And I, Nephi, did build a temple; and I did construct it after the manner of the temple of Solomon save it were not built of so many precious things; for they were not to be found upon the land, wherefore, it could not be built like unto Solomon’s temple. But the manner of the construction was like unto the temple of Solomon; and the workmanship thereof was exceedingly fine.

—2 Nephi 5:16

Tuesday evening I entered a Latter-day Saint temple for the first time in over a decade.

Don't have a stroke—it wasn't a religious relapse. The LDS Church has taken its blocky, six-story meetinghouse near Lincoln Center in Manhattan and hewn from its rocky heart a new temple. (I've touched on the subject of this construction project in earlier writings.) This edifice is open to the public, more or less, through June 5, after which it will be closed to heathen, given a final hard spit and polish, and dedicated to Elohim, as God is known to His friends. My wife Laura and I, along with three intrepid friends, were fortunate enough to attach ourselves to a tour this week.

Having returned, I shall soon report. (If you happen ever to have experienced a Mormon temple endowment ceremony and possess an evolved sense of irreverence, you are busting a gut at that line. Otherwise you're either scratching your head or reaching for a firearm.) But first, a brief word about temples.

A temple-building people

To members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or, less correctly, Mormons), a temple is a building much more holy than a standard Sunday meetinghouse. It is a place where sacred ordinances, or ceremonies, such as baptism for the dead, endowment, and celestial marriage are performed. After its dedication, a temple can only be entered by a worthy member of the LDS Church who carries the proper authorization, in the form of a wallet-sized card signed by his ecclesiastical leaders. It it quite literally, to the faithful, the House of the Lord.

The Church has more than 10,000 meetinghouses scattered around the globe and is building more a rate greater than one every day. Of temples, however, they have only 117 in operation, with a dozen or so others announced or under construction. It should be noted, though, that the number of temples worldwide has far outpaced the growth of Church membership in the past 25 years. Only 17 of those 117 were operational before 1979.

Temple ordinances are so critical to eternal salvation that, in earlier decades, Mormons in remote locales might save for years so they could travel ten thousand miles to spend a day or two in the House of the Lord, and count it money well spent. Nowadays temple attendance is becoming far more convenient for the average Saint. The blessed members of Manhattan, for instance, must no longer make the arduous trek to Boston or D.C. to save their souls and the souls of their ancestors.

But I'm getting ahead of the story.

What really goes on in there?

My little gang of five—Bob, Jim, Liz, Laura and I—met up on the sidewalk in front of the Manhattan temple at about 7:45 pm on Tuesday, May 18. Of the group, I was the only one who had ever been LDS, let alone seen the inside of a Mormon temple. The other four were raised Catholic, though the indoctrination didn't stick with any of them.

Bob and I had ridden the subway uptown together from work. On the way, he said, "I understand why I'm interested in taking this tour—I'm curious, and everything I see is going to be new to me. But it's less clear why you want to subject yourself to it again."

It was a fair statement. "I haven't been inside a temple since 1992 or 1993," I said, "and then it was mostly the older, established temples. I'm curious to see what the newer ones, where they've streamlined the processes more, look like inside. I'm also curious to see what they will and won't show us, and how they've crammed all the functions into a couple of floors of that building."

Construction equipment still littered the sidewalk, and from all the plywood on the exterior of the building it seemed that restorations to the marble-looking façade were still in progress. A contingent of a dozen young, fresh-scrubbed missionaries waiting outside the entrance to greet arrivals and lure in unsuspecting passersby. At curbside, beyond the LDS property line, stood two or three anti-Mormon pamphleteers, each with his or her own street display. The one nearest us wore a T-shirt reading TRUST JESUS and stood beside a sign detailing what "really" goes on inside a Mormon temple, complete with drawings of little figures in funny robes and hats embracing and making strange gestures. He handed me a booklet published by New Testament Ministries of New Bedford, Texas, in which a couple named Richard and Cindy Benson related their progress from Mormonism to the true worship of Christ. (I skimmed it later and found nothing very interesting about it, with no accusations against the Church I hadn't encountered before.)

Lest anyone be confused, an official-looking sign near the missionary cohort said something to the effect that opinions proferred outside temple property were decidedly not the views of the LDS Church.

Our gang of five chatted idly for a few minutes in the cool evening. Laura smoked a cigarette for the benefit of the watching missionaries. At about five minutes to eight we ran their gauntlet—with a brief pause to allow the elders to check our shoulder bags for bombs and video cameras—and entered the temple.

Busy little bees

To be more accurate, we entered the meetinghouse, negotiated a dogleg turn right and left, and congregated with twenty or so other tourgoers in a small foyer. As we would learn in a few minutes more, the temple occupies the fifth and sixth floors of the building, and a portion of the first. We were waiting in the non-temple portion.

The lighting was bright and the walls very white. The room was finished in a trim that looked like a prefabricated wood veneer—neat and clean, semi-ornate, but a little cheap-looking. I realized as we waited for an elevator to arrive that I was nervous. What feelings or flashbacks might arise as I ventured again into the sacred-not-secret guts of a Mormon temple? Would my observations remain clinical, or would the experience scare me? Would the feelings themselves end up scaring me? It wouldn't be the first time my indoctrination overrode my reason.

Our group piled into a wide elevator that would ferry us to the third floor. The interior was all done in the same wood veneer, with a large beehive in bas-relief on each panel. The elevator operator was a portly, balding missionary whose nametag read ELDER BUSH. (He didn't look much older than 22 or 23. Male Mormon missionaries are infamous for premature baldness.) Someone asked if the beehive symbol was religiously significant. Elder Bush said no, it was just a symbol of industry and diligence.

His point was debatable, but I didn't feel I should take up the challenge. The beehive appears in many Church contexts, and also on the flag and seal of the state of Utah. Its provenance is a passage in the Book of Mormon describing the arrival in the Western Hemisphere of an ancient people fleeing the confounding of languages at the Tower of Babel:

And they did also carry with them deseret, which, by interpretation, is a honey bee; and thus they did carry with them swarms of bees, and all manner of that which was upon the face of the land, seeds of every kind.

—Ether 2:3

On the basis of this verse, early Mormons seized on "Deseret" as the name for their new territory, and the industriousness of bees as their watchword. ("Industry" is still Utah's state motto.) Of course, you only see the beehive as a religious symbol if you regard the Book of Mormon as a purely religious work. A person can only see it otherwise if he believes the Book of Mormon to be literal history. An esoteric argument for a different day.

Souls in limbo

On the third floor, we were deposited in a large chapel to wait for the start of our tour. The five of us slid into a long pew in the center section. There were maybe forty other people in the chapel, many of them missionaries. The chapel itself was stark. The ceiling was high, with two row of unadorned white globes hanging from the ceiling, giving off light. The walls were white and devoid of ornamentation except for the front wall behind the dais, where a large square patch of primer indicated where painting had yet to be completed. The wooden pews, at least, were solid and stained dark, and had upholstered cushioning.

I tried not to think about the three or four sacrament meetings I had attended in that very chapel, during my brief backslide in 1998.

"I can't get over how bright it is," said Bob when we were seated.

"More used to churches being gloomy and dim?" I asked.

"Sepulchral."

"Mormons aren't big on gloomy churches. Every one I've ever seen has been pretty bright and airy. Of course, most of those were lined with big windows on both sides. This one doesn't even have any windows, which makes the brightness more remarkable."

"This isn't exactly a typical Mormon building," said Jim, who has an uncle who converted to Mormonism years back. "But is this chapel pretty much the same as what you'd see in most churches?"

"Very much so," I said. "The size and layout of the room are very standard."

"That's what I seemed to remember from some of the times we went with my uncle to something at his church," said Jim. "I also notice that you don't see a lot of decoration inside here. Will there be any when the renovation is finished?"

"Mormons don't go in much for iconography in their churches," I said, "though it's a little different in a temple. You wouldn't even see the beehives in most churches, and you won't ever see any crosses."

"Yeah, yeah," said Liz. "I was noticing there weren't any of those around."

"Mormons don't use the cross at all as an icon. You might see some paintings here and there in a Mormon church, but nothing in the chapel itself. Maybe a portrait of Jesus at the front, but that would be about it."

We spoke in hushed voices, like everyone else in the chapel was doing, a group of souls in bright limbo. After another minute or two of chat, a medium-sized fellow in a suit and tie entered the chapel and stepped up to the first pew. He had sandy-grey hair, a youthful face, and a neatly trimmed, almost military-style mustache. A white name badge pinned to his lapel identified him as a volunteer temple worker.

"Is this our tour group?" the man asked in a voice so soft we could barely hear it in the fifth row. He was speaking to us all, but he bent his head in such a way that he seemed only to be looking at the people in the first pew. "Welcome to the House of the Lord. I'm Brother Creigh—you'll find that we all call each other 'Brother' and 'Sister' in the Church—and I'll be your guide here on this tour of the Manhattan New York Temple. We're excited that you're here to learn more about what we do here. We just ask that you help us preserve the atmosphere of reverence in the temple during your visit, and remind you that no picture-taking is permitted."

Brother Creigh turned out to be that soft-spoken for the rest of the tour, although most of the time we were in rooms quiet and close enough that there was no trouble hearing him. After a bit more introductory patter, he led our group of twenty or so out of the chapel down a hall.

Better than most corporate productions

We filed obediently into a small classroom filled with four or five rows of stackable upholstered chairs. At the front of the room, a television sat atop a tall rolling A/V cart which was shrouded in white cloth, like an altar. The television screen showed the DVD VIDEO logo. A volunteer handed us each a pair of elastic-topped white plastic slippers to wear over our shoes. These would protect the light-colored temple carpets from our shoes during our tour. It made me feel as if we were visiting a semiconductor factory.

When we were seated and settled and sanitized for the building's protection, the lights went down and a 13-minute video presentation on temples began. As a narrator delivered calm, reassuring words over a bed of reverent strings, views of different LDS temples around the world panned across the screen. I felt chills crawl up my body, the same chills I had once interpreted as the presence of the Holy Ghost testifying to me of truth. Stop it, I told myself. This is a Pavlovian reaction to long conditioning, I told myself. You feel the same thing during the opening frames of Star Wars. Control it.

I touched my chest briefly. Under my blue dress shirt I was wearing the "X-Mormon" T-shirt (based on a design sent in by a loyal reader) for which I had done the graphic design. Between the realization of why I was feeling what I was feeling, the reminder of my true convictions, and the presence of my gentile family and friends, I got the "rightness chills" under control. I didn't feel them again for the remainder of the tour.

The video offered us a sketchy history of temple-building in the ancient and modern worlds, touching on Moses's portable desert tabernacle and Joseph Smith's constructions in 1830s Ohio and Illinois. The narrative followed the persecuted early Saints west to the shores of the Great Salt Lake where they began the forty years of construction that would culminate in 1893 with the dedication of the iconic Salt Lake Temple. Interspersed with this narrative were sound bites from a couple of talking heads, professors from the Department of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University. (I mentally translated the name of their college to "Department of Wishful Archaeology.")

This put me on alert for references to the Book of Mormon (one of those "ancient scriptures" they study at BYU, together with the Bible and the Pearl of Great Price) during the remainder of video. But despite the prominence of Joseph Smith in its first half, no mention was made of the grand second testament of Christ he produced in the late 1820s, a book that the Church promotes as "the keystone of our religion." In fact, no mention was made of the Book of Mormon for the duration of the tour. The focus was squarely on Jesus Christ, and on the doctrine of eternal familes, which received due attention in the second half of the video, with apostles like Boyd K. Packer and even the Mormon prophet, Gordon B. Hinckley, extolling the importance of temples in helping families be together forever.

After the video, the lights came up. We blinked as Brother Creigh explained to us how the Manhattan temple was unique in the LDS world in that most temples, as we had seen in the video, were expansive structures on wide expanses of manicured grounds in suburban setting. This one was the only temple besides Hong Kong's to be fashioned from an existing building, and the only one at all in which the sacred and restricted temple portions were tetrissed together with a general-access meetinghouse.

(My suspicion is that a Manhattan temple would never have been built had the Church's plans for a temple in Harrison, near White Plains, not bogged down in several years' worth of litigation. But I figured it wouldn't have been politic to raise my hand and ask Brother Creigh to comment.)

"We'll move back down to the first floor now and enter the temple proper," said Brother Creigh. "If you have questions while we're moving, feel free to ask, but there will be an opportunity to ask questions also at the end of the tour."

