Salt Lake City
A reminder to me that Mormonism remains a missionary religion is that the young women in long print dresses passing me on the sidewalk in the vicinity of Temple Square give me huge smiles—an impulse young women elsewhere have long learned to resist.
When I venture into the church museum or its neighbouring Family Research Library, I am asked by staff whether I am a member of the church. If I gently resist their ministrations, they gently persist.
The story of Mormonism has so many classic American elements: religious revelation, revival and zeal; proselytization; persecution; violence; migration; racism; prosperity; even, weirdly enough, constitutionalism.
There’s a lot of construction around Temple Square at the moment—a measure of the wealth of the church. (60 Minutes did an exposé last night claiming the church has more than $100 billion in investments—money that ultimately arises from tithes on ordinary members.)
Despite the construction, I was able to tour the hall where the Mormon Tabernacle Choir lift their voices. A guide illustrated the acoustics by dropping a nail on the pulpit, which I could clearly hear clearly three-quarters of the way back.
Across the street is the museum, which tells the tale of Joseph Smith’s revelation, first from God the Father and Jesus, and later from the Angel Moroni and various prophets. A guide draws my attention to golden plates, replicas of those Smith discovered at the direction of the Angel. She says they are in “Arabic”, which they are plainly not. Smith interpreted the otherwise indecipherable script with the help of special spectacles given to him by Moroni, and that became the Book of Mormon.
If it all seems a little absurd (which it does) it’s partly because the Mormons’ origin story does not have the sanctification of time, as do for example, Jesus’ rising from the dead after three whole days or Mohammed’s ride to Jerusalem on a winged steed brought to him by the Angel Gabriel.
The Mormon museum features an immersive film in which we witness Joseph Smith’s first vision, and then we follow him as his little band of followers expands, but equally inspires the rage of neighbours, and the faithful are pushed progressively west in a series of violent encounters.
Smith himself was killed by a mob who seized him from the town jail in Carthage, Illinois in 1844 where he was awaiting trial for destroying a rival’s printing press. It was left to Brigham Young to lead the flock to the other side of the Rockies, where those who survived the harrowing journey settled in the Salt Lake Valley in what is now Utah. Their fierce constitutionalism, despite the fact that the constitutional authorities seem to have deserted them at every turn, was apparently a way of insisting that they were “normal” Americans.
The museum treads lightly over Smith’s polygamy, which came as a result of a revelation, it claims. The information in the museum emphasizes Smith’s reluctance to accept the practice, despite the encouragement of celestial visions, and it generously suggests that his secretiveness about his many wives was out of fear of being misunderstood. After long remaining quiet about Smith’s polygamy, the church recently officially accepted that he took more than 30 Mormon women as wives during his lifetime.
The practice of polygamy became open after Smith’s death. Brigham Young, who was introduced to it by Smith, had 56 wives. (Surprisingly, he managed to produce only 57 children.)
Polygamy was proscribed by the church in 1890, which paved the way for Utah to become a state. It continued quietly for some time, however, and persists still among splinter groups.
Both Smith and Young attributed the skin colour of Black people to the Curse of Cain and the Curse of Ham and the church has been openly racist through most of its history. Blacks were not admitted to the higher orders of the church and righteous Blacks were long thought to become white after death. Blacks were admitted to the priesthood in 1978 and the church has gradually opened up. Apparently Gladys Knight became a Mormon.
I may have missed it, but I saw no reference to any of this racial history in the museum, though the recent iconography was obviously multiracial. Maybe none of this is surprising. I don’t know how deeply they go into the Inquisition at the Vatican museum.
I also poked into the church’s Family Search Library, which a librarian told me is the largest repository of genealogical records in the world. She pressed me to have a try at one of the computers, and I quickly found records about my late father. I decided not to go any further and create an account as I was encouraged to do. The Mormons’ interest in genealogy stems from the belief that you can retroactively baptize relatives into the faith—something I am sure my Catholic father would prefer not to happen to him.
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Potatoes
Before I was in Utah, I spent some time in Idaho.
The Idaho license plate says “Scenic Idaho” on the top, one of those meaningless slogans devised by ad people to promote tourism, similar to “Beautiful British Columbia”, “Virginia is for Lovers” and—a personal favourite—”visitPA.com”.
However, at the bottom of the Idaho license plate is an addendum that seems to cast a shaft of light into the state’s character. “Famous Potatoes”
It is simultaneously humble and disconcertingly insecure. After all, the truly famous don’t need to be proclaimed as such. No one says “famous pop star Beyoncé” or “famous former president, Donald Trump”.
By explicitly declaring that its potatoes are famous, Idaho seems to be concerned that some people might not quite realize that they are. I would like them to drop the “Famous” and have the courage to go with straight-up “Potatoes” in the hope that those who do not understand will at least be intrigued.
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Politics
Speaking of Donald Trump, I have genuinely been trying to keep politics out of this Substack to the extent I can and I have been greatly assisted in this by the surprising absence of public proclamations of opinion on next year’s presidential election that I have seen. In the ten or eleven days I have been down here in the US, I have come across only two expressions of interest, exactly polarized:
I am going to post a little bit about all this in the next week or so. Two and a half months is not as much as it may seem for a journey of this magnitude, given the challenges of doing this in an EV.
That’s a nice post Paul, filled with info and insight.
When I was in Salt Lake City a few years ago my crew and I dined near the Temple and had the opportunity to sample some of the microbrewery fare on the menu such as a beer called “Why Have Only One?” another labeled “Take Some Home for the Wives” and so one. Not surprisingly the Mormon establishment turned out not to have a sense of humour about that sort of thing and I believe they used some muscle to persuade the proprietors to wisecrack in a different direction.