Under the Banner of Heaven (11 page)

Nine months after the translation was completed, the 588-page book finally rolled off the presses and went on sale in the printer’s brick storefront in downtown Palmyra. Little more than a week after that—on April 6, 1830—Joseph formally incorporated the religion that we know today as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The religion’s foundation—its sacred touchstone and guiding scripture—was the translation of the gold plates, which bore the title
The Book of Mormon.

SIX

CUMORAH

The authority that Mormonism promised rested not on the subtlety of its theology. It rested on an appeal to fresh experience
—
a set of witnessed golden tablets that had been translated into a book whose language sounded biblical. Joseph Smith instinctively knew what all other founders of new American religions in the nineteenth century instinctively knew. Many Americans of that period, in part because of popular enthusiasm for science, were ready to listen to any claim that appealed to something that could be interpreted as empirical evidence.

R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans

Today, no less than in the nineteenth century, the Hill Cumorah is one of the holiest sites in all of Mormondom, and sooner or later most Latter-day Saints make a pilgrimage here. To a Utah Mormon, accustomed to the eleven-thousand-foot peaks of the Wasatch Front thrusting heavenward like the teeth of God over Temple Square and the City of the Saints, Cumorah’s puny dimensions must come as something of a disappointment. A mound of glacial scrapings left behind after the last ice age, it humps up no more than a couple of hundred feet above the surrounding cornfields, and most of Cumorah is shrouded in a gloomy tangle of vegetation.

All the same, this modest drumlin is the highest landform in the vicinity, and from its crest one can glimpse the office towers of downtown Rochester, twenty miles distant, shimmering through the midsummer haze. The summit is adorned with an American flag and an imposing statue of the angel Moroni. On the slope beneath Moroni’s massive, sandaled feet, the unruly forest has been cleared and a broad swath of the hillside planted with impeccably groomed bluegrass. Somewhere on this part of Cumorah, 175 years ago, Joseph Smith dug up the golden plates that launched the Mormon faith.

It’s a steamy evening in mid-July, and more than ten thousand Saints are politely streaming into the meadow at the drumlin’s base, on which rows of plastic seats have been set up to accommodate them. Immediately above the meadow, a multilevel stage, half as big as a football field, covers the hill’s lower apron, surrounded by a steel forest of fifty-foot light towers. The elaborate stage, the lights, and the Mormon throngs all materialize here every summer for “The Hill Cumorah Pageant: America’s Witness for Christ,” which is due to begin at sunset.

According to promotional materials published by the LDS Church, the pageant is “America’s largest and most spectacular outdoor theatrical event… a magnificent, family-oriented production,” replete with arresting special effects straight out of Hollywood: “volcanoes, fireballs, and explosions with sound effects from the movie ‘Earthquake.” A prophet is burned at the stake. Lightning strikes the mast of a ship. A 5,000K carbon arc-light ’star‘ (with FAA clearance) appears at the Nativity scene. Christ appears in the night sky, descends, teaches the people, then ascends into the night sky and disappears.“ The pageant, which has been staged here since 1937, is held for seven nights every July, and draws near-capacity crowds each night. Admission is free.

As dusk settles, the soothing harmonies of the Utah Symphony Orchestra and Mormon Tabernacle Choir drift over the field from concert loudspeakers. Two squads of sheriff’s deputies direct traffic into pastures that have been transformed into vast parking lots. A surging tide of Saints is now moving from their cars and chartered buses toward the seats, and as they traverse Highway 21 to reach the meadow beneath Cumorah they are confronted with grim-faced clumps of anti-Mormon picketers.

The demonstrators, who belong to evangelical Christian denominations, wave hand-lettered placards and shout angrily at the Mormons: “Joseph Smith was a whoremonger!”

There is only one gospel!“

“
The Book of Mormon
is a big fairy tale!”

“Mormons are NOT Christians!”

Most of the Mormons stroll quietly past the ranting evangelicals, unperturbed, without rising to the bait. “Oh, gosh, we’re used to that kind of thing,” says Brother Richard, a wide, cheerful man with liver spots and a comb-over, who brags that he has twenty-eight grandchildren. He and his wife drove here in a thirty-seven-foot Pace Arrow from Mesa, Arizona. This is their eighth visit to the pageant.

