[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 139 (Friday, September 8, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S13136-S13137]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                 WORK NOT WELFARE IN THE MORMON CHURCH
 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, we are talking a great deal in the 
Senate these days about welfare reform. Recently, I had a chance to 
read an article by Ralph Hardy, a Mormon leader in the Washington, D.C. 
area, in the magazine American Enterprise published by the American 
Enterprise Institute.
  It is titled, ``Work not Welfare.''
  For a long time we have known that Mormons have been exceptional in 
not having their people on welfare. But this article goes into more 
detail than I had known.
  If we try to get welfare reform without providing jobs for people, we 
will not have welfare reform.
  It is interesting to note in the article, he says, ``I quickly 
learned that the physical welfare of my charges was an important 
influence on their spiritual welfare.'' That is true in the religious 
sense and also in the non-religious sense.
  I will have an amendment to try a WPA-type of demonstration in four 
different places in the country.
  I hope it can pass.
  The reality is there is simply no great demand for unskilled labor in 
the United States today, and most of the people on welfare fall in that 
category. If we were to do that, not only would we help the people 
more, as the Latter-Day Saints do, but we would be moving on other 
social problems.
  We spend a great deal of time making speeches about crime and doing 
very little constructive about it. Show me an area with high 
unemployment, whether it is White, Black, or Hispanic, and I will show 
you an area of high crime.
  I ask that the Ralph Hardy piece be printed in the Record and I urge 
my colleagues to read it.
  The article follows:
                 Work Not Welfare in the Mormon Church

                            (By Ralph Hardy)

       In 1996, the 9 million-member Church of Jesus Christ of 
     Latter-Day Saints (popularly known as the Mormons) will 
     commemorate the sixtieth year of its welfare program. It was 
     in 1936, with the Great Depression sapping the strength and 
     spirit of the nation, that our church's visionary president 
     Heber Grant inaugurated the Church Welfare Program as ``a 
     system under which the curse of idleness would be done away 
     with, the evils of a dole abolished, and independence, 
     industry, thrift, and self-respect be once more established 
     amongst our people. The aim of the 

