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CHAPTER 1
Scene One
Sunday morning, 1962, a family restaurant.
A husband, wife, and two young sons are eating lunch after attending church. The mother is dressed like Jackie Kennedy — white pillbox hat, long white gloves. The father wears a black suit like Joe Friday on Dragnet. The boys have black suits like their father's, and crew cuts, freckles, and glasses that are taped together and hang sideways on their noses. The boys are uncomfortable in their Sunday clothes. The father is uncomfortable with his family.
The mother asks her sons, "Well, what did you learn from the sermon this morning?"
"The minister was saying God listens to our prayers," says the younger son, age five, "so I was praying, asking God to move the light hanging from the ceiling, as a sign. Nothing happened."
"I don't believe in God," says the older son, age six.
The mother is shocked. "Don't say that. There most certainly is a God."
"It's a lie," the boy says. "There is no God." He's angry.
The father is adding up the check, making sure the numbers are correct. The younger son looks out the window to the gas station across the street where a man is filling his tank.
The man bursts into flames.
The son looks at his dad. "They made a mistake," he says. "They overcharged us by $2.38."
The boy looks back to the man in flames, and he's rolling over and over on the asphalt, trying to put himself out.
CHAPTER 2
Inside the Momosphere
Most cities are built on flat ground where buildings and trees block the view of the horizon, but Salt Lake City sits in a valley between two separate mountain ranges and has something of the shape of a bowl. Inside this bowl, no matter where you are, you can see every other place in the bowl — to distances of twenty miles — but nothing beyond it, unless you get up on the rim, on top of the mountains. From there you can see the curve of the Earth.
This is what I'm used to, living in a bowl, a high desert basin. When I leave town and spend time in flat places I start getting claustrophobic because everything is close up and nothing is far away, and if I stay too long I have panic attacks. I tell this to my friends who live in flat places and they say it is I who live in a claustrophobic place — among the Mormons. "How can you live there?" they say, meaning, How can you live surrounded by religious fanatics?
This makes me defend the Mormons, as they are much like people everywhere else — some are bad, some are good. It doesn't bother me that Mormons believe God grew up as a human being on a planet circling a sun called Kolob. I'm not upset when they tell me He came to Earth in a physical body and had sex with the Virgin Mary. These beliefs, as Jefferson said, neither pick my pocket nor break my bones. And when it comes right down to it, some of the most liberal minds I know come from Mormon families — men and women who would be careful before criticizing what they don't understand.
I have a problem with only one of their beliefs — that Mormons are God's chosen people and He gave this land to them. This is Zionism, and I'm against it, wherever it occurs, because it's nothing but a lie used to justify taking land and liberty from other people. This does pick my pocket and break my bones, and I hope someday it'll be seen by everyone as a ridiculous and archaic notion, similar to the belief that the Earth is flat.
I'm working on a screenplay, one where God appears with a bag of golf clubs in the apartment of a successful New York public relations executive and says He wants to kill himself because He's always been a lousy god and He thinks everybody will be better off without Him. There are other planets, He says, run by other gods, and their people are happy. And this isn't the first time he's failed. He's had other planets in the past and they didn't turn out well either. He just kept thinking He could do better next time. He comes to the PR executive because He's realized He can't actually commit suicide, says He tried it and it didn't work, so He's decided the next best thing to do is ruin His image, make it so nobody wants to pray to Him ever again.
"All we got to do is tell them the truth," He says.
The PR executive asks God why He has golf clubs, and God says He thought they could get in some rounds while they're going over the details of the media campaign. God says He's been working on his game and that He plays as a human, not as an all-powerful being, for religious reasons. When they get out on the course it turns out God isn't very good at all. He misses shots and gets really angry and pounds His clubs into the grass yelling, "God damn it!"
The plan is to bring back Walter Cronkite and have him announce on the six o'clock news that God is a big failure and wants to quit, followed by an exclusive, commercial-free interview with the deity Himself. In the interview God says He now realizes it was wrong to keep starting new religions, telling different people they were His chosen ones and then giving them a bunch of land where other people were already living. In His confession He breaks down and says, "I just wanted my children to be happy. I just wanted them to love me."
I've tried to leave Salt Lake, many times, but I always come back. Now, after living here for nearly fifty years, I'm starting to think this landscape has become a part of my body and I need to see the mountains — Lone Peak, Twin Peaks, Mt. Olympus — in order to feel whole. I watch how they change shape with the light. On a clear morning after a snowstorm they rise up like a wave about to crash down on the city; in the summer haze they are so small and far away.
