Mormonism Veiled and Unveiled: e Bold Belief that Embarrasses Mitt Romney

Mormonism Veiled and Unveiled:
                   e Bold Belief that Embarrasses Mitt Romney

                                      by Ed Firmage, Jr.

Mitt Romney won’t remember me as a kid. But as a boy, I had occasion to bother him in church.
Mitt was a counselor to my grandfather, Edwin R. Firmage, who served two stints as bishop of BYU
student wards — student-only congregations — many years ago. My sister and I loved to spend
weekends with our grandparents, and so, although neither of us remembers the fact, Mitt and I must
have rubbed shoulders more than once on Sundays. For my part, the only regret from this long-ago
encounter is that Mitt’s genius for making money seems not to have rubbed off on me.

As a Mormon, albeit a lapsed and a poor one, I followed Mitt’s presidential campaign with interest. I
desperately hoped that he would win the Republican nomination, not because I thought he’d make a
good president but because I knew Barack Obama would. My opinion of the august Mitt was not
always so low. Mitt rode into Salt Lake as our champion and savior when the 2002 Winter Olympics
looked like they were headed for trouble. Like every Salt Laker, I watched our state do itself proud
under Mitt’s competent leadership. What changed my mind about Mitt was his metamorphosis into
Republican and Christian goosestepper. Mormons are mostly Republicans and they are mostly
Christian, but they’re not generally goosesteppers, in my experience. And Mitt, up to the last
presidential campaign, had never demonstrated this particular weakness of mind. He seemed to be a
model of that increasingly endangered species, the compassionate and common-sense Republican.

What bothered me even more than his goosestepping, however, was his wishy-washy portrayal of
what it means to be Mormon, or rather what it meant when being Mormon meant something. Even
I, as a lapsed one, was embarrassed by Mitt’s embarrassment. To set the record straight, I thought
that people should know something about the other Mormons, the ones who would just as soon give
the finger to evangelicals as court their approval. Herewith, then, an alternative version of
Mormonism. is is what I had hoped Helen Whitney, in her 2007 PBS series, would tell America.
Helen and I talked for many hours about this old-fashioned Mormonism. In the end, considering
America’s substantial ignorance about even Mormon basics, Helen decided that she would have to
content herself with Mormonism Lite, 3.2% Mormonism. What I’d like to talk about is 80-proof,
Valley Tan Mormonism, the kind Mitt would just as soon you didn’t ask him about.*

When I was 12, I was ordained a deacon in the LDS church. A deacon’s principal jobs are to “pass
the sacrament” (the bread and water of the Mormon Eucharist) during the Sunday “sacrament
meeting” and to collect “fast offerings,” the donation that Mormons make for the poor once a month
on “Fast Sunday.” At 14, I became a “teacher,” the next step up in the church’s junior-grade Aaronic

*3.2% is the farthest Utah beer will take you toward liquid bliss. Valley Tan is the moonshine
Mormons used to make before they became tea-, or rather, soda-pop-totallers.

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Priesthood. As a teacher, I accompanied an adult priesthood holder, usually my dad, on monthly
“home teaching” visits to other members of our ward. ese visits, much dreaded by teacher and
taught, are occasions, nowadays especially, for giving perfunctory lessons that weren’t entirely fresh
even when they were canned 50 years ago. At 16, I became a priest, the highest office in the Aaronic
Priesthood. is advance entitled me to bless the bread and water of the Mormon sacrament. At 16,
like every other good Mormon boy, I was doing what a Catholic priest does when he celebrates the
Mass, albeit in humbler style.

In Mormonism, there are two priesthoods, the Aaronic, which concerns itself with the temporal
activities of the church and minor ecclesiastical functions such as the blessing of the sacrament, and
the Melchizedek, which is concerned with “the powers of godliness.” In the ordinary course of
events, a Mormon boy advances mechanically from deacon to teacher to priest, and then at around
age 18 is ordained an elder in the Melchizedek Priesthood (the conjunction of age and title never
ceases to make me smile). Usually around this same time, as a newly-minted elder, a Mormon boy
goes on a two-year proselyting mission for the church. I left on my mission when I was 19 and spent
two years in Bavaria and Austria.

Each of these priesthood ordinations is a turning point marked with ceremony. e mission, like
service in Israel’s IDF, however, is a true rite of passage. It marks one’s entry into adulthood. It creates
relationships and bonds of friendship that continue for life. Future business connections are often
made here. Marriages are decided here. And failure here can be catastrophic. In fact, for many young
Mormon men, a mission is, as advertised, “the best two years” of their life. During this period, elders
live and work in pairs. It’s the first and for most the only experience they will have with same-sex
marriage. During this period, elders do nothing other than preach the Gospel. It’s a time of total
dedication to a single cause. As missionaries, young men do not date, socialize, travel, or pursue any
other personal interests. In the “mission field,” boys of 19-21 may serve as bishops of congregations,
marry and bury members, teach and baptize converts, and run mission offices, and all of this often in
a foreign language. I spent the first half of my mission proselyting and the second as the mission’s
financial secretary, responsible for a million-dollar budget, a mission fleet of some 50 cars, 125 or so
missionary apartments, contractual and other arrangements with local businesses including major
firms such as Deutsche Bank, keeping the mission books and providing monthly financial statements
to church headquarters in Salt Lake, arranging facilities for special regional conferences, and any
number of other business affairs, and I did most of this in a language I had not known when I was
eighteen. By the end of my mission, I could speak, read, and write German as well as most natives,
and I had an insider’s view of life in Germany and Austria that very few foreigners ever achieve. I also
knew my religion.

