SALT LAKE CITY — At his downtown Hilton Hotel restaurant, bartenders pour cocktails and fine wine while Nathan Tanner deals with his usual internal conflict of good business versus Mormon morality.
A faithful member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which forbids alcohol consumption, the restaurant manager and Hilton executive says he believes in all of his church's doctrines and teachings. "I served a mission and I loved it," Tanner said. "I believe in proselytizing."
Tanner also believes in the value of theocracy, the rule of God on Earth, an ideal that his faith promises will come with Christ's return. "It's part of my religion," he said. "There is a time and place for it, in a perfect society where everyone is LDS."
Obviously, everyone isn't.
And Tanner, a fifth-generation Mormon, says he's often uncomfortable with his church's role in such secular tasks as helping to craft state liquor laws because it stokes chronic complaints that church and state in Utah are too chummy, too often.
The enduring perception of Utah as a state run by the Mormon church also is a constant frustration for church leaders, who say they wish forever to erase the perception that traces of its 19th-century theocracy persist today.
Church President Gordon B. Hinckley, 93, who has worked since 1935 to dispel unwanted images of the church, would not talk to the Associated Press on the subject, despite repeated interview requests.
"Many groups have to endure stereotypical images. Claims of church involvement in politics here is just another stereotype," church spokesman Bruce Olsen said. "But it isn't true, and I think that perception is changing."
Maybe. But vestiges of Utah's peculiar theocratic past haunt even its recent history and, in the eyes of many, its tendencies will remain for the foreseeable future.
Utah isn't a literal theocracy, which is rule by a divinity through prophets on Earth.
It hasn't been since President James Buchanan in 1857 declared the territory of Utah in open rebellion against the United States and replaced Brigham Young, the church's prophet and president, with the first of a series of interim territorial governors.
But "tension still exists. It leads to a cultural divide," said historian David Bigler, author of the 1996 book "Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American West."
