As millions of eyes turn to Salt Lake City during the Olympics, many likely will look for more than athletes and alpine events.
Utah is home to the largest concentration of Latter-day Saints ? known as Mormons to most ? and few journalists can resist the cultural backdrop. For more than a year, leaders and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have been scrutinized by the press in a fashion that has fomented humor and angst among locals.
In the past two weeks, at least a dozen stories ? including several this weekend ? have appeared in major media.
Writes Timothy Egan in the New York Times: "It was Mark Twain who said of the empire that the Mormons built at the base of the Wasatch Mountains: 'This was a fairyland to us ? a land of enchantment and awful mystery.' Less than a week before the start of the Winter Olympics, as Utah opens its door to the world, Twain's head-scratching over the cryptic nature of the Beehive State still holds."
The New Yorker magazine served up a lengthy piece in its Jan. 21 issue. Associated Press is offering quick-read "FAQs about the Mormon church." The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Houston Chronicle have all weighed in, trying to provide a cultural context to match the dramatic scenery of the Wasatch Mountains.
"When (Salt Lake Mayor Rocky) Anderson met recently with a group of international journalists, they kept asking not about the vibrant arts and culture, burgeoning high-technology sectors, commitment to public transport, safe streets or waist-high powder of the slopes," noted William Booth in the Washington Post. "No, the foreign press wanted to know about the Mormons."
Mormons and the Olympics
Stories from other papers:
Houston Chronicle (Feb. 4): Games offer Mormon religion a golden opportunity to shine
Newsweek International (Feb. 4): Mormons and Moguls
The Globe and Mail (Feb. 4): Praise the Lord and pass me a Polygamy Porter
New York Times (Feb. 3): A Leap of Faith for Utah's 'Peculiar People'
New York Times (Feb. 3): Tiptoeing Out to Meet the World
Newsday (Los Angeles Times) (Feb. 3): The Mormon church wields the clout in Utah, but during the Games it's going for a lighter touch
Irish Times (Feb. 2): Salt Lake City and Mormons to curb religious zeal for Olympics
The Columbus Dispatch (Feb. 1): Local Mormons volunteer at Olympics
The Oregonian (Jan. 29):
Mormons Await World Scrutiny
Indeed, rather than focusing on them as hard-working, family-oriented and faithful to their church, the caricatures more often define Latter-day Saints by what they are not: beer or coffee drinkers, all-night partiers. Or by what many of their early ancestors were: polygamists.
That's no surprise to Jan Shipps, who has spent her lifetime as a non-LDS scholar studying Latter-day Saints. As professor emeritus of history and religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, she has become an "inside outsider" after more than 40 years studying LDS faith and culture. As the Games have drawn closer, she has spent hours most every day giving context to reporters for whom "Mormonism" is as foreign as it is enticing.
While Shipps said she gives "high marks" to what she believes has been "quite balanced" mainstream media coverage in USA Today, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report, to name a few, the nature of journalism makes such coverage a challenge.
"It's not just how the reporters do but what the editors want, and a lot of people don't understand that. I think there are a lot of editors that want the quirky stuff. They want to sell papers, and they want things that are different and unusual, the kind of stuff that people don't know."
That was the challenge with a couple of European reporters who interviewed Shipps, one of whom flew to Indiana to talk to her in person. In those cases "the reporter was so convinced of their own understanding of Mormonism as being bizarre that they called me to say 'we know it's bizarre, tell us how' or 'give us a quote that will let people know we're right.' "
An LDS "conspiracy" behind securing the Olympic Games made for a plausible story early on, Shipps said in a column she's written this week, posted on the Web at www.beliefnet.com.
While the church's concern with its public image is a real issue, Shipps said, the "conspiracy" theory that purported that church officials orchestrated the bid and controlled the Salt Lake Organizing Committee had no basis in fact, she believes.
Those who look below the surface of many newspaper and magazine accounts will find that far from being a church-sponsored festival, the 2002 Winter Olympics have presented something of a dilemma for the church, Shipps said.
"One reason church leaders did not speak about the Games to their members until late 1998 (the Olympic bid was won in 1995) may be the division that existed in the church hierarchy about whether trying to get the Olympics for Salt Lake City had been a good idea."
Shipps said she learned about the division among church leaders during an interview with President Gordon B. Hinckley before the Olympic bribery scandal came to light. When she asked whether the church had actively supported the bid, she reported he told her, "Our people were on both sides of the question."
But settling on the right public relations strategy ? which has included a ban on proselyting of Olympic visitors and a training effort in non-missionary etiquette for LDS volunteers ? "apparently took a bit of doing," she said.
Yet "by the time the church placed its own Olympic logo on its Web site early in 2001, its approach to the Salt Lake City Games was this: As the metaphorical patriarch of the culture, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would be 'gracious hosts,' welcoming the world into its home."
The impression visitors and viewers take away is crucial, Shipps says, to the church's future presence in nations around the globe. Missionaries proselyte only in nations where the government gives its approval.
While hundreds of stories have been written, at this point no one knows the particulars of how the state's post-Olympic portrait will continue to develop in newspapers, magazines, on Web sites and on television until the Games are over.
Most, including Salt Lake Organizing Committee officials and Anderson, want it to appear cosmopolitan and multicultural. Some prefer the monocultural reinforcement for a variety of reasons, both personal and political.
But virtually everyone agrees that when February is over, the world's vision of Utah will never be the same.
Which is bittersweet news to some, like the Rev. Frederick Q. Lawson, quoted in the Houston Chronicle.
" 'This (city) has been a very well-hidden and -protected gem, a treasure,' said Lawson, who was raised in Salt Lake City and is canon at the city's Episcopal cathedral. 'And now it is going to be revealed to everyone.' "
The medals plaza itself will provide the quintessential cusp of the media's portrait of the Games, with winners up front on the podium and the Salt Lake Temple spires in the distance. Even so, after the Mormon Tabernacle Choir plays its part in the Opening Ceremonies, the cultural backdrop will fade into the background, Shipps believes.
E-mail: carrie@desnews.com