Likewise, the massive emphasis on families, especially the sanctified nuclear family, that one sees in post-WWII Mormonism in large part comes from the way in which the church placed an appeal to family at the heart of its incredibly successful proselytizing work in the twentieth century.  To be sure, the theological material was ready at hand to create a cosmic narrative about eternal families, but the theology of the family implicit in the Home Front ads was not the same thing as the theology of the family implicit in the sealing practices of Joseph Smith or Brigham Young.  The sharp turn toward a massive emphasis on the family came at the time when in some sense the identification of Mormonism with happy monogamy was embryonic and aspirational rather than established.  Heber J. Grant, it is worth remembering, was a polygamist and it was only a few years after his death that David O. McKay was preaching the gospel of the sanctified nuclear family.

This brings us to the “I am a Mormon” ad campaign.  It gives an image of Mormons as multicultural, hip, interesting.  It palpably and aggressively labors against the stereotype of Mormons as white Republicans locked into traditional family roles and uninteresting corporate jobs.  I know a lot of young Mormons who love the ads.  They identify – or want to identify – with the cool and interesting people in the ads.  They like the way in which they are relieved of the need to conform to a stereotype locked someplace between Spanish Fork, Utah and Alpine, Utah.  At the same time, a lot of the sophisticated wanna-be sophisticates who identify with the ads have cried foul.  “Most of the people I go to church with aren’t nearly that interesting,” they point out.  “They are a lot whiter, more Republican, and less creative than the ‘I am a Mormon’ ad people.”  Lies, lies, lies, they insist in their darker moments.

This misses the point.  There is clearly a sense in which the “I am a Mormon” ads are a PR shtick.  Like all PR shticks they do not describe reality in any kind of complete or accurate way.  Rather, they pick at reality to create an appealing vision.  The difference is that this PR shtick is embedded within the missionary program of the Mormon Church.  That missionary program will do two things.  First, it will relentless grind its way forward, searching for converts and institutional growth.  The growth will comes from people who find its message appealing.  Second, it will transform the church that it serves.  Many Mormons, especially Mormon leaders, have their sense of what it means to be a Mormon forged through missionary work.  For them Mormonism is and in some sense always will be the message that they preach as missionaries, a message that includes not simply – or even primarily – the theological content of the lessons they teach but the rhetorical tropes and emotional images in which those lessons are embedded.  Over time Mormons will push their own lives to conform to the images presented by the Church of what it means to be a good Mormon.  Those images of good Mormons, however, are always made with at least one eye on missionary work.

This means that the “I am a Mormon” ads ought to make hipster, young sophisticates hopeful.  If I am right, over the course of their life times Mormonism in its teachings and cultural practices will transform itself to look more and more like the cool Mormons in the “I am a Mormon” ads.  That will be pretty cool to watch.

And also, ye yourselves will succor those that stand in need of your succor; ye will administer of your substance unto him that standeth in need; and ye will not suffer that the beggar putteth up his petition to you in vain, and turn him out to perish. Perhaps thou shalt say: The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand, and will not give unto him of my food, nor impart unto him of my substance that he may not suffer, for his punishments are just — But I say unto you, O man, whosever doeth this the same hath great cause to repent. (Mos. 4:16-18)

I don’t buy it.

First, to be clear, I believe that poverty is a great moral evil. I believe that God has commanded us that we are to have a special concern for the poor. I believe that we have a moral obligation to materially assist the poor. I don’t know the exact extent of that obligation, but I think that C.S. Lewis was right when he suggested that if your charitable giving does not impose some kind noticeable economic pain on you, you probably aren’t giving enough.

But it is precisely because I believe this that I do not believe that the choice to give money to a panhandler is morally significant. I begin with the exegesis of King Benjamin. He says that we have a duty to succor those that need our succor and that we should not let the beggar turn his hand up to us in vain. I take this to mean that we must do something to alleviate the poverty and suffering of others. One possible way of looking at this is that we have an unconditional duty to give aid to panhandlers.

