Utah vividly illustrates the changes credit has wrought in the United States. Last year, 28 of every 1,000 Utah households filed for bankruptcy, twice the national average and nearly triple Utah's rate a decade earlier, according to Economy.com, a West Chester, Pa., consulting firm. Utahns often get married early and have the largest families in the nation on average. That makes for a lot of young parents with modest incomes looking for big homes and cars. The median monthly mortgage payment in Utah equaled 45.3 percent of a worker's average monthly income in 2002, the fourth-highest level in the nation, according to the Utah Foundation, a Salt Lake think tank.

In a conservative, largely Mormon state, the surge in bankruptcies has led to soul-searching. At a conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in April, President Thomas S. Monson, the church's second-ranking leader, said he was "appalled" at advertising for home-equity loans that is "designed to tempt us to borrow more in order to have more."

Despite the dicta of sages, many economists — led by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan — see the expansion of credit to lower-income families as a sign of progress. Some speak of the "democratization" of credit. In an April speech, Greenspan said that in colonial times through the late 19th century, only the affluent had access to credit, and rates were high. Now, Greenspan says, "innovation and deregulation have vastly expanded credit availability to virtually all income classes."

Yet many fear credit has spread so widely that many Americans are overextending themselves. Outstanding household debt doubled to more than $10 trillion between 1992 and 2004, after accounting for inflation. Concern about out-of-control credit is especially prevalent in Utah. Last month, Jay Evensen, the editor of the editorial page at the Deseret Morning News, wrote a column blasting "people who wield their Visa cards like swords as they cut through the jungles of greed on a shopping crusade."

By the time Jason Wadsworth graduated from the University of Utah in 1994, he was married with two children, and he and his wife, Amy, had run up $60,000 in student loans. He ditched his dreams of becoming a music teacher and took a steadier job at the post office. To keep afloat financially and treat his family to occasional extras — a video camera, DVDs, a stereo — he eventually piled up an additional $15,000 in debt spread over a dozen credit cards.

The Wadsworths had two more children, and their debts became so onerous that they moved into the basement of Amy Wadsworth's parents' house for five years. Today they live in a tiny brick home with a carport a few miles from her parents and are slowly paying down their debts, which include $45,000 in student loans and $7,000 in credit-card debt.

"Interest compounds, and it becomes like a monster around the corner," says Amy Wadsworth.

Robert Head, a Utah mortgage broker, complains that too many Utahns suffer from what he calls "the Nephite syndrome," referring to a clan described in the Book of Mormon that was reduced to poverty through greed. Head helps solve debt problems by restructuring high-interest loans.