Founder, 1878–1961. 4. Eduardo Balderas Oral History, interviews by Gordon Irving, 1973, typescript, p. 1. See, also unpublished memoir manuscript by Guillermo Balderas, Eduardo’s younger brother, p. 1. 5. See Embry. In His Own Language, Mormon Spanish Speaking Congregations in the United States, 14–16. 6. Millard and Jorge Chapa, Apple Pie and Enchiladas: Latino Newcomers in the Rural Midwest; Flores. The Mexican Revolution in Chicago: Immigration Politics from the Early Twentieth Century to the Cold War; Badillo. Latinos in Michigan; and Valdez and Bill Holm. Mexicans in Minnesota. 7. See Embry, “In His Own Language,” pp.  14–17; also, Tullis’s Mormons in Mexico, for a more extensive history of the church in that country. Also valuable is Dormady and Jared M. Tamez, Just South of Zion, The Mormons in Mexico and Its Borderlands, which is a collection of essays of Latter-day Saint, particularly Mexican Americana, on the border region. For a discussion of the church’s move toward acceptability in the United States, see Reeve’s Religion of a different color, The Mormon Struggle for Whiteness. 8. See Reeve’s Religion of a Different Color. 9. For an explanation of those changes see Alexander’s Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints; also, see Peterson and Brian Q. Cannon’s The Awkward State of Utah: Coming of Age in the Nation, 1896–1945, for a discussion of what was happening in Utah during that time of transition. 10. Two works that speak to Mormon colonialism and paternalism toward other groups are Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst’s The Mormon Church and Blacks:

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A Documentary History, and Hafen and Brenden W.  Rensink’s Essays on American Indian and Mormon History. 11. The Book of Mormon told of the day that the Lamanite—once thought to be all people of non-European, indigenous roots were to “blossom as a rose.” See 2 Nephi 10: 4–9. 12. For more on the Third Convention and its return to the fold, see Tullis. Mormons in Mexico and Pulido’s “The Spiritual Evolution of Margarito Bautista.” 13. Tullis. Mormons in Mexico, pp. 158–159. 14. 2 Nephi 10: 8–9. This scripture tells of the “great” future of the Lamanite but also implies that whites are going to “nurse” them. Sometimes, of course, nursing implies control, at least until the patient is cured, and it is usually the medical personnel who decide when. “Nurturing” and “being prepared” were concepts often talked about when I was growing up, when some of our local leaders always emphasized the point that our “white brothers” were to train us and prepare us for our “blossoming.” 15. See Pulido. “The Spiritual Evolution of Margarito Bautista…” p.  80. See 118–120 for Bautista’s comments. 16. See “Race and the Priesthood” in the Topic Essays section in Lds.org, the church’s website. For a person of color’s justification of the priesthood ban, see Keith N. Hamilton’s Last Laborer Thoughts Reflections of a Black Mormon. 17. See “LDS Church’s “Be One” Celebration Draws Thousands for Music, Dancing, Applause,” Daily Herald, June 1, 2018. 18. See Mora’s Making Hispanics, How Activists, Bureaucrats and Media Constructed a New American, for a discussion of how disparate groups are constructed into panethnic groups. 19. This comes from my own experiences and also from a conversation with an international colleague who, when she goes back home to her country, attends an ethnically and racially mixed ward where the few whites dominate the leadership positions and the language used in some of the services. 20. This is an observation of years attending stake conferences where Latino members are called out from the congregation to “bare their testimonies.” 21. For a discussion of Joseph Smith’s theological innovations concerning the afterlife, see Bushman, Joseph Smith Rough Stone Rolling, pp. 421–422; for scriptural reference to “work in heaven” see Joseph F Smith’s vision, found in the Doctrine & Covenants, section 138. 22. For discussion of European Mormons, see Annus and David Morris, et  al. Mormonism in Europe. 23. Guillermo Balderas’ unpublished manuscript, p. 5. 24. For glimpses of this kind of activities in the life of Latino Saints in the United States, see Ventura’s self-published La Historia de la Rama Mexicana de Salt Lake, 1920–1960); Zuñiga, From the House of Joseph to the Land of the Restoration; Iber, Hispanics in the Mormon Zion, 1912–1999; and García, Chicano While Mormon, Activism, War, And Keeping The Faith, pp. 29–49. 25. See works cited in note 24. 26. For a discussion of mutual aid societies among Mexican Americans, see Hernández’s Mutual Aid for Survival: The Case of the Mexican American; and Pycior. Democratic Renewal and the Mutual Aid Legacy of US Mexicans. 27. See Chicano While Mormon, pp. 29–49.

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28. To understand the LDS Church’s approach to ministering, see “Ministering,” by Elder Peter F. Meurs on the lds.org website. 29. See Bowman’s article, “Zion: The Progressive Roots of Mormon Correlation.” 30. I speak about this and provide an example of how it happens in my memoir Chicano While Mormon, pp. 164–165. 31. See Fanon. White Mask, Black Skin. 32. See García, “Empowering Latino Saints to Transcend Historical Racialism: A Bishop’s Tale.” 33. See “Empowering…” pp. 150–151 for a short discussion of the Lamanita conferences of which I was a part of. For an example of Lamanite conference among Latinos, see “Florecimiento Lamanita” in https://discursosud.wordpress. com/2016/01/05/florecimiento-lamanita/; also, see Brown, “Mesa temple a big draw” for an often used description of the Mesa temple as the “Lamanite Temple” because of the temple excursions from Spanish-speaking members from Mexico and Latin America. 34. The focus seemed to change from efforts to “uplift” Spanish-speaking members in the United States to Spanish-speaking Saints in Mexico and Latin America. 35. See 3 Nephi 21: 12 in the Book of Mormon for a reference to the Lamanitas being as a lion among the gentiles. 36. For more on Rey L. Pratt and his views of the Mexican people as Lamanitas and his work among them, see Beecher, “Rey L. Pratt and the Mexican Mission,” pp. 293–307. Also, see Tullis Mormons in Mexico, 42, 81, 96, 99, 100–101. 37. De Hoyos, El Lamanita Mestizo. 38. Ibid., 2. 39. Church president Spencer W. Kimball was the apostle that did most to expand the work among the Spanish-speaking in Mexico and Latin America, and the one who predicted that Latinos would one day be the majority in the church, and Spanish would become the official language. This was, of course, before the massive expansion of missionary work in Asia and Africa and the high rate of church inactivity in Latin America. 40. At the moment, the LDS Church History Department has done little to write about this population in its official publications and while there have been works on Latter-day Saints of Mexico, Central and South America, there has been no overarching work done, and thus these histories remain disconnected. 41. Stewardship is the way Latter-day Saints describe their ecclesiastical duties. 42. See my article, “Thoughts on Latino Mormons, Their Afterlife, and the Need for a New Historical Paradigm for Saints of Color,” 1–30. 43. See Reeve, Religion of a Different Color, which points out that this doctrine of Ephraim (though not specifically referred to as that) was already being expounded in the early years of the church, pp. 40–41, 207. 44. In their temples, Latter-day Saints engage in proxy baptisms for those who have died, believing that in the afterlife people will get to choose to follow Christ or not. 45. In my view, this will not impact the perception of Saints of color that Latter-­day Saint doctrine can easily be interpreted as inclusive—though maybe not fully to LGBTQ+ Saints (though that is changing as more and more Latino Saints “come out” and their close-knit families and congregations come to their defense) and applicable to most people. It is their interpretations and “add-ons” that will become questionable.

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46. Many of these are good people, but they function in the way of the “haves” in American society. They promote the idea of beautiful and expensive temples, costly celebrations, a corporate approach to governance, selectivity in admission to church schools, acceptance of capitalist ventures in real estate and other businesses, and reveal a discomfort with the homeless and the undocumented. 47. The LDS Church has recently asked its members to help the refugees who come into their communities, and Latter-day Saint politicians of both parties in Utah have asked for more refugees to be sent to the state. Unfortunately, only tepid support has been given to comprehensive immigrant reform. 48. Too often their “mobilization” has been directed by church officials to support conservative moral issues that are anti-gay, anti-ERA (Equal Rights Amendment), and pro-patriotism. Many white Latter-day Saints have engaged in more progressive issues but Latino Latter-day Saints, for the most part, have not.

Bibliography Alexander, Thomas G. 1986. Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890–1930. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Annus, Irén E., David Morris, et al. 2018. Mormonism in Europe. Americana eBooks. Balderas, Guillermo. Unpublished Memoir Manuscript. Historical Department Archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City. Badillo, David A. 2003. Latinos in Michigan. Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Beecher, Dale F. 1975. Rey L.  Pratt and the Mexican Missio. BYU Studies 15 (3, Spring): 293–307. Bowman, Mathew. 2016. Zion: The Progressive Roots of Mormon Correlation. In Directions for Mormon Studies in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Patrick O.  Mason. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press. Brown, David M.  Mesa Temple a Big Draw. In the Arizona Republic Webpage, September 27, 2009. http://archive.azcentral.com/community/mesa/ articles/2009/09/22/20090922mr-gntemple0927asf.html. Bushman, Richard L. 2005. Joseph Smith Rough Stone Rolling. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. De Hoyos, Arturo. 1996. El Lamanita Mestizo. Editorial Zarahmela. Dormady, Jason H., and Jared M. Tamez. 2015. Just South of Zion, The Mormons in Mexico and Its Borderlands. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Embry, Jessie L. 1997. In His Own Language, Mormon Spanish Speaking Congregations in the United States. Provo: Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Brigham Young University. Fanon, Franz. 2008. White Mask, Black Skin. Grove Press. (Re-issued). “Florecimiento Lamanita.” In https://discursosud.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/ florecimiento-lamanita/. Flores, John H. 2018. The Mexican Revolution in Chicago: Immigration Politics from the Early Twentieth Century to the Cold War. Champagne: University of Illinois Press. Garcia, Ignacio M. 2015. Chicano While Mormon, Activism, War, And Keeping The Faith. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson Press. ———. 2017. Empowering Latino Saints to Transcend Historical Racialism: A Bishop’s Tale. In Decolonizing Mormonism. Thoughts on Latino Mormons, Their Afterlife, and the Need for a New Historical Paradigm for Saints of Color. Dialogue, A Journal of Mormon Thought, Winter.

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———. 2018. Empowering Latino Saints to Transcend Historical Racialism: A Bishop’s Tale. In Decolonizing Mormonism, Approaching a Postcolonial Zion. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Hafen, Jane, and Brenden W. Rensink. 2019. Essays on American Indian and Mormon History. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Hamilton, Keith N. 2011. Last Laborer, Thoughts, Reflections of a Black Mormon. Salt Lake City: Ammon Works LLC. Harris, Mathew L., and Newell G. Bringhurst. 2015. The Mormon Church and Blacks: A Documentary History. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Hernández, José Amaro. 1983. Mutual Aid for Survival: The Case of the Mexican American. Malabar, FL: Krieger Pub Co. Iber, Jorge. 2000. Hispanics in the Mormon Zion, 1912–1999. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Irving, Gordon. 1973. Eduardo Balderas Oral History Interviews. Typescript, p.  1, Oral History Program, Archives, Historical Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City. Millard, Anne V., and Jorge Chapa. 2004. Apple Pie and Enchiladas: Latino Newcomers in the Rural Midwest. Austin: University of Texas Press. Mora, G. 2014. Cristina. Making Hispanics, How Activists, Bureaucrats and Media Constructed a New American. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Peterson, Charles S., and Brian Q. Cannon. 2015. The Awkward State of Utah: Coming of Age in the Nation, 1896–1945. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Pulido, Elisa Eastwood. 2020. The Spiritual Evolution of Margarito Bautista: Mexican Mormon Evangelizer, Polygamous Dissident, and Utopian Founder, 1878–1961. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pycior, Julie Leininger. 2014. Democratic Renewal and the Mutual Aid Legacy of US Mexicans. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Reeve, Paul. 2015. Religion of a Different Color, The Mormon Struggle for Whiteness. New York: Oxford University Press. Tullis, F. Lamond. 1987. Mormons in Mexico. Logan: Utah State University Press. Valdez, Dionicio, and Bill Holm. 2005. Mexicans in Minnesota. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press. Ventura, Betty G. 1998. La Historia de la Rama Mexicana de Salt Lake, 1920–1960. Self-published. Zuñiga, Simón B. 2010. From the House of Joseph to the Land of the Restoration. Denver: Bilingual Publications.

CHAPTER 29

Views from Turtle Island: Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Mormon Entanglements Thomas  W.  Murphy

There is a story that has been told and retold in Indigenous communities. In this oral tradition, Seneca farm hands, acquaintances of Joseph Smith, tutored him on the basics of the Gaiwí:yo, the Word taught by the prophet Handsome Lake. They thought “what the white people need to do is to take the best of their Christian heritage and traditions and stuff that come out of their European ways and mix it with the Indigenous ways of the people who have lived on this land for a long time.” To facilitate the launching of a new religion for the settlers who had come to Turtle Island (a Haudenosaunee [Iroquois] name for North America), the farm hands melted down some gold they had received as payment from the British for their role in the War of 1812. On tablets of gold they inscribed the Gaiwí:yo in “picture writing,” buried them, and invited the incipient Mormon seer to find and interpret these records with a Christian emphasis “so that your people will tune into it.” In this teaching Joseph Smith becomes a prophet for European settler colonialists much like Handsome Lake is for Haudenosaunee. The message, though, “got watered down and changed here and there over time from what the real true Word was, from the way Gaiwiio spoke it.” The Book of Mormon, they say, has “too much emphasis on the Christian thing, more than there used to be, more than the way that we passed it on, the Iroquois passed it on, the Seneca there to Joseph Smith.” What happened to the tablets after the translation? “That gold, it belonged to the Seneca.” It “went back to its owners.”1

T. W. Murphy (*) Edmonds College, Lynnwood, WA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_29

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This Indigenous oral tradition unsettles written stories of Mormon origins. Whether historically factual or not, this living tradition contains important truths. This teaching expresses a kinship between neophytes of Handsome Lake’s revitalized religion and a new colonial faith community from the burnt over district of upstate New York. The story points beyond itself to similarities between two religions, both founded in Seneca territory within decades of each other.2 The Haudenosaunee account, though, reverses the common Mormon trope that Indigenous religions retain a kernel of truth that has degraded over time. In this case, it is the Latter-day Saint version that has degenerated. This telling, though, liberates Mormonism from one of the most offensive aspects of its origin story: the theft of gold plates and a translation of the records without consent from or compensation for the Seneca. In this account Joseph Smith collaborates, trickster-style, with Seneca co-conspirators in the construction of the plates, creates a religious narrative intended for settlers rather than American Indians, and then respectfully returns the gold tablets back to their proper owners when he is finished with them. Indigenous people make up a small fraction of the membership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) and related movements in North America. Yet, their theological and cultural presence looms large. A simple quantitative analysis of church membership would overlook the “hybridity, adaption, and exchange” that has characterized Indigenous peoples’ encounters with Mormon settler colonists.3 Indigenous views of the Mormon presence on Turtle Island are diverse, entangled, and complicated. This chapter outlines seven different overlapping examples of hybrid, adaptive, and syncretic exchanges between Indigenous communities and Mormon settler colonialists on Turtle Island. These entanglements illustrate Indigenous interactions with Mormons and occasional identifications with Mormonism, but often on Indigenous terms. The broad patterns outlined here are neither exclusive nor constrained by Latter-day Saint or social scientific conceptions of ethnic identity and religious affiliation. Each category is illustrated with representative examples of lived experiences of specific people from historic and ethnographic records. These entanglements collectively illustrate Indigenous presence and absence in Latter-­ day restoration communities is more significant than numbers might suggest.

Methodology I employ a decolonizing methodology.4 Decolonizing “approaches focus on the history, colonial processes, ideologies and institutional practices that structure the relations of power between Indigenous people and settler society.”5 I emphasize what Diné Latter-day Saint scholar Farina King calls “Mormon Indigenous lived experiences and perspectives.”6 I adopt a holistic perspective that includes not just variant branches of Mormon faith traditions but also Indigenous traditions that express a prophetic and/or apocalyptic affinity with restoration movements. I emulate anthropologist Robert Rapaport’s

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“whole-­culture approach, examining those who ignore and reject the stimulus as well as those who accept it.”7 I incorporate oral history alongside written documents.8 Decolonizing methodologies emphasize the importance of authors situating themselves within the narrative.9 Thus, most of my ancestry comes from Northern and Western European settlers who emigrated to what is now Canada, the United States (US), and Mexico making me complicit in the colonial process. Yet, I am also the seventh-generation descendant of Susannah Ferguson, born about  1786  in the Mohawk community of Tiononderoge. Mohawk is one of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee League that also includes Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora. Lura Elmina Cole, Susannah’s granddaughter, relocated to Kansas, joined the LDS Church, and then moved to Albion, Idaho. I grew up in southern Idaho hearing stories of Susannah as a “Lamanite” ancestor. Lamanites, according to the introduction of the Book of Mormon at that time, were “the principal ancestors of the American Indians;” and, according to the scripture, prophesied to become “white and delightsome” after acceptance of the gospel.10 In my family intermarriage facilitated the fulfillment of prophecy. Curiosity about my ancestry inspired a career that has included ethnohistorical and ethnographic field work with Indigenous peoples in Canada, the US, Mexico, and Guatemala.11 I employ the term settler colonialism to describe Canada and the US within a global context. The particular form that colonialism takes in North America is that of a “settler-colonial state” in which the primary object of colonization is “the land itself rather than the surplus value to be derived from mixing native labour with it.”12 Settler colonialism is distinctive because settlers seek to permanently settle on colonized land. It extends beyond an initial invasion through oppressive social structures, re-education, and elimination and/or absorption of Indigenous peoples. Settlers pursue their own belonging through replacing Indigenous narratives with false constructions legitimating settler presence.13 Mormon origins, expansions, and scriptures are deeply embedded within settler colonial processes. Mormon scriptures prophesy an apocalyptic future in which descendants of Lamanites, presumed to be American Indians, will destroy wicked settlers and build a New Jerusalem with help from a Christian remnant of the settler population.14 In actual practice, though, the “Book of Mormon became a powerful tool to subjugate Indigenous peoples.” LDS and Dakota historian Elise Boxer explains: “By depicting Indigenous Peoples as Lamanites, or the first immigrants to this continent, the Book of Mormon provides the necessary justification for Indigenous removal and dispossession by Mormon settlers.”15 Diné and LDS scholar Moroni Benally observes: “The Book of Mormon functions as both a tool of invasion and replacement, but also, strangely, as an instrument of resistance against the Church itself.”16

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Demographics Despite persistent evangelizing efforts over nearly two centuries Indigenous peoples make up a tiny fraction of church membership. In 1981 the LDS Church claimed 45,000 American Indian members (slightly less than 1 percent of the general church membership and just over 3 percent of American Indians).17 Data from The Next Mormons survey in 2016 found that 1 percent of a representative sample of Mormons in the US identified as Native American.18 Between 1972 and 2012 an average of 1.3 percent of US General Social Survey respondents claiming Indigenous ancestry identified as Mormon.19 A report from 2009 found 5 percent of Canadian aboriginals identified as Mormon.20 Overall, only a small percentage of Native Americans in North America identify with Mormonism. The Harvard Values Project sent dozens of field workers to Rimrock, New Mexico between 1949 and 1953.21 Their scholarship and anthropologists who followed in their footsteps provide ethnographic portraits of Diné (Navajo) Mormon membership and participation at the community level. Local church records reported 34 Diné baptisms at Rimrock in 1877.22 By 1900, though, colonization had taken priority over missionizing and significant rifts over land and resources opened between Mormon settlers and Navajos. Prominent converts “were not treated as brethren, but were refused burial in the Mormon cemetery as ‘outside parties.’” Marcos, who identified strongly as Navajo and Mormon observed that, “The Mormons told me that there were 140 Navahos baptized … but none of them come to church.” He continued, “I was the only one who kept coming to the church in Rimrock every week.”23 A concerted effort after World War II focused on converting Diné and other Indigenous peoples with the launch of the Southwest Indian Mission and the Intermountain Indian School in 1949. Five years later the LDS Relief Society absorbed a previously illegal and informal foster program (Indian Student Placement Program, ISPP) that placed approximately 50,000 Indigenous children in the homes of Mormon settlers between 1947 and 2000. A seminary program serving Indian schools in the US followed in 1958. In Canada, Latter-­ day Saints integrated Kainai children from the Blood Reserve into public schools in Cardston, Alberta. Brigham Young University (BYU) would offer scholarships and by the early 1970s would host the largest collegiate Indian program in North America. The tide began to change in 1979, though, when Elder Boyd K. Packer of the LDS Quorum of the Twelve used a keynote address at Brigham Young University’s Indian week to discourage inter-racial marriage and scold North American Indians for not doing enough to redeem the millions of “pure Indians” in Mexico, Yucatan, Guatemala, and South America. “If all you come away with is a degree, and the ability to make a living, if all you have come here for is to get [that], then you may well have failed.” Packer continued, “You have a destiny. You are chosen to serve.” By the mid-1980s, the LDS Church scaled back these programs and scholars would soon begin asking why they failed. Failure, though, depends upon one’s

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perspective. Packer projected an institutional failure to reach its objectives onto individuals who shared different priorities. As historian R. Warren Metcalf notes, “American Indians would reclaim their place in American society, but they would do it on their own terms.”24 Data from Rimrock illustrate the temporary impact of this renewed investment on a local congregation. The ward clerk reported a total of “257 Lamanite members on the new church rolls” in October of 1949. Except on rare occasions, attendance at Sunday services “rarely exceeded thirty in the years between 1950 and 1970.” The Christmas service in 1959 that included dinner, treats, and gifts was an exception. “On this occasion, 290 Navajos were present, whereas attendance on the Sundays immediately before and after totaled ten and one, respectively.” During Blanchard’s field observations from 1970–1973 attendance averaged “less than twelve persons per week and usually included the same group of regulars.” In 1973, three years after the merger of the Indian Branch with the Rimrock Ward, the rolls indicated 265 Navajo Mormons, twenty-five of whom were “actively involved.”25 Sociologist Martin Topper found evidence of similar difficulty in retaining Navajo students who participated in LDS placement between 1966 and 1973: 21 of 25 interviewees rejected the LDS Church and resisted continued involvement.26 In 1981 the LDS Church would claim 20 percent of Navajo were baptized Mormons but did not share data on activity rates.27 When Indigenous Mormon engagements are measured in terms of church membership and attendance they may appear disappointing. Such an evaluation, however, measures human behavior by a standard that only rarely would have been shared by Indigenous participants. Indigenous motivations for entangling themselves with Mormonism have been multi-variant and have included objectives such as making friends, sharing stories, showing hospitality, challenging aggression, cementing an alliance, exchanging gifts, healing, finding transcendent powers, extending trade relations, accessing food, building kin networks, reconciling grievances, seeking employment, learning English, and increasing educational opportunities. As Diné/Hopi anthropologist Angelo Baca notes, “We went to church because that’s where people went, it was where opportunities were, and where the educational, business, and social worlds intersected.”28 Moroni Benally illustrates this complexity in describing the conversion of his grandfather, a Diné medicine man and others like him who “negotiated membership into the LDS Church on their terms, destabilizing the power of conversion politics while retaining tenets of faith not consistent with the logics of Latter-day Saint success.”29 When evaluated by the actual motivations of the people involved, Indigenous entanglements with Mormonism exemplify many successful forms of hybridity, adaptation, and exchange. Mormon settlers, too, brought their own secular objectives. These include many of the same motivations as their Indigenous counterparts but also those of negotiating safe passage, acquiring new lands, accessing resources, finding polygynous wives, securing labor, developing cultural brokers, assuaging settler

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guilt, and turning Indians “white and delightsome.” When measured by these goals, Mormon settlers, likewise, have been quite successful. For example, American Indians retain only 4.5 percent of the land in Utah that was entirely theirs prior to the saints’ arrival.30 In fact, the very success of settler colonialists in obtaining these more mundane goals has often impeded their ability to reach their stated religious objectives.31 The seven entanglements described below illustrate complex and cross-fertilizing ways American Indians and Mormon settlers have come together for shared and disparate goals that go beyond mere membership and participation statistics.

Parallel Teachings In the 1990s historian Lori Taylor recorded second and third hand accounts of the “Mormon Creation Story” that opens this chapter and identifies the late Tuscarora elder Wallace “Mad Bear” Anderson (1927–1985) as its most prolific teller.32 Anderson found common cause with an LDS woman from Salt Lake City, Zula Brinkerhoff (1914–2002), and traveled with her, Hopi messenger Thomas Banyacya (1909–1999), and other representatives of 50 nations in a Unity Caravan visiting reservation communities from 1967 to 1973. The travelers sought a unified effort to combat federal government policies terminating tribal governments, opposed the destruction of sacred lands, and shared prophecies of an impending environmental apocalypse.33 The common cause an LDS woman found with Native activists centered on complementary prophesies of a gathering of Indigenous nations with a remnant settler population, an apocalyptic destruction of remaining settlers, and restoration of Indigenous sovereignty and power. In 1959, before he met Brinkerhoff, Anderson retold a prophecy to the journalist Edmund Wilson that he attributed to the Peacemaker from centuries ago. Before “leaving the [Haudenosaunee] Indians in the Bay of Quinté in Ontario, he told the Indian people that they would face a time of great suffering. They would distrust their leaders and the principles of peace of the League, and a great white serpent was to come upon the Iroquois.” Although they would initially treat the serpent as a friend, “it would become so powerful that it would attempt to destroy the Indian” and “choke the life’s blood out of the Indian people.” In this time of turmoil hope would come in the form of “a young leader, an Indian boy, possibly in his teens, who would be a choice seer.” This powerful seer would gather the people “in the land of the hilly country, beneath the branches of an elm tree” where they would burn tobacco and call upon the Peacemaker to return. The Peacemaker had said “that as the choice seer speaks to the Indians that number as the blades of grass … he would be heard by all at the same time.” “A portion of the white serpent” would see the light of the Peacemaker and “make its way toward the land of the hilly country” and “join the Indian People with a great love like that of a lost brother.” The remainder of the white serpent would retreat to the sea and “never again be a troublesome spot for the Indian people.” The Peacemaker “would return

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to his Indian people, and when he returns, the Indian people would be a greater nation than they ever were before.”34 Also in 1959, Brinkerhoff independently began correspondence with Banyacya. Her intent was to learn more about the “day of purification” discussed in Hopi prophecies. Banyacya replied to Brinkerhoff’s July 20th letter expressing gratitude for her interest in the spiritual side of Hopi people. “Although we do not have any written books or bible we have learned these teachings and instructions and prophecies through words of mouth handed down to us by our forefathers who did see and hear the words of the Great Spirit who spoke to them and laid down the Life Plan of the Hopi and other Indian people in this continent.” He invited her to attend a gathering of Hopi Traditional Leaders in mid-August. He noted, “It’s true the Mormon Book teaches many things similar to the Hopi teachings, in fact, some places it’s the same. But Hopi has been warned against accepting or falling for any other kind of religion that may come to them.” Rather than joining other religions, Hopi “were to hold fast to the teachings that were given them by the Great Spirit.” At the gathering in August, Brinkerhoff learned from Dan Katchongva that Hopi did not need to convert as they already awaited “Massauu” who would soon return to lead the Hopi people into a new life.35 Brinkerhoff, Anderson, Banyacya, and Katchongva recognized a kinship in each other’s prophetic traditions.

Playing Lamanite As a Latter-day Saint youth in the 1970s and 1980s my church activities included participation in Boy Scouts of America (BSA). Serving in leadership roles in the Tendoy District of the Grand Teton Council in Pocatello, Idaho, I found myself inducted into the Order of the Arrow and then helped initiate younger boys into the same program at Camp Little Lemhi in Targhee National Forest. I was asked to don feathers and a bison headdress and play a medicine man while I read passages from a handbook. The older men who had dressed and painted me expressed frustration at my inability to read the script without my glasses, as if that were the only clue that might indicate we were engaging in a faux ceremony. In his book, Playing Indian, Dakota historian Phil Deloria chronicles the fascination of European settlers with donning Indian disguise from the Boston Tea Party to the twentieth century BSA.  Deloria discussed Joseph Smith as having similar aspirations and inspiration to Lewis H. Morgan, another colonialist in Seneca territory who created a settler fraternal order modeled after the Haundenosaunee League. “Smith’s Mormonism—and indeed the general ferment in American religious practice—suggests that Americans felt a lack of the social meanings Morgan sought to create.” Deloria elaborates, “The dispossessing of Indians exists in tension with being aboriginally true.” As settlers have displaced Indians they have also sought to become autochthonous, in play if not in fact. “And so, while Indian people have lived out a collection of

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historical nightmares in the material world, they have also haunted a long night of American dreams.”36 Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson notes, Morgan (and we can add Smith to this) incorporated Indian signs and symbols into his hobby group to create a “mythic connection with a place and a past in what was previously, unambiguously Indian territory.”37 Latter-day Saints have enthusiastically engaged in playing Indians, Nephites, and Lamanites. In Kirtland, Ohio in 1830–1831 recent Latter-day Saint converts “climbed atop stumps and fences to harangue imaginary Indian audiences in what they believed were authentic Native languages revealed through the gift of tongues. They then guided imaginary converts into the waters of baptism.” Enacting settler fears, they “tomahawked, scalped, and disemboweled invisible foes in an epitome of the imminent apocalyptic fate of unconverted white Americans.”38 Later, in a tragic scene at Mountain Meadows in southern Utah in 1857, Mormon militiamen donned Indian disguise and massacred approximately 140 members of a wagon train en route from Arkansas to California.39 Disguise, here, served to unleash Latter-day Saint savagery. Indian play reverberates throughout settler culture. Zula Brinkerhoff would don a beaded feather headdress, gather her collection of kachina dolls and bows and arrows, and travel throughout the Mormon culture region in the 1960s and 1970s “giving talks on the Indian people.”40 Use of Indian place names and fake legends serve social functions of forgetting stories of actual Natives and replacing them with mythological ones infused into the landscape through settler storytelling.41 The creation in 1971 at BYU of an “all-Indian song and dance troupe called the ‘Lamanite Generation’” engaged Indigenous people in the performance of “highly anglicized song and dance routines.”42 Pioneer day parades, pageants, reenactments of the Mormon trek, monuments, and heritage parks are means for acting out the unease with and audacity of settler colonialism. Dakota historian Elise Boxer recalls using sarcasm to deflect the pain she felt in 1997 when asked as a Latter-day Saint youth to participate in sesquicentennial reenactments of the Mormon invasion of the Salt Lake Valley. “We would not play ‘pioneer,’” she recalls. Alternatively, “we joked that we would ‘play Indian’ and attack the handcart re-enactors to give them an ‘authentic’ experience.”43 Brinkerhoff’s actions and Boxer’s resistance illustrate the roles of mimesis and alterity in Mormon experience even as they spoke out against settler policies and practices that sought to erase Indigenous sovereignty.

Mormon Indian Alliances Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1999 novel Gardens in the Dunes tells the story of a Mormon alliance with the Paiute prophet Wovoka and his followers more than a century earlier. “Small groups of Mormons … had been waiting for the Messiah’s return.” They “began to dance hand in hand with the other dancers; these Mormons who believed in Wovoka were generous and donated meat for the dancers. The white canvas for the dancers’ shawls was

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donated by the Mormons.” After soldiers and Indian police broke up the dancing, the young female protagonist Indigo and her Grandma Fleet survived on food provided by a Mormon woman, Mrs. Van Wagnen whose “husband and other wives had been arrested, and their children sent away to live with foster families in the new Mormon Church.” Grandma Fleet speculated that new Mormons are tired of fighting the US government; “so the old Mormons moved to remote locations. For years and years, the U.S. soldiers chased Mormons when they weren’t chasing Indians.”44 Silko’s novel reimagines “early American Indian—Mormon relationships as collaborative, not in any attempt to reify religious truth claims maintained by one group over the other, but rather as friends and allies in mutual resistance against US federal restrictions on territorial and spiritual sovereignty.” While the protagonists are fictive, the narrative is built “around explicit parallels between the Book of Mormon prophecy, the prophet Wovoka (Northern Paiute), and the late nineteenth-century Ghost Dance Movement.”45 Military leaders, anthropologists, and historians have debated the extent of Mormon entanglement in Ghost Dance movements of the 1870s and 1890s.46 Latter-day Saint prophecies predicting the annihilation of European settlers and the building of a New Jerusalem by American Indians, assisted by a believing remnant of the immigrant population, made Mormon neighbors uneasy. Scriptural prophecies of an American Indian prophet created conditions ripe for cross-fertilization. Historian Gregory Smoak explains: “Mormon and native prophecies emerged from different traditions, yet were similar enough to enable the two peoples to speak to one another in prophetic terms.” Mutual excitement around visions of a Bannock Prophet in Idaho, Wodziwob, and Wovoka at Walker Lake, Nevada and visits of three strangers in the 1850s, 1870s, and 1890s fueled mass baptisms of Shoshone, Paiute, and Goshute and created a “religious middle ground, a set of creative misunderstandings that, at least for the moment brought them together.”47 While accusations of militaristic alliances between Mormons and Indians dissipated in subsequent centuries, belief in an Indian prophet and messianic visits have continued to inspire Mormons. Brinkerhoff reprinted accounts of a visit of the “Red Christ” to Walker Lake, Nevada along with a story of the prophet Handsome Lake.48 Retired BYU professor of photography, Val Brinkerhoff, recently reconstructed scriptural grounds for “the rising up of the Native American people in the last days,” the need for Latter-day Saints to “help” rather than “lead” in the establishment of a New Jerusalem and the anticipation of “an Indian prophet.” He makes a case for the “Indian Messiah” who visited Walker Lake, Nevada in 1890 as Christ providing direct ministry to Indigenous peoples.49 Independent Mormon fundamentalist Rhea Allred Kunz (1906–1989) has built a scriptural case for an Indian prophet, noting that Orson Pratt’s footnotes to the 1879 Book of Mormon identified “the one mighty among them” in 2 Nephi 3:24 as “an Indian prophet.” Kunz identifies “Wovoca” as “one of the Twelve Apostles or Disciples called and ordained by the Savior at Walker Lake.”50 Prophecies of Indigenous leadership, an Indian

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prophet, and an alliance with remnant settlers are integral parts of the fullness of the gospel.

Not Quite White In the summer of 1992, I joined my wife, Kerrie Sumner Murphy, and her parents on a visit to the Wilford C. Wood (1893–1968) Museum in Bountiful, Utah. Kerrie’s mother identified herself to the docent as a descendant of Daniel Wood (1800–1892), Wilford’s grandfather. Apparently delighted by the connection, the guide excitedly asked, “By which wife?” My mother-in-law replied, “Peninah.” “Oh,” the docent exclaimed as her expression of excitement shifted to one of disappointment. Kerrie’s mother had apparently spoken too openly about a class-defying inter-racial marriage, sanctioned in 1846 but scandalous more than a century and a half later. Despite lingering intra-family prejudice, the Church News in 1997 remembered Peninah as a “Mormon Sacagawea” during the LDS Church’s celebration of the sesquicentennial of the settling of the Great Basin. This label, anachronistically attributed to Daniel Wood, inaccurately represents Peninah’s actual role in the trek and values her for services to settlers rather than for her own desires and intentions.51 A family history, told by her son Joseph Cotton Wood (1856–1943) in 1934, would identify the Cherokee woman Peninah Shropshire Cotton Wood (1827–1879) as “the first of her blood to enter plural marriage in this dispensation” and “the first of the descendants of Lehi” to join the LDS Church. Peninah, an orphan and servant in the Wood household, married Daniel in the Nauvoo temple on January 21, 1846, shortly before joining the Saints on the trek west.52 The Wood family would stay at winter quarters in 1847 and leave for the valley the following year.53 Upon the arrival of the first party in the Salt Lake Valley, Brigham Young declared his intent for more white Mormon men to “marry Wives of every tribe” so that in a few generations “they will become a white & delightsome people.”54 In 1849, Peninah would take primary responsibility for the care of two girls (Lucy and Mary) and a boy (Thomas), likely orphaned during the invasion of Utah Valley. All three children would die during outbreaks of diphtheria and pneumonia in 1860 and 1861.55 Peninah reportedly enjoyed the Book of Mormon and “preferred reading to attending meetings or gatherings.”56 She should be remembered not as another colonial settler trope of Sacagawea but as an illustration that the practice of taking Indian children as servants into Mormon homes and later marrying them started in Nauvoo rather than Utah. Historian Michael K.  Bennion has documented 415 Indian children who entered Mormon homes as captives, slaves, indentured servants, traded commodities, and/or adoptees between 1847 and 1900. “Their stories are important because many of these cross-cultural voyagers represented anomalies in their host communities, and as such they are often invisible in broader surveys of Indian and Mormon History.” Where records are available, they indicate that 56 percent were purchased, 18 percent gifted, and 14 percent captured in

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conflict. Thirty-six percent of the 73 for whom sufficient data have been found, did not have any LDS ordinances (such as baptism) completed. Known data document 80 marriages. Sixty-five of 69 Native women “married a white spouse, two married other Native Americans, and two married Hispanics;” Thirteen percent were plural marriages. Nine of 11 Native men with known marriages wed white women and two married Native American women.57 These Native children who grew up to marry settler Mormon spouses “prolifically multiplied.” Bennion reports that “David Lemmon, Janet Smith Leavitt, Zenos Hill and Jannie Hull raised large families. Of marriages where records list specific family information, 14 Mormon couples with at least one Native American spouse produced 106 children, and those children in turn raised 270 grandchildren.” Research by historian Juanita Brooks demonstrated that by the 1930s many 4th and 5th generation descendants “seem to have forgotten there was ever an Indian ancestor.” Others, such as descendants of Janet Smith Leavitt, may have recalled their grandmother but turned away agents from the boarding school at Carlisle who came to St. George, UT to recruit them. “How insulted they were! They were white, and no inducement could have any weight with them. They preferred to pay their own way to white institutions rather than to go free to an Indian school,” Brooks wrote.58 By the twenty-first century, there are six and seven generations of descendants from these unions and many more. Some descendants have made a transition to a white identity, but not everyone would find it so easy or desirable. Some descendants identify with Indigenous communities in the twenty-first century. Southern Paiute Arthur Richards joined the LDS Church at age 30 and “served in the bishopric.” He participates in traditional “Cries” and uses peyote. “I’m still Mormon,” he says, “but I’ve retired.” He tells how his “great great grandmother was left by Iron Mountain, just standing there along the side of the trail.” “She was picked up by the Richards family.” She married one of the brothers, “that’s where my dad, Arthur Richards, got the Indian blood in him.” Southern Paiute Lalovi Miller describes herself as “a jack Mormon,” a Salt Song “apprentice,” and finds “the whole Lamanite idea, that our color is a curse” rather difficult. She tells how “her husband Fred came from the Mormon Dudley Leavitt, from the lineage out of Shivwits.” He tells the story of how his grandmother Jeanette “was traded for some food to the Dr. McGregor family in Parowan.” “I guess Dudley Leavitt was carrying the mail through and she took a liking to him.” They married over the objections of another wife “who threw her shoe at Jeanette.” “Jeanette had kids with him. That was Fred’s mother; Virginia Barnham. That’s what my husband tells.”59 Intolerance toward inter-racial marriages in the twentieth century may have contributed to selective forgetting in some settler families but did not prevent more marriages. Some placement program participants were products of inter-­ racial marriages and others defied the prejudice and married settler Mormon spouses.60 Members of the Catawba Nation were already significantly intermarried before converting en masse in the 1880s and would continue blending into the twenty-first century. Many have “found themselves in an ambiguous

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ethnic position.” Judy Canty Martin described her experience: “I’m not white enough to be white and I’m not Indian enough to be Indian.”61 Such are intergenerational entanglements of those who might appear to be but are not quite white.

