M ormons have been the butt of satire (and rage) ever since Joseph Smith claimed to have seen the gold plates that bore the religion’s foundational text. Most recently, Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone’s smutty, successful musical The Book of Mormon mocked two earnest young missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for their efforts to spread the faith in a Ugandan village where hunger, Aids and a genocidal warlord are of more pressing concern. One song, “I Believe”, took aim at the belated desegregation of the church – “I believe that in 1978 God changed his mind about black people”. Never daunted by adversity, the Mormons saw a marketing opportunity. At the West End performance I attended, advertisements in the programme invited us to learn more: “You’ve seen the play, now read the book”. In the 1970s the Osmonds, a pearly-toothed Mormon family quintet who avoided drink, drugs, coffee and Coca-Cola, had already led the way. The devil’s music was harnessed to Mormon proselytization on their album The Plan (ie, The Plan of Salvation), increasing the numbers of converts by tens of thousands.
Mark Twain jeered that The Book of Mormon was “chloroform in print”. Richard Lyman Bushman’s Joseph Smith’s Gold Plates, Grant Hardy’s The Annotated Book of Mormon and Benjamin E. Park’s American Zion, reviewed for the TLS by Seth Perry, all take a more sympathetic view of the faith, its prophets and its text, which in Hardy’s view repays attentive reading as “an ingenious, innovative work of early modern American liter
