Under the Hammer of Heaven
A recent television series brings a grisly Mormon murder case to life, though questionable renditions of history overshadow its more thoughtful aspects.
In 1998 I was amusingly reminded that Latter-day Saints are, as they like to put it, a “peculiar people.” At the Brooklyn bar I frequented, another regular — a cigarette-smoking, whiskey-pounding, foul-mouthed Orthodox Jew — had just learned that I was a Mormon.
His verdict? “That’s weird.”
There are about 7.5 million Jews in the United States, and nearly 6.8 million Latter-day Saints — around 2.4% and 2.0% of the country’s population, respectively. The numbers are similar, yet the cultural visibility of the two groups is so vastly different that a representative of one can, with some justification, call a representative of the other “weird.” How weird is that?
Mormons have typically been depicted in popular entertainment either as monsters, deviants or buffoons. The first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, propagated an image of the Saints as murderous kidnappers and slavers, as did the 1922 silent film Trapped by the Mormons (still sometimes shown as a midnight movie). In westerns, they were mostly backgrounded either as weird polygamists or meek types in need…