In the movie Becket, there is a wonderful scene between King Henry II, played by Peter O’Toole, and the Archbishop Thomas Becket, played by Richard Burton. Becket is distributing blankets to the poor.

A skeptical King Henry asks, “Why are you giving these people blankets?”

“To keep them warm,” says Becket.

“He’ll only sell it to buy drink,” insists Henry, pointing to a ragged man.

“Then that will keep him warm,” says Becket.

Based on King Benjamin’s sermon and this scene, which for some reason has always stuck with me, I have given many panhandlers the contents of my pockets. When I have done this, I have often felt good about myself. I have felt as though I have survived some moral gauntlet. I have felt that I have reached out to help the poor.

I am no longer convinced that this is true. First, I don’t believe that my contributions to panhandlers are especially significant, even to them.   In part this because I almost never carry very much cash, but even more because I am simply not convinced that giving money to panhandlers significantly alleviates poverty, including the poverty of the panhandlers. Second, in at least some cases, I am sure that Henry is right. Giving cash to someone on the street may well facilitate self-destructive behavior.

But doesn’t this run smack into King Benjamin’s insistence that it is sinful to say to ourselves, “The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand, and will not give unto him of my food, nor impart unto him of my substance that he may not suffer, for his punishments are just”?

I am trained as a lawyer, and I train lawyers for a living. This means that I am – if I do my job right – skilled at making fine distinctions and offering sophistical arguments in favor of the forces of mammon, who after all are the ones that are usually willing to fork over $250 an hour for legal advice. I note this, only to be fair to those who wish to dismiss what I am about to say as pettifogging hairsplitting. You are more than welcome to the rhetorical resources I give you for the ad hominem riposte.

So here goes. I think that King Benjamin is saying that it is sinful to withhold our support from the poor on the basis of a belief that the poor deserve their poverty and are getting their just resorts. King Benjamin makes this claim not because he believes that all poor are deserving poor and none have brought their suffering upon themselves. Rather, as I read him, he is saying that the beggar who brings poverty upon himself is an everyman. We have all done unwise and sinful things that leave us as beggars before God, and if God is unwilling to ultimately make his decisions based on the idea of desert, then neither should we.

It is, however, consistent with King Benjamin’s teachings to withhold from the panhandler if one believes that giving him money is going to be destructive. This is where I think that Becket’s response to Henry is fatuous. It is presented as a kind of moral purity, a willingness to love in the face of human foibles. Ultimately, however, I think it is actually a form of indifference. Becket’s ultimate choice in the scene is not about trying to alleviate poverty. It is about trying to perform a virtuous act, in the most shallow sense of a virtuous act. By this I mean an act that reveals the good intention and good character of the actor without regard to the effect or consequences of the act in the world.

But if our duty is to succor the poor it ought to matter to us a great deal whether our act helps or harms. We ought to engage in acts that help, and we ought shun acts that harm. This means that we need to make judgments about those for whom we have an obligation to care. We are not making judgments about whether they are worthy of our concern. We should, however, have a realistic sense of their character. If we know that they will sell the blanket for drink, we ought not to give them the blanket. Not because selling the blanket for drink makes them unworthy of our concern, but because indifference to whether the blanket helps or hurts them is ultimately not an act of concern, but a kind of moral narcissism.

The reality is that I know virtually nothing about the panhandlers who approach me on the street. They may be desperate victims of circumstances. They be a hucksters in need of a fix. I can give them a few dollars, and imagine that I have fed them if only for a moment. I can refuse to give them a few dollars, and imagine that I have kept them from sinking further into self-destructive behavior. (If I give them a few dollars believing that they will use it on self-destructive behavior, then I think I am simply confused.) None of these stories has that much to do with helping the poor. They have a lot to do with constructing a vision of myself as a righteous person. It seems to me, however, that the heart of King Benjamin’s teaching is that constructing such a vision of your self is not important. Indeed, it is something that will almost always be deceptive and will often be sinful.

