The Mormons are coming

Long before Mitt Romney and "Big Love," Mormons were demonized as polygamists, prudes and vampires. But Mormonism just may be the first major world faith since Islam.

By Andrew O'Hehir

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Sept. 20, 2007 | Almost a hundred years before Mitt Romney, Harry Reid and "Big Love," Mormonism had its first big pop-culture moment. It was not a happy one. In the early days of cinema, more than 30 films were made featuring villains drawn from a new and controversial sect, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mormons were generally depicted as bearded, depraved and violent cultists who abducted wholesome American women into polygamous marriages.

In fact, the Mormon church had repudiated the practice of multiple marriage in 1890, although it continued in secret at least into the first decade of the 20th century. Needless to say, that didn't stop the pop-culture juggernaut from spewing out bigotry and misinformation, culminating with H.B. Parkinson's huge 1922 hit "Trapped by the Mormons," which produced a sequel ("Married to a Mormon") the same year and has now spawned a 21st century parody remake, starring a drag king as a seductive Mormon vampire.

Mormons may not be vampires, but I was personally bitten by one. This occurred in the mid-1970s, in an old gold-mining town in the Northern California mountains. I'm not going to say exactly where, because for all I know Dawna, the Mormon who bit me, still lives in that town with an enormous brood of Mormon children. Dawna was the girl next door, literally. She was 13 years old, going on about 24, while I was 12, going on 12 and a half. We were on a sofa in the garage, and Alice Cooper's "Billion Dollar Babies" was on the record player. Despite mimed instructions from her brother, who was on the other side of the room with his arm around another Mormon girl, I had no idea what Dawna wanted me to do. So she bit me, on the hand, hard enough to draw blood and leave an infected wound that lingered past summer and weeks into the school year. I bore it with a mix of puzzlement and pride.

I doubt the LDS church would have put forward Dawna or her mother (a CB radio operator also named Dawna whose on-air handle, I swear to Jesus, was "Dawna Donut Dunker") as ideal examples of Mormon womanhood. By the next summer Dawna junior had definitely joined the ranks of the town's "bad girls," and a few years after that her mom ran away with a truck driver she met over the airwaves. Still, the Dawnas cured me of at least some of the stereotypes I might have held about Mormons; in their own way, they were acting out some of the central contradictions or paradoxes -- especially the tension between separatism and assimilation -- that LDS historian Terryl Givens finds at the heart of Mormon culture.

Across the several summers and Christmas vacations I spent hanging out with Mormon kids and their families in that dusty Sierra Nevada town, I did begin to imbibe the idea that Mormons were culturally distinct, if not entirely separate. Our town was almost half Mormon, and while the Saints mixed occasionally and awkwardly with gentiles (Mormons often use this word, to the perennial amusement of Jews) at bingo tournaments or the pancake breakfast in the Odd Fellows' Hall, mostly they kept to themselves.

If I was welcomed, and fed enormous meals, in various Mormon households it might have been because, as Givens explains, their culture puts a high premium on cordiality and sociability. It might have been sheer pity: I was an only child, and my parents were weird summer people from the Bay Area who stood outside the town's divisions. (They weren't Mormons or Presbyterians or Methodists, or any other denomination people in that town understood; stranger still, they were widely known to be Democrats.)

Nobody in those households ever wasted their time trying to convert me, but I picked up random bits and pieces of Mormon religious belief and cultural practice along the way. I'd heard about the angel Moroni and the Prophet Joseph and the gold plates buried in a hillside somewhere back East, but what did that have to do with all the canning and pickling and preserving that went on in Mormon kitchens? Dawna's brothers and other Mormon boys talked eagerly about the prospect of being sent overseas as missionaries, but given the dusty horizons of life in our little town, that was understandable. Most mystifying of all, why did Mormon kids have to sneak up the hill behind Main Street into the Jeffrey pines to share a Coca-Cola?

I couldn't have known this at the time, and I doubt the Mormons in our town knew it either, but the faith founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith -- who claimed direct and personal contact with God, Jesus, the Holy Ghost, John the Baptist and various angels -- was even then undergoing a dramatic transformation. As Givens discusses in his fascinating new book "People of Paradox," Mormonism has always been seen as a quintessentially American phenomenon, born out of the visionary religiosity of the Second Great Awakening and the fervent individualism of Jacksonian democracy.

At the same time, thanks to its peculiar history of both persecution and self-exile, the LDS church has long been associated with the outer margins of American life. For most of its existence, a large proportion of its adherents have been low-income, low-status rural whites in Utah and other isolated regions of the Far West. If the stereotype of Mormons as polygamous deviants had faded by the '70s, the counter-stereotype -- Mormons as unbearably wholesome, awkward and naive family-values Americans, à la the Osmonds, or for that matter the Romneys -- endures to this day.

But by the end of the decade when Dawna bit me, the Mormon "priesthood," which permits entrance to temples and full adult participation in the faith's most sacred rituals, had finally been opened to men of African ancestry. There are still very few African-American Latter-day Saints (one prominent exception being R&B legend Gladys Knight), but the expedient "revelation" of 1978 launched a new wave of global missionary expansion. Today, fewer than half the world's 13 million or so Mormons live in the United States, and only about 14 percent live in Utah. Given the church's rapid growth in Africa and Latin America, the day when people of color make up the Mormon majority is not far away.

In his introduction, Givens speculates that Mormonism is on the path toward becoming "the first new world faith since Islam." That may be premature, since the global ratio of Muslims to Mormons is roughly 115 to 1. Still, the longer you consider the parallels between these two faiths, the more provocative they become, which I'm pretty sure was not Givens' intention. Most obviously, both religions involve divine revelations directly communicated to a charismatic latter-day prophet, who rapidly attracts followers but is widely viewed by outsiders as a huckster, a fake or even a madman.

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