This isn't how it is for most people who live here. Among the Mormons it's not the mountains that are important but Temple Square, downtown. It's an entire city block, a perfect square, seven hundred and fifty feet long on a side, surrounded by a wall twelve feet high. Inside the wall is the neo-Gothic Salt Lake Temple, which is the center of the Mormon metaphysical cosmology. This is very important, and yet it takes people a long time to learn. For members of the LDS Church, the Salt Lake City Temple is the hub around which everything that means anything revolves. Their identity, their purpose, is embodied there inside the wall.
The Tabernacle is also in there, a beautiful egg-like building, home of the longest-running radio show in history — "Music and the Spoken Word," with the Tabernacle Choir, broadcast every Sunday since 1929, now on two thousand stations around the world. Utah has six national parks, but Temple Square attracts more people every year than any of them.
You can't go inside the Temple unless you are a Mormon and have a recommendation from your bishop, but you can go inside the wall to see the Tabernacle and the two visitor centers with movies and dioramas. The official tours are usually guided by young sister missionaries who will bear their testimony at the drop of a hat, telling you how they know Joseph Smith was a prophet of God and that the Book of Mormon is true. They glow while they say these things, light coming from a burning in their bosom, and it can be very appealing because they are genuinely happy. Pretty soon you'll be writing down your address for them. But then it will be the young brother missionaries who will come to your house. No matter where you live, they will find you, and it will be difficult to make them go away.
I will take you on my own tour of Temple Square, but I'd like to start with the white marble statue of Joseph Smith in the lobby of the old Hotel Utah, just across Main Street from Temple Square.
Built in 1911, eleven stories tall, glazed white with a beehive on top, the Hotel Utah offered the finest accommodations between Denver and San Francisco and was known as the "Grande Dame." It hosted U.S. presidents, foreign dignitaries, and Hollywood movie stars, but turned away Ella Fitzgerald and Harry Belafonte. In 1987 the Church closed the hotel and converted it to offices, a genealogy library, meeting rooms, and an IMAX theater now showing Joseph Smith: The Prophet of the Restoration.
The statue of Joseph Smith stands in the old hotel lobby, which was preserved for historical value. The room is ringed by grey marble pillars two stories tall with a stained-glass ceiling and an enormous crystal chandelier hanging down in the center. The statue is ten feet tall and very white — Joseph in a suit coat and bow tie, holding the Book of Mormon.
You can walk right up and stand in front of him, gazing up at his proud and handsome face. But when you look down about eye level, you see he's wearing some pretty tight pants and there's a six- or seven-inch bulge between his legs, like the back of a white whale surfacing above the water. You can touch it if you want, even rub it like in the Catholic and Hindu traditions. But I've never seen anyone actually do it and I don't know what would happen if you did.
Let's go outside and look at the Brigham Young statue. He's up there on top of a granite monolith, twenty-five feet in the air, standing over Main Street looking southward down the valley. His left arm is raised, palm up and open as if to say, "Someday, my son, all of this will be yours."
Brigham Young and Joseph Smith were both strong, charismatic leaders, but their personalities were opposite in nature, like Stalin and Lenin, and so too are their statues. Joseph is carved in white marble, immaculate, while Brigham is cast in bronze that has blackened over time. This is not to say that Brigham has lost his standing among Church historians; that's not the case at all. He was just different in nearly every way from Joseph. Joseph was a utopian visionary who led by inspiration; Brigham was pragmatic and led with a hammer.
Joseph Smith said he was visited by angels, prophets, Jesus Christ, and God Himself. He said he'd been told that all religions on Earth had fallen into apostasy and that he'd been chosen to restore the one true gospel and build a New Jerusalem in America so Jesus would have a place to come back to. Joseph and his early followers tried building the New Jerusalem in Kirtland, Ohio, then Independence, Missouri, and then Nauvoo, Illinois, but in each location they were met by opposition and persecution from their non-Mormon neighbors. Then, in June 1844, in the middle of his campaign to become president of the United States, Joseph was killed by an angry mob in Carthage, Illinois.
And it came to pass that the Saints of the Latter Days would move again and find another place to build the Kingdom of God on Earth. Joseph himself, shortly before he was killed, said he'd received a revelation that the Saints were to move to a location in the Rocky Mountains, as foretold in the book of Isaiah:
And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established in the top of the mountains and shall be exalted above the hills, and all nations shall flow into it. (Isaiah 2:2)
But it was Brigham Young who brought the Saints across the Great Plains to the Great Basin in covered wagons. It was Brigham who was tough as nails and pushed the envelope of space, moving his people outside the territory of the United States into an uncontrolled part of Mexico where they would be left alone. There were bands of Native Americans living along the western slope of the Wasatch Mountains, but the Salt Lake Valley was a no-man's-land, a buffer zone between the Shoshones to the north and the Utes to the south. Later, of course, there were massacres, small and large, but in the beginning the pioneers walked into open space — a high desert basin covered in dry grass and sage brush.
