Mormon Beefcake

That is what attracted Christopher Hayes, 23, of Marysville, Wash., who posed for the 2009 edition. Hayes's mother, in fact, urged him on after the 2008 edition was cited as the "Hot Calendar" of the year by Rolling Stone magazine. Hayes's mother and grandparents even attended the photo shoot in Las Vegas in March. "What we're doing is showing people that Mormons aren't the weird, sheltered people that people think we are. It was more of an acceptance of us as people."

Hayes, Moser and the other models say they're not concerned that the church would discipline them for participating in the endeavor, and there is no indication that the church has taken any action against them. Indeed, Moser said a stake leader (the equivalent of a parish priest) in his area quizzed him about it before telling him it would not be a problem. "You don't see anything in this calendar that you wouldn't see at a church pool party," says Cody Bloomfield, 21, of Irvine, Calif., who is the 2009 cover model. "Actually, you see more at a church pool party."

Each man said he received a reassuring e-mail from Hardy telling them that his excommunication was the result of personal conduct issues--his lapsed attendance and tithing--rather than the calendar.

But Mormon scholar Richard Lyman Bushman of Claremont Graduate University School of Religion in California believes the calendar was the real problem, noting that "a third or half of the church doesn't tithe or go and they don't discipline all of those people." The issue for LDS authorities, Bushman says, is probably the juxtaposition between the chaste look of the missionaries and the "introduction of faintly erotic themes into that image. To say, 'Listen to the missionaries because they're also powerhouse bodies and pulsating sexual beings,' that's not what the church wants."

Melissa Proctor of the Harvard Divinity School thinks Hardy's excommunication could also be "calculated as a warning message from the leadership to Mormons who bought the calendar or to the returned missionaries who hope to pose in the next issue that such behavior is unbecoming." If so, Hardy said it failed; none of the 2009 models have tried to back out. (They couldn't even if they wanted to at this point, he says; the 2009 calendar is already at the printer's.)

The fact that the calendar has been a hit among gays--and that the 2008 and 2009 editions feature two openly gay men each--is undoubtedly somewhat discomfiting to a faith that accepts gay members only if they are chaste, Bushman said. Hardy estimates that half the 2008 calendars were bought by men. He and some of the models have been interviewed by gay publications. "I like to joke that this is the tamest beefcake calendar a gay man could ever own," Hardy quips.