The spires of the Mormon Temple will serve as the centerpiece for the 17-day-long Olympic Games. Temple Square-headquarters for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS)-will be, like the downhill ski run, an Olympic venue. Every medal ceremony will take place against the backdrop of the temple’s spires. And the number of informative but surprisingly mellow missionaries who stroll the square will be beefed up to greet the more than 200,000 Olympic visitors expected to tour the church’s sprawling downtown campus.
“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 field 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, attache 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.
When Salt Lake first bid for the Winter Olympics, church-linked businesses chipped in $211,000. Weeks before allegations emerged that SLOC officials had bribed members of the International Olympic Committee-a federal trial of two former SLOC members is scheduled for this summer-LDS president Gordon B. Hinckley publicly urged his flock to volunteer for SLOC.
And once W. Mitt Romney, a Mormon himself, was brought in to run SLOC and the scandal dust began to settle, the church again pitched in. It pledged $5 million in cash, the temporary use of 160 acres for Olympic parking lots, 16 more acres to help build roads and a prime block of downtown Salt Lake City to be used for the nightly medals ceremony. “I go for help,” Romney says of SLOC’s relationship with the LDS. And sometimes the church says no. For instance, it declined to share its vast pool of translators with SLOC, reserving them instead for curious tourists-and potential church members-set to swarm Temple Square.
“We don’t apologize for our history, but we’d like people to understand who we are,” says Otterson. The Mormons are resigned to the fact that the church will take some hits during the Games. Still, he’s secure in knowing that, come next February, Mormons won’t have to knock on doors to spread their word. Instead, the world will be coming to the church’s doorstep.