So when a panhandler approaches you on the street, what do I think you should do? My answer is that it probably doesn’t much matter. The amount of money involved is trivial. One might argue that you should always give, just in case, or perhaps as a way of having a real and personal moment of confronting poverty. It seems just as likely, however, that endowing the moment with this moral significance will give you an inflated sense of your own moral sensitivity deadening real moral concern. Alternatively, you can say that you don’t give to the panhandler because you don’t want to enable self-destructive behavior. Such reasoning, however, can very easily be an excuse for doing nothing.

I think that what we should do is simply stop pretending that panhandlers present an important moral decision. Rather, what we should do is find ways of giving that we are confident will actually help the poor and then give far more than the change in our pockets.

The most fundamental question is whether the Church should save a portion of its revenue. Despite the price tag, from the Church’s point of view the Mall is less a piece of flashing spending, than consequence of the choices that the Church’s commitment to institutional thrift impose upon it. The Church does not spend the totality of its revenues each year. Rather, it always takes a portion of revenues and sets them aside. My understanding is that this policy was put in place in the 1970s by President N. Eldon Tanner, who was tasked with solving the financial mess that was created by the rapid expansion of spending during the McKay administration, especially after the death of J. Reuben Clark, who was the leading voice for thrift and restraint in Church finances.

As a result of this policy of thrift and institutional restraint, the Church necessarily builds up a massive pool of cash. If it is not spent, this cash must be parked someplace and the amounts we are talking about mean that it cannot really be parked in a bank account. The result is that the Church invests this money. The Church is funding the Mall out a holding company for its investment. From the point of view of the Church’s balance sheet this is not an expense. Rather, it is a form of saving against future expenses.

One might disagree with the notion that the Church should save a portion of its revenues. It could spend all of these revenues in their entirety each year. Given that spending could be used to defray suffering in Haiti, as Jana suggests, it is important to realize that saving by definition will limit the amount of resources devoted to the poor – and everything else that the Church supports. I am willing to entertain that this might be the right thing to do. My wife has done humanitarian work in Haiti, and the suffering there and elsewhere is appalling. Given such suffering, a policy of institutional thrift on the Church’s part may be open to criticism. But framing the issue in terms of saving children in Haiti versus an expensive shopping mall misses the issue. The real question is whether there should be saving at all. Once one opts for savings, however, that saving will necessarily be invested in some profit making activity.

What the Mall reveals, however, is that with regard to its saving the Church does not actually behave as a profit maximizing institution. What a profit maximizing institution would do is turn its savings over in their entirety to a portfolio manager at JP Morgan or the like and let them seek out the highest rate of return on those savings. This, however, is not what the Church has done. Rather, in effect it feels a sense of obligation for Salt Lake City and wants to improve the city. It does this by taking money from its investment portfolio and putting it in an asset — a shopping mall — with a higher level of risk and a lower level of return than it would normally obtain. In other words, the shopping mall investment doesn’t actually look like profit maximizing behavior to me. In economic terms, I think it is safe to assume that the opportunity costs of the investment in the Mall are higher than the expected return on that investment.

Given that this is the choice the Church is making, I think that the there are two major questions. First, does the Church owe a special obligation to Salt Lake City. For example, I might argue that the Church has a general obligation to help humanity but no special obligation to Salt Lake. If this is what I believed, then Church ought to invest its savings in the assets that will generate the maximum return and then spend that money based on some criterion generated by its universal obligation to humanity. (Or alternatively, one could simply not save and spend all revenue based on the universal criterion.) The Church leadership clearly feels a sense of obligation to Salt Lake City, but the Mall actually reveals that it is a rather weak sense of obligation. The $1.5 billion price tag of the Church’s investment is not the right measure. Rather, the measure is the foregone marginal profit of placing the saving elsewhere, say an investment account at Goldman Sachs. Hence, the Mall indicates some sense of local obligation but not a strong or overwhelming sense of local obligation.

