Mormonism was born amid secrecy, and throughout its existence as a religion it has sustained a close yet complex relationship to the arts of silence. From the start, the Mormon penchant for secrecy came from two different sources. The first was internal and theological.

Like many great world faiths, Mormonism has an important strand of sacred mystery. Mormon temples have traditionally been closed to outsiders and designed with opaque windows. Marriage and other key rituals take place in this hallowed space.

Like Mormon ritual, much of Mormon theology remains relatively inaccessible to outsiders. The text of the Book of Mormon has always been spread to a broad audience, but the text is not a sufficient guide to understanding the details of Mormon teaching. Joseph Smith received extensive further revelation in the nature of sacred secrets to be shared with only a handful of close associates and initiates within the newly forming church. The most famous such revelation was the doctrine of celestial — which was to say plural — marriage, revealed to Smith as early as 1833 but formally announced to the world only in 1852, eight years after his death.

The connections between the sacred and the secret in early Mormonism did not come out of nowhere. Mormonism's theological secrets have more than a little in common with religious mysteries that can be found in medieval Islamic esotericism, kabbalistic mysticism and ancient Christian Gnosticism. Successive generations have rediscovered these secrets and reasserted their antiquity in ways very similar to Smith's discovery of ancient tablets.

Almost from the start of his career, Smith was denounced as a charlatan, an impostor and worse. Notwithstanding these attacks, Mormonism grew steadily. Growth brought publicity — and outright persecution. This external persecution created a second, externally driven source for secrecy: protection.

In 1838, after skirmishes between armed Mormons and state militia left several people dead, Gov. Lilburn Boggs of Missouri issued a military order declaring that the Mormons had made open war on the state and that therefore they "must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the state, if necessary, for the public good."

Later, at Nauvoo, Ill., the Mormon community under Smith's leadership came under constant pressure from skeptical and sometimes violent neighbors. Smith was gunned down by a kind of quasi-organized lynch mob after having been arrested and jailed in nearby Carthage.