Hagoth's Children

New Zealand's Protestant churches rallied last week against invaders: the proselytizing Mormons of Salt Lake City. Among the South Pacific's Polynesians, the Mormons keep scoring remarkable gains, have almost tripled their members (80% Maoris) in New Zealand to 17,000 in the last 30 years. They drew a crowd of 112,000 to a newly opened $8.000.000 church college and gleaming white temple, and this week set up the first Mormon "stake" -a sort of diocese -outside North

America and Hawaii. Protestants charged the Mormons with "pouring in money." Cried an official Presbyterian statement: ''They go from door to door infiltrating and trying to make converts. They are only interested in sheep stealing."

The Mormons reply that the sheep are simply returning to their proper fold after centuries astray. Their missionaries find an ancient kinship with the Pacific's brown-skinned peoples in a passage from the Book of Mormon, which Founder Joseph Smith produced as revelation in upstate New York in 1829. In Smith's history of the first inhabitants of America, some of the white-skinned, "delightsome" members of the Israelite tribe of Lehi grow quarrelsome and sinful after arriving in America from Israel. Result: they turn dark-skinned and "loathsome," thereby producing the American Indians. A patriarch named Hagoth builds a boat, sails away into the Pacific and is never heard of again. Many Mormons presume that Hagoth's descendants are today's Pacific islanders.

Though the church gives no official interpretation of the Hagoth legend, it has served Mormon missionaries from Hawaii to New Zealand to give thousands of natives hope that they may once again become "white and delightsome." According to New Zealand Mormon President Ariel S. Ballif, the way is simple: "As they take up the righteous way of living, they become more attractive and acceptable to white people and lose their dark skin [by intermarriage]."

Apart from Hagoth, Maoris and Mormons seem to mesh because both once practiced plural marriage. Even more important, white Mormons have carefully learned the Maori language, fostered their art and culture. New Zealand's National Council of Churches has flatly rejected the Mormons as members: "Their conception of God is anthropomorphic. To them he is really a glorified man." But New Zealand's Anglicans at least were ready to take a lesson from how the Mormons are "sheep stealing" among the Maoris. Questioning whether they have really made Maoris feel at home in their churches, the Anglicans were thinking of borrowing some of "the devotion and self-sacrifice of these heretical missionaries."

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