The second question is whether the Mall will actually be effective in revitalizing Salt Lake City. On this, I am not sure. I don’t care for malls and the kind of glitzy consumerism Jana describes is distasteful to me. On the other hand, I realize that my sense of what is or is not tasteful is probably not a great guide to what works effectively at boosting the local economy or encouraging urban renewal. I am not especially sanguine about the shopping mall business model or the kind of high-end, mixed-use developments that have been done at City Creek, but I also have to confess that I am not an expert when it comes to real estate development and urban renewal strategy. I think that you can make perfectly good arguments about that this project is a bad idea, but it seems to me that these are ultimately questions of practical judgment, i.e. what will be most effective, not moral judgment.

Jana’s ultimate conclusion is that the Mall is a moral failure. On this I disagree. As I see it, at each point the Church was faced with a question of good judgment rather than the stark moral choice that Jana sees between malls and starving children. Should the Church save a portion of its revenues? Should the Church put a portion of its revenues in a sub-optimal investment because of a special duty to the community where it’s headquarters is located? Will the Mall be effective in promoting urban renewal? Thrift, local obligation, and urban renewal strategy. These are matters on which people can disagree. They are matters on which people can be wrong. Errors about such matters, however, do not strike me as moral failures.

A final point: Jana invokes the prophet Amos in her article. She is trying to get the kind of simple moral clarity that he demonstrated. This, I think, is admirable, and I think that she is absolutely correct in invoking Amos in thinking about our moral obligations to the poor. On the other hand, Amos – and other ancient prophets – are not, in themselves, very good templates for thinking about modern investment decisions. This is because the underlying economic infrastructure in the ancient worlds that they discuss was strikingly different than those that exist in the modern world. The kind of complex investment decisions that the Church faces simply did not exist in Amos’s world. In particular, the institutions that mediate between saving and investment in a modern economy were created at the end of the seventeenth century. This means that saving and spending have different social effects in the ancient world than do in the modern world. This doesn’t mean that the concerns expressed by Amos aren’t just as relevant today as they were when he expressed them. It does mean, however, that understanding the meaning and application of those norms requires a more nuanced understanding of investment than can be provided by reading the scriptures.

I start with work, the labor I must do to live. I should like to be good at my job. I don’t have any particular desire to be at the very top of my profession. Academic stardom looks like rather too brass a ring to devote all of one’s energy on the greasy pole to achieve. I would like, however, to teach my students well. I would like to write things that help people to think better, to say a few somethings that will still be worth saying and reading a generation or two hence. To the extent that I have other intellectual ambitions, I would like to be remembered as one of the people who helped to push along Mormonism intellectually, a person who treated the Restoration with charity and respect and learned something from it, perhaps something that had not been learned before.

I would like to be a good husband and father. I want to teach my children how to be good and productive people. I want them to be kind, virtuous, intelligent, and hard working. I want to give them the foundations of a faith that will carry them through an eventful life. I want to play with them and enjoy the company of my little ones before time, in its brutality, carries them inevitably away from me. I want to make my wife happy, to serve her. I want more of those moments when she lights up at the sight of me without being aware that she glows. I want to be the means for her to be happy, productive, and content. I want to share TV shows and companionable reading together. I want to tend a garden with her and enjoy the fruits of our harvest. I want to hold her when she cries and be the person who makes her smile in the midst of her anger or frustration.

I have respect for the forms. I don’t need or even want my life to be some work that I author ex nihilio. Rather, I want to be rooted in a tradition and a people. Hence, I want to live a virtuous Mormon life not simply as an act of fidelity to God but as an act of filial piety to the people that have reared me. I’ve no particular ecclesiastical ambitions and I don’t enjoy being in charge or going to meetings. I would, however, like to serve diligently where I am called, and find ways of bringing some light or aid into the lives of those with whom I worship. I should like to keep my covenants, and follow God in the way that my fathers followed him. I always want “Come, Come, Ye Saints” and “The Spirit of God Like a Fire is Burning” to reach down to some deep core of my identity, a core to with which I am reconciled and at peace.

