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For more than 5,000 high schoolers applying to college each year, Brigham Young University, in Provo, Utah, checks two critical boxes: It's an extremely good university, and its tuition fees are just $5,790 a year.

But if you're a Mormon student, there's another reason to want to attend: It's the largest and best majority Mormon university in the world. And for women, that comes with an additional perk. "The point of Mormon women going to college is to find a spouse, period," says Kate Kelly, an alumna of the college who graduated in the early 2000s. BYU is just about the best place to do so, with a student population of 35,000, and a Mormon-majority community that prioritizes marriage and the family unit. Within 12 years of graduating, 84% of BYU graduates are married.

At BYU, the hunt for a spouse touches almost every aspect of student life, says Kelly, who grew up in the Mormon faith but was excommunicated in 2014 over her push for gender equality. It's the focus of speeches given by religious leaders, meet-and-greet activities, even religious practice, she says. Even at regular compulsory worship, students are split up by marital status-if you're single and lucky, The One may be sat over in the next pew. The pressure was everywhere: "BYU is just like a dating factory," she remembers, "but [for women] that was the entire point."

"BYU is just like a dating factory, but [for women] that was the entire point."

But while secular women may see education as a route to a more lucrative or successful career, most of BYU's female alumni never work outside the home, despite having attended a top university. The messaging starts early, Kelly says: Throughout Sunday school and other forms of Mormon education, Mormon girls are explicitly told that their college education is predominantly a back-up, "if ever accidentally your husband were to die or you found yourself in a position where you had to earn a living. But otherwise you are not to use it." Statistics bear this out: Male graduates of BYU earn 90 times more than their female peers, with a median income of $71,900 by the age of 34. Female graduates, on the other hand, earn on average $800 per year. Even the wage gap at other religious universities is not quite so extreme. Female graduates of Huntingdon University, Baptist Bible College, and Maranatha Bible University earn between about $15,000 and $20,000 a year at age 34. It's a little more than a third of their male peers' salary, or more than 20 times more than female BYU grads.

Majority-Mormon neighborhoods in the US closely resemble a 1950s ideal: As a 2015 New York Times investigation observes, "the male-dominated nature of Mormon culture has kept nonemployment rates for prime-age women extremely high-as high, in some areas, as they were for American women in the 1950s."

But Mormon culture, with its reputation for "family orientation, clean-cut optimism, honesty, and pleasant aggressiveness," as the historian Jan Schipps puts it, hasn't always looked like this. As far back as the mid-1800s, leaders in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (commonly abbreviated to LDS) encouraged women to apply themselves to work outside the home. The 19th-century LDS prophet Brigham Young, for whom the university is named, thought women might usefully "study law or physic, or become good bookkeepers and be able to do the business in any counting house, and all this to enlarge the sphere of usefulness for the benefit of society at large."

As of 2013, however, roughly 25% of Mormon women are in full-time employment, compared to 43% of all women in 2018. That's because, as the Mormon journalist McKay Coppins writes for Buzzfeed, "for many Latter-day Saint women, staying at home to raise children is less a lifestyle choice than religious one-a divinely-appreciated sacrifice that brings with it blessings, empowerment, and spiritual prestige."

What gives? Over 150 years, as the pressures on the LDS community have shifted, the church's official stance on women's rights and obligations has grown more rigid and conservative, changing female adherents' opportunities and career prospects in the process.

Updated policies

Founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' roots lie in Christianity. There are still overlaps, including a belief in the the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, but the two have striking differences. Mormonism uses additional scriptures, including the Book of Mormon, and recognizes Smith and other Mormon leaders as prophets. Around 1.5 million members of the church live in Utah, out of 6 million nationwide, with an additional 10 million overseas. Many have converted to the religion after encountering enthusiastic young Mormons; missions, in which LDS members bring the good news of prophet Smith to every corner of the globe, are strongly encouraged by the church.

But there's another important distinction between LDS members and other Christians, which has in turn dictated the changing church policy on women's roles. For most mainstream Christians, scripture remains as it ever was, with no updates in a few millennia. Mormons see it differently. The church's president, sometimes known simply as "the Prophet," serves as a direct line of sorts to God, ready to revise, supplement, or update policies as soon as he hears word. Speaking to CNN, historian Kathleen Flake describes him as "Moses in a business suit-someone who can lead people, write Scripture and talk to God." Revelations appear on a rolling basis, via the church's most senior members: In October 2018, for instance, the current leader, Russell Nelson, declared it "the command of the Lord" to use the church's full name, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when referring to it. Continuing to employ nicknames such as Mormon or LDS would be "a major victory for Satan," he warned. (Whether for reasons of practicality, forgetfulness, or nostalgia, many members of the church flout these instructions, as do secular news outlets such as the New York Times or CNN.)

