A Reporter at Large
Lives of the Saints
At a time when Mormonism is booming, the Church is struggling with a troubled legacy.
by Lawrence Wright January 21, 2002
When the 2002 Olympic Winter
Games open in Utah next month, the world will be greeted by a young,
well-scrubbed, and ingratiating religion. The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints has its headquarters in Salt Lake City, and although
its leaders have taken pains to keep the event from being called the
Mormon Olympics, they view this as an unprecedented opportunity to make
the acquaintance of billions of prospective converts.
Mormonism, which entered the twentieth century as the most persecuted
creed in America, begins the twenty-first century as perhaps the
country’s most robust religion. During the past thirty years, the number
of its adherents in the United States has increased by nearly two
hundred and twenty-five per cent, to more than five million. (In the
same period, the ranks of Southern Baptists, the other fast-growing
major denomination in the country, have swelled forty per cent, to
sixteen million.) At the same time, the memberships of older, more
mainstream denominations, such as Methodism and Episcopalianism, have
sharply declined.
The number of Mormons throughout the world may soon equal that of
Jews, and, indeed, many see a parallel between the two faiths. Harold
Bloom, the Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale, who has written
about Mormonism in his book “The American Religion,” observes that
“Mormons have repeated in a deep sense the pattern of the Jews—they are a
religion that has become a people.” Like the Jews, the Mormons
undertook an exodus that forged their early identity as a scorned
people; and they believe that they are God’s chosen. They divide the
world’s population between themselves and “gentiles”—a category that,
for Mormons, includes Jews. Unlike the Jews, however, the Mormons are a
missionary people, and the majority of them today are first-generation
converts. Worldwide, according to the Church, the number of Mormons has
grown by nearly four hundred per cent during the past thirty years, to
more than eleven million. In “The American Religion,” Bloom speculates
about a time when American Mormons are so numerous and so wealthy “that
governing our democracy becomes impossible without Mormon cooperation.”
In 1847, Mormon pioneers followed Brigham Young across the Great
Plains into what was then the northern extension of Mexico. They dreamed
of creating their own theocratic empire, in a land they called Zion.
That vision was eroded by the ceding of the Utah Territory to the United
States in 1850, after the Mexican War, and by the subsequent admission
of Utah as a state, in 1896. Yet it is striking how much of the dream
has been achieved. Mormons constitute sixty-three per cent of Utah’s
population. (The figure includes non-practicing Mormons.) Virtually all
statewide elective offices, from the governor down, are held by Saints,
as Mormons call themselves. The state legislature is overwhelmingly made
up of white Mormon Republican males. Three-fourths of the state
judiciary is Mormon. The entire United States congressional delegation
from Utah is Mormon. School boards, city councils, municipal agencies,
and mayors’ offices are dominated by Mormons. “The fact is we live in a
quasi theocracy,” James E. Shelledy, the editor of the Salt Lake Tribune,
told me. “Eighty per cent of officeholders are of a single party,
ninety per cent of a single religion, ninety-nine per cent of a single
race, and eighty-five per cent of one gender.”
The major secular institutions in the state often have a parallel,
Church-owned counterpart. There is the University of Utah (the “U”) in
Salt Lake City, and there is Brigham Young University (the “Y”) in
Provo, which is the largest religiously sponsored school in the country.
The non-Mormon Tribune is the state’s principal newspaper, but the second-largest one is the Church-affiliated Deseret News.
Church affiliates also own the state’s biggest television and AM radio
stations. Most public junior high and high schools have a Mormon
seminary available for religious study. The Mormon majority tends to
perceive institutions that are not owned by the Church as anti-Mormon,
especially in Salt Lake City, the only major city in Utah where Mormons
are a minority (about forty-five per cent of the city’s population).
“This causes some cultural and religious divisions that are not present
in the rest of Utah,” Shelledy said. “It’s frustrating for the
non-Mormon majority in the city, because the cultural boundaries are
already set, and there is little opportunity for their input.” The
city’s energetic mayor, Rocky Anderson, a former Mormon who left the
Church at the age of eighteen after what he said was “an intense period
of self-examination,” has made bridging the divide between non-Mormons
and Mormons a priority of his administration. “I believe we’d have a far
better community,” he told me, “if people could break out of their
isolation on both sides.”
Saints compare their headquarters in Salt Lake
City—an imposing complex of buildings set against the Wasatch
Mountains—to the Vatican. Brigham Young, who founded Salt Lake City,
mandated that streets be numbered according to their distance from the
pale neo-Gothic granite temple that stands at the center. Young’s
regimented thoroughfares are a hundred and thirty-two feet wide—wide
enough to turn around a train of oxen, he decreed—so there is a lot of
high-desert sky between buildings. In this setting, the handsome state
capitol nearby looks a bit captive.
Temple Square, the ten-acre heart of Mormonism, is a serene
enclosure. The Tabernacle, home to the celebrated choir, stands in the
middle of the complex, facing the multi-spired Temple. Simplicity is the
sensibility at work in this cloister. Although Mormon temples are often
impressive pieces of architecture, the icons and crucifixes and
frescoes that adorn many Christian churches are notably absent here—as
if decoration were an affront to the pragmatism that Mormons pride
themselves upon. Even the occasional stained-glass window shies away
from depictions of religious passion in favor of geometric patterns.
Across North Temple Street is a new conference center, a million two
hundred thousand square feet in size—nearly ten times as large as the
old Tabernacle—which can seat more than twenty-one thousand people.
Salt Lake City is a pleasant town that is often ranked as one of
America’s best places to live; it’s clean, has a low crime rate, and
provides ready access to ski slopes and wilderness areas. The extremes
of wealth and poverty that characterize most American cities are not
evident in Salt Lake City, in part because of the Mormons’ emphasis on
frugality and charity.
Some Mormons regard the forthcoming Olympics as the fulfillment of a
prophecy. “We shall build a city and a temple to the Most High God in
this place,” Young told his followers. “Kings and emperors and the noble
and wise of the earth will visit us here, while the wicked and ungodly
will envy us our comfortable homes and possessions.” But the
International Olympic Committee’s choice of Salt Lake City for the 2002
Games was accompanied by less welcome news. First came the revelation
that members of the Salt Lake Bid Committee had boosted its candidacy by
dispensing more than a million dollars in cash and gifts to members of
the I.O.C. The United States Attorney’s office indicted two of the Salt
Lake committee’s leaders, David Johnson and Thomas Welch, both prominent
members of the Church, on bribery and other charges. It was expected
that their trial might implicate other leading members of the Mormon
establishment, including Michael O. Leavitt, the governor of Utah. Last
August, however, the federal judge in the case, David Sam, who is also a
Mormon, threw out the key charges, calling them an “uninvited federal
intrusion” into the state’s affairs. Johnson and Welch faced additional
charges of conspiracy and fraud, but the case was dismissed by Judge Sam
last November. The federal government has appealed the decision.
In the meantime, the Church was obliged to revisit the most horrific
episode in its history. In 1857, a wagon train of migrant families
heading to California was massacred in southwest Utah. A hundred and
twenty people were murdered in a grazing spot called Mountain Meadows.
The Church had long denied any responsibility for the massacre, blaming a
few renegade Mormons and a band of Paiute Indians, whom the Church
accused of killing the women and children. In 1999, at the request of
the descendants of the victims, the Church rebuilt a small monument at
the site. The gesture became a public-relations disaster when
construction workers discovered a number of bones that seemed to
indicate that the women and children had been shot at close range,
apparently by Mormons, rather than killed by the arrows, clubs, and
knives of the Indians.
The traditional Mormon practice of polygamy, which the Church
officially banned in 1890, also became a subject of renewed controversy
when the Tribune published a series of articles about child abuse
and welfare fraud in polygamous families. The articles revealed, among
other things, that polygamous marriages were still flourishing in
various parts of the state, and in greater numbers than ever. When Tom
Green, a man with five wives and thirty children, flaunted his life
style on talk shows—he was eventually tried and convicted on charges of
bigamy and criminal non-support—the Church was obliged, once again, to
try to come to terms with its most vexing legacy.
