2024 Spring LDS General Conf. Section

194TH ANNUAL GENERAL CONFERENCE

194TH ANNUAL GENERAL CONFERENCE

Past Purchase

Past Purchase

A deeper look at the Kirtland Temple’s past, present and future after landmark sale. › Pages 2-11

A deeper look at the Kirtland Temple’s past, present and future after landmark sale. › Pages 2-11

PHOTOS

KIRTLAND TEMPLE SALE • COMMUNITY OF CHRIST PERSPECTIVE

The Utahbased Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recently purchased the faith’s first temple in Kirtland, Ohio, from the Community of Christ, which also traces its beginnings to Joseph Smith.

‘There’s a lot of sadness’

Church historian says members feel a “profound loss” after caring for this historic building for generations.

By DAVID NOYCE and PEGGY FLETCHER STACK The Salt Lake Tribune

While Brigham Young and his band of pioneers in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints trekked across the country to a new home in Utah, a smaller group remained in the Midwest and lovingly cared for the sacred spaces left behind — including the faith’s first temple, in Kirtland, Ohio. The latter believers, led by founder Joseph Smith’s eldest surviving son, eventually formed the Reorganized Church of Jesus

Christ of Latter Day Saints and became devoted custodians of some of Mormonism’s earliest sites in Ohio and Illinois.

This month, the much larger Utah-based faith bought many of those sites, including the Kirtland Temple, along with other historical artifacts for $192 million.

Though members of the Community of Christ — the new name for the RLDS — understand that this money will help their ability to continue their global mission into the future, many have expressed sadness, heartache and tears at the sale. They lament losing ownership of these cherished pieces of

the past.

It was “a profound loss,” says David Howlett, a Community of Christ historian, visiting religion professor at Smith College in Massachusetts and author of “Kirtland Temple: The Biography of a Shared Mormon Sacred Space.”

He worries that the two churches — which at times were bitter enemies but have enjoyed warmer ties in recent years — may have fewer interactions as a result of the property transfer.

Here are excerpts from Howlett’s recent

Courtesy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

David Howlett • Community of Christ historian

interview on The Salt Lake Tribune’s “Mormon Land” podcast:

How did the news of the sale hit you personally and professionally?

I spent 12 summers of my life living in Kirtland, giving tours of the temple, studying the temple, interviewing people, thinking about it, writing a dissertation, and later a book about it. I had invested a lot of my professional life, thinking about it through these different academic terms, but also my personal life. So there’s a lot of sadness that went along with hearing about [the sale]. I went to a very personal place. I went back to Facebook, and I looked at a picture of my dad and me, when I gave him a tour in 2019 of the temple. As an academic, I know that things aren’t just things — things stand on a continuum between thing and person. If I were just to sell my grandparents’ wedding ring, I’d still feel some regret over it because it’s not just a thing. … People sometimes drift

apart, fathers and sons, and families. But sometimes things bring people back together. I thought about that day with my dad and how that thing, the Kirtland Temple, brought us back together. It was the first time he had seen it in his life. He told me about it as a kid. I had known about it from his stories, and then to be able to come together as a family in a relationship as adults now, I thought about what that meant to me and my father, too.

Do you think the sale of the temple, the other buildings and artifacts was a good thing?

It’s a profoundly complicated question. In terms of immediate funding for the [Community of Christ] church for its future, it gave the church some capital that it can invest to ensure a certain kind of endowment income for the future. That’s good in that sort of business sense. But it is harder to tell the church’s story about its 19th-century past and connect with it without those places. It’s not just paper and places that are detached from it; people

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How did the Community of Christ approach temple tours?

have literally cared for these places for generations. And it’s not just ownership, but care is another way of having a relationship to something. When you lose that relationship with care, that’s also a profound loss. It’s a profound loss, I think, overall.

In the past, the two churches shared quite a bit of animosity — at times even being outright enemies. What is the current relationship between them?

One of the best relationships between the two churches had been through historic sites because you had professionals invested in a common history, and also invested in common methods like historical preservation, historical stories, but also knowing that they had to tell these stories to faith communities. Probably in the future, there’ll be fewer opportunities for these two churches to have places for interaction with each other. I don’t see that as necessarily a good thing either. So that’s a loss as well.

There was an evolution in terms of the temple tours. The earliest tours that I can find were from the 1950s, and it’s clear from those tour scripts that [the temple] is being used as a prop for talking about the “one true church” and about the restored gospel, and the order of the church offices of this “true priesthood.” By the time we get to the ’60s and ’70s, there’s a growing professionalization of historic sites that begins with the people involved. Professional historians are now part of it, rather than folks who are Seventies (kind of missionaries in the former RLDS faith). That changes the temple tours, and it changes how things are shared. Professionalization continues throughout the ‘80s, ‘90s into the 2000s. The staff working on the sites have museum studies degrees or history degrees or religious studies degrees. And the tours reflect that.

What did Community of Christ guides tell guests about Christ’s reported appearance in the temple?

Earlier RLDS official church histories talked about it. However, today there is an assumed commonsense notion of what that means for LDS folks, which I don’t think would have been clear for 1830s folks at all, and certainly was not clear for RLDS folks because they were from different traditions. There’s a tradition the LDS Church built around that vision, which RLDS did not share because they didn’t have the same tradition. For LDS, it legitimizes temples today, and the ordinances and the power to do them today. RLDS read it as an appearance of Christ to accept the temple and didn’t have a theology of keys to accompany it. That theology of keys in the LDS Church is not at all clear in the 1830s, but what it means develops over time in Nauvoo and evolves even further in the Salt Lake Valley.

Please see TEMPLE, S6

Photos courtesy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The interior of the Kirtland Temple in Kirtland, Ohio.

Members of the now-named Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square visit the Kirtland Temple in 1911.

A new era in LDS preservation of temples is underway

Historians discuss the faith’s commitment to caring for the Kirtland and Manti temples.

By PEGGY FLETCHER STACK and DAVID NOYCE The Salt Lake Tribune

In the past, historians and preservationists were not always pleased with how The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints treated its treasured buildings. Bulldozing Utah’s Coalville Tabernacle and gutting the Logan Temple led to cries of anguish from insiders and outsiders alike.

These days, though, the same groups are lauding the

Temple

≥ Continued from S4

Are you concerned that Latter-day Saint missionaries — under the guidance of professional historians — will now be the tour guides?

painstaking and resplendent renovation of the faith’s pioneer-era Manti Temple, which is now open to public tours. And they are reassured by the Salt Lake Citybased church’s plans for its recent purchase of Mormonism’s first temple, in Kirtland, Ohio.

I can’t dictate to the LDS Church [leaders] about their training program. I could suggest that [they do] something like what the Community of Christ did. We would use college-age interns, (not that much different than [young LDS] missionaries really, they’re the same age) and do a class at night with them. It was a three-hour college credit course. It was a real college credit course where they had to read stuff and do papers. It made them into better guides. A real academic course could be really helpful for missionaries. But maybe that’s not what they thought when they were originally called on the mission.

“We can look back, and we’d want to redo some decisions here and there,” Matthew Grow, managing director of the church’s History Department, said on a recent Salt Lake Tribune “Mormon Land” podcast. “And, of course,

What is the function of the Community of Christ’s temple in Independence, Mo.?

The template for the Independence Temple is the Kirtland Temple, in which you have church headquarters, you have a place for public worship and conferences. Then you also have the church’s graduate seminary, which is like what happens in the school of the apostles or other iterations of priesthood training in the Kirtland Temple. It does show the kind of continued legacy of Kirtland in the present day life of the Community of Christ.

What are your hopes for Kirtland for the future?

I do hope it still will be a place where multiple traditions can

value it and that the sale of sites won’t mean the Community of Christ will value its 19thcentury history less. I hope that it continues its promise of being a version of progressive Christianity with a restoration heritage, that can put those two together in a way that is kind of unique among the Mormon family of churches. I think that needs to happen in this world just for the ecological diversity of the restoration tradition. That’s a valuable thing. I hope, too, that folks who found Kirtland in the past as a safe place — I think of LGBTQ Mormons and Mormon feminists and others — to reconnect with the past and an institution that sometimes they feel very alienated from (the institution they were born into). ...That’s really complicated. And I feel sadness, too, wondering how that will play out.

Courtesy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

A view in 2023 of the Kirtland Temple and historic cemetery from inside the newly restored home of church founder Joseph Smith and wife Emma Smith.

Courtesy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The Kirtland Temple, left, and the Manti Temple.

Please see KIRTLAND, S8

A staircase in the Manti Temple. The Salt Lake City-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recently went through painstaking efforts to renovate the pioneer-era structure. The temple now is open for public tours

Kirtland

≥ Continued from S6

one big change has been, over the last 50 years, there’s been a much more professional approach taken as people like [historic-sites curator] Emily [Utt] and others have become experts in how to do historic preservation with the latest technology.”

Grow added that another change has been “the willingness of the church to spend significant resources in preserving some of the real gems of our pioneer heritage.”

Here are excerpts from the podcast interview with Grow and Utt.

When did negotiations with the Community of Christ, formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, begin for the purchase of the Kirtland Temple and historic properties in Nauvoo? And what was your role in them?

Grow • The two churches very much wanted this to be

seen as a joint effort. [The joint statement] says that the negotiations that led to the transaction began in June 2021. Over the past months, I helped guide the historical discussions about the buildings and the artifacts and things like that. … We’re really excited in the church’s History Department about the opportunity to interpret these buildings, as well as to assume the sacred stewardship of them. That’s the terminology that was used in that joint statement that we’re assuming a “stewardship.”

Do you have any personal connection to Kirtland?

Utt • I have a family relationship with the Kirtland Temple. My ancestors joined the church in the Kirtland era, helped build the building, worshipped in it and attended the school of the elders. One of my ancestors took Hebrew lessons inside the Kirtland Temple. I went to school in Cleveland so I was a member of the Kirtland Stake [a cluster of congregations] and attended meetings in that building. I’ve played “The Spirit of God” on the piano in that building. So when I go there, it’s that kind of personal testimony place for me, but also a realization of my ancestors’ connection

and my desire to do right by them. Every time I’ve gone to

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Kirtland for preservation of other structures in the city for the last 15 years, I stopped by the temple. … But my relationship really has been as a professional.

Has the Kirtland Temple been altered in the past century?

Grow • One of the amazing things about the Kirtland Temple is that it appears much as it did in 1836. There’s never been extensive renovations to the temple. There was never an elevator [added] or another wing put on the temple, which would be very common in the building of

Please see NEXT PAGE

Courtesy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

this age. … Our intent will be to continue to allow it to appear that way, in a stable structure moving forward.

What will Latter-day Saint guides in Kirtland tell visitors about the Community of Christ caretaking on the temple?

Grow • They will tell visitors that the Community of Christ did a marvelous job for well over a century in taking care of it, in preserving and making it accessible. So the tour itself in Kirtland will focus on the 1830s on the building of the temple, and particularly on what Latter-day Saints view as the marvelous spiritual manifestations that accompanied the temple’s dedication, and then the week thereafter, when Latter-day Saints believe that Jesus Christ and ancient prophets appeared to [church founder] Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery. The tour will focus on those events, but not to the exclusion of everything else. They will certainly acknowledge and celebrate what the Community of Christ has done over time and also note a little bit of the history after 1836, because every building has a life of its own.

Will guides tell visitors about the Community of Christ’s theology of the reported visitations of Jesus and biblical prophets versus the Latter-day Saint theology?

Grow • The intent will be to share those spiritual manifestations from the perspective of the individuals who experienced them. So [Latter-day Saint] missionaries will be looking at the primary sources that Joseph Smith and others created at the time or shortly thereafter. And talking about those events, primarily from that perspective.

What do you say to Community of Christ members and historians who are heartbroken by the sale of the temple and these Nauvoo properties in Illinois?

