'A Pecular People'

I

Accounts of Mormons and the Mormon Church--officially the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints--tend toward one of two extremes. On the one hand, accounts of Mormonism from the church's founding by Joseph Smith in the 1820s have emphasized the sensational, the lurid, the scandalous, the heretical and the titillating, for the reason that, well, there is much in Mormon history, culture and doctrine that is sensational, lurid, scandalous, heretical and titillating, as measured against mainstream American culture then and now. Mormons had (and some dissident Mormons still have) lots of wives; they do not smoke or drink or even drink coffee; the genuinely devout ones wear funny underwear and do strange rituals in temples closed to outsiders; Mormonism's presumably deeply oppressed women bear an unfashionably large number of children, and up until just a couple of decades ago, the Mormon Church denied blacks full participation in the church. From the 19th century down to the present day, Mormonism has succeeded in pushing American society's hot-buttons on religion, race and sex.

On the other hand, other accounts of Mormons--accounts of the people rather than the articles of their strange faith--have often emphasized the cheerful virtue, the upright and yet often relaxed, pragmatic goodness of its adherents, their ability to hold together families and raise decent children and provide the consolations of community in the confusing modern world more successfully than many others. These accounts often pass over in discreet silence the sometimes embarrassing tenets of faith that, especially if one were Mormon, might have been thought an inestimably important part of making that moral success possible. If opponents of Mormonism have often asked, "Can't we stop the Mormons from being Mormon?", ostensible admirers of Mormons as people have often asked, at least by implication, "Can't we have Mormons--but without Mormonism?"