A mission is one of the things that makes it possible for the Mormon Church to operate without a
professional clergy, because, in a lot of ways, a mission is more than the equivalent of a degree in
divinity. What Mormon missionaries lack in specialized academic training, they often make up for in
practical congregational experience. A mission is a kind of ecclesiastical Peace Corps that does
perhaps more for its participants than its intended beneficiaries. During my mission, I also managed
to fall head over heals in love with one of my female converts (not, however, the woman I ultimately
married). And I fell deeply in love with the language and people of Germany and Austria. Heady
stuff for a 19-year-old from Salt Lake City, Utah. Belief and I have since had a parting of ways, and I

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would find it impossible now to do what I did then. Like Ed Abbey’s Seldom Seen Smith, I’m now
on lifetime sabbatical from my religion. All the same, even knowing what I now know, I don’t think I
would advise my younger self to do things differently. I think that I had to do what I did then to do
what I’m doing now, world’s apart though yesterday’s Ed and today’s may be. I don’t know that I
could say that these were the best two years, but they were good years. ey were intense and
transformative years. However naive and even misguided in some respects, they were years full of
meaning. I wish every American man — and woman — could have such an experience.

e mission world is not the “real world.” Missionaries learn this with some pain when they return
home. It often takes months for them to decompress and reenter even mainstream Mormon society.
Missionaries experience not only the culture shock of coming back from often radically different
countries but also the spiritual shock of reentering a society that is, despite appearances to the
contrary, essentially secular. Missionaries spend two years isolated not from the world — many in
fact are immersed in a world far more gritty than any they have ever known — but from the pursuit
of their own interests. ey’re not thinking about education or career, they aren’t focused on making
money (and they have next to none), they have little time for diversions, they’re cut off from family,
they can’t date, and, however much they may think about it, they can’t have sex. ey can’t even
masturbate, at least according to the rule book. It’s a singularly focused, or, in Mormon terminology,
consecrated life. Returning to a life without such focus is like learning to walk again.

In this world, God is omnipresent. So is the Devil. One has few other companions. e certainty
that one is a player in a drama of supernatural forces makes the hardships meaningful. In the mission
field, everything is meaningful because everything is suffused with this sense of being a participant in
an unfolding divine story, as if one were a character in a Charles Williams novel. Interwoven with the
apparently mundane world is a spiritual one that has a narrative written with divine imagination. It’s
full of heroism, intrigue, and power that people seldom experience in “normal,” waking reality. To
have a part in this story is like waking up to find that Middle Earth is real, that sleeping next to you
is a elven princess, and that you’re on a quest on which hangs nothing less than the fate of the world.

Believers will say that this is reality. If C. S. Lewis were sitting next to me now, for example, he’d
affirm that Charles Williams’s is the truer picture of the world. While he might not believe in
Moroni, he’d tell me that angels do walk among us. Most importantly, he would assure me that
nothing could be more certain than that we are players in a cosmic drama.

is is the ultimate story. Mormons have one version of it, Catholics, Baptists, Adventists, high-and
low-church Episcopalians another. But, for all of their differences in details, which in the case of
Mormonism are admittedly quite unusual, the stories have much in common. At the heart of each is
an epic, mythic tale that says that there is much more involved in and at stake in human life than
meets the eye. e tale asserts that there is purpose in human life, and that there is a depth of being
surrounding us — terrors and beauties — beyond anything we can imagine.

Kafir though I am, I cannot altogether dismiss this tale. At some level, it still feels “true.” I’ll define
more exactly what I mean by this later on. For the moment, let me just say that I believe in this story,
as Carl Jung might be said to have believed in alchemy. For Jung, alchemy was the language of
psychology before psychology. It expressed in mythic terms, in story terms, what we do with words

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such as psyche, ego, id, superego, archetype, and the like. I’m not sure that our new vocabulary
improves on the mythic, though our physical understanding of the brain certainly has. It seems to
me that either way we’re still operating on what is effectively a platform of metaphor. Alchemy,
according to Jung, was the language of the development of the fully realized self. It was the creation
of this self that was the Magnum Opus, the Great Work. And, Jung, who was a physician and
clinician of real ability as well as being one of the great creative minds of the 20th century, thought it
worthwhile to devote himself to understanding this Great Work, developments in more conventional
psychiatry and evolutionary biology notwithstanding. I feel the same about my Mormon version of
the Great Work. And, whatever the ultimate truth of this brand of alchemy, there can be no
disputing the palpable effect that it has had in the real world. I am living proof of it, as are hundreds
of thousands of others in a hundred and fifty settlements built by the Mormons in the American
desert. is Mormon Great Work still inspires. If Mormons better understood their own story,
perhaps it would inspire more.

e great Mormon myth operates on two levels, the social and the individual. e heart and soul of
early social Mormonism was the sense of being called to build a new society, Zion. is objective of
building Zion, the City of Enoch, the Kingdom of God, was what created the first Mormon
communities in Kirtland, Ohio, Independence, Missouri, and Nauvoo, Illinois. From the start,
Mormons felt compelled to build new community. ey were not content with simply becoming
converts to a new religion and living where and more or less how they had lived before, with just a
change of ideology. Religion, as other Americans tended to practice it, held no interest for the
Mormons. ey weren’t out simply to live a pious life but to create an entirely new world. is Zion
mentality ultimately brought them west when it proved impossible to build their ideal community
among other Christians. And, the Zion mentality is in large measure responsible for the success of
the Mormon saints in an environment that few thought inhabitable.

