What Size of City, and What Sort of City, Could (or Should) the City of Zion Be?

• Published in: Dialogue (Salt Lake City, Utah) Utah), 2020-07, Vol.53 (2), p.37-55
• Main Author: Fox, Russell Arben
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 20th century; Agriculture; Census of Population; Christianity; Cities; Farms; Fashion; Mormon Studies; Mormonism; Populism; Religions and Theologies; Rural areas; Sermons
• ISSN: 0012-2157; 1554-9399
• DOI: 10.5406/dialjmormthou.53.2.0037

Now, given the thoroughly urbanized environments that the large majority of American Mormons live in today, the temptation is to take this seventy-year-old message, a message that presents a close association with agricultural labor as normative for Latter-day Saints, quietly chuckle at how General Authorities say the darndest things, and set it aside. There are at least two good interpretive reasons to do so. First, it is very easy to read Widtsoes language as reflecting a thoroughly institutionalized kind of rural sentimentality rather than any actual prophetic counsel. While the romance of the pioneer farm and life in the countryside has never been a dominant theme in the messages handed down by the LDS gerontocracy (note that Widtsoe was seventy-seven years old when he gave that sermon), it was a constant throughout the twentieth century nonetheless. The dynamics of our authoritarian church make it inevitable that the rhetorical norms expressed by one generation of leaders are taken to heart by the next, thus keeping strong an idealization of the rural pioneer experience even though as early as 1910, forty years before Widtsoes sermon, rural life had already become a minority experience among Utah's Mormon population/ But no matter; the idealization continued to roll forward. Consider, for example, the way Presidents Joseph F. Smith and Spencer W. Kimball talked about the profound value of maintaining regular contact with the natural world, or the way multiple General Authorities have invoked the lessons of farm work and rural villages while talking about the Sabbath day, or teaching children discipline, or receiving the Lord's blessings. The urban and suburban American Mormons of today know this language and have made their peace with it in one fashion or another. The lessons encoded in this language don't necessarily lose their significance just because nearly everyone who hears them separates them from their context entirely.