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In Nauvoo I stopped at the church-run visitors center, up the hill from the restored historic district. The place had changed since I had seen it as a kid. Installed below a towering statue of a decidedly muscular Christ were several video monitors equipped with touch screens. Each screen had a menu of philosophical questions. I selected "What is the purpose of life?" although I was tempted to cut to the chase by touching "Is there life after death?" Instantly a robotic male voice answered, "To see if we will follow the plan of our Heavenly Father, each of us is given two great gifts. One is time, the other freedom of choice... Every day, every hour, every minute of our span of mortal years must sometime be accounted for." The screen showed a high school boy inside his car, a lurid, seductive neon sign reflected in its windshield. The pensive young man looked as though he had suddenly realized he had been wasting precious mortal minutes and had better drive home while there was still time.
I spent another half an hour at the screen, taking advantage of its forthright answers to a veritable maze of cosmic quandaries. As a teenager I had appreciated such certainties; as an adult I was tempted to make fun of them. My secular college professors had insisted that truth is always complicated, relative, but I still felt the tug of religious absolutism. Watching a woman in a wheelchair beside me earnestly punching up answers on her screen, I concluded I was not alone.
I toured what was left of old Nauvoo and learned that Smith had run his growing church from an office above his family's general store. I liked this detail. It brought the man alive for me. Unlike Brigham Young, the stern puritan who succeeded him, Smith was an improviser, a boyish mystic, brimming with charismatic, homegrown visions. In the fields beyond his store, he liked to dress up as a general and drill his personal army, the Nauvoo Legion. In 1844, the year he was murdered, he announced a quixotic candidacy for the U.S. presidency. All in all, it was as if Huck Finn had founded a major religion.
The frontier jail where Smith was killed lies southeast of Nauvoo, in Carthage, Ill. I arrived in the middle of a guided tour: 30 or 40 Mormon teens sat on the floor of a second-story room and listened to a husky, white-haired elder narrate the tragedy of Smith's last hours. The elder, using a walking stick to imitate the rifles of the mob, enacted the death scene with stagey gusto, but when the bloody climax came--Smith's disastrous fall from the building--he grew somber. "I personally think that when Joseph fell out that window, the Savior was right there to catch him." There were tears in his eyes now and more tears on the cheeks of the girl with corn-silk blond hair sitting beside him.