THE LEADER
The president of the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints is a ninety-one-year-old man named Gordon B. Hinckley.
I visited Hinckley in his spacious, sun-filled office in Temple Square,
which is comfortably but plainly furnished. Hinckley’s manner is more
corporate than pastoral. He has a round face with a genial expression,
and eyes that dance about smartly behind trifocals. Among his followers,
his youthfulness and energy are legendary, as is his vinegary humor.
“All writers should be put in a box and thrown in the sea,” he said as
he rose to greet me. Like every other man I had seen in the Temple
complex, he was wearing a black suit, a white shirt, and a dark, narrow
tie. His office was full of Americana and personal mementos: a bust of
Lincoln; a portrait of the Church’s founder, Joseph Smith; a photograph
of Hinckley at the White House handing Ronald Reagan a set of Mormon
scriptures; another of him with the talk-show host Larry King. On a
shelf behind Hinckley’s desk was a buffalo skull, an ancient coin that
he described as a “widow’s mite” (“to remind me of where the Church’s
money comes from”), and a slab of wood from a black-walnut tree he had
planted more than thirty years ago, which was used for the pulpit in the
new conference center. “I’m a farmer at heart,” he said. “Never a
spring has passed that I’ve not planted some trees.”
Seated behind a massive wooden desk, which was covered with
correspondence and reports, Hinckley told me, “I don’t think the Church
has changed so very much as the perception of the Church has changed.”
He has been instrumental in that shift, having modernized the Church’s
vigilant public-relations department, in the nineteen-thirties. As I
placed my tape recorder on his desk, three smiling dark-suited men from
the P.R. office placed tape recorders beside it.
Before assuming the top job, in 1995, Hinckley was the acknowledged
power behind the throne. He is by no means the oldest man to lead the
Church. David O. McKay led it from 1951 until his death, in 1970, at the
age of ninety-six. McKay’s successor, Joseph Fielding Smith, died at
ninety-five. The Church is run by the Quorum of the Twelve, also known
as the apostles, and by a three-man group known as the First Presidency.
The longest-serving apostle ascends to the presidency upon the death of
the leader. The system may help resolve disputes over succession, but
it has also resulted in a gerontocracy whose leaders have sometimes been
physically or mentally incapacitated. Hinckley, however, is constantly
flying around the globe, visiting missions, dedicating temples, writing
books, giving speeches, and holding press conferences. He is widely
regarded as the most accessible and capable leader the Church has had in
decades.
”I’m the third generation in this Church,” he told me. “My
grandfather joined the Church in his late teens in Nauvoo.” Nauvoo,
Illinois, was a refuge that the Mormons created in 1839, following an
order by the governor of Missouri to run them out of the state. But
Illinois soon proved to be worse than Missouri. In 1844, after an
anti-Mormon mob murdered Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum, the Mormons
headed west. Hinckley’s grandfather Ira was among them. Thousands died
on the trek across the Great Plains, including Ira’s wife and his
stepbrother, Joel, who both died of cholera on the same day in 1850.
Hinckley showed me a small bronze figure of a pioneer standing beside
a grave. “Here’s a little statue somebody made of that event,
portraying my grandfather’s burial of his wife in a coffin he made
somewhere, we know not where. And afterward he picked up his
eleven-month-old daughter and carried her to this valley.” Hinckley’s
voice grew thick. “Now, that’s my background in this Church, and it’s
real, and it’s pragmatic, and it’s Mormonism.”
In the Mormon scheme, every person is a potential divinity. The adage
“As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be” expresses the
Mormon belief that God was once a human being, with a wife and children.
But Hinckley did not seem interested in discussing matters of theology.
When I asked him to characterize God’s connubial relationship, he
replied, “We don’t speculate on that a lot. Brigham Young said if you
went to Heaven and saw God it would be Adam and Eve. I don’t know what
he meant by that.” Pointing to a grim-faced portrait of the Lion of the
Lord, as Young was called, he said, “There he is, right there. I’m not
going to worry about what he said about those things.”
I asked whether Mormon theology was a form of polytheism.
”I don’t have the remotest idea what you mean,” he said impatiently.
”More than one god.”
”Yes, but that’s a very loose term,” he replied. “We believe in
eternal progression.” By that he meant that human beings can evolve
toward godhood by following the Mormon path. “You want to be a reporter
always?” he said. “You want to be a scrub forever, through all eternity?
We believe that life, eternal life, is real, that it’s purposeful, that
it has meaning, that it can be realized. I wouldn’t describe us as
polytheistic.”
I asked Hinckley what role the Church planned to take during the
Olympics. There would be no proselytizing of visitors to the Games, he
assured me. “We intend to be gracious hosts,” he said. “We’re not bad
people, and we do things in a pretty decent way, when all is said and
done.” When I brought up the bribery scandal, his tone hardened. “I just
regret very much that this has occurred, but the Church has not been a
party to it in any sense whatsoever,” he said. Of the two men under
indictment, he said, “I don’t keep track of every member,” and added,
“Certainly we believe in the concept of you’re innocent until proven
guilty.”
As I was leaving, Hinckley cautioned me against speaking with the
Church’s many critics, who, he said, are not a part of the “life of the
religion.” He said, “I’m a living part of it. These men”—he indicated
his public-relations officials—”are a living part of it. They know why
this thing ticks. They know why this is the fastest-growing religious
element in the United States and in the world, almost. They know why
we’re able to send out sixty thousand missionaries. They know why we can
build meetinghouses all across the world, four hundred a year. It is an
absolute miracle what this Church is doing.”
REVELATIONS IN GOLD
In 1820, in the little town of Manchester, New
York, a fourteen-year-old named Joseph Smith had a visitation. It was a
fertile and turbulent time in American religious history. Old beliefs
were losing their influence, and new ones were arising that were more
responsive to America’s revivalist spirit. The upstate region where
Smith was living was known as the “burnt-over district,” because of the
religious fevers that continually swept through it. One morning, Smith,
who was trying to sort out the claims of truth that each denomination
put forward, went into the woods to pray for guidance. He had no sooner
knelt than he sensed the presence of a higher power, and felt himself
surrounded by darkness. “Just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a
pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the Sun,
which descended gradually until it fell upon me,” he wrote in a brief
memoir. Out of the light stepped two “personages,” hovering in the air,
whom he took to be God and Jesus—”beings of substance, of form, and of
personality,” as Hinckley described them to me. Smith managed to ask
these beings a question: Which of all the sects was right? “I was
answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the
personage who addressed me said that ‘all their creeds were an
abomination in his sight,’ “ he wrote. A moment later, he found himself
lying on his back, gazing up at the empty sky. He went home and told his
mother, “I have learned for myself that Presbyterianism is not true.”
Three years later, Smith had another visitation, this one from an
angel, called Moroni, who revealed to him that an ancient book written
on golden plates was buried nearby on a hill called Cumorah. Smith began
making annual pilgrimages to Cumorah, waiting for a further sign. In
1827, he eloped with a young woman, Emma Hale. In September of that
year, he returned to Cumorah and again he encountered Moroni. This time,
the angel entrusted the golden plates to him, along with a pair of
“seeing stones,” called the Urim and Thummim, which permitted him to
translate the strange language inscribed on the plates (identified by
Smith as “reformed Egyptian”).
In 1830, Smith published the five-hundred-and-eighty-eight-page Book
of Mormon. It was prefaced by the statements of eleven witnesses who
claimed to have seen the golden plates and, in eight cases, to have
actually “hefted” them. The plates themselves, however, were no longer
available for examination. With the “translation” finished, Moroni had
reclaimed them and taken them back to Heaven.
