Mormonism

With Romney now the presidential contestant against Obama, barring a bolt of lightning from Rick Santorum’s Roman Catholic God striking him down , and aware that many will be concentrating upon Mormonism’s eccentric belief system, i cut and pasted and re-hashed this alternative response.

The same holy texts can, in different social settings, give rise to entirely different behaviours and attitudes. Religion is a contradictory social phenomenon, the vast majority of those who call themselves Catholics actively flout the Pope’s rulings about sex, for instance. We can also read of the early Christians practicing and preaching common ownership and at the same time read of the later church advocating individual wealth promotion. When many people think of Mormonism it is the wealthy advocates of capitalism like Mitt Romney and his and its right wing political positions that springs to mind.

Religion is a social phenomenon and it will persist so long as social conditions render it necessary. Denouncing God and religion is easy. What’s harder – and much more important – is creating a world that no longer has need of them.

After its founding one hundred and eighty-two years ago , the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has certainly prospered. The Church has diversified into commercial enterprises, owning television and radio stations, universities, farms, banks, real estate, many of the casinos in Las Vegas is owned by the church, and shopping malls. Yet there has been a strand of egalitarianism within the LDS. Joseph Smith repeatedly told his followers, “if you are not equal in earthly things you cannot be equal in obtaining heavenly things.”   Brigham Young also championed wealth redistribution, “We have plenty here. No person is going to starve, or suffer, if there is an equal distribution of the necessaries of life.”

Early Mormons experimented with communal living. The early Mormon settlers in Utah implemented a “socialist” economic system under the direction of Brigham Young. In the Salt Lake Valley, land was distributed to the members of the community according to the principle, “equal according to circumstances, wants and needs.”  They never used the word “socialism,” but “socialistic” is the one way it can be described. The early Mormons strove to build a society where there were no poor, nor any who could be called rich. The weak were not left to starve. Instead, food was re-distributed in times of want. Everyone was given land, rather than having to buy it. The wealth and natural resources of the community belonged to the people, all the people. Brigham Young in 1848 declared, “There shall be no private ownership of the streams that come out of the canyons, nor the timber that grows on the hills. These belong to the people: all the people.” The same was true of mineral resources from mining.  When a group of new Mormon immigrants arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in the early 1850s,  Brigham Young made it clear what kind of society they were entering: “As for the poor, there are none here, neither are there any who may be called rich, but all obtain the essential comforts of life.”

A public authority was appointed to oversee water use. The canals and ditches were built on a community basis. The canals were “built by the farmers, owned by the farmers, and operated by the farmers.” Public buildings, roads, and bridges were all constructed communally. Bishops would give out building assignments in church meetings on Sundays. Church members completed these projects by donating one day out of ten to public labor as a tithe.

In Salt Lake City, exploiting workers was considered socially unacceptable. Brigham Young told the story of a bishop who stopped a member of his congregation from building a house, because the man wasn’t paying fair wages to his carpenters. Brigham Young said, “If those that have, do not sell to those that have not, we will just take it & distribute among the Poors, & those that have & and will not divide willingly, will be thankful their heads are not wallowing in the Snow.”
 

In 1855, a series of natural disasters hit. The Mormon Church implemented two new “share-the-wealth” programs. The first was called “Fast Offerings.” Even though the Mormons had long fasted (gone without food one day each month) for spiritual reasons, they now asked that everyone donate the food they saved by fasting. The bishop would then distribute this food to the poor. The second was a food rationing program. Each father was asked to place his household on a ration of one half pound of breadstuff per day, and to use any extra food they had to feed people they employed or who were in their congregation. Brigham Young said that those who didn’t comply would be kicked out of the Church and their excess grain taken. Church policy was aimed to ensure that no one person was making “exorbitant profits,” which created an early stigma attached to anyone dubbed a “profiteering saint.”

