c. 1997 Religion News Service

GRANGER, Wyo. _ Since April, Stephen Sorensen _ whose 19th-century western garb, long blond hair, mustache and goatee make him look more like Buffalo Bill than the 38-year-old university professor he is _ has been driving a mule-drawn covered wagon across parts of Nebraska and Wyoming toward Utah’s Valley of the Great Salt Lake.

Covering up to 23 miles a day, Sorensen, his wife and their four children have been retracing the route that his great-great-great-grandfather, Joseph Murdock, traveled in 1847 as a member of the first group of Mormons to enter the valley.

Sorensen is one of about 200 core members of the 1997 Sesquicentennial Mormon Trail Wagon Train, a re-enactment of the journey that brought almost 60,000 Mormons to Utah between 1847 and 1868, when the opening of the railroad ended the need for wagons.

The re-enactment will end in Salt Lake City next Tuesday (July 22) _ 150 years to the day that Mormon leader Brigham Young led a vanguard party of Latter-day Saints into the valley and proclaimed:”This is the place.” Yet as tired, sunburned and grimy as he is after more than three months living outdoors, Sorensen is in no hurry to see his journey come to an end.”I’ll probably mourn the end of this for some time,”said Sorensen, who teaches 19th-century American history at the University of Utah.”An experience like this puts a lot of things into clear perspective, about being a Mormon and just life. I’ll miss it _ even the hardships.” The Mormon Trail re-enactment is a celebration of the Mormon pioneers who settled the intermountain West and a chance for the worldwide 9.7-million member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints _ once vilified as a dangerous sect but now securely within the American mainstream _ to stand in the spotlight and dramatically proclaim its message.

For individual participants, it’s a combination spiritual adventure and religious summer camp, migratory theme park and a living lesson in American history. It’s also a logistical headache for Mormon Trail Wagon Train 150 Years Inc., the non-profit, church-supported company running the re-enactment.

An estimated 10,000 people already have participated in the re-enactment _ many of them non-Mormon Western history buffs and outdoor-adventure types. Many more people are expected to join in as the wagon train nears Salt Lake City, where several days of celebration are planned.

Crossing both public and private land, the wagon train has followed the original Mormon Trail when possible _ on occasion upsetting historical conservationists and environmentalists who say some of the trail’s landmarks and the delicate plains ecology have been harmed by the large number of re-enacters.

But the wagon train also has made do with traveling across farm and ranch lands, local roads and even Interstate Route 80 in places where the actual trail was off-limits.

Most participants have spent just a few hours or a few days riding in a wagon, following on horseback, or simply walking the trail. Most days, the wagon train has numbered about 400 people.”In a lot of ways this is just like another camping trip,”said Leslee Poulton, a French and Russian language professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, who spent five days in early July with the re-enactment as it crossed southwestern Wyoming’s high plains.

But, said Poulton, a Mormon whose ancestors made the trek to Salt Lake City in 1852,”it’s obviously also a great deal more to me because of my roots. I’m here to experience a measure of the faith shown by the Mormon pioneers.” Sorensen and the rest of the core group began its 1,100-mile journey in mid-April, starting out from Florence, Neb., just north of Omaha and once known as Winter Quarters. It was there that the original Mormon party spent the winter of 1846-47 before heading for the Salt Lake valley.

The core group is traveling with some 45 wagons and nine handcarts, replicas of the large carts that Mormons who could not afford a wagon pulled across the plains and mountains to the Salt Lake valley _ their American Zion.

The re-enactment is a meshing of the authentic and the inauthentic. Some wagons sport rubber wheels and springs. Most participants favor Nikes over boots and the latest in high-tech tents and other camping equipment is in evidence each night.

Some re-enacters carry laptop computers and cell phones to send extensive reports of the trek back home _ or simply to stay in touch with friends and relatives.

Osamu Sekiguchi, a Japanese convert to Mormonism traveling the entire length of the trail with his wife and their two young boys, e-mails reports to about 25 schools in Japan and several Japanese newspapers and TV and radio stations.”In Japan, they are not familiar with the (Mormon) pioneers,”said Sekiguchi, a writer.”We sometimes feel like missionaries, because we get many letters back from Japan from people who think what we’re doing is wonderful.” Recreation vehicles, horse trailers, trucks hauling water and portable toilets, and other support and media vehicles round out the wagon train, which stretched for a mile as it pulled out of Granger, a ramshackle town of 150 people with more satellite dishes than paved streets.

Each day the re-enacters are on the move _ the wagon train rests every Sunday _ an American flag flies from the lead wagon and a walker carrying another U.S. flag stays a few steps in front of the first handcart.

The flags are a telling symbol, recalling both the early Mormon conflicts with America’s political and religious establishment, and the degree to which the Mormon church _ with its emphasis on family values _ has since slipped into the American mainstream.

