Dominated by Church : Salt Lake: A Worship of Order

Walking the streets of Salt Lake, it’s difficult not to feel wholesome, maybe even a little bit holy. Tidy, neighborly and as innocent as Mormon values are conservative, Salt Lake is a Perry Como kind of place, an America of the ‘50s holding out against the beat of heavy metal.

This is the city that leads the nation in the per capita consumption of bubble gum and Cracker Jack. It’s a city without an X-rated movie theater, a jolt of wickedness or a discarded beer can in sight, a place where trends and fads come to die. Here, in the Deseret Book shop, this month’s No. 1 best seller is the autobiography of Ezra Taft Benson, the 88-year-old president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS); No. 2 is “Be of Good Cheer” in which the author shares his secrets of happiness.

‘Happy Valley’

“People talk about Salt Lake being Happy Valley,” said Mayor Palmer DePaulis, a political oddity in a state controlled by Republican Mormons with lifelong Utah roots. He is a Democrat, raised in Michigan, a Catholic who once studied for the priesthood. He still considers his election victory in 1985 “pretty remarkable when you think about it,” especially since six of the seven members of the City Council are Mormon, as are about 95% of the state legislators.

“Of course, we do have problems, on a manageable scale: We have juvenile problems, child abuse, drugs, the homeless, just like anywhere else. But sometimes I think there is a tendency in Utah for people to stick their heads in the sand and pretend there are no problems. A lot of this has to do with image, how the people see themselves. And they see themselves as family oriented and they want life to be orderly and nice. Everything has to be in its place.”

Tallest Building in State

A few blocks from City Hall, in a 28-story office building, the tallest in the state, the LDS bureaucracy and its mainly elderly leaders look down on a city where everything feels extraordinarily logical.

The streets (safe at night and never clogged with too many cars during the day) are laid out in numbered grids, eight blocks to a mile, each boulevard 132 feet wide--big enough for an oxen-pulled wagon to make a U-turn. Traffic signals chirp like electronic canaries to aid the blind in crossing, and no one jaywalks.

Parking-enforcement officers seem to lurk behind every snowbank, appearing with ticket in hand the moment a meter’s red flag snaps into place. One hears no raised voices here, senses no naughtiness, expects no raucous debate.

Utah today is the only state that still lives by the teachings of a church. The influence that emanates from the LDS’ office building colors every aspect of life: political, economic, cultural.

“The church is like a 500-pound gorilla; you just have to get out of its way,” one Utah politician said. Indeed, the church’s authority is so sacrosanct that Pat Bagley, the political cartoonist for the non-Mormon Salt Lake Tribune, knows he is free to draw President Reagan in caricature, but not Ezra Taft Benson.

“The overriding rule for me,” he says, “is that the church is off limits.”

Long persecuted for their beliefs, including the practice of polygamy (abolished in 1890 under threat of excommunication), the Mormons have created in their Western Zion a prosperous society that places a premium on self-sufficiency, decency and industriousness. It is also a society in which church decisions and finances are shrouded in secrecy and public criticism of church personalities and policies is muted at some undefined point.

When the Soviet poet Valentina Inozemtseva visited Utah last year and was asked what Salt Lake reminded her of, she replied, after a moment’s hesitation, “the Soviet Union.”

The analogy to the Soviet Union is a widely quoted, though nettlesome, one here, among both Mormons (making up 70% of the state’s 1.6 million residents) and “Gentiles,” as all non-Mormons, including Jews, are called.

Full of Contradictions

Whatever its validity, Utah is undeniably distinctive and full of contradictions. At the same time the nation has been moving in more socially liberal directions, Utah has grown more conservative, socially and politically, and that in turn has created conflict between civic realities and religious ideals.

Contradiction No. 1: Here’s what President Benson told the LDS priesthood last year about the role of women: “ . . . We know that sometimes the mother works outside of the home at the encouragement, or even insistence, of her husband. It is he who wants the items of convenience that the extra income can buy. . . . I say to all of you, the Lord has charged men with the responsibility to provide for their families in such a way that the wife is allowed to fulfill her role as mother in the home.”

The economic reality, said Jinnah Kelson, executive director of Phoenix Institute, a women’s-help organization, is that most Utah families today need two income-earners. In fact, the percentage of working women in Utah now is higher than the national average, though 80% of them earn less than $16,000 a year. Utah competes with Louisiana as the nation’s most discriminatory in wage equality, with women earning 53 cents for every dollar a man makes.