Latter-day Lamanites Northwestern Shoshone Beeshup (Red Clay) Timbimboo (1861–1919) survived the 1863 Bear River Massacre only to be purchased later by a Latter-day Saint settler “for a bag of beans, a sheep, a sack of flour, and a Mormon quilt.” The Amos Warner family of Willard, Utah raised Be-shup and renamed him Frank Warner. He would graduate from Brigham Young College in Logan, serve three missions for the LDS Church, and pursue “a distinguished career as an educator.”62 In 1914–1915 while on his a mission to the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana, Warner kept a handwritten journal that serves as an early example of a convert adopting a Lamanite and an Indian identity. He preached of “their fallen condition [as Lamanites] and how the dark skin came upon them” and what is needed so “that dark skin may fall from” them. “I told them,’ he writes, of “the great blessing in store for them.” He described the Book of Mormon as “true and a history of the American Indians” and spoke in church about “the time when there was no Lamanites or any other-ites on the Continent, when all the people lived in perfect harmony and Love when all kind of wickedness was not in the land. They had all in common.”63 Pershlie Tewawina, a Hopi living in an LDS home in Culver City, California, won a speech contest in the 1971 All-Lamanite Youth Conference in Salt Lake City. In response to the contest theme, “A Lamanite: Who Am I?” she wrote the following. Lamanite is the name I love most. It creates no image; I am grouped in a whole, along with other nations of similar lineage, yet I am singled out as an individual. Now I create my own image. As a Lamanite I am who I make myself to be, and because I live in two worlds, my struggle for identity becomes harder. I want to be known as a Lamanite and to better my ways, but I don’t want to lose my Indian heritage. Some Indian people call me a coconut or an apple, which means to be white on the inside but brown or red on the outside. They say that I want to be white. What do they mean by white? A color, a culture, a better way of life? My skin remains dark, and to better one’s life is not white—it’s progress.64

Elise Boxer describes ISPP as “a colonizing enterprise designed to assimilate Indian students via conversion to Mormonism.” “Mormon Indian children negotiated their indigenous identity on their own terms,” she observes, “but they did so within a religious framework that influenced how they understood, constructed, and defined their identity.”65 In a 1975 article in the LDS magazine Ensign Larry Echo Hawk reported that growing up Pawnee in Farmington, New Mexico he was “ashamed to be

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an Indian” until he read LDS scripture. “For an Indian looking for pride, the Book of Mormon was a wonderful experience.” “It was really an uplift to me.” Yet, Echo Hawk objected to one thing he did not understand, “It says we’ll be white and delightsome people someday. I like the color I am. In fact, I don’t know any Indian who wants to change.” He continued, “The gospel is going to be restored to the Lamanites—to my family and friends. We’re not going to be a mediocre people. We’re going to be leaders in the Church and the nation. I know it’s going to happen. I can see it beginning now.”66 Elder Larry J. Echo Hawk fulfilled his own prophecy when he became the first American Indian elected attorney general in Idaho in 1990. He subsequently taught at BYU, served as assistant secretary for Indian Affairs in the administration of US President Barack Obama, and as a Seventy of the LDS Church from 2012 to 2018.67 Many Indigenous people have found the label of Lamanite ill-fitting. Albert H. Harris, born on the Northern Ute Reservation in 1920 with both Ute and European heritage, served as an LDS branch president in Klamath Falls, Oregon. His son, Lacee A. Harris, recalled his father’s protest. “Lamanite! I am not a Lamanite. They are a wicked people. I am not a wicked person.”68 A Kainai woman from southern Alberta shared similar sentiments in the twenty-­ first century; Rita rejected the label explaining “Lamanites do not believe in Christ.”69 Alicia Harris was “born in prosperous Ogden, Utah in the 1980s” to a family with Assiniboine, English, Danish, and Swiss heritage. She felt “caught in a place where I couldn’t fully embody my Native heritage, because I was expected to enact and celebrate my European Mormon pioneer ancestry, and my Indigeneity remained a mystery, eternally ancillary.” She learned to call “that mystery my ‘Lamanite’ heritage. To be clear, I never wanted to be known as a Lamanite. It wasn’t really a very attractive thing to be.”70 Tsimshian blogger and ex-Mormon Sarah Newcomb writes in 2017, “I was raised being taught I was Tsimshian, but that my tribe was actually ‘Lamanite’ heritage, part of a bigger picture. By categorizing my tribe in a different heritage—their true history was warped and stolen with a lie.”71 Active Latter-day Saint Edith Green states: “People call me a Lamanite, and I say, ‘I’m not a Lamanite,’ cause, when you’re converted to the gospel, you’re no longer Lamanite.” She prefers, “Catawba.”72

Lamanite No More In August of 1972, as part of the Unity Caravan, Anderson, Banyacya, and Brinkerhoff stopped for a rally in West Jordan, Utah, the only settler community they visited. At that stop Banyacya implicated an LDS attorney, John S. Boyden, in corrupt practices to mine Hopi lands without genuine consent of the people.73 Boyden, along with Utah Senator Arthur Watkins, attorney Ernest L.  Wilkinson (later President of BYU), and H. Rex Lee, a ranking bureaucrat in the Bureau of Indian Affairs played formative roles in constructing and implementing the termination policies the Unity Caravan opposed.74

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In his travels, Mad Bear “gathered opposition to termination legislation and carried it to Washington, D.C., from 133 Native American tribes and nations, effectively killing the last attempt to buy out reservations in the United States.”75 Anderson would also appear back in Utah in April 1974 with “some fifty Indians” associated with the American Indian Movement (AIM) protesting at the LDS General Conference. Mad Bear “demanded that the church turn over Indian skulls in a Temple Square museum so that Indians could give them a ‘proper burial’ and ‘send them back to the spirit world in the proper way.’” Vernon Bellecourt (1931–2007), an Ojibwe organizer of a series of such protests decried current LDS programs for engaging in “acts of cultural and religious genocide.”76 The Book of Mormon imagines a past and a future in which there are no more—ites of any kind. In fact, for more than a century it predicted that over the generations Lamanites would become “a white and delightsome people.”77 Intermarriage, slavery, servitude, and foster programs aimed to fulfill that prophecy. Elder Spencer W.  Kimball, LDS Quorum of the Twelve and later church President, proclaimed in 1962, “I firmly believe that tomorrow there will be no reservations,” and “I believe that integration into our economy and community life is essential and I look forward to the day.”78 Yet, this concept of Zion appears much more like a settler colonial utopia than an Indigenous one imagined by prophets like Wovoka. As Moroni Benally articulates, Native resistance became “a struggle against elimination, against … erasure.”79 Motivated by a desire to access resources on Indian land and justified by religious imperatives, a group of powerful Latter-day Saint attorneys and politicians played leading roles in formulating federal policies in the mid-twentieth-century designed to make American Indians disappear, legally if not in fact. In pursuit of this ideal Boyden, Watkins, and Wilkinson circumvented genuine consultations, manufactured the appearance of consent when it did not exist, coercively withheld funds, concealed conflicts of interest, amassed millions in profits, and drew the ire of Native activists whose protests would lead to the reversal of these policies under subsequent administrations.80 Senator Watkins called termination policies “the Indian freedom program.” Between 1954 and 1962 more than 100 nations would be cut off from federal services through policies designed to end the legal relationship between federal and tribal governments. Historian R. Warren Metcalf notes, “Watkins’s religious convictions, underpinned by Mormon doctrines regarding Indian origins and destiny, led him to see Indian peoples as a fallen race, ignorant of the truth, and deprived of the liberating aspects of civilization.” Firm in his faith, “Watkins truly believed that he knew what was best for the Indian, whether they offered consent or not.”81 In 1954, Watkins targeted Utes and Paiutes as early examples for others to follow. Five years later, the predominantly Mormon Catawba would follow. Termination proved devastating culturally and economically. Congress would reverse the termination of the Southern Paiute bands in 1980 and Catawba in 1993. Mixed blood Utes remain terminated.82

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Indigenous Mormon entanglements include painful memories of termination. McKay Pikyavit from the Kanosh band of Southern Paiutes recalls sitting down with Senator Watkins to discuss termination. “He said it’ll be good for you, be just like a white man. I told him I ain’t no white man, never will be.” Pikyavit and his father wrote a letter opposing termination, “but they booted us anyway.” Prior to termination the band was “making pretty good money on our farm, about nine thousand acres. When termination came, everything just blew up. Couldn’t borrow money because we didn’t have nothing. We were supposed to get this and get that. We were supposed to be equal to our white neighbors. That didn’t work out.” In the end, “we lost the Kanosh reservation in the tax deal. I think that was part of the idea of termination, to take all our lands.” Most reservations in Utah, he noted, were “little bitty ones. The Mormons just wouldn’t give anybody anything. They even went on and stole the little we got.” He objects, “We ain’t Lamanites.” “Another thing,” Pikyavat had heard, “the Book of Mormon is Indian religion. When Joseph Smith was back east he met with an Indian guy back there, asked about Indian religion, and he wrote it down. Then he made the Book of Mormon up.”83 Eunice Tillahash Surveyor, a member of the Shivwits band of Southern Paiutes, recalled the pressure her father faced from Senator Watkins. Tony Tillahash “was orphaned at a young age, raised by his blind grandmother.” When he was about five or six years old, “These people living in Moccasin came up and took him, those polygamists, those Heatons. He was raised there by those white people.” Later her father went to Carlisle Indian Industrial School where he met the linguistic anthropologist Edward Sapir who recorded many of his songs and stories. She remembers that “Arthur Watkins. He’d come down all the time, wanted my dad to sign those papers so they could terminate them. He kept on bugging him. Before he did, he made all kind of plans what they were going to do for the people. I’m gonna do this and that for you when we terminate you. That didn’t go through. He had great promises, but his words weren’t very good.” The Paiute Indian Claim Commission (ICC) case handled by Wilkinson and Boyden also drew her attention. In 1964, the ICC awarded Paiutes “$7.3 million dollars in compensation for the loss of more than 26 million acres of land.” “We didn’t get that money until ’72. The biggest portion went to the lawyers.” She linked these offenses to deception at Mountain Meadows. “They said these white men, they all dressed up in Indian, paint themselves up.” “They like to lie, just to protect themselves from people having opinions about them.”84 LDS politicians who harnessed the power of the federal government to terminate Indian sovereignty threatened all of Turtle Island, not just Indigenous Mormons.

Latter-day Lootings In a grisly display of settler triumph, the LDS Church Museum put the skeleton and grave goods of Antonga Black Hawk (c. 1830–1870) on display for decades. Historian John Peterson has suggested that Black Hawk may have

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stayed in Mormon homes as a young prisoner after the 1849 conflict at Battle Creek, that he was likely baptized, and had joined in a general conference of the LDS Church in Salt Lake City in 1850. Black Hawk aided the settlers in a conflict at Fort Utah in 1850 and in the aftermath they demanded, apparently successfully, that he be recognized as a Ute chief. He had watched as Mormons decapitated heads of 40 or 50 of his relatives, at the direction of an Army surgeon, and sent them back east for study. This incident likely changed Black Hawk’s perception of the Saints and years later he became the settler’s most potent antagonist in a Mormon civil war from 1865–1872 that bears his name. Long after his death Latter-day Saint miners looted the grave in 1917 and brought the spoils to the LDS Church Museum. The museum exhibited Black Hawk’s skeleton and grave goods for decades alongside those of Ancestral Puebloan peoples marketed as “mummies.”85 Because looting is glorified and given divine sanction in narratives of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, Indigenous neighbors have found it difficult to forestall an onslaught of grave robberies, vandalism, and artifact thefts by Mormon adventurers and hobbyists. Smith had a history of treasure hunting, claimed to find gold plates in angel/treasure guardian Moroni’s grave, and encouraged his followers to desecrate Indian burial mounds in attempts to find validation for precarious claims of scripture. By sacralizing looting he set an example for centuries of destructive, unethical, and illegal behavior by settler Mormons who have followed suit with vigor, enthusiasm, and ignorance of the offensiveness of these actions to Indigenous neighbors.86 Indigenous peoples have been reaching out pro-actively to stop the desecration and destruction of cultural sites across the landscape of southern Utah. In addition to resource extraction, “there is desecration wreaked by humans, both determined looters and careless visitors who have robbed graves, stolen artifacts, and damaged ancestral dwellings that in some cases had endured for a millennium or more in the nearby canyons and cliffsides.” “What they did to our ancestors over there, they started digging them out,” Diné spiritual leader Jonah Yellowman explains, “How would they feel if their [ancestors’] bodies were being dug out?” Indigenous efforts to address these issues have been hampered by oppressive local governments sustained by voter suppression. Natives, for example, could not vote in Utah until 1957. In the 1970s, 1980s, and 2010s federal courts have had to intervene to stop racial gerrymandering by settler Mormons in San Juan County, Utah and Apache County, Arizona.87 In 1986 and 2009, federal agents raided Mormon homes in Blanding, Utah and seized stolen artifacts. These actions enraged Latter-day Saints but did little to stop persistent looting.88 After inquiries from a boy scout in the mid-1990s helped locate Black Hawk’s skeleton, BYU’s Museum of Peoples and Culture responded to the publicity and new legislation by repatriating his remains to Ute relatives in compliance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act

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(NAGPRA) of 1990.89 Also in response to NAGPRA legislation BYU notified Hopi, Paiute, Pueblo, and Zuni nations in 2010 and 2012 that it had in its possession and intended to repatriate human remains of at least 39 individuals and 139 related funerary objects removed from San Juan County between 1893 and 1981.90 In this struggle to stop looting, a boy scout and the federal government have proven to be better allies than have local elected officials. The resistance of Mormon politicians to requests from their Indigenous constituents for assistance is particularly evident in the struggle to protect Bears Ears, a culturally significant area in San Juan County, Utah. Diné journalist Alastair Bitsoi notes that “this spiritual connection between humans and animals includes other living organisms and cultural sites presently under siege by water contamination from proposed natural resource extraction, looting of cultural artifacts, and overgrazing, among other environmental health issues.”91 In 2012, with an endorsement from the Navajo Nation, Mark Maryboy, who describes himself as a “traditional Navajo,” and Gavin Noyes formed the non-­ profit Utah Diné Bikéyah to pursue protections for the Bears Ears region. They first sought collaboration with LDS elected officials through Utah Representative Rob Bishop’s Public Lands Initiative and San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman’s San Juan County Public Lands Council. Feeling silenced and deeply offended when Lyman joined a 2014 protest ride through protected areas of Recapture Canyon, Diné leaders reached out to Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute, and Ute Tribe of Uintah and Ouray to create a Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and pursue federal monument designation.92 The Coalition meanwhile continued efforts to work with state and local officials. Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk, Coalition Co-Chair and former councilwoman for Ute Mountain Ute, flew in to speak to the Utah Legislature’s Commission for the Stewardship of Public Lands on April 20, 2016. “I felt a great sense of honor to have the opportunity to conduct government-to-­ government business and develop relationships in my service to my tribal people. But I was not given the same respect by the chair of the commission, who cut me off and prevented me from delivering my prepared statement.” Lopez-­ Whiteskunk explains: “Our attempts at conversations with the county and the state have been incredibly contentious … In contrast, when we have conversations with the federal agencies and, specifically, the White House [Obama] administration, they are far more open to listening and seeing some of the solutions we have.”93 The Coalition successfully built inter-tribal alliances between traditional enemies and with environmental organizations willing to accept Indigenous leadership. In response to this unprecedented coalition, President Obama established Bears Ears National Monument on December 28, 2016. Diné/Hopi anthropologist Angelo Baca explains: “Bears Ears is the only national monument where traditional knowledge has been explicitly integrated into land management planning, placing the tribes, the original stewards of the land,

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alongside federal agencies.” He continues, “The monument designation sends a clear message that damaging, disturbing and looting our heritage is unacceptable, unethical and illegal to those nonnative residents who have always believed it to be allowable.” Elected officials in Utah, though, fought back and successfully lobbied newly elected President Donald Trump to undo protections and co-management the coalition had finally secured. On December 4, 2017 Trump came to Utah to meet triumphantly with leadership of the LDS Church and announce a decision to dismember and reduce by 85 percent Bears Ears National Monument. Baca reflected on the actions of leaders of the church in which he was raised, “I believe they have sacrificed their own Mormon values and beliefs.”94

Conclusion Indigenous Mormon entanglements run deep and exceed, by far, the marginal success Latter-day Saints have had in converting and retaining Indigenous membership. While Indigenous communities of Turtle Island and adherents to Mormon faith traditions only overlap at the margins, their cultural, political, and theological import to each other dwarfs demographics. Hybridity, adaption, and exchange have forged parallel teachings and traditions that intersect and depart from each other. Mormons play Indian, Nephite, and Lamanite to quiet the dead who haunt settler colonial expansion. Indigenous communities and Mormons have sought and only rarely achieved alliances with each other. Longings for an Indian prophet linger in the theology and aspirations of various expressions of the Latter-day restoration. Domestic unions between settlers and Indigenous Mormons have blurred identities. This desire to erase, absorb, and claim Indigeneity has oscillated with a tendency to label American Indians as Lamanites. While some Indigenous people have come to see themselves as Lamanites, others find the ethnonym disparaging and undesirable. Latter-day Saints have wielded the power of federal Indian policy in efforts to terminate Indigenous communities but cried federal overreach when tribal governments have sought federal allies in protection of ancestral remains, cultural, and natural resources. Environmental organizations have learned to assist tribes in achieving common goals while LDS politicians and church leadership have stood with President Donald Trump against Indigenous sovereignty. Despite deep entanglements Mormons and Indians are yet to build a lasting and sustainable alliance of equals. Settler Mormons, it appears, are much more effective as colonists than evangelists.

Notes 1. Taylor, Lori E., “Telling Stories About Mormons and Indians” (Ph.D., State University of New York at Buffalo, 2000): 309–314. 2. Murphy, Thomas W, “Other Scriptures: Restoring the Voices of the Gantowisas to an Open Canon,” in Essays on American Indian & Mormon History, ed.

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P.  Jane Hafen and Brenden W.  Rensink (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019): 23–40. 3. Blackhawk, Ned, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empire in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006): 8. 4. Colvin, Gina and Joanna Brooks, Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2018); Hafen and Rensink, Essays. 5. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, “Keeping a Decolonising Agenda to the Forefront,” in Decolonisation in Aotearoa: Education, Research and Practice, ed. Jessica Hutchings and Jenny Lee-Morgan (Wellington, New Zealand: NZCER Press, 2016): ix–x. 6. King, Farina, “Indigenizing Mormonisms,” Mormon Studies Review 6 (2019): 2. 7. Rapoport, Robert N. Changing Navaho Religious Values: A Study of Christian Missions to the Rimrock Navahos, Reports of the Rimrock Project Values Series, No. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum, 1954): 14. 8. Denetdale, Jennifer Nez, “The Value of Oral History on the Path to Diné/ Navajo Sovereignty,” in Diné Culture, Decolonization, and the Politics of Hózhó, ed. Lloyd L. Lee (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014). 9. Kovach, Margaret E. Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts (University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, 2010); Wilson, Shawn, Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Winnipeg, Manitoba: Fernwood Publishing, 2008). 10. Smith, Joseph, The Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1981). For a discussion of how that view has changed over time see: Murphy, Thomas W and Angelo Baca, “DNA and the Book of Mormon: Science, Settlers, and Scripture,” in The LDS Gospel Topics Essays: A Scholarly Engagement, ed. Harris, Mathew L. and Newell G. Bringhurst (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2020); Metcalfe, Brent L., “Reinventing Lamanite Identity,” Sunstone, no. 131 (2004): 20–29. 11. Murphy, Thomas W, “Decolonization on the Salish Sea: A Tribal Journey Back to Mormon Studies,” in Decolonizing Mormonism, ed. Colvin and Brooks: 47–66. 12. Wolfe, Patrick, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999). 13. Veracini, Lorenzo, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); The Settler Colonial Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillon, 2015). 14. Fenton, Elizabeth and Jared Hickman, Americanist Approaches to the Book of Mormon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Hickman, Jared, “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse,” American Literature 80, no. 3 (2014): 429–461; Thayne, Stanley J., “‘We’re Going to Take Our Land Back Over’: Indigenous Positionality, the Ethnography of Reading, and the Book of Mormon,” in Americanist Approaches, ed. Fenton and Hickman: 321–338. 15. Boxer, Elise, “The Book of Mormon as Mormon Settler Colonialism,” in Essays, ed. Hafen and Rensink: 4. 16. Benally, Moroni, “Decolonizing the Blossoming: Indigenous People’s Faith in a Colonizing Church,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon  Thought 50, no. 4 (2017): 74. 17. Stewart, Jon and Peter Wiley, “Cultural Genocide,” Penthouse 12, no. 10 (1981): 82. Gibbons, Francis M., “Statistical Report 1981,” Ensign, no. 5

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(1982); Sandefur, Gary D., Ronald R. Rindfuss, and Barney Cohen, Changing Numbers, Changing Needs: American Indian Demography and Public Health (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1996): 82. 18. Riess, Jana, The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 19. Sherkat, Darren, Changing Faith: The Dynamics and Consequences of Americans’ Shifting Religious Identitites (New York: New York University, 2014): 43–45. Global Social Survey samples exclude Native American reservations. 20. Todd, Douglas, “Aboriginals, Churches Share a Mutual Respect; Christianity Remains a Major Part of Native Peoples’ Lives, Despite Grim Legacy, Overlooked Polls Reveal,” The Vancouver Sun, Aug 28, 2009. 21. Rimrock and names of individuals are pseudonyms. For an overview of the project see: Vogt, Evon Z. and Ethel M. Albert, eds., People of Rimrock: A Study of Values in Five Cultures (New York: Atheneum, 1975 [1966]). 22. Blanchard, Kendall A., The Economics of Sainthood: Religious Change among the Rimrock Navajos (Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1977): 33. Vogt reports 150 baptisms of Navajo and Zuni by fall of 1877. Vogt and Albert, People of Rimrock, 56. 23. Rapoport, Navaho Religious Values, 129–133. 24. Metcalf, R. Warren, “‘Which Side of the Line?’: American Indian Students and Programs at Brigham Young University, 1960–1983,” in Essays, eds. Hafen and Rensink: 242–245; Mauss, Armand L., All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003): 136; Parry, Keith, “Blood Indians and ‘Mormon’ Public Schools: A Case of Ethnicity and Integrated Education,” in Education, Change, and Society, ed. Carlton, Richard A., Louise A. Colley, and Neil J. MacKinnon (Toronto: Gage Educational Publishing Limited, 1977): 225–238. 25. Blanchard, Economics of Sainthood, 20, 113–120. 26. Topper, Martin D., “‘Mormon Placement’: The Effects of Missionary Foster Families on Navajo Adolescents,” Ethos 7, no. 2 (1979): 142–160. 27. Stewart and Wiley, “Cultural Genocide,” 82. 28. Angelo Baca, “Porter Rockwell and Samuel the Lamanite Fistfight in Heaven: A Mormon Navajo Filmmaker’s Perspective,” in Decolonizing Mormonism, ed. Colvin and Brooks: 67. 29. Benally, “Decolonizing the Blossoming,” 75–76. 30. Leydsman McGinty, Ellie I. “Land Ownership of Utah,” in Rangeland Resources of Utah, ed. Banner, R. E., B. D. Baldwin, and E. I. Leydsman McGinty (Logan: Cooperative Extension Service, Utah State University, 2009): 22. 31. Bagley, Will, The Whites Want Every Thing: Indian-Mormon Relations, 1847–1877, Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American Frontier (Norman, OK: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 2019); Cuch, Forrest S., ed. A History of Utah’s American Indians (Salt Lake City: Utah State Division of Indian Affairs/Utah State Division of History, 2000); Hafen and Rensink, Essays; Colvin and Brooks, Decolonizing Mormonism. 32. Lori E. Taylor, “Joseph Smith in Iroquois Country: A Mormon Creation Story,” in Essays, ed. Hafen and Rensink: 41–60. 33. Blueotter, Will, Pt 1–1972 Unity Caravan: Mad Bear Anderson, Thomas Banyaca, Janet Mccloud, podcast audio 2014, https://www.blogtalkradio. com/prophecykeepers/2014/11/02/pt-1%2D%2D1972-unitycaravan-mad-bear-anderson-thomas-banyacya-janet-mccloud.

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34. Wilson, Edmund, Apologies to the Iroquois (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992[1959]): 163–167. 35. Brinkerhoff, Zula, God’s Chosen People of America (Salt Lake City: Publisher’s Press, 1971): 1–11. 36. Deloria, Phil, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998): 72, 191, 219. 37. Simpson, Audra, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2014): 78. 38. Smith, Christopher C., “Playing Lamanite: Ecstatic Performance of American Indian Roles in Early Mormon Ohio,” Journal of Mormon History 41, no. 3 (2015): 131. 39. Bagley, Will, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002). 40. Brinkerhoff, God’s Chosen People. 41. Farmer, Jared, On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). 42. Metcalf, “Which Side of the Line?” 235. 43. Boxer, Elise, “‘This Is the Place!’ Disrupting Mormon Settler Colonialism,” in Decolonizing Mormonism, eds. Colvin and Brooks: 77–99. 44. Silko, Leslie M., Gardens in the Dunes: A Novel (New York City: Simon and Schuster, 1999): 31, 40. 45. Taylor, Michael P., “In the Literature of the Lamanites: (Un)Settling Mormonism in the Literary Record of Native North America, 1830–1930,” in Essays, eds. Hafen and Rensink: 89. 46. Smoak, Gregory E., “The Mormons and the Ghost Dance of 1890,” South Dakota History 16, no. 3 (1986): 269–294. 47. Smoak, Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006): 80, 126. 48. Brinkerhoff, Zula, The Spirit of Geronimo Returns (Salt Lake City: n.p., 1973). 49. Brinkerhoff, Val, The Remnant Awakens (Create Space, 2018): 7. 50. Allred, B.  Harvey, A Leaf in Review of the Words and Acts of God and Men Relative to the Fullness of the Gospel, 2nd ed. (Draper, UT: Review and Preview Publishers, 1968[1933]); Allred Kunz, Rhea, The One Like Unto Moses the Branch Prophet (Salt Lake City: Latter Day Publications, 2000): 51, 292. 51. Boren, Karen, “Indians to Settlers: ‘We Must Help One Another’,” Church News, July 5, 1997. Murphy, Thomas W, Kerrie S.  Murphy, and Jessyca B.  Murphy, “An Indian Princess and a Mormon Sacagawea: Decolonizing Memories of Our Grandmothers,” Unpublished manuscript, 2020. 52. Wood, Joseph C. “Peninah S.  Cotton Wood,” in Family Histories, ed. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City, UT: Church History Library, 1934); “Peninah Schropshire Cotton Wood,” in Pioneer Women of Faith and Fortitude (United States: International Society Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1998): 3438. 53. Wood, Daniel, “Autobiography of Daniel Wood Sr.,” in Book of Abraham Project (Brigham Young University, 1868). 54. Bagley, Will, The Pioneer Camp of the Saints: The 1846 and 1847 Mormon Trail Journals of Thomas Bullock (Spokane, WA: The Arthur H.  Clark Company, 2001): 243.

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55. Wood Naylor, Josephine, “History of Daniel Wood Cemetary,” http://www. angelfire.com/band/lobster/cemetery.html. Naylor incorrectly attributes the origin of the children to the Blackhawk War which did not begin until 1865. If they came in 1849, as claimed, they were more likely survivors of the conflict at Battle Creek in Utah Valley. See Christopher C. Smith, “Mormon Conquest: Whites and Natives in the Intermountain West, 1847–1851” (Claremont Graduate University, 2016): 147. 56. Wood, J., “Peninah.” 57. Bennion, Michael K., “Captivity, Adoption, Marriage and Identity: Native American Children in Mormon Homes, 1847–1900” (University of Nevada, 2012): 3, 28, 152–157. Bennion’s data overlooked Peninah Shropshire Wood and the three children she took into her home in 1849. 58. Ibid., 210–212. Brooks, Juanita, “Indian Relations on the Mormon Frontier,” Utah Historical Quarterly 12, no. 1/2 (1944): 39. 59. Hebner, William L., Southern Paiute: A Portrait (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2010): 87, 91, 138, 41. Janet Leavitt, discussed above by Brooks, and Jeanette Leavitt, discussed by Miller, might be the same person. If so, Brooks reached her conclusion about white identities in the 1930s prematurely, incompletely, or inaccurately. 60. Shumway, Dale, and Margene Shumway, The Blossoming: Dramatic Accounts in the Lives of Native Americans (Orem, UT: Granite Press, 2002). 61. Thayne, Stanley J., “Mormonism and the Catawba Indian Nation,” in Essays, eds. Hafen and Rensink: 121. 62. Christensen, Scott R. Sagwitch: Shoshone Chieftan, Mormon Elder, 1822–1887 (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1999): 67. 63. Bennion, “Captivity, Adoption, Marriage,” 1, 202–209; Warner, Frank W. “Frank W. Warner Missionary Journal,” in Missionary Database, ed. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Church History, 1914–1915). 64. “People and Places,” New Era 1, no. 8 (1971): 21. 65. Boxer, Elise, “‘The Lamanites Shall Blossom as the Rose’: The Indian Student Placement Program, Mormon Whiteness, and Indigenous Identity,” Journal of Mormon History 41, no. 4 (2015): 132–176. 66. Echo Hawk, Larry, “Someone’s Concerned About Me,” Ensign (1975). 67. “Elder Larry J.  Echo Hawk,” https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church/ leader/larry-echo-hawk. 68. Harris, Lacee A., “To Be Native American—and Mormon,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18, no. Winter (1985): 143. 69. Thayne, Stanley J. “The Blood of Father Lehi: Indigenous Americans and the Book of Mormon” (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2016): 189. 70. Harris, Alicia, “An Abundant God Knows the Middle Also,” in Decolonizing Mormonism, ed. Colvin and Brooks: 114–115. 71. Newcomb, Sarah, Lamanite Truth, Jan. 16, 2017, https://lamanitetruth. com/2017/07/25/hurt-by-beliefs-facts-hidden-in-the-dna-essay/. 72. Thayne, “The Blood of Father Lehi,” 188. 73. Blueotter, Unity Caravan; Wilkinson, Charles F., Fire on the Plateau: Conflict and Endurance in the American Southwest (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999). 74. Metcalf, R.  Warren, Termination’s Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).

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75. “Anderson, Wallace ‘Mad Bear’,” in Encyclopedia of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy), ed. Bruce E.  Johansen and Barbara A.  Mann (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000). 76. Garrett, Mathew, Making Lamanites: Mormons, Native Americans, and the Indian Student Placement Program, 1947–2000 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016): 181–182; Hendrix-Komoto, Amanda, “Boycotting General Conference 40  Years Ago: The Lamanite Generation, the American Indian Movement, and Temple Square,” April 12, 2013, https://juvenileinstructor. o r g / boycotting-general-conference-50-years-ago-the-lamanite-generation-theamerican-indian-movement-and-temple-square/. 77. 2 Ne. 30:6. In 1981, the LDS Church restored a change of the word white to pure that Joseph Smith had made in 1840, but that had been lost in subsequent editions. Campbell, Douglas, “‘White’ or ‘Pure’: Five Vignettes,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29, no. 4 (1996): 119–135. 78. Jacobs, Margaret D., “Entangled Histories: The Mormon Church and Indigenous Child Removal from 1850 to 2000,” Journal of Mormon History 42, no. 2 (2016): 41. 79. Benally, “Decolonizing the Blossoming,” 73. 80. Metcalf, Termination’s Legacy; Wilkinson, Fire on the Plateau; Gottlieb, Robert and Peter Wiley, America’s Saints: The Rise of Mormon Power (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986 [1984]); Nielson, Parker M., The Dispossessed: The Cultural Genocide of the Mixed-Blood Utes (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998); Brugge, David M., The Navajo Hopi Land Dispute: An American Tragedy (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994). 81. Metcalf, Termination’s Legacy, 235–239. 82. Ibid.; Alexander, Thomas G., “Native Americans in Post-War Utah,” http:// historytogo.utah.gov/; Thayne, “The Blood of Father Lehi”; Cuch, Utah’s American Indians. 83. Hebner, Southern Paiute, 64–66. 84. Ibid., 107–112; Metcalf, Termination’s Legacy, 122–123. 85. Peterson, John A., Utah’s Black Hawk War (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1998), 53–62, 78–79, 396–397; Leonard, Glen M., “Antiquities, Curiosities, and Latter-Day Saint Museums,” in The Disciple as Witness: Essays on Latter-Day Saint History and Doctrine in Honor of Richard Lloyd Anderson, eds. Anderson, Richard L. et al. (Provo: Brigham Young University, 2000): 291–325. 86. Murphy, Thomas W and Angelo Baca, “Rejecting Racism in Any Form: LatterDay Saint Rhetoric, Religion, and Repatriation,” Open Theology, no. 2 (2016): 700–725. 87. Robinson, Rebecca, Voices from Bears Ears: Seeking Common Ground on Sacred Land (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018), 77–78; Mauss, Abraham’s Children, 123. 88. Robinson, Bears Ears, 30, 228, 374–376. 89. Peterson, Black Hawk War, 78–79, 396–397. 90. Hutt, Sherry, “Notice of Inventory Completion: Brigham Young University, Museum of Peoples and Cultures, Provo, UT,” Federal Register 75, no. 185 (Sept. 24, 2010): 58433–58435; O’Brien, Melanie, “Notice of Inventory Completion: Brigham Young University, Museum of Peoples and Cultures, Provo, UT; Correction,” Federal Register 77, no. 167 (Aug. 28, 2012): 52057.

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91. Bitsoi, Alastair, “Greenthread: Bear’s Ears to Brooklyn,” in Edge of Morning: Native Voices Speak for the Bears Ears, ed. Jacqueline Keeler (Salt Lake City: Torrey House Press, 2017): 46. 92. Robinson, Bears Ears. 93. Ibid., 202; Lopez-Whiteskunk, Regina, “Afterword,” in Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, ed. Amy Irvine (Salt Lake City: Torrey House Press, 2018): 85; “Fighting for the Land and Building Healing from Within,” in Edge of Morning, ed. Keeler: 26. 94. Baca, Angelo, “Bears Ears Is Here to Stay,” New York Times, Dec. 8, 2017; Dougherty, John, “Trump’s Dismemberment of Bears Ears National Monument: Perspectives from Indigenous Scholars,” The Revelator, Dec. 5, 2017.