Zion, though alive in theory today, died in practice with the generation of Brigham Young. What has
survived is mostly dry bones ideology, the piety without radical consequences that the first Mormons
abandoned when they joined the church and trekked from Kirtland to Independence to Nauvoo and
finally to Salt Lake City, alienating the pious as they went. What contemporary Mormons like Mitt
cling to is the physical shell of this early faith, the lovingly embalmed corpse. But the soul is gone,
because the commitment to build Zion is gone. And the willingness to offend the moral majority is
gone. Mormons will no doubt dispute my assessment of the state of today’s Mormon body politic,
but the central fact is indisputable. Salt Lake City today is not Zion. It’s indistinguishable from any
other American city in broad outlines. Core principles of the Zion that Brigham Young sought to
build, such as polygamy and religious communism, have been abandoned and are today even
attacked by many Mormons with passion. During the 2008 election, Mormons, including Mitt,
were in hysterics about Barack Obama’s plans to “redistribute wealth,” oblivious to the radical
redistribution of wealth that their ancestors not only practiced by necessity but regarded as an
essential part of the Gospel. Compared to practitioners of the United Order of Enoch, President
Obama looks like the blessed Milton Friedman, patron saint of BYU’s business school, resurrected.

e Mormon social Gospel had an individual counterpart no less radical. It survives in the Mormon
temple ritual, or “endowment,” that is among the most extraordinary, and for members like Mitt
embarrassing, of Joseph Smith’s many accomplishments. It is this locus of religion-making

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imagination that has Harold Bloom, a Jewish professor of literature at Yale and would-be Kabbalist,
singing Joseph Smith’s praises (rightly, I think) as the greatest religious genius America has ever
produced. Harold seems to me to be a better advocate for Mormonism than Mitt. If Mitt ever does
make it to the White House, I nominate Harold to be the guide for the perplexed.

e Mormon temple endowment is shrouded in secrecy. When Mormons receive their endowments,
they covenant to keep certain aspects of the ceremony secret. In the temple endowment that I
experienced but that has since been rendered less frightening, participants took oaths of secrecy, like
the Masons’, the violation of which was punishable by death. In my understanding at least, these
oaths were never intended to be enforced by a human posse, but were rather symbolic of the fact that
the recipient indicated that he or she would rather die than forsake the principles that were taught in
conjunction with the terrible oaths. e temple oath is like the slap on the face that old knights gave
to new inductees to chivalry. It insures that you take your principles to heart. Be that as it may, out
of respect for the Mormon tradition of secrecy, my fida silentia sacris, I won’t reveal anything here
that I believe violates the oath I myself took. But I do want to unfold some of the meaning of the
temple endowment, which I think is without doubt the most imaginatively daring of Joseph Smith’s
revelations and therefore the one that sits least comfortably with the imaginatively challenged moral
majority.

e temple endowment is unlike anything else in Mormonism or indeed anything this side of a high
Mass in America in being highly and essentially ritual in nature. Unlike Mormon Sunday services, it’s
not sermonizing. It’s not largely even instruction. Like all ritual, it uses the language of symbol, and
is therefore largely not understood even by most Mormons. But it is also more than symbol. As
ritual, it claims to do something real, and this is cause for even greater confusion. To understand this
dimension of the endowment, one might usefully compare it with a ritual better known to the lay
reader. In the Catholic Eucharist, participants symbolically recall Jesus’s injunction to his disciples at
the Last Supper to remember him when they ate together in future. But there is more than symbol or
remembrance in the Eucharist. Catholic orthodoxy asserts that partakers of the wafer and the wine
experience the transubstantiation of these into the literal body and blood of Christ. is is what
makes the Eucharist provocative in a way that simple remembrance or symbol would not be. It is this
magical, or in scholarly lingo, theurgical transformation that is hard for the skeptical outsider to
swallow. In the great rituals of the Christian West, this element of transformation is always present.
Ritual is never purely symbolic, never solely pedagogic. It invokes a different reality. e point in the
case of the Eucharist is not simply that you consume the bread and wine in remembrance but that
these are transformed and in being transformed somehow affect the partaker in ways that
remembrance alone would not. is theurgical component is what distinguishes great religious
traditions from their modern feel-good, get-together, new-age counterparts. e old rituals self-
confidently assert that real miracles take place in the here and now.

e same is true of the temple endowment, which asserts nothing less than the transformation of the
participants, male and female, into exalted beings, “priests and priestesses unto the Most High God,”
on their way to becoming gods and goddesses in their own right. e endowment is the installation
or induction ceremony of a god. And, for Mormons, the endowment isn’t simply one of the ways
that this transformation may occur; it is the only way.

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is transformation, this unlocking and unfolding of the divinity in individual men and women,
went hand in hand with the societal transformation that Mormonism undertook. Without the
endowment, in Mormon thinking, the transformation of individuals and hence of society cannot
occur. Correspondingly, to the extent that such personal transformation does occur, a Zion society is
bound to be the collective manifestation. To have a living temple endowment, that is, one that
transforms life, without a corresponding change in the larger society is a contradiction in terms. But,
importantly, Mormonism takes the Protestant work ethic to a whole new level in asserting that being
saved not only motivates one to get one’s ass in gear but that one’s very ass is somehow transfigured.
Without pronouncing on the ultimate claims of the Mormon endowment, one could say that the
early saints did appear to have felt empowered, and they did, however briefly, create a radically
different form of society that truly expressed the core ideas of the Mormon Gospel. e fact that
contemporary Mormon society is so little different from the generic American suggests that the
descendants of the first saints do not feel empowered by their endowment.

Modern students of the Mormon endowment are perhaps inclined to dismiss it as so much mumbo
jumbo borrowed from the Freemasons. And, indeed, the borrowing cannot be denied. is
explanation, however, while historically correct as far as it goes, does not satisfy, because the early
Mormons, many of whom were Masons, acknowledged the Masonic connection and did not think
that it in any way compromised the significance or reality of the endowment. For early Mormons,
what Joseph Smith did with Masonry was the same thing that he had done with everything else from
Scripture to economics and social order to sexuality and marriage. He had restored the original form,
the divinely intended form, of these things, incorporating existing elements to the extent that they
were in fact remnants of the primeval forms. What he had done, to the empowerment of early
Mormons, was to reimagine notions of individual and society on the basis of an entirely new
religious mythology. Joseph Smith’s audacity was not simply, as his biographer Fawn Brodie said, to
claim revelation in the age of newsprint, but to reconceive Christianity from the ground up, and not
just in theological terms but with new sacred history and Scripture (e Book of Mormon, Doctrine
and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price), innovative liturgy, and radical social organization. Even as
mainstream Christianity was beginning to make its secularizing peace with modernity, Joseph Smith
was digging for mythological and ritual treasure buried deep in pre-Christian history. Chief of his
discoveries, which hark back to the very earliest of human religious beliefs, were the notions that
divinity is not a singular proposition but a plurality and that gods are not a disembodied Other but
physical beings who eat and drink and love and mate as we do. Even more daringly, Joseph asserted
that God is an exalted human and that men and women in their turn can become gods. In the words
of the Mormon tag, “As man is, God once was, as God is, man may become.” is is the polytheistic
heterodoxy that sticks in the craw of orthodox Christianity and that is the source of embarrassment
to Mormons such as Mitt Romney, who want nothing more desperately than for conventional
Christians to accept them as 100% mythology-free, safe, and grandmother-approved.