As we followed Brother Creigh back out of the classroom, Bob said to me, "That video was really well done. Very professional. I've seen corporate PR films that weren't nearly that accomplished."

"They've done their own production in-house for a long time, and they spare no expense," I said.

"You can tell. They do an impressive job."

"The Church is quite the PR machine."

From the time we first heard the announcement of the temple construction, Laura and I had been keeping an ear cocked for word of the open-house tours which would surely follow. When we finally did hear, the word came in a morning news story on WNYC, our local NPR affiliate. The Church PR machine was nothing to underestimate.

We five followed along helplessly as it carried us down the hall.

All ye who enter

Brother Creigh halted our unwieldy group near the third-floor elevators. "It looks like there are too many of us to ride down in one load," he said. "We'll fit as many on as we can, but if any of you are athletes you can feel free to take the stairs and meet us on the first floor."

Only in a Mormon temple is an athlete defined as someone who can successfully walk down two flights of stairs. Yes, Brother Creigh was cracking a little wise, but since the average age for temple workers and patrons is on the elderly side of senior citizen, the implication of his joke was more true than he had probably intended.

As people crowded into the elevator, the five of us opted to display our superior athletic prowess. Laura in particular was eager to avoid the elevator because the building was making her feel claustrophobic already. She fairly vibrated with nervousness and had since we entered the building. She had already heard plenty from me about what goes on in a Mormon temple, and had been served several helpings of more incendiary material from her born-again mother. As curious as she was to see the inner workings for herself, Laura did not like being inside a Mormon stronghold.

When Laura is uncomfortable, she tends to laugh more than usual, so as we and a few other tourgoers descended the stairs there was a bit more hilarity than Brother Creigh probably would have deemed appropriate. But hey, we weren't inside the temple proper yet, and we managed to work most of it out of our systems before we rejoined the main group on the first floor.

Brother Creigh led the group back along the dogleg we had originally negotiated on the way into the building. He halted us in a cramped area just inside the main entrance. "Now we're about to enter the temple itself," he said. "If you look right up there behind you, there's a phrase engraved over the front entrance that you'll find somewhere on every temple."

We turned to look. The entrance was four doors wide and was framed in a metal that looked like (but probably wasn't) weathered bronze. Engraved in the lintel over the central doors were these words:

That's to remind us," said Brother Creigh, "that we are entering the House of the Lord, very literally. The temple, unlike regular church buildings, is where the Lord dwells on earth."

He didn't mention that after the temple's dedication, the Lord would take residence and begin to charge admission.

Greasing God's palm

Opposite the main doors an entryway two people wide led into the temple. Brother Creigh guided us through it—I swear, Laura was emitting an audible tone by this point—and into an anteroom dominated on its rear wall by a stained-glass tableau brightly from behind. A little lectern or reception desk was centered a yard or two inside the entryway. Brother Creigh took up position behind it.

"Now, for regular church activities, you would come into the building and go right. For admission to the temple, however, you come straight in this way and check in with your temple recommend. This is literally a card you can carry in your wallet that's been signed by your bishop and other leaders, maybe an, um, area president, that says you've been found worthy to enter the temple. This is good for one year, and it will get you into any temple anywhere in the world."

Brother Creigh did not volunteer any details about what it means to be "found worthy," nor did anyone in the tour group ask, that I heard. Leaving aside the qualifications you might expect—refraining from sexual relations outside of marriage, abstaining from use of coffee, tea, alcohol, and tobacco, etc.—the two most important requirements for temple admission are:

1. The disavowal of any connection with or sympathy for apostate groups or those who seek to destroy the Church.

2. The payment of a full ten percent of your income as a tithe to the Church.

I see wet people

From the anteroom, Brother Creigh led us left into another bright passage. A twist and turn or three brought us into the baptistery, a high-ceilinged chamber that housed a huge white basin resting on the backs of twelve sculpted oxen. The oxen were arranged in an outward-facing circle and appeared to have been carved from white stone, though they could just as plausibly have been constructed of plaster applied to a supporting armature. A short flight of steps to either side of the circle gave access to a sort of balcony running around three walls of the baptistery. The floor of the balcony was almost level with the lip of the basin.

We trooped up the steps and arrayed ourselves in a ragged semicircle around the basin. Inside, the basin was lined with pale blue tile and filled with about four feet of clear water. Five or six steps led down into the basin from where we were standing. The air around the font was cool, almost cold, but not humid at all.

"This is the baptismal font, where one of the important ordinances of the temple takes place," said Brother Creigh. "Now, if you've looked behind you there on the back wall, you've probably noticed that large painting." In fact, we all had; a gigantic oil canvas filled the available wall space behind the balcony, picturing a river that meandered through a scrubby brown landscape. "That's the River Jordan, where Jesus Christ was baptized. As Latter-day Saints, we believe in emulating Christ's example in all things, so we become baptized as a sign that we're his followers."

Laura tapped me on the arm and lifted one of her feet enough that I could see the sole. She had apparently snagged her plastic slipper on something and ripped a hole in it the size of a quarter. She seemed chagrined and pleased in equal measure to be tracking some of the dust of her feet across the pristine temple carpets.

"I wasn't raised in the Church myself. I was in my twenties in college when I was baptized. My children were born in the faith and were baptized at the age of eight. But we were all baptized in humbler fonts than this, in regular meetinghouses. This font, as you saw coming into the baptistery, is supported on the backs of twelve oxen, representing the Twelve Tribes of Israel, and a different kind of ordinance takes place in it. What we do here is called 'baptism for the dead.'"

Brother Creigh spoke delicately, as if he knew he might be treading on tricky ground. "In the New Testament, the apostle Paul wrote the following to the Corinthians: 'Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? Why are they then baptized for the dead?' You see, baptism is a necessary step in following Christ, but what about the many, many people who have lived on the earth but never heard of Christ? We believe in performing this baptism for them, on their behalf, which is why the LDS people do genealogy. We feel a great desire to find out who our ancestors are, and when we do we bring their names to the temple so we can be baptized on their behalf. Children do this for their ancestors starting at the age of twelve."

His description made it sound as if baptism for the dead were a leisurely family affair performed sparingly and only for direct ancestors. While this is sometimes the case, the predominant mode in an operating temple baptistery is one of quiet but deadly efficiency. One mission of the LDS Church is to redeem all the dead, and to this end its members pore tirelessly over old records from across the world, microfilming as they go and compiling a vast database of as many names of dead people as possible. As new names are turned up, these get fed into temple computers. Youngsters of age twelve and above then descend on the temple in regimented droves, dress in white clothes, and await their turns to be baptized in rapid succession on behalf of a bewildering number of dead people apiece.

While we were hanging out in front of the temple before the tour, I had described for my companions my own first experiences with baptism for the dead, when I was twelve or thirteen. I remember entering a dressing room at the Ogden Utah Temple with other boys from my ward to change into pure white coveralls. We then queued up together with the girls in the baptistery. When my turn arrived, I climbed down into the warm water of the font where an older man in white clothing awaited. A television monitor was mounted near the font, on and the screen appeared a name and a set of dates. The name sounded Dutch or German, and the dates were from the late 17th Century. The man raised his right hand, rattled off a quick invocation that included my name and the name on the screen, then dunked my skinny frame backward in the water as I bent at the knees. As he raised me back into a standing a position and I sputtered for breath, a new name appeared on the screen and down I went again.

This happened thirty times in all. The whole process took less than five minutes.

Standing in the Manhattan baptistery, I looked around for any trace of a computer screen or a place where one could be mounted. I could find none. When it went into operation, that room would be like an Ellis Island for the dead, processing vast hordes of departed souls through Heaven's bureaucracy at assembly-line speeds. But that apparently was not the impression we were meant to take away from our tour—especially given that some Jewish groups are still locked in legal battle with the Church over its wholesale baptizing of Holocaust victims.

"Being baptized on behalf of deceased ancestors is such a special experience for young people," Brother Creigh said. "Many report feeling that those souls are present during the ordinance, and that they're conveying their gratitude and joy at finally getting to partake of its sacred blessings."

I had heard many tales growing up of people who didn't just sense their spectral benefectors in the baptistery but actually saw them and sometimes heard them speak. Such reports are so much hysterical rubbish, but as Brother Creigh led us back out of the room a certain spooky ambience seemed to tag along.

Me and Yeshua down by the churchyard

We trooped back into the anteroom, this time passing behind the check-in desk and pausing near the large stained-glass display. It consisted of three panels. The two flanking panels were merely decorative, while the wider center panel showed Jesus walking down a country road in the company of two robed men. One man had a beard, while the other was clean-shaven and balding.

"As we continue through the temple," said Brother Creigh, "you'll notice how much art there is throughout. This is original art, these beautiful and uplifting works, and we've spared no effort in providing it. This is the House of the Lord, after all, and nothing is too good for the Lord. This beautiful piece of stained glass, for instance, was commissioned especially for the temple. It depicts Jesus Christ on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection. If you remember from the New Testament, two of his disciples were walking along this road when they encountered a stranger . . ."

As Brother Creigh related this Bible story, Bob leaned over to me and said softly, "Looking at this picture, you know the thing I never realized? That one of Christ's disciples was Paul Simon."

Instructions from Big Brother

The next stop on our tour was the fifth floor, to which another beehive-festooned elevator whisked us in two batches. Brother Creigh led us to the heart of this level via what I presume was a shortcut through a ladies' changing room. (I can't think of any other reason why the Church would want to show us what was essentially a locker room.) This almost resulted in half the group wandering lost in the wilderness, though, when one older woman near the middle of the pack failed to keep up with the folks in front of her. When my contingent, in the rearguard of the tour, rounded the corner into a narrow passageway, we found this woman and a couple of other folks dithering back and forth between two different doors, unsure through which the vanguard had passed. Finally some clever soul thought to read the signs next to the doors and successfully identified the ladies' changing room. We passed quickly through it and caught up with the rest of the group in short order.

We gathered in a little nexus doorways and intersecting passages. One or two other tour groups were trying to negotiate this area at the same time, and their jostlings caused us to contract into a tighter and tighter knot, like an amoeba prodded by a microfilament. As we waited for the way to clear, I overheard someone asking Brother Creigh about the symbolism of the beehive. He offered this person a somewhat more expansive explanation than Elder Bush had given earlier, then went on to expound on temple symbolism. "For instance," he said, "as you look around you might see stars worked into the design here and there. . . ."

At last the way was clear for us to file into what Brother Creigh told us was an "instruction room." This was a rather cramped little chamber with five or six rows of theater seats and an aisle down the center. At the front of the room, before a white wall, was a low altar topped with a velvet cushion. The other walls and the ceiling were painted with a mural depicting a bucolic landscape of trees, as if we stood in the middle of a forest glade. Beams of that same artificial-looking wood arched up the walls and across the ceiling, dividing the mural into panels. Brother Creigh invited us all to sit, if we liked. Laura was feeling very claustrophobic by this point and signaled to me with a shake of her head that she preferred to stand. We took up a position against the wall at the back of the room, at the end of the center aisle.

"Another important function of the temple for Latter-day Saints," said Brother Creigh, "is as a place of learning and instruction. To gain answers to the great questions of existence that we all have—where did I come from? why am I here? where am I going after this life?—is why members of the Church come here. They enter the temple and change into all-white clothing—white pants and shirts and ties for the brethren, long white dresses for the sisters—then assemble here in this room. The white clothing they wear symbolizes not just purity but also equality. With everyone dressed in white, you can't tell the difference between the young and the old, the healthy and the sick, the rich man and the poor man. Everyone is equal, just as they are in the eyes of the Lord."

I suppose that's how it works in theory, but on all my visits to the temple I'd never had any trouble telling the wealthy from those of more modest means. Even with white clothing, gradations of quality aren't that hard to detect. Furthermore, in most temples people who don't own their own white clothes are able to rent white jumpsuits for a small fee. Believe me, the jumpsuits stick out like a sore thumb. (I believe I read somewhere that the Manhattan temple does not feature clothing rental; there was just no room in the building for that and the requisite laundry facilities.)

"You'll notice the lovely mural here on the walls. This room is actually called the Creation Room, and the mural is symbolic of the creation of the earth." (To me it looked representational, not symbolic, and representational of the Garden of Eden at that. But that could just be me.) "It's in this beautiful setting that the Saints are instructed in the answers to those great questions I mentioned."

"Who does the instructing?" asked someone seated in the first row.

