SALT LAKE CITY -- Rocky Anderson, mayor of the city that will host the Winter Olympics next month, includes in his official press package an article he wrote about his happy hours pub-crawling with members of "the astoundingly beautiful Utah Bikini Team."
Why was the mayor playing foosball at brew gardens with the current Mrs. Utah and her gal pals? It seems Anderson faces an unusual public relations challenge: how to convince the world that his city is not a Dullsville populated by teetotaling missionaries in skinny ties and sensible shoes.
When Anderson met recently with a group of international journalists, they kept asking not about the vibrant arts and culture, burgeoning high-technology sectors, commitment to public transport, safe streets, or waist-high powder of the slopes.
No, the foreign press wanted to know about the Mormons.
The mayor, a Democrat and non-Mormon in a state that is solidly Republican and 70 percent Mormon, took pains to point out that the church should play a role in the Olympics because of its overwhelming presence, not to mention that it was Mormon pioneers who settled this stunning valley and built a city from scratch. "It is a story worth telling," he said.
"But there is so much more to Salt Lake now," Anderson continued, boasting not just of the city's virtues but of its newfound diversity -- the annual gay-pride parades, the growth of immigrant communities and the rising population of non-Mormons, who now account for about half the population of Salt Lake City.
The foreign press did not seem convinced -- not even by the Convention & Visitors Bureau pamphlet "Salt Lake City: Saltier Than You Might Think," also tucked in the mayor's press package.
It is a fact that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is so entwined in the history, commerce and politics of Utah that its presence at the Olympics will be inescapable.
From the arcane liquor laws that require buying "memberships" at "private clubs" to order a drink, to the concerts given by the glorious Tabernacle Choir, to the presence of 4,000 clean-cut Mormon volunteers dressed in dark suits and plain dresses, thechurch's influence will be felt everywhere.
Soaring behind center stage at the Medals Plaza will be the towering spires of the church's central Temple, topped by a golden statue of the angel Moroni blowing his clarion. It is an icon that will be beamed to billions of television viewers during the Olympics, and is likely to be as photographed as Sydney's Opera House at the 2000 Summer Games.
To counter the "Mormon Olympics" image, Gordon B. Hinckley, the church's 91-year-old president and "living prophet," has declared that missionaries will not buttonhole potential converts during the Games here next month. The word from on high is: Keep a low, polite, neighborly profile.
Show the world that the Latter-day Saints are a wholesome, vibrant, conservative but mainstream Christian religion, and not some weird cult of polygamists (a practice the church officially renounced more than a century ago).
"We want to be good hosts," said Jeffrey R. Holland, the former president of the Mormons' Brigham Young University and one of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the church's leadership. "We are, after all, a pretty decent people."
There is, however, really no other place in America where one religion so dominates daily life. The role of the Mormon faith in Utah is often compared, favorably, to Catholicism in Rome and Judaism in Israel, or unfavorably, by its critics, to Islamic theocracies in the Middle East.
"Taking the Mormons out of the Games is like taking the salt out of the lake. It ain't going to happen," said Daniel Darger, a lawyer and proprietor of the Dead Goat Saloon here, who has tangled with the church and its members on the liquor commissions. "They're into everything."
The head of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, Mitt Romney, is a Mormon bishop. The two leaders of the bidding team who brought the Games to the city -- and scandal, too, because of their enticements to the International Olympic Committee -- are also Mormons.
Ditto the governor, the entire congressional delegation and the overwhelming majority of Utah's judges, mayors, city councils, school boards and state legislators, who routinely debate issues such as whether a painting of a nude in a museum might violate Utah's pornography prohibitions.
The heart of Salt Lake City is the Temple and its surrounding square, where the church has its central offices, visitors' centers, genealogy libraries, history and art museums, famed Tabernacle, and a new 21,000-seat conference center, where for 10 nights during the Games the church will present its multimedia, song-and-dance extravaganza called "Light of the World."