The Book of Mormon purports to be the history of two tribes of
Israel—the fair-skinned, virtuous Nephites and the dark-skinned,
conniving Lamanites. The Nephites and the Lamanites battle for
centuries, eventually carrying their feud into North America. In the
midst of their warfare, the resurrected Jesus suddenly appears in the
New World, demanding repentance. He teaches the Nephites the Lord’s
Prayer and delivers a discourse similar to the Sermon on the Mount. The
two tribes are temporarily reconciled. But, four hundred years later,
the Nephite leader Mormon is slain, with hundreds of thousands of his
people, in the final triumph of the Lamanites. Mormon’s son, Moroni,
survives to record this last event on the golden plates, which are then
buried on Cumorah.
Written in a florid style—Mark Twain called it “chloroform in
print”—the narrative was compelling to many who read it, and even to
many who only heard about it. The idea of a new, homegrown faith that
posited the divinity of the individual struck a chord in a young country
whose settlers believed, in Harold Bloom’s words, that they were
“mortal gods, destined to find themselves again in worlds as yet
undiscovered.” In Smith’s vision, the New World became the new Holy
Land, and he located the Garden of Eden near Independence, Missouri,
close to the center of the continent.
By the time he was in his mid-twenties, Smith had become one of the
most controversial men in America. Tall and fair, with a slight limp
from a childhood operation, and sharp, rather feminine features that
contrasted with a powerful build, he was a fascinating figure. The Book
of Mormon, along with continuing revelations reported by the young
prophet, formed the basis of a new faith. From the beginning, it was a
missionary creed, and Smith sent emissaries throughout America and
abroad. Thousands of followers were drawn to his ministry, including
Brigham Young, a young carpenter in upstate New York, who became one of
the greatest colonizers of the West. The Mormons, at first derided as
cranks, were soon objects of fear and hatred, not just because of their
heretical beliefs but also because of their communal economy, their
monolithic politics, and, eventually, their practice of polygamy. In the
nine years that remained in his brief life, Smith and his disciples
were driven from one settlement after another, in what was an
unparalleled assault of religious persecution in America. The epic
migration of Smith’s followers to Utah produced a people who were at
once self-reliant and wary—”a sociological island of fanatic believers
dedicated to a creed that the rest of America thought either vicious or
mad,” the novelist Wallace Stegner, an admirer, wrote of them.
In 1857, ten years after their arrival in Salt Lake City, the Mormons
found themselves on the verge of war with the United States. A column
of federal soldiers was advancing on the Utah Territory to unseat
Brigham Young, the area’s defiant and dictatorial governor. Young
declared martial law and prepared his followers to burn down their homes
and retreat to the mountains for guerrilla warfare. Meanwhile, a wagon
train consisting of thirty well-to-do families, mostly from Arkansas,
and a large herd of cattle, horses, and oxen entered Utah on the way to
California. The Mormons viewed the newcomers with hostility, partly
because of the recent news that one of the Church’s apostles, Parley
Pratt, had been murdered in Arkansas. Despite calls by some Church
leaders for revenge, the wagon train was able to traverse nearly the
entire state without serious incident, until they reached Mountain
Meadows.
The events that led to the massacre have been a subject of historical
dispute for nearly a hundred and fifty years. Mark Twain accused
Brigham Young of ordering the killings. The Mormon historians James B.
Allen and Glen M. Leonard, in the official history of the movement, “The
Story of the Latter-day Saints,” exonerate Church leaders and attribute
the slaughter to “a band of Indians and a few ill-informed and
overzealous settlers.” According to the jailhouse confession of John D.
Lee, who was an adopted son of Brigham Young and who was later executed
by the government for his part in the incident, a band of Paiute
Indians, three to four hundred strong, took the initiative, attacking
the wagon train and then harrying it for four days. In Lee’s account,
the standoff was finally broken when he approached the wagons at the
head of a squad of Mormon militia under a flag of truce and laid out
what he said were the Indians’ terms for surrender. The besieged
families agreed to put down their arms in return for safe escort to
Cedar City, about thirty-five miles away. Once disarmed, the men marched
single file behind the women and children and the wagons bearing
infants and the wounded. At a prearranged signal, the Mormons turned on
the male captives and shot them all, leaving the women and children for
the Paiutes to kill with knives and hatchets. In the end, only seventeen
were spared, all of them children. Twain believed that the “Indians”
involved were actually Mormons wearing war paint, which conforms to
accounts given by surviving children.
News of the massacre prompted members of Congress to call for the
elimination of the Church. A lurid report to Congress written by a
United States Army officer, Brevet Major James H. Carleton, who arrived
on the scene a year and a half later to bury the remains, further
inflamed national feeling against Mormons. “The scene of the massacre,
even at this late day, was horrible to look upon,” Carleton wrote.
“Women’s hair, in detached locks and masses, hung to the sage bushes and
was strewn over the ground in many places. Parts of little children’s
dresses and of female costume dangled from the shrubbery or lay
scattered about; and among these, here and there, on every hand, for at
least a mile in the direction of the road, by two miles east and west,
there gleamed, bleached white by the weather, the skulls and other bones
of those who had suffered.”
Brigham Young managed to forestall a federal investigation into the
massacre by agreeing to step down as the territorial governor. It now
seems likely that Lee was made a scapegoat to appease public opinion and
the forces in Congress opposed to Utah’s bid for statehood. A Tribune
columnist named Will Bagley, who is writing a book about the massacre,
has found contemporary diaries which he believes demonstrate that Young
ordered the killings and supervised a coverup.
For the Church, the execution of Lee put the
incident to rest, until the construction workers came upon the bones of
the victims two years ago. The practice of polygamy proved to be a
bigger burden, which kept alive the hostility of Victorian America
toward the sect. Writers such as Twain and Arthur Conan Doyle described
the Mormons in terms similar to those the press uses to describe the
Taliban today. Curiously, the Book of Mormon is replete with
denunciations of plural marriage, as the arrangement is often called.
Indeed, throughout Smith’s life monogamy was the official doctrine of
the Church. He himself, however, seems to have been a compulsive
philanderer, and rumors circulated about his multiple “marriages.” “What
a thing it is for a man to be accused of committing adultery, and
having seven wives, when I can find only one,” he said in 1844, but by
then it was known that he had taken more than thirty wives, and perhaps
twice that many, with whom he “sealed” himself in secret ceremonies,
“for time and all eternity.” Some of the brides may have been as young
as fourteen, and at least eleven of them were already married to close
associates. Some he married after dispatching their husbands to the
mission fields. A definitive tally of Smith’s wives may never be
established, but it is clear that in the last years of his life he was
in a kind of marital frenzy, taking an average of one new wife per
month, at the same time that he was building a spiritual and temporal
empire, fielding his own army, and announcing his candidacy for
President of the United States.
Emma Smith denied that her husband had made multiple marriages, even
though she is reported to have chased one of Joseph’s wives out of the
house. Urged by his brother Hyrum to seek divine guidance concerning
plural marriage, Smith produced a revelation in July, 1843: “I reveal
unto you a new and an everlasting covenant; and if ye abide not that
covenant, then are ye damned,” the Lord warns. He goes on to say that
“if any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the
first give her consent,” it is not adultery in God’s eyes, even “if he
have ten virgins given unto him by this law.” God then addresses the
beleaguered Emma by name: “And I command mine handmaid, Emma Smith, to
abide and cleave unto my servant Joseph, and to none else. But if she
will not abide this commandment she shall be destroyed.”
Evidently cowed by this injunction, Emma kept her peace. Meanwhile,
some members of the inner circle were appalled at Smith’s behavior and
told him so. William Law, a Nauvoo businessman, begged his leader to
abandon his polygamous ways. Smith responded by excommunicating Law and
his brother. The Laws then set up a paper called the Nauvoo Expositor,
which published an exposé of multiple marriages within the Mormon
hierarchy. Smith, who was the mayor of Nauvoo—at that time one of the
largest settlements in Illinois—convened a town-council meeting, in
which it was resolved that the Expositor was a public nuisance and must be shut down.
