Matthew Bowman. Worldmark Encyclopedia of Religious Practices. Editor: Thomas Riggs, 2nd Edition, Volume 1, Gale, 2015.
Overview
The Latter-day Saint movement—including the Salt Lake City-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or LDS Church, and several smaller sects—is a “restorationist” Christian movement founded in the late 1820s during a time of intense religious activity in the United States. It shared with other restorationist movements the conviction that existing churches had strayed so completely from early Christianity that they were incapable of reform from within. However, unlike most Protestants and other restorationist groups, which sought to model their religion on close readings of the Bible, the Latter-day Saints believed that their leader, Joseph Smith (1805-1844), was a prophet and that only Smith and others in the Latter-day Saint movement had the priestly authority required to perform ordinances (sacred rituals such as baptism).
First organized in upstate New York, the Saints followed Smith westward through the United States and eventually to Illinois. Often persecuted, they were called “Mormons” by their critics—a derisive term drawn from the Book of Mormon, the work of new scripture Smith had produced—but they eventually embraced the term. In 1844 Smith was killed, and the movement splintered. A majority of Saints followed church leader Brigham Young (1801-1877) to Utah, while others stayed in Illinois or moved to Texas or Wisconsin.
In 2013 the LDS Church claimed some 15 million members, around 7 million of whom lived in the United States, mostly in Utah and elsewhere in the West. A majority of the remaining 8 million lived in Latin America, although the LDS Church has a strong presence in Polynesia and Africa and has had congregations in Europe since Smith’s lifetime. The church is known in the United States for its strong defense of the traditional nuclear family and general cultural conservatism, which has attracted criticism in the United States but has increased its appeal in the southern hemisphere.
History
Joseph Smith claimed his first revelation occurred at age 14, in 1820. God and Jesus Christ appeared before him in the woods near his home in Palmyra, New York, telling him to join no church. According to Smith, a few years later an angel gave him golden plates containing an ancient record called the Book of Mormon, which Smith translated through divine inspiration. In 1830, one month after the publication of the Book of Mormon, Smith organized the LDS Church in Manchester, New York, restoring, he claimed, the primitive church founded by Jesus Christ. For believers the Book of Mormon was a revealed companion to the Bible. Others, however, thought that it was a blasphemous competitor to the Bible and that Smith was a false prophet.
As Smith’s followers grew in number, so did hostility toward them, leading to the initially pejorative term “Mormons.” A pattern of new revelation by Smith, renewed hostility toward Mormons, and migration west was repeated in the church’s successive relocations, from New York to Ohio in 1831, Ohio to Missouri over the course of several years in the mid-1830s, and finally to Illinois in 1839. As the Mormons moved, they also grew more distinctive as a community, developing increasingly esoteric doctrines, religious rituals, and a strong communal identity. With each move Smith built towns to gather the large numbers of new converts from throughout North America and eventually the British Isles. The influx of a large and socially exclusive population to an already volatile American frontier drew increasing suspicion, and in 1838 Missouri’s governor directed his militia to assist the ad hoc efforts of mobs to expel from the state more than 10,000 Latter-day Saints.
The Mormons fled to Illinois, where they built a city called Nauvoo, Smith’s most complete effort to create a society to reflect his religious vision. Smith served as mayor, commanded a militia, and in 1841 introduced the practice of polygamy, which allowed a husband to have more than one wife. Although Smith hoped to keep it secret, polygamy quickly became the subject of rumors, exposés, and internal dissent. The combination of new doctrine and political power proved provocative, and in 1844 Smith was killed by an anti-Mormon mob. Upon the death of its founder, the Latter-day Saint movement splintered in several directions. Contesting claimants to leadership brought small groups to Wisconsin and Texas, and Nauvoo soon emptied under pressure of raiding mobs. Many of the scattered were gathered in 1860 into what became the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (later headquartered in Independence, Missouri, and in 2001 renamed the Community of Christ).