"[The prophets say] point blank that women are not to work outside the home."

If you're looking for a guide to modern life, the Bible is a challenging place to start. That's especially true on matters of women's rights: As a thousand-years-old text, it's frustratingly oblique on such thorny issues as how women should dress, whether they should work outside the home, and God's preferred balance of career and motherhood. But for Mormons, His words continue, via the prophets and church leaders, and do indeed address such topics directly. These dynamic revelations have allowed church leaders to communicate God's word, and fashion an official line on Mormon women's activities.

"It's explicit. [The prophets say] point blank that women are not to work outside the home," says Kelly. "This is not optional. What Mormons say is, 'The thinking has been done.'"

A 1995 church text called The Family: A Proclamation to the World spells it out plainly: "By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children." These responsibilities, and the family unit, are sacred.

Pioneers and suffragettes

In the church's earliest incarnation in the early-to-mid 19th century, women's labor was critical to the success of the movement and to help "build up Zion," writes the historian Colleen McDannell in her 2018 book Sister Saints: Mormon Women since the End of Polygamy. These initial LDS women were expected to work-and in almost any field that they chose, from men's tailoring to studying obstetrics, managing a telegraph office, healing the sick, or even "spawning fish in springs." Motherhood was valuable, of course, but it was only the start of what these pioneering souls were expected to do to help. Later, these same women would be swashbuckling suffragettes, fighting to be allowed to vote in US elections, in part to preserve their own right to practice "plural marriage," which many felt was key to building community and sharing labor.

Early Mormon women were expected to work to "build up Zion."

While in the early years of the faith, Mormons generally lived apart from other religions, growing affluence led to greater integration. After abandoning polygamy in 1890, church members grew closer to the US mainstream, adopting a far more traditional approach to the family unit. Women were thus confined to the home. "Since the 1940s, male and female church leaders had been unequivocal in their celebration of motherhood, to the exclusion of almost every other role for women," writes McDannell. Actively or otherwise, the history of pioneer women was largely forgotten, she explains, with "postwar women [...] told to concentrate on home and ward life."

Though the mainstream started to liberalize in the wake of the war, LDS policy did not. Instead, church publications, fireside talks, and annual meetings allowed elders to speak out against the cultural changes happening in the secular world. Among these voices was Spencer W. Kimball, one of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, an important all-male governing body tasked with receiving and communicating God's message. In 1973, he became the church's president and prophet.

Though guidelines for Mormon women's dress had existed since the 1910s, it was not until the 1950s that Mormon women began to adopt different standards of modesty. In 1951, Kimball, then an apostle, gave a talk on modesty in dress, titled "A Style of Our Own." After it was reprinted in the official Church News, many Mormon women opted to "kimballize" their wardrobe, lengthening hems or buying little jackets to wear with then-popular strapless dresses. Just one week after the talk, an editorial in BYU's Daily Universe noted "the noticeable change in attire at the Friday night Banyan Ball" among its female students. Fearing the rise of counterculture, other official pamphlets followed, emphasizing modesty in speech and conduct and a feminine, clean-cut "Molly Mormon" dress style.

Over the same period, church leaders grew more didactic about women's roles. In the first year of his presidency, in 1973, Kimball sketched out a cozy image of the ideal family unit, which is still cited by church authorities as a key text on "mother's employment outside the home." "The husband is expected to support his family and only in an emergency should a wife secure outside employment," he said, in a fireside talk. "Her place is in the home, to build the home into a heaven of delight ... I beg of you, you who could and should be bearing and rearing a family: Wives, come home from the typewriter, the laundry, the nursing, come home from the factory, the café."

Though these comments resemble so many other conservative critiques of the period, they have far more heft in a Mormon context: Kimball was, after all, speaking as God's proxy. Rather than suggestions or even commentary, these were divine ordinances from the church's highest spiritual authority, to be taken as seriously as the words of any ancient prophet.

While most of American Christianity was liberalizing, Mormonism was doubling down on male leadership.

