soulmen : IN A QUIET REVOLUTION, MORMONS CARRY NEW VISIONS OF LIFE--AND HEAVEN--TO LATIN AMERICA

RATHER THAN SNEAK OVER THE HIGH fence of spiked steel bars outside the Mormon church on Huelen Street, the terrorists boldly rang the bell.

As a cousin went to open the gate, Jose Medina Jr., thinking someone was coming to help with preparations for church services the next day, kept working, setting up folding chairs in a meeting room. Suddenly, someone put a pistol to his neck and ordered him to the floor. When he hesitated, the gunman shoved and kicked him and shouted, “Hurry up. We’re in a hurry.”

Four intruders splashed Medina and the room with gasoline, threatening to kill him if he fled. Another gunman summoned Medina’s sister from a bathroom with a barrage of curses.

Outside the front gate, a fifth man was keeping watch when Jose Medina Sr. arrived on foot from his home a few blocks away. Medina, a 52-year-old carpenter, is the lay bishop of the neighborhood chapel in El Montijo, a working-class neighborhood in Santiago, Chile. As he reached the church, he came face to face with a member of the small but notorious Lautaro terrorist group.

“He told me to get away if I didn’t want problems,” Medina says. “I told him, ‘Look, I’m not going anywhere. You’re the one who has to go.’

“I moved in closer. He pulled out a pistol and told me to shut up or he would kill me,” Medina says. “ ‘Get out,’ I said. I shoved him with my shoulder. Then he had to shoot. He shot me here, in this part of the leg,” Medina says, pulling up his gray pin-striped suit to reveal a small scar on his lower thigh. “It didn’t scare me. I knew that the Lord was protecting me.”

The gunman seemed almost apologetic. “We don’t have anything against you,” he told Medina. “We want the Yankees to go home.”

“I told him, ‘Look, the Yankees don’t teach us politics, they teach us spiritual things, things of the Lord.’ ”

When the gunman fired warning shots into the air, his partners ran from the church, throwing matches on the gasoline they had splashed inside. Flames spread instantly through the building. Medina grabbed a fire extinguisher, and with the help of his son, who escaped the flames, he put out the fire.

Medina, sturdy and gray-haired, has worked with his hands for low wages all his life. He doesn’t have a telephone or a car, and he doesn’t look like a terrorist target. But he is a Mormon, and Lautaro doctrine categorizes the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a tool of Yankee imperialism. The church’s young missionaries, increasingly familiar figures throughout Latin America with their white shirts and ties and close-cropped hair, are seen as the insidious harbingers of capitalism. The Lautaros, Chilean revolutionaries known for their hit-and-run bank robberies and for their dedication to the cause of free sex, have made a specialty of bombing, ransacking and burning chapels of the Mormon Church.

Why, I ask, would Lautaro single out the Mormon Church for such attacks? “What I have heard from other people, not from them,” Medina says, “is that they have this hate. They think foreigners come to take the country’s wealth. They always think Americans come to steal the wealth. They have a veil of ignorance; their minds are totally closed by politics.”

Since the early 1980s, when Lautaro first emerged during Chile’s military dictatorship, terrorists have set off nearly 300 explosions and fires at Mormon churches in Chile. Medina is the only person who has been seriously injured in the attacks, but total damage is estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. While none of the bombs has been deadly, fires have nearly destroyed four buildings.

Terrorists have also attacked in other Latin American countries. In neighboring Bolivia, two Mormons were killed in 1989, and since then, guerrillas have damaged at least 11 Mormon chapels in Bolivia with dynamite blasts.

Terrorists think the missionaries “are working, as they say, for the psychological and ideological penetration of imperialism into the nation,” says Ramiro Donoso, a Bolivian Mormon Church officer. “They see in the Mormon Church a kind of American agency for infiltration and indoctrination.”

And, in a sense, that may be true. These missionaries, and many of their converts, are determined to overturn centuries of Latin American tradition--a tradition of almost universal Catholicism--and to remodel lives not only with a new religious doctrine, but also with a new social morality and work ethic. Maybe the Lautaros see that the Mormons, in their own way, are revolutionaries, too. For as radical Marxist movements weaken and retreat across Latin America, the Mormons and other Christian soldiers from the non-traditional Protestant ranks are gaining strength and marching on toward what they envision as a new and startlingly different millennium.

