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Do you foresee any significant pressure to change those policies?

One of the problems in the Mormon system right now is that Mormon intellectuals are rarely consulted, it seems to me, in terms of thinking through strategy. Mormons could have the equivalent of the School of World Mission at Fuller Seminary, but they don't. And if they did, the General Authorities probably wouldn't listen to it anyway.

I think very gradually the Mormon church will experience what the Roman Catholic Church has in this century. Eventually it will begin to have non-American apostles. At some point, a hundred years from now, it will have a non-American prophet. The growth of the church, just the huge size of the church, will require more administrative decentralization. And as this happens, inevitably some of these unimportant, tertiary policies will become more flexible.

One thing Mormons have in common with liberal Protestants is the concept of ongoing revelation.

Mormonism is a fascinating mixture of the most rigid imaginable literalism with liberalism, depending on the topic you're looking at. The best example of Mormon literalism is the belief that God the Father inhabits a body of flesh and bones, just like you and I do. The reason for that is scriptural—;doesn't it say in Genesis that God walked in the Garden?—;as well as the direct revelations to Joseph Smith that are in Doctrine and Covenants.

Like evangelicals, Mormons believe in the biblical miracles. They believe in the supernatural. They believe in their own version of heaven and hell, which is different from the traditional Christian view.

But yes, there is a definite streak of theological liberalism as it would be understood in a Protestant context. Smith could be seen as the most successful rebel against colonial Calvinism, the highly educated, very precise theological world that controlled religious thought in this country in the early nineteenth century [when Smith founded the LDS church]. An upper-class rebellion occurred at the Harvard University Divinity School, and we think of it as Unitarianism. Smith represents a populist rebellion—;a modestly educated farm hand who posits a direct revelation of God, overthrows original sin, presents not only an optimistic view of the human estate but the belief that men can become gods in the afterlife. And, more radical yet, that God the Father is an exalted man who is made of the same stuff we are and was once what we are now, and so we can aspire to becoming like him eventually.

What surprised you as you prepared this book?

I think the basic things that might strike people as surprising were not surprising to me, because I had observed the LDS phenomenon for so many years. But I was not aware of many details of Mormon theology and the type of discussions that have occurred theologically.

For example, the belief that Jesus did not die on the cross for our sins, which is pretty basic to everything else in Christendom. In Mormonism, the atoning work of Christ occurred in the Garden of Gethsemane. It's another example of where they are liberal Protestants. In other words, it's the humanity, the pathos, the self-giving of the Savior, rather than his death on the cross, which offers salvation.

Another example is the extraordinary interest in C.S. Lewis among Mormons, and the belief that Lewis is almost a crypto-Mormon. In fact, Lewis, in an offhand remark recorded in one of his books, believed that Joseph Smith was the author of the Book of Mormon, not ancient Israelites. He was aware of the LDS claims and totally rejected them. And yet his books are prominently featured in [LDS-owned] Deseret Bookstores, and he is widely quoted from tried-and-true defenders of Mormon orthodoxy. It just shows the extraordinary acceptability and the usefulness of C.S. Lewis, because of course most of what he says is perfectly acceptable to Mormons.

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February 7 2000, Vol. 44, No. 2