Salt Lake City’s Temple Square. Photograph by Robert Polidori

When the 2002 Olympic Winter Games open in Utah next month, the world will be greeted by a young, well-scrubbed, and ingratiating religion. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has its headquarters in Salt Lake City, and although its leaders have taken pains to keep the event from being called the Mormon Olympics, they view this as an unprecedented opportunity to make the acquaintance of billions of prospective converts.

Mormonism, which entered the twentieth century as the most persecuted creed in America, begins the twenty-first century as perhaps the country’s most robust religion. During the past thirty years, the number of its adherents in the United States has increased by nearly two hundred and twenty-five per cent, to more than five million. (In the same period, the ranks of Southern Baptists, the other fast-growing major denomination in the country, have swelled forty per cent, to sixteen million.) At the same time, the memberships of older, more mainstream denominations, such as Methodism and Episcopalianism, have sharply declined.

The number of Mormons throughout the world may soon equal that of Jews, and, indeed, many see a parallel between the two faiths. Harold Bloom, the Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale, who has written about Mormonism in his book “The American Religion,” observes that “Mormons have repeated in a deep sense the pattern of the Jews—they are a religion that has become a people.” Like the Jews, the Mormons undertook an exodus that forged their early identity as a scorned people; and they believe that they are God’s chosen. They divide the world’s population between themselves and “gentiles”—a category that, for Mormons, includes Jews. Unlike the Jews, however, the Mormons are a missionary people, and the majority of them today are first-generation converts. Worldwide, according to the Church, the number of Mormons has grown by nearly four hundred per cent during the past thirty years, to more than eleven million. In “The American Religion,” Bloom speculates about a time when American Mormons are so numerous and so wealthy “that governing our democracy becomes impossible without Mormon cooperation.”

In 1847, Mormon pioneers followed Brigham Young across the Great Plains into what was then the northern extension of Mexico. They dreamed of creating their own theocratic empire, in a land they called Zion. That vision was eroded by the ceding of the Utah Territory to the United States in 1850, after the Mexican War, and by the subsequent admission of Utah as a state, in 1896. Yet it is striking how much of the dream has been achieved. Mormons constitute sixty-three per cent of Utah’s population. (The figure includes non-practicing Mormons.) Virtually all statewide elective offices, from the governor down, are held by Saints, as Mormons call themselves. The state legislature is overwhelmingly made up of white Mormon Republican males. Three-fourths of the state judiciary is Mormon. The entire United States congressional delegation from Utah is Mormon. School boards, city councils, municipal agencies, and mayors’ offices are dominated by Mormons. “The fact is we live in a quasi theocracy,” James E. Shelledy, the editor of the Salt Lake Tribune, told me. “Eighty per cent of officeholders are of a single party, ninety per cent of a single religion, ninety-nine per cent of a single race, and eighty-five per cent of one gender.”

The major secular institutions in the state often have a parallel, Church-owned counterpart. There is the University of Utah (the “U”) in Salt Lake City, and there is Brigham Young University (the “Y”) in Provo, which is the largest religiously sponsored school in the country. The non-Mormon Tribune is the state’s principal newspaper, but the second-largest one is the Church-affiliated Deseret News. Church affiliates also own the state’s biggest television and AM radio stations. Most public junior high and high schools have a Mormon seminary available for religious study. The Mormon majority tends to perceive institutions that are not owned by the Church as anti-Mormon, especially in Salt Lake City, the only major city in Utah where Mormons are a minority (about forty-five per cent of the city’s population). “This causes some cultural and religious divisions that are not present in the rest of Utah,” Shelledy said. “It’s frustrating for the non-Mormon majority in the city, because the cultural boundaries are already set, and there is little opportunity for their input.” The city’s energetic mayor, Rocky Anderson, a former Mormon who left the Church at the age of eighteen after what he said was “an intense period of self-examination,” has made bridging the divide between non-Mormons and Mormons a priority of his administration. “I believe we’d have a far better community,” he told me, “if people could break out of their isolation on both sides.”

Saints compare their headquarters in Salt Lake City—an imposing complex of buildings set against the Wasatch Mountains—to the Vatican. Brigham Young, who founded Salt Lake City, mandated that streets be numbered according to their distance from the pale neo-Gothic granite temple that stands at the center. Young’s regimented thoroughfares are a hundred and thirty-two feet wide—wide enough to turn around a train of oxen, he decreed—so there is a lot of high-desert sky between buildings. In this setting, the handsome state capitol nearby looks a bit captive.

Temple Square, the ten-acre heart of Mormonism, is a serene enclosure. The Tabernacle, home to the celebrated choir, stands in the middle of the complex, facing the multi-spired Temple. Simplicity is the sensibility at work in this cloister. Although Mormon temples are often impressive pieces of architecture, the icons and crucifixes and frescoes that adorn many Christian churches are notably absent here—as if decoration were an affront to the pragmatism that Mormons pride themselves upon. Even the occasional stained-glass window shies away from depictions of religious passion in favor of geometric patterns. Across North Temple Street is a new conference center, a million two hundred thousand square feet in size—nearly ten times as large as the old Tabernacle—which can seat more than twenty-one thousand people.

Salt Lake City is a pleasant town that is often ranked as one of America’s best places to live; it’s clean, has a low crime rate, and provides ready access to ski slopes and wilderness areas. The extremes of wealth and poverty that characterize most American cities are not evident in Salt Lake City, in part because of the Mormons’ emphasis on frugality and charity.

Some Mormons regard the forthcoming Olympics as the fulfillment of a prophecy. “We shall build a city and a temple to the Most High God in this place,” Young told his followers. “Kings and emperors and the noble and wise of the earth will visit us here, while the wicked and ungodly will envy us our comfortable homes and possessions.” But the International Olympic Committee’s choice of Salt Lake City for the 2002 Games was accompanied by less welcome news. First came the revelation that members of the Salt Lake Bid Committee had boosted its candidacy by dispensing more than a million dollars in cash and gifts to members of the I.O.C. The United States Attorney’s office indicted two of the Salt Lake committee’s leaders, David Johnson and Thomas Welch, both prominent members of the Church, on bribery and other charges. It was expected that their trial might implicate other leading members of the Mormon establishment, including Michael O. Leavitt, the governor of Utah. Last August, however, the federal judge in the case, David Sam, who is also a Mormon, threw out the key charges, calling them an “uninvited federal intrusion” into the state’s affairs. Johnson and Welch faced additional charges of conspiracy and fraud, but the case was dismissed by Judge Sam last November. The federal government has appealed the decision.