*

METROPOLITAN SANTIAGO’S POPULATION OF 5 MILLION SPRAWLS over a broad valley at the foot of towering Andean mountains. There are fancy sectors with sumptuous homes and elaborate landscaping, as well as large areas of middle-class homes. But much of the city, like the El Montijo neighborhood on the eastern side, is a drab patchwork of low-cost apartment projects, cheap little houses and ramshackle slum dwellings. Here, many of the streets are unpaved; fresh paint and green grass are rare. This dusty environment reflects the low wages, hardship and poverty of Latin American underdevelopment.

In a small classroom in the El Montijo Mormon church, Luisa Tapia stands before 20 people, mostly women. Tapia, 33, a secretary wearing a pink smock and white pumps, holds up an article entitled “External Evidence of the Book of Mormon.” She tells her Sunday School class that the story contains findings by non-Mormon authorities, including explorer and author Thor Heyerdahl, that corroborate the Mormon scriptures’ account that ancient Israelites had come to the Americas. Then she asks the class, “With this proof that the Book of Mormon is true, what should we do?”

“Read it and meditate on it,” she answers without pausing.

“I know that it is true,” she adds. Her voice quavers and her eyes mist. “I feel it in my heart. I know that the church is true.”

As holy to the Latter-day Saints as the Holy Bible itself, the Book of Mormon tells how Jesus came to America and ministered to a branch of a lost Jewish tribe, the Nephites, who, along with another branch, the Lamanites, had come across the waters from Jerusalem 600 years before Christ and spread through the Americas, ancestors of the American Indians. The tribe’s history, the scriptures say, was inscribed on metal tablets by a Nephite prophet called Mormon.

In the early 1820s, according to Mormon doctrine, a series of divine revelations led an American youth named Joseph Smith to the plates bearing the Book of Mormon, which he translated and transcribed. The Book of Mormon was published in 1830.

The 500-page volume and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, founded by Smith, were a radical departure from the orthodox Christianity of the times. The leader and his followers were ridiculed and persecuted, partly because of their tolerance for polygamy, and a mob killed Smith in 1844 in Illinois. His successor, Brigham Young, led the Mormons to the territory of Utah, where members of the highly disciplined, church-dominated society multiplied and prospered. By early this year, the Mormon Church claimed a worldwide membership of 8.5 million. Of the 4.5 million in the United States, 1.3 million were in Utah and 725,000 in California.

Just as Joseph Smith and Brigham Young went against the religious and social grain of 19th-Century America, so people like Jose Medina and Luisa Tapia are swimming against the established current in Latin America. And they are making remarkable headway. The church claims more than 2 million members from Mexico to the tip of South America, marking the church’s most important region outside the United States. According to official figures supplied by the Mormon Church in Chile, its fold has grown from seven people in 1956 to 25,000 in 1976 to 328,000 at the beginning of this year.

Originally, the church in Chile consisted of a handful of Mormon missionaries, walking dusty streets and lanes, always in pairs, knocking on doors, returning again and again, persuading, trying to baptize people, change them. By late 1992, there were 1,229 Mormon missionaries in Chile, 458 of them Chilean and 771 foreigners, mostly American. By the end of this year, a Santiago church official predicts, Chile will need few, if any, foreign missionaries because the number of Chilean missionaries will double. At a meeting last year of 1,300 Mormons in Santiago, he says, 365 volunteered.

Guillermo Torres, 22, worked as an advertising draftsman in the northern Chilean city of La Serena before volunteering for a two-year mission. Dark and stocky with short black hair, he’s been a missionary for 16 months and says he has brought 50 people into the Mormon Church. He has had 14 partners, seven American and seven Chilean. Chad DeWitt, his partner for two months, came to Chile from Park City, Utah.

The pair have an appointment at 10:30 a.m. with a woman they know only as Maria, and, as it is still early, the two young men take their time getting ready in their small, somewhat shabby house about 10 blocks from the Mormon chapel on Huelen Street. Short-sleeved white shirts on hangers hang from the back of a chair, and a small, hand-lettered sign that reads “BAPTIZE” is taped to the wall over a little table that holds an iron.

