Salt Lake City -- When the Olympics in Salt Lake City were well over a year away, Mormon officials met in New York City with NBC executives and said they were considering spending several million dollars on advertising time to create a positive impression of their church during the network's broadcasts of the Winter Games.
The church, after all, had been handed an ideal public relations opportunity with the selection of Salt Lake City, its headquarters, as an Olympic venue. At last, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would have a chance to assert its credentials as a welcoming Christian church with international reach and family values.
Not long after the meeting, however, church officials contacted NBC and said they had decided against conducting any advertising campaign during the Winter Games, said Randy Falco, the network's president. A church spokesman said on Friday that church officials had concluded that a large, expensive advertising campaign would have sent the wrong message.
"We saw no way of doing that tastefully as a religion without looking like a corporate entity," the spokesman, Michael Otterson, said in a statement.
Now a church known for its industrious proselytizing has found itself lying low in the city it built, making a conscious decision not to promote its faith when the Olympics shine a global spotlight on Utah in three weeks.
Church leaders have made clear that their eyes are not on the Olympics but on what happens afterward. If international visitors return home having discovered the Mormons are in the mainstream, church leaders say they will consider the Olympics a success.
"If I were in their P.R. department, I would say, 'Look, anything that just gives us even halfway neutral press coverage, particularly in the East, helps, ' " said Rodney Stark, a non-Mormon professor of sociology and comparative religion at the University of Washington who has studied the church.
Until recently, the church seemed eager to play a dominant role in the coming Olympics.
In the last year, though, the church found itself increasingly on the defensive, with references to the event as the "Mormon Olympics."