I asked Hinckley what role the Church planned to take during the Olympics. There would be no proselytizing of visitors to the Games, he assured me. “We intend to be gracious hosts,” he said. “We’re not bad people, and we do things in a pretty decent way, when all is said and done.” When I brought up the bribery scandal, his tone hardened. “I just regret very much that this has occurred, but the Church has not been a party to it in any sense whatsoever,” he said. Of the two men under indictment, he said, “I don’t keep track of every member,” and added, “Certainly we believe in the concept of you’re innocent until proven guilty.”

As I was leaving, Hinckley cautioned me against speaking with the Church’s many critics, who, he said, are not a part of the “life of the religion.” He said, “I’m a living part of it. These men”—he indicated his public-relations officials—”are a living part of it. They know why this thing ticks. They know why this is the fastest-growing religious element in the United States and in the world, almost. They know why we’re able to send out sixty thousand missionaries. They know why we can build meetinghouses all across the world, four hundred a year. It is an absolute miracle what this Church is doing.”

REVELATIONS IN GOLD

In 1820, in the little town of Manchester, New York, a fourteen-year-old named Joseph Smith had a visitation. It was a fertile and turbulent time in American religious history. Old beliefs were losing their influence, and new ones were arising that were more responsive to America’s revivalist spirit. The upstate region where Smith was living was known as the “burnt-over district,” because of the religious fevers that continually swept through it. One morning, Smith, who was trying to sort out the claims of truth that each denomination put forward, went into the woods to pray for guidance. He had no sooner knelt than he sensed the presence of a higher power, and felt himself surrounded by darkness. “Just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the Sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me,” he wrote in a brief memoir. Out of the light stepped two “personages,” hovering in the air, whom he took to be God and Jesus—”beings of substance, of form, and of personality,” as Hinckley described them to me. Smith managed to ask these beings a question: Which of all the sects was right? “I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the personage who addressed me said that ‘all their creeds were an abomination in his sight,’ ” he wrote. A moment later, he found himself lying on his back, gazing up at the empty sky. He went home and told his mother, “I have learned for myself that Presbyterianism is not true.”

Three years later, Smith had another visitation, this one from an angel, called Moroni, who revealed to him that an ancient book written on golden plates was buried nearby on a hill called Cumorah. Smith began making annual pilgrimages to Cumorah, waiting for a further sign. In 1827, he eloped with a young woman, Emma Hale. In September of that year, he returned to Cumorah and again he encountered Moroni. This time, the angel entrusted the golden plates to him, along with a pair of “seeing stones,” called the Urim and Thummim, which permitted him to translate the strange language inscribed on the plates (identified by Smith as “reformed Egyptian”).

In 1830, Smith published the five-hundred-and-eighty-eight-page Book of Mormon. It was prefaced by the statements of eleven witnesses who claimed to have seen the golden plates and, in eight cases, to have actually “hefted” them. The plates themselves, however, were no longer available for examination. With the “translation” finished, Moroni had reclaimed them and taken them back to Heaven.

Portrait of Joseph Smith, center, with his wife Emma and his brother Hyrum. Photograph by Robert Polidori Photograph by Robert Polidori

The Book of Mormon purports to be the history of two tribes of Israel—the fair-skinned, virtuous Nephites and the dark-skinned, conniving Lamanites. The Nephites and the Lamanites battle for centuries, eventually carrying their feud into North America. In the midst of their warfare, the resurrected Jesus suddenly appears in the New World, demanding repentance. He teaches the Nephites the Lord’s Prayer and delivers a discourse similar to the Sermon on the Mount. The two tribes are temporarily reconciled. But, four hundred years later, the Nephite leader Mormon is slain, with hundreds of thousands of his people, in the final triumph of the Lamanites. Mormon’s son, Moroni, survives to record this last event on the golden plates, which are then buried on Cumorah.

Written in a florid style—Mark Twain called it “chloroform in print”—the narrative was compelling to many who read it, and even to many who only heard about it. The idea of a new, homegrown faith that posited the divinity of the individual struck a chord in a young country whose settlers believed, in Harold Bloom’s words, that they were “mortal gods, destined to find themselves again in worlds as yet undiscovered.” In Smith’s vision, the New World became the new Holy Land, and he located the Garden of Eden near Independence, Missouri, close to the center of the continent.

By the time he was in his mid-twenties, Smith had become one of the most controversial men in America. Tall and fair, with a slight limp from a childhood operation, and sharp, rather feminine features that contrasted with a powerful build, he was a fascinating figure. The Book of Mormon, along with continuing revelations reported by the young prophet, formed the basis of a new faith. From the beginning, it was a missionary creed, and Smith sent emissaries throughout America and abroad. Thousands of followers were drawn to his ministry, including Brigham Young, a young carpenter in upstate New York, who became one of the greatest colonizers of the West. The Mormons, at first derided as cranks, were soon objects of fear and hatred, not just because of their heretical beliefs but also because of their communal economy, their monolithic politics, and, eventually, their practice of polygamy. In the nine years that remained in his brief life, Smith and his disciples were driven from one settlement after another, in what was an unparalleled assault of religious persecution in America. The epic migration of Smith’s followers to Utah produced a people who were at once self-reliant and wary—”a sociological island of fanatic believers dedicated to a creed that the rest of America thought either vicious or mad,” the novelist Wallace Stegner, an admirer, wrote of them.

