Where are all these Mormons coming from? Between Mitt Romney running for president on a “I’m a conservative like you, just a slightly different flavor” platform and HBO’s Big Love with its pandering after the ups and downs of sex in a multiple wife marriage, it seems like the Mormons [...]]]>

Where are all these Mormons coming from? Between Mitt Romney running for president on a “I’m a conservative like you, just a slightly different flavor” platform and HBO’s Big Love with its pandering after the ups and downs of sex in a multiple wife marriage, it seems like the Mormons are coming out of nowhere. But what most people don’t know is that the Mormons have not just been cooling their heels in Utah for the past 100 years. They have been on a role for quite some time now.
While the Baptists have been struggling to retain members and the Methodist and Episcopalian churches have been shrinking, the Mormon church (known as Latter Day Saints, or LDS, by their members) has been expanding at a rapid clip. In fact, it is the fastest growing religion in the world. There are now far more Mormons outside of Utah than within the boundaries of the beehive state.
What’s the appeal? The Mormons don’t lay a lot of head trips on their members like all that stuff about Adam and Eve and original sin. For LDS we are all on a continuous trajectory from imperfection to a higher plane. God and Jesus are just like us (yes, they are physical beings), they are just farther along on the spiritual journey. Death is not the end, it is just a marker on the journey. And we are all traveling with our extended families. But in order to make sure that their families are coming with them, LDS members have to find out who they are.
You may not know it, but the Mormons have been collecting information on your family for quite some time now. For them, genealogy is a religion. And they believe that advent of the internet (which allows information to be made available to everything through sites like Ancestry.com) was divinely inspired. Having personally experienced the mesmerizing pull of searching for my own ancestors, I think that is a big part of their draw. And as a psychiatrist I think that doing genealogical research on the internet has become like an addiction for many people.

You can read more about my speculations on Mormonism, genealogy, and my own quest to find my missing family in my recently released book The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg, available in paperback and also $0.99 Kindle.

You can read the first chapter here and the enthusiastic reader reviews here.

Chapter 27

In 1823, an 18-year-old boy from Palmyra, New York, was visited by an angel, who told him of some magical gold plates. Armed with special glasses, he was able to translate them into a book that told about how the lost tribe of Israel was visited [...]]]> The Fastest Growing Religion on Earth

Chapter 27

In 1823, an 18-year-old boy from Palmyra, New York, was visited by an angel, who told him of some magical gold plates. Armed with special glasses, he was able to translate them into a book that told about how the lost tribe of Israel was visited by Jesus in the Americas hundreds of years ago. In 1831, he started a church in Kirtland, Ohio.

He later said that church members could act as proxies for deceased persons, baptize them, and “seal” them into family clans that would be reunited in Heaven. His successor wrote about “the perfect mania” that possessed some of his followers as they started “to get up printed records of their ancestors.”

Over the next 168 years, 113 million people were introduced, after death, to the church.

Members of his church, called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS, commonly known as the Mormons), are worried that their ancestors who lived before the beginning of the church won’t be able to join them in heaven. But in order to get them into the church, they have to figure out who they are first.

That makes them some pretty damn good genealogists.

They’ve got a vault carved into the solid granite of a mountain 20 miles southeast of Salt Lake City, Utah, where they store information about the births, marriages and deaths of over 2 billion people, the largest single database on the details of the human race in the world. Buried 600 feet into the mountain, protected by two nine ton and one 14 ton doors built to withstand a nuclear blast, the Granite Mountain Vault isn’t going anywhere soon. Five billion documents are stored on 1 ½ million rolls of microfilm and 1 ½ million microfiche. 25,000 volunteers are currently working to scan and index all of these documents as well as put them on the internet so that one day soon you can access all of this data while sitting in your kitchen in your slippers with a laptop on your lap.

Ancestry.com, a subscription based service started by members of the LDS church, has 900,000 subscribers, and is growing. Ancestry put millions of documents online, including 5 billion names. They have census records for all of the US from the past 200 years, birth, marriage and death records, and more. In May of 2007 they dumped the military records of all of the soldiers who fought in all of the US wars, 90 million of them, online.

Genealogy is now America’s #1 hobby. Millions of documents are being put on line so that subscribers can sit in their kitchens rather than traipsing across the country in search of obscure church and governmental archives.

As the fastest growing church in the world, you have to wonder if the Mormons are onto something. That connecting with the nodes of your family, those linked to you by sperm and eggs and DNA, looping simultaneously backward and forward through space and time, like the drooping lines connecting the electricity towers that move through mowed swaths of forest in the rural parts of America, will lead you to paradise?

Who am I to say no?