But nothing about Mormonism’s founder was grandmother-approved. Nowhere is this fact more
evident than in the endowment, which is not simply the occasion on which one learns about one’s
divine origin and potential as a literal spirit child of a god, but the means (at least in part — death
and its aftermath also help) by which you become such a god. Where the Mormon endowment parts
company with the Masonic ceremony is precisely in its adoption of this cosmic drama of children of
God becoming gods. And not only this. At the heart of the Mormon endowment and the Mormon

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notion of priesthood as presented in the endowment is human sexuality. e archetypal Mormon
endowment culminates in a sacred marriage, a hieros gamos. Each man in an endowment ceremony
(it’s a liturgical drama performed in a group of several dozen or more participants) is Adam, each
woman Eve. e ceremony takes Adam and Eve on a symbolic journey from their pre-existence as
the offspring of God through their incarnation as mortal beings on earth and into life after death and
eventual exaltation. In older Mormon temples, this journey is enacted by moving through the
building from one room to another, progressing clockwise like the sun and upward toward heaven.
Each room, decorated with symbolic imagery lovingly painted by pioneer hands (I speak here of the
older temples), represents a different stage of Gospel living, and in each room Adam and Eve are
given new elements of priesthood power. e ceremony ends with the entrance of Adam and Eve
into the presence of God. When an LDS couple are married, the husband-to-be leads his bride
through the symbolic separation of earth and heaven, known as the “veil,” and the two of them then
proceed to one of several small chapels located next to the Celestial Room, the representation of
heaven, where they are united in an eternal bond that brings together not only a mortal man and
woman but exalted beings whose life and ultimate power span eternity.

In the Mormon conception, perhaps the most important aspect of divinity is that it entails the
promise of eternal procreation. Almost all human beings, Mormons believe, no matter how wicked,
will eventually be “saved” in the sense that they will enjoy an eternal life of happiness. But only those
who undertake the path of the endowment and all that it entails, including polygamy and a life of
complete consecration to the building of the kingdom of God on earth, will have an eternal life with
the capability of bearing children. e rest live, as Mormons say, “separately and singly.” At the heart
of the Mormon endowment is the promise, the priesthood promise, of health and fertility in this
world and in the world to come. e fulness of the priesthood is eternal sex with divine stamina and
multiple partners. Sounds like a heaven that old Seldom Seen himself would have liked.

Four points are worth stressing in connection with the Mormon endowment. First, it’s all about
priesthood. What Mormons receive in the endowment is the highest form of priesthood, which is
not, as is sometimes said in Mormon circles, “the authority to act in God’s name,” but rather the very
power of divinity, the power to become a god oneself, the power kept from mankind in the biblical
creation story (though not in the Mormon retelling of it in the endowment). Second, this power is
not simply talked about or foreshadowed in the endowment, but actually given. is is the audacity
of the endowment as a ritual as opposed to a purely pedagogic or even symbolic act. is is why
Mormons believe that without the endowment you cannot be saved in the fullest sense of the word.
is is also why Mormons perform endowments for the dead just as they do baptisms for the dead.
ird, priesthood is not the exclusive prerogative of a clerical class that functions as mediator
between God and man. It is not quite the same thing as the “priesthood of all believers” in that not
all members, even male members, hold priesthood. Receiving priesthood is conditioned on
worthiness. But in principle all members would hold the priesthood and indeed must hold it, because
it is a power necessary for salvation. us, it is less like traditional priesthoods, which were to varying
degrees small, closed subgroups within religious communities, and more like an initiation such as the
Eleusinian Mysteries accessible to the community as a whole. Clearly, in view of what’s been said, it
is not primarily associated with the administration of an organization but with empowering
individual spiritual progress. Fourth, the endowment is given to men and women equally, without
the slightest distinction. Men receive no priesthood in the endowment that women do not also

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receive, and to the same degree. In the ultimate sense that is implicit in the endowment, priesthood
is indistinguishable from the union of man and woman, because there can be no divinity without
that union. ere are no single gods and goddesses in the Mormon heaven. If there’s sex outside the
Celestial Kingdom, it’s solitary. Ultimately, priesthood is the power of life, and in the Mormon
conception life entails co-equal male and female partners.

e irony of the contemporary LDS debate about women and priesthood is that LDS women
already hold the priesthood. ey are given it just like men when they go through the temple
ceremony. What Mormons commonly call the priesthood, which is the authorization to act in an
ecclesiastical capacity, is a manifestation of the temple priesthood, but is neither synonymous with it
nor something separate from it. e ecclesiastical offices are simply specialized applications of
priesthood. In Mormon terminology, they are “keys,” and these keys enable certain kinds of action.
An elder possessing the key of his office can perform the duties of that office, a seventy, high priest,
or apostle a different set of duties. But “elder,” “seventy,” “high priest,” and “apostle” are not
synonymous with priesthood. As an LDS bishop once remarked to me, “the priesthood is greater
than any of its offices.” And the priesthood is unitary. In Mormon terminology, therefore, one could
say that women hold priesthood but do not hold the keys of ecclesiastical action. Not yet, anyway.

is view, while orthodox, I believe, is not the one held or at least promoted by church authorities
today or by most ordinary Mormons. Nonetheless, it flows from the very nature of the endowment.
And, it seems to have been the view of many early saints, including not a few of the church’s
extraordinary women, among them my great-great-great grandmother, Zina Diantha Huntington
Jacobs Smith Young, wife, sometimes simultaneously, of Henry Jacobs, Joseph Smith, and Brigham
Young. Some day, for real entertainment, Mitt, we must talk about Mormon polyandry.

