Senate leader says LDS faith is 'part of who I am'

WASHINGTON - Back then, Harry Reid had no faith.
    He had just been in a fist fight with his future father-in-law and was eloping with his wife-to-be when a Mormon friend offered to help.
    The bishop of a congregation in Henderson, Nev., offered Reid space in a local ward house and said he'd perform the ceremony while another friend stood guard. It would be one of the memorable encounters Reid had with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on a journey that now leaves him the highest-ranking elected Mormon in U.S. history.
    In a new book, The Good Fight: Hard Lessons from Searchlight to Washington (G.P. Putnam's Sons Publishing, $25.95), the U.S. Senate majority leader talks about his conversion to Mormonism. It was happenstance in some ways, but also a change Reid attributes to divine intervention.
    "It's hard for me to think that there wasn't some divine acknowledgement that my little wife and I were trying to find our place in life," Reid said in a Salt Lake Tribune interview this week, "and we had such wonderful examples, as I talk about in the book, of people who were good to me and nice to me as I was growing up."
    Reid, a soft-spoken man who now wields extraordinary political power, grew up in Searchlight, Nev., in a wooden home fastened from oil-soaked railroad ties, chicken wire and plaster. There was no running water, an outhouse for a toilet and cold linoleum on the floor.
    "At the time, I thought our house was really nice," Reid writes in the autobiography written with Mark Warren, "but as I look back, I guess it wasn't."
    The former mining town relied on prostitution as its dominant source of income, Reid writes, so much so that when a brothel was found to violate a law for being too close to a school, the town moved the school.
    Reid grew up without religion. "None, zero," Reid writes. "And when I say none, I don't mean 10 percent religious. I mean none. It wasn't that my parents were atheists or something, it was that religion just wasn't part of our lives."
    That changed as Reid grew older.
    In his freshman year at Basic High School, Reid met Ron McAllister, a guy he describes as a "real ladies man." McAllister was slick, Reid writes in his book, and he invited Reid to something called "seminary" with the pitch that all the best-looking girls went to seminary.
    "And McAllister didn't lie," Reid writes. "There were lots of pretty girls at seminary."
    But there was also something else, talk of a man named Jesus, whom Reid knew nothing about. He was so intrigued by Jesus, he attended seminary at 7 a.m. every school day. "Well, Jesus and girls, I suppose," Reid quips.
    Later on, when Reid found the love of his life, Landra, he proposed marriage. Because she was Jewish and her father forbade the relationship, the two eloped. Henderson LDS Bishop Marlan Walker offered to marry the two at the local ward house.
    "Even though Landra was a Jew and I was a nothing, this wonderful man had taken it on himself to break all the rules and offer us the sanctuary of his church," Reid writes in the book. "If man might frown on such arrangements, God apparently did not."
    There are five Mormons in the Senate, but none as powerful as Reid, who essentially controls the agenda and holds sway over the bully pulpit of the Senate majority.
    In The Good Fight, Reid intersperses descriptions of life as minority leader and then majority leader with tales from his youth and early career as a lawyer. And he talks openly about his faith, a topic Reid normally holds close to his vest. While Americans may know Mitt Romney is a Mormon, few know that about Reid.
    "I've tried not to wear my religion on my sleeve," Reid said.
    "I've tried to live what I feel would be a good Christian life, recognizing that other people have their own religions and I've tried to respect that," Reid said. "But for me, my religion has made me a better person and I have no doubt it's contributed to my family, my five children being the good people they are."
    Reid, who receives round-the-clock protection from Capitol police officers, still attends church in either Nevada or Washington and does his monthly home teaching as encouraged by Mormon leaders.
    Reid says his faith in the church is part of who he is, how he legislates and how he deals with others. He doesn't flaunt his religion, he says, but he doesn't separate it either.
    "You can't. You're a whole person. You can't put your religion over here, and your eating habits over here and your education here," he says, pantomiming different locations with his hands. "You're just one person. That's part of who I am."
    Scattered through his book, Reid mentions his interactions with Mormons as he grew up, and his conversion in February 1960 while in college after inviting missionaries to teach him and his wife for months.
    "Every week for months they came, and we would ask a mountain of questions," Reid writes in book. "And more and more, their faith became our faith."
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    * THOMAS BURR can be reached at tburr@sltrib.com. Send comments about this story to religioneditor@sltrib.com.