Glenn Beck's Mormon Conversion

Glenn Beck, the weepy-eyed rabble rouser who has been out Limbaugh-ing Rush, converted to Mormonism in 1999. Mormonism, which now boasts at least as many members as all of Judaism (by most accounts, each have about 13 million worldwide), has been called the fastest growing religion in the world.



Then again, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, there are only about 4 million active members, and Seventh Day Adventists are growing faster. And, for every Glenn Beck, there's a Harry Reid, who once said, "I think it is much easier to be a good member of the Church and a Democrat than a good member of the Church and a Republican."

Dictator Kitsch

When former President Bill Clinton was in North Korea to rescue former Vice President Al Gore's wayward reporters, he was photographed with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il in front of a huge and garish mural.

It's dictator kitsch, writes, Eric Gibson in the Wall Street Journal this week:

"'Kitsch' has become a byword in the culture for anything over-the-top or tacky. In art, it’s meaning is more specific. It refers to works trafficking in facile, base or false emotions—most often sentimentality—and whose imagery is off-the-shelf and formulaic, a debased version of a once-original aesthetic idea. Need to conjure that warm-and-fuzzy feeling? Cue the fiery sunset. Looking to express fragile innocence? Bring on the shoeless urchin carrying the bird with the broken wing."

Later in the article there's a great anecdote about a Russian artist who was employed by the Soviet Union as a creator of Socialist Realist art. After the fall of the Soviet Union, his transition was clumsy: "so ingrained were his earlier habits that every time he painted the face of Jesus, he wound up with a likeness of Lenin."


In fact, there isn't so much difference between religious kitsch and kitsch employed in the service of totalitarian regimes. Take this poster of Moroni, a character from the Book of Mormon. Aside from the fact that it looks computer-generated, like something out of a late-90s era video game, the rays of sun could just as easily indicate religious themes as socialist ones.


Perhaps a better example, one from the same company Real Hero Posters, is this one of the Bible character Ruth. Here, we see a proud agricultural scene, complete with dramatic sunlight, sheaf of wheat, and a low perspective that makes the figure look large and heroic. This looks positively Soviet, yet it's quite the opposite.

This Just in: Obama's Mother Saved From Purgatory

Thank God. According to Politico, Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham--who died in 1995--was baptised posthumously by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Baptising dead people is a common practice for the Mormons, who believe that it's the only way to help good people who didn't get the chance to hear the "good news" while alive into heaven. A Church statement e-mailed to Politico said:

"The offering of baptism to our deceased ancestors is a sacred practice to us and it is counter to Church policy for a Church member to submit names for baptism for persons to whom they are not related. The Church is looking into the circumstances of how this happened and does not yet have all the facts. However, this is a serious matter and we are treating it as such."

This practice got the Church into big trouble PR-wise when it came out that they had been baptising Jews who died in the Holocaust.

Apparently the Church stopped doing it after a formal complaint was lodged in 1994 by Holocaust survivor Ernest W. Michel and the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.

Michel found out that his parents, who did not survive the Holocaust, were baptised by the Mormons years after their deaths. "I was incensed that my parents who were killed in Auschwitz were now listed as members of the Mormon faith," Michel told the New York Times.

The Times described the ceremony in a 1995 article:

"Although little known outside Mormon circles, 'baptism for the dead,' in which a church member stands in for a deceased person, is a main tenet of Mormonism. The church teaches that such ceremonies were performed in the early Christian church and work to help extend Mormon membership not just to the living, but also to the dead, who exist in what the church calls 'the spirit world.'

In Mormon theology, all people, living and dead, possess 'free agency,' and may either accept or reject church membership, even if they are baptized by proxy.

Ceremonies take place in the faith's 46 temples. A church member is immersed in a baptismal font as names of the deceased are read. The names of those to be baptized are taken from the church's genealogical archives, which contain approximately two billion names.

Elder Brough, who is executive director of the church's Family History Department, said church rules obligated members to perform genealogical research so they could baptize their ancestors, thus allowing the extended families to reunite in heaven."