Grow • We know these Community of Christ historians and archivists, so as we’ve assumed stewardship of the buildings, for me, there have been three primary emotions. First, excitement to take stewardship. The second has been a deep sense of responsibility, a deep sense of a sacred trust that’s been passed to us. And the

TRENT NELSON | The Salt Lake Tribune

Matthew J. Grow, managing director of the church’s History Department, speaks at a news conference in 2018. Grow has played a key role in the Utah-based faith’s acquisition of the Kirtland Temple.

third emotion has been the real sense that as Latter-day Saints — from a scripture that we share — is that we’re called “to mourn with those who mourn.” ... We understand this as a hard time [for them], and we’ll do everything we can to help it not be quite as hard, although mourning is always a process. We hope to walk with them a bit in that process.

Utt • We want to be good neighbors at all of the historic sites we own around the country and around the world. Being a good neighbor means that you welcome your community partners in and you make sure that the building is used and open and available, and we want to take good care of it. And I take that responsibility very seriously.

The contract, according to the joint statement, calls for the Kirtland Temple and the Nauvoo properties to remain open to the public for 15 years. The Community of Christ says after that, the Utahbased church has agreed that it “intends” to keep it open. That seemed to be language that could lead to the Kirtland Temple being closed, maybe turned into a fully functioning temple. What is the Utah-based church’s intent on that?

Grow • The church’s intent is that it remains a historic building … accessible to the public. … That is very much the intent of everyone I’ve talked to at the church and everyone who was involved in the transaction. … So, for me, I have no concerns that the church would turn it into a functioning temple that would be only accessible to members of the church.

What did you think when it was initially announced that the Manti Temple was slated for gutting?

Grow • We understand that there are lots of complicated issues at play in these questions of historic preservation. Historic preservation is really, really expensive. And we understand that temples have a living purpose, and that sometimes those living purposes take precedence over historic preservation. But, of course, we wanted to be a voice for historic preservation, always understanding those complicated dynamics.

How do you restore murals like those by artist Minerva Teichert?

Utt • You hire people that are very

skilled, that have decades of experience, and then give them the resources they need to do it. In the case of the Manti Temple murals, we found a firm out of Chicago that had been doing this for 25 years. They came out and spent weeks with us in the temple, studying the murals, analyzing the challenges we had with them, and trying different compounds to get the varnish off. They spent 10 months in the building, removing varnish, cleaning, making repairs, in some cases, inch by inch through the building. It is a very detailed and very slow and a very arduous process. If you are not patient, you should

then wax resin, and then spray paint and just gunk. So the job really was removing all of that and revealing C.C.A. Christensen’s original magnificent work, and then doing the repairs that we needed to do without touching that mural. The painting that you do is with a very specialized kind of paint, and it’s almost a pin-drop-size paintbrush. Nothing touches the original. There have been some objections to Minerva Teichert’s interpretation of human history, even claiming that it celebrated European colonizers. What do you say to that?

Grow • Every artist exists within a context. And Minerva is painting in the 1940s with certain ideas about the progress of civilization. And, of course, you could find similar ideas at art galleries across the country and across the world. And what Minerva is trying to do with that room is to tell the story of the gathering of Israel. So on the back wall you have the Tower of Babel, the scattering of God’s people. Then along one wall, you have scenes from the Old Testament, Moses and Abraham. And then on the other wall, you have what Minerva would have said is the gathering of the Gentiles or the gathering of people who are not Israel. And along that wall you do have the sense of a progress of civilization in a way that would make us uncomfortable today, seeming to be progressing from Eastern civilizations to Western civilizations. And so when we’re looking at art, of course, as we walk through it, there’d be things there that we would do differently or think about differently today, whether it’s race or gender or ethnicity. But at the same time, I think if we can step back and say, “OK, well, what was Minerva’s vision? What is the grand story that she was trying to tell then?” Would we change details?

Sure. But this grand story about God’s gathering of his people from the scriptures, that’s really Minerva’s textbook.

not become an art conservator.

Do you paint over the murals or try to match the colors?

Utt • Conservation (and preservation in general) is about making visible the original work. So on the [exterior] stone, you want it to look and act like it did when it was installed in 1888. Really, it’s about reversing previous changes, especially in the creation room in Manti. Over the last 130 years, lots of people have tried to help. A little crack would form, and they would fill it in with spackle and plaster mud, and

Utt • It’s a part of a bigger conversation happening in professional history in the United States in general. Every generation is going to interpret it differently. And the entire preservation community and in the entire historical community in the United States is really wrestling with these issues. What do you do with statues that are maybe interpreted differently today? What do we do with buildings themselves that were built to convey certain messages about society that we don’t agree with today? And there’s not a good answer. I think the beautiful opportunity is the debate, the discussion. And, as historians, and as people in

Photos courtesy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Above • Ordinance room in the renovated Manti Temple displays the restored and brightened Minerva Teichert murals. Below • An ordinance room in the Manti Temple.

general, the more we can talk about it, the more we can wrestle with the problems, we’ll find, I think, not only clearer understanding and appreciation for the way that people lived in the past, but lessons about how we maybe don’t want to repeat some of those lessons moving forward.

What other kinds of restorations did you have to do?

Utt • The project was actually really limited to behind-the-scenes — walls and a new mechanical system in parts of the building that really desperately needed it. … The big other part of the preservation was the east wall. Over the last 100 years, we’ve been watering that wall, that side of the building. All of that water has found its way through the stone [and] into the interior spaces, some of the “sealing” rooms especially. So we dug a 40- foot-deep hole to the bottom of the footings on that side of the building and waterproofed it. Now that building is dry. That’s a huge preservation thing — keeping water out of a building means it can be open for 50 years.

What’s your favorite part of the Manti Temple?

Utt • There are billions of things I love about that building. I love the sight of that temple, the way that it kind of sits in that valley, and is just this light on this hill, this grand building in the middle of nowhere that’s graceful and solid and sacred. I love the sight of it. I also love the floor plan of that building. The way that the rooms progress [upward] for me creates a really powerful physical reminder of some of the messages and the stories that we learn when we’re in temples.

Grow • I love the murals — the jewel of the temple. In the first room — in what we would call “the Creation Room” — the mural is by a 19th-century Latter-day Saint artist named C.C.A. Christensen. It’s just this beautiful room. He’s using textbooks of his own time to think about how dinosaurs fit into the creation. He depicts the different periods of creation. Of course, Minerva Teichert’s World Room is just amazing. If you’ve seen pictures of it, you don’t understand the scale. The walls are so tall, the space that she’s working with is so big, and what she’s able to do with that space — it’s really a remarkable story.

Courtesy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Emily Utt, curator of church historic sites, speaks at the rededication ceremony for the Brigham Young Family Cemetery in Salt Lake City in 2022. Utt has been key in the church’s work at the Kirtland and Manti temples.

America learns about parents sending their kids on Latter-day Saint missions — from a Real Housewife

Bravo reality show offers a glimpse at how tough it can be on moms and dads.

By SCOTT D. PIERCE The Salt Lake Tribune

Since the first Latter-day Saint missionary was sent out to proselytize in 1830, more than a million have been called. And hundreds of thousands of parents have known the pain of being separated from their sons and daughters for 18 months or two years.

It’s not something members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints talk about a lot. And it’s not something that has been shared with a lot with nonmembers — until, that is, the fourth season of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” when the son of one of the Housewives announced his decision to go on a full-time mission.

That shocked his mother, Lisa Barlow, because 18-yearold Jack Barlow kept her in the dark about his mission plans for about a year.

Weirdly enough, the Bravo reality show about women who spend a lot of time fighting with one another offered arguably the best glimpse for non-Latter-day Saint viewers of the workings inside a Latter-day Saint family. In the first episode of Season Four, Lisa got teary when she said, “I’m not going to see him for two years.”

And that’s a continuing theme. In a later episode, Lisa told Jack it’s going to be hard “not having you here for Christmas. Not having you here for

Thanksgiving.” Lisa’s husband and Jack’s father, John, predicted that Lisa would cry for a week when Jack left. Jack said his mom would cry “up until I come home, pretty much.”

Lisa agreed. She continually expressed the emotions a lot of parents feel when their sons and daughters commit to a mission. Weeks before Jack was scheduled to leave for the Missionary Training Center, Lisa was fighting back tears. “It’s just ... I know he’s never really coming home again.”

(Meaning he’ll be an adult when he gets back.)

A Utah tradition?

Lisa threw a party for Jack’s mission reveal — when he learned where he was going for his two-year volunteering stint, and shared the news with friends and family. Lisa served an elaborate menu, including a cake topped with a faux Elder Barlow missionary nametag that is “going to make me cry,” she said at the time.

In a confessional, Lisa said, “Oh, my God. Today is the day we are going to find out where Jack is going to spend two years of his life.” And getting your mission call is “a huge thing in Utah — like a gender-reveal party.”

Jack read the mission call and learned he was assigned to the Colombia Bogota North Mission. Lisa’s reaction was predictable, although it was the same reaction a lot of parents would have: “Oh, my gosh, I cannot believe he’s going to Colombia. He’ll probably be held up at gunpoint at least once or twice on his mission.” However, she added, “I

mean, overall, it’s thrilling.”

Shopping for mission clothes

Lisa and John accompanied Jack to Odion / Modern Missionary Menswear to outfit him for his impending mission, giving viewers a peek inside what missionaries wear and what they do. The shopping trip itself was funny, because Lisa was so out of her element.

She wanted to buy Jack a teal suit. The salesperson explained that that’s prom attire, and missionaries are supposed to dress more conservatively. “He’s going on a mission,” John said. “He’s not going [to] a dance or whatever.”

Lisa wasn’t listening. She wanted to buy Jack a red, pinstriped suit for the mission to which John remarked, “Maybe if he was going to Vegas.”

A bit later, Lisa said, “I like that one brown-color pant, because I feel like it could be, like, total jungle chic.” Jack rolled his eyes and said he should’ve come shopping with just his father.

Lisa said missionaries “don’t need to forget fashion.”

Spreading misinformation

Some of the information Lisa shared about the church and about Jack’s mission on “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” was misleading, and some of it was flat-out wrong.

• The subject of Jack going through the temple came up, although why he did so and what that means was never explained. Lisa left viewers with the impression that she would decide if she would go through the temple with Jack. John would “definitely” accompany their son, she said, and she had to think about that “next-level commitment. … You’re going to have to wear [temple] garments. And I respect the garments [but] I don’t do that.”

(Part of going through the temple includes a pledge to wear temple garments, modest underclothing devout Latter-day Saints wear as a private and personal reminder of their devotion to the faith.

• Lisa told viewers “you have to be worthy” to go to the temple. “I might not feel worthy because I drink too much Diet Coke. Someone might not feel worthy because they drink too much

alcohol” or “because they’re hitting it with their neighbor.”

There was a lot wrong with that. Diet Coke or any other soft drink won’t keep anyone out of the temple. Alcohol and adultery will. Lisa never mentioned the need for interviews with lay leaders to get a temple recommend. (Or, possibly, that was edited out.)

Jack was not coerced by his parents

It’s clear in “RHOSLC” that Jack was under no pressure to go on a mission. It’s also clear that Lisa would have preferred that he stay close to home and available to her. Both John and Lisa assure their son that if, after he arrives at his mission, he wants to come home, he’s welcome to do so.

John talked about his own mission and hauled out photo albums with pictures from that time in his life. And, he added, when he was growing up, he “had friends whose parents borderline threatened them that if they didn’t go on a mission, that they were going to kind of be kicked out of the family.”

That may not have made

Courtesy of Bravo

Jack Barlow talks with his mother, Lisa Barlow, on “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.” Jack announced plans to go on a full-time mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, surprising his family.

church leaders happy, but John was far from the first one to tell that sort of story.