They arrived on July 24, 1847, and Brigham Young already had the map of the new city plotted out in his mind. It was to be a rational system, a Cartesian grid with the temple as the "0,0" origin point, the axes running to the cardinal directions. This earthly city would be a mirror image of the heavenly city where God and Jesus live, and it would be a gathering place where all would be of one heart and mind, the City of Zion.
For three days Brigham Young walked around, scouting out the valley, trying to decide where to put the temple. He knew that whatever spot he chose would be ground zero for time and all eternity. Finally, near the bank of a stream at the northern end of the valley, he jabbed his cane into the dirt and said, "This is where we will build a temple to our God."
It was a good decision, a nice location. From here you can watch the Wasatch mountains like a wraparound drive-in movie.
Thus did Brigham speak, and thus did the Salt Lake Valley, empty of meaning and purpose, become part of a transcendent reality — absolute. Land was transformed into property, chaos into cosmos. The x and y axes of the Cartesian grid ran to the cardinal points. The temple itself would be the third axis, the z, running straight up to heaven and down to the center of the Earth.
Brigham named all the streets and addresses in the valley from this spot. For instance, the second street to the east he called Second East, and the fourth street to the south he called Fourth South. So today wherever you go in the valley, whether as a believer or an unbeliever, your position is described as a set of coordinates in relation to the temple.
We can't go into the Temple, but we can walk right up to it, walk all the way around it, and even touch it. It is made of light grey, almost white, granite quarried from the base of Little Cottonwood Canyon, fifteen miles to the south. It took them forty years to build. They hauled the stone by oxcart and railway and cut it into perfect square blocks and stacked it up so seamlessly and straight that the building looks as if it was carved in place from one giant rock. It has six spires, the highest spire holding the gold-plated statue of the angel Moroni with his long trumpet pointed to the east — an air raid siren for the Apocalypse. They don't call themselves Saints of the "Latter Days" for nothing.
Inside the Temple the righteous enact rituals called ordinances and covenants — baptisms, endowments of the priesthood, marriages for time and all eternity, and different blessings. These are sacred ceremonies and the language and symbolisms used are not to be discussed in public. They are secrets, and even Mormons who have fallen away from the church and no longer believe its doctrines will refuse to speak of the ceremonies that go on inside because of the promises they made there with God.
I first heard about these ceremonies when I was eight years old, walking to school with my two friends. They told me they'd been baptized in the Temple and now they were going to a different heaven than I was, unless I converted. They said there are three levels of heaven and they were going to the highest one, the Celestial Kingdom, but the best I could hope for was the second level, the Terrestrial Kingdom, which isn't a bad place, just not the best place. There is, they said, no hell, except for a few really bad people, Sons of Perdition, who are cast into the Outer Darkness.
The best thing about the highest heaven, where they were going, was that through "the law of eternal progression" they would someday become gods, like our God now, with their own planet, only somewhere else in the universe. They said they were telling me all this because they didn't want me to miss out. They wanted me to start reading the Book of Mormon and praying about whether it was true. Each of us had peach fuzz on our faces and pants with patches ironed onto the knees, and we were carrying "new math" textbooks, yet they were on their way to godhood and I was just walking to second grade.
The power of the Temple is mighty and strong. Touch it. Feel the rock — nine feet thick at the base, six feet thick at the top. The foundation goes down forty feet. When I touch it I think of Lone Peak, which is the same rock, the same granite. You can stand on this rock on top of Lone Peak and look down here and see Temple Square, twenty miles away. You can see the whole valley, and then you can ski down into it. That's probably not as good as becoming a god. It's more like becoming a bird.
There are four doors to the Temple, two on the east and two on the west, but everyone enters and exits through atunnel underground. The doors will open when Jesus comes back. Until then, they stay locked.
Since we can't go inside, we should walk around to the flagpole between the Temple and the Tabernacle, in the exact center of the square. From here you can look up and see the American flag juxtaposed against the upper spires of the Temple. This is the money shot. In Utah, church and state go together like muscle and bone, intertwined in Mormon mythology. Joseph Smith believed Jesus "raised up" our founding fathers and guided their hands in writing the Constitution in order to make a new nation, tolerant of religious beliefs, where the restoration of the gospel could come about. In other words, Mormons believe the United States of America was designed by Jesus for Joseph Smith to become God's prophet of this last chapter of civilization as we know it. The flag and the temple, the temple and the flag, in the center of the center of the cosmos, where Jesus is going to live when he comes back.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Prisoner of Zion"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Scott Carrier.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
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