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This book is long overdue. Once the most persecuted faith in the United States, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the LDS or Mormon church) has emerged as one of the fastest growing and most influential religious groups in the country. It enjoys political representation beyond its 2 percent of the U.S. population (5 percent of the U.S. Senate is Mormon, for example) and now holds assets estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. It is truly an international church; indeed, membership abroad recently surpassed that inside the United States. If growth rates continue as sociologist Rodney Stark has predicted, Mormonism will soon be the newest major world religion since Islam.
In spite of this remarkable status, very little has been written for a general audience on the subject. Mormonism certainly invites sensationalist coverage with its history of colorful prophets, polygamy, theocracy, and temple rites closed to all but committed insiders. Unfortunately, much of what has been published on the LDS church veers toward defensive apology from believers or acerbic invective from opponents. Other surveys are either tendentious and out of date (America's Saints: The Rise of Mormon Power, by Robert Gottlieb and Peter Wiley, 1986) or geared to a scholarly audience (Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition, by Jan Shipps, 1985).
Mormon America: The Power and the Promise, by Richard N. and Joan K. Ostling, has broader appeal, although its loose journalistic style of documentation may frustrate the reader accustomed to more careful footnoting of claims. Here at last we have a well-researched and eminently readable overview of Mormonism that is penetrating but also respectful (and therefore able to make sense of why the church inspires such growth and loyalty in its members). Mormon America covers a wide array of topics, from well-known issues like polygamy, racism, and peculiar lifestyle habits to less publicized issues like politics, finances, and theology. Throughout, the authors seek to understand and explain the Mormons by contextualizing them in both mainstream America and contemporary Christianity.
This is no insignificant task in light of an issue that permeates both this book and its predecessors. Stated most simply, there is an "us and them" mentality found in the LDS church, exemplified in an anecdote the Ostlings share about the distinguished historian Leonard Arrington, author of Great Basin Kingdom. When Arrington, a devout Mormon, was called as the first (and only) official church historian not drawn from the ranks of the church's highest ecclesiastical leadership, he discovered his own book on the shelves of the historian's office, filed under the category "anti" ("anti-Mormon literature"): "The book apparently had not provided enough supernatural explanations, so a librarian decided 'if it wasn't pro-Mormon it must be anti.' " As the Ostlings observe, "the thin-skinned and image-conscious Mormons can still display some immature, isolationist, and defensive reactions to outsiders [and even to insiders, such as Arrington], perhaps because there is no substantive debate and no 'loyal opposition' within their kingdom."
This "us and them" mentality is a holdover from the nineteenth century, when the Latter-day Saints constituted a decidedly unwelcome minority in America. But it is surprising to encounter such a stance from an institution that at the end of the twentieth century has surpassed the 10-million membership mark worldwide: "As Jan Shipps observes, Mormonism can no longer employ special pleading for itself as a protected minority. What occurs inside Mormonism is no longer merely an internal matter, and what Mormonism does is becoming vitally important to the larger culture." The Ostlings go to great lengths to circumvent the church's defensiveness and front of silence; their financial estimates, for example, cannot be wholly conclusive since the church will not publicly reveal its assets and revenues. But their tone strives to avoid the "us and them" mentality of both church apologists and antagonists by presenting a spectrum of viewpoints that includes faithful believers, nonpartisan scholars, and dissenters.
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