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"If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it."
Good news for all those folks who worry that Utah is unduly dominated by a particular religion: It isn't.
Bad news: Utah might be a better place if the church many of us deride for having too much power over us actually had the power to tell its followers, or anybody else, what to do.
Clearly, Utah does fit in a nation that gets its true moral instruction from comedians, not from religious or political leaders.
The official doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is to help the poor, shelter the stranger and all that other Jesusy stuff that the leaders of other denominations usually say equally supportive things about — and the followers of other denominations equally ignore.
At least, that's what it says on the LDS website. As a heathen immigrant from away, I take their word for it.
And the church's admonition, and its efforts, to help the poor have had an impact. Megan McArdle, a center-right policy pundit who writes for Bloomberg View, visited Utah recently and churned out a 4,666-word tome on just how much easier it is to rise from poverty to relative affluence in Utah than just about anywhere else. (It's online at sltrib.com/opinions .) She gave much of the credit to the LDS Church, its ward system, its Welfare Square, but despaired at the thought that its successful mix of self-reliance and non-government community support could be replicated in other cultural atmospheres.
She also undercut her own point by being the latest to fall into the trap of saying that Utah has solved its homeless crisis. And she didn't visit Draper.
Philadelphia won its reputation as the meanest town in the country when the crowd at an Eagles game actually booed Santa Claus. (Hey. It was really cold and the Eagles were 2-12 that year.)
Philly, though, has got nothing on Draper. That's where an angry crowd at a town meeting hurriedly organized to discuss plans to build a new homeless resource center not only turned on their own mayor, they also booed a homeless man who came to the meeting in search of some compassion for his plight and the plight of many others in Salt Lake County.
Yeah. I've got your Christian nation right here.
It is fair to complain that excessive LDS influence guides our laws on alcohol and marijuana, and that it did slow the state's acceptance of gay rights until the pressure popped a couple of years ago.
But it is also fair to say that such thumbs on the scales of justice also exist in places where, say, Southern Baptists are ascendant. Sorry, Utah, you're not that special.
And not that uniform. In Thursday's Salt Lake Tribune, there was an article about a self-described Mormon woman whose blog is replete with white supremacist garbage that the church is Officially Ashamed Of. And, in the same day's paper, a story about law students from Brigham Young University volunteering to onto the least of these, specifically providing legal help to residents of a Texas holding center for women and children who crossed the U.S. border illegally.
If you get beyond alcohol, which I trust most of us can, the things a lot of Utahns don't like about the supposed Mormon dominance of our political system has little or nothing to do with LDS/Christian doctrine, because the actions of our supposedly LDS-dominated government don't have anything to do with it, either. It's all about being a member of a club, which happens to be made up of people who nominally share a religious orientation, who like coal and guns and charter schools and abhor the regulation of the free market. Except alcohol.
What we have here, which also probably is not that different from places where other religions, or no religion, are a lot of good people who would quite admirably kick you in the teeth to get their own child the last seat on the lifeboat. And when they hear "homeless" they assume, with some reason, that what's planned for their neighborhood is what we have on Rio Grande.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, wants that.
(Well, it may be in the back of House Speaker Greg Hughes' mind that if Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams, the only Democrat of any stature in the state, gets saddled with the blame for putting a homeless shelters in places people don't like, it will be well worth the $24 million he got out of the state's budget for the purpose.)
But nobody is planning to build one anywhere. The vision now is for smaller resource centers that are much more proactive in moving the homeless out of their despair and into some level of self-sufficiency, with controls that discourage the drug dealers from congregating.
The mess on Rio Grande just sort of grew up over the years as that stressed-out nonprofit kept folks from starving during the day and freezing at night. A drug epidemic, an economic downturn and a criminally negligent mental health support system kept adding to the problem.
But nobody in a position of power really noticed until rich folks determined that, like Indian reservations that had been imprudently located atop gold deposits or oil fields, the homeless reservation was standing in the way of the newest urban regentrification. And it became A Problem That Must Be Solved.
That's the task that Ben McAdams is taking on. Whether any of the good Christians surrounding him want him to succeed or not.
George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, is ashamed of himself when he gives money to downtown panhandlers, and ashamed of himself when he doesn't.