Enterprises were, from the beginning, formed to protect and promote equality, community self-reliance, and community unity; to encourage maximum production through home industry as opposed to consumption and trading. Cooperatives were created to ensure that the wealth that was generated from trade was equally distributed among the people and was used for the “building up of the kingdom of god.” As Brigham Young states, the purpose of cooperation was “to bring goods here and sell them as low as they can possibly be sold and let the profits be divided with the people at large”  and to “guard against the development of a moneyed class among the latter-day saints themselves which would rend the social fabric and destroy cohesion and unity”

In 1869, The Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution (ZCMI) was established as a joint stock company in Salt Lake City or a member-owned cooperative. By church mandate, ZCMI then became the central distributor of all goods imported into the territory, with each settlement charged to establish similar cooperatives at the local level. Members were admonished to only do business with the ward and community cooperative stores. Brigham Young believed that ZCMI’s monopoly on regional trade was justified due to its public ownership and the importance given to production over distribution. After ZCMI was established, cooperative industry was encouraged in practically every aspect of economic life. Enterprises such as iron-working, farming, butcher shops, molasses mills, shoe manufacture, wool manufacture, furniture makers, textiles, cotton, and tanneries all formed under cooperative principles and structures.

Korihor, one of the great villains of the Book of Mormon, tried to trick people into thinking that, “every man fared in this life according to the management of the creature; therefore every man prospered according to his genius, and that every man conquered according to his strength; and whatsoever a man did was no crime (Alma 30:17).”

In the Book of Mormon, the prophet Alma wrote of a more egalitarian system, in reference to the Nephites, “…and thus they were all equal, and they did all labor, every man according to his strength. And they did impart of their substance, every man according to that which he had, to the poor, and the needy, and the sick, and the afflicted; and they did not wear costly apparel, yet they were neat and comely. (Alma 1:26-27)

For a short time in the Book of Mormon, the Nephites abandoned their love of riches and established “Zion” — a classless utopia that according to the Book of Mormon, established a socialist society after the resurrected Jesus descended from heaven and visited them. They established a society in which there were no classes, and where “they had all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor, bond and free, but they were all made free, and partakers of the heavenly gift (4 Nephi 3).”
 

The Socialist Party of America peaked in 1912, with presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs getting close to 1 million votes and in the early 20th century, about 40 percent of the members of the Utah Socialist Party were LDS. There were many thousands of socialists in Utah, which was only one of 18 states that had socialists in its state legislature. In fact, there were nine socialist publications in Utah, with the largest, The Intermountain Worker, boasting a circulation of 5,000. LDS socialists. Utah socialists controlled the entire administrations in Bingham, Murray and twice in Eureka.

 Eureka, a mining town, was the center of socialist success. In 1907, the voters of Eureka elected Wilford Woodruff Freckleton to the city council as a socialist. Halfway through his term. Mormon Church authorities called him on a mission to England. Upon his return two years later, he resumed his involvement in the Socialist Party and in 1917 was again elected to the city council on the socialist ticket.

 A.L. Porter, a Mormon and prominent Springville socialist, wrote this declaration of beliefs that was unearthed in the Springville High School gymnasium, dedicated in 1931 (Porter was the janitor): “Our political faith is Socialism, our religious faith is (Mormon) the Latter-day Saints. We are living under capitalism and the wealth of the world is privately owned by individuals … but this building is collectively owned by the community … It is built by wage slavery as all labor at this point in history is …”

In 1981 at the opening of the cornerstone of the Gila Stake Academy in Thatcher, Arizona was revealed a socialist manifesto written by a prominent Mormon of that period, George W. Williams, who helped construct the building. Williams, born in Toquerville, Utah, firmly stated his beliefs, including, “millions are walking the streets of our large cities seeking employment. The capitalists who own the machinery of governments are using every means under their control to hold in check the rise of the workers who are beginning to show their strength …”  Williams expected those who read his statement in the future to “be living in the light of a better day”

More than 100 socialists were elected in Utah in 19 communities during that era, but by 1920 the movement had already peaked and socialism began its slide into irrelevance.

The LDS Church, had sought assimilation at any cost. They had began to privatize their cooperative business ventures throughout the 1880s (and publicly abandoned polygamy in 1890).  In 1882, John Taylor stopped official church sponsorship of the cooperative movement. Eventually local business men began to gain control of the co-ops and the stock fell into fewer and fewer hands and they have practically vanished without a trace in the formal economic sector. The course was set. To survive in America, Mormons would transform themselves into patriotic citizens. The quest for Zion would be replaced by the American dream. The rhetoric of communalism exchanged with a reverence for the free market. The growth of Utah socialism clashed with the LDS Church’s deliberate decision to try to move into the mainstream of American society and as the LDS Church was moving toward a more free-enterprise, capitalistic institution.  Mormon leaders were clearly anti-socialist and anti-union. Out of this springs forth Mitt Romney!!