The majority of the Latter-day Saints in Nauvoo followed Brigham Young to the West. At the time of Smith’s death, Young was the president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles—a powerful leadership body in the church—and, therefore, had significant pull with LDS members. Along with large numbers of converts from Europe, this group pioneered settlements throughout the Rocky Mountain territories, establishing a religious-based government, or theocracy. In 1850 Young became governor of the newly created territory of Utah. At the same time, however, the U.S. government attempted, both violently and nonviolently, to make Mormonism conform to 19th-century American moral and political norms, sending the U.S. Army and federal marshals to Utah to suppress polygamy and monitor the church’s involvement in territorial government. It was the Mormon church’s eventual acceptance of the separation of ecclesiastical and political office, as well as its late-century renunciation of polygamy, that allowed Utah to become a state in 1896 and that led to a measure of social acceptance for the Latter-day Saints.
In the 20th century, following renewed emphasis on global missionary work after World War II, the church regularized its procedures and policies to accommodate rapid growth in the southern hemisphere. A process called “correlation” standardized church curriculum, practice, and even meetinghouse architecture all over the world. In the mid-20th century some Mormon leaders embraced distinctly conservative social and theological positions and a pessimistic outlook about the liberalizing sexual and moral trends in American society. However, in the early 21st century, as the church found itself once again the focus of national attention because of the high-profile presidential campaign of Republican Mitt Romney, a Mormon, church leaders adopted an increasingly upbeat public stance, emphasizing Mormon diversity, charitable efforts, and focus on family life. By 2013 there were 15 million LDS Church members in approximately 123 nations and 21 territories, with membership growing at an annual rate of 3 percent per year.
Central Doctrines
The Latter-day Saints worship a godhead composed of three separate divine beings: God the Father, his Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost, united in purpose and holiness but not in substance. Thus, the Latter-day Saints do not believe in the traditional idea of the Trinity, which holds that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are one God of three persons. This, combined with the church’s doctrine of “eternal progression”—a belief that human souls are the spiritual children of God and thus possess divine potential—has led some to argue that the LDS Church is not Christian. Yet the church shares with traditional Christianity the doctrine of the Father’s sovereignty and of Christ’s divinity as God’s only begotten son in the flesh, whose sacrificial atonement and resurrection is the sole means of overcoming human sin and death. Equally central to Latter-day Saint belief are the traditional Christian practices of baptism and the Lord’s Supper—which Mormons believe must be performed by proper priestly authority—and doctrines of repentance, faith, and prayer.
While endorsing the traditional biblical revelation of God through Jesus Christ, the Latter-day Saints also believe that God has spoken and continues to speak to his covenant people through prophets, who are called to lead the church according to contemporary needs. The chief example of such a prophet is Smith, but his successors are also regarded as modern prophets. Smith regularly issued statements that he said were revealed to him by God; more recent leaders have been more reticent to do so. One of the most recent examples of this was in 1978, when Spencer Kimball (1895-1985), the president of the church at the time, issued a statement revoking a ban on ordination of members of African descent to priesthood office, which had been in place since Young’s time. Kimball declared that God had directed him to remove the ban, and that statement is now canonized as part of Mormon scripture, along with a footnote indicating the institution of the ban was of uncertain origin. Individual members seek divine revelation on matters of personal concern, especially with respect to their own salvation and church responsibilities. Mormons call this doctrine “continuing revelation.”
Moral Code of Conduct
The Latter-day Saints subscribe to the classic ethical values associated with New Testament Christianity, such as love of God and love of neighbor (broadly defined), honesty, and charity. In addition to its emphasis on moral integrity, the church places a high value on sexual chastity, including abstinence prior to, and fidelity within, marriage.
Sacred Books
The LDS canon includes four books that are considered equally authoritative: the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. The church officially endorses the King James Version of the Bible, though it uses a version with Smith’s inspired commentary and clarification (called the Joseph Smith Translation) contained in footnotes.