Aha, I thought, this should be an interesting revelation. Anticipating the answer, I looked straight up the back wall, above my head, to where I knew there would be a small rectangular opening or two.

"The instruction is done by video, projected onto this wall behind me," said Brother Creigh. If he understood how creepy and 1984-ish this sounded, he didn't let on. "The Saints watch and listen in reverence, and they learn where they came from before this life and all about the purpose of existence."

He went on a few moments more in that same non-informative vein while I reflected on how immeasurably more fascinating the unvarnished truth would have been. The video he mentioned was not some dystopian talking head, as the tourgoers might have imagined, but a filmed version of a peculiarly Mormon mystery play. In it, the story of the Creation is enacted, together with Lucifer's tempation of Adam and Eve and their subsequent Fall and expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Along the way—and I shit you not—Adam and Eve are taught the handshakes and passwords that will enable them to enter God's Kingdom when they pass from this life. The white-clothed audience learns them too.

As I explained to my companions later that evening, this is what is known as the "endowment" ordinance. It may sound outlandish and fantastical, but I've seen it with my own eyes, heard it with my own ears, and given the secret shakes with my own right hand. If you don't believe me, it's not all that difficult to find a reliable transcript of the ceremony online and read it over for yourself.

In older temples the mystery play is performed live, with stiff elderly temple workers taking the parts of Elohim, Jehovah, Adam, Lucifer, and the rest of the gang. As the play progresses, the audience rises up and moves from room to room, the Creation Room giving way to the lush Garden Room yielding up to the desolate World Room. A new streamlined design was introduced in temples built after 1953, however, with the functions of those three rooms collapsed into one, and the mystery play projected as a movie. Various updates of the "temple film" were produced over the subsequent years and shown in rotation, with my personal favorite being one produced in 1969 and featuring none other than Gordon Jump (of WKRP in Cincinnati and Maytag repairman fame) in the role of the Apostle Peter. (And yes, I'm the wag who submitted the credits listing and plot summary to IMDB.com back in the late '90s. I garnered the information from a book by David John Buerger entitled The Mysteries of Godliness: A History of Mormon Temple Worship.)

We filed out of the Creation Room in an orderly fashion; another restless tour group was waiting outside to take our place. As Brother Creigh led us down the hall to our next destination, someone asked him if the instructions in the video presentation were different on different visits to the temple.

"No, it's the same instructions every time," said the unflappable Brother Creigh.

I don't know whether or not he realized how much like a recipe for brainwashing that sounded. And I wonder if anyone else in the group realized how much stranger the truth was than the thin veneer we were allowed to see.

A clash of symbols

Our next stop on the tour was the Terrestrial Room, although Brother Creigh never did refer to it by name. This was a high-ceilinged, very bright and spacious chamber just down the hall from the Creation Room, and painted all in eggshell white. The light came from teardrop-shaped fixtures suspended from above. Several rows of theater seats were arranged in gently curving arcs before a sumptuous ruffled curtain hanging inside a proscenium arch at the front of the room. The room might have functioned as a particularly high-class playhouse or cinema.

"This is the next room to which the visitors come for instruction on their visits to the temple," said Brother Creigh, "and again it's very symbolic. The high ceilings indicate that we're moving more and more into the presence of the Lord, while the brightness of the room is symbolic of the light of Christ that's shed forth upon the earth."

Rather glaringly, he didn't say a word about the symbolism of the curtain at the front of the room. I stayed alert during the rest of the tour for a chance to pose him that question, but the opportunity never came—at least, not where I could ask it for the benefit of the entire group. I was quite interested to hear how he would answer, given that the heavy curtain is actually there to conceal a much gauzier curtain called the Veil. And the Veil is symbolic of the veil that separates our material world from the afterlife.

As, again, I explained to my companions later that evening, the endowment ceremony continues in the Terrestrial Room. After some further instruction, handshaking, and bad acting, the heavy curtain is raised to reveal the Veil. Symbols borrowed from Masonry such as the square and compass have been stitched into the fabric, and an officiator proceeds to explain their meanings. The endowees then approach the Veil in orderly queues. As each arrives at the Veil in turn, he or she reaches through slits in the fabric to embrace a temple worker stationed on the far side. This embrace is known, or used to be known before the endowment ceremony was abridged in 1990, as the "Five Points of Fellowship," and is another blatant borrowing from Masonry. Locked in this position (which, when enacted by an old male temple worker and a young female petitioner, some Mormon friends of mine smirkingly referred to as the Six Points of Fellowship), the temple worker quizzes the endowee on the passwords and handshakes taught during the ceremony.

Most of the passwords are short, but the last one is quite long and bears reproducing if only because it's so much fun to say quickly. Over beers that evening I repeated it from memory for my companions, with only a brief pause or two: "Health in the navel, marrow in the bones, strength in the loins and in the sinews, power in the priesthood be upon me and upon my posterity through all generations of time and throughout all eternity."

When the petitioner has successfully passed the test (and no one fails because a prompter is standing by to fill in any gaps in memory), he or she is invited to pass through the Veil and symbolically enter the Kingdom of Heaven by moving into the chamber beyond, the Celestial Room. So when Brother Creigh spoke his next words to the tour group—"Let's now move on to the Celestial Room, in the same fashion that temple patrons would do so"—I believed irrationally for a moment that this was the route we were about to follow.

But it was not to be. "The Celestial Room is the very heart of the temple," he said. "It represents the highest level of Heaven, and it's a place for sacred meditation and prayer. I ask as we enter that we all preserve the reverent atmosphere of the Celestial Room by not speaking until we've left it again."

He led us out the door of the Terrestrial Room and down a short and very prosaic hallway. There would be no passing through the Veil for us that day.

Super Masonic

Before we continue, a brief word about Mormonism and Masonry. Though most Latter-day Saints downplay or even pooh-pooh the connection, Joseph Smith was a Mason, and he borrowed liberally from Masonic rites when he created the first version of the endowment ceremony in 1842. This is ironic in light of the fact that the Book of Mormon struck many people as a rabidly anti-Masonic work when it was published in 1830.

The Book of Mormon is, of course, a product of the place and time in which it was written—upstate New York in the late 1820s. Those years were a period of intense suspicion and hatred of Masonry, so it's not surprising that the latter half of the book is rife with stories of "secret combinations"—gangs of robbers and murderers who join together, bound by secret signs and blood oaths, to sow suspicion and dissent, to overthrow all that is good and decent, and to profit by their mutual black iniquity. One typical passage in Ether (the section which perhaps prompted Mark Twain famously to declare the Book of Mormon "chloroform in print") condemns the activities of these marauding bands in unequivocal terms:

And it came to pass that they formed a secret combination, even as they of old; which combination is most abominable and wicked above all, in the sight of God;

For the Lord worketh not in secret combinations, neither doth he will that man should shed blood, but in all things hath forbidden it, from the beginning of man.

—Ether 8:18-19

And secret combinations were much on the mind of the people of New York thanks to the abduction of William Morgan.

In September 1826, hooded men burned a printing press in Batavia, New York, and beat the owner severely. The press had just produced proofs of a book exposing the rites and covenants of Freemasonry. Shortly thereafter, the book's author, William Morgan, was abducted, never to be seen again. Five men, well-known Masons all, were tried for Morgan's kidnapping and presumed murder in January 1827 at Canandaigua, New York, not far from Joseph Smith's home. Three of the five were acquitted, while the two others received light jail sentences. Further trials the next month resulted in more acquittals, and an anti-Masonic fervor the likes of which the country has never seen since swept New York and many surrounding states.

By 1842, however, the pendulum had swung the other way again for Masonry. It had enjoyed an enormous resurgence in popularity in the years after the Morgan affair blew over. The Mormons were growing into a powerful voting bloc in the state of Illinois, and Masonic candidates for public office would have been foolish not to curry Mormon favor. So it was that Joseph Smith, a man once painted as fiercely anti-Masonic, underwent a meteoric advancement through the ranks of Masonry at the hands of Abraham Jonas, Grandmaster of the Illinois Lodge and a prominent candidate for public office. On March 15, 1842, Joseph Smith received his initiation as an Entered Apprentice Mason, the lowest of Freemasonry's three degrees. The next day, he received the Fellow Craft and Master Mason degrees, despite the normal thirty-day waiting period required before advancement.

On May 4, 1842, a scant fifty days after first participating in the Masonic mysteries, Joseph Smith introduced a new ordinance, the "endowment," to his most trusted followers in a room above his red brick store in Nauvoo, Illinois. This new ordinance bore a striking similarity to the Masonic initiation rites—a parallel which could not have been lost on Joseph's inner circle, since most of them were Masons as well.

I won't belabor the many correspondences between Masonic rites and the Mormon endowment. Suffice it to say that, the moment I mentioned the compass and square stitched into the Veil to my friends that evening, Jim said, "Hey, that sounds like Masonry."

I guess some things are easier to see from the outside.

Heaven means never having to say a word

Trailing Brother Creigh, our silent group entered the Celestial Room. I don't have much to say about the experience. The room's ceiling was even higher than that of the Terrestrial Room, the appointments grander and more ornate. Instead of theater seats, it contained groupings of expensive chairs and couches. The walls were bright white but not painfully so. The overall effect, though, was less of welcoming and warmth than of cold, remote formality.

I looked around the room, trying to spy out the place from which endowees would emerge after passing through the Veil. In other temples I've seen, there's a sort of baffle in the Celestial Room screening the Veil from direct view, but in this room there was no such thing. I did spot a couple of doors in the Veilward wall, and I can only presume those provided ingress to endowees.

My eyes came to rest on the high stained-glass windows set into one wall. Each window depicted a stylized tree with tangled branches and white fruit. I'm guessing that this was either the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil from which Adam and Eve ate, or, more likely, the Tree of Life of which the prophet Lehi dreamed early on in the Book of Mormon. What struck me about the depiction of the trees, though, was that in some cases the white fruit hung in pairs, resembling nothing so much as tidy little scrotums.

I wanted to point this out to Laura, but we were in the Celestial Room and no one was speaking. Not that utter silence was something I'd ever observed in operational Celestial Rooms. On the occasion of my first endowment, in 1986, I was told that the Celestial Room is in fact the only place where the endowment can be freely discussed and questions can asked. Not that this discussion ever rises above the level of a murmur, but at least it does take place.

(Speaking of speaking, upon the successful completion of my own endowment—August 15, 1986, in the Salt Lake Temple as it happened—my father hugged me in the Celestial Room and said to me, "No matter how many times I go through it, I always learn something new." He meant the endowment ceremony itself, in which he had participated regularly for at least a quarter of a century. Why undergo the ordinance so many times? Because, of course, on subsequent visits you're doing it by proxy for dead people.)

But whether filled with quiet murmurs or deathly silence, the Celestial Room is hardly my idea of Heaven. Any place where I'm afraid to sit on the furniture and I can't try to make my wife laugh is not a place where I care to spend eternity.

An ear for dialog

After a decent interval, Brother Creigh led us out of the Celestial Room again. The group breathed an almost palpable sigh of relief. And if my companions were any indication, they also carried with them a large misconception about the purpose of the Celestial Room. As Jim commented later that evening during my explication of the endowment ceremony, "You mean you can't just visit the temple and go directly to the Celestial Room to meditate?"

"No," I said. "You can only get there by going through the whole ceremony, with the video and the robes and the handshakes."

"What a ripoff!" said Jim. "I got a completely different impression from what the guy said on the tour."

Our tour group bunched up again near the elevators. I ended up standing near Brother Creigh, and while we waited to be ferried up to the sixth floor he tried to strike up a friendly conversation. "So where are you visiting us from today?" he asked me.

"We live here in the city," I said, "but I'm originally from Utah."

"Oh! Where at?"

"I grew up in a town called Kaysville," I said.

"I grew up in Florida myself," said Brother Creigh. "Never even made it west of the Mississippi until after I was twenty-three."

We chatted pleasantly for a moment or two more. If anything surprised me about the conversation it was that Brother Creigh completely failed to ask me whether or not, being from Utah, I was a member of the Church. In retrospect I probably shouldn't have been surprised. I'm sure the tour guides had been carefully instructed not to make assumptions about the participants on the tour, to avoid giving inadvertent offense.

Either that or my ear piercings made him wary.

A throbbing in the temples

The sixth floor of the temple was devoted to weddings—or, to use the more proper terminology, "sealings." Whereas Mormons consider a wedding to be a civil bond that dissolves upon the death of either party, sealing is an ordinance by which a man and a woman are spiritually married "for time and all eternity." The ordinance can, as I'm sure you have guessed, only be performed in a temple.

