by Ted Koppel
Mormon families belong to a ward, as the church calls its congregations. There is no hard-and-fast membership number, but in a high-density Mormon population, a ward can be as large as four or five hundred people. Wards are presided over by a bishop and two counselors, in a structural pattern (units led by a presiding body of three) repeated throughout the church. Above the ward level is the stake, analogous to a diocese in the Catholic church. The number of wards in a stake can vary but on average is about ten, so there might be as many as four or five thousand people in a stake, with a president and two counselors presiding over each stake. The triumvirate at the pinnacle of the ecclesiastical hierarchy is known as the First Presidency, comprising the Prophet or President, a First Counselor, and a Second Counselor. Just beneath them is the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, then the First Quorum of the Seventy, and then the Second Quorum of the Seventy.
This organizational pattern is repeated, literally, around the world. However unfamiliar its governing structure may be to nonmembers, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a vast, efficiently run enterprise, claiming a worldwide membership of more than fifteen million, of whom roughly six million are in the United States. Describing its intricate hierarchy is, in the context of this book, useful only in this sense: one would be hard pressed to find a large religious organization with more precise systems of communication and oversight.
Each ward is expected to have its own emergency plan, designed to deal with the sorts of natural disasters peculiar to the region, and a local bishop’s placement within a military-style chain of command gives him and those in his care access to an incredible network of resources. In case the electricity is out and the normal phone system is no longer functional, satellite phones have been pre-positioned with stake presidents and a network of ham radio operators has been set up. If cars aren’t working or if gasoline is scarce, local bishops have plans to send messengers by bicycle or foot. A ward bishop knows who in his community is vulnerable and where he can find those with the particular skill sets to assist—those who can, for example, provide medical assistance, or help with rudimentary repairs. According to Steven Peterson, managing director of the church’s welfare services, the bishop’s recognized authority within the ward enables him to organize the community at the local level. Peterson expressed complete confidence in this “chain of authority,” declaring that “in the situation where communications are largely eliminated and it’s not possible to connect with other leaders, we firmly believe that the individual members who have storage and food and preparation in their homes, led by local bishops and stake presidents, would immediately join together and figure out how they could best care for each other.”
The finely calibrated, professional operation this national network represents can, and has on occasion, outstripped Washington’s own disaster response machine. In a 2007 article for Mother Jones, Stephanie Mencimer recounted the LDS church’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It was, she wrote, “a performance that put the federal government to shame.” The New Orleans branch of the LDS church had evacuated all but seven of its approximately 2,500 congregants before the storm even hit, largely because the church had created an automated telephone emergency warning system that alerted all its members, instructing them to get out of town and telling them where to go. “While FEMA was floundering,” Mencimer wrote, “the church dispatched ten trucks full of tents, sleeping bags, tarps to cover wrecked roofs, bottled water, and 5-gallon drums of gas from its warehouses to New Orleans and other hard-hit areas. The supplies were distributed in an orderly fashion to people who desperately needed them.”
There is an entire branch of the church hierarchy dedicated to dealing with the administration of the church’s physical assets—its 148 temples and 19,000 buildings worldwide, as well as the torrent of resources it produces, sells, and distributes. These temporal affairs are the responsibility of the Presiding Bishopric, of which Gérald Caussé, a Frenchman whose parents were Mormon converts, is First Counselor. “There is scripture that we refer to in the church,” Caussé told me, “that says that if you are prepared you shall not fear. This is at the center of our religion, this scripture, to be prepared. So a lot of what we are doing is teaching people, helping people get prepared in their families for anything that comes.”
“Anything that comes” doesn’t have to be a disaster on the scale of Katrina, or indeed any kind of collective emergency. Where a family is no longer able to deal with its own setbacks, whether that be a lingering illness, a sudden death, or perhaps the loss of a job, it is still expected to turn to its ward bishop. It is through a bishop’s “recommend” that a ward member can be granted access to what is variously referred to as a “bishop’s storehouse” or “Lord’s storehouse.”
A recommend, which can be bestowed or withdrawn, is an incredibly powerful tool for influencing behavior. To a ward member experiencing hard times, the bishop’s storehouse can be an indispensable resource. “It’s like a grocery store,” Caussé explained, “but you don’t have to pay. You know, there is no cashier and you cannot pay at the end. You choose to come with your recommendation of the bishop and you will take whatever food you need for your family.” A recommend is not an open-ended license to load up a shopping cart, but it is a generous extension of charity for the time that the bishop determines it will take a family to become self-reliant again. Those availing themselves of the bishop’s storehouse are expected to volunteer their own time to work at the storehouse for a few hours each week. Several of my hosts stressed the high priority that the church places on volunteering, both as a means to strengthen the fabric of the community and as a way for those receiving help to restore their own self-esteem.
I saw this effort to treat everyone as useful and functional firsthand during my visit to a bishop’s storehouse. I was struck there by the presence of a young staffer who was clearly challenged. His name tag identified him as a church elder. He was, it was explained to me, incapable of fulfilling the duties of a missionary overseas, but with supervision he could assist with simple tasks at the storehouse to fulfill his obligation. It would be the first of several instances in which I witnessed a determination not to consider or treat any member of the community as anything other than productive.