All downtown addresses are numbered by their distance from the Temple, and church-owned and -affiliated businesses are everywhere -- an empire with estimated assets of at least $25 billion and an international roster of believers at more than 10 million and growing.
Mormons own one of the city's two daily newspapers, the Deseret News, as well as the local NBC affiliate and radio stations. On television station KBYU-11, Donny and Marie Osmond (two of the church's most famous members) will be hosting hourly updates on "What's Happening Today" at the Games.
The large downtown shopping center is the Mormon-owned ZCMI Center Mall, which stands for Zion's Cooperative Mercantile Institution. Just next door are the Zion First Nation Bank and the Beneficial Life Insurance buildings, both owned by the church, displaying painting and sculpture commemorating the early Mormon pioneers who fled religious persecution back east, pulling handcarts and leading teams of oxen over the mountains to settle here.
The site of the Medals Plaza, where winners of Olympic events will receive their awards, is owned by the church and loaned for the Games, as were other lands.
As Richard and Joan Ostling wrote in the 1999 book "Mormon America," Salt Lake "is their headquarters city, their Olympus, their Zion."
Romney, the head of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, promises the church "will have a presence but not a dominant presence" at the games.
"As with our sponsors," Romney said, referring to the blue-chip corporate donors and advertisers, "the feeling is that more is often less. If a sponsor, or the church, is too overbearing, there is the potential for a backlash, and so the wise course for any institution is to be reserved."
The church leadership, prickly about how it is perceived at home and abroad, has established its own media center for the Olympics, where members are prepared to deal with the onslaught of questions about the religion -- as well as offering their own "100 Great Story Ideas" for the press. The suggested topics include: Sexual Morality a Key Tenet; Tithing: Foundation of Church Finances; Families Can Be Eternal; and Book of Mormon Another Testament of Jesus Christ.
The faith is indeed unique, as any curious guest to the visitors' center at Temple Square will see in the dioramas of church history, which depict Native Americans asmembers of the lost tribes of Israel who immigrated to the New World in boats and built great cities and temples that have never been found.
The religion was founded by Joseph Smith in upstate New York in the early 19th century. According to church doctrine, Smith experienced visions and visitations from God, Jesus Christ and his apostles and angels. The angel Moroni told Smith of golden tablets buried in a hillside near his home. Using "seeing stones," Smith is said to have translated the text: It told how after Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection in the Holy Land, he appeared in the Americas to preach to the Lamanites and Nephites, tribes who had crossed the ocean to the New World in big wooden boats. Those civilizations disappeared -- but left in Smith's hands was the Book of Mormon, which is a combination of an edited standard Bible and the new revelations.
Among the revelations in church scriptures are tenets that veer from other Christian teachings, such as beliefs that God is "an Exalted Man" and that the dead can be baptized and enter heaven. The church believes in "continuing revelations," and that President Hinckley is the living prophet, seer and revelator. Church members also believe that the Garden of Eden was located in what is today Independence, Mo.
Holland, of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, explained that if visitors want to know more about the church, members are free to answer their questions, or to get their addresses, so they can be visited by one of the 60,000 missionaries that the church has around the world, in 160 countries.
"We're not retreating, but we're keeping a very, very low profile," he said. "There's been too much said about the 'Mormon Olympics.' "
In one way, the church's decision not to proselytize during the Games shows just how far the Mormons have come -- meaning that the church now is so successful, so accepted in the big river of American culture, that it does not need to try quite so hard.
"That is a legitimate discussion," Holland said. "We are bigger, more experienced, probably more comfortable in our own skins. You know, we were on the run for the first 75 years of our history." Indeed, Smith was attacked and killed by a lynch mob and the early members kept moving west to avoid persecution. "We're just a lot more confident that people do accept us now."
Holland leaned back in his chair and smiled. "Any other questions you want to ask, just fire away."