Salt Lake City, Utah - Do you ever get the feeling that everyone is watching you? It's a suddenly relatable phenomenon in 2011 for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, many of whom may feel that who they are and what they believe is the subject of greater public scrutiny than at any time since the early history of the church, when Joseph Smith and his followers were a subject of national controversy.
The scrutiny is at least greater than at any time since 2008, which, not coincidentally was the last time that a Latter-day Saint mounted a serious presidential bid, and also brought the prolonged and very public quarrel over Proposition 8 in California. What's different in 2011 is that the latent atmosphere of suspicion and resentment has been replaced by something more curious and less contentious.
When Newsweek published a cover story in June that heralded the arrival of a "Mormon Moment," there wasn't even really a suggestion that such a phenomenon might be strange or undesirable. Has America moved on from merely putting up with the church to actually being kinda welcoming of it?
Maybe. Professional pollster Gary Lawrence, author of the books "How Americans View Mormonism" and "Mormons Believe ... What?!" (released earlier this week), said that church members have a heightened sensitivity to media coverage of their faith.
Lawrence, who is LDS, said that Latter-day Saints tend to "think that those stories make more of a connection in other people's minds than they really do."
On the one hand, Lawrence said, Mormons and Mormonism are certainly more widely known than in America's recent past: "Eighty-five percent of all Americans have heard of Mitt Romney."
It sounds great, until you know the other half of the equation. Lawrence said that only 41 percent of Americans can identify Romney's religion. And that's a comparatively good score. Only 11 percent of Americans who've heard of fellow presidential candidate Jon Huntsman can identify his religion. For Democratic senator Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader since 2007, it's only 6 percent.
Still, there are two Latter-day Saints running for president. And church leaders aren't hiding from the publicity. In June, the church's Missionary Department launched a major public relations campaign in New York City centered on its "I'm a Mormon" ads that profile individual members.
Elder Richard Hinckley, executive director of the Missionary Department, said in a press release announcing the Big Apple push that putting a face on religious principles makes them more approachable.
"It is one thing to read a list of beliefs and to try to determine what it all means," Hinckley said. "It is quite another to see those beliefs in action in an individual you know." Or at least someone who looks like you might casually run into them on the street.
Hinckley's father, the late Gordon B. Hinckley -- who worked tirelessly to improve public perception of Mormons, first as a longtime media and publicity specialist for the church and later as its 15th president -- would no doubt approve.
Big on Broadway
It's hard to tell how far into contemporary society familiarity with the church has penetrated. Chris Bigelow, co-author of "Mormonism for Dummies" and owner-operator of small-press publisher Zarahemla Books, said that he thinks Mormonism might be on its way to becoming a medium-sized fish in the big pond of American culture.
"Many people are taking us much more seriously now as a valid subject of interest, at least in academia and the media," Bigelow said. "Whether that awareness filters down much to the common American, I don't know."
Presidential candidates, of course, aren't the only high-profile Mormons around. Political commentator Glenn Beck, who left Fox News at the end of June so he could launch GBTV (which debuted earlier this month), is a major national figure and a Latter-day Saint. There's also author Stephenie Meyer, whose "Twilight" novels launched a mega-successful film franchise that rolls forward in November with "Breaking Dawn: Part 1."
Actually, the people who have arguably struck the most far-reaching blow for cultural awareness of Mormonism in 2011 aren't even ... Mormons. That would be "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the braintrust, with composer Robert Lopez, behind the Tony-winning musical "The Book of Mormon."
The Broadway blockbuster has content that might make the proverbial sailor blush -- to say nothing of the proverbial Latter-day Saint -- and certainly doesn't go out of its way to flatter the church. On the other hand, there's a general consensus that Parker and Stone, who've more than dabbled in Mormon satire before, are perhaps laughing with the church a tiny bit more than laughing at it.
As Bigelow sees it, "The Book of Mormon" -- which was nominated for 14 Tony Awards and bagged nine, including "Best Musical" -- has been more boon than bane, particularly in terms of breaking down barriers. "This is especially true when Mormons don't overreact against it," Bigelow said, "following the model of restraint set by the LDS Church itself."
The church's only official statement about the play, issued earlier this year, said merely, "The production may attempt to entertain audiences for an evening, but the Book of Mormon as a volume of scripture will change people's lives forever by bringing them closer to Christ."
Senior church publicist Michael Otterson declined to see "The Book of Mormon" but gave a measured assessment of its runaway popularity in the On Faith blog of The Washington Post. Prominent LDS historian Richard Bushman, who also didn't see the show, but learned about its plot from extensive reading of reviews, even identified with the crisis of faith of the show's main character, fictional missionary Elder Price, in a blog post for CNN.
"When I went off to Halifax to preach the gospel," Bushman said, "I was pretty shaky in my belief. For three months I wrestled with questions about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon."
The people in your neighborhood
It isn't just missionaries, of course, or even presidential candidates, who represent the church in the public eye. A large part of what determines the outcome of America's Mormon Moment could depend on the actions of church members, including the ones who haven't written a best-selling novel, or thrown a touchdown pass in the NFL.
