United apostates of America air dirty laundry on Mormon doctrines
BY: TONY ALLEN-MILLS, WASHINGTON From: The Times April 17, 2012

THERE have been many attempts over the past decade to change the way that Mormonism is perceived by non-believers, not all of them related to Mitt Romney’s stalwart campaigns to become the first Mormon US president.

A few years back, a pair of Mormon filmmakers hit upon a bright idea that would combine the wholesome values of their faith with a decent story and interesting characters designed to appeal to a broader mainstream audience without too much recourse to polygamy jokes.

The quest for a Mormon crossover hit led to Jane Austen, the high priestess of monogamous decency, and filming duly began in the summer of 2003 on a Mormon version of Pride & Prejudice – subtitled “A latter-day comedy” set in modern-day Utah.

The film, directed by a transplanted Scot named Andrew Black, was initially subtitled “a Latter-Day comedy”, a sly wink at the Mormon church’s official name, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, widely known as the LDS.

The film should not be confused with the 2005 Hollywood version of Pride and Prejudice, which starred Keira Knightley and raked in $US120 million at the box office worldwide. Sadly, Black’s film failed to be noticed by many non-Mormons and earned only $US373,942. despite being helpfully dubbed the world’s first “Mormon chick flick”.

In a strange way, Romney’s second and more promising White House bid represents the most ambitious expression to date of Mormon yearning for mainstream acceptance. Can a minority church of unorthodox Christian credentials, born in controversy and stained by sexual and racial scandal, really provide a US president?

The big question, as Romney’s previously hesitant advance on the Republican Party’s presidential nomination begins to look secure, is whether his theologically complicated, historically provocative and widely derided faith may yet prove his ultimate undoing.

In theory, it should have no effect – the constitution separates church and state. Yet John F. Kennedy was famously obliged to defend his Catholicism against warnings that his presidency would be subordinate to the whims of the Vatican.

When Romney first ran for president in 2007, he delivered his own version of Kennedy’s “faith speech”, pledging his loyalty to “my Mormon faith . . . the faith of my fathers”. In case there was any doubt that his religious conviction might be trumped by political convenience, Romney added: “Some believe that such a confession of my faith will sink my candidacy. If they are right, so be it.”

Yet what exactly is it that this wealthy 65-year-old financier and former governor of Massachusetts believes in? And just who are these coffee-averse, teetotal Mormons inspiring so much political and theological frenzy, not to mention a successful Broadway musical based on the Mormon bible?

The church has grown at an astonishing pace since the 1820s, when a farmer’s son, Joseph Smith, claimed to have been visited by an angel named Moroni, who purportedly showed Smith the buried location of a series of engraved golden plates. These Smith would duly transcribe into the Book of Mormon, the LDS bible, which almost two centuries later remains the subject of intense devotion, rampant scepticism and wildly catchy Broadway tunes. It’s only too easy to dismiss the tale of Smith and his plates – never seen by another human – as a fabrication by a conman. Yet the church not only survived doubts about its angelic birth; it also overcame a period of persecution for its 19th-century practice of polygamy, shrugged off a nasty row over its treatment of black people – who were not admitted to the priesthood until 1978 – and has grown to become the US’s fourth-largest religious denomination with 14 million members across the world.

As its full name suggests, the LDS is part of the Christian tradition, yet many of its core beliefs, as passed down by Smith, differ radically from mainstream Christianity. The LDS belief that God and Jesus were separate entities, each with a physical body, is anathema to faiths that regard the holy trinity as indivisible.

These and many other doctrinal diversions from the Christian Bible not only explain why so many evangelical Republicans have been determined to vote for anyone but Romney, they have also persuaded prominent US churchmen such as Robert Jeffress, a popular Dallas evangelical pastor, to dismiss Mormonism as a “theological cult”.

Yet what struck me most, as I began to talk to Mormons about their beliefs, and the mockery and suspicion they must often endure, is that the church’s problems have little to do with theological nicety but a great deal to do with human frailty and the unfathomable challenges of preserving your faith when someone on the internet tells you it is fake.

Oh yes, it’s all there on the internet: polygamy, magic underwear, sinister historical tales of “delightsome” white-skinned pilgrims and their “loathsome” dark-skinned rivals, the bloggers’ tabernacle known as the Bloggernacle, and the revelation that a US magazine for homosexuals recently nominated Salt Lake City, the home of the Mormon faith, as the “gayest” city in America.

That turns out to be much of the trouble with modern Mormonism – what used to be a largely enclosed, faintly peculiar community of devout, hard-working believers has suddenly found that all of its dirty laundry is Googleable.

Who can possibly forget Joyce McKinney and the Case of the Manacled Mormon that enthralled Britain in the late 1970s? In case you’ve forgotten, just search the internet for “Mormon sex in chains”. (It’s so much more fun than “Mitt Romney healthcare”.)

Besotted with a Mormon missionary named Kirk Anderson, McKinney followed him to London, kidnapped him at gunpoint, secured him to a bed with mink-lined handcuffs and ravished him repeatedly. Eventually charged with false imprisonment, she jumped bail and fled the country, but her legacy was far from insignificant.

