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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints expands its membership ceaselessly through missionary programs all over the planet. The worldwide Mormon population of 11 million reflects a 900% increase since 1945. Slightly less than half reside in the United States. They dominate politics and culture throughout Utah, and wield considerable power in Idaho and other Western states.

Assets in excess of $30 billion and an annual income of $6 billion, including $5.3 billion in members' tithes, would place the LDS church in the upper middle range of Fortune 500 companies-- larger than Johnson and Johnson or Prudential. The church presides over vast agricultural and real estate holdings. Income is generated by church-related business ventures such as Beneficial Life Insurance, and through a large portfolio of interest-yielding investments. Mormon business interests are staunchly anti-environmental, maintaining that conservation is an absurdity in the face of the millennial Last Days.

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The LDS church is headed by a President (currently Gordon B. Hinckley) and two advisors who comprise the First Presidency, and Twelve Apostles. All are held to be divinely mandated interpreters of God's will. The sect was founded by Joseph Smith in Palmyra, New York, in the 1820s.

According to Smith, both God and Jesus Christ appeared to him when he was 14, and charged him with founding the true Christian church. Later, the angel Moroni revealed to him a set of golden plates on which the Book of Mormon was inscribed. With the aid of two magic stones, Urim and Thummim, Smith translated the Book of Mormon into English.

The Book of Mormon, which Mark Twain described as "chloroform in print," was first published in 1830. It tells the story of the followers of Lehi, a tribe of Israelites who in about 2200 B.C. purportedly emigrated to North America, where they founded a doomed civilization-- and received a post-Resurrection visit from Jesus Christ. (Native Americans are said to descend from Lamanites, a surviving degenerate branch of the original tribe.) The text describes the exertions of stick figures with names like Zeezrom, Teancum, Orihah, Corihor, Tubaloth, and Gidgiddoni. Its 500-plus pages, written in a nutty-fruity pseudo-Jacobean prose bedecked with repetitions of "And it came to pass," read like a Monty Python version of the Old Testament.

After Smith was assassinated in Carthage, Illinois, in 1844, members of the increasingly unpopular sect fled across the Great Plains under the leadership of Brigham Young, and founded Salt Lake City in what is now Utah. The settlement grew and prospered. In 1896, once the church had outlawed polygamous practices instituted by Young, Utah was admitted as the nation's 45th state. Mormon culture has intermittently clashed with Federal law over such doctrinal matters as the now-discarded belief in the inferiority of people of color.

By mainstream Christian standards, many LDS traditions are eccentric. Both sexes wear one-piece undergarments resembling abbreviated union suits. Temple rites are closed to non-Mormons. Borrowed largely from Free Masonry, they involve costumes, skits, and secret handshakes. The Mormon penchant for secrecy has long attracted recruiters from the FBI and the CIA.

Much Mormon ritual concerns itself with posthumous induction of members' non-Mormon ancestors into the church. With active church members standing in as proxies, the dead are baptized, married, and ushered through endowment rites providing membership credentials. Mormons are preoccupied with genealogy, tirelessly seeking forebears to add to the fold.

The church is resolutely patriarchal. While it has banned plural marriage, vestiges remain of a polygamous heritage; low-profile polygamous households still exist. Whatever their marital arrangements, women are expected to be obedient wives and dedicated mothers. In the 1970s, Mormon leadership helped defeat the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) proposed to secure constitutional status for women's equality.

The purpose of marriage, as LDS Prophet Harold B. Lee explains it, is to provide a bridge to the physical world, "over which God's spirit children might come into mortal bodies," a stage in their passage to a higher spiritual plane. Reproduction is virtually a requirement. A 1982 directive specified that Mormons who indulged in such "unnatural, impure or unholy" non-procreative conduct as oral sex during marital relations were to be excluded from worship.

Its non-procreative character makes masturbation a serious sin. Apostle Mark E. Petersen's pamphlet "A Guide to Self-Control: Overcoming Masturbation," widely circulated from the 1960s into the '80s, urges young men to touch "intimate parts of the body" only during "normal toilet practices," to wear restrictive clothing, to shun spicy foods, to avoid solitude, never to read "pornographic material," and to pray for deliverance from self-abuse without actively thinking about it. "If the temptation seems overpowering while you are in bed," the tract suggests, "GET OUT OF BED AND GO INTO THE KITCHEN AND FIX YOURSELF A SNACK." If all else fails, Petersen advises a nightly regimen of tying the offending hand to the bed frame. (See Mormon Masturbation Prevention.)

Gay sex is anathema. In the 1970s, Brigham Young University, Paula Houston's alma mater, developed a repertoire of electroshock techniques aimed at straightening out gay Mormon men. In America's Saints (1984), Robert Gottlieb and Peter Wiley relate that at the same time, the church "stepped up surveillance and spying, particularly at BYU.... Surveillance of gay bars in Salt Lake City was commonplace, and lists were drawn up that identified 'persons involved in lewd behavior.' At the peak of the campaign against gays, the BYU security force was granted statewide power by the Mormon-dominated legislature...." Collaborating with the Utah Highway Patrol, BYU agents began participating in raids on public bathrooms and roadside rest stops.

In 1978, Apostle Boyd K. Packer delivered an address that retains the force of doctrine, in which he called homosexuality "a condition that draws both men and women into one of the ugliest and most debased of all physical performances." The pervasiveness of Packer's attitude was reflected in the Salt Lake School District's willingness to ban all extracurricular clubs in local high schools rather than accept the presence of a Gay/Straight Alliance chapter. (The ban ended last October after a long struggle in and out of court.) Utah was the first state to pass an anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

Affirmation, the support organization for lesbian and gay Mormons, is not recognized by church authorities. A thriving gay community is gaining visibility in Salt Lake City, but for LDS members, uncloseted homosexuality spells excommunication.