“It’s Not About the Sex” My Ass (9 page)

God must have been watching over the apostles. They cursed
the White House, president and all, without incident. It may have helped,
however, that at the last minute and just this once, they made the decision to
dress like ordinary tourists, inaudibly mumble the oaths, tone down the
pantomimes to look like they were waving away gnats and, lastly, race through
an abbreviated, whispered curse.

They returned home exulting. They had done it! They had
cursed the evil United States government, the evil United States president
along with it, and walked away free men.

I need hardly point out that the curse worked. William
Jefferson Clinton is no longer president.

O the vainness, and the frailties, and the foolishness
of men! When they are learned they think they are wise, and they hearken not
unto the counsel of God, for they set it aside, supposing they know of
themselves.

—Book of Mormon 2 Nephi 9:28

Should doubt knock at your doorway, just say to those
skeptical, disturbing, rebellious thoughts: “I propose to stay with my faith,
with the faith of my people … I forbid you, agnostic, doubting thoughts, to destroy
the house of my faith … ”

—Thomas S. Monson as first counselor in the First
Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon), in a
speech given at Brigham Young University, November 13, 2007. Three months
later, Monson became the head of the church as its prophet, seer, and
revelator.

Use your head. That’s why you have one.

—Me, looking back on the madness

When you look at a cult from the outside, it’s hard to
fathom how anyone could buy into its insanity. But cults suck their victims in,
degree by degree, until everything is viewed from the
inside
. All sense of rational detachment is lost.

There were moments when sanity ever so slightly pried open
the door to my mind, just a crack, just enough to let in a sliver of doubt.
Usually the experience terrified me. Apostasy was the sin of the faithless.
Those doubts, I knew, were Satan doing his best to sabotage me. I would banish
him, along with any slivers of doubt, re-close the door, and double the locks.

But each doubt, no matter how small or fleeting, left behind
traces. When the next doubt came along, it added to them.

Over time, the traces piled up.

You may recall Laura Brokaw, the child molester who prayed
for guidance each day in order to choose the right socks to wear. It troubled
me that Harmston, a prophet, was oblivious to her dangerous background. You’d
think God would have warned him not to marry her or at least not to let her
near any children, not to let her teach in the school, and for sure not to let
her share a bed with an about-to-be-married teenage girl.

But then, perhaps it was God who had guided us to uncover
her past.
Who was I to tell God how to
inspire us?
That kind of self-talk, that kind of excuse-making, is one of
the many ways that cult followers talk themselves into denying evidence in
order to cling to irrational beliefs. For years, I was as good as the next
person when it came to finding creative ways to disqualify evidence. More and
more, however, I was starting to see through it.

As for the sock thing, I didn’t believe it for a minute. Not
even I was religiously deluded enough to think that God took time each day to
tell Laura which socks to put on. The problem wasn’t that. It was that I
couldn’t write off Laura as the exception. Lots of respected TLC members
reported getting equally nutty revelations about equally inconsequential
things. What to have for dinner? Ask God. Which toenail to paint first? Was it
even OK to paint them? Were any colors verboten? Ask God. As gods go, sometimes
ours seemed oddly available to help with life’s daily minutiae, yet oddly
unavailable to warn us when there was a child molester among us, much less warn
his prophet Harmston not to marry one.

I believed—worked hard to believe—that Harmston
was a prophet. But then, what about the many times he predicted things that
didn’t happen? Borrowing a caveat that Mormons find handy in defending their
own prophets, Harmston explained that he was only a prophet when officially
speaking as one. When he shot off his mouth as an ordinary man, he was as
subject to error as the next fellow. It was up to us to understand that, to be
patient with it, and to remain sufficiently in tune with the Holy Spirit to be
able to discern when God was and wasn’t speaking through him. I couldn’t help
observing that this explanation twisted things around so that when Harmston was
wrong it wasn’t his or God’s fault. It was ours.

Yikes. Was I questioning God’s anointed?
Get thee behind me, Satan,
I told those
horrible, seditious thoughts.