[[Page S 13137]]
     church is to help the people to help themselves. Work is to be re-
     enthroned as the ruling principle of the lives of our church 
     membership.''
       From this beginning, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-
     Day Saints developed a detailed system for social assistance 
     that favors work instead of welfare. It has proven extremely 
     practical and effective in helping vulnerable people. This I 
     know from my own personal experiences.
       In the late 1940s, when I was about eight years of age, my 
     father roused me out of bed one early Saturday morning and 
     announced that we were going to the stake (roughly analogous 
     to a diocese) welfare farm. This was an exciting prospect; I 
     had never visited a farm and I eagerly anticipated seeing 
     many creatures of my imagination. However, when my father and 
     I arrived at the enterprise on the far west side of Salt Lake 
     City, I was surprised not only by the lack of farm animals 
     but by the large machete I was given. There ended the fun. 
     For the remainder of that Saturday my father and I, along 
     with several other men and their sons, harvested heavy, dirty 
     sugar beets by hand, throwing them into the back of a three-
     quarter-ton truck. After hefting those beets I never felt the 
     same about sugar again. I did, however, acquire a healthy 
     respect for the life of a farm boy.
       Later, a few years after my family had moved to Washington, 
     D.C., the assignment came again to work on the stake welfare 
     farm. This time, however, I held no illusions. I braced 
     myself to work in the intent heat and 95 percent humidity 
     that only the Washington area can promise in July. Throughout 
     that day, which still ranks as one of the hardest episodes of 
     labor I can remember, my father and I toiled in the fields 
     digging fence-post holes.
       It was with a little sadness that I later learned that this 
     stake welfare farm had been sold, with a large dairy farm on 
     Maryland's Eastern Shore acquired in its place. When I 
     returned to Washington after graduate school, I spent many 
     more Saturdays cleaning barns and pouring cement at the dairy 
     farm.
       When I turned 12, I became a deacon in the church like 
     other boys of my age. One of my first assignments was to 
     visit about eight families in our local congregation on the 
     first Sunday of every month. My purpose in going was to 
     collect from these families a ``fast offering''--a cash 
     contribution from each household equal to the value of two 
     meals skipped by that family on the first Sunday of the 
     month, known as Fast Sunday. I traveled by bicycle, and at 
     the end of the afternoon I would bring all the offerings back 
     to the bishop at the meetinghouse. These contributions 
     created a pool of funds for our bishop to use in providing 
     assistance to needy families in our ward. Although I did not 
     know who these families were, I knew that our wise bishop 
     would put the funds to good use.
       When I was 34, the leadership of the church asked me to 
     serve as bishop of my ward. One of the key assignments I was 
     given, like all other bishops in the Church of Jesus Christ 
     of Latter-Day Saints, was to assume direct responsibility for 
     the physical welfare of the nearly 600 members of the 
     congregation. I quickly learned that the physical welfare of 
     my charges was an important influence on their spiritual 
     welfare.
       The good people of my ward were from all walks of life. 
     Some were reasonably affluent, many were not. More than a 
     few, especially young families, struggled. One adult member 
     of my ward was retarded and living alone. Another was 
     severely overweight, without family or transportation, and 
     virtually unemployable. Over the five years of my service I 
     spent an enormous amount of time administering to the many 
     needs of these people.
       One day, after I had been bishop for only about four 
     months, one of the very faithful men in my ward came to see 
     me. He had been assigned as the ``home teacher'' to several 
     families, and, as such, he visited these families faithfully 
     each month on my behalf. This man said to me, ``Bishop Hardy, 
     I am concerned about one of my families. The husband is out 
     of a job, and his spirit and self-confidence are broken.'' I 
     knew the man's name at once, and was distressed that I had 
     not been perceptive enough to detect that the family was in 
     difficulty.
       I immediately visited the man and his wife and confirmed 
     that they were without the basic necessities of life. Their 
     pantry was bare. All of their meager income went toward 
     paying rent, now in arrears, and for gasoline so the man 
     could search for work. And that search was not proving 
     successful. That evening, I immediately called the very 
     capable president of our ward's women's auxiliary, known in 
     our church as the Relief Society, and asked her to also visit 
     the home so that this family's immediate needs could be 
     confidentially assessed. By noon the next day this was done. 
     Counseling was begun, and a list of commodities and other 
     necessities that this struggling family would need was 
     compiled. By five o'clock in the evening, the Relief Society 
     president and the wife in the family had driven to our 
     regional bishops' storehouse facility and filled a large 
     order of foodstuffs and other commodities to sustain that 
     family of five for a period of time.
       A few days later, by prearrangement with the husband, I 
     contacted the man's older brother living in the southwest and 
     inquired about the extended family's ability to be of 
     assistance to their kin. To my joy I received a commitment 
     from them to donate not only cash assistance to their brother 
     but also a good used automobile to replace the family's old 
     car, which was not worth fixing. Then I asked a capable young 
     attorney in my ward to help me prevent the family from being 
     evicted from their rented townhouse; he was able to work out 
     a rent moratorium with the landlord. From the Fast Offering 
     funds donated by members of my congregation I advanced a 
     deposit of one month's rent so that the landlord would feel a 
     sense of commitment. Also from Fast offering funds I made 
     several direct payments to the electric utility and to 
     several physicians, in order to free up the family's meager 
     cash resources for other purposes.
       As is the practice in our church, I asked the man and his 
     wife if they would perform some church service to partially 
     recompense for the assistance that they received. I asked the 
     man if he would undertake a project to repaint one of the 
     long hallway walls in our ward meetinghouse. This assignment 
     was accepted and the work was performed over the course of 
     several Saturdays.
       A member of our ward who had been assigned to serve as an 
     employment specialist then began turning over to this man 
     every possible job lead. Before we could succeed at this, 
     however, the man's own extended family found him employment 
     in the Southwest. I still hear from him every Christmas and 
     can report that he has been gainfully employed ever since his 
     crisis, and is a productive member of our church and society.
       At every turn the LDS church teaches the dignity of work 
     and the importance of personal industry. Work is emphasized 
     as a ruling principle in the lives of all of our believers. I 
     learned this lesson as part of a religious congregation, 
     through personal labor in the church welfare system, and 
     through my participation in our system of financial and 
     service offerings. Work is basic in the doctrine of our 
     church, and the virtues of work--and the cursedness of 
     idleness--are taught to Latter-Day Saints at a young age.
       More generally, the members of our church are taught to be 
     self-reliant. Coming in part from our pioneer traditions, the 
     importance of self-reliance and personal independence 
     receives great emphasis. Spencer W. Kimball, a recent church 
     president, taught that:
       The responsibility for each person's social, emotional, 
     spiritual, physical, or economic well-being rests first upon 
     himself, second upon his family, and third upon the church if 
     he is a faithful member thereof. No true Latter-Day Saint, 
     while physically or emotionally able, will voluntarily shift 
     the burden of his own or his family's well-being to someone 
     else.
       Our emphases on work and self-reliance lead directly to a 
     third requirement in church teaching--that of provident 
     living. This means we must train members, from youth, to live 
     within their means; to avoid unnecessary debt; to adopt on a 
     family basis the principle of the ``storehouse,'' which 
     encourages laying up a year's stock of food, commodities, and 
     financial resources against a time when they may be needed.
       These work- and independence-based principles inoculate 
     most church members from serious problems of economic 
     security. And where personal welfare problems do crop up, our 
     vast system of temporary church assistance and guidance back 
     toward work is able to ease most situations without any 
     involvement by the government. This is not mere rhetoric. 
     Last year within the United States alone, 35,207 of our 
     unemployed members were placed in gainful employment through 
     the church's employment centers. In addition, over 1,500 so-
     called ``unemployable'' persons were placed in jobs, with 
     more than 85 percent still working at the same business over 
     one year later.
       I have seen the LDS church welfare assistance system in 
     action. I learned its principles as a child; I taught them as 
     a full-time missionary for the church as a young man 
     overseas; I have administered the system at the grassroots 
     level as a church bishop. This system works because it is 
     focused on the self-worth of the individual, and because it 
     is administered as a part of religious practice at the local 
     level.
       Ours is a program built on work, self-help, personal 
     dignity, and redemption. I have seen it succeed. And I know 
     that many of its principles could be applied to the world at 
     large.
     

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