When one relative asked how the Mormons managed to dig up dead bodies and drag them into the temple to be baptized, Riess realized how little most people knew about her newfound beliefs and practices. She contacted Wiley Publishing, Inc., creators of a bestselling book series for beginners in any field.

Three years later, Mormonism for Dummies: Your Plain-English Guide to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is just hitting the bookstores. It joins other Dummies' books on Christianity, Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam and Wicca.

"Mormonism is one of the fastest-growing faiths in America," said Kathy Cox, Wiley's acquistion editor. "People have a lot of questions and misconceptions about it. That's one of the reasons Dummies gets into any religion. Without proselytizing, we answer your basic questions."

As work on the book began, Riess was overwhelmed with her job as religion book editor at Publishers Weekly and with finishing What Would Buffy Do? The Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide. So she was paired with Christopher Kimball Bigelow, a former editor at the LDS Church's official Ensign magazine and editor of the satirical Mormon newspaper The Sugar Beet.

They figured their twosome represented many sides of Mormonism.

Riess, who joined the church while studying religion at Princeton Theological Seminary, lives in Kentucky with her non-Mormon husband and their daughter. Bigelow is the great-great-great-grandson of a Mormon apostle who had more than 40 wives. He lives in Provo with his wife and four children.

The Dummies series has a distinct formula - concise, conversational and light-hearted, free of "silly details and useless background information." Humor is essential.

"We can be irreverent without being disrespectful," said Wiley project editor Chrissey Guthrie, who oversaw the Mormon book.

Both Bigelow and Riess were at home with Dummies' brand of humor, Guthrie said.

"We are [Mormon] participants and fully engaged," Riess said. "We love it enough to laugh at ourselves. Not in a way that is snide or sneering, more like the loving jests that happen in a family."

Still, the assignment to squeeze all aspects of this fast-growing American faith into the Dummies formula was, well, daunting. History, doctrine, fun facts, spiritual disciplines, culture and scripture all had to be explained.

Only one chapter on history? Impossible, Riess said.

"For Mormons, history is theology," she told them. "It can't be done in one short chapter."

Eventually they got three short chapters, a mere six pages to summarize the 175-year-old church's founding events.

The authors also worked hard at setting the right tone and content. Mormonism for Dummies was not written as propaganda or critique. They had to mention all the church's sticking points: its history of denying blacks the priesthood, changing roles of women, birth control, homosexuality, and involvement in politics, to name a few. Differences between LDS beliefs and mainstream Christianity were clearly enumerated.

"To represent the diverse views within the faith, we put a lot of thought into when to say "a few Mormons," "some," "many," or "most," Bigelow said. "We tried to fairly and accurately acknowledge the positions of Mormon-related splinter groups, other Christians who disagree with Mormons, and even anti-Mormons."

Probably the trickiest part to write was the section on race, Bigelow said. "We didn't want to call the church to repentance, but we wanted to acknowledge that many Mormons still don't think we've fully come to terms with our past racism."

Given that Mormons don't talk about temple rituals to outsiders, the chapter on temples was "quite sensitive to write," he said. "During revision, we pulled back on several details about logistics inside the temple. Still, I think a clearer picture than usual emerges about what goes on inside temples.

Riess and Bigelow sent chapters and drafts to more than 20 readers - Mormon and other, conservative, liberal, inside Utah and out in the "mission field." Well-respected religious studies scholar Jan Shipps, a non-Mormon historian in Indiana specializing in LDS history, was a technical adviser, approving every page.

"This may be the only book some people will ever read about Mormonism," Riess said. "We felt a lot of responsibility to do it right."

Think of the book as "a big Sunday buffet at Grandma's house. You can eat as many of the yeast rolls as you want, and you don't have to touch the peas if you don't want to," they write. "There's no wrong way to eat this buffet."

pstack@sltrib.com

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Tithing is only a warm-up exercise: As much of a sacrifice as paying tithing is, Mormons see it as a lesser law that God gave because people couldn't live the higher law. Basically, tithing is God's Plan B, a first step in learning to live Plan A, which Mormons call the Law of Consecration.

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