I should like to feel the presence of God. I would like to pray so that at times I approach the throne of grace. I always want to experience the marvelous and excessive beauty of the world as a gift from a loving Father in Heaven. I want to be aware of the place in which I live, to know how the water drains off the land, to feel the rhythms of trees and birds and seasons, to feel the immediacy of God’s creation. I want to read scripture and poetry and let the language permeate my soul to some deep place before logic and analysis. Maybe, once before I die, I want write a poem that says a true thing, beautifully. I want to run and run and run, to float on my legs over the land and feel my body tired but strong and healthy.

When I die, I do not want to be lonely. I want to be surrounded by people I love – whether they are on this side of the veil or the other. I want to leave behind words and memories that will live on in this world when I am gone. I want to be happy to have run the course that I ran, to feel that I pushed through to the end of the race to which I was set. I want to be laid in a garden spot, some piece of land to which I am not a stranger. I want to be clothed in the robes of the holy priesthood in the casket, and I want my son or my grandson to bless the land by the authority of that priesthood to be protected to the hour of the first resurrection.

That, it seems to me, would be a good life.

Jews do well among conservative Christians and among liberal secularists. The reason for this is that while there is an anti-semitic strand in Christianity, there is also a philo-semitic strand that continues to see Jews as God’s chosen people in some sense and gives Jews a starring role in various eschatological dramas. Among conservative Evangelicals, for example, this shows up as Zionism from afar in the form of support for the State of Israel. Hence, conservative Christians — or some significant chunk of them — have theological reasons for happy thoughts about Jews. Secular liberals like Jews because there are a lot of liberal Jews. Hence, Jews are in the odd position of getting love for theological reasons from the right and love for political reasons from the left.

Mormons are in precisely the opposite position. Among conservative Christians — especially Evangelicals — there are strong theological reasons for disliking Mormons. (The theological reasons are coupled here with demographic competition for converts.) Secular liberals, on the other hand, dislike Mormons because they are political conservatives. Hence, Mormons garner hostility on the left for political reasons. There is not off setting love from the religious right, however. Hence, Jews are in the odd social position of being loved on both sides, and Mormons are in the odd social position of being disliked on both sides.

The summer seminars led by Professor Bushman beginning in 1997 pursued the theme of “Joseph Smith and His Times.” Participants were asked to connect the Mormon prophet to the religions, philosophies, and cultural formations of his period. More recently the seminars have posed the same question for Mormonism as a whole. How is Mormon thought to be situated in its broad cultural environment?

For the conference, participants are invited to make comparisons to large cultural systems such as democracy, capitalism, evangelism, or science, or to specific thinkers and movements. The aim is to highlight aspects of Mormon thought or praxis that emerge more sharply when juxtaposed against other cultural formations or intellectual perspectives.

Brief analytical reflections of about twenty minutes duration will be most suitable for the conference format. Friends and students of Professor Bushman are invited to submit.

Send a short (1-2 pp) abstract of the proposed paper, along with a short (1 p) C.V., to Spencer Fluhman at fluhman@gmail.com by November 1, 2010.

All the talk of pioneers, of course, is just a polite way of saying Mormons in public, and the point that it makes is correct: The Mormon pioneers in Utah were squatters.  There is a certain amount of tetchiness on this point in the comments at the DN site, but there isn’t any serious debate about this.  Granted, after the ceding of northern Mexico to the U.S. at the end of the Mexican-American war, Mormon immigration to Utah didn’t necessarily involve illegally crossing an international boarder (although there was some of that later in the 19th century), but the settlements up and down the Mormon corridor were settled by people who did not possess legal title to the land that they occupied.  Indeed, the editorial understates this, implying that after 1869 when the territorial land office was set up in Utah everything was entirely legal.  Not so.  It actually took a decade or two to sort out legal title to all of the settled land in Utah.

