Welfare System of the Mormon Church

In recent years, a number of investigations, both popular and scholarly, of the philanthropic endeavors of the Mormon Church have been undertaken, both intrinsically and in the larger context of church organization. In general, those investigations undertaken within the Mormon Church community appear to adopt an explanatory structure for those within the community with a nisus toward apologia for those without. Those undertaken outside the community tend toward explicit or implicit modes of critique on one hand or comparison with non-Church welfare systems on the other.

In the background of the development of the Mormon Church's internal welfare system is the origin of the church as a religious institution governing the moral and physical lives of its membership. What is most essential to understand about the origins of Mormonism is that it was always conceived as Other--other than established religions, other than established (American) society, other than established ethos. Mormon tradition describes the f

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i.e., male) church authority under the direction of Eliza Roxcy Snow until her death in 1887. During World War I, the MFRS "participated in a variety of service activities, particularly in crisis situations where additional labor became a necessity. Relief Society activities ranged from Red Cross volunteer work to the sale of its entire inventory of 200,000 bushels of wheat to the U.S. government to use for war relief" (Gottlieb & Wiley, 1984, p. 192). The MFRS was also largely responsible for institutionalizing the Mormon view that families should store one year's supply of clothing, food, and fuel at all times (Gottlieb & Wiley, 1984; Laake, 1993). The Society was increasingly absorbed by that authority in the 1920s, even as its leadership shifted from female to male and from a suffrage orientation spilling over the boundaries of religion to that of service work engaging the faithful almost exclusively. From 1930 to 1944, the Female Relief Society, which had been the principal charitable arm of the Mormon Church, was transformed in its constituent parts into a more institutionalized, male-dominated, policy-driven vehicle of (or more exactly alternative to) forms of government-sponsored public welfare (Derr, 1987). That veh
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