The storehouse I visited is part of a sprawling network. Think of 111 mini-marts spread around the United States and Canada. Like any supermarket chain, the individual stores need to be replenished, for which there are four large central warehouses in the United States and one in Canada. Those warehouses, in turn, are resupplied from an enormous complex in Salt Lake City. Only a chain of stores on the scale of Costco or Walmart would need a facility of this size: building after building, thirty or forty feet high, pallets stacked floor to ceiling with everything from food supplies to shelves of truck tires. Some buildings are air-conditioned, others refrigerated. There are giant generators ready to provide electricity in the event of a shutdown and underground tanks of diesel fuel with an estimated storage capacity of 250,000 gallons. The diesel also fuels the trucks that service the church’s national distribution system.
Those trucks, too, are owned and operated by the church—part of LDS’s proprietary trucking company, Deseret Transportation. An online ad for drivers specifies that they must hold a federal commercial license, meet all Department of Transportation state and local requirements, be able to back trailers into a dock for loading and unloading, and be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A prospective trucker for Deseret Transportation must also be “currently temple worthy,” which is no simple task. The concept of being “worthy” to enter the Lord’s house has its roots in the Old Testament, the 24th Psalm: “Who shall ascend unto the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart.” The Mormons take that literally and require that each church member be interviewed by priesthood leaders at least once every two years. Each member is asked the same questions, dealing with, a
mong other issues, chastity, tithing, church attendance, honesty, keeping the covenants, and sustaining the president of the church. If a member is found to be worthy to enter the temple, he is issued what is called a “temple recommend.” This is a card signed by his bishop, valid for two years and granting the holder admission to the temple.
The relevance of a temple recommend to the qualifications of a trucker is not as obscure as it may seem. Deseret Transportation, I was assured, has the best safety record of any trucking company in the country. I cannot vouch for that, but it makes sense. A Mormon truck driver who is temple worthy can reliably be assumed to be drug and alcohol free, and not even to rely on caffeine as a stimulant. Starkly put, the temple recommend ensures the church leadership a degree of top-to-bottom control over anyone who would consider him- or herself a practicing Mormon.
Deseret trucks transport product not only to all bishop’s storehouses but also to more than one hundred church-run home storage centers, where church members and outsiders alike can buy prepackaged nonperishable goods. The trucks are available, the drivers are reliable, and there is a vast emergency reservoir of fuel. Even this extensive infrastructure, however, merely hints at the scope of the enormous, self-sustaining food chain that supplies the Latter-day Saints.
Don Johnson is director of production and activities of the LDS welfare program. “We have fifty-two farms, ranches, and orchards; twelve canneries and processing plants,” he told me. Together these constitute a self-sustaining conveyor belt carrying enormous quantities of food into the vast distribution system that supplies the church’s emergency preparedness network directly and, through sales beyond the network, indirectly. It’s difficult to quantify how much food they give away through the bishop’s storehouses, but Johnson estimated that it works out to about $145 million worth annually. Approximately 60 percent of what is grown and produced and processed by church subsidiaries is sold on the open market. In the event of a massive crisis, though, everything could be consolidated to provide resources for the church and its members.
The church is independent of any outside supplier. What it donates, what it sells, and what it puts into storage all come from within a single ecosystem. There were enormous silos outside the facility where we met. The harvest had just ended, so the silos were filled with about twenty-four million pounds of hard wheat, soft wheat, and durum wheat. Bill Dutton, the manager of the Deseret Mill and Pasta Plant, showed me two gigantic, gleaming pasta-making machines that had just been imported from Italy. The pasta-making operation alone—one machine for the long goods, like spaghetti, the other for the macaroni, elbow, and small goods line—represented an investment of somewhere between $18 million and $20 million. Their projection was for an average of four million pounds of pasta annually.
In Elberta, Utah, about seventy-five miles south of Salt Lake City, I was met by David Secrist, vice president of cattle operations for Ag Reserves, Inc., a privately held subsidiary of the Mormon Church. He and I were standing on a hill overlooking a long, narrow valley, and he nodded in its direction. “We have about ten thousand irrigated acres that we grow feed [on] for the cows on the farm.” Dave’s use of the term “cows on the farm” may conjure up an image of placid herds of Holsteins chewing their cud in rolling fields, but this is a more industrial enterprise. These cows are, most of the time, under roof in open-sided barns and supplied by feed that lies fermenting under tarps in open yards. There is a small mountain range of feed: enough forage and corn base (which will be mixed with mineral additives) to feed five thousand mature cows and four thousand young heifers for a year. Each young heifer has its own plastic “kennel” to protect it from the elements. The lines of kennels have the look of a neat, if sprawling, military camp.
