Mormon stakes, part two

So I set off for the Cherry Hill LDS church, still not sure when the meeting might start. I figure that 10:00 am on a Sunday morning might be a reasonable time, and arrive at 9:50. The building is a handsome brick structure in the middle of a residential neighborhood, with a very large parking lot. On the outside of the building are the words “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints” and “Visitors welcome.” (Later I would notice that other LDS churches in the area are extremely similar in architecture and almost always have the same words on the outside. It’s as though there is only one blueprint for an LDS church building.)


I walk inside and realize that I have arrived not for the beginning of a service, but in the middle. Two things strike me at once: 1) there are no windows in this sanctuary, which makes me feel just a tad claustrophobic, and 2) there are lots and lots of children and babies in this sanctuary. In fact, there are so many children and babies that at times I cannot hear anything except the younger members of the congregation. I sit in a pew against the back wall, next to a couple of very active and very cute young boys who are climbing up and down the back of the pew and eating cookies.


A young Latina girl is standing in the pulpit when I enter; she seems to be reading her statement of faith. She is very sweet – young, earnest, nervous. Now I notice that the congregation is very balanced racially, among black, white, and Hispanic congregants. I estimate that there are about 125 people in a sanctuary that will seat 250. Of these 125, at least 25% are children – this is a congregation with a young average age!


Three men in suits sit behind the pulpit. After the young woman finishes speaking, three other women sing a song without accompaniment, and with very nice harmonies. Next, a man who is obviously a bit nervous about speaking in public comes to the front and speaks for a few minutes about his father (today is Father’s Day). An older man takes the pulpit and speaks about his father, whom he remembers fondly as a poor fisherman and a stern disciplinarian.


We sing a couple of songs, accompanied on the organ and with hymn leaders who wave their arms in the vigorous but largely ineffective manner I have noticed among hymn leaders in other churches. The final hymn is “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” and I am somewhat surprised to find this old standard in a Mormon church. I expected them to have their own, more Mormony hymns.


While we are singing the final hymn, an Indian woman in a sari is distributing presents to the men in the congregation. Judging from the size and shape of the boxes, they might be ties. Perhaps these are Father’s Day presents, although the wrapping papers, confusingly, have Christmas and birthday themes.


After the hymn, a man introduces himself to me and shakes my hand. A woman sitting near me asks if I am a visitor, and I reply affirmatively. She asks where I live. When I tell her “Haddon Township,” she informs me that this service is for the Cherry Hill stake, although I am quite welcome to attend. The Haddon Township stake will have its service at 11:30.


It seems that four different LDS congregations, or stakes, use this building, each with its own meeting time. This strikes me as a practical way for small congregations in the same denomination to use resources: share one building. Everyone seems to be exiting expeditiously, possibly for Sunday School or something like that. So I exit also.


It’s only 10:30. I haven’t really seen a Mormon service, only part of a service. However, I can’t wait an hour for the next one, because I have to get back home so that Neil can use the car. I’ll have to try to attend a complete Mormon church service at some other time. I decide to drive around looking for a church with an 11:00 service. I realize it might be hard to find a church with an 11:00 service in the middle of the summer, but, on the other hand – there are so many churches! Maybe I’ll get lucky.

Mormon stakes, part one

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
Cherry Hill, New Jersey
June 17, 2007

I had been attending a conference the previous Thursday through Saturday, so I didn’t have time to properly research the church whose name I had drawn for this Sunday, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) in Cherry Hill.

At any rate, I woke up early on Sunday and tried to determine the meeting times for the LDS Church in Cherry Hill. The listing in the phone book gave me three numbers. One turned out to be the number of the Family History Center; when I called I heard a recorded message that informed me that they offer family genealogy classes. I called the two other numbers, but the phones just rang and rang – there was no answering machine.

I tried searching the web. All I found was a rather mysterious article about the local temple, which featured sentences such as “To help prepare new members and the newly activated for the temple, each unit in the stake regularly holds Melchizedek Priesthood and temple preparation classes,” and “Pam now serves as the Primary president and Tom received the Melchizedek Priesthood in May 1998. They are hoping everyone in the family will be ready to go to the temple in 1999 to be sealed.”

Hmm. They speak a whole different religious language.

So – what did I know about the LDS church? I knew that the church’s founder, Joseph Smith, claimed to have discovered the Book of Mormon in the form of golden plates that he dug up near his home in New York in the early 1800s. An angel named Moroni appeared to him and told him where to dig.

