SALT LAKE CITY, Utah (dpa) – Concerned leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints met in February in their Salt Lake City chambers to write up a decree changing they way people refer to the church and its followers.
The members of First Presidency and the Council of the 12 Apostles said the term Mormon Church should no longer be used, instead the institution should be referred to as the Church of Jesus Christ on second reference.The leaders took the extraordinary step as part of a broader effort to polish the church’s image ahead of the 2002 Olympic Winter Games when thousands of international media will be descending on Salt Lake and may turn their focus on the Mormon headquarters here.Church officials are concerned stereotypes of Mormonism as an odd, evangelist Christian cult will be perpetuated by media reports at the Games. They are especially concerned that the church’s positions on alcohol and polygamy will be misrepresented.“People will be coming here, we know that,” says church spokesman Michael Purdy. “There’s a lot of inaccurate information out there and we hope we can dispel that.”“These are not the Church’s Games. But we hope to be good hosts and we want the Olympics to be successful.”Purdy said the three-member First Presidency had issued a directive to Church members saying there should be no extra efforts to proselytize during the Winter Games beginning next February.The name change was undertaken to emphasize to the world that Mormons are firstly followers of Jesus Christ, not some other teachings.“We want to clarify Mormon is not the name of the church. Mormon is not accurate when referring to the institution of the church,” says Purdy in explaining the new line.But in Salt Lake it is hard to avoid the Mormons’ history and overriding impact on the area. Fully 1.6 million residents of Utah consider themselves Mormons, nearly two-thirds of the total – although the percentage of Mormons in Salt Lake City is under 50 per cent.It also is not hard to find references to the Mormons’ past practices of polygamy. On a downtown street a plaque honors a Danish businessman who founded the city’s first jewelry shop. It also mentions that he had a “plural marriage” to three wives and fathered 18 children.Driven from their homes first in New York state and later in the Midwest, hundreds of followers of the new church founded by Joseph Smith in 1830 migrated in dire conditions across the American West in search of a place they called Zion where they could worship in peace.After Smith was “martyred” in Illinois, Brigham Young led the followers across the desert and mountains to the Great Salt Lake Valley where in 1847 he proclaimed, “This is the place” for a Mormon community to be built.Through their industriousness and discipline the Mormon pioneers gradually built a thriving community in a beautiful but harsh environment.Monuments to Mormonism and the pioneers are everywhere in Salt Lake. The downtown is centred around the castle-like Mormon Temple, Mormon Tabernacle and Temple Square, where a stone laid by Brigham Young marks the central point for all numbered streets stretching out across the valley.Mormons derive their name from the Book of Mormon which was said to have been revealed to Smith, who is referred to as a “prophet”, by the angel Moroni. The angel led Smith to a cache of gold tablets that contained the teachings he would use to found the new church.Mormons now number 11 million worldwide, with more members located outside the United States than inside. The church conducts aggressive evangelism, including a requirement that all young Mormon men must spend two years proselytizing outside their community.