These comments came at the tail end of a push by church leaders to, as McDannell puts it, "consolidate power, standardize doctrine, and coordinate the various programs" across individual churches. One effect of "correlation," as it was called, was to limit women's influence within the church. At this time, most of American Christianity was liberalizing, decentralizing, and opening up to the possibility of women in the pulpit. Mormonism, meanwhile, was doubling down on male leadership and placing more power in fewer hands-and further away from women.

The rest of the US was grappling with scripture of a different sort. Since the early 1960s, the rise of second-wave feminism and of thinkers such as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan had changed how women thought of their lot-encompassing professional prospects, work-life balance, and what they were prepared to tolerate. Mormon women were not immune to these rumblings-though, like their secular peers, they found little consensus.

In perhaps the best snapshot of these many different views, the independent Mormon journal Dialogue released its "pink issue" in 1971, which dealt primarily with questions of women's rights. Edited by Claudia Lauper Bushman, an LDS member who would later become a history professor at Columbia University, it paints a picture of women considering their options and obligations from all angles. "Although we sometimes refer to ourselves as the LDS cell of Women's Lib, we claim no affiliation with any of those militant bodies and some of us are so straight [conventional] as to be shocked by their antics," Bushman explains in the introduction. "We do read their literature with interest."

For some of these writers, parenthood and the home is ample spiritual and personal nourishment: a veritable homily to motherhood-"Bless Sesame Street! That psychedelic learning feast!"-extolls its joys above all else. But not all found the life of a stay-at-home parents so straightforward. Another writer explores the challenges of balancing a frowned-upon writing career with being mother and stepmother to five boys. On occasions when an unexpected visitor appeared at the door, the writer notes, she felt obliged to hide her typewriter and assume her position by the ironing board.

"In all honesty, we are not always completely satisfied with our lives as housewives."

The group behind this issue of the journal were emphatically not "against" men, Mormonism, or the value of a structured family unit, but a strong sense of questioning the status quo comes through nonetheless. Far from calling for mass abandonment of husbands or burning of bras, many of its writers advocate for women to have more choice and a less prescribed role. "In all honesty, we are not always completely satisfied with our lives as housewives," Bushman wrote. And even among those who were, it seemed a shame that "women with strong career orientations" faced terrible pressure to marry, and disapproval if they pursued their "special interests" outside the home.

The church's leadership, however, was moving in almost precisely the opposite direction. In 1978, recognizing some of these countercurrents, then-apostle Ezra Taft Benson spoke out about these "feelings of discontent" among young women who wanted more "exciting and self-fulfilling roles" than to be wives and mothers. Church policy, he argued, leaves little room for that: "This view loses sight of the eternal perspective that God elected women to the noble role of mother and that exaltation is eternal fatherhood and eternal motherhood." Like Kimball before him, Benson was setting down scripture. That "eternal perspective" might not have always been so explicit-but it was now.

A small group of pro-ERA demonstrators gather near the National Presbyterian Center to get their message across to Ronald Reagan.

Ordinarily mostly apolitical, the church applied its clout in 1979 to wage an out-and-out war against the pro-gender equality Equal Rights Amendment, on the grounds that it did not recognize the "vital" differences "biologically, emotionally, and in other ways" between men and women, as one church elder put it. Sonia Johnson, an LDS woman who campaigned in favor of the Amendment, was summarily excommunicated on the grounds of "teaching false doctrine."

In the decades since, the church has grown still more conservative in its stance on women's roles. In 1987, Benson gave a sermon in which he encouraged women to quit their jobs. Then, in the early 1990s, six high-profile Mormon intellectuals, many of whom were outspoken LDS feminists, were excommunicated. Next, in 1995, the church published its official view on how family should be composed, noting the "divine design" of a one-income family. The following year, church president Gordon B. Hinckley reiterated the message at the annual General Conference, an annual gathering of members: "It is well-nigh impossible to be a full-time homemaker and a full-time employee." (Only women, it was strongly implied, could be the former.)

Divine, domestic bliss?

Nearly two and a half decades later, many of the same arguments about managing work and domesticity are still being thrashed out. Though many LDS women find motherhood to be empowering and spiritually fulfilling, plenty of others struggle to live up to that Mormon ideal of divine, domestic bliss. Those who seek professional goals instead, or as well, often find themselves marginalized from the LDS community in the process. Kelly's LSAT cohort at BYU had "maybe two women" in a class of over 50, she remembers; at law school, she discovered that only men were permitted to be leaders in the Mormon lawyers' association, the J. Reuben Clark Law Society. At the association's meetings, she was directed to "a separate room where all the wives were," despite being a member in her own right. In her "most intimate community," these professional choices were "very frowned upon," especially by her then in-laws.