In 1857, ten years after their arrival in Salt Lake City, the Mormons found themselves on the verge of war with the United States. A column of federal soldiers was advancing on the Utah Territory to unseat Brigham Young, the area’s defiant and dictatorial governor. Young declared martial law and prepared his followers to burn down their homes and retreat to the mountains for guerrilla warfare. Meanwhile, a wagon train consisting of thirty well-to-do families, mostly from Arkansas, and a large herd of cattle, horses, and oxen entered Utah on the way to California. The Mormons viewed the newcomers with hostility, partly because of the recent news that one of the Church’s apostles, Parley Pratt, had been murdered in Arkansas. Despite calls by some Church leaders for revenge, the wagon train was able to traverse nearly the entire state without serious incident, until they reached Mountain Meadows.

The events that led to the massacre have been a subject of historical dispute for nearly a hundred and fifty years. Mark Twain accused Brigham Young of ordering the killings. The Mormon historians James B. Allen and Glen M. Leonard, in the official history of the movement, “The Story of the Latter-day Saints,” exonerate Church leaders and attribute the slaughter to “a band of Indians and a few ill-informed and overzealous settlers.” According to the jailhouse confession of John D. Lee, who was an adopted son of Brigham Young and who was later executed by the government for his part in the incident, a band of Paiute Indians, three to four hundred strong, took the initiative, attacking the wagon train and then harrying it for four days. In Lee’s account, the standoff was finally broken when he approached the wagons at the head of a squad of Mormon militia under a flag of truce and laid out what he said were the Indians’ terms for surrender. The besieged families agreed to put down their arms in return for safe escort to Cedar City, about thirty-five miles away. Once disarmed, the men marched single file behind the women and children and the wagons bearing infants and the wounded. At a prearranged signal, the Mormons turned on the male captives and shot them all, leaving the women and children for the Paiutes to kill with knives and hatchets. In the end, only seventeen were spared, all of them children. Twain believed that the “Indians” involved were actually Mormons wearing war paint, which conforms to accounts given by surviving children.

News of the massacre prompted members of Congress to call for the elimination of the Church. A lurid report to Congress written by a United States Army officer, Brevet Major James H. Carleton, who arrived on the scene a year and a half later to bury the remains, further inflamed national feeling against Mormons. “The scene of the massacre, even at this late day, was horrible to look upon,” Carleton wrote. “Women’s hair, in detached locks and masses, hung to the sage bushes and was strewn over the ground in many places. Parts of little children’s dresses and of female costume dangled from the shrubbery or lay scattered about; and among these, here and there, on every hand, for at least a mile in the direction of the road, by two miles east and west, there gleamed, bleached white by the weather, the skulls and other bones of those who had suffered.”

Brigham Young managed to forestall a federal investigation into the massacre by agreeing to step down as the territorial governor. It now seems likely that Lee was made a scapegoat to appease public opinion and the forces in Congress opposed to Utah’s bid for statehood. A Tribune columnist named Will Bagley, who is writing a book about the massacre, has found contemporary diaries which he believes demonstrate that Young ordered the killings and supervised a coverup.

For the Church, the execution of Lee put the incident to rest, until the construction workers came upon the bones of the victims two years ago. The practice of polygamy proved to be a bigger burden, which kept alive the hostility of Victorian America toward the sect. Writers such as Twain and Arthur Conan Doyle described the Mormons in terms similar to those the press uses to describe the Taliban today. Curiously, the Book of Mormon is replete with denunciations of plural marriage, as the arrangement is often called. Indeed, throughout Smith’s life monogamy was the official doctrine of the Church. He himself, however, seems to have been a compulsive philanderer, and rumors circulated about his multiple “marriages.” “What a thing it is for a man to be accused of committing adultery, and having seven wives, when I can find only one,” he said in 1844, but by then it was known that he had taken more than thirty wives, and perhaps twice that many, with whom he “sealed” himself in secret ceremonies, “for time and all eternity.” Some of the brides may have been as young as fourteen, and at least eleven of them were already married to close associates. Some he married after dispatching their husbands to the mission fields. A definitive tally of Smith’s wives may never be established, but it is clear that in the last years of his life he was in a kind of marital frenzy, taking an average of one new wife per month, at the same time that he was building a spiritual and temporal empire, fielding his own army, and announcing his candidacy for President of the United States.

Emma Smith denied that her husband had made multiple marriages, even though she is reported to have chased one of Joseph’s wives out of the house. Urged by his brother Hyrum to seek divine guidance concerning plural marriage, Smith produced a revelation in July, 1843: “I reveal unto you a new and an everlasting covenant; and if ye abide not that covenant, then are ye damned,” the Lord warns. He goes on to say that “if any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent,” it is not adultery in God’s eyes, even “if he have ten virgins given unto him by this law.” God then addresses the beleaguered Emma by name: “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.”