DeWitt, 20, finished high school and worked in a hotel before volunteering for missionary duty and being called to Chile. His first months have been hard, and often discouraging--knocking on scores of doors each week, facing the constant answers of not home, not interested, come back, come back again.

Low-key and calm, DeWitt seems to take it all in stride. “You try to keep a smile on your face and go to the next door,” says the blond, ruddy-cheeked missionary. “It’s their decision. You can’t force them to do anything, so I don’t really worry myself about it.” He reflects a moment and adds: “Sometimes it makes me feel bad because it’s their salvation they’re losing, their chance to change their life for the better.”

Ready for work, Torres and DeWitt stand face to face in the tiny living room, bow their heads and pray. Then we begin to walk. At a small yellow house a few blocks away, the missionaries stop to greet a smiling woman whose family has converted to Mormonism. “They have taught us good life habits, to be organized,” the woman says.

The Mormon Church’s doctrine and teaching are designed to influence not only the spiritual life of its members, but also their family life, work, health and welfare. Members are expected to abstain from alcohol, tobacco, coffee and tea, and households are encouraged to gather for weekly family nights to reinforce unity and religious values.

Down a few blocks, the pair stop for their appointment with Maria. She is nowhere to be seen. “ Alo, alo, “ Torres calls several times from the fence. “That always happens,” he says. “We’ll have to come back another day.”

At this point, they don’t know if Maria is a potential convert or someone who just doesn’t like to say no, like Maria Sandoval. The 62-year-old woman lives in a two-room house of unpainted brick across the street from the El Montijo Mormon church, and missionaries often come by to talk to her. Sometimes she comes out to listen; other times she pretends not to be home. It’s the same message, and same reaction, each time the missionaries’ stays expire. When Elders Torres and DeWitt leave in a few months, to be replaced by the fresh and eager faces she’ll know only as Elders Metzger and Jensen, she’ll go through the same routine--breaking them in--one more time.

“They wanted me to get baptized, and that’s why I don’t come out sometimes. I say I am busy,” she says, standing by her unpainted fence. “I don’t like their ideas, their religion, because I am Catholic.”

The missionaries are friendly and polite, she says, but the blond boy has a thick accent. In fact, she adds confidentially, “I didn’t understand anything he said.”

*

ON A BLOCK OF PRIME REAL ESTATE ON SANTIAGO’S UPSCALE PEDRO DE Valdivia Avenue, a spacious four-story administrative center and the imposing main temple bespeak success and prosperity. Gonzalo Sepulveda, an insurance-agency owner and one of the church’s 11 regional officials in Chile, takes me on a tour of the center, which is full of busy, courteous people. The stairways gleam with wax, the halls are covered with new-looking carpeting, and all the cream-colored walls look freshly painted. In a room called the Registry of Membership, two big Digital LGO2 computers sit in an air-conditioned room. Then Sepulveda opens another door. “Here we have something interesting,” he says. “This is called the Family History Center.”

One large room is full of filing cabinets containing microfilmed birth, marriage and death certificates, copied from old Catholic Church records throughout Chile. The records help the Mormon Church put together family genealogies so that the ancestors of church members can be posthumously baptized. This is the church’s way of trying to keep extended families together in heaven. “All this,” says Sepulveda, “is financed with tithings.”

And it is built in the gap left by the eroding strength of the Roman Catholic Church. For centuries in Latin America, the church, along with the military and landowners, was a pillar of power. Catholicism held solid in most countries until the 1940s and 1950s, when urban migration, spreading literacy, mass communications and popular political movements helped change the lives and thinking of multiplying millions of people. As the old social order crumbled, the Catholic Church’s authority was undermined. Cities grew, but new churches and schools, priests and nuns did not follow. And Catholicism’s traditional methods and messages lost much of their appeal to people in search of values relevant to their changing lives.

One sector of the church attempted to respond with the “liberation theology” movement, which spread in some Latin American countries during the 1970s and 1980s, promoting radical action on behalf of the poor and oppressed. But Pope John Paul II has suppressed its political activism, and the decline of Marxism, with which it was often aligned, has drained some of its ideological fuel.

