Mormons Grow but Face Hostility : Religion: The church has been attacked with words and graffiti. But the Santa Clarita Valley unit has expanded to 5,100 members.

Mormons in the Santa Clarita Valley, where Magic Mountain’s rides are part of the landscape, have been on an emotional roller coaster of their own in recent months.

In September, an anti-Mormon speaker gave talks at fundamentalist churches in the area, leaflets critical of Mormon beliefs were circulated in residential neighborhoods and vandals scrawled anti-Mormon slogans one night on church property in Valencia.

But Mormons were pleased when the Santa Clarita Valley Interfaith Council reacted to the flyers by taking a stance against such religious warfare.

And Mormon churchgoers celebrated a special service this month marking the division of the Santa Clarita Stake, or administrative center, into two such units--a step necessitated by a membership that has grown from 3,000 nine years ago to 5,100 today.

Asked about the vandalism in September at the Valencia church facility, outgoing stake President Gary L. Larkins said that kind of incident is rare.

“Thankfully, we haven’t had a lot of trouble,” he said.

Church officials said the writing on walls called Mormons “heretics” who were going to hell. The graffiti was washed off or disguised before churchgoers arrived for services that Sunday morning, officials said.

The incident occurred about the time that Granny Geer, a widely traveled critic of Mormonism, was giving talks at five Pentecostal and Baptist churches in the Santa Clarita Valley.

Pastor Ken Teel of Lily of the Valley Christian Center in Saugus, one of the churches where Geer spoke, said his congregation also distributed 5,000 flyers to homes that month warning residents against door-to-door missionaries of Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormon Church.

“The Bible is clear that we are to warn persons about many false teachings that are dangerous; Mormonism is a cult that misleads people,” said Teel, whose church is affiliated with the Assemblies of God.

“Maybe there is a chance someone will misinterpret this warning as the right to destroy property, but we abhor such acts. We don’t want that.”

The Santa Clarita Valley is also home to The Master’s College, where history professor Ed Gruss teaches a class each semester on religious groups considered sects by the fundamentalist school. Gruss said a Mormon spokesman is invited to speak and answer questions on his church but that the class perspective “is not completely objective.”

“From our standpoint, we are just responding to the Mormon position that all churches but theirs are basically false,” Gruss said.

Based on 19th-Century founder Joseph Smith’s claims of revelations that included the “Book of Mormon,” the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints asserts that it is the true Christian church restored to its original teachings.

After a century of persecution because of its longtime practice of polygamy and other beliefs, the Mormon Church kept to itself for 50 years--using the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and a clean-cut family image to serve as a public relations buffer to evangelical attacks on its theology and rituals.

But in the late 1980s, the church reversed itself and sought to involve itself in interfaith and ecumenical projects led by friendlier, non-evangelical clergy. That was evident most recently in the San Fernando Valley when the Mormon stake center in Van Nuys was the host of an interfaith observance of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.

Not many months after the Santa Clarita Valley Interfaith Council formed in 1989, a Mormon representative joined the board. The Valencia stake facility serves as the council’s meeting place.

When anti-Mormon leaflets began showing up in doorways in September, a member of the Bahai faith who was on the council displayed a copy and urged the board to raise objections to the church listed as the source, Lily of the Valley Christian Center.

Council President Preston Price, a United Methodist pastor, wrote a letter to the Christian center objecting to the tone of the leaflet.

“While it is not hate-crime activity, it encourages compartmentalization of various groups and that gives rise to vandalism and instances of hatred and bigotry,” Price said in an interview.

Price said one goal of the council, which includes Catholic and Jewish representatives, is to encourage amicable relations among local faith groups.

But he said anti-Mormon feeling is not confined to conservative churches.

“To my chagrin, some members of my own church could not bring themselves to an interfaith Thanksgiving service that we held at a Mormon church,” Price said.

Nevertheless, Monte McKeon, one of the two new Mormon stake presidents named this month to serve the Santa Clarita Valley, said the church feels very fortunate to be associated with the interfaith council.

“I’ve lived here since 1964 and we have great feelings toward people in the Santa Clarita Valley,” said McKeon, who is also part-owner of the Howard & Phil’s Western Wear stores, founded by his father. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon, a Santa Clarita city councilman, is one of Monte McKeon’s four brothers.

For Larkins, chief operating officer for the House of Fabrics national store chain, his release this month from nine years of volunteer duty as stake president means more time for family and leisure. The Mormon Church has no paid clergy, relying instead on volunteer service.

“I was spending anywhere from 15 to 20 hours a week counseling people and working with bishops of our 14 wards,” Larkins said. A number of wards, or congregations, make up each stake.

The appointments of the new stake presidents--McKeon and investment banker Reed Halladay--were announced at a service Feb. 7 attended by 2,500 people (including 500 linked by television)--less than 24 hours after they were interviewed by a Mormon official from Salt Lake City and offered the posts.