In another episode, Lisa tells viewers, “A lot of people here pay their kids to go on missions. Or blackmail them. Or say, like, ‘Go or you’re going to embarrass the family.’ Like, there’re social pressures in Utah. But Jack has been raised nonorthodox.”

Orthodox vs. unorthodox

By accepting a mission call, Jack agreed to live the most orthodox of Latter-day Saint lifestyles, strictly adhering to the religion’s tenets and mission rules. His parents, on the other hand, are not exactly orthodox, which was, Jack told his mother, why he kept his mission plans a secret from them for months.

“And I’m, like, ‘Why don’t you tell us?’” Lisa said. “And he literally said, ‘Because you and dad are different than me.’”

It may have been unclear to anyone unfamiliar with Latter-day Saints, but Jack was likely referencing the fact that his parents are not temple recommend-carrying members. They drink alcohol, for instance.

Weird but believable

Asked during the “RHOSLC” Season Four reunion about reports that Jack was seen in Southern California, not in Colombia, Lisa said that Jack “bounced on his mission. He’s not going.” A week later, viewers learned that Lisa was joking — that Jack’s Colombian visa had not yet come through, so he had been sent to SoCal to spread the word while waiting for it.

For anyone familiar with how missions work, that’s not hard to believe at all. Happens all the time.

The apparent circumstances behind this delay, however, were unusual. According to Lisa, the photo Jack sent to Colombian officials was of himself on a boat at Lake Powell showing his “great six-pack.” He “sent it to the [Colombian] government as his visa picture, like, thinking it’s funny, and they denied it. So he had to reapply.”

on the “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” learned that their son, Jack, right, plans to serve a Latter-day Saint mission, which will require him to live the most orthodox of LDS lifestyles.

CHARLES SYKES | Bravo

Lisa and John Barlow, above,

Courtesy of Bravo

A belated salute to the unknown ‘soldiers’ of the LDS Relief Society

March was widely observed in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia as Women’s History Month, spotlighting the achievements of women, past and present.

This annual monthly commemoration is especially fitting for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, because the Relief Society, its global women’s organization, was organized March 17, 1842, a birthday that has been honored and celebrated through most of the years since it s founding.

This year’s observance found Latter-day Saint women gathering in chapels to listen to a broadcast featuring Relief Society General President Camille N. Johnson and her counselors, and Russell M. Nelson, the faith’s prophet-president. The prerecorded talks by those leaders were followed by local expressions of women’s faith in covenants, the power of God, and their perceived roles in the church, family and community.

Few specific women — other than Nelson’s two wives, one living and one deceased — were cited by name. Speakers praised the Relief Society’s efforts to support education, nutrition and health care in far-flung regions, without the specificity that I crave and in which I find inspiration. To augment the nonspecific, principles-based teaching of that evening, I offer here brief historical sketches of some Latter-day Saint women, whose convictions led them to actions beyond reverent statements of their faith. These women — most of them unknown to the world at large — embody the original Relief Society mandate “to relieve the poor” and “to save souls,” with the organization’s long-standing motto that “charity never faileth.” (This is not to suggest, of course, that Latter-day Saint women are or were the only ones to step forward to help in times of need, only that Latter-day Saint women have responded to the best ideals of their organization.)

If adhering to Relief Society principles includes heeding the counsel of church leaders, then today’s Relief Society women will be committed to Nelson’s advice given at General Conference a year ago: “In situations that are highly charged and filled

ARDIS PARSHALL

with contention, I invite you to remember Jesus Christ. ... As we follow the Prince of Peace, we will become his peacemakers.”

Calming a gunman

her husband now lie in the city’s historic cemetery.

Saving airmen

I know of no better or more dramatic illustration of peacemaking than that of Cordelia Perkins Green, a native of Kentucky who joined the faith as a 45-yearold widow in 1900. It was a volatile time for Latter-day Saints in the South, and it grew worse in the spring of 1902 as a Protestant minister issued repeated calls to drive them out of the county. On June 19 that year, Cordelia (known as “Cordie”) attended an outdoor baptism of four converts, then made her way that evening to a schoolhouse for a preaching service. The service commenced with singing and prayer, and a missionary proceeded with his sermon: “This is my commandment, that ye love one another as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

At that point, the meeting was interrupted when a man entered with a drawn gun. He ordered the missionaries to leave. Cordelia rose to her feet, noticing her bodily response: “I felt strong and felt so light. I felt like with a little effort I could soar up in the air. I was not scared or the least bit excited.” She stepped between the elders and the gunman, resting her hand on the gunman’s arm. The man tried to push Cordelia away, but she stood her ground, calmly speaking to him, then slowly backing

him out of the schoolroom and onto the school grounds. Others followed Cordelia’s lead, speaking soothingly to the gunman and the dozens of other men they found waiting outside. In the face of Cordelia’s peaceful approach, the mob shamefacedly melted into the woods and left the elders and the Saints to continue their meeting.

Delivering the Dutch

War has been a natural setting for other acts of extraordinary bravery by Latter-day Saint women who were called to fulfill the ideals of the Relief Society despite the perils.

Geertruida Lodder Zippro, district president of the Netherlands Relief Society, was living in Amsterdam in May 1940 when Rotterdam was obliterated by two days of German bombing. While others were fleeing the chaos, Geertruida rode her bicycle 60 miles directly into the smoke and panic. She found the Latter-day Saint chapel in Rotterdam destroyed. The mission home was largely intact, however, so Geertruida made that her base of operations, helping displaced Saints find shelter, and distributing bedding, food and clothing donated by other Dutch members. She continued her bike rides throughout the war — even after her tires wore out and her husband, Willem, had to wire lengths of garden hose to the rims — arranging for food distribution and keeping isolated Saints in contact with one another.

After the war, Geertruida and her family emigrated to Salt Lake City; she and

Lucile Fabres, a nurse in her 50s when she joined the faith in 1937, was an active Relief Society participant in a Paris branch until the beginning of World War II. Possibly to protect the other Latter-day Saint women in Paris, Lucile’s name was omitted from the records kept by her good friend Eveline Kleinert, who held that branch together during the war years. Lucile had a radio that allowed her to receive broadcasts from England, and she transmitted news and messages to the French Resistance. At least four times, she rescued Allied airmen who had parachuted from their destroyed planes and hid them in her apartment until they could be passed along on the road toward England.

She participated in the liberation of Paris. Although details are scarce, historian Grant Emery has discovered the broad outlines of her service, including the fact that the governments of France, Canada and the United States awarded medals to Lucile for her work in saving the lives of their airmen.

Fleeing genocide

Other wartime women embodied Relief Society ideals by enduring and emerging with spirits intact.

Yeranik Gedikian grew up as a Latter-day Saint in the Armenian community at Aintab, Turkey. When she was 16, the genocide of Armenians by the Turks washed over her people, and Yeranik was driven south into the Syrian desert, following the same route used by the Israelites who had been driven into captivity in Babylon.

Please see

Cordelia Perkins Green

Lucile Fabres

Yeranik Gedikian

Courtesy of FamilySearch Geertruida Lodder Zippro — with her husband, Willem, and their son, Johannes — helped feed and clothe Dutch Latter-day Saints during World War II.

Yeranik’s young husband was shot, and she endured the next three years in an open-air concentration camp before escaping and making her way back to Aintab. In 1922, Yeranik fled from Aintab to Aleppo, Syria, as shifting borders and political conditions made one place less dangerous than another. In Aleppo, Yeranik was reunited with a brother. She was also called into Relief Society service. Having endured the worst of what humankind could do, she was well suited to reach out with compassion to others in great need.

Nursing the sick

The Relief Society’s mandate to relieve suffering found early expression in nursing the sick, a practice that extended from tending patients in homes, providing medical training in frontier Utah and establishing hospitals. Some Relief Society women gave their lives in service to their ideals.

Enduring internment

Chiyo Koji Shiogi, the first Japanese convert to the faith to emigrate to the United States, arrived in Portland in 1912. She carried with her the recommendation of her mission president, Elbert D. Thomas, stating that Chiyo, a college-educated woman, had taught Sunday school classes. Knowing of the prejudices at home, Thomas urged the American Saints to “treat her as a saint should be treated” and “do your best to see that she is guarded from unfair treatment.”

Chiyo had come to the U.S. to marry a Japanese farmer, whose home and work were far from any Latter-day Saint branch. Her formal church activity necessarily ceased. But she retained some awareness of those she had once known. Chiyo’s husband was arrested by the FBI on the evening of the Pearl Harbor bombing, and Chiyo and her youngest child — a U.S. citizen — were soon interned in the camp at Minidoka, Idaho, where they spent years behind barbed wire.

Chiyo somehow was able to contact Thomas, who had become a U.S. senator. He labored tirelessly to locate Chiyo’s husband, Sadaji Shiogi. While Thomas was not able to free the family, he did succeed in reuniting the family at Minidoka.

Elsie Thackery of Croydon, Utah, began her formal nursing education at Salt Lake City’s LDS Hospital at age 18. When a flu pandemic reached Utah late in the fall of 1918, she remained at her post, until she was infected herself, becoming one of Utah’s earliest flu victims, dying at age 19 on Nov. 3. Leonie Reeder, 27, of Brigham City, was also a nurse, so well respected that she was hired to tend to a dying church President Joseph F. Smith (he did not have influenza, although he did die during the first surge of the pandemic). Leonie caught influenza while tending to another patient and died Dec. 2. Other nurses died after contracting flu from their patients; some wives and mothers died after nursing their own families. But the need for nursing patients was so great that many women volunteered to care for neighbors and others for whom they were not responsible, save for purely altruistic reasons. One such volunteer Utah caregiver, Alice Louise Nay of Monroe, was 17 when she died of the illness she contracted while nursing a neighbor.

women who had helped them.

Facing bigotry

Some Latter-day Saint women who most deserve remembrance, perhaps, are those who joined the faith and embraced Relief Society principles under a double handicap: Not only did they choose to believe at times and in places where the faith was held in particular contempt, but they also did so despite the refusal of their religious sisters and brothers to fully accept them in the faith.

Mormon announcements. The missionaries, one of them an apostle, could find no better way to try to contact the vast majority of Buenos Aires residents than to pass out flyers on the street corner. That is, until Herta, who had picked up Spanish, decided to invite some of her friends to watch a missionary slideshow. She brought more than 100 of her friends to that meeting.

Spanish-speaking parents soon began attending meetings to ask why their children expected to pray before meals and to learn the new songs their children were singing. Spanish names began showing up in the baptismal records of the new mission after Herta’s simple invitation to her friends broke the language barrier.

Baking the bread of life

When an earthquake struck San Francisco on the morning of April 18, 1906, Salt Lake City, as one of the nearest large cities that could furnish assistance, filled trains with relief supplies.

Breaking a language barrier

Other women, as young as nurses Elsie and Alice, extended themselves beyond their home circles in the spirit of Relief Society service. Herta Klara Kullick, for instance, was 16 in 1925, when three church leaders arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to open the first formal mission in South America. The elders had come at the invitation of several German families, immigrants to Argentina, who asked to be baptized.

Herta was the youngest of five new converts. But missionary work stalled at that point. The German adults spoke no Spanish and could not introduce the missionaries to anyone outside their circle. Two of the three missionaries spoke no Spanish. Newspapers were not interested in printing

It was an emergency tailor-made for women who lived by ideals of feeding the hungry and caring for the destitute. While the city could furnish untold amounts of raw wheat, the California sufferers could not make immediate use of that wheat, nor could they readily use flour in the first days of the crisis. They needed bread, and lots of it, ready to eat. The women of Salt Lake City baked bread in their kitchens all day, and carried it to train stations to be shipped to California that night.

