Jana Riess on the City Creek Mall

This is a prophetic voice:

The LDS Church has spent approximately $1.5 billion on the nation’s largest retail project of recent memory. Interestingly, the $1.5 billion figure is just over the $1.3 billion figure that the LDS Church has spent in humanitarian aid since the international Humanitarian Fund began in 1985. And by coincidence, 1.3 billion is also the figure released this month about the number of people around the world who qualify as living in “extreme poverty”—a statistic that has improved sharply over the last decade, but that is still around a sixth of the world’s population.

Given those facts, spending a billion and a half dollars on a den of luxury consumption is a moral failure. It just is. A more modest, scaled-down plan to revitalize Salt Lake’s once-thriving downtown would have been enough. The rest is vanity, calculated to impress. It is palpably ironic that the mall contains a luxury store called True Religion jeans (opening Summer 2012). Whatever else it may be, this mall is not true religion.

Read the rest of Jana's essay at Flunking Sainthood.