Some Kinda Mormon

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My parents were part of the hippie-Christian movement: devout California beach bums who gave up pot and let Jesus get them high. The first church they attended was a tent on a beach where it was de rigueur to show up barefoot and halter-topped. By the time I was born, the congregation had moved to a high school auditorium. There, my dad played guitar onstage and my mom held me in one arm so she could lift her other one closer to God.

The Mormon faith started with a guy who was a lot like my parents. Joseph Smith was a 14-year-old boy in early-19th-century upstate New York, where all kinds of preachers came through town on a busy revival circuit. Bewildered by the variety of denominations on offer, Smith prayed to God for an answer. It turned out that God had been waiting for Joseph Smith to call out to him, because God spoke back. Smith hadn't been able to find the right church because there was no right church. God had chosen him to reinstate 'the true sect.'

Three years later, God sent a messenger to Smith's bedroom--the angel Moroni. Moroni told Smith to dig up an ancient scripture from the base of a hill less than three miles from the Smith family farm. The scripture was written on golden plates using a language Smith described as 'reformed Egyptian' and buried with magic seeing-crystals that Smith could use to translate the text into English. The translation was published in 1830 as the Book of Mormon.

And so the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was founded. The story is bizarre, but the impetus is not. Joseph Smith wanted the truth and he found it. My parents wanted the truth and they found it. No one wants God to be cooped up in a church building. Everyone wants God in their lives, in their homes, in their hearts.

But America wasn't ready for Mormonism--a loose religion that edited the Bible and adopted a social structure that outsiders found closed off and elitist. Mormons even had special underwear--woolen long johns--designed to protect them from evil. And when Smith started printing his own money and forming a militia, the U.S. government had him hauled off to prison, where he was killed by an angry mob. That's when the rest of the congregation marched themselves off to Utah, where, after a brief stint as polygamists, they settled down for good as respectable, God-fearing Americans.

My grandfather was obsessed with debunking the religion that tore his family apart: 'Moronism' as he called it. And what he hated about the 'Morons' was their secrecy--the windowless rooms in their temples and their secret rituals. Nothing infuriated him more than the thought of Mormons baptizing immediate family members after their deaths, undoing whatever baptism they had chosen in life.

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