A Brisker Status Quo

Last July, when Joseph Fielding Smith died at the age of 95, command of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints passed to a relative youngster. The new president, Harold Bingham Lee, was only 73--the youngest man to assume the mantle of "prophet, seer and revelator" for the Mormons since 1918. (Smith took office at 93.) Since his accession, both outsiders and members have wondered just how much innovation Harold Lee would bring to the rich, rapidly growing but still monolithic Mormon Church.

This month Mormons from round the world gathered in Salt Lake City for their semiannual general conference, filling hotels and homes, jamming Temple Square--a clean-cut, well-dressed crowd, heavy with zealous young. In a vote that was never in doubt, they "sustained" Prophet Lee in his selection. There was talk of expansion, modernization, more efficient administration, but little talk of change. "Lee is the man of the hour," said Apostle Gordon Hinckley, 62, one of his closest associates. "But instead of saying he will innovate, I would say he will change the way of implementing those principles that have been with us from the earliest days of the church."

An Idaho grade school principal at the age of 17 and a onetime city commissioner in Salt Lake City, Lee has spent most of his adult life in the Mormon bureaucracy. Lately he has represented the church's interests as a member of the board of such companies as the Union Pacific Railroad. By all accounts a skillful administrator, he began streamlining various Mormon enterprises as first counselor during the brief rule of Joseph Fielding Smith. Says an associate: "Lee has a genius for organization. The church runs like a great beautiful computer, clicking away. Everything is in its place." Some of Smith's achievements and problems:

GROWTH AND EVANGELISM. With 16,000 young missionaries at work in the U.S. and abroad, the Church of Latter-day Saints remains one of the most aggressively evangelistic in the world. All young men and women are expected to put in two years as missionaries, mostly at their own expense--a requirement that has paid off handsomely. The church has grown by 50% in the U.S. over the past twelve years to a total of 2,000,000 members, and by 250% outside the U.S., bringing its foreign membership to 1,000,000. Missions have been especially successful in Mexico, South America and the South Pacific.

Lee is likely to emphasize further the international character of Mormonism. He has already held a conference in Mexico City and made handshaking hops to England, Israel and Greece, reassuring government officials that visiting Mormons will stay out of politics. Says Dean Sterling McMurrin of the University of Utah's graduate school: "Lee has caught the vision of Mormonism as a worldwide movement. He is trying to break through the bonds of provincialism into universalism."

WELFARE AND FINANCES. Just last month the Mormons released for the first time data on their huge welfare expenditures to their needy members: more than $ 17.7 million in 1971. About $8,000,000 was raised by their monthly fast days, after which they turn over the price of missed meals to their poor. Despising doles, the Mormons insist that welfare recipients, even in their 70s and 80s, earn their checks by working on farms, in canneries, or in other welfare industries. It was the recent threat by Salt Lake County to put these properties on the local tax rolls that prompted the Mormons to divulge the extent of their welfare activities--a revelation that quickly persuaded the county fathers to leave the properties taxfree.

It was Harold Lee who organized and ran the church's vast and efficient welfare system from 1937 to 1959. He now wants to expand the scope of Mormon welfare to include more rehabilitation programs for alcoholics, drug abusers and ex-convicts. The church remains tightly mum about most expenditures, but one sign of prosperity is a new 30-story, $30 million world headquarters recently erected behind the temple. By Mormon policy, all buildings are paid for as they are built.

BLACKS. To many outsiders the most urgent problem for Mormons is the fact that blacks of African ancestry are still denied entrance into the broad Mormon "priesthood," the full-fledged membership to which all other adult Mormon males are entitled.* In Utah, where less than 1% of the population is black, the issue does not seem so pressing. There are, however, 240 black Mormons in the area of Salt Lake City, many of whom are chafing at their second-class status. Some were converted before they learned that they could not become priests. Charges Darius Gray, 26: "I didn't hear about it until the night before I was baptized." By then, Gray was too convinced of Mormonism's truthfulness to back out, even though the restriction still galls him. Another young Mormon black, Eugene Orr, is distressed that unlike other Mormon fathers, he will be unable to baptize his own son when the youngster is eight and ready for the ritual. "I am not about to hand my child over to a white man to bless him," insists Orr, but he sticks by Mormonism all the same. "You wonder why we continue in the church?" he asks. "It's because I know that this is the true church. And truth is truth; you can't get around that."

In God's eternal plan, American blacks have been assured, they will some day be given the right to become Mormon priests. Although there is no sign that the day is imminent, Harold Lee, the "revelator," could theoretically receive the word from God any time. Meanwhile, he advises blacks to become Mormons anyway. Even if they cannot attain the highest privileges, he says, they will "get more by baptism into the true church than they would otherwise."

* African blacks are excluded from the Mormon priesthood because they are said to be descendants of Noah's cursed son Ham and his wife Egyptus, a descendant of the fratricide Cain. Supported mainly by the Mormon Book of Abraham, a document "translated" from Egyptian burial papyri by Joseph Smith in 1835, this teaching resembles the Southern Christian theology that was used to justify slavery. Historians have noted that the Mormons, who began as egalitarians, were sojourning in slave-state Missouri--and having serious troubles with their Missouri neighbors about their free black brethren--when Smith's revelation was made known. The curse does not apply to other black peoples, such as those in the South Pacific, who have become members of the Mormon priesthood.

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