Online, LDS feminism has surged in popularity, with the internet providing a forum for hundreds of young LDS feminists to congregate, share links, or question commonly held assumptions about how Mormon women should behave or live their lives. Forums such as I'm a Mormon Feminist or Young Mormon Feminists have become places where women's voices have primacy. Often, these explore the best way to be a liberal feminist and follow Mormon teaching. The group blog Feminist Mormon Housewives, for instance, is only very barely tongue-in-cheek, if at all. At the same time, a majority of LDS women still dismiss the feminist movement as irrelevant to their lives or even heretical-on Twitter, one young Mormon woman self-identifies as "not a feminist" in her bio, while another notes: "Anything that can convince women to kill their own babies and pursue something as fleeting as career over family can't be of God."

Despite this curiosity, church leadership shows no sign of updating its perspective from the one stated some decades ago. Suggestions that women enter the leadership, for instance, have been shot down vehemently-in 2013, Kelly and a group of LDS women started the organization Ordain Women, the foundation of which eventually led to her excommunication on charges of apostasy. But, in what might be read as a conciliatory spirit from the leadership, smaller challenges have been more successful. In late 2012, a group of Mormon feminists launched the first Wear Pants to Church Day; since then, female church employees and missionaries have had the right to sometimes wear dress slacks while working. In 2015, women first gained the right to serve on high-level church councils.

LDS women seeking to make ends meet tend to look for the gray area, working "inside the home," by selling products on Etsy or monetizing being a blogger or influencer. Multi-level marketing schemes, in which people sell products to their friends or neighbors, are also hugely popular as a way to follow church policy while contributing financially. "There's so much pressure in LDS culture to be a stay-at-home mom," Mormon mother and Lipsense lipstick consultant Alyx Garner told the Utah CBS affiliate KUTV. Direct sales isn't the most lucrative way to make a living-Garner might make $1,250 in a month-but it's a compromise between her need to have an income and her desire to adhere to church policy.

"It's a miserable situation."

Even as the church remains steadfast, Mormon households are still subject to larger economic forces. Throughout the US, only the very wealthiest families can easily get by on one salary. Now in her 80s, Bushman has spent the last decades of her life in academia, specializing in domestic women's history. She encounters many women who would like to follow church policy, but simply can't afford to. "It's a miserable situation," she told Quartz, "There's very little support for at-home mothers, and families can now hardly get along with less than two incomes."

It's not hard to see how this failure to modernize places undue burden on women. If they don't work, their families may struggle economically. And if they do, they face tremendous social pressure, or the implication that they are bad mothers. Women who rely on childcare, for instance, must tolerate the shame of literally going against the word of their religion, which considers motherhood a "divine service [that] may not be passed to others." It's a bind-and one that many women struggle to disentangle.

For the LDS leadership, the challenge is also tremendous. Having adopted such a cut-and-dry approach to women's roles, it is hard to argue that God has changed His mind, or that earlier prophets were mistaken. But with more Mormon women continuing their education, marrying later, and embracing mission work, some leaders are making moves toward a more permissive approach. Speaking in 2011, church elder Quentin Cook praised stay-at-home mothers-but added that those sisters who worked outside the home were not necessarily any "less valiant."
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints believe in the Holy Trinity. In fact, they believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost as separate entities.

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Mormon women are caught between economic pressures and the word of God

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For more than 5,000 high schoolers applying to college each year, Brigham Young University, in Provo, Utah, checks two critical boxes: It's an extremely good university, and its tuition fees are just $5,790 a year. But if you're a Mormon student, there's another reason to want to attend: It's the largest and best majority Mormon university in the world.

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wenty-five years ago this week, in a remote corner of northern Idaho, the modern militia movement was born in a firefight. On the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, two weeks ago, observers could see from the presence of well-armed men in fatigues that that movement was still with us. But back in 1992, they hadn't yet formed. A firefight between six US marshals and two boys and a dog, changed all that.

On 21 August that year, the marshals went to a location that became known as Ruby Ridge, near Naples, to scout a location where they might ambush a fugitive, Randy Weaver. Weaver had been holed up for a year and half with his family in his cabin, having failed to attend his trial on firearms charges.