Furthermore, the endowment ordinance is a prerequisite for sealing. Young Mormon men usually undergo the endowment at the age of 19, before serving missions, so they have plenty of time to absorb the oddity of it before being sealed to a bride. But for many young women, the first endowment comes the day of or maybe the day before their nuptials. If you think normal wedding-day jitters are bad, try throwing an endowment ceremony in on top of them!

Our first port of call on the sixth floor was the so-called Bride's Room. This was a glorified dressing room, complete with vanity desk, a little arrangement of settees, and several mirrors. The walls were done in reverent shades of a color that hitherto undiscovered portions of my brain tell me was lavender or mauve.

"This is where, before her wedding, a bride is able to prepare for the coming ceremony, together with her mother and a few other female relations," said Brother Creigh. "It's furnished with every amenity a new bride could possibly need—which means, of course, a lot of mirrors."

An appreciative ripple of laughter rolled through the room, though beside me Laura bristled.

"You know," Brother Creigh went on, "I just got a call from my daughter in Utah last week, and she told me she's engaged. August fourteenth she'll be entering a room in Salt Lake City just like this one to prepare for her own sealing. It's strange to think that as many times as I've been in the temple, this is the first time I've seen the inside of a Bride's Room. There is no Groom's Room, you know. What they do before the ceremony I couldn't tell you."

He was cracking wise again, in that self-consciously eye-twinkling Mormon way. I leaned over to Laura and whispered, "Strip club."

By this point Laura was so keyed up you could have used her to tune a piano. She let out a laugh that could have brought down the walls of Jericho.

The tour was already leaving the Bride's Room, and people pretended they hadn't noticed. Laura glared at me in chagrined mock-fury, and she punched me in the arm.

Victory is sweet.

A passion for the Christ

As we moved along the wide main corridor of the sixth floor, Brother Creigh pointed out waiting areas for wedding attendees and more examples of what he referred to as "original art." It's true, there were a lot of paintings hanging on the walls of the temple. But not all of them were what I would have called original.

I'm not deriding the quality of the work. I am saying that, having spent my first 28 years as a member of the Church, I recognized most of it. In most instances what we were seeing were not in fact original works but skillful copies of well-known pieces by important Mormon artists. For example, a painting I had seen hanging near the dressing rooms adjacent to the baptistery was a copy of an Arnold Friberg work, "Alma Baptizes at the Waters of Mormon," originally commissioned as an illustration for the Book of Mormon. Near the Bride's Room I thought I had picked out a piece in the style of Minerva Teichert, a portrait of Mary or some other important Biblical or Book of Mormon woman.

There on the sixth floor we passed one painting that I recognized as a partial detail of a work called "The Second Coming." Laura stopped dead.

"Wow," she whispered to me. "I never knew Jesus was so hot. I'd let him lay hands on me."

"Eww," I said, shaking my head. "This is a copy of a Harry Anderson, and I've never really liked the way he portrays Christ."

"What's not to like? This Christ looks like he doesn't take shit. Like Willem Dafoe."

"Well, okay," I said, tugging her along.

A whited sepulchre

Brother Creigh was pointing out fancy architectural details. "Again, take a look at the marvelous detail that's gone into these cornices and moldings. Work like that doesn't come cheap, but like we say, nothing is too good for the Lord."

Actually, the architecture did look a little cheap to me—cheap and bland and tasteless, in a nouveau riche kind of way.

Bob saw it a little differently. "You know," he said, leaning into the center of our little group, "it's all very beautiful and immaculately maintained, but with the cold air and the silk flowers and the white walls and the hushed atmosphere—it's not like a house of worship. It's a funeral home."

"Yes, yes, yes!" said Liz, jabbing the air in Bob's direction with her finger. "That's it exactly, what I was thinking!"

As Laura and Jim added their agreement to the general chorus, I was having an epiphany. A funeral home! Of course! A temple was an edifice with far more focus on the dead than the living. It really was a mortuary. Why hadn't I ever picked up on that before?

Because some things are easier to see from the outside.

Yes, but what happens in the Boston temple?

The penultimate stop on our tour was the sealing room at the end of this main corridor. This was where actual temple wedding ceremonies would take place. The sealing room was a somewhat close rectangular chamber with thirty or forty chairs lining the walls. In the center of the room stood an altar covered with velvet and surrounded by a cushioned perch just the right height to kneel on. Mounted on the two side walls, facing each other perfectly across the altar, were two large mirrors. Below one of the mirrors was a bench chair wide enough for two people to sit on.

We took seats around the outside wall. Brother Creigh stood near the altar. "I see none of you took the wide seat under that mirror," he said with a smile. "I guess that means everyone here is married already. That's where the prospective bride and groom sit while the officiator addresses the wedding party before the actual ordinance is performed."

He went on to explain how a temple sealing joined a man and woman into the eternal family stretching back into the infinite past and forward into the everlasting future. "The bride and groom kneel here, across from each other at this altar, and in these opposing mirrors they see themselves as part of that endless chain reflected back and forth to eternity, ancestors trailing back forever in one direction and descendents in the other."

He did not describe much more than that of the ceremony, which also consists of the bride and groom giving each other the secret handshakes from the endowment ceremony across the velvet top of the altar. He did, however, bring up the matter of proxy sealings, whereby dead couples receive the ordinance with living persons standing—or rather, kneeling—in for them at the altar.

My attention wandered a little, I will admit. There was a beautiful little stained-glass window set high in the back wall of the sealing room, and as I looked at it in fascination I realized that the natural-looking daylight shining through it could not possibly be natural. Imagineering: it's a powerful thing.

I'm not sure quite how it happened, but while I wasn't paying attention one question or another set off a chain of associations that led to Brother Creigh's attempting to untangle the complicated skein of theology that permits a man whose wife has passed away to be sealed eternally to another woman but does not permit a woman whose husband has passed away to be sealed eternally to another man. A discussion of polygamy and how it's bound up with this matter is beyond the scope of this report, but suffice it to say that the topic is endlessly diverting, especially to a non-LDS crowd attempting to understand it.

As Brother Creigh led us out of the sealing room, a handsome, strapping fellow—to my eye and ear, half of a gay couple who were studiously not holding hands during the tour—was asking him, "If there's temple marriage, is there such a thing as temple divorce?"

While our erstwhile guide chased down that particular hare (the answer, by the way, is yes, sort of), Laura said to our small gang, "Oh, my God. When he pointed out that no one had taken the marriage seat, how much did I want for me and Lizzie to go sit there together?"

"I think the two fellows there were considering it as well," said Bob.

Brother Creigh was leading us to a stairwell that would take us back to the third floor. "So yes," he was saying, "in that situation the man and woman could certainly be married civilly. It's just that a temple sealing could not take place."

"So even though the man could be sealed to another woman," said the handsome man, "he couldn't to her because she's already sealed to someone else."

"That's it exactly," said Brother Creigh.

"Yeah," said Laura as Brother Creigh passed out of hearing, not loudly but still two shades louder necessary to speak just to the other four of us, "but you can fuck whoever you like."

I thought I saw the ghost of smile flit across the lips of the man ahead of us, who I believe was the handsome man's partner.

The obligatory coda to any LDS function

We emerged from the stairwell onto the third floor, skinned off our protective slippers and deposited them in a bin, and bid Brother Creigh farewell. We were back in the non-temple portion of the building, and our final stop on the tour was the "cultural hall," a sort of glorified gymnasium where a refreshment table had been set up. Pleasantly plump folks behind the table served us large oatmeal raisin cookies and plastic cups of cold water. I was mildly disappointed and a little embarrassed that my people weren't serving their guests red punch, or green Jell-O.

This was apparently where the Q&A at the end of the tour was meant to take place, on this brightly lit basketball court where a dozen round tables had been set up for tourgoers to rest their hindquarters after a stressful hour of touring. Missionaries stood by ready to answer the deepest of questions and to sign people up for a personalized visit at their homes.

Bob, Jim, Liz, Laura, and I finished our cookies, drank our water, and headed for the exit. Not that the victuals weren't appreciated, but we were more than ready to tromp up Columbus Avenue through the noise and stink of an Upper West Side night to a bar called Peter's, where the beer is cold, the dominant decorative motif is the female nude, and the conversation is so loud you need to shout to be heard. When we got there, we talked ourselves hoarse.

I say these things humbly in the name of Informed Consent, amen.

Bob has posted his own impressions of the temple tour online at LiveJournal.com.

There used to be a diner called Orloff's on Columbus Avenue between 65th and 66th. It occupied a storefront in a grand white six-story building across from Lincoln Center. But Orloff's isn't there anymore, having been displaced by its landlord, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. On August 7, the Church announced plans to turn two floors of the building, which already contains two Mormon chapels and a genealogical library, into a temple.

I don't begrudge the Mormons their temple, but I will miss Orloff's sorely. That was the place that demonstrated to me, five years after leaving Utah, that New York City was where I belonged.

It was 1995 when I moved here. I was twenty-eight years old. I came here with a girlfriend who challenged me to question the doctrines I'd been raised with. I studied all the Mormon research I could get my hands on, and I found I couldn't reconcile the Church's colorful and shaded history with the sanitized fables I heard from the pulpit every Sunday. I shed my faith in a leap that seemed precipitous at the time, but which in retrospect I realize I'd been working up to for years.

When my girlfriend and I parted ways in 1998, however, I wondered how much of my fervor for apostasy was my own, and how much had rubbed off on me from her. To find out, I started attending Mormon services again—at the building on Columbus.

I lasted only four weeks. Newly convinced that my reasons for leaving were sound, I turned my back on the Church and have never returned.

But around the same time, I started a job at the Children's Television Workshop, just two blocks down the street from the chapel. I began eating lunch and even dinner at Orloff's with some frequency, watching through the window as the Mormon missionaries came and went next door. And it became a morning ritual of mine to stop at Orloff's for a sesame-seed bagel—with cream cheese and tomato slices—on my way to work from the subway stop at 66th Street.

Orloff's became an indispensible part of my routine. I attended more regularly than I had ever bothered going to church.

One Sunday morning early in 2000, I had to swing by the office to finish up a little work. On the way in, I figured I'd stop at Orloff's for my usual breakfast treat. As I crossed Columbus from the subway exit, I could clearly see Sunday school in session through the wide second-story windows in the Mormon meetinghouse above the diner. This was the Manhattan Singles Ward, the congregation where handsome, young unattached men mingled with pretty, young unattached women in hopes of creating eternal companionships.

I watched the Sunday school class for as long as I could see into the window, and for a moment I felt the pangs of an outsider, a pariah cut off from his people. The separation hurt.

Then I passed under the first-floor awning and entered the diner. The scent of fresh-brewed coffee wreathed me—a welcoming aroma you would never smell in the meetinghouse upstairs.

At the counter, a gruff, rangy old fellow with a drooping, nicotine-stained mustache waited to take my order.

"Good morning," I said. "I'll have a sesame bagel, please, with—"

"Wait, I know!" said the man at the counter, whom I saw most mornings of the week. "With cream cheese and tomato, right?"

A chill ran through me, and I smiled. "Right," I said.

I was taught in my Mormon Sunday school that Jesus won't be the one to judge us. He'll sit in court at the Judgment Bar, yes, but we will judge ourselves. We'll sort ourselves out into the kingdoms where we feel the most comfortable, according to what we've done and how we've lived. It won't be a matter of punishment or reward. It will be a matter of belonging.

I understood, when that old fellow behind the counter anticipated my breakfast order, that I was in the place where I belonged.

Orloff's, I'll miss you. To you I raise my cup of morning coffee.

And I command mine handmaid, Emma Smith, to abide and cleave unto my servant Joseph, and to none else. But if she will not abide this commandment she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord; for I am the Lord thy God, and will destroy her if she abide not in my law.

—D&C 132:54

The modern LDS Church has plenty of embarrassing historical specters hanging around, but few haunt it the way polygamy does. The church has tried to distance itself from the practice in the past century, but with mixed results. If you ask most Mormons today whether or not they believe it's proper to practice polygamy, they'll tell you no. But if you ask them whether or not it's a correct principle, they'll say yes.

In fact, the practice of polygamy is an excommunicable offense, and has been for many decades. This has not always been the case, however—polygamy was once, deservedly (and still is, erroneously), the chief distinguishing characteristic of Mormonism in the minds of most Americans—and many Saints believe it may not always be the case in the future. They look forward to the day when the moral and political climate in the United States and other nations has cooled enough to permit the church to reinstitute the practice—though the more reasonable of these don't expect it to happen until Christ's Millennial reign on Earth. (Note that I specified "the more reasonable.")

