Doubters in the Temple

Not every Mormon comes to Harvard and jumps into the full commitment that some Mormons here have made to the church. Some men, for example, decide against leaving on missions, although the present prophet and president of the Mormon church, octogenarian Spencer W. Kimball (Mormons say he is young for his job), declared recently that it is every Mormon man's duty to go on a mission. Dr. Chase N. Peterson '52, vice president for alumni affairs and development and current president of the university branch, never went on a mission. Two active Mormon seniors, Muliufi Hanneman and J. Arthur Jensen, have not gone on missions. (Women in the church are not under similar pressure to go on a mission. If one wants to she must wait until she is 21, two years later than the men. "They figure we'll be married then," Kathy Bybee '78 speculates.)

Jensen, one of several pre-med Mormons, says the then-president of the University branch of the local church met with him in March of his freshman year and asked if Jensen was interested in going on a mission. Jensen says he explained that he had questions about the church. "I didn't think I could represent it with intellectual honesty, and say to people, "I know this church is true.' I'm not sure everything in the church is true." In later months, Jensen says, graduate students would invite him over for dinner and "a mission would just pop up."

For some, the years at Harvard bring growing distance from the church. Octaviano M. Ledesma Jr. '76, a Math major living in Canaday Hall, attended the Cambridge church regularly the first year after he arrived from his home in Calexico, California, a town of 11,000 near the Mexican border and about 120 miles east of San Diego. The Mormon church there had about 100 members, with only 15 or 20 Anglos. Ledesma's parents converted to Mormonism when he was four or five; missionaries had come to their home, then in Los Angeles, and, he says, "My ma had a hunch." This interest led to conversion for Ledesma, his mother (who now works as a clerk in a grocery store), and his father (who collects social security now after retiring from his own little business of collecting volcanic rock in Mexico for sale as ornaments in Southern California). While Ledesma says he is not ready to accept the church as true, many of the questions and contradictions that once bothered him have been resolved.

Yet Ledesma's church attendance dropped off his sophomore and junior years and stopped this year, although his participation in Calexico has not lagged. The dark-haired, pudgy and mustachioed senior explains that he doesn't "feel the same kind of closeness here." He attributes much of this to the reorganization of the church here several years ago, which sent some of his close Mormon friends to other wards. While the University branch is "very, very friendly" and more open than Harvard itself, Ledesma says, its members are not as tightly knit as those in the Calexico ward. "When you sit down with others, that is where you actually learn. But when you don't feel comfortable, then you're not learning as much," he says. Feeling estranged, Ledesma has found it hard to raise the will power to go to church.

Ledesma, who hopes to become a math professor, protrays himself as someone who clashes with Mormon stereotypes. First, he says, his liberal preferences clash with the church's generally conservative leanings; "I believe in strong government intervention," he says, his hands bobbing and weaving to stress his points. Ledesma says that while he finds some church doctrines (such as eating in moderation) make a lot of sense, he follows them "only as well as I can. I recognize them as good practices, but do not regard them as gospel." Finally, many of his companions live a life that violates fundamental Mormon doctrines. Many of his friends last year smoked dope, he says, and his roommate drinks (a Bacardi rum bottle stands on a nearby table in his suite). When deciding to room with the friends, Ledesma says, "the drinking never came into consideration." It would have for most Mormons, he adds.

Annis J. Hagee '75, who is now a secretary in University Hall and lives in the master's residence in Kirkland, grew up a Protestant, a leaf on a family tree overgrown with Congregationalist ministers. But the family church had become an empty routine to her. As a high school senior, Hagee visited the Mormon church in her home town, St. Joseph, Missouri, on a dare from a Utah Mormon she had befriended at a student conference. Hagee found "a lot of spirit there, something very real, something I wanted to know about."

That visit brought Mormon missionaries, whom the family "just made fun of for a while," to the house, Hagee says with a touch of regret. But a few months later, Hagee's interest took a serious turn and by the end of May she had been baptized. Within a year her whole family--a widowed mother and younger brother--had also converted.

In her first year at Radcliffe, Hagee became "totally involved" in the church here. But the next year, she says, she began dating a Catholic whose mother despised her Mormonism; nonetheless, visits to his house on Sundays continued, often during the time she usually reserved for Mormon services. Then, her junior year, Hagee threw herself into the church again. But towards the end of her first semester last year, trying personal events led Hagee to "pull back some" from a religious commitment "that can be totally absorbing." All fall she has been going to non-sectarian services at Memorial Church, although her attendance at the Mormon church back home has not lagged.

Hagee partially blames her late conversion for her current restraint; she believes that Mormons who have grown up surrounded by the religion are not as troubled by doubts as she has been: "It's a hard thing to catch up to," she says with frustration. An English concentrator now considering graduate school, Hagee was somewhat frustrated by the church's emphasis on education in its services. While she embraces this emphasis as a principle ("It's so positive, it reinforces good things you want to do yourself, it's a constant urge to be better," she says), Hagee also longs for a more mystical religious service.