The Book of Mormon is a 500-page narrative of an Israelite civilization in the Americas. It reads much like the early narratives of the Hebrew Bible, featuring God’s direction to various prophets and patriarchs, stories of wars and families, and constant exhortation to follow God’s commandments and to believe in Jesus Christ. Late in the book a resurrected Jesus Christ appears, repeats many of his teachings as recorded in the New Testament, and calls 12 apostles to organize a church. Since the 1980s, when the then-president of the LDS Church exhorted Mormons to study it, the Book of Mormon has become the central work of devotional life in the church. This is less true in other Latter-day Saint movements.
The Doctrine and Covenants contains about a hundred of Smith’s revelations concerning the organization of the church and clarification of its doctrines. Many of these are written in the first-person voice of God; others are statements describing church organization, procedure, and policy. In keeping with his malleable view of Scripture, Smith occasionally edited and combined these revelations. In 1921 a set of early sermons Smith had approved, called the Lectures on Faith, were discarded from the Doctrine and Covenants because they were not in keeping with doctrine elucidated in Smith’s later revelations.
The Pearl of Great Price is a miscellany of Smith’s other writings, many of which are revisions and elaborations on biblical narratives. The two most prominent works in the Pearl of Great Price are the Book of Abraham and Book of Moses, both of which are brief narratives describing the interaction of each biblical figure with God and containing a slightly altered summary of the creation narrative in Genesis. The Book of Abraham contains several distinctive Latter-day Saint doctrines, most prominently the preexistence of human souls.
Sacred Symbols
On top of every LDS temple is a statue of an angel blowing a trumpet. A common motif in LDS imagery, this figure symbolizes both a specific event and a religious ideal. Historically it refers to the angel Moroni, who gave Smith the golden plates upon which the Book of Mormon was based. Moreover, since Moroni is equated with the angel bearing the Word of God to the world prophesied in Revelation 14:6, the statue also symbolizes the church’s sense of divine commission to evangelize the entire world.
In 1995 the LDS Church altered its official logo to more prominently display the name of Jesus Christ. This was an attempt to reaffirm its basic Christian belief and to avert a common mistake in the media of referring to the church as the “Church of Latter-day Saints.”
Early and Modern Leaders
Besides Joseph Smith, Brigham Young is probably the most famous Latter-day Saint. Young led the Mormons in their colonization of the western United States. In the 20th century the leaders of the church became increasingly well educated, and since the mid-20th century they have usually been trained in business and the law—a sharp contrast from the largely uneducated and unpolished Smith and Young. Gordon B. Hinckley (1910-2008), who served as president of the church from 1995 until his death, is perhaps the most important of the church’s modern leaders. A warm and media-savvy personality, Hinckley embodied Mormonism’s early-21st-century pivot toward increased media openness. He also devoted great attention to the growing international body of Mormons, who came to outnumber American Mormons during his presidency. In 2008 Thomas S. Monson (1927- ), a former newspaper publisher known for his mild pastoral style and concern for the poor, became president of the church. Under his leadership the church added “To care for the poor and needy” to its official “missions.” (The other missions include missionary work and preparing all Mormons for salvation.)
Major Theologians and Authors
Latter-day Saints give little weight to formal scholastic theology, in part because of their view that Greek philosophy corrupted early Christianity and their great reverence for the revelatory powers of the president of the church. The church sponsors no professional theologians, and clergy generally spend their energy on sermons and exhortation rather than formal theology.
Many church leaders, however, have devoted time and resources toward expounding on Mormon doctrine. Among the most important since Smith’s time were the brothers Parley (1807-1857) and Orson Pratt (1811-1881), who developed theories of Mormon restorationism; the early 20th century thinkers B. H. Roberts (1857-1933) and James Talmage (1862-1933), who sought to bring Mormon theology into harmony with science; and the mid-20th-century writers Joseph Fielding Smith (1876-1972) and Bruce McConkie (1915-1985), who stressed a strictly literal interpretation of Scripture and hostility toward the theory of evolution. Smith and McConkie remain influential thinkers in Mormonism, though their influence is waning as more recent leaders of the church have emphasized the pastoral and devotional aspects of their leadership and de-emphasized the importance of doctrinal rigor in favor of exhorting Latter-day Saints to live well rather than to believe specific doctrine.
