… UTAH IS UNIQUE among the fifty states. It is literally a church-state, a theocracy inside a democracy, and Salt Lake City—heart of the church-state—is a holy city just as Mecca is. Understanding this is key to understanding what happened to Franklin Bradshaw, happened both before and after the old man was found lying dead on the floor of his warehouse with two bullet holes in his back.
In Utah, the American melting pot is unstirred. Three out of four people are Mormons, and they are all here in this bleakly beautiful sanctuary “behind the Zion Curtain” because of religious persecution. For a nation that boasts it was founded on principles of religious freedom, the treatment of the Mormons has been harsh indeed. Only African slaves and native Americans fared worse. Before they reached their Promised Land, the Saints were tarred and feathered, lynched, massacred. They were hounded and mercilessly ridiculed by fellow Americans from the same Nordic and Anglo-Saxon Protestant backgrounds, from the same families, the same blood. The memory lingers. Xenophobia is endemic here.
But Mormonism is more than a religion. “To get the feel of what the Mormon church is all about, you have to see the Mormon church not as a church in the ordinary sense at all, but as a society—a society and a culture that is built around religion.”*
The society and culture that has evolved behind the Zion Curtain is not just unique among religions of the earth, it is uniquely American. What other nation could support a faith at once so fundamentalist and so optimistic as to preach eternal life, eternal marriage, eternal chastity and—fortunate under the circumstances—eternal upward mobility?
The first revelation came to the young farm boy Joseph Smith in 1820, when God and Jesus spoke to him in a grove of trees outside his home town of Palmyra, New York. Two years later the Angel Moroni appeared in his bedroom, and led him to the hill of Cumorah where he found hidden a Bible made of solid gold plates—the Book of Mormon. Here too the angel gave him the magical stone spectacles, the Urim and Thummim, which enabled Smith to read and to translate the plates’ “reformed Egyptian” hieroglyphics into English. They told the wondrous story of a band of Hebrews who, in 600 B.C., had made their way to the New World and become the aboriginal forebears of the American Indians. After Christ’s crucifixion He had visited His American flock, and He now promised Joseph Smith that if the people would return to the simple gospel ways of the early Christians, God would return once more and guide His flock with divine revelations here in the latter days.
The spectacles disappeared, but Smith translated further revelations by staring at a magic “seer stone” he held hidden in his hat while scribes on the other side of a blanket wrote down what the young prophet said. Smith’s original Mormon doctrines were modified by later prophets, in particular Brigham Young, and zealous missionary work began.
The new faith scrapped the concept of original sin and replaced it with the more American idea of man’s eternal perfectibility. “As man is, God once was, and as God is, man may become.” Hence divinity is progressive. Gods, angels, and men have progressed to different levels. God Himself—Themselves?—was once a man; Jesus is a kind of older brother. (Devils exist too. They are rebellious spirits, cast out for all eternity. Eternal vigilance is essential since a hundred devils exist for every living man, woman, and child.)
The Mormon belief system unites curiously American pairs of opposites. A relish for the dog-eat-dog practices of the marketplace goes hand in hand with the stern obligation to “Help thy neighbor.” Saints do more than tithe at least ten percent of their income; they entirely look after their own. No Mormon need worry about food, housing, or medical care. The Mormon belief in the sanctity of the family coexists side by side with the Mormon doctrine of blood atonement: certain crimes—adultery, apostasy, murder—are so evil they can be paid for only by the shedding of the sinner’s own blood.
Once one accepts the notion that the soul never dies, and that even the dead may be baptized and thereby forever saved, it becomes urgent to find out who one’s ancestors are. All one’s ancestors. Theoretically, at least, it should be possible to trace them back to Adam and Eve. Mass proxy baptisms of the dead take place regularly in the subterranean baptismal fonts, borne on the backs of twelve oxen, that are housed in the basement of every Mormon temple. By 1984 the church had built forty-seven temples around the world, including twenty-two in the United States, seven in Utah.
The urge to locate these ancestral legions of literal “lost souls” has made the Mormons into fanatic genealogists. The Salt Lake City skyline is dominated by two structures. One is the Mormon Temple, which shares a huge, ten-acre-square block amid lavish gardens with the glitter-domed auditorium of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. This Temple is the symbolic heart of the entire church and, like all Mormon temples, entirely off limits to Gentiles. It is a structure to make pharaohs weep—huge, six-spired, fantastically turreted and built of deeply crenellated black stone. Its finial is a giant gold-leafed statue of the Angel Moroni blowing his heavenly trumpet out across majestic, snow-capped peaks.
The other building, a towering white marble skyscraper, is open to all. This is the World Center for Ancestors, an ever expanding genealogical library with the capability of listing on microfiche the name of every person who ever lived on this planet. Well over a billion names already are on file here. Carloads of new, or rather old, birth and baptismal records collected by the faithful from churches and town halls around the world arrive daily. Library visitors are taught how to look up and record their own family trees, using the library’s five hundred microfilm reading machines available for public use. Mormonism is at once newfangled and extremely archaic, a form of computer-aided ancestor worship in modern, polyester dress.
In Mormon society and culture, highest values are placed on hard work, thrift, clean living, obedience to the elders and, above all, on the importance of the family. The best-known Church rubric is “No Success Can Compensate for Failure in the Home.” Mormons perceive the family as a quasi-sacred entity which must be protected from the evils of society. Good for the family are plenty of group work, group play, and plenty of (marital) sex. Music and dancing are also good, and Salt Lake has long been renowned as a cradle of American ballet and symphonic arts, as well as for its Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Bad for the family in equal measure, and regularly denounced from the pulpit, are premarital sex, abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, homosexuality, pornography, and women who work outside the home. These attitudes have given Utah a divorce rate only one third the national average, and a birth rate double the norm.
Mormonism is a male religion, a dream of prophets and patriarchs. The Saints are organized according to strict patriarchal principles, and sternly watched over by white-bearded elders who have renounced polygamy relatively recently, for reasons less doctrinal than political—not because polygamy is intrinsically such a bad idea, and perhaps it is not; but because the federal government declared it illegal. Still, it might be remembered that once you renounce monogamy, eternal chastity in marriage is a less drastic idea.
Joseph Smith declared Blacks the children of Cain, “cursed by God,” and, until 1978, any trace of Negro blood made one ineligible for the Mormon priesthood. Women still are ineligible. Women and Blacks aside, the religion is extremely democratic. Any male convert over age twelve has a chance not just to enter the priesthood, but to better himself spiritually, to progress through this life and the next until he actually reaches the status of a god himself. What the faith offers his eternal wife—formerly read “wives”—beyond the attractions of being a god’s wife, is not spelled out. Finally, as in every male tribal group, be they Mormons, Masons, college fraternity brothers, or cannibals in New Guinea, the church has plenty of secret rites and closed doors—the whole mumbo jumbo of Keeping Others Out. Secrecy is never so appealing as in a free society.
One last thought: In a society and culture devised by old men sealed for eternity into marital chastity, even serial marital chastity, the essential male-female bond may remain the one between husband and wife. But the essential male-female tension, the trilling wire in the blood, becomes the one between Susannah and the elders, between father and daughter.
* University of Utah history professor Sterling McMurrin, dean of Mormon intellectuals and former U.S. Commissioner of Education, quoted in the Denver Post Special Report, “Utah: The Church State,” Nov. 21–28, 1982.