That’s left a void that aggressively evangelistic Protestant churches such as the Mormons, Assembly of God, various Pentecostal churches and Seventh-day Adventists have moved to fill. Because the Protestants, like Catholics, preach the Christian Gospel, they have the credibility of the familiar. And because they seek out individuals and pay personal attention to their needs, they have an appeal that is widely lacking in Latin America’s Catholic Church. Evangelical Protestant congregations are often smaller and more closely knit than Catholic ones in Latin America, giving leadership roles to common people and popularizing worship with emotional expressions of fervor. And evangelical pastors generally come from the communities where they preach. They stay attuned to the spiritual and material needs of the individuals in their flocks and personalize the religious experience--an approach that has proven to be a formula for success. The Catholic Church, large, and with widely spread churches and clergy, has found it difficult to compete.

In Brazil, the biggest country in the region with 150 million people, 21% are Protestant, according to a 1990 estimate by Patrick Johnstone, a British expert on the Protestant movement in Latin America. He says about 24% of the population is Protestant in Guatemala, nearly 24% in Chile, 9 in Bolivia, nearly 8% in Argentina, 5 in Mexico. And so forth throughout a region that was nearly 100% Catholic in the early 19th Century.

Growth in Protestant membership rolls is as much as 7% a year in some countries, including Brazil--meaning Brazil’s Protestant population could double to 60 million within a decade in a quiet revolution that implies new power structures, new values, new power relationships. Johnstone cautions, however, that his estimates, though regarded by other experts as the most reliable available, often come from unverified sources, including the official figures of Protestant churches, which sometimes include former members. “The back door of the church is pretty wide,” Johnstone says, “and they don’t necessarily keep a count of those who left.”

Mormons account for a modest fraction of total Protestants in Latin America--2% of the population in Chile, 1% in Uruguay and Guatemala. But Mormon ranks often grow at an even faster pace than evangelicals’. In Chile, for example, while all Protestant denominations are growing an estimated 5% a year, Mormon membership is expanding at 13%, Johnstone says. The Mormons’ organizational structure, discipline and sheer persistence seem to epitomize many of the traits that have contributed to evangelical success in the region.

Sepulveda, the Mormon official, tells me about the church’s efforts to mold new men. “When a man joins the church, he is expected to put his life in order,” he says. “One has to organize his time. He also is going to have to organize his finances. He is expected to be a better worker, responsible, hard-working, conscientious--something that is not part of our Latin culture.”

The church’s lessons on work and responsibility pay off for Mormons. Some Chilean employers go out of their way to hire Mormons because of their reputation for enterprise, reliability and honesty. Many chapels offer job-placement services, and the administration center has a full-scale employment agency. Patricia Morales, the agency’s secretary, says it places 35 to 50 job-seekers a month, 95% of them with non-Mormon employers. Their skills have become increasingly valued as Chile has begun to emphasize private enterprise.

“An unemployed person should work eight hours a day looking for work,” Sepulveda says. Such Mormon values could radically “change Chile in terms of a better quality of people, better parents and spouses, better sons and daughters, more honest politicians, harder-working workers. We would have businessmen who are fairer in their treatment of employees,” he says.

And ultimately, that is the church’s goal. “We are patriots,” he says. “There is no doubt that we want Chile to be a better country in every way, and we are going to struggle for that.”

*

JAIME TOCORNAL, A CATHOLIC priest from a patrician family, arrives at the San Jose parish on a bicycle. He wears a gray, short-sleeved shirt with a clerical collar.

“I look like a Mormon,” he quips as he unlocks a gate to put the bicycle away.

“With the bicycle,” I agree.

“And short sleeves,” he says, smiling easily.

Tocornal is in charge of the Catholic parish that includes El Montijo, where Bishop Medina’s Mormon chapel was built seven years ago. Tocornal says the Mormons have built five or six chapels in the 200,000-population parish, and he estimates that the parish now has more than 100 Protestant houses of worship, most of them evangelical or Pentecostal denominations.

The Catholic Church, meanwhile, has 24 chapels, with only five full-time priests, including Tocornal.

