Joseph Smith Jr. was a teenager in Palmyra, N.Y., when he began having visions, first of God and Jes

RELIGION Mormon Road Trip! My weekend with a group of Madison believers Seth Jovaag on Thursday 09/20/2012 A statue of Mormon founder Joseph budget rental cars 63301 Smith and his brother, Hyrum, in Nauvoo, Ill., where Mormons settled after being chased out of Missouri. For more photos, click gallery, above. Credit:Seth Jovaag
We're standing in the parking lot of Madison's "university ward" of the Church budget rental cars 63301 of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Nearby, two passenger vans are gased up and ready to take two-dozen young area Mormons five hours south to Nauvoo, Ill., a small town on the Mississippi River that is something of a mecca for Mormons.
He's right. I am here to meet Mormons, a group that's in the spotlight this year as one of its own, Mitt Romney, makes a bid for the White House. But what Dan means as a joke touches a nerve: I already feel a bit like a party-crasher, infringing on a trip to a sacred place that has no significance to me.
I was invited here by the trip's leader, Reg Christensen, a 60-year-old Utah native who moved to Madison 14 years ago. A father of seven and grandfather of 10, Reg has an avuncular manner that befits a guy who teaches scripture to young adults at the 1711 University Ave. ward. He's led this trip for a dozen years now, paying for it with money the ward collects selling parking spots to Badgers fans at nearby Camp Randall each fall.
A half-hour later, I'm chatting with Reg in the front seat as we cruise Highway 18/151 past Epic Systems in Verona. Through the windshield, Reg and I count nine cranes hovering over the perpetual construction site that is Dane County's largest employer.
Epic, Reg and others budget rental cars 63301 tell me, has fueled the small but steady growth of Madison's Mormon population. The company recruits heavily at Brigham budget rental cars 63301 Young University, the church-sponsored school in Provo, Utah. Several budget rental cars 63301 employees are on this trip, and they estimate 80 to 100 of Epic's 6,000 workers are BYU alumni. budget rental cars 63301 (An Epic spokesperson said the company budget rental cars 63301 recruits at dozens of colleges and but doesn't release school-by-school totals "to respect our employees' privacy.")
The church divides into geographical "stakes," and Madison's, budget rental cars 63301 which stretches from Prairie du Chien to Beaver Dam and Portage to Janesville, is one of six in Wisconsin. It has 3,714 members — men, women and children — up 8.5% from five years ago.
Within Madison, there are five "wards" with more than 1,700 members. The fastest-growing fourth ward meets in a decade-old church budget rental cars 63301 on Bear Claw Way on Madison's far west side, where membership is up 56% since 2007, further evidence of the "Epic effect."
Still, Mormons are a small minority budget rental cars 63301 in Madison. And this group I'm traveling with is unique, too. Other than Reg, me, Dan and his wife, Eleanor, everyone is single. In fact, the university ward is also dubbed the "singles ward," open to members ages 18 to 30. It's jokingly called a meat market by one member, as the goal is to help young Mormons meet and — if all goes well — marry and have children.
Dan moved here four years ago to enter the doctoral program in chemical engineering at the University budget rental cars 63301 of Wisconsin. The couple met as students at Brigham Young, rekindled their relationship years later and got married last October. They're expecting their first child in November.
By his own admission, Dan is a sort of prototypical Mormon, from a big family. He spent his high school years getting up at dawn each weekday to study the keystone scriptures — the Bible, the Book of Mormon and the Doctrines and Covenants — in "seminary," a sort of Sunday school on steroids.
At BYU he was a competitive budget rental cars 63301 cross-country budget rental cars 63301 runner, able to gallop five miles at a five-minute pace. His college years included the familiar Mormon detour, a two-year mission that took him to Santiago, Chile. Mormon men are strongly encouraged to go on missions after age 19; for women over 21, an 18-month stint is voluntary.
On the trip, I meet several Mormons like Dan. Big families, Utah connections and missionary tales of spending 10 hours a day proselytizing to strangers in a foreign tongue were common. The church's prohibitions on booze, drugs, premarital sex and hot caffeinated budget rental cars 63301 beverages are part of their DNA.
A decade-long resident of Madison, Kyle, 29 , is a short guy with expressive hands who tells his life story in a pleasantly self-effacing way. He grew up Amish, on his family's horse breeding farm in northern Minnesota. His home lacked running water and electricity until he was 13. They made their own clothes.
The coming years for Kyle could be fodder for a book. He rambled for a while but eventually earned a master's degree in dance from a small fine arts academy. He met a guy and moved to Madison in 2002. They got "married," he says in air quotes. The relationship dissolved several years later, but Kyle stayed in town. He worked various jobs, most recently as a consultant helping nonprofits streamline their organizations.
