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Any discussion of Ezra Taft Benson’s eight years as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture must include mention of his family, especially his wife, Flora, and his oldest son Reed, whom he credited as his most valued advisers. “It was Flora’s ideas and courage—her positive influence and determination— more than anything else,” Benson wrote in 1962, “which added steel to my spine to fight it out for principle against the nearly overwhelming pressures of political expediency.” Second only to Flora was Reed, twenty-four in late 1952, who, according to Benson, understood “more fully what I was trying to accomplish possibly better than anyone else. . . . He worked quietly and effectively behind the scenes on matters that were often of the utmost importance.”Benson’s wife and children not only provided love and support but also emerged in the national media as the public face of an idealized mid-twentieth-century American family—white, privileged, patriotic, with mother as homemaker, father as breadwinner, surrounded by attractive, well-mannered offspring. 

It is not often that we see a convergence in predictions between apostles and sociologists, though, to be sure, this is not the first prediction from Rodney Stark that has proved pleasing to the LDS leadership. Yet, for today’s LDS members in Europe, the predicted “great days of gathering,” or, in President Hinckley’s terms, “second harvest,” must seem as far off as the Millennium itself. Certainly Stark’s earlier projections of enduring Church growth have proved rather optimistic for Europe, where the rate of new converts has barely kept pace with the defections. The seemingly static membership in western Europe is no secret, nor is the Church’s ongoing struggle with retention. Well-researched articles on such topics have been appearing for more than a decade, and a series of 2005 articles in the Salt Lake Tribune brought the problem forcibly to public attention.