'Zion' can be anywhere where there are Mormons

Orem » Leaving Utah for a Massachusetts prep school in the 1940s, 15-year-old Chase Peterson felt like a Brigham Young going East.

Peterson, the future University of Utah president, was the only Mormon most of his high school -- and later Harvard -- peers would ever know and thus felt a keen responsibility to uphold the traditions and standards of his parents, culture, church and place. But he was never homesick.

"My values, my religion, and my parents all traveled with me," Peterson said Thursday at a two-day conference sponsored by Utah Valley University's Religious Studies Program. "With them, I had a passport that allowed me to engage opportunities that were not guaranteed to succeed and not always in areas where I was trained."

Ned Hill studied chemistry at Cornell in 1969 and ended up serving as the area's LDS Institute of Religion director. His office was on the same floor as Catholic anti-war activist Daniel Berrigan.

"It was so fun to associate with brilliant people, refined, thoughtful and kind from all different backgrounds, religions and parts of the world," said Hill, now professor of finance at Brigham Young University. "I tell people -- 'Get out of Utah, you'll have an adventure.' "

Peterson and Hill shared their experiences at the UVU conference, "Outmigration and the Mormon Quest for Education," the culmination of a 20-year research study done by G. Wesley Johnson and

The couple conducted some 600 oral interviews in 21 American cities. Three-quarters of the approximately six million American Mormons live in large urban areas around the country in congregations that mostly were populated by outmigrants from the West, Johnson said during the conference's opening session.

"These traveling Mormons continued to cling to their own religious world and culture while fully embracing urban and suburban American society, jobs, schools, institutions and, most import, values," Johnson said. "They left behind the 19th century notion that the promised land or 'Zion' was to be found only in Utah, and that, in fact, it could be found anywhere in the country where a critical mass of Latter-day Saints was assembled."

Keeping the Faith

Most of the migrants retained their religious orthodoxy, while becoming more cosmopolitan in their political, intellectual and social views, Johnson said. "The interviews reveal a wide spectrum of behavior and attitudes within acceptable limits. Mormons come as liberals and conservatives, traditionalists and radicals. . . .There are populists, elitists, feminists, and in some cases, snobs. The church is the bridge that keeps them together."

The church also drew on the skills of these young, educated male members to lead their local congregations and a number of them later joined the church hierarchy. Several LDS apostles fall into this category: L. Tom Perry was an executive in Boston, Robert D. Hales was born and raised in greater New York City, Dallin H. Oaks got his law degree and later taught at the University of Chicago, and Henry B. Eyring's father took the family to Princeton.

Indeed, historian Jan Shipps argued that 19th century Mormon elites were either related to church founder Joseph Smith or to pioneers who trekked across the plains. After World War II, though, the pattern shifted.

"Members of the educated elite were brought into church leadership at the highest level," said Shipps, who has studied 1,500 of the estimated 4,800 case files in a 1967 directory of Latter-day Saints with advanced degrees. "Nearly 75 percent of those with advanced degrees had a church calling."

The women, many of whom went because of their husband's education, had a different experience but still were stretched and changed.

At Cornell, Hill's wife, Claralyn Hill, had five young children and most of her friends were Mormon.

"We weren't rich. We weren't famous. We raised our children and did our work," she said. "It was a huge effort just to keep the church growing."

Later, in Bloomington, Ind., where the Hills lived for 10 years, Claralyn Hill got her own graduate degree in counseling, worked at the Kinsey Institute for Sex, Gender and Reproduction, and created a non-profit organization for pregnant women.

"It was a powerful, life-changing experience," she said. "I had to learn to adapt where I landed. It made me more flexible."

Questions Remain

Though valuable, this research focuses too much on the educated elite and men and not enough on the ordinary men and women who populated Mormon congregations, said LDS sociologist Armand Mauss .

The story needs to be fleshed out to reflect such aspects as "trying to raise the only Mormon family within 50 miles; how to deal with one's teenagers and college kids as they start pairing off with non-members; how to implement a church program that was created with Utah wards in mind; how to get approval for a new chapel from church bureaucrats who know nothing about local conditions; how to deal with diaspora Mormons who don't fit, . . . and so on," said Mauss, visiting scholar in Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University in southern California. "We need, in other words, a narrative that is a little less heroic and a little more realistic."

He would like to see more data about how were outcomes different, for example, for those who opted for advanced education rather than a two-year LDS mission? How was the experience of married and single migrants different? What were the consequences of specific areas of higher education? How were their religious and family lives affected?

Finally, Mauss suggested, any story of the outmigration has to include its impact on the heartland.

Did the ready resort to recent Utah immigrants for leadership hinder or help the development of local leaders? Were defectors and apostates more likely or less likely to face church discipline in far-flung congregations? How did conversion and retention compare between Utah and the hinterlands?

Johnson embraced all Mauss's suggestions for further research and added one of his own -- the impact of the G.I. Bill on Mormon outmigration. He did, however, defend his research, noting that the first 300 interviewees were randomly selected and did include more than leaders.

The Johnsons' book, Mormons Move to the Mainstream: How the 20th Century Outmigration Reshaped Mormon Society from Isolation to Assimilation , he told the conference's 150 attendees, will provide "a rich and textured story."

pstack@sltrib.com