In the National Post a few days ago:
"The 9,000 folding chairs facing the Mormon holy site called Hill Cumorah are filling up quickly two hours before the annual pageant is set to begin just after sundown. This is the opening performance of what will be a week-long run and each night pilgrims who have travelled from all around the world to be here will occupy nearly every seat.
Tonight they have come to sit in this field in a scrubby, slightly woebegone part of upstate New York under oppressive heat to see a reenactment, by a cast of 800, of The Book of Mormon, the foundational story of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mormons say Joseph Smith, a poorly educated farm boy, found gold plates etched with hieroglyphics on this hill in 1823 after he was directed to the spot by an angel. In 1827, the angel told Smith he was finally deemed worthy to take the plates and translate them into English. Once he was done, the plates were taken back to heaven.
For 90 minutes tonight, the hill will explode with fiery eruptions, cataclysmic battles, warnings from prophets and scenes of Jesus Christ suspended in mid-air that recall what Mormons say was his visit to an ancient tribe of Israel in the Western Hemisphere just after his crucifixion and resurrection 2,000 years ago.
Mormonism burst out of a period of intense religious fer vour called the Great Awakening. The new sects that came forth were all in the Protestant tradition and differed over subtle interpretations of the Old and New Testaments, but the basic Christian story was the same with the same prophets and apostles.
However, Mormonism contains tribes, characters and prophets completely unknown to 99.9% of the world's Christians.
"Here's this guy saying Jesus visited the New Word, he adds a new book that's supposed to complete the Bible, brings in a whole new level of religious history that takes place in the Americas and introduces characters no one has ever heard of," says Jon Butler, a professor of religious history at Yale. "The people of his time were tired of all the schisms around them. Smith gave them a vision. He gave them a new truth in a time of great confusion and argument."
This then is ground zero for the faith, and for the faithful.
Nearly everyone gathered here tonight brings rockribbed faith and cheerfulness to unheard of levels. It is hard to imagine a friendlier people squeezed into a similar-sized plot of land on the planet. To anyone outside the Mormon faith, this kind of openness can be oddly unnerving. Anyone carrying a bag of popcorn or a paper cup of homemade lemonade from the concession stand to his seat must constantly rearrange their treats in order to shake the many hands that constantly reach out to greet.
"Is this your first time at pageant? Do you know about the Mormon Church? Ask us anything you want."
The scene epitomizes the term wholesome; Mormons do not smoke, drink alcohol, coffee or tea. And they never swear, at least not public.
Before the play begins, the actors mingle with the crowd as if greeting long-lost friends. The costumes look like an odd mixture of wardrobes that flew off the pages of 1,001 Arabian Nights and Cecile B. DeMille's film The Ten Commandments.
Even the young people, who look you in the eye when they speak, manage to linger with older folks without once looking bored or edgy.
Four teenage boys, three dressed as Nephites and one dressed as a Lamanite, make their way over to me to ask if I have any questions about the play or about Mormonism. Two are from Connecticut, the others from New Hampshire and Washington State. They all say it is tough being a teenager in a Mormon world, but their faith is far more important.
"Why would I do something that would harm me? My family and my faith are everything," says Zach.
Many of the people gathered here know they are living in what some observers have called the "Mormon Moment."
There are only 13 million Mormons in the world, but it is growing at a faster rate than most any other Christian faith. There are now two Mormons seeking the Republican presidential nomination -former governors Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman -and Democratic Senate Majority leader Harry Reid is a convert to Mormonism.
The Broadway play, The Book of Mormon, a good-natured musical satire on two young Mormon missionaries, was accepted by most Mormons with good humour.
But there is a dark side to this moment. HBO shows like Big Love, about a polygamous family, continue to spread the myth that Mormon men have multiple wives. Numerous websites and books continue to label the church as a mindcontrolling cult. Polls in 2008 showed many Americans would not want Mr. Romney as president because of his Mormonism.
Popular journalist Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven told the story of a breakaway fundamentalist Mormon sect involved in a grisly murder but also depicted a violent strain running through the entire faith.
"The book pathologized the religion," said Kathleen Flake, an associate professor of religious studies at Vanderbilt University, and a renowned Mormon scholar.
"When I tell people I'm a Mormon they fall silent; they don't know what to say.... I know this dimension. I've known it since I was a child. Many people think that Mormonism is stupid."
She adds this anecdote: "Once I was on a double date, I was a law student at the time, and it came out that I was Mormon. And the guy on the other side of the double date said, 'But you're smart.' People think Mormonism is dumb and phony. Those are the two things they think about it. Those who are more liberal think it's cruel."
Mormonism is a religion but sitting among these pilgrims there is more of a sense of being among a people connected by blood rather than just beliefs.
Sociologist Thomas O'Dea wrote: Mormons have come "closer to evolving an ethnic identity on this continent than any other group."
Those here tonight believe The Book of Mormon not only completes the Bible by telling the story of 1,000 years of "Judeo-Christian" history that took place in the Americas, but also restores Christianity to its true form.
Over nearly 600 pages, the book tells of how a prophet named Lehi, along with his extended family, sailed to this continent from Egypt before the Babylonian exile of the Jews in 600 BC. It tells of how two of his feuding sons, Laman and Nephi, created two tribes that warred with each other for generations. Then Jesus came just after his crucifixion in Jerusalem to preach the gospels and for a time peace prevailed. It finally ends with a battle worthy of Revelation in which the Laman-ites, believed by Mormons to be the forbearers of Native Americans, exterminate the Nephites in one final battle.