The marshals aroused the attention of Weaver's dogs. Alarmed, they retreated to a small clearing to the west of the house. Weaver ventured out, looking for the source of the disturbance. His 14-year-old son, Sammy, and his young friend Kevin Harris did the same on a separate route, following on the heels of a dog, Striker.

Weaver met the marshals first, they challenged him, and then he retreated into the brush. A minute later, the two boys and the dog came out of the woods. There was an exchange of fire. The exact order of events has been disputed for a quarter of a century, but the end result was that Sammy Weaver, deputy marshal Bill Degan and Striker were all dead.

The Weavers retreated to their cabin and laid Sammy's body in a shed. Over the next day, federal and local officers - now under the command of the FBI - began to arrive in their hundreds to join the siege.

The next day, 22 August, operating under rules of engagement that allowed deadly force, an FBI sniper wounded Randy Weaver as he checked on Sammy's corpse. The same sniper then shot Randy's wife, Vicki, dead and wounded Kevin Harris.

The last photograph of Vicki Weaver before she was killed by an FBI sniper. Photograph: Youtube

The siege dragged on to the end of August, and the scene became a circus.

Neo-Nazis from the nearby Aryan Nations compound at Hayden Lake showed up to protest.

Other far-right groups poured in from all over the country to stand against what they saw as the persecution of an innocent family by a tyrannical federal government.

Ruby Ridge was resolved, in the end, not by agents, but by civilian negotiators including Bo Gritz, a former green beret, prolific conspiracy theorist, and the Populist party's presidential candidate, who was briefly on a ticket with the ex-Klansman David Duke.

Along with the botched Waco siege the next year, during which 76 besieged members of the religious group the Branch Davidians died, Ruby Ridge badly damaged the credibility of the Clinton-era FBI (Bill Clinton became US president on 20 January, 1993), and boosted some emerging narratives on the far right: that the feds were coming for the guns and property of those, like Weaver, who wanted no further contact with a country they saw as irredeemably corrupt.

Mike German, a former FBI officer who at the time of Ruby Ridge was working undercover in white supremacist groups, and now Fellow at NYU's Brennan School for Law and Justice, says that while the FBI "inherited a mess" when it took on the badly handled case, the bureau "ultimately saw it as a mistake, and an escalation that had caused significant harm, including to children".

They made it worse, he says, by "engaging in a cover-up to hide their mistakes". In 1997, E Michael Kahoe, who had helped supervise the FBI's response, was sentenced to 18 months in a federal prison for burying documents critical of the agency's approach to the siege ahead of the prosecution of Weaver and Harris.

Randy Weaver supporters at Ruby Ridge in northern Idaho. Photograph: Jeff T Green/AP

Bill Morlin reported on Ruby Ridge for the Spokane Spokesman-Review, and is now a fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). He has monitored the far right since the early 1980s. He says simply: "Ruby Ridge became a demarcation point for the rise of the modern militia movement.

"It put the fertilizer in their minds which sprouted radical anti-government beliefs."

For a radical fringe, with especially intense anti-government beliefs, it became a reason to form paramilitary groups and stockpile arms in the expectation that they would have to defend themselves against totalitarian overreach from a "New World Order". Some expected the agents of this conspiracy to swoop in in black helicopters and establish world government, while persecuting patriots.

David Neiwert, a contributing writer for the SPLC and author of several books on the far right says the Ruby Ridge myth was potent. Neiwert says it allowed groups to say: "You're next! They're going to round people up and put them in concentration camps." He says some groups even had detailed maps claiming to show where the network of camps would be located.Groups from Montana to south-west Oregon combined different forms of anti-government ideology, such as fears about gun confiscation and grievances about federal land management practices.

Morlin says that the ideology of "local supremacy" was also central to movement beliefs. "They said the only real authority in law enforcement is the local sheriff. The feds have no jurisdiction. Some people still believe that." To this day, pro-milita sheriffs, such as Glenn Palmer in Oregon, hold political power in the region.

From this, and a welter of spurious legal beliefs, many groups mounted direct challenges to the authority of federal agencies such as the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Many agents of these bodies faced violence or harassment in the course of their work during the 1990s.

Morlin says that militia groups, large and small, used the story of Ruby Ridge to recruit people, and to amplify existing anti-government beliefs: "The whole idea was to play on people's fears."

The rise of the movement was fortuitously timed with a broader uptake of internet technologies. Morlin says that militia groups made intense use of these technologies to spread their messages and work around mainstream outlets.