Organizational Structure
LDS congregations are organized geographically and are called “wards.” Several wards form a “stake.” Both of these divisions date to the time of Smith, as do the titles of their leaders: a bishop presides over a ward, and a stake president over a stake. Both are lay leaders who serve for a limited tenure.
As the church has expanded to other parts of the world, larger organizations have been formed: several stakes make up an “area,” the aggregation of which covers the world. Areas are presided over by officials known as “seventies.” From the level of the seventies up, church leaders are known as “general authorities” and serve full time. The highest-ranked general authorities are the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and the three-member First Presidency, headed by the president of the church.
All these men serve for life. Upon the death of the president of the church, he is succeeded by the longest-serving member of the Quorum. This precedent dates to Young’s replacement of Smith, as does the move to prominence in leadership of the Quorum of the Twelve. All these officials are men. Women are not ordained into the priesthood of the church. The church’s official reason for this is, simply, that God has not directed it be otherwise. Smith, like most other 19th-century religious leaders, ordained only men, and in the absence of divine direction otherwise, the church follows that tradition. Women serve in leadership positions in various auxiliaries in the church and regularly preach and teach in worship services, but they perform no priesthood rituals.
Houses of Worship and Holy Places
Formal LDS worship occurs in both chapels and temples. Chapels are the site of regular Sunday worship services and are architecturally unique among houses of worship because of their absence of the cross. This reflects the LDS Church’s emphasis on Jesus’s resurrection. More distinctive are the more than 140 temples built throughout the world. Temples, open only to members of the church, are used for formal rites of worship, including an initiation ceremony, or “endowment,” and the sealing of marriages.
Certain locations, such as Temple Square in Salt Lake City and places associated with Smith’s ministry, are deeply meaningful to the Latter-day Saints as sites of religious sacrifice or revelatory experience. The first temple Smith built was in Kirtland, Ohio; as of 2013 it was owned by the Community of Christ and was being used as an assembly hall. The LDS Church, however, owns several sites nearby, and Latter-day Saints from a variety of denominations regularly visit Kirtland. A similar arrangement holds true in Nauvoo, Illinois: There the Community of Christ owns Smith’s homes and the store Smith ran, while the LDS Church owns the homes of many other early Mormons, including Young. Mormons treat Kirtland and Nauvoo as pilgrimage sites, and both locations are regularly visited for spiritual and devotional reasons.
Temple Square in Salt Lake City is the home of the Salt Lake Temple, a massive Gothic structure that took nearly 40 years to complete. It is surrounded by buildings important to the church: the Tabernacle, where Young regularly held gatherings; the modern Conference Center, which hosts the twice-yearly General Conference of the LDS Church; and various museums and administration buildings. It is a popular tourist attraction for Mormons and non-Mormons alike.
What is Sacred
The Latter-day Saints normally do not ascribe particular sanctity to objects. Rather, they take literally the Hebrew Bible’s notion of a priestly people who, in virtue of their relationship to God, are able to mediate the divine for the sake of the world. In this manner, Latter-day Saints believe that God acts to sanctify the world through humans who can consecrate, bless, and heal through prayer, anointing, and laying on of hands. However, Mormons do embrace the notion of sacred space: Latter-day Saint temples are considered holy ground, requiring sacred clothing and ecclesiastical endorsement to enter. They are closed to nonmembers of the church.
