Mormonism Enters a New Era

It was July 24, 1847 when Pioneer Brigham Young gazed down at the desolate Salt Lake Valley and declared: "This is the place." His Latter-day Saints, hounded out of three states, had found their homestead. Last week in Salt Lake City, 200,000 people celebrated the Pioneer Day legend with a mammoth parade. At the head of the procession was Brigham Young's latest successor, Spencer Woolley Kimball, 83, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Behind him were brass bands, floats, fiddlers, and such lesser dignitaries as Scott M. Matheson, the Governor of Utah.

Just as the Saints once made the desert bloom through honeybee-like enterprise, so have they made their church into the biggest, richest, strongest faith ever born on U.S. soil. It has grown fourfold since World War II to 4 million members, including 1 million outside the U.S. Church income is rumored to exceed $1 billion a year, though Kimball insists it is "much less than that."

Despite Mormonism's obvious success and the comforting image evoked by Donny and Marie or the Tabernacle Choir, outsiders (known as Gentiles) still find something disturbing about the faith. Though Mormons are no longer as isolated as they once were in Young's mountain kingdom, they nonetheless seem to exist behind an invisible barrier. Once a Mormon temple is consecrated, no outsider may enter to see the secret rites or oxen-borne baptistries. Ecumenical entanglements with conventional Christian groups are forbidden. The Mormon religion, with its modern-day prophets and scriptures, can seem odd indeed to nonbelievers.

The most offensive tenet vanished in June in a "revelation" promulgated by Kimball, who is regarded as God's unique "Prophet, Seer and Revelator." Henceforth, headquarters announced, "all worthy males" may enter the priesthood, a lay office normally attained by all young men in the clergyless church. Previously the Mormons had denied the office to "Africans." The change will give blacks celestial benefits. Priests can "seal" their marriages for eternity in the temple. This, in turn, means they can aspire to the highest level in the multitiered Mormon heaven after they die. Thus Phone Repairman Joseph Freeman, 25, who became the first known black in the priesthood in the 20th century, was able to seal his marriage. Several dozen U.S. blacks are-expected to follow Freeman's example.

Kimball's revelation freed the faith from a gnawing problem. Missionaries faced constant questions about Mormon racism. "Church young people were mortified," says University of Utah Historian Brigham Madsen. "They would not put up with it any longer." The N.A.A.C.P. went to court to end bias in Mormon Boy Scout troops. A dissident member even dared picket the 28-story headquarters building that dominates the Salt Lake City skyline. The revelation also solved the dilemma of who is eligible to use the new temple in racially mixed Brazil.

How did the word come? By one account, 13 Apostles (top leaders) experienced a common revelation at a prayer meeting on June 1. In other renditions it came complete with a visitation from Joseph Smith, the prophet of Palmyra, N. Y., who founded the faith in 1830. In an interview, his first since the announcement, Kimball described it much more matter of factly to TIME Staff Writer Richard Ostling: "I spent a good deal of time in the temple alone, praying for guidance, and there was a gradual and general development of the whole program, in connection with the Apostles."

Kimball's predecessors felt bound by the traditional interpretation of Smith's scriptures. Passages in the Book of Mormon consider dark skin a sign of God's disfavor, and the Book of Abraham specifies that Canaanites (interpreted as Africans) are "cursed as to the priesthood." Indeed, outside dissidents bought a full-page ad in the Salt Lake Tribune last week accusing Kimball of heresy and pointing out that Brigham Young declared that blacks would only get the priesthood after all "other descendants of Adam" had their chance.

Mormons believe in a prior spirit life, and their leaders have long taught that people are born into the black race because they somehow failed God during their preexistence. Kimball says flatly that Mormonism no longer holds to such a theory. He remains opposed to interracial marriage but couches his warnings against it as fatherly admonition; Brigham Young considered such marriages an offense punishable by "death on the spot."

Sterling M. McMurrin, graduate dean at the University of Utah and leading Mormon liberal, gives Kimball personal credit for changing the church's stance. "He is a deeply spiritual person, not bureaucratic," says McMurrin. "He has suffered through this problem for 30 years." What if Kimball had not received the revelation during his tenure? Under the strict seniority system among Apostles, the next president in line is Ezra Taft Benson, 78, Ike's Agriculture Secretary. After him would come Mark E. Petersen, 77, former editor of the church-owned daily, Salt Lake's Deseret News. Both are considered much too conservative to have acted as Kimball did in lifting the barrier for blacks.

Kimball, a onetime realty and insurance man, had undergone throat cancer and heart surgery before he took over in 1974, but he has proved to be a vigorous, globe-trotting activist. He is at his desk daily by 7 a.m., stays there till 5:30 p.m. without a lunch break, then works until 10 at the home he shares with wife Camilla. In typical Mormon fashion he attributes his vitality to the fact that "all my life, from the time I was a little boy on the farm, I have done hard work." Like other practicing Mormons, he shuns alcohol, tobacco and caffeinated drinks.

Kimball is by no means the first Mormon leader to alter a major doctrine. The most famous earlier example occurred in 1890, when one of Prophet Smith's successors ended the "everlasting covenant" of polygamy after the practice had plunged the church into a bitter, and losing, battle with the U.S. Government.

