Sometime around the mid-1990s, I began hearing regular speculation among my Latter-day Saint friends and neighbors that comedian Steve Martin was a member of the church.<\/p>\n
I think it started right after his starring role in \u201cFather of the Bride<\/a>,\u201d a 1991 film so white it wears neck pillows in the airport.<\/p>\n He wasn\u2019t the only clean-cut celebrity to be so labeled, albeit through unverifiable rumors spread by my Utah community. Tom Hanks. Angela Lansbury. Even Mandy Moore was baptized at 8, or so I was told by a friend who was moved by \u201cA Walk to Remember<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n We didn\u2019t have the internet then. No quick Wikipedia search was available to undermine our confident whisperings. Not that Wikipedia would have deterred us anyway.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not super well known, and he is really private about it,\u201d a boy in my Sunday school class told me in 1995. \u201cBut my cousin lives in Las Vegas and she said Gladys Knight<\/a> invited Puff Daddy to church once, and now he goes every week.\u201d<\/p>\n When I was 10, my friend Jackie\u2019s mom told my mom that someone in her sister\u2019s ward recently visited Graceland<\/a> and had an amazing experience.<\/p>\n Apparently, just as the tour group was leaving Elvis\u2019 bedroom, the guide quietly pulled this woman aside and said, \u201cI don\u2019t know why, but I just felt impressed to tell you that when Elvis died, they found a Book of Mormon<\/a> on his nightstand with a bookmark at Page 422.\u201d We then looked in our own copies. HE WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF 3 NEPHI.<\/p>\n We rode that high for a year.<\/p>\n (AP) Did Elvis Presley keep notes in a copy of the Book of Mormon? The simple answer, a Latter-day Saint historian and myth debunker says, is no.<\/p>\n Conversations about which celebrities were rumored to be meeting with missionaries occupied much of my childhood. I rarely saw even the smallest inklings of dissent when someone made a claim. Why would I or my friends protest any of this completely unverified information? <\/p>\n Maybe we couldn\u2019t say with certainty that Bob Saget was once a bishop. But we also couldn\u2019t say with certainty he wasn\u2019t once a bishop.<\/p>\n Eventually we grew up. The world changed. It seemed the most outrageous of the rumors \u2014 maybe due to the internet \u2014 became less common.<\/p>\n And then I sort of forgot about this part of my childhood.<\/p>\n Two (sides) can play this game<\/p>\n \u201cI heard Mitt Romney hasn\u2019t gone to church since about 2005?\u201d<\/p>\n I was so informed 10 years ago at a dinner party. I had recently stepped away from my religion and my friends who had also left The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints suddenly started saying stuff like that to me. They brought up well-known members and through attenuated citations insisted these people were living a different life privately than the one proud members knew publicly.<\/p>\n (Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Mitt Romney ranks as one of the best-known Latter-day Saint politicians and remains a practicing member.<\/p>\n \u201cMy classmate\u2019s cousin is a bartender and she has seen Donny Osmond at the Beerhive Pub.\u201d<\/p>\n It was harmless untrue gossip, probably not meant to be taken seriously, with the claims hardly interrogated and the names dropped casually.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t difficult to get used to this sort of thing. These conversations felt familiar. This was my childhood happening in reverse. This new group was undoing the stake-claiming I had participated in in the 1990s, using the exact same means and methods.<\/p>\n \u201cMarie Osmond left the church, like, 20 years ago but just hasn\u2019t publicly announced it because she doesn\u2019t want to lose her fan base.\u201d<\/p>\n (Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Marie Osmond, shown in 2023, is known for her Latter-day Saint membership.<\/p>\n What I always assumed was totally one-sided gossip by eager Latter-day Saints was actually a quiet competition. Warriors were being claimed in this fantasy football-esque religious war. Celebrities young and old. Politicians. Philanthropists. No one was off-limits.<\/p>\n Tom Hanks called church members who supported California\u2019s Proposition 8 \u201cun-American\u201d in 2008. Many Latter-day Saints were horrified at the time. A notable victory for the disaffected.<\/p>\n But as the gentiles successfully identified their spokespersons in the early 2000s, the Saints became more deliberate, and factual, in their campaigning. \u201cI\u2019m a Mormon<\/a>\u201d ads popped up on my social media feeds, featuring D-list celebrities demonstrating it\u2019s possible to both do genealogy and be cool.<\/p>\n The war raged on. Our state\u2019s faithful continued to tag known celebrities, like Ken Jennings<\/a>, while the others undermined the claims by pointing to Chelsea Handler <\/a>(rumored to have Latter-day Saint roots). No one is officially keeping score, but the points feel about even. <\/p>\n (“JEOPARDY!” via AP) Ken Jennings of “JEOPARDY!” fame is a prominent Latter-day Saint celebrity.<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy to get caught up in it. But occasionally I take a step back and wonder why we do this.<\/p>\n As a kid, I guess there was something comforting about implausible stories of shared faith. It felt less lonely, if not validating. Why wouldn\u2019t those who left the faith feel the same way?<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not doing this by myself. The second set of footprints in the sand belong to Aaron Eckhart.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s just a theory. I guess I\u2019m not really sure why, exactly, rumors about Sandra Bullock\u2019s faith made us feel more confident in our own upbringings in 1994. Why we implicitly valued her supposed judgment, sometimes more than our own. Why Ryan Gosling<\/a> not going to church anymore makes us feel more at peace about our similar decisions.<\/p>\n We aren\u2019t alone<\/p>\n (Pat Bagley | The Salt Lake Tribune)<\/p>\n In his 2018 book \u201cCalypso<\/a>,\u201d David Sedaris writes about waking up the day after the 2016 presidential election. He was deflated because of the results. <\/p>\n \u201cStaring at the ceiling, wide awake,\u201d he writes, \u201cI suddenly think of Cher and realize that what I\u2019m feeling, she\u2019s feeling as well. \u2026 The next morning I wander the city in a daze, my eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, thinking, I\u2019m not alone. I\u2019ve got Cher.\u201d<\/p>\n Maybe here, in Utah, we don\u2019t have the market cornered on the tendency to hope someone well known shares an opinion with us on something we care about. Maybe it\u2019s just human nature to claim warriors in our most treasured ideological battles.<\/p>\n David Sedaris has Cher.<\/p>\n In Utah, we have Steve Martin, maybe. We have Mitt Romney, possibly. We have Steve Young, depending on the topic. We\u2019re not alone. We all have someone.<\/p>\n In a perfect world, we all would have one another. Groups of people with different beliefs and experiences, supporting one another instead of relying on a stranger in Hollywood to do that for us \u2014 caring more about the people we actually know, different as we might be, and less about, say, whether a famous stranger was reading his scriptures when he died.<\/p>\n Getting there would take time, of course, and some humility.<\/p>\n Until then, we all have Jewel.<\/p>\n (Pat Bagley) Note to readers \u2022 Eli McCann is an attorney, writer and podcaster in Salt Lake City, where he lives with his husband, new child and their two naughty (yet worshipped) dogs. You can find Eli on X<\/a>, formerly known as Twitter, at @EliMcCann<\/a> or at his personal website, www.itjustgetsstranger.com<\/a>, where he tries to keep the swearing to a minimum so as not to upset his mother. This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.<\/p>\n
\nEli McCann, Salt Lake Tribune guest columnist.<\/p>\n