Holidays and Festivals
The Latter-day Saints observe Easter and Christmas. They also commemorate the Mormon exodus from Illinois and heroic crossing of the American continent every July 24, the date Young arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. It is officially observed in Utah as “Pioneer Day” and is celebrated with parades in Salt Lake City and other Utah towns; frequently Mormon congregations will sponsor reenactments of the pioneer trek, sending youth and adult leaders to pull handcarts and lead wagons into the valley. The Salt Lake City parade has become increasingly popular in the 21st century.
Mode of Dress
Latter-day Saints dress in the fashion of their respective cultures, adapting it only to observe certain standards related to modesty, particularly for women, who are discouraged from wearing short skirts or sleeveless shirts. Temple-going church members wear at all times underclothing resembling a white T-shirt and boxer briefs. Called “the garment” from the Genesis reference to the clothing God gave to Adam and Eve upon their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, it symbolizes a dedication to serving God and divine protection. The garment has been increasingly considered a device for maintaining modesty in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Mormons embrace formal attire for Sunday worship: men are expected to wear suits, or at least a shirt and tie, and women wear dresses. The same clothing is expected of Mormon missionaries.
Dietary Practices
Latter-day Saints observe a dietary code called “the Word of Wisdom,” revealed to Smith in 1833 and formalized as a requirement of church members in the 1920s. It forbids the consumption of alcohol, tea, coffee, and tobacco and advocates wise eating habits as foundational to both spiritual and physical strength. For much of the 19th century the Word of Wisdom was considered just that—sound advice offered by God, which church leaders often repeated but which was not understood to be a divine commandment. However, as the Latter-day Saints integrated more fully into American culture in the 20th century, leaders of the church began to emphasize the Word of Wisdom and in 1921 made it an expectation of all Latter-day Saints who wished to worship in temples.
The Word of Wisdom today is perhaps the most dramatic point of distinction between Mormons and the world around them and is often invoked within the church as a boundary marker that reminds Mormons of their distinctiveness. Since the mid-20th century many Mormons believed tea and coffee were proscribed because they contain caffeine; the same was assumed about caffeinated sodas. However, in 2012, in response to media inquiry, the LDS Church’s public affairs office clarified that caffeinated sodas are not prohibited by the Word of Wisdom.
Rituals
The foundation of Smith’s restorationism was his claim that the priesthood authority Jesus Christ had given to the Apostle Peter had vanished from the earth before Smith himself restored it. Mormons, like Catholics, believe that sacraments performed by priestly authority are necessary for salvation, and thus their religious life is infused with ritual. However, Mormons use the term “ordinance” rather than “sacrament.”
Beginning at age 12, all Mormon men are ordained to priesthood office and are given a role in administering these ordinances. The most common is the Lord’s Supper, which Mormons call “the sacrament” and which is administered in Mormon services by teenage boys who bless the bread and water and pass it to the congregation. It is the central act of Mormon Sunday services and is described to Mormons as a weekly opportunity to renew the covenants they made at baptism to obey the commandments of God. After the administration of the Lord’s Supper, Mormon Sunday services resemble Protestant Sunday services, with a focus on hymns and sermons. Baptisms are usually administered outside worship services. Mormons, who hold to believer’s baptism rather than infant baptism, are baptized by immersion at the age of eight; they understand baptism as a covenant to obey God’s commandments and believe one must be old enough to understand that obligation.
Additional ordinances are performed in temples: the sealing of marriages, which are brief wedding ceremonies in which Mormons believe a husband and wife are joined for all eternity, and the endowment, a sacred drama of the creation and the fall of Adam and Eve performed for an audience told to view Adam and Eve as proxies for themselves and punctuated with vows to obey God’s commandments. In temples Mormons also perform proxy baptism and endowments for deceased persons who did not receive such ordinances while alive. As Mormons believe that such ordinances are essential for one’s salvation, they believe that proxy baptism and proxy endowment offer the deceased a chance to accept the rituals and be saved in the afterlife.