Perhaps one of the youngest women to make such a contribution was 14-year-old Nabbie Clawson, who was experienced in caring for her father’s family after her mother died. Nabbie’s name was not recorded in the city’s newspapers that day, but because she slipped notes of encouragement under the wrappers of her bread, some of the responses she received were printed over the following weeks, noting the gratitude of recipients and sending greetings to the

The stories of many such women — Black Latter-day Saints — are becoming better known due to research projects like historian W. Paul Reeve’s “Century of Black Mormons” and Amy Tanner Thiriot’s award-winning publication, “Slavery in Zion.”

Samantha Norman Cummings of Mecosta County, Mich., was baptized as a Latter-day Saint in 1876, incredibly early for such Black conversions at a distance from Utah. Although she wrote to church President John Taylor asking about the possibilities of emigrating to Utah, Samantha remained in Michigan the rest of her long life, the heart of an extended mixed-race family of Latter-day Saints, with Black, white and Native ancestry. Her life, traced by Brigham Young University student genealogist Sarah Day, shows Samantha remained connected to the faith, despite only occasional contacts from missionaries, to the point that 40 years after her baptism, perhaps presenting herself as mixed white and Native without mentioning her Black heritage, she traveled to Salt Lake City and went to the temple there, receiving ordinances that were formally withheld at the time from Black members.

Identifying 19th- or early 20th-century Black members of the faith often reveals expressions of racism in Latter-day Saint records. One leader touring Brazil in 1959, for instance described the “surprising experience” of “find[ing] our Relief Society president there a Negro woman,” with another “young girl in her early 20s with Negro blood in charge of the Primary.” While he did acknowledge that these two were “recognized as the strongest women in the community,” his “surprising” discovery also provoked a discussion of limitations placed on Black members and the need to better train missionaries to deal with “this problem.”

The prejudice was apparently so great that when Relief Society President Geni

Elsie Thackery

Alice Louise Nay

Courtesy of FamilySearch Herta Klara Kullick, the only teenager in this group photo, helped boost the success of Latter-day Saint missionary work in Argentina by learning how to speak Spanish.

Ardis E. Parshall

Chiyo Koji Shiogi, the first Japanese Latter-day Saint convert to emigrate to the United States, holding her oldest son, Woodrow, with her husband and a brother-in-law on their Oregon berry farm.

Samantha Norman Cummings

Diniz Junqueira Pereira emigrated to Utah and Idaho, she concealed her racial background from even her grandchildren, who discovered it in recent years through DNA testing. Geni may be the earliest Black Latter-day Saint woman to preside over white women as Relief Society president, and I am glad to know that the grandson with whom I have been in touch is deservedly proud of his grandmother.

While Samantha and Geni were able to “pass” as white for the purpose of temple attendance, no such opportunity for full acceptance within her faith came to my most beloved early Black member of Relief Society. Marie Benjamin Graves of Oakland, Calif., was obviously Black. She and her husband, William, had no known problems fitting into their primarily white Oakland branch after their 1911 baptism. Both appear frequently in branch minutes praying and bearing testimony.

In 1920, however, when the couple traveled to Atlanta, and Marie wanted to take two friends to worship with her, she recorded that “we found the right church, all right, but found the wrong people.”

Marie tried to claim her membership, but “it seems like I had gone into a den of evil spirits, so bad was the feelings against us, because we was colored.”

Shocked by such treatment, Marie wrote to church President Heber J. Grant, believing he would correct the problem. She vowed that while “I never had nothing to hurt me like that in all of my life,” her faith would remain intact.

It did — despite the letter Grant sent to the president of the California Mission asking him to tell Marie that “should Oakland suddenly become populated thickly by Negroes, evidently the same color line would have to be drawn there as now exists in the Southern states.”

Marie continued to attend services, teaching classes, folding paper cups for the sacrament (Communion), donating to Relief Society charitable funds and in all other ways refusing to be driven away from the faith she loved.

Most Latter-day Saint women will not face wartime risks, or blatant bigotry from fellow members. Our service may be as homely as that recorded by mission president and future apostle Charles A. Callis on the recommendation he wrote in 1912 for Eliza Ann Jane Durrance of San Mateo, Fla.: “In addition to her many other good qualities ‘Aunt Sis’ is not excelled as a maker of good bread. Many and many a time she had favored the missionaries in Jacksonville with a good loaf.”

Or we might contribute labor to welfare work, or visit the lonely, or tend children so others can attend the temple, or in any number of other ways relieve small burdens. It’s all worthy work — worthy of doing, worthy of remembering, worthy of recording about the women of our past. Charity never faileth.

Ardis E. Parshall is an independent research historian who can be found on social media as @Keepapitchinin and at Keepapitchinin.org. She occasionally takes breaks from transcribing historical documents to promote the aims of the Mormon History Association’s Ardis E. Parshall Public History Award.

‘Mormonism is open to falsification’ — LDS philosopher on pushing the boundaries of faith and knowledge

By TAMARRA KEMSLEY The Salt Lake Tribune

Asking big, hard questions is in Tarik LaCour’s DNA.

A convert to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he spent nearly three years pelting missionaries with them and hasn’t stopped asking since his baptism in 2009. Now a doctoral student of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, he is at work arguing in favor of the existence of free will and “against a cosmos filled with the immaterial.”

The Salt Lake Tribune sat down with LaCour to learn more about how his faith and studies shape one another, the relationship between religion and science and why he chose Mormonism over Catholicism.

The following has been edited for length and clarity:

Why did you join the church?

LaCour • I had studied the church for about three years. I started investigating because I always thought there should be one church, so that left me with Catholicism, Orthodoxy or Mormonism. I strongly considered Roman Catholicism, but I didn’t believe in the traditional Trinity, and I don’t believe in anything that’s immaterial. That’s to say, I don’t think anything exists that current or future physics couldn’t tell us about.

The Doctrine and Covenants mentions that God is a person of flesh and bones and the Son also. That’s also something that Joseph Smith talked about in his famous King Follett sermon. I just find it very unlikely there are immaterial forces in the cosmos, so I couldn’t go the traditional Christian route.

What questions drive you?

LaCour • Perhaps I’ll just quote Stephen Hawking: “I want to know everything about the universe and how it works.” That’s what drives me.

More specifically, though, I am a proponent of scientism. So I think

in it. Religion gives us something to live for and work toward.

Some religions are more personal philosophies. And then there are others, like Christianity, that make claims about external realities — there’s a God, Jesus Christ is risen. Those types of things. Science can track certain religious claims, with the caveat that science is always open-ended and can change its mind.

Can you give me an example of science tracking a religious claim?

science is our way to understand the world and truth. And by science, I don’t just mean physics. I mean history, linguistics, language and other things as well — so “science” in the very broad sense of the term. But we should also understand how science works, what its limits are, what we can hope to achieve with it, and what is probably going to be beyond our horizon.

There’s a lot we can know, and there’s a lot we probably can’t. So I’m trying to push the frontiers of knowledge that way.

Elsewhere you’ve said, “Faith without evidence is not faith at all.”

What do you mean by that?

LaCour • People within the New Atheism movement — people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens — have said things like “faith is believing without evidence.” And I don’t think that’s right.

First of all, I don’t think faith is about belief per se. Faith is about doing, not about knowing or believing. Those are two different things. Faith is what you do with what you know.

How are science, religion and philosophy connected for you?

LaCour • Science can show you what the world is like and our place

LaCour • Yes, for example Mormonism is open to falsification because it believes God is physical. So, in principle, if you could describe all of the cosmos physically, you can determine whether God is there. Mormonism is sticking its neck out and saying, this thing is in the cosmos. You can verify or falsify it. Whereas in traditional Christianity, it wouldn’t really matter how much you knew about the universe. You would never find God.

And do you find that compelling, that willingness to stick its neck out?

LaCour • Yes, if your beliefs don’t take risks and aren’t open to being falsified — I’m very skeptical of those types of things.

Have you run into a culture within the church of discouraging the asking of difficult questions, especially those aimed at truth claims?

LaCour • When I was investigating the church, I had a lot of questions. Certain people didn’t like that, so I stopped asking them and decided I would just have to get answers on my own. But I wouldn’t say in a typical church atmosphere that I’ve been told not to ask questions.

I can understand, though, how some people could feel that way. There are people who have been told either that a question isn’t important

Courtesy of Tarik LaCour Tarik LaCour is a doctoral student studying philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.

Geni Diniz Junqueira Pereira

Marie Benjamin Graves

or not to worry about something. My view is if truth is your aim, then you don’t have to be afraid of anything. So ask questions and keep diving until you get an answer.

How have your studies informed your politics and vice versa?

LaCour • Academia being more left-leaning, I would say it’s helped me to be more open to other forms of opinion, even if I have my own. That seems to be the trademark of the American left, being open to questioning that way. I certainly have learned philosophically how to defend my political beliefs, and I do want them to be in line with what science is teaching us.

There are those for whom faith very much drives their politics. Whereas I would see mine as somewhat detached. If I were an atheist, I feel that my politics would be the same. I see them as consistent but not driving the other.

What, if anything, is missing regarding the conversation of race within the LDS Church? Is there anything you would hope to see changed?

LaCour • Obviously, the church has

gotten better on the race front since 1978. And obviously President Russell M. Nelson has been very vocal against racism on multiple occasions in his presidency — President Dallin H. Oaks, too. From that standpoint, I think it’s good that they’re decrying racism openly. It’s important, though, that the church be a bit more forthcoming about whether or not it was right or wrong for the [priesthood/temple] ban [against Black members] to take place in the first place. That hasn’t really been talked about as much.

But, overall, I think the church is heading in the right direction on race. For example, Nelson meeting with and supporting the NAACP has been very good.

In the philosophy of race, I’m just interested in the question of whether race is a biological or scientific concept or is it just a social construct. Which is a very live topic these days because racism unfortunately in 2024 remains a very important issue for some reason. You’d think we’d have moved past it, but apparently it just keeps going through cycles.

Do you think the church should apologize for the priesthood/temple ban?

LaCour • In one sense, I think that’s logically impossible. I think an apology is

something one has done wrong. Since none of the current leadership was involved in implementing or sustaining the ban, I don’t think they can apologize for it.

I suppose there’s another sense in which you can apologize and say, “I’m sorry that this happened.” But that could only come after acknowledging that the ban was wrong. So we have to grapple with that first.

Are there any Latter-day Saint thinkers whose writings are especially compelling to you?

LaCour • Obviously Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. I know that President Young has a bad reputation among Black members of the church due to comments he’s made and that’s well-deserved, but I think a lot of what he said was very interesting. B.H. Roberts is another one, and Sterling McMurrin. The philosopher Blake Ostler, who’s a good friend of mine. And while I don’t always agree with him, Adam Miller is also a very interesting thinker with whom I wrestle.

As far as non-Mormons, there’s David Hume, David Albert, Daniel Dennett, Alex Rosenberg and Bas C. van Fraassen.

There are not a ton of Latter-day Saint philosophers.

Why do you think that is?

LaCour • There’s a saying about philosophies having been “mingled with scripture.” So perhaps people hear that and think all philosophy is bad. Also, philosophy is more of a college-level discipline that’s not really taught in high schools, at least in the United States. Many people just don’t have an exposure to it or see what it’s useful for, even though they use it all the time.

Also, if you look at the field paper surveys, most philosophers are atheists. So I think members of the church associate philosophy with atheism.

Has anyone ever pushed back against what you do by arguing that we already know everything we need about the universe and our place in it through revelation?

LaCour • People will ask questions, but I’ve never had any hostility or any pushback.

If anyone were to say that, how would you respond?

LaCour • There’s just a lot that scripture and revealed religion doesn’t tell us but that we’re commanded to know. Even though you have a framework, the details matter.

LDS General Conference — a time for protests, proselytizing and ... bagpipes

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, controversy swept Salt Lake City and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when locals complained about a deal between the two entities to sell a portion of Main Street. The idea was to allow the church to develop it into a small plaza connecting two of its large downtown properties. There were various iterations of the arrangement through the years, carved up and amended due to threatened and filed litigation.

