LETTER FROM AMERICA: My friend Anton used to have his own way of dealing with Mormons and others who accosted him on the streets of Dublin intending to save his soul. He would beam delightedly and insist he was only thrilled to have a conversation about God.
"Do you know who I am?" he would say dead-pan. "I am the Son of God." And as the look of horror spread across our interlocutor's face and he backed away smartly, Anton would add: "They didn't believe me last time either . . . Where are you off to?"
It worked very effectively as a strategy and is one that I would heartily recommend to those of you heading to the world capital of Mormonism, Salt Lake City, next week for the Winter Olympics. Except that, to the surprise of all of us, the Mormons have recently announced that they have forsworn proselytising in the city for the duration of the games.
It's a bit like the whole of Las Vegas closing its gambling tables just as the biggest tourist influx in years begins.
Should you express an interest in their religious views, the thousands of soberly-dressed hosts and hostesses will take your name and promise that one of the 60,000 missionaries sent out every year by the church internationally will contact you when you get home. The strength of that missionary tradition is such that the state contends it has been deprived of a seat in the House of Representatives in the recent reallocation because the authorities refused to count Utah's overseas legions.
The Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-day Saints had lobbied hard to bring the Olympics to the Mormon-dominated state of Utah, but it has decided that proselytising would be counter-productive. Far better simply to show the world a welcoming, friendly mainstream church, easy in its relationship with the secular world, and hope that when missionaries come knocking on doors back home, they will get the courtesy of a moment's attention.
The president of the church is the energetic 91-year-old Gordon Hinckley who told a church convention last year that the Olympics represents a fulfilment of Brigham Young's prophecy: "We shall build a city and a temple to the most high God in this place. Kings and emperors and the noble and wise of the earth will visit here, while the wicked and ungodly will envy us our comfortable homes and possessions."
The games will be opened by the renowned Tabernacle Choir and, among others, Sting. The Mormons will be offering a free spectacular show every night in the city centre.
Mormonism entered the 20th century deeply persecuted; it begins the 21st as perhaps America's most successful religion. In the last 30 years, the number of US adherents has increased by 225 per cent to over five million, while rivals, such as Episcopalianism and Methodism, have declined. Southern Baptists, the other fast growing denomination, have grown 40 per cent to 16 million.
Internationally the Mormons are now at some 11 million and the majority are first-generation converts. The number of Mormons throughout the world may soon equal the number of Jews.
Mormons, practising and non-practising, constitute some 63 per cent of the state of Utah which the editor of the Salt Lake Herald, James Shelledy, has described as a "quasi-theocracy". They are heavily engaged in politics at every level of the state and the head of the Olympic organising committee is a bishop of the church, as were two of the committee that bid for the Olympics, now mired in a bribery scandal.
The church is now also extraordinarily wealthy - Time has calculated its assets at some $30 billion and its annual income $6 billion.
It has been described by Tolstoy as "the American religion" - and is not only temperamentally so but its teachings are based on an account in Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon of the coming of Christ to the New World to preach repentance and to reconcile, temporarily at least, two warring tribes, the Nephites and Lamanites. In Smith's divinely inspired vision, the New World became the new Holy Land and he located the Garden of Eden in its centre, near Independence, Missouri.
Its adherents are deeply conservative, quintessentially middle class and pragmatic. They regard authority as important. Practitioners see themselves as living saints and are challenged to bring others to the faith through conversion or through proxy baptism of the dead - hence the church's obsession with genealogy.
To date the church claims to have baptised some 200 million dead people as Mormons, including Buddha, all the Popes, Shakespeare, and even Elvis. Attempts to start on the victims of the Holocaust provoked a row with Jewish genealogists who now monitor Mormon baptismal lists to make sure Jews are not included.
And, contrary to popular myth, the church has been striving to eliminate polygamy since 1933, though pockets of fundamentalists still cling to the practice.
Meanwhile, back to the games, the news is that Christian activists have protested outside the Olympic village at the provision by organisers of some 12,000 free condoms for athletes - the village will contain 3,900 athletes, so work it out yourself!
The Olympics should be about "virtues, like the spirit of unity and sportsmanship, not recreational sex, not even safe sex," said Brandi Swindell, director of Generation Life, a group of students, artists and musicians from Boise, Idaho. The condoms were donated by Cardinal Health, the official Olympic drug supplier. (A company, not a cleric.)
And just in case the earth does move, literally the state's earthquake response teams are ready for anything. The state has about 1,000 earthquakes a year, the vast majority too gentle to notice.