Mormons today flee equally from Joseph Smith’s radical sexuality, his radical economics, and his
radical theology. Mormons such as Mitt Romney, who are contestants in America’s never-ending
religious beauty pageant, are acutely embarrassed by the faith’s heterodoxy, which simply refuses to
stay decently covered. Core doctrines such as the Mormon notion of the plurality of gods and the
eventual divinity of men and women, while not officially disowned, are downplayed in a bid to gain
acceptance by a Christian majority from which early members of the church were only too happy to
disconnect. Early Mormons relished being different from other Christians, and saw in this difference
the measure of their own good fortune.

ese differences were far from being matters of simple dogma. ey expressed themselves concretely
in many forms of action. In the early Mormon view, for example, polygamy was not simply a
principle one could live if one chose to (although it was in fact always a matter of choice), it was the
highest order of priesthood. Ultimate exaltation in the Mormon sense, therefore, could be achieved
only if one practiced polygamy. e temple endowment also enjoined upon participants the principle
of consecration, in which one covenanted to devote all of one’s time, means, and talents to the
building of the Kingdom of God, not in some remote future but in the present.

To build their kingdom required a total rethink of how society works. American society, for example,
prized profit. Brigham Young rejected the profit motive altogether. American society prized
individuality. Brigham Young preached community. Perhaps no other factor was more important in

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the ultimate survival of the Mormon people than their sense of subsistence-oriented and collective
identity. In his study of the Mormon village, based on settlement records of towns such as Escalante,
Ephraim, and American Fork, Lowry Nelson, son of Mormon settlers in Ferron, Utah, and later
professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, identified a number of attributes of the typical
early Mormon community, of which the following eight are perhaps the most crucial.

1) At settlement, land was distributed equally by lot, with no preference being given on the basis of
ecclesiastical or social rank.

2) Holdings were small (< 25 acres) so that all members of the community could own land.

3) e Mormon pattern of settlement was unique in the West and especially unusual among farming
communities in dividing land into three different types. Each settler received a small holding,
typically 1¼ acres, inside the town for a residence, vegetable garden, and orchard. In addition, each
resident received another plot of about five acres outside the town for raising animals and grain.
Finally, everyone in the community had rights in common land still farther outside the town where
livestock could graze. is pattern of land use encouraged the development of tightly knit
communities in which people associated with one another on a daily basis in town. is form of
town life stands in stark contrast to that of much of the frontier West where homes were located
miles from one another and where town life took a backseat to farm life. e notion of fundamental
equality among the residents of a town was taken at times to strange lengths. For example, to insure
equal access to common land, residents of some towns mandated that no one could use the
commons before a certain date. On that date, the town would hold a dance to which everyone was
invited. Only when the dance was done, were people allowed to go out and stake their temporary
“claim” to a portion of the commons. In this way, everyone literally started from the same point with
equal odds of access to any part of the commons. After a certain point in the fall, the commons was
thrown open so that anyone could graze their animals anywhere.

4) All town residents shared responsibility for building forts, roads, irrigation ditches, and other
public works and public buildings.

5) In larger towns, the Church established cooperative wholesale stores to provide a market for
exchange. ese were not commercial stores in the usual sense. eir intent, as illustrated by the
reaction of Charles Smith to the introduction of the co-op program, was in fact to prepare the saints
for the fullness of the communitarian Gospel, the “United Order of Enoch,” that was shortly to
come.

    “I went to Ward meeting Bro A M Musser and G Q Cannon occupied the time. ey spoke upon this
    matter of our trading with those who are not of us. He shewed the advantages from our cooperating
    putting our means together...is movement was intended to make us more united to bring us closer
    together, according to the pattern of the Gospel. Bro Cannon Said it was very evident that men were
    Seecking to get rich and build themselves up, and to form that distinction of class in society, which
    thing was an abomination in the sight of God. He referred to the Nephites shewing that when they
    began to get rich they Drew off in Classes and despised the poor. is matter to which our attention
    was now being called would bring about good results, and would prepare the minds of the people, to

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receive further those principles that pertained to the order of Enoch...At the close of the meeting
    subscriptions were handed in to carry forward the movement of a cooperative Wholesale Store.”

6) Agriculture, which formed the basis for all Mormon communities, though it became in time a
business, was first and foremost a matter of subsistence and self-sufficiency. is modality continued
well into the 20th century. Writing in 1947 for the state’s centennial history, Arvil Stark, former
secretary of the Utah State Horticultural Society, observed, “In general, the commercial orchards are
small, averaging less than 5 acres in size and the fruit crop is usually associated with other kinds of
agriculture to make a diversified agriculture. In other words, farming in Utah is usually a way of life
rather than the highly specialized business characteristic of some other areas.”

7) In most cases, towns were not created helter-skelter by individuals seeking their own place to settle
down. Instead, the Church would “call” people, that is, request them, to settle an area in order to
promote Mormon control of essential territory. Members of each “mission” were chosen for their
particular skills so as to provide an effective basis for self-sustaining communities all around the
Mormon pale. us, personal empire building was subordinated to that of the Kingdom of God. It
was not unheard-of for people to be called to settle one area only to be asked in subsequent years to
move to another.

8) e culmination of the Mormon communitarian experiment was the heroic, if short-lived,
attempt at true religious communism known as the United Order of Enoch, or United Order for
short. In this system, individuals voluntarily gave all of their property to the Church and received
back what they needed to live on. All surplus was distributed within the community. is form of
communism was never universally practiced, nor was it mandatory even in places where it was
attempted. Nonetheless, the attempt itself indicates the tendency within the early LDS Church
toward community and egalitarianism.