The governor of Illinois, Thomas Ford, called Smith’s conduct “a very
gross outrage” and said that he should stand trial. Smith thought of
fleeing, but eventually he and Hyrum turned themselves in at a jail in
the non-Mormon town of Carthage. A mob burst past the nonresisting
jailers and shot the Smiths in a second-floor bedroom. According to a
witness, Smith uttered his last words—”Oh, Lord, my God”—as he fell from
the window onto the street. There he was propped up against a well and
shot again by a four-man firing squad.
Smith’s death did not bring an end to polygamy. In 1866, Brigham
Young declared, “The only men who become gods, even the sons of God, are
those who enter into polygamy.” He set an example by marrying perhaps
fifty-five women, an aspect of his life that is ignored in an official
church biography, published in 1997. Throughout the nineteenth century,
it was popularly assumed that Mormon women were little more than sex
slaves, even though the women occasionally pointed out that they had
chosen polygamous marriages. Moreover, Young encouraged women to take up
the professions of law and medicine, and, as governor, he allowed them
to vote, long before women elsewhere in the United States enjoyed such
privileges.
In the nineteenth century, more than a thousand Mormon men went to
prison for polygamy-related offenses, and many families fled to Canada
and Mexico. In 1890, the United States Supreme Court sanctioned the
nationwide confiscation of virtually all Mormon property, essentially
authorizing that the movement be crushed. That year, the Church’s
president, Wilford Woodruff, received a revelation that inspired him to
declare, in what is called the 1890 Manifesto, that plural marriage was
no longer officially allowed. As Gordon Hinckley told me, “Polygamy came
by revelation, and it left by revelation.”
A Beehive
A paradox of Mormonism is that a faith with such an
embattled history has fostered a community whose members are ostensibly
so conventional. Mormons have managed to make themselves into an ethnic
group without any of the usual markers of ethnicity—no distinctive
language or accent, no special foods or music.
Mormons think of themselves as a people chosen by God to lead the
rest of humanity to salvation. Submission to authority is an essential
part of the religion. Mormons aim at being what they call themselves:
saints. Charity, integrity, decency, courtesy, and clean living are the
fundamental ingredients of the Mormon personality. Thanks in part to the
Church’s efforts to promote an image of worldly success, Mormons also
think of themselves as being unusually industrious—”perhaps the most
workaddicted culture in religious history,” Harold Bloom says. Stephen
Covey, a management consultant and the author of “The Seven Habits of
Highly Effective People,” who is descended on both sides from Mormon
pioneers, told me, “There is a heavy emphasis in Mormonism on
initiative, on responsibility, on a work ethic, and on education. If you
take those elements together with a free-enterprise system, you’ve got
the chemistry for a lot of industry.” The symbol of the state of Utah is
a beehive.
By far the most successful Mormon business venture is the Church
itself. Among its largest holdings are the Beneficial Life Insurance
Company, which has more than two billion dollars in assets, and the
Bonneville International Corporation, a media company with eighteen
radio stations concentrated in Chicago, San Francisco, St. Louis, and
Washington, D.C. The Church reportedly owns more than a million acres of
land in the continental United States (the equivalent of the state of
Delaware), on which it operates more than a hundred and fifty ranches,
farms, and orchards. It runs the largest cattle ranch in the United
States, Deseret Cattle & Citrus, near Orlando, Florida. Although the
Church is secretive about its empire, Time surveyed its assets
in 1997 and calculated its net worth at a minimum of thirty billion
dollars and its annual income at about six billion dollars, which, if it
were a corporation, would place it in the middle of the Fortune 500
list. (In a letter to Time, the Church said that the figures were “greatly exaggerated.”)
Saints are required to tithe in order to attend temple. They also
fast one Sunday a month and give the money they would have spent for
food to those in greater need. “We ask, in effect, between fourteen and
fifteen per cent of people’s income, including tithing and other
things,” one of the governing apostles, Neal A. Maxwell, told me. “We
are equally demanding of time.” In many respects, being a Mormon is like
holding down a second job. Saints are routinely called upon to spend a
Saturday making cheese in the storehouse of the local bishop or to take a
year off from their regular job to work as a guide at one of the many
Mormon historical sites. The Church runs one of the largest private
welfare operations in the country, producing everything from granola to
detergent under its own brand names. Almost all these goods are made by
volunteers. “The practice goes back to the thirties, when Church leaders
were worried as much about idleness as about the lack of resources,”
Harold Brown, the managing director of L.D.S. Welfare Services, told me.
“We typically try to take care of our own. We believe the poor will be
better blessed if they do as described in our doctrine: specifically,
they should work for what they receive. The bishop may suggest that you
help a widow down the street who has a yard she needs weeded. You can
receive according to your need, but you are expected to work according
to your ability.”
Underlying Mormonism’s cultivation of middle-class normality and
hardheaded pragmatism is a deep core of mysticism. When Mormon children
come of age, they are taken to a patriarch in the Church, who bestows a
blessing that foretells their future. These prophecies are kept on file
in the Church archives. At the age of eleven, Gordon Hinckley received a
blessing: “Thou shalt grow to the full stature of manhood and shall
become a mighty and valiant leader in the midst of Israel. . . . The
nations of the earth shall hear thy voice and be brought to a knowledge
of the truth by the wonderful testimony which thou shalt bear.” Mormons
are taught to pray for a “testimony” whenever they encounter doubts
about the truth of their religion, and they look for guidance to their
president, whom they also call a “prophet,” “seer,” and “revelator,”
because he is assumed to be in direct communication with God. “We
believe in the principle of continuous revelation,” Hinckley told me.
“To me, it’s so perfectly clear and understandable that the God who
revealed himself in the comparatively simple days of the Old West would
not fail to reveal himself in the very complex times in which we now
live.”
When I asked him to describe his own revelations, Hinckley demurred.
“They’re very sacred to me. They’re the kind of things you don’t want to
put before the world,” he said. But he added, “There’s no doubt in my
mind we’ve experienced a tremendous undertaking in the building of
temples across the world, having just dedicated the hundred-and-second
working temple of the Church. I believe the inspiration to move that
work forward came from the Almighty.”
Sunday-morning worship takes place in ward houses—the Mormon
equivalent of neighborhood churches—and anyone is welcome to attend. A
ward is part of a larger “stake,” which is akin to a diocese. There is
no separate clergy in Mormonism, and the officers are drawn from the
membership. During worship, all Saints, including children, are called
upon to give testimony in affirmation of their faith. All Mormon males
can become “priests” at the age of sixteen, and when they become
missionaries they graduate to the higher order of “elders.” Only Mormons
who have been approved by the bishop of their ward and the president of
their stake are allowed to enter a temple. During Hinckley’s tenure,
temple attendance has increasingly come to define a good Mormon. It is
in the temples that weddings and sacred rituals, such as the Baptism for
the Dead, take place.
Mormons believe that the dead can achieve salvation through proxy
baptisms, and this accounts for their keen interest in genealogy. If
dead souls accept the invitation to become Latter-day Saints, they can
be united with their families in the hereafter. “Baptism for the Dead is
one of the most appealing doctrines there is,” Stephen Covey told me.
“How can you possibly reconcile the justice of God with the idea that
only through Christ can you be saved? Most of the world lives and dies
and never even hears of Christ. There has to be some mechanism set up
for all those who have ever lived to have an opportunity to hear of
Christ.” In practice, teen-agers line up in the temple to be baptized as
proxies for dead people whose names appear on a computer screen. “We
also have people who are called ‘extraction missionaries,’ ‘’ Elbert
Peck, the former editor and publisher of the Mormon intellectual
magazine Sunstone, told me. “They basically go to their little
stake center and sit down at a microfilm machine and take these names
and put them into our computer database.” According to Richard E.