The editorial also understates the way in which the Mormon pioneers status as squatters effected their attitudes toward the law.  Mormons were hostile to federal authority for much of the 19th century.  Most of this had to do with polygamy and theocracy, but it would be a mistake — I think — to underestimate the impact of property law on events.  Some pretty solid modern scholarship has demonstrated that the expulsion of the Mormons from Missouri (as opposed to the earlier expulsion from Jackson County) was orchestrated in part by a group of local non-Mormon elites who manipulated public sentiment against the Mormons as a way of getting their property.  At the very least, these elites profited mightily by snapping up Mormon “preemption rights” thereby reaping the economic benefits of Mormon improvements.  Thus, during the Utah period Mormons were in part suspicious of federal authority because they feared — not without cause as past experience showed — that formal land law could be used by enemies to confiscate their de facto property.  The result was a healthy dollop of contempt by Mormons for federal legal power and even — I believe — a certain amount of extra-legal violence (read “law breaking”) against claim jumpers, real and perceived.

There is another strand of thinking at work in the DN editorial, a strand associated with the work of Peruvian political activist Hernando De Soto and the Nobel Prize winning economist Douglas North.  Both of these thinkers have looked at the way in which informal and illegal activity can be formalized and brought within the legal domain.  Hence, North has argued that the origins of the rule of law in the Anglo-American tradition can be found in the formalization of land title in medieval England.  De Soto has argued that one of the chief impediments to economic prosperity in the developing world is the way in which the poor are excluded from the formal legal system.  In effect, they must exist as squatters.

Hence, this article is implicitly doing more than simply calling for immigration reform.  It is in effect arguing that the shadowy, informal, illegal labor market inhabited by undocumented immigrants is akin to the shadowy, informal, illegal system of land holding that Mormon pioneers (and medieval lords and peasants, the inhabitants of Brazilian slums) inhabited.  Just as the formalization of property rights in land allowed for economic flourishing, the formalization of property rights in labor — if you will — will allow for economic flourishing.

Aside from the merits of the argument, the DN editorial raises an interesting question: Is this a “Mormon” editorial?  Yes and no.  The example of Mormon pioneers serves two functions.  First it illustrates a point.  Second — and far more importantly — it appeals to a Mormon audience, inviting them to associate immigrants with pioneer forbearers.  In part this is simply a rhetorical move.  But in part it represents a peculiarly Mormon challenge to the claims of national identity to primary allegiance.  The idea is that if immigrants are like Mormon pioneers they have some claim to the regard of American Mormons in the face of any objection that they are not like Americans.  It is an appeal over the head of national identity to tribal and religious identity.  On the other hand, the arguments — especially the implicit appeal to De Soto and North — are not themselves peculiarly Mormon.  What we get is thus a marriage of Mormon stories and imagery to a-Mormon ideas, along with a subtle subliminal appeal to Mormonism’s most potentially radical political idea, namely the way in which it compromises allegiance to the nation state.

The Deseret News shouldn’t really exist.  I can’t think of any city in the U.S. of comparable size to Salt Lake that supports two major daily newspapers.  The DN is gambling that they can carve out a niche for themselves with — among other things — a stronger and more unique editorial voice, one that emanates from their “values.”  In this context, I don’t think that  values is simply a code word for “Mormonism” or “conservatism,” although at times it is both of those things.  Rather, I think it is an attempt to find a voice that combines an engagement with public ideas with some voice and ideas rooted in a Mormon milieu.  The possibility of such a voice is the final issue lurking within this editorial.

All in all there is quite a bit more going on here than one normally gets from the editorial page of a struggling regional daily.

