In the past and even today, the LDS church dominates Salt Lake City -- economically, politically, and certainly visually -- illustrated particularly well by the Temple Square and Welfare Square. Click on each image to learn more about each place. In 1870 more than 90 percent of Salt Lake's 12,000 residents were Mormons. Whether Mormons converts came from the Midwest or from Western Europe (England or Denmark), they came to the Great Basin not as individualists committed to the capitalistic ethos but as communally-oriented Latter-day Saints ready to build Zion. In the next twenty years the non-Mormon population grew two to three times as rapidly as did the Mormon population. By 1890 half of the city's 45,000 residents were non-Mormons; and there was also increasing variety among them, as a portion of the flood of twenty million immigrants who came to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found its way to Utah.
Approximately 73 percent of the citizens of Utah are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Salt Lake City is less than 40 percent Mormon. More than half of the Church's 11 million members live outside of the United States and only 14 percent of the total resides in Utah. In 1996 the eight Intermountain States contained less than 6 percent of the nation's total population, but encompassed 52 percent of American Mormons. Weekly church attendance for Mormons in the Intermountain West is much higher (69.5 percent) than for Mormons elsewhere in the nation -- 40.2 percent, similar to other conservative churches.
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Sources: map, Travel West; air photo, LDS.
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