The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844.

Diocesan and denominational yearbooks and periodicals these years bring little but bad news. Members may believe in God and behave in godly ways, but their efforts do not add up to organizational prosperity. Bishops cut staffs and close churches, and only in the suburbs near the megamalls is there good news about religious institutions.

An exception makes its appearance each year when the Church Almanac of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints thuds through the mail slot and then weighs down the desk. It is loaded with statistics of growth in numbers and donations, burdened with pictures of temples and enhanced by lists of addresses. On page 410 this year there is a record of "Progress during Administrations of the Presidents," beginning with Joseph Smith, during whose presidency 280 members were attracted. This number grew to 8,688,511 by May of last year; 4,734,000 of these are in North America.

While non-Mormons think of these Saints as being segregated in the Great Basin Ghetto surrounding Utah, they are to be found most anywhere and they will keep making more Saints everywhere. It becomes increasingly urgent for the people they call Gentiles to understand them.

Understanding is a task never made easy, thanks to the esotericism of Mormon teachings and life. Was founder Joseph Smith a prophet of God, as the orthodox Saints believe, or a charlatan, as his and their critics often do? Are there other ways to look at him and the restoration movement which he fostered? Jan Shipps's Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (University of Illinois) is the book I have usually handed the curious Now in my other outreached hand will be a pathbreaking volume, The Refiner's Fire by John L. Brooke. He takes more time, uses more pages, delves more deeply, and offers more detail than did Shipps. His book is a model of the historian's enterprise.

Brooke, like Shipps, does not position himself in either the "Smith the Prophet" or "Smith the Charlatan" camp. A non-Mormon and not a Mormon-basher, he has nothing to slake but the thirst born of his own curiosity and nothing at stake except an historian's integrity. Often one wishes he would utter a "Hey! this Smith is really ally nutty!" or a "Move over, Elijah!" kind of signal or clue. Instead he blends the passion of the detective and the dispassion of the good judge as he describes the background and context of Mormonism.

Not many years ago Protestant-Catholic Jewish America was served by (goo enough) historians who tended to tell stories of staid and strait religions, the flow of forces into "mainstreams" and "establishments," the balancing of upsetting spiritual agencies into tried, true, and often dull movements and institutions. The trend these days is to move behind the facades and edifices, to look at slipstreams and sidestreams until one relativizes the mainstream concept, and discovers a different America than the one that had looked familiar.

This America is a place where people in the past smuggled in their gods in plain brown wrappers, kept household idols under the table, believed in everything a little bit and tried almost everything more than a little bit. They believed in the uncanny, the supernatural, the impinging of angelic messengers on their ordinary lives. They improvised new religiosities right under the noses of the orthodox clergy and violated the proprieties of middle-class pieties while going through the motions of being ordinary. In other words, they were like the Americans of 1995.

Brooke's devisers of Mormon cosmology had two sets of raw material at hand as they invented. (Remember: "invent" can mean "find" or "make up.") In a marvel of research and compression he tells the story of medieval and then Reformation-era alchemy, hermeticism, and magic, as Catholics and Protestants alike watched spiritual power flow "between invisible and visible worlds." Via the radical English Reformation sects and innumerable New Englandish underground or parachurch experiments, seekers helped create a spiritual envelope in New York State in the 1820s, the time of the rise of Joseph Smith.

Smith also was surrounded by and often contributed to contemporary efforts to nurture or tap into the flow "between invisible and visible worlds." In Brooke's terms, he lived in the tension or with the paradox of "purity and danger" that came with hermetic traditions. He and his neighbors dug for buried treasure all over New York and thereabouts. They played or worked with seer stones, went divining, and some of them became expert at counterfeiting. In that wondrous environment Smith was visited by divine personages, received golden plates of revelation and seer stones to interpret them, found companies of fellow conspirers ("breathers-together"), founded a church, led it, west, took unto himself wives, and was martyred in Illinois.

By the time his successors, under Brigham Young, took the Latter-day Saints to Utah, the "Mormon cosmology" of the subtitle was quite well developed, though it has always been open to more development. Many of Brooke's pages are devoted to the influence of local Masonic rites on the Mormon founders. That they were thus dependent is a familiar story, but here it is patiently detailed.

Whoever is a part of the Mormon people finds the whole story to be plausible. If "cognitive minorities" prosper, here is evidence of the most prosperous such minority among us. Latter-day Saints see everything religious and cosmological in distinctive ways, unshared by their neighbors - and then plop themselves down inside the moderate and conservative forces of American society where they seem perfectly, perfectly at home: in the best of two worlds. Whoever is an eighth of an inch beyond Mormondom may see this instead as a story of self-delusion, other-delusion, folly, and even chicanery.

To Brooke's credit, he provides good reason for the Saints to take a fresh and critical look at their roots and branches. And he invites Gentiles to understand their neighbors better while they suspend disbelief and look in on people who live "between purity and danger." They may see some elements of self-portraiture in the Saints, who exaggerate some features of American religious life and mirror others.