The joy that greeted Elizabeth Smart's safe return last week was tempered here with widespread revulsion for David Brian Mitchell, the man accused of kidnapping and subjecting her to a nine-month ordeal of servitude and abuse.
That Mitchell, a homeless man known around town as a bearded, glint-eyed but seemingly harmless religious crank, might have justified the abduction as a divinely inspired polygamist mission strikes many people here as not only cruel, but also irrelevant.
His supposed justifications for his bridal quest, they say, have nothing to do with religion -- certainly not with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which outlawed polygamy more than a century ago and even excommunicated Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee, for their heretical views.
But isolating Mitchell, 49, and Barzee, 57, from their religious milieu may not be quite that simple in a state that is home to tens of thousands of practicing polygamists, and whose governor only this week signed legislation imposing tougher penalties on men who take multiple brides.
Since the couple's polygamist views came into focus through a rambling treatise Mitchell wrote last year in the voice of "Immanuel David Isaiah," a prophet claiming divine powers and wisdom, many Mormons here say the misconceptions about their church are back.
"When people say Mormons practice polygamy, that really disturbs me," said Carolyn Jensen, a Mormon and junior at the University of Utah. "People still have a distorted view of what we do and don't do, and that view has been perpetuated. It's frustrating."
Yet for any misconceptions held by others, many Mormons say they are altogether comfortable with a history that includes polygamy, and with recent church efforts to keep it all in perspective. Polygamy became a part of Mormon life in 1830 through divine revelation to Joseph Smith, the church founder, and ended through divine revelation to another church leader 60 years later.
"Polygamy was put away," said Russell Butler, a church member and professor at Idaho State University. "But we're not running from anything here. It's not something we're hiding. It's part of our history."
To outsiders, the history becomes problematic only when someone like Mitchell emerges, cloaking himself in church doctrine to validate his actions. His treatise made it clear he felt entitled to multiple wives and left the impression Elizabeth was to be the first of at least seven in addition to Barzee.
Larry Long, a lawyer who met with him in his first days in jail, told a Salt Lake City television station that Mitchell still considered Elizabeth his wife, adding, "He still loves her and knows that she still loves him, that no harm came to her during their relationship and the adventure that went on." Long also said Mitchell was acting on a "call from God."
Mormons like Rebekah Prisbrey vehemently reject Mitchell's views. "In my mind, these people are sexual predators," Prisbrey said. "They took their ideas from religion and went off on a tangent. That happens a lot. But what they did doesn't justify religious fanaticism."
While prosecutors insisted they were treating the defendants as "predatory sex offenders," rather than as people acting on religious conviction, church officials conceded that the Smart case had put them on the defensive once more, even after disclosing that Mitchell and Barzee were excommunicated from the church several years ago "for promoting bizarre teachings and lifestyle far afield from the principles and doctrines of the church."
"Over the last few years there have been a number of individuals we considered deviant with practices they ascribe to religious beliefs," Richard Turley Jr., a senior church official, said in an interview this week. He added that conflicts arise when they "embrace only selective elements of church teachings" that apparently provide them a justification for their actions.
That is an especially thorny problem with polygamy because Mormon scripture is, on the surface, ambiguous.
As a general rule, Turley said, church scriptures recognize only monogamy, a concept protected by the 1890 manifesto "Official Declaration 1" that outlawed polygamy. But a section in Mormon scriptures written 60 years earlier appears to condone polygamy, saying, in part, "if any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent, and if he espouse the second, and they are virgins, and have vowed to no other man, then is he justified."
Turley said the earlier section was an example of exceptions to the monogamy rule found in the Old Testament and Mormon scripture, written when polygamy was practiced, saying, "A lot of people who live here descend from polygamists and look back to their ancestors with reverence and awe."
But other Mormons concede that what outsiders might consider an ambiguity gives legitimacy for people like Mitchell and thousands of other polygamists in the country who regard plural marriages as a fundamental part of their lives, promoted by the same historical figures whom the modern church reveres.
Steve Dunlavy, who lives close to where Elizabeth was found last week in a Salt Lake City suburb, referred to the Mormon belief that God speaks through the church leader -- now, Gordon B. Hinckley, who is 92 -- and said: "If God says polygamy needs to be brought back upon earth, it will be. There is no question."
While Mitchell and Barzee are hardly alone among one-time church members charged with crimes that have polygamous overtones, they are unusual in that they are not members of any identifiable polygamist community or extremist brand of Mormonism. Indeed, the pair were once productive members of the mainstream church before they fell into homelessness and panhandling several years ago.
Members of the Smart family say they are disgusted by any suggestion the defendants may justify their actions in the name of religion. They cite the Mormon belief that people choose their own path in life, good or evil, and reap the consequences in the hereafter.
Angela Smart, one of Elizabeth's aunts, described the defendants, particularly Mitchell, as "pure evil," insisting their religious explanation for their actions was "a really bad sham."
She said the concept of polygamy had once disgusted her, as well, until she recalled a conversation with her husband, Zeke Dumke, before they were married. "I told him that if the issue of polygamy ever came up, you're not going to have any other wives. That's just not going to happen," she said.
But in 1984, when ethnic conflicts were simmering in the Balkans and her brother, Tom Smart, a photographer for The Deseret News, was sent to cover the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, she thought of Tom's wife, Heidi, and gave her husband a tiny exception.
"At the time, I wondered what would happen if Tom didn't make it back," she said. "I love Heidi more than anybody in the world, so I told Zeke I'd let him take care of her."