Word: mormons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For three nights last week, the faithful and the curious gathered there in record numbers-some 135,000 in all-for the 17th Hill Cumorah Pageant, which depicts in dramatic terms the legendary origins of the Mormon faith...
...Zealand's Protestant churches rallied last week against invaders: the proselytizing Mormons of Salt Lake City. Among the South Pacific's Polynesians, the Mormons keep scoring remarkable gains, have almost tripled their members (80% Maoris) in New Zealand to 17,000 in the last 30 years. They drew a crowd of 112,000 to a newly opened $8.000.000 church college and gleaming white temple, and this week set up the first Mormon "stake" -a sort of diocese -outside North
...Mormons reply that the sheep are simply returning to their proper fold after centuries astray. Their missionaries find an ancient kinship with the Pacific's brown-skinned peoples in a passage from the Book of Mormon, which Founder Joseph Smith produced as revelation in upstate New York in 1829. In Smith's history of the first inhabitants of America, some of the white-skinned, "delightsome" members of the Israelite tribe of Lehi grow quarrelsome and sinful after arriving in America from Israel. Result: they turn dark-skinned and "loathsome," thereby producing the American Indians. A patriarch named Hagoth...
Though the church gives no official interpretation of the Hagoth legend, it has served Mormon missionaries from Hawaii to New Zealand to give thousands of natives hope that they may once again become "white and delightsome." According to New Zealand Mormon President Ariel S. Ballif, the way is simple: "As they take up the righteous way of living, they become more attractive and acceptable to white people and lose their dark skin [by intermarriage...
Nevertheless O'Dea's research has been comprehensive. He has a good understanding of the Book of Mormon and of Mormon theology and history. Indeed, he devotes too much space to a mere chronicle of Mormon history. But O'Dea realizes two essential things about the Mormons: that their values and experience have been peculiarly American, and that the Mormons are not merely a religious sect, but a distinct society. Although O'Dea does not make the connection, these are the two principle reasons for the continued success of Mormonism...