The lactating cows are milked three times a day, for a total of about 84 pounds of milk per cow per day. The five thousand cows on this facility produce 420,000 pounds of milk a day. That’s about 50,000 gallons of milk per day. It all goes into the production of fluid milk, cream, ice cream, sour cream, butter, and cheese.
Cows usually “leave this operation” after they’ve had three to five calves and are six or seven years old, at which point they become a part of the meat-generating part of the food chain. The torrent of dairy and beef products flows into the same production stream that carries millions of pounds of wheat, miles of pasta, tons of fruit from the orchards, and thousands of gallons of honey from the apiaries.
Many of the church’s companies and operations carry the name Deseret. It’s a term used in the Book of Mormon, meaning “honeybee,” and it has symbolic resonance within the church. Honeybees, too, work and live within a self-sufficient, collaborative, and highly productive community. Mormon settlers at one point proposed calling the territory around Salt Lake City the State of Deseret.
With their vast resources, ongoing production, and wide distribution network, the Latter-day Saints are prepared for just about anything. They have responded to postwar shortages, earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis. But there has never been anything quite like the loss of an electric power grid over an extended period of time. Caussé conceded as much, saying that, in the event of a disaster of truly national scale, “I hope we have enough to take care of the members of the church. We hope that all our families have enough to care for themselves and to help their neighbors. But there is no way we can take care of the whole country.”
What would they do if, in a time of widespread national shortages, others tried to take it all away from them?
18
Constructive Ambiguity
I cannot imagine turning away hungry people when we have food at our house to share.
— ELIZABETH TAGGERT, LDS MEMBER
If they came up on my porch, armed…I’d probably shoot them.
— STAN WOLZ, LDS MEMBER
In the event of a national catastrophe, if an electric grid went down, every bishop’s storehouse—not to mention their supply chain—would seem an inevitable target for looters. It’s an uncomfortable topic, painful to contemplate; but with their history of having been driven from pillar to post and their disciplined culture of preparing for the worst, it is hard to believe that church leaders in Salt Lake City haven’t considered the issue.
As president of the Presiding Bishopric, Bishop Gary E. Stevenson sits very near the top of the church hierarchy. The temporal affairs of the entire church are his direct responsibility. “What if,” I asked Stevenson, “the church institution, in terms of its warehouses, becomes a target?”
“We rely on who we rely on every day in a scenario like that. I think we have to rely on the reaction of those who have the responsibility to police the citizens, and that doesn’t fall under us as a church. We’ve never built a preparation model that would talk about arming ourselves, or arming members of the church to defend…”
I assured him that I was not suggesting the church had any plans to militarize.
“I know you’re not,” he said, “but I’m suggesting that we don’t.”
The issue of guns and self-defense is a minefield for any religious organization. It is particularly so for the LDS church, within which there is a historical sensitivity to the subject of armed violence. During the years of their trek across the country, Mormons were both victims and perpetrators, albeit more often the former than the latter. Active self-defense remained an issue into the second half of the nineteenth century, even after the church put down its roots in Salt Lake City. The open acknowledgment of plural marriages among Mormons led to such tensions with other settlers in the Utah territory that in 1857 President James Buchanan sent the army to maintain order. With memories of what had happened to Mormons in Illinois and Missouri still fresh in their minds, LDS members prepared for an invasion. What ensued was somewhat hyperbolically called the Utah War. It hardly rose to the level of a war, but it was marked by a particularly horrible act of violence, when a Mormon militia unit slaughtered a wagon train of men, women, and children on their way to California
, in what came to be known as the Mountain Meadows massacre. It has taken the church a long time to come to terms with the aftermath of that incident, and it’s only in recent years that it has acknowledged the Mormon militia unit’s complicity.
Even the most benign neighborhood security patrols would run the risk of exhuming such images among church critics. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has had a difficult enough time being accepted into the mainstream of American life without reviving volatile images of a highly organized, self-sufficient, and heavily armed entity. It is totally understandable that the church leadership won’t even discuss the option of defending its resources with an armed force. Nothing would more completely isolate the church. Still, certain internal contradictions remain unavoidable.
The Pew Research Center estimated that there are between 270 million and 310 million guns in the United States, and in western states with a large Mormon population, including Utah, Idaho, Nevada, and Arizona, guns are an accepted and normal part of many, if not most, households. The LDS church has set world-class standards for disaster preparedness and imbued its membership with a sense of individual and group responsibility. Its strategists have established a communications network that would survive anything short of a nuclear attack. It requires an almost deliberate act of obliviousness on the part of church leaders, for whom the gathering and listing of every potential resource is an essential ingredient of disaster preparation, to avoid any discussion of guns and self-defense. This is an organization that, in almost every other respect, stresses its self-sufficiency, its independence, its reluctance to depend on government assistance. The issue of self-defense, though, is toxic.
“People protect their assets,” said Stevenson, “and the way that we rely on protecting our assets as a society, in our country, the adequate way of protecting assets has just been through the state, through the police. And as a church, as an institution, I think, we have always felt comfortable that the state is going to provide the kind of protection that we would need.”