Church leaders funnel billions of dollars into humanitarian aid and disaster relief efforts every year. And 2011 marks the 75th anniversary of the LDS welfare program, created to help members and others return to self-sufficiency after hard times. In observance of that anniversary, wards and branches around the world have been asked to organize a special day of community service before the end of the year.
Yet for all the good that Mormons do, and for all that Mormonism may appear to cast a looming shadow, there are still a lot of people in America whose opinion of the church, provided that they have one, is largely, if not wholly, based on secondhand information. "Thirty-seven percent of all Americans do not know a Mormon individually," Lawrence said. "Fifty-five percent do not know an active or devout Mormon."
It's up to rank-and-file Latter-day Saints to change that, whether by creating a personal profile on Mormon.org, or taking a plate of cookies to the neighbors. Or, from time to time, popping up on national television. That's the case with the current season of the CBS reality game show "Survivor," which has two Utah residents, both Latter-day Saints, among its cast.
For Brigham Young University professor Dawn Meehan, a married mother of six who lives in South Jordan, being a highly visible Mormon on a major TV network was not an entirely unfamiliar sensation. Working at BYU, Meehan said, "I absolutely know, every day of my life, that I represent the church. And I think that helped me on the show." (Filming was completed earlier this year, though episodes only began airing Sept. 14.)
Meehan said that she felt fortunate to find herself in a position to represent the church to quite a few people who may not know much about it.
Another Latter-day Saint in a similar position is filmmaker and LDS Film Festival founder Christian Vuissa, who wrote, directed and produced the film "Joseph Smith -- Volume 1: Plates of Gold," released theatrically in Utah on Sept. 2. Vuissa, a native Austrian, screened his film in Austria and Germany even before bringing it to the United States.
Vuissa's three most recent films about Mormonism (the other two are the missionary movie "The Errand of Angels" and the new-bishop-on-the-block drama "One Good Man") are straightforward and sincere, which is something of a rarity even just among films made by LDS filmmakers. He said he thinks that a lot of depictions of religion take the route of Parker and Stone's Broadway "Book of Mormon" because they allow whoever is telling the story to tackle a serious subject without treating it seriously.
"Sometimes it seems like people think that's the only way to have the discussion," he said. "They have to maintain that ironic distance." It's an observation that carries the weight of personal experience: Vuissa's first film about Mormons, in 2004, was the "Baptists at Our Barbecue," a literary adaptation and parody steeped in broad caricatures.
All publicity is ... good publicity?
If either Romney or Huntsman blazes a path to the Republican presidential nomination, then the 2012 election cycle could go a long way toward creating a lasting impression of the church in the cultural consciousness. On the other hand, there are already signs that people just don't care as much as they did the last time around.
Bill Keller, who recently stepped down as executive editor of The New York Times, wrote a somewhat peevish editorial printed Aug. 25 in The New York Times Magazine wondering why there aren't more people asking the Republican presidential candidates pointed questions about their religious beliefs.
Adam Christing, who made the documentary "A Mormon President" about Joseph Smith's presidential ambitions, said he thinks Romney and Huntsman are seen as being more religiously bland than other candidates. Christing said there's a fair amount of evidence that suggests Smith had theocratic designs on the presidency, hoping that he could use it to unite the aims of church and state.
"The candidate who's most like that today, wanting the Bible to be the playbook for politics," Christing said, "is Rick Perry."
Bigelow said he thinks that Mormons in national politics are almost old hat at this point. "Since 2008, many people have gotten the novelty of Mormonism out of their systems and have largely moved past it as a serious concern," he said.
There are still plenty of people who haven't been convinced that Latter-day Saints are wholesome, or even just benign. Lawrence said that more people view the church favorably than unfavorably today, which is a reversal of the situation that existed at the time that Romney bowed out of the presidential race in 2008. At the time, Lawrence said, "we were upside down. Now we're back to being right-side up."
Even so, there are still 34 percent of Americans whose view of Mormons is unfavorable -- that's roughly a third of all Americans who would probably rather not have anything to do with a Mormon Moment.
That, as Lawrence sees it, is fine. As a Latter-day Saint, he said, he'd rather see people antagonistic than apathetic. When the church was preparing to give tours of its new temple in Newport Beach, Calif., Lawrence said, local Latter-day Saints wondered what they should do if they encountered angry protestors.
"Offer them water," Lawrence said. "If there aren't any protestors, go down to Rent-a-Mob and get some. People driving by will see them and say, 'I wonder what that's all about.SSRq"
He used the story of a German man investigating the church to illustrate his point. The man read an anti-Mormon tract and was so struck by its contents that he sought out LDS missionaries and was baptized. Later on, Karl Maeser founded a university in Provo.
As Lawrence sees it, it's less important that Broadway's "The Book of Mormon" contains foul language and blasphemy, and more important that it has people talking. "My whole point is, 'Say what you want, just be sure to spell the name right,SSRq" he said. "The Lord will find a way to turn it to our good."