It used to take at least three centuries--remember the Christians and the lions?--for a "cult" to be transformed into a respectable mainstream religion. America has shortened the time it takes for religious dissidents to go from running for their lives to possessing immense religious and financial clout.

And why not? The beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the institution's official title, are no more--and no less--irrational than the beliefs of any other religion. They simply have more recent origins. The church's founder, Joseph Smith, claimed that the Book of Mormon, the religion's sacred text, was delivered to him in upstate New York by the angel Moroni, who completed the job in 1827.

Early 19th-century Americans were quite outraged at the thought that a new sacred book might supplant the Bible, and they proceeded to persecute the Mormons all the way to Utah. New claims of religious revelation always enrage believers in older faiths, because such claims raise questions about the unprovable supernatural events that surround the origins of all religions.

Why is it any less reasonable to believe that the angel Moroni appeared with some golden tablets in New York State in the 19th century than it is to believe that God handed down stone tablets with the Ten Commandments from the heights of Mt. Sinai thousands of years ago? We tend to doubt the sanity of people who claim to have seen God or his messengers yesterday, whereas we revere beliefs based on claims that other people saw and spoke to God many millennia ago. Time sanctifies everything.

There were two main reasons why Mormons were singled out for persecution in the last
century--their practice of polygamy and the annoying fact that everywhere they settled, they proved to be better farmers and businessmen than the locals and were perceived as unfair economic competitors.

The economic issue disappeared when the Mormons settled in Utah, where there weren't too many settlers to displace and the Mormons could proceed to persecute others. (Thus sayeth the Lord.) And after the Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857, when the Mormons murdered 120 non-Mormons traveling through the area in a wagon train, not too many outsiders had much interest in social and economic intercourse with the latter-day sinners. Non-Mormons making the trek westward headed straight for Hollywood, and what is now the state of Utah became a virtual theocracy.

As the price of admission to the Union in 1896, the church officially renounced its belief in polygamy. The issue continues to resurface embarrassingly among rogue fundamentalist Mormon groups, who not only continue to practice polygamy but also force girls as young as 13 into holy matrimony.The official Mormon church now denounces such groups, and polygamy, in unambiguous terms.

If there was ever any doubt that Mormons are entering the mainstream, it was erased this week by a reverential two-part television show, "The Mormons," on PBS. A few critics were interviewed, including some who have been excommunicated, but the general tone of the show was that Mormons today are pretty much like the rest of religious America.

And so they are. One reason why Mormons have entered the mainstream is that their religious beliefs on cultural issues are almost identical to those of the Protestant Christian Right. Mormons are part of the right-wing religious coalition that strongly opposes abortion rights and gay marriage.

Within the church, women are second-class saints. Women cannot be "priesthood holders," and childbearing, as well as proffering sage advice to husbands, is seen as the primary role of the Mormon wife. Women who have spoken out against their church's restrictive concept of the female role have been excommunicated.

There are many Internet blogs for Mormon women struggling with their second-class status within their religion (and within their marriages), and some of the commentary is heartrending. It made me literally sick to my stomach to read a comment by a married woman who already has six children and feels extremely guilty because her husband wants a seventh child and she doesn't. Her faith tells her she is obliged to accede to his wishes, but she is suffering from clinical depression and is exhausted as a result of caring for the six children she already has.

In a 1998 interview with Larry King, the church's 96-year-old president, Gordon B. Hinckley, noted that his church's position barring women priests was virtually identical to that of the Roman Catholic Church. He said "it would take another revelation" to change matters. Given Hinckley's advanced age, the angel Moroni had better make haste if any new divine revelations are in the offing. (It took the angel several years to complete the delivery of the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith back in the 1820s.)

Of course, many individual Mormons are much less rigid in their private beliefs than the official position of their church would indicate. Mitt Romney only became anti-choice after he started running for the Republican nomination for the presidency.

I would not vote for any devout Mormon for president, for the same reason that I would not vote for a fundamentalist Baptist or a right-wing Roman Catholic.The religious Right, of which the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints is a part, wants to write its views into law and impose them on other Americans.

President Bush has already succeeded in changing the balance of the Supreme Court by appointing two far-right Catholics to the bench. A Mormon president, given the highly conservative tenets of the Mormon church, could be expected to follow a similar course and appoint even more religious conservatives to public office. We have already had more than enough of faith-based government during the past eight years.

But make no mistake about it: there is nothing "un-American" about Mormonism. It is, in fact, a great American success story. From a ragtag group of religious dissenters being chased across the country, the Mormons have evolved into one of the wealthiest religious institutions in the world. Mormons are also aggressive proselytizers, with missionary operations on every continent. Mormon missionaries are in heated competition with Jehovah's Witnesses to hector local populaces out of their ancient religious customs, which of course antedate the miraculous appearance of Moroni and are therefore inferior.

The only unusual thing about Mormonism is that its origins are recent enough to lay bare the child-like faith in miracles and revealed truth that forms the emotional rationale for the founding of every new religion in every era of history.