The church traces its roots to Joseph Smith, who in 1822 in Palmyra, N.Y., said the angel Moroni (hence the name Mormons) had told him where God had buried a set of gold tablets recounting Jesus’ ministry in North America among an otherwise unknown, ancient Israelite civilization. Mormon tradition holds that Smith’s translation of the tablets became the Book of Mormon, which Latter-day Saints regard of equal stature to the Bible.

Upstate New York at the time was a hotbed of religious revival, and Smith soon attracted both a following and controversy.

Smith proclaimed his to be the one, true Christian church. He preached the establishment of a political theocracy on American soil and he taught the continued revelation of God’s truth, in opposition to mainstream Christianity’s belief in a closed canon of Scripture. He also called himself a prophet equal in stature to such biblical prophets as Abraham and Moses.”Early Mormonism was not a reformation movement so much as it was a restoration movement,”said Lawrence Young, a professor of sociology at Utah’s Brigham Young University and a leading Mormon scholar.”Smith claimed a new revelation, a source of unique truth far stronger than most sectarian revivals.” Mormons say their faith has been the most persecuted in American history. Historians and religious scholars say Smith’s authoritarian style, the sect’s now-abandoned practice of polygamy and general Mormon disdain for the mainstream Christianity of mid-19th-century America contributed much to the often violent conflicts in which the church became embroiled.”Gathering all their numbers in one locale _ what Mormons refer to as their Zion _ also caused problems because wherever they were, their concentration altered the local political status quo,”said Young, who shares distant ancestry with Brigham Young, who succeeded Smith as head of the church.

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Open conflict between Mormons and local authorities prompted the Latter-day Saints to move from New York to Ohio, and then to Missouri and Illinois. As they moved, their ranks swelled with converts gained by Mormon missionaries sent to northern Europe and Canada.

Nauvoo, a Mormon settlement on the banks of the Mississippi River, became the fastest growing city in Illinois. But continued strife between Mormons and their neighbors led to Smith’s jailing and death at the hands of a mob.

His death prompted Mormons _ most of whom then switched their allegiance to Brigham Young _ to head for the Salt Lake valley, then Mexican territory.

In 1846 they trekked across Iowa _ an event that was commemorated last year with a similar, but smaller wagon train re-enactment. After wintering in eastern Nebraska, the Mormon”vanguard party”led by Brigham Young set out in the spring of 1847 for what is now Utah. Some 6,000 Mormons died along the way.

Today, the church is a prosperous denomination headquartered in Salt Lake City and calls itself”Christian but … neither Catholic nor Protestant.”It is the largest American-spawned religious movement.

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However, the male-led church is no longer just an American phenomenon, thanks to an extensive foreign missionary program. Currently, about 50,000 Mormon missionaries _ mostly young men and retired couples _ work at their own expense for the church around the world.

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In the late 19th century, more than 90 percent of all Mormons lived in Utah. Today, more than half of all church members live outside the United States. Mormon temples _ which are restricted to Mormons in good standing _ can be found in Australia, Brazil, Tahiti, Korea, Sweden, Taiwan and South Africa, among other places.

In the United States, California, Idaho, Arizona, Washington state, Texas, Oregon and Nevada all have sizable Mormon populations _ in addition to Utah, where three of every four residents has Mormon ties.

Mormons achieved political acceptance when they relinquished their dream of a self-governed theocracy based on ancient Israel and instead joined the United States. Today, 16 Mormons sit in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.”Instead of gathering in Zion, the church teaches today that you become Zion wherever you are,”said Lawrence Young.”Nineteenth-century Mormonism was really an Old Testament kind of religion based on being part of a particularistic society. Today, Mormonism is more a New Testament faith.”Mormon identity has shifted from the corporate level to the individual level.” (END SECOND OPTIONAL TRIM)

Religious acceptance has not necessarily followed political acceptance,however. Many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians still regard Mormonism as a non-Christian faith. The Southern Baptist Convention, for example, recently produced a video”warning”Bible-believing Christians not to be”taken in”by Mormon claims to be Christian.

The video notes as unbiblical the Mormon belief in God having a body of flesh and bones and Jesus literally being God’s son, as opposed to a manifestation of God in accordance with the doctrine of the Trinity.”Most mainstream Christians still would be uncomfortable with the notion that their daughter wanted to marry a Mormon, but less uncomfortable with the notion that a nice Mormon just moved in down the street,”said Lawrence Young.

However, being dismissed as non-Christian means little to Mormon Todd Zenger, a 38-year-old Salt Lake City attorney who joined the wagon train with his family for a few days.”Others may have a definitional problem, but I don’t,”Zenger said as he tried to steady himself in a wagon that rocked back and forth as it slowly moved west out of Granger over a rutted, gravel road.”The Savior is the cornerstone of our faith. If that’s not Christian, I don’t know what is.”

MJP END RIFKIN