Program Particulars
*Times indicated refer to web version of audio

(02:02–04:06) Music Element
"The Multiples of One"
from Awakening,
performed by Joseph Curiale

(02:10) Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon
Joseph Smith (1805-1844) founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when he published The Book of Mormon in 1830 in Palmyra, New York. According to Smith's account, an angel named Moroni had led him to a set of golden plates buried near his father's house. Moroni also gave him two "seeing" stones, which Smith used to translate the text engraved on the golden plates.

Members of the LDS Church consider the Book of Mormon to be a "holy scripture comparable to the Bible." It tells the 1000-year story of a group of Israelites who were led from Jerusalem to North America around 600 BC, where they fought wars, received revelations, and were visited by Jesus Christ after his resurrection. The introduction to the Mormon scripture goes into further detail about how the book came into being:

The book was written by many ancient prophets by the spirit of prophecy and revelation. Their words, written on gold plates, were quoted and abridged by a prophet-historian named Mormon. The record gives an account of two great civilizations. One came from Jerusalem in 600 B.C., and afterward separated into two nations, known as the Nephites and the Lamanites. The other came much earlier when the Lord confounded the tongues at the Tower of Babel. This group is known as the Jaredites. After thousands of years, all were destroyed except the Lamanites, and they are the principal ancestors of the American Indians.

The crowning event recorded in the Book of Mormon is the personal ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ among the Nephites soon after his resurrection. It puts forth the doctrines of the gospel, outlines the plan of salvation, and tells men what they must do to gain peace in this life and eternal salvation in the life to come.

Smith, considered a modern-day prophet, launched an ambitious missionary effort that attracted thousands of converts in the next several years. The story of Smith and his followers' journey West is an arduous tale of forced migrations. Their sheer numbers made them a political threat wherever they went. When Joseph Smith advocated taking up arms to defend his community, the governor of Missouri announced that Mormons should be driven from the state or exterminated. Smith and his followers fled to an abandoned town in Illinois and renamed it Nauvoo. The town grew rapidly with an influx of Mormon converts and began to rival Chicago in population. Smith served as mayor of the town, and in 1844 he ran for president of the United States.

Settlers in the surrounding county grew increasingly hostile to the Mormons in Nauvoo, and a few of Joseph Smith's church leaders began to turn against him when he started to advocate the practice of polygamy. William Law, a local businessman, started a newspaper criticizing Smith's new teachings, and Smith had the newspaper shut down. The incident attracted state-wide coverage, and the governor of Illinois ordered Smith to stand trial. He and his brother Hyrum turned themselves in. While in jail awaiting trial, Smith and his brother were murdered by a mob who had burst into the jailhouse without much resistance. Smith was 38 years old.

(02:19) The Second Great Awakening
From 1795 to 1835, a revival movement spread across the United States. Baptist and Methodist ministers began preaching in pioneer camp meetings, producing a huge increase in church membership. Many new religions sprouted up, especially in the area of upstate New York where Joseph Smith lived, which became known as "the burned-over district" because of the way religious enthusiasms swept through like wildfire. Among these religious groups were the Shakers, a celibate sect of Quakers; the Perfectionist Oneida Community, who celebrated free-love; the followers of Jemima Wilkinson, who believed she was the reincarnated Jesus Christ; the followers of Charles Miller, who believed that the world would end in 1843; and the Spiritualist Movement, which started when two girls in Rochester announced that they could communicate with the dead through séances. Early leaders of the abolitionist movement, the feminist movement, and the temperance movement also came from the same part of New York.

(02:52) A Number of Sacred Texts
Mormons consider the traditional Bible to be a sacred text, but they also include among their canon the Book of Mormon and two collections of Joseph Smith's revelations: The Doctrine and Covenants, and The Pearl of Great Price.

(04:58) Monday Family Home Evening
Family home evenings are a Mormon tradition, started in 1915 by the president of the LDS Church, Joseph F. Smith, as a weekly family get together "devoted to prayer, singing hymns, songs, instrumental music, scripture-reading, family topics and specific instruction on the principles of the gospel, and on the ethical problems of life…. Formality and stiffness should be studiously avoided, and all the family should participate in the exercises." In 1970, the LDS Church officially designated Monday night as the time for family home evenings and offers an instructional guide to conducting family home evenings.