Harmston pushed the caveat further. A prophet, he once
explained to me, was a prophet only 10 percent of the time. The other 90
percent of the time, he was no more than an ordinary guy with opinions. How to
tell the 10 from the 90 percent? Short of discerning by the Spirit, you had to
await outcomes. When an outcome confirmed something that Harmston said, it was
evidence that he was a prophet. When an outcome contradicted something that
Harmston said, it proved nothing at all.
A
prophet isn’t of much use if you never know when to count on what he says,
came a thought from nowhere.
Get thee
behind me, Satan,
I replied.

For fun I tallied my success rate in obtaining answers to
prayers. I found that when I asked God yes-or-no questions, the answers I
received panned out about half the time. Fifty percent? That much was to be
expected from random chance. Even so, my 50 percent beat Harmston’s 10 percent
by 40. Why did I need a prophet when my own success rate was better? And why
did I need to ask God for help with decisions when I could do as well flipping
a coin?
Uh oh. Get thee behind me.

One day I stumbled upon a newspaper article about a rival
cult that had been around longer than ours. Everyone in the TLC knew about
them, including the fact that their prophet was a charlatan and a nutcase. But
as I read, I saw that Harmston’s doctrine mirrored the rival cult’s doctrine
point for point. They were polygamists, they knew Christ was coming soon, they
were gathering to a place that would become a Shekinah, and their leader was a
reincarnation of Joseph Smith. I was shocked.
He and Harmston were the same. If the other guy was a charlatan and a
nutcase, what did that make Harmston?

Tripping over my tongue to avoid showing disrespect or,
worse, disbelief, I asked Harmston about it. “Satan,” Harmston explained, “is
the great counterfeiter.” It shouldn’t surprise me that Satan would cook up a
look-alike group, he said. What better way to lead the less discerning astray?
I nodded and thanked him for clearing up the mystery. But inside it didn’t sit
quite right.
Get thee behind me,
I
thought, with waning conviction.

One day as we were preparing to hold a Prayer Session,
Harmston stepped behind a curtain visible from the room to change into his
temple robes. We hadn’t yet settled into a sacred mood, so I wisecracked, “Pay
no attention to the man behind the curtain.” In
The Wizard of Oz
the line heralds the exposure of a charlatan. I
was alluding to no such thing. Yet after Elaine Harmston shot me an accusing
look, I wondered.
Had I just spoken more
truth than I realized?

During another Prayer Session, Elaine, acting as voice,
spoke to me on behalf of one of Jeff’s late ancestors. A new voice, accent, and
personality overtook her. Everyone in the room quickly came to like the fellow
purportedly speaking through her. He was funny and personable. I asked him if
he wanted us to perform a baptism for the dead on his behalf. Of course he did.
As I said, no one ever turned us down.

Then he told us a little of his story. He had lived to an
old age. In the spirit world from which he addressed us, he had been restored
to the equivalent of a 20-year-old. Some of the older people in the room whose
body parts were starting to sag took heart at the thought.

The guy was so likable that I decided to learn more about
him. Digging through Jeff’s family records, I found a genealogy with the man’s
birth and death dates—and discovered that he had died at the age of
three.

Once more trying not to appear disrespectful or doubting, I
showed the record to Elaine. How was it, I asked, that our departed friend
claimed to have lived to an old age when the family genealogy showed he died at
the age of three? Elaine didn’t know the answer, so she convened another Prayer
Session to find out. This was a weighty question, so she called in the Holy
Order—spirits of the dead who ranked among God’s most knowledgeable and
authoritative. Speaking through Elaine, a dead dude of the Holy Order cleared
the confusion right up. There was a typo in Jeff’s genealogical records, he
said.
Bullshit,
that nagging voice
from nowhere said.
Tell me about it,
I replied in my mind.

It was 1998. We had invested five years of our lives in the
cult. If it was all a farce, all a fraud, it would mean facing up to having
wasted those years. Though it was getting increasingly difficult to rationalize
away my doubts, I did my best to pretend they weren’t there.

