I've known many poor Mormons but I don't think Mormonism is very attractive as a belief system for people dealing with poverty?

Many places outside of the United States have many poor Mormons. My daughter is trying to convert poor Central American peoples but while she helps poor people she doesn't mention being able to convert many of them. The people she has been able to try and convert don't seem to be as impoverished as them.

What I'm getting at is I think Mormonism isn't really a religion that looks after its poor. I guess this is obvious given Nelson's telling poor Africans that paying him money will make them less impoverished.

But my mother is from an impoverished home. She often went hungry and was lucky to get an orange for Christmas because there was no extra money after her father's drinking allowance. He was incidentally raised in Mormon poverty but one of the agricultural poverty of central Utah's earlier years.

As Utah moved from an agrarian to a suburban lifestyle I think many poor Mormons moved from believers to unbelievers. As Mormonism developed in The 20th Century I believe it went from helping its poor to ignoring them?

Nice pic of a burning chapel. Not much info and how the church helped these poor people...

https://www.lds.org/church/news/with-most-members-homeless-paradise-ward-bishops-minister-in-the-wake-of-camp-fire?lang=eng

(anono this week)

Ive never heard this perspective:
"As Utah moved from an agrarian to a suburban lifestyle I think many poor Mormons moved from believers to unbelievers." For my family it was the opposite. Back in the 1860's my folks settled Cache Valley with the great immigration that took place up there in that decade from Salt Lake. Many went to N. Utah because they were growing tired of how Brigham was running things. Lots of my grandfather's cousins saw mormondom as it really is and left.

But as my grandfather's generation received the Truman entitlements of the GI bill. All meant to get Utah boys off the farm to gain literacy and become civilized into industrial settings of blue collar, white collar middle class. Then they settled back into mormon traditions in suburban 1950's middle class. Then came the babyboom generation of my family and they did rather well acclimating into mormon middle class society, because of the expanded prison-military complex bureaucracies of post WW2 that dominated most of the later half of the 20th century in Utah.

It's the new generation that maybe seeing things differently the millennials and gen-Xrs who have lived in this new system of surging student loans, high taxes, entitlements, stagnant wages, delayed marriages and smaller families. A nation of renters.

Mormondom doesn't know how to address this new poor. We are becoming socialist and secularist, while at the same time mormondom is benefitting from the fact that most of the wealth generated has gone to the wealthy within the last 40 years. They are recipients of wealth, and are unable to grasp how socialism is changing America and what to do to help the poor.

macaRomney Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> They are recipients of wealth, and are unable to
> grasp how socialism is changing America and what
> to do to help the poor.

Well put. Mine was just a theory for me to explain my ancestors, the impoverished and rejected poor Mormons who flocked from their failed farms to the cities like Provo.

If socialism is adopted in the US to any extent, the Church will experience a crisis of faith.

We had a family from Sweden join our ward for a year while he worked at a local university. Taxation in their socialist paradise is so high for all levels of society that the only members who can afford to be active (live on a single income and pay tithing) were "doctors and university professors." When taxes exceed 50% for all incomes, tithing becomes effectively 20% or more of after tax income.

If socialism forces taxes that high in the USA, the Church will either become more overly tilted to the ultra-wealthy than it is now or measures will be taken to pay tithing on net income or other measures may be taken to allow average families to cope with their Church obligations. Since the decisions will all be made by men with high incomes, I don't expect them to have any clue what is happening in wards other than railing against those "losing their faith."

Further very interesting insight. Thanks!

No. It's not attractive to anybody, let alone the poor (in wealth or spirit).

It doesn't help the POOR but expects them to help it.

In TIME, MONEY, PROMISES, etc.

Oh, no, and hell no.

It's a prosperity gospel.

Poor need not apply.