"Around here your spirit gets hungry, lonely," she says in a hushed voice. "Sometimes I just want to be quiet, to have beauty and reverence." But then, Hagee turns on this feeling with a Puritan self-criticism that many Mormons seem to lapse into. "This urge," she says, is "probably a weakness." Instead of counting on church services for instilling her with piety, she reprimands herself. I should follow the lesson of Mormon friends, she tells herself, who find time each day to "commune or nourish themselves spiritually." But, she adds, "I need help to do that."

Mormon undergraduates here agree that the university branch is more intellectual than their churches back home. Hagee's perspective is typical: Her ward in Missouri is largely bluecollar, while the church here is predominantly professionals. Talks at the Cambridge church are often witty and well written, but at Hagee's hometown congregation there are often speeches by young children and teenagers. Another Mormon says that while services here center on church philosophy, those at home often try to prove the historical truth of the church, such as the revelations of Joseph Smith, its founder.

In some ways the Mormon church is a potpourri of contradictions. As a lay church it is democratic and has strains of communalism. The tasks of each branch are spread among all members, and anyone can speak in relief society, priesthood, Sunday school and sacrament meetings. Members are encouraged to work out their individual relationship to God and to follow their revelations. The church's extensive welfare programs--financed by its awesome tithings--allow "anyone in need to get it immediately," according to Peterson.

Yet the church's organization shows a feudally hierarchic side of Mormonism that helps lead to its political conservatism. The impact of revelations depends on one's position in the church: Prophet Kimball's revelations can change all Mormon doctrine (Prophet Wilford Woodruff did just that on the polygamy questions in the 1890s, after a federal crackdown on polygamy sent many prominent Mormons to prison.) The revelations of the head of the Boston stake (or diocese) will affect the stake (in the choice of a branch president, for example), and each individual's revelations are restricted to his or her self and family. "My experience with the church is that the people in charge are more Christ-like," Larry Dewey '73, a first-year medical student, says. "The man in authority works more hours, loves more and serves more people. The idea of [taking on the job of] branch presidency just makes my soul quiver with fright."

Added to this strange mixture is the church's strong affinity for capitalism. As if guided by the Weberian theory of the Protestant ethic, the Mormons tie prosperity to their religion; material success is taken as a sign of the Lord's rewarding Mormons. Larry Dewey's father, for example, believes that the good things that have come to him since his conversion to Mormonism are directly attributable to the church. The work ethic is evident in Mormon undergraduates, who are not coincidentally often pre-med.

What contradictions exist in church doctrine are compounded in the unlikely meeting of Mormonism and Harvard. In this analytical and often cynical community, the spirituality of Mormons and their peculiar religious dogma stand out like saffron-robed Krishna followers in a crowd of Unification Church members. Just as the notion of an inconspicuous 19th-century American starting a religion heavily based on a pair of long-lost golden tablets brings snickers here, so the spirituality of Mormonism clashes with the pre-professionalism that prevails here. While Mormons are certainly not opponents of the return to academics, they do not spend their Sundays at the University branch to pad their resumes and applications.

The cultural conflict between Mormonism and Harvard originates in the church's ties to the American West as much as from the religion itself. Teresa Dewey, who grew up in Idaho and graduated from Brigham Young before moving here to marry Larry, says it took her a while to cope with the differences between west and east, country and city. The conservative politics and life style of Mormons no doubt has many of its roots in the far west's relative conservatism.

Along with polygamy, the church's prohibition against African blacks holding the priesthood (which men can hold after age 12) has grown into a central Mormon issue in Cambridge and the East. The doctrine causes few problems in the lily-white far west; Larry Dewey say the only black he had talked to before he came to Harvard was a halfback for nearby Borah High. But mention of the ban brings stories of blacks who broke off friendships because of the prohibition, although this is not always true: Carlyn Christensen '74 roomed with a black woman sophomore year.

Mormon undergraduates' attitudes toward the ban range from angry rejection ("I think it's total b.s., and I don't even want to talk about it," one says) to passive acceptance of the doctrinal justification with hopes that Prophet Kimball will have a revelation admitting blacks. Matt Thomas "77 accepts the prohibition as legitimately based on Mormon scriptures, but he becomes upset and ashamed when some Mormons take the "tiny fact [of prohibition] to say blacks are inferior." He adds, "I'm convinced that blacks at some point will receive the priesthood right by revelation."

The undergraduate Mormons here inevitably know each other; six live in Kirkland House, which Thomas calls the "Mormon ghetto." Yet even those in Kirkland rarely join each other outside church functions. Carlyn Christensen says she makes a point not to "stick around with Mormons; there are too many other interesting people." While none of the Mormons mind being identified as one, most are wary of being typed as a Latter-Day Saint, or, in Peterson's words, of wearing their Mormonism on their sleeve.

Many Mormon parents are reluctant to let their children come out East. Peterson says that often, especially in his five years as dean of admissions and financial aid, he had to persuade Mormon parents that their children would not go to hell at Harvard. "If the kid has intellectual strength," he says, "This is the right place for him to come for church reasons." Indeed, in Peterson's eyes the four years at Harvard will provide Mormon undergraduates with a sort of mission. Harvard's regenerative effect on Mormons works best when Mormons broadly sample life here; a Mormon student here should not spend all his or her time in the church, Peterson says. They should get involved, he says, go to "cocktail parties and bashes." But, he quickly adds, "you don't have to go home drunk and hit a telephone pole or go home with the wrong woman.