So, what is polygamy, and how did the practice arise?

The word comes from Greek roots, and means, quite literally, "multiple mates." The more proper term for what Mormons practiced would be "polygyny," or "multiple wives," though a bit of polyandry ("multiple husbands") did creep in there at the beginning—much to the distress of the Saints to whom this fact is pointed out. (And lest we banish semantic confusion entire, I'll point out that Mormons prefer the term "plural marriage," though they're fighting a losing battle on that one, just as they are with the label "Mormon" itself.)

The first Mormon polygamist was, as you may guess, Joseph Smith himself. Critics sometimes charge he concocted the whole plural-marriage scheme to cover up and sanctify marital infidelities, but if so he did some very careful advance planning. The first hint of his unconventional philosophies to come can be found in the Book of Mormon, in a sermon delivered by the prophet Jacob to the people of Nephi, which Joseph wrote (or translated, if you prefer) in 1829:

. . . [T]hey understand not the scriptures, for they seek to excuse themselves in committing whoredoms, because of the things which were written concerning David, and Solomon his son.

Behold, David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord. . . .

Wherefore, my brethren, hear me, and hearken to the word of the Lord: For there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife; and concubines he shall have none . . .

For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people; otherwise they shall hearken unto these things (Jacob 2:23, 24, 27, 30).

This passage seems to suggest, if you squint at it sideways and cock your head, that God can, when necessary, suspend the laws of monogamy—presumably so that every woman of child-bearing age can get a legitimate bun in the oven and help His earthly kingdom explode in population like a warren of rabbits. In any event, when you recall that Biblical figures other than David and Solomon practiced polygyny with God's blessing, you see that, even this early in his prophetic career, Joseph was already trying to reconcile problematic aspects of the Old Testament with the conventional Christian morality of his day.

Evidence suggests that Joseph's first explicit "revelation" on the subject of plural marriage came as early as 1831, but even so, it's important to realize that his marital innovations were hardly unique. Other religious communities in the Northeast, including the Perfectionists and the Swedenborgians, experimented with nonstandard sexual mores during roughly the same period. But Joseph's teachings were destined to overshadow and by far outlive the others, both in actual implementation and in the nation's thrilled and horrified popular imagination.

Joseph had married Emma Hale in 1827, and commencing in 1830 he may secretly have entreated girls as young as twelve to become his "spiritual wives." But it wasn't until 1833 that his first well-documented plural marriage took place, when he wed Fanny Alger, a sixteen-year-old girl working as a maid in the house where he lived with Emma and their children in Kirtland, Ohio. Joseph's clandestine proposal may have been relayed to Fanny by her uncle, Levi Hancock, who is also held to have performed the ceremony at the prophet's behest. Though Emma knew nothing of this second marriage, she suspected a relationship between Fanny and her husband and threw the girl out of the house not long after the wedding. (Fanny may possibly have been pregnant with Joseph's child at the time.)

Joseph's next generally accepted marriage took place in 1838, to Lucinda Pendleton Morgan Harris, widow of the martyr William Morgan (the very man killed in 1826 for having written his famous exposé of Masonry). Lucinda was Joseph's first verifiable polyandrous wife; she was already married to minor Mormon leader George Washington Harris when she wed Joseph.

This pattern would repeat itself many times over the next several years, as nearly a dozen of the at least thirty-three women he wed polygynously were already married. Some had converted to Mormonism and moved west without divorcing their husbands, but others, like Marinda Nancy Johnson Hyde, were wives of other prominent church leaders. (Marinda, in fact, married Joseph while her husband, apostle Orson Hyde, was serving a mission for the church in Palestine.) Joseph also married the young (and dare I suggest nubile?) daughters of many of his closest associates, and you are entirely justified in wondering what led these men to put up with their prophet's shenanigans.

Well, around this same period, Joseph was also developing his doctrine of celestial marriage, which states that men and women who are "sealed" together by priesthood authority on Earth will remain married eternally in Heaven. His lieutenants may have permitted (or rather, not opposed) Joseph's celestial marriages to their wives and daughters in order to ensure the proximity of their own links to his in the great dynastic chain he was forging for the life to come. These were magnanimous gestures on the parts of his followers, though heartbreaking when you realize that because women were (and still are) allowed to marry only one husband eternally, these men were in effect sacrificing their own celestial marriages with their first and presumably most beloved wives for the sake of the prophet.

(Joseph for his part may also have been testing the loyalty and obedience of his closest counselors. Tradition holds that an agonized Parley Pratt, then an apostle, consented to let the prophet wed his cherished wife Mary Ann, only to have Joseph let him off the hook at the last second. Their faithfulness proven, Joseph told the relieved Pratts that they were blessed for their obedience but that the sacrifice would not be required of them after all. Psych!)

As Joseph's plural marriages proliferated, so did the rumors flying around Nauvoo (the city in Illinois to which the Saints had meanwhile relocated) of his sexual malfeasance. Only those who had to know were taught the principle of plural marriage, and Joseph publicly denied the rumors of its practice time and again. Not even Emma knew the truth of the matter, though she certainly suspected Joseph of continual infidelity. The situation at home came to a head when Eliza R. Snow, Joseph's fourteenth or so plural wife, came to live and work as a teacher in the Smith's home. In February 1843 Emma's jealousy of Eliza reached such a pitch that she angrily tossed the other woman out of the house and into the night. (One account claims that Emma actually kicked Eliza down the stairs, causing the younger wife to miscarry Joseph's child.)

So many of Joseph's lieutenants were now living in polygamy as well that it was harder and harder to keep the practice hidden. Joseph was finally forced, lest she murder his suspected mistresses, to let Emma in on the secret. She didn't take the news well, but did assume responsibility for selecting Joseph's next wives. Evidently Joseph hadn't told her the whole truth, however, because the first girls Emma chose to wed him, sisters barely out of their teens named Emily and Eliza Partridge, were already his plural wives. Joseph staged a second marriage ceremony with the sisters so Emma wouldn't feel more angry and humiliated than she did already, after which the girls moved into the house. Another sister pair selected by Emma, the teenaged Sarah and Maria Lawrence, soon joined them.

Emma never embraced the practice of polygamy, however, and found the necessity of living under the same roof with other wives nearly intolerable. (Joseph's polyandrous wives for the most part lived with their original husbands, and many others boarded with families privy to the secret.) She begged Joseph so fervently to disavow the principle (either that or permit her to take "spiritual husbands" to assuage her horrid loneliness) that when he finally issued a revelation from God legitimizing plural marriage, it contained a side note to Emma, telling her, in so many words, that if she didn't shut up and get with the program she'd be "destroyed" (D&C 132:54).

Emma really didn't take that well. Later, after Joseph's death, she repudiated polygamy entirely, going so far as to deny that Joseph had ever had any wife but her. She stayed behind when Brigham Young led the great exodus to the Salt Lake Valley, and her son Joseph Smith III became the president of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a sect headquartered in Missouri that claims prophetic succession passes only from father to son.

The practice of plural marriage flourished in Utah. Apostles Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball between them married (for time only, not eternity) the bulk of Joseph's wives who didn't already have other husbands, and of course they and other leaders had already amassed plenty of wives of their own. Lesser leaders and other prominent men acquired plural wives as well, though rarely more than two or three apiece. Unlike Joseph, these men actually supported all their wives and their families, and in 1852 Brigham Young, by now accepted as the new prophet, at last publicly acknowledged the Mormon practice of polygamy, canonizing Joseph's 1843 revelation on the subject.

Though plural marriage in this era was practiced within a strict moral framework, with little bawdiness and often less joy, the rest of the country was outraged by the deviant proceedings in the new territory of Utah. Starting in 1862, the U.S. Congress enacted an escalating series of laws intended to root out the evil of polygamy and restore decency to the nation. Utahns laughed at the earliest of these laws, for local enforcement lay in the hands of Mormon-dominated courts, but later legislation sent Federal agents to the territory to ensure that scofflaw polygamists went to jail.

In 1887, with many of the church's highest leaders already in hiding to avoid prison sentences, Congress passed the toughest law of all, the Edmunds-Tucker Act, which legislated the LDS church out of existence and placed its assets into receivership. (Say what you will about polygamy, this response to it was one of the more shameful acts in Congress's shameful history.) John Taylor, third church president, died in hiding that year, having already overseen the transfer of most church property into private hands to prevent its seizure by the government. His successor Wilford Woodruff announced the official end of polygamy in 1890, in a declaration that set the stage for Utah's admission to the Union in 1896 and the eventual restoration of the church's sanctioned legal status.

The Manifesto (as it was known), for all its rhetoric, did not disavow plural marriage as a correct eternal principle, but merely forbade the Saints from practicing it. He and his two successors continued to sanction certain secret plural marriages until as late as 1907, however, despite continuing skirmishes between Congress and the church and a "Second Manifesto" from sixth president Joseph F. Smith in 1904 reaffirming the cessation of polygamy.

Most Mormons abided by the new declarations, but a zealous minority continued practicing plural marriage underground, believing either that the Manifestos were just for show or that the leaders of the church had gone astray and betrayed bedrock principles faithful members were required to follow to achieve salvation. Polygamous communities thrive to this day, largely in remote areas of Utah and Arizona, though quietly practicing families can be found in most every large city in Utah. (A polygamous family lived up the street from us in Bountiful, in a dilapidated house on a large corner lot so cluttered with rusting cars and overgrown with shaggy trees that it looked like it had been transported whole from some poor backwoods hamlet circa 1930. I never saw any of the parents, but I understand there were something like three wives and eleven children in the house. The boy my age was named Zed—short for Zedekiah—and he came to school in homespun clothes that looked like they'd passed through the hands of several older brothers. He was a sweet kid and I liked him, but rarely was he allowed to play with the rest of us on the block after school.)

How does the law view polygamy today? It's still illegal of course, though traditionally state governments have left polygamous families alone. As more and more instances of child and spousal abuse and even incest among these families come to light, however, prosecution is growing more common. Certainly not all polygamists are otherwise lawbreakers, but the ones who are bring plenty of unwanted attention to the ones who aren't, and give a bad name to them all.

The modern church takes a unilaterally hardline stance against polygamy. Any orthodox Mormon found to be practicing polygamy gets excommunicated—no if's, and's, or but's. The church has worked so hard over the past century to buff itself up for the media and drag itself into the respectable mainstream that it can't abide any association that harks back to the days of cultish infamy. And that's fine with most polygamists; the ones who still call themselves Mormon belong to splinter sects and no longer acknowledge the authority of the leaders in Salt Lake City. There's no love lost here.

Plural marriage in the afterlife still stands as an enticement to mainstream Mormon men, however. If your first eternal wife should die before you, you have perfect freedom to get sealed to a second (provided, of course, that's she's never been sealed to a different husband), and in that event you don't even have to get the first wife's permission! Not only that, but Mormon tradition holds that there will naturally be more women than men in the Celestial Kingdom, and every man who makes it will have more than his share assigned to him as wives. (And they'll have perfect bodies, too, even if they didn't in this life!)

Bottom line: If you're a Mormon man, you have strong incentives to behave in this life and a lot to look forward to in the next—even disregarding the ever-present hope that polygamy might be reinstated as an earthly institution within your lifetime. Woo-hoo!

If you're a Mormon woman—well, the story for you is a little different. Rather than launch into an elaborate treatise on the subject, I'll simply reproduce something my friend Benny wrote me in E-mail:

Regarding plural marriage, I'd almost suggest that you mention something about the average modern Mormon woman's attitude toward it. Simply put, if the church tried to reinstitute it now, the Relief Society wouldn't have it. One of my wife's few sore spots concerning LDS doctrine is the notion that she will have to share her husband with myriad other wives. I tried rubbing her nose in it one time, and it nearly provoked a request for a divorce. The contradiction speaks volumes, doesn't it?

That it does. And if you're a Mormon woman, about the best thing I can say about what you have to look forward to in the next life is that at least you'll have plenty of sister wives to share your misery.

Plural marriage—it's a grand institution, just grand.

This third edition of "Korihor's Corner" is something of a special event. Today—Tuesday, February 17, 1998—my good friend Bob Howe and I are swapping essays. When we discovered we were each writing pieces on the theme of panhandling, me for "Korihor's Corner" and him for his excellent "Fetish Weather Forecast," it seemed only logical that we should share. So I'm running his along with mine, and he's running mine along with his. We hope you enjoy this two-fisted, stereoscopic examination of the problem of panhandling in American cities.

