Every four years, figure skaters glide and ski jumpers soar against a backdrop of snow and ice—and amidst a marketing blizzard of products carrying the five rings of the Olympic logo. But the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games could mark the first time the event has been used as a marketing tool by an organized religion.

    As Salt Lake City gears up for next year's Winter Olympics, the Mormon leadership is taking another step to appear more "Christian."  

    "As the Church grows across boundaries, cultures and languages, the use of the revealed name, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is increasingly important in our responsibility to proclaim the name of the Savior throughout all the world," says the letter to be posted in all local Mormon churches. (Is this because in certain dialects of Chinese the word Mor-mon means "the gates of hell?")
    But who is this "Savior?" Is it the same One described in the Bible? The average Mormon layman would be surprised at the question and would probably answer, "Of course. There is only one "Jesus."
    But, a careful study of the Book of Mormon and other central Mormon literature reveals a very different person than the biblical Savior.
    Three major differences emerge. Instead of the eternal Jesus co-equal with the Father, the Mormon Jesus was once a man who achieved godhood by his own virtuousness during a pre-incarnate existence. His spirit was then impregnated into the virgin Mary by the "Eternal Father" who came from the planet Kolob for the physical union with her.
    Second, Mormonism teaches that Jesus and Lucifer are brothers who competed for the opportunity to become the savior of planet earth. Jesus' plan won approval and Lucifer rebelled and became the tempter and deceiver of planet earth.
    Third, Jesus is only one of many saviors who are each responsible for the salvation of the population of other planets like earth. Mormon men are working with the promise that they, too, will eventually become gods and be given a planet of their own to populate. This will be accomplished by their intercourse with many wives who will bear millions of spirit children to inhabit the bodies of the people on their planet.
    Mormons are actively recruiting through TV and other media. They are presenting themselves as a church of Jesus Christ which most people assume is "Christian."

    “These will be the Mo-lympics,” says Steve Pace, a Salt Lake health-care consultant, Olympics critic and lapsed member of the church. “Almost everything that happens in Utah usually has a church spin on it. And the church has never been able to do anything with a small bit of a light touch.”
    The Mormons say the Games are not a proselytizing opportunity but a public-relations mission. Church officials scoff at Pace and others who presume that street-corner conversions, demands for temperance and a defense of the long-rejected practice of polygamy will dominate the Games, a $1.3 billion production staged by the Salt Lake Organizing Committee (SLOC). Instead, says Michael Otterson, the church’s chief spokesman and a member of its Olympics coordinating committee, the LDS’s fundamental goals are to use the Olympics to show that the people of Utah—70 percent of whom are church members—can be “good hosts and to correct misperceptions.” Otterson adds: “The Games have been awarded to Salt Lake City, not to the church.”
    Sometimes, separating the two is difficult. Founded on the belief that God, Jesus and an angel came to founder Joseph Smith Jr. 180 years ago in a grove of trees in upstate New York, the Mormon Church is booming, with 11 million members worldwide, half in the United States. In addition, the church is wealthy—with holdings worth some $30 billion—and experienced at savvy, pinpoint marketing.
    Months ago, the Mormons beat the multitude of official Olympic sponsors—known for sending message-filled trinkets to the media—to the publicity punch. Last fall, hundreds of journalists received tiny, finely detailed, attaché cases. Inside the four-inch-wide briefcases were panels of LDS-related story ideas. Later, a lush calendar of Mormon events was sent. During the Olympics, the church will host its own posh media center. And it’ll stage lavish shows in its new 21,000-seat Conference Center, a building seven times the size of New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. Church officials are hush-hush about the details of the expected “Olympic offerings” at the conference center. But high-tech theater and music will surely be part of the religiously themed extravaganzas that are expected to be open to the public.