Ultimately, a federal appeals court heard complaints that converting the formerly public space into a private religious site with all the supervising and content restrictions that entails might violate the First Amendment. The court ruled the sale of the property to the church was constitutional and the matter ultimately faded from the public conversation. Most of this story is a distant memory now for those of us who were around to witness the fight. Everyone else likely assumes Main Street heading northbound always ended at South Temple.

I was a teenager when the city held one of its televised City Council meetings in which it had invited the public to attend and voice their concern or support for the proposed sale.

Latter-day Saints lined up to express their appreciation that this small section of Main Street was going to be put to better use, in their view. Another crowd — of what I’m sure I thought of as “antagonists” at the time — gave speeches about the right to free assembly and their discomfort with the idea that a government can sell important public property to the area’s predominant religion.

Several critics who showed up to speak were familiar to me — loud, boisterous, bearded protesters I had spotted surrounding Temple Square before and after General Conference sessions. They usually hoisted large signs insisting conference attendees repent and start listening to Jesus, something the attendees no doubt believed they were already doing by going to conference. Some of these signs contained vulgar claims about church founders and current leaders. The most clever of them included large colorful drawings of the devil burning the wicked. (I always liked those ones.)

I don’t know how long this has been a practice, but at least at that time, alongside the protesters, you could always

find Latter-day Saint counterprotesters, adorned in JODI dresses and Mr. Mac suits, singing hymns. Or holding up “free hug” signs. Or yelling back at the beards. Or (seemingly out to hurt everyone all at once regardless of creed or conviction) playing bagpipes.

A precursor to yelling on social media

The circus scene appeared to grow with each passing year. The battle to out-noise one another, probably counterproductive to the broadcast’s administrative efforts inside the conference venues, didn’t die down when sessions began. The sidewalks’ various stakeholders stayed firm at their posts, continuing to shout down and drown out one another’s attempts at screamed evangelism. There they’d be, waiting and ready for the conference attendees to exit their meeting and trudge bravely through the crowded public spaces that now resembled a bizarro religious version of the New York Stock Exchange on a history-making day.

I like to think of this arrangement between Latter-day Saints and their protesters as a preview to what social media would ultimately become: strangers yelling non sequiturs at one another while trying to crowd the space with their own opinion in an effort to drown out anything else. Maybe it was impossible for a religion founded during the Second Great Awakening to avoid this chaotic, contentious and raucous fate.

I lived in an apartment near Temple Square in my late 20s. This was after I stopped going to church. I always knew when General Conference weekend had arrived, not only because of the obvious increase in minivan traffic, but also because the bagpipes, shouts and strained singing filled the atmosphere on Saturday morning and didn’t let up until at least dinnertime

on Sunday.

I confess I haven’t conducted any real investigation on this, nor have I ever seen any data. But I’ve always assumed no one surrounding Temple Square on General Conference weekend is engaging in any sort of effective missionary work. I could certainly be wrong about that. Maybe the bearded brigade has plucked away a Latter-day Saint who was on the fence about whether fire and brimstone are really all that bad. Or maybe the white shirts and ties holding up copies of the Book of Mormon and declaring it true has changed someone’s mind about whether there should be an expensive private reflection pond on Main Street.

It sounds like I’m being glib, and I probably mostly am, but I do really wonder about all this effort we put into yelling at one another. If it doesn’t change hearts and minds, isn’t it a waste of energy and well-being? I once heard that advocacy without a sincere attempt to persuade only serves the activist. Is the yelling motivated by a sincere attempt to persuade? Maybe. Maybe the screamers and singers really believe their efforts might amount to a successful recruitment.

Or it might be the case that everyone is down there in our state’s capital a couple of times a year damning one another to hell simply because they find it fun. I doubt that’s true. Or at least, I hope it’s not true, because that somehow makes it

all more depressing.

Temple Square-off

The old Main Street/now plaza is currently under reconstruction, along with much of the rest of Temple Square and the surrounding church properties. I don’t know what the plaza will look like in its next aesthetic iteration, but I assume the rules will continue to forbid protesting there. And I assume that won’t stop the protesters and counterprotesters from filling public sidewalks in the surrounding areas. No, the great and loud biannual missionary war will continue in some form.

Maybe there will come a day when religion doesn’t require anyone to actively recruit those who don’t want to be recruited, a day when people are entitled to peacefully live their beliefs with sufficient confidence that their example is evangelism enough. Maybe the bagpipes will get mysteriously and irreparably punctured.

Until then, I’ll be here in my house, trying my darndest to avoid the free hugs.

Eli McCann is an attorney, writer and podcaster in Salt Lake City, where he lives with his husband and their two naughty (yet worshiped) dogs. You can find Eli on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @EliMcCann or at his personal website, www.itjustgetsstranger.com, where he tries to keep the swearing to a minimum so as not to upset his mother.

ELI MCCANN

LEAH HOGSTEN | The Salt Lake Tribune

To the sounds of bagpiper Tim Fowers, Latter-day Saints flow into the Conference Center in downtown Salt Lake City in April 2023 before the start of General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

How LDS apostle Ezra Taft Benson nearly became George Wallace’s running mate

Editor’s note • The following is adapted from “American Zion: A New History of Mormonism” (Liveright, 2024).

Just as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sought to stitch together its increasingly diverse religious body, including a new correlation program that streamlined global publications and practices, the cultural tumult that surrounded America’s 1968 presidential election threatened to tear apart the nation’s social fabric.

The political fracturing that dissolved traditional allegiances across America left many, especially those outside party establishments, scrambling to form new unions.

Ezra Taft Benson, the Latter-day Saint apostle who had previously served in Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Cabinet but now seen as a political outsider who refused to mince words on socialism and civil rights, was in hot demand. In April 1966, a new John Birch Society–backed political organization, styling itself the “1976 Committee,” aimed to

restore the nation to what members be lieved to be its libertarian principles during its bicentennial. They proposed running a third-party ticket with Strom Thurmond as president and Benson as vice president. Benson, ever eager to jump back into the political fray, begged church Presi dent David O. McKay for approval. This was the only chance to “stem the drift to ward socialism in this country,” Benson urged. McKay begrudgingly agreed. The Latter-day Saint prophet became worried, however, when, six months later, Ben son was moved to the top of the ticket. By

January 1967, there were even bumper stickers, and Benson claimed he received

BENJAMIN PARK

energetic, charismatic and uncompromising firebrand, now exiled from the national Democratic establishment, eyed a third-party run. For a running mate, he desired someone who was nationally recognized and could therefore add validity, was a Republican and could offer bipartisan support, and was outside the South and could demonstrate geographic range. Someone who was a political outsider and also known for his bombastic rhetoric. Someone like Ezra Taft Benson.

On Feb. 12, at Wallace’s request, Benson, just finished with an apostolic assignment in Wisconsin, flew to Alabama for a clandestine rendezvous in the state mansion. Wallace flattered him for more than three hours, and Benson came away believing he had just spoken to the next American president. The apostle, finally seeing his chance to save the country, wanted to join the ticket. He knew that persuading McKay to give permission, however, would prove difficult, so he plotted his path carefully. Benson meticulously documented in a judiciously crafted letter why he should run, emphasizing it was the best chance to curb communism’s tide once and for all. He even favorably compared Wallace’s political party, the American Independent Party, to church founder Joseph Smith’s political ideals. Benson’s letter was accompanied by a personal appeal from Wallace. The cause was urgent, and the timing was intricate — the deadline for getting their names on ballots was quickly approaching.

The big meeting with McKay

Benson tried to meet with McKay the day after he returned to Salt Lake City. The nonagenarian prophet had been so sick that he had not attended any leadership meetings for months. Visits were strictly managed by his counselors and secretary. Knowing he would not receive a warm

reception from either Tanner or Brown, Benson instead sidestepped them entirely and approached Alvin Dyer, a fellow conservative who had recently been appointed an additional member of the First Presidency. The two strategized how best to approach the ailing church prophet and eventually secured a meeting at 3:30 that afternoon in his Hotel Utah apartment. Dyer went in first to introduce the topic and ease McKay to the idea, after which Benson joined them. Then, after a brief discussion, Benson and Dyer sat silent for 10 minutes as McKay, sickly and bound to his office chair, perused the letters and considered the situation. The pause was poignant. Benson’s entire political trajectory pointed to this exact moment.

For once, McKay was decisive. “You should turn the offer down,” he said with conviction. This time, he was not willing to be swayed. Benson, hiding his disappointment, said he was willing to abide by the decision. His most promising political opportunity had effectively come to an end. McKay, likely sensing the anguish, reaffirmed his high regard for the apostle.

They exchanged long handshakes and parted.

As Benson and Dyer walked back to the church’s office building, a block from McKay’s apartment, Benson could not help but retrace his steps and consider where things went wrong. Was Dyer to blame?

“You did not make any recommendation, did you?” he asked, referring to Dyer’s preliminary chat with McKay. Dyer assured him he did not. Benson, still despondent and without someone to blame, tried to accept the new reality. His opportunity to save the nation had vanished.

Benjamin E. Park teaches American history at Sam Houston State University. His new book is “American Zion: A New History of Mormonism.” He also is the author of “Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier.”

Ranch was a hangout and hideout for mobsters, prostitutes, polygamists ... and Adam and Eve?

of the D.I. Ranch is wrapped up in Book of Mormon yarns and Vegas intrigue.

By MARK EDDINGTON The Salt Lake Tribune

St. George • Mobsters, prostitutes, polygamists, bandits and Adam and Eve are just a few of the people reported or rumored to have frequented a large ranch in southwestern Utah.

for Desert Inn Ranch — hardly seems like a gathering point for sinners, saints or anyone else, for that matter. Located in rugged cactus country 25 miles west of St. George, the 831-acre cattle ranch is in the middle of nowhere and seemingly light-years from everywhere.

Still, this former high-desert retreat was no garden-variety hideaway. Some polygamists believe the site is either the long-lost biblical Garden of Eden or Adam-ondi-Ahman, the latter a place members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe Adam and Eve lived after being cast out of their Edenic paradise.

sallied out of their wilderness sanctuaries 2,000 years ago to petrify and plunder their law-abiding neighbors.

While the original ranch house and other buildings are no longer there, cowboys and others in the St. George area still gather around the campfire or the hearth in their homes on occasion to reminisce about what was up and speculate about what went down at the ranch years ago. For most, however, the place is too remote and too under the radar for them to be familiar with its past or present.

Indeed, the D.I. Ranch — short

Others have asserted the surrounding hills were the haunt of the Gadianton robbers, a secret society the Book of Mormon says

Yet another claim is that nearby red cliffs were the landing site of the Jaredites, a group that Mormonism’s signature scripture relates fled the Holy Land during the Tower of Babel and crossed the ocean in submersible barges to found an ancient civilization in the New World.

Larry Shurtleff heard many of polygamists’ revelations about the D.I. when he managed the ranch for the late Hyrum W. Smith, prominent Latter-day Saint co-founder of Franklin Quest Co., and his wife, Gail, who owned the place during the 1990s. Shurtleff vividly recalls Legacy

Courtesy of Suzanne Dalitz via The Moe Dalitz Archive

Moe Dalitz smiles from a horse at the D.I. Ranch.

the conversation he had with John Shugart, who owned the ranch for two years before losing it in 1980 after defaulting on an $82,500 payment, according to the Washington County Historical Society.

Shugart, a polygamous preacher with a small band of followers, wanted to turn the ranch into a religious retreat to await the apocalypse that would usher in the Second Coming. About a dozen years after losing the D.I., Shugart talked to Shurtleff and asked him to no avail if he could return and take over managing the ranch.

