Would the late LDS prophet Spencer W. Kimball have backed the Occupy Wall Street movement?

Maybe, opines Mormon writer and blogger Julie M. Smith at timesandseasons.org. After all, Kimball, best known for a 1978 decision opening the Utah-based faith's priesthood to black men, strongly condemned certain economic practices and inequities.

"Compromise money is filthy, graft money is unclean, profits and commissions derived from the sale of worthless stocks are contaminated,” Kimball, then a Mormon apostle, said in a 1953 LDS General Conference sermon, “as is the money derived from other deceptions, excessive charges, oppression to the poor and compensation which is not fully earned."

Kimball, with his Yoda-like voice and gentle manner, goes on to assail “those of us who require excessive compensation for services and who fail to give 'value received' and who give no loyalty with their insufficient and inefficient service.”

He further decries those who are “greedy for excessive wealth, and especially that which comes with sharp practices and at the expense of strict honesty and complete integrity. ... Why another farm, another herd of sheep, another bunch of cattle, another ranch? Why another hotel, another cafe, another store, another shop? Why another plant, another office, another service, another business? Why another of anything if one has that already which provides the necessities and reasonable luxuries?”

Smith concedes she is being a tad playful here, acknowledging that Kimball likely “would be opposed to some of the methods, as well as the general aesthetic” of the Occupy movement.

“I’m not claiming he’d be out there, unshaven and unwashed," she writes, "eating free pizza and trying to get arrested."
But Kimball's speech does suggest, Smith writes, that he “is one of a long line of prophets to occupy something other than the ground from which the free market is worshipped.”

Peggy Fletcher Stack