Turley, Jr., the managing director of the Family and Church History
Department, in Salt Lake City, as many as two hundred million dead
people have been baptized as Mormons, including Buddha and all the
popes, Shakespeare, Einstein, and Elvis Presley—what Peck dismissively
calls “celebrity work for the dead.” In the early nineties, some Mormons
were moved to baptize victims of the Holocaust. The practice caused a
great deal of friction with Jewish genealogists, who now monitor Mormon
baptismal lists to make sure that Jews are not included.
The most distinctive badge of Mormonism is the
sacred garment that adults are supposed to wear under their clothes at
all times. In the early days of the Church, sacred garments resembled
long underwear, but they have changed to accommodate modern styles. At
some point early in the twentieth century, the undergarments were
modified into “a kind of Calvin Klein jumpsuit sort of thing,” as one
historian describes it. Now short-sleeved two-piece garments are
commonly worn, but they are still cut in a fashion sufficiently
distinctive so that it’s possible to spot a Mormon by the lines under
his or her clothing. (Non-Mormon lawyers have been known to wear similar
undergarments in an attempt to influence Mormon juries.) There is
considerable folklore about the protective powers of the
garments—stories about people whose underwear enabled them to survive
wars or car wrecks. In 1977, a Wyoming beauty queen, Joyce McKinney,
kidnapped a twenty-one-year-old Mormon missionary and handcuffed him to
her bed in an attempt to become pregnant. His garments, he later said,
kept him chaste. The garments lend themselves to such magical
interpretations because they are discreetly embroidered with symbols
derived from Freemasonry. “Most Mormons would say that the garments are a
spiritual protection and a shield,” Peck told me. “They remind us of
our covenants, which keep us safe and clean and pure from the world.”
Mormons think of themselves, in a larger sense, as Christians. They
take Communion (usually Wonder bread and water); they celebrate
Christmas and Easter. They regard the Bible as sacred but incomplete;
the Book of Mormon, they say, is “another testament of Jesus Christ.” To
some other Christian denominations, however, Mormonism is essentially
an overgrown cult. The Southern Baptists, who often find themselves on
the side of the Saints in their campaigns against such issues as
abortion and gay rights, have called Mormonism “counterfeit
Christianity.” Even the more accommodating Presbyterians have condemned
Mormonism as a polytheistic heresy. “That just hurts us to the core,”
Peck told me. “To say we’re not Christians—oh, that just makes us cry.”
SOLDIERS OF THE FAITH
Salt Lake City is the official headquarters of the
Church, but the spiritual home of the religion is in Provo, the site of
Brigham Young University and of the Church’s Missionary Training Center.
Provo is the West Point of Mormonism; it is where the leaders of the
Church are made.
On the day that I visited the M.T.C., a number of Mormon families
were dropping off their children, nearly all of them teen-age boys in
dark suits and narrow ties. Women can volunteer for missionary work at
the age of twenty-one, but all young Mormon men are encouraged to give
two years of their lives to the mission fields. From the moment they
arrive at the Provo center, or at one of fourteen other
missionary-training facilities around the world, until the day they
return home, they are subject to rigorous strictures on their behavior.
They cannot call home except on Mother’s Day and Christmas, and can
write letters only once a week. No dating. No television or radio. As I
watched parents saying goodbye to their sons, Church officials
circulated among them, passing out tissues.
More than half the missionaries are sent abroad, and fifty languages
are taught at the M.T.C. When they arrive at their destination, they are
expected to spend six days a week knocking on doors and presenting
prepared lectures on Joseph Smith and the Mormon message. Two years ago,
sixty thousand missionaries signed up two hundred and seventy-four
thousand converts worldwide—an average of fewer than five converts per
missionary. “You tend to internalize the values,” Ronald W. Walker, a
professor of history at B.Y.U., who served his mission in Georgia and
Alabama, said to me. “The kids go out and may convert a few here and
there, but, more important, they convert themselves.”
The experience of having doors closed in one’s face day after day
leaves a lasting impression. “It’s funny how people who served as
missionaries often say it was the most difficult two years of their
lives, and also the best,” Mitt Romney, the head of the organizing
committee for the Salt Lake City Olympics, told me. Romney served his
mission in Paris and Bordeaux. He is the scion of one of the most famous
Mormon political families; his father, George Romney, was the
Republican governor of Michigan for three terms beginning in 1962, and a
Presidential aspirant in 1968. “As you can imagine, it’s quite an
experience to go to Bordeaux and say, ‘Give up your wine! I’ve got a
great religion for you!’ ‘’ he said. “It was good training for how life
works. I mean, rejection of one kind or another is going to be an
important part of everyone’s life. Here I’d grown up as the son of a
governor, from a wealthy home. No one had asked me about my religion, or
cared, and now I was on the street, lower than a Fuller Brush salesman,
in a place where Americans were not particularly liked, where I
couldn’t speak the language very well, and where selling religion,
particularly Mormonism, was going to be very painful.”
Romney, who was tapped by Governor Leavitt to take over the Games
after the bid scandal, is a successful venture capitalist in Boston and a
centrist Republican who ran a strong Senate race against Edward M.
Kennedy in 1994. A tall, distinguished-looking man with his father’s
lantern jaw, he has proved to be a capable but controversial choice for
the Olympics job. Non-Mormons, along with Church members who were
worried about the appearance of cronyism, criticized Romney’s
appointment as an invitation for the world to view the Winter Games as
the Mormon Olympics. James Shelledy, the Salt Lake Tribune editor, said to me, “The Governor conducted an exhaustive forty-eight-hour search for the best B.Y.U. graduate available.”
In the ideal Mormon world, the youthful missionaries return to Provo
after their service to attend B.Y.U. and to find a mate. The
concentration of missionaries, students, and young families has made
Provo the youngest city in America. It is beautifully situated, on the
western slope of the Wasatch Mountains, but it lacks the usual bars and
coffeehouses, the slouchy funkiness of a college town.
A powerful denominator of Mormonness in Provo is Diet Coke. Joseph
Smith included the consumption of “hot drinks” in his list of vices that
Mormons should avoid, along with alcohol and tobacco; as a result,
coffee and tea are forbidden on campus. Soft drinks, however, pose a
theological puzzle. Some Mormons believe that the injunction against hot
drinks should include any beverage with caffeine. President Hinckley
said as much on the Larry King show a few years ago, alarming many
members of the faith who had grown accustomed to taking their caffeine
cold. The Diet Coke advocates pointed out that the president’s statement
was not issued as a divine revelation, so there was still no official
ruling on the matter, but caffeinated soft drinks disappeared from
campus. Recently, however, the university has been embroiled in a
dispute over whether the student paper should accept ads even for
decaffeinated Diet Coke, which is seen as a dangerous substitute—like
candy cigarettes. In the religion department at B.Y.U., I found only one
professor who admitted to being a Diet Coker, but later that afternoon I
joined members of the sociology department as, plastic mugs in hand,
they headed for an off-campus convenience store.
During that outing, Tim Heaton, a professor of demographics,
explained the “four ‘C’s” that distinguish Mormons from other Americans:
chastity, conjugality, chauvinism, and children. A premium is placed on
sexual purity, and Church studies show that among Mormon high-school
seniors only ten per cent of boys and eighteen per cent of girls say
that they have had sexual relations—respectively seven times and three
times lower than comparable national figures. “Mormons are more likely
to marry in their early twenties, whereas the national average is around
twenty-six or twenty-seven,” Heaton said. Family violence is at about
the national average, but there is a marked difference in attitude about
parental roles, with Mormons inclining toward more traditional ideas
about the father as the head of the household and the mother not working
outside the home. The Mormon birth rate is about fifty per cent higher
than the national average.