“He told me the D.I. was the Garden of Eden and [he and his group] planted 10,000 fruit trees when he owned the ranch,” said Shurtleff, adding only five of them survived. “He wanted to plant more fruit trees and turn it back into the Garden of Eden.”

Another story, more secular than sacred, that gained currency is that notorious outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid once holed up and hid gold at the lower Guerrero home on the south end of the ranch.

“When we bought the ranch, people would break in and knock holes in the wall looking for gold,” Shurtleff said. “I don’t think anyone ever found anything.”

Hanging out, hiding away

Tales about the D.I.’s history as a desert hideaway for mobsters are a little less fanciful and a bit more rooted in reality. In 1954, reputed mobster Moe Dalitz purchased the property and named it the D.I. Ranch after the Desert Inn, the luxury hotel and resort he owned at the time on the Las Vegas Strip.

Dalitz owned laundries and was a rum runner for the Little Jewish Navy band of bootleggers during Prohibition, ferrying illegal booze across Lake Erie from Canada to the U.S. He also ran a string of illegal casinos in Cincinnati and on the other side of the Ohio River in Kentucky.

When Congress turned up the heat on organized crime after World War II, Dalitz relocated his gambling operations and resurfaced in Las Vegas, where gaming was legal. He and several partners with ties to the mob took over construction of the Desert Inn in 1949, which developer Wilbur Clark had started but lacked the funds to finish.

Clark was essentially the frontman for the hotel and casino while Dalitz and his partners pulled the strings behind the scenes. Dalitz then parlayed the success of Desert Inn into other, mostly legitimate, investments that forever changed the Las Vegas landscape and also supported a number of charities that helped burnish his tarnished reputation. In fact, so many took a shine to Dalitz that by the time of his

death, in 1989, he counted powerful politicians such as then-Nevada Gov. Paul Laxalt as close friends and had been honored by the Anti-Defamation League with the Torch of Liberty Award.

“He was a major player,” said historian Geoff Schumacher, vice president of exhibits and programs for The Mob Museum in Las Vegas. “He had his fingers in all kinds of things in Las Vegas and played a role in making it a better place through his good works. But, in the end, he was [still] a mobster, and he probably was skimming off the top from the Desert Inn and Stardust [casino], where he also had an investment.”

When Dalitz bought the D.I. Ranch, he transformed it into a cattle operation and hunting lodge, where he loved to escape the Las Vegas heat — literal and legal — to host guests, ride horses and hunt mountain lions.

The ranch was reputedly a haven for mobsters in hot water with the law to hide out and cool down. It was also supposedly a discreet retreat for showgirls, high rollers, prostitutes, enforcers and, on occasion, actors and other celebrities.

Rod Leavitt, who lived in nearby Gunlock, partnered with Dalitz and managed the ranch. Among other things, he built an airstrip where guests, many of them flying out of Las Vegas, could arrive by plane rather than negotiate the long, rough dirt road to the D.I.

Seeing stars, burying bodies

One of the stellar visitors was star Elizabeth Taylor, who visited the D.I. on one occasion wearing a white outfit ill-suited for the ranch.

“She was worried about her appearance because of all the wind, dirt and everything,” said Rod Leavitt’s son Jay, who was a child at the time. “She thought she might not look as glamorous as she should.”

For the ranch’s rougher guests, there were reportedly wild parties and prostitutes on hand to show them a good time. Emeritus Latter-day Saint general authority Steven E. Snow, an attorney and the former church historian, remembers the tour a client, subsequent D.I. owner Herb Fletcher, took him on years ago to show him where the guest lodge had been.

“What really caught my attention,” Snow recalled, “were these little cabins — he called them ‘rabbit hutches’ — where [Dalitz] kept the girls … and he told me some of the names of the mobsters that came out [to the ranch].”

There were allegedly even darker deeds done at the D.I. under the cover of darkness. St. George resident Jerome Jones remembers talking with Dalitz while herding cattle at the ranch during the summers as a boy

Pilfering polygamists and the aspiring actor

During his life, Dalitz was said to have beaten every rap except his checkered past. The same could be said of the D.I. Ranch. More than a decade after Dalitz sold it in 1969, Mormon-born aspiring actor Virginia Hill took $1.5 million from her then-husband, Henry Allen Hilf, when the Detroit bookie was sentenced to federal prison for sports gambling in the late 1980s, according to historian Scott Burnstein.

Hill then moved to St. George and stashed her cash in the home of an uncle who was an associate of Shugart, the onetime D.I. owner and a former bishop in the polygamous Apostolic United Brethren, led by Owen Allred Shugart later persuaded Hill to help buy the ranch.

Upon learning that UAB members had absconded with her money and funneled it to other individuals and companies instead of purchasing the D.I., Hill sued the church and its leader in 1997, alleging civil conspiracy, fraud and money laundering. In 2003, a Utah judge ruled that Allred and members of his sect had bilked Hill out of her money and awarded her $1.54 million and interest.

Today, Kayenta developer Terry Marten and his partners own the D.I. Ranch and are more interested in the water rights that came with the land than its unsavory past. Others, however, savor the stories and cherish the history of the hideaway.

Said Zoellner: “The D.I. Ranch was an intriguing amalgam of fringe LDS culture and Las Vegas sleaze. Two very different human geographies collided at this place. The D.I. Ranch deserves a historic marker.”

and listening to stories around the campfire.

“I heard stories about people digging holes in the creek by the D.I. and driving a car full of [dead] people into the creek and burying them,” said Jones, adding his father sent him to bed when the stories got too sordid.

When the Smiths bought the ranch in the 1990s, Shurtleff said, locals would often pop by to regale him with anecdotes about Dalitz and the D.I. He said a cardinal rule for cowboys staying and herding cattle at the ranch was not to venture out of their buildings at night.

Shurtleff said one cowboy woke up one night after hearing a noise and walked out to a wash to investigate.

“There was this backhoe digging a big hole to bury a car,” Shurtleff recalled the cowboy saying. “I asked him, ‘What did you do?’ He answered, ‘Nothing, I just went back in and never said a word to anyone.’”

Others told Shurtleff that the D.I.’s cattle business had more to do with laundering money than livestock and that unwelcome visitors to the ranch would find themselves on the business end of an Uzi carried by armed guards. The saying among locals at the time was that the letters “DI” really stood for “don’t intrude,” according to former Salt Lake Tribune reporter Tom Zoellner, who wrote about the ranch a quarter century ago.

For their part, Jones and Jay Leavitt don’t dispute Dalitz’s mob background

but believe many stories about him and the ranch are overblown or outright fibs. They remember him as a soft-spoken gentleman who genuinely liked people, hunting and hanging out with cowboys on horseback or around the fire.

Dalitz’s daughter, Suzanne Dalitz Gollin, a writer who lives in New Mexico, concurs.

“He loved being a cowboy,” said Suzanne, who was 6 years old when her father and mother, Averill, divorced. “He identified more with a Wild West dream than he did wanting to extend his bootlegger or racket boss era. It was like he was looking to leave that behind.”

Some of Suzanne’s fondest childhood memories are riding with her parents en route to the D.I. Ranch and spotting Red Mountain.

“I was a pixie-haired rascal in a red cowgirl hat, bouncing in the back seat of the big Land Rover,” she recalled in a 2016 presentation to the Washington County Historical Society. “Back then, I was his little girl, the only daughter of the man they called the ‘Great Gaming Pioneer’ of the early Las Vegas Strip.

“Red Mountain meant we were at the halfway point between the Mesquite Dairy Queen and our beloved Desert Inn Ranch,” she continued. “By the time we spied Red Mountain, I was so giddy from the soft serve ice cream I would, at the least provocation, break out into that song about where the deer and the antelope play. By the time the Land Rover lumbered down the last rocky switchback, the three of us sang our traditional song together, ‘She’ll be comin’ round the mountain.’ “ ≥

Photos courtesy of Suzanne Dalitz via The Moe Dalitz Archive

Above • Joe and Averill Dalitz and their daughter, Suzanne, on a visit to the Grand Canyon. Right • Horseback riding at the D.I. Ranch.

One of the LDS Church’s architectural gems in SLC is destined for demolition

By BLAKE APGAR | The Salt Lake Tribune

Despite a seemingly imminent sale last year, a storied Latter-day Saint meetinghouse that was once described as one of the faith’s “finest and largest” will stay in church hands, at least for now.

But it won’t keep the bulldozers at bay.

After northern Utah’s 2020 earthquake sent shockwaves across the Salt Lake Valley and damaged the historic Wells Ward at 1990 S. 500 East in Salt Lake City, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints opted to abandon the building and put it up for sale with the stipulation that the buyer demolish the nearly century-old chapel.

Negotiations with a potential purchaser, however, fell through. In a statement, church spokesperson Sam Penrod said the Utah-based faith will hang onto the property for potential future use or another sale.

“Due to concerns over the safety and stability of the meetinghouse,” he said, “the church will soon seek a permit from the city to demolish it and secure the property.”

In 1919, members of the Wells Ward announced plans to build the chapel on land once owned by Daniel H. Wells, a Latter-day Saint apostle who was appointed second counselor in the governing First Presidency by the church’s pioneer-president, Brigham Young.

When the meetinghouse opened in 1926, The Salt Lake Tribune reported that it was said to be one of the faith’s “finest and largest,” with a seating capacity of 1,000. It became a community hub, hosting dances, lectures and athletic competitions.

It’s unclear who was in negotiations to buy the property last year or what the plan was for the land.

In the past, according to architect and preservation advocate Allen Roberts, the church’s old buildings have been put to good use after retiring as places of worship. There are economically feasible ways, he said, of preserving and repurposing the Wells Ward.

Many buildings were damaged in the 2020 quake, he said, and they are being fixed. This one is its neighborhood’s most architecturally significant structure, and he doesn’t want to see it go.

“It’s a wonderful building,” he said. “It’s really the heart and soul of the

neighborhood that it sits in.”

The global church has shown it is willing to spend big money to preserve historic buildings. The faith shelled out nearly $200 million to acquire a series of structures and artifacts that trace back to the church’s earliest days, including the Kirtland Temple in Ohio.

Jettisoning old buildings, Roberts said, is “pretty coldhearted.”

Bill Davis, chair of the Liberty Wells Community Council, said members of his organization adopted a resolution last year to lobby for keeping the property zoned for single-family homes in the event a buyer wanted to rezone the land but has since had a change of heart.

While change may be hard, Davis said, he and his board want to see the land transform into a development that offers more density, as long as it fits the scale of the neighborhood. The existing building, he said, is simply damaged beyond repair.

“We want more density because we’re aware of the fact there’s a critical housing shortage in Salt Lake,” he said, “or actually all of Utah on the Wasatch Front.”

Although the meetinghouse faces a future of rubble, the church has taken steps to preserve some of its elements, including the removal of a sculpture and time capsule. The faith also documented the chapel with photographs and a high-resolution 3D scan.

TRENT NELSON | The Salt Lake Tribune

The Wells Ward Latter-day Saint meetinghouse, which was damaged after northern Utah’s 2020 earthquake, is poised to be torn down.

Why the explanations for slower LDS Church growth may all be wrong — or right

During the spring General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, leaders issue a statistical report documenting — as we have come to expect — the faith’s ongoing expansion, complete with an increased number of congregations, multiplying missions and so on.

And yet, this expansion is not what it once was. The church is not shrinking in terms of raw numbers, but its growth rate is slowing. In particular, it appears that U.S. membership has stagnated.

The question is why this might be. There are a number of answers, some more complicated than others, and some boiling down to “because the church isn’t doing more of what I want it to do.” The disappointing reality is that the doldrums likely have little to do with anything the church itself is or is not doing. Rather, the church is falling victim to trends that extend far beyond it.

Secular vs. sacred

One common, and rather simple, argument offered to explain these trends is what we might call the “conflict thesis.” This notion depends on a dichotomy between the “secular” (sometimes known as the “world”) and the church, or “faith.” According to this metric, human society is like a pie. As the secular gobbles up more of the world, the influence of faith fades.

