As Others See Us: The Media Looks at the Church

From England, to Canada, and to Europe, by means of newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, more and more people throughout the world are coming to know of the Church and its activities.

Newspaper readers throughout the United States and Canada have been recently reading major articles on the family home evening program, a dance festival, and the growth of the Church.

The Vancouver Sun, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, recently carried a feature article on the Church with emphasis on family home evening and on the Church’s outward reach by means of radio.

Writing of the members of the Church, feature writer Sean Rossiter stated, “They also believe in the down-home, one husband, one wife and lots-of-kids family we all used to know and love.

“That billboard that towered a couple of months ago over downtown Granville Street [the heart of Vancouver’s business district]—‘No other success can compensate for failure in the home’—must have irked the 18-hour-a-day stocks and bonds promoters whose marriages are in the hands of their lawyers.

“Then there was the radio commercial over CKWX and CJOR:

“Remember last week when you said next week you’d spend more time with your children?

‘Well, it’s next week.’” The writer then went on to talk of the Family Home Evening manual that, he said, has been called “probably the most creative manual published by any church.”

Louis Cassels, a senior editor for United Press International, recently told the story of the Church in a series on the religious faiths of America.

Said he, “The success of the Mormon ‘family home evenings’ and a fabulously vigorous and varied youth program (everything from symphony orchestras to basketball teams), have enabled them to do what few other religious bodies have done in our time. They have kept most of their younger generation ‘strong in the faith’ of their fathers.”

The recent Area General Conference in Munich and the European tour of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir also elicited a great deal of favorable publicity for the Church.

David Wigg, writing in The Times of London, England, said of the choir, “… it becomes a national institution almost blasphemous to criticize.”

An unusual view of the choir was given by columnist Herb Caen writing in the San Francisco (California) Chronicle.

“‘MILK, MILK, OR MILK?’: What may well be the biggest non-smoking, nondrinking flight in the history of aviation takes off tomorrow in the form of a World Airways’ chartered 747 carrying 421 Mormons, including the famed Mormon Tabernacle Choir, to a conference in Munich. No coffee or tea, but 75 gallons of milk, will be stowed aboard for the passengers, also a record.”

Also from California came a Los Angeles Times story on the Southern California Dance Festival:

“The statistics are boggling: 6,000 teenagers in costumes that took 40,000 yards of fabric, 300 pounds of glitter, 390,000 spangles, 10,000 feet of zippers, 6,000 mirrors and 90,000 feathers—all 6,000 dancing at once in the Rose Bowl.

“Watching them will be 70,000—or more—members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and their guests—the largest gathering of Mormons anywhere in the world.”

In an editorial on Salt Lake City, The Oxbow Herald, Oxbow, Saskatchewan, Canada, recently stated:

“Salt Lake City, 65% Mormon and very definitely influenced by Mormon thought, is a living, thriving example that the United States, 1973, is not all bad, is not totally immoral, and, as some Canadians would like to think, is not entirely populated by crooks.”

“Salt Lake City represents much of what is good in America. New York, Detroit, Houston, and New Orleans receive wide coverage for their murders, their drugs, their violence. But in all fairness to the United States there are other Americans, millions of them, who are good, kind, and law-abiding citizens. Salt Lake City is but a symbol of all that is best in America.”