Opiate of the masses, I thought. But I didn’t say it out loud.
“So I just kept going west with the Kimballs, and they kept talking to me about what they believed. When we reached Provo, I looked around a little bit and then I got a job for a while, at a bookstore. And eventually I rented an apartment, and that became my life for the next year. All very normal. No cult indoctrination, just a lot of reading and conversation. And the next fall I formally transferred to Brigham Young, and I was majoring in art history and making friends. I even started dating a cousin of the Kimballs I met at one of their firesides, though, to be honest, I think she was even more interested in leaving the church than I was in joining it. And I was talking to missionaries all this time, and the Kimballs introduced me to their bishop and he was just this wonderful guy. Everyone was very respectful of my Jewishness, and about Dad. And I did keep moving toward it—I mean, baptism and confirmation. I think I wanted it, some part of me, just never all of me. I think I told myself, you don’t have to rush this.”
“Just out of interest, where did Mom think you were all this time?”
“Ithaca, at first. There wasn’t a lot of communication going on, like I said. Also, by then we all had cell phones. Flip phones, not smartphones, but you could text on them. So she’d check in with me. Are you ok? And I’d text back, I’m ok. That was the extent of it for a while. Then I called in November or December and told her I’d taken a leave from Cornell, and she wanted to come rushing out to Utah to rescue me, probably with a deprogrammer or something, but I promised her I was fine, because I actually was fine. I went home on the anniversary for the next couple of years. Well, anniversary and our birthday. Very much an ordeal. But I wouldn’t stay. It was painful seeing any of them. Any of you.”
Lewyn had zipped up his jacket, to the chin, and now sat with his hands in his jeans pockets. It was starting to get cold and starting to get dark.
“Should we go?” he asked.
“Just tell me the rest, okay?”
“What rest? I came home. Obviously.”
“Come on, Lewyn. Something must have happened. Unless … you didn’t actually get baptized, did you?”
He shrugged. “Not quite. I did write an undergraduate thesis on four Mormon artists. I think that’s actually what ended it for me.”
“Mormon art? Made you not want to be a Mormon?”
He seemed to consider. “Actually, I would say yes. That was a big part of why. I’d always been curious about what divides ‘fine’ art from ‘commercial’ art. I think a lot of people are. Especially with an image that explores some aspect of religious faith, there’s an element of conveying or, to be crude, ‘selling’ the idea of a specific belief, presumably the artist’s own specific belief. But we’d put an Old Master annunciation in a very different category than a depiction of Joseph Smith visited by angels, painted in the 1960s. That might actually have been my topic if I’d stayed for my PhD, but it didn’t come to that. At BYU I got interested in these four artists. Friberg, Anderson, Lovell, and Riley. Between them they created the visual iconography of the modern LDS church. Their paintings illustrate the scriptures; they’re in every Mormon home, they’re on the walls of every visitors’ center at every Mormon site. I saw them for the first time in Palmyra, and then I saw them virtually every day for the next four years. They’re undeniably powerful, but when I started to study the work, and the artists, I learned that only one of the four was actually a member of the church. The other three were professional illustrators, for magazines and advertising, and the covers for pulp novels. When the companies they’d been working for started to replace illustrations with photographs, their work dried up and they all needed money, so one of them accepted a commission from the church, and then they kept handing the job off to one another when they could afford to stop doing it. But it was never even personal for any of those three, let alone spiritual. In fact, they were so uncomfortable with it that I started to think of the images as a form of dishonesty. And then it all began to feel dishonest.”