The conflict thesis has been widely repeated over the past hundred years of U.S. history. It emerged among 19th-century critics who argued that religion was fundamentally mystical and backward and hence in conflict with reason, science and rationality, which they called “secular.”

Those people thought that the secular would inevitably prevail. They defined certain things like science and government as “secular” and therefore not appropriate spaces for religion. Even though religious people disagreed that religion would inevitably fade, they, oddly enough, often bought into the basic framework.

MATTHEW BOWMAN

They adopted the idea that some things are religious and others are secular, and the two are basically in conflict.

For instance, Clark Gilbert, the current church commissioner of education, recalls an experience from his time teaching at Harvard. Noting one day that the Harvard Memorial Church stands immediately opposite the university’s library, Gilbert thought “these two ideals seemed to be facing off in a conflict that, at least in this formidable secular environment, would almost certainly end for many with the victory of reason.” But the further you delve into the notion that religion and secularism are distinct forces in some fundamental conflict, the less and less coherent the idea becomes.

For one thing, it’s uncertain what “secular” means. Francis Collins, the immediate past director of the National Institutes of Health and an evangelical Christian, described sequencing the human genome “an act of worship.” Gilbert asserts that Harvard has decoupled “spiritual learning from secular inquiry,” but what exactly makes one thing spiritual and another thing secular is in the eye of the beholder. Are genetics classes at Harvard sacred or secular? Is science inevitably “secular”?

One might define the “secular” as a world in which religious participation is dwindling and religious organizations hold less sway. The sociologist Rodney Stark described that idea as the “myth of past piety,” the notion that Western society was once deeply faithful and that religious practice is eroding. And yet, as long as there have been Christian leaders,

they have bemoaned the fact that nobody goes to church. Indeed, national rates of membership in any Christian church is still higher now than it was across the bulk of the 19th and early 20th century. Historians have estimated that fewer than half of Americans were members of a Christian church before the 20th century and even fewer than that before the Civil War.

It may be, then, too simple to explain the apparent decline in current Latter-day Saint sacrament meeting attendance as the result of the spreading power of the secular.

Are ‘strict’ churches strong?

A more sophisticated version of that argument is sometimes called the “strict church” theory. The idea is that “liberal” or “mainline” churches have, essentially, gotten distracted. They do service projects and pour resources into fighting poverty and ending hunger. And they lose members.

Writers who support this theory argue that shifting a church’s focus away from the things that make it unique — its particular theological claims, requirements like tithing or attendance, and the oldtime, ultimate question of going to heaven — toward social service and socializing means that people have little reason to choose it over, say, the Red Cross or Big Brothers Big Sisters or running for city council.

According to the strict-church theory, demanding high commitment from members means that a church gives high

rewards. If only 20% of the congregation sings, it sounds bad, more people won’t sing the next time around, and eventually fewer people show up to church. But if everybody is expected to sing, everybody enjoys the music. Similarly, if a church expects a high level of commitment to its youth programs, the summer camp will be incredible. In sum, the more everybody contributes, the better the experience will be, and the better the experience, the less likely people will leave. The more the church demands, the more it can offer.

Some Latter-day Saints have pointed to these arguments as an explanation for why church growth is slowing, worrying that the faith is abandoning its distinctive beliefs, broad array of community activities — from the three-hour Sunday block to its pageants to an extensive youth program and Relief Society bazaars — and rigorous expectations for its members’ behavior and lifestyles.

But scholars have pointed out that over the past 30 years, all religious groups have lost members — the “strict churches” along with more mainstream churches. While it is true that the quintessentially mainline United Church of Christ and Methodist Episcopal Church have shrunk, so have the Southern Baptist Convention and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, strict churches par excellence. And those who have left the former do not seem to be joining the latter, which we would expect if people were seeking out the sort of rewards strict churches can offer.

Similarly, “strictness,” however one

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTOPHER CHERRINGTON

defines it, does not seem to be universally equated with growth in membership and participation. Many “megachurches,” large evangelical congregations with thousands of members, have grown rapidly in the same period more traditional religious organizations have declined. Oddly enough, megachurches appear to have accomplished this while demanding far less from their attendees than traditional “strict” churches do.

The observations the strict-church theory makes seem to have held some truth in the 1970s and ’80s, when evangelical churches (and the LDS Church) were booming in membership while older mainline churches were hemorrhaging members. But it also appears that the American religious landscape is changing in ways that make the argument seem today rather archaic.

Taking up a progressive agenda

A final attempt to explain the decline of Latter-day Saint growth is the opposite of the strict-church theory. Proponents of this case argue that the church is losing members because it holds positions increasingly at odds with the mainstream of American culture. These might range from historical claims some find implausible, like the historicity of its signature scripture, the Book of Mormon, or the origins of the Book of Abraham, to church leaders’ stated positions on issues of gender and sexuality.

Supporters of this position have gathered anecdotal data to bolster the point, though it tends to be from educated Americans who participate in conversations about the church online. They argue that younger members want a faith that focuses less on truth claims about the supernatural and issues of gender than on community and a wider sense of moral imperatives.

And yet, a number of Christian denominations in the United States that have adapted in these ways do not seem to have strengthened their membership. Indeed, since the 1980s, the mainline Protestant churches, those which have tended to deemphasize biblical literalism and embrace progressive social positions, have suffered a quite rapid decline in membership. Although the correlation between those points is not firmly established, it nonetheless is unclear that such shifts would boost retention in or conversion among Latterday Saints. It seems possible that such

arguments are committing the fallacy of composition — assuming that a certain group of people who have left the church represent the whole range of those who have.

Where from here?

Although there may be flaws in each of these theories, the fact remains that LDS Church growth is slowing, and there must be reasons why. Some combination of these theories may have something to do with it, although any single one of them does not seem terribly persuasive on its own. It’s entirely possible, though, that the reasons U.S. membership is stagnating have only somewhat to do with the church itself.

This brings us back to the myth of past piety. As historian Thomas Alexander has documented, a hundred years ago the participation at sacrament meetings hovered around 15% or 20%. It was only after World War II, when the church mounted a strong push for organizational regularity and expected participation in worship, that numbers began to climb past 50%.

This is true likewise for many American religious traditions that flourished in terms of membership and organization in the mid-20th century as they rarely had before. Since the 1960s, however, U.S. institutions of all sorts, including but not limited to religious organizations, have suffered growing levels of mistrust and abandonment. Americans consistently report fewer friends and less interaction with others than in past decades. They increasingly conceive of religion (or “spirituality,” to use the modern term) as an individual and eclectic pursuit.

These are trends affecting all U.S. religious groups and are beyond the reach of any single organization to solve. Just as the grandparents of today’s young people enjoyed an era of strong institutional growth in the mid-20th century, we are today living in an era of institutional decline. It is that problem, more than any aspect of the church itself, that Latter-day Saint leaders must grapple with as they seek to solve the problem of slowing growth.

Matthew Bowman is the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University and the author of the recently released “The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America” and, in 2012, “The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith.”

LDS Church and BYU should eliminate rules that stir judgments about outward appearances

One of the outmoded practices still caroming around inside The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is an emphasis on proper physical appearance, what that appearance is and means, what it says about a person, what it perhaps unintentionally, perhaps not, enables in terms of making judgments about others.

Exhibit A is the Church Educational System’s “Dress and Grooming Principles and Expectations,” a recently updated, though still stunningly antiquated, set of rules applied at Brigham Young University and other church schools as a part of a wider-ranging Honor Code. That code is a behavioral standard that includes proscriptions regarding what students and faculty can wear, how they can style their hair, what hair they can grow on their heads, how they can appropriately present themselves.

one has been endowed. Accommodation may be made for athletic participation.

• “Be neat and clean. Sloppy, overly casual, ragged, or extreme clothing is not acceptable.

For grooming, it adds:

The standard reads like this: “Each student, employee, and volunteer commits to:

1

• Represent the Savior Jesus Christ, the church, and the Church Educational System.

2 • Preserve an inspiring environment, without distraction or disruption, where covenants are kept in a spirit of unity so the Holy Ghost can teach truth.

3 • Promote modesty, cleanliness, neatness, and restraint in dress and grooming.

4 • Maintain an elevated standard distinctive to educational institutions of the Church of Jesus Christ.”

Expectations are then given, with an overarching note that “application of these principles is not limited to the expectations listed.” That implies a stricter application on occasion.

Here is what’s officially listed. Dress for men and women, it states, should:

• “Be modest in fit and style. Dressing in a way that would cover the temple garment is a good guideline, whether or not

• “Hair should be clean, neat, modest, and avoid extremes in styles and colors.

• “Men’s hair should be neatly trimmed. [Elsewhere it indicates hair should be short.] Men should be clean shaven. If worn, mustaches should be neatly trimmed.”

CES standard is not the church standard

Mixed into all of the above is the implication that those who do not wear clothes according to the standard, those who wear their hair differently, those who sport beards, essentially anyone who looks different than the properly washed is not representing Christ, is not preserving an “inspiring environment,” is not promoting “modesty, cleanliness, neatness, and restraint.”

Which is to say, Latter-day Saints — and non-Latter-day Saints — who don’t dress a certain way or look a certain way may be less than those who conform. That is a dangerous message to send, especially for a worldwide church that spans a thousand cultures that assign completely different meanings to different physical characteristics.

Let’s make it clear: The CES standard is not the official church standard, but it emanates with the blessing of top church leadership and creates a wave that is too often felt all around, on every Latter-day Saint shore.

It smacks of a church based in Utah, run

in large part by old white men, applying their biases about bygone beatnik and hippie movements, seeing long hair and sideburns and beards and hair colors as some kind of rebellion, as a threat to the stability of sound traditions of good, clean living and good, clean faith.

The irony there is that some of those traditions don’t go back very far. Many former Latter-day Saint prophets and apostles wore beards, wore longer hair, hair that was not “neatly trimmed.” It has long been a source of mockery that Brigham Young wouldn’t have passed muster, with his styles of choice, to qualify for attendance at the school named after him. And those paintings of Jesus that hang in church foyers show he, too, would not have made the grade. He, therefore, wouldn’t, according to the dress and grooming standard above, be representing himself appropriately.

Which is just plain stupid. Forgive the crassness of that term, but it’s the truth. Scripture says God looks on the heart, not on the outward appearance. It’s time for church leaders and members to do likewise.

It’s understood that there are companies, militaries, organizations that require a certain look. That’s their business. But those outfits are not — and do not claim to be — God’s true church, reaching out to all of God’s children.

Across the church, it seems as though some of these “higher standards” are being “downgraded.” We can only hope. Individuals who have tattoos, for instance, and multiple piercings or who have dyed

their hair varying shades of colors may still be judged in Latter-day Saint culture, but they aren’t violating Latter-day Saint dogma.

Judge not

It’s easy to believe that such judging brings greater condemnation than the ridiculously perceived offenses — and that the “spirit” can dwell just as comfortably in the body of one with pink or green hair as one with brown or blond locks.

I have a close friend who wears a small tattoo on her arm that includes two olive branches, a number of olives and numerous leaves. Each represents something meaningful in her life — family members, peace and the tranquil, charitable example of Jesus. And yet, she still sees the glances at and away from her arm, the rolls of the eyes of those who see themselves as more righteous for not having a tattoo.

So it is in the implementation of such dress and grooming standards — and the proclamation of their importance in some church corners, the mere implication in others — that some Latter-day Saints continue to judge. They size up and value others by the way they look, not by the way they act, not by the way they serve, not by the way they love.

That’s not the way Jesus goes about his important eternal business. It might be time — no, it is time — for the church that professes to belong to the bearded (at least in much of its art) King of Kings to do it a better way, to do it his way.