For those who are going to be in Virginia next week, Southern Virginia University in Buena Vista, Virginia is going to be hosing a conference on September 10th entitled “Embracing the Law A scholarly conference on Doctrine and Covenants 42.”  The conferences is being sponsored by the Richard L. Evans Chair for Religious Understanding at BYU, the Mormon Theology Seminar, and Southern Virginia University.  Details below:

September 10, 2010 • Free Admission

Session 1

9:00 – 10:45 a.m., Stonemetz Conference Room Jeremiah John, Southern Virginia University

Law and Church in Section 42 of the Doctrine and Covenants

Nate Oman, William and Mary Law School “I Give Unto You My Law”: Section 42 as a Legal Text and the Paradoxes of Divine Law

Discussant: President Rodney K. Smith, Southern Virginia University

Session 2

1:30 – 3:00 p.m., Main Hall 337

Russell Fox, Friends University “Thou Wilt Remember the Poor”: Liberation Theology and a Radical Interpretation of “The Laws of the Church of Christ”

Robert Couch, Willamette University Consecration and the End of the Poor

Discussant: TBA

Session 3

3:30 – 5:15 p.m., Main Hall Ballroom

Karen Spencer, independent scholar “To Teach or Not to Teach”: Three Possible Interpretations of D&C 42:12-14

Kristine Haglund, editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought “The Beauty of the Work of Thine Own Hands”: On the Possibility of an Aesthetic for Zion

Joe Spencer, University of New Mexico “Remnants of Revelation”: On the Canonical Reading of D&C 42

Discussant: Scott Dransfield, Southern Virginia University

Today I would also like to speak about handcart pioneers.  In 1855 and 1856 Mormons across Scandinavia and the British Isles began gathering together their possessions and making their way to North America.  They were converts to the church.  They had heard the missionaries preach the gospel and the message of the Restoration.  They had been touched by the Holy Spirit and had been baptized.  They wanted to gather with the Saints.  They were looking for a better life for themselves and their families in America, but beyond that they wanted to gather to Zion and assist in the building up of the kingdom of God.  Many of them had scrimpted and saved for many years to have enough money to make the journey.

They traveled by ship and rail until the railroad ended in Iowa City, Iowa.  These Saints were poor and by the time they arrived in Iowa their money had all but given out.  Furthermore, the church was poor.  It lacked the resources to subsidize the purchase of the wagons and ox teams that were usually necessary to cross the interior of the continent.  So at the behest of church leaders these Saints built handcarts and resolved to walk the 1000 miles to Utah, pulling their possessions behind them.  The first handcart companies to set out left in late spring and early summer.  It was a long and exhausting pull, but they arrived safely in the Salt Lake Valley.

The last two companies, however, were delayed and they didn’t leave Iowa City until early July.  It was mid to late August by the time they arrived in Winter Quarters near present day Florence, Nebraska.

There they met Levi Savage.  Levi Savage was a remarkable man.  He had joined the church and gathered with his family to Nauvoo.  There he was a close friend of the Prophet Joseph Smith and after Joseph’s murder he went west with the Saints.  In 1846, Brigham Young asked him to join the Mormon Battalion, a unit in the U.S. Army, in order to raise money for the rest of the Saints.  Levi Savage joined and walked from Florence, Nebraska all the way to San Diego, California.  From there he walked north to San Francisco.  From San Francisco he walked across the Sierra Nevadas to rejoin the Saints in the Salt Lake Valley.  Brigham Young gave him a few years to catch his breath, and then called him on a mission to Siam, in present day Thailand.  It would be difficult to imagine a more remote place for a nineteenth-century American.  So Levi Savage walked to San Francisco, and then took a ship to Calcutta, India.  From there he struggled to make it to Siam, but he was unable to get there due to a civil war.  Civil wars were the sort of thing that could finally stop Levi Savage.  He did, however, make his way to Rangoon, Burma in present day Myanmar and preached the Gospel there.  At the conclusion of his mission he boarded a ship sailing west around the Cape of Good Hope to Boston and from thence he made his way to Winter Quarters.

Hence, when Levi Savage met up with the Willie Handcart Company he had literally walked or sailed around the entire globe at the behest of church leaders to build up the kingdom of God.  He was an experienced frontiersman, someone who knew what was involved in crossing the interior of North America.  He begged and pleaded with the European immigrants not to set out so late in the summer.  He knew that setting out so late was terribly risky.  They could be caught in early winter storms on the high plains hundreds of miles from their destination.