Evidently cowed by this injunction, Emma kept her peace. Meanwhile, some members of the inner circle were appalled at Smith’s behavior and told him so. William Law, a Nauvoo businessman, begged his leader to abandon his polygamous ways. Smith responded by excommunicating Law and his brother. The Laws then set up a paper called the Nauvoo Expositor, which published an exposé of multiple marriages within the Mormon hierarchy. Smith, who was the mayor of Nauvoo—at that time one of the largest settlements in Illinois—convened a town-council meeting, in which it was resolved that the Expositor was a public nuisance and must be shut down.

The governor of Illinois, Thomas Ford, called Smith’s conduct “a very gross outrage” and said that he should stand trial. Smith thought of fleeing, but eventually he and Hyrum turned themselves in at a jail in the non-Mormon town of Carthage. A mob burst past the non-resisting jailers and shot the Smiths in a second-floor bedroom. According to a witness, Smith uttered his last words—”Oh, Lord, my God”—as he fell from the window onto the street. There he was propped up against a well and shot again by a four-man firing squad.

Smith’s death did not bring an end to polygamy. In 1866, Brigham Young declared, “The only men who become gods, even the sons of God, are those who enter into polygamy.” He set an example by marrying perhaps fifty-five women, an aspect of his life that is ignored in an official church biography, published in 1997. Throughout the nineteenth century, it was popularly assumed that Mormon women were little more than sex slaves, even though the women occasionally pointed out that they had chosen polygamous marriages. Moreover, Young encouraged women to take up the professions of law and medicine, and, as governor, he allowed them to vote, long before women elsewhere in the United States enjoyed such privileges.

In the nineteenth century, more than a thousand Mormon men went to prison for polygamy-related offenses, and many families fled to Canada and Mexico. In 1890, the United States Supreme Court sanctioned the nationwide confiscation of virtually all Mormon property, essentially authorizing that the movement be crushed. That year, the Church’s president, Wilford Woodruff, received a revelation that inspired him to declare, in what is called the 1890 Manifesto, that plural marriage was no longer officially allowed. As Gordon Hinckley told me, “Polygamy came by revelation, and it left by revelation.”

A BEEHIVE

A paradox of Mormonism is that a faith with such an embattled history has fostered a community whose members are ostensibly so conventional. Mormons have managed to make themselves into an ethnic group without any of the usual markers of ethnicity—no distinctive language or accent, no special foods or music.

Mormons think of themselves as a people chosen by God to lead the rest of humanity to salvation. Submission to authority is an essential part of the religion. Mormons aim at being what they call themselves: saints. Charity, integrity, decency, courtesy, and clean living are the fundamental ingredients of the Mormon personality. Thanks in part to the Church’s efforts to promote an image of worldly success, Mormons also think of themselves as being unusually industrious—”perhaps the most workaddicted culture in religious history,” Harold Bloom says. Stephen Covey, a management consultant and the author of “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” who is descended on both sides from Mormon pioneers, told me, “There is a heavy emphasis in Mormonism on initiative, on responsibility, on a work ethic, and on education. If you take those elements together with a free-enterprise system, you’ve got the chemistry for a lot of industry.” The symbol of the state of Utah is a beehive.

By far the most successful Mormon business venture is the Church itself. Among its largest holdings are the Beneficial Life Insurance Company, which has more than two billion dollars in assets, and the Bonneville International Corporation, a media company with eighteen radio stations concentrated in Chicago, San Francisco, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. The Church reportedly owns more than a million acres of land in the continental United States (the equivalent of the state of Delaware), on which it operates more than a hundred and fifty ranches, farms, and orchards. It runs the largest cattle ranch in the United States, Deseret Cattle & Citrus, near Orlando, Florida. Although the Church is secretive about its empire, Time surveyed its assets in 1997 and calculated its net worth at a minimum of thirty billion dollars and its annual income at about six billion dollars, which, if it were a corporation, would place it in the middle of the Fortune 500 list. (In a letter to Time, the Church said that the figures were “greatly exaggerated.”)

Saints are required to tithe in order to attend temple. They also fast one Sunday a month and give the money they would have spent for food to those in greater need. “We ask, in effect, between fourteen and fifteen per cent of people’s income, including tithing and other things,” one of the governing apostles, Neal A. Maxwell, told me. “We are equally demanding of time.” In many respects, being a Mormon is like holding down a second job. Saints are routinely called upon to spend a Saturday making cheese in the storehouse of the local bishop or to take a year off from their regular job to work as a guide at one of the many Mormon historical sites. The Church runs one of the largest private welfare operations in the country, producing everything from granola to detergent under its own brand names. Almost all these goods are made by volunteers. “The practice goes back to the thirties, when Church leaders were worried as much about idleness as about the lack of resources,” Harold Brown, the managing director of L.D.S. Welfare Services, told me. “We typically try to take care of our own. We believe the poor will be better blessed if they do as described in our doctrine: specifically, they should work for what they receive. The bishop may suggest that you help a widow down the street who has a yard she needs weeded. You can receive according to your need, but you are expected to work according to your ability.”