Bill's Essay | Bob's Essay

And also, ye yourselves will succor those that stand in need of your succor; ye will administer of your substance unto him that standeth in need; and ye will not suffer that the beggar putteth up his petition to you in vain, and turn him out to perish.

—Mosiah 4:16

Latter-day Saints hail King Benjamin as one of the greatest prophets of their holy volume of scripture The Book of Mormon, though the short section dealing with this character spans no more than twenty pages of this 531-page book. This is due largely to a single sermon delivered by Benjamin, which takes up most of the aforementioned twenty pages. The sermon in question covers such disparate topics as the characteristics of a good king, the foretelling of Jesus Christ's birth and ministry and sacrifice, the practical meaning of repentance and remission of sins, and the proper treatment of the poor and needy.

Mormons refer to this sermon, as recounted in Chapters Two through Five of the Book of Mosiah, as "King Benjamin's Address"—and it's that last topic I mentioned that the leaders of the Mormon Church would appear to have skimmed over in their reading, the one about the dispensation of the poor.

The thrust of King Benjamin's remarks on this subject, as contained in what Mormons consider canonized scripture and what their prophets have hailed as "the most correct of any book on earth," are that to deny the petitions of beggars is a grave and mortal sin. Segueing from a discussion of the effects of God's forgiveness, Benjamin says this to his assembled subjects:

"And also, ye yourselves will succor those that stand in need of your succor; ye will administer of your substance unto him that standeth in need; and ye will not suffer that the beggar putteth up his petition to you in vain, and turn him out to perish.

"Perhaps thou shalt say: The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand, and will not give unto him of my substance that he may not suffer, for his punishments are just—

"But I say unto you, O man, whosoever doeth this the same hath great cause to repent; and except he repenteth of that which he hath done he perisheth forever, and hath no interest in the kingdom of God.

"For behold, are we not all beggars? Do we not all depend upon the same Being, even God, for all the substance which we have, for both food and raiment, and for gold, and for silver, and for all the riches which we have of every kind?" (Mosiah 4:16-19).

Okay, so here Mormons are exhorted by their holy scriptures in unequivocal terms to not deny the petitions of beggars. So what in the world is that sign doing on the sidewalk beside the Temple entrance at the corner of Main Street and North Temple in Salt Lake City?

You know the sign I mean, if you've attended the Salt Lake Temple any time in recent memory. It's a modest but forceful sign, phrased gently but in the sort of unquestionably authoritative voice to which Mormons are so conditioned to respond with obedience. The sign requests that, in accordance with city ordinances, Temple patrons not give money to panhandlers at the Temple gates, but rather contribute money to homeless shelters, where it can do more good.

And the panhandlers are there—oh, boy are they ever. They know a corner ripe for the plucking when they see it. Thousands of well dressed and affluent Saints pass through those gates every day, on their way to redeem their ancestral dead by standing proxy in ritualistic ceremonies rife with secret passwords and handshakes. Surely some of those well-fed worshippers can be convinced to part with a few of their hard-earned shekels before they enter the House of the Lord to commune with the Holy Spirit! And surely this does happen, or else the panhandlers would find some other corner on which to ply their trade.

But what about that sign? Why don't the good Mormon people obey it? Well, a lot of them do. But others no doubt recall the lesson that King Benjamin taught, and they don't deny the beggars their petition.

I defied that sign myself on a few occasions, though the last time I passed through those gates was late in 1991. I gave ten dollars to a young fellow who said he needed gas money to get to a job interview, and who told me if I came to that same corner at the same time the next day, he would pay me back in full. I didn't judge his request—well, okay, I did judge his request. I judged that he was lying—but that didn't stop me from imparting of my substance, because I had learned from the scriptures that was what I was supposed to do.

Which is why I was always so troubled by that damned sign, even before I decided to set my back to the Mormon Church forever. It might very well be true that donating money to a homeless shelter would do more good than squandering it on isolated beggars—but King Benjamin did not say to donate money to a homeless shelter. He said not to deny the beggar his petition.

But panhandling is illegal, you might argue. There's a city ordinance against it! Ergo, giving money to a panhandler is abetting and encouraging crime! Not to mention the fact that Joseph Smith counseled us in his Articles of Faith—also canonized Mormon scripture—to keep and respect the law:

"[Mormons] believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law" (Articles of Faith 1:12).

Well, fine—except that the Bible and The Book of Mormon both are rife with examples of people forced to choose between obeying two conflicting commandments. Adam and Eve: don't eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of How to Have Sex—but do multiply and replenish the earth. Nephi: thou shalt not kill—but thou shalt lop the head off this drunken oaf I've dropped into the dust here at your feet. Modern Saints: obey the law—but don't deny the beggar his petition.

It would seem to me, weighing the two sides, that the beggar wins in a walk.

Besides which, I've pored over The Book of Mormon, and there's only one loophole I've found for the beggar rule. It goes like this:

"And again, I say unto the poor, ye who have not and yet have sufficient, that ye remain from day to day; I mean all you who deny the beggar, because ye have not; I would that ye say in your hearts that: I give not because I have not, but if I had I would give.

"And now, if ye say this in your hearts ye remain guiltless, otherwise ye are condemned; and your condemnation is just for ye covet that which ye have not received" (Mosiah 4:24, 25).

In other words, poverty is the only acceptable excuse for not giving, and even then you have to want to give, or else you're toast, no matter how poor you are.

This is one of the few ideals from my Mormon upbringing, aside from basic moral principles like not killing and not stealing, that I still practice today. I'm not saying that I think it's better or smarter to give to panhandlers than it is to donate to homeless shelters and outreach programs—that's not the point of this essay at all. The point is that I was taught from a young age not to judge the beggar—and that the wizened old tightwad hypocrites who run the multibillion-dollar corporation that the Mormon Church has become appear to have forgotten this basic lesson from the very scriptures they hawk like snake-oil salesmen through late-night infomercials and 1-800 numbers.

I have a message for those dried-up, loveless misers who have judged the petition of the beggar before they've even heard it, and who are interested in nothing more than keeping unsightly riffraff from clogging the portals of their Temple. Call the number listed on your screens and order yourselves a free copy of your vaunted other "testament of Christ," The Book of Mormon. Turn to the fourth chapter of Mosiah and review the principles you purport to believe, paying particular attention to the promise in the twenty-second verse:

"And if ye judge the man who putteth up his petition to you for your substance that he perish not, and condemn him, how much more just will be your condemnation for withholding your substance, which doth not belong to you but to God, to whom also your life belongeth; and yet ye put up no petition, nor repent of the thing which thou hast done" (Mosiah 4:22).

Jesus knew what to do with the moneychangers in his temple. I don't believe there's any true justice, either in this world or in the next, but if there is, then I hope Christ comes back in all his righteous fury and flogs the shit out of you bastards.

In the meantime, I'll give my money to whomever I feel like giving it to. And you can be certain it won't be you. Not ten percent—not anything.

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

by Robert J. Howe copyright © 1998 by Robert J. Howe. Reprinted by permission from "Fetish Weather Forecast."

I  take the New York City subway every day, and every day I see one of the most mean-spirited features of the Guiliani administration. It's an advertisement, set in a thought balloon so that it appears to be issuing from the head of whoever is seated in front of the ad. The text goes like this, more or less:

"Oh, no, it's another panhandler. They always seem to ask me for money. Don't they know it's illegal to ask for money on the subway? I feel bad for them, but I want to give my money to legitimate charities—so I know it will go to the really needy."

Or words to that effect.

Me, I give money away to everyone who asks. Usually whatever change is in my pocket, or a dollar or two, if I'm feeling flush. The only exception is the rare panhandler who tries to be intimidating—I have a loathing for extortionists, and I see no point in encouraging any more anti-social behavior than there already is on the streets of New York.

Sometimes this seeming irresponsibility irritates whoever I happen to be with. My stock reply is that it's better to be the panhandled than the panhandler. The truth goes deeper than that, however. For one thing, I have a touch of the Bill Clinton disease: I want everyone to like me—even panhandlers. I want to be a "nice" guy, strange when you consider that I'm into S & M.

I've made less trivial decisions than who gets my pocket change based on this desire to be a nice guy. As a brand-new seaman aboard the US Coast Guard's 95-foot patrol boat Cape George, I decided that I wanted to be an electrician based on the performance of the boat's electrician, Lloyd Wentworth. Lloyd was a happy-go-lucky Electrician's Mate Second Class—that he was on independent duty (no supervising Electrician's Mate Chief or First Class) meant that Lloyd's previous superiors thought he was a pretty skilled electrician. What impressed me at the time, however, was that everyone on the Cape George came to Lloyd when they needed something fixed. From the Skipper (a Lieutenant J.G.) on down. Whether it was some piece of the boat's equipment or some broken piece of personal gear, Lloyd always got the call.

When I graduated from electrician's school on Governor's Island and was sent to the USCGC Gallatin, a 378-foot high-endurance cutter, I emulated Lloyd as best I could. In time, I became a fairly skilled troubleshooter, (though not as skilled as I thought was, being 22-years-old and still rather damp behind the ears). But I gave almost every job my best shot, and pretty soon the other engineers were calling for me when there was a troubleshooting job—sometimes regardless of the fact that one of my three Third Class colleagues was the duty electrician, and I was entitled to "sleep in." Since sleep is the holiest of sacraments to a sailor (food being the next holiest, and sex completing the sailor's trinity), I didn't always take the professional compliment with the best grace. Despite its shortcomings though, that life of service was in many ways a deeply satisfying one.

And this, more or less, has been the story of my life. From my earliest recollections, I valued service above personal enrichment; self-sacrifice above self-interest. I came of age in the post-JFK world, but his famous words, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country," resonated deeply in my adolescent soul. As an adult I have worked almost exclusively for non-profit, humanitarian, or news organizations (the latter having an influence on me disproportionate to the small amount of time I was actually among the working press).

Given my worldview, it's not surprising that I've remained in modestly-paid jobs in non-profit settings. The other side of the coin, of course, is that I hold in contempt those whose main goal is making money. This doesn't immunize me from envy—rather, it makes the pangs of jealousy more keen. I can't quite decide whether I'd rather be amomg the rich, or have the rich be poor. On the one hand, human nature being what it is, people will not work without incentives (usually financial); on the other, I can't help but think that there is a certain level of comfort and dignity we owe those unable or even unwilling to work. Despite the fact that Communism and Socialism are seen to be failed welfare ideologies, it was Stalin who said, "Those who do not work shall not eat."

One could even make the case that charity is immoral:

"Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee thou foolish philanthropist that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities, the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-fold Relief Societies; though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold" (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance).

Beyond my personal ideological contortions, however, there's this: if someone needs a few cents, or a few bucks, badly enough to ask, the least I can do is come across with it. And I often think I should be doing more—that we all should be doing more—for fellow human beings so bereft of means and dignity that they're reduced to asking for pocket change from passers-by. It's true that you can't save everyone from themselves. But it seems to me that if the rate of homelessness correlates with the disappearance of moderately paid jobs for unskilled or semi-skilled workers in the toughest real estate market in the country, I have to consider the possibility that many, if not most, panhandlers are victims of circumstance, rather than defective human beings.

You hear the argument that panhandlers are going to spend the money on drugs or booze, or something equally "bad" for them. So what? I don't know what I need in life, half the time. I'm certainly not wise enough to make that decision for anyone else. It's not as if any panhandler's going to put the 75¢ I give him into his stock portfolio. Adam Smith might disapprove, but Adam Smith never spent a night sleeping exposed to the elements on a city street.

I'm lucky. I have a job that pays well enough to allow me to sleep indoors; I have a family that would never let me end up on the street; and I was able to acquire some useful skills along with my college degree. I'm a fairly presentable caucasian male without any life-threatening illnesses or addictions, and I can usually dress myself in the mornings without help. Most of these traits are accidents of birth and circumstance. If I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth, I at least have a spoon, and food to eat with it.

I'm not consciously thinking of all these things when I dig into my pocket, of course. I just can't seem to ignore panhandlers. Especially since I can usually satisfy their requests with a handful of change or a couple of bills that I'll never miss. I feel better being able to help in this small way, and on the rare occassions I don't give, I feel bad about it. Whether it is a "wicked dollar," I don't know, but in the meanwhile, I can do no other.