Utah has been called the land of milk and cookies, because of the
vast consumption of these products (although Jell-O was recently voted
the official state snack food). Perhaps because of the Mormons’ lower
consumption of alcohol and tobacco, their life spans are as much as
eleven years longer than the American average. (Only the largely
vegetarian Seventh-Day Adventists live longer.) On the other hand, Utah
reportedly leads the nation in the use of antidepressants; Prozac
prescriptions, for instance, are about sixty per cent above the national
average. Death rates from cancer and heart disease are lower than in
the rest of the country, but diabetes is higher. “Sugar is our great
vice,” Heaton said.
SECRETS OF THE MUMMIES
At Brigham Young, the study of religion is divided
into Ancient Scripture—which includes the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and
other Mormon texts—and Church History and Doctrine. These departments
are housed in the handsome Joseph Smith Building. In an atrium, behind a
pane of glass, is a statue of the ecstatic teen-age founder receiving
his vision in the grove. It is one of the few pieces of permanent art on
campus. When the university’s art museum sponsored a travelling
exhibition of Rodin a few years ago, “The Kiss” was hidden away in a
basement.
I was curious why people who are so outgoing and capable would choose
a faith that imposed such restrictions on their lives. I spoke to
Robert Millet, a former dean of religious education at B.Y.U., and asked
him if there was anything about Mormonism that he had difficulty
accepting. “I think each of us would have our unresolved issues,” he
said. “For example, I doubt that any of us have all the answers on
issues like plural marriage. We have what we call some ‘shelf
doctrines’—things we put aside for the time being. But being a Mormon is
really a matter of faith, in that we accept the historicity of Smith’s
first vision—the angel, the plates, and so on—and go from there.”
When I noted that Smith’s veracity about the revelations might be
questionable, given that he had lied about his polygamy, Millet replied,
“The issue for us is do we apply the same kind of standards to the
Bible and Biblical figures as we do to the Book of Mormon and Joseph
Smith. Clearly, the Christian faith is dependent upon acceptance of a
divine miracle that took place on Easter morning, for which there is no
evidence. Would you do a similar critique of Abraham, who, presumably,
lied here and there? Or of Jacob, who took more than one wife? I mean,
if you were a believer, you’d come at this from the perspective that the
Lord is behind all this, and the deception, if there be any, is by
design.”
Across the campus from the Smith Building is a small house where the
Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies has its quarters. It
is a controversial organization even among Mormons. The aim of the
foundation is to demonstrate the historical truth of the Book of Mormon
and other documents that Smith produced. Here I met with several
professors, including Hugh Nibley, who is the most venerable figure in
Mormon scholarship, although he is little known outside it. At the age
of ninety-one, he was at work on his “fourteenth or fifteenth” book.
The Book of Mormon poses formidable problems for scholars. After many
decades of research, not a single person or place named in it has been
shown to exist. If Nephite civilization once covered the continent,
where are the ruins? Nowhere in North America is there evidence of an
ancient civilization that had, as Smith describes it, wheeled
transportation or the capacity to make steel weapons, or a written
language that corresponded to Egyptian. “People underestimate the
capacity of things to disappear,” Nibley wrote in 1957. Nor has DNA
testing supported the Mormon belief that the Lamanites—supposedly a
Semitic race—are the ancestors of Native Americans.
”Well, if it was all pure fiction, who on earth had ever done
anything like that?” Nibley said with some asperity. “This is the
history of a civilization, with all its ramifications having to do with
plagues and wars. The military passages are flawless. Could you please
tell me any other book like that?”
Even more troubling for Mormon scholars is a document called the Book
of Abraham. In 1835, Joseph Smith, who was then living in Kirtland,
Ohio, bought a wagonful of Egyptian mummies from a man named Michael
Chandler. Inside two of the mummy cases, wrapped in linen, were scrolls
of papyrus covered with hieroglyphs. Smith gave the mummies to his
mother, who charged visitors a quarter to see them. Meanwhile, he
undertook a translation of the scrolls. Before long, he was telling
fellow-Mormons that the scrolls contained the writings of two Old
Testament patriarchs, Abraham and Joseph.
In 1842, Smith published the Book of Abraham. It purports to be an
unfinished fragment of Abraham’s autobiography, the very material from
which the Book of Genesis was drawn. At the time that Chandler visited
Kirtland, no scholar in America believed that it was possible to
translate hieroglyphs; news had not yet reached America of the discovery
of the Rosetta stone or of Champollion’s success at rendering the
hieroglyphic language into French. The Book of Abraham is disconcerting,
not only because its dubious authenticity reflects on Smith and the
Book of Mormon but also because of what it actually says.
The book describes a multiplicity of gods and posits the preëxistence
of souls, and also delves into the subject of race. Pharaoh, Abraham
says, was descended from Ham, whose line was cursed with black skin, and
for that reason “he could not have the right of Priesthood.” On the
basis of this statement, the Church denied priesthood to black members
until 1978.
After Smith’s death, the papyri were sold to a collector, and for
many years it was thought that they had ended up in the Wood Museum, in
Chicago, which was destroyed in the great fire of 1871. Then, in 1966, a
retired professor of Middle Eastern studies from the University of
Utah, Aziz S. Atiya, who was doing research at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art in New York, decided to take a closer look at some fragments of
papyri in one of the document cases. He said he realized at once that he
had found the original scrolls for Smith’s Book of Abraham. (Museum
officials maintained they knew that the papyri had belonged to Smith,
and said they granted Atiya access to them in the hope that he would
convey them to the Church.) When the Church showed the documents to four
distinguished Egyptologists, however, each of them came to the same
conclusion: the papyri were ordinary Egyptian funerary documents and had
nothing at all to do with Abraham.
This disclosure brought forth various defenses by Nibley and other
Mormon scholars, who said, in effect, that not all the papyri had been
recovered. They proposed that the Book of Abraham was more an inspired
reading than an actual translation, but the fact that Smith had also
produced a “grammar” of the Egyptian language weakened the theory.
Gradually, the protests died down, largely, perhaps, because few members
actually resigned from the Church over the issue. Today, even Nibley
seems weary of the effort to authenticate the Book of Abraham. In his
view, the controversy is of a piece with the entire Judeo-Christian
tradition. “Very few scholars even believe that Abraham ever lived,”
Nibley said.
AN ABUNDANCE OF WIVES
Mormons who condemn the legacy of polygamy tend to
speak openly and sympathetically about it as a practice that was part of
their ancestors’ trials of faith and survival. “Among my
great-grandparents, we had at least two who were polygamous,” Mitt
Romney told me. One of them, a woman named Hannah Hood Hill, wrote a
memoir in which she described the difficulty of sharing her husband with
another woman. “She talks about how she and her husband wept together
when he was asked by Brigham Young to marry another woman,” Romney said.
“My great-grandmother prepared a room for this new wife and knitted her
a rag rug. Brigham Young ultimately asked him to take five additional
wives. It was the great trial of the early Mormon pioneers.” Romney told
me that when his father ran for President his friends kidded him that
there wouldn’t be enough room in the White House for a family gathering.
“My dad had something like two hundred and thirty-two first cousins,”
Romney said.
Although Romney, like other Mormons, defends the practice of polygamy
in the early days of the Church by pointing to a surplus of women in
Utah, census reports for the time show roughly equal numbers of men and
women. Church leaders were told to take multiple wives and “live the
principle.” In religions where polygamy is still practiced—for example,
in Islam—the number of wives is usually a reflection of the husband’s
wealth; the currency behind Mormon polygamy, however, seems to have been
spiritual. Only men are given the priesthood power of salvation, and
through them women gain access to the celestial kingdom. Faithful women
were naturally drawn to men who they believed could guarantee eternal
life; in fact, Brigham Young authorized women to leave their husbands if
they could find a man “with higher power and authority” than their
present husband. Apparently, many of them did, as shown by the rate of
divorce at the time.
After the 1890 Manifesto officially ended plural marriage, thousands
of Mormons in good standing, including a number of apostles, continued
to marry multiple wives in secret. When Congress demanded that furtive
polygamists be rooted out, Joseph F. Smith, who was a nephew of the
founder and became president of the Church, issued a Second Manifesto,
in 1906, in which he declared that anyone who participated in the
practice would be excommunicated. Nonetheless, Smith himself continued
to perform secret plural marriages. In 1933, the Church’s president,
Heber J. Grant, began a determined policy to eradicate polygamy
altogether.