The Gilgal Sculpture Garden

I didn't write about Salt Lake City's Gilgal Sculpture Garden when I was here last year because I didn't know how I could do it justice: It's a bizarre little Mormon-themed public city park nestled in the middle of a quiet residential block created by a former Mormon bishop and masonry contractor-turned-sculptor.

Thomas Child started the 12 monumental pieces, including the grotesque sphinx with LDS founder Joseph Smith's face, in 1945 in what was then his backyard. Work stopped when he died in 1963 and the property became a public garden in 2000.

The 12 pieces vary in size and shape. One four-part sculpture (seen in the background above), involves a monolith topped with a wire representation of the angel Moroni, a stone arch, a stack of four giant stone books, and a purple boulder which was intended to be carved into a globe that would sit atop the books. Each piece has personal and Mormon symbolic meaning.

Much of the carving, including Joseph Smith's face, was done with an oxyacetylene torch -- a steel-cutting tool. According to the Garden's stewards, Child's son-in-law and assistant Bryant Higgs was "a pioneer in this sculpting method." Child also got assistance from Maurice Edmond Brooks, a local sculptor who did a lot of the church's sculpture. Brooks was the one who used the cutting torch to sculpt Smith's face on the sphinx.


As kitschy as Child's art is, it's also thoroughly modern and thoroughly Mormon. The piece above, a self-portrait and "monument to the trade," shows Child holding a set of blueprints and a bible against a background of stone and tools.


Child's art is remarkable because while it's well outside of the American Modern mainstream -- it may be best categorized as folk art -- it has a very mid-century modern feel to it, even as it seeks to interpret a strange and insular religious sect. It is, simply, Mormon modern art. But it wasn't the sort commissioned by the Church, and that's what's so interesting to me. It was made over nearly 20 years by a devout man who was moved to make it by his own very personal faith.


That's what makes folk art so much more captivating than much of our modern and contemporary canon. It is art made by untrained, uncompensated individuals who felt compelled to create inspite of their lack of artistic schooling and without the promise of an audience. It seems that much more pure when it's done outside of the neat confines of the academy and commerce.

Then again, it is quite amateurish. The Joseph Smith-faced sphinx is comically weird. The self-portrait with brick pants is endearingly naive. Maybe Child's art is so noteworthy merely because it's so big. Anything carved out of so many tons of stone is impressive. Add the Mormon dimension and the unconventional use of a cutting torch and you have a real story.

I like it. I've made this strange little garden a regular part of my visits to Salt Lake City. It gives Mormonism and its white bread capitol a new depth and dimension for me.

The Salt Lake Tribune has a virtual tour of the Garden.

Finally: A Magazine For Prudes

New! From the people who fight to cover cleavage on women's magazine covers in supermarket checkout lines and edit popular movies for religious family consumption, a magazine for the modest girl who doesn't necessarily have to be a Mormon: ELIZA.

"Why isn't there a fashion magazine without nakedness that still has great photography and beautiful models?" asked Mormon model Summer Bellessa. And so she started one. The 3,000 circulation magazine's board is made up of religious prudes of Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and Protestant faiths.

Writes Deirdre Fulton in an article for The Phoenix called "Prudish Publication Makes Its Debut":

"A casual reader may see the rail-thin model on the cover (who also happens to be Eliza’s editor, Summer Bellessa), in combination with inane feature articles such as “Get Your Yoga Om,” and think this is just another Cosmo knock-off. But it’s more than that — it’s Bellessa’s answer to today’s female fashion choices, which this member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints perceives as provocative, skimpy, and tacky. One senses that the Utah-based Eliza crowd feels the same way about modern female behavior in general."

Predictably, Eliza's fashion features consist of more and more layers, plenty of contour disguising, hot-weather-be-darned layers.

The magazine is quarterly for now, and a year subscription costs $13.97. Editor Summer Bellessa and her magazine have been covered on Fox News, Good Morning America, and Newsweek.