But only an account of this earth, and the inhabitants thereof, give I unto you. For behold, there are many worlds that have passed away by the word of my power. And there are many that now stand, and innumerable are they unto man; but all things are numbered unto me, for they are mine and I know them.

—Moses 1:35

Hi, neighbor! Did you know that I'm special? Well, that's right—I'm special, uh-huh. And did you know what? You're probably not. Yep, that's right. At any rate, you're probably not as special as I am. You're special, all right, neighbor, but unless you were born a Mormon, then you're not nearly as special as I am. Uh-huh.

Now why don't you go ahead and put down that hammer, neighbor, so I can tell you why it is that being born into God's One True Church makes me so much more special than you. It's not that I'm the most special I could possibly be. Why, there are people a lot more special than I am, people like the prophets who talk with God face to face, or like Saul of Tarsus or Alma the Younger—guys who were so special that when they were bad God Himself came down and told them to stop it because they were special and shouldn't oughta act that way (see Acts 9:1-22 and Mosiah 27:8-37).

Still, I'm pretty darn special. How do I know? Well, the prophets have assured us that these are the Last Days before the Millennium, and only the most valiant of our Father in Heaven's spirit children were saved until the Last Days to come to earth and get bodies and be born into His One True Church. And what did I do to prove I was so valiant? Well, I fought bravely on God's side in the War in Heaven, that's what. (If you need a refresher on the War in Heaven, see "The Great Sacrifice.") That means I'm a great hero! See how special that makes me?

Not convinced? Let's put some numbers with that, then, shall we, neighbor? Population experts tell us that there are about six billion people living on this little earth of ours. That's 6,000,000,000 in numerical form, or 6 x 10⁹ in scientific notation. Mormon statisticians tell us that there are about ten million members of the Church, or 10,000,000—that's 10⁷. Dividing the latter number by the former, we discover that only one out of every 600 (or 6 x 10²) living human beings is a Mormon. That right there is enough to tell you I'm pretty darn special, eh?

But wait—not all of those ten million Mormons were actually born into the Church, like I was, and everyone knows that people valiant enough to be born into the Church are more special than converts. The Church has grown explosively in the past 50 years—there are almost ten times as many Mormons now than there were in 1950. Back then, 87% of all Mormons lived in North America; now only about 56% do. What this means, neighbor, is that convert baptisms have increased at a phenomenal rate, particularly outside the United States and Canada. (Source: Historical Atlas of Mormonism, edited by S. Kent Brown, Donald Q. Cannon, and Richard H. Jackson, Simon and Schuster [New York, NY], 1994.) Let's be conservative then, and estimate that about half of all living Mormons are converts. This means that the chances of your have being born into the Mormon Church like I was are now about one in 1,200 (1.2 x 10³). I'm getting more special by the moment.

I could keep going in this vein, calculating the likelihood that I would be born not only Mormon but also American, white, and male, but what's the point? You can already see how special I am, and we have bigger fish to fry. Let's go get 'em, neighbor.

Those wacky population specialists tell us, at their best estimate, that currently living humans account for between ten and twenty percent of all the humans that have ever lived on the earth since the dawn of man. (Granted, this goes back farther than Adam and Eve, but hey, let's pretend we're scientists for a minute. It can be fun sometimes—I mean, otherwise we couldn't believe in dinosaurs, and then we'd have to start believing that Jurassic Park is evil!) If we go with the conservative figure, twenty percent, then we see that there's only a one in five chance that we would be alive in these Last Days, and only one chance in 6,000 (6 x 10³) that we would be a born Mormon living in the Last Days.

Those are pretty slim odds, neighbor, but not nearly as slim as your odds of say, being killed by lightning (one in 2,000,000) or winning the New York Lottery (one in maybe 60,000,000). You may look at these figures and be tempted to start thinking that I'm really not that special at all. But au contraire, how wrong you would be!

Let's go back to that quote at the top of the page, the one from the Book of Moses. (If you've never heard of the Book of Moses, that's because it's part of The Pearl of Great Price, one of the four holy books of the Mormon Church.) In that verse, God said the following to Moses:

"For behold, there are many worlds that have passed away by the word of my power. And there are many that now stand, and innumerable are they unto man . . ." (Moses 1:35).

What does that mean? Well, neighbor, this and other verses from Mormon scripture make it clear that God made more planets than just this one, and that numberless planets out of all those numberless planets have people on them, too.

On the surface, that's neither here nor there, because if we assume that all those other countless inhabited planets have about the same proportion of Mormons to non-Mormons, it still doesn't change the overall odds that you'd be born Mormon. There's one more crucial bit of information, however, which changes everything. Wanna hear it?

I knew you would. The crucial detail is something that one of our modern Mormon prophets (I don't remember which one, but maybe someone out there can help me) told us, and it's a real doozy. He told us that Jesus Christ is not just the Savior of our earth, but he's also the Savior of every world that God has ever created! And do you know what else? His one single solitary sacrifice on this earth was enough to save everybody on every planet everywhere!

But wait, neighbor—there's more! Do you know why it is that Jesus was sacrificed on this earth instead of on some other earth? We are assured by our prophets that this earth is the only earth in all of God's creation that was wicked enough to kill its own Creator. Can you imagine that? This is the most wicked world in the entire universe, and little ol' me was one of the few children of God valiant enough to be sent there in the Last Days to battle the forces of darkness and evil. Can you even imagine how special that makes me?

(Wait, maybe a better question at this point would be whether or not you can imagine a world more wicked than this one at all. I mean, this world can be pretty wicked, but I don't have much trouble imagining one that's worse. But that's probably only because I'm a science-fiction writer, and trained in the exercise of my imagination. I'm quite certain that a wickeder world could not possibly exist, yup, uh-huh. Believing anything else would be blasphemy.)

Let's do some calculations, shall we? First of all, we have to figure out about how many worlds add up to "innumerable." Well, innumberable is pretty big, but let's be conservative again and say that innumerable means 10¹⁰⁰, which is a one with a hundred zeroes after it. (Mathematicians have a special affection for 10¹⁰⁰, so much so that they've given it a special name: they call it a "googol." Which only goes to show how silly mathematicians can be, right, neighbor?)

Hmm, on second thought, maybe a googol is way too small, because any number I can actually write down can't really be innumerable. But what the heck—I'm getting a headache trying to think of a bigger one, so let's just go with that for now.

Okay, are you ready for some really big math? Here we go. If there are 6 x 10⁹ people living on the earth today, and that's only twenty percent of the people who have ever lived on the earth, then 5 x 6 x 10⁹ have lived and possibly died since the beginning of time. That comes out to 3 x 10¹⁰, or 30,000,000,000, or 30 billion.

That means God had at least 30 billion spirit children earmarked for life on this earth alone—and probably a lot more, because there's still a Millennium that has to go by before this world comes to an utter end. (An interesting implication of this calculation becomes clear when you realize that fully one third of the host of Heaven were cast out with Lucifer after the War in Heaven, which means at least 15 billion evil spirits have been assigned to this planet—and on average that's 2.5 for every human now living. At least. Scary, huh, neighbor?)

But we decided a little while ago that God made about 10¹⁰⁰ other worlds. If there were 3 x 10¹⁰ spirit children created for each one of them, then that's a grand total of 3 x 10¹¹⁰ spirit children in God's universe. And if you count the evil spirits back in, you get 4.5 x 10¹¹⁰. Whoa, Nellie! God and his wives have been awfully dang busy!

Now let's get back to the chances of having been valiant enough to be born Mormon in the Last Days on the only world in God's creation wicked enough to crucify its own Creator. That's no more than 5 x 10⁶ folks who fit the bill (half of the current Church membership), out of a possible 4.5 x 10¹¹⁰. In other words, my chances of being as special as I am are one in 9 x 10¹⁰³—which are staggeringly longer odds than my chances of winning any puny earthly lottery. I am so dang special I can hardly stand myself!

But are you ready for this, neighbor? It gets even better! Check out the following paragraph from a recent issue of Time magazine:

"Mormons reject the label polytheistic pinned on them by other Christians; they believe that humans deal with only one God. Yet they allow for other deities presiding over other worlds. [Joseph] Smith stated that God was once a humanlike being who had a wife and in fact still has a body of 'flesh and bones.' Mormons also believe that men, in a process known as deification, may become God-like. Lorenzo Snow, an early President and Prophet [of the Mormon Church], famously aphorized, 'As man is now, God once was; as God now is, man may become'" (David Van Biema, "Kingdom Come," Time, August 4, 1997, p. 56).

You see, neighbor, Mormons believe that God was once a human like you or I, and that He had a God of His own, and that He was good and faithful and endured to the end and eventually become a God in His own right, and that this process has been going on forever, and will continue forever and ever, amen. We can become Gods ourselves, if only we're nice and play by the rules.

But then again, maybe our God wasn't quite like you or I. You see, one of our more recent modern-day prophets—I think it was Joseph Fielding Smith, but I could be wrong—has given us more information about the nature of God than Lorenzo Snow did. It hinges on a particular scripture in the fifth chapter of John, in which Jesus heals an invalid on the Sabbath, in violation of Jewish custom. When the Jews attacked him, Jesus responded:

"Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise" (John 5:19).

Joseph Fielding Smith (or whoever it was) told us that the proper interpretation of this verse is that Jesus followed his father's example in everything, up to and including his death and sacrifice and resurrection and atonement. In other words, Smith assures us, our God was also the Savior of His Father's entire Creation!

Can you dig it, my neighbor?! That makes me, and everyone else on this rock, about a zillion times more special than we previously calculated. Let's be fairly generous this time and figure that one out of every thousand of a particular God's spirit children will go the distance and eventually become a God himself. A thousandth of 4.5 x 10¹¹⁰ (what we previously calculated as the lower bound on the number of God's offspring) is still a whopping 4.5 x 10¹⁰⁷. And since there's only one Savior for every Creation, that means the chances that our God would also have been a Savior are one in 4.5 x 10¹⁰⁷.

And now for the grand capper, let's combine that with our previous calculation so that we can learn approximately how much chance I had of being born a Mormon in the Last Days of the most wicked world in the entire Creation of a God who was also the Savior for His Father's Creation. And the answer is . . .

One chance in 4.05 x 10²¹¹.

Neighbor, I'm not sure that you can rightly appreciate just what mind-blowingly long odds those are, and exactly how dang special that makes me. For perspective, let's consider some other fairly big numbers. Rock music, for example, has been around for only about 1.25 x 10⁹ seconds (about forty years), agriculture for 3 x 10¹¹ seconds (about ten thousand years), and modern Homo sapiens for 10¹³ seconds (about a third of a million years). But those numbers don't come anywhere close to 4.05 x 10²¹¹. Let's try something bigger, shall we?

Consider the number of protons—tiny, tiny things only 10^-12 (.000000000001) centimeters across—that it would take to fill the entire universe, which is estimated to be about 40 billion (4 x 10¹⁰) light-years across. Are you ready? A cube as big across as our universe would hold only about 10¹²² protons. (Source: Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences, by John Allen Paulos, Hill and Wang [New York, NY], 1988.) But that's still no more than a speck beside the incomprehensible hugeness of 4.05 x 10²¹¹.

Do you begin to see, neighbor? Do you? Do you begin to see how amazingly, splendiferously, unbelievably special I am?

I thought you would, neighbor. Yep.

Try not to get struck by lightning on your way home.

. . . [W]e are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. And every priest standeth daily ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins: but this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God; from henceforth expecting till his enemies be made his footstool.

—Hebrews 10:10-13

Okay, so here's the story of the universe in a nutshell, at least according to Joseph Smith:

Once upon a time, there was God, and there were also countless intelligences—or in other words, floaty thinking essences that were distinct and sentient, but which didn't have much substance, and which had existed for ever and ever. God saw these intelligences and did something mystical with his wife (or wives) whereby billions and billions of them (the intelligences, not the wives) were given greater substance, turning into what we call spirits.

(For you science fiction fans out there, the notion of intelligences is what formed the theological underpinning for the "philotes" of Orson Scott Card's novel Xenocide [Tor Books, 1991]. For what it's worth.)

Joseph Smith, in D&C 93:29-30, expounds: "Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be. All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence." All of which is his way of saying that we were all there in Heaven with God, that we always were, and that we could do with ourselves what we liked.

Okay, fine, but what were we like physically? Ghostly masses of energy? Again according to Brother Joseph: "There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes; we cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter" (D&C 131:7-8).