(05:29) Different Names for God
In the early books of the Hebrew Bible, God is referred to as Elohim, which is the plural form of the Hebrew word for "majesty" or "god". In the Hebrew Bible it is usually used grammatically in the singular as the name for the single Hebrew god. Later, in the Book of Exodus, Moses learns that God's personal name is Yahweh or Jehovah. Some scholars believe that the books of the Hebrew Bible that refer to God as Elohim are traceable to the northern kingdom of Israel, while the books that refer to God as Yahweh or Jehovah are traceable to Judea. Mormons believe that the two names refer to two distinct beings — Elohim is the name for God the Father and that Yahweh or Jehovah is the name for Jesus the creator.

In his book The Mormon Faith, Robert Millet writes:

"Though Latter-day Saints generally refer to the Almighty as ‘God' or ‘the Lord' or ‘our Heavenly Father' or ‘Father in heaven' or simply ‘the Father,' they also use the name-title Elohim, the Hebrew word used as a generic name of God…. Latter-day Saints believe that Jesus the Christ is the same being as Jehovah (Yahweh), the God of the ancients, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; that under the direction of the Father he created the worlds… that as an act of mercy and grace, an act of supreme condescension, Jehovah came to earth and took a body of flesh and bones and became Jesus of Nazareth."

(05:55) A Corporeal Being
Joseph Smith taught that God is not a mysterious unknowable being, but that God has a body of flesh and bone, and that God was in fact once a man. Smith wrote,

"God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! That is the great secret. If the veil were rent today, and the great God who holds this world in its orbit, and who upholds all worlds and all things by His power, was to make himself visible, – I say, if you were to see him today, you would see him like a man in form-like yourselves in all the person, image, and very form as a man…. It is the first principle of the gospel to know for a certainty the character of God, and to know that we may converse with Him as one man converses with another, and that He was once a man like us; yea, that God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ Himself did."

(09:05) Mike Huckabee's Remark
article in The New York Times Magazine profield Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and asked him whether he believed Mormonism was a cult or a religion. He responed, "I think it's a religion, I really don't know much about it." But then he added, "Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?"

(10:00–10:59) Music Element
"Good Is It to Thank Jehovah"
from Songs of Faith,
performed by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir

(12:41) The Doctrine of Pre-Existence
Krista quotes from The Origin of Man" published by the LDS Church's First Presidency in 1909. "The doctrine of pre-existence — revealed so plainly, particularly in the latter days, pours a wonderful flood of light upon the otherwise mysterious problem of man's origin. It shows that man, as a spirit, was begotten and born of heavenly parents, and reared to maturity in the eternal mansions of the father, prior to coming upon the earth in a temporal body to undergo an experience in mortality. It teaches that all men existed in the spirit before any man existed in the flesh."

In his book The Mormon Faith, Robert Millet argues that other religious thinkers, as well as non-Mormon writers and poets, have alluded to the idea of a previous existence. He quotes William Wordsworth's poem "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood":

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

(18:30–19:53) Music Element
"The Book"
from The Sad Machinery of Spring,
performed by Tin Hat

(22:01) The Doctrine of Salvation of the Dead
Robert Millet refers to a revelation Joseph Smith reported just after the construction of the first Mormon temple in Kirtland, Ohio, in 1836. Joseph Smith's experience is recorded in Section 137 of Doctrine and Covenants:

I saw Father Adam and Abraham; and my father and my mother; my brother Alvin, that has long since slept; And marveled how it was that he had obtained an inheritance in that kingdom, seeing that he had departed this life before the Lord had set his hand to gather Israel the second time, and had not been baptized for the remission of sins. Thus came the voice of the Lord unto me, saying: All who have died without a knowledge of this gospel, who would have received it if they had been permitted to tarry, shall be heirs of the celestial kingdom of God; Also all that shall die henceforth without a knowledge of it, who would have received it with all their hearts, shall be heirs of that kingdom; For I, the Lord, will judge all men according to their works, according to the desire of their hearts.

(24:14) Mormon Temple in East Germany
Construction of the Freiberg Germany Temple began on April 23, 1983, at a time when it was still the policy of the Communist German Democratic Republic to restrict the influence of churches on public life. A small community of Mormons had lived in Germany since the 1850s, but after World War II, Mormons in East Germany became the targets of surveillance by the Stasi, the East German secret police. The Stasi investigated all aspects of society, but they were especially suspicious of Mormons because their religion had originated in the United States and the leaders of the LDS Church in the U.S. were known to be anti-Communist.

