Joe Smith's Excellent Adventure

I remember reading in the news a few years back about a big, home-grown National Organization of Women demonstration surrounding the main temple in Salt Lake City. There was a lot of other female emancipation activity within the LDS Church going on at that time, if memory serves me, and I remember thinking that women who entertained hope that such a paternalistic institution as that might loosen up a bit were asking the leopard to change his spots.

Throughout my life I've known quite a few Mormons of all varieties, lapsed, "jack," and devout, and sometimes I feel like I've spent large parts of my life trying to avoid the Mormon Church. I'm scared by it, in the same way I'm scared by the movie versions of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," but at the same time fascinated by it. Sometimes I think it's chasing me.

Most of what I know about the LDS I learned from Fawn M. Brodie. If you're Mormon, I'll bet you're already familiar with her, so I probably don't have to tell you that she grew up in Utah, that her family was very prominent in the church hierarchy, that her paternal Uncle David O. McKay was president of the church, that her first book was "No Man Knows My History," a biography and expose of the career of "The Prophet" Mr. Smith, that she was excommunicated and generally condemned in Utah, not just as a heretic but as a traitor to her religion, her community, her family, etc., that she wrote four other successful biographies including a ground-breaking account of Thomas Jefferson's personal life and multi-racial descendants, and that she died after a successful career as a history professor at UCLA, respected, affluent, and influential. My kind of person, in short.

I read "No Man Knows My History" years ago and don't recall it perfectly, but I remember the important parts of it: a poor kid in Pennsylvania with an overactive imagination hatches some gold-discovery and -digging schemes which come to nothing of course, and this adolescent impulse gradually metamorphoses into a vision of a hoard of golden discs or plates inscribed in a formerly unknown language with the auxiliary Biblical scriptures of a lost Tribe of Israel which had been stranded in the New World, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum and ad nauseaum. The whole towering, swaying, fantastic edifice was built up piece by piece and brick by brick over a relatively short time, crowned by the appearance of one of the most curious literary works under the sun.

I find the Book of Mormon interesting, but unreadable. Mark Twain called it "chloroform in print." I've never known what to make of people who give credence to it. It's an incredible flight of imaginative and ludicrous fancy, and supplies the template for home-grown American religions from our early days down to the present, a bizarre landscape littered with millennial end-times cults, elaborate, complex, and thoroughly articulated fantasies such as the Urantia Book, and insane messiahs like Jemimah Wilkinson.

All these exuberant and excessive effusions of Spirituality Gone Wild are way too loud, rich, and flecked with the saliva of hysteria for someone as deeply planted in quiet skepticism as your humble narrator. I don't really know enough about the how or why of the universe to claim knowledge of anything, but I'm solidly convinced, as a lifelong and vaguely deistic Unitarian, that if there even is a God at all, there's only one of her, and that her outstanding trait, as far as humans are concerned, is unknowability.

The Buddha asked, "Why engage in vain speculation? We know that all things are fixed by causation, so let us practice good, so that good may result from our actions."