Contradiction No. 2: The Mormons’ emphasis on family and their preoccupation with increasing the size of the flock has made Mormonism one of America’s fastest growing faiths (present membership: 6.4 million worldwide) and Utah one of the nation’s fastest growing states. Utah’s birth rate is now roughly twice the national average and is approaching that of India’s.

That growth has challenged the quality of Utah’s progressive education system, based on the notion that “the glory of God is intelligence.” Utah’s classrooms are the most crowded in the United States and the state’s per capita spending on education one of the lowest. Although Utah is second only to Alaska in the percentage of students completing high school, the problem of overcrowding is likely to worsen: Utah has the highest ratio of residents 17 years and younger in the country.

Unusual Drinking Laws

Contradiction No. 3: Getting a drink in Utah is at once easy and difficult. The other day an out-of-state businessman walked into the Marriott Hotel’s bar and ordered a martini. The bartender sent him down the corridor, where he stood in line with 30 others to purchase his cocktail at a tiny state-owned, hotel-run liquor store. He returned to the bar with two 1.7-ounce miniatures of gin and a quart of vermouth. The bartender provided him a glass with ice and an olive for $2.50, and the visitor, at long last, mixed the drink himself at the bar.

Sinful though drinking may be, liquor taxes raised $8.8 million last year for the state’s school-lunch program. Three years ago, the State Liquor Commission, fearing that the cumbersome drinking laws were scaring off conventioneers and tourists, drew up legislation to simplify the process of getting a drink. Not a single state senator would sponsor the bill--until the church said it did not object. Then virtually all rushed to become sponsors.

Contradiction No. 4: The state attorney general (whose agents raided a bingo game last year in this non-gambling, non-lottery state) has ruled that the word “condom” cannot be used in school. Nor can the term “sexual intercourse.” Thus, an after-school, voluntary lecture on AIDS prevention was canceled recently in the Alpine School District when the teacher realized the futility of the gathering. Other districts have banned Red Cross booklets and films on AIDS prevention under the state statute that forbids the mention of contraception in school.

There were, though, 48 cases of AIDS reported in Utah last year and, despite the church’s aversion to homosexuality, the gay community is said to be the largest in the Mountain States. The state superintendent in public instruction, James R. Moss, is asking legislators to liberalize the statute, which is written so broadly that encyclopedias, dictionaries and newspapers also could be banned because they provide information on contraception.

Goes Against the Grain

“It’s certainly true that some of this goes against the grain of what is happening in society,” said LDS spokesman Jerry Cahill, a former city editor of the church-owned Deseret News. “But I suspect the church will continue to stick to its guns on questions of morality, especially sexual morality. If anything changes, we would hope society does. We continue to teach the only acceptable sexual involvement is between a man and a woman who are married to each other. We believe in abstinence before marriage and fidelity after marriage.”

For the Mormons, Salt Lake is what the Vatican is to Catholics and Jerusalem is to Muslims and Jews. Its atmosphere is clubby, for the church is the community. The church, often said to be the richest in the world on a per capita basis, owns locally a daily newspaper (the Deseret News), a television station, an insurance company, several banks, a $50-million shopping mall, a department store and much real estate. The church’s denial--until a revelation by the LDS president in 1978--of full Mormon membership to blacks explains at least partly why only 1.5% of the city’s 165,000 residents are black.

And the church’s omnipotent influence on daily life has convinced some prospective residents that they would always be outsiders if they moved here, for the Mormons historically were a cloistered people whose religious survival was based on a strong communal spirit and homogeneousness.

“Salt Lake was one of the toughest cities in the country to recruit for,” said John Lloyd of Phoenix, a former executive “headhunter.”

“The perception people had was that it’s a closed community. At one point I was considering moving my own business there. My wife and I were overwhelmed by the beauty of the place, but she had a strong fear of Salt Lake. And I came to realize that I could never feel part of that community, although I’ve lived everywhere and I’m one of the most adaptable people I know.”

Push by Missionaries

On the outskirts of Salt Lake, at the University of Utah, law professor Edwin Firmage, a Democrat and a Mormon of liberal persuasion, offers an interesting scenario for the future of the LDS church--and, indirectly, of Utah itself.

There are, he pointed out, 35,000 Mormon missionaries throughout the world. They are expected to make 200,000 converts to Mormonism this year and, if present trends continue, the church before long will be predominantly Spanish-speaking.

“I think the Third World will force onto us some radical choices,” he said. “Will we welcome in people of different color, custom, lower economic rungs? Will we do this on a basis of equality or not? That’s the challenge and the crisis.

“This incessant missionary push may move the church away from the political and social conservatism that is its hallmark now . . . and that to me is a kind of joy.”