On a lark, Kyle was researching his family tree on the Internet and kept noticing pop-up ads for the LDS church — no surprise, considering it operates the largest genealogical organization in the world.
Kyle was skeptical. While he believed in God and the divinity of Jesus, he figured organized religion wasn't for him. And then there was Mormonism itself, founded, Kyle jests, "by some white boy who dug up some gold plates."
Joseph Smith Jr. was a teenager in Palmyra, N.Y., when he began having visions, first of God and Jesus, and later of the angel Moroni. The story goes that Moroni guided Smith to a hillside, budget rental cars 63301 where he dug up a book of golden plates inscribed budget rental cars 63301 in ancient Egyptian. Using a "seer stone" and a top hat, Smith translated the plates into the Book of Mormon. In 1830, at age 29, he printed off 5,000 copies, and a religion that now has 14 million adherents worldwide — 6 million in the United States — was born.
The book itself, famously slammed as "chloroform in print" by Mark Twain, tells of an ancient tribe of Israelites that sailed to North America centuries before the birth of Christ. It outlines wars between budget rental cars 63301 two races, and at one point, the resurrected Jesus pops over to keep the peace. A few hundred years later, however, the heroic Nephites are slaughtered; the last survivor was Moroni, son of the army commander, prophet and historian, Mormon, for whom the religion is named. Moroni recorded the history on the golden plates and, 14 centuries later, led Smith to them.
Many historians deride Smith as a con artist who fabricated the book to create a movement that capitalized on the religious fervor of his time. But to Mormons, he was a prophet who restored the Christian gospel.
Kyle and other converts I spoke to struggled to verbalize why Mormonism resonates with them. One likes the day-to-day commitments it requires of the faithful. Another was drawn to its promise that families will be together eternally.
Kyle was baptized last July. It's no small commitment: The church prohibits sex before marriage, yet forbids gay marriage, so Kyle's facing a lifetime of chastity. Church leaders have even called budget rental cars 63301 same-gender attraction an "affliction."
"That part sucks," Kyle says frankly. Since he joined the church, however, the only alienation he's felt has come from gay friends in Madison. At another Madison church he'd tried earlier, he says he was treated like a pariah. On the contrary, his LDS friends have become family.
And, he adds, there's a sliver of hope. Mormons believe God offers "continuing revelation" through prophets. Maybe, Kyle says, the leaders in Salt Lake City will someday be moved to change doctrine regarding gays.
Kyle tells me his story as we're sitting on a bench , watching the sun set in Nauvoo. In a nearby field, a couple hundred kids and parents are playing 19th-century pioneer games like stilt-walking, budget rental cars 63301 tug of war and the hoop roll.
A tiny tourist town of 1,150 souls that attracts 250,000 budget rental cars 63301 visitors annually, Nauvoo is dotted with shops and statues, wagon tours and blacksmithing demonstrations, budget rental cars 63301 almost all of it geared to tell a romanticized story of Smith and the early church budget rental cars 63301 members. Over two days, I see Smith's grave, his home and the Trail of Hope where Mormon pioneers began their exodus to Deseret, or modern-day Utah. There are musicals, square dances and, for the grand finale, a pageant at nightfall that everyone says will knock my socks off.
Nauvoo's significance to Mormons is huge. Early adherents, led by Smith, settled here in 1839 after being chased from Missouri by a government-issued "extermination" order, the only one of its kind in U.S. history. Over the next few years, the city's population swelled to 12,000, rivaling Chicago. But by the mid-1840s, Smith was dead, shot in a jail cell by a mob in nearby Carthage, and the "Saints," led by Brigham Young, were again on the run.
On our second budget rental cars 63301 day, many in the Madison contingent budget rental cars 63301 take part in an "endowment" and the "baptism of the dead." The former is a secretive ritual — though Reg tells me I can read about it on the Internet (I did). For the latter, members dressed in white jumpsuits are dunked into baptismal fonts so as to offer someone's deceased ancestor, by proxy, a shot at eternal life.
Kyle estimates that on this trip, the Madison group baptized 150 people in this manner. Doing so is considered a duty, and for Madison Mormons, getting to a temple regularly — even though the closest one is in Chicago — is encouraged.
It's comfortable, she says, to be with people budget rental cars 63301 "who share your standards and beliefs." As one of a handful of Mormons budget rental cars 63301 in high school, she says her peers were mostly respectful and "just curious" about her faith, though she had to field occasional questions budget rental cars 63301 like "How many moms do you have?" (Polygamy, though practiced by early Mormons, was outlawed by the church budget rental cars 63301 122 years ago.) Those questions don't pop up in Nauvoo.
Almost invariably, these Mormons say yes. I broach the topic with four women, ages 22 to 30. Three are Mormon-born Brigham Young grads and new to Madison — two work for Epic, the third