After the anti-government zealot Timothy McVeigh bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168, including many children, the movement came under more scrutiny. While many believe the movement dropped off sharply after McVeigh's act, German thinks that its real numbers are difficult to assess, and that many simply turned their attention to other activities, such as acting as vigilante immigration enforcers on the southern border.

In the years between their prominence in the 1990s and their resurgent public visibility today, the militias' basic ideology - stressing federal overreach, local supremacy, and a hardline constitutionalism - gained a greater acceptance among many in rural areas.

Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents stand next to the outbuilding located near the Randy Weaver home near Naples, Idaho. Photograph: Gary Stewart/AP

Contemporary "patriot movement" groups such as the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, or the various " Light Foot Militias " seen on the streets of Charlottesville, do not generally foreground fervidly conspiratorial anti-government rhetoric. For the most part, they fastidiously disavow racism and white supremacy.

Unlike those in the earlier wave of the militia movement, whose adherents mainly confined themselves to rural and provincial areas, newer groups have come, bearing arms, into the heart of liberal cities. This has been apparent during the wave of rightwing protests that have swept cities from Berkeley to Boston since Donald Trump's inauguration. Usually, militias turn up on the basis of providing security and protection for "free speech".

In the Trump era, these groups are far more emboldened, and often organize openly on social media. They're also able to bring weapons into public places in a way that was not previously possible. Changing gun laws - such as proliferating open carry provisions, the end of the assault weapons ban, and the supreme court's Heller decision - mean that groups can bring semiautomatic weapons, sidearms, and body armor into cities unchallenged.

And if their rhetoric seems less far out, it may be because some of the ideas they nurture have been brought into the mainstream by broadcasters such as Alex Jones, who has embraced the 9/11 "truth" movement and united it with well-established themes within the militia movement.

Their willingness to turn out in numbers in volatile situations is a new and striking development. In Charlottesville, Virginia's governor, Terry McAuliffe, said police had held back because they felt outgunned by militia.

Of the new movements, Neiwert says: "They're far more dangerous than they were in the 1990s ... This has become a huge problem and I don't see any way out of it."

In 2017, the shots fired 25 years ago at Ruby Ridge are still echoing in the streets of American cities.

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Ruby Ridge, 1992: the day the American militia movement was born

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wenty-five years ago this week, in a remote corner of northern Idaho, the modern militia movement was born in a firefight. On the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, two weeks ago, observers could see from the presence of well-armed men in fatigues that that movement was still with us.

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Palmyra, NY - Every year, Eric and Julie Lentz take their six children on a family vacation.

Last year, the Lentz family - who are Mormons - drove across the country, visiting family and historical church sites in Ohio, Illinois and Salt Lake City, Utah.

This year, they decided to drive an hour west to Palmyra in Wayne County to take part in 70-year-old Mormon tradition - the Hill Cumorah Pageant.

"It very much is a spiritual experience," Eric Lentz said. "There are people from all over the world here. It's a great opportunity for our children, especially our teenagers, that there are other folks who have the same values and believe in the same things we do."

The Lentz family, of Cicero, who are expecting their seventh child - a baby girl, due Aug. 8 - belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as Mormons. The entire family is taking part in the largest outdoor production of its kind in the United States, which starts tonight.

The 75-minute pageant featuring a 655-member cast takes place on the same hill where church founder Joseph Smith is said to have received the golden plates from which the Book of Mormon was translated. Volunteer cast members are from throughout the United States, as well as Canada, South Africa. There's even a soldier on leave from Afghanistan, Eric Lentz said.

Mormons consider the Book of Mormon a book of scripture and a second witness to Christ.

The New York Times once called the pageant "a George Lucas tech-dazzler with the scope of a Cecil B. DeMille epic."

The script is adapted from the Book of Mormon, which traces the rise and fall of an ancient civilization in the Americas. It dramatizes the story of a small group of people from Jerusalem.

The Lentz family read parts of the Book of Mormon together every day, said Julie Lentz, a stay-at-home mom who homeschools her six children. During this past school year, all six children memorized 25 different scriptures in the Book of Mormon, their mother said.

"They were proud of that," she said. "It reaffirms their testimony of the Book of Mormon and about the church. It helps them to be better people."

