There’s still a very great deal of work to be done.

On our ride from Heathrow Airport into London yesterday, we had an amusing, curious, knowledgeable, and talkative cab driver.

At one point, he asked where in the States we were from.  When we answered “Utah,” saying that we had just flown in from Salt Lake City, he was thoughtful for a moment.  Then he asked, “Isn’t that where those Mormons live?”  He had, he said, just watched a really fascinating item on television about a Mormon in Utah with three wives, who was considering marrying his brother’s three widows.  “That,” he observed, “is pretty strange.”

I thought that I should mention that we were Mormons, and that the woman riding with me is my only wife.

“Oh,” he said.  “So they’re not all polygamists?”

“No,” I responded.  “In fact, for the past 127 years, any member of the Church who takes a second wife is excommunicated.  Booted out.”

He found that interesting, and remarked that he was always happy to learn new things.  Had I ever, he then asked, seen the musical The Book of Mormon?  “It’s quite popular here in London,” he said.  He hadn’t seen it himself, but had heard that it’s funny.  “And aren’t the Osmonds Mormons?” he asked.

During the conversation, I kept thinking that we’re quite often rather pleased with ourselves.  Heck, at any given time we have scores of thousands of missionaries out. And, yes, there are the Osmonds.  And Mitt Romney.  And the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, even singing at presidential inaugurations.  And there was Harry Reid.  And there are two temples in England, where missionaries have been preaching since 1837.  And he was driving us to a prominent Marriott hotel near Hyde Park, which has copies of the Book of Mormon in every room.  And, for that matter, yes, there’s The Book of Mormon, playing near Leicester Square with huge illuminated signs and, even now, advertised on buses and in tube stations.  We’re well known.

Sort of.

Still today, most people know almost nothing about us, really.

Except, perhaps, for polygamy.

Some critics have argued that polygamy demonstrates the Church false because it has effectively trampled upon and drowned out other, more significant, parts of our message.  That’s an intriguing argument, actually.  In some ways, they have a point.  Not that plural marriage proves Mormonism false and Joseph Smith a false prophet, but because it has indeed obscured something of our message and, to some degree (less so now, certainly, than while we were still practicing it), limited the appeal of that message.

I would respond in several ways.  One of those ways would be to argue that, in conjunction with our doctrine of “gathering” into the isolated valleys of the intermountain West, polygamy also created a social (and literal) distance between us and the “world” that helped to prevent our relapsing into a form of Protestantism — as, to a very great degree, our cousins of the Reorganized Church (now the Community of Christ) have actually done.  Mormonism might actually not even have survived without those two factors.

But that’s another issue, and I don’t intend to get into it now.

I just want to observe that we haven’t yet begun to tell our story nearly well enough or widely enough.  Most of the world hasn’t really rejected the message of the Restoration.  Most of the world — even here in England — hasn’t really ever even heard it.

We need to find and use new media and new ways of sharing that message.  And, frankly, we need to work harder.  We’ve only begun.  There are still plenty of people out there who, if they really ever actually heard and understood the truth, would accept it.

Posted from London, England