Levi Savage was much more experienced that the leader of the handcart company, James Willie.  Willie seems to have felt threatened by Levi Savage’s expertise and his strong opinions.  His ego and pride seem to have gotten involved, and he overruled Savage, insisting that the company would leave immediately.  At this point, Levi Savage got up and gave a remarkable speech.  He said:

What I have said [about the risks of setting out so late] I know to be true; but seeing you are to go forward, I will go with you, will help all I can, will work with you, will rest with you, and if necessary, will die with you. May God in his mercy bless and preserve us.

Why did Levi Savage go with the handcart pioneers?  He didn’t have to.  He didn’t know these people and had never met them before.  Their leaders had treated him badly.  But they were his people.  Their God was his God. (Ruth 1:16) They were not strangers or foreigners, but fellow citizens in the household of God.  (Eph. 2:19) Levi Savage had been baptized and had made covenants that he would bear one another’s burdens that they may be light, would mourn with those that mourn and comfort that that stand in need of comfort. (Mos. 18:8-9)  And he knew that the emigrants would need someone to bear their burdens, to mourn with them, to comfort them.

Levi Savage, of course, was absolutely right.  The handcart companies were caught in an early blizzard high on plains of Wyoming more than 500 miles from their destination.  They were unable to move forward, and the members of the company began to die of exhaustion, starvation, exposure, and hypothermia.

Brigham Young learned of the late-departing handcart companies in early October.  It was General Conference, and the Saints were assembled on Temple Square.  Brigham got up and said:

I will now give this people the subject and the text of the Elders who may speak to-day and during the conference. It is this. On the 5th day of October, 1856, many of our brethren and sisters are on the plains with handcarts, and probably many are now seven hundred miles from this place, and they must be brought here, we must send assistance to them. The text will be, ‘to get them here.’ I want the brethren who may speak to understand that their text is the people on the plains. And the subject matter for this community is to send for them and bring them in before winter sets in.

That is my religion; that is the dictation of the Holy Ghost that I possess. It is to save the people. This is the salvation I am now seeking for. . .

I shall call upon the Bishops this day. I shall not wait until tomorrow, nor until the next day, for 60 good mule teams and 112 or 115 wagons. I do not want to send oxen. I want good horses and mules. They are in this Territory, and we must have them. . . .

I will tell you all that your faith, religion, and profession of religion, will never save one soul of you in the Celestial Kingdom of our God, unless you carry out just such principles as I am now teaching you. Go and bring in those people now on the plains.

Brothers and sisters, suffering seems to be a major part of mortality.  Sometimes we suffer because of our own pride and foolishness, like Captain Willie.  Sometimes we suffer because of the sin of others.  And sometimes we just suffer.  Bad things happen to good people, and the Lord doesn’t really explain why.  He is very clear, however, on what we are supposed to do.

The Savior told a story about a man on the road to Jericho who fell in among thieves.  (Luke 10:30-37) They beat him, took all of his possessions, and left him for dead in the dirt on the road.  A Levite came along.  The Levite was a good person.  He was keeping all of the rules.  He no doubt had on a white shirt and tie.  But he walked by, leaving the beaten man in the dust.  Then along came a Samaritan.  I imagine that he was a bit scruffy.  He wasn’t as good a member of the church as he could be.  He wasn’t keeping all of the rules like he should.  But he stopped.  He bounded up the man’s wounds, picked him up, and carried him to an inn, and promised the innkeeper that he would pay for whatever was necessary to heal the man.

Brothers and sisters, we are surrounded by people who are suffering and who face challenges.  There are people in our families, in our ward, and in our community who are trapped in the snows high on the plains of Wyoming, who are lying in dust on the road to Jericho.  Our job is to go and bring in the people on the plains, to pick them up and carry them to an inn. This is our religion; that is the dictation of the Holy Ghost to us. It is to save the people. This is the salvation that we should seek.  I pray that we may do so, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.