Rites of Passage
Membership in the church occurs at the age of eight through baptism by immersion and confirmation. Receiving the endowment, full-time missionary work, and marriage in a temple all mark important transitions to adult status within the church. The temple is the preferred site of LDS marriages because only in the temple may a couple be joined for all eternity. The dead are buried in simple ceremonies that emphasize the certainty of resurrection and include prayers over the grave.
Membership
The LDS Church keeps membership records that include all persons who have been baptized into the church in order to track the administration of the ordinances. Names are removed from this record only upon death, excommunication, or at the request of the individual.
Because they believe that the LDS Church is the only religion with the proper priestly authority to administer ordinances deemed essential for salvation, Mormons since Joseph Smith’s time have been vigorous evangelists. In 2013 the LDS Church had 55,000 missionaries, organized by the church’s central administration into 350 missions in more than 120 countries. Serving voluntarily and at their own expense, LDS missionaries are typically college age and devote up to two years introducing people to the church. These young missionaries are sent all over the globe, where they learn the local language and attempt to locate possible converts through various methods, such as gaining referrals from church members and knocking on doors.
In addition, the LDS Church encourages public interest in its beliefs through television and radio programming, particularly through the broadcast of church events and through advertising. Most prominent of the church’s ad campaigns in the 21st century was the “I’m a Mormon” campaign, which sought to advertise the ethnic and lifestyle diversity within the church. The church also maintains two major Web sites: http://www.lds.org, which contains official information about the church, and http://mormon.org, which is intended for interested outsiders.
Religious Tolerance
Its doctrine of the necessity of free choice, as well as its experience of religious violence, has led the LDS Church to be supportive of religious tolerance. Smith’s brief catechism for the church, the Articles of Faith, declares, “We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege.” The church welcomes opportunities to cooperate with other religions for the benefit of society at large. However, because it teaches that it uniquely possesses priestly authority and that its leaders possess special access to God’s will, the church does not participate in ecumenical movements that seek common ground among various Christian faiths.
Social Justice
The church requires a biblically based 10 percent tithe on each member’s income that is reallocated through an extensive welfare program designed to care for the poor in each congregation. Its welfare department administers farms, storehouses, and canneries designed to aid the needy both inside and outside the church. Additional donations support educational programs. Members are also expected to make generous offerings for the benefit of the poor by fasting two meals one day a month and donating the cash equivalent (or more) of the meals for distribution to the poor. Much of this money has been allocated for global relief efforts, including those in Haiti, New Orleans, and Southeast Asia.
The LDS Church also has an extensive educational program, including the several institutions for higher learning in the Brigham Young University system (in Provo, Utah; Rexburg, Idaho; and Laie, Hawaii) and religious education for young people. It recently developed a Perpetual Education Program, which offers interest-free college loans to needy Mormons who served a mission, with particular emphasis on aiding members of the church in the southern hemisphere.
Social Life
One of the distinctive and central beliefs of the LDS Church is that the family is ordained by God to function for the salvation of its members and is empowered to do so through temple ordinances. “No success,” states a common church teaching, “can compensate for failure within the home.” In 1995, while Hawaii was entertaining the first same-sex marriage laws in the United States, the First Presidency issued “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” declaring the importance of the institution and endorsing traditional gender roles within it. The proclamation declares that the husband holds primary responsibility to provide for the family, while a wife is in charge of raising and nurturing the children. The church’s emphasis on traditional gender roles is mirrored in its administration: all men above the age of 12 are ordained to priesthood office and thus dominate the administration and decision making of the church. Women, however, preach regularly and administer several auxiliary programs, including the Relief Society, a women’s organization present in every Mormon congregation, and youth programs for children and young women.
During the 19th century Mormon women were involved in national women’s suffrage and other women’s rights organizations. Beginning in the 1970s, however, church leaders generally looked at the modern women’s movement with some suspicion and encouraged women to remain in the home rather than seek employment. Though some outspoken feminist activists have left the church or been excommunicated, the rhetoric of church leaders has gradually become more accommodating. For example, in 2013 women were invited for the first time to pray in the church’s General Conference. Twenty-first-century church leaders also have begun to stress the importance of education for women and that there is some benefit to women working outside the home in some circumstances.
