NAUVOO, Ill. - At church gatherings in this bend of the Mississippi River, lay ministers Rocky and Helen Hulse paint a menacing specter: legions of impeccably groomed Mormons pedaling house-to-house on bicycles, robbing anyone at home of their immortal souls.
Their alarm has sounded because of a $30 million temple that will soon open in Nauvoo, a revered historical and religious site for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints. In the three-state region around Nauvoo, fundamentalist churches have prepared their flocks for what they see as an army of Mormon invaders who will attend the open house and dedication of the temple in May and June.
''The pastors know they are going to lose people to the Mormons, and they want their people warned,'' said Colleen Ralson, who runs the Nauvoo Christian Visitors Center.
''The temple is a desecration of Christianity,'' Rocky Hulse, a former Mormon, recently told more than 200 people packed into the First Christian Church in Dallas City, Ill., about 15 minutes down Highway 96 from Nauvoo. ''The Mormons aren't bad people, they are just deceived people.''
While only 250 or so Mormons live in the region, their church has has long had a significant presence there. The expected influx of up to 300,000 visitors, along with construction of the temple, worries some that 150 years after they left, the Mormons will again seek to dominate the area's economy, culture, and politics.
''Many feel that the Mormons will reoccupy the town,'' said Ralson, who said Mormons have bought the hardware store and turned it into an LDS bookstore, and own the town's largest hotel.
For their part, the Mormons have tried to avoid arguments.
''It serves no purpose,'' said Ann Orton, a spokeswoman at the Nauvoo Visitors Center, which is run by the Mormons. ''We believe what we believe, and they believe what they believe. Hopefully, there is common ground so we can be good neighbors.''
Orton said the church is treating the Nauvoo temple dedication much as it did the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. ''This will not be a proselytizing event,'' she said. ''There will be no big push for baptisms or conversions. This will be a soft, neighborly approach.''
Visitors guide Elder Steve Stutz said the Mormon policy is to ignore the detractors. ''They say things like that about us wherever we build temples,'' Stutz said.
While they are neither Protestants nor Catholics, the Mormons say, they are Christian.
Dean May, a social historian and Mormonism specialists at the University of Utah, said the Nauvoo temple is of enormous importance to the Mormons.
''They regard its rebuilding much like the Jews would the building of a temple in Jerusalem,'' or even more accurately, he said, ''like rebuilding the synagogue in the Warsaw ghetto.''
Mormons fleeing persecution in Missouri arrived in Nauvoo in 1839. Work on a temple began in 1841, and the town soon grew to about 20,000 people, exceeding Chicago at the time.
Much of the Mormon Doctrine and Covenants, said to contain founder Joseph Smith's revelations from God, was written in Nauvoo, May said. The town's early history is intertwined with church scripture and doctrine. Many Mormons can trace their family histories directly to Nauvoo, he said.
But as the town grew, so did the unease among its neighbors. In 1844, a mob broke into the jail in Carthage, Ill., and killed Smith and his brother.
Within two years, the Mormons were forced to leave town, and Brigham Young led the party west to Utah. In 1848, a fire believed to be the work of an arsonist destroyed much of the Nauvoo temple.
The new temple will be used only for special ceremonies and not for regular Sunday worship. With an exterior entirely of limestone from Alabama, the 55,000-square-foot temple stands 165 feet tall. Atop the cupola is a golden statue of the Angel Moroni, who Smith said appeared to him as a teenager and called him to work for God.
Interior features include a baptismal font that rests on 12 limestone oxen, representing the 12 tribes of Israel.
The area's evangelical churches, meanwhile, see menace rather than grandeur in the temple. The Hulses represent a national ministry that serves many of these churches and is centered on keeping their followers away from Mormonism.
The Hulses, who moved recently to the area specifically for this task, have been going from church to church in attempting to warn that Mormonism is a cult with secret handshakes, blood oaths, and bizarre rituals.
In sessions that can last more than four hours and draw as many as 600 people, the Hulses humorously recount their own conversions to Christianity, then tear into one Mormon teaching and ritual after another.
The Harmony Bible Church of Danville, Iowa, took out a full-page ad in a newspaper, denouncing the Mormon teachings, and prompting a holy war war of words in the letters to the editor columns.
Ralson of the Christian Visitors Center also insists that it's not just what the Mormons teach that has her upset.
''It's their attitude,'' she said. ''Their arrogance - this is my town, I will do what I please.''
Orton asks for tolerance.
''In the United States of America, we should all be able to worship as we choose,'' she said. ''We would support them in the ways they worship, and we ask that they do the same for us.''