the mormon people the making of an american faith

The impulse was their own, but progressivism provided them a structure. For the Mormons, these efforts were helping to revitalize the creation of the Kingdom of God and to create a citizenry worthy of it. By the time of the Great Depression, the Mormons had erected the Church Welfare Program, a charity system that encouraged recipients to offer labor in return for donations and cultivate habits of thrift and industry. Though participation was voluntary, these associations reached far in the 1910s, and today it is assumed that members of the church will participate in all such organizations for which she or he is eligible. Like many other American churches, they organized programs designed to take on the social problems of their age: a Young Men’s and Young Women’s Improvement Association a primary school for young children a Sunday school-among others.

Mormons also constructed their own progressive movement in miniature. In the same decade, Mormon leaders endorsed the Prohibition movement, and influential progressive leaders like William Jennings Bryan and Theodore Roosevelt passed through Salt Lake City to commend the Mormons for their organizational talents and their embodiment of the American virtues that progressivism taught. In 1913, for instance, the church formally affiliated with the Boy Scouts of America, a quintessentially progressive organization founded on the notion that participation in a quasi-military hierarchy and group activities would teach young men self-discipline. Mormon leaders threw themselves into the progressive project, embracing the notion that organizations could instill virtue in human beings. They saw, in progressivism’s aspirations to moral uplift, the mirror image of Joseph Smith’s rejection of original sin and both progressives and Mormons believed in the unlimited possibilities of human potential. In progressive proclamations of a stable and harmonious society, they heard an echo of their dreams of Zion. In the progressive impulse of the early twentieth century, they found some of their own ideals. In these years, after decades of persecution and retreat, Mormons were hungry for entry into mainstream American life.

The mormon people the making of an american faith