Bibliography Alexander, Thomas G.  Native Americans in Post-War Utah. http://historytogo. utah.gov/. Allred, B. Harvey. 1968 [1933]. A Leaf in Review of the Words and Acts of God and Men Relative to the Fullness of the Gospel. 2nd ed. Draper, UT: Review and Preview Publishers. Anderson, Wallace. 2000. Mad Bear. In Encyclopedia of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy), ed. Bruce E. Johansen and Barbara A. Mann, 24–25. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Baca, Angelo. 2017. Bears Ears Is Here to Stay. New York Times, December 8. ———. 2018. Porter Rockwell and Samuel the Lamanite Fistfight in Heaven: A Mormon Navajo Filmmaker’s Perspective. In Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Post-Colonial Zion, ed. Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks, 67–76. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Bagley, Will. 2001. The Pioneer Camp of the Saints: The 1846 and 1847 Mormon Trail Journals of Thomas Bullock. Spokane, WA: The Arthur H. Clark Company. ———. 2002. Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. ———. 2019. The Whites Want Every Thing: Indian-Mormon Relations, 1847–1877. Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American Frontier. Norman, OK: The Arthur H. Clark Company. Benally, Moroni. 2017. Decolonizing the Blossoming: Indigenous People’s Faith in a Colonizing Church. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 50 (4): 71–78. Bennion, Michael K. 2012. Captivity, Adoption, Marriage and Identity: Native American Children in Mormon Homes, 1847–1900. MA Thesis, University of Nevada. Bitsoi, Alastair. 2017. Greenthread: Bear’s Ears to Brooklyn. In Edge of Morning: Native Voices Speak for the Bears Ears, ed. Jacqueline Keeler, 44–49. Salt Lake City: Torrey House Press. Blackhawk, Ned. 2006. Violence over the Land: Indians and Empire in the Early American West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Blanchard, Kendall A. 1977. The Economics of Sainthood: Religious Change among the Rimrock Navajos. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses. Blueotter, Will. 2014. Pt 1–1972 Unity Caravan: Mad Bear Anderson, Thomas Banyaca, Janet Mccloud. Podcast November 2. https://www.blogtalkradio.com/prophecyk e e p e r s / 2 0 1 4 / 1 1 / 0 2 /

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p t - 1 % 2 D % 2 D 1 9 7 2 - u n i t y - c a r a v a n - m a d - b e a r- a n d e r s o n - t h o m a s - b a n y acya-janet-mccloud. Boren, Karen. 1997. Indians to Settlers: ‘We Must Help One Another’. Church News, July 5. Boxer, Elise. 2015. ‘The Lamanites Shall Blossom as the Rose’: The Indian Student Placement Program, Mormon Whiteness, and Indigenous Identity. Journal of Mormon History 41 (4): 132–176. ———. 2018. ‘This Is the Place!’ Disrupting Mormon Settler Colonialism. In Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion, ed. Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks, 77–99. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. ———. 2019. The Book of Mormon as Mormon Settler Colonialism. In Essays on American Indian & Mormon History, ed. P. Jane Hafen and Brenden W. Rensink, 3–22. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Brinkerhoff, Zula. 1971. God’s Chosen People of America. Salt Lake City: Publisher’s Press. ———. 1973. The Spirit of Geronimo Returns. Salt Lake City: self-published. Brinkerhoff, Val. 2018. The Remnant Awakens. Create Space. Brooks, Juanita. 1944. Indian Relations on the Mormon Frontier. Utah Historical Quarterly 12 (1/2): 1–48. Brugge, David M. 1994. The Navajo Hopi Land Dispute: An American Tragedy. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Campbell, Douglas. 1996. ‘White’ or ‘Pure’: Five Vignettes. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29 (4): 119–135. Christensen, Scott R. 1999. Sagwitch: Shoshone Chieftan, Mormon Elder, 1822–1887. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press. Colvin, Gina, and Joanna Brooks, eds. 2018. Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Cuch, Forrest S., ed. 2000. A History of Utah’s American Indians. Salt Lake City: Utah State Division of Indian Affairs/Utah State Division of History. Deloria, Phil. 1998. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press. Denetdale, Jennifer Nez. 2014. The Value of Oral History on the Path to Diné/Navajo Sovereignty. In Diné Culture, Decolonization, and the Politics of Hózhó, ed. Lloyd L. Lee, 68–82. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Dougherty, John. 2017. Trump’s Dismemberment of Bears Ears National Monument: Perspectives from Indigenous Scholars. The Revelator, December 5. Echo Hawk, Larry. 1975. Someone’s Concerned About Me. Ensign, December. Elder Larry J.  Echo Hawk. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church/leader/ larry-echo-hawk. Farmer, Jared. 2008. On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Fenton, Elizabeth, and Jared Hickman. 2019. Americanist Approaches to the Book of Mormon. New York: Oxford University Press. Garrett, Mathew. 2016. Making Lamanites: Mormons, Native Americans, and the Indian Student Placement Program, 1947–2000. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Gibbons, Francis M. 1982. Statistical Report 1981. Ensign, no. 5. Gottlieb, Robert, and Peter Wiley. 1986 [1984]. America’s Saints: The Rise of Mormon Power. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Hafen, P.  Jane, and Brenden W.  Rensink, eds.  2019.  Essays on American Indian & Mormon History. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

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Harris, Lacee A. 1985. To Be Native American—and Mormon. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18 (Winter): 143–152. Harris, Alicia. 2018. An Abundant God Knows the Middle Also. In Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Post-Colonial Zion, ed. Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks, 114–130. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Hebner, William L. 2010. Southern Paiute: A Portrait. Logan: Utah State University Press. Hendrix-Komoto, Amanda. 2013. Boycotting General Conference 40 Years Ago: The Lamanite Generation, the American Indian Movement, and Temple Square. Juvenile Instructor, April 12. Hickman, Jared. 2014. The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse. American Literature 80 (3): 429–461. Hutt, Sherry. 2010. Notice of Inventory Completion: Brigham Young University, Museum of Peoples and Cultures, Provo, UT. Federal Register 75 (185): 58433–58435. Jacobs, Margaret D. 2016. Entangled Histories: The Mormon Church and Indigenous Child Removal from 1850 to 2000. Journal of Mormon History 42 (2): 27–60. King, Farina. 2019. Indigenizing Mormonisms. Mormon Studies Review 6: 1–16. Kovach, Margaret E. 2010. Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts. University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. Kunz, Rhea Allred. 2000. The One Like Unto Moses the Branch Prophet. Salt Lake City: Latter Day Publications. Leonard, Glen M. 2000. Antiquities, Curiosities, and Latter-Day Saint Museums. In The Disciple as Witness: Essays on Latter-Day Saint History and Doctrine in Honor of Richard Lloyd Anderson, ed. Richard L.  Anderson, Stephen D.  Ricks, Donald W. Parry, and Andrew H. Hedges, 291–325. Provo: Brigham Young University. Leydsman McGinty, Ellie I. 2009. Land Ownership of Utah. In Rangeland Resources of Utah, ed. R.E. Banner, B.D. Baldwin, and E.I. Leydsman McGinty, 9–23. Logan: Cooperative Extension Service, Utah State University. Lopez-Whiteskunk, Regina. 2017. Fighting for the Land and Building Healing from Within. In Edge of Morning: Native Voices Speak for Bears Ears, ed. Jacqueline Keeler, 22–34. Salt Lake City: Torrey House Press. ———. 2018. Afterword. In Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, ed. Amy Irvine, 83–89. Salt Lake City: Torrey House Press. Mauss, Armand L. 2003. All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Metcalf, R.  Warren. 2002. Termination’s Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln. ———. 2019. ‘Which Side of the Line?’: American Indian Students and Programs at Brigham Young University, 1960–1983. In Essays on American Indian & Mormon History, ed. P. Jane Hafen and Brenden Rensink, 225–245. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Metcalfe, Brent Lee. 2004. Reinventing Lamanite Identity. Sunstone 131: 20–29. Murphy, Thomas W. 2018. Decolonization on the Salish Sea: A Tribal Journey Back to Mormon Studies. In Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Post-Colonial Zion, ed. Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks, 47–66. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. ———. 2019. Other Scriptures: Restoring the Voices of the Gantowisas to an Open Canon. In Essays on American Indian & Mormon History, ed. P.  Jane Hafen and Brenden W. Rensink, 23–40. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

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Murphy, Thomas W., and Angelo Baca. 2016. Rejecting Racism in Any Form: Latter-­ Day Saint Rhetoric, Religion, and Repatriation. Open Theology 2: 700–725. ———. 2020. DNA and the Book of Mormon: Science, Settlers, and Scripture. In The LDS Gospel Topics Essays: A Scholarly Engagement, ed. Matthew L. Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books. Murphy, Thomas W., Kerrie S.  Murphy, and Jessyca B.  Murphy. 2020. An Indian Princess and a Mormon Sacagawea: Decolonizing Memories of Our Grandmothers. Unpublished manuscript. Naylor, Josephine Wood. History of Daniel Wood Cemetary. http://www.angelfire. com/band/lobster/cemetery.html. Newcomb, Sarah. 2017. Hurt by Beliefs. Facts Hidden in the DNA Essay. Lamanite Truth, July 25. https://lamanitetruth.com/2017/07/25/hurt-by-beliefs-factshidden-in-the-dna-essay/. Nielson, Parker M. 1998. The Dispossessed: The Cultural Genocide of the Mixed-Blood Utes. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. O’Brien, Melanie. 2012. Notice of Inventory Completion: Brigham Young University, Museum of Peoples and Cultures, Provo, UT; Correction. Federal Register 77 (167): 52057. Parry, Keith. 1977. Blood Indians and ‘Mormon’ Public Schools: A Case of Ethnicity and Integrated Education. In Education, Change, and Society, ed. Richard A. Carlton, Louise A.  Colley, and Neil J.  MacKinnon, 225–238. Toronto: Gage Educational Publishing Limited. Peninah Schropshire Cotton Wood. 1998. Pioneer Women of Faith and Fortitude, 3438–3439. International Society Daughters of Utah Pioneers: Salt Lake City. People and Places. 1971. New Era 1, no. 8, August. Peterson, John Alton. 1998. Utah’s Black Hawk War. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Rapoport, Robert N. 1954. Changing Navaho Religious Values: A Study of Christian Missions to the Rimrock Navahos, Reports of the Rimrock Project Values Series, No. 2. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum. Riess, Jana. 2019. The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church. New York: Oxford University Press. Robinson, Rebecca. 2018. Voices from Bears Ears: Seeking Common Ground on Sacred Land. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Sandefur, Gary D., Ronald R. Rindfuss, and Barney Cohen. 1996. Changing Numbers, Changing Needs: American Indian Demography and Public Health. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Sherkat, Darren. 2014. Changing Faith: The Dynamics and Consequences of Americans’ Shifting Religious Identitites. New York: New York University. Shumway, Dale, and Margene Shumway. 2002. The Blossoming: Dramatic Accounts in the Lives of Native Americans. Orem, UT: Granite Press. Silko, Leslie M. 1999. Gardens in the Dunes: A Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster. Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Smith, Christopher C. 2015. Playing Lamanite: Ecstatic Performance of American Indian Roles in Early Mormon Ohio. Journal of Mormon History 41 (3): 131–166. ———. 2016a. Mormon Conquest: Whites and Natives in the Intermountain West, 1847–1851. PhD Thesis, Claremont Graduate University.

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Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2016b. Keeping a Decolonising Agenda to the Forefront. In Decolonisation in Aotearoa: Education, Research and Practice, ed. Jessica Hutchings and Jenny Lee-Morgan, ix–x. Wellington: NZCER Press. Smoak, Gregory E. 1986. The Mormons and the Ghost Dance of 1890. South Dakota History 16 (3): 296–294. ———. 2006. Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stewart, Jon, and Peter Wiley. 1981. Cultural Genocide. Penthouse 12 (10): 80–84, 152–154, 63–64. Taylor, Lori E. 2000. Telling Stories About Mormons and Indians. Ph.D. Thesis, State University of New York at Buffalo. ———. 2019a. Joseph Smith in Iroquois Country: A Mormon Creation Story. In Essays on American Indian & Mormon History, ed. P. Jane Hafen and Brenden W. Rensink, 41–60. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Taylor, Michael P. 2019b. In the Literature of the Lamanites: (Un)Settling Mormonism in the Literary Record of Native North America, 1830–1930. In Essays on American Indian & Mormon History, ed. P. Jane Hafen and Brenden Rensink, 85–109. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Thayne, Stanley J. 2016. The Blood of Father Lehi: Indigenous Americans and the Book of Mormon. PhD Thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ———. 2019a. Mormonism and the Catawba Indian Nation. In Essays on American Indian & Mormon History, ed. P. Jane Hafen and Brenden Rensink, 113–136. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. ———. 2019b. ‘We’re Going to Take Our Land Back Over’: Indigenous Positionality, the Ethnography of Reading, and the Book of Mormon. In Americanist Approaches to the Book of Mormon, ed. Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, 321–338. New York: Oxford University Press. Todd, Douglas. 2009. Aboriginals, Churches Share a Mutual Respect; Christianity Remains a Major Part of Native Peoples’ Lives, Despite Grim Legacy, Overlooked Polls Reveal. The Vancouver Sun, August 28. Topper, Martin D. 1979. ‘Mormon Placement’: The Effects of Missionary Foster Families on Navajo Adolescents. Ethos 7 (2): 142–160. Veracini, Lorenzo. 2010. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2015. The Settler Colonial Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Vogt, Evon Z., and Ethel M. Albert, eds. 1975 [1966]. People of Rimrock: A Study of Values in Five Cultures. New York: Atheneum. Warner, Frank W. 1914–1915. Frank W.  Warner Missionary Journal. In Missionary Database, ed. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Church History. Wilkinson, Charles F. 1999. Fire on the Plateau: Conflict and Endurance in the American Southwest. Washington, DC: Island Press. Wilson, Edmund. 1992 [1959]. Apologies to the Iroquois. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Wilson, Shawn. 2008. Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Winnipeg, Manitoba: Fernwood Publishing. Wolfe, Patrick. 1999. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. London: Cassell.

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Wood, Daniel. 1868. Autobiography of Daniel Wood Sr. In Book of Abraham Project. Brigham Young University. http://www.boap.org/LDS/Early-Saints/Daniel_ Wood_Journal.html. Wood, Joseph C. 1934. Peninah S. Cotton Wood. In Family Histories. Salt Lake City, UT: Church History Library.

PART V

Final Concerns and Reflections

CHAPTER 30

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Response to the 2019–20 Coronavirus Pandemic Matthew T. Evans

In November 20191 a new coronavirus, apparently originating in bats, spread to one or more human beings and then began spreading from person to person.2 The first death occurred on January 11, 2020 in Wuhan, Hubei Province China. Three months later the virus had spread to 233 countries and territories,3 more than one million people had been infected, 100,000 had died, and “more than [one third] of humanity [was] under some form of lockdown” (including 95 percent of Americans).4 The pandemic dramatically reduced commerce and social interaction all over the world and profoundly affected governments, businesses, and other institutions, including The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (alternately, “the Church,” in appropriate contexts and Latter-day Saints for Church members). By the last day of February 2020 there were “more than 85,000 global cases,” but less than 3000 had died, and the “vast majority” were in China.5 That same day Ireland reported its first case, Brazil its second, and Mexico its fourth.6 The United States still had only two dozen cases and one death,7 and just three days prior US president Donald Trump had said cases were “going very substantially down, not up.”8 Instead, however, the cases grew exponentially, and by the second week in March institutions worldwide were taking dramatic preventative steps. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic,9 and the same day The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued its first public statements about this

M. T. Evans (*) Correlation Research Division, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, UT, USA © The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0_30

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unfolding pandemic. These included four very notable news releases about the impacts on global Church operations, three of them jointly signed by the faith’s governing bodies, the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. I will begin this chapter by first summarizing these pandemic impacts, chronologically, for each of four significant areas of Church operation: (1) missionary work, (2) worship and other gatherings, (3) temple work, and (4) welfare and humanitarian efforts. I will then compare the Church’s unified, hierarchical pandemic responses with other major US denominations’ localized or congregational responses to their own pandemic concerns. Finally, I will explore some of the potential long-term impacts of the pandemic on Church operations and policies.

Summary of Church Responses to the Pandemic Missionary Work 3/11/20: Prominent Missionary Training Centers (MTCs) Stop Admitting New Missionaries. The first press release this day was perhaps most significant. It said, “beginning March 16, 2020, all missionaries scheduled to enter missionary training centers in Provo, Utah, or Preston, England, will be trained remotely by video conference.”10 The Church had “more than 67,000 full-time missionaries … in 399 missions throughout the world,”11 and every week hundreds of missionaries began their service in “one of the Church’s 11 missionary training centers (sometimes called MTCs), where missionaries spend three to nine weeks in training (those not learning a foreign language stay at an MTC for only three weeks or less).”12 The Preston MTC serves the Church’s Europe and Europe East areas, while the flagship Provo MTC provides training in more than 50 languages for service all over the world.13 (Training at the Provo MTC is facilitated by student teachers drawn from adjacent Brigham Young University (BYU), which has nearly 22,000 students who have previously served missions.14) Suddenly switching to a remote-training model, encompassing such a large number of missionaries and training personnel, was no doubt an enormous and challenging undertaking, with unknown consequences on language acquisition, morale, and later proselyting proficiency for the missionaries in training. 3/16/20: Missionaries Reassigned or Released Early. Five days later the Church issued another statement about missionaries, saying those “unable to travel to their assigned missions may be temporarily reassigned to another mission,” and that many others may be sent home early. These included both young missionaries in the United States and Canada, who could be released up to three months early, and older age and at-risk missionaries (“young missionaries with health issues and [all] senior missionaries”), who would be released immediately.15 Normally young men serve as missionaries for two years and young women for 18 months.16

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3/20/20: Missionaries Reassigned to Home Nations, Missions Shortened, and All MTCs Stop Admitting New Missionaries. Even bigger changes to missionary work came after another four days. The three-pronged announcement said: • “In the coming weeks, based upon world conditions, substantial numbers of missionaries will likely need to be returned to their home nations to continue their service [following] a 14-day period of self-isolation.”17 • “The term of service for missionaries returning to or serving within the United States will likely be reduced to accommodate the large number of missionaries returning from around the world.” • “Missionary training centers (MTCs) worldwide will not receive new missionaries. MTC training for missionaries will take place through technology, and missionaries will be sent to their assigned mission as soon as possible.” On March 22, the Church said the returning missionaries would be “asked to self-isolate for 14 days, regardless of where they traveled from,” and asked parents or guardians to “go to the airport alone to meet a returning missionary and practice safe social distancing while there.”18 Unfortunately, two days later at Salt Lake International Airport, “hundreds of people gathered for tearful reunions for some 1,600 missionaries flying back in chartered planes from the Philippines,”19 which ignored social distancing guidelines provided by the Church and the airport (and became national news). 3/26/20: US and Canadian Missionary Assignments Shortened Even More. Within one week, the Church was reporting that 50 percent of the entire global missionary force had been affected in terms of “returning home for reassignment or release.”20 With only 29 percent of missions,21 but a much larger percentage of global missionaries,22 US and Canadian missions could not absorb all the missionaries for possible reassignment. A letter from the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles announced that, “where possible, in some areas of the world, missionaries will remain and complete their regular term of service,” but all missionaries from the United States and Canada would have their terms of service shortened—“elders … currently serving in the United States and Canada” after 21 months of service, and those returning from international assignments, after 15 or 18 months, for sisters and elders, respectively.23 Worship and Other Gatherings 3/11/20: No In-person April General Conference. A second major press release on March 11 said “Proceedings of the [April 2020 General Conference] will be distributed throughout the world via technology only. The public will not be admitted in the Conference Center in Salt Lake City, or in stake centers or meetinghouses in areas where contagion is a concern.”24 This was another remarkable departure from the status quo. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

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has been holding general conferences continually since June 9, 1830, just two months after the Church was organized on April 6, 1830.25 These twice-a-year conferences26 have been broadcast via satellite since 1975, but “the only general conference in the twentieth century to be canceled completely was in October 1957, because of the Asian flu epidemic.”27 While the April 2020 conference was not canceled, the complete elimination of an in-person audience was another striking change from anything that had previously occurred. This change was especially disappointing because of the heightened significance attached to the coming April conference. At the previous conference in October 2019, Church President Russell M.  Nelson explained that “In the springtime of the year 2020, it will be exactly 200 years since Joseph Smith experienced the theophany that we know as the First Vision…. Thus, the year 2020 will be designated as a bicentennial year. General conference next April will be different from any previous conference.”28 3/11/20: No More Local Conferences and Other Large Gatherings. A third press release this day said “we will postpone stake and leadership conferences and other large gatherings in Church Areas where illness caused by COVID-19 is a challenge, including, Asia, Asia North, Europe, Europe East, [and all Areas] in the United States and Canada.”29 A “stake” is an administrative unit of “five to ten congregations,”30 and “each stake holds two stake conferences during the year.”31 Cancelling such conferences likely had little short-term impact on members, but was another significant departure from established routines. 3/11/20: No More Events at Church-owned Universities. The final press release of March 11, 2020 came from leadership of the Church Educational System (CES), which oversees the Church’s educational programs, including the Church-run universities: BYU (Provo), BYU–Hawaii, BYU–Idaho, and LDS Business College.32 In relation to these four “institutions of higher education” in three US states, the press release said courses would continue, but “there will be no gathering for large events such as commencements, convocations, devotionals, conferences, public lectures, performances and concerts.”33 An update was released the next day (3/12/20) cancelling face-to-face classes at all four universities, to be replaced by remote instruction the following week. 3/12/20: No More Local Church Meetings or Activities. On March 12, the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles made the unprecedented announcement that “beginning immediately, all public gatherings of Church members are being temporarily suspended worldwide until further notice.” This included “all public worship services” (sacrament meeting) and other local activities,34 such as activities designated for youth. On 4/16/20, the Church made it clear that in such “exceptional circumstances, when ward sacrament meetings are not held for an extended time, a bishop may authorize worthy priesthood holders in his ward to prepare and administer the sacrament in their own homes or in the homes of other ward members who do not have a worthy priest or Melchizedek Priesthood holder in the home.”35 3/13/20: Concerts and a Major Conference Cancelled. On March 13th, the Church announced the cancelation of upcoming concerts by the Tabernacle

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Choir at Temple Square, and closed public access to their weekly rehearsals, as well as to television (TV) and radio broadcasts of Music & the Spoken Word.36 In addition, RootsTech London—a European branch of the “world’s largest family-history technology conference”37 held annually in Salt Lake City—was postponed until autumn 2021.38 Later the Church postponed or canceled 2020 pageants, youth camps, treks,39 and an international tour by the choir.40 Temple Work 3/13/20: All Temples Cease Proxy Ordinances for the Dead, and Limit Ordinances for the Living. On March 13 the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles issued another press release with profound worldwide ramifications: “On a temporary basis, proxy temple ordinances will not be performed,” and “temple ordinances for living persons will be accommodated as capacity permits by appointment only.” Even ordinances for the living would be suspended “where restrictions on gathering effectively prevent it.”41 What those of other faiths refer to as religious ceremonies, sacraments, rites, or rituals, members of the Church of Jesus-Christ of Latter-day Saints refer to as “ordinances.” In addition to the Lord’s Supper—which members of the Church refer to simply as “the sacrament”—there are public ordinances considered by the Church to be essential for salvation: baptism and “confirmation” (laying on of hands to bestow the gift of the Holy Ghost while simultaneously confirming the baptized person as a member of the Church). In addition, there are certain non-public ordinances performed only in temples (which are different than the “meetinghouses” used for regular weekly worship and meetings and are accessible only by active Church members). Latter-day Saints believe these sacred temple ordinances are necessary for progression in the afterlife, and that they can be performed vicariously for deceased souls (who then, in the heavenly realm, have an opportunity to accept or reject the proffered ordinances). Therefore, members feel an obligation to perform proxy (or vicarious) ordinances of salvation on behalf of the deceased; this activity has become one of the primary missions of the Church. Toward this end, the Church has 224 temples in some phrase of use or development (161 operating, seven undergoing renovation, 15 under construction, and 41 announced but not yet under construction),42 and members have performed literally hundreds of millions of vicarious ordinances over the years.43 Thus, for members, suspension of these efforts is another very sobering departure from their normal religious lives. 3/25/20: All Temples Closed. While proxy temple activities for the deceased had already been curtailed, ordinances for living members within temples were still being performed, in small groups, by appointment. However, in a March 25 letter, the First Presidency announced that they had “decided to suspend all temple activity Churchwide at the end of the day.”44 Because “the privilege of entering the House of the Lord, the temple, and participating in its ordinances is a spiritual apex of LDS religious life,”45 this directive was highly disappointing to anyone planning at that time to receive their first

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temple ordinance(s). But it was especially disappointing, and even disorienting, for those (like one of the author’s family members) with appointments or plans to soon marry in the temple. Known as “sealings,” temple marriages are thought to endure beyond the grave, rather than “until death do [us] part.” When two members in good standing are engaged to be married, they typically plan to solemnize their marriage in a sacred temple ordinance that is binding for eternity. Indeed, throughout peoples’ lives, the importance of “temple marriage” is emphasized in the Church. In some countries wherein Latter-day Saints reside, the state requires performance of a civil marriage prior to having a temple marriage. But in other countries—like the United States, where a large percentage of members lives—those officiants who perform the temple ordinance also have state authority to simultaneously solemnize the marriage. Therefore, the temple sealing is not just an additional ordinance, rather it is the marriage itself. So many prospective Latter-day Saint marriage partners, suddenly unable to be sealed together in a temple, had to either postpone their marriage plans for an unknown period of time, or at least temporarily settle for just a civil marriage, a prospect that runs counter, in many cases, to a lifetime of expectation. Welfare and Humanitarian Efforts Internal Efforts. Latter-day Saints care for their own primarily by contributing “fast offerings” to their ward (or congregational) bishops. “One Sabbath day each month is set aside for the purpose of fasting. Members of the Church go without food and water for two consecutive meals in a 24-hour period and then contribute the money that would have been spent for that food to those in need.”46 The money is aggregated at Salt Lake City headquarters, and then the bishops who lead congregations throughout the world can pay bills and otherwise draw upon the funds to help those in need.47 It would not appear these efforts were suspended during the coronavirus pandemic, though it may have presented a challenge for persons in need to meet directly with their bishops to request the assistance. The Church also directly provides food through “bishops’ storehouses” in areas of high member density, and provides access to clothing and many other goods through Deseret Industries thrift stores. Beginning March 18, these stores were “closed to the general public for shopping and donations but [remained] open to support the needs of individuals served by bishops’ orders and community partner grants.”48 4/14/20: External Relief Projects Announced. The Church’s efforts concerning external humanitarian activities appear to have become even more pronounced during the pandemic, as the Church retooled some of its resource operations to specifically target helping with pandemic-related needs. A letter from the First Presidency, and subsequent news release, both describe some of the efforts and specific relief projects, key highlights from which are excerpted below:

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• “We are joining with other organizations around the world to address specific needs related to the pandemic. For example, our Beehive Clothing facilities in Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, Paraguay, and Utah are temporarily shifting their operations from the manufacture of religious clothing to the sewing of masks and gowns needed by local health care professionals and communities. In Utah, the Relief Society is leading our participation in a partnership between Latter-day Saint Charities, Intermountain Healthcare, and University of Utah Health. Church members, in their homes, will help sew 5 million clinical face masks, which will be donated to health care workers.” • “To date, we have approved over 110 COVID-19 relief projects in 57 countries. Most of these are done with trusted partners …. [By April 30, 2020 this was 280 projects in 80 countries.49]” • “We invite our members to participate in … relief projects in their areas and communities as opportunities arise and as local government directives and personal circumstances allow.”50 • “The Church has partnered with Project HOPE in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. The first donation came at the beginning of the year, when masks and other protective equipment were shipped to China.” • “The Church’s humanitarian arm has also provided medical equipment and personal protective equipment throughout Europe. In addition, masks have been donated in Vietnam, in partnership with Fatherland Front in Hanoi City. Work is also underway in underdeveloped countries where there’s currently no available testing for COVID-19.” • “Latter-day Saint Charities is also responding to the pandemic by providing food and other supplies around the globe. In partnership with Save the Children, relief is being sent to Rwanda, Sudan and Tanzania. Another project to provide personal protective equipment is underway in Ukraine, in partnership with the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA). In addition, the Church is participating in another project with ADRA to provide urgent food in Serbia.”51

Comparisons and Analysis of Organizational Responses Having identified and summarized the primary responses of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint’s responses to the coronavirus pandemic, I will turn now to some comparisons of these responses with those of several other major US religious denominations and analyze the differences seen in these comparisons. In the final section of this chapter, I will consider what some of the long-term impacts might be on Church organization, operations, and policies.

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Illumination of Latter-day Saint Church Polity by Response Comparisons Perhaps the most distinguishing aspect of the Church’s response to the pandemic is the uniform, global application of its decisions. This reflects the Church’s unusually hierarchical polity. The polity of a Church, its decision-making process and power structure, constitutes the foundation for addressing both internal and external challenges to the institution. Ranging along a continuum from highly centralized hierarchical polities at one end, to decentralized, congregationally based polities at the other, particular denominations vary in their fundamental decision-making structures and processes. While institutional policies and practices are determined by top officials in hierarchical religious organizations, they are established by local congregations in decentralized structures.” “[In the LDS Church] both doctrinal and policy decisions reside in the governing bodies of the First Presidency, composed of the president of the Church and his counselors, and the Council or Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.52

To compare and contrast The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ approach to dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, I contacted colleagues from other denominations, asking if their denominations had made similar decisions to shut down congregations and related organizational activities during the pandemic. These included the three largest denominations in the United States: the Roman Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the United Methodist Church. (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the 4th largest.53) My respondents also included a colleague who is a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which has also has a hierarchical polity, and several other mainline and evangelical Protestants. Replies of colleagues to my question concerning the response of their churches to the pandemic follow. Some of them also elaborate on their denomination’s polity underlying the scope of given responses.54 Despite the outward hierarchical appearing structure of the Roman Catholic Church, the pandemic policy of Catholic congregations was not proscribed by the Pope or directives emanating from Rome. Rather, consistent with Catholic “episcopal polity” (rule by bishops), decisions were in fact made by individual bishops, who oversee their designated archdioceses throughout the United States and world. Colleague Answer Regarding Roman Catholic Church Response: For the Catholic Church, each bishop issued his own order for closing churches, mostly by the middle of March (although some individual parishes had already made that decision on their own). See, for example,

• https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/us/coronavirus-kentucky-churchescancel.html.

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• https://www.catholicnews.com/services/englishnews/2020/churches-begincanceling-masses-in-effort-to-stem-covid-19-pandemic.cfm or • https://www.cdow.org/massescanceled/ Many bishops around the world cancelled Masses and other public gatherings, but again at their own initiative and not at the insistence of Pope Francis, although he announced the closing of churches in Rome (https://www.foxnews.com/world/coronavirus-update-rome-mass-catholic-fasting-prayer-day). Nearly everyone, including Pope Francis, has continued to celebrate the Masses and offered them online in some way (Facebook Live, YouTube, EWTN, parish and diocesan websites, etc.). This has been a common practice for the elderly and shut-ins for years, but the logistics of making Mass available online at every parish was daunting!!

Within the Southern Baptist Convention, United Methodist Church, and other Protestant denominations with “congregational polity,” individual congregations made their own decisions: Colleague Answer Regarding Southern Baptist Convention Response: As you know, SBC churches are free to make their own decisions. That said, there have been many suggestions/directives/finding help options from many levels within our complex organization. For example: In mid-March, the Executive Director of the Arizona Baptist Convention sent out information that caused my little church to understand it was time for us to stop gathering together. Other SBC churches around us continued to meet for at least 2 more weeks.

Colleague Answer Regarding United Methodist Church Response: No denominational edict. I believe local congregations made their own decisions, informed by guidance from their Bishops.

Colleague Answer Regarding Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) Response: We are not centrally governed at all, so our congregations always make their own call on this. That said, you can see the statements and other responses we’ve made on this page:

• https://disciples.org/dns/disciples-and-covid-19/#news. Colleague Answer Regarding American Baptist Churches USA Response: Because American Baptists are characterized by congregational polity, we do not mandate actions for our congregations. We did recommend that all churches follow the social distancing and travel restrictions of their local, state, and federal governments.

Colleague Answer Regarding Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod Response:

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For the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, the decision has been entirely up to congregations. That is a result of the overall polity of the LCMS, which gives congregations full autonomy to self-govern. While the denomination cannot (by our polity) mandate congregations to make specific decisions, what we have done is to push resources out to the congregations to help them adjust to meet and minister virtually and more recently how to respond to the CARES Act. Here are few links to LCMS efforts to assist churches and ministers, as well as to encourage congregations to follow local and federal guidelines:

• https://blogs.lcms.org/2020/resource-helps-congregations-plan-forwidespread-illnesses/ • https://blogs.lcms.org/2020/what-your-church-can-do-right-now-inresponse-to-covid-19/ • https://www.concordiaplans.org/hub/covid-19-what-you-need-to-know.html • https://www.lcms.org/how-we-serve/mercy/health-ministry/pandemic Colleague Answer Regarding Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Response: Because of our polity, as three different expressions of church (congregation, synod, and churchwide office), none has power to make decisions over the other expressions. So, although we have a presiding bishop, she does not have the authority to tell congregations to suspend gatherings, nor do the synod bishops around the country.

Even in the hierarchical Seventh-day Adventist Church, local congregations made their own decisions in relation to the pandemic. Colleague Answer Regarding Seventh-day Adventist Church Response: SDA has worldwide headquarters but the decision to close local churches was not suspended centrally. My answer … is: My local church (along with the denominational university) was closed based on [the] recommendation of the senator in Michigan. The senior pastor worked along with the president of the University, they consulted other universities and followed recommendation of the governor of Michigan. NO CENTRAL DECISION was made.

The globally uniform response of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was quite different from the denominational responses reported above. Church uniformity of policy and its efficient implementation occurred despite wide risk differentials across regions, countries, and variable-sized geographies around the world; sometimes this did result in a seemingly disproportionate response. For instance, when the Church suspended all public gatherings worldwide on March 12, and all temple activity on March 25, the countries and territories of Oceania (two temples, 504 congregations, and over 200,000 members) were included, even though they had not reported a single case of COVID-19.55 Nevertheless, the cautious but global and uniform approach taken by the Church during an international crisis, such as this

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pandemic—bolstered by high compliance of faithful members, missionaries, and leaders—quite likely is a major factor in reducing overall risk to its members. Perhaps for this reason, only two of 67,000 missionaries, who were dispersed around the world until abruptly returned to their homes, were known to have contracted COVID-19 by the end of March 2020.56 One exception to the uniformity was the approach to Sunday services. While the Church’s top leaders issued guidance on the performance of ordinances and leadership meetings, there was nothing in terms of “what congregations worldwide should do about services during the pandemic.”57 This led to a variety of approaches at the local level, “each trying to meet the worship needs of a ward [congregation] family. Some [called] their efforts ‘messages,’ ‘devotionals’ or ‘firesides,’ but they happen on Sunday online for members to tune in.” And “some congregations … held full sacrament meetings (without Communion), via videoconferencing, that included prayers, talks and songs.”58 Cooperative Engagement with Other Institutions Another striking feature of the Church’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is the extent to which its decisions reflect engagement and consultation with non-LDS experts and organizations worldwide. For example, the initial major Church news releases of March 11 all mention counseling with “governmental, ecclesiastical and medical leaders,” both locally and around the world.59 The State of Utah declared a preemptive state of emergency on March 6,60 Salt Lake City did the same on March 10,61 and the Church began its major COVID-19 policy announcements the next day—the same day the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a pandemic.62 (This was also the same day when Utah Jazz professional basketball center Rudy Gobert tested positive for coronavirus, triggering immediate huge consequences for basketball leagues and other spectator sports in the United States.)63,64 On March 12, the Utah System of Higher Education announced that all public colleges and universities would be moving to online instruction,65 and the governor of Utah, where the Church is headquartered, eliminated “gatherings above 100” including “church gatherings.”66 It was this same day that the Church discontinued all public gatherings, including worship services, worldwide.67 Pre-Coronavirus Changes and Resources Finally, it’s worth noting that the Church made some changes over the preceding couple of years that probably made it easier for leaders and members to accommodate the suspension of Church meetings and temple ordinances during the COVID-19 pandemic.68 In fact, both the Church69 and Latter-day Saint websites70 have subsequently promoted this idea, seeing divine providence in the establishment of these policies prior to the coronavirus outbreak. These policy changes include the following:

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New Ministering Program. First, on April 1, 2018, Church President Russell M. Nelson announced “the decision to retire home teaching and visiting teaching as we have known them. Instead, we will implement a newer, holier approach to caring for and ministering to others. We will refer to these efforts simply as ‘ministering.’”71 Under the long-established home teaching program, all Church members were supposed to be visited on a monthly basis in their home by two assigned (lay) priesthood holders, who would typically deliver a gospel message. In addition, women members received a visit in their homes from two assigned women, which was called “visiting teaching.”72 In some ways the new “ministering” effort was similar to the old program, with the nomenclature of “ministering brothers” and “ministering sisters” replacing “home teachers” and “visiting teachers.” However, the prior expectation that contact be (a) monthly, (b) in-person, and (c) include delivery of a gospel message, was replaced by great flexibility in terms of “frequency and type of contact … and the need for and content of messages.”73 Visits could “take place at home, at church, or in any setting that is safe, convenient, and reachable” and could include community projects or even “supporting a youth’s soccer game.” More importantly, relative to stay-at-home orders that emerged during the 2020 pandemic, in-­ person contact could even be supplemented or replaced by phone calls, texts, “a note or card or email.”74 It’s unclear how well the ministering effort is currently working, but prior permission to engage in non-physical ministering seamlessly merged with sudden government imposition of social distancing and stay-at-home orders. Home-Centered Church Emphasis. Perhaps a more important set of changes, in terms of preparing members for home-based religious activities, was presented on October 6, 2018 when Church President Russell M.  Nelson announced the following: As Latter-day Saints, we have become accustomed to thinking of ‘church’ as something that happens in our meetinghouses, supported by what happens at home. We need an adjustment to this pattern. It is time for a home-centered Church, supported by what takes place inside our branch, ward, and stake buildings.75

The idea of a more “home-centered Church” was operationalized by, among other things, reduction of the long-standing three-hour Sunday services to two hours, and by introduction of a new curriculum called Come, Follow Me to be used at home.76 While the curriculum itself is produced by the Church and used in coordination with the Church’s extant Sunday School and Primary programs, it did seem to convey a broader vision of spiritual self-reliance. For instance, as President Nelson unveiled this new curriculum, he mentioned “a family who, because of [no proximity to a chapel], was required to meet in their home. I asked the mother how she liked going to Church in her own home. She replied, ‘I like it! My husband uses better language at home now, knowing that he will bless the sacrament here each Sunday.’”77 Eighteen

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months later, Latter-day Saints all over the world were placed in approximately the same position as this family. Perhaps at least some members’ experience with the recent emphasis on the “home-centered” concept resulted in less cognitive dissonance when suddenly confronted with the necessity of having “Church at home” due to pandemic social distancing rules. Civil Marriages. Only faithful Latter-day Saints are permitted to enter temples to participate in, or view, ordinances performed therein, including marriage or “sealing for time and all eternity.” Thus, if Latter-day Saint couples are married in the temple, their non-members friends and family are excluded from viewing or participating in the marriage ceremony. This exclusion obviously has the potential to create heartache for non-member parents and other close but non-member relatives.78 For many years, an alternative arrangement was to have a civil marriage for the couple first and then have the marriage sealing ordinance performed in the temple at a later time. However, this arrangement tended to have attached to it a potential stigma (a perception that that the couple might have been initially unworthy to have a temple marriage) and a likely delay in finally having a later temple sealing performed, at least in the United States and Canada. “In the United States, where the Church’s official ability to perform weddings has long been recognized by the government, there has been a one-year waiting period between a civil and a temple wedding. In some other nations where the government has not licensed the Church to perform weddings, couples have been able to be sealed in the temple immediately after their civil wedding.”79 However, on May 6, 2019 this one-year-wait policy was ended, although leaders were still told to “encourage couples to be both married and sealed in the temple”.80 After the coronavirus pandemic forced the closure of all Church temples worldwide, engaged members now must be married civilly before they can be sealed in the temple (or postpone marriage until temples re-open). Once again, then, changes to the old temple marriage wait policy, that occurred the previous year, have now normalized the civil-marriage-first arrangement for at least the duration of the pandemic restrictions.

