News for Mormons

Leader of the Newport Beach California Temple discusses the growth of his faith

From The OC Register:

Mormons. Just mentioning the name can evoke images as wide-ranging as “polygamists living in the deserts of Utah” and “a traditional all-American family with strong religious values.”

Both can be found in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as it has evolved into one of America’s fastest-growing religions, with more than 13 million members worldwide, including approximately 50,000 in Orange County.

In 2005, Orange County got its first temple: the Newport Beach California Temple. For Mormons, temples are very important and differ from the sites used for regular Sunday worship meetings. They are considered houses of God where ceremonies such as baptism and eternal marriages are performed. The primary function of temple rituals is to seal families together, allowing them to dwell together for eternity.

According to Mormon beliefs, the roots of their religion go back to 1827, in Palmyra, N.Y., where Joseph Smith dug up a set of golden tablets, which he translated and published as the Book of Mormon. This book is considered sacred and, along with the Old and New Testaments, guided Smith and his followers.

On the 8.8-acre Newport Beach campus, where along with the temple there is a meeting house, we met with Dr. Weatherford Clayton, 55, stake (diocese) president. An obstetrician and father of five children, he has been a Mormon “basically all my life.” Here are his edited responses to several questions.

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From The Economist (UK):

Near the edge of Temple Square in Salt Lake City is an unobtrusive statue of a man pulling a wooden handcart, with his family walking beside him. It commemorates a trek more gruelling than the tourists who gawp at it can imagine. The early Mormons were not popular. They formed an exclusive, polygamous community with a militia and territorial ambitions. The governor of Missouri, Lilburn Boggs, called for them to be “exterminated or driven from the state”. Their prophet, Joseph Smith, was shot dead by a lynch mob in 1844.

After his murder, his followers embarked on a great exodus.Some set off in a wagon train and founded a city by the Great Salt Lake in what is now Utah. Others followed. The poorest of them pulled handcarts from Iowa to Salt Lake City—1,300 miles (2,092km) over wilderness and Rocky Mountains. Many died en route. At one point, 1,000 handcarters got stuck in the snow. Brigham Young, the prophet’s successor, sent up a mule train from Salt Lake City to rescue them. He saved about 800, but the rest starved or froze to death.

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From The Associated Press:

REXBURG, Idaho (AP) — After selling houses in this Mormon college town for two decades, Ted Whyte knows what some of his customers want: a home near the new Mormon temple. If only he could use that in his ads.

“The federal Fair Housing Act kicks in and calls it discriminatory,” said Whyte, who like 92 percent of Rexburg’s 31,000 residents is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Call it the Temple Effect.

Towering Mormon temples like the one scheduled for completion in Rexburg in February, and another slated to be finished in mid-2008 in Twin Falls 190 miles away, can have a mighty spiritual — and economic — effect.

Home prices in surrounding neighborhoods escalate. Motels offer rooms with temple views. Devout retirees relocate. Members of the community swell with civic pride and excitement. And sometimes, those of other faiths look on with resentment and suspicion.

Unlike Mormon chapels, where anybody can enter, temples are places where Mormons must be in good standing with the church leadership to get inside. Once there, they baptize the dead by proxy, marry for eternity and make sacred covenants with God — all beneath golden spires topped with Moroni, the angel Mormons say delivered the golden plates that form their gospel’s foundation.

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