“JOSEPH SMITH WAS A LIAR!”
Flanked by a handful of fellow evangelists holding signs describing with gravitas and acrylic paint the various ways Mormonism had earned God’s wrath, a middle-aged, thickly stubbled man in blue jeans, tucked-in t-shirt, and baseball hat cried repentance from his bullhorn into the gathering crowds of Mormon pilgrims who poured out of cars and tour buses in the parking-lot pasture in front of him. Despite the volume and bold declarations, he sounded almost bored, as though the real effort had been just showing up and now all he needed to do was stay on-script and cycle through a handful of hastily memorized anti-Mormon tropes and supposedly relevant Bible verses. The tinny calls to repentance went unacknowledged by the Mormons here this evening to see the famous “Hill Cumorah Pageant,” Hill Cumorah being the place where, in 1823 and under the direction of an angel named Moroni, Joseph Smith dug up a collection of ancient religious writings etched onto golden plates, its final chapters written by the same Moroni in his pre-angelic days around 412 A.D., the pageant being a sequence of ambitiously staged highlights pulled from the plates to tell a centuries-spanning story of the tragic collapse of a once-righteous civilization somewhere on the American continent. Not long after their discovery, Smith translated the plates into The Book of Mormon and close to two centuries later, between 1997 and 1999, in a faltering Spanish learned solely for proselyting, I tried to persuade the people of Uruguay to read and believe it.
Another nineteen years after that— last month— on an oppressively humid July 14, I arrived in Palmyra, New York on a somewhat casual pilgrimage to see the handful of Mormon historical sites in the area: the log house where Joseph Smith lived as a child, the grove of trees nearby where God and Jesus visited him when he was fourteen (though his earliest accounts of the experience only mentioned the visitation of angels), the Whitmer farm where the church was legally organized, and Hill Cumorah, among other sites. The Mormon church has made a substantial effort over the years to purchase land where significant events in its history occurred and has for the most part returned them to their early-19th century condition, letting the land go wild in some places, restoring or building replicas of original structures in others such as the Smith family log home, or putting a chapel or visitor’s center on the property. At all the sites, earnest young “sister missionaries” and older missionary couples stationed as docents receive the thousands of visitors who make their way there throughout the year.
I was at the pageant this evening out of uncynical curiosity, having been raised on rumors of its epic scope and the occasional tantalizing photograph of it in the church newspaper. The pageant was ‘added value’ to the Palmyra experience. Premiering in 1937 as a missionary and devotional effort, it aimed to attract non-Mormons and help them “feel the Spirit,” but was probably most effective in bolstering the already converted. In 2018, the existence of the pageant seemed a curious holdover from an earlier iteration of Mormonism, before the church had gone significantly global and its provincial personality had been increasingly edged out by the need to stay on-message and consistent across the several dozens of languages and cultures that comprise its present-day membership, a time when we kids jokingly bandied quotes amongst ourselves from the seminary school video and object lesson, “Johnny Lingo,” in which the protagonist teaches his fellow villagers on a Polynesian island the true worth of a soul by paying not one, not two, but eight cows as dowry for his would-be bride, the shy social pariah, “ugly” Mahana. Lingo’s insistence on paying eight cows caused quite a stir on the island. He must have gone mad, they reasoned, to have paid eight cows when her father had only asked for three and secretly would have accepted just one. They couldn’t comprehend that wise Johnny Lingo saw Mahana’s true value behind her cowering disguise and this was his way of letting her know: she was an ‘eight cow wife!’ The moral is delivered in the final scene with the reveal of a confident and radiant Mahana. The film’s heart is in the right place and, when charitably viewed as an artifact from a different era, is still charming. Enterprising Mormons have since produced t-shirts proudly announcing the wearer as an ”eight cow wife” which are still worn, mostly ironically, by 20 and 30-something Mormons in the same way you, along with those same Mormons, who weren’t raised entirely in a bubble, might wear an “E.T.” or “Goonies never say die!” t-shirt today. The digressive point here is that if you weren’t a Mormon in the 80s and 90s, you missed out on some pretty great niche pop culture.