Julie and Eric Lentz, and their children - Jamie, 16, Mike, 15, Rachel, 12, Megan and David, 10, and Daniel, 8 - don't have to memorize any lines for the pageant. But they have been practicing for several hours a day in the heat and humidity most of the week in Palmyra.

Eric Lentz, an electrical engineer at SRC, formerly known as Syracuse Research Corp., took 11 days vacation to be part of the production. The family arrived last Friday and plan to stay until July 18, he said.

When they're not rehearsing, the children play games, make crafts, run in the sprinkler and participate in other activities. Eric and Julie Lentz said they are helping oversee a group of 7- and 8-year-olds, and teaching the children Sunday school lessons.

They're also ready for tonight's opening production.

Eric Lentz said he will play the role of a father who carries his sick daughter in to be cured by Jesus Christ. He plays the role of one of the 12 disciples.

"We believe Christ came to visit people in America after his death," Lentz said. "He had 12 disciples, similar to the 12 apostles, and I play one of the 12 disciples. I don't have to say anything or do anything. I just listen and Christ teaches to the people."

Julie Lentz and her daughter, Rachel, are citizens of King Noah, a wicked king in the Book of Mormon.

"The prophet of Abinadi comes to the king's city to teach about Christ and the Ten Commandments," Julie Lentz explained. "Many people in that city reject the prophet, but I am going to follow the prophet." The prophet is burned at the stake, she said.

"It's a quite dramatic scene," she said. "There's real fire on the stage."

Mike Lentz is in a battle scene.

Jamie Lentz is a dancer when the people are prosperous.

Daniel Lentz is a child who touches Christ. "He thinks that's really neat," Julie Lentz said.

And twins Megan and David Lentz are in a destruction scene with an earthquake.

"I'm just a wicked guy (pretending to be a non-believer)," David Lentz, a sixth-grader explains. "I run across the stage, scream 'Ahhh,' and jump off the stage and die. I'm dead on the stage. I get wet. I'm right under a water cannon."

Megan Lentz said her character also dies.

"I'm all confused because it's an earthquake," she said. "Then I go onto the stairs and hang my arms over the banister and pretend I'm dead."

Julie Lentz said it's been fun to see the children try something new.

"They believe in the Book of Mormon, and they get to act out and portray parts of the stories they know," she said. "It's fun to see how excited they are."
Catie O'Toole can be reached at cotoole@syracuse.com or 470-2134.

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Cicero family of eight take part in Hill Cumorah Pageant, a Mormon tradition

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David Lassman / The Post-StandardThe Lentz family from Cicero are part of the cast in the Hill Cumorah Pageant in Palmyra, N.Y. Julie Lentz (center - in hat) with her family. From left they are: Rachel, 12, David, 10, Mike,...

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BU-trained scholar says uninformed prejudice abounds

Why is this man smiling? Anti-Mormon prejudice could hobble Mitt Romney's campaign, a BU-trained scholar warns. Photo by Austen Hufford

By their underwear ye shall know them.

A recent USA Today story highlights how many Americans are "uninformed" about, and "wary" of, Mormonism, put off by such practices as the wearing of blessed undergarments as the sign of full fellowship in the church. And even though the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints renounced polygamy in the 1890s (with the exception of a militant sliver), some non-Mormons suspect that "fundamentalist groups were somehow hiding in plain sight within the fold of the church," says scholar Cristine Hutchison-Jones (GRS'11).

In fact, she says, "no one has been more aggressive about prosecuting polygamists in this country in the 20th and 21st century than Mormons." As for that underwear thing, she notes that other religions invest certain garb with sacred significance. Facts aside, Mitt Romney's Mormonism has alarmed some conservative Christian voters pondering his run for president.

Hutchison-Jones, a Harvard University administrator, is not Mormon, but an interest in religious intolerance led her to write her BU doctoral dissertation on "Reviling and Revering the Mormons: Defining American Values, 1890-2008." (Those years marked the official Mormon abandonment of polygamy and Mitt Romney's first run for president, respectively.) She began with the assumption that this would be another American story of a minority's assimilation into, and acceptance by, the mainstream culture. To her surprise, she learned that Mormonism remains "really problematic for a lot of people. The negative images of Mormons far outlasted my expectations." If voters' self-description can be trusted, things may not be so grim. A Pew Forum poll in July found 81 percent saying that they were comfortable with, or indifferent to, Romney's faith.

BU Today spoke with Hutchison-Jones about what prejudice against Mormons says about us and the prospects for Romney's second bid for the White House.