Chloroform in Print

I had the pleasure of walking by the great Mormon temple across from Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side in Manhattan yesterday. It is, no doubt, a sign of wealth and influence for the Mormons to have such a large and ornate marble church in the heart of New York City.

A day later, today, I was reading the current issue of the New Yorker, and found a mention of Mormonism buried in an article about the insane former leader of Turkmenistan. It was a quote from Mark Twain -- he called the Book of Mormon chloroform in print -- and I was able to find it online. It's from his book Roughing It:

All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the "elect" have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so "slow," so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle--keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate. If he, according to tradition, merely translated it from certain ancient and mysteriously-engraved plates of copper, which he declares he found under a stone, in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason.

Heaven Is Right Here

The single most interesting I've learned about the world from the Mormons:

"Latter-day Saints know, through modern revelation, that the Garden of Eden was on the North American continent and that Adam and Eve began their conquest of the earth in the upper part of what is now the state of Missouri. It seems very probable that the children of our first earthly parents moved down along the fertile, pleasant lands of the Mississippi valley."

From Mormon Apostle John A. Widtsoe's Evidences and Reconciliations, Salt Lake City: Bookcraft 1960, p. 127 (found at Utah Lighthouse Ministry)

Yeah. That's right. Missouri.

The Mormons, Explained

I'm quivering with anticipation over next week's PBS documentary on The Mormons, a two part, four hour extravaganza about this weird and influential church of 12 million. The Deseret News, the official church mouthpiece, says (through Mormon spokesman Michael Purdy) "We simply want viewers to understand that the church is the subject of this film, not its producer." The church cooperated but didn't fund the film.

It's a co-production between PBS's Frontline and its series American Experience, the first such collaboration, and it will air on April 30 and May 1. It will also be viewable online.

For a little preview into the Mormon mystique, check out this story from the Salt Lake City Weekly (September 2005) called "The Gangs of Zion." It's about the Tongan Crip Gang and their rivals, the Baby Regulators. One unpredictable result of the LDS (Mormon) proselytizing in Polynesia was the rise of gang violence in the Tongan and Samoan Mormon community that was created in Salt Lake City:

For young Polynesians, what started as reasonable self-defense against other ghettoized ethnic groups, or else grew out of the centuries-old rivalry between Samoans and Tongans, has become a monster that has disfigured their powerful family allegiances. The LDS Church, for the most part, has left Polynesian families to fend for themselves. Now, the resulting cycle of violence is crashing down through the generations.

We may not hear about that in the PBS documentary. The rest of the article gives a fascinating history of Mormon Polynesia, which started in the mid-nineteenth century. But wait, it gets weirder:

According to traditional church teachings, Polynesians and American Indians are Lamanites, a tribe of Israel that was wicked; as punishment, God colored their skin dark and banished them to the wilderness, where they would stay until the Mormons saved them.

That's right, most of the darker-skinned peoples of the Western hemisphere (and some of the Eastern) are considered the descendants of the people who committed genocide against the "good" tribe of Israel that settled North America.

On a lighter note, City Weekly's "Best of 2006" includes the following, under the heading BEST POLYGAMIST SIGHTINGS:

Starbucks at 700 East & 2100 South

If you live in Sandy, according to HBO’s Big Love, you only have to look out the window to see plural wives going about their business. While there may well be some truth to that, common lore has it that the one place you’re bound to see women in old-fashioned skirts is at Costco, buying in bulk. But if you want that more intimate, elbow-rubbing feeling, go to the Starbucks on 21st South, sit down at a table, and if you’re lucky, you might find yourself next to a man and one of his sister-wives deep in conversation.

So it's true! Polygamy (or more accurately polygyny -- Greek for many wives) is alive and well in suburban Salt Lake.

One last thing to amuse and delight you till next week: A sphinx with the head of LDS founder Jospeh Smith, carved by a devout mid-twentieth century artist named Thomas Child. Feast your eyes:
More on Child's art later.