Besides, something big was about to happen. Something big
enough to eradicate all doubt. Preparatory to his second coming, which was
going to happen any day, Jesus was going to put in a personal appearance to
Harmston and the apostles—all of them, including my husband. Jesus was
going to let them feel the prints of the nails in his hands and feet and the
mark of the sword in his side. He was going to perform with them the temple
oaths, secret handshakes, and signs. He was going to place a white apron on
them, ceremonially replacing the green one. He was going to seal upon them
their calling and election—Mormon speak for guaranteeing the best eternal
salvation heaven had to offer and promising one day to bestow godhood upon
them.

Yep. After death, they were going to be resurrected, become
gods, have multiple wives, create worlds, populate those worlds with spirit
children of their own, speak to them through prophets, send them a savior, the
works. The Mormons thought these blessings were in store for them. For us, the
fact that they were sure to be surprised—just before being struck dead at
the Second Coming—was icing on the cake.

This was big. This was no time to give in to something as
antithetical to religion as reason or logic.

Always one for theatrics, Jesus told Harmston and the
apostles to meet him for the ceremony in Adam-Ondi-Ahman, which is where Adam
and Eve lived after God kicked them out of the Garden of Eden. Off went
Harmston and the apostles, not to the Middle East, but to the Midwestern United
States. To Missouri, to be exact.

If you’re not Mormon, perhaps it is news to you that Adam
and Eve were Missourians. According to Mormon founder Joseph Smith, God planted
the Garden of Eden in Missouri. (Suck it up, Iraq and other claimants.) Smith
taught that after their eviction for illegal possession of fruit, Adam and Eve
ended up about midway between St. Louis and Springfield and named the place
Adam-Ondi-Ahman. On a visit to the site in 1838, Smith showed his followers a
pile of rocks and assured them that it was no ordinary pile of rocks. It was
the remains of an altar built by Adam himself. If a pile of rocks doesn’t
convince you, I don’t know what will. The Mormon Church owns the site, but
Jesus wasn’t going to let its having fallen into the hands of the accursed ones
stop him from holding his little ceremony there.

Back in Manti, Judith and I hovered near the phone. There
was no way I was going to miss this call. It’s not every day when your husband
calls and says, “Guess who I met today” and you get to yell back “Jesus Christ”
without swearing.

The night wore on. And on. I jumped when at last the phone
rang. Grabbing the receiver I breathlessly asked, “Was your calling and
election made sure? Did you see—
him?”

“Yes,” Jeff said. But something tentative in his tone seemed
to suggest that it might be a good idea to delay squealing our delight and
bursting into an impromptu victory dance until after we’d heard what Jeff would
say next.

What Jeff said next was, “Sort of.”

Jeff told us that the group prayed late into the night at
Adam-Ondi-Ahman. Nothing. They prayed some more. Still nothing. After a few
hours, Harmston received a revelation. Jesus was there, Harmston told the
apostles. They couldn’t see him, but Harmston could. Jesus, it seemed, had
changed his mind about coming through the veil that night. He would be staying
on his own side of the veil after all. From where he stood, he sealed upon
Harmston his calling and election, following which Harmston sealed upon the
apostles their calling and election, complete with bestowing white aprons,
while Jesus watched and approved.

Isn’t that convenient,
I fumed.
Harmston made this whole thing
up. This was all a last-minute act to cover his great big lying ass.

There was disappointment in Jeff’s voice, but if he had
doubts, he didn’t express them. Handing the phone to Judith, I stomped about
the kitchen, banging pots, slamming cupboard doors, and sputtering doubts.
“This whole thing is nothing but a big lie,” I spat out. Judith, who had
finished speaking with Jeff, set down the phone and lit into me. How dare I say
such things after all the blessings, manifestations, and marvelous experiences
I’d had?
What blessings, manifestations,
and marvelous experiences?

I regained control of my emotions by the time the men
returned from Missouri. Harmston convened a meeting the next day in which we
apostolic wives received our white aprons and had sealed upon us our calling
and election. Now we too were secure in the knowledge that when our husbands
became gods, we would be right there with them as plural wives and helpmeets.
What a blessing.