Mormons take care of their own
As host Tess Vigeland hosts the show from Salt Lake City, we get a brief history of Mormons and their unique way of providing for one another in crisis from journalist and author Ken Verdoia.
Journalist and author Ken Verdoia (PBS)
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Tess Vigeland: Utah is no stranger to crises, usually of biblical proportions. Plagues of crickets eat the crops. Mines collapse. Through it all, Utahans came together and forged ahead.
How does that pioneer spirit carry into today's financial upheaval? For our visit to Salt Lake City we turned to local journalist and author Ken Verdoia. He briefed us on the economic history of the place, going back to the 1840s.
Ken Verdoia: In pioneering settlements, Salt Lake City was balanced on the head of a pin of agriculture, subsistence agriculture if you will: pioneer farms trying to produce enough food for the network of Mormons that had settled the Salt Lake Valley area.
[Mormon folk song]: Oh what a dreary place this was when first the Mormons found it. They said the land it was no good and the water was no gooder and bare idea of living here was enough to make men shudder...
That doesn't change until the 1870s with the first infusion of non-Mormons and they begin a mining boom, which drives the economy all the way up to the Great Depression of the 1930s. When mining prices teeter in the East coast, your mining economy goes under.
Utah was devastated by the effects of the Great Depression -- huge unemployment numbers in Utah -- and they had a sense that the only people they could count on were each other. They developed a very progressive social welfare system in the 1930s that became the envy of the New Deal. Roosevelt administration people were sent out to Salt Lake City to study the Mormon church's welfare system for caring for its own.
Every Mormon in good standing gives 10 percent back to the church for the pool of funds that provide food, clothing and shelter for members that are in a time of trial. But in the instant case, this church has an extraordinary ability to render assistance to members in good standing that are in financial crisis.
The Salt Lake City population is now pretty evenly balanced between Mormon and non-Mormon. On one hand, we have these personal traits of fiscal austerity, conservative and saving money for a rainy day, and yet conversely, we have this dark side that wants to make a quick buck the easy way. We have been routinely victimized by stock fraud, by confidence schemes. We have been the financial fraud capital of North American at times.
Utah is still considered this crossroads of the American West, still this largely rural, largely isolated economic enclave that goes it on it's own and moves to a slightly different drummer, many times 18-24 months behind the national economic trends.
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From Bountiful, UT, 02/06/2009
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints annually spends millions of dollars on people of all faiths. In 2002, The Church gave 568 wheelchairs to the government of Jamaica. My husband and I personally were able to find dozens of people whose lives were changed dramatically with the gift of a wheelchair. Nobody asked them which Church they attended, only if they could find a way to the ceremony to receive the wheelchair. They have repeated similar gifts in country after country. These chairs are manufactured tough enough to be able to withstand the rough roads of 3rd world countries. They also gave containers filled with medical supplies to the island's hospitals that same year. Many times The Mormons are the first to land practical, needed supplies in time of natural disaster. They sent immediate necessities, and then later sent fishing boats to Thailand after the sunami. On Welfare Square stands a building (among many producing food and gathering clothing for those in need) and in this particular building a person can come to receive counseling about how to rebuild a broken life. They can be assigned a personal volunteer who will stick with them during the learning process to get back on their feet. They can receive clothing and food. These people are the community's needy who get help regardless of religion. My daughter was on their staff and I sat in on their employee training. It seems strange that a Church that will go to such lengths would discriminate against anyone such as you have described. There must be more to your story. I hope you can soon find the way to making your life happier. But the Church is not the calloused, uncaring organization you described. It truly cares. All of the money to fund this help comes from the people of The Church in the form of Tithing...a donation of one tenth of their income. Pretty unselfish, I would say.
From Formerly of Salt Lake, UT, 11/12/2008
If you leave the church and are no longer Mormon, you see a very different face of the religion. Mormon's don't offer support as a group unless they view you as in need, and even then they take a "bake bread for the needy" approach--if you are homeless and get help, you aren't viewed as a person. Policy and systemic-level changes are not addressed. I was never in great enough need for church support, but I know people that were in need and did not get help because they were accused of being homosexual, or breaking another religious law (even reading feminist theorists was a violation in my childhood ward, and some nobel prize winning writers were banned from the local school by my friend's parents). As far as emotional and community support, I was completely and silently cut off from my family and home community when I stopped being Mormon. I didn't and don't do drugs (or drink coffee for that matter), and I didn't start working for Rated R movie distributors or do anything that contradicted the church directly. Simply by leaving, I was completely cut off. Sometimes people say spiteful things and accuse me of not believing in prayer or god (even though I have maintained a strong spirituality). There is only support in Mormon land if you are a Mormon, and I wish you had dug a little deeper on this. People are afraid to critique the church because they get blamed for biased reporting--the church is hyper sensitive to "persecution." But good reporting should still tell both sides of the story, and there are many, many problems with the church welfare, and the community's view of service and inclusion.
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