Despite such gradual accommodations, Mormonism will never blend easily into the religious landscape. Ever since Jesus appeared to Smith to denounce other Christian creeds as "an abomination," the Mormons have considered themselves the one true "restored" church. While standard-brand Christianity insists that God is a spirit. Mormons believe that he inhabits a body of flesh and bone. In fact the Mormon God was once a man himself, and Mormon men can hope to become gods themselves in the afterlife. The Mormons reject such orthodox doctrines as the Trinity and original sin. In their complex eschatology, Jesus will return to establish his kingdom's capital at Independence, Mo.*

The key differences stem from the foundation stone of the faith, those unique Mormon scriptures, which are the subject of deep but carefully concealed doubts among some church intellectuals at Brigham Young University and at Mormon "institutes" on secular campuses. Smith said he dug up golden tablets at Hill Cumorah near Palmyra in 1827 and dictated their contents to a scribe before they were taken up into heaven. The result was the Book of Mormon, an account of two migrations of ancient Jews to the Americas, and of a ministry by Jesus in the New World. These Jews built elaborate civilizations before many were wiped out around A.D. 400 in a civil war at Hill Cumorah, won by ancestors of the American Indians. The trouble is there is no accepted archaeological proof of the book's claims, and the church shows no interest in excavating Hill Cumorah, where there should be vast numbers of skeletons. The effort of anti-Mormons to impugn the book through handwriting experts, on the theory that it was stolen from the manuscript of an old novel, fizzled out last year when one expert backed out and a second reversed his findings.

The Book of Abraham, the scripture that includes the priesthood ban, was said by Smith to be his translation of ancient scrolls written by Abraham, and purchased by Smith in 1835. He had indeed bought some old scrolls; lost for a century, they were rediscovered in a New York museum in 1967. After studying them, various Mormon scholars have concluded that they were not nearly ancient enough to be Abraham's and further, that the scrolls might not be an authentic translation after all, but instead might have provided the "catalyst" that fired Smith's imagination and opened him to direct revelations about Abraham.

The appeal of Mormonism today stems as much from its stable, self-contained lifestyle as from its doctrines--perhaps more so. Mormons sell their converts "instant community," says one analyst. They are the very epitome of successful striving, patriotism and clean-cut, law-abiding morality. Believing the family is all important, they advocate that a "family home evening" be set aside each Monday. A Mormon family can get needed food or clothing free through the famed Welfare Plan, which also finds church-sponsored jobs for the unemployed. Mormons go without two meals a month to save money that is contributed to the system, which does not extend to Gentiles.

Such family nurture is the province of the Mormon woman. "Because they are expected to be a mother of eight, a charming hostess, the perfect housekeeper with no help, and supportive of their husbands in all things, there's a lot of stress," says Mormon Housewife Mona Daniels. The church is honoring its women with a new sculpture garden at a restored village in Nauvoo, Ill., one of the Midwestern communities where raging mobs drove out the Mormons in the mid-19th century after Prophet Smith was shot to death. Despite the gesture, the church is adamantly opposed to the ERA or other concessions. Kimball states that unlike blacks, it is "impossible" that women would ever attain priesthood.

The feminist issue may one day come to afflict the church, but for the present, Mormonism is booming. Growth is fueled by members, who give 10% of their gross income, and profits from such church holdings as a good chunk of downtown Salt Lake City, 326,500 acres elsewhere, insurance companies with $383 million in assets, the Salt Lake newspaper, eleven radio stations and two TV stations, $36 million in Times-Mirror Co. shares (3% of the total company stock), and controlling interest in a department-store chain and a beet-sugar firm.

The income will go into four more temples (in Seattle, Tokyo, Mexico City and American Samoa) and 600 buildings under way around the world--all to be paid for in full before dedication. All Mormon young men are supposed to devote two years to missionary work between their education and their careers. For many of the 26,500 now in the field, the task will broaden horizons and hone speaking and selling skills for advancement in business.

Mormon evangelism even extends beyond the grave. The church believes that people who have died can only have an opportunity to accept the "restored Gospel" if Mormons on earth are baptized on their behalf in the temple. To make this mammoth task possible the church is collecting literally billions of names in its huge genealogical files, and members are baptized repeatedly in the names of ancestors and even nonrelatives. In April Kimball's administration arranged a speedup of such temple "work".

As for those who are now living, Mormonism has been diligent and successful in spreading its message, with one vast exception: black Africa. The church could hardly have functioned there without anyone eligible for priesthood. Despite June's revelation, Kimball says careful consideration will be necessary before he dispatches the first mission teams in history to the area. But ultimately, Kimball has a broad vision: "The Saviour said, go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature, and that's what we have been working toward." The Mormons have a long way to go, but as a result of Spencer Kimball's innovations, new classes and cultures may yet penetrate Brigham Young's mountain-ringed fastness.

*Unfortunately the millennial temple site is in the hands of one of many splinter groups. The largest of these is the "Reorganized" Latter-day Saints (186,000 members), formed by Smith's heirs, who opposed Young's takeover.

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