Potential Future Impacts of the Pandemic As we have seen, the immediate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Church have been profound and far reaching, to wit: “For The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, its fundamental operations, programs and plans have been upended by the coronavirus. Services have been canceled. All temples are closed. And tens of thousands of missionaries have been recalled, released or reassigned.”81 What are some likely ongoing, future consequences for the Church as this pandemic eventually recedes? No one at this moment in time, of course, can provide precise and confident answers to this question. But in the most general terms, and based on the outcomes of past historical disasters, I tend to agree with a response given by Latter-day Saint scholar Patrick

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Mason: “I think once the virus goes away, I think we go back to church, I think people go back on their missions, I think people go back to the temples.”82 The short-term changes forced upon Church leaders by the pandemic have indeed been dramatic, and there are likely to be many residual effects continuing for some time. But I do believe that most core aspects of the Church are likely to return to a relatively normal state in the long-term. Again, history does give us some guidance in this regard, including evidence for both hope and concern. This is especially true with regard to Church missionary programs and membership growth. To illustrate, I excerpt reflections from a statement by a researcher who studies growth and other aspects of the global Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints about previous Church responses during time periods of health crises and political upheavals in specific world areas: • “Significant disruptions in Church operations have yielded a mixed bag of results, but generally the long-term findings are mostly positive …. For example, … in Ghana between June 1989 to November 1990 … the government banned all activities of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As a result, annual membership growth rates decelerated [dramatically, and] the number of branches in the country [declined]. … Nevertheless, the Church in Ghana has consistently reportedly moderately high growth rates since [and it] appeared to help prepare local Ghanaian members to operate stakes. • “Another noteworthy example of positive growth after disruptions in Church activities is in Liberia and Sierra Leone when the 2014–2016 Ebola crisis occurred. Prior to the Ebola outbreak, the Church in these two nations generally experienced intermittent periods of rapid growth punctuated by slow or stagnant growth that appeared caused by local leadership development problems and civil wars. … The Ebola outbreak slowed annual membership growth rates in both nations … but these rates have gradually increased since the outbreak ended. However, most importantly, the Church in both Sierra Leone and Liberia has experienced unprecedented growth in the number of congregations and higher convert retention and member activity rates. Local leaders have indicated that much of these improvements have been due to increases in the number of returned missionaries serving in leadership positions. However, the evacuation of all foreign missionaries and mission leaders required local members to undertake missionary and leadership roles more independently.” • “There are other examples when significant disruptions in Church operations have set back progress. The Church in the Republic of Georgia is a prime example of when such disruptions resulted in significant convert attrition and leadership voids. The Church evacuated full-time missionaries for three months during the brief war between Russia and the Republic of Georgia in 2008. Perhaps half of the active members became inactive…. It took approximately one decade for the Church to return to its previous status…. The Church in Sri Lanka was also significantly affected by the removal of

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f­ull-­time missionaries from the late 2000s to the mid-2010s although there was no disruption to Church meetings or operations for local members.” • “There are also additional examples where long-term Church growth trends did not appear affected by significant disruptions to missionary work or Church activities, such as with political instability and its impact on the Church in Serbia and the Church in Albania during the late 1990s/early 2000s, or periodic viruses that limited missionary work or church meetings in industrialized East Asian countries in the 2000s.”83 In 1981, then-President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Spencer W. Kimball, unveiled a three-fold mission statement that has subsequently informed all Church programs. In his words, the three guiding objectives are: 1. “To proclaim the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ to every nation, kindred, tongue, and people.” 2. “To perfect the Saints by preparing them to receive the ordinances of the gospel and by instruction and discipline to gain exaltation.” 3. “To redeem the dead by performing vicarious ordinances of the gospel for those who have lived on the earth.”84 In 2009, the Church First Presidency added a fourth mission objective to supplement the first three: 4. “To care for the poor and needy.”85 This set of mission statements are now called the “four divinely appointed responsibilities,”86 and they continue to guide the Church’s thought, planning, operations, and activities. For purposes of this closing section, I will refer to these “responsibilities” (or objectives) as: (1) missionary work among non-­ members, (2) Church programs directed toward the spiritual development of Church members themselves, (3) vicarious temple work for the dead, and (4) caring for the poor and needy. Within a general framework provided by these four objectives, I will now turn attention to specific potential future impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Church’s programs. Missionary Work Future Prospects The most noticeable impact of the coronavirus pandemic will surely be on missionary work, including the number of convert baptisms occurring throughout the world. First, we already see a sharp reduction in the number of Church missionaries called and beginning their service. As mentioned previously, current prospective missionaries are now instructed that they must either delay submitting their missionary application or submit it and then wait to begin service until

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“conditions allow.” Those already called as missionaries, but who haven’t yet started training, also face unknown periods of delay. Even those who had already begun their MTC training online were released from their callings, possibly for as long as 18 months.87 Historically, other significant worldwide crises have caused significant temporary reductions in the number of LDS missionaries available to serve. For example, the number of missionaries called by the Church dropped considerably during World War I, World War II, and the Korean War, but then generally bounced back at the conclusions of these major conflicts.88 Second, the Church is seeing huge reductions in the number of its missionaries in field as a result of all US and Canadian missionaries with international assignments being released and sent back to their homes for up to 18 months.89 There have been small declines in the number of missionaries in field at various times in recent years, but nothing of this magnitude. For example, there was a 13 percent decline in missionaries in field in 2015,90 but that decrease followed the huge missionary “surge” in 2013, when the minimum missionary age was lowered for both men (from 19 to 18) and women (21 to 19). There were also 9 percent declines in 2003 and 2004,91 following Apostle M. Russel Ballard’s “Raise the Bar” talk at the October 2002 general conference.92 Both of these declines in the missionary force proved to be only temporary. Beyond the obvious impact on convert baptisms, removal of in-field missionaries will decrease the average missionary experience and degrade various forms of missionary infrastructure and working capital, for example, rented apartments (unless leases are maintained on empty ones), social connections, knowledge of areas, language skills, and so on. The loss of experience and language abilities will be more pronounced for this cohort than previous ones, because it will not be caused by a decline in new missionaries, as in most previous times, but in currently serving missionaries.93 Third, there will be large declines in the number of convert baptisms, not only because of the reduced numbers of missionaries called and in field, but because of the greatly reduced ability of the remaining missionaries to proselytize. For example, the Church initially instructed missionaries “not to go door to door or contact people on the street in areas, such as the U.S. and Canada, where COVID-19 is a concern.”94 Subsequently, after most in-field missionaries were returned to their homes, the Church reported “missionaries who remain in regions where COVID-19 is of particular concern are taking precautions to stay healthy, including staying in their apartments as much as possible, avoiding personal interaction with other people and teaching through phone calls or other technology.”95 Once social distancing rules relax after the pandemic runs its course, it seems plausible to suspect that people who otherwise might be interested in hearing the missionary message may still be more leery of inviting missionaries into their homes than prior to the pandemic. As social contact and interaction restrictions eventually begin to lift, there will likely be a “surge” of LDS missionaries entering service, as there was following the previous decline in 2013. In turn, within a couple of years, this

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projected surge will likely smooth out, and, among other current concerns, baptismal conversions will increase. Most of these issues will likely be resolved— though there may be some long-term impacts, including on the cohort of missionaries themselves who only partially served, or wanted to serve, during this difficult time. Future Prospects for Church Programs Member Activity. Latter-day Saints identify their lay participation in Church programs as being “active,” something that is a strongly emphasized in the Church. Being active is referenced primarily by attendance at Sunday services and, to a lesser extent, by holding a volunteer position or “calling” in the congregation. Indeed, among other requirements, members cannot enter and participate in temple ordinances unless they “strive to … attend” their meetings.96 Past Church President Gordon B. Hinckley famously said that every convert “needs three things: a friend, a responsibility, and nurturing with ‘the good word of God.’”97 Thus, in the United States, at least, LDS Church members are more likely to attend religious services than those of any other religious group except Jehovah’s Witnesses,98 and “there is no doubt that Mormons are the highest when it comes to religious volunteering.”99 Given this long-standing prior emphasis, and the strong lay culture that nurtures and reinforces organizational participation, it seems reasonable to anticipate that a large majority of currently active members will return to Sunday worship services and resume serving in Church callings, once current pandemic restraints are lifted. However, even among Latter-day Saints, there could be a small decline in long-term Church attendance and participation depending on how long the “church-at-home” policy remains in place. Studies suggest that departures from established routines, whether because of competing activities that “crowd out” participation, or even simple passive disengagement, can lead to long-term “inactivity.” For instance, Smith and Denton found that religious decline among teenagers is largely attributable to fairly passive processes. Adolescents simply lose interest, just stop going to church, or are incapable of providing a reason altogether … We assert that these passive rationales are prominent in early adulthood. Emerging adulthood brings with it a host of responsibilities (e.g., work, school) and opportunities (e.g., increased autonomy) that simply and subtly crowd out religious participation … Once adolescents leave the structures (i.e., families) that have patterned their religious lives, religiosity may simply be left behind as well.100

In short, when circumstances return to a more or less normal state, most members are likely to rejoice at their ability to fellowship once again with their fellow Saints. But a small subset, perhaps especially among younger members, may find they enjoyed their break from Church meetings and responsibilities and become disinclined to return.

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Organizational Finances. According to LifeWay (an organization that conducts surveys and research for Christian ministries), “Most American churches do not have sizeable endowments … 26 percent of churches have seven weeks or less of operating income. An additional quarter only have enough to last eight to 15 weeks.” Thus, according to LifeWay’s executive director, “It would not surprise me at all if 5 percent of [American Christian] churches close over the next year.”101 With one of the largest endowments in the world—at a pre-pandemic value of $124 billion102—The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will not face the kind of financial hardships that are already confronting many other denominations and congregations. However, there will likely be a decline in new tithing revenue, because (a) members are removed from the convenience and reminder of donation slips and envelopes normally available to them in their local congregations and (b) a large percentage of Latter-day Saint members are US citizens and, like millions of their fellow Americans, a number of them have lost employment and other sources of income as a consequence of pandemic restrictions on normal business operations. Temple Work Performance of proxy ordinances in temples of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on behalf of people who have died is referred to as “temple work.” This work tends to be the province of highly committed members, especially retired persons, who also provide much of the staffing in temples. Such temple ordinances as marriages, family sealings, and  endowments, are also received by members on their own behalf. These ordinances, and the subsequent performances for the dead, are important to the spiritual experience of “temple-worthy members.” Absence of these spiritual experiences during the pandemic period of temple closures is likely to create a reservoir of desire among active members to renew these experiences. Once existing temples reopen following the lifting of pandemic restrictions in the countries where they are located, it seems likely that temple activities will surge back to at least pre-COVID-19 levels (perhaps with an initial small decline due to lingering concerns about suddenly coming into close proximity to hundreds of people after months of enforced social distancing). Humanitarian Programs for the Poor and Needy The coronavirus pandemic “shutdown” effects on world economies have already been catastrophic. Levels of unemployment, poverty, homelessness, domestic abuse, sickness, and all other categories of social ills will surely escalate in the months and even years ahead. The Church’s humanitarian programs have never seen a greater need for their continued (and hopefully expanded) operations throughout the world. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint’s vast “rainy day” fund has enormous potential to support expansion of

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its existing humanitarian outreach efforts in helping to provide some measure of relief for both its own poor and needy members as well as nonmembers.

Notes 1. See Josephine Ma, “Coronavirus: China’s first confirmed Covid-19 case traced back to November 17,” South China Morning Post, March 13, 2020, https:// www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coronavirus-chinasfirst-confirmed-covid-19-case-traced-back; and Josh Margolin and James Gordon Meek, “Intelligence report warned of coronavirus crisis as early as November: Sources,” ABC News, April 8, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/ Politics/intelligence-report-warned-coronavirus-crisis-early-novembersources/story?id=70031273. 2. “Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19),” “Situation Summary,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, updated March 26, 2020, accessed April 2, 2020, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/summary.html. 3. “2019–20 coronavirus pandemic by country and territory,” section “Timeline of first confirmed cases by country or territory,” Wikipedia, accessed April 15, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_ pandemic_by_country_and_territory#Timeline_of_first_confirmed_cases_by_ country_or_territory. 4. Holly Secon, Aylin Woodward, and Dave Mosher, “A comprehensive timeline of the new coronavirus pandemic, from China’s first COVID-19 case to the present,” Business Insider, April 7, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/ coronavirus-pandemic-timeline-history-major-events-2020-3. As this chapter neared completion on May 5, 2020 there were 3.62 million confirmed cases and over 250,000 deaths worldwide. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ COVID-19_pandemic_by_country_and_territory). 5. Julia Hollingsworth, Steve George, and Amy Woodyatt, “February 29 coronavirus news,” CNN, February 29, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/asia/livenews/coronavirus-outbreak-02-29-20-intl-hnk/index.html. 6. Ibid. 7. “Timeline of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic in the United States,” Wikipedia, accessed April 15, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Timeline_of_the_2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_the_United_States. 8. “Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Conference,” The White House, James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, February 26, 2020, issued February 27, 2020, h t t p s : / / w w w. w h i t e h o u s e . g o v / b r i e f i n g s - s t a t e m e n t s / remarks-president-trump-vice-president-pence-members-coronavirus-taskforce-press-conference/. 9. Donald G. McNeil Jr., “Coronavirus Has Become a Pandemic, W.H.O. Says,” New York Times, March 11, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/ health/coronavirus-pandemic-who.html. 10. “COVID-19’s Impact on Missionary Training Centers,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, news release, 11 March 2020, Salt Lake City,

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https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/ covid-19-mtc-adjustment. 11. “Missionary Program,” Newsroom, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed April 8, 2020, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/ topic/missionary-program. 12. “Missionary Training Centers,” Newsroom, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed April 7, 2020, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/topic/missionary-training-centers. 13. Ibid. 14. “Facts & Figures,” Brigham Young University, accessed April 8, 2020, https:// www.byu.edu/numbers. 15. “Update on How COVID-19 Is Impacting Missionary Service,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, news release, 16 March 2020, Salt Lake City, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/covid-19-impactmissionary-service. 16. “Missionary Program,” Newsroom, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed May 5, 2020, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/ topic/missionary-program. 17. “More Temporary Adjustments Made to Missionary Work,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, letter, 20 March 2020, Salt Lake City, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/ covid-19-further-adjustments-missionary-work. 18. “Church Emphasizes Self-Isolation Guidelines for Missionaries,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, official statement, 22 March 2020, Salt Lake City, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/self-isolationguidelines-missionaries. 19. Scott Neuman, “Salt Lake City Airport Tightens Rules For Greeting Missionaries Returning From Abroad,” NPR, March 24, 2020, https://www. npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/03/24/820534509/ salt-lake-city-airport-tightens-rules-for-greeting-missionaries-returning-from-a. 20. “COVID-19 Impacts 50 Percent of Church’s Global Missionary Force of 67,000,” Church News, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, March 26, 2020, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church/news/ covid-19-impacts-50-percent-of-churchs-global-missionar y-force-of67000?lang=eng. 21. As of July 2019 there were 399 missions (Scott Taylor, “Church announces creation of 4 new missions, dissolving of 12 others,” Church News, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, January 2, 2019, https://www.thechurchnews. com/global/2019-01-02/church-announces-creation-of-4-new-missionsdissolving-of-12-others-5878), but only 110 missions in the United States, and six in Canada (“List of missions of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” Wikipedia, accessed April 17, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List_of_missions_of_The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints). 22. The United States and Canada have 42% of members (at the end of 2019 there were 6,721,032 members in the United States and 199,054 in Canada, versus 16,565,036 in the world, per “Facts and Statistics,” Newsroom, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed May 5, 2020, https://newsroom.

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churchofjesuschrist.org/facts-and-statistics), 48% of congregations (United States 14,459 and Canada 497, vs. 30,940  in the world; same source), and higher activity rates (estimated at 40% in the United States in 2018, per “Country Resources,” Cumorah.com, accessed May 5, 2020, https://cumorah.com/index.php?target=countries, vs. 35% in Europe and Africa, and 25% in Asia and Latin America, per “The Law of the Harvest: Practical Principles of Effective Missionary Work,” Cumorah.com, accessed May 5, 2020, https:// cumorah.com/index.php?target=law_harvest&chapter_id=7). 23. “Further Adjustments to Missionary Service,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, letter, 26 March 2020, Salt Lake City, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/further-adjustments-missionary-service-march-26-2020. 24. “How COVID-19 Will Impact the April 2020 General Conference,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, news release, March 11, 2020, Salt Lake City, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/april2020-general-conference-format-change. At this point the plan was still “to conduct all five sessions of that conference at the Conference Center. General authorities, general officers and their spouses, musicians, choirs, technicians, and others will participate as assigned.” By March 19, however, a decision was made to “broadcast from a small auditorium on Temple Square. The First Presidency will preside and conduct those sessions, and only those who have been invited to speak or pray will attend. The music for the conference has been pre-recorded.” (“Additional Adjustments to the April 2020 General Conference,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, news release, 19 March 2020, Salt Lake City, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/ article/adjustments-format-april-2020-general-conference.) 25. Ryan Morgenegg, “A Brief History of General Conference,” Church News, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, October 3, 2014, https:// www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church/news/a-brief-history-of-generalconference?lang=eng. 26. William Rolfe Kerr, “Conferences: [sub-article] Conferences,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism (New York: Macmillan, 1992), https://eom.byu.edu/index. php/Conferences#Conferences:_Conferences. He notes, “two General Conferences are held each year, one in April (designated the ‘annual’ conference) and the other in October (designated as a ‘semiannual’ conference).” 27. Kenneth W. Godfrey, “150 Years of General Conference,” Ensign, February 1981, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1981/02/150years-of-general-conference?lang=eng. He adds, “influenza also postponed the April 1919 conference till June.” 28. President Russell M. Nelson, “Closing Remarks,” October 2019 general conference, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/20 19/10/57nelson?lang=eng. 29. “A Letter about COVID-19’s Effect on Large Gatherings of Saints,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, news release, March 11, 2020, Salt Lake City, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/ covid-19-impact-large-gatherings-latter-day-saints. 30. “Stake,” Gospel Topics, The Church of Jesus Chris of Latter-day Saints, accessed April 8, 2020, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/ gospel-topics/stake?lang=eng.

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31. “Stake Conferences,” Section 29.3.1 in the online General Handbook: Serving in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed April 8, 2020, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/handbook-2-administering-the-church/meetings-in-the-church/meetings-in-thechurch?lang=eng. 32. “Church Educational System,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint, accessed April 17, 2020, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church-education. Note: CES also oversees Seminaries & Institutes (S&I), which provides high-school- and college-based religious instruction, and BYU Pathway Worldwide, which provides online education. Note: LDS Business College will be renamed Ensign College effective September 1, 2020 (Jenny Goldberry, “LDS Business College changes name, adds four-year degrees,” The Daily Universe, February 25, 2020, https://universe.byu.edu/2020/02/25/ lds-business-college-changes-name-adds-four-year-degrees/). 33. “CES Guidelines Related to COVID-19,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, news release, 11 March 2020, Salt Lake City, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/ces-guidelines-covid-19. “Sections on BYU, BYU–Hawaii, BYU–Idaho and LDS Business College were added March 12, 2020.” 34. “Update: Gatherings of Church Members Temporarily Suspended Worldwide,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, news release, March 12, 2020, Salt Lake City, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/ gatherings-worldwide-temporarily-suspended. 35. “Directions for Essential Ordinances, Blessings, and Other Church Functions,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, April 16, 2020, https:// newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/ essential-ordinances-blessings-other-church-functions. 36. “How COVID-19 Impacts The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, news release, March 13, 2020, Salt Lake City, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/temporaryadjustments-temple-worship. 37. Joan Griffis, “Joan Griffis/Illinois Ancestors: RootsTech 2017 names prize winners,” The News-Gazette, Mar 1, 2017, https://www.news-gazette.com/ news/local/joan-griffis-illinois-ancestors-rootstech-2017-names-prizewinners/article_c770186a-652e-5b4e-95da-c145b77d9b6f.html. 38. “RootsTech London Postponed to 2021,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, news release, March 13, 2020, Salt Lake City, https://newsuk.churchofjesuschrist.org/ar ticle/rootstech-london-postponedto-autumn-2021. 39. “Church Cancels 2020 Treks and Pageants,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, news release, April 30, 2020, Salt Lake City, https://newsr oom.chur chofjesuschrist.org/ar ticle/camps-youth-confer encespageants-2020. 40. “2020 Heritage Tour Postponed to 2021,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed May 5, 2020, https://www.thetabernaclechoir. org/tour/2020-tour.html. 41. “Temporary Adjustments Made to Temple Worship Around the World,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, news release, March 13, 2020, Salt

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Lake City, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/ temporary-adjustments-temple-worship. 42. “Temple List,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, access April 17, 2020, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/temples/list?lang=eng. 43. In 1988 the Church announced, “the total number of endowments for the dead … passed the 100 million mark,” and “the next 100 million … might be performed within fifteen years or less.” (“100 Million Endowments Performed for the Dead,” Ensign, November 1988, https://www.churchofjesuschrist. org/study/ensign/1988/11/news-of-the-church/100-million-endowments-performed-for-the-dead?lang=eng.) Note that each endowment ordinance is preceded by vicarious baptism, confirmation, ordination (in the case of men), and initiatory ordinances. 44. “First Presidency Temporarily Closes All Temples,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, letter, March 25, 2020, Salt Lake City, https:// newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/first-presidency-temporarilycloses-all-temples-march-25-2020. 45. Allen Claire Rozsa, “Temple Ordinances,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism (New York: Macmillan, 1992), https://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Temple_ Ordinances. 46. “Fasting and Fast Offerings,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, accessed April 19, 2020, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/fasting-and-fast-offerings?lang=eng. 47. Isaac C. Ferguson, “Fast Offerings,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism (New York: Macmillan, 1992), https://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Fast_Offerings. 48. “Updates on How COVID-19 Is Impacting Saints Worldwide,” subsection “Welfare and Self-Reliance Operations (Updated March 17),” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 17 April 2020, Salt Lake City, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/ar ticle/coronavir us-update#welfareself-reliance. 49. “Church Donates Cash and Commodities to Support COVID-19 Relief Efforts,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, April 30, 2020, Salt Lake City, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/church-cashcommodities-donation-covid-19-april-2020. 50. “First Presidency Letter: Opportunities to Address COVID-19 Needs,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, April 14, 2020, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/covid-19-first-presidency-letterapril-14-2020. 51. “Latter-day Saints Participate in Global COVID-19 Relief Efforts,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, news release, April 14, 2020, Salt Lake City, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/latter-daysaints-global-covid-19-relief-efforts. 52. O. Kendall White Jr. and Daryl White, “Ecclesiastical Polity and the Challenge of Homosexuality: Two Cases of Divergence within the Mormon Tradition,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 37, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 72, 74, https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/ Dialogue_V37N04_85.pdf. 53. “Church giving drops $1.2 billion reports 2012 Yearbook of Churches,” National Council of Churches, March 20, 2012, http://www.ncccusa.org/ news/120209yearbook2012.html. At the time, the Catholic Church had 68.2

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million members, the Southern Baptist Convention had 16.1 million, the United Methodist Church 7.7 million, and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 6.2 million. 54. All responses were sent to the author by email, and all were sent April 16, 2020 except the one for American Baptist Churches USA, which was sent April 17, 2020. 55. The Church provides data on membership and congregations for 21 countries and territories in the “Oceania (Pacific)” area (“Facts and Statistics,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). As of April 19, 2020, 13 of them still had no confirmed cases of COVID-19: the countries Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu; and the territories American Samoa, Cook Islands, and Niue (“2019–20 coronavirus pandemic by country and territory,” Wikipedia, accessed April 19, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_ coronavirus_pandemic_by_country_and_territory). Together these countries and territories have 215,766 members in 504 congregations—most of them in Samoa (83,740 members, 162 congregations, and a temple) and Tonga (66,361 members, 173 congregations, and a temple (“Facts and Statistics,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). 56. “Updates on How COVID-19 Is Impacting Saints Worldwide,” subsection “Missionary Work (Updated April 1),” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, April 17, 2020, Salt Lake City, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/coronavirus-update#missionary-work. 57. Peggy Fletcher Stack, “Many Latter-day Saints across the globe are holding virtual Sunday services, but not in Utah? Here’s why that is.,” The Salt Lake Tribune, April 23, 2020, https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2020/04/23/ many-latter-day-saints/. 58. Ibid. Curiously, the online Sunday meetings were suspended in Utah in mid April when the leader of the Utah Area “sent a letter to the state’s lay leaders saying, ‘We have noted that some local leaders or members are attempting to hold sacrament meetings, Sunday school classes, and elders quorum and Relief Society meetings via technology [but such online gatherings] should not be held until the First Presidency lifts the directive to suspend those meetings.’” 59. “COVID-19’s Impact on Missionary Training Centers,” “How COVID-19 Will Impact the April 2020 General Conference,” and “A Letter about COVID-19’s Effect on Large Gatherings of Saints,” all The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 60. “Gov. Herbert Declares State of Emergency in Preparation for Coronavirus Cases in Utah,” Governor Gary R. Herbert, March 6, 2020, https://governor.utah.gov/2020/03/06/gov-herbert-declares-state-of-emergency/. 61. “Mayor Erin Mendenhall Declares State of Local Emergency,” Mayor’s Office, Salt Lake City, [March 10, 2020], accessed April 23, 2020, https://www.slc. gov/mayor/2020/03/11/mayor-erin-mendenhall-declares-state-of-localemergency/. 62. McNeil Jr., “Coronavirus Has Become a Pandemic, W.H.O. Says.” 63. Ryan McDonald and Sarah Todd, “NBA season suspended after Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tests positive for coronavirus,” Deseret News, March 11, 2020. Retrieved 4/23/20 from https://www.deseret.com/

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sports/2020/3/11/21174378/nba-season-postponed-rudy-gobertcoronavirus-covid19-utah-jazz-oklahoma-city-thunder. 64. Adam Kilgore and Ben Golliver, “U.S. sports face coronavirus reckoning as NBA suspends season, NCAA to play without fans,” The Washington Post, March 11, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/03/11/ ncaa-tournament-attendance-coronavirus/. 65. “USHE COVID-19 Updates,” Updated: March 12, 2020, 1:15 p.m., Utah System of Higher Education, https://ushe.edu/ushe-covid-19/. 66. Tad Walch, “Utah governor asks churches to limit gatherings to 100 or fewer,” Deseret News, March 12, 2020, https://www.deseret.com/ faith/2020/3/12/21177118/mormon-lds-church-coronavirus-covid19gary-herbert-gatherings. 67. “Update: Gatherings of Church Members Temporarily Suspended Worldwide,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 68. Another pre-COVID-19 church practice was the long-standing encouragement for LDS members to practice food storage and keep other emergency supplies in their homes, which may have helped some to better weather stayat-home orders and the reduced availability of goods in stores. 69. See “The Lord Has Prepared His Church,” at “Administrative Principles in Challenging Times,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Newsroom, April 16, 2020, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/administrative-principles-in-challenging-times. 70. See Lindsey Williams, “19 Ways the Church Is Prepared for the COVID-19 Pandemic,” LDS Living, March 26, 2020, https://www.ldsliving.com/19Ways-the-Church-Is-Prepared-for-the-COVID-19-Pandemic/s/92603; and LDS365, “27 Ways the Church is Prepared for the COVID-19 Pandemic,” LDS 365, March 31, 2020, https://lds365.com/2020/03/31/27-wayschurch-prepared-covid-19-pandemic/. 71. President Russell M. Nelson, “Ministering,” 2018 annual general conference, April 1, 2018, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2018/04/ministering?lang=eng. 72. For more information see Wayne R. Boss, “Home Teaching,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism (New York: Macmillan, 1992), https://eom.byu.edu/index. php/Home_Teaching. 73. “Frequently Asked Questions: Ministering with Strengthened Melchizedek Priesthood Quorums and Relief Societies,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­day Saints, accessed April 24, 2020, https://www.churchofjesuschrist. org/study/manual/faq-ministering/faq?lang=eng. 74. Ibid. 75. President Russell M. Nelson, “Opening Remarks,” 2018 semi-annual general conference, October 6, 2018 (emphasis in original), https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2018/10/openingremarks?lang=eng. 76. Elder Quentin L. Cook, “Deep and Lasting Conversion to Heavenly Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,” 2018 semi-annual general conference, October 6, 2018, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/

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2018/10/deep-and-lasting-conversion-to-heavenly-father-and-the-lordjesus-christ?lang=eng. 77. President Russell M. Nelson, “Opening Remarks.” 78. Peggy Fletcher Stack, and Scott D.  Pierce, “LDS Church changes policy about civil ceremonies and temple sealings, making way for more family members to be part of weddings,” The Salt Lake Tribune, May 6, 2019 (updated Mary 7, 2019), https://www.sltrib.com/news/2019/05/06/ lds-church-changes-policy/. 79. Jana Riess, “Mormon leaders change policy on temple weddings: No more one-year waiting period after civil ceremony,” Religion News Service, May 6, 2019, https://religionnews.com/2019/05/06/ mormon-leaders-change-policy-on-temple-weddings-no-more-one-year-waiting-period-after-civil-ceremony/. 80. Russell M. Nelson, Dallin H. Oaks, and Henry B. Eyring. “Discontinuation of One-Year Waiting Period after Civil Marriage,” letter and enclosure, May 6, 2019, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/multimedia/file/SealingAfter-Civil-Marriage-Letter.pdf. 81. “‘Mormon Land’: LDS scholar examines the coronavirus’s effects on the global church, anticipates a General Conference with talk about Second Coming,” The Salt Lake Tribune, April 1, 2020 (updated April 2, 2020), https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2020/04/01/mormon-land-lds-scholar/. 82. Patrick Mason, “LDS scholar examines the coronavirus’s effects on the global church,” Mormon Land podcast, episode 123, April 1, 2020 (retrieved, and transcribed by the author), https://soundcloud.com/mormonland/ episode-123. 83. Matthew Martinich, “COVID-19 and Church Growth Predictions,” Growth of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) (blog), March 22, 2020, http://ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com/2020/03/covid-19-andchurch-growth-predictions.html. 84. President Spencer W. Kimball, “A Report of My Stewardship,” Ensign, May 1981 (emphasis added), https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ ensign/1981/05/a-report-of-my-stewardship?lang=eng. 85. “Mormon Church to emphasize care for poor and needy,” KSL.com, Dec. 10, 2009, https://www.ksl.com/article/8984614/mormon-church-toemphasize-care-for-poor-and-needy. 86. The new General Handbook: Serving in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­day Saints (section 1.2) lists the “four divinely appointed responsibilities” as “Living the gospel of Jesus Christ,” “Caring for those in need,” “Inviting all to receive the gospel,” and “Uniting families for eternity.” Accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/ study/manual/general-handbook/1-work-of-salvation-and-exaltation. title_number3-p28?lang=eng#title_number3#title_number3. 87. “Church Offers New Options for Missionary Service,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, letter, 31 March 2020, Salt Lake City, https:// newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/service-options-missionariesmarch-31-2020. 88. The number of missionaries called each year went down 20% from 1913 to 1914 (858 to 684), when World War I started, went down 25% from 1916 to 1917 (722 to 543), when the United States entered the war, and went down

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another 55% in 1918 (to 245) perhaps owing to the Spanish flu. In 1919, when the war was over, the number quadruped to 1211. The number called went down 50% from 1941 to 1942 (1257 to 629), just after the United States entered World War II (on 12/11/1941), and skyrocketed from 1945 to 1946 (400 to 2297), when the war ended. During the Korean War the numbers went from 3015 in 1950, when the war began, to a low of 872 in 1952, and then up to 1750  in 1953, when the war ended. (All data compiled by the author from the Deseret News 2012 Church Almanac (Salt Lake City: Deseret News), 2011.) 89. “Church Offers New Options for Missionary Service,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 90. In 2012 there were 58,990 missionaries serving. In 2013 that figure jumped 41% to 83,035. The next year it remained high, at 85,147, and then began to decline as the double cohort came home—down 13% in 2015 to 74,079, and then continuing to decline each of the next three years (compiled from multiple Church statistical reports). 91. The number of missionaries in field went from 61,638 in 2002, to 56,237 in 2003, and 51,067 in 2004 (compiled from multiple Church statistical reports). 92. Elder M. Russell Ballard, “The Greatest Generation of Missionaries,” October 2002 semi-annual general conference, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/ study/general-confer ence/2002/10/the-greatest-generation-ofmissionaries?lang=eng. 93. This did happened in 1982 when the length of mission service switched from two years to 18 months. There were actually more new missionaries called in 1982 than in 1981, but the total number of missionaries in field went down 11 percent. It appears this happened because male missionaries, who had originally been called for two years, and had been in the field for more than one year, could choose to complete their assignment after only 18 months; a number did so. Less than three years later the policy was reversed because it tended to deprived missions of veteran missionaries who were most capable of performing their work, particularly in foreign language fields. (Data on missionaries called: Deseret News 2012 Church Almanac. Data on missionaries in field: “From conference reports and Church almanacs, 1925–85,” in Darwin L. Thomas, “Afterwords,” BYU Studies 26, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 99–103.) 94. Peggy Fletcher Stack, “During coronavirus, LDS missionaries instructed not to go door to door in U.S., Canada and much of the world,” The Salt Lake Tribune, March 18, 2020 (updated March 19, 2020), https://webcache. googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:IGQZA2CCLUAJ:https://www. sltrib.com/news/2020/03/18/during-coronavirus-lds/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct =clnk&gl=us. 95. “Updates on How COVID-19 Is Impacting Saints Worldwide,” subsection “Missionary Work (Updated March 17),” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­day Saints, summary page, March 18, 2020, Salt Lake City, http:// webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:petwI7cBaG8J:newsroom. churchofjesuschrist.org/ar ticle/coronavir us-update-febr uar y27-2020%3Fcid%3Demail-OCA_031220_PastChanges+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=c lnk&gl=us. 96. “Church Updates Temple Recommend Interview Questions,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, October 6, 2019, Salt Lake City, https://

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newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/ar ticle/october-2019-generalconference-temple-recommend. 97. President Gordon B.  Hinckley, “Converts and Young Men,” April 1997 annual general conference, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1997/04/converts-and-young-men?lang=eng (emphasis added). 98. Pew Research Center, “Religious Landscape Study,” page “Attendance at religious services,” section “Attendance at religious services by religious group,” [2014], https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/attendanceat-religious-services/. 99. David Campbell, “Mormons and Civic Life” roundtable discussion, The Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, March 15, 2012, https:// www.pewforum.org/2012/03/15/mormons-and-civic-life/. See also Ram Cnaan, Van Evans, and Daniel W.  Curtis, “Called to Serve: The Prosocial Behavior of Active Latter-day Saints,” 2014, https://www.sp2.upenn.edu/ wp-content/uploads/2014/07/cnaan_lds_giving.pdf. 100. Jeremy E. Uecker, Mark D. Regnerus, and Margaret L. Vaaler, “Losing My Religion: The Social Sources of Religious Decline in Early Adulthood,” Social Forces 85, no. 4 (June 2007): 1685–1686. 101. Michelle Conlin, “Empty pews, empty collection baskets: coronavirus hits U.S. church finances,” Reuters, April 11, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/ article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-church-finance/empty-pews-emptycollection-baskets-coronavirus-hits-u-s-church-finances-idUSKCN21T0EH. 102. “Top 100 Largest Endowment Rankings by Total Assets,” Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute, accessed April 24, 2020, https://www.swfinstitute.org/fundrankings/endowment.

