| Popis: |
According to its many observers, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is either one of the most American or one of the most international churches of our time. Born during the first decades of the nation in upstate New York, the early Mormon community pushed westward along the same paths traveled by other Anglo-American pioneers. For decades after the founding of the church, leaders encouraged members scattered abroad to gather with “the Saints in Zion” in order to build up the kingdom of God. That early church body was predominantly Anglo-American in origin, sharing commonalities of language, dress, and religious practice nurtured through the 1870s by a steady migration of Europeans to Utah’s Wasatch Range. Even today, LDS history is measured in handcarts, prairie skirts, and a determined self-sufficiency. Visitors to the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City are treated to an abundance of artifacts of those nineteenth-century pioneering beginnings. Moreover, believers understand the American West, originally designated as the theocratic state of Deseret, as a sacred space, the place in which Zion will be built. |
