?A Spirit of Persecution?

His pilgrimage paved the way for the Hill Cumorah Pageant, which officially began in 1937. According to the pageant?s spokeswoman, Toi Clawson, the LDS Church always had big ambitions for the pageant. They hoped it would become ?America?s Oberammergau.? For its 50^th anniversary, the church recruited famed science-fiction writer and lifelong Mormon Orson Scott Card to revamp the script, with the hope of making it more accessible to the ?Bible-reading, non-LDS public.? And while the appeal to non-Mormons remains limited, the pageant has become a major stop on a summer-long pilgrimage undertaken by many Mormons who live out west. Ken Adams, a retiree from St. George, Utah, told me that he and the tour group he was traveling with from Utah were ?hitting all the spots? on the now well-established route, which starts with Joseph Smith?s birthplace in Vermont and ends at Nauvoo, Ill., where, in the early 1840s, Mormons built a city that, at the time, rivaled young Chicago in size.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=8150252003a2a72c03951e41c461a298

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