Ian Boyne, Contributor
THE MORMON church is one of the most fascinating churches to have sprung from Nineteenth Century America. It is today America's richest church with approximately US$30 billion in church assets and an annual income of an estimated US$6 billion.
The church began in New York with six members in 1830 and has today grown to over 10 million worldwide. Its extra-Biblical book, for which inspiration is claimed, the Book of Mormon, has been published in 54 languages, with some 100 million copies in circulation, according to the May 2000 issue of the church monthly magazine, Ensign.
Prophet Joseph Smith called the Book of Mormon, "The most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion".
But a book which rolled off the presses last year and which sheds much light on that "most correct book" has been gaining significant attention in the big American secular and religious media in North America and Britain.
Titled Mormon America: The Power and the Promise and written by one of America's finest religion writers, Richard Ostling, and his wife, Joan, the book could really be subtitled, "Everything You Ever Wanted to know about Mormonism". It has been hard to get fair and balanced information on the Mormons for most of the literature on the group has been written by detractors and Evangelical apologists who have tried in vain to check the church's phenomenal growth.
Sensitive
Ostling, the long-time Religion editor of Time now with the Associated Press, is sensitive and even-handed, though he himself is an Evangelical who would believe (though he doesn't say it in the book) that the Mormon church is a cult.
But in this 454-page tome he gives the history, warts and all, of this controversial and powerful group.
The Ostlings show the many positives of the Mormons. They tend to be happier in their family lives and marriages, less likely to indulge in sexually and socially deviant behaviour and far less likely to be involved in any kind of substance abuse than average Americans.
"Various studies show that Mormons live eight to eleven years longer than other Americans. A 1997 UCLA study showed their death rates from cancer and cardiovascular diseases to be about half of the general population." They represent only six per cent of the deaths from a variety of diseases as well as homicides and suicides, too.
Mormons are hard-working, thrifty, the most educated of all the American sects and the most successful in their personal lives.
Many are attracted to the religion for its beneficial effects on people's lives, not just for its peculiar--even strange--theology. And strange, indeed, are its doctrines.
Mormons believe God was once a man that he evolved into God, that men will become gods in the next life. They believe that God has flesh and bones and that all of us humans had a pre-mortal existence.
Indeed, the reasons Mormons tend to have large families is due to the teaching that God has many spirits in Heaven waiting for human bodies to tuck them in.
They have secret Temple rituals which no member is allowed to talk about. They baptise for dead relatives and friends and believe they are the only true church on the earth today.
The Ostlings' book tells of the secret polygamous lives still being lived, the murders committed, the racism still subtly practised, the child and wife abuse and the suppression of intellectual thought.
It is the best contemporary book available on Mormon history, sociology, theology and way of life. The style is gripping and suspenseful and the research thorough. In 2080 it will be the most important world religion to have emerged since Islam with 265 million members. Get to know this religion.