Bibliography Ballard, M.  Russell. The Greatest Generation of Missionaries. October 2002 Semi-­ Annual General Conference. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/generalconference/2002/10/the-greatest-generation-of-missionaries?lang=eng. Boss, Wayne R. 1992. Home Teaching. In Encyclopedia of Mormonism. New  York: Macmillan. https://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Home_Teaching. Brigham Young University. Facts & Figures. https://www.byu.edu/numbers. Accessed 8 April 2020. Campbell, David. 2012. Mormons and Civic Life. Roundtable Discussion, The Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, March 15. https://www.pewforum.org/2012/03/15/mormons-and-civic-life/. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2020. Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), Situation Summary. Updated March 26. https://www.cdc.gov/ coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/summary.html. Accessed 2 April 2020. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, The. 1988. 100 Million Endowments Performed for the Dead. Ensign, November. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/ study/ensign/1988/11/news-of-the-church/100-million-endowments-performedfor-the-dead?lang=eng.

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———. 2019. Church Updates Temple Recommend Interview Questions. Salt Lake City, October 6. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/ october-2019-general-conference-temple-recommend. ———. 2020a. A Letter about COVID-19’s Effect on Large Gatherings of Saints. News release, Salt Lake City, March 11. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/covid-19-impact-large-gatherings-latter-day-saints. ———. 2020b. Additional Adjustments to the April 2020 General Conference. News release, Salt Lake City, March 19. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/adjustments-format-april-2020-general-conference. ———. 2020c. CES Guidelines Related to COVID-19. News release, Salt Lake City, March 11. (“Sections on BYU, BYU–Hawaii, BYU–Idaho and LDS Business College were added March 12, 2020.”) https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/ ces-guidelines-covid-19. ———. 2020d. Church Educational System. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/ church-education. Accessed 17 April. ———. 2020e. Church Emphasizes Self-Isolation Guidelines for Missionaries. Official statement, Salt Lake City, March 22. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/ article/self-isolation-guidelines-missionaries. ———. 2020f. Church Offers New Options for Missionary Service. Letter, Salt Lake City, 31 March. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/service-optionsmissionaries-march-31-2020. ———. 2020g. COVID-19 Impacts 50 Percent of Church’s Global Missionary Force of 67,000. Church News, March 26. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church/ news/covid-19-impacts-50-percent-of-churchs-global-missionar y-force-of67000?lang=eng. ———. 2020h. COVID-19’s Impact on Missionary Training Centers. News release, Salt Lake City, March 11. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/ covid-19-mtc-adjustment. ———. 2020i. Facts and Statistics. Newsroom. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist. org/facts-and-statistics. Accessed 5 May. ———. 2020j. Fasting and Fast Offerings. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/ study/manual/gospel-topics/fasting-and-fast-of ferings?lang=eng. Accessed 19 April. ———. 2020k. First Presidency Letter: Opportunities to Address COVID-19 Needs. April 14. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/covid-19-first-presidencyletter-april-14-2020. ———. 2020l. First Presidency Temporarily Closes All Temples. Letter, Salt Lake City, March 25. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/first-presidency-temporarily-closes-all-temples-march-25-2020. ———. 2020m. Frequently Asked Questions: Ministering with Strengthened Melchizedek Priesthood Quorums and Relief Societies. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/ study/manual/faq-ministering/faq?lang=eng. Accessed 24 April. ———. 2020n. Further Adjustments to Missionary Service. Letter, Salt Lake City, March 26. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/further-adjustments-missionaryservice-march-26-2020. ———. 2020o. General Handbook: Serving in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (section 1.2). https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/generalhandbook/1-work-of-salvation-and-exaltation.title_number3-p28?lang=eng#title_ number3#title_number3. Accessed 10 April.

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———. 2020p. How COVID-19 Impacts The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square. News release, Salt Lake City, March 13. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/temporary-adjustments-temple-worship. ———. 2020q. How COVID-19 Will Impact the April 2020 General Conference. News release, Salt Lake City, March 11. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/april-2020-general-conference-format-change. ———. 2020r. Latter-day Saints Participate in Global COVID-19 Relief Efforts. News release, Salt Lake City, April 14. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/latter-day-saints-global-covid-19-relief-efforts. ———. 2020s. The Lord Has Prepared His Church,” at “Administrative Principles in Challenging Times. Newsroom, April 16. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist. org/article/administrative-principles-in-challenging-times. ———. 2020t. Missionary Program. Newsroom. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/topic/missionary-program. Accessed 8 April. ———. 2020u. Missionary Training Centers. Newsroom. https://newsroom. churchofjesuschrist.org/topic/missionary-training-centers. Accessed 7 April. ———. 2020v. More Temporary Adjustments Made to Missionary Work. Letter, Salt Lake City, March 20. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/covid19-further-adjustments-missionary-work. ———. 2020w. “RootsTech London Postponed to 2021.” News release, 13 March, Salt Lake City. https://news-uk.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/rootstech-londonpostponed-to-autumn-2021. ———. 2020x. Stake. Gospel Topics. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ manual/gospel-topics/stake?lang=eng. Accessed 8 April. ———. 2020y. Stake Conferences. Section 29.3.1  in the online General Handbook: Serving in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/handbook-2-administering-the-church/meetings-inthe-church/meetings-in-the-church?lang=eng. Accessed 8 April. ———. 2020z Temple List. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/temples/ list?lang=eng. Accessed 17 April. ———. 2020aa. “Temporary Adjustments Made to Temple Worship Around the World.” News release, 13 March, Salt Lake City. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/temporary-adjustments-temple-worship. ———. 2020ab. Update: Gatherings of Church Members Temporarily Suspended Worldwide. News release, Salt Lake City, March 12. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/gatherings-worldwide-temporarily-suspended. ———. 2020ac. Update on How COVID-19 Is Impacting Missionary Service. News release, Salt Lake City, March 16. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/covid-19-impact-missionary-service. ———. 2020ad. Updates on How COVID-19 Is Impacting Saints Worldwide. Subsection “Missionary Work (Updated March 17).” Salt Lake City, March 18. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:petwI7cBaG8J:newsroom. churchofjesuschrist.org/article/coronavirus-update-februar y27-2020%3Fcid%3Demail-OCA_031220_PastChanges+&cd=2&hl=en&ct =clnk&gl=us. ———. 2020ae. Updates on How COVID-19 Is Impacting Saints Worldwide. Subsection “Missionary Work (Updated April 1).” Salt Lake City, April 17. https://newsroom. churchofjesuschrist.org/article/coronavirus-update#missionary-work.

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———. 2020af. Updates on How COVID-19 Is Impacting Saints Worldwide. Subsection “Welfare and Self-Reliance Operations (Updated March 17).” Salt Lake City, April 17. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/ coronavirus-update#welfare-self-reliance. Cnaan, Ram, Van Evans, and Daniel W.  Curtis. 2014. Called to Serve: The Prosocial Behavior of Active Latter-day Saints. https://www.sp2.upenn.edu/wp-content/ uploads/2014/07/cnaan_lds_giving.pdf. Cook, Quentin L. 2018. Deep and Lasting Conversion to Heavenly Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 2018 Semi-Annual General Conference, October 6. https://www. churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2018/10/ deep-and-lasting-conversion-to-heavenly-father-and-the-lord-jesus-christ?lang=eng. Cumorah.com. 2020a. Country Resources. https://cumorah.com/index. php?target=countries. Accessed 5 May. ———. 2020b. The Law of the Harvest: Practical Principles of Effective Missionary Work. https://cumorah.com/index.php?target=law_har vest&chapter_id=7. Accessed 5 May. Deseret News 2012 Church Almanac. 2011. Salt Lake City: Deseret News. Godfrey, Kenneth W. 1981. 150 Years of General Conference. Ensign, February. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1981/02/150-years-ofgeneral-conference?lang=eng. Goldberry, Jenny. 2020. LDS Business College Changes Name, Adds Four-Year Degrees. The Daily Universe, February 25. https://universe.byu.edu/2020/02/25/ lds-business-college-changes-name-adds-four-year-degrees/. Griffis, Joan. 2017. Joan Griffis/Illinois Ancestors: RootsTech 2017 Names Prize Winners” The News-Gazette, Mar 1. https://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/ joan-griffis-illinois-ancestors-rootstech-2017-names-prize-winners/article_ c770186a-652e-5b4e-95da-c145b77d9b6f.html. Hinckley, Gordon B. 1997. Converts and Young Men. Annual General Conference, April. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1997/04/ converts-and-young-men?lang=eng. Hollingsworth, Julia, Steve George, and Amy Woodyatt. 2020. February 29 Coronavirus News. CNN, February 29. https://www.cnn.com/asia/live-news/coronavirus-outbreak-02-29-20-intl-hnk/index.html. Kerr, William Rolfe. 1992. Conferences: [sub-article] Conferences. In Encyclopedia of Mormonism. New  York: Macmillan. https://eom.byu.edu/index.php/ Conferences#Conferences:_Conferences. Kilgore, Adam, and Ben Golliver. 2020. “U.S. Sports Face Coronavirus Reckoning as NBA Suspends Season, NCAA to Play Without Fans.” The Washington Post, March 11. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/03/11/ncaa-tournamentattendance-coronavirus/. Kimball, Spencer W. 1981. A Report of My Stewardship. Ensign, May. https://www. churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1981/05/a-report-of-my-stewardship? lang=eng. KSL. 2009. Mormon Church to Emphasize Care for Poor and Needy. December 10. https://www.ksl.com/article/8984614/mormon-church-to-emphasize-carefor-poor-and-needy. LDS365.com. 2020. 27 Ways the Church is Prepared for the COVID-19 Pandemic. March 31. https://lds365.com/2020/03/31/27-ways-church-prepared-covid19-pandemic/.

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Ma, Josephine. 2020. Coronavirus: China’s first confirmed Covid-19 case traced back to November 17. South China Morning Post, March 13. https://www.scmp. com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coronavirus-chinas-first-confirmedcovid-19-case-traced-back. Margolin, Josh, and James Gordon Meek. 2020. Intelligence Report Warned of Coronavirus Crisis as Early as November: Sources. ABC News, April 8. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intelligence-report-warned-coronavirus-crisis-early-november-sources/story?id=70031273. Mason, Patrick. 2020. LDS Scholar Examines the Coronavirus’s Effects on the Global Church. Mormon Land podcast, episode 123, April 1. Transcribed by the author. https://soundcloud.com/mormonland/episode-123. McDonald, Ryan, and Sarah Todd. 2020. NBA season Suspended After Utah Jazz Center Rudy Gobert Tests Positive for Coronavirus. Deseret News, March 11. h t t p s : / / w w w. d e s e r e t . c o m / s p o r t s / 2 0 2 0 / 3 / 1 1 / 2 1 1 7 4 3 7 8 / nba-season-post-poned-rudy-gobert-coronavirus-covid19-utah-jazz-oklahomacity-thunder. McNeil, Donald G. Jr. 2020. Coronavirus Has Become a Pandemic, W.H.O. Says. New York Times, March 11. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/health/coronavirus-pandemic-who.html. Morgenegg, Ryan. 2014. A Brief History of General Conference. Church News, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, October 3. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church/news/a-brief-history-of-general-conference?lang=eng. National Council of Churches. 2012. Church Giving Drops $1.2 Billion Reports 2012 Yearbook of Churches. March 20. http://www.ncccusa.org/news/ 120209yearbook2012.html. Nelson, Russell M. 2018a. Ministering. 2018 Annual General Conference, April 1. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2018/04/ ministering?lang=eng. ———. 2018b. Opening Remarks. 2018 Semi-Annual General Conference, October 6. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2018/10/ opening-remarks?lang=eng. ———. 2019. Closing Remarks. General Conference, October. https://www. churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2019/10/57nelson?lang=eng. Nelson, Russell M., Dallin H. Oaks, and Henry B. Eyring. 2019. Discontinuation of One-Year Waiting Period after Civil Marriage. Letter and enclosure, May 6. https:// newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/multimedia/file/Sealing-After-Civil-MarriageLetter.pdf. Neuman, Scott. 2020. Salt Lake City Airport Tightens Rules For Greeting Missionaries Returning From Abroad. NPR, March 24. https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/03/24/820534509/salt-lake-city-airport-tightens-rules-forgreeting-missionaries-returning-from-a. Pew Research Center. 2014. Religious Landscape Study. Page “Attendance at religious services,” section “Attendance at religious services by religious group.” https:// www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/attendance-at-religious-services/. Riess, Jana. 2019. Mormon Leaders Change Policy on Temple Weddings: No More One-­ Year Waiting Period After Civil Ceremony. Religion News Service, May 6. https:// religionnews.com/2019/05/06/mormon-leaders-change-policy-on-templeweddings-no-more-one-year-waiting-period-after-civil-ceremony/.

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Rozsa, Allen Claire. 1992. Temple Ordinances. In Encyclopedia of Mormonism. New York: Macmillan. https://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Temple_Ordinances. Salt Lake Tribune, The. 2020. ‘Mormon Land’: LDS Scholar Examines the Coronavirus’s Effects on the Global Church, Anticipates a General Conference With Talk About Second Coming. April 1. (Updated April 2, 2020). https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2020/04/01/mormon-land-lds-scholar/. Secon, Holly, Aylin Woodward, and Dave Mosher. 2020. A Comprehensive Timeline of the New Coronavirus Pandemic, from China’s First COVID-19 Case to the Present. Business Insider, April 7. https://www.businessinsider.com/ coronavirus-pandemic-timeline-history-major-events-2020-3. SLC.gov. 2020. Mayor Erin Mendenhall Declares State of Local Emergency. March 10. https://www.slc.gov/mayor/2020/03/11/mayor-erin-mendenhall-declaresstate-of-local-emergency/. Accessed 23 April 2020. Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute. Top 100 Largest Endowment Rankings by Total Assets. https://www.swfinstitute.org/fund-rankings/endowment. Accessed 24 April 2020. Stack, Peggy Fletcher. 2020. During Coronavirus, LDS Missionaries Instructed Not to Go Door to Door in U.S., Canada and Much of the World. The Salt Lake Tribune, March 18. (Updated March 19, 2020). https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/ search?q=cache:IGQZA2CCLUAJ:https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/03/18/ during-coronavirus-lds/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us. Stack, Peggy Fletcher, and Scott D. Pierce. 2019. LDS Church Changes Policy About Civil Ceremonies and Temple Sealings, Making Way for More Family Members to be Part of Weddings. The Salt Lake Tribune, May 6. (Updated Mary 7, 2019). https://www.sltrib.com/news/2019/05/06/lds-church-changes-policy/. Taylor, Scott. 2019. Church Announces Creation of 4 New Missions, Dissolving of 12 Others. Church News, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, January 2. h t t p s : / / w w w. t h e c h u r c h n e w s . c o m / g l o b a l / 2 0 1 9 - 0 1 - 0 2 / church-announces-creation-of-4-new-missions-dissolving-of-12-others-5878). Uecker, Jeremy E., Mark D.  Regnerus, and Margaret L.  Vaaler. 2007. Losing My Religion: The Social Sources of Religious Decline in Early Adulthood. Social Forces 85 (4): 1667–1692. Utah System of Higher Education. 2020. USHE COVID-19 Updates. Updated: March 12, 1:15 p.m. https://ushe.edu/ushe-covid-19/. Utah.gov. 2020. Gov. Herbert Declares State of Emergency in Preparation for Coronavirus Cases in Utah. March 6. https://governor.utah.gov/2020/03/06/gov-herbertdeclares-state-of-emergency/. Walch, Tad. 2020. Utah Governor Asks Churches to Limit Gatherings to 100 or Fewer. Deseret News, March 12. https://www.deseret.com/faith/2020/3/12/21177118/ mormon-lds-church-coronavirus-covid19-gary-herbert-gatherings. White House, The. 2020. Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Conference. James S.  Brady Press Briefing Room, February 26, issued February 27, 2020. https://www.whitehouse. gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-vice-president-pence-members-coronavirus-task-force-press-conference/. Accessed 15 April 2020. White, O. Kendall Jr., and Daryl White. 2004. Ecclesiastical Polity and the Challenge of Homosexuality: Two Cases of Divergence Within the Mormon Tradition. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 37 (4 Winter): 67–89. https://www.dialoguejournal. com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V37N04_85.pdf.

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Wikipedia. 2020a. 2019–20 Coronavirus Pandemic by Country and Territory. https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic_by_country_ and_territory. Accessed 19 April. ———. 2020b. 2019–20 Coronavirus Pandemic by Country and Territory. Section “Timeline of First Confirmed Cases by Country or Territory.” https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_coronavir us_pandemic_by_countr y_and_ ter ritor y#Timeline_of_first_confirmed_cases_by_countr y_or_ter ritor y. Accessed 15 April. ———. 2020c. List of Missions of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_of_The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_ Latter-day_Saints. Accessed 17 April. ———. 2020d. Timeline of the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_ the_United_States. Accessed 15 April. Williams, Lindsey. 2020. 19 Ways the Church Is Prepared for the COVID-19 Pandemic. LDS Living, March 26. https://www.ldsliving.com/19-Ways-the-Church-IsPrepared-for-the-COVID-19-Pandemic/s/92603.

CHAPTER 31

Summing Up: Problems and Prospects for a Global Church in the Twenty-first Century Ryan T. Cragun

From a small, esoteric group in upstate New York, the Mormon movement has expanded around the world and splintered into numerous well-established religions. While occasionally referencing other religions within the Mormon movement, this chapter will primarily focus on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is the largest and most international of the Mormon religions. The international expansion of the LDS Church initially took place in fits and starts. As Bartholomew, McDannell, Otterstrom and Plewe, and Stewart detailed in their chapters in this volume, the policy of gathering stunted international growth for much of the first century of the religion (1830–1930), preventing the religion from building a local base of members in the various countries where the leadership sent missionaries. Once converts were encouraged to stay where they were, international growth increased. The period of rapid growth of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church)—from the end of World War II until the turn of the twenty-first century—was likely less about how the LDS Church approached proselytizing (i.e., “supply”) and more about the confluence of American appeal and demand. As van Beek, Decoo, and Decoo detail in their chapter, much of the world was enamored with the US following World War II (WWII); the missionaries and message of this very American religion, as Maffly-Kipp argues in her chapter, were quite attractive. The transition to a younger, single, and dedicated missionary force that capitalized on widespread American appeal combined with rapid socioeconomic development around the world that lead to social dislocation created high demand for a religion that offered security

R. T. Cragun (*) University of Tampa, Tampa, FL, USA

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and community.1 As Martinich illustrates in his chapter examining LDS Church growth, the roughly 40 years between 1960 and 2000 were characterized by rapid growth, which forced the leadership to enact a number of changes. The leadership needed to professionalize to manage the growth. Business executives were called into the upper leadership to help with financial oversight and to correlate doctrine, teachings, and the leadership structure—streamlining the religion to help it function like a highly efficient corporation2 (see the chapters by Garcia and Prince for additional discussion of the corporatization of the LDS Church over time). The LDS Church organization has certainly proven nimble, flexible, collaborative, and socially responsible in dealing with various natural crises in modern times, exemplified by its response to the current global coronavirus pandemic as detailed in Evan’s chapter. As of early 2020, the LDS Church claimed a membership over 16 million, though scholars are well-aware that those numbers are substantially inflated as they fail to reflect the millions of converts who no longer identify as members.3 Actual members who self-identify and participate are substantially smaller than the claimed membership.4 The structure of the religion—from local to regional leaders all the way up to the Church headquarters and the professional staff and general authorities—is now clearly delineated. While the finances of the LDS Church remain opaque and it requires whistle blowers and leaks to discern the wealth and investments of the religion,5 it is clear that the LDS Church is on sound financial footing and has sufficient wealth to sustain it for decades to come, as Evans and Moffat and Woods argue in their respective chapters in this volume. As the luster of American greatness has waned in the early twenty-first century, economic development has leveled off, and secularization has accelerated in all of the developed world and much of the still developing world,6 the LDS Church is arguably in the middle of a pivot in its focus. Managing rapid growth seems to be less of a priority; preventing the hemorrhaging of members is increasingly a serious concern. Academics, minorities, and Indigenous communities around the world have called into question the ethics of globalization, colonial practices, and cultural destruction by hegemonic superpowers, science, corporations, and religions. Additionally, of the 195 countries in existence in 2020, 30 have legalized same-sex marriage7 and attitudes have shifted in a more accepting direction toward lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals in most of those 30 countries.8 Awareness and a growing acceptance of transgender individuals is spreading in the developed world, though there is still a long road ahead for the normalization of transgender individuals.9 Countries are now ranked on gender inequality by the United Nations,10 raising numerous concerns about the patriarchal structures and doctrines of the LDS Church in the twenty-first century.11 Millions of people are also leaving religions, growing increasingly disillusioned with antiquated and discriminatory values and practices, with doctrines and beliefs that are no longer credible in the light of modern science and scholarship, and with ecclesiastical dishonesty and abuse.12 In the twenty-first century, the leadership of the LDS Church has demonstrated interest in addressing criticisms for its lack of multiculturalism, its continued exclusion of sexual and gender minorities, and its inability to retain

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members and declining growth rates in the face of secularization. Throughout this volume, the various chapters have touched on each of these challenges facing Mormonism generally and the LDS Church specifically. In this concluding chapter, I summarize these challenges and problems the now globalized LDS Church faces in the twenty-first century.

Multiculturalism Multiculturalism is the presence of or acceptance of varied cultures within a group. For any religion that expands beyond its initial cultural group, questions about how to accommodate different cultures will arise. A clear illustration of this question comes from Acts in the New Testament (see Chaps. 10 and 15), when the early apostles of Jesus, who were all Jews, wrestled with the question of whether Gentiles could become Christians. They had to decide questions like: do Gentiles have to follow kosher laws? And do Gentiles have to get circumcised? The social structure of the LDS Church has made it difficult for the leadership to understand and embrace multiculturalism. The way the religion’s hierarchy is organized and selected almost guarantees that the upper echelon of leadership remains monocultural. As detailed by Prince in his chapter, the highest decision making bodies in the LDS Church are the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. The First Presidency is made up of individuals selected from the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, which means the highest level of leadership in the LDS Church is made up exclusively of Apostles. The selection process used by apostles to select new apostles isn’t perfectly clear, but, by examining those who are selected, it seems highly likely that selection is based on some or all of the following criteria: demonstrated past dedication to the religion (e.g., having served in local and regional leadership positions), demonstrated leadership ability, and some degree of expertise in one’s profession.13 Structurally, what these requirements necessarily result in is the selection of older male individuals as they have to have experience both within the LDS Church and within the world at large. Because of the implicit selection criteria, the odds of a 20-year-­ old (or even anyone under about 50 years of age) being selected as an apostle are very low. And because the highest leadership positions at every level in the LDS Church are all reserved for men, women are excluded. As a result of the hierarchy’s relatively rigid albeit informal practice for deciding who will become an apostle, the highest levels of leadership of the LDS Church—The First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles—are virtually guaranteed to be made up of older males (a problematic outcome also addressed by Stewart in his chapter on LDS growth dynamics). That, of course, is the case as of early 2020. The average age of the apostles (counting both the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve) is 76. The two most recently selected apostles, Ulisses Soares and Gerrit Gong, who were sustained in 2018, were 59 and 64 at the time of their ordination, respectively. The other structural component that contributes to the monocultural nature of the leadership of the LDS Church is how those meeting the above criteria

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are ultimately selected from the pool of qualifying candidates. If selection of apostles was intended to represent the cultural makeup of the religion, with more than half of the membership outside the US, there should be substantial diversity among the apostles—some from Europe, some from Asia, some from Latin America, and some from states other than Utah. But, structurally, apostle selection is a top-down process and not a bottom-up process; it is not a democratic election and there is no way for a lay member of the religion to nominate worthy candidates to become apostles. Selection is based on formal and informal social network ties.14 Basically, this comes down to who the existing apostles know. A somewhat simplified illustration of this is to examine where the current apostles were born. Of the 15 apostles in early 2020, 13 of the 15 were born in the US; ten were born in Utah. Given the current characteristics of apostles, it is clear that the method for selection draws upon social ties rather than proportionate representation. Given what we know about human social ordering,15 it is not surprising that existing apostles tend to select apostles who are a lot like themselves. To summarize, then: all of the apostles are elderly white men. Two thirds of them were born in Utah and just two apostles (13 percent) were born outside the US (Soares in Brazil; Uchtdorf in Czech Republic). The selection process for apostles—which is a manifestation of the social structure of the religion— leads to a shared culture, a monoculture, within the highest echelons of the Church. LDS general authorities generally share the same beliefs, values, norms, and behaviors. Perhaps the selection of two apostles who are not from the US and one apostle who is a racial minority (Gong is Asian American) will start to open up the possibility of broadening the monoculture among ecclesiastical leaders. But, at present, top LDS Church leadership appears to struggle with the idea that there might be more than one way to be a righteous Mormon in good standing with the Church. The various chapters in this volume illustrate the lack of multiculturalism in the leadership of the LDS Church. McDannell’s chapter shows these challenges quite well, noting that Mormons around the world have generally not been allowed to write their own hymns (a point also addressed by Stewart in his growth dynamics chapter) but, instead, have been forced to sing translated versions of hymns that were written almost exclusively by Mormons of European descent (Allen and Östman note in their chapters there is an initiative to change this that began in 2019). In other words, there is no Ghanaian Mormon hymn book filled with songs that reflect Ghanaian melodies or perspectives on Mormon doctrines or values. There is, as of early 2020, only a Ghanaian translation of the universal Mormon hymn book; Ghanaian Mormons sing songs that reflect the values of white Mormons from the US. McDannell argues quite compellingly that the leadership of the LDS Church has pursued a path of “universalism” over multiculturalism, suggesting that the vision of what it means to be a good Mormon held by the apostles is true for all people of every culture around the world. McDannell illustrates that the leadership of the religion in the nineteenth century held similar views, attributing the declining rates of growth of the religion in Europe not to encouraging converts to

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migrate to Utah but rather to the idea that they had “harvested” all of the worthy people in Europe, which retrospectively reads as an implicit condemnation and thoughtless insult to all those who remained in Europe. Ironically, the LDS Church may have been more multicultural in the nineteenth century than it is in the twenty-first century, as Laurie Maffly-Kipp argues in her chapter. With the rapid influx of mostly European migrants to the body of the Saints (in both Nauvoo and then in Utah), there was widespread intermingling of cultures, languages, and ideas. At the time, Mormonism was widely rejected in the US and was considered un-American, often being grouped with Islam and not considered Christian, in part because of the hierarchical structure of the religion and its embrace of polygamy (see Bennion’s chapter on Mormon fundamentalism).16 However, with the discontinuation of polygamist practice at the end of the nineteenth century and the eventual adoption and enforcement of specific behavioral practices during the twentieth century (e.g., no drinking alcohol, no swearing, encouraging conservative family values, etc.), the LDS Church came to be seen as quintessentially American.17 In many respects, it reflected the values and mores of twentieth century America. And, in many respects, it continues to do so in the religion’s efforts to spread internationally. Just as the US government has and continues to push American values throughout the world both explicitly through military and economic means and more subtly through the export of US media,18 the LDS Church is similarly exporting conservative, white, middle-class American values by encouraging Mormons around the world to worship and behave in essentially the same way Mormons in Utah do (Cooper and Hernandez de Olarte and Stewart discuss this at length in their chapters in this volume). Men and women are encouraged to groom and dress themselves the same way in Fiji as they are in New Guinea, South Africa, South Korea, Russia, and Ecuador, and that blueprint was drawn and packaged in Salt Lake City, Utah. Leaders of the LDS Church describe the Utah-based, white, middle-class, American culture they advocate not as monoculturalism but as “gospel culture” (see the chapter by Barber on Australia and New Zealand). Laurie Maffly-­ Kipp notes how “gospel culture” was used as a justification to tear down low-income housing around the New Zealand temple, much of which was built and occupied by less affluent members of the religion. That housing was then replaced by upscale housing sold on the open market. Similar projects have been completed near the Salt Lake City and Ogden temples, as church leaders wanted the immediate areas surrounding the temples to reflect the middle-­class values they espouse.19 In the process, intentionally or not, the message LDS Church leadership is sending is that gospel culture embodies white American middle-class values. Other examples of LDS Church leaders failing to reflect multiculturalism are examined in almost every chapter in this volume. LDS Church leaders have discouraged lobola or bride wealth, a common practice in South Africa which, if not followed, can lead to cultural rejection (see Kline’s chapter). Barber illustrates similar problems in New Zealand as LDS Church leaders have

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discouraged Māori funerary rites (tangihanga) and have strongly encouraged Māori members to assimilate to the values of English-speaking New Zealanders. Palmer and Knowlton illustrate how the leaders of the LDS Church distanced members from the process of creating a holy temple in Arequipa, Peru, insisting that what is important is not the site, not the building, not the architecture, but what happens inside. In the process, as Palmer and Knowlton compellingly illustrate, Peruvian members of the religion have to find ways to make their temple sacred. Palmer and Knowlton argue that the temple construction philosophy of the LDS Church is designed to be a one-size-fits all package with no attempts to get local input or even local help. In the interests of corporate expediency, cultural customization of the holiest of holy edifices in Mormonism is no longer allowed. Cooper and Hernandez de Olarte’s chapter on Mexico provides a compelling illustration of how LDS Church monoculturalism can lead to disastrous outcomes, like the Third Convention split that occurred in Mexico when LDS Church leaders refused to select local members to lead the religion. While many of those who left the Church eventually returned, this is a clear illustration of how efforts to impose white, middle-class, American strictures on local cultures and populations can result in serious problems for the LDS Church. Van Beek et al. illustrate how the failure of LDS Church leaders in the US to understand that “religious freedom” is understood very differently in Europe than it is among conservative Christian groups in the US led to serious problems in obtaining visas for missionaries, a problem that could easily have been avoided by consulting with local members. Halford and O’Brien similarly illustrate that LDS Church leaders’ dismissal of the long and serious conflict between England and the Republic of Ireland has resulted in a single administrative unit overseeing both locations and similar missionary policies being employed, policies that are more attuned to England than they are to Ireland. Allen and Östman also discuss the challenges that the lack of multiculturalism among the leadership impose on members living outside the US culture region. In Scandinavia, members were required for a long time to use Mormon vernacular that clearly set them apart from other Christians (e.g., “ward,” “stake,” “beehive,” etc.; Rainock and Takagi note similar problems with Mormon terminology in Japan in their chapter). Members were discouraged from wearing traditional dress to religious services and instead had to wear the Mormon “uniform” that, again, reflects white middle-class American and corporate values—conservative dresses for women and a white shirt and tie for men. LDS leaders frowned on Scandinavian members celebrating cultural traditions that were linked with Lutheran Christianity, which worked to further marginalize Scandinavian members. As Allen and Östman argue, many of these cultural conflicts could be addressed by Utah Church authorities simply listening to the members and local leaders around the world rather than dictating to them what must happen. Rainock and Takagi frame these cultural conflicts as an issue of “religious capital,” arguing that the substantial amount of religious

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capital required to adopt Mormonism comes at considerable cost in Japan, a country with a very different set of cultural norms, values, and beliefs when compared to white, middle-class, tee-totaling Mormons in Utah. Moffatt and Woods suggest in their chapter that the LDS Church has made some progress toward multiculturalism, pointing toward, for instance, the translation of Church materials. However, translating materials into a local language does not make a religion multicultural any more than translating the TV show Friends into Arabic makes it suddenly reflect Saudi Arabian values (Prince makes this point clearly in his chapter). Translating Mormon texts into other languages is a first step toward communication, but using translated materials to prescribe “gospel culture” as the norm for Mormons around the world is not multiculturalism. Whether the leaders of the LDS Church are willing to adjust the religion to cultures around the world (as affirmed by Martins in his chapter on LDS transformations in Brazil) or not, local members of the religion will adjust Mormonism to fit their situation. Thomas Murphy’s chapter on Indigenous Mormons in the US provides keen insights into how this happens and how it is manifest. Some Indigenous American Mormons have syncretized the doctrines and values of the LDS Church. As Murphy summarizes, some Indigenous Mormons tell completely different religious origin stories that counter the colonial narrative offered by Joseph Smith Jr., which remains the standard narrative today—that Native Americans are the “fallen” descendants of righteous believers who must be saved by white Europeans and brought back into Christ’s fold. For these Indigenous groups, Joseph Smith Jr. inverted the “true” narrative—it is not the Europeans who have come to save Indigenous populations but rather Europeans who have corrupted Indigenous teachings and have then tried to force those corrupted ideas onto Indigenous populations. Native American ancestors always had “true” religion and they perceive similarities between the pure and authentic religion of their ancestors and Mormonism, but also see Mormonism as having been corrupted, rejecting the narrative of LDS Church leadership. Barber describes similar instances of syncretism among the Māori who, rather than discontinue their traditional religious practices, have adapted them to accommodate Mormonism. It is unlikely the current leadership of the LDS Church will embrace alternative cosmologies and rituals that differ as radically as those of the Indigenous Americans and the Māori do from LDS colonial narratives, which is why multiculturalism will continue to be a challenge for the LDS Church. In addition to wrestling with how to adjust Mormonism to cultures around the world, the LDS Church continues to struggle with its racist past and present. The monoculturalism of the Church makes it extremely difficult for both leaders and members to see how a policy change and a denial that the LDS Church taught racist doctrine for close to a century are not enough to help Black members feel like they are part of the religion. As noted in the chapters by Barber, Garcia, Kline, Martins, Williams, and Stevenson, the LDS Church changed its policy on Black members in 1978, allowing them to fully

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participate in the religion at that time. Martins and Stevenson both argue that this change was heavily motivated by international expansion and growth—primarily in Brazil and Africa—and not motivated by a desire to accommodate Black individuals in the US. Barber’s discussion of Australian aboriginals and some Polynesians illustrates the complexity of the 1978 policy change. Until 1964, Australian aboriginals were considered “black” by LDS Church leaders, and, as a result, were discouraged from joining the LDS Church. But LDS Church leaders changed their mind in 1964 and Australian aboriginals were suddenly no longer considered “black.” As is widely understood today, this arbitrary declassification of a people of color—Australian aborigines—as not being Black demonstrates that race is a social construction, not a meaningful biological distinction, that is used to discriminate.20 That LDS leaders could arbitrarily classify and declassify groups as being “black” illustrates how race is an instrument of prejudice.21 While some may argue that the 1978 policy change ended racial discrimination in the LDS Church, multiple chapters in this volume indicate that that is not the case. Garcia reports repeated instances of discrimination in wards throughout the US, as does Williams. This has also been shown in other research on the LDS Church.22 Kline makes it clear that, even though the women who were interviewed in South Africa didn’t focus on racial discrimination, many noticed that none of the apostles or First Presidency were people of color (when the interviews took place, that was the case). The clearest illustration of the consequences of monoculturalism among the LDS Church’s leadership is Williams’ chapter. Much of her chapter focuses on the Black Legacy Conference that takes place annually in Washington, D.C. While the conference provides an opportunity for Black Mormons to gather and support each other, the origins of that conference are informative. It was not organized by the LDS Church. It was organized by frustrated Black members and was allowed to proceed by leaders of the LDS Church, similar to the Genesis Group in Utah. In other words, on issues of race, LDS leaders don’t seem to know how to move forward. They certainly want to distance themselves from the explicitly racist past, but the lack of racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity among the general authorities of the religion means that they are following discussions of race, not leading them. As Williams argues, this is a clear example of structural racism. Stevenson’s chapter on the LDS Church in Ghana and Nigeria problematizes issues of colonialism and racism and provides important nuance for this discussion (as does Cusack’s analysis of Indigenous peoples in her chapter on Canada). As Stevenson argues, the long history of conquest, forced assimilation, and cultural contact between Africa and other parts of the world means that there is no fantasized “pure” African culture. For many Ghanaian and Nigerian members, part of the appeal of the LDS Church is that it reflects middle-class American values (an argument similar to that made by van Beek et  al. for Europeans in the twentieth century). Converts to Mormonism in Africa may adopt—wholly or in part—“gospel culture” and assimilate to white, American, middle-class values, but that may be what they want. To argue that

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the LDS Church is exclusively a colonial and imperialist institution is also to argue that converts to the religion lack autonomy, which, ironically, is also a colonial argument. While LDS Church monoculturalism is problematic and has caused challenges for members around the world, Howlett’s chapter on the Community of Christ in the Philippines offers an important counterpoint. As he details, the original foray of what was then the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (RLDS) into the Philippines took place under leaders who jettisoned most of the beliefs and practices that made the RLDS distinct. These leaders had embraced indigenization to such an extent that the early converts in the Philippines were told that they didn’t have to change any of their beliefs or practices in order to be members of the religion. More recent leaders in the Philippines have realized that this approach has its own problems and have moved the members and congregations of the Community of Christ in the Philippines toward closer alignment with the Community of Christ in the US while still retaining some of the cultural adaptations that have made the religion work. Howlett’s chapter suggests that unfettered indigenization and multiculturalism is probably not the answer to the LDS Church’s problem with multiculturalism (Rainock and Takagi make a similar argument in their chapter). The solution moving forward is likely a middle path—some cultural adaptation within broadened LDS Church values. The LDS Church, as a global religion, has a serious challenge before it: how does it adjust to or accommodate the many cultures around the world where people have joined the religion? Other religions (e.g., Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, and Catholicism) have faced these challenges in the past and have all found ways to accommodate varied cultures. Can the LDS Church do the same?

