| BY MARK COATNEY
Topic
for today: Rebirth and redemption. We've taken a bus trip
north of our stop in Alton to Nauvoo, Ill., where members
of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, otherwise
known as the Mormons, are building yet another temple. But
not just any temple — this one has special significance
to church members, for Nauvoo was where the Mormons tried
to settle before they were forced out and headed west to
Salt Lake. It is also the burial place of murdered Mormon
founder Joseph Smith.
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| DIANA WALKER FOR TIME |
| The Mormons strike up a tune for the TIME crew as they arrive in Nauvoo, Ill. |
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After getting
kicked out of Missouri, Joseph Smith in 1839 led his rapidly
growing flock to a swampy area on a bend on the east bank
of the Mississippi. In six years they built a town of 20,000.
Then some mean people arrested Smith, and then they killed
him, and then people began making life tough for Mormons in
Nauvoo, and then the Mormons left.
At least
that's the story as presented in the film we were shown
at the Nauvoo visitors' center. It leaves out a few things,
like, um, why Smith was arrested and hauled off to jail
in Carthage (among other things, it was because he had destroyed
a press that was printing mean things about Mormons).
Hardly
a lynching offense, but still. Other fun facts the Mormons
didn't mention: Nauvoo had grown to be the largest city
in the state, with a standing army of 4,300 (at the time,
even the feds had only 8,000 troops), and Smith and many
of his followers were advocates of polygamy. Both facts
were causing considerable friction in the area.
The Mormons
— who, by the way, have renounced polygamy — greet
us when we arrive in town, and they're very nice, and much
better dressed than we are. They're also determined to control
every aspect of our tour, which in the end makes it somehow
even more interesting and revealing. After the film (in
which, interestingly enough, the actor they have playing
Smith's successor, Brigham Young, looks an awful lot like
Steve Young, quarterback for the San Francisco 49'ers and
a descendant of Brigham) we are loaded into a horse-drawn
cart for a trip around the place. Church members wave, and
tell us stories about the town, and bring us gingerbread-man
cookies. I start to feel really guilty when we pass a brass
band, standing out in the cold just to play a few bars for
us as we ride by.
The Mormons
are buying up everything they can in this town of 1,000
(some 200 of whom are church members, a number that's expected
to keep growing), and are turning it into a kind of Latter-day
Colonial Williamsburg. They've restored quite a few of the
remaining brick buildings (including Brigham Young's home)
and are constructing new log cabins to match the ones the
Mormons lived in originally. But the big project, the one
that has the locals upset, is to rebuild the temple here
on the spot where the original one stood. That building
was completed just as the last few wagon trains of Mormons
were packing up and heading west; it burned down a few years
later, and then a tornado wiped out nearly all that was
left.
Locals
are worried that the temple will draw more tourists to town
than it can handle. Already some 250,000 people a year come
to this tiny place via a tight two-lane road, and that's
only going to increase when the temple is finished. Residents
are worried that the town's infrastructure won't be able
to handle the load, and that when the temple is complete
and the town becomes a sort of Mormon Mecca, the place won't
be recognizable as theirs.
So. Yes.
Rebirth — after all, Mormons are closer to their creation
than any other major American religion, and visiting here
is in some ways like revisiting Jerusalem 150 years after
the temple was destroyed. As long as the reborning doesn't
obliterate what came after the original baby moved on.
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