BU Today: What do Americans in 2012 think of Mormons, and how much of what they think is accurate?

Hutchison-Jones: I think a lot of what Americans think they know about Mormonism is wrong. We think of Sister Wives and Big Love [TV shows about polygamous apostate Mormons]. There's been a strong theme in the last 30 years in popular representations of Mormons of Mormon violence against non-Mormons, pioneer violence. There was a film in 2007 called September Dawn, about the Mountain Meadows massacre in 1857 [the slaughter of a wagon train by Mormon militia]. It is very historically inaccurate. I have gotten calls from friends and family who catch it on HBO and say, "I learned so much from that movie."

Why do negative images of Mormons linger?

There are a couple of reasons. You had the rise of evangelical Christianity in politics, and for conservative Protestant Christians, Mormons are not Christians; Mormons are a cult. So you had an increase in the amount of anti-Mormon propaganda coming out of religious communities.

The other people who are uncomfortable with Mormons are socially and politically liberal Americans. Polls ask, would you vote for a Mormon presidential candidate? People who self-identify as liberal have a tendency to say no. There's a tendency to see Mormons as a hegemony, as if they were en masse in thrall to church leadership. The Moral Majority reached out to Mormons, and because of that association, liberals tend to see Mormons as off-limits. I had to get over some of that myself. That was the expectation I came into my research with. I headed off to the Mormon History Association national conference, and the group of scholars there are by and large Mormon, and they are not in any kind of political lockstep. There's a wide diversity of opinion.

With the Moral Majority, it seems Mormons were crawling into bed politically with people who had a prejudice against them.

It's true. In the 1980s, the New York Times didn't know what to do with Orrin Hatch, who rode into the Senate as a conservative Republican Mormon. Then conservative Republicans proposed a school prayer amendment to the Constitution. He said, "Absolutely not. I am part of a minority religion that has been abused, and I am not going to be party to telling anyone how they should or should not pray." Hatch famously went on to work with Ted Kennedy for federally funded children's health care. Mormons have a very strong sense of the common good.

The guys who did South Park did Book of Mormon on Broadway.

I would argue, vulgarity aside, that they have one of the most sympathetic and understanding perspectives on Mormons of contemporary representations. They never talk about polygamy, because they see it as ancient history, which it is.

If there is so much misperception, do universities need to offer more course work on Mormonism?

Any religion-in-the-United States course that's taught in the department of religion is going to cover it. How well it's covered, that's another question. Mormonism usually gets a day. Whether or not you can justify an entire course, because they are less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, might be a little hard. On the other hand, Jews are an extremely small minority, and every university worth its salt has some kind of Judaic studies. And Mormonism is growing by leaps and bounds. The last time I saw a syllabus for [College of Arts & Sciences religion professor] Steve Prothero's undergraduate course on religion in the United States, it included Jan Shipps' book on Mormonism. It isn't just a one-day passing thing. It's reaching a point where it probably deserves some discussion in the context of world religion classes.

What do Americans' views of Mormonism say about our ideals and values?

It boils down to our sense of ourselves as a nation in which church and state are separate. I would argue that Americans aren't separating all religion from all politics. We're just not comfortable with groups that don't fit into a generally moderate, Protestant mold. I've got a colleague who did his PhD on images of conservative Christians as villains in Hollywood cinema. You can almost certainly tell in any crime drama that if somebody quotes the Bible, you're later going to find out that they're a psychopathic killer.

And we're nervous about groups who openly say the church should be involved in our politics, whatever that church might be for that group. And Mormons wear their religion on their sleeve. The average Mormon spends something like 20 hours per week in activities at their local congregation. It's really the core and center of their community, and they are absolutely open that their religion informs their social and political values. And Americans don't like that.

Do you think Romney might lose the election because of his religion?

I think if Romney loses, it's going to be for a variety of reasons. And yes, Mormonism may be problematic for him going forward. Conservative voters might be a little less enthusiastic about getting out the vote because they're nervous that he's a Mormon, and they're the ones he needs. And you may find independents who find his politics appealing, but some of them might be put off by the association with Mormonism and the concern that Mormons are all conservatives.

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Why We're Afraid of Mormons | BU Today | Boston University

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By their underwear ye shall know them. A recent USA Today story highlights how many Americans are "uninformed" about, and "wary" of, Mormonism, put off by such practices as the wearing of blessed undergarments as the sign of full fellowship in the church. And even though the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints renounced ...

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