Jones's organization, Christian Research & Counsel, is one of dozens of anti-Mormon groups--ranging from hobbyists, who manage websites from their living rooms, to professional ministries with full-time staff members that publish books, newsletters, and documentaries and send protesters to the opening of every new LDS temple or ward (the LDS equivalent of a parish). Some organizations, such as the Institute for Religious Research in Grand Rapids, Michigan, run mentoring programs for Mormons who want to leave the church. A group called Mission to Mormons maintains a revisionist exhibition on Mormon history in Nauvoo, Illinois, an important site in the church's early history. Tactics range from sophisticated theological arguments to junior-high lunchroom name-calling: One anti-Mormon site refers to its chief opponents as "annoying, smelley [sic] trolls." At the Hill Cumorah Pageant, too, methods vary. Jones's volunteers prefer to stand quietly with tracts and signs. On the other side of the road, street preachers--mostly middle-aged, unshaven men with Bible verses printed on their baseball caps--screech through megaphones, wave Mormon temple garments in the air, and hoist signs that say ask me why you deserve hell.
One day, early in pageant week, a volunteer named Calvin Arnt stands in a spot of shade, manning a table stacked with pamphlets. He is a high school civics teacher from Ontario who has spent many years in missionary work--on one trip, he went door-to-door among fundamentalist Mormon communities in the Southwest, where polygamy is still the norm. Today, he stands quietly, watching packs of tourists and combing his long ponytail with his fingers. He wears his hair long to facilitate authenticity in another one of his passions, Revolutionary War reenactment.
But many more conservative Christians blanch at the idea of any cooperation with Mormons, let alone the endorsement of a Mormon for the nation's highest office. The protesters at the Hill Cumorah Pageant insist that Christianity is incompatible with Mormonism. Talk of a Mormon president brings shudders, gasps, and predictions of a return to the theocracy of the Mormons' nineteenth-century Great Basin Kingdom. Asked why he would not vote for Romney, Jim Robertson, who runs an anti-Mormon ministry in Arizona, puts evangelical fears in stark terms. "The Mormon goal," he says, "is to take over the world."
that seems to be the goal of every religion. The Mormons seem to want to do it by leading exemplary lives. While I might disagree with them on religious viewpoints, I admire their practicing what they preach concerning family values.