“Come the judgment, we’ll see who winds up in the Celestial Kingdom and who doesn’t,” Richard muses. “But just between you and me? Them folks waving the signs is the ones that should be worried.” As this thought escapes his lips, the glint in his eye momentarily vanishes and his guileless face darkens with pity. “The Lord allows everyone to choose for themselves whether to see the truth or ignore it. You can’t force a man to heaven, even though it’s for his own good.”

The LDS Church produces the Hill Cumorah Pageant at no small expense. Although non-Saints are encouraged to attend, and the church considers the flamboyant shows a powerful tool in its tireless efforts to convert the world, more than 95 percent of the people in attendance belong to the church already. Mostly the pageant functions as a Mormon jamboree, an occasion for members of the tribe to gather at their place of origin and celebrate one another’s testimonies of faith.

The pageant has the energy of a Phish concert, but without the drunkenness, outlandish hairdos (Brother Richard’s comb-over notwithstanding), or clouds of marijuana smoke. People started arriving hours ago to claim the best seats. While they wait for the show to start, families sprawl on blankets along the edges of the meadow, eating fried chicken and Jell-O salad from plastic coolers. Clean-cut teenagers, shrieking gleefully, toss Frisbees and water balloons in the gloaming. Order, needless to say, prevails. This is a culture that considers obedience to be among the highest virtues.

The sun finally skids behind the horizon in an ozone-enhanced blaze of orange. A scrubbed Mormon “elder,” in his early twenties, walks out and leads the audience in a heartfelt prayer. A few seconds after he finishes there is a fanfare of trumpets, and lasers pierce the night sky with shafts of dazzling light. A thrill ripples through the crowd. Great billows of ersatz fog roll across lower Cumorah. Emerging from the mist, 627 actors march onto stage, costumed as a curious menage of biblical figures and pre-Columbian North Americans, some wearing headgear adorned with towering antlers.

Suddenly a disembodied voice—a stern baritone that sounds like it could belong to God Himself—thunders from the seventy-five loudspeakers: “This is the true story of a people who were prepared by the Lord to be ready for the coming of the savior, Jesus Christ. He came to them in the Americas, but their story began in the Old World, in Jerusalem…” For the next two hours, the rapt audience is treated to a dramatic reenactment of
The Book of Mormon.

The narrative inscribed on the golden plates, translated by Joseph Smith as
The Book of Mormon,
is the history of an ancient Hebrew tribe, headed by a virtuous man named Lehi. In raising his large brood, Lehi drummed into the heads of his offspring that the most important thing in life is to earn God’s love, and the one and only way to do that, he explained, is to obey the Lord’s every commandment.

Lehi and his followers abandoned Jerusalem six hundred years before the birth of Christ, just ahead of the last Babylonian conquest, and journeyed to North America by boat. In the New World, alas, long-simmering family jealousies flared. Lehi had always favored his youngest and most exemplary son, Nephi, so it shouldn’t have surprised anybody when the old man bequeathed leadership of the tribe to him.* But this infuriated Nephi’s miscreant brother Laman, causing the tribe to split into two rival clans after Lehi’s passing: the righteous, fair-skinned Nephites, led by Nephi, and their bitter adversaries, the Lamanites, as the followers of Laman were known. The Lamanites were “an idle people, full of mischief and subtlety,” whose behavior was so annoying to God that He cursed the whole lot of them with dark skin to punish them for their impiety.

*Even abridged,
The Book of Mormon
is a fantastically complex story that requires no small effort to digest, and the names of the protagonists do not always lodge easily in the non-Mormon memory. But an attempt to recall Moroni and Nephi will be rewarded later in this book, for both these fabled personages figure in the modern saga of Dan Lafferty.

Shortly after the resurrection of Christ, according to
The Book of Mormon,
Jesus visited North America to share His new gospel with the Nephites and Lamanites and to persuade the two clans to quit squabbling. Heeding His message, for several hundred years they united amicably as Christians and prospered. But then the Lamanites began to backslide into “unbelief and idolatry.” An unbridgeable rift developed between the clans, and they fought each other with escalating violence.

