A recession has a way of bringing the fundamental problem of economics into sharp relief—the fundamental problem of scarcity. Scarcity is always a problem but it’s even more visible now when the things we need and want are even scarcer. How do we distribute limited resources? Is it based on need? Is it based on merit? The answers to these questions drive our basic economic and political philosophies. I am interested in the place religion plays in answering these questions. Religion is powerful, it gets to the heart of who we are, what we believe is most important. The problem of economics, the distribution of scarce resources, is one of the most important problems we face. It can be the difference between life and death for some the world’s poorest people. If these problems are so important, surely religion will have something to say about them. To quote historian Leonard Arrington, “religion, as with all social institutions, must be judged according to its usefulness in attacking the ageless problems of humanity.” [1]
Perhaps the best example of a religiously motivated economic system in America is the network of Mormon settlements in Utah during the nineteenth century. Mormons, under the leadership of Brigham Young, sought to establish the Kingdom of God on earth after the pattern of the early Christians as recorded in the Book of Acts: “And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul; neither said any of them that aught of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common” (Acts 4:32). The Latter-day Saints called this the Law of Consecration, among other names. Mormons have a tendency to look back on the experiments in these communities ultimately as failures. But this would short-change the broad diversity of economic experiments developed during this time. Some communities and institutions were quite successful for some time. Furthermore, it is important to realize that one major reason for the ultimate failure of many of these endeavors was persecution by the federal government.
Perhaps the best historical research on this time period was done by Leonard Arrington in his book Great Basin Kingdom. Arrington observed that the peculiar economic ideals of the Latter-day Saints were likely responsible for their survival in the arid environment of the Great Basin. When the Saints arrived in the Great Salt Lake Valley they found farming very difficult. Crops failed, crickets ate what little they had. The first years in the Valley were times of intense poverty. But Brigham Young and the church were able to organize the people to ration what little they had, to share with each other and ensure their survival. Even after these days of total depravity, this ethic of cooperation continued.
One of the most important programs of this time was the Perpetual Emigration Fund. This fund provided funds to bring people out of their impoverished conditions in Europe and live in the Great Basin with the Saints. When the emigrants arrived they were expected to use their labor to pay back to the fund so that more emigrants could follow after them. During especially hard times, the church innovated and created handcart companies in order to transport people across the plains at a fraction of the cost of wagons.
In the 1870s church leaders began to experiment with new economic ideas to increase collective prosperity. One such movement was the cooperative movement and included the formation of Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution or Z.C.M.I. Eventually this expanded into more extensive communal efforts like the Brigham City Cooperative and many United Orders. In the Brigham City cooperative Lorenzo Snow had established a community in which all residents had shares in a mercantile cooperative. Brigham City was largely self-sufficient and nearly completely insulated from the Panic of 1873. This community so inspired Brigham Young that he may have used it as a case example when he began to establish United Orders in St. George and other locations.
The United Orders most closely approached the ideals of the Law of Consecration and the early Christians in the Book of Acts. There were various models of United Orders. Leonard Arrington broke them down into four groups.
1. St. George-type Orders—people contributed all their property to the order and received differential wages and dividends depending on their labor and property contributed.
2. Brigham City Plan—did not involve consecration of all property or labor but an increase in community ownership and cooperative enterprises.
3. Modified Brigham City Plan—Adapted to wards and larger cities. In areas with many people who weren’t Mormons complete economic reorganization was not possible. But a single cooperative or corporation was still organized and financed by ward members
4. Communal Plans—Everyone lived together in communes and shared everything. The most famous example was in Orderville.
It is important to understand that the support for all of these economic developments came from the Saints commitment to their faith, to their God and to each other. This faith had powerful effects in developing the Great Basin, starting with a section of the West that no one wanted and creating a prosperous community.
This temporal Kingdom was not able persist however as the United States federal government passed legislation to dissolve the church and confiscate its assets. The Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 forcibly brought an end to the church’s direct influence in the local economy, or at least drastically reduced it. It was the opinion of Leonard Arrington that the anti-Mormon legislation had as much to do with opposition to the church’s cooperative economics as it did with polygamy. “The campaign against Mormonism was part and parcel of the rising national campaign for private property, the free market, competition, and unrestrained enterprise.” [2]
The Restoration of the church began in the Age of Jackson when the country was brimming with concern for the common man. The Mormons were not alone in their brand of economic experiments. However as they moved West, isolated from the rest of the country they continued in this spirit of concern for the community while the Eastern United States developed a new spirit of laissez-faire capitalism. “The Mormon response to the problems imposed by the settlement of the Great Basin—a response which becomes ever clearer in succeeding decades—suggests that Mormon economic policies bore a greater resemblance to those of the ante-bellum northeast than did the economic policies of the West during the years when the West was won. Isolated as they were from American thought-currents after 1847, and under the necessity of continued group action to solve the many problems which plagued them, the Mormons were not affected by the growing accommodation to the private corporation, rugged individualism, Social Darwinism, and other concepts which account for the rise of laissez-faire after 1850.” [3]
It is true that many of the United Order communities fell apart under their own weight due to internal divisions, back-biting, and selfishness. However, many of the church's cooperative organizations were doing quite well before “The Raid”. The United Order in Orderville had gone through some restructuring before the Edmunds Act but it was this legislation that drove many of the leaders of the community into hiding and made the order’s continued existence impossible.
In the end, the government was able to dissolve, along with polygamy, many of the Great Basin’s most admirable institutions and qualities. In fact that may have been part of the motivation behind of the legislation. Leonard Arrington remarked, “It may be conceded that the well-publicized conflicts and differences between Mormons and other Westerners and Americans were not so much a matter of plural marriage and other reprehensible peculiarities and superstitions as of the conflicting economic patterns of two generations of Americans, one of which was fashioned after the communitarian concepts of the age of Jackson, and the other of which was shaped by the dream of bonanza and the individualistic sentiments of the age of laissez-faire.” [4]
That’s a sad ending to an interesting example of religiously motivated economics that was ultimately thwarted. But while it lasted the cooperative culture of the Utah Mormons was an excellent example of the power of religion to motivate people to take care of each other. The Gospel has a unique answer to the problem of economics, the problem of scarcity. How do we allocate scarce resources? The Mormons found answers in their faith. They believed that Zion could only be established if they were of one heart and one mind and had no poor among them. If they were not one in earthly things they could not be one in heavenly things. Zion, the ideal society, could not exist until everyone had what they needed. It’s a different economic system then either free-market capitalism or communism. But I believe it is a system we ought to acknowledge and evaluate.
References
1. Arringon, Leonard. Great Basin Kingdom. p. viii
2. ibid., 174
3. ibid., 63
4. ibid., 63
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