Controversial Issues
The church’s sacramental view of marriage and the family places it on the conservative side of many controversial questions, especially those related to sex and gender. In the 1970s and early 1980s, church leadership mounted an organized campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have deemed unconstitutional any laws that distinguished between the genders. Church leaders feared that the amendment would weaken traditional gender roles, particularly in terms of marriage and childbearing, and the Relief Society organized voting campaigns that contributed to its defeat.
Beginning in the mid-1990s the church urged members to contribute money and volunteer time to fight the legalization of same-sex marriages in certain U.S. states, a stance that, by the 2008 election campaign, attracted widespread publicity and frequent harsh criticism. Early rhetoric from church leaders about homosexuality was often unforgiving. Today the church regards homosexual activity as a sin but is careful not to take a position on whether the origin of homosexuality is in nature or human choice. In recent years the church has made efforts to indicate that gay and lesbian members are welcome to full participation provided that they remain celibate. Similarly, the church urges its members to embrace traditional gender roles in marriage, to have children early in marriage, and to avoid divorce. It prohibits abortion except in certain extreme circumstances related to rape, incest, or the health of the mother.
The church’s staunch stance in favor of the nuclear family continues to be challenged by the practice of polygamy by certain fundamentalist Mormons. Polygamy is an excommunicable offense in the LDS Church, and church leaders frequently ask the media not to refer to fundamentalist Mormon churches as “Mormon.” However, the persistence of its practitioners and the regular appearance of polygamists like Tom Green and Warren Jeffs in the media mean that it remains an issue.
The LDS Church has faced questions on the practice of proxy baptism. Many groups find the practice of proxy baptism for the dead offensive, and the most vocal have been Jewish groups disturbed by the proxy baptism of Holocaust victims. In 1995 and again in 2012, LDS leaders agreed to cease the practice for Holocaust victims, unless the proxy ordinance was requested by a family member of the deceased. However, the system of proxy ordinance work has traditionally been very decentralized, and after the 1995 agreement church leaders found it difficult to enforce its wishes on eager Mormons who performed the work either in defiance or in ignorance of the agreement. In 2012 the practice was placed under tighter restrictions.
Cultural Impact
Through dramatic representations in literature and film, such as Zane Grey’s The Riders of the Purple Sage, the Latter-day Saints have long symbolized paradoxical elements in the American mythos: hardy Western pioneers and subversive fanatics, all-American citizens and dangerous outsiders. This double-mindedness about the Mormons is perhaps no better represented than in HBO’s television series Big Love (2006-11), which featured a polygamous family menaced by an oppressive LDS Church.
In the 21st century the Latter-day Saints have come to represent the simultaneous success and naiveté of the American middle class—as seen, for example, in the famed Broadway play and subsequent film Angels in America by Tony Kushner (1956- ) and the Tony Award-winning musical The Book of Mormon. Cultural productions by the church itself include weekly broadcasts by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and elaborate plays staged at various LDS historical sites, such as the Hill Cumorah pageant in Palmyra, New York. These sites have been meticulously restored by the church to encourage tourism and the propagation of its message.
Prominent Mormon artists whose work has been particularly influential both within the church and outside it include the award-winning science fiction author Orson Scott Card (1951- ), who has scripted several church productions; the essayist Eugene England (1933-2001), who founded Dialogue, a prominent journal of Mormon thought and culture; the nationally respected painter Minerva Teichert (1888-1976), whose work is frequently displayed in Mormon meetinghouses; and the Osmond family of musicians, who became particularly popular in the United States in the 1970s and remain prominent. More recently the young-adult novelist Stephenie Meyer (1973- ), author of the Twilight series, American Idol runner-up David Archuleta (1990- ), and rock musician Brandon Flowers (1981- ) of the Killers have entered the ranks of well-known Mormon artists.