But the Stasi could find no evidence that any members of the Mormon church were involved in radical politics. In the 1970s, Mormons in East Germany began to flood the government with requests for visas to visit the Mormon temple in Switzerland. The German Democratic Republic later granted Mormons the right to build their own temple inside the country. Some East German government officials also believed that a good relationship with the Mormon church might provide new political connections to the United States and improve relations with the West.

The temple was completed in 1985. It was the smallest temple the LDS church had ever built, and it was located in the city of Freiberg, with a population of 40,000 people. In keeping with Mormon tradition, the temple was open to visitors for two weeks, and an estimated 90,000 people came to see it. The familiar gold statuette of Moroni was not allowed to be erected when the temple was originally built, but was later added after the Communist government collapsed.

(26:39–27:44) Music Element
"I Love to See the Temple"
from The Sad Machinery of Spring,
by Janice Kapp Perry

(27:39–30:16) Music Element
"Blind Paper Dragon"
from The Sad Machinery of Spring,
performed by Tin Hat

(30:50) The Church's History with Race
The Washington Post published an in-depth article about the LDS Church's troubled history with race, and its attempts to improve relations with African Americans.

(31:00) Current DNA Evidence
According to the Book of Mormon, all Native Americans are descended from Israelites who migrated to the United States in 600 BC. Simon Southerton, an Australian molecular biologist and former member of the LDS Church, examined the DNA of Native Americans from North, Central, and South America to determine if there was any link to peoples of the Middle East. He found that the DNA of Native Americans shows Asian ancestry, but no trace of Middle-Eastern heritage. He published his findings in his book Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church, in 2004. The following year he was ex-communicated from the church on charges of adultery.

In response to the DNA findings, some Mormon scholars have argued that perhaps the Israelites in North America were a relatively small group, surrounded by groups that had migrated from Asia, and so their traces of DNA would be much more difficult to find. But this teaching has not been formally endorsed by the leaders of the church.

(31:20) Pew Research Poll
Krista refers to a December 2007 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. When asked to describe their impression of Mormons in one word, 27 percent of respondents used a negative word, and the most common negative word used was "polygamy." Fifty-one percent of respondents also said they knew very little or nothing about Mormon religion, and 62 percent said they believed the Mormon religion was very different from their own religion.

(31:28–32:31) Music Element
"Oasis"
from Moondog (The Viking of Sixth Avenue),
performed by Moondog

(31:42) Tradition of Missionary Service
The LDS Church announced in 2007 that it had sent out its one-millionth missionary. The Church currently operates more than 350 missions in 162 nations, with more than 53,000 missionaries serving at any one time. About one-third of missionaries come from nations outside the United States. Single women can become Mormon missionaries when they turn 21, and they make up 13 percent of the global effort. Retired couples constitute about 7 percent, but the vast majority are single men from the ages of 19 to 25, making up 80 percent of all missionaries from the LDS Church.

(39:59–40:39) Music Element
"Merlin - II. Time's Way"
from The Modern Marimba: New Works for an Ancient Instrument,
performed by William Moersch

(41:00) The Book of Abraham
In 1935, Joseph Smith was living in Kirtland, Ohio when he bought a collection of Egyptian mummies from a man named Michael Chandler, along with some scrolls of papyrus covered with hieroglyphs. Smith gave the mummies to his mother, and began working on a translation of the papyri, which he said were fragments of an unfinished autobiography of Abraham, the Old Testament Patriarch. He published The Book of Abraham in 1842. It is now part of the sacred Mormon text, The Pearl of Great Price.

The Book of Abraham is controversial, because it was the source of the early Mormon teaching that people with black skin had been cursed by God and therefore could not be Mormon priests. Churhc leaders used this as the basis for denying priesthood to black members of the LDS church until 1978. But The Book of Abraham became another source of controversy in 1966 when Aziz S. Atiya, a retired professor of Middle Eastern studies, found the papyrus scrolls that Smith had purchased back in 1835. Atiya showed them to four different Egyptologists, each of whom said that he scrolls were ordinary funeral documents, and had nothing to do with Abraham.

There are at least two different theories among Mormon scholars to explain the discrepancy. Some argue that the papyri that have been found are just a few of the many scrolls that Joseph Smith worked from. Others argue that what Smith published was not a literal translation but a divinely inspired reading.

(47:30–48:08) Music Element
"Hoarse"
from Natura Morta,
performed by Cepia

(49:41–52:45) Music Element
"The Suns Gliding!"
from Around,
performed by Tom Verlaine