LDS Slogan
Leading a Charmed Life

BY LINDA FANTIN
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

    The purple package containing Deseret Book's Olympic CTR charm calls it a "unique" way to remember Utah and the 2002 Olympic Winter Games.
    That's an understatement.
    CTR is an LDS Church-copyrighted acronym for "Choose the Right" and the Salt Lake Organizing Committee has a policy prohibiting official licensees from using religious symbols on 2002 merchandise.
    Still, the committee won't demand the products be pulled from the shelf, spokeswoman Caroline Shaw said Friday.
    "The [SLOC] licensing manager who approved it made a mistake," said Shaw, noting the person was not from Utah and did not understand the LDS connotation. "Given the fact that we approved the initial artwork, we're not going to be heavy handed toward the licensee."
    SLOC did instruct Ogden-based SymbolArts to cease production and distribution of the $4.95 charms, but the bookstore chain owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ordered only 5,000 and they were delivered three weeks ago.
    Shaw draws a line between approving the design of a product and endorsing its message.
    "It's not our official charm," she said.
    But the package states that it is, indeed, "official."
    An official Olympic charm depicting an official LDS symbol will do little to lessen the perception that the 2002 Winter Olympics are the "Mormon Games," a moniker SLOC President Mitt Romney and LDS Church officials have gone to great lengths to debunk, calling the depiction destructive and divisive.
    Shaw said she doesn't believe the sale of the CTR charm undermines SLOC's position.
    Nonetheless, news of the charm raised eyebrows at the U.S. Olympic Committee, which promptly called SLOC and requested an explanation. USOC spokesman Mike Moran would not comment on the record and said only that the USOC had nothing to do with the licensing deal.
    SymbolArts has a separate contract to produce 500,000 CTR rings for the LDS Church, said salesmen Mike Leatham. He said the Olympic collectible was not an attempt to use the Olympics to promote the LDS Church. He likened it to several other charms and pins that depict icons associated with Utah culture like green Jell-O and "Mormon Muffins."
    "[The CTR charm] is just somebody's idea to help support the Olympics," Leatham said. SLOC, which earns about a 15 percent royalty on licensee merchandise, stands to make about $3,700 if all the charms are sold.
    Leatham also argued that CTR can stand for a lot of things, including "Catholics Totally Rule" and "Corrupt the Righteous." But he acknowledged that, in this case, it stands for "Choose the Right."
    And you can find it at Deseret Book at the counter where all the other CTR rings, charms and merchandise are sold -- while supplies last.

Don't miss these other charms that have been produced, all depicting LDS symbols, showing how the Mormon church has used this opportunity of PR to proselytize during the 2002 Winter Olympics

The Beehive is a symbol used by the Mormon religion. Here we have one of the new charms compared to one of the many doorknobs of the Salt Lake Temple. This is was used as a religious symbol before Utah gained statehood.

Do you notice that this charm only mentions Brigham Young as a prophet? They could have attempted to try and pull this one over if they would have mentioned that he was the first governor of Utah instead. 

The Salamander letter stands out as a real masterpiece among the forgeries Mark Hofmann sold to the LDS Church. What ever happened to the ability of the Prophet as a "Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, one will never know. While it has defects as far as the text is concerned, the handwriting is beautifully executed and the physical appearance is so good that it could fool the best of experts. Even examination under ultraviolet light does not seem to reveal the flaws found in many of Hofmann's other documents.
    Mr. Hofmann must have known that the letter would receive a great deal of scrutiny because of its controversial contents and that it would probably end up in the hands of document examiners. Allen Roberts and Fred Esplin wrote the following with regard to the Salamander letter:

    "Jacobs and Hofmann said they realized they possessed something which would make the controversy over the Joseph Smith III blessing pale by comparison....
    "The implications of the letter were not lost on Hofmann and Jacobs. If Harris's description was taken literally, it challenged Joseph Smith's later official testimony that he had received the plates from an angel. The letter was a potential source of conflict and controversy in Mormon history." (Utah Holiday, Jan. 1986, p. 54)

The Deseret News for May 12, 1986, reported:

    "A Utah documents expert has given additional testimony that the controversial Martin Harris letter—better known as the 'White Salamander Letter'—is a forgery....

 

Olympics 2002, Mormon-style

Winter Games will offer a close-up view. The church welcomes it.
By Larry Fish
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

