In this week’s issue, Adam Gopnik reviews new books about Mormonism and discusses the history of the Church of the Latter-day Saints. The New Yorker has previously published two substantial articles about the Mormon religion. The first of these was Samuel Hopkins Adams’ “Home Town of a Prophet” from 1942. Adams visited Palmyra, New York, the birthplace of Mormonism, and described how the town related to the Church decades after the Mormons moved West to build their stronghold in Utah. (It was not until 1915 that the Latter-day Saints made an effort to reëstablish itself in its birthplace.)
Like many writers on the origins of Mormonism, Adams notes that the region around Palmyra had a history of religious fervor. “Within a hundred-mile radius have first appeared portents and wonders more numerous and significant than in any other equal area in the Western Hemisphere.” (The area was known as the “burnt-over district” because of this.) Adams found that in the “prosperous, tidy Village of ordered respectability and impregnable Republicanism”, Mormonism, in the nineteen-forties, was “of less concern than the town high school’s basketball score.” That there was a Mormon presence in the town, was due largely to the work of Elder Willard Bean, who, Adams writes, was sent from Salt Lake City to Palmyra “to make converts, if possible, but particularly to make friends among the populace definitely suspicious, mildly contemptuous, and generally hostile.” Bean not only succeeded in changing the perception of the locals and establishing a Mormon congregation in Palmyra, but he also oversaw the acquisition of many of the faith’s significant landmarks, including the farm where Joseph Smith lived, the Sacred Grove, where Smith received a vision of God and Christ, and the Hill Cumorah, where the Angel Moroni appeared to Smith.
In 2002, just before the start of the Salt Lake City Olympics, Lawrence Wright published “Lives of the Saints,” a Reporter at Large surveying the history and organization of the Mormon Church. Mitt Romney, who was the head of the organizing committee for the Games, is featured prominently in several passages in the article. In this section, on the role of missionaries in the Church, Romney discusses conversion challenges greater than those faced by Elder Bean in Palmyra:
The experience of having doors closed in one’s face day after day leaves a lasting impression. “It’s funny how people who served as missionaries often say it was the most difficult two years of their lives, and also the best,” Mitt Romney, the head of the organizing committee for the Salt Lake City Olympics, told me. Romney served his mission in Paris and Bordeaux. He is the scion of one of the most famous Mormon political families; his father, George Romney, was the Republican governor of Michigan for three terms beginning in 1962, and a Presidential aspirant in 1968. “As you can imagine, it’s quite an experience to go to Bordeaux and say, ‘Give up your wine! I’ve got a great religion for you!’’’ he said. “It was good training for how life works. I mean, rejection of one kind or another is going to be an important part of everyone’s life. Here I’d grown up as the son of a governor, from a wealthy home. No one had asked me about my religion, or cared, and now I was on the street, lower than a Fuller Brush salesman, in a place where Americans were not particularly liked, where I couldn’t speak the language very well, and where selling religion, particularly Mormonism, was going to be very painful.”
The articles—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—are available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issues.
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