Gender and Sexuality The LDS Church is also facing challenges resulting from changes in norms related to gender and sexuality. With growing gender equality around the world, the Church will be pressured to allow cisgender women all the same opportunities as cisgender men and will also be pressured to discontinue its current discrimination against transgender individuals. The LDS Church will also continue to be pressured to change its discriminatory policies and doctrines against lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals. Pressure on both of these issues will continue to come from both inside and outside the religion. The LDS Church is not an egalitarian institution; it’s theology and policies discriminate on the basis of sex, gender, and sexuality (as Ross and Finnegan clearly illustrate in their chapter). In order for the LDS Church to be fully egalitarian, women (and all other gender identities as well as non-heterosexual individuals) would need to have the ability to serve in and hold all of the same positions in the religion as do heterosexual men.23 That would include every position from prophet and apostle to Aaronic Priesthood holder. As of spring 2020, women cannot hold all of the same positions as do men in the LDS

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Church; it’s priesthood organization is explicitly patriarchal, and not egalitarian. As several of the chapters in this volume make clear (see the chapters by Kline and Ross and Finnegan, in particular), arguments that men and women (ignoring other genders and sexes for a moment) are “separate but equal,” or “different but equal,” or “complementary in their equality” in the LDS Church are disingenuous. A simple test of this would be to replace “women” in these comparisons with other groups. Would the LDS Church be egalitarian if Argentinians could not hold all the same positions as Americans? Or if red-­ haired Saints couldn’t hold all the same positions as members of the religion with blonde hair? And what if Black men could not hold all the same positions as white men? In all of these scenarios, no one would, as of 2020, claim that the religion is “separate but equal.” These would be clear illustrations of discrimination and inequality. Yet, ecclesiastical leaders euphemistically continue to claim that there is no inequality between men and women in the LDS Church because men and women have “complementary” roles.24 Patriarchy in the LDS Church clearly exists, but it should also not be over-­ stated. It is the case that the teachings and policies of the LDS Church strongly discourage spousal abuse and, in practice, many Mormons hold views toward gender equality that align with those of their surrounding culture. As noted above, because the leadership of the LDS Church is largely monocultural and that culture is a reflection of middle-class, white American (albeit conservative) values, explicit suggestions that men and women are not equal and that women should be subservient to men have diminished substantially over time. As a result, in some cultures where spousal abuse and more severe inequality between men and women exist, the LDS Church can seem relatively progressive when it comes to gender equality (see the chapters by Kline, Garcia, Cooper and Hernandez de Olarte, and Moffatt and Woods). Nevertheless, gender discrimination continues in the LDS Church. There has been vocal opposition and activism to change this over the last decade.25 Intriguingly, research on granting women the priesthood suggests that female members of the religion are less in favor of such a change than are male members of the religion,26 as noted by Ross and Finnegan in their chapter. This may seem surprising, but recent research on gender and religion suggests that women who are members of conservative religions are strongly supportive of sexist policies.27 Some women find validation of their desire to stay home and raise children inside conservative religions.28 Some women are empowered within conservative religions as they are still given a fair amount of control and responsibility.29 An alternative perspective on why women in conservative religions defend their subordination derives from system justification theory. From this perspective, Mormon women internalize their inferiority and then defend their subordination more vocally than do men in order to align their self-­ perception with the system of inequality in which they find themselves.30 Regardless of the explanation, research suggests that many Mormon women justify and defend the patriarchal structure of the religion and even go so far as

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to claim that the LDS Church is egalitarian, in spite of their institutionally subordinate positions. Of course, not all Mormons defend gender discrimination. Many criticize it. Gender inequality factors into the reasons given by many people who leave the LDS Church (exemplified in Cusack’s chapter, wherein she discusses LDS disaffilation trends in Canada).31 And many people outside the religion criticize this inequality. Given changing gender norms and dynamics around the world, with many countries now mandating that women must have specified representation in government and growing initiatives to empower women in industry, education, government, non-profits, and even in religion, pressure will continue to mount for the LDS Church to change its policies, practices, and even doctrines regarding the role of women. Given the gendered nature of Mormon doctrine, this will not be an easy task and will likely take decades. But it is a problem facing the increasingly globalized LDS Church that will have to be continuously addressed, likely through small concessions such as those that have occurred in recent years: balancing the funds given to young women’s programs with those given to young men’s programs in wards, including women on committees and councils, and giving women a more prominent position in general conferences and Church publications. These are small steps, but they are all steps toward gender equality, not away from it. Given the internal and external pressure to move toward gender equality, the LDS Church will be forced to continue to move in that direction. Equality between men and women is a major issue within the LDS Church, but it is just one component of the gender, sex, and sexuality complex. At a very foundational level, the leaders of the LDS Church continue to confuse and conflate gender, sex, and sexual identity. Scientists distinguish between all of these. Sex is primarily biological and refers to the physical makeup of one’s body. Does an individual have exclusively male organs and genitalia, exclusively female organs and genitalia, or a combination of the two? In the first case, they would be categorized as male, in the second, female, and in the third, intersex. There have been times and places historically where intersex individuals were accepted and not forced into a sex binary.32 In much of the Western world, accepting the possibility that intersex individuals do not have to be forced to undergo surgeries as early as possible to force them into a specific sex is a relatively recent change in medical policy and practice. Thus, there are at least three sexes—male, female, and intersex33 and which sex someone is assigned to is, at least to some degree, a decision made by medical authorities.34 Gender is different and is related to social behavior: how does someone present themselves? To a large extent, gender is an act or something we do— we portray ourselves in a very specific way to tell other people who we are.35 Of course, how one does their gender is tied to cultural norms, which means wearing skirts in one culture may be masculine or feminine (e.g., Scottish kilts) while it may be exclusively feminine in other cultures. In many cultures, gender is still primarily limited to masculine and feminine acts, creating a gender binary that has often been forced onto a sex binary. In other words, those with male genitalia and sex organs are expected to act in masculine ways; those with

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female genitalia and organs are expected to act in feminine ways. However, as of the late twentieth century in most of the developed world, it became clear that “masculine” and “feminine” were social constructs—humans invented these categories and forced actions and behaviors onto them. Once humans become aware of the fact that we created something, it gives us the power to change it. As a result, understandings of gender have changed. There is no reason that gender has to be limited to just two broad categories—masculine and feminine. There are now hundreds of gender identities, including genderqueer, agender, queen, bigender, gender variant, and so on. Some scholars have suggested that a new way to classify gender is to divide individuals into two groups (which, ironically, runs counter to queer theory, but is still a useful intellectual exercise): cisgender and transgender individuals.36 Cisgender individuals are those whose biological sex and (chosen) gender identity align in traditional masculine/feminine ways. Transgender individuals are those whose biological sex and chosen gender identity do not align in traditional masculine/feminine ways; for example, FtM (female to male), MtF (male to female), agender, or gender fluid individuals, among many others.37 Finally, sexual identity refers to whom someone is sexually attracted. People can be attracted primarily to those who are unlike them as regards biological sex (i.e., heterosexual), those like them (i.e., homosexual), both (i.e., bisexual), neither (i.e., asexual), or it may shift over time (e.g., sexually fluid). Thus, to understand gender, sex, and sexual identity, it’s necessary to understand that gender is not sex, sex is not sexual identity, and sexual identity is not gender. These may all be related, but they are also different concepts. With the above explanation in place, it warrants examining briefly how the leadership of the LDS Church think about these ideas in 2020 (see Vance and Vance’s chapter for how this has changed over time). The LDS Church received a fair amount of media attention when it was announced in spring 2020 that they had modified the handbook used by leaders around the globe to make policy decisions. Included among those changes were some modifications to the language surrounding gender, sex, and sexual identity. For decades, the handbooks referred to transgender individuals only as “transsexuals,” an outdated, pejorative term that groups all transgender individuals together. For the first time, the new Handbook used the term “transgender.” However, it’s clear from the language of the handbook that the leaders remain confused (or are willfully rejecting modern understandings of these concepts). Here is one of the passages from the Handbook regarding whether transgender members can hold the priesthood: A member who has received elective medical or surgical intervention for the purpose of attempting to transition to the opposite gender of his or her birth sex (“sex reassignment”), or who has socially transitioned to the opposite gender of his or her birth sex, may not receive or exercise the priesthood. Area Presidencies will help local leaders sensitively address individual situations. A male member who experiences gender incongruence, but who does not pursue medical,

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s­ urgical, or social transition to the opposite gender of his birth sex and is worthy, may receive and exercise the priesthood.

There are a number of issues with this language in light of modern understandings of gender, sex, and sexuality. To begin with, the passage continues to conflate sex and gender. In some sense, it is beginning to distinguish between these by recognizing that people can “socially” transition to a different gender, but the passage also claims that surgery is used to change someone to the “opposite gender” from their “birth sex.” This language choice is intriguing. Implicit in this passage is the assertion that people simply have a sex at birth, not that sex at birth is assigned, which it is.38 That sex is assigned means it is more complex than a simple binary classification. The language also includes “opposite,” which implies a binary. Additionally, the passage assumes that a “sex reassignment” surgery transitions someone’s gender but not their sex. In other words, “sex” is innate, while gender can be transitioned. This understanding does not align with modern understandings of sex and gender. Transgender individuals—whether they transition or simply reject gender norms—do not “feel” as though their sex has stayed the same. The very idea behind a sex or gender reassignment or confirmation surgery is to help transgender individuals to align their sex with their gender identity. The LDS Church Handbook is drawing this distinction because the Handbook later uses “sex at birth” as the exclusive means of classifying individuals, as this passage from the Handbook suggests, Gender is an essential characteristic of Heavenly Father’s plan of happiness. The intended meaning of gender in the family proclamation is biological sex at birth. Some people experience feelings of incongruence between their biological sex and their gender identity. As a result, they may identify as transgender. The Church does not take a position on the causes of people identifying themselves as transgender. Most Church participation and some priesthood ordinances are gender neutral. Transgender persons may be baptized and confirmed as outlined in 38.2.3.14. They may also partake of the sacrament and receive priesthood blessings. However, priesthood ordination and temple ordinances are received according to birth sex.

The implication of this passage, as detailed by Vance and Vance in their chapter, is that, regardless of whether someone feels like the sex they were assigned at birth reflects their true sex, and whether or not someone’s biological sex aligns with their gender identity, the LDS Church, like other transphobic organizations, is insistent that an identity that was assigned to these individuals when they were incapable of contesting that identity (as newborns) must be their identity throughout their lives. Thus, an intersex individual who was classified by a doctor as female at birth who later transitions to a masculine gender identity and then gets surgery to align their genitalia more closely with

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their identity must, per the 2020 LDS Church Handbook, always be treated as a female because a doctor classified them as such when they were first born. The LDS Church is, in some ways, locked into this understanding of sex and gender because of its gendered doctrine that asserts that Heavenly Father is male and he has a female wife, Heavenly Mother, and only these two sexes can exist in eternity. Likewise, that Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother are heterosexual is assumed and therefore results in the assumption that no one is actually going to be lesbian, gay, or bisexual in the afterlife.39 This doctrine suggests that anyone who rejects the gender binary, is dissatisfied with their assigned sex at birth, or who finds someone attractive who they are not supposed to according to Mormon teachings will be changed in the afterlife— obliged to be one of only two sexes, obliged to assume a cisgender identity, and obliged to be sexually straight. Current LDS doctrine on gender, sex, and sexuality is a doctrine of erasure for all those who do not fall neatly into a heterosexual cisgender binary. Attitudes toward homosexuality have shifted dramatically in the US and in many other countries around the world over the last 40  years, as shown in Fig. 31.1. While acceptance of transgender minorities and bisexual individuals lags behind acceptance of homosexuality,40 these views are shifting as well, as are attitudes toward polyamory.41 Just as internal and external pressure will continue to push toward equality between cisgender men and women, similar pressure will continue to mount for the LDS Church to change its policies toward sexual and gender minorities. This pressure has resulted in a clear and demonstrable change in language and tone, as detailed by Vance and Vance in their chapter in this volume. Policies have shifted slightly as well. But the position of the LDS Church toward sexual minorities (i.e., lesbian, gay, bisexual,

Fig. 31.1  Attitudes toward homosexuality in the US, 1973–2018. (Source: General Social Survey)

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and other sexual identities) and transgender individuals remains discriminatory and untenable for most such individuals. As Vance and Vance detail, only heterosexual individuals are allowed to have intimate relationships; all other individuals are restricted to a life of seclusion, isolation, and loneliness as “being gay” isn’t a sin, but “acting” on non-­ heterosexual desires is. Likewise, transgender individuals who do not consider themselves the sex they were assigned at birth will be forever forced to identify as the gender that aligns with that sex so long as they remain affiliated with the LDS Church. While limited, there is now some research indicating that LGB (lesbian, gay, and bisexual) individuals who were raised in or joined the LDS Church have much better mental health outcomes when they leave the religion than if they stay and try to integrate their sexual identity with their religious identity.42 LDS leaders claim that they embrace LGBTQ+ individuals, but their policies are discriminatory and harmful toward all but cisgender heterosexual individuals. As norms, values, and laws toward LGBTQ+ individuals change in the US and around the world, as more and more children raised in the LDS Church identify as LGBTQ+, and more and more members of the religion come into contact with and become more accepting of LGBTQ+ individuals, the LDS Church will continue to be pressured to change.

Secularization At its most basic, secularization theory posits that modernization causes problems for religion; as societies develop, religion becomes less attractive and religions lose their status and authority in society.43 Comprehensive theories of secularization include growing multiculturalism and increased gender and sexual equality among the many causes of declining religiosity.44 By discussing them separately, I don’t mean to suggest that they are unrelated to secularization. Both multiculturalism and gender and sexual equality are important manifestations of and contributors to secularization. The causal relationship, of course, is complex and difficult to untangle and won’t be addressed in this chapter.45 The focus in the last section of this concluding chapter is secularization broadly, and how declining interest in religion is a problem for Mormonism, generally, and the LDS Church, specifically. While the US is often described as quite religious when compared to other highly developed countries, that characterization is increasingly inaccurate. Scholars knew in the early 1990s that people in the US over-stated their religious attendance; only around 20 percent of Americans attend religious services on a roughly weekly basis.46 With the end of the Cold War, during which the US was pushed toward developing a religious identity to counter godless communism,47 the percentage of Americans who identify as having no religious affiliation has increased rapidly.48 As of 2020, nonreligious Americans make up somewhere between 24 and 28 percent of the US population, a larger share than any single religious denomination. Belief in God remains relatively high, with just over 50  percent saying they know God exists, but just under

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50 percent either reject the existence of God/gods, don’t believe God’s existence can be determined, believe in a higher power, or are unsure. Collectively, there has been a decline in religious behavior, religious belonging, and religious belief in the US, which has resulted in a more vocal albeit declining conservative religious minority.49 The US is somewhat behind other developed countries in its path toward secularization. More than 50  percent of the British now report no religious affiliation.50 More than 30 percent of the French are atheists.51 And religious attendance throughout Scandinavia and Northern Europe is in the single digits.52 Similar declines have been observed in other highly developed countries outside of Europe (e.g., Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, etc.). The evidence supporting a decline in interest in or “demand” for religion as societies develop economically is now quite robust.53 The LDS Church did experience a period of rapid expansion and growth following the end of WWII and running through the late 1990s. Much of that growth took place in countries that were experiencing rapid economic development. As prior research has established, the LDS Church grows most rapidly in countries that are developing, but that growth slows dramatically in countries that are highly developed.54 Both Martinich and Stewart, in their chapters in this volume, illustrate this same pattern and show that the LDS Church is basically stagnant in highly developed countries. Rainock and Takagi compellingly illustrate that the only reason why the LDS Church is not actually experiencing a decline in overall members in Japan is because of its active missionary efforts that are recruiting enough people to offset the losses to secularization. van Beek et al. also conclude that the LDS Church is stagnant in The Netherlands and Belgium with virtually no growth and no prospects for growth. Likewise, Allen and Östman assert that the prospects for future growth of the LDS Church in the Nordic countries are very poor. Stewart argues that the prospects for LDS growth in Eastern Europe and Russia are also limited. All of these chapters indicate that the LDS Church has no answer for secularization; once countries have secularized, the LDS Church is forced to fight a rear-guard action, fending off decline and collapse. The regions of the world that were responsible for the rapid growth from the 1960s to the 1990s—primarily Latin America, but some other countries as well—are now more economically developed and, as a result, growth in many of those countries has slowed substantially. There are only a couple of regions where the LDS Church continues to see rapid growth—Africa and some less developed countries in Asia. Assuming those countries continue to experience economic development, the rapid growth of Mormonism in those countries will probably begin to slow as well. What challenges, then, do the LDS Church and other Mormon groups face as a result of secularization? More and more people will likely question why they “need” religion. Most of the growth of the nonreligious (i.e., those with no religious affiliation) in the US, Canada, and many other highly developed countries is still due to people leaving religions,55 though the percentage being

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raised nonreligious is increasing as well.56 There are clear differences in religiosity between generations, suggesting that it is in the transmission of religion from parents to children that a lot of secularization takes place.57 The LDS Church is facing this challenge as well. Already in the 1980s it was clear that those who left the LDS Church were particularly likely to become nonreligious,58 a finding confirmed more recently as well.59 Recent changes in LDS practices suggest that the leaders of the religion are trying to slow the losses of young people, who are the most likely to leave religion altogether. Reducing the age at which young men and women can serve missions removes or reduces the amount of time between high school graduation and entering the mission field when many of these young people would have attended college and had greater autonomy. Many people take advantage of their greater autonomy during emerging adulthood to leave their parents’ religion.60 Organizing wards for young adults is also a tactic the LDS Church has employed to attempt to minimize losses. By encouraging young people to marry quickly, they minimize the risk that young Mormons will have pre-marital sex or choose to cohabit, both of which are associated with a higher likelihood of leaving religion, not because these individuals have “sinned” but because these individuals reject the moral condemnation of traditional and increasingly anachronistic teachings regarding chastity and moral purity.61 Encouraging marriage at a young age also increases in-­group social network ties, which make it more difficult to leave.62 Since the LDS Church does not report the number of people who have resigned their membership or have been excommunicated on an annual basis and also does not report activity levels (though numerous chapters in this volume have provided this information; see, e.g., Cooper and Hernandez de Olarte’s chapter on Mexico), it is difficult to know just how big of a challenge this is for the LDS Church and other Mormon religions (e.g., Community of Christ or the FLDS Church). Even so, given prevailing trends in highly developed countries around the world, losses of young people is a major challenge facing Mormon religions and the LDS Church in the early twenty-first century around the world. Related to people leaving are the over-stated membership numbers of the LDS Church and the low levels of activity. The LDS Church reports specific member counts in countries around the world annually. However, a number of countries include religious affiliation as a question in their census; census numbers reflect how people actually identify themselves and not the claimed membership of religions. This provides an opportunity to verify the claimed membership of the LDS Church. Unlike the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-­ day Adventists, the LDS Church does not fare well when comparing their claimed membership to census numbers (see Martinich’s and Stewart’s chapters).63 In some countries, only 20 percent of those the LDS Church claims self-identify as members. The concordance between claimed membership and census numbers varies substantially, from a low of about 20 percent to a high of around 60  percent. Even so, census data indicate that the LDS Church’s

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claimed total membership of more than 16 million in 2020 is a dramatic overstatement. The number of people who self-identify as members of the religion is probably close to half of that number. The LDS Church defends the over-stated membership by asserting that all of the people they are claiming were baptized at some point and have not been excommunicated or resigned their membership. But it also speaks to the problems the LDS Church has with member retention. While they use different approaches, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-day Adventists both regularly clean their rosters, removing individuals who no longer self-identify as members or are not actively engaged with the religion.64 In contrast, the LDS Church insists that individuals who haven’t been to religious services in decades and do not identify as members are still members. This approach reflects the top-down, hierarchical nature of the religion; the LDS Church continues to insist that it has the authority to determine who is and is not a member. Yet, the low levels of self-identified affiliation reflected in censuses illustrate just the opposite—individual people control their religious identity, not religious organizations. The LDS Church has a massive retention problem but, at least publicly, continues to emphasize its official membership figures in spite of large numbers of former members who have left the religion. Related to the inflated membership numbers are concerns about levels of activity or involvement with the religion. As various chapters in this volume have noted, there are large percentages of members of the religion who retain their LDS identity but who never attend religious services or participate in religious activities. Leaked data from the LDS Church from the early 2000s suggests that 70 percent of young single adults in the US and 80 percent of young single adults outside the US are no longer actively involved in the religion.65 Given that younger adults are more likely to be nonreligious, the lack of involvement with the LDS Church is strongly suggestive that many of these individuals will eventually leave the religion.66 As noted, secularization often occurs in the transmission of religion from parents to children and there are clear generational gaps in religiosity. Despite efforts to stem the losses of young people, there is direct and indirect evidence that this is occurring. Young people are finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile prejudicial teachings and discriminatory practices—like those of the LDS Church toward LGBTQ individuals and women—and fail to see the relevance of Mormonism for their lives in the modern world. As Knoll and Reiss illustrate in their chapter in this volume, younger generations of members of the LDS Church are less likely to accept and follow the teachings of their faith tradition. They are secularizing and many of them will eventually leave the religion. Several chapters in this volume also note that, in locations where the LDS Church is relatively small, the LDS Church (and the Community of Christ) are structured around families. While missionaries may recruit the occasional new member, the backbone of the religion in these locations are multi-generational families who have been members of the religion for decades and provide the core leadership (see especially chapters by van Beek et al., Rainock and Takagi,

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Allen and Östman, and Howlett). In describing these families, many of the authors note that, while there are participation costs to these families like there are for all those involved with Mormonism where it is peculiar, some of those participation costs are offset by the social status these families receive within the smaller community of the LDS Church. In other words, in the “big pond” of broader society, these families are unlikely to be unique; they are “little fish.” But in the “little pond” that is the LDS Church community in that specific location, these families are the “big fish.” Future qualitative research should examine to what extent status within Mormon wards, stakes, branches, or districts functions as an incentive to remain an active Mormon in the face of secularization. In addition to those who leave the religion, many of those who stay in the religion are going to continue to pressure the religion to change. Three hour Church services have been shortened to two hour services.67 The manifest reason was to allow for a greater balance between religious instruction at home and during services. But an equally plausible explanation is that members no longer wanted to dedicate three hours of their weekend to religion and it made it challenging to invite non-members to attend services when the invitation required a three hour commitment. Changes to temple practices have also occurred in recent years, reducing some of the explicit patriarchy in the ceremony.68 These changes were likely the result of agitation among members for greater gender equality. Small changes like these to accommodate an increasingly secular membership are likely to continue. Another change that is likely resulting from secularization is the widespread critical inquiry into Mormon teachings concerning the history of the religion (Prince and Stewart discuss this issue in their chapters). Scholars who have turned their investigative tools to the history of Mormonism have uncovered a number of facts that the leaders of various Mormon religions long ignored or hoped would not come to light: Joseph Smith Jr.’s use of a peep-stone to seek buried treasure,69 the marrying of other men’s wives and underage girls when polygyny was first introduced,70 claimed translations of Egyptian papyri that have been shown to be inaccurate,71 the killing of over 100 people in a wagon train in Southern Utah by Mormons,72 among many other issues and concerns. Many of those who have left the religion note these elements of Mormon history as causing them to experience a crisis of faith that eventually led to their exodus out of the religion. While the LDS Church and other Mormon religions may be able to address concerns about gender and sexual inequality and become more multicultural, the challenge of secularization is an existential threat that, in some parts of the world, has already arrived but is looming on the horizon for the rest of the world. It is ever more difficult to claim to be the one true religion in a world that is increasingly interconnected and where people interact with others of different religions on a daily basis.73 Growing individualism leads people to turn inward for guidance rather than to elderly patriarchs whose values and ideas are a generation out of date.74 Religions that remain part of the world,

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even if they encourage members to distance themselves from the modern world, will be forced to cope with the juggernaut of secularization, which is reshaping the world as it spreads. So long as the future entails global economic development, it likely will also show a declining interest in Mormonism among increasingly secularized populations.

Conclusion Given the challenges the LDS Church faces in the twenty-first century detailed in this chapter, how do I think they will fare? What are the prospects of this global religion? As Armand Mauss and I have argued,75 there is a certain utility to maintaining some conflict with the broader society. Religions that perfectly align with prevailing cultural mores have very limited appeal. Readers can think about it this way: which is the more appealing product: (a) a generic version of a perfume/cologne manufactured and packaged by a local pharmacy, (b) a somewhat more expensive perfume/cologne manufactured by Ralph Lauren or Polo, (c) or a truly luxury perfume/cologne that only the uber wealthy can afford (e.g., Hermès or Baccara at over $1000 per ounce)? If we ignore human psychology and use strict logic, the cheaper generic brand should have greater appeal because it is largely the same scent as the others but much cheaper. But humans are not always rational. Most of us would rather purchase the more expensive items, such as the more costly perfume (or clothes or car or house) because we believe that items that are more costly come with greater benefits.76 But we are also restricted by how much money we have. As a result, people may want the most expensive perfume/ cologne, but they will settle for the medium-priced, name brand perfume/ cologne and not buy the generic one. We convince ourselves that there is greater value in products that cost more, whether that is true or not.77 Of course, there is another option as well—many people may simply conclude that perfume/cologne isn’t necessary at all. There is reason to believe that the same psychology applies to religions. Religions with close ties to governments, like those in England and Northern Europe should, based strictly on reason and logic, be wildly popular. Their values align with those of most of the population and, for many of them, they receive indirect and direct financial benefits from their respective governments. They are, to continue the example above, generic religions. Yet, attendance and involvement with the established or state-sponsored (or formerly state-­ sponsored) religions in those countries has declined to almost negligible numbers—fewer than ten percent of people in most of those countries attend religious services on a regular basis78 and the fastest growing types of ceremonies and rituals for celebrating life events (e.g., weddings and funerals) are secular or Humanist.79 While a simplistic comparison, these established and (formerly) state-sponsored religions are like generic perfume—there is minimal cost to membership and, therefore, very limited appeal. For those who are attracted to religion, they would rather adhere to a more costly religion because

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they believe it is more likely to be worth the cost (i.e., time, money, loss of social status and friendships, etc.).80 However, the highest cost religions—those that require complete exclusion, self-flagellation, unusual sexual practices, donations of all of one’s wealth to the religion, and so on—are simply too costly for most people.81 Thus, for many who want religion, the option on which they settle is the medium cost religion. Such religions come with some cost; often the members of such religions feel marginalized by mainstream society, leading to stronger in-group identity.82 Of course, large percentages of people are opting out of religion altogether, which, in the face of secularization, is an increasingly attractive option.83 Thus, if we consider religion to be a simplified marketplace, we could argue there are four options: low cost generic religion, medium cost branded religion, extremely high cost exclusive religions, and no religion at all. Assuming people have the freedom to choose their religion (an assumption that does not hold around the world), those who are interested in religion are most likely to choose the medium cost religions as they believe they offer greater rewards than low cost religions and they can afford the costs. What does this marketplace model mean for the LDS Church in the twenty-­ first century? The LDS Church is currently besieged on two fronts. Given its headquarters in the US and a small but not insignificant percentage of its members are left-leaning, there is constant clamor for the religion to accommodate to prevailing social norms. Progressive critics of the religion want the religion to give ciswomen and transgender individuals the priesthood and open up all offices in the religion to ciswomen and transgender individuals. Likewise, they want the religion to fully accept and embrace LGBTQ+ individuals with no restrictions on membership. They also want the religion to adjust the policies, practices, and doctrines to accommodate varied cultural practices around the world and to embrace cultural relativity. Finally, they also want laxer requirements for full membership, including allowing people who reject specific practices and doctrines or emphasize others (e.g., worshiping a Heavenly Mother) to be allowed full membership in the religion, from being able to say prayers in sacrament meetings to participating in temple ceremonies. In other words, progressive Mormons and critics of the religion want the LDS Church to move toward prevailing social norms, perhaps not realizing in the process that the religion will become a non-controversial, generic religion with limited appeal to religionists. On the other side are conservative members and stricter religionists who believe the LDS Church’s accommodations have diminished its appeal. For some of these individuals, the 1978 policy change allowing Blacks full participation in the religion was an objectionable accommodation that led them to leave the religion (see Bennion’s chapter on fundamentalist Mormons). For others, suggesting that homosexuality may have a biological component and therefore warrants sympathy was too controversial to accept. Many are aware of the thousands of polygamist Mormons in the Intermountain West who view the LDS Church’s discontinuation of polygamy and embrace of monogamy as

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a capitulation to prevailing social norms, as detailed by Bennion in this volume. For many of these individuals, the decline in prophecy, the perceived milquetoast doctrinal innovation, and the growing corporatism of the LDS Church suggest that the religion is accommodating modern society too much. These individuals want extremely high cost, world-rejecting religion and may reject the LDS Church because it isn’t costly enough. In the face of rapid secularization in the US and in developed and developing countries around the world, the leadership of the LDS Church will need to figure out on what path they want the religion to continue. If they assimilate to prevailing cultural values too much, the religion loses its appeal over generic, liberal religions. If they fail to assimilate at all, the religion becomes too costly for those who live in the world and have to be part of it as well, which is likely the majority of the active membership. As I have argued elsewhere,84 the LDS Church will continue to move in a progressive direction, albeit slowly and in a punctuated fashion. Every time the LDS Church accommodates a prevailing social norm—allowing women to say prayers at general conference, granting that homosexuality likely has a biological component, allowing Blacks to hold the priesthood—these are accommodations that cannot be undone. A counterfactual here will illustrate the point: imagine how members and non-members alike would respond if the LDS Church leadership announced they were rescinding the policy change allowing Blacks to hold the priesthood. The result would be apocalyptic for the religion. Only white supremacists would continue to embrace such a high cost, radical religion. Progressive accommodations, once they occur, shift the religion in a direction that cannot be reversed. In practical terms, this means the religion will continue to shift toward progressive values. A common refrain among progressive Mormons is that the LDS Church is always about 30 or 40 years behind the times. What they may not realize—whether this is a leader intended outcome or not—is that maintaining an “optimum” level of conflict with prevailing social norms may be in the best interest of the Church’s survival, if not its possibility to flourish, as a twenty-first century global religion. Progressive Mormon agitation for accommodation is, simultaneously, agitation for generic and low cost religion. The LDS Church would lose much of its appeal if it became the Community of Christ. I’m not a bold enough social scientist to suggest specific dates or a timeline for future accommodations to prevailing social norms, but I believe it is safe to prognosticate that the following changes will occur at some point in the future. The LDS Church will gradually extend its acceptance of LGBTQ individuals into full membership. Women will eventually be ordained to the priesthood and positions in the religion will be opened up to all sexes and genders. The LDS Church will slowly begin to adjust its policies and practices to allow for greater cultural modification around the world (something it is already doing, but very slowly). Finally, at some point the Church’s leadership will also have to concede that people leave the religion because they don’t find the truth claims credible, that the religion doesn’t work for some people, and some

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people have lost confidence in the institution itself rather than continuing to insist that those who leave were never fully committed, were offended, or did not want to or couldn’t uphold their religious standards. This last point is a major concession as it would entail an admission by leaders that the LDS Church is but one religious choice among many other valid options, and that there are many paths to being a good person; it would transition the religion from an exclusive, sectarian organization to a more ecumenical one. In a religious marketplace that includes thousands of options and, an increasingly popular and appealing option of no religion at all, the LDS Church will have to carefully balance its slow accommodation to more egalitarian and progressive values with its desire to remain appealing by requiring some social cost with membership. The direction will be accommodation; it must be accommodation. But it will continue to lag behind society in general by decades in order for Mormons to continue being a “peculiar people.”85

Notes 1. Ryan T.  Cragun and Michael Nielsen, “Fighting Over ‘Mormon’: Media Coverage of the FLDS and LDS,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 43, no. 4 (2009): 65–104. 2. D.  Michael Quinn, Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1997). 3. Ronald Lawson and Ryan T. Cragun, “Comparing the Geographic Distributions and Growth of Mormons, Adventists, and Witnesses,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 51, no. 2 (2012): 220–40, https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1468-5906.2012.01646.x; Rick Phillips, “Rethinking the International Expansion of Mormonism,” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 10, no. 1 (August 1, 2006): 52–68, https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2006.10.1.52. 4. David G. Stewart, “Growth, Retention, and Internationalization,” in Revisiting Thomas F.  O’Dea’s The Mormons: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Cardell K. Jacobson, John P. Hoffman, and Tim B. Heaton (University of Utah Press, 2008), 328–61. 5. Jon Swaine, Douglas MacMillan, and Michelle Boorstein, “Mormon Church Has Misled Members on $100 Billion Tax-Exempt Investment Fund, Whistleblower Alleges,” Washington Post, December 17, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost. com/investigations/mormon-church-has-misled-members-on-100-billion-taxexempt-investment-fund-whistleblower-alleges/2019/12/16/e3619bd2-200 4-11ea-86f3-3b5019d451db_story.html. 6. Isabella Kasselstrand, “Secularity and Irreligion in Cross-National Context: A Nonlinear Approach,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 58, no. 3 (2019): 626–42, https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12617. 7. David Masci, Elizabeth Podrebarac Sciupac, and Michael Lipka, “Same-Sex Marriage Around the World” (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, October 28, 2019), https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/gay-marriage-aroundthe-world/.

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8. Amy Adamczyk, Cross-National Public Opinion about Homosexuality: Examining Attitudes across the Globe (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017). 9. Ryan T. Cragun and J. E. Sumerau, “The Last Bastion of Sexual and Gender Prejudice? Sexualities, Race, Gender, Religiosity, and Spirituality in the Examination of Prejudice Toward Sexual and Gender Minorities,” Journal of Sex Research 52, no. 7 (2015): 821–34, https://doi.org/10.1080/0022449 9.2014.925534. 10. Senem Ertan, “How to Study Gender Equality Policy Cross-Nationally? Aggregate or Disaggregate Gender Equality Policy Indices?,” Social Indicators Research 125, no. 1 (January 1, 2016): 47–76, https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11205-014-0841-1. 11. J.  E. Sumerau and Ryan T.  Cragun, “The Hallmarks of Righteous Women: Gendered Background Expectations in The Church of Jesus Christ of LatterDay Saints,” Sociology of Religion 76, no. 1 (2015): 49–71, https://doi. org/10.1093/socrel/sru040; J.  E. Sumerau and Ryan T.  Cragun, “TransForming Mormonism: Transgender Perspectives on Priesthood Ordination and Gender,” in Voices for Equality: Ordain Women and Resurgent Feminism, ed. Gordon Shepherd, Lavina Fielding Anderson, and Gary Shepherd (Draper, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2015), 117–36. 12. Phil Zuckerman, Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Daniel Enstedt, Göran Larsson, and Teemu T. Mantsinen, eds., Handbook of Leaving Religion (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2019). 13. D.  Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power, 1 edition (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1994). 14. Quinn, Mormon Hierarchy. 15. Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M. Cook, “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 415–44. 16. Matthew Burton Bowman, The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith (New York: Random House, 2012); Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 17. Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). 18. Benno Nietzel, “Propaganda, Psychological Warfare and Communication Research in the USA and the Soviet Union during the Cold War,” History of the Human Sciences 29, no. 4–5 (October 1, 2016): 59–76, https://doi. org/10.1177/0952695116667881; Ian Scott, “‘Pride and Joy’: Propaganda Wars, ‘Projections of America’ and the Dismantling of the Office of War Information at the Close of World War II,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 39, no. 4 (October 2, 2019): 768–87, https://doi.org/10.108 0/01439685.2019.1600914. 19. Derek P.  Jensen, “LDS Church Hoping Hefty Investment Will Shield Its Temples,” The Salt Lake Tribune, April 2, 2011, https://archive.sltrib.com/ article.php?id=51497060&itype=CMSID. 20. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996). 21. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010).