Today, the Church regards anyone living in polygamy as no longer a
Mormon. Those who do live in plural marriages often call themselves
“fundamentalist” Mormons. Their number is a matter of speculation, since
polygamists are generally reluctant to identify themselves. It is
estimated that there are between forty thousand and a hundred thousand
people living in polygamous situations in Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona,
and California. In the Salt Lake City area, the Allred clan is said to
have more than three thousand members. Another well-known Salt Lake
clan, the Kingston family, is thought to include about two thousand
people. The Kingstons reputedly favor intermarriage between near
relatives, in order to keep their line pure.
There are also uncounted numbers of “independents.” Some of them live
in trailer parks and wear long-sleeved shirts and old-fashioned
dresses, conforming to the stereotype of zealots who reject the modern
world and its trappings. The majority of them mingle easily in commerce
and society. The Kingston patriarchs do so in a Lear jet.
Owen Allred, the eighty-seven-year-old patriarch of the Apostolic
United Brethren, a fundamentalist order of Mormons, lives in the
semirural community of Bluffdale, south of Salt Lake City. “I proposed
to one woman when I was twenty-three, and she’s been mine for sixty-five
years,” he told me. “I’ve never proposed to another, and I’ve got eight
living wives.”
”So they proposed to you?” I asked.
Allred nodded. “See that home over there?” he said. “That one, this
one, and the two more along the way belong to the wife that lives in
it.” Allred claims twenty-three children and two hundred and six
grandchildren. “I love those kids,” he said. “A lot of times their
mothers will say, ‘Leave Grandpa alone,’ and I say, ‘No! Let them come
to me.’ Precious little darlings.’’
In 1998, a woman named Vicky Prunty paid a visit to
Utah State Senator Scott Howell. Prunty had been to see him a couple of
years before, when she was living with five of her six children in a
shelter for battered women after leaving a polygamous relationship.
Howell had helped her find another place to live. Now Prunty had a
larger purpose: she wanted the state to crack down on polygamy.
”I was basically a foster, orphan-type kid that really wanted to be a
part of an eternal family,” Prunty told me recently. She had gone
through a typical Mormon courtship, having met her future husband, Gary
Batchelor, at B.Y.U. when she was eighteen. A convert to the religion at
seventeen in his native England, Batchelor had just returned to college
after two years of missionary service in Italy. He and Prunty were
married in the temple in 1981, and they soon began having children. “For
about seven years, we lived a very mainstream, monogamous life,” Prunty
recalled. “Then our life took kind of a turn.”
Prunty, who is a reflective, matronly woman of thirty-eight with
bright-blue eyes, said that she and her husband began to read early
teachings of the Church that linked godhood to plural marriage. In the
course of their reading, they also learned that the tenets of an
experiment in communal living, which Smith had called the United Order
of Enoch, were being followed by a variety of colonies in the state.
Prunty and her husband pledged themselves to one such group, called the
Rockland Ranch, near Moab. Batchelor stayed in Salt Lake City during the
week, selling cars, and his wife and children moved into a sandstone
cave.
In 1988, Gary Batchelor met a nineteen-year-old legal secretary and
student of broadcast journalism named Mary Morrison. During his visits
to his wife and children, he began to talk about taking “the next
step”—marrying a second wife. Prunty had her doubts—”I believed that
plural marriages couldn’t be lived in this lifetime,” she said—but she
felt that it wasn’t her place to question her husband. At his urging,
she wrote a letter to Mary and invited her “into the family.”
Morrison, who had been reared in a monogamous family, was at first
appalled. “I basically wrote her back and told her to take a hike,” she
recently told me. Prunty answered her with, in Mary’s words, “a really
kind letter, which impressed me.” During the next several months,
Morrison fasted and prayed for a testimony about whether plural marriage
was right for her. By the spring of 1989, she had become “adamant” that
it was, but she remained uncertain about the Batchelors as an
appropriate family. She continued to pray. In October, she paid a visit
to the Batchelors. She was greeted by Vicky, who was noticeably
pregnant, and by a child who was hanging on her mother’s skirt. Warmed
by the sight, she “fell in love” with the whole family. “I was walking
on air,” she recalled. The plural marriage took place that December in a
secret ceremony. Vicky was seven months pregnant with her fourth child.
She took Mary’s hand and gave it to her husband, symbolizing the
family’s step away from monogamy and into polygamy.
During the women’s first year as “sister wives,” Vicky had the
upstairs bedroom and Mary had a room downstairs. “It worked pretty
well,” Prunty said, but she felt an “unreality” about the arrangement,
even though Gary was careful to treat both women equally. At night, he
would sit between Vicky and Mary, watching television and holding hands
with both of them. “We’d act like brother and sisters until a certain
time,” Vicky said. “Then he’d either go upstairs or downstairs. There
were times when I made myself put her laundry on her bed just to see his
robe on her bedpost. That made it real for me.” The fact that Gary
loved Mary, and was not just having sex with her out of some kind of
religious obligation, unsettled Vicky. Ten months after the marriage,
Mary gave birth to her first child; a second one was born fourteen
months later. Meanwhile, Vicky had her fifth child.
In the third year of the relationship, Gary stopped having sex with
Vicky. “He told me I had already committed ‘spiritual fornication’
against him,” she said. “I guess he meant that I was rebelling against
his authority.” She asked him for a divorce. “He put his hand to the
square, like they do when they’re casting out evil spirits,” she
recalled. “He started praying for my death. I don’t even know what he
was saying, whether he was speaking in tongues or what.” One afternoon,
she dropped off her oldest son at a karate lesson, then drove over to
the house of another polygamous family and asked if she could join them.
The husband agreed. “I thought it would be easier being the third wife
than the first wife,” she told me. “I thought that, with a different
husband, maybe I could live the principle better.”
Prunty’s new relationship—it was never formalized in a marriage
ceremony—lasted only a few months before the man broke it off.
“Basically, he sat us all down and said he never did believe in
polygamy—he just did it to have sex with more than one woman,” she
recalled. She appealed to Gary to take her back, but he refused. (They
were divorced in 1993, and he contributes to the support of their
children.) When she tried to reconcile with the other man, he became
violent, and she fled with her children to the shelter.
Scott Howell was shocked by Prunty’s story. Since
leaving the shelter, she had met other women like her, and she told
Howell about the existence of incestuous clans, in which birth defects
were common. With the Winter Olympics four years away, Howell foresaw a
huge public-relations problem. “I didn’t want to make this the No. 1
issue for foreign journalists coming into Utah,” he told me. The
solution, he decided, was to eliminate polygamy by 2002.
In Utah, polygamy abides in a legal fog. In 1935, the legislature
passed an unenforceable law that made it a felony to cohabit with “more
than one person of the opposite sex”—a statute that could conceivably
criminalize anyone living in anything but a convent, a monastery, or a
homosexual relationship. Howell’s first act was to offer a bill that
would raise the marriageable age, for girls, from fourteen to sixteen. A
year earlier, a similar measure had been defeated by conservative
lawmakers who were worried that it would encourage pregnant teen-agers
to seek abortions in lieu of marriage. But Prunty proved to be a
brilliant lobbyist. She formed a group of women who had been involved in
polygamous families called Tapestry Against Polygamy, and she filled
the gallery of the legislature with teen-age girls in wedding gowns. A
compromise version of the legislation passed—girls could now marry at
fifteen, with a judge’s approval—and the state attorney general
appointed a “polygamy czar.”
To Mary Batchelor, Prunty’s former sister wife, these developments
seemed to be “modified ethnic cleansing.” She and two other women, Anne
Wilde and Marianne Watson, set about collecting positive stories of
polygamous marriages, which they compiled into a book entitled “Voices
in Harmony,” which was published in 2000.