Obviously, the Catholic Church is worried about what it calls “sects,” a pejorative term for evangelical Protestant denominations. In conjunction with the Catholic Church’s 500th anniversary in the New World, it declared last year as a time for “new evangelization.” Throughout the Americas, priests and lay workers conducted popular campaigns to revive the fervor of Catholic masses.

Tocornal says Catholic “missionaries” visited 70% of the households in his parish last year to take a religious census and show the church’s interest. This year, he says, follow-up visits will be made to homes where faith needs reinforcing. “What the mission pursues is not only to revive the peoples’ faith, but also to revive the missionary spirit in us,” he says. Like the Mormons, the Catholic missionaries have taken to working in pairs, “returning to the style that we never should have left,” Tocornal says. “The Lord taught two by two. It wasn’t the invention of Mr. Joseph Smith.”

Tocornal says Mormons and other Protestant missionaries present lukewarm Catholics with a dramatic, black-and-white choice. “Almost all of the sects say, ‘You are the sinners, we are the righteous, we are saved,’ ” he says. Often, he adds, they seek out people with trouble in their lives, such as wives of alcoholics, people looking for aid or solace.

In addition, he says, Mormon missionaries project an image of organized, successful people. “They come with their short hair, short sleeves, neatly dressed. They bring a style, call it a culture, highly structured. They propose a work plan with discipline.” And Mormons often entice prospective converts with promises of jobs, he observes--”an attraction for someone who is out of work, just imagine.”

He directs me to Manuel Arangui and his wife, Maria Leon, who have felt the pull of the Mormon message. They live three blocks from a Catholic church and half a block from a Mormon chapel.

Arangui’s face is smooth and unwrinkled, but at 36, he is starting to go bald and get a little pudgy. The Aranguis have four children, ages 19, 18, 12 and 5. The wall behind the dining room table is decorated with one child’s scrawlings in crayon, and Arangui, a scout leader, wears a T-shirt that reads “Guides and Scouts of Chile.”

The family became Mormon in 1980, Arangui says. “We were going through a major marital crisis at the time,” and a pair of Mormon missionaries began calling at the house. They gave talks, left behind reading material, and came back several times.

“I pretty much rejected them,” Arangui recalls. But Maria Leon decided to be baptized, along with their children. “I saw a great change in her, and in my children, too,” Arangui says. “A spiritual change, an internal change.”

Arangui had not bothered to read the pamphlets brought by the missionaries, “but I did read the Book of Mormon, and one part that caught my attention a lot was when I read the story that Jesus Christ was in America. That part really touched me. Jesus was here.”

He was baptized Oct. 30, 1980, a turning point in his life. He stopped smoking and drinking. He saved more money from his earnings as an auto parts salesman. He spent more time with his family. And his marital problems evaporated, he says. “I started seeing my wife not as my woman but as my companion,” Arangui says. “The church taught me that.”

It also taught him to tithe--to give 10% of his earnings to the church. “When you give your tithing, God pays you back, and not only 10% but much more,” Arangui says, adding that he did not join the Mormon Church for material reasons. “Many people think that to win converts, the Mormons offer jobs,” he says. “They never offered a job to me.” But he does thank divine Providence and a Mormon connection for his current position.

About two years ago, he had been out of work for about four months. He was downtown looking for work when he thought of a Mormon friend, the owner of a small photocopy shop. “I decided to visit him and ask about his health, because I knew he had been sick,” Arangui says. “And through God’s mysterious ways, we came to the subject of work and he offered me a job.” Arangui is now the shop supervisor.

Although he still believes in the Book of Mormon and still lives by Mormon doctrine, he rarely goes to the chapel these days, he says. His activities as a scout leader take up the time that he used to dedicate to the church, he says. But Father Tocornal had mentioned that the family was returning to the Catholic Church as well. I returned later to talk to Arangui’s wife, Maria Leon.

Manuel, she says, took to the Mormon Church like a duck to water, “and that began to unite us, because we went to the church together. And he began to change for the good. I liked the change. He gave up his (beer-drinking) friends and pool. But it absorbed him too much. He was at the church seven days a week. He became too attached. And that started to bother me.”