In Palmyra, I kind of missed being Mormon.
Technically I still am Mormon; my name has yet to be removed from the church’s roster by excommunication or by my own formal request. Officially, I’d be called “inactive.” In spirit, I’m still pretty Mormon, too, if not in doctrinal belief or practice, in heritage and psychological profile. How could I escape the influence of almost two-hundred years of religious devotion on both sides of the family tree, or the first twenty some-odd years of my own life when being Mormon was the cornerstone of my identity? I couldn’t amputate that part of myself even if I wanted to, although I did try from time to time. Mostly I tried to ignore it.
I missed being a believing and participating Mormon the way you miss a former lover you’ve moved on from but who you still care about, and who shaped your life even though you have no desire to get back together with her. The kind of missing that’s fond, perhaps wistful, but not tying your stomach in knots with desire or pain. Even as recently as a year ago, I’m not sure I could have seen this Mormon milieu in Palmyra with the curiosity and interest I had now. I’d never been angry with the Mormon church or felt betrayed by its at-times condemnable self-protective behavior in the way many of my friends and family have, but I did still lack a critical rapprochement with it that would allow me to do something like visit Palmyra and pay homage to my religious roots.
Mormons speak of placing the tricky and troubling parts of their religion that they’re not sure what to do with “on the shelf” where they sit until they are at last integrated into the individual’s faith, or until the shelf can no longer carry its burdens, at which point the whole thing comes crashing down and a major restructuring of faith or its abandonment altogether becomes existentially necessary. I kept my own religious doubts on the shelf for most of my twenties until, weakened by years of supporting a growing weight its screws weren’t graded to hold, in an instant— while I was reading a book in the bathroom of my apartment in Utah, to be exact— it pulled away from the wall and there was no putting things back despite my frantic efforts to do so.
Unbeknownst to me, I had other shelves for other unresolved things in life and after my belief in Mormonism fell apart, my entire relationship and history with it ended up on one of of those shelves, not for future reconsideration or to hedge my bets with a lingering question mark— it was a dead question to me by then— but because Mormonism is inescapably part of my past and who I still am. Understanding this but not knowing what to do with it now that I didn’t believe, nor knowing who I was without it, onto a shelf the entire thing went where it remained as a psychic fragment for over a decade.
And here I am now! With an empty shelf and in Palmyra to see where the whole thing started. I may be “over” my days of devout Mormonism but being here reminded me of someone I once was and I couldn’t help but enjoy the memories from those communal days of young and certain love. Even this adamant Samuel the Lamanite crying an amplified repentance from the sidewalk to the benighted “chosen” Nephites brought a nostalgic smile to my face at the memory of a time when it was ‘us against the world’ and exciting, not to mention validating, to be persecuted by sign-holding sectarians who took us seriously.
Fastened to poles throughout the parking lot, speakers played alternately triumphant and ominous orchestral music, designed, I assumed, to get attendees in the mood to be spiritually moved as well as to provide evangelist-cancelling white noise, and only partially succeeding at either. The undeterred t-shirt tucking ‘voice in the wilderness’ continued:
“JESUS SAID, ‘MANY WILL COME IN MY NAME CLAIMING, “I AM THE MESSIAH,” AND WILL DECEIVE MANY.’”
[pause to let the gravity of the situation sink in]
“YOUR JESUS IS SPIRIT BROTHER TO SATAN! YOUR JESUS WILL CONDEMN YOU TO HELL.”
[swell of violins and jubilant brass]
“YOU MUST CONFESS YOUR SINS TO GOD IN HEAVEN…”
[rumbling timpani]
“THE NEWSPAPER REVIEW SAID THE PAGEANT WAS LIKE A HOLLYWOOD PRODUCTION… THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT IT IS. THE PAGEANT IS A LIE. JOSEPH SMITH WAS A FALSE PROPHET!”
By the time I reached the end of the parking lot, the evangelist’s voice had been lost in the distance between us and I passed unchallenged through the open gates into the pageant grounds.