Such was the practical expression of the Mormon notion of building a different kind of world fit for
gods to inhabit. It didn’t last long. Polygamy officially came to end in 1890, when to end
government persecution and to secure statehood for the Utah Territory, the church officially
discontinued the practice. While federal law prohibiting polygamy is still on the books, the political
climate of the not-too-distant future might well tolerate the revocation of this law. e Mormon
Church is powerful enough now that it could probably bring this result about if it chose to. But it
does not, and likely never will. e church is too desirous now of fitting in to take a course of action
likely to resurrect the old bugaboos of Mormon differentness and subversion. e early church’s
other distinctive social form, the United Order is also gone, and seems equally likely never to
reappear. No group of Americans is more ardently and vocally capitalist than today’s LDS Church. I
seem to be in a tiny minority in thinking that we’ve lost something valuable here. And then there’s
the temple endowment, the last vestige of a radically different conception of what human life is
about. e implications of the endowment are not denied, but they’re certainly not trumpeted either,
even within the Mormon community. It’s ironic, then, that at the very moment when social mores
have loosened to the point that America might be willing to tolerate Mormonism in all its weird
originality, at the very moment when Mormons have a shot at putting one of their own in the White
House, the church has nothing original to say. If only people’s worries about what weird stuff a
Mormon president might do were well-founded!

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One way that Mormons say they’re still different in spite of this loss of originality is that their
leaders, who are sustained as “prophets and seers,” receive continuing revelation. Mormons are proud
of the fact that their leader is a prophet and not a pope. Although comforting to the faithful, this
belief is belied by the fact that there has not been a single significant addition to Mormon scripture
since Joseph Smith. Indeed, the only changes of note have been by way of removing things, first
Joseph Smith’s radical notion of polygamy, which was put on ice by the 1890 Manifesto, and second
the unscriptural but no less fundamental prejudice against blacks holding the priesthood, which
ended officially with Spencer W. Kimball’s 1978 revelation. What passes for modern revelation
among the LDS today (e.g. General Conference talks) is the same sort of sleepy sermonizing you can
hear on any given Sunday in any other church in America. e truth is that Mormons have known
only two prophets, one a charismatic maker of religion without parallel in American or modern
world history, the other a differently charismatic social reformer and social engineer without peer.
ese are Mormonism’s twin Moseses. e rest aren’t prophets as much as marcom managers. ey
neither shock the world with new revelations (Joseph Smith’s version of prophecy) nor stand up to it
with the force of moral indignation (Brigham Young’s). Joseph Smith and Brigham Young took
Americans by the scruff of the neck and shook them out of their complacency. eir version of
prophecy brought one third of the U. S. army down on Utah in 1858 with the apparent intent of
putting an end to the Mormon kingdom. But Harold B. Lee? Ezra Taft Benson? Gordon B.
Hinckley? Wherein are these men, these admittedly decent men (well, at least two of them), in
anything but an Orwellian kind of abuse of language prophets and seers? Gordon B. Hinckley was to
Joseph Smith and Brigham Young what a pussy cat is to the king of the jungle. To call both kinds of
men prophets is like calling Sarah Palin and omas Jefferson public servants in the same breath.
e not-easily-impressed might refer to such an abuse of language as just plain fraud.

Contemporary Mormonism is a religion of contradictions, sometimes outrageous contradictions. It’s
a religion of revelation that hasn’t had a revelation worthy of the name in a hundred and fifty years.
It’s a religion built on communism that is now ranked among the Fortune 50. It’s a religion of
unorthodox sexuality that preaches family values and persecutes gays. Mormon theology is the most
radical in Christendom. Indeed, this side of the mystery religions of antiquity, there probably hasn’t
been a faith of any kind with a grander conception of what it means to be human and what it means
to be divine. And yet Mormonism is embarrassed by this grandness. Instead of proudly asserting the
merits of their peculiar unorthodoxy in the face of evangelical attacks, Mormons like Mitt fairly
grovel to portray themselves as ordinary Christians. ey are desperate to adopt the look of
successful Christian mediocrity.

If there is a single word to describe present as opposed to past Mormonism, the staid and uninspiring
maturity versus the charismatic adolescence of the faith, it is mediocrity. Of the many manifestations
of this mediocrity, none is more outrageous than the disparity between the grand pretensions of the
temple endowment and its contemporary incarnation. Mormons go to the temple to experience a
ritual that purports to prepare them for godhood. And how is this ritual, which surely should have a
form commensurate with the pretense, experienced today? As a B movie in a second-rate theatre. e
endowment as practiced throughout most of the 20th century was a very participatory liturgical
drama. ere really isn’t an exact modern analog, but in some ways the endowment was not unlike
the Passion Play that is put on every few years in Oberammergau, in which ordinary people

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impersonate Jesus and the other characters of the Gospel stories. In the endowment drama, temple
workers (members of the church who volunteer their service for this) played the roles of key figures
in the drama such as Michael (the archangel who is also the pre-existent and semi-divine Adam), the
mortal Adam, Eve, Satan, and the apostles Peter, James, and John. ese actors led those receiving
their endowment from step to step and room to room. All of this was done live. Several decades ago,
when it began building smaller, cheaper temples (I prefer to call them endowment factories or
endowment multiplexes) intended to move people through the endowment as quickly as possible
and generate larger numbers of endowments for the dead, the church replaced this live drama with a
movie version. Over time, this version has also replaced the live drama in older temples. But, until
now, the live drama remained in the church’s flagship temple in Salt Lake. No more. As of June
2009, only the movie will be available. With the loss of the live drama, there will no longer be any
place in Mormondom where members can experience the full participatory quality of the old
ceremony. is is a liturgy that purports to have been practiced since the beginning of history, and
yet the contemporary church can’t be bothered to allow it to continue in its traditional form in even
one of its many temples.