I knew that members of Smith’s church were originally polygamous, but gave that up around the time Utah became a state, and that there are still several offshoot groups that practice polygamy. I knew about the custom in LDS churches of having young men go off in pairs for a year or two to evangelize.

I know that lots of other churches consider Mormonism a non-Christian heresy; I’ve read Kingdom of the Cults, more than once -- not the newest edition, though – this book has been in print more than forty years!

So I turned to Wikipedia, where I learned a number of interesting things. I learned that Mormon (the man, not the book) was a prophet who lived in the fourth century; that the LDS church officially repudiated polygamy in 1890; and that Mormons tend to discourage the use of the word Mormon to refer to the church, although they seem to be okay with using it to refer to members.

As with most churches, there are various subgroups and splinter groups. Some historians divide the LDS church into the Utah Mormons and Missouri Mormons. Utah Mormons are descended from everyone who followed Joseph Smith to Utah; the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) is the largest among these groups, but not the only group. Missouri Mormons are descended from the folks who didn’t go to Utah. There’s one big problem with splitting the church into Utah Mormons and Missouri Mormons – most Mormons no longer live in either Utah or Missouri. In fact, today most LDS (Utah Mormon) members live outside the United States, and most of the folks who would be considered Missouri Mormons do not live in Missouri.
Notable Mormons include Butch Cassidy; Ed “Big Daddy” Roth (the creator of Rat Fink, a cartoon character my brother and I spent hours attaching to plastic model cars in the form of decals in the sixties; the Marriott family (of hotel fame); Orson Scott Card, author of really, really interesting science fiction; Steven Covey, the life organizer guy; the singing Osmond family; Philo T. Farnsworth (the inventor of television, and also a guy with the perfect name for an inventor); and Mitt Romney, a politician who seemed to be in the news quite often at this time, since the primary season for the 2008 elections had already begun.

From Wikipedia I learned that the LDS church is the fourth largest denomination in the United States, which was a surprise. They report worldwide membership of 13 million, with about 5 million of those members in the United States. Some sources report that it is one of the fastest-growing churches in the US, but these data seem to be offset by other data that show that the LDS church also loses members at an extremely fast rate, making net growth about zero right now.

LDS is considered a restorationist church. All restorationists believe that they have recovered a pure or pristine version of faith that has been lost by the historical churches – the Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant groups. Other groups to whom the term restorationist is applied include Quakers, some Baptists (like the Landmark Baptists), Seventh-Day Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. One thing that strikes me as really unusual is that Mormons seem to believe that, to achieve the highest degree of salvation, a person must be married. This is in sharp contrast to the high value accorded celibacy throughout most of Christian history.

I learned that Mormons have churches, where anyone can attend a service, and also temples, where non-Mormons are not allowed. In fact, even some Mormons are not allowed into temples; there are special entrance requirements, including an orthodoxy test. Mormon men are expected to serve a two-year period of missionary service at the age of 19; women may or may not have a similar period of service, although for them the age of service would be 21 (if unmarried), and the mission term would usually last only 18 months. The church does not have paid clergy; in most local churches the ruling presidents and bishops (all men – Mormon women wear the invisible hijab) serve on a volunteer basis. Mormons are expected to abstain not only from alcohol and tobacco, but also from coffee and tea.

So I won’t expect a coffee hour after the service.

The barn's fat shadow

The barn swung its fat shadow across the yard, holding it gently by dark wrists and letting it turn, turn, stretch out in the evening upon the ground but never slip. . . . . The mailbox stood soldierly by the road, capturing a man and releasing him, again and again.

Impressions of life as seen by a dog, from the novel The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski. A good summer read - the story of Hamlet retold on a dog breeding and training farm in rural Wisconsin, believe it or not. And the part of Ophelia is played by a dog!

View to the North

As you grow older, it gets colder.
You see through things.
I’m looking through the trees,

their torn and thinning leaves,
to where chill blue water
is roughened by the wind.

Day by day the scene opens,
enlarges, rips of space
appear where full branches

used to snug the view.
Soon it will be wide, stripped,
entirely unobstructed:

I’ll see right through
the twining waves, to
the white horizon, to the place

where the North begins.
Magnificent! I’ll be thinking
while my eyeballs freeze.