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22. Jana Riess, The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019). 23. Mark Chaves, Ordaining Women: Culture and Conflict in Religious Organizations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 24. Sumerau and Cragun, “The Hallmarks of Righteous Women.” 25. Gordon Shepherd, Lavina Fielding Anderson, and Gary Shepherd, eds., Voices for Equality: Ordain Women and Resurgent Mormon Feminism (Greg Kofford Books, Inc., 2015). 26. Ryan T.  Cragun et  al., “Predictors of Opposition to and Support for the Ordination of Women: Insights from the LDS Church,” Mental Health, Religion & Culture 19, no. 2 (March 10, 2016): 124–37, https://doi.org/1 0.1080/13674676.2015.1126703; David E.  Campbell, John C.  Green, and J.  Quin Monson, Seeking the Promised Land: Mormons and American Politics (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 27. John E. Hoffmann and John E. Bartkowski, “Gender, Religious Tradition and Biblical Literalism,” Social Forces 86, no. 3 (March 2008): 1245–72; Orit Avishai, “‘Doing Religion’ In a Secular World: Women in Conservative Religions and the Question of Agency,” Gender & Society 22, no. 4 (August 1, 2008): 409–33, https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243208321019; Orit Avishai, Afshan Jafar, and Rachel Rinaldo, “A Gender Lens on Religion,” Gender & Society 29, no. 1 (February 1, 2015): 5–25, https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243214548920. 28. Linda Woodhead, “Gendering Secularization Theory,” Social Compass 55, no. 2 (June 1, 2008): 187–93, https://doi.org/10.1177/0037768607089738. 29. Chaves, Ordaining Women: Culture and Conflict in Religious Organizations. 30. John T Jost, Mahzarin R Banaji, and Brian A Nosek, “A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo,” Political Psychology 25, no. 6 (2004): 881–919. 31. Riess, The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church; John P. Dehlin, “Understanding Mormon Disbelief: Why Do Some Mormons Lose Their Testimony, and What Happens to Them When They Do?” (Logan, UT: whymormonsquestion.org, March 2012), http://www.whymormonsquestion. org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Sur vey-Results_UnderstandingMormon-Disbelief-Mar20121.pdf. 32. Raewyn Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987). 33. J. E. Sumerau et al., “Helping Quantitative Sociology Come Out of the Closet,” Sexualities 20, no. 5–6 (2017): 644–56, https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1363460716666755. 34. Connell, Gender and Power; Sumerau and Cragun, “Trans-Forming Mormonism: Transgender Perspectives on Priesthood Ordination and Gender.” 35. Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” Gender & Society 1, no. 2 (June 1, 1987): 125–51, https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243287 001002002. 36. Sumerau et al., “Helping Quantitative Sociology Come Out of the Closet.” 37. Katharine McCabe and J. E. Sumerau, “Reproductive Vocabularies: Interrogating Intersections of Reproduction, Sexualities, and Religion among U.S. Cisgender College Women,” Sex Roles, June 28, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11199-017-0795-2. 38. Connell, Gender and Power.

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39. J.  E. Sumerau and Ryan T.  Cragun, “‘Why Would Our Heavenly Father Do That to Anyone’: Oppressive Othering through Sexual Classification Schemes in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,” Symbolic Interaction 37, no. 3 (April 1, 2014): 331–52, https://doi.org/10.1002/SYMB.105. 40. Cragun and Sumerau, “The Last Bastion of Sexual and Gender Prejudice?” 41. J.  E. Sumerau and Ryan T.  Cragun, Christianity and the Limits of Minority Acceptance in America: God Loves (Almost) Everyone (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018). 42. John P.  Dehlin et  al., “Psychosocial Correlates of Religious Approaches to Same-Sex Attraction: A Mormon Perspective,” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health 18, no. 3 (July 3, 2014): 284–311, https://doi.org/10.1080/1935970 5.2014.912970; John P.  Dehlin et  al., “Sexual Orientation Change Efforts among Current or Former LDS Church Members,” Journal of Counseling Psychology 62, no. 2 (April 2015): 95–105, http://dx.doi.org.esearch.ut. edu/10.1037/cou0000011. 43. M. Chaves, “Secularization as Declining Religious Authority,” Social Forces 72, no. 3 (March 1994): 749–74. 44. Steve Bruce, Secularization: In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 45. Damian J.  Ruck, R.  Alexander Bentley, and Daniel J.  Lawson, “Cultural Prerequisites of Socioeconomic Development,” Royal Society Open Science 7, no. 2 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.190725; Damian J.  Ruck, R.  Alexander Bentley, and Daniel J.  Lawson, “Religious Change Preceded Economic Change in the 20th Century,” Science Advances 4, no. 7 (July 1, 2018): eaar8680, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aar8680. 46. C. Kirk Hadaway, Penny Long Marler, and Mark Chaves, “What the Polls Don’t Show: A Closer Look at U.S.  Church Attendance,” American Sociological Review 58, no. 6 (December 1993): 741–52. 47. Ryan T.  Cragun, “The Declining Significance of Religion: Secularization in Ireland,” in Values and Identities in Europe: Evidence from the European Social Survey, ed. Michael J.  Breen, Routledge Advances in Sociology (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2017), 17–35. 48. Joel Thiessen and Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme, None of the Above: Nonreligious Identity in the US and Canada (NYU Press, 2020). 49. Ariela Keysar, “Shifts Along the American Religious-Secular Spectrum,” Secularism and Nonreligion 3, no. 1 (2014): 1–16, https://doi.org/10.5334/ snr.am. 50. David Voas and Siobhan McAndrew, “Three Puzzles of Non-Religion in Britain,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 27, no. 1 (2012): 29–48, https:// doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2012.642725. 51. Phil Zuckerman, “Atheism: Contemporary Numbers and Patterns,” in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael Martin, 1st ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 47–68. 52. Isabella Kasselstrand, “Nonbelievers in the Church: A Study of Cultural Religion in Sweden,” Sociology of Religion 76, no. 3 (September 1, 2015): 275–94, https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/srv026; Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge University Press, 2004); Loek Halman et al., Changing Values and Beliefs in 85 Countries (Brill, 2007).

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53. Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular. 54. Ryan T. Cragun and Ronald Lawson, “The Secular Transition: The Worldwide Growth of Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Seventh-Day Adventists,” Sociology of Religion 71, no. 3 (2010): 349–73, https://doi.org/10.1093/ socrel/srq022. 55. Joseph O. Baker and Buster G. Smith, American Secularism: Cultural Contours of Nonreligious Belief Systems (New York: NYU Press, 2015); Thiessen and Wilkins-Laflamme, None of the Above. 56. Stephen M Merino, “Irreligious Socialization? The Adult Religious Preferences of Individuals Raised with No Religion,” Secularism and Nonreligion 1, no. 0 (December 26, 2011): 1–16. 57. Cragun, “The Declining Significance of Religion: Secularization in Ireland.” 58. Stan L. Albrecht and Howard M. Bahr, “Patterns of Religious Disaffiliation: A Study of Lifelong Mormons, Mormon Converts, and Former Mormons,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 22, no. 4 (1983): 366–79. 59. E. Marshall Brooks, “Disenchanted Lives: Apostasy and Ex-Mormonism among the Latter-Day Saints” (Dissertation, New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University, 2015). 60. Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, “Emerging Adulthood,” American Psychologist 55, no. 5 (2000): 469, https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.5.469; Jeremy E. Uecker, Mark D. Regnerus, and Margaret L. Vaaler, “Losing My Religion: The Social Sources of Religious Decline in Early Adulthood,” Social Forces 85, no. 4 (June 2007): 1667–92. 61. Uecker, Regnerus, and Vaaler, “Losing My Religion: The Social Sources of Religious Decline in Early Adulthood.” 62. Ryan T. Cragun, What You Don’t Know About Religion (but Should) (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013). 63. Lawson and Cragun, “Comparing the Geographic Distributions and Growth of Mormons, Adventists, and Witnesses”; Phillips, “Rethinking the International Expansion of Mormonism.” 64. Lawson and Cragun, “Comparing the Geographic Distributions and Growth of Mormons, Adventists, and Witnesses.” 65. Jana Riess, “Worldwide, Only 25 Percent of Young Single Mormons Are Active in the LDS Church,” Religion News Service, October 5, 2016, sec. Beliefs, https://religionnews.com/2016/10/05/leaked-worldwide-only-25-ofyoung-single-mormons-are-active-in-the-lds-church/. 66. Rick Phillips and Ryan T.  Cragun, “Mormon Religiosity and the Legacy of ‘Gathering,’” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 16, no. 3 (2013): 77–94, https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2013.16.3.77. 67. Peggy Fletcher Stack, “Mormons Rejoice at News of Shorter Sunday Services, but the Move Will Pose Challenges to Some, Especially Single Members,” The Salt Lake Tribune, October 6, 2018, sec, https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2018/10/06/mormons-rejoice-news/. 68. David Noyce, “LDS Church Changes Temple Ceremony, Gives Eve a Bigger Role,” Religion News Service, January 3, 2019, sec. News, https://religionnews.com/2019/01/03/lds-church-changestemple-ceremony-gives-eve-a-bigger-role/. 69. Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (Vintage, 2007).

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70. George D. Smith, Nauvoo Polygamy: “…But We Called It Celestial Marriage”, 2nd Updated edition (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2011). 71. Klaus Baer, “The Breathing Permit of Hor: A Translation of the Apparent Source of the Book of Abraham,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 3, no. 3 (1968): 109–34. 72. Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows, New edition (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004). 73. Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor, 1990). 74. Steve Bruce, Secular Beats Spiritual: The Westernization of the Easternization of the West, 1 edition (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018). 75. Armand L.  Mauss, The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle With Assimilation (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Ryan T.  Cragun, Michael Nielsen, and Heather Clingenpeel, “The Struggle for Legitimacy: Tensions Between the LDS and FLDS,” in Saints Under Siege: The Texas State Raid on the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, ed. Stuart A. Wright and James T. Richardson (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2011), 80–106. 76. Mirja Hubert and Peter Kenning, “A Current Overview of Consumer Neuroscience,” Journal of Consumer Behaviour 7, no. 4–5 (2008): 272–92, https://doi.org/10.1002/cb.251. 77. Hilke Plassmann et al., “Marketing Actions Can Modulate Neural Representations of Experienced Pleasantness,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 3 (January 22, 2008): 1050–54, https://doi.org/10.1073/ pnas.0706929105. 78. Inger Furseth, “Secularization and the Role of Religion in State Institutions,” Social Compass 50, no. 2 (June 1, 2003): 191–202, https://doi.org/10.117 7/0037768603050002005; Kasselstrand, “Nonbelievers in the Church.” 79. Matthew Engelke, “The Coffin Question: Death and Materiality in Humanist Funerals,” Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief 11, no. 1 (March 1, 2015): 26–48, https://doi.org/10.2752/205393215X 14259900061553. 80. Michael McBride, “Club Mormon: Free-Riders, Monitoring, and Exclusion in the LDS Church,” Rationality and Society 19, no. 4 (2007): 395–424. 81. Stuart A.  Wright, “Leaving New Religious Movements: Issues, Theory, and Research,” in Falling From The Faith: Causes and Consequences of Religious Apostasy, ed. David G.  Bromley (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1988), 143–65. 82. Christian Smith et al., American Evangelicals: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 83. Zuckerman, Faith No More. 84. Cragun, Nielsen, and Clingenpeel, “The Struggle for Legitimacy: Tensions Between the LDS and FLDS.” 85. John A.  Widtsoe, “Why Are the Latter-Day Saints a Peculiar People?,” Ensign, April 1988, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/ study/ensign/1988/04/i-have-a-question/why-are-the-latter-day-saints-apeculiar-people?lang=eng.

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Index1

A Aaronic Priesthood, 38, 59, 825 Abraham, 9, 678, 695, 696 Abuse, 50–51, 183, 249, 283n47, 352, 373, 445, 512, 525, 610–613, 687–691, 697, 698, 800, 818, 826 Activity rate, 166, 169, 181, 325, 329, 330, 332, 335, 338, 448, 478, 565, 642, 643, 652n9, 755, 796, 803n22 Adam-God doctrine, 684, 686, 699n17 Adams, George J., 560 Adolescents, 387, 447, 708, 799 Africa, 5, 8, 9, 13, 21, 80, 81, 100, 105–107, 144, 151, 159n15, 166, 169–170, 299, 316, 323–338, 354, 442, 452n28, 521, 586–588, 592, 594, 596–598, 600, 602n14, 619, 622, 652n8, 662, 747n39, 789, 803n22, 824, 832 Christianization, 589–590 diaspora, 717 African Initiated Christianities (AIC), 586 Agency, 4, 82, 93, 148, 252, 347, 399, 425, 443, 549, 592, 601, 623, 685, 712, 767, 768

Alcohol, 148, 185, 220, 307, 310, 315, 382, 445, 524, 542, 548, 549, 566, 576, 685, 821 Allred, Marvin, 682, 700n31 Allred, Owen, 682, 690, 691, 700n31 Allred, Rulon, 682, 690, 691, 694, 696, 699n25, 700n31 American business model, 478 American Indian, 753–766, 768 Anderson, Neil L., 563 Anderson, Wallace "Mad Bear", 756, 763, 764 Anti-Mormon, 8, 66, 466, 476, 479, 536, 712 Anti-religious laws, 380 Aotearoa, New Zealand, 455–468 Apartheid, 607–609, 613, 615–618, 626n2 Apostasy, 62, 66, 178, 189, 194n102, 215, 220, 273 Apostate, 270, 272, 364n99, 517, 677, 684 Apostles, 5, 36, 38, 42, 43, 68, 101, 179, 180, 191, 217, 235, 243, 275, 279, 280, 346, 398, 402, 404, 409–411, 416, 511, 534, 563, 659–661, 665, 666, 686, 747n39, 819, 820, 824, 825

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 R. G. Shepherd et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52616-0

851

852 

INDEX

Apostolic United Brethren (AUB), 677, 680, 682, 683, 686, 687, 690–692, 696, 697 Armenia, 336, 563, 571–573, 578 Asia, 5, 8, 13, 69, 70, 80, 100, 102, 103, 106, 151, 166, 170–171, 316, 323–338, 354, 455, 636, 649, 656, 660–663, 747n39, 786, 789, 803n22, 820, 832 Assiniboine, 763 Atheism/atheist, 486, 509, 561, 564, 832 Auckland, New Zealand, 53n21, 102, 440, 442, 462, 463 Australia, 5, 9, 14, 16, 68, 97, 102, 214, 241, 244, 247, 250, 336, 337, 434, 446, 450n2, 455–468, 656, 658, 664, 821, 832 Australian aborigines, 456, 824 Auxiliary organizations, 40–41 Azerbaijan, 571–573 B Baby/babies, 50, 187, 242, 317n19, 346, 410, 610, 624, 627n17, 659, 693 Baca, Angelo, 755, 767, 768 Ballard, Melvin J., 421 Ballif, Ariel S., 461 Banyacya, Thomas, 756, 757, 763 Baptism, 6, 10, 17, 20, 36, 47, 64, 77, 78, 87n73, 95, 146, 147, 159n16, 165, 172–174, 179, 181, 183, 185, 187, 195n108, 242, 270, 329, 338, 346, 357, 364n99, 381, 383, 386, 387, 405, 423, 424, 448, 461, 468, 505, 513, 535, 537, 540, 550, 564–566, 571, 572, 575–578, 599, 607, 636, 637, 644, 652n4, 652n10, 653n12, 658, 659, 661, 685, 711, 743, 747n44, 754, 758, 759, 761, 787, 797, 798, 805n43 Barlow, Dan, 688 Barlow, John Y., 680, 681 Bateman, Samuel, 680 Bautista, Margarito, 15, 377, 728, 730, 741 Bear River Massacre, 762

Bears Ears, 767, 768 Beck, Ulrich, 476, 482 Beehive Clothing, 789 Benally, Moroni, 753, 764 Bennion, Michael K., 760 Benson, Ezra Taft, 51, 150, 178, 560, 563, 686 Be One celebration, 731 Biafra, 593 Bible, 11, 39, 64, 136n26, 207, 301, 411, 440, 508, 510, 592, 658, 685, 724n11, 757 Big Love, 689 HBO series, 689 Birth rate, 75, 167, 168, 171, 173, 177, 219, 300, 329, 338, 433, 564, 692 Bisexual, 270, 271, 273, 275, 277, 278, 282n13, 818, 825, 828, 830 Bishop, 36–38, 40, 41, 45, 48, 49, 51, 99, 185, 209, 236, 243, 248, 249, 251–253, 270, 279, 304, 347, 351, 384, 386, 390, 413, 428n15, 510, 519, 522, 542, 551, 592, 641, 695, 715, 727–729, 738, 740, 786, 788, 790–792 Bishop interviews, 249 Bishop, Nelson Spicer, 459, 470n13 Bishop, Rob, 767 Bishopric, 270, 384, 391, 663, 664, 708, 761 Bitsoi, Alastair, 767 Bitterroot Valley, Montana, 682 Black culture, 247, 607, 609, 621, 708 empowerment, 721 genealogy, 718, 721 history, 710, 716, 719, 720, 722 identity, 705–723 members, 237, 607, 629n32, 705, 706, 708, 714, 717, 719–722, 823, 824 youth, 707 Black Hawk, Antonga, 765, 766 Black Lives Matter movement, 714 Blackmore, Harold, 687 Blackmore, Ray, 687 Blood atonement, 682, 683 Bluffdale, Utah, 690

 INDEX 

Book of Mormon, 3, 4, 7, 9–11, 15, 19, 36–37, 48, 60, 64, 70, 144, 145, 153, 178, 185, 344, 353, 354, 358n3, 369, 374, 377, 402, 411, 432, 433, 458, 459, 536, 542, 543, 547, 559, 562, 571, 577, 593, 607, 610, 613, 624, 629n34, 658, 661, 684, 685, 718, 721, 729, 730, 732, 734, 740–742, 746n11, 747n35, 751, 753, 759, 760, 762–766 Bountiful, British Colombia, 689 Bountiful, Utah, 689, 692, 760 Bowman, Matthew, 236 Boxer, Elise, 753, 762 Boy Scouts of America, 757 Boyden, John S., 763–765 Branches, 11, 14, 22, 61, 65, 67, 99–101, 106–108, 122, 323–325, 329, 330, 332–334, 372, 373, 375, 377, 379, 384, 385, 388, 392n2, 427n6, 434, 435, 438, 456, 457, 465, 480, 485, 504, 524, 535, 541, 563, 565, 570, 637, 652n10, 687, 689, 690, 696, 718, 728, 729, 731, 733–735, 737, 738, 740, 742, 752, 756, 796, 835 Brazil, 20, 21, 87n73, 105, 107, 108, 110–113, 117, 125–129, 241, 329, 330, 401, 421–427, 559, 594, 783, 789, 820, 823, 824 Brigham Young, 39, 41, 68, 146, 180, 206–210, 344, 357n1, 357n3, 370, 371, 561, 594, 613, 629n32, 679, 681, 699n17, 729, 760 Brigham Young University (BYU), 71, 151, 167, 267, 272, 275, 278, 280, 359n31, 438, 439, 442, 559, 562, 595, 597, 707, 713, 741, 754, 758, 759, 763, 766, 767, 784, 786, 804n32 Bringhurst, Newell, 236, 357n1, 623 Brinkerhoff, Val, 759 Brinkerhoff, Zula, 756–759, 763 British, 66, 68, 79 Gold Coast, 589 media, 476 Broadbent, Leslie, 680, 681 Brooks, Juanita, 761 Brown, Hugh B., 52

853

Browning, Gary, 564, 580n36 Bunyan, John, 594 Butchereit, John, 682 Bytheway, John, 707, 724n6 C Calles Law, 376 Cameron, David, 476 Campbell, Alexander, 36, 37, 732 Canada, 11–13, 15, 18, 19, 46, 61, 79, 82, 104–106, 173, 176, 241, 244, 246, 247, 250, 253, 279, 324, 326, 328–329, 343–357, 357n1, 357n3, 358n14, 362n68, 362n69, 363n73, 363n75, 656, 667, 687, 691, 697, 699n25, 699n29, 753, 754, 763, 784–786, 795, 798, 802n21, 802–803n22, 809n94, 832 Mormon colonies, 680 Cannon, Angus, 11, 679 Cannon, George Q., 9, 679, 680 Cannon, Janath, 594 Cannon, Ted, 594 Canon law, 41–42 Card, Charles Ora, 12 Cardston, 12 Caribbean, 172, 324, 328–331, 732 Carranza, Venustiano, 373, 375 Castillo, Florence Galicia, 376 Catawba, 761, 763, 764 Catholic, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 52, 72, 86n72, 95, 146, 194n102, 218, 300, 380, 382, 401, 412, 414, 415, 479, 485–487, 489, 503, 504, 507, 510–513, 517, 523, 527n10, 561, 590, 643, 655, 656, 662, 665, 694, 733, 790 Catholic Church, 95, 251, 346, 380, 384, 401, 405, 486, 488, 489, 508, 511–513, 561, 616, 790, 805n53 Catholicism, 400, 479, 480, 486, 488–490, 512, 734, 825 Celestial Kingdom, 280, 418n26, 684, 686, 688 Celestial marriage, 265, 266, 678, 680, 699n19 Centennial Park, 688 Centers of strength policy, 326, 334, 576

854 

INDEX

Centerville, Utah, 680 Central Asia, 335, 559–579 Ceremony, 39, 272, 273, 282n12, 364n99, 386, 397, 401–403, 409, 410, 414, 417n26, 461, 513, 567, 615, 622, 623, 628n28, 658, 686, 691, 710, 757, 787, 795, 835–837 Chapels, 14, 17, 44, 45, 99, 102, 216, 242, 343, 346, 349, 376, 380, 392, 399, 401, 411, 412, 423, 434, 437, 441, 488, 489, 542, 546, 567, 570, 576, 580n35, 596, 599, 655, 690, 707, 727, 734, 794 Chastity, 163, 170, 263, 271–278, 383, 446, 548, 833 Cherokee, 760 Chihuahua, Mexico, 117, 681, 700n42 Children, 3, 9, 11, 17, 18, 23, 41, 46, 48, 59, 63, 66, 67, 73, 74, 77, 78, 87n73, 95, 154, 165, 167, 168, 170, 171, 173, 177–179, 182, 183, 186, 187, 211, 214–216, 218, 247, 249, 252, 267, 269, 270, 272–274, 276, 279–280, 285n69, 300, 317n19, 323, 352, 353, 356, 357, 364n99, 379, 383, 387, 388, 391, 410, 443, 446, 449, 482, 489, 512, 518, 520, 521, 524, 535, 539, 542, 547, 549, 564, 578, 608–612, 614, 615, 628n27, 629n31, 646, 653n13, 657, 678, 679, 683, 685–693, 695, 697, 700n42, 710, 713, 714, 733, 737, 740, 741, 754, 759–762, 772n55, 772n57, 826, 831, 833, 834 China, 6, 8, 16, 68, 170, 177, 183, 188, 335, 336, 405, 560, 783, 789 Christian, 4, 16, 20, 24, 35, 42, 49, 58, 60–62, 66, 69, 70, 79–81, 95, 97, 144–146, 152, 153, 163, 168, 170, 171, 174, 175, 177, 178, 182–184, 189, 194n102, 298, 300, 331, 335, 352, 355, 356, 363n73, 414, 432, 433, 435, 443–445, 458, 466, 476, 478, 482–484, 486, 504, 508–510, 513, 518, 521, 535, 536, 548, 549, 560, 561, 573, 585, 586, 589–592, 594–596, 611, 619, 635, 636,

639–643, 646–650, 651n1, 652n5, 652n10, 653n11, 656, 657, 660–662, 664, 694, 732, 736, 739, 751, 753, 800, 819, 821, 822 persecution, 59, 183, 189, 331 Christianity, 7, 22, 36, 64, 69, 80, 184, 188, 354, 356, 369, 401, 459, 476, 480, 484, 493n35, 508, 510, 511, 517, 549, 571, 586, 587, 589–591, 640, 641, 643, 647, 649, 662, 711 decline, 188, 476, 480, 647 Chukwu, Ambrose, 591 Church calling, 48, 184, 212, 305, 435, 448, 519, 522, 567, 740, 799 Church of England, 483, 490n3 The Church of the First Born of the Fulness of Times, 677, 680, 691, 694–697 The Church of the Firstborn of the General Assembly of Heaven, 697 Church of the Lamb of God, 695 Coffee, 185, 214, 219, 220, 307, 310, 315, 382, 524, 548 Cole, Lura Elmina, 753 Colonia Juarez, 117, 681 Colonia LeBaron, 681, 694, 695 Colonialism, 80, 155, 354, 478, 487, 489, 490, 588, 599, 628n23, 732, 745n10, 751–768, 824 European, 586 Colonization, 352, 354, 456, 458, 459, 609, 719, 753, 754 British, 458 Colorado City, 687, 689 Colvin, Gina, 160n22, 353, 354, 460, 464, 465, 467 Communalism, 14, 677 Communism Central Europe, 561 Eastern Europe, 561 Community, 4, 6–10, 12–14, 17, 19, 22, 23, 40, 49, 58, 65, 71, 80, 81, 93, 100, 105, 113, 117, 120, 143–145, 148–150, 153, 155–157, 167, 175, 177, 183, 184, 186, 190, 207, 209, 212, 213, 215, 218–220, 236, 238–240, 250, 258n30, 264, 268, 269, 277, 280, 299, 301, 303, 305,

 INDEX 

309, 310, 314, 315, 331, 332, 334, 338, 343, 347–349, 352–354, 357n1, 358n14, 360n41, 371, 372, 393n7, 421, 425, 426, 433, 435, 437, 442–444, 447, 449, 456–458, 460–463, 465, 466, 468, 476, 481, 484, 485, 490, 508, 512, 513, 515, 517, 518, 523–526, 534, 539, 541, 543, 544, 548–552, 554, 564, 568, 586–588, 593, 595, 597–599, 601, 608, 612–614, 616–618, 621, 622, 624–626, 626n5, 627n10, 628n22, 641, 644, 648, 656, 665, 668, 669, 680, 683, 685–692, 695, 697, 698n14, 705–723, 729, 733–737, 739–741, 743, 744, 748n47, 751–754, 756, 760, 761, 763, 764, 768, 788, 789, 794, 817, 818, 835 Community of Christ, 51, 357n1, 555n2, 655–669, 825, 833, 834, 838 Competition, 57, 61, 174–175, 216, 275, 331, 335, 444 Conversion, 5, 6, 8, 50, 62, 81, 82, 97, 98, 124, 152, 157, 166, 172, 180, 181, 275, 343, 345, 353, 355, 382, 383, 448, 458, 477, 478, 481, 486, 489, 523, 534, 535, 540, 549, 550, 564–566, 572, 574, 588, 594, 611, 614, 615, 648, 659–663, 717, 733, 743, 744, 755, 762, 799 Convert baptisms, 77, 78, 87n73, 96, 165, 173, 329, 338, 386, 540, 576, 636, 637, 644, 797, 798 Convert retention rates, 166, 170, 173, 181, 187, 338, 381, 566 Cornwall, Marie, 167, 236 Coronavirus pandemic, 82, 165, 295, 783–801 Correlation, 20–22, 43, 212, 214, 218, 235, 236, 360n40, 460, 552, 651, 735 Ćosić, Krešimir, 562 Council of Fifty, 681 Council of Seven (Council of Friends), 680, 681, 692

855

COVID-19, 82, 96, 786, 788–790, 792, 793, 795, 797, 798, 801n4, 806n55 Cowdery, Oliver, 3–5, 36, 344 Curse, 613, 629n34, 713, 723, 761, 762 D Dakota, 753, 757 Dalton, Terrill, 697 Dayer Lebaron, Alma, 681, 694 Death, 5, 19, 39, 40, 43, 49, 51, 52, 75, 178, 189, 210, 280, 283n40, 284n58, 285n71, 372, 377, 393n16, 428n21, 441, 484, 507, 540, 643, 657, 681, 692, 695, 696, 766, 783, 788, 801n4 Decolonizing, 752 Decoo, Wilfried, 217, 548, 565, 817 Dehlin, John, 47, 278 Deloria, Phil, 757 Deseret Industries, 788 Diné, 752–755, 766, 767 Navajo, 754 Disafilliation, see Apostasy Disciples of Christ, 36, 37, 791 Discrimination, 179, 189, 220, 253, 254, 280, 351, 352, 356, 481, 483, 618, 705, 719, 733–735, 824–827 Districts, 72, 99, 104, 105, 108, 117, 159n15, 271, 323, 325–327, 373, 376–378, 384, 385, 392n2, 401, 402, 416, 417n25, 427n6, 434, 458, 461, 480, 545, 569, 752, 835 Divorce, 167, 486, 519 Doctrine & Covenants (D&C), 5, 10, 25n5, 145, 443, 562, 658, 683–686, 699n19, 699n20 Domestic violence, 611, 613, 628n22 Drugs, 183, 283n47, 382, 445, 520, 700n42 Dublin, Ireland, 479 E Eastern Bloc, 560, 562 Ecclesiatical organization, 35–52, 93, 295, 379, 382, 384–386 Echo Hawk, Larry, 762

856 

INDEX

Economics, 5, 7, 11, 12, 14–16, 22, 24, 58, 71, 96, 101, 106, 144, 148, 150, 151, 154, 155, 159n14, 160n22, 163, 175, 211, 300, 332, 362n70, 380, 389, 392, 403, 425, 434, 435, 446, 447, 449, 457, 462, 467, 477, 506, 514, 551, 565, 593, 599, 600, 609, 611, 640, 644, 657, 659, 663, 677, 679, 683, 684, 692, 694, 695, 706, 710, 729, 733, 738, 740, 744, 818, 821, 832, 836 Edmunds-Tucker Act, 210, 264, 679 1890 Manifesto, 264, 680 El Centro Escolar Benemérito de las Américas, 22 El Dorado, Texas, 689, 699n29 Empathy, 248, 249, 706, 709, 711, 714, 716, 717, 719, 721–722 Endowment, 20, 38, 39, 236, 386, 387, 398, 449, 461, 628n28, 629n32, 658, 685, 686, 690, 691, 800, 805n43 End Times, 5 Environment, 153, 155, 185, 250, 273, 399, 416n3, 438, 443, 444, 486, 503–526, 542, 562, 567, 568, 593, 600, 607, 708, 713, 718–720, 733, 738, 739, 741 Equality, 237, 244–246, 249, 254, 269–272, 280, 281n3, 343, 348–350, 355, 356, 362n67, 445, 518, 520, 522, 551, 552, 608, 609, 613, 616–618, 630n57, 706, 710, 728, 731, 733, 744, 825–827, 830, 831, 835 Especially for Youth (EFY), 707–711, 713, 714, 723 Ethics, 81, 181–182, 190, 191, 507, 572, 588, 818 Europe, 6–8, 10, 12, 13, 15–17, 21, 23, 24, 45, 60, 61, 68, 70, 80, 82, 102, 103, 106, 122, 150, 151, 166, 167, 171–172, 174, 188, 191, 282n12, 323–338, 456, 467, 478, 481, 485, 492n27, 506, 507, 511, 514, 516–518, 520, 524–526, 533, 543, 548, 554, 561, 646, 652n8, 732, 789, 803n22, 820–822, 832

Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 792 Ex-Mormon, 763 F Family, 10, 12, 13, 16, 23, 39, 40, 42, 50, 58, 59, 62, 63, 67, 72–74, 92, 96, 151–156, 163, 167, 170, 171, 175, 177, 183, 184, 208, 211, 212, 214, 215, 226n114, 242, 244, 247, 248, 254, 263–270, 272–275, 277, 279, 280, 281n5, 283n41, 299, 300, 344, 349, 352, 353, 356, 358n14, 372, 373, 377, 382, 383, 386, 387, 399, 404, 416n4, 423, 424, 433–435, 440–442, 444, 445, 448, 449, 457, 459, 461, 462, 464, 466, 468, 483–486, 510, 513, 514, 518, 519, 523–525, 537, 539, 540, 542, 544–546, 548–550, 554, 562, 564, 566, 567, 577, 594, 608–612, 619, 622–626, 628n27, 641, 646, 648, 655, 659, 661, 663, 664, 677, 679, 682, 683, 685, 688–691, 693–695, 697, 698, 708–714, 717, 721, 722, 728, 733–738, 740, 742, 753, 759–763, 788, 793–795, 799, 800, 808n78, 821, 829, 834, 835 values, 58, 176, 623, 821 The Family Proclamation/Proclamation on the Family, 244, 264, 273, 274, 609, 612, 628n29, 629n31, 829 Fasting, 273, 278, 707, 788 Father, 4, 9, 26n38, 58, 146, 147, 153, 154, 208, 212, 243, 245, 246, 254, 264, 267, 272, 310, 344, 373, 383, 397, 411, 423, 445, 559, 563, 591, 592, 608, 610, 612–615, 624, 683, 684, 686, 688, 694, 710, 713, 737, 763, 765, 829, 830 Federal Commonwealth of Australia, 455 Federal government, 4, 7, 11, 13, 42, 96, 145, 147, 158n4, 211, 216, 352, 358n14, 458, 593, 677, 679, 691, 729, 756, 765, 767, 768, 791 Fellowshipping, 172, 382, 390, 567

 INDEX 

Feminism/feminist, 50, 237, 243, 246, 249, 343–357, 518, 519, 608, 627n8, 682, 733 Ferguson, Susannah, 753 Fertility, 167–168, 187, 646 First Presidency, 11, 13, 20, 40, 43, 44, 50–52, 65, 82, 101, 149, 179, 217, 236, 269, 270, 272–275, 277, 281n3, 283n30, 284n58, 285n65, 285n69, 286n76, 295, 346, 378, 423, 424, 426, 460, 468, 619, 681, 697, 784–788, 790, 797, 803n24, 806n58, 819, 824 Forgiveness, 615 Fox, Marama, 464, 465 Free-rider effect, 167 French West Africa, 589 Friends, 50, 62, 79, 96, 107, 276, 277, 279, 283n41, 371, 374, 404, 406, 409, 415, 425, 481, 482, 484, 514, 517, 521, 542, 550, 554, 559, 568, 578, 593, 614, 648, 680, 681, 692, 707–709, 711, 712, 714, 715, 738, 742, 745n2, 755, 756, 759, 763, 795, 799 Fundamentalism, 677–698, 821 Fundamentalist, 67, 476, 510, 525, 526, 658, 677, 678, 680–698, 699n29, 759, 837 independent polygamists, 697 G The Gathering, 5–9, 12–16, 57–82, 207 Gathering of Israel, 459, 685 Gathering to Zion, 24, 58, 175, 177, 187, 561 Gavin, Sherie, 467 Gender, 58, 73, 74 categories, 236 role complementarity, 250, 255 roles, 58, 152, 167, 239, 243–255, 264, 351, 611–613, 677 stereotypes, 248, 255 General authority, 52, 95, 104, 105, 107, 137n50, 269, 310, 314, 318n37, 426, 460, 468, 519, 567, 569, 732, 739, 803n24, 818, 820, 824

857

General conference, 36, 42, 53n26, 73, 84n15, 102, 105, 107, 147, 160n23, 192n32, 242, 265, 270, 273–275, 284n58, 307, 318n37, 323, 619, 699n21, 716, 717, 764, 766, 785, 786, 798, 803n24, 803n26, 827, 838 Genesis Group, 594, 714, 824 Georgia, Independent Republic of, 796 Gerontocracy, 51–52, 178–179 Ghost Dance, 759 Goshute, 759 Gospel, 7, 10, 13, 16, 38, 58, 62–64, 72, 106, 150, 164, 176–178, 184, 185, 190, 214, 247, 270, 277, 353, 371, 378, 411, 432–434, 437, 438, 446, 451n8, 462, 541, 560, 568, 593, 615, 616, 620, 624, 658, 667, 682–684, 699n20, 711, 721, 722, 727, 728, 730–734, 736, 739, 740, 745, 753, 760, 763, 794, 797, 808n86 Gospel culture, 22, 23, 151–154, 157, 175–177, 445, 446, 460, 467, 622, 821, 823, 824 Graham, Janan, 237 Grant, Heber J., 13, 44, 636 Gray, Darius, 713 Great Basin, 6–8, 35, 39, 40, 43–45, 60, 63, 187, 760 Green, Edith, 763 Grover, Mark, 220n1 Growth projections, 164, 165, 205, 421 Growth rates, 21, 77, 95, 121, 164, 165, 169, 172, 174, 186, 191, 323, 324, 326, 328–333, 335, 336, 338, 542, 566, 596, 796, 819 Guatemala, 753, 754 H Hagoth, 9, 459, 464 Hammon, Marion, 688 Handsome Lake, 751, 752 Harmston, Jim, 696, 697 Harris, Albert H., 763 Harris, Alicia, 763 Harris, Lacee A., 763 Harris, Matthew, 236

