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March 20, 2001

MORMONS WILL USE OLYMPICS TO CAST POSITIVE IMAGE OF CHURCH

 

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will use the 2002 Winter Olympics, which will be held in Salt Lake City, to clear up misunderstandings about the church.

Temple Square
The Mormon church in Temple Square, Salt Lake City will provide the backdrop for the nightly medals ceremony during the Summer Olympics telecast on NBC.

"The church's highly organized public affairs department is already working to ensure that the world gets a positive, and accurate, view of Latter-day Saints," according to Stephen Scott, a religion reporter for Knight-Ridder newspapers in St. Paul, Minn.

The church has mailed glossy Utah calendars to reporters covering religion and sports, and its media website has downloadable video clips and sound bytes for broadcasters' use.

Although it is not an Olympic sponsor, the church has donated a key parcel of downtown land across from the Delta Center for the medals plaza. This will put its Temple Square headquarters in a picturesque backdrop for the nightly medals ceremony that will be televised by NBC.

The church also will run a media center on Temple Square for journalists. Gary Sheppard, who has written several books on Latter-day Saints, said the Olympics will be a "huge PR opportunity for them."

"Having an event like this taking place within the homeland of the Mormon Church and that being such a prevalent backdrop for the Olympics will confer a certain amount of mainstream legitimacy," said Sheppard, associate professor of sociology at Oakland University in Michigan.

The church, which now counts 11 million members, more than half of them outside of the U.S., has always attracted suspicion and accusations, said Scott.

Questions persist about polygamy, which was renounced by the church in 1890, and many Christian groups, including the Southern Baptists, and other evangelicals, do not consider the Mormons to be Christian and have launched campaigns to convert them.

"We feel the Olympics will offer a good chance to clear up some of those misunderstandings," Lynne Cropper, the church's Minnesota public affairs director, told Scott.

The church's desire for acceptance has been anything but passive. In a highly publicized event in 1997, thousands of Mormons in covered wagons recreated the 1,030-mile, 19th-century migration from Illinois--where Brigham Young and 70,000 followers had been persecuted--to Utah.

Edelman PR Worldwide, Chicago, handled publicity for the event.

This August, in Sea Trek 2001, hundreds of Mormons will sail in tall ships from Copenhagen to New York in a reenactment of another 19th-century migration--from Europe to America.

 

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