Mormons in the spotlight
, and more another.
SALT LAKE CITY, Utah (Reuters) - After more than a century
on the fringe of America&39;s bid to become the first Mormon in the
White House to Public Broadcasting Service&39;s darkest
episodes, the once-isolated religion is moving into the open.
“We welcome it,” Elder D. Todd Christofferson, a member of
the Presidency of the Seventy, a church leadership body, said
of the sudden attention.
“To the extent that attention can be informative as opposed
to pejorative and there&39;s positive,” he said.
But areas the church would rather forget are sharing the
limelight, including its awkward ties to nearly 40,000
fundamentalist Mormons who practice polygamy, which the church
introduced before the Civil War and then banned in 1890.
“Big Love,” HBO&39;s polygamists.
VIEW ON POLITICS
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the
sect based in Salt Lake City, Utah, is formally known, is the
fourth-largest U.S. religion and one of the richest, with 12.9
million members globally and an estimated &39;s biggest skeptics are not evangelical Christians but
those who shun all organized religion. “They tend to look at
Mormons as religion on steroids,” he said.
In an interview, Christofferson sought to dispel several
long-festering misconceptions, such as whether Romney would
take direction from the church&39;s position there&39;s no
church discipline applied,” he said.
GROWTH PEAKING?
He said the church was growing by about a million members
every three to five years, a pace below previous official
estimates of a million every three years. Experts say the rate,
while fast relative to the Roman Catholic Church and some other
religions, has slowed, especially in the United States.
“Retention is a problem for them, as it is in other
religions, and it&39;s well-funded political campaign.
“It's a matter certainly of interest here,” he said.
The church, founded in upstate New York in 1830 by Joseph
Smith, has long struggled for mainstream acceptance. Many
evangelical Christians are taught that Mormonism is a cult with
a heretical interpretation of Scripture and doctrine.
Although Mormons revere Christ as Savior and consider
themselves devout Christians, they reject the unified Trinity
and teach God has a body of flesh and blood. They believe Smith
was a prophet instructed by God to restore his true church.
Guided by an angel named Moroni, Smith professed to have
discovered tablets written in what he called “reformed
Egyptian” hieroglyphics that told the story of the Book of
Mormon and detailing an ancient civilization of Israelites sent
by God to America.
Smith was able to read and translate the tablets with the
help of special transparent stones he used as spectacles.
Christofferson said it was conceivable Mormonism could end
a ban on women in its lay priesthood as it did with blacks in
1978, if God directs the church president to do so in a
revelation. Revelations are a central tenant of Mormonism,
giving the religion flexibility to evolve.
“We think the Lord continues to reveal his will,” he said.
Read http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070611/us_nm/usa_mormons_dc_3
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