RICK EGAN | The Salt Lake Tribune Believer Tattoos are sported at the LoveLoud Festival in 2019. Tribune columnist Gordon Monson says Latter-day Saints need to stop judging others based on appearance.

GORDON MONSON

Brigham Young

Black LDS theologian responds to those who say Jesus taught unity, not diversity

By TAMARRA KEMSLEY The Salt Lake Tribune

Uniformity is not unity, James Jones wants his fellow Latter-day Saints to know — and the latter can be found only within a society where there are no marginalized.

The 36-year-old theologian is knee-deep in his second degree from New York’s Union Theological Seminary, where he has spent the past three years razing and rebuilding his definition of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus in today’s world.

The Salt Lake Tribune caught up with Jones to learn more about how formal theological training has compared to his religious education growing up in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, plus what more he believes leaders of the Utah-based faith could and should be doing to root out racism among the membership.

The following has been edited for length and clarity:

What are some of the lessons you learned in divinity school that have transformed your scripture study and worship?

Jones • As far as scripture study, I’ve learned that there are always more questions to ask beyond what’s merely in the text. There’s this expression, “a text without context is a pretext.” You’ve got to ask: Who wrote the text? Who is the audience? Who is teaching it? Who did it serve when it was originally written? Who is it serving now?

The scriptures, particularly the Hebrew Bible, were written by oppressed and exiled people, many of whom were anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist — the exact opposite of the institutions and individuals often found teaching them in America today. So these are questions we’ve got to ask ourselves.

As far as worship, I have come to a visceral understanding of the extent to which the emulation of

Christ and living Christianity’s most fundamental ethics is. It’s far more active than just going to church or the checklist that Latter-day Saints place a premium on. What ultimately determines whether we are going to heaven or hell isn’t that checklist. It’s how we treat other people. If you look at Matthew 25, for example, with the parable of the sheep and the goats, there is nothing in it about how often you go to church. Instead it asks: Did you feed the hungry? Did you give water to the thirsty? Did you visit people in prison or in the hospital? Did you welcome the foreigner?

So worship, for me, is ultimately not an act of ecclesiastical fealty but an act of right living, right relationship with the community and people around you.

Is being actively engaged in a faith community central to Christian worship? Or is that a vestige of a different time?

Jones • Christianity is definitionally an interdependent enterprise. The most effective work performed by Christians has been done in community. That’s also where the biggest harm is done, but the best work is still done in community. That is our best shot at spreading the gospel message and feeding the hungry.

Who are your influences, the people you really admire both within and without the Latterday Saint tradition?

Jones • When I encountered Marvin Perkins and Darius Gray, their work on Blacks and the scriptures, including the work around skin color, curses and other problematic verses, that was instrumental to my staying in the church and believing that there was a place for me in the church as a Black person. Neither one would call themselves theologians, but they are doing the work of theology.

As far as other trained theologians in the church, top of my list are definitely Rev. Dr. Fatimah Salleh and Margaret Olsen Hemming, the authors of “The Book of Mormon for the Least of These.”

They are doing the work that I want to do of breathing life into the scriptures, particularly for people on the margins, making a sacred text like the Book of Mormon really come alive for us. I can’t credit anybody with reinvigorating my faith in the Book of Mormon more than these two.

As far as outside the church, my first brush with anything related to Black theology was James Cone. He was one of the first people to systemize a theology around validating Black people.

The Latter-day Saint faith has a long tradition of emphasizing its own religious education — classes at Brigham Young University, seminary, Institutes of Religion — over traditional theological training. Having now experienced both, what are some of the similarities and the differences between the two?

Jones • As far as similarities, at the end of the day, we’re all trying to understand some of the same texts better, and I know from having done institute and seminary and taken religion classes at BYU that Latter-day Saints are honestly trying to do that.

A major difference is the supplemental materials used as part of that process. The Doctrine and Covenants tells us to seek wisdom out of the best books. But for every institute class, every BYU religion class I’ve ever taken, the primary texts were student manuals and the sacred texts themselves. I think it says a lot that we don’t really wrestle with the text beyond what Latter-day Saint leaders and student manuals, a leader-approved resource, say about them.

That’s the biggest difference, the capacity for scrutiny of our texts

or of the conventional wisdom or what has already been said about them. That was nonexistent within the context of my church education and is ever-present in my theological education.

Why do you think that is, that emphasis in church education within the Latter-day Saint institution on church leaders’ interpretation of the scriptures?

Jones • The church has way too much to lose by entertaining criticisms or ideas that could just highlight its infallibility. They would have to relinquish power in ways that they just don’t want to. So much about institutional religion, and I say this carefully, is about control and keeping people in line.

Recently, general authority

Seventy Christophe G. GiraudCarrier became the latest in a growing list of top Latter-day Saint leaders to warn members about the sin of racism. Do you see these statements as having any impact, in your experience? Is there anything else you wish leaders would say?

Jones • Saying racism is bad is the bare minimum. It’s also very easy and very reasonable to expect racism as a disqualifier from the temple [which Giraud-Carrier said in his speech]. Who wants to share the temple with a racist? I certainly don’t.

The problem is that a lot of people don’t really understand what racism is, how deeply it runs or all the ways in which it manifests itself. And once we decide it includes

more than wearing a [Ku Klux] Klan hood and burning crosses or calling someone racial slurs, then the conversation gets much harder.

I don’t know anybody who disagreed with President Russell M. Nelson when he denounced racism in 2020. I wish he would do more than tell people not to be racist. That’s a very easy thing to do. I don’t think that is being prophetic. It would be a lot more impactful if he were to directly address how we have propagated racism, how we as a church have allowed it, and then work earnestly to teach people how to unlearn the racism in themselves and the church.

What would you say to those who say Jesus prioritized unity over diversity?

Jones • I’ve heard that in response to cries for social justice or just better conditions for marginalized folks in general. And I don’t feel like people really understand what unity is when they say we want to prioritize unity over diversity. Because way too often, what people mean when they say unity is actually uniformity. They’re asking others to overlook the unique challenges and experiences of marginalized groups.

Unity doesn’t allow for systemic inequalities or injustices. For us to be truly unified, we have to take into account the existing power imbalances that contribute to inequality. And while Jesus may not have used the word “diversity,” his church was compared to a body made up of necessarily different parts for its “proper function.”

Courtesy of James C. Jones Theologian James Jones says Latter-day Saint leaders need to do more to teach members what racism is.

How can the LDS Church help families? Think lower tithing, free missions, child care at the chapel ...

It is no longer news that middle-class Americans are struggling to afford families in light of the staggering costs of housing, child care, higher education, groceries and other critical expenses — and U.S. Latter-day Saints are hardly exempt from this dilemma.

The increasing cost of forming a family might be the greatest long-term challenge facing The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose theology, volunteer structure and future growth rely on members’ ability to afford families and the time and resources for church service.

It is past time for serious talk of how the church might evolve in light of this quandary. In particular, how might it provide more practical support to its members, especially those raising children?

Below are suggestions I have heard that are worth discussion. Some might require paying workers to maintain buildings, repurposing spaces in meetinghouses, contracting with providers, or navigating business, legal, insurance and regulatory requirements. The question is not whether this global church of 17 million members with financial riches in the tens of billions could but whether it should. Faiths with far fewer resources routinely overcome these obstacles. The more relevant questions are whether (1) these proposals are consistent with its mission and revelation received by those in authority and (2) could be done competently.

Not every suggestion will make sense for every community. While my focus here is on how the church might better serve parents and children, we should also have conversations about how it might better serve other demographics. Local input is vital when considering what a community needs and how to best use meetinghouses and resources:

Open up meetinghouses to child care • Some buildings already are being used for community programming. Could underused ones be used for more children’s activities? The church could pilot renting spaces at a steep discount to qualified organizations for full-time child care. Buildings also could be used for simpler things such as parent-run preschools, summer camps and after-school activities.

Have ward nights rather than youth nights • Being a parent is isolating. While the church has solid youth programs, it provides little social support for parents. As I have suggested before, it makes sense to convert youth nights into ward nights with informal opportunities for congregants to gather.

Design future meetinghouses as community centers • These buildings often sit empty for most of the week. The church could design future facilities for multipurpose daily uses, including coworking, child care, lounges and community classrooms.

Have a second-hour parenting course • On Sundays, I would most like to discuss the parenting challenges I share with other Latter-day Saints, including how to respond to difficult questions we and our children have about the church. We gather in the halls to discuss these topics anyway. Why not make it a class to which all are invited?

Adjust ward boundaries more frequently and flexibly •

Gentrification can decimate a ward surprisingly quickly. It is hard to reverse a congregation’s decline after it loses the critical mass necessary to attract newcomers. Encouraging local units to more easily and frequently adjust their boundaries to maintain critical numbers of families could help retain current members and attract new ones. When doing so, leaders should be mindful of school boundaries, transportation routes and other factors. It would be wise to speak with the impacted members before finalizing changes, because they know their communities best.

In addition, there might be benefits in making it easier for some members to attend wards outside of their geographic areas. For example, could we normalize allowing seniors to attend the ward of their choice if they want to downsize? Moving should not have to mean losing lifelong friends. Could we invite divorced parents to attend the same ward, even if one lives outside the boundaries, so that their children do not need to shuttle between wards? Anything the church could do to remove barriers to its members moving would help create a more efficient housing market.

Think harder about the theological roles of extended family, friendship and community • Our focus in church is usually on the nuclear family, the (private) home, and the specific, gendered responsibilities of each parent. As a consequence, those who are not parents often feel excluded. Those who are frequently feel unsupported by the wider community because they are supposed to handle everything on their own. Younger members rightly perceive that they may not be able to replicate the model of breadwinner father and stay-athome mother even if they desire to do so. What if we thought harder about the possibilities offered

by deeper extended family, friendship and community ties?

Make young adult missions free • Young adults who serve missions are already giving up future earnings to live a difficult lifestyle and must pass through a series of gatekeepers. It’s unclear to me that they need more skin in the game. Could we eliminate this expense for families?

Prioritize family while serving senior missions • Senior missionaries typically have more flexibility to temporarily leave their missions. Many internalize the idea, however, that they should not leave unless in an emergency. Could we create a culture in which senior missionaries are encouraged to prioritize and spend time with their families while serving?

Reduce male-only callings • Men could become more involved in the children’s Primary and other activities if we reduced the number of callings that require male-only priesthood and invited bishopric members to sit with their families when not conducting services. These changes also would aid women, who are often with their children throughout the week and on Sunday.

Give members permission to pay less in tithing • To be clear, I believe in the principle and blessings of tithing. But the historical context in which we pay it has changed. The church is no longer a financially struggling institution, and it plays far less of an economic

and political role in its members’ lives than in previous eras. Today, it is a rich organization while many of its members struggle. There are solid arguments that tithing never was intended to be narrowly defined as either 10% of gross or net income, the cultural standards to which many members cling even though the church is careful not to inquire into the details of how its members calculate their donations.

The simplest way to help Latter-day Saints afford families is to leave more money in their pockets. Some members might benefit from permission to meet their family’s needs before paying tithing, while others could afford to pay more in different seasons of their lives. I appreciated a friend’s suggestion that members be asked for a more flexibly defined “generous” tithe.

The church cannot solve the affordability crisis. Yet what members need from their faith is always tied to what is happening in the wider society. It is worth pondering if the church could help its members, increase its relevance and generate more future members by making parenting a bit easier.

Natalie Brown is a writer, scholar, lawyer, mother and Latter-day Saint. She is writing in her personal capacity. Her views do not necessarily reflect those of the church or her employer.

NATALIE BROWN

TRENT NELSON | The Salt Lake Tribune

Wendy Rivera gets a piano lesson from Elijah Frandsen at a Latter-day Saint meetinghouse that serves as Pioneer Park Community Resource Center in Provo in February.