What Makes The Mormon Church Tick?

Walter Kirn describes his history with the Mormon Church, and discusses living with a bunch of church members in Los Angeles (h/t Ritholtz):

In a way I remembered from my teenage years, my housemates did everything in groups, with friends from their Santa Monica “singles ward.” They hit the beach for all-night bonfire parties and convoyed off to a giant monthly flea market held at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. At least once a week, they threw a backyard cookout: burgers and chicken, rolls, potato salad, lettuce salad, Jell-O salad, ice cream. When everybody finished eating, we’d gather inside the main house’s soaring living room to watch that week’s episode of Sophie’s talent show or one of the bloody, hard-boiled action movies that Bobby couldn’t get enough of. The mood was casual and disheveled, reminding me of a fifth-grade sleepover. I was faintly aware of crushes within the group, of certain young men who had eyes for certain young women, but there was no withdrawing into pairs. Everyone paid attention to everyone else.
I’d forgotten that social life could be so easy. I’d forgotten that things most Americans do alone, ordinary things, like watching television or listening to music or sweeping a floor, could also be done in numbers, pleasantly. One night, I sat on the floor next to a kid, muscled and tall, rectangularly handsome, who turned out to be a quarterback for UCLA. I learned this from Kim; he’d never bothered to mention it. Too absorbed in the goofy talent show, too busy barbecuing chicken breasts or squirting Hershey’s Syrup on bowls of ice cream, assembly-line style, while someone else stuck spoons in them. At Beverly Zion, that’s how it worked: pitch in, help out, cooperate, cooperate. Divide the labor, pool the fruits. This reflexive communalism went way back in Mormonism and underlay a frontier economic system known as “The United Order.” It had also inspired the early Mormons’ symbol of themselves, the beehive. In Brigham Young’s Utah, where speculative self-enrichment was explicitly discouraged (along with the mining and trading of precious metals, which Young decried as a barren, corrupting enterprise), the direction of the pursuit of happiness was toward the advancement of the common good.
It dawned on me that the purpose of Beverly Zion was not to seal out Hollywood at all, but to provide a setting for the enjoyment of a mutualistic way of life familiar from childhood homes and churches. Well, good enough: It kept me fed. It kept me company when I wasn’t writing and when Amanda, also a writer, was on assignment. It provided me with a car when mine broke down, with a truck when I bought a used sofa and had to fetch it, with laundry supplies when I ran out of them, and with dog-sitters for Amanda’s poodle when we flew to St. Louis to watch the filming of Up in the Air. It also provided me, thanks to Bobby’s father, a product designer for a Big Three auto company, with an insider’s discount on a new car that saved me a sweet 4,000 bucks. And in repayment for these kindnesses? Nothing. I asked. Just help finish this Jell-O salad.
“I mean it: Are they for real?” Amanda kept asking me. She’d grown up a Roman Catholic in Chicago and felt guilty about accepting favors that she couldn’t instantly return. Beverly Zion soon overwhelmed this attitude.

It is an interesting perspective that is often overlooked in today's discussion of individualism and self-sufficiency.  American history is full of communalism which has been blocked out by the story of the rugged individualist.  Frontier America was full of a combination of the two.  People really did do most things for themselves, but at the same time, you had barn raisings and communal threshing and church-based support networks.  Ghetto Catholicism was based on a similar understanding of communalism.  That melted away with the suburbanization of the post-war era.  I can understand some of the concerns of religious folks about a secular support network replacing a faith-based one, but can anybody tell me that part of the resistance to the welfare state doesn't have something to do with opposition to helping out people who aren't like you (for instance, minorities)?  It seems odd that the first Mormon party nominee for President seems to ignore the historic recognition of actions for the common good in his quest for the Presidency.