858 

INDEX

Haudenosaunee, 751–753, 756 Iroquois, 751 Hawaii, 5, 9–11, 14–17, 44, 100, 107, 159n21, 294, 438, 444, 447 Health, 51, 82, 96, 148, 174, 178, 180, 185, 187, 190, 278, 284n58, 384, 435, 443–445, 506, 519, 548, 564, 767, 789, 796, 831 Heavenly Father, 245, 246, 397, 614, 615, 699n17, 829, 830 Heavenly Mother, 348, 830, 837 Helping hands, 425, 443, 728 Hierarchy, 14, 40, 43, 51, 98, 100, 104, 107, 121, 154, 157, 160n21, 178, 205, 208, 236, 303, 314, 426, 427, 515, 522, 594, 617, 619, 640, 693, 819 Hildale, Utah, 689 Hinckley, Gordon B., 50, 100, 107, 264, 270, 284n58, 327, 477, 572, 799 Holiday, 22, 212, 425, 567 Holland, Jeffrey R., 107, 171, 180, 503, 520, 564 Holy Ghost, 58 gift of, 36, 787 spirit of, 185 Home schooling, 682, 686 Homosexual gay, 267, 268, 276, 278, 280, 520 lesbian, 263, 267, 268, 276, 278, 280, 282n13 Hopi, 755–757, 762, 763, 767 Humanitarian outreach, 350, 801 Human rights, 182, 183, 188, 191, 272, 362n67, 520, 665 Huntsman Chemical Corporation, 571 Huntsman, John Sr., 571 Husband, 15, 26n38, 63, 73, 177, 243, 244, 251, 252, 266, 267, 383, 387, 423, 519, 576, 609–612, 615, 619, 621, 628n28, 683, 684, 686, 687, 713, 722, 759, 761, 794 Hyde, Orson, 5, 560 I Idaho, 68, 71, 100, 101, 285n71, 692, 697, 753, 757, 759, 763 Identity, 15, 23, 24, 45, 49, 147, 152, 153, 155, 184, 189, 206, 207,

211–213, 215–217, 235, 236, 239, 241, 244, 253, 263–281, 295–297, 299, 308–310, 314, 315, 375–377, 416, 445, 456, 457, 460, 462, 464, 466, 467, 475, 479, 483–486, 489, 506, 510, 512–514, 519–521, 523, 533, 534, 536, 548, 549, 554, 568, 585–587, 596, 600, 609, 623–626, 648, 665, 669, 705–723, 734, 736, 740–742, 752, 761–763, 765, 768, 825, 827–831, 834, 837 Illegal immigration, 183 Imperialism, 586, 623 Improvement Era, 43 Independence, Missouri, 3, 4, 39, 358n18, 656, 657, 660, 661, 666, 668 Indian, 3, 4, 12, 171, 741, 754, 756, 757, 761, 763, 768 Indian Student Placement Program, 754, 762 Indigenous, 80, 751–753, 755, 758, 765, 767, 768 identity, 587–588, 625, 762 people, 9, 344, 352–354, 405, 586, 730, 741, 752–754, 758, 759, 763, 766, 768 Inequality, 243, 249, 255, 346–349, 544, 555, 617, 618, 818, 826, 827, 835 Internet, 47, 48, 96, 184, 185, 239, 243, 347, 359n32, 360n41, 391, 438, 440, 445 Intersectionality, 347 Interviews, 180, 185, 190, 249, 277, 296, 347, 383, 389, 412, 423, 464, 480, 485, 486, 518, 521, 574, 608, 613, 618, 622, 628n28, 629n35, 656, 662, 666 Investigator, 78, 185, 270, 381, 563, 565, 567, 569, 572, 574–576, 620, 741 Ireland, 6, 97, 214, 455, 475–490, 783, 822 Irish identity, 486, 489 independence, 479, 486, 487 Iron Curtain, 106, 188, 562, 564, 574 fall of, 562, 564, 574

 INDEX 

Islam, 189, 421, 476, 486, 508, 512, 562, 573, 821, 825 Isrealite lineage, 468 J Jackson County, Missouri, 39, 65, 145 Japan, 13, 16, 97, 103, 105, 150, 167, 170, 181, 335, 336, 425, 426, 635–649, 660, 661, 822, 823, 832 Jeffs, Rulon, 688 Jeffs, Warren, 688–690, 698n14, 699n29 Jehovah's Witnesses, 166, 174, 175, 178, 187, 189, 305, 331, 508, 510, 571, 573, 575, 592, 596, 639, 640, 656, 799, 833, 834 growth rates, 596 Jenkins, Phillip, 596 Jensen, Lamoine, 691, 700n31 Jensen, Marlin, 48, 554 Jessop, Joseph Lyman, 682, 690 Jessop, Merril, 688, 689 Jessops, Marvin, 691, 692, 700n31 Jessops, Morris, 691, 692, 700n31 Jesus, 3, 15, 19, 22, 24, 35–38, 42, 46, 57–82, 91–125, 143–145, 150, 151, 157, 163–165, 179, 182, 184, 189, 206, 211, 235, 243, 263, 284n58, 293, 296, 310, 315, 323, 328, 335, 338, 343–346, 350, 356, 357n1, 358n18, 362n68, 369–392, 397, 398, 402, 421–427, 431–449, 455, 466, 475–490, 504, 533, 534, 547, 555n2, 559, 560, 566, 577, 585, 586, 594, 607–626, 635, 643, 652n10, 656, 677, 685, 688, 689, 693, 694, 696, 697, 705, 710, 713, 715, 721, 724n1, 727, 745, 752, 783–801, 817, 819, 825 Johnson, Benjamin, 681 Johnson, LeRoy, 682, 687 Jordan, Dan, 695 Juarez Academy, 12, 16, 22, 388 K Kainai, 754, 763 Katchongva, Dan, 757 Kazakhstan, 335, 563, 569, 572, 575, 578

859

Kelsch, Louis, 680, 682, 687 Kimball, Spencer W., 20, 46, 51, 79, 103, 105, 164, 178, 266, 267, 269, 277, 280, 424, 587, 594, 686, 724n1, 741, 742, 747n39, 764, 797 King, Farina, 752 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 718 Kingdom of God, 10, 60, 61, 143, 149, 207, 209, 210, 213, 561, 681, 684, 686, 694, 732 Kingston, Charles, 692 Kingston Clan, 677, 693 Kingston, David, 693 Kingston, Elden, 692 Kingston, John Daniel, 693 Kingston, John Ortel, 692 Kingston, Paul, 692, 693 Kirtland, Ohio, 4, 37–39, 65–67, 655, 758 Kunz, Rhea Allred, 759 Kyrgystan, 571–573 L Lafferty, Dan, 697 Lafferty, Ron, 697 Lamanite, 3, 4, 15, 153, 377–380, 697, 730, 740–742, 746n11, 746n14, 747n33, 753, 755, 757–758, 761–765, 768 Law of Consecration, 684 Law of Placement, 688 Law of Satisfaction, 693 Lay priesthood, 59, 62, 103, 105, 169, 170, 237, 348, 422–424, 432, 435, 440, 443, 511, 519, 636, 666, 724n1, 794 LDS Church bureaucracy, 81, 179 ecclesiastical organization, 93, 295, 379, 384–386 Handbook, 390, 829, 830 leaders, 59, 68, 80–82, 179, 269, 273, 313, 376, 379, 383, 476, 478, 490, 520, 627n20, 628n27, 821, 822, 824 membership records, 86n71, 381 schools, 438

860 

INDEX

Leaders, 4, 38, 59, 60, 62, 63, 66, 68, 70–73, 80–82, 83n9, 84n15, 98, 143, 166, 206, 235, 237, 263, 264, 295, 344, 371, 405, 423, 434, 456, 476, 505, 534, 563, 592, 607, 658, 679, 711, 727, 756, 793, 818 Leadership roles, 7, 13, 20, 22, 105, 238, 244, 246, 249, 251, 252, 351, 628n27, 692, 735, 757, 796 Leavitt, Dudley, 761 Leavitt, Jeanette, 761 LeBaron, Brent, 695 LeBaron, Ervil, 691, 694, 695, 697 LeBaron, Joel, 694, 695 LeBaron, Verlan, 695 Lee, H. Rex, 763 Legacy Conference, 705–707, 716–723, 824 Leningrad, Russia, 563 Lesbian, 263, 267, 268, 270–273, 275–278, 280, 282n13, 818, 825, 830 LGBTQ, 49, 344, 349, 356, 520–521, 834, 838 exclusion, 179 Liberation theology, 95, 631n63, 718, 721 Lineham, Peter, 464 Llewellyn, John, 691 Lopez-Whiteskunk, Regina, 767 Lost years in Europe, 568 Luthern Church Missouri Synod, 791, 792 Lyman, Phil, 767 M Machismo, 383, 733 Manchester, England, 6, 102, 477 Mandela, Nelson, 616, 618 Manifesto, 42, 210, 264, 679, 680 Māori, 11, 14, 150–157, 159n17, 411, 455–465, 467, 468, 471n32, 822, 823 hongi, 461 tangihanga, 461, 463, 465, 822 Markow, Mischa, 561 Marriage, 11, 12, 58, 69, 74, 151, 154, 167, 170, 177, 180, 208, 217, 220, 244, 251, 263–266, 269–280,

281n3, 282n11, 282n12, 284n58, 285n69, 299, 300, 310, 313–315, 344–346, 356, 357, 364n99, 445, 459, 461, 466, 481, 486, 491n7, 512, 518–520, 549, 550, 609–613, 622, 627n20, 658, 677–682, 684, 686–694, 696–698, 699n19, 699n25, 708, 710, 712–714, 720, 754, 760, 761, 764, 768, 788, 795, 800, 818, 833 Martin, Judy C., 762 Martins, Helvécio, 423, 424 Martins, Rudá, 428n15 Marvel Comics Black Panther, 717 Maryboy, Mark, 767 Masculinity, 252, 383, 609–613, 626 Matrifocal network, 683 Mauss, Armand, 81, 166, 184, 525, 550, 836 Maybe, Rachel, 413 McGriggs, Mica, 237 McKay, David O., 16–19, 42–45, 51, 52, 83n9, 100–103, 150, 178, 190, 235, 380, 460, 511, 591 Medicine, 624, 755, 757 Melchizedek priesthood, 14, 38, 236, 567, 570, 652n8, 695, 696, 786 Member of record, 166, 170, 186, 381, 543 Membership records, 86n71, 270, 381, 390, 652n8, 653n13 Mensah, Raphael A, 593–595 Merrill, Leo, 569 Metcalf, R. Warren, 755, 764 Mexican converts, 381–383, 385, 734 Mexican Revolution, 373–378, 730 Mexico, 87n73, 753, 754 census, 381 Constitution, 14, 376, 387, 393n16 Cristero War, 14 law, 376, 377, 380, 387, 694 LDS membership, 117, 121 Mormon colonies, 12, 370, 372, 375–377, 388, 389, 680, 694 religious nationalism, 377 San Marcos, 375, 385 Mexico City, 101–103, 117, 120, 330, 369–373, 375–377, 385, 387, 388, 729 Middle East, 144, 335, 337–338, 560

 INDEX 

Millennials, 49, 50, 168, 237, 293–316, 355 The Millenial Star, 6, 11, 479 Millennium, 20, 145, 219, 458, 478, 697, 766 Ministering program, 184, 190 Missiological research, 573–577 Missionaries, 3, 35, 57–82, 91, 144, 164, 208, 249, 299, 323, 343, 370, 404, 423, 431, 456, 475, 504, 534, 559, 586, 616, 636, 657, 685, 707, 729, 784–785, 817 Brazil, 425–427 Missions age requirement, 74 baseball baptisms, 478 Brazil, 112, 114 closed, 7–9, 12 Eastern Europe, 560, 563, 565, 566, 568, 574 ethics, 81, 181–182, 190 female missionaries, 72–74, 78, 384, 576 Ghana, 594 itinerant missionaries, 176–177 local members, 171, 481 Mexico, 97, 108, 370–373, 376–379, 385, 389, 729, 730, 741 Missionary Handbook, 575 Missionary Training Center (MTC), 22, 71, 151, 389, 442, 784, 785, 798 mission president, 65, 70 native missionaries, 124, 169, 171, 173, 441, 568 Preach My Gospel, 72, 173, 185, 572 presidents, 9, 10, 13, 15, 45, 48, 72, 93, 100, 101, 103, 105, 108, 122, 154, 180, 182, 186, 191, 372, 373, 376–379, 384, 385, 393n2, 428n15, 434, 459–461, 468, 514, 519, 541, 542, 546, 554, 564, 566, 569, 572, 575, 577, 580n36, 599, 607, 741 release from calling, 177 self-isolation of missionaries, 785 techniques, 381 tracting, 66, 575 youth mini-missions, 568

861

Mohawk, 753, 758 Monogamy, 58, 265, 266, 548, 679, 837 Monroy, Raphael, 375, 385 Monson, Thomas S., 51, 74, 697 Moral authority, 49, 182–184, 187, 191, 561 Morales, Vicente, 375 Morgan, Lewis H., 757 Mormon Gender Issues Survey, 235, 238 Mormon History Association (MHA), 48 Mormon Tabernacle Choir, 6, 154, 345 Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, 679 Mother, 39, 153, 154, 247, 251, 252, 264, 272, 383, 385, 402, 482, 483, 551, 610, 612–614, 622, 624, 625, 627n17, 683, 691, 693, 697, 710, 713, 760, 761, 794 Mould, Rebecca, 595 Mountain Meadows, 758, 765 Murphy, Kerrie S., 760 Murphy, Thomas W, 753, 757 Muslim majority nations, 188 migrants in Britain, 485 Musser, Josepth, 680–682 Mutual improvement associations, 43, 65 N Native American, 9, 37, 143, 145, 241, 353, 432, 458, 741, 754, 759, 761, 764, 823 Nauvoo, Illinois, 5, 39, 43, 65–67, 145, 176, 208, 432, 536, 658, 665, 760, 821 Nelson, Russell M., 24, 50, 60, 84n15, 273–275, 398, 402, 403, 466, 468, 563, 573, 744, 786, 794 Nephi, 9, 684 Newcomb, Sarah, 763 Newell, Linda K., 237 New religious movement (NRM), 58, 335, 476, 486, 640 New Testament, 37, 63, 70, 145, 214, 435, 549, 652n10, 723, 819 Newton, Marjorie, 457, 465–468 New York, 3, 37–39, 62, 144, 294, 344, 586, 588, 678, 752 Nielsen-Naylor Group, 688

862 

INDEX

Nigeria civil war, 593 white people's church, 585 Nineteenth century, 6, 8, 12, 13, 15, 16, 22, 36, 40, 41, 58, 60–69, 73, 91, 95, 124, 146, 147, 157, 177, 211, 214, 343, 354, 357n1, 369, 393n3, 433, 456, 458, 459, 465, 477, 483, 504, 512, 533, 534, 537, 539, 543, 549, 555n2, 629n32, 646, 657–659, 681, 732, 759, 820, 821 Nominal members, 165, 167, 169, 170, 183, 186 Nones, 254, 294, 301, 308, 314 Northern Ireland, 476, 479, 487, 490n3, 490n4, 491n7, 491n18 Noyes, Gavin, 767 Nyhagen, Line, 483 O Oaks, Dallin, 59, 107, 151, 170, 180, 264, 273–275, 277, 622 Obama, Barack, 763, 767 Obinna, Anthony, 594, 595, 597 O'Dea, Thomas, 421 Old Testament, 206, 207, 724n11 Olsen, Margaret Hemming, 718 Oppression, 152, 252, 346, 458, 561, 608, 609, 613–621, 626 Oral history, 608, 612, 613, 615, 616, 618, 620, 622–624, 626, 627n7, 627n17, 629n35, 753 Ordain Women, 237, 348, 551 Ordinances, 37, 45, 147, 150, 237, 242, 248, 270, 276, 384, 386, 387, 398, 441, 445, 461, 462, 523, 594, 623, 624, 684, 699n20, 711, 761, 787, 788, 793, 795, 797, 799, 800, 805n43, 829 Osmond brothers, 478 P Pacific Islanders, 9, 10, 14, 23, 26n37, 143, 153, 432, 435, 436, 439–443, 447, 449, 462, 463 Pacific Islands, 9, 22, 432, 435, 437, 438, 440–449, 450n6, 455, 458

Pacific Ocean, 457 Packer, Boyd K., 266, 267, 754, 755 Paiute, 759, 761, 764, 765, 767 Palmer, Spencer J., 597, 822 Partridge, Edward, 37 Patriarch, 36, 38, 540, 691, 692, 695, 729, 737, 835 Patriarchal blessing, 713, 724n10 Patriarchy, 347, 612, 628n27, 733, 826, 835 Pawnee, 762 Paxman, William, 459 Peace, 5, 12, 144, 182, 306, 314, 393n12, 393n16, 489, 607–626, 655, 656, 722, 756 Peacemaker, 756 Pearl of Great Price, 213 Perpetual Education Fund, 22, 389, 392, 439 Perpetual Emigration Fund, 13 Peterson, Derek, 588 Peterson, Gerald, 696 Peterson, John, 765 Philippines, 20, 21, 97, 103, 107, 124, 170, 180, 181, 185, 191, 299, 335, 336, 338, 442, 655–669, 785, 789, 825 Pierce, Arwell, 379, 384, 385 Pikyavit, McKay, 765 The Pilgrim's Progress, 588, 594 Pinesdale, Montana, 686, 690, 691 Pioneer, 22, 45, 143, 156, 173, 206–208, 211, 212, 216, 226n114, 344, 404, 411, 413, 520, 553, 564, 597, 685, 696, 717, 739, 758, 763 Plan of Salvation, 263, 266, 273, 274 Plural marriage, 12, 39, 42, 53n17, 58, 69, 146, 147, 180, 208, 263–266, 279, 280, 282n11, 282n12, 344, 459, 466, 658, 677–682, 684, 688, 690, 691, 693, 694, 696–698, 760, 761 Policy, 8, 13, 17, 18, 35, 44, 45, 50–52, 74, 96, 102, 154, 169, 178–180, 182, 187, 191, 214, 238, 263, 269–273, 275, 277–281, 285n69, 295, 310, 325, 326, 334, 350, 351, 357, 377, 380, 390, 422, 424, 427, 460, 461, 463, 468, 472n50, 481,

 INDEX 

484, 515, 518, 520–522, 544, 550, 552, 554, 571–577, 589, 592–594, 609, 620–622, 668, 694, 710, 724n1, 732, 744, 756, 758, 763–765, 767, 768, 784, 789, 790, 792, 793, 795, 799, 809n93, 817, 822–828, 830, 831, 837, 838 Politics, 10, 67, 148, 149, 216, 294–296, 310, 314, 346, 355, 460, 463, 464, 475, 491n5, 506, 508, 517, 520, 524, 547, 551, 586, 729, 743, 755 Polygamy, 7, 8, 11, 42, 48, 60, 81, 117, 147, 148, 180, 181, 208–212, 263–265, 280, 358n14, 359–360n34, 466, 476, 483, 491n13, 515, 644, 658, 677–683, 685, 686, 689, 690, 697, 698, 699–700n29, 729, 821, 837 Polygamy manifesto, 210 Polygyny, 264, 281n5, 835 Polynesia, 9, 45, 336, 337, 432–437, 448, 455, 457, 460, 462, 658, 668 Pope Benedict XVI, 51 Pope Francis, 52, 791 Popocatépetl, 371 Pranskevičiūtė-Amoson, Rasa, 562 Pratt, Harold, 377, 378 Pratt, Orson, 264, 759 Pratt, Parley, 4 Prayer, 23, 37, 268, 273, 305, 306, 308, 371, 376, 378, 397, 398, 404, 484, 489, 523, 548, 615, 684, 727, 793, 837, 838 true order of, 684 Prejudice, 7–9, 13, 23, 81, 179, 586, 607, 617, 618, 719, 729, 733, 743, 760, 761, 824 Prendergast, James, 459 Priesthood ban, 8, 20, 113, 241, 423, 424, 620–622, 629n35, 709, 712–714, 717, 746n16 definition, 238, 254 40th anniversary of ban, 706, 717 holder, 105, 170, 236–238, 244, 264, 324, 350, 462, 567, 612, 683, 685, 708, 714, 717, 724n1, 786, 794

863

keys, 303, 680, 681, 696 1978 revelation, 49, 113, 422, 424, 587, 686 ordination of women, 50, 241, 248 responsibilities, 242, 243, 245 Primitive Church, 36 Prince, Gregory A., 178, 235, 364n98, 818, 819, 823, 835 Property, 13, 16, 67, 155, 216, 376, 387, 457, 535, 622, 637, 664, 679, 681, 694 Prophecy, 5, 11, 42, 97, 207, 464, 741, 753, 756, 757, 759, 763, 764, 838 Prophet, 4, 5, 19, 35, 36, 62, 65, 84n15, 101, 146, 153, 160n22, 163, 206, 246, 310, 315, 344, 402, 403, 412, 427, 432, 458, 464, 519, 561, 573, 620, 622, 623, 657, 680, 681, 683–688, 690, 693–697, 699n29, 724n1, 730, 751, 758–760, 764, 768, 825 Protestant, 5, 7, 8, 10, 13, 16, 38, 60, 61, 64, 66, 68, 70, 72, 146–148, 218, 265, 371, 466, 507–510, 517, 518, 523, 573, 590, 642, 643, 656, 658, 660, 663, 666, 694, 735, 790, 791 Protestant Christianity, 194n102, 476 Provo, Utah, 71, 151, 439, 442 Pueblo, 758, 766, 767 Q Quorum of the Anointed, 39 Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, 16, 42, 82, 179, 206, 217, 295, 421, 423, 424, 426, 427, 428n21, 784–787, 790, 819 R Race, 9, 15, 18, 48, 81, 105, 149, 236, 239, 241, 254, 255, 269, 299, 424, 468, 481, 586, 607, 608, 613–621, 626, 630n51, 699n17, 708–710, 712, 713, 717, 720, 724n1, 728, 731, 741, 743, 764, 766, 824

864 

INDEX

Racism, 49–50, 515, 615, 616, 621, 709, 711, 712, 714, 717, 722, 723, 729, 733, 743, 824 Rands, Tania, 564, 565, 569 Rapaport, Robert, 752 Rebranding, 35, 46, 657, 659–663 Reiss, Jana, 834 Relational cultural theory, 706–707 Relief Society, 11, 15, 18, 20, 40, 46, 48, 251, 595, 612, 616, 619, 624, 683, 715, 754, 789, 806n58 Religiosity, 163, 209, 213, 215–217, 219, 305, 382, 392, 481–483, 486, 506, 507, 548, 561, 562, 646, 647, 650, 799, 831, 833, 834 Religious freedom, 57, 95, 188, 271–276, 337, 371, 392, 513, 516, 517, 535, 536, 540, 561, 573, 578, 579, 822 Religious self-identification, 75, 297 Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS), 39, 357n1, 358n18, 466, 555n2, 655–669, 825 Repatriation, 751, 764, 766–768 Reporters Without Borders, 188 Republican Party, 679 Republic of Ireland, 479, 480, 487, 490n4, 822 Revelation, 4, 19, 20, 25n5, 37, 38, 49, 58, 62, 65, 83n12, 113, 145, 175, 179, 181, 242, 244, 247, 273, 274, 301, 303, 424, 432, 519, 587, 594, 621, 652n10, 678, 680, 683–686, 697, 715, 732, 743 Richards, Arthur, 761 Richards, LeGrand, 594 Richards, Stephen, 686 Rigdon, Sidney, 5 Righteous Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 696 Ritual, 17, 154, 211, 212, 236, 237, 248, 281n5, 356, 413, 548, 615, 628n28, 686, 707 Roberts, Brigham H., 11, 237 Rogers, Thomas, 564–566, 574, 575, 580n35, 580n36

Russia, 79, 177, 188, 325, 331, 332, 425, 539, 559–579, 796, 821, 832 Russian Orthodox Church, 537 S Sacrament, 14, 23, 37, 39, 46, 144, 152, 242, 248, 276, 346, 464, 481, 489, 523, 565, 572, 652n8, 667, 740, 742, 786, 787, 793, 794, 806n58, 829, 837 Sacrifice, 17, 22, 63, 276, 410–416, 440, 577, 732 St. George, Utah, 100, 688, 761 Saint Patrick's Day, 489 St. Petersburg, Russia, 559, 563–565, 569, 570, 577 Salleh, Fatimah, 718 Salt Lake City, Utah, 5, 39, 70, 95, 143, 180, 207, 293, 348, 370, 423, 478, 554, 587, 607, 658, 680, 717, 728, 756, 785, 821 Same-sex marriage (SSM), 263, 264, 269, 271–273, 275, 279, 280, 284n58, 310, 313–315, 356, 357, 364n99, 486, 491n7, 512, 520, 521, 818 Samoa, 16, 17, 102, 124, 336, 337, 433, 434, 438–445, 462, 467 Scandinavia, 5, 13, 43, 61, 144, 533–536, 538, 541, 548–550, 554, 555n1, 555n2, 561, 599, 652n8, 822, 832 Schwimmer, Eric, 461–465 Science, 51, 235, 239, 240, 505, 518, 646, 731, 818 Scripture, 25n5, 26n37, 37, 58, 60, 65, 72, 145, 147, 164, 179, 183, 185, 186, 254, 268, 278, 295, 300, 301, 304–306, 308, 313, 318n30, 369, 382, 388, 432, 437, 440, 443, 458, 510, 567, 574, 576, 577, 616, 621, 658, 661, 679, 685, 713, 717, 721, 727, 729, 730, 746n14, 753, 763, 766 Second Great Awakening, 36 Secularization, 314, 331, 334, 338, 449, 476, 480, 485, 491n7, 505–508, 510–512, 524, 525,

 INDEX 

568, 644–647, 649, 818, 819, 831–838 Secular values, 482 Seer, 751, 756 Seminary, 21, 41, 93, 216, 352, 388, 414, 438, 439, 447, 552, 567, 577, 636, 666, 737, 754, 804n32 Seneca, 751–753 Seventh Day Adventists, 95, 167, 174 Seventies, quorum of, 65, 104 Sex, 20, 212, 220, 253, 263, 268, 270, 271, 273–276, 278–281, 285n69, 307, 313, 364n99, 370, 445, 476, 481, 486, 520, 521, 681, 685, 687, 689, 690, 825–831, 833, 838 Sex education, 482, 518, 520 Sexism, 250–252 Sexual abuse, 50–51, 512, 697, 698 Sexual identity, 263–281, 521, 827, 828, 831 Short Creek, 680–682, 687, 690, 696 raid, 687 Shoshone, 759, 762 Sidney Rigdon, 37–38 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 758 Simpson, Audra, 758 Sin, 209, 242, 243, 248, 249, 253, 266, 268–272, 276, 278, 353, 641, 694, 831 Singer, John, 697 Sister Wives, 689 TCL series, 689 Slavery, 760, 762, 764, 765 Smith, Emma, 237, 264 Smith, George Wooley, 696 Smith, Heber, 696 Smith, Joseph, 4, 5, 10, 11, 25n5, 35–40, 49, 50, 95, 97, 144–146, 158n4, 163, 164, 178, 181, 206, 208, 211, 263, 264, 272, 281n5, 310, 315, 344, 412, 428n21, 432, 466, 548, 560, 561, 613, 657, 658, 661, 677, 678, 680, 681, 684, 686, 694, 696, 697, 699n20, 732, 736, 746n21, 751, 752, 766, 786, 799, 823, 835 first vision of, 315, 786 Smith, Joseph F., 13, 42, 43, 53n19

865

Smoot, Reed, 42, 44, 53n15 Hearings, 35 Soares, Ulisses, 398, 403, 404, 409, 427, 819 South Africa, 6, 16, 18, 23, 45, 105, 169, 333, 334, 607–611, 613, 615, 618, 620, 621, 623, 628n22, 629n35, 821, 824 South America, 754 Southern Baptist Convention, 790, 791, 806n53 Soviet Union, 492n27, 560 Spanish, 21, 101, 146, 183, 369, 372, 383, 391, 398, 409, 467, 523, 525, 599, 600, 727–745 Spiritual blessings, 243 Spiritual marriage, 689 Stack, Peggy Fletcher, 169 Stake, 17, 38, 61, 77, 78, 81, 84n17, 86n72, 99, 147, 183, 208, 243, 270, 323, 347, 434, 504, 542, 637, 822 Stark, Rodney, 66, 85n45, 165, 205, 421, 640, 644 State of Deseret, 39, 143, 146 Stereotypes, 81 negative, 586 Stewart, John J., 591 Stratford, Travis, 47, 48 Suffering, 511, 561, 615, 682, 756 Supreme Court, 216, 219, 271, 313, 679 Surveyor, Eunice Tillahash, 765 Syncretism, 414, 418n35, 823 T Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square, 787 Tatum, Beverly, 709 Taylor, John, 5, 6, 11, 12, 137n50, 210, 280, 344, 371, 680 Taylor, Lori, 756 Teacher, 36–41, 43, 216, 388, 438, 482, 523, 564, 577, 616, 620, 666, 711, 712, 715, 728, 733, 737, 738, 784, 794 priesthood office, 36, 37 Tecalco, Mexico, 372, 376, 378–380, 393n7

866 

INDEX

Teenager, 624, 665, 707, 799 Temple, 75, 79 Aba, Nigeria, 107, 334, 596–598 Accra, Ghana, 334, 596, 597 covenants, 441 garments, 214, 216, 220, 684 Hamilton, New Zealand, 153, 337, 411, 461 Helsinki, Finland, 546, 567 Kyiv, Ukraine, 567 London, England, 332, 477 marriage, 264, 265, 279, 282n12, 788, 795, 800 ordinances, 45, 150, 237, 276, 386, 387, 462, 787, 788, 793, 795, 799, 800, 829 Preston, England, 332, 477 recommend, 183, 190, 258n32, 270, 307, 327, 351, 360n43, 401, 402, 441, 446 Sao Paulo, Brazil, 113, 330, 423, 424, 427n7 sealings, 346, 685, 714, 788, 795, 800 Washington, D.C., 705 Tewawina, Pershlie, 762 Theology, 14, 18, 19, 57–62, 65, 144, 153, 163, 209, 211, 236, 237, 244, 263, 265, 300, 352, 359n34, 416n4, 418n26, 463, 547, 549, 629n31, 631n63, 657, 658, 660, 661, 664, 678, 718, 721, 730, 731, 737, 738, 742, 743, 768, 825 Third Convention, 14, 15, 101, 375–380, 516, 730, 746n12, 822 Thirteen Articles of Faith, 36 Thompson, Joseph, 682, 690 Thompson, Lynn, 692 Tillahash, Tony, 765 Timbimboo, Beeshup, 762 Timpson, Alma, 688 Timpson, John, 688 Tithing, 19, 23, 41, 42, 102, 148, 160n22, 268, 349–351, 362n64, 362n66, 382, 515, 541, 550, 800 Tonga, 16, 17, 124, 174, 336, 337, 433–435, 437–444, 447, 462, 467, 806n55 Topper, Martin, 755

Tradition, 35, 38, 49–52, 70, 93, 144, 151, 152, 156, 168, 176, 179, 189, 218, 273, 294, 296, 297, 301, 304, 343, 348–350, 352, 354, 355, 360n40, 370, 405, 425, 444, 455, 458, 462, 464, 476, 483, 489, 519, 548–550, 553, 562, 569, 586, 587, 590, 608, 611, 618, 622–626, 631n63, 658, 696, 731, 733, 751, 752, 757, 759, 768, 822, 834 Training videos, 390 Transgender, 239, 240, 246–247, 250, 253–255, 257n27, 258–259n44, 267, 270, 273, 275, 445, 818, 825, 828–831, 837 Traveling high council, 38, 40 Treaty of Waitangi, 152, 456, 457, 459 Tribe, 3, 4, 152, 370, 760, 763, 764, 767, 768 True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days (TLC), 689, 696 Trump, Donald, 294, 514, 768, 783 Tsimshian, 763 Turtle Island, 353, 355, 363n87, 751–768 Tuscarora, 753, 756 U Underage marriage, 687, 688, 692, 699n25 United Effort Plan (UEP), 680, 687, 690 United Kingdom (UK), 13, 17, 24, 102, 181, 241, 244, 247, 250, 253, 331, 332, 455, 475–490, 490n4, 492n21, 492n24, 492n27, 493n35, 534, 593, 600, 658, 664 United Latter-day Church of Jesus Christ, 696 United Methodist Church, 656, 790, 791, 806n53 United Order, 680, 684, 685, 692, 694 United States Supreme Court, 272, 356, 521 Utah, 60, 67, 71, 80 Attorney General, 687, 689, 691 legislature, 219, 681 Mormon culture, 163, 176, 212

 INDEX 

territory, 8, 63, 92, 117, 176, 180, 264, 344, 477, 533, 537, 538, 561, 679 Utah Diné Bikéyah, 767 Ute, 763, 764, 766, 767 V Van Beek, Walter, 171, 172, 181, 182, 188, 548, 552, 564, 567, 569, 575, 817, 822, 824, 832, 834 Vargas, Getúlio, 423 Villa, Fernano (Pancho), 373 Violence, 145, 183, 189, 353, 354, 536, 593, 595, 598, 611, 613, 616, 628n22, 657, 663, 729, 732, 734, 744 Virgin Mary, 383 Virtues, 163, 278, 464, 522, 623, 660 Volcanoes Region of Mexico, 371–374 W Walls, Andrew, 586 Walls, Elissa, 690 War, 5, 15, 16, 47, 60, 73, 79, 96, 101, 150, 152, 182, 183, 209, 242, 251, 348, 373, 434, 443, 487, 503, 507, 508, 540–542, 561, 565, 590–595, 602n22, 636, 692, 706, 733, 766, 796, 808–809n88 Ward/wards, 17, 18, 22, 23, 40, 46, 80, 81, 86n72, 99–101, 104–107, 185, 208, 209, 212, 213, 216–219, 275, 279, 323, 324, 326, 329, 330, 334, 338, 346, 347, 351, 359n32, 384–386, 388, 390, 392, 427n6, 434, 438, 463, 467, 468, 478, 480, 505, 513, 519, 521–526, 527n4, 542, 544, 547, 566, 567, 570, 576, 611, 621, 624, 627n17, 637, 641, 656, 707, 708, 710, 714, 715, 717–722, 727–729, 733–740, 742, 745n1, 746n19, 755, 786, 788, 793, 794, 822, 824, 827, 833, 835 Watkins, Arthur, 763–765 Welfare, 16, 150, 353, 362n66, 443, 490, 549, 690, 691, 693, 784, 788–789 fraud, 686, 687, 691, 693

867

White, Daryl, 237 White, Kendall, 237 White supremacy, 608 Whitmer, David, 37 Whitmer, John, 36 Wife, 11, 18, 38, 39, 63, 68, 110, 208, 252, 264, 266, 276, 383, 387, 542, 553, 566, 622, 682, 683, 688, 693, 696, 699n17, 760, 761, 830 Wilkins, Charles, 680 Wilkinson, Ernest L., 763–765 Williams, LaMar, 591, 592 Wilson, Edmund, 756 Women, 5, 36, 50, 73, 74, 214, 237, 244–246, 264, 299, 338, 343, 346–349, 370, 403, 468, 476, 505, 547, 595, 608, 613–621, 638, 664, 708, 732, 784 Wood, Daniel, 760 Wood, Peninah, 760 Wood, Wilford, 760 Woodruff, Wilford, 5, 146, 147, 210, 264, 280, 398, 400, 679, 680 Woolley, John, 680, 696 Woolley, LeGrand, 680 Woolley, Lorin, 680, 681 Word of Wisdom, 185, 268, 310, 318n39, 444, 446, 524, 548, 565, 685 The Work, 688 World Health Organization (WHO), 82, 783, 793 Worldview, 60, 211, 235, 236, 239, 442, 443, 460, 461, 465, 609, 624, 625, 640, 641 World War II, 15, 47, 58, 75–79, 91–125, 150, 152, 157, 186, 187, 295, 379, 380, 423, 434, 435, 441, 460, 464, 510, 514, 537, 539, 540, 543, 547, 559, 561, 562, 580n35, 636, 637, 754, 798, 809n88, 817 Wovoka, 758, 759, 764 Wuhan, China, 783 Y Yearning for Zion Ranch, 689 Yellowman, Jonah, 766

868 

INDEX

Young adults, 59, 74, 79, 82, 272, 298, 313, 438, 440, 512, 550, 710, 712, 833 Young, Brigham, 5, 6, 8–10, 12, 27n50, 39–41, 68, 146, 180, 206–210, 344, 357n1, 370, 371, 428n21, 561, 594, 613, 629n32, 679, 681, 729, 760 Young, Gordon C., 154, 165, 460 Young, Margaret, 713 Youth retention, 168, 173

Z Zion, 4–7, 12, 16, 19, 24, 35, 43, 44, 58, 60, 83n12, 100, 101, 103, 143–157, 175, 177, 205–220, 248, 459, 465, 477, 504, 538, 561, 621, 661, 695, 724n11, 728, 736, 764 Zion National Park, 681 Zitting, Charles, 680, 682, 687 Zuni, 767