There is the Mormon church’s long association with polygamy, a practice it outlawed in 1890 but which continues to haunt it in the shape of extremist Mormon splinter sects, salacious TV series and an endless parade of multiple wife jokes. Those jokes once included a howler by Romney, whose attempt to make light of Mormon hostility to gay marriage prompted a slightly desperate recourse to polygamy humour: “I believe marriage should be between a man and a woman,” he quipped in Boston in 2005, “and a woman . . . and a woman . . . ”

He hasn’t repeated that one since, but his return to political prominence has ignited a perceptible sense of unease among many Mormons, who are proud of their co-religionist’s achievements yet simultaneously nervous that the higher he reaches, the more hostile and unsettling the scrutiny of Mormonism will become.

They know, if the rest of the US has forgotten, that Mormons were persecuted in the early years. Smith was murdered by an anti-Mormon mob in 1844 after campaigning for the US presidency, and the lawyer who successfully defended his killers was a founder of the Republican Party.

Not the least of the church’s problems now is the growing number of highly educated, formerly prominent Mormons who have left the LDS and are only too ready to tell the world exactly why.

As a molecular biologist studying forest trees in Brisbane, Simon Southerton was in many ways a Mormon role model. He was 10 years old when his parents joined the church and he was baptised into the faith in 1970. He rose through the ranks and became a bishop to his flock. Over the years, he was vaguely aware that some of the historical events described by the Book of Mormon did not match the archeological or scientific record. “But I hadn’t dwelt on it,” he said. He loved his church for its emphasis on families and the sense of community it fostered.

Yet there was one key aspect of church doctrine that began to trouble him. The Book of Mormon describes a migration of Israelite clans across the Atlantic to the US long before Columbus. The notion of a New Jerusalem, founded on US soil by the ancient forefathers of Mormonism, is one of the faith’s key tenets. Yet Southerton, familiar with the use of DNA to chart early human migrations, began to worry about the sheer weight of scientific evidence undermining the Book of Mormon. “Once I started looking at it seriously, it didn’t take me very long at all to realise that the Book of Mormon wasn’t real history,” he said. According to Mormon doctrine, Native Americans are descended from one of the Israelite clans. “But there’s been no serious mainstream belief in anything other than Asian origin for Native Americans for much of the last century,” Southerton added.

One night, joining his children at bedtime, he began his usual routine of singing them stories adapted from the Book of Mormon. Suddenly he found himself crying. Next morning he was no longer a Mormon.

That was just the start of Southerton’s story: the collapse of an Australian bishop’s faith sent shockwaves through the church. As it happened, his marriage was in trouble at the time and he had separated from his wife. LDS leaders took aim. When he started questioning the doctrine, he was excommunicated for adultery.

“They attempt to scare the bejesus out of you so you go back to the church,” Southerton said. “First I got a three-page diatribe from the LDS. I became ‘the bishop in Brisbane who had gone off the rails about DNA’. They put me in touch with (doctrinal) experts at Brigham Young University (the Mormon college in Utah), but it all had the reverse effect on me. Four weeks later, I was labelled a critic of the church.”

Southerton believes he was accused of adultery and not apostasy – renunciation of church beliefs – because the LDS did not want his heretical views aired at a disciplinary hearing. “They just don’t want more people hearing about uncomfortable truths . . . It was all a bit of a circus. The irony is, I reconciled with my wife and we’re still together seven years later.” The couple live in Canberra.

When Southerton left the church, the internet was still gathering steam and the Bloggernacle was in its infancy. Today, it’s a mega-network of countless Mormons and exmos (ex-Mormons), many of them engaged in passionate online dissection of everything from feminist Mormon housewives to whether God will support Romney for the presidency.

In the past, the LDS leadership could at least hope to limit the fallout from public implosions of Australian bishops; today it doesn’t stand a chance, and you need only search for the name Lyndon Lamborn to see how much havoc a dissident voice can play.

Lamborn, like Southerton, began to question key church doctrines and was rapidly excommunicated. Unlike Southerton, Lamborn turned into a very angry exmo, smothering the internet with YouTube videos, Facebook posts and blog entries, all purporting to explain the “real truth” of Mormon history – and denouncing Romney along the way.

“I’m a critical thinker and I really can’t explain why I was deceived for so long,” Lamborn said from his Arizona home. “I thought it would be a lonely, dreary transition to atheism, but the internet has opened up a whole new world.”

It’s time to meet a different Mormon, a clever, inquiring, single woman in her late-40s who faced a heartbreaking crisis of her own, yet somehow emerged with her faith intact. You won’t hear Ardis Parshall slagging off Mormon bishops, nor does she believe it is necessary to turn your back on a church because of doubts about some of its doctrines or complaints about some of its priests. “No sane person learns that some drug is ineffective and gives up on medical treatment entirely,” says Parshall, in between research stints at a Mormon archive in Salt Lake City. “But people are willing to do that with religion.” If we are looking for a glimpse of Romney’s soul, we might find a flicker in Parshall.