May Swenson


I certainly hope that the scene will open as I grow older; I think I've experienced some of that already. In fact, it's odd sometimes to think back to my younger self and feel that it was so much smaller, tenser, duller, and tighter than the way I feel today. Oh, I don't mean to put my younger self down - but I sometimes feel sorry for myself twenty or thirty years ago, the way you might feel sorry for a child who is needlessly worried about things that don't matter or don't exist.

There's a real freedom that comes with getting older, for some people at least, I think. But when I was much younger I thought it was the other way round, of course.

Bootleggers and Baptists

"Here is the essence of the theory: durable social regulation evolves when it is demanded by both of two distinctly different groups. “Baptists” point to the moral high ground and give vital and vocal endorsement of laudable public benefits promised by a desired regulation. Baptists flourish when their moral message forms a visible foundation for political action. “Bootleggers” are much less visible but no less vital. Bootleggers, who expect to profit from the very regulatory restrictions desired by Baptists, grease the political machinery with some of their expected proceeds. They are simply in it for the money.

The theory’s name draws on colorful tales of states’ efforts to regulate alcoholic beverages by banning Sunday sales at legal outlets. Baptists fervently endorsed such actions on moral grounds. Bootleggers tolerated the actions gleefully because their effect was to limit competition."

The two paragraphs above are taken from Bruce Yandle's article, "Bootleggers and Baptists in Retrospect," in which he looks back on an influential article he wrote in 1983, when he was executive director of the Federal Trade Commission. There are some fascinating arguments for how well the theory has stood the test of time.

Examples include the effort to protect the northern spotted owl, supported by the giant logging operation Weyerhauser, which not only protected the birds but drove profits for timber companies through the roof. Similarly, the National Corn Growers' support for ethanol production was touted as environmentally responsible, but also happened to result in huge windfalls for their constituencies. (Funnily enough, as the article points out, this subsidy had a literal Baptist-bootlegger connection: "the taxpayer subsidy benefits the producers of beverage alcohol as well as industrial alcohol.")

At least one other social issues comes to mind: why would drug dealers and cartels support legalization? It would ruin their business. It's logical for drug dealers to be staunch supporters of strict drug laws.

Similarly, "The Tobacco Settlement," by Jeremy Bulow, explains why higher taxes on cigarettes actually provide fiscal protection for the big tobacco companies, and help them retain market share.

Sources: Bruce Yandle of Clemson University. Hat tip: Megan McArdle, explaining why Wal-Mart is supporting national health care (hint - it's good for business, of course).

Image courtesy Flickr user Darren Copley.

What Do You Think Of Universal Health Care?

Heck, we already have it. What we really need is less of it. For a start everybody should have to pay real money for their own primary care. It is completely ridiculous that we pay for the routine medical care of a growing population of people who will spend three hundred bucks a month for cigarettes not to mention other irregular pleasures but who regard a twenty dollar copay or a hundred bucks here or there for a visit to a Family Doctor as a monstrous injustice and an assault on their human dignity.

Well, we wouldn't so much mind the occasional twenty or hundred if it weren't for fear of the overwhelming cost of a hospital visit, but still . . . . another point of view, and an interesting one, from Panda Bear, MD

American Summer

Each day was a time clock that scarcely moved,
a slow fist punching us in, punching us out,
electric heat smoldering in the purple air,

but each night was a towering white fly ball
to center field—“a can of corn”—coming down
through stark glittering above the diamond.

Each day was a pair of heavy canvas gloves
hoisting garbage cans into an omnivorous mouth
that crept through thoroughfares and alleys,

but each night was the feeling of a bat
coming alive in your hands, it was lining
the first good pitch for a sharp single.

That summer I learned to steal second base
by getting the jump on right-handed pitchers
and then sliding head-first into the bag.

I learned to drive my father’s stick shift
And to park with my girlfriend at the beach,
Our headlights beaming and running low.

I was a sixteen-year-old in the suburbs
and each day was another lesson in working,
a class in becoming invisible to others.

But each night was a Walt Whitman of holidays,
the clarity of a whistle at five p.m.,
the freedom of walking out into the open air.


Edward Hirsch


I love the poetry of Edward Hirsch, and "American Summer" is a good one for a hot, muggy day like today promises to be in southern New Jersey. How many teens have taken that class in "becoming invisible to others" first through their summer jobs? How many have experienced the release of summer nights as a "Walt Whitman of holidays," or as a "can of corn" heading straight at them, thrilling and just a little scary?