The Development of the Mormon Church's Welfare System

Moroni explained to smith that Smith had been chosen by God to do special ghostly work. When Smith asked which religion he should follow, the angel replied, none of them, "for all be wrong," and instructed Smith to start his own religion. Moroni also told Smith where to give away and how to translate gold tablets containing additional holy scriptures not shortly found in the biblical canon; these became the testamentary root word of Mormon principle (Book of Mormon, 1981; Ruthven, 1991).

The manner in which Mormonism arose is of the essence(p) to its eudaimonia ethic for several reasons. Conceived as a religion that would be set apart from the mainstream yet also institutionalized to a remarkable degree, Mormonism inevitably achieved the status of a highly insular social organization. Ruthven cites the Mormons' clannishness, communitarianism or "utopian socialism," and persecution by mainstream American religious and social organizations. Carlson says that the Mormon Church has historically seen itself "as plain from the nation as a whole" (1992, p. 27). Also important was the doctrine of polygamy, which persisted officially until the last years of the 19th century. all(prenominal) of these elements shows the tendency of Mormons to develop a sense of mutuality at bottom the organization

But the Mormon store maintains a small but steady volume outlay about $300,000 in order to fill 3,000 orders annually. Recipients include collective vice presidents as thoroughly as poor laborers and a few nonmembers [sic], storehouse manager Keith Barnett said (Smith, 1989, p. Ml).

Gottlieb and Wiley (1984) offer a critique of the manifestation of the theories that serve as the underpinning of the insular good-hearted features of the Mormon Church.

The millennium and concomitant apocalypse having failed to arrive in the 19th century, the Mormon Church was obliged to institutionalize doctrine and organization, with dramatic results: "As the visions of the millennium grew dimmer, the church for a clock gave up the idea of building a parallel ball club that would fulfill all the spiritual and temporal needs of its members. Instead, it centre on building an autonomous religious culture that would take on its members in a spiritual life on a daily basis and touch all aspects of their lives" (Gottlieb & Wiley, 1984, p. 52). That culture does egress to have attained the accidentals of a parallel society turn exacerbating the conflation of spiritualism and temporal experience.

Shupe, A. (1992, June). The darker side of virtue: corruption, dirt and the Mormon empire. The Journal for the Scientific study of Religion, 31, pp. 242-3.

May, D.L. (1990). The philanthropy quandary: the Mormon Church experience. Faith and Philanthropy in America. Ed. R. Wuthnow & V. Hodgkinson. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. pp. 211-231.

The drumhead source of Mormon Church doctrine, The Book of Mormon contains umteen passages that appear intended to affect the temporal as well as spiritual well-being of the faithful. The welfare ethic is unexpressed in Mormon Church scripture. The Mormon Book of Alma (32:4) declares that "a great multitude were . . . poor in heart because of privation as to things of world." The Third (Mormon) Book of Nephi (6:12) says that "some have no chanc
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