    SALT LAKE CITY - When gold medals are handed out at the 2002 Winter Games, the ceremony will take place on a plaza built and owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
    TV cameras - and thus the eyes of the world - will have little choice but to linger on the church's nearby gothic Temple, bristling with spires, and on other buildings that make up the headquarters of a rapidly growing American-born faith that claims 11 million members worldwide.
    Though tainted by a bidding scandal, Salt Lake City's Winter Games will certainly focus much of the world's attention on a dynamic Mormon culture, which is why the media-savvy church is gearing up to capitalize on the opportunity.
    Church officials say they will go for the soft sell - no aggressive missionaries or overt ties between the Games and the church. But the location of the medals plaza alone guarantees that billions of people worldwide will be exposed to the church's teachings.
    "I think it is fair to say that there will be a positive impact," said Elder W. Craig Zwick, president of the missionary district that includes Pennsylvania and New Jersey. "It's a name-recognition deal."
    Elder Zwick, like many others, hopes that camera shots of the Temple will become the Games' signature image, and that the media, in telling the church's story, won't get "hung up on polygamy, Mormon wealth, and a lot of things that don't matter."
    For Salt Lake City's mayor, Rocky Anderson, the challenge will be to get people to look beyond the church to see his city.
    Anderson was so chagrined when Mitt Romney - a Mormon and the head of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee - agreed to siting the medals plaza in the Temple's backyard that he won a promise that the five illuminated Olympic rings would be hung only on the century-old City Hall building, the symbol of secular Salt Lake.
    Putting the rings on City Hall, Anderson said, is an important part of "the look of the Games in Salt Lake City, how we will present ourselves."
    "We wanted to dispute any notion that there is going to be any one icon or image presented to the world," Anderson said.
    Raised in the church but no longer a member, the former trial lawyer was elected in 1999 to lead a city where the non-Mormon population has grown to 52 percent, in a state still 70 percent Mormon.
    He, like everyone else, knows the spotlight will be shining on the church, which plans its own media operation barely a block from the Olympics' official center, to handle requests from the 11,500 media representatives expected.
    For Michael R. Otterson, the church's director of media relations, the important thing will be for the church and community "to be a good host."
    He and others closely watched the Summer Games in Sydney, Australia, and noted the favorable reputation that city garnered.
    "It's the lasting impression that people have 10 or 15 years away," Otterson said, that is the chief benefit of hosting the Games.
    Church officials also know that media accounts of the history of Salt Lake City, and of Utah, cannot avoid the subject of the church, because, to an extent, they are one and the same.
    Led by the prophet Brigham Young, the Mormons arrived at the Great Salt Lake in 1847, fleeing the persecution that dogged their unique form of Christianity.
    It was begun by Joseph Smith in 1830, when, by Smith's account, an angel named Moroni led him to a hillside in Upstate New York, where he uncovered golden tablets that the angel translated as the Book of Mormon.
    The Book of Mormon details Christ's ministry in North America, where it says he appeared after his resurrection to the remnants of the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel. With Christ's eventual departure, true Christianity was absent for 1,800 years, until Moroni restored it.
    This Mormon version of Christianity, which originally sanctioned polygamy, invited the wrath of non-Mormons, and Smith was killed by an irate mob in Illinois. The danger led Young to bring his followers to the remote Salt Lake valley to establish their Zion in freedom. Here, they have flourished ever since.
    The church grows primarily through converts. Most men are encouraged at age 19 to devote two years to missionary work, and women at 21 have also begun to take up the missionary role.
    The clean-cut missionaries often can be seen in Philadelphia's subways, though in general the East Coast has not been a principal site of growth. Elder Zwick said there were 11 "stakes" in Pennsylvania (each representing up to 5,000 members) and missions in Harrisburg, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, as well as Cherry Hill and Morristown, N.J.
    There is no temple anywhere between Washington, D.C., and Boston, however, and thus no site in the region for the church's most important rites.
    Under the current president, Gordon B. Hinckley, however, the number of temples worldwide has mushroomed, with 31 opening just in the last year, for a total of 100. More than 60,000 missionaries, working in Asia and Africa, have greatly expanded the religion's global reach.
    Today's church is extremely conscious of its image. The church-owned Deseret News, one of Salt Lake's two major daily papers, pays close attention to how the world is regarding the city, which Otterson said expected to host 50 heads of state during the Games.
    "Press not hyped about S.L. Games," one recent front-page story said, in a roundup of news accounts in which reporters predicted that dour Utah, which broadly adheres to the abstemious tenets of Mormonism, was unlikely to be a match for boisterous Sydney.
    The story quoted the Irish Times as saying that "grim-faced pillars of the Mormon faith" would not even allow smoking - and certainly no alcohol - on the church-owned medals plaza. (Beer gardens are planned nearby, however.)
    It remains to be seen whether Salt Lake will become known as a fun city through the Games, but it is certain the church will do everything it can to burnish its own image.
    "The Olympics is a series of images - of the competition and so forth, but also of the community that hosts it," said Ted L. Wilson, who was mayor of Salt Lake from 1975 to 1985 and now teaches at the University of Utah.
    Wilson, who converted to Mormonism as an adult, said church president Hinckley was "a super PR guy" who knew the opportunity the Games represented.
    "Under Gordon B. Hinckley, the church is extraordinarily image-conscious," he said. "They may deny that, but it is true."
    And by having the medals plaza adjacent to Temple Square, Wilson said, "that will play well into the cameras.
    "The church will be intercepting the camera view every way you look."