The book was supposed to have been written by a Nephite warrior and prophet named Mormon on the eve of his people's destruction. It is Mormon who is said to have commanded his son Moroni in 400 AD to bury the plates so that one day the story could be told.
David Cook, a lawyer from nearby Rochester, is here with his wife and one of their sons to be part of tonight's pageant.
At first, he is dressed like almost every other Mormon man here: white shirt and tie. Later in the evening, however, he and his wife will don the costumes of a Nephite couple and will be killed in the epic battle scene.
In the church hierarchy, Mr. Cook holds the title of "Area Seventy," roughly equivalent to an archbishop. There are no paid clergy.
At the top point is the president, considered to be a living prophet who can receive and give revelations from God.
Mr. Cook, who is also involved with Habitat for Humanity and liberal Democrat politics, has deep Mormon roots. His third great-grandfather on his mother's side, Heber C. Kimball, was one of the first men to read the first printing of The Book of Mormon and an early convert to the faith who ended up making the perilous trek to Utah.
As he leads me on a tour of the site, Mr. Cook points out the origins of Mormonism all around. There is the Sacred Grove behind the Smith family farm, the place where he believes Joseph Smith, at age 14, had a vision of God and Jesus, both appearing as men. We go into a replica of the Smith farm and stand in the bedroom where in 1823 an angel named Moroni is believed to have hovered above Smith's bed and told him where to find the plates. On Sept. 22, 1827 Smith was finally deemed worthy enough to take the plates away and translate them into English.
"A remarkable thing happened on that night," explains Mr. Cook. In Mendon, where his ancestor Heber C. Kimball lived, people looked up in the sky and said they saw an army marching across the heavens from one horizon to the other. "They didn't know what it meant but they viewed it for some time."
In 1830, the year The Book of Mormon was published, Smith and five followers formally organized the denomination now known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Over the next 17 years the Mormons were chased out of New York, Ohio, Missouri -where the governor threatened them with "extermination" -and Illinois, where Smith was murdered by anti-Mormons. By the time they sought their own safe promised land in Utah, there were nearly 80,000 members, thousands of whom died along the way.
The surroundings of this holy spot in upstate New York hold neither the glory of Jerusalem nor the beauty of Rome, but the reverence among those here tonight brings equal awe. Mormon history is so relatively young that everyone knows about the persecutions, the violent assaults on early church members, and the gruelling trek across the country.
Jon Butler of Yale University said the genius of this religious story is that Mormonism "cleaned the slate" and created a new story set in America for which there was no precedent.
"This new story had no history so you can't argue about it. It's not like Presbyterians arguing over an interpretation of the Bible. With The Book of Mormon you either accept it or not. And once you accept it there's nothing to argue about."
For most Christians, especially evangelicals, the Bible is a closed canon, said Prof. Flake of Vanderbilt. "It's a well in which they dip into to learn how to live their lives. And by bounding the Bible it makes religion safe.
"That's why Mormons are considered dangerous because they're enacting it, they're still doing it. You see these characters out of the 19th century and even 20th century and you can't help but think of Moses and Peter and Paul on the road to Damascus. There are few more dramatic stories than Mormonism."
As the smoke clears on the stage below Hill Cumorah, the Angel Moroni buries the golden plates. The scene then switches to a young Joseph Smith, signalling that the gap has finally been closed and the only true American religion is about to begin.
The production is jaw-dropping. But intead of raucous cheering, there is only polite applause and beaming faces. Here the play holds no surprises.
"It's all about faith," says one of the many volunteers. "Read the Book of Mormon for yourself and then decide. God will tell you it's all true."
(Ref.
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/religious+spectacle/5111523/story.html )
And here's my letter to the National Post's editor:
"I’m a former member of the Mormon (Latter-Day Saint or LDS) Church, who left 19 years ago. I was raised in cultic Mormonism and like scores of others, I attended the Hill Cumorah Pageant more than once in my youth. It depicts the same LDS nonsense today as in generations past.
Reporter Charles Lewis wrote that the Book of Mormon (BoM) is the foundational story of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He is mistaken. The First Vision that Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism in the 1830s, claimed to have had is the primordial Mormon narrative. One of the biggest doctrinal problems for the LDS Church stems from the fact that Smith told and wrote conflicting versions of his fantastical First Vision experience. Historical documents show that he kept changing his story, making it more spectacular so it would appeal to a larger audience. Throughout the ages, religions have needed myths to generate faith and Smith’s Mormonism is no exception.
Another hugely inconvenient reality that utterly undermines Mormonism is that science has proven the BoM to be a work of fiction. For example, genetic research has repeatedly shown that native Americans did not descend from Jews, as the BoM says and the Hill Cumorah Pageant depicts, but from Asians in Mongolia and the surrounding region.
Believing in Mormonism, including what is shown at the Hill Cumorah Pageant, requires people to shut off their critical thinking and lock their reason in a mental closet. Mr. Lewis quoted religious scholar Kathleen Flake as saying 'Many people think that Mormonism is stupid.'
Many people are correct."