Brad Olson: Behind the jokes -- learning the truth about a religion

Tuesday, in one of my classes, as we discussed a Supreme Court case involving the tiny Ohio town that has restricted door-to-door solicitation, my professor asked, "So who comes to your door? Give me some examples."

Across the room from me, someone said, "Quakers." The professor looked puzzled, and the person explained, "Quakers, you know, they come to your house to tell you about the Book of..." He trailed off, but undoubtedly, he was about to say Mormon. I winced.

A little over a year ago, I had written a bit in Mask and Wig about this confusion. A person approaches me, and knowing that I'm Mormon, keeps asking, "Where's your beard? Where's your horse and buggy? Why aren't you out churning butter and so forth?"

It was all in jest, but jokes are never written or told for the sake of laughter only. Goethe said, "Where he makes a jest, a problem lies concealed."

The problem lay concealed since my freshman year, when my girlfriend at the time earnestly looked at me during a late night walk and asked, "Bradley, are you planning on having more than one wife?" And, this was not an isolated event -- it's happened about four times.

Let me be clear. Never in my life, at any time, did I consider having more than one wife. Neither did my friends in high school, all of whom were Mormon. My father, also a Mormon, never did, and my mother, a third generation Mormon, did not consider marrying a husband who was married with someone else. Everyone I have ever met who was a Mormon did not practice polygamy, nor had they entertained the notion.

It is true that there are some people, hiding in a few desert communes in southern Utah, that are still polygamists, but they are not members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the real name of the Mormon Church). They claim to be "fundamentalist" Mormons, or if they don't, the press labeled them as such, but really, there is no such thing as a fundamentalist Mormon, either.

It is common for reporters to make mistakes like these while writing about us. Of course, news articles are supposed to be balanced, rather than laudatory, and reporters, for the sake of "balance," throw in a few of our "beliefs" that seem really crazy to offset some of the more overt Mormon niceties.

Nearly all "Mormon" articles have a formula. First, they start by describing the prodigious growth of the church. For example, in last month's New Yorker: "During the past thirty years, the number of its adherents in the United States has increased nearly two hundred and twenty-five percent."

Secondly, in the "good" section, they quote Rodney Stark or Harold Bloom, both of whom are non-Mormon academics who have separately labeled Mormonism the "American Religion." If it's Stark, then he will have said only good things about the church. If it's Bloom, the quotes are mostly good. Both of them believe that before this century is over, the LDS Church will be among the world's great religions. Stark puts the number at 280 million.

To offset this, then, they begin the laundry list of wacky beliefs. They might quote Brigham Young, the second prophet of our church and one of the most notorious polygamists of all time (after Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, probably), when he said, "As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may become."

Never mind that Brigham Young did not say that, but he did say a whole truckload of other things that were even odder.

They will close by discussing polygamy in our past, beginning with Joseph Smith, and move on to our present, with the recent trial of polygamist Tom Green, as if it's still as prevalent as it ever was.

But the press does this all the time. They generalize anything into making it seem pervasive (shark attacks and anthrax, among other things).

To be honest, polygamy really did happen.

And even more honestly, I think it's a little weird, along with a few other things in the church's history. But are our stories any weirder than those of other religions? God organizes people into castes? Moses parted the Red Sea? After this life, paradise is similar to becoming a cloud? A man named Jesus died and then, after three days, was not dead?

Religion, in the end, will always be logically preposterous. All in all, then, the only difference between Mormons and any other religion is that we have a few more crazy stories. Brad Olson is a senior History major from Huntsville, Texas.

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