Then Leon’s mother dropped out of Mormon church activities because she felt neglected. She never returned to the Catholic Church, but before she died in 1991, Leon brought Tocornal to visit her on her sickbed. “He came often, two times a day sometimes,” she says. Partly because of her mother’s experience, Leon also stopped attending the Mormon Church. Since her mother’s funeral Mass, Leon sometimes has gone to Mass again “because I felt the lack of something.”

Leon says her husband stopped going to the Mormon Church after she did. “Apparently he had a problem with a brother,” she says. “I don’t know which one.”

And then before Christmas in 1991, a Catholic neighbor brought Leon to her house. “And she showed me a huge box with goods and Christmas presents.” It was for the Arangui family, from the Catholic Church.

“I felt super happy because we didn’t have anything, not even presents for the children,” Leon says. “I said to my husband, ‘The Mormon Church never sent a box of anything.’ From then on, I started praying more gladly to the Virgin.”

*

FOR THE MORMONS, KEEPing faith is interlocked with living right, and classes and manuals teach everything from marital relations to work ethics to eating habits. This requires a well-organized program of recruitment, indoctrination, training and constant reinforcement.

The Mormon chapel on Huelen Street is the focus of this program for change in the El Montijo neighborhood. Bishop Jose Medina likes to describe his life as an example of how Mormonism can change a man. Since converting on Christmas Day of 1980, the carpenter has quit drinking and gambling, begun to save money and built a house for his family. He helped build the chapel on Huelen Street in 1985, then became its bishop six years later. The congregation has grown from 46 members to 115, and several hundred more have been baptized, although not all of them attend church.

“When they fall away, we go out to visit them,” Medina says. “It’s like a balloon. When it gets cold, it deflates a little. So the neighbors need to visit them and replace that force, remind them of the commitment they have made.”

Medina’s church has member missionaries who visit those who have gone astray, and home teachers who try to help people who have family problems or economic difficulties. The church has training programs for these missionaries and teachers, as well as social programs for children, young adults, fathers and mothers. Many of the mothers participate in classes that teach skills such as sewing and gardening. All this is in addition to Sunday School classes, held before the regular Sunday church services.

It is clear that one of the keys to the Mormon program is member responsibility and participation. On a recent Sunday, Medina listens as a woman and three young men give talks, bearing witness to their personal experience in the faith, and citing church history and prophecies from the Book of Mormon.

A thin man sits next to me amid the women in dresses and the men in coats and ties. He wears a blue-and-red jacket, jeans and sneakers. Thin black stubble covers his jaw. He seems a little out of place.

Jose Toledo is 22, and with his bony, unshaven face and his decayed teeth, he looks hungry and poor. He says he is out of work, and his wife is home in bed, expecting twins. Toledo joined the Mormon Church four years ago, but he strayed from the fold.

“My problems are a punishment,” he says, echoing the assessment of a Mormon home teacher who’d visited his house a few days earlier. “Ever since I stopped coming here, everything has gone wrong.”

But after his first Sunday back at the church, he says he feels better. “It has helped me,” he says. “I am more relaxed. I am more tranquil.” And one of the brothers has promised to help him find another welding job, he says. “I am thankful, and I know that this Church of Jesus Christ is the true one,” he says.

Then I notice a red string on his left wrist, and I ask what it is. “This is a protection that I have,” he says. It once had a medal of Christ on it, but the medal fell off, he says. The Mormons don’t believe in those things, I say. Is he going to take it off?

“I don’t think I’ll take it off,” he says. “I’ve gotten to like it.”

It might be tempting to cite either Toledo or Medina as a symbol of how the Protestant revolution will turn out in Latin America. It will remold and regenerate a region of faded traditions and weakened energies or it will turn into yet another of Latin America’s unfulfilled revolutionary promises.

But I don’t see it as either/or. It’s more like the Mexican revolution, the Cuban revolution, the Sandinista revolution--all historically significant, but now subsumed in the historical flow of this complex part of the New World. It seems clear that even if Protestantism does not sweep Latin America, it will, like the revolutions that preceded it, leave deep and lasting marks. And the missionaries will keep advancing in wave after swelling wave.