During the legislative session of 2001, Prunty lobbied for another
bill, this one aimed at the leaders of the polygamous clans. The bill,
sponsored by State Senator Ron Allen, would have made it a third-degree
felony for a parent to allow a minor child to enter into an unlawful
marriage or for any person to knowingly “solemnize” the union of a woman
with a man who was already married. Anyone who “encouraged” or
“promoted” such activity would also be subject to criminal charges. The
state senate passed the Allen bill unanimously. It then went to the
state legislature’s judiciary committee, whose members decided to hold
an open hearing on the bill.
When the committee opened its doors on the morning of February 14th,
about a hundred polygamists showed up, a few with their children, and
demanded to be heard. What followed was by far the largest public
hearing in Utah’s history in which polygamists aired their views openly.
They were not advocating for the right to turn their daughters into
child brides; in fact, some of them said that the marriageable age ought
to be raised to eighteen. But they viewed marriage between consenting
adults as a different matter. Owen Allred got up and said, “The man who
wants several women to be his sexual partners can have children by them,
and the state will support those children. He remains free of any legal
accusation—until he marries more than one wife. Marry them, and he
becomes a criminal. It is the marriage that becomes the crime.”
Vicky Prunty reminded the committee of the dangers of incest. She
said that one girl had come to Tapestry because she had been forced to
marry her own father at the age of twelve. But many of the polygamists
in the room said that they were opposed to incest and wanted to see it
vigorously prosecuted. “The people here are not the guilty parties,”
Anne Wilde said. Mary Batchelor urged the committee to strike the words
“encourage” and “promote” from the bill, “so that it couldn’t be
construed to make the teaching of our religious beliefs to our children a
crime.” The committee scratched that part of the bill.
After the hearing, the polygamists claimed victory. The lawmakers had
modified the existing law by reducing the proposed penalty for
performing illegal marriages, downgrading it to a misdemeanor. The
polygamists seemed a little dazzled by what they had achieved. “This is a
major day,” Anne Wilde said. “It’s the first time in a hundred years
that this many people have come out in a public gathering in favor of a
polygamous life style.”
In any event, nobody was talking any longer about eliminating
polygamy before the Olympics. “It’s just too extensive,” Ron Allen said
later. “We’ve let this go on too long.”
HOW BIG A FOLD?
A disproportionate number of Mormons have been
elected to higher office in America; although Mormons account for only
1.8 per cent of the country’s population, five of the hundred United
States senators are Latter-day Saints. The Church made a decisive entry
onto the national political scene in 1976, when it launched a five-year
campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment. (The Church feared that it
would lead to a “unisex” society.) The Church is now conducting a
similar campaign against same-sex marriage. Two years ago, Church
members in California were instructed to vote in favor of Proposition
22, which upheld the ban against same-sex marriage, and in some cases
members were directed to donate specific amounts of money to the cause.
Church-supported prohibitions against gay marriage also passed in Hawaii
and Alaska. Two years ago, the Church threatened to withdraw its
support of the Boy Scouts of America if the organization allowed gay
scoutmasters. Since the Church sponsors more scouting units than any
other comparable institution, the threat, if acted upon, might have
ended the scouting movement in the United States.
Mormon theology played an unexpected role in the recent debate over
federal support for stem-cell research. Although the Mormons’ usual
partner in the culture wars, Roman Catholics, categorically condemned
experimentation with human embryos, the five Mormon senators lined up on
the side of science. “I believe that human life begins in the womb, not
in a petri dish or a refrigerator,” Utah’s Senator Orrin G. Hatch said
in a hearing in July. For Mormons, human life is just one phase of
existence. They believe that everyone has a pre-incarnate life as a
“spirit child,” during which each awaits his or her opportunity to begin
a human term on Earth. Among Mormons, the moment when the spirit child
enters its mortal body is uncertain—a theological nicety that has
enabled them to be somewhat flexible on the issue of abortion. The
Church opposes abortion except when a pregnancy is caused by rape or
incest, when the life of the mother is endangered, or when the child’s
survival is unlikely.
In recent years, the Church has become more flexible on matters of
race. It was clear, following the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that it
could not exist in America if it continued to practice racial
discrimination, and yet the issue of extending priesthood to blacks was
not resolved until 1978, when the Mormons’ president, Spencer W.
Kimball, expanded the eligibility rule to “all worthy males.” That
statement enabled Mormonism to become a truly international religion.
There are now more than a hundred and fifty thousand Church members in
Africa. According to Jan Shipps, a prominent non-Mormon historian of the
religion, race is no more a problem in Mormon circles than it is in any
other major religion. At Mormon headquarters, however, all the top
executives are still white men.
In 1993, a leading apostle, Boyd K. Packer, spoke, with alarm, of the
“major invasions into the membership of the Church” by feminists,
homosexuals, and scholars and intellectuals. A few months later, five
Mormon intellectuals were excommunicated and one was “disfellowshipped,”
in part for their involvement with women’s issues. Since then, dissent
within the Church has been subdued. Mormon women are generally cautious
about labelling themselves as feminists. The basic unit of salvation in
Mormonism is the family, not the individual, and for many women in the
Church the emphasis on eternal family unity is deeply appealing. “About
eighty-five per cent of Mormon women are perfectly happy with who they
are,” Shipps maintains. “It’s only an extremely vocal minority who feel
that their position is not fully equal in the Church.”
Those who are willing to speak out maintain that the standing of
women in the Church is in decline. “I believe that women’s participation
in the Church will become even more limited,” Lynn Matthews Anderson, a
Mormon who is a freelance writer and editor, told me. She maintains
that Church leaders have discouraged women from becoming missionaries.
“The Church for Mormon women is entirely different from the Church for
Mormon men,” she said.
Many Mormon intellectuals seem unconcerned with the
question of whether Joseph Smith was a genuine prophet or a confidence
man. “The starting point is that I am a committed Mormon,” Ken Driggs, a
Mormon historian and a lawyer in Atlanta, told me. “I can’t imagine
anything else. Once you make that decision, nothing knocks you awry. I
am aware of the conflicts; I know the Book of Mormon doesn’t stand up to
historical examination. But for me to decide that the problems are
insurmountable would mean walking away from five generations of people
before me. What really clicks, what really keeps us there, is the
culture.”
There are now more Mormons outside the United States than within it.
This phenomenon may be the response to an appeal that goes beyond
matters of religious truth. “Essentially,” the historian D. Michael
Quinn says, “the Mormon message attracts people who want to become
Americanized.”
Leo Tolstoy is said to have called Mormonism “the American religion.”
Travelling on a train in Switzerland in 1857, he had met a Mormon man,
probably a missionary, who had given him a favorable impression of the
new religion. Thirty years later, one of Brigham Young’s daughters, Susa
Young Gates, sent Tolstoy an admiring biography of Joseph Smith by
George Q. Cannon and a copy of the Book of Mormon. “I read both the
Mormon Bible and the life of Smith and I was horrified,” Tolstoy wrote
in a diary entry. “Yes, religion, religion proper, is the product of
deception, lies for a good purpose. An illustration of this is obvious,
extreme in the deception: The Life of Smith; but also other religions,
religions proper, only in differing degrees.”
Five years later, Andrew D. White, an American diplomat in Russia,
had a conversation with Tolstoy about Mormonism, in which the great
novelist reportedly said that “on the whole he preferred a religion
which professed to have dug its sacred books out of the earth to one
which pretended that they were let down from Heaven.” Forty-five years
later, a Mormon writer told the story with embellishments that were no
doubt more appealing to his audience. In this account, Tolstoy told
White, “The Mormon people teach the American religion; their principles
teach the people not only of Heaven, and its attendant glories, but how
to live so that their social and economic relations with each other are
placed on a sound basis. If the people follow the teachings of this
Church, nothing can stop their progress—it will be limitless.” ♦
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