Tensions continued to build, eventually sparking a full-blown war that culminated, around A.D. 400, with a brutal campaign in which the reprobate Lamanites slaughtered all 230,000 of the Nephites (which explains why Columbus encountered no Caucasians when he landed in the New World in 1492). Facing starvation, the handful of Nephite children clinging to life at war’s end were forced to cannibalize the flesh of dead family members, but in the end they, too, succumbed. The victorious Lamanites survived to become the ancestors of the modern American Indians, although eventually these “red sons of Israel” lost all memory of both the Nephites and their Judaic heritage.

The leader of the Nephites during their final, doomed battles had been a heroic figure of uncommon wisdom named Mormon; the last Nephite to survive the genocidal wrath of the Lamanites was Mormon’s son Moroni, whose account of the Nephites’ demise makes up the final chapter of
The Book of Mormon.
This same Moroni would return as an angel fourteen centuries later to deliver the golden plates to Joseph Smith, so that the blood-soaked history of his people could be shared with the world, and thereby effect the salvation of mankind.

The Book of Mormon
has been much derided by non-Mormons since before it was even published. Critics point out that the gold plates, which would presumably prove the book’s authenticity, were conveniently returned to Moroni after Joseph completed his translation, and they haven’t been seen since. Scholars have observed that no archaeological artifacts with links to the supposedly advanced and widespread Nephite civilization have ever been found in North America or anywhere else.

As history, moreover,
The Book of Mormon
is riddled with egregious anachronisms and irreconcilable inconsistencies. For instance, it makes many references to horses and wheeled carts, neither of which existed in the Western Hemisphere during the pre-Columbian era. It inserts such inventions as steel and the seven-day week into ancient history long before such things were in fact invented. Modern DNA analysis has conclusively demonstrated that American Indians are not descendants of any Hebraic race, as the Lamanites were purported to be. Mark Twain famously ridiculed
The Book of Mormon’s
tedious, quasi-biblical prose as “chloroform in print,” observing that the phrase “and it came to pass” is used more than two thousand times.

But such criticism and mockery are largely beside the point. All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith. And faith, by its very definition, tends to be impervious to intellectual argument or academic criticism. Polls routinely indicate, moreover, that nine out of ten Americans believe in God—most of us subscribe to one brand of religion or another. Those who would assail
The Book of Mormon
should bear in mind that its veracity is no more dubious than the veracity of the Bible, say, or the Qur’an, or the sacred texts of most other religions. The latter texts simply enjoy the considerable advantage of having made their public debut in the shadowy recesses of the ancient past, and are thus much harder to refute.

In any case, like a movie that is panned by New York critics yet goes on to become a huge blockbuster in the hinterlands, the tremendous popularity of
The Book of Mormon
makes it impossible to dismiss. The sheer quantity of copies in print—at last count over a hundred million—lends the book a certain gravitas, even among cynics. The numbers speak eloquently to the book’s power as a sacred symbol and its raw narrative force. The simple truth is,
The Book of Mormon
tells a story that multitudes have found compelling—and continue to find compelling, as the swarms who flock to the Hill Cumorah Pageant every July attest.

In early nineteenth-century America, vestiges of a previous civilization—ruins such as the many Indian burial mounds near Joseph’s home—were everywhere.
The Book of Mormon
explained the origins of these ancient tumuli in a way that dovetailed neatly with both Christian scripture and a theory then in wide circulation, which posited that the American Indians were descended from the lost tribes of Israel. Joseph’s book worked both as theology and as a literal history of the New World. To an awful lot of people, the story makes perfect sense.

Joseph began winning converts almost immediately after he received the plates from Moroni, well before the book was printed and made public. The excitement conveyed by Martin Harris, Joseph’s parents and siblings, and others who swore they had actually “seen and hefted” the “golden bible” convinced their friends and associates to become “Mormonites,” as the Latter-day Saints were initially called. When the Mormon Church was formally established in April 1830, it claimed some fifty members. A year later the membership exceeded one thousand, and fresh converts were arriving all the time.