Born into a Mormon family that traces its roots to the great westward migrations of the 1830s, Parshall grew up in Salt Lake City “where Mormonism was just part of the air”. When she was 22, she left on a church mission to Switzerland and France, with the seemingly doomed task of persuading the locals to abandon their Pernods and Gauloises and sign up for clean-cut Mormon eternity.

“It was not the best 18 months of my life,” she says, although there were many small victories, such as the time one Frenchwoman belligerently lit up a cigarette and challenged Parshall to tell her to put it out. “I told her that we were in her home and she set the rules there,” Parshall said. “She stubbed out her cigarette then and never again smoked in our presence.”

The worst of it had nothing to do with the French. Parshall fell foul of the male leader of her mission, who seemed to enjoy her discomfort and routinely criticised her work. When Parshall fell ill, her superior “made a crude sexual joke about women’s bodies” and brusquely informed her that mission insurance would not cover a visit to a French doctor.

By the time she returned home and was seen by a US doctor, her reproductive system was so badly damaged she was told she could never have children. “I never dated – not even once – after I returned from my mission,” she says.

“The kind of man I wanted would want a family, so I believed the kind of man I wanted would not want me. All during the years when marriage was most possible, I suffered from that warped thinking and pulled away from the slightest interest shown in me.”

Another woman might have left the church on the spot, and Parshall acknowledges that for a long time she struggled with her faith. “I didn’t understand why God had abandoned me,” she says. “I began to question whether there really was a God . . . maybe it was all a fraud.”

Gradually, she concluded that her faith should not be shaken simply because one man had behaved unworthily. An early contributor to the Bloggernacle, she become one of its sanest voices, acknowledging the imperfections in the history of Mormonism, but convinced that Mormon energy and commitment remain an overwhelming force for good.

“There’s so much out there on the internet spun to make the church look bad,” she told me. “And the church doesn’t do a very good job of responding. Those of us who believe and are active online think we’re helping by being open and candid. But a more traditional answer tends to be: stay away from that evil internet.”

While the Bloggernacle buzzes with salacious stories about Joseph Smith and his polygamous marriages – one to an unwilling 14-year-old girl – Parshall still sees him as “a legitimate prophet in the same sense as the Old Testament”. She acknowledges popular revulsion with polygamy, but adds with a hint of wistfulness: “I think I understand where polygamy came from – it might have helped women like me who wanted a family but didn’t find ‘the one’.”

There is no easy middle ground between a believer such as Parshall and a bile-spewing exmo such as Lamborn, yet there’s one Mormon thinker who manages to explain how a church born of such dubious circumstances can remain a beacon of faith.

Richard Lyman Bushman is one of America’s most eminent historians – with the title of Gouverneur Morris professor emeritus at New York’s Columbia University – and remains a practising Mormon who is only too familiar with the historical and sociological anomalies of his faith. “A lot of religions begin with a miracle,” he notes. “There are many people who still believe in the literal resurrection of Christ. You wonder how such a belief can survive in an age of reason with a high degree of scepticism, yet people assimilate it into their thinking.”

Mormons may be a comparatively new entry in the crowded field of religious unorthodoxy, “but once you become accustomed to it, the bizarre, exotic side of it goes away. You may be aware that at times it seems strange to people outside, but inside, you feel comfortable with it.”

Bushman argues that there’s “something quite exciting about being on the edge of respectability. We don’t have a long tradition, there’s room for exploration. It’s a very heady mix of being innovators, mavericks.”

Yet he acknowledges that the church has real problems with prominent members who “just suddenly drop off a cliff”. He told me: “These people flock to me. I get plaintive letters saying, ‘What should I do? I’m losing my faith’. Sometimes they come limping back and recover; others are lost. There’s a debate as to why it happens and what the church can do.”

Both Lamborn and Southerton claim that “dropping off a cliff” has become a bigger threat than the church is prepared to admit. “They are bleeding at the highest levels,” Lamborn said. “They don’t know how to deal with the falsehoods in their history without losing two-thirds of their membership.”

Southerton claimed that the growth in new members of the church masks a “significant drop-off” in church attendance, not least because so many Mormons are sharing their doubts online. “The church expects you to believe things that are not only not true, but demonstrably not true,” he said. Bushman is more relaxed: “The church has become more accustomed to scrutiny . . . it doesn’t seem as threatening as before.”

All of which leaves Romney in the unusual spot of being the US’s most voluble Mormon, without a word to say on Mormon matters.

In the endless Republican debates this winter, rival candidates attacked Romney for shifting his views on abortion and healthcare and for all manner of heartless mischief on Wall Street, but no one dared raise a squeak about whether or not he wears magic underwear – the temple garments that Mormons put on for spiritual protection. Nor did they address weightier subjects such as post-mortem baptism or the racism ingrained in Smith’s Mormon doctrines.

Does it matter exactly which of Mormonism’s many controversial tenets Romney doubts or believes? If he wins the Republican nomination and faces President Barack Obama, it’s hard to imagine these questions won’t be raised. “In a way it will be wonderful if he does become president, one of our guys sitting (in the White House),” Bushman said. “But the question will remain how much good it will do to the church.”

The Sunday Times

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/united-apostates-of-america-air-dirty-laundry-on-mormon-doctrines/story-fnb64oi6-1226328122436