So, purer matter—kind of like coherent hydrogen steam, I suppose. At any rate, we were with God in Heaven, and life was good. And apparently it went on for a long, long time. Unimaginably long.

But there was a problem. We had a loving Father who wanted us to be like Him—but we weren't quite like Him yet. According to ol' Joe, "The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man's" (D&C 130:22). We looked like him, in general size and shape, but it was damned difficult for Him to play hobbyhorse with us when we'd climb up on His Knee and slide right through. After all, we were spirits.

So how to bring about the next stage in the intelligence-spirit-god progression? Nothing so simple as a celestial quickie would work this time. It was more difficult than that. So God rounded us all up one day into the amazingly huge family rec room, and He told us what would have to happen. This was called the Council in Heaven.

To get bodies, He told us, we would have to go to Earth. What's Earth? we asked. Where is it? Well, it wasn't built yet. That's what the meeting was all about.

You see, God told us, if you want to live with Me in Heaven forever, then you have to pass a test—complete your college degree, so to speak. You have to go to Earth, and you have to get a body, and you have to grow up, and you have to keep all the rules (which you will incidentally have to discover along the way), and you have to suffer and be miserable and then die without breaking any of them. Or otherwise you'll have to be tormented in hell for all the ones you didn't keep. Oh, yes, and I'm going to take your memory away before you go. Sounds fun, doesn't it?

Oh, yes, we chorused. Um, but what's this part about torment?

Oh, yes, that, God said. I forgot to tell you how you can get around that. See, one of you can volunteer to get punished for everyone else's mistakes. All you have to do is not make any yourself. Any takers?

We all looked down at our feet.

And that's when Jehovah, who was the oldest one of us spirit children (well, the first one spun into spirit, anyway), raised his hand and said, Sure, I'll do it.

And we all wiped our brows and grinned in relief. Good old Jehovah to the rescue! (Of course, a few of us muttered, "Brownnoser." But they were bad sports.)

Now you understand, God said, that even with this sacrifice Jehovah's going to make, not all of you will be coming back. You still have to keep the rules the best you can, and you have to listen to your brother and do what he says! Otherwise, it's into the toaster for you.

We all became very serious at that point, nodding and saying, Of course we'll be good, oh yes, of course, don't worry about us!

But then someone else spoke up—Lucifer, another one of the older kids. Smart, good-looking, but kind of a rebel. Hold on a minute, said Lucifer. What's all this talk about torment and free will and so forth? Listen, send me instead of the Jee-man over there, and I'll make sure everyone makes it back. Everyone will know the rules from the start, and we won't lose a single one. No one gets toasted, and no one has to hang from a tree. I'll make sure of it. So how about it, Pops?

Some of us started to nod. Yes, that certainly sounded better!

Um, no, I don't think so, God said. I like the original plan. I think everyone should get to choose what they do.

Me, too! said Jehovah. That's what I think!

Well, you can count me out, said Lucifer. No way I'm going to Earth under those conditions.

And some of us started to cluster around Lucifer, even as others were clustering around Jehovah. Names were called, food was thrown, someone caught a punch—and then things got ugly. This is what we call the War in Heaven.

Guess who won? That's right, Jehovah and the gang—and you and I were on the right team. How do we know? Because we're here.

You see, Lucifer and the spirits who sided with him—fully one third of God's spirit children—got kicked out of Heaven as their penalty for starting the fight. And as part of the punishment, they lost their chance ever to get a body and try to become like God. This is what prompted Isaiah to write those immortal words: "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning?" (Isaiah 14:12).

Abraham wrote his own account of these events—at least, Joseph Smith once translated some scrolls that he said were written by Abraham—and this is how he summarized the story so far:

"Now the Lord had shown unto me, Abraham, the intelligences that were organized before the world was; and among all these there were many of the noble and great ones; and God saw these souls that they were good, and he stood in the midst of them, and he said: These I will make my rulers; for he stood among those that were spirits, and he saw that they were good; and he said unto me: Abraham, thou art one of them; thou wast chosen before thou wast born.

"And there stood one among them that was like unto God, and he said unto those who were with him: We will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell; and we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them; and they who keep their first estate shall be added upon; and they who keep not their first estate shall not have glory in the same kingdom with those who keep their first estate; and they who keep their second estate shall have glory added upon their heads for ever and ever.

"And the Lord said: Whom shall I send? And one answered like unto the Son of Man: Here am I, send me. And another answered and said: Here am I, send me. And the Lord said: I will send the first.

"And the second was angry, and kept not his first estate; and, at that day, many followed after him" (Abraham 3:22-28).

(First estate meaning, of course, Heaven, and second estate meaning Earth.)

Anyway, Jehovah and his best buddy Michael, once they had taken out the trash, got the job of actually building the Earth. With God's blueprints in hand, they organized it out of the celestial soup and made seas and rivers and mountains and plants and animals. When everything else was done, they made a man, and Jehovah put the spirit Michael inside it. And when he woke up, Michael discovered that he was a man named Adam, and that he couldn't remember anything else.

You probably know the story from there.

Anyway, skipping four thousand years or so, Jehovah eventually got a body also, after God had sex with a daughter of His named Mary. He was named Jesus, and he never did anything wrong, and then he voluntarily suffered for an infinitude of sins in the Garden of Gethsemane, and then he got nailed to a cross and he hung there until he died. And that was the Great Sacrifice for which Mormons (and all Christians) worldwide worship and revere Jesus.

Only . . .

Only Jesus got to take his body back three days after his "sacrifice," and he got to fly back to heaven and sit down on the right hand of God, and he assured of perfect eternal life and Godhood for ever and ever.

So how much of a sacrifice was it, really?

Well, it was infinite, right? The Book of Mormon says: "Wherefore, it must needs be an infinite atonement—save it should be an infinite atonement this corruption could not put on incorruption" (2 Nephi 9:7). That's pretty heavy, isn't it?

Well, sure that's a lot of suffering, and a lot of atonement. But when the reward is so great, so much more infinite than the suffering (after all, the "infinite" atonement ended when Jesus died), then how much of a sacrifice was it, really?

So when is a sacrifice not a sacrifice? When you benefit from it personally.

No, if this Mormon myth is really true, then you and I are treading toward heaven on the back of someone who is paying an even greater price than Jesus—who chose to pay an even greater price. Someone who will be tormented forever with no hope of deliverance. And Mormon theology demands that there be such a miserable, wretched fall guy: "For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so, my first-born in the wilderness, righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad" (2 Nephi 2:11).

In other words, there had to be a Lucifer. There had to be a chump who took the real fall while the nominal Savior suffered for a day and then waltzed back home to Heaven. God's plan for us wouldn't have worked any other way. For a God who claims to be just and fair, isn't that just a little bit underhanded? Isn't that pretty dirty pool?

But Lucifer chose to rebel, you say. He deserves his punishment. Sure, okay, he chose it. But someone had to. The theology demands it. If it hadn't been Lucifer, then it would have had to have been someone else. And if no one else had taken the job of the opposition—well, what would have happened? Would someone have been coerced into the role? Might it have been you? Or me? How much do you like the idea of necessary opposition now?

If you're not convinced, then consider a parallel situation—the part Judas Iscariot played in Jesus's death. In Raphael Carter's excellent novel The Fortunate Fall (Tor Books, 1996), a character named Pavel Voskresenye offers the following explication of Judas's betrayal:

"'Don't people still know that story even now? Judas betrays Christ, his friend and Lord, and we are supposed to believe it is all for a few silver coins, which, as it happens, he covets so much as to immediately throw them away. Now . . . is that a plausible motivation? If a man like Judas said to you, "I did it for the money," would you believe him?'

"'I suppose—'

"'No! Of course you wouldn't. There is only one reason why Judas committed his crime. He did it because it fulfilled the prophecy. It made Christ a martyr. He did it because if he had not, Jesus of Nazareth would have wound up as a starving beggar in the streets of Rome, leprous and louse-ridden, making himself portwine out of the ditch-water. He violated the shining law that Jesus had set forth, because only in that way could he make sure that law was not forgotten. . . .

"'There is only one way to contain an evil you have once begun, and that is to provide a scapegoat. You may find someone else to fill the role—the coward's way. But the wise man, when forced into evil, makes a scapegoat of himself. That is what Judas does. He knows what must be done; he does it; and then he makes sure that the people he has benefited will revile him, because only that can prevent his crime from being repeated. He takes the damnation that he has deserved, even though he has done more for the faith than Christ himself. He does not just accept damnation, he rushes to it; the touch of the rope is a lover's embrace'" (The Fortunate Fall, pp. 245-246, 249).

Is it possible that Lucifer actually knew what he was getting into? That he opposed God's plan specifically in order to help complete it?

Who can say? It's only a myth, after all. Because if it were real, then the Mormons would owe thanks to Lucifer as much as, if not more so than, to Jesus Christ.

And we couldn't have Americans giving thanks to the devil, right?

No, of course not.

And it came to pass that the high priest said unto [Korihor]: Why do ye go about perverting the ways of the Lord? Why do ye teach that there shall be no Christ, to interrupt their rejoicings? Why do ye speak against all the prophecies of the holy prophets?     Now the high priest's name was Giddonah. And Korihor said unto him: Because I do not teach the foolish traditions of your fathers, and because I do not teach this people to bind themselves down under the foolish ordinances and performances which are laid down by ancient priests, to usurp power and authority over them, to keep them in ignorance, that they may not lift up their heads, but be brought down according to thy words.     Ye say that this people is a free people. Behold, I say they are in bondage. Ye say that those ancient prophecies are true. Behold, I say that ye do not know that they are true.

—Alma 30:22-24

For those of you tuning in late to this whole Mormon morass, a few words of explanation are probably in order for the moniker under which I've chosen to present my musings on the logical fallacies and moral shortcomings of that behemoth that calls itself the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Korihor is perhaps the most infamous of the several "antichrists" put forth as characters in the Book of Mormon. He receives rather harsh treatment at the hands of that book's author, Joseph Smith, not to mention at the hands of other characters. This shouldn't be surprising, since the story of Korihor exists expressly to illustrate the evils of intellectualism. Brilliantly and briskly, it lays the foundation of the mindset which permits Mormons to dismiss any rational criticism of their beliefs out of hand as the work of Satan. All this in just a few short pages of tortured pseudo-Biblical prose. Wow!

Briefly, the story goes like this: Into the peaceful, God-fearing land of Zarahemla comes the sly and evil Korihor, who goes about preaching that the people should not believe in ancient prophecies, that there is no life after death, and so forth. Now, the law can't touch him, because the people of Zarahemla are free to believe as they like, but Korihor makes the mistake of wandering into the lands of Jershon and Gideon, where the laws against free speech are apparently more strict (and where, as the author is careful to point out, the people are "more wise"), and the people there tie him up and take him before their chief judge.

After a short theological debate, Korihor gets extradited back to Zarahemla, where he appears before Alma, who is not only governor of all the land but also God's head prophet. (Can you say conflict of interest?) After a somewhat lengthier debate, Korihor asserts that he will not believe in God unless he is given a sign. Alma handily obliges him, striking him mute by the power of God.

At this point, Korihor admits (in writing, of course) that he really believed in God all along, but that the devil had appeared to him one night and taught him all sorts of pretty things to say which were "pleasing unto the carnal mind" in order to lead the people astray. He then somewhat contradictorily explains that he told so many lies that he eventually came to believe them, and he begs Alma for his voice back.

Alma's response? "Um, I don't think so, Korihor. You'll just start telling lies again." So much for freedom of speech in ancient America.

Well, poor Korihor's wickedness is published throughout the land, and he himself is cast out into the streets to eke out a beggar's existence, going from house to house for his food. Eventually he comes to the land of the Zoramites, where the people run him down and stomp him to death.

All of which is basically a disheartening and even frightening parable of how the Mormon Church as both an institution and a society silences its voices of dissent. See what wonderful things you can learn from the Book of Mormon?

Thank goodness for the Internet. If Korihor had had a Web page, maybe the Big Brethren would never have put the make on him.

So this one's for you, Korihor, in whatever imaginary hell Joseph Smith conjured up for you. I know they only obtained your confession under duress. I mean, what are you going to do? They had your fucking voice. But don't worry—there are plenty more of us now, and they can't get us all.

Hang in there, guy. We'll tear down those deafened walls of superstition and set you free. Along with ourselves. And whomever else we can take with us.

And to the men with the silencers, look out. We're coming for you, too—and we're closer than you think.