To understand the significance of this loss, imagine that you are a Catholic and that the Vatican has
just announced that in future all Masses everywhere, even in St. Peter’s, will be presented exclusively
in movie form. Never again will you see a live priest at an altar or hear a live choir and organ.
Instead, you’ll watch a video. rough the miracle of modern communications, attendees will have
individual wireless headphones for listening to the soundtrack of the mass in their choice of
language. Since wafer and wine cannot decently be made virtual, a lay member will distribute the
necessary materiel pre-blessed, hygienically packaged for your convenience, and shipped from a
warehouse in Boston. anks to these efficiencies, the Vatican says that it can have you in and out of
Mass in almost the time it takes to go through the drive-in at McDonald’s (billions and billions
saved).

e movie version of Mormonism’s most important ritual is the dream of a corporate church focused
on cost, efficiency, and statistics. ese are the measures of Mormon mediocrity. And, they are
inimical to the spirit of the endowment. Early Mormons understood the significance of the
endowment and went to Herculean lengths to give it an appropriate temporal locus. Historic
Mormon temples in Logan, Manti, St. George, and Salt Lake are among the most impressive and
beautiful of the faith’s many accomplishments. For people living in log cabins, these were buildings
that said temple, axis mundi, meeting place for gods and men. But their beauty is not simply by way
of comparison with humbler surroundings. For sheer, simple elegance, if not grandeur, these old
Mormon buildings can stand next to Karnak, the Parthenon, or Notre Dame without
embarrassment. ey are buildings that one not only can but should spend time enjoying. Time
spent in the most beautiful and significant space your faith has to offer should be something that
members relish rather than dread, something that the institution encourages rather than limits. A
temple is a physical emblem that should inspire devotion. And historically it did. In Nauvoo, for
example, women ground up their fine china in order to make a plaster for the building that would
sparkle. e Salt Lake temple is built from solid granite nine feet thick at the base hauled down by
men and horses from a nearby canyon with gargantuan effort. It took the saints 40 years to build this
temple, and the people who built it were not well-healed Mitt Romneys but hard-scrabble pioneers
who were simultaneously building log cabins for themselves and planting gardens, sowing fields,

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digging irrigation ditches, and fighting locusts. Buildings such as this were of a kind with the epic
nature of the ceremonies that took place inside. Today, with incomparably greater resources, both
financial and technical, at its disposal, the church builds cookie-cutter temples of dubious inspiration
that remind one of nothing so much as 60s chic. e pioneer notion of a building that is the
Mountain of the Lord has long since vanished.

For many Mormons, the new, efficient, cinematic endowment and the equally efficient endowment
factories are progress. ese Mormons don’t really understand the endowment and would just as
soon get it over with as quickly as possible. ey don’t understand liturgy and so prefer a movie.
ey don’t appreciate sacred space and therefore find nothing upsetting about a temple multiplex.
Most Mormons today have never experienced the old endowment nor have they been in one of the
old pioneer temples. Speaking as a veteran on both counts, I can only say that I’m grateful that
Mormon bean counters haven’t as yet offered to upgrade the Sistine Chapel or the Haram al-Sharif.

How is it that a liberal Mormon, who doesn’t believe most of what his church teaches or any of the
mythology, finds himself lamenting the end of Mormon uniqueness and Mormon spunk? Well, part
of the answer is that this liberal Mormon laments the collapse of any form of protest against
American love-it-or-leave-it evangelical capitalism and capitalist evangelicalism. If there has ever been
a time when prophetic protest was needed against the abuse of the poor and the self-satisfaction of
the rich, it is now. If there has ever been a time when America needed a voice for integral community
based on notions of spiritual common cause, it is now. If there was ever a time when individuals
needed a vision of themselves as something other than human resources for building multinational
corporations, it is now. e church of my past was such a voice of protest. Well might a world-
traveler like Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor) put Utah high on his list of places to write a
book about. It’s not every day you can witness a Moses, or Jesus, or Muhammad at work. It’s not
every day that you can see for yourself what it might have been like to be a first-century Christian or
a seventh-century Muslim. In Europe at the turn of the century, the great German classical historian
Eduard Meyer gave lectures on Mormonism as a new religious force on par with early Christianity
and Islam. Leo Tolstoy opined that if the Mormons were given three or four generations to develop
their religion without interference, they would change the world. Mitt, it appears, wants very much
to be the most powerful man in the world but is loathe to change it. Blessed are the poor.

American society has always struggled to identify its spiritual center. But for Mormons, that was easy.
e center was the temple, that outrageously outdated, mythical omphalos that was the hub of the
camp of God. Not since the Gothic cathedrals had Western society seen anything like it, and here it
was in the middle of the great American desert. Inside the temple, companies of handcart veterans
dressed like kohanim reenacted rituals that they believed began with Adam and Eve and ended in
godhood. And when they weren’t taking part in sacred drama, they were working together to build
the City of Enoch in brick and mortar. No grubbing to make a buck (or a million bucks) for these
folks. No being sales associates or roughnecks or venture capitalists. What I miss in all of
Mormonism’s contemporary success and gentrification, exemplified by its tall, handsome, and
intelligent poster boy, Mitt, is any sense that living in the shadow of a temple has implications for
living. I mean, of course, implications commensurate with a temple. Implications on the scale of the
multiplex are a dime a dozen. On the former scale is building Zion, on the latter is persecuting
queers. Building Zion is the task of latter-day saints. Bashing queers is something any thug can do.

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Mormonism’s up-beat theology fits the Western landscape, which is a place of seemingly infinite
potential. e desert inspires because the desert is empty. Even with lots of busy Mormons, the
desert was empty, and it was inspiring. In this solitude, free of the past and of the present, the
Mormons could start over. e desert inspires people to start over. Moses got his start in the desert.
So did Jesus and Muhammad. e desert invites you to empty yourself and to be filled with a new
spirit. As a manner of speaking, let’s call this spirit God. When you live in the desert, you necessarily
live with God. Balzac once said, “In the desert, God is present and man is not.” (Query: If God
speaks in the desert and there is no man to hear him, does he make a sound?) For me, the point is
not that man is not here but that God is everywhere here. He/She/It is inescapable. ere is no tree or
bush behind which we can hide ourselves when God goes walking in the evening. If there is any
place in which people can live sub specie aeternitatis, it is here. Early Mormons, taking a page from
the Masonic handbook, expressed this idea with the symbol of the all-seeing eye, which they put
everywhere, not just on temples but on ordinary churches, and even on warehouses. Nowadays,
unless protected as a National Historic Landmark, the all-seeing eye isn’t seen much. I think it’s out
of shame.

If we Mormons can no longer muster the strength to be the “American sublime,” perhaps we could
be the American soul, the vanishing part of America that takes pride in growing things. e
Mormons set themselves to make the desert blossom, and in this, if not the more ambitious Zion
revolution, they succeeded brilliantly. As late as the 1960s, when I rubbed shoulders with Mitt in my
grandparents’ ward in Provo, the little Provo-Orem area alone was home to almost 700,000 fruit
trees, Brigham City and its environs to 200,000 more, Weber County to 100,000, and Washington
County to 50,000. And these numbers are half of what existed when Utah’s orchards were at their
peak in the 1920s. Unbeknownst to most Utah Mormons today, our state has some of the finest
fruit-growing land in North America. ere isn’t a lot of it — it’s sandwiched into the less-than-10-
mile-wide strip of old Bonneville Lake benches that stretch the 100 miles from Brigham City to
Santaquin — but all of it is remarkable. Most remarkable of all, it wasn’t developed at taxpayer
expense or with BLM muscle or civic fraud (Owens Valley) but with local water and local power.
Our orchards were Zion-powered. eir disappearance is symptomatic of the loss of soul as well as
spirit that comes from trading co-ops for Wal-Marts. Today’s Mormons just want to make the desert
pay, and deeply resent it when the BLM forces them on occasion (a rare occasion) to let the desert
bloom.

I miss these orchards that were one of the chief features that visitors to the Salt Lake valley such as
Mark Twain and Richard Burton took notice of.

    Next day we strolled about everywhere through the broad, straight, level streets and enjoyed the
    pleasant strangeness of a city of fifteen thousand inhabitants with no loafers perceptible in it...a
    limpid stream rippling and dancing through every street in place of a filthy gutter; block after
    block of trim dwellings, built of “frame” and sunburned brick — a great thriving orchard and
    garden behind every one of them, apparently — branches from the street stream winding and
    sparkling among the garden beds and fruit trees — and a grand general air of neatness, repair,
    thrift and comfort, around and about and over the whole (Mark Twain, Roughing It, 1860).

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I miss the landscape that might have remained of mountain valleys dotted by communities of small,
soulful homes, big gardens, and glorious temples. I miss the little fruit stands that lined the roads of
Orem even as late as my boyhood. I miss the ranches in Sandy, where my grandfather would come to
buy, breed, or stable his Arabian horses. I miss the irrigation ditches that snaked through Holladay,
from which my dad and I would draw water for our pasture. I miss the cornfield next door to our
local ward house and the cornfields that lined many of Salt Lake’s boulevards. I miss narrow canyon
roads like the two-lane, tree-lined avenue that led up Provo Canyon to Bridal Veil Falls or the byroad
that led past the Old Mill on Big Cottonwood Creek. I miss open space on the Salt Lake benches
and empty lots between homes. I miss the neighborhood grocery store like the one my mother’s
uncle owned near East High School, the ma-and-pa diners that my grandfather used to frequent, the
home-grown ice cream soda fountains like Cooks in Provo, the autochthonous barber shop, and the
myriad other forms of local culture that we buy-local advocates struggle to remember much less
preserve. I miss Firmage’s Department Store, founded during the Depression by my great-
grandfather and an anchor of Provo’s main street before it was put out of business by the Orem
University Mall. I miss kids playing army outdoors in alleys and backyard jungles before video and
computer games invaded our homes. I miss old people living next door like Colonel Rich and
Brother and Sister Evans before we discovered the convenience of the retirement ghetto.

I’d miss these things anywhere in America today. But I feel their absence here even more because we
had a chance to build a different kind of community. A few years ago, I debated State Senator Tom
Hatch on the radio on the issue of big water projects. Utah currently has two in planning. e first
would draw water from the already oversubscribed and climate-threatened Colorado to irrigate golf
courses in St. George. e other would keep starter palaces growing in Weber and Davis County by
taking water from the Bear River, which is the primary source of the Great Salt Lake, one of
America’s most critical bird sanctuaries and the source (from “lake effect”) of not a little of the
“Greatest Snow on Earth.” I said that before we spend billions to promote more development in
communities like St. George we should consider what kind of community it is that we want. Is
growth for its own sake a self-evident good? Like a lot of pro-development Mormon business types
today, Hatch said that he was glad that St. George was no longer a “Podunk town.” e St. George
of my boyhood that Senator Hatch seemed so anxious to disown was red cliffs surrounding a
brilliant white Mormon temple and groves of fruit trees. Hatch’s Podunk Town was Brigham Young’s
winter residence and the southern anchor of Zion. It was a starkly beautiful setting that exemplified
perhaps better than any other what made Mormon community different. Today, it’s subdivisions,
strip malls, and outlet stores straight out of Victorville.

In a Mormon temple marriage, bride and bridegroom kneel facing one another across an altar.
Behind each of them is a mirror, and the two mirrors, reflecting one another, create a series of
kneeling couples that stretches in each direction into eternity. At the center of this procession is
the couple being married now, in the only moment in this eternal stretch of time that is theirs.
Eternity ends and begins in this moment. It is in the nature of a sacrament to focus eternity in
the present moment. To live sacramentally, therefore, as early Mormons sought to do, is to act in
each moment with the awareness of an eternity leading to and from this moment. For me, this is
the essence of what it means to live with the great Mormon myth. I don’t believe that there was a
man named Adam and a woman named Eve who walked naked in